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xp_logsArthur seeks to interview those with psionic powers to paint a full of picture of what’s happening at the mansion after conferring with Hope Abbott and Quentin Quire.
***
Topaz shares her experiences after unexpected happenings when meeting with Arthur and Haller.
“I really appreciate your time.” It was a good opening gambit after the initial email. Arthur had felt that this was more important to do in person since he knew all too well the pressures of powers being a mess. It was, however, time to look for a pattern.
Topaz was a good start. She was already on the list.
“First, I want to let you know that I’m going to be taking notes.” Arthur tapped his pad in hand with a ready pencil. “There’s no wrong answers here — all I’m doing is a little fact finding.” The man smiled kindly before getting to business. “Let’s start there, set the stage. Easy questions. Let’s talk about how your powers work normally.”
"I feel when people feel things," Topaz said with a shrug. "It's like telepathy, but instead of words, I get feelings."
"So you can sense feelings. Outside of the magic, is that all?" He jotted a couple notes at this.
"I can also project feelings and manipulate what people feel, and I have a secondary telepathy mutation that allows me to hear thoughts associated with strong emotions." She counted on her fingers as she spoke to make sure she was getting everything.
Arthur squinted his eyes in thought, but that was definitely worth noting. "Thank you for sharing that. You're right, though. Sounds a bit like telepathy, but with feelings. I get hazier surface thoughts with my power, but that's with a vision." He locked eyes with her. "Have you had anyone else notice your radio static since the last time we met?"
"Marie-Ange mentioned getting some feedback the other day at work. I spend a lot of time alone, though, so if it happens more often there's no one to comment on it." Topaz tilted her head, thinking for a moment. "My cat has been acting off, though. That thing about animals being in-tune with our emotions is true, you know. I imagine it's worse if I'm actually projecting something."
"Felix definitely knows when something is up with me," Arthur said in complete agreement. "What's been off about Midnight?" The man dropped the name like he was a man who could, at any moment, name and describe each and every pet in the mansion. He likely could.
"She's been very skittish. And a little more bitey. Last night it got pretty bad, actually." Topaz rolled up her left sleeve to show long, thin gashes in her arm. "When she's really stressed out, she attacks with teeth."
Another note, but also a sympathetic grimace. "Ouch. So, skittish and aggressive." Arthur's focus drifted into the middle distance, as if he was trying to picture the scene. "Why aggression, though? Could be defense. Do you take Midnight to work, or is she a housecat? Is she around you most of the day?"
"She's a housecat, generally. The last time I took her somewhere besides the vet for her yearly physical was back in August when I spent a few months in England." Topaz rolled her sleeve down while she spoke. "For the most part she's gentle. It's just those little stress moments."
"Huh," Arthur said with a nod. "Speaking of England, have you been out of the mansion over the past three months?"
"I got back at the end of December, but since then the only place I've gone has been work."
"Do you remember exactly when you got back?"
"Hard to forget." Topaz's voice was wry. "I was barely back five minutes when the little Summers girl invaded."
"Ah," Arthur chuckled, "December 22nd. Would you believe I wasn't at the mansion that night?"
"Must be lucky." A small smile twitched at Topaz's lips.
She got an answering smile. "Can't possibly confirm or deny."
***
Beatrice’s interview is less straightforward.
“I really appreciate your time.” Arthur wasn’t sure what to expect here. He hadn’t thought of Beatrice for a long time, and that fact weighed on him.
“First, I want to let you know that I’m going to be taking notes.” He tapped his pad in hand with a ready pencil. The same, practiced monologue. “There’s no wrong answers here — all I’m doing is a little fact finding.” Cue the smile. “Let’s start there, set the stage. Easy questions. How do your powers normally work?”
Beatrice watched Arthur with rapt attention, eyes flicking from his face to his hands to the door of the office. She’d made herself scarce since their last interaction and while she’d agreed to the meeting, there was a frantic edge to her, lip already between her teeth in thought. Releasing her hold, she cleared her throat softly and smiled in return. “I, uh, it just works? I read minds? Though, I admit I haven’t used them since . . . well since I arrived actually.”
