A Fistful of Nanites - Faulty Input/Output
Apr. 7th, 2021 04:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsWhile on a nature hike, Maya and Arthur talk about the X-Men, her career plans, and then things go sharply awry.
“Get a move on, white boy. Nature isn’t going to hike itself.”
Maya grinned at Arthur as she led them farther from the mansion and off into the wooded paths that surrounded it. Sure, there were the standard rich people manicured lawns around the main building but then it gave way to acres of forest and that was the part she loved the most.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t comfortable in the opulence, frankly if someone else wanted to pay so she could play video games on a truly sweet setup including state-of-the-art streaming equipment then her Twitch following thanked them completely.
It was that once you got far enough in, you could scream your lungs out without anyone asking you if you’d like to talk about your feelings and after her therapist had suggested it as a safety release valve for some of her more toxic anger responses, she’d just on it like a duck to water. She decided it was the best place to tell one of the people she actively respected that she was quitting office work to throw herself out of planes for a living, or whatever it was the X-men did on a regular basis.
The other, older blonde man just nodded at Maya like she had said something both completely reasonable, but he also had a gleam in his eye that hinted at other things. Not the sort of gleam, mind you — the gleam where money happened, or waters parted circumstantially, or a family of poor otters won the publisher’s clearing house despite being otters… no, the gleam of a stupid, teachable moment. Arthur grinned as Maya barreled ahead, “There was a poet who once said to 'Adopt the pace of nature. Her secret is patience.’ I always thought that was deep, like, we should let her pace-ence flow through us?”
Or it was the gleam of a dad joke. One of those.
“That was truly awful,” Maya noted as she slowed down to walk beside Arthur. “I’m actually impressed at how awful that was. Have you been practicing Dad jokes with Alex?”
Arthur beamed proudly. “We’ve been trying to see who we can break at the office, but Q only helpfully reminds us that ‘everyone has already lost.’ I’ll take that as a compliment!” The smile paused for a moment, and Arthur looked left off-trail. “Let’s go this way. I put on extra fuzzy socks this morning, that’s something that calls for something different."
“Okay?”
Maya followed on behind him, having put on her hiking boots for just such an eventuality. She knew Arthur was always down for something a little different, it’s why she liked him.
“QQ is always crying about something. I’m surprised he didn’t give you a lecture on ‘The Man’“
She completely ignored the fact that she was being so pot, kettle, black that the very universe should have made a collective gasp at the words leaving her mouth. Besides, she was allowed, it was Quentin. That called for any depth she was willing to stoop to.
Arthur stopped for a minute, taking a deep breath. “I just love getting lost in nature, even though you can’t really get lost. Nature finds you right back.”
They had ventured plenty deep enough, but at this point, the two of them pretty much knew these woods. The pause turned into a concerted stare off into the distance, and he put a single finger up. “Wait for it. Just…”
A red fox and its kit break out from behind a tree and sprint quickly behind another tree, playing chase.
Maya took a moment to watch the foxes, smiling at their antics. She knew this forest had a variety of animal life but she’d only seen kits once before.
“Did you see that I joined the X-men?” She asked finally, unable to keep it contained any longer. She didn’t want to let anyone down but she knew she could do some good on the other team. “I’ve been meaning to tell everyone, about leaving X-Factor. I can’t do both and school, so I need to choose.”
Arthur's smile softened as he took his eyes off the foxes and looked over to Maya, and he repositioned slightly to ensure that she could see his face. The smile never broke. "I do talk with Scott, Maya. We — Me, Lorna, Alex — were just wondering when you would tell us. We're so," and he leaned in to emphasize this, "excited for you! How exciting! Action! Adventure!"
“I guess that makes sense,” Maya replied with a wry expression. Here she’d been fretting about whether they’d see her moving on as a defection and a reflection on them and they’d just been excited for her. “How hasn’t QQ drowned you all in the bath yet? You’re all way too chipper.”
"Hey now. Q isn't here, Maya. We — me, Alex, Lorna, everybody — care about you. What's got you so excited about X-People-ing?"
“Apart from getting to punch bad guys in the nose?” Maya smiled at Arthur, crouching as one of the Kits decided it was playtime with its mother, who was having none of it. “I’m not really the type of person who sits behind a desk, mostly. It’s not that I don’t get investigation is important, even in the X-men but I like the idea of being the first person into something, protecting people.”
His eyes crinkled a little as he shrugged, understanding. "It is important to try all the things! Punching, helping, even desk sitting. I guess the all-leather getup too. Oooh, and the mystery." At this point, Arthur was getting off-topic and stopped himself. "You're always welcome to come help or hang out if you want, still. You're part of the XFi family."
