xp_logs | Aftershocks

Haller meets Amanda at the crime scene as agreed, but neglected to mention he was going to have someone with him. Amanda is Not Impressed. Once that's dealt with, they get down to work.

A CTS Decon company must have been retained; no trace of Margaret and Celeste Hoey's last few moments remained. Nonetheless, the site was easy to find. Over the last several days people had been to the alley and left little mementos in memorial of the mother and daughter. The spot had become a shrine of flowers, candles, photographs -- and, heartbreakingly, a tiny stuffed rabbit. Jim felt an unexpected wave of emotion at the gesture, and hated himself for wondering if any of the other victims had gotten the same treatment.

There wasn't much time for this indulgence, however. Their contact was already on-scene, apparently assessing the impromptu memorial. Jim raised a hand to the slim blonde figure in a wave.

"Hi, Amanda," he said, adjusting his course. "Sorry we're late. I got a little turned around after parking."

"Hey, Haller," Amanda replied. She continued to speak as she turned her head towards the incoming pair. "So who got guard... what the fuck is she doing here?" Her demeanour rapidly changed as she took in the sight of her little sister at Haller's side, a frown appearing and her body language screaming 'not happy with this bullshit'. "Since when do we drag students into murder investigations?"

”Hi?” Meggan was surprised that he hadn’t told Amanda she was coming. “Mr. Haller told me what was going on,” she answered carefully. “We thought that adding emotions on top of everything might help, if magic and telepathy alone didn’t work. Empathy. All three things might pick up a trace, if the two of them won’t find anything. Just in case.”

“I volunteered, Amanda,” Meggan said softly, hoping to reassure her sister. Given the circumstances, however, it probably wasn’t any comfort at all. She just hoped she understood that she had to try. “If you two find something? If I’m not needed for anything after all,” she continued, “I’ll just be standing over here. Completely out of the way, not interfering in the least little bit.” Out of danger. Right next to a dumpster that smelled strangely as though it were filled up with week old fish, but she still wouldn’t move from her spot.

Amanda didn't look mollified. "Empathy. When we're looking for a psychopath killing off innocent people. You want to feel this nutter?" She crossed her arms over her chest and gave Haller a Look. "Whose bright idea was it to have my little sister paddling around in a serial killer's emotions?"

"Mine," Haller confessed, belatedly realizing that when involving someone's adopted sister the thing he should have done, really should have done, was remember to tell Amanda. Nonetheless, he stood his ground. "Look -- I'm sorry to ask this, but I have real concerns that we can do this on our own. Nothing spiked on Cerebro, which means whoever's doing this is either shielded or extremely focused. I only deal with active minds. For someone like this, that even Cerebro doesn't catch . . . I'm not sure that will be enough. Meggan has an exceptional ability to attune herself to her surroundings as well as emotions, and we might need that."

The telepath paused, then looked the witch right in the eye. "Amanda," he said, his tone now low and intense, "this person killed an eighteen month old child. I hate asking this of her, and I'll do whatever I can to shield her if it comes to that, but if this means potentially keeping one of the students off the slab -- yes. I'll ask it."

Amanda looked from Haller to Meggan, her expression unreadable. Then her shoulders sagged: "Fuck," she said quietly, mostly to herself. She knew when she was beaten, and she knew they'd probably need Meggan's help - without an object belonging to the killer, her location spells were useless. "Okay, fine, if we need her, she helps. But..." and here she directed her words to Meggan herself. "...if it's too much, we stop. I don't want you getting fucked up by this. Empathy's tricky enough and I don't want you getting scarred for life by this bloke's emotions."

Meggan stopped short of saying ‘don’t worry,’ because of course Amanda would worry. It was part of a big sister’s job description, and she understood her reluctance to stick her in the middle of all this. “I understand,” she breathed. “If you do end up needing me, I swear I’ll tell you the very first millisecond it feels like anything’s coming through that I can’t handle.” Getting swamped by violent emotions was not something she wanted either.

"Agreed," said Jim. "If we get backlash, it's over. I promised the professor." The man had honestly been only marginally less unenthusiastic about the risks than Amanda, but had eventually conceded that Meggan was old enough to at least be offered the choice -- with the understanding that, should anything happen, it would be on Jim's head. As if he would ever have felt any differently.

The witch still looked profoundly unhappy. Ever since she'd found Meggan, she'd tried to shield the empath from the ugly side of her adopted family's life. She hadn't always succeeded, but she kept trying, desperately wanting to keep her little sister from having to make the same choices she'd made. Only she wasn't a child any more and Amanda was realisinig that the hard way. "Be careful," she said softly to Meggan, voice quivering a little before she turned to the shrine. "Let's get this done, then. I'll need to find something connected to the victims, since the killer's so bloody careful about leaving behind traces. I might be able to use New York's memory to backtrack."

