xp_logs | Adrienne, Amanda and Morgan

Following this post, Amanda drops by Harry's to meet with Adrienne. Gossip occurs, as does Morgan.

Set before this email.

It made Adrienne smile to see baseball once again on the television at Harry's. The Jays were playing the Yankees, and she looked around for Garrison as she waved off Harry's offer of a Moosehead and ordered a glass of wine instead. Wine seemed more appropriate for a meeting of women, though she doubted Amanda would care. Carrying the wine to a table, she sipped at it while she waited for the other woman and let her eyes become glued to the tv, rubbing aimlessly at the sling that held her arm in place so her collarbone could heal.

"Wow, you've really been in the wars, haven't you?" came the cheerful greeting as Amanda breezed over to her table. "Pint of Guiness, Harry," she called, still enjoying the fact she could actually do that now. He gave her a stony look in reply and she busied herself with sitting, dumping her file bag on the floor and hanging her jacket over the back of the chair. "How're you pulling up? At the 'sore and cranky' stage, or are they still giving you the good drugs?"

"It's not too bad," Adrienne said with a shrug of her good shoulder after giving Amanda a warm smile in greeting. She'd had worse injuries before. "I'm trying to wean myself off the good drugs. They knock me out and I'm worried if I don't have all my mental faculties Inez is going to take over my company without my noticing. So sore and cranky it is. How are things with you? 'Haven't talked to you since before you left for Europe," she pointed out.

"Good stuff - I've got a healing spell but it's kind of 'emergencies only'," Amanda replied, her tone more irreverent than her expression, which was relieved. She nodded to the barmaid as her beer was set down in front of her. "And yeah, sorry. We've all been a bit busy, what with India blowing up and all. If it helps, I managed to sort myself out a bit more while I was away? And Emma and Sof have been tag-teaming with the therapy thing, so hopefully we'll get the mess my head's in fixed up sooner rather than later."

Raising an eyebrow, Adrienne sipped her wine. "Don't be sorry. Sorting yourself out's never a bad thing. 'You get a chance to sort anything out with Angelo?" she inquired conversationally.

Incredibly, Amanda blushed, rosy-red. "Um, yeah, I did," she said, a little awkwardly. "He came and joined me in France, and then we went and dropped by my family in Germany." A hand moved to the neckline of her tank top, where the edge of what looked to be a new tattoo could be seen. "It was... good. He seems a bit more settled now too."

Adrienne was thrilled by Amanda's blushing and before she could rein herself in she'd emitted a girlish "oooooo!" to go along with the pointed smirk. She drained the rest of her wineglass to give herself time to regain her composure, recognizing that she wasn't nearly drunk enough to be sounding like a sorority girl. "That's great," she added, eyes darting towards the ink she spotted on the other girl. "Was that the occasion for the tattoo?" she guessed, "and what is it?"

"Yeah," Amanda admitted. "There was this... ritual. Magic thing. Sort of a bonding spell." The blush deepened. "A little bit like getting engaged, I s'pose. Sort of."

"Engaged?" The psychometrist was glad she'd finished her wine, because she might have been spitting it over the table by now. "That's..." she bit back the urge to say 'scary as hell.' "That's wonderful. And scary as hell." Shit. No more wine and pills together. "I was about to say that I've been considering getting a tattoo of my own, but if it's an engagement thing, I've changed my mind," she joked. "I've been there once, and I'm not doing it again." She sat back in her chair, smiling, trying hard to derail her train of thought but unable to. "Engagement's the fun part." No matter how it had ended, she'd enjoyed the early days with Steven, and couldn't muster up much anger for them. "So does Angelo have a matching one, or is it just a girl thing, like a ring?"

"Well, what with the disappearances and the near-death experiences, it sort of made sense - the spell lets us know the other's still around, you know?" Amanda shrugged, not really good at the whole 'girl talk' thing, but still visibly pleased regardless. "It's a mutual thing. One for him, one for me. My sister's a witch, so we got her to do it, since my powers don't work that way so well any more." She snorted. "Jimi was trying to convince Ange it was a whole naked ritual. Nearly got the pants off him before I stepped in."

"That's hilarious," Adrienne responded with forced enthusiasm, waving Briar off as the barmaid approached with a bottle to top off her wine. Honestly, she didn't understand what was so appealing about a naked Angelo, but kept the comment to herself. "How do your powers differ from your sister's?" she inquired instead.

