InsaneJournal

Meggan was a night owl. Not really out of a deep desire to be one or a love of the darkness, but because it was just easier. Walking around at night, going to stores and things when it was dark, or so early the world was mostly asleep, meant there were less emotions to deal with. Meggan didn’t do well with crowds. Going into a store at normal hours sounded like her own little version of hell. Even coming in and out of Pickman at certain times of the day could be downright overwhelming.

Still, she’d never quite had this level of freedom in her life before. She spent the first twenty years of her life locked in a caravan, only able to walk around at night in the dark anyway, when she couldn’t be seen. Then she was off with Brian and Betsy and Excalibur, with people a lot, busy doing things. Brian had never even taken her on a proper date. So adjusting to Dunwich was equal parts exhausting and amazing.

Plus, she was making so many new friends! There were many people here far more curious about her than frightened, and many people who were like her, or different in other ways that could relate to her. It was sort of amazing, and she was finding that she liked it a lot. So tonight was another night of exploration, and she found herself at a little diner in town, open all night.

The smell was amazing. The few people in there mostly felt tired, or calm, some feelings of hunger or satisfaction. Easy things to deal with, nothing too complicated. She chose a spot at the little bar area instead of a table, to be a little closer to the woman who poured the coffee because she had a nice disposition. She felt like a happy person, and Meggan loved a happy climate.

“Coffee please, oh and do you have pie?” She’d seen coffee and pie in diners on television so often, but she’d never had it in real life. The waitress told her they did, and Meggan lit up like a christmas tree, her eyes wide. Sitting up straighter, as if she were pretending to be more of a lady and more proper than she really was, she said “I’ll take a coffee and a slice of pie then, please.”

---

It was in Kay's nature to keep his head on a swivel even when he wasn't, strictly speaking, on the clock. He was aware of the blonde when she entered the diner, just like he'd been aware of the trucker stopping in for a bite before he continued his long drive through the night. Or the couple talking in furious whispers in the corner. Or the waitress who liked to hum along with the PA.

Another local, he figured, and went back to his coffee and the crossword puzzle he'd been working his way through at the counter. The newspaper it featured in wasn't his. Neither was the pencil he was tapping against the faded page.

But he could try to figure out a five-letter word for chicken motions and chew gum at the same time. Or rather, he could decide on the spot: "I'd like some pie, too?" Because the locals sometimes had good ideas, and he liked the concept of pie enough to want to try the real thing.

---

Meggan was surprised when someone came and sat down next to her. She didn’t know many people here yet, but she could tell he wasn’t a local by the way he felt. Which… really threw her off. It was so muted. So controlled. Instinctually, Meggan held the sides of her chair tightly, trying not to shift. The slight fear and discomfort she felt had her wanting to change, but she kept herself steady. For once.

Distracted by his desire to also have pie, she brightened up and sat up a little straighter once more. “Have you ever had coffee and pie before at a place like this? I’ve never.” She leaned in a little, almost conspiratorially in nature. “I’ve seen it tons on the tv though, you know? Always looks right posh, men in their suits after a long day at work, or women in their beautiful dresses having brunch.”

She talked a lot for someone who was still trying to figure out why his emotions were setting off alarm bells for her. “Are you local? You must not be. I can tell. I’m Meggan, I just arrived here oh, a week or two ago?”

---

The deluge of interrogatory statements nearly threw Kay for a loop. Then again, most people spoke faster – and more – than he did, so it wasn't a particularly high bar to clear. He revised his initial assessment of the blonde: the locals could be chatty, but not like this. They didn't want to know your opinion. They didn't volunteer details about their arrival in Dunwich, almost as though they'd always been here.

"Kay," he replied slowly, both answering her question and introducing himself. "I've had coffee." The mug to the right of his crossword confirmed as much. Whether that made him halfway posh was debatable. For one thing, he wasn't wearing a suit. For another: "A little late for brunch."

The waitress chose that moment to return, expertly balancing two plates of pie for the pair of them and an extra coffee for Meggan.

---

At first she thought it was a snuff. She’d been responded to simply with kay in the past, usually right before someone walked off or said something mean, turned around and ignored her. For a brief moment, she felt her heart start to crumble. Her hair visibly dulled into a mousy dark blonde. When he kept going though, it registered. His name. Kay was his name. Weird name. She liked it.

