Xaviers!

Wanda is asleep on one of the common room couches. It's obviously not a very restful sleep. For one thing, she's too tall for the couch. For the second, she's shifting position frequently. There's a book cradled in one arm, something leather bound from the school library.

((Open))

In her dream she's skipping down a small forest path towards a little hut she somehow knows lies deep in the woods. She's been down this path before many times, knows the forest and the land. But yet she's nervous. Lately there have been rumors. Something has taken up residence deep in the forest. Dead wildlife has been found. Just wolves, people said at first. Nothing to worry about too much. But then the rumors started. Someone saw a wild man running between the trees. Heard a howl at night that sounded not quite like any wolf they'd ever heard. Then someone found a half-eaten deer, strung up in a tree, marred by fangs.

Still, she'd always lived in tune with the lands and she knows the path like the back of her hand. She respects the balance of the woods like the old woman who lives in the little hut has taught her. There's nothing to fear from nature for those who respect the land and it's spirits. She should know, she's seen the old woman calm a bear to tend to it's injured cub. Nothing to fear. Then why does she feel like malicious eyes are watching her from the underbrush? A cloud passes over the sun and for a moment the woods turn dark, the shadows deepen and a growl comes from somewhere off the path. A rumbling voice full of teeth and gravel begins reciting in a chant.

"There is a peak in distant Zan,
Beyond the wonted haunts of man,
Where broods alone in a hideous state
A spirit dead and desolate.

In nightmares only is it told
What scenes beneath that peak unfold;
What scenes, too old for human sight,
Lie sunken there in endless night."

She slows, knowing stopping entirely is folly. She gathers the air around her, only a slow lazy spin at present. The old woman had told her that nature was a friend to one who was a friend to it. She'd learned to speak its language and now it answered her call as she moved further along the path. The sky rumbles in response to her uncertainty.

In the real world, a lazy breeze starts circulating around the common room.

The voice let's her pass and she keeps going, the gentle breeze playing with her red travelling coat as it spirals around her. Further down the road she can see movement in the bushes next to the street and a hulking shadow lurking. As she passes it growls it's chant again.

"One midnight, redolent of ill
I saw that peak, asleep and still;
While in the lurid sky there rode,
A gibbous moon that glowed and glowed.

A furtive man that sowed the seed,
Of ruthless death and callous deed;
A string of sacrificial lamb
To birth the chosen son of man;
So wielding in his hand the Key,
Nebuchadnezzar's blank decree."

She spins on the spot, maintaining her movement down the path in the way that only dream logic allows. The wind focuses at her gestures, blasting at the hulking shape with significant force. Fear is a powerful motivator and only afterwards does she think to ask, "Who are you?"

In the common room, small loose items are flung against the far wall away from Wanda.

The shadow doesn't respond, but the sudden burst of wind drives it back, slinking further into the forest again. She continues on her path and in the distance she can see smoke rising above the tree-tops. She's almost there. She keeps following the road and eventually she comes around a bend and can see the little hovel. Except the smoke doesn't rise from the chimney. The whole building is in flames! And in front of it her teacher lies on the floor in a spreading pool of crimson. She turns her head, somehow still alive with her bowels spilling out of the deep gouge in her stomach and she looks at the woman in the red cloak with wide eyes. She opens her mouth and begins to speak with a weary but urgent voice.

"And as the dreadful moon climb’d high,
Fright’ning the stars from out the sky,
I saw the jagged mountain glow
Till buried things rose from below.

About the ancient one uncover’d,
The monstrous dancing shadows hover’d,
When lo! there oped with sudden stir
The portal of each sepulchre!
No ear may learn, no tongue may tell
What nameless horror then befell."

"No!" Wanda shouts, dashing towards the woman, sliding across the ground to end up next to her. As she does so, it begins to rain. The big fat drops fall from the sky in a sudden torrent, hissing into the flaming building and drenching everything else. Wanda cradles the woman's head in her lap, looking for something she can do, anything that will let her fix this, even though she knows its hopeless.

The common room gets a sound it doesn't often hear: the rumble of thunder indoors. Dark clouds begin to spread across the ceiling.

There is in fact very little she can do as the woman bleeds out in her arms and just as a lightning strikes a nearby tree with a thunderous roar she can see an image in the woman's eyes. A jagged mountain rising against the moon, a lone figure in front of it bathed in writhing shadows, laughing in the feverish pitch of a madman as the world dies. And with another booming lightning strike that shatters the windows in the common room Wanda bolts awake, shouting out the words that dance across her mind.

"I see that peak—that moon agrin—
That nothing and the God within—
Waking, I pray that on that door
The nightmare peak may rise no more!"

Wanda sits up, sweating and hugging her knees. The cold rushes in the open windows, warring with the warm system that Wanda's distress has set up and roiling the already unstable atmosphere in the common room. She gasps for air, a sympathetic pain across her abdomen making the dream that much more real to her as she tries desperately to collect herself.

Vivienne had not been expecting a thunderstorm/tornado?, especially in indoors. Good news, rain means water and Vivienne quickly steps into the torrent and pushes the water outwards from her body forming a large dry bubble as she quickly crosses the room to kneel beside Wanda, enveloping her too in the shpere.

"Is this yours?" She asked loudly as she places a hand on the other young woman's arm.

