[ This isn't the station, and it isn't the mountain temple in China. She's landed somewhere new again, her life taking another unexpected turn, and unlike before, she's genuinely unsure whether it's a good turn or a bad one. Flinching away from those hands, she insists on doing whatever they want herself, explaining You can't touch my skin and fumbling through her disorientation as best she can. There won't be any more lives on her conscience, not if she has anything to say about it.

At least the jumpsuit they give her isn't grey, but dark green. Small blessings are all she can hope for these days.

As she walks through her new 'home', if it might ever be considered that, she stops to examine signs, doors, any small sign of soundproofing. She even bends to roll a bit of sand between her bare fingers, feeling the texture and already trying to think of other ways they might stay safe here. ]

[ Aside from the creatures who apparently want to kill anything that makes sound, this place really isn't so bad. Everything seems better than what she'd faced in her original world, though, so Rogue wouldn't be the least bit surprised if she's in the minority with that opinion. It had been the same on Hyrypia with the other hosts; while she'd been thrilled at being out in the sun among other people, at being free, so many of them had focused on the downsides of their situation and how to get back home. Perhaps things would have been different if she'd had a home to go back to...

But she has been wondering something, craving it more like, so when she finally stumbles upon someone who doesn't look like they'd try to bite her head off for asking a question, she holds out her device for them to read:

I don't suppose there's any coffee around here?

[ The cold silver metal of the lab surrounds her, the usual sheen of Cerebro now dulled from years of being abused during the Sentinel War. She blinks up at the masked figures of today's batch of scientists, all of them covered head to toe but still seeming to have an air of satisfaction around them as they wheel out their most recent victim. Her most recent victim, the young man whose arm they had pressed to her own and held in place until he'd stopped breathing and her skin had glowed with his power while she cried. His mind had settled into her own and she'd apologized again and again as she stuffed him into yet another room in the endless hallways of the house in her mind, the place where hundreds of copied psyches now reside. Her tears fade as the bring out the scalpels again, unzipping the leg of her pants and slicing away strips of her skin to test before moving up to an arm, her stomach. Sample after sample, the pain is a welcome distraction from the agony in her soul.

Another mutant is wheeled in, then a baseline human, these victims only absorbed to the point of unconsciousness and not death. Again and again, the cycle continues, an endless string of experiments to unlock the secrets of her mutation to rid the planet of mutants once and for all.

The new hallway is an abrupt change, not matching any of the ones in her mind. But then she's falling, almost flying, and she wonders if this might finally be it - until she lands in that red dust. And suddenly there's someone else being pulled into that torture, someone there in that lab who never had been before, and she's sorry, so sorry. ]

[ You know the drill, show me what you've got! Feel free to hit me up via PM, over at taintedcrimson or on discord at taintedcrimson#0896 to chat things out. ]