Deepened echoes of harmonious life

[Rahne Sinclair]

(( OOC: This picks up from “To fruitful strifes and rivalries of peace”… I figure it’s been long enough that it’ll be more fun to fast-forward a little. (Which is my lame-ass way of saying “Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted!”) Laurie, I’m g’modding you a bit here, but I think it’s in-character; of course, if you object to any of it just say the word and I’ll edit. ))


This would be much easier if She would let me kill them, Rahne thinks to herself for approximately the fifteenth time since she and Laurie escaped from prison.

Hitchhiking had turned out to be a remarkably impractical idea, given the understandable reluctance of drivers near a major mutant incarceration center to pick up strangers. So they’d ended up walking, at Laurie’s frustratingly slow pace.

Admittedly, it hadn’t actually slowed Rahne down all that much in the long run… since neither a wolf nor a naked redhead was exactly inconspicuous in this area, she’d had to stay out of sight, which definite cut down on her traveling speed. On the other paw, if it hadn’t been for Laurie, Rahne would not have stayed by the side of the road in the first place. Not that she resents it, of course – the emotion literally never even enters her mind – but she’s certainly aware of the logistical issues.

They’d had to walk several miles before finding a traveler who stood still long enough for Laurie to “convince” him to give them a ride into town. (Rahne is still somewhat embarrassed by that: her suggestion had been to stuff the man in his own trunk and take the vehicle, which would not have worked out especially well given that neither she nor Laurie seemed entirely clear on how to control the vehicle.)

Fortunately, once they’d arrived in town – whatever town this is – it hadn’t been too difficult to get both of them a change of clothes in what appears to be the local fashion… more brightly colored and tightly fitting than Rahne is entirely comfortable with, but she’s learned the importance of blending in. Many things are different here than they were in New York circa 2007, but Rahne hardly notices; compared to the Highlands where she was born and raised it’s all equally unfamiliar.

All of which has culminated in the two of them bedding down for the night in the somewhat-furnished attic of an elderly couple Laurie had “convinced” to let them sleep in their home, and Rahne being under strict orders to leave the couple untouched.

"So we’re free, then? Lovely. Where do we go now?"

[Laurie Collins]

"So we’re free, then? Lovely. Where do we go now?"

Laurie barely restrains a groan at the question. Why does anyone ever want to lead anything? she wonders a little grumpily. The events of the past day including her sudden promotion to leader of a blood-thirsty army of one are beginning to wear. It’s completely surreal to have someone looking to her for direction and she’s wondered once or twice if her teachers or the junior X-men ever feel this way, like looking over their shoulders to make sure it’s really them being looked to for answers. Now, in a somewhat rebellious fit of childishness, she flops backwards on the bed that she’s been sitting on so that her head flops over the edge and she’s staring at Rahne upside down, making a face to indicate her feelings about this entire time-traveling escapade.

“Honestly? My plan was to wait for my friends to find us and take us to some sort of…gathering place or something… and everything would be figured out there. I guess, I just thought it would be faster than this though, that they’d have done something tech-y or psychic and found us by this morning, which I guess was dumb since…” she trails off and sits back up. Rahne, pragmatic that she seems to be, probably isn’t interested in her complicated and now probably faulty reasoning and besides what she thought isn’t really relevant.

“Okay, well, we can’t stay here much longer without putting these people at risk, which I won’t do.” she pauses for a moment, trying not to look like a little kid insisting that she will not go to bed before realizing it’s probably better not to politely pause where someone might object but not quite knowing how to go on. Then she sits up straighter, “Oh! That man in the camp who said he was Bob, I’m still not sure I believe him about that, but we‘re definitely in the future. I just need to look myself up, or maybe my mom, find…find a database or something where I can do that…” she trails off for a moment, considering. Though if Bob’s running prison camps twenty years in the future do I even want to know what I’m up to? He implied it was something pretty bad… she shakes her head and gives Rahne a small smile, “We could look you up too if you wanted. What do you think you’d be doing twenty years in the future anyway?” she asks idly as she swings her feet over the edge of the bed and begins poking around for her shoes.

