New Mutants: Here Comes Tomorrow - Friday afternoon

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In the Adirondacks, the newly-formed New Mutants face their first challenge - finding the campsite.



"All right, maggots! This is your first day in Hell!" Cain's face was red as he barked at the group of young girls in their windbreakers. With one large arm, he gestured past the group to the pine-strewn hills around them. "Hell for you guys, anyway. Me and Gary plan on getting some good fishing in. Okay, you all have a map. Unless you are a brain-dead retard and left your map in the car or used it to roll cigarettes - I am looking at you, Temple! - you will look at your map and see that we are on Sparrow's Fall Trail. Ignore the fruity fairy granola name and orient your maps north. NORTH! That's up towards Canada. THAT way!" He pointed with a finger. "You will see on your maps that there is a creek one half mile from here. You are to pair up and get across it. And before one of you little wiseasses asks why, because that's where your tents, food, sleeping bags, mosquito gear, and dry clothes are."

He looked over at where Garrison was leaning against the large pickup truck. "Gary and I will drive there and start dinner. You want some warm food, make it there before it gets cold. Each team's got a compass and some supplies in those bags. Go."

Cess wondered if she looked half as dazed as she felt. Cowering behind the nearest boulder seemed like an appropriate response, but she was too afraid of Mr. Marko to even try it. There was a map in her hand, but while the colors were quite pretty, she wasn't sure which way it was supposed to be pointing. "Does anybody know how to read a map?" she asked in a tiny voice.

Karolina peered over Cessily's shoulder, looked around and shook her head. "If this was the Meatpacking District, no problem but I've never been anywhere like this. I usually rely on my phone's GPS." Not an option here and why the hell were they here anyway? And who let teachers talk like that to students? She was going to report this to Ashley as soon as she got some cell service. Her therapist would probably have a lot to say about it too. That thought made her perk up slightly. Maybe they'd finally see that it was time to let her come home!

Inez pulled the compass out of her belt pouch and turned, following the little needle. "North, yo. I bet we beat all your slow asses there. C'mon, Angel. Wanna bet we can even beat Marko and Candy-Kane there?"

"Well, at the very least if we get lost, we'll be the only ones with hot food," Angel remarked as she tightened her jacket arms around her waist. She might not need it for conventional reasons but it would make a handy ... something if something were to come up. Her logic was strong if confused. "So, strength, flames and good looks? Oh yeah, we're totally going to rock this on it's butt."

Yvette glanced over at Tatiana, a very slight smile playing across her face. She had a feeling they were going to do better at this than anyone thought they might. "Are you ready, yes?" she asked the taller girl. The yellow and black uniform (made from Forge's special cloth) clashed horribly with her red skin. "It is too bad that Callie was sick and could not be coming. She would like all the plants here, I am thinking."

"Yeah, I'm ready." She honestly could say that she'd lost her mind - she didn't camp. Not much, anyway. But still, she forced a smile as she looked at Yvette. For all that the girl wasn't that much younger then she was, she just seemed that way. "She could have my share, anyway." Plants? Not her favorite, but she was just constantly looking around to make sure there weren't animals.

One would have to be being very charitable to call the look on Noriko's face sullen. Sullen didn't even cover it. Sullen had been passed about five minutes after she'd heard about this stupid trip. By now she was into epic levels of hatred for, really, everyone, but particularly Marko, Kane and Xavier. And her parents. And her classmates. She stood silently, not responding to Marko's instructions or the conversation going on around her, hating everyone.

About four seconds after getting out of the truck, Catseye had shifted into cat form, leaving her uniform in a heap on the floor of the woods and diving into a pile of leaves. She pounced happily for several minutes, paying attention with only half a mind to what first Cain and then her classmates were saying. Pair up and get across the creek. That didn't seem hard at all for a cat. Except she wasn't supposed to be in cat form when she took part in the team exercises, because apparently communication with her teammate was only possible in human form. So she reluctantly ended her game of pouncing on imagined prey underneath the fallen leaves and shifted back into human form, picking up her uniform with her tail and holding the clothes as far away from herself as possible. "Catseye doesn't need to read the map," she said cheerfully. "Catseye and ShockyGirl will beat everyone else to camp because Catseye will use her hunting skills!"


