Riots SUCK. (Open!)

[my_soul_itches]

San Francisco was rioting.

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[my_soul_itches]

Megan barely had enough time to see the source of the new voice and note that the girl's appearance wouldn't have been at all out of place at a Dazzler concert when it hit her. A wall of terror and panic and oh God it was like she was back there, no, like she was back on the street with the Hellfire Club kicking her and stomping on her wings and no, it was more like being back in Limbo and her soul was being ripped out again and it was like every emotional wall that Megan had slowly built up over the past two years was being ripped away. Pain or no, she flew backwards as fast as she could, hallucinogenic dust falling like rain from her wings until she hit the wall.

((...if that was too overly dramatic and OH NOEZ, let me know and I'll change it. My Pixie-muse is starting to get mad at me for making her angst so much over the past day :-P Also, feel free to not be in the path of the hallucinogenic dust, but if you so choose it tends to do things like make people see innocent happy things like teddy bears, bubbles, and unicorns :-P ))

[psy_nuisance]

((Oh, that was just fine. :) Apologies for agnst causing!))

Sage got the wave on the rebound and..oh god. Those people. It made her angry, really and if she could just focus on the anger instead of the fear she'd be stronger...was that a purple chicken? Ok, now she had something to focus on besides the multiplying bad feelings.

"You know there's a purple chicken in here. It's laughing at me. The jerk!- or jerkette. All chickens are female, right? Otherwise they'd be called roosters." She wasn't terribly worried that she was hallucinating, since she was so loopy anyway. Things were a little bit weirder than usual, that was all.
"Oh!" she noticed Megan had hit the wall. "Dammit, I didn't mean to do that. It's ok now, I promise. Except for that blue noise smell."

[my_soul_itches]

((Ha, no problem. I get a kick out of torturing my chars.))

The wave of horrible emotions dropped away suddenly, and Megan became aware of the dust coming off of her. "Eep!" She dropped back to the ground with a thud and winced, still keeping far back from the girl, who didn't look that weird compared to some of her friends from the Institute.

"I'm sorry, I do that sometimes when I get scared." She edged a little closer, curious. "You're seeing chickens?"

She always had wondered what her dust made people see.

[psy_nuisance]

Sage nodded. "Yep. Purple and hairy. You don't see them? Then I'm probably hallucinating. Or they're real at a different level of reality than you can see." She waved to the chickens.
"Do you, uh need anything? Sorry I flipped. I just hate mobs." She'd been nearly killed by a mob once, though they'd been little kids, she was a little kid at the time too and it was scary. "Idiots." She whispered.

[my_soul_itches]

"You're hallucinating." Megan nodded briefly. "It's my fault, sorry. My dust makes people see things. Yeah, if you could point me in the direction of the hosp--wait, how did you know about the mob?" Her face paled momentarily, before she gave herself a mental headthwap. Mutant, remember? Used to other people with weird abilities by now, at least in theory? "Oh, are you a telepath? Or a mutant or something? Or did you come here from the protest, too?"

[psy_nuisance]

"Yeah, I thought so. I'm Sage."
She snorted, "yeah, that's it, people act like I'm some kind of mutant, though most people have unused psi skills and albinism is pretty common too." (Ok, the clothes and the fake vampire fangs didn't help much either, but if people were going to look at her she liked to pretend they were staring at her great sense of style, not her acne.)
Sage calmed down a little more, maybe remembering who she was talking to. "I'm mostly an empath and I sometimes get memories, if they're as emotional as yours. Those were really awful- who were those people after you?"

[my_soul_itches]

"I'm Megan. Um. They were anti-mutant protesters." One hand drifted up to rub at her face, but she dropped it again as it touched the bruised skin. Her wings fluttered nervously behind her, though she stayed on the ground. "They want us all chemically sterilized." All the American ones, anyway. She had no clue if the law (if voted in to be voted on and passed) would stretch to foreign mutants there on student visas, like her. Still, it was a very bad thing.

She winced. To her, "Empath" held a very upsetting connotation, being the code name of the man who influenced the Hellfire Club to attack her shortly after she moved to San Francisco. She had stabbed him with her Souldagger--twice, once then and once when the crazy scantily-clad women had used him to throw things out of balance while they invaded Graymalkin Industries--and neither event was a pleasant memory. "An empath?" she said weakly, trying not to reach down into the void part of herself where the Souldagger hid. "That's pretty cool. I'm friends with a bunch of telepaths--" not that the Cuckoos were likely to call her a friend, but they weren't here and didn't have a say-- "and that's almost the same, right?"

[psy_nuisance]

"Really." Sage's lip curled. "You come from a different world then, but one with many of the same kinds of people.

Yeah, empathy's almost like telepathy, but I can't get other people's thoughts. Just feelings and experiences.

Here, do you need an asprin or something?" She certainly did seem to need something "I bet my brother Rat has one. I can go get him."

[my_soul_itches]

"Yeah, I--I kind of knew an empath once. Or at least he called himself that." For certain definitions of "know," mostly involving stabbing him in the head with a magic blade. "Oh, that would be great. I'd just like to stay on my feet long enough to get to the hospital wing, you know? Or at least to a bathroom. I must look terrible."

[psy_nuisance]

"Right! I'll go find him." Relieved to be away from the source of bad memories, Sage sprinted off.

[my_soul_itches]

Megan gave a thumbs-up and slumped against the wall, glad for the opportunity to rest.