Chapter 4 - In Which Tom Milsom Overhears an Intervention
Saturday, November 9th, 2013
(11:41 A.M.)
"Oh, I'll tell you right now: he's fucking mental."
Ben chuckled at his distinctively blue-haired interviewee. "I'm glad someone's still okay with talking about this. Let's start with the required questions though before we get too far into it, alright?"
"Yeah, fine," Tom agreed.
Ciaran readied the cameras and filming commenced.
"Name?" Ben asked.
"Tom Milsom."
"Colony?"
"E.B.O."
"Occupation?"
"Musician."
"Registered superpower?" Ben requested.
"Echolocation," Tom replied.
"Now that is a shit power."
Tom laughed. "Oh? How so?"
"Why would you need echolocation?" Ben asked. "I mean, it might make sense if you were blind or something, but you can already see!"
"But not at night though," Tom countered, waving his arms with more animated gestures as he became more excited. "Echolocation is fucking cool, okay? It's like your brain is automatically doing all these calculations to determine everything you need to know about your surroundings. You pick how much sensory input you want; if you don't send out signals, you don't receive information. If you want more information, you just send out more signals. It's really cool!"
"Well, as long as you're satisfied with it, I guess," the interviewer conceded. "What's your superhero name?"
Tom's grin faded at the recollection. "I just go by 'Tom'."
"Come on, man, what's the name?"
"I didn't pick it," Tom said defensively. "The public chooses the names."
"Right…" Ben began, "and yours is...?"
Tom sighed deeply. "Batkid."
Ben laughed. "Wasn't that name taken already? Didn't you have to be like, 'Batkid72' or something?"
"I had so many good ideas for names," Tom groaned. "I could have been like 'The Nightcrawler' or the 'Sonic Shrieker' or even some stupid pun like 'Call and Response' would have been better than fucking Batkid! It's not even accurate—I'm not a bat!"
"It's okay, Tom…"
"No it's not! God! Are people actually so ignorant that they think the only animal that uses echolocation is a bat? I mean honestly, there are birds and dolphins and—"
"Tom," Ben interrupted.
"...whales—"
"Tom."
"...fucking shrews, Ben! They forgot about the fucking shrews!"
"Tom!" Ben shouted. "Focus! We have a lot of interviews to get through!"
Tom grinned sheepishly. "Sorry. Go ahead."
Ben sighed. "Alright, so moving on from the fact people weren't feeling very creative when they voted on your name, what can you tell us about Alex Day?"
"Fucking mental," Tom concluded.
"And how did you come to this conclusion?"
Tom scoffed. "Oh, where to begin?"
xxxxx
Tuesday, March 12th, 2013
(3:45 P.M.)
Alright, I'd known Alex longer than most of the people here and it was obvious that something was drastically different about him. Towards the beginning of 2013, Alex's musical career had really slowed down and—understandably—he wasn't too happy about it. But I knew it was bad when he started letting the YouTube comments get to him.
"Do you think I'm 'straying too far from my roots'?" he asked me that afternoon as we were hanging out at my flat. I'd been trying to show him this really epic part of a song I was working on, but he wasn't really paying attention as he scrolled through comments on his laptop. "With my newer music I mean."
"Is that what they're saying?" I asked over the instrument.
He nodded.
"Do you think you are?"
"I don't know." He shrugged. "I mean, I have changed…"
"Well, who says you have to be the same person you were when you started making music? You're allowed to change. If they don't like it, they can go fuck themselves."
He smiled a bit, but I could tell he wasn't convinced.
"Don't let it get to you. Just do what makes you happy," I advised. Still, he seemed out of it that day. Every time I'd try to get him to do something, he'd just keep getting drawn back to the Internet and the opinions.
"Maybe I need to study more of what I was doing before," he later said. "I mean, maybe there's… something that I used to have in my songs that I just don't have anymore. They're saying I sound too 'professional' and 'produced' now…"
"Are you even listening to yourself?" I asked. "You've gotten better. Anyone with a brain can see that. Don't try to undo all your growth."
"I'm not, I just think maybe I need to go back and look at what I used to do. Maybe I'll figure out what everyone tells me is missing from my new stuff. That's all."
I shrugged. "Knock yourself out—they're your own songs. But don't get too obsessed with it, okay? The numbers aren't the only thing that matters."
"I'm not going to get obsessed!" Alex laughed.
xxxxx
"I'm guessing he got obsessed?" Ben ventured.
"Completely." Tom nodded. "After that day, Alex started spending an incredible amount of time in the studio working with his older songs."
"Parrot Stories, right?"
"Yeah. It was like he was dissecting them—comparing each element of his old songs to his new ones. Every single time I'd stop in the recording studio, he'd be there, bent over a computer screen, adjusting parts of his music…"
xxxxx
Wednesday, August 14th, 2013
(5:00 P.M.)
"Hey man, don't you ever leave?" I asked him. His eyes were hauntingly bloodshot and there were huge dark circles under them.
He didn't respond right away, like it took a few seconds for his brain to register my words. "I'll leave when I'm finished," he finally answered, without even taking his eyes off the screen.