Arriving, the group faces their second challenge - tents.




Garrison and Cain were sitting in folding chairs, relaxing around a small fire off to one side of the campsite. It was a circular meadow, just past the creek, and their various pieces of equipment and tents were arranged in five piles in a rough circle. As the girls finally straggled in, Garrison put down his cup of coffee and waved them over.

"Glad you could all join us for dinner. We took the time to unload all your gear, which, I should point out, is about the last bit of help for a while from Mr. Marko and I. There's two things you need to set up a camp; tents and a fire. All of the tents are two person tents, and appropriately you need two people working together to actually put them up. Yvette, your tent has been made out of the same material as your suit, so as long as you're careful, you should have any trouble with it. Once you've got your tents up, you'll need to build a firepit in the middle, safely, because you'll need to keep it going until we break camp. Angel, you're in charge of finding firewood. Get some people to help you, while the rest of you work out how to get the fire started." Kane looked up into the sky and smiled. "Oh, in case any of you'd prefer to sleep under the stars tonight, forecast is calling for rain, so I'd get those tents up. Have fun."

"Uh, I'm assuming that using me as a firestarter is out, then," Angel said, knowing it really wasn't a question at that point. "Right, to me my minions!"

"You might want to be making the tent first, yes?" Yvette pointed out, combing dead leaves out of the spikes of her hair with her fingers. "Once there is the place to be sleeping, I can help with the wood."

Angel's arms dropped slightly as she squinted. "What, no minions right now? Blast. Ah, well, tent first, fire second." She eyed the pile of various tents with some trepidation. While she was rather enjoying all of this, she'd never actually gone real camping before (sleeping behind the mansion did not count). Her parents jobs had kept them in cities (or away on assignments and she'd been stuck in the city) and even if it hadn't, her dad's knee injury kept him from tromping around the wilderness. "Tell me those things are labeled..."

"Label is not very help," Nori muttered, scowling at the piles of things which were supposedly tents. Tents. They were sleeping out here. Why the hell did she even have to be on this idiotic trip. After the hike up here she was seriously contemplating waiting until the impending rain thoroughly soaked the camp site and then blowing up a tree.

"Catseye will help with the wood too! And Catseye will read the labels for ShockyGirl if ShockyGirl will help with the pieces. Catseye's tail will help too!"

Noriko's sigh was audible, her semi-good mood from when it was just the two of them having clearly vanished upon entering the clearing and being confronted with Marko and Kane again, but she nodded at Catseye and moved to join the purple haired cat-girl at the tent piles.

Cess tried to sort through the parts of the tent. "Which way is up on these things?" she asked.

Karolina poked dubiously at the tent materials and then picked up the instructions. "I don't think it matters," she replied to Cess, "I think the point is that we don't belong out here and we should go find a hotel where it doesn't matter if we're in a tent or not."

It helped that the tent was of the same material as her bodysuit and gloves, but Yvette found herself looking at the pieces in confusion. It wasn't like she'd hadn't slept outside in the elements before and with her powers it wouldn't bother her as much as before, but the others would need somewhere to sleep. "If you can be reading the instructions, Tatiana, I can be helping with ours?" she suggested - the English on the labels was a bit more technical than she was used to.

"Sure," Tat said as she squinted. "Uh. Take two of piece three, and.... one of the long bars, and it goes in the middle." She looked at the pieces, and then back at the instructions. "It looks like we lay out the framing, mostly, and then put up the tent. There's little... channels, I guess, in the tent fabric that the pole things go into." She made a face. "Does that even make sense?"

Cess held up a pole and a part of the tent. "So this thingie goes in that thingie? And poof?" She started to feed the pole into the channel.

"I can seriously fly back to a town in under an hour. Really." The rainbow colors in her aura all flared out in cool tones--blue, green, lavender. She tugged her sweatshirt around herself, tightening it against her frame. "This is so dumb. What's it going to prove? We should leave these woods to the creatures that actually live here and not torture them by sticking hooks in their flesh and half-suffocating them." Clearly she was going to be entirely useless to Cessily.

