xp_logs | Nico, Amanda and a guest appearance by Doug

Following up on the conversation with Adrienne, Amanda gives her apprentice the tour of Snow Valley she was asking about, before getting down to the nitty-gritties. Backdated to January 24, before Nico's experiments.

"...And this is one of our boardrooms," Amanda continued, opening the double doors and showing her student in. One end of the large table was piled high with old-looking books.
"Last stop, grasshopper."

Amanda had a reason for bringing Nico here, but she hadn't given the girl much of a chance to ask about it, instead meeting her at the designated parking spot for the bus and taking her to the Snow Valley offices as if it was just another day. Then the promised tour of the premises, which was almost as populated on a Saturday as it was during the week. But finally, here they were, with the combined total of what research Amanda had been able to do on the Minoru family since her talk with Adrienne.

"Uh oh."

The tour had been alright; it was your after all, what else was she supposed to think about it. But when her most especial teacher technically locked them in what looked like a classroom -more than the rest of the place at least-, Nico knew there was something else going on. Adjusting her backpack, the goth decided to wait and see what happened.

"We're doing a bit of a history lesson today," Amanda explained, waving Nico at a seat before taking one herself behind the piles of books. "I had a bit of a chat the other day with Adrienne. She was a bit worried about that Staff of yours."

"Ah...that." She had considered Adrienne would tell Amanda, since they were friends and everything, and even considered going and telling the witch herself, but she had gotten a bit worried and scared at her possible reaction; the fear of being rejected was still strong. "What did she tell you?" Did Adrienne think it was Nico all the way, or that the Staff of One had done something on it's own? Taking a sit slowly, Nico hoped this didn't end up in a scolding session.

"That," Amanda confirmed, resting her elbows on the table and leaning forward. "Nothing to worry about, Nico, you're not in trouble - she told me the Staff jumped into her hand and made her Read it." She looked concened, however. "Any reason why you didn't tell me about it yourself?"

Okay, what to do, what to do? Nico decided that being honest was the only thing that could makes things any better at that moment. "I was scared that you would get mad at me; Ms. Frost...fainted, and I didn't know if the Staff had hurt her or something. She is your friend, I don't know how I would react if a friend of mine got hurt in ways I don't understand." Lowering a little her head, Nico was starting to feel as if she were back at the classroom with Adrienne on her lap, unconscious.

Truth. Truth was a good sign. A lie would have been an indication she felt she had something to hide. "I probably would have done the same thing in your shoes," Amanda replied gently. "But from what Adri told me, you weren't in the wrong. You made sure she was all right, after."

Well, it didn't seem to be going all that bad, but guilt was still strong in Nico. "I should have done more, maybe? I froze when I realized she was probably hurt..." Looking up, Nico decided she had apologized enough. "So...", the girl tried to sound as casual as possible.
"What did she tell you? Anything useful?"

"She's fine. She made me go to a kareoke bar." Amanda wrinkled her nose. "As for what she told me... yeah, there was some interesting stuff in there. I'm going to see if I can't get Emma to let me see the ritual of making the Staff myself with the mind meldin, so I can see if there's any clues from that, but I've been poking around in various magical history books, trying to get a handle on the Staff and on your family. I figure it'd help both of us, knowing where your magic's coming from."

"Karaoke bar? She got really affected, then?" Why would she do that to herself?

Nico nodded, her mood perked. "Yes, it would certainly help to know...you know, something at least. If someone of my family did make the Staff..." Well, that spoke a lot of the kind of people the Minorus were then, and only pushed further on her conviction of being different, better. "And...what did you find out?" As she spoke, Nico placed the backpack in front of her, remembering what she had brought with her.

"Bits and pieces. I got as far back as your great-grandmother - she was a witch with a decent amount of power in Asia. Things got a bit muddy beyond that, but from what I've been able to tell, there's a fairly high level of magic being passed down in your family from mother to daughter." Amanda reached for one of the books and flipped it open, running her finger down the pages until she came to the bit she wanted. "Apparently your great-grandmother was known in certain circles in China. Well, I say "known", but it was more like "scared the shite out of"."

Nico listened, mouth half opened, completely surprised. "My parents...never talked of the family; I had to ask a whole week to get anything on my grandmother, and by the time they told me, she was already dead..." So magic was on the family business for quite a while? She shouldn't be so surprised, but like many subjects she shouldn't be so surprised about, Nico couldn't help it.

"So she was...evil like my parents? Or just really powerful? Did she do something? Did she kill someone?" Anxiousness was starting to get the best of Nico, and her voice was a clear indicator of that.

Amanda sighed, hearing the touch of fear in the girl's voice. "She was powerful, yes. And... evil. There's not a lot to go on, about what she actually did, just rumours." She shrugged almost helplessly. "I wish I had more to go on, but there's not a lot out there."

