06-05-2020, 11:22 AM
The arse end of Russia was not where she had imagined herself ending up.
Early-hour guard duty wore her patience to ground-up dust, though only because it gave her too much time to think in the fucking silence, when the only movement in the shadows was the puff of her own frigid breath. The Custody’s offer hadn’t been any kind of choice at all, given the ruin Marcil made of her career, but it didn’t stop her thinking about what she’d left behind. The patients in Moscow’s shitty Guardian complex she was not there to treat. The lives she did not save. Her contemporaries had always questioned her dedication to such a dirt-poor institution when she could have been making real money from her god-given talents. But for Morven it had always been about justice.
She hated Marcil for that.
Hated, too, not knowing what had happened to Sage Parker. Though the kid had a fucking computer lodged in his brain, and it wasn’t like he couldn’t have found her if he’d needed her. She knew he wasn’t dead at least. That would have to be enough.
Beyond that she had discovered she enjoyed the training. She’d always been athletic, spending most of her summers hiking with her sister in the Cairngorms, and even when her studies robbed most of her leisure time Morven had taken care of herself. She took to the physical training like a duck to water, and revelled in the challenge of it. She was competitive and ambitious; driven to excel by consistently performing to the very edge of her limits. This was the sort of discipline she had been made for; one in which she was not required to show tact around gentler feeling. The camaraderie discovered amongst the others in her troop was not something she had ever thought to look for, or had ever felt missing from her life, but it proved a powerful euphoria.
Not that the path was smooth by any means; she had a temper, and blood that ran hot, and sometimes a pride easily injured. Weapons handling seemed particularly pointless at first, given that a bare twist of her mind gave a far more potent result. But there weren’t any channelers here, nor anyone to teach her. She was instructed to show one careful demonstration of her abilities one night, and that with ranking government officials she did not even know the name of at the time, but it was made quite clear that she was not to use her edge for the duration, nor to allow others to know of it -- which admittedly didn’t always stop her pressing against the boundaries. Caught wrong, though, Morven accepted the punishment with equanimity. Justice was justice, after all, and once she ken the reason it made sense. The military couldn’t be seen to be training fucking channelers after all. Not for violence, anyway.
Officers training followed as Spring rolled around. She’d been originally trained for the ER, and working in the chaos of the moment was wired into her psyche; it was the rote tasks she found more challenging, particularly after the adrenaline of military basics. Caring for the more mundane aspects of her comrades at the medical centre that was now her temporary base seemed a startling reevaluation at first, skills she did not lack but did not always exactly favour. She was a good doctor, but she was not one known for her empathy. Least not if you did not deserve it.
She expected deployment after that; Africa was a fucking mess, and they said even America was about to carve itself up in the south. But when the summons came it was not to service at all, it was back to Moscow before she’d even passed out. That ground her teeth, to begin with. It seemed that now she had proved her soul to be signed in blood to the Custody’s cause, the real specificity of her training was to begin; the reason the agents had made the offer in the first place, following her forced registration. She was an asset, she got that; a rare commodity, if not so rare a gem as Jensen James. But first that skill must be honed.
It wasn’t the first time she’d been studied, though the cavernous halls of the Facility far outstripped even the Network’s breadth of resources.
She quickly discovered, to some disappointment, that the Ascendancy only surrounded himself with male channelers, and she already knew from Soren that she could neither learn from them nor teach them her own tricks. The Dominions, the Consul, Alric. Ironically enough the most prominent scientists in here were actually women, though Morven had little in common with either of them -- even Danika, who resonated the self-same gift. She didn’t think the woman’s feet even touched the ground when she walked, her head was so high up in the fucking clouds. So what time Morven did not spend accepting the tests of her power and wondering what the fuck they actually intended for her future, she spent in the Dominion’s gym, whether she was welcome there or not. It seemed a general consensus to them that she was to be an auxiliary to their work -- the nice little woman who’d patch them up when they fucked up. Well, at least until she bust Taichechski’s nose so she could show him just how she could put it back together for him. Seemed their opinion on her changed after that.
