Prince Of Mind Hallucinations

Chapter 9: A Small Act of Courage in the Cafeteria

The cafeteria at Liberty High during second lunch was an audio hellscape. The smell of lukewarm chili, the grease from the deep fryer, and the sweat of hundreds of teenagers collided to create a suffocating atmosphere. To Raditya, this wasn't just a dining hall; it was a frequency minefield. Ever since the lightning bolt rewired his neural structure, he felt like a radio with a busted antenna; picking up every signal with no way to turn it off.

He picked a table in the farthest corner near a broken vending machine, hoping his telepathic range wouldn't catch too much emotional garbage. He just wanted to eat his soggy chicken nuggets without knowing who was cheating on who, or who forgot to wear underwear today. But his new looks made him a magnet. His brain's radar vibrated violently as a group of sophomore girls walked past him.

Holy crap, his jawline is so sexy. I just want to lick from his ear all the way down his neck, whispered the internal voice of a girl who looked completely innocent in pigtails.

Raditya nearly choked on a fry. He tried to keep his head down, but the sensory assault didn't stop there. Three feet away, a senior named Siska was sitting with her back to him. Siska was known as the quiet, conservative church girl, but when Raditya tried to "shut" his brain, a mental projection from her head exploded like a 4K adult film forcefully played right in front of his eyes.

In Raditya's mental vision, the loud cafeteria faded out, replaced by a dark, damp space—the locked teachers' restroom. In this steamy visualization, Siska imagined Raditya cornering her against the cold porcelain sink. He saw himself—or rather, a far more dominant, feral version of himself—grabbing Siska's hair and forcing her to look at their reflection in the fogged-up mirror.

"Please, Raditya... a little rougher," Siska's voice moaned inside his head, so incredibly real he could feel the ghost of her hot breath against his ear.

In the fantasy, Raditya's large, veiny hands roughly tore open Siska's conservative blouse, popping the buttons. Siska imagined her heavy breasts spilling out, her nipples instantly hardening from the cold air, while Raditya sucked on them greedily. The visual shifted into even more extreme territory: Raditya saw himself yank Siska's skirt up, revealing pale skin before he lifted her and slammed her against the wall. The Siska in the thought moaned wildly, her legs wrapping around his waist while he entered her with a primitive, unyielding force that churned up pure pleasure.

Raditya could feel the phantom throb of arousal transferring from that vision into his actual body. Cold sweat dripped down his back, and his jeans were already starting to feel painfully tight. Siska's visualization ended with an imaginary climax so loud it felt like it ruptured his psychic eardrums.

"Dammit..." Raditya growled, squeezing his eyes shut until his forehead wrinkled. He wanted to throw up, but his teenage libido was simultaneously spiking to dangerous levels.

He looked away, desperately trying to focus on an inanimate object: a stack of plastic forks on the next table. But the cafeteria madness was just getting started. From the center of the crowd, he heard an internal voice dripping with smug, malicious satisfaction.

Hahahaha, take that, Dina! I swapped your nice homemade roast beef sandwich with the cold, soggy tuna sub that's been rotting in my locker since Tuesday. Hope you don't get food poisoning, bitch, thought Brad, a bulky football player known for being a low-level bully.

Raditya turned his head. He saw Dina, the quiet honor student, opening her Tupperware container with a hopeful smile. Instantly, her expression morphed into pure horror as she saw the slimy, foul-smelling lump of tuna replacing the lunch she had packed. Tears welled up in Dina's eyes. She had used her own allowance to buy the ingredients for that lunch, and now it was ruined.

Brad, sitting two tables ahead of Dina, was pretending to chat with his buddies, but his internal monologue was cheering: Damn, this roast beef is incredible. Good thing I'm a ninja and swapped it while she was busy gossiping in the corner. Better in my stomach than that bookworm's.

Raditya's anger began to boil. The sexual visualization from Siska had already left his testosterone and emotions incredibly unstable. He was sick of seeing the hypocrisy around him. The people who looked pure had incredibly filthy minds, and the people who acted like "friends" had the souls of thieves.

Normally, the old nerd Raditya would have stayed quiet. He would have kept his head down and pretended not to notice. But his new body and power seemed to come with a brand-new circuit of courage he never knew he had. He stood up abruptly, his chair screeching loudly across the cafeteria floor. Everyone within a fifteen-foot radius turned to look.

"Brad," Raditya's deep voice cut through the cafeteria noise like a sharp blade.

Brad choked on the roast beef he was chewing. He turned around with a tough-guy glare. "Huh? What do you want, pretty boy?"

Raditya walked over to Brad's table. His steps felt light but carried an undeniable authority. The entire cafeteria went dead silent, instantly transforming into a dramatic stage.

"Give Dina her lunch back," Raditya said casually, but his eyes bore straight into Brad's pupils with a glare that felt like it could peel the secrets right off a person's soul.

Brad let out an arrogant laugh, though his internal monologue suddenly spiked with anxiety: How the hell does he know? Impossible, nobody saw me! Crap, why is his stare so terrifying?

