xp_logs | Amanda and Medusa, Tuesday morning

Medusa and Amanda run into each other at Columbia, then grab a cup of coffee to talk about Prague, snow and respectability.

Medusa walked out of her class, shaking her head. It was very frustrating to her when it was obvious that some of her classmates had not prepared for the day, leading her to sit through a boring lecture of material that could easily have been picked up from reading the text. Seeing a familiar blonde, Medusa waved hesitantly. Amanda had been nice enough when she'd given Medusa a tour of the campus, but they hadn't really had much contact since.

For her part, Amanda was just finished a meeting with one of her 'supervisors' - she didn't take actual classes at Columbia due to the whole arse-backwards nature of her degree, but she still had work to turn in and languages to practice. And, apparently, lectures on the lack of either during the previous month to endure. As a flash of brilliant red caught her eye, she grinned. Medusa was an odd choice for a friendly face, but they'd got on all right when the other girl had first arrived, and Amanda quite liked Crystal, even with the inevitable confusion caused by the differences in background.

"Hey," she said as Medusa caught up with her. "Fancy meeting you here, coming out of class. Someone'd think we were students or something."

Medusa looked at her a little oddly until she realized that Amanda was joking. "Oh, I see. Indeed. Are your studies going well?"

Amanda wrinkled her nose a little. "When I have the time to study? Fine. But there's been a bit much of the world-hopping lately, so I've gotten a bit behind. Which my Mandarin teacher decided to point out for a good while. How about you? Settling in all right?"

"Yes, I am, though there is still a lot for me to learn about America." She smiled at the other girl. "On the other hand, I wonder if my professors even noticed my absence while I was in Prague. Class here is not what I expected it to be." Besides her individual tutoring with Nathan, Medusa didn't feel like she was learning all that much about the languages she was studying than she had known prior to her arrival.

"You did the private tutor thing back home, didn't you?" Amanda asked, sympathetically. "'S hard, getting used to the lecture hall sizes. Classes of twenty were bad enough, but fifty plus?" She glanced at her watch. "You got time for a coffee or something? I don't have to be back at work for a bit and I wouldn't mind hearing about Prague, if you're up for talking about it."

"Yes, it is quite a difference. It is also strange to me that some students appear to not desire to further their knowledge," Medusa said with a shrug. "And coffee sounds delightful. I have not had nearly enough of the quality kind recently. The substance that passed for coffee in Prague was more akin to motor oil."

"They're American?" Amanda suggested with a grin. "And there's a decent coffee place not far away - my old magic tutor put me onto it. He used to teach here, before he went off to become a rogue cult hunter." She began heading down the hall, towards the main doors. "I'm guessing Prague didn't have a lot of things." She snorted a little. "Like, you know, peace and quiet and a government that respects its citizens. I was considering coming to help when things blew up, only I didn't want to risk my mutant power acting up. I'm still working out how much it's effected by things like civil unrest. Bad enough some parts of Berlin gave me a headache."

Medusa merely smiled and nodded at Amanda's calm statement about her previous tutor's new career. She had heard and seen stranger. "Yes, that sounds like a good summary of Prague....though it is probably best you ended up staying away. It was not a good time to be there and there was unfortunately very little to be done without stirring up more trouble." As the girls stepped outside, Medusa's hair swayed forward to cover her ears and keep the chill away. She had practiced this trick often enough that it was barely noticeable to an outside observer and it served to keep her ears warm in the chilly air. "So cities give you headaches? I know Crystal told me that your power was absorbing energy from certain areas, but I did not know they could cause you pain."

"Must have been frustrating, being there and not being able to do much," Amanda observed, fishing her woolly hat out of her coat pocket and pulling it down over her ears. It was the same one Clarice had made for her, retrieved from the school's attic and the box of clothes she'd left behind last year. "I'm surprised Nate didn't go ahead any way, tho' I'm glad he didn't - he must be getting sensible in his old age." She smiled a little fondly as she said it. "The powers thing... I'm still working out the details, but Moira seems to think it's about disruption of energy flow. So somewhere where there's been a lot of damage, or a lot of negative energy, tends to get interpreted as a blockage of the energy. The bigger and more recent the damage, the worse it is, which is why San Diego made me feel off. I doubt I'd have gotten much from it intact, but it was such a mess over there, I couldn't avoid feeling it." She shrugged a little. "All part of basically manifesting this late - I'm learning all sorts of new things about how my power works, now it's doing what it's supposed to."

"That is rather unfortunate, but at least you are doing what you can to make up for lost time." Medusa would never fail to be surprised by people who wanted to live their lives as though they didn't have power. Abilities were something special, to be used and enjoyed, not ignored. "As for Nathan, I think he perhaps realized how important the reason we went to Prague in the first place was and did not want to jeopardize it with any other actions." She allowed a small, amused smile to play across her face. "Though from the stories I have heard about his behavior on previous ventures, perhaps I should give him some credit for learning sensibility."

"Yeah, I can guess what kinds of stories you've heard. I've been around for some of them, or helped fix him up after - I suppose you could say he was high-maintenance for a while there. Tho' it was usually in the cause of doing good." Amanda shrugged a little. "I'm glad he's learnt to tone it down. Means less time in medlab, at the least." She glanced at Medusa. "From what Angelo says, things got pretty hairy. Pun not intended," she added, grinning a little. "I'm glad everyone made it back in one piece."

