ataraxionlogs | when all of your wishes are granted

Just because she was trapped on a spaceship didn't mean that Rogue didn't want to keep training. For her, that meant mostly trips to the gym. She'd swim, run, take on the punching bags, or even run a few simulations on the holo-decks that she'd managed to find close enough to your standard Danger Room session. Today had been an easy day, running, mostly, and strength training. Throughout the whole workout, she'd kept hearing voices, but the room itself was empty. Only a mural on one wall that, the more she looked at it, the more it seemed to change.

Having freshly showered, a towel wrapped around her bare neck, she heard the voices again. They were different from the ones she usually heard, in her head. "Hello?" Rogue called out, following them back into the gym. The mural had changed again, but she was too far away to really make it out. "Hello! Is anyone there?"

"Rogue?"

By now, Mystique's voice has become as familiar as it is unwelcome, no doubt. The sound precedes her only by a few sinuous strides, and then she's there, scaly and blue and blinking yellow-eyed in the cold light of the gym. She looks unarmed and unarmored, as usual. Probably no less dangerous than ever, though there's no hostility in her face when her stare cuts to Rogue.

Pretends to skip over the murals right there, but she noticed them. She keeps them in the periphery by now. Her perusal of the network has led her to understand that, sometimes, staring at bizarre phenomena aboard the ship has unwanted ramifications. Though speaking of comms- "The network went down for me a few minutes ago. Something's wrong."

Though exhausted, the second she hears that voice, Rogue is on her guard, prepared to throw off a glove. Mystique could best her, sure, but she'd go down fighting.

Turning her back to the mural that had caught her eye, she looks at Mystique carefully. "So you ran to find me to tell me?" Skepticism ran through her voice as she raised an eyebrow. "I got you your cookies, but that don't make us friends."

"No." Mystique's eyes cut over to the younger woman. She looks annoyed, but not angry; warier than anything. "If you hadn't figured out something was wrong with the way the lights are blood red, there's not a lot I can do for you.

"But I heard a voice." Rogue's voice. --other voices. Mystique isn't sure suddenly which it was; she's been steadfastly ignoring the rise and fall of other whispers that have been following her through the corridors, but it hasn't been easy by any stretch. More because she's discomfited by that than because of real, singular interest, or any belief that looking at them is going to possibly help the situation, she adds:

"You found something." The mural.

"Y'know, I'm used to eery lighting telling me something's up, but bless your heart, thanks for the reminder." In Southern, that basically translates to go fuck yourself.

But the mention of a voice, and Rogue drops the sass for a moment. "I did, too." Which was why she'd called out in the first place. Good to know they were dealing with disembodied voices.

Something? Rogue glances over her shoulder for a moment and gasps, looking at the mural behind her. It was now noticeably different, recognizable. The figure in the middle, those white streaks in what she assumed to be hair made it all too clear that the central figure was her. Turning her back on Mystique, she approached it in awe, holding a gloved hand out. When she arrived at the wall, she traced the outline of her torso, to make sure it was real. It was. And the paint wasn't even wet. The figures now, to the right and the left, were more distinct. One sitting in a chair- Xavier- and the other...

"Why are you in here?" Rogue demands, her green eyes narrowed as she doesn't even dare look at the woman she's addressing. "Why are you in my mural?"

--Mystique can't help but look at the murals herself. Intellectually, she knows this unwise, but the visceral fascination yanks her with inexorable temptation when the girl asks her question. She's incredulous, her scaly feet making a faint snik snik snik sound as she walks up beside Rogue, prepared to discredit the girl's interpretation of the painting, even if she has the sinking suspicion that Rogue wouldn't volunteer that if she had any other option.

No. That's her all right.

The exact same shade of blue as the ugly creature on the mural ten feet out to her right. Despite that the other mural depicts its figure shaped like a manticore, Mystique knows, with unshakable conviction, that it's her. She's shapeshifted into those ugly beasts enough times, by now, to be sure of it. (She remembers too: Hank talking about blue ones.) (In the corridor reproduction of his worst, living nightmare.) "I don't know," she says, staring at the blue manticore's eyeless face, dripping maw. "Maybe it's the new future. The one Erik keeps talking about."

Good lord, no. There were two of them, she can see the other one in the corner of her eye as she glares at the older woman. Two Mystiques on the walls. Blue when otherwise it was red and black and white. How it happened, she did not know, but she did not care to, either.

"New future? You mean my life?" She doesn't let-up, venom soaking her words. "Or is this some brand new future where, oh, lord if I know- ya'll succeed in killing me or having me join your side or- something!" she gestures with both gloved hands.

"No." Mystique looks still more annoyed, but it's still a suppressed and controlled well enough that there is no ninja flipping-around or particular cruelty. "The future where I don't kill Bolivar Trask and damn all of our kind to extinction." Her eyes narrow. She moves away from Rogue's painting to look at her own closer, her splotchy pupils constricting as she regards the artwork in a long silence.

