What I Want to Be when I Grow Up, by Jamie and Kitty

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Friday afternoon. Kitty experiments with making electronics go fzzt, Jamie helps, and then they start talking about changing the world.



Kitty had gone looking for Jamie but he wasn't in his room, wasn't in the rec room, wasn't with Doug or Artie or anyone else she could find. Finally she'd headed down to the labs to at least do some design work on the tests she wanted to run. Pushing open the door to the lab she finally spotted Jamie.

"Hey babe, what're you doing down here?"

Jamie grinned. "Well, besides lurking in places you're likely to be, I'm just kinda playing around." He indicated the tableful of precision-engineered debris. "Doc McCoy let me play around with one of his old inducers. I'm pretty sure I could build one now if I had the parts. How about you?"

Walking over she slid her arms around him, giving him a hug as she peered at the inducer. "Was just going to start getting ready to run some experiments. Was actually looking for you, wanted to see if you'd be my lab assistant."

Jamie took the opportunity to sneak in a kiss, then waggled his eyebrows. "Ooh. You gonna wear a lab coat? Yeah, that sounds fun." He slid the inducer bits neatly into a static-free Ziploc bag and turned back to face Kitty, curiosity in his eyes. "What kind of experiments?"

"You know how I told you there was something up with my laptop, right?" When he nodded, she continued. "Well, I was fighting with it, trying to get it to boot and nothing doing. Thought it was a power supply issue, but even changing out the battery is giving me nothing. I think I must have done something to it when I accidentally phased through it, and now I want to figure out what. So, um..." she paused, considering. "Well, I guess I need to do some experiments to see how I disrupted it. Or, well, how I disrupt things in general, if it is in general. And then, no idea. I'll make it up as I go." Kitty grinned.

"No skipping merrily through the server room, though, funny as that might be for ten seconds. I've got a calculator, though. Think it still works." He fished through the table drawers for a moment, and then triumphantly held up a rather battered American Express promotional calculator, decorated to look like one of their credit cards. "Never leave home without it. Good for any calculatorial needs as long as you only want to do basic math in less than ten digits."

Kitty laughed. "No, definitely no skipping through the server room. Would rather not have the doc kill me." She pulled out an old, battered graphing calculator as well as a tamagotchi she'd found in the back of her desk drawer. "Need to replace the battery, but I've got a couple theories which I needed different things for."

Setting the two down on the counter she moved across the room and started rumagging through the supply cases, looking for batteries. "Can you stick something in the calculator's memory? Anything'll work."

"42, then. Might as well mess around with important things." Jamie grinned and tapped buttons, then slid the calculator within Kitty's reach. "Over to you, gorgeous. Do I need to stand back?"

Kitty laughed. "Nah, nothing like that. Let's start with it off..." Saving the 'data' to the calculators (very small) memory, she shut it off, setting it back on the counter. She slid the batteries she'd found towards Jamie. "Can you swap these into the toy for me? And give the little guy a name. If I'm right, it may be the last thing it ever gets..."

Phasing out, she stuck her hand through the calculator, then pulled it back and phased in again. Pressing the button, she brought the calculator back to life.

"Well, there's your answer..." she said, poking at it and retrieving the stored memory. "42, just like it should be." Kitty sounded curious, considering the machine.

"Premeditated Tamagotchi murder. That's a hanging offense in kindergarten, you know." Jamie inserted the batteries, then paused before entering a name for the critter, watching Kitty and the calculator intently. "Huh. Try it again now it's on?"

Kitty nodded, setting the calculator down. "In theory," she muttered as she phased out, "this'll shut it down. And it'll either wipe the memory, or it'll kill the whole thing. I'm just not sure which." Shruging, she swiped her hand through the calculator and table, moving it quickly away. With a quite fzzt the caluclator died.

Phasing in, she picked it up and pressed the button. Nothing happened. "Well, that's one possible answer. Got any double As?"

