asgardmeridiem | [open] if you don't shut your mouth, you're gonna feel the floor.

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[open] if you don't shut your mouth, you're gonna feel the floor.

Who: John Allerdyce and, perhaps, you.
What: Crossing the line and getting his ass fired.
When:Night 267
Where: Baldr, either at the bar or wandering.
Rating: PG-13 for John's mouth and potential violence, will mark up if needed.

[They knew that he drank on shift. They knew that he mouthed off customers and occasionally even told them to get right the fuck out of the bar. But they were strapped for employees, so they held onto him.

Until he got extremely loaded on this particular evening and started - or attempted to start - a fistfight with his boss. The large, burly man had just enough colour to be angry, so he joined in gladly, and it got to the point where Pyro had to pull his knife. One long cut up his boss's bicep later, Pyro's ass was out on the street.

You can find him:

A) Standing in the open doorway of the small bar, hollering abuse at the owner/bouncer who just threw him out, his arms and face badly bruised and a slight list to his walk;

or

B) Wandering through Baldr with a fresh bottle in his hand, a steady stream of muttered annoyance trailing behind him. There may be shadows of bruising left, but they'll be hard to make out in the darkness.

It's hard being Pyro, damnit. So much manpain, so little time.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I don't need -

[Well, this is a dilemma. Let the hot girl keep holding onto you, or retain your pride?

In the end, he doesn't have much of a choice. When he tries to draw on the sober reserves in his brain and walk properly, it ends in a stumble that nearly brings him to the ground, so he's got to lean on her for the moment. Might as well enjoy it.]

- had more than I thought.

[She would have let him pull away if he'd insisted. Sure, she tends to be a little bossy and doesn't mind manhandling a guy when necessary, but she doesn't know him and he's not part of her rebellion.

Once they're seated she lets go of him, but doesn't scoot away. She takes a drink of his whiskey and passes it back.]

Yeah, that happens sometimes.

[He snorts, taking the bottle back and glaring off into the distance. She may be able to make out the ghosts of a few scrapes and bruises on his face now that they're so close, but they're disappearing so fast that it could just seem like a trick of the light.]

Haven't drank this much since I was on the streets. But at least I was myself then.

[There are too many things weighing on him right now, and his usual coping strategies - starting fires or fights - have both been curbed by the loss of his power. He doesn't even have his knife anymore, since he dropped it while getting dragged away from the bar. First thing he actually bought here instead of stealing.]

'M gonna snap if I stay here much longer.

Yourself? [Because Echo never had 'powers' per say to be taken away. She had personalities and it's awfully lonely in her head right now. She can commiserate with him, even if she doesn't realize it at the moment.]

Good to know I still got that ahead of me.

A mutant. [He doesn't care if that's gibberish to her, or what she pictures. Too drunk and too angry.] If they made you a guy here, would you just say "Oh, I'm a dude, I can deal with that until they decide to let me go?" Or a dog? Or some kind of bug?

[Someone other than Magneto and Mystique has to understand. They can't all be so weak that they'll just sit back and take what the gods do to them, or just moral-free shit-stirrers like Moriarty. Someone has to get it.]

[His particular, chosen example makes her snort an almost laugh before she sobers and snatches the whiskey back from him. She takes a long drink, passes it over and explains.]

Bad example. I've--used to have a couple of guys running around in my head. I kinda miss 'em. [There's more than 'kinda' in her voice. Sure, she didn't have any love for crazy, serial killing Terry, but she misses Paul so much she aches with it.]

Never was a dog or a bug, but yeah, I get it. They took parts of me and now...[She pauses, pursing her lips before she finishes her sentence.] Don't really know who I am now.

[She got so used to having all those people, all those voices, in her head that it's lonely and quiet without them. She has to trust herself, rely on her own instincts and decisions, skills and abilities.]

In your head.

[She's not being very clear, and between that and the drunkenness, he just thinks she sounds sort of crazy. In other peoples' heads, sure, but other people in your head?]

You're a multiple or something?

Sort of. I'm a vault. [Which she realizes doesn't explain anything.] Back home, I worked for this company that loaded me up with personalities and sent me out on engagements with clients. I could be anyone from a professional safe cracker, hired to steal priceless art to a college girl fulfilling some professor's fantasy. [Yeah, it's what it sounds like.] Eventually I absorbed all the personalities. I could access them at anytime I wanted and still be me. I always had them in my head and now...I've got five, tops, rattling around in there.

[Then something he said catches her attention.] Mutant. Okay you're gonna have to explain that one to me. I mean, outside of a calf with two heads.

