Vanessa & Crystal | Friday afternoon
Jul. 30th, 2010 05:44 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsVanessa goes to the hospital to check up on her various missing persons and finds someone she didn't expect as well as a potential lead.
The first place to check for missing people was in a hospital, particularly the morgue. Vanessa figured that hospitals had already been checked out but she wanted to ask herself so she could cross them off her list of possibilities. Death was just too glaringly obvious a thing to not check into. Of course, now she was hanging out in the waiting room waiting for them to grab someone with the time to talk to her. Hospitals had that going for them too, busy saving lives and the like. Somehow the metamorph did not envy these people their profession, respect it as she did.
It turned out that a young blonde paramedic was the one who was chosen to speak with the blue woman sitting in the waiting room. Not everyone was mutant friendly, and it had made sense to people to send a known mutant out to talk to one who was obviously a mutant. It was sad but true; there were still a large number of people who viewed mutants in a negative light, and even then some people looked at mutants with physical mutations in an even worse way. She stepped into the waiting room, calling out the name she'd been told. "Vanessa Carlysle?"
That certainly hadn't been who she'd been expecting. A nurse or maybe a clerical type, but instead it was the mansion's resident princess all dressed up as a paramedic. To be fair, Vanessa didn't really know Crystal or talk to her so she was judging a lot off the bat here. Still, it seemed like a strange thing but if she was good at it and wanted to do it then more power to her, right? Vanessa stood and walked toward Crystal with one of those obligatorily polite smiles on her face that people typically used for strangers. "That would be me."
Crystal did her best to hide the shock and confusion she felt upon seeing the shapeshifter. She certainly hadn't expected to see her here. Wasn't her name Morgan Lennox? If she was giving a fake name here, why not have a fake appearance as well? She didn't have to look like someone with an obvious mutation, so why not appear as a baseline human in order to avoid mistrust? Not that Crystal felt that Morgan or Vanessa or whatever her name was, or anyone else, should have to worry about looking like a mutant, but she was well aware of the unfortunate fact that life wasn't always easy for people with physical mutations or ones who had been "outed" to others. Using her image inducer in the last couple of months had allowed her to experience this firsthand: skin tones deemed unnatural by human standards certainly drew attention, whispers and stares, and sometimes obvious avoidance.
Crystal returned the blue woman's polite smile. "Please follow me, Ms. Carlysle," she said, leading the way to an unoccupied room where they could speak in private. She supposed she should call her by the name she had given at the hospital, but despite having been on the same school staff as the woman, she didn't quite feel comfortable being on a first-name basis with her. Plus, this was more professional. The former self-defense teacher clearly hadn't come to talk to Princess Crystal or Crystal Amaquelin the school-teacher; she had come to someone who worked at this hospital, and that's exactly what she'd get.
The metamorph followed along just as politely as she would have with any stranger that might have been the one sent to help her. Vanessa watched the looks she got from people she passed out of the corner of her eye but seemed unaffected by their gazes. Once inside the room she'd been led to Vanessa waited until the door was shut before speaking. "I'm looking into a handful of local missing persons. All are mutants and all from the District X area. The girl at the desk said she'd get me someone who could look up records to tell me if any of them had come through here as patients or corpses. I've got names and dates when they were last seen. Can you help me?"
Crystal nodded, moving to stand behind a laptop on a portable table. District X. Not her favorite place at the moment, and she supposed it might be silly to avoid an entire area due to one person; after all, she didn't avoid Attilan even though Maximus was there, did she? Of course, he was safely under lock and key, and Haven was roaming free. "Yes, I can help," she told Vanessa. Or Morgan. Or whatever her name was. It didn't really matter what her name was, did it? She'd told the medical assistant she was working for a private investigator, and Crystal assumed that was the name she was using for her investigations. "What are the names of the people who are missing, and what are the dates of their last known appearances?"
