It was an uneventful Wednesday morning in London. There was some traffic on the street, people on business, parents with children, people leading dogs or walking home with shopping. It was pleasantly sunny for a change.

Still pretty chilly compared to Hawaii, thought one particular shopper, but you have to admit, it'd get boring having weather like that all the time. If there's one thing we have here, it's variety.

Jennifer noticed something was wrong before she consciously realized what it was. People had halted in the middle of the street, wherever they were, just staring ahead of them. Reflexively she glanced into the sky - nothing there, of course; it wouldn't be until later that she consciously located the image that had made her do that - but no, they weren't looking up, or anywhere in particular...

A man in an expensive business suit swung his briefcase in an arc, smashing the windscreen of a car parked on the kerb, his face still strangely calm. Someone else took out a lighter and proceeded to set fire to the newspaper he'd been reading. Across the road a woman started trying to kick a hole in the glass of a bus shelter. The man with the newspaper threw it through an open window. Everywhere on the street, people were committing vandalism with the same blank expression on their faces.

Jennifer froze for a moment, calculating options, vaguely noting at the back of her mind that whatever the influence was, it didn't seem to be affecting her. There was nothing visible in the vicinity, nothing even of the slight sensation she'd had when looking closely at Avalon and Katsumi, of power held in check, like standing next to a high-voltage transformer...

She flung her viewpoint upwards, hundreds of yards into the air, looked down, searching for boundaries, yes, the circumference of the area of effect was there, which would put its centre there, in that block of flats, she flashed down towards it; the sensation was like insanely fast, reckless flight, though to any observer in condition to notice, she would have been simply standing on the pavement doing nothing in particular.

Down through the first half dozen floors, wait, there was something - back up and to the right, there.

A young man was lying in bed asleep, but every neuron in his brain was working flat out, more activity than she'd ever seen in a waking person let alone a sleeping one. Doing what and how exactly? Irrelevant right now. She reached out, touched the sleeping man's nervous system. A gentle nudge calmed the frantic activity, then sent the man into a deep, peaceful sleep.

She checked outside again. Yes. The madness had stopped. A quick search of the area - thankfully, the violence had been confined to petty vandalism. Nobody appeared to have been seriously hurt. People were blinking curiously at the damage, shrugging and going about their business.

Jennifer let go of the effect she'd used, breathing a long sigh of relief. She blinked slightly at the momentary disorientation as her vision returned to normal, realizing she was still holding onto her shopping.

She looked around, shook her head and started walking again, pretty much, in fact, as everyone else was doing.