robothell | [open] this sort of thing is supposed to be a Fantastic Four problem blast it

Entry tags:

emma frost | myownbestfriend

[open] this sort of thing is supposed to be a Fantastic Four problem blast it

Who: Emma Frost and Whoever
Where: Crater, Forum, and ???
When: I feel like I should be measuring this by people's injuries or relationship travails but I got nothin'.
What: Emma does not like your stupid planet but has noticed something's up.
Warnings: Emma is v. unpleasant.

A - The Crater

Emma was extremely unimpressed to find herself suddenly not looking out over the Golden Gate Bridge. This wasn't Utopia. This wasn't even Earth. She knew that from the perfect psychic silence broken only by a few individual notes from a handful of minds, even the low background hum of San Francisco absent entirely.

But there was something else, a vast diffuse sense of presence that Emma instinctively shied from, slamming her mental shields into place as soon as she realized the source--or lack of source. Alone on an alien world was not the time to take risks.

That sentiment also led her to give the energon deposit a wide berth. Nothing good came of green glowing nonsense. Emma made for the ruined city, impractical white cape billowing behind her as she strode across the uneven ground as confidently as if it were Rodeo Drive. The inconvenient crater wall presented more of a problem, but after frowning at it for a moment, she changed into her secondary form, changing in a flash to a woman sculpted of diamond, and started jumping up the side in effortless 10-foot hops.

B - The Forum

Cities were alive, or should be, each of them with their own psychic voice, the sum and more of its inhabitants' minds giving rise to something new. This one, though. This one was a corpse. In that dead silence, it was easy to follow the pull to the forum. As soon as Emma allowed them to, her feet carried her there of their own accord. All things here bent towards that one place. Even the psi-blind should be able to feel it, she thought, whether or not they could put a name to their compulsion.

Emma stopped at the terminal and its mysterious loop of images, craning her neck to watch them flash in silence for several minutes, piecing together a fragmented story of the world's past. "All right, then," she said, quite certain she was addressing something capable of hearing. "What do you want?"

C - Wildcard

Roll your own. Emma doesn't have much to do besides wander. I don't even know why I gave this its own cut.

OOC: Emma is an extremely powerful telepath, and since they're living beings, her talent will absolutely work on giant space robots. However, if you prefer, it can just not come up, because no power is written as inconsistently as psi I mean goddamn. Please let me know what extent of telepathy is okay, including "none at all."

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Anger was a sharp note knocking around the inside of his head; nails digging into the temples, hard to see - hard to think. After he had unexpectedly come up against Tarn every reaction was all a blurred together outlash. Shockwave believed himself capable, to the point of barefaced arrogance, of bringing his own emotions to heel.

Shockwave made it several kilometres into the wasted city when the looming, emptied towers spiraling up around like became overwhelming and whatever composure he cleaved to finally slipped through his fingers. Cybertron he could suffer no longer to be a twisted reminded of everything; his part in Megatron's madcap attempts to play revolutionary. The Regenesis project and every gash cut into the planet that had his brand of calculated cruelty etched into it. Seeing Tarn was just the fire that lit the fuse. A walk amongst the naked bones of the shriveled up remains of Cybertron, chewed and spat back out.

That was it.

Cybertron was his and his to burn. A bellowing howl of frustration that rattled him to the core prelude to a volley of fusion cannon fire pelting the side of an abandoned lecture hall - an academy. The metal walls puckered and melted until Shockwave brutalized the place with his fist. Screams echoing off the walls, Shockwave feeling everything save the fire swelling around him.

Well, that was someone having a screaming tantrum. Emma winced and stumbled as the sudden psychic bellow of rage and pain echoed through her, breaking her composure and her stride. She almost didn't notice that the sounds of fusion cannon blasts and shrieking metal were physical things, not part of the telepathic onslaught.

"As though this place isn't enough of a disaster area," she muttered, rubbing her temples and forcing her shoulders down from her ears. With the ease of long experience, Emma reached out to the source of the turbulent emotions...to find a mind familiar despite its alien birth, the tumult all too human, yet backed by the kind of destructive power few humans could bring to bear.

