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xp_logs2010-03-14 12:53 pm
xp_daytripper) wrote in xp_logs2010-03-14 12:53 pm
Amanda, Nico and Marie-Ange - Forbodings - backdated to March 14
Backdated due to Life. Amanda takes Nico for that reading with Marie-Ange, and, as usual, the answers are just as confusing as the questions.
The interior of Marie-Ange and Doug's apartment was not all that different from any other young professional couple in New York City. At least not on the surface. Furniture a mix of Ikea and whatever shops Marie-Ange had found. Magazines and newspapers and books in piles on the tables, a basket of laundry waiting to be put away, coats on the coat rack and draped on the back of chairs and a scattering of the general clutter that made up their lives.
Taken individually, the little things might not have seemed out of place. A shoulder holster visible just under a man's winter jacket hanging on the coat rack just inside the door. This was New York City, after all.
The decks of tarot cards everywhere - on nearly every flat surface, atop the television, atop the microwave, atop the laundry basket. They were everywhere, but it could be taken as a sign of an unusual hobby. The small terrarium with a mouse, not so unusual. The tray of sand next to it with mouse tracks, a little more so.
But the headlines of the newspapers were in a dozen languages, if not more, and the books in nearly a dozen more, as though the reader just didn't care - or notice - what language he or she was reading in. A paper shredder sat on the kitchen table, with a wastebasket full of paper next to it. A small safe sat under an end table in the living room, almost hidden - but not quite inaccessible.
At the knock, Marie-Ange had opened the door herself, which itself was unusual - she'd long been in the habit of having one of her images do the work for her. But that was for friends, for people who were used to the little dreadlocked imps and sketched creatures.
Not that the images weren't active - one was silently dumping the shredded paper into a trash bag, even as Marie-Ange opened the door.
Amanda gave her friend - and at one time, roommate at Xavier's - a grin. "Hey Angie," she said easily, more for the sake of her student standing with her than anything. "I brought Nico 'round for that reading. You stocked up on the aspirin?"
"Despite some people's best efforts to break into my medicine cabinet at four in the morning and steal it, yes. I still do not know how she gets in here." Marie-Ange closed the door behind Amanda and Nico, glancing over the British witch, and her student. "Plus ca change, no? Always a teacher and a student wearing a lot of dark clothing?"
Nico looked down at her clothes, which were obviously dark and gothy. "It can't be helped, I guess." She wasn't going to go into an elaborated explanation of why she liked her clothes like that mainly because Marie-Ange didn't seem to actually mind the whole thing. The fact they were there in order to get her future read was another important reason she wasn't particularly minding much else. "Nice place", added in an absent tone as she looked around.
"Merci. I have tea on. Also I think there is soda and juice in the kitchen, but perhaps not the soda." Marie-Ange said with a shrug. "Sometimes it disappears as soon as we buy it." She waved a hand towards the kitchen and began clearing off the low table in front of the sofa. "Did Amanda explain any of this to you at all?"
"Tea's brilliant, but you already knew that. And you know, I could always put a ward on your place same as mine, to keep your "sleep burglar" out." Amanda snorted, then sobered. "I explained the pre-cog a bit, and the whole 'the future is mutable thing', if that helps."
"Oh, anything is fine." Nico didn't mind having tea; there was a reason Amanda liked it, right? "Not that the idea of peeking in the future makes any more sense, but yeah, she explained." Another shrug. Was she really meant to get the point anyway?
"If it helps, it still does not always make sense to me, and I have been doing this for years. So I do not expect any of it to make sense to anyone else." Marie-Ange said, leaving out the 'except Tante Mattie' that automatically sprung to mind. It was not the time to traumatize the poor girl. "The long version involves a cat and a box and knowing where electrons are and also having seen that Future movie with the car." It was sad when the best explanations came out of Doug's dvd collection. "The short version is that we will talk and I will shuffle some cards and you get to write down everything I do and say and then we will try to make heads or tails out of it while I nurse a headache."
"And don't worry if Angie makes faces. It's what she does," Amanda added 'helpfully'. "If you're really lucky, she might even foam at the mouth."
The wadded-up ball of art paper bounced neatly off the middle of Amanda's forehead. "I have never once acted as though I were rabid or epileptic." The retort came back easily, and Marie-Ange laughed. "If you are lucky I will swear creatively in French. If you are very lucky I will call Amanda names that she does not know what they mean."
