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xp_logsWhen the field trip group arrives, they find out that the Seattle airport is a rather busy place on Halloween, thanks to the summit. It's not unexpected, but the tone of the crowd is oppressive, and Jennie gets to experience that up-close and personal.
A wise person once said you could tell a lot about the way a society was by the state of their airports. If one considered the state of the Seattle airport they would conclude that society was on a nice downward spiral. It was jam-packed with people, the usual business class and tourists overrun by mobs of hippies, college students, older yuppies, religious groups and the like, all here for one reason. The G8 summit. The same reason one rather motley group of teenagers and adults was standing in the terminal while their teacher made some phonecalls to get them a bus to their hotel.
Jennifer Stavros stood off to the side with her hands stuffed in the pockets of her coat and frowned. Several hours on a plane on her birthday made her grouchy. And the way things were looking, there wouldn't be much celebratin' either. Mr. Dayspring and the other teachers were making noises about keeping the kids at the hotel for the night. It was Halloween for crying out loud! There at least should be something. So lost in her moody thoughts Jennie didn't notice the older genetleman until her was almost upon her. He held a bible in one hand, and stack of pamplets in the other. His nametag announced that he was a pastor from Dalton, Georgia.
'Don't make eye contact.' Jennie thought to herself hurriedly. 'Don't make…….. shit, he saw me.'
"Hello young lady." He said in a pleasant voice. Jennie gave him a weak smile and desperately looked for a way out.
"Have you accepted the light of Christ into your heart?" He said, as he stuffed a pamphlet in her hand. It proclaimed that the man was from a church in Georgia, and that only through Christ's love she could find redemption. Oh, and that society was full of fornicators, homosexuals and mutants and they were all going to hell. Lovely.
Jennie flashed the man another smile. "Yes, I have sir. Thank you." She tried to duck out the way, but he blocked her path. She wondered if it was the magenta streak in her hair that she recently added or the old Black Sabbath t-shirt she was wearing that cued the man the she wasn't exactly on the straight and narrow.
"Mutants are sign of the degradation of society. A plague sent by the father of lies himself." The man said solemnly, nodding towards the group of students. "We must all accept the light of Jesus Christ into our hearts, for it is through he that we shall be delivered from Satan's unholy plague."
Jennie was shocked. Open hatred was still a very new thing to her. "Let me guess," she said when she recovered, "You've also kept evolution out of the schools and are damn proud of it." The man looked taken aback. She went on, "I don't know what kind of hate you're selling, but don't do it in my God's name." The man opened his mouth to retort, but Jennie quickly picked up her bag and strode back over to the main group. She dropped it near Clarice and linked her arm through the smaller girl's. Clarice looked up in surprise, but Jennie only shook her head and put it on Clarice's shoulder. The girl gave her head a small comforting pat.
Jennie glanced back just once, to see the pastor with his eyes bugging nearly out of his head. He made the sign of the cross at them. Jennie wished there was an adult version of sticking your tongue out at someone so she could show her contempt. She turned back to the group and sighed. Her 17th birthday was gearing up for some major suckage.
~*~
Jubilee and Forge retrieve their luggage and ponder the potential for trouble.
Jubilee dodged the fast moving elderly grandmother who'd pushed past her on the way up the ramp from the plane, grinning as she realised it wasn't only teenagers that got impatient. She wondered if said Grandmother was visiting anyone, or was coming home from a trip.
She loved to travel, and this had been a perfect opportunity to do so. Carlie had been super jealous that she wasn't coming along but Jubilee had promised her a visit at Christmas, complete with bringing David along to meet her. She'd have to talk to Mads about that at some stage.
Forge felt the nudge as Jubilee pushed into his backpack. "'Scuse you," he grumbled, looking over to see her smiling face. "Moving sidewalks not fast enough? The hotel isn't going anywhere, you know."
He'd felt uncomfortable the whole flight. What with the prohibition on wireless net connections, he'd had to settle for running his CAD program the entire time, designing new fiber-optic nerve connections for his prostheses. And now Jubilee was in a rush to... get to the hotel and wait for the political summit?