Nico sighed helplessly as well, and then looked back up as she remembered what she was carrying all along. "Of course..." The goth opened her backpack and took a tattered old looking book from it; its cover was entirely black without any marking, and it was big enough to give Nico's backpack a slightly rectangular shape. "I took this from my father", started Nico as she opened it and flipped some pages. "But I can't read most of it...maybe you can?" And with that she passed over the book, hoping she was on a right lead. "It somehow speaks of me...but I think it also does of others...of my family..."

The book was cold to Amanda's touch and she shivered, using only her fingertips to handle it. The text swam around, refusing to stay in one place and she grunted, putting a hand over one eye and squinting. "Ugh. I'm so gunna have a migraine after this," she muttered, but as she kept making faces at the page, she began to be able to make sense of it. "Huh. Looks like all our answers were sitting right under our noses."

Nico blinked, confused at the way Amanda was acting. "What? Why are you touching it like that? And yeah, the text is a mess, but it settles after a while..." Leaning forward, Nico squinted her eyes as well, trying to get a grasp of the words slowly taking definition. "Well...I managed to read a tiny bit, but nothing too concrete. Do you see something?"

"It doesn't like strangers," Amanda said briefly, still reading. "It's the Minoru family history, or at least parts of it. There's a bunch of protective spells on it, which is why it's giving me trouble... Actually, you mind if I grab one of my work mates? Doug's power ranges to magical languages, he might be able to read the whole thing for us."

Strangers, huh? That probably meant anyone that wasn't a Minoru then, but having the family history right there was both thrilling and scary. "Doug as in Doug the guy talking about...in the Journals? First I thought he was some sort of geeky guy, but apparently...not so much?" She had seen the conversations between the people from Snow Valley, or at least those everyone could see, and they all seemed pretty interesting, leave alone weird up to some level. "Sure, if he can read this thing, why not?"

"Oh, he's a geek, just not as bad as some." Amanda reached for the conference room phone and dialled a number. Doug? You got a sec? I have a translating job for you."

There was a pause as the other end replied, Amanda nodding her head. "Right then, see you in a couple. Ta." She put down the phone and looked over to Nico. "Prepare yourself for the not-geek."

Nico smiled, trying to prepare herself. "I can't wait!"

Doug let himself into the conference room, closing the door softly behind himself. He looked slightly distracted and his hair was a bit more mussed than usual, which suggested that he'd been spending a longish amount of time in front of his computers running whatever latest search Remy had asked of him. "Amanda," he greeted his coworker, then noticed the other occupant of the room. "Miss Minoru, I take it?" Not that it was really a question, given that Amanda had spoken of her quasi-apprentice, and he'd seen her around the mansion once or twice when he'd been over there. He nodded at the book. "That the item in question?" he asked, then took in Amanda's hesitant and wary body language. "Anything I should know about it?" he asked a bit more sharply.

"Doug, meet Nico. Nico, Doug." Amanda made introductions cursorily, before getting to the meat of things in much the same way Doug had. "Magic text," she replied. "There's some protective magic on it - nothing that'll blow up in your face, but it doesn't like being read. I figured you'd have better luck than me."

"It doesn't like being read..." Doug repeated rather incredulously. It seemed a bit anthropomorphicizing, but where magic was concerned, the strange and unexpected tended to be de rigeur. He reached out cautiously and slid it over closer to him, then opened the cover. "The history of the family Minoru," he read from the front page with a
nod, then flipped the next page and stopped.

"What in the...?" he murmured. The text...it wasn't simply gibberish. If that were the case, it would have almost been better. Instead, it seemed as though the lines of letters were crawling around the page, evading his attempts to understand their meaning. And the most maddening part was that every so often it felt as though he could glean the barest bit of information from the skittering blobs of ink. If it had been completely without meaning, it would have been easier to look away and dismiss it. But Doug, much like his girlfriend, did very poorly with the idea of not knowing things. He pressed a finger to the page, trying to trace and follow individual letters, then snatched it back with a wince. "Cold," he said with a grimace.

"You weren't kidding," he told Amanda.

"I don't usually, about black magic," she replied wryly.

"So...anyone got anything?" Nico was feeling helpless again; they had the means, but not the ways to obtain the information. And now she was really interested about having that information. Very.

"Anything at all?"

"Easy, grasshopper, we're not stumped yet." Amanda considered the recalcitrant book. "I can read bits of it, and so can Nico - it must react to the magically inclined. Too bad Strange is still off and about, or I'd see if he had any luck." She glanced up at Doug. "Thanks for trying. Looks like I'll have to do it myself and have the migraine meds on stand by."

"Standby?" Doug worked at uncrossing his eyes, blinking slowly. "How about you give some to me now?"

***

"Ow." Amanda leaned back, closing her eyes and massaging her temples. "Fucking hell, that hurts." She reached for the aspirin and the glass of water Doug had provided before he'd left and took some before focusing somewhat blearily on Nico. "Right, I think I got everything it's going to let me read for now. It's... not pretty. There's some stuff about what your parents have been up to. You sure you want to hear it?"