The paint wiggles.

Mystique's spine goes ramrod straight and she takes a nearly involuntary step backward. There's that rattlesnake sound of her scales moving, reforming over her sinuous back; a sharp plastic shiv ejects into her hand. "Did you see that?"

That was... a future. "I've heard of Trask." He'd created the Sentinel program. She'd fought them before, in the Danger Room. Luckily, she'd never run into them out and about. Not like she could personally really do anything about them. Thanks, shitty powers.

"No," Rogue admits. She was busy staring at her own mural. "What- what happened?"

"I changed it."

Mystique sounds uncharacteristically disconcerted. Her blue face twists into a frown, and she glances back at the girl. "I changed it," she says. "I-- think I changed my own mural. I don't know what that means." Her eyes snap level to her mural again, and she studies the blue manticore's ugly maw, the empty sockets of its eyes, the blood crusted around its ragged claws. Something is under its foot now, is all. She cranes her head down to look; it's glinting metal. She can't tell what it is.

But there's something kind of adorably confused about the way she pauses a long moment, then slowly, tentatively cranes her own head over, lifts her five blue piggies up on her right foot to peek under her own toes. Is she stepping on something now! What is happening. --no, it turns out she isn't.

No. Nothing about Mystique is adorable. No way in hell.

Rogue frowns, leaning closer to the paint of Mystique's, shivering. "It's... how?" Never mind that stuff like this should be common place for her now.

"What is that?" She points at the metal piece, the idea of Trask long gone.

"I don't know." Mystique manages to sound annoyed-- snappish, even, and simultaneously incredibly confused. Her forehead creases, which is a feat considering it's covered up in scales. She twists her head to look at Rogue's mural one more time, finding the blue figure there motionless still. Scowling thoughtfully, she looks back at her mural. Her yellow eyes sharpen. She concentrates, not knowing exactly what she's concentrating on or how, but then--

--the paint smears slightly, over her mural figure's foot. Like someone's laving over the paint; like it's still dry, even though both she and Rogue know, by now, that it isn't.

The brush strokes bend, reform. The manticore's foot has risen a few inches. What lies underneath is metal, shiny as the glimpse they'd been afforded earlier. Unimaginably, though, it's wrought into the shape of a human heart, with its chambers and cut-off arteries and all

She gasps, watching as the paint changes, the mural moving right in front of them. Another one follows when the object is revealed.

"Is that-?" A heart. A human heart. A metal human heart.

"Good lord..."

"I think so."

Mystique sounds disgusted, more disconcerted than the younger girl will have ever seen her. With the exception of when she was racked with agony thanks to a horrifying nanite infection. "We should leave." She straightens sharply, turning her head to glance one more time, briskly, over Rogue's mural.

"It's not safe, with the things the ship throws at us."

"Whaddya mean?" The tone of Mystique's voice is worrying. Extremely. "You don't think-" she didn't even know how to finish the sentence, but instead turned to look at her own mural. Her figure seemed to have shifted slightly, and as Rogue looked at it again, began to change. Her hair blew outward, obscuring the face of the other figure- Xavier, she had to assume.

"The fuck is goin' on?"

Mystique's voice is worried, which should indeed be worrying. "I do think," she replies, a little sharply. A few sinuous steps take her rapidly away from the murals, close to Rogue, and she keeps her head turned away sharply-- refusing to look at them. "Phenomena on this ship have a way of getting into our minds. It can affect perception, emotions, even our health. The fabric of reality is unstable.

"And it almost never works to our advantage. We should leave." She puts out a hand, blue fingers extended-- an absurdity of a gesture.

Normally, Rogue would have told her to stay the hell away from her. But she couldn't, for whatever reason. Instead... Instead, she can't, because this woman is worrying her. This was still not the Mystique she knew. And that alone made her uncomfortable.

"You're right," she said quickly, looking at Mystique's hand. For a moment, she hesitates, her hand hovering in mid-air. But she remembers and drops her hand, wondering why the hell she just almost took Mystique's hand. Mystique's hand, when she barely held Bobby's hand.

Mystique doesn't hold anybody's hand either-- you know, apart from the fact that she nearly did. Her arm ends up dropping sharply too, her eyes cutting over to Rogue for a brief moment, then away again, furtive, or even worse, perhaps even disconcerted. "You have friends, don't you?" she asks. "It might be best to stick pretty close to them for awhile." It's not hesitation exactly, that stalls her bare toes for a few more seconds.

She turns, the scaled soles of her feet snik snikking the floor.

when all of your wishes are granted

Gym » Darkholme Women

YAY thank you for making starter

no problem!

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p.s. apparently we can't change our own murals, so maybe we're subconsciously doing each others?

Yes yes we are.

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