Okay...

[Atragon9 0]

::A9 has been sitting very still since the food tray levitated into his cell. He couldn't bring himself to touch the tray or anything on it. His hands and face are twitching and he keeps staring at the tray and thinking - very hard!::

{Okay, so, that tray... it floated in here, but it wasn't anti-grav, it had to be TK. Yes, TK - it can't be something else, there is nothing else, that's what it has to be.}

{Okay, it's too much of a coincidence that someone with TK is involved with the imprisonment of someone with TK. It's a plan, a plot, a conspiracy, it's not by accident, no, no way!}

{Okay, it has to be someone from the Project, what else could it be, it has to be that. I have to believe... it has to be a Belisarius kid, it's all that make sense, I have to hold onto that, nothing else fits the puzzle,}

{Okay, so the group of us from the Project. There were six kids, that's it, not a big group. Got smaller when Elsa and Nicholas died while we were playing, Just Playing, but we didn't know just how bad it could be. They didn't keep a close enough eye on us, they didn't tell us to be easy, careful - how could we know, how could they NOT know?}

{Okay, so they really put us under tight controls after that, didn't talk to us about Nick and Ellie, figured we wouldn't understand. Not understand, we saw the bodies - twisted up, banged up, so... kinetic. We knew what had happened, how it had happened, we understood - as much as any kid understands death.}

{Okay, well, that led to Charlie and Xian Yi losing it. They couldn't handle what happened and then they felt the team leaders were blaming them for the deaths, but wasn't it all our faults? These two were always on edge, worried, frightened, guilty, suspicious, un-focused. Frak, WAS it their fault?}

{Okay, they got taken away and it was just Lundy and I. We didn't know what was going on. They left us alone for so long after that, locked in a room with nothing to hurt ourselves with... just like the one I'm in here. Food tray, food trays were all we had to play with. No utensils and the trays were so flimsy, like foil wrappers. The food was all soft, nothing we could turn into a projectile, nothing we could choke on. Can't remember how long, there were lots of meals - and nothing else.}

{Okay, so, then they separated us and still more meals. It was hazy... It IS hazy now...}

{Okay, my parents came, we left there, we moved out of Project housing, we just made do. The Fleet kept payments coming and we just tried to make us a family again. It took a long time, but I made it. I saw Lundy once, after a few years and it looked like she made it, too. They kept us apart. I lost track of her, of our teachers, I never went back to the Project center. I went on, I went to Starfleet, but so much later than other students, it took SO long for me to just be with others again. Controlling the TK, knowing that friends were friends and enemies were to be avoided, not ... hurt, not controlled. The meds helped right off and I finally stopped using them a year before the Academy.}

{Okay, so what the frak is going on? Why am I here, why am I going through this again? It's all about my TK, it's all about punishing me. It has to be, IT HAS TO BE}

::he snaps his head around the empty room. Looking at his food tray, he kicks it to the corner. He is about to stomp on it and he stops and picks it up, staring at the food. He dumps the food onto the floor and tosses the tray into the air, "grabbing it" with his TK. The tray wavers for a moment and then begins to crumple in on itself. Soon it is a ball of foil and it continues to get more and more compact, the concentration showing on his face. Within a minute, the ball of foil is the size of a marble and very dense. He exhales a breath he had been holding and the marble drops to the floor. He drops to the floor next to it and reaches out his hand to touch it, as if he isn't sure it's real::

(whisper) i'm sorry.