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xp_logsHaller gets a front-row seat to April's twinned self-image while he questions her during parkour.
"It's not that dissimilar from the psionic switchboard," Jim explained. "Superficial, targeted communication only. The main difference is that I'll also be using it to track your self-image while you shift. It might help us narrow down what exactly is causing the block."
"That's fine!" April was perched on one of the low starting walls that she could access with just her body strength. "Go ahead and do that? I'll shift what I can after. Slower than normal, I guess, so you can see what my mind does. It's pretty second nature to me."
"Sounds good." Jim dropped to the ground, cross-legged. Assuming an actual lotus position was not something he was willing to do to his knees, but there was still something to be said for grounding. He breathed in once, twice, and then cast the link between them.
"Okay," he said, "I'm set up on my end. Go ahead and get started. I'll ask you some questions as we go, too, if you don't mind."
"Out loud, or is thinking the answers fine?" April's hands and lower legs switched slowly but fluidly. Mentally, it was a similar process. A fully dressed April, pulling on boots and gloves before looking into a mirror and nodding. The woman staring back was her – but not quite her, with longer hair and red shot throughout her suit.
In the actual world, April jumped to the next wall, scaling it easily and running lightly across the narrow top before leaping at a metal bar. One – then two – revelations, and she was flinging herself into the air and shooting webs at her next target.
#I'll hear either one,# Jim replied, noting the younger woman's mental image. Not integrated, but easy, like a familiar change of clothes. A good baseline.
#How have you been doing lately?# he asked as she swung from stand to stand. #I know Pyotr had a family emergency, then Forge . . . That must be difficult.#
The silence in April's mind was its own sort of answer, more impressions and memories than speech. Tripping over an empty bottle of vodka peeking out from under the kitchen table, flinging open Pyotr's door to give him the same teasing scold she always did. A hastily made bed with clothes on it, a half-finished painting still on the easel in their living room near the window.
"I'm dealing," she finally said out loud as she moved through the course. Boris, barking happily from Illyana's side as soft, feminine Russian corrected her own terrible pronunciation. Finally reverse engineering the last of the backup webbing fluid she'd had on her, and the quiet triumph when she was able to figure out the last of Forge's steps to create a spray to dissolve it. 'For training accidents,' he'd said, and they'd laughed together at the time, but instead she was head down on the workbench he'd used, crying into her arms while a mechanical hand patted clumsily at her hair. Miserable, a little angry. Mostly sad. "The other grad girls and Sooraya have been pretty good about not letting me dwell. Boris keeps me busy, of course. It's just a lot at once."
#It would have to be. Like starting over in some ways. # Jim remembered coming back to the mansion after the world had broken. Faces he'd grown to rely on just... gone. Yeah, he knew what that was like. #Sorry if I'm getting too personal, but that's essentially what you had to do when you came here, wasn't it?#
#Yeah. And if I don't want to answer, I won't. You're fine.# April's feet stuck to the underside of a set of monkey bars, hair bouncing and moving with every light step. Superimposed was what looked like a version of herself with very short hair in baggy jeans and a crop top walking across the top of the bars. #I'd never just been April before, really. Always an extension of May, of the Parkers in general. Arriving here... no background, no preconceived notions about who I was. Just whatever I was willing to share.#
#I've heard that sometimes identical twins raised apart end up much more alike than those raised together,# Jim remarked, noting the ghostly double. It was almost identical to April, but there was something different about her -- a different set to her face, maybe, or crease of her mouth. May. #Maybe it's because as twins grow together they feel a desire to individuate from each another. To be seen as individuals, not just half of a whole. But you said your memories were also hers, right?#
"Until I was discovered, yes. So roughly 18 years of memories." April balanced on one of the poles, ready to hop to the next one. "It's... weird. Waking up with no idea where you are, who most of the people around you are. Yet knowing them intimately, as if you'd rarely been apart." She took a leap, landed securely, took another. Arms out at her sides, flowing into different motions as she leapt. A much younger version of May was superimposed over her, leaping across a polished wooden floor in a leotard and ballet slippers. "You have all of these likes and dislikes, but no idea if they're actually yours or not." Green tea was an actual like. Licorice was an actual dislike. Borscht popped into her mind, followed by the queasy sensation of her stomach churning and a large, warm hand rubbing her back as Pyotr muttered soothing Russian at her while she was sick after a night of excessive drinking.