Vanessa pulled a folded piece of paper out of her pocket and began to read off the list, "Tracy Davis, last seen on May 9th; Ben Johnson, last seen on April 24th; Derek Barnes, last seen around Christmas; Julian Frost, last seen on June 8th; Marilyn Walker, last seen February 3rd; and Sandra Butcher, last seen around mid-January."
Crystal began to type on the keyboard, accessing the proper search program and entering in the information Vanessa had provided. She checked each name, engrossed in her work, waiting and allowing the final search to finish before tearing her eyes away from the laptop's screen. Looking at Vanessa, Crystal shook her head. "I am sorry, none of these five people has a medical record here within the specified timeframes. Perhaps they might have been brought in without identification and were therefore listed as John and Jane Does. Do you have the physical descriptions of the missing persons?" Given the fact that Vanessa had already stated that all of the five were mutants, Crystal was prepared to hear anything from what would be considered average human descriptions to, well, practically anything. Green skin, orange eyes, violet hair, extra limbs, wings, tails, horns, etc. The list was endless.
"Aye, that I have." She found a small notebook in her pocket and pulled it out to flip through a few pages. A description of each of the missing people occupied a separate page. "Tracy's about five-foot-six, blonde hair down to the middle of her back, blue eyes, pale skin and arms like crab pinchers. She's in her mid-twenties. Ben Johnson is around six-foot-eight, short brown hair, brown eyes and the body of a grasshopper; he's in his late thirties to early forties. Derek Barnes is around six feet tall, brown hair, brown eyes, scrawny, and sixteen. Julian Frost is around five-foot-ten. He's got pale blue eyes; short, cropped, white hair and his skin is translucent like looking through ice. It might actually be made out of ice but the person who reported him missing wasn't sure. They said you could see his organs through the maybe ice. No one was sure of his age but they thought he looked around thirty...for the past twenty years or so. Marilyn Walker was five-foot-three, glowing green eyes, jet black hair and black skin." Vanessa glanced up from the page she was reading from to glance up at Crystal. "Aye, but not like African American black, like onyx. Apparently she was typically covered in clothing because her touch caused detonations of varying intensities. She was thirty-seven. Sandra," her eyes turned back down to her notebook, "was nineteen and three-foot-two. Dark hair, solid black eyes and her skin was patterned like a calico cat. Physique was described like a half-cat half-girl like an anime character."
In a group where everyone else would be recognized as a mutant right away, the description of Derek Barnes was the odd one out. Perhaps the physical descriptions of four of the mutants should have been the ones to stand out, but in this particular circumstance, the one that seemed to stand out the most was the one who was not listed as having a physical mutation. The others, however... did they live in District X due to their physical appearances? And wasn't it possible that the teenage boy had a mutation that could potentially make life difficult even if it wasn't obvious just by looking at him? That was the case with Kevin and Jared, after all. Crystal began typing the new information into the hospital's search engine and then slowed as she remembered something that had been said to her weeks earlier. 'What was done, was done with the desire to ease their lives only.' Haven's words rang out in Crystal's mind. These people had been missing for months... Haven had seemed confident in her abilities... what if this group had served as her test subjects? For weeks, Crystal had assumed that others had come before the four 'Untouchables', but she hadn't wanted to dwell on that too much. Now, faced with the idea that it was possible that these specific people had crossed paths with Haven, and that her 'success' with the Untouchables did not necessarily mean that the others had shared an identical fate, Crystal paled.
When she spoke again, it was not as Crystal Amaquelin, EMT, but as Crystal Amaquelin, mutant princess of Attilan and resident of the mansion housing Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. 'And so, the action was out of a moment in which I considered my judgement on the matter was the right one.' Had Haven made the same call months ago, doing to another group of mutants what she had done to Cammie, Jared, Kevin, and Yvette? Maybe the ones who had come earlier had been given a choice. Maybe not. Maybe the two groups had nothing to do with each other. But maybe they did. "There is a woman who works at a holistic clinic in District X," Crystal said slowly, "and seems to believe that it is her life's mission to 'ease the lives' of mutants with mutations that can make their lives unpleasant. Perhaps it is possible that she either met or simply saw your missing persons and decided to take it upon herself to 'help' them. She is the one who is responsible for the loss of the mutations of four mansion residents."