The end of her sentence possessed a search by quality. Trying to gauge the reaction and if her response had been proper, what he was looking for. If she’d said the right thing.
Arthur frowned, confused. He leaned forward as if to study her. "Bea, what's wrong? I know we haven't talked since before I was hurt."
And Bea leaned back, eyes widening a fraction before her expression attempted to return to a polite smile. “I — yes, right, of course. We haven’t spoken since before you were hurt,” she agreed.
“I haven’t used my powers since I arrived and was interviewed by David Haller. I apologize, that’s all I know on any psychic power, I said I wouldn’t be much use. Can I — may I leave now?” Her eyes had fixed on something beyond him.
This got a deeper frown. "Beatrice? What's wrong?" Arthur regrouped quickly, though, and plowed forward without needing an answer. "Have you been having any headaches lately? Shield issues? If you are, you aren't the only one." He smiled. "I know that my psychometry has been off — people have been seeing my memories on objects I've touched."
“Psychometry? Wh — no. No,” she cut off her own question to repeat the word firmly, now looking at Arthur, hands, face, following his eyes. Taking a slow breath, she shook her head. “I have not had any experiences like you’ve described. Are there any more questions or may I please leave?”
"Just one more," the man said carefully. He put a hand behind his head, cocking his head to one side as he continued to try to make sense of her. "Well. Two, now. Have you spent any time away from the mansion in the last three months? Anything more than a day."
A slow shake of her head as she refused to take her eyes off him now. "I have not left the mansion since my arrival. The final question," Bea prompted immediately.
His mouth pressed into a thin line. "Why haven't you used your power since November?"
This earned him a look of utter confusion. “Am I . . . am I allowed to? I assumed not after David interviewed me, so I didn’t.”
"David isn't the boss of anyone," Arthur said offhandedly in an uncharacteristically clipped tone. The lights in the room flickered in response, and he shook his head with a sigh. "Beatrice. Bea? I said once that you aren't a prisoner, and that's still true. You are allowed to do what you want. We trust you."
Beatrice stared at Arthur for a moment before slowly drawing herself out of her chair, keeping her form rigid so she didn't lean towards him as she stood. "I would like to go back to my room now. So I am going to. I'm sorry, I told you I didn't know anything."
He didn't stop her.
Arthur only sat, frowning, and stared at where the figure of Beatrice had just been.
***
Meggan has likewise not noticed anything. Arthur can’t help but ask about empathy.
“I really appreciate your time.” Arthur still did. So far he’d gotten no new information, but the smiling woman in front of him shook off all of the doubt from his last interview.
Plus, he could learn something either way.
“First, I want to let you know that I’m going to be taking notes.” He tapped his pad in hand with a ready pencil. “There’s no wrong answers here — all I’m doing is a little fact finding.” His practiced smile. “Let’s start there, set the stage. Easy questions. How do your powers normally work?”
Meggan nodded to acknowledge that; she understood. It was fine. She was happy to help however she could, even if she hadn’t experienced anything out of the ordinary to the best of her knowledge. It was probably best to keep it all simple; she’d done a lot of surveys herself in the past after each time a reality was visited, even if this was something a bit different.
“I’m an empathic shapeshifter,” she began. “Always have been, for as far back as I can remember. I feel the emotions from primarily people. Some empaths project emotion, but I can’t do that at all. I’m basically a receiver for all the stuff that can get picked up. I can feel what’s basically the essence in something like trees, too, and immerse myself in the calming aspect of those if negative emotion got to be too much.”
She paused for a moment, if he needed to write any of that down, before she continued. “For the rest of it? I react to the outside stimuli by changing my appearance to something much better suited to the environment that surrounds me. Consciously, or if I’m not focused on not allowing it to happen, unconsciously. Or changing in other ways, like making gills if it's necessary for me to be underwater for a prolonged period of time.” She hoped that helped.
His answering smile was radiant with fondness. "Hey now, empathy. We share that in common, except mine is less cool. We've got a baseline now, though, which is great. Were you in the mansion all December and January?"
