Jake had always had a knack for finding the useful and the ignored, and in this case Woodbridge Park was both. Hours ago he had set off from the Mansion in the throws of wanderlust, catching a bus out towards the city center not because it was where he had intended to go, but because it had shown up at a convenient time. At the end of the line, he had simply walked to a street corner and followed the path of least resistance through the city. As usual, he had made good time and eventually ended up in front of a ratty old park nestled in between the towering industrial complexes along the East River. That was one of the blessings of a wanderer's life: you have nowhere to go, so you can get nowhere, fast.

Woodbridge Park was just one of a million other small urban renewal projects which littered the city. Every once in a while, some civil politician would use a park like this one to show off to the environmental community that he was 'making a difference'. Such parks were cheaply built, and even more cheaply maintained, but for Jake, this was the perfect place to escape the bustle and endless crowds of the inner city.

The park itself was the epitome of simplicity: a simple waist-high chain-link fence surrounding a scrap of grass and wood chips on three sides. The park backed onto the massive brick wall of a brewing company on the fourth, causing the entire place to reek slightly of hops. The park had your basic park amenities as well, such as a public bathroom (now chained shut with a padlock), a crude jungle gym (now covered in spray paint) and a simple set of swings.

Grinning, Jake calmly swung himself over one of the low fences and wandered across the expanse of wood chips towards the jungle gym and the swings, his senses playing out before him. Despite the park's apparent age and condition, Jake could tell it had once been the center of some child's world. Rich connections of freedom and escapism hang from every surface and contour, arching from the gym to the swings and back again.

Idly, he strolled over to the swings and settled himself down upon one of them. The fit was tight, and for a moment the bar overhead complained about his weight, but it held. Shifting his weight back and forth, Jake slowly urged the swing up to speed and drank in the sensations fostered by so many before him. It was exhilarating. Free.

Jake nearly jumped as the first heavy gob of rain smacked sharply into his mirrored shades. As more droplets began to crash down, he slewed the swing to a stop and tilted his head upwards towards the brooding clouds above. Another summer rain storm. Quickly, Jake turned his alien senses towards the myriad of connections that flowed outward from him and took hold of the fine thread that connected him to his room in the distant Mansion. He was a long way off.

“Damn,” he muttered coldly as the rain closed in around him.

Day, week , month who knew what it all was and what it all mattered for. Not for her though. Those things where not relivant for a person who had nothing but time on her hands. She had no obligations, no school, no work, nothing to pay attention to and to spend time on. Well her puzzles ate time like clockwork but it was more that she wasn't paying attention to time as much as the puzzles. Her entire room was stuffed with them leaving but a small spot to walk up to her bed from her door. Today she escaped it. She felt like doing something else.

She wandered through New york again, like she did mostly. How she ever found her way back was uncanny for her to know because she always got lost. It was part of the adventure. She even got back from this weird school once so her moral of returning to her puzzle filled room was high.

She passed allot of places, including stores, houses and theaters. New york was full of places with to many people for her to be. All the talk in her head was enough to drive her insane, literly. She wasn't quiet right for well pretty much half her life. She didn't know that it wasn't normal.

She passed a old park on her way through new york. She decided to go through it since it started to rain a bit. Rain was fun, it was like being in the pool without drowning.... and with your clothes on. To bad she forgot to bring her rain boots. The voices in her head told her differently though. She was supposed to stay out of the rain they said. It was evil and such. She sometimes just ingored them. Well ignoring them in a way of not taking their "advice."

As it started pooring rain and she just stood in a open patch of grass something just hit her. Information poored into her mind about somebody who was here. All kind of minor and mayor things just came to her as if she already knew this person for many years. It was actually a bit of a overload because normal people resisted this more then this person. She looked as if she was in pain but didn't speak a word. She pulled a face to match as she closed her eyes and used one hand to slowly rub her face. This was going to be very akward for the person who was seemingly around. His name was Jake townsend and he clearly was around here. A soft tune started playing around her seeing as a overflow of information made her power go a bit out of check more then normal. She had nothing to direct it too though so it would probably not harm anybody.

Jake glanced down at the growing mud puddle forming in the rut beneath the swing set and stood, rather then allowing the flow of water to invade his footwear. It was time to find someplace, anyplace, to camp out for the evening. Turning, he let his senses wash over the center of the park and watched as they bent around, and through...something.

It was a snarl. A knot. A malignant gathering of connections that bent them into a strange and unwholesome pattern, and for a moment, Jake was lost and confused until he realized there was a person there, in the midst of it all. The weave that played out from any normal person was complex, consisting of billions of small connections that quite literally wove them into their universe, but here was a person with almost no cares. A person who had almost wholly divorced themselves from reality.