#Telepathy can be similar, but in our case those memories mix with existing thoughts and experiences, not form the foundation of an identity. That's unique to your circumstances, I think.# It was fascinating, in its way. You could grow a body with all the genetic modifications you desired, but it still needed a mind to operate it. Simply grafting an existing schema onto the construct was an efficient, if horrifically unethical, work-around. For the man who wants the benefit of creating life, but none of the responsibility for raising one, Jim thought, sarcastically.
#How did you feel about that, if I can ask?# Jim ventured after a moment. #Realizing your memories weren't your memories? Was it upsetting? Or did it give you an anchor?#
April paused in her handstand, slowly letting herself drop before pulling up enough to swing her legs over and sit. "I'm... not entirely sure, actually?" she eventually said, blinking a few times. "Nobody's ever asked me that before. I mean. We had therapy. Me, May, us, the whole family except Benjy - he was there, he just wasn't old enough to be very verbal yet. He'd just started kindergarten the year I ended up here. There was a lot about how I was adjusting, trying to ease the transition, but I don't... think it ever got put like that. It can be both, right? I wish sometimes I'd been able to develop as myself, or been found earlier and given more time to grow into myself when it's deemed appropriate. But at the same time... Dad really showed how strongly he believes in the whole Parker family motto thing. And I got to see that through May's eyes and then experience it for myself. It wasn't easy, but they chose not to take the easy route. It would've been simple enough to dump me into the system. Or to keep me around until I graduated, then told me to get out. They didn't have to try and adjust to suddenly having twins and one of us being extra-weird."
Jim smiled. #It can be both. We don't always get to choose the situations we find ourselves in, and when they're exceptionally weird ones it's natural to be left with mixed feelings. There's no point in resenting the things that made us who we are -- you'll just rip yourself apart. But I think it's also fair to let yourself take a step back once and a while and say 'Wow, that was really kind of fucked up.'#
#Deeply fucked up. I mean. Making a human clone is weird enough. But he got access to May as an infant. He was able to get to her enough to steal her memories. It's...# April shoved a hand through her hair, looking disturbed, and a brief flicker of black and blue streaked down her face, receding as she took several deep breaths. "I don't like to think about that part too hard, really. It's almost impossible science, which is interesting but bad enough on its own, wondering if there were other failed attempts, and it makes me incredibly angry. For both of us, not just me."
Marking the fluctuation in her form, he telepath nodded. Ethical issues aside, she had essentially "been" May until she'd been free to develop her own life and experiences. If the two of them had been treated as twins by the Parkers then any other attempts would have been, for all intents and purposes, her sisters -- or more. They would've started from the same point April had, with the same emotional and experiential foundation harvested from the same unwitting donor. Copies made from the same source. Maybe, in a way, they would have been other selves.
#I agree,# he said, #That sort of science is reprehensible. But none of us have a say in how we're made. You're alive, and you were loved. It's okay to be thankful for that. Regardless of how it came to you.# Jim paused, then decided to press a little further. #The first time you changed completely -- what was that like?#
"Terrifying." April didn't like thinking about it, even now. "May found out dad had been kidnapped, where he was being held. I was coming from campus, on my bike and just... so fucking angry that some shitty villain had decided to grab a man that couldn't fully fight back anymore, y'know?" The combined maelstrom of rage and terror that she'd felt came back, heavily muted as she continued the course. "I didn't even know I could fully shift, or that I had until May attacked me as well. It... I guess she recognized my clothes or something, or maybe it was that I was attacking the person holding Dad too and wasn't worth splitting attention for, at least until she was able to get him free and into an ambulance. I got them tied up, she got them to a waiting police car." Her mind was full of melancholy and regret. "I'd stashed my bike behind the warehouse and was on my way back to it when the portal appeared, and a few minutes later I was blown through it." She'd turned for what felt like minutes and weeks all at once, and she'd been exhausted and hungry when she landed, on top of confused and angry and scared. "Eventually, I landed here. Still changed."
