"What did you say your division was called? Rupert?"

The woman across the desk was in her fifties and looking at Noel like she was absolutely bonkers. Something must have come up on the screen for her security check. How classified was RUPERT? The ex-agent didn't really know since she had done one last job for the group: wiping the memory of their existence clean out of who knows how many heads. Noel knew they had been a little paranoid about security, but government agencies liked that kind of crap.

"Regional Urban Preternatural Extraction and Reconnaissance Team? I'm sorry, if you don't know about RUPERT maybe you don't have the clearance to ask questions about it." She was a tad short with her potential new boss, but the woman wasn't getting anything out of Noel that she wasn't supposed to.

"Our computers aren't bringing anything up, but they can be slow. You know how they never wanna pay for upgrades. Why don't you tell me about your training in the mean time? Did you train at QUANTICO?" That didn't taste like the morning dew, but everybody fudged a bit here and there. Noel needed to be polite. She needed this woman to assign her somewhere so that she could go back to work and go back to normal.

The brunette shook her head. "While attending CalTech, I went through the regimen out there. Firearms, ballistics, investigative techniques and mutational specific training. They flew in a psychic to help me figure out the trigger for…" Noel tapped her finger against her temple and shrugged, not wanting to say it. "You know." Her mutation was mental. That made people uncomfortable. Like the lady sitting across from her who now shifted in her seat.

"Is that how you got in here?"

"To the FBI? I was recruited for my mutation and went through training same as-"

"No." The woman interrupted. "I mean is that how you got in to see me today? With your mutation?"

"I made an appointment same as anybody else." Noel said the words slowly and clearly. What was the deal with this lady? Was she stupid?

"May I see your sidearm?"

Noel pulled her matte black 9 millimeter, popped the clip out and removed the slide before putting all the pieces on the desk between herself and her superior, just as she'd been trained. The woman relaxed and gingerly poked through the pieces.

"Look, to be honest, I don't like being a mutant any more than you seem to like me being one, but you can treat me the same as anybody else. I have my ways to cope."

"What about your partner?"

Noel shrugged. She felt constantly off balance by the topic jumping. "When they dissolved the program, my guess is that he just went elsewhere. He was a contractor. Like I said earlier, all I had was the note to report here. So here I am. Assign me somewhere."

"Are you sure? Are you absolutely certain that you can't remember?"

"That. Is. My. Job." Noel squeezed the words out from between clenched teeth, she was trying for smile but she felt like mauling than smiling. "I. Make. People. Forget." This woman was starting to make her head ache.

There was a soft knock at the door and the woman seemed grateful for the interruption. Noel turned, expecting to see a case lead. Instead there were two men, stoic as body guards. Not huge, but well trained and with a tension that spoke of barely contained action.

"You honestly believe you are an agent of the Federal government, don't you?"

Noel's head whipped around so fast that her hair slapped against the back of her chair. "Yes, I do." What was going—?

"There is no RUPERT."

"Whu-Not anymore, but I-" Noel was on her feet and didn't quite remember how she got there. The woman across the desk remained sitting. The look in her eyes said everything.

"I am not crazy. I didn't make any of it up. It's real."

"Your badge number belongs to an agent that went missing in action." She turned her computer screen toward Noel and saw a picture of a woman she did not at all recognize. Her name was Noel. But Noel's name was Noel…

"No. But I-" Her head ache swelled, threatening to make her eyes burst out of her head. "I earned my badge, same as the rest." A hand caught her upper arm, had she almost fallen? Or had she just tried to take a step?

"We need your full cooperation—" Whatever they needed her cooperation for, the woman didn't say once she met Noel's eyes.

"Whatever you're doing stop it now." The voice was commanding with not a hint of panic. Noel heard the sound of a gun being drawn, felt metal at the base of her skull.

Her life was lie.

She wasn't doing anything.

She was hollow.

Something clicked and she turned shaking eyes up to see the man. Why was everybody so mean?

The rainbow candies spilled across the table and her hand darted out for one. Red. She liked the red ones.

"Un uh. No candy until you can tell me your name."

The brunette screwed up her face and rolled her lips together. She had a name. Surely somebody else knew it. She glanced around at the open space. The afternoon light made delicate patterns on the floor. That reminded her of other patterns on the floor. She frowned at the shady shapes and tilted her head slightly. It could have looked like a seal… with an eagle…

"Noel?"

The girl brightened and fixed her eyes on the man with the reflective sunglasses. "That's my name!"

She didn't get a skittle.

Blank canvas. That's all she had.

Jane Doe peeked at the guy next to her and his canvas had some yellow blob with white and black spots on it. He noticed her watching and turned his shoulder between his artwork and her eyes.

