🅧 Please explain to me the scientific nature of 'the whammy'

[faithfulskeptic]

[ n a m e ; ]	Dana Katherine Scully
[ c a n o n ; ]	The X-Files
[ g a m e ; ]	spicy times in noctiumrp

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[faithfulskeptic]

That gets a hum of more or less assent. It's more complicated-- whatever Sunlight believed he was, he thought he was a necessary force of brutality. He thought he was an angel, but as her grandmother saw things-- angels were generally monstrous. Her experiences have not dissuaded her of that view.

It takes her a moment to answer. This is-- a secret? No, not exactly-- but she's buried it, denied it, tried in so many ways to forget.

"Maisie," she murmurs, finally. "The senior who'd died-- I saw her in the locker room, like she was any other girl. And then she wasn't."

[bigfootfetish]

Exactly the kind of experience she flatly refuses to entertain in cases until forced. She has been holding out on him, if not - he assumes - on purpose. This can't be something a person simply forgets, but maybe she'd found ways to excuse the experience. Weird trips, stress about the murders, all kinds of strange little pieces of her life coming together to make her hallucinate. It's a thin explanation to cling to, but it sounds reasonable on the face of it. Scully loves reasonable, and as a kid with no prior experience with the supernatural, she must have needed to find a way to explain to herself what had happened.

"What happened?" He's not convinced that seeing a flash of a dead girl would be enough to burn the experience into Scully's memory; anyone could imagine that by accident, thinking of a death when everyone else is thinking of it, too. Something more must lie beneath her explanation.

[faithfulskeptic]

Without really meaning to she shuts her eyes, trying to remember the details. Ironic, really, considering how long she spent trying to forget-- or trying to tell herself she misremembered it, she imagined it, she dreamed it.

"We were the only people in the locker room-- the period hadn't started yet," she says softly. "And she seemed sad. I asked her if she was a friend of Maisie's-- I'd never met her, I didn't recognize her-- and she seemed confused, and I rambled something about the accident and..."

She can feel an echo of the inexplicable burning sensation; without thinking about it she draws her hand to her collarbone, clasping it around her necklace.

"She screamed, not like anything I'd ever heard-- and then she started bleeding. It was like her body was just... tearing itself apart, reliving her death. Begging someone to stop. I knew it wasn't an accident because I saw her die again there."

And she knows what it sounds like-- the kind of ghost story she'd roll her eyes out on a case.

"I ran to get help-- I didn't understand, couldn't think what else to do-- but of course when everyone came there was nothing. Not a drop of blood. They thought it was some kind of prank."