6514/Let's Kill Our Enemies With Weapons

Let's Kill Our Enemies With Weapons
Date of Scene:	10 June 2021
Location:	Master Bedroom: Jean Grey
Synopsis:	A humble library scientist and a marriage on the rocks come to a climax in PROFESSOR GREY'S MUTANT MASSACRE. THRILL to the room where the bodies were broken! GASP at the chainsaw-slaughter from the top pupil! SHUDDER at the cataclysmic revelation of ACADEMIC ANTIPATHY and MUTATED MALICE in SEN-SU-ROUND. Or, Shan demonstrates a possible new therapy approach to Jean! One of those two.
Cast of Characters:	Xi'An Coy Manh, Jean Grey

---

Xi'An Coy Manh has posed:
A little while ago...

Xi'an Coy Manh pops the final latch on her prosthetic, double checks that the charging block is duly plugged in, and then flops backwards into a big fluffy pillow with a profound, soul-shaking groan. She is in her room in the Xavier Institute; Leong and Nga are duly parked in their own housing; the books are in order; her classwork is current; her phone is off so nobody can text her about more volunteer opportunities, or 'volportunities' to quote Casey.

She lays there, with the room only dimly lit by a subtle light, indirectly radiating through a little kitschy lamp in lieu of the ceiling light.

Two minutes pass.

Three.

Four. No relaxation is coming.

Shan rolls over onto her side. Invisibly, a wave reaches out. An invitation; a soft touch reaches out, fluttering with the usual Shan-characteristic tang of volume-level displays on a mixer board. The words thus sent come telepathically.

"Dr. Grey? Headmistress? Mme de la Rouge?"

"Do you have a few minutes?" Shan continues. "I had an idea for something about two weeks ago, and I think I need to try it out."

The invitation has the psychic-image attached to it of... a door. A simple door, floating in psionic space. It opens slightly, with invitation, revealing some kind of empty space - dance studio? It's a sketchy outline, almost greyscale with those tense purple knots that come with Shan's own telepathic talents.

"Did you ever see the old movie, 'Strangers on a Train'?"

Jean Grey has posed:
With the official end of the school year, Jean has finally had a little something of a respite. While there are cliches crime never taking a day off and thus superheroes being equally bound, the reality is that her day job is often more demanding, at least in terms of the number of raw hours of her life that it sometimes demands. Demands? Rather, that she willfully devotes to it, as she's always been a bit of an overachiever type.

But tonight Jean has had some time off in the evening, which she uses for various relaxations and hobbies. She reads, enjoys a glass of wine, soaks in the rather legendary jacuzzi. Maybe at some point she does all three of these at the same time! The fact is, she is in a nicely relaxed mood when Shan reaches out for her. This sort of communication is not wholly unusual, even unprompted. While it might seem a bit of a cheat to skip the texts or emails and go straight to their brain, Jean does sort of have a special relationship with her fellow telepaths at the school. Even if she's not supposed to play favorites, it's like parents with their kids: you just know they have one. And as devoting herself to the school goes, she definitely gives a little extra of herself on their behalf.

Which includes little conversations like these, the sharing of an errant thought or feeling, be it inspiration, anxiety, or anything else.

"Hello Shan. I'm not busy." While Jean has enough control not to accidentally let the precise details of what she's doing bleed in, her reply is laced with warmth and ease, reflecting those surroundings. Curiousity soon joins the equation. "Oh? Well, sure, let's see."

Soon she's moved beyond that basic communion, projecting herself outward and stepping into the realm of thought that's been constructed. The version of her that opens the door and steps inside is a reflection of her comfy evening in, although rather than dripping wet from the bath, she's garbed in red silk dressing robe embroidered in gold, its flowing volume something a bit fantastical itself, trailing behind her at an impractical length, shifting like living fire. Striding inside, she examines the space.

"That's the Hitchcock one, with the cross-cross murder plot? I'm not sure I've ever actually watched it through, it's one of those movies everyone pretends they know when they've culturally just absorbed the references, like Rosebud in Citizen Kane."

Xi'An Coy Manh has posed:
It has its advantages, to touch minds like this. You could not do something like this in a text! Imagine painting a complicated world, all through text on the Internet? Ridiculous.

