multiversallogs | where fast the Arctic nights set in

Entry tags:

where fast the Arctic nights set in

Who: Logan, Laura Kinney, Njoki Rainmaker, and some other people probably. Not all at the same time.
What: Existing in Baedal once an obvious exit sign has since not been found.
Where: Various!
Warnings: Swearing, so we can get an Oscar.

Shaking the cage of people in his same predicament, turns out, isn't as engaging as he had hoped. He doesn't like the CiD, it fits wrong in his hand, he feels like he could shatter it if he draws tendon and bone tight in a fist, and its mechanisms feel too small for his fingers. But eventually, he sends off a text message, some delayed and somewhat grudging.

could use that beer

He misses traffic, too. Cars don't spook so easily and he can live out of a truck.

There is a time after dusk that he picks up a scent, and follows it all the way into the Spatters. He'd been looking for it before and despite the waning hour, because a little darkness never killed nobody, and he had to know.

The evenings he isn't working in the gambling dens, with cards and fists both, to make his way are spent in hibernation on uncomfortable mattresses with a roof over his head. Daylight holds as many bar interiors as the evening. It isn't like useless, purposeless roaming never suited him before.

It just chafes, this time around.

[ OOC: See comments for some thread starters, both open and closed, otherwise make your own! ]

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She should have killed him. It's bothering her, tension visibly rising -- she should have killed him. Leaving survivors goes against everything she's been raised with, and it's a poor tactical decision to boot. She scared him and he might lay off for a few weeks, maybe months, but sooner or later he'll try again when he's sure he won't be caught. She shouldn't have let him live.

Laura's fists clench hard enough to leave her knuckles white as she turns around. She's never happy to see him under the best circumstances, but she's making an attempt to reign her anger in because he's not the one she knows. Her claws retract; she's not planning on fighting him.

"I told you to stay away from me." They're both so good at doing what they're told, yes.

He doesn't have claws out to retract, but he notes it when she does. His hands have found their way back into his pockets by the time she's turned to him, his posture loose and open. If they were to suddenly descend into fisticuffs, he'd have the disadvantage in terms of nanoseconds. And while he may not be programmed to her degree to think tactically about the lay of the street and the positioning of warm bodies as an automatic thing, it's probably not not deliberate.

"Yeah. It didn't take."

Clearly. He wanders a step closer, kind of nods in gesture of wherever the action just too place, the smell of panic still lingering in the air. "You do this a lot?"

She gives him this look like really, you're here to make smalltalk? and doesn't answer. He didn't track her down because he's interested in her hobbies, she's reasonably sure of that, and he's not dumb, he knows by looking at her that she doesn't need to be tailed for protection.

Yeah, well, no one said he was ever good at it either, and he gives a vague, uncomfortable sort of shrug when she simply looks at him. Not that hunting down thugs is much of a hobby per se, but then again, it may as well be for some people in this town.

"Valid question. Someone put metal on your bones for a reason. Wondering if it was this."

"No." Wouldn't that be nice, though.

She considers him for a moment. If she were in his position, she'd want to know. The similarities can't have escaped his notice and she wouldn't blame him for assuming it does have something to do with him, because he would be right. If he doesn't remember Weapon X, implied from the last time she mentioned it around him, then she knows something about his past that he does not. "You want to know what I am."

It isn't a common procedure. It isn't a common metal.

And getting answers from someone on his end of things is something he can swallow in place of wheeling and dealing with the likes of Stryker. I'll take my chances with them. "Yeah, I want to know what you are," he agrees, his voice level and neutral, and he flicks a glance around the street, and then back to her. "Wanna walk?"

He isn't offering apology for the fuck off he gave in every way that wasn't actually those words, but mostly because he isn't sure it'd take.

Laura starts walking without answering -- well, why not, she's not a chatty kid by any stretch of the imagination. She's heading to a lesser populated area -- nearly out of the Spatters, but also close to the fog, where average Baedalites won't go. That prickly feeling she gets in every one of her enhanced senses is annoying, but it doesn't bother her enough that she can't stand to be out here. Anyway, it keeps her alert.

