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| Waltz in Red and Green; Wanda and Samson - psych session | |
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| Topic Started: Aug 11 2009, 03:19 AM (238 Views) | |
| Wanda | Aug 11 2009, 03:19 AM Post #1 |
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Reality Warping
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Date: August 10th Time: Afternoon The doorway stood, unsupported, nothing to suggest it was nothing other than a random piece of rooftop debris, tossed up and forgotten, maybe stood up in someone's ideal fit of fancy. Samson stood in front of it, and mused to himself that there was a time that he would have found this ridiculous, been unable to believe that what was about to happen here was possible. That was before his world had changed from a fairly dry mental health focus, to something far more... colorful. He had familiarized himself with the habits and personality of the woman he had come to see, on the way here. Samson, like many New Yorkers, didn't drive, and he had thought that an official escort car emblazoned with the SHIELD logo would not have been welcomed, so he had taken a taxi cab, giving him plenty of time to read over the rather sparse file they had on Wanda Maximoff. This was going to be a unique session, oh, yes, it was, and Samson was almost overflowing with intellectual curiosity. He knocked on the door, a surprisingly light knock from a fist the size of the average person's head. "Miss Maximoff?" he called, "Are you in?" A knock? Was there a knock? It was then that she remembered someone had told her she was going to have a visitor, someone who just wanted to talk. Who had told her? It wasn’t important. The world was full of important things and unimportant things, and as she couldn’t remember, it was obviously one of the latter. She swung open the door and stared at a wall… of chest. Tilting her head back, she looked into the face of… “They did not tell me a giant was coming. I think I would have remembered that part, it would have been one of the important things.” She stepped away and left the door open. She didn’t caution him to mind his head in her strange little cottage, with its dangling bits of glass, still her current obsession, but presumably he was no stranger to head-height dangers. The door opened and revealed a tiny slip of a woman, in scarlet, and bangles who spoke with the thick accent of eastern europe. Samson's eyes widened when he saw the home within. He'd worked with SHIELD long enough that extra-dimensional locations were not unfamiliar to him, but the decorations and style of the home, well, he had never quite seen anything like this. He ducked his head and entered, drawing his fingers lightly along the dangling glass decorations to hear them clink together musically, "Beautiful," he said, "I imagine the effect is quite striking when the sunlight hits it just right." He looked at the woman, and said, "My name's Doctor Leonard Samson. Did Havok tell you I was coming to talk to you today?" He had read that the woman had a curiously childlike mental state, but he didn't speak to her in the slightly slow, slightly high voice many people used when speaking to children or the insane. Wanda Maximoff was neither, and therefore, she should not be treated as such. She watched him glide his hand lightly over the glass so that they jingled faintly together pleasantly. “Yes, it does,” she reassured him, “but not as striking,” she said, burrowing his word, “as what I see through them,” and left it at that. “Doctor…” she said as if tasting the word, gleaning every nuance from it. Her gaze touched of her deck of tarot cards and idly tapped the deck with one red polished nail (Jet’s doing), before deciding to forego the cards in favor of her eyes. “We have a clinic close by,” she said as she gave him a measuring look, “but you are not a doctor of sprained feet and black-eyes. Ahh,” she exclaimed as if the light had only now just come on in her head, “a mind doctor… Jonny says that you shrink heads. Truly the blackest of arts. But I think I like my head this size… with all the contents inside.” She was indeed an interesting young woman, and Samson was quickly learning that she was not going to be an easy nut to crack. She took things very literally, clearly, and he smiled, "Jon was using a colloquialism that is not a literal fact. As you might guess from my appearance, I do have a measure of superhuman ability, but actually changing the size of someone's cranium is not it. I'm a doctor for the mind, yes, but I'm not here to cure or even really poke around in your thoughts, so to speak. I've been sent to talk to you, to see what we can do to make sure that X-Factor is capable of continuing the good job they're doing here in Mutant Town, and possibly expand that to the rest of the world, so that what happened with Apocalypse will never happen again." “Ohhh, I see,” she said and waited patiently as he explained things. “No, we