Welcome to Gaia! ::

Cybil kept tapping away. "We're getting lots of stuff about Abigail Adams and random unrelated World War stuff. Now, I have no idea who Abigail Adams is, but I don't think she's the one we're looking for. It might help if you could narrow down which World War we're talking about here."

Mark had grown bored of reading over Cybil's shoulder. He turned away, knelt and reached under the blonde's bed. Pulling out a locked box, he didn't even pause before sliding a hand under the mattress and tugging out a key. After unlocking it, he opened the box to reveal a bunch of old papers. "Think there might be anything in here?" he asked.

Cybil glanced idly over her shoulder. "I doubt it," she said with a shrug. "But I never went through it, and I guess there might possibly be a reason why it was the only thing I brought with me from home. Go for it. It can't be much more useless than trying to find her with only a first name in five hundred and forty-one thousand hits."

She didn't seem to question why Mark already knew that it was there; maybe she'd shown it to him before.

Nodding, Cybil turned back and began to type. After a few seconds, she announced, "Twenty-five thousand hits, give or take a few hundred. Much more manageable. Now let's see what we've got here." She turned her attention entirely to her computer screen, meticulously clicking on each link and reading through the information on each one.

Mark, meanwhile, was sitting cross-legged on her carpet, papers scattered around him. He was reading each one closely, even when they seemed to be no more than tax papers and family notes.

"Hmm?" murmured Cybil absently, glancing up at Miranda when she realized the girl had asked her another question. "Oh. I don't really know. It just...felt like the thing to do at the time, I suppose. Which is why I'm now wondering if maybe there's something in there that's important. I don't suppose you have any boxes of old stuff stored in your attic or whatever."

Her time for musing finished, she returned to her typing.

Cybil continued tapping merrily away, reading each page and often giving a sigh or a shake of her head in disgust before moving on to the next. There was nothing, nothing, nothing, and every half-hour or so she began to wonder if they were wasting time. But she resolutely kept on. Eventually, there had to be something. She had faith in the wonders of the Internet. "Okay," she replied absently to Miranda's words. "You do that. It'll help. Thanks."

Mark remained happily seated on the floor, scattering more papers. "I dunno," he replied, looking up at Miranda with childlike innocence in his gaze, even as his fingers started to shake once again. "I guess I'll know when I find it."

That said, he dived in again, and kept reading through sheets of boring paper. Most people would have been sick to death of this chore within a few minutes, but Mark seemed as excited as a child on Christmas morning. With every paper he read, he looked more thrilled, as unlike Cybil's vaguely annoyed face and irritated mutterings as could be.

"I just think there's something in here," he said cheerfully. "I don't know what, but when we see it, we'll know."

Mark beamed at her, as though she'd said something particularly clever. "Well, it's all we've got," he replied, sounding much too happy for such a statement. "And every research project is an invisible needle in a hayfield, if you want to look at it that way. You just have to start somewhere and hope for blind luck to take a hand."

With another smile, he went back to his pages. His trembling hands were growing worse, but he didn't appear to notice. And he wouldn't, thought Cybil as she glanced over at him, not for another few hours. Then the desire would get bad. Then he would want to leave, score a quick hit and come back. But she wouldn't be able to let him. She needed him aware and alert.

And damn it, he was like a little brother. She wanted him off that s**t.

At Miranda's words, Cybil's eyes kindled for a brief second before dying off again. "Miranda? That's really old news. Maybe if you read something besides the tax reports, it would help," she said tartly.

Her family had been boring. And that had been how she'd liked it. But when her father died, and her mother had married Colin the Creep, things had gotten more interesting. Infuriating enough that she had run away, but yeah, more interesting.

Not that she was going to share that with Miranda.

Cybil shrugged, her back still to them. "Whatever makes you happy," she replied. "But don't complain to me about how my family's boring. I already know. And reading tax reports won't help change your mind in the slightest."

