xp_logs | Nathan and Pete, backdated to Monday, May 3rd

Backdated to May 3rd, just after Nathan's missing weekend. Nathan goes to find Pete and the two of them try to figure out what happened.

It didn't take him long to find Pete. Once he'd established that no, he wasn't in his rooms or in his office, that left 'outside, having a cigarette' as the next likeliest option. Nathan took a leisurely turn around the outside of the mansion - leisurely, because his side was throbbing in earnest this morning, now that the rest of the drugs were out of his system - and found Pete on the porch, smoking.

"So has your packs-per-day gone down or up since you've been here?" Nathan said, climbing the couple of steps with some difficulty.

"It's about the same. Stress levels occasionally shoot through the roof, but I don't hate my boss half as much."

Pete's tone was even as he chained another cigarette off, since he was outside anyway, and ground the old one out.

"So, have you got an excuse, you daft sod? And what actually happened to you, anyway?"

Nathan leaned back against the porch rail, half-shrugging. "Excuse? Not really. Like I said, I fully intended to ask you to back me up. I have no clue why I didn't... I don't remember deciding not to..." He stopped, wincing, his hand going to his forehead at the stab of pain behind his eyes. It faded after a moment and he went on, hoping Pete would take that for what it was worth and not push too hard. "As for what happened... it was one of my old instructors from Mistra. Insisted he wanted to help me, but I don't know what the fuck he did to me besides apparently drug me to the eyebrows." He stopped, trying to focus on the memory of the warehouse, the fight. "And I think... we crossed paths with a Mistra retrieval team at some point. Or at least I did."

Pete noticed Nate's wince, and made a mental note to have a word with Moira and Charlie later. The timing might have been a co-incidence, but still...

"OK, well, we'll leave your apparently rapidly encroaching senility for, y'know, mocking you about later. You're only half dead looking, which is about par these days,and not actually pushing up daisies, so let's assume that whoever the geezer is, he's got some sort of use for you that means he needs you alive somewhere down the line."

Pete paused a second.

"I really don't like where this line of thought's leading me, Nate."

"Me either," Nathan said bleakly. "Worse-case scenario, it's something I'm supposed to do here. I've been thinking about the possibilities - seems to me that the likeliest targets would either be Charles, or the school in general." He fell silent, staring out at the grounds for a long moment. "Could you take me down if you had to?" he asked finally, looking back at Pete.

Pete took a long drag on his cigarette, staring off into the distance.

"Maybe. If I was lucky, or you got careless. It ain't something I'd want to bet the house on."

He looked back at Nate.

"So what're you going to do?"

"Talk to Charles. See if he can't help me put the pieces together." Nathan shifted a little, his hand going back to his side. "It just... doesn't make sense, any of it. The things MacInnis told me, versus what little I remember them doing..." He trailed off, shaking his head.

Pete nodded at the mention of Charlie. "So what *do* you remember?"

"Talking to MacInnis at the bar. Him telling me that he and some unspecified other people who'd gone sour on the program had been trying to help the few of us who've gotten out or want out." Nathan grimaced. "It starts getting hazy towards the end of the conversation. After that, the fight's the only clear thing. The rest is just pieces..." He hesitated, leery of examining those pieces too closely. "Not being able to move," he finally said, reluctantly. "People talking over me. I think... I think I remember trying to reach Moira, but I couldn't..."

"Let's stick to the fight, for now - that's got to be a large part of what they had in mind when they kidnapped you, unless they suddenly got really sloppy mid-job. It was with a Mistra team? Any idea where you were?"

"A warehouse. They had me cornered..." Nathan tilted his head, shaking it a little as if he could shake the memory loose. "It was the right size and mix for a Mistra team. They were using the same old tactics." He stopped, frowning. "There was someone else there," he went on more slowly. "While I was wrestling with the one that stabbed me. She was..." Pain behind his eyes again, as if someone had stuck a knife in and twisted, and he grabbed at the porch railing to steady himself, his breathing ragged. "I'm not--supposed to remember her," he gritted out.

Pete half rose, ready to catch the larger man if need be. "Shit. You wanna leave this until you've had a chance to sit down with Charlie, then? See if he can get you past the block?"

Nathan concentrated on breathing for a moment, giving the pain a chance to fade. "I think I'm okay," he said unsteadily. "So that's... two. This woman, and whatever happened to make me 'forget' to take back-up. Must be the things they really don't want me to remember." He straightened slowly. "Yet they let me remember MacInnis. Maybe I'm supposed to know him when I see him again..."

"Or they just don't have the tech to completely block it. Whatever they did to make you forget to talk to me has to have happened before you left the house, right? So that means there's got to be something they put in you before this round of nonsense. Maybe they're just exploiting that, and there's a limit to what it covers?" Pete started pacing in front of the steps.

"You'd think that if there was something they could use to get me to walk obligingly into their hands without bringing along any inconvenient friends, they'd have used it years ago." But Pete had a point, and Nathan thought about it for a moment, rubbing absently at his forehead as he did. "I don't answer the phone around here--hell, I think I've only used the phone once or twice since I got here. I do most of my talking over the computer..." He stopped, frowning. "Can't have been that email, because I decided to ask you to come along after I read it..."

"Maybe they would have, but it's not like it just shut you off and made you walk off like a zombie. Fuck, I dunno, maybe Charlie can give us a better idea of how it works."

Pete puffed on his cigarette, thoughtfully. "Shot in the dark: You haven't been picking up packages at the gate, or anything recently?"

Nathan thought for a moment, then shook his head. "Don't think so," he said, grimacing. "I'll check my computer again, see if there's anything unusual on there." He gazed at Pete for a moment, unable to help a tiny, wry smile. "For all that I was worried about being a security threat when I first got here, this was not exactly what I had in mind."

Pete grinned.

"Not that it'll help any, but you ain't the only one I worry about being a risk from the inside. I've learned to live with it, and the kids are all well drilled in what to do if someone goes all wrong. For the time being, we'll just get you a little tinfoil hat to stop the mind control lasers..."

Nathan glowered a little. "Oh, very funny." It was good to hear that the kids were prepared for the occasional person-going-berserk, though there was part of him that wondered just how prepared most of them could be for *him* going berserk. "We'll sort it out," he said, more to reassure himself than Pete. "I don't think any of Mistra's psis can be a match for Charles."

"Not a chance, mate. Not a chance." Pete stubbed his cigarette out. "So, you talk to Charlie, I'll see if there's been any news about Mistra losing a team recently, although given how much luck I've had in the past ferreting them out, I don't expect to hear a damn thing, and in the meantime, you don't talk to strangers, and always look both ways before crossing the road."

He rolled his eyes.

"Y'know, I'm starting to feel like I might be too old for this..."

Nathan laughed a bit wearily. "You and me both, Pete."