The yellow orb that made up the Dream Sultan’s head rippled in agitation. Waves of small pyramidal spikes washed over the smooth surface of his featureless face. “Bravo, child. I, the Dream Sultan, acknowledge your skill in telepathic combat. You mask your thoughts well. I can barely sense them.”

 

Jeff leaned his head to one side.”…Huh? Dude, is that why you’ve been staring at me for like an hour? You thought we were doing a telepath fight?”

 

The Dream Sultan hovered silently. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

 

“You…You’ve been looking at me. In silence. For the past hour?”

 

“You’ve been looking at me for the past hour to! And you’ve been doing it without eyes!”

 

The Dream Sultan didn’t want to believe it. Had he truly wasted an hour of his time while his enemies planned and maneuvered?

 

His head rippled again.

 

“Why…why didn’t you say anything?”

 

Jeff shrugged. “I don’t know! What was I supposed to say? A big-time supervillain pops out of nowhere in front of me, you kind of took me out of my element dude!”

 

“I, the Dream Sultan, masters of countless dreamworlds, appear before you, my enemy…and you just stand there like a statue? Like a moronic statue?”

 

“Hey bud, first of all a statue can’t be a moron. It doesn’t have brains, duh…oh wait that would make it a moron…but anyway, I think if you teleport in front of someone, you should be the one to say something first. Like you skip the whole calling up people or knocking on their doors bit, you should at least say hi.”

 

–Jeff vs The Dream Sultan

 

Jeff looked at the diagram. “Hey Danny! That’s a pretty neat diagram of a molecule!”

 

“Jeff, that’s  a cell.”

 

The class giggled.

 

“Naw Danny, I’ve seen Hell. Coach Emmy has a picture of it in the detention room. If that’s Hell it’s got to be like, a Hell for little blobs and circles…” Jeff turned to Danny “IS it a Hell for little blobs and circles?”

 

–Fast Times at Martin’s High

 

Name:

 

Jeff Penn

Despite rumors, he does not have it written on all his school supplies.

 

Supername:

 

Turbo Tunnel 

 

Oh lord.

 

This might take some explaining.

 

No, it’s not one of those “I’m clever because I picked a supername that has nothing to do with my powers, personality, or aspirations” supernames. At first, Jeff wanted to be Turbo because he liked how it sounded (“I dig the name! TUR-BOW. I don’t know what a tur is, but I know what a bow is, so a tur must be another kind of weapon. I bet people said things were turbo when they were as fast as an arrow shot from a bow, or a tur, if a tur could shoot arrows…but then wouldn’t that make it a bow?) and because he “thought fast.”

 

And he does think fast. His gray matter has the processing speed of an MS. It’s just that his…ratiocination lags behind his number crunching.

 

So where does “tunnel” come in? Jeff says that he thinks of telepathy as a series of tunnels. So he is “turbo tunnel” meaning “a fast telepath.”

 

There you go. That’s the reason. That’s all the reason there is.

 

But you know what? Odd as it sounds, I think it’s a pretty creative name.

 

Average Grade: 

 

F

 

Even if he tried,  Jeff probably wouldn’t be more than a C student. Some people aren’t good at sports, or money, or luck, or love. Jeff isn’t good at books. His IQ is in the double digits, but then again, so is half the population. That’s how normed ratios work.

 

Lack of aptitude aside, it’s in Jeff’s best interest to give academics his best effort. As his teachers, we have a duty to bring out the best in Jeff. If a C is the best he can do, we need to get him to make that C. His “I’ll never be good, so what’s the point?” attitude will not fly at Martin’s.

 

Emergency Response Class:

 

3

 

Jeff wants to be a superhero, so of course he’s in the highest ERC.

 

He struggles with it, like he struggles with any class. He put the wrong thoughtform or the wrong kind of thoughtform on the wrong person. Sometimes he does this by mistake, sometimes he does this deliberately to get a laugh.

