@rubyquartzed -- skype rp transcript
It'd been weeks since Asher had actually been to his home dimension. It seemed that weeks in this universe only played over to a few hours in his own though it didn't work in the reverse for him. . . somehow. There was an amount of guilt that came with being here for extended time periods, however. It had taken him a while to remember what he wore to this universe last time he traveled over, but figured it out once he was digging through his laundry. He was already heading down the elevator to the lower levels of the building, sucking on a piece of hard candy he'd found in the kitchen with a bottle of soda in his hand.
It was still super surreal for him to look around here and think about the place he was going to again - the walls were desolate and eroded back home, vacant of pretty much all life besides the broken machinery and decorations. He brushed his hand against the wall as he swung a corner, heading toward the area where he'd figured out they currently held uniforms and different weapons. It was a weird place for this universe to have a portal to his dimension, but he really couldn't complain in earnest.
Maxine had come to accept that she now lived in this dimension; she had never found any route out and as far she knew the Nexus consisted of the entire planet without portals. Of course, she couldn't be entirely certain of that, but many of the inhabitants of the mansion had traveled to distant locales on the world and if there were portals they were probably small and hard to find-- after all she had been given little warning on finding hers in her home universe.
Was this a Nexus Earth, or a Nexus universe? She couldn't tell and the people here didn't seem to be able to tell her. But all she ever wanted was a safe home for herself and her family, and she had no reason to fight her way back to the world she left.
Her relationship with her son, Asher, worried her however. She'd completely accepted him as her own, though sometimes she doubted her own motives. Was she looking for a replacement for the child she'd lost? Was she truly seeking to protect children from what she'd suffered? Her heart went out to them-- and him-- but she feared how easily she might become like... Magneto.
He seldom spoke to her of his background, and she seldom spoke of hers. Was it distrust? Or-- more likely-- a sense of duty to bear each their own burdens? She wanted to protect him from the world, but a world she did not know had already gotten to him. She wanted to provide him with a sense of security and safety that she had so longed for, but she doubted she could possibly give something she had never obtained.
Maxine had noticed him slip away, like he often did, and she put down her book. For a moment she lingered, watching her own biological children sleep, then she pressed a kiss to her baby daughter's soft forehead where she was twitching agitatedly in her sleep, and moved her son next to her side. The twins did seem to sleep sounder next to one another.
She stood and slipped out after him, feeling tentatively out to touch the walls and doors of this place in her fields. The elevator was going down... no problem. She strode with purpose, reaching and opening the elevator doors with an impatient flick of her wrist and stepping out into empty space.
She glided downwards, feeling out the mechanics of the machine, then pushing the elevator car further down out of the way when she reached where he had stopped. Maxine waited for him to move several doors along before exiting, striding silently an inch above the surface of the decking.
Asher took a swig of his soda with a weird little face. They didn't have Mountain Dew where he came from, but it satisfied his need for something sweet. It seemed like the other people here liked to jump on any opportunity at the Pepsi and Coke when it was restocked in the fridge - whoever did that. He'd assumed it had been their humble headmaster, but he'd never witnessed it face-on since he avoided the man like the plague.
He sighed and put down the drink near the wall, smacking his tongue off the top of his mouth in a bit of distaste. He'd been told it was a radioactive green color and he could say that the taste it left behind reminded him of toxic waste. It went to show how far he'd go for a sugar kick. Well, at least he had something similar back home to fall on. The hard candy didn't help either, though.
It wasn't terribly late in the day, but late enough that everyone had retired to their rooms for the evening to do their own personal doing. He'd taken his leave now to avoid any unwarranted questioning about his destination. Portals and universes may have not been his forte, but he knew that it was better off for him to slip in and out unnoticed.
He felt along the wall again, looking around for something visually obvious. There had always been no rhyme or reason for this to be a portal or whatever it may have been called technically. All he knew is that once he spent enough time near a certain area, it seemed to allow him passage without even realizing it most of the time. He scooted toward the far end of the hall.
