LOGs: Terp Attack

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Clarice and Marie's wild Homecoming Weekend starts off innocently enough, cute frat boys, a parade...and the MONSTERs.



Marie had a huge smile on her face as she and Clarice walked across campus. The two girls had just watched the Homecoming Parade and it had been a lot more fun than she had thought it would be. "If you had told me there would be so many cute boys there, Ah wouldn't have given you as a hard a time for dragging me out at the crack of dawn for a parade." Truth be told, Marie had already been awake, as she was most mornings, but she'd still been feeling antisocial. Clarice, on the other hand, had cheerfully insisted that she attend despite her protests and excuses.

After being up all night building the damn float, there was no way that Clarice was going to miss the parade. Hyped up on hot chocolate and red bull (a truly hideous combination), a parade was just what was needed to calm her down enough to sleep. And the guy watching wasn't bad either, especially when one of the upperclassmen dorms known for being antisocial within residential life decided to moon the float judges. They hadn't won the float contest although Clarice thought that they should have won the cute ass contest.

Stifling a yawn, Marie turned to ask Clarice if they could go somewhere besides the dining hall for breakfast when she did a double take. "Um...not to freak you out or anything, but doesn't that pair look like their following us?" She recognized the two from the parade...in fact every time she and Clarice had stopped to look at a float, so had the pair. Marie hadn't thought too much of it in the morning, but the guy and girl following them were even more obvious now.

Clarice turned, groaning when she saw Helen and a friend of hers. "Joy & rapture. It's my cult. Ignore them and maybe they'll get a life," this was really beginning to get on her nerves.

"Your cult?" Marie asked, raising an eyebrow. "Oh!" she said as the realization hit. "Those kids who keep trying to get you to join their club?" She glanced at them again, twirling a white piece of hair around her gloved hand. "They don't look so bad."

Art blew a puff of smoke in the air and flicked some ash off his cigarette. He wanted to quit, really, but it's oh so good. Plus, it gives him the whole 'look at me, I'm cool and a rebel' look. Which he hoped would convince Clarice to at least listen to what they had to say. "I think they've seen us," he said to Helen. "We should say hi."

"Okay!" Mina grinned and shoved her hands in her pocket, picking up her pace as they headed towards the pair. "I hope she doesn't like, teleport away. Though that'd be so cool."

They were coming closer and there was no way that Clarice was going to run (or worse, teleport) away from a couple of mutant-wannabes. She had standards. "Just, try to ignore them, or something," Clarice counseled Marie, "They are mutant groupies. Total wannabes."

"You should be nice to them," Marie chided. "Better than having some F.O.H. crackheads harassing you." She looked over at Art and Mina, then smiled at Clarice. "They're kinda cute. Like your own little pep squad." Of course, Marie realized the situation wouldn't be quite so amusing if she was the subject of the group's focus, but from where she stood, the whole thing was hilarious.

In his mind, Art described his motion as strutting. Cool and calm and confident. But others would probably see it as a confused, hesitant shuffle. Even walking up to the president of the university that one time didn't disturb him as much as this. But here she was, the key to all of MONSTER's success. If only she'd listen to them. Really listen. "Hey, Clarice," he said, waving his free hand.

"Hey," she replied blandly doing everything she could to project completely disinterest in him and everything he was about. She was not encouraging him, no. Absolutely not.

"Hi Clarice!" Mina exclaimed, her face slightly pink all over. This was not, to her chagrin, a sign of any impending mutant-ness, but rather a sunburn from the day she had sat outside all day trying to absorb the sun's rays in order to do something 'cool' with them. "And Clarice's friend," she added, raising her hand and waving at Marie. "How're you guys liking the parade? Isn't it awesome?"

"Hey," Marie said with a warm smile despite Clarice's warning. She had been raised to be polite and just because she wasn't talking to her parents didn't mean she couldn't still use the manners they had taught her. "It was a lot of fun. Ah hadn't ever been to anything like it before. Are y'all going to the game later?"

"Oh, definitely," Art lied. Hopefully Adrian had gotten him a ticket. It was definitely too late to get one now. "Wouldn't miss it. We're gonna kick, uh, their asses, right?" Never mind that he didn't know who "their" was. "We're all gonna be there. Adrian, Helen, Mina and me. We'll see you there?"