“Mostly, when I wasn’t helping with monitoring the wormhole or other things over at the Chapel, or over in District X,” Meggan confirmed. Now wasn't the time to regale him with tales of the mysterious snack machine's contents that everyone was keeping tabs on. It didn’t take long for her to remember something else that had kept her away from the mansion, though. “For a couple of days early in December, I was in Florida with eXcalibur.”
"So everything's been working as normal?" Arthur made a note of Meggan's window of time outside the mansion next to an open question of 'portal interference? Wormhole?'. "Nothing unexpected or different?"
Meggan shook her head. She could only think of one thing which didn’t relate to this. “It’s been normal for all of it. The only time anything’s gone haywire was just . . . in January, after I’d ventured too close to where you were, when your luck wasn’t acting right? After everything.” She had planned to bring him extra blankets if they were needed, but saw there were enough, and left before anyone had known she was even there.
She wouldn’t ever blame him for it. It wasn’t intentional. Once she’d seen the announcement later, it wasn’t difficult to guess the cause.
She gave a slight shrug, and mimed the way she’d gone a bit wrong in her flight path. “Slipped. Went over the banister, bumped something when I tried to fly, went off course weirdly, and crash landed on the furniture a few times. But it was okay after a few variations of that, and some nice quality time downstairs! Aside from that, my powers haven't done anything unexpected.”
He visibly grimaced, but still made a note. "Would it help to know that I'm sorry about that? Recovery hasn't been easy, and it turns out my luck and I need to come to a better understanding. If it helps, that actually sounds awesome." All he could do was offer a smile. "About your empathy," and this was admittedly off topic, "Have you ever felt something you couldn't shake off? Some feeling too big?"
“Oh, I know. It's okay,” Meggan assured him. “It wasn’t your fault. I just camped out on the sofa for a few extra hours, before I realized I could finally get back to my room, and the stairs were safe for me to go up again,” she laughed.
“I’ve always felt like the worst is an absence of it,” she admitted. “If someone just doesn’t have any feelings at all in them. The sheer physical coldness that goes along with sensing no emotion in someone is an extra level of awful.” Still, she gave the only advice she could, since it wasn’t often that she encountered the absolute total absence of feeling. “But for too much? When there’s too much sorrow from everyone, just try to be with the ones you love and latch onto a bit of that.”
"Oh, I had that once," he said. "Extremely creepy. I was in the head of a woman who created plagues to feel big. What I do isn't the same as you, I think, but I feel the past?" He shook his head. "I feel whatever the person was feeling in my readings."
Meggan could sympathize with that; it had to be beyond rough to get into that lady’s head. “Empathy’s empathy, however you’re getting all of that emotion. Doesn’t matter when it's from, or if it's even in the same way, it's still being felt by you,” she reasoned.
Arthur perked up, something nagging in the back of his mind. "Wait, Meggan. Let's go back for a second. Do you get thoughts at all? Or is it just vibes?"
“It’s just the feelings, the vibes, like you say,” Meggan confirmed. “There’s never been thoughts that come attached to them to clarify the specific reasons behind the feelings, if that’s what you mean. The sheer depth of it coming off of someone can give a really big clue if I know a person, and there's different levels, but no. There's no thoughts to weed out, to clarify whatever I might be picking up from someone.”
"That's not what I get at all," Arthur said with an eager nod. "It is wonderful we're all different, right? Most of the things I see don't make any sense. Feelings on top of a movie with general impressions. A spliced cut." It was an oversimplification and he knew it. "I sometimes get what was top of mind, I think, but I also get audio and visual."
“It becomes unique flavors of powers like that,” Meggan agreed. It certainly wasn’t boring! “It sounds a bit like trailers, too—just instead of giving you all the information, though, you’re getting the vague and unsettling bits without enough context to lead you to the answers immediately,” she offered, piggybacking on his analogy.
He shook his head as he began to trace little circles on his notepad with one, gloved finger. "It would be way more fun with a narrator voiceover and a dramatic soundtrack. It makes more sense than my other thing, though. The luck only feels good. A rush, but all me."
“Closed captioning would be useful along with all of that, if it’s all mysteriously reverberating somehow for you, and impossible to make out all the words,” Meggan mused. She wondered what narrator his powers could end up implementing in that sort of scenario. “To make it a little less cryptic all around, if it tends to be that.”
