Xaviers!

"Fine..." she begrudgingly agrees. "If that's the only way to do it."

"Oh, it's not. But it's the best way and the fastest way. If you want to go poking around by your lonesome, you're more than welcome," Mel smiled, stepping behind Miriam and putting her hands on Miriam's shoulders.

"Well I already tried that and she turned out a boring ditz. Fine, fine, just... show me how."

"Mmm," Mel smiled. "We'll make an expert out of you yet."

She walked over to the well and knocked on it three times.

"The first thing we need to do is get it's psyche in here. You do this when you work on a normal person, though you may not realize it--when you convince someone to look the other way or to forget that you were somewhere, you're altering their actual mental state. What you were trying to do here was create an entirely new mental state from scratch, and I'm not even sure I could do that very well, and you know how skilled I can be, darling."

"Now, you called this well a place for raw material, but that's not all it is. It's your connection directly to the heart of Will. For most people, that's potentially dangerous--if you mess around too much, you might break it. But, again Will's not really a person, so the rules don't apply. It's modeling clay, and, like silly putty and news print, we can just take a piece and have it absorb anything we want. If you grab a piece of someone else's psyche, you're breaking it beyond repair. If you grab a piece of Will, it reflects the whole, without hurting the whole."

She reached in, and pulled. She had, by the hair, Will, who seemed to be...unconscious was the wrong word. Frozen? Stuck? Motionless? Something like that.

"So he's... some kind of hivemind. Or distributed consciousness. Literally and metaphorically." she says, at least somewhat following along. "Memory foam." she finally settles on something that sounds closer to what Mel is talking about.

"Precisely! You could physically split in two and have one of your own, but I don't think that's quite your style. Better to keep a private room in here for when you're alone, yes?"

"Yeah because having two Wills walking around is so inconspicuous. We'll just split him up in here."

"Well, it's a shapeshifter, so you could just keep it shoved in your sock drawer when not in use, but you're the boss, darling," Mel smiled.

"Now, because we don't want to go through the messy nonsense that is the food metaphor that's so utterly prevalent in here, we create our own. Since it's clay, I prefer to physically remove and add on bits. Let me give you an example."

She walked over to Will, focused for a second, and shoved a hand into her chest, wiggling her hand around as she looked--and then pulled a wet, round ball of clay out.

"This is the memory of what it ate for dinner last night," she explained. "It's not very important or integral, so it's easy to just slip on out."

She tossed it from one hand to another, and then took a small bite, and wrinkled her nose. "Hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. Ugh."

"Okay so... put his tastes on the list of things to adjust. Take out all the worship non-sense and all his memories of you for starters." she says, walking up to the Will dummy and staring at it as she tries to find either one of those things before hesitatingly mirroring Mel and plunging her hand into the clay to try and pull out all the OtherSam things.

It didn't want to come out, not right away.

"His worship of the Morrigu is a bit more entrenched--a little bit harder to just pull out."

She bent down and started balling up some clay from the floor. "Better to change it...or replace it, don't you think?

I don't suppose you're the type to want a worshipper yourself, of course."

"Replace it with what precisely?" she asks, dubiously eyeing the clay Mel is shaping.

"Well, that's up to you, now, isn't it?

It's devotion to a cause, so maybe you just need to find a new cause. I picked myself, because, darling, we have an ego. You're ashamed of it, though, so maybe you can think of a better cause than little ol' Sammy."

"I'm not ashamed of it, I just don't need people grovelling at my feet. We should just replace it with wanting to enjoy itself. A bit of hedonism, showmanship, replace the ridiculous Celtic deity with some Dionysus. Metaphorically."

"Living for pleasure? Someone after my own heart," she grinned. "Fiddle while Rome burns."

"Let's try not to make this as ridiculous as you obviously are." she says as she tries to remold what she's struggling to pull out of the Will simulacrum.

Miriam wound find that making those specific alterations seemed...well, it felt like it was doing something. A feeling of warmth, more than anything else--not altogether unpleasing.