"I'm not likely to disappear or anything, not completely. That'd give QQ too much peace and quiet, and think what he'd do with all that?" Maya's eyes had softened into a true smile and she grinned up at Arthur before turning back to watching the kits, relaxed now that she'd gotten her true mission out of the way, and content to just enjoy the day. She'd always felt happier out here, and not just because buildings with any amount of history tended to have 'feelings' to them. "So, anything else in your bag of urk..."
Maya's words cut off as her hands reached for her head, her fingers digging as she clawed at the sudden pain. She couldn't reach it though, couldn't stop it. All she could do was scream.
An appropriate reaction to this may have been a blank stare or a sudden what, but — given the randomness of his general mutation and the even more general wtfery that living around the X-people instilled or, quite possibly, having lived through a lot at this point — Arthur's first reaction wasn't either of those things, but instead to immediately support Maya as she reacted. "Woah now, keep breathing. Deep breaths.
Serious-faced, Arthur did the same as he worked to best lower Maya onto her back as he fumbled for his phone. "This is one of those 'stress screams' is it?" He knew it wasn't, but levity seemed appropriate. He hit his contact icon for the medical bay and switched the phone to the speaker.
Maya tried. She did. But the pain had gone from her ears to the back of her head and she couldn't stop it. It was like something had taken hold of that part of her brain and was twisting It was all she could do not to claw at the implants.
Answering the phone in the medlab, Clarice didn't bother asking information. She heard screaming and hit the command to activate the GPS in the phone. Glancing at where the ping came from, she grabbed a field kit and teleported there immediately. "Why screaming?" she asked, crunching twigs and leaves under her croc. They were ugly as sin and twice as evil, but they were amazingly comfortable for the medlab. Hers were, of course, green glitter.
Despite the glitter and special effects, Arthur's eyes were still on stabilizing Maya. He signed as he talked, making sure that Maya could clearly see his hands. "I don't even know. She just grabbed her head and started going. No mention of a headache, no being unsteady. Just..."
He gestured widely to, well, this all.
"Gotcha," Clarice replied absently, already opening a new portal to take them all back to the medlab. No reason to try to work things out right there, especially if simply moving her could fix the problem. Unfortunately, things were never that easy.
Maya's condition is not improving, so Clarice takes some emergency measures.
Maya was still screaming as Clarice ported them directly into one of the surgical suites in the Medlab, her hands gripped against her jean legs to keep from scratching against her scalp and ears. She couldn't stop the pain, and she couldn't get enough air into her lungs to explain to Clarice what was going on either.
"Gonna give you something to help..." Clarice said, even while knowing that Maya couldn't hear her over whatever was going on to cause the pain.
Without any other warning, she ran a line into the vein on her arm, working quickly and efficiently to tape it down, grabbing soft restraints at the same time. Just in case.
"There you go..." she murmured, injecting morphine into the port, "That should start helping in a moment."
It would also give her a better start to figuring out what was going on. She wasn't bruised, beaten, battered, nothing was broken...it was something internal and that made it all that much harder, especially since internal things tended not to hurt. Not like this.
Maya felt the numbness spreading almost immediately, not a lack of pain as that was still there just as it had been, but suddenly it was like the morphine had placed a wall between it and her.
She took a deep breath and blinked rapidly, reaching out to grab Arthur’s arm as she noticed him hovering on her other side. She made a gesture to her ears, unable to think enough past the morphine haze to actually attempt ASL.
“Ears.” she slurred, hoping that what she thought she’d said was actually what she said “Hurtssss.”
The man at her side gripped her hand back for the moment he could, reassuringly, and narrowed his eyes at the gesture. The blur of travel from the woods back to the medlab had been quick, but it was a lot easier to move someone with two sets of hands than just one (even if bedazzled). Arthur's gaze traveled to Clarice, "Did you hear that? Do you want me to grab a telepath or... something?"
Arthur had been friends with the medlab staff long enough to know that all he could do was ask for a job and follow through at this point.
Plucking the cochlear transmitter from Maya's head and removing it along with the earpieces, Clarice watched carefully to see if that made any improvement. Not that she could see. Dropping them on a nearby tray, she continued her examination, checking Maya's pupils and using an otoscope to look in her ears. "I heard," she replied absently, still focused on her patient. It was so much easier when they were bleeding profusely from somewhere, but there was much more to medicine than just that. "Just...stand over there," she indicated an area a few feet away.
This got her a thumbs up that would have read as sarcastic from anyone but, well, this guy. Arthur made sure he was still in Maya's vision, and whenever she focused his way he was sure to give her a comforting look. This would be okay! Everything was fine! Everything was fine.
Everything was not fine, but Clarice was not going to say that. Ten minutes later, she had learned nothing else, other than soft restraints were also a good idea. "I'm....this isn't working," she murmured, going to a locked cabinet and opening it, readying what she needed. Injecting the drugs into the port in Maya's hand, Clarice watched carefully as her patient slipped into a deep sleep. "There you go...that'll make you feel better," she murmured. It wouldn't stop the pain, but it would buy them time to do more tests and figure things out.
