Xaviers!

Sam takes a deep breath and knocks on the Headmistress' door.

"Please return during office hours." comes the reply from inside. It almost sounds like a recorded message.

"I'm here to talk about Will," she says a bit more forcefully, banging on the door.

"One moment." And a minute or two later, "Come in."

"Look," Sam says as she barges in, really before she even gets a chance to look around, "you had no right to ask that of Will."

Ashlie is sitting at her desk, bits of electronics spread out in front of her as well as a computer monitor she's in the process of setting up. Her face is bandaged up on the entire left side, covering her eye and most of her cheek and wrapping around down around her jawline. Despite this her voice still sounds normal, even if her mouth is not really moving properly.

"Excuse me?"

"...Jesus, how hard did he hit you?" Sam gawks.

"He shifted his fist into an anvil. His combat capabilities are fairly impressive." she says coldly.

"And you're... still..."

"...Jesus."

"I restrained him and placed him in a cell until he calms down. He was being a threat."

"But he said you... he said you threatened his friends back at the base, and you wanted him to help you."

"Did he mention who that 'friend' is?" she asks, glancing down at the intricate electronics on her desk, picking out clearly broken components of her cybernetic eye and setting them aside.

"...no. I ah... I guess I didn't."

"An US military reconnaissance satellite in geostationary orbit above the school. His 'friends' are spying on him and the school."

"He's ah... he's got fuzzy lines on whether objects are people. I think because sometimes he's a something rather than a someone."

"He doesn't understand the difference. I didn't expect the matter to come to blows. Can I assume that you understand why a satellite is incapable of consenting to anything."

"...right. I... I'm surprised he was so violent."

"As was I. It's possible that the military ensured his loyalty somehow."

"Well I ah..."

"...I might have something to do with that."

"Excuse me?" she asks again among the muffled sound of metal grinding on metal.

"I... I know he's been unbalanced lately. That... might be my fault."

"Elaborate, please. I know the two of you are friends..."

"Okay, what you have to understand is that Will's head was... well, a wasteland of goo when he started here. It was like a bomb went off in it."

"Miriam and I... we found the black box that survived that, we think."

"I'm not sure what that means, but I have reason to believe he has forgotten a lot about his past. He's much older than 60 years."

"It's... complicated. There's locks on the box that seem to react to me. I ah... loosed one, and his mindscape filled out a bit. It's got trees, now."

"I don't quite follow." she says, apparently oblivious to her skin kind of sagging on the left side of her mouth.

"Uhm... you've got a little..."

She gestures at the side of her own face.

"...anyway, usually a mind has... you know, more to it. And Will's didn't. He had no defenses, a lot of goo, and... well, kind of ruins under it all? Like a sign that there was something there, before. But none of it worked. Even the representations of him in there were pretty daft."

"But there's entities in the box, too. And they're him. They don't feel like they were put there, they feel like they belong. You can actually converse with them, unlike the other bits. And they said the box was like an emergency backup."

"So when I set one of them loose, his mindscape got better. It started to be a bit more like what you'd expect a mind to be. Like a real landscape."

"But ah... the one that I set loose was... rather the one that's all about punching and going around trouserless."

Ashlie reaches for her face and her one visible eye frowns, more of an expression of annoyance rather than pain as one might expect.

"An aggressive personality aspect." she muses, wondering if the Major was right to warn her. "What would you say is the possibility he's extra-terrestrial?"

"Er... that's the thing. The box seems to react to me... because somewhere deep in his head he thinks he knew me before. Or a me. Or someone like me. He thinks Miriam is someone else, too."

"I believe he might be right. I have empirical evidence that he is not from this universe. And one of the students here claims to have been to several parallel universes. I am still waiting for her to give me more details on those worlds but she claims to have met several people currently at the school before."

"...oh. That's... kind of a bit beyond me, you know?"

"It's beyond all of us. I am running calculations on dimensional parameters based on the readings I got from Will, but I'm far from having any answers. All I know is that Will has lived for longer than this universe has existed and that a young boy named Will Stanton in the US has been shot to death earlier this month." she says, flipping the computer screen as she pulls up the image of the brown-haired boy.

"I... I saw that, aye." She sighs.

"I just don't know how to take this personally, because there's expectations, aye? About things I'm... still trying to figure out about myself."

"And what Miriam saw in there about scared her to death."

"There are no expectations. Only possibilities. I have a theory that this phenomenon is connected to a localized causal cluster of universes. Neighboring branches on a tree that are being wound together. But our choices are still our own regardless."

"Well there's... two more locks still on the box. They're tied to... other parts of me."

Ashlie seem to dwell on this for a moment.

"Open them. I will take full responsibility."

"I... it's not that simple. There's other concerns, aye? Miriam is afraid Will is going to hate her if he remembers all this. 'Mel' is... not a good person, really."

"And I don't know. Those parts of me are hard to dig up. I'd probably need some help there."

"He has a right to those memories. The only one who can decide this is the Will inside that box and the only thing we have to go by is his choice of locks. I can only extrapolate, but it's what I would do if I had to preserve memories that I wanted back."

"Can I... have some time to think it over? It's... it's a lot you're asking of me."

"Of course. I understand that it's a lot to ask. But don't take too long, I'd rather not keep him locked up any longer than I have to."