(no subject)
The upper reaches of the Hellfire Club are brightly lit--halls and rooms alike, and especially in the White Queen's Office. Emma paces, and around her is the evidence of a night interrupted. Heels by the desk, earrings and necklace coiled in a pile on top. A jeweled clip is dropped on a chair, and she's wearing a silk shift dress that ripples in liquid movements as she walks. Telepathy has been kept on wide spread receiving, information exchanging at the speed of thought.
Damp and pale, with a wide split at his shoulder that exposes a faint sheen of metal plating beneath the canvasy black of his overcoat, Erik provides nothing in the way of telepathic information. A dampener gleams harsh at his ear by the time he throws open Emma's door, leaving it at an awkward angle on one remaining hinge ahead of his advance. The absence of thought aside, his expression reads of poorly contained fury, and the scent of wet concrete and superheated metal clings acrid in his wake.
Erik is angry. That much is obvious.
So let me back up a few steps and give a quick background for those who weren’t around when this went down a few months ago. Angered by the reveal of sentinel technology designed specifically to thwart mutants, Erik decided that it would be weak and foolish to allow human authority that success unchallenged. He wanted to destroy them. Not over the course of months or years - but immediately, he wanted to go out and blow one up to make it clear that they were not invincible and that he did not intend to lie down and let men in giant plastic suits force him or any other mutant into ANYTHING. The Inner Circle had plans of their own to investigate and dig and blah blah blah. Erik was not interested. For him, this was a situation that sort of summarized everything about Hellfire (I will use HF and InCi interchangeably here because that is what I do, sorry) that he feels is ignorant and backwards. When someone fires a tank at you, you don’t take the tank to court or start digging in hopes of eventually burrowing far enough that the tank falls into a hole. You get a bigger tank and blow the evil tank the fuck up.
Sentinel technology is not a legal restriction, it is war. So, having assumed for SOME REASON that the InCi would not be enthusiastic about marching on the police department to provoke a sentinel out so that it might be destroyed, Erik packed up a new (and somewhat stupid) Pawn he knew would be thrilled to have an opportunity to destroy things and set off to make some JUSTICE. They got there, made trouble, started fighting a sentinel and cops, and in the midst of losing - pop! Illyana appeared with Bahir on Adel’s orders, and together they effectively shunted Erik out of the fight and back to the club against his will.
So Erik has just gotten back, and he is pissed. PISSED. It was raining and he was shot at, so he looks a mess, but he wants to knock heads RIGHT NOW.
The overcoat is something I’ve played for two or three years now in place of the uniform on non-major missions. It is basically a very thick, stiff black overcoat made out of a canvasy, slash-resistant material with a series of metal scutes or plates worked in between the canvas layers. It is typically enough to repel plastic and ceramic bullets or darts, but it’s not infallible, and the metal plates don’t cover everywhere. Mostly though, I just like posing it. He’s probably about due for a uniformed appearance, but on a game like XMM, it’s kind of hard to find a reason to put him in it. You know?
He throws the doors open hard enough to break them. Lulz. SORRY. I do not get to play him furious that often. I do take some joy in it.
Hardly warned of Illyana's return a moment before he enters, Emma is caught off guard. She spins on a toe and catches herself with a stumble. She sinks quickly into a more defensive stance however, measuring the expression written into the craggy lines of his face against her own cold burning anger. He wins. Emma doesn't admit defeat easily though. "Just what the /hell/ were you thinking?" she snaps.
"I was going to /destroy it/." Low voice hushed quiet within the open confine of her office, Erik stops only briefly past the door before turning to move more directly for her. "All of your secret investigations, your spying, your /pressure/. This is the outcome."
Emma backs up, weaving around a couch to put it between them without taking her eyes off him. "/Destroy/ it? And then what, Erik? They build another? They improve upon it? They come looking for you?" she hisses, matching tone for tone. "And then? You lead them right back to us? This is the outsome, but not of /our/ work. It's the outcome of /your/ actions. /Your/ violence. Your /statements/. Like tonight."
"Retrieve the pieces. Study them, while they build another. We could use that knowledge to destroy the next one." Contempt is clear in the glaciatic steel of his glare when she weaves behind the couch, and her desk twists against its metal root, screeching and screaming against itself. "I am not content to lie here and sip tea while you mastermind your own political career."
