OOC: Tess Log!
X-Men: Movieverse 2 - Sunday, January 25, 2009, 11:55 AM
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=NYC= Lobby - Shaw Research Center - New York University
Doubled sets of doors open into an atrium filled with light. The delicate webbing of brushed chrome that supports the glass seems a fragile support, yet it holds. The interior is sleekly modern, with metal, glass, dark woods and stone. Plants are lush, bordering so-carefully on untamed.
The seating is comfortable, scattered into various conversational arrangements around low chairs, with higher cafe tables and stools near a Starbucks pressed flush against one wall. The reception desk is typically manned by undergraduates, and security is tight, but discrete.
[This room is set watchable. Use alias SRCLobby to watch here.]
[Exits : [Lab] and [O]ut]
[Players : Tess ]
Weekend, what? To someone not teaching, weekends mean less, and so Tess is once again at work. She has her computer out in the lobby to avoid feeling quite so cut off and lonely inside her lab, but she's so busy that everyone's ignoring her anyway, not even really bothering to glance at her. She waves at some colleague, gets no response, and the bends her head to her laptop again, typing out notes in disconnected bursts as her mug of coffee goes cold beside her.
I don't understand that.
Weekend, what? Jean may be teaching, but she is also researching, campaigning and doctoring. Thus, 'weekend' is really just another word for 'more work can get done'. A bit bleary eyed from the drive in, she cradles a travel mug refilled with coffee in one hand, while the other rests atop an attache case worn on a crossways strap over her shoulders. Lost in her own muzzy thoughts, she doesn't notice the Tess at first either, and settles down at the next table over with nary a glance.
Tess looks up, notices the lack of interest, and then drops her head again. Sigh. She's at the end of a cycle of concentration, though, and her field starts to fade and stutter as her energy hits the bottom. She presses palms to her forehead against an immiment headache, and rummages in her bag. Sugar, sugar? There's the Snickers she left in there.
Coffee. Mmmm, coffee. The mind at the next table over begins to slowly turn over like a recalcitrant engine on a cold morning, coaxed to life with outside sources of power. With a long sigh, Jean reaches down, pulls her laptop from her bag, and stares dully at the screen as XP resumes its tasks. One hand lifts, her forehead leaned into it as thumb and index finger massage at her temples. There's a vague twitch now and again, timed to those flickers in Tess's field.
Tess sips her coffee. Ugh. Cold. Well, chocolate at least. She munches through it as her face returns mostly to normal noticability, and she gives Jean a wan smile. "Hi," she says, and then opens her email, politely not intruding on Jean's work.
Jean's coffee is hot and delicious, if overpriced as only Starbucks can do. Little wisps of pleasure rise from her like steam from the mug, tickling at nearby sensitives. "Morning," she offers in turn, the 'Good' part of the traditional greeting absent with a vengeance, if a self-deprecating one. XP chimes at her, before the laptop settles into the clicky noises of a hard drive working overtime to load startup programs. "Any luck with your research?"
"No," Tess said, some of her usual diplomacy absent in the face of her burgeoning headache. She closes her eyes for a moment. "At least--you know how these things go. No big breakthroughs." She concentrates on her food.
"All too well," Jean agrees ruefully, as her virus scanner flashes up a screen to demand updating. "I think it's even worse when you -have- had a breakthrough or two before, and then you hit a long patch of of 'now what?'." She falls silent for a few moments after that, attention transferring to her laptop screen before she conducts a careful study of Tess's face.
"All too well," Jean agrees ruefully, as her virus scanner flashes up a screen to demand updating. "I think it's even worse when you -have- had a breakthrough or two before, and then you hit a long patch of of 'now what?'." She falls silent for a few moments after that, attention transferring to her laptop screen before she conducts a careful study of Tess's face.
Tess doesn't notice the study. She takes a deep breath, letting it out to try to solve whatever 'tension' is giving her problems. "I think I've been staring at the screen for too long." She looks up again. "What are you up to?"
"Headache?" Jean wonders, with a sympathetic curve of her lips. Her computer beeps for attention regarding yet another update, and earns itself a stab of a finger on its mouse to send the alert away again. "Oh, at this point showing up early for a day's work in the al-Razi lab."
"Oh, I met Dr. al-Razi the other day," Tess say, interest perked a little. "Yeah--I dunno. This feels like a bad one again." She sighs. "Not migraines, but just--too much concentrating."
"What did you think of him?" Jean wonders, her tone kept even beyond a thread of curiosity. Curiosity drives another question, on the heels of the first, as well: "Where is the pain localized? Behind the eyes, or...?"
"Much more friendly than most of the people here. Plus--" She stops herself, well short of mentioning anything Bahir might like kept private to someone who there's still a possibility might not know. "One can alway talk shop, with colleagues." Tess fans fingertips over her temple. "Not really. Just generalized."
"Mm," Jean murmurs, and looks thoughtful. Voice lowered, she taps at her own temple and wonders "Have you been practicing much? It could be a psionic headache."
