https://xmenrevolution.com/w/api.php?action=feedcontributions&user=Sunshine&feedformat=atomX-Men: rEvolution - User contributions [en]2024-03-29T08:06:38ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.35.13https://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Xavier%27s_School&diff=25985Xavier's School2024-03-26T20:47:14Z<p>Sunshine: /* Extracurriculars */</p>
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== Purpose ==<br />
<br />
Located outside Salem Center in Westchester County, New York, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters is publicly known as a prestigious boarding school, founded in 1992 and providing an outstanding college preparatory education to middle- and high-school students. With a rigorous academic curriculum and a low student-to-teacher ratio, Xavier's sends its students on to the best colleges in the country.<br />
<br />
The school's true purpose is much more secretive -- Founded by its current headmaster, Charles Xavier, in his family's ancestral home, the school serves as a safe haven and training ground for young mutants to learn to cope with and control their powers. Alongside more typical high school classes, Xavier's students receive instruction and guidance from the faculty in responsible use of powers, the ethics of living with them, and how to eventually make their way back out into the world.<br />
<br />
== Recruitment ==<br />
<br />
Xavier's is ''not'' publicly known to be a mutant school, and its students as welll as its faculty are found by proactive recruitment.<br />
<br />
The school is intended to help students who ''cannot'' attend school due to the danger posed from their mutations. Please keep that in mind when crafting your characters' backstory -- the overwhelming majority of their students are there because they need help to learn to control their powers, and were unable to go to their previous schools. If your character has a mutation that is under control and is not experiencing difficulties at their school, it is ''very unlikely'' that they would be offered a place at Xavier's.<br />
<br />
The sole exceptions are: <br />
<br />
a) mutant students from very wealthy families, who are, occasionally, offered spots at Xavier's even if their powers are not posing them any trouble -- with nearly all their students on scholarship, it's helpful to have a ''few'' students who are actually paying tuition.<br />
<br />
b) immediate family of ''current faculty'' (children, siblings) who are -- if they wish -- allowed to attend the school even if they do not require its specialized accomodations. Weirdly enough, very few human relatives actively ''want'' to go to Freak School, so this is rare.<br />
<br />
Faculty tend to be recruited on recommendation/word of mouth. It is ''not'' required to be a mutant to teach at Xavier's, but, obviously, it is required to be positively disposed towards them.<br />
<br />
OOC Note: Keep in mind that Xavier's is a middle/high school, ''not'' a shelter for wayward or distressed mutants. If you would like a character who is taking ''refuge'' at Xavier's, getting help learning to control their powers at Xavier's, etc. '''you need to make a teenage, student character'''. Your adult ''will not'' be accepted to train and learn at Xavier's, regardless of their own perceived need.<br />
<br />
== Schedule ==<br />
<br />
The school year at [[Xavier's School|Xavier's]] is divided into three terms. Breaks fall between terms, with summer term falling for two months beginning in early June. Though classes are not in session, the school is open residentially through all breaks. Students must have permission from their legal guardians to remain at school during breaks and holidays, including summer term. During summer term, an abbreviated class schedule is in place for those students needing remedial/make-up classes, or those enrolled in elective summer school courses.<br />
<br />
====Daily Class Schedule====<br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Schedule<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
{| cellpadding="10" class="wikitable"<br />
!style="color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#000000;" | Monday<br />
!style="color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#000000;" | Tuesday<br />
!style="color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#000000;" | Wednesday<br />
!style="color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#000000;" | Thursday<br />
!style="color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#000000;" | Friday<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 7:00 - 7:45<br />
Breakfast<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 7:00 - 7:45<br />
Breakfast<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 7:00 - 7:45<br />
Breakfast<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 7:00 - 7:45<br />
Breakfast<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 7:00 - 7:45<br />
Breakfast<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#CDB5CD;" | 8:00 - 8:45<br />
Class A<br />
|style="background-color:#CDB5CD;" rowspan="2" | 8:00 - 9:15<br />
Class A<br />
|style="background-color:#74BBFB;" rowspan="2" | 8:00 - 9:15<br />
Class C<br />
|style="background-color:#CDB5CD;" rowspan="2" | 8:00 - 9:15<br />
Class A<br />
|style="background-color:#74BBFB;" rowspan="2" | 8:00 - 9:15<br />
Class C<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#7BCC70;" | 8:55 - 9:40<br />
Class B<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 9:45-10:15<br />
Study/Break<br />
|style="background-color:#7BCC70;" rowspan="2" | 9:25 - 10:40<br />
Class B<br />
|style="background-color:#FBA16C;" rowspan="2" | 9:25 - 10:40<br />
Class D<br />
|style="background-color:#7BCC70;" rowspan="2" | 9:25 - 10:40<br />
Class B<br />
|style="background-color:#FBA16C;" rowspan="2" | 9:25 - 10:40<br />
Class D<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#74BBFB;" | 10:20 - 11:05<br />
Class C<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FBA16C;" | 11:15 - 12:00<br />
Class D<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 9:45-10:15<br />
Assembly/Break<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 10:50 - 11:35<br />
Study/Break<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 10:50 - 11:35<br />
Assembly/Break<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 9:45 - 10:15<br />
Advising<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 12:10 - 12:55<br />
Lunch<br />
|style="background-color:#FFCC11;" rowspan="2" | 11:45 - 13:00<br />
Class F<br />
|style="background-color:#D44942;" rowspan="2" | 11:45 - 13:00<br />
Class E<br />
|style="background-color:#FFCC11;" rowspan="2" | 11:45 - 13:00<br />
Class F<br />
|style="background-color:#D44942;" rowspan="2" | 11:45 - 13:00<br />
Class E<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#D44942;" | 13:05 - 13:50<br />
Class E<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FFCC11;" | 14:00 - 14:45<br />
Class F<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 13:05 - 13:50<br />
Lunch<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 13:05 - 13:50<br />
Lunch<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 13:05 - 13:50<br />
Lunch<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 13:05 - 13:50<br />
Lunch<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#ADEAEA;" | 14:50 - 18:05<br />
Athletics/Extracurriculars<br />
|style="background-color:#ADEAEA;" | 14:50 - 18:05<br />
Athletics/Extracurriculars<br />
|style="background-color:#ADEAEA;" | 14:00 - 18:05<br />
Athletics/Extracurriculars<br />
|style="background-color:#ADEAEA;" | 14:00 - 18:05<br />
Athletics/Extracurriculars<br />
|style="background-color:#ADEAEA;" | 14:50 - 18:05<br />
Athletics/Extracurriculars<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 18:30 - 19:30<br />
Dinner<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 18:30 - 19:30<br />
Dinner<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 18:30 - 19:30<br />
Dinner<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 18:30 - 19:30<br />
Dinner<br />
|style="background-color:#B0B0B0;" | 18:30 - 19:30<br />
Dinner<br />
|}<br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
====Academic Calendar, 2023-2024====<br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Summer Term 2023'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
June 26 (Monday) - Summer session faculty arrival<br />
June 27 (Tuesday) - Summer session students return<br />
June 28 (Wednesday) - Summer session classes begin<br />
August 21-25 (Monday-Friday) - Exam week; special class schedule for exam period<br />
August 25 (Friday) - Summer term ends<br />
</pre><br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Fall Term 2023'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
August 28-19 (Monday-Tuesday) - New faculty orientation<br />
August 31- September 1 (Thursday-Friday) - Faculty meetings<br />
September 2-3 (Saturday-Sunday) - New Student Orientation<br />
September 4 (Monday) - Labor Day; Returning Students Must Check-in (by 6 pm)<br />
September 5 (Tuesday) - Required Opening of School Assembly; Classes Begin<br />
September 15 (Monday) - classes as usual - Rosh Hoshanah begins at sundown <br />
September 25 (Monday) - No classes - Yom Kippur (begins at sundown on Sept. 24)<br />
October 6-8 (Friday-Monday) - Family Weekend (No classes Monday)<br />
October 12-13 (Thursday-Friday) - Midterms<br />
October 28 (Saturday) - Halloween Dance (Casual)<br />
November 10 (Friday) - Last day of Fall Term classes<br />
November 13-17 (Monday-Friday) - Exam week; special class schedule for exam period<br />
November 17 (Friday) - Last day of Fall Term; Thanksgiving vacation begins<br />
November 21 (Tuesday) - Fall term grades/reports due (Faculty)<br />
November 22 (Wednesday) - Fall term academic review meeting, 9:00-13:00 (Faculty)<br />
</pre><br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Winter Term 2023-2024'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
December 3 (Sunday) - Thanksgiving vacation ends; students must return and check in before 6 pm.<br />
December 4 (Monday) - Winter term classes begin<br />
December 16 (Thursday) - Winter Ball (Formal)<br />
December 15 (Friday) - Half-day of classes; Winter vacation begins after classes end<br />
January 2 (Tuesday) - Winter vacation ends; students must return and check in before 6 pm.<br />
January 3 (Wednesday) - Classes resume<br />
January 11-12 (Thursday-Friday) - Midterms<br />
January 15 (Monday) - No Classes - Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Mandatory all-school assembly, 9:45-10:45.<br />
February 5-6 (Monday-Tuesday) - No Classes - Mid-Winter Holiday<br />
February 10 (Saturday) - Valentine's Dance (Semi-Formal)<br />
March 8 (Friday) - Last day of Winter Term Classes<br />
March 11-15 (Monday-Friday) - Exam week; special class schedule for exam period<br />
March 15 (Friday) - Last day of winter term; break begins once exams end<br />
March 19 (Tuesday) - Winter term grades/reports due (Faculty)<br />
March 20 (Wednesday) - Winter term academic review meeting, 9:00-13:00 (Faculty)<br />
</pre><br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Spring Term 2024'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
March 25 (Monday) - Spring vacation ends; students must return and check in before 6 pm.<br />
March 26 (Tuesday) - Spring term classes begin<br />
April 1 (Monday) - Mid spring holiday, no classes<br />
April 26-27 (Thursday-Friday) - Midterms<br />
May 6-10 (Monday-Friday) - AP exams<br />
May 13-17 (Monday-Friday) - AP exams<br />
May 24 (Friday) - Spring Ball (Formal)<br />
May 24 (Friday) - Last day of Spring Term Classes<br />
May 27-June 31 (Monday-Friday) - Exam week; special class schedule for exam period<br />
May 31 (Friday) - Vacation begins after exams end.<br />
June 1 (Saturday) - Senior-Faculty Dinner<br />
June 1 (Saturday) - Senior academic review meeting, 9:00-13:00 (Faculty)<br />
June 2 (Sunday) - Commencement<br />
June 4 (Tuesday) - Spring term grades/reports due (Faculty)<br />
June 5 (Wednesday) - Spring term academic review meeting, 9:00-13:00 (Faculty)<br />
June 7-9 (Friday-Sunday) - Alumni reunions<br />
</pre><br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Summer Term 2024'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
June 24 (Monday) - Summer session faculty arrival<br />
June 25 (Tuesday) - Summer session students return<br />
June 26 (Wednesday) - Summer session classes begin<br />
August 19-23 (Monday-Friday) - Exam week; special class schedule for exam period<br />
August 23 (Friday) - Summer term ends<br />
</pre><br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
== XS School Rules ==<br />
<br />
ICly, all students at Xavier's are expected to be familiar with the rules and follow them while they are living at and attending the school. OOCly, clearly, people break rules and we do not expect all characters to be studious and well-behaved at all times! Just keep in mind that they have teachers who are telepaths, and boarding schools are highly prone to a busily turning gossip mill. There are things that are easy to get away with and things that are likely to be discovered; don't be surprised if your char's frequent class-skipping or curfew-breaking or bullying lands them in hot water with the school administration.<br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Major Infractions'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
<br />
'''Major infractions will result in more severe disciplinary action. Choosing to remain present while violations of any school policies are occurring may also result in disciplinary action.'''<br />
<br />
*A large part of Xavier's safety lies in its discretion. Under no circumstances should information about the school's mutant status or the X-Men or the mutations of anyone associated with the school be divulged. If students believe they have found other children who would benefit from schooling at Xavier's, they should bring this to faculty attention rather than extending any sort of information or invitation themselves.<br />
<br />
*Violence of any sort is prohibited at Xavier's.<br />
<br />
*Hazing or bullying of any kind will not be tolerated at Xavier's. Hazing is defined as harassing, intimidating, bullying, or coercing another student with the purpose or result of embarrassment, disturbance, or humiliation. Bullying or discriminatory behaviour will not be tolerated. <br />
<br />
*Leaving school grounds without permission. All students must sign out with and be cleared by the faculty member on-duty before leaving school grounds at any time. There is no requirement for a chaperone when leaving campus under normal circumstances. However, if there is a crisis students must be attended by a faculty chaperone or a guardian.<br />
<br />
*Purchasing, possessing, using, or distributing any illicit or illegal drug, any prescription drug in a manner inconsistent with the instructions of the prescribing physician, or legal over-the-counter drugs for purposes other than legitimate medical treatment.<br />
<br />
*Purchasing, possessing, drinking or being under the influence of alcoholic beverages.<br />
<br />
*Dishonest acts of any kind, including cheating, plagiarizing, and other forms of academic dishonesty.<br />
<br />
*Xavier's is a safe location for mutants to live and explore their powers free of the judgement and hostility encountered in the rest of the world. Students are encouraged to train and practice and explore responsible use of their powers while at the school. Use of mutant powers in malicious or destructive manners, whether towards persons, creatures, or property, is never acceptable and will be dealt with strictly.<br />
<br />
*ALL out of school visitors, including family members, must be cleared by a faculty member and signed in with security while they are on school grounds.<br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Additional Policies'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
<br />
*Students are not permitted to possess weapons or firearms of any sort, including BB guns. Permitted use of weapons during athletic activities and training sessions is allowed only under the supervision of a faculty member.<br />
<br />
*Gambling for money is prohibited.<br />
<br />
*Students are required to attend all their scheduled appointments punctually, including classes, assemblies, athletic sessions, or meetings with their adviser. Students who are ill and unable to attend their appointments must report to the medical bay; only Health Services staff may excuse students for medical purposes. Students with other schedule conflicts must receive a note, in writing, from a faculty member excusing them from their school duties.<br />
<br />
*All Xavier's students are issued a cellphone for emergency use. Students leaving school grounds must bring their school-issued cell phone with them at all times. Xavier's cellphones come with a 'panic button' that alerts the school if students find themselves in trouble. Students are expected to utilize this if they are in danger: casual misuse of the panic button outside of emergencies will result in disciplinary action.<br />
<br />
*All students are allowed access to the equipment in the computer lab and, for those with their own computers, internet connections are available in all dorms and wireless internet throughout the school grounds. All students utilizing school technology resources must comply with the acceptable use policy at all times. (Typical regulations about responsible use, prohibiting fraud, pirating, account sharing, malicious hacking, any illegal activities.)<br />
<br />