I sighed. It seemed I would have to be the responsible one. "Alex, I think you need to chill out with this music thing," I said cautiously. "I mean, how long have you been here?"
He shrugged.
"When's the last time you slept?"
"That's what this is for," Alex said, pointing a jittery finger at the mug of tea next to him.
"That's not healthy, mate…"
He rested on hand on his chest. "After a while, you hardly notice the heart palpitations… it all kinda blends into the music…"
"Okay, that's it. We're going home now." I stepped over to him and started pulling his chair away from the desk.
"Nooo!" he cried, struggling against me (albeit weakly). "I'm almost there! I can feel it!"
"Yeah, you're almost dead, I can see it," I retorted. I spun the chair around and dragged him by the arm. "Come on, I'm taking you home and I'm going to make Charlie barricade you in your room for the next ten hours so that you fucking get some sleep! Jesus!"
"Charlie moved out," he answered flatly.
"He what?" I asked, letting his arm go.
"He left."
"When? Why?"
"A couple days ago." He shrugged. "I can't remember why… I think he just got sick of me."
"How could he get sick of you? You're never home," I pointed out.
Alex shrugged again. "Guess I'm just that annoying."
He looked so dejected… abandoned. Almost instinctively, I found myself hugging the broken remains of my friend. "Come on, let's go home. I'll stay with you tonight."
xxxxx
After that, he didn't spend quite so much time at the studio, but he still worried me. When we'd talk, he would seem almost disoriented—like he was living in his own little world and my words could only drag him back to reality for a few minutes at a time. It was far easier just to leave him to his own devices. Soon, I could kind of understand why Charlie left. It was like Alex wasn't really there anymore and he had been replaced by this musical robot whose only goal was to get back up in the charts. And it was working.
Within the next few weeks, he made one of the most drastic rebounds of chart history with the release of several singles from his new album. I didn't really understand it, to be honest, because the songs all seemed kind of shallow and amateur. It certainly wasn't his best work. But he was happy and I was just glad that the musical madness would be over. Or so I'd hoped.
I'd had my suspicions for a while, but it wasn't until Carrie brought it up that things started to click.
xxxxx
Wednesday, October 23rd, 2013
(6:30 P.M.)
I was hanging out with Alex again a few weeks after the new citizen initiation ceremony. Carrie had stopped by too, but Alex—being his new, weird self—wasn't really participating much. Everything she'd say, Alex would either completely ignore or else just float back some vaguely related response, which almost always led back to his music. After a while I could tell she was getting irritated with his lack of effort, so I excused myself to make some tea and give them some space.
Alright, fine—I was eavesdropping.
As soon as I'd put the kettle on, I snuck back and stood right outside the room, pressed up against the wall so that I could somewhat see into the room, but they couldn't see me.
"Alex," Carrie was saying.
He didn't respond but just continued to gaze blankly ahead.
"Alex, look at me," she tried again, concern evident in her tone. He seemed to struggle to turn his head. Once his eyes were looking into hers she spoke. "Listen, I need you to be honest with me."
He sighed. "What about?"
She took a deep breath and then quietly asked, "Are you on drugs?"
"No!" he said forcefully, the slow, float-y voice suddenly being replaced by an angry one at the accusation. "I don't do drugs!"
"Then what is going on?" she demanded. "Because you've been acting really weird lately!"
"I'm just trying to focus on my music, okay? Fucking hell..."
"I'm starting to worry about you and your music," she went on. "It's all you ever talk about anymore. You used to have so many things that you cared about! Now it's all just this one album!"
"I have to focus on it if it's going to be any good!"
"I know but… it's like it consumes you. And not just you either. Other people are getting really, really into it."
"Yeah Carrie, that's what people do when they like something! Can't you just let me be successful?" he shot back.
"Of course, but… don't you think some of this is getting out of hand? I mean you have what, three singles out? And there are literally people in the streets cheering your name every time you step out of the house. I hear 'Good Morning Sunshine' in every single lift I step into, and yesterday I saw someone nearly get hit by a car because he was spinning around singing 'Funnel Cake'. It's an unnatural amount of adoration, okay? People are taking this to new levels."
"God, leave it alone, will you? I'm not hurting anyone."
"I'm just worried about you…"
"You mean you're just jealous!" he spat back. "You know you'll never be as successful as me!"
I stepped out from my hiding place, unable to believe what I'd just heard. Carrie was just staring at him. "What did you say?" she finally asked.
"You're just jealous," Alex repeated.
Her face flushed and she inhaled shakily before responding. "You know what? I don't need this." She stood up quickly and grabbed her bag. "Talk to me again when you're ready to stop being a pillock!" And with that she stormed out.
xxxxx
"So, what happened then?" Ben asked.
"I tried to talk to him after Carrie had gone—get him to apologise or something," Tom said.
"Did he?"
"No, he insisted that he hadn't done anything wrong. Then he kind of… went off the deep end."
"How?"
"As it got closer and closer to the time of the album's release, Alex became more obsessed. He made zero effort to talk to anyone, and when other people would try talking to him, he'd just ignore them. You can only deal with that for so long."
