xp_logs | Topaz and Haller || Mind Games

Haller and Topaz take a stab at working on emotional projection and accidentally bring Cyndi out to play. It's still not a complete disaster, though.

The firepit beside the lake was quite peaceful. The local flora was responding to the encroaching spring, and birds dipped and dove at one another in territorial attacks and courtship displays. A ways down the shore a pair of ducks were paddled. Depending on how this went they might soon be reconsidering their choice of nesting ground.

Jim settled himself on one of the logs that served as a bench around the empty pit. A gentle touch of assent confirmed Charles' awareness. He wasn't precisely monitoring them, but a figurative eye was being kept open. With student and teacher being who they were Jim hadn't wanted to take any chances.

"Okay, go as slowly as you can," he said, turning his attention to Topaz. "If you can, try something positive. My connection between powers and the stronger negative emotions is pretty tight -- we don't want to start this with a forest fire."

"Right," Topaz murmured. Something positive. She'd never done positive. Well, not counting the Askew World when she'd tried to calm down Matt and Hope. Calm was almost happy, right? "Okay." She closed her eyes, reaching out. Haller's emotions were fairly level at the moment, making them easier to work with. Still, she wasn't good with happiness. She felt as if she was trying to convince his emotions to do something.

A frustrated sigh escaped the girl's lips, and she rubbed the back of her neck. She couldn't quite seem to get to happy.

Jim let her take a moment. After the incident with Tandy they'd concentrated primarily on her ability to drain off emotions -- small, controlled siphons intended to give himself and the professor an idea of her abilities as much as to provide her with additional experience. They had finally agreed it was time to address the projective aspect of her empathy. Clearly they were now working with a brand new learning curve.

"Trouble?" he asked.

She was scowling just a bit, annoyed by her inability to manage this one little emotion. "No." She knew what happy felt like, everyone was happy in this bloody mansion almost all the time. Her roommate was the embodiment of happiness. She knew what happiness looked like, felt like, it shouldn't have been this hard. "Maybe" she finally admitted, opening her eyes again and looking down at Haller.

The telepath thought for a moment. "Asking you to fabricate an emotion might be too much," he concluded. "Maybe you should try something you either feel now or have recently." The fact happiness was unlikely to be on that list was something he let pass.

...Okay then. Topaz tangled her fingers in her hair, flipping through the last few weeks. She wasn't about to tell the counselor that she couldn't clearly recall the last time she'd strongly felt something. Hmn...hang on, birthday. There'd definitely been an overtone of sadness that day.

She closed her eyes, recalling the pressing, slightly suffocating feeling, and projecting it towards Haller, careful about the influence she exerted. She could feel it working - at least more than happiness had been. That was something.

The weight of a gentle depression fell over him. Suddenly what they were doing seemed unimportant: he was tired, and he just wanted to walk away and be alone. And it saddened him, too, that this was what she found when she reached for an emotion -- a thought that under normal circumstances he could have regarded in the abstract now magnified by her influence.

But the part of his mind that had learned to dissociate during a crisis remained functional. This wasn't him. This was an outside influence, and he had a job to do.

Prepared as he was, he still felt a twitch from his own defenses. Behind the depression an opposing, active force that wanted to throw off the emotion, to stop feeling sad, to do something rose up. He took a few moments to calm it, then opened his eyes.

"Good," he said, though it was almost an effort to speak. "I feel that. Does it go both ways? Do you feel the effect it has on me?"

She crossed her arms tightly over chest as she mentally pulled back. She'd felt the twitch, and remembered what he'd said about his powers being linked to negative emotions. She wasn't going to be responsible, even indirectly, for burning down the woods. "Yeah. That's how I can tell s'working. Sorry," she added quietly. She wasn't generally a vindictive person, after all - she certainly wouldn't wish these feelings on anyone else.

