xp_logs | Immram: Mindtrap

In the infirmary, Jean discovers that there's nothing physically wrong with Nathan. To fix what is wrong, Charles helps her find a way onto a mindscape gone mad, and a part of the truth about Trask finally comes out.

"This is very unusual." Charles's voice was low and calm, but very intent as he leaned back in his chair, pulling back his hands, which until a moment ago had been resting lightly on the temples of the man unconscious on the examining table. "His vitals are stable, Jean?"

"Completely," Jean said, "not even the fluctuations associated with REM sleep. Pulse and blood pressure lower than normal, but not dangerously so. I'd say it was a run of the mill coma but, well, there's nothing terribly run of the mill about a coma, and there's nothing I can find that would have triggered one."

"Oh, I do see the problem," Charles murmured. "The why of it, at least." He reached out telepathically to Jean, waiting for her nod of permission before linking with her, and drawing her towards Nathan's mind to get a look at what he was seeing.

Nathan's Askani-influenced shields were unusual to the telepathic 'eye' even when they were fully functional. Layers upon layers of highly elaborate patterns of psionic energy, formed into strangely elegant mental fortifications. All of that elegance was gone, but the shields themselves... were not. It was as if some force had warped them inside out, leaving the smooth interiors exposed and all of the defensive structures turned inwards. What Charles and Jean were presented with now was gleaming, seemingly impenetrable blankness.

Jean lifted her 'eyes', staring up at the vast blankness. "Oh," she said after a moment, seeming more than a little overawed by the inverted shields. "Well that's... odd."

"I believe what we're looking at," Charles said, his voice still very calm, although the deep concern in his keen eyes was obvious, "is a very extreme defensive reaction. But it's perplexing. Any attack seriously enough to provoke something like this is something I should have sensed." He leaned forward again, his fingertips touching Nathan's temples once more and a familiar look of concentration descending over his features. "It would be... profoundly unwise to force a way into his mind, if this is an attempt to defend himself. But perhaps if we can find a discreet opening..."

Perhaps it was the memory of what Nate's shields usually felt like, but the idea of secret passages into and out of castles suddenly sprung to Jean's mind. And the way Askani patterns linked over and around each other did reflect the idea of walls within walls and passages between. In a weird sort of way. Of course, with castles you needed to know the password or trick to open the secret passage. "The link to Moira?" Jean asked quietly. "Locked away, I assume, but it would still be there..."

Silence, for a moment, from Charles. "Ah, yes," he finally murmured, his eyes closing. #Jean.# His mental voice was soft, undemanding, but the request was there, even before he went on. #I believe he's less likely to register you as a threat.#

She could think of several reasons why that might be, so she nodded, reaching out to touch Charles' mind, to try and see the path he had found.

It was barely a path. More a thread-thin passage, barely perceptible as an opening at all. But it was enough.

---

The beach was there in Nathan's mind, as it always was. But the sky was choked with black clouds, lightning darting downwards towards the water and ominous rumbles of thunder coming nearly simultaneously to the flashes. There was no rain, but a fierce wind, bending the trees that lined the beach nearly parallel to the ground and creating whitecaps on the usually calm water.

As she always did when she found herself in Nathan's mindscape, Jean gave the water a wide berth as she walked along the beach. If anything, she was staying slightly farther from the lapping waves than usual, unsettled by the brewing storm. "Nathan?" she called out once more.

There was a rustling in the trees, and a black-clad Nathan emerged almost explosively. Gray eyes filled with freezing rage locked onto Jean's face, and he leveled the gun in his hand at her head. He snarled something at her - in Askani. When she didn't immediately respond, he repeated it at a yell, and the dark clothes he was wearing shimmered and changed, flickering back and forth between their original appearance and body armor that wasn't like anything worn by the X-Men. Or in this century.

Jean had instinctively stepped back, hands rising up to show they were empty, even as she replied in Askani, trying to placate the man. "I'm not here to hurt anyone," she said, the words understandable, although her accent was not terribly good. "Please, I want to help."