Still, the psyche she brushed against with light mental fingers was strange enough that she had no confidence her subtler skills would do the trick. Emma could play a human like a violin, calming fury like this with a thought, but this being's mind was an unfamiliar instrument. Rather than risk harm...or even worse, failure, she simply seized Shockwave's motor functions and stopped him dead in his destructive tracks.

Just what do you think you're doing? Emma's telepathic voice was a cold mix of scorn and righteous anger etched in diamond. Ms. Frost was not pleased.

Edited 2015-04-09 05:26 (UTC)

Shockwave experienced an almost out-of-body moment. Some analytical part of him left intact even as the full force of millennia of turmoil cut away only to be forced back inside remained. Logic hanging on like a malignant tumor, watching. Attempting in vain to dissect his own actions as metal buckled under furied hit after hit. It reminded him or watching a living specimen exposed to a poisonous miasma. Choking and writhing - then, nothing.

"W...hat-?"

Nothing. It all came to a screeching halt that was in no way some abrupt return of reason as every part of him down to the smallest piston refused to budge. A voice drilled into him, sharp and critical, moments after he processed his sudden immobility.

Shockwave can see Emma refusing the heat of the fire licking at her heels. And knows immediately she is to blame. A sound administered virus? Unlikely - it would not have worked with that sort of expediency that seized him so. Dubious still that a human could get their hands on that kind of bioweapon. Even coming down from a maddening rage, he was ever the scientist.

This is absurd. It does not occur to him that this human, this woman could pick up the astonishment he had for the both present circumstance and what led them here.

It most certainly is. Picking her way around the wreckage, Emma replied to his thought mind-to-mind while she got a more comfortable distance from the fire he'd set. It couldn't hurt her in diamond form, but if she had to switch to fend off the heat, she'd lose her grip on his mind.

"Does your entire species go around creating public safety hazards in fits of rage, or are you just uniquely ill-behaved?" Her physical voice was somehow so much less than her telepathic one, but still recognizable as hers, and every bit as covered in icy disdain as she scowled up at Shockwave.

"A fair question," Shockwave said, hoarse indignation of his voice petering out to a calmer timbre, "One with an answer that I'm afraid would only dim what I am sure is an already low opinion of our species."

It occurred to him that he should be mortified. Ashamed with himself and whatever episode had completely overtaken him, but he is not. Curiosity was a constant in his life and that at least never changed. He would like to know why exactly it is he can't move. Shockwave registered that the fire at least should be suffocated, as he struggled in vain against nothing.

What have you done to me? Shockwave believed he had begun to understand the rules Emma had created as he employed his own running inner monologue. His verbal stream of consciousness was much less guarded and composed. Fear and agitation permeated it like the stench on an infected wound.

Emma sniffed in disdain. He wasn't wrong, and she didn't know Cybertronian psyches well enough to recognize the shattered edges of the Shadowplay that ringed Shockwave's mind and that even she would agree formed extenuating circumstances. Right now she only saw the turmoil without yet understanding the cause.

Nothing irreversible. I've just got my thumb on your voluntary motor functions, so to speak. Her blue eyes flicked him over from hexagonal head to blocky toe while her mind did much the same to his. While far from calm, he was no longer a danger, she thought. The years of rigid control had left their mark, which she could sense even if she didn't know the source. To her, it looked like he could control his emotions quite well and had chosen not to. It was a mistake she'd never have made reading a human.

If you've quite finished, I'll give you back the controls. It would take someone far less perceptive than Shockwave to miss the threat underlying the offer. If he decided to steer off a cliff, she could push him right back out of the driver's seat.

Concertina wire that closed in tight around his every thought like a persistent headache that faded but never left would put an image to the constant shift of his quiet disturbances. Cut loose from the string, Shockwave fought to remain standing when his knees had buckled underneath him. The shift from total immobility to being ambulatory again threw his joints into shock. He suspected that Emma was not speaking wholly in metaphor about what she had done to him.

Impressive. However, you're still traipsing as you please through territory best left uncharted. Shockwave was not referring to the city or even the ruins of the lecture building.

