Reptiles and Bibliophiles (Marnie)

[Marnie Sullivan]

"Everything."

If Marnie had been expecting a certain answer, that wasn't it. In a school populated with students who could read minds, bend fire, and conjure a variety of materials out of thin air, having skin that changed color at inopportune times hadn't seemed all that exciting. The last time anybody had expressed any serious interest in Marnie's power, it had been her public school classmates being sent into a frenzy over her face turning green.

"It depends," she answered after a moment. "I can usually change color if I want to, but sometimes it just kind of happens. Like if I freak out about something I just kind of go, 'oh god, guess I better be the same color as the wall, that'll help.' If I think about it I can usually stop it, but it's sorta like telling yourself not to blush, you know?" Technically that answered Ash's first question, but she did ask to know everything, so Marnie's thoughts cast around for what to explain next.

"Here, look - " Marnie held her left hand out, palm facing the floor. She sucked in a breath and tried to concentrate; her hand prickled, though it wasn't as bad as the pins and needles she felt elsewhere while she willed the rest of her skin to remain as it was. A few seconds later, her hand had faded to the buttery yellow of her bedspread. Some tiny blue smudges appeared as well, nearly the same shade as the bedspread's cornflower print, but not nearly defined enough to be recognizable. "Last year if I tried that, I'd be yellow all over."

[Ashley Engel]

She didn’t know what it was like to try to not blush. At least she didn’t think she understood. Maybe once or twice in her life she’d tried not to be clearly embarrassed by something, but it wasn’t something she related to as Marnie spoke. At the very least she seemed to grasp the important parts. Ash nodded along, eyes moving from Marnie’s face to her bedspread to her hand. It was, by her standards, a fairly impressive show. On one hand she felt like she was obligated to clap in return, but on the other doing so felt remarkably awkward. So instead her hands briefly lifted in her lap before moving to either side of the chair. She gripped the edges as she leaned forward slightly, inspecting the differences between the precise pattern on the bed and the clumsily recreated spots on Marnie’s skin. It wasn’t perfect, but that was to be expected. Ash marked pattern precision down on a mental list of the girl’s weaknesses.

“A commendable display.”
After a moment longer of staring, Ash leaned back and returned her hands to her lap. She was slow to pull her eyes back up to Marnie’s own.
“I’m actually impressed you can localize it to select parts of yourself. Can you manage multiple colors on different limbs, or is your proficiency limited to a singular camouflage at a time?”

[Marnie Sullivan]

"That second one." Marnie had tried, of course. Instead of achieving two distinct changes on separate body parts, she had only succeeded in turning a messy, muddled shade all over, as though someone had dumped two types of paint together and gave up stirring halfway through the job. The worst part was that even though Marnie hadn't gotten it right, just the act of trying had drained her. "I want to get there eventually, but lately I've been practicing patterns and stuff. I can almost do zigzags." It sounded silly when she said it, but really, zigzags were harder than they looked.

Marnie paused, wondering what to mention next. Ash did say she wanted to know everything, but there was plenty Marnie didn't understand about it herself. In the book she'd received from her mother, she'd read that chameleons changed color because the different pigments were already present in their skin cells, ready to blossom when those cells expanded. Biology had never been one of Marnie's strong suits, but she was pretty sure that wasn't how it worked for her.

"Oh, wait!" she blurted, suddenly remembering what was, in her opinion, the strangest part of her power. It wasn't something she did often because it took more concentration than she liked to expend most of the time, and it was (again, in her opinion) quite an unflattering look. "Check this out."

Another deep breath, and this time Marnie closed her eyes so tightly that her nose wrinkled. For a few moments, nothing; then her scalp began to tingle, and she knew it was working. Strands of her hair began to clump to themselves, at first giving the appearance that Marnie had gone too long without a shower. Then they began to twist - not into curls, but into angles that seemed random but resembled the twigs and sticks that littered Felix's terrarium.