The gun wavered, flickered back and forth from an ordinary handgun to something unrecognizable, and then back again. The clothes went back to plain black, the type you wore scrambling around on rooftops, and the image of Nathan lowered the gun to his side, looking bewildered. Around them, the storm continued to intensify.

"No one is supposed to be here," he finally said, still looking confused, but his voice was harsh as he looked up at her. "That's the whole point of it. To keep it all out. I'm done with this, I've paid her price. No more, dammit!" He sounded almost desperate, on the last - and whirled suddenly, dashing towards the trees.

It wasn't Nathan's conscious mind - the lack of control an obvious indicator that she was dealing with a subconscious guardian. But, given the connections between conscious and unconscious... Jean shot after him, running flat out to try and catch up or, at the very least, keep him in sight.

The forest blurred around her, the distance between her and the dark-clad figure she was following seeming to shrink, then grow into immensity, the mindscape shifting around them. How long they ran was hard to define. There was no change in elevation, no sense they were running up the mountains visible from the beach. But suddenly they were stumbling back out of the trees, into the clearing that stood in front of the gleaming white house that looked like it had been transported here from Santorini.

Nathan ran to the center of the mosaic pavement in front of the house, standing in the circle at the heart of the pattern formed by the colored stones. The pattern was made up of very familiar interlocking spirals, and he seemed to relax as he turned to face Jean.

"I can wait her out," he said bleakly. "I can wait as long as it takes." The sky above them was growing darker and darker, and the wind just kept picking up.

Rather than cut through the pattern, Jean set her feet to the edge of one of the spirals, carefully tracing it out as she worked her way inward. "Wait who out, Nathan? What's going on here?"

"She's trying to pull me back in. Make me into what she wants me to be..." He gave a wavering laugh, flinching as a lightning flash was following almost instantly by thunder. "~I am not her tool, to be picked up because I'm not currently being used. Never again.~" Gray eyes looked skyward with a bleak, wild sort of satisfaction. "I'm going to make sure she doesn't survive this," he went on in English.

"~You might not survive this, my friend.~" Jean gazed up at the sky, frowning. At least the gathering storm seemed to be perpetually gathering and not really starting, but she didn't know how long that would last. "And I still don't understand what's going on," she said, turning back to Nate.

"You don't see her?" he demanded. "Walking through the rooms in my head..." As if summoned by his words, there was suddenly a spectral form there on the mosiac with him. So fuzzy that it was only vaguely human-shaped, with no distinguishing features, it moved just as Jean was moving, following the spirals inward to where Nathan stood shaking at the center.

Jean stopped instantly, raising her hand and watching as the projection Nate had made echoed the motion. She was less worried by Nathan's assertion that "she" would not survive this, though, than by the fact that he seemed to be unable to associate the her that was speaking with him to the her that was moving through his mind. Something was very wrong here. "She wants to pull you back? Back where, Nathan?"

"Back into them. I nearly lost myself so many times, in them... no more, damn it!" He leveled his gun - no, his psimitar at the projection of Jean, but then stopped, blinking at it, his head jerking back and forth as if he was following something Jean couldn't see. "I don't see her. Shadows. She's in the shadows, slipping in and out..."

"You are not making a lot of sense, Nate," Jean said, although it was more a comment to herself than him. But... as far as she knew, nothing Jean had done could have triggered this pulling into himself. There had to be something else going on. "When did you first become aware of her, Nate? What happened first?"

"I was and wasn't aware of her. All along. But she didn't leave. In the morning." He kept looking around, searching for something, the gun - and it was a gun again - lowering slowly. "She was still there... I thought..." The gun hit the mosaic and disappeared, and Nathan reached up, hands to his temples, a tight groan escaping him. Lightning slashed into the forest beyond them, the strikes sounding like small explosions. "Jean?" he said suddenly, looking up at her with something close to bewilderment. His clothes stayed very firmly black. "Jean, it's... I couldn't let her go, I couldn't let this continue. She's been making me dream."