The door opens and admits Jean into...

Indeed: It's a dance studio, or something close to it. There's a mirror on one end, and windows that suggest sunlight but do not really commit to the idea. It would be chic, maybe.

Shan is sitting on a chair without her leg on at the moment. She is slouching backwards, scenically. She looks noticeably if not agonizingly skinnier here, in this place, than she is in real life; but her clothing is a white tube top and a black skirt with some pleats. Her hairband is made out of implausible shimmering chrome.

"Yes! Though now I have watched it; I didn't have a choice," Shan says. "In fact, there was a quiz at the end. To be frank with you I wish I had stayed home that night, but it did give me this idea, so there will be something to show for it."

Shan raises her hand and, for some cthonic reason, snaps her fingers. In forced-perspective, there is a pencil-sketch animation of what is clearly one of her siblings, several years and at least one Mutation Abuse Incident ago, picking up a book - considering it - and then dropping it, face-down, onto the ground. There is a skeletal crack as the binding breaks. Then the 'animation loop' begins to repeat.

"I remember from your own seminars," Shan says, leaning forwards in her chair, "the idea of taking your fears and gaining a certain measure of control over them... make a picture, make it bigger," suddenly Leong-or-Nga is the size of a respectable dinosaur, "or smaller," now the size of a mouse, or very far away, "or louder," KRRRRACK! "and so on... so that you have control over it, so you do not panic."

Shan pauses. Her eyes lid for a moment. The animation disappears. She brings her hands together with a precise, crisp 'clap'.

"And I have also learned that you cannot tickle yourself. It just does not work! You could do it all day and all you would do is make the saints cry! BUT," Shan continues, looking towards the mirrors on the other side of the studio, "what IF, you were to find someone else with whom you can achieve some rapport... and then you were to both create your own little bete noire--"

There is a brief blurry fog on the other side of the dance studio, which resolves to a sort of free-floating engram in an amethyst frame; looking at it gives the subtle taste, feeling, of having someone mash the horn at you and then cut you off on the highway.

"And then you smash the other person's! Just... blast it, completely. Not what's in them," Shan adds, "exactly, but what they put out there. Just, TIANG!"

"If you think it's a fun idea, we can try it out," Shan continues. "There's some weapons and hammers and everything in the closet over there."

Jean Grey has posed:
Although this studio is not a real place -- at least, in the convention most others would use: perhaps their particular mutant subculture could appreciate the ways in which it could be very real -- Jean takes a leisurely look around, moving further within as she does. Indeed, her curiousity might reflect that very same difference in perspective. Whatever degree of abstract reality one would ascribe to these realms, in the moment, it is the space they share, a little microcosm. Best to get acquainted with things!

"You're taking a film course?" she wonders, briefly surprised, distracted from other trains of thought. It is a mundane bit of information and yet somehow more unusual than the fact she is exploring a place with no phyiscal existence. Perhaps because it represents surprise, reminds her that, as well as she feels she knows 'her' school and everyone in it, people are wonderful and unique and unpredictable. And validates that the discipline she worked so hard to learned when she was a student, to allow people people something so small as privacy.

Shan then performs her demonstration, which is at first quite very familiar (in broad terms) although still manages to make her smile in the specifics.

"It's a pretty staple technique," she observes, at the end of the show. "Not even just for telepaths. Visualization - a lot of people have studied it, used it in psychoanalysis and treatment, or in self-help books, all sorts of things." She doesn't render judgment in that moment, although there is a sense it is a topic she could go on about, given her academic background.

And the conversation turns theoretical. It is perhaps noteworthy, that as things have strayed academic, that Jean's appearance has changed, with such subtlety it would be impossible to pinpoint the moment when it happened, only to recognize it after the fact. Namely: her robe is green now, or has been for some portion of this intellectual discussion.

"So you're saying- I understand why you brought up the movie now -that you think the procedure might be more effective if you 'cross visualized,' then? I admit, it's not something I'd ever thought of. Of hand, it seems a little bit more oriented toward, hmm... building that relationship, understanding the other person, than dealing with the demons themselves." Jean looks toward the 'weaponry closet,' and back. She's clearly amused by that representation, too, although somewhere her smile bleeds away a little, leaving her lips in a thoughtful line. "Of course, it could be a lot for the other person, depending on what you showed them."

