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

[myownbestfriend]

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."

Comments

[orerrible]

"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."

[myownbestfriend]

"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."

[orerrible]

"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."

[myownbestfriend]

"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."

[orerrible]

"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?"

[myownbestfriend]

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?"

[orerrible]

"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."

[myownbestfriend]

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?"

[orerrible]

"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."

[myownbestfriend]

"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."

[orerrible]

"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.

[myownbestfriend]

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.

[orerrible]

"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."

[myownbestfriend]

"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."

[orerrible]

"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."