Summary:Jean and Avril meet in the disaster zone and discuss mental calisthenics. Log Info:Storyteller: None |
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Evening in the Disaster Zone brings a sort of peace. Fewer adventure seekers are eager to go poking around after nightfall, and for good reason — it's not a particularly safe place to be, even by the Zone's own rather low standards for safety. The people who are left tend to be those who are very serious about their Zone-crawling. Or those who are hiding from something or someone. Or sometimes both!
But for every rule there's an exception. That's probably what explains the presence of the young woman in the honestly rather gaudy red, blue, and black costume with the starfields and the gold highlights. As the moon rises up above the skyline, she's trying — with painstaking care — to clear the rubble away from a small section of street by pushing debris back with a sort of glowing golden wedge. It takes more effort than it probably ought to, and more concentration, which is why she's not so good at noticing anyone else who may be nearby.
Finals are over. Graduation is next week. And Jean Grey still doesn't know for sure what she's actually going to do with her life. She's been distracting herself with this whole conflict of pantheons thing, but the gods seem to be making at least an attempt at behaving right now, which means…she's low on distractions.
So she's gone back to an old favorite.
Jean's costume isn't much less gaudy than Avril's, though in white and green with a simple domino mask across her features. And her task isn't much different from Avril's either, though a little more focused. She's always checking for anything that might have been left behind that someone can abuse, but it usually doesn't come with rebuilding. Tonight, she's on her usual mission. Or at least she was, until she heard the sound of buildings moving.
She levitates herself just enough to peek over the edge of a pile of rubble behind Avril until she determines that this is probably not a danger. "Trying to put that somewhere specific?" she calls over, floating toward the other woman.
Busted.
Luckily — though it's probably mostly lucky for /her/ — Avril is not a person given to panicky responses. So, when she hears a voice intruding on her … whatever it is she's doing, she turns toward it, yes — but that's about all. Instead of immediate defensive or, worse, offensive action, she brushes a hand back through her hair and directs a slightly embarrassed smile toward her interlocutor. "Not really," she says, attempting a light tone, though her ears are red. "Just trying to put it somewhere else."
"It's … really hard to move things a little bit, and exactly where you want them, instead of just sort of, um, shoving them around willy-nilly. That part's easy." She looks around her and gestures vaguely: "But this is a good place to practice. There's always more stuff to move around and if I screw up no one's going to get /too/ upset."
"Yeah, no kidding," Jean smiles ruefully as she reaches the other woman, crossing her arms loosely over her chest as she floats next to her. "It's a momentum thing, kind of," she notes, almost academically. "If you're just hitting it, it's kind of like…hitting a golf ball. You put the power in up front, then let physics do the rest. But placing it just so is trickier. But hey, you got the flying thing figured out," she adds, as if that's supposed to be reassuring. "You should've seen me the first few times I did it. It was…pretty embarrassing."
"I guess I never thought of the zone like that," she admits, thoughtful. "Kind of makes me surprised I haven't run into more people testing things out here."
Unmasked, and apparently not concerned by it, Avril waits with her feet on the ground as Jean approaches her. "Right! Exactly. When you hit something you sort of don't care … well, don't care as much how hard you hit it." She lets out a relieved little breath. "It's /such/ a pleasure to meet someone who gets it. I feel like /such/ an idiot." Her tone's rueful. "So mostly I just avoid doing that any time I think someone might see me. How long did it take you to get the hang of it?"
She is also, it would seem, worried about her actions being misinterpreted. "I mean — I wouldn't want anyone to think I was being careless," she adds hastily. "I looked out for power lines and water lines and anything that might get damaged — I mean, damaged more than it already is — when I mess up. And I thought just the street debris would be less likely to have — well, there's probably nothing that anyone's looking for in a bunch of broken-up pavement." Of course, at this late date probably no one is looking for any cherished personal possessions in the Zone, but you never know!
"No way," Jean shakes her head as she comes to the ground. "You're definitely not an idiot." She offers over a gloved hand, smile easy. "Marvel Girl," she introduces herself. "Or at least that's what I used to go by. I'm feeling like it's probably time for a rebrand." At the question of how long it took her, she takes a deep breath.
"I'm probably a bad example," she admits. "I started when I was ten, so. It's not a great yardstick. And sometimes for me it's as much about learning how to hold back as it is how to use it. You?"
Avril suggests, with a wry smile, "Well, not for /that/ reason, at least." She shows no hesitation in taking Jean's hand, clasping it for a moment; "I'm, um, Quasar. And saying that out loud still feels strange. Do you have any ideas on what you're going to go by instead? Don't get me wrong, 'Marvel Girl' has panache, but I can see why you might want to change it up."
Her eyes widen. Now she's really impressed. "When you were /ten/?" she echoes. "That's /amazing/. I can't imagine how badly I would have screwed it up if I'd started when I was /ten/. I've only been doing this for a couple of months."