[Ashley Engel]

There was a small humming noise from Ash as Marnie explained.
Maybe zig-zags did sound silly, but she still understood. If nothing else, Ash would never be able to do what Marnie could. That alone left her impressed. (And more than a little frustrated, since she wasn’t used to seeing things she couldn’t learn to do herself.)

Overall she thought she’d gotten more or less the jist of Marnie. Normal girl, good attitude. Colorful power. It wasn’t enough to really satisfy her interest, but it did give Ash a sort of contentedness. If nothing else what she knew of the other now was a good starting point for research. It was lucky in that moment that she was the telepath of the two of them, because the thought occurred to her of setting up some trap or prank to test the panic response of Marnie’s ability.

The girl’s readiness to display something else pulled Ash’s attention off the planning of sabotage. She straightened, watching attentively as Marnie shut her eyes. At first nothing seemed to be happening, and she wondered if the display was something not yet perfected, and thus not going to happen quite right. But then, slowly but surely, she noticed the changes.

This time she found it worth clapping.
Her own motions weren’t nearly as energetic as Marnie’s, but they were audible and complimentary.
“Absolutely fascinating. Palettes and textures..” Her words were low, distracted sounds. She was staring at Marnie’s hair, face lined carefully with signs of awe. Blending into wallpaper and bedspreads was amazing enough on it’s own. But adding in this new detail pulled Ashley from interested to downright entranced.

“You should practice more. Your potential promises captivating growth and discoveries.”
Again, she was smiling slightly. It was about as close to the common teenage term of ‘that’s really fucking cool’ as Ash would likely ever get.

[Marnie Sullivan]

Marnie opened her eyes. As her breath whooshed out of her, the clumps of her hair came undone and fell back into strands over her shoulders. As a result, she looked significantly less unwashed than she had a moment ago, but she knew from experience that her hair would still be a mess until she brushed it out.

"Well, thanks." Marnie grinned. As ...unorthodox as Ash was at expressing her opinion, Marnie still enjoyed the attention. "That's about as cool as it gets, at least right now." Maybe someday she'd be able to mimic textures with her skin, but she seriously doubted it. Even while turned the most peculiar colors, her arms and face had only ever felt like arms and a face.

"All right, now it's my turn to ask you something." Marnie only had to consider for a moment before she decided. She pointed behind her at the terrarium on the shelf. "Can you read Felix's mind?"

[Ashley Engel]

Something about the idea of Marnie practicing more made her happy.
Maybe it was projection. Maybe something about the idea of the other girl getting better was uplifting. Whatever the reason, Ash found it easier to relax in her seat. Marnie’s room felt less like a foreign space she was intruding upon, and more an open dwelling. Not hers, but not.. not hers, either. It was strange.

When the spotlight returned to Felix, Ash was almost eager to look up at the creature. The lines of the chameleon’s body were strange and curious. She admired it briefly, listening to Marnie and withholding a sigh. She wanted to huff only because the topic was one she’d tested before.

“No.” She frowned slightly, though not before attempting to hear more than Marnie in the room. If Felix was thinking anything it was either beyond her skill level, or simply not something her process could read.
“I’ve tried animals before- the moose back home. They didn’t make sounds either. As far as I can tell I can only hear people.” She shrugged casually, even though it bothered her. Limitations to anything she could do were aggravating. It felt like she did something wrong, even if it was a natural barrier and not a product of a mistake.

After a moment longer of staring at the reptile she looked back to Marnie.
“And, for the record, I can only hear conscious people in open spaces.” It only seemed fair to return what Marnie had shared with her. Ash didn’t have much regarding her own abilities, but preemptively answering questions seemed like fair payment for the colorful display she’d been given.

“If you’re asleep, or shut your door, I have no way of listening to your thoughts.”
That was just for peace of mind. Ash didn’t usually tell people that much, it was generally more amusing to leave them paranoid that she was ever-listening. But so far Marnie seemed tolerable and that earned her the small reprieve of confirmed personal space.