"Yeah, we'll be there," hopefully they wouldn't be seeing each other. That was the last thing Clarice wanted, to cheer on her football team with the freaks documenting every motion and trying to copy it. It was bizarre and more than a little annoying.

"Cool!" Mina said with a big grin. "You guys can sit with us, if you want. Oh! I'll save you guys a seat, okay?"

Marie took one look at the tortured expression on Clarice's face and decided to take pity on her friend. "Thanks for the offer, but y'all don't have to do that. Maybe we'll see around, yeah? It was nice to meet ya." With a friendly wave, she followed Clarice in the direction of the dorm.

Homecoming isn't complete without the Football Game. Win, lose, it's all the same at Univeristy of Maryland - they'll find any reason to go at it. And the girls find that the MONSTERs have a use!



Marie adjusted her gloves carefully, looking around the sea of red and black in the stadium nervously. She had been careful to fully cover her skin in anticipation of the crowd at the game, but she was still somewhat apprehensive. It wasn't quite cool enough to warrant gloves, so she'd gotten a few odd looks, but people's attention was generally quickly turned to the purple girl beside her. She glanced down at the little red towel someone had shoved into her hand when the two girls had walked across campus. "Remind me why we're at a football game Clarice?" she teased, hoping that her anxiety would disappear with the distraction.

"Dude, it's homecoming!" Clarice wasn't much of a football fan, but she loved the halftime show, "And besides, when else could I wear my oh-so-clashing black and red Terp sweatshirt? Better red and black than damn bumblebees anyways."

"It's not so bad," Marie said with a grin. "Makes you look all abstract art like." She watched the band line up into formation for the pre-game show, before her eyes flicked over to the cheerleaders. She was about to comment to Clarice on the skankiness of both side's outfits when one of the NCState girls caught her eye. "Whoa."

"Wha?" Clarice followed Marie's gaze to a very mutant cheerleader, "I see your whoa and raise you a 'what the hell'."

"Ah'm just surprised...it's great." She watched the pink haired girl flutter a pair of delicate wings as she held a Wolfpack sign high above her head. She glanced around the crowd. A few other people had noticed and were staring, but most people seemed to not be caring too much. "Except that for some reason it makes me nervous. This hasn't been the best year for mutants, y' know?"

Shrugging, Clarice went back to watching the band set up, the drumline was cool to watch, "We're not wine, Marie. It's never a good year. We deal, we go on. And we relax by enjoying the halftime show. Everything will be fine," she hoped.

----

Marie had been surprised to find herself getting into the game. There was less than a minute left in the game and the Terps were down by three points on the 15 yard line. The funny man in the cape on the field was yelling at the students to cheer on their team. "It's a key play! Get your keys out!" The entire student body seemed to hold their breath as the team surged forward. NC State's defenders couldn't keep up and the crowd erupted into cheers as the Terps scored a touchdown.

There were 30 seconds left in the game as Maryland kicked off to NC State. The students around the girls were already congratulating each other on the win their team had pulled off, a surprise victory for the Terps, when the play restarted. Apparently, the Terps on the field had also thought this game was already a sure thing as they didn't quite move fast enough to tackle the player who caught the ball. He started running down the field, 10 yards, 20, 30, 40...with no tackle to stop his progress. As the clock went to zero, the NC State player dove into the end zone.

----

Meanwhile, on the other side of the field...

"Can you believe this shit?" Rod said to his friend Bill, both of them feeling absolutely no pain. Bill took a swig from the bottle of Jack Daniels before responding. "Fuckin' not right, man. You see the litle fairies on the sidelines? Maybe it's the booze, but ain't one of them purple?"

Rod strained his eyes - having a better tolerance for liquor than his friend - and blinked. "Think you might be right, man. Ya know, couple of those throws little a little ... helped, ya know?"

-----

Angry mutterings were circulating through the entire stadium and Marie shifted nervously from one foot to another. The crowd hadn't started to file out of the stadium and everywhere she looked she saw angry faces. "Are they always like this when the lose?" she whispered to Clarice.

"Yeah," Clarice whispered back, "It's even worse when we win though." The University of Maryland had a tradition of rioting and they believed in upholding tradition. It was bad when they lost, but it was almost always worse when they won.

"Let's get out of here then. Ah'm not really in a rioting state of mind, y' know?" Marie said as she grabbed Clarice's arm and headed up the stairs. She wasn't sure if it was her imagination, but she felt like the entire crowd was staring at them and she thought she heard a few whispers of "Damn muties." Stop being so paranoid. Still, the sooner the girls were back in Clarice's dormroom, the better she would feel.