"Not a clue," Jean laughs, smile flashing. "But I feel like it's kind of the least of my worries right now, so I'll figure it out eventually. And I didn't get a lot of choice in the matter of when." She sobers a bit, choosing her next words carefully. "I'm a mutant. And my powers manifested when my best friend got hit by a car and died in my arms. Telepath, telekinetic," she waves a hand vaguely. "Let's just say that it was pretty traumatic, but I was extremely lucky to find people who could help me. And if this is a couple of months, you're doing great."
She pauses, tilting her head before looking around. "Do you…Sorry, this is probably going to sound presumptuous, but do you have someone training you? Showing you the ropes? Someone who knows how these things work?"
Although she's a little surprised to hear about how Jean came to be … well … Jean, Avril's reaction is unqualifiedly sympathetic. "Oh, my goodness, what a terrible thing to have to experience when you're only ten," she says, sounding entirely sincere in her dismay. "That's awful. I'm so sorry. And, I'm sorry for your loss, however belatedly. It's so great that you found help, though. I know that — well, a lot of people could use a little more understanding than they get."
And just when her ears were starting to return to their normal color, there they go again. "No, no, it's not presumptuous at all," she hastens to reassure Jean. "It's a completely sensible thing to ask. I, well, the person who had these powers before I did showed me … the basic basics, if that makes sense? But I think he really felt like if he kept telling me what to do, it would sort of, um, hinder me from figuring things out? So I guess the answer is kind of not really."
"See, now that sounds hard to me." Jean considers the idea of figuring it all out on her own. "I've had a mentor ever since I came into my powers. I don't know where I'd be without his help." She doesn't seem to be upset about her past, or at least she's good at keeping those feelings inside. "Definitely a good place to practice, though, if that's what you can do after just a couple of months and mostly on your own."
"I guess everything looks different depending on your perspective," Avril says, with a small smile. "But I bet if you'd had to figure it out yourself, you would have managed okay. It seems like usually, we can handle the things life gives us to handle. I mean, so far." Her smile turns a touch wry, and she attempts to wave away this praise, embarrassed. "It's nice to get better," she says, "but at the end of the day the only thing that's important is, are you good enough to help the people who need help? And if you're not, you don't feel any better about how much or how little time it took you to get where you are, you know?"
"True enough," Jean agrees. "We do what we can to make things better. So that this is the only place like this," she adds, looking around. "I still remember…" Trailing off, she shakes her head. "Maybe I can help some?" she offers. "Although it's possible it might not work the same. I've found a lot of the mental stuff differs from person to person. We just think about it differently. Good news though is that it's usually easy for us to tell each other about it," she adds with a wry smile.
Abruptly, Avril's embarrassed again. "Listen to me," she says, amusement in her voice, "talking like this to somebody who's been doing this since she was ten, like I can tell you anything you don't already know." She gives a rueful shake of her head, but she's not annoyed or upset, just a little abashed. "Oh, um. Do you think? Because, that would be amazingly cool and helpful of you, if you think it'd work."
"Hey, sometimes that means I still think about it like a ten year old," Jean points out with a grin. "Besides, experience isn't everything. But yeah, I'd love to show you a little. See how it works for you." She tips her chin toward the piece of rubble Avril was shifting before she showed up. "Uh, the weird part, though. Do you mind if I, ah…peek in your mind while you're doing it? It helps me see how you're thinking of it and seeing it, and it helps me show you how I think of it. Sort of in-brain translation."
"We should all be able to do that," Avril says, rather cheerfully (meaning, think like a ten-year-old, presumably). She listens closely to Jean's suggestion, and is a little surprised: "You can do that? Very cool. Um … sure? I'd say 'there's probably a lot of stuff in my head that I don't consciously know about' but if you look into people's minds then you probably don't need anyone to tell you /that/. So — go ahead? Just say when." Evidently she's already feeling trusting, or else she's just not very good at defending herself mentally, since she's more-or-less open.
"Good news, you are a sentient being," Jean winks at the warning. "You've got no idea what rolls around in people's heads. Trust me, it's better that way." She pauses to focus for a moment, then there's just a sense in the back of Avril's mind. Sort of like when you know you're sitting on a couch with someone. Just sharing a space.
< Tada! > comes an amused though, accompanied by a crooked smile as Jean eyes the rubble. "Okay, so just…go ahead and do your thing."
Avril can't help but laugh. "My Mom will be so thrilled. She always hoped I'd grow up to be sentient," she says. Once Jean's mental presence is in her head, she keeps glancing sidelong to her left or her right like she's trying to catch sight of something. "That is the weirdest feeling," she says, "and, I mean, I've already seen some pretty weird things even in just a couple of months." Shaking her head to clear it, she turns back toward the rubble she was working on earlier …
Oh! Those weird wristbands aren't just decorative; her mind's telling them to do something and then there's a sort of yellow-gold wedge pushing at a five-hundred-pound chunk of sidewalk. She's trying to slide it slowly along the devastated street, but she comes across, psychically, like someone trying to eat a salad while wearing boxing gloves.