If Nico was really lucky, these two wouldn't start a paper ball war. Not that she wouldn't have enjoyed it, but getting in the middle of it didn't sound advisable. "I'll keep my eyes and ears open for anything remotely French then." Besides English and some rusty Spanish -she was from California after all, where half the cities had names on Spanish-, Nico had no idea of other languages. Well, she was starting to be close to stand Latin, but whatever. "So you just sit and talk, and shuffle? No crystal balls, levitation, light bulbs exploding and white eyes?"
"I could go get Wanda if you insist on someone fulfilling the stereotype of a gypsy, but she swears more than I do and she makes things break a lot." Marie-Ange said, laughing a little. "I lay out the cards, and sometimes I say things, and hopefully I do not lose track of where I am, because that makes it hard to remember what cards came up for you. And then I try to figure out what it all means because precognition is tricky. Not as tricky as cooking, but still tricky."
"If we get Wanda in here, we'll wind up drunk off our tits by two in the afternoon," Amanda said wryly. She indicated that Nico should sit down opposite Marie-Ange. "I'll go finish making the tea while you two start, yeah?" she suggested, heading towards the kitchen with the ease of someone who knew exactly where everything was by dint of frequent visits. "Make sure you write down what she says, no matter how weird it sounds."
Getting wasted by two in the afternoon was oddly appealing. "We could call her once we are done..." Hey, she hadn't seen the woman in a while anyway, and it would be cool to have a chance to talk to her again. Nico sat in silence. "I'll write everything, taking special interest on what sounds weird." Taking a deep breath, she reached out to grab the pencil and paper on the table. "Alright, weird me out."
***
Marie-Ange was not going to whine, despite being sorely tempted to. She had suffered worse post-precognitive-fit headaches. It was just that the alcohol and headache pills were so far away, and she couldn't have both at the same time in any case. "So, not so weird, yes? Just hard to understand and also please tell me I was not quoting the Bible at you because I do not want to turn into my mother."
"Hate to break it to you, mate, but you were. Genesis, even - snakes and tempation and the Garden of Eden, the whole shebang." Amanda was already on her feet, heading for the bottle of heavy-duty painkillers on top of the fridge - Marie-Ange had almost as many bottles of those floating around the apartment as tarot cards. Refilling her friend's teacup, she handed her the bottle. "My guess is you were going for original sin? The sins of the fathers bestowed on the children, or however it goes?"
Nico was silent, but she looked considerable a lot paler than before. It has been scary to put it in a way; frightening was another nice expression she could think of. "Well, it sounds pretty accurate, I guess? It wasn't precisely new that my family has been passing down some nasty traditions." Marie-Ange made it sound several times worse though, as if some really bad business were about to go down.
"With the First Minoru as the Snake, I suppose," Amanda agreed, giving Nico a reassuring pat on the shoulder. "Some of Angie's predictions like to establish what's gone on before," she explained. "Sort of like a preview of what happened last week in a telly show?"
Marie-Ange shook a pill into her hand and swallowed it with a long gulp of tea that was too hot. But the steaming tea and scalded tongue shook her out of her headache-induced daze and she sat up carefully. "She could also have been Eve. Tempted into sin and causing all the women after her to have pain and carry her burdens?" She reached for some of the notes that Nico had taken and then groaned as she read them. "The darkened child will become the bearer of sin? I said that? I never did."
Nico hit her head with the table, slowly but decidedly. "I hate the Bible." The fact her parents had been religious freaks before she found out about everything didn't make it any better. Lifting her head, she tried to sound calm. "So what do we know that we didn't know before? That my parents are going to pass the sin to me? Like some family tradition? I thought the Minoru had been fighting against a curse, not helping it spread; it makes no sense." Grabbing the paper again, Nico checked it once more; there was a lot of weird stuff there. "What creeps me out the most are all these indirects about people dying and things being blown to pieces."
"Metaphor," Amanda replied. "'S not always literal explosions - pre-cog tends to go for the poetic licence more than anything. So death can just as easily mean change as much as actual, you know, dying." She peered at one of the papers. "Bloody hell, Nico, your handwriting's almost as bad as Jubilee's. What's this? Something about Lilith?"
"Lilith was Adam's first wife." Marie-Ange said. "There are a lot of myths about her, mostly it is just that she is evil and then I think she slept with some angels. Or ex-angels? Maybe they were the angels who were working for Satan, I cannot remember right now because my brain is packing it's things to go on vacation to Fiji." She rubbed the back of her hand against her forehead and sighed. "Also, yes, there are not always explosions but sometimes, yes there are. It is only literal at the most annoying times."
"So where does that leave us?" Amanda asked. "I'm not the best with Biblical imagery at the best of times - I'm a bit stumped here. Anything we should be looking out for in the whole 'bad things will happen and try to eat your head' sense?"
