xp_logs | Siege Perilous - Aftermath

Gabe and Natasha.

He was squatting on the ground, staring at the dirt. He reached down and touched it, not entirely sure what he was looking for. But it felt right, didn't it?

Well, Gabriel supposed it did, because he was there, and Natasha was with him. And he wasn't having whatever mental breakdown or emotional crisis or panic attack he thought he'd just been having minutes ago, whatever it was that made his chest feel tight and sent his mind wandering off to — well, to what, exactly, he wasn't sure. To imagine he'd been sitting on top of a crime syndicate, making deals with the worst kind of people?

"I — " he looked toward Natasha, his skin clammy under his coat but no longer crawling. There was no way he could explain whatever mental journey he'd just taken without ending up in a psych ward, and the idea that his progress had been so fragile concerned him. "Dirt samples," he said after a second's hesitation. "Right."

Natasha was doing her own cognitive recalibration at the moment, blinking back images of her own death and the carnage and destruction that had come before that. She shuddered slightly at the chill that crawled down her spine. Where had these memories come from? Were they resurfacing from prior Red Room programming? Had they been hit by something while doing this investigation?

The unanswered questions made her shift her weight from one foot to the other and skate a quick glance through their surroundings. Empty except for birds and the distant and not so distant sounds of cars driving by. They were out there by their lonesome. Just like it should be. She made herself unclench her jaw and relax back into nonchalance. They were fine. They were absolutely fine.

"...Yes, dirt samples." Then the slight offness in Gabriel's manner registered. She frowned. "Did we just get hit with some mental powers bullshit?"

“I don’t...” Gabriel rose, looking at her somewhat blankly. “What did you see?” He asked her, somewhat dumbly. “I mean, the part... I saw you — well, I didn’t see it, but you...” He trailed off, as he recalled a vision of the straight-from-the-movies ambush. “I don’t know what happened,” he said.

Images of her last moments superimposed themselves over their surroundings and Natasha shook her head to clear the deja vu. She hated deja vu. "Death and destruction, my own included." It wasn't the way she'd have chosen to go out but if the fractured memories were anything to go by at least it had been in service to a greater good. "It was a world different from this one. Do you think it has anything to do with the case we're working on?"

Gabriel shrugged. "I guess? I mean, like... the simplest explanation is usually right or whatever." He studied Natasha, genuinely curious about her reaction. "Are you... okay?" Whatever this was, it was not the first time Gabriel had presented with another version of himself. He knew how jarring it could be.

Natasha arched an eyebrow. "It's not the first time someone's messed with my memories. I take some small comfort in that it was created out of whole cloth rather than events that actually happened and I was made to forget. It does make me question what the purpose of everything else was."

"Yeah." Gabriel couldn't help the snort that escaped him. "Been there." He idly scratched his right arm, then shrugged. The conversation that kicked this mission off suddenly came to mind. Emma and Amanda had mentioned dimensional wonkiness, hadn't they? "We should check in with the rest of 'em. I doubt we both had the same shared breakdown, and this is not my area of expertise."

"Most likely. We seem to be running into more and more of this stuff lately." It made Natasha wonder what was going out in the world to bring all this trouble to their doorstep. "Let's get out of here before something else mind whammies us," she said turning back toward the street.

Kevin and Clea

"What the fuck-" Kevin slammed back into the driver's seat of the car. He'd just opened the door and sat down when the world had- disappeared and changed. One minute, he'd been in a life for years, fighting the Hellfire Club with everything he had, dying in the process and the next, back here leaving the house of the strange ice witch with zero useful information about the killings they were investigating.

"Oww." Clea held her head and then looked around, "What the actually bloody fuck was that?" Turning her head towards the house and then back at Kevin as if she was seeing him in a new light.

"Wha- what the hell did that bitch do to us? Is this some kind of price for her worthless fucking information?" Kevin reached for his gun, instinct kicking in over the confusion of memories sleeting through his head.

"I don't - I don't think so." Clea rubbed her head. "Did we just have the same -- dream?" Clea wasn't sure if she even wanted to call it a dream. It felt too real.

"Were you in fetish gear taking orders from the Hellfire Club? If so, yes. If not... I don't have a good response in that case." It was weird. The memories were like a nightmare, but they also seemed to roll off him, like instead of an actual memory of the events, it was a memory of a film he'd watched.

Her hands went to her cheeks, "If it was any other situation I would question why you would be picturing me in fetish gear, however, that is bloody accurate to what I was seeing. It was like a bad movie."

"We need to call this in. That was just a little too specific to be random." Or isolated, he left unsaid as he reached for his phone.

Jubilee and Doug.

Jubilee blinked and looked at Doug quizzically for a moment before looking around at their current position.

She reached down to feel her legs, completely normal and then up to touch her throat which was still covered in the brace to keep her neck steady.

It couldn’t have been a dream, they’d been awake and while it felt like forever had passed, it seemed that only a few minutes had in reality.