"What the hell are you talking about, man? What lunch? I bought this from the lunch line!" Brad snapped, trying to build a fortress of lies.

Raditya smirked, a cold smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Oh, so the cafeteria is serving artisanal roast beef with a little heart-shaped piece of provolone cheese today? I didn't realize the lunch ladies were serving meals out of pink Tupperware that has Dina's name Sharpied on the bottom."

Brad turned sheet white. HOLY SHIT! He knows about the heart-shaped cheese?! How?! Was he hiding under the table?! Brad's internal panic screamed so loud it made Raditya's ears ring.

Dina looked at Raditya, then at the Tupperware in Brad's hands. The realization hit her, and her pale face flushed red with anger. "Brad! That's my container! That's the lunch I made at home!"

"Bullshit! Don't listen to this hallucinating freak, Dina! I found this on a chair!" Brad tried to defend himself, but his voice cracked.

"Look under your chair, Brad," Raditya continued, raising his voice slightly. "There's the receipt for the tuna sub you bought on Tuesday that you threw down there for an alibi, right? Unfortunately, the rotting, cold tuna you put in Dina's container is slightly less disgusting than the way you act."

Brad reflexively glanced down at his feet, and that tiny, involuntary movement was a pure confession of guilt. Cheers and jeers started erupting from the corners of the cafeteria. Other students, who were usually afraid of Brad, started mocking him.

Damn, Raditya is a badass. He was all the way in the corner! Is he a detective or something? Sucks to be Brad, tried to look cool and totally fumbled.

Raditya felt a strange, thrilling satisfaction crawl up his spine. For the first time, his ability to hear the "trash" yielded a clean result. He stepped closer to Brad, towering over the bulky football player. Raditya's new posture made Brad look surprisingly small.

"You've got two choices: give that container back to Dina with some dignity right now, or I tell everyone about your other little scandal... like how you swiped the AP Chem answer key out of Mrs. Higgins's bag last week," Raditya whispered, his voice low and incredibly intimidating. He had just forcefully yanked that particular piece of information from Brad's short-term memory.

Brad's face shifted from red to an ashy gray-blue. Is he... is he a witch or a demon? Why does he know everything?! I'm gonna get expelled if the Principal finds out about the Chem test! Brad's inner voice was practically sobbing.

With shaking hands, Brad shoved the Tupperware container toward Dina. "Fine, whatever! Sorry! It was just a prank, bro, you don't gotta take it so seriously!"

Dina snatched her container back, her eyes welling up with tears—not out of sadness, but immense gratitude. "Thank you, Raditya... I... I don't know what to say."

Raditya just gave a tight nod. He could feel Dina's mind radiating waves of warm admiration, a highly relieving contrast to the filthy sexual fantasies and devious cheating he had been force-fed all day.

But the mass attention of the student body was the absolute last thing Raditya wanted. As soon as his heroic act was finished, he felt thousands of thoughts piling onto him again, commenting on what just happened with a dizzying array of confusing motives.

Turns out he's a hero too, God he's getting hotter by the second. Ugh, probably staged just to get the girls to swoon. Raditya is scary, man, how did he know details like that?

The pressure of the collective internal voices in the cafeteria focusing on him felt like thousands of volts of electricity. Raditya grabbed his head, a sudden wave of dizziness hitting him. His transforming body needed more oxygen, but he was constantly breathing in the toxic mental exhaust of everyone else.

"I gotta go," Raditya said shortly to Dina, not even waiting for her to say anything else.

He turned around and fast-walked out of the cafeteria. He pushed through the exit doors and finally felt like he could breathe again as the open air from the outdoor basketball courts hit his face. He leaned against the metal canopy pole of the gym, his lungs pumping oxygen rapidly.

That tiny act of courage had forced him to expend a massive amount of psychic energy. But in the midst of that exhaustion, he realized something fundamental: this "thought-radio" wasn't just an embarrassing curse forcing him to watch other people's mental p**n. This power could be a compass, a weapon to right injustices, even if he had to do it in absurd, bordering-on-dangerous ways.

He looked at his own hands, large and muscular now, the residue of the lightning's power.

"Being righteous is apparently just as exhausting as being hot," he muttered to himself, wiping the sweat from his temples.

Suddenly, he felt a gaze on him. A "cold" mental signal hit his radar again. Bianca was standing on the second-floor breezeway balcony, looking straight down at Raditya. Bianca wasn't thinking anything he could explicitly intercept, but the emptiness of her mind carried a different kind of calm. It was as if Bianca was speaking through her wordless mind: You've just started a very dangerous game, Raditya.

Raditya met her gaze for a split second, then walked away. He realized that his days at Liberty High were going to be a very loud moral war. A war between the feral human desires his sensors picked up, and his new drive to enforce justice using information he was never supposed to have.

As he walked back toward the main building, Raditya only hoped for one thing: that his next dream date wouldn't be a radio broadcast about a school closet or a sink, but an honest conversation that didn't need to be translated by his tortured, exhausted mind.