X-Factor: Deep Thoughts
-Jean has pronounced Walter, Pete and now Kelsey free of compulsions. If you want to be off-cammed and on her list, please comment or let me know on game!
-Kelsey came only after the removal of a particularly nasty bit of work by a joint Jean&Emma venture. The gist of it seems to be that she was compelled to try and sabotage the mission in any way she could. Jean's made sure to pass this on to Bahir, not the least because it had Shadowy fingerprints mixed in all over it, as well as something else that was probably Jeff.
X-Men: Movieverse 3 - Tuesday, June 02, 2009, 8:43 PM
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Ever since Jean assured her that she would check her out personally and that she was at the top of her list, Kelsey has been anxious. Well, wouldn't you be if you'd recently shot two of your teammates because of nefarious telepathic influence? She keeps moving from place to place, for the moment settled in a sofa in the guest lodge with a mug of hot chocolate, care of Amber. Not even reading, just...waiting.
Jean has gotten herself settled as quickly as possible, but when 'settled' includes things like briefings and updates and getting a mild headache looking at the hole in the side of the cookhouse, 'quickly' can have an imprecise meaning. But eventually Jean makes a return to the guest house, a knock sounding at the door in automatic manners before she thinks to let herself in. "That looks like a good idea," is her greeting, with a nod to the hot chocolate.
Kelsey is just taking a sip of said hot chocolate when the door knocks. She looks over, confused as to why someone would knock, but her expression melts into one of relief when she sees who it is. "Aye, Amber makes a mean cup' cocoa," she muses. "How are you doin'?"
"Better now that the property destruction has ceased," Jean sums up, with a crooked smile and a pad over to the sofa to take a seat herself. "And I imagine you'll feel better once I've had a look at your brain, I hope."
Kelsey laughs a bit, her body seeming to relax with one big sigh. She sets her mug down on a coffee table. "That's what I'm hopin', too," she responds, drawing a leg up onto the couch to face Jean.
"Still remember the drill?" Jean wonders, turning sideways to sit cross-legged on the couch with her hands on her thighs. Her voice is soft, abstracted as she shucks mental shields and reaches out to touch the surface of Kelsey's mind. "I'd like you to think back to the events of last night. Think back to what you were feeling and remembering under the compulsion."
Kelsey closes her eyes with a nod, doing her best to relax. Her mind is jumpy and hesitant as it looks back to the previous night, but it finally settles on that moment of first seeing Jeff. The moment when the rifle was pointed at her, when all that really seemed important was the mission not succeeding. Jeff didn't have to do anything more that night to really make her attack her teammates.
Steady and round as a water-smoothed stone, Jean's mind eases in against Kelsey's. Settled on the riverbanks, as it were, it positions itself to move if there's anything of interest that flashes past her. "Jeff... tell me a little more about him?" she counsels, letting the conversation turn up connections where she's watching to see them.
"He seemed nice at first," Kelsey responds, a bit dryly. "I didnae see much o' him. Then, o' course, the team got news that he was the bad guy, an' I found out." The subject makes her uncomfortable, her mind wanting to shy away from it. "I guess he holed up in the mine? We found where he an' Sid were livin'."
"Keep talking about him," Jean prompts in a murmur, chasing after the shying away. "You twitched a little there, which often means interesting things."
Some small part of Kelsey's mind is probably panicking right now, trying to hide what really happened, a part Kelsey's not even aware of. "It's funny: he was the first person I met here, an' it seemed like Angela was the bad guy. He was a bit of a flirt. An' last night...I wanted to protect him more than anythin'." There's some sense of safety in that, oddly. Something good about protecting this guy.
Oh, -hello- there. "Tell me about that," Jean prompts, tickling at that line of thought. "Try to think of that feeling, try to bring it back." There's a pause, and a wry "I promise not to let you shoot me, worst case."
The real Kelsey is horrified by the idea, but that small part of her brain is comforted, knows it was the right thing to do. "I...it felt like the right thing to do. The mission isnae supposed to succeed." A hiccup there. "It /wasn't/ supposed tae succeed."
Jean delves deeper and deeper into that little small part, murmuring encouragement of "I know it feels wrong, but just keep talking -- you're bringing it into easier range to focus on."
Kelsey actually shudders for a moment. "I had to make sure Jeff got to his car, that he got away," she tries to explain. "Percy was trying to stop him. Walter was the next most dangerous person there, then Pete."
"Ooooh..." murmurs Jean, although she spares a hand to pat at Kelsey's knee as the shudder penetrates on some level or another. Down, down, down she goes, passing the fading ribbons of the lighter compulsions, a smattering of images kept on file as interesting things are explained. "Yes, I definitely--" But what she definitely is left aside, as her eyes are thrown open, and open wide, and she sits back on her heels.
Kelsey's eyes open as Jean's words cut off, her mind already getting mixed up without the added confusion of Jean's behavior. "What is it?" she asks, worry starting to emanate in her voice.
"I..." says Jean, and then catches the worry in Kelsey's voice. She silences herself until she can draw in a cleansing breath and explain that "The compulsion to stay on the ranch is well and truly gone, and I -think- the other one as well, but there's something else." She pauses to take another long breath. "Something insanely delicate in its construction, and big to go with it. I don't feel comfortable removing it by myself."
The words take a moment to sink in, and Kelsey is silent for even longer. "The idea that there's somethin' in my head ye dinnae feel comfortable dealin' with by yourself is terrifying, Jean," she says in a small voice.
"Even the best surgeons still don't operate alone when it's a tricky case," Jean offers, not so much making light as attempting reassurance.
It's not really that reassuring, but at least Kelsey's not freaking out. She shifts in her seat, though, putting both feet on the floor as she looks away from Jean. "I thought it was just last night," she says.
"You've been on the ranch a while, yes?" Jean murmurs, shifting so that she can settle a hand on Kelsey's shoulder in the un-touchy telepath analogue to someone else's comforting hug. "It could've happened at any point. But I've made a note of where I found it, so we can find it again, and although Emma Frost is the sort of bitch to make Lucrezia Borgia say 'Oh, that's just too much', she's a very powerful telepath I've worked with before on things like this."
Kelsey's mouth opens, but then she just shut it and nods. She looks back over at Jean for a moment. "I'm not goin' tae hurt anyone before ye get it out, am I?" she asks.
"I won't let you." On this, Jean is dead level.
Kelsey swallows, nods again. "Guess that's all there is to it, then. Nothin' tae be done til ye guys can get it out." She leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees and rubbing her temples. Something about being around Jean just makes her feel younger, in that strange way that happens when you see teachers from your past.
"We'll be heading to their base bright and early tomorrow morning," Jean offers, with a rueful smile. "Once there, it'll be a lot better of a space to work in to get it out. We'll have other telepaths to draw on, too, and there's the benefit that whatever's lying there seems to be pretty dormant for now."
"All right," Kelsey says, the words almost more of a sigh. She puts her fingers through her hair, rubbing them vigorously in an attempt to clear her head. Red curls now pretty much everywhere, she offers a rueful, tired smile to Jean. "I was supposed to be in Virginia." And then she came here and life exploded.
"I was in Antigua," Jean reveals, but more in the spirit of trade-for-trade than bragging. "And now I wish I could've gotten here sooner. But we -will- fix this," she promises. "And then I'm sure these people would get you on your way to their fellow agency."
"They offered me a job with them," Kelsey reveals, the subject seeming almost comfortingly pedestrian. "I said yes."
"They're a good group, at least from what little I see," Jean murmurs. "I've already sent a few Xavier's faces in their direction. "
Kelsey smooths her hair back in an ineffectual gesture. "Aye, that's what it seems like." She smiles, stands up. "I actually think I'm goin' tae get tae bed. All o' this--" She makes a vague hand gesture in the direction of her head. "--I dunno, it's got me pretty exhausted."
"I won't say sweet dreams," Jean says, with a push to her feet as well. "But I do hope you get some rest."
Kelsey smiles in a small sort of way. "Thanks. An'...thanks for tonight an' all."
"Wish I could've done more." This appears to be becoming something of a refrain, and by Jean's grimace as she pads for the door, not an especially likeable one.
"Not your fault," Kelsey offers over her shoulder as she heads to her bunk.
Backdated to the last night at Lost Waters, Jean takes a look into Kelsey's head and finds Something There.
X-Men: Movieverse 2 - Tuesday, June 02, 2009, 9:00 PM
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=XF= Administration - Chemekata Military Base
The glass and metal lobby of the building carries the 'Titan Enterprises' charade through in brushed aluminum letters set high on the wall behind the main desk. The name disappears, however, as one moves deeper into the building. The security is high, and the presence of armed guards is unmistakable.
The subfloors are heavily shielded from possibly electromagnetic attack, and it is there that communications and intelligence are centered. The hum of happy server farms is impossible to escape. The upper levels are given over to offices, meeting spaces, and classrooms. The computers are cutting edge, their screens are large, and furnishings are terrifically ergonomic.
[This room is set watchable. Use alias XFAdministration to watch here.]
(Exits : [O]ut, [M]eeting [R]oom, [C]lassroom, and [C]omputer [L]ab )
(Players : Amadeus )
The Southern California sunshine may be pleasant, but it's starting to hit the time of year where the Southern California air conditioning is more pleasant still. Having taken up a post in the main lobby of the administration building, and thus easily findable, Dr. Jean Grey has got her laptop out and on her lap, and is currently seeing what's fallen into her inbox while she's been away from an internet connection all of a day. She's dressed in a neat navy business suit, hair pulled back in a butterfly clip, and she's managed to procure another cup of coffee from somewhere.
One imagines there may be tiny little robots that zoom around, making sure the coffee carafes in the admin building are always full. Consdiering the potential for disaster if many of the agents and techs present go without coffee for too long, it would be a wise expenditure. Robot upkeep is far cheaper than replacing walls. Or equipment. Or...the narration digresses.
After over a month spent in plainclothes, Pete has reverted to his more typical style of dress, black suit, white shirt, very MiB save for the rakish air about him. He has at least been polite enough to give warning in advance of his arrival, so his descent upon Jean's staked out patch of lobby is not entirely out of the blue. "Doctor Grey?" It is not inquiry this time, but a simple verbal indication of presence as his approach slows to a stop.
"Agent Wisdom," The greeting from Jean is mostly the same, with a hint of her native sociability underpinning it. "I hope this was convenient for you -- I needed an hour or two to settle my head after previous..." She trails off, and then snaps back into proper attention. "When you're ready, I can start. It would be helpful to know is you had any previous contact with the hosrile, any failed capture attempt."
"As convenient as anything around here is bound to be for a while," Pete replies, surface prickle summoned up as emotional defense against the idea of having yet another person poking through his brain. After compulsions and evil mines and daily scans, it's possible it is beginning to feel a little bit like a parade ground. "Prior to this mission? Not that I can recall. Though I suppose that doesn't mean a great deal, does it?"