Jean twitched back as the gun hit the ground, then moved hesitantly forward. So very, very confused. "Who is she? Where is she?" If he'd been attacked, the insistence that he hadn't let 'her' go might explain the inverted shields, locking his attacker inside his brain - not the smartest of moves, really, but it made sense from a certain point of view. But then, if so, where was she?

"I don't know. I..." Nathan groaned again, wavering on his feet, as the storm swept down on them. "It's not telepathy... or empathy..." Even Nathan's subconscious knew all too well what invasive psis of both those types felt with. "It's something else." he shouted hoarsely, over the increasing scream of the wind. "I can't let her go, Jean - I can't see her when she goes, and if I can't see her, I can't stop her from getting back in!"

"But holding her like this, you're holding yourself in, too." Not telepathy and not empathy only really left an astral attack, but Jean wasn't sure how someone could have done that to Nate without Charles being aware.

The wind screamed and the rain lashed at them, and Nathan fell to his knees. The mosaic started to shift, a straight path to the center appearing out of the spirals. "Help," he said disjointedly. "This isn't really working the way I thought...

"I can believe it," Jean said with a sigh, stepping off the spiral path and walking down the straight road to join Nate in the middle of the pattern. "You say you've got her caught, but that she's moving through the shadows? We may have to go to her..."

The black clothes shifted again, flickering to street clothes and then back again, as Nathan's conscious mind tried to force its way to the front. "I have no idea how I did this," he muttered, looking up at the storm. "But it hurts..." He made himself focus on Jean. "I don't really know who she is. I... suspect, but I don't know. Is Charles out there?"

"I can believe that," Jean said, flinching slightly as one of the lightning strikes came rather closer to where the two of them were standing than she'd have liked. "Yes, Charles is out there. You're in a coma, in the infirmary, and you've somehow managed to invert your shields. He helped me to, well, more or less sneak in the back - we didn't think you'd take it well if he was the one to come in and try to find you."

"I don't think I would have." Nathan got up slowly, staggering a little. "I should... be able to open them, even like this. That way Charles can see what she is, when she runs..." His eyes were wide, still shocky, as they met Jean's. "I'm maybe a little fixated. But I watched the Clan die once, and I don't need to do it again in my dreams."

"You've been dreaming of the Clan?" Jean asked, startled. She'd wondered what the dreams he'd mentioned were, but he'd not been in any state to ask. "Since when?" And this woman, whoever she was, was behind the dreams?

"Weeks. I should have been dreaming about killer clowns and dead children and drowned islands, but I was dreaming about the Askani." Nathan was rubbing at his temples, his eyes unfocusing. "And English keeps slipping away."

"Why would someone make you dream about that? I mean, who even knows about them, except for us?" It didn't make any sense.

Nathan was staring at her almost fixedly. "Out of the corner of your eye," he said. "Do you see her? Don't look, or she'll vanish, but... she's here. Watching us."

It took willpower to keep from turning her head, but Jean managed to relax slightly, taking deep breaths as she spread her awareness... There. "Yes," she hissed, a snarl of distaste flickering briefly over her features. After everything that had happened, there was little that could make her angrier than this sort of mental intrusion. Invasion. "I see her."

"Shadows. She's made of shadows." Nathan ran his hands through his dripping-wet hair, droplets of rain flying away, seemingly in slow motion. "Tell me Charles will see her." His voice almost broke. "Just tell me he'll see her, and the two of you will help me keep her from coming back, and I'll let him in. I just can't do this anymore, Jean, I can't. She doesn't belong here. There should be two voices in my mind now. Only two."

Her anger faded in the face of his distress, replaced with concern. Focus was what was needed - ironic, that, since it seemed impossible to focus on the figure. Jean couldn't even tell if she'd ever seen the woman before, couldn't make out any features at all, except for the faint outlines which claimed the intruder was a woman. "If anyone will be able to see her, it will be Charles." It wasn't much assurance, but it was all she had.