[Marnie Sullivan]

"Good to know." Before that point Marnie hadn't really thought about how far her neighbor's power stretched. Although Ash was the first telepath that she had lived next door to, she wasn't the first telepath Marnie had ever gone to school with. Moving in, reacclimating, all of it had been enough of a distraction that it was only now occurring to her to be creeped out by the possibility of having her thoughts constantly monitored. Which apparently they would not be.

Another idea occurred to her, and and Marnie's brow furrowed. "Wait... so you can hear through people's skulls, but not through drywall? That seems kind of backwards." She knew that mind-reading wasn't a physical power after all, but it didn't make a whole lot of sense that one could punch through a wall, but it was still better at insulating thoughts than the head's natural defense. "What if somebody had like one of those metal plates put in their head? Would that be like having a wall there, or would you just get in through the sides or something?"

[Ashley Engel]

Something lit up in her. Ash eyed Marnie with a sort of appraisal.
The comment of skulls and drywall was pleasing, apparently. More accurately, she liked the sign of someone thinking. Marnie was giving something serious thought, and Ash liked that. She nodded slightly, because she’d considered the same fact. The answer, however, felt obvious to her now that she knew it. There was a weird sense of almost-pride that came from being able to enlighten the other on a problem she’d questioned herself not so long ago.

“I thought the same thing, once. I can’t prove anything with definition, since it seems like not all telepathy functions the same. But in my case, I think it’s likely both a lack of practice and a biological function I don’t understand. See, when there’s too much noise in a room my head will hurt here.” She tilted her head to the side and pointed to a space just behind her ear. It took her a moment before she straightened, clarifying quickly. Not everyone had brain lobes memorized, she had to remind herself.

“Temporal lobe. In charge of a few things- most notably processing sensory input and deriving meaning from information. Essentially.. it registers a sound collected from the ears, and sends it elsewhere to be decoded. Initially I had assumed telepathy would strongly utilize the frontal lobe for the reasoning skills and cognition, since it does seem like a more invasive ability, doesn’t it? But no, I think it relies totally off my ability to understand sound. So I think what I can do is less about me hearing into someone’s mind and more I can just pick up the sounds they’re already making.”

She leaned back, spine straight and shoulders rolled.
When Ash grinned it was wide and a little childish. She looked absolutely proud of herself though, like she was presenting Marnie with a drawing to stick on the fridge.

“Thus I don’t have to hear through the skull. I just have to hear, which I can’t if there’s a wall or door in my way. As for a metal plate, I have no idea. I’ve never met anyone like that before so I can only theorize.”

[Marnie Sullivan]

If biology wasn't Marnie's strong suit, neuroscience definitely wasn't either. She was pretty sure she'd caught most of Ash's explanation, but more than a couple terms whizzed over her head. The parts Marnie thought she understood, however, only raised more questions.

"So it's like thoughts make sounds? Or they are sounds? That's nuts." She supposed what Ash had said about different types of telepathy existing must be true. What Ash was describing sounds distinctly different from what Marnie had been told before about telepaths who could only read the thoughts of a person as they touched them, or of powerful and well-trained telepaths who could read thoughts from miles away. Marnie wondered if she were ever to sit in on one of the training classes specifically for telepaths, whether each student's power would differ so much from the next's. Maybe all powers were like that. It wasn't something she'd ever considered before - the farthest Marnie had ever gotten in that line of thought was knowing that all of her classmates seemed to have more useful abilities than she did.

Well, her power might not be useful, but Marnie was beginning to doubt that is was as boring as she'd believed.

"You know, you're pretty smart," she told Ash. "I definitely didn't know that much about the human brain when I was your age."

