xp_logs | Psi War: Obscura

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Haller and Emma take a closer look at Parker Matthews to discover the origin of his malady. They do learn that this Parker Matthews is worlds away from the man they used to know.

"I'm going to name five objects. Please remember them; I'm going to you to tell me what they are later. Apple. Tiger. Tie. Pen. Car."

Jim's eyes twitched to Matthews over the top of the mental status exam. The man didn't look well - tired, slightly pale, though maybe that was just the fluorescent lights. He tried to focus on that present unwellness and not the past associations.

As Matthews repeated the words the counselor asked: ~Is he fighting you?~

~Not in the slightest,~ replied Emma. ~Not that I'm giving him any reason to,~ she added archly, sending along with the words a picture of Emma, dressed in the classic White Swan outfit from Swan Lake tiptoeing delicately across a stage, her pointe shoes barely deigning to touch the ground. ~If he is what he was, I don't want to step on any landmines.~

~True.~ In the state Matthews seemed to be in he suspected any psychic beartrap she stepped into was more likely to blunt its teeth on her ankle. Still, like Emma, he wasn't taking appearances for granted.

"You have a $100," Jim continued aloud. "You go to the store and buy a dozen apples for $3 and a tricycle for $20. How much did you spend?"

"Too much for the lamest kid's birthday gift ever." Parker said although he received a blank look in response. "OK, no comedy. Got it. Uh, twenty-three dollars, plus any tax?"

Jim ticked a box, giving Matthews no indication as to whether he was right or wrong. "And how much do you have left?"

"Math. Why did it have to be math. I hate math. Seventy-seven? Yeah, that's right."

Jim pondered as he moved to the next question. The man seemed a little nervous, as tended to happen when one was being assessed by a stranger about a seemingly undiagnosable illness, but he was cooperative and even his jokes were appropriate.

~The next section will need more active engagement from him,~ Jim remarked. ~Should help divert attention from his defenses. Any disconnect between his interior and his affect?~

~ Not that I have noticed,~ replied Emma. ~His mind is not – simple, but it seems very uncomplicated so far. Which is almost making me more suspicious than if it was a maze of deadfalls and cul de sacs. Almost. Am I allowed to confess that I dislike uncomplicated people? Though,~ she added as she carefully turned towards another section of his psyche, quartering her search efficiently, ~it does make these sorts of scans rather less stressful for everyone.~

Jim pondered as he had Matthews repeat the five original objects. The act triggered memory-retrieval, passively opening further mental compartments for Emma to slip through.

~If his power is geared toward suggestion it's primarily projective,~ he mused. ~There may never have been a need to set up the typical blinds and defenses. Nurture shaping nature.~

Emma sent Jim a mental picture of her rummaging through a chest of drawers, flinging underwear over her head, so it drifted down in a snowstorm around her, although her actual mental touch on Parker’s mind was as light as a breath. Then the image cut off suddenly as something became clear to her. ~You know, I think our patient doesn’t actually use his powers. Not consciously. Not for a very long time.~ She carefully sifted through the memories she held in her mental hands. ~He doesn’t – like them. Trust them? Trust what they may be providing to him? It might explain why his psyche is so ascetic.~

Jim allowed a flicker of surprise to touch his thoughts as he had Matthews reverse increasingly long strings of numbers. ~This sort of power usually manifests like a direct line to the id. He has to be making a conscious effort to suppress it.~

~Indicating a conscience, perhaps?~ mused Emma as she picked through further memories. ~Or an ego the size of Texas – maybe he can’t stand the thought that he’s getting what he wants because he’s a mutant, not because of his natural charm and good looks.~ Emma’s mental tone could not have been drier. ~Self-hate manifests in so many different and exciting ways. It might be interesting to find the place in his history where he found out he was a mutant and what his powers did. It might shine a light on why he’s chosen this path.~

"This circle is a clock-face. Please fill in hour markers, and the time at ten minutes to eleven o'clock." Lobbing softball questions at Matthews as another psi conducted the actual assessment because he was still squeamish about sending his mind where it had not been, Jim noted that an observation could be both shockingly cynical and potentially correct.

