After that little bombshell —if you'll pardon the pun— The issue of my return to college became an impassable one. "You'll be staying home until that awful woman gets caught." My mom said, in a tone which brooked no argument. My dad just nodded. My dad took the minivan to pick up my stuff from the dorm, and my mom had to go back to work the next day, which left me alone in the house. I woke up around ten o'clock to a note, as well as directions to find food in the refrigerator. It turned out to be homemade nachos, my favorite.

I reheated the food in the microwave and booted up our family's antique PC. My own laptop had been in my backpack and had been subsequently destroyed by the blast. I hoped I'd be able to pull the hard drive out at least, but for now I was stuck using the dinosaur.

I pulled up Parahumans Online and started digging. The plate of nachos evaporated as I clicked through dozens of articles about capes, by capes, and so on. I'd never really been a big follower of the whole parahumans thing; it had always seemed less interesting than my own dream of being a materials engineer. The thought set me back on my heels for a minute. Did I even want to be a cape? Sure, there was all the fame and glory that could come with it— if you didn't get drowned by Leviathan, crisped by Behemoth, or brainwashed by Simurgh. There were a thousand villains waiting out there who would have no problem with doing all kinds of horrible things to me with their powers. It would probably be easier and safer to just say nothing about my abilities and just keep my head down and stay the course I'd already set out for myself: Bachelor's in materials engineering, maybe a Masters, a nice house and a job working for whoever needed a new kind of steel that week.

But that brought me to the other hand. What if I turn out to be really, really good? I still wasn't even sure what my power entailed, nor what its limits were. How could I resist finding out just what I could do? I'd never been very good at sports or anything competitive, really. But with powers, that could change. I couldn't deny it— for the first time I had the potential to be significant. So I went back to searching. Hours later, I heard the garage door rumble, and realized my dad had come back. I erased the browser history of the last seven hours, went to Youtube, and clicked through a bunch of long documentaries. On the last one, I fast-forwarded to about three-fourths of the way through the video, then leaned back in my chair and adopted my very best couch-potato expression.

"Dave!" my dad yelled. "Can you take a few bags?"

"Sure!" I tried to say. For fucks sake. I scowled and grabbed the whiteboard, then hurried over to the garage where my dad was struggling to carry four massive duffel bags in one trip. "Just those over there." He indicated them with a jerk of his chin.

I nodded and picked up the indicated bags. They were heavy, packed in haste without any knowledge of how everything had gone in together. Following after my dad, we carried the bags to my room, where we grouped them in a pile near one corner. "We'll unpack later." My dad said. "That drive really tuckered me out." He sat down on my bed, which squeaked a bit. I sat cross-legged on the floor across from him, a bit nervous about letting him find out about the model train I'd fixed.

"By the way," my dad continued, "I found this while I was packing up your stuff."

He pulled the bottle of rum I'd bought a few weeks ago for a party that would have been last weekend. My eyes widened, but he just chuckled a bit. He went into the kitchen for a moment and came back with a bottle of coca-cola and two glasses. "Don't tell your mom about this." He smiled and poured a drink for each of us. With a toast, we each drank.

"Hell, if anyone deserves a shot, it's you right now." Dad continued. "Hell of a thing to be in your place."

I nodded, and scribbled on the whiteboard before holding it up. "I feel fine at least. Just wish I could talk again."

"I'm glad." He said. "I figure we'll have to call the semester a bust, but they ought to catch this Bakag— Baki— whatever woman before too long. If you don't feel safe there anymore, I'm sure we can look for another school. Your grades were excellent, so maybe you'll be able to squeeze an even bigger scholarship out this time."

I smiled. He patted my knee and rose. "I already booked an appointment with a Dr. Rockwell, starting tomorrow. When the doctor says it's okay for you to drive, we'll go up and get your car, but for now I'll be driving you."

I nodded again, scrawled "thanks, dad" on my whiteboard.

The first session of speech therapy went… less than well. Dr. Rockwell was a nice lady in her early forties, with the sort of kindly manner that I'd never seen in someone who wasn't a grandma before. We sat at the little round table in her office as she read my file on her computer.

"The hospital says you've gotten Broca's Aphasia from a nasty knock to the head." She commented. "We'll begin today with just a few simple exercises to try and see what the nature of this particular case is, and how we can start fixing it, does that sound good?"

I nodded.

"I'd like for you to try and speak as often as possible while you're here." She continued. "So let's try that again. "Does that sound good?"

"Y-yrrrrrh." I managed. My face burned.

"Don't worry about it." Dr. Rockwell soothed. "We all know that it's just your speech centers that have been affected, the rest of your brain works fine. No one will think the less of you here."

"Thhh."

"You're very welcome." She handed me a pen and a sheet of paper. "Now, can you write out your name for me?"

I wrote "David Fraser" in careful letters. Dr. Rockwell seemed surprised.

"That's unusual." She commented. "Often my patients have trouble writing words or sentences, but you don't seem to be having any trouble. Can you write the sentence 'the ball is red'?"

I shrugged and wrote "The ball is red" below my name.

"Hmm." She frowned. "Now, can you read that aloud for me?"

"Thhhh. Bbbb. Rrrr." I tried. Mom squeezed my hand beneath the table.

