2861/The Blue Light

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The Blue Light
Date of Scene: 10 August 2020
Location: Giorgio's Pizzeria - St. Martin's Island
Synopsis: Colette and Terry have a quiet dinner together. God-killing, city-dooming and crotch-kicking are but some of the topics touched upon this very normal conversation.
Cast of Characters: Terry O'Neil, Colette O'Connail




Terry O'Neil has posed:
It really is a fortunate thing that Terry's life is such an active one. That's what life is like when you're with the Titans- and one of the things that makes it possible for pizza to be a somewhat frequent dish without incurring some of the penalties. Donna's exercise regiment and the constant patrols certainly keep the Titans burning up those calories whenever there isn't an alien invasion to stop.

Tonight, though, it isn't a Titans reunion at Giorgio's. It's just The Cat and The Meddler, catching up. Even if the cat is wearing his human suit right now.

"So I have to ask you," the redhead says, taking a sip out of his soda, "What's your take on the secret identity thing?"

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette raises her eyebrows and looks over the rim of her milkshake glass at Terry. "You're asking me? You're seriously asking me? You know what I think of superheroes in general. You shouldn't ask me." She slurps a straw-load of shake and leans back, contemplating the member of said ilk thoughtfully.

    "Lots of you guys don't really bother. Others do." She shrugs her shoulders carelessly. "There's the protecting the family thing. I guess that makes some amount of sense, but honestly it's probably a pretty remote thing. I mean police officers make criminal enemies too, but how many cops have secret identities? Then there's the celebrity thing. Maybe you don't want people noticing you wherever you go. On the other hand as most of the time where you go you go with greenstuff, that's pretty much a moot point, isn't it? And several of the A-listers don't bother with that stuff, like Carol, or Stark. Wonder Woman. Um... probably others. "

    Colette takes a thoughtful pause. "On the other hand, everyone's got secrets, right? I mean let's say for example I'd figured out who Batman is. Which by the way, about ninety-five percent sure I have. Well, if he wants to keep it a secret..." She shrugs again and does a wobbly hand gesture. "Let him, you know? People shouldn't parade each other's secrets around."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Point." He gestures, "The reason I ask you is because you're in a different headspace. My main worry is mom, really. I mean, cops have enemies but how many cops have /supervillains/ as enemies? It's an added layer of risk."

He grabs a breadstick and muches on it, "On the other hand... what if Gar and I get serious? To protect my family, Gar'd have to date 'the cat', and... am I going to have a double life where I'm single in one and not in the other? Heck, what if some day we decide to marry?" He waves his hands, "Hey, hey, it could happen... that'd be... super complicated."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
"Is it really an added layer of risk?" Colette asks, leaning back and grabbing herself a grisini which she nibbles on. Colette always makes sure there's grissini on the table. "Supervillains tend to be more effective when it comes to, you know, stealing bridges or destroying the moon, or whatever. When it comes to getting revenge on someone's mom, any fucking moron with a gun is pretty much an equal problem, Terry."

    "For that matter," Colette adds with a thoughtful frown. "She's a PI, right? I mean okay so she's probably generally doing lost cats and unfaithful spouses, but it's kinda the same deal there. She's probably made enemies. Does she have a secret identity? And what about your deadbeat dad? I mean you had an idiot try to execute you because of him. So on the one hand, yeah, it can increase risks. On the other hand, the guy never thought to come looking for you, did he? It was only 'cos you walked into his house and the guy was a fucking moron. You know, if your only concern is about your mom, why don't you ask her opinion? That's the one that matters."

    Colette repurposes the half-eateng grissini as an implement of bready gesturing and jabs the air with it demonstratively. "Secret identites are a pain in the ass, Terry. That school I work at, which by the way I never told you anything about and Carol totally can't blame me for that. Half the people there have a secret identity. Hell, I bumped into a student and a teacher from there at this guy's... well. There were a bunch of like sorcerers or something. It was this whole thing. I probably shouldn't have been there and probably made a terrible mistake that will doom New York, but whatever. It was the guy with the cloak's fault for inviting me."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry hmms, taking these points into consideration. "I guess I'll have to take this in. Of course, I wonder how Lois would react. For that matter, the Planet. And its readers..."

He snaps out for it and looks at COlette, a slow smirk spreading across his face. "Oh yeah, how /is/ your life? It seems that things got so crazy that I have fallen behind with everybody- you, April, Harl. But you seem to not have been driven insane by your charges, so I am assuming things are well enough for now?"

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "Tell Lois, tell your mom, and ask both of them for their opinions," Colette suggests. "There you go, personal perspective and professional perspective. Better than asking me. Besides I don't want to give you guidance on this one. It's kind of a bit too... well I mean who knows what the consequences of your actions are. Seems like about half of you Titans have a secret identity and half don't. Maybe you're going to be like the tipping point that helps decide the way this kind of thing works out in the future. Critical mass and all that. That means it should come from you."

