Yesterday I wrote about meeting Ms. Raiko for the first time, but I didn't have time to record all of the details, so first let me correct that before moving on. We sat and talked for a bit while sitting in the McDonalds.
"You're a middle school student?" She asked. She had a voice that reminded me of the color of dark, well-polished wood. Rich and earthy.
"Unfortunately, yes." I muttered, around a mouthful of tsukimi burger. She was sitting with an elbow resting on the table and her cheekbone resting on her hand, watching me eat with a slightly bemused, but friendly expression.
"Well, you're not the first girl of that age to start spontaneously stalking me. What's your name?"
"Shouldn't you give yours before asking someone else's?" I snapped without thinking.
"I just bought you a burger. How about I get yours first?"
I swallowed the last of my sandwich and looked down self-consciously. "Thank you for the meal, I guess. I'm Sumireko Usami."
"There you go. Pleased to meet you Sumireko. I'm Raiko Horikawa," she said with a smile. "A college student," she added, after a slight pause.
Part of me scolded myself for giving my real name so readily. I didn't know who this person was, after all. Just because she was good at drums didn't mean she wasn't some sort of scammer. Still though, that performance and the sense of almost supernatural confidence she projected had earned my respect. And it's not like I was defenseless if she turned out to be some sort of criminal.
"So," she began, the smile on her face curling up to the corners of her eyes, "why were you stalking me? You've been following me since I left the arcade, right?"
"Do I have to answer that?"
"You're the one who followed me in here then ate the burger I bought you. If you were just impressed by the way I can spin a stick then just say that. If that's all it is, I won't embarrass you any further. You can just pay me back for the meal and go home." She smiled and tapped out a quick rhythm on the table with one fingernail.
"Miss Horikawa, you're a professional drummer, aren't you?"
"Just call me Raiko. I guess you could say it's what I do, but I'm not sure you could call it a job."
"Well, your performance was spectacular," I said, crumpling up my wrapper and sipping my coke. "I guess I just followed you because it was kind of captivating? Spellbinding, almost."
"Spellbinding! That's a new one." she said in a tone of mild shock, raising her head up off her hand. She smiled as she looked me in the eyes. The way she looked at me was odd. It seemed somehow more thorough than the way most people did. Like she was seeing more of me. "Well, my mistake then. For some reason I thought you had followed me because you had found a kindred spirit."
"A kindred spirit?" I asked, "Are you looking for people to start a band or something? I don't make a habit of following people just to make friends." As I said this, I tossed the crumpled burger wrapper across the restaurant toward the trash bin. It would have fallen a little short on its own, so I gave it a tiny little mental push. Just enough to have it swish into the opening, a perfect bullseye.
Raiko watched as the balled-up paper went in. Her eyes tracked the projectile precisely, but her expression never changed.
"Nah, I already belong to a band. When I was choosing songs for that last number back there though, were you the one who kept trying into tap the cymbal to change the song?" she asked.
Just as I had given the ball of paper a little push just now, I had done the same in the arcade, tapping away from the selected song just before Raiko had hit play. It hadn't worked. My mental push against the surface of the drum pad had never registered. "So you did notice then!" I said with a smile. "I kind of thought you had. You're only the second psychic I've ever met."
"Oh no, I've been found out," she said in an utterly flat tone, returning my smile. "I wasn't expecting to meet a kindred spirit so near at hand, but I guess the jig is up." Saying that, she tapped out a little beat on the tabletop, her fingernail rapping in precise time against the surface. As she tapped, the straw of her shake contorted and twisted, tying itself into a knot, but only moving in jerky fits and starts, almost as if it were dancing rather than being manipulated with telekinesis.
Telekinesis. It was the first of my abilities that I had awakened to. The power to manipulate objects using only the power of thought. In the past, I had been clumsy with it, sometimes even moving things without intending to as a child. I had refined both my precision and my power over time though. Right now, I've tested myself with weights of up to 100kg with no trouble and I can be precise and light enough to push a button on the TV remote without knocking it off of a table. It makes cleaning or rearranging the furniture in my room a breeze.
There's one clear limit to telekinesis that I had theorized before, however. I had only had a brief opportunity to test it back during the very first time I encountered someone with a similar power. I hadn't talked to them about it then though, merely come up with my theory - when two people with telekinesis try to interfere with the same object at the same time, only the first one to hold that object in their mind can affect it. Any other telekinetic will be able to feel the object, and sense its presence, but not move it. I had discovered this concept back in elementary school, but my experiments just now in the arcade had finally proven it for me. It was hard to keep the smile off of my face. Raiko had just proven to me not only that she was a psychic with similar capabilities to my own, but that such abilities could be used with style. She had clearly been hitting the beats on the arcade machine with her mind, tapping just as soon as she saw the markers on the screen while the impressive tricks she had been doing with the sticks the whole time were clearly just for show. It was incredibly cool, but perhaps not the most appropriate use of telekinetic abilities.
"So what now?" she asked, tapping her straw back to normal so she could drink out of it again. "Are you going to introduce me to some secret society of psychics or something?"
