Lex and Nori | Late Thursday Night

[x-lexington.livejournal.com]

Lex spends another sleepless night reading, and is awake to meet Noriko in an overcharged state.


Lex rubbed his eyes and looked at the at the clock on the microwave. It was damn near four in the morning, and he hadn't gone to bed yet. If this kept up he was going to have to ask the doc for something to knock his ass out, otherwise, he was going to go off the deep end. For two of the past three hours he'd had to listen to Julio and his girlfriend in the other room. He'd tried reading in his room but the sounds were worse, if muffled more. He had also thought about leaving, but was too lazy to make it past the comfy recliner.

The one consolation in the whole thing was that he'd made good headway on rereading his book. With this read through he thought he might finally be understanding what his father had said so many years ago, 'You have to stop seeing things as things and see them as one with you in an event.' It made him happy, even if he couldn't quite figure out how to apply it to his mutation.

Julio had fallen asleep and, worn out, he'd sleep like the dead. Which was ok with Nori because she always hated disturbing him but lying still when she was as charged as she apparently was was simply not an option. Slipping out of the bed she remembered at the last moment that someone else was living in the suite again now and snagged one of Julio's t-shirts, just in case, before heading out into the living space. Now the question was whether to go find a way to burn off the extra energy or use the awakeness to study... A question which was derailed by the presence of the stranger in the living room. "Hello," she said, only sounding a little wary.

Lex practically jumped at the sound. He'd felt something behind him, but dismissed it to paranoia. Turning around he saw a short Japanese girl in a shirt that was way too large for her. "Um... you must be Julio's girlfriend." It was all he could really say as he swayed a little bit. "I'm Lex, I'd shake your hand but that's too many types of inappropriate at the moment."

"Hai, I am Noriko, Julio's girlfriend." She waved offhandedly, more a 'don't bother' gesture than a 'hello' as she crossed into the little kitchen space, wondering if there was likely to be anything that she felt like eating. Seemed unlikely. "Is ok. Shake hands with me is maybe not good idea. Is zap now."

Is zap now. Lex rolled the words around in his head as he tried to figure out what that meant. It was too late at night to be interpreting bad English. He yawned and decided that the more words he heard, the better sense he could make of them. "Your mutation I take it?" he asked, deciding he needed a glass of orange juice.

"Hai," Nori said again, not turning around from where she seemed to be scowling at the entire contents of the fridge. "Nori mutation is zap. Am walking battery." Apparently giving up on the fridge she closed it and turned back to him, holding up her hands and, since she was a bit too charged to realize it probably wasn't the best idea, arced a spark between them, letting the volts surge out of her right to melt back into her left.

"Huh." Lex said, a perplexed expression spreading across his face. He didn't know that there could be somebody with his powers, especially one with so much more control over her abilities. He'd never been able to do more than create a burst of energy through a solid surface, or as a weak wave through the air. "Can you do anything else with it?"

It might not be wise but she needed to burn off some of the energy if she was going to sleep at all tonight... The bright grin was the only warning and then in the blink of an eye she was on the other side of the room, dropping into an armchair as a sharp wind rushed after her. "I can!"

Lex felt the pulse of electricity, something he was fairly sure someone without his mutation would have dismissed as the rush of air. He had no idea how she had manipulated electricity to make it across the room like a--well, like a flash of lightning. "That's simply amazing," he blathered. "How is it possible to manipulate energy fields like that?"

"Eh?" Nori said, cocking her head at him from where she sat and then in a second she was back in the kitchen. "Is not energy field," she answered, and most of her classmates would probably have been stunned to know she could understand what he'd said, but if there was one topic she didn't shirk her studies in it was powers training which, for her, included a thorough grounding in electro-magnetic theory, although much of that study had been done in her native Japanese. Still, she knew the vocabulary inside and out after these years. "Nori power is electrical absorption and storage." To demonstrate she held her hand out towards the power outlet in the kitchen and another arc of power came flashing out to vanish into her hand, although she blushed faintly as the lights in the room flickered in response. "Can use stored charge either as zap or to run."

"Ah," he wasn't sure that negated his question, but he figured it would have to suffice. He moved towards her slowly and extended a hand towards her. He was struck with a curious need to test how his abilities would interact with hers. "I have an ability that I think most would classify as similar to yours." He looked around for some way to demonstrate. "You see, I can generate and manipulate electricity, although I am not very good at the former." He thought he was speaking the truth, but he'd never really studied exactly how his powers worked, he simply tried to control what he could do with them.

"Generate?" Nori said, perking up. Which was actually alarming, given she'd not exactly been down before. At least she hadn't hit manic. Yet. "Like Jean-Phillipe. Is good. Nori is not generate, is never same charge in brain, always crazy. So Lex is safe for touch when buzzing..."

"Only one way to find out." Lex extended his hand towards her, he didn't know if he was immune to electricity but he didn't think it was too dangerous.

"Oh, Nori not so bad now..." she said, taking his hand with only a moment's hesitation, more from her dislike of physical contact than any real worry. Even when she was buzzing out of her mind with power overload she kept an almost neurotic sense of how dangerous casual contact would be. After all, Julio wasn't immune to her power, even if she had maybe given him something of a kink. Now, though, her sense of the flow of power which she'd been working on in her power control classes told her that not only had that slight shock of static come from her hand but there was also a flow coming in, reminding her that Lex was a power source and she clamped down on that pull as much as she could, not wanting to drain him.

Lex felt his fingertips go numb for a moment during the contact, and then feeling returned to him. He shook a little before speaking, "Well that was interesting." He released her hand and then looked at, "Did you draw some energy from me?" He couldn't believe how weird it had felt, he couldn't remember experienced anything like it.

"A little," Nori admitted, shrugging and leaning back against the counter. "Is can not help. Sorry. Nori is try not take much..."

"No worries," Lex laughed, he didn't want to turn the one person he'd met who might be able to help him develop his powers away. "It didn't hurt, it was just an interesting experience."

Nori grinned at that - it had taken a while but she'd finally got a handle, she thought, on the way American's used 'interesting'. "Is many interesting experiences here at Xavier's. Lex will see!"