Early-hour guard duty wore her patience to ground-up dust, though only because it gave her too much time to think in the fucking silence, when the only movement in the shadows was the puff of her own frigid breath. The Custody’s offer hadn’t been any kind of choice at all, given the ruin Marcil made of her career, but it didn’t stop her thinking about what she’d left behind. The patients in Moscow’s shitty Guardian complex she was not there to treat. The lives she did not save. Her contemporaries had always questioned her dedication to such a dirt-poor institution when she could have been making real money from her god-given talents. But for Morven it had always been about justice.
She hated Marcil for that.
Hated, too, not knowing what had happened to Sage Parker. Though the kid had a fucking computer lodged in his brain, and it wasn’t like he couldn’t have found her if he’d needed her. She knew he wasn’t dead at least. That would have to be enough.
Beyond that she had discovered she enjoyed the training. She’d always been athletic, spending most of her summers hiking with her sister in the Cairngorms, and even when her studies robbed most of her leisure time Morven had taken care of herself. She took to the physical training like a duck to water, and revelled in the challenge of it. She was competitive and ambitious; driven to excel by consistently performing to the very edge of her limits. This was the sort of discipline she had been made for; one in which she was not required to show tact around gentler feeling. The camaraderie discovered amongst the others in her troop was not something she had ever thought to look for, or had ever felt missing from her life, but it proved a powerful euphoria.
Not that the path was smooth by any means; she had a temper, and blood that ran hot, and sometimes a pride easily injured. Weapons handling seemed particularly pointless at first, given that a bare twist of her mind gave a far more potent result. But there weren’t any channelers here, nor anyone to teach her. She was instructed to show one careful demonstration of her abilities one night, and that with ranking government officials she did not even know the name of at the time, but it was made quite clear that she was not to use her edge for the duration, nor to allow others to know of it -- which admittedly didn’t always stop her pressing against the boundaries. Caught wrong, though, Morven accepted the punishment with equanimity. Justice was justice, after all, and once she ken the reason it made sense. The military couldn’t be seen to be training fucking channelers after all. Not for violence, anyway.
Officers training followed as Spring rolled around. She’d been originally trained for the ER, and working in the chaos of the moment was wired into her psyche; it was the rote tasks she found more challenging, particularly after the adrenaline of military basics. Caring for the more mundane aspects of her comrades at the medical centre that was now her temporary base seemed a startling reevaluation at first, skills she did not lack but did not always exactly favour. She was a good doctor, but she was not one known for her empathy. Least not if you did not deserve it.
She expected deployment after that; Africa was a fucking mess, and they said even America was about to carve itself up in the south. But when the summons came it was not to service at all, it was back to Moscow before she’d even passed out. That ground her teeth, to begin with. It seemed that now she had proved her soul to be signed in blood to the Custody’s cause, the real specificity of her training was to begin; the reason the agents had made the offer in the first place, following her forced registration. She was an asset, she got that; a rare commodity, if not so rare a gem as Jensen James. But first that skill must be honed.
It wasn’t the first time she’d been studied, though the cavernous halls of the Facility far outstripped even the Network’s breadth of resources.
She quickly discovered, to some disappointment, that the Ascendancy only surrounded himself with male channelers, and she already knew from Soren that she could neither learn from them nor teach them her own tricks. The Dominions, the Consul, Alric. Ironically enough the most prominent scientists in here were actually women, though Morven had little in common with either of them -- even Danika, who resonated the self-same gift. She didn’t think the woman’s feet even touched the ground when she walked, her head was so high up in the fucking clouds. So what time Morven did not spend accepting the tests of her power and wondering what the fuck they actually intended for her future, she spent in the Dominion’s gym, whether she was welcome there or not. It seemed a general consensus to them that she was to be an auxiliary to their work -- the nice little woman who’d patch them up when they fucked up. Well, at least until she bust Taichechski’s nose so she could show him just how she could put it back together for him. Seemed their opinion on her changed after that.