Does Jean get a little paper flag to wave? "Unfortunately not terribly," she confirms, with a crook of her lips. "And during... well. But when was the first sign of a behavior lapse that you noticed, if any?"
"That would be when the whole lot of us turned over our laptops, cellphones, and even our bloody communicators to the bastard's catspaw without even a word of protest," Pete replies. One needn't be a telepath to detect the note of banked frustration in his voice, just sufficiently observant as regards human behaviour. "And went days before realizing staying put and out of contact might not be the most fantastic idea ever. So, within a minute of clapping eyes on him."
"Psionicists," Jean offers, with a crooked smile that doesn't reach her eyes. "When we go evil, we're horrible people... but if you're willing to try and call back up the memories of that first meeting, and the feelings associated with them, it will make it easier on me to slie into the flow of things."
Pete draws up a chair and takes a seat, in case some part of the brain rummaging process involves dropping him flat on his ass. /That/ would be embarassing. Distrust flickers across the surface of his mind, native paranoia bolstered by recent events and paying no consideration to things like personal ethics. He shoves it aside, then nods once to show readiness. Summoning up the events is not hard - his mind is well trained to memory, to noting and storing away detail, analyzing and reanalyzing and turning everything upside-down for another look. Summoning up the related emotions - this takes longer, and they are muted, wariness giving way to acceptance of the perfectly /reasonable/ proposal that they all cut themselves off, suspicion remaining strong enough to cement a reason to /stay/, but not strong enough to give any reason to make contact.
Unfamiliar minds are never all that fun to go wading in. Unfamiliar mind of a paranoid career secret agent freshly back from a psionic nightmare? There's a visible steeling of herself before Jean allows her shields to slip downwards and her mind to wander free and cross the border to slip into synch with Wisdom's. "And when you discovered you couldn't leave?" she wonders. "Call up your memories of that, if you can?"
"The lack of desire to leave faded. I suppose it would be easier to force us to stay than force us to /want/ to?" Pete's tone is measured and remarkably even, verbal markers summoning recollection of a car heading towards a gate it just couldn't reach. This time, recalled emotions synch enough with real to be bleeding bright rather than muted by the passage of days. Anger and frustration and furious helplessness stand out in odd, jagged contrast to the precise, almost analytical memory of events, for all that the emotions are kept under chokingly tight control.
Emotions map to memories, map to other interesting sections of the brain in the neuronal version of the hip bone's connected to the thigh bone. For all of the attentive quality to Jean's murmured confirmation of "It would be, yes, especially with that number of people," her attention is inwards, deep and going deeper along the pathways of Pete's mind. "The next time you can think of being interfered with, please?"
"The mine," Pete says automatically. Any intervening instances seem not to come to mind. He does not elaborate, but the memory of it is elaboration enough, bleedingly intense. Entering with Kitty, then separating, despite knowing better. The crushing darkness, and the recollection of some ancient /something/ in her eyes, half seen but seared into memory all the same. Peter Wisdom does not believe in evil, in the classical sense rather than the banal, human one, but it is possible that just this once, he may have made an exception. The anger and frustration is joined by /guilt/, radiating outward like a spiderweb to touch on oh so many other things (or is it cracks in a pane of glass?). And if there is some softer, brighter glimmer in referential link to one Ms Pryde - well. It probably has nothing to do with compulsions.
Nothing to do with compulsions means nothing to do with Jean's business, but that soft glimmer does elicit a flash of curiosity in green eyes that's soon ruthlessly squashed by good manners. (And Kitty would be easier to get dirt from anyways.) But the evil steals away any amusement, ringing all too familiar, if in the muted way of a reaction to a reflection, and leaving her a little pale as her mind retreats backwards to less deep scanning. "Jesus," is murmured, before she requests "And the next?"
Pete notes that paling, one eyebrow quirking slightly in question, though - perhaps acting against type - he doesn't pry after the cause. "More of the same. After Pryde was snatched." This time, the anger does leak into his tone. "He - it - whatever seemed content enough to fuck about with us rather than play at puppetmaster." Flashing heat (surprise, still, that he registered it) and malevolent laughter and that same crushing darkness stand out in the memory-reel. So, too, does Kelsey's disappearance, however brief it had been.
Once more, the hopscotch from memory and emotion into other linked sectors of the brain, this time with an added flicker of a mental note being taken at the memories of Kelsey vanishing. Once more, Jean surfaces, finding nothing out of the ordinary remaining. "Any more?"
"It was toying with all of us on stakeout. Screwed Drake's perceptions to hell and back, and may have done for Harper and I." It is professional frustration this time - Pete dislikes unanswered questions. "And when Jeff tried to make a break for it..." Self-disgust twists at the recollection of the impulse to let the man go, for all that he overcame it once Percy snagged his attention back to the quarry rather than Manchurian Candidate Kelsey. The memory, so blazingly fresh, flickers on beyond that. (The sizzle of rain on blades of sheer, blinding heat, recollection of burning flesh, shocked helplessness because there wasn't really anything he could do to bring Pryde down, was there, if she was aware of him - and thank /god/ for Natalie Simon there, professionalism overriding the raw urge to incinerate Jeff's brainstem and do the whole damn world a favour...)
Some dark part of Jean understands all too well that overridden urge. Deep within her own brain, something cheers at it, then subsides in dark-winged disappointment as reason triumphs Her tracings here are quicker than before, not lingering, but the repeated passes over similar areas linked by the memories and their emotions are at least generating some sort of map. She settles back at last, breaking contact with a film of sweat on her brow and deep disquiet behind her eyes. "I will," she notes with precise firmness as she reaches for a cup of coffee now gone cold. "Be very happy when the day comes that that parasite gets too weak to take another host. I hope I live to see it. But your brain's clear -- a few traces of the snapped compulsions are still discernable, but they'll fade within days."
"I suppose an exorcist wouldn't do the trick?" Pete wonders, taking refuge in dry humour in a retreat behind emotional walls that are thick enough when one has to rely solely on the ability to read people, but only slightly stronger than tissue paper when one has the ability to read /minds/. "I'm sure someone's got one on speed dial, otherwise..." He studies her for several long moments, gaze sharp. "And that's a relief," he admits finally. "Thank you."
"I admit I haven't tried that," answers Jean, matching dry with dry as she swipes surreptitiously at her forehead, then turns the gesture into a slow massage of her temples, auburn hair pushed out of the way from where the clip has failed to tame it. "Next time I'll recommend splashing people with holy water... but you're welcome," she finishes, looking perhaps a little startled at gleaning the thanks.
Amusement flickers brief and bright in Pete's eyes. Being polite to the powerful telepath taking the time to make sure there are no more ticking time bombs on the team might have been the reason for the thanks, rather than his native tendency to do the unexpected - but the latter is certainly not an unwelcome bonus. He stands, and slides the chair away. "I'll send some more coffee 'round, shall I? And some sort of fruit?"
"Find me fresh strawberries, and I'd kiss you," Jean murmurs, eyes ghosting shut but with enough of a twinkle in them before they close to suggest that Pete is in no real danger of molestation by powerful telepaths. (Although we can't speak for Emma in a capricious mood.)
Pete's response to that is a low, amused snort, and an equally amused, "I'll see what can be found." And then he exits the chrome and glass haven of the administration building, out into the warmth of the California day.
Jean gets to muck around in Pete's mind. She's so lucky.
X-Men Movieverse III - Wednesday, June 03, 2009, 2:00 PM
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=XF= Administration - Chemekata Military Base
The glass and metal lobby of the building carries the 'Titan Enterprises' charade through in brushed aluminum letters set high on the wall behind the main desk. The name disappears, however, as one moves deeper into the building. The security is high, and the presence of armed guards is unmistakable.
The subfloors are heavily shielded from possibly electromagnetic attack, and it is there that communications and intelligence are centered. The hum of happy server farms is impossible to escape. The upper levels are given over to offices, meeting spaces, and classrooms. The computers are cutting edge, their screens are large, and furnishings are terrifically ergonomic.
[This room is set watchable. Use alias XFAdministration to watch here.]
(Exits : [O]ut, [M]eeting [R]oom, [C]lassroom, and [C]omputer [L]ab )
(Players : Emma and Kelsey )
So yes, Jean /did/ say she wouldn't let Kelsey hurt anyone. That didn't keep Kelsey from putting herself under house arrest, though. But now, having been told to meet up to have her head examined, she makes her way slowly--she doesn't really know her way around, after all--to the administration area of the base. There's a nervous energy about her, and she keeps running a hand through her red curls.
Jean has decided to go with comfort over business today, returning to a knit turtleneck sweater and a pair of dark slacks instead of a suit set, and has personally inspected the various seating options in the Administration complex to find the comfiest ones. She's left Emma and her personal chef to handle telepath snax, however, instead taking up a post near the doors to wait for Kelsey and greet her with held-out hands and a smile that's small but warm. "How are you feeling?"
Emma is already ensconced in the appointed room - one that has been made a bit less sterile with furniture and cushions and food on a tray (even if it is food she had to bring in themselves). She is tucked into a corner of a couch, sprawling with indolent grace across the length, looking bored while Jean does the meet and greet thing. Her clothing is tailored, but relatively comfortable. It is also less heat-stroke inducing than Jean's.
"Like a public menace," Kelsey says with a weak smile, giving Jean's hands a squeeze. A quick glance is directed in Emma's direction before flicking back to Jean. "Hopefully I'll feel better after today," she says with a hopeful lilt to her voice.
"I have every confidence in Emma and I being able to work together long enough to get things sorted out for you," Jean assures, with a brief touch to Kelsey's shoulder that does neat double duty as direction and an offer of human contact ahead of crazy mutant mind-mining. Of course, as this is Jean and Emma, Kelsey will then probably want to sneak out the back under clouds of low-flying snark when they're done. "Have you been able to eat anything at all?"
"Please, Jean. /Darling/. You'll scare the woman." Emma swings her legs off the couch and rises to saunter closer to the pair. Mischief and smug arrogance percolate cheerfully under her shielding as she approaches to dangle a hand off Jean's shoulder and smile at Kelsey. "You make it sound as if we've never worked /together/ before." There is the slightest pressure on the word 'together', opening the door to so many possibilities.
"A wee bit," Kelsey tells Jean, following her direction toward one of the sofas. An eyebrow is cocked at the two other women, but she just takes a seat instead of commenting. Let's get this over with. "I'll be happier when my brain is back tae normal."
"Just setting realistic expectations for your attention span, Emma dear," Jean offers in turn with an arch look. She motions Kelsey over to a chair, claims one for herself, and allows more usefully that "I may have gotten a clue for the timeframe that this was implanted in last night -- apparently you ended up separated from your group temporarily while exploring the abandoned mine looking for Kitty, Kelsey?"