"Dude, so not my fault. It was that little old granny." Jubilee replied, pointing to the woman who was now some distance ahead and appeared to be assaulting someone's shins with her cane. "Who stepped on your little pet frog, anyhow? Thought politics was your thing."
Forge brightened up. "It is. I'm totally hyped about it. I just wish we could have taken the Blackbird, you know? After flying at Mach Four, commercial air just seems like a downer, you know?"
"The blackbird is not a toy." Jubilee replied in a mock-serious impersonation of Scott Summers. "Besides, can you think of the explanations we'd have to make as to why we've got a military style plane when we're just meant to be a school?"
She pulled Forge out of the way as a man with a briefcase came barreling by at what seemed excessive speed. Jubilee shook her head. "I swear, something about airports just makes people complete nuts. I wonder if they put stuff in the water or somethin'."
With a nod, Forge stopped by the baggage carousel, looking at the other students straggling towards the baggage claim area, herded by the chaperones. "No kidding. Did you see Mister Marko's rules for the field trip? 'No unauthorized setting of anything on fire. No one is going to authorize any fire, period. There will be no games of Protest the Foreign Infidels. Despite Mr. al-Rashid's insistence, Miss Munroe is not a Foreign Infidel." He had to crack a smile. "Really, this is going to be fun. I mean, there's so much potential here"
"Yeah. Potential for trouble." Jubilee replied, lining up at the carousel. Her baggage was neon-yellow, it shouldn't be hard to miss. "Getting all these people in one place? Would only take one idiot to start something."
Forge's enthusiasm was good, and Jubilee didn't want to step on it but she had never put much faith in human nature when it came to not being dipshits.
Shrugging, Forge reached out to lift Jubilee's neon-yellow suitcase off the rotating carousel and place it behind him. "That's why we brought so many 'chaperones', I'll bet." He nodded to Jubilee's suitcase thoughtfully. "I'll bet dinner that you've got gear in there that's not exactly casual mall-hopping wear, if you catch my drift. Professor Xavier's a smart man, I'm sure Mr. Summers and everyone have all the eventualities covered. But still," he shrugged.
"It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye, right?"
~*~
Nathan is sizing up the crowd and not liking what he sees. He and Wanda agree that it would be good to get out of the airport and to the hotel, even before Marie-Ange shows up with her 'my precognition is pinging me' face on.
Most of the kids, since they were in Seattle for a grand three nights, had stuck to carry-on luggage. A few of the heavier packers had checked baggage, however, and as Nathan waited for them to retrieve their bags, he studied the activity in the airport, frowning.
I'm not sure I like this... He'd expected the Seattle airport to be a busy place today, but it was the composition of the crowd that concerned him. He let his mind drift across the crowd, cataloguing what he found. A group of junior FoH handing out pamphlets over there, a half-dozen members of one of the more militant pro-mutant groups getting off a place from Louisiana over there...
Wanda frowned as she helped bustle the students towards the exit. Turning, she reached out mentally. #Nathan? I know airports are supposed to be crowded but...is there some holiday I've missed or something? This seems...#
She dodged a group as they pushed around her and she caught a glimpse of an FoH pamphlet as it was shoved into her hands. Staring at it and then at Nathan, an eyebrow rose. #Is this bad?#
#We expected lots of attendees at this little shindig,# Nathan sent back darkly, seeing through her eyes what she had in her hands. #Some of the attendees represented in this airport are a little... questionable, though. And not just the FoH... there's a group of teenagers over by the coffee shop calling themselves disciples of your father, for example.#
At that, Wanda rolled her eyes. #This could get very ugly, very quickly. The faster we get ours out of here the happier I'll be.# Edging her way through the crowd, she eventually made her way to his side and took in the scene. "It's like a mass of people. Or, well, a mess of people, anyway."
"I'm having a hell of a time keeping track of ours," Nathan said dourly. "I swear, if any of them get any bright ideas about holding debates with the FoH in the airport, I'm dragging them out of here by the ear." He shook his head in amazement, though, as he scanned a little further. "This is international, Wanda. These aren't just American activist groups coming in, not by a long shot."
