xp_logs | Miles & Matt, Thursday afternoon

Miles meets another resident face-to-face and gets a veteran's take on the school.

Late September offered Miles another lovely opportunity to do his homework outside. This time he brought his chemistry textbook and headed to the same tree where he'd met Gabriel yesterday. Maybe the guy would be there again, but hopefully not smelling like skunk spray on wet grass.

When he arrived, he was surprised to see an unfamiliar face hanging upside-down from the tree. He wasn't reading or anything, though. Just hanging out like a lazy red-headed monkey.

"Hey," Miles greeted the stranger.

Matt had heard the approach of the unfamiliar heartbeat even with his earbuds in. "Yo," he replied, tugging them out gently. It was polite, even if it didn't matter with his powers. Plus, listening to Spanish for class wasn't his idea of fun, hence hanging upside down to do so.

With ease, he swung down and around so he was sitting upright on the limb. He was kinda old and tall for climbing trees, but it was still fun and provided nice contrast from the gym.

Miles had to admire the guy's core strength to be able to get up like that. Another mutant acrobat? "Hi, I'm Miles. Um, I'm new." It was almost becoming his catchphrase. He almost offered his hand to the other man until he realized just how high up he was, and how short Miles himself was. Way to not be awkward.

"Matt," he said, "and I figured the new part. I saw your journal post. What's up? Other than the obvious," just in case he was as smart-alecy as Matt could be.

"It's not fun when you beat me to the punchline like that," Miles replied, grinning. "Just comin' out here to do some reading for class. Chemistry. It's my favorite. Besides physics and math and history..." Now in addition to awkward, he sounded like a dork. Good going, he chastised himself.

"Sorry," Matt replied, absolutely unrepentant, "Chemistry, huh? How come? I was never much good at the hard sciences. I get the theories, but the labs sucked," especially in college, but then again, yay being blind! Some things just didn't quite transfer over. "But I'm a total nerd too. Have you met Clint? We're gonna make t-shirts."

Miles would not say that part of his motivation to do well in science class was because of the fictional Spider-Man. "Haven't met him in person, no. Chem's fun, I guess. I like to see what comes out in the end of all that work. What do you like, then?"

Miles was definitely younger than him, so it was a fair guess to assume that he was in the same suite as Clint. Or wait...there were probably enough guys that there were two suites now, "I'm more into reading, literature. Sociology, anthropology, etc. The soft sciences."

"That's cool, though. Bones is an anthropologist. Mind if I come up there?" Ground floor was lame.

"Yeah, sure, this tree is big enough for the both of us!" he wasn't going to help him up, but if Miles wanted to come on his own, all good, "So what grade are you in anyways?"

He probably wasn't going to get much studying done right now, so Miles left the textbook on the ground and crawled up the tree. Crawled, not climbed. That should garner a reaction, he felt. "I'm a sophomore. How 'bout you?" He asked, settling against the groove at the joining of the branch to the trunk.

This was Xavier's, crawling up a tree wasn't all that shocking. "Same, but in college," he agreed, "Nice technique. You ever consider the aerial arts? You'd be awesome."

Miles shrugged. "I dunno where to study. Not gonna go to some McDojo. I used to watch kung fu movies with my uncle all the time. I can do some of Bruce Lee's moves."

"Nah, you go to a proper aerial gym," Matt explained, "There's a trapeze here and a class for it, but I go to a place in Manhattan a few times a week." He had taken trapeze his senior year of high school and fallen in love. "And there's a proper gym with high bars and rings and stuff for gymnastics."

"I saw part of the gym the other day, with the free weights and machines for the super-strong people. That was really cool. I'll finally be able to figure out how strong I am. Oh, that's what I do. Strong and flexible and some other stuff. What about you? Is it polite to ask that? Oh no, that's not some mutant no-no to ask, is it?"

Matt shrugged, "Enhanced senses. The flexibility and all that are just from working out," well, and a lot of gymnastics. And aerial arts. And various fighting styles. "It helps my balance and things like that, but no super strength."

"That's cool. Oh hey, if you're in college but still living here, does that mean that you do X-Men stuff?" Miles asked hopefully.

Nodding, Matt stood, something not too easy when you were 6'3" and you were on a tree branch. Carefully, he turned until he was in a handstand, showing off, "I do," he agreed. "But I could stay here and go to college even if I didn't."

Jesus Christ, he was tall. Most people were tall to Miles, but this guy was reallytall. "Are you fully on the team or just training. Kyle -- Wildchild? What should I call him? Anyway, he was telling me a little about it."

