Majgen Ch. 009

My sincere apologies for the delayed posting of this chapter. *

----=(Sense, silence and a promise)=----

In the following days Majgen truly learned to understand the burden of guilt, Baglian's manipulations had convinced her, she had harmed Ukrial, and while the grane was in effect, Baglian made sure Majgen was not ripped out of that illusion. He monitored her mind thoroughly and regularly to see how well his plan worked; at all times he found she suffered appropriately from the draining emotion, yet he did not allow her much spare time to wallow fully in the guilt.

While Majgen's empathic abilities were gone, Baglian forced her to focus on her schooling in non-empathic matters. Often he caught her reading with her eyes only, not allowing the words to reach her mind, while thinking of the child, Ukrial. When she did that, he sometimes slapped her, other times he slapped the table she was at, startling her.

"Do you think that you are helping anyone right now, Student Majgen?" he would ask.

"No, Femaron Baglian," she would reply each time.

"If you ever want to be able to help anyone as a mentarion, you must study harder," he often finished, before leaving her to her studies again, and every time, Majgen would focus harder again.

Majgen yearned for her empathic abilities to come back, not just to find out how much she had hurt Ukrial, but also to be able to train her mentarion skills. Majgen hoped that if she became a skilled mentarion, then one day she would be allowed to help Ukrial again.

In the middle of the night five days after the whipping, Majgen woke.

'The effect of the grane is wearing off,' she thought, while lying on her stomach to spare the bruises on her back.

Femaron Baglian was sleeping in his own bedroom. Since she couldn't sense him through the walls no one was within her sensing range, still she easily recognised the sensation of her empathic senses turning on and off - uncontrollably. It never disturbed her to turn her senses off and on voluntarily. The uncontrolled switching, however, gave her a slight nausea. Unable to sleep further, she got up and went to the living-room to study.

Four hours later it was time for her to make breakfast for herself and her mentor. At that time her senses were back at full power. A few moments earlier than Baglian's wake up alert, Majgen had the breakfast set and ready. Dutifully she returned to her studies while waiting for her mentor to arrive. He usually showered and groomed prior to breakfast.

When Baglian entered the living-room, Majgen rose from her studies to serve him his breakfast. That was their morning routine. Baglian would sit. Majgen would hand him any breakfast dishes he felt like. Before the whipping Baglian often had not needed to state his desires; from his emanations she had mostly known what he felt like eating. While Majgen had been affected by grane he had of course needed to speak his wishes.

Quietly, Majgen served her teacher, knowing Baglian didn't enjoy conversation in the mornings. She gave him the dishes he wanted sooner than he asked for them, as they were both used to from the days prior to the whipping.

"I see you have your empathic abilities back, Student Majgen," Baglian said, and started devouring his meal.

Majgen nodded and gathered food for herself. After choosing a hot beverage, she sat to eat. Not halfway through her meal she received Baglian's memories of Ukrial. She froze spoon mid-air.

'Ukrial is well.' Relief shot through her as she perceived Baglian's full analysis of the child. 'Ukrial is healthy, she will be ok. I didn't harm her.'

Majgen remembered the spoon, and ate more soup while going over Baglian's memories of mind-scanning Ukrial. The bowl was half full by the time she started wondering why Baglian hadn't told her.

'He knew I thought I had harmed Ukrial,' Majgen remembered.

Raising her face, Majgen studied Baglian across the table. Visually Baglian appeared to only be interested in his food, but she sensed he was paying an unusual amount of attention to her emotions.

'He is guessing I just gained some of his knowledge regarding Ukrial,' Majgen perceived.

A moment later Baglian entered the top of her mind to certify his assumption. Without talking, he left her mind again and continued his meal.

'He intentionally kept the knowledge from me. He wanted me to believe I had hurt the child.'

That realisation made Majgen angry, but she said nothing either. Instead she sipped her breakfast beverage, trying to visually appear unaffected - like Baglian did. She knew her mentor would not punish her for how she felt about him, as long as she behaved appropriately.