"Well", Nico started as she looked up again. "Maybe we can make a time line or something? I mean, is there a way to tell what will happen first and what later, in this whole 'We Aren't Sure What's Going On' read we just got?" Maybe knowing what to expect first would help them? She hoped so.
"You should keep her around." Marie-Ange waved a hand towards Nico. "She says sensible things when my head is too angry at me for me to be sensible. If you go to the back room, there is a very very large sketchpad leaning against the wall. A time line could be useful." She certainly wasn't going to get the thing herself, not with the lights still too bright and the feeling of an ice pick in her eye. "Sometimes there is a way to tell, and if this is important enough for me to have seen your future, writing it all down in a line means it will be easier to share with some of the others."
"I'll go - can't have Nico getting lost and walking in on Doug's dirty boxers on the floor or something." She winked at the younger girl. "There's a reason I keep her around, tho' - I need someone smart to help me out." And with that Amanda got up and vanished into the back room, where she could be heard rummaging around for the sketchpad.
Yeah, Nico was shuddering now; funny how the idea of someone's dirty underwear had a more direct impact than her already grim future. Amanda's compliment...made her feel weird. Valuable, maybe; it was something she hadn't felt in a while, because when you are surrounded by powerful people, you kind of feel like you aren't good enough; she was smart at least. Sighing, Nico looked down at the notes again, but looked up and Marie-Ange seconds later. "Can someone change the future? Fate? Destiny? I mean, do I have a chance to avoid...whatever is coming?" Saying she sounded anxious was an understatement.
"Has Amanda told you about..." Marie-Ange paused, biting her lip as the headache grew from angry hornets to angry hornets with jackhammers. Which, she thought, could be a warning that explaining Amanda's own issues with power and temptation were her own to explain. Or just that telling Nico of how to gain power could send the young witch off on in an unwise direction. "...about any of what I have seen before? No? It is hard to explain without a visual aid." she continued, awkwardly.
Amanda was returning and overheard the last. "Bits and pieces," she replied, sliding the sketchpad in front of Marie-Ange and sitting down again. "Mostly about how what's seen isn't guaranteed to happen, but that we have to be careful what we do in case we send things sailing off in a worse direction. 'S your thing, I figured you'd be better explaining it."
Marie-Ange sat up carefully and pulled a marker out from the depths of the sofa cushions. "Have you seen the movie with the car and the time travel? No? Yes?" She was going to start giving it out as Christmas presents. Even if was old and outdated. "So, here we are with the present and the past, which we know, yes?" She drew a line on the paper, and at one end draw a cartoon snake and a witch on a broomstick.
"Let us suppose that you do not know what will happen to you and we never figure out what it is I have seen for your future." Marie-Ange drew the line out further, with a little picture of a dark-haired girl with devil horns. "And you are supposed to become evil and take over New Jersey and... I do not know, make a zombie teamster and destroy the Turnpike." ... after a moment, she drew a little halo over the girls' head. "Perhaps that would not be evil. We do not know. But that is my point. Perhaps in doing that, you prevent the mob from killing someone important, even if you do not know it."
Then she drew another line that branched off the first. "But perhaps I tell you, oh, yes, Nico, you will become evil and raise Zombie Jimmy Hoffa, and that is evil and you should not do that. But because you are not the Zombie Queen of the North Shore, someone who will become president someday is killed by the mob." She was trying to keep the explanation light-hearted enough that it would not terrify the poor girl. "And we never go back to the moon and do not start a colony there and the aliens eat us. Not very good, yes?"
Then she drew yet another line. "What is most likely is that we do not know what will happen. Because we have seen some things, perhaps things change. Or perhaps they were supposed to change. I tell you not to become the Zombie Queen, and you do not, because I saw that you would become evil. And because I told you, it does not happen." Finally, Marie-Ange drew a big question mark over the whole thing. "Confusing, yes? So we try to figure it out as best we can, and hope for the best. I warn you, you do not make a pact with a demon and we all go to the moon."
"Back to the Future? Good movies." But then she listened, putting every ounce of her intellect to get a meaning out of Marie-Ange's words. Which was a rather hard thing to do, because she seemed to be talking...a lot of nonsense. She did consider it slightly evil to destroy the Turnpike, alright, but she felt that half the time she needed to translate the woman's words; it was as if she were talking of her visions while having another vision, or speech? A speech for the future? No wonder if sounded confusing. Maybe because of that Marie-Ange did freak her out, but Nico kept it for herself. She ignored the fear, the presence of Amanda nearby, the dark thoughts that could make her shiver, and compared the information to what she knew, and to what she wanted to know. She hadn't tried to figure anything with such willpower in her entire life, she realized, and that was going to giver her as well one heck of a headache. When Marie-Ange stopped talking, she would find Nico looking straight to the lines and pictures, apparently not paying attention at all; she was actually, but once the words stopped coming she kept on working with them. And slowly, something started to take shape.
