During the spring of 2003, the American government formed CRAMP, the Committee for the Research of Abnormal and Magical Phenomena. They were to look into the growing population of magic users and non-humans who lived in the United States. Most importantly (to the mundanes who pushed for CRAMP to be formed) they were supposed to look into doing something about "dangerous" underage magic users.

Luckily, we got some prominent magic users onto the committee, or things would have been a mess for any magic user during the early twenty-first century. As it was, they passed URMA, the Underage Magic Restriction Act, in mid August, and that just sucked. It stated that all magicals between the ages of twelve and eighteen (non-humans who didn't participate in human society were exempt) had to be under the care of an approved facility. They then created PRUM, the Project for the Restriction of Underage Magic, a set up that would provide any and all approved facilities for underage magicals.

Since PRUM just sounded really stupid, most of us just called it the Project. Well, most of us who cared. Most people didn't care, but some of us, like my sister and me, were going to have to live in those places. Telling someone we lived at a PRUM House seemed way too embarrassing, especially if that someone was one of our friends, and saying P.R.U.M., like it was supposed to be as an acronym, took too much time and effort. Calling it a Project House at least gave it the resemblance of coolness. Of course, that still didn't make the idea of having to live in a Project House for the rest of my "childhood" any more appealing.

The thing was, the mundanes had all the wrong ideas about who was dangerous to them and who wasn't among magicals. They assumed that just because a younger magical had less experience, that he or she would not have any control whatsoever. They thought that because some magicals could summon demons and spew fireballs that we all could. They were sure that parents who had different magic from their children couldn't possibly be able to teach the children the basics of control. They, most of the time, we wrong on all counts.

But what annoyed me the most was that they knew a little, but assumed they knew everything there was to know about magic. They didn't know that manifesting magic before adulthood is rare (almost non-existent) among non-magical lineages, so we almost always have some sort of family to teach us when we have magic during youth. Add to that the fact that magical power usually peaks in humans around age twenty-one, and the fact that if a person from a non-magical family is going to manifest power, it will happen around that peak, and you can't help but wonder what CRAMP was smoking when they passed URMA. The people most likely to lose control and be dangerous to those around them are those between ages eighteen and thirty, not the ones governed by URMA.

Of course, it was also annoying that my sister El and I were going to be forcibly caught up in PURM, even though neither of us was any danger to the mundanes. Sure, El is a telepath and destructive mage, but she has had perfect control since childhood, if only because she doesn't want to use her magic at all, and can't do that if she can't control it. She doesn't blow things up by accident. And she has better manners than most mundanes assume when it comes to her telepathy. She doesn't just invade people's minds on whim, except for maybe mine, and she can't help that.

And as for me... I couldn't use my gifts to be dangerous if I tried. My powers are complimentary opposites of my twin sister's. Where she has destructive magics and telepathy, I have shields and empathy. I can't hurt with the shields, and even if I could, I wouldn't because I can feel it in the other person, and that sucks. And it's not like I can do anything with my empathy that someone who's really good at readying body language can't do. But, I'm still a magical, and I was only fourteen when URMA was passed, so I had to go be part of the Project, just like all the other teenaged magicals out there.

El and I actually got kinda lucky when it came to the Project. Because there were so few magicals who the mundanes trusted to teach us "dangerous" kids, Project Houses were few and far between. Some kids had to move to different states just to get in a House. But the one for our area got set up right in our city, only a couple of blocks away from our school. Everyone else in that particular House had to come from the far corners of the state, except for one other girl. One guy was even shipped in from Missouri, since he was a summoner, and the next closest House with a summoner teacher was on the east coast.

Still, it was kind of annoying when the Project contacted Mom and Dad in mid-August, right after it was formed, asking if El and I could move in asap. The others were coming from farther away and had more to deal with, so they wanted us, the close-by one, steeled before they had to worry. We didn't want to go, especially El, but we didn't really have a choice. The Project, and thus the government, knew we were there because Dad had registered the whole family years before. Mom and Dad would get in trouble with the law if we didn't go to the Project House, as stupid as it was.

