Hugs Are Important

[iamnotpolaris]

The first thing Emily notices is that something felt weird when she pulled open the door to Hank's lab.
The second thing Emily notices is that what's on the other side of the door is not Hank's lab.
"That's weird," she muses, stepping inside and looking around. Surely someone would have mentioned if they were remodeling? Surely she would have noticed it happening?
...Surely they wouldn't have installed a bar?
For lack of a better idea of what to do, she wanders up to the bar, still looking around to see if an explanation for this oddness will be readily apparent.
"This is strange," she murmurs, drumming her fingers on the bar.

Comments

[iamnotpolaris]

...Yeah. That's fairly predictable, in retrospect, from how she reacted to the idea of mind reading. It's not evil. It's just sad.
Hugs. She can't fix this--it's not logically impossible to fix but any cure would by definition be worse than the disease--but she can do hugs.

[calescent]

The hugs are nice.

"My name's Kiribel Ardelay."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Emily Xavier."
And boy is there a lot of context under that. She has--somehow, she doesn't think about the mechanics--two fathers, only one of whom she can publicly admit. Her sister is not, legally, her sister. The fact that her name probably should be Xavier-Lehnsherr or Lehnsherr-Xavier or something but isn't.
She doesn't dwell on this, it just passes through her mind as an accepted piece of context.

[calescent]

Kiri doesn't ask.

"So if you don't have Ardelays why can your sister read minds?"

[iamnotpolaris]

Mutants. Some people are just born with powers--Emily has her magnetism, Scott has his eye beams, Jean has telepathy AND telekinesis, that Frost woman Dad argues with when she visits has telepathy and the diamond shapeshifting thing, Warren has his wings, Aunt Raven has her blue skin and more general shapeshifting...
And it's not only wings and blue skin that can be different, physiologically. That's how Emily has two dads.

[calescent]

Headtilt. Okay then.

"I have the mind thing and fire," she mentions. "The fire I don't do by accident anymore, it didn't take very long to stop. I don't think the mindreading is going to stop."

[iamnotpolaris]

It is really extremely a good thing Edie (sister/twin) cannot do fire. Of course, if she could set things on fire with her mind, she wouldn't have started trying to do so as a harmless expression of anger, but it would be briefly very unpleasant for someone or something if she ever actually developed pyrokinesis.
It's a shame she can't control the mindreading, but not inherently bad, telepathy is nice.
...Emily's sister is a projective telepath too. Emily has just as good a grasp of Edie's mind as vice-versa.

[calescent]

"I think I could - do stuff. But I haven't tried it. I don't know what I'm doing. If my great aunt worked like this at all she never told."

[iamnotpolaris]

It seems likely to Emily that if the great aunt didn't seem like the kind of person who would hide mind reading, she probably wasn't a mind reader, and while it would certainly be worth looking into if she was alive, it's pure conjecture now.
Brief wistfulness at the idea of dead relatives.

[calescent]

"She could tell when people were lying. ...From farther away than five feet. But she might have been faking, only telling about part of her powers. I don't know."

[iamnotpolaris]

"From farther away than five feet" seems to support the not-a-proper-telepath idea. Well, not that Kiribel is a proper telepath as Emily knows them, what with the not projecting or turning it off, but.
Kiribel does not appear to be actively sad anymore! Yay!

[calescent]

"Maybe she was stronger than me and she did everything I did just from farther away and never said anything except that she could detect lies. Maybe she read my mind. We knew I was going to be next."

[iamnotpolaris]

That would be very bad, since Kiribel does not want her mind read, and if said great-aunt were to appear in front of Emily with confirmation that she had done so Emily would probably punch her. But it seems unproductive to dwell on, since the woman is dead.

[calescent]

"Yeah. ...We didn't think she was going to die this soon. We thought I'd be older when I got the primacy."

[iamnotpolaris]

People dying is bad, and Kiribel should not have to go extra years without hugs. But there is a definite trend, in Emily's world, that telepaths who come into their powers earlier than later tend to do better. It is, perhaps, not a statistically significant trend--telepaths are a thing that happens, unlike, say, eye beams, but they're not actually common relative to the baseline population--but younger minds definitely seem better able to handle oh hey I can viscerally perceive that other minds exist.

[calescent]

"I think that's different from me. I shouldn't read most people's minds and I can just tell that people are there from how warm they are if they're out of range and I'm not - having trouble coping with you being in range, or anything."

[iamnotpolaris]

Her thing is pretty different from mutant telepathy, isn't it? Yeah, so it would unambiguously be better for this other woman to have survived longer.

[calescent]

"Unless she was reading people's minds without permission."

[iamnotpolaris]

True. But they don't know that she was. Ideally she would be not and also live another decade, and it's not like they can bring her back to life whether or not she read minds.

[calescent]

"Yeah."

[iamnotpolaris]

Hugs
...And it's a little annoying that Kiri keeps coming back to worrying about something that can't be determined like a philosopher gnawing on the meaning of life, sorry Kiri, wouldn't be choosing to say this out loud.

[calescent]

[iamnotpolaris]

Think about something else. Hugs. Hugs are good. Why do fire and mindreading go together, it's odd, but then not really any stranger than diamonds or telekinesis going with telepathy so whatever.
...She said Ardelay prime, does that mean there's an Ardelay secundus or a something else prime or something?

[calescent]

"There are five primes. Fire and mind are the halves of the sweela element. The others are blood and water is coru, air and soul is elay, earth and flesh is torz, and wood and bone is hunti. The prime has to be related to the relevant family and have the right elemental personality. I'm really sweela and the last prime was my great aunt and I have a power birth blessing so it was pretty obvious it was going to be me. My twin is torz and my little brother thinks he's probably elay so it couldn't have been them. The hunti prime thinks his granddaughter is going to be prime after him. Since I got it so early he's trying to teach her stuff earlier than he should have to."

[iamnotpolaris]

That is sensible! And each of these primes has a different part of a person, that's nifty, although she's not sure she understands the difference between mind and soul.