"I thought I was recognizing more languages than I normally would be," she responded, frowning. "And I cannot track them with 'strings', it does not work like that. Well, not in most cases, anyway." Pietro's string was...different, but that probably came from being twins.
"You know," Nathan said dryly, "either this is going to be a fabulous education in global political culture for the kids, or this is going to be a monumental clusterfuck for everyone. I'm hoping for the former, but I'm not a natural optimist."
"So, I'm assuming if I tell you to "turn that frown upside down", you'll do something horrid to me, correct?"
"Quite possibly," was the reply, with what was more a baring of teeth than a smile, even if there was a certain amount of wry good humor behind it.
"Well, darn, there goes my conversation piece." Turning, Wanda peered through--and sometimes over--the crowd. "Are all of ours off, yet?"
"Trust me, I would not have left the plane without making sure they all did. I'm well-aware that my track record of field trips is not so good."
The crowd was a lot larger than she'd expected. On top of Marie-Ange's dislike of being caught off-guard, it made getting Doug through the airport that much more difficult. It was harder than usual to keep track of her classmates too. Normally, it was as simple as keeping an eye open for Clarice's distinctive shade of hair - but purple, and blue, and more lurid color choices were in wide display, from mutants and supporters alike.
After a weave around a group of highly excited chattering protesters, and then taking a wide berth around the Junior FOH members, to avoid Doug deciding that now was a good time to engage in conversation, Marie-Ange finally managed to find -someone- she recognized. And thank heaven, it was Nathan and Ms. Maximoff. Nice, sensible adults.
Coming up next to them, she nudged Doug on the shoulder to indicate that they were stopping, and waved tiredly.
"Angie," Nathan said, and eyed Doug measuringly. Oh, yes, getting certain people out of the airport soonish would be good. "I've been telling people to congregate in front of the gift shop once they've finished getting their bags and hitting the washrooms and mainlining coffee and all."
"I have never seen that many people make a beeline to Starbucks," Wanda said, dryly, having nearly gotten run over by the coffee lovers. "I would ask how you two are holding up but it seems to me the faster we hit the hotel, the better we will be."
Oh, coffee. She should have gotten some coffee. It might have eased the headache. Or she could have given it to Doug and listened to his happy coffee noises. "Yes, but here is where you are, and I do not have to listen to anyone's complaints when the Starbucks runs out. Which they will." The lines were insane, she'd noticed, and the poor baristas looked like they wanted to just fall over. "And yes, leaving soon would make me very happy." Marie-Ange looked decidedly uneasy, more so than usual, even for such a large crowd."
Nathan frowned at Angie's expression. "What?" he asked warily, gazing down at her. "I know that look. Something's nagging at you."
Wanda gave them both a worried look. "When the precog looks off, there's trouble in the air." Big trouble, usually. Great.
"I just... do not like this crowd.' Marie-Ange answered, shaking her head. "I could not tell you why though. I just have an uneasy feeling." She glanced over at Doug, who was blissfully off in iPod-land, music loud enough that she could just hear it, despite his earphones being in. "I cannot put a finger on anything specific. I tried during landing, and I could not figure out why I was anxious.."
Nathan bit his lip to stifle the noise of frustration that was trying very hard to escape. Great. Just great. He should have known. Why would any field trip of his go smoothly, after all? "Well," he said, trying to sound reassuring, "we should probably focus on getting everyone together and out of here, and reassess at the hotel, then."
"Telepathic shout to get them to rejoin?" Wanda suggested, trying not to loose some of them out of her sight but it was getting harder and harder to do. "I'd be tempted to turn on my powers but in here?" She snorted. "Would not do us a lick of good."
"There are too many people here..." Marie-Ange said quietly. "I am not sure how anyone can focus on any one thing... " She frowned and tried to look through the crowd. "If anything happens, I do not think it will be here. I hope.."
"More comfortable places to continue this discussion and examine that feeling than the airport," Nathan said briskly, and closed his eyes. It was an adaptation of the telepathic switchboard, the partial mind-net he'd been maintaining with the students and other chaperones. #EVERYONE OVER TO THE STARBUCKS! NOW!# Angie and Wanda both proceeded to wince at him, and he offered them a brief, apologetic smile. "Sorry. Shall we go?"