"I suppose you will just have work to keep my interest then," Emma purrs, pushing away from Jean and dropping into a chair of her own. While Jean talks, Emma drops her shields and extends her powers like a mushroom cloud expanding to envelop everything in it's blast radius. She slides over Kelsey's mind, orienting herself a bit to it and looking for Jean's prior fingerprints.
Kelsey glances between the two before settling down, closing her eyes, and trying to relax. "Aye, just for a second. Though I saw something, but turned out tae be nothing." Her own memory of the event is as she describes, and seems relatively harmless. Somewhere deeper, though, unknown to Kelsey, there's the knowledge of what actually happened.
"Maybe a reward system," Jean murmurs, as she lets slip her own shields and lets her mind drift over to converge on and around Kelsey's like campfire smoke. One tendril shoves a few amused images of some of the prettier male agents in Emma's direction, before she pulls her attention back to the task at hand. (What? She has -eyes-.) For Kelsey's benefit, she speaks at least partially aloud. "I left a little flag near the site of the knot," she says, as her mind flashes up what Emma should be looking for. "Take a look at the thing yourself and give me your impressions, if you care to."
Emma considers the images with tolerant dismissal and turns her attention to the task at hand. She is less careful in how she approaches the land marked knot than Jean, more bulldozer than eel. A few days of mucking around in people's minds has eaten at patience, if not skill, so by the time she's slid into Kelsey's mind and traveled past conscious awareness into the lower, subconscious reaches, she has left a bit of memories churned up and floating in her wake. Bits and pieces, really, and a sense that Kelsey is not alone. Emma slows in front of the flag and stretches her mind like a cat warily circling a rat. "Mm. It's not /quite/ like the others..." she murmurs aloud, leaning her elbow on the chair arm and pressing her fingertip to her lips in thought. "There's more than one signature here."
There's a bit of discomfort at the mess of memories Emma leaves in her wake. With so much crap having happened to her brain while in Colorado, it's still unnerving to have /anyone/ in her head, even if it's someone trying to help. But she takes a deep breath, doing her best to relax. Great. More than one person had their hand in her brain. Wonderful.
"For one," says Jean with a grim smile and absent eyes as she looks with other senses than sight. "It's still intact. But I see what you mean -- they're entangled, and a lot more tightly than they should be if it was two individuals working together." There's a pause, as she views the knot from another mental angle, and a smoke-tendril reaches out to poke at the knot. << Simply tearing it apart it would be a poor idea, I feel... look at the number of connections. >>
<< It is rather like one of those tacky little balls made out of rubberbands, >> Emma muses as she slides a surprisingly gentle finger in under one of the strands and lifts it. It is merged in places houwever, and pulling one, picks up another, which slides under another, tangling and holding the unit together. "One of us will need to holds the strands while the other separates."
"This is all verra reassurin'," Kelsey mumbles, her mind flittering about nervously. It keeps brushing on the night of the confrontation with Jeff, particularly her shooting of Percy and Walter, the memories laced with guilt and anxiety over how safe she actually is currently.
"Just talking shop," Jean answers Kelsey, but does offer some useful direction of "If you could keep your mind focused on what happened in the mine, it might help bring this a little nearer to the surface." Silently, she considers the ball, a whiff of dry approval escaping at Emma's metaphor. << Holding will take more strength and separating more finesse. Which do you prefer? >>
<< We may need to exchange roles at some point, but since I am already holding this one, why don't you go ahead and snip there? I'll handle the excess as you free it. >> Emma lowers her lashes over bright and sharp blue eyes, veiling them so she can observe Kelsey discretely as they work.
Kelsey's jaw tightens for a moment as she directs her mind to that day in the mine, searching for Kitty. She tries to focus on that moment of leaving the group, even if, to her, nothing happened during that time.
"We're starting now," Jean thinks to inform the flatscan in the room, as on another level smoke solidifies into a scalpel's blade of molecular thinness, "Let us know if you experience any odd sensations, all right?" With the lightest of pressures, the thought-scalpel flicks, parting the first tangle with its touch.
Emma eases the edge of the strand under another, so that the line plays out more until it reaches another point where it had simply merged rather than tangled. As she works, she wraps the tail end almost absentmindedly around her 'hand'. She doe snot notice the subtly increasing pressure it is exerting there.
Kelsey's hands grip the seat of the sofa by her legs, fingers digging into the cushions. She doesn't protest aloud, but a sense of anxiety is quickly increasing.
Time passes. Caught up in her seeking and her snipping, trusting Emma to mind her own half of the task, Jean doesn't notice the subtle tightening either. More and more threads are passed along, like carefully snipping a mat loose from a long-haired dog that's gotten into a patch of burrs. A telepathic << ? >> is floated Emma-wards in a status check: need a switch?
<< Can you focus on one thread at a time? >> Emma snips after the fifteenth thread end is passed back. Her hands are a little full, and she's starting to tangle on /her/ end. She shuffles thread ends and winces as she realizes that the earlier threads have tightened considerably around her telepathic hand, glomming on in blind instinct to something almost familiar to them. << Oh, /shit/ >> she gasps, realizing that the sticky threads are not sliding off easily.
There are little winces inside Kelsey's head as the mass is picked apart. Panic is rising in one area, a sense of self-preservation, enough to actually make her audibly say, "Stop." But it's followed up fairly quickly with some mental steeling and a quick, "Fuck. No. Dinnae stop. Sorry."
<< ...crap. >> Jean has the decency not to say aloud, as she looks from Kelsey's mind to Emma's mental hands with more than a hint of dismay and an underpinning of frustration at Jeffs and their Shadows. "So damn' sick of him..." escapes, along with a look down at their twitchy experimental subject. "We'll go a little easier for a bit, Kelsey," she assures, before returning to study the problem of the stuck Emma. << Maybe cutting from both ends...? >> she ventures, and spares a flicker of thought to try and dice at one of the clinging threads.
Scalpel? We don' need no stinkin' scalpels! Emma goes for something a bit more brute force and starts to beat her hand against the 'floor' of Kelsey's mind. It's not the most pleasant sensation, but it does the trick. Mostly. The strands relax and slide off her hand to puddle at their feet. << We need some way of destroying these, >> Emma says, lightly panting as she looks down at them, then slants a suggestive glance at Jean. << Jean, darling... you are the telepathic lighter, aren't you? >>
<< Freezing often works too, >> Jean points out, with a fine sense of timing for a pun. But a mental glower is spared for the sticky puddle, and a cleansing flame kindles in the midst of them. It's only in Jean's mind that something screams... right?
Actually... Emma looks a little sickened by the melty-puddle and hands off the remaining handfuls of mental threads to Jean. The ball is a emaciated version of it's former self. They have made progress!
Left with a handful of evil, Jean opts for the simple expedient of shifting herself rather than the mindscape, flames flaring along her hands in a representation of psychic destruction that's less prosaic than the perfectly serviceable imagery of a paper shredder would be. << It's coming down in size nicely. I'm looking forward to her being able to tell us what it -was-. >>
Kelsey starts trembling when Emma begins using brute force, the panic in that mess of tangles rising and causing panic in Kelsey's own healthy brain. Her breathing quickens, taking in rapid, deep breaths that put her close to hyperventilating.
Emma pulls out a diamond envelope opener, since we're stuck on dramatic office supplies. She picks at the ball, preferring to unroll as much of a single thread as possible at a time rather than slicing and dicing a number of thread. It is slower, but much easier to manage on the tail end. Suddenly, she stiffens and directs her attention elsewhere in Kelsey's mind. "We're nearly there, darling," she soothes, trying to overlay empathic calm over the compulsion's instinct. << If we go further without controlling her, this may drive her to harm herself, >> Emma reports in clear, clipped communication to Jean. << If the ends are manageable, perhaps you could leave them and tend to holding /her/ together. I can make quick work of the core. >>
<< On it. >> is Jean's response, quick and affirmative, and waiting only to dispose of the last threads sticking to her before she pulls mostly out of the mindspace and back into the real world, keeping tabs on Emma's progress, but leaving herself more aware of Kelsey as she slips over to take a seat beside the younger woman, and hold out her hands to take hers. "Breathe with me," she encourages quietly. "This is the compulsion talking, it's not you."
There's some comfort in Jean's support, and Kelsey immediately latches onto her hand. With a large amount of it destroyed, Kelsey's ability to fight the compulsions in her head have gone from nonexistent to moderately able. She tries to calm her breathing to match Jean's, but some part of her mind starts talking. "Ye're ruining it." Her voice is low, almost rough. There's a visible struggle going on within the woman. "Keep going," she finally manages.
Emma waits until Kelsey's control reasserts itself, then covers the core with a shield that shimmers faintly on the mindscape. Freezing indeed. Whatever it is that is left inside batters in a sudden frenzy as it is cut off from the support of Kelsey's own mind, and slowly starves, withering away to lifelessness.
There's an audible sigh from Jean as the lingering shred of compulsion is trapped and severed, a whooshing noise as tension downregulates, and her grip on Kelsey's hand becomes less of a cling and more of a support. Her free hand goes to see about finding a sugary drink to press on Emma once she's done freezing. "How do you feel?"
There's a tightness in Kelsey's body as the last of the compulsion dies inside her brain, an anxious waiting more than any sort of pain. For the first time since shooting her teammates, she relaxes, opens her eyes. "Different," she says. "Better."
Emma extracts herself somewhat more gingerly than she had entered. She opens her eyes, lashes sticking together for a second, and sits back in her chair to dangle limply. Limply, but elegantly, of course. "That was nasty," she observes breathlessly.
"I really," says Jean, offering over a glass of juice once she frees her hand from Kelsey, "-Really- hate that thing." Not having taken the endgame, she is marginally less limp than Emma, but a bone deep case of the shakes despite her turtleneck speaks to crashed blood sugar and a long fight -- her own glass of juice is not far behind. "Can you tell us what happened now, Kelsey?" she quizzes, opting for diagnostic techniques that only involve listening and thinking.
Kelsey takes a long drink of the juice, her own shakes starting to subside. "I was in the mine," she begins, searching through the new memories she's been given, "looking for Kitty with the others. An' I just...got the urge to leave down this passage. Jeff was there, an'...I think Sid." The corners of her eyes crease as her brow dips down, the memories almost confusing. "I didnae want tae leave when I found him. He grabbed me, started diggin' in my head." She closes her eyes, trying to sort it. "I was supposed to mess up the mission. Any way how."
Emma looks at Jean and raises her eyebrows. Her glass is half gone, so that when she lifts her hand to examine her nails, it hardly trembles. "He is a formidable telepathic enemy."
