(no subject)
From Valkyrie's paper journal:
It is strange, perhaps, to find such reassurance in youth. Do you look for yourself in the young, as you age? Actually if I had found more of myself in him, I suspect it would have been disturbing. One does not wish to examine one's reflection too closely, after all.
I feel some of my old dead optimism creeping back to life.
Perhaps being an insular creature is not as necessary as I've made it out to be. It warrants consideration.
OOC: Haha! I made Pyro scene-set *and* pose out! I'm such a bitch.
<> Large Cave
This cavern is huge, mostly hollowed out by thousands of years of water erosion but modified through architectural efforts by various members of the Brotherhood. Thin waterfalls bathe the walls and empty themselves in the large lake that surrounds a wide platform of stone. Smaller slabs of stone surround the main platform, each a brief hop away from one another. While their surfaces have been smoothed by water exposure, the main platform has been inlaid with metallic tiles that create a courtyard atmosphere. The water that surrounds the area bounces light in all directions, providing limitless illumination with little effort. The sound of lapping water carries well on the echoing interior, but not so much as to drown out the speaker of the moment. At the edge of the main platform furthest from the entrance of the cave, a metallic podium has been set into the rock and elevated on a granite pedestal. There are no seats, but it is safe to say one does not have meetings here for their attendants to get comfortable.
There's a flickering off the cavern walls that would set a will-o-the-wisp to shame, as John--very intent look knitted across his face--stares down at the two small flames, one dancing in each palm. Start slow, start small. He's been staring at them for several minutes, attempting to hold them as steady as possible. The flickering and flaring, though, show only partial success. Concentrate, mate.
Ellen has been exploring the confines of her new home for a little while now; there some physical conditioning in the morning, at which point it became painfully obvious that she will need some defense training from someone in future, and then practice utilizing her mutation to repair minor injuries, most of which she inflicted on herself. Now she's earned both the large meal she bolted to replenish her energy and the downtime to get to know the place. She draws to a halt, proceeding through the cave, as she notes the flickering of firelight on the walls; then she turns to discover the source. Without any particular plan in mind, her quiet steps drift towards him.
It takes a moment before Pyro registers another presence and just then, the concentration snaps and the flames blaze up a moment. He snaps his hands shut, extinguishing the fire and glances up. "G'day," he greets, apparantly not concerned at the distraction. "Ellen, right?" he asks after a moment's recollection.
Ellen comes to a halt not far from him and nods once, briskly, as she rests one hand on her hip, the other trailing down her side. "Yes," she replies. "I was just looking around. I didn't mean to disturb you."
"Well," Pyro says, breaking into a slight smirk, "I'm not sure Toxin would agree, but I'm needing a break
anyways. So not disturbing in the slightest. And yeah, not the bigest place, but seem to find a lot of little places to get away. Which is probably a good thing."
Ellen's mouth quirks ever-so-slightly. "Probably. The social events calendar crowd, we don't seem to be," she intones dryly. This suits her absolutely *fine*, by the way; hobnobbing always made her feel faintly sick to her stomach. Ellen frankly sucks at pretending to like people when she doesn't. "Which is not to say a little company isn't welcome now and again," she amends mildly, largely because sharing a cell with nobody for two years has warmed her a little to the prospect of human contact.
"Yeah, mostly just takes a bit to.. figure out where you fit," Pyro shrugs. "Not been here but a few weeks myself. So, you've seen my bit. What do you do? Awful big planning to free you guys, so I'm sure the big'uns are expecting great things. No pressure, or anything," he adds with a wink.
Ellen's composed expression reflects tolerant amusement as she dips her head, favoring Pyro with a slow sweep of the lashes. "I don't expect I'll disappoint," she says. The wryness hasn't faded entirely, although it has receded some into the pleasant calmness that backdrops most of Ellen's speech. "I manipulate living cells. It's not as easy to practically demonstrate as your talents, I fear, unless you're of a mind to grow some extraneous skin."
"Eh, thanks but no," Pyro says, leaning his weight against the rocky wall. "Rather attached to my skin. So living cells being... just people? Or anything?"