"Call it ridiculous if you will; I'm effective."

"You're a narcissist. And that's being polite." she mumbles as she finishes what she's doing and pushes the chunk of clay back into Will. "Now to just get rid of his memories of you..." she says and reaches into the clay once more, trying to find what she pictures as some kind of black blob of oily contamination.

They were particularly hard to find, as she rooted around in there.

"You're going to have a hard time with that one; it's repressed and buried them so much.

And forgive me if I don't take a hand in attempting to remove myself. I quite like it here, actually; I worked long and hard to worm my way into it's psyche, such as it is."

"Fine, I'll just bury it more then." she says, trying to find the memories pertaining to her instead and trying to enlarge them to make them more prominent and hopefully drown out any memories of Mel that might otherwise get associated with them.

"You can't just say "remember more"; you've got to give it something concrete to work with. CRAFT the memory. Get your hands dirty."

"I don't want to fabricate any, just make them larger so they'll overshadow you." she says, pulling one out at random to take a look at it.

"I'm pretty sure those are buried deep in the subconscious, and you'll want to learn a few more lessons before mucking about in THERE," she said, teasingly, not at all trying to get Miriam to delve deeper, nope.

It was a weird memory for a monoform--a sensation of dangling from her own neck, as "she" teased Sam across the table.

"I just have to make some of these larger..." she says, pulling on the piece of clay to literally make it bigger before shoving it back into Will.

Will shook a little as Miriam shoved some memories around and re-arranged things.

"Clumsy, but probably effective.

Now, what you should DO is go out with your new hedonistic friend and have some REAL fun. We had a blast in the high-rollers room in Vegas," Mel suggested.

It only takes Miriam a second to realize the potential in that. It takes her a little longer to swallow her pride and admit that this is an excellent idea, despite it's source. She doesn't give Mel the satisfaction of admitting it though, simply withdrawing from Will's mind, eyes snapping open in the real world.

"The Ritz Club Casino." she decides.

"Hrm, I've always preferred Aspinalls, but to each their own. I'm sure you can find plenty of ways to have fun there, yes?" she smiled.

Miriam shakes her head to rid herself of Mel's voice, instead focusing on Will in the real world. "Come on, let's go." she says, getting up and holding her hand out to Will.

"Mmm," Will grinned, sliding closer to Miriam. "Go? But we're having so much fun," she purred.

"Just somewhere else. How do you feel about gambling?" she smirks, taking Will's hand and pulling her up and into herself, slipping one arm around her waist.

"Seems risky to me," she teased. "What did you have in mind?"

"Sure, risky." she smirks. "I was thinking The Ritz. It's not too far from here." she says, starting to move and pulling Will along with her. On the way across the club she mentally gets one of the staff to call them a cab.

"Sounds fancy-shmancy. Are you sure we're dressed appropriately?" she teased, draping herself over Miriam.

"Are you suggesting what I think you are?" she grins.

"Moi? Suggest things? Surely you jest. I just go with the flow, remember?" she grinned.

"Well let's see where the flow is going then, yes?" she says as they head out of the club and towards the curb where cabs are picking people up. She leads the two of them right up to one, trying to ignore the "Hey." from the person they're stealing the cab from, just briefly turning her head. "Go away." she brushes the man off before climbing into the cab.

Will laughed. "THAT comes in handy, doesn't it?"

"Sure does. He can take the next one, right?" she says as she settles into the cab. "Ritz Club Casino." she tells the driver before going back to ignoring him.

"How far away can you mess with people? What can you make them do?"

"Never measured it but thirty, forty meters maybe if I actively try. And each person has their own idea of what they're willing to do. Staying close to that makes it easier, which is why it's much easier on drunk people. Never tried to push that too hard, but I imagine making someone go against their morals is hard."

"Plus, that sounds nasty. Getting people to loosen up is good. Making people do something they'd hate, not so much."