A wise person once said you could tell a lot about the way a society was by the state of their airports. If one considered the state of the Seattle airport they would conclude that society was on a nice downward spiral. It was jam-packed with people, the usual business class and tourists overrun by mobs of hippies, college students, older yuppies, religious groups and the like, all here for one reason. The G8 summit. The same reason one rather motley group of teenagers and adults was standing in the terminal while their teacher made some phonecalls to get them a bus to their hotel.
Jennifer Stavros stood off to the side with her hands stuffed in the pockets of her coat and frowned. Several hours on a plane on her birthday made her grouchy. And the way things were looking, there wouldn't be much celebratin' either. Mr. Dayspring and the other teachers were making noises about keeping the kids at the hotel for the night. It was Halloween for crying out loud! There at least should be something. So lost in her moody thoughts Jennie didn't notice the older genetleman until her was almost upon her. He held a bible in one hand, and stack of pamplets in the other. His nametag announced that he was a pastor from Dalton, Georgia.
'Don't make eye contact.' Jennie thought to herself hurriedly. 'Don't make…….. shit, he saw me.'
"Hello young lady." He said in a pleasant voice. Jennie gave him a weak smile and desperately looked for a way out.
"Have you accepted the light of Christ into your heart?" He said, as he stuffed a pamphlet in her hand. It proclaimed that the man was from a church in Georgia, and that only through Christ's love she could find redemption. Oh, and that society was full of fornicators, homosexuals and mutants and they were all going to hell. Lovely.
Jennie flashed the man another smile. "Yes, I have sir. Thank you." She tried to duck out the way, but he blocked her path. She wondered if it was the magenta streak in her hair that she recently added or the old Black Sabbath t-shirt she was wearing that cued the man the she wasn't exactly on the straight and narrow.
"Mutants are sign of the degradation of society. A plague sent by the father of lies himself." The man said solemnly, nodding towards the group of students. "We must all accept the light of Jesus Christ into our hearts, for it is through he that we shall be delivered from Satan's unholy plague."
Jennie was shocked. Open hatred was still a very new thing to her. "Let me guess," she said when she recovered, "You've also kept evolution out of the schools and are damn proud of it." The man looked taken aback. She went on, "I don't know what kind of hate you're selling, but don't do it in my God's name." The man opened his mouth to retort, but Jennie quickly picked up her bag and strode back over to the main group. She dropped it near Clarice and linked her arm through the smaller girl's. Clarice looked up in surprise, but Jennie only shook her head and put it on Clarice's shoulder. The girl gave her head a small comforting pat.
Jennie glanced back just once, to see the pastor with his eyes bugging nearly out of his head. He made the sign of the cross at them. Jennie wished there was an adult version of sticking your tongue out at someone so she could show her contempt. She turned back to the group and sighed. Her 17th birthday was gearing up for some major suckage.
~*~
Jubilee and Forge retrieve their luggage and ponder the potential for trouble.
Jubilee dodged the fast moving elderly grandmother who'd pushed past her on the way up the ramp from the plane, grinning as she realised it wasn't only teenagers that got impatient. She wondered if said Grandmother was visiting anyone, or was coming home from a trip.
She loved to travel, and this had been a perfect opportunity to do so. Carlie had been super jealous that she wasn't coming along but Jubilee had promised her a visit at Christmas, complete with bringing David along to meet her. She'd have to talk to Mads about that at some stage.
Forge felt the nudge as Jubilee pushed into his backpack. "'Scuse you," he grumbled, looking over to see her smiling face. "Moving sidewalks not fast enough? The hotel isn't going anywhere, you know."
He'd felt uncomfortable the whole flight. What with the prohibition on wireless net connections, he'd had to settle for running his CAD program the entire time, designing new fiber-optic nerve connections for his prostheses. And now Jubilee was in a rush to... get to the hotel and wait for the political summit?
"Dude, so not my fault. It was that little old granny." Jubilee replied, pointing to the woman who was now some distance ahead and appeared to be assaulting someone's shins with her cane. "Who stepped on your little pet frog, anyhow? Thought politics was your thing."
