Morgan and Adrienne- late Monday night (early Tuesday morning technically)

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

Backdated to last monday night. After this.

Morgan visits Adrienne and comes bearing a gift. Some odd, uncomfortable conversation occurs (and that's not the stuff about poking fish or the size of Morgan's ass.)

Lining a pint glass of Anchor Steam up next to her own half-finished Moosehead, Adrienne sat back down on the couch and set her laptop down under the couch. Staring at sales figures on the screen after several hours of teaching and then work were making her eyes ache. It was a relief to have an excuse to pick up the Wii controller and fiddle around with creating a Morgan character as she waited for the woman to arrive.


Morgan tried the door without bothering to knock. Finding it unlocked she sauntered in with a grin on her face. "Can I really be a 'dastardly villain'? Amazon-dot-com says I can be and I demand dastardliness! Is that a word? Who cares." The blue woman fell into place next to Adrienne on the couch and grinned at her. "So how was your day my dear cupcake?" Without pause she picked up the pint of Anchor Steam and took a sip.

"You can definitely be a dastardly villain. After I finish creating a you Mii character since you don't have one yet. My day was just peachy," the psychometrist replied with a smile. Yes, a visit from Morgan was definitely what she was needing right now. "I learned that this game was coming out today so I made Inez go and pick it up for me an hour ago. After what happened two weekends ago I think she's afraid to say no to me," she smirked. Okay, so it had been pretty evil to make Inez go pick up a video game at midnight. But at least Adrienne had provided the car and driver. "Torturing the students seems to be a theme with me lately," she pointed out with a grin, taking a sip of her own beer. "But Temp seems to actually like math so I can't punish her the same way I can Miss Dean."
Morgan groaned at the second girl's name and promptly took a much, much larger gulp of beer. "Flippin' bird drives me up the wall!" The Irish in her accent roared to the forefront with the exclamation. "She's a pacifist. Violence doesn't solve anything," she said in a mock whine. "She's so knowledgeable about the world at, how old is she? Twelve? Fourteen? They sort of mostly look the same to me, honestly. Obviously she hasn't studied history at all. Or ever been physically attacked. I am tempted to attack her in a copied body one night just to make a bloody point but I think Xavier would frown on that and then his head would gleam and blind me in retaliation or summat."

"Never mind Xavier, I would blind you if you did something like that," Adrienne replied instantly, setting her controller down and grabbing a pillow from the couch to hug against her chest as a shiver ran through her body. "It's a good thing I know you're joking," she added with a frown, struggling to compose herself, "because I'm pretty sure violence can solve some things, and I think me taking this controller to your noggin would be a good way to solve you saying shit like that. But you're joking," she reassured herself. "I don't really understand- isn't self defense class mandatory? Why aren't her parents talking to her about how important it is that she learn how to defend herself?"

"Because they are actors and probably don't live on this planet?" Morgan shrugged. Outwardly she appeared unaffected by Adrienne's response to her comment. Truthfully, she figured saying anything about it would just make things awkward so she chose not to. "Honestly, I wouldn't do it. I don't really do the attacking the innocent thing, but someone needs to teach her a lesson and she'd be better served if it was someone who wanted to teach her a lesson and not someone who just wanted to," she trailed off and a moment later waved her hand through the air, "whatever her. Violence can solve a lot of things, but self-defense is sort of specialized violence. You know, I'm not teaching the kids how to kill a man with their bare hands, even though I could. This is all non-fatal stuff. It's about getting you enough space and putting them down just long enough to get the hell away. It's not about standing and fighting, it's about defending yourself so you can escape, end of story. She's just young and stupid and thinks she knows everything. Y'know, like most teenagers."
Suddenly perking up, Morgan bounced once on the couch. "Oh! I have a present for you!" Grinning, she reached behind her and pulled something out from where it'd been tucked into the waistband of her cargo pants. It was actually wrapped and everything. "I thought you needed this." It was a game where you swam around and poked fish, or so it seemed to Morgan. How could Adrienne not need that?

