Synopsis: A cheerleading competition is coming to town, and a teenage MC decides to take advantage of the situation. Instead, the situation takes advantage of him. But in a good way.
Standard Disclaimer: If you're under-age, or you disapprove of mind control (with or without sexual shenanigans) or sexual shenanigans (with or without mind control), go elsewhere.
Nonstandard Disclaimer: If you disapprove because you expect nothing but mind control and sexual shenanigans, including the title page and the disclaimers...well, I'll get to it eventually, but it's gonna take a while. Please be patient :-)
"The CheerEarth Pan-Pacific National Championships?!?"
Jon Thompson was surfing for information on his soon-to-be new hometown. His family moved a lot; this would be his seventh move in his sixteen years, although he was only old enough to remember five moves. He'd become adept at collecting advance information on new hometowns. School web sites. Maps. Local colleges. Crime reports--big crime, small crime, and just plain weird crime. Like the nut arrested for indecent exposure after trying to hit on a police horse (don't ask). But he hadn't expected to find this:
"Over 700 cheerleading teams from all fifty states...two days...the entire convention center..."
Jon found out he could control minds only a couple of years earlier, shortly after arriving at Middleton High School (his soon-to-be former hometown, a.k.a. move # 6). And even then, he stumbled across his powers only by accident. A particularly happy accident in which Jon lost his virginity, and the school's star quarterback lost his girlfriend. Granted, the accident could have been even happier if the girlfriend had dumped the quarterback for Jon; on the other hand, since no one--particularly the dumped quarterback--associated the dumping with Jon, this was probably the happiest non-lethal accident possible.
Once Jon got over the shock of discovering his powers--and discovering himself in bed with Jenny, the quarterback's soon-to-be-former girlfriend--he assumed it was a fluke caused by stumbling across the right girl in the right bad relationship at the right time. Until he mentally scanned other students--another power he didn't know he had--and realized most of the girls in school were in bad relationships.
Middleton was a relatively small town, and its girls suffered from the low expectations common to such towns. For the average Middleton girl, dating a star football player was more likely than succeeding on her own terms and in her own way. And the star football players knew it, and treated female students as their own personal trophies. Or harem. Or somewhere between the two. As a result, Middleton girls were getting...maybe not the short end of the stick, but certainly the short end of the relationship. Jon wasn't sure if he was repulsed or jealous--probably both.
He was jealous when Jenny started dating someone else--at first. Once he thought about it rationally, however, he realized Jenny's new boyfriend treated her far better than the old one. Which was cool, since Jon suspected that a happy sub-accident within the primary happy accident might have contributed to that....
I can't use my powers to convince girls to date me, Jon reasoned at the time. Unless I can convince the rest of the school that there's nothing unusual about someone like me dating someone like Jenny. And I can't use them to convince girls to sleep with me. Well, I can, but that's even worse than the jocks; at least the jocks give their girlfriends a trophy boyfriend and some sex, no matter how bad. That line of reasoning was making Jon pretty queasy, especially since he accidentally had slept with Jenny without giving her anything in return. On the other hand...I did get her to find a better boyfriend, so I guess she did get something out of it...would it work on the other girls?
So Jon started looking for girls in a similar bind:
His mental scans revealed that the set of eligible girls included both cheerleading squads, the entire volleyball team, about half of the girls' basketball team, and several girls who didn't play sports at all. Probably more, but thanks to the upcoming move, he'd never know how many more. And with most of those girls, he discovered that his happy accident with Jenny wasn't a fluke. And most of the school's jocks mysteriously found themselves dateless.
Jon planned to do the same thing in Plainfield, his new hometown. Until he read about the cheerleading competition. With over 700 cheerleading teams. All arriving from out of town, some for the first time. All firmly toned, athletic, and flexible.
Jon had always been careful with his powers, but frankly, he'd never encountered such high-quality temptation in Middleton. Correction: Middleton had high-quality temptation, but not high-quality and high-volume temptation. His initial mental image quickly degenerated into temporary, top secret harems of firmly toned, athletic, flexible sex slaves--until his conscience and stomach caught up with his hormones.
