xp_logs | Carmen Animi Vermium: Marius, Marius, Monet and Jean. (Reply)

OOC: I owe Dex (for some very wonderful socking) and Tap and Cora for the log. Many, many thanks to you all. This one is also backdated like anything.

Some answers are sought from Marius-The-Elder in Sydney, leading (hopefully) to a resolution of Monet's health problems.

Backdated to 16/10.

EDIT: Er, reposting this, because I somehow totally missed the part where this was posted in x_m, rather than in x_logs. Yes. Lalalala.

Transport by Clarice was, at best, disconcerting. It didn't come with the nausea that accompanied transport-by-granddad and was, instead a momentary blink and the disconcerting sensation that it really should be mid-afternoon, rather than barely dawn, jetlag gone mad. Monet was still walking, at least, if unsteadily at times. They'd been told that there wasn't that much time left before the ...whatever it was the Professor had tracked back to Marius (and what had her dad been thinking, calling both the Mariuses Marius, anyway?) did irreparable damage. Apparently it had been visible but not obvious, once you started to look for it, rather than screening for cancer and physical brain abnormalities. Little points of psychic residue, crawling through the physical structure of her mind, looking, once you saw them, like a sea of almost invisible maggots. Parasitic traces of something and whatever it was they were meant to do had gone wrong. Badly so. But they had a name to trace it back to, and even the address, available free online. The 8th floor of the housing commission flats in Waterloo, Sydney, number 802.

The door was the same as all the others in a hall lit with bright fluorescent lighting. Locked, of course. 6 am, what other option would there be? There was the sound of snoring, loud and irregular from inside. "It looks like he's home." Monet shoved at the door, breaking the lock. She wanted this over and she wanted answers.

"I suppose offerin' to initiate contact as one whose mind is currently not infested with psychic phenomena would be a bit irrelevant at this point," the Marius not currently in his sister's ill and increasingly hostile graces remarked. He took a brief moment to take stock of the circumstances, which currently involved quite a lot of tense silence whilst occupying a rather shabby hallway. It was perhaps a testament to the recent tenor of his life that the general strangeness of confronting his half-brother for the first time concerned him less than his internal debate over whether to restrain Monet or assist in what was probably an inevitable beating. The boy cast a cautious glance at the X-Man who had accompanied them. Ah, it's irrelevant. Any untoward action and she's likely to dangle us by our shirtcollars with her superior brain.

Jean stood behind the half-siblings, her own expression unreadable except for the tightness about her eyes. In truth the only interceding she was likely to do should things head in the beating direction would be to get her own licks in. Jean did not take well to people mucking about with her students at all. But for now she was content to let Monet handle things, and see how they went.

"Come on." Monet led the way into the flat and staggered, slamming into a little table. If the noise of the door hadn't woken Marius up, this was sure to have. "We know you're in here. Come the fuck out here and talk to us, you bastard."

The snoring had cut off, and there were scrabbling noises from the room. Marius emerged, a cricket bat in his hands, clad only in a pair of filthy y-fronts and a surly expression. "Fuck do you lot want then? This is my private property, right? Breaking and entering. You going to explain this one to the courts yeah." He was unshaven, and his hair hung in greasy locks, but he didn't show any fear. More triumph in his stance.

"Sure you will. I really reckon you want the cops coming around, so you can explain why you're trying to turn my brain into jelly to them. There's not really any doubt about whose side they're going to take. Now get them out of my head before I break every bone in your body." Monet was dimly aware that this possibly wasn't the most diplomatic way to go about things but she didn't really care.

"Fuck off, rich girl! You've got nothing on me." He pointed the bat at Marius. "Take the rest of these bloody twats with you."

"We've got the Professor's report. He documented it and traced it back to you. He pointed out that this kind of thing is recognized as a crime in the US and Australia. I don't reckon Dad would hush it up this time." ~Jean? What do we do now? He's not admitting it or anything. We're going to be kind of fuxored if he doesn't admit it, aren't we?~ She wasn't sure if she'd ever felt this scared before.

The younger Marius regarded the elder dryly. "You know, oft did I wonder why dad should keep the bastard son on the books whilst tossin' the legitimate. I thank you for solving this mystery of many years. Incidentally, though the legal validity of this evidence may be in debate, your power-signature stands in glaring compliment to the problem at hand." The boy's eyes followed the end of the bat up its owner's arm and into his face, and he added, "You wank."

"You don't know fuck all about it, you spoiled cunt." He swung the bat threateningly, forcing them back. "Got everything, and nothing left for me because I made a mistake. Dad don't care 'bout you getting pissed and flashing your tits beside Paris Hilton. Or little bastard boy's fucksticks moaning on in the gossip sheets when he left. No, I had to be the perfect one, and when I wasn't, I got tossed aside for his other fucking mistakes and his whore wife's new brats. You both got everything for nothing. So go fuck yourself, Monet. I'm not dying so you get to have your waste of a life back, bitch!"

