Aureus Canis - Early Sunday Afternoon

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Mariah's at the mansion, and Jean helps calm her enough to help Jennie out.



Jean took a deep breath - calm. She needed to focus on calm. The girl, Mariah, was clearly not fully in control of her powers, and the medical facilities at the school where Jennie was waiting seemed to be overwhelming her even more. Jean needed to not pressure her, no matter how anxious she was to have Jennie back. "Is there anything I can get you? Some juice or something?"

Mariah shook her head quickly, dark eyes wide, face pale. What were they going to do to her? And what if this didn't work? What happened then? "No. Thank you. I...I'm good." Her hands were just as pale as her face, clenched to small fists in her lap. "I'm sorry. I really didn't mean to hurt anyone."

Jean nodded, face calm. "We know that, Mariah. Really, we do." She settled on the edge of a second chair to look into the girl's eyes. "It will be all right, I have faith." Which was kind of the only thing keeping Jean going at the moment.

The lack of yelling gave Mariah some hope, but not much. People always started out nice. "So...what do we do? I mean...you can fix them, right? They're not...I didn't turn them into dogs forever?"

Oh yeah, this was promising. "We believe that you can fix them, Mariah. In our experience we've never found a mutant with a shifting ability, either of themselves or others, who doesn't have a... a reverse switch, if you will."

The big black dog that sat on the floor tilted it's head at Mariah and nodded. Trying to project trust, when as far as Jennie knew, Mariah could just make it worse and she'd either shrink or, God Forbid, lose her mind entirely. Jennie looked at Jean and waited.

Inexplicably, that actually worked to calm Mariah when nothing else did. "So...what do I do? I don't even know how I did this in the first place."

"That's something i can help with," Jean said, "if you'll trust me. I can take you back inside your mind to when it happened, show you what using your power feels like from the inside."

Mariah hesitated a moment, then slowly nodded and Jean smiled her 'relax, trust me, I'm a doctor' smile. "All right then," she said, reaching out to take the girl's hand. "Here we go..."

Finding the memory in Mariah's mind wasn't difficult and Jean watched it all play out in the time between heartbeats, then gently collected the girl's consciousness, bringing her inside the memory. #Here. This is what happened?# she asked. The memory started to play again from when Jennie went to open the bedroom door, the entire scene colored by the memory of Mariah's fear and tension. #This is normal,# she said. #Tension and extreme emotion are almost always a factor in late manifestation. That's what sparked it.#

"But what do I do?" Mariah said out loud, the thought echoing inside her head a million times over with the natural confusion of someone who has never learned to focus mind to mind. She didn't really want to relive this. It had been bad enough the first time.

Jean was just glad she wasn't panicking at the Jean's presence in her head. #First you have to relax,# she told the girl. #Stress triggered it the first couple times, but control requires calm and patience. Feel what happened - not just the fear and confusion, feel the physicality of it. Find the moment your powers triggered and learn what it feels like.#

But Mariah didn't want to learn. Learning meant that this wasn't just some bad dream. That she was really as much of a freak and loser and outcast as she'd always suspected. "Can't you just fix it and make it go away?" she thought and said unhappily, tears welling up in her eyes again even as she groped blindly after that memory.

Jean suppressed her initial 'tough cookies' response to that thought as unhelpful. #No, I can't, Mariah. I know it's difficult but this is not something that's going to go away. It's something you need to learn to control. Not just for Jennie and the others' sakes but for your own as well.#

It's not fair. Mariah thought but didn't say, knowing there wasn't a teacher in existence who wouldn't slap her for that. She sniffled and finally found the place where she'd panicked, trying to figure out what exactly had gone on in that split second of emotion. "I don't know what I did. I was just...I wanted her to stop and it just happened."

Jennie looked at Jean. #I'm half-tempted to re-create the scene itself, potentially by knocking her out of her chair# she thought at the other woman dryly. But there was no malice behind the words, just exhaustion.