"The snake, and this witch; Adrianne", muttered as she placed a finger there. "A pact with a demon, yeah." Her finger went down the line. "My family..." And then stopped on the girl with horns. "The last Minoru, me. With horns? And it's all written already, but we don't know why...or how." It made sense, but in a way she felt like she was stretching some things. "The snake is temptation, of course, and the promise of freedom, knowledge...power; that crazy ancestor of mine that Ms. Frost say...she made something back then that has bothered my family. A pact, with a demon or something like one, no less, and it ends with me." Nico leaned back, closing her eyes for a moment. "But what ends. The world? School? My life? There is one thing I'm certain about." She looked up at Marie-Ange, looking too serious for someone of her age. "It won't do any good that I do or don't know. God, my parents should know more about this whole..." Piece of crap, that's what this is. "And the whole moon parts make no sense to me...but it sounds vaguely familiar though."
Leaning back at the page, she looked at Amanda for a moment. They had made a promise, not because Nico thought she could take on her teacher -she didn't even want to- but because she felt it on her gut she would be a danger for everyone sooner or later. Not the kind of feeling Marie-Ange had, but the kind of feeling the designated comic relief friend has when he says 'I have a Bad Feeling about this.' "If we got this right, something will taint me sooner or later, if it hasn't done it already. Something will...hunt me down, I don't know, prepare me to become the Last Minoru, which implies my parents won't be around when it happens." She looked back at Marie-Ange, and then Amanda, her looks going from worried to half crazed. "I'm going to kill them right?!" She wasn't sure if she was happier than terrorized from the idea, but both feelings were there.
Amanda paused. There was still the information she'd gleaned from the Book of Minoru that she hadn't shared with Nico, mostly because she didn't want to be the pebble that started the whole avalanche of disaster. "Not necessarily," she said at last. "Them dying is connected to you, yeah - the book said as much. But it doesn't mean that you actually kill them. Could be they die protecting you, or someone else kills them to save you, or a hundred other things." She shrugged just a little. "What we do have is that there's a dark power rising, something into corruption and temptation. So we stay on our toes and keep an eye out, yeah?"
"Also someone being tricky, like a snake. Beware reptiles with apples." Marie-Ange said. "Or offers that seem too good to be true, it is the same thing. We know something will happen, and so we keep watch like Amanda said. What I see is a piece of the puzzle, but not the whole of it." She pulled her feet out from under her and carefully stood up. "As to your parents... that is if they die in the way that we think death means. Medicine today means you can die and still not be dead. Your heart can stop, or you can stop breathing." It had happened before, and Marie-Ange was fairly sure it would keep happening. "Even that is not something I can be clear about. But we do know that something will happen, and that you are at the center of it."
Somehow Nico didn't think that talking about death in such a way was any reassuring, but she didn't say anything. "What if I don't want to be at the center of anything? What if I just hide until everything passes? But no, wait." She then slammed her hand on the table, as she felt she was starting to lose her cool. "I've been hiding since I arrived here, so probably it doesn't matter what I want, does it." The room was starting to heat up--no, she was starting to heat up, the whole 'Let's keep our eyes open' being too little of an effort to keep her calm. She wanted it to end, whatever it meant. Looking up at Marie-Ange, she tried to look as calm as possible. "Thanks for the help."
Amanda lay a calming hand over the one Nico had slammed on the table. "Easy, grasshopper," she said, tone reassuring and calm. "Angie and I, we've been through this before, so we know what to look for. And you can bet I'll be working with you even more now, to make sure nothing sneaks up on us. Trust me, okay?"
"If I did not think this would help, I would not have done the reading." Marie-Ange said calmly. She really hadn't meant to convince the poor girl that it was hopeless. "We have resources you would not have had alone, no one is going to just leave you to whatever fate you are so scared of." She gave what she hoped was a reassuring look. "I am afraid you are stuck with all of us now trying to make your life better. But if it helps, we all have very bad habits so you can still be a delinquent if you like. Amanda still is."
"I...I know, thanks; I mean it." Nico stood up, surprised her feet would support her anyway. Marie-Ange was right when she said they didn't know what kind of dark fate she was supposed to go through, but they would be there, watching over, and she needed to focus on that. She grinned a little and almost laughed at her offering of being a delinquent; would it be wrong to point out she already was one? It probably would. "I'll take that into consideration." Who knew? Maybe some shoplifting would ease her mind.