#So it was something you did for the 'right' reasons -- or rather, something that happened involuntarily, but that you used to save a life -- and you were rejected for it. Or at least that's what it seemed like. The very first time you did something that was completely of yourself, not a derivation of May.# Jim shook his head. #And then you never got to see them again to work it out.#
#Yeah. And when I landed here... through the weird ass portal, apparently looking like a worse version of what had come through before... # "I mean. They tried to communicate with me. Doug? But what I can say in that form doesn't seem to translate, and then he made a move that I thought was hostile and well... I was mostly trying to escape. Eventually they got me tangled up in some sort of red light, and that's the last thing I remember before waking up in medical like this. I couldn't shift at all for a few weeks." April shrugged. "Pyotr moved in about a month later, and I was happy to have a roommate."
#Honestly, any one aspect of that is pretty traumatic. In this instance I wouldn't be surprised if your brain didn't process it as a single chunk.# The telepath held up his hands and threaded his fingers together, like the teeth of a bear trap. #Everything happened so fast: the threat to your family, the transformation, the jump to this world, and all that came afterwards. In that case, I'd guess your powers aren't blocked by any one thing. Rather it's a number of factors bleeding into each other. Given the timing of it, is it possible that on some level you might associate that change with . . . the end, almost, of the life you had?#
"It's possible. Makes some sense scientifically, even. It's not like I've done therapy since I got here. Maybe that was a mistake." April shrugged as she landed. "So maybe I need to process my trauma better?"
Jim allowed his sardonic amusement to bleed through the link. #That's a general state of being around here,# he replied. #But yeah, it probably wouldn't hurt -- and not just regarding your powers, obviously. It never hurts to be aware of how stress and trauma might be affecting you. It has a habit of laying low until one day you put your foot in the wrong place and end up taking the emotional equivalent of a rake to the face.#
April laughed, and the sound bled over to the psi-realm as well. #I've been very... "just keep swimming"... wait, does Finding Nemo exist here? But yeah. Threw myself into school and trying not to get cabin fever too badly, and never really stopped doing that, I guess. You have any suggestions locally? I mean. No offense, but for regular therapy I'd rather talk to someone I don't live with. I can't imagine how weird that could make team dynamics.#
This time Jim snorted. #I happen to agree with you, so I've never had to find out. Plus my field of specialty is fairly narrow. But yeah, I know of at least two in the city that've already been vetted by Snow Valley that have some familiarity with less conventional traumas. I'll text you the information later and you can try them out, see if you click. Sometimes it's helpful to get an outsider's perspective anyway. Or at the very least the perspective of someone who hasn't had the concept of living on top of a wormhole completely normalized.#
A burst of amusement came down the link, and a mental version of April twisted her tendrils into a heart for just a moment as the real one took a seat. "That sounds good. I'm glad you aren't offended. I've worked with people that get tetchy about wanting an outside perspective, like you're questioning their professionalism or something. My first therapist was like that, didn't understand why I wanted to see someone that wasn't also seeing May outside of the occasional joint appointment. But once I moved to someone new, it really helped us, because we were getting two perspectives. And she could tell us apart too, where the first one had difficulty."
The telepath didn't bother hiding his expression, which somehow managed to convey his opinion of that approach without actually vocalizing the four-letter words.
"I'm glad you found a second opinion," he said with deadpan neutrality. "Personally, I feel like if you have a patient that might want to explore questions about their individuality the central thing you should not do is treat them as part of a unit, but of course everyone has their own approach. It's just that some of them are wrong."
"Yeah, Sheryl - my therapist - was very good at treating us as individually as possible, considering the circumstances. She was the one that encouraged me to take a year off after high school, do some of the work on figuring out who I was as myself. And she encouraged both of us to try something new together, to make those memories together but independently. So we did some small stuff, little trips and events, together and with the family."
Jim nodded. "I'm glad it sounds like you found someone who was able to see you for yourself, not just as a situation. That can be difficult when you're an air quotes special case. I've been seeing the same doctor since I was in my mid-teens for that reason. And realizing sitting in this position might have been a mistake." With a wince, Jim pulled one of his legs out from under him and manually rearranged it into a less agonizing angle. "Sorry, watching you parkour was making my joints ache. The good news is I think I got a decent baseline for you, at least in a controlled environment. Ideally I could get a read for when you're in a more stressful situation, too, but actively inducing that falls under 'weird team dynamics', so I'll survive."
"Oh, like when Garrison decides we need flashbangs in the DR scenarios? Those always stress me out. You can link for one of them sometime if you think it'll help, I'm sure he'd enjoy throwing the gauntlet at me again." April's smile was easy. "Not everyone is lucky enough to get the bendy factor as part of their mutation."