A lump of anger and resentment formed in Majgen's throat. Although it was troublesome to force food past that lump, she managed to finish her meal. Remaining seated, she waited for Baglian to finish, so she could clear the table. When done eating, Baglian turned his eyes to Majgen. She perceived the meaning of what he would say before he spoke it. But she still turned her eyes to him, in order to listen appropriately attentively.

"I agreed to see Ukrial in two years, for a follow up session," Baglian said, "If you study hard and progress as a mentarion, and do your best to be obedient, then I will let you come with me."

Majgen swallowed a few times. She sensed Baglian wanted a reply, but wanted to be sure her reply would not reflect her anger.

"I will do my best, Femaron Baglian."

Neither of them spoke further. Baglian left the table, to let his student clean up after their meal. Neither of them mentioned Ukrial again later.

While putting food and dishes in place, Majgen considered her teacher's promise. She decided to do her best to honour her end of the bargain. Although she resented having to please Baglian to that end. Anger still boiled in her, Majgen was not accustomed to feeling anger. In her time at the Mentariata she had been too scared to be angry. Only two weeks had passed since she left that school.

----=(Back to work)=----

Upon receiving Majgen as a personal student, Baglian had taken a vacation from his other Femaron duties. By the time he resumed his regular work, Majgen had still been influenced by grane. Because he couldn't educate her on mentarion therapy-forms while she was non-empathic he didn't bring her with him, instead he kept her locked in the apartment while working.

The first day Majgen's empathic abilities were back, he locked her in the apartment again, estimating the extra hours of solitude would aid his student in working out her anger issues. He calculated that a little privacy at this time would be an efficient tool for his student to clarify and strengthen her motivations to study.

The next day Baglian brought her with him to work. Thereafter, bringing her to work with him was steady routine.

Working as a therapist, Femaron Baglian received clients in an office at the nearest public hospital, only seven minutes travel from his apartment in Drom. The majority of his patients were assigned to him by the Empaticon and the Mentaricon, the two empath ruling structures. But he kept a third of his work hours free to treat patients whom he allowed the public hospital to appoint to him from their mental health departments, after their own choice and selection. Out of a population of two-hundred thousand, Baglian and Majgen were the only empaths known to currently reside in mining habitat Drom.

The majority of Baglian's wealth didn't come from this public work. Mentarions were highly paid for the work they performed for the Government and the empathic sub-societies, but the steady wage could not compare to the fortunes wealthy persons were willing to spend on mental health. Baglian only rarely accepted private patients, but when he did he treated them in his own time, at his own home, and charged immensely for it.

He had not done that since fetching Majgen at the Mentariata. Having more money than he needed he felt that lessons on the ethics and doings of private income, could wait till his student was closer to attaining graduation.

As with all prior students, Baglian provided strict instructions that Majgen remain quiet while he worked. In between patients he would not object to questions, but Majgen hardly ever had to ask; his emanations supplied her with more information than she could have thought up questions.

Even while performing procedures, Baglian allowed her to scan his patients' minds. Majgen felt how ill Baglian's patients were, how severely they suffered before his treatment, and how immense the improvement was after every session. Seeing the effects of Baglian's work, she understood that an educated mentarion was an invaluable therapeutic tool. In the past Majgen had never been able to respect a Femaron simply for what the uniform represented. Now, however, after five years of living as a mentarion, Majgen began to think of Femarons as valuable.

Baglian relaxed between each patient. Having only Femaron-potential, he did not have the mental stamina for mind-scanning actively more than five hours a day. In order to do even that six days of the week, on a regular basis, he needed to rest his empathic senses often.

Mostly he spent his resting time in his office. Reading books or listening to music. Sometimes he spent the time drilling Majgen in her teachings. He knew very well, that she took at least parts of many of the right answers from his emanations, rather than from her own memories. Baglian didn't mind though, that made him able to use the drillings to teach her things. When evaluating how much she remembered and understood unaided, he made her shut off her senses first.

