Ghost of a Chance

[x-cypher.livejournal.com]

Doug returns to the mansion to hopefully do some work with Kitty. He heads down to the lab, where he sees a familiar face in a very unfamiliar location.



Doug wandered down into the basement and toward one of the labs. He was still wrestling with whether or not this was a good idea. Certainly getting started on the AI Pete wanted him to build was a good idea. But returning to the scene of the crime, as it were, had him extremely anxious.

Walking through the entryway, in particular, had been a grueling journey, and he was glad that the elevator to the basement had been empty so that he could let out the explosive breath he'd held crossing the floor. A few people had noticed him, and waved or said hello, and he'd even managed to be polite in return, but thankfully the one person he'd been hoping not to run into had been scarce at that moment.

Attempting to return his breath to something like normal, Doug triggered the door to the lab. Kitty would be down in a little while to begin working on the AI, he hoped. He was a little bit early, which would give him time to...

He stopped in his tracks. There was no conceivable way that Quentin Quire should be in a computer lab at Xavier's. There was just no way God would be that cruel to him.

Quentin looked up at Doug and smiled, waving cheerfully. Which set off warning bells in Doug's brain. Quentin would never be cheerful with him. Which begged the question of..."What the hell is going on here, Quire?" he asked.

Quentin didn't respond, but simply looked back down at the computer in front of him. Doug frowned. "Quentin?" he asked again. Striding over to the terminal, he waved a hand in front of Quentin's face. "Hello? Anyone there?" Just as he was about to reach out and shake Quentin's shoulder, he rapidly changed color, like a Polaroid picture in reverse, and dissolved, leaving a slight film on the stool he'd been sitting on.

Doug cocked his head, even more confused now than when he'd started. Dipping his finger in the film and rubbing it against another finger, he blinked. That disappearance was familiar. It was what happened every time Marie-Ange's larger constructs disappeared. As he spun around, looking for his ex-girlfriend hiding in some corner, he stopped, several more pieces falling into place.

There had been discussion on the journals of various...hallucinations, for lack of a better word. They'd finally been traced to some manner of malfunction with Marie-Ange's power. Doug had been trying to tell himself he wasn't concerned about her, but he was doing a very poor job of lying to himself.

Doug pulled out another stool and sat on it, cupping his chin in his palm. There was a pattern to all of this, somewhere. It niggled at the back of his brain, like one of those blacksmith's puzzles that needed to be twisted just right for the pieces to stop rattling up against each other.

He needed to approach this logically. Start with what you know, he directed himself. Gathering his mental faculties, he listed the things he knew. First, the hallucinations were not real. That was fairly obvious from the way Quentin had disappeared in front of him, but still important.

As an addendum, he noted that, on top of not being real in the sense that they were like Marie-Ange's constructs, they were also unreal in that, when they had involved mansion residents, they had generally involved those people doing things they would not normally be doing at all, like Jono, or people being places that they couldn't conceivably be, like Meggan.

Second. From every account he'd read, none of the hallucinations involving mansion residents had involved them being anything other than the age they were. No older, no younger. Illyana was the lone exception, but that was easily explained away by the fact that she had aged something like ten years in an eyeblink by being trapped in a dimension where time ran differently.

Doug bit his lip in concentration. There had also been an older Logan, but he could explain that as possibly a Logan without the healing factor. He was zeroing in on a hypothesis, and while there were a few anomalies, those could be explained.

"What if it's some interaction of both of her powers?" he mused to himself. "Precognition and projection combining to create...what? Visions of...alternate nows?"

The theory seemed solid to him. It was entirely possible he'd danced very quickly across the top of the facts that he had to reach a wildly incorrect conclusion, but it felt correct to him. He tapped his cheek and continued with his train of thought. So, if he operated on the assumption that he'd seen an alternate now when he'd entered the lab, then it logically followed that in that 'now', Quentin Quire was a student at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.

"Which would make him a mutant..." Doug breathed to himself in shock. And like that, other pieces fell into place in his head. Quentin hadn't been in class for an entire week, hadn't been in the university's computer lab at all, and Doug hadn't seen him walking around campus either.

Doug hadn't even found any of his characters on World of Warcraft when he'd gone looking to vent some frustration on the other young man's hapless Alliance characters. Which suggested that something might actually be seriously wrong with him. What if he had a traumatic power manifestation or something? Doug asked himself. He didn't like the guy, and that was the understatement of the year. But if he was a mutant, and there was something wrong with his power, then Doug thought that he could maybe swallow his animosity long enough to help out. If nothing else, it'd give him the moral high ground from which to blaze away at Quentin when he opened his mouth and said something idiotic again, which was a sure bet.



After finishing up work on the AI, Doug runs into Cain in the entryway. He asks Cain to come along with him when he goes to visit Quentin to see if anything's wrong.



Several hours later, Doug shut down his workstation in the computer lab. He had gotten some good work done, and the world hadn't ended upon his return to the mansion. He just hoped he could miss Marie-Ange again on the way out. Better not to tempt fate. As he rode the elevator back up to the main floor, Doug again pondered the vision he'd seen when he'd first entered the lab. He ought to drop an email to one of the staff members about paying Quentin a visit. It wouldn't be proper for Doug to go alone, especially since he was no longer officially part of the school. Not to mention his and Quentin's own little battle of personal animosity.

Exiting the elevator, his face brightened at the sight of Cain Marko in the entryway. Perfect. "Mr. Marko!" he called as he strode toward the larger man.

Cain looked down from where he'd been reattaching one of the unobtrusive security cameras for Lee. "Hey dere, Doug," he drawled, voice muffled by the three screws he held in his teeth. "Wha's goin' on?"

The more he thought about it, Cain would make a good choice to go visit Quentin with him. Not knowing what sort of power Quentin might have, you never knew when invulnerability might come in handy. Besides, Doug liked the bluff groundskeeper. "So, um, I was here to work on some computer stuff with Kitty," he started, and then sketched out the vision that he'd seen, explaining how he knew Quentin from classes at Westchester U., how he'd seen Quentin when he'd entered the lab, and the conclusions that he'd drawn. "So, he's been out of class for a week, and I'm wondering if maybe he didn't have some sort of power mishap," Doug concluded. "I was thinking maybe somebody should go check on him, and I figured it might help to bring a staff member along. You free tomorrow?" he asked, looking at his watch. It was probably too late to go drop in on Quentin this evening.

Cain pondered for a moment. "Kid probably needs some help, you know Chuck's going to say we need to give it to him. Suppose we oughta go check it out."

Doug nodded. He didn't like Quentin, but it was the right thing to do. "So, I'll meet up with you on campus midmorning tomorrow? My class lets out at 11," Doug told Cain. "Then we'll go see what's up."

Cain nodded, taking another screw and affixing the camera in place. "Shouldn't be anything big. Still, oughta let Chuck and Ororo know, in case he's like some nuclear-fungus-sprouting supergeek."

Wouldn't -that- be poetic justice, Doug thought to himself. "I'll drop them an email tonight, let them know what's up," he said with a nod. "See you tomorrow."