So no harems, he reasoned. But on the other hand, surely I'll find at least one cheerleader who meets the three bad-relationship rules, right? With rationalization firmly in place, Jon started his research.
And Jon needed research, because this wasn't his normal MO. At school, he had plenty of time to pick a bad relationship, design a plan for approaching the girl, and act on the plan. But that took time, and there wasn't enough time in a one-weekend cheerleading event for that. Instead, he'd have to do his planning in advance.
An hour or two later, he'd sketched out his advance plan. He needed the following:
Shortly after the Thompson family arrived in town, Jon found a help-wanted ad for routine go-fer work for high school students in the convention center's IT/communications department. The ad didn't call it "routine go-fer work" of course, but he could read between the lines; after all, running cable was union work, and running the network was professional work. But there was always stuff to be moved back and forth, or arranged here or there, and he could do other stuff on weekends when the professionals were gone.
Item #1: Done.
Among other things, he got on-the-job training in circuit troubleshooting, so he spent a lot of time running in and out of frame rooms verifying what cables were or weren't properly connected. He wasn't responsible for actual fixes, but by gaining frame room access and doing the troubleshooting himself, he reduced response time for the actual-fix people.
Item #2: Done.
Jon wasn't fond of crowds--a Bad Thing for jobs involving mega-conventions. Until he learned from the other techs that the frame rooms were excellent lunchrooms. The equipment fans generated enough white noise to drown out convention noises. The rooms were close enough for easy access after picking up a hot dog from the nearest vendor. There were even non-public restrooms, accessible only via the frame rooms. (Especially useful after eating a hot dog from the nearest vendor.) Finally, the rooms were accessible only with an appropriate ID badge, and were discreetly hidden from public view so you could walk in and out without the feeling you were walking on stage.
Item #3: Done.
The original master plan called for blankets on the frame room floor, but Jon got something better. One weekend, some of the local furniture stores rented out part of the convention center for a holiday inventory clear-out/mass mark-down/MONSTER TRUCK BIGFOOT SMASH-DOWN!!! (No, wait, this was an inventory clear-out mark-down big sale. The MONSTER TRUCK BIGFOOT SMASH-DOWN!!! was after the sale.) After the furniture event, one vendor accidentally left behind floor models for a discontinued line of bedroom furniture. The next event--the SMASH-DOWN!!!--was the next day, so Jon and another gofer moved a bed (with blankets, pillows, several sets of top-of-the-line sheets, etc.) and nightstand into a storage room. Since the next event also needed the storage room, Jon took the initiative to clear it out, wrestling everything into a nearby frame room. Fortunately, the frame room had been sized for future growth, so there was plenty of room to hold all of the bedroom stuff.
Item #4: Even better than done.
T minus one day...and everything was ready.
The four critical items Jon identified in June were in place.
He worked extra hours after New Year's so he could take off this weekend to "recuperate".
The bed and nightstand, long forgotten by everyone, were still in "his" frame room.
He found a cap and wig so he could go to the competition without being recognized by other center employees. He wasn't sure what would be worse--being spotted at a cheerleading competition, or being spotted and put to work.
The next morning, he'd pack sandwiches and drinks for meals so he could avoid the evil hot dogs and the rest of the overpriced under-reheated concession-stand fare. He'd also pack extra food for his expected "dates" so they'd get at least one decent meal that day.
He was excited, no doubt about it--probably more excited than he was in June. Back then, he figured he'd work on Operation Cheerleader in parallel with his usual relationship-improvement work at his new school. But Plainfield High School was different.
The PHS football team had gone from "perennially strong" to "powerhouse" to "state champions" to "state dynasty" in recent years. If Middleton High had been that good, their football players would have been completely insufferable. The PHS players were even worse than that, so Jon should have found acres of girls who met his three-rule criteria.
Except that Plainfield was a wealthy part of a wealthy town. The good news was that the girls didn't suffer from the "narrow horizon" syndrome endemic to Middleton. The bad news was that too many PHS students--and their parents--had allowed the money and power to go to their heads. Or more accurately, they'd allowed the power to go to their heads, and the money to go to shopping malls and car dealerships, judging from the designer clothes in the hallways and the brand new cars and trucks in the student parking lot.
