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xp_logsMarie-Ange has one of her little moments - in Emma Frost's office, when Emma's not there. Doug is there - but doesn't manage to keep Marie-Ange from going at some important papers with a pair of scissors.
Keeping Snow Valley updated - and secure - was, as Doug had complained several times over - was three fourths cleverness and one fourth sitting around waiting for little bars to complete. Upgrading every single system in the building was a tedious late-night activity only made marginally better by company, and Marie-Ange's remarkable ability to not have the coffee shop girls hate her for ordering ridiculous coffee drinks.
Doug was sprawled in a pair of jeans and casual shirt, in Emma Frost's office, in Emma Frost's chair, with a coffee mug that was 89 percent espresso and 11 percent chocolate, tapping a game on his phone in a way that no one else could have gotten away with. Marie-Ange was really no better for the lack of stealing Emma's chair, curled on the (far more comfortable that it looked) lounger on the office, with a sketchpad resting on her knees and a box of colored pencils next to her.
The third thing that made late night upgrades marginally better was GrubHub. And living in New York City, where one could order and receive whatever food one wanted at any time of the day. The deliveryman buzzed from the lobby with their Korean barbecue, and Doug heaved himself up from Emma's chair to go obtain and pay for food. When he got back, whistling a snatch of some nameless tune, he noticed a very intent look on Marie-Ange's face, and cocked his head, trying to determine what she was so focused on.
Marie-Ange was surrounded by papers, little scraps of them, in snowdrifts across her lap and sketchpad, and was humming "the Unbirthday song" from Alice in Wonderland as she directed a pair of imaged scissors through white paper sprinkled with black type. She brushed a few of the scraps from her lap and turned to face Doug, waving a delicately snipped page at him.
Waving it made the paper doll's skirt swish slightly, and she set it down with a satisfied smile, returning again to the strangely cartoonish scissors.
Doug knew that at times like these Marie-Ange wasn't necessarily seeing him. She was seeing whatever had led her to cut up what looked like...equal parts stock reports on a pharmaceutical company named Virtanen, a legal contract, and the crisp heavy stationery Doug instantly recognized as being the one favored for formal Hellfire invitations. "Angie?" he asked quietly, knowing from experience the best way to approach her when she was in the middle of a fugue state.
Marie-Ange looked up at Doug, and then stood up to pat his cheek. "Big brother? No, no the dolls do not want to play with boys much. Perhaps their choir teacher, appointed by the queen? Teach them how to sing." She said, touching his lips and ears and then patting his hair gently. "But first before they can sing, the birds must be free of their cage. Little gemstone mockingbirds, go home to mother, the nest is on fire."
Gemstones and queen meant Emma. Which made sense, because they were in Emma's office, and the documents Marie-Ange had cut into tiny dolls were Emma's. But. "...mother?" Doug asked, somewhat unbelievingly. "Oh dear." The idea that Emma had...daughters out there somewhere was frankly terrifying. "Where's my phone, where's my phone..." he muttered. Emma needed to be brought in on this. And fast.
Then - they tell Emma. It goes about as well as can be expected, until there is an interruption.
"So the original of the Mander contract is now in a number of small pieces? Small, doll-shaped pieces? The original? Of the Mander contract? The one that the lawyers considered would be really quite useful in resolving the intellectual property dispute? Which is why it was dug up from the archives and happened to be sitting in my In tray? When you got... snippy?" Emma thought she might as well nail down, in detail, all of the pieces of the small disaster that Doug and, more particularly, Marie-Ange had brought to her.
Marie-Ange looked about as contrite as it was possible to. Which if she had been considering the larger picture, would've presented an interesting puzzle - feeling safe enough to show how badly she felt for ruining the papers meant she probably wouldn't get her mind erased, but it put her in a much more vulnerable place in the short term, which left her vulnerable to amusing telepathic retribution, but the show of trust might lessen the chance for creative application of psionics.
"And medical papers, and a gala invite, for the Hellfire Club." She added. "I think that is all. We tried to find all the scraps but I was in quite a fugue state."
Knowing Emma, she probably had some ideas on how to mitigate the loss of the documents. But still, Doug winced a bit at the unamused expression on Emma's face. Even though it wasn't really his fault per se, and powers incidents happened, he still felt vaguely guilty. "There were...a lot of scraps," he said quietly. "During the fugue, Marie-Ange said something about...gemstone mockingbirds flying back to their mother." He raised an eyebrow, not nearly gauche enough to actually ask the question.