Brow furrowing, Vanessa asked, "Jea-" She stopped what she was going to ask and rephrased it. "You mean Kevin and Yvette and them?" She didn't honestly think either Jean-Paul or Kevin would have minded if she'd asked Crystal if she was talking about 'Jean-Paul's boyfriend' but she didn't know Crystal well, her opinions on same sex relationships, age disparity or even if she knew about the pair of them.
The real problem, though, was what Crystal was saying about this woman. "She's the reason the mansion's 'Don't touch me club' can touch and she did it...intentionally?" Imagine what that sort of power could do if you simply didn't like someone, if their mutation made their life easier than yours or if they accidentally did something to hurt someone you cared about. Vanessa thought of Jono Starsmore who didn't have any blood from what she knew of him. Without his mutation he'd die. No heart, no lungs and no mutation to keep him going. "Fucking hell," she swore quietly. Eyes refocusing on Crystal she asked, "Have you got an address for her?"
Crystal nodded. "Yes, it was intentional, and when I went to speak with her she did not show any remorse for what she had done. She believes that she has helped them and that she did the right thing, even though she openly admits that she did not ask each person for permission. She only asked Yvette; this is why Cammie is upset at her and has been rather rude on the journals." She paused for a moment. "So, yes, I know where you can find her. However, I will point out that she did not need to have physical contact with the members of the 'don't touch me club' in order to take away their powers. She changed four mutants into baseline humans without even speaking to two of them." Crystal's gaze intensified as she looked at the blue-skinned woman without blinking. There was a statement that was obvious without being spoken aloud, but she was still going to say it. "I sat across a table from her. She could have changed me, removed my mutation. She could do the same to you."
Vanessa nodded. "Understood. I appreciate that heads up, too. I'll be sure I look baseline before I go see her. Unless she has an ability to sense shapeshifters but since it's genetic there's only so much to pick up on if I'm not shifting into another mutant, right?" That last word held a slightly hopeful note. "Have you got a name to go with her address?"
"She goes by the name 'Haven'," Crystal told the shapeshifter. "I do not know anything else about her abilities, so I am unsure as to whether or not she can tell that someone is a mutant simply by looking at them or being near them even if they do not display any obvious signs of mutation. She was aware of the fact that I am a mutant, but I gave her my name even before the meeting and the fact that I am a mutant has not been a secret from the public for nearly three years." Haven could have known about her from her visits to District X, or a simple internet search could have revealed her background and identity, or perhaps Haven had not known who she was and had been able to tell just by being in close proximity. Even her words, questions, and demeanor could have made it easy to guess that she was a mutant. There was no way to know for sure.
Crystal took out a pen, removed a piece of paper from a notepad, wrote something down, folded the paper, and handed it to Vanessa. "She exists within her own world, I think," Crystal warned. "In this world, she is right, and anyone who does not agree with her is wrong." Crystal felt apprehensive about helping the woman see Haven; she hadn't ever particularly cared for Morgan/Vanessa, but she didn't want anything bad to happen to her. Crystal wouldn't even wish Haven's powers against her worst enemy. On second thought, didn't people such as Maximus deserve... no. No, that line of thinking would make her no better than Haven. Once someone started picking and choosing who should remain a mutant and who shouldn't... no, that was a road too dangerous for anyone to travel. This was why Crystal found Haven so frightening; it wasn't because of what she could do, but the way she did it, and the way she seemed to feel that she had the right to do it. "'The greater good', she called it," Crystal continued. "That is what she thinks that she has done." Yvette might agree, but Cammie would not.