*Sunday through Thursday, students under the age of 16 are required to be on school grounds by 8 p.m. and in the mansion building by 10:30 p.m. Students over the age of 16 are required to be on school grounds by 9 p.m. and in the mansion building by midnight. On Friday and Saturday nights, students over the age of 16 have no curfew but are still required to follow appropriate sign-out/permission procedures at all times. For students under the age of 16, Friday and Saturday night curfew is extended; students are required to be on campus by midnight, with no requirement to stay in the building. After curfew, students may not leave again before 5 a.m.<br />
<br />
*There is no formal dress code at Xavier's; students are expected to exercise good judgement in the appropriateness of their attire, both in terms of offensiveness and of modesty. Students must change if requested to by a faculty member.<br />
<br />
*Students are not permitted in Cerebro at any time. Students are not permitted anywhere on the second basement level without a faculty escort.<br />
<br />
*Students possessing a valid driver's license are allowed to keep one personal vehicle in the school garage, if they first obtain the written permission from the faculty.<br />
</div></div><br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Dormitory Rules'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
<br />
*Dormitories have quiet hours to allow students to sleep and study: any period of the day when classes are in session, and after 10 p.m. every night except Fridays and Saturdays.<br />
<br />
*No out-of-school visitors will be allowed on the dormitory floor after 10 p.m. Approved visitors staying overnight at Xavier's will be given a room in the guest wing.<br />
<br />
*Students may only be in their OWN dormitories after curfew. Exceptions may be made only by faculty and RAs.<br />
<br />
*Open flames are not allowed in student dorms, to include candles, matches, incense, lighters, or uses of mutant powers that produce flames. Highly flammable materials may not be stored or used in student dorms. Students may not tamper with smoke detectors or fire alarm systems.<br />
<br />
*Student rooms are required to be kept neat and orderly. Inspections for cleanliness will occur on a regular basis; inspection beyond simple observation is considered a room search and will not occur without dean approval.<br />
<br />
*Pets are permitted to students only with faculty approval. Approved pets are the responsibility of the student to care for and oversee. Approval may be revoked for considerations of hygiene, student safety, and animal welfare.<br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
== Academics ==<br />
<br />
Xavier's School runs on trimesters, with an optional summer term for students who wish to stay at school over the summer. In order to graduate, students must complete at least 60 credits of courses through their four years; in almost all cases, classes count as one credit per trimester. Students must enroll in a minimum of four and maximum of six classes per term, except for summer term.<br />
<br />
*Art - 3 term credits; Must study at least two different disciplines (visual arts, performance, or music.) Normally non-credit performance extracurriculars (e.g. Xavier's Players, Band, Chorus) can fulfill a discipline requirement. Visual arts requirements can be waived by permission of the [[Jax|arts department head]].<br />
*Computer Science: 3 term credits; alternatively can test out. <br />
*English - 11 term credits <br />
*History - 6 term credits; three of which must be U.S. history and three of which must be non-U.S. history.<br />
*Health & Human Development: 2 term credits.<br />
*Language - 9 term credits of one language or 5 each of two; alternatively, can test out. <br />
*Mathematics - 9 term credits <br />
*Philosophy, Ethics, and Religion: 6 term credits<br />
*Physical Education: 2 term credits per year; can use a season of athletics as one term of phys. ed. requirement.<br />
*Science - 6 term credits<br />
*Social Sciences - 1 term credits<br />
*Vocational Tech - 1 term credit<br />
<br />
Additionally, students must successfully complete sixty hours of community service activities through the course of four years. Faculty advisors are available to help students find appropriate service projects. <br />
<br />
'''Note''': The following courses, highlit in red in the course list, are mandatory for all students:<br />
*English - Expository Writing<br />
*Health & Human Development - Teen Health Matters (formerly Health & Human Development. Must be taken first term upon enrolling at Xavier's)<br />
*Health & Human Development - Thriving in Community (formerly Human Sexuality)<br />
*Philosophy, Ethics & Religion - Bioethics - Humanity in a Post-Genomic Era<br />
*Philosophy, Ethics & Religion - Power & Social Responsibility<br />
*Philosophy, Ethics & Religion - The Ethics of Power<br />
*Phys. Ed - Psionic Self-Defense<br />
<br />
'''Note''': Classes marked with an asterisk* can be repeated for credit. Classes without an asterisk may only be taken for credit once. Any classes may always be audited (for no credit) as fits the students' schedule, with permission from the instructor.<br />
<br />
'''Note''': Students taking interdisciplinary classes may choose ''one'' department to apply their credit to. Credit will not be awarded in multiple disciplines for the same class.<br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Xavier's Academic Offerings<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
{| cellpadding="10" class="wikitable" style="width: 90%;"<br />
!style="color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#000000;" | Department<br />
!style="color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#000000;" | Course<br />
!style="color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#000000;" | Term Length<br />
!style="color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#000000;" | Teacher<br />
!style="color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#000000;" | Class Description<br />
!style="color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#000000;" | Notes<br />
|- <br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Introductory Theory and Composition*<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | 1 (Fall)<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | [[Maya]]<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This course is designed to give students a vocabulary to further understand and describe the music they will encounter. After beginning the year learning hand-written musical notation, the study of scales, intervals, tonality, harmony, melodic organization, voice leading in two parts, and harmonic dictation ensues. After this study is complete, students will be in a position to knowledgeably describe every aspect of a typical piece of music that they may come across. Ear-training skills are developed through dictation and sight singing. Those taking this course in the fall are encouraged to combine it with Intermediate and Advanced Theory and Composition to form a three-term Advanced Placement Music Theory sequence. Students will begin composing near the end of the term, but it should be noted that most compositional activity will occur in the intermediate & advanced classes.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Intermediate Theory and Composition*<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | 1 (Winter)<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | [[Maya]]<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
Continuing from where Introductory Theory & Composition leaves off, this course begins the students’ hands-on compositional development. Small pieces are composed almost nightly as students now begin to demonstrate what they previously learned to recognize and describe. Also in this term, students will compose several larger pieces that will be written for and recorded by classmates. As the term progresses, the chords of Western music are incorporated into their musical vocabulary one by one. Further study in sight singing and ear training help to continue that development. In most years, this term includes a field trip to see the New York Philharmonic in concert.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Advanced Theory and Composition*<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | 1 (Spring)<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | [[Maya]]<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
Completing the music theory sequence, the focus for the beginning of this term is on preparation for the AP exam in May. Students study non-dominant seventh chords, applied dominant seventh chords, and musical form before a week of AP prep. After the AP exam, a larger project is decided upon. Past projects have included studying Chopin’s piano preludes, examining poetic meaning in Schubert’s songs, and composing a 3–5 minute work.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Becoming Musical<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This course examines the elements that are universal in music and develops the practical skills needed to become functioning musicians. Rhythm, pitch, scales, keys, intervals, and triads are the basic material of the course. By studying a variety of both popular and classical styles, students will discover how composers employ the elements of music to create varied moods and expression. The practical skills of ear training, sight-singing, and dictation as well as the notation of music are integrated into the course. The department encourages students to take private lessons along with this course.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | The Nature of Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | [[Maya]]<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This course offers a basic introduction to music literature, theory, performance, and composition. Music from various cultures and historical periods is examined in an attempt to increase student awareness of the musical languages and practices. Students compose several original compositions, and they also receive instruction on musical instruments. No previous experience in music is required.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Western Music History<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | [[Maya]]<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
A one-term survey of Western music history. The course progresses chronologically from classical antiquity to the music of today, exploring along the way the religious, social, historical, and human issues surrounding music and its composition.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | World Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | [[Maya]]<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
In this performing/writing course, we will explore, connect, and engage cultures from different corners of the world through music composition and improvisation. Students will have access to the many traditional instruments owned by the Xavier's Music Department. All participants will share equally in the creative process and an end-of-the-mod performance will highlight the experience.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Popular Music in America<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | [[Maya]]<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
What is American popular music? How does the rich variety of American popular music styles reflect trends in American society and the major events of American history? Through a series of readings and recordings, students will trace the history of popular music in America across three extended time spans: 1840-1920 (beginning roughly with Stephen Foster and the advent of minstrelsy through ragtime and early blues forms); 1910-1950 (to include New Orleans jazz, syncopated song and dance music, big band, swing and bop, and Chicago jazz); 1950-1980 (including cool jazz, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, British rock, rock, soul, Latin music, and contemporary jazz). Emphasis will be placed on developing understanding and perception of the musical elements of instrumentation, rhythm, melody, harmony, dynamics, texture and form through study of classic recordings from a wide spectrum of popular artists.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Your Musical Brain<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
What playlists do you create to accompany you through the parts of your day? How does the music we choose shape the personal and communal tapestry of our daily lives? The Musical Brain explores why music matters so much to us as individuals and as a species. Through reading assignments, listening assignments, and classroom activities we’ll explore the rapidly evolving field of inquiry and research in music perception and cognition. Topics will include the science of sound, the biological origins of music, relationships between music and language, and the sources of music’s emotional impact. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Film Scoring<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
In this course, students will study film music primarily through compositional exercises, as well as analysis of films from various genres and time periods. The course will begin with an introduction to a wide variety of compositional styles and techniques employed throughout the history of film, including changes resulting from increased technological resources throughout the 20th century. Students will then compose music for film scenes from different genres, such as drama, horror, romance, and action/adventure. Though this course will primarily focus on music from the 20th century to the present, students also will learn about how certain composers connected music to visual images in classical concert music prior to 1900.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Jazz History<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This course begins by examining jazz’s mixture of African and European traditions and the subsequent pre-jazz styles of spiritual, blues, and ragtime. It then proceeds with a study of 20th-century jazz styles, beginning with New Orleans and culminating with the multifaceted creations of today’s artists. Along the way the course pays tribute to the work of some of jazz’s most influential innovators, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis. Original recordings, photographs, and videos are used extensively throughout the term.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Songwriting Workshop<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
Popular music plays an important role in our modern culture: it can provide an escape from our daily lives and influence our thoughts and actions. MUS480 will begin by exploring popular songs from artists such as Ryan Black, Lady Gaga, Miranda Lambert and Rihanna as well as those of other artists from Motown to the present day. We will study songs from a variety of genres—including jazz, blues, rock, R&B, folk, and country western—as a way of building a foundational understanding of popular music. In addition to frequent songwriting exercises, students will create three original songs in the genre of their choice with particular focus on the musical attributes needed to support both the genre and the specific topic of each song. Students interested in all musical genres are welcome; however, it is expected that all students will be capable and willing to perform at a basic level using their own voice and/or an instrument and/or technology.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Modern Music Making*<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This course is a workshop for students interested in making modern styles of music, primarily through technology. Students will develop their technique, their aesthetic and their ears by working on multiple collaborative and independent projects across a spectrum of musical genres including (but not limited to) pop, hip-hop, EDM, ambient and experimental. There will also be opportunities for live performances, cross-disciplinary collaboration and student-initiated projects. The in-class studio environment will be one of creativity, curiosity and collaboration as students work both together and alongside each other in pursuit of their musical goals.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Music Recording and Mixing*<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This course will give students hands-on instruction in the craft of recording and mixing music across multiple genres. Through focused discussion, experiential recording and in-depth mixing projects, students will learn the following: foundations of acoustics; aspects of digital recording using a DAW; microphone techniques in a variety of musical circumstances; design and implementation of signal chains in a multi-track environment; proper gain staging techniques; effective use of effects and signal processing; mixing best practices; and the interpersonal nuances of recording. Mixing projects will utilize audio recorded by the class, recordings made at on-campus music events, and stems from professionally recorded studio sessions.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Band*<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Variable<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed"> Band provides students an opportunity to begin and continue instrumental development. Students new to string instruments must take the fall term course "Introduction to Orchestra" before auditioning for placement in an appropriate level of rehearsal: Concert (beginners and intermediate repertoire) and Symphonic (intermediate and advanced repertoire). Percussion Ensemble runs when there are sufficient percussion students and will combine with the other courses for recitals. Additional rehearsals and performances may be required. Participation in this course may count as an "Arts: Performance" credit 'instead' of "Arts: Music" credit for spring term only if the student performs in the year-end combined concert and demonstrates sufficient independent rehearsal commitments. No more than two credits can be exchanged in this manner. <br />