"Jimi's not a mutant," Amanda explained, not missing the slightly forced tone of Adrienne's voice but deciding it wasn't worth causing issues. Besides, not everyone had to like everyone - as long as it didn't cause problems, she could overlook it. "She... inherited her magic from our mother, when she passed on last year. She's more what people think of a witch being - the whole pagan gods and magic potions and communing with nature, that sort of thing. I draw my power from my mutation, which connects to the city, so I'm more flashy light shows and graffiti wards, that sort of thing. I guess you could say Jimi's magic is more subtle?" Amanda sipped at her beer. "She's got a lot to learn still, but Margali, that's our mother, she gave her a pretty good grounding." Amanda had lost the anger in her voice when talking about Margali, but there was still a certain discomfort for the woman who had nearly killed her.

The brunette's smile was genuine this time. "When I think of a witch I think black cats, cauldrons, and broomsticks," she admitted, a tad sheepish. "And don't forget pointed hats." She considered bringing up the deceased mother, but noticed the unease in Amanda's voice and steered clear of it. "Do I want to know what a graffiti ward is? 'Sounds a little bit... I don't know... messy?" She tended to learn the most interesting, if random, things while talking to the younger woman.

The Brit laughed. "That's more Jimi's side of things. Me, I'm more the leather jacket and Docs." There was a ring mark on the table between them from Amanda's pint - they served Guiness chilled here, ugh - and she reached over to draw patterns on the table with it. "Traditional wards are basically writing 'keep out' in certain magical laguages and then putting the power into them to keep the nasties at bay," she explained. "Traditional magic doesn't mesh with my power so well, so I had to come up with something that would. So I tend to use spray cans and combine tranditional runes wth graffiti tags, that sort of thing." She grinned. "It's only messy when Cain catches me doing it at the mansion without telling him what I'm up to."

Interesting. "Can you ward against anything, or only physical nasties?" Adrienne asked, rubbing her finger around the rim of her wineglass.

Amanda made a face. "Depends. Weaker mystical energy I can keep out as long as I keep the spell up to date. The Big Bads... not so much. Back in May, when the firestarters were grabbed from the school, that was an Asgardian goddess, the Enchantress. She went through my wards like they were nothing and I got a raging headache for the experience. But even with the Big Bads, the wards do act as an early warning system. I have the brownstone fully covered. The mansion too, tho' I need to go back and give it a refresher after Amora's stunt."

"Would you be able to ward against something like... dreams? Nightmares? Keep someone from having them? Hypothetically speaking, I mean?" As much as Adrienne hated asking for help, she was running out of the pills that knocked her out and feeling guilty about waking Terry up with her screaming when she went to sleep without them.

"Dreams?" Amanda looked regretful. "The wards can't do that - 'm no psi. But I do have some training in lucid dreaming and such. Back when I was a student, my magic tutor taught me some tricks to deal with nightmares. It's come in handy, especially lately. I could teach those." She paused, catching Adrienne's eye with a candid gaze. "Hypothetically speaking, of course."

Adrienne played with the rim of her wine glass some more. "Hypothetically speaking, that sounds like it would be beneficial to whomever was having nightmares. Does it take a lot of time to learn?"

"Depends on the hypothetical person. If they're willing to keep an open mind, shouldn't take too long." Amanda grinned a little. "I could hypothetically be convinced to spend a bit of time every day out of a hypothetical person's busy schedule?"

The paychometrist grinned back. Amanda was a much more pleasant partner to have 'hypothetical' conversations with than Morgan had been. Though she hoped her nightmares would go away when her worry over her future was resolved and time blunted the pain of the India trip, Adrienne recognized that learning Amanda's trick could prove useful. "I think that could hypothetically work out very well."

Amanda raised her glass in agreement. "Here's to hypotheticals," she replied.

Morgan had walked in, clad in leather and with her bike helmet dangling from one hand, in time to hear Amanda's last comment to Adrienne. Honestly she hadn't been paying attention to most people in the place but the word "hypotheticals" drew her attention to the table. She shook her head. She passed the table and leaned down to whisper, "Hope you're not getting all with the sharing with your hypotheticals again," to Adrienne on her way to the bar. She hadn't come to crash their girl date or whatever it was the two were up to and she had no intention of joining them for that reason.

"Different hypotheticals!" Adrienne shouted after the blue woman. "Have you met Morgan?" she asked Amanda.

For her part, Amanda was in the process of trying not to choke on her drink as she recognised Morgan both as the girl she'd enjoyed meeting at Silver and as the one Pete had warned the Trenchcoats about trusting. "At silver, actually," she told Adrienne as Morgan waited at the bar. "Got on pretty well." She weighed things up, and then made a decision. It'd be more obvious if she avoided the blue woman that something was up, and how easier to watch someone than to have them close? "Hey, stranger," she called, raising her voice so Morgan could her. "Come and join us?"

