xp_logs | The Gates: Necessity (Reply)

Nathan and Medusa are outside at the medical clinic helping some of the wounded when a group of soldiers arrive looking for mutants. Things go somewhat downhill from there.

The wounded kept coming. Some were ambulatory, and some of the ambulatory wounded were carrying in others more seriously injured. It was too many, Nathan thought, straightening from where he'd been doing what he could to help a man who'd been shot in the leg. His field medicine skills were decent enough, if unpracticed lately, but there were simply not enough supplies on hand. And triage was breaking down. Not enough supplies on hand, not enough hands...

Medusa was not trained to provide any sort of medical aid, but she was doing what she could to help with the not enough hands issue. Scattered throughout the space in front of the yard were splashes of red; from a distance, one might have mistaken them for blood soaked rags, but upon closer inspection the texture was all wrong. Pieces of hair were carrying supplies, holding things in place and in one spot acting as a cane for a man who was rising to his feet and hobbling towards the clinic.

Medusa's face had a strained look as she stood close to a wall, the scissors in her hand continuing to sever chunks of hair. She had long ago worked through the black strands and had lost track of the red pieces she had sent to do various things. She had never controlled this many individual pieces before and she furrowed her brow as she added one more to the mix.

Nathan had taken a moment to marvel at it, when she'd started. He'd taken a moment to appreciate it deeply a little while later. Now, there was just a little voice in the back of his head commenting, occasionally and casually, on how anyone back at the mansion who might think to doubt the utility of Medusa's powers was getting dumped in the lake with extreme prejudice.

As he stepped back out into the yard in front of the clinic to talk to the nurse supervising triage out here, Nathan nodded to Medusa, giving her a critical look for any signs she might be pushing too hard. He didn't know anything about the limits of her powers, and when you were trying to help, it was counterproductive to collapse and add yourself to the list of people who needed help. She seemed steady enough, though...

His head snapped around as a Humvee stopped in front of the clinic, brakes screeching. Several soldiers got out, visibly agitated, and started shouting at the patients lying here and there in the yard. Oh crap... Nathan stared at them hard through the smoke and dust that hung in the air. Too many explosions, too many fires. It was getting hard to breathe out here.

The steady motion of her hands stopped as the soldiers stormed into the area. Her eyes quickly scanned the yard to find Nate as she decided to gauge her reaction based on his actions. Slipping the scissors into a bag, she slowly made her way over to where the soldiers were arguing loudly. She was careful to keep her hair doing the tasks she had assigned, but as they finished, she let them collapse.

Nathan was shaking his head. Stay there, stay there... He very nearly projected right through her shields - it would have been an option, if not a palatable one. But a couple of the soldiers started to turn their attention to her, one of them yelling belligerently in Czech, his eyes narrowing as he stared down at her.

Medusa halted at the first shake of Nate's head, automatically holding her hands up in a nonthreatening gesture. She was glad she had put the scissors away, not wanting to give the soldiers any reason to see her as a threat. She held her hair still, though it wouldn't take much to connect the vibrant red strands on the ground with the hair falling gracefully to frame her face.

Nathan was across the yard and right there before the soldier could do more than snarl a few more angry-sounding words down at Medusa. He hadn't run; he'd just flowed across the intervening distance, soundless and swift. The soldier reacted as he'd expected, instantly focusing on him as a threat.

"Go away," he said, calmly and clearly in English. Not even trying his minimal Czech. He gestured around them at the injured. "They're hurt."

"Mutant?" the soldier asked ominously, in accented but understandable English - and pointed his gun at Medusa. "Mutant?"

Nathan's hand was around the barrel of the gun, forcing it down, almost before the second one-word question was out of the other man's mouth. The soldier's comrades instantly reacted, moving towards the confrontation, a couple of them leveling their guns and issuing orders that Nathan knew probably meant 'back away' or the like.

It was all Medusa could do to keep her hair from ripping the guns from the soldiers hands. This was too reminiscent of another evening, years before. But she knew that giving evidence of an active mutation would only serve to escalate the situation. She shifted her body so that it was behind Nathan, slowly letting her hands come to a resting position. "I could disarm them, but I am concerned how that would cause the rest to react," she whispered quietly in Nathan's ear.

"Don't," Nathan said, just as quietly, and closed his eyes. Ignoring the shouting, the soldier who was a heartbeat away from yanking his gun back, even Medusa's tense presence behind him. Calm. He had to be calm about this, calm and careful and focused...

It was easy to identify the soldier's minds, to distinguish their thoughts from that of the wounded around them. Nathan tagged the last - and then lashed out, catching them all up in what wasn't the telepathic switchboard, but something closer to a net. Askani had taught him this once, one of the many techniques he'd never had the desire to practice.

