Chapter 10

Crystal was not in school the next day either, and Lauren was growing increasingly worried for her friend. She had tried placing a few more texts to Crystal throughout the day, all of which went unanswered.

She felt awkward walking down the school hall next to Bo, some students stopping to stare, and a few of the more dim ones asking their closest neighbor who the new girl was in response to Lauren's sudden transformation.

Even Dyson had stopped her. She guessed he was trying to flirt with her but she was never very good at telling when someone was paying her that type of attention, then again that could be because up until just recently no one ever had. It did not however go unnoticed by Bo who quickly butted in and wrapped her arm protectively around Lauren steering her away from the smug lacrosse team captain.

Bo had tried to insist on staying and waiting to take Lauren home after her Model UN meeting, but Lauren had insisted that she take the afternoon with Kenzi as she wanted to head out to the town's library after her meeting, she had also hoped that if she had enough time after the library she would be able to swing by Crystal's house to check on her friend, and Bo begrudgingly agreed, insisting yet again however on picking her up the following morning for school.

So here it was, five o'clock had finally rolled around and Lauren found herself outside the steps to the local library. She trotted up the steps and smiled at the older librarian who greeted her with a warm grin of her own.

When Lauren was finally upstairs and just a few rows away from the Magic and the Occult section, she felt that strange draw again. The hair on the back of her neck began to prickle and she shivered as she looked around the sudden feeling of eyes on her, only to find that she was completely alone in the deserted upper floor of the old library.

She took the few remaining steps into the section, and turned scanning the stacks for the book she had seen the other day. After a few minutes looking through where she could have sworn she had seen it, she continued to come up empty. She frowned to herself as she scanned up and down the rows of books again still finding nothing.

She turned and almost tripped over something large and heavy on the ground, just catching her self she looked down to find the familiar large, antique, leather bound book with gold embossed lettering.

Slowly Lauren bent down and picked up the unsurprisingly heavy book. She looked around. She could have sworn that the book had not been laying there when she first turned down the isle. Cradling it in her arms she hurried to the first cubby she could find where she plopped herself down and began to read.

"A Brief History of Telekinesis and Energy" she said quietly to her self as she allowed her fingertips to gently dance across the ancient looking gold leaf wording. She stopped her self. Was she crazy? This had to be crazy. Or was it? Given the strange events surrounding her recently, and lack of a better explanation she decided to just give into the last lead she had.

She coughed a little as dust popped out of the old text as Lauren delicately snapped the book open, taking care not to damage the delicate spine.

Psychokinesis is the influence of the mind on a physical object in the universe that cannot be accounted for by the measure of any known universally corporeal energy. In turn, it's counterpart Telekinesis which is the ability to move a physical object by no limitations of science fact, simply by the use of ones mind.

Though the two are separate manifestations in mortal beings, one being more commonly known as manipulating nature, and the later as manipulating a physical entity, there have been documented on rare occasions that both psychokinetic and telekinetic abilities manifest into a line of single individuals.

Lauren leaned back in her chair and rubbed the bridge of her nose. This was looking to be the beginnings of a long evening.

Three hours later and the library was beginning to close up for the night. In fact it should have closed an hour earlier, but the librarian over the years had taken a shine to Lauren and did not want to interrupt the girl who was deep in thought pouring over some of the older texts that the library had to offer.

Lauren thanked the librarian gratefully and checked out a few of the tomes she had found most interesting over the last several hours, now eager to get home and perform a few tests, her mind reeling from all of the new information it had just soaked up.

The books had gone into great detail of the earliest known manifestations of both psychokinesis and telekinesis. They seemed to be both reported in their earliest exhibitions in the Anglo-Saxons in the early fifth century. From there things got a little muddied however, some sources claiming the "gifts" to have been bestowed by God himself, or angles to those they favored, mainly those who may be physically weak but strong of mind and heart; while others were entirely opposite, claiming it to have originally manifested in witches, who passed down their "gift" to their future bloodlines. They went on to chronicle that while either a male or female could be a Telekinetic, a Psychokinetic could only be female. None of the books Lauren has skimmed through had mentioned why this was the case, though some did allude to this being caused by the powers being passed down by a witch to her female descendants as a true gift from mother earth allowing them to bend her elements at will, where as their male and sometimes female telekinetic counterparts could only move a physical object, rather than manipulate the elements and energy surrounding said object.

The books went on to report that a child born with either gift would live their childhood free from ability, however upon his or her eighteenth birthday their dormant powers would finally begin to manifest.

Ultimately deciding to entertain the notion that psychokinesis and telekinesis were at all possible, let alone her being one, the last bit of information had unsettled Lauren. She was still nearly a month away from her own eighteenth birthday, so why was she already displaying these abilities? At first she had dismissed the notion of telekinesis or psychokinesis purely based off of scientific fact and all of the knowledge that she held near and dear. But the more she read, the more it strangely made sense.