Morgan glanced over her shoulder at Adrienne and arched an eyebrow at her shouting. "Better be different fucking hypotheticals," she muttered to herself before grinning at the bartender. Her pint of Anchor Steam was in her hand by the time she heard Amanda calling over to her. Inwardly she groaned a little at the very idea of balancing those two at once. It wasn't like she was there to meet anyone so what choice did she have? She couldn't stand the Yankees so it wasn't like she could use the game as an excuse. Sighing, she stood up and went back to the two women, though she looked much less reluctant than she felt about it.

A chair was flipped around backward so Morgan could straddle it. She was, perhaps, still a little in a male mindset from her time in India. That happened sometimes when she didn't have another part to play afterways. Pint set down on the table, and helmet set down under her chair, Morgan shrugged out of her leather jacket. "Fancy spying you here," her words were directed toward Amanda and the Irish in her accent had automatically risen in her voice.

Adrienne raised an eyebrow at Morgan's shift in tone. "You want me to leave you two alone?" she asked with a smirk, directing her question at either of them.

"Heard Adri had been in the wars and thought I'd drop by an' do that whole 'sympathetic friend' thing. Except I suck at it so we ended up talking about tatoos and such instead," Amanda replied easily, her own accent thickening as she made a face at the brunette. She hadn't called Adrienne by the nickname before, but her old habit of giving them had never really died.

Morgan's look to Adrienne was all sarcasm. "Are you of the opinion I need alone time with everyone I'm friendly to, cupcake?" The difference in her tone was obvious, though. When she spoke to Amanda there was an undercurrent of flirtation in her voice, much the way there tended to be when she spoke to Garrison. That was completely absent when she addressed Adrienne.

"Yes, yes, I am of that opinion," Adrienne replied quickly, smirking again. "You don't have to get defensive about it, though. It's not as if I care." She made a face at that, but then smiled broadly. "She's head over heels for her boyfriend to the point where she blushes about him, though, so I don't think you have much chance with her." She'd considered repeating what Amanda had told her about the 'engagement', but had caught herself before mentioning it, in case it was a secret. To Amanda, she narrowed her eyes, though she couldn't make herself sound as threatening as she wanted to. "Don't call me 'Adri'." The fact that Amanda had said she was doing the whole 'sympathetic friend' thing was strange enough to hear, but no one had ever called her by a nickname before (cupcake notwithstanding, since she knew Morgan just said it to irk her), and it made her nervous, because it forced her to think that maybe she was letting her guard down too much, letting people into her life.

"I could think of something else?" Amanda replied with an unrepentant grin. "Ask Jubilee, you don't want to know what kind of nicknames I can come up with. Tho' I kind of like 'cupcake'." She turned to Morgan. "There a story behind that?"

Morgan gave Amanda a curious look at the mention of the boyfriend. "Huh, didn't even know you had one of those." She sounded amused with a note of faux disappointment. Alright, maybe it wasn't quite that fake. In regards to the nickname she shrugged. "Aye, though not much of one. She didn't appreciate me calling her 'love' so I started using more obnoxious terms to piss her off. Cupcake just stuck." She grinned at Adrienne and leaned closer to Amanda, "She looks like a cupcake, don't she?"

Adrienne glared at the pair who seemed to be conspiring against her. "You look like more of a cupcake than I do, Morgan," she pointed out, inching away from the blue woman in case Morgan got any ideas about copying her, or smacking her. "Cupcake was actually less disturbing than 'sugar tits'," she explained to Amanda, wrinkling her nose, "so yeah, I haven't been protesting the cupcake thing, since she's obviously not happy unless she's irritating somebody in some way or another." She gave an overacted sigh. "We all have our cross to bear, and 'cupcake' is mine. But you and Jubilee can just keep your nicknames between yourselves, I don't need any more." Lee had definitely been amusing in India. Adrienne had enjoyed her company. "I bet Jubilee's come up with some great ones herself."

"Sounds like when Jubes was calling me 'Mandy' in school - she knew I hated it and did it to piss me off. At least until we got into a brawl in the foyer." Amanda shrugged ruefully. "The idiocies of youth."

"Aw, c'mon Poopsie," her voice had taken on a sickeningly sweet tone. "I only call you 'cupcake' because you're so sweet. You're the sweetness in my life, sugar nipples. Why would I do anything just to annoy you?" She was smirking and then went back to looking totally normal as she drank from her glass, acting as if she'd said nothing at all.

Adrienne's face darkened as Morgan's last two phrases echoed painfully close to things she'd had said to her in the past, though 'annoy' was always substituted with 'hurt' or 'hit', usually after Steven had just done so, and usually followed by an apologetic 'I'm sorry, but you deserved it.' The man had definitely been a sweet-talker.

She shook the images away and flung herself back in her seat dramatically, crossing her good arm over her injured one as best she could. "You see what I have to put up with?!" she screeched to Amanda. "If my arm wasn't in this sling I'd take you out into the foyer," she threatened Morgan.

