Rooms

Need your help. Meet me.

[Locked to Charles Xavier]

[Randomly and in hurried, firm handwriting.] If I was on life support or in the hospital grievously injured, would you visit me? Despite everything?


[Locked to Raven Darkholme]

How are you?

[Locked to "Nora"]

Are you still here?

Who: Brielle, Xavier, Cap
What: Collecting the criminal
Where: Gatsby. The Vega.
When: Now.
Warnings: TBD.

[It was all a blur. The doctors prescribed heroin and the band played soft jazz through the night, gentle notes that crumbled into the muffled sighs of ghosts by the time they reached the upstairs where Brielle slept in an oversized poster bed. Men had replaced the windows, and the blood stains on the floor were removed to the best of housekeeping ability, the memories of dark stains flowed seamlessly into the patterned designs in the carpet. Business carried on as usual downstairs, the bar stayed busy and the parlor stayed polished. The staff brought her food, and the doctors brought medicine, and mostly, Brielle slept.

There were headaches, lapses in time, and notes on the nightstand in handwriting she didn't recognize. The name ERIK circled in ink, pinned beneath the brass edge of a gas lamp at low flame. The bedroom was kept dim like mourning. The colorful glass of a Tiffany lampshade glowed blue and green, seaside floral like the long, sleeveless dress that Brielle wore while she sat at a mirrored vanity, fastening wormsilk curls back with beaded combs. Her reflection was sallow from painkillers and forlorn from happenstance that night. The doctors assured her that her hearing would return completely once she was fully healed, which could take weeks. In the meantime, everything sounded distorted like words spoken through walls. It might have been more bothersome if she had anyone to speak to at all. Instead, she slept.]

[Locked to Nora]

You didn't show, but you also didn't send anyone to catch me, so I must admit I'm intrigued. Where are you?

[Afternoons held heat. Latent, sticky regret of the dawn broiling tar in the streets. The city at midday smelled like rubber and gasoline, but there was a part of Brielle that did not mind the smell as much as she used to. There was something complex about gasoline, and she could contemplate it from the backseat of stretched towncars. The driver wore a little black hat and never looked her in the eye. The staff skirted around her like so many ghosts in a miserable graveyard. It was widely known that she was a guest of the Vega's criminal echelon. Even with the absence of management, the place ran smoothly with Brielle as the phantom bride of the top floor. They took her into the city on Sundays and they hung her silks out to dry in the mornings.

Evenings held a breeze. The water carried cool memories from the oceans as easily as it carried sailboats. Nights were when the speakeasy brewed with violence and music, gangsters and stolen liquor. But it wasn't night yet. Early evenings like this, when the heat bent to accommodate cooler gusts, the building felt very quiet. The walls decompressed like exhales, and Brielle opened the windows of her bedroom. It hadn't taken her very long to get used to the opulence at all. It was not hers, but she'd had similar things once. She'd had imported carpets and cherrywood that gleamed. She'd had music and silk and nights that whispered promises of violence. Nothing in the world, even in this world, seemed very strange to Brielle.

Not antique pasts or polite gangsters or journal correspondence with perfect strangers. Not vintage outfits or the trunk that gradually accumulated stacks of cash like one might accumulate dust. Sometimes she wondered where it came from, but discovering the truth might just be worse than mild worry.

Downstairs, she could hear the staff beginning to prepare for the evening. People shuffled outside of her door, and the band was beginning to tune their strings from down below. Brielle, meanwhile, sat at her writing desk and opened her journal.]

[Handwritten, anonymously.]

I have had this dream before. [....] Or, perhaps, this is a memory. C'est familier, mais différent. How can I be sure?

The city's coming back together nicely.

[LOCKED to Erik L]

Question.

[Fuzzy timelines. After Marta and Seven, before heading back to Gotham.]

[Locked to Mutants, biological and pulse-made.]
[As Alison V.]

Someone's gone missing been taken. By someone, I mean a mutant.

[A grid of 3 x 3 is drawn, with an X placed in the upper right quadrant.]

[Public]

Eight seconds.

[Steve R]

[A quick-sketch, pencil. Not as good as photographs, it's not his strength. But enough. Small figure, hand outstretched.]

I think I owe you a thank you.

[Preston R]

You sent Captain America.

[Wren H]

Are you safe?

'Regards'? Your sarcasm needs work.

[locked, simply, to 'nora'.]

I have a little something I need done, and it's right up your alley. Interested?

Who: Luke & Brielle Nora
What: A run-in.
Where: The streets.
When: Recently.
Warnings/Rating: Not much.

( 'Are you angry with me?' She feigned Victorian innocence with a swooning twist toward him as they walked. The vintage lady routine didn't really work when she was wearing the kind of clothes that one bought out of the back pages of Bondage Monthly, but Nora liked to play pretend. )

Who: Brielle Nora & Norman Osborn
What: Evil mastermind hangout.
Where: Osborn mansion.
When: Recently.
Warnings: Minor character death.

( He liked power. There could never be too much of it, and with her at his side... they could lay waste to all those who stood against him. )

[Locked to mutants, both born and made through the pulse]

I have been waiting and watching, and I believe it is time to speak.

My name is Erik Lehnsherr, and I am a mutant. I have the ability to manipulate and control metal. I understand there were some people hit by a "pulse" that caused them to develop new abilities. Someone caused it, and knowing humans, they will be looking for you. Perhaps they've already found you, or tried to experiment on you. I've seen this before, and they will not stop.

Brothers and sisters, we don't need a cure, and there isn't one, nor should they be. We are capable of many great things, things that ordinary people cannot fathom. And they will hate and fear you for it.

I had a team before. We found and protected mutants, and prepared for the coming war, because there is one. It is only a matter of time. Join me if you wish to be a part of real action, not hiding and hoping for the best.

[Ink, blocky letters.]

If anybody's seen a deaf white cat with blue eyes in the hotel, let me know. I have... money, around, somewhere, if you want it.

Brielle awoke in the Vega with no idea how she'd gotten there. Smearing the dust of sleep from the corners of her eyes, she looked around the small room with a rising sense of panic, something that was a familiar houseguest in her crippled heart. There was a glass of water on the bedside table, and Brielle gulped it down, wondering at the taste of ash that clung to her tongue and the dried blood that was embedded beneath her nails.

The room was furnished by things from another time, and the idea of where she might be at least put some of her worries at ease as she slipped from the bed in a dress that she did not recognize as belonging to her. There was a hooded jacket and a pair of jeans hanging on the hook behind the bedroom door, which reassured Brielle that she had come here and changed. She simply must have been so exhausted that she didn't remember it now. Things had been strange over the last couple of weeks, and this was not the first time that she'd woken up in a strange place with no idea how she'd gotten there.

Brielle thought that such a thing should worry her more, but there was a deeper part of herself that seemed to accept it as something inevitable and unadjustable. Everything would be fine ultimately, she believed that. Because she had to, there was little choice but to have faith that whatever had been going on with her with the spells of missing time was somehow attributed to the injuries she'd sustained that had required hospitalization.

After Wren's madness on the journals began, Brielle headed down the stairs, bordering on hysterics and in search of her sister. "Anaïs?!"

[locked to wren h. during this.]

He truly hates me. Are you satisfied now?

[locked to brielle m.]

We need to talk.

[Midway through his conversation with Brielle.]

[text to wren h.]

This is bullshit.