"Dunno if that one was designed to have the batteries changed, and I think it takes watch batteries anyway . . ." Jamie thought for a moment, then fished through the drawers again, emerging a moment later with a watch battery and a grin. "Luckily the Doc is a packrat."

He managed to pry the back off the American Express calculator and switch in the new battery, to no effect. He poked a few buttons, then glanced over at Kitty with eyebrows raised. "The winner and still champion, Kitty Pryde, by knockout in the first round. Electrons fear your name."

"Hmm..." Kitty muttered, glancing at it. "Well, so there's good news, and there's bad news. The good news is, we don't have to keep going. If I can kill something that simple I can kill anything. The bad news is, I've got to be way more careful."

"Well, the other good news is that you don't kill regular wiring, or else Mr. Marko would be a lot grumpier than he is."

Kitty chuckled. "Yeah, there's a point. Ok, gimme the tamagotchi. Let's see what happens when I take it with me."

"One sec." Jamie fidgeted with it for a minute. "OK, Bob is depending on you."

"Bob?" Kitty raised her eyebrows and grinned. "Alright, Bob, here we go." Taking the toy in her hand she phased out, watching the screen for any change. "Nothing. Still going just fine." Phasing back in she set it down. "Interesting... Oh!" she suddenly said, laughing. "Duh. My watch!" Looking down at the digital on her wrist, she said, "I should have known that. So, it's got to be something about me when I'm phased, rather than something about phasing itself."

Jamie grinned. "Well, I didn't realize either. And yeah . . . wonder if it has anything to do with your body's electrical field doing funny things with the electricity in the gadgets?"

Kitty nodded. "Yeah, that's got to be. But... well, hmm. How do I test that." Hoping up onto the counter, she looked around the room, thinking to herself. "If the wiring doesn't go, I must not be actually disrupting the electric flow. We'd have noticed flickers in the light."

"And you'd think you'd get backsurge, or something, and fry yourself." Jamie blinked. "You don't think you could, do you? I mean, should we get you a surge protector?"

She nodded, then laughed. "Nah. If it were going to happen it would have. Which means, probably, what I'm doing isn't disrupting the electric flow, but rather the stored info. The memory of how it's supposed to work. So something like a lamp, which doesn't need to remember, doens't get affected, but something like this, she held up the dead calculator, goes all to hell."

"Or else it's a complexity thing. Anything with microchips, which are kinda flimsy anyway, and the lamp's just too clunky to notice what you're trying to do to it?"

"Yeah, could be." She nodded. "I mean, it's basically just two ways of saying the same thing. Either I'm disrupting the programing of the chip, or the power flow inside of it, both of which would shut it down. I'd lean towards the first, since it seems to be a permanent effect, but really, it wouldn't be that hard to blow something complex by just disrupting the power flow."

"Well, I was thinking maybe you're a very wimpy EMP, or something. Not that you're a wimp, of course, just short . . ." He grinned.

Kitty laughed. "Ninety-eight pound weakling, that's me. But either way it works, it does work. Or, at any rate, causes things to stop working. Which is obnoxious. Possibly also useful, but obnoxious."

"You've been phasing all over the place anyway and this is the first time it's happened, so it shouldn't be that huge a problem. Just another Nifty Thing Kitty Does."

Slipping off the counter she moved over to lean against the wall near Jamie. "Yeah, but... Well, yeah. Just have to remember not to phase through a car, or plane, or anything. Avoid going through computers..." She grinned faintly. "Once in three years really isn't that bad, right?"

"Nah." He slid over and put an arm around her shoulders. "Not a catastrophe, just a thing. Sucks about your laptop, though, it was a cute little machine."

Leaning into him, she sighed faintly. "Another casualty in the war against people who hate us. Frankly, I'd rather the laptop died than... well, anyone else."

Jamie tightened his half-hug, but looked down at Kitty a little uncertainly. "Actually . . . would it sound silly if I said I thought I had an idea about how to change the people-who-hate-us thing? I mean, in the long term?" He grinned sheepishly. "I'm having a hard time figuring out if I should actually tell anybody, because I haven't figured out how to bring up the subject other than 'I want to change the world when I grow up,' which sounds kinda arrogant."

