xp_logs | Amanda & Nico || BBQ Revelations

Amanda and Nico have a little talk on the BBQ party, and Nico finally gets to know why Amanda keeps gettng beaten up.

It had been amusing, being bundled onto a lounge chair and told to stay put. Amanda settled herself a bit more comfortably, wincing as her stitches pulled, and waited for Nico to return. The sun was warm, she had her sunglasses perched firmly on her nose to hide the healing black eyes and someone had insisted on her wearing a big floppy hat to keep her pale skin from burning.

Nico came back quickly, carrying more food than Amanda could possibly eat. Admittedly, it was a lot of food. Whatever kept her mentor still and getting better. "Here", said as she placed it ceremoniously in front of her, a smirk on her face. "I didn't bring beer because I don't know if whatever you're taking won't make you shake like a fish out of the water. Water, I should get you some of that..."

"Woah, grasshopper, I'm good." Amanda held up a water bottle. "Wanda's been making sure I'm hydrated, so I've had this bloody thing attached to me. Sit down and take a break, you're making me feel right lazy." It was said with a fond smile, however.

"The whole point is that you have time to be lazy now, so be lazy." At least she didn't have to go looking for water now. Nico sat next to Amanda; she still hadn't asked her why she was like that, but she was itching to let it go. "You can chew right?" But first she needed to be done with being worried.
Amanda snorted.

"What if I said 'no'? Would you offer to chew my food for me?" she teased, before picking out a piece of celery and crunching into it. "My face is mostly healed up, grasshopper, nothing to worry about. Just a couple of black eyes I don't feel like showing off to the munchkins here." She began to shrug, then stopped. "Although the shoulder's a right pain in the arse."

Nico made a face. "Ew no, I would magically melt it and give you a spoon." Nico was certain that would not be pretty. "And can't you, you know, use your magic to patch you up? Or I could keep working on my own healing, although I guess that anyone in three miles around us might get a little upset if I do it wrong." It wasn't as easy as she had thought, transferring energy without picking from others. She had plenty to use, but when it was all tainted like hers, Nico had to put a lot of concentration of making it usable first. "Seriously, we need HP potions or something."

"My healing magic's like yours - I need energy from people to actually do anything," Amanda reminded her. "And since it wasn't that long ago I was patching up Wanda, I don't really want to lean on the Trenchcoats for donations again. You understand." She gave her student a wry grin. "Besides, it's only a stab wound. Docs tell me it'll heal in a few weeks."

Nico bit her tongue before she could offer herself as a battery of sorts. If she knew Amanda (and by know she was pretty sure she did) then the woman would reject that without giving it a second though. "Stab wound? Okay, I've been trying to be nice and don't ask, but what the hell have you been doing? I want the truth, Amanda." She was looking at her as seriously as her worry let her; she was even using her name and all! Nico was being very serious this time.

The older witch sighed and finished off her celery before setting her overloaded plate aside. "All part of the job, I'm afraid," she replied. "But I suppose I haven't really explained what the job is. You're not a student any more, so I guess I can actually tell you." She pushed back the hat as she thought things through. "So, what exactly do you think the Snow Valley Centre is? Considering all the stuff you read on the journals as well as what you've been told?"

Taking a moment to collect her thoughts, Nico sighed and decided to go with what she knew or was pretty sure. "Well, for once, you guys travel around. Like a lot. And Remy might be charming and everything, but there's something about the way he moves that makes me think he doesn't make little boats inside of bottles on his free time." More like he made people eat the bottles, but Nico didn't want to be rude...or plain weird. "There's also the whole magic research thing you are into, and that time I had to pretty much drive over someone to get out of that place. And you getting beaten." She stopped there; it was a number of oddities her
rational mind was trying not to connect, but Nico had an idea of what was even deeper.

"Oh, and apparently you hired Cammie or something? I mean Cammie, you guys are probably into all sorts of clandestine things, right?" She was half joking there, but a part of her was scared of what Amanda would say next.

Nico was a smart girl and Amanda nodded at the way she'd connected the dots, so to speak. "The Centre's a cover," she said, deciding on plain language rather than dressing things up. "We're actually... well, the best term for it would be spies, I guess. We go after the people the X-Men can't. And we aren't particularly dainty about it, sometimes."

"So you...kill people?", asked Nico as delicately as she could. "Bad people, of course, but are you guys some sort of uh, preemptive strike force or something around those lines?" Why wasn't she as surprised as she should?

"Sometimes." Where Nico was delicate, Amanda was blunt. "And yeah, that's pretty much it. We go in and take care of things before they turn into the sort of disasters the leather brigade gets involved in. It's not particular heroic and there's no praise or medals - if we don't get noticed, we're doing our job right. But we do what's needed and we save lives - lots of them, sometimes. That makes it worth it, at least to me." She was watching Nico's face carefully - with her student asking about work, she'd expected this talk to come up at some point.

Nico did a decent job at hiding just how freaked out she was to actually hear Amanda saying that, but after a moment she just sighed shakily and straightened on her seat. "Your job is creepy." Yeah, that was all she had to say immediately. Nico could understand the implications of what Amanda did very well, and she knew that she was most likely seeing things her mentor's way at that moment because she trusted her and the rest to do what they thought was right...but the truth of everything wasn't less upsetting once she managed to put that away. They were basically killing people that had either done nothing yet, or had acted in such ways that was impossible to bring justice to them in any other way.

Could she be okay with it? After all, Nico wanted to kill her parents herself, but it was entirely different to actually doing it is a concise chance presented to her.

"Hey, this isn't the kind of thing you have to kill me over in order to keep the secret safe right? That would really suck." Nico decided to worry about those things when they had to do a lot more with her. If they ever got to do with her of course. She didn't feel like the one who should be judging anyway.

"Well, yeah, it is a bit creepy. Or a lot creepy, when you get down to it. But there's creepy parts of the world out there and they get away with it, for the most part. Which us where we come in." Amanda seemed satisfied by Nico's reaction; if she'd been impressed or excited by it, that would have been a worry. "And no death, but I would appreciate it if you didn't go posting notices about it."

It might have sounded exciting to her if she hadn't been through all the things she had, but at that moment of her life Nico wasn't really keen on seeing things with an unecessary ammount of romanticism. "Because I'm the one person in the whole mansion that doesn't have to deal with stuff that's better out of everyone's attention. Don't worry about that." All in all, Nico felt a little better. Sure, Amanda was travelling around the world ending bad guys in shady and suspicious ways or something, but at least the woman had trusted her. And while Nico couldn't say that she actually aspired to be like that when she got older, she could at least find some peace in the fact that you didn't need to be a complete monster to take that path.

"Now you better worry about eating or I will melt the shit out of this thing and put a straw on it."