Office Hours, Thursday

[on_her_korhal]

Yesterday's meeting with River was still fresh in Kerrigan's mind. As a result, she was... thoughtful, and maybe a little distracted, adding what had been spoken about in class yesterday to her memories of the images she had been picking up over the past year or so.

Resignation and that malicious spark of hope that Zeratul had left behind fought each other in her mind. She couldn't get a grip on either, and that irritated her.

River would bring back succesful reports soon enough, she was sure of that. There would be new species of zerg. They would swallow up a great deal of her time, and then she could go hunting for xel'naga artifacts. Work this all out. Stop being party to human weakness...

Ngh. She embedded a pencil in the wall with her telekinesis and glared at it.

[[ open! though warning for SP later; today is going to be a looong day. ]]

Comments

[icecoldfrost]

"I've been working with Ino on occasion, and I figured your office would be full of eager students after your offer last week," Emma replied, coming in to take a seat. "Now that I'm taking on Jonothon as a pupil, I need to accept that I can't teach myself everything."

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"I've only had the one so far," Kerrigan said, though she didn't sound fussed. "Most of them find me a little off-putting." That... could be a joke. "But it's nice to get confirmation you kids can be taught something about yourselves. Anything in particular you want to learn, or shall I just assume ignorance?"

[icecoldfrost]

"They find you off-putting? Have they met other psions?" In Emma's experience all of them tended to be.... strong willed and predominantly female.

Or just 'bitchy,' depending on who you asked.

"Assume ignorance. I know how to shield and read other people; I wipe minds, put people to sleep, and create pain, but for all I know there's better ways to do it than what I know."

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"You'd almost start to wonder," Kerrigan agreed, drawling. "You're also right about the other matter. There are a lot of better ways... and you don't need to be a teek to figure them out, trust me."

She raised her chin, shutting the door behind Emma with her telekinesis.

[icecoldfrost]

Emma followed the shutting door with envious eyes. "That doesn't mean I can't express admiration for the ability," she sighed, by 'admiration' meaning 'envy.'

Emma folded her hands in her lap, and fixed Kerrigan with an expectant look. "I am at your disposal."

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"Just what I was hoping to hear," Kerrigan said, mildly. "I don't suppose you've figured out cloaking yet, have you?"

[icecoldfrost]

She shook her head. "I can focus very hard on 'you can't see me,' if that's what you mean, but if I get distracted, it fails," she admitted. "It's harder the more people I try to influence, and I can't expand it to include other people at all."

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"That's because you're picking individual brains to focus on," she replied, with a slight snort. "Back during my days in the Confederacy military, they'd give us suits to help focus that power inward, so it would remain useful no matter the crowd. Or our level of concentration."

[icecoldfrost]

"Inward?" Oh Kerrigan, you just got Emma's undivided attention. "Why inward? How?"

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

She grinned. It wasn't a nice grin. "Because you don't need to convince the world it's not seeing you," she said, "You need to convince you you're unseeable."

[icecoldfrost]

"Seriously?" That was something for consideration, clearly, and Emma was fascinated. "How?"

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"It takes a different kind of focus," Kerrigan replied. "Human teeps back home never manage it without a suit and an 'activation switch' on their person, so to speak. Of course, human teeps back home are overloaded with conditioning, so they were never given the chance to see if they could produce enough will and power to manage it by themselves."

Kerrigan had, though. But that would be a mixture of her biology and her carefully deconstructed conditioning talking. "You toggle the 'switch' and erect a shield, so to speak. It takes energy, obviously, but timing is everything in any situation." She sat back. "I could get you a copy of the hardware switch, if you're interested in how it works."

[icecoldfrost]

Emma chewed her lower lip thoughtfully. "I'm not the best at engineering or things like that, beyond how to hotwire something," she admitted. "But poking at it couldn't hurt."

She sure as hell wasn't going to ask for help with it; she didn't want anyone on the island deciding technology to control telepathy applications was awesome. If she had to sneak into MIT and try downloading people's brains, she'd do it.

"I wonder if I could do the same thing with mental visualization, if I knew how the hardware worked," Emma mused. "What does the suit look like?"

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"It's a full-body suit, except for the head," Kerrigan replied, leaning back into her chair. "Helpful to externalize the psionic energy you need to project a non-presence to the world. Ours were wired up to evade infra-red scanners as well. Though of course it's still going to emit some alpha-waves."

... Oh, just wait until she brought up psi emitters and psi disruptors, Emma. Now that was stuff in hands you really didn't want it to be in.

[icecoldfrost]

"Focusing in to project out," she repeated slowly. "Like instead of thinking of my shields as something inside my head to keep people out, they're a bubble around me. Like a one-way mirror."

The idea of a psi disruptor was going to freak her the hell out someday, until she could build one of her own and figure out how to counter it. Someone was a bit of a control freak.

"That's... brilliant. Twisted, to condition someone to the point they need a physical switch, but brilliant."

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"We were supposed to be handy little animals in cages, Emma," Kerrigan reminded her, not quite lightly. "Twisted is the least word for it... but effective, yes. Though it'll take practice to get to the power output you need to keep it stable."

[icecoldfrost]

"We're considered freaks no matter what world we're in," Emma said with a flash of bitterness. "I never thought I'd be thankful to be considered crazy, but I'm sure the same thing will happen once my world realizes people with powers are real and not a hoax."

"But practice?" She gave Kerrigan a confident smile. "I already work at least two hours a day on expanding my range, adding time isn't something I'm opposed to doing."

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"One of many reasons why I'm training you all," Kerrigan said, coolly. "I won't let power-hungry ingrates put any of our kind in cages if I can help it." There was a flash - a calculated one, not that she'd admit to it - of memory bubbling up above Kerrigan's shields, of a younger-her sitting in a tiny room with no windows, curled up in the corner; then a hatch opened, and two human hands dropped in a zerg larvae, and terror snuck into her heart-- how long had she been there? How many days had it been?

"Sorry." She shook her head briskly to 'clear' it. "But I suggest you check out the switch and see if you can get the principle to match your personal psionic system. After that, you and I are going out to practice."

[icecoldfrost]

Emma did the polite thing of raising her shields slightly higher, to prevent 'overhearing' leakage.

Kerrigan would most likely be able to tell that she didn't have them all the way up. Emma wasn't going to be caught off-guard if someone was loudly broadcasting something juicy. Or thinking directly about her.

"'Out to practice?'" She looked positively thrilled. "I've practiced in New York when I can, but ugh, hearing the same people over and over here sometimes makes me want to scream."

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"Don't I know it," Kerrigan snorted. Though really, her last experience with that had been before her genetics had been altered. Her range went... a little too far for that, now. "We'll have to go somewhere a little less crowded than New York, but I don't see why we need to stick around here with all the morality knights and the tragic sob-stories."

[icecoldfrost]

"'Emma, our powers shouldn't be used like that,'" she said, doing her best to mimic Jean's tones with a roll of her eyes, and there was a flash of the red-haired morality cop that she didn't bother to hide. "'Emma, giving Jono a mental Valium wasn't nice, despite the fact that he can't physically take antidepressants.'"

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

Kerrigan rolled her eyes. "Really," she drawled. "Sometimes you just have to go out and act instead of coming up with pretty little lectures. We're all better off that way."

Really, sometimes, Emma made it easy.