Majgen didn't talk much unless prompted to do so by inquiries or direct commands. After five friendless years in the Mentariata, she was out of the habit of having social conversations. Living with Baglian was not an encouragement for her to change that habit. His relationship to her was purely professional.

The resentment Majgen felt towards her teacher started wearing off as the respect she felt towards what he could accomplish as a mentarion grew. She didn't like him, but, nonetheless, she began to respect him. Once the respect outgrew the resentment, she found it was easy to maintain a professional relationship to him.

If she had realised that her future well-being had been the largest of Baglian's motives for making her lesson in guilt so cruel, then maybe she would have developed warmer feelings for him. But she had not perceived it. The promise he had made to her, without telling her, was no longer on top of Baglian's mind when the effect of grane wore off. Because at that time he had no longer been worried, his plan had worked to perfection. Majgen had come to truly understand, she was not yet sufficiently educated to make therapeutic decisions on her own.

----=(Colours)=----

Majgen studied a blue picture, hanging on a wall in Baglian's office. It was hand-made. Her mentor had once used one of his own memories of that picture to mind-sedate her. With his eyes it had looked different, the colour receptors in his eyes were of another phenotype than hers.

In the past, Baglian had studied the picture for many hours to gain a perception and interpretation of it strong enough to make the memory suitable for sedation. The Femaron was not planning to train her in these matters any time soon, but from his emanations Majgen had understood the basic concepts of sedation by images, and she was eager to learn.

A flickering of emotion in Baglian's emanations, distracted Majgen from her studies of the picture, and she turned her attention to him. The Femaron was sitting in a comfortable chair reading a news article.

'The article is annoying him,' she perceived.

The content of the article was logic based and too complex to translate directly through emotions, hence Majgen couldn't sense exactly what the subject was.

'Whatever the subject, it carries many different associations for him,' Majgen concluded, as she received many different memory sequences from him at once.

Majgen was not surprised to sense that he intended to finish the whole article in spite of how much it annoyed him and how ridiculous he considered it to be. It would be very unlike her mentor to let emotions deter him from a path once he had started on it. Even when the path was to read a ludicrous news article which had seemed valid and sensible until he started reading.

She turned her eyes to the painting again, and locked out the memories streaming from Baglian. She had begun to learn how to control how much she sensed from emanations. With Baglian's ideas and not always gentle pushes she had begun to grasp how to increase her unique sensitivity at will. Baglian had not shown any interest in teaching her how to perceive less. But when Majgen began to grasp how she could increase her sensitivity, she also intuitively began to understand how she could decrease it. She had learned to lock out memories from Baglian's emanations.

'I have been his personal student for a bit more than a month now,' Majgen realised, 'Life has been peaceful lately. This morning in the shower I didn't see a single bruise on my body.'

Baglian had allowed her to use healing ointments on her back, and the bruises from the whipping had long healed. Those bruises had kept her from sleeping on her back for over a week, but they could have been worse. If Baglian had used a neutral tool to inflict the same amount of pain during that whipping, the bruising would have been far more severe, but he had used a shock-cane at intermediate setting.

'Even if he had used a neutral whip, those bruises would still be gone by now,' Majgen thought, she had extensive personal experience in bruises and their rate of healing.

From her time at the Mentariata, Majgen was accustomed to using healing ointments on various bruises, on average she had smeared some part of her body with the sticky substance nearly every second night.

What had felt strange to her this morning was that she had no bruises at all. Anywhere on her body. She couldn't remember having seen her own body completely unblemished by bruises any time in the previous five years. She was fairly sure there had been several occasions, where her body had been unmarked, but she also knew for a fact that she had never noticed it in the mirror.

Since a few months before she became fifteen, Majgen had avoided looking at her naked body in mirrors. Before her fifteenth birthday, she had assumed a habit of only using mirrors to adjust her looks when fully uniformed. Or if necessary also when applying ointment to places on her backside.