Medusa smiled a little at Amanda's play on words, nodding in agreement. "It was unclear at first how things would play out...if they would let us leave that easily. Prague is a troubled place. I believe what happened in Smichov has set the on the road to change, but it's still up in the air where they take it from here. It was disturbing to see how quickly people went from friends to enemies." As she spoke, the edge of her lips had moved down until a slight frown creased her face.

Amanda thought of Margali, and what she'd done to Kurt. "Yeah, it is," she said, voice dropping a little sadly. "Doesn't take much even, sometimes." She shook herself a little. "Still, from the news from the UN, looks like it's changing things, like you said. Czechoslovakia's really in the shite 'cause of it."

Medusa didn't react to Amanda's casual use of cursing, though she would never understand or be able to do so herself. "I hope there will be change, otherwise I would wonder about the purpose of our venture." She smoothed an imaginary wrinkle on the front of her skirt, memories of the guards pointing guns at her rising unbidden to the surface of her mind.

"Sometimes it's hard to see the point of something straight away," Amanda replied, thinking of Tennessee. "But believe me, what you lot did, it wasn't pointless. Getting that information out... people had to know what was really going on in there." They reached the coffee shop, not far from Strange's old building. "Here we are."

"Thank you," Medusa said sincerely. It was a relief to finally hear someone say that they'd done a good job, not asking why they hadn't done more. Entering the coffee shop, Medusa blinked as her eyes adjusted to the dimmer light inside. Ordering an espresso, she walked down the cashier and handed the man her credit card. "Put hers on it too," she said softly. "My treat," she said to Amanda with a smile.

"Tea, thanks," Amanda told the counterhand. "English Breakfast, if you've got it." Nodding at Medusa, she stuffed her wallet back into her pocket. "Thanks for that," she said, accepting the offer with far more grace than she might have. Choosing a table, she pulled out a chair and started peeling off layers. "What's the weather like in Attilan right now?" she asked, curiously - she didn't know much about Medusa and Crystal's home country.

Medusa nodded in recognition of Amanda's words. "It's warmer than here," she replied as she set her coffee down on the table. "It is usually about 18 degrees now. Adjusting to the cold here is taking some effort," she said as she slipped out of her jacket, draping it carefully on the back of her chair before sitting down.

"England's not as cold as here, least not the bit I lived mostly. My first winter here was a bit of a shock. Still, snow's sort of fun, when you've got somewhere warm to go to." Amanda chuckled a little. "Especially when you get to throw it at people."

The idea of throwing snow at people was pretty foreign to Medusa, but she dismissed it as some strange American custom. "I have enjoyed the snow when we've gone skiing, though it'll be strange for it to be around constantly. When did you move from England?" Medusa blew gently on her coffee and then drank it.

Having let her tea steep enough, Amanda fished out the teabag and dumped it on the saucer, glad this place didn't put the milk in for her. Milk and teabags were ew. "Bloody hell, must be going on three years ago now. Four, next January. I got sent to the school to get me out of trouble - didn't work at first, but I've always been a bit too stubborn for my own good." She grinned wryly.

"A bit of stubbornness can be beneficial, as long as you do not let it rule your life," Medusa said as she set her cup down. "And sometimes it can just take longer for certain people to hear a message."

"I got there, in the end. I'm downright respectable these days, at least when I remember not to swear on the phone to a client." Amanda wrinkled her nose a little, sounding not entirely pleased about her respectability. "But we're doing good work at Snow Valley. It's worth knocking off the rough edges."

Medusa shrugged slightly. "Respectability is something to be proud of, in my opinion," she said, laying one well manicured hand on the table. "As it sounds like you are finding, it allows you do good deeds. Not that, of course, certain types of actions do not require a, ah, certain amount of objectionable behavior."

Raising her eyebrow as she drank from her teacup, Amanda was inwardly amused at the euphemism. 'Oh, if you only knew how objectionable we can be...' "Oh, I'm not denying it's got it uses - I get a lot more done by being nice and polite than I ever did being an obnoxious punk brat. But you're right - sometimes there are times you need to set aside the manners and be as brash and annoying as you can be. Even without violence, it gets things done."

"It can," Medusa said. "Though I believe that people often do not fully explore their options before resorting to losing their manners." At the sound of the door opening, her gaze drifted across the room, taking in the crowd of Columbia students and her almost ever present bodyguard before returning to Amanda. "Were there any other questions you had about Prague?"

Amanda thought about it as she sipped at her tea some more. "Is there much word back yet on how the aid agencies are getting in?" she asked. "I did what research I could on the Euro versions, but there wasn't a lot of information getting in or out, even after the riots eased off."

"Now? The agencies are having no trouble entering Smichov. Of course, it should have been that way from the beginning." Medusa frowned slightly. "And the flow of information should have been steadily increasing since the riot. Though if you were checking immediately after, I believe there was still some hesitation about what to allow out."

The Brit nodded. "It was during the riots, yeah, so things were pretty locked down. 'S good it's getting better, tho'. And that serving the UN gave Czechoslovakia had to help, tho' I'm not sure sanctions in an-already buggered up country is going to do more harm than good. But they have to know, I s'pose." She shrugged a little and grinned. "Politics can be bloody frustrating. Sometimes I prefer that more direct method."

"Politics are like a dance. There is a form, but the way you do it can be an art." Medusa smiled at the other girl. "And as Minister Barath showed, even politics can have a rather direct feeling of success at times."