xp_logs | LOG: Forge is given the abbreviated tour by the resident Glitter Pixie

Set Friday afternoon, shortly before/during Shiro's eruption.

The suite itself wasn't bad at all. Two adjoining rooms with a shared kitchen in between them. Forge had assumed that the door his key fit would be his room, and that the two wardrobes and beds meant he'd have a roommate. He'd thrown his suitcase on the bed farthest from the door and already pushed the wardrobes around to try and make as much of a wall as he could.

The laptop computer on the desk was a recent model, as well. Wireless network access, everything already set up to log on. All the comforts of home, and then some. This could definitely work out.

"Hellooo?" Clarice called from the kitchen. She'd considered knocking, but figured she'd get the added benefit of annoying Jay if she teleported into the kitchen. Which of course meant he wasn't there. Oh well. "Forge?"

Forge straightened up, smacking his head against the top shelf of his wardrobe. That wasn't the Professor. That was a girl's voice. In his suite. He hadn't heard the door - had he left it open?

Rubbing the back of his head, he cautiously stuck his head around the corner. "Um... in here?"\

"Oh good, I didn't want to look all over this place for you," exhuberant was a word frequently associated with Clarice, as was 'sugar high', and today was no exception. Although she wasn't bouncing yet, "Hi!"

This, Forge assumed, would be the welcoming committee. He tossed his suitcase into the wardrobe and shut the door quickly. Not as if he really had a lot to unpack.

Trust the Professor, he told himself. "I guess you're..." his next words were going to be "my tour guide" before he walked out into the kitchen and saw Clarice. His eyebrows hit his hairline as his mouth kept working silently before finishing the sentence with "...purple."

"I am?" Clarice looked at her arm confusedly, before looking back up at Forge, "You need your eyes checked, dude."

She laughed at his confused expression, "Clarice Ferguson, resident Purple Pixie and Glitterbug," she did a mock-salute, "At your service."

The word "cheerleader" kept repeating in Forge's head, desperate to find some classification to put the girl - Clarice - into. Then again, he'd never known a cheerleader who was purple, with a tattoo over her eye and -- a tattoo?

He pointed a finger at her eye inquisitively, "Didn't that HURT?" he demanded, voice unconsciously cracking.

"This?" she touched her eye, suddenly selfconscious. "Yeah, a little," she shrugged, "not as much as that probably," she in turn pointed at his leg.

If it was possible to blink audibly, Forge was trying to do so. "I--" he was an utter loss for how to respond. Usually the reaction to his prostheses was either polite attempts at ignoring them, or barely-masked revulsion. Not direct questioning.

"At first," he explained. "It, er... there's no feeling around the interface." He tapped the top collar that fastened the artificial leg to what remained of his left thigh, just below the hipbone. "The rest has as much tactile sensitivity as I adjust it to. I didn't design the biometric interface, but the rest-" he glanced up, wondering if he was boring Clarice.

"Um, never mind," he stammered. Thankfully, a rumble from his stomach distracted him from what was sure to be an awkward ramble of technical specifications that most people would usually tune out. Whether the rumble was hunger or anxiety, though, Forge wasn't sure. "The Professor, he mentioned... er, showing me where things are? I mean," he pulled his PDA out of his pocket, "I have a floorplan but it's not labeled..."

Clarice listened, not understanding all of it, but still interested in the medical aspects of the prosthesis. "We're not much for floorplans. Baddies, you know," she stated this matter-of-factly, heading towards the door, "Come on, I'll show you around, I have a free-study right now."

"Standard classes for whatever level you're at and are interested in," she explained heading down the hall with Forge in tow, "and more extra stuff than you can poke a stick at, mostly self-defense related. I work in the medlabs and with RedX and fence."

"Baddies? RedX? Self-defense?" Forge asked. Maybe this was more like military school than he'd initially thought. Xavier had mentioned something about sending him a class schedule to start Monday.

A brief memory of the "self-defense" class he'd taken in P.E. flashed through Forge's mind, mostly involving the half-remembered pain of being dropped roughly on his back against the gymnasium floor a lot. He frowned. A class to avoid if at all possible.

"Um...we're mutants. The world isn't too hunky-dory on that," she spoke as if speaking to a slow child, "So they try to teach us to defend ourselves, if you want. And powers training of course. RedX is a division of the Red Cross, we help out in emergencies. You saw the news about the shooting at the mutant-human blood donation site last weekend?"

"I don't watch the news," Forge droned. "Nothing interesting." As they walked, Forge wiggled the fingers of his artificial hand in the 'record' macro that would activate a program he'd designed. By 'typing' in a preprogrammed sequence, he could take notes on a removable flash-memory chip and go over them later. Right now, the main focus of his attention was on trying to pay attention to where things were. Like the kitchen Xavier had mentioned.

"What's to eat around here, anyway?" he asked, figuring they'd head by the kitchen at some point.

"Downstairs, this way, Lorna makes dinner. Don't piss her off." she turned a corner and thundered down the stairs, "News is boring," she agreed, "but last week the first known mutants were allowed to donate blood. It was a big deal. Anyways, I was there working at it, and Doug, another guy here, he was shot."

As those last words sunk into his head, Forge stumbled over his own feet, nearly taking a header into the wall. "Shot?" he repeated. "Jesus..."