Jim traded looks with Meggan before giving Amanda a small, apologetic smile. He turned his attention to the shrine. "Is there anything here you can use?" he asked, looking at the pile of candles and flowers doubtfully. "I don't know if any of this actually belonged to the victims."

Amanda shook her head. "Nah, 's all after the fact." She crouched down, letting her fingers brush the pavement, eyes half-closing as she let herself tune into the surface presence of New York. "Wait. There's... something. Over here." She reached over and moved aside several bouquets of flowers and a small stuffed rabbit, exposing a patch of pavement with a slightly dark stain on it. "Something the clean up crew missed," she murmured.

Meggan leaned forward a little to see. She didn’t want to be the one to interrupt Amanda’s becoming one with the alley, but she had a question. “Did one of them drop something…like an earring?” A very small piece of jewelry like that could have been overlooked if it had bounced away, she supposed. A child’s toy would have been big enough to be spotted by the police, and already removed. The horrible thought of a teething ring being left behind drifted through her mind, given the baby’s age.

"Not exactly." Amanda touched the spot and pulled her fingers away as if they'd been burnt. She almost expected a stain to show when she looked at her hand, but it was clean. "There's blood here. Not a lot, but enough, I think."

The telepath looked at the brownish spot. It was faded, but now that Amanda had called it to his attention he recognized the shade. He had seen it before on the side of the road, smeared around the carcasses of animals.

It made a terrible kind of sense. If you needed something personal, there was nothing more intimate than blood.

Jim knelt beside the witch. "All right," he said quietly. "Tell me what to do."

Amanda shifted so that she was kneeling, the concrete digging into her knees and the healing bullet wound protesting slightly. "Two things," she said to the telepath beside her. "I might wind up merging with the city a bit for this, so I'll need you to keep us mostly invisible to onlookers, if you can. And since I'm up close and personal with the city, I'm not always the most objective, so I'll need you to scan what I'm seeing for clues. All right?"

"I'll try." Going mind-by-mind to blank their presence from passers-by would be difficult and leave him psychically exposed -- ah, wait, the alley mouth was a small area. Yes, he could project a generalized aura of avoidance and disinterest. That would be easier, as well as lessen the odds of someone walking into them. Jim nodded, already reorganizing his mental resources. "All right. Whenever you're ready."

Meggan looked back and forth between the duo. She knew when things were seriously underway when Haller moved to touch her sister's shoulder, went still as a statue…and gained that ‘more than a little spacey, out to lunch’ sort of look. She resolved to remain utterly quiet until they came out of it, not daring to make any sounds that could accidentally ruin their concentration as the two struggled to find something.

As she had predicted, from her kneeling position, Amanda sank part-way into the pavement as she opened her powers to the city. With Haller's presence a vague tickle in the back of her mind, she nudged her way into New York's 'presence', communicating with it in a way that went beyond words, her mindscape widening to become an alien structure of concrete and tar, bricks and metal and the living energy of every individual human, animal and plant.

The witch opened her eyes, blank and unseeing as she let her hand merge with the bloodstain. Her voice, when she spoke, was edged with the sounds of traffic and subway. "I can't... there's too much here, too many people have been here. Too many lives over time - it's like asking someone to remember a particular ant out of an anthill."

It took a moment for Jim to respond. He hadn't known what he'd expected when Amanda had talked about the memory of the city, but it hadn't been that. The last time he'd felt any sort of consciousness like that had been years ago when he'd made contact with Xorn. It was . . . not scattered, but undifferentiated. The city felt everything, but it wasn't human. Humanity was only a small part of what defined it. To the city, a man being beaten in an alley was no more important than the drip of an air conditioner on the pavement.

He tried to sift through the impressions, looking for anything familiar, anything relevant, but it was like trying to single out an individual drop of rain against his skin. #Amanda,# he sent, the touch of her mind throbbing with the rumble of subway cars and weight of feet on cement, #I'm sorry, but this -- there's no mind left for me to find -- we need her.#

There was a long pause and then Amanda nodded once. "Meg," she called in that strange echoing voice. "We need you. Come over here."

Pushing aside any hint of trepidation she might feel now that it was her turn, Meggan came over. Sinking down to her knees just a little to Amanda’s right, she whispered, “Do I need to move any closer to you?”

"We need contact." Without warning, Amanda's free hand reached out to grab Meggan's in a tight grip. "Haller can link you to the event, but I can't get a grip on anything specific. I need you to focus me."

Another hand settled lightly on Meggan's back. This time it was Jim, and with the contact came the settling of a psychic link.