The interior of Marie-Ange and Doug's apartment was not all that different from any other young professional couple in New York City. At least not on the surface. Furniture a mix of Ikea and whatever shops Marie-Ange had found. Magazines and newspapers and books in piles on the tables, a basket of laundry waiting to be put away, coats on the coat rack and draped on the back of chairs and a scattering of the general clutter that made up their lives.
Taken individually, the little things might not have seemed out of place. A shoulder holster visible just under a man's winter jacket hanging on the coat rack just inside the door. This was New York City, after all.
The decks of tarot cards everywhere - on nearly every flat surface, atop the television, atop the microwave, atop the laundry basket. They were everywhere, but it could be taken as a sign of an unusual hobby. The small terrarium with a mouse, not so unusual. The tray of sand next to it with mouse tracks, a little more so.
But the headlines of the newspapers were in a dozen languages, if not more, and the books in nearly a dozen more, as though the reader just didn't care - or notice - what language he or she was reading in. A paper shredder sat on the kitchen table, with a wastebasket full of paper next to it. A small safe sat under an end table in the living room, almost hidden - but not quite inaccessible.
At the knock, Marie-Ange had opened the door herself, which itself was unusual - she'd long been in the habit of having one of her images do the work for her. But that was for friends, for people who were used to the little dreadlocked imps and sketched creatures.
Not that the images weren't active - one was silently dumping the shredded paper into a trash bag, even as Marie-Ange opened the door.
Amanda gave her friend - and at one time, roommate at Xavier's - a grin. "Hey Angie," she said easily, more for the sake of her student standing with her than anything. "I brought Nico 'round for that reading. You stocked up on the aspirin?"
"Despite some people's best efforts to break into my medicine cabinet at four in the morning and steal it, yes. I still do not know how she gets in here." Marie-Ange closed the door behind Amanda and Nico, glancing over the British witch, and her student. "Plus ca change, no? Always a teacher and a student wearing a lot of dark clothing?"
Nico looked down at her clothes, which were obviously dark and gothy. "It can't be helped, I guess." She wasn't going to go into an elaborated explanation of why she liked her clothes like that mainly because Marie-Ange didn't seem to actually mind the whole thing. The fact they were there in order to get her future read was another important reason she wasn't particularly minding much else. "Nice place", added in an absent tone as she looked around.
"Merci. I have tea on. Also I think there is soda and juice in the kitchen, but perhaps not the soda." Marie-Ange said with a shrug. "Sometimes it disappears as soon as we buy it." She waved a hand towards the kitchen and began clearing off the low table in front of the sofa. "Did Amanda explain any of this to you at all?"
"Tea's brilliant, but you already knew that. And you know, I could always put a ward on your place same as mine, to keep your "sleep burglar" out." Amanda snorted, then sobered. "I explained the pre-cog a bit, and the whole 'the future is mutable thing', if that helps."
"Oh, anything is fine." Nico didn't mind having tea; there was a reason Amanda liked it, right? "Not that the idea of peeking in the future makes any more sense, but yeah, she explained." Another shrug. Was she really meant to get the point anyway?
"If it helps, it still does not always make sense to me, and I have been doing this for years. So I do not expect any of it to make sense to anyone else." Marie-Ange said, leaving out the 'except Tante Mattie' that automatically sprung to mind. It was not the time to traumatize the poor girl. "The long version involves a cat and a box and knowing where electrons are and also having seen that Future movie with the car." It was sad when the best explanations came out of Doug's dvd collection. "The short version is that we will talk and I will shuffle some cards and you get to write down everything I do and say and then we will try to make heads or tails out of it while I nurse a headache."
"And don't worry if Angie makes faces. It's what she does," Amanda added 'helpfully'. "If you're really lucky, she might even foam at the mouth."
The wadded-up ball of art paper bounced neatly off the middle of Amanda's forehead. "I have never once acted as though I were rabid or epileptic." The retort came back easily, and Marie-Ange laughed. "If you are lucky I will swear creatively in French. If you are very lucky I will call Amanda names that she does not know what they mean."
If Nico was really lucky, these two wouldn't start a paper ball war. Not that she wouldn't have enjoyed it, but getting in the middle of it didn't sound advisable. "I'll keep my eyes and ears open for anything remotely French then." Besides English and some rusty Spanish -she was from California after all, where half the cities had names on Spanish-, Nico had no idea of other languages. Well, she was starting to be close to stand Latin, but whatever. "So you just sit and talk, and shuffle? No crystal balls, levitation, light bulbs exploding and white eyes?"
