6/2 - Kelsey
Emma reports that she has scanned the following people and all are now certified free of compulsions.
=XF= Administration - Chemekata Military Base
The glass and metal lobby of the building carries the 'Titan Enterprises' charade through in brushed aluminum letters set high on the wall behind the main desk. The name disappears, however, as one moves deeper into the building. The security is high, and the presence of armed guards is unmistakable.
The subfloors are heavily shielded from possibly electromagnetic attack, and it is there that communications and intelligence are centered. The hum of happy server farms is impossible to escape. The upper levels are given over to offices, meeting spaces, and classrooms. The computers are cutting edge, their screens are large, and furnishings are terrifically ergonomic.
So yes, Jean /did/ say she wouldn't let Kelsey hurt anyone. That didn't keep Kelsey from putting herself under house arrest, though. But now, having been told to meet up to have her head examined, she makes her way slowly--she doesn't really know her way around, after all--to the administration area of the base. There's a nervous energy about her, and she keeps running a hand through her red curls.
Jean has decided to go with comfort over business today, returning to a knit turtleneck sweater and a pair of dark slacks instead of a suit set, and has personally inspected the various seating options in the Administration complex to find the comfiest ones. She's left Emma and her personal chef to handle telepath snax, however, instead taking up a post near the doors to wait for Kelsey and greet her with held-out hands and a smile that's small but warm. "How are you feeling?"
Emma is already ensconced in the appointed room - one that has been made a bit less sterile with furniture and cushions and food on a tray (even if it is food she had to bring in themselves). She is tucked into a corner of a couch, sprawling with indolent grace across the length, looking bored while Jean does the meet and greet thing. Her clothing is tailored, but relatively comfortable. It is also less heat-stroke inducing than Jean's.
"Like a public menace," Kelsey says with a weak smile, giving Jean's hands a squeeze. A quick glance is directed in Emma's direction before flicking back to Jean. "Hopefully I'll feel better after today," she says with a hopeful lilt to her voice.
"I have every confidence in Emma and I being able to work together long enough to get things sorted out for you," Jean assures, with a brief touch to Kelsey's shoulder that does neat double duty as direction and an offer of human contact ahead of crazy mutant mind-mining. Of course, as this is Jean and Emma, Kelsey will then probably want to sneak out the back under clouds of low-flying snark when they're done. "Have you been able to eat anything at all?"
"Please, Jean. /Darling/. You'll scare the woman." Emma swings her legs off the couch and rises to saunter closer to the pair. Mischief and smug arrogance percolate cheerfully under her shielding as she approaches to dangle a hand off Jean's shoulder and smile at Kelsey. "You make it sound as if we've never worked /together/ before." There is the slightest pressure on the word 'together', opening the door to so many possibilities.
"A wee bit," Kelsey tells Jean, following her direction toward one of the sofas. An eyebrow is cocked at the two other women, but she just takes a seat instead of commenting. Let's get this over with. "I'll be happier when my brain is back tae normal."
"Just setting realistic expectations for your attention span, Emma dear," Jean offers in turn with an arch look. She motions Kelsey over to a chair, claims one for herself, and allows more usefully that "I may have gotten a clue for the timeframe that this was implanted in last night -- apparently you ended up separated from your group temporarily while exploring the abandoned mine looking for Kitty, Kelsey?"
"I suppose you will just have work to keep my interest then," Emma purrs, pushing away from Jean and dropping into a chair of her own. While Jean talks, Emma drops her shields and extends her powers like a mushroom cloud expanding to envelop everything in it's blast radius. She slides over Kelsey's mind, orienting herself a bit to it and looking for Jean's prior fingerprints.
Kelsey glances between the two before settling down, closing her eyes, and trying to relax. "Aye, just for a second. Though I saw something, but turned out tae be nothing." Her own memory of the event is as she describes, and seems relatively harmless. Somewhere deeper, though, unknown to Kelsey, there's the knowledge of what actually happened.