Erik is a confident dude when he is angry, and an aggressive one. Where he might have intended to rage at her from afar, her snapping at him drives him up into her face immediately. When he’s this angry (not that frequently, fortunately, though Emma has seen this side of him rather a lot), as we’ll see later, arguments do not tend to merely stay arguments. He gets very physical very quickly, and does not have any compunctions about seriously hurting people who have crossed him. Emma is enough of a force to be reckoned with that he doesn’t act out immediately against her, but - again, more on this later - had she tried anything to try to get the dampener off of him, he would have put her into a coma. Don’t poke the bear. Don’t poke the bear unless you have a really big stick that will definitely make him go to sleep or kill him and make sure are far far away when he wakes up and figures it out.
I appreciate it a lot from an OOC standpoint that she physically backs away like aaah even if she’s standing up against him at the same time. There are few things in the world of supervillainy more frustrating than someone that you should kill because of they way they are acting but can’t because that would be mean. That much of a retreat is enough to signal to him that this isn’t her trying to take him on because she wants to.
Did I mention that he’s pissed? He’s really pissed. In lue of taking it out on Emma, who isn’t 100% the guilty party here, he has to tear at something. So the desk suffers. This is an ugly side of Erik, but again, it’s fun to play. Raaaaaaaage.
"And retrieving the pieces /quietly/ isn't sufficient?" Emma retorts with contempt equal to his own. "This has /nothing/ to do with me, Erik, nor with sipping tea. It has /everything/ to do with doing things /intelligently/." She draws herself up straight and narrows her eyes in cool defiance. "You should have trusted us."
This seems like an excellent time for Mr. Trust Violator himself to knock on the door, don't you think? Adel rat-a-tats, and then steps in. He glances only briefly toward Emma. The majority of his attention is on Magneto.
Skepticism narrows in around colder anger, and Erik leaves the desk twisted upward at a painful angle to step closer to the couch that separates him from Emma. "My mind has been open to your influence for months, and I have said nothing. Do you really think me so ignorant that I would be unaware of your particular /touch/ that morning on the couch? More and more you've taken advantage of my /trust/, and now this. I would be well within my rights..." And then there is Adel. Leonine features snap back to the door, and fury rekindles itself in full.
OH LOOKIE WHO IT IS. If Emma is not 100% to blame, by Erik’s logic, Adel is. Not only did Adel give the order to stop him, but Adel is an underling. Adel is a second in command who took it upon himself to veto his King. He is also a second in command who Erik never wanted because he didn’t trust him not to singly serve Emma’s idea of what the Circle needed to be and OH LOOK HERE HE IS REAFFIRMING THAT. On a more personal level, Magneto is Magneto, and he does not like being forced to do anything. Least of all by some uppity telepath who gets his jollies licking Emma’s butt. Furthermore, because Adel is ranked like he is, and as close to Emma as he is, the Circle is already balanced in his favor. It is 2 against 1, if Percy is a neutral party, which very nearly makes Adel more of a real “King” than Erik is. The fact that he can get away with something like this with Emma apparently agreeing affirms that. So there are sort of layers upon layers of indignity and rage, here.
Taking a slight step back, trust is a big deal with Erik. He is an old, paranoid warrior who has lived through a lot of people trying to kill him, and he does not like telepaths. It was a significant move on his part that he stopped wearing dampeners around the club. That was his silent agreement to put himself at a disadvantage before them. It wasn’t so that they could actually use it against him - it was so that they could feel some security in the knowledge that they could if they were afraid that he might go off the deep end and decide to kill them all or something. It might be a stretch to say that he felt like he was lying his life down before them, but he certainly felt like he gave them the keys to his brain to a bunch of self-interested yuppies under the understanding that they would keep them just in case but would not ever actually use them for anything outside of him going crazy and trying to kill Emma or something.
I like that he comes in and he sort of knooows that there is badness going on and needs to keep his eyes open. Adel is cautious. And yet, as he will prove in a few moments, entirely not.
The fact that Erik and Emma DID IT OMG has been awkward since it happened. She teased him, he doesn’t like being teased. He didn’t force her to sleep with him, but he didn’t exactly ask politely, either, and she used telepathy to tip things in her favor. Erik notices these things. The incident made him uncomfortable, not only because he knew she was doing things with his brain that he might not be entirely okay with in a setting where he was not completely horny and slightly deranged, but because it was a dark move to make on his part. He is not a rapist, but there is a part of his personality that was pumped up through the AU plot that is basically solid Id. There is no good in it and it drives him to do things that his better half tends to regret. Knowing that, it is risky to throw that card in her face, but he is mad and perhaps a little irrational, so he tries it anyway as an example of, “THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I TRUST YOU.”
