3.1.1

Alick closed his eyes and put his head down on the desk. Studying was becoming more and more useless as the night wore on and more people came to the library. The week before finals week was always a precarious time at the library; everyone was on edge, cramming to get the last bit of information in before the fateful test, and every chair had an owner by nine at night, with more people sitting in nooks and corners wherever a relatively comfortable one could be found. Alick had chosen the tenth floor because in the past it had been one of the least used floors, the mains study floor with all the desks and comfy chairs was the eleventh floor, and the other place people usually chose to study if given the chance was on the main floor, being the only one with carpet to sit on instead of cement when the chairs ran out. It was almost midnight, however, and finals were less than three days away. More and more people were filtering into the library and finding spaces wherever available, eventually overflowing into Alick's precious tenth floor. It had cement floor and only a few chairs that accompanied only two desks, one of which was taken up by himself and a girl across from him who seemed to be having a horrible time trying to tell apart genetic diseases.
To everyone else in the room, a blanket of quiet hung over everything, the unspoken rule that whoever talked would be ostracized from their college society. To Alick, however, voices buzzed through the air, constant as a steady rain but less pleasant, and certainly not calming. They invaded his mind constantly, and weren't even normally all that interesting. At the moment, he caught snatches of thoughts about codons and junk DNA from one side of the room, and the capitals of Europe from another. Most of the time at least, the voices were so layered on top of one another that they would meld together and he could more easily ignore them, but sometimes people would get excited or frustrated and their voices would rise. Phrases like "Yugoslavia! Not Austria!" or "Why the hell did I write mRNA?!" were pretty hard to ignore when screamed at the top of people's lungs.
Well, not screamed; thought.
Of course none of these people were really saying any of these things out loud in a library; that would be ridiculous. What Alick was hearing was something that no one should be able to hear. People's minds were all around him opened to him like millions of audio books playing simultaneously from every direction. He had no way to shut them out, except to get far enough away from them as possible. The tenth floor was the least crowded of all the floors (he had checked) and therefore had been his best bet to get work done, but it still took a strong amount of willpower to block out all of the voices. Willpower that was quickly failing him as the night wore on.
It was worse at home though. At home everyone was in everybody's business and he knew that he would never be able to get any work done there. So the library was his best option.
He put his head down on the table, ignoring, for the moment, his paper on the Russio Japanese war. He let the voices pouring in from around him consume his mind, blocking out all of his own thoughts until everything simply became an ocean of sound, washing over him in waves. When he concentrated like this, he could easily hear voices from almost every floor of the library, and he found that a few minutes of simply letting them overtake him was often the best way to clear his mind enough to start concentrating again on his work afterward.
It was nice, really. It felt familiar, the waves of voices coursing through him. He had always had this ability, as did half his clan. Every time he let it overwhelm him, he felt a bit of nostalgia, of thinking back to the first time it happened, when he was in his mother's kitchen and the wall between his mind and the rest of the world had broken and it had all come in the first time-
"Help me"
Alick gave a violent spasm when he heard the words echo through his mind, the emotions coming with them so strong that they drowned out everything else tumbling through his mind. He listened in the direction that he had heard the words coming from; somewhere above and to his left.
"Oh God. Oh God. He's going to -"
The words came into his mind with such force again; this girl - it was a girl from the sound of her voice - was terrified. He was able to hold himself mostly steady at this point because he knew what was coming. The words were coming from the back stairs, about the height of the eleventh floor.
He should not interfere. He knew that he should not interfere. How did he know? Because that was how he was raised. He had been raised to know that anyone outside the clan was not to be messed with. They were insignificant and below his time and it didn't matter what happened to them. They were not like him. They did not matter.
But then the voice came again.
"-going to shoot me-"
Whoever she was, her thoughts were turning into raw emotion. Emotion was harder to hear, but it came out as a noise just like the voices, simply with no meaning or understanding attached to what was being heard. The sound was high and wailing - fear. But there was another sound as well that he could just barely make out. It was a sort of humming, oscillating sound coming from the same direction. The emotion was happiness.
He wasn't supposed to go help her, but something was terribly wrong.
Getting up from the table, Alick tried - and most likely failed - to look inconspicuous as he walked towards the stairway, brandishing his Complete History of the Russio Japanese War textbook in his hand. Upon approaching the stairway, it occurred to him that it may not be the best idea to let someone with a gun know that he was approaching, and he slipped out of his shoes before opening the door. He bounded up the stairs, the high wailing sound and the oscillating tune undercutting all the other voices that he could hear coming at him from every other floor.
Turning the corner to the final set of stairs on the stairwell, he caught sight of them. There was a single window at the top of the stairs, made to look out on the surrounding landscape, as it was the tallest building around for miles. Glass from the window was littered around the feet of the two people standing there, as it was smashed wide open. The girl, the one he had been hearing, had her back to the window, facing another person, a guy who looked, from what Alick could tell form behind, much too old to be the average college student.