His mind did linger to those he left behind here that he did think fondly of. Emma had become a teacher for him albeit his newly deemed mother didn't seem to happy with his decision to allow her to continue practicing with him. The thought of his mother herself, however, made him feel a little guilty for how he went speaking around like he had. She was awfully protective of him and he knew it, but he knew he'd never get to go back to his home dimension and his brother without the little white lies he tried to pass off as truth.
He bumped into the wall at the end of the corridor and pressed both hands to the surface. Palms flush against it, he smoothed them over it as if feeling for some kind of opening. He'd figure the system out yet. Was it his presence? Was it anyone's presence? He sighed, leaning his forehead against it when nothing happened immediately.
Maxine wasn't entirely certain what she was doing. Spying? If she was, she did it with a determination to help, not betray any trust they'd built. She couldn't force him to bend to her will, and it wasn't her will that he do nothing if he had a mission, she just hated being lied to and made to sit on the sidelines helplessly. She WOULD NOT be made a bystander.
She slowed when she couldn't feel any more doors move, and she hovered cautiously in place, listening and moving forward slowly. Finally she tired of waiting and feeling foolish, and she allowed herself to drop lightly to the floor and stride forward to find him and discover what he was up to directly.
On the flipside, Asher wasn't quite sure what he was doing on his end of the situation either. He grunted irritably as he didn't find anything he was looking for. He glanced to the side to another wall and reached out to touch that one as he heard something behind him. It wasn't hard to tell even slight noises when the rest of the hallway was in dead silence. He swung around, arm still reaching out to the other wall.
His eyes widened behind his glasses, not expecting the one woman he didn't want to see down here. His mouth dropped open and his tongue ran across his incisors as he looked for words to actually speak, "Mom!" Well, it was somewhere to start. "What are you doing down he--!" His hand fell onto the wall and he turned to lean against it with his arms crossing over his chest, back pressing against the side of the hallway though he continued to fall back as if there had been no wall at all. "Whoa!" He flailed, already disappearing back into seemingly a wall.
Whatever he was searching for, he had evidently an incomplete idea of where it was. He whirled and spotted her quickly, and she dropped her hands to her sides to approach, not wanting him to get the wrong idea of her mood. Maxine started speaking at the same time he started asking her questions.
"Asher, I only w--" He fell back with as much surprise as she witnessed it and it struck her that he had found one. A portal. Another universe, and before she could comprehend what she was doing she had created a bubbling field of blue-white energy in her hands and projected it forward, slamming it into the magnetic pull she could feel of another world momentarily transposed with the one she occupied, before throwing herself into it after him completely unprepared for whatever existed on the other side.
Asher had expected to find himself stumbling through the portal to his own dimension - the decrepit X-Mansion he'd come to know as a hideaway. Instead, he fell flat onto his back against what felt like concrete. Concrete? He groaned out in a mix between pain and confusion, rubbing the back of his head where it'd struck ground. He shifted in an attempt to sit up before noticing there were no walls around him. . . and he was sitting on a sidewalk.
He heard something next to him, but found himself hypnotized by everything else he saw. "What?" He wrinkled his brow as he watched cars passing by and people immediately walking past him though he was in the middle of the path. He scrambled to stand up and look for anything familiar, grabbing onto his glasses to adjust them on his face as he pressed himself up against building. Where was he now? There was immediate panic beginning to set in as he felt up the wall he was hiding next to, looking for another way back. "No, no, no, no!" His breathing began to rush, heart not far behind as he pounded fists on the wall. This wasn't the X-Mansion and it wasn't any place he knew of. "Take me back!"
Maxine flew past Asher and crashed into the ground, scraping knees and elbows and swearing softly in German as she landed and realized she had appeared in public. She sat up dizzily and stared at where he was pressed up against the unfamiliar building, then she hugged her arms over her chest and scrambled to her feet. This was not what she'd been planning when she decided to confront him for once.
"Asher," she said sharply. "Calm down, where are we?"