"Living organisms," Ellen answers briskly. It seems there's a lot of explaining her powers to be done of late. Not that she objects; it is, after all, a topic on which she can speak with considerable authority. "Although I must confess I have spent most of my time on people. I am most familiar with human anatomy. Occasionally animals ... and I haven't done much with plants since I finished by bachelor's degree." Plenty of sneaky manipulating of plant cells into the correct configuration, the sort of cheating you only do when you are either an extremely immoral person or you just can't stay awake long enough to complete the lab-work yet *again*.
See, and all that John can do is make water boil pretty quickly. Which is fine for chemistry but completely useless in any other subject. "What'd you get pinched for? You locked up for long? Or is that taboo? Just, y'know, walk away or smack me or something if so." Because how can you learn to be bad unless you ask the right sort of questions?
Ellen's mouth twists briefly into a wry grimace before it retreats to cool composure and she dips her head. "Oh, it was in the papers, hardly private. I killed a human." In hindsight, in an extremely stupid way. "My sentence was for life, but I only served two years of it." The "only" fizzles with bitter irony on her tongue.
"Two years?" Pyro's eyes widen. "That's just rotten. Those cells were..." He trails off, tagging a quick, "I'm sure he deserved it anyways. Or she." He could probably sound a little more certain about that, but heck, he's young and still very mallable.
Ellen glances serenely elsewhere for a moment, shrugging her shoulders. "Deserved?" She speaks the word as though it's unfamiliar to her. "I don't know. He *was* bigoted and irritating." She frowns. Despite the aims of the criminal justice system, she never really spent much time wondering if what she did was "wrong" - it was more that she was irritated by the waste of resources, incarcerating genius and forcing it to rot. "I wouldn't say that killing him was the most reasonable impulse I ever acted upon," she allows.
"To hell with reason," John says, rolling his eyes. "Just something else people feed you to make you do what they want. Sure wouldn't be here right now if I'd been following it."
Ellen cants her head slightly to one side, regarding him with a puzzled blink. "To hell with reason," she repeats slowly, as though this, too, is a completely foreign concept. But then, it is apparent that the young man is ... well. Quite young. She remembers grasping for her reason so stridently when she was his age, and spared a moment's horror wondering what she would have done without it, and offers a tiny smile. "That's one way to do it, I suppose. Abandon rationality for passion ..." She lets the sentence trail off. Ellen personally tries to accomodate both reason and passion. It's occasionally impossibly difficult. "I try to keep hold of mine, whatever everyone else's might be. For the most part."
"Passion or just... action," Pyro qualifies. "Mostly just got tired of sitting around hoping things would work out. That's reasonable. Or not reasonable. Depends on who you ask, I guess." One hand absently reaches for the lighter. Apparantly, deep thoughts must be accompanied by special lighter action, and so it flares then dies as he flicks it open and closed. "But mostly realized that things /weren't/ going to happen unless I made them happen."
"Ah," Ellen replies. She nods gravely. "Wisdom enough, I think." She casts a brief glance to the study of her fingernails. Then the cool grey eyes lift to Pyro again, after her dignified pause, warming slightly with something akin to approval. "I have found that while patience is worthwhile, it is only so when it is directed towards a specific." Otherwise, you frustrate yourself into discontented madness.
It's a tribute to his youth that Pyro still grimmaces slightly at the mention of patience. "Guess that'd be right," he comments, however reluctently. "Time and place for it. Good to have purpose now, though. How're you finding it here?" Ah, also the unrelated tangencies of youth.
Ellen spreads her arms wide, an uncommonly expansive gesture. "Look - I'm touching neither wall," she says lightly, before dropping her arms back to her sides. "Even with that notwithstanding, I'm ... glad, I suppose, is the right word. Glad to be here." She smiles, a quick and rueful expression that soon vanishes into the ether. The tall blonde glances around the cave, taking a deep breath of air in through her teeth to release it through her nostrils. There is a quiet earnestness in her voice when she speaks again: "To fight for our people. To feel certain I have a people to fight for. It might sound trite, but ... " She shrugs.
"That'd be right," Pyro nods. "Not trite. Just hard to get out loud. Humans're the ones that want to play rough, so we'll just have to show them we can hold our own. At least those of us who can fight have to. Because those stupid black bands people are wearing sure aren't doing us any favors in the long run."
Ellen wrinkles her nose with evident distaste. "If they weren't taking unacceptable measures, I imagine we wouldn't have to, either." Sometimes it's kind of *fun* knowing you're the one that's caused their incurable illness, but she decides that to say so would be impolitic, or at least, not conducive to the pleasant philosophical discussion.