That was how my sister and I ended up moving into the House on August 20, 2003, instead of going camping with our friends, something we'd been planning since May. The Project wanted us moved in that day, and we had no room to argue. El was not pleased, and she spent the whole morning grumbling. Of course, I knew she wasn't just pissed about being forced to miss the trip. She was scared of her magic, and had been since second grade when she almost killed David Prior by accident (which just shows how abnormally powerful she is...no normal seven year old has the power to kill a person). Moving to the Project House meant she'd have to use her power, instead of keeping it safely bottled up the way she liked it, and that scared her. She tried to keep her fear from everyone, even me, but the combination of our bond and my empathy have always made it near impossible for her to hide her feeling from me.

Still, even though she was scared and pissed off, she put on a good face for the people at the Project House when we moved in around noon. This was mostly because she had heard the rumors that the teachers and two "caretakers" (for lack of a better word) for our particular House were some of the most skilled and/or talented people in their respective fields in the whole country. El was quite well known among magical society in the US for being extraordinarily powerful for her age, and had attracted some pretty cool adults to our House because of it. El knew this, and thus didn't want to seem sulky and immature when she came face to face with the half-famous people.

I'm not quite sure if El realized that she wouldn't be able to hide all of her bitterness from the people at the House. After all, there had to be teachers with the appropriate powers to teach us there. So someone there had to be a telepath, and the same with an empath. (Technically it's possible to be both, but it's so rare that TI didn't even consider it, especially since empathy is already a pretty rare gift.) There would be at least two people there who could see through El's act. I was sure because she was radiating bitterness to me, and that usually meant she was having a hard time keeping her act up. I didn't think they would mind, though, since anyone would be bitter at being forced to leave home like that.

I forced myself too look cheerful as well, to hopefully give a little more believability to El's act. I am, in general, much better at acting than El is, because of my stronger shielding and the slight projection of feelings that leant some realism to my feelings. I was just better acquainted with feelings, and their concealment, than my sister was. I was fairly confident that I would be able to keep all except maybe the empath from seeing through to my resentment.

What no one ever guessed, not even El, was that I envied my sister. Being twins, we were always compared to each other, and for the longest time I was sure she was more powerful, cooler magically, and more special than I was. After all, she was the one who could do flashy stuff. She could blow things up and read minds, and that was cool. All I could do was shields and the empathy, which just didn't seem like anything special, especially after El joked about setting our homeroom teacher's toupee on fire in seventh grade and earned the awe of all of our not-quite-yet friends.

Being in the Project House, El would be forced to use her magic more. So would I, but a little extra practice wouldn't make my magic as impressive as hers. And once she was actually using her powers, I would never be able to forget how much better her magic was. After all, she was the one known throughout the country for being unusually powerful. Next to her, I felt insignificant, and I didn't like it.

It didn't matter to that jealous part of me that our respective powers fit with our personalities. El was the outgoing, confident, aggressive one of us. I was quieter, more passive, even though I'm the male, not her. It probably would have helped had I noticed the fact that I was just as powerful, if not more so, than she was. My shields could stop one of her attacks almost all the time, and she never found something out from me if I didn't want her to. But that wasn't something I noticed, so I was jealous of her.

Still, I loved her more than anyone else. She was my best friend, and not just because we were psychically linked. She was the one I trusted with my secrets. We had always been together, and at that point we probably would have suffered if we had been separated. I was just envious as well. She was more outgoing, more powerful, better with people...everything I wished I could be.

So I was all smiles the day we moved into the House. I even put my act on for Mom and Dad that morning, letting them relax with the knowledge that at least one of us wasn't pissed off at anyone and everyone for being forced into this. It wasn't true, but what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them, in this case.

Our father took and hour off of work to help us move in that day. Because he was helping, getting our things, especially El's massive wardrobe, over to the House would be infinitely easier. After all, Dad had a teleportative form of telekinesis as one of his gifts, a very useful skill when moving. Though he had to be there anyway, as one of our parents.

