Aureus Canis - Sunday Morning

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Jean, along with Marius and Kyle, travel down to North Carolina to retrieve Mariah. Unfortunately, Kyle gets too close.



Not quite the subterranean secret lair," Marius remarked, regarding the small, rather disappointingly normal cabin. "Pity. I rather fancied the experience of doing battle above a river of lava. Just for the dramatic atmosphere, you understand."

Jean was more than a little tense, and just arched an eyebrow at him. "You're an odd, odd boy."

"I second that, totally, and put it on the table for voting." Kyle said. "The Marius is odd, not the river of lava. I want nothing to do with rivers of lava, like, ever." He tilted his face towards the sky, and shut his eyes, trying to concentrate on sounds and scents. After a few seconds, he shrugged, shaking his head. "I got nothing. It smells like trees and dog poop."

Jean nodded. "Potentially good news. There's definitely someone inside. Let's go." Walking up and knocking seemed anticlimactic, but it left more options open than kicking the door in would do.

Mariah jumped about a foot at the sound and knocked over the bottle of water she'd just opened, splashing the floor and drenching herself. Too exhausted to even get upset, she rubbed her eyes and went to see who was at the door. The neighbors around here were few and far between and had never once visited. There were small glass windows on the top of the door but Mariah was too short to peek through them. She tugged the door open instead, most of her body hidden behind it. She didn't recognize any of the people standing on her porch. She frowned, "Hello? Can I help you?"

Marius eyed the girl curiously. She wasn't quite what he'd been expecting. She wasn't reading as a shapeshifter like Masque, not quite, but something he'd seen before -- almost. That bloke at the Conservatory . . . ah, right, Wyndham, that was it. He glanced at Jean and nodded infinitesimally.

Jean's eyes had to track down and she was more than a little surprised at the girl standing there. She... did not seem like a threat. "Good afternoon Miss...? I do hope you can help us, yes. May we come in?"

This may have been North Carolina but Mariah was from New York City and there was no way in hell she was letting anyone inside. She pushed her glasses back on her nose more firmly. "Um...what's this about?" One hand checked her pocket for her key and then locked the door so all she had to do was pull it shut. Cautiously, she edged around the jamb and stepped out onto the porch.

Kyle had taken a step back, and now took one to the side, trying to see -or hear - around the door, hoping that while Dr. Grey and Marius were doing the talking, he could figure out if they were in the right place. Not that 'cabin in the middle of nowhere' had given them a lot of options, and this -was- a girl and she was about the right age, and he did smell dog. Sort of.

"We were hopin' you could assist us with a bit of a problem," Marius said brightly, his yellow eyes flicking to Kyle craning his neck and back to the girl again. Kyle wasn't being particularly subtle, but distraction Marius could do. "Or, perhaps, we you. Have you perhaps been involved in any, ah, accidents of late? That sort which, despite lackin' any actual illegality are nevertheless rather difficult to report due to their less than usual nature, that is."

Mariah stared, blinked, stared some more. "Huh?" She didn't think she was stupid but...that didn't make any sense at all.

Jean couldn't quite suppress a tight little smile at the girl's befuddlement; Marius had that effect on a lot of people. "I'm sorry," she said, "he's prone to somewhat flowery prose at times, but he's correct that we're hoping you can help us, and possibly we can help you. Has anything particularly strange happened to you lately - any sort of incidents you couldn't exactly bring up any officials?"

The fear that had been chased away by puzzlement returned full force. These were Jennie's friends. That meant... "Oh no. You're... No. There's nothing wrong. I'm great! Just great!" What she was in reality was about two seconds from bolting back inside and hiding under her bed until they went away.

"Shyeah, right." Kyle scoffed, before he could really stop himself. Despite knowing better. He covered his eyes with one hand and grunted. This was not even remotely going well. "Dude, it's fine, we know it wasn't on purpose, we just need you to turn her back into a person." Maybe she thought they were going to arrest her, Kyle thought. He'd have thought so.

"But I can't!" Mariah shrieked before thinking then slapped a hand over her mouth. Behind her, the door nosed open a bit and a small caramel papillion wriggled out, bounding onto the porch furiously yapping. "Whitney! No!"

The dog gave her the most adorable 'bitch please' possible and ran, heading for what the tiny blonde mind inside the tiny blonde dog identified as the most likely protector--the really tall hot guy. Mariah shrieked again and followed, hands stretched out after her.