"After the escape of Weapon X, the facility launched a new project intending to create a viable clone embryo. They used a DNA sample obtained during Weapon X's escape, but it was damaged and alterations were necessary. In the process, they removed the incomplete Y chromosome and doubled the X. A specimen was produced from that, surgically altered, and weaponized."

She pauses.

"They succeeded with me where they failed with you."

She's going fast. Or, really, no. The words are out of her face at a normal rate, but it's big information in not as many syllables as it might deserve. Logan's expression has lines in it, connoting tension, but he doesn't interrupt. If he knows anything about youth, and he sort of does by now, it's to let 'em speak, even if Laura is a different kind to the ones he's met. A lot different.

He keeps pace, longer strides slowed to match her's.

And for a moment, they are both silent, because she's finished and he is processing. "And what did success look like?" he asks, gruff.

There's no emotion in her curiously flat voice, no inflection -- these are straight facts that she recites as if she's talking about someone else or reciting a report for a class she's young enough to be in. "I outperformed Weapon X on every virtual combat simulation by an average of two minutes and thirty-eight seconds. My healing factor is estimated to be forty-three percent more effective. I killed one hundred and eighty six people over the span of three years, averaging twenty minutes, nine seconds per mission, at a rate of fifty five million dollars."

A million dollars a pound, is how Sarah put it. Laura was ten.

Her claws pop out of her knuckles, but it's not a threatening gesture; she's just looking at them.

Finally she looks at him, but without turning her head. "I almost killed you."

"Jesus."

Excuse him as he says that out loud when he didn't entirely mean to, although he doesn't seem to notice anyway. Logan's breed of horrified is generally understated, and it is now, muttered in two syllables, and he isn't really talking about himself, there, because she's wrong. She's never almost killed him. But he's met someone not too unlike her who has.

Those are a lot of numbers. Big where they shouldn't be, small where he'd prefer them not to be. His gaze wanders for her claws, but he doesn't put his own on display, meeting her sidelong glance only briefly.

"I was told I chose it." A beat. "You know the name Stryker?"

"Colonel William Stryker. Televangelist and anti-mutant bigot. Acquitted of the murders of his wife and mutant son. Responsible for the bombing of a bus of depowered mutant students at the Xavier Institute For Higher Learning which killed twenty-five percent of the student body. In his attempt to eradicate mutantkind, he reactivated the Sentinel descendent designated Nimrod. Executed by Elixir. Resurrected and lead the Purifiers in an attempt to assassinate the mutant Hope Summers. Executed by Archangel. There is evidence connecting him to the Weapon X project."

That's a huge information dump from a girl who rarely speaks more than a few words at a time, but again, it sounds like she's reciting a report -- which she sort of is, most of her information comes from accessing classified files. It's also pretty clear that her universe differs radically from his -- but there's still just enough in common for certain names to be recognisable.

Twenty-five percent of the student body. She sounds so calm. Those were her friends.

"You are not the same Wolverine I... knew. I do not know. The Wolverine who is my genetic donor was captured by Weapon X and experimented on against his will."

Edited 2012-01-03 14:07 (UTC)

That's a lot of information Stryker, and it rings familiar in spirit, but not in practicality. In his reality, Logan was the one who condemned him.

"But we might get along. Sounds like we got a few things in common."

He means his alternate self, but it's coded in a way that isn't deliberate and probably too subtle for Laura to catch. Two Wolverines in a room might end in bloodshed, anyway, or basically just the building cleaned out of beer. And either way, he won't get the specifics about why he is the way he is, or even the project that made him that way, not from Laura; but it's a start.

Logan squints off at the building faces they pass by. "That day you came to find me, was that because you thought I was the guy you knew?" The guy is about as familiar as he'll get - it is truly bizarre to think of a different him.

"Yes." Laura moves her hand from side to side, watches the way the light catches off her claws -- she's not worried about anyone seeing the reflection and coming to investigate, this part of town's more or less abandoned, and nobody's going to start shit with the two of them anyway. He's a big guy and she looks pretty tough. Still, after a moment she retracts them, but out of sight, they're still in mind -- she is always aware of that weight in her hands and feet.