“Tell me that I wasn’t the only person who was like, there.”

Doug grunted, feeling the loss of being hale and healthy for a time, whatever it had been. Plus, y'know, having experienced being killed. Not that it bothered him, per se, more that it was just...a lot of input at one time. "You weren't," he acknowledged.

“We should check on the others, figure out what the fuck just went on.”

Jubilee pushed herself from the seat and headed for the door, not waiting for Doug to follow her.

"'Do you need help getting up, Doug?' 'Why yes I do, Jubes, thanks for asking,'" Doug muttered at the door before levering himself upward with a groan. It felt like every cell in his body had gotten caught up on all the tiredness they'd miss while whatever it was had happened. He followed behind, just at a much slower pace.

Artie and Amanda.

It was literally a breath. Amanda had taken a puff of her cigarette, inhaled... and then she was exhaling smoke in a gasp, trying to recentre herself. Images unspooled in her mind's eye and she stumbled backwards , sitting abruptly down on the stoop next to Artie as she tried to take it all in.

"What. The. Bloody. Fuck?" she managed at last.

Artie was still staring into space, breathing deeply. He could see - he had seen. He remembered. It was. Everything.

He'd always had a perfect memory for anything he saw, a side effect of his powers. After -- when everything had changed, he'd seen ghosts of the way the world used to be on every street in Manhattan. He'd just remembered a lifetime. "That was a sushi bar." He pointed at the bodega across the way, signing uneasily. "That was a sushi bar and over there, that was a coffee shop."

"So, you saw it too?" Amanda's hand shook slightly as she took another drag. Not from fear or anger, but from fatigue. She felt so drained... "It doesn't feel real, but what was that? Something happened." She frowned, images coming back. Adam, Charlie... why had they been there? "And something's different. Here, I mean."

Artie nodded and when he had Amanda's attention, signed, "It was like seeing someone else's life. Like..." He paused. :"It was me, if I wasn't so fucked up."

"And me, if I was a lot more fucked up than I am." Amanda shook her head to clear the cobwebs. "We should get back to the office. See if whatever this was is tied into the whole serial energy drainer deal." And to see if anyone else had the weird mind movie thing.

Artie dragged himself to his feet, suddenly exhausted, hailing a passing cab.

Amanda pulled out her phone, thumbs moving over the touch screen. "I'll just ping the Boss Lady on the way..." she said mostly to herself as she climbed into the cab behind Artie. "See if she noticed anything weird..."

Marie-Ange and Topaz.

Topaz shot up, looking around the dingy alley, gaze pausing on Marie-Ange - stirring a few feet away - and blinking rapidly. "What," she said slowly, deliberately, "the fuck."

"Agreed." Marie-Ange was on her feet, a knife in one hand before she had the presence to continue. "At least on the sentiment. Ah. Were you...." She tucked the knife away, up a sleeve. "Hellfire? Was that shared?"

"Seemed like it, yeah." Topaz was a bit slower on the physical getting up, but was already mentally scanning the area around them. Nothing immediately stood out to her, except for the distant feeling that she had just woken up from the weirdest dream. "I... I think I tried to sell Clea to Doug."

The brick wall was thankfully sturdy and ice cold, and the rough texture and chill dug furrows out of the fatigue that was coating her entirely. Marie-Ange reached over to help Topaz up. "I am fairly sure I killed Stephen Strange. The adult one, not Clea's boyfriend. And..." She cut herself off. "I think I killed a lot of people. It is all murder and finances, in my head."

Topaz took the offered help, moving her hand to Marie-Ange's arm to keep her steady. She wasn't tired, per se - confused, absolutely, and the world felt a little surreal at the moment - but she was steady enough, even as she blinked off the dream-like feeling. "Should we uh... get in touch with everyone else?" Her brain was trying to run through everyone who had been there. Artie, Doug, Clea, Emma, Amanda, several people she hadn't recognized, Adam Destine - she bit down a shudder. No, he was definitely dead. That had definitely just been part of the messed up dream.

"Yes. I will call in, can you start sending text messages?" Marie-Ange said. "We need to determine if it was just us, and localized, or shared among everyone we saw." She was not at all sure if she wanted it to be shared - or could keep the details to herself, and not have to confess anything.

"Got it." Topaz got out her phone and began pulling up contacts for a group message. She was eyeing Marie-Ange out of the corner of her eye, though. "Are you okay?" It was a stupid question she already knew the answer to, but still she asked.

Marie-Ange looked over at Topaz. "Emotionally, alarmingly yes. I should be.. . something. Guilt-ridden. Depressed. Angry. But mostly no. I am exhausted and starving and the sooner we get back to the office the sooner I can order in food."

Topaz nodded, going back to her phone, but paused again when something else occurred to her. "Is there any version of me that isn't fucked up and evil?"

"Sometimes I rather wonder the same about myself."