xp_logs | Haroun and Nathan, late Monday morning

Before going to the Mandarin class That Didn't Happen, Nathan goes to get some fresh air. He's approached by Haroun, who wants to talk about the Arabic class. The two of them discuss the students, teaching methods, and inevitably get onto the topic of what happened on Saturday. Haroun is supportive; Nathan isn't particularly responsive.

The air was warm - too warm, really. His abused lungs weren't appreciating the humidity at all, but the mansion had been even more stifling, if in a very different way. Sitting on the porch steps, his eyes closed against the sunlight, Nathan tried to ignore the various aches and pains still making themselves known this morning, particularly the rather loud protest from his injured arm, which hadn't liked whaling on the punching bag at all. Maybe it was a good thing Dom had threatened to go tattle to Moira... yet pain or not, hitting something had felt awfully good.

Haroun, out for a morning flight, spotted Nate sitting on the back porch and looking fairly miserable. Haroun landed gently, with a practiced pulse of his power to come to a feather-soft landing. The jetpack silently remerged with his torso as he descended, and Haroun got a faintly odd look on his face for a second before approaching Nathan. "Good morning." he said cheerfully, raising his flight goggles off his face and unwinding the windguard he used to keep bugs out of his teeth.

Nathan opened his eyes, blinking at - Haroun, right. New guy, not the cop, not the furry one. "Morning," he said a bit uncertainly, his voice still little better than a rasp. "Good flight?"

"Not too bad. Think there's a glitch in the backpack - it always feels weird when it expands or retracts. Must remember to talk to Hank about that." he said with a smile, taking a seat next to Nathan. "I won't bullshit you with platitudes, and you're a telepath, so you can probably tell what I think of what happened. I'd like to talk about the Arabic class - what have you been teaching them, what's left to cover, that sort of thing. I'd like to make the transition as smooth as possible."

Straightforward. Straightforward was good. He didn't try and reach to see precisely what Haroun was thinking, though. Concussions and telepathy didn't mix real well, and to be honest, he really didn't want to know what Haroun actually thought about Saturday. "We've been.." Nathan stopped, coughing to clear his throat. "Intensive grammar at first, to get the basics down. Scaled that back a little a couple of weeks ago, once we got into the more complicated parts of the syntax. They've been doing very basic Arabic-to-English and English-to-Arabic for a while now...."

Haroun nodded. "Makes sense. What sort of material are you giving them? Translating from the Koran, poetry, technical documents, or anything current?" he asked with real curiousity. His body-language was hard to read - unnaturally still, almost.

"Some of the Koran. We tried a bit of Sufi poetry... last week?" Nathan blinked, trying to remember. "I think it was last week... they liked that. And I had them watch a news broadcast on Al-Jazeera... that didn't go over quite as well. Turned into a political debate."

Haroun nodded. "Good. A mix of the old and the new. I'm impressed." he said with a grin. "Too many just teach the old and none of the new. I may have to dig up one of the old translated Greek geometry texts - that should throw them for a loop. You haven't read Pythagoras until you've read him in the original Arabic." he said with a grin. "But it sounds like they're a good bunch of kids, and they want to learn. No screaming fanatics, I take it?"

Nathan mustered a faint smile in response. "No fanatics. Not a whole lot of knowledge about the parts of the world where Arabic is spoken, mind you. I've been trying to... illuminate culture, too, but it's gone over better some times than others."

Haroun frowned. "That will be a problem. Have you spent a lot of time living in Arab lands?" he asked. "I'm a native Moroccan and I've gone on the hajj."

The smile was a little easier, suddenly. "You're better-equipped than I am, then. I've spent... well, quite a bit of time in Arabic-speaking areas, but never for more than a few months at a time."

Haroun nodded, and then stretched his upper body somewhat. "I think I'll do a combined course - language and history and culture - the three are all bound together; trying to unravel them is pointless."

Nathan nodded. "I was... trying to decide what to replace Arabic with in my schedule for the fall," he said. Thinking back to the days just before Saturday, when he'd been considering things like this, was harder than it should have been. "Farsi or Hindi... I think I'd narrowed it down to one or the other..."

Haroun quirked both his eyebrows. "You're more well-spoken than most - although I suspect you cheat by using telepathy. Either one would be a good exposure - all these white kids have to see how the other sides live." he said with a mocking smile. "I'm looking forward to Arabic - and while I'm thinking of it, who are your stars and who needs the most work?"

"I do cheat," Nathan admitted, easily enough. "I'm a beta telepath, but it's receptivity that aids language-learning..." He paused for a moment, resting his chin in his good hand. "Amanda Sefton, Marie-Ange Colbert, Monet St. Croix... probably the three stars of the class. Monet in particular has a family background in Arabic - she's picking it up particularly quickly. Amanda..." He tensed, swallowing hard. "She's working independently on the Arabic version of Dioscorides - the big medieval text on herbal medicine? And Angie just works particularly hard. She's going out with the TA, so I think she feels she needs to keep up.... oh, right. Doug. Your TA." He smiled again, a bit feebly. "Mutant linguist."

Haroun's eyes widened at that last bit. "Now that's an interesting power. He speaks - anything? Fluently?" He whistled in appreication. "I can see how that'd be useful. I'm surprised the NSA hasn't tried to snatch him up yet. Or the CIA."

"Anything and everything. Nearly got driven out of his mind by the cicada chatter earlier this summer, actually." Nathan snorted softly. "He reads body language, too. Almost as good as telepathy. And as for intelligence agencies, he's already had a close encounter with the French. See the above-mentioned girlfriend."

