xp_logs | Kyle and Inez

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Inez is restless and smashing things in the woods. Kyle comes to check on her, and an idea or two are hatched.

With the weather finally getting warm, Kyle was spending as much time as possible outside. It let him keep an eye on the couple of kids who liked to spend time in the woods, and get his classwork done, without having to hide out in a unused room or avoid people when he needed to concentrate. Noise-reducing headphones only did so much - and they did nothing to reduce the chaotic mix of smells that came from the mansion's population.

He was halfway through a question-and-answer essay on the five types of learning when what he'd originally dismissed as random noises became more regular, and recognizable as tree trunks and large branches hitting each other, and the ground, and sometimes splintering.. The lack of any sort of burning or smoke smell meant he could rule out Angel or Shiro, and that there -was- noise meant it wasn't Yvette.

He made a quick stop to stash his laptop and bookbag in the treehouse before continuing on towards the sound of minor destruction, and as he got closer, the source was obvious. The occasional grunt identified the tree-attacker as female, and there was only one woman in the mansion with that kind of strength who didn't have access to the Danger Room. Kyle took the 'high road' as it were, approaching through the trees, and dropped down just as a tossed branch that was as thick as one of Kyle's legs went crashing into some low growing brush. "Yo. Trees pissing you off, or are they innocent bystanders?"

Inez just grunted as she picked up another fallen tree about the size of a telephone pole and snapped it across her knee like kindling. She turned around and casually tossed the broken halves into the woodline, brushing splinters off her gloves. "Yo back. Just blowing off some steam. Heard it's a bad thing to break the weight room and trees are just kinda like nature's punching bags, right?"

"Yeah, there's this total jerk of a groundskeeper and maintenance guy, he makes people help put the stuff they break back together." Kyle answered, grinning widely. "As long as they're dead trees or marked for removal, go to town." He pointed to one of the trees that had a white piece of masking tape on it with a X written in black marker. "Anything like that is sick, dying or overcrowding the new growth and needs to go and we just haven't gotten to it yet."

"Hey, I'm cool with that," Inez said, bouncing on her toes and adjusting the fingerless weightlifting gloves that Marko had given her when they'd started training. "I was just chucking around stuff that'd fallen. And yeah, I made sure no one else was in the way. I'm not dumb, you know."

"Dude, if I thought you were dumb, I wouldn't have dropped in. I'd have yelled at you from the safety of fifteen feet up." Kyle jerked a thumb up towards the higher branches. "I just heard the racket, and wondered what was up, you know? So, what's up? I mean, yeah, letting off steam, I get that, but usually something causes the steam in the first place."

Inez sighed, peeling her gloves off and shoving them in a pocket. Ever since her talk with Julian, she wasn't mad at him anymore, but still pretty frustrated. "Did you ever get in a fight with someone," she asked Kyle, "and then you realized you were wrong and you made up, but you were still just all grr argh? Because yeah, much with the grr argh."

Kyle nodded. Grr argh was something he understood all too well. "Dude, that's like half my life. Much with the grr argh. Is the tree-locaust helping? Cause smashing stuff helps me, but that's me, and usually it's more that I bust my own ass and then sleep off the grr then like, the destruction actually helping." Sleep did more to help than almost anything else, mostly because by the time he'd worn himself out, and then gotten a couple hours of shut-eye, he'd forgotten why he was mad in the first place.

"It helps a bit. It used to help a lot when I could just go beat up Marko for an hour or so," Inez said. Of course most of the time it was really more like "Have Marko throw heavy shit at my head and swear a lot" but she wasnt about to admit it.

But that gave her an idea.

"Hey, yo," she said in a sly tone, walking over to Kyle. "You worked with Marko for a while, right?"

"Yeahh..." Kyle recognized - or thought he did anyway - that sort of look. That was the same look that Angel got right before "And buy me donuts!" came out of her mouth. And while he didn't quite think Inez would try to con a dozen donuts out of him, he didn't quite trust the look. "Why? And before you ask, dude, I'm not letting you sign out the chainsaw, the power drill or the jackhammer."

