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Victoria van Dyne, Hope van Dyne, Cassandra LangLocation: Stadium hallways
Well, of course it wouldn't be that easy. Victoria closed her eyes amd took a breath. "I meant tomorrow in the stands, since I assumed you'd be there to cheer Cassie on. But if it won't wait... Can you walk and talk at the same time? Believe it or not I am actually on the clock." she nodded down the hallway, before turning to Cassie. "Tell us what?" she asked, thinking what could be so important. The thought of the Young Avengers withdrawing from the contest came to her mind, which would be mildly amusing - Tori would want a picture of the more contest-keen Excelsiors' faces when they learned of that.
Hope let out a pained sigh. She knew that Vicky cared and felt very deeply, but it seemed like family always fell at the bottom of her priority list. She supposed she only had herself to blame for that behavior. Maybe that was part of this, somehow. She'd put too much of herself into Vicky. "Sure. I can walk and talk."
Cassie grimaced a bit, rocking backwards on her heels ever so slightly. She'd really meant to send a heads up about this, but Vicky wasn't competing and she wasn't nearly as close with anyone on Excelsior, so it slipped her mind. "Oh, it's just... The Strange Academy kids like to play dirty. Mess with your heads and stuff."
"Oh. Well, then, consider us informed. Sabine pulled memories out of one of them that kinda point out to them using some sort of boost drug. Hence me heading to their hotel room to look through the window." she explained, "...and possibly engage in a bit of BNE... unless you're saying they can spoof memories and outsmart our outsmarting?" Victoria raised an eyebrow.
She turned back to Hope. "Good! Because- because..." she could the nanites on her cheek changing to reflect more of the red spectrum, as she felt like - well, was, really - a kid asking mom for help. "...I could really use someone to point me to an exit. I swear I walked forward with no more than 0.015° deviation and I still walked in circles..." she sighed, setting out at a slow pace, checking if Hope followed. "Well, then, I suppose we're doing this now, so... How much did you hear from Dr. Whitehall and Cassie?" She asked, not really wanting to go over it again and drag those ugly emotions back to the forefront of her mind, but considering how many things slipped her sister's mind recently...
Cassie's eyebrows scrunched up, the same way they had when as kids, her favorite stuffed animal had gone missing - only to be sneakily replaced with a duplicate. The Strange Academy kids were staying at a hotel? But this was a boarding school and they were hosting? That didn't add up to her. "That's weird that they're staying at a hotel... They live here, right?" Cassie asked, a little uncertain. Vicky seemed so sure of things. And she knew her sister was paying close attention to this situation, whereas Cassie had barely been able to spare the contest a moment's thought past few weeks, what with everything happening with Billy and then the stuff with the Mother... "I mean - I meant that they like to get into your heads. Play tricks on you. Find your weaknesses and exploit it, even before the contest starts and stuff."
Hope and Cassie both walked with Vicky, Cassie situated in the middle. As Vicky expressed her need for help, Hope nodded in commiseration. Magic and technology did not always cohabitate well - something she had taken special pains to attempt to correct for when she had been designing Vicky, all those years ago. She hadn't wanted her to be crippled by it. "Of course. It's a little ways ahead - right before the main merchandise store." She then hesitated. Vicky's other question was harder to share. She hadn't spoken with Cassie much about what had happened - Cassie's favorite parent when it came to emotional crises was Scott. What conversations they had shared had been blunt and tense, as Hope rapidly found herself out of her depth.
But she was at her heart a researcher - so Vicky had not been the only one to attend a counselor. They had only had a few sessions, but Hope felt she had the tools to approach this conversation. Or at least, she hoped that she did. "The school notified me when you sent yourself to CAGE, but I never received a call from a Dr. Whitehall. Cassie and I had some discussions, but... I think it would be better if you said it to me directly. I want to hear from you, Vicky. Not another person."
Vicky paused in thought for a moment. "Well... Okay, I only have a confirmed sighting of them at the hotel. All the more reason to look what were they up to." she shrugged at Cassie's confusion.
Back to the issue at hand... "You might want to slip that ring on, I bumped into mom and, well... I don't think you in particular need telling that families are not all sunshine and roses and the feelings can get ugly." Tori thought over the mind link.