Vanessa had to wonder if Haven was the woman in question's real name or if it was a name she had adopted for herself. How a person chose to identify themself said a lot about their self-image and the sort of person they were. Haven. It was a powerful word, particularly to the sorts of people who lived in District X. She could see why they might flock to someone with such a name, but did the woman really believe that's what she was? It gave Vanessa an uneasy, creeping sort of feeling to think about.
The folded slip of paper was pocketed with a nod. "Nut jobs come in all shapes and sizes, aye?" That made it no less disturbing, though. "Thanks for this. Could you ring me when you know for certain if any of those people showed under John or Jane Does, dead or not?" A business card was offered to Crystal. It didn't have Vanessa's name on it, only X-Factor Investigations along with the address, phone number and a tag line about being a PI agency.
Crystal nodded, taking the card from Vanessa. "If they are not listed at being at this hospital, would you like me to check at other hospitals?" She wasn't quite sure if Vanessa intended to pay Haven a visit immediately or if she meant to wait until she found out additional information about the status of the missing person. And whenever she did go see the woman at the clinic... what exactly did she intend to do?
"Yeah, if you've got the ability to do it. That'd be really helpful." It would also free Vanessa up from having to stop by each one so she could dig up some information on this Haven chick. Surveillance could be a way to go, but not getting caught would be imperative if this woman could really wipe your mutation away from you.
"I can do it; it will not be a problem," Crystal said. Of course, whatever she found out, it wouldn't necessarily prove one thing or the other in regards to the woman called Haven. If they hadn't been brought to a hospital, they could still have been harmed and the evidence disposed of in a way that would never be found. If they were dead in a morgue somewhere, there might not be a way to tell who was responsible. Still, Morgan/Vanessa had come here looking for information on the missing mutants, not Haven, and Crystal intended to help with the investigation.
"Great. Thanks." Vanessa double checked her mobile and the slip of paper with Haven's information on it in her pocket, then grabbed her motorcycle keys out of the other pocket. "I'll talk to you after you've found out whether or not any of them have popped up at hospitals then." She offered Crystal her hand and then took off. Looking into this Haven woman was priority at the moment. That and all those other priorities she'd already had, anyway. It was possible she'd need to enlist some help, but at least she already had the offer of it from Jean-Paul.
The first place to check for missing people was in a hospital, particularly the morgue. Vanessa figured that hospitals had already been checked out but she wanted to ask herself so she could cross them off her list of possibilities. Death was just too glaringly obvious a thing to not check into. Of course, now she was hanging out in the waiting room waiting for them to grab someone with the time to talk to her. Hospitals had that going for them too, busy saving lives and the like. Somehow the metamorph did not envy these people their profession, respect it as she did.
It turned out that a young blonde paramedic was the one who was chosen to speak with the blue woman sitting in the waiting room. Not everyone was mutant friendly, and it had made sense to people to send a known mutant out to talk to one who was obviously a mutant. It was sad but true; there were still a large number of people who viewed mutants in a negative light, and even then some people looked at mutants with physical mutations in an even worse way. She stepped into the waiting room, calling out the name she'd been told. "Vanessa Carlysle?"
That certainly hadn't been who she'd been expecting. A nurse or maybe a clerical type, but instead it was the mansion's resident princess all dressed up as a paramedic. To be fair, Vanessa didn't really know Crystal or talk to her so she was judging a lot off the bat here. Still, it seemed like a strange thing but if she was good at it and wanted to do it then more power to her, right? Vanessa stood and walked toward Crystal with one of those obligatorily polite smiles on her face that people typically used for strangers. "That would be me."
Crystal did her best to hide the shock and confusion she felt upon seeing the shapeshifter. She certainly hadn't expected to see her here. Wasn't her name Morgan Lennox? If she was giving a fake name here, why not have a fake appearance as well? She didn't have to look like someone with an obvious mutation, so why not appear as a baseline human in order to avoid mistrust? Not that Crystal felt that Morgan or Vanessa or whatever her name was, or anyone else, should have to worry about looking like a mutant, but she was well aware of the unfortunate fact that life wasn't always easy for people with physical mutations or ones who had been "outed" to others. Using her image inducer in the last couple of months had allowed her to experience this firsthand: skin tones deemed unnatural by human standards certainly drew attention, whispers and stares, and sometimes obvious avoidance.