"Maybe a reward system," Jean murmurs, as she lets slip her own shields and lets her mind drift over to converge on and around Kelsey's like campfire smoke. One tendril shoves a few amused images of some of the prettier male agents in Emma's direction, before she pulls her attention back to the task at hand. (What? She has -eyes-.) For Kelsey's benefit, she speaks at least partially aloud. "I left a little flag near the site of the knot," she says, as her mind flashes up what Emma should be looking for. "Take a look at the thing yourself and give me your impressions, if you care to."
Emma considers the images with tolerant dismissal and turns her attention to the task at hand. She is less careful in how she approaches the land marked knot than Jean, more bulldozer than eel. A few days of mucking around in people's minds has eaten at patience, if not skill, so by the time she's slid into Kelsey's mind and traveled past conscious awareness into the lower, subconscious reaches, she has left a bit of memories churned up and floating in her wake. Bits and pieces, really, and a sense that Kelsey is not alone. Emma slows in front of the flag and stretches her mind like a cat warily circling a rat. "Mm. It's not /quite/ like the others..." she murmurs aloud, leaning her elbow on the chair arm and pressing her fingertip to her lips in thought. "There's more than one signature here."
There's a bit of discomfort at the mess of memories Emma leaves in her wake. With so much crap having happened to her brain while in Colorado, it's still unnerving to have /anyone/ in her head, even if it's someone trying to help. But she takes a deep breath, doing her best to relax. Great. More than one person had their hand in her brain. Wonderful.
"For one," says Jean with a grim smile and absent eyes as she looks with other senses than sight. "It's still intact. But I see what you mean -- they're entangled, and a lot more tightly than they should be if it was two individuals working together." There's a pause, as she views the knot from another mental angle, and a smoke-tendril reaches out to poke at the knot. << Simply tearing it apart it would be a poor idea, I feel... look at the number of connections. >>
<< It is rather like one of those tacky little balls made out of rubberbands, >> Emma muses as she slides a surprisingly gentle finger in under one of the strands and lifts it. It is merged in places houwever, and pulling one, picks up another, which slides under another, tangling and holding the unit together. "One of us will need to holds the strands while the other separates."
"This is all verra reassurin'," Kelsey mumbles, her mind flittering about nervously. It keeps brushing on the night of the confrontation with Jeff, particularly her shooting of Percy and Walter, the memories laced with guilt and anxiety over how safe she actually is currently.
"Just talking shop," Jean answers Kelsey, but does offer some useful direction of "If you could keep your mind focused on what happened in the mine, it might help bring this a little nearer to the surface." Silently, she considers the ball, a whiff of dry approval escaping at Emma's metaphor. << Holding will take more strength and separating more finesse. Which do you prefer? >>
<< We may need to exchange roles at some point, but since I am already holding this one, why don't you go ahead and snip there? I'll handle the excess as you free it. >> Emma lowers her lashes over bright and sharp blue eyes, veiling them so she can observe Kelsey discretely as they work.
Kelsey's jaw tightens for a moment as she directs her mind to that day in the mine, searching for Kitty. She tries to focus on that moment of leaving the group, even if, to her, nothing happened during that time.
"We're starting now," Jean thinks to inform the flatscan in the room, as on another level smoke solidifies into a scalpel's blade of molecular thinness, "Let us know if you experience any odd sensations, all right?" With the lightest of pressures, the thought-scalpel flicks, parting the first tangle with its touch.
Emma eases the edge of the strand under another, so that the line plays out more until it reaches another point where it had simply merged rather than tangled. As she works, she wraps the tail end almost absentmindedly around her 'hand'. She doe snot notice the subtly increasing pressure it is exerting there.
Kelsey's hands grip the seat of the sofa by her legs, fingers digging into the cushions. She doesn't protest aloud, but a sense of anxiety is quickly increasing.