Xi'An Coy Manh has posed:
At the question of the course, Shan laughs! "Oh, no," she says; "no, not a class, no."

She moves along. Leaning forwards in the seat, she says, "Just so... though I imagine that it is sort of a matter of which and where, yes? I mean from the one perspective, you are being relieved by the other person taking a certain sort of authority over your own demons, over what you reveal... and the idea of the exercise wants to encourage you yourself to express yourself as well, you know? Since ideally," she gestures, "this is a mutual thing..."

Shan rises to her feet. The leg slides into place and she walks towards the closet, not with haste. "Of course you could have it be a single, how would you say, a single polarity, right? I know I have looked in a few places," minds "where there was the sort of central figure to the psychodramatics, a kind of linch pin, or core point. This would help make the, mm, the recipient a little more engaged, yes?"

"Though I don't know if that would change the energy of it to harm the situation or to improve it," Shan says, tilting her head to the side. "Still, it does not sound... incredibly perilous and risky at a first glance?" She smiles! "Success!"

The closet door seems to pulsate with menace. A highlight, with a mood on it. The color of the light -- and take a moment to look around, and really there isn't anything that out of place for a dance studio or similar in New York City, and based on the subtle level of detail on the floorboards and that little ghost-shadow of where there might have been an arm impact on a mirror, this is absolutely a real place called up from memory --

The color of the light along the closet door is faded. A green filter. Ominous. Horror film. Shan reaches over and gently turns the doorknob, pulling it open with a high-camp wooden c r e a k.

"That's why I put out Msr. Salopard there," Shan says, gesturing at the free-floating memory. "Though, it is pretty abstract, isn't it?" She reaches into the closet and brings things out to set on the ground. A baseball bat. A cricket paddle. A knight's sword. "Do you think something more specific would have more... impact?"

The nebulous impression of a Narrowly Averted Car Accident fades out as if a hand was drawn over it.

"It'd be a little mean to put out an image of a person," Shan muses. "Then again, I mean, if this is a good technique..." She looks up at Jean as she puts a modest and well-kept chainsaw on the ground, "We will surely see a lot of fathers and older brothers, don't you think?"

Jean Grey has posed:
"-And exes," Jean agrees, by way of ammendment to the list of likely effigies. "Or not-so exes."

"I like the concept, but the tricky parts of this stuff is always in the execution. You're right, that some people are ruled over by particular troubles and traumas moreso than others, but I'm not sure you could categorize that they'd all react the same." She is very much deep in thought now, her image expressing the concept in the fullest of stereotype, with a thinker's pose-like raising of hand and fingers brought to chin and lips. Although it doesn't go as far as an actual rock appearing. "If they're full of unresolved anger, letting it out, or watching someone enact it, might be cathartic. But I can think of a couple of cases pretty easily where the reaction might be the exact opposite. Not everyone wants to hurt the people that hurt them, and sometimes, perversely, they want to protect them."

Given their non-traditional environment, anywhere words may fail to adequately and wholly give live to a thought, to fully realize the underlying concept, the thought itself may serve, may be laid out for scrutiny. Here, at the door where she entered, except briefly appearing more like the inside of the front door of a house, such a thought-scene is staged: a police officer attempting to effect arrest on a man while a woman interposes herself between them. She shows signs of injury, battery, very likely the reason for the officer's summons. And yet she attempts to prevent his arrest.

A fleeting image, and in this case, abstract, clearly not drawn from any experience more substantive than a dramaticized version from TV. A cultural shorthand, as before.

"But as long as you avoid those kind of deep-seated and central things, at least until you fully know what you might be dealing with, I think it might be a bit safer," she concludes. "Trying it out with smaller peeves and the like, more isolated instances, and working your way up."