Okay, no, you first. Why the fuck -

[ - Did they do this? Was it legal? Did you agree to it? There are a million endings to that question.]

Because until I became 'self aware', I do the job, come back to the agency and they wipe the personality along with any memory I've got of it. I can't come back and blackmail anyone. Ever. By the time I could keep a handle on things, I had bigger problems then preventing a professor from getting tenure or stealing a Picasso back.

[Well, that's one he wasn't thinking of, and it's opened up a whole new layer of wtf.]

You're shitting me. No one could get away with -

[Attacking a school to tranq and kidnap little kids?]

- but you're not even a mutant. [This is sobering him up pretty quick, but not enough to realize that he's having half of this conversation inside his thoughts.]

[The rabbit hole just goes deeper, Pyro.]

Yeah, they could. They did.

[Precisely. She does laugh a little bitterly at his mutant comment and grabs the whiskey bottle from him again.]

Kinda am. In my own way, in my world. Animals develop mutations to survive, to evolve in their world. I sorta developed my own. [She sighs and takes a swig of whiskey.] Topher, boy genius who figured this out, sets up my brain to work with personality programming, right? He also sets up the machine that wipes my brain to a tabula rasa state. It's impossible according to all his rules, programming and shit to resist the wipe, to hang on to memories and personalities, to realize what the hell he's doing. There are thousands of actives, maybe more and there's two of us who can do what I did.

[Another swig of whiskey]

Mutant.

Gimme that back.

[He holds out his hand for the bottle. He's the one who needs it now.]

Thousands. And this is just under the radar, or your government's as screwed up as ours?

Definitely as screwed up as yours and you haven't even told me how screwed up yours is. [she passes the bottle back to him.]

CIA is one of our biggest clients.

Well, the army funded a guy who was out to commit mutant genocide, so you decide.

[He shakes his head, taking a long drink.]

Shit. Humans just get more messed up the more worlds I hear about.

Sounds like a government to me.

[She looks over at him.]

So are you going to explain the mutant thing or am I just going to assume you've got two of something.

[She adds a cheeky sort of grin to it.]

[Oh, flirting! That's a good way to get him out of a brood.]

I dunno, would that involve a full-body search to find out what?

[She smirks at him.]

Did I mention I was a dominatrix on more than one occasion?

[It's not one of the personalities in her head right now, but she's got the memories.]

Whoa, whoa, back up. I don't call anybody Mistress.

[He smirks, though. Nice attitude.

And even while drunk, he can rattle off this explanation with no trouble. It's burned into his brain.]

Mutants have an extra gene, the X-Gene. We're born with it, but the results don't manifest 'til puberty. They can be... anything you can think of. Controlling things, like pyrokinesis or cryokinesis, or changing how you look completely with a thought, or phasing through walls - the kinds of things people call "superpowers." Some of us look different because of 'em and some pass for human until we use our ability.

Doesn't matter which, though - the humans hate all of us.

Don't worry. It's not one of the personalities I got to keep.

[She smirks at him, sobering as he delivers his speil. She thinks about that a moment, nodding along.]

Huh. Anyone different. Sort of a theme with humanity. So what could you do? Before you got here.

Don't have to tell me that.

[He pulls a distinctive zippo lighter out of his pocket, flicking it open and on.]

Pyrokinesis. Can't create fire, but as long as there's at least an ember, it'll do whatever I want.

That'd be handy.

[She watches him with the lighter a moment before looking back up to his face.]

So how do you deal with it? Losing a part of yourself.

[He laughs bitterly.]

Drink a lot? Get in fights? Mouth off the gods and get cursed?

Oh, and get told to suck it up and deal with it a lot.

[She goes quiet a moment, considering that. When Paul had died, she'd had no choice but to suck it up and deal with it. They were literally in the middle of a battle and she had people that needed to get to safety. She hadn't held it together for long though and it wasn't her chosen method of dealing, but then they were talking about powers and not people.]

Not that easy, is it?

[There hasn't been one day here that she hasn't missed the riot of noise and people in her head. Some of them she missed more than others--she ached, she missed Paul so much--but they were all a part of her that she couldn't imagine living the rest of her life without. They had literally made her who she was.]

It's hell. [A bit of a cold smile touches his lips.] Just got fired for knifing my boss. Back home, I could've taken out the whole bar in a second - now I get one cut in before the shit's getting beaten outta me.

[But it's not just the destructive power, the fact that he can wield it over others.]

It's in my blood. Shapes the whole way I see the world. Not having that... it's not even like going blind, or losing an arm. It's losing yourself but still being alive.

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