“Does brunch have to be at a specific time?” They never really explained the concept in the tv shows, and she’d never asked anyone about it before, so she really didn’t know. It never even crossed her mind that it was the time between breakfast and lunch. She just thought it was a name for a get together of fancy ladies.

The pies arrived and Meggan’s smiled brightly to the waitress, thanking her before she picked up her coffee and took a sip - which she nearly choked on and almost spit out. “Why is it so bitter?”

---

The hair thing might've been a trick of the light or proof that Kay's eyesight was defective. He couldn't immediately decide which option applied. Maybe both. Maybe neither.

"I think it's in the name. Between breakfast and lunch… brunch." No one had explained it to him, either, but he'd read a lot of books and watched plenty of old films, and grasped some concepts – like family, love, and yes, brunch – through sheer osmosis.

He wordlessly slid the sugar toward Meggan. "Some people put milk in it, too." Though he wasn't one of them. "I've seen it – in movies." Since she'd brought it up, he figured it might not sound so odd to say as much. Hard to guess. In addition to a failing eyesight, it was possible Kay's other faculties were also declining. Such things were inevitable.

---

“Oh, that makes sense.” She probably did know that, thinking about it, but Meggan was never much of a deep thinker. With the sugar being slid towards her, Meggan dumped some into her coffee - far too much honestly - and then found the little container with the milk in it, and turned her coffee almost white. Stirring it up, she tentatively took a sip.

Well, it was better.

The pie would be an easier bet, so she slid that towards herself now too and took a bite of that, enjoying it far more than the coffee. “Do you like movies? I watch movies all the time, and programs, I watched so many tv programs growing up, it’s where I learned pretty much everything!” She admitted in her excitement, cheeks turning slightly pink at her own admission.

---

Meggan's milky-coffee concoction seemed to elicit no further complaints. Just in time for the waitress to emerge from the kitchen, full tray in hand and the lyrics to match the diner's soundtrack on her lips.

Kay watched her from the corner of his eye, attention mostly focused on the mousy blonde beside him. "They don't have school where you're from?" Not a judgment, though the phrasing might've suggested otherwise. Some people didn't hold with state-mandated education. Others just didn't have that option. Meggan's world could be a little or not at all like this one; Kay wouldn't know which until she told him more.

Notably, he made no attempt to answer her question, much less reveal anything about his own origins. Nor, for that matter, did he reach for his slice of pie.

---

“Oh, they do.” She replied, taking another sip of her now cold and too sweet coffee. She liked the creaminess to it, at least. She left it at that. It wasn’t a topic she generally enjoyed talking about - because if she said anything, then he would know she couldn’t read and had no formal schooling and it was embarrassing. Something she was very ashamed of.

Taking the spoon and setting it in the coffee so she could stir it out of nervous energy, she looked back at Kay, wondering why he wasn’t eating his pie. Why he felt the way he did, which was… not a lot, honestly. There was not much emotion coming off of him at all. It was weird. Very controlled. She could feel it underneath, though. The rage. It was deep and suppressed and Meggan almost wanted to pull it out, scratch the itch so to speak, but she knew that was bad.

“Are you okay?” She asked instead, the slight fear of that hidden rage turning her hair a little red, her cheeks a little fuller, her eyes a sharper blue. It almost looked, even sitting, if she had gotten taller - maybe a touch more muscular, too. A stronger, more mature looking woman than she had been a few minutes ago. “You feel angry.”

---

Two questions, one more easily bypassed in favor of the second. Kay cocked an eyebrow, amused. "I do?" Although looking at Meggan now confirmed what he'd doubted before: it wasn't a trick of the light, her hair really did change from moment to moment.

Eyes, too. Build and features, and the air with which she carried herself. Less mousy, more controlled.

And she was doing it while speaking to him. Reacting to him, maybe. Odd. "I don't usually get told how I feel," Kay mused, setting his pencil down and reaching for the coffee. It was just the only thing humans couldn't dictate to a replicant – and did that ever make them anxious.

