![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
x-roulette.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
xp_logsJean and Jennie scour the suburbs in order to find people that are stranded. They find one trapped family, and luck leads them to another much more dire situation.
Oh, how she hated the cold.
"A blizzard, friggin' brilliant," Jennie muttered into her scarf as she trudged along behind Jean. They were on search and rescue out in the suburbs of KC. The younger girl hunched down into her coat and continued. "My first outing and it's gotta be the cold, this is totally what I get for chickening out during Hawai'i." Her excuse for not going in December had been her sensitivity to the smell of blood, in reality however, she was just leery of traveling. But when the blizzard hit Kansas City she knew she couldn't just sit around twiddling her thumbs again. Her conscience wouldn't have shut up for one, so now she and Jean were on the hunt for stranded people, the telepathy and probability powers complimenting nicely.
At least she was getting the opportunity to use her powers. Marius was stuck handing out sandwiches. In a heated tent. The bastard.
"Well, on the surface of it, a blizzard is more straightforward than a volcano," Jean said. "I mean, since this sort of thing's not completely uncommon, Kansas' infrastructure and building codes are designed to facilitate help and withstand the snow. There's not much you can do to withstand lava." The fact that the roof wouldn't collapse over your head as you froze to death was probably cold comfort (and Jean mentally groaned at the inappropriateness of the phrase), but it did help.
Jennie nodded and blew into her hands, trying to warm them. "Freezing to death would be one of the worst ways to go. Because you basically suffocate, don't you? Lungs constrict from the huddling to keep warm, plus your body temp drops and then you pass out. And you're horribly miserable before you do." Her idea of hell was the desert on a winter morning, nothing between you and the elements. "But some of these people have blankets and stuff right?"
"Certainly here they will," Jean said, gesturing around at the outlines over suburban prefab housing that was only slightly more indistinguishably the same when covered in feet of snow. "Out here the problem's as much the lack of electricity, gas and plumbing for food and clean water than simply the cold. And, then, most of the people out here had the money and the wit to get out before the storm." They'd fought their way past several empty house-shaped mounds of snow. "In the center of town things will be worse, but then, in the center of town it's easier for the city's rescue crew to get about."
"Right, we hope people weren't stubborn and decided to get the hell outta dodge." Jennie held out her arms for balance as they navigated down the street. "Still don't see anything."
Jennie was using her ability to read probability lines in the hopes that they would get "lucky" and find some people trapped in the snow. Unfortunately that had the side effect of Jennie's normally chancy luck becoming steadily worse.
There was a clang and a muffled squeak as Jennie racked her knee on a buried fire hydrant. She cursed loudly and rubbed the injured joint, eyes tearing slightly.
Jean's mental senses open wide, she caught the flash of pain from Jennie and frowned slightly. "You ok? Don't push too hard, kiddo," she said. "We've got quite a way to go on this shift, and you'll need your strength. There's just too much snow for me to cope with it all - I'll need your help to figure out where to push." But she was just as suddenly distracted by a sudden flash of fear.
"Down the road," Jean said, eyes going distant as she reached out in wordless reassurance. "About two blocks. A family, and they've got a little kid. We'll go faster if we fly," she suggested, offering Jennie a hand. "You'll be able to scan what we go over with less worry about what you'll run into, too..."
Jennie looked at Jean's hand with a little hesitation, but then reached out and grasped it firmly, the pain in her knee forgotten. "Let's go," she said.
Jean smiled, then carefully lifted them both clear of the snow and off towards the thoughts she'd sensed. She wasn't going terribly fast, since they needed to make sure they didn't miss anything as they went past, but flying with a telekinetic was rather unlike any other sort of flight. Despite only being connected at the hand, if felt like one was being carefully lifted and supported everywhere, as a sourceless force pushed you forward. Or backward. Or whatever way the telekinetic wanted to go. It wasn't uncomfortable, but it was fairly strange.
Well, Jennie'd always wanted to know what it felt like to fly. She couldn't contain her gasp as they lifted up and went towards the house. The air was bitterly cold, and her eyes watered again. She tightened her grip on Jean's hand, not hard enough to hurt, but still tight. She squinted, trying to read the lines. There were tangled threads of red and white just up ahead, at a two story clapboard house. The kind Jennie had believed only existed in movies and picturebooks before she had moved to the east coast. "That one there?" she said, pointing towards the house.
Jean might not have needed the hand to hold onto Jennie, but she had suspected, rightly, that Jennie needed the hand to hold onto Jean. "Yes," she said, "that's where I'm sensing them." The front door was covered over with a snow drift almost as high as Jean's head - there were shapes under the snow which were probably lovely bushes in the summer, but had made a perfect catch for the wind-blown snow along the side of the house. "What do you see?" she asked, settling carefully down into the snow.