At his last comment, she just wasn’t sure what she could say to help him with that thought. She didn’t know enough about luck powers to offer much of anything on that, and didn’t want to bug him with random platitudes that might bother him even more. She could listen, though.
This got a sad chuckle. "Wouldn't that be nice? A power settings menu. I love picturing you being able to commune with a tree to center yourself, though. I just have yoga, but as you said: the emotions just reverberate up here." Arthur tapped one temple in illustration.
“Add instinctively leafy hair sometimes, or skin that’s getting some bark coloring when I’m really settled down in the middle of that, and it’s probably exactly like you’re imagining,” Meggan grinned. “They’re usually as calm as can be.”
"Confirmed: all forests are zen gardens, true be-leaf-ers." Arthur grinned at his own bad joke, but he had noticeably relaxed. "I just wish I knew what to do with all of those extra feelings."
Meggan couldn’t help it; she laughed at the bad pun. There might be a blip of something when woodpeckers wouldn’t leave them alone, but it was usually almost that level of peace with the trees around the grounds. “With the zen garden route, unfortunately you can’t just plant them deep in the most secluded bit of the forest where they couldn’t hurt anyone and walk quickly away,” she pointed out.
"Oh don't worry, I place them all in lockboxes and bury them in the beach of my mind." It was meant to be a joke, and he honestly tried to smile, but . . . well. He shrugged. "I recently learned that I need hefty amounts of therapy. Score one for team mental health."
“Hey, if it helps you even a bit in the end, then at least you’ve tried it,” Meggan offered. “The therapy, that is, not the likely leaky lockboxes.” At least he knew he needed some extra help! Because she couldn’t really recommend that other way, since it probably wouldn’t go so well.
"I'm trying," and his voice was suddenly very tired. "It has been a very long year so far. But! I do want to thank you for humoring me and my questions. It seems like you've been the lucky one lately."
Meggan couldn't help but agree that the year was off to a bit of a rocky start. She hadn't humored him, she'd genuinely wanted to help. "No problem. And if you think of any others that you forgot to ask me later, feel free to ask away!"
***
Topaz shares her experiences after unexpected happenings when meeting with Arthur and Haller.
“I really appreciate your time.” It was a good opening gambit after the initial email. Arthur had felt that this was more important to do in person since he knew all too well the pressures of powers being a mess. It was, however, time to look for a pattern.
Topaz was a good start. She was already on the list.
“First, I want to let you know that I’m going to be taking notes.” Arthur tapped his pad in hand with a ready pencil. “There’s no wrong answers here — all I’m doing is a little fact finding.” The man smiled kindly before getting to business. “Let’s start there, set the stage. Easy questions. Let’s talk about how your powers work normally.”
"I feel when people feel things," Topaz said with a shrug. "It's like telepathy, but instead of words, I get feelings."
"So you can sense feelings. Outside of the magic, is that all?" He jotted a couple notes at this.
"I can also project feelings and manipulate what people feel, and I have a secondary telepathy mutation that allows me to hear thoughts associated with strong emotions." She counted on her fingers as she spoke to make sure she was getting everything.
Arthur squinted his eyes in thought, but that was definitely worth noting. "Thank you for sharing that. You're right, though. Sounds a bit like telepathy, but with feelings. I get hazier surface thoughts with my power, but that's with a vision." He locked eyes with her. "Have you had anyone else notice your radio static since the last time we met?"
"Marie-Ange mentioned getting some feedback the other day at work. I spend a lot of time alone, though, so if it happens more often there's no one to comment on it." Topaz tilted her head, thinking for a moment. "My cat has been acting off, though. That thing about animals being in-tune with our emotions is true, you know. I imagine it's worse if I'm actually projecting something."
"Felix definitely knows when something is up with me," Arthur said in complete agreement. "What's been off about Midnight?" The man dropped the name like he was a man who could, at any moment, name and describe each and every pet in the mansion. He likely could.
"She's been very skittish. And a little more bitey. Last night it got pretty bad, actually." Topaz rolled up her left sleeve to show long, thin gashes in her arm. "When she's really stressed out, she attacks with teeth."
