After-Action Report (Part Two)

Being team leader, I had to do all kinds of things that others didn't. Things like train to protect X-Men secrets. That meant hours spent doing interrogation training and telepathy defense. Just in case you weren't aware, both of those things suck.

For telepathy training, they'd just stick me in a room with the Cuckoos, tell them they had a set amount of time to get something out of my head, and let them go to town on my brain.

Miss Frost observed the training, her foot tapping impatiently on the ground, "Come on, girls. How long could it take?"

Longer than she'd like. In past sessions, the Cuckoos hadn't been given enough time to pull whatever they were after out of me, so they were given more and more time to do it in following attempts. That pissed them off, because it didn't make them look very good, so they tried harder and harder to beat me.

This particular session had me on the floor, dealing with the kind of splitting headache only reserved for concussions.

Meanwhile, all three Cuckoos were focusing as best as they could, their hands placed near their temples to help them focus, "His defenses are stronger than you told us," Phoebe said.

"He trains with Blindfold," Celeste followed up, "He's used to defending against telepaths."

Mindee seemed to be the most eager of the three of them to wrap things up, "We only have to get the HBO GO password to finish."

I didn't know how much time had passed. I was more focused on the feeling of my brain splitting, "Get the fuck out of my head," I said through gritted teeth, "I am not giving up my streaming accounts for this stupid exercise."

Because then they'd use them, and if they weren't putting in on what I had to pay every month for them, they could fuck off. As a man who never slept, I got lots of use out of my streaming services.

The struggle went on for I didn't know how long, until the pressure suddenly passed. The melodic sound of the three sisters' voices saying, "Got it!" in unison.

"Goddamn it!" I slapped the floor as Celeste quickly wrote down the password she, Phoebe, and Mindee had yanked out of my skull, "Great! Now I've got to change everything!"

Miss Frost looked at a watch with a raised eyebrow, "Twenty-four minutes, twenty-eight seconds. You girls only had thirty-two seconds left to spare," She informed the relieved Cuckoos, before turning to me, "Well done, Mister Marcher."

It was honest praise, but I was more annoyed that I had to change my privacy settings, "Well done, my ass," I snapped, phone already out so I could go through my apps one-by-one, "Way to almost scramble my brain, guys. I thought we were cool."

The girls seemed offended at the thought, "We would never do anything permanent to you," Phoebe insisted.

"We lost the last two times we did this," Celeste reasoned, "We didn't want to make it three."

Fair enough. I didn't like losing either.

Miss Frost walked over to me as I picked myself up off of the floor, "I don't think we'll have to do this again, if that helps. You'll be hard-pressed to find any single telepath stronger than the Three-In-One. If they find it hard to read you, you should be able to defend yourself from any others, at least long enough for help to arrive."

I also could have just blasted the Cuckoos to make them stop, but that wasn't the point of the exercise, "While that won't help my headache go away, that's good to know. Can I go now? I need pills."

I could have sworn her expression softened for a split-second before Lady Hardass returned, "Go see Henry and make sure nothing is wrong, darling," She directed.

I wanted to make a remark, asking what exactly he could do for me if there was, but I refrained. I liked Dr. McCoy, and any excuse to expose myself to the wit of Beast was cause for celebration. Unfortunately for me when I got down there, he wanted to do a scan of my brain. While I did have all the time available in a day, I still didn't want to sit around waiting for a PET scan. I was a good boy about it though, and eventually I did get to leave.

When I did, I spotted the container full of ooze that was Quentin Quire. He had been quiet for a while, at least in my head. I was cool with that, but it was a bit weird. He had to know he'd been pissing me off, so why did he just let off? Did he get bored with me? And if I was right there, thinking out loud in front of his face, why didn't he respond?

It was then that what Miss Frost had said dawned on me. It took all three of the Cuckoos almost half an hour to fight intel out of my head when we were all in the same room. If all of my practice and experience with Ruth really had been paying off to that kind of degree, Quire probably couldn't do anything to me from where he was in the second basement. Even in front of me, as long as I kept my guard up, it was probably hard for him to get inside my head.

If nothing else left me feeling smug that day, this was it. So smug, I felt the need to voice it aloud.

I stared down Quire's containment device as I walked around it, "Hah, you can't read me, can you? Which means you can't talk to me, or hear me," I gloated, knowing that I was doing it entirely for me. As he was, he didn't have ears to physically listen, "Well, I'd say it was nice knowing you, shitbird, but I'm not much of a liar."