“Get a move on, white boy. Nature isn’t going to hike itself.”
Maya grinned at Arthur as she led them farther from the mansion and off into the wooded paths that surrounded it. Sure, there were the standard rich people manicured lawns around the main building but then it gave way to acres of forest and that was the part she loved the most.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t comfortable in the opulence, frankly if someone else wanted to pay so she could play video games on a truly sweet setup including state-of-the-art streaming equipment then her Twitch following thanked them completely.
It was that once you got far enough in, you could scream your lungs out without anyone asking you if you’d like to talk about your feelings and after her therapist had suggested it as a safety release valve for some of her more toxic anger responses, she’d just on it like a duck to water. She decided it was the best place to tell one of the people she actively respected that she was quitting office work to throw herself out of planes for a living, or whatever it was the X-men did on a regular basis.
The other, older blonde man just nodded at Maya like she had said something both completely reasonable, but he also had a gleam in his eye that hinted at other things. Not the sort of gleam, mind you — the gleam where money happened, or waters parted circumstantially, or a family of poor otters won the publisher’s clearing house despite being otters… no, the gleam of a stupid, teachable moment. Arthur grinned as Maya barreled ahead, “There was a poet who once said to 'Adopt the pace of nature. Her secret is patience.’ I always thought that was deep, like, we should let her pace-ence flow through us?”
Or it was the gleam of a dad joke. One of those.
“That was truly awful,” Maya noted as she slowed down to walk beside Arthur. “I’m actually impressed at how awful that was. Have you been practicing Dad jokes with Alex?”
Arthur beamed proudly. “We’ve been trying to see who we can break at the office, but Q only helpfully reminds us that ‘everyone has already lost.’ I’ll take that as a compliment!” The smile paused for a moment, and Arthur looked left off-trail. “Let’s go this way. I put on extra fuzzy socks this morning, that’s something that calls for something different."
“Okay?”
Maya followed on behind him, having put on her hiking boots for just such an eventuality. She knew Arthur was always down for something a little different, it’s why she liked him.
“QQ is always crying about something. I’m surprised he didn’t give you a lecture on ‘The Man’“
She completely ignored the fact that she was being so pot, kettle, black that the very universe should have made a collective gasp at the words leaving her mouth. Besides, she was allowed, it was Quentin. That called for any depth she was willing to stoop to.
Arthur stopped for a minute, taking a deep breath. “I just love getting lost in nature, even though you can’t really get lost. Nature finds you right back.”
They had ventured plenty deep enough, but at this point, the two of them pretty much knew these woods. The pause turned into a concerted stare off into the distance, and he put a single finger up. “Wait for it. Just…”
A red fox and its kit break out from behind a tree and sprint quickly behind another tree, playing chase.
Maya took a moment to watch the foxes, smiling at their antics. She knew this forest had a variety of animal life but she’d only seen kits once before.
“Did you see that I joined the X-men?” She asked finally, unable to keep it contained any longer. She didn’t want to let anyone down but she knew she could do some good on the other team. “I’ve been meaning to tell everyone, about leaving X-Factor. I can’t do both and school, so I need to choose.”
Arthur's smile softened as he took his eyes off the foxes and looked over to Maya, and he repositioned slightly to ensure that she could see his face. The smile never broke. "I do talk with Scott, Maya. We — Me, Lorna, Alex — were just wondering when you would tell us. We're so," and he leaned in to emphasize this, "excited for you! How exciting! Action! Adventure!"
“I guess that makes sense,” Maya replied with a wry expression. Here she’d been fretting about whether they’d see her moving on as a defection and a reflection on them and they’d just been excited for her. “How hasn’t QQ drowned you all in the bath yet? You’re all way too chipper.”
"Hey now. Q isn't here, Maya. We — me, Alex, Lorna, everybody — care about you. What's got you so excited about X-People-ing?"
“Apart from getting to punch bad guys in the nose?” Maya smiled at Arthur, crouching as one of the Kits decided it was playtime with its mother, who was having none of it. “I’m not really the type of person who sits behind a desk, mostly. It’s not that I don’t get investigation is important, even in the X-men but I like the idea of being the first person into something, protecting people.”
His eyes crinkled a little as he shrugged, understanding. "It is important to try all the things! Punching, helping, even desk sitting. I guess the all-leather getup too. Oooh, and the mystery." At this point, Arthur was getting off-topic and stopped himself. "You're always welcome to come help or hang out if you want, still. You're part of the XFi family."
"I'm not likely to disappear or anything, not completely. That'd give QQ too much peace and quiet, and think what he'd do with all that?" Maya's eyes had softened into a true smile and she grinned up at Arthur before turning back to watching the kits, relaxed now that she'd gotten her true mission out of the way, and content to just enjoy the day. She'd always felt happier out here, and not just because buildings with any amount of history tended to have 'feelings' to them. "So, anything else in your bag of urk..."