Another note, but also a sympathetic grimace. "Ouch. So, skittish and aggressive." Arthur's focus drifted into the middle distance, as if he was trying to picture the scene. "Why aggression, though? Could be defense. Do you take Midnight to work, or is she a housecat? Is she around you most of the day?"
"She's a housecat, generally. The last time I took her somewhere besides the vet for her yearly physical was back in August when I spent a few months in England." Topaz rolled her sleeve down while she spoke. "For the most part she's gentle. It's just those little stress moments."
"Huh," Arthur said with a nod. "Speaking of England, have you been out of the mansion over the past three months?"
"I got back at the end of December, but since then the only place I've gone has been work."
"Do you remember exactly when you got back?"
"Hard to forget." Topaz's voice was wry. "I was barely back five minutes when the little Summers girl invaded."
"Ah," Arthur chuckled, "December 22nd. Would you believe I wasn't at the mansion that night?"
"Must be lucky." A small smile twitched at Topaz's lips.
She got an answering smile. "Can't possibly confirm or deny."
***
Beatrice’s interview is less straightforward.
“I really appreciate your time.” Arthur wasn’t sure what to expect here. He hadn’t thought of Beatrice for a long time, and that fact weighed on him.
“First, I want to let you know that I’m going to be taking notes.” He tapped his pad in hand with a ready pencil. The same, practiced monologue. “There’s no wrong answers here — all I’m doing is a little fact finding.” Cue the smile. “Let’s start there, set the stage. Easy questions. How do your powers normally work?”
Beatrice watched Arthur with rapt attention, eyes flicking from his face to his hands to the door of the office. She’d made herself scarce since their last interaction and while she’d agreed to the meeting, there was a frantic edge to her, lip already between her teeth in thought. Releasing her hold, she cleared her throat softly and smiled in return. “I, uh, it just works? I read minds? Though, I admit I haven’t used them since . . . well since I arrived actually.”
The end of her sentence possessed a search by quality. Trying to gauge the reaction and if her response had been proper, what he was looking for. If she’d said the right thing.
Arthur frowned, confused. He leaned forward as if to study her. "Bea, what's wrong? I know we haven't talked since before I was hurt."
And Bea leaned back, eyes widening a fraction before her expression attempted to return to a polite smile. “I — yes, right, of course. We haven’t spoken since before you were hurt,” she agreed.
“I haven’t used my powers since I arrived and was interviewed by David Haller. I apologize, that’s all I know on any psychic power, I said I wouldn’t be much use. Can I — may I leave now?” Her eyes had fixed on something beyond him.
This got a deeper frown. "Beatrice? What's wrong?" Arthur regrouped quickly, though, and plowed forward without needing an answer. "Have you been having any headaches lately? Shield issues? If you are, you aren't the only one." He smiled. "I know that my psychometry has been off — people have been seeing my memories on objects I've touched."
“Psychometry? Wh — no. No,” she cut off her own question to repeat the word firmly, now looking at Arthur, hands, face, following his eyes. Taking a slow breath, she shook her head. “I have not had any experiences like you’ve described. Are there any more questions or may I please leave?”
"Just one more," the man said carefully. He put a hand behind his head, cocking his head to one side as he continued to try to make sense of her. "Well. Two, now. Have you spent any time away from the mansion in the last three months? Anything more than a day."
A slow shake of her head as she refused to take her eyes off him now. "I have not left the mansion since my arrival. The final question," Bea prompted immediately.
His mouth pressed into a thin line. "Why haven't you used your power since November?"
This earned him a look of utter confusion. “Am I . . . am I allowed to? I assumed not after David interviewed me, so I didn’t.”
"David isn't the boss of anyone," Arthur said offhandedly in an uncharacteristically clipped tone. The lights in the room flickered in response, and he shook his head with a sigh. "Beatrice. Bea? I said once that you aren't a prisoner, and that's still true. You are allowed to do what you want. We trust you."
Beatrice stared at Arthur for a moment before slowly drawing herself out of her chair, keeping her form rigid so she didn't lean towards him as she stood. "I would like to go back to my room now. So I am going to. I'm sorry, I told you I didn't know anything."