 

Jeff is very popular in team activities, not only because his thoughtform generation power is useful across a wide variety of scenarios but because when he’s subordinate to a good leader he avoids making mistakes on his own initiative. He can be very effective if he has someone to help keep him on track.

 

As his encounter with Dream Sultan suggests, Jeff can be very tricky for other telepaths to fight. Telepathic combat can be likened to a debate two people have on what reality should look like. It can get very esoteric and very weird, but telepathic combat is a two-way street. It’s hard to debate someone when you don’t know their language. In that case, all your fancy words just sound like noise. It’s the same way with thoughts. If you throw a lot of concepts at an opponent, but they don’t understand the concepts, you’ve accomplished nothing.

 

There’s a lot that Jeff doesn’t get, so there’s a lot of attacks that go right over his head–and right through his mind.

 

Personal Curriculum:

 

Emergency Response With a Focus On Support, Remediation, Superpowers and Culture

 

Jeff is another of our supportheroes like Adam. With the ability to spawn an army of thoughtforms to both fight bad guys and support good guys, he’s most useful acting from the back.

 

Though he’s very useful as a supporthero, it isn’t what he wants to do. He wants to be on the frontlines. Unfortunately, with an 88 IQ, he doesn’t meet the requirements for ERC 4–the class our ERC 3 grads receive upon graduating which allows them to act with the authority of a superhero. ERC 4 lets you make priority calls to the police and Statesmen, go on patrol without being accused of being a stalker, and not be accused of excessive force if a dust-up with a supervillain happens to knock down a building or two. ERC 4 means people trust you. It means people are aware of your capability and respect it. Some people train to earn ERC 4 without any intention of becoming a superhero, just to bask in the pride of earning such an achievement.

 

But they only give you ERC 4 if you’re at least of normal intelligence–defined as 90-100 on the paperwork. Jeff is 88.

 

That means the Jeff will only be ERC 3 when he graduates, meaning they want him to work in a subordinate role, meaning he’s stuck as a supporthero, and not a supporthero with a leadership position like Adam.

 

This frustrates Jeff more than he lets on. “Sometimes I hate how I am.” Jeff once told me, “I’m dumb, but I’m not dumb-dumb. Sometimes I wish I was. Sometimes I wish people had to dress me and take care of me. I think that’s better than being only kind of stupid like I am. I’m only smart enough to know stupid I am, and how close I am to not being stupid.”

 

I told Jeff that Socrates was found wise by the Oracle because he admitted he knew nothing.

 

I think that helped him, a little.

 

Jeff is also in remediation. That class is mostly associated with our multiverse kids from worlds less technologically advanced than our own, but it’s also for traditional educational remediation. Jeff lags behind his peers. He’s always having to play catchup, poor guy. The frustration of not being able to get material even as its presented to him over and over again likely contributes to him wanting to play the fool.

 

Superpowers and Culture is for students that want to apply their powers to cultural pursuit–art and music and the like. It’s what Lucia Regio takes. Jeff is in Superpowers and Culture to help him express himself and because it’s the one class where he can’t act the fool. He can try and underperform all he likes, Dr. Wallace will ask him why he chose to do this or that in his telepathic art-forms and Jeff can’t help but want to explain himself, say what his intentions were, and talk with Dr. Wallace about what he could have done differently to better express those intentions.

 

Contact Education:

 

The Joyous Harbor Statesmen Center

 

Like Edith, Jeff uses his telepathy at the local Statesmen center to help people backtrack through their memories to solve problems like where they lost their keys and whether or not they remembered to feed their cat. It may not seem like much, but such services help keep our community friendly and prosperous.

 

Hyperstasis:

 

Telepathy, Telekinesis 

 

Into the Tunnel

 

Jeff showed an aptitude for the psychic arts in middle school. His thoughts were clear and precise if simple–and perhaps clear and precise because they were simple. When he advanced to freshman, he was placed in Telepathic Development and Telekinetic Development to hone his powers.

