xp_logs | Doug, Marie-Ange, visions. (Reply)

Half of a typical day for Doug and Marie-Ange. Dead drops, paperwork, bribery and an unexpected precognitive vision of possibly the last person Marie-Ange ever wanted to have to admit was right about anything.

The body-sized lump under the mass of pillows and blankets didn't move much at all. One eye peeked out from under the covers, and a grey-and-darker-grey dreadlocked little imp skittered out from a sketchpad to clamber up into the alarm clock and beat it ineffectively with an equally pencil-drawn mallet. "You are fired as a alarm clock destroyer." Marie-Ange sighed, before sitting halfway up and switching the alarm off herself. The imp didn't say anything, just hopped off the nightstand and disappeared into nothing.

Doug shook his head in bemusement at the antics of the imp and the form completely swathed in blankets. He'd known Marie-Ange wasn't a morning person, but even he hadn't realized just how much until they moved in together. "Good morning," he said gently to her, holding a mug of coffee that he'd made upon his own rising a bit earlier.

"You are up early?" It wasn't quite a question, exactly. More a combination of asking why he was up, and also if she was correct in her assumption that Doug had been up for a while now. The coffee disappeared in gulps as Marie-Ange untangled her legs from the blankets and sat up fully.

"Got up to check the email dead drops. The joys of time zones and all that." Plus beginning his perusal of the daily stack of newspapers and tabloids, seeing if anything pinged his 'pattern-dar', as he sometimes called it. "I even started some toast for you," he said with a smile.

Marie-Ange wasn't much of a breakfast person. Being not much of a morning person, she'd given up on defining meal choices by time. But a 'first meal of the day' was important. She gave Doug a brief kiss on the cheek as way of thank you on her way to the bathroom, pausing halfway through getting undressed to ask "Did anything interesting arrive? Or just more, ah, what did you call it, about the spam people?"

"Mostly the Bog of Eternal Stench. But as I haven't heard any complaints about my 'manhood', that all gets filtered. A few possible items of interest from one of the Russian conduits, but I'll have to check on it more once we get to the office." Doug shrugged.

---

"And so he is saying that he wants a bribe to not have me arrested by the Latvian special police. So I have to wonder, was he not listening to me the entire time, because I had told him first thing that the police were already willing to look the other way." Marie-Ange was obviously on her third coffee of the day. One in bed, one between the apartment and the subway and now a third as she and Doug walked past Mark's desk at the front door of the Snow Valley Institute.

Doug listened to the chatter with about half of his attention, while the rest was paid to the goings-on in the office. Mark was doing his usual who-knew-what. Doug put even money on whether it was actual work or Bejeweled. Illyana moved briskly down the hall to Wanda's office, files in her arms and the usual 'you are all idiots' look on her face. They continued down the hall towards Doug's server room when Jubilee appeared with a small stack of papers. "Ah, thank you," Doug said, taking the papers, and just as Jubilee took in the breath to say something, he placed the extra donut he'd gotten at the coffee shop in her mouth. Without breaking stride, he folded the papers under one arm and walked into the server room.

It wasn't more than ten minutes before Marie-Ange popped out of her cubicle and over to the server room, a sheaf of papers in one hand. "Are you busy? I thought this was Russian but it is not ... I hate Slavic languages." Marie-Ange's Russian was fine for conversation, but she fell short where the written aspect was concerned. "One of the trafficking networks in the Ukraine was shut down, but the disappearances are still as high as they were last month, and ..." She set the papers down on Doug's desk. "Missing persons reports, such as they are."

"Hm." Doug shuffled through the papers, rearranging them slightly, and then reading from the beginning. "You're right, it's not Russian," he said after the first few pages. "It's a few different dialects based on the areas the reports are from. They're from kind of all over the place, Belarus, Ukraine..." He made a thoughtful sound. "Looks like the large majority are from rural areas. Makes sense, I suppose. Easier to make people disappear in the boonies."

He paused, then swiveled his chair. "Hold on a second," he told Marie-Ange, a thought having occurred to him. He tapped at his keyboard, bringing up the email dead drop he'd checked earlier in the morning. "Aha, so that's what he meant," he murmured. At a questioning look from Marie-Ange, he explained. "So, this morning I got word about a large number of suspected mutants going missing. And surprise, surprise, the names or descriptions mostly match your missing persons reports." Not all of them, but enough to be statistically significant.