Jean was not really what one could call a menacing figure, for the most part. But the look in her eyes as she stepped forward, well, it did rather suggest 'I can kill you with my brain and right now it's sounding like a good idea'. "Oh, and so Monet should die so you live? Is that how you think this is going to play out. Because I tell you right now that you are very, very wrong."

The younger boy gave something very close to a growl. "Right. Imminent death does not grant you leave to act the utter cunt, which is a judgment I am well qualified to pass. You weren't the only one dealt from the shallow end of the St. Croix genepool. What, did it never occur to you to ask?" Marius gestured in exasperation at the cricket bat. "An' stop swingin' that idiot thing! We've got a telekinetic and a bloody invulnerable here!"

"Won't stop me shoving it up your ass, mate!"

Monet glared at Marius-the-Fuckwit. "For fuck's sake! Look, how about this for an idea? You deworm me and we don't hurt you, we don't break your knees and we even fucking send you to Muir. And if you don't, we start by breaking your knees, and work from there. How about that? And, by the way, the cricket bat is so not scary."

"There, see?" the younger Marius shot, and made a swipe at the bat.

Jean rolled her eyes and yanked the cricket bat out of Marius-the-elder's hand telekinetically, then reached out to grab Marius-the-younger's shirt, pulling him back. "Brawl later. Medical issues first." Her tone brooked no argument.

Okay, so, plan A had been 'Get Marius-the-Fuckwit to fix it without damaging him too badly or his link to the worms might break'. Plan A was a monumental failure but they'd had to try it anyway. Plan B, the one everyone had laid odds on being more likely to work was also far, far more complicated. From what Monet had understood of the explanation, it involved a feedback loop set up by the worms. Essentially, the closer she got to Marius, the stronger they were. It was only that she'd spent most of the intervening time time on the other side of the planet that had kept her this healthy. For a certain, given, not very large value of healthy. Unfortunately, Plan B involved getting a barely trained telepath to wander around her brain with the psychic equivalent of a can of Mortien. And there was a good chance that getting rid of the worms that way would make them rebound. They'd either spring back like a rubber band and ...bye-bye Marius's frontal lobe or they'd come back and land on Monet again. Plan B was not a good plan. But Plan A wasn't doing much at all, was it?

"Jean, it's not working. He's not going to help." Why would he? All he had to lose was a nice, new body. Monet was close to tears with frustration. And she wasn't even allowed to hit him in case she damaged him too badly. The world was unfair, sometimes. "Should we go with Plan B?"

The younger Marius massaged the front of his shirt as he quirked an eyebrow at Jean. "What's Plan B, then?"

Still glowering at Marius the elder, Jean answered, "Plan B is when we go in and do this the hard way. Hands on, as it were." She glanced over at Monet, and her face softened, some of the worry she felt showing through. "It's... not guaranteed."

"I fucking know that! I knew that before Clarice dropped us off." Monet shook her head and staggered as the room spun. "But. I want them out. Besides, it's my goddamn body. He doesn't get to have it. Ever." No-one had ever said that St Croix family was good at sharing. "Jean? Can you do the head-twiddly thing? I ...don't know how to get at my own head. His I can get at, but that's so totally not helpful. Marius? Watch Marius and make sure he doesn't do anything." Monet collapsed to sit cross-legged on the floor, trying hard not to think about what she was sitting in. On. I'm getting new jeans when this is done..

Jean took a deep breath, setting her anger to the side. "Watch him," she told Marius the younger curtly as she turned to kneel next to Monet. "Come on," she said, placing her hand on the younger woman's temple for the added depth of perception it allowed her. "Let's go inside..." Catching up Monet's consciousness she dropped the two of them deep into Monet's mind, showing her the path inside.

Marius watched the two women's faces . . . close. It was a quality difficult to quantify, particularly for one with little understanding of psionics, but when he looked in their eyes he got the distinct impression that someone had pulled the shades. This was unquestionably the end of his involvement.

"Right," he muttered, "guess we'll just wait here then." And then, just because he couldn't resist, he shot a glance at where his elder brother fumed and added, "Try not to be a twit."

Monet hadn't been sure what to expect, if anything. A shoe shop, where all the edges broke the rules of how perspective should work in multiple, contradictory ways wasn't it. She lent over slightly, taking a closer look at a pair of Louis Vuitton pumps, only to step away slowly at the sight of the maggots crawling around in them. "Oh, god." Maggots wriggled in the shadows and many of the shoes. Something, deep in her subconscious, seemed to like labels. Every pair of shoes and every rack of shelving came with its own little label. One nearby said "bananas and red wine", another "Toes: Left foot only."

She reached out and picked that shoe up, shaking the maggots onto the floor. "I should put everything back the way I found it, right? Just without the maggots?" Distantly, Monet wondered what would happen if she changed the label on the shoe to 'right foot only.'