[Rahne Sinclair]

Were she anyone else, Rahne would be wondering why she follows this child, who acts nothing like an alpha.

Rahne being Rahne, though, the thought doesn’t even cross her mind… she simply does, and that’s an end to it. Abstract contemplation is not one of her great strengths, especially in wolf-form. So she mostly ignores Laurie’s discussions about questionable identities and being “in the future,” a phrase she finds essentially meaningless.

But when Laurie asks her what she’d be doing twenty years in the future, the result is something not entirely dissimilar to a headache. Had anyone else asked, she would simply dismiss the question as an annoyance, but it was Laurie who asked, so she does her best to answer..

Questions of this sort are easier for her to contemplate when the Beast is distant, so she shifts to human form, pulling the blanket she’d been lying on over her body for modesty, and thinks about it. After a few minutes she replies, slowly, "Much the same as I do now, I suppose. My nature does not change, child."

The challenge met, she shifts back to the more comfortable hybrid form and stands up – well, crouches up, anyway. "Now… are we to hunt this ‘database’, then?."

[Laurie Collins]

"Much the same as I do now, I suppose. My nature does not change, child."
Laurie bites her lower lip and wiggles her left foot around under the bed until she bumps into her shoes with it, then begins nudging them out into the open. It’s hard to know how to feel about Rahne. On the one hand she’s an enthusiastic agent of Primer’s who’d almost killed Bob less than a week ago. But on the other hand is that really her fault? Rahne’s following her unquestioningly after one dose of pheromones after all, it’s hard to see the other mutant holding out against. So she comes up not blaming Rahne for the things she’s done pretty easily but that doesn’t really clear anything up. She feels responsible for Rahne and so she wants to like her, wants Rahne to look at her as a person she’s decided to obey instead of a source of orders she must follow, and so she pokes at her with questions like that, asks her opinion on things. But maybe that’s not doing her any great favor…just seems to make her uncomfortable, so maybe I‘m just being selfish. She lifts a hand to massage her temples briefly, wondering if maybe responsibility is just a nice word for having a headache all the time.

"Now… are we to hunt this ‘database’, then?"

That gets a smile out of Laurie as she pictures the two of them chasing a computer through a field nature-program style for a moment before she hops off the bed into a standing position and turns around to face Rahne.

“That’s the plan. We’re in Albany, which is hopefully still the capital, so I’m going to ask Mr. Edwards to drive us down to a records building. We’ll look through the database, find whoever can best help us, and then start figuring out how to get back to where we came from.” Which, she knows, is definitely not a fool-proof, or even particularly great, plan. For one thing it seems like mutants are not doing so well in the year 2027, most of her friends might be in prison by now or in some sort of underground resistance that wouldn’t exactly pop up on Google. Then there’s the suspicion a couple girls wandering in and searching for mutants might arouse, but she’s counting on her pheromones to smooth that over. Really her hopes are centered around finding her mother who is human and so hopefully has no reason to be in hiding but would probably have some idea of where Laurie-from-the-future and the others were. “So, we’re off then.” she says, trying to stay as decisive as she’d miraculously managed to be in that last sentence, looking behind her as she heads for the door…

---

About an hour later they’ve been very helpfully, with some nudging from Laurie’s pheromones, directed to a row of terminals in the basement of some fairly standard, musty, state building. Luckily they’re rather more antiquated than some of the more intimidating new models of technology she’d seen upstairs, records departments are never exactly full of the latest high funded technology, and so they’re familiar enough that she’ll be able to use them without help. She looks over at Rahne, doubtful but not wanting to be entirely dismissive, “Think you can use one of these? It would go faster with two I suppose.”

[[hopefully the scene-jump isn’t a problem?]]