"Your sarcasm is filling up the room and leaving us no room to be comfortable." It wasn't quite the expression Marie-Ange had wanted but she didn't feel up to trying to get it out just right. A headache was building behind her left eye and it was grating at her nerves. "That is what who meant? You said he?" Before Doug could answer, Marie-Ange held up a finger. "Russian also. Perhaps someone that if we mentioned his name to either David or Illyana, they would have unfriendly things to say about that person?"

"And now who is being sarcastic?" Doug asked with a chuckle. "Also, which one of us has the pattern recognition power again?" He shook his head. "And no, the information didn't come from Alexei Nikolai'ch himself, but it did come from a man within the GRU. And unexpectedly enough that it almost certainly had to have Vazhin's blessing."

"Just because you have a power does not mean that other people cannot recognize patterns." Marie-Ange said. "So we have many missing Russian mutants? Or from the areas that were the Soviet Republic? Why would he send that to us?", she wondered aloud. "I do not have -time- for this today. I already have a headache, and two phone calls to make that are going to take all morning." Pete's extended rehab and Remy being missing was very much taking it's toll.

---

"Lunch time!" Doug called as he came around the corner and into Marie-Ange's cubicle. "Where do you want to..." he trailed off at a very familiar tableau. A spread of tarot cards was on a cleared-off space on her desk, and a vacant expression on her face, as if she was looking at something somewhere or somewhen else. He immediately pulled up a chair, grabbed a notepad, and waited.

The spread of cards lasted about as long as it took Doug to get out a pen and start taking notes, and then Marie-Ange scooped all the cards up in one motion and shuffled them back together. She snapped down cards quickly in an elaborate layout, nearly half the deck in place somewhere on her desk. She stared at it for some time, one hand idly playing with her hand and the other flipping through the last few cards in the deck.

And then that too was scooped up, and again she laid cards down, only a few, and in a straight line across her desk, their edges touching and almost ruler-straight.

Doug scribbled hastily on the pad, taking notes on each group of cards as they were laid down, trying his best to keep up with Marie-Ange. When she finally set the deck aside and looked as though she were coming out of it, he set the pad down. "You back?" he asked her.

The response was perfectly clear to Doug, in that Marie-Ange put her head down on her desk and groaned, while groping blindly in a drawer until she found a prescription bottle and shook out a single tiny yellow pill. Then she picked her head up long enough to dry-swallow the pill. "I think that I... " then she caught sight of the notepad and cut herself off. "How long were you here? Long enough to take many notes?"

"Long enough, I think." Doug gestured at the several pages of notes taken in an improvised shorthand. "You went through several different geometries," he told her. "How much of it do you remember?"

"Just a few cards. I was trying to see if it was urgent or not, and if what I saw was symbolic or a literal vision." Marie-Ange explained. "I saw a city burning, which... " she didn't need to really explain, Doug's nod told her that he had seen Shiro's post too, and the arguement that she and Shiro had in comments. "And a comet crashing into the city. I am not sure it was Tokyo though. The architecture looked wrong. And the X-Men are already in Toyko..."

"Okay. So we have a city burning, which may or may not have something to do with Shiro's 'visions'." The coincidences did seem to point that direction, but Doug was trying to maintain a skeptical position as a sort of devil's advocate until they interpreted the vision. "There were some recurring cards when you were laying them out." He consulted his notes.

"The Sun," which did sort of naturally lend itself to symbolizing Shiro in Doug's mind, given the source of the Japanese mutant's power, as well as being a general fire signifier. "The Tower, reversed," which he remembered well from Cain Marko's time as the groundskeeper, meant destruction. "The King of Wands," another fire signifier. "And here's the weird thing. Two copies of The Magician, one reversed."

"Do you know what I do not like at all, not one bit? When my power starts having me mix up decks." She didn't even remember pulling from another deck, which meant she might have put that card in weeks before. "So, power, fire and more power. That certainly sounds like Shiro, and the nightmares he was having." Marie-Ange frowned. "I really do not like having to admit he was right about those nightmares having significance."

"Since when do you like having to admit anyone was right if it means having to admit you were wrong?" Doug teased gently. "Let's go break out the maps in the conference room and see if we can't pin down that city, if it wasn't Tokyo. I'll have something sent up for lunch."

"You are so mean to me." Marie-Ange was obviously in a very mature state of mind, right down to sticking her tongue out at Doug as she stood up.