Crystal returned the blue woman's polite smile. "Please follow me, Ms. Carlysle," she said, leading the way to an unoccupied room where they could speak in private. She supposed she should call her by the name she had given at the hospital, but despite having been on the same school staff as the woman, she didn't quite feel comfortable being on a first-name basis with her. Plus, this was more professional. The former self-defense teacher clearly hadn't come to talk to Princess Crystal or Crystal Amaquelin the school-teacher; she had come to someone who worked at this hospital, and that's exactly what she'd get.
The metamorph followed along just as politely as she would have with any stranger that might have been the one sent to help her. Vanessa watched the looks she got from people she passed out of the corner of her eye but seemed unaffected by their gazes. Once inside the room she'd been led to Vanessa waited until the door was shut before speaking. "I'm looking into a handful of local missing persons. All are mutants and all from the District X area. The girl at the desk said she'd get me someone who could look up records to tell me if any of them had come through here as patients or corpses. I've got names and dates when they were last seen. Can you help me?"
Crystal nodded, moving to stand behind a laptop on a portable table. District X. Not her favorite place at the moment, and she supposed it might be silly to avoid an entire area due to one person; after all, she didn't avoid Attilan even though Maximus was there, did she? Of course, he was safely under lock and key, and Haven was roaming free. "Yes, I can help," she told Vanessa. Or Morgan. Or whatever her name was. It didn't really matter what her name was, did it? She'd told the medical assistant she was working for a private investigator, and Crystal assumed that was the name she was using for her investigations. "What are the names of the people who are missing, and what are the dates of their last known appearances?"
Vanessa pulled a folded piece of paper out of her pocket and began to read off the list, "Tracy Davis, last seen on May 9th; Ben Johnson, last seen on April 24th; Derek Barnes, last seen around Christmas; Julian Frost, last seen on June 8th; Marilyn Walker, last seen February 3rd; and Sandra Butcher, last seen around mid-January."
Crystal began to type on the keyboard, accessing the proper search program and entering in the information Vanessa had provided. She checked each name, engrossed in her work, waiting and allowing the final search to finish before tearing her eyes away from the laptop's screen. Looking at Vanessa, Crystal shook her head. "I am sorry, none of these five people has a medical record here within the specified timeframes. Perhaps they might have been brought in without identification and were therefore listed as John and Jane Does. Do you have the physical descriptions of the missing persons?" Given the fact that Vanessa had already stated that all of the five were mutants, Crystal was prepared to hear anything from what would be considered average human descriptions to, well, practically anything. Green skin, orange eyes, violet hair, extra limbs, wings, tails, horns, etc. The list was endless.
"Aye, that I have." She found a small notebook in her pocket and pulled it out to flip through a few pages. A description of each of the missing people occupied a separate page. "Tracy's about five-foot-six, blonde hair down to the middle of her back, blue eyes, pale skin and arms like crab pinchers. She's in her mid-twenties. Ben Johnson is around six-foot-eight, short brown hair, brown eyes and the body of a grasshopper; he's in his late thirties to early forties. Derek Barnes is around six feet tall, brown hair, brown eyes, scrawny, and sixteen. Julian Frost is around five-foot-ten. He's got pale blue eyes; short, cropped, white hair and his skin is translucent like looking through ice. It might actually be made out of ice but the person who reported him missing wasn't sure. They said you could see his organs through the maybe ice. No one was sure of his age but they thought he looked around thirty...for the past twenty years or so. Marilyn Walker was five-foot-three, glowing green eyes, jet black hair and black skin." Vanessa glanced up from the page she was reading from to glance up at Crystal. "Aye, but not like African American black, like onyx. Apparently she was typically covered in clothing because her touch caused detonations of varying intensities. She was thirty-seven. Sandra," her eyes turned back down to her notebook, "was nineteen and three-foot-two. Dark hair, solid black eyes and her skin was patterned like a calico cat. Physique was described like a half-cat half-girl like an anime character."