do not want Apocalypse to happen again. And I will not ask you in what way you and SHIELD deem you in a position to judge us… and me,” she muttered in an aside, “but I am certain you are indeed… fit,” she added graciously. “I, too, am a doctor, so to speak, but not one with the luxury for long… chats,” she said, hesitating over the unfamiliar word. “I spend my time doing… well… things that need doing,” a slyly vague amid the sudden new focused energy replacing the dreaming, smiling young woman who’d answered the door. “And as you do not seem to need my help… but you look like you have long legs, long enough to keep up,” she said with a sociable but challenging smile. She moved toward the door, her bangles jingling, “Can you talk and walk at the same time?” Samson made a courtly bow, as she moved towards the door, sensing that she might be the sort to like the dramatics. "I can walk, talk, and chew gum if I wanted to," he assured her. "I'm very interested to see what kind of things you are needed to do, if you'd like to show me. But, before we go, let's not use the word 'judge.' It makes me sound like I should be wearing a black robe and a white wig. I'm simply here to offer aid, not judgment. You and your team are publicly known and have made a huge impact on the cause for Mutantkind. I, for one, want to see that impact continue, positively. SHIELD is offering you a great deal of backing, both financial and supportive, so they're very concerned with making sure they're doing the right thing by you. This is all a very complicated matter, and the world is changing far faster than people are accustomed to. You understand that, don't you?" She smiled and curtsied a reply to his bow and quip. Back and forth, back and forth, the sway of the conversation reminded her of a dance. No one could dance as well as Pietro, but as they left her strange portal-cottage behind, it crossed her mind to give the green-haired doctor a turn and see if he could keep in step. “Oh, yes, SHIELD is very generous,” Wanda said with a nod as she snatched up her leather pouch, leaving the door open as they left. “SHIELD has always given us… I mean to say, Mutant Town, special attention,” not mentioning the Sentinels but who could forget that ‘special attention’. She turned her gaze guilelessly up to the giant man at her side. “The people of Mutant Town will sleep more soundly in their beds knowing that X-Factor supports SHIELD… oh, excuse me, it is the other way around, I meant to say.” The dance was noted by Samson and he mentally made a note to correct the portion of the file that suggested that the Scarlet Witch was not aware of what was around her. She was far more clever than she let on. Had he been anything but sincere, he would have been quite disheartened, but as Samson genuinely believed that he was doing what was right for the world, he found her shrewdness oddly comforting. It meant that she would let them know when they were overstepping their boundaries in no uncertain terms. After all, even though Samson worked for the government, that didn't necessarily mean he entirely trusted them. "I detect a note of distaste in your voice, Ms Maximoff," he said, calmly, "I'm going to guess that you're a little apprehensive over this association between our respective organizations?" As they made their way through old brownstone that Alex Summers had bought and set them up in, Wanda gave an airy, dismissive gesture. “In the park down the street, everyday at lunch, two little boys, Mark Thomas and James Donovan, sit in the sandbox. They make buildings and fight and argue about whose sand it is… the sand does not care, it goes on being sand no matter if Mark or James proclaims himself king of the sandbox.” "No," Samson said, "But if Mark and James, in their fighting, spill the sand out of the sandbox then no one else can play with it. So, don't you think that, in the interest of fairness to the other children, that Mark and James should find some kind of common ground?" Wanda glanced at Samson with a strange gleam in her eyes, “Then, for the sake of others, and themselves, they should try very hard, very… hard… not to spill any sand or they will be removed from the sandbox and not allowed to play there anymore,” and beneath the words ran a current of confidence that what she was saying could be quite easily done. Down on the city street, she paused, taking in … everything. The city. The people. Every ebb and flow of action. “This way,” she said headed into the maelstrom of Mutant Town. It could have been a threat, or just a statement of fact. This woman at his side was after all the daughter of Magneto, a man so dangerous that even many mutants considered him the boogeyman. Samson nodded, though, without comment on the threat in her voice. "That's not as easily done without disastrous consequences. Humanity and Mutantkind stand on a precipice. It's a hard world we live in right now." He walked with her through Mutant Town. A few people waved to her, and looked in curiosity at him, by his association with her, not because of his size or the color of his hair. It was a unique sensation. "Do you think people like us can help stop this squabbling? Or are we destined to make it worse? Is that why you and your brother joined X-Factor?" |