Jennie titled her head to the left, and then to the right. "Um, it's not great, but it's not really bad either." She carefully picked her way around the bushes. "Like, I can't really describe it much. They're in trouble, but not horrible trouble. Can you hear them?" Despite Jennie's own squick when it came to people in her head, there were times where that had to be stuffed tightly in a corner. Especially when people were in trouble.
"Yes," Jean said simply, not pointing out that when someone was untrained, the way these people were, it usually took effort to stop hearing them. "For the most part they know you're right -they're worried, but not terrified. Particularly worried about the little boy, although he seems to think it's all a great game." She eyed the building, not seeing any obvious weakness that moving the snow would affect, but she'd done enough training with Wanda to not discount the opportunity Jennie would have to see what she couldn't. "I'm not missing anything important that will happen if I clear out the snow in front, am I?"
"Nope." Jennie said with confidence. She pointed to the roof. "If you move the snow, odds are it's going to slump off the back up there. I'm going to go around the other side, see if that'll break anything important if it does."
"Well, if it goes backwards, that will at least mean I won't have to move that, too. Snow's too fine to be easy to work with. Give me a holler if you spot anything?" Already she'd started carefully moving the snow from the top of the drift, the heavy, wet stuff more floating off than being tossed by a shovel.
The dark-haired girl nodded and gingerly picked her way around the back of the house, squinting every now and then in case anything pinged. A small headache was forming at her temples from reading the lines too much, and she knew she was in for a serious migraine later. Seeing nothing of importance, she stopped and closed her eyes, trying to see if she could use a bit of luck to find a better entrance to the house. She felt a faint tug and opened her eyes, seeing a fine thread of white drifting away from the house. "Do what now?" she muttered, trudging clumsily after it.
It lead her to a mound of snow halfway down the block. This one had weird indentations in it. The tugging sense stopped, and Jennie squinted, and then her eyes widened. Red. This mound was red. Something was wrong. She stumbled closer to the mound and began digging at it, her heart pounding in her chest, because the mound looked a lot like the other car-shaped mounds on the street. The snow was heavy and wet, and hard to move, but Jennie cleared enough to peer into the driver's side window of the car. Two figures were slumped together in the front seat.
DR. GREY!
The pile of snow she was working on was forgotten in an instant as Jennie's mind opened in alarm. The family in the house was sheltered and safe at the moment, whereas the couple in the car...
Flight was faster than the trudge through the snow, so it was less than a minute later that she touched down next to Jennie. "They're alive." On the edge of hypothermia, they're minds already deeply slowed and sluggishly hard to sense so it would have been almost impossible for Jean to find them on her own, but alive. A massive push had the snow shoved off the top of the car so they could free the doors.
Jennie held out an arm and had Jean back up, while in her other hand a red disk formed. The doors were frozen shut, she could see the ice along the edges. With a flick of her wrist the disk splashed against the doorway. There was a loud scraping sound, followed by a bang as the ice cracked and the car door rusted and fell off into the snow.
"The ran the heater as long as they could," Jean said, picking up on the memories caught in frozen dreams. "Melted some of the snow, which then just froze around them as it cooled again." It took some concentration to carefully guide the first - a young man, not that much older than Jennie herself. "Can you get the other door? We can take them back to the house and get them started warming up while we wait for an evac for all of them." Already she was checking over his fingers, there was some frostbite, but if they were careful he'd recover. Both teens knew Midwestern weather well enough to have been bundled up.
"Right." Jennie darted around the other side of the car, pushing aside some of the snow in front of the door. Another flash of red, and the door cracked but stayed closed. Jennie took another steadying breath and tried again, and this time the door mercifully popped open. Her energy reserves were running low, and her muscles felt like rubber, but still Jennie managed to pull the girl out of the car. The blonde girl wasn't even shivering anymore, and her lips were blue. Jennie stuck the tip of a gloved finger in her mouth and pulled off her glove with her teeth, before resting her warm hand on the girl's cool neck, checking for a pulse. It was sluggish, but still there. Her fingers glowed softly as she gave the girl a little bit of luck for good measure.
"It's a wonder they didn't suffocate," Jennie said, looking back over to where Jean was tending to the boy.
"Bodily functions slow down in your sleep and in the cold, so they'd have needed less oxygen once they passed out, but I think it was still probably a close thing. They got very lucky." Jean reached out to take the weight of the girl off of Jennie, lifting her up clear of the snow with her mind. "Let's get them inside."
Jennie nodded and got to her feet, pulling her glove back on as she did so. "You go ahead, I'll follow along behind."
With the couple securely gripped, Jean lifted up off the ground again. "See you there."
The girl tried to follow after her teacher as quickly as she could, but as she had learned the hard way, there was always a balance. She turned a corner too fast and smacked her other knee on yet another buried fire hydrant.