Forge brightened up. "It is. I'm totally hyped about it. I just wish we could have taken the Blackbird, you know? After flying at Mach Four, commercial air just seems like a downer, you know?"
"The blackbird is not a toy." Jubilee replied in a mock-serious impersonation of Scott Summers. "Besides, can you think of the explanations we'd have to make as to why we've got a military style plane when we're just meant to be a school?"
She pulled Forge out of the way as a man with a briefcase came barreling by at what seemed excessive speed. Jubilee shook her head. "I swear, something about airports just makes people complete nuts. I wonder if they put stuff in the water or somethin'."
With a nod, Forge stopped by the baggage carousel, looking at the other students straggling towards the baggage claim area, herded by the chaperones. "No kidding. Did you see Mister Marko's rules for the field trip? 'No unauthorized setting of anything on fire. No one is going to authorize any fire, period. There will be no games of Protest the Foreign Infidels. Despite Mr. al-Rashid's insistence, Miss Munroe is not a Foreign Infidel." He had to crack a smile. "Really, this is going to be fun. I mean, there's so much potential here"
"Yeah. Potential for trouble." Jubilee replied, lining up at the carousel. Her baggage was neon-yellow, it shouldn't be hard to miss. "Getting all these people in one place? Would only take one idiot to start something."
Forge's enthusiasm was good, and Jubilee didn't want to step on it but she had never put much faith in human nature when it came to not being dipshits.
Shrugging, Forge reached out to lift Jubilee's neon-yellow suitcase off the rotating carousel and place it behind him. "That's why we brought so many 'chaperones', I'll bet." He nodded to Jubilee's suitcase thoughtfully. "I'll bet dinner that you've got gear in there that's not exactly casual mall-hopping wear, if you catch my drift. Professor Xavier's a smart man, I'm sure Mr. Summers and everyone have all the eventualities covered. But still," he shrugged.
"It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye, right?"
~*~
Nathan is sizing up the crowd and not liking what he sees. He and Wanda agree that it would be good to get out of the airport and to the hotel, even before Marie-Ange shows up with her 'my precognition is pinging me' face on.
Most of the kids, since they were in Seattle for a grand three nights, had stuck to carry-on luggage. A few of the heavier packers had checked baggage, however, and as Nathan waited for them to retrieve their bags, he studied the activity in the airport, frowning.
I'm not sure I like this... He'd expected the Seattle airport to be a busy place today, but it was the composition of the crowd that concerned him. He let his mind drift across the crowd, cataloguing what he found. A group of junior FoH handing out pamphlets over there, a half-dozen members of one of the more militant pro-mutant groups getting off a place from Louisiana over there...
Wanda frowned as she helped bustle the students towards the exit. Turning, she reached out mentally. #Nathan? I know airports are supposed to be crowded but...is there some holiday I've missed or something? This seems...#
She dodged a group as they pushed around her and she caught a glimpse of an FoH pamphlet as it was shoved into her hands. Staring at it and then at Nathan, an eyebrow rose. #Is this bad?#
#We expected lots of attendees at this little shindig,# Nathan sent back darkly, seeing through her eyes what she had in her hands. #Some of the attendees represented in this airport are a little... questionable, though. And not just the FoH... there's a group of teenagers over by the coffee shop calling themselves disciples of your father, for example.#
At that, Wanda rolled her eyes. #This could get very ugly, very quickly. The faster we get ours out of here the happier I'll be.# Edging her way through the crowd, she eventually made her way to his side and took in the scene. "It's like a mass of people. Or, well, a mess of people, anyway."
"I'm having a hell of a time keeping track of ours," Nathan said dourly. "I swear, if any of them get any bright ideas about holding debates with the FoH in the airport, I'm dragging them out of here by the ear." He shook his head in amazement, though, as he scanned a little further. "This is international, Wanda. These aren't just American activist groups coming in, not by a long shot."
"I thought I was recognizing more languages than I normally would be," she responded, frowning. "And I cannot track them with 'strings', it does not work like that. Well, not in most cases, anyway." Pietro's string was...different, but that probably came from being twins.