Adrienne unclenched the pillow from her hands and picked up her beer. Her hands weren't even shaking, which pleased her greatly. "I know you don't," she said quietly in response to the blue woman's comment about not attacking the innocent. "And I know what you teach them. I think they should make what you teach compulsory for every school-age female." The brunette made a face and downed some beer. She knew it was stupid to lament her own past- she probably wouldn't have fought back against her father or Steven even if she had known what to do. She'd accepted years ago that she must possess some sort of mental deficiency for letting them treat her the way they had. And it had nothing to do with pacifism. Dwelling on it was pointless. "Do you think maybe even if she doesn't participate, she's soaking some things up just by sulking in the corner? And maybe she'll remember it if she ever changes her mind and decides she'd rather protect herself instead of... letting something happen to her?" Snapping out of her funk when Morgan perked up, Adrienne felt her melancholy evaporate with the announcement of a present. She tore greedily into the slim package. "It's not even my birthday... what's the occasion? Holy Christ, Endless Ocean?! I've heard of this! I heard you get to poke fish! Dude," she laughed, putting on her best stoner voice, "this is such a stoner game. And quite fantastic." She grinned appreciatively at Morgan. "Thank you very much."


"Meh," Morgan shrugged. "Maybe she's learning just by having to listen to me, unless she's not listening, but you don't really understand stuff like self-defense by just hearing about it, you need to practice doing it. If she ever needs it, well, she's fucked. Simple as that." There was a finality about the way Morgan said it. She was over the whiny little teenager. She wanted more enjoyable pursuits of conversation.

Adrienne's excitement over the game made Morgan grin broadly. "Aye, cupcake, poking the fish. And feeding them. Why you're feeding wild fish I don't know. Seems a bit dodgy but then what can you do about that? I figured you really needed somewhere where you could have a nice relaxing swim and poke some fishies."

Glad for the finality on the other topic, Adrienne had no trouble focusing her attention on lighter things. Opening the case so she could read the liner notes, she handed her controller to Morgan. "Finish creating yourself and I'll load the poking fish game. I'm not sure how to make you blue, but I think I got your eyebrows down, what with that unibrow. The bulbous nose... the afro..."

Morgan took the controller and blinked repeatedly at Adrienne. "The and the what?" The controller hung limply in her hands. "When'd I grow an afro?"

"Well, clearly, I'm trying to make you as ridiculous-looking as possible," Adrienne deadpanned, taking up the second controller and sipping on her beer. "But the part that amuses me is that you may have actually looked like that image on screen at some point in time."

Head tilting to one side and then the other before repeating again, Morgan squinted at the Mii image on the screen. "I don't know. I don't think I ever had an afro and a unibrow. Actually I've only had an afro once and I definitely don't remember a unibrow with that. The nose, though, I've had that nose a few times. Damn French," she grumbled and tried to figure out what she was doing so that she could finish the Morgan character for Adrienne. "You made my ass too big." She craned her neck so she could peer over her shoulder. "Yeah, definitely too big, cupcake."

"I can't control the size of your ass, blueberry. You're just going to have to live with it." She took the controller out of Morgan's hand and clicked on another screen, going out of sequence. "I should see if my sister's computer geek can find some way to make you blue. Until then, I'm just going to have to make you chocolatey brown. And I think I'm going to use the stoner eyes, since we're going to play the stoner fish game. There." Not giving Morgan a chance to protest, Adrienne changed screens again. "What colour shirt would you like?"

"Blueberry? All that fancy, ruthless businesswoman and the best you can come up with is 'blueberry'? Even 'smurfette' is better than that." Was she really defending Smurfette as a nickname? It seemed that way, which meant clearly the world had turned into a scary, scary place when she wasn't looking. "Well if you're making me black with a fro the shirt might as well be blue," she told Adrienne with a slight grumble.

Shrugging, Adrienne clicked on the blue button, named her creation 'Blueberry Smurfette' and exited the program. "I thought Smurfette was derogatory what with her being a big brainless whore but if you'd rather be 'smurfette' that's perfectly fine with me." She got up and loaded Endless Ocean into the console. "Have you ever been scuba diving?" she asked when she sat back down and waited for the game to load.

"And how am I not a big, brainless whore?" There was a tone of genuine curiosity in her voice as if Morgan truly believed herself to be just that. "I did fuck for money for a few years and we both know I'm an idiot." She nodded along in agreement with her own words, an expression of vacant thoughtfulness on her face. The question about scuba diving caused Morgan's lip to curl even as she took a drink. "Do I look like the scuba diving type?"