"It's not that dissimilar from the psionic switchboard," Jim explained. "Superficial, targeted communication only. The main difference is that I'll also be using it to track your self-image while you shift. It might help us narrow down what exactly is causing the block."
"That's fine!" April was perched on one of the low starting walls that she could access with just her body strength. "Go ahead and do that? I'll shift what I can after. Slower than normal, I guess, so you can see what my mind does. It's pretty second nature to me."
"Sounds good." Jim dropped to the ground, cross-legged. Assuming an actual lotus position was not something he was willing to do to his knees, but there was still something to be said for grounding. He breathed in once, twice, and then cast the link between them.
"Okay," he said, "I'm set up on my end. Go ahead and get started. I'll ask you some questions as we go, too, if you don't mind."
"Out loud, or is thinking the answers fine?" April's hands and lower legs switched slowly but fluidly. Mentally, it was a similar process. A fully dressed April, pulling on boots and gloves before looking into a mirror and nodding. The woman staring back was her – but not quite her, with longer hair and red shot throughout her suit.
In the actual world, April jumped to the next wall, scaling it easily and running lightly across the narrow top before leaping at a metal bar. One – then two – revelations, and she was flinging herself into the air and shooting webs at her next target.
#I'll hear either one,# Jim replied, noting the younger woman's mental image. Not integrated, but easy, like a familiar change of clothes. A good baseline.
#How have you been doing lately?# he asked as she swung from stand to stand. #I know Pyotr had a family emergency, then Forge . . . That must be difficult.#
The silence in April's mind was its own sort of answer, more impressions and memories than speech. Tripping over an empty bottle of vodka peeking out from under the kitchen table, flinging open Pyotr's door to give him the same teasing scold she always did. A hastily made bed with clothes on it, a half-finished painting still on the easel in their living room near the window.
"I'm dealing," she finally said out loud as she moved through the course. Boris, barking happily from Illyana's side as soft, feminine Russian corrected her own terrible pronunciation. Finally reverse engineering the last of the backup webbing fluid she'd had on her, and the quiet triumph when she was able to figure out the last of Forge's steps to create a spray to dissolve it. 'For training accidents,' he'd said, and they'd laughed together at the time, but instead she was head down on the workbench he'd used, crying into her arms while a mechanical hand patted clumsily at her hair. Miserable, a little angry. Mostly sad. "The other grad girls and Sooraya have been pretty good about not letting me dwell. Boris keeps me busy, of course. It's just a lot at once."
#It would have to be. Like starting over in some ways. # Jim remembered coming back to the mansion after the world had broken. Faces he'd grown to rely on just... gone. Yeah, he knew what that was like. #Sorry if I'm getting too personal, but that's essentially what you had to do when you came here, wasn't it?#
#Yeah. And if I don't want to answer, I won't. You're fine.# April's feet stuck to the underside of a set of monkey bars, hair bouncing and moving with every light step. Superimposed was what looked like a version of herself with very short hair in baggy jeans and a crop top walking across the top of the bars. #I'd never just been April before, really. Always an extension of May, of the Parkers in general. Arriving here... no background, no preconceived notions about who I was. Just whatever I was willing to share.#
#I've heard that sometimes identical twins raised apart end up much more alike than those raised together,# Jim remarked, noting the ghostly double. It was almost identical to April, but there was something different about her -- a different set to her face, maybe, or crease of her mouth. May. #Maybe it's because as twins grow together they feel a desire to individuate from each another. To be seen as individuals, not just half of a whole. But you said your memories were also hers, right?#
"Until I was discovered, yes. So roughly 18 years of memories." April balanced on one of the poles, ready to hop to the next one. "It's... weird. Waking up with no idea where you are, who most of the people around you are. Yet knowing them intimately, as if you'd rarely been apart." She took a leap, landed securely, took another. Arms out at her sides, flowing into different motions as she leapt. A much younger version of May was superimposed over her, leaping across a polished wooden floor in a leotard and ballet slippers. "You have all of these likes and dislikes, but no idea if they're actually yours or not." Green tea was an actual like. Licorice was an actual dislike. Borscht popped into her mind, followed by the queasy sensation of her stomach churning and a large, warm hand rubbing her back as Pyotr muttered soothing Russian at her while she was sick after a night of excessive drinking.