Jon's three-rule criteria just didn't work at Plainfield High. Rule 1 was easy; girlfriends of the "jocks and pops", as he called the athletes and other popular boys, were everywhere. On the other hand, Rule 2 was nearly impossible to meet because PHS relationships were more balanced. Thanks to the overwhelming presence of wealth, jocks-and-pops and their girlfriends exploited each other with equal ease. The snooty attitudes affected Rule 3 as well; frankly, Jon decided that the jocks-and-pops and their girlfriends deserved each other.
So after one semester at PHS without finding anyone remotely appealing to him, Jon desperately hoped someone at the cheerleading competition needed his special kind of relationship assistance.
"This sucks!"
Jon was sitting on the floor near "his" frame room, slumped against the wall. He was exhausted, and not in the way he wanted.
He was there when the gates opened at 7 AM, expecting throngs of high-school women with flexible bodies, skimpy outfits and hot moves. Instead, he found kindergarten girls with bare midriffs, which he neither expected nor wanted. He bought a program in an attempt to make sense of it all, and eventually figured out two things:
That explained the crowds of little girls and the initial lack of high-school women. Damn, I could have slept a bit longer, he thought. He didn't think much about the bare midriffs at first, other than to wonder how gyms managed to get those uniforms without parental complaints or other forms of rioting.
Consulting the schedule further, Jon realized the first performance wasn't until 8:00, so he stashed his cooler of food in the frame room, grabbed a coffee (one of the few concession-stand things he trusted), and settled down with his schedule.
As 8:00 arrived, crowds of older girls in cheer uniforms started filling the entrance hall. Relieved to finally see his target demographic, Jon picked out the best-looking cluster and followed them to their destination, which turned out to be a performance by their gym's grade-school team. Well, I might as well watch the performance while I'm listening for signals, he reasoned. Since mental scans were hard work, he usually eavesdropped on girl-talk first; if talk turned to boyfriend problems, he'd scan the girl(s) with the problems. He saved himself a lot of mental strain that way.
He enjoyed the younger team's performance in an "Aw, that's so cute!" way, at least part of it. However, in addition to the bare-midriff short uniforms, the grade-schoolers had also adopted the dance moves of the older girls. Jon was no prude; he enjoyed hot dance moves and bare midriffs...from the older girls. But little girls shaking things they wouldn't even have for several years? What the hell are their parents thinking?!?, Jon wondered.
After the performance ended, Jon tried to stick with his cluster of high school girls; unfortunately, there were way too many people leaving, and the volunteers were very efficient in moving audiences in and out for the next performance without allowing any flow-inhibiting maneuvers. Jon mistook the volunteers for cheerleaders--albeit cheerleaders with more conservative uniforms--until he saw "CheerEarth Pan-Pacific" on their sweaters.
Jon caught up with his targets just as they arrived at another stage on the other side of the main exhibit hall. He still didn't hear any boyfriend talk from the girls, but he discovered that they were required to watch (and cheer for) every team from their gym. A quick glance at his schedule confirmed that these girls would be hopping from performance to performance to performance all day. Even if he eavesdropped long enough to find a girl with boyfriend problems, he didn't think he could pull her away from the others unnoticed, so he drifted away to another group of attractive high school girls.
And another.
And still another.
Until he realized that everyone was hustling from performance to performance with the rest of their team, and none of them were talking about boyfriends. Getting desperate, he started sending out mental probes to every high school girl, searching for relationship and sex problems.
But the more minds he checked out, the more depressed he became, because relationships and sex were the last things on the cheerleaders' minds. They were too busy thinking about (a) what they needed to do for their next performance, (b) what went wrong (or right) about the previous performance, (c) whether their competition was having a better or worse day, or (d) all of the above. Usually (d). Jon eventually decided that every hunk in Hollywood could strip naked in the main corridor, but the cheerleaders would be too busy rushing to the next performance to notice. Either that, or they'd criticize the strippers' routine. ("What kind of lame choreography is that? No music, no stunts, no cheers, and they weren't tight at all!" And they wouldn't be talking about stripper butts, either.)