"We do not always 'get along'." She uses the colloquialism with obvious effort, like she's saying something in a language she doesn't speak, and -- as if that weren't obvious with the way she greeted him with intense, open hostility. That's mild for her, really, if she really hated him, she wouldn't have bothered reining in her temper.

Out of sight and still in mind for him as well; it would be a mistake to forget what she's capable of, but he thinks-- imagines-- he might 'get her' better than he did when they were bristling like angry cats on the street. One would hope so, by now.

"No, I, uh." Squint off into some dark alley. This place is fucking quiet. "I got that impression." His tone is one of almost amusement, in a way that is self-deprecating... as much as one can be across alternate realities.

"Who is Stryker in your universe?" She guesses he likely still had some involvement in the Weapon X project, but Logan's unfamiliarity with him indicates he may not have the same highly public persona he does on Earth 616 -- Stryker isn't quite a celebrity per se, but people do tend to know of him as 'that one televangelist nut' the same way they know, say, Ted Haggard.

She's curious. He murdered a lot of her friends and is indirectly responsible for her existence by being directly responsible for his.

"A dick."

So, same difference. It's sort of said with a tone that implies that casually calling him names is too good for him, made somewhat more solid when he adds; "And dead." Or so Logan assumes. Jean didn't survive the flood, so why would Stryker? The backs of his knuckles scratch the underside of his jaw, an uncomfortable fidget. "Never saw him on TV; government had enough assholes for that job.

"He was, uh. A scientist for the military, did experimentation on mutants, including his own kid, and in the end, he tried his hand at mass genocide. How he ties in with me, well, all I know is what he had to say, and desperate men talk a lot of bullshit. But he was in the business of brainwashing mutants to carry out his orders, and before that, I guess there's me."

Whatever that was supposed to be. "I don't remember," he reiterates gruffly, for those playing at home.

Experience has taught Laura to never write someone off as dead until there's a body, and even then, to still be prepared for their eventual return. There's a reason they call death the revolving door, where she's from. She says nothing more on the subject of Stryker except for a mild grunt that's much more Wolverine than most of her other mannerisms thus far -- there are probably more of those, but they manifest so oddly in her. (Seeing her smoke a stogie is pretty surreal.)

After a moment, she says, "You will." It's meant to be comforting, but Laura is just... not good at that, so it comes out more awkward. It is, at least, not an empty platitude: the one she knows remembered, eventually. It's unlikely that this one never will.

She almost wishes she could forget.

It isn't. Comforting. And the crooked half-smile that comes of it is not because Logan feels comforted. "I'm not sure I want to. The fragments that I do remember sometimes weren't exactly a picnic.

"Besides. I have this place now."

He sounds incredibly unenthusiastic. "No Stryker, no... Weapon X." No Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters. "No one to hold responsible." It's about then that he realises he is talking too much, to a girl who was doing something useful before he showed up. He stops when he does and glances at her, away, and slows his walking as if to allow her to detach and go off on her own.

"You should, uh. Let me know if you want help out here. 'Want' bein' the operative word, because it doesn't sound like you need it." The qualifier is less to pander to her ego and more to circumvent precise correction.

Not that she might not get it anyway, occasionally, but it's polite to ask.

Baedal does have that effect on people.

Laura makes a gesture like an aborted shrug; if it seems unnatural on her, it's because it is. She's not used to utilising body language the way normal people are, it's something she had to be taught. A Logan who doesn't remember who he is is probably not the best choice when it comes to sniffing out Candlelighter and Militia business, which is largely what Laura does in the Spatters, and when it comes to dealing with the petty (and not so petty) crime down here that is her lesser priority, she definitely does not need help.

Still, she does actually recognise the offer for what it is. She doesn't say anything -- the I don't need your help hangs clearly in the air, but not saying it is her way of holding out a white flag -- just before she swings up the fire escape of the nearest building and disappears that way, unceremoniously. She doesn't do goodbyes under the best circumstances, and he'll know where to find her if he wants to.

She's the only one in the city who smells like him.

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