Pyro's still probably at the point where he would be shocked at that. Not fully brainwa-- er, integrated into the collective yet. "So what did you do before... y'know, prison?"
"I was a litigator," Valkyrie answers, fluffing back her fine blond hair with a sharp gesture from both hands. There is amusement in the grey eyes as they flick back to Pyro's face, for she has concluded that before the Brotherhood, the young man must have been in school. His whole life ahead of him, and he'd devoted it to the betterment of mutant kind. Ellen suspects that an entirely sane person might be appalled that she finds this sweet.
And she'd be entirely right. Though maybe not as sweet if she knew his schooling history. Ah, but that will come to light eventually. Pyro blinks. "Law stuff. Wish we had some good people in there now instead of the dips that passed this MRA thing. Beyond what the govs can do anyways now, but maybe once upon a time."
Ellen's mouth twists into a wry grin. "Couldn't do politics," she says. "Too many skeletons in the closet, you might say." Familial skeletons. Nasty ones. Not to mention how maddeningly ineffective politicians have to be ... Ellen hates compromise. "But government has never been that effective at curtailing bigotry. The tail end of any progressive social movement, that's where you find Congress lurking." A sneer ripples through her bland voice and she shakes her head, slowly.
"Nooooo," John trails off, the sarcasm dripping onto the floor between them. "And here I thought the US government was the epitome of impartiality and democracy."
Ellen looks at him for a moment and then barks a short, sharp laugh: an unusual sound, with a hint to it as if it hasn't been put into practice in a very long time. "Sorry," she says, inclining her head to him as she continues blandly, "Sometimes lawyers have to be mind-numbingly obvious."
Pyro smirks slightly. It's always gratifying to get a laugh, in any form. "Yeah, well I guess soldiering is a bit more interesting and rewarding. At least when you know what you're fighting for," he tags on. "Least you get things done instead of talking all day about how to make things more difficult for folk."
Ellen favors him with a cool blink. "Talking is useful," she opines gently, a touch of correction to the mild tone before she continues, resigned: "but only to a point." She hardly spent all that time becoming polylingual and studying rhetoric to abandon her love of language entirely, it's just that talking is a waste of words when the ears you're aimed at aren't listening. "It's largely a question of getting people to listen to what you have to say. Unfortunately humans aren't interested in what we have to say and I'm not inclined to beg for their ears. This way, we can't be ignored." Or tossed in cells to rot forever and never accomplish anything useful ever again. That one sucks, too.
Pyro's bilinguial! He speaks Australian English and American English. In an Aussie accent. "Yeah, that's what the pacifists just don't see," he agrees. "You can talk and talk, but if they don't want to believe you. Might as well be tongueless."
Ellen nods solemnly. "Might as well," she answers. "At least here we can make a bit of *difference*." She laces her fingers together and cracks her knuckles, as though preparing for a bit of it now - not that there's much she can do on this island, in this cave. Hell, she hasn't even proven her loyalty yet, of which the metal bands that gleam on her wrists and ankles are a constant reminder.
"S'all I want," Pyro nods, snatching the next spout of flame and twirling it around the air like a bit of fiery string. "Just a chance to make a difference."
Ellen offers him a faint smile in response. "Indeed." She dips her thumbs casually into the front pockets of her black drawstring pants, her fingers splayed haphazardly over her lean thighs. "Well," she says, as it seems they have come to a reasonable breaking point in the conversation, and she's beginning to get peckish again - the metabolism needs replenishing after a long day's cellular futzing. "It was good talking to you, Pyro." It's the name she's heard him referenced by, on her campaign of randomly touring the island in between bouts of training, and the playing with fire gives a vital clue as to who you're dealing with even if you never get around to asking his name.
"Same to you, Ellen," Pyro nods. "Or is there something else you'd be going by?"
Ellen has already started to turn away, in the direction from whence she came. She glances back over her shoulder at him to answer, "Valkyrie, if you prefer."
Pyro nods after her. "Well, good to meet you then, Valkyrie," he adds with a quick nod. And then spends the next minute debating whether to head back for something more interesting to do. But eventually responsibility wins over, and with a practiced flick, the dual flames appear in the palms and he resumes his fixed expression attempting to hold them out until exhaustion sets in.
