sixthiterationlogs | i've fallen out of favour and i've fallen from grace

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i've fallen out of favour and i've fallen from grace

WHO: Jean Grey
WHERE: The fountain, the village roads
WHEN: 2 December
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: Jean is a telepath - her powers are diminished but she can feel strong emotions and loud thoughts/surface thoughts. If there's something you would like her to pick up in specific, let me know on Plurk. She also has the ice power, so as she's coming out of the fountain she is freezing things around her. This isn't normally what happens in the fountain and she's not freezing over the surface of the fountain itself, just the lip of it.
STATUS: Open to new threads.

Everything was black. It was black and cold, bone chillingly cold, and Jean couldn't understand why she felt like she was being pushed upward through a passage when she'd just been in Egypt where the heat was dry and hot. None of it made sense, really, but did anything make sense lately? There were people out to kill them because they were mutants, there were mutants out to kill them because they weren't the right kind of mutants. Down was up and up was down and she was currently swimming in an abyss she didn't recognize.

She reached out with her mind first. Charles had always said that her mind was her greatest gift and her finest asset and not feeling him, not feeling that familiar answer back shook her to the core; had he died? He'd been there. He'd told her to unleash her full power, to fight back, to be everything she was capable of and to stop restraining herself from fear in order to save them all. Why wasn't he answering? She tried again, harder, and then out loud. Surely he'd hear her if he screamed, wouldn't he, even if he couldn't hear her in his head?

"Charles!" she screamed, choking down water in exchange for her troubles. She scrabbled up through the water and bumped up against what felt like solid rock and then, only then, did she chance opening her eyes. It was a fountain, similar to a fountain at a school or a museum, and she had no idea why she'd be half-drowning in a fountain with snow on the ground when she'd just been in Egypt with hot, dry air swirling around her and searing her lungs.

"Charles! Professor! Charles, please!" she screamed again, fingers slipping on the edge of the fountain. She kept trying to clear the snow away but there was more and more, almost as if her efforts to get rid of it were multiplying it instead. What was happening? How was this happening? She'd always been a telepath, had always had this ability and this gift? How was she suddenly locked away from hearing anything but a low, faint buzz and making snow pile up beneath her fingertips?

"Answer me! Someone! Anyone!?"

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"Well, you're certainly not at home," is Peggy's first reply, tugging at the door to the inn to haul herself in, desperately trying to get towards the heat. She feels her fingers going numb and so when she puts them near to the fire, they sharply hurt. It's that pain that makes her turn to the woman, eyeing her warily, recalling how Karen had been able to create fire from her fingertips. "Are you normally so cold?" she asks, knowing that the poor girl is probably overwhelmed, but she feels like getting to the matter as quickly as possible seems to be the best plan of action.

Between the fountain, Peggy's pain, and the girls' surprise about the cold, she has to believe that something strange is afoot.

Jean shook her head. Now that she was inside, everything began to warm up a little and her fingers, while still frozen to the bone, seemed to be the only thing that weren't catching up to the rest of her body. It was strange but she knew that some mutants developed a secondary mutation. What if this was hers? What if ice was her secondary mutation?

"No, I'm not. I've never experienced anything like this before." Jean crossed over toward the fire, turning her palms out toward it. As she did, the fire seemed to bend away from her hands, almost as if they were too cold to sustain the heat. How was that even possible?

"This place seems to be quite the crash course in experiencing things that no one has, before," Peggy says ruefully, wrapping up her palms in dry towels and then sitting on them so that it feels comfortable. She exhales with mild relief when she starts to feel warmth come into the digits once more. "Though, I've never seen such a wintry arrival. Maybe the water is somehow supercharged," she says, grasping at straws. "Perhaps it's just that it will take longer for you to thaw?"

"Is it uncomfortable?" she wonders.

"A little," Jean said. At least by the fire, she could start to feel her extremities again and the fog around her brain started to recede a little. She couldn't focus in and hear any thoughts to the degree which she'd like but at least there was the matter of being able to do it at all, which she could; it was just like trying to tune in a radio with a broken antenna. It would take some doing, but she could figure it out.

More concerning was the ice power. If her secondary mutation had manifested, maybe it was affecting her primary one. It was late for her to get a second one, yes, but that wasn't something she was an expert at. She'd need to ask the professor about it, honestly, and she didn't think he was here. Even at her diminished strength, he would have heard her. He could hear non-mutants.

"Do you know where this place is?"

