Psi War: Astra | Resurrection
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xp_logsRachel and Marie-Ange guide Quentin back to the material world, but he does not return unchanged.
It had been a few days since Quentin's Christ-like resurrection. Long days. Quentin was exhausted just by living in Jean's head. If he cared to consider her feelings at all, then he would probably feel even worse about it. But empathy was not a feature of a disembodied psyche crashing on another telepath's psychic couch. So when the opportunity to be reborn into his own body presented itself, he only cared about what it would mean for him.
"I can't fucking wait to get wasted again," he told Jean as she walked them down to the medlab. "First thing I'm doing: tequila shots. You in?"
Though Jean was used to having people's thoughts in her mind, she wasn't used to having an entire person in there at all. Especially, of course, her student.
"I'll pass, thanks," she said, turning over the jar of grey ectoplastic goo that was once Quentin that she'd brought at Marie- Ange's request. While she was relieved that they had found Quentin and he was...conscious, it was still a major adjustment.
"I'd rather have whiskey." Just enough to make all of this feel like a bad dream.
She came to a stop outside the medlab.
"You ready?" she said.
"Why the hesitation? It's not like it's brain surgery," he quipped, and urged her to enter.
"No, brain surgery would be easier," Marie-Ange said, not a little unexpectedly. "And would not involve me admitting I have kept every single Snapchat you have sent me." She had pushed two exam tables together into an L-shape, and had papers and sketchbooks and a tablet computer strewn about on one of them. And at the far end of that table, she had propped an unframed oil painting up.
It showed Quentin, lounging on a pile of ebony black furs, naked, erect, and giving the viewer a look that was less "come hither" and more "lets fuck".
If Quentin had a mouth and not just a telepathic voice, then he would have whistled in appreciation. Instead, he just sent: "Nice. Did you make my cock bigger? Thanks."
There was almost a giggle, that Marie-Ange cut off into a sort of strangled hiccup before she composed herself enough to answer. "Art is meant to be idealized a little, so I tried to catch all your best features."
The medlab doors swung open again to admit another, albeit more frazzled-looking redhead. "I thought we were here to do science?" Rachel asked, hands shoved into the pockets of her slightly singed lab coat as she hopped up into a table. "'Cause I'm not sure if we have the same ideas about art."
"Appreciate things. Open your mind a little," Quentin retorted, and then groaned when he realized he had unintentionally made a joke. "Chuckles says you've telepathically rebuilt your body out of nothing. So you're supposed to help me do it, too. How?"
"Magic," Rachel replied with a toss of her head and the sweetest smile you could imagine. The professor had called her back from where she had been sciencing somewhere out in bumfuck nowhere - and while she appreciated having a clean bed and hot shower again, it didn't necessarily mean that she was happy to leave her work to deal with Sassy McSassy. "Marie-Angie magics you a body and we pour you into it. Like filling a pint of beer from a tap. Easy. Unless we somehow screw up and you explode in the astral plane."
"The constructed body is more likely to explode first, and then we will all be slimed." Marie-Ange explained, as she rearranged sketches and photographs. "Any excessive energy will, as I understand it, disrupt the ectoplasm my images are created from and we will have to start from scratch. Which means a higher risk of mess, but a lesser risk to Quentin's mind damaging itself." She paused, considering another risk. "Or possessing anyone else, besides Doctor Grey. Or myself I suppose. I can control the images, so the Professor and Ms. Frost have always suspected that I have a psionic connection to them."
"That doesn't mean you'd have control over my body, does it?" Quentin asked warily.
"Briefly, perhaps." Marie-Ange said, and then set her hands firmly on the table, and the in her hair, and then fiddling with a pen, and another piece of paper, and then she rubbed at her face. She was not going to be dishonest, or even dissembling, not for this. "I think. This is new territory for me, and I have quite a lot of theories, and I know my constructs can be possessed because I have done it, but it has been a long time since anyone else tried to control anything I made." And that last time was a copy of herself. From another universe. "I think once you are inside, I can cede control."
"I trust them," Jean said to Quentin as she glanced between the three of them to make a point, putting the jar of ectoplasmic goo on the table.