</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Orchestra*<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Variable<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed"> Orchestra provides students an opportunity to begin and continue instrumental development. Students new to string instruments must take the fall term course "Introduction to Instrumental Music" before auditioning for placement in an appropriate level of rehearsal: String (beginners and intermediate repertoire), Philharmonic (intermediate repertoire), and Symphony (advanced repertoire). Additional rehearsals and performances may be required. Participation in this course may count as an "Arts: Performance" credit 'instead' of "Arts: Music" credit for spring term only if the student performs in the year-end combined concert and demonstrates sufficient independent rehearsal commitments. No more than two credits can be exchanged in this manner. <br />
</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Chorus*<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Variable<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed"> Chorus provides students an opportunity to begin and continue vocal development. Students new to choral singing must take the fall term course "Introduction to Reading Music" as well as audition for placement in an appropriate level of rehearsal: Treble Choir (beginners and intermediate repertoire, women's voices only), Tenor/Bass (beginners and intermediate repertoire, mens's voices only, does not run all years), and Concert (advanced repertoire, mixed voices). Additional rehearsals and performances may be required. Participation in this course may count as an "Arts: Performance" credit 'instead' of "Arts: Music" credit for spring term only if the student performs in the year-end combined concert and demonstrates sufficient independent rehearsal commitments. No more than two credits can be exchanged in this manner. <br />
</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Instructor engages in blatant favoritism, both among classes and within classes. Students who can sight sing are often appointed section leader with no other qualifications. Consistently assigns more rep than can be reasonably learned and memorized, and drops selections within the week of the final concert. <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Arts: Music<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Jazz Ensemble*<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | NPC (instruments) & NPC (vocalists) <br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed"> This audition-only course is for those students interested in pursuing the study and performance of jazz/popular music. Instrumentalists and vocalists will rehearse separately to master jazz techniques before coming together to work on group improvisation and performance. Participation in this course may count as an "Arts: Performance" credit 'instead' of "Arts: Music" credit for spring term only if the student performs in the winter term performance and demonstrates sufficient independent rehearsal commitments. No more than two credits can be exchanged in this manner. <br />
</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#FF3EB5;" | Instructor engages in blatant favoritism, both among classes and within classes. Students who can sight sing are often appointed section leader with no other qualifications. Consistently assigns more rep than can be reasonably learned and memorized, and drops selections within the week of the final concert. <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Beginning Dance Technique*<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
Dance Technique focuses on modern and contemporary vocabularies that enhance the artistic and physical prowess of the dancer. Students are placed in appropriate levels of beginning, intermediate, or advanced depending on their level of training. All three levels explore the same content of technique training but at different accelerated paces. Classes are designed to introduce the technical study of dance movement to students of levels beginning through advanced. The style and technique explored is determined by the individual instructor and the dance chair. Students new to the school who desire to be placed in the intermediate or advanced level must receive the permission of the Dance Department chair.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Intermediate Dance Technique*<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
Dance Technique focuses on modern and contemporary vocabularies that enhance the artistic and physical prowess of the dancer. Students are placed in appropriate levels of beginning, intermediate, or advanced depending on their level of training. All three levels explore the same content of technique training but at different accelerated paces. Classes are designed to introduce the technical study of dance movement to students of levels beginning through advanced. The style and technique explored is determined by the individual instructor and the dance chair. Students new to the school who desire to be placed in the intermediate or advanced level must receive the permission of the Dance Department chair.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Advanced Dance Technique*<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
Dance Technique focuses on modern and contemporary vocabularies that enhance the artistic and physical prowess of the dancer. Students are placed in appropriate levels of beginning, intermediate, or advanced depending on their level of training. All three levels explore the same content of technique training but at different accelerated paces. Classes are designed to introduce the technical study of dance movement to students of levels beginning through advanced. The style and technique explored is determined by the individual instructor and the dance chair. Students new to the school who desire to be placed in the intermediate or advanced level must receive the permission of the Dance Department chair.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Dance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
All peoples and cultures dance. This course investigates why we dance as a representation of culture, as a form of communication and expression, and as a way of understanding our world. Students will look at various forms of dance generally and then delve more specifically into works of art that shape American concert and pop culture dance. Students will watch and analyze dance, research dance pioneers, and learn examples of significant and pivotal choreography. The class will learn about and do various forms of dance and will culminate with students using techniques and theories learned to develop their own composition. No prior dance experience needed.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Introduction to Dance*<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This course introduces students to four primary disciplines: ballet, modern, jazz and hip-hop. Basic composition and improvisation skills will be introduced. Little or no previous dance training required.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Intermediate Dance*<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This course focuses on Western concert dance disciplines: ballet, modern and jazz. Composition and improvisation skills will be developed. Previous dance training, which must include ballet, is required. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Advanced Dance*<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This accelerated course provides advanced dancers with intensive training in concert dance disciplines (ballet, modern, contemporary and jazz). Classes will consist of a warmup, technique and complex choreographed phrases, along with composition and improvisation. Prerequisite: instructor permission. Extensive dance training, which must<br />
include ballet, is required.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Introduction to Street Styles*<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This course introduces students to the culture of hip-hop and a variety of street dance styles under the hip-hop umbrella. Disciplines may include party/social dances, breaking, house, vogue and waacking. Classes will consist of a warmup, historical context, technique and some choreography. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | West African Dance*<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
The content of this course gives an introduction to basic West African movement, rhythms, and songs. Each class begins with a warm-up to prepare the body for this particular style of movement, followed by movements across the floor, and finally work on specific dances. Students will learn several dances from West Africa, primarily from Nigeria, Mali, Guinea, and the Senegambia regions. Classes are accompanied by live drumming, giving the students the opportunity to understand the unique connection between polyrhythmic timing and the body in motion. While the class focuses on the dances of West Africa it is also a means for understanding the culture of the people.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Moving Your Way<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This course is a creative movement class designed to introduce the novice dancer to dance in a comfortable learning environment while allowing the experienced dancer to further develop their choreographic tool box. Both novice and experienced dancers will explore and develop creative thinking skills, useful to the learning process. We will look at the different impetus of motion that can be initiated by the stimulus of sound and imagery, as well as external energy forces outside of the kinesthetic realm of the body. The course relies heavily on improvisation as a primary tool for finding one’s own authentic movement quality and is structured to liberate the way we move through space and communicate with each other by freeing up habitual patterns that may be restricting our unconscious and kinesthetic flow of energy.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Introduction to the Theatre<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
Why do we make live performances? What does it take to create a production? This course explores the foundations of theatre and dance. How the different elements of directing, costume design, scenic design, lighting design, dancing, and acting—combine to create a unified production for an audience. In the process, students will learn the vocabulary of the stage and develop a conceptual framework for creating a performance.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Fundamentals of Acting*<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This course is designed for students with little or no acting experience. By doing exercises in movement and voice production, reading, improvisation, and scenes, a student who is curious about the theatre may determine whether he or she has ability or interest in acting while learning something of the process of characterization — the major responsibility of the actor. The emphasis is on the variety of acting experiences rather than on a polished final product.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Intermediate Acting*<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This intermediate course focuses on developing and supporting each actor’s unique approaches to performance making and ensemble-building. Vocal and physical training deepens techniques introduced in THR202, empowering students to explore a diverse selection of dramatic texts and develop skills in improvisation and devising. Students may work with “heightened” texts or improvisations that present new challenges in terms of language, physicality, characterization, style or content. Students rehearse, workshop and perform material for each other, becoming increasingly adept at communicating and synthesizing creative ideas.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Advanced Acting*<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This course offers students the opportunity to build on performance skills acquired throughout their Xavier's career and immerse themselves in a rigorous, thoughtful ensemble process. The class will conduct intensive analysis and rehearsal of either the work of a playwright or devise new performance material together based on the interest of the group. It may culminate in a series of fully explored scenes or in a full-length production.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Choreography*<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;]" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This course investigates choreographing dances in a variety of genres and styles for the stage. Students will be led through explorations and formal exercises to learn how to generate and manipulate movement in clear and innovative fashions. Coursework will culminate in a final presentation of original compositions. Students will also examine and analyze works of professional choreographers to gain a deeper understanding of dance elements and choreographic tools. Ultimately, students will deepen their understanding of movement as a form of communication and expression.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Directing*<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course offers the essential theory and practice of stage direction, with particular emphasis on the leadership skills needed to create a constructive ensemble rehearsal environment. Beginning with a series of independent exercises aimed at honing the director’s aesthetic sensibilities and style, the course then invites students to select and direct a short play of their choosing. Students proceed step by step through the entire production process: from play selection, script analysis and casting to the detailed work of a rehearsal period. Along the way, students develop skills in the areas of composition and use of space, picturization, textual interpretation, and collaboration and communication with actors. All plays receive a public performance at the end of the term.<br />
</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Lighting<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course introduces the fundamentals of lighting design for theatrical and dance productions. Students will learn to use a design concept to make choices about how to express the theme and mood of a play or dance to enhance the storytelling of a production. The course will also enable students to work hands-on with lighting equipment in Theatre and Dance Department spaces as they learn how to manipulate the controllable properties of light: direction, intensity, color, pattern, movement, diffusion, and composition. The course places a heavy emphasis on self and peer critique of work and on revising work.<br />
</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Set Design<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course introduces students to the design process and elements that inform the scenic designer’s choices when designing for theatrical performances. Focus will be on the use of a conceptual approach to design scenery that coveys the themes and mood of a script and creates a cohesive and effective design for a show. To create designs, the class will use several creative tools, including computer drafting software and the resources of the makerspace. The design process will include several steps, such as written concept statements, visual research, sketching/drafting and model making. The course places a heavy emphasis on self and peer critique of work and on revising work.<br />
</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Public Speaking<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course offers opportunities to practice speaking in community. Students experiment with writing, preparing and delivering effective and engaging speeches. While investigating communication strategies, students also explore somatic exercises to deepen their own physical and vocal awareness, and manage the anxiety that often accompanies public speaking. We emphasize attention to the dynamic relationship between speaker and audience, and students take an active role in each other’s growth. Students offer one another constructive feedback and gain greater insight into their own public speaking goals. The encouraging and supportive environment fosters greater self-confidence while developing both empathy and leadership skills.<br />
</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | The Art of Comedy<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Come discover elements of Comedic theatre. Among other things we will explore stand‑up, slapstick and sketch comedy through radio, movies, theatre, performance and street artists. We will ask what humour really means to humanity and where its edges might be. What can we do with fear, excitement, posture, breath, props, light, and sound? During the class you will create a repertory for yourself. No theatre experience required, just a willingness to have deep fun.<br />