"Huh." That sense of observation lingers in the back of Avril's mind as Jean listens in on the exercise. "Yeah. The golf ball thing was a good analogy," she muses. "Okay, so I want you to try to focus on the stone itself, more than the wedge. Thing about how it would feel against your hands, about the way your muscles would work if it was something you were pushing yourself."
As she speaks, Jean lets her own senses - admittedly a bit different in origin - wrap around the chunk of sidewalk, sharing the impressions she picks up from it. Even that is different. In the background of those senses is this vague awareness of every molecule, down to the atomic structure. And yet, it's almost as though she's purposefully not paying attention to those things. Like they're background noise.
The puzzlement in Avril's voice is echoed in her thoughts, which are all over the place. "Okay, I'll give that a try," she says, although her uncertainty as to how to do that exactly would be easy for even a nontelepath to pick up on.
Her first attempt is a complete failure: she's so focused on the stone she can't maintain enough concentration on the wedge to even keep it in existence. The experience makes her grimace, but, patiently, she tries again. "I can feel it," she says; "is that you? It feels so … /there/. So present. That's really strange." And distracting, apparently. "Like /this/?"
"Yeah, that's me. Sorry," Jean chuckles ruefully, pulling back on her perception of the stone. "That's more how it works for me. But you've got a sort of…second-hand thing going on," she muses. "Like chopsticks. Or the golf ball. Hmm." Keeping a lighter touch on her own perceptions, she gently nudges a little more of Avril's attention into the construct, more specifically into the surfaces coming into contact with the sidewalk. "Let's try a little bit of that…"
"No, no! Don't be sorry!" Avril says hastily (accompanied by a rush of recriminations and self-criticism inside her head, of course; be nicer! She's trying to help you, there's no call to make her feel like she needs to apologize!) "I'm the one who should be sorry, if anyone should. I guess I just don't really have any other way of handling it to compare to," she adds, apologetically.
The shift in her perception is — a little disorienting. She sways on her feet for just a moment before regaining her balance. "Okay, /that/ is … trippy. Excuse the phrasing. Oh, wow. Now I'm a little worried I'm going to break my shoulder when I push on it. But it's not /me/ pushing on it. It's not me pushing on it," she repeats, trying to convince herself. All the same, when she does push, it's … with trepidation.
"You aren't doing the pushing at all, I think," Jean muses, stepping forward to tap a finger at one of the bands. "Any more than when you turn on the water in the shower, you're pushing the water through the pipes. Whatever you're doing, it seems like it's coming through these things. All you have to do is tell it what to do."
She tilts her head slightly, pulling back just a little to where she's just watching. "Actually, try thinking of it that way. You've got water coming through those bands like it's coming out of a showerhead. Your ramp there is just like if you put your hand under the water to guide a stream right down the drain. You're not making the water fall, you're not pushing. You're just…letting it move through you."
This is an insight that, obvious as it may seem, has evidently not occurred to Avril previously. "You mean it's like I'm turning the faucet on and then trying to speed up or slow down the water flow with my hands," she asks, "instead of just … turning the faucet up or down instead?" A slow nod. "Okay, sure. That … makes sense. It's a little scary to think about but it makes sense, in the metaphor at least."
She's not quite sure how to go about this, and she's also not quite sure it's a good idea, so her initial attempt ends up being a tiny, tiny little push that would barely move a dust molecule, much less a chunk of pavement. It'll take a lot of practice to get to a point where she can reliably get as much or as little as she wants, that's for sure.
Jean doesn't press this time, though a faint smile touches one corner of her lips. "Remember, you're safe to try here," she offers. "And if it makes you feel better…" Holding out a hand, she lifts a block of cement the size of a car, then two more alongside of it. "If you go too hard, I'm right here with you. I can catch it." Gently, she sets the blocks down. She hasn't shared the sensation of lifting them, but there's certainly no sense of strain coming through the link.
Taking a deep breath, Avril lets it out slowly, and nods, trying (with modest success) to psych herself up for this. "Safe. Right. Okay. I do feel better, actually. I just … it's /so/ easy to get this wrong, really badly wrong."
This is not the time for worry, though. This is the time for experimentation! Very, very cautiously, she directs that tiny little push at the pavement chunk, but, this time, she keeps it pushing. Her attempt at increasing it slowly, alas, is not successful, and instead she ends up propelling the asphalt toward the wall of a wrecked building at uncomfortably high speed.
"Hey, there you go!" Before the asphalt can go flying, Jean has a hold of it in turn, slowing it down and lifting it up to burn some of the momentum. "It might be a matter of shapes, too," she points out, lowering the pavement. "A wedge isn't going to give you the same sort of control you'd get from, say, a pulley."
Before she can say anything else though, there's the tell-tale buzz of a cellphone at her thigh and she groans. "Sorry. That sounds like the prints of- Yeah, no, that's way too long a story to explain. Gotta go pick up some pictures," she grins. "It was nice meeting you, Quasar," she says as she starts to back away. "Maybe I'll run into you again soon."