~I've got six more questions to work with,~ he sent. ~If nothing else, a causal event might might help us anticipate any future issues, conscious or not. Self-hate has a tendency to fester.~

~Mmm-hmm,~ responded Emma, the majority of her mind obviously elsewhere. Changing the mental landscape she was using to search Parker’s mind, she suddenly stood in a room full of old fashioned filing cabinet, moving rapidly through the room, her fingers tracing lightly across the cards on the front that described their contents. A short search later, she made a satisfied noise and opened a cabinet, extracting an old-fashioned manilla folder, tied with red ribbon. She untied the ribbon, and opened the file, allowing her to see the memory, projecting it to Jim as she did.

"There was a little Spanish flea. A record star he thought he'd be. He saw the Monkees and Beatles and Chimpmunks who sang on TV! Why not a little Spanish Flea?" Parker's internal mind sang.

The song rippled with de-contextualized images, like old newspaper clippings. Closed faces across a poker table. Hands hovering over chips worth ten times what he had in his pocket. Eyes beneath long lashes gazing at him over drinks. A scrapbook of missed opportunities. The refrain echoed:

Why not a little Spanish Flea?

But in the background of each image, like the shadow of a negative, were a pair of silver eyes.

~He trained himself out of using his powers,~ Jim said, impressed despite himself.

~And he’s very coy about how he found out about them,~ said Emma, somewhere between amused and annoyed at the vagaries of the memory. ~Mmm. Silver eyes. Boy? Girl? Girl, I think. Judging by the current expression of his orientation and the flavour of his mind when he thinks about the eyes.~ Emma sent an amused picture to Jim of her holding a brain in her right hand and licking it with the delicacy of a gourmet tasting a white truffle. ~Yes, I know I’m taking this insufficiently seriously – consider me pre-chastised, so you don’t have to harrumph at me. What do you think – is it worth following the trail of this memory?~

Had someone caught Matthews in the act? Distantly Jim was aware there was a less than slim chance this was relevant to their assessment, but something had caused the man to limit his powers. Not that he had any personal bias related to that sort of scenario, of course.

~If his mind is otherwise as straightforward as you say, I admit I'm curious,~ Jim confessed. He refrained from further confessing he was somewhat amused by Emma's flippancy despite himself; it was a pleasant reprieve from the stress of his standard accreditation work, and he had a hard time believing she couldn't already sense it.

~Then we might as well go a little deeper,~ responded Emma, flashing an image of her in a dazzling white swimsuit, diving gracefully from some impossible, dizzying height. Even as she sent the image, she sent the rest of her mind scouting outward from the memory she held in her psychic hands, tracing the flavour of it outwards through Parker’s austere mindscape. The thin thread of emotion meandered onwards for some time, leading Emma deeper into his psyche, into areas she hadn’t yet had time to explore. Turning a psychic corner, Emma breathed out suddenly in surprise. ~Oh my,~ she said. ~I wasn’t really expecting this.~

It looked like an old, overgrown garden. Greenery grew haphazardly between broken stone and across piles of shattered marble. Occasionally, through the tangles of vines and kudzu-like ground cover, a bit of detail could be recognized; the carving of three toes of a foot, the loop of an ear, a mostly covered detail of thigh muscle. The short plinths were well overgrown, but the piles around them suggested that statues had been placed there before. A quick examination revealed that they had been violently smashed from their perches, and broken up into unrecognizable jumbles of stones.

So much damage so close to Matthews' core . . . yet Emma's borrowed perceptions indicated no foreign fingerprints. Instead the tableau was permeated by a different impression: that they were looking upon the remains of a natural disaster, or perhaps even that a sculptor had taken a sledgehammer to his own creations.

But the ruins were wild with green. Overgrowth had enveloped the rubble, anchoring the loose pieces where they'd fallen to conceal and secure what lay beneath. Self-destroyed, self-repaired.

