xp_logs | Log: look at the pretty colours!

waaaaaay backdated and set shortly after this post by Jubilee back at the end of February. Manuel and Dani colour and compare how they 'see' emotions. They even manage to have a (mostly) serious discussion on being Indian, surpressed and their powers without fighting. I'm shocked, I am.

Manuel spread out his oil pastels carefully, each label facing upwards for maximum ease of reading, the easel set up just so with a blank sheet all ready to be scribbled upon. He was under no delusions that he had any great talent for art, but this was more for his own piece of mind and for explaining how he saw the world. With two, maybe three exceptions in the Mansion, no one really had a clue. A little education may just be what the doctor ordered.

Dani for her part had her easel set lower so she could sit and color, her pastels on the table next to her still in their new box. She'd never tried to create the colors she felt more than saw for the emotions, but it made sense to try it.

Manuel glanced over and grinned. "Ready to try this?" he asked, putting his shades back on his face. "I have to say, it feels _good_ to really feel things again." he grinned. "Any idea what feeling you're going to go for?" he asked curiously. "I was thinking about a little happiness, since the atmosphere around here has been so toxic lately."

"I didn't know I was drawing with Joe Cool," Dani said, raising on eyebrow to indicate his sunglasses, "but I was thinking something positive. Maybe relief."

"Hey, you deal with things in your own way. Besides, Joe Cool is a _camel_." he protested with a laugh. "And yeah, a positive feeling would be good. Do you have it in your mind, or do you want me to show you again?"

"I think I can do it," she didn't mention that someone nearby was feeling that way for some reason, "and it's a camel?"

"Yeah. On the cigarette pack? Wait, no. That's Joe Camel. Who's Joe Cool?" he asked confusedly. "Never mind. Doesn't matter. Back to the drawing. Hrm, happiness. I think I can do that." he mused out loud, then grabbed a handful of his pastels and placed them next to the easel. "Start with those, as they're closest."

"But they're not the right ones!" Dani said, moving them closer to him and selecting several other colors from her own tray, "Relief is definitely more pinky-blue."

"I was thinking for me, not you. For you, you want those over there." he said, pointing to a different section of her pastel box. "That's closest to what you really want. Not those. Those would be great if you were doing, I don't know, relief after taking a nice piss or something, but not quite what you had in mind."

She looked at him as if he'd lost his mind, "You're joking, right? Or color-blind maybe? Relief is pinky-blue. If it were after peeing there'd be more yellow in it! And your colors are wrong - happiness is not yellow!"

"The hell it's not! Happiness can be a bright sunshiney yellow, or it can be a warm red. Depends on what kind of happiness, and what else is hanging off of it." he said indignantly. "Besides, you don't see them primarily, not like I do. Stick to dreams and nightmares." he grinned.

"You're just jealous you don't get nighttime visits from me," she teased, smearing a bright pink stick onto her paper with vigor, "I still think you're colorblind."

"I get plenty of night-time visits, but none of them are from you." he leered. "And I have _superior_ color vision. Dr MacTaggert said so." he said, indulging his childish side for once and sticking his tongue out at her. Then he picked up one of his lighter red pastels and smeared it over his paper. "Red for passion." he said with a grin.

"And anger," she agreed, adding blue to the edges of her paper, "The pink is the cooling previous emotion - anger or passion - and the blue is the soothing coming in. Like taking a deep breath to calm down."

"Yes, since anger is a passion." he said simply. "And I will lighten it, define it further. A little of this one, perhaps." he said, scribbling over his previous effort with the new color, lightening the overall effect. "That's better. This looks like a really weird variant on happiness right now. Mentally ill happiness." He then shivered as a memory, unbidden, came to mind.

Unconciously Dani mimiced his shiver, her time spent less than stable still all too recent and possibly happening again. She'd never been admitted to an asylum, but that had been more luck than sanity, "Since you asked so nicely," she added yellow just inside her blue, "pee."

"Woman, you are _obsessed_." he said with a grin. "You should seek professional help." He then laughed, and added a little yellow to his own "art". "Since you're all about the pee today, I added a little to my own drawing here."