Time passes. Caught up in her seeking and her snipping, trusting Emma to mind her own half of the task, Jean doesn't notice the subtle tightening either. More and more threads are passed along, like carefully snipping a mat loose from a long-haired dog that's gotten into a patch of burrs. A telepathic << ? >> is floated Emma-wards in a status check: need a switch?
<< Can you focus on one thread at a time? >> Emma snips after the fifteenth thread end is passed back. Her hands are a little full, and she's starting to tangle on /her/ end. She shuffles thread ends and winces as she realizes that the earlier threads have tightened considerably around her telepathic hand, glomming on in blind instinct to something almost familiar to them. << Oh, /shit/ >> she gasps, realizing that the sticky threads are not sliding off easily.
There are little winces inside Kelsey's head as the mass is picked apart. Panic is rising in one area, a sense of self-preservation, enough to actually make her audibly say, "Stop." But it's followed up fairly quickly with some mental steeling and a quick, "Fuck. No. Dinnae stop. Sorry."
<< ...crap. >> Jean has the decency not to say aloud, as she looks from Kelsey's mind to Emma's mental hands with more than a hint of dismay and an underpinning of frustration at Jeffs and their Shadows. "So damn' sick of him..." escapes, along with a look down at their twitchy experimental subject. "We'll go a little easier for a bit, Kelsey," she assures, before returning to study the problem of the stuck Emma. << Maybe cutting from both ends...? >> she ventures, and spares a flicker of thought to try and dice at one of the clinging threads.
Scalpel? We don' need no stinkin' scalpels! Emma goes for something a bit more brute force and starts to beat her hand against the 'floor' of Kelsey's mind. It's not the most pleasant sensation, but it does the trick. Mostly. The strands relax and slide off her hand to puddle at their feet. << We need some way of destroying these, >> Emma says, lightly panting as she looks down at them, then slants a suggestive glance at Jean. << Jean, darling... you are the telepathic lighter, aren't you? >>
<< Freezing often works too, >> Jean points out, with a fine sense of timing for a pun. But a mental glower is spared for the sticky puddle, and a cleansing flame kindles in the midst of them. It's only in Jean's mind that something screams... right?
Actually... Emma looks a little sickened by the melty-puddle and hands off the remaining handfuls of mental threads to Jean. The ball is a emaciated version of it's former self. They have made progress!
Left with a handful of evil, Jean opts for the simple expedient of shifting herself rather than the mindscape, flames flaring along her hands in a representation of psychic destruction that's less prosaic than the perfectly serviceable imagery of a paper shredder would be. << It's coming down in size nicely. I'm looking forward to her being able to tell us what it -was-. >>
Kelsey starts trembling when Emma begins using brute force, the panic in that mess of tangles rising and causing panic in Kelsey's own healthy brain. Her breathing quickens, taking in rapid, deep breaths that put her close to hyperventilating.
Emma pulls out a diamond envelope opener, since we're stuck on dramatic office supplies. She picks at the ball, preferring to unroll as much of a single thread as possible at a time rather than slicing and dicing a number of thread. It is slower, but much easier to manage on the tail end. Suddenly, she stiffens and directs her attention elsewhere in Kelsey's mind. "We're nearly there, darling," she soothes, trying to overlay empathic calm over the compulsion's instinct. << If we go further without controlling her, this may drive her to harm herself, >> Emma reports in clear, clipped communication to Jean. << If the ends are manageable, perhaps you could leave them and tend to holding /her/ together. I can make quick work of the core. >>
<< On it. >> is Jean's response, quick and affirmative, and waiting only to dispose of the last threads sticking to her before she pulls mostly out of the mindspace and back into the real world, keeping tabs on Emma's progress, but leaving herself more aware of Kelsey as she slips over to take a seat beside the younger woman, and hold out her hands to take hers. "Breathe with me," she encourages quietly. "This is the compulsion talking, it's not you."