    Colette finishes her grissini and returns to slurping shake. It's good shake. "No charges. Summer." She gives a broad grin - she seems to enjoy the fact. "So yeah. I mean apart from when my parents wanted to flee to the countryside when there was that whole Brainiac thing, and the bit where I probably doomed New York, and the bit where I finished school, it has all been pretty quiet. Sorcerers are fucking idiots, by the way."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Yeah, don't tell Raven that." Terry starts on another grissini, and gives Colette a glance. "Okay, start from the beginning about the part where you doomed New York. I have family there I need to get out if that's the case. And friends. Who live in... underground." Yeah, that was the best way of explaining that.

Pause. "You haven't run into any martial-arts-prone terrapins in your non-adventures, have you? Just, since, you know, weird follows you."

He said that with a straight face.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette slurps noisily and narrows her eyes at Terry. She assumes the martial-artist terrapins thing is some kind of weird Titan-joke and decides to ignore it. "I didn't doom New York. If anything it's probably your fault anyway, for people so preachy about the whole not killing thing. Remember? Who gets to choose if someone lives or dies? Well that wasn't much fucking help when you're put in the position of chosing."

    "Okay, so it goes like this. There were some weirdos on the subway who went for a walk along the tracks and I followed them." Colette puts her shake down and settles back for the story-telling. "They ended up at an abandoned subway station and did some magic, then there were a bunch of 80s ghosts, then a ghost train full of zombie commuters showed up, and one of the wierdos opened a portal, so I got the hell out with them. When I get home there's a letter pinned to the door of my apartment inviting me to go back to the place where the portal opened the next day, right? Because this guy Strange thinks I must have been there for a reason. So what the hell, I figure I'll go along because it sounds kinda interesting. Anyway, turns out that when Mutant Town got ripped out of the city, it basically messed up the entire psychic wossname, and those guys were hunting down the genii locorum of the city for help. So all this random damaged psychic energy is flapping around lose, and it kinda doesn't like to do that. All the anger, love, angst, fear, greed... everything that has gone into making the city what it is over the generations? Turned into a new god. All these sorcerers and associated magical types were at this Strange guy's house, and the god shows up and demands a name."

    Colette takes another slurp of her shake, watching Terry's reactions to this frankly bizarre story carefully. "So. If a brand new god asks you for a name... well. Names have power. So I'm like... guys, we need to call it Susan. Or Jim. But noooo. Too many smart asses around with suggestions like 'Let's call it Hudson after the river,' or 'Let's call it Nothing, then it will have no power.' So the god split into a tripartite proto-deity or some kinda crap like that, and we split into three groups... the genii locurum gave us some bits of tat to help out. I got an old-ass polaroid fucking camera."

    Colette puffs her cheeks out and shakes her head. "Story is too long. Basically I went with a bunch into the realm of the god-part that got named Nothing. Which was where the heart of the god was. Soon as we went through the portal we're all split up into our own separate spaces, each one clearly intended to isolate us in our own personal nightmares, kinda thing. Not being a fucking idiot I took a photo with the camera, which showed the reality behind the hallucinations and fetched everyone together. The heart was diseased and dying and I pointed out that we could basically try to heal it or finish it off, and inevitably everyone's there saying 'oh yeah, let's heal this random god entity we know nothing about, that'll go well. I was tempted, Terry. Really tempted to just kill the fucker. Probably nobody would have even noticed, they would have just thought they hadn't pumped enough hippy bullshit magic into it or whatever. But like an idiot I thought about what you said in the car on the way back from Sabatini's, about not thinking you have the right to chose. So I didn't."

    Colette sighs a little and shakes her head. "So there it is. There's a new god of New York, and I have no idea whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. I didn't kill it, I just told it that it owed us and the genii locorum and it better not fuck with the city, but it's a god. I don't expect it to listen."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry fixes Colette with a blank stare throughout this narrative, occasionally taking a break from staring to chomp on breadstick or suck on soda, but otherwise remaining speechless throughout the entire odyssey. There are a thousand questions he could ask, of course, but most of them would probably get him a glare and a threat, so he simply says "Well. You know how magic somewhat works, you know. You could have killled him, but how do you know something worse wouldn't have crept into the sudden, new power vacuum?"

He hehs, and shakes his head "Somebody actually listened to something I said and took it seriously. I don't think that's ever happened before."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "Don't get a swell head, Wonder-Cat." Colette smirks at Terry, then gestures to the waiter and down at the nearly finished grissini. They've been here often enough by now that the waiter knows exactly what she's talking about and goes to fetch some more while she takes the last stick.

    "Could have been something worse instead, could have been something better instead. Do you let the lack of knowledge paralyze you into inaction? That's dumb. You have to deal with the problem in front of you. If I'd killed it, that problem would have gone away. Instead we hoped it would stop being a problem. So yeah, all the other guys wanted to heal it, and despite the fact that they had already all shown themselves to be far too smart for their own good and far too stupid for everyone else's I went along with it."