"I've been doing it every five minutes!" she explained, patting her belly, "Up down up down, it's ridiculous! Never get pregnant, Manuel, all you do is pee."

"If I got pregnant, there would be something seriously wrong with the laws of God and Man." he laughed. "So far as I know, there aren't any of my bastards out there in the world. Plenty of "cousins", but no sons or daughters." he said thoughtfully. "Which is, I suppose, a good thing."

"Good point," Dani studied her paper, unsure if abstract emotions really counted as a drawing. Careflly she looked through her pastels before selecting a darker pink for the center. Whomever she was feeling was rather concentric.

"My father is categorically unable to, as Jubilee says, keep it in his pants." he said with another laugh. "I've gotten used to it by now. So, let's add in a little bit of white here, lighten things up a bit - whoops! Too much! More red!" he said to himself as he worked.

"'Gotten used to it.' Right," Dani's tone obviously said she did not agree, but she also was not about to push, "Remember Picasso, these are emotions, they ain't the Mona Lisa."

"Well, hey, getting bent out of shape about it got me disinherited the first time around." he said, having to force a little of the good cheer this time. "There are things I can control, and things I can not. That's one of the things I can not." he mused, and then scribbled over his "artwork" with more shades of red.

"Don't mean you gotta like it," Dani pointed out, pulling a new piece of paper out, "Just means you gotta accept it. There's a difference."

"My point is that it doesn't _matter_ what I like and don't like. Never has, likely never will." he said, now unable to completely hide his bitterness.

Putting the colors down, Dani turned to face the older man, completely serious, "What you like does matter. It only don't if you let it. You may not get what you want all the time, but you always have the choice to like it or not."

Manuel smiled thinly. "Not when you're an uncontrolled empath." he said sourly. "I'm still getting used to the idea that I can actually have a preference, and not just blindly like or not like whatever everyone around me liked or didn't like." he said. "And, really, I don't have many tastes in common with folks here. You should understand that, I would think."

Dani nodded, she understood all too well, "Ain't like I'm the poster child for power control or have my trips to the box in a straight jacket already been forgotten? But even when I am feeling or doing something I don't want to, I usually still know what I want. I just can't do anything about it," she paused, making a face, "People here are so...the same."

"I spent a week or two in the Box. It was very unpleasant." he said with a shudder. "Even just the objective memories tell me that. It's cold in there, I swear!" he said with a half-serious laugh. "I suppose my talent is stronger than yours - although you have the other part of it, while I'm just a straight empath."

"Yeah, big bad boogeyman, scaring children in their sleep," Dani replied sarcastically, carefully adding some green to a new page, "Every time I try to make a good mirage, or even a bad one, while I'm awake, nothing really happens. It tries, but nothing. So one power works too much and the other not at all. Green for just a little bit of envy."

"Nice envy there." he said, looking over at her drawing. "For me, I get a nice golden red for arrogance, and a splash of bluish-white for humility. An interesting mix if you can get it. A humble man who knows what he's good at. I'll be that - someday. Not now, though." he laughed. "And your mirages will come. You're new to the power, remember?"

"I never made mirages until I got pregnant," she explained, biting her tongue slightly as she added some pink and orange to the drawing, "But I felt emotions. Not like this though, they didn't control me. It was like...background noise. I'd get a headache and go out where there weren't anyone and they'd go away. Was a lot easier living in the middle of nowhere to do that."

"See, I always preferred the cities. Alphonso had the manor house, but it was nearly in the city itself. And then when I finally had too much and ran, I hid out in Madrid. Looking back, it's amazing I didn't go more insane than I did." he said pensively, adding a splash of green and brown to represent Spain.

Reaching into her tray she found a light tan and added it to the edges of his green and brown, "Our homes ain't so different," she explained, "Similar colors."

"In some respects, indeed. Basque country is beautiful - you might like it. It's up in the mountains between Spain and France - butts right up against the bottom of wine country." he said as he remembered. "A good people, brutally suppressed - reminds me of yours, just with less smallpox." he smirked.