There's some comfort in Jean's support, and Kelsey immediately latches onto her hand. With a large amount of it destroyed, Kelsey's ability to fight the compulsions in her head have gone from nonexistent to moderately able. She tries to calm her breathing to match Jean's, but some part of her mind starts talking. "Ye're ruining it." Her voice is low, almost rough. There's a visible struggle going on within the woman. "Keep going," she finally manages.
Emma waits until Kelsey's control reasserts itself, then covers the core with a shield that shimmers faintly on the mindscape. Freezing indeed. Whatever it is that is left inside batters in a sudden frenzy as it is cut off from the support of Kelsey's own mind, and slowly starves, withering away to lifelessness.
There's an audible sigh from Jean as the lingering shred of compulsion is trapped and severed, a whooshing noise as tension downregulates, and her grip on Kelsey's hand becomes less of a cling and more of a support. Her free hand goes to see about finding a sugary drink to press on Emma once she's done freezing. "How do you feel?"
There's a tightness in Kelsey's body as the last of the compulsion dies inside her brain, an anxious waiting more than any sort of pain. For the first time since shooting her teammates, she relaxes, opens her eyes. "Different," she says. "Better."
Emma extracts herself somewhat more gingerly than she had entered. She opens her eyes, lashes sticking together for a second, and sits back in her chair to dangle limply. Limply, but elegantly, of course. "That was nasty," she observes breathlessly.
"I really," says Jean, offering over a glass of juice once she frees her hand from Kelsey, "-Really- hate that thing." Not having taken the endgame, she is marginally less limp than Emma, but a bone deep case of the shakes despite her turtleneck speaks to crashed blood sugar and a long fight -- her own glass of juice is not far behind. "Can you tell us what happened now, Kelsey?" she quizzes, opting for diagnostic techniques that only involve listening and thinking.
Kelsey takes a long drink of the juice, her own shakes starting to subside. "I was in the mine," she begins, searching through the new memories she's been given, "looking for Kitty with the others. An' I just...got the urge to leave down this passage. Jeff was there, an'...I think Sid." The corners of her eyes crease as her brow dips down, the memories almost confusing. "I didnae want tae leave when I found him. He grabbed me, started diggin' in my head." She closes her eyes, trying to sort it. "I was supposed to mess up the mission. Any way how."
Emma looks at Jean and raises her eyebrows. Her glass is half gone, so that when she lifts her hand to examine her nails, it hardly trembles. "He is a formidable telepathic enemy."
Jean curls herself around her juice once she retakes her seat, settled sideways and with her legs drawn up to rest the glass on her knees. "And more than capable of subtlety while exercising that power," she agrees with Emma. (Outside, pigs begin to fly.) "Anyone among your fellow agents here who's familiar with him -- and there are at least two I can think of -- will understand very well that your actions weren't your own."
Kelsey curls her knees up to her chest, sipping juice as she goes through her memories, trying to figure out what parts of her behavior were abnormal. "I dinnae think the people I really screwed over are the ones who're familiar with him," she says.
Emma sets her empty glass on the floor by her feet and rises, mostly steadily. She presses fingers against her temple and exhales a thin breath. "Tell them to talk to the ones who don't snivel about it," she says waspishly. No one ever said Emma was good for sympathy. She is, however, good at practical. She crosses to the door without a further word, comforting or otherwise.
"I would have phrased that a little more delicately," says Jean dryly from over her juice, in the wake of Emma exits. "But the core advice is sound -- even if I think you're entitled to snivel a bit if you damned well want to. Explain what happened, and if they have questions or don't believe you, Bahir al-Razi and Tom Sikorski will know what they're talking about." She lingers where Emma doesn't, possessed of ties to Kelsey that Emma lacks to keep her lingering impractically in the face of a growing headache.
Kelsey is fixed.
Emma gives Illyana advice. Emma's advice is always suspect.