Of course, not saying things with a telepath in your head didn't really work, but the fact that she'd not actually said it counted for something, at least with Jean. #Patience,# she sent on a tight beam to Jennie, an edge of a smile coloring the tone. #How long did it take you to master consciously using your powers?#

Turning her attention back to Mariah she explained, #That wanting is at the base of it - you wanted her to stop, wanted it so badly that you stopped her. And it's that wanting that will turn her back.# Jean held the memory in the moment Mariah had found - the edge before when her powers activated - and carefully began removing extraneous information from it; the background noise Mariah hadn't even realized she'd been hearing from the refrigerator and heater and the street below; the sharp details of the apartment; even the sharp mental tang of Mariah's panic that was making feeling anything else difficult, until all that was left was Jennie reaching for the door and Mariah reaching for her. And the buzzing undercurrent of power, so subtle and so completely unfocused it was hardly there at all.

"That's it?" Mariah was taken aback. How could it be that? It was small and weak, nothing that felt like it could have so completely destroyed her world. Knowing what she was feeling for made it easy to locate the same power outside of her memories, still held in the careful calm that Jean had constructed. She could see how the power had flowed out, how it wrapped around Jennie. So it was just a matter of... Mariah reached out, touched Jennie's head and pulled back, taking the power with her.

There came that pressing sensation again, and Jennie's skin prickled. Heat bloomed in her head, running down her spine and down her limbs. She crouched, suddenly dizzy, and then sneezed, flinging her backwards.

When Jennie's vision finally stopped spinning and settled on one picture, she noticed that she was on her back and looking up at the ceiling. She blinked, and rubbed her eyes, and then pulled her hands back to stare at them. Eight fingers and two thumbs, all opposable. She wiggled them experimentally. Then she noticed two other things. One, that she was cold, as she was on the medlab floor and now she only had skin, and two, all of her clothes were probably still on the floor of Mariah's apartment.

"Holy--" Jennie sat up, pulling her knees to her chest. She looked up at Mariah and Jean sheepishly. "Hi. Little help?"

Jean's bright smile was 98% relief and only 2% amusement. Really. And even as she spoke, saying, "Jennie. Good to have you back. Excellently done, Mariah," her mind was seeking out the closet where they kept clean lab coats and summoning one to her. She opened the door just a crack and pulled the long white coat in, offering it to Jennie.

Mariah was just staring, at Jennie, at Jean, at her own hands that didn't look any different than they had a second ago. Shouldn't there have been some outward sign that she had that kind of ability? "So...can I go now?"

"Well, there's a small brown fox that would probably like it if you helped him out," Jennie said, gratefully pulling on the labcoat and trying to repress her giggles. "And as much as I'd hate to for them to be able to talk again, there's Whitney and Madison."

"Oh...right." Mariah slumped then turned bright red. "Um, so we should get that taken care of, I guess?"

"Come with me," Jean said gently, "I'll stop and collect some more clothes and then we can go see them. And we can discuss your options. You're welcome to train your powers here at our school - at the very least I'd recommend you take up some form of meditative hobby like Tai Chi or Yoga. Even knowing how to reverse the process you don't want to accidentally trigger your power whenever you're particularly upset." Jean opened the door, stepping aside so Mariah could precede her into the hallway. "Jennie," she said before she stepped out, "we're going to want to do a quick physical before we release you. Would you prefer to wait for me to finish up with the others or can you cope with Amelia?"

"Eh?" Jennie looked up from settling the labcoat around her shoulders. Coordination was getting some used to. Again.

"Nah, I'll, uh, wait."

"All right. I'll be back as soon as I can. And, really, Jennie. It's good to have you back." Jean smiled, then slipped into the hall, closing the door to give Jennie some time to get used to only having two feet again.

And that thought was answered by a shuffle and then a thud, and then a muffled "I'm okay!" from inside the room.