>>5583735"Kids always imagine the scariest shit." Sam says. "So that's what Mad Mary looks like--in our world. Inside a person's mind, she doesn't have a look. She doesn't have a form. She's a feeling, specifically the feeling of a panic attack. But that's her just squatting in your mind. That's just the cold warmth evaporating off her non-body. When she wants to feed, well...imagine a car engine redlining, being put on max power until it just tears itself apart. Now imagine the engine is a person's body. The body's fear response is pushed well beyond what the body can naturally produce. The brain short circuits. The heart explodes. You die instantly, and that's exactly what happened to three TIMS telepaths, three highly trained TIMS telepaths. They made contact and boom, down they went, stone dead, right in front of little Dr. Bell, little Judy Bell who was, as you might intuit, was terrified. And Mad Mary lapped up her fear like a cat water."
"The other telepaths got her. They pinned her down inside Judy Bell's soul. But just imagine you're this girl. This thing, this creature, has been tormenting you for a month. It shows up, goes away, comes back, and then you hear about something in the news happening in Belltown. You don't know what's going on. You're eight. And then these other adults show up, professional, cool as cucumbers, and they say they're going to help you. They've had years of experience dealing with mean magical friends. They've seen it all. And then they die at your feet spasming. And the ones that survive? They seal this thing inside you, because its the best they can do. And then they tell you that you have a black 20 inside you, an Astral predator that evolved to gather fear like a tiger evolved to gather meat."
"Mad Mary ate well that night, I bet." you say.
"Yes she did. Probably part of why she stopped fighting. She had a lot to digest."
"She's got to be one heck of a telepath to go through all that." you say.
"She's good. One of the best. It's why she not only teaches here, she teaches TIMS kids, kids like her. She's a special ed teacher, and dude, when it comes to superhuman special ed teachers, those guys are like superhuman spec ops."
"How did she get Mad Mary in the first place?" you ask. "Isn't there usually some sort of traumatic trigger for a black 20?"
"Yeah." Sam takes a deep breath. "Here comes the real scary part of the story. The black 20 was harvesting fear from her. Remember that cloth map with the pins I told you about? Well, the TIMS guys found that the pins got closer to the farm over time. Mad Mary did something 5 miles away, then 4, then 3. It was eating the fear Judy Bell created by being afraid that her parents would find out she was connected to the hauntings."
"Why was she afraid of that?" you ask. "If I had a thought-form, mom would be the first person I would tell."
"Because her parents abused her."
"Oh."
"More common than thought-forms and just as destructive." Sam says.
