Xaviers!

"We all find ourselves insufferable, looking into a mirror," Mel said, stepping back to get a better vantage point of Miriam's creation.

"Very Greek."

"Something like that." she says as the building grows until it encompasses the clearing among the trees. Inside it remains rather spartan for the time being, although a sort of well forms in the middle that appears to be filled with grey goo from beneath.

"Strong symbolism. I like the idea of a wellspring. Very creativly done," Mel said, approvingly, as she walked over towards the well. "Plan on drawing up a few Naiads?"

"And what, have an army of metaphorical servants?" she scoffs a little. Behind her, from the well, an ill-defined shape emerges. Kind of like the shadow of a person, although the proportions and amount of limbs are hard to define. It's blurry and undefined in a way that only mental things can be.

"Easier to work with than any actual people, to begin with--like training wheels," she said, observing this "newcomer".

The shadow pulls itself out of the clay and collapses next to the well before pulling itself up with an unnatural jerk and slinking away into the regular shadows of the building.

"Yeah, because they'd be hollow puppets. What's the point of that?"

"I'm looking for the Will I knew before all this Sam crap. I don't know if I can just recreate that from scratch. Maybe if I just filter out all the Sam crap." she muses, turning around to look at the well.

You're certainly welcome to try, darling, but it's hard to really remove something once it's mixed into a solution like this. Starting from scratch is SO much easier.

But, if you insist on doing things the hard way, I'll at least try to offer my advice as you go along."

"I just don't care for a blank slate." she says, although she's mostly worried about what she might be tempted to shape Will into if she starts from scratch. "Besides, wouldn't that just be a glorified way of talking to myself?"

"Not at all. It's like..." she said, pausing in thought.

"It's like planting a seed. You know roughly what it will grow into, but if you let nature take it's course, it can surprise you. Of course, you'd need to come back with the pruning shears from time to time."

Miriam frowns. Or, well, her avatar's masks tilt slightly as she looks at Melpomene. Then she plunges her hand into the clay in the well, causing it to bubble and stir as she makes a vaguely humanoid shape climb out of it.

Mel looked on, nodding, as the clay figure hauled it's way out.

Miriam goes to work (though this mostly just involves forcing her will on the clay figure) and forms the clay thing into something that slowly begins to resemble Will, although it remains fairly androgynous. The physical shape seems to go pretty fast, though then Miriam slows down as she tries to call up her own memories of Will before the whole Sam thing. She focuses her mind and tries to imbue the blank slate in front of her with how she saw Will then. A little naive, friendly, carefree, lacking much of a sense of self and comfortable with pretty much any shape. And, most importantly, considering Miriam a friend.

This 'Will' blinked, and looked around, stretching it's new limbs and blinking, slowly looking around and fixating on Miriam.

It's head cocked unnaturally to one side as it considered her.

"That's a little uncanny. Can you talk?" she asks the construct.

"Yyyyessss," it slurred a little bit. "Yes. Yes, I can. I can talk. Yes."

A thrilling conversationalist, but you have to give it credit for being literally seconds old.

"Yes. Miriam. Friend. Hi. You are? How? Good-like?"

"Well, it's a start. I'm alright, thanks for asking. I suppose you need to be a little smarter..." Reaching into the clay again and pulls out a stream of it that snakes through the air and towards one side of the room where it slowly turns into shelves and books of various shapes and sizes.

Mel slipped to one side and flipped through some of the books, curious to see what Miriam was doing--if she was paying enough attention to do more than just 'books', or if she was more focused on her Will model.

The books are empty, though they seem to be slowly filling with text. Mostly boring things like grammar and vocabulary, dictionaries and encyclopedias, but here and there are diaries recounting her interactions with Will. They do seem to have quite a bit of bias towards Miriam though in how they portray events, downplaying her mistakes and casting her as mostly a victim of circumstance or misunderstandings. To an impartial observer they might seem a little whiny, though they're not entirely removed from the truth.

Mel smiled and nodded.

"Good work so far--though you might be able to spice things up a little bit. A tad dry, if you ask me.

She secretly tried to see if Miriam would notice her altering some of the text herself before it 'set', as it were.

Miriam wasn't paying too much attention to her, but her speaking up puts and end to that as she turns towards the woman.

"I want him to at least be somewhat eloquent. And what, pray tell, would you consider spicing things up?" she asks, floating over to take the book out of Mel's hands to take a look at what she'd been doing.

Mel's notes weren't fit for general publication--they would make most people turn a bright crimson.

"Just checking to see if you were paying attention," she said, innocently. "Its essentially impossible to keep an eye on EVERYTHING at once, so I was seeing what you considered important."

"Eloquent how--you want him to be spewing Shakespeare at you?" she said, trying to change the subject.

It's hard to tell if Miriam is embarrassed, but she doesn't read very far before literally brushing the words off the page with her hand.

"I want him not to sound like a moron. It's fairly obvious what kind of things you'd have him do. Try that again and I'm kicking you out of this place."

"If you say so, darling." she said, innocently.

Will, meanwhile, was looking around and poking through things on the shelves as they filled up with more of Miriam's thoughts.

Miriam shoots Mel a glance and floats over to Will to look over his shoulder.

"Anything you'd like to read in particular?"

"Oh, geez, no--sorry, Miriam, I didn't mean to spy," he said, apologetically.

"It's alright. I made this for you. I was just wondering if you'd like anything in particular." she says, trying to sound reassuring. She didn't mean to intimidate Will or make him seem like she was reprimanding him.

"Oh, you didn't have to do all that," Will apologized again. "That probably took a lot of effort. I'm sorry."

"Hmm... He's missing some things." Conjuring up a new book she titles it 'Wants & Needs', adding a couple basic seeds to see if they take. She starts with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but quickly finds herself having to revise chunks of it considering that most things under the physiological one don't really apply to Will. So it ends up with just Safety, Belonging, Esteem and Self-actualization as a baseline and Miriam watches the book to see if they're being processed and interpreted by the Will in front of her.

They seemed to be, but they were so vague and unspecific--it seemed to all be filtering through the general, overarching concept of poor Miriam being a victim.

He carefully put the book he was looking at up on the shelf, frowned, took it back out again, dusted off the top, and put it back in. He stepped back and frowned again.

Miriam thinks for a moment, then suddenly gets an idea. A shelf full of reference cards for the library appears, including a directory and an ordering system. She places the book on Wants & Needs at the top of the order and then ties her sob-story into the chapter on social needs as a sub-directory.

Will blinked again as his mind was re-written, and Mel applauded from the side.

'Good! Good. Always good to keep your toys organized."


"Miriam?" Will asked, turning to look at her. "What is...what are we doing here?"

"We're just organizing somethings that got shaken loose during all the recent changes." she tells him, one of her masks glaring at Mel, hoping Will won't acknowledge her presence.

If Will DID notice Mel, he didn't let on.

"Oh dear, did I mess something up again?" he signed, rubbing his temples.

"Oh! Well, that's different then. You know best, after all. I'm always a mess," he laughed.