Jean curls herself around her juice once she retakes her seat, settled sideways and with her legs drawn up to rest the glass on her knees. "And more than capable of subtlety while exercising that power," she agrees with Emma. (Outside, pigs begin to fly.) "Anyone among your fellow agents here who's familiar with him -- and there are at least two I can think of -- will understand very well that your actions weren't your own."
Kelsey curls her knees up to her chest, sipping juice as she goes through her memories, trying to figure out what parts of her behavior were abnormal. "I dinnae think the people I really screwed over are the ones who're familiar with him," she says.
Emma sets her empty glass on the floor by her feet and rises, mostly steadily. She presses fingers against her temple and exhales a thin breath. "Tell them to talk to the one who are don't snivel about it," she says waspishly. No one ever said Emma was good for sympathy. She is, however, good at practical. She crosses to the door without a further word, comforting or otherwise.
"I would have phrased that a little more delicately," says Jean dryly from over her juice, in the wake of Emma exits. "But the core advice is sound -- even if I think you're entitled to snivel a bit if you damned well want to. Explain what happened, and if they have questions or don't believe you, Bahir al-Razi and Tom Sikorski will know what they're talking about." She lingers where Emma doesn't, possessed of ties to Kelsey that Emma lacks to keep her lingering impractically in the face of a growing headache.
Jean and Emma remove Kelsey's compulsion using psychic office supplies.
X-Men: Movieverse 3 - Wednesday, June 03, 2009, 11:24 PM
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=XF= Administration - Chemekata Military Base
The glass and metal lobby of the building carries the 'Titan Enterprises' charade through in brushed aluminum letters set high on the wall behind the main desk. The name disappears, however, as one moves deeper into the building. The security is high, and the presence of armed guards is unmistakable.
The subfloors are heavily shielded from possibly electromagnetic attack, and it is there that communications and intelligence are centered. The hum of happy server farms is impossible to escape. The upper levels are given over to offices, meeting spaces, and classrooms. The computers are cutting edge, their screens are large, and furnishings are terrifically ergonomic.
[This room is set watchable. Use alias XFAdministration to watch here.]
(Exits : [O]ut, [M]eeting [R]oom, [C]lassroom, and [C]omputer [L]ab )
One benefit to rather hotel-feeling guest apartments is that they come with little hotel-feeling baskets of tea and coffee, even if there's a lack of maid service and no mints on the pillows. Curled up on a couch that actually feels comfortable after a long day, if not before, Jean's got the television on and turned to some medical-historical show featuring both explosions and surgery as she waits for her room's electric kettle to boil. A small pill bottle, now empty, sits on a flat surface in the kitchenette as a testament to a long past couple of days indeed.
The knock on the door isn't quite hesitant, but it isn't too loud, either. Kitty obviously doesn't want to disturb the person on the other side if she's asleep or worn out, knowing how much she's been kept busy. A plate of brownies is rested on her hip, waiting to be offered in peace. She also makes a conscious effort to announce her presence mentally as best as possible to Jean, if she chooses not to get up to answer the door.
The rustling of someone moving about takes long enough to suggest careful uncurling of a spine that's just starting to get old enough to complain about hours-long car trips followed by more hours-long car trips, followed by marathon brain-poking sessions. Thus, it's also paired with an << Evening, you. >> of mental greeting, sounding tired but welcoming before Jean can get herself over to the apartment door to let Kitty in and greet her more conventionally. "You're looking like you've gotten some sleep," she assesses.
"Some," Kitty replies with a soft smile, plate of brownies held out to Jean. Perhaps she's putting it between them for a reason, as the next words out of her mouth are a teasing, "You look like hell. I take it you haven't been getting enough?" Though the tone is teasing, there's a flash of worry for the headmistress wearing herself out so much.
"Brownies? I love you," says Jean with a laughing sigh at the offer of brownies, and is already her first bite into one by the time the teasing hits, earning Kitty a mock-glower for her timing as she chews, swallows, and waves towards the small living area, where the couch awaits and, beyond it, the kettle has boiled. "Oh, sleep is fine," she assures. "It's more doing this many deep brain scans this quickly, on this many people I know nothing about... or -knew- nothing about, anyways. Tea?"
Kitty slides past Jean to go about finding the mugs in the guest kitchen. "Yes, please. If you want to sit down, I can make it for you." The mugs are out in plain site, near the coffee and tea basket. She flips two of them over as she shoots Jean a glance. "You finding out a lot about people, Jean? I thought you telepaths were too polite to do that sort of thing." She quirks an eyebrow at her playfully challenging.
"With something like this, it's impossible not to get bits and pieces," Jean explains, and disappears the brownie in a couple more bites suited more to voracious grasshoppers than dignified if fatigued telepaths. "Politeness comes into play in not passing it on... even if I -really- wish that I could, sometimes."
"Oh?" That draws Kitty's full attention for a moment as she inquires, "Anything interesting in my teammates' heads? I'm guessing they all secret love the color pink and want hugs." She grins at that as she drops tea bags in the mugs before pouring the hot water over it.
"Yes. And your crustiest ones sneak out every Saturday morning at five to care for orphaned puppies." Jean confirms, sober as the grave, before she snitches another brownie and then waves Kitty over to come help eat them.
Kitty hands over one of the steaming tea mugs before grabbing a brownie for herself. "It should shock me more, but I always knew they all had a secret soft spot." She flops onto the couch, nibbling on the corner of her brownie as she tucks her legs underneath her. "Are you telepaths almost done with the brain scans?"
"Just about... we cleared out Kelsey's mind of a particularly nasty compulsion earlier today," Jean shares, after a moment's considering defines Kitty as both leadership on the recent mission and Kelsey's school days friend and thus share-able with. "Bad enough that it took Emma and I together to get it... which is why the general wrecked look," she explains, with a crook of a grin in the wake of success. "So you picked a good night to get a visit in -- how are things?"
"They're fine," is the casual reply from Kitty. She takes a bite so as not to have to answer anything more just yet. The chewing gives her time to think. She finally says, "A little complicated, personally. I like the job, though. It makes me feel useful again, when it's not stressing me the hell out, and when we're not dealing with things way above our capabilities."
"Personal complications, already?" Jean wonders, eyebrows arching and a twinkle coming to tired green eyes as she nibbles at the brownie some more. "Although there is Alex Summers out there."
"He certainly makes things complicated enough," Kitty mutters at her brownie. She brushes at the crumbs on her shirt with a guilty duck of her head. "I don't know how I collected them so quickly. Maybe someone placed a magnet on me when I didn't see it."
"Anything non-classified?" Jean wonders, casting a glance over towards the quasi-tea to check its progress towards drinkability. In a cipher of another sort lies the message: Want to talk about it?
There's a long pause before Kitty does talk about it. She starts with the easiest, to her. "Alex kind of... Well, he made it clear that he had feelings for me, when we were out in Colorado." She picks at a piece of brownie, crumbling it between her thumb and pointer finger.
"Oooooh, Summers timing at work there," Jean winces, if not without a certain quality of fondness for the breed. She shakes her head slightly, and pinches the bridge of her nose. "Of course, sometimes it works out..."
"It wouldn't," Kitty says with only a little hesitation. "Even if the feelings weren't a product of the stress, it's not like I can exactly return them." There's a frown at the treat in her hand. It's obviously its fault.
"No spark?" Jean wonders, her own brownie no longer around to blame. She sucks lightly at one knuckle, chasing down traces of chocolate crumbs. "Poor Alex... but it really -would- feel too soon, after breaking it off with Piotr and heading right into something with someone who may be going back to the other side ofthe continent."
"Yeah, that," Kitty agrees noncommittally. She shrugs and points out to the older woman, "But, Piotr's the one who broke it off with me. I can't exactly pine for him forever." The words come out sounding a bit defensive.
Defensive is interesting. Defensive even gets a raise out of Jean's brain, languishing limply behind her mental barriers as it is. "Ah," she speculates. "A more active sort of personal complication, then?"
There's a guilty look, much as a teacher would get when finding a student cheating on a test. Kitty hasn't quite grown out of thinking of Jean as a teacher, but she does admit, "You wouldn't approve. It's just... No one approves." All two people who've implied it. She shrugs with forced casualness.
"You do realize that I've currently got a probably-hundred-and-thirty year old man waiting to drag me off to bed, or possibly a convenient wall, when I get myself back to Westchester, right?" Jean, apparently, has decided that Kitty is well and truly past being a student now. She smirks slightly, and rises to see about the tea. "There's not much room for me to disapprove of other people's complications, so long as they're legal."
"I don't know what illegal complication you'd think I'd get into, Jean," Kitty replies dryly, watching her move across the room. She waits for a second, before saying, "Wisdom and I like each other, and we're seeing each other. I think you met him, though it was hectic the day you arrived." Her brownie gets suddenly very interesting as she waits to the older woman to absorb the information.
Jean's first words are -not- 'That paranoid bastard?'. After all, the circumstances they met in made a certain amount of sense for paranoia happening. They are not 'I can confirm he likes you because I saw it in his head' either. Her first words are a little delayed as a result, and come after she's passed a cup of tea over to the brownie-gazing Kitty. "He seems very professional."
The cup is accepted gratefully with a smile towards Jean. Kitty blows a breath of air across it, pausing to input. "Yes, he is." There's more attempts to cool off the tea. "He's... different. Well, he does remind me a /bit/ of Logan."
"A generic model that has its strengths as well as its defects," Jean murmurs, adding an excessive amount of sugar to her tea before stirring it. "Although I admit to having a fondness for it... how so?"
"He has that hidden soft spot that you can only see if you let yourself get pricked enough," Kitty replies with an amused, inward grin. She takes a sip of the tea finally. "It's good."
"Tea, I can make," Jean confirms. (It is, as is well documented, about the -only- thing she can make that isn't sandwiches or science.) She repairs to her own mug of it, tasting the barely-dissolved sugar on her tongue and closing her eyes as if envisioning the glucose hitting her bloodstream and racing straight to her brain. Opening them again, she does warn that "It's a gift, that... but be careful. I won't say it's not worth it to try, but just be careful."
Kitty nods thoughtfully, peering at jean over the tea. "I will be, Jean." The topic feels a bit uncomfortable which is obvious in her fingernail tapping against her cup. She changes the subject, relaxing into more neutral topics. "So, tell me about Xavier's. How's everything going?"
"Well, as always, the pressing need to have their kids taught in a safe space has overruled parents' fears over the kidnappings by those Pied Piper people," Jean answers. "We're honestly going to have to start thinking about opening satellite schools in a few years, if demand keeps outstripping supply like this... the food bills would make you faint, and as for the hot water..." In a blend of economics, gossip, smidgens of politics, dashes of hilarity and occasional moments of pensive reflection, the news is shared as the tea disappears.