He didn't stop her.
Arthur only sat, frowning, and stared at where the figure of Beatrice had just been.
***
Meggan has likewise not noticed anything. Arthur can’t help but ask about empathy.
“I really appreciate your time.” Arthur still did. So far he’d gotten no new information, but the smiling woman in front of him shook off all of the doubt from his last interview.
Plus, he could learn something either way.
“First, I want to let you know that I’m going to be taking notes.” He tapped his pad in hand with a ready pencil. “There’s no wrong answers here — all I’m doing is a little fact finding.” His practiced smile. “Let’s start there, set the stage. Easy questions. How do your powers normally work?”
Meggan nodded to acknowledge that; she understood. It was fine. She was happy to help however she could, even if she hadn’t experienced anything out of the ordinary to the best of her knowledge. It was probably best to keep it all simple; she’d done a lot of surveys herself in the past after each time a reality was visited, even if this was something a bit different.
“I’m an empathic shapeshifter,” she began. “Always have been, for as far back as I can remember. I feel the emotions from primarily people. Some empaths project emotion, but I can’t do that at all. I’m basically a receiver for all the stuff that can get picked up. I can feel what’s basically the essence in something like trees, too, and immerse myself in the calming aspect of those if negative emotion got to be too much.”
She paused for a moment, if he needed to write any of that down, before she continued. “For the rest of it? I react to the outside stimuli by changing my appearance to something much better suited to the environment that surrounds me. Consciously, or if I’m not focused on not allowing it to happen, unconsciously. Or changing in other ways, like making gills if it's necessary for me to be underwater for a prolonged period of time.” She hoped that helped.
His answering smile was radiant with fondness. "Hey now, empathy. We share that in common, except mine is less cool. We've got a baseline now, though, which is great. Were you in the mansion all December and January?"
“Mostly, when I wasn’t helping with monitoring the wormhole or other things over at the Chapel, or over in District X,” Meggan confirmed. Now wasn't the time to regale him with tales of the mysterious snack machine's contents that everyone was keeping tabs on. It didn’t take long for her to remember something else that had kept her away from the mansion, though. “For a couple of days early in December, I was in Florida with eXcalibur.”
"So everything's been working as normal?" Arthur made a note of Meggan's window of time outside the mansion next to an open question of 'portal interference? Wormhole?'. "Nothing unexpected or different?"
Meggan shook her head. She could only think of one thing which didn’t relate to this. “It’s been normal for all of it. The only time anything’s gone haywire was just . . . in January, after I’d ventured too close to where you were, when your luck wasn’t acting right? After everything.” She had planned to bring him extra blankets if they were needed, but saw there were enough, and left before anyone had known she was even there.
She wouldn’t ever blame him for it. It wasn’t intentional. Once she’d seen the announcement later, it wasn’t difficult to guess the cause.
She gave a slight shrug, and mimed the way she’d gone a bit wrong in her flight path. “Slipped. Went over the banister, bumped something when I tried to fly, went off course weirdly, and crash landed on the furniture a few times. But it was okay after a few variations of that, and some nice quality time downstairs! Aside from that, my powers haven't done anything unexpected.”
He visibly grimaced, but still made a note. "Would it help to know that I'm sorry about that? Recovery hasn't been easy, and it turns out my luck and I need to come to a better understanding. If it helps, that actually sounds awesome." All he could do was offer a smile. "About your empathy," and this was admittedly off topic, "Have you ever felt something you couldn't shake off? Some feeling too big?"
“Oh, I know. It's okay,” Meggan assured him. “It wasn’t your fault. I just camped out on the sofa for a few extra hours, before I realized I could finally get back to my room, and the stairs were safe for me to go up again,” she laughed.
“I’ve always felt like the worst is an absence of it,” she admitted. “If someone just doesn’t have any feelings at all in them. The sheer physical coldness that goes along with sensing no emotion in someone is an extra level of awful.” Still, she gave the only advice she could, since it wasn’t often that she encountered the absolute total absence of feeling. “But for too much? When there’s too much sorrow from everyone, just try to be with the ones you love and latch onto a bit of that.”
