xp_logs | Marie-Ange and Artie, Thursday afternoon. "You will need an actual job."

Marie-Ange hunts Artie down in the sewers. Questions are asked about what Artie plans to do next and how he's going to deal with the fallout from his little incident in Atlantic City.

The abandoned pumping station was lit with battery-powered Christmas lights, the white non-twinkle kind, and for a sewer, remarkably both dry and not entirely filthy. Which wasn't to say it was clean - the camping cot and the hot plate hooked up to a 8-volt battery and the milk crates of stuff were in the driest, least dirty area, and it looked like someone had at least sort of swept and put down some cheap YMCA towels as a makeshift rug.

When Artie returned back with his bag of food, Marie-Ange was seated on the cot, reading the Village Voice. "You should do your laundry more often." She said, at his "wtf" face.

Artie stalled for a moment, pulling a bottle of water out of his backpack and tossing it over to her. He'd considered most of his clothes to be effectively clean: nothing in the gym bag smelled or had much visible dirt. Nowhere near in need of a wash. The clothes he'd been wearing,however, were another story. "Clean clothes are a bad idea down here. Don't look right in them. You put some kind of tracker thing on me, didn't you?" The text was small and close to her eyeline, the visual equivalent of speaking quietly.

"Doug has a set of RFID trackers on sticky paper. We had Jubilee stick one on you." Marie-Ange explained, as she opened the water bottle. "Even if you do not wash them, you should check them more often. Or not, if you wanted us to find you." They could've done it the hard way, looking at old patterns of Morlock hideouts, but that was so much more time consuming than one pickpocket, one nerd and a hacked GPS satellite.

"I will be, believe me. So, why the visit?" Artie asked, sitting down on a milk crate, backpack at his feet.

"Because Arcade is sending us bills for the money you owe him, and if you do not want a repeat of Artie's Adventures In Wonderland, you need to fix that." Marie-Ange explained, very very calmly. "The next time, I doubt he will be so nice as to call us and tell us that he has you."

"He's sending you bills? I already gave him back everything I had!" For a moment, Artie looked very young and very frightened. "I could... there's a tunnel system in Toronto, another one in Montreal..."

"It is Arcade, he wants interest and expense money." Marie-Ange rolled her eyes - she wasn't going to underestimate him, but Arcade annoyed her. "We can manage to get him to agree to a payment plan, but you will need an actual job, one that comes with a paycheck, not one that comes with fleecing tourists."

"Oh." Artie sighed and rubbed his eyes, tilting his head back till it thudded against the concrete wall behind him. "Your artist friend introduced me to his artist friends. They always said they'd be happy for me to take a more active role than just verification. I could talk to them..." He hadn't missed the fact that with no college and as a visible mutant most jobs were beyond him. Fuck.

"Are you wiling to do that?" Marie-Ange leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. "Artie, that would mean doing illegal things - more than you've done just scamming idiot tourists who think that is a part of the New York Experience. If you think you can do that - counterfeit , steal, run cons, I want to hear it from you. Or see it, signing is fine."

Artie closed his eyes and thought about it, unconsciously dropping into body language he'd learned at school. Opening his eyes again, he looked over at Marie-Ange and began to sign. "Yes." A pause. "I'd be willing to do that." And not just because it would keep the noose off his neck a little longer. "I'd be willing to steal, run cons, counterfeit. Hurt people if I had to."

Marie-Ange was really almost hoping he was going to say that fuck no, he'd work at the Burger King first. "Well, Sarah is already teaching you hand to hand, and Doug has a spare room, though you may want to room with someone else, or see if we have a free empty flat." She paused at Artie's "what the hell are you on now?" face. "You were reasonably capable in a fight, you already know we do terrible things, and your own health insurance would mean I can stop feeding you my vicodin. As long as Remy clears it, and I shall give you a fair warning, he may not, or he may with a long lecture for you about how we are horrible broken people, I think you would do better working for X-Force, not for Neal."

"What?"

"What what? Did you want me to grab you by the ear..." She did, gripping the top of Artie's ear tightly. "And tell you that you were lucky to get out alive, I cannot believe you were that stupid to try to scam Arcade and that I am going to throw you into a dark mine in the basement of Australia where you can dig out opals for us?"

"I know that I was lucky he didn't kill me," Artie replied, signing it before rubbing his ear. "That's why I said 'what'. Someone who does things as stupid as that - I'd be a liability. How do you trust that I won't be that stupid again?"

"Cammie let an assassin into our Brownstone. Doug got himself shot when he was not much younger than you, and I let him. Amanda almost killed Jubilee. Remy is a wanted criminal. I ran off to New Orleans and told no one, including Doug - who I was dating at the time." Marie-Ange explained. "Everyone makes stupid mistakes that they regret, and then Remy throws you off the roof and you do not make them again." She gave an indifferent shrug to the idea of being tossed off the roof. She hadn't had that happen yet. "Are you going to do it again?"

"No. Or at least," Artie shook his head, trying to put what he wanted to say into words, "not because I'm angry at the world and want to claw as much as I can out of it. I wouldn't do it again for that reason."

"Well, are you going to go off angry and lie to people about where you are, and be very stupid like that again? Because if you are just going to bugger off in a month when we ask you to do something a little bit awful, then this is not going to work."

There was a long pause before Artie answered. "No. I won't be stupid like that again."

"Good because this job is frequently miserable, and everyone likes sending the new person to sticky hot places or cold miserable places." Marie-Ange said, with a particularly unpleasant smile. "All the headaches of powers training, none of the sleeping it off the next morning."

"I think I can learn to manage that."

"Good. Now we're going to go get you some clothes that do not have rat wee on them, and you can pretend I am Remy, and you are trying to convince me to hire you, because he is going to ask you why you want the job, and it should not be because you owe Arcade money." Marie-Ange's smile was no warmer this time, but a little more gentle. "However, getting Arcade off his back may help."

"Mind if I take some time to do laundry, too?" Or at least find the RFID tag and stick it on a the side of an Amtrak train.

"I will even feed you." Marie-Ange said. "If you promise not to run off."