Kitty gets to have her first Grownup Girl Talk with Jean. She's just lucky Storm wasn't there too.
-Kelsey came only after the removal of a particularly nasty bit of work by a joint Jean&Emma venture. The gist of it seems to be that she was compelled to try and sabotage the mission in any way she could. Jean's made sure to pass this on to Bahir, not the least because it had Shadowy fingerprints mixed in all over it, as well as something else that was probably Jeff.
X-Men: Movieverse 3 - Tuesday, June 02, 2009, 8:43 PM
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Ever since Jean assured her that she would check her out personally and that she was at the top of her list, Kelsey has been anxious. Well, wouldn't you be if you'd recently shot two of your teammates because of nefarious telepathic influence? She keeps moving from place to place, for the moment settled in a sofa in the guest lodge with a mug of hot chocolate, care of Amber. Not even reading, just...waiting.
Jean has gotten herself settled as quickly as possible, but when 'settled' includes things like briefings and updates and getting a mild headache looking at the hole in the side of the cookhouse, 'quickly' can have an imprecise meaning. But eventually Jean makes a return to the guest house, a knock sounding at the door in automatic manners before she thinks to let herself in. "That looks like a good idea," is her greeting, with a nod to the hot chocolate.
Kelsey is just taking a sip of said hot chocolate when the door knocks. She looks over, confused as to why someone would knock, but her expression melts into one of relief when she sees who it is. "Aye, Amber makes a mean cup' cocoa," she muses. "How are you doin'?"
"Better now that the property destruction has ceased," Jean sums up, with a crooked smile and a pad over to the sofa to take a seat herself. "And I imagine you'll feel better once I've had a look at your brain, I hope."
Kelsey laughs a bit, her body seeming to relax with one big sigh. She sets her mug down on a coffee table. "That's what I'm hopin', too," she responds, drawing a leg up onto the couch to face Jean.
"Still remember the drill?" Jean wonders, turning sideways to sit cross-legged on the couch with her hands on her thighs. Her voice is soft, abstracted as she shucks mental shields and reaches out to touch the surface of Kelsey's mind. "I'd like you to think back to the events of last night. Think back to what you were feeling and remembering under the compulsion."
Kelsey closes her eyes with a nod, doing her best to relax. Her mind is jumpy and hesitant as it looks back to the previous night, but it finally settles on that moment of first seeing Jeff. The moment when the rifle was pointed at her, when all that really seemed important was the mission not succeeding. Jeff didn't have to do anything more that night to really make her attack her teammates.
Steady and round as a water-smoothed stone, Jean's mind eases in against Kelsey's. Settled on the riverbanks, as it were, it positions itself to move if there's anything of interest that flashes past her. "Jeff... tell me a little more about him?" she counsels, letting the conversation turn up connections where she's watching to see them.
"He seemed nice at first," Kelsey responds, a bit dryly. "I didnae see much o' him. Then, o' course, the team got news that he was the bad guy, an' I found out." The subject makes her uncomfortable, her mind wanting to shy away from it. "I guess he holed up in the mine? We found where he an' Sid were livin'."
"Keep talking about him," Jean prompts in a murmur, chasing after the shying away. "You twitched a little there, which often means interesting things."
Some small part of Kelsey's mind is probably panicking right now, trying to hide what really happened, a part Kelsey's not even aware of. "It's funny: he was the first person I met here, an' it seemed like Angela was the bad guy. He was a bit of a flirt. An' last night...I wanted to protect him more than anythin'." There's some sense of safety in that, oddly. Something good about protecting this guy.
Oh, -hello- there. "Tell me about that," Jean prompts, tickling at that line of thought. "Try to think of that feeling, try to bring it back." There's a pause, and a wry "I promise not to let you shoot me, worst case."
The real Kelsey is horrified by the idea, but that small part of her brain is comforted, knows it was the right thing to do. "I...it felt like the right thing to do. The mission isnae supposed to succeed." A hiccup there. "It /wasn't/ supposed tae succeed."
Jean delves deeper and deeper into that little small part, murmuring encouragement of "I know it feels wrong, but just keep talking -- you're bringing it into easier range to focus on."
Kelsey actually shudders for a moment. "I had to make sure Jeff got to his car, that he got away," she tries to explain. "Percy was trying to stop him. Walter was the next most dangerous person there, then Pete."
"Ooooh..." murmurs Jean, although she spares a hand to pat at Kelsey's knee as the shudder penetrates on some level or another. Down, down, down she goes, passing the fading ribbons of the lighter compulsions, a smattering of images kept on file as interesting things are explained. "Yes, I definitely--" But what she definitely is left aside, as her eyes are thrown open, and open wide, and she sits back on her heels.
Kelsey's eyes open as Jean's words cut off, her mind already getting mixed up without the added confusion of Jean's behavior. "What is it?" she asks, worry starting to emanate in her voice.
"I..." says Jean, and then catches the worry in Kelsey's voice. She silences herself until she can draw in a cleansing breath and explain that "The compulsion to stay on the ranch is well and truly gone, and I -think- the other one as well, but there's something else." She pauses to take another long breath. "Something insanely delicate in its construction, and big to go with it. I don't feel comfortable removing it by myself."
The words take a moment to sink in, and Kelsey is silent for even longer. "The idea that there's somethin' in my head ye dinnae feel comfortable dealin' with by yourself is terrifying, Jean," she says in a small voice.
"Even the best surgeons still don't operate alone when it's a tricky case," Jean offers, not so much making light as attempting reassurance.
It's not really that reassuring, but at least Kelsey's not freaking out. She shifts in her seat, though, putting both feet on the floor as she looks away from Jean. "I thought it was just last night," she says.
"You've been on the ranch a while, yes?" Jean murmurs, shifting so that she can settle a hand on Kelsey's shoulder in the un-touchy telepath analogue to someone else's comforting hug. "It could've happened at any point. But I've made a note of where I found it, so we can find it again, and although Emma Frost is the sort of bitch to make Lucrezia Borgia say 'Oh, that's just too much', she's a very powerful telepath I've worked with before on things like this."
Kelsey's mouth opens, but then she just shut it and nods. She looks back over at Jean for a moment. "I'm not goin' tae hurt anyone before ye get it out, am I?" she asks.
"I won't let you." On this, Jean is dead level.
Kelsey swallows, nods again. "Guess that's all there is to it, then. Nothin' tae be done til ye guys can get it out." She leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees and rubbing her temples. Something about being around Jean just makes her feel younger, in that strange way that happens when you see teachers from your past.
"We'll be heading to their base bright and early tomorrow morning," Jean offers, with a rueful smile. "Once there, it'll be a lot better of a space to work in to get it out. We'll have other telepaths to draw on, too, and there's the benefit that whatever's lying there seems to be pretty dormant for now."
"All right," Kelsey says, the words almost more of a sigh. She puts her fingers through her hair, rubbing them vigorously in an attempt to clear her head. Red curls now pretty much everywhere, she offers a rueful, tired smile to Jean. "I was supposed to be in Virginia." And then she came here and life exploded.
"I was in Antigua," Jean reveals, but more in the spirit of trade-for-trade than bragging. "And now I wish I could've gotten here sooner. But we -will- fix this," she promises. "And then I'm sure these people would get you on your way to their fellow agency."
"They offered me a job with them," Kelsey reveals, the subject seeming almost comfortingly pedestrian. "I said yes."
"They're a good group, at least from what little I see," Jean murmurs. "I've already sent a few Xavier's faces in their direction. "
Kelsey smooths her hair back in an ineffectual gesture. "Aye, that's what it seems like." She smiles, stands up. "I actually think I'm goin' tae get tae bed. All o' this--" She makes a vague hand gesture in the direction of her head. "--I dunno, it's got me pretty exhausted."
"I won't say sweet dreams," Jean says, with a push to her feet as well. "But I do hope you get some rest."
Kelsey smiles in a small sort of way. "Thanks. An'...thanks for tonight an' all."
"Wish I could've done more." This appears to be becoming something of a refrain, and by Jean's grimace as she pads for the door, not an especially likeable one.
"Not your fault," Kelsey offers over her shoulder as she heads to her bunk.
Backdated to the last night at Lost Waters, Jean takes a look into Kelsey's head and finds Something There.
X-Men: Movieverse 2 - Tuesday, June 02, 2009, 9:00 PM
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=XF= Administration - Chemekata Military Base
The glass and metal lobby of the building carries the 'Titan Enterprises' charade through in brushed aluminum letters set high on the wall behind the main desk. The name disappears, however, as one moves deeper into the building. The security is high, and the presence of armed guards is unmistakable.
The subfloors are heavily shielded from possibly electromagnetic attack, and it is there that communications and intelligence are centered. The hum of happy server farms is impossible to escape. The upper levels are given over to offices, meeting spaces, and classrooms. The computers are cutting edge, their screens are large, and furnishings are terrifically ergonomic.
[This room is set watchable. Use alias XFAdministration to watch here.]
(Exits : [O]ut, [M]eeting [R]oom, [C]lassroom, and [C]omputer [L]ab )
(Players : Amadeus )
The Southern California sunshine may be pleasant, but it's starting to hit the time of year where the Southern California air conditioning is more pleasant still. Having taken up a post in the main lobby of the administration building, and thus easily findable, Dr. Jean Grey has got her laptop out and on her lap, and is currently seeing what's fallen into her inbox while she's been away from an internet connection all of a day. She's dressed in a neat navy business suit, hair pulled back in a butterfly clip, and she's managed to procure another cup of coffee from somewhere.
One imagines there may be tiny little robots that zoom around, making sure the coffee carafes in the admin building are always full. Consdiering the potential for disaster if many of the agents and techs present go without coffee for too long, it would be a wise expenditure. Robot upkeep is far cheaper than replacing walls. Or equipment. Or...the narration digresses.
After over a month spent in plainclothes, Pete has reverted to his more typical style of dress, black suit, white shirt, very MiB save for the rakish air about him. He has at least been polite enough to give warning in advance of his arrival, so his descent upon Jean's staked out patch of lobby is not entirely out of the blue. "Doctor Grey?" It is not inquiry this time, but a simple verbal indication of presence as his approach slows to a stop.
"Agent Wisdom," The greeting from Jean is mostly the same, with a hint of her native sociability underpinning it. "I hope this was convenient for you -- I needed an hour or two to settle my head after previous..." She trails off, and then snaps back into proper attention. "When you're ready, I can start. It would be helpful to know is you had any previous contact with the hosrile, any failed capture attempt."
"As convenient as anything around here is bound to be for a while," Pete replies, surface prickle summoned up as emotional defense against the idea of having yet another person poking through his brain. After compulsions and evil mines and daily scans, it's possible it is beginning to feel a little bit like a parade ground. "Prior to this mission? Not that I can recall. Though I suppose that doesn't mean a great deal, does it?"