Out of the five adults who were going to be living there (three teachers and two substitute parents), only one was there to meet us when we moved in. That was Jeren, one of the two non-teachers. He came as a surprise to me, since I had only heard of famous people for teachers. Jeren, however, was also quite well known.

Jeren Denkieth was the youngest lightning Grand Master in history, not that there were many in the first place with that rare talent. Also, together with his wife, he was part of the only Grand Master team of our times. Together, Jeren and his wife did electronic magic, and they had created the first magic computer ever. In other words, he was just really cool.

El wasn't terribly impressed, but that didn't surprise me. El didn't follow the computer world very closely, and she avoided the magical world like the plague. And even though Jeren was famous in his particular areas, he wasn't well known to others at all. I knew about him mostly because I had wanted (and still did actually) one of the magical computers that he designed. Mom refused to pay for it, though, so I tried to convince her by showing her how brilliant the people who created it were. It didn't work, but it left me with a very thorough knowledge of Jeren and Keren Denkieth. (It was probably a good thing that I didn't know then that Keren was to be in charge of the girls' floor, or I probably would have been too busy blabbing to actually talk to either of them.)

"Hello, and welcome to the House," Jeren said to us after Dad did a self-introduction for the three of us. I noticed that he avoided saying PRUM House, even though I'm sure he was supposed to. "I've been expecting you. Why don't you come in and sit down so we can fill out the paperwork?"

He sounded fake, like he was reciting a memorized speech, or reading off of cue cards. I later learned that that wasn't far from the truth. It turned out that even though the government wasn't allowed to do anything in the running of the Houses, they felt the need to stick their noses in anyway. They had dictated pretty much every step of moving a new magical in, and Jeren was playing along to avoid a hefty fine.

About a half hour later we were completely moved in, sorta... Dad had gone to move our things from the house while Jeren went over the rules of the House. That saved us a good fifteen minutes, not that anyone but Dad was in much of a hurry. After that Jeren had a few more papers for Dad to sign, the ones that gave the House the right to act as our parents for the rest of our legal childhood (provided Mom and Dad never took that right back, which they could do if we moved), and then Dad was free to go, leaving us with a common room full of things to start getting put into our new home.

...El was even more pissed off at that point than she had been earlier. I couldn't quite figure out why she was angrier then than she was earlier, but it was bad enough that it was starting to spill over onto me. And that meant I was having a harder time keeping my act up. I wanted to try and figure out why she was being so difficult, but not in front of Jeren, who had decided to help us get things into our rooms. So instead, I did something that I had needed to do since I first saw Jeren in the doorway.

"You're that Jeren Denkieth, right?" I asked him while we were both in the common room getting things to haul over to my room.

"I don't know," he said. "What Jeren Denkieth are you talking about?" That was the first time I realized that my empathy might give me an advantage over some of the adults at the House. Just because Jeren was a Grand Master when it came to lightning magic didn't mean he had a whole lot of ability in other areas (like telepathy, empathy, and mental shielding, though I later learned that he was slightly sensitive). In other words, I could feel his emotions rather clearly, and he was lying, though it seemed to be all in fun.

"The one who designed the Merlin," I said, choosing not to let him know that I knew he was lying.

"Oh, yeah, that's me," he said, smiling sheepishly. "How'd you know?"

"You're famous," I said.

"But not outside of certain circles," he said. "And most of those circles don't really attract kids your age."

"I've been trying to convince my mom to get us a Merlin for a year now," I said. "I even did research on the creators to try and impress her. She really didn't care though. I guess I've been a fan ever since... Never thought I'd get to meet you, though."

"If you're impressed by me, wait until you meet the teachers," he said. His emotions told me that he was suitably impressed by the teachers, which made me suspect that they were going to be more than a little famous.

"Well, we've already heard rumors about them..." I said, grinning. "So we're ready for some famous people there. I just didn't expect famous people in your position. It doesn't sound like a very fun job."