She sighed, already feeling drained before she even uttered a word. "So... You understand that I'm angry, do you? Want to help, hm?" She tried to take a nonconfrontational tone, but the command never reached her mouth. "I am sooo much more than that. Above all else, I am fucking terrified! I'm scared that at any point you or a couple of others can take away whatever perceived autonomy I have! I mean, is my drive to help people even my own, or did you order me to do that too? Next? I've never felt this betrayed. Did you put a control chip in Cassie after she broke into your stuff to empower herself and not tell her about it? That would still be fucked up beyond all reason but at least it would be a consequence of something she did - not what she might do or what she is! I could stomach it if you gave me to someone else to raise and were some distant creator person, but this from someone acting as my parent..."
The words were coming out like an avalanche. Once it started, it could not be stopped. "And angry? Oh, no. I am bloody enraged. I did everything right. I played along with the human masquerade you had me doing, despite the fact that it was tearing me up on the inside. I stopped Ultron from being freed from me around Halloween time - Don't get me started on using that as my core - only to be shot in the back by that same backdoor. What do you think Arcade used to take control of me? I'm meant to be a protector and HE USED ME TO FUCKING KILL SOMEONE!" her voice was growing more and more thunderous with every sentence.
Vicky had to take a moment to calm back down. "All I could do was watch. And when I tried to shut down to prevent it? Not only wouldn't it let me, but apparently, doing the thing I was built for and taking every option to not let that bastard have an obedient Ultron gets me landed in a madhouse!" she hissed.
"And now you want to help? What made you do that? Did you grow a conscience, or perhaps the spine to tell the government 'no'? No. I don't trust you enough to let you help. Hell, I'm still worried that even now you might somehow take control of me." That brought forth a thought. Was there something that could be done to remedy this screwed up situation at all? Vicky meant what she said. Even if Hope offered to remove the offending features, she wasn't letting her anywhere near her code. And no one she trusted had the skill to do the changes. No one but- "You want to make this right? Give me the specs for my core, so I can fix this myself. No more strings on me. I cannot settle for anything less."
Hope didn't want to fight Vicky. She wasn't here to scream and argue. And as much as she would have wanted to respond to every point her daughter made, she couldn't. Her memory wasn't perfect, she was only human, and seeing her daughter in so much pain, so lost and confused and angry... It was killing her. She wanted nothing more than to pull her into a tight hug, to do whatever she could to take the pain away. She'd thought - she'd thought she'd done the right thing by Vicky. That was all she had ever wanted to do was give her the tools she needed to be successful. The backdoor access - it was a precaution, no one knew how a knew artificial intelligence would react, not when Vicky had first been made. Hope hadn't thought about it in years. And the core - it was connected to Ultron, yes, but it was connected to Vision too - the very best synthezoid Hope had ever known, someone she had dreamed her daughter could be like.
She stopped walking. She listened as Vicky spoke. And when there was space for her to join in, she took a breath, and could only hope that her child would hear her, too. She was only human. She made mistakes. "I am so so sorry... I never meant for you to be in pain like this, to hurt like this. I've only ever wanted the best for you. I never wanted to control you. I only ever... I only ever wanted to protect you, to give you the tools you'd need to succeed." Her hands were trembling, as she reached into her purse, and pulled out a datapad. Her fingers swept across the holographic surface, until the transfer was complete. "There. I sent you everything. Every bit of data, every line of code, all of it. And..." she paused for a moment, before a series of contacts would be sent to Vicky as well, "I know you don't trust me to do this. But operating on yourself... it's dangerous. Please, at least give one of these folks a call. Just for advice, if nothing else. Tony can help."
Victoria paused walking as well. She looked at her mother and sister with an expression that would be unreadable, because a lot of feelings were mixed in her at the very moment. She didn't expect to just get the information without some sort of pushback. But there was no lecture, no explanation, nothing, just... compliance with her wishes, seemingly for free. Finally, she sighed softly. "I doubt I will ever understand how humans think. Back at CAGE, Cas said that the government would come to scrap me if those safeguards were no longer in place. I don't know how to take you giving me this without even a warning about that, but... I'll choose to believe you don't have ill intentions. Especially since I would still do this even with the warning, so it'd be a moot point anyway..."
She then looked at Hope in full for the first time in this interaction. "And... look... I'm not so arrogant to think I can do no wrong modifying myself. I said I don't trust anyone else to actually commit the code, as they could swap it for something else while I was powerless to stop it. I don't mind you checking the changes for errors, and I'll trust the one who wrote it in the first place over anyone else. You know what killed me the most on this situation?"
Tori reached up with her hands slowly, as if unsure if she was allowed to. But she pushed through the doubt, and took Hope's hands in hers. "I thought I didn't have a safe home to come to anymore." she admitted, "I... don't think it's unsafe anymore. I'm still not entirely okay until I do make those changes, but... I want to try and make this right, if you'll still have me."