Even as his interest concerning this mystery woman piqued and his mood plateaued, he sense of prioritizing kicked in again. Underfoot, Shockwave suffocated the worst of the fires and let the rest exhaust itself. Picking up the pieces of his tantrum something shook loose again. Nostalgia. A triggered reaction from this experience that blew the dust off a memory. A memory distilled into a single thought that recalled an exchange the last time someone had leashed him.

Do you have any conception, No no no - this wasn't him this was something worse bleeding out again. Of how much damage I could do to this insubstantial world?

Emma hit him with a blandly unimpressed look from her inexhaustible supply, and examined her nails. Since she wore gloves and thus couldn't in fact see her nails, it made the gesture even more dismissive, helping to conceal her growing awareness that his emotions felt...wrong, in a way she couldn't yet place.

Yes, yes, look upon your works, we mighty, and despair. Whether or not Shockwave recognized Romantic poetry, it was obvious Emma was quoting. I've held the power to shatter worlds too, darling. It's overrated.

That 'darling' was about midway on the scale of Emma's condescending use of the word...so, normal for her.

Edited 2015-04-09 21:17 (UTC)

It was not exactly an extended period Shockwave experienced Earth conscious and fully aware, but being a tad bit...persnickety, he wasted no time learning by osmosis humanity's capacity to compensate their short lived collective existence for now shortage of words. Words words words. They were a navelgazing species to rival Cybertron.

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings!" It was a barking fit of laughter intermingled with something much more raw; Shockwave had a voice that shook the ground like thunder and cracked like lightning in his burning throat - jarring and terrible, "Nothing beside remains.

Ah, but the parochialism that afflicts your species that compels to apply the works of dead romantics as if in this infinite universe no other had their own to speak of."

Shattering worlds how very miniscule. Again within the space of his own mind the words lacked the bit of what he could control that came out of his own audio processors. Wavering, inconsistent.

Emma ignored the jab at humanity and her eyes narrowed into intense blue focus as she at last realized there was more at work here than someone pitching a childish fit. His emotions...too rough, too sharp. Too quick to fragment from brittle calm to this jagged agitation, splintering his thoughts along with them.

"A shatter'd visage..." she said softly, more to herself than Shockwave. "What's wrong?" She echoed the question in his mind, tinging the psychic version with more concern than showed in her bearing or voice. An alien robot who could quote Shelley endeared himself to Emma more than she was willing to admit.

"A slave in soul and to hold no strong control over our own wills." Shockwave rattles and buckles to his knees digging into the yielding pavement heated and soft by the dead fires. The political episode which affected Shelley bleeding into his thoughts finding context in the conversation which he could barely anchor his own thoughts to.

Plating tight and crowded close over jointed parts that grated metal against metal with chassis that shivered. His right unbroken hand raked through the ground as he gripped hard for some purchase to hold him to this fleeting moment of clarity.

"I cannot function like this."

"No, you damn well can't," Emma agreed, moving to his side in a reflexive urge to help, but even in diamond form she wouldn't be able to assist Shockwave to his feet. She hesitated only a moment before pulling off one of her long gloves, revealing a perfect manicure. He believed he could do irreparable harm to the planet, and that was currently where she lived, no matter how little she liked that fact.

I can handle this. Try to relax. She wasn't as certain as she sounded--his mind was unexplored terrain--but Emma Frost hadn't become the most skilled telepath on Earth by running from challenges. Laying her bare hand on his...skin? she let the touch heighten the psychic link, wanting every advantage she could get.

And then, as she reached deeper into his mind, she knew it was called plating, knew it was less a part of him than her own skin was of her, a thing easily changed at the wearer's desire...and also that, somehow, that was part of the problem.

Cybertron was too fraught, and Earth as well, so she reached into her memories for a neutral setting, something that partook of neither homeworld, and within the shared space of their telepathic connection, built up one of the vast, featureless deserts of the Breakworld, barren and unforgiving, and quite unfamiliar to Shockwave. The still-soft metal under his knees became sand, and the heat no longer radiated from the twisted wreckage of a building, but from the red sun that burned above them.

"The lone and level sands stretch far away," she said dryly, amused at her own subconscious. "Now we can talk. Nothing you do here can hurt anyone."