Does Jean get a little paper flag to wave? "Unfortunately not terribly," she confirms, with a crook of her lips. "And during... well. But when was the first sign of a behavior lapse that you noticed, if any?"
"That would be when the whole lot of us turned over our laptops, cellphones, and even our bloody communicators to the bastard's catspaw without even a word of protest," Pete replies. One needn't be a telepath to detect the note of banked frustration in his voice, just sufficiently observant as regards human behaviour. "And went days before realizing staying put and out of contact might not be the most fantastic idea ever. So, within a minute of clapping eyes on him."
"Psionicists," Jean offers, with a crooked smile that doesn't reach her eyes. "When we go evil, we're horrible people... but if you're willing to try and call back up the memories of that first meeting, and the feelings associated with them, it will make it easier on me to slie into the flow of things."
Pete draws up a chair and takes a seat, in case some part of the brain rummaging process involves dropping him flat on his ass. /That/ would be embarassing. Distrust flickers across the surface of his mind, native paranoia bolstered by recent events and paying no consideration to things like personal ethics. He shoves it aside, then nods once to show readiness. Summoning up the events is not hard - his mind is well trained to memory, to noting and storing away detail, analyzing and reanalyzing and turning everything upside-down for another look. Summoning up the related emotions - this takes longer, and they are muted, wariness giving way to acceptance of the perfectly /reasonable/ proposal that they all cut themselves off, suspicion remaining strong enough to cement a reason to /stay/, but not strong enough to give any reason to make contact.
Unfamiliar minds are never all that fun to go wading in. Unfamiliar mind of a paranoid career secret agent freshly back from a psionic nightmare? There's a visible steeling of herself before Jean allows her shields to slip downwards and her mind to wander free and cross the border to slip into synch with Wisdom's. "And when you discovered you couldn't leave?" she wonders. "Call up your memories of that, if you can?"
"The lack of desire to leave faded. I suppose it would be easier to force us to stay than force us to /want/ to?" Pete's tone is measured and remarkably even, verbal markers summoning recollection of a car heading towards a gate it just couldn't reach. This time, recalled emotions synch enough with real to be bleeding bright rather than muted by the passage of days. Anger and frustration and furious helplessness stand out in odd, jagged contrast to the precise, almost analytical memory of events, for all that the emotions are kept under chokingly tight control.
Emotions map to memories, map to other interesting sections of the brain in the neuronal version of the hip bone's connected to the thigh bone. For all of the attentive quality to Jean's murmured confirmation of "It would be, yes, especially with that number of people," her attention is inwards, deep and going deeper along the pathways of Pete's mind. "The next time you can think of being interfered with, please?"
"The mine," Pete says automatically. Any intervening instances seem not to come to mind. He does not elaborate, but the memory of it is elaboration enough, bleedingly intense. Entering with Kitty, then separating, despite knowing better. The crushing darkness, and the recollection of some ancient /something/ in her eyes, half seen but seared into memory all the same. Peter Wisdom does not believe in evil, in the classical sense rather than the banal, human one, but it is possible that just this once, he may have made an exception. The anger and frustration is joined by /guilt/, radiating outward like a spiderweb to touch on oh so many other things (or is it cracks in a pane of glass?). And if there is some softer, brighter glimmer in referential link to one Ms Pryde - well. It probably has nothing to do with compulsions.
Nothing to do with compulsions means nothing to do with Jean's business, but that soft glimmer does elicit a flash of curiosity in green eyes that's soon ruthlessly squashed by good manners. (And Kitty would be easier to get dirt from anyways.) But the evil steals away any amusement, ringing all too familiar, if in the muted way of a reaction to a reflection, and leaving her a little pale as her mind retreats backwards to less deep scanning. "Jesus," is murmured, before she requests "And the next?"
Pete notes that paling, one eyebrow quirking slightly in question, though - perhaps acting against type - he doesn't pry after the cause. "More of the same. After Pryde was snatched." This time, the anger does leak into his tone. "He - it - whatever seemed content enough to fuck about with us rather than play at puppetmaster." Flashing heat (surprise, still, that he registered it) and malevolent laughter and that same crushing darkness stand out in the memory-reel. So, too, does Kelsey's disappearance, however brief it had been.
Once more, the hopscotch from memory and emotion into other linked sectors of the brain, this time with an added flicker of a mental note being taken at the memories of Kelsey vanishing. Once more, Jean surfaces, finding nothing out of the ordinary remaining. "Any more?"
"It was toying with all of us on stakeout. Screwed Drake's perceptions to hell and back, and may have done for Harper and I." It is professional frustration this time - Pete dislikes unanswered questions. "And when Jeff tried to make a break for it..." Self-disgust twists at the recollection of the impulse to let the man go, for all that he overcame it once Percy snagged his attention back to the quarry rather than Manchurian Candidate Kelsey. The memory, so blazingly fresh, flickers on beyond that. (The sizzle of rain on blades of sheer, blinding heat, recollection of burning flesh, shocked helplessness because there wasn't really anything he could do to bring Pryde down, was there, if she was aware of him - and thank /god/ for Natalie Simon there, professionalism overriding the raw urge to incinerate Jeff's brainstem and do the whole damn world a favour...)
Some dark part of Jean understands all too well that overridden urge. Deep within her own brain, something cheers at it, then subsides in dark-winged disappointment as reason triumphs Her tracings here are quicker than before, not lingering, but the repeated passes over similar areas linked by the memories and their emotions are at least generating some sort of map. She settles back at last, breaking contact with a film of sweat on her brow and deep disquiet behind her eyes. "I will," she notes with precise firmness as she reaches for a cup of coffee now gone cold. "Be very happy when the day comes that that parasite gets too weak to take another host. I hope I live to see it. But your brain's clear -- a few traces of the snapped compulsions are still discernable, but they'll fade within days."
"I suppose an exorcist wouldn't do the trick?" Pete wonders, taking refuge in dry humour in a retreat behind emotional walls that are thick enough when one has to rely solely on the ability to read people, but only slightly stronger than tissue paper when one has the ability to read /minds/. "I'm sure someone's got one on speed dial, otherwise..." He studies her for several long moments, gaze sharp. "And that's a relief," he admits finally. "Thank you."
"I admit I haven't tried that," answers Jean, matching dry with dry as she swipes surreptitiously at her forehead, then turns the gesture into a slow massage of her temples, auburn hair pushed out of the way from where the clip has failed to tame it. "Next time I'll recommend splashing people with holy water... but you're welcome," she finishes, looking perhaps a little startled at gleaning the thanks.
Amusement flickers brief and bright in Pete's eyes. Being polite to the powerful telepath taking the time to make sure there are no more ticking time bombs on the team might have been the reason for the thanks, rather than his native tendency to do the unexpected - but the latter is certainly not an unwelcome bonus. He stands, and slides the chair away. "I'll send some more coffee 'round, shall I? And some sort of fruit?"
"Find me fresh strawberries, and I'd kiss you," Jean murmurs, eyes ghosting shut but with enough of a twinkle in them before they close to suggest that Pete is in no real danger of molestation by powerful telepaths. (Although we can't speak for Emma in a capricious mood.)
Pete's response to that is a low, amused snort, and an equally amused, "I'll see what can be found." And then he exits the chrome and glass haven of the administration building, out into the warmth of the California day.
Jean gets to muck around in Pete's mind. She's so lucky.
X-Men Movieverse III - Wednesday, June 03, 2009, 2:00 PM
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=XF= Administration - Chemekata Military Base
The glass and metal lobby of the building carries the 'Titan Enterprises' charade through in brushed aluminum letters set high on the wall behind the main desk. The name disappears, however, as one moves deeper into the building. The security is high, and the presence of armed guards is unmistakable.
The subfloors are heavily shielded from possibly electromagnetic attack, and it is there that communications and intelligence are centered. The hum of happy server farms is impossible to escape. The upper levels are given over to offices, meeting spaces, and classrooms. The computers are cutting edge, their screens are large, and furnishings are terrifically ergonomic.
[This room is set watchable. Use alias XFAdministration to watch here.]
(Exits : [O]ut, [M]eeting [R]oom, [C]lassroom, and [C]omputer [L]ab )
(Players : Emma and Kelsey )
So yes, Jean /did/ say she wouldn't let Kelsey hurt anyone. That didn't keep Kelsey from putting herself under house arrest, though. But now, having been told to meet up to have her head examined, she makes her way slowly--she doesn't really know her way around, after all--to the administration area of the base. There's a nervous energy about her, and she keeps running a hand through her red curls.
Jean has decided to go with comfort over business today, returning to a knit turtleneck sweater and a pair of dark slacks instead of a suit set, and has personally inspected the various seating options in the Administration complex to find the comfiest ones. She's left Emma and her personal chef to handle telepath snax, however, instead taking up a post near the doors to wait for Kelsey and greet her with held-out hands and a smile that's small but warm. "How are you feeling?"
Emma is already ensconced in the appointed room - one that has been made a bit less sterile with furniture and cushions and food on a tray (even if it is food she had to bring in themselves). She is tucked into a corner of a couch, sprawling with indolent grace across the length, looking bored while Jean does the meet and greet thing. Her clothing is tailored, but relatively comfortable. It is also less heat-stroke inducing than Jean's.
"Like a public menace," Kelsey says with a weak smile, giving Jean's hands a squeeze. A quick glance is directed in Emma's direction before flicking back to Jean. "Hopefully I'll feel better after today," she says with a hopeful lilt to her voice.
"I have every confidence in Emma and I being able to work together long enough to get things sorted out for you," Jean assures, with a brief touch to Kelsey's shoulder that does neat double duty as direction and an offer of human contact ahead of crazy mutant mind-mining. Of course, as this is Jean and Emma, Kelsey will then probably want to sneak out the back under clouds of low-flying snark when they're done. "Have you been able to eat anything at all?"
"Please, Jean. /Darling/. You'll scare the woman." Emma swings her legs off the couch and rises to saunter closer to the pair. Mischief and smug arrogance percolate cheerfully under her shielding as she approaches to dangle a hand off Jean's shoulder and smile at Kelsey. "You make it sound as if we've never worked /together/ before." There is the slightest pressure on the word 'together', opening the door to so many possibilities.
"A wee bit," Kelsey tells Jean, following her direction toward one of the sofas. An eyebrow is cocked at the two other women, but she just takes a seat instead of commenting. Let's get this over with. "I'll be happier when my brain is back tae normal."
"Just setting realistic expectations for your attention span, Emma dear," Jean offers in turn with an arch look. She motions Kelsey over to a chair, claims one for herself, and allows more usefully that "I may have gotten a clue for the timeframe that this was implanted in last night -- apparently you ended up separated from your group temporarily while exploring the abandoned mine looking for Kitty, Kelsey?"