"And, if it doesn't work the first time, we'll keep trying. You'll just have to be a passenger for a little while longer."
There was a moment's hesitation before Quentin projected his thoughts. "You're a real glutton for punishment, aren't you? Fine. The risk of complete oblivion is worth getting a six-pack without actually having to work out. Hey, thanks for that, too."
"I could re-paint it and give you one extra ab." Marie-Ange said, with such a look of utter sincerity that she might have believed herself, if it was not such a ridiculous prospect.
"Do you know how ridiculous that would look?" Quentin asked snidely. "An odd number of abs. Please. I'm not a freak."
"Would probably be more interesting to look at at least," Rachel piped up, tilting her head to the side as she studied his naked and aroused mannequin with a deliberate air of intent. The corners of her lips ticked up in a cheeky smirk as she wrinkled her nose at Marie-Ange to convey that she was joking. To some measure.
The exam table, the empty one stayed continually empty for a long minute as Marie-Ange sat, one hand in her ponytail and one rolling a stubby pencil over her knuckles. She didn't move when the copy of Quentin appeared on the table, one bent leg dangling in the air weightlessly. The black furs from the oil painting faded into view and then back out, leaving a film on the table.
Marie-Ange did not move at all even after the furs were gone, but her face went tight in concentration until the construct moved as though it was actually affected by gravity.
The image's legs unbent, lying flat on the table, and its arms slid down to rest on its chest, and the unavoidably visible state of its erection was... no longer an issue.
"Whenever you're ready, Pink. Separate yourself from Jean and follow the blue lights, nice and easy," Rachel instructed, crossing her legs on her perch as she shot a harmless blue orb of energy in Jean's direction as a demonstration. "Just don't wander away from us. We'll do the heavy lifting and you should be in possession of that hardon soon enough."
Quentin dislodged himself from Jean's psyche, unmooring his mental anchor to float in the ether like a balloon. His perception of the material world went black the instant he disconnected from Jean, now that he no longer shared her senses. But he was not alone. Jean's, Jono's, and Rachel's telepathic presences illuminated the astral place. Marie-Ange's much less so, but he could identify the construct, pulsing with an energy he had never perceived before. Something halfway between the starry night of the astral plane and the harsh flatness of the real world. A bridge between the mind and the body. It was a simple matter of crossing.
But even with the guidance of the two other resurrection-capable telepaths, Quentin found himself stuck. The path was a bottleneck, preventing Quentin from pushing all of himself into the construct at once. He ignored their warning and kept pushing, anxious to be human again. It was too much for the construct to bear and its light suddenly vanished.
"What the fuck just happened? Where'd I go?"
Jean calmly wiped the ectoplasm from her face before it could get into her eyes and mouth. It covered every part of her, and the walls, and the ceiling, and everyone else in the room.
"Right now, your body isn't really a body yet. It's like....a balloon. And your form is like water. Too quickly, and the balloon explodes," she said. She shook her head.
"You have to be patient, Q. If you keep trying too hard we'll be at this all night." She held up her hand, greyish goo dripping from her fingers.
"And I do not like Ghostbusters that much. Just trust them, okay? They know what they're doing."
"There is perhaps a metaphor here regarding orgasm denial, but I am perhaps the wrong gender to really express it." Marie-Ange said, voice muffled by the futile attempt to wipe her face with the inside of her shirt. She settled herself, pulled the ruined shirt back down and shut her eyes for a few seconds to settle the discomfort in her head. Losing an image was never comfortable - losing one while vaguely slightly connected to another mind was unsettling.
The second Not-Quentin was no faster or slower to appear. Like the first, it popped onto the table silently and suddenly. Unlike the first, this one appeared without the furs from the painting, and settled itself down quickly until it lay limp and flat on the exam table.
A new light on the astral plane turned on, signaling to Quentin the re-creation of the construct. Though still eager to inhabit it, he followed instructions, trailing the path of lights Rachel set to guide him. Marie-Ange's quip about edging was easy to understand and to translate into practice. Whenever he felt like he was rushing, he pulled back. The others may not have appreciated all the grunting and moaning sounds Quentin projected into their heads, but at least it was better than another face-full of ectoplasmic ejaculate.