"Boundless and bare." The verse were pulled backwards as Shockwave yielded himself to be guided forwards into an encompassing void that tugged white and blinding at the corners of his vision. Until nothing.

Until it broke away into sensations new and old. Fabricated but easily to delude oneself into accepting a sort of grounded reality to it that beckoned him like the first sinner. Shockwave was slow to respond before he opened his eye; his eyes - pale and wet to the light an infant sun.

It was an open room. Furniture set against a single wall with molding and design that was as if someone sucked all the color out of a late baroque styled room and dropped it in the middle of a white lit beach on a green-blue water beach shore. Shockwave pulled one leg over the other with hands knitted loose in his lap without sign of dissociation from this form from the original. Cold mixing with the fragile warmth beneath the surface.

"You never struck me as having rococo sensibilities."

"You've known me less than five minutes," Emma pointed out as she settled into her chair. "Besides, when you're working in monochrome, it can sustain a lot more detail."

Interesting that he'd fallen so easily into a human form, and a female one at that...but really, what did gender even mean to alien robots? That was a question for another time, though. Now, it was more important to make sure he wasn't going to destroy any more buildings. Next time the person caught in the downrange might not be as hard to kill as Emma was.

"So." She steepled her fingers in a gesture common to masterminds everywhere. "I'm Emma Frost. You're Shockwave. As you've already surmised, I'm a powerful telepath and this is a mental construct designed to give you some psychological distance. Our physical bodies are unharmed and enough of my awareness is focused on the outside world that if anything happens we can be back to our normal perceptions in an instant."

Edited 2015-04-10 02:15 (UTC)

"You, humans, stratify yourselves so readily - gnawing at the bit to do so that it took me no more than a few weeks to works out the patterns."

Shockwave leaned back into the chair with upholstery compliant to the added weight until there was a found sense of near comfort. The human experience was overrated but Shockwave had been willing to lend that to Emma's influence. It had been nice, at least, to put a name to a face.

"We've always been so very eager to segregate. Segregate ourselves by form over function to function over form until it was no longer held pretense about being so arbitrary." The we was purposeful. Four million years had given Shockwave a broader perspective where the organic and inorganic overlapped. More ways than even the most tolerant of Autobots would consider without such a uniquely detached perspective.

"But where do we stand, Ms. Frost?"

Politely non-invasive though she was being, there were flashes of experience behind Shockwave's words that Emma couldn't entirely avoid seeing. Uniformed humans, the memory of them rimed with cold contempt. A flourishing Cybertron and a parade of Cybertronian faces accompanied by waves of anger or love, and all of them by a vast sorrow. The sense of an unimaginable gulf of time in which something had been lost.

...A bench?

"You tell me," she said, not trying to interpret the disjoint images she was getting. Without reading deeper, it would be a futile exercise, inevitably tainted by her own emotions and experiences. "I pulled you for a time-out because fusion cannons and nervous breakdowns don't mix, but I'm doing you the courtesy of not poking about without permission. Why were you having a violent fit in a dead city?"

"Did you know beauty is as pervasive and and narrow a standard here as it is anywhere?" Shockwave said; asking without a solid answer proceeding it. "Was." Shockwave amended with the sound of his own conscious capacity for recollection falling out to a rhythmic statice in a grey haze. A mono-eyed face there; two smiling and youthful flashes in an old lecture hall there crowed around by a blue of naked spaces after years of information creep; memories being unconsciously reinterpreted.

"We covet what we want and mutilate what is deemed unattainable, Ms. Frost." Distancing yes but entirely without relation to the current topic, no. Shockwave was a cool winters chill coming in through the cracks of broken insulation bringing the temperature of such a tepid environment down a few degrees for whomever was wise to typical Earth conditions.

"Once," Shockwave took notice of a lit cigarette that had been burning for who knew how long between the knuckles of his ring and forefinger; he could not physically take a drag nor did he feel inclined to as he spoke, "I was quite the beauty."

Shockwave was going to edge up to it, then. All right, Emma could play therapist. She schooled her features into an expression of polite interest, only a hint of the acuteness of her concentration showing as she listened with more senses than hearing.