"So mean!" Inez said with a mock-pout, but then she smiled and went back to bouncy "So I want to try and get the rest of the New Mutants motivated to train and stuff again, because with the whole dead Garrison thing and Marko leaving no one's really done anything and then half of us nearly got killed on that stupid trip because no one knew how to work together and you're like an X-Man and stuff and everyone likes you, so I was thinking you could maybe run us through some training stuff?"

It was possible that she'd taken a breath somewhere in that sentence, maybe.

Kyle put his hands up defensively. "Whoa, whoa, back the train up. I've been an X-Man for a -year-. I can do some stuff, and I could come up with some ideas, but you're gonna need someone else there too." Off the top of his head, he could think of a few people that'd be good for that, depending on what was needed, that wasn't a huge problem.

He pushed one of the larger and less broken branches over towards a half-uprooted stump and sat down on it, elbows on his knees, and toes digging into the dirt. "But you've got a point, you guys can't work together hardly at all, and too much shit happens here where you need to back each other up instead of blowing each other up."

Inez pouted for real this time. "I know we've got to get permission and stuff, duh. But I don't want to push Garrison on this until he's less weird about the whole back from the dead thing. And you know everyone listens to you, right? You're like, the cool college guy and stuff." Which was true. Of course, there was Marius, but he was the Cute One. And Forge was the Weird One. It all made perfect sense in her head.

"I am very cool." Kyle said, grinning again. "I dunno about everyone listens to me though. And college is weird to me, I'm totally not supposed to be going to college, it's freaky." And if his folks and grandparents would stop saying how proud they were, it'd be less weird. "Okay, so lets assume I can talk someone into supervising with me, cause no way I'm watching all however many the hell there are of you guys alone, and lets assume that I can figure out how to program the DR, or how to set something up outside of it." He waited for a nod, and then continued on. "Teamwork's the big problem you guys have, right? I mean, some of you guys have power issues but mostly it's teamwork."

"That's putting it lightly," Inez said with a roll of her eyes. "I mean, we pulled our shit together in Manhattan - but every other time half of us are going different directions and no one knows how to stick together. When we had that team-building exercise? I think only me and Angel and Yvette took it at all seriously. I don't know how you guys do it. The X-Men, I mean. It's not like you guys don't have problems. I've read the journals, duh. How you guys keep from dropping Clarice down a well or something is beyond me."

"Half the time, if we're dealing with someone we don't like, something's on fire, or shit is going down and there's no time for bullshit. Same as you guys in New York. Shit hit the fan, and nobody had any time to be an asshole." Which wasn't to say there wasn't interpersonal conflict on the X-Men, but in a fight, they could put it aside, at least for a little while. "Not that I'm saying you guys should be set on fire so you'll work together. But it's why we do partner stuff in the Danger Room, so that even if we gotta work with someone we hate, or who hates us, we know what they can do and what they can't. Maybe you guys need to start with smaller groups? Like, groups of two or three, and -then- as a big team?"

Inez nodded, practically skipping with excitement. "Good idea! I'll talk to the others and see who's interested, and you'll go get permission from... whoever we've got to get permission from! This is going to be great!"

She bounced over to Kyle and gave him a quick hug and squealed in a manner usually reserved for teens at a Miley Cyrus concert. "So cool! You're totally the best, yo."

Kyle had the sinking feeling he'd just been tricked into something and he wasn't sure what, or how it had happened. And that it had been in part, his own idea. Could you even be tricked if it was partially your own idea? "Maybe we outta see about it being more than just the folks who are interested, but everybody. It's not gonna help if people get to opt out, right? I mean, that'll just reinforce even more, whatever, separation-thingy."

"See, I knew you weren't just another pretty face!" Inez said gleefully and started to head back to the mansion before turning around. "I suppose, uh, you probably want me to clean up the broken tree mess stuff, huh?"

"Yep." Kyle agreed. "You can haul 'em over to the toolshed and I'll turn them into firelogs and mulch." He sort of liked running the woodchipper. It was cheerfully destructive and productive, since the mulch got used for the plant beds. He looked around at the mess, and added it mentally to the existing pile that had been created by Yvette blowing off steam. "Man, at this rate, Miss Munroe's not gonna need to buy any mulch until like, 2012 or something." .

"We can't make that into a productive team-building exercise?" Inez asked hopefully, then pouted at Kyle's disapproving head shake. "Phooey. No love for poor me."