xp_logs | Jean and Nathan, Friday night

Wakanda's back to normal, but operating in a realm of pure thought has problematic consequences even for telepaths.

"Jean?" Nathan's voice was very woeful as he leaned hard against the doorframe. They were in the Kanda guesthouse where he and Ororo and the others had stayed the previous summer. Where Ororo or T'Challa were right now, he wasn't sure. They'd left him and Jean alone to "get some rest". Translation: get un-crazy. Which was entirely unfair. He and Jean were not the ones who'd been possessed. "Can you have psychosomatic food poisoning from eating a talking astral plant?

"You can have anything you want," Jean informed him, her voice emerging somewhat reluctantly from the middle of the bed she'd collapsed onto and curled up in within minutes of being left alone. "Except you can't make the world flex anymore. Much too solid. 'S not fair."

Nathan tottered towards the other bed in the room. Technically Ororo's, he knew. Did he care? "I like it when the world stays put," he muttered, sitting down on the bed. His head was still spinning. "It's okay if all the walls change in your head, but they shouldn't change out where you can see them. Give you a complex."

"Complex of complexes all with great complexity," Jean singsonged, then giggled briefly before choking it off. Hysteria was a bad idea. "I feel like Manuel; high on the lives of others one minute, crashing into myself in their depression, boundaries all gone but I can't fly anymore. Inside of my head's too narrow because the edges go on forever."

Nathan shook a finger at her; or tried. His coordination was a little shaky. "Shh. They'll hear us and lock us up for being crazy people. We're supposed to be better at faking it than this." Lucidity was a very funny thing. He thought he was mostly lucid, especially in comparison to the babbling redhead in the bed, but still, if you had to ask yourself whether or not you were lucid the answer was probably no.

The babbling redhead was definitely not doing so well. "Don't want to fake it, want to be it. I could be anything, could and was, anything and everything, so where does it leave me now? World's gone muddy and solid; colors too bright and light's too dark. And my head hurts. Where's Scott? I want to see with real eyes. You need real eyes to see the real world and mine have gone."

"T'Challa promised he'd get us home. What good are kings if they don't have planes? And I can't call Moira and ask to borrow hers again, or she won't let me leave the house anymore." It came out sounding very aggrieved, and Nathan sighed and laid back, swinging his legs up onto the bed. "I was a bird," he said after a moment. "Not like usual. Really a bird."

Jean finally lifted her head to look at him, eyes shadowed and dark, although dry. "I was everything," she breathed out. "I was the air as it blew and the water which flowed. Fire burned and it was me as I fell to the ground with the earth. But one can't be everything and still be one, and I can't be me when I'm not anything." Burying her head again she strove for lucidity and asked, "You did say we were alone? Or did you think it? I can't tell and I don't know how far away they are because they're all here and nowhere, but I don't want to be quite this crazy when someone can hear me when they're not you since you're already the same."

Nathan looked sideways at her. "There's no one close enough to hear," he said, the look in his eyes going distant. "Go to sleep. Dream your way back to Scott... it doesn't matter that there's an ocean in the way. Not right now." Nathan closed his eyes, sighing. So damned tired. It had been an hour or so, in the... whatever it had been, or so they'd been told. But it had seemed much, much longer.

"Distance isn't real," Jean muttered, reaching out to pull a pillow closer, "and time is an illusion." She paused, then added, "Lunchtime, doubly so," with a smirk in her voice.

Nathan sat bolt upright, glaring at her. "Insane, mean woman," he muttered, sliding off the bed and shuffling back to the bathroom. "Fucking smart-assed talking plant..."