[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]

"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."