Emma sighed and did something that she was fairly sure she had learned from Adrienne. With a dramatic stretch of her arms, she planted her face on the desk. It said something about the cut-crystal quality of her voice that her words weren't even slightly muffled by being spoken into expensive executive leather. "You tell me Marie-Ange went into a fugue, turned various important papers into confetti and then want me to interpret pre-cognitive poetry." She raised her head sharply and looked at both of them. "And no, Doug, before you even think of asking, I am not even slightly willing to try and rummage around Marie-Ange's head and try and work out what gemstone mockingbirds are. Telepaths and pre-cognitives are a truly terrible mix. I don't think we want anything dramatic involving nose bleeds, migraines and just possibly psychosis, do we?"
"Plus the bird in my head is still very angry." Really. The dimensional... smushing, for lack of a more elegant term, had left Marie-Ange with migraines and a need to go cold-turkey on pain medication until her tolerances went back to something closer to normal and less like Dr. Gregory House, MD. "I think I also implied that you were a giant ladybug, and that everything was on fire, and there were paper dolls." She opened the folder that she and Doug had scooped the larger papers into and picked one of the dolls up. "My concern is that perhaps my choice of art materials itself was significant but now they are so mutilated..."
Emma sighed. “If it’s truly important, I can ask Adrienne to Read it and we can work out what everything is. Was. IF what it was proves important.” She frowned for a second and then some of the general crossness left her expression and a small modicum of interest began to sneak in. “So this was actually a bird in your head? To the inside your head value of bird, of...”
It's the smell that hits her first. Bleach and latex and oil and rusting metal all mingle in the air. It's distinctive and pungent in a way that is not at all pleasing and something she's utterly unable to place. She can barely hear, too. It almost sounds like someone is nearby, but she's listening through a heavy woolen mask or good pair of earplugs. God, her arms feel heavy. So do her legs. Eyelids too. Everything feels like... Where was she? She'd almost think she'd been injured somehow, but the setting seems all wrong. Clearly, this wasn't a hospital, nor a...
Panic lances hot and fast through her mind as she fails to come up with the word she wants. She knows it. She definitely knows the word she needs. She learned it years ago, in school. It was that day when--
And she can't remember that day clearly either. She knows of it, but only in the vaguest sense. It may as well have been a story a friend of a friend told her.
She does a quick check. One set of arms. One set of eyes. One pair of legs. One. One everything.
It feels so wrong.
And suddenly she's aware of her splitting headache. There's no relief from it, no other minds to find refuge from the pain. She can feel shreds of her psyche flapping, listless and disconnected and the huge, gaping hole in her mind shouts at her that something is Not Right.
She's alone. She's never never never never alone. Her power, sluggish and slow, explodes outwards as she is suddenly desperately looking for herself, begging the sky and every word she can think of (of which it feels there are many missing) as she searches. In her panic, she doesn't notice how far and how wide it is before she finds what she needs: herself. Everything is alright.
She grabs as tightly as she can, and forces herself back together. Her eyes shoot open, wide and unseeing.
Everything is wrong.
Too many limbs. Not enough limbs. It was the first thing that Emma felt - a reach inside her mind (who could reach so easily into her mind, past her shields, no-one could reach inside her head like that), but it was her own mind, her own mind reflected, refracted, distorted and it wanted to count her arms and legs and flaps of a shredded psyche tried to grab hold of her arms and legs and count them and there were too many limbs and not enough limbs.
Shields of diamond tried to crash down but even Emma's iron control couldn't drive out this psyche. It wasn't telepathic strength combined with panic, though both those things were there. It was too like her, it's psyche another version of her own remade, and she couldn't sort out what was her and what was it and drive it OUT.
Not out. Outwards. Bouncing back into its mind, HER mind, part-her, only parts of her, broken bits of a psyche reaching out for anything like itself and finding Emma Frost and Emma Frost found her back. Latex, rubber, bleach, smells like a olfactory slap, muffled sounds and nothing to see and her hands were bound, tied down, she was TIED DOWN and Emma Frost opened her mouth to scream and stopped herself dead.