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| Wanda | Aug 25 2009, 10:10 AM Post #2 |
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Reality Warping
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Doc and Wanda JP “Life hard?” She questioned as they walked through the resurrecting neighborhood. “Who said life was ever easy? Death,” she muttered, “that is easy.” Wanda walked through the streets with the confident stride of someone walking through their own house, like streets and everything around belong to her. "Do you think people like us can help stop this squabbling? Or are we destined to make it worse? Is that why you and your brother joined X-Factor?" She stopped, turned and looked up into his blue eyes. “Squabbles,” she said, parroting the word, “are not the problems. For the whole of time, when you put one person next to another, you will have bickering and squabbles. And sometimes if you only have one person,” she shrugged and added, “if that person is very strange.” Turning back to their walk, she ignored the question about why she and Pietro joined. She walked in silence a moment, her brow furrowed in thought, “I am not so good at stopping the kettle before it whistles… yet.” "Yet?" Samson asked, not disturbed by the implied dangers such a statement might conjure up, "If people will fight and there is nothing to stop them, then what is it you hope to accomplish, Miss Maximoff? If the squabbling isn't the problem, what is?" She was quiet a long time before sighing heavily, “Again, you ask the wrong question. Think about things the wrong way. You are a bright man with letters behind your name, which I am told is a good thing, though,” she began but stopped. Dodging and weaving through the playing children and idle oldsters, a scruffy man, like Paul Rebens after the bad weekend bender, made a herky-jerky beeline for Wanda and Samson… mostly Wanda. Though his dark, filthy hair stuck out wildly and the goggles on his head had lens so dirty they were surely impossible to see through, the most eye-catching feature about him, and there was so much to chose from, was the surely the streaked sock he wore on one hand, a sock puppet. “Miss! Miss!” He called out, bringing the puppet up to attention. “We’ve seen them getting closer!” He pleaded and looked toward the puppet for confirmation of his tale; with only one button eye, frayed bits of thread where the other had been, and a huge scar of bright red stitchwork, causing it to resemble the Frankenstein of sock puppets. Samson opened his mouth to speak, to ask her what she thought he should be asking when, they were suddenly accosted by an obvious derelict, with clear signs of mental disturbance. His agitation was clear, though he seemed to be reporting to Wanda, as if she had given him a task at some point and he had no thought in his mind but to obey, a sentry ordered to watch out for what... "Who's getting closer," Samson asked, "What can we do to stop their advance?" He didn't speak as if he was humoring the man, but rather as if he was concerned for him. If 'they' were approaching, it was of deadly importance to the man, and clearly they must be stopped. The man stared fishy-eyed at Samson as the puppet replied, “The Dark Men,” accompanied by the man’s voice. Wanda’s gaze drifted away, looking around in daydreamy sort of way, as though the buildings and people were no longer there. “Thank you, Alfred and Alice.” She looked at the sock and pointed, “Alice lost her eye. It is a wonder she can see anything with only one eye.” She reached into her pouch, “I am going to tell you what to do… are you listening? Ah,” Wanda’s hand came out with a button, a spool of thread and a needle. “This is Doctor Samson, with letters behind his name, he is very good at fixing things. He wants to fix the world, so he can fix an eye first, yes?” She said, holding out her hand to Samson but a judging-look shimmered in her eyes, a test. He had not sewn a button on in his life, muchless with fingers the size of sausages, but he was aware enough to realize he was being tested. Taking the needle in his hand, almost invisible in his fingers, he carefully took 'Alice' from Alfred, and said, "I'm afraid this might pinch, Miss Alice, but you'll be as good as new when I'm done." He set to work, attempting to sew the button on straight. Not looking up from his task, Samson asked, "Who are the Dark Men? What do they want here?" Wanda nodded, almost imperceptivity, when the big man took the delicate thread and gingerly began to sew. Alfred held his naked hand protectively against his stomach, staring anxiously at Alice. “Sneaking shadows… they get closer when they think I’m not watching, but Alice is always looking