- Bahir
- Kelsey
- Illyana
- Anyone else who wants to have been off-cammed. (It'd be nice if you would leave your name in a comment.)
=XF= Administration - Chemekata Military Base
The glass and metal lobby of the building carries the 'Titan Enterprises' charade through in brushed aluminum letters set high on the wall behind the main desk. The name disappears, however, as one moves deeper into the building. The security is high, and the presence of armed guards is unmistakable.
The subfloors are heavily shielded from possibly electromagnetic attack, and it is there that communications and intelligence are centered. The hum of happy server farms is impossible to escape. The upper levels are given over to offices, meeting spaces, and classrooms. The computers are cutting edge, their screens are large, and furnishings are terrifically ergonomic.
So yes, Jean /did/ say she wouldn't let Kelsey hurt anyone. That didn't keep Kelsey from putting herself under house arrest, though. But now, having been told to meet up to have her head examined, she makes her way slowly--she doesn't really know her way around, after all--to the administration area of the base. There's a nervous energy about her, and she keeps running a hand through her red curls.
Jean has decided to go with comfort over business today, returning to a knit turtleneck sweater and a pair of dark slacks instead of a suit set, and has personally inspected the various seating options in the Administration complex to find the comfiest ones. She's left Emma and her personal chef to handle telepath snax, however, instead taking up a post near the doors to wait for Kelsey and greet her with held-out hands and a smile that's small but warm. "How are you feeling?"
Emma is already ensconced in the appointed room - one that has been made a bit less sterile with furniture and cushions and food on a tray (even if it is food she had to bring in themselves). She is tucked into a corner of a couch, sprawling with indolent grace across the length, looking bored while Jean does the meet and greet thing. Her clothing is tailored, but relatively comfortable. It is also less heat-stroke inducing than Jean's.
"Like a public menace," Kelsey says with a weak smile, giving Jean's hands a squeeze. A quick glance is directed in Emma's direction before flicking back to Jean. "Hopefully I'll feel better after today," she says with a hopeful lilt to her voice.
"I have every confidence in Emma and I being able to work together long enough to get things sorted out for you," Jean assures, with a brief touch to Kelsey's shoulder that does neat double duty as direction and an offer of human contact ahead of crazy mutant mind-mining. Of course, as this is Jean and Emma, Kelsey will then probably want to sneak out the back under clouds of low-flying snark when they're done. "Have you been able to eat anything at all?"
"Please, Jean. /Darling/. You'll scare the woman." Emma swings her legs off the couch and rises to saunter closer to the pair. Mischief and smug arrogance percolate cheerfully under her shielding as she approaches to dangle a hand off Jean's shoulder and smile at Kelsey. "You make it sound as if we've never worked /together/ before." There is the slightest pressure on the word 'together', opening the door to so many possibilities.
"A wee bit," Kelsey tells Jean, following her direction toward one of the sofas. An eyebrow is cocked at the two other women, but she just takes a seat instead of commenting. Let's get this over with. "I'll be happier when my brain is back tae normal."
"Just setting realistic expectations for your attention span, Emma dear," Jean offers in turn with an arch look. She motions Kelsey over to a chair, claims one for herself, and allows more usefully that "I may have gotten a clue for the timeframe that this was implanted in last night -- apparently you ended up separated from your group temporarily while exploring the abandoned mine looking for Kitty, Kelsey?"
"I suppose you will just have work to keep my interest then," Emma purrs, pushing away from Jean and dropping into a chair of her own. While Jean talks, Emma drops her shields and extends her powers like a mushroom cloud expanding to envelop everything in it's blast radius. She slides over Kelsey's mind, orienting herself a bit to it and looking for Jean's prior fingerprints.
Kelsey glances between the two before settling down, closing her eyes, and trying to relax. "Aye, just for a second. Though I saw something, but turned out tae be nothing." Her own memory of the event is as she describes, and seems relatively harmless. Somewhere deeper, though, unknown to Kelsey, there's the knowledge of what actually happened.
