9210/Meeting The New Sam

Meeting The New Sam
Date of Scene:	15 September 2019
Location:	Jean's Office - Xavier's School
Synopsis:	Jean meets with new student and Hydra/SHIELD retrival Samuel, assigns him as a Special Student in Xavier's to further work on his normalization.
Cast of Characters:	Phoenix, Samuel Morgan

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Phoenix has posed:
Having received an update about the unusual student Cannonball recruited from SHIELD, Jean made sure to setup a time for a one on one meeting, so she could better evaluate the new student. SHIELD have their hands in all manner of shady projects, and some may not necessarily be capable of handling the regular high school student experience. As always, better safe than sorry, she does have a huge responsibility as Headmistress.

Jean is sat at her desk, waiting for Samuel to be shown the way for the meeting. She expects punctuality from someone with a file like his.

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    In this, Jean is unlikely to be disappointed. Exactly five seconds to the time of the meeting, the door opens after a respectful knock, and Sam marches in. Marches, steps in perfect time, so that his right foot crashes down to attention in front of the desk at exactly the appropriate time, the student himself standing at attention, eyes fixed just above the right shoulder of the headmistress at her desk.

    "Samuel Able Morgan, reporting as ord-.. requested, Ma'am." A slight hesitation there, as he's still adjusting to life as a student, rather than a prisoner or an active agent.

Phoenix has posed:
"Militaristic, I see," Jean remarks at Samuel's marching mannerism, as she takes in the new student in silence. "Able is a curious middle name. Are you?" She asks, "able that is?"

Motioning at the empty chair across from her desk, Jean invites, "please, have a seat, and tell me about yourself. I understand you had an unusual background, to say the least?"

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    There is little response to the first remark, there is no reason to deny what is patently obvious. The second one, however... "Yes ma'am. I am. And it's old phonetic for A, ma'am, before NATO. I chose it myself."

    When motioned to sit, Sam finally seems to relax slightly. A carpet parade would have him standing at attention the entire time, so at least this isn't likely to be about some rule he had broken. He even sits, looking suddenly far more human. "That would be on way of putting it, yes ma'am."

Phoenix has posed:
"I like that it was a choice you made yourself, are you accustomed then, for making your own choices?" Jean has to ask, particularly after the case of X-23, which was a very unique case. In fact, I case she choose for personal undertaking. "Then do proceed to tell me about yourself, where do you come from, what was your experience before coming to Xavier's, and how did you get to Xavier's? Take as much time as you need, I'm listening..."

Almost as an after thought, she adds, "I am Jean Grey, Headmistress of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, I was a student on the very first class, so know the school very well. I am also a mutant, and therefore understand having abilities or being different very well."

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    "In limited circumstances, yes ma'am." Sam begins, starting to process the rest of the information, the rest of the request. The request, not an order. It almost makes it harder to begin, so he demurs and stalls for a bit of time, hoping to find a useful segue into the rest of the topic.

    "Most of my life all decisions were made for me, all the important decisions anyway. My input was... not required. So I made as many other decisions as I could." And at that, he seems to have found some kind of say into the meat of it, the rest of the tale he knows he needs to tell. "Most of this is going to be in the file, but I take it you want to hear everything from me?"

Phoenix has posed:
"Then you'll be interested to know that you'll get much more autonomy on decision making as a student at Xavier's," Jean offers, "while you clearly have to listen to your teachers, and follow rules, you do have the freedom to choose to break them. If you have a valid reason, you may even avoid punishment. You can choose what you like, what you don't like. If you disagree with a teacher, you can bring it up to discussion. There's a freedom afforded you, along with your duties to learn, train, and better yourself."

"Files can be miscontrued, they can mischaracterize you, they can be false to being with. I want to hear it all from you, in your own words, if you would allow it. I want to get to know 'you' the person, not 'you' the file."

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    "I'm still getting used to being able to open my door from the inside, Ma'am. With respect, I suspect it may be a while before I'm used to... autonomy."

    For a moment, Sam looks uncertain, looks up at the ceiling, and then at the desk, picking out details, steadying his breath. "To begin at the beginning, I don't know where I'm from. My father... sorry, Doctor Eisen... never told me which lab made me. I think he considered it to be irrelevant. My first memories are of a house in Virginia, so I suppose that's as good a place as any to call home. Wasn't that bad of a place, actually, lots of space, large garden... a bush near the back that had a very nice smell, never figured out what genus of plant it was... Normal, basically, except that all the neighbors were HYDRA agents. That's the kind of thing you don't notice when you're five or six..."

Phoenix has posed:
"So you were kept as a prisoner in a cell, only taken out when needed?" Jean inquires, a bit of a frown on her face, she never likes to hear about people being kept under lock and key. Particularly after having experienced the same as a child. "Then that is something we can work on, we may assign you some exercises about this with Laura Kinney, if you hadn't the chance to meet her yet, she's a special student with somewhat similar circumstance to yours."

"This house in Virgina, can you be sure it is a memory of yours, rather than an implented one?" Jean offers something that Samuel may or may not have considered before, but she knows how these organization operates, and many layers are fabricated to ensure obedience for the most part. "So it's fair to say you were raised in the system, rather than enrolled...do you have any special abilities they asked you to use in their service?"