"I could go get Wanda if you insist on someone fulfilling the stereotype of a gypsy, but she swears more than I do and she makes things break a lot." Marie-Ange said, laughing a little. "I lay out the cards, and sometimes I say things, and hopefully I do not lose track of where I am, because that makes it hard to remember what cards came up for you. And then I try to figure out what it all means because precognition is tricky. Not as tricky as cooking, but still tricky."
"If we get Wanda in here, we'll wind up drunk off our tits by two in the afternoon," Amanda said wryly. She indicated that Nico should sit down opposite Marie-Ange. "I'll go finish making the tea while you two start, yeah?" she suggested, heading towards the kitchen with the ease of someone who knew exactly where everything was by dint of frequent visits. "Make sure you write down what she says, no matter how weird it sounds."
Getting wasted by two in the afternoon was oddly appealing. "We could call her once we are done..." Hey, she hadn't seen the woman in a while anyway, and it would be cool to have a chance to talk to her again. Nico sat in silence. "I'll write everything, taking special interest on what sounds weird." Taking a deep breath, she reached out to grab the pencil and paper on the table. "Alright, weird me out."
***
Marie-Ange was not going to whine, despite being sorely tempted to. She had suffered worse post-precognitive-fit headaches. It was just that the alcohol and headache pills were so far away, and she couldn't have both at the same time in any case. "So, not so weird, yes? Just hard to understand and also please tell me I was not quoting the Bible at you because I do not want to turn into my mother."
"Hate to break it to you, mate, but you were. Genesis, even - snakes and tempation and the Garden of Eden, the whole shebang." Amanda was already on her feet, heading for the bottle of heavy-duty painkillers on top of the fridge - Marie-Ange had almost as many bottles of those floating around the apartment as tarot cards. Refilling her friend's teacup, she handed her the bottle. "My guess is you were going for original sin? The sins of the fathers bestowed on the children, or however it goes?"
Nico was silent, but she looked considerable a lot paler than before. It has been scary to put it in a way; frightening was another nice expression she could think of. "Well, it sounds pretty accurate, I guess? It wasn't precisely new that my family has been passing down some nasty traditions." Marie-Ange made it sound several times worse though, as if some really bad business were about to go down.
"With the First Minoru as the Snake, I suppose," Amanda agreed, giving Nico a reassuring pat on the shoulder. "Some of Angie's predictions like to establish what's gone on before," she explained. "Sort of like a preview of what happened last week in a telly show?"
Marie-Ange shook a pill into her hand and swallowed it with a long gulp of tea that was too hot. But the steaming tea and scalded tongue shook her out of her headache-induced daze and she sat up carefully. "She could also have been Eve. Tempted into sin and causing all the women after her to have pain and carry her burdens?" She reached for some of the notes that Nico had taken and then groaned as she read them. "The darkened child will become the bearer of sin? I said that? I never did."
Nico hit her head with the table, slowly but decidedly. "I hate the Bible." The fact her parents had been religious freaks before she found out about everything didn't make it any better. Lifting her head, she tried to sound calm. "So what do we know that we didn't know before? That my parents are going to pass the sin to me? Like some family tradition? I thought the Minoru had been fighting against a curse, not helping it spread; it makes no sense." Grabbing the paper again, Nico checked it once more; there was a lot of weird stuff there. "What creeps me out the most are all these indirects about people dying and things being blown to pieces."
"Metaphor," Amanda replied. "'S not always literal explosions - pre-cog tends to go for the poetic licence more than anything. So death can just as easily mean change as much as actual, you know, dying." She peered at one of the papers. "Bloody hell, Nico, your handwriting's almost as bad as Jubilee's. What's this? Something about Lilith?"
"Lilith was Adam's first wife." Marie-Ange said. "There are a lot of myths about her, mostly it is just that she is evil and then I think she slept with some angels. Or ex-angels? Maybe they were the angels who were working for Satan, I cannot remember right now because my brain is packing it's things to go on vacation to Fiji." She rubbed the back of her hand against her forehead and sighed. "Also, yes, there are not always explosions but sometimes, yes there are. It is only literal at the most annoying times."
"So where does that leave us?" Amanda asked. "I'm not the best with Biblical imagery at the best of times - I'm a bit stumped here. Anything we should be looking out for in the whole 'bad things will happen and try to eat your head' sense?"
"Well", Nico started as she looked up again. "Maybe we can make a time line or something? I mean, is there a way to tell what will happen first and what later, in this whole 'We Aren't Sure What's Going On' read we just got?" Maybe knowing what to expect first would help them? She hoped so.
