log: Matt, Nico and....Esther

[x-daredevil.livejournal.com]

Tea is meant to be soothing. Ghosts though...are not soothing. It creates a dilemma.



Nico hated coffee. It gave her horrible stomachaches and didn't really manage to wake her up at all. Some people had mentioned it might be just an attitude problem she had towards it, but she wasn't interested on trying again. Yucky coffee. Tea? Tea was so much better though, hence why she was brewing some in the kitchen, humming quietly as the scent of the tea slowly filled the immediate space. Dark, strong tea, just like she liked it.

Matt hated coffee too. It smelled too much and was much too bitter. Tea though, was alright. It was a little prissy, sort of. Who drank tea except for adults who weren't drinking alcohol and the British? Except that Matt did not like sodas either, the carbonation bothered him. So...tea. He liked tea, even if he got teased sometimes for drinking hot tea. He hadn't been teased since coming to Xavier's, but before that. Smelling tea, he headed to the kitchen, "What kind of tea is that?" he asked, curious.

"Huh?" Looking around, she spotted Matt, and immediately recognized him as the blind kid with the super senses or something around those lines. "Earl Gray", said as she turned her attention back at the infusion getting ready. "And it's just done, so if you want some...I made a lot, actually."

"Who's Earl Grey?" he asked, he had heard of the tea before, and he was pretty sure he had had it, but he had always wondered that. "And uh, sure. If you made enough. I was mostly just curious, not looking to mooch," though if she was offering, he would mooch. Always. "I always wondered why that dude had a tea named after him."

Nico smiled as she served two mugs of hot, dark tea. "Beats me, but it's kinda lame to have a tea named after you." Turning around with the two mugs, Nico wondered how the heck she was supposed to pass one over to Matt. This could get messy. "Maybe it's not a name? I need to Google this thing later to find out." She gave a step towards him, and stopped. "How am I supposed to hand this over to you? It's pretty hot to hold just like that."

"Just put it on the counter and I can take the handle if you tell me where it is," Matt replied, "Use the numbers of the clock. So if the hand is facing outwards, that's 3 o'clock," the clock face way of saying where something was, was incredibly useful. "It smells good at least," and it did seem very hot too. He would have to wait for it to cool more.
"May I have some, too?" a tiny voice with a vague echo inquired. "Please?" A few feet away from the two, a little girl hovered in place. Her expression was unusually serious for a child, and her hands were folded in front of her mildly. She looked up at them expectantly.

The only reason Nico didn't drop the mugs was that she was actually too surprised to move. Once she overcame the surprise though, the girl set the mugs on a table -momentarily forgetting Matt- and stared at the...hovering little girl. She was getting some definitely odd energy readings from her. Still, she was already used to things she didn't understand. "No tea for you until you tell us exactly who you are, and what you are."

Matt about jumped from his skin, looking around wildly, even though he couldn't see, "What the fuck?!" he demanded, not caring about his language right now. "What is that?" he couldn't hear a heart beat or anything, he'd had no idea that anyone else had joined them. "Nori...." he trailed off, not liking being left in the figurative dark.
"I'm sorry," said the little girl contritely. "It was rude of me not to introduce myself before asking for tea. My name is Esther. Esther Kleeman. I'm a ghost."

"No shit you are a ghost." That didn't stop Nico from blinking hard at the floating girl. "She's a ghost, Matt, so yeah, you aren't going to sense a thing from her unless she talks. She's floating over...ah, as if it mattered. And obviously wants some tea." Nico turned towards Esther. "I'm Nico. Esther, right? Can't you even drink stuff?"

"A ghost?" Matt repeated. Okay. So. He did not like this whole not sensing things from her. He did not like that at all, "It's rude to sneak up on a blind person like that!" he snapped at her, more out of being weirded out than anything. "Yeah. No tea if you're going to just spill it on the floor. You gotta be corporeal for tea."

Esther blinked at them for a minute, brows furrowing and mouth pursing into a pout that quickly transformed into a trembling lip.

"...you're mean," she said softly. "That's not a very nice thing to say at all. All I wanted was for someone to have a tea party with me."

The incorporeal girl wrapped her tiny arms around herself. "My brother promised he would have a tea party with me on my sixth birthday. I was so excited when I was coming home from school that day...but then I got hit by the milk truck and I didn't get my tea party."'

Okay and now he felt like crap. Ghost or no ghost, she was just a little girl. Uncool, Murdock, uncool. "Fine," he sighed, "I'll have a tea party with you. And my roommate. Because he's mean to little girls too," well, not really, not that Matt knew, but if he was doing this crazy thing, so was Artie. That was just how it was going to be. "And I got hit by a truck too," he added, trying to comfort the girl. "That's how I was blinded. It had toxic chemicals and they got in my eyes."
Even as Matt told the ghost child that he would have a tea party with her, she didn't smile, but she did stop pouting and no longer looked like she might cry.

"I'm sorry," said Esther. "That must have hurt." She floated over by Matt and then NIco, the air growing colder when she was right beside them. "There are two things I need for the tea party to be perfect...a cloche hat and a feather boa."

"Look, if you can drink the tea, you can have the tea. I'm not trying to be mean, but you'll be upset if it just falls through, right?" It made complete sense for her, considering she was having a conversation with a ghost in the kitchen. It all would have gone well if she hadn't started making requests. Had she somehow managed to mix her life with an online game's quests? "Alright, I guess? Where do we get those?" She turned at Matt, once again reminding it didn't matter if she was looking at him or not, but hey, manners. "You can deal with this, Matt?"

"Yeah, sure," Matt was pretty sure that he could handle this. Now, whether he wanted to was another story...but he was not a fan of anything that he could not hear, like ghosts, especially little girl ones who wanted tea parties.
"At the place where you woke us up, of course," replied Esther matter of factly. Her gaze wandered over to the tea again and she looked at it longingly before remembering something. "Oh, yes. I forgot to say. There are five of us. I'm sure everyone will come say hello when they're ready. It would be the polite thing to do."

Nico let herself fall on a chair. She didn't feel like drinking tea anymore. "Great, just...great." She had requested them to tell stories, right? Now they just wouldn't go away. She was in trouble. Big trouble. "There goes my nice tea afternoon."