Adrienne made a face. "You're not an idiot." She couldn't really address the whore comment, since it was technically true, but the psychometrist felt like saying something to let Morgan know that she hadn't meant the name to be derogatory in the way Morgan was meaning. "Money's probably the best reason to fuck someone, discounting the need to fulfill psychologically ingrained animalistic urges, I mean. Love's a ridiculous reason, after all. And power always has that tendency of going south or coming back to haunt." She looked Morgan over. "What do you mean, type? Is there a type? You're athletic, you like solitary pursuits. That's about all I know of scuba diving, honestly. I'm guessing that's a no?"

"Money's a fucking rotten reason to fuck someone," Morgan declared with certainty. Before going on she took a long drink from her glass. "You should fuck someone because you want to, not because it's the only way you can survive. If the only thing you have to sell is yourself that's bloody fucking degrading. Sex should at least mean more than that, for fuck's sake." There was a quiet almost growl in her voice by the end and she swallowed down any further talk on that particular point. "Um, what's the point of scuba diving? You go see fishes and shit. Do I strike you as someone who cares about fish? I like to swim, I don't need to peer around at coral reefs and all that rot."


Adrienne gave Morgan a curious look. "I wasn't talking about taking money because you need it to survive," she stated firmly. Where the hell had that come from? "Sex, and money deriving from sex, and anything related to sex that is undertaken for reasons of survival is..." she shivered. "I don't even know. I don't even have a word for how horrid that is. Of course the 'want' thing has to be a factor. I just happen to want money more than I want to be in love with someone."


"People don't generally prostitute themselves because they have many choices, Adrienne. How the fuck else do you end up with sex for money? Do people now pay their spouses for sex?" The tone made her distaste more than just a little apparent. Morgan didn't follow how sex could equate to money unless it was through prostitution and who signed up for that just because they wanted to?

Frowning, Adrienne raised an eyebrow at Morgan. "I don't think we're anywhere near the same page anymore. I wasn't meaning actual 'hand me the cash after I fuck you' scenarios, I was thinking more along the lines of 'you pay for dinner and the drinks and the cab and I don't pay for anything because you want to fuck me and I want sex and the gorgeous, expensive things I have coming to me'. More like being a mistress, I suppose," she added with a grin. "But you making the choice as to who spends their money on you. Which is different from prostitution in the sense you obviously mean." Wrinkling her nose, she handed her controller over to the blue woman. "Maybe we should change the topic. I know it's a sensitive one for you. This game is supposed to be relaxing, and I think you need to play it more than I do. Or would you rather play boxing and pound the virtual shit out of me?"

"A," Morgan ticked off a finger, "it's not a 'sensitive topic.' I'm not going to cry over it or get mopey or need to hug my inner child because of it. I just have strong opinions about it. Fucking people for money as your only means of survival tends to give you strong opinions about the whole thing I'd think. B, that's still prostitution. Just because you dress the bitch up in thousand dollar shoes doesn't make her less of a whore, it just makes it socially acceptable. There's the only real difference. Be an escort, you can do the same thing. And C, technically you always have the choice who spends the money and who you fuck, it's just sometimes the choice involves not eating if you turn them down. Or getting a beating."

"Maybe I'm trying to avoid your strong opinions so I won't get lectured anymore," Adrienne pointed out with a sweet smile. "I never said 'b' wasn't prostitution. I said it was prostitution in a different sense, which is the same as your 'socially acceptable'. I don't want to talk about this anymore," she stated with a shake of her head, downing the last of her beer and getting up to refill her glass. "If you keep talking about beatings my inner child's going to get upset and I'm guessing mine hates hugs as much as yours so I don't want to go there."

"I could buy your inner child off with brownies," Morgan offered as a solution. "Am I poking fishies?" Her head tilted to the side as she finally really registered what was on the screen since the controller was in her hands and all. There was a hand icon on the screen and the problem was Morgan didn't know how to get rid of the pokey hand so she just started pressing buttons in hopes of finding the right one.

"Mine was a model, remember? I don't think I ate a brownie until college," Adrienne smirked when she returned with another beer, watching the television screen with a look of confusion on her face. "I don't know why you're poking them, but you're doing a bang up job. I don't think I even need to read you the instructions." She flopped down onto the couch casually, glad they'd put the uncomfortable topic behind them so they could concentrate on poking fish.