"I suppose you will just have work to keep my interest then," Emma purrs, pushing away from Jean and dropping into a chair of her own. While Jean talks, Emma drops her shields and extends her powers like a mushroom cloud expanding to envelop everything in it's blast radius. She slides over Kelsey's mind, orienting herself a bit to it and looking for Jean's prior fingerprints.
Kelsey glances between the two before settling down, closing her eyes, and trying to relax. "Aye, just for a second. Though I saw something, but turned out tae be nothing." Her own memory of the event is as she describes, and seems relatively harmless. Somewhere deeper, though, unknown to Kelsey, there's the knowledge of what actually happened.
"Maybe a reward system," Jean murmurs, as she lets slip her own shields and lets her mind drift over to converge on and around Kelsey's like campfire smoke. One tendril shoves a few amused images of some of the prettier male agents in Emma's direction, before she pulls her attention back to the task at hand. (What? She has -eyes-.) For Kelsey's benefit, she speaks at least partially aloud. "I left a little flag near the site of the knot," she says, as her mind flashes up what Emma should be looking for. "Take a look at the thing yourself and give me your impressions, if you care to."
Emma considers the images with tolerant dismissal and turns her attention to the task at hand. She is less careful in how she approaches the land marked knot than Jean, more bulldozer than eel. A few days of mucking around in people's minds has eaten at patience, if not skill, so by the time she's slid into Kelsey's mind and traveled past conscious awareness into the lower, subconscious reaches, she has left a bit of memories churned up and floating in her wake. Bits and pieces, really, and a sense that Kelsey is not alone. Emma slows in front of the flag and stretches her mind like a cat warily circling a rat. "Mm. It's not /quite/ like the others..." she murmurs aloud, leaning her elbow on the chair arm and pressing her fingertip to her lips in thought. "There's more than one signature here."
There's a bit of discomfort at the mess of memories Emma leaves in her wake. With so much crap having happened to her brain while in Colorado, it's still unnerving to have /anyone/ in her head, even if it's someone trying to help. But she takes a deep breath, doing her best to relax. Great. More than one person had their hand in her brain. Wonderful.
"For one," says Jean with a grim smile and absent eyes as she looks with other senses than sight. "It's still intact. But I see what you mean -- they're entangled, and a lot more tightly than they should be if it was two individuals working together." There's a pause, as she views the knot from another mental angle, and a smoke-tendril reaches out to poke at the knot. << Simply tearing it apart it would be a poor idea, I feel... look at the number of connections. >>
<< It is rather like one of those tacky little balls made out of rubberbands, >> Emma muses as she slides a surprisingly gentle finger in under one of the strands and lifts it. It is merged in places houwever, and pulling one, picks up another, which slides under another, tangling and holding the unit together. "One of us will need to holds the strands while the other separates."
"This is all verra reassurin'," Kelsey mumbles, her mind flittering about nervously. It keeps brushing on the night of the confrontation with Jeff, particularly her shooting of Percy and Walter, the memories laced with guilt and anxiety over how safe she actually is currently.
"Just talking shop," Jean answers Kelsey, but does offer some useful direction of "If you could keep your mind focused on what happened in the mine, it might help bring this a little nearer to the surface." Silently, she considers the ball, a whiff of dry approval escaping at Emma's metaphor. << Holding will take more strength and separating more finesse. Which do you prefer? >>
<< We may need to exchange roles at some point, but since I am already holding this one, why don't you go ahead and snip there? I'll handle the excess as you free it. >> Emma lowers her lashes over bright and sharp blue eyes, veiling them so she can observe Kelsey discretely as they work.
Kelsey's jaw tightens for a moment as she directs her mind to that day in the mine, searching for Kitty. She tries to focus on that moment of leaving the group, even if, to her, nothing happened during that time.
"We're starting now," Jean thinks to inform the flatscan in the room, as on another level smoke solidifies into a scalpel's blade of molecular thinness, "Let us know if you experience any odd sensations, all right?" With the lightest of pressures, the thought-scalpel flicks, parting the first tangle with its touch.
Emma eases the edge of the strand under another, so that the line plays out more until it reaches another point where it had simply merged rather than tangled. As she works, she wraps the tail end almost absentmindedly around her 'hand'. She doe snot notice the subtly increasing pressure it is exerting there.
Kelsey's hands grip the seat of the sofa by her legs, fingers digging into the cushions. She doesn't protest aloud, but a sense of anxiety is quickly increasing.
Time passes. Caught up in her seeking and her snipping, trusting Emma to mind her own half of the task, Jean doesn't notice the subtle tightening either. More and more threads are passed along, like carefully snipping a mat loose from a long-haired dog that's gotten into a patch of burrs. A telepathic << ? >> is floated Emma-wards in a status check: need a switch?
<< Can you focus on one thread at a time? >> Emma snips after the fifteenth thread end is passed back. Her hands are a little full, and she's starting to tangle on /her/ end. She shuffles thread ends and winces as she realizes that the earlier threads have tightened considerably around her telepathic hand, glomming on in blind instinct to something almost familiar to them. << Oh, /shit/ >> she gasps, realizing that the sticky threads are not sliding off easily.
There are little winces inside Kelsey's head as the mass is picked apart. Panic is rising in one area, a sense of self-preservation, enough to actually make her audibly say, "Stop." But it's followed up fairly quickly with some mental steeling and a quick, "Fuck. No. Dinnae stop. Sorry."
<< ...crap. >> Jean has the decency not to say aloud, as she looks from Kelsey's mind to Emma's mental hands with more than a hint of dismay and an underpinning of frustration at Jeffs and their Shadows. "So damn' sick of him..." escapes, along with a look down at their twitchy experimental subject. "We'll go a little easier for a bit, Kelsey," she assures, before returning to study the problem of the stuck Emma. << Maybe cutting from both ends...? >> she ventures, and spares a flicker of thought to try and dice at one of the clinging threads.
Scalpel? We don' need no stinkin' scalpels! Emma goes for something a bit more brute force and starts to beat her hand against the 'floor' of Kelsey's mind. It's not the most pleasant sensation, but it does the trick. Mostly. The strands relax and slide off her hand to puddle at their feet. << We need some way of destroying these, >> Emma says, lightly panting as she looks down at them, then slants a suggestive glance at Jean. << Jean, darling... you are the telepathic lighter, aren't you? >>
<< Freezing often works too, >> Jean points out, with a fine sense of timing for a pun. But a mental glower is spared for the sticky puddle, and a cleansing flame kindles in the midst of them. It's only in Jean's mind that something screams... right?
Actually... Emma looks a little sickened by the melty-puddle and hands off the remaining handfuls of mental threads to Jean. The ball is a emaciated version of it's former self. They have made progress!
Left with a handful of evil, Jean opts for the simple expedient of shifting herself rather than the mindscape, flames flaring along her hands in a representation of psychic destruction that's less prosaic than the perfectly serviceable imagery of a paper shredder would be. << It's coming down in size nicely. I'm looking forward to her being able to tell us what it -was-. >>
Kelsey starts trembling when Emma begins using brute force, the panic in that mess of tangles rising and causing panic in Kelsey's own healthy brain. Her breathing quickens, taking in rapid, deep breaths that put her close to hyperventilating.
Emma pulls out a diamond envelope opener, since we're stuck on dramatic office supplies. She picks at the ball, preferring to unroll as much of a single thread as possible at a time rather than slicing and dicing a number of thread. It is slower, but much easier to manage on the tail end. Suddenly, she stiffens and directs her attention elsewhere in Kelsey's mind. "We're nearly there, darling," she soothes, trying to overlay empathic calm over the compulsion's instinct. << If we go further without controlling her, this may drive her to harm herself, >> Emma reports in clear, clipped communication to Jean. << If the ends are manageable, perhaps you could leave them and tend to holding /her/ together. I can make quick work of the core. >>
<< On it. >> is Jean's response, quick and affirmative, and waiting only to dispose of the last threads sticking to her before she pulls mostly out of the mindspace and back into the real world, keeping tabs on Emma's progress, but leaving herself more aware of Kelsey as she slips over to take a seat beside the younger woman, and hold out her hands to take hers. "Breathe with me," she encourages quietly. "This is the compulsion talking, it's not you."
There's some comfort in Jean's support, and Kelsey immediately latches onto her hand. With a large amount of it destroyed, Kelsey's ability to fight the compulsions in her head have gone from nonexistent to moderately able. She tries to calm her breathing to match Jean's, but some part of her mind starts talking. "Ye're ruining it." Her voice is low, almost rough. There's a visible struggle going on within the woman. "Keep going," she finally manages.
Emma waits until Kelsey's control reasserts itself, then covers the core with a shield that shimmers faintly on the mindscape. Freezing indeed. Whatever it is that is left inside batters in a sudden frenzy as it is cut off from the support of Kelsey's own mind, and slowly starves, withering away to lifelessness.
There's an audible sigh from Jean as the lingering shred of compulsion is trapped and severed, a whooshing noise as tension downregulates, and her grip on Kelsey's hand becomes less of a cling and more of a support. Her free hand goes to see about finding a sugary drink to press on Emma once she's done freezing. "How do you feel?"
There's a tightness in Kelsey's body as the last of the compulsion dies inside her brain, an anxious waiting more than any sort of pain. For the first time since shooting her teammates, she relaxes, opens her eyes. "Different," she says. "Better."
Emma extracts herself somewhat more gingerly than she had entered. She opens her eyes, lashes sticking together for a second, and sits back in her chair to dangle limply. Limply, but elegantly, of course. "That was nasty," she observes breathlessly.
"I really," says Jean, offering over a glass of juice once she frees her hand from Kelsey, "-Really- hate that thing." Not having taken the endgame, she is marginally less limp than Emma, but a bone deep case of the shakes despite her turtleneck speaks to crashed blood sugar and a long fight -- her own glass of juice is not far behind. "Can you tell us what happened now, Kelsey?" she quizzes, opting for diagnostic techniques that only involve listening and thinking.
Kelsey takes a long drink of the juice, her own shakes starting to subside. "I was in the mine," she begins, searching through the new memories she's been given, "looking for Kitty with the others. An' I just...got the urge to leave down this passage. Jeff was there, an'...I think Sid." The corners of her eyes crease as her brow dips down, the memories almost confusing. "I didnae want tae leave when I found him. He grabbed me, started diggin' in my head." She closes her eyes, trying to sort it. "I was supposed to mess up the mission. Any way how."
Emma looks at Jean and raises her eyebrows. Her glass is half gone, so that when she lifts her hand to examine her nails, it hardly trembles. "He is a formidable telepathic enemy."