"Maybe a reward system," Jean murmurs, as she lets slip her own shields and lets her mind drift over to converge on and around Kelsey's like campfire smoke. One tendril shoves a few amused images of some of the prettier male agents in Emma's direction, before she pulls her attention back to the task at hand. (What? She has -eyes-.) For Kelsey's benefit, she speaks at least partially aloud. "I left a little flag near the site of the knot," she says, as her mind flashes up what Emma should be looking for. "Take a look at the thing yourself and give me your impressions, if you care to."
Emma considers the images with tolerant dismissal and turns her attention to the task at hand. She is less careful in how she approaches the land marked knot than Jean, more bulldozer than eel. A few days of mucking around in people's minds has eaten at patience, if not skill, so by the time she's slid into Kelsey's mind and traveled past conscious awareness into the lower, subconscious reaches, she has left a bit of memories churned up and floating in her wake. Bits and pieces, really, and a sense that Kelsey is not alone. Emma slows in front of the flag and stretches her mind like a cat warily circling a rat. "Mm. It's not /quite/ like the others..." she murmurs aloud, leaning her elbow on the chair arm and pressing her fingertip to her lips in thought. "There's more than one signature here."
There's a bit of discomfort at the mess of memories Emma leaves in her wake. With so much crap having happened to her brain while in Colorado, it's still unnerving to have /anyone/ in her head, even if it's someone trying to help. But she takes a deep breath, doing her best to relax. Great. More than one person had their hand in her brain. Wonderful.
"For one," says Jean with a grim smile and absent eyes as she looks with other senses than sight. "It's still intact. But I see what you mean -- they're entangled, and a lot more tightly than they should be if it was two individuals working together." There's a pause, as she views the knot from another mental angle, and a smoke-tendril reaches out to poke at the knot. << Simply tearing it apart it would be a poor idea, I feel... look at the number of connections. >>
<< It is rather like one of those tacky little balls made out of rubberbands, >> Emma muses as she slides a surprisingly gentle finger in under one of the strands and lifts it. It is merged in places houwever, and pulling one, picks up another, which slides under another, tangling and holding the unit together. "One of us will need to holds the strands while the other separates."
"This is all verra reassurin'," Kelsey mumbles, her mind flittering about nervously. It keeps brushing on the night of the confrontation with Jeff, particularly her shooting of Percy and Walter, the memories laced with guilt and anxiety over how safe she actually is currently.
"Just talking shop," Jean answers Kelsey, but does offer some useful direction of "If you could keep your mind focused on what happened in the mine, it might help bring this a little nearer to the surface." Silently, she considers the ball, a whiff of dry approval escaping at Emma's metaphor. << Holding will take more strength and separating more finesse. Which do you prefer? >>
<< We may need to exchange roles at some point, but since I am already holding this one, why don't you go ahead and snip there? I'll handle the excess as you free it. >> Emma lowers her lashes over bright and sharp blue eyes, veiling them so she can observe Kelsey discretely as they work.
Kelsey's jaw tightens for a moment as she directs her mind to that day in the mine, searching for Kitty. She tries to focus on that moment of leaving the group, even if, to her, nothing happened during that time.
"We're starting now," Jean thinks to inform the flatscan in the room, as on another level smoke solidifies into a scalpel's blade of molecular thinness, "Let us know if you experience any odd sensations, all right?" With the lightest of pressures, the thought-scalpel flicks, parting the first tangle with its touch.
Emma eases the edge of the strand under another, so that the line plays out more until it reaches another point where it had simply merged rather than tangled. As she works, she wraps the tail end almost absentmindedly around her 'hand'. She doe snot notice the subtly increasing pressure it is exerting there.
Kelsey's hands grip the seat of the sofa by her legs, fingers digging into the cushions. She doesn't protest aloud, but a sense of anxiety is quickly increasing.