The prone construct reached a hand, stiff and Frankenstein-like, into the jar of now-glowing pink goo. As if magnetically attracted to the body, the goo enveloped the hand and pulled itself up the arm, across the chest, up the neck and down the torso and legs, until the luminescent film engulfed the whole body. Then like a sponge, the body absorbed the goo and the glow disappeared.
Quentin gasped, filling his lungs with air for the first time.
The delicate astral connections between Marie-Ange and the body she had created for Quentin were innumerable. Far more than any other construct she had made - she could feel the air inflating lungs that had not been there the moment before as Quentin drew that first breath reflected in her own body, and she unwillingly took a breath of her own.
Giving over control was like a lightning strike in reverse, each branch and fork releasing from Quentin one at a time. A curl of energy unwrapped from what would become, or was already his spine. A pair unwove themselves from the long bones of his legs, and another from where they were burrowed into Quentin's shoulder blades. One long fork unwrapped from his neck, bringing ribbons that were buried in Quentin's eyes and mouth with it. The last was a messy spiral tangled all through Quentin's chest and knotted up where his heart would be. The astral lines retreated slowly, as Marie-Ange unwrapped her control over the constructed body.
Her concentration was obvious right up until the moment the links retreated with a noticeable psychic crackle, and a backwash of discomfort as they finally disappeared.
Rachel waited for the others to exit the astral plane before withdrawing herself. Blinking against the bright lights, she stood and shucked off her ruined lab coat, which went straight into the nearest trash can.
"That was fun," she said. "It should've worked, right? Do we need to run a DNA test to confirm that that's Pink's actual body now?"
"If you need some from before to test with this, there's plenty in Gabriel's stomach." Quentin's voice sounded foreign to his own ears, even though it was exactly the same pitch and tone as it used to be. He sat up slowly, feeling stiff as if he'd been sleeping for days, and gingerly turned around so his legs were hanging off the side of the table. The world spun when he moved, so he grasped the edge of the table tightly to keep himself from falling off. "This is the second worst hangover I've ever had. I can't even . . ." He looked up at Jean, his eyes suddenly focusing. "I can't hear anything. I-In my head, there's nothing, I can't . . . My telepathy is gone. What the hell did you do?"
Jean blinked. "I didn't do anything," she said, shaking her head. She frowned thoughtfully.
"It's possible that when the---when he pushed your powers to the limits, they burned out. But I don't know. I've never dealt with anything like this before. Especially in a new body," she admitted.
"Well, get them back! You bring me back and I'm not even a mutant anymore?" Quentin jumped off the table, ignoring both the sudden bout of nausea and any humiliation he might have felt from being naked in front of three women. Looking down, he did notice one major change to his body, though. "Oh great, the pink's all over now. So I get a ridiculous hair color and no real powers. Nice. Do it again!"
"Cannot." Marie-Ange said sternly. "You only get to do this once, the pink is your own doing, not in my drawing and put on some pants." She had an ice pack up against one eye, and was thumbing through a packet of pills. "You wanted to be out and proud about mutancy, you made yourself out and proud. Enjoy your pink eyebrows. Consider it an exchange for the better penis."
Jean rubbed her temples. She would've smiled, except she still continued to feel Quentin's indignation as if he were still in her head. A drawer opened and a hospital gown floated into her hands. She tossed it to him.
"Look. Like I said, none of us have done something exactly like this before, Quentin. Be glad you're alive at all," she said.
She'd already had a headache for most of the time Quentin had been there, but it hadn't been that bad. Her head felt like someone was playing the bongos, and her stomach churned with nausea. Holding Quentin's mind in for so long and then letting it go left hers trying to readjust. Haller had warned her there would be consequences. She just didn't think it'd be this soon.
"We'll figure this out okay? Just...stop bitching and be grateful you're even breathing."
Quentin caught with gown and slipped it on after sparing Jean a nasty look. Not that he did not appreciate the great lengths they had all just gone through on his behalf — even though the longer he was awake, the more he realized how tired, pained, and achy he was — but this did not seem like the end to a long and horrible story. He dreaded the cliche, but this was only the beginning.