In a group where everyone else would be recognized as a mutant right away, the description of Derek Barnes was the odd one out. Perhaps the physical descriptions of four of the mutants should have been the ones to stand out, but in this particular circumstance, the one that seemed to stand out the most was the one who was not listed as having a physical mutation. The others, however... did they live in District X due to their physical appearances? And wasn't it possible that the teenage boy had a mutation that could potentially make life difficult even if it wasn't obvious just by looking at him? That was the case with Kevin and Jared, after all. Crystal began typing the new information into the hospital's search engine and then slowed as she remembered something that had been said to her weeks earlier. 'What was done, was done with the desire to ease their lives only.' Haven's words rang out in Crystal's mind. These people had been missing for months... Haven had seemed confident in her abilities... what if this group had served as her test subjects? For weeks, Crystal had assumed that others had come before the four 'Untouchables', but she hadn't wanted to dwell on that too much. Now, faced with the idea that it was possible that these specific people had crossed paths with Haven, and that her 'success' with the Untouchables did not necessarily mean that the others had shared an identical fate, Crystal paled.
When she spoke again, it was not as Crystal Amaquelin, EMT, but as Crystal Amaquelin, mutant princess of Attilan and resident of the mansion housing Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. 'And so, the action was out of a moment in which I considered my judgement on the matter was the right one.' Had Haven made the same call months ago, doing to another group of mutants what she had done to Cammie, Jared, Kevin, and Yvette? Maybe the ones who had come earlier had been given a choice. Maybe not. Maybe the two groups had nothing to do with each other. But maybe they did. "There is a woman who works at a holistic clinic in District X," Crystal said slowly, "and seems to believe that it is her life's mission to 'ease the lives' of mutants with mutations that can make their lives unpleasant. Perhaps it is possible that she either met or simply saw your missing persons and decided to take it upon herself to 'help' them. She is the one who is responsible for the loss of the mutations of four mansion residents."
Brow furrowing, Vanessa asked, "Jea-" She stopped what she was going to ask and rephrased it. "You mean Kevin and Yvette and them?" She didn't honestly think either Jean-Paul or Kevin would have minded if she'd asked Crystal if she was talking about 'Jean-Paul's boyfriend' but she didn't know Crystal well, her opinions on same sex relationships, age disparity or even if she knew about the pair of them.
The real problem, though, was what Crystal was saying about this woman. "She's the reason the mansion's 'Don't touch me club' can touch and she did it...intentionally?" Imagine what that sort of power could do if you simply didn't like someone, if their mutation made their life easier than yours or if they accidentally did something to hurt someone you cared about. Vanessa thought of Jono Starsmore who didn't have any blood from what she knew of him. Without his mutation he'd die. No heart, no lungs and no mutation to keep him going. "Fucking hell," she swore quietly. Eyes refocusing on Crystal she asked, "Have you got an address for her?"
Crystal nodded. "Yes, it was intentional, and when I went to speak with her she did not show any remorse for what she had done. She believes that she has helped them and that she did the right thing, even though she openly admits that she did not ask each person for permission. She only asked Yvette; this is why Cammie is upset at her and has been rather rude on the journals." She paused for a moment. "So, yes, I know where you can find her. However, I will point out that she did not need to have physical contact with the members of the 'don't touch me club' in order to take away their powers. She changed four mutants into baseline humans without even speaking to two of them." Crystal's gaze intensified as she looked at the blue-skinned woman without blinking. There was a statement that was obvious without being spoken aloud, but she was still going to say it. "I sat across a table from her. She could have changed me, removed my mutation. She could do the same to you."
Vanessa nodded. "Understood. I appreciate that heads up, too. I'll be sure I look baseline before I go see her. Unless she has an ability to sense shapeshifters but since it's genetic there's only so much to pick up on if I'm not shifting into another mutant, right?" That last word held a slightly hopeful note. "Have you got a name to go with her address?"
