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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"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.

"Sometimes it's less about being alone and more about who comes through next," Jean said. "Has everyone wanted to help out? There haven't been any...uprisings or anything?"

Considering the political environment she'd come from, Jean didn't want to make any waves here in this new place. She'd been relatively protected within the school but now, exposed? What were the sentiments toward mutants in a place like this?

"Not yet, but I haven't checked in with the local temperature," she jokes, thinking that perhaps there had been some close calls, but at the same time, they also have enough peacekeeping personalities here that she's not too worried that they'll be overwhelmed with riots in the street, exactly.

"Was that why you were in Egypt? An uprising?" Peggy prods, gently.

"Yeah, something like that," Jean said. It was difficult to explain what had happened in Egypt and she didn't know if she could trust someone who wasn't there. How could she trust someone who hadn't been there, hadn't seen what she'd done with her powers?

"I think...I think we might have won? But I'm not really sure. I ended up in that fountain before there was any real resolution to the conflict and it's bothering me that I don't know."

It's another mark in the column of Peggy wondering if they've all been kidnapped here to have their effectiveness stopped (effectively), but there's really no proof or long game to establish what it is that they might be trying to prevent. Or, rather, what they might be trying to do. "Well, unless I missed one during afternoon tea, there hasn't been a revolution here to speak of," she says.

She'd have noticed because if she's honest, it would've been at least a little bit of an interesting change from the status quo.

Jean laughed at that. Afternoon tea was such a ridiculously British thing to say and weirdly, it reminded her of Charles even though he hadn't been very British at all in the time she'd known him. His house was American, he mostly had American students - the only thing British about him was himself.

Still, he was stuffy sometimes and insufferable a lot and the afternoon tea mention definitely made her think of him and think of home.

"English people really like their tea, huh? My professor is English, back home. I never really noticed a real addiction to tea or anything but he had lived in America for a long time."

"There's absolutely a lack of proper tea in the US," Peggy says, feeling quite passionate about that, which had been one of the troubles of being here for some time until tea stores had started to arrive. "Honestly, I'm not sure it's even about the tea itself, but more the ritual. When you're brought up with it as a routine in your daily life, it becomes a part of you," she says.

"Was your professor with you, in Egypt?" she asks, still trying to shed more light on what had been happening.

"Yeah, he was there." Jean worried about that, actually, because when she left Egypt and turned up in this place, he'd been disabled and crippled - his mind had reached out to her and pushed her to be the best she could but she didn't know if he was going to live or die.

"He was hurt, though. I don't know if he's going to be okay."

Peggy is still struggling with the knowledge that this place has so many unanswered questions. One of the chief amongst them that plagues her thoughts is whether or not time stops while they're here. She wants, so badly, to believe that no time at all passes. She wants to think that if she ever gets out of here, she'll return to the same moment that she'd left in.

That requires her to believe that they're somehow suspended in time. That, of all things, seems the maddest. "Well, with luck, he might come here and put your mind at rest. Not only that, but it seems the waters have a slight restorative property when you get here. I can vouch for that personally."

"Do you think it could help him walk, then?"

One of the reasons that Jean feared the professor coming here was because he couldn't walk - not only would he be without the full strength of his telepathy and telekinesis, he would also be hampered by disability. But if the fountain healed people when they came through, he'd be able to walk again, wouldn't he?

"I don't know," Peggy confesses, because her baseline is flawed in that regard. "I was injured quite severely and it healed completely when I was here, but it was already on its way," she says. "I know others, though, who have lost limbs and the water isn't regenerative in that way," she says. "So I'm not entirely sure what might happen to him."

"Is he ill? Some sort of disease?"

"He broke his spine several years ago - way before I knew him. Way before I was even alive, I think. If he uses medicine to heal it, it...the side effects aren't okay. So he doesn't and he can't walk. He's always been in a wheelchair since I've known him."

Jean only knew about the other from hearing about it from some of her teachers. It wasn't something Charles ever talked about himself, by any means.

"So I guess he'd be in one here, too."

"Yes, I don't think that water is quite the cure for a broken spine," Peggy admits, because most of the injuries she's heard about healing are the sort of blood and bruises, the kind that time would eventually do its work on, as well.

She takes a cautious look at Jean, thinking that she looks warmer, which is a good sign. "Were you studying something in particular?" This is the first time that it's struck her that they don't really have an educational system, mainly because they haven't really needed one, up until this point.

Jean shook her head. "I was finishing up with high school, more or less. It was a private school so the curriculum wasn't the same as a public school. I'm sure there were...electives and things."

Things like how to stay alive if the government tries to eliminate you weren't exactly part of a public school curriculum.

"But I wanted to go to college. I want to be a doctor."

Peggy's not entirely sure what this place can offer, though she does know that there are at least one or two medical professionals around. "Well, we don't have a university, as such, but I'm sure that someone would be willing to take you on as a practical student." The lack of books might be a hindrance, of course, unless someone were to start writing them.

Even then, as good an idea as it is, they are lacking in the supplies to do so.

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

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