Wanda starts at the contact, but nods timidly. She's holding one arm across her stomach and wiping futilely at her eyes with her free hand. The storm starts to contract as the cold air from the broken windows reaches Wanda and she starts to shiver.

"I am Vivienne, I will stay with you. Are you injured?"

She nods and shakes her head at the same time which results in a strange, jagged diagonal head movement. She inhales another gulp of air, but when she speaks she seems to default to her native tongue for a moment, "Dålig dröm. Fruktansvärda dröm."

Vivienne looked confused a moment, the Nordic languages were not strong suit. "A dream? Yes?"

She moved on the the couch, her hand resting on the other's arm.

"Focus on your breathing, calm yourself, then reach out to your element gently and calmly. Take your time, I will keep the water out and away."

True to her word that invisible shape in the rain morphed and developed a channel towards the ruined window. The rain water pooled above them and ran along the channel to the outside.

Wanda took a couple of deep breaths and the rain began to subside, "A dream... yes... a nightmare," she says, with some difficulty.

"It felt real? Dröm smärta?" She carefully indicated to the arm Wanda was using to guard her midsection.

"Yes, but not me. Someone else... I knew her... but I don't know her." She shakes her head, "It's... There were words." She tries to latch on to the words but they seem to keep slipping through her fingers.

"Dreams are not my specialty, I know a telepath, but it may take too long to go find her. If the words have meaning, they may come again if you care to tell me what you saw." Vivienne sat back a little now that the other young woman was calmer.

She stumbles through the details, taking long pauses as she visibly racked her brain. "I was... walking through a forest... going to visit my teacher... I was wearing red... being chased by some creature chanting words..."

"Chanting implies magic, magic I know." Vivienne's body color rippled into her fey blue-green as her eyes became dark. She looked around the room and at Wanda, searching for threads of magic.

There were a few traces of magic around Wanda, but nothing immediate and nothing that would open her up to nightmares was immediately obvious.

"There is magic around you, nothing actively being sent against you. I would say what happened was from within. You may have an innate magic that is beginning to awaken. Perhaps a vision of a past life the magic was once attached to." She smiled and returned to human.

"I... what?" That seems to confuse Wanda at least a little bit.

It took a moment for Vivienne to realize her faux pas. "Forgive me, I had assumed that the magic I saw around you was apart of you and your abilities that you'd gained when you came of age."

"I manipulate the weather. It's my mutant ability. I've never done magic." Which was not true, from what Vivienne had seen. Even if she wasn't doing magic now, she'd done it in the past.

"What humans now explain with science was once called magic. Sometimes it is truly just science, measurable, countable, other times it is the old ember of 'something else' or magic. At some point you have touched magic or it has touched you."

"Okay, now you're just... I don't know," she says, rubbing her eyes and checking on the book she'd been cradling, which had miraculously avoided harm.

"I am fae, half fae. Often misnamed a fairy. Vivienne Chinnior, Interim Lady of the Lake, daughter of Numue." She offered her hand to Wanda.

Wanda stares at her for a long moment. Then she pinches her own arm which is followed by an "Ouch!" She rubs the spot she pinched, "So not still dreaming."

Viv smiles. "Awake, I'm sure. Though you did feel pain during your most recent dream as well. I'm not sure that was an effective test. Here." She rippled, her skin and eyes changing color again.

"Human and fae, though human is more comfortable. Embracing my fae nature while among humans has proven to be most frustrating for both parties involved. I have been deemed by close acquaintances as "uptight" when I am fae for extended periods of time."

Wanda sighs, resting her head on her knees. "I'm sorry... there's just been a lot... and I'm out of sorts."

"Magic is real, it's just been asleep a while. Seems to be awaking up again in a big way recently."

She let Wanda sit in silence for a moment.

"Actually, I had come looking for you specifically." As she spoke the residual water in the room slowly pooled together under the 'open' window, once collected it proceeded to defy gravity and travel up the wall towards the outside.

Wanda eyes her suspiciously, "You'll have to take a number. Apparently quite a few people are 'looking for me.'"

"Oh?" Vivienne understood that feeling.

"I assure you, I'm no threat. I am, or was a student...political obligations required me to leave and return home for a time, but I have returned. I was looking for you to talk to you about your ability, the nature of weather without your influence and perhaps enlist your aid. I can call upon you another time if you prefer."

"I am apparently key to dooming the world," she says bitterly, "And I'm not sure that there's anything anyone can do about it at this point."

Vivienne looked thoughtful, "I can manipulate water, I have become so skilled that I can pull the life blood from a living body. Yes, I can see that with your abilities you could be key to dooming the world, but just because we can do these things does not mean we will. You are, from what I see now, human, you have free will. You are not a mindless tool just waiting around to be used by others."

"I don't know if I believe that anymore," she says, "But I appreciate you trying. What did you need?"

"What you believe is far more powerful then you think, especially when it comes to magic."

Vivienne straightened herself, time for business.

"I was wondering how far your ability reached and if you could feel changes, most specifically possible nonseasonal changes. I am looking for someone, someone who could possibly effect the climate with in a small location."

"Usually only as far as I can see," Wanda says, "But fly high enough and you can see for a some distance. I might be able to feel it if I was close enough, but that part of my abilities is really hit-and-miss."

"Hmm, during your training have you become familiar with...weather images? If I was able to obtain images from the last six months of the Isle would you be able to decipher them? I am interested in locations that are unusually warm for this time of year."