"I don't know," Kitty said. "I'd say it sounds wonderful."

"Well, okay. It has to do with changing the way people think. On a really large scale. So I'm going to make TV shows, eventually--because, I mean, find me somebody under forty who hasn't ever said 'D'oh!' when they've screwed up--and even Paige slips into Buffyisms and she self-edits everything before she says it in case it comes out Kentucky." He grinned. "And could TV be more pervasive? It's like '1984.' Change how people talk and you're halfway to changing how they think, so I'm going to have very snappy dialogue and a mutant-friendly message. And I'm going to crash and burn within three episodes at least twelve times, and that doesn't even count how many times I die in the boardroom, but eventually people are going to listen, because I won't go away until they do and not even then." Jamie closed his mouth, having run out of breath, and shrugged. "I dunno if it'll work. But it was a thought."

Kitty's smile slowly began to widen. "It's like Marie-Ange's idea, the whole 'mutant underwear models', only more thought out." She paused for a second, then added, "It's definitely going to take a while, but... well, in our lifetime we've gone from the controversy of Ellen being gay to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It could work..."

"That's what I was thinking. I just need to . . . there's this whole list of things that need to happen first. Like college, I need to figure out how to major in making TV shows really well, because I don't think they actually offer that as a program. I have a whole list of things to do." He grinned. "And until I get a lot further down my list, I want to try to do stuff like demonstrations and marches and stuff. I need to talk to the Professor about that, for permission and to see if he can find people, because I don't have the cash to get all of Guido's friends out here."

"The Milliion Mutant March..." Kitty mused thoughtfully. "And the major you want is Communications. It's all about working in TV, film, and radio."

"That was one of the ones I was thinking about. Also Media Studies, and there's places that offer minors in creative writing, and I should probably take some business classes so I know how to talk producerese . . . I may need to find enough scholarships to go to two different colleges." He paused. "Y'know, it's kind of a weird feeling, knowing what I want to do with the rest of my life. Feels right, though."

"I'm glad..." Kitty smiled, hugging him. "And I think it's a great plan. Kind of like what I've been thinking about these days."

"Oh yeah?" He grinned and hugged back. "I showed you mine . . ."

"Well, I was kind of thinking that I'd like to be a, I don't know, a Mutant spokesperson, like Dr. McCoy, or like Dr. Grey was. I mean, genetics and biology isn't my field, but I like what little I have studied. It would be interesting, at least."

"You'd be good at that. You're very principled, and people can see that when you talk. And you won't back down even if a lot of people tell you you're wrong. And you'd look really good on TV, although I'm biased there."

Kitty chuckled. "Just a bit, yes. And I guess I'm principled..." Considering this, she cocked her head to the side. "Well, sometimes, maybe."

"A lot of the time. And when you believe something, you go full speed, and that's a big part of getting people to agree with you."

"Well, I can't argue with that." Kitty smiled, turning and kissing him softly. "I think it's a good plan you have. And I know you've got the follow through to make it work."

"See? And now I agree with you. Thanks." He grinned. "I think we make a good team, and we're going to need people to talk at the march. Even if it's only a Thirteen Mutant March If You Count All My Dupes right now."

"Well, you know you'd get most of the Mansion, right? Plus Guido and his friends, and, I don't know. There's got to be others out there. Alison Blaire fans, if no one else."

"That's a start. See, I told you we make a good team."

"You know," she said slowly, smiling, "I think I knew that already. Or, at any rate, I've had my suspicions..."

"Well, now." Jamie bent his head down to kiss her. "Where'd you get that idea, I wonder?"

Grinning she kissed him back. "No idea, really. Just this theory I've been working on."

"We should explore that theory. Scientific method, right? Always test your theories."

Kitty giggled. "Oh yes. Much experimentation is needed for a working hypothesis."

"No time to waste, then."

"Indeed. I say we get to it."