"Interesting," Ben mused. "So did his popularity diminish then?"
"With his friends? Yeah, definitely. But with his fans it was the opposite. He just kept climbing the charts, taking over the music industry one hit single at a time."
Ben nodded and marked something down on his notepad.
"Anything else?" Tom asked.
"Yeah, actually," Ben replied, flipping through the pages until he found what he was looking for. "You mentioned something about the 'Initiation Ceremony'. Could you explain what that is?"
"Oh, that's right. I forgot you only got here like three days ago. Right, well…"
xxxxx
Saturday, September 21st, 2013
(1:00 P.M.)
"Anyone who cares to witness the New Citizens Initiation Ceremony, please report to Town Hall immediately," John Green's voice called across the loudspeakers in the square.
I didn't have anything in particular to do that day, so I decided to follow the general commotion and attend the ceremony. Besides, I liked watching the superpower demonstrations.
Looking around for someone I knew to sit by, I spotted PJ by the water coolers.
"Hey Tom!" he called as he refilled his bottle. "Come to see Carrie?" He grinned.
"Oh, is that who it is?" I asked. I hadn't heard if she'd immigrated yet or not.
"Well, her and a load of others, but I don't know any of them."
We found seats in the back as the auditorium slowly filled with people. PJ handed me a programme that had the schedule for the evening and who would be in the ceremony. I scanned over the names but only recognised one or two before I spotted 'Carrie Hope Fletcher', the last on the list.
I settled into my plastic chair, knowing I'd have to sit through the entire ceremony before I would see Carrie's demonstration. It was worth it though, because this would most likely be the only time I would get to see her powers firsthand.
PJ and I watched the new citizens as they, one by one, had their faces covered in peanut butter (or sharpie), were automatically entered in the drawing for a free puppy sized elephant, took the Oath of Nerdfighteria, and finally, demonstrated their superpowers.
We watched in awe as some guy magically shapeshifted into a rubbish bin and then back again. A girl turned invisible and downed a whole pint of butter beer, the glass mug floating effortlessly in front of where her lips must've been. Someone grew defensive barbed quills like a porcupine, and someone else lifted Bertie Gilbert straight out of his seat with just their mind.
A group of llamas had just finished cleaning up the orange juice mess from the last citizen's power demonstration when Hank Green called, "Carrie Hope Fletcher!"
She walked onstage, beaming and curtsying to the crowd. I noticed her scanning the faces in the audience. Apparently she didn't see whoever she was looking for because she frowned as John Green applied a thick layer of peanut butter to her nose with a spatula.
Once her face was sufficiently coated, she repeated the Oath after Hank and was sworn into the nation of Nerdfighteria.
I saw French, the llama, whisper something in Carrie's ear and she nodded.
"Ready to show us your power, Carrie?" Hank asked.
"I think so," she said, a little nervously.
"There's nothing to be afraid of," John said. "You'll be fine."
There were murmurs of encouragement from the crowd, but I heard someone say, "The actress has stage fright?" and laugh to his friends.
Carrie ignored him and bit her lip as the Green brothers walked off stage, arguing about something.
She exhaled slowly and turned around to reveal that her dress had two large slits cut in the back.
Suddenly, huge, white, feathery wings sprouted through the holes in her dress.
There was a collective gasp from the crowd as she spread them, showing her entire majestic wingspan to the room. She did a couple of spins and flapped her wings for us, showing that they were completely separate from her arms and could be tucked inside her dress when not in use, somehow magically shrinking so that not even a feather poked out.
A couple of llamas wheeled a large staircase that had a platform at the top and then a sheer drop to the stage some five metres below. It was like a high dive, but without the pool.
As Carrie slowly climbed the stairs, I realised that her demonstration had only just begun. When she reached the top, she took in a sharp breath and steeled herself for the jump.
xxxxx
"Did it work?" Ben asked, captivated by Tom's story.
"Like magic," Tom said simply. "I mean, it probably would have been a lot more majestic if not for the peanut butter smeared all over her face, but still…"
"So, she could fly?"
Tom nodded.
"And you believed it?"
"Well obviously I was sceptical at first. I looked for wires or other mechanisms that could have faked it but—Ben, she flew right over my head! It was amazing! It was one of the most epic demonstrations I'd ever seen. The only one that was better was when Dan Howell walked straight through a pillar of fire in nothing but swimming trunks and he wasn't even singed! That was brilliant." Tom cracked a huge, genuine smile.
"I see," Ben nodded. He wrote something else down on his notepad. "Okay, you're free to go now, Tom. There should be an officer outside waiting to escort you back to Town Hall."
Tom raised an eyebrow but said nothing as he walked out of the room.
The moment the door shut behind Tom, Ciaran asked, "Ben?"
"Yeah?" Ben didn't glance up as he flipped through his notes.
"Why didn't you tell him it was a trick? I mean, Carrie told us herself that she can't actually fly."
"All in due time, my friend," Ben said mysteriously.
Ciaran rolled his eyes. "You are so full of shit. You know that, right?"
Ben just smiled.
A/N: This chapter was co-written with Katisha (tumblr: cookieboxofsocks)