    Colette stares down at her grissini and rolls it this way and that between her fingers before ending its life with a chomp. "Honestly Terry, there was a part of me that just... wanted to. I mean how often do you get the chance to kill an actual god? It was sick. Hovering on the edge. If I'd... well, it wouldn't have been hard to finish it off, you know? Then I'd have killed a god. That would be... I dunno. It just... part of me feels like that would be... exhilarating."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Like, say, killing _the_ Cheshire Cat?" Terry asks, nonchalantly, finishing off his soda. By the tone of his voice, you'd swear he had just asked the most casual and nonimportant thing ever. "There's only ever one, you know. That's more unique than a god."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    A flicker of anger crosses Colette's features, but it's only there for a moment, and when she speaks her voice is entirely lacking in ire. "Everyone's unique. There's only one /the/ brand new god of New York, as well, and unlike the Cheshire Cat, he's not my friend. But you're missing the point. It's not..."

    She falls silent as the waiter arrives with another order of grissini, and gives him a smile and a nod, waiting for him to depart before continuing. She leans forwards, and lowers her voice. "I'm not like a... serial killer or something, Terry. It's not collecting trophies. It's... I don't know how to explain it. But a /god/. An actual god. That's power. The sheer amount of life force involved is... beyond other things. And there is a part of me... something inside of me... that... Look. People are complicated. We're all made up of different ideas, different motivations. You should know that better than most people. Your personality changes when you're the cat. Did you know that? Well. There's a part of me that kinda... I told you about the shadow thing. It's connected to that. That part of me, that kind of likes the idea of... you know."

    She leans back again, shaking her head ever so slightly. "But that's not the voice that I listened to, is it? You know the... I told you we got split up into separate illusionary locations, right? Well that god... I guess he couldn't figure me out. He got me angry, but not... I wasn't paralyzed by it, like the others. For me it was a room, just like a regular living room. Only one half of the room was decorated in white and the other in black. And it kept kinda... tipping. Like the black would take over, then the white would take over for a while and... well. I just... instinctive I guess. I just sat in the middle of the floor until it... until I... Look. In the end I didn't listen to that voice, right? So I dunno. Maybe if I had killed it, that would have been it's fault for trying to mess with me like that."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"It would have been his fault," Terry says, nodding, "But it would have still hurt you in the end. Power is... scary. You don't know about this, I guess, but during the Brainiac thing, they sort of..."

He takes a sip of water. "I volunteered to get hooked up to this thing. To psychically overload some of the invaders. Since then, I've noticed some things about myself. About some thoughts that come through at times... if I've stayed Cheshire for a long time."

He shrugs, and looks away for a moment, "Not... the most... I dunno. I wonder, at times, what exactly caused my dad to go the way he did..."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "Now you know why I'm so reluctant to use my powers, Terry." Colette leans an elbow on the table and reaches a grissini out of the cup they're served in. She doesn't pull it out at once, but taps it a few times against the bottom before withdrawing it.

    "I get the impression with the Cheshire cat thing that you and he kind of feed off each other, you know? Like he's an element wild force, but the way that force gets expressed is through the filter of Terry. Does that make sense? But maybe the flip side of that is that if he's in the driving seat too long, that rubs off on you. Maybe you'll become wilder and more chaotic, less inhibited. But I figure it'll still be a wild and chaotic Terry. Your dad though? Well. I'd guess he was a piece of work /already/. The Cheshire, filtered through that, was a different story. And yeah, that's probably a whole feedback thing."

    "I think so long as you're trying not to be a monster... as long as you don't want to be a monster, you're not going to become one. For me it's more like... ah. I dunno. Like there wasn't a filter for it. Now there is."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Well, then I propose a toast to filters. And to keeping monsters at bay," he raises his soda.

And then he pauses, as if thinking about something carefully from different angles, before adding, "And I honestly hope to god that I didn't accidentally doom New York. Is that a good toast? Because it feels like a good toast to me."

He gives Colette a quiet look and adds "You know, after dealing with Raven, I just have to ask you to please /not/ turn into a vortex of darkness and destruction. I don't have a ton of friends, and I'd hate having to go and risk losing one to darkness. Besides," he adds with a lighter tone, "You still haven't taught me that kick you said could drop any man to his knees yet."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette tilts her head one way, then tilts her head the other. Her eyes defocus and she chews on her lip. "You know," she says finally. "That's a pretty good toast all in all. I mean you've got the whole thing that bothers both of us in there, and as an addendum you've got not having doomed a major city. That's good scope. I'll drink to that."

    She raises her shake and clinks it against Terry's soda. "To... all that stuff you said, it's too much of a mouthful to repeat. Don't worry, there's no danger of me turning into a vortex of anything. I don't do vortices. In return I'm gonna ask you to please stick to being a Cheshire cat, and not suddenly get it into your head to be a Cheshire tiger instead. Deal?"

    Colette lowers her eyes uneasily for a moment. "Terry... I haven't... you know. Told you everything. Or even told you much. I'm sorry. You've trusted me with... well, pretty much everything. It's not that I don't... I just can't. I'm sorry. It's not that I don't trust you, just... I'm just not ready to yet, okay? "

    The serious expression quickly gives way to a grin, and she raises her glass to her lips, pausing for just one more comment before she drinks that toast. "As for that kick. I mean you should have figured it out by now Terry. I did say a kick that would drop any /man/ to his knees, after all."