 

Jeff is pretty powerful. Think of him as having a combination of Tommy Taylor’s telekinesis and Wendy Crow’s telepathy. This surprises a lot of people, because the prevailing stereotype is that telepaths are very smart with 130 IQs and Mensa membership. Telepathy does involve a lot of cognition, and people serious about telepathy do tend to be highly gifted in abstract thinking, but while intelligence correlates strongly to telepathic ability, the correlation is not 1 to 1.

 

Consider TIPs (thought integrity protectors), commonly known as telepathic shields. They’re very simple machines, simpler than calculators, but they can bombard the noosphere with a concentrated signal that overpowers telepathic thoughts. They’re the ancestors to digital life like the Hesperides of Hera City in much the same way that trilobites are the ancestors of humans. TIPs prove that one does not necessarily need to have brain-smarts to have brain-muscle.

 

And Jeff does not have brain-smarts. He has a measured IQ of 88 which puts him below normal.

 

It takes Jeff longer to understand things than his peers, he forgets things easier, he sometimes fails to grasp instructions, etc. But the worst part is that he plays into his low IQ as the class clown. When the kids laugh at him for doing something silly, it gives him attention, and so sometimes he really doesn’t get the material, other times he pretends not to get the material for a laugh and it’s often hard to tell the difference.

 

Thoughtform Generation

 

Jeff has a little something extra besides the standard powers one would come to expect from a telepath and telekinetic. He can hear thoughts, project thoughts, implant thoughts, alter thoughts, etc. He can lift objects, push objects, pull objects, turn objects into pretzels, etc. But he can also spawn thoughtforms. 

 

Thoughtforms typically come from the near Astral. Out on the Odylic Border where

 

Fragments of Astral light develop just enough intelligence to seek out the thoughts of living things to feed upon. But sometimes, a person’s mind creates the right kind of circumstances for thoughtforms to produce. Internally generated thoughtforms are theorized to be the origin for Wendy Crow’s psychic energy.

 

Jeff’s thoughtforms are simple. They’re primary colored geometric shapes without function. Evidence of a simple mind? Perhaps, but “blank” thoughtforms are very useful. Jeff can adapt them to whatever situation is at hand. Is someone suffering an anxiety attack because a supervillain just knocked over their house? Jeff makes one of his thoughtforms a thoughtform of fear and tells it to gobble up their anxiety. Then to deal with the supervillain, he tells the same thoughtform to induce fear in the bad guy and then harvest it when he’s no longer a threat.

 

Simplicity is good when you can readily develop complexity from it, as Jeff’s thoughtform blanks show.

 

Against The Dream Sultan

 

Before the Dream Sultan was neutralized by Mr. Neiros’ Night Club (Morgan McGraw turned him into an action figure), he was caught by Mr. Carter’s Night Club trying to add the dreamworld of Somerland to his empire. During the confrontation, Jeff found himself alone against the Dream Sultan. For an hour, they stared at each other in silence until the Dream Sultan congratulated Jeff for being a worthy foe. He was having trouble following his thoughts. Jeff was skillfully cloaking them.

 

Then Jeff told him that he wasn’t telepathing with Dream Sultan at all.

 

He really just stood still for an hour waiting for Dream Sultan to do something, anything.

 

By wasting the Dream Sultan’s time, Jeff bought Night Club time to unshackle Somerland from the Dream Sultan’s control by awakening Aeolian (as in Aeolian harp), the living embodiment of the universe (as in 

 

The news that “Jeff defeated Dream Sultan by acting stupid.” spread fast, That got Jeff a lot of laughs and a lot of attention. Unfortunately, the incident seems to have furthered Jeff’s slacker disposition. Why should he have to work to be smart of if being dumb is getting him ahead?