As this realization settled over him, Jake watched as his own connections of recognition slid into the snarl and played off in twisted, jagged shapes, outlining the subtle contours of the woman's body. This was a girl? Jake's mind reeled for a moment as his image of her stabilized and cleared. She was mutant, obviously. The only creatures to have ever imposed such impossibility on his image of the universe were mutants. But what kind of mutant?

Jake moved closer slowly, approaching her from behind and plucking at the ambient connections that washed over the young woman and thereby collecting an image of her despite the snarl inhabiting the center of her personal weave. She was young, slender, with short cropped hair. No boots. He could feel her body shuddering involuntarily in the cold while her mind played on wholly ignorant. As he drew closer, he felt several twisted and jagged tendril of recognition erupt haltingly from her form and mesh with his own, followed by others whispering of arcane understanding and truth. She was taking something from him, but he had no idea what that could be.

When he was ten feet from the girl, he stopped and watched as the snarl 'unfurled' at some level and several twisted and broken tendrils emerged full of impossibility and weight. These were unlike any connection of meaning he had seen before. Most connections sang with a specific meaning: I love you; I hate you; I know you. These did not. Instead they bubbled with twisted meanings, and in the midst of that power Jake recognized something beautiful and something vile, at once conjoined and discordant.

Jake braced himself mentally as the tendril drove itself into his own weave and played over his senses. The world in Jake's eyes seemed to vibrate as the tendril sank down into his own weave, and he watched as the twisted mass attempted to shuck off Jake's native connections and hungrily tie in its own vision of events. As it played through him, he felt the curious sounds of something holy on his ears. Something entrancing and wonderous.

Jake's sense of reality flickered for a moment, and he found himself on one knee in the rain with his body shuddering and a brief panic bubbled up within him. Setting his mental footing, he directed his own mental strength against the invasive presence of the tendril and pushed. He doubt the girl had put any strength into her invasion, if she intended it at all, and after a moments pressure, he felt the offensive thing slide free and his vision clear. The sound, that wondrous sound, also died away. Setting his defenses, he let the poisonous thing slide over and around him, seeking some other mind to merge with. Jake watched it slide past, and then turned his attention back to the girl.

She looked damaged. It was the only way to describe the few personal connections she maintained, and Jake felt a sadness come over him. He noticed at that point how thin the strands of recognition were that emerged from her. Maybe she didn't really know he was here, or couldn't accept it. Strange.

”Excuse me. Are you alright?” Jake asked calmly from behind her, his voice both curious and concerned.

”Excuse me. Are you alright?”

Her eyelids spazzed out for a moment and blinked very fast. Her eyes where turned up and you mostly saw the white part. That is if you can see ofcourse. She then squeezed her eyes shut very thight and shook the entire thing of her. It was over for a moment. This jake character had a mind like a book and a guide who pointed you to all the things if you wanted to. Not many people had a mind like this, but then again not everybody was the same.

Somebody approached her though. It was the jake character. A mutant to say the least. He was wearing sunglasses in the rain. How odd was that. Probably because he didn't look at everything like normal people did. "I'm ok." She replied trying to catch her breath from all the spastic overloads she just had from this mad.

This man was a oddity at the very least from everyone else. It was like she knew him for years now like a character from a book she read. Not like a friend though, emotions and thoughts are two different things. Voices spoke to her about danger and things. He knew stuff about her too, not about her personally but more at where she had been. Who she had met. This was very odd seeing as somebody like her got a totally different way of getting that kind of information. Not that she controled it, it just came to her.

"Don't talk, Don't run, Don't walk." The voices in her head went. She shook her head one more time and tilted it. The hymn that was almost as soft as the wind faded away more. "Your odd." She said. Not talking about his appearence though, but talking about his thoughts and memories.

Jake gritted his teeth and took a few worried steps forward through the muck as he watched a spasm arc through the slender woman. Immediately, the dull sense of worry he had felt about her solidified into honest concern. He moved quickly, despite the wetness, and sloshed to a stop only a foot short of being ready to catch her if she fell.

“I'm ok.” The words were frantic as they tumbled from her lips, but there was an honesty to them that Jake could see in the midst of her. She was used to this? He couldn't imagine what life was like for other mutants. He had always considered himself fortunate for the most part. Few mutants were as subtlety afflicted as he was and most lacked his options for dealing with their troubles. It was now that Jake realized that the scene playing out around him had changed: the malignancy he had felt around her had dissipated and had been replaced with a sense of inquisitiveness. Those strands of recognition that had behaved so strangely earlier had now affixed themselves throughly to his form. She truly knew he was there now, for good or ill.

Jake could feel her plucking at the thick bed of connections that spilled out from him. He didn't understand the how or the why of this, he just knew what was happening. She was appraising him, drinking off his meaning with each gentle touch of her mind. Jake reeled mentally as questions swarmed through him looking for something to connect with. Who was this girl? Why was she here?

