Xaviers!

Sometime after making sure her girlfriends are okay, Sam raps her knuckles on Miriam's door.

"Yes. Come in." she says in the familiar tone of sounding ever so slightly put upon, although Sam would probably notice the sense of mild surprise that lies underneath.

"Hey," she says sheepishly as she slips in. "Is it too early? I just... well, I needed to talk."

"What even is a regular sleep schedule anyway." she says from where she's sitting at her little coffee table with a book, awake but still in dark-blue pajamas. "Mind your head." she motions towards Sam and the bed that's hanging over the door, high enough to walk under but only just.

"New layout, huh?" She asks as she navigates that space into the room proper.

"More room this way and it helps me sleep." No elaboration on whether that's because of the elevation, the thick curtains or the fact that the bed feels vaguely like Will.

"So. There have to be at least three people ahead of me on the list of people you go to when you need someone to talk."

"And not much in the way of answers as to what's been bothering me, I'm afraid."

"I'm not going to say you're impartial, but you're... differently partial."

"A very Sam way of saying I'm prone to be inconsiderate but honest. Only getting optimistic reassurance from the hanger-ons?"

"Well they're also kind of... marinating in me on a regular basis. So they know something's off, but they're not quite sure what."

"That's what happens when you start a cult." she jokes.

"Har har. That's... a whole other thing."

"No, apparently something happened to me during that business at the concert and I can't put my finger on it."

"Right, one of the Wills apparently got messed up by that too. What happened?"

"Conduit built some sort of ray gun using the collars they escaped from Muir with. It made nonmutants into mutants all of a sudden, utterly uncontrolled."

"With mutants, what it did was a little harder to define. For me it was like getting forced through a prism."

"You're going to have to elaborate on that or let me into your head, because I'm not sure I follow."

"I was... well, I was still me, but expressed differently. Then the gun blew up and I pushed back against it. I thought I got myself back how I ought to be, but apparently I didn't."

"Mhmm, mhmm." Miriam nods along, clearly not following as evidenced by the fact that Sam can feel Miriam's thoughts slipping into hers, trying to follow the mental connection between the topic of the conversation down to the actual memory itself. Her casual demeanor doesn't last long when she finds the event, only messier through the lens of memory. She shivers and drops her book, not quite recoiling but jerking in her chair as she withdraws.

"What the bloody hell was that!?" she asks, one hand almost instinctually going to her forehead and clutching her own skull.

"Not fun, aye? Knocked me clean out of the sky."

"That girl is a menace..." she mutters, awkwardly running her hand through her hair. "It's like the Astral was churning around you trying to... make sense of something? Make sense of you."

"One of the things I'm learning is there's a lot of different ways to be me. I'm just a particular flavor."

"If the next words out of your moth are that you think Conduit flavor-blasted you I am going to go to the roof and wait for the sunrise, I swear to god."

"No, no, she just... I don't think I was the Morrigan for a bit there. I was just... similar. I had the same purpose."

"I see what you mean with prism. And you think you ended up putting yourself back together wrong?"

"Wrong? Maybe. Differently? Well, Tereza could notice."

"Do you feel different?"

"I don't, really. And it's not like it was a conscious process of aligning everything, aye? Just a push towards what felt better."

"So of course it feels right to you then. Did she elaborate in what ways? You seem like yourself to me."

"She really didn't. Just something coming off of me. Not good, not bad, just... different."

"How delightfully vague. But she knows you better than me I'd imagine, what do you want me to do?'

"Honestly I'm not even sure where to begin. I just figured that..."

"Well, you've had as much of a time with shite like this as I have."

"And that makes me wary. If I let my power bring out what's in Will's head the worst case is a shambling trauma monster. Which is bad enough but your head has a pit filled with some kind of fractal non-sense that hurt to look at even through your eyes. I can't even begin to imagine what would happen if I'd accidentally let that manifest in reality."

"I don't think that was me, Miriam."

"Are you absolutely sure about that? You recognized it, I could tell that much."

"I've seen things like it before, but I don't think it came from me."

"What is it then? Some kind of Astral non-sense?"

"It's... well, I've seen it around..."

"Don't laugh, alright?"

"Souls."

"God I hate that I can tell that you're serious." she says, faintly shaking her head. "You're seeing souls. Well, better call the Vatican et al, let them know they can pack it up." she jokes but it doesn't take a genius to tell that there's a lot of deflection in there and that the thought makes Miriam uncomfortable.

"What else am I supposed to call it when I can see that everybody's got a little light in them, and it gets brighter before they die?"

At that Miriam just kind of shrugs helplessly. "Fine. Okay. Souls. Souls with strange...fractal... stuff?"

"It's kind of like... looking at them from a particular angle. Everyone seems to see them a little differently but if you squint there's sometimes... something behind them, I guess."

"Do... I have one?"