She's beginning to feel rather useless as far as information goes. It's not the girl's fault, but Peggy finds herself feeling terribly frustrated every single time this happens, because she's still trying to find answers for herself and doesn't have anything to offer to them. "Honestly, I don't know," she says, deciding that being blunt is the best way of approaching this. Better not to lie or offer false hope. "I can tell you that it's a small village that appears to be on the outskirts of all civilization," she shares.

"And that, once you start looking around a little, you'll notice that the technology doesn't seem to go past the last 19th century."

"Why would the technology be so behind?" That didn't make sense. Then again, a lot of things about her life in general didn't make sense and Jean had gotten somewhat used to that. Being a mutant meant that normal was abnormal and the strange, the unusual - that was your new baseline. This place was just another one to be taken in stride.

The difference, though, was that she had never been well and truly alone before. She had always been surrounded by professors and students, by peers who could do strange things even if it wasn't at her level or her type of power and not being able to even feel one other mind made her feel shunted off and isolated in a way she hadn't in years.

"Who would bring us to a place like this?"

"I don't know," Peggy confesses, because she doesn't know if there's time travel or something else at fault here, but it does seem like the only clear thing is that she's completely without answers and she absolutely detests that. It itches at her every time, and now she's being presented with another mystery before her, namely why this poor girl is so very cold.

"Theories have been thrown around," she admits, "but that's all we've managed, really. Theories and guesswork. None of it gets us out of here. Where were you from, before this?" she asks, figuring that she ought to at least contribute to her data.

"I'm from New York. Upstate, originally, but I go to school in Westchester," Jean explained. She didn't know if the school itself was common knowledge. Mutants themselves weren't exactly something that were advertised right out in public; there was still a lot of stigma even though it was a lot better than it was in the early days.

"I was in Egypt before I turned up here, though, so it shouldn't be cold like this at all. It...it should be the desert. It should be hot and dry. There's no way it should be cold like this where I was at."

It seems that New York is being quite well represented, though to what purpose, she doesn't know. "No, we're certainly not in Egypt," Peggy agrees, feeling the warmth finally back in her fingers as she reaches out to stretch them and feels comfortable, once more. "Are you feeling any warmer now?" she asks, wishing she had a watch or something else to help measure the time to properly know how much time had elapsed in the warming process.

"A little bit, finally," Jean admitted. "It seems to be taking a really long time but maybe that was because of the snow and because I was in the water for what felt like a long time. I almost drowned in there because I panicked."

She laughed, just a tiny bit awkward. "It would have been silly if I drowned in a fountain. It's such shallow water. I have been swimming since I was a kid. I know that water was cold and I wasn't prepared but I still know how to swim. It shouldn't have been a problem."

"I can assure you that some of the things you think should be as simple as anything become very complicated here," Peggy says, thinking of how the canyons continue to elude her when she's done enough recon and scout work in her life that she should have found an exit out by now. And yet, she's still stuck here and she doesn't have any leads.

"Is there any particular reason that caused you to panic? Something that you saw?" she coaxes, trying to fish for clues even now.

"I was just afraid because this isn't where I came from," Jean said. "And when I was trying to get out of the fountain, it was like ice and snow kept coming from my fingers." She almost let the words secondary mutation slip from her lips but she stopped herself before they did - that would not be something to admit to out loud in a place that she wasn't familiar with.

"I came from a place that was hot and dry and then all of a sudden I woke up in a fountain in a place that was cold and damp and overcast. I didn't know how it happened so I just started to panic. Have you ever seen anyone else panic when they arrived?"

She had panicked too, but true to her usual situations, Peggy had buried it down as deep as she could. "No one who comes here, comes here calm and assured of anything," she can guarantee the girl that. "It's a strange situation, one that none of us have a good explanation for. I'm fairly sure panic is the least of which we should expect when arriving."

"I know you've just warmed up, but maybe we should try again and see if you're still capable of creating ice," she says thoughtfully, wondering if perhaps this isn't an isolated incident.

"Do you think I can?" The idea of a secondary mutation had been in her mind since she could really think past trying to get out of that fountain but she didn't want to reveal her abilities at all to an unknown person. Still, Peggy had asked so maybe it was all right to trust her. Hmm.

"Do...other people here have abilities like that? To make ice and things of that nature?"

"I think that I have a friend who could suddenly create fire," Peggy says, thinking of Thor, "and that nothing here is what it seems. Perhaps you arrived here with a little extra skill," she offers, thinking of how panicked she would be if that were the case. The whole incident with zero matter had opened Peggy's mind to such things, but it's still an entirely different thing to imagine such powers in your hands.