</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Arts: Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | Filmmaking<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course provides practical experience in basic cinematography without dialogue. Using digital video equipment, students learn about the history of filmmaking as well as the use of the camera and editing techniques to create their own short films. Student, amateur and professional film sequences are discussed and analyzed.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#A32CC4;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Drawing 1: Methods & Materials*<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | [[Jax]]<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Drawing is fundamentally about learning how to see and how to translate that vision onto paper through a variety of mark-making techniques. Through in-class exercises and formal assignments, students learn the language of drawing and develop skills relating to contour, gesture, and fully rendered compositions. Course concepts include the depiction of three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional plane, use of light and dark contrast, and sighting. Assignments are designed to develop students’ skills in drawing representationally from direct observation and to encourage creative and expressive thinking.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Painting 1: Paint, Palette, and Process*<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | [[Jax]]<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Develop skills with the basic elements of painting in acrylics as you explore different approaches to generate ideas for paintings. Learn how dots become complex abstract compositions or how the game of Pictionary prompts surreal spaces. Working from both the imagination and observation, specific projects are assigned to facilitate the study of fundamental paint handling, color mixing, and blending. Issues of form and space relationships, composition, and development of ideas are addressed in balance with the student’s desire for self-expression. Class critiques and visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art complement the actual painting process.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Advanced Drawing, Painting, and Mixed Media*<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | [[Jax]]<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course builds on the knowledge and skills developed in Drawing I and/or Painting I, while helping students find and express their artistic voice through one medium or a combination of 2D media. This class focuses on thematic subjects and continues to stress the development of concepts and skills. Using painting or drawing, students can create artworks from both the imagination and observation to broaden their definition of what painting or drawing can be. For those students interested in mixed media, they can combine traditional or experimental drawing or painting methods with collage and other techniques. During this course, students are encouraged to design their own projects and to build a portfolio of their artworks. Critiques and virtual visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art are important components of this course.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Life Drawing*<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | [[Jax]]<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Drawing realistically has been a revered art ever since the ancients used mark-making to create the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface. This course is designed for beginners who want to learn the basics of drawing from life. Students will develop their representational drawing skills using a variety of charcoal media. As the course progresses, students will draw from still life, photographic references, and finally live models. Through a series of demonstrations, in-class drawing, group critiques, and individual assistance from the instructor, students will develop their ability to draw convincingly from life. Focus topics include composition, proportion, value relationships, edge relationships, modeling, materials, and stylization. In-class drawing exercises and assignments will focus on subjects exposed to one-source lighting and will vary in length from quick studies to more developed compositions.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Advanced Studio Art: Portfolio Intensive*<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | [[Jax]] & NPCs<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course provides experienced students a rich opportunity to pursue the successful completion of a professional portfolio of artwork featured in an end-of-term thesis exhibition in the Half Gallery in New York City, team-curated by the class with a contemporary favor. The meaningful study of 21st-century visual culture is infused in the course through visiting artists and the investigation of artists relevant to ongoing studio work in all mediums. Students focus on photography, printmaking, painting, drawing, ceramics and 3-D design. This multimedia studio course requires strong self-direction, a unique studio investment and creative motivation. Students focus on a particular art medium and create multiple works that explore a concept or idea. Under the guidance of the instructor, students will set qualitative and quantitative goals for the term in their chosen studio concentration. Weekly process critiques are an integral part of the course and support ongoing artistic growth. In addition, the instructors meet individually with students for more-specific feedback and to mentor the process. Useful feedback is given to students from Art Department faculty who specialize in their chosen studio discipline to help them develop ideas and offer suggestions. Students may also receive guidance in the development of an art portfolio suitable for college admission criteria.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Graphic Design*<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Design shapes how we see and experience information. Those who visually communicate through design have the opportunity to shape the meaning of the images we consume. This course not only addresses the formal, sensory, conceptual, and technical aspects of design, it also encourages students to consider the ethics and design history that have shaped our contemporary visual experiences. Students will use design thinking principles and real-world scenarios to create pieces that will be shared with their communities.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Graphic Design II*<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course is divided into two parts: practical design application and personal projects. We will begin the course by examining the practices of designers working in today’s market. This includes engaging with visiting designers and illustrators and creating work for a real client. Part two of this class is dedicated to exploring one’s emerging design aesthetic using a breadth of digital media. Students pitch and create their personal projects, which can range from branding to book illustrations. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Architecture I<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course will introduce the basic principles of architectural design through a sequence of related projects in drawing, site analysis, and research into precedent, culminating in the design of a space or structure. The design projects will change from Term 1 to Term 3 and will address architectural design in different contexts so that a student wishing to continue with architecture at the advanced level can work with a variety of design issues. With hands-on sketches, drawings, and models, students will explore the issues of a well-planned structure and learn to see the environment in terms of human scale, materials, and the organization of space. Class time will include discussions and demonstrations as well as studio time. There will be a required evening lab. Students often find that this class requires more than the usual amount of homework time.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Architecture II*<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Designed as a continuation of Architecture I for students who wish to develop and further expand their ideas. The sequence of projects throughout the term is designed to allow a student to study a range of architectural issues by addressing different contexts—a natural setting and an urban context. This course also will offer the possibility of developing a multidisciplinary project in coordination with work in another class.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Photography I: Appreciating Light, Color, and Theme*<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course allows students to channel their excitement and passion for photography into a more intentional and sophisticated image-making process. Using digital cameras, students will gain a highly functional understanding of essential camera skills and<br />
photographic principles and learn to maintain proper exposure, focus, and creative control over the camera. Students will acquire skills in the digital studio including digital workfow management; online portfolio maintenance; Photoshop techniques and inkjet printing methods. Students will also develop their critique skills, learn to frame and present their work in a gallery, and practice writing artist statements. Each exploration challenges students to think conceptually, to shoot creatively, to develop an eye for strong composition and quality of light, and to make images that start conversations. Throughout the term, student photographers develop a vibrant online portfolio based on a series of thematic photo explorations, including identity-based portraiture, abstract, minimalism and Photoshop layers.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Photography II: Beyond the Camera*<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Advanced Photography is designed to challenge students to go beyond technical skills and photographic principles to establish a conceptually strong personal photographic style and artistic voice. Through hands-on practice, in-depth critique and weekly assignments, students will develop a refined, concept-driven, professional online portfolio. In-studio learning exercises will continue to challenge students to build their digital camera skills, while out-of-studio assignments will become increasingly more in-depth and creatively challenging. A range of tools will be used including Photoshop, inkjet printers, and an array of studio lighting equipment. Students will produce original work, with special attention to ways in which their technical and aesthetic decisions can clarify their artistic intentions. Photoshop and iMovie are used to explore creative and experimental possibilities for enhancing and manipulating digital photos and video. The course culminates with a self-directed final project, allowing students to practice proposal writing, project development and final presentation, while pursuing work rooted in their own interests and experiences.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Film Photography*<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course in analog photography concentrates on the use of 35mm cameras and chemical processing. Students are instructed in proper camera use, basic film exposure, and darkroom familiarity. Weekly meetings are divided into lab and classroom sessions. In the lab, students learn the fundamental tools and techniques of a traditional darkroom; in the classroom, students present their work to gain a fuller understanding of photography as a medium of expression and storytelling. Students can expect to examine the invention of photography and the “flaneur” tradition of 35mm photography as exemplified in the work of artists such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, and many more. Film cameras will be provided for students to explore light-sensitive silver materials. Laboratory instruction in printing fine art images with variable contrast filters will be provided.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Ceramics I: Form & Function*<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The Xavier's Clay Studio introduces students to methods used to create unique sculpture and tableware. Developing their creative concepts, students will throw on the potter’s wheel, hand build forms, and create a series of pieces over the course of the term, which may include objects such as plates, cups, bowls, teapots and sculpture. Drawing inspiration from contemporary ceramic artists, the class will explore a variety of techniques for surface design, glazing and fring. The teacher will offer innovative and sophisticated approaches that will provide further opportunity for experimentation.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Ceramics II: Molding Meaning*<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This advanced course offers a combination of assigned and self-directed projects with a further investigation of working with clay. Building of of skills gained in Ceramics I, students develop a more sophisticated approach to methods and techniques that are used to create forms with clay. Projects such as throwing, hand building, modeling and industrial slip casting will foster individual style and creativity. Students will focus on process and exploration of a broad range of contemporary clay works, functional, industrial and sculptural. Examples of contemporary artists’ pottery and sculpture are used as inspiration for studio assignments. Advanced Ceramics also offers the unique opportunity to study the science and chemistry behind glazing and firing. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Printmaking I: Pop Culture*<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The printmaking course is a comprehensive studio experience that emphasizes experimentation and creativity while providing a strong technical basis. Students explore a variety of print processes, including screen printing, block carving, and monotype and letterpress printing. Using surfaces such as linoleum, woodblocks and silk screens, combined with a wide variety of carving tools and inks, students will create a substantial print portfolio that explores such concepts as image reversal, multiplicity, color theory, commercial applications and graphic design. Inspiration for projects includes fonts, portraits, still-life objects, photographs, media references and works by artists of the past and present. Inventive approaches, including T-shirt printing, will also be explored. Film clips and the examination of contemporary printmakers will enrich studio work.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Environmental Sculpture<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> The course provides an opportunity to work and think about art on a large scale. Students create scale models of potential larger works that might require months to actually construct. They work outdoors on projects using simple "green" materials to create large pieces that are both objects and activate the space around them. Students are given a variety of prompts and requirements to address when creating their sculptures. For example, themes have been based on ideas about safety vs. danger and transitions. Students in the class are, sometimes for the first time, sawing and hauling logs, hefting rocks, digging holes and generally breaking a sweat to create their visions.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Wearable Art<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">In this course, students make art that can be worn on the body. Students use traditional jewelry making and sewing materials but also work with non-traditional materials, with a strong focus on concepts and the transformation of materials.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | The Moving Image<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Video art has been described as the “electronic canvas.” In this course, students will learn to use the moving image as an artwork unto itself. Students will be exposed to video art’s unique history, as well as the video art pioneers and contemporaries who have created work outside the traditions of the narrative and documentary. We will explore the technical aspects of video, including using the camera, the software, and the moving image in both traditional and experimental ways. Editing will be done using the digital process of Final Cut Pro, but students may also explore other methods of creating moving images. How, where, and when to present work will also be explored.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Arts: Visual<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | Drawing: Otherness & Social Justice<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | [[Jax]] & NPCs<br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">In this class, students explore drawing using text as primary imagery. Students learn about design and text-based drawing strategies to explore human rights while developing a body of drawings addressing their study. The course is designed to provide students with opportunities to explore fundamental human rights and varying Western/non-Western viewpoints and perspectives through the exploration of art as a vehicle to promote and encourage social change. The course explores the history of political art blending both critique and debate learning opportunities with studio art practices. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#17684F;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | Computer Science<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | Digital Literacy<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">In this introductory course, students become familiar with the basic principles of a personal computer, including the internal hardware, operating system, and software applications. Students gain practice in using key applications such as word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software, as well as understand literacy issues around the Internet, information, and security, including how to navigate sorting trustworthy sources from unreliable ones online.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | Computer Science<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | Computing and Society<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course introduces students to algorithms and algorithmic thinking through the lens of social and public policy. Students explore the impact of algorithms and software on privacy, censorship and other sometimes contentious matters in the modern world. Students will learn programming as a tool for exploring these concepts.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | Computer Science<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | Fundamentals of Computer Science<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | 2<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course begins with an introduction to computational thinking, potentially including programming in a block-based language such as Scratch, and then moves to programming in Python, JavaScript, Processing, or another text-based programming language. Students will learn about variables, functions, conditional statements (if-else), and iterations (loops), and will design and code their own programming projects. The course may include additional units such as programming Finch robots or performing introductory data analysis using SQL.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | Computer Science<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | Algorithms and Data Structures<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | 2<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course examines classic data structures: lists, queues, stacks, binary trees and graphs, and hash tables. Standard algorithms for sorting and searching will be studied, and complexity analysis performed using big-oh notation. Students also develop a deeper understanding of software engineering principles as the course emphasizes reuse and generic programming.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | Computer Science<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | Mobile App Development<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | 2<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Within this course, we will explore mobile spaces by developing applications for one or more of the presently available platforms (Android, IOS, etc.). Students will explore development topics specific to mobile applications, device operations and user interaction. Throughout the term, sound software design and engineering practices in encapsulation and modularization will be emphasized.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | Computer Science<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | Introduction to Artificial Intelligence<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | 2<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI) course teaches students important programming concepts that enable the use of AI in computer science and society at large. Students learn the implications of AI on society and develop a series of projects that illustrate the variety of ways AI can be used to optimize and predict information. Students learn how AI has been used in gaming and other applications, create an unbeatable computer Tic Tac Toe player; learn how chatbots are developed to interact with humans and create an informational chatbot of their own; learn how to make predictive models using linear and logistical regression and clustering, and create their own predictive models using complex data sets.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | Computer Science<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | AP Computer Science<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Three-term course in algorithms, object-oriented programming, and data structures, guided by the College Board’s AP Computer Science course description. The course covers Java language syntax and style, classes and interfaces, conditional and iterative<br />
statements, strings and arrays, Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), searching and sorting algorithms, recursion, data structures, and the design<br />
and implementation of larger programs, including group projects.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F8EF6C;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#CE2029;" | Expository Writing<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Participants learn how to read challenging texts and how to think and write about them clearly and coherently. Readings for the course are taken from various disciplines, such as literature, journalism, and social sciences. The course enables students to identify the strengths and weaknesses in their writing and to improve their skills through individual and group work, discussions, revisions, in-class exercises, and homework. We read and analyze works that exemplify good writing, and we learn how to define a thesis, organize an essay, and incorporate appropriate vocabulary.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | AP English Language & Composition<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Learn about the elements of argument and composition as you develop your critical-reading and writing skills. Students read and analyze nonfiction works from various periods and write essays with different aims: for example, to explain an idea, argue a point, or persuade your reader of something. Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-english-language-and-composition AP English Language] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | AP English Literature & Composition<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Learn how to understand and evaluate works of fiction, poetry, and drama from various periods and cultures. You’ll read literary works and write essays to explain and support your analysis of them. Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-english-literature-and-composition AP English Literature] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | American Immigrant Literature<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">What does it mean to be an immigrant in the U.S.? What do individuals experience when they move from one country and settle in another? What do these immigrants gain in the process, and what do they lose? How do they deal with being “the other?” How do immigrants connect or disconnect with their American- born children? Students explore all these questions and more by analyzing short fiction and films by American immigrants. Throughout the mod, students read and respond to text on a nightly basis, gaining a better understanding of how difficult assimilation can often be for immigrants in their new abode. Students come ‘up close and personal’ with immigrant issues by interviewing an immigrant of their choice and writing up their interview in a People magazine manner. The course culminates with a final project which ties all the readings together thematically in a creative and artistic way, addressing the essential question: what is the immigrant experience?</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Creative Nonfiction<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">“The essay isn’t a retreat from the world but a way of encountering it,” writes Leslie Jamison in Best American Essays 2017. Throughout the term, we will explore the art of telling stories — ours and those of others — and learn how to translate personal experience and research into effective pieces of creative nonfiction. We will read and listen to essays on a range of topics: health care, bird watching, immigration, craft beer, hunting and Serena Williams (to name a few). Forms will vary from traditional to more contemporary and innovative — memoir, lyric essay, braided essay, graphic essay, podcast and video essay. We will discuss them as readers (digesting content) and as writers (analyzing form). Students will craft original pieces of creative nonfiction, experimenting with a variety of compositional elements and techniques. The writing process will be workshop-oriented: Students will receive peer and instructor feedback, work through multiple drafts and build a supportive writing community.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Creative Writing: Poetry<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">“Poetry,” wrote Robert Frost, “is a way of taking life by the throat.” From its origins in oral tradition and tribal lore, as well as its role in incantatory spiritual practice, poetry has carried in its rhythms the deep longings of humanity. In this course, students will dip into this current, writing poems with a view to aspects of craft modeled by poets in a diverse range of voices and writing traditions. In our workshops of one another’s poems, we will consider the relationship between content and form, as well as what differentiates poetry from other writing genres. Through experiments in received forms (traditional forms such as the sonnet and sestina), as well as more contemporary approaches (for example, writing in free verse or in prose poems), students will move toward the development of a distinctive voice and style.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Creative Writing: Short Fiction<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This writing-intensive course invites students to explore fiction as both readers and writers. The short stories and novels read in class will serve as models for students to create their own fictional work, introducing them to the craft and mechanics of fiction and storytelling. This course traditionally offers an MFA-style workshop model, providing students an opportunity to both receive and offer constructive feedback, and to revise their work using this input. Assignments may include two or three short stories and an analytical essay over the course of the term.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Under the Fur: Animals in Literature<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">According to thinker Gilles Deleuze, anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool. But we live in a time when more than one cable television channel is entirely dedicated to animal programming, when whole weeks are given to sharks, and when people carry their dogs as an accessory. It seems we are not concerned about becoming fools for species not our own. This course explores both how animals and animal lives are represented in narrative and how the presence of animals allows us to understand in new ways how narrative and language function. For this reason, we will dip into several genres, disciplines, and media: memoirs, novels, short stories, poems, philosophical essays, critical theory, internet videos, lectures, and films. We will be asked by these works to question what it means to represent animals but also what it means to represent at all. How can representation be ethical? How can it respond to and provoke wider political, theoretical, and philosophical debate? How should we and can we care for the nonhuman world? What are the dangers, boundaries, and rewards of cross-species sympathy?</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | African Literature<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This seminar course will challenge students to take a closer look at African literature by tracing its evolution and discussing its diversity in terms of genre and geographical setting. Class discussions, written assignments, blog postings, and oral presentations will be based on the texts and films recommended for the course. Students will pay particular attention to how literary works produced on the continent have over the ages represented the African identity and how this has been perceived in other parts of the world. Possible texts: ''The Thing Around Your Neck'' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria, West Africa); ''Betrayal in the City'' by Francis Imbuga (Kenya, East Africa); ''A Walk in the Night'' by Alex La Guma (Republic of S.A., South Africa); ''Miramar'' by Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt, North Africa); ''The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry'', edited by Chikane & Moore (continent-wide). A selection of films and articles will complement the study of these texts.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | The Art of Protest: Revolutionary Writings<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course examines protest as a form of literary activism. From the grittiness of hip-hop lyrics to the density of civil disobedience tracts, this class will seek to explore distinct genres of vocalizing dissent. The approach is multicultural and interdisciplinary, and it seeks to inspect the role of literature, art, music and film in galvanizing communities and creating spaces to examine social justice. Students will be asked to write in various protest genres (poetry, epistolary witness, monologue and fiction) to compile a portfolio of their own literary activism.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Utopias and Dystopias in Literature<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Fantastic societies have held a fascination for writers from Thomas More to the present day. Utopia, “no place,” represents an idealized society whose inhabitants willingly embrace its difference from our own world. Dystopic visions are the disturbing fip side of this coin. Both genres inevitably cause readers to draw parallels between their own experiences and those of the protagonists. Scientific and technological advances are often at the root of the utopic/dystopic discourse, and one of the main functions of this course is to explore the presentation of technology as narrative. The course seeks to examine some of these alternate worlds to explore the way writers of fiction and filmmakers have presented the effect of projected changes and developments on the fabric of society. We will build our visionary galaxy from the following: Thomas More, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Alfonso Cuarón, Octavia Butler, and other contemporary writers and filmmakers. Students will write analytical and creative essays.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Theories of Children's Literature<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC-Marlene Zudke<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course considers the role of the imagination in communicating and effecting cultural change. Students will be asked to apply a variety of critical theory for interpretation and discussion of the literature. Themes explored by this course will include alternative realities, the nature of dreams, the function of the subconscious, and the use of allegory. Probable selections include ''The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland'' and ''Through the Looking Glass'', by Lewis Carroll; ''Haroun and the Sea of Stories'', by Salman Rushdie; ''The Wind in the Willows'', by Kenneth Grahame; ''The Jungle Book'', by Rudyard Kipling; ''The Wizard of Oz'', by L. Frank Baum; ''The Pied Piper of Hamelin'', by Robert Browning; ''The Secret Garden'', by Frances Hodgson Burnett; ''A Child’s Garden of Verses'', by Robert Louis Stevenson; ''The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'' and ''The Last Battle'', by C.S. Lewis; and ''Grimm’s Fairy Tales'', ''Mother Goose'', writings by Carlos Castaneda, and essays by Bettelheim and Zipes. Possible films include ''The Red Balloon'' and ''The Point''. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | This class sounds cute and easy and has a reputation for actually being extremely intense and challenging; the teacher is particularly demanding in expecting students to analyze works & engage in class & homework.<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Gothic Literature: Living in the Tomb<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course traces trends in Gothic forms, from their origins in the damp and dark castles of Europe to the aridity of the contemporary American landscape. Students will identify gothic conventions and themes such as the haunted house, family dynamics, apparitions, entrapment, secrecy, and the sublime. They also will read novels, short stories, and poetry spanning roughly 200 years in order to explore questions about the supernatural, the psychology of horror and terror, the significance of fantasy and fear, the desire for moral closure, and the roles of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Probable selections include ''The Castle of Otranto'', by Horace Walpole; ''Faustus'', by Christopher Marlowe; ''Rebecca'', by Daphne du Maurier; ''Dracula'', by Bram Stoker; ''The Turn of the Screw'', by Henry James; stories by Poe, Faulkner, Gaskell, Irving, Hawthorne, Gilman, Jackson, Cheever, DeLillo, Carver, and Oates; and poetry by Christina Rossetti, Thomas Gray, William Cowper, Louise Glück, and Sylvia Plath. Possible films include ''Affliction'', ''The Royal Tenenbaums'', ''A Simple Plan'', ''Psycho'', and ''The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari''.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Contemporary Native American Literature<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">What does it mean to be a Native American writer in the 21st century? In this course, students will explore life on and off the Native American reservation in works produced by writers from a wide variety of indigenous communities in the United States. The course will involve navigating issues/topics a propos to Native American studies, such as colonialism and genocide, cultural survival, and political and environmental activism. Possible writers to be studied: Luci Tapahonso, Evelina Zuni Lucero, Sherman Alexie, Paula Gunn Allen, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ramson Lomatewama, Simon Ortiz, nila northSun, Joy Harjo, Gerald Vizenor, Louise Erdrich, Diane Glancy, Winona LaDuke, Anton Treur, Wendy Rose, and Linda Hogan.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Inheritance, Exile, and the Jewish Literacy imagination.<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Primo Levi’s short story “Quaestio de Centauris” describes a centaur living in exile from others like him in the human world. In her discussion of this story for a series in The New Yorker, Jhumpa Lahiri describes Levi’s time in Auschwitz as “the most brutal form of exile” and later quotes Levi on the subject from The Truce when he writes: “This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.”<br />
