Doug and Adrienne Log - backdated to last Monday

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

Backdated to November 24

Attempting to get some answers from Forge, Adrienne goes to his lab but finds Doug there instead, and comes to the startling realizations that he's a very odd young man with no emotions and that she can read him psychometrically, which leads to much badgering as she tries to figure out why.

Because the 'genius' had never answered her email question about the long-term affects of the hand-coating, and Adrienne was too embarrassed to ask him on the journal system, she was venturing down to his lab to question Forge in person. The person she found in the lab, however, wasn't Forge. It was someone she'd never met before, though she recognized him from the journals. "Is Forge here?" she asked loudly from the doorway, not sure if she should go in.

Doug looked up from his laptop at the intrusion. At this rate, maybe the lab wasn't the best place to go to avoid people, with the number of visitors he'd gotten. He recognized Adrienne as Emma's sister, and shrugged diffidently. "Nope. Not sure where he is," he said politely. The inventor could be any number of places, really, and Doug wasn't his keeper. "I can tell him you came looking if you like," he offered.

"Trying to evict me?" she asked curiously, sounding amused. To be contrary, she ventured into the lab. It wasn't his lab, after all, so it wasn't like she was intruding on his personal space. "Are you working on some type of secret sabotage operation where if I see anything on your laptop screen you'll have to kill me?" she suggested with a raised eyebrow.

Was the entire Frost family this contrary? Doug wondered. "Not exactly." Which served as an answer to both of the questions, really. He shut his laptop, mostly because he didn't fancy people staring over his shoulder while he worked, even if it wasn't exactly sensitive. "So why are you looking for Forge?" he asked. He could do small talk. Maybe.

"Oh, just trying to get an answer to whether or not I'm going to suffer any long-term side effects to a little invention of his. Why are you so curious about why I'm looking for Forge?" Adrienne retorted, trying to sound paranoid. This was a fun game, one which she would probably tire of sooner rather than later, but for now it amused her.
Definitely contrary, and definitely a Frost. Doug wasn't really fooled by Adrienne's attempt at sounding paranoid, and he wasn't exactly in a mood to engage in verbal sparring games, so his reply was direct. "Just curious. Trying to make small talk."

Frowning, Adrienne sat herself down next to Doug's laptop. "If we're going for small talk, we could always talk about your girlfriend, or my sister, or any number of other topics that would be much more interesting than why we're both here when Forge is nowhere to be found."


Doug grunted, scooting subtly to one side at the invasion of his personal space. "Okay, you pick a topic, then." He didn't feel any desire to make this any easier on her, but he also didn't feel the need to be overtly hostile and make her leave. More like somewhere in the middle ground.


"Um..." There was something she should say to him, actually. "About you trying to talk to me about what happened to Kane and the others..." she said with a rueful half-smile. "I'm sorry I wouldn't let you in. I wasn't thinking straight."


"I doubt anyone was," Doug replied, attempting to smile back. It was difficult to be reassuring, but he tried. "I guess Amanda called and got the information we were looking for, so no harm done." Hurting his feelings wasn't really possible at the moment anyway, given the state his brain was in.


Crossing one leg over the other at the knee, Adrienne moved her hand from where it had been resting in her lap to her side. It was a casual, slight movement, but she accidently brushed her hand against Doug's own, and in doing so she suddenly found herself staring not at Forge's lab, but at complete darkness. Then some sort of tree... an apple tree? A city. A garden. A game board with mismatched pieces. And then Emma, but not flesh-and-blood Emma, holding a cocoon or chrysalis or something of the sort; ripping it open. Doug falling out-

The circuit breaker in her head kicked in and Adrienne was able to break contact with Doug's skin. She could only stare at him for several moments, blinking, completely stunned. "What... was that?" she hissed in a whisper, eyes wide with fear. What the hell had happened? "Did I just... read you?" She didn't read people. And why hadn't Forge's coating substance protected her from whatever the hell had just happened.


Doug hadn't felt much from Adrienne's reading, the barest tickle at the back of his brain that was somewhat like the touch of a telepath's mind and yet completely different. It had been there and gone almost before he was aware of it, barely enough time to recognize its presence, and certainly not nearly enough to raise any kind of mental shields against it. But Adrienne had frozen for more than a few moments, her body language clearly indicating that her mind had gone somewhere else. "What did you see?" he asked her intently.


Adrienne shook her head dismissively- clearly, he was missing the point. "Random, pointless things." Pointless to her, anyway, since she was much more concerned with the 'why' rather than the 'what' at the moment. "I dunno... darkness. Apple tree. City. Garden. Pieces from games? And then something that resembled my sister. You in some sort of cocoon. But who cares what I saw?" she scoffed. "You don't understand. I don't read people." Shit. If her powers were malfunctioning now because of the mental trauma she'd inflicted on herself due to her reading of Garrison's car, the Mountie was due for a sound thrashing when X-Force found him.


"Clearly you do now." One thing, even two, could be brushed off as coincidence. But she'd seen quite a bit of what he remembered from being inside of Mastermold, and the cyst that Emma had torn him out of. That was too much to brush off. Still, he moved farther to the side in order to give Adrienne her personal space.


"No, I don't. I can't." As Doug shifted, she moved as well, putting even more space between them. "You're a nerd," she stated bluntly. "C'mon. Figure this out for me. I don't read people. Why did I read you?" And what the fuck did I see? she asked herself, though she didn't feel comfortable asking Doug aloud. "Don't tell me the stress of... what's going on... broke my brain," she muttered. "There has to be another reason."