#Telepathy can be similar, but in our case those memories mix with existing thoughts and experiences, not form the foundation of an identity. That's unique to your circumstances, I think.# It was fascinating, in its way. You could grow a body with all the genetic modifications you desired, but it still needed a mind to operate it. Simply grafting an existing schema onto the construct was an efficient, if horrifically unethical, work-around. For the man who wants the benefit of creating life, but none of the responsibility for raising one, Jim thought, sarcastically.
#How did you feel about that, if I can ask?# Jim ventured after a moment. #Realizing your memories weren't your memories? Was it upsetting? Or did it give you an anchor?#
April paused in her handstand, slowly letting herself drop before pulling up enough to swing her legs over and sit. "I'm... not entirely sure, actually?" she eventually said, blinking a few times. "Nobody's ever asked me that before. I mean. We had therapy. Me, May, us, the whole family except Benjy - he was there, he just wasn't old enough to be very verbal yet. He'd just started kindergarten the year I ended up here. There was a lot about how I was adjusting, trying to ease the transition, but I don't... think it ever got put like that. It can be both, right? I wish sometimes I'd been able to develop as myself, or been found earlier and given more time to grow into myself when it's deemed appropriate. But at the same time... Dad really showed how strongly he believes in the whole Parker family motto thing. And I got to see that through May's eyes and then experience it for myself. It wasn't easy, but they chose not to take the easy route. It would've been simple enough to dump me into the system. Or to keep me around until I graduated, then told me to get out. They didn't have to try and adjust to suddenly having twins and one of us being extra-weird."
Jim smiled. #It can be both. We don't always get to choose the situations we find ourselves in, and when they're exceptionally weird ones it's natural to be left with mixed feelings. There's no point in resenting the things that made us who we are -- you'll just rip yourself apart. But I think it's also fair to let yourself take a step back once and a while and say 'Wow, that was really kind of fucked up.'#
#Deeply fucked up. I mean. Making a human clone is weird enough. But he got access to May as an infant. He was able to get to her enough to steal her memories. It's...# April shoved a hand through her hair, looking disturbed, and a brief flicker of black and blue streaked down her face, receding as she took several deep breaths. "I don't like to think about that part too hard, really. It's almost impossible science, which is interesting but bad enough on its own, wondering if there were other failed attempts, and it makes me incredibly angry. For both of us, not just me."
Marking the fluctuation in her form, he telepath nodded. Ethical issues aside, she had essentially "been" May until she'd been free to develop her own life and experiences. If the two of them had been treated as twins by the Parkers then any other attempts would have been, for all intents and purposes, her sisters -- or more. They would've started from the same point April had, with the same emotional and experiential foundation harvested from the same unwitting donor. Copies made from the same source. Maybe, in a way, they would have been other selves.
#I agree,# he said, #That sort of science is reprehensible. But none of us have a say in how we're made. You're alive, and you were loved. It's okay to be thankful for that. Regardless of how it came to you.# Jim paused, then decided to press a little further. #The first time you changed completely -- what was that like?#
"Terrifying." April didn't like thinking about it, even now. "May found out dad had been kidnapped, where he was being held. I was coming from campus, on my bike and just... so fucking angry that some shitty villain had decided to grab a man that couldn't fully fight back anymore, y'know?" The combined maelstrom of rage and terror that she'd felt came back, heavily muted as she continued the course. "I didn't even know I could fully shift, or that I had until May attacked me as well. It... I guess she recognized my clothes or something, or maybe it was that I was attacking the person holding Dad too and wasn't worth splitting attention for, at least until she was able to get him free and into an ambulance. I got them tied up, she got them to a waiting police car." Her mind was full of melancholy and regret. "I'd stashed my bike behind the warehouse and was on my way back to it when the portal appeared, and a few minutes later I was blown through it." She'd turned for what felt like minutes and weeks all at once, and she'd been exhausted and hungry when she landed, on top of confused and angry and scared. "Eventually, I landed here. Still changed."