The crowd was getting uglier on both sides of things. Finally, inevitably, someone threw the first punch. At first, it was a localized knot of people taking swings at each other, but the ugly mood swept both sides of the crowd like wildfire, and over the sounds of violence and pain one thing could be heard.

"MUTIE!"

"Fuck!" Clarice yelled, freezing in place in a panic causing people to collide into her. Teleporting in a crowd was not a good idea unless she wanted to take random bits of other people with her and she was very obvious. They had to get out of there, but there was no way out of the mob that she could see. "Marie!" she grabbed Marie's wrist tightly, holding on. Getting separated would be worse than being together.

Helen wasn't a particular fan of football, but school spirit was important. And the MONSTER group had had the brilliant idea of handing out flyers for their cause among their fellow spectators during half-time. Well, it had seemed like a brilliant idea. As the riot broke out, it was becoming less so. "Let's get out of here," she suggested to Adrian, who was sitting next to her, right at the moment she heard a familiar voice utter a very familiar curse word. Helen's head whipped around and she spotted Clarice, caught up in the middle of a very ugly crowd.

Marie broke away from Clarice for an instant to pull her sleeves down further, making sure they overlapped with her gloves as the crowd seemed to press in around them. They were turning from a milling group of angry students to a mob with a purpose, and she didn't much like where they were focusing their attention. She cast a glance upwards at the blue sky, then shook her head. A display of her powers would probably only serve to enrage the crowd. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a flash and quickly shifted to stand in front of Clarice, staring in disbelief at the pack of batteries that hit her square in the chest.

Rod saw the perfect little attack of opportunity - a tall skinny little fucker with beady eyes and spindly fingers. Growling, he pushed his way through the crowd and took a massive swing at the slender man. "MUTIE!" he yelled as he attacked, and this seemed to galvanize the crowd around him.

"What the fuck is wrong with people?" asked Art rhetorically, trying to shove aside half a dozen drunk students away from him so he could get up. A wild punch hit him smack in the ear, and he just barely avoided collpasing onto the bleachers to get stampeded by the crowd.

"Guys!" Mina shouted, hunching her shoulders and slipping away from a knot of angrily-tussling students. "We've got to help Clarice! Look!" She pointed wildly down the bleachers, where the crowd was quickly converging towards the spot where Marie and Clarice were standing. She grabbed at Art's wrist, trying to pull him up as she gesticulated towards the purple girl. "C'mon, hurry!"

Helen grabbed Art's other wrist and the two girls hauled him upright. "We've got to get down there!" Helen cried, looking wildly around. "C'mon, follow me!" She started shoving her way through the crowd, using her solid size to her advantage, purple dyed hair acting like a beacon for the others.

Riots have an ebb and a flow all their own, especially ones with multiple skirmishes. The innocents inside want to get out, the belligerants want to do some damage, and the people caught in-between are trying to protect themselves. An ebb in the riot left the way to Clarice and Marie free, and the two girls and Art took advantage of it as best they could. Art stumbled along, propelled more by the two girls than his own two feet, face slack at the horror of what was going around all around him. He always felt bad after getting his own ass kicked by the bigots around campus, but now he felt like he just wanted to curl into a ball and let the world pass him by.

Marie did the best she could to block the worst of the blows from hitting Clarice, but there were so many people and all the energy of the crowd was focused on the two girls. "That way!" she cried out to Clarice, grabbing the purple girl's arm and pulling her through a gap in the crowd. The pair came to a surprised halt as they almost ran into the M.O.N.S.T.E.R. members.

Art didn't waste any time. Freeing himself of Mina and Helen, he grabbed Marie's arm and led her through the crowd that was descending onto the field, and out the stadium. "FBI was right when they said CP is the most dangerous campus in the country," he muttered loudly enough for everyone to hear.

"Are you all right?" Helen asked Clarice anxiously as she propelled herself to the teleporter's side, anxiously checking for injuries. "We'll get you out of here, just hang onto me. We'll do the human shield thing, y'know? It works for protests all the time."

"You take front, I'll take back," Mina said, jostling a little as someone shoved into her. "Sorry," she added with a grimace, stepping as best she could behind Clarice and spreading her arms out to either side. "Okay, let's go, and step on it!"

