Nate Grey (thexman) wrote in wariscoming, @ 2011-10-16 08:39:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | kimberly corman, nate grey |
Who: Nate Grey and Kimberly Corman
What: Kim and Nate spend a night out on the town in Vegas. Unfortunately, so does TMZ.
When: October 15th, night.
Where: Vegas. Probably the strip, says the guy who has never actually been to Vegas.
Warnings: Probably none.
Nate had never been to Vegas. He’d been all over the world back home, but somehow he had never actually made it to Vegas. Now that he was in the thick of things here, he wasn’t quite sure how he felt about it. It was fun, but for a telepath, it wasn’t hard at all to sense the waves of desperation and overindulgence that poured off people here. Nate found it curious that even though everyone, if pushed, would say that most casino games are rigged, people in them still somehow believed that they would be the ones to hit the mythical jackpot. It was the sad sort of thinking that let these casinos drain the money from their pockets. More than once, Nate found himself gently nudging the mind of someone tapped out, nudging them in the direction of the door rather than to another game. Some would probably have thought that an invasion of privacy, but Nate would argue the point. Even if it was, he found it a far better sin than letting the nearly penniless continue to chase a dragon that they would, in all likelihood, never catch.
He might have also telekinetically stopped a few slot machines. Maybe.
The shows, on the other hand, were much better. They were fun, even if he could sense most of that one magician’s secrets. Not that he really needed to. Back home, back in his real home in the nightmarish Age of Apocalypse, he was a member of a small band of rebels saving human and mutant alike from the clutches of Lord Apocalypse, an immortal Egyptian mutant with a twisted Darwinian belief that lead him to slaughter any he deemed “weak” or “unworthy” of his world. He wasn’t, despite his codename, an X-Man in that world. He’d admired the X-Men, Magneto’s band of elite soldiers fighting for the same cause, but he wasn’t one of them. He was one of Forge’s outcasts, a small troupe of freedom fighters that didn’t get to go to a hidden mansion out east to hide and lick their wounds. They traveled the North American continent under the guise of performers, and while it was technically only their cover, Forge had insisted every member of his little band actually learn the performances and the skills necessary for them. Just for fun, he’d spent a few of the shows with his telepathy tamped down to a low whisper and just used his eyes to spot the tricks.
The biggest trick of all, though, was the change in his current traveling companion. Nate didn’t know Kim well, and he usually wasn’t one for simply turning off powers, but seeing the sharp change in her mood made Nate think maybe this time it was the right call. Not only that, of course. An unfortunate side effect of doing what he had to do to turn the power off meant that he got a glimpse of some of the things Kim had seen with her “gift”, and while Nate had seen worse – a factory where living humans were ground into a protein paste to be fed to Apocalypse’s chosen mutants still haunted him to this day – it wasn’t difficult to see why Kim would want to be rid of this particular ability. In some small way, Nate could relate. Once upon a time, he’d been able to voluntarily cast his mind into the future to take peaks at possible outcomes. While he never had to deal with unpleasant visions forced on him, more than once he’d seen his own well-intentioned actions utterly destroy the Earth. In those moments before he forcefully cut those visions, they were as real as the present was to him, complete with the telepathic sense of global suffering.
Kim’s visions may not have been prophecies of doom, but in a way, the more personal visions were worse. When Nate saw himself blow up half the world, it wasn’t from a distance close enough to actually see the looks on the faces of those he’d damned. Kim’s visions were up close and personal, forcing her to witness the life drain out of someone from close enough to see their eyes. There were only two people in any world he’d wish something like that on, and so far neither Apocalypse nor Mr. Sinister were here. But all that was in Kim’s past now. Every telepath had different names for what Nate did. Emma Frost, she of the skimpy clothes and creepy calm, called it psychic surgery. Nate wasn’t sure what his Professor Xavier called it. He knew that Jean Grey, Nate’s sort-of mother, had her own name for it. They were all a little off, at least in Nate’s eyes. Nate preferred to think of it, at least in this particular circumstance, as psychic healing. Maybe someday Kim would decide the visions could be worth something, and if she ever did then he could take the psychic block down, but if she didn’t want them, never accepted them, they would take a grievous toll on her psyche in short order. He’d seen people who literally tore themselves apart because of an unwanted power. He wasn’t going to let that happen to someone else.
Things had been better since the block had gone up. It wasn’t that the power was gone. It was still very much present, and Nate imagined the visions might still technically happen, but the psychic block would prevent Kim’s mind from accessing them and vice versa. It was sort of like putting a big impenetrable wall around a quarantine zone. The zone was technically still there, and whoever or whatever was in it could still go about their business, but that business couldn’t cross the wall and neither could anyone on the other side of it. And it was impenetrable to all but a few. Charles Xavier could do it, but while the older Professor X and Nate had never really gotten along too well, Nate didn’t think the elder man would disagree with Nate’s assessment in this case. It was even less likely for the one here, who seemed to Nate to be at a point before he’d compromised his own idealism. Jean Grey could do it, but she wasn’t here. Emma Frost might be able to pull it off, but Nate had some not insignificant blackmail material he could hold over her to prevent that if she ever showed up. Blackmail wasn’t exactly Nate’s favorite thing in the world, but neither was a woman who nearly fed her students to the Butcher Beast or did what she’d done for Norman Osborn. Cable could have done it, being genetically identical to Nate and thus similarly powerful, but all but a few scant shreds of his psychic power was constantly devoted to keeping a very aggressive techno-organic virus from consuming his body. Of this short list of people, only Charles was here. So unless one of the angels went screwing around in Kim’s mind, or the seal did something, the wall up around Kim’s powers wasn’t going to be penetrated, not even if she sat in the room with a brutal mob hitman while he killed someone.
So of course, they were partying. While it was true that a city with a greater population was a better test than a literal ghost town, Nate had the sneaking suspicion that Kim really just wanted to let off some steam after having to deal with the visions for as long as she had. True or not, it was an endeavor that Nate entirely supported. People often chuckled at the cliché about laughter being the best medicine, but as a telepath who could actually watch people’s psyches heal, Nate knew it was absolutely gospel truth. So if she wanted to cut loose and have a little vacation in a city synonymous with it, so be it. Besides, by three of the four ways you could measure his age, Nate was young and had never really gotten the chance to be young. It was actually sort of refreshing to be out with someone his own age just having fun for a change. He hadn’t had quite as much to drink as Kim, though he’d had a few thanks to a handy little telepathic nudge to convince people he was “of age”. Which he technically was, even if he didn’t quite look it. “Oookay, so,” Nate said, with a smile and a friendly little nudge of Kim’s shoulder to get her attention, “we saw the ventriloquist guy. Where to now, oh Mystical Guide to Vegas?”