"Oh, is there such a thing?"
"You're asking me? If there is, I've never heard of them."
"I haven't either, but I figure there must be. I mean I know the idea of a shadow government controlling everything is a little cliché nowadays, but people like us are just plain better at stuff. If there isn't a secret psychic cabal in charge of the world, there ought to be. You'd look good in one of those Men In Black suits."
"So if you're not trying to recruit me, why seek me out then? Just curious to meet another person like yourself?"
"Well, the idea of having someone I can talk to about it seems nice. There are things I could only ask someone with similar powers."
"Oh? Like what?"
"Well, for example, do you have any recollection of how you became this way? Was there any sort of trigger, or have you always been like this?"
"Hmm, that's a difficult question. I've been doing things this way for as long as I can remember doing them," she said with a smile. She tapped a beat onto the table again and then a fry popped out of the container in front of her and sailed into her waiting mouth. It might seem like an incredibly lazy way to eat to most people, but I'm experienced enough to realize just how much finesse that would take. Such fine movements are usually easier to do by hand. At my current level of control... well, I wouldn't want to try throwing anything at my mouth. "How about you?" she asked.
"Hmmm... I was definitely able to do it since before I was in kindergarten. I'm pretty sure someone gave me these powers though."
"Gave them to you? Is there a shadowy organization out there handing out supernatural powers to children?"
"I don't know. I'd never seen the person who gave them to me before, and I haven't seen her since. Wouldn't it be cool if there was something like that though? It'd be like something out of an urban legend."
"It certainly sounds improbable enough to be one. You said you've never seen the person who gave them to you again? I can't imagine why anyone would go to the trouble of giving a kid powers like that then leave them alone to do as they please."
"So you don't remember someone giving you something as a child then, I take it?" I reached deep into the well of my memories, trying to recall every detail of what I had seen that night as I sat in the park alone and watched the sun go down. I tried hard to remember the face of the woman who had given me the amber jewel, but only her voice and the color of her dress remained in my mind. "Is this really it?" I asked with a sigh. "You're older than me, but you've never been kidnapped off of the street and taken to a mysterious facility to be experimented on, or tailed by men in unmarked cars or overheard your parents saying they were actors or anything like that? You're just a psychic who's learned to use her powers to play the drums and impress people in arcades? Do you even have any special techniques? Can you like, punch someone as fast as you can drum with your mind or clap their ears and make their head explode or something?"
She looked at me with a worried expression. "No, why would I want to do that?"
"It's common in manga. You have a character with a power they think is nothing special then they get put in some desperate situation and have to use it fight monsters or something."
"Ah, well no, that's never happened. My power's only about as strong as my hands. I guess if I wanted to kill someone I could push them down the stairs or off of a station platform or something."
"...Have you ever done that, Ms. Raiko?"
"Why would I?"
"Well, you could commit the perfect, undetectable crime. I'd be lying if I said I'd never thought about it myself." I wondered if Raiko was being honest with me. If she was, then I was definitely much stronger than her. If I'd wanted to, I could have caused any of the cars driving past on the street outside to crash into lampposts or knocked holes in any of the windows around me. It's only because of my geniality that I had resisted the occasional urge to become a force of destruction terrorizing this city. Even if I could get away with doing such things though, why bother? Destroying property for no reason without destroying all of humanity along with it wouldn't make the world any less boring. Shooting up the scenery and breaking things in a game like Razing Storm is one thing, and could be amusing. Doing something like that in real life though would just be pathetic. It's the sort of thing a bottom-tier villain would do to show how powerful they are. If I was going to be a villain I'd want to be an impressive one, a mastermind, not some powerful but braindead thug the hero beats on their way up the ladder. It would be both embarrassing and a waste not to use my powers for something meaningful.
"So what do you use your powers for? Don't tell me you're going around finding ways to kill people."
"Of course not. I've never used my powers in public though, I try to keep them secret. I guess I haven't really thought of anything good to use them for yet. Do you think getting a full perfect combo on DrumMania is a good use for them?"
"Well, people seem to enjoy it. Sometimes junior high-schoolers even start stalking me."
I couldn't help but laugh. Getting a perfect score on a game through telekinetic cheating might be a boring idea, but the show she had made of her performance certainly hadn't been. I'm sure I wasn't the only one who left the arcade thinking of her that day. I suppose if you were the sort of person who enjoyed being in the spotlight, using your powers for something peaceful like that was better than shoving people in front of trains.
She took one last pull of her shake then stood up, lofting the cup into the trash can with no mental assistance required. I crammed the last of my fries into my mouth, washed them down with my coke and stood up to join her.
"Alright then Sumireko, let's go." she said.
"Go? Where?"
"Karaoke, of course. Where else would a junior high schooler go after class?" She winked at me, and I could only blink in confusion.
-.-.-.-.-
After that, we sang for almost three hours. She slipped out, saying she was going to the washroom at the end, but instead she paid the bill and ditched me. I never saw which way she went. As for today, nothing interesting happened. I just wanted to finish writing about her.