[Rahne Sinclair]

> " Think you can use one of these? It would go faster with two I suppose."

Rahne gives Laurie an incredulous look. Bad enough she must remain in her half-deaf, scent-blind, abominably vulnerable, irreversibly immodest human form throughout these operations of hers; bad enough she must wear scratchy human clothes in place of her own fur… must she now interact with the musty old technological monstrosities the humans are perpetually fascinated with?

Apparently, yes, she must. She sniffs the terminal skeptically and sighs a long-suffering sigh of acquiescence.

"This is the database, then? What d’ye want me t’do with it?"

(( OOC: Nope, it's cool. ))

[Laurie Collins]

Laurie laughs aloud at Rahne's martyred air and scoots her wheeled chair closer to where the other mutant is looking at the computer with the sort of abject disgust one usually saves for cockroaches.

“Come on it’s not that bad.” she says, grinning, “I mean try having to write papers on one of these. Then you can hate them, right now all you have to do is type in the name of someone you want to find-” she moves the mouse on Rahne’s computer so that it highlights the appropriate place, “-there. Then you hit the key that says enter and it tells you what you want to know and then you…know…and stuff.” she concludes lamely, not really all that used to explaining computers to people, it’s usually the other way around. “So, look for someone it’d help to find or you’d want to know about or something… I’m going to start with myself I guess.” She rolls her chair away again, punching her name into the search engine and crossing her fingers under the desk, a silly little ward against Drake’s implications.

---

News travels fast in the world of political paranoia. The moment Laurie enters her search a window pops up on the terminal of a man tucked away in an office two buildings down from the archives moldering in their basement. It cheeps discreetly, a soft little mechanical noise, and the man strokes long fingers over the touch screen, coaxing it up to a full sized warning. He frowns, minimally wrinkling his smooth face, and touches a few more spots on the screen- open conversation, audio link only, Senator Jones.

“Yes? What is it?” The voice is nervous, resentful, this is the urgent line and no one likes the messenger.
“Senator, there seems to be a search going on in the state archives for a Laurie Collins.” there’s silence on the line and the man barely bites back a sigh. It’s the downside of the business of vigilance to deal with those who don’t seem to understand the meaning of the word.
“She goes by a different name now. You see her in a…social capacity…”
“Oh shit, shitshitshit…you take care of this okay? You take care of this so that in half an hour I can be in session telling congress about plans to open a central Midwest camp and lift those goddamn ’ethical’ guidelines the Northeast camp keeps trying to pass without worrying about someone jumping up and saying…it’s a harmless indulgence…it can’t ruin…” The senator is practically incoherent and the man takes the liberty of cutting him off-
“I’ll take care of it sir.”

The line is disconnected and the man opens up another.

---

“Someone’s looking for you Lily.” the woman tightens her hands on the steering wheel and glances down at the hands-free phone built into the dashboard of the car she’s guiding away from a large house, her last appointment. The name, after over a decade, has finally ceased even to phase her and she has to remember to ask her first question. “Under what name?”
“Your old one, Laurie Collins. The Senator’s having a fit, one of his associates is threatening to send a security team down to the archives building and…”
“No!” she snaps quickly, reflexively. After all this time it isn’t likely but it could still be someone from the Institute looking for her, one of those who had been kids back in those days, just punching in the names of anyone they can remember. Unlikely, but still the idea of a security force bursting onto that imagined scene is worse than terrible and if it is someone trying to find her for something less innocent…well, does it really matter? A senator and the chief of the NYPD number amongst her clients, she’s protected from arrest, and any physical threat doesn’t particularly phase her. Past a certain point it just doesn’t matter anymore. “No,” she repeats, “just let me go down there and check it out first okay?”

It’s difficult, but she’s managed to get someone from the “escort” service- an agency not without cache catering as it does to exotic tastes- to talk to someone from the senator’s office, buy her a few minutes, and now she’s hurrying down the stairs to records. She reaches the bottom and pushes open the door apprehensive and irritated and curious and strangely hopeful all at once-

“Hello? Is anyone down here?”

