Plurimum Chapter One

Rachel Berry liked to think that up until that faithful moment in time before her eighteenth birthday she was an ordinary freshman at high school. She had friends from the Glee club, she had classes she attended methodically, she was picked on for being at the bottom of the social calendar. She was your average Joe(ette).

And then two boys showed up at her home one day and decided that, clearly, that wasn't enough.

She remembered the day very clearly. She woke up at 6am, as she normally did, and proceeded through her daily workout. She took a shower right after, dressed in her favorite brown owl sweater, put on her pleated blue skirt and white tights, a pair of light blue shoes, and was packing her back pack, humming to herself happily when her Dad and Daddy poked their heads through the door.

"Rachel? Honey? There's someone here who wants to talk to you…" Dad said, his voice containing a small, barely detectable tremor. She looked up at him and smiled cheerfully, leaving her bag behind and prancing downstairs, her Daddy telling her that the guests were in the living room. As she waltzed down the stairs she clearly heard one man say to the other 'She's finally ready'. But at the time, she had just shrugged it off.

She paused before entering the living room, smoothing down her shirt and wiping the sweat off the palms of her hands. Oddly enough, she was nervous.

'This is ridiculous! I'm Rachel Berry! I don't get nervous!' she thought to herself before breathing in deeply, putting on a smile and walking through the door.

Two boys about her age sat on the sofa. The larger one was twiddling his fingers uncomfortably around, looking awfully out of place in their small room. His knees almost reached up to his chin as he tried to find a comfortable position on the sofa. The other had a Mohawk and two large tattoos on his hands. They didn't appear to make any sense, they looked like spirals and swirls to her. He was slightly smaller than the other male, and had his feet propped up on their coffee table, his hands behind his head in a pose she had seen various characters in Japanese anime do.

She cleared her throat and the two swiveled through heads towards her. The bigger boy got up and clumsily lumbered towards her. "Rachel Berry?" She nodded uncertainly. The other boy got up and smoothly walked towards her too. He was the complete opposite of his companion.

"Dammit girl! We've been looking everywhere for you! We've been on the road for a year!" he growled, crossing his arms over his chest and smiling devilishly at her.

"Looking for me? Why?" she asked. She suddenly sensed her parents enter the room and come to stand behind her. She felt trapped, cornered. Her Dad put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed reassuringly. A flood of images started to seep from his fingers and into her brain, and she shuddered. She wasn't completely used to the fact that her father had abilities that you only read about in books and comics, and every time he used it on her, she was just a little bit more freaked out by the notion.

The images flitted through her mind's eye, showing her that she wasn't in trouble, that she was like him. That these were her friends. They were like her.

She opened her eyes, not even aware that she had closed them in the first place, and moved away from her fathers and to the boys. They towered above her, making her feel like a doll in the presence of giants.

"My name's Finn. This is Puck," the clumsy one introduced, smiling at her goofily. He didn't look very smart, but he had an air of gentleness around him. She liked him already. "As you probably already know, your parents have special abilities we like to call Powers." He put air quotes around the last word, rolling his eyes.

"See, it's a genetic thing," the other boy, Puck, picked up. "And you have a power too. You might not realize it, but it's definitely there. And we're here to pick you up and take you to the place where you're meant to go now that we're sure it's you!"

Rachel's mind stalled then. She looked back at her fathers, then at these boys, then at her hands, and then back at the boys.

"Powers? What…what can I do?"

The boys looked at each other worriedly before Finn bashfully said, "We thought you'd know that already…"

Rachel sighed, and crossed her arms, attempting to take the position of authority she often used to get her way in Glee club. "So you came looking for me on the pretext that I am one of many who have a power, as you say, and yet have no idea what said power is?" she turned around swiftly, catching her Daddy's eye. "And you let them in here?!"

"Darling, we trust them! We went through this before too, you know!" Rachel frowned, remembering that her Dad wasn't the only telepath in the room. Her Daddy was too. That's how they had met – they had latched onto each other's wavelengths and didn't stop until they found the one they had been speaking through via their mind. She remembered suddenly that when she was a little girl both of them had made her undergo tests to see if she had the same telepathic abilities, but they had come up failed. She was, apparently, as normal as anyone could be.

So this was a bit of a bother.

"The only way we can find out if you have a power is to do a quick home test, now," Puck reasoned, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a crumbled piece of paper. He lifted it to his face and motioned to Finn. "Can you start testing her out man?"

Finn nodded and went for a bag Rachel hadn't noticed before, standing near the armchair. He reached into it and brought out a rock. He held it easily in his hand, and handed it out to her. An eyebrow raised, Rachel tried to take it into one hand, but ended up falling onto her knees with the weight. Puck chuckled.

"That knocks out both telekinesis and super strength," he looked up over the rim of the paper and narrowed his eyes. "Have you ever stopped time? Like, been running late for something and just wished time would stop and it did for a few seconds?"

She shook her head.

"OK so, time control is out too."

Finn rummaged back into the bag, his head almost completely inside. "There's gotta be something else here!"

"Have you ever transformed into an animal?"

"No!" Rachel shouted at him, getting more and more exasperated by the questions as each one came shooting at her. Puck sighed and just kept bombarding her. Ever healed a cut? Ever moved a coin without touching it? Ever walked through walls? Ever stretched her limbs to uncanny lengths? Ever found herself coughing fire? Ever touched someone and read their mind? Ever had visions? Ever teleported? Ever duplicated? Each question became more and more short and snappy as both the tiny diva and the big mohawked boy lost their patience. Eventually, Finn came out of the bag holding a piece of glass. He looked overly confident as he stuck it out in front of him.

"Rachel, can you scream at the glass?"

"Excuse me?!" She was tired of all these questions now. She was beginning to think this was some sort of joke, that Ashton Kutcher would come out of nowhere soon and tell her she'd just been Punk'd or…whatever!

"Just do it!" Puck growled at her, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "We'd be done and out of here sooner if you do!"

That seemed like a good enough prompt. And so she complied.

She addressed every muscle in her vocal chords to get to the highest note she could reach, and for five seconds she gave it out, willing the sound waves to go towards the piece of glass. Puck and Finn winced at the pitch, and suddenly, the glass broke.

"Well, well, well!" her Dad said behind her, and she spun, detecting the smile in his voice. "Our little girl is a Siren!"

"What? What does that mean? What can I do?!" Rachel asked, firing her questions at everyone in the room. They were all gawking at her, their eyes filled with wonder and possibly fear. Puck grinned smugly at her and held his hands out to her, his palms out, almost like it was a form of surrender. She noticed that the tattoos ran not only across his arms, but also over his palms, his knuckles, and even his fingers. She thought she saw Latin words embedded in the swirls, but she wasn't sure.

"Rachel Berry, all your questions will be answered, I promise! But you have to come with us, to a school where you'll learn everything."

"But, my dads won't let me go, right?!" she half-hoped they would say no. After all, it was a pretty cool idea to be amongst people who were just like her, a place where she finally belonged that wasn't Glee club. But they looked at each other lovingly before nodding at the boys.

"She's all yours! She needs to learn about who she is, how to use her power…everything…"

Finn grabbed the bag and slung it over his shoulders.

"Tomorrow we'll be back with the school forms and everything. Pack your stuff tonight. Tomorrow you join us at St Clementine's School for the Gifted."

She nodded, for once in her life completely speechless.

And with that the two boys left.

As Rachel Berry turned around to look at her fathers, a smile started to form and broaden on her face, until it was powerful enough to light all of Ohio with its brightness.

She couldn't wait.