The emotional weight withdrew. Jim smiled and shook his head. "You don't have to apologize during a training session. This is the only way to learn. Now, can you describe what it's like when you use the power? Is it something you push outward from yourself? Something you find and intensify in the person?"

"It's..." Topaz kicked at the ground, thinking. "The first one, I guess. Sort of. I kind of have to..." She held her breath for a moment, remembering what she'd done in the Askew World. "If I can at least pretend like I feel it, imagine it in my head, I can...push it onto the other person. If that makes sense."

Jim nodded. "That you need a point of reference to cause a specific effect? It does." He pressed a knuckle to his lips. "You pick things up from other people anyway . . . does it have to be a feeling native to you, or do you think you could use someone else's emotions as your model?"

Well she'd tried doing that with happiness and it certainly hadn't worked. But this was something new. She probably just needed time, she reasoned. "I could...probably use others. I'm not sure. I'd have to practice more. I don't see why not, though." Everyone's emotions did a good job of imprinting themselves on her mind anyways. She might as well make use of them.

"Hm." It was too early to invite in a third party to experiment . . .but then, maybe they didn't need one. Jim brushed off his knees and stood up.

"Maybe we can test it. I'll provide you with an emotion. Watch closely, then see if you can duplicate it. Sound like a plan?"

"...Sure?" Topaz wasn't quite sure how that was going to work. How exactly would they know her influence was working if he was already feeling the emotion she was copying? But he knew what he was doing. She assumed. "Sounds good."

"Okay. Give me a minute."

The counselor turned to the water and let Cyndi come to the fore. The trick was not to talk. Not that silence came naturally to Cyndi, but the alters knew the rules.

The habitual pyrokinetic reached toward the lake. Water leapt into the air like flame, echoing her manifestation of choice. A few playful flicks of the wrist twisted the liquid now into serpentine coils, now into a rippling sheet. With the exercise of power came the usual rush of pleasure and contentment: the sense of doing what one was born to do.

Two or three minutes was enough. Cyndi let the water collapse and exhaled. A heartbeat later Jim was in control again.

"Have it?" he asked, glancing back at Topaz.

Topaz winced at the sudden switch, her lips pressing together tightly. She wasn't used to it by any means, it didn't happen often, and it still felt incredibly jarring. "Yeah," she murmured, the echoes of joy and exhilaration still bouncing around her mind. She bit her lip as she tried to concentrate, to hold onto the emotions and push them back onto the suddenly level man. But it was like trying to grab water - they were slipping through her fingers.

She was struggling. He could feel the occasional judder as she made the attempt, but nothing substantial. The only thing Jim could sense was a barely-detectable undercurrent of frustration, though he was uncertain whether that was being actively projected or something his own telepathy had keyed to.

After some awkward moments without success Jim finally raised a hand to halt her. "Okay, that's enough," he said. Aside from not wanting to discourage her, emotion would be counter-productive to the exercise. He gave her a crooked smile. "It's all right. It was an experiment. For now we'll concentrate on the first application, the intrinsic emotions. Do you want to try another?"

She sighed a bit, entirely annoyed. "Yeah, all right." She debated for a moment before deciding to do something useful with her annoyance, carefully projecting it outward, pushing it onto Haller's mind. That one came a bit easier.

The irritation came on more quickly than the sadness. It was a nice day and he was stuck here, teasing apart the specifics of this kid's powers after all the brainwork he'd already been doing with Adrienne, and the happiness he'd gotten from the all-too brief exercise of his power was gone--

I was in a good mood, dammit!

With an aggravated snort Cyndi spun around and took out her frustration on the nearest safe target. A stack of firewood erupted into flame so violently the sudden heat hit them like a slap.

Topaz jerked back, both from the force of the heat and the very loud thought that wasn't hers - and wasn't Haller's either, for that matter - suddenly echoing in her head. Blimey. She pulled her influence back quickly, blinking rapidly and swallowing hard. So much for not being inadvertently responsible for setting fire to anything.