“You're odd,” she stated with a plain and utterly inhuman honesty, and Jake grinned boyishly. He couldn't help it. The statement was perverse, discordant, and exactly the kind of thing he would throw at a person to keep them off guard. That wasn't what the girl intended, though. To her, this was simply a fact to be stated.

“I like to think I'm broken in all of the right places,” he retorted softly over the dull roar of the rain. Gently, very gently, he allowed a little of the Awe's power to flow into him, giving extra weight and charm to his speech and presence. “Who are you?”

“I like to think I'm broken in all of the right places,”

Broken in all the right places. Weird statement, but true for most people. Specially this one since he had such a weird brain that everybody who had the slichtest influence on it, could poke around in it. Something you do not come across very often. Most people resisted it even just a tiny bit, but with him you could walk right through. This asked for abuse sometime but first see where this would go.

“Who are you?”

His voice changed with a reason behind it. Did he just try to charm his way into getting a name. Tricks like that worked on normal people but not on her. She was to mentally unstable to act like a normal person hence those tricks didn't work. She tilted her head a bit to the right and tried to look trough the sunglasses. No use though they where as black as night and the rain didn't help one bit.

"Are you trying to trick me?" She said with a faint smile on her face. This would be funner then she thought. A trick of, that nobody could win from her. If she used her powers that is, but even then it could still come out akward. Who knew what type of people walked in the rain in the middle of the day. With her itchy hands just down her side she awaited where this would take her. If it would be fun, she would just have to wait and find out.

It took Jake a moment to comprehend what he had seen in the midst of his retort, but now he was sure. There had been an arrogant smugness within her tied around those connections of understanding. She was reading him and she thought she was better then he was. She even intended to harm him. Sickening anger and frustration flowed through him. Every time he had met and empath in this damned city they had thought of him like this and he was tired of it. His expression melted from bemusement to anger.

“Trick you...? How could asking you for your name be a trick? That's like bitching about the first move in a game of chess. It's bull****.” Jake could feel the Awe surging against the mental constraints he had set upon it, but he pushed it back. It wouldn't help him here. Instead he focused his senses on those jagged connections of understanding that had embraced him and followed them back to her intentions. He was faster then she was, he was sure of that. If she intended to fight him, he would see her intention of violence within the strand before she even began to act, and he would move first. Could he end it with one punch? At this range, he could hardly miss.

“I did try to influence you into answering me, but I think that's only fair,” Jake responded coldly. “You're the one taking the grand f***ing tour. I try not to violate a mind as soon as I meet it, but you've already taken my name and more. I'm not going to start a fight, but I'll sure as hell end one.” Names carried a lot of weight in Jake's view of the world, and his own more then most. He could taste it in the connections between them.

Rant rant, bla bla it was all the same. She tilted her head the other way and pulled up a big grin. This was hilarious seeing as he just played right into everything she said. She didn't even have to toy with his mind, he just got angry all by himself. This was extra funny since this man could never even hit her. She would see it coming as soon as he thought about it and there was nothing he could do about it. Its like his head had a gaint window in in and a glowing pointy finger saying : Abuse my brain. This could be a very fun and not so innocent way of experimenting.

His rant finished with a threat of some sort. Normally she would be scared but staying at the sanctuary and getting out more made her less scared. Specially from somebody like him. She laughed softly like only crazy ladies do. Her hand twitched a bit and she stopped his laugh. "Your not going to hit a girl now, are you?" She said. "Not that you could hit me." She teased him a bit more. "But you have to be asking yourself this first." She said and moved her head a bit closer as if she was telling a secret. "Maybe im doing more to you then reading, maybe im not even here." She said softly and smiled again. She leaned her body back to normal and watched her words sink in.

Jake frowned as the malignancy he had felt before flooded once more into the scene. She was toying with him out of amusement... Coldly, he measured his options. He was fairly sure that violence would still work. No one had ever managed to hide from Jake. Wherever a person went, so did their thoughts, dreams and intentions. Just the fact that she was talking to him would tell him where she really was.

Was violence the answer? The last thing he wanted out of this encounter was blood. He had only talked to the woman at all out of concern and interest, and he couldn't go around starting a fight with every mutant he met. If this was all he he would find in this encounter, he had already had his fill. Would the girl allow him to retreat? He had no idea how her power worked, but it was a chance either way. I will be violent if you try and contain me and I want nothing more to do with you, he thought, hoping she would get the point.

“It's unfortunate you can't be civil. Have a good life.” Jake smiled in angered disgust and turned away with a sarcastic wave. His shoes squelched through the mud as he moved across the small strip of grass towards the gate at the far end of the park.