Emma flicks a glance toward Adel, then scowls and narrows her eyes. She pitches her voice low to carry and draw Erik's attention back to her. "You didn't complain about my 'touch' at the time." << His inhibitor. If he does anything, we have to get that off him. >> "I've taken advantage of nothing." She feigns a smooth, steel tipped indifference. "Unless you /really/ want it spread that I took 'advantage' of /you/?"
Silent long enough for his gaze to find the curve of the dampener at Erik's ear, Adel's lips twist slightly toward a crooked grimace before his expression smooths again. He inclines his head. "Dr. Lensherr." His hands fold at the small of his back. "Ms. Frost," he adds in afterthought. << If he does anything, we'll never get it off him quickly enough. Cut the sex shit. This isn't the time, >> he answers in the pause before his next words. "I apologize for the fact that involved the pawns, Dr. Lensherr." He sounds so sober, but a whisper of the usual indolence winds in his next question: "How far have we progressed in the argument about what happened?"
Magneto bristles at Emma's retort, hollowed jaw swinging back around with eyes stark against the fast fraying influence of sanity. An alien chorus, product of magnetism's pulse through the walls, echoes through the office, and for a few sparse seconds, he does not move or speak. Calculating.
Emma looks up warily at the sound, then returns her attention back to Erik, but answers Adel. "No farther than who is to blame for the armor's existence." She lifts a brow. "You are upset we intervened. We are upset you decided upon a /quite/ public course of action without consulting us. Is that the gist?"
Yeah, see. Calling him on his, “The sex was your fault,” shit only serves to sort of driiiive him over the edge. That is a good call on Adel’s part. Were Adel anyone else, or had someone else other than Adel given the original order, his calm in the face of Erik’s increasingly animalistic rage might be of some help. Unfortunately, the fact that he is both Adel and the man who disrupted the chain of command to spit in Erik’s face make him a very bad person to be in the position he is in. OOCLY HIS EFFORT IS APPRECIATED. ICly Erik has moved on from arguing to calculating whether or not he needs to eliminate one of them to keep the numbers in his favor.
The secondary telepathic conversation going on here kind of adds an interesting level to what’s going on, and it amuses me that Adel is the more reasonable of the two even as he is being thrown through a wall later on. The more responsible tone of his telepathic communication leads me to think that he’s provoking Erik intentionally out loud, but I do not know.
"Actually, I'm upset that he took a probably stupid and likely suicidal course of action because of a moment's fury, rather than getting upset that he didn't mention he'd be going out to blow things up," Adel corrects. He leans his shoulder up against the door, glancing briefly between the silent Magneto and talkative Frost. Rock and a hard place? "A moment's satisfaction: is it really worth the price to your cause," he asks, gaze largely on Magneto but not avoiding a brief chide in Emma's direction, "or /is/ your only cause your satisfaction?"
Outwardly deaf to their individual opinions of what, precisely, is what, Erik is slow to furrow his brow. His eyes flicker aside to Adel and stay there. The wall across the wall explodes outward, vomiting drywall into Emma's office beneath a snarl of black iron that binds itself around Adel's chest and neck. An arm, a leg, over his eyes, it is smotheringly hot.
"Erik!" Emma startles at the explosion, catches herself, then curls her fists at her side. "Release him, Erik. Your argument is with /me/," she growls in a low, warning tone, despite the fact she is fully aware of how inequitable their power levels are at the moment.
On the list of things not to tell Magneto when he is furious about something, ‘You did something bad and put mutants in a bad place for your personal satisfaction and desire for revenge,’ is probably near the top. He is already very, very unhappy with Adel. That he has the gall, virtually unprotected, to accuse Erik of selfish motivation when he very much acted in this case because he is MAGNETO and he thought it was the most pragmatic and necessary course of action for mutants at risk of death is like. Well. If the switch was sort of wavering dangerously near the flipping point, that is where it flips.
There are some people he will take shit off of. Adel is not one of them. Particularly not in a situation where he is already raging. Fortunately I guess, this is a pretty rare occurance, but Erik handles Adel here as he would anyone he is no longer interested in tolerating, with little care for whether or not he lives or dies because of it. He wants him to be afraid, he wants him to hurt, and he wants him utterly at his mercy. He wants him blind and suffocating and in danger of a slow, painful, smothering death. That is Erik at his worst. CONGRATS ADEL YOU WIN THE PRIZE.
When one steps into an office with a /very/ cranky Magneto, one really expects such a thing: Adel flinches (how not?) but doesn't seem exactly surprised. Uncomfortable? Surely. Does his breath quicken? Of course. But beyond a faint grunt, he doesn't cry out. "Point remains," he says, a trifle breathless. He gives Emma an exasperated glance, adding an additional: "Actually, I think it's with me." He wriggles. Futilely.
