Description:
Things have been interesting...and problematic. By now, half the fighting world is abuzz with the word of Vanessa and the Ikari known as Whip receiving mutually frightful revelations from their SNF fight last weekend, and then disappearing off the radar entirely for about a day. The fact that Vanessa has been keeping her head down is hardly surprising, all things considered - given her fame, the paparazzi are roaming in /packs/ to try and get a word from the Boxing Queen, who no doubt just wants to bury her head under a few thousand bottles of scotch.
Which is why it is perhaps a /surprise/ when someone blows into Rose's office behind the library now - Vanessa herself.
She's dressed in all black, even the black tie. She looks, approximately, like hell, like she hasn't been sleeping and has been compounding the effect with heavy drinking, her red hair in complete disarray. She hasn't showered, hasn't even tried to take care of herself...
...well, the fact that she's /here/ is probably a good sign, anyway.
She's at least sober enough to stand mostly upright, though she's leaning against the door frame for support. She waits exactly long enough for Rose to notice she's there before the Boxing Queen says, "Rose, we need to talk."
Rose does not comment at any real length on what is going on with Vanessa. She had gotten a vague impression while Vanessa was approaching that SOMETHING was going to happen, but even her foresight is not infallible. Vanessa, thus, bursts in on Rose while she's got her feet up on her desk and is reading an Italian newspaper.
"My God," Rose says, maybe at the smell. She shifts out her legs, letting them tuck under the desk. "Vanessa, thank goodness that you are alive. Listen -" She gestures at the refrigerator, "Help yourself, you look like you need it. Sit, sit!"
There are chairs and the mini-fridge has bottled water and juice. (No beer, sadly. But then, there are kids around here...)
Vanessa huffs out a tired (exhausted! And no surprise, really...) sigh, and steps inside. Rose's eyes would surely notice Vanessa is favoring one leg, which is probably related to the fact that she's not signed up for any combat events for this week. She hobbles over to the refrigerator, saying, "Thank you," as she grabs two bottled waters - she doesn't particularly want to have to /get up/ after she finishes chugging the first, which she begins doing immediately - and then limps over toward a chair, and flops into it.
When she's done with the first bottle, she lets it hang limply in her hands, breathing and looking slightly dazed.
"I," she manages, eventually, "have had a bad week."
"I can tell," Rose says, her tone sympathetic. "What the devil happened? Tell me everything." She also opens her bottled water --
When did she get it?!
She leans back in her chair, though, looking pensive. She can perhaps guess some of the outlines...
She gives Rose a long look, for a moment. "That's a lot," she says, dropping the first bottle lazily, to free up her hand to open the second. "I...God, you know by now, don't you? I was...married, once. It's how I got here." The super-short-hand. Doesn't even mention the tragedy itself - that wound is not as old as it was, torn open anew by the Igniz and his Ideon Blade. Vanessa's always been touchy about the whole thing, of course, but...well, it's public record, now. No hiding it anymore. And Rose needs to know, now. Vanessa can't pretend to have no ulterior motives anymore. She's going to need help, she's going to need guidance, because Vanessa's...
She closes her eyes, growling quietly. Not strong enough.
"I used that to...to become what I am, Rose. And the man I fought in the SNF last week - Igniz, they said his name was." Her lip curls up, a furious sneer on her tired face. "He said he's the one that ordered it."
She twists the second bottle hard, opening her eyes again. "He did some nasty stuff to the Ikari I was fighting with, Whip, too. We fought as hard as we could, but we lost."
She spits the last word, visibly frustrated. She let herself play it cool during the match, but here - afterwards - she can allow herself to be angry. She's not as angry as she was, though; it's been days since then, and she's been spending them all processing what happeend. She's calm enough to speak with others without breaking down in tears or punches immediately - and she won't let Igniz have the victory of putting her through hell all over again. She's let Igniz have the last victory she ever intends to allow.
The recap isn't unwelcome, because Rose wants to hear it all from Vanessa - almost as if somehow she hadn't been paying close attention to the news, caught up in other affairs.
"Mm," she says softly, nodding her head once. Her eyes narrow very slightly at the news, and she takes a small sip of the cool water. She doesn't rise - not yet, at least. Vanessa may need it, but she doesn't need it now, and damaging pride can be as bad as leaving someone swinging in the wind.
