Xaviers!

"Sorry, they've fallen into disuse and disrepair. They haven't been used in a looooooong long long long time.

Loooong."

"Just how old are you? On the surface you don't remember anything before being thawed out of the arctic ice, but there has to be something in here about how you ended up there."

Distract yourself, don't even think about the falling and you'll get used to it...

"Well, that depends a GREAT deal on what day it is, doesn't it?" Will said.

The two landed with a thump on a conveyor belt, which then started rolling into the darkness.

"Somehow I feel you don't want to give me straight answers." she says, pushing against Will's embrace to try and free herself.

"Maybe you should start asking crooked questions.

We're all quite mad here, you know. Time will do that do you."

Miriam was only really succeeding in making herself more stuck in some sort of Will-taffy at the moment.

"Very well then, let's go off the rails a bit."

Not making any headway freeing herself Miriam rolls the both of them to the side and off the conveyor belt.

The two of them fell again, and Will bounced off of her when they hit the ground, momentarily stunned.

"What's the matter, Mel, can't stand the shoe being on the other foot for once?" he said, beginning to draw himself back up like a T-1000 or something.

They were on a vast factory floor, with automated cranes picking things up, moving them and dropping them in various ovens, vats of molten candy, wringers--the works.

Miriam whirls around her own axis as she pulls herself into the air, hovering in front of Will. She was letting him toss her around and why? Because somehow her and something from his past has gotten tangled up in his mind. If it had felt familiar she surely must have just caught a glimpse of that false connection. She's letting herself get tangled up this deep in his mind because she's being manipulated, even if it's just accidentally!

"I told you. My name is Miriam!" For a moment her shroud flares out as she spins, revealing some of her body underneath as well as what seems like another pair of feet for just a moment before the shroud settles around her again.

"So, you DIDN'T come alone," Will grinned.

"Learned your lesson somewhat from last time, hrm? Your playtoy has gone up a level or two, and we've had eons to ponder...oh, just about everything."

"I'm never alone." she says cryptically. "And I'm just here to find out if it's safe to unleash this on Will's mind. If this is who you are then maybe it was locked away for a reason." she snarls.

"This IS Will's mind. What's left of it. This is our raft, our lifeboat.

And you're not going to mess it up. Fool me six or fewer times, shame on you..." he said, as monitors around the room began to light up.

"I'm here as a favour! To pull in your lifeboat! Make sure it's not going to hurt him!" she hisses, the masks on her cloak twisting and turning to look at the monitors lighting up.

"There is no HIM to hurt."

The monitors flickered to life, showing...well, disturbing scenes, to say the least.

Will was being...twisted, shaken and sliced and diced. On various screens, he was being held to candlepoint and melted, thrown and slammed against walls, or trapped in progressively shrinking containers. He was dancing and twirling, very much against his own control if the look on his face was any indicator. He was being boiled in a pot, affixed to the baring of a car as it sped off, and trod upon as people entered a fancy party of some sort.

Every so often, in the background of some of the screens, Miriam would see just the quickest flashes of a very familiar face.

Miriam recoils from the images. Down here she's as removed from her actual stomach as it gets, but that doesn't stop the feeling of a pit spreading through her. If anything it's worse being this much closer to these images. These memories. She'd feared there had been trauma but she hadn't imagined this. It's impossible to look away, not just because it draws her attention but because Will wants her to see it. And then she sees the face cropping up here and there. At first it seems like her mother but after catching another glimpse of it she realizes that the similarities are only superficial. The age is right but even then this woman looks like she's taken much better care of herself and the cheekbones are a little too prominent, the nose is different and the eyes are too piercing. No... this isn't her pathetic mother, if only for the cruel sneer on the woman's lips.

It's her. Twenty, thirty years older somehow. But her. "No... no. This can't be!" she screams, arms clutched around herself.

That isn't me! It's not, it's somebody else! I went too deep, I'm seeing what he thinks he's seeing! I'm letting him have too much control! I can't... I'm me! No one else has a say in that! I'm in control!

She rises further from the floor and the lanterns dangling behind her begin to glow brightly, growing more intense by the moment as she tries to drown out the monitors and the images they're showing with her own light.

"It just eats away at you, doesn't it, that YOU weren't the one to trap us in this box? That we did it to ourselves? That we created a place where nothing could harm us? That you weren't the one to rip us away from our home, our loved ones, our friends and our gods? After all the time, and all the effort, it must eat away at you that you lost, doesn't it, Mary Bell?

I won, don't you see? I may have bats riding around in my belfry, but I won. And now, you have no power here."

The monitors continued cycling through images, faster and faster.

Miriam tries to rise higher, still clutching at herself as she tries to escape the flashing images. She tries to summon up the mental picture of herself in the real world and to retrace her steps back out of the box.

"Fine, you win! I'm going! Let me go!"

"Come back any time! We'll make brownies!"