Doug simply raised an eyebrow. The baldness of 'you're a nerd' didn't bother him for the obvious reason, but it also didn't make him inclined to help Adrienne out all that much either. Even if he didn't have feelings to hurt as such, there was still such a thing as politeness.


"I didn't mean 'nerd' in a bad way," Adrienne corrected, "I meant that you're smarter than me. I'm sorry, this is just a little hard to accept, and with everything that's been going on lately my fuse is a little shorter than usual." If the apology didn't work to get her what she needed she would just go to someone else, but it would be nice to have an answer from Doug rather than having to track down Nathan or the Professor or Emma.


"I honestly don't have any answers for you," Doug said apologetically. "I couldn't begin to tell you why. It could be any number of different reasons." And he wasn't an expert on mutations. That would be the Professor or Moira.


Frustrated, but keeping her tone as level as possible, Adrienne tried once more to get something out of Doug that would help her. "Well, why the hell did I see that weird shit, then, can you tell me that, maybe? The apple tree, a pear, a city, some sort of garden, a game board with all those different pieces? And the fucking cocoon, and Emma ripping you out of it? I usually read timelines, but that's just messed up. Were they thoughts?" Now, that would be terrifying- to learn she was becoming psychic. The psychics she knew- Nathan, Emma, the Professor- were scary.

"How much do you know about what happened with your sister in New York?" Doug asked quietly. It wasn't an easy topic for him, even considering his current emotional state, or lack thereof.


Adrienne frowned. "What happened with my sister in New York when? During the invasion, or whatever it was? I don't know anything. We didn't really speak about it. What does Emma have to do with my reading your thoughts?" Unless they weren't thoughts, and actually were part of Doug's timeline. "Did Emma actually cut you out of a cocoon?" she asked with some considerable interest.

"Yes." The question was rather blunt, and so was his reply. "Be grateful you didn't see a bit earlier than that." He frowned. "The other things you saw...they happened as well, yes." He wasn't sure how much he felt like revealing to Adrienne about Mastermold, and what had happened to him. Death was somewhat personal, after all.


"So it really was your timeline, then," Adrienne confirmed. Well, that was some small comfort. At least she wasn't reading his thoughts. "Something must have happened to you in the cocoon then, that makes me able to read you?" It must have, because the psychometrist was not willing to believe that she was now able to read people. It was a lot more comforting to think that Doug was special.


"Maybe." Doug could think of a dozen other explanations off the top of his head that made as much sense as Adrienne's theory. There was no real way of knowing for sure at this point what the cause of his strange interaction with her power was. He shrugged.


Pulling a canister out of her purse, Adrienne sprayed some of its contents onto her hand. "Forge's miracle substance wears out throughout the day," she explained to Doug absentmindedly. The action would ensure that she didn't become overly curious and touch him again just so she could try to learn more about why she'd read him. "Maybe..." she carried on when she'd stashed the canister away again. "Maybe something happened to you? You don't know? Do you know why didn't I see your body?" she prodded. "I always see the object I'm reading." Toying with some sort of device on the counter, she smirked at Doug. "Maybe you didn't have a body? Maybe your mind was separated from your body and the cocoon was actually some sort of womb-thing and I saw you being reborn?" It was proving difficult to get any sort of emotional response from Doug but Adrienne would keep trying. "Maybe I can read the new body because you're not actually human anymore, you're some sort of pod creature?"

It was only the muting of his emotional responses that kept Doug from being frustrated and angry at Adrienne's prodding. So she wanted the truth? He looked flatly at her. "A Russian technopath who was turned into a 'meat computer', who we had encountered once before, was attempting to take over the New York Stock Exchange. We only narrowly defeated her before when she was using very old Russian technology, and this time she had a lot more computing power, plus stock brokers to use as her 'drones'. So your sister, with my permission, went into my mind, removed everything that could be a distraction, and fed me to the giant meat computer, where I drowned to death, was absorbed into it, defeated her in her own virtual 'landscape', and then narrowly managed to reconstitute my own body before the entire thing collapsed from my driving her out of it." He shrugged. "That answer your questions?"


Waiting several beats for the information to sink in, Adrienne nodded. "I think so." She tried to appear as flippant as possible, despite how disturbing Doug's tale was. "So you actually did die. I don't really know how to test that theory, but maybe that's why I can read you." She studied Doug for several seconds before speaking again, her tone softer this time. "Obviously Emma hasn't put your 'distractions' back since you're acting like a pod creature?" At least, Adrienne was assuming that his lack of emotional responses were not something that were normal for him.

"Not yet." The 'pod creature' crack rolled off of him completely. He knew he wasn't acting normally, but it was through his own decisions. "But she's going to." Emma had promised, and he had believed her. He just would rather it was sooner than later, as his inability to sleep through the night was starting to wear on him.


"I'm sure she will soon," the psychometrist replied with a smile and not the slightest trace of doubt in her tone. With that comment, she slid off the tabletop smoothly. She had much more important things to think about than Forge's hand substance now, and a strong urge to run away from the pod creature. "I won't keep you from your secret sabotage operation any longer. This was... interesting, Doug. I may even let you into my room next time, unless you're still a pod creature."


Doug nodded and made his best polite 'that's nice' smile. "Okay. It was nice meeting you in person," he told her, waving as she headed toward the door, but already looking back towards his laptop.