Maya's words cut off as her hands reached for her head, her fingers digging as she clawed at the sudden pain. She couldn't reach it though, couldn't stop it. All she could do was scream.
An appropriate reaction to this may have been a blank stare or a sudden what, but — given the randomness of his general mutation and the even more general wtfery that living around the X-people instilled or, quite possibly, having lived through a lot at this point — Arthur's first reaction wasn't either of those things, but instead to immediately support Maya as she reacted. "Woah now, keep breathing. Deep breaths.
Serious-faced, Arthur did the same as he worked to best lower Maya onto her back as he fumbled for his phone. "This is one of those 'stress screams' is it?" He knew it wasn't, but levity seemed appropriate. He hit his contact icon for the medical bay and switched the phone to the speaker.
Maya tried. She did. But the pain had gone from her ears to the back of her head and she couldn't stop it. It was like something had taken hold of that part of her brain and was twisting It was all she could do not to claw at the implants.
Answering the phone in the medlab, Clarice didn't bother asking information. She heard screaming and hit the command to activate the GPS in the phone. Glancing at where the ping came from, she grabbed a field kit and teleported there immediately. "Why screaming?" she asked, crunching twigs and leaves under her croc. They were ugly as sin and twice as evil, but they were amazingly comfortable for the medlab. Hers were, of course, green glitter.
Despite the glitter and special effects, Arthur's eyes were still on stabilizing Maya. He signed as he talked, making sure that Maya could clearly see his hands. "I don't even know. She just grabbed her head and started going. No mention of a headache, no being unsteady. Just..."
He gestured widely to, well, this all.
"Gotcha," Clarice replied absently, already opening a new portal to take them all back to the medlab. No reason to try to work things out right there, especially if simply moving her could fix the problem. Unfortunately, things were never that easy.
Maya's condition is not improving, so Clarice takes some emergency measures.
Maya was still screaming as Clarice ported them directly into one of the surgical suites in the Medlab, her hands gripped against her jean legs to keep from scratching against her scalp and ears. She couldn't stop the pain, and she couldn't get enough air into her lungs to explain to Clarice what was going on either.
"Gonna give you something to help..." Clarice said, even while knowing that Maya couldn't hear her over whatever was going on to cause the pain.
Without any other warning, she ran a line into the vein on her arm, working quickly and efficiently to tape it down, grabbing soft restraints at the same time. Just in case.
"There you go..." she murmured, injecting morphine into the port, "That should start helping in a moment."
It would also give her a better start to figuring out what was going on. She wasn't bruised, beaten, battered, nothing was broken...it was something internal and that made it all that much harder, especially since internal things tended not to hurt. Not like this.
Maya felt the numbness spreading almost immediately, not a lack of pain as that was still there just as it had been, but suddenly it was like the morphine had placed a wall between it and her.
She took a deep breath and blinked rapidly, reaching out to grab Arthur’s arm as she noticed him hovering on her other side. She made a gesture to her ears, unable to think enough past the morphine haze to actually attempt ASL.
“Ears.” she slurred, hoping that what she thought she’d said was actually what she said “Hurtssss.”
The man at her side gripped her hand back for the moment he could, reassuringly, and narrowed his eyes at the gesture. The blur of travel from the woods back to the medlab had been quick, but it was a lot easier to move someone with two sets of hands than just one (even if bedazzled). Arthur's gaze traveled to Clarice, "Did you hear that? Do you want me to grab a telepath or... something?"
Arthur had been friends with the medlab staff long enough to know that all he could do was ask for a job and follow through at this point.
Plucking the cochlear transmitter from Maya's head and removing it along with the earpieces, Clarice watched carefully to see if that made any improvement. Not that she could see. Dropping them on a nearby tray, she continued her examination, checking Maya's pupils and using an otoscope to look in her ears. "I heard," she replied absently, still focused on her patient. It was so much easier when they were bleeding profusely from somewhere, but there was much more to medicine than just that. "Just...stand over there," she indicated an area a few feet away.
This got her a thumbs up that would have read as sarcastic from anyone but, well, this guy. Arthur made sure he was still in Maya's vision, and whenever she focused his way he was sure to give her a comforting look. This would be okay! Everything was fine! Everything was fine.
Everything was not fine, but Clarice was not going to say that. Ten minutes later, she had learned nothing else, other than soft restraints were also a good idea. "I'm....this isn't working," she murmured, going to a locked cabinet and opening it, readying what she needed. Injecting the drugs into the port in Maya's hand, Clarice watched carefully as her patient slipped into a deep sleep. "There you go...that'll make you feel better," she murmured. It wouldn't stop the pain, but it would buy them time to do more tests and figure things out.