And then there were the junior high teams. Like the grade school girls, they imitated the midriff-baring uniforms and hot dance moves of the high school teams. Unlike the grade school girls, some junior high girls looked old enough to be high school girls, giving him quite a nasty shock when mental scans of several "sophomores" and "juniors" revealed them to be 7th and 8th graders.
After the umpteenth nasty shock, Jon even resorted to scanning the team moms. (Although "resorted" wasn't the right word; there were plenty of hot team moms.) Although he avoided mature-looking seventh graders that way, he didn't stumble across suitable team moms, either; they were just as focused on performances and schedules as the girls.
By late afternoon, Jon had tailed and scanned likely targets from performance to performance to performance, all day long, all over the huge convention center, without success. And in-bed stamina did not translate to convention-floor-hiking stamina, which explained his current death-warmed-over appearance and mood.
Jon was numbly eating one of his sandwiches when he became aware of a presence nearby. He didn't pay any attention to the presence until it spoke.
"Hey, where'd you get the sandwich?"
Jon looked up to see one of the volunteers in pseudo-cheerleader uniform. "Brought it. I don't trust the concession stands," he replied. Through his exhaustion-induced fog, Jon realized she was even cuter than her uniform. Brunette hair in a ponytail, friendly and perky--or as perky as possible after a full day running around the conference center--and cute. Not stereotypical queen-bitch-cheerleader unapproachably gorgeous like every cheerleader in Plainfield High, but wonderfully, approachably cute. And really cute geek-girl glasses--Jon liked geek-girl glasses. Normally, he would have started feeding suggestions to her mind on the spot, but he was too tired to form his own coherent thoughts, let alone form them for someone else.
The cheerleader volunteer slid down the wall--closer to slumping, really--and sat next to Jon. "Me neither. All the years at the Pan-Pacific, and I never thought to pack my own lunch!" She leaned toward him and murmured into his ear, "So. How's the mind control going? Get laid yet?"
Jon shook his head and murmured back, "Pfft. Nada. No one's thinking about sex, and I can't get anyone away from her team and where-the-hell-ever they're going next. I even scoped out the moms, but they're even more schedule-crazed than the cheerleaders. Do you guys train for day-long convention center forced marches along with your routines, or what? And what's with grade-school girls in inch-thick make-up trying to Work It, and why aren't their parents attacking coaches with torches and pitchforks?" As he finished saying this, he chuckled at the incongruity of this cute, innocent-looking cheerleader--OK, volunteer, but she looked like a cheerleader--asking about getting laid.
She chuckled back. "Well...one, the teams go to progressively bigger competitions, so they build their way up to the day-long forced marches; two, hell if I know, 'cause my old teams never dressed like that; and three, hell if I know, 'cause my parents would still go torch-and-pitchfork if my uniform showed my abs, and I'm in college!"
Jon wasn't quite listening, however, because a small part of his brain had resynchronized with reality. HOLY CRAP! She asked about mind-control! And I told her! What the fuck?!?
"Anyway," she whispered back into his ear, "what were you gonna do if you got a cheerleader controlled? Wait, not yet; we're in public. Where would you take her?"
The small part of Jon's brain that was in panic mode knew that answering her question was a Really Bad Idea. The rest of his brain didn't see any problem talking to this friendly, pretty girl, however, and that part was still running things. "I've got a room back here. I'll show you." He grunted his way to a standing position--his legs and feet weren't the least bit happy that rest time was over--then helped her to her feet.
"By the way, I'm Alison," and she shook the hand that had pulled her up.
"Jon. Pleased to meet you." Jon guided her to the nearby frame room, pulled his convention center badge out of hiding, and used it to let themselves in.
"Wow." Alison stared at the full king-size bedroom set tucked in the back of the frame room. "I've seen bathroom stalls, deserted conference rooms, and the back seat of cars a mile away, but this is new. How on earth did you get all this?" Jon wondered how she'd seen all those things (She must really get around!) but he answered her by talking about his job--he pulled off the cap and wig since it obviously didn't match his ID badge--and explaining how he latched onto the unclaimed furniture.
