Warren parked his bike at the back of Nikki's, leaving his helmet hanging on a handlebar. Luckily the guy who owned the bar(who's real name turned out to be Nicodemus, but everyone called him Nikki since he had threatened every person within three square miles with death by crowbar if they dared used his full name) had been glad of a helping hand. It'd be nice to have something familiar to do.
Walking through the sliding metal doors that were the back entrance, Warren passed through a dark wood hallway with three doors in it, one leading to the bathroom for employees, one to the kitchen and grill and the last to the storage/ice room. Right before the hallway turned out to the back of the bar, he hung up this leather jacket on a coat stand. Looking out he noted the beginnings of the dinner crowd coming in, the fresh air from outside mixing in with smell of steak, fresh bread and beer. Two pool tables dominated one side of the large room, while small tables occupied the other, an old model jukebox sat directly across the bar…old rock playing just over a murmur, the chairs lining the edge of the black partially obscuring the machine from sight…a far cry from the Lantern.
That Warren knew of only three people were working on staff tonight…Nikki, him and the cook. Lucky him, he got to be cook's assistant and bouncer this shift. Scraping his hair back into a short tail as he turned towards the kitchen, he caught a familiar shock of white blond flash going by as he went. Mentally shrugging, Warren hoped the sharp tongued punk didn't get into trouble. Then again, odds were the other three boys were nearby…though the tallest two were more men than boys. So the brat couldn't get into too much trouble.
Nikki manned the beer tap, threatening the younger kids with a hard glare when they tried to bribe him for a glass of beer, shooing them off with a low growl…and gave the few adults (mostly truckers stopping for a break from the road) warning glances as he handed them their drinks. Nikki's was usually populated by students from Spencer and the surrounding area and was liked by almost all the younger generation.
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It couldn't have been more than an hour later when Warren felt something pulse along the edge of his empathy. Startled, he stilled himself for a moment, then finished pouring the kids along the bar their sodas. Turning slightly, he scanned the room with his eyes, wondering what had caused the feeling. It had been a long time since anything had had the power to push through the barriers he'd built up around his empathic senses.
Last time it had been when Will had pissed off Layla last year right before prom. Warren couldn't remember exactly what Armstrong had done but he did remember the entire school had been turned into a jungle greenhouse for the next two weeks. It would have been hilarious if he hadn't ended up with a migraine splitting his skull for the next three days.
But this was different. Layla's outburst of power and fury had combined to knock him out for an hour…feeling something like a jack hammer pounding on the base of his neck and skull. This felt more like a…ripple…if that made any sense. Kind of like the reaction you get when you drop a pebble into a still body of water. Even stranger, though, was that such a quiet action could garner enough strength to break through the barriers without hurting him. Wait, that wasn't right…reaching out Warren, could still feel his shields intact. Whatever it was, it hadn't even left a mark on them…it had passed through them instead.
Not seeing anything with his eyes, Warren pushed some of the power into the orbs. Now, on the one hand empathic sight was slightly different from that of normal sight, and on the other it really wasn't. He could still see objects, shapes, and most others things but they were seen, instead of in the color spectrum, in varying shades of black, grey and white. The only thing that looked even close to the natural colors were the emotions that surrounded people like a fine mist, shifting through the spectrum as their feelings changed from moment to moment.
What he was searching for though was power, something that showed quite differently than emotions in the sight. Emotions hovered around a person, their own personal miasmic cloud of different hues. Power was something that lived beneath the skin, glowing from the inside out…not so much in colors as everyone around them but more of a white light.
There, by the pool tables stood the sharp tongued brat and what looked like the youngest of the group from the other night, both with softly glowing light moving under their skin. Watching the pool tables from the corner of his eyes as he worked, he saw the brat's power shifting slightly as he used it to rig the game, smirking in amusement as the college boys across from him threw a fit. Raised voices started to emit from the two groups, then in a pushing shuffling mass the moved toward the back yelling all the way.
A whisper touching his empathy again, he turned towards the other side of the room. There were the other two fourths of the brat's friends, pushing their way to follow their wayward brat. If the younger two glowed with power, these two practically shone with it, their power fair ripping under their skin. And there, behind them was another that shone with power. But it was so laced with black and sickly yellow that almost none of the original power was able to shine through. His empathy recoiled at the sight of it, the wrongness of it almost strong enough for him to taste it…stolen power.
Pulling back the power from his eyes, Warren looked at everything in color this time. The man with the tainted power sat with two girls, one light and one dark, looking after the two departing for the brat's direction…which happened to be right out back…where his bike was parked.
Cursing under his breath, Warren tore off the apron he had on and threw it on the shelves beneath the bar top and started off in the direction the older boys had taken. Nikki stopped him on the way out with a hand on his shoulder, handing him a baseball bat. Warren looked at it for a moment. Nikki nodded his head in the direction of the back lot and told him to "go mingle with the locals…and make sure the damn brats don't damage anything." Giving a curt nod, he walked out.
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A chapter! Joy! Thanks for the inspiration, Yagizami!
