"Like I said, it's drawn to complex emotions and thoughts. And people are full of irrational, illogical, messy feelings and thoughts. The kinds of things that other living creatures don't experience. It wants to experience those kinds of passions, and so as it travels from galaxy to galaxy, dimension to dimension, sometimes it comes across someone that piques its interests. And the Phoenix fuses itself with that person. Possesses them. And for a time, it's a nice thing. Wow, you suddenly have godlike powers to make the world a great place and eliminate hunger and drought and freaking climate change. But the Phoenix can't handle the full range of human emotions, especially the illogical ones. The kind that makes you punch a hole in the wall or chuck your coffee cup across the room. Those feelings don't make sense. And the Phoenix goes insane. And then it destroys everything."
Pause for dramatic effect, pause for dramatic effect, pause for dramatic effect.
"I'm the one that the Phoenix wants. We have a very long, very, very complicated history that goes beyond my teenage capacity to deal with. The kind of history that crosses timelines, crosses realities. Cliff notes version, it has found and possessed my future self multiple times, used my future self to consume entire planets in rage. Different timelines of me have died and been reborn and died again because of this thing more times than I can count." Jean let out a big breath and closed her eyes for a second, because this was always really fucking difficult to explain. "It's like the worst, possessive and abusive boyfriend you can imagine and I am trapped in this cycle with it. I've felt myself get lost to this thing and die again and again over a span of fifty years and I'm only nineteen."
Of course he couldn't get it. Who would? Not even Jean could think about it. The only reason she got it was because she was forcefully given all these memories and images and emotions of dying and dying and dying and dying and dying and-- what kind normal person could ever really get that kind of nightmare?
Jean swallowed hard and opened her eyes again, hardened by pain and anger.
"Look. This thing always comes. And it always ends the same way. Lots of fire. Lots of death. And the last thing I remember before I came here was that it came for me. This version of me. Not my future self, not some alternate dimension self. Me. And there's no reason to believe that it can't follow me here when it finds out where I am. Or, at the very least, it would be stupid not to prepare for it to come for me again."