Perhaps to show that she is sporting, now Jean supplies such a thing. An older man and older-than-Jean yet younger-than-him woman together. Maybe in a car, or... across a desk? She's enacting less a specific scene, but rather as Shan did earlier, a conceptual representation, mixing a variety of experiences and details. Without actual dialogue, the words and thoughts of the couple are nonetheless plainly apparent: the woman frustrated with her own children, the man tired, harried, annoyed... and yet occasionally finding time for brief flashes of fantasy not involving his partner, but some 'vague' 'conceptual' redhead.

OK that one is probably not so vague.

Apparently she's conjured the Ghosts of Christmas' Shitty Parents, possibly an amalgamation of many of the worst parent teacher conferences imaginable.

Jean smirks, and gestures from them to the pile of weapons gathered on the floor. "Feel free?"

Xi'An Coy Manh has posed:
Jean raises the question of exes. Shan looks towards the white-washed-brick side of the museum hall with a grimace. Then back upwards.

Still in this seated and studious posture, Shan brings out a couple more things, including several long boxes, perhaps instrument cases, pregnant with possibility and the question of what may lay within. Her eyes stay raised up, the student on practical work. "Yes," she says. "Yes, that's very true."

She breathes in and breathes out. She sees the scene without turning her head - she watches it, in fact, in the dance-studio mirror - but even reversed, the idea is the same. "Mm. But that's what perhaps this could do. Though really I suppose there is an element of judgment in this, isn't there?" Shan says as she raises the next thing she takes out of the closet - a coiled up bullwhip with barbed wire threaded in it - and presses it to her lower lip.

"Obviously we look at this and we see it is wrong and I doubt it is going to be doing that person any favors, but..." And then something is drawn together, a couple forming together, a shape combining, reconciling, blending together like one of those statistically average people that you might see on the cover of a magazine, or inside of an advertisement. Her brow knits for a moment. But then she tunes in, as if listening on the radio -

"Tch," she says. She contemplates the whip in her hand for a moment, then sets it down on one of the instrument cases, before picking up... YES, SPORTS FANS, IT WAS INEVITABLE: The chainsaw.

Shan pushes the gas-pump button and grips the pull starter. "I want to say, Doctor Grey - or I guess I should say, Jean - that I appreciate, so terribly, all the times you have sat on the other side of this desk and spoken to others. I say this on behalf of all the students. At the same time," the cord gets pulled, "I *DO* admit," again, "that this is kind of satisfying!" THIS time it catches, producing a quite authentic cloud of blue-hued smoke. "I wonder if that means something!"

And with this, Karma advances forwards, holding the chainsaw dead ahead - flinching a little, probably for struggles against CHAINSAW SAFETY LESSONS (everyone has to do their little bit to clear the brush, even if they could probably just have Scott and Piotr do all the heavy lifting) - before raising it up and then bringing it DOWN atop that irritated and fantasia-filled heads - then ACROSS -

Despite the inevitable noise of the chainsaw, Shan takes her turn as well.

Someone comes through the doorway. "Excuse me," he says. It's a guy. He has horn-rimmed glasses. He is a sort of composite himself, a vision of intellect, seriousness, gravity, with a little bit of fun and a whole lot of a certain ineffable je-ne-sais-quoi. He stands in front of the door, and deliberately swings it shut behind him, before leaning on it.

This visage looks at Jean then, heedless of the CHAINSAW ACTION, which ends mercifully. Shan raises the weapon above her head, waggles it, and then takes her hand off the control! Yeaaaaaaaaaaah.

"Thank you for stopping that infernal racket," the man says.

Then he looks at Jean directly.

"Ah, so you're interested in library science?" He tilts his head back, his ass firmly pressed back to keep the door - or perhaps, to keep the gate - under his control.

"Name every book," he challenges Jean.

Jean Grey has posed:
As MORE items are brought out, Jean stands watching, cataloguing this curious collection of cathartic contraptions.

Again, there is a measure of joy in the, pure, true surprise as Shan's arsenal is revealed to include such an absurdly, impractically violent choice as its centerpiece. It does seem that if the goal of the exercise is to learn a little about one another, in this regard it may already be succeeding! At the very least, it might be the impetus for discussion of a horror movie night.