It had been a few days since Quentin's Christ-like resurrection. Long days. Quentin was exhausted just by living in Jean's head. If he cared to consider her feelings at all, then he would probably feel even worse about it. But empathy was not a feature of a disembodied psyche crashing on another telepath's psychic couch. So when the opportunity to be reborn into his own body presented itself, he only cared about what it would mean for him.
"I can't fucking wait to get wasted again," he told Jean as she walked them down to the medlab. "First thing I'm doing: tequila shots. You in?"
Though Jean was used to having people's thoughts in her mind, she wasn't used to having an entire person in there at all. Especially, of course, her student.
"I'll pass, thanks," she said, turning over the jar of grey ectoplastic goo that was once Quentin that she'd brought at Marie- Ange's request. While she was relieved that they had found Quentin and he was...conscious, it was still a major adjustment.
"I'd rather have whiskey." Just enough to make all of this feel like a bad dream.
She came to a stop outside the medlab.
"You ready?" she said.
"Why the hesitation? It's not like it's brain surgery," he quipped, and urged her to enter.
"No, brain surgery would be easier," Marie-Ange said, not a little unexpectedly. "And would not involve me admitting I have kept every single Snapchat you have sent me." She had pushed two exam tables together into an L-shape, and had papers and sketchbooks and a tablet computer strewn about on one of them. And at the far end of that table, she had propped an unframed oil painting up.
It showed Quentin, lounging on a pile of ebony black furs, naked, erect, and giving the viewer a look that was less "come hither" and more "lets fuck".
If Quentin had a mouth and not just a telepathic voice, then he would have whistled in appreciation. Instead, he just sent: "Nice. Did you make my cock bigger? Thanks."
There was almost a giggle, that Marie-Ange cut off into a sort of strangled hiccup before she composed herself enough to answer. "Art is meant to be idealized a little, so I tried to catch all your best features."
The medlab doors swung open again to admit another, albeit more frazzled-looking redhead. "I thought we were here to do science?" Rachel asked, hands shoved into the pockets of her slightly singed lab coat as she hopped up into a table. "'Cause I'm not sure if we have the same ideas about art."
"Appreciate things. Open your mind a little," Quentin retorted, and then groaned when he realized he had unintentionally made a joke. "Chuckles says you've telepathically rebuilt your body out of nothing. So you're supposed to help me do it, too. How?"
"Magic," Rachel replied with a toss of her head and the sweetest smile you could imagine. The professor had called her back from where she had been sciencing somewhere out in bumfuck nowhere - and while she appreciated having a clean bed and hot shower again, it didn't necessarily mean that she was happy to leave her work to deal with Sassy McSassy. "Marie-Angie magics you a body and we pour you into it. Like filling a pint of beer from a tap. Easy. Unless we somehow screw up and you explode in the astral plane."
"The constructed body is more likely to explode first, and then we will all be slimed." Marie-Ange explained, as she rearranged sketches and photographs. "Any excessive energy will, as I understand it, disrupt the ectoplasm my images are created from and we will have to start from scratch. Which means a higher risk of mess, but a lesser risk to Quentin's mind damaging itself." She paused, considering another risk. "Or possessing anyone else, besides Doctor Grey. Or myself I suppose. I can control the images, so the Professor and Ms. Frost have always suspected that I have a psionic connection to them."
"That doesn't mean you'd have control over my body, does it?" Quentin asked warily.
"Briefly, perhaps." Marie-Ange said, and then set her hands firmly on the table, and the in her hair, and then fiddling with a pen, and another piece of paper, and then she rubbed at her face. She was not going to be dishonest, or even dissembling, not for this. "I think. This is new territory for me, and I have quite a lot of theories, and I know my constructs can be possessed because I have done it, but it has been a long time since anyone else tried to control anything I made." And that last time was a copy of herself. From another universe. "I think once you are inside, I can cede control."
"I trust them," Jean said to Quentin as she glanced between the three of them to make a point, putting the jar of ectoplasmic goo on the table.
"And, if it doesn't work the first time, we'll keep trying. You'll just have to be a passenger for a little while longer."