She tilted her chair back and continued to type away. Her gaze took on a slow, focused concentration after a moment or two. Then she and Mark spoke seemingly as one.

"Got something."

Mark was holding a little piece of paper that looked like some kind of receipt, and Cybil was staring at her computer screen. Embarrassed, Mark waved Cybil on. "You start," he said.

She grinned. "Well, I have here a list of victims of the ancient witch hunts. It turns out that one of the last witches to be executed over in Europe was named Marie Deschamps, and--" she held up a hand to forestall the inevitable interruptions, "it says here that she had only one direct line of descendants, which ended with one Miss Abigail Lavalle, born in 1921 and deceased at the age of twenty-four in 1945 from some unknown illness. You think Abigail maybe inherited some super-special powers from her great-great-however-many-greats-it-is grandma?" More seriously, she continued, "Does Lavalle ring a bell for you? Either of you?"

Mark held up his receipt. "And I've got this," he said. "It looks like a receipt for a bunch of stuff, and it's from an antique store. And this one," he held up another, "is from an old junk shop. They both have 'diary' listed on them. Maybe you have the book at home, Cyb, and didn't even know it."

Cybil grinned, swiveling in her chair. "Maybe we're starting to sift out some hay from that hayfield of ours, Miranda."

Mark shrugged defensively and Cybil blinked at Miranda. "Okay," she replied, ignoring Miranda's mutter. "How about in your visions? Any hint of Lavalle there? Did our Abigail look like she could be twenty-four? 'Mysterious illness' could mean anything, after all - could be anything from the aftereffects of the freaky monsters of darkness to some weird strain of fricking chicken pox. Middle of a war, not a great time for records."

She saved the page to her favourites and tilted back her chair. "But you notice that she didn't have any kids, as noted by the fact that she was the end of the Deschamps line. So if this is our Abigail, and if we got our powers from her some seventy, eighty years later - both big ifs - how did it happen? Can't blame heredity if there aren't any kids."

Sitting back, she continued aloud, "And how did we get her stuff?"

Strangely, it was Mark who offered, "Maybe it found its way to us. Well, to Miranda and you, maybe. Because she knew we'd be the ones who would have to continue it."

Cybil considered, then turned and lifted a brow at Miranda. "What d'you say?"

Cybil sighed a bit. "Well, okay. But until we find a picture or a portrait or whatever the hell it would have been around then so that we can match it, or we find out for sure some other way that Abigail Lavalle is our Abigail, we have to keep looking. We can't focus everything on Lavalle if we can't even be sure."

Mark glanced over at her in some surprise, then blinked and hunched his shoulders a little. "Oh," he muttered. "I guess I kind of forgot about that little step."

Cybil shrugged, tapping some more keys to head on to the next website. "It's the little ones that trip you and send you face-first into the concrete, Mark. Rules to live by." Idly, she tilted her head to show Miranda she was listening even while she read through the next site. "Not everything, Miranda," she disagreed. "We don't have anything useful for all-out battle, have you noticed that? We can't change shape or cast spells, we can't make things fly or explode. All we have - as far as we know - is that we can see stuff coming or going."

She rolled her eyes when Mark gave her a pointed stare. "Yeah, yeah, it's nitpicky, but I think it might matter. But that wasn't your point. You think she anchored them to a person?" The thought of that made something slightly sick roll in her stomach. "Stuck that responsibility and that weight on someone, maybe a bunch of someones, without them knowing or agreeing? 'Cause you know that if you're desperate, you wouldn't want to risk them saying no, you're crazy." She shoved a hand through her blonde hair, staring daggers at the screen. "So why not just go ahead and put them at risk without warning them so that you don't have to feel like you might have screwed things up?"

Mark looked up at her. "Cybil," he said quietly, his gaze wry, "you're projecting again."

Cybil shrugged. "Yeah. Probably. Anyway." She turned back to her screen. "Could be, Miranda. But I have to say that thinking of it going down like that really pisses me off."