Jim sent, ~I think this is beyond the scope of our assessment.~

~I think… yes,~ replied Emma, the brief interlude between her words giving her sufficient times to run her mental hands over a number of the remains. ~Uncovering this is going to take either slicing or digging, and I don’t think I’m willing to do either without a second opinion.~ A few further moments of rummaging lightly through the rubble, so lightly it didn’t even disturb the mental dust, convinced her. ~I can only feel him here. But what is here is scar tissue. Something rather epic happened here. I’d like to talk to Xavier before I embark on psychic surgery to open it up.~

~Agreed. Let me finish here and I'll be right up.~

Jim mulled over this information as he mouthed through the final section of the test, a short anecdote designed to test information retention and detail extrapolation.

"Good news," Jim said aloud when Matthews had finished, "you got a perfect score for someone of your age and education level, so whatever's going on isn't impairing your mental status. I know your scans were clear, but sometimes things get strange with mental abilities."

"Great, so my... powers, or whatever, aren't the pre-existing condition. I'm just dying from a different type of unknown thing." He sighed. "Gotta tell you Doc, I was hoping it was something that you guys could just cut out with my powers and fix everything."

Jim quirked an eyebrow, remembering the shattered garden at the heart of Matthews' mindscape. "Why?" he asked. "Did you think they're related to what's happening to you?"

Parker shrugged. "Not until you guys brought me in for this exam. But if that was the case, having a solution that stopped me feeling like death and that got rid of the things would be two fixes in one."

The telepath allowed the professional mask to drop. There was no need to disguise the sincerity of his concern. "Why's that?" he asked. "You seem to have a good handle on it. Exceptionally good for someone self-taught, in fact."

"Hey, I'm not judging other mutants and their powers but mine are the kind no one should have."

"Why do you say that?"

"My power is to make people do things. Whether they want to or not. And, if you want to be contrary, sure, I might be the greatest hostage negotiator of all time or something. But do you think it stays confined like that." Parker sighed and sat back down. "I paid my way through University playing poker. Even thought about turning pro at one point. And, a nice side benefit was that being a good player at the time was like being the starting quarterback with the girls. It was nice when you bought the prettiest girl in the bar a drink and, man, she only had eyes for you."

He started to slowly drywash his hands; an obvious nervous tick. "And then you find out you have this power. And suddenly think, did I make the other players lose? Did I use it on those pretty girls? There's some pretty strong words used to describe people who use force to get money or sex. I bet you've heard them."

"Yes." Jim thought back to a different Matthews, haunting a different Jean. "I have."

"Yeah. So now, everything good that happens for me always has that voice behind it: did I use my powers for this? And every time life gets difficult for whatever reason, it's that same voice reminding me there's an easy way to fix it." He shook his head again. "Maybe there are people who are strong enough to handle that and still be able to use them for good. But I'm not. I don't even know if I'm strong enough to keep them locked away. So, yeah... you got a way to get rid of them, sign me up."

So Emma had been right about the distrust of his powers, perhaps even about the self-hate. Could that have been the source of the damage? he wondered. Had Matthews mutilated his own mind trying to kill his powers?

"I can see how that'd be stressful," Jim said finally. "We can't get rid of mutations, but sometimes it's possible to put in a type of block. It's a last resort measure, though. If you're interested we could do another assessment after the physical side of things is settled to see if that might be something you'd benefit from, or if there's anything else we can do to help you there."

"Wait, you're serious? It's... actually possible?"

"Sometimes. And it's got risks -- it can cause psychological problems, and it's not something we'd consider unless you're in good physical shape. But I can still run it by the professor if you'd like."

"I'd like some more information... because I'm told it is off-putting to agree so quickly that I'm willing to volunteer to open up my skull myself if it helps. But yeah... just... some kind of certainty for once."

Jim smiled. "We use non-invasive methods. But yeah, obviously it's a discussion that deserves a session of its own. I'll look into it. For now, though, let's focus on getting you better." The counselor stood, tucked his clipboard under his arm, and offered the other man his hand. "It was nice to meet you, Mr. Matthews."