Cressida spent a great deal of time contemplating how to describe what it felt like to be a telepath. As soon as someone found out about her mutation, that was the first question that she was asked. Most people took 'reading thoughts' in a literal sense: assuming a telepath could 'read' a person's thoughts like a line of text that flared above their foreheads. Another theory focused on auditory stimuli - perhaps, they thought, a telepath could 'hear' the thoughts like whispers breathed on the back of their neck. Other people, and this was the most popular theory, assumed it must be a visual experience: the telepath was able to pull down a projector in a person's mind, unwinding a mutoscope of thought to see the pictures and memories as they were transmitted through their brains. All of these descriptions were wrong.
Being able to read minds was like standing on top of a Tesla coil and trying to make sense of the sparks shooting out of it. It was unpredictable. It was difficult. It took an incogitable amount of concentration to be able to divide 'useful' conscious thoughts from the 'useless' subconscious thoughts. It was an almost impossible task to be able to focus the incoherent babble inside of a person's mind into something that could be understood. The effort often gave Cressida a headache.
Sitting in the middle of a crowded conference room of superheroes as she waited for the meeting to start, Cressida smiled secretly to herself and enjoyed the comparison. She sipped her cup of her hibiscus tea, which was a very visible cranberry-red in the transparent cup, and her mouth contorted at the tart taste. Bitter. She realised that she had put in a spritz of lemon juice but had forgotten to add the honey after that, too distracted by Wanda and her vivid reenactment of her first date with Vision from the night before. A secret first date, Wanda had warned with a threatening look in her eyes. So I'll have to kill you if you tell anyone else about it. Seeing as Wanda's father was Erik Lensherr, who was so dangerous that he had once been imprisoned by the Pentagon, Cressida felt that she didn't need to be told twice.
Cressida gazed into the red tea, almost meditative. Standing on top of a Tesla coil. . . yes, that's right. The sound of the door opening, being pulled hard on their hinges so that they squealed, hadn't met her ears before the first sparks of thought flashed through her mind. Tony Stark. His mind had intrigued her from the moment that she'd arrived at the compound. It still did. She lifted her gaze to see him enter the room: wearing a grubby, sweat-soaked shirt and denim jeans that had clearly seen better days - with how they were spotted with oil and stained with grease - Tony took a seat near the head of the table and crossed his arms over his chest. With how he was dressed, anyone could have guessed that he'd just come from his robotics lab after a morning of working on a new invention.
Yet the telepath could do more than just guess. With her mutation, just whetting the dull edge of her concentration, she could see the plans that he'd been working on come to her mind like 3D-projections taking up the entire space above the glass conference table. Even though she wasn't a stranger to technology, she felt a bit dazzled at the technical words that were streaming through his mind like digital schematics. Her Uncle Hank might've been able to understand it, but she'd stopped at physics before it had become so complicated. She lifted the cup to her lips and drank.
"Someone's quiet this morning," Bruce said as he slipped in next to her, "What're you drinking? It looks good."
Cressida smiled. She knew that he was lying. The first mental images that had sparked up in his mind after seeing the drink was that it looked like a bowl of nosebleed water. He was far happier with his green tea, which he drank for its calming purposes. Though he'd never admit it out loud, he believed that it helped him control the Hulk.
"It's Hibiscus," Cressida named and then smiled wryly, "And it tastes terrible. Forgot to add sugar."
"Aww. That's too bad," Bruce winced sympathetically, "You - you can have a sip of mine, if you like."
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Lore: When a Trickster Meets His Match
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