Vanessa sits quietly for a moment, staring at a point somewhere between Rose and the rest of the cosmos. Her bloodshot eyes aren't quite focused. "We...tried," she murmurs. "We did try. I..."
She growls, and then shakes her head, and then winces because she's got the mother of all hangovers crawling around in her skull knocking over synapses. "Later, time for that...ugh. That's not what I wanted to tell you. Something else happened, something I think you need to hear. Just...I don't know, maybe you'll understand it. I sure don't."
She takes a few breaths, trying to calm the frustration that's still boiling at her heart. She takes a long drink of water, and then takes a long, slow breath.
"We didn't wake up in a hospital," she says. "I didn't, anyway - it was a room, some kind of...cell, I guess. I'd been treated for my wounds, but...as soon as I woke up, the cell bars retracted, and I was in some kind of...dojo, or training ground, or something."
She shakes her head, less vigorously this time - confused by events, rather than frustrated by weakness. "There was a man there, who told me I had to fight him if I wanted to leave. He used this...energy, Rose, it was like nothing I've ever seen."
Rose nods once, not saying anything - she then leans back in her chair.
The words come, then, and she feels a dull sort of thrilling in her stomach. It's something ominous; she can dimly see the outlines of what Vanessa means, and she does not like them. She says gently, "As you speak, please... try to remember, how it seemed to you. What you saw, and what you felt. I swear to you that I will look at only such things."
She sips her water and wishes she had liquor. She continues, as an addendum, "After that, I think you need to sleep. But, if you stop now, half shall be forgotten and you shall be tense and restless..."
Vanessa finally remembers that Rose can, in fact, see that kind of thing, and the insane flashes of half-completed thoughts slow, as the woman tries to get her thoughts in order.
"The...It was a really big room, like for...lots of fighters, probably..." ...pads on the ground, and red drapings on the side...and a man sitting in a shadowed chair. "He was tall...slim, kind of gray hair..." A manner somewhat like Rugal is when he's being pleasant. Magnanimous and talkative, not...crazy and full of punches. Also, very small chin. "But that energy..." She shakes her head. "It wasn't like any kind of chi I'd ever seen. It was...angry. Violent, and...every time he punched or kicked it was full of the stuff, and even the most basic ones hurt like some of the strongest things Igniz threw at me. He hit me with it once, just the stuff of it, and it was like it tried to, to, suck out every bad memory I'd ever had and rub my face in it."
She closes her eyes, that instant still vivid in her mind - the pain of it, crushing her mind under it. She didn't fall, refused to yield, but...golly, it hurt. A lot.
Rose is solemn at the sight of this. This man, she thinks; some kind of an actor? He has that look, that intense and crazed look and those curiously pleasant features and those easy words and...
She shakes her head slightly, once. "That power," she says quietly. "Channeled as clearly as it was... It hurt, you said? Like your very body, your very mind was remembering all the insults visited to it...?"
Vanessa nods, slowly. It's hard, of course - this last week has been an emotional one, between the Igniz fight, fighting the mystery man twice, working her way out of the jungle, then the hospital, then being moved to her home because the paparazzi were trying to sneak photos of her in the hospital and she didn't have the strength to break them in half.
"He...the doctors say I can't fight for another few days." She mutters. She gestures at her knee, at her hip, at her belly. "He broke my knee, damn near shattered my hip...the doc didn't even want to know what he did to my kidneys." She looks up at Rose, trying to remember some of the sensation of it without actually reliving those agonizing moments, for Rose's benefit. "One kick each. A weaker person would be dead. And, the feeling was what you describe."
"I can understand completely," Rose says gently. She does rise, though, now, stepping out from behind the desk. "That power... it is what is called, by some, 'Psycho' power. I think that the word has certain implications in English...?" She raises a hand. "Stop me, of course, if I am repeating myself."
She comes closer, then, reaching to gently place a hand on Vanessa's shoulder. "You should not have had to endure that. That sadism... It is unforgivable. You're very strong, to have come out of it as well as you have, and I know that I will not think less of you if you wish to do nothing but sleep for a week, after such an ordeal."
