Morgan & Jake | Monday morning

[x-copycat.livejournal.com]

Morgan sets a trap to meet this Gavin person and carry out her obligatory friendly threats.

It was always hard to decide how to approach these things. On the one hand some people were more receptive to the Bad Cop routine while others were more receptive to the Good Cop routine. Usually when having to make a choice between the two Vanessa had either intel to inform the decision or didn't particularly need the target to like her or survive long enough to care if the Bad Cop routine worked out. Usually bullets wound up embedded in some "expendable" type appendage during those situations. Unfortunately for her the target had to stay alive and even in good health. A few of her coworkers may get a bit grumpy with her otherwise, to say the least. So Good Cop won out. Pity, she really, really liked playing Bad Cop.

Part of Good Cop meant luring the target to you. After a very small amount of digging around she found out about some pastry Achilles heel that Sir Gavin Lancaster the Eighth of Devonshire apparently possessed. He could at least make it harder than that, couldn't he? She could have just hunted him down but that took effort and came on too strong. Though this may have very well been a losing battle considering Jubilee: Devourer of Food was about. Morgan left the box of assorted danish and Italian pastries out on the counter of the office break room anyway. She then grabbed an apple and conspicuously perched on a counter chomping away at it while reading a newspaper. Now she just had to wait for the target to show.

Last known sighting was in Paris in Febru... Jake was reading and walking at the same time, nose-deep in one of the files he'd managed to swipe from Remy, and he paused in both just outside of the break room door. His spider senses were tingling. There, on the counter--his stomach rumbled loudly as he realized what was in the box, loud enough that had he been anyone else, he might have been embarrassed. Instead he stepped into the room and crossed directly to the pastries. Ooh, pecan and maple danish. He fished one out of the box and started to contemplate whether or not he could smuggle a second one out of the room without anyone noticing.

"Traditionally people chew and then swallow when they eat," Morgan pointed out in an amused voice. "People usually use the inhaling metaphor but that was more like a high class hooker with a practiced deep throating technique. Impressive." Her voice was flat other than that amused note it'd begun with. She was openly sizing Gavin up. He was cute, she'd give Adrienne that. Kind of boyishly attractive. Not the type she'd ascribe to Adrienne being interested in, though. "Aye, but then everyone's got to have their talents." He was a bit on the skinny side though and mentally her nose wrinkled up about that.

He'd whirled around at the sound of her voice, pastry held between them like a weapon, and stood there blinking for a moment before he recovered. "To hear Wanda tell it, my appetite's legendary on four--no, maybe five continents now," he said with a bit of a smirk, leaning back against the counter and trying to look casual. "Some say it's a secondary mutation. And that was before I had to grow anything back." He took another bite of the pastry, taking his time this time around, sizing Morgan up right back. He had no idea who this strange woman was, but Jake was willing to believe that he was reasonably safe in the Snow Valley offices. "I don't believe we've met. I'm Jake."

She was a little upset about the lack of poncy aristocracy. It wasn't that she liked that in a bloke, it was just that it was so much easier to not like them. That and sometimes they did the wibbling thing with their lower lip when you threatened them. "Growing things back? What, have a torrid affair with some criminal's wife and he took your manhood from you?" She knew he was a shapeshifter but she didn't know he could grow things back. Way to get the short fucking straw, Ness. "Morgan." She considered telling him it wasn't the name on the books but that was like tempting him to go find the one that was and explaining she might make him grow his nuts back if he insisted upon calling her Vanessa could just get messy.

One eyebrow rose slightly at her name, and he tilted his head to the side, regarding her for a brief moment. "Huh. Apparently I missed the memo about being blue." Another blue shapeshifter. Because Mystique wasn't terrifying enough. "And no, not my manhood. Someone borrowed my arm and forgot to give it back."

"Huh, usually the blue memo comes out first. Next is the whore memo. I think Likes-To-Kill-Shite's memo three. Not-Actually-A-Demon usually comes out fourth unless there's Catholics involved, then it gets bumped up to second. First if they can manage it without too much confusion." Morgan wasn't really sure why there had to be a blue memo and the sarcasm of her words covered that confusion for her. Though, on the other hand she wasn't sure how someone had managed to mention her without mentioning the blue and red, honestly. Some people had different priorities she guessed.

