The Interview

The Interview is a tale written by Crazah.

The following has been reconstructed from notes taken by ██████ during a debriefing session at a secure facility outside of Boise, Idaho. The subject was a fourteen year old boy recovered from the site of a mass casualty event in rural Montana. The event was publicly attributed to a propane explosion at a church gathering. Forty one people died. The boy was the sole survivor.

The boy was uninjured. He was found sitting in a field approximately two hundred meters from the blast site, facing away from the wreckage.

██████ identified the boy as a latent sensitive. His energy signature was consistent with an uncontrolled discharge event. Given his age and the absence of any training, this was classified as an accidental manifestation. What it attracted was not accidental.

The following excerpts are from his third and final interview before he was transferred to REDACTED for long term placement.

Interviewer: Can you tell me what you remember?

“Everyone was singing. I was sitting in the back because I always sit in the back. I felt sick. Like really sick, like the air got heavy. My mom looked at me and she mouthed 'are you okay' and I nodded. Then the windows went dark. Not like the lights went off. Like the windows stopped being windows.”

Interviewer: What do you mean?

“They were just black rectangles. And everyone kept singing. Nobody noticed. I tried to stand up but my legs wouldn't work. And then there was a man at the front of the church. He wasn't there before. He was standing behind the pastor, just standing there, and nobody saw him. He was tall. Really tall. He didn't look right.”

Interviewer: Didn't look right how?

“He looked like a person the way a drawing of a person looks like a person. Close but wrong. Like someone described a human being to something that had never seen one, and it did its best. He was smiling. His mouth was too wide. I could see all of his teeth and there were too many.”

Interviewer: What happened next?

“He put his hand on my mom's shoulder. She didn't react. Nobody did. He looked right at me. Directly at me. Everyone else was still singing but I couldn't hear them anymore. I could only hear him. He didn't move his mouth but I heard him anyway.”

Interviewer: What did he say?

“He said thank you. He said I brought him here. He said the singing was very beautiful. He said he was going to keep it.”

The boy stopped responding to questions at this point and became nonverbal for the remainder of the session. Psychological evaluation noted symptoms consistent with acute trauma, but also an unusual calmness that evaluators found difficult to reconcile with the events described.

The boy's energy output has since been measured at levels consistent with a ██████ class sensitive. He has not spoken about the event again.