"Put your brush in the paint, honey." A portly woman in white came to guide her hand. The white made her look wider than she really was.

Her brush went into blue paint and a glub of air escaped from the bottom of her cup. "Don't worry about making a picture. It doesn't have to look like anything. Just put the brush on the page." Her hand and by extenuation the brush was guided toward the canvas. The lady was nice, but Jane stopped the bristles just shy of touching the canvas. The woman pushed her hand forward and Jane balked.

"I want red."

"Blue is a good color. Besides, someone else is using the red just now."

Sure enough there was a girl flinging red hard enough to splatter her neighbor. Jane pulled her lower lip between her teeth and watched her helper leave to go handle the mess maker. She ditched the blue and went for black. That was almost as good as red.

Dipping her brush in the paint, a blue circle appeared around where the already full paintbrush had contaminated the black. That was pretty too.

Someone threw their cup of paint and the splatter caught Jane across the chest. She touched her neck and looked at her fingers. They were red. All red.

Panicked, she asked the first question that came to mind. "Am I going to be a vampire now?"

"Absolutely not."

Sometimes they talked in front of her like she wasn't there. With her fingers in her mouth, she watched a bird peck at a pebble outside of the barred window. Her head was a sieve. Why would she care?

"I don't see why. She's been docile as a kitten since the day she got here."

"Kittens are the worst. They have claws, but don't know how to use them."

When she tasted blood, Jane took her fingers out of her mouth and looked at the reflections the light made on the moisture there. She had long ago run out of nail and now every time she bit at them, her fingers bled. "Oops."

"Ugh, see? She needs something to focus her energies into. You can't pretend the mind and body are unconnected things." One of the men pulled a pair of gloves out from his pocket and slipped his hands into them with a snap before taking hold of the hand Noel held out to them.

"She didn't take to painting?"

"She painted a gun."

"Wasn't she some kind of agent? She might need something more familiar to trigger recognition. Uh-no pun intended."

"We are not giving her a gun."

"Some people are kinesthetic learners." Four eyes turned to her before scrambling in their pockets for sunglasses. Her head was a sieve, but she wasn't stupid.

"Can we go to the park?"

She picked at her toenail polish. It was starting to grow out anyway and the red paint came off in big flakes. She remembered painting hairy toes yellow once. Though, she really didn't like yellow.

Today, two men in sunglasses came to see her. Her headache throbbed. "I am not crazy." She hated how sullen her voice sounded, but it was hard not to be crazy cooped up as she was. This was for her own good, they said. They were rehabilitating her, they said. They said a lot of things.

"Tell us again about RUPERT. What was the purpose?"

Jane sighed and traced the black ink letters on her arm. She knew they were letters, but when she tried to focus on them, they jiggled around and didn't make much sense. Letters gave her headaches.

"RUPERT wants to track dangerous people with uh- special abilities." Jane tipped her head back and forth with each phrase, making a rocking motion in her chair. It didn't help her protestations against crazy. "You know, if you get enough data on something how you can try to predict how things might…?" She made a condensing motion with her hands because she just didn't have the words. "Or you might learn who has friends or who out with who… whom… whoever..."

She trailed off, distracted by some distant thought before shaking her head. "You won't tell anybody, will you? They're not going to like me telling. My job is to keep others from telling."

"And you will stay, at all times, within my sight. Do you understand me, Jane? Jane?"

Jane Doe looked back from her toes to the man talking to her. For some reason, looking at the chipped red paint desperately made her want to go outside. She wanted to run and run and run until she saw something she could recognize. She knew enough not to tell the man nurse that. "I want to go outside."

"We are going outside. This whole room is." He had a pair of white socks and a pair of white, flat tennis shoes. Both looked cheap and matched the pale scrubs they both wore. Jane Doe's were the faintest blue, her doctor's were sort of minty green, the man nurse wore creamsicle orange, the man in the chair next to her who was waiting for his turn to get help was wearing all white.

"Do colors make people crazy?"

"We don't use that word here."

She apologized (because he expected her to) before amending herself. "Do colors make people Mentally Handicapped? There's no color here."

"Sometimes colors can trigger memories that people are pushing deep down inside of themselves." Jane had one sock on and was just about to cover up the last bit of vibrant color she had seen in a long while.

"So… wouldn't it be better to be surrounded by color?"

"That's part of the reason why we're going to the park." He chucked her on the chin like an uncle might and helped her with her shoes. Jane adjusted her white medical bracelet so that it covered part of the black letters on her arm. She wished the letters would go away.

"Two bunny ears, remember?"

Her tongue stuck out the corner of her mouth in concentration. This tying shoes business felt entirely foreign.

((OOC: Story continues in Totaled))