"Mr. Haller?"

The annoyance vanished, and with it Cyndi's control. The switch was abrupt enough that even he was jarred. Jim blinked for a minute, then pinched the bridge of his nose. "Um, sorry," he said, still mildly disoriented. At least the fire was contained. He shook his head. "That was what I meant when I said my powers and emotions are tied. You pulled an emotion associated with the power I just used. I think the fact you pulled it right after I used the power made the reaction more extreme."

Then he caught sight of the girl's face. She looked . . . unnerved, which was not a typical reaction for her. Jim frowned. "Topaz? What's wrong?"

She felt the switch back and forced herself to calm down, taking a deep breath and shaking her head, schooling her expression back into a blank mask of calmness. "Nothing." That wasn't exactly new to her, hearing thoughts associated with strong emotions - and apparently she'd gone a little overboard this time - but usually the thoughts were in the same voice as the person thinking them. That...that was new.

"No, it wasn't," the counselor responded bluntly. She was good at internalizing, but that just made the rare slip all the more telling. He glanced at the smoldering logs. He didn't think a fire was enough to elicit this kind of reaction. He turned his attention back to the empath. "This is a lesson," he said, his tone softer. "This is how we find things out. Not talking defeats the purpose. What happened? Did you feel something?"

Topaz massaged her forehead with her fingers for a moment, trying to think. "It's...sometimes - when an emotion is strong enough, sometimes I can hear the thoughts that come with them," she finally said. "Like, if a person's really angry, and they're thinking about whatever's makin' them angry, I can hear it. And just now, right before-" she gestured at the logs, "that happened, I heard you, but it didn't sound like you. I probably just heard wrong, wasn't payin' attention."

Jim blinked. "You have telepathy?"

"I...suppose so, yeah." She'd never really thought of it as telepathy. She'd never thought much about it at all, really - it was just something that happened sometimes. She was used to it.

It did make sense. There was a degree of overlap between telepathy and empathy -- but he hadn't realized Topaz was anything but pure empath. If he'd know there was a chance she could actually read the context of the emotions . . . well, so much for ifs. Jim exhaled and readjusted his strategy, and with that decision the rush of uncomfortable surprise receded into practicality.

"Okay, hang on," he said. "First, don't dismiss your instincts or observations. Especially when we're in a lesson. We're testing your capabilities. Right now nothing is unimportant and nothing is weird. Okay?"

She caught his moment of surprise, but it was gone as soon as it appeared, back to the same, level-headed teacher. "So...I shouldn't dismiss the fact that I heard a female voice in your head, then?"

Touche, he thought, but the reciprocal bluntness elicited only a smile. "No, you shouldn't. It's an aspect of those issues with emotional regulation I told you about." He shrugged a shoulder. "The official diagnosis is Dissociative Identity Disorder. Multiple personalities. It was one of them you heard."

"Is that what causes the emotional shifts?" Topaz asked, tilting her head and thinking about the sudden switches in emotions that shouldn't have been possible.

The telepath nodded. "Exactly. When I was young there were feelings I couldn't or wouldn't deal with, so I sort of . . . made another part that could handle them. Then I manifested." He made a vague motion with one hand. "It was pretty bad. I was telepathically engaged at the time, and since I already had dissociative tendencies I essentially shattered under the trauma. The memories and feelings created by that experience were farmed out to different parts of my mind because I couldn't deal with them, and the same happened to the powers I used. They took on identities of their own." Jim gave another one-shouldered shrug. "It's gotten better over the years, but the really strong emotions are still tied to my alters. I can feel things on my own now, but in some respects they still personify the . . . undiluted extremes, I guess you could call it."

Topaz would admit, she was slightly fascinated by the lengths Haller's mind had gone to in order to deal with everything. "Like what just happened, then. When I messed with your emotions, it drew one of them out, yeah?" She was trying to make sure she understood all of this. It was kind of a lot.