"You should keep her around." Marie-Ange waved a hand towards Nico. "She says sensible things when my head is too angry at me for me to be sensible. If you go to the back room, there is a very very large sketchpad leaning against the wall. A time line could be useful." She certainly wasn't going to get the thing herself, not with the lights still too bright and the feeling of an ice pick in her eye. "Sometimes there is a way to tell, and if this is important enough for me to have seen your future, writing it all down in a line means it will be easier to share with some of the others."
"I'll go - can't have Nico getting lost and walking in on Doug's dirty boxers on the floor or something." She winked at the younger girl. "There's a reason I keep her around, tho' - I need someone smart to help me out." And with that Amanda got up and vanished into the back room, where she could be heard rummaging around for the sketchpad.
Yeah, Nico was shuddering now; funny how the idea of someone's dirty underwear had a more direct impact than her already grim future. Amanda's compliment...made her feel weird. Valuable, maybe; it was something she hadn't felt in a while, because when you are surrounded by powerful people, you kind of feel like you aren't good enough; she was smart at least. Sighing, Nico looked down at the notes again, but looked up and Marie-Ange seconds later. "Can someone change the future? Fate? Destiny? I mean, do I have a chance to avoid...whatever is coming?" Saying she sounded anxious was an understatement.
"Has Amanda told you about..." Marie-Ange paused, biting her lip as the headache grew from angry hornets to angry hornets with jackhammers. Which, she thought, could be a warning that explaining Amanda's own issues with power and temptation were her own to explain. Or just that telling Nico of how to gain power could send the young witch off on in an unwise direction. "...about any of what I have seen before? No? It is hard to explain without a visual aid." she continued, awkwardly.
Amanda was returning and overheard the last. "Bits and pieces," she replied, sliding the sketchpad in front of Marie-Ange and sitting down again. "Mostly about how what's seen isn't guaranteed to happen, but that we have to be careful what we do in case we send things sailing off in a worse direction. 'S your thing, I figured you'd be better explaining it."
Marie-Ange sat up carefully and pulled a marker out from the depths of the sofa cushions. "Have you seen the movie with the car and the time travel? No? Yes?" She was going to start giving it out as Christmas presents. Even if was old and outdated. "So, here we are with the present and the past, which we know, yes?" She drew a line on the paper, and at one end draw a cartoon snake and a witch on a broomstick.
"Let us suppose that you do not know what will happen to you and we never figure out what it is I have seen for your future." Marie-Ange drew the line out further, with a little picture of a dark-haired girl with devil horns. "And you are supposed to become evil and take over New Jersey and... I do not know, make a zombie teamster and destroy the Turnpike." ... after a moment, she drew a little halo over the girls' head. "Perhaps that would not be evil. We do not know. But that is my point. Perhaps in doing that, you prevent the mob from killing someone important, even if you do not know it."
Then she drew another line that branched off the first. "But perhaps I tell you, oh, yes, Nico, you will become evil and raise Zombie Jimmy Hoffa, and that is evil and you should not do that. But because you are not the Zombie Queen of the North Shore, someone who will become president someday is killed by the mob." She was trying to keep the explanation light-hearted enough that it would not terrify the poor girl. "And we never go back to the moon and do not start a colony there and the aliens eat us. Not very good, yes?"
Then she drew yet another line. "What is most likely is that we do not know what will happen. Because we have seen some things, perhaps things change. Or perhaps they were supposed to change. I tell you not to become the Zombie Queen, and you do not, because I saw that you would become evil. And because I told you, it does not happen." Finally, Marie-Ange drew a big question mark over the whole thing. "Confusing, yes? So we try to figure it out as best we can, and hope for the best. I warn you, you do not make a pact with a demon and we all go to the moon."
"Back to the Future? Good movies." But then she listened, putting every ounce of her intellect to get a meaning out of Marie-Ange's words. Which was a rather hard thing to do, because she seemed to be talking...a lot of nonsense. She did consider it slightly evil to destroy the Turnpike, alright, but she felt that half the time she needed to translate the woman's words; it was as if she were talking of her visions while having another vision, or speech? A speech for the future? No wonder if sounded confusing. Maybe because of that Marie-Ange did freak her out, but Nico kept it for herself. She ignored the fear, the presence of Amanda nearby, the dark thoughts that could make her shiver, and compared the information to what she knew, and to what she wanted to know. She hadn't tried to figure anything with such willpower in her entire life, she realized, and that was going to giver her as well one heck of a headache. When Marie-Ange stopped talking, she would find Nico looking straight to the lines and pictures, apparently not paying attention at all; she was actually, but once the words stopped coming she kept on working with them. And slowly, something started to take shape.