It is strange, perhaps, to find such reassurance in youth. Do you look for yourself in the young, as you age? Actually if I had found more of myself in him, I suspect it would have been disturbing. One does not wish to examine one's reflection too closely, after all.
I feel some of my old dead optimism creeping back to life.
Perhaps being an insular creature is not as necessary as I've made it out to be. It warrants consideration.
OOC: Haha! I made Pyro scene-set *and* pose out! I'm such a bitch.
<> Large Cave
This cavern is huge, mostly hollowed out by thousands of years of water erosion but modified through architectural efforts by various members of the Brotherhood. Thin waterfalls bathe the walls and empty themselves in the large lake that surrounds a wide platform of stone. Smaller slabs of stone surround the main platform, each a brief hop away from one another. While their surfaces have been smoothed by water exposure, the main platform has been inlaid with metallic tiles that create a courtyard atmosphere. The water that surrounds the area bounces light in all directions, providing limitless illumination with little effort. The sound of lapping water carries well on the echoing interior, but not so much as to drown out the speaker of the moment. At the edge of the main platform furthest from the entrance of the cave, a metallic podium has been set into the rock and elevated on a granite pedestal. There are no seats, but it is safe to say one does not have meetings here for their attendants to get comfortable.
There's a flickering off the cavern walls that would set a will-o-the-wisp to shame, as John--very intent look knitted across his face--stares down at the two small flames, one dancing in each palm. Start slow, start small. He's been staring at them for several minutes, attempting to hold them as steady as possible. The flickering and flaring, though, show only partial success. Concentrate, mate.
Ellen has been exploring the confines of her new home for a little while now; there some physical conditioning in the morning, at which point it became painfully obvious that she will need some defense training from someone in future, and then practice utilizing her mutation to repair minor injuries, most of which she inflicted on herself. Now she's earned both the large meal she bolted to replenish her energy and the downtime to get to know the place. She draws to a halt, proceeding through the cave, as she notes the flickering of firelight on the walls; then she turns to discover the source. Without any particular plan in mind, her quiet steps drift towards him.
It takes a moment before Pyro registers another presence and just then, the concentration snaps and the flames blaze up a moment. He snaps his hands shut, extinguishing the fire and glances up. "G'day," he greets, apparantly not concerned at the distraction. "Ellen, right?" he asks after a moment's recollection.
Ellen comes to a halt not far from him and nods once, briskly, as she rests one hand on her hip, the other trailing down her side. "Yes," she replies. "I was just looking around. I didn't mean to disturb you."
"Well," Pyro says, breaking into a slight smirk, "I'm not sure Toxin would agree, but I'm needing a break
anyways. So not disturbing in the slightest. And yeah, not the bigest place, but seem to find a lot of little places to get away. Which is probably a good thing."
Ellen's mouth quirks ever-so-slightly. "Probably. The social events calendar crowd, we don't seem to be," she intones dryly. This suits her absolutely *fine*, by the way; hobnobbing always made her feel faintly sick to her stomach. Ellen frankly sucks at pretending to like people when she doesn't. "Which is not to say a little company isn't welcome now and again," she amends mildly, largely because sharing a cell with nobody for two years has warmed her a little to the prospect of human contact.
"Yeah, mostly just takes a bit to.. figure out where you fit," Pyro shrugs. "Not been here but a few weeks myself. So, you've seen my bit. What do you do? Awful big planning to free you guys, so I'm sure the big'uns are expecting great things. No pressure, or anything," he adds with a wink.
Ellen's composed expression reflects tolerant amusement as she dips her head, favoring Pyro with a slow sweep of the lashes. "I don't expect I'll disappoint," she says. The wryness hasn't faded entirely, although it has receded some into the pleasant calmness that backdrops most of Ellen's speech. "I manipulate living cells. It's not as easy to practically demonstrate as your talents, I fear, unless you're of a mind to grow some extraneous skin."
"Eh, thanks but no," Pyro says, leaning his weight against the rocky wall. "Rather attached to my skin. So living cells being... just people? Or anything?"