There was a moment's hesitation before Quentin projected his thoughts. "You're a real glutton for punishment, aren't you? Fine. The risk of complete oblivion is worth getting a six-pack without actually having to work out. Hey, thanks for that, too."
"I could re-paint it and give you one extra ab." Marie-Ange said, with such a look of utter sincerity that she might have believed herself, if it was not such a ridiculous prospect.
"Do you know how ridiculous that would look?" Quentin asked snidely. "An odd number of abs. Please. I'm not a freak."
"Would probably be more interesting to look at at least," Rachel piped up, tilting her head to the side as she studied his naked and aroused mannequin with a deliberate air of intent. The corners of her lips ticked up in a cheeky smirk as she wrinkled her nose at Marie-Ange to convey that she was joking. To some measure.
The exam table, the empty one stayed continually empty for a long minute as Marie-Ange sat, one hand in her ponytail and one rolling a stubby pencil over her knuckles. She didn't move when the copy of Quentin appeared on the table, one bent leg dangling in the air weightlessly. The black furs from the oil painting faded into view and then back out, leaving a film on the table.
Marie-Ange did not move at all even after the furs were gone, but her face went tight in concentration until the construct moved as though it was actually affected by gravity.
The image's legs unbent, lying flat on the table, and its arms slid down to rest on its chest, and the unavoidably visible state of its erection was... no longer an issue.
"Whenever you're ready, Pink. Separate yourself from Jean and follow the blue lights, nice and easy," Rachel instructed, crossing her legs on her perch as she shot a harmless blue orb of energy in Jean's direction as a demonstration. "Just don't wander away from us. We'll do the heavy lifting and you should be in possession of that hardon soon enough."
Quentin dislodged himself from Jean's psyche, unmooring his mental anchor to float in the ether like a balloon. His perception of the material world went black the instant he disconnected from Jean, now that he no longer shared her senses. But he was not alone. Jean's, Jono's, and Rachel's telepathic presences illuminated the astral place. Marie-Ange's much less so, but he could identify the construct, pulsing with an energy he had never perceived before. Something halfway between the starry night of the astral plane and the harsh flatness of the real world. A bridge between the mind and the body. It was a simple matter of crossing.
But even with the guidance of the two other resurrection-capable telepaths, Quentin found himself stuck. The path was a bottleneck, preventing Quentin from pushing all of himself into the construct at once. He ignored their warning and kept pushing, anxious to be human again. It was too much for the construct to bear and its light suddenly vanished.
"What the fuck just happened? Where'd I go?"
Jean calmly wiped the ectoplasm from her face before it could get into her eyes and mouth. It covered every part of her, and the walls, and the ceiling, and everyone else in the room.
"Right now, your body isn't really a body yet. It's like....a balloon. And your form is like water. Too quickly, and the balloon explodes," she said. She shook her head.
"You have to be patient, Q. If you keep trying too hard we'll be at this all night." She held up her hand, greyish goo dripping from her fingers.
"And I do not like Ghostbusters that much. Just trust them, okay? They know what they're doing."
"There is perhaps a metaphor here regarding orgasm denial, but I am perhaps the wrong gender to really express it." Marie-Ange said, voice muffled by the futile attempt to wipe her face with the inside of her shirt. She settled herself, pulled the ruined shirt back down and shut her eyes for a few seconds to settle the discomfort in her head. Losing an image was never comfortable - losing one while vaguely slightly connected to another mind was unsettling.
The second Not-Quentin was no faster or slower to appear. Like the first, it popped onto the table silently and suddenly. Unlike the first, this one appeared without the furs from the painting, and settled itself down quickly until it lay limp and flat on the exam table.
A new light on the astral plane turned on, signaling to Quentin the re-creation of the construct. Though still eager to inhabit it, he followed instructions, trailing the path of lights Rachel set to guide him. Marie-Ange's quip about edging was easy to understand and to translate into practice. Whenever he felt like he was rushing, he pulled back. The others may not have appreciated all the grunting and moaning sounds Quentin projected into their heads, but at least it was better than another face-full of ectoplasmic ejaculate.