[Rahne Sinclair]

Rahne tries to follow Laurie’s explanations, but it’s no use. Eventually she works out by a process of elimination that “keys” are the square plastic things Laurie is pressing, and that “Enter” is likely one of the three keys that begins with what she finally recognizes as the letter “E” (itself the result of laborious, unappreciated, and largely unsuccessful attempts by several members of the Brotherhood to teach her to read). But by the time she works her way up to the realization that by “looking for someone” Laurie means typing out their names, the spellings of which she has not the slightest clue about, Laurie has already slid off and started typing furiously.

Well, no matter. Laurie can handle the database-hunting, whatever that turns out to be, and Rahne will remain alert to threats and protect her.

Of course, threats seem unlikely. It is late in the day, and the age of most trace scents indicates that this room is not often used; there is no reason to expect anyone to join them. Eventually calmed, and exhausted from the day’s travels, Rahne takes the opportunity to nap… then wakens swiftly when the door opens and a new voice challenges them.

Rahne’s reaction is swift, instinctive, and mostly inappropriate… she leaps from the chair she was dozing on and dives toward the newcomer, her recently obtained clothing shredding around her body as she shifts. She lands, pinning the intruder to the ground with three limbs, and the fourth is on its way to strike when the scent reaches her.

Can’t be! It’s Her?

Confused and uncertain, Rahne freezes, looking back and forth between the girl and the woman as if seeking direction.

[Laurie Collins]

Laurie looks over as Rahne becomes exasperated with the machine and curls up for a nap, smiling a little to herself at the other girl’s definitely expressed opinion of technology and reading before going back to her own search. Her name returns relatively little until she reaches college, Barnard she sees and feels a giddy at apparently actually making it into her top choice, and then a bit further on there are a few news articles about her discovery and subsequent expulsion. She sits very still for a moment, soaking that in, and feeling a little foolish for not having expected it in a world where mutants were apparently rounded up into camps, then takes a deep breath and scrolls down, looking for what Drake had alluded to and there’s…nothing. She apparently lived at the Institute for awhile and then dropped off the edge of the earth after being expelled from college. Maybe I joined a resistance movement or something? He probably would have seen that as pretty terrible.

She shrugs and moves on, starting to type in her mother’s name when a voice startles her from the doorway. Before she can even gasp Rahne’s sprung from the chair, transforming practically in mid-air, and pinning the woman to the ground. This is what they mean when they trot out that cliché about things happening in slow motion, she thinks, because she can see where this is going but can’t quite get herself together fast enough to stop it, and Rahne is already bringing an arm back to strike and- she stops. What the…?

"Uhm, yes, please don’t kill her.” Laurie says, finally getting her feet under her. The woman who has lain still and silent under Rahne, face not showing any particular emotion except perhaps a shade of resignation after the initial surprise of being tackled. Now, however, at the sound of Laurie’s voice she makes a surprised noise and raises her head as much as she’s able, enough to see the younger version of her self and to be seen in return.

“Who are-”
“Who are-”

The younger Laurie recovers first and skitters forward a couple steps, still startled but with some idea of what’s going on, “Hi, sorry, um, I’m Lau- that is, I’m you. From the past. 2007.” she gets out, then waves a hand furiously for a moment in a vague, ridiculous greeting.

The woman takes that in for a moment, looking as if she’s heading for disbelief but not quite out of shock yet, and looks back at Rahne. “…and you?”

[Rahne Sinclair]

> " Uhm, yes, please don’t kill her."

Truth be told, Rahne had been hoping for something more on the decisive side, but the direction is at least unambiguous, which she appreciates. She continues to not kill the invader, who cooperates handily by not struggling..

> " I’m Lau- that is, I’m you. From the past. 2007.."