"I'm a trainee," most people his height weren't so great with gymnastics, but Matt was an exception, "Kyle's your English teacher," he pointed out, "Mr. Gibney. So you're from New York? Whereabouts?"

"Yeah, Brooklyn. Uh, Bushwick, specifically. Boricua pride, yo. You also from New York?"

Turning right side up with a few twists around the branch, Matt ended back as he had been, sitting on the branch. "Hell's Kitchen, yo. Gotta represent," he offered Miles a fist bump. Normally his accent was there, but it was especially heavy right now. "Did the foster thing for a while though, so I missed all the gentrification going on there. Been here since I was 15."

Miles returned the fist bump with a flourish. "How long have you been training for the X-Men, then?"

"Since I finished high school," so a year, not all that much. It was slow going for him since he was balancing school and other stuff with it, "Dude. You've got years you know. No leather for you yet. And hopefully you'll grow another foot or so." Matt had grown like a weed in four years, though he hadn't been as short as Miles was now at the same age.

"You don't have to be tall to be a hero. That's sizeist. Heightist? Some kind of -ist. How do you like it, then? Training for the X-Men, I mean. Obvs."

Sticking his tongue out at Miles, Matt made a face, "We aren't heroes. And there's no height requirement, I'm just teasing you. But the training isn't so bad. It's tough. They push your limits hard, but that's the point."

If that meant not almost getting killed by crazy glowing gangsters anymore, then Miles could live with that. That first thing Matt said, though, was weird. "Why do you say you're not heroes?" he asked. Were the X-Men not the definition of superheroes? "You've got costumes, codenames, bad guys. I wasn't in Manhattan when that crazy guy tried to take it over a few years ago, but weren't you guys involved in stopping him?"

"You mean Apocalypse?" Matt asked. He'd just been a kid then, newly in foster care. It had been terrifying, locked in the apartment with nearly no news as battle waged outside. "Yeah, I remember that. Horrific," not as bad as living Genosha, but the not knowing had been worse there. "Yeah, the X-Men were there. I dunno. I don't feel like a superhero. I'm a college kid trying to do the right thing. We all got demons and stuff, we're all trying to make a broken world better."

Those were like magic words to Miles and he couldn't help but smile. "I hear that. It's what you should do when you have power. Pero like I hear that there are actual real demons. Not just like personal, internal demons."

"Por supuesto," Matt replied automatically. Four years of Spanish and he could manage that much at least, "Demons suck."

"Where do they even come from? Is Hell real? Should I be praying the rosary right now so I don't go to Hell? I never thought that everything Father Pablo or mis abuelas said would be right."

"We can ask Sister Maggie once she decides to humor us. Or Father Daniel," Matt didn't really think of it as the Christian idea of demons, but something else. "No idea though. I go to mass and confession and they don't really talk about demons, other than the internal kind. No one believes in real ones anymore."

"Tell that to my church," Miles snorted. Not that he went to church under his own volition, and his parents had thankfully stopped haranguing him once he started boarding school. "No but really, if demons are real then where're they from if it's not scary burny ohmygod I'm on fire Hell?"

"Other places," Matt sighed and ran a hand through his short hair, "I don't know, Miles. I don't have all the answers, but none of the demons I've encountered or heard of have ever had fire or brimstone, none wanted souls, nothing. Mostly, they just want to kill you. Or sometimes summon other demons. But if I were killed by a demon, I know I'd go to heaven. So, that kinda defeats the purpose."

Miles held up his hands as a gesture of appeasement. "Sorry, didn't know it's such a touchy subject. Does it happen a lot or just enough to go onto our hypothetical TVTropes page?"

"After the first few times, the demon thing loses novelty," Matt explained, laying back on the branch with his legs dangling down, "but it definitely gets counted as a TV trope. And the field trip curse. Just trust me. They're cursed. Doesn't stop us from trying though."

"You know what Einstein said about insanity." Miles adjusted his position so he could wrap his legs around the branch and hang upside-down from it. "So I guess all in all, you like it here."

"Best place I've ever lived," Matt agreed. "Nicest, too. And weirdest. What do you think so far?"

Miles looked out at the grounds - a beautiful mixture of greens and reds and oranges in the early fall - and the upside-down ivy-covered mansion a short distance away. Transferring from public school to Visions Academy had been a substantial upgrade, but that was nothing compared to this place. Even the tales of terror he'd been warned for were insignificant compared to what he saw before him.

"Yeah, I think I'll stay."