<br />
The imaginative worlds of writers are necessarily infuenced by their lived personal and inherited cultural experiences. In this class, we will consider the ways in which history, exile and intergenerational inheritance shape the artistic worlds Jewish writers create. While the readings in this course will focus on a particular literary tradition, the course is relevant and welcoming to students of all cultural backgrounds. Writing assignments will ask students to reflect on their own lives and heritage, and the ways that history, culture and diaspora hold meaning for them as community members, individuals, thinkers and artists. Assignments will range from the personal (poem, essay, short story, visual work) to the collaborative (interview, documentary, ekphrasis, collage), inviting students to consider the forces that infuence their own imaginations. Readings will include fiction by Clarice Lispector, Primo Levi, Grace Paley, Franz Kafka and Courtney Sender; poetry by Anthony Hecht, Adrienne Rich and Joseph Brodsky; and criticism by Walter Benjamin, Svetlana Boym and others. The course will include visiting lecturers from within and outside of the Xavier's community.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Blood Roots: Horror Literature and its History<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Author Carmen Maria Machado writes that, “Horror is an intimate, eerie, terrifying thing, and when it’s done well it can unmake you.” From historical hauntings to modern-day slashers, horror literature as a genre has existed for centuries. Beginning with Walpole’s 1765 medieval terror ''The Castle of Otranto'', we will study the field’s evolution from gothic horror to contemporary scary stories, exploring the distinctions between gothic, psychological, and supernatural horrors, among others. Machado goes on to say that horror “tells us a lot about who we are, what we are, and what we, individually and culturally, are afraid of,” a claim which will guide us as we dive into ghastly and macabre tales that captivate a culture and hold a mirror up to our truest selves.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Strange Worlds: Speculative Fiction<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Whether it is Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, science fiction and fantasy can not only delight our imagination but also help us understand our real, present world more thoroughly. Students in this course will study a wide array of science fiction and fantasy. They’ll look at how fantasy provides commentary on race, gender and class through works such as Octavia Butler’s Fledgling or Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, and consider science fiction’s power to comment on technological and social quandaries, such as Frank Herbert’s prescient consideration of global warming in Dune or Philip K. Dick’s exploration of artificial intelligence and identity in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Students will write critical reflections, examining the intersection of these imagined worlds with real life as well as trying to craft science fiction or fantasy of their own.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Crime Fiction<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course introduces students to early works in the development of the “detective story” (Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and the ways in which those early works help establish the foundations for a variety of “crime fictions” that have steadily grown in popularity throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will learn to appreciate authors working in different times, places and settings and to explore the criminal mind and those tasked with solving criminal cases and fighting criminal activity (whether amateur detective, private eye or police officer). Along the way, students will try their hand at writing their own pieces of crime fiction and produce short analytical pieces examining the books and films they encounter.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Fictions of Finance<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">What do we value? The pursuit of profit, surges in wealth and the suspect principles of the financier have intrigued authors since the 19th century. How do language, narrative style, structure and literary production transform with shifts in the marketplace? Through a careful investigation of literature, film and illustration, we will discuss how art imagines and redefines social and economic relations. We will supplement the literary works with historical documents or articles that shed light on the economic climate at the time of publication. We might consider how the imagined space of the novel presents the mystery of the financial market, which seems shrouded in a haze. We might also ponder how authors imagine worlds where money has no practical use and nothing has any purchasing power. Over the course of the term, students will write short analytical pieces and complete a creative independent project of their own design.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Humor<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Robert Frost called humor “the most engaging cowardice” and Percy Bysshe Shelley characterized laughter as a “heartless fiend,” but maybe they weren’t in on the joke. In this course, we’ll read literary humor writing—including comedy, satire, irony, and wit—in a variety of forms and genres in an effort to face a paradoxical (and not entirely unfunny) question: should we take humor seriously? Students should expect to contend with critical theory, read across genres and media, and attempt to write humor of their own.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Mid-Twentieth Century American Poetry<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course will introduce students to poets and movements that have shaped the direction and contours of American poetry since World War II. Students first study the Beat Movement and then explore the so-called “schools” of poetry—Black Mountain, New York, Confessional, et al. The course finishes with an exposure to poetry that is happening right now, which includes bicultural and multicultural poets. Most class time will be spent deriving themes through discussions of poets, poems, poetic movements, criticism, and theory. Poets include Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac, Dylan, Waldman, Bukowski, Creeley, Olson, Levertov, Ashbury, O’Hara, Lowell, Plath, Berryman, Bishop, Rich, Dove, Hass, Kinnell, Hogan, Nye, Springsteen, and Colvin.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Epics and Heroes<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Great epics of the past tell us about the culture, history, religion and magic of a particular time. As Joseph Campbell wrote, they are “the wonderful song of the soul’s high adventure.” We will look at powerful stories, as well as their meaning for the period and for today. Possible readings include mythology from around the world, Hermann Hesse’s ''Siddhartha'', and an assortment of modern comic books.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Rememories: Trauma and Survival in 20th-Century Literature<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison coins the term “rememory” to describe a type of memory that won’t stay buried—ghosts of experiences that resurface across years, decades, even centuries, memories of trauma that continue to haunt literature to this day. This course will examine how narratives of trauma and survival have been represented (and re-presented) in 20th- and 21st-century literature. In our investigation of literature about war, terrorism, diaspora, and other cultural traumas, we will encounter authors writing from a variety of historical moments and perspectives. We will look closely at how trauma literature both delineates and breaks down divisions within individual, societal, and generational trauma experience. And we will engage with course texts by writing in a number of modes, both critical and creative. Thematic focuses will include the problematics of truth and testimony; the dismantling of traditional narrative structures and genres; individual vs. collective memory; societal regeneration; and the ways trauma literature engages with issues of race, class, gender, and national identity.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Asian-American Literature<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This seminar explores the literary, historical, and broader sociocultural development of the complex and ever-expanding body of work that collectively (and not always neatly) contributes to what may be called “Asian/American” literature and film. We will engage with a wide range of written and visual texts, including poetry, fiction, memoir, cinema, and television, as well as with scholarly and other artistic forms of production, in order to fashion an analytical framework, informed perspective, and interpretive approach through which to reread and rethink the culture, politics, and history of the United States itself. A related goal is to understand the role of literature and other cultural forms in our nation’s struggles over identity, power, and resources. Focusing on the development and representation of Asian/America, we will unpack the social formation of race and the complexity of racial dynamics in the United States historically and today.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Theatre of the Marginalized<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Course previously titled "Theatre of the Unusual/Everyday Life." Students who took that class previously should not sign up for this one) Through literature of the theatre, students focus on differences in everyday lives. Students will have an opportunity to explore many issues of accessibility, physical and mental challenges through time, cultures, definitions, and values, and the everyday struggles individuals have relating to others. Plays may include: ''Elephant Man'', ''Children of a Lesser God'', ''Fences'', ''Getting Out'', and ''The Ballad of a Sad Café''. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Beyond the Thousand and One Nights: Introduction to Arabic Literature<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">In this class, students will learn of the development of Arabic literature from its inception in the medieval Arabic literary tradition, which begins in the sixth-century with nomadic Bedouin poetry and the Qur'an, through new literary forms adapted from Western imaginative literature. The aim of the course is to introduce students to key samples of modern Arabic literature, which trace major social, political, religious, cultural and linguistic developments in the Arab world, including North Africa. All readings will be in English translations. The class will also explore the politics of translation. Some questions that will be addressed, but not exclusively: How do some Arab writers conceive of "modernity"? How do they conceive of their relation to politics, and how do they understand the role of intellectuals in their societies? Who are the readers (actual or implied) of these texts? How do these authors relate to the Arabic, European, and American literary traditions? </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | South Asian Literature<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course will focus on different genres, contexts, time periods, and even languages (although all readings will be in English/translation) that fall under the broad category of ‘South Asian Literature.’ In one year, we might focus on the events surrounding the Partition of 1947 and how it inspired a generation of writers in Urdu. Another year, we might focus on Sanskrit literature: for example, poetry, drama, and/or short stories. In other iterations, the class might explore LGBTQ authors, the South Asian diaspora, and even the works of a particular author. The readings would focus mainly on shorter literary works, such as short stories and poems, but there would also be in most of these classes the opportunity to read full books (e.g. Bharati Mukherjee’s ''Miss New India'' and ''Wife'', the Sanskrit ''Vetālapañcaviṃśati'', Abha Dawesar’s ''Babyji'') or excerpts thereof. Within each version of the course, students would be able to research and learn about the historical context of the works as well as where they fall in the literary sphere.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | English<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | Shakespeare Now<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Poet Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare that he “was not of his age, but for all time.” But what does a poet-playwright, dead now some 400 years, have to say that speaks to this moment of the human experience? In this class we will read and discuss the Bard’s plays in order to see how they were understood in their time as well as how they address modern sensibilities of race, gender, sexuality, economics and politics. How does Measure for Measure figure in the #MeToo movement What does a queer reading of Twelfth Night yield? How does The Tempest engage colonialism, race and the violence of language, or how does King Lear take on the betrayal of both the body and the body politic? How might Henry IV address cultural appropriation and entitlement or Henry V espouse or critique nationalism? Through discussing, writing about and even performing scenes from some of Shakespeare’s plays, we will test whether and how these works still resonate. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#B74BF5;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | Health & Human Development<br />
|style="background-color:#CE2029;" | Teen Health Matters (Formerly Health & Human Development)<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">In this first-term, age-appropriate course, required of all new students, students will discuss health issues such as sleep, time management, living and learning in a diverse community, mindfulness, positive psychology and stress management, media literacy, and social practices in a digital landscape. All topics will be addressed in the context of adjusting to a campus community, accessing resources and understanding school rules. Together, all new students will explore how to fully integrate into their new class and how to have a healthy, mindful transition to Xavier's. A special emphasis on decision-making as they become emerging adults will help students make decisions about their future that offer complexities of choice. In-depth conversations will enable new students to build self-efficacy skills and prepare for challenging health and lifestyle choices. The pass/no pass grading system encourages student participation, honesty and sharing in a supportive and more relaxed environment.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | Health & Human Development<br />