This was embarassing. Superpowered X-Men caught in a post-football game mod unable to safely use their powers and being saved by mutant-wannabes. Clarice vowed never to say a word of this to anyone at Xavier's. Ever. "Thanks, guys," she said, actually meaning it. Shw was surprised, but she couldn't decide if it was because she meant her thanks or because she hadn't expected the MONSTERs to actually do something like this. It changed things. "I'm fine, really."

Sirens could be heard approaching Byrd Stadium, so Art led them acroos the street to Hagerstown Hall. "I'd say that was exciting, but that'd be a lie," he admitted, fighting the sudden desire to calm his nerves with nicotene.

"Ah, uh, thanks," Marie said blushing. She looked around at the four beaming faces and wondered how she would ever live this down.

"No problem," Helen said. Now the adrenaline was wearing off, she was feeling a little shaky, but exhilerated. "I, um, I'm just glad everyone's okay. That could have gotten a lot uglier than it did." Suddenly confronted by a Clarice who wasn't rushing off or spouting bad-tempered quotes at her, she wan't sure what to say.

Mina didn't seem to have that problem, however. "Whew! That was crazy all right. Hey, Clarice, y'know, it'd be really cool if you wanted to hang out sometime... I mean, we did just sort of bond there in the whole mob-thing. Our meetings are really cool, and if we get the budget approved we might even have pizza!" The blonde grinned, wondering if 'navigating out of a mob of angry people really fast' was a bona fide mutant power.

Being helped out of a mob in a non-violent way did score the MONSTERites some brownie points, but that didn't mean Clarice was all buddy-buddy. However, she did owe them, at least a little, "I'll come to one meeting. ONE," she stressed, "and if you have any useful ideas, I'll see about helping," why did she suddenly feel like they just gave her enough rope to hang herself? But hanging was better than stoning by a mob.

Embarrassed beyond words, Marie & Clarice vow never to discuss the weekends events.



The four M.O.N.S.T.E.R.ites had tried to talk the girls into grabbing a pizza with them, but the pair had begged off, using the excuse that being a mutant and out in the city probably wasn't the best idea at the moment. Marie breathed a huge sigh of relief as soon as the girls were safely in Clarice's room. "Ah can't believe that just happened," she said, shaking her head.

"I haven't had anything more than being called a few dirty names since the semester started," Clarice agreed. She would have been at the RA's door and up to the President of the Univerity if anything more had occured. "And now this!" she rummaged in the minifridge to see if they had any ice. She hadn't realized that she'd been hit and was bleeding a little from her forehead. How did she manage to miss that?!

"That's not the part Ah can't believe," Marie said as she peeled off her gloves and threw them onto the bed. "Maybe it's pessimistic, but rioting people targeting mutants isn't all that surprising ta me." She pulled a lighter, shorter pair of gloves out of her bag and slipped them on. "It's the how we got away part that has me going 'Huh?'" She turned a semi-serious face towards her purple friend. "You realize we will never live that down if people find out."

Clarice had taken a frozen dinner and was holding it to her head, just in case. She didn't think she was hurt and Marie wasn't freaking out over her, so it was really just a precaution. "I was trying to block that from my mind," she admitted ruefully. "And my agreement to go to one of their meetings."

Marie shook her head, her lips twitching upwards a little. "Ah still can't believe you agreed to that. Ah thought they were gonna split their faces open with those smiles." She frowned as she looked up at Clarice. "You ok?"

Examining her forehead in the mirror, Clarice realized she was overreacting. It was barely even a cut, probably someone's elbow or something, with only a hint of blood. She'd had worse fencing bruises than this thing, "I'm fine. Well, as fine as I can be roped into their insanit. You okay?," she paused to turn around, "It seemed like a good idea at the time?

"Yeah, Ah'm good," Marie answered. "Invulnerability really comes in handy an' all." Plopping down in a desk chair, she stretched her arms over her head. "And it really was the least you could do for them."

"Of course it is, but that's not the point!" Clarice flopped down on her bed, as well as she could flop on a loft bed, "The point is, we shall never speak of this! No one has to know!"

Marie floated up to Clarice's level and solemnly held out her pinkie, though her face was threatening to break out into a smile or a laugh. "I promise never to mention this to anyone. We were not there. It never happened."

"Go where? What happened?" she replied, locking pinkies. "Cross my heart and hope to die."