"When a human says that, it means they've aged past their physical prime. What does it mean when you say it?"

"Mutilation was not a figure of speech, Ms. Frost." Two eyes. Two hands. Humans see machines and don't consider the possibility an inexpressive block nailed to the shoulders would be out of the ordinary. They break so easily and have a dim view of the mechanical that it was no wonder it would never factor that some things could live without a head. Or that such an existence was an intentional breach of agency.

"And now you're here poking around what little I have left."

"Given that I'm sure the overwhelming advantage in confrontations with humans usually lies with you, I find myself less than moved," Emma replied coolly, but then she sighed and leaned forward in her seat, resting her elbows on her knees and recalling just how it felt to have her mind shattered.

"I understand more than you realize, and not from being a mind-reader," she said, and if the faint, echoed ghosts of remembered Phoenix-fire licked around them both for a moment, well, no one's control was perfect, "but you still almost brought a building down on me."

Edited 2015-04-15 21:44 (UTC)

"You're certainly not the first human to believe they were holding a leash that couldn't be yanked both ways," Shockwave retorted over the steady sound of slender fingers rapping on the polished and carved armrest "Though I humbly concede you're the first with a firm grip. Yes, I'm familiar with telepathy."

Soundwave came to mind, so to speak. Only a brief flash; a bright and garish red that colored the frustration hidden behind a visor when Soundwave fell short of the mark making their own attempts at piercing the walls in Shockwave's mind. Had Shockwave been known to indulge in pettiness and not rediscovered a wide defensive streak where outliers were concerned, he would have found Emma succeeding where Soundwave had failed for the last four million years amusing.

"You were in the building I was bringing down."

So much for a lack of pettiness.

Emma gave him the sort of level, unimpressed look her students got when they weren't bringing their obnoxiousness A game. Surely he could do better than that.

"You're not my first giant purple robot. The most amenable to civilized persuasion, though." A long unhappy history with Sentinels aside, she didn't need to hide any deep distaste. Appearances were a mask, she knew that better than most, and Shockwave had as much in common with those single-minded, non-sentient killing machines as Emma did with a marble statue, and sentient killing machines, at least, could be reasoned with. Not that Shockwave was making the task easy, though she couldn't blame him. Positions reversed, she'd be behaving similarly.

"Frankly, I'm usually willing to let people stew in their problems--I have enough of my own to deal with--but you're dangerous." It was a compliment, really. "I didn't realize it in the moment, but it's not that you won't control your temper. It's that you can't. It wasn't just your body that was mutilated--the edges of your mind are like shattered glass."

Wrong universe, Emma.

"When disinclined to give into his arrogance I was consigliere to the worst warlord in our recent history. Civilized behavior must be preserved where it can when it comes to our species." Even when he was not talking about himself, Shockwave was talking about himself.

Then, Emma struck home and the observations she made were the diamond hard truth. That made Shockwave rankle even as they sat in this tenuous headspace of his.

"One significant disadvantage of being biomechanical," Shockwave said slowly, "Is that like any machine with the right sort of finesse we can be reprogrammed."

"Oh, you can do it to humans, too. Believe me on that, if nothing else." Tired of much more than being trapped on some miserable alien rock, she dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. Here in her telepathically-projected world, it didn't smear her makeup everywhere.

Did she want to make the offer? Of course she wasn't blind to the idea that he'd make a powerful ally, but there were other ways to cultivate that, cool and businesslike and not fraught with an all-encompassing intimacy.

Oh, damn it. When had she gotten so bloody soft?

Emma straightened, looking Shockwave's human mental avatar in the eye. "I won't force it on you or hold it against you if you decline, but...I can help. I...have a lot of experience rebuilding broken minds."

Edited 2015-05-13 06:30 (UTC)

"On thing you must understand about undiluted Shadowplay, Ms. Frost," Shockwave finds the sensation of his thoughts splintering; the fissures around the insulating layers of complete personality rewrite widening and his own image begins to split like a double exposure and taken on a more masculine but worn shape, "Is that I'm not broken. They've simply robbed me of anything worth breaking."

It wasn't a no.