|style="background-color:#CE2029;" | Thriving in Community (formerly Human Sexuality)<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | [[Jax]]<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">In this class, required for all high school students, students will discuss a variety of health issues, such as mental and psychological health, character development, cultural competency, gender, sexual behavior and sexuality, consent/healthy relationships, and alcohol/drugs. This course is focused on helping students navigate some of the most common health and relationship concerns for their age group. Class aims to enable students to build self-efficacy and prepare for challenging health and lifestyle choices. Intentionality is explored throughout the term so that students will develop effective decision-making skills with purpose and thought. In this class students will explore identity development and self-authorship, foundational aspects to a student’s transition from adolescence to young adulthood. The pass/no pass grading system encourages student participation, honesty and sharing in a supportive and more relaxed environment focused around a growth mindset.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | Probably the class most complained-about by parents to administration each year; Jax is very open in talking with students about sexuality, gender and identity issues and Many Parents are concerned he will turn their students trans or something.<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | Health & Human Development<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | The Pursuit of Euphoria<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course will explore the use of mind-altering substances throughout history, across cultures and within subcultures of the United States. From a biochemical, sociological and psychological standpoint we will probe the reasons why people seek to alter their state of being, whether through the use of drugs or through natural means. Readings will include selections such as: ''The Compass of Pleasure'' by David Linden; Flow: ''The Psychology of Optimal Experience'' by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; and ''Forces of Habit'' by David Courtwright.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | Health & Human Development<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | The Power Within: Philosophy and Science of Optimal Health<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">How can we best manage life’s competing challenges? How should we measure success? What are the most effective means to enhance one’s capabilities, strengths and health status? We will aim to answer these and other questions by studying traditional teachings and practices, as well as the insights and lessons offered by modern-day behavioral science and neuroscience. Through reading, research, reflection, personal practice and experimentation, students will investigate the theories, models and methods that have proven to enhance well-being.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#E6A2AD;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | AP Art History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-art-history AP Art History] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | AP European History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-european-history AP European History] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | AP U.S. History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-united-states-history AP U.S. History] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | AP World History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-world-history-modern AP World History] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | U.S., Colonialism - 1861<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course introduces students to the formation of American values and institutions from the early English settlements of North America through the Revolution and Civil War. Emphasis is given to the cultural, economic and social diversity of early America, the tension between local and central authority during the struggle for independence, the establishment of the Constitution, economic and social change in the young republic, slavery, and the growing sectional confict that culminated in secession. Students will complete a library research project.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | U.S., 1861-1941<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course continues the survey of American history with the Civil War and follows with the attempt to rebuild the union during Reconstruction. Emphasis is given to economic and social changes of the late 19th century and the emergence of the United States as a world power. Topics include the transformation of the United States into an urban industrial society, the dilemma of race, the changing role of women, the Depression and the political response to these issues. The course ends with the advent of World War II. There will be a required library research paper this term.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | U.S., 1941-Present<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course begins with U.S. involvement in World War II. Emphasis is given to the Cold War and rising global involvement of the United States. Other topics include the Civil Rights movement, the social and political turmoil of the 1960s, the dual crises of Vietnam and Watergate, the Reagan revolution and issues of the contemporary world. A term paper, based on independent research, is required to pass the course.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Native Peoples of the Americas<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course surveys the history of indigenous groups from their prehistoric roots to the Post-Classic Period. Students gain exposure to anthropological, archaeological and historical resources to illuminate the Mesoamerican societies with a particular focus on the Mayan and Aztec Empires. Students also gain exposure to the evolution of independent cultural and social systems among indigenous tribes in North America. Among the subjects highlighted are the production of foodstuff, evolving patterns of tribal life, governance, warfare and economics. During the latter stages of the course, students examine the ways in which the lives of indigenous peoples were dramatically reconfigured as the economic systems of the Atlantic world forever changed tribal life.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Jailhouse Nation: U.S. History of Crime, Punishment, and Mass Incarceration<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Jailhouse Nation explores America’s long and troubled history with crime, punishment, and prisons. By first examining how both crime and thus the “criminal” are socially and historically constructed, students will consider the role of violence and systematic punishment in Puritan New England, the slave South, and later, the modern United States. The institution of slavery will provide an important framework to help students understand how new modes of punishment (namely, incarceration in jails and prisons) emerged alongside the abolition of slavery. Furthermore, we will examine the role of post-emancipation prison regimes in shaping popular (mis)understandings of “race” and the idea of “black criminality.” Lastly, we will discuss the rise of the carceral state in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, noting long historical parallels and the roles of contemporary political and economic forces driving the prison boom. Throughout the course we will consider the distinct experiences of punishment for men, women, children, African Americans, whites, Latinos, sexual minorities and non-citizens in order to tease out the specific relationships between race, class, gender and punishment at various moments in American history. Within our broader exploration of state-based punishment policies, we will also consider community resistance to policing and incarceration and the rise of so-called prison abolitionists.<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
</div></div><br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Law and American Society<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course provides students with an introduction to the American legal system and to the development of American constitutional law. Historic Supreme Court decisions and legal case studies will be used to develop an in-depth understanding of the historical background and present-day constitutional controversies over such topics as free speech, censorship, abortion, workplace discrimination, affirmative action and the rights of the accused. Practitioners from the fields of law and criminal justice may provide an added dimension to the course. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Rocking the Schoolhouse: US History of Education<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This class will examine the history of American Education. From the one-room schoolhouse to Race to the Top, students will leave with a deep understanding of how America educates its k-12 students. Rocking the Schoolhouse does not look at a broken system, rather the students analyze why the system is purposely designed to educate some, and leave many behind. Public schools today are as racially segregated as they were in 1954. The class presents a thesis: “The US Public Education System is the greatest Civil Rights issue of the 21st Century.” From this thesis, arguments and evidence will be presented and students will be asked to analyze the data and take their own stand. The racial opportunity gap has been identified, and little has been done to remedy this built-in aspect of public education. The final project challenges the student to identify a need in public education, and design a school that will remedy the problem. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | U.S. Youth Subcultures<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course explores the role of subcultures in contributing to the cultural spectrum of the United States between the 1920s and the twenty‑first century. Studying subcultures can reveal as much about the shadows of society in which they resided as it does the mainstream. Subcultures also represent a unique intersection of radical political ideologies and innovative artistic trends, often expressed through a group’s attachment to a specific genre of music, social outlet, and/or fashion. We will examine the value systems, and the broader historical contexts that gave rise to them, of: the flappers; hipsters, and beatniks; greasers; hippies; the hip‑hop and punk rock scenes, and street art. We will also focus on the ways in which society has repeatedly co‑opted these previously marginal movements, rendering them into yet another popular means of corporatized mass consumption.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | U.S. Black Studies<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Black Studies is a broad field of study that can be approached from many disciplines. In this course, we survey African American history from the period of the Great Migration through the present. We explore the socio-economic, political, and cultural contributions of African Americans with an emphasis on movements for racial equality, the arts, and Black feminism. Texts include foundational writings in African American history and literature, including writings from W.E.B. Du Bois; James Weldon Johnson; Booker T. Washington; Martin Luther King Jr.; Malcolm X; Ida B. Wells; Angela Davis; Shirley Chisholm; Audre Lorde; Richard Wright; James Baldwin; Langston Hughes, and many others</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | U.S. Environmental History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">How did European cattle wage war on the Wampanoag in colonial Massachusetts? How did the Bible’s Eden, a belief in magic, and a mapping mistake come together to lay the groundwork for race-based disenfranchisement and colonial incursion? How did soil make decisions about what slavery would look like in the Cotton South? How did capitalist ideas effect changes in the landscape of New England? How does the difference of 20 inches of rain per year lead to drastic differences in population, politics, and culture between eastern and western states? What myths do we tell ourselves when we visit our national parks? How are we, through globalization, forcing ourselves to change the way we talk about the natural world? What is truly natural and how do we use Nature as a weapon to destroy societies and the earth? With this introduction to the newest field of American History, we will learn to study history by looking at the roles humans play within ecosystems and the effects of those ecosystems on human society.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | U.S. Constitution<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">US Constitution is a hands-on, project-based class that seeks to examine the roots and development of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and then asks students to apply the document practically to several real and fictional Supreme Court cases. Hence, students begin the module with factual readings, the Federalist Papers and smaller debates, and general discussion. The class looks at the way fundamental concepts and definitions of freedom, citizenship, and “for all” have been shaped, undermined, and refined through the Constitution and its interpretation by the US Supreme Court. As the mod progresses, the assignments become more difficult and intense (briefing cases like Marbury v. Madison and Tinker v. Des Moines School District), culminating in the preparation and presentation of oral arguments for a mock Supreme Court in two cases, and sitting as a justice for one. Much of the grading for the class is done in groups, rather than individually, and so students are asked to trust and depend on their peers while making sure to hold up their own end of the workload. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | The Transatlantic World: Empire, Contact and Legacies<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course examines the imperial interests, race and gender relations, and cultural influences and exchanges that manifested during the era known as Colonial America. Though the course, by the end, focuses on the colonies that would become the United States, it begins with the pre-contact experiences of Native Americans, Africans and Europeans and how their lives eventually converged. Relationships impacted by economic development, racism and religious fervor forged a complex, historical, multiethnic legacy that is still visible today.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Race: A Global History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Scientists agree that there are few genetic differences between people of different races and ethnicities. Social scientists thus contend that racial distinctions are a product of society and culture rather than biology. At what point, then, did differences in skin color and other phenotypic traits become signifcant? This course will explore the history of race and racism by looking at examples across the world. We will consider how humans have been divided into different “groups” and the historical circumstances that have led to those divisions. We will also interrogate the use of scientific theories to justify racism and the more recent repudiation of these theories. Using both primary and secondary sources, students will apply the methods of historical thinking to understand the evolution of racial categories and the impact of history on modern-day issues related to race and ethnicity.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | The 20th Century<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course is an introduction to significant events in the 20th century. Students investigate cause, effect and change in places such as Europe, Africa and Asia (including the Middle East). One principal aim of the course is for students to develop a better understanding of the response of traditional societies to the impact of modernization on their values and customs. Another is to examine ideological conficts of the modern world. Students also research contemporary problems that originated in the 20th century that demand creative and thoughtful solutions. Analytical skills, synthesis of conficting viewpoints, conducting research in the Academy Library, participating in debates and writing historical essays are all emphasized in this course.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Classical Greece<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course examines the archaeology, literature, history and society of the Greek city-states from 1000 to 300 BCE. From Homer and Sappho to the Acropolis of Athens, a variety of materials introduces students to the literature, art, material culture and everyday life of an expansive Greek world. This course encourages students to establish connections between the ancient world and today and question the modern reception of the classical past. It introduces and develops fundamental historical skills, particularly research and writing.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Classical Rome<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course examines the archaeology, literature, history and society of the Roman world from the foundation of the city through Late Antiquity. Central themes include urbanism, architecture, imperialism, daily life and archaeology. The course introduces and develops fundamental historical skills, particularly writing and research. It encourages students to establish connections between the ancient world and today and question the modern reception of the classical past.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | The Medieval Worlds<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">In the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire, three distinct and dazzling civilizations emerged. This course examines the creation of the European, Byzantine and Islamic worlds from the end of antiquity to roughly 1350, exploring the political, cultural, social and religious changes in each society. We examine the rise of the Christian Church in Europe and Byzantium, the birth and rapid success of Islam, and the impact on the values and behaviors of medieval people. Key figures, themes and events are studied, including Charlemagne, Muhammad, Justinian, mysticism, scholasticism, the Reconquista and the Crusades. We also discuss how early interactions and conficts shaped the views each society held of the others. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Early Modern Europe, 1350-1660<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The centuries following the Black Death saw the beginnings of modern Europe. This course focuses on the rebirth of European society and the new values, optimism and cultural achievements of the Renaissance. It then examines the turbulence of the Reformation — the shattering of Christian unity and the wars fought in the name of religion. The course then explores the development of new politics and the Age of Exploration when Europeans set sail and changed the shape of the world.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Absolutism and Revolution, Europe 1660-1800<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Beginning with the reign of Louis XIV, students examine 18th-century European society. We explore how the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment challenged the ideas of the Old Regime and created new perceptions of humanity, society and government. The course concludes with an analysis of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | The European Century, 1800-1914<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Beginning with the study of Napoleon’s Empire and the Congress of Vienna, this course examines how the French Revolution of 1789 and the Industrial Revolution transformed European society and politics in the 19th century and established Europe’s global preeminence. The course concludes with an examination of World War I, the shattering event that culminated Europe’s dominance.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | World War and European Society, 1890-1945<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">At the pinnacle of its power and confidence at the start of the 20th century, Europe could not have imagined the crises, mainly of its own making, that it would face between 1914 and 1945. In this course, we examine the era when Europe was shattered by two world wars, an unprecedented international depression, and the rise of totalitarian states in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. We examine why Europeans cheered for the Great War when it began in 1914, and how four years of industrial warfare and diplomatic failures contributed to catastrophes that followed. We then explore European culture during the interwar period called the Age of Anxiety, the Russian Revolution under Lenin and Stalin, the foundering of the democracies, and the rise of Hitler and Mussolini.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Europe Since 1945<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Once the region of geopolitical domination, Europe after World War II was forced to rebuild and redefine its place in a rapidly shifting world. This course examines the change in Europe’s position as it contended with the Cold War’s series of freezes and thaws; economic, political and social developments, such as the student revolts of the 1960s; and the dramatic decade of the 1980s with Thatcherism, Gorbachev, the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism. Topics analyzed include modern leadership in Germany, Great Britain and France; the Soviet Union from Stalin through its collapse; Eastern Europe’s transition from communism, and the European Union. We will conclude by examining Europe’s current position in the contemporary world.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Capitalism and its Critics<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course provides a survey of the origins and evolution of capitalism in a global world up to the present, with emphasis on the political economies of the West. Students examine the ideas of the great political economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, Karl Marx, J.M. Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek, as well as trace the progression of modern industrial economies in Europe and the United States. The course ends with an analysis of the 2008 financial crisis and the Occupy movement.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Understanding Violence, War and Peace<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course explores both the history of and theories related to violence, war and peace across the globe, from ancient to modern times. Readings may include selections from a variety of disciplines, such as anthropology, ethics, philosophy, psychology and sociology. Students may consider such questions as: Is there such a thing as a just war? Are humans naturally violent? How do societies avoid violence and maintain peace? What role does technology play in shaping violent behavior? Can justice be achieved through the use of violent means? Is peace a realistic possibility in a globalized world? Is there more to peace than an interim between wars?</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | China: The Last Dynasty<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course explores Chinese history with a focus on the Qing Dynasty period (1644-1912). Students will tackle such questions as: How can Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism coexist in the same time? How did the role of the Qing Dynasty in global history shift across the centuries? What makes the Opium Wars (1839-1842, 1856-1860) and the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) turning points in modern Chinese history? How does Chinese history look different from the perspective of a rural female villager versus an emperor? What are the strongest motivating factors in these two individuals’ decision-making? To help us explore how lived experience of this vast history can vary based on where in China one lived, what role in society one fulfilled, and which events one lived through, we will analyze a range of sources including film, fiction and scholarly assessments.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Modern China<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course examines China’s dramatic recent history through multiple lenses: historical survey, biography, memoir, film and journalism. We begin by identifying key themes and questions to guide our study. Then we move back in time to the 19th century, when contact with Westerners provoked war and internal rebellions. We examine the decline and eventual collapse of the imperial dynastic system, the rise of warlordism, an experiment in weak republican government, the prolonged civil war, China’s role in World War II, the founding of the People’s Republic, the thought and governance of Mao Zedong, the economic and social reforms of Deng Xiaoping, and China’s entry into the global marketplace. The last part of the course utilizes a variety of current sources to address the majorissues facing China in the 21st century. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Contemporary Middle East<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The course begins with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and examines the rise of Arab nationalism and the struggle against foreign domination. The strategic and economic importance of the region is studied along with the founding of Israel; the continuing confict among Jews, Arabs, and Christians; and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding the Arab-Israeli confict. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Modern Asia: Contested Histories<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">How and why do different national histories define themselves in competition with those of their neighbors? This course will focus on how recent trends in the writing of history are applied to the context of contemporary Asia including China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Thailand and Vietnam. These topics will be explored through a range of sources including film, memoirs, fiction, periodicals and scholarly assessments that reflect the diversity of experiences across Asia. Topics will include Marxist history, cultural history, gender, memory, modernity and ethnicity. This course will rely on students to conduct independent research throughout the term in digging through contested topics and historical controversies, including but not limited to competing national histories of imperialism, colonization, and nationhood in the 20th century.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Precolonial Africa<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course introduces students to the complexity and dynamism of the African past, from antiquity to the dawn of the 20th century. The course begins with an examination of the Nile Valley civilizations in antiquity, the historical debates surrounding that era and the advent of Christianity in North Africa. Students then study the rise of Islam in Africa and the West African empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai. Next, students examine the role played by slavery in the creation of the Atlantic World. The course ends with an analysis of the dynamics of the cultural clash that ensued from the European colonization of Africa.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Modern Africa<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">What do we mean by “modern,” and what does “modern Africa” look like? The story of modernity has often been told from a Eurocentric perspective — one that conveniently excludes Africa. In this course, we will investigate the ways in which Africa is tied to modernity and the world. Chronologically, the course will investigate the continent’s history, beginning with the abolition of slave trade; 19th-century imperialism and the “scramble” for the continent; anti-colonial movements and decolonization; as well as the post-independence social and political realities. For the most part, academic study of Africa in the Global North has been dominated by non-Africans. Alternatively, in this course, we re-center African voices — that is, scholarly, literary and political writings of notable Africans to help students challenge the conventional wisdom about the rise of the modern world and the role of Africa in the global arena. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Modern Latin America<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course examines how modern social and political institutions developed in the region that includes Central and South America and the Caribbean. We begin by questioning why such diverse places are imagined as a single region. We explore how colonialism shaped the region and how independent nations emerged from European political control in the early 19th century. Through a series of case studies, we then examine selected social, political and economic issues that shaped Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Modern India<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course examines the history of what is today the world’s largest democracy. It starts in roughly 1700 with a study of the Mughal Empire and its decline, followed by the rise of British India. We explore the East India Company and the impact of British imperialism on India. The 1857 rebellion, the beginning of direct British rule and the consequences of these major events are analyzed. We explore the development and role of the Indian National Congress, explore the emergence of Indian nationalism, and assess Gandhi and other Indian leaders, as well as the forces around independence in 1947. In the last part of the course we study India’s identity from independence to today and the current issues and conflicts confronting this increasingly prominent nation.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Japan: Tradition to Modernity<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course is an overview of Japanese history and considers how changes in political institutions, economic patterns, social organizations, and cultural practices took shape to transform the lives of individuals across the archipelago. We will explore questions that contemporary scholars grapple with to this day: How did the role of the emperor transform from the 16th to the 18th century? Why is the samurai such a powerful symbol? How did a region poor in resources and largely isolated from the West emerge economically vital in the last hundred years? Why did the concept of progress become such a pivotal concern for the leaders of Meiji Japan in the late 19th century? What are the consequences for rapid industrial revolution? With an emphasis on primary sources, students will analyze this history in terms of those who lived it. We will read from the perspectives of a daimyo reformer and a low-ranking samurai, from an impoverished farmer and an afuent merchant, the emperor and a housewife.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Japan: Post-war to the Akihabara Generation<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The Akihabara district of Tokyo, Japan houses the world’s largest collection of everything that is associated with anime and the otaku culture and industry. It provides us with the goal and opportunity to examine Japan’s emersion from World War II into a thriving economic revival, democratic politics, and a new social order. With a particular focus on the creation of Otaku culture, we follow Japanese history through the 20th and into the 21st century, its cultural expansion and impact on not only the neighboring countries but the Western world as well. Post-war Japan has navigated its way through challenging encounters with its past, this course looks at those encounters and examines what role the otaku culture plays in the definition of 21st century Japan. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Humans and the Environment<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">What drives human history? Do the pivotal factors lie beyond human control, such as climate, geography, ecosystems and microbes? This course examines the interactions between people and the natural world over time. In struggling to master an often hostile environment, human societies have had an ever-increasing impact on the planet, and apparent success has often ended in failure. The course begins with the emergence of humans in the Paleolithic period and then explores the invention of agriculture, the emergence of global trade and migration networks, colonialism and the Industrial Revolution. Students examine in depth an instance of humans managing — or mismanaging — a natural resource and conclude the course with a close look at 20th-century trends and the future we collectively face.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Genocide in the Modern World<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course studies the history of genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries, exploring both the patterns and unique circumstances of this important global issue. Students read and hear from historians, victims and perpetrators. Likely case studies are the Holocaust, Cambodia, the Balkans, and Rwanda, with time set aside for research into events determined by student interest. Students study root causes, including economic, political and social factors that permit the occurrence of genocide; assess international responses; and evaluate attempts at reconciliation, including justice systems and community reactions. The comparative nature of the course creates a framework to draw broad lessons about what leads to genocide in the modern world; enables us to assess the behavior, actions and inaction of the various groups involved; and pushes us to consider how these lessons could be applied to prevent such crimes in the future.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Totalitarianism: Past & Present<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course takes students on a fascinating exploration of the totalitarian and fascistic tendencies that have proven to be alluring alternatives to the democratic states and societies. These movements were often shrouded with utopian promises against a backdrop of apocalyptic struggles, regardless of the temporal or geographic location of the totalitarian movement. We begin by examining five national case studies drawn from Europe and Asia between the 1920s and 1960s. We then investigate more modern iterations of fundamentalism, including political, racial, and religious fundamentalism. The class concludes by focusing on the nature and appeal of cults. A final project invites students to tie the course’s main themes together.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | History<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | Revolutions<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | [[Tian-shin]]<br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#1053E9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | ASL Track<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | variable<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | NPC - Nadia Dirie<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">There are 9 classes in the American Sign Language track, divided into Beginning (1-3), Intermediate (4-6), and Advanced (7-9), usually scheduled such that each cycles once per school year. Coursework focuses on practical fluency, but also touches on history, culture, sociology, and other aspects of the ASL-using world. Students may test into any level and take any number of these classes, in any sequence, but retaking a passed language class will not count further toward graduation requirements.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Arabic Track<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | variable<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">There are 9 classes in the Arabic language track, divided into Beginning (