too,” his eyes began to well with tears, “that’s why they pulled her eye off.” Holding his hand, Wanda patted it gently. “The dead,” she told Samson matter-of-factly, “he is talking about the dead. With all the people who died here, did you think they just went away?” she asked. “Where were you when they pulled Alice’s eye off?” Nervousness ate at Alfred as he watched his friend being operated on; his fingers itching to take her back when he could. “In the park, where that new stream cuts through. The grass is soft there.” “You go to the mission Kitchen, you know the one I mean, and we will go see the park and make the shadow men go away again,” Wanda told him once he had Alice back. Samson handed the puppet back, smoothing her yarn hair as he released her. "The dead want revenge?" he asked, as if this was a normal conversation with normal people, "Or justice? Or do they simply not know they are dead? It seems to me that if they are attacking poor Miss Alice that they are very angry with us. The question is why. Did we not do enough? Do they want us to join them?" Wanda nodded slightly as the big doc tenderly smoothed the sock puppet’s hair. “We shall have to ask them when we find them,” Wanda said, wrapping her fingers around his big arm. “It is this way,” she said, pointing down the street. “Off you go, Alfred,” she verbally hustled him away from the doctor, blocking anymore questions. Alfred’s hand slipped into the puppet and as it started to more, his bleary eyes lit in relief. “Are ya hungry Alice?” He paused, staring into the puppet’s buttons as he shuffled away, seeming to forget Samson and Wanda. “Oh now, that ain’t right, you’ve gotta eat… gotta keep up your strength,” he chided Alice as they wandered away, muttering as he went. “No more sleepin’ by the creek for a little while; it’s getting down right unhealthy.” Wanda tilted her head back and looked up into Samson’s face. “What do you know of ghosts?” Samson watched Alfred and Alice wander off, wondering idly if he was actually communicating with the puppet via a mutant ability of some sort, or if he was lost in the throes of schizophrenic delusion. Wanda took his arm and then addressed him, her pretty face guileless as a child. This was not a game she was playing to make a point. This was something that was part of her life. "I've never met a ghost, Miss Maximoff. I'm afraid I'm not going to be much help." “Ohhhh.” She said, “I see. Hmmm… Do not feel badly about it, you have other good qualities… and an honest face. That must come in very handy,” she said as she started off for the park. “Perhaps we should tell Dead Girl,” Wanda said almost softly, as though she were talking to herself, “perhaps, but we can not let them just drift around attacking people. A warding… Things will get worse when winter comes,” this last bit directed toward her companion. “Have you noticed that things always get worse when the light fades and chill seeps into people’s bones?” "There's a theory that Seasonal Depression is caused by an absence of light," Samson said, "Exposure to sunlight causes serotonin which basically is a mood elevator, increasing appetite, giving more restful sleep, making one generally feel better. When the sunlight is dim, less serotonin is produced and people suffer from Season Depression. A way to prevent that is to use a lignt box to manually stimulate production of the neurochemical." He was purposely taking the way of science, to see if he could force the hand of magic to prove itself to him. Wanda gave him a sidelong look, “It is good you have an honest face to spout such nonsense. Perhaps you think all people are like my brother’s girlfriend, Avery, that we are like daisies,” she stretched out her arms and tilted her face to catch the full light of sun, “that we turn and bask in the sun, like cats, eh.” “No,” she took her head. “All of the bad things that happen throughout the year collect, like rain in a bowl.” Her hands came together, curving like a bowl. “Bad luck, sorrow, anger, doubt… it fills up the bowl and people feel this. They can not see it,” she reiterated, “but they feel it. The same way people can walk in the darkness and feel… something there.” Around them, it was August and they walked in the bright summer sun, even so, a sudden chill was in the air. “In winter, they feel the growing strength and freezing claws of… Are you feeling well? You look a bit pale.” He could feel it, the sudden cold that was impossible in New York summer. Her words wove around him in a way that was more than speech. She was changing the song they danced to and he was helpless except to fall into step or leave the floor, "We should have several months of leeway though, shouldn't we, Wanda? It's only August. How is the darkness coming for us now?" Samson put a hand to his forehead as if checking for a sudden fever. "I may be a little chilled," he told her, throwing out a line to see if she would take the hook. “I am not surprised,” she told him and reached up, putting