"Oh, I had that once," he said. "Extremely creepy. I was in the head of a woman who created plagues to feel big. What I do isn't the same as you, I think, but I feel the past?" He shook his head. "I feel whatever the person was feeling in my readings."
Meggan could sympathize with that; it had to be beyond rough to get into that lady’s head. “Empathy’s empathy, however you’re getting all of that emotion. Doesn’t matter when it's from, or if it's even in the same way, it's still being felt by you,” she reasoned.
Arthur perked up, something nagging in the back of his mind. "Wait, Meggan. Let's go back for a second. Do you get thoughts at all? Or is it just vibes?"
“It’s just the feelings, the vibes, like you say,” Meggan confirmed. “There’s never been thoughts that come attached to them to clarify the specific reasons behind the feelings, if that’s what you mean. The sheer depth of it coming off of someone can give a really big clue if I know a person, and there's different levels, but no. There's no thoughts to weed out, to clarify whatever I might be picking up from someone.”
"That's not what I get at all," Arthur said with an eager nod. "It is wonderful we're all different, right? Most of the things I see don't make any sense. Feelings on top of a movie with general impressions. A spliced cut." It was an oversimplification and he knew it. "I sometimes get what was top of mind, I think, but I also get audio and visual."
“It becomes unique flavors of powers like that,” Meggan agreed. It certainly wasn’t boring! “It sounds a bit like trailers, too—just instead of giving you all the information, though, you’re getting the vague and unsettling bits without enough context to lead you to the answers immediately,” she offered, piggybacking on his analogy.
He shook his head as he began to trace little circles on his notepad with one, gloved finger. "It would be way more fun with a narrator voiceover and a dramatic soundtrack. It makes more sense than my other thing, though. The luck only feels good. A rush, but all me."
“Closed captioning would be useful along with all of that, if it’s all mysteriously reverberating somehow for you, and impossible to make out all the words,” Meggan mused. She wondered what narrator his powers could end up implementing in that sort of scenario. “To make it a little less cryptic all around, if it tends to be that.”
At his last comment, she just wasn’t sure what she could say to help him with that thought. She didn’t know enough about luck powers to offer much of anything on that, and didn’t want to bug him with random platitudes that might bother him even more. She could listen, though.
This got a sad chuckle. "Wouldn't that be nice? A power settings menu. I love picturing you being able to commune with a tree to center yourself, though. I just have yoga, but as you said: the emotions just reverberate up here." Arthur tapped one temple in illustration.
“Add instinctively leafy hair sometimes, or skin that’s getting some bark coloring when I’m really settled down in the middle of that, and it’s probably exactly like you’re imagining,” Meggan grinned. “They’re usually as calm as can be.”
"Confirmed: all forests are zen gardens, true be-leaf-ers." Arthur grinned at his own bad joke, but he had noticeably relaxed. "I just wish I knew what to do with all of those extra feelings."
Meggan couldn’t help it; she laughed at the bad pun. There might be a blip of something when woodpeckers wouldn’t leave them alone, but it was usually almost that level of peace with the trees around the grounds. “With the zen garden route, unfortunately you can’t just plant them deep in the most secluded bit of the forest where they couldn’t hurt anyone and walk quickly away,” she pointed out.
"Oh don't worry, I place them all in lockboxes and bury them in the beach of my mind." It was meant to be a joke, and he honestly tried to smile, but . . . well. He shrugged. "I recently learned that I need hefty amounts of therapy. Score one for team mental health."
“Hey, if it helps you even a bit in the end, then at least you’ve tried it,” Meggan offered. “The therapy, that is, not the likely leaky lockboxes.” At least he knew he needed some extra help! Because she couldn’t really recommend that other way, since it probably wouldn’t go so well.
"I'm trying," and his voice was suddenly very tired. "It has been a very long year so far. But! I do want to thank you for humoring me and my questions. It seems like you've been the lucky one lately."
Meggan couldn't help but agree that the year was off to a bit of a rocky start. She hadn't humored him, she'd genuinely wanted to help. "No problem. And if you think of any others that you forgot to ask me later, feel free to ask away!"