[Ashley Engel]

Ash tapped her lips with one finger and hummed again.
It was fairly “nuts”, all things considered. But she liked her theory, and so far she hadn’t been able to disprove it. The actual power in question wasn’t pleasant, and she didn’t find it useful or interesting as a tool. But the methods behind it were still technically unknown, and thus something to eagerly debate over. Marnie not pointing out a giant flaw in her ideas was nice. Even if the girl didn’t seem to be a leading expert in the field, her not pointing out something obvious Ash may have missed was reassuring. Another point put towards temporal lobe telepathy.

For all her smarts and pride in it, she still looked startled when Marnie complimented her.
Her hands dropped back to her lap and she stiffened briefly, staring. She was smart. She knew that. But hearing someone say it caught her off guard. People, especially ones her own age, weren’t often in the practice of admitting that fact. She wasn’t sure why. However, Marnie’s comment made Ash’s face draw up in quick confusion.

“You mean you’re not seventeen?”
Marnie looked about her age, but Ash of all people knew looks could be misrepresentative. It didn’t occur to her Marnie was assuming she was younger. Her first impression was that the girl in front of her was just older than she looked. Which was sort of awkward because how old could you get without learning about the lobes of the brain and their primary functions?

[Marnie Sullivan]

"No, I'm... sixteen..." Marnie trailed off, puzzled. Not far from Ash's guess, but her question didn't make sense. Not unless -

Marnie stiffened, her eyes grew wide and the yellow of her bedspread melted into her cheeks. If Ash wasn't thirteen, she must have seriously missed the mark. And they had been getting along so well.

"Hang on, how old are you again?"

[Ashley Engel]

The pause throughout the room was stiff and near physical.
Ash didn’t look mad so much as puzzled. She stared at Marnie, eyes narrowing like she was trying to decipher something complicated. Context was making it fairly clear, telepathy thus unneeded. So she didn’t pry. Less for Marnie’s privacy and more for her own pride in saying she could figure things out without eavesdropping on people’s brains.

Carefully, with each syllable pronounced slow and obvious, Ash spoke.
“I’m seventeen years old.”
She was a year older. Marnie had assumed she was younger. It wasn’t a surprising situation, just something on the exasperating end. Ash sighed to herself. She really wished at least one of her parents had held better genes for her.
“How old did you think I was?”

[Marnie Sullivan]

Seventeen. Ashley was older than she was. It wasn't the worst mistake Marnie had ever made, but she was sure Ash was offended. Why else would she be speaking to her as though she were a moron? And no wonder - her compliment had become condescending and their shaky second try had hit a wall.

"I dunno, maybe fifteen?" Marnie lied, giving an exaggerated shrug. Ha ha, just a simple mistake, happens to everyone, right? "Man, that's really gonna work in your favor when you're thirty-five." She grinned a little too tightly to be believable, even to a mind-reader.

[Ashley Engel]

At first her face had soured. It was less in any upset at Marnie and her mistake and more in clear suspicion. She wasn’t sure if she bought the idea of being mistaken as fifteen over seventeen. At any rate, it wasn’t worth getting too bent up about. Ash hadn’t interacted with many people growing up, but of those she had almost all of them assumed she was younger than she was. She was used to it by now.

“Huh.”
Marnie’s comment made her expression smooth back out into neutrality. She cocked her head ever so slightly and looked away, to a nondescript part of the wall behind her company. She looked thoughtful for a moment, before blinking passively and looking back at Marnie.
“I hadn’t thought about that. I guess I kind of always assumed I’d be dead by my twenties.”

No explanation was offered whatsoever.
Ash just shrugged offhandedly.

“I suppose you’ll look good in theory when you’re older as well. You have a good bone structure, looks like. And who knows what camouflage could do for your skin at that point.”

[Marnie Sullivan]

Marnie didn't know what response she'd expected, beyond the sour face, but that wasn't quite it. That made sense, she supposed - they'd been getting along quite well that day, but in the end there was still so much she didn't know about Ash.

"Well, thanks," Marnie finally replied.