 

I have my suspicions–and I’m not the only one, Dr. Bell and Steel Dolly will back me up here–that Jeff knew exactly what he was doing against the Dream Sultan.

 

Behavior:

 

Good

 

Jeff is an underachieving slacker. He’s funny, popular, sociable, but he’s got bad grades. Part of it isn’t his fault. He’s got a 88 IQ. But part of it is because he leans on his IQ as a reason to not apply himself. His grades can be better than what they are. He won’t make the honor roll, but he can pass his classes.

 

Having a 88 IQ today is very different from having a 88 IQ decades ago. The noosphere has proven to be a global nootropic. Poor cerebral processing, dementia, and developmental delays could be mitigated by an Astral boost from the noosphere. If flesh and blood neurons weren’t sufficient, the mental load could be off-loaded onto the noosphere. The noosphere effectively gave humanity extra brain space, and the general factor of intelligence skyrocketed. But this didn’t lead to an evening out of IQ differences. Any metric will vary if examined across a large enough sample size. While IQ has increased year by year as mankind becomes more used to the complexities of the noosphere and more efficient at utilizing its features (a phenomena known as the Flynn Effect), you still have low IQs and high IQs. You have people that, through training or instinct, are better at using the cognitive features of the noosphere than others, and people like Jeff who are worse.

 

Compared to a man decades ago, Jeff is actually rather smart. We’ve told him this, but he still insists on playing up his low IQ. 

“Sorry Dr. Hwang, but being smarter than a caveman or a castleman just doesn’t cut it. I’m not living in a cave–despite what the duty MS’s say about my dorm–and I’ll never live in a castle.”

 

Jeff, unfortunately, likes being the “dumb one.” He likes being the class clown. He’s discovered the feel-good feedback loop all class clowns. He makes an earnest mistake, he gets called on it, and the kids all laugh. He gets attention, and he wants more of that attention, so he leans into it. He adds a joke at the end. He starts to make comments that he knows are wrong. He leans into his ignorance because his ignorance makes him popular.

 

His victory over the Dream Sultan didn’t help things either. He got a lot of notoriety out of “beating Dream Sultan because he was dumb.” The Press interviewed him. He got a lot more of that positive attention he likes.

 

I think our best chance at getting Jeff to want to apply himself is going to be through his Superpowers and Culture class. He’s bad at it because he doesn’t study the works he’s presented, but in terms of creating his own works, he’s doing good and being praised for doing good. It’s hard to deliberately fail at expressing yourself because the act of doing so betrays a clever sense of irony. Jeff has tried to cut corners in his work, but when Dr. Wallace presses him on why he made certain decisions regarding his composition (or lack thereof) Jeff can’t help but come up with a clever answer. Superpowers and Culture is the one class where Jeff can’t hide how clever he really is.

 

Appearance:

 

Jeff wears a tie-dye bodysuit, and as he’s a fan of the superhero fashion trends of the late 80’s (“Dr. Hwang, why are you surprised I’m stuck in the 80’s? I can’t even get my IQ to 90!”) and wears a black jacket over it and large square sunglasses. He says that the tie-dye is just because he’s a telepath, and tie-dye is a telepath color. And that’s true, historically telepaths have used iridescence as a visual symbol of telepathy and its infinite possibilities, especially during the sixties and seventies. Examples include the Agent of Aquarius, Rainbow Renegade, and Prism Princess.

 

Come to think of it, telepaths also seem to like alliteration…

 

But I have a theory–and its only a theory, mind you–that the tie-dye represents an aspirational goal of his. A lot about Jeff’s telepathy is simple. His thoughtforms are primary colored blobs or stick figures. His dreamworld is a void where the products of wayward thoughts float aimlessly. With his tie-dye, I think Jeff is modeling the complexity he hopes to one day have with his telepathy.

 

Either that, or he just likes how the swirl makes the design look vaguely tunnel-ish. It’s easy to overthink things when it comes to Jeff. I think he uses that to his advantage.