her hand to the side of his face and looking deeply into his eyes. “You look into the black depths of soul, the darkest place there is, and chase away their fears and worries and doubts… face the monsters, the chains of memories with bloody hooks that anchor people down in misery… and you do it without protection on your own soul. How often do you think can brush against horror and not carry some of it back with you?” There were people in this world who would look at Wanda Maximoff and think her insane... Wanda herself may doubt her sanity, though Samson was sure that if she did it was in mere flashes now and again. But he knew crazy. He knew the clinical diagnosis of a thousand different psychosis... What Wanda was was something... different. "How is what I do, Wanda, any different from what you do? How many of your teammates have fallen to the blackness at various times? How often has your leader been lost? We suffer, my dear, and what makes us heroes is that we do it despite the stain it leaves on our soul. If I protect myself, then who will protect them?" “And if you leave yourself too vulnerable, sweet man,” she patted his cheek as her hand slipped away, “who will prowl the dark pathways of their minds and bring them home again.” “So many people find themselves lost… now and then,” she spoke with an odd foreboding dread, then turned and continued to the park. He put his hand to his cheek where she had touched his face and he smiled. She turned to the park and continued on their way. He kept up with her, amazed that such a small woman could travel so far so fast. "How do we find them?" Samson asked her. "And how do we help them find their way back?" |
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| Wanda | Sep 7 2009, 05:17 AM Post #3 |
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Reality Warping
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JP Wanda and Samson As they closed in on the park, the world around them suddenly dimmed as though a dark cloud drifted by overhead, throwing its shadow down on the world, but there was no cloud or return of the summer sunshine. “Like most things, doctor,” she replied as she looked around at the gloom, “trouble comes to us.” Wanda glanced back the way they had come, “The people, they stay do not venture here.” Behind them, children played in the sun and people went about their business, seemingly oblivious to the patch of unnatural dusk. “Have you ever been on a farm, doctor,” Wanda asked out of the blue. “Seen horses shy away from a mundane stick or pile of leaves? They see something you do not. People dull their eyes and minds with a thousand trivial things, but even still, there is still instinct.” She gestured with a nod of her head to the people, “They avoid this dark place… do not even see it… and do not know why they feel the tingling fingers of fear if they stray too close.” She looked up at Samson, “Only fools and the mad would come here.” He'd seen many things in his time as a psychiatrist, and many more things since joining the ever growing ranks of the superhuman community. Dr. Leonard Samson Ph.d, Pys.d, A.B.P.P., however, was beginning to see that there were still many mysteries in the world that he was unfamiliar with. "You can see these things," Samson said to Wanda, remembering that he was suppose to be analyzing her as they went, "Is this a by product of your mutation, or something you've always been able to do? As a child, did you see the darkness? Can your brother see these things?" “I am not inside Pietro’s head, I do not know what he sees,” she shrugged. “I do not know what you see. I can only hope you see enough,” she turned back the way they were headed. “But he accepts what I see, whether or not he sees it too, and that is enough. He loves me,” she said simply but with total conviction. Wanda was fearless as she strode deeper into the strange patch of gloom, but it wasn’t bravery; she had ceased to fear anything a long time ago. To feel fear, or love, you had to connect – she’d only really had one person in her life, her Pietro. “When I was young, it took a long time to hear and see the things that I do now, and not get carried away by the tide; some times, I was.” Fear and the clammy chill of death choked the air. In a stomach churning instant, the world shifted into a dreamlike replay of War’s attack on Mutant Town. Her words and her faith in her brother locked down what everyone said about the twins, that they were entwined like creeper vines around each other, shielding the world for and from each other. Samson wanted to continue on this train of thought but something.... something was suddenly happening, moving... Ghostly, almost slow motion, he was watching the events of War's attack on Mutant Town. He saw people falling, engulfed by heat and swarms of what appeared to be ash, but must be the nanobots that had been revealed as the cause of conversion. No one he saw was converted though. They all just fell where they stood. "This is