Time passes. Caught up in her seeking and her snipping, trusting Emma to mind her own half of the task, Jean doesn't notice the subtle tightening either. More and more threads are passed along, like carefully snipping a mat loose from a long-haired dog that's gotten into a patch of burrs. A telepathic << ? >> is floated Emma-wards in a status check: need a switch?
<< Can you focus on one thread at a time? >> Emma snips after the fifteenth thread end is passed back. Her hands are a little full, and she's starting to tangle on /her/ end. She shuffles thread ends and winces as she realizes that the earlier threads have tightened considerably around her telepathic hand, glomming on in blind instinct to something almost familiar to them. << Oh, /shit/ >> she gasps, realizing that the sticky threads are not sliding off easily.
There are little winces inside Kelsey's head as the mass is picked apart. Panic is rising in one area, a sense of self-preservation, enough to actually make her audibly say, "Stop." But it's followed up fairly quickly with some mental steeling and a quick, "Fuck. No. Dinnae stop. Sorry."
<< ...crap. >> Jean has the decency not to say aloud, as she looks from Kelsey's mind to Emma's mental hands with more than a hint of dismay and an underpinning of frustration at Jeffs and their Shadows. "So damn' sick of him..." escapes, along with a look down at their twitchy experimental subject. "We'll go a little easier for a bit, Kelsey," she assures, before returning to study the problem of the stuck Emma. << Maybe cutting from both ends...? >> she ventures, and spares a flicker of thought to try and dice at one of the clinging threads.
Scalpel? We don' need no stinkin' scalpels! Emma goes for something a bit more brute force and starts to beat her hand against the 'floor' of Kelsey's mind. It's not the most pleasant sensation, but it does the trick. Mostly. The strands relax and slide off her hand to puddle at their feet. << We need some way of destroying these, >> Emma says, lightly panting as she looks down at them, then slants a suggestive glance at Jean. << Jean, darling... you are the telepathic lighter, aren't you? >>
<< Freezing often works too, >> Jean points out, with a fine sense of timing for a pun. But a mental glower is spared for the sticky puddle, and a cleansing flame kindles in the midst of them. It's only in Jean's mind that something screams... right?
Actually... Emma looks a little sickened by the melty-puddle and hands off the remaining handfuls of mental threads to Jean. The ball is a emaciated version of it's former self. They have made progress!
Left with a handful of evil, Jean opts for the simple expedient of shifting herself rather than the mindscape, flames flaring along her hands in a representation of psychic destruction that's less prosaic than the perfectly serviceable imagery of a paper shredder would be. << It's coming down in size nicely. I'm looking forward to her being able to tell us what it -was-. >>
Kelsey starts trembling when Emma begins using brute force, the panic in that mess of tangles rising and causing panic in Kelsey's own healthy brain. Her breathing quickens, taking in rapid, deep breaths that put her close to hyperventilating.
Emma pulls out a diamond envelope opener, since we're stuck on dramatic office supplies. She picks at the ball, preferring to unroll as much of a single thread as possible at a time rather than slicing and dicing a number of thread. It is slower, but much easier to manage on the tail end. Suddenly, she stiffens and directs her attention elsewhere in Kelsey's mind. "We're nearly there, darling," she soothes, trying to overlay empathic calm over the compulsion's instinct. << If we go further without controlling her, this may drive her to harm herself, >> Emma reports in clear, clipped communication to Jean. << If the ends are manageable, perhaps you could leave them and tend to holding /her/ together. I can make quick work of the core. >>
<< On it. >> is Jean's response, quick and affirmative, and waiting only to dispose of the last threads sticking to her before she pulls mostly out of the mindspace and back into the real world, keeping tabs on Emma's progress, but leaving herself more aware of Kelsey as she slips over to take a seat beside the younger woman, and hold out her hands to take hers. "Breathe with me," she encourages quietly. "This is the compulsion talking, it's not you."