She began to write it off yet again however when she realized that she certainly would have known if Jack held any magical powers, or the ability to move objects with his mind, only to go over the description of how a Psychokinetic could only be female, and yet again, it was as if this absurd theory could possibly have some merit.

Lauren began to think long and hard over the possibilities on the way home. Was she a Psychokinetic? It did fit. Why the lights had flickered out outside her house when Bo first kissed her, the mirrors in the girl's bathroom suddenly shaking and shattering, not to mention the vase the previous evening when she had fought with her father, as well as the chemical beakers crashing to the floor and mixing together with their explosive results. All of those things pointed to nature, using the energy around the objects to overload the lights causing them to blow a fuse, as well as the glass and mirrors to spontaneously combust. It did not however explain the fire hydrants sudden leak, or what had happened to Tamsin's chair at lunch. Lauren was resolved in that she needed to preform a series of tests to see if it was at all possible that she was perhaps one of the elusive hybrids. None of the books had been able to give her much information on a PK/TK. It seemed that the breed was not only rare, but quite secretive, and the sections she did find explaining the two combined alluded to there being even more powers manifested when the two were combined, but that there was not much in way of proof, the stories being highly guarded and to be passed down from generation to generation of hybrids only.

Lauren's anger began to rise. How could this be happening to her? She was a scientist for crying out loud, the supernatural was not only far from her area of expertise but far from anything she could even remotely begin to believe in. She liked facts. Something tangible, results she could hold in her hands and know to be true. But this, this was ridiculous. Was her mother one? Did she know? She would have had to based off of everything that she had read. Her mother would have had to be the one to pass the traits onto Lauren. She was furious. Why did her mother have to die and leave her with so many unanswered questions? And what about her father? Did he know? Had he been keeping this from her her whole life, knowing what she would be going through in just a short time? No. Her father was the most stick to the facts, logically minded individuals Lauren had ever met. There was no way he would have accepted any of this as more then poppycock. So what, had her mother been able to keep this a secret from her father? If she had known how to control her powers then it was completely possible. Wasn't it?

Lauren began to wonder about her mother's family. She had never met any grandparents on either side of her family. Both her father and mother had claimed that each of their parents had died before Lauren was born. She thought Jack had maybe met their father's mother, but she wasn't entirely sure. She did know that she had an aunt in Vancouver on her father's side who she hadn't seen since she was a little girl, as well as her father's younger brother deemed "Crazy Uncle Joey" a bit of an eccentric artist who resided in Berkeley, California and taught sculpture at UC Berkeley.

As far as her mother's side of the family however, she had never heard anything about any aunts or uncles, nor had her grandparents on her mother's side ever even been brought up for any reason, she knew just about everything worth noting about her father's side of the family, her father and siblings grew up in Newmarket, her grandfather was a family practice physician and her grandmother a school teacher, but nothing about her mother's parents.

She knew that eventually she would need to sit her father down and have a real discussion about her mother, her mom's family, where she came from, and how she had passed away. But she wanted to let the waters cool a little before she breached the subject. History had taught her that her father would do everything is his power to dance around the subject of her mother's death, and if Lauren's hypothesis was correct, she needed some real, substantial proof before going to her father with the claims of having psychic abilities.

It was after eight thirty when Lauren finally got home. She had rushed to the kitchen and grabbed a pre prepared sandwich from the fridge along with a bottle of water before rushing upstairs and locking herself away in her bedroom as she prepped for her tests.

Lauren had worked for hours concentrating as hard as she could, attempting to roll a pencil across her desk with only her mind. Time ticked away with no results and Lauren was beginning to question her hypothesis as well as her sanity when a text from Bo had come in, upon the startling tone and vibration of her phone mixed with the name that scrolled across the screen, the pencil Lauren had been focusing on shot across the room and embedded its self into the drywall next to her bedroom door.

She then spent a few more hours attempting to recreate the act, accelerating her heart rate suddenly while focusing on moving an object at the same time, but nothing happened.

Finally frustrated and exhausted Lauren rolled into bed around two am.

Bo and Kenzi were waiting for Lauren outside her house the next morning as promised, and they all rode along to school engaging in light, pleasant conversation. It was small talk, but it was refreshing to Lauren after her long night of fruitless concentration.

Kenzi even from the back seat couldn't help but notice the way Bo's eyes seemed to sparkle when she looked at Lauren, and how she would brush her hand over the blonde's whenever she didn't think Kenzi was looking.

This was beginning to trouble the smaller brunette. Nobody was there except her, so why was Bo hamming it up in private? She should be holding out for when there was an actual audience like Tamsin or Dyson, this was a competition and a bet after all wasn't it?