Asher turned back around with his body language just reeking of fear for where they were. "I-- I-- I was trying to go back home and now, now we're, we're..." He stammered horribly over each word. "This, this, this hasn't happened before." He turned his head to glance past her with a hard swallow. "This isn't home." He clawed his fingers into the wall behind him, finding some kind of chalky feeling between his fingers. He lifted it up, finding some sort of dust there. He turned back slightly toward the wall, noticing he's taken a big chunk of it out. "Is... that supposed to be brick?" He reached out to touch it again, pressing his fingers into it like it was just a sandcastle. "Where are we?" He glanced back at her again, holding out his hand with another fistful of whatever it was sprinkling down between the gaps in his fingers.
She threw herself over to where he was and gripped his shoulders tightly. "It's alright, we'll figure this out." She had no idea what to do but she was convinced she was telling the truth. They WOULD figure this out.
Maxine wasn't paying attention to the wall, she was trying to study the people and locate signs and indications of what decade or century they were in. "Yes, yes, I'm trying to figure it out. We'll be alright together."
Asher flinched under the hand on his shoulder, knitting his brow into a straight line with a slow breath. ". . . Okay." He mumbled, still picking at what was in his hand. He glanced back up, chewing at his bottom lip. He looked around, actually trying to examine the people. "Well, I think we're still in the same time period." He murmured, still sort of fixated on the wall.
He looked to his right and grabbed hold of Maxine's arm, trying to tug her along. He may have towered above most the people he was running past, but it only made it easier for him to get by. "Maybe there's another opening around here?" He spoke back to her, unsure of where he was already beginning to drag her.
"That's good, we both know a little about it then," she started, settling into damage control mode. She turned back to try see what he had in his hand before being suddenly dragged.
She ducked and slipped her hand out of grasp with a twist; she'd been a smuggler in the ghettos, she knew a few tricks of her own and didn't want to be accessory to running around frantically. Asher needed to calm down and help her work this out. She knew he was an intelligent kid with a head for logic, she just needed him to slow down for a moment.
Maxine caught his upper arm. "Please stop," she hissed warningly. "I want to get back too, my babies are alone. Let's think, when I pushed through I felt this world's magnetosphere overlaying the Nexus world's. We need to find a weak point."
She pulled him out of the public traffic. "Did you always go to the lower levels to find the portals?"
Asher, while a smart kid in many ways, always had a tendency to panic when things went astray. That's something he hadn't gained from his nexus world counterpart. He really didn't work well under pressure.
He made a face and turned back to look down at her, furrowing his brow. His heart was still racing in his chest, blood filling his ears. He whined, wanting to continue going before he was snagged.
He stopped, worriedly looking down at her with a shift of his weight. The mention of the twins being left alone was enough to send him back into a spiral. "Yeah?" He murmured, glancing around again.
He willingly allowed himself to be pulled out of the way, nodding at her question. "It was always near where I was... in my world too." He scuffed his foot on the ground. ". . . Are we going to get home?"
She pushed herself up on her tip-toes and put a hand to his forehead, then slid it back through his hair to cup the back of his neck. Maxine hoped he ate something before trying to pull his disappearing act. The last thing she needed was for him to faint at the rate he was going right now.
"Then let's find where the X-Mansion is... or was... in this world. It's a starting point. And yes, we are, because I'm not going to give up so long as I'm breathing."
It was a good thing that she hadn't tried asking him if he ate anything, she'd be horribly disappointed. He was looking forward to picking up Alex, taking him to McDonalds then run by the ice cream parlor. He had little reason to eat beforehand. His eyes flickered between hers, wondering what she was checking for.
"We don't even know what country we're in, let alone where the X-Mansion is, was, or will be. Plus the walls are made out of chalky stuff."
It was a good sign that he seemed less panicked now. She wrinkled her brow. "Oh? Well, building materials could be a clue. Let's take a look." Maxine smiled, pleased that he was starting to think of what they needed to sort out. It was a beginning.