Another nod. "That was the one in charge of my micro-telekinesis. Irritation, frustration . . . she functions as a kind of release valve for those kind of emotions, among other things. And yes," he added with a sigh, "my inner arsonist is a girl."

"Is there any rhyme or reason to it? I mean...is there a reason your inner arsonist is a girl, or did it just happen that way?" Topaz stopped, suddenly realizing how deeply personal these questions were. "Ah...sorry. Never mind." She looked away, rubbing the back of her head. She was a little too interested in this.

For the second time that day, Jim waved off the apology. "It's fine, I'm okay with questions. It demystifies it. But yeah, there is a reason. As far as we've been able to work out her primary function is to be the anti-me: extroverted, impulsive, not given to a lot of introspection. Being female is just another opposite. I think the micro-TK was associated with her because of aspects. Besides, I couldn't like my powers. They hurt people. But Cyndi was someone else. She was allowed to like what she could do." Jim thought for a moment. "Things like social pressure or depression tend to bring her out -- the first emotion you used on me, for example. She reacted to that. It's how my brain tries to protect itself."

She still had more questions. So many more questions. It wasn't her business though, even if Haller didn't mind. There was one thing she could ask, though. "You said there are other alters...any emotions I should be avoiding when we do this?" She waved her hand to sum up their lesson in one gesture. She was...fairly certain none of his alters were dangerous - he wouldn't be allowed around the students if they were, right? - but better safe than sorry.

"Anger." The answer was immediate and matter-of-fact. "My primary telekinetic personifies it. He won't hurt you intentionally, but his power isn't always well-contained and I don't want to risk collateral damage. At least not until you're more advanced." Jim went back over the session so far, this time focusing on his own reactions. He probably wasn't the best person to use as a baseline, he realized, but there were some interesting implications.

"You can trigger a reaction from an alter by creating an emotion they typically defend against," he mused, "and you can provoke a full switch if you hit their emotional sphere directly. I wonder if you can also put one away."

"Anger. Got it." She was pretty good at avoiding that herself. Anger was...frightening. "Put one away?" She repeated after a minute, raising an eyebrow. "I'm not really sure about that..."

"They're only extensions of me. Their emotional range is . . . I don't know if I'd say limited, but it's different. Cyndi can feel sad, and Jack can feel happy. But it's not what they were made for." Jim furrowed his brow thoughtfully. "And they always feel something. Only David can be numb."

Topaz was carefully cataloging everything away, keeping tracks of names and what emotions he associated them with. "Could we try it?" She asked finally, a rare moment of curiosity striking her. "Not now, I mean, but maybe some day. Try putting one away, I mean."

Topaz was not alone in her interest. Switches had been triggered by outside influences before, but never intentionally. "Sure," Jim said, flashing her a quick smile. "I mean, it is only tangential to your lessons. I doubt that particular trick would have applications for anyone else. But the interaction between powers and mental disorders isn't well-explored yet. That's one of the reasons I study the field. I'll have to set up something with the professor to make sure it's not causing some kind of damage or other long-term effects, but I'd be interested to see what happens. We might learn something useful." He glanced at the woodpile, which was beginning to burn down. "And considering the emotion/powers tie with myself in particular, a potential emergency brake might not be a bad idea."

Deciding it was best not to think about what situation would require an "emergency brake," Topaz shoved that to the back of her mind. Part of her wanted to try today, but she wasn't going to push her luck. She knew as far as powers went she was still being rather closely monitored, and she wasn't going to do anything to get herself into trouble. "What effects could there be?" She asked curiously. It seemed like a safe topic. And if there was anyone who needed to know more about long-term effects...