"Living organisms," Ellen answers briskly. It seems there's a lot of explaining her powers to be done of late. Not that she objects; it is, after all, a topic on which she can speak with considerable authority. "Although I must confess I have spent most of my time on people. I am most familiar with human anatomy. Occasionally animals ... and I haven't done much with plants since I finished by bachelor's degree." Plenty of sneaky manipulating of plant cells into the correct configuration, the sort of cheating you only do when you are either an extremely immoral person or you just can't stay awake long enough to complete the lab-work yet *again*.
See, and all that John can do is make water boil pretty quickly. Which is fine for chemistry but completely useless in any other subject. "What'd you get pinched for? You locked up for long? Or is that taboo? Just, y'know, walk away or smack me or something if so." Because how can you learn to be bad unless you ask the right sort of questions?
Ellen's mouth twists briefly into a wry grimace before it retreats to cool composure and she dips her head. "Oh, it was in the papers, hardly private. I killed a human." In hindsight, in an extremely stupid way. "My sentence was for life, but I only served two years of it." The "only" fizzles with bitter irony on her tongue.
"Two years?" Pyro's eyes widen. "That's just rotten. Those cells were..." He trails off, tagging a quick, "I'm sure he deserved it anyways. Or she." He could probably sound a little more certain about that, but heck, he's young and still very mallable.
Ellen glances serenely elsewhere for a moment, shrugging her shoulders. "Deserved?" She speaks the word as though it's unfamiliar to her. "I don't know. He *was* bigoted and irritating." She frowns. Despite the aims of the criminal justice system, she never really spent much time wondering if what she did was "wrong" - it was more that she was irritated by the waste of resources, incarcerating genius and forcing it to rot. "I wouldn't say that killing him was the most reasonable impulse I ever acted upon," she allows.
"To hell with reason," John says, rolling his eyes. "Just something else people feed you to make you do what they want. Sure wouldn't be here right now if I'd been following it."
Ellen cants her head slightly to one side, regarding him with a puzzled blink. "To hell with reason," she repeats slowly, as though this, too, is a completely foreign concept. But then, it is apparent that the young man is ... well. Quite young. She remembers grasping for her reason so stridently when she was his age, and spared a moment's horror wondering what she would have done without it, and offers a tiny smile. "That's one way to do it, I suppose. Abandon rationality for passion ..." She lets the sentence trail off. Ellen personally tries to accomodate both reason and passion. It's occasionally impossibly difficult. "I try to keep hold of mine, whatever everyone else's might be. For the most part."
"Passion or just... action," Pyro qualifies. "Mostly just got tired of sitting around hoping things would work out. That's reasonable. Or not reasonable. Depends on who you ask, I guess." One hand absently reaches for the lighter. Apparantly, deep thoughts must be accompanied by special lighter action, and so it flares then dies as he flicks it open and closed. "But mostly realized that things /weren't/ going to happen unless I made them happen."
"Ah," Ellen replies. She nods gravely. "Wisdom enough, I think." She casts a brief glance to the study of her fingernails. Then the cool grey eyes lift to Pyro again, after her dignified pause, warming slightly with something akin to approval. "I have found that while patience is worthwhile, it is only so when it is directed towards a specific." Otherwise, you frustrate yourself into discontented madness.
It's a tribute to his youth that Pyro still grimmaces slightly at the mention of patience. "Guess that'd be right," he comments, however reluctently. "Time and place for it. Good to have purpose now, though. How're you finding it here?" Ah, also the unrelated tangencies of youth.
Ellen spreads her arms wide, an uncommonly expansive gesture. "Look - I'm touching neither wall," she says lightly, before dropping her arms back to her sides. "Even with that notwithstanding, I'm ... glad, I suppose, is the right word. Glad to be here." She smiles, a quick and rueful expression that soon vanishes into the ether. The tall blonde glances around the cave, taking a deep breath of air in through her teeth to release it through her nostrils. There is a quiet earnestness in her voice when she speaks again: "To fight for our people. To feel certain I have a people to fight for. It might sound trite, but ... " She shrugs.
"That'd be right," Pyro nods. "Not trite. Just hard to get out loud. Humans're the ones that want to play rough, so we'll just have to show them we can hold our own. At least those of us who can fight have to. Because those stupid black bands people are wearing sure aren't doing us any favors in the long run."
Ellen wrinkles her nose with evident distaste. "If they weren't taking unacceptable measures, I imagine we wouldn't have to, either." Sometimes it's kind of *fun* knowing you're the one that's caused their incurable illness, but she decides that to say so would be impolitic, or at least, not conducive to the pleasant philosophical discussion.
