[Activity] Mutatis Mutandis Emenda

[Narrator]

The Danger Room is on but set to a blank room, in the middle of which Sveta Karelia has discarded her hollow prosthetic body and is now simply a head perched on top of a wide spread of nervously twitching and snapping tendrils that tightly cinch around the prosthetics arms and legs. She has the list of room controls hovering in front of her and she's slowly assembling a scene for herself. A beach of fine sand, waves calmly rolling in. Birds are crying in the distance and gliding through a blue sky. She spends some time creating a couple of people around her, trying for a while to recreate specific people - her family and friends from the looks of it - and finally settling for a close enough approximation. Her tendrils get much more agitated at the presence of anything at all to latch on top and she briefly looks worried as they wrap around her family members, but with the room set to full safety she does no damage to the constructs which seems to put her at ease.

She goes on, creating a rowhouse that looks like it belongs in the middle of London but is now propped up on slight stilts at the edge of the beach. The windows are open and she cycles through a couple of food smells to waft out from it until she finds one that's familiar enough to fit. Another couple commands and an old iPod sits on the windowsill, playing some of her favorite music. The last finishing touches set what must be her little brother and her mum to play beach badminton and generates a surfboard next to her, stuck upright in the sand for her to cling to. One last look around and she nods up to where the observation deck is hidden behind the hard-light constructs, prompting Ashlie to initiate the MGH injector they'd attached to what's left of her neck.

Sveta flinches, her grip on the surfboard tightening at the brief jab of pain but nothing more happens for a good 10 seconds while she works to try and relax. Then a ripple goes thorugh her tendrils, starting at her neck and slowly encompassing the whole length of them. They lash out, flailing, twisting and contorting themselves as if she's cramping, finally coiling in on themselves and twisting into thick cords made of dozens of tendrils at a time. They bend and fray, intertwining with other thick cords, slowly weaving themselves into rudimentary arms and legs, then partially merging to form a torso. The more they twist, weave and knot themselves together, the more the surface comes to resemble skin. A close look still shows the seams where tendrils aligned and tightened into skin but little by little she grows more human. Tendrils curl into hard little plates that become evident as fingernails when they're pulled in on top of her fingertips. Short ends of tendrils thin out to form soft hairs protruding out from her skin. Through some of the larger closing gaps a keen observer might spot bunches of tendrils creating hollow tubes that form intestines, a big chunk taking on a purple hue as it twists itself into a liver, tiny looped ends of tendrils shrinking down until they're microscopic alveoli on a surface that closes up into lungs. And finally the larger cracks and seams come together and what is left is, at a glance, a normal young woman, albeit a very naked one.

And once she realizes as much she blushes and in being flustered some of her new body uncoils again, hands and forearms splitting into hundreds and hundreds of tendrils again before she takes a couple of hurried breaths and they slowly re-unite into hands and she scrambles to pull her clothes off of the prosthetic body to dress herself.

[Haley Crusek]

Haley stepped into the room after the hastily departing woman her face screwed up into a worried grimace. The huge, empty room loomed over her menacingly and she stood staring almost vacantly at the floating controls in the center of the room not really sure how to even begin.

"So...it's...supposed to maybe work like you... recreate something that will make you think of your powers, right?" she called out, not even sure anymore who was going to answer.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Ashlie's voice comes through the intercom from the observation deck.

"Got it in one. The theory is that it will adapt to your state of mind and your circumstances, but the exact mechanics are still uncertain. Imagine you're setting a scene, a scenario of conditions that align with your old power. When your power first manifested you were angry, yes? The working theory is that your telekinesis and telepathy were molded off of that. Lashing out, crushing a car, conveying your thoughts and feelings wildly to those around you. It didn't consider things such as day to day live because all it had was that moment when it manifested when all that mattered was an outlet. If you can create a situation in which you would want or need more nuanced telekinesis we might be able to steer it away from it's current purely destructive form."

[Haley Crusek]

Haley screwed her face up in thought for a moment before exhaling sharply and running her hands through her hair. She stepped up to the control panels and began tapping and swiping around, the room slowly building a scene around her. It was a dark, moonlit night in a nondescript urban industrial area. A rusting warehouse, piles of crates here, a couple of shipping containers there to fill in the fenced in wet and crumbling asphalt.

"So. This might not be exactly the same...but," she continued, working, tapping, dragging and sliding her hands through the air as she spoke, "I think it should maybe get me the same feelings..."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"That's the idea. Now, if you have anything that you think might put you in a better position of control that could be helpful. What exactly depends a little on yourself. Something calming or something that's linked to ordered, systematic thoughts like Mathematics. Or in your case perhaps more something like... cheerleading?" she takes a bit of a guess. "Confidence could be good too. If it fits into the original scenario in some way, even just as an imaginary narrative, that might help as well. Parents or friends that have your back in the moment, perhaps."