"There's blood under us," he said, voice distant. "Follow it down. Into the pavement. Back to the moment it fell. Back to when it soaked into the stone and became part of the city." He turned his blue and brown eyes to Meggan, and in them was the echo of street lights and sirens. The world around them seemed to grey, filled with the ghosts of people who had come and gone, the endless rumble of the dumpster emptied and replaced, the patter of rain on the sidewalk and the warmth of the sun on its bricks. The memory of the city, flowing through the three of them like an electrical current.

As the external world faded, there was the sensation someone had taken Meggan's hand without touching it.

#Find them,# Jim whispered in her mind, and pressed the ghost of her hand to the pavement.

“Okay,” Meggan murmured as she tried to get her bearings. Things were very muted. It took another moment to follow the trail properly, sort out the feelings this way, to find what they needed to locate. Meggan sensed two main emotions streaming through the source, one far weaker than the other. The weakest one was a small, swirling mass of both confusion and a tickle of surprise at the same time…so, that was the victim. The source of the blood. The murder was too fast for any fear to form. There wasn’t any solid pain for her to pick up. Distantly, she was relieved the person dying hadn’t suffered.

Meggan frowned for a moment, and pushed on. A little further, and…there. It was a little cloudy at first, but it was becoming easier with each passing moment to pick out bits of feelings from the rest of the echoes that were in this place. She wasn’t getting any animalistic hatred, no fury, no feelings of desperately wanted vengeance. There was just…a steady determination trickling in, like this terrible thing had to be done. That wasn’t enough, she knew.

“I…I think I’ve got something,” she distantly whispered. Oh, yes, that was something right there. The cold, gnawing emptiness accompanying that earlier sense of purpose that was strongly coming through might be the “scent” Amanda required. It was unnerving, yes, but it was not overwhelming her. Should she keep searching? There was nothing else for her to find in the emotions of that person no matter how hard Meggan strained to look.

Through the triple link - New York, Haller, Meggan - Amanda felt/sensed/tasted their target. Traces, not much to hold onto, but distinctive. Something you'd never forget after experiencing it just once. "That's it," she murmured, as around them the grey world darkened and chilled.

Jim felt as much as heard the implicit answer in her voice: We have him. Feeling what Meggan felt, he realized why Cerebro hadn't registered the kill. The victim had died too quickly for a psychic cry, and from the killer himself . . . nothing. Only a terrible stillness.

"Could you find it again?" he asked Amanda. A thousand miles away, a car horn honked. A woman yelled. Life moved on.

"Yes." It wasn't clear who the stony resolve was coming from; maybe it was all of them. Around them, the phantom city was flickering and rumbling, a beast awakening to anger. "We need to break the link. I can't hang on."

With nothing left to find in the phantom alley, that seemed to be the smartest move. “Go ahead,” Meggan quietly encouraged. There was a sense of relief at Amanda’s words, but if it was just Meggan’s feeling or all three of them sharing the emotion in unison she couldn’t be completely certain.

The telepath exhaled. He drew his hands away first from Meggan, then Amanda, taking the link with him. The physical world came flooding back, strangely flat now that all he could see again was the present.

Head still swimming, Jim turned to smile at Meggan. "Good job," he said, quiet but warm.

That had been more than a little disorienting, going back and forth. “Thank you,” Meggan replied with a small smile. While she was tired, she was glad that she had been able to find something to help them.

Between them, Amanda sharply exhaled and popped out of the pavement like a cork bobbing to the top of water, going briefly to her hands and knees before straightening. "That... was intense," she managed, voice back to normal. "I forgot links go both ways - we showed New York what's going on and now it's pissed off." She looked at Meggan. "You okay?"

Meggan hoped New York wasn’t mad enough to take things into its own hands. Or streets, as it were. If it could even act on its own. “I think so, yeah. I’m good, just a little tired,” she answered as she shifted to another position before she began to get up. Exhausted might apply to her state of being more than just tired. It hadn’t hurt, for which she was very thankful. She didn’t feel like she was about to tip over, but she did have a foot that was gearing up for a pins and needles feeling if she didn’t move off the ground, and soon. “What about you two? You’re both okay, too?” She might be just as concerned for them, as they were about her.

Jim nodded. "I'm fine. It was . . . different, but it got easier after we found a focus." He glanced at Amanda. "How're you doing? Need a ride back to the brownstone?"

"Please." Amanda was beat and she didn't particularly want to teleport through the city in this particular mindset. "We can work out what we're doing next over tea, if you like."

"All right-- wait." Jim glanced around to make sure they hadn't attracted attention, then knelt by the stain. The pavement split under a telekinetic strike with a sound like a muffled gunshot. The tall man prized out a piece of cement and offered it to Amanda, grey draining from his eyes.

"Just in case New York needs reminding," he said.

Amanda took the chunk of pavement, fingers briefly touching the brown stain. When she looked up, her face was closed off and remote.

"Let's go."