Monday Afternoon - Amanda and Jennie

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Jennie goes to Amanda for some updates on Mother. Mother remains frustratingly vague and out of reach.



Jennie walked through the streets of Manhattan, keeping her head down and her hood up. She could now walk without pain, but her face still bore traces of bruising from Copenhagen, and she wanted to avoid questions. Her eyes darted around as she made her way through the crowds of people, mostly NYU students and tourists, to the building near the end of the block. She couldn't help the slight jump of her heart when she saw a pair of mirrored sunglasses, but it wasn't one of them.

The nightmares had begun again, picking up where they'd left off. Only this time, when she saw his face, it wasn't the malicious, gleeful evil she remembered from Prague. It was the barely sane man who'd sat above her, fist shaking.

And who'd spared her life.

The offices of Snow Valley seemed to be quiet, and she passed Wanda's office without pause. There was someone else she had to see.

Amanda's office was, as to be expected, full of old books and folios and the smell of ancient paper. What wasn't to be expected, however, was the general neatness - those who had seen the witch's room at the mansion knew personal tidiness wasn't one of her strong suits. But instead of the random piles on every available surface you found in her living quarters, the books were carefully catalogued and shelved, the folios stored in their own cabinet, and the desk, while not having a lot of surface visible, was organised with a series of labelled trays. To be fair, the labels were things like "Murdering Fucks" and "Don't Touch The Thing" and a Pixies album was playing in the iPhone dock, but it was definitely not what you'd expect of the witch-brat of old.

The blonde was peering at something on her computer screen, reflecting that perhaps she should go get her eyes checked sometime soon, when Jennie arrived. The door was open - Amanda seldom closed it unless she was deep in a research vortex.

Jennie knocked to get her attention. When she looked up, Jennie pulled a file from her bag. "What do you know about demonic possession?" she said without preamble. She looked exhausted, and there was a still-purple bruise on her cheek.

"More than anyone really should," was the wry reply. Amanda pushed her chair slightly to the side so she could face Jennie, and waved at the chair on the other side of the desk. "Sit down before you fall down. Wanda mentioned you and Clint got into a mess in Copenhagen. What've you got for me?"

"All of the Copenhagen stuff," Jennie said, handing over the file. It contained all of the information about the serial killings, and still images taken from the robbery at the Danish National Museum. "Plus some facts about the gem that they stole, The Star," Jennie sat, and tried not to wince. "Wanda is going to help run down some things about it's companion, The Eye, but I came to you because you know more about demons than her." Jennie rubbed her hands together. "Have you gotten anything new on Mother?"

"Brilliant." Amanda took the file eagerly, glad for details. The Eye and the Star were annoyingly obscure, and she'd only made a small dent in the research on the Eye itself. "Yeah, Wanda asked me to help out, what with the whole immortality thing. Typical magic user bucket list item - be all-powerful, live forever, blah, blah." She made a face. "Which is much easier to research than this Mother business, I can tell you. I've dug through all the 'Who's Who in the Demon World' type books and there's nothing on her at all."

"She's good at what she does," Jennie sighed. "We've been digging and digging, and all that we got is stuff that started after World War 2. Did anything specific happen then? Did the Nazis open a portal to hell or something?"

"I wouldn't have put it past them, what with the obsession with the occult and all." Amanda grimaced. "But since there wasn't a plague of possessions, I'm going to guess they didn't get that far. It could just be the records got destroyed during the bombings and such. And a lot of magic users were on the Nazis' 'to be horribly exterminated' list, as well. So the oral tradition got a bit broken up."

"Not a lot of her in any of British files either," Jennie said. "Did you know that they'd been keeping records since Edward the third's time?" she sagged back in her chair. "But, back to the possession thing. What generally happens when a person is possessed?"

"Oh, for a couple of days in that collection." Amanda sighed a little and then brought her attention back to Jennie. "It's not one size fits all, but there are some generalities. Demons often can't handle our plane of existence for long - think trying to breathe in a vacuum - so often they jump into a person and wear them kind of like..." She caught the anguish in Jennie's eyes and remembered her particular connection to a possessed person and changed her words from "meat suit" to: "Life support system. Something to protect them from the whole atmosphere of our world. Which is why the really powerful demons go in for the world domination plans - they want to change the world into a version of their own plane, so they can get along without the whole possession thing."

Jennie rubbed her nose. "And what about the person's soul? Once they're in there, there's not enough room for two. We came across a couple of-- well. Let's say that once we got rid of the demon, there wasn't anything left. It was just a body that, breathed, and could be kept alive. But nobody was home." Again, there was Donal above her, fist shaking.

Amanda hesitated. She knew Jennie was hurting, but she didn't want to give her false hope. Or, for that matter, confirm her worst fears. "Honestly? It really depends. On the demon, on the person being possessed... In some cases, like with Tandy or Wanda, a person can be possessed and their mind gets locked up in a tiny space inside them, so if they're unpossessed, they're back, safe and sound. Sometimes they remember, sometimes they don't. For others, yeah, the soul gets... eaten and there's nothing left of the person except the shell."

"Thing about Mother's Disciples, well, you saw for yourself what happens. Their bodies change. They get new abilities. They heal so fast. We've never Undiscipled a Disciple, you have to kill them to get them to ..stop. And every one that falls, she just takes another. She took Donal because he killed a Disciple himself. Was able to burn the head off with his power. We had a way of stopping them, so she took him." Jennie sat forward, putting her elbows on Amanda's desk. "I've seen a lot of terrible things, been through some terrible things, but I've never seen something like this before. In all your research, is there anything like this? Like Mother?"

Another pause from the witch as she dropped her own gaze to her desk before lifting her eyes to meet Jennie's again. "No," she said simply. "Never. And it's not just me. I've been sounding out the network, and no-one's seen anything like this before."

"Fuck," Jennie said, and her shoulders sagged. "I was naive to think she'd just go to sleep for another few years," she added, mostly to herself. Then she straightened. C'mon Stavros, John had faith in you. "XF is better at tracking than the X-Men, can you guys run down the footage of the Disciples, see if you can identify them, and any special skillsets they had? Mother likes to specialize her toys, and she's got two mutants now. That's also a clue as to what big boom she's planning. She nabbed Irish people for her IRA bombings, and a few Muslims for her Islamic terrorist phase."

The witch nodded. "Yeah, we can do that - Doug's got some brilliant face recognition software that will make things easier. And I'm not done yet either - if I can't find her, I can try and find what she's after. There's no point having the Star if she doesn't have the Eye, so we know what she'll be looking for. With luck, we'll find it first."

"Well, that at least is something I can help with," Jennie said, and gave Amanda a tired smile.