#So it was something you did for the 'right' reasons -- or rather, something that happened involuntarily, but that you used to save a life -- and you were rejected for it. Or at least that's what it seemed like. The very first time you did something that was completely of yourself, not a derivation of May.# Jim shook his head. #And then you never got to see them again to work it out.#
#Yeah. And when I landed here... through the weird ass portal, apparently looking like a worse version of what had come through before... # "I mean. They tried to communicate with me. Doug? But what I can say in that form doesn't seem to translate, and then he made a move that I thought was hostile and well... I was mostly trying to escape. Eventually they got me tangled up in some sort of red light, and that's the last thing I remember before waking up in medical like this. I couldn't shift at all for a few weeks." April shrugged. "Pyotr moved in about a month later, and I was happy to have a roommate."
#Honestly, any one aspect of that is pretty traumatic. In this instance I wouldn't be surprised if your brain didn't process it as a single chunk.# The telepath held up his hands and threaded his fingers together, like the teeth of a bear trap. #Everything happened so fast: the threat to your family, the transformation, the jump to this world, and all that came afterwards. In that case, I'd guess your powers aren't blocked by any one thing. Rather it's a number of factors bleeding into each other. Given the timing of it, is it possible that on some level you might associate that change with . . . the end, almost, of the life you had?#
"It's possible. Makes some sense scientifically, even. It's not like I've done therapy since I got here. Maybe that was a mistake." April shrugged as she landed. "So maybe I need to process my trauma better?"
Jim allowed his sardonic amusement to bleed through the link. #That's a general state of being around here,# he replied. #But yeah, it probably wouldn't hurt -- and not just regarding your powers, obviously. It never hurts to be aware of how stress and trauma might be affecting you. It has a habit of laying low until one day you put your foot in the wrong place and end up taking the emotional equivalent of a rake to the face.#
April laughed, and the sound bled over to the psi-realm as well. #I've been very... "just keep swimming"... wait, does Finding Nemo exist here? But yeah. Threw myself into school and trying not to get cabin fever too badly, and never really stopped doing that, I guess. You have any suggestions locally? I mean. No offense, but for regular therapy I'd rather talk to someone I don't live with. I can't imagine how weird that could make team dynamics.#
This time Jim snorted. #I happen to agree with you, so I've never had to find out. Plus my field of specialty is fairly narrow. But yeah, I know of at least two in the city that've already been vetted by Snow Valley that have some familiarity with less conventional traumas. I'll text you the information later and you can try them out, see if you click. Sometimes it's helpful to get an outsider's perspective anyway. Or at the very least the perspective of someone who hasn't had the concept of living on top of a wormhole completely normalized.#
A burst of amusement came down the link, and a mental version of April twisted her tendrils into a heart for just a moment as the real one took a seat. "That sounds good. I'm glad you aren't offended. I've worked with people that get tetchy about wanting an outside perspective, like you're questioning their professionalism or something. My first therapist was like that, didn't understand why I wanted to see someone that wasn't also seeing May outside of the occasional joint appointment. But once I moved to someone new, it really helped us, because we were getting two perspectives. And she could tell us apart too, where the first one had difficulty."
The telepath didn't bother hiding his expression, which somehow managed to convey his opinion of that approach without actually vocalizing the four-letter words.
"I'm glad you found a second opinion," he said with deadpan neutrality. "Personally, I feel like if you have a patient that might want to explore questions about their individuality the central thing you should not do is treat them as part of a unit, but of course everyone has their own approach. It's just that some of them are wrong."
"Yeah, Sheryl - my therapist - was very good at treating us as individually as possible, considering the circumstances. She was the one that encouraged me to take a year off after high school, do some of the work on figuring out who I was as myself. And she encouraged both of us to try something new together, to make those memories together but independently. So we did some small stuff, little trips and events, together and with the family."
Jim nodded. "I'm glad it sounds like you found someone who was able to see you for yourself, not just as a situation. That can be difficult when you're an air quotes special case. I've been seeing the same doctor since I was in my mid-teens for that reason. And realizing sitting in this position might have been a mistake." With a wince, Jim pulled one of his legs out from under him and manually rearranged it into a less agonizing angle. "Sorry, watching you parkour was making my joints ache. The good news is I think I got a decent baseline for you, at least in a controlled environment. Ideally I could get a read for when you're in a more stressful situation, too, but actively inducing that falls under 'weird team dynamics', so I'll survive."
"Oh, like when Garrison decides we need flashbangs in the DR scenarios? Those always stress me out. You can link for one of them sometime if you think it'll help, I'm sure he'd enjoy throwing the gauntlet at me again." April's smile was easy. "Not everyone is lucky enough to get the bendy factor as part of their mutation."