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    "What? No, it wasn't... not until... until later. After. After it all started to go wrong." Sam's train of though misses the stop, jumps the rails and crashes into the scenery, causing him to blink several times and look at anything, /anything/, except the desk in front of him and the person behind it.

    "I'm trying to tell this. It's not easy. Please?"

Phoenix has posed:
"Please...do take all the time you need. Take a deep breath, close your eyes, visulaize...try slowly," Jean offers, a soft smile on her lips, as she looks encouragingly at Samuel.

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    "I wasn't supposed to be... supposed to be like this." Sam continues, dragging himself back into the tale he's trying to tell. He can't seem to bring himself to call himself a mutant. "They used a sample of DNA that they thought would make me smarter. Nobody expected this would happen."

    "I don't know if the house in Virginia is real, and I can't know until I somehow find it. Don't even know where to start looking. And when I was eight, we moved away, to a base on the east coast. Everything was either underground or behind fences and barbed wire, I hated it. Hated it. But I thought people would kill me if they could, and HYDRA was there to protect me. That's what I'd been taught." Behind closed eyelids, Sam relives the moments. Of meeting his first combat instructor, of being told he was important, of why he was important. "They made me with someone else's genes. I'm almost a straight copy except for... for the bits that don't belong. I was supposed to be outed as his son in a public scandal, work my way into the elite that way, give them another way to manipulate the world. So they needed me to know things, to be capable of things... to do horrible things."

Phoenix has posed:
While talking to Samuel, Jean starts using her telepathy to ascertain for herself if the Virginia house is a real memory or a fabricated one, skimming at his mindscape while looking quite attentive to his words. She is after all one of the world's premier telepaths. Not that it's wildly publicized, but it only takes an encounter with her for a telepath to understand the scope of her ability. That's before taking into account the very unusual augmentation.

"Tell me what you remember from Virgina...?" Jean muses, while scouring his related memories, measuring his words with what she can find, and how 'real' it is.

"You clearly were moved to a military base, even if an off grid facility. "In other words, SHIELD intervened, things didn't go to Hydra's plans, and they may or may not want payback or to retrieve you?" Jean guesses, while letting Samuel agree or disagree with her theory.

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    "In a nutshell, yes." Sam agrees, even as he describes Virginia in a level of detail that seems to surprise even himself. The memory, for all its flaws and oddly distorted proportions as if seen through the eyes of a small child, is very much real.

    "It went wrong after... after..." There is a sudden vivid image of Sam watching an older man get into a helicopter, trying to hold back tears. A vision of Sam sitting alone on a bed in a room not unlike the dorm rooms in the mansion, aside from the bare concrete walls and no light except for the fluorescent strip bolted to the ceiling, feeling immensely alone and homesick. To a sudden, shocking vision of a young Sam, no more than ten years old, standing alone and worried in a bare concrete room, looking at someone tied to a chair with a bag over their head, a pistol in his small hand, an order coming over the intercom... the slight hesitation, the feeling of cold dread as he raises the pistol to the captive's head, the feeling of the pressure as the trigger starts to move back... Being slapped on the back by several older people in congratulation, a cake on a trestle table in a locker room with the dreaded HYDRA symbol picked out in green frosting, the world looking curiously red-tinged around the edges, faces fuzzy and distorted, going from friendly smiles to savage grins and flickering back again. "... After."

Phoenix has posed:
Jean takes notes of how seamless the memory appears, and for the most part, if it was implanted, it was done by a master for her not to pick on an anomaly. "You know, I would lean on the memory being real, save for the fact you really have a lot of minute details most people don't tend to recall...it almost seems too good to be true. At least that's my suspicion. Unless of course you have picture perfect memory."

"I would definitely place you as a Special Student for the time being, with either minimal or supervised interaction with other students, until we know you are not prone to violent outbursts...I'm sure you understand where the concen is coming from. But after you prove yourself, you can join regular classes with the other students, welcome to Xavier's, Samuel, were you already assigned a dorm room?"

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    There is a sudden jolt back to reality, Sam's ears ringing so badly that he barely hears Jean speak and has to blink a few times to see more than just grey fog. His thoughts, a great jumble of grey water held behind a precariously flimsy dam, recede until there is enough mental energy to focus on the present.

    "Yes Ma'am. Mister Guthrie and Mister Ramsey made sure. Of course I understand your concern..." and so, slowly, Sam grows colder again until the traces of his unguarded moments utterly disappear, thoughts and emotions pulled up on short leashes. "You won't have any trouble from me, you have my word."

Phoenix has posed:
Jean extends her arm towards Samuel from across the desk, "in that case, I welcome you warmly, and hope to see the progress you make. I hope soon we can have you as a full regular student...you're dismissed, and may go to your dorm room."

Samuel Morgan has posed:
Samuel reaches across the desk and shakes the offered hand. "Yes Ma'am, thank you Ma'am." With that, he rises from his seat, nods, side steps, takes one step backwards and then turns on his left heel, walking back out of the office in almost exactly the way he came in.