"It doesn't?" he asked. His "aura" (for lack of a better way to describe the cloud of emotions that surrounded him that I could dip into to find out how he felt at any given moment, and tended to read without even thinking about it) told me he was slightly suspicious of me, but mostly surprised. I think he thought I was planning on being trouble, though if he knew anything about El and me he would have realized that El would almost always be causing the problems, not that I was perfect. I just wasn't outgoing or daring enough to stand up to the adults, especially since I knew that they probably thought this whole PRUM thing was just as stupid as we did.

"Well, I don't know about your job specifically, since I don't know any of the other guys coming here," I said. "I know I don't plan on causing problems. But whoever's in charge of the girls is gonna have a wonderful time with El. She can be pretty stubborn, and she really doesn't want to be here right now."

"I heard that!" El's voice said in my head, which made me jump. She had taken off for the bathroom before I started talking to Jeren. I didn't think she was psychically listen in on my conversation, which meant she must have gotten back already. It also meant that El was going to be pissed off at me for a while too.

"Well it's true," I called out loud, towards the door, where a quick check had told me El was standing. This, of course, earned me a strange look from Jeren. "El's out there, and she doesn't like me talking about her "behind her back." Too bad we're not actually behind her right now."

This got a laugh from Jeren, which was how I wanted it. Unfortunately, it didn't amuse El, which was what I really wanted. Instead, she stalked away from the door and back towards her room. She could get away with that because we had finished moving stuff into her room before starting on mine. Still, that was a very bad sign.

El didn't even speak to me again until dinner that night. By that time Keren had returned from the airport with Lilani Tessel, a famous healer who I had only heard a little about, because I really didn't care much about that aspect of the magical world. I did plan on trying to learn a little more about Lilani, though, since she had introduced herself as the one who would be teacher me better control of my empathy. She wasn't with us at dinner, though; she had gone immediately to her "lab," saying that she had samples with her that needed refrigeration right away, and she hadn't returned. I was too busy being impressed by Jeren and Keren to really care.

I think what impressed me the most about them was how they felt like friends to me as soon as I thought about it a little. I was used to that in general, since it was how I had always decided who I could trust. As an empath, I had a very, very accurate intuition when it came to judging people, and Jeren and Keren were, like my friends, all right by that sense.

To be completely honest, I don't remember most of the conversation at dinner that night. I remember either Jeren or Keren telling us that they had Merlins for anyone in the House who wanted one (for free...proving that it's good to know the creator sometimes). I also remember that El sulked through most of the meal, and that left just Jeren, Keren, and me for conversation. We mostly spent the meal getting to know each other.

But then, toward the end of the meal, Jeren mentioned my warning about El to Keren, right in front of El. I'm sure he thought it wouldn't hurt since she already knew I had told him about it. Maybe he even thought she would be less likely to do it since he had warned Keren right in front of her. But, instead it just pissed her off more.

"You know, Lin might cause you more problems than you think," El said right after that. I knew she was pissed; I could feel it, but I would have known from the way she said that statement anyway. Unfortunately, she was too on guard for me to figure out what she was talking about, so I had to wait for her to say it, just like Jeren and Keren.

"How so?" Jeren asked.

"Well, he still sometimes needs to sleep in my bed with me to keep the nightmares away," she said. I felt my face grow warm as soon as she reached the word sleep, and I realized that my face must have been bright red. "And you can't legally let him do that here, can you?"

"El!" I exclaimed, right at the same time as Keren asked, "The nightmares?"

"Well it's true," El saidi to me sweetly before turning back to Jeren and Keren. "When we were young Lin used to get all of the dreams that the mundanes who lived near us had, good and bad. He remembered the bad ones and called them the nightmares. And the only way he could keep them away was by sleeping with me."

"And it still happens now?" Jeren asked. El nodded.

"No!" I exclaimed. "The only time it's happened since we were little was during the weeks after September 11th, and I bet any empath needed some extra support then. And since I'm sure we all," I glared at El, and she had the decency to go pale, "hope that something like that doesn't happen again in our lifetimes, let alone while we're here...it shouldn't be a problem."

"Oh," Jeren said.

"I still don't understand why would have mundanes' dreams in the first place," Keren said.