"Vaccinated as a kid, whiteman" she smirked, for once not using the word as an insult. "You didn't hear this from me, but the only people actively surpressing us now, is ourselves. Whitemen just do it through neglect now. Neglecting their treaties and agreements," the thought saddened her, "But I guess it's okay to let a people suicide slowly."

"Don't have to tell me about it - I call myself a Spaniard, but I'm from Basque stock through and through. Well, go back far enough, and it's from mixed Basque and Roman stock. No, not Italian. Roman." he said with a grin. "Family history was always a guilty pleasure of mine."

Dani drew black and red slashes across her page, adding more and more until it looked like some gothic interpretive peice, "Sand Creek Massacre," being Basque or Italiam Roman meant nothing to her.

Manuel glanced over at her drawing. "Hrm, I think someone's having a little bit of a problem letting go of old injustices. Tell me, is that why your people are sitting there in rusted iron shacks getting drunk all day? Because they can't let go of the past and try to make for themselves a future?"

Dani paused mid-slash with a white stick to consider, "No...I don't think so," she replied slowly, "We were forced on our reservations and for a long time we couldn't get jobs off them. Hiring an Ind'n was as bad as hiring a black person, probably worse in some places. The government took the kids and forced them to go to boarding schools to learn to be white, like being Ind'n wasn't good enough. Maybe if you wash really hard in the bath you'll turn white, you know? Enough years of that, losing hope, ain't really surprising what happened," Dani ripped her page in half, throwing it away. "You get told enough times you're nothing, you believe it."

Manuel hrmmed at that. "In that case, if I were an Injun, as you so nicely put it, I'd give Americans the finger and build our own soceity. They don't want to hire Indians? Fine - start your own business, and hire nothing but Indians. Start small and grow. That's how we did it in Basque country."

"Yeah, some did. Others pretended to be Mexican and left. Some went in the military to get away in World War II. But you need money for a business, permits and whatever," she shrugged, "My grandparents and I lived on social security. Ain't no money. Now, there's more. I been looking at some scholarships and things, but until I came here, college wasn't ever considered. How many more kids are there back on the rez who could go to college and don't even know it and don't bother to try?"

Manuel shrugged. "Then you're writing your own ticket to nowhere. Besides, don't you people all do gambling now or something?" he asked with a grin, and just for fun, added a dollar sign in green to his drawing.

"Not in Oklahoma. Some reservations allow it, more are starting to. Depends," She drew a happy face on her paper with a mortar board on its head, "Graduation is soon."

"Well there you go! Assuming all you Reds can keep your traditional rivalries in check, maybe make some of the rich ones help out you poor plains Injuns with a little seed capital?" he smirked

"Shut up," Dani smiled, causually leaning over to mark him with orange, "I ain't going back, I don't think. Ain't a place to raise a kid."

Manuel leaned back, but not fast enough to avoid being Orange'd. "HEY!" he said, forgetting himself for a split-second and projecting his surprise and annoyance to all and sundry. He realized what he'd done a second later and clamped down on his power, letting the red eyeglow fade away as soon as it had sprung into being.

Blinking in surprise, Dani looked at him pissed, "What the hell was that for?" she asked, after the anger had faded, even as she spoke she realized it had been him, "Oh...Orange. Sorry."

"No, I should apologize. That hasn't happened in a while - you took me by surprise, and my control slipped. Good thing Loki's not here." he said with a shudder.

"Loki?" Dani asked, unfamiliar with the name.

"It's a very, very long story. Norse God of Mischief and Lies. He taught me a great deal about my power. Adopted me, in his own way." he said as he remembered. Inspired, he took up his black oil pastel and drew a rune on his picture. "There. That for Loki, the Chaos-bringer." he said with satisfaction. "Remind me to show you my translation-stone sometime."

That sounded interesting, "Sure," she replied, groaning as she stood up, "Bathroom. I'll see you later, okay?"

Manuel nodded. "Sure, sure." he said, waving her off.