Getting off the topic of her blueness, though, she focused on the fact that someone had borrowed his arm. "Having an extra arm about's a handy thing, you know. Nearly lost one of mine once. Lucky for the healing factor I went and borrowed. Shite luck for you, though. Reckon they fancy unborrowing it any time soon?"

"It's official--I'm out of the loop," Jake muttered at the reciting of the memos. "And that's why I'm here--seeing if I can figure out who decided they wanted my arm." A curious look came across his face. "You borrowed someone's healing factor? Like, ah, Marie does? With the stripe in her hair," he indicated his nearly nonexistent bangs. "I thought you were a shifter," he said, taking a thoughtful bite of his danish.

"I am a shifter, but that's the Morgan For Idiots version. The actual version," she sighed, already bored with this part, "is that I am a genetic metamorph. I touch a person and I take on their form down to the DNA. Hold on long enough and I get a sort of mental fingerprint that they like to call someone's 'psi patterns' because it makes them sound like intelligent gits and makes the rest of us go, 'huh?' For a normal human that's it. For a mutant if I've held on long enough to get a pis pattern then I've gotten their mutation too. Gets a bit annoying when you don't think someone's a mutant and it turns out they've got telepathy and you've got a job to impersonate them for two weeks. Have you any idea the idiotic and downright disgusting things people think?" She shuddered, then wondered what obscene things ran through his brain when no one was looking.

"Yes, actually," he said absently, "I've spent enough time with Emma, and she delights in sharing." His head was still tilted to one side, contemplating. "Mine's a photoreflexive malleable genetic imprint with control on a cellular level," he rattled off his own spiel. "Bit different then, isn't it? Fascinating." Another thought occurred to him then. "So you have to be touching someone?"

Morgan made a mental note to never become close enough to Emma for her to have a need to share with her. "Your version sounds like a massive switchboard you've to keep track of." Her nose wrinkled up at the thought. All those switches and levers. All that attention. Bah. She liked her version better. "Yeah, I've to be touching them. Or genetic material of theirs." Out of her pocket she drew the thin braid of bright orange hair. "This is Aoife, for example."

"No, I'm used to..." he trailed off as she pulled out the braid. Maybe, Jake thought, the blue was Nature's way of warning people about the crazy shapeshifters. Like the bright colors on poisonous frogs. "Eefay?" Too late, he realized that the look on his face was a strange mix of fascinated and horrified. "So you steal bits of people in order to turn into them?" Surely Remy would have mentioned it if he thought that Morgan might be behind the theft of his arm.

She rolled her eyes at his reaction. "An arm's a bit conspicuous, don't you think? I work with hair, and Aoife's original volunteered it actually. Daniel's it was stolen from by a speedster, he never noticed. And I don't usually reuse mimics. Usually it's just a touch, that's all I need for a good enough genetic imprint that'll give me their vocal chords and voice. Your arm'd be a bit hard to keep in my pocket just in case. And I've never met anyone who does what I do precisely, if that's any consolation. Besides, I'd never get anything off your arm but your body. No fun switchboard shifting from that."

"It's not really a switchboard," he protested, feeling that perhaps this was safer ground. "More just...background processes. You don't usually think about breathing, or digesting, or any of that, right? Same for me. I just have some failsafes built in. And some party tricks," he said, his eyes briefly flashing yellow before returning to blue.

An eyebrow quirked upward at his so-called party trick. "Certainly more fun at parties than I am." She wondered how liberal he was with the use of his mutant. It may have been an odd thing to ponder but her default state was obvious, who would go around blue if they had a choice? But he could look however he wanted just because he wanted to. There was manipulation in that if one chose to take that route. She supposed there were ways of finding that out that didn't involve asking him.

Without any segue whatsoever, Morgan stated rather than asked, "I hear you went and asked my mate out on a date. Been here for less than a week haven't you? Self-starter and all that?"

He nearly choked on his danish at that. "So you're friends with Adrienne," he said once he'd managed to swallow. "Is this the 'touch her and I kill you' conversation?"

"Why would I threaten to kill you," she inquired with the most innocent tone she could pull off with her own accent. It was startlingly believable out of her lips. "Whenever you go threatening to kill people they never take you seriously. Really, what are the odds that someone would actually kill you? You know they won't it and so it's just an empty threat, hyperbole without the impact."

