Nathan, Adrienne, and Angelo - Friday afternoon

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

Adrienne visits Nathan to see how her donations to Elpis are being used.

It had been a long morning of meetings, and he hadn't remembered to stop and get anything to eat for lunch on the way back. He'd returned to the boathouse with the intention of raiding the fridge, but then Juliette had announced that another "excessively large folder" had arrived from Tel Aviv, and Nathan had found himself skimming, then reading through the material it had contained. A full hour got away from him before he was distracted by a knock on the office door.

"Come in," he called, before he quite realized that the psi-pattern was unfamiliar.

Pushing the door open tentatively, Adrienne entered the boathouse that served as the Elpis office and glanced around to find a pretty young admin sitting at the desk, whom she bypassed without a word to angle straight for the man she recognized from a picture in a fundraising newsletter article as Nathan Dayspring. "Adrienne Frost," she announced, stopping in front of him and extending a hand. "I've come to see what my money gets up to here, since obviously it's not being used to buy a proper office."

Nathan smiled slightly, and took her hand. "You should see the Tel Aviv office," he said. "That's the showpiece. The one we had to rebuild after it got blown up. I would be Nathan, obviously," he said. "Juliettte Hathaway, over there busy bringing order to our little world."

"Flatterer," Juliette said, then nodded politely at Adrienne and returned her attention to her word.

"Usually I have rather more minions than this, but they're all off either working elsewhere or attending to their schoolwork," Nathan went on. "Or other things. I don't ask."

Adrienne raised an eyebrow. "You don't ask where your employees are and what they're attending to? I hope they're not on the clock." She took up a chair across from Nathan, looking around the room again. "I've seen pictures of the Tel Aviv office. It is impressive. Your Mr. Rollins sends me newsletters, as a contributer to your organization. You're sometimes mentioned in them. Afghanistan, if I remember correctly... there was a particularly flattering article about you in regards to Afghanistan. The newsletters are nice, Mr. Dayspring, but they don't really delve into very much detail. I thought I'd take you up on your offer to see what my money's been doing."

"Afghanistan... oh, the mutant trafficking. Sorry about that. I have my head very much in our current batch of projects, and that one's been somewhat on the back burner." Nathan straightened, eyeing a folder on the other end of his long desk. It floated up into the air, and drifted over for a gentle landing in front of Adrienne. "Currently we're in the process of launching several DDR - demobilization, disarmament and reintegration - centers geared specifically to help mutant child soldiers. Our centers in Sri Lanka and Uganda are up and running, one in Chechnya should be within a week. Three more are still in the process of being established, in Wakanda, Serbia, and the DRC."

Nodding in approval at what she was hearing, Adrienne poked at the folder that had landed in front of her with a gloved finger as if it might bite her. "Neat trick," she mumbled, unused to being around other mutants and never having seen telekinesis at work before. "So what sort of work force do your DDRs have? I mean, I trust you've got more than two people sitting in a one-room office?"

"Oh, quite." He noted the gloves, and wondered, but that was a rather more personal question than you asked a donor at first meeting. Joel had taught him some manners, after all. "We've hired locally whenever we can. Obviously it's more effective to have people from that society helping these kids reintegrate into it. We've also got non-local staff when the people available locally didn't provide the whole skill set necessary - they're mostly medical specialists who've had experience with treating mutants, or those with powers training experience. But the person in charge of each of these centers is from the region, and usually a mutant themselves."

"Powers training experience?" Adrienne asked, interested fully now. "Not unlike Xavier's in that regard, is it? I have to tell you that being able to teach children control over their powers from a young age is something I thoroughly support, Mr. Dayspring." The businesswoman struggled to keep her face impassive, unaware that she was rubbing the backs of her hands together in her lap as if the contact would somehow give her the control she knew she lacked. "If anything, it will save them having to come to this madhouse- where people speak in rhymes and haikus- as adults to learn control. What are your figures for expected successful reintegration at the DDR centres?"