"You must be good at reading people." He liked to think he was, too, that it was part and parcel of his function. It was why he found himself adding, "If you're worried, there are other seats…" The diner was mostly empty at this hour and Kay wouldn't take it personally if she chose to eat her pie in peace somewhere else.

---

“Sort of. It’s there, really deep. You mostly feel calm, controlled. Kinda like a robot. Have you ever seen any movies or shows about robots that can look really human? That’s kinda how you feel.” Meggan was not one who thought much before she spoke. Or, she did, but it didn’t help much. Maybe once she was in Dunwich a bit longer, she might know when to hold her tongue.

Probably not, though. “I am good at reading people. I guess, I mean. I can feel them. It’s not um, a skill. It’s an ability.” Sometimes she got it wrong, but she had felt anger and she had felt control and she had felt a lot of different feelings that she recognized them pretty easily. Had she not, too, had that same rage underneath her surface, often?

Had she, too, not done her very best so many times to remain perfectly controlled, so that she wasn’t shifting all over the place? Once she learned that’s what she was? That she could control it? It was exhausting, though, and Meggan preferred to just let it be when she was able to. “I’m not worried. I’m just… curious, I guess.”

---

"So red hair means curious?" Kay asked, not really expecting an answer. She'd already revealed more than he had and was holding up the conversation almost entirely on her own. Pitching in seemed polite. "I have seen those movies. They're not very popular where I come from." On account of replicants passing for human a little too well.

On account of people like him being tasked to bring in the ones who got it into their heads that they could be.

Ones like him.

Kay set his coffee mug down after a sip, each movement careful and precise. Calm. Like a robot. "So you're a mutant." There were a few at Pickman. Some talked openly about their abilities, others betrayed themselves in conversations on the network or within earshot of others. Kay had read through messages predating his arrival but stopped keeping up with the chatter a few weeks after that event.

There just didn't seem much point in scraping the feeds for information he could do nothing about. Simulation or not, his current circumstances weren't the worst. Something about the mouths of gift horses flashed through his mind, though he'd be fucked if he could untangle the specific saying.

---

“Is it red now? I suppose it gets that way when I’m mad, or feeling defensive. I was feeling what you were feeling. It’s almost… to be off-putting, I guess?” It was hard to tell sometimes. Her morphing ability went often with how people felt about her, or how she felt about a situation at hand. Even in response to environmental changes. “Picking up on the anger, I shifted in response. If it were cold in here, I could grow fur. If we were flooded, I’d have gills to breathe under the water.”

She was oversharing, of course, but Meggan didn’t know she shouldn’t. This world, at least, had all sorts of strange people who could do strange and different things. She’d learned from Kurt and Kitty and Gar and may others already that she could be herself here, and it was unlikely she’d be hated or hunted down for it. Not like how it had been, sometimes, in her own world.

Head tilted to the side, she watched him carefully. He didn’t betray anything, it was only if she really pressed she could feel anything other than the calm coolness he was portraying. “I wasn’t a big fan of the robot movies either, though I suppose if I was in a world full of robots I might have an easier time figuring out what it is I’m feeling, or what I really look like.” She shrugged, the red fading into her normal blonde, her structure changing to something she usually looked like.

“It could be this, but I’m not sure. What are you, then? How d’you know what mutants are?”

---

Convenient ability to have, Kay thought, though better control would've been preferable. As it was, Meggan quite literally wore her – and others' – emotions on her sleeve.

She seemed to find him less angry now, judging by the slow shift in her appearance. That was a relief. Kay had spent most of his existence pretending to be quite firmly anchored to his baseline. He didn't want to believe something as trivial as a near-death experience could undo all his hard work.

"I read and I listen." That wasn't pedantry: there really was no more to it than keeping an ear to the ground. He picked up his pencil. "I'm a replicant." So far, no one in Dunwich seemed to know what that was and while Kay was under no obligation to explain, he found himself adding, "A bioengineered synthetic human." Not quite a robot, definitely not a person.

"Any idea about a five-letter word for chicken motions?" As conversational shifts went, it wasn't his most natural, but it would have to do.

---

Better control would certainly have been beneficial, but she had barely come to know that she could control her powers at all, let alone master them. She was doing well so far, but there was so much more to go. The Doctor was supposed to help her, though she wasn’t sure he could and he wanted to go into her mind to do it.