It wasn't as if he was a stranger to mutant activism. He'd read up on all the papers as soon as he'd been diagnosed x-factor positive. A lot of the writings fell into line with the stuff he'd been reading. McCoy's genetics papers, Grey's work on Capitol Hill, as well as the Lensherr Manifesto that had made its way around the Internet.

"That kind of stuff happen often here?" he asked, wondering just what kind of school needed THAT kind of self-defense class.

Clarice turned towards the taller boy, stopping suddenly just outside the kitchen, her normally silly demeanor gone, "Yeah. We do a hell of a lot more than give out bandaids in the medlab," she reverted back to her irreverant self as if nothing had happened, "But Doug'll be fine if his girlfriend doesn't drive him nuts, kevlar is a good thing. Kitchen is always fully stocked, if you want anything in a grocery run, write it on the pad over there."

"You work with Dr. McCoy, then?" Forge asked. He almost missed a step again, doing a double-take at himself. This was a conversation. Small talk. He didn't do small talk.

There was something about Forge that amused Clarice, he reminded her of herself, albeit if she were into technology as much as she was into sewing, "Not usually, he's not here now. I work with Dr. Bartlet mostly. Each of the student assistants are assigned to a specific doctor. We work with them as needed or if our powers are an asset. "

THAT piqued his interest. "So what do you do?" he asked, figuring that her answer was most likely going to be something sarcastic or just a dirty look. For all he knew, being purple was the extent of Clarice's mutation, but his curiosity got the better of him. "I mean, your - you know, 'thing'."

She rolled her eyes as he stumbled over his words, "Boy's have 'things' when you're in middle school," she shot back sarcastically, "Mutants have powers. I'm a teleporter."

This day was just getting more and more interesting. "Teleportation?" Forge's brain practically whirled. "How? I mean, I've read up on the technical work they've done in the labs - but no one's been able to reproduce the effects on a superquantum level. How do you get around the whole positional velocity issue?"

Clarice shrugged, "Velocity never changes. I teleport standing still, I won't be running when I reappar. It's like Stargate, without the woosh," she created a portal over herself and teleported across the room. "But every teleporter I've met does it differently."

Forge's hand twitched rapidly, as he attempted to catalog the effects of Clarice's demonstration. It was almost as if she simply willed herself to be in another place and did so. Curious. Heisenberg would have shot himself over the blatant violation of his Uncertainty Theory right there. Forge resigned himself to the fact that the laws of physics were constantly being rewritten in a school of mutants.

"There's classes, then?" he asked, "on... powers?" The word sounded too weird. Like a science fiction novel or a fairy tale. His gift was simpler. He just did what he did, that was it. There wasn't anything to explain.

Clarice had teleported to the refridgerator and was rummaging around in it, trying to find, "A ha! Banana bread!" she crowed, pleased, "Want some? You designed and built your leg and hand, right?," she paused, waiting for him to nod, "Then you probably don't need a class per se, but those of us with psychic or physical powers need practice. The Professor or Wisdom will probably know better than me."

Forge nodded, flexing his 'good' leg as he slid onto a stool across the counter from Clarice. He needed to adjust the flexion on his prosthetic foot. Too far forward, it seemed, and his flesh-and-blood knee was bearing too much of the strain. He'd definitely have to run a diagnostic tonight.

He tapped his artificial fingers together to shut off the recording function and steepled his hands together, watching Clarice slice the bread and practically bounce around the kitchen area. "Is everyone here so - cheerful?" he blurted out without thinking about it.

Clarice practically doubled over in laughter, "Oh hell no! I'm a special case. We have Sarah in the basement, she'll gut you as much as look at you sometimes and Jono's been dubbed the 'Fucking Prince of Darkness. They think they're badass or something."

"Oh." Forge snickered to himself. Every school had their own little "we're all outcasts" clique. They were just as bad as the jocks or the social queens. They liked you if you were like them, that was it.

"This sure isn't like any school I've been to," he announced. "I mean, not like there's exactly a mutant boarding school on every streetcorner." He struggled to try and figure out what to say next instead of dealing with the inevitable awkward silence that had always accompanied any kind of one-on-one interaction in the past.

"So what else is there to do here?" he asked, hoping the answer would give him some kind of clue as to what he could expect from the rest of the student body.

"Um...anything?" Clarice was momentarily stumped. "Fencing, martial arts, a tai chi class just started I think, HeliX tries to get mutants and humans to hang out, pranking people, Alex skateboards, dancing and gymnastics, I sew, we have a band..." she rambled not knowing what he wanted. "If we don't have it, talk to a teacher about starting it yourself. Or if you can drive, see if it's in town."

"Drive." A smile crept over Forge's face. "That I can--"

His boast was cut off by a sudden bright light coming through the window, followed by a violent thunderclap that shook his teeth. Instinctively, Forge dropped to the ground, only peering up over the counter when the noise had ceased.

"What in the sam hell was THAT?" he asked cautiously, absolutely terrified of what the answer could be.

"Fuck if I know!" Clarice muttered from next to him. "You duck well!" she informed him, getting up to look out the window cautiously. There was no one outside except Mr. Marko heading towards the main building. "Oh. Something went boom. Probably not baddies."

She grinned at his bewilderment, "Sometimes, we go boom too," she said before teleporting off to the medlab.

Forge just stared at the empty space where she'd been before deciding that if he was going to get any kind of handle on the insanity, it'd best be done from the safety of his room.

His self-preservation, however, did not stop him from grabbing a plate of banana bread during his retreat.