Non-responsive past an irritable glance at Emma's assertion, Erik turns his head to follow the iron's progress around his own Bishop. Wriggling gives the metal cocoon room to bind more securely, restricting breath, and Adel is lifted into the air. "Your amiable relationship with Mystique is finally beginning to make sense."
<< Shut /up/, darling. >> Emma edges out from behind the couch walking telepathic fingers with less care up Erik's metaphorical leg, twining upwards until they slither around the cool field created by the device at his ear. She slides a finger into one of the fields cracks and starts to work at widening it.
His argument is with both of them, obviously, but Adel is the bigger nuisance, the bigger offender, and the lesser threat. If Emma takes too many wrong steps, he could well wrap her up and fling her out after him. For the record, the dampener Erik was wearing at the time was one of the models that does not have cracks. There are not many of them, but he…made them, so I felt safe in assuming that he was not stupid enough to march in there with a model he knew Emma would be capable of penetrating. I made no OOC correction in scene because it flustered me that I’d been put in a position where - if I did say anything - it might look like I wasn’t interested in any kind of resistance from an OOC standpoint. If she had actually penetrated and tried to mess with him, I likely would have said something. As things are currently, I think it adds some tension to the log so that is good, but. FOR THE RECORD. Erik is old. He is uber. He isn’t stupid. He wouldn’t be wearing armor with holes in it into a fight where he might have people wanting to kill him.
It is tricky. On one side, I am really, really self-conscious about not godmoding at people. On the other side, Erik Lensherr is one of the baddest asses in all the land and it is canonically fact that if you screw with him, he is going to fuck you up and there may not be very much you can do about it. That is not to say there AREN’T ways to stop him. Something as simple as a plastic gun pointed at his head could have had him out of this office fairly effectively, even if it would have made him mad. I can promise that trying to telepathically manipulate him out of it would have made him way more furious anyway!
Back to ADEL, the Mystique remark is spawned from the fact that Mystique made a habit of accusing Erik of acting for his own benefit when he wasn’t. Seriously, there are few things that make him madder. As I think he tells Adel in a bit, he’s sacrificed everything that humanity didn’t straight up take from him to fight the battles he fights, and outside of maybe Bahir and the occasional ‘thnx for saving the world’ he doesn’t exactly see much asspattery from it. He doesn’t do anything for asspats, though. He does it because he thinks it’s right, and the least the people he fights for could do is not accuse him of doing it for the lulz. The success of their lives and the lives of their children is his life. HONESTLY, ADEL.
Even so, he’s giving him a chance, here. To beg. Or to dig his own grave. Emma seems to catch wise to this! Yay! Also he’s squeezing him like a stress ball because he wants to see him in pain, but.
"She's quite nice. Very blue," Adel says, voice an unsteady harshness through the latest flippancy before he reserves air for important things like ... breathing. << For fuck's sake, Emma. Don't unless you have to. >>
Magneto's breathing is likewise loud; hoarse. Forced. He does not reply immediately, squeezing still harder, until his own jaw creaks against the pressure mounting there, and eyes eyes blaze from Adel back to Emma. "How is this any different?" Her intrusion passes unnoticed, in the meanwhile, though noxious steam vents through the crack, blisteringly cold.
<< I'm /not/ going to let him kill you to in a /bluster/. >> Telepathic finger form a faint sheen over then as they dig deeper into a crevice, guided by markers placed rather recently. "Different than /what/?" she grinds out, taking another step.
“How is this any different?” He is actually trying to calm down and make a point about telepathy, here, to explain why he is so angry. The way it renders people utterly powerless. The way it places you at someone’s mercy. Someone who you may not trust not to crush you out of existence. One of his long-running frustrations is that telepaths never seem to understand why he hates them so much. The answer is simply that Erik very much values his freedom. If that includes the freedom to get himself killed in a stupid way, than so be it. Had this part of the conversation proceeded in a more kiss-assy and/or understanding fashion, the scene likely would have gone differently.
<< Then watch for the impulse, and if it comes, act. If not, /don't/, Emma. >> Frustration sears along the connection of Adel's silent words, the telepathic conveyed much more quickly than the spoken. For that, each words is carefully parceled with breath a precious commodity: "What's more important? Your pride, or our species?"
"/I do not act upon my pride,/" Erik finally bellows, and Adel is flung bodily from the room, across the hall, and through the ragged hole he recently punched in his own office. "You are all the same. I should have known better than to think otherwise."