what happened," he said, "When War attacked. Were you here then? Did you see this first hand?" “No,” she said, the word so clipped that it barely escaped her lips, then rounded on Samson in sudden fury, “I am the witch here, for this place, and when I was needed, they said ‘no, Wanda, you are needed elsewhere,’” she yelled, not angry with Samson, he was merely the unfortunate one to be standing in front of her. “I go… and this… this is what I return to. I failed them. I see the ghosts … I hear the wails of their last moments. I said, I was young, I listened to others, but it was they,” she threw her hand toward the dying people, “who paid the price of my ignorance.” Pale mist arose from the broken and smoldering bodies, encircling the pair; within the blurring wall of vapor, things moved. "And that makes you angry," Samson said, as she whirled on him. He wasn't afraid she would hurt him, it would be difficult for her to do so physically, and so far her powers had not manifested as offensive ones to him. He continued to speak, his voice never changing inflection, simply a pleasant baritone, surprisingly light, "The others made you follow them because they didn't understand, and there's a lot of guilt over letting your people down. Seems to me as if your words weren't heard by the people in charge. What do you have to say, Wanda? What do you have to say to these people?" The shadowy figures began to creep up on them, closer and closer. "You can say it now. I'll listen." “I know you are listening, and when the moment is right, you will be telling. Tell them that Wanda Maximoff will not follow… does not follow, not again. This,” she spread arms and the spectral fog closed in, enveloping them with the dead, “will not happen again!” The dead surrounded them, clinging like smoke, the psychosomatic crawling of his flesh as fingers not really there scraped his skin... "It would have happened in Pakistan though!" Samson called over the phantom moaning and sobbing. "Wanda, there is a time to follow and a time to lead. The key is knowing when to do which. These people died, but others would have died if Pestilence was not stopped. How do you choose who lives and dies? How do you decide?" “I just do,” she said simply and raised her hands out from her sides. In her palms, ethereal flames burst into life. The spirits around them moaned as though it was the only warmth and light they could remember. “It is time for you to go,” she told them kindly. Little by little, tendrils of mist reached for the flames and were drawn inside. “I decide, doctor Samson, because deserving or not, I have power to do so.” "But is it your place?" Samson asked, watching in barely disguised amazement as the spirits were drawn into her light. "Your father has the power to kill every human in a range for his powers to lock on to the blood in their veins. The men who killed your mother had the power to throw stones, did that mean they have the right? War had the power to destroy this town, Pestilence to decimate Pakistan, Death London, Famine the Midwest. Apocalypse has the power to crack this world in two. But still you fought him. If might makes right, why didn't you bend knee right then and there?" She looked at him with the dreamy gaze that came when she dipped into the pool of her power and this world, reality, seemed less real more like smoke that she could shape to her will. “Place… Right…” She shrugged. “Ideas that have no meaning attached to me. Do you know Jet, the blonde one who smiles? She was dead and I snatched her from the doorway of Death, not the Angel remade… but Death, that which existed in the beginning and will continue until the last lonely life is gone. Did I have the right? Was it my place?” She tilted her head, the dazed look in her eyes giving her the sense of being something completely alien to this world. “Ask Jet.” "Then morality means nothing?" Samson asked, "Responsibility? One life more or less might not mean much, but where do you draw the line?" He brushed his green hair into some semblance of order after the strange attack, "And if Right means nothing to you, why do you choose to stand with X-Factor and not with the Brotherhood? Why did you and your brother leave your father's service?" “I did not say that,” she said with a winsome smile as ghostly vapor swirled around them. “But I would go mad confined to your perceptions. Can you see across the infinite void? Or feel Time as it flows back and forth? If I could stop, I might… but…” she let the sentence fade away. “How very simple your world must be…” she said wistfully. "Then, you're a goddess?" Samson asked, "And, we're subject to your will? You decide if we live, if we die. You follow no rules but your own, no law of man or nature? You're alone in your wisdom and your power? My world may be simple, but yours sounds very lonely to me." She didn’t look away as the simple tear trailed down her cheek, “ It is.” - End - |
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8:59 AM Jul 11