It’s not exactly that Rahne is surprised by this explanation… after all, Laurie has essentially been talking about this future/past/time-travel thing nonstop for the last several hours. But the truth is, Rahne hasn’t been paying that much attention. Time travel, much like economics and law and vegetarian recipes, just doesn’t play a significant role in her world.

Or at least it didn’t used to. Now, faced with the unarguable reality of two of the same person, one significantly older than the other, she has something concrete to organize it around. Ah… so that’s what She’s been going on about.

She’d never considered the possibility before, but accepts it now in the same matter-of-fact fashion that she has accepted teleportation, television, nationwide database searches, traffic jams, and all the other novelties of life in America.

> "…and you?"

"Rahne. Rahne Sinclair." It occurs to Rahne that some further introduction is probably called for, explaining their situation in more detail, but nothing else occurs to her. She is as she is… what more is there to say?

[Laurie Collins]

Rahne doesn’t say anything about her ‘orders,’ she never really does, but Laurie’s gotten a little better at reading her ways of not questioning and she laughs suddenly as she realizes what she’s really said which is, for all intents and purposes, nothing. “Sorry, you can let her go as well. Could you make sure we don’t get surprised again too please? Apparently people are looking for us.” She adds, nodding towards the stairs her older self had just come down and wondering hopefully if she’s getting any better at this, before realizing that her older self will probably be running things from here. If she doesn’t just take off running… she thinks, watching her older self scrambling to her feet and looking decidedly unconvinced of all this. There’s a moment when her thoughts rush fragmented and insubstantial through her mind (so that’s what I look like when I’m old, not too wrinkly, I wonder if my nose looks like that now, how did she know we were here, should I have told Rahne to leave her alone I don’t even know what she, I’m, like) but she pushes them back and for a moment the shock of actually being able to do that paralyzes her.

“What is this then? Some sort of shape shifter…but who would? Drake. Of course. Look-“
“When I was getting the cure shot there was a poster on the wall across from the chair, one of those weird motivational things with a mountain and a little saying. They were talking about how the change could be jarring and strapping me in, but all I noticed was that they’d misspelled one of the words in the slogan, ‘your’ instead of ‘you’re’ and that’s what made me nervous because I didn’t think people who didn’t notice things like that should be trusted with needles.”
“…this is impossible.” Laurie smiles slightly and shrugs. She’s waiting for this woman to spring into action, to have a plan, but she just stands there and looks as blankly helpless as Laurie’s felt for the past day and a half. “So…um, I know it’s hard to believe and everything but we can’t just stand here is…is mom around?” she asks, then feels a little embarrassed that her automatic response to is to want her mom and opens her mouth to ask something more intelligent and less baby-ish which she hopes will come to her sometime before she actually starts speaking, but the look on the woman’s face stops her short. “She’s dead. Over a decade ago. We were in hiding and SHIELD found our location, she was killed for harboring a mutant. Matthew died a couple years after that at least, Drake’s a traitor, and Josh has been dead longer than any of them. There’s no one that can help you.” the words come out flat and cruelly matter-of-fact, lived with and worn down until they’re just facts, nothing more, and Laurie takes them like a slap in the face. It hasn’t happened yet for her contemporaries, she knows, but hearing it on top of recent stresses and the fact that she has no idea where the contemporary versions of these people are or if they’re all right, not to mention that last sentence, is enough to make her take a couple steps backwards and sink down into a chair, looking as lost as she’s been trying not to feel.

[Rahne Sinclair]

> " Sorry, you can let her go as well. Could you make sure we don’t get surprised again too please? Apparently people are looking for us. "

Rahne shifts fully into wolf-form, nods emphatically, and begins to patrol the periphery of the room, loudly sniffling every crevice with her ears swiveling back and forth to catch the slightest anomalous sound.

It doesn’t stop her from listening to the two Lauries conversing, although the truth is very little of what they’re saying makes much sense to her… especially the bit about using /yur/ instead of /yur/. On the other hand, she doesn’t need to understand very much to get that last sentence, or to perceive Laurie’s despair over it.