"Ow...son of a bitch."
Oh, how she hated the cold.
"A blizzard, friggin' brilliant," Jennie muttered into her scarf as she trudged along behind Jean. They were on search and rescue out in the suburbs of KC. The younger girl hunched down into her coat and continued. "My first outing and it's gotta be the cold, this is totally what I get for chickening out during Hawai'i." Her excuse for not going in December had been her sensitivity to the smell of blood, in reality however, she was just leery of traveling. But when the blizzard hit Kansas City she knew she couldn't just sit around twiddling her thumbs again. Her conscience wouldn't have shut up for one, so now she and Jean were on the hunt for stranded people, the telepathy and probability powers complimenting nicely.
At least she was getting the opportunity to use her powers. Marius was stuck handing out sandwiches. In a heated tent. The bastard.
"Well, on the surface of it, a blizzard is more straightforward than a volcano," Jean said. "I mean, since this sort of thing's not completely uncommon, Kansas' infrastructure and building codes are designed to facilitate help and withstand the snow. There's not much you can do to withstand lava." The fact that the roof wouldn't collapse over your head as you froze to death was probably cold comfort (and Jean mentally groaned at the inappropriateness of the phrase), but it did help.
Jennie nodded and blew into her hands, trying to warm them. "Freezing to death would be one of the worst ways to go. Because you basically suffocate, don't you? Lungs constrict from the huddling to keep warm, plus your body temp drops and then you pass out. And you're horribly miserable before you do." Her idea of hell was the desert on a winter morning, nothing between you and the elements. "But some of these people have blankets and stuff right?"
"Certainly here they will," Jean said, gesturing around at the outlines over suburban prefab housing that was only slightly more indistinguishably the same when covered in feet of snow. "Out here the problem's as much the lack of electricity, gas and plumbing for food and clean water than simply the cold. And, then, most of the people out here had the money and the wit to get out before the storm." They'd fought their way past several empty house-shaped mounds of snow. "In the center of town things will be worse, but then, in the center of town it's easier for the city's rescue crew to get about."
"Right, we hope people weren't stubborn and decided to get the hell outta dodge." Jennie held out her arms for balance as they navigated down the street. "Still don't see anything."
Jennie was using her ability to read probability lines in the hopes that they would get "lucky" and find some people trapped in the snow. Unfortunately that had the side effect of Jennie's normally chancy luck becoming steadily worse.
There was a clang and a muffled squeak as Jennie racked her knee on a buried fire hydrant. She cursed loudly and rubbed the injured joint, eyes tearing slightly.
Jean's mental senses open wide, she caught the flash of pain from Jennie and frowned slightly. "You ok? Don't push too hard, kiddo," she said. "We've got quite a way to go on this shift, and you'll need your strength. There's just too much snow for me to cope with it all - I'll need your help to figure out where to push." But she was just as suddenly distracted by a sudden flash of fear.
"Down the road," Jean said, eyes going distant as she reached out in wordless reassurance. "About two blocks. A family, and they've got a little kid. We'll go faster if we fly," she suggested, offering Jennie a hand. "You'll be able to scan what we go over with less worry about what you'll run into, too..."
Jennie looked at Jean's hand with a little hesitation, but then reached out and grasped it firmly, the pain in her knee forgotten. "Let's go," she said.
Jean smiled, then carefully lifted them both clear of the snow and off towards the thoughts she'd sensed. She wasn't going terribly fast, since they needed to make sure they didn't miss anything as they went past, but flying with a telekinetic was rather unlike any other sort of flight. Despite only being connected at the hand, if felt like one was being carefully lifted and supported everywhere, as a sourceless force pushed you forward. Or backward. Or whatever way the telekinetic wanted to go. It wasn't uncomfortable, but it was fairly strange.
Well, Jennie'd always wanted to know what it felt like to fly. She couldn't contain her gasp as they lifted up and went towards the house. The air was bitterly cold, and her eyes watered again. She tightened her grip on Jean's hand, not hard enough to hurt, but still tight. She squinted, trying to read the lines. There were tangled threads of red and white just up ahead, at a two story clapboard house. The kind Jennie had believed only existed in movies and picturebooks before she had moved to the east coast. "That one there?" she said, pointing towards the house.
Jean might not have needed the hand to hold onto Jennie, but she had suspected, rightly, that Jennie needed the hand to hold onto Jean. "Yes," she said, "that's where I'm sensing them." The front door was covered over with a snow drift almost as high as Jean's head - there were shapes under the snow which were probably lovely bushes in the summer, but had made a perfect catch for the wind-blown snow along the side of the house. "What do you see?" she asked, settling carefully down into the snow.