Pyro's still probably at the point where he would be shocked at that. Not fully brainwa-- er, integrated into the collective yet. "So what did you do before... y'know, prison?"
"I was a litigator," Valkyrie answers, fluffing back her fine blond hair with a sharp gesture from both hands. There is amusement in the grey eyes as they flick back to Pyro's face, for she has concluded that before the Brotherhood, the young man must have been in school. His whole life ahead of him, and he'd devoted it to the betterment of mutant kind. Ellen suspects that an entirely sane person might be appalled that she finds this sweet.
And she'd be entirely right. Though maybe not as sweet if she knew his schooling history. Ah, but that will come to light eventually. Pyro blinks. "Law stuff. Wish we had some good people in there now instead of the dips that passed this MRA thing. Beyond what the govs can do anyways now, but maybe once upon a time."
Ellen's mouth twists into a wry grin. "Couldn't do politics," she says. "Too many skeletons in the closet, you might say." Familial skeletons. Nasty ones. Not to mention how maddeningly ineffective politicians have to be ... Ellen hates compromise. "But government has never been that effective at curtailing bigotry. The tail end of any progressive social movement, that's where you find Congress lurking." A sneer ripples through her bland voice and she shakes her head, slowly.
"Nooooo," John trails off, the sarcasm dripping onto the floor between them. "And here I thought the US government was the epitome of impartiality and democracy."
Ellen looks at him for a moment and then barks a short, sharp laugh: an unusual sound, with a hint to it as if it hasn't been put into practice in a very long time. "Sorry," she says, inclining her head to him as she continues blandly, "Sometimes lawyers have to be mind-numbingly obvious."
Pyro smirks slightly. It's always gratifying to get a laugh, in any form. "Yeah, well I guess soldiering is a bit more interesting and rewarding. At least when you know what you're fighting for," he tags on. "Least you get things done instead of talking all day about how to make things more difficult for folk."
Ellen favors him with a cool blink. "Talking is useful," she opines gently, a touch of correction to the mild tone before she continues, resigned: "but only to a point." She hardly spent all that time becoming polylingual and studying rhetoric to abandon her love of language entirely, it's just that talking is a waste of words when the ears you're aimed at aren't listening. "It's largely a question of getting people to listen to what you have to say. Unfortunately humans aren't interested in what we have to say and I'm not inclined to beg for their ears. This way, we can't be ignored." Or tossed in cells to rot forever and never accomplish anything useful ever again. That one sucks, too.
Pyro's bilinguial! He speaks Australian English and American English. In an Aussie accent. "Yeah, that's what the pacifists just don't see," he agrees. "You can talk and talk, but if they don't want to believe you. Might as well be tongueless."
Ellen nods solemnly. "Might as well," she answers. "At least here we can make a bit of *difference*." She laces her fingers together and cracks her knuckles, as though preparing for a bit of it now - not that there's much she can do on this island, in this cave. Hell, she hasn't even proven her loyalty yet, of which the metal bands that gleam on her wrists and ankles are a constant reminder.
"S'all I want," Pyro nods, snatching the next spout of flame and twirling it around the air like a bit of fiery string. "Just a chance to make a difference."
Ellen offers him a faint smile in response. "Indeed." She dips her thumbs casually into the front pockets of her black drawstring pants, her fingers splayed haphazardly over her lean thighs. "Well," she says, as it seems they have come to a reasonable breaking point in the conversation, and she's beginning to get peckish again - the metabolism needs replenishing after a long day's cellular futzing. "It was good talking to you, Pyro." It's the name she's heard him referenced by, on her campaign of randomly touring the island in between bouts of training, and the playing with fire gives a vital clue as to who you're dealing with even if you never get around to asking his name.
"Same to you, Ellen," Pyro nods. "Or is there something else you'd be going by?"
Ellen has already started to turn away, in the direction from whence she came. She glances back over her shoulder at him to answer, "Valkyrie, if you prefer."
Pyro nods after her. "Well, good to meet you then, Valkyrie," he adds with a quick nod. And then spends the next minute debating whether to head back for something more interesting to do. But eventually responsibility wins over, and with a practiced flick, the dual flames appear in the palms and he resumes his fixed expression attempting to hold them out until exhaustion sets in.