She feels it as if it were her own… perhaps because of pheromones, perhaps not. Nobody should be that alone, and the truth is that Laurie isn’t, at least not while Rahne is around.

She trots over to where the younger Laurie is sitting, glares at the older Laurie, and leans her muzzle sympathetically on the girl’s lap.

[Laurie Collins]

[[sorry for the lengthy-ness, future!Laurie characterization etc.]]

Lily (because she’s used that name for about sixteen years now, it’s hers as much as Laurie ever was) feels the rush of…she doesn’t precisely know what, whatever had made her snap like that… dissipate as her younger self sinks into a chair looking like the world’s just dropped out from underneath her. And that’s how it felt, she remembers, letting herself think for the first time in years of her life at the Institute and the people who had mattered then, and about leaving them when she’d made her choice. There’d been argument, of course, but she’d been really determined for one of the only times in her life and everyone except Matthew had seemed to accept it in the end. Leaving Matthew like that when he hadn’t, or wouldn’t, understand why, when he’d begged and threatened in turn to get her to stay, had hurt more than even she had expected. It wasn’t just leaving a boyfriend because he’d never been just that- he’d been the first mutant she’d knowingly talked to, the first person she’d opened up to, told about her father (and if she could have known then that he’d be a comparatively minor problem in her life…), first real best friend after such a nomadic life, first kiss, first love, first person she’d slept with. He’d been so much a part of her life that when she’d heard he was dead, even after over two years had gone by without a word between them, it had been the end of something. Her mother’s death had left her raw and devastated, weakened to within an inch of just giving up and letting SHIELD find her, and the other deaths and Drake’s defection had hit her with such force she always thought it would get easier and was always wrong. But when she’d heard about Matthew she’d stopped her search for the others. After that she had, without ever really articulating it to herself even thought, given up on being Laurie Collins and settled in to inertia. And in 2007 I’m just getting used to the idea that dating might just work out all right…was anyone ever really that young?

She watches this younger Rahne (and since when did I ever give orders to anyone, much less Rahne Sinclair?) cross towards the girl and comfort her while glaring at Lily. She takes the rebuke and blushes which sits incongruously on a middle-aged woman, and then starts as she realizes how much older she really is than the sixteen year old sitting before her. For the first time since was twenty pushing what her mother would have thought to the back of her mind as she concentrated on giving highs without drugs and arousal without touch in back alleys she wonders what they would have thought of her now, the jury of the dead looking over her shoulder at the life of work, watching TV without really seeing it, never moving unless she’s prodded into it, hating Drake for what he’s done but servicing people much more culpable than him without ever considering it might be some of the same thing until now.

“There’s…a place.” she says slowly, not knowing she’s going to speak until it’s been dragged out of her. “Years ago I was planning on locating the resistance and a contact told me where to find one of their sites. I never followed through but I remember the location, about a half hour outside the city in an old industrial complex. I don’t know if they’re still there, but even if they aren’t they might be watching it. Of course the other side might be watching too. It’s a risk-”“We have to at least try.” the girl says, cutting her off and getting to her feet before suddenly pausing and looking down at Sinclair, “If we go where she says we could find the others, or at least people who could help us get home, but those people from the camps could come and try to take us back again. Do you mind going? I won’t just go off without you if you do.” she adds gravely and Lily raises her eyebrows, unable to remember being that unabashedly solemn about anyone else at sixteen.

[Rahne Sinclair]

> " Do you mind going? I won’t just go off without you if you do. "

Rahne looks up at the suddenly decisive-seeming Laurie and tilts her head to one side, puzzled. Does she mind? She’s not in the least bit certain how to answer that.

After puzzling over it for a few moments she decides to shift to hybrid form, in the hope that this is one of those questions that it’s easier for her to answer that way. A few moments later one thing becomes clear: it isn’t.

