xp_logs | Dani & Lorna - THE KITCHEN!!!

Set last Wednesday morning, Dani and Lorna plot for a new kitchen and about what to until they have it. They also discuss teh suck that Sheldon is and adoption as a viable option.

Dani stumbled downstairs to Ms. Dane's office to see what needed to be done today. Some of the new equipment should be arriving if she had remembered correctly. Groaning slightly, she sat in the extra office chair and tried not to wince. She did not overdo it yesterday. Not at all.

Lorna was reading when she walked in, sipping coffee as she did. She didn't notice Dani until she went to step around the usual position of the chair Dani was in and bumped into it instead. She squeaked but recovered without spilling anything. "Dani, hi, didn't see you." Lorna dumped the catalog on the counter and leaned against the desk, "The floor guys and the cabinet guys are supposedly in today and possibly the counter guys...I'm not really sure. Hey," she stopped and looked more closely at Dani, "you look like hell, you know? Have you stopped for, oh, the last 24 to 48 hours?"

"Yeah," Dani muttered, arms crossed over her chest protectively, although what she was protecting herself from she wasn't entirely certain, "I think I slept. Couldn't get comfortable. I just hurt. I'll be fine."

"Overdid it. Hmm." Lorna repeated and sipped from her coffee mug, eyeing the girl. Dani would react very badly to being told she wasn't going to help until she was not hurting. "Well, luckily today is a light day for moving and lifting and such. We get to just sit back while the construction guys work. I really desperately need someone to sift through these invoices though. Is it possible that there is a delivery fee and a labor charge and a transportation fee?"

"Maybe," Dani did not trust Ms. Dane to not-quite-intentionally-but-on-purpose keep her from doing what she needed to do. She also hurt and wasn't hiding it well. It left her up the proverbial creek without a paddle. "I can do that?" she asked sighing, knowing it was now her job.

"You don't have to sound quite so enthusiastic about it. If you have a better plan, I'll just shove it off on, hmm, bet I can guilt Kitty into it. She likes numbers." Lorna stood and wandered behind her desk, flopping into the chair, still eyeing Dani. "The only thing you can't do today is lifting and junk. For one thing, if you're this sore after today, I'm going to have to do all the cooking myself and I'm not eager to take that up again. So come up with a sedentary way to help me. And make no mistake, Dani, it is helping. I wouldn't bother humoring you. It's a waste of both our times."

Dani could tell she was telling the truth, "I hate not being able to do everything I used to do. And everyone acting like I'm going to break if I stub my toe," now she was pouting, even if there was no reason, "And Hahkota told me I couldn't lay in his room this morning."

"That may have a large part to do with the fact that he's a teenage boy. Let him be. If you absolutely have to steal a bed, take my old one. Alison won't mind." Lorna kicked back farther and propped her feet on her desk. "And tell me about it. You should have heard me whining after I finally got out of the medlab last year. I couldn't do a damn thing without hearing about it from the physical therapist. So irritating."

She lowered her voice as if telling a secret, "But it's never mattered before if he wasn't sleeping in it. Hey, Ms. Dane? If I tell you something, will you not freak out?"

Lorna shrugged, “Can I pledge to try not to freak out? Because if you tell me that you’ve discovered a secondary mutation where you bleed snakes there is going to be freaking. Just saying, I have my limits. Below that though, we’re probably safe on the freak out scale.” She glanced toward the door and nudged it the rest of the way shut.

Dani laughed, leaning forwards slightly to rub her back, "No snakes. You can tell Allison too. But...Sheldon wants to give the baby up for adoption," she blurted the last sentence out, slurring her words together. She had told Hank, but that wasn't going to be much help unless he spontaneously became better.

Lorna didn’t even blink, just shifted to sit properly in her chair and leaned forward. “What do you want to do?” she asked, figuring that was a more important question than what the absentee soon to be ex-husband wanted.

"I..." Dani shrugged helpless, she was not freaking out. She did not want to hurt the baby, but it wasn't easy. Lorna's projected calm helped too, "I'm not sure it matters, what I want. I already talked to my lawyer, he says if they prove I'm unstable because of my powers, which I am, then they can declare me incompetant."

