Thread: Mercury & Optic Who: Aubrey Ryan & Cessily Kincaid When: Afternoon, Wednesday, April 30, 2008 Where: A small sandwich shop in Manhattan What: At Cait's request, Aubrey has been somewhat secretly building an image inducer for a Brotherhood operative. It's finally ready, and he's come to take it to her. And I think she made him cookies to repay him.
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Aubrey was only mildly concerned that this Cait girl was going to kill him.
She seemed all right, even if she was a member of the Brotherhood, and she was in need of an image inducer. There was nothing wrong with that, and Aubrey ... it wasn't that Aubrey was willing to see across affiliations and ignore past transgressions, but if a girl needed an image inducer in order to survive in public, then who was he to say no? Sure, it would have been easier to say no. A lot easier, because this one happened to be a bitch to make, but it gave him something to do and it meant that maybe he'd start networking, start getting this technology to other people than those at the school.
Maybe it was wrong of him to think that the image inducer was a necessary thing. He would have liked it if everyone could just walk around as they were. He wished everyone was as brave as Hank McCoy, whose blue furry self went walking around town all the time. But the fact of the matter was, not everyone was like that. People got hurt. His girlfriend got hurt. His girlfriend used an image inducer for her safety as well as her own comfort, and if that was the choice a mutant wanted to make... that was that mutant's choice. He could only imagine that this Cait girl was getting a lot of flack for this, if any Brotherhood members knew.
Of course, in the wrong hands, this technology could be incredibly dangerous. The right programming and anyone could become almost like a shapeshifter. No alteration in a person's size, but features could be tweaked and... well, Aubrey had an overactive imagination and he'd done a lot of thinking of what could happen if the Brotherhood took his image inducer and ran with the technology. Then again, he also knew they had a freakish computer genius or two on the team who really didn't need any of his research. They'd handle things themselves. So he'd decided that the worst-case scenario was so unlikely that he was just willing to give the girl her damn image inducer.
He agreed to meet her in this little sandwich shop in Manhattan, driving out from Westchester so they could meet in a neutral area where neither one of them would get killed. He was sitting alone at a table in the corner, so he could see out at the rest of the restaurant, and he was dressed simply in sneakers, jeans, and a t-shirt reading "Drop it like it's Pluto." In front of him was a neat little box and he was drumming his fingers on it, waiting. He felt like a spy. Or a drug dealer.