Tess wrinkles her nose at her hands. "I haven't even touched someone accidentally for a couple days." She looks up, realizing that needs clarification. "I mean--I need that. So it can't be there."
"What about shielding?" Jean wonders, shuffling herself and her laptop a little closer. "You guard yourself pretty ferociously, you know -- bad history?" (Tact? Not prying? Bah!)
Tess frowns. "I use it to make sure I don't get stuff leaking in every time I shake hands with someone," she says, slowly. "Maybe--it's all self-taught, after all. Is there a more elegant way to go about it that I've misssed?"
"I admit I haven't really studied how you shield in depth," Jean confesses, fingers interlaced together. "I could take a look now, if you wanted -- I'd just need you to throw one up where I can see it."
"I admit I haven't really studied how you shield in depth," Jean confesses, fingers interlaced together. "I could take a look now, if you wanted -- I'd just need you to throw one up where I can see it."
"Please!" Tess sits up in enthusiasum. "I would love to have someone else give me suggestions." She leans forward. "May I?" She takes Jean's hand, and then with something to shield against, she throws her own up. They're no more clunky than any other self-taught shields, but there's a whisper of that same impulse back again. Her shields are boring. Competent enough. Not worthy of notice.
Boring, routine, nothing to see-- Jean's mind screeches to a halt, as some bit of internal science geek takes umbrage at the notion that -another telepath's brain- is -boring-. She relaxes, and tries to study it again.
There's a little pain to be seen around the edges of Tess's thoughts as her head starts to pound a little, but not past the point that can just be worked through. The boring is faint, with not much to feed from, but pervasive.
A few experimental pokes try and locate the source of the boredom, but, diffuse as it is, Jean eventually ends up simply sitting back and reclaiming her hand. "Interesting," says she, as a preliminary report.
Tess lets her shields go down to their base level with a sigh of relief. "It is the shields. That was hard, maybe I have been using too much energy on them." As she lets herself relax, her field fades away down to nothing.
"Sort of-- hey, do that again!" Jean directs, attention focusing on Tess with alacrity. "You just--" 'Got a lot more interesting' is not very nice. Therefore, Jean leaves the sentence uncompleted.
"What, let my shields fall?" Tess tries to eradicate them entirely, but it's difficult, and concentration brings with it her field. She makes an effort, but then exhales a laugh, and stops trying so hard. Her shields aren't entirely gone, but she's there as her real self again--sharp planes to her face, and bright hair. Not just brown on brown.
"Not... quite," says Jean, rubbing at a temple as if this will help coax out the sense of familiarity niggling away behind it. "It's more like-- dammit, I -know- what I'm feeling. I just can't--" Coffee. Jean drinks it, and awaits inspiration.
Tess looks wryly frustrated, then shrugs in resignation. "I'll try making my shields more efficient, anyway," she says. She plunges in her bag again, and finally goes off to buy overpricing pastries, leaving Jean to cogitate and guard her laptop until she returns a few minutes later.
Jean cogitates. We might even say that she percolates, thanks to the coffee. Ideas bubble up and burst, replaced by new ones, and she studies the reactions of passerby to Tess as she moves away from Jean's area of effect.
People mostly act normally around Tess at this moment--no looking right past her, though there is a marked tendency for people's attention not to linger. She gets a cinnamon roll, and licks her fingers happily from the stickiness as she sits back down.
Jean has an answer! "Have you ever read Douglas Adams?" she wonders.
Tess thinks for a moment. "The first one, I think? Towels." She smiles. "I'm afraid I've forgotten most of it. There weren't any telepaths in that, were there?"
"I forget which of the books he talked about it in," Jean admits, pushing away her travel mug at last. "But have you ever noticed that people just don't notice you, sometimes?"
Tess's lips turn up dryly. "It's New York. If you're not a celebrity working her rack or a homeless guy screaming at the walls, no one notices you." She gestures to herself--neither extraordinarily endowed nor homeless.
"It's more than that," says Jean, with a slight shake of her head and a nibble at her lower lip. "Telepaths can create what we geekishly call a Somebody Else's Problem field, in a nod to Douglas Adams. Basically, people just don't notice you. I wouldn't really expect one from someone with your power level," she admits. "But..."
"Low," Tess says with a laugh, humor distracted as she thinks. "So it's not--I'm not actually that uninteresting?"
"Well, you're partially right about New York," Jean says with a crooked smile, and a twinkle of her eyes behind their reading glasses. "But it's quite possible that you're somehow generating one. I kept finding it very hard to stay focused on talking with you when we first met," she admits. "And I'd like to think I was raised with better manners than that."
Tess leans forward, but her cellphone makes an alarm noise, and she winces. "Hell. Appointment." She starts madly stuffing all her things away. "I'll start trying to see if I can sense when I'm doing it, though. But maybe sometime you could show me--?"
"You've got it," Jean promises. "Now, I've got a charity auction to attend tonight but..." Up pops a scheduling program at her fingers' command, and things briefly become a whirl of comparative times before the two women head their separate ways.
Wherein Tess learns that, maybe, possibly, she is interesting.