The prone construct reached a hand, stiff and Frankenstein-like, into the jar of now-glowing pink goo. As if magnetically attracted to the body, the goo enveloped the hand and pulled itself up the arm, across the chest, up the neck and down the torso and legs, until the luminescent film engulfed the whole body. Then like a sponge, the body absorbed the goo and the glow disappeared.
Quentin gasped, filling his lungs with air for the first time.
The delicate astral connections between Marie-Ange and the body she had created for Quentin were innumerable. Far more than any other construct she had made - she could feel the air inflating lungs that had not been there the moment before as Quentin drew that first breath reflected in her own body, and she unwillingly took a breath of her own.
Giving over control was like a lightning strike in reverse, each branch and fork releasing from Quentin one at a time. A curl of energy unwrapped from what would become, or was already his spine. A pair unwove themselves from the long bones of his legs, and another from where they were burrowed into Quentin's shoulder blades. One long fork unwrapped from his neck, bringing ribbons that were buried in Quentin's eyes and mouth with it. The last was a messy spiral tangled all through Quentin's chest and knotted up where his heart would be. The astral lines retreated slowly, as Marie-Ange unwrapped her control over the constructed body.
Her concentration was obvious right up until the moment the links retreated with a noticeable psychic crackle, and a backwash of discomfort as they finally disappeared.
Rachel waited for the others to exit the astral plane before withdrawing herself. Blinking against the bright lights, she stood and shucked off her ruined lab coat, which went straight into the nearest trash can.
"That was fun," she said. "It should've worked, right? Do we need to run a DNA test to confirm that that's Pink's actual body now?"
"If you need some from before to test with this, there's plenty in Gabriel's stomach." Quentin's voice sounded foreign to his own ears, even though it was exactly the same pitch and tone as it used to be. He sat up slowly, feeling stiff as if he'd been sleeping for days, and gingerly turned around so his legs were hanging off the side of the table. The world spun when he moved, so he grasped the edge of the table tightly to keep himself from falling off. "This is the second worst hangover I've ever had. I can't even . . ." He looked up at Jean, his eyes suddenly focusing. "I can't hear anything. I-In my head, there's nothing, I can't . . . My telepathy is gone. What the hell did you do?"
Jean blinked. "I didn't do anything," she said, shaking her head. She frowned thoughtfully.
"It's possible that when the---when he pushed your powers to the limits, they burned out. But I don't know. I've never dealt with anything like this before. Especially in a new body," she admitted.
"Well, get them back! You bring me back and I'm not even a mutant anymore?" Quentin jumped off the table, ignoring both the sudden bout of nausea and any humiliation he might have felt from being naked in front of three women. Looking down, he did notice one major change to his body, though. "Oh great, the pink's all over now. So I get a ridiculous hair color and no real powers. Nice. Do it again!"
"Cannot." Marie-Ange said sternly. "You only get to do this once, the pink is your own doing, not in my drawing and put on some pants." She had an ice pack up against one eye, and was thumbing through a packet of pills. "You wanted to be out and proud about mutancy, you made yourself out and proud. Enjoy your pink eyebrows. Consider it an exchange for the better penis."
Jean rubbed her temples. She would've smiled, except she still continued to feel Quentin's indignation as if he were still in her head. A drawer opened and a hospital gown floated into her hands. She tossed it to him.
"Look. Like I said, none of us have done something exactly like this before, Quentin. Be glad you're alive at all," she said.
She'd already had a headache for most of the time Quentin had been there, but it hadn't been that bad. Her head felt like someone was playing the bongos, and her stomach churned with nausea. Holding Quentin's mind in for so long and then letting it go left hers trying to readjust. Haller had warned her there would be consequences. She just didn't think it'd be this soon.
"We'll figure this out okay? Just...stop bitching and be grateful you're even breathing."
Quentin caught with gown and slipped it on after sparing Jean a nasty look. Not that he did not appreciate the great lengths they had all just gone through on his behalf — even though the longer he was awake, the more he realized how tired, pained, and achy he was — but this did not seem like the end to a long and horrible story. He dreaded the cliche, but this was only the beginning.