<< I have to be in position to /do/ so, Adel. I can't breach the dampner in one fell swoop. >> Concern and anger dance in concert with his frustration, along with the unarticulated assurance that she is not /quite/ so irrational. Just yet. Emma inhales a sharp, hissing breath at the fling, and something solidifies deep inside her own mind. She sinks both hands into the fissure and braces herself, poise to pour raw power through it to the mind that swirls beneath in a gray and purple miasma. "Enough, Erik. What is it you /want/? The pieces? We'll get them. If that /is/ what this about." A slender tendril of power dives through the levels, seeking out the first receptive mind and pouring instructions in.
SWITCH FLIPPED. SWITCH IS BROKEN OFF. SWITCH IN DANGER OF BLOWING UP AND LEVELING THE CLUBHOUSE. I have already talked about this so I will merely reiterate: There are few things Erik resents more in the world than being accused of having selfish motivations. How often does he yell at people? This is the angriest he’s been and the most betrayed he’s felt in a long time. Particularly in that he knew all along that Adel and Emma thought the wost of him and would always act accordingly. I must confess I don’t know if Adel just thinks he’s so right and justified that he doesn’t care that he is incurring the wrath of Magnetosaurus or if he is deliberately attempting to draw Erik’s ire away from Emma to protect her. Maybe it is something else! I AM CURIOUS; MY FRIENDS CALL ME WHISKERS.
P.S. Don’t get mad but there is no fissure. FFFFFF. I'M SORRY BUT MY CHARACTER IS A GENIUS OK.
Crash. Smash. Et cetera. Adel lands with a certain amount of /pain/, and also some groaning. His first act is to reach out to Emma to make certain she isn't doing anything UNWISE: << Don't, >> he says, dazed and in pain but not unconscious. Ow. << Not yet. >> After another fuzzy second he adds, << --although if you want to get Triage, I wouldn't mind. >>
"This is about forcibly subverting my authority and then assuming..." Erik breaks off, frustration written deep into the lines and shadows around his face. "I've given over my entire life to this cause. I have no pride. I have been stripped of it. Caged here, trying to be agreeable."
"Then perhaps we can start working /together/ for that cause. I don't believe our goals are that disimaliar." Another step, and she is within reach. Un protected by technology or furniture. "We stop subverting your authority, and you stop subverting our security..." << They are on their way, love. Stay still. >>
One last great flounce later, Erik is drained. Hot fires burn through their fuel quickly. It has become thickly apparently to him that he and the Circle are never going to understand each other, and it isn’t even worth trying to explain things to them. To him, they are dealing with such obvious insults and lines of morality that doesn’t think he should have to. If they can’t comprehend where they’ve gone wrong here, then they are not worth it. Shortly after this, he began making preparations to leave. Packing his belongings, etc. After he was arrested, there would not have been much clean up for the Circle to do in his wake, because he’d already done most of it.
What he says is honest. Sitting in a mansion all the time trying to behave has not suited him well, and after all this time, the only concession he’s felt the Circle made to his preferred style was helping him to release Ellen. Speaking of whom.
Stay still? /That/ Adel is not having a problem with. Resigned agreement whispers through her thoughts. Yeah. He's still.
Magneto says nothing. He eyes Emma for a moment, then looks back to the hallway, silver hair still dark with the earlier rain. A chunk of wall thuds down onto the floor. "Where is Ellen?"
"Floor down. You might have woken her. I'm building her a lab in the basement." Emma might be babbling a little, hanging onto the fissure with invisible hands, but not yet having expended the energy to enter.
Magneto studies the debris on the floor in further silence, expression fallen into a distant blank. Then he turns away from Emma in full, and starts for the broken door.
Emma stumbles after a step as if drawn by the intangible ties she still holds in his mind. She blinks, then narrows her eyes in anger, allowing it to froth to the fore for a moment before settling it with a look at the hole (and Adel) in her wall. Feet sound in the distance, clattering up stairs. She holds her tongue. GOOD EMMA.
Ignorant of any last minute temptation, Erik rounds the corner and hustles down the stairs past pawns headed in the opposite direction.
His instinct is to make sure that they haven’t done anything to Ellen in the short time they were fighting. In the way of trying to use her as leverage, or whatever else. On a more basic level, he wants to take someone who does have some comprehension and go make camp somewhere else, where he isn’t depending upon the Circle for anything. Hole up, do a damage assessment, and decide what he is going to do. Unfortunately, he was…sort of arrested before he could do any of that. Really, though, it was probably fortunate because he was horribly depressed and I was depressed and blah blah blah blah.
THAT IS THE END. I know I didn’t actually write much about Adel specifically because there was a lot going on so if you want elaboration ASK STUFF YO.