But they needed to go away. And he pushed that suggestion down the strands of the net, letting it build on its own echoes, until it was at the forefront of each set of thoughts connected to the psi-net.

Medusa noticed a look of tenseness cross the soldiers' faces simultaneously. They turned, almost woodenly, and returned to their vehicles without speaking a word. "Nathan?" she said, the name coming out a question. She took a step back, putting a bit of distance between her and the telepath. She had known that Nate was a psi, but this was the first time she had seen visible evidence of his ability.

Nathan didn't answer. His eyes opened, but he stared blindly after the Hummvee. His face had gone so pale that there was almost a gray tinge to his skin, and his hands, even as they fell to his sides and clenched into fists, were shaking violently. He could still feel the psi-net, burning coldly and still holding the soldiers in an iron grip. And his mind was at the center of it, like a spider at the center of a web...

Deciding that Nathan looked like he was about to pass out, Medusa swung her hair out to pull a stool towards him. "You should sit down before you topple over," she said, a note of caution in her voice. "What did you do to them?" And how often have you done it before?

Nathan slumped onto the stool, trying to regulate his breathing. He had to hold onto the psi-net... or did he? What did he do, how did he stop them from turning around and coming back as soon as he let go...

The answer came to him immediately, floating up out of the accumulated, half-conscious memories of all the techniques Askani had taught him that he'd never used, most of them telepathic. He swallowed and, before he answered Medusa's question, reached down the psi-net and forced an image into their minds.

You came to the clinic. And there were no mutants there.

Not a suggestion. Not the usual 'these are not the droids you're looking for' trick that bought a few minutes of inattention or distraction. Actual memory alteration. He'd never... stop it. Concentrate. Bile rose at the back of his throat as he let go of their minds, and Nathan could hear his breathing go a bit ragged again.

"They won't come back. I've... never done that before." His voice was strained-sounding, higher than it should be.

"What exactly was that?" Medusa asked, though she relaxed at the knowledge that he had never done it before. Taking a step towards Nathan, she wondered which of them looked more sick at that moment in time.

"I sent them away. Replaced..." He was going to throw up. Nathan squeezed his eyes shut, rubbing his hands over his face, and focused on breathing until the wave of nausea passed. But he couldn't stop thinking about it. Holes in their minds, he'd made holes in their minds and put something else in there...

"What would have been preferable? Letting them start shooting up the place?" The voice whispering in his ear was not Medusa's. Nathan looked around slowly, and GW raised an eyebrow. "Serious question, bro."

Medusa followed Nathan's gaze, worried for a moment that more soldiers were coming, but failed to see anything of note. "They are all gone," she said softly. "And they do not appear to be returning." Not after you...did whatever you did... Medusa was brought out of her internal concerns as she realized that Nate was not returning to a normal color and still looked queasy. "Should I call for a medic? Or perhaps one of the others..."

"No." There was no one there. Thankfully. Nathan swallowed and rose. "I'm fine." Don't add yourself to the number of people needing help. He took another deep breath, and looked down at Medusa. "I had to make sure they wouldn't come back. The people here... they're helpless."

Medusa clasped her hands behind her back and concentrated for a moment, collapsed strands of hair righting themselves and beginning to work again. "So the ends justify the means?" Her voice was carefully neutral. "They will not return, but at what cost?" For a moment, she was amazed at the words coming out of her mouth. How could she defend them? The soldiers who had attacked mutants, who had pointed a gun at her? Holding up a hand, she added. "I do not know if there was another way. I am just wishing that there was an alternative to mind manipulation."

Nathan's laugh was almost inaudible, and so bitter that it hurt to hear. "There probably was. But I tend to pick the fastest and easiest way out when there are guns pointing at innocent people. Usually that involves knocking the person holding the gun through the nearest wall..." But this was the closest thing to a hospital, in the middle of a war zone, and you didn't turn a hospital into a battlefield. And oh, wasn't that just the most wonderful excuse ever for doing what the Mistra conditioning teams had done, what Gideon had done...

Nathan could feel himself teetering on the edge of a mental precipice and pulled himself back through sheer force of will. Away. It all had to go away, until later. Too much to do. He was not going to be dead weight, not in the middle of this.

"We can talk about this later," he said in something closer to a normal tone of voice. The color had not appreciably returned to his face, however. "I think right now we both need to get back to work."

Medusa nodded curtly and began to return to her station. She paused after a few steps and looked over her shoulder. Perhaps she should tell one of the others about this...something was not sitting right with her about the situation and it was something that went beyond witnessing a telepath use his powers.