Alison replied, "Something tells me it's not a coincidence that you happen to work at a convention center that also happens to host a cheerleading competition, and you just happen to have a bed in here. Right?"
"Well, um...." Jon reached into the cooler to get some water--his throat seemed awfully dry all of a sudden--then he remembered his manners. "You want some water too?"
"Sure!"
"I've got more sandwiches, too--ham and cheese, or roast beef--take your pick."
"But I can't take your dinner away...." Alison looked into the cooler and realized it was still full of sandwiches and water. "You brought all that? You're not living here all weekend, are you?"
"No, this was for...well, for any cheerleaders I managed to get back here," Jon mumbled as the back of his brain went from mere panic to DefCon 3.
"How?" Although Alison's cheery face looked like she was discussing ordinary weekend plans, her eyes hinted she knew exactly what they were discussing.
"By...slipping into their minds--and making sure they're really in high school and not middle school, which you damn near have to read their minds to do, because you can't tell by looking--and suggesting they come back here to join me." Jon stared at his shoes without really seeing them, then looked back at Alison as she giggled quietly. "What?"
Alison shook her head. "This time of day, you don't need to slip into anyone's mind. If you opened the door right now and announced you had a bed in here, half the crowd would run you over, then fight each other over who takes the first nap! Assuming they had any energy left...and speaking of which, is it OK if I sit down? Looks like you need time off your feet, too!"
Jon nodded, so Alison plopped onto the bed. "I hope you don't mind," she added as she started taking her shoes and socks off. "Just giving my feet a rest. You can too, if you want. Anyway, what would you do once you got a girl in here? We're not in public, so you can talk now."
While shedding his own shoes and socks, Jon talked despite the sirens and klaxons in his head screaming of impending doom. "I'd do, er, what I usually do--ask them if there's something they've always wanted to, um, try. I always 'suggest' that I'm OK to do it with, of course, but other than that, I leave it to them; I don't try to influence what they want to do. If they've got something in mind, I'll start with that if I can, or I'll ask them to show me how." He finally managed to ask the question he'd been asking himself for the past few minutes. "What are you doing, and why am I telling you all these things?"
"Well, I've lived here all my life, and this is my..."--Alison did a bit of mental math--"fourteenth Pan-Pacific. Twelve years with teams from our local gym and/or school; since then I've been here cheering for the university." ("The university" in this case was the local college, Plainfield State University.) "I would be out there with them this year, but I messed up my leg last summer. My leg healed in time to cheer at ballgames, but not in time to practice for competitions. Since I've got more time on my hands this year, I'm volunteering mornings and afternoons, then I'll change uniforms and give my team moral support from the sidelines tonight when their slot comes up."
"As for what the volunteers do," Alison continued, "we do go-fer work, we keep everyone pumped during awards ceremonies, we help get audiences moved around between performances...and we watch mind-controllers like yourself, although that's not general knowledge."
"Why? How? I mean...." Jon's head was spinning. "You actually have people watching for mind-controllers? There's that many of us? And..." His head stopped spinning long enough to be stunned by the deduction he'd just reached. "Are you making me spill the beans? Are you a mind controller too, or something?"
"Last question first. Yes, all of us volunteers are "Guardians", meaning we all use mind control to fend off mind controllers. But most of the time when we intervene with an Int--an Intruding Controller, like you--we limit ourselves to feeding two suggestions: tell the truth, and don't do anything that risks blowing our cover. That way, we don't have to worry about someone making a scene, and we can figure out what needs to be done without rummaging through someone's brain or exercising more control than necessary."
"You can do more? Did you do more to me?" Jon was thinking specifically about the part of his mind that screamed of danger, but was helpless to avoid it.