By now Amanda was snickering into her glass, shaking her head. "Completely balmy, the pair of you," she declared. "I'm surprised Garrison hasn't fled the pub screaming into the night before now."

Morgan was already laughing before Amanda had said anything. "And what? Be bitchy until I died from obnoxious? Remember who you're talkin' to, cupcake. You still throw a punch like a fucking girl. I don't." She shook her head. "Garrison just likes that we pick on each other more than we pick on him. Sometimes. Alright, it's sort of rare."

"He's just too easy to pick on." The psychometrist pouted. "I'm getting better at punching. Maybe you're just a shitty teacher and that's why I suck," she deadpanned. "I bet Amanda knows how to punch, and I bet she's a good teacher. Hypothetically speaking, I'd bet money on her beating you up in a hypothetical foyer brawl."

Morgan rolled her eyes. "Isn't it Munroe's job to be teaching you how to defend yourself anyway? The kids learn just fine from me. Maybe you're a shitty learner."

"Sure it is, but she doesn't just teach me how to punch. There's a lot more to self-defense than punching, you know," Adrienne retorted haughtily, failing at her attempt not to smirk. "Like..." She turned to Amanda for help.

Amanda grinned. "Yeah, there's the biting and scratching and hair-pulling too," she agreed. Her own training focussed on what someone her size and weight could do, which included exactly those things. "You could always try expanding your training partners? Spending a couple of hours trying to keep out of Bishop's reach has done wonders for me."

Morgan snorted. "That's right, love, you play mouse, someone else'll play cat and you can try to learn to not get eaten." She grinned. The mental image of Adrienne as a tiny mouse, big ears and tail and all, running away from Marko with kitty ears was far too entertaining and she ended up choking on her beer when she tried to drink it because of the look she put on Marko's face when he captured the mouse. The Adrienne mouse that was hanging by it's tail from his paw, of course.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Adrienne snapped at Morgan defensively, "and I don't think it's very funny." She turned away from the blue woman and scowled at Amanda. "Expanding my training partners means I'd have to be sociable with more people," she explained, as if that was enough of an excuse.

"Come visit the brownstone one night. Emma's still in India and there's always someone in the Danger Gym. And I promise you won't have to make nice if you don't want to - no-one'll judge you for being cranky." Amanda winked at Morgan. "Wanda's fun to train with and you've met her already."

Morgan was snickering. "Good thing they won't judge, you see how good she is at sociable," she gestured in Adrienne's general direction before turning to her. "What, have something against the rodent population? You shouldn't be so species-ist, or whatever. It's not nice." And then she was laughing again.

"No more... whatever the hell you've been smoking for you," Adrienne said to Morgan with a shake of her head and a look of sympathy for the deranged woman. To Amanda, she shrugged. "I'm not sure 'danger' and 'gym' together sound very appealing to me, sorry. But I've never actually been inside the brownstone, so maybe I'll use the danger gym as an excuse to snoop around before Emma gets back." She smiled to show she was kidding. Sort of.

"It's a joke. No actual danger, except when Remy's training you, and he's off in Europe still." Amanda's face clouded a little, but she covered the dip in her mood with a drink and a smile. "Okay, Morgan, time to explain the joke. What's so funny about cat and mouse?"

Morgan's eyes shifted from one to the other, then an eyebrow raised. "What, am I the only person who gets vivid mental images?"

"No, but it's more fun if you share. Not everyone's a 'path, you know," Amanda pointed out with a grin.

Morgan cleared her throat and eyed Adrienne. Then she very blatantly moved her chair closer to Amanda. "So, you take Adrienne, yeah? And then you give her these giant mousey ears. Not like Mouseketeers, but like an actual mouse," she was gesturing at Adrienne as she explained. "And then you elongate her nose and mouth so she has a mousey snout, complete with whiskers. Then you shrink her down a bit and give her a tail. Then you take Marko. And you give him pointy, kitty ears," now she was gesturing on herself as she explained. "And you give him kitty eyes. And razor sharp teeth. And a kitty tail. And you send him chasing after mousey cupcake here. Until he catches her and has her dangling from her little mousey tail, thrashing about in the air, while he holds her from his paw over his mouth. With the razor sharp teeth." She was already snickering, knowing something was likely to be thrown at her.

"Like I said," Adrienne repeated, eyes wide and voice a mixture of sympathy and shock, "no more smoking crack for you." Coming from Morgan, the visual was too ridiculous to warrant even Adrienne's usual self-defensive paranoid thoughts about being prey to a man like Marko. It wasn't frightening when Morgan put it that way. It was just... silly. "And speaking of smoking, I'm suddenly in desperate need of a cigarette." She rose from the table and canted her head towards Amanda in a silent question.

"The nicotine gods demand worship," Amanda agreed, sliding back her chair.