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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.]

[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.]

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.

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.

[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.]

All right, Kid, so the big question is, why were you trying to knife your boss? Or take the bar out for that matter.

[Echo doesn't understand the need to wield power over others. In fact, it's one of the major things she fought against with the Dollhouse. No one should have control over another person's life that way as far as she's concerned. She's certainly not a live and let live sort of person. She's murdered plenty of people and if she were still back home, would again. She just has some distinct ideas about power and control.]

That part though, you don't have to explain. I get that part. Like they're slowly bleeding all of the you away until you're an empty shell to be filled however they see fit.

[And in her case, she means that literally.]

[She rolls her eyes at the surly look. She's not impressed.

It's on the tip of her tongue to pop off back at him when the expression on his face stops her cold.]

Now you're talking about something I know about. So you're the rebellion? Or is it more organized than that?

And I brought down the Dollhouse back home. So the question is, why are they bringing us all together? It doesn't seem that smart, but assuming they're dumb is sorta...setting ourselves up for failure. [She doesn't want to call him 'dumb' for assuming the gods are dumb, but pride goeth before the fall or something like that.]

Yup. That's seriously what it was called. [it's very...descriptive if nothing else.

She considers the idea and then nods.]

So they bring the people who are going to be the most pissed off. I can dig that.