"You know," Nathan said dryly, "either this is going to be a fabulous education in global political culture for the kids, or this is going to be a monumental clusterfuck for everyone. I'm hoping for the former, but I'm not a natural optimist."
"So, I'm assuming if I tell you to "turn that frown upside down", you'll do something horrid to me, correct?"
"Quite possibly," was the reply, with what was more a baring of teeth than a smile, even if there was a certain amount of wry good humor behind it.
"Well, darn, there goes my conversation piece." Turning, Wanda peered through--and sometimes over--the crowd. "Are all of ours off, yet?"
"Trust me, I would not have left the plane without making sure they all did. I'm well-aware that my track record of field trips is not so good."
The crowd was a lot larger than she'd expected. On top of Marie-Ange's dislike of being caught off-guard, it made getting Doug through the airport that much more difficult. It was harder than usual to keep track of her classmates too. Normally, it was as simple as keeping an eye open for Clarice's distinctive shade of hair - but purple, and blue, and more lurid color choices were in wide display, from mutants and supporters alike.
After a weave around a group of highly excited chattering protesters, and then taking a wide berth around the Junior FOH members, to avoid Doug deciding that now was a good time to engage in conversation, Marie-Ange finally managed to find -someone- she recognized. And thank heaven, it was Nathan and Ms. Maximoff. Nice, sensible adults.
Coming up next to them, she nudged Doug on the shoulder to indicate that they were stopping, and waved tiredly.
"Angie," Nathan said, and eyed Doug measuringly. Oh, yes, getting certain people out of the airport soonish would be good. "I've been telling people to congregate in front of the gift shop once they've finished getting their bags and hitting the washrooms and mainlining coffee and all."
"I have never seen that many people make a beeline to Starbucks," Wanda said, dryly, having nearly gotten run over by the coffee lovers. "I would ask how you two are holding up but it seems to me the faster we hit the hotel, the better we will be."
Oh, coffee. She should have gotten some coffee. It might have eased the headache. Or she could have given it to Doug and listened to his happy coffee noises. "Yes, but here is where you are, and I do not have to listen to anyone's complaints when the Starbucks runs out. Which they will." The lines were insane, she'd noticed, and the poor baristas looked like they wanted to just fall over. "And yes, leaving soon would make me very happy." Marie-Ange looked decidedly uneasy, more so than usual, even for such a large crowd."
Nathan frowned at Angie's expression. "What?" he asked warily, gazing down at her. "I know that look. Something's nagging at you."
Wanda gave them both a worried look. "When the precog looks off, there's trouble in the air." Big trouble, usually. Great.
"I just... do not like this crowd.' Marie-Ange answered, shaking her head. "I could not tell you why though. I just have an uneasy feeling." She glanced over at Doug, who was blissfully off in iPod-land, music loud enough that she could just hear it, despite his earphones being in. "I cannot put a finger on anything specific. I tried during landing, and I could not figure out why I was anxious.."
Nathan bit his lip to stifle the noise of frustration that was trying very hard to escape. Great. Just great. He should have known. Why would any field trip of his go smoothly, after all? "Well," he said, trying to sound reassuring, "we should probably focus on getting everyone together and out of here, and reassess at the hotel, then."
"Telepathic shout to get them to rejoin?" Wanda suggested, trying not to loose some of them out of her sight but it was getting harder and harder to do. "I'd be tempted to turn on my powers but in here?" She snorted. "Would not do us a lick of good."
"There are too many people here..." Marie-Ange said quietly. "I am not sure how anyone can focus on any one thing... " She frowned and tried to look through the crowd. "If anything happens, I do not think it will be here. I hope.."
"More comfortable places to continue this discussion and examine that feeling than the airport," Nathan said briskly, and closed his eyes. It was an adaptation of the telepathic switchboard, the partial mind-net he'd been maintaining with the students and other chaperones. #EVERYONE OVER TO THE STARBUCKS! NOW!# Angie and Wanda both proceeded to wince at him, and he offered them a brief, apologetic smile. "Sorry. Shall we go?"
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