Asher nodded slowly, walking over to the side of a building. He scratched his fingers into the brick, taking a big chunk out of it and leaving behind an imprint of where he dug into the side. "I don't know what sort of brick this is..." Just looking at it made him uneasy.
"Uh..." Maxine was taken aback, finally really looking at the bricks for the first time. She tentatively pressed her fingers into the soft surface, then peeled out a chunk. She stared at it for a few seconds, grinding it between her fingers to feel the consistency, then screamed and dropped it.
Asher nearly jumped out of his skin when she screamed, dropping what he was holding and flinching back. "What's wrong?!" He squeaked, hand shooting out to take her by the shoulder. "It's just... sand?"
Her eyes darted frantically to the people in the street, finally needing to know how they were not interrupted for this scene they'd been having for so long and what the hell this was. "Scheiße." She held her hands away from her body, freezing up for several seconds while she attempted to compose herself.
Asher raised an eyebrow at her frantic actions now, feeling himself get more nervous just watching her. Was it not sand? He bit down on his bottom lip, slowly retracting his hand away from her shoulder as she seemed to try to calm down. "Yeah? I think we've been trying to do that." He looked over his shoulder, noticing there were fewer people around them now than before. Turning around, he started walking down the sidewalk they'd already started on. "Do you think the X-Mansion is even somewhere in his place?"
She licked her lips nervously and then schooled her expression into something more emotionless. She had nightmares like this, of unspeakable things done to human bodies; how could she not, she had lived through it.
Maxine gripped him by the elbow and started leading him with long strides. "We'll just start moving. Signs are in English, at least. That's good."
Asher was never a fan of Maxine's way of making herself appear absolutely apathetic. He was almost envious of it, looking about as confident as a wet kitty when anything ever turned astray. He wanted to ask what had her so feared, but he couldn't do that while she began pulling him by the elbow. He turned back toward the buildings as they passed, curiosity looming over his thoughts. He tripped over his own feet as he turned his head back around, mumbling something unrelated under his breath.
"In English, but that doesn't mean we're anywhere close." He shifted. "Should we. . . ask for directions?" He tried to see if anything on the signs were related to places they knew. He himself had never exactly been much farther than the X-Mansion in either dimension he'd visited, so he wasn't of much use in literally 99% of the rest of the time-space-whatever they were trapped in now.
"Close or not, it's an advantage in our favour, and we're taking all we can at this point," she answered brisquely, lengthening her strides to eat distance with purpose. "I'd prefer not to talk to anyone here. I trust you have some survival skills," she snapped in addition, regretting instantly she was being so short with him, but hell. She was scared and tensing to fight the whole world.
"We landed here for a reason. There has to be a way back around here somewhere. Keep your eyes-- open for anything resembling the X-Mansion or any physical features that might indicate where it was."
"I don't think our favor is very high." He sighed, looking back and forth at the signs. He wasn't the biggest geography nut, but he knew that these signs didn't seem to be pointing toward any place in New York. He wanted to ask for directions... get some bearing on where they were. "Uhm - I think you mean minimal survival skills. I was a laboratory experiment for a decade. I don't know how to make food for myself unless I have specific directions laying in front of me." He admitted, halfway beginning to cling to the arm pulling him along.
"What reason do we have to be here exactly?" He swallowed hard, shaking with the exhale that found itself escaping his lips. "Okay, okay." He skimmed the buildings and signs they passed, chewing his cheeks raw.
Maxine was getting increasingly agitated with the fact that nobody seemed interested in the two aliens to this world. The longer she stayed here the more aware she became of the heaviness and dull overcast this world seem to have, a world in which even the magnetosphere felt like it was conspiring against her, like it was fractured and yet whole, spinning to a rule that she wasn't born to and couldn't connect with.
"What? Is stealing against some strange moral code you have?" she retorted with a half-snort. She scanned the signs, mostly superficially, drawing on her power to try to map out some greater feel of the planet and how its field laid out. "I don't think we landed here randomly, nor due to some vague fate, either. Rule number one. Look for connections. And keep moving. I hate the feel of this place."