That left her feeling uneasy. She’d had her mind messed with before, and she didn’t like it much.

When Kay explained who - and what - he was, she nodded her head in understanding. Although those were quite large words she wasn’t exactly familiar with, she got the jist of what he was saying. “So they… just created you.” Not like it ws normally done. “In a lab?” She asked, and though it might have been considered rude to ask it wasn’t asked with disgust or disdain. She was just, well, curious.

At the question, her eyes went a little wide. What did chickens do? What motions did they do? They ran, they flew, they - “Flap? Is that five letters?” She sounded it out to herself, using her fingers as she internally tried to spell the word. “Could that be it?”

---

"A farm." Replicants were sown, grown, and reaped like any crop. Transported the same way, too. Transformed, like any raw resource, into whatever end product was required at a given time. And then consumed.

The pencil gave a noticeable creak in Kay's fist. He made himself relax his hand. Didn't look up to see if Meggan had noticed. Told himself he didn't dread the horror he might see on her face.

"That's four letters… But flaps is not." He penciled it in and found that it fit. "Works. Thank you." And still without looking over at Meggan, he gingerly slid his pie across to her section of the counter. A form of gratitude, yes, but also a way to mitigate the latent anger she'd called him out on before. "Some of these hints makes no sense. ''Sang Smelly Cat?' Is that a popular song in this time period?"

---

“A farm.” Like chicken. Or something else on farms. Cows and pigs. Meggan’s face did, in fact, have a look of shock and horror, but it also had a bit of a look of recognition. She knew it, too, that feeling of being less-than. Not being human, being labeled an animal. A flash of anger in her own feelings, the shock of her own true anger meant that she didn’t quite hold it in, it leaked out - even the waitress looked momentarily annoyed before Meggan got it back under control.

After a moment of breathing, she finally spoke up again. “I’m sorry you were treated that way. Being a mutant, in my world… Well. We weren’t exactly accepted, because we’re not exactly human, either.” Of course, Meggan’s life had been even worse given her upbringing, and she knew mutants like Kurt, who had such visible abilities, were often treated poorly.

Her eyes fell to the pie that was slid her way, and she picked up on the fact that this was a nice gesture, and she knew some people felt very strongly about not mentioning nice gestures. So, she didn’t. She finished her own pie and started to work on his, making sure she smiled at him if he did look at her.

“Oh! I know that one! It’s from a show called ‘Friends’ isn’t that a great name for a show? It’s all about, well, friends! There’s a silly woman on there, she sings it. Her name is Phoebe.” Don’t ask Meggan how to spell that, because she couldn’t. But she was extremely happy she knew the name.

---

The exchanges on the network rarely went into that level of detail, but Kay had read between the lines and gleaned a certain familiar wariness. A learned vigilance that could only mean one thing.

He felt an entirely unexpected surge of fury at the thought. It rose up in him like a wave, only to fade just as quickly, without consequence. He did look at Meggan then, but she was cutting into her second piece of pie, more controlled than first met the eye.

If she wasn't going to mention what had just happened, then neither would Kay.

Fortunately, there was a crossword puzzle to fill what might otherwise have been an awkward silence. Meggan's suggestion matched the requisite number of spaces – and got him that much closer to solving the entire thing. "You may have found your calling," he mused, shooting her a quick glance. "Crosswords. Want to try one more?"

---

“Think they’d pay me for it? Professional crossword guesser?” Meggan laughed, picking up her overly sweet and sadly very cold coffee and taking another sip of it. It wasn’t like her to push her emotions on others like that - despite her lack of control of quite a lot of her abilities, projecting her own emotions had always been a bit more difficult to do. Only very intense emotions tended to leak out like that, and it always caught her by surprise when it did.

She pursed her lips together, hoping he didn’t ask her to read the next one. She took another bite of pie and nodded her head at the paper he was filling out. “Go on then, read us the next clue.” Smiling brightly, cheeks tinged with pink she set her elbow on the table, placing her chin in her hand, staring casually at Kay.

She thought, maybe, she might like to be friends with this one. She was gathering a nice collection of people with interesting and controlled emotional states here, in this world.