~WHO ARE YOU?~ she broadcast into this part-psyche that was somewhere far out there and inside her head at the same time and all of it was broken into pieces.
Not alone but still alone in the ways that really mattered but someone was here oh god someone else was here when they shouldn't be. It's something older and the same, her but not her, with a mind all its own. It echoes back down the back down the psychic link and can see more people, feel more limbs but they don't belong to her even as they do. Something's invaded the link, and it's talking at her.
She pulls hard at her bindings, thrashing around. She feels part of herself moving without her input and pulls all the harder. Coarse leather bites at her wrists. She think she's screaming, but she can't tell if it's aloud or just in her head.
~GET OUT GET OUT GETOUTGETOUTGETO--~
The mental equivalent of the sound of shattering glass echoes through her mind, and she's alone. Again.
Doug knew the body language of someone dealing with telepathic input, especially in Emma. And unexpected, uninvited input from the brief look of confusion and surprise on her face. "Emma?" he asked, concerned as to what this latest development might signify.
"A ladybug," Emma's voice was torn from the screaming she hadn't let come out of her mouth. "Gemstone mockingbirds. Little paper dolls." She looked up from the desk, at Doug and Marie-Ange and her face went blank for a moment as she processed what had just been put in her head without her consent. She reached down with one hand, dug diamond fingernails deep into the leather of the chair beneath her as iron control rendered her face an expressionless mask again. "They want to come back to the nest. My nest." Her gaze dropped for a second to her desk and back up again. "Someone has made daughters for me. And now they are killing them."
Marie-Ange's mouth opened and the tiniest gasp of shock escaped as she shook herself. "I am sorry. I was... I should probably have something astute to say, but this all makes no sense." She twitched back the loose hairs from her bun and then reached for a pad of paper. "Who made them? When did someone make them? How... " She glanced at Doug - and then back at Emma, and the bleak looks gave her no answers to her questions, and a long list of new ones. "No, no, none of that. Where. Where do we need to go, and how quickly. The rest we can find out, yes?"
Doug took his duties as Emma's Knight seriously, almost verging on a sense of protectiveness at times. For her to drop her gaze for even a moment to regain control...it simultaneously scared him and engaged that protective instinct. "The rest we -will- find out," he said emphatically.
Keeping Snow Valley updated - and secure - was, as Doug had complained several times over - was three fourths cleverness and one fourth sitting around waiting for little bars to complete. Upgrading every single system in the building was a tedious late-night activity only made marginally better by company, and Marie-Ange's remarkable ability to not have the coffee shop girls hate her for ordering ridiculous coffee drinks.
Doug was sprawled in a pair of jeans and casual shirt, in Emma Frost's office, in Emma Frost's chair, with a coffee mug that was 89 percent espresso and 11 percent chocolate, tapping a game on his phone in a way that no one else could have gotten away with. Marie-Ange was really no better for the lack of stealing Emma's chair, curled on the (far more comfortable that it looked) lounger on the office, with a sketchpad resting on her knees and a box of colored pencils next to her.
The third thing that made late night upgrades marginally better was GrubHub. And living in New York City, where one could order and receive whatever food one wanted at any time of the day. The deliveryman buzzed from the lobby with their Korean barbecue, and Doug heaved himself up from Emma's chair to go obtain and pay for food. When he got back, whistling a snatch of some nameless tune, he noticed a very intent look on Marie-Ange's face, and cocked his head, trying to determine what she was so focused on.
Marie-Ange was surrounded by papers, little scraps of them, in snowdrifts across her lap and sketchpad, and was humming "the Unbirthday song" from Alice in Wonderland as she directed a pair of imaged scissors through white paper sprinkled with black type. She brushed a few of the scraps from her lap and turned to face Doug, waving a delicately snipped page at him.
Waving it made the paper doll's skirt swish slightly, and she set it down with a satisfied smile, returning again to the strangely cartoonish scissors.
Doug knew that at times like these Marie-Ange wasn't necessarily seeing him. She was seeing whatever had led her to cut up what looked like...equal parts stock reports on a pharmaceutical company named Virtanen, a legal contract, and the crisp heavy stationery Doug instantly recognized as being the one favored for formal Hellfire invitations. "Angie?" he asked quietly, knowing from experience the best way to approach her when she was in the middle of a fugue state.