"Hey, I have no idea what's with the verse, either. As for the kids at these centres... the powers-training is more trying to rectify the damage already done when they were conscripted into whatever military or militia group decided to use them as weapons. In the end it's the same goal as we have here," Nathan conceded. "Control over your abilities so that they don't control you. The kids we're dealing with in the DDR centres are... well, not always, because there are some fairly traumatic backgrounds among the students here as well, but in general they've been through more." Nathan made a helpless gesture. "So I don't know, how this is all going to work... standard DDR programs never took mutation into account, so we've had to invent whole new models. It's uncharted territory, in a sense."

With a raised eyebrow, Adrienne stopped fidgeting and focused on Nathan's words instead of her lack of control over her own power. "So speaking in verse isn't normal for the inhabitants here? That makes me feel slightly more at ease." She crossed her legs and folded her hands in her lap as Nathan explained more about the goals of Elpis's work with the DDR centres. "So is that what your people do here? Invent the models? When they're not attending to their schoolwork or other things?"

"Research, mostly. Some of my more long-term employees go to conferences or meetings in New York - I do a lot of that, too. Just came back from the UN, as a matter of fact. See, the point of having this office is really the proximity to the UN. I do a little teaching here still, mostly on the individual basis and powers training, but I'm not as much a part of the school itself as I used to be. These days," Nathan said with a smile, "I'm mostly a part-time languages teacher."

"Do you only teach powers training to students?" Adrienne asked conversationally, though she was mentally cracking her knuckles over her good fortune at having found herself a possible body to help her recover the control she had lost over her powers.

Well, that was an interesting question. "Not necessarily," Nathan said after a moment, eyeing her. "I'm a telepath and telekinetic - I've helped other psis. I've got a good grasp of meditative techniques that can be helpful with a range of mentally-directed abilities. Some of it's leaned from Charles, of course, but I've had other teachers." And he was not discussing the ghosts from the future on a first meeting.

"Mentally-directed abilities like... psychometry?" She contemplated just cutting to the chase and asking Nathan for help, but her pride wouldn't allow it.

Ah-hah. "Well, I'd be happy to meditate with you," Nathan said slowly. "I used to be a precognitive, too, before I burned out, so I do know some, uh, trick for adapting to anomalous sensory input. But you might not know this - Charles has actually trained a mutant with psychometry before."

Eyebrow rising skyward again, the brunette smirked at Nathan. "You make it sound as if this mutant was a dog and Charles a handler in some sort of show." She picked an invisible piece of lint off her skirt. "I don't need meditation or any such thing, but even if I did, I'd still have some other candidates to interview. I don't know how I would feel being 'trained' by you or the Professor, at least not
before I'd checked out the other psis who teach here. The psi Charles trained isn't still here, are they?"

He was tired, suddenly. Fencing with people was entertaining enough, when you hadn't already been doing it all day and your shields weren't in raggedy tatters. "No," he said, and it came out patiently enough, "but he lives in New York. My apologies if I was presumptuous with the offer. I've been helped so much here that I sometimes forget that not everyone around here needs that."

"I don't need it. I don't need any help," Adrienne stated forcefully, to convince herself as much as Nathan. She dug her fingers into the palms of her gloves to keep herself from rubbing them again. "I should probably be going, unless you have anything else to tell me about my money and Elpis."

The door opened, at this point, and Angelo strode in from outside, in the middle of an animated phone conversation in Russian.

You are so lying through your teeth, lady, Nathan thought, but didn't say. "One of my staff," he said to Adrienne, inclining his head at Angelo. "Angelo Espinosa."

Angelo glanced up, having not initially realized anyone but Nate was in the room, and nodded politely to Adrienne as he listened to whoever was on the other end. Excusing himself from the conversation for a moment - again in Russian - when they'd finished, he smiled at her, recognizing her from her icons. "Good afternoon."

"Adrienne Frost," she stated, since Nathan hadn't introduced her to Angelo when he'd introduced Angelo to her. The former international model recognized that Angelo was speaking Russian, but beyond that she couldn't comprehend what he was saying on the phone. "Angelo's the one who can't count, right? Nice to see he has some uses," she said to Nathan in a sympathetic voice, completely serious.