Dr. Rockwell was typing notes into her laptop. "This is unusual. I'd say you have moderate to severe aphasia, but somehow your actual language center seems completely fine. I'm also looking at your MRI, and there are several inconsistencies." She flipped the computer around, showing a black-and white image of what I took to be my brain.

"Unfortunately we don't have an MRI from before the accident for comparison." She went on. "But you can see here that the impact came to the back of your head, where this tissue is right here." She pointed. "Now, all that seems to be doing fine. Your vision is unimpaired, and your physical coordination seems to be fine." She pointed to a section closer to the front of my brain. "Now this is your speech center, and again it seems to be physically intact. "It's always possible that we've missed something, but there doesn't really seem to be any of the damage we would usually associate with a speech disorder."

"So what does all this mean?" my mom asked.

"It means that although the concussion and the speech impairment looked related at first glance, they don't seem to actually have the same cause." Rockwell answered. "Rather, that whatever reason David is unable to speak, something else must have happened to cause it. Perhaps a sympathetic reaction to the concussion, but the one is not a direct result of the other."

"What could it be, then?" My mom asked.

"There are a number of possibilities. Drugs would be my number one guess—" mom squeezed my hand again "—but his blood work was clean as a whistle. Perhaps a very, very small stroke caused by the impact, or perhaps even a simple panic reaction."

"Could it have been a trigger event?" Mom asked. I froze.

"No, I doubt it." Dr. Rockwell answered. "We don't fully understand them, of course, but as a general rule they seem to affect the body more often than the brain. Tinkers and Thinkers of course might seem different, and perhaps with a pre-accident MRI we could be certain, but for now that seems very unlikely. You haven't noticed any new powers, have you David?"

I shook my head, then remembered I was supposed to talk. "Nnn."

Mom visibly relaxed. "So you're saying the most likely reaction is some sort of mental…block?"

"Of the sort, yes." Dr. Rockwell agreed. "I would almost classify this as a sort of selective mutism, where the patient will remain unwilling to speak, no matter what the consequences might be."

My mom tsked and smacked my arm. "David! You had us all worried! You're fine, you just have to start talking!"

"It's not that simple." Dr. Rockwell said. "I said that's what it looks like, but again the data doesn't match. Selective mutism usually doesn't come into play so late in development— usually it goes away under the right circumstances, or the child grows out of it. David's an adult —even a young one— and if he seems to be unable to speak on any occasion, we must again conclude that this isn't true either."

"So…" mom prompted.

"So I can't really be sure what this is." Dr. Rockwell said. "It seems to be an unusual case. I recommend he come here for speech therapy anyway, and we'll try a combination of treatment for Broca's Aphasia and selective mutism. In the meantime, I'll have to look further into this case."

The rest of the session was comprised of me trying to speak. The process resembled nothing so much as pulling teeth with a pair of rusty tweezers, as one grunt at a time I attempted to make sounds that resembled words. By the end, my throat was raw, despite having not uttered a single damn discernible sentence the entire time. Dr. Rockwell must have seen my frustration, for as we left she said, "It will get better, David. You're young and intelligent, and something like this can't hold you back forever."

I just nodded. Wasn't like I could do much else. That weekend, me and Dad drove up to go snag my car from Cornell. We rolled up to the main entrance, which had a newly-erected barrier across it. A cop stood behind it, and walked over to the car's driver side window as we pulled up. I was driving, as Dad had considered it a good idea to check if I was able to drive before we turned around for the journey home.

"May I ask what your business is in the college this afternoon?" the cop asked.

I nodded and reached for my whiteboard.

"Hey!" the cop reached for his sidearm. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Officer, he's got aphasia." My dad explained from the passenger's seat.

"He's retarded?" the cop asked, confused. "Why's he driving, then?"

I flushed. Being called dumb was the one insult that always got to me— probably because being smart was about the only positive trait I had.

"He got a concussion from the bombing two weeks ago." My dad elaborated. "The doctors think his inability to speak is the result of that. I assure you, he's perfectly capable of driving, but we don't think staying the semester is a good idea. We're just here to pick up the other car."

"Right." Agreed the cop. "Sorry 'bout that. And I don't blame you for wanting to take the semester off— this Bakuda bitch isn't messing around."

"There have been more bombings?" Dad asked.

"Three total, now." The cop sighed. "First one was in the foyer of a lecture hall, the next one was in one of the classrooms themselves. This latest one was in a professor's office; we're just waiting for the media to swarm all over the story."

"I'm sorry to hear that." Dad said.

"Yeah." The cop sighed and pulled back the gate. "Well, if 'sorries' were fishes, I'd have twelve guys following me around and writing down everything I said. Have a nice day, stay safe."

I gave him a small wave and we hummed through the gate. I found my car easily enough, and we stopped in a nearby space to get out and stretch our legs before driving back. My dad glanced at my car.

"You sure it can get you all the way home?" he asked. "Maybe it's better if I drive it, you take my car back."

I shook my head. "It's my car." I wrote. "I can drive it."

He shrugged. "Keep your cell phone on, just in case."

I raised my eyebrows. His shoulders sagged a little. "…Right."