"This is your mindscape," Jean said, standing a few steps back, letting Monet take it in on her own, but also cataloging signs of the maggots' damage. "It's the representation of your mental presence on the astral plane, and it bears a direct relation to your actual mind, in both directions. Things that happen here very much affect your mental and physical self. But it's your mind. If there's something you want to change, far be it for me to stop you. Sometimes one of the most effective ways a telepath has of getting their actual mind in order is in ordering their mindscape." Of course, that took a lot of training and practice to do well, but Jean could help with that. "You don't have to just put things back the way they are without the maggots, we can actually repair the damage."

When they'd canvassed plan B, everyone had pointed out that as it was her mind, she could make it whatever she wanted, while she was in its astral plane copy. You killed maggots with boiling water, didn't you? Or fire. Monet stared at one hand, imagining it holding a can of hairspray, the other a lighter. She concentrated, hard, for a moment and bingo! She aimed it at one pair of shoes, flicked the lighter on and "Ow! Ow! Ow!" She dropped the hairspray and lighter and beat the flames out of the shoes. Those maggots at least, were gone but the shoes were charred and something, deep inside her head hurt. "Fire bad."

She paused, thinking aloud. "Shoes are waterproof, right? I mean, really, hot water and steam shouldn't hurt them, should it? Because they're not real shoes. They're brain shoes and that means I can make them waterproof, right?" She wasn't going to think too closely about all this. The mechanics of it all were mind boggling.

Jean hadn't even realized what Monet was thinking when the hairspray popped into existence, so she didn't have time to say anything. Now, though, she simply nodded. "You can make them waterproof, sure. And it's definitely a good idea to think about that before you start unleashing destructive power." Because she could make them fireproof, too, if you tried hard enough, but it was the kind of thing you didn't do willy-nilly.

The floor Jean stood on shot up, leaving her on a narrow, spindly pedestal and a neon purple umbrella sprung into being over Jean's head. She'd hardly need one herself. Monet stared up at the sky, glowing green mist shot through with gold and pink sparks (what did that say about her, anyway?) and concentrated on the idea that her brain was waterproof. As was its contents.

It began to rain, a torrent of boiling water pouring from the sky, flushing the dying maggots out of all the little, shadowed corners. It was knee deep in moments and began creeping up Monet's thighs. "Uh, Jean? What happens if my brain gets flooded? Will I have to spend the rest of my life with my head full of water?"

"You create a drain and let it out," she told Monet - seemingly having no trouble hearing the girl, despite being almost a dozen feet higher. Nor did her voice seem to come from a distance. Jean watched the rain from under the umbrella Monet had thoughtfully provided; she could have created her own guards - had a few in place anyways - but it was good that Monet was thinking about these things.

A drain. That was easy enough. It appeared in the floor, a dark red rubber plug on a chain stopping it. Monet pulled the chain and watched as the water streamed out through it. Don't think about where it's going or you might break something. There was a sort of ...twang, the feeling of a rubber band being flicked back and the last dead maggots, the ones that hadn't been washed away, vanished leaving little glowing trails behind them. "Uh. Where'd they go? They're not in here any more."

Jean eyed one of the glowing trails. "I don't know, but they've gone," she said, casting about with her senses. "I don't feel anything in here but you, do you?"

"No.... They're gone, though. I can't see anything and I think I'd be able to." Monet looked around the room. "Let's go eh? I'm think we're good. You good to give us a lift? I think I'm kind of stuck."

Jean stepped off the pillar Monet had created and was instantly on the ground, the pillar gone. "Yeah, we're going to be working on this one," she told Monet with a smile. "Come on." She reached out to touch Monet's temple again and they were back.

Monet rubbed her eyes. For a moment, the room had seemed almost too real, the colours and perspective too correct. "Marius? I think we did it." A glance around the room and she noticed that the other Marius' nose was bleeding, little points of light disappearing up it, one, two, three and they were gone. "Shit!"

Marius' attention whipped from one half-sibling to another. There was something fundamentally irritating about being the only one in the room not privy to some dramatic psychic exchange; as far as he could see the only thing occupying the last handful of moments had been blank silence and a series of unsettling twitches from his elder brother. Marius gave up. There was no reason to feign understanding when a clear expression of ignorance had served him so well in the past.

"What happened?" he asked, looking at Monet before his attention settled uneasily back to their now-bleeding sibling where he sat slumped on the floor, "Eh -- there supposed to be leakin' here?"

"I don't. No, I don't think so." Monet wasn't sure she could stand to reach the phone right now. "Jean? Can you call an ambulance? We should maybe go before someone calls the cops on us."

Jean knelt next to the elder Marius where he twitched, eyes serious, face closed. Suddenly she nodded, summoning the phone to her. "Definitely time to go," she said as she dialed.