In any case, she stands and watches the still-absurd imagery of Xi'an advancing with her chainsaw, setting out to do ultraviolence to these conglomerate phantoms. As such vague presences their reactions are equally unreal and bizarre, although not to the point of robbing the whole thing of well-earned satisfaction. Indeed, in their psycho-plasmic dismemberment, they seem to experience no shortage of visceral damage nor ensuing horror. That said, as much as she has bought in to the idea of the lesson, it does not seem that Jean is intentionally puppeting them to provide any kind of reaction, what she thinks Shan might enjoy or otherwise. Rather, their destruction releases the rest of whatever broad collection of stray thoughts was used to build this cobbled psychic matrix: a variety of pathetic ideas, unjustified anxieties, and other unpleasant thoughts, shredded and cast asunder like a glorious confetti of shitty brainwaves.

"It's nice of you to say that," Jean anmswers, very much belatedly, as the sound of the revving engine, even the psychically-constructed revving engine, conforms to its ideal and drowns out any other conversation for a few moments. "And I should say, in all fairness, that most of them aren't like this, or aren't nearly so bad all together." Because, ultimately, Jean is a nice lady and she DOES appreciate the parents who've gone as far as to make it to Xaviers, as opposed to simply abandoning their unwanted mutant offspring.

Ah, but now, she is to be interrupted by a familiar stereotype!

"Ooh! I know this one. Ran into a couple when I did my grad stuff," Jean admits, now adopting the appropriate level of gleeful appreciation for the opportunity the exercise presents. "I'd say that I'm surprised that it would be so bad in your field, too, but I guess... I'm really not." By now, she is surveying the weapon pile, the man's demand for the full literary heritage of humanity answered with a single upheld 'shush' finger. However, after looking over the pile a bit (and that whip does get more than a momentary glance), she sighs.

"I admit, I'm no good at this kind of stuff. Ask Scott, he'd tell you what a pain it is to make sure I keep up with our combat training." It is less than the fact that she is not a competent weapon-user (much as Shan is not an expert Chainsaw Massacre-er), but rather something else, that her conception of violence is very different. And in a moment, this becomes very clear.

The man has been shushed, and of course finds this a great offense. He perhaps opens his mouth to make some comment-

-yet Jean has lifted a hand, and suddenly, he cannot speak, or apparently even breathe, doing an admirable impression of Imperial Officer #3 getting choked out by Darth Vader. Hanging, struggling, he looks horrified. But Jean is not satisfied with this. A second gesture with her other hand, and the whole collection of weaponry rises en masse, a cloud of ridicuolous weaponry that circles around her in a belligerent halo and then sails across the space between them, assaulting the man in a combined storm.

It is a reminder that violence, in the mind of Jean Grey, means something more than hitting a dude with a bat. Indeed, considering that he hasn't been reduced to atomic particles, she's -still- going easy.

That said, somewhere along the way (was it when Shan started in on the Bad Parents, or only when Jean started?) the robe has gone red again.

Xi'An Coy Manh has posed:
Things spray outwards in a glorious red fountain and Shan regards her work, breathing a little heavily. She looks over her shoulder, and smiles, with red on the side of her face: "Oh, I'm sure... a selected highlight. It's the same with him, really," Shan says, tilting her head back. "You don't get the whole thing in one go. Just a slice. But slice after slice after slice..."

Her eyes gleam. "Soon enough you have an entire pizza."

She blinks once at what Jean is saying, almost as a lead-up.

"Actually," the man with the glasses says, reaching up to adust them, "I think--"

"ghk," he says then, floating upwards. There is some continued effort to speak, as if a piece of programming, of imagery, is running without an anchor. He reaches up to touch his throat, and then - then, and it may be a relief, at least, he begins to act out the demise of an admiral who has failed for the last time, down to the last wiggle of the mouth and froglike croak - though his eyes do widen as the weapons rise up and move together, orbiting around Jean in a widdershins array of casual and suggestive death before

SMASH
SLAM
CUT
TEAR
SLAM, SLAM, SLAM; two of the instrument cases fall asunder, one revealing a Thompson submachine gun as new as the day it was filmed, and the other revealing -- a trombone; the wave-form collapsed, and this one without peril.