The full-wall mirror in Baglian's bathroom had been a difficult adjustment for her.

For six full hours, every four days, Majgen hated her body. The other ninety hours of every four days she tried not to think too much about her body, to avoid thinking of those six hours which returned every four days.

That was how things had been since the last months before her fifteenth birthday. Or almost since then at least. It had taken a while before the interval was set to an unchanging four days apart. She clearly remembered the first time they had made her sign an application to personally apply for the treatment. And she clearly remembered the second time six months later too.

'The first time, I was eager to sign, once they explained the benefits to me,' Majgen remembered.

The second time, she had initially refused to sign again, when they gave her a new six months application.

'The first time they informed me I had the right to refuse. They neglected that the second time round, but I remembered.'

The second time, only her and a single Femaron had been present. While offering her the application, he had tried to convince her with the same arguments as last. But she had refused to sign.

'I clearly sensed he had no intentions of breaking the law and order me to sign, yet I don't know where I found the courage to stand my ground that day.'

After a while the Femaron had let her leave the office without signing. Majgen had gone straight to her room. Shaking from the face-off and she had been in dire need of some privacy to cry. While she cried her relief-mixed fear out on her bed, a personal message had arrived. The message had been simple:

--Tenth Ranked Student Majgen-- --The offer remains available, you may call me anytime you want a new chance to sign the application.--

At that moment she had still been determined to never sign such an application again. The first six months had been six too many for her.

Majgen's eyes kept scanning the blue picture in Baglian's office, but her facial features tightened in response to her memories. It had been harder in the beginning, she had grown more used to the 'treatment' over the last three years, but it still bothered her.

The memory of how she had finally been convinced to sign the second time, bothered her too.

----=(A freedom of choice)=----

The morning after Majgen had refused to sign the second application, a Femaron came to her room five minutes prior to wake up call for students. Majgen was startled to be woken by a man's voice rather than the usual alarm.

"Wake up, Student Majgen."

Majgen sat up so abruptly her eyes blackened to the extent she wasn't sure she had remembered to open them. When her vision returned she was met with blood-red markings on the yellow of a Femaron uniform. Her eyes travelled up to see the face of the teacher who was her primary private tutor at this time.

"I have come to give you some instructions regarding changes in your schedule, Student."

Majgen was already too scared to sense clearly, yet she sensed he had come for more and other reasons than that.

"Are you sufficiently awake to receive instructions, Student?"

"Yes, Femaron Hollo," she replied, her voice rusty with sleep.

"In one week a special class for the twelve Mentariatan rank 6 students who are above the age of seventeen will begin. Since they are so far behind those of equal age, we want to give them a better chance to improve the efficacy of their studies. We are planning to give them more intense training circumstances. So starting in ten days they will be joined in one class, which will be training unsupervised every four days, for as long as they have empathic stamina for."

Majgen was confused by the long speech. She was rank 10, she didn't understand how rank 6 student plans could affect her schedule.

"You have youth-worker experience in serving mentarions. We have decided that you will serve them drink and food during their unsupervised exercises."

'Me serve?' Majgen was not fully awake. 'Why me? I'm never assigned to serving duties.'

Femaron Hollo took a short break from talking. He would prefer if Majgen caught every word, so he would not have to repeat himself several times.

'Why do they suddenly want me to serve food and drink. They usually keep me off such duties; they still don't think it's safe.'

"You will commence those duties in ten days," Femaron Hollo reiterated, "There is another matter though. You will need to pack your things, you are moving rooms today. We are moving you to rank 1 student sleeping quarters. Now that you are no longer interested in keeping your subconscious emanations under control, we cannot allow you to move around in areas where you might run into the youngest students."

Majgen was sufficiently awake to consider that good news.

'Rank 1 students are able to resist my emanations, as long as they remain wary of me.'

For a moment she thought the Mentariata had decided to adapt circumstances to her decision not to sign the application. Femaron Hollo's next words ripped her out of that misunderstanding.