Kyle lunged, to make a dive for the small dog. It should've been easy. It was a very very small dog, and he was a very fast human and he could catch his cat, and Shamu wasn't that much bigger then this dog. One tiny purse-dog shouldn't have been that hard to grab.

But somehow, he tripped. And it didn't feel like a trip at all, so much as falling through one of those pastry bags that Lorna used, and being squished out inside the skin of a baked potato, only without being a potato. Instead of getting an armful of cute itty dog, he got a face full of porch and found himself tangled up in his own pants.

Which made no sense, Kyle thought, trying to untangle himself as he rolled over onto his back. Those pants fit perfectly well and they certainly weren't so big that he could get both of his legs stuck down one leg of his pants.

That he was significantly smaller didn't occur to him until he was untangled from the pants, and attempting to swear loudly. Unfortunately, the fact that what was a over six foot tall teenaged boy was now a small brown fox meant that his stream of expletives came out as "Yip, Yip, Bark, Yip Yip."

Marius stared at the small animal struggling from the pool of Kyle's clothing as the papillion voiced a series of truly piercing yips.

"Well," the Australian said, "that's a bit off."

"You prove that you have a flair for understatement as well at the oddest times," Jean said. The papillion seemed likely to make a break for it, given the boy she'd planned on hiding behind had turned into a fox, and Jean quickly collected the dog, whose mind was suspiciously not dog-like, telekinetically. "RIght, then," she said, turning back to the girl on the porch. "Now can we discuss helping each other with our respective canine problems?"

Mouth pouted and brow puzzled, Mariah just sort of collapsed back against the cabin and pointed a bit indignantly at the fox. "That's not my fault. It's not," she insisted in a dull shocked tone, this all just a little bit too much to take. "I don't do foxes. Only dogs. You can't say that's my fault."

Marius spread his hands and tried very hard not to look to his left, where he had the distinct impression Kyle was biting his own tail. "Here, no worries. Bit of a powers malfunction, happens to the best of us." Glancing at the levitating papillion, he added, "Repeatedly, it seems."

Jean collected the small, yipping dog out of the air with an offhanded, "Whitney, was it? Regardless, quiet, please." Turning her attention back to the source of their trouble, she said, "Might be less malfunction and have more to do with some strange interaction with his mutation. We'd really need to do tests before I could say for sure, and that's hardly priority one. I take it you've not mastered dog into human yet?"

Mariah shook her head slowly, sniffling. "I've been trying and trying but nothing works. I don't even know how I did it in the first place." She was creeping slowly toward the door. "You're all mutants."

"Happily, yes. Hailing from a place which specializes in the care an' training thereof." Marius nodded to Jean. "For instance, the esteemed Dr. Grey-Summers here happens to be a teacher, an' I myself am a student. Kyle as well." He gave the yipping fox a somewhat dubious look. "Granted, with a bit less polish on the manners."

While the remaining-bipeds were having their brief conversation, Kyle had determined the nature of his smaller size and sudden quadriped nature, expressed his dismay at having a tail for the second time in his life by attempting to chew it off at the base, failed, and then caught the all too familiar sound of his name and a mildly disparaging comment.

It was only natural for him to trot over and begin gnawing on Marius' foot. Gently, of course, because transformed into one half of a Disney Movie was no excuse to draw blood on a friend.

Without even glancing down, Marius calmly lifted his foot out of the way. He shrugged at Mariah, knee still raised and balancing on one foot. "One becomes used to it, after a point."

Jean sighed. "And now that that is at least moderately cleared up, can we come in and discuss things. Or, better yet, would you be willing to come back to our school where Jennie is and we can work on getting her and Kyle and Whitney here back to normal." A spate of barking from within the house had her adding, "And that, whoever that is."

"Madison," Mariah said in a tiny voice. "Can't you just...fix them? Why do you need me?"

"Because it's your power that did this. We need to figure out how it works and how you can undo it." Jean's voice was sympathetic, and most of her desire to shake the girl had passed.

"No worries," Marius smiled as he gently shoved the snapping Kyle aside with the side of his foot, "against all logic an' standard rules of reality, this sort of thing happens with distressing frequency. For instance, last year Dr. Grey-Summers endured prom as a man."

The small dancer looked at Marius like he'd suddenly grown another head. "I'll just...go get Madison? And...my purse?" She gave them all extremely skeptical, somewhat scared looks. "Where are we going?"

"Westchester county - Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters," Jean said. "We can go as soon as you're ready."