Slumped in his chair, Shockwave finds looking Emma in the face increasingly difficult with eyes lighter in color, paler like thinning ice wreathed in furrows of wrinkles and bruise purple shadows. Something in him has shook loose for him to drop the guarded manifestation of his psyche.

"I won't stop you," He says distantly, "But you won't like what you'll find."

"I don't know. Real food would be a start."

Cammi peeked out from under one of the large tables that lined The Forum like a lecture hall on a television show. It wasn't like she had much experience with actual lecture halls to be able to tell. Her jacket pockets bulged where she had stored the strange fruit she'd found around Cybertron, because something to eat was better than starving. Even if it was like biting into tin foil, storing it up was just basic survival instinct and Cammi was pretty good at that in her own way.

She took a moment to look Emma up and down before snorting and smiling a little to herself. "What's with the sexy Snow Queen costume? Did I come in the middle of abandoned giant city Halloween?"

Even if there was something slightly off about her and her thoughts, one thing Emma won't find is snide inner comments. Cammi doesn't really know how to do that, how to think about stuff on the inside and keep it to herself. All her inner thoughts usually end up as outer remarks.

Edited (past tense is my weakness BUT I WILL FIGHT IT UNTIL IT IS MY STRENGTH) 2015-04-09 07:37 (UTC)

"White Queen, darling," Emma said, amused, turning to face her undersized verbal sparring partner. She was indulgent with children, even the horrid ones. Especially the horrid ones. Even if the face and nom de spandex weren't familiar, the X logo nested questionably between Emma's breasts should have been. "It's a chess reference."

Not that she'd used the name in years--it was too tainted by the Hellfire Club. (That "Black Queen" affair with Norman Osborn's little side project could hardly be counted, though irritating that cow Selene had been a nice side benefit, even if she'd overreacted shamefully to such a minor provocation.) Still, Emma was only human and had a hard time resisting an opening like that.

She took a close look at Emma's top, nose twitching a little as she dug up stuff she remembered from her time on Earth. She spent ten years on that planet and somehow recalling them is difficult because they were so similar it hardly mattered. There's a vague memory of a news report on television that she flicked past during dinner at one point, but she could think on it in the meantime.

"We don't really do chess where I'm from."

Rural Alaska is a little less board games and a little more hunting and fishing. Drinking obviously took a front row seat as well, but Cammi didn't dwell on that any more than was convenient. Not like she was dwelling on the 'X' on Emma's chest anyway.

"You're one of those mutant guys right? You were on the news once. People were really freaking out."

It was, admittedly, hilarious from the viewpoint of a person located too far away for it to matter.

"'Once?'" Emma raised an eyebrow in genuine surprise. They might not be the media's darlings, but the X-Men and mutants in general made the news far more often than that. "Rather more than that, but yes. I'm Emma Frost."

Ordinarily, she would have expected to be recognized, but she'd set her sights lower, given that Cammi wasn't coming off as particularly engaged, either conversationally or in the blunted emotions Emma was picking up from the girl.

"Maybe you were in more after I left. They don't exactly have cable in space," she said, shrugging her shoulders as she looked a little past Emma at the terminal. The pictures may as well have been Greek to her for all that she understood them, but Emma had asked a question out loud so maybe she knew more. Cammi didn't care about a lot of things, but she was curious enough about this to try.

"I'm Cammi." She pointed past Emma to the still flickering terminal. "Were you talking to that?"

Emma's surprise at finding out there was a pre-teen wandering around the galaxy was minimal. That sort of thing happened all the time, and wasn't relevant to this mess.

"Not to the terminal. To the planet." She gestured widely to encompass the world, arm sweeping her cape aside. "It's self-aware."

"It's what?" The question was purely and obviously rhetorical. She understood what Emma said well enough, but grasping the scope of it was just something she found a little difficult.

Cammi looked at the ground under her feet with a mixture of disgust and fascination as she shifted her weight to balance on her heels. It was weird to know she was walking on something that had a mind of it's own, or whatever it had.

"So is it pissed off?"

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[open] this sort of thing is supposed to be a Fantastic Four problem blast it

C.

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B; I'm sorry for this.

emma deserves to suffer & also idc about tense-matching

i wanna practice anyway c:

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