"We can all do more if we have to. If the Int uses more power, we do too. We all talk to each other mentally as well, so we can keep in touch without walkie-talkies, plus we can monitor each other in case an Int slips past someone's defenses. If that happens, we can go remote, or if worst comes to worse, group-override the Int. Fortunately, that's never happened." About this time, Alison realized Jon looked more confused than frightened. "Sorry, didn't mean to slip into jargon. 'Going remote' means that one of us mentally finds the Int and fights him from a distance--Ints are almost invariably 'him's."
"What's 'group-override'?" Jon's curiosity was overtaking his fear.
"Um, that's when all of the Guardians go remote against an Int, and we...well, basically, we frag his mind back to the Stone Age." Alison was obviously not comfortable talking about the extent of their powers, and was anxious to steer the subject in another direction. "But like I said, we've never had to resort to that. Most of the time, we just 'tell' Ints to tell the truth and maintain cover. That's all I did with you."
"Really?" Fear shot past curiosity again. Jon knew she'd caught him, and was afraid she may have done something else to him. And the thought of having his brains scrambled on the spot, sight unseen, terrified him.
"Really. No mind-reading or anything else." Alison didn't need to read Jon's mind to know he was scared, so she put her hand on his shoulder for reassurance. "Besides, most Ints are so overwhelmed by the combination of everything--crowds, noise, schedules, uniforms, performance make-up, loud music, crappy food--well, not the food in your case--they're already half worn out before we even do anything. Truth be told, you've held up a lot better than most Ints."
"No way!" Jon didn't think he'd held up better than anyone at this point.
"Yes way!" Alison grinned, which was a good sign, so Jon grinned back. "Once we spot a potential Int, we monitor them until (a) we determine he's not an Int, (b) he attempts something beyond a simple mental scan, or (c) he's approaching mental exhaustion. They added (c) after the first year's competition; they found too many guys sprawled out in the side corridors, crying and babbling incoherently. By noon Saturday. You, on the other hand, are still forming reasonably complete sentences at 4:30."
"I can relate to the crying and babbling," Jon signed as he flopped onto his back. "Why don't you just chase them out on the spot?"
"It takes more power to hit them while they're still fresh, and we try to limit how much power we throw around. Harder to keep our actions under wraps, too. Besides, if we throw an Int out first thing in the morning, the only thing he learns is 'Keep away from the volunteers' and he's likely to try again. If we throw him out right at the brink of collapse, the lesson's different: 'If the convention doesn't do you in, the volunteers will!'"
Jon snorted. "I'm surprised the convention doesn't do you guys in! How do you stay on your feet all day?"
"Both days, you mean?" Jon moaned at the thought of two days of competition purgatory. Alison continued talking as she flopped down next to Jon; that position seemed much more comfortable than sitting. "Lots of things I guess. Adrenaline, the energy you get from other teams, the fact that the schedule won't let you rest...and I suppose we only have to worry about one disappointment per performance at the most, although it's a big disappointment if it happens. With an Int...let's see, we've got 700 teams, of which maybe...250 teams are high-school age...and an average of, oh, say 15 girls per team, so that's roughly...3500, almost 4000 cheerleaders. Which sounds great if you're an Int looking for some fun. But that's a lot of disappointment when you realize they're all completely oblivious to everything except competition."
"Now that you put it that way...." Jon rubbed his face with his hands. Even lying down in the relative quiet of the frame room, he found the mathematics of 2 days times 4000 control-resistant cheerleaders to be exhausting. "Wish I'd thought of that before I did all this."
"That's OK, no one ever does. It's not like we're overrun with Ints, but we do draw them in. When they see 'cheer' and 'national' in the same sentence, they immediately think 'cheerleader smorgasbord' and start looking for the serving line. Problem is, they're trying to distract a bunch of women who have been practicing umpteen hours a week, week after week, month after month, for this day, this time, and this place. Damn few mind controllers can distract someone with that kind of mental resolve, and if you've facing entire teams roaming around with that resolve, forget it." Alison rolled over on her side so she could face Jon. "Changing the topic...you said if you found someone, you'd ask her what she wanted to do. If you don't mind my asking, um...why? I mean, isn't mind control all about doing what you want, not her?"
"Long story." Alison nodded her head to encourage Jon to continue, which he did.