"There are others with different abilities, though theirs tend to be more muted."

If there were other mutants, at least, perhaps it wasn't as dangerous for her to admit what she was as she feared. Still, admitting she was a mutant in a place that was collecting them might not be the best idea. For now, she just nodded; if the fire and ice was something other people had, she could admit to that. She would keep the rest of it to herself for right now.

"Yeah, the ice is something new. I've never been able to do that before in my life," Jean agreed. She examined her hands, looked at how blue her fingertips still were. "So I guess it has to do with this place."

"There's a great many things that are strange about this place," Peggy says with a knowing nod of her head. "I don't want to overwhelm you just now," she does admit, given that Jean had freely admitted to panicking when she'd come out of the fountain. "Perhaps you'd like to talk about it later, when you've had some time to settle in?" It doesn't even have to be with her, but Peggy isn't going to burden the poor girl with all this at the start.

If only she'd had the same option (not that she would have done any thing with it, a touch too stubborn for that).

"Yeah, that might be nice. I just...haven't been anywhere other than school in a long time. It's a big shift to somewhere new."

That was a little bit of a lie, considering she'd just gone to Egypt to help save the professor, but for right now, it was all she needed to explain. This place was new and overwhelming and it was far outside her normal world. Even if a world of mutants wasn't perceived as normal, per se, it was normal for her.

"I am sorry for getting so upset, though. That's not normally like me."

"I'd worry if you hadn't become upset," Peggy says softly, given that this is hardly a normal situation by any means. "You were just in Egypt and all of a sudden, you were thrust into the freezing water of a cold fountain with ice building up all around you. Honestly, if you hadn't panicked, that would be when I suspected that maybe something is off," she says, given that it might be evidence of something more sinister.

Her mind drifts to the Red Room and the girls it produces, thinking of how Dottie Underwood might react to climbing out of that fountain. She imagines that it would be with all the careful, cold, cunning determination as ever, yielding to no one once she was out. "I promise, later, when you're settled in, then you can be calm."

"Panic is just a way that the body tries to make you shut down, though. It's best to put it away and try to focus on logical things." That was what she'd always heard when she was learning how to focus her telepathy and it would have to ground her here without the professor or anything familiar around her.

"But yeah, I guess it is a natural reaction. Did you panic when you arrived? Even just a little?"

"Yes, of course," Peggy says, a touch surprised by the girl's calm and rational acceptance that panic is just a reaction. "When I arrived, though, there were these awful, terrible sirens," she shares. "Then a windstorm blew in and all of a sudden, I had to focus on too many things at once, least of which was the fact that I had somehow been kidnapped." Pressing her lips together, she breathes out slowly, and thinks back to that first day.

"Where my luck came in, though, was the fact that I wasn't alone. When I arrived, there were many of us," she says. "Strangely, having more people panic with you makes you panic just a little less."

"Is that normally how it happens, then? That a whole bunch of people come at once instead of just arriving alone like I did?"

Maybe Jean had come alone because she'd been a mutant. It wasn't anything Peggy had said, or anything, but Jean was trying to piece together the differences in her arrival and compare them to Peggy's so she could try to make sense of this place and how it worked. It was the only thing that made logical sense.

"It hasn't happened since," Peggy says, which is something that she also can't explain. Why did they all arrive like that, choked off at the top of the fountain, amassed together in panic. "The windstorm and the sirens, those haven't happened again either. It seems so odd, so singular, and we still don't have any reason as to why it happened."

"I'm afraid that's what this place is like," she apologizes to Jean. "It's a great deal of odd and not many answers."

"It doesn't make a lot of sense but, then again, not a lot about life does." Not Jean's life, anyway, and while she'd gotten used to the garden variety weirdness that came with being a mutant, this place was something else entirely.

"How many people are here, Peggy? Are there a lot?"

"I try and keep count, best I can. I think we're hovering close to fifty," she says, though it gets hard sometimes when she's not sure if someone has vanished or is simply away from the settlement for a long number of days. She's noticed that Frank Castle has tended to do that, but also that other man, Alvarez. It's made keeping track a little harder, but she has her own system of recalling, in case anything ever happens. "You won't be alone, if that's your worry," she promises. "Everyone is working to make sure we stay alive, that we're safe and in good health."

It might not be perfect and it might be a great deal different than home, but it's also not as bad as it could be.

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