And he was pointing a gun at her face.
Alick's bravery failed him for a minute, after all, guns kill people. But he couldn't just go down stairs and leave her there. Not in the hands of that man, that clearly psycho man. Thankful that he was wearing socks to pad his footsteps, he continued his way up the stairs, slower than he had been going for fear of being heard.
The man was laughing. His hair was wild, untrimmed and unbrushed. He reminded Alick of the homeless people that he saw on High Street. Now that he was closer, he was starting to hear this guy's voice, a quiet one, repeating inside his head. "Death. Death. This girl is mine and she will be dead." It wasn't the way normal people would think, his thought pattern. It was quiet and halting. There was clearly something wrong with him.
The girl, on the other hand, looked like a normal, terrified college student. As her captor's laughter grew louder, her eyes started to dart around the stairway, a trapped animal looking for a way to escape. She spotted Alick and for a second he saw uncertainty in her eyes, as to what this would mean for her. He could hear her thoughts go through a list of possibilities, of alerting the man to another's presence, of trying to make a run for it and hoping he would go for the other guy. He felt a stab of betrayal for a minute, hearing her thoughts, hearing her trying to turn on him when he had simply come to help, but she did none of those things and instead her thoughts turned to ways of trying to help Alick to escape without the man noticing. That made Alick feel guilty for some reason, which didn't really help things either.
He moved up the last few steps to the landing, on level and less than a few yards away from the two locked in position. The man seemed sure on the inside that he was going to shoot her, but he had not yet moved position. Maybe that was simply the crazy in him coming out, that he didn't know what to do now.
Alick took his opportunity, before he could change his mind and do anything to the contrary. He brandished his text book out in front of him, took a great swing, and...
The crack from the collision was painful, even to hear. The girl screamed and leaped to the side and behind Alick, to the top of the stairs. The man went down like a bag of rocks, the textbook having hit him hard on the right side of his head, a perfect shot. The sound of him hitting the hard concrete was almost as bad. Alick winced, but was smart enough to grab for the gun. Not that the man would have done anything with it, he was clearly down for the count, and a pool of blood was beginning to collect around his head.
The girl tried to speak, "uh- uh- um-" was all that she could get out of her mouth. Her eyes were welling with tears, the realization that that man was not going to kill her washing over her. Alick heard her thoughts racing, "Who is he? Does he know this guy? Does he even go here? Why did he save me? He could have been killed! What do I do now? What do I say?"
Alick put down the textbook and gun at his feet and covered his temples with both hands. The girl was welling up with emotion and her thoughts were getting louder, growing on a headache that had started when he was on the tenth floor. "Stop..." he hung his head down, his auburn brown hair covering his eyes and snaking through his fingers, "stop... thinking so loud... Call 911. Now." he slid down to the floor, his back to the wall, his eyes shut tight. Telling her to stop thinking so loud had obviously just confused her. He hadn't meant to say it, it just sort of came out.
The girl, her hands shaking badly, grabbed her phone out of her pocket, almost dropping it twice while doing so, "I... I don't think I can- ... can you?"
He shook his head, "Don't know how. Never used one. Hurry up, that guy's bleeding out." Was bleeding out the right terminology? Who knows. Probably not. But she dialed the number anyway.
His vision was blurring when he opened his eyes again, the adrenaline that had shot through him was starting to dissipate and leaving him exhausted. He could hear the girl talking on the phone, but he couldn't understand what she was saying any longer. That wasn't good.
The one thought he still had was that he had to get out of there. It seemed as though nothing good would happen of being confronted by a bunch of police and an almost dead man. So as the girl was still on the phone, he got up, shakily, and started down the eleven flights of stairs and the door.

3.1.0

There are the descriers, and there are the voices, and that is how the congregation of South Baneland came into being. When referring to their group, it is simply "the congregation" for everyone in the area knows it. They tell people that they are the modern Amish, or maybe that's their cover, for no one really ever seems to believe it. To outsiders, they're a cult. No group can be so close knit, they reason. They live secluded lives from the world, intertwined so deeply with each other that often outsiders joke that they are interchangeable. Many will go months, if not years, without leaving the congregation quarters; a spot on the edge of the city, near the world yet separated by rows of trees, somehow less than a mile from modern society yet so isolated that not a sound will get through the dense patch of trees running around it.
So the congregation isolates, secludes, distances itself from everyone different from themselves. The others outside are considered below them. They cannot do what the congregation does. Therefore, few from the congregation bother to leave. They have their own society inside that little patch of trees at the edge of the city. All the children must go to school, for that is the law, but out of school only the men have jobs, and that is the only time they spend not at the congregation. The women leave only to shop, although they grow most of their food themselves. College is an optional sort of state, attended at times by the men of the congregation but rarely by the women; why go to college if you wont ever get a job?
Thus comes the belief formed by the outsiders that the congregation is a cult, and that is how it has stayed for hundreds of years.