"Curiouser and curiouser." he said, but then let the matter drop. "So long as his girlfriend doesn't mess with his ability to do meaningful work, I really don't care too much." he said casually. "Charles probably works fairly hard to keep the baleful eye of the United States of America away from this place - I remember the Stryker incident."

"Doug's very dedicated," Nathan said. "Probably one of the hardest-working students here. Been pretty much invaluable thus far." He stared out at the grounds, almost blindly. "And Charles does, I think," he said, his voice more strained. "This is supposed to be a safe place for the kids, after all..."

"And it's up to men like us to make sure it stays that way." Haroun added quietly. "Columbia notwithstanding, we overall do a good job."

"Right. Good job," Nathan echoed, trying to pull his mind back on track. Arabic, they'd been talking about Arabic. "There are a few that have trouble," he said, more steadily. "But even they work hard. I might... Amanda, and Jubilation Lee, they've got some sort of weird rivalry going on. They do it in both Arabic and Mandarin. It's sometimes a little disruptive..."

Haroun shrugged. "I think I can deal with two catty girls. Who's stirring them up, some boy they're competing over? Or are they rivals for position in the school social hierarchy?"

"A little bit of both," Nathan said after a moment. "Fortunately, the boy's not in either class." He looked sideways at Haroun, a wry smile flickering across his face. "Was the atmosphere this... soap-opera-ish when you were here before?"

"It was actually worse, if memory serves. At least the Starsmore boy has learned how not to kill us all every time he wants to exercise his power." Haroun recalled. "Of course, I was usually the one stirring things up. I regret that, now." he said.

"Turning over a new leaf, now that you're back?" Nathan inquired. Easier to focus on someone else, he thought.

Haroun nodded. "Trying to, anyway. I made a dog's dinner of my last time here, and I don't plan on letting that happen again. Especially since I can't go back to Morocco." he said sadly. Forcing a smile, he shook off the black memories. "I'm looking forward to seeing who's got a little bit of fire inside of them."

"Don't think fire's the issue. Properly directing it, though..." Nathan waved a hand limply, an aimless gesture. "It's funny, you know," he said after a moment. "All kinds of people here with limited options. You can't go back to Morocco, I apparently shouldn't be leaving school grounds..."

Haroun winced as what he was saying finally dawned on him. "Crap. Didn't mean to reopen that wound, sorry." he said apologetically. "Stupid of me. Things will settle out, one way or another. I just wish I could have helped you - by the time we got word, it was too late. I missed the last massacre where I could have made a difference, I don't plan on missing any more."

"It happened too quickly," Nathan said. "Knew it would, when it did..." Just like he'd known that no one here would be able to help, he thought, and the laugh that slipped out wasn't particularly pleasant-sounding. "Hopefully there won't be any more occasions like that," he said, making a stab at something approaching a normal tone. "Can't imagine they really wanted that much publicity."

"That is what was bothering me about it as well. Admittedly, I am far from the guy who has all the information, but is it possible we're looking at a splinter cell here? A rogue faction, acting without authorization?" he asked. "This is, from what I've been able to tell, far outside the standard wetwork MO."

Nathan rubbed at his eyes. "I was warned things had changed, once the US government started investigating them," he said, thinking about that conversation with MacInnis at the beginning of his lost weekend back in May. "I don't know what's going on. Those operatives, the ones who did all the collateral damage... ten years ago, they would have been killed in training."

"You'll have to forgive me for saying so, but at this point I'd have preferred it if they were strangled in their cribs." he said drily. "But let's not dwell on the darker things. A shame I can't carry anything that's not shielded - it's a beautiful day for a flight."

Nathan stared at him, the younger man's words bouncing around in his head as if they'd taken on a life of their own. His voice, when he spoke, was just as raw yet strangely calm, too. "They didn't do that of their own free will," he said. "They don't have free will. Mistra uses psionic conditioning on their operatives. They... they're just kids, before." It struck him then that the wrongness of the operatives at Columbia might have had more to do with their personalities before conditioning - second-gen conditioning could be done up to the late teens, but the thought flickered away again before he could examine it too closely. "They didn't... have a choice about becoming what you all saw on the news."

Haroun snarled. "GAH! A pox on anyone who would _do_ that to a child! That's ... inhuman!" he said, clearly feeling and not thinking. "If there is anything I can do, anything at all, just let me know. These people are _monsters_!"

"People keep saying that," Nathan said, his voice very low. "Righteous horror... seems like a very natural response." Funny, though, how no one had ever showed up to do something about it, not in all those years...

"It should be, for anyone with a functioning sense of right and wrong." Haroun said with real indignation. "I wish I would have known about them before, so I could have helped earlier on! Ah well, no use in wishing on what is already past. I'll be expecting you to ask if you need backup or anything, you understand me?"

Nathan almost told Haroun he'd add him to the list, but caught himself in time and nodded instead. "I appreciate that," he said, the pro forma response, and rose. "I should go," he went on. "Mandarin class."

Haroun nodded. "I'm sorry, I was trying to cheer you up and I believe that I have failed." He stood as well, then looked skywards. "I think I will take another few laps around the grounds before I get the rest of my day started. If you would be so kind, drop off whatever you have on the Arabic class - I'll want to get started on it as soon as possible."

"I will. Have a good flight," Nathan said dully, turning to go back in. Knowing that he probably wasn't going to find any of his students in the classroom, but not really caring.