Jean curls herself around her juice once she retakes her seat, settled sideways and with her legs drawn up to rest the glass on her knees. "And more than capable of subtlety while exercising that power," she agrees with Emma. (Outside, pigs begin to fly.) "Anyone among your fellow agents here who's familiar with him -- and there are at least two I can think of -- will understand very well that your actions weren't your own."
Kelsey curls her knees up to her chest, sipping juice as she goes through her memories, trying to figure out what parts of her behavior were abnormal. "I dinnae think the people I really screwed over are the ones who're familiar with him," she says.
Emma sets her empty glass on the floor by her feet and rises, mostly steadily. She presses fingers against her temple and exhales a thin breath. "Tell them to talk to the one who are don't snivel about it," she says waspishly. No one ever said Emma was good for sympathy. She is, however, good at practical. She crosses to the door without a further word, comforting or otherwise.
"I would have phrased that a little more delicately," says Jean dryly from over her juice, in the wake of Emma exits. "But the core advice is sound -- even if I think you're entitled to snivel a bit if you damned well want to. Explain what happened, and if they have questions or don't believe you, Bahir al-Razi and Tom Sikorski will know what they're talking about." She lingers where Emma doesn't, possessed of ties to Kelsey that Emma lacks to keep her lingering impractically in the face of a growing headache.
Jean and Emma remove Kelsey's compulsion using psychic office supplies.
X-Men: Movieverse 3 - Wednesday, June 03, 2009, 11:24 PM
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=XF= Administration - Chemekata Military Base
The glass and metal lobby of the building carries the 'Titan Enterprises' charade through in brushed aluminum letters set high on the wall behind the main desk. The name disappears, however, as one moves deeper into the building. The security is high, and the presence of armed guards is unmistakable.
The subfloors are heavily shielded from possibly electromagnetic attack, and it is there that communications and intelligence are centered. The hum of happy server farms is impossible to escape. The upper levels are given over to offices, meeting spaces, and classrooms. The computers are cutting edge, their screens are large, and furnishings are terrifically ergonomic.
[This room is set watchable. Use alias XFAdministration to watch here.]
(Exits : [O]ut, [M]eeting [R]oom, [C]lassroom, and [C]omputer [L]ab )
One benefit to rather hotel-feeling guest apartments is that they come with little hotel-feeling baskets of tea and coffee, even if there's a lack of maid service and no mints on the pillows. Curled up on a couch that actually feels comfortable after a long day, if not before, Jean's got the television on and turned to some medical-historical show featuring both explosions and surgery as she waits for her room's electric kettle to boil. A small pill bottle, now empty, sits on a flat surface in the kitchenette as a testament to a long past couple of days indeed.
The knock on the door isn't quite hesitant, but it isn't too loud, either. Kitty obviously doesn't want to disturb the person on the other side if she's asleep or worn out, knowing how much she's been kept busy. A plate of brownies is rested on her hip, waiting to be offered in peace. She also makes a conscious effort to announce her presence mentally as best as possible to Jean, if she chooses not to get up to answer the door.
The rustling of someone moving about takes long enough to suggest careful uncurling of a spine that's just starting to get old enough to complain about hours-long car trips followed by more hours-long car trips, followed by marathon brain-poking sessions. Thus, it's also paired with an << Evening, you. >> of mental greeting, sounding tired but welcoming before Jean can get herself over to the apartment door to let Kitty in and greet her more conventionally. "You're looking like you've gotten some sleep," she assesses.
"Some," Kitty replies with a soft smile, plate of brownies held out to Jean. Perhaps she's putting it between them for a reason, as the next words out of her mouth are a teasing, "You look like hell. I take it you haven't been getting enough?" Though the tone is teasing, there's a flash of worry for the headmistress wearing herself out so much.
"Brownies? I love you," says Jean with a laughing sigh at the offer of brownies, and is already her first bite into one by the time the teasing hits, earning Kitty a mock-glower for her timing as she chews, swallows, and waves towards the small living area, where the couch awaits and, beyond it, the kettle has boiled. "Oh, sleep is fine," she assures. "It's more doing this many deep brain scans this quickly, on this many people I know nothing about... or -knew- nothing about, anyways. Tea?"
Kitty slides past Jean to go about finding the mugs in the guest kitchen. "Yes, please. If you want to sit down, I can make it for you." The mugs are out in plain site, near the coffee and tea basket. She flips two of them over as she shoots Jean a glance. "You finding out a lot about people, Jean? I thought you telepaths were too polite to do that sort of thing." She quirks an eyebrow at her playfully challenging.
"With something like this, it's impossible not to get bits and pieces," Jean explains, and disappears the brownie in a couple more bites suited more to voracious grasshoppers than dignified if fatigued telepaths. "Politeness comes into play in not passing it on... even if I -really- wish that I could, sometimes."
"Oh?" That draws Kitty's full attention for a moment as she inquires, "Anything interesting in my teammates' heads? I'm guessing they all secret love the color pink and want hugs." She grins at that as she drops tea bags in the mugs before pouring the hot water over it.
"Yes. And your crustiest ones sneak out every Saturday morning at five to care for orphaned puppies." Jean confirms, sober as the grave, before she snitches another brownie and then waves Kitty over to come help eat them.
Kitty hands over one of the steaming tea mugs before grabbing a brownie for herself. "It should shock me more, but I always knew they all had a secret soft spot." She flops onto the couch, nibbling on the corner of her brownie as she tucks her legs underneath her. "Are you telepaths almost done with the brain scans?"
"Just about... we cleared out Kelsey's mind of a particularly nasty compulsion earlier today," Jean shares, after a moment's considering defines Kitty as both leadership on the recent mission and Kelsey's school days friend and thus share-able with. "Bad enough that it took Emma and I together to get it... which is why the general wrecked look," she explains, with a crook of a grin in the wake of success. "So you picked a good night to get a visit in -- how are things?"
"They're fine," is the casual reply from Kitty. She takes a bite so as not to have to answer anything more just yet. The chewing gives her time to think. She finally says, "A little complicated, personally. I like the job, though. It makes me feel useful again, when it's not stressing me the hell out, and when we're not dealing with things way above our capabilities."
"Personal complications, already?" Jean wonders, eyebrows arching and a twinkle coming to tired green eyes as she nibbles at the brownie some more. "Although there is Alex Summers out there."
"He certainly makes things complicated enough," Kitty mutters at her brownie. She brushes at the crumbs on her shirt with a guilty duck of her head. "I don't know how I collected them so quickly. Maybe someone placed a magnet on me when I didn't see it."
"Anything non-classified?" Jean wonders, casting a glance over towards the quasi-tea to check its progress towards drinkability. In a cipher of another sort lies the message: Want to talk about it?
There's a long pause before Kitty does talk about it. She starts with the easiest, to her. "Alex kind of... Well, he made it clear that he had feelings for me, when we were out in Colorado." She picks at a piece of brownie, crumbling it between her thumb and pointer finger.
"Oooooh, Summers timing at work there," Jean winces, if not without a certain quality of fondness for the breed. She shakes her head slightly, and pinches the bridge of her nose. "Of course, sometimes it works out..."
"It wouldn't," Kitty says with only a little hesitation. "Even if the feelings weren't a product of the stress, it's not like I can exactly return them." There's a frown at the treat in her hand. It's obviously its fault.
"No spark?" Jean wonders, her own brownie no longer around to blame. She sucks lightly at one knuckle, chasing down traces of chocolate crumbs. "Poor Alex... but it really -would- feel too soon, after breaking it off with Piotr and heading right into something with someone who may be going back to the other side ofthe continent."
"Yeah, that," Kitty agrees noncommittally. She shrugs and points out to the older woman, "But, Piotr's the one who broke it off with me. I can't exactly pine for him forever." The words come out sounding a bit defensive.
Defensive is interesting. Defensive even gets a raise out of Jean's brain, languishing limply behind her mental barriers as it is. "Ah," she speculates. "A more active sort of personal complication, then?"
There's a guilty look, much as a teacher would get when finding a student cheating on a test. Kitty hasn't quite grown out of thinking of Jean as a teacher, but she does admit, "You wouldn't approve. It's just... No one approves." All two people who've implied it. She shrugs with forced casualness.
"You do realize that I've currently got a probably-hundred-and-thirty year old man waiting to drag me off to bed, or possibly a convenient wall, when I get myself back to Westchester, right?" Jean, apparently, has decided that Kitty is well and truly past being a student now. She smirks slightly, and rises to see about the tea. "There's not much room for me to disapprove of other people's complications, so long as they're legal."
"I don't know what illegal complication you'd think I'd get into, Jean," Kitty replies dryly, watching her move across the room. She waits for a second, before saying, "Wisdom and I like each other, and we're seeing each other. I think you met him, though it was hectic the day you arrived." Her brownie gets suddenly very interesting as she waits to the older woman to absorb the information.
Jean's first words are -not- 'That paranoid bastard?'. After all, the circumstances they met in made a certain amount of sense for paranoia happening. They are not 'I can confirm he likes you because I saw it in his head' either. Her first words are a little delayed as a result, and come after she's passed a cup of tea over to the brownie-gazing Kitty. "He seems very professional."
The cup is accepted gratefully with a smile towards Jean. Kitty blows a breath of air across it, pausing to input. "Yes, he is." There's more attempts to cool off the tea. "He's... different. Well, he does remind me a /bit/ of Logan."
"A generic model that has its strengths as well as its defects," Jean murmurs, adding an excessive amount of sugar to her tea before stirring it. "Although I admit to having a fondness for it... how so?"
"He has that hidden soft spot that you can only see if you let yourself get pricked enough," Kitty replies with an amused, inward grin. She takes a sip of the tea finally. "It's good."
"Tea, I can make," Jean confirms. (It is, as is well documented, about the -only- thing she can make that isn't sandwiches or science.) She repairs to her own mug of it, tasting the barely-dissolved sugar on her tongue and closing her eyes as if envisioning the glucose hitting her bloodstream and racing straight to her brain. Opening them again, she does warn that "It's a gift, that... but be careful. I won't say it's not worth it to try, but just be careful."
Kitty nods thoughtfully, peering at jean over the tea. "I will be, Jean." The topic feels a bit uncomfortable which is obvious in her fingernail tapping against her cup. She changes the subject, relaxing into more neutral topics. "So, tell me about Xavier's. How's everything going?"
"Well, as always, the pressing need to have their kids taught in a safe space has overruled parents' fears over the kidnappings by those Pied Piper people," Jean answers. "We're honestly going to have to start thinking about opening satellite schools in a few years, if demand keeps outstripping supply like this... the food bills would make you faint, and as for the hot water..." In a blend of economics, gossip, smidgens of politics, dashes of hilarity and occasional moments of pensive reflection, the news is shared as the tea disappears.
Kitty gets to have her first Grownup Girl Talk with Jean. She's just lucky Storm wasn't there too.