There's some comfort in Jean's support, and Kelsey immediately latches onto her hand. With a large amount of it destroyed, Kelsey's ability to fight the compulsions in her head have gone from nonexistent to moderately able. She tries to calm her breathing to match Jean's, but some part of her mind starts talking. "Ye're ruining it." Her voice is low, almost rough. There's a visible struggle going on within the woman. "Keep going," she finally manages.
Emma waits until Kelsey's control reasserts itself, then covers the core with a shield that shimmers faintly on the mindscape. Freezing indeed. Whatever it is that is left inside batters in a sudden frenzy as it is cut off from the support of Kelsey's own mind, and slowly starves, withering away to lifelessness.
There's an audible sigh from Jean as the lingering shred of compulsion is trapped and severed, a whooshing noise as tension downregulates, and her grip on Kelsey's hand becomes less of a cling and more of a support. Her free hand goes to see about finding a sugary drink to press on Emma once she's done freezing. "How do you feel?"
There's a tightness in Kelsey's body as the last of the compulsion dies inside her brain, an anxious waiting more than any sort of pain. For the first time since shooting her teammates, she relaxes, opens her eyes. "Different," she says. "Better."
Emma extracts herself somewhat more gingerly than she had entered. She opens her eyes, lashes sticking together for a second, and sits back in her chair to dangle limply. Limply, but elegantly, of course. "That was nasty," she observes breathlessly.
"I really," says Jean, offering over a glass of juice once she frees her hand from Kelsey, "-Really- hate that thing." Not having taken the endgame, she is marginally less limp than Emma, but a bone deep case of the shakes despite her turtleneck speaks to crashed blood sugar and a long fight -- her own glass of juice is not far behind. "Can you tell us what happened now, Kelsey?" she quizzes, opting for diagnostic techniques that only involve listening and thinking.
Kelsey takes a long drink of the juice, her own shakes starting to subside. "I was in the mine," she begins, searching through the new memories she's been given, "looking for Kitty with the others. An' I just...got the urge to leave down this passage. Jeff was there, an'...I think Sid." The corners of her eyes crease as her brow dips down, the memories almost confusing. "I didnae want tae leave when I found him. He grabbed me, started diggin' in my head." She closes her eyes, trying to sort it. "I was supposed to mess up the mission. Any way how."
Emma looks at Jean and raises her eyebrows. Her glass is half gone, so that when she lifts her hand to examine her nails, it hardly trembles. "He is a formidable telepathic enemy."
Jean curls herself around her juice once she retakes her seat, settled sideways and with her legs drawn up to rest the glass on her knees. "And more than capable of subtlety while exercising that power," she agrees with Emma. (Outside, pigs begin to fly.) "Anyone among your fellow agents here who's familiar with him -- and there are at least two I can think of -- will understand very well that your actions weren't your own."
Kelsey curls her knees up to her chest, sipping juice as she goes through her memories, trying to figure out what parts of her behavior were abnormal. "I dinnae think the people I really screwed over are the ones who're familiar with him," she says.
Emma sets her empty glass on the floor by her feet and rises, mostly steadily. She presses fingers against her temple and exhales a thin breath. "Tell them to talk to the ones who don't snivel about it," she says waspishly. No one ever said Emma was good for sympathy. She is, however, good at practical. She crosses to the door without a further word, comforting or otherwise.
"I would have phrased that a little more delicately," says Jean dryly from over her juice, in the wake of Emma exits. "But the core advice is sound -- even if I think you're entitled to snivel a bit if you damned well want to. Explain what happened, and if they have questions or don't believe you, Bahir al-Razi and Tom Sikorski will know what they're talking about." She lingers where Emma doesn't, possessed of ties to Kelsey that Emma lacks to keep her lingering impractically in the face of a growing headache.
Kelsey is fixed.
Emma gives Illyana advice. Emma's advice is always suspect.