Do I Know You? (prologue)

[xp-erverse.livejournal.com]

Horror rocks the Astral Plane, which sends Quentin into a fit of panic.


“You’ll need to sign here and here. And mademoiselle, you sign here.” The doctor passed the final form to Monsieur and Madame Gauthier, who quickly added their signatures without much thought. Their young daughter, though, hesitated when the document came her way.

“Come on, Daniella,” her mother urged, reaching over to take the 15-year-old’s hand. “We’ve discussed this. You’re sick. We’ve been to every doctor in Quebec and only Docteur Poulin has found any way to help you! I know how scary it must be . . .”

The girl’s father put his on his wife’s and looked his daughter straight in the eyes. “We have God on our side, Daniella. All those other doctors rejected Him, but He guides Docteur Poulin. He will see you through this.”

“I know how scared you must be,” the older man on the other side of the desk added. “Surgery is never easy. But your father is right. The Devil plagues you with these visions, he rots you from the inside. But we can stop him.”

“Daniella . . .”

The girl jerked her hand away from her parents’ and tremblingly opened her mouth to say something, but no sound came out. The all-too familiar pain that seared through her brain was returning. It felt like her head was going to split open. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she would have fallen out of her chair had her father not caught her and held her tightly, as if trying to absorb the agony to spare her from it.

The spell passed almost as quickly as it came, leaving Daniella Gauthier panting for breath, warm tears streaming down her face. With a shaking hand, she picked up the pen she dropped and added her own signature to the doctor’s forms.

Anything to get rid of this.

~*~

Quentin Quire sat in an office more than 600 miles away. Day after Halloween, most people were recovering from the previous night’s frivolities. Unsurprisingly, Quentin had stayed in rather than interact with people, so he was tasked with the weekend activities at XFI.

Which was actually good because it meant that he could continue his blissful solitude.

He sat at his desk to update some financial records when a sensation of pure, abject terror ran through him. It would have knocked him to the ground had he not been sitting. He was paralyzed, could barely breathe. Was his short life about to be snuffed out? He would be found dead in an office building, a truly ignoble end to an ignoble life.

And just as fast as it came, it went. Quentin fought to catch his breath and it took him a moment to realize that he was crying. He opened his mind’s eye and “glanced” around, but there was no one or nothing near. If someone had attacked him (and who would do that?) then they were long gone.

Maybe it wasn’t an act of aggression, though. He was in mutant central, so maybe it was just a powers accident. That seemed likely. Quentin sat back down to start on his work, but even as he tried to intellectually convince himself that was the truth, he could not shake the feeling that this was just a harbinger of something real and awful.