His face turns red, then purple, then finally with a noise much akin to that of a frog, he... croaks; and goes limp. This one is a little distressing in its realism, but perhaps Shan has seen these things close-up often enough for it to be part of her toolkit.

A moment later his head explodes, releasing colorful butterflies and... oh, yes; a great deal of blood. As the butterflies flutter out, ruby-red and glistening, Shan puts a hand on her hip and says, "That was...!"

"Honestly I don't know what it was, but I do feel relieved," she says. "It's like the feeling of... you know, popping your back? I think it's like that." The still-bundled-up whip rolls forwards, like a kinky tumbleweed, and is nudged aside with Shan's prosthetic leg, which naturally enough does not get cut up by the strand of barbed wire.

The feelings released on those butterfly-wings are mostly anxious stray thoughts with a substantial minority, worthy of representation, of good old fashioned Catholic guilt, with a healthy soupcon of a certain degree of snarling bloody-minded rage which is, perhaps, not typical in librarians.

Right?

"What do you think? Worth working upon, if we can find the time? We shall not, I'm sure, lack for people with roughness in their pasts."

Jean Grey has posed:
The butterflies are definitely something, causing Jean to marvel somewhat at their color and whimsy. By contrast, she does not seem overly moved by the phantasmal gore, nor any of the detail in the re-enactment that leads up to it. This reflects another truth: that at her own darkest moments, Jean Grey has witnessed (and enacted) destruction at truly mind-boggling scales, both of size and pure destructive ferocity. This procedure is perhaps not quite up to the task of exorcising her darkest demons.

But it seems well-suited to getting out the mundane frustrations accumulated in her daily life as an attractive school principal! And can one say, for certain, that managing the latter does not have some value in holding the former at bay?

"It felt good."

This, Jean's reply and ultimate assessment, is one that would seem to weigh in favor of such value. At the same time, she withdraws her outstretched 'hand of doom' so that she might clap both together and 'dust off' whatever imagined remnants of the task, signifying the completion of the entire effort. As to the specific, vaguely chiropractic feeling? "Something like that, or whatever the emotional equivalent. They're not the things that pain us most, but still, the little things, the irritations... when you live with them, it can add up. And it feels cathartic to dismiss them. Although..."

Jean's hands are on her hips now, as if supporting herself as her posture shifts a little off center, as if she were trying to physically get a new perspective on the situation, survey it from another angle. This might be representative of a mental equivalent, or... just some idle fidgeting. But! It does accompany thought, consideration, expressed clearly in her face if not as definitively in her stance. "I'm not sure about the 'exchange' aspect. Not that it's bad just, I'm trying to get a handle on how reframing things like that changes the equation. Or doesn't? It adds a certain distance, and maybe that makes it all feel a little less serious, more something you can laugh at?"

Fancy degrees aside, her conclusion is still a noncommittal shrug: "I'm not sure!"

However, this is far from a condemnation, and given the last question, her response is encouragement. "I think it's worth working on, experimenting a little, playing around. I can see the team-building value, for sure, helping get some perspective on the people around you and appreciation for where they're coming from- I'd have never pegged you for chainsaw murder fantasies!" Said with surprising -acceptance-, and a dubiously appropriate laugh, given the words that made up that last sentence.

Xi'An Coy Manh has posed:
"It did," Shan agrees.

She runs a hand through her hair. The blood in it turns to... water? Hair gel? It is hard to say. She takes another huge breath and lets it out.

"Yes... that's good. It really was sort of off the top of the head, you know? If you do have the chance to experiment yourself, please do let me know what you find. I wonder if we should keep diaries or something... this is sort of its own science, isn't it?"

She does smile, then, and laugh. "Oh, well," Shan says as she straightens up and sweeps blood off her skirt, "I have seen my share of these movies, you know. They can be fun. And it's always the one you least expect, right?"

And then drifting out through that door and a little idle chit chat, followed by a sound night's sleep.

The dance studio memory remains present in the astral plane around the Institute until just after midnight; or perhaps when Shan sinks into REM sleep at last; one or the other. Either way, that is when the sun goes out, and the memory of a room fades away, from the astral back, perhaps, to nowhere.

Nowhere real, at least.