The three girls pulled up to school and Bo held her hand out for Lauren to take as they began to walk down the crowded school hallway. They were about fifty feet from Lauren's locker when the blonde stopped dead in her tracks and gave Bo's had a tight squeeze, causing Bo to stop and look up to see what she was looking at. Crystal stood at her locker next to Lauren's gawking at the pair, her expression unreadable except for the obvious shock.

"Go talk to her. Work it out." Bo said as she pulled Lauren into her side, throwing her arm around he blonde's shoulders and giving her an encouraging squeeze before placing a light kiss on her cheek causing Lauren to flush as a few passers by stopped to watch the display. "I'll see you at lunch. We'll sit outside and enjoy the last week of warmth." Bo added with a smile as she pulled away, giving the blonde a small nudge toward her friend.

Lauren stood for a moment, still unsure of what to do. She knew that she needed to talk to Crystal, to work things through. She had gotten so caught up in herself and her work the evening before that she had forgotten all about her plan to stop by Crystal's and check on her.

Lauren took in a deep breath and quickly crossed the rest of the hall, closing the tense distance between her and her best friend. That was just it. Crystal was her best friend and she would do anything to get that back, and keep it that way.

"Hi." Lauren said sheepishly as she tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear.

"Hey." Crystal said a little uneasily, forcing a smile as she allowed her eyes to wander up and down Lauren. The girl was a far cry from the one who had barged out of the bathroom on her earlier in the week. Lauren was wearing one of the light blue v-neck sweaters she had picked out for her with the sleeves rolled up, matched with tight blue jeans and brown suede boots. But what really took her aback was the fact that not only was Lauren's hair cut and styled, perfectly framing the chiseled features of her face but the lack of glasses, and what she thought looked like traces of makeup. "Wow, you look great." Crystal mused, nodding her head at Lauren, giving her a small genuine smile.

"Thanks, I couldn't have done it without you and Kenzi." Lauren said with a little blush as she began to pick at the paint on her locker door. Crystal nodded again.

"Yeah, I guess things worked out with you and Bo then? That's great." Her voice held a trace of sadness, but Lauren didn't think that it was due to things working out between her and Bo, but rather Crystal still blaming herself for thinking that she had perhaps ruined that shot for her friend with her outburst.

"Yeah." Lauren replied quietly, looking away for a moment back to the corridor Bo had disappeared down. "She came by my house that night to apologize."

Crystal nodded.

"That's good, she needed to."

Lauren's ears began to burn with embarrassment. The two girls stood there silently for a minute before they both spoke up at once.

"I'm sorr—" The girls said in unison before each bursting out in a fit of nervous giggles.

"I'm," Crystal said, pausing to make sure that Lauren was not going to try to speak again as well, earning a smile and a nod to continue from the taller blonde. "I'm sorry for everything on Monday. The cafeteria, the bathroom." She rolled her eyes. "Especially the bathroom."

Lauren gave Crystal an encouraging smile. She had thought about it and though she was new at this whole friends and relationships thing, she felt that she had a pretty good handle on what had happened.

"Don't be, I completely understand." Lauren said smiling at her best friend.

"You, you do?" Crystal asked a little shakily. Lauren nodded.

"Yes, due to the sudden onset of stressors and anxiety, you suffered from a sudden lack of impulse control. That mixed with your brain stems beginning to misfire, you became confused and desperate and in turn acted out inappropriately, not on any real actual desires just confusion, you wiring essentially just got crossed causing you to act in the heat of the moment." Lauren finished smiling. "You'd have a pretty good case if you were up on a manslaughter charge, I'd give you temporary insanity." She joked hoping to relieve the lingering tension.

Crystal stood staring at Lauren blankly for a moment before she cracked a wide smile.

"I only about half understood what you just said to me, but yes, I think that is exactly what happened, temporary insanity, I like the sound of that." She burst out in a fit of laughter, slapping Lauren on the shoulder. "So we're good then Lewis?"

Lauren smiled back at her friend and nodded.

"We're good."

Crystal brightened even more and she began to drag Lauren away from her locker and down the hall toward their respected homerooms.

"Good, now you've got to fill me in on everything that happened over the last couple of days! I want details! All I can tell you is what happened when Mike's teacher thought he caught him cheating on an exam during the excessive Growing Pains marathons I've endured!" Crystal pulled Lauren into in a friendly side hug. She had been incredibly anxious to face her friend, afraid that Lauren would never speak to her again. She still had her reservations about Bo; she didn't like the flicker of guilt that had flashed through Bo's eyes when she had accused her of playing games with Lauren. But her best friend was looking to be just that again, and she seemed happy. So she had no intentions of rocking the boat just yet. Instead she would be encouraging, and the friend that Lauren needed, however, she would be keeping a close eye on Bo Dennis.

A/N: Shorter chapter I know, but I wanted to get into the meat and potatoes of it and this felt like a good place to leave off after the grand reveal of where Lauren's powers came from, and a little of the mythology behind them.

I hope that you enjoyed!

Thank you again for your continued support!