Finally, with more uncertainty than Laurie has ever heard in her voice, she responds "Of course I’ll go, if ye want me to?"

[Laurie Collins]

"Of course I’ll go, if ye want me to?"

“Well, I do, I just didn‘t want to make you go if you didn‘t want to since it‘s risky and risk can be bad but... right, sorry working on the babbling-thing.” If I mess this up I could land all three of us back in the camps, and the thought of that is enough to make her waver almost physically. She would have counted the Invasion, prior to this little escapade, as the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to her but had quickly decided that the isolation, the casual cruelty and invasiveness had been much worse than the sharp but simple fear of the previous encounter. But it’s our best chance to get home too, only one it seems like since I’m out of ideas, and someone has to be decisive I guess. “Okay. We‘re going then.” she decides, trying to sound certain and her older self nods. “My car’s around the back.”

-----

About half an hour later they’ve pulled up in front of what must have once been some sort of assembly line factory, one story and sprawling with sturdy concrete construction. “Like I said I don‘t know if they‘re still here and there‘s no front door to knock on. If this is their base they should see us, and if they‘ve abandoned it hopefully they keep a watch like at the Institute ruins.” Laurie nods slowly and walks away a couple feet, sitting down with her back against one of the walls. Her older counterpart had explained the events of the past few years in more detail and Laurie’s not sure which part she should be reeling over more. I just left everyone behind to go and hide in some basement…just gave up on everything… even if my mom needed me I should have made her see it was best for both of us to stay with the others. But joining the Brotherhood… she shakes her head to clear her thoughts but they only skitter on to new topics, the details of her friends and mother’s deaths, and the confirmation of Colonel Drake’s identity. How could he ever work somewhere like that? And he didn’t just work there he was running it, he approved everything that happened to us there. He’s part of the reason my mom and Matthew are dead too. but she doesn’t really want to think about that either and she gets to her feet again, looking around apprehensively. “Wonder how long till someone realizes we’re here?”

[[So I’m leaving it up to you-as-Warren as to whether the Brotherhood is in there, or if it’s an old site they keep an eye on, or if they even see our intrepid adventurers at all or what they think of them. Drake seems to know Laurie‘s alive but Matty thought she was dead up till he died so future!Laurie‘s presence might make them suspicious. Or, conversely, I suppose future!bob could be watching the place.]]

[Warren Worthington III]

(going with "monitored")

Boss… y’think there’s anything left you wouldn’t believe just happened? Warren looks up from the timeline he’s putting together from old archives, trying to make some sense out of what needs not to have happened when if it turns out they really can ‘fix’ history, and fixes Elliot with the telepathic equivalent of a fierce glare. The remarkable thing is that, despite your unquestioned psionic prowess, you still can’t seem to tell when I’m not in the mood for games. What is it now? Um… right. Well, we’ve got visitors at the abandoned factory site… check it out.

Warren sits bolt upright as the security monitor image is inserted into his memories. "Unbelievable. She’s still alive? Or, no, wait… is this another time-travel – oh. I get it. She found her older self." It’s not as surprising as it could be, really… who would know better than her where she would go to hide? It’s less clear why Sinclair is with them, or whether that’s the new version or the old – with shapeshifters it’s hard to tell.

What is clear that they expect to be spotted. Which makes them either mutant refugees in need of recovery, or lures for a trap, he thinks to himself as he suits up to go out. So what else is new, right? OK, E – I’m heading out to intercept now. Put together a backup team from whoever’s available in case this goes south, willya?

It doesn’t take very long for Warren to reach the site, and he makes sure to keep his forcefield up as he joins the three… the last thing he needs is a faceful of mood-altering pheromones. "Evening, folks. Sorry we missed you on the Camp extraction." To Laurie-the-Elder he adds "So… what brings you back from the dead?"

(( OOC: Anyone else from around the base who wants to join this thread, feel free to be part of the “backup team” ))