"I...um..." I said, but I was too embarrassed to explain it. Yeah, it was a common thing among empaths, but only for those who didn't have strong enough shields to keep them out. It was a weakness, and not something that I wanted to admit to.

The air in that room got tense as I stayed silent. I think El was about to answer, which I wanted even less than to explain it myself, since she was still pissed off at me, but before she could open her mouth, the door opened and Lilani walked in. Four pairs of eyes fixed on her, which caused her to pause in the doorway, look around the room, and frown in confusion.

"This is a rather interesting conversation, it seems," she said after a moment. "What did I miss?"

"Ellen was just telling us about how she sometimes needs to sleep with her brother to prevent him from having nightmares," Keren said, which made me turn beet red, again. "I was trying to figure out why he has these nightmares in the first place."

She turned to me, and before she could even speak I started explaining myself. "I used to need El's help to stop the nightmares, but I'm strong enough to do it on my own now."

"What nightmares?" she asked.

"From the mundanes who lived near us," I said, and she nodded in understanding.

"Keren, do you know what the first thing any telepath or empath learns about mundanes is?" she asked. Keren shook her head. "It is that there are two types of mundanes, one that will make your life harder some of the time, and one that will make your life harder most of the time.

"The first group are those who have natural shield. They don't broadcast thoughts and emotions to each and every magical in range, which is always a relief. But, they are also near impossible to read if you want something from them.

"On the other hand, the second type of mundane has no shields whatsoever. He or she will send thoughts and emotions out to anyone who can pick them up, and the only way to keep them out is with developed personal shields. This can, and had, broken the minds of several budding telepaths and empaths, especially the empaths, and even moreso when the victim is young. They are, however, quite useful when one needs information as soon as possible.

"Of course, even knowing that these mundanes are a problem for any empath or telepath, they are significantly more distressing to empaths than they are to telepaths. Telepaths have a natural protection of sorts; they almost always can tell when a thought they are picking up is coming from someone else. It is much more difficult for an empath, and especially so when these foreign feelings come at night, in dreams, when any person's defenses are weakest."

El yawned at that point, since she already knew everything Lilani was saying, and didn't particularly want to hear it again. But the little voice in the back of my head that was El told me that she didn't want to walk out while Lilani was talking either, not on the first day. Luckily for El, Lilani noticed the yawn, and a guilty look flashed across her face. Then she smiled weakly at the table.

"Anyway," she said quickly. "That would be why Ellin might have mundanes' nightmares."

I didn't realize it until much later, but Lilani's speech that night was actually quite a bit shorter than her usual. As her student, I quickly learned not to ask her a question unless I really wanted the answer, because she had an annoying habit of turning any explanation into a full blown lecture. And she very rarely realized when she was boring people.

"I'm going to my room," El said as soon as Lilani was done talking. I started to stand up to follow her, since I wanted to talk to her and explain that I hadn't meant to make her mad, but she turned to me and fixed me with a cold stare the moment she realized I was standing up.

"Don't even think about it," she said to me silently. "I want to be alone, and that means you too."

She was very, very pissed off at me, and from the way she sounded, there was nothing I could say at the moment to change her mind. So, instead of following her like I wanted it, I stayed in the dining room and talked with the adults some more. And then later I went up to my room alone to get things a little more settled. It felt weird, spending the evening without El, but every time I checked on her she was still just as mad as before, and I didn't want to make it any worse.

Still, my room was too quiet. I was just Jeren and myself on the floor that night, since the only male teacher and the other guys weren't there yet... Because of that, all I could hear were the noises that I made myself. No El just next door, talking on the phone with our friends until Mom or Dad yelled at her to get off the phone. No random tv noises form Mom and Dad's room. No Spork (I never quite understood why El had to name our puppy after the infamous plastic utensils at school) barking at the neighbor's cat, or the squirrels that inhabited our front yard, or every other car that drove by. It was way too quiet.

And as much as I hate to admit it, I had a hard time sleeping that night because of it. I almost tried to go to El's room in the middle of the night and apologize. I didn't, though; she was asleep, and waking her up would just make her even angrier.

But I was lonely, even if I would never let anyone find out about it, not even El.