"She goes by the name 'Haven'," Crystal told the shapeshifter. "I do not know anything else about her abilities, so I am unsure as to whether or not she can tell that someone is a mutant simply by looking at them or being near them even if they do not display any obvious signs of mutation. She was aware of the fact that I am a mutant, but I gave her my name even before the meeting and the fact that I am a mutant has not been a secret from the public for nearly three years." Haven could have known about her from her visits to District X, or a simple internet search could have revealed her background and identity, or perhaps Haven had not known who she was and had been able to tell just by being in close proximity. Even her words, questions, and demeanor could have made it easy to guess that she was a mutant. There was no way to know for sure.
Crystal took out a pen, removed a piece of paper from a notepad, wrote something down, folded the paper, and handed it to Vanessa. "She exists within her own world, I think," Crystal warned. "In this world, she is right, and anyone who does not agree with her is wrong." Crystal felt apprehensive about helping the woman see Haven; she hadn't ever particularly cared for Morgan/Vanessa, but she didn't want anything bad to happen to her. Crystal wouldn't even wish Haven's powers against her worst enemy. On second thought, didn't people such as Maximus deserve... no. No, that line of thinking would make her no better than Haven. Once someone started picking and choosing who should remain a mutant and who shouldn't... no, that was a road too dangerous for anyone to travel. This was why Crystal found Haven so frightening; it wasn't because of what she could do, but the way she did it, and the way she seemed to feel that she had the right to do it. "'The greater good', she called it," Crystal continued. "That is what she thinks that she has done." Yvette might agree, but Cammie would not.
Vanessa had to wonder if Haven was the woman in question's real name or if it was a name she had adopted for herself. How a person chose to identify themself said a lot about their self-image and the sort of person they were. Haven. It was a powerful word, particularly to the sorts of people who lived in District X. She could see why they might flock to someone with such a name, but did the woman really believe that's what she was? It gave Vanessa an uneasy, creeping sort of feeling to think about.
The folded slip of paper was pocketed with a nod. "Nut jobs come in all shapes and sizes, aye?" That made it no less disturbing, though. "Thanks for this. Could you ring me when you know for certain if any of those people showed under John or Jane Does, dead or not?" A business card was offered to Crystal. It didn't have Vanessa's name on it, only X-Factor Investigations along with the address, phone number and a tag line about being a PI agency.
Crystal nodded, taking the card from Vanessa. "If they are not listed at being at this hospital, would you like me to check at other hospitals?" She wasn't quite sure if Vanessa intended to pay Haven a visit immediately or if she meant to wait until she found out additional information about the status of the missing person. And whenever she did go see the woman at the clinic... what exactly did she intend to do?
"Yeah, if you've got the ability to do it. That'd be really helpful." It would also free Vanessa up from having to stop by each one so she could dig up some information on this Haven chick. Surveillance could be a way to go, but not getting caught would be imperative if this woman could really wipe your mutation away from you.
"I can do it; it will not be a problem," Crystal said. Of course, whatever she found out, it wouldn't necessarily prove one thing or the other in regards to the woman called Haven. If they hadn't been brought to a hospital, they could still have been harmed and the evidence disposed of in a way that would never be found. If they were dead in a morgue somewhere, there might not be a way to tell who was responsible. Still, Morgan/Vanessa had come here looking for information on the missing mutants, not Haven, and Crystal intended to help with the investigation.
"Great. Thanks." Vanessa double checked her mobile and the slip of paper with Haven's information on it in her pocket, then grabbed her motorcycle keys out of the other pocket. "I'll talk to you after you've found out whether or not any of them have popped up at hospitals then." She offered Crystal her hand and then took off. Looking into this Haven woman was priority at the moment. That and all those other priorities she'd already had, anyway. It was possible she'd need to enlist some help, but at least she already had the offer of it from Jean-Paul.
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