Yvette, in the meantime, was industriously putting poles together for Tatiana to feed through the channels. "I think it is fun," she said mildly. "To be camping outside and hiking with my friends." It was good to be part of things, she was realising.

On the one hand, Noriko entirely agreed with Karolina that it was stupid that they were out here. On the other hand, it sounded like the specific reasons Karolina had? Were completely insane. Left with the choice to sulk with her whacko roommate or help the crazy cat-girl, there really was no choice.

Bouncing around happily, the purple-haired girl copied Yvette's actions, putting the poles together while holding the instructions with her tail. "Catseye thinks camping and hiking with friends is one of the VeryBestThings. ShockyGirl and Catseye are going to put this tent up before anyone else, Catseye bets."

"Totally not!" Inez called from across the small clearing, wiping her hands off and throwing an arm around Angel's shoulders. "We are tent-pitching masters, yo."

Kane took a moment to look over the tents that were slowly being set up. They were whining, complaining, and in at least one case, sulking furiously, but for a brief moment, most of them were actually working together. Sure, it might be under the threat of getting soaked with rain and eating trail mix for dinner in the cold, rather than having hot food and a warm fire, but it was a start. The Canadian turned back to his own fire.

Angel grinned up at Inez and nodded. "Whoever finishes last gets to do the dishes?" she suggested, spreading her hands wide. "Come on, I bet it'll be better than being a rotten egg or something." Despite the mud, and the scratches from where she'd fallen while she and Inez had headed to the site, she was in decent spirits. Besides, she liked beans (or food in general) and the faster they finished, the faster she could be shoveling yummy, mushy beans in her gob.

"Enjoy," Cain said, dipping a tin canteen cup into the pot of beans and continuing to attack it with a spoon. "Might want to hurry up, too. Supposed to be a storm coming in this weekend, no one wants to sleep in the mud, do they?"

Karolina watched the other girls for another moment and firmed up her shoulders. They might be willing to just roll over and do as they were told just because someone with so called authority told them to, but that was part of the problem with this whole world. Everyone just did as they were told and no one ever stopped to demand why. The colors of her aura heated as she flew over to the two men. (And who thought it was a good idea to send a couple of creepy old men out with a bunch of underage girls anyway?) She settled on the ground and folded her arms. "Why are we doing this?"

"Team... togetherness. Or something." Tat was standing on tiptoe, trying to hook the little loop onto a pole since the instructions didn't say to do it before, and now the tent was half up, and- She made an angry sound in her throat. "Or to make us all crazy. That seems to be working really well." She leaned up a litttttle further, and barely caught herself before she fell into the tent, but the hook was... well. Hooked.

"Hooray," Yvette said with a smile at her partner. She'd been hoping she wouldn't have to catch her before she pitched into the tent. She looked at Karolina. "The Professor is being worried we are not helping each other and we are being alone too much. So he is wanting to have the, how you say? Bonding?"

"Thanks, Princess Positive, but I was asking the people who dragged us out here and set up the torture test. Togetherness can be achieved without destroying the natural world. A yoga class would have been good. Or group therapy," Karolina snapped and faced Kane and Marko again, "Well?"

"~Oh, well, that's just a load of bullshit,~" Noriko muttered to herself as she helped Catseye wrestle with the tent, forgetting momentarily that Kane spoke Japanese. "~Team togetherness. These stupid girls may be classmates, but they're not my group.~"

Raising an eyebrow at Nori's mutterings, Catseye let out a cat-ish noise of confusion. "Did ShockyGirl say she wanted to try to reach the top part of the tent to put that thing onto the pole?" At her height she could probably reach it easily herself but she was detecting a note of annoyance in Nori's voice and felt like being petulant.

"Well, what?" Kane said, looking bored in the firelight. "Professor Xavier said you all needed a team building exercise and decided this would be best. Now, considering he's one of the leading minds in education and a hell of a lot smarter than anyone in this park, you can trust in his decision. Or, you can accept that your parents said that they trust him, and signed over your rights to his school for the duration of your tenure here. Regardless, you can either help get your tent up or sleep outdoors in the rain. Up to you."