Marie-Ange looked up at Doug, and then stood up to pat his cheek. "Big brother? No, no the dolls do not want to play with boys much. Perhaps their choir teacher, appointed by the queen? Teach them how to sing." She said, touching his lips and ears and then patting his hair gently. "But first before they can sing, the birds must be free of their cage. Little gemstone mockingbirds, go home to mother, the nest is on fire."
Gemstones and queen meant Emma. Which made sense, because they were in Emma's office, and the documents Marie-Ange had cut into tiny dolls were Emma's. But. "...mother?" Doug asked, somewhat unbelievingly. "Oh dear." The idea that Emma had...daughters out there somewhere was frankly terrifying. "Where's my phone, where's my phone..." he muttered. Emma needed to be brought in on this. And fast.
Then - they tell Emma. It goes about as well as can be expected, until there is an interruption.
"So the original of the Mander contract is now in a number of small pieces? Small, doll-shaped pieces? The original? Of the Mander contract? The one that the lawyers considered would be really quite useful in resolving the intellectual property dispute? Which is why it was dug up from the archives and happened to be sitting in my In tray? When you got... snippy?" Emma thought she might as well nail down, in detail, all of the pieces of the small disaster that Doug and, more particularly, Marie-Ange had brought to her.
Marie-Ange looked about as contrite as it was possible to. Which if she had been considering the larger picture, would've presented an interesting puzzle - feeling safe enough to show how badly she felt for ruining the papers meant she probably wouldn't get her mind erased, but it put her in a much more vulnerable place in the short term, which left her vulnerable to amusing telepathic retribution, but the show of trust might lessen the chance for creative application of psionics.
"And medical papers, and a gala invite, for the Hellfire Club." She added. "I think that is all. We tried to find all the scraps but I was in quite a fugue state."
Knowing Emma, she probably had some ideas on how to mitigate the loss of the documents. But still, Doug winced a bit at the unamused expression on Emma's face. Even though it wasn't really his fault per se, and powers incidents happened, he still felt vaguely guilty. "There were...a lot of scraps," he said quietly. "During the fugue, Marie-Ange said something about...gemstone mockingbirds flying back to their mother." He raised an eyebrow, not nearly gauche enough to actually ask the question.
Emma sighed and did something that she was fairly sure she had learned from Adrienne. With a dramatic stretch of her arms, she planted her face on the desk. It said something about the cut-crystal quality of her voice that her words weren't even slightly muffled by being spoken into expensive executive leather. "You tell me Marie-Ange went into a fugue, turned various important papers into confetti and then want me to interpret pre-cognitive poetry." She raised her head sharply and looked at both of them. "And no, Doug, before you even think of asking, I am not even slightly willing to try and rummage around Marie-Ange's head and try and work out what gemstone mockingbirds are. Telepaths and pre-cognitives are a truly terrible mix. I don't think we want anything dramatic involving nose bleeds, migraines and just possibly psychosis, do we?"
"Plus the bird in my head is still very angry." Really. The dimensional... smushing, for lack of a more elegant term, had left Marie-Ange with migraines and a need to go cold-turkey on pain medication until her tolerances went back to something closer to normal and less like Dr. Gregory House, MD. "I think I also implied that you were a giant ladybug, and that everything was on fire, and there were paper dolls." She opened the folder that she and Doug had scooped the larger papers into and picked one of the dolls up. "My concern is that perhaps my choice of art materials itself was significant but now they are so mutilated..."
Emma sighed. “If it’s truly important, I can ask Adrienne to Read it and we can work out what everything is. Was. IF what it was proves important.” She frowned for a second and then some of the general crossness left her expression and a small modicum of interest began to sneak in. “So this was actually a bird in your head? To the inside your head value of bird, of...”
It's the smell that hits her first. Bleach and latex and oil and rusting metal all mingle in the air. It's distinctive and pungent in a way that is not at all pleasing and something she's utterly unable to place. She can barely hear, too. It almost sounds like someone is nearby, but she's listening through a heavy woolen mask or good pair of earplugs. God, her arms feel heavy. So do her legs. Eyelids too. Everything feels like... Where was she? She'd almost think she'd been injured somehow, but the setting seems all wrong. Clearly, this wasn't a hospital, nor a...