"In this building, I tend to believe that people really could and would kill me, if they put their minds to it," he said with a shrug. "Although generally speaking they just threaten long and painful bouts of torture. But I'm not--" he gestured aimlessly with the pastry. "I don't have ill intentions towards your friend. In fact, I don't even really know what intentions I have towards her. But she seemed nice." He seemed sincere, if somewhat confused.

"Torture involves screaming and I'm pretty anti-ear piercing shrieking, personally." She was going to say something else but then he admitted he didn't know what his intentions were. Morgan was torn between amusement and confusion. "You asked cupcake out because she seemed nice? Ouch. That's worse than my assumption you asked her out because she's hot and all people ultimately want to get hot women in bed with them."

"If you ever have cause to torture me, I'll do my best not to scream," he said solemnly. "And, yeah, there's that," he said, squirming slightly. "She is hot, and I certainly wouldn't mind if she wanted to sleep with me. I don't mean nice like--" he gestured at nothing again, not finding the words he needed. "Let's just say I do realize that she's a Frost."

"And exactly what do you interpret her being a Frost to mean in terms of you taking her on a date?" Morgan didn't know Emma very well at all and didn't even have that much contact with the woman but the feeling she got off her was very different from the one she got from Adrienne. Comparing one to the other or imposing rules, restrictions of modes of behavior that applied to one to the other was likely problematic at best. Though maybe she just didn't know Emma well enough and she was, in reality, completely wrong. But the women read entirely differently to her from a purely superficial, non-mutationally based reading of them.

Jake raised one eyebrow. "We'll go somewhere really nice that I can probably barely afford?" He shrugged. "I don't think Adrienne is anything like Emma, if that's what you're asking. It's just that I don't want you thinking that I'm expecting her to be all sweetness and light." He glanced down to realize that he still had a bite of danish in his hand, and popped it into his mouth. "So what should I expect from a date with Adrienne?" he asked around the food in his mouth.

Morgan shrugged. "Not sure, I don't know of anyone asking her out on their own. Normally it's more manipulative and for her benefit. Though the restaurant bit fits from my experience. Of course," she grinned impishly, "I also got her in my bed at the end of the night despite her refusing to let me get her drunk. She's given that vow up again, though." Her hand waved dismissively, though she wasn't sure if it was given up entirely. It was possible Adrienne was sticking to no drinking when around attractive men that aren't secretly blue women.

He looked puzzled, tilting his head to one side. "So I'm the first person you know of who's asked her out?" He couldn't help but smile a little, despite himself. "That's surprising."

"You're the first people I know of who's asked her out without her orchestrating it," she pointed out. "She's controling that way." A grin spread across her lips. "I'm willing to bet she's a top in bed unless the other person is really dominant."

"I'll take that into consideration," he said, still half-smiling. "Anything else I should know about her?"

She thought about that, then shook her head. "Though if you put your hands anywhere on her that she doesn't want them or try to do anything she has not given you permission to do to her I really will cut off your hands and keep them in jars. And for every time and place you put your hands somewhere unwelcome I'll repeat it on subsequent days." She smiled at him. "Obligatory friend duty, nothing personal. You seem like an alright guy so I might even feel bad if I had to cut off your hands. But probably not that bad."

He actually shuddered a bit at that, the smile dropping from his face, although his tone of voice was still light. "I'm done with people chopping off bits of me, thanks. Besides, I'm a gentleman." The smile came back then, if slightly over-confident. "I promise I won't do anything she doesn't ask me to."

Morgan laughed. She laughed hard enough that her shoulders and chest shook from it. "Oh, love, you're definitely thinking of the wrong Frost if you think she's likely to end up in anyone's bed but her own or mine after your date."

"That's not fair!" Jake protested playfully. "We haven't even had the date yet and she's already teasing me! Here you are telling me she likes to be on top, and then you turn around and tell me I have no chance? Totally. Not. Fair."

She gave him her most innocent smile. This time she didn't pull it off in the least. "I'm just trying to help you keep your expectations realistic, love. After all, if she wanted you I could be you without that pesky arm problem I've heard you have. So much more time to concentrate on her instead." Morgan grinned, ignoring the bit where she had a boyfriend and wouldn't be fucking her best friend because he didn't really need to know that.

Yeah, Jake thought, the blue was definitely Nature's way of warning about crazy shapeshifters. "Whatever makes you two happy," he said with a smirk. "I suppose if she calls me, we'll find out which one of us she's really interested in."

"Well, she does need a consolation prize, after all," she joked. "I suppose you'll do."