video;

[lehnsherr]

[it's automatic now; to make a call out that's meant only for a certain telepaths mind. a yell of tell me you're back. tell me you can hear me. please, before it's gone completely. his mind wiping blank in a way that only a person who spent half their lives around telepaths would know how to do

now, he turns his attention to his network device. it's different to his last one, but similar enough that he has no trouble navigating his way through it. the draw of the ship is too strong for him to leave the area yet. so when the video cuts in, the metal hull, gleaming in the sun, is all too clear]

Glory. If this is your doing, congratulations. You got me.

[his face may look familiar, but there are differences there. his hair is slightly longer, styled differently. he seems more relaxed than his other self. even his voice differs slightly. the undercurrents of german are less pronounced. but it's still clear that he's spent a lot of time speaking another language entirely. (hebrew, to those who can tell).]

We've already discussed this, so if you wouldn't mind, I have work to do.

[he adds a ping here to the few people he cares about; to hope summers, snape, caffrey. even givens gets a message sent through. but they're all bouncing back, and that leaves him...confused. annoyed. angry]

Will someone tell me what's going on here? Is this the city playing tricks again, or...

[there's some muttering under his breath then; hebrew now. if anyone listens closely enough, they may register the word ha-satan amongst it all. yes, he's talking about that satan]

I want answers. Now.


ooc; to you pesky telepaths: you're welcome to pick up on that first message. he knows how to project his thoughts well enough to make it rise above the usual surface thoughts people have. he just can't direct it to one person :|b

Comments

[myresponsibility]

Where was your last home? [Because holy crap that sounds. Ominous.]

[lehnsherr]

A city named Bete Noire that also managed to pull together people from various different worlds. It was...interesting.

[an understatement, but he's not getting in to that.]

[myresponsibility]

[Peter snorts a little, because interesting sounds like one of those code words for "awful" or something similarly "interesting concept in theory, but in practice I'd rather be home, thanks very much".]

So this is like, a normal day of the week for you.

[lehnsherr]

[there's a humourless smile on his face when he speaks.]

It seems to be now, for better or worse.

[and now that he knows about them-] Did you happen to have a run-in with the Authorities?

[myresponsibility]

[That seemed to be the assumption most people had when they first saw him, but he's got a decent enough explanation for it anyway and shakes his head.]

I just got here. There was- [He still isn't really sure he wants to be honest with people he doesn't know or trust about the whole Hey I'm Spider-Man! thing.] An attack on my school before I woke up on the ship.

[lehnsherr]

And you managed to get yourself involved.

[no, he isn't trying to find out just how useful peter would be in a fight. what makes you think that?]

What kind of an attack?

[myresponsibility]

A giant lizard came and tried to smash the place up.

[Which he is saying with a completely straight face. Well, sheepishly straight face, anyway, but yes this is a thing that actually happened.]

[lehnsherr]

[he'd be laughing now if he hadn't seen mutants at home with animalistic features before. yet alone his stay in bn.]

A literal lizard, or something...more?

[myresponsibility]

[Again, he hesitates for a moment before answering, because he'd told Captain Stacy. Heck, he'd been basically yelling about it in a crowded police station, it wasn't like people didn't know.]

Dr. Connors - Curtis Connors - while trying to grow himself a new arm? Turned himself into a giant lizard, kind of by accident. It's not permanent, but... he can cause a lot of damage when he's all scaly and mad.

[lehnsherr]

So he's managed to temporarily mutate himself?

[oh the possibilities. if they could do the same to some of the world leaders back home, if would solve so many of their problems. it may not make them mutants in the strictest sense, but a point would still be made.]

Do you happen to know how? [not that he's...really expecting much of an answer to that.]

[myresponsibility]

[Yes, it's all my fault is the real answer, but probably not the smartest thing to tell a complete stranger.]

Not... really. I was kind of like- [Quick Parker think of something.] An intern for him, for a while. [And time to throw this back at you:] Why?

[lehnsherr]

Mutants are the next stage in human evolution. But there are certain individuals who are happy to persecute us simply for existing.

You've made it clear that there may be a way to show them just what we're forced to go through.

[well, that's the family friendly version of it.]

[myresponsibility]

What? [There are actually a lotttt of questions he wants to ask about that, because he's never heard of mutants, even if the talk of the next step for humanity isn't necessarily entirely unfamiliar talk.]

No. No, no no no no, no, you don't get it, this was supposed to be about helping people, like, finding a cure for Parkinson's with crosspecies genetics, but it doesn't work, that's the point. He was trying to regrow his arm and he ended up killing a bunch of people. That's not gonna teach anyone anything about tolerance.

[lehnsherr]

All it means is that there's some refinement needed first. We have people who are more than capable of doing that.

[or they'll find scientists who're capable of it and force them to do it. emma would be a great help there, regardless of where the two of them stand with each other now.]

[myresponsibility]

[:| this face Erik :|]

Because forcibly turning people into giant lizards is totally going to make them like you more.

[lehnsherr]

[get used to making that face, pete.]

Whoever said anything about them liking me more?

[myresponsibility]

If you want them to understand what you've been through, doesn't it make sense for you not to just piss them off more? [Logic man, do you has it.]

[lehnsherr]

Perhaps not. But logic means very little when you're persecuted simply because you were born a mutant. So while I agree that there may be other ways to get the point across, a decade of trying has made little difference.

They have their own biological weapons. What's wrong with evening out the playing field?

[myresponsibility]

Because it's just gonna make things escalate? Didn't you have to learn about the Cold War and stuff?

And I don't want to sound ignorant, but what's a mutant? Where you're from, anyway, I'd guess my definition for it would be kinda different from how you're using it.

[lehnsherr]

I'm a soldier. Trust me when I say that I know about war. [though not the cold war. it's one event that simply didn't happen in their world. not while everybody was clambering for their own mutant-shaped weapon instead.]

A mutant is a person born with an ability beyond the capabilities of a simple human.

[myresponsibility]

[He kind of wants to ask about that, point out that then he should know why being the country with the biggest, hardest weapon usually just made everyone else decide they need one too and well. Every single science fiction author had written about what happened next.

But his answer to his second, non rhetorical question grabs his interest faster, so we're sticking with that for a minute.]

How common is that, where you're from?

[lehnsherr]

Not as common as it should be. [less so when he has no idea how many various worldwide organisations are keeping off the record.]

A few hundred-thousand that I know of.

[myresponsibility]

Oh. [That's a lot different from. Two. That he knows of.

And he's cobbling together an encryption. It's not great, but it'll keep some people out for a while, and hey, a project to work on!]

[Encrypted]

Do you mind if I ask what you can do?

permalocked;

[lehnsherr]

To put it in its simplest of terms, I can manipulate metal.

[and more. but until he's mastered the more recent developments, he won't bring it up. there's a pause now as he considers whether to pose a question of his own. to him, there's no reason to hide his gifts. but he knows it isn't the same for everybody else.]

Is there a reason you're so interested?

permalocked;

[myresponsibility]

[If the situation was different - i.e. if Erik hadn't immediately started talking about wanting to hurt other people because they'd hurt them - Peter might have said something about what he could do, because he was the only thing that had really survived the experiments without horrible side effects, and his powers didn't wear off or make him go nuts and rip up downtown Manhattan, and that was... kinda weird, really. Just another thing he would have loved to ask his dad about, what made him special, what made him different from Dr. Connors or Fred the mouse, but he couldn't, and he didn't trust this guy at all, so he was extremely reluctant to confide in him about anything more than he already had.

So he proceeds with caution for now.]

It's just... different, I guess. We don't have a lot of people who can do that kind of thing back home.