"Sleep, drink, cry," Vanessa mutters, letting most of her usual wry candor slip in. She's tired - /so/ tired - but she's here, back among friends and people who can help, and that's a calming thing. She does look up and provide a small, exhausted smile at the feel of Rose's hand on her shoulder. There is tension there, obvious to even the most untrained of hands. She's been running on adrenaline, grief and liquor - in varying proportions - for days. She may not need Rose's encouragement to sleep; she won't have much of a choice in the matter, pretty soon. Not even a fighter of Vanessa's caliber can go for too long, treating her body like this.
"Psycho Power, huh," she murmurs. "It felt like that in more ways than one. I've heard...rumors. Stories - you know, the little myths that go around the locker rooms and fighting circuits, about powers like it. I never put a lot of credit into them until now."
She shivers, a little. "He...he'd also grabbed Whip," she says. "I fought him alone first. He said I was interesting, so he put me back under for...hell, I don't know how long. Me and Whip fought him, and beat him, but it got him pretty pissed. He just...picked us up and tossed us out. The power of it...I blocked, I know I did, but it still felt like someone had punched me square in the chest. Whip..." She frowns. "I don't know how Whip is. That fight with Igniz, and then the fight with this nut...she's probably worse off than I am."
Difficult to fathom, but not totally impossible.
Rose squeezes Vanessa's shoulder, lightly. She can feel that tension like a cable stretched too tight. It is worrying in and of itself; the rest, of course, is bad as well, but the singular case is vital. As above, so below, as some have said.
"I don't know," she says quietly. "If the Ikaris can recover her, she will be well, in time..." But 'in time' includes 'the heat death of the universe'. Rose steps around Vanessa, then, her hand going off her shoulder. "All of it... What you have heard is not necessarily true. The powers of the mind are not evil... But, they can tempt and corrupt, because with them come other powers."
She says, as she steps over to get another bottle of water, and while looking over her shoulder, "This, for instance." It may take Vanessa a minute to realize that Rose's lips stayed close while she spoke, and that, in fact, Vanessa's ears never came into play at all.
Rose then moves over, to sit, again. "There are two possibilities," she says, this time using her lips once more. "I shall think that this is the lesser, and that there is another who has gained this power, or cultivated it. It is a great evil, in the wrong hands... But it is not insurmountable."
Vanessa is tired, dazed, still a bit drunk, and still recovering from Hangover Con taking place in her skull. So she takes a drink of her second water bottle as Rose speaks, still listening, and turns to watch the woman go get her new drink, and it takes her a pretty solid twenty seconds for her eyes to widen. "You..." she mutters, mental gears groaning as they slowly churn. Memory is alright - regurgitating thoughts she's been processing and reprocessing for days, she can do that. New thought takes time. Still, she eventually manages, "I...get it, I think." So Rose has similar kinds of powers? 'Psycho', like psychic. Vanessa had made that connection, too. She knew Rose had abilities like that, she just had never bothered to connect all the dots. She had never needed to.
She nods, slowly, as the thoughts sink into her head. It's not that bizarre, really. She uses chi attacks, and so do some of the scarier jerks at the top of the fighting food chain. Powers like that aren't governed by morality - right and wrong are determined by the user. As Rose appraises the situation for her, Vanessa nods, letting the thoughts process in her head at their own pace. "I'll...hope for that as well," she says. "We do have one thing for us...he didn't seem to know his own limits. Or at least...I guess that'd be why he fought us like that? He didn't hold us ransom, or anything. Just...just grabbed us, fought us, and let us go."
Rose seems calming, somehow. It's as if Vanessa is leaning on something supportive and comfy on some psychological level. Naturally this is because Rose is doing the mental equivalent of what she'd done just now, in that brief squeeze of the shoulder. Normally she might find this invasive to do on a person, but sometimes a knife in someone's belly is an attack, and at other times, vital surgery.
"Good," she says quietly. "Once you have rested... I will deal with him, and see what there is to see. I may ask for your help, but if you should feel the need to stay away - you have done more than any could ask."
She seems to be at Vanessa's side a moment later, though it's hard to say just when she got up. Maybe Vanessa blacked out for a moment there. She gently touches the other woman's arm, then, guiding her to her feet. "I am going to take you to the infirmary, where you may rest until you can return home," she continues. "If you do not feel safe there, I shall find you another place... but for now, sleep without fear. I will be watching."
Log created on 22:23:10 04/05/2008 by Rose, and last modified on 04:15:59 04/06/2008.