Nico straightened. "Yes, I need to hear this; I need to be able of making sense of what is going on with my life, or at least the general picture." And that general picture could range from 'looks like you have a crazy, magical family' to 'you will probably die', and Nico didn't like to be on the dark. "Not pretty is my second name by now."

Rubbing her eyes, Amanda nodded. She had to give it to the kid, she had guts. More and more she reminded Amanda of herself at the same age. She pulled over her notepad of notes. "Right. Okay. Youre grandmother moved over the States when she was a young woman and set up her own magical group - yes, it would be called a coven - on the West Coast. There's not a lot about what she did specifically, tho' there's some things I want to chase up in the news archives." She moved to the next note. "She had your mum and when your dad and your mum got married, he took her name. Apparently 'Minoru' is a matriarchal line. Your dad had some magical talent of his own - it was probably some sort of semi-arranged thing, to create a more powerful witch - and they took over the cult. There's something here about using blood sacrifices as a protection against some sort of curse." Amanda looked up.
"Young women, mostly."

Nico nodded in silence. "Like the one I saw...it means they have been doing it all along, and my grandmother, and her mother, and...God." So she was the proud descendant of a family of murderers. The weight of it forced her to press her back against the chair, eyes closed tightly as she tried to control herself. There was also the fact the last name was her mother's. But if they had a boy? A shriek that went down her spine answered her question. Maybe she had lost a brother without even knowing it.

"A-anything else?" She forced the words out, well aware she was already getting more than she could chew. Still, Nico made her best to regain her composure. "Anything about my parents?"

"They took off, after you left." Amanda kept it as factual as possible, trying to soften the blow - Nico didn't need her opinion of the whole thing, which was pretty much 'round up the occult network and take this fuckers down'. "I'll have to do some more research, but it looks like from this that they're on the move a lot, keeping a low profile. Not that it'll help them, by the looks." She stopped, not sure if she should go on. After the mess with Morgan, she felt even less competent to be this girl's mentor.

Nico closed her eyes, slowly this time. "They are killing again, right? They want something, bad, and they won't stop. The fact I left didn't change anything..." Nico looked up at her mentor. "They will come for me, right? I can't let them hurt my friends, if they decide to attack the mansion, or here, or..." She was starting to panic a little, breathing accelerating. "Maybe it's not safe, I have to go somewhere else? Hide?"

"They're running 'cause they're scared. They're hiding from something, some sort of curse," Amanda replied, reaching out to the girl. "And if they come for you, they've got a fuck load of people to go through first who know what they're doing. You live in a house full of super heroes, remember? Not to mention me and my mates here. We won't let anything happen to you." She pushed the point. "If you run, you'd be caught within a week. Besides, they're going to die. Says so right here." She tapped the book with one nail-bitten finger.

She wasn't really paying attention until the part when her parents were meant to die. "Really?" Was she happy or sad? Concerned or anxious? Or all that at the same time? "Do they know that? A curse? So they die of a curse of sorts, and that is why they kill people?" She was convinced they would end up dying by her own hands, since that was the only way she would be sure, but if the book said they would die anyway...what could she do?

"I...I don't know how to feel about it. A part of me wants to kill them myself. The other part just wants to give up." Holding her head with her shaky hands, Nico felt like crying again, and internally blamed her own weakness.

"Since they've read the book, I'm guessing they know. It'd explain the spells they're using the sacrifices for - they're trying to shield themselves." Amanda rolled her chair closer to Nico's, ignoring the pounding of her head in favour of comforting her student. "This book, it just doesn't tell what's happened in the past, it seems to be covering the present and perhaps the future too." Although she was definitely going to talk to Marie-Ange about that as well - magical prophecy never sat well with Amanda. Especially the parts she wasn't going to tell Nico about just yet. "All I know is, my name appears in the rest of the pages, usually in connection with yours. I can't read that part yet, but you won't be alone, Nico. And I won't let them get you. You're more than your history - I was raised by a black magician until I was eleven, so I should know, right?"

Great, so maybe they knew; a desperate pair of wizards that knew how they would die were dangerous in Nico's head. The mention of the future being somehow written there didn't attract her much; she had had enough to even dream about knowing what would happen next; it was just too scary to think about. "I guess...eh, Amanda?" Nico blushed a little she looked at her mentor. "Can I get a hug?"

Amanda's response was to slide her arms around Nico's shoulders. "I know it's terrifying," she said quietly as the girl clung to her. "But you aren't alone, Nico. I'll teach you everything I can to keep yourself safe."

Hugging back, Nico started to cry in silence, finally breaking down and feeling like crap. But at the same time she had decided to fight; against her parents, the future and whoever that got in her way. "I-I k-k-know", managed to mumble. "Thanks."