Nathan gazed back at her very mildly. "Ms. Frost, while we all deeply appreciate your interest in our organization, I would prefer you didn't insult my staff. At least not to their faces."

Angelo seemed to be treating this as a diplomatic business meeting, as his smile hadn't wavered. "I did tell you I was good at languages, Ms. Frost."

Smiling sweetly up at Angelo, Adrienne nodded. "Yes, you did. Good for you." She turned then to Nathan. "It wasn't meant as an insult, Mr. Dayspring, merely an observation. I can't abide useless people, and I'm glad to see my money hasn't been wasted in the employment of them. I'm sorry if you took my comment as an insult," she added to Angelo, in the same patronizing tone she'd used before.

"I didn't take your comment as anything it wasn't", he returned, still perfectly polite. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got work to attend to." He raised the phone back to his ear, half-turning away.

"Angelo was my first research assistant, back before Elpis was actually founded," Nathan said. "Joel has great hopes of him playing a major role in the organization somewhere down the line."

"Well, I hope it's not in the math department," Adrienne smirked, almost hoping to rile Nathan up again. "How long was Elpis in your head before it came into fruition, Nathan?" Here at least she felt on somewhat common ground with the telepath; building an idea into a successful organization.

"Several months," Nathan said, and launched into the nicely edited version of the story. "My father passed away, and I inherited a substantial amount of money, as well as a data recovery company I had no desire to run. I had already been investigating these types of situations for Charles, so it seemed like a natural extension."

Recrossing her legs, Adrienne smiled knowingly. "Ah yes, the old familiar 'inheritance' tale. What would any organization do without an inheritance? They do make things easier in the beginning stages, don't they?" Receiving the stipend Emma had given her to start up her company, knowing that achieving her dream of starting 64 Square would be just that much easier with money she didn't have to work for was, bitterly, the happiest moment of Adrienne's life. "So what did you do with the data recovery company? Sell it off or integrate it into Elpis?"

"Sold it." Nathan didn't mean to sound flat, but it came out that way. He forced himself to smile, if thinly. "More efficient, that way." And I'm not getting into a conversation with a stranger about how good it felt to shed even that part of my father's legacy.

"Is it really more efficient to out-source for data recovery?" she asked, curious. With a gesture towards Angelo, Adrienne narrowed her eyes. "Surely you could get use from someone like him in data recovery? Unless there's math involved... but you've got to have other people who can cover the math end of things. What's he doing on the phone, anyway?"

Angelo, at that moment, happened to be ending the conversation, and clicked the phone off before he looked back up at Adrienne. "I was discussing one of our projects with a colleague. Nathan knows what I'm good at."

"We don't do much data recovery, Ms. Frost. In fact, we do a lot of compiling new data. Elpis staff do a lot of investigative trips, to establish needs and challenges for mutants in various regions." Damn, he really was starting to sound like Joel.

"Well, you both seem rather vague about all of this," Adrienne murmured, losing interest fast, "but I suppose that's to be expected. I wouldn't feel as comfortable handing over as much money to your organization as I do if you weren't professionally discreet about what you tell your donors. On another topic? 'Any idea what's going on with this seeming poetry attack?"

Nathan made a helpless gesture. "Not a clue," he said.

"It's being worked on", was all Angelo could offer. "But for once, it's not just us."

"That's... comforting?" Adrienne replied sarcastically, then rose from her chair in a smooth motion. "I've taken up quite enough of your time, Mr. Dayspring. Thank you for the insight into Elpis, however scant it may have been. Angelo," she said in farewell with a cant of her head toward the other man before exiting the boathouse.

Angelo watched her go, waiting an extra few moments before he spoke. "Well, that was an... interestin' visit."

"She didn't take her folder," Nathan said a bit mournfully, gazing at where Adrienne had left it on the desk. "All of that background info I
put together..."

"You made her a folder?" Angelo asked, a little startled, then shrugged. "One of us can just drop it in her pigeonhole when we're up
at the house."

Nathan made a noise that sounded alarmingly like 'meh'. "Joel can go back to handling donors," he grumbled, pushing his chair down the length of his desk to another stack of documents that he started to rifle through industriously. "I don't like them."