"The snake, and this witch; Adrianne", muttered as she placed a finger there. "A pact with a demon, yeah." Her finger went down the line. "My family..." And then stopped on the girl with horns. "The last Minoru, me. With horns? And it's all written already, but we don't know why...or how." It made sense, but in a way she felt like she was stretching some things. "The snake is temptation, of course, and the promise of freedom, knowledge...power; that crazy ancestor of mine that Ms. Frost say...she made something back then that has bothered my family. A pact, with a demon or something like one, no less, and it ends with me." Nico leaned back, closing her eyes for a moment. "But what ends. The world? School? My life? There is one thing I'm certain about." She looked up at Marie-Ange, looking too serious for someone of her age. "It won't do any good that I do or don't know. God, my parents should know more about this whole..." Piece of crap, that's what this is. "And the whole moon parts make no sense to me...but it sounds vaguely familiar though."
Leaning back at the page, she looked at Amanda for a moment. They had made a promise, not because Nico thought she could take on her teacher -she didn't even want to- but because she felt it on her gut she would be a danger for everyone sooner or later. Not the kind of feeling Marie-Ange had, but the kind of feeling the designated comic relief friend has when he says 'I have a Bad Feeling about this.' "If we got this right, something will taint me sooner or later, if it hasn't done it already. Something will...hunt me down, I don't know, prepare me to become the Last Minoru, which implies my parents won't be around when it happens." She looked back at Marie-Ange, and then Amanda, her looks going from worried to half crazed. "I'm going to kill them right?!" She wasn't sure if she was happier than terrorized from the idea, but both feelings were there.
Amanda paused. There was still the information she'd gleaned from the Book of Minoru that she hadn't shared with Nico, mostly because she didn't want to be the pebble that started the whole avalanche of disaster. "Not necessarily," she said at last. "Them dying is connected to you, yeah - the book said as much. But it doesn't mean that you actually kill them. Could be they die protecting you, or someone else kills them to save you, or a hundred other things." She shrugged just a little. "What we do have is that there's a dark power rising, something into corruption and temptation. So we stay on our toes and keep an eye out, yeah?"
"Also someone being tricky, like a snake. Beware reptiles with apples." Marie-Ange said. "Or offers that seem too good to be true, it is the same thing. We know something will happen, and so we keep watch like Amanda said. What I see is a piece of the puzzle, but not the whole of it." She pulled her feet out from under her and carefully stood up. "As to your parents... that is if they die in the way that we think death means. Medicine today means you can die and still not be dead. Your heart can stop, or you can stop breathing." It had happened before, and Marie-Ange was fairly sure it would keep happening. "Even that is not something I can be clear about. But we do know that something will happen, and that you are at the center of it."
Somehow Nico didn't think that talking about death in such a way was any reassuring, but she didn't say anything. "What if I don't want to be at the center of anything? What if I just hide until everything passes? But no, wait." She then slammed her hand on the table, as she felt she was starting to lose her cool. "I've been hiding since I arrived here, so probably it doesn't matter what I want, does it." The room was starting to heat up--no, she was starting to heat up, the whole 'Let's keep our eyes open' being too little of an effort to keep her calm. She wanted it to end, whatever it meant. Looking up at Marie-Ange, she tried to look as calm as possible. "Thanks for the help."
Amanda lay a calming hand over the one Nico had slammed on the table. "Easy, grasshopper," she said, tone reassuring and calm. "Angie and I, we've been through this before, so we know what to look for. And you can bet I'll be working with you even more now, to make sure nothing sneaks up on us. Trust me, okay?"
"If I did not think this would help, I would not have done the reading." Marie-Ange said calmly. She really hadn't meant to convince the poor girl that it was hopeless. "We have resources you would not have had alone, no one is going to just leave you to whatever fate you are so scared of." She gave what she hoped was a reassuring look. "I am afraid you are stuck with all of us now trying to make your life better. But if it helps, we all have very bad habits so you can still be a delinquent if you like. Amanda still is."
"I...I know, thanks; I mean it." Nico stood up, surprised her feet would support her anyway. Marie-Ange was right when she said they didn't know what kind of dark fate she was supposed to go through, but they would be there, watching over, and she needed to focus on that. She grinned a little and almost laughed at her offering of being a delinquent; would it be wrong to point out she already was one? It probably would. "I'll take that into consideration." Who knew? Maybe some shoplifting would ease her mind.