Jennie titled her head to the left, and then to the right. "Um, it's not great, but it's not really bad either." She carefully picked her way around the bushes. "Like, I can't really describe it much. They're in trouble, but not horrible trouble. Can you hear them?" Despite Jennie's own squick when it came to people in her head, there were times where that had to be stuffed tightly in a corner. Especially when people were in trouble.
"Yes," Jean said simply, not pointing out that when someone was untrained, the way these people were, it usually took effort to stop hearing them. "For the most part they know you're right -they're worried, but not terrified. Particularly worried about the little boy, although he seems to think it's all a great game." She eyed the building, not seeing any obvious weakness that moving the snow would affect, but she'd done enough training with Wanda to not discount the opportunity Jennie would have to see what she couldn't. "I'm not missing anything important that will happen if I clear out the snow in front, am I?"
"Nope." Jennie said with confidence. She pointed to the roof. "If you move the snow, odds are it's going to slump off the back up there. I'm going to go around the other side, see if that'll break anything important if it does."
"Well, if it goes backwards, that will at least mean I won't have to move that, too. Snow's too fine to be easy to work with. Give me a holler if you spot anything?" Already she'd started carefully moving the snow from the top of the drift, the heavy, wet stuff more floating off than being tossed by a shovel.
The dark-haired girl nodded and gingerly picked her way around the back of the house, squinting every now and then in case anything pinged. A small headache was forming at her temples from reading the lines too much, and she knew she was in for a serious migraine later. Seeing nothing of importance, she stopped and closed her eyes, trying to see if she could use a bit of luck to find a better entrance to the house. She felt a faint tug and opened her eyes, seeing a fine thread of white drifting away from the house. "Do what now?" she muttered, trudging clumsily after it.
It lead her to a mound of snow halfway down the block. This one had weird indentations in it. The tugging sense stopped, and Jennie squinted, and then her eyes widened. Red. This mound was red. Something was wrong. She stumbled closer to the mound and began digging at it, her heart pounding in her chest, because the mound looked a lot like the other car-shaped mounds on the street. The snow was heavy and wet, and hard to move, but Jennie cleared enough to peer into the driver's side window of the car. Two figures were slumped together in the front seat.
DR. GREY!
The pile of snow she was working on was forgotten in an instant as Jennie's mind opened in alarm. The family in the house was sheltered and safe at the moment, whereas the couple in the car...
Flight was faster than the trudge through the snow, so it was less than a minute later that she touched down next to Jennie. "They're alive." On the edge of hypothermia, they're minds already deeply slowed and sluggishly hard to sense so it would have been almost impossible for Jean to find them on her own, but alive. A massive push had the snow shoved off the top of the car so they could free the doors.
Jennie held out an arm and had Jean back up, while in her other hand a red disk formed. The doors were frozen shut, she could see the ice along the edges. With a flick of her wrist the disk splashed against the doorway. There was a loud scraping sound, followed by a bang as the ice cracked and the car door rusted and fell off into the snow.
"The ran the heater as long as they could," Jean said, picking up on the memories caught in frozen dreams. "Melted some of the snow, which then just froze around them as it cooled again." It took some concentration to carefully guide the first - a young man, not that much older than Jennie herself. "Can you get the other door? We can take them back to the house and get them started warming up while we wait for an evac for all of them." Already she was checking over his fingers, there was some frostbite, but if they were careful he'd recover. Both teens knew Midwestern weather well enough to have been bundled up.
"Right." Jennie darted around the other side of the car, pushing aside some of the snow in front of the door. Another flash of red, and the door cracked but stayed closed. Jennie took another steadying breath and tried again, and this time the door mercifully popped open. Her energy reserves were running low, and her muscles felt like rubber, but still Jennie managed to pull the girl out of the car. The blonde girl wasn't even shivering anymore, and her lips were blue. Jennie stuck the tip of a gloved finger in her mouth and pulled off her glove with her teeth, before resting her warm hand on the girl's cool neck, checking for a pulse. It was sluggish, but still there. Her fingers glowed softly as she gave the girl a little bit of luck for good measure.
"It's a wonder they didn't suffocate," Jennie said, looking back over to where Jean was tending to the boy.
"Bodily functions slow down in your sleep and in the cold, so they'd have needed less oxygen once they passed out, but I think it was still probably a close thing. They got very lucky." Jean reached out to take the weight of the girl off of Jennie, lifting her up clear of the snow with her mind. "Let's get them inside."
Jennie nodded and got to her feet, pulling her glove back on as she did so. "You go ahead, I'll follow along behind."
With the couple securely gripped, Jean lifted up off the ground again. "See you there."
The girl tried to follow after her teacher as quickly as she could, but as she had learned the hard way, there was always a balance. She turned a corner too fast and smacked her other knee on yet another buried fire hydrant.
"Ow...son of a bitch."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}