Bath knew his long-range manipulation range to be about three and a half miles: this was the distance that he could project parts of his body out before they would naturally disintegrate and return to his Center.

A fairly workable distance, Bath noted. He had recently begun working on improving his long-range manipulation, and realized that there was a lot of progress to be made. The only requirement for control be that he have some kind of ambiguous physical connection to the objects he was projecting, but this was trivial considering his ability to control his own partially dematerialized mass.

Practicing long-range manipulation didn’t make the ability stronger; rather, it increased his ability to make delicate maneuvers and move his particles quickly. This was important considering that he needed to move them fast enough to fly into into the exhaust pipes of cars on the interstate.

He wanted to rapid-fire release and manipulate hundreds of particles in the span of seconds, a goal currently at the limits of his ability. As he planned his day of action on paper, Bath worked on sending out and reclaiming as many particles as possible in an attempt to make the action second-nature.

He found that control the particles was taking up an obnoxiously large amount of his concentration. Bath considered himself an impatient creature, though that was mostly because of his warped sense of time. Relative to any human, Bath had patience in droves. But already three weeks had passed and the gains from constantly manipulating his essence at range were only minimal.

Bath sighed. Was he going about this the wrong way? He wanted to wage psychological warfare rather than a physical war. He wanted people with specifically gas cars to fear driving. He didn’t want to force humans off the roads: He wanted them to purchase electric cars.

He had schemed that the best way to destroy the engine of a gas car was bleach. If Bath could somehow manage to fill cars up with bleach, the idea was that they would stall and become nonfunctional. He came up with the idea to use a rapidly-moving particle from his own body that would have space at its center for a pool of bleach. The particle would fly into the car through the exhaust pipe and then disintegrate naturally to ash in the heat of the engine, leaving behind the bleach to wreak havoc.

Bath didn’t feel confident in his ability to execute the plan at all. He'd assumed that he would be able to easily control hundreds of particles at high speeds and send them into cars moving at over sixty mph on the highway. Bath almost never encountered challenges that exceeded his abilities—after all, he could destroy a highway full of cars in a heartbeat—but this plan of subterfuge was growing more unlikely by the day.

Bath knew he needed to think of another way to shut down gasoline cars while sparing other kinds of vehicles. Perhaps...something to do with the exhaust itself? It stood to reason that gasoline cars and electric cars had different kinds of exhaust fumes. In fact, he could try to target CO2 itself, the infamous greenhouse gas.

Except when he looked up CO2 online, not only did he find CO2 was near impossible to combust, he discovered that it was even used as a fire extinguisher.

“Seriously?” he muttered to himself. This whole brainstorming-tactician thing was a real bust.

Bath knew he must be missing something that would provide a key to the muddled puzzle that was car sabotage. As he continued his long-range manipulation exercise, a thought occurred to him.

Can I feel the difference between cars based on their undersides? He promptly looked up pictures of gas-based and electric-based car undersides online. Nope.

“Wait.” Bath thought about his original plan, then this new plan, and connected them together. “How...” Did. I. Miss this!?

Bath groaned out loud. No need to complicate things, simple plans are better, whatever. He knew all of this. And yet he had failed utterly in utilizing that foresight in the brainstorming process.

What did gas cars have that electric cars didn’t?

“A fricking exhaust pipe,” Bath snarled. It was trivial to differentiate between cars with and without exhaust pipes. “Why was I set on stopping gas cars from the inside? Why didn’t I even think to just identify them and, for lack of a better wording...destroy them utterly?”

Bath wondered how he was so terrible at thinking of plans. Was it that he didn’t make plans often enough? But that wasn’t an excuse: He'd devoured enough humans by now that he should have the mental capabilities of at least one genius-level human, if statistics were anything to go by. Unless the humans of the Middle Ages were simply stupider than the ones today, though Bath didn’t think that speculation held weight.

He still didn’t quite understand the mechanics of intelligence with respect to his shapeshifting. His ability to think with human-like awareness had developed slowly over time with mammals like the ancestors of dolphins, humans, elephants, and pigs. Those developments had largely been over the past few millions of years.

In some ways, Bath longed for a time when things had been simpler. Back when the smartest predators thought of little else than their territory and offspring. He didn’t miss the days predating the move to land, for the oceans back then had been utterly unforgiving and bleak. Even a creature such as himself who reveled in destruction was happy to escape such a time. Roaming the oceans in a constant state of violence for millions of years...and all because his primitive mind had known no other alternative...it was pitiable.

Bath rubbed his hands against his eyes and cheeks, then stretched out his arms and shoulders. He stopped his long-range manipulation exercise and looked out his window at the car in the family driveway.

“How can I wreck you without causing damage to your riders?” he pondered. Of course, he recognized that any plan he enacted on the roads would almost certainly result in human deaths, but it was a necessary sacrifice.

He thought of a few different ideas, and then decided once again that simpler was better. His solution was a bit nicer than he originally intended—the damage done could be repaired by a mechanic at an auto shop—but more than sufficient to make gas-car-drivers think twice about driving out in the morning.

✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽

“Did you hear what happened about on I-295?” Kathy gushed while the group of friends sat down in the common area before the start of classes.

“No,” everyone replied questioningly. Kathy’s eyes lit up.

“Well, according to my dad, who just called me a few minutes ago, nearly all the cars on I-295 were caught in this crazy traffic jam to end all traffic jams.”

“What happened?” Lisa gasped.

“Nobody knows! That’s just it. Apparently, the mufflers of nearly every car on the interstate were ripped off over the course of a few minutes! And by ripped off—” she paused for effect— “I mean that the mufflers were torn off cars with a serious amount of force. Going as fast as cars on the interstate are, a muffler falling off is extremely dangerous.”

“You said nearly all the cars had their mufflers ripped off. Was there anything special about the excepted cars?” Bath asked. His entire plan hinged on humans figuring out that electric cars had been spared.

Kathy shrugged. “It’s too early to tell. I’m sure we’ll all hear about it if they figure anything out. This kind of terrorist attack is unprecedented!”

“What are you smiling about?” Lisa asked.

Bath gave her an easygoing expression. “I’m just...” he searched for words to mollify her. “Enjoying this little mystery. Conspiracy stuff like this never seems to come to D.C.,” he defended.

I'm going to have to wait a bit longer to see how the media is interpreting this, Bath reasoned silently while listening to everyone discuss ways to defend themselves against car-wrecking terrorists. He found it at once laughable, and a bit sad, that they thought they’d be able to deal with any such scenario.

“Do you think the terrorist is American?” Ben, another one of the friends, asked, worry etched into his athletic face. “Already four people have died from traffic accidents this morning. The guy who did this—however they did it—is one hell of a monster.”

They were all quiet for a moment.

“Well,” began Lisa, ever one to boost morale, “I don’t know enough yet. But, whoever this is, he’s obviously going to be caught. You don’t sabotage that many vehicles without leaving a trace like hair or fingerprints. We'll see soon enough.”