"Honestly? I don't have a lot of experience with empathy in this area. From provoking a switch by asserting a specific emotion -- probably nothing. I'll have the professor make sure, but you're only triggering an emotion. I have those all the time." Jim folded his arms and gave it more thought. This was interesting. More, it was encouraging to see Topaz actually engaged enough to question: typically she was master of the down-play. Still, the little voice in his head that had nothing to do with other personalities and everything to do with common sense was reminding him that this wasn't just an abstract case study, it was his brain.

"There is one thing," he said. "If you start feeling serious resistance -- an opposing emotion, maybe -- don't try to force it. Stop. A minor twinge isn't a big deal, but I don't regulate emotion normally. I'm not sure what preventing my defenses from kicking in would do in this context, but . . ." The telepath showed her his right hand. The old burn scars were obvious in the sunlight. "I chased a bad idea once and tried to change how my brain works. It didn't go well. So let's just play it safe."

A slight wince at the sight of the scars was the only outward reaction Topaz gave. "Ah. Right then. No forcing anything, then. So...one of your alters controls fire and water. What do the others do? If you don't mind me asking," she added quickly. It really was dangerous to let her get interested in something.

"There are only two now. Well . . ." he amended with some reluctance, realizing a failure to disclose this almost guaranteed it would become an unexpected issue, "three. The third predates my manifestation and has no powers. He's a child, and he's buried deep. Compared to the others I would be surprised if you can do anything to pull him. Anyway, the other one you're likely to see is Jack. He's the macro-telekinetic. He handles the same type of telekinesis as Dr. Grey-Summers, but without the skill. He handles the more aggressive emotions. His primary role is as a defender."

"And he's why we avoid anger." She tangled her fingers in her hair, tugging a bit, her lips pressed together. "That's...a lot to have going on in your head."

Jim shrugged. "Yes and no. I talk like they're different people, and it seemed that way when I was younger and they held different memories for me, but in the end they don't feel or think anything I don't. What differs is the method and degree of expression. I trust Jack around the students even though he may say and do things I would only think. Cyndi might embarrass me by painting my nails and spiking my hair on my off hours, but she's never compromised my standing with the school." He gave her another crooked smile. "Most of us have different faces for different situations. Mine are just over-developed."

Different faces for different situations. Topaz pressed her lips together, shoving her hands into her pockets. "Yeah." Don't think about him.

Jim noted the shift back to introspection. Now she had something on her mind, and he doubted it had to do with him. He had also begun to realize much could be inferred about Topaz's state of mind from the proximity of her hands to her pockets.

"I'd guess you're more used than most to the inherent contradictions in people, though," he said, casting a gentle line.

"Hmn?" Topaz brought herself back to reality, blinking as she looked up at the teacher. "Aren't most psis? Hard to hide when you're dealing with someone who can read your every thought or emotion."

"For most. My telepathy was stunted by my disorder, so even after I got access to it I rarely picked up anything unless I know a person well. But I did spend a lot of time watching people trying to figure out 'normal' and why they acted like they acted." He smiled and put his own hands in his jacket pockets. "All telepathy really did was confirm that people are confusing."

"Don't think you need to be a psi to know that," Topaz murmured, more to herself, a slight smirk pulling at her lips. "People suck."

Jim responded with an answering smirk. "Everyone sucks sometimes. But it helps to understand why." He snapped his fingers as a belated thought struck him. "Oh, one thing. I'd appreciate it if you didn't advertise my disorder to the other students. It's not really a secret, but it's distracting enough I'd rather not get into it unless it's necessary. Maddie is the only other one I've told."

Who was she going to tell? "I won't," Topaz said with a nod. "Don't worry."

"I won't." He did trust her. And not just because the mental image of Topaz engaged in gossip caused his brain to try to eject itself from its skull.

"All right," he said, pulling his hands from his pockets. "We have a couple things to aim for, but first we need to master the basics. Want to go again?"

Topaz straightened up as well, letting her hands hang at her sides once more. "Sure. Let's go."

"Okay. But if you do annoyance again . . . if you can, go a little slower. We're out of safe things to burn."