Nathan reached out for her hands. His were shaking badly and ice-cold. The clothes he was wearing flickered back to black, and the mosaic reoriented itself around them, all the spirals facing outwards. Open, to the 'world' around them. His shoulders were sagging with weariness. "My shields... they're locked up in the inverted form, I think. Help me force them back to the way they should be?"

"Not force," Jean said, taking his hands. "You're too tired, and will do too much harm." Holding his hands, she could reach out and alter the mindscape without hurting him, and the center of the mosaic returned to what it had been, the inverted spiral. But this time, there was a difference. About halfway out from where they stood, the pattern shifted where she'd overlaid the proper patterns, a convex point where the spirals moved from in to out. "Trace out the pattern, Nathan. Easy. Gentle."

He'd shuddered when the mindscape had changed, even with how gently she'd done it. Subconscious reactions were still mixing with conscious, and he was badly shaken, the last of his energy draining away even as the storm started to quiet. But the pattern was here, was solid, and Jean's voice was soothing.

Rays of sunlight broke through the black clouds suddenly, warm and golden.

---

"Jean?" Charles's voice was calm, questioning but calm. "Are you well?" The question was echoed telepathically.

The only visible sign of her return to her body was a slight relaxing of her posture, so it was just as well that Charles didn't really need a visual sign to tell that she was back. It took her a few moments to answer his question, though, as even the slight movement had sent twinges of pain through muscles which now informed her they'd been still for far too long. "I will be," she said after a bit, reaching up to massage at her shoulders with a wince.

Charles let his breath out on a sigh, an unusual sign of worry for him. "It's been nearly five hours," he told her, before looking back down at Nathan, who still hadn't stirred, although he seemed to be breathing more deeply than he had. "This is... normal sleep now, I believe. That was rather a remarkable sight. His shields, unfolding like a-" He stopped speaking, suddenly, his eyes narrowing all at once, still locked on Nathan's face.

Because there was another presence in the room, a presence that was unmistakably psionic, but almost like smoke, rather than a solid astral form. It struggled up out of Nathan's battered mind, clearly seeking escape.

Stiff muscles were suddenly the last thing on Jean's mind as she sat bolt upright in her chair. "That's her!" she exclaimed. "That's the shadow woman who attacked Nathan. He had her trapped."

"I see." Charles's mind lashed out, and had the motion been an attack, it would have dissipated the smoky presence like a gale-force wind sweeping down upon a weak fog. But it was mental hands, instead, reaching out to enclose the foreign presence like a child might try to catch a butterfly, without harming it. #We do not mean you any harm, but we must know your intentions here,# he sent sternly to the struggling presence.

Jean might possibly argue with the idea that they didn't mean the woman any harm, but she held her peace as she extended her senses towards the presence. Unmistakably female, Jean got no sense that the woman was frightened of Charles - there was far too much self assurance there to allow for the idea that she might be in danger. "She knows Nathan," Jean muttered, catching flickerings of thought-memories. The woman had a visual sense of him, had seen the man in person. "This wasn't random."

"Nor was this the first time she found herself in his mind," Charles said, his voice increasingly sharp. "I can see what she's been doing, shifting across the astral plane and into his subconscious. Into his memories..." He stopped suddenly - and released the presence, which fled instantly, thinning out as it vanished. "Nathan is not the only one of our people in whom she was interested," he murmured. "Jean, we must call Wanda."

"Of course," Jean said, moving to stand. The effort was more or less futile, though, as she collapsed back into the chair before she'd even made it fully to her feet. "Oww..."

Charles smiled very slightly. "Or perhaps you should sit for a time, and keep an eye on Nathan. I will see to advising Wanda that we need her assistance, and let Moira know what's happened."

"Thank you. Nate will be okay, I think, now that he's just sleeping." Jean sighed faintly. "Five hours..." Maybe she could get Scott to carry her upstairs.