“Chica, if he said that you need a better lawyer.” Lorna shook her head, rolling her eyes at the ridiculousness of that particular legal advice. “Look around you, if you ask us, there isn’t a single adult in this school who won’t fight tooth and nail for you. So do you want to keep your baby? Because there isn’t anything wrong with adoption if you want to do that. I’m adopted myself.”

"You are? Why?" Dani was surprised and clapped her hands over her mouth as soon as she asked, "Sorry. I...don't know, really. I hadn't thought about it until now. I don't think I could give it the life it deserves, but I can't give give it to some random white couple either. It's Cheyenne."

“I have no idea, actually. My parents didn’t tell me until I was 19 and I’ve never asked.” Lorna shrugged, not mentioning how much it disturbed her not to know. “But it never mattered, they’re my parents, blood or no. I don’t know much about the actual process but I would imagine that an adoption agency would do its best to find a home that you would be comfortable having your baby raised in. We can always look into it if that’s what you want to do.”

"I don't know," Dani practically whined, frustrated with it all. Slowly, she took several breaths, trying to calm herself like Mr. Dayspring had shown her, "I don't know. Maybe. It, I'm tired of refering to it as an it. She. She is Cheyenne. And probably a mutant. She needs to know her heritage and not be hated if she is a mutant."

Lorna thought about being in Dani’s place, seventeen, pregnant, going through a divorce and trying to figure out how to balance an entire life at odds with everything she’d ever known. She sighed. She couldn’t have done it. Hell, she was four years older and still didn’t think she could do it. “You don’t have to decide right now. Right now all you have to do is tell me whether or not you want one of our lawyers to call Sheldon and tell him that it’s not his decision. And then we have tea and pick out paint colors.”

"Okay," this was surprisingly easy now that she had finally said something. Rubbing her back some more, she was surprised at how much tension was suddenly gone. "I like red."

"For the kitchen?" Lorna considered that, "Yeah, okay, I can see that. Like a brick color. Maybe something Tuscan." She jotted down a note to get a hold of a lawyer. "What kind of tea would you like?"

"Not Valerian!" she'd already had her cup for the day after Forge had made her go away, "Do we have mint? Or juice?" Juice was better than tea for her, but in the cold weather she preferred hot tea.

"Of teas, we have all things. Juices…not so much thanks to the lack of fridge space though there is probably some papaya juice in my suite." Lorna thought about that and then added, "unless Alex drank
it. Which happens."

"Actually, we have a makeshift refridgerator outside...it's called winter. And Ms. Munroe is making sure it doesn't get too hot either. We have some staples like the the venison and milk out there," at Lorna's dubious look she continued, "It's in crates, protected."

"I'm deeply suspicious of that idea. Not that Ororo can't keep things cold but I still think the health officials would not be pleased. We should outfit one of the sheds to be a cold storage." Lorna blinked at her own suggestion then eyed Dani, "Actually that really sounds like a good plan. Want to tackle it? Not the building itself, but planning and such?"

"Ah, sure," Dani agreed quickly, not having any idea how to do that. She'd go ask Mr. Marko, she had a feeling he'd know, "I wasn't thinking about the health department, just trying to makeshift as much a kitchen as we could.

"It's a bad habit of mine, worrying about health standards and keeping us up to code. I'm trying to figure out a way to explain evil cyborgs to the health inspector when she comes by." Lorna didn't expect Dani to be fully versed in health code and such but she figured the project would both do so and keep Dani occupied on something that was obviously useful. "In the meantime, makeshift is pretty much where we're at so..." she shrugged. "I was going to do something, what was it...oh, right tea!"

"It's a bad habit of mine, worrying about health standards and keeping us up to code.Â I'm trying to figure out a way to explain evil cyborgs to the health inspector when she comes by."Â Lorna didn't expect Dani to be fully versed in health code and such but she figured the project would both do so and keep Dani occupied on something that was obviously useful. "In the meantime, makeshift is pretty much where we're at so..." she shrugged.Â "I was going to do something, what was it...oh, right tea!"

"Tea," Dani agreed, reaching towards the desk and snagging some of the papers that looked like Important Plans. "And planning. I'd say plotting, but I don't think refrigerators and lunch is on the same level as chocolate."

"Not quite." Lorna laughed and got up. "Go ahead and read through those and I'll grab the tea. Then we're going to break our little brains planning a kitchen that will make us the envy of every chef this side of the Atlantic."

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