Panic lances hot and fast through her mind as she fails to come up with the word she wants. She knows it. She definitely knows the word she needs. She learned it years ago, in school. It was that day when--
And she can't remember that day clearly either. She knows of it, but only in the vaguest sense. It may as well have been a story a friend of a friend told her.
She does a quick check. One set of arms. One set of eyes. One pair of legs. One. One everything.
It feels so wrong.
And suddenly she's aware of her splitting headache. There's no relief from it, no other minds to find refuge from the pain. She can feel shreds of her psyche flapping, listless and disconnected and the huge, gaping hole in her mind shouts at her that something is Not Right.
She's alone. She's never never never never alone. Her power, sluggish and slow, explodes outwards as she is suddenly desperately looking for herself, begging the sky and every word she can think of (of which it feels there are many missing) as she searches. In her panic, she doesn't notice how far and how wide it is before she finds what she needs: herself. Everything is alright.
She grabs as tightly as she can, and forces herself back together. Her eyes shoot open, wide and unseeing.
Everything is wrong.
Too many limbs. Not enough limbs. It was the first thing that Emma felt - a reach inside her mind (who could reach so easily into her mind, past her shields, no-one could reach inside her head like that), but it was her own mind, her own mind reflected, refracted, distorted and it wanted to count her arms and legs and flaps of a shredded psyche tried to grab hold of her arms and legs and count them and there were too many limbs and not enough limbs.
Shields of diamond tried to crash down but even Emma's iron control couldn't drive out this psyche. It wasn't telepathic strength combined with panic, though both those things were there. It was too like her, it's psyche another version of her own remade, and she couldn't sort out what was her and what was it and drive it OUT.
Not out. Outwards. Bouncing back into its mind, HER mind, part-her, only parts of her, broken bits of a psyche reaching out for anything like itself and finding Emma Frost and Emma Frost found her back. Latex, rubber, bleach, smells like a olfactory slap, muffled sounds and nothing to see and her hands were bound, tied down, she was TIED DOWN and Emma Frost opened her mouth to scream and stopped herself dead.
~WHO ARE YOU?~ she broadcast into this part-psyche that was somewhere far out there and inside her head at the same time and all of it was broken into pieces.
Not alone but still alone in the ways that really mattered but someone was here oh god someone else was here when they shouldn't be. It's something older and the same, her but not her, with a mind all its own. It echoes back down the back down the psychic link and can see more people, feel more limbs but they don't belong to her even as they do. Something's invaded the link, and it's talking at her.
She pulls hard at her bindings, thrashing around. She feels part of herself moving without her input and pulls all the harder. Coarse leather bites at her wrists. She think she's screaming, but she can't tell if it's aloud or just in her head.
~GET OUT GET OUT GETOUTGETOUTGETO--~
The mental equivalent of the sound of shattering glass echoes through her mind, and she's alone. Again.
Doug knew the body language of someone dealing with telepathic input, especially in Emma. And unexpected, uninvited input from the brief look of confusion and surprise on her face. "Emma?" he asked, concerned as to what this latest development might signify.
"A ladybug," Emma's voice was torn from the screaming she hadn't let come out of her mouth. "Gemstone mockingbirds. Little paper dolls." She looked up from the desk, at Doug and Marie-Ange and her face went blank for a moment as she processed what had just been put in her head without her consent. She reached down with one hand, dug diamond fingernails deep into the leather of the chair beneath her as iron control rendered her face an expressionless mask again. "They want to come back to the nest. My nest." Her gaze dropped for a second to her desk and back up again. "Someone has made daughters for me. And now they are killing them."
Marie-Ange's mouth opened and the tiniest gasp of shock escaped as she shook herself. "I am sorry. I was... I should probably have something astute to say, but this all makes no sense." She twitched back the loose hairs from her bun and then reached for a pad of paper. "Who made them? When did someone make them? How... " She glanced at Doug - and then back at Emma, and the bleak looks gave her no answers to her questions, and a long list of new ones. "No, no, none of that. Where. Where do we need to go, and how quickly. The rest we can find out, yes?"
Doug took his duties as Emma's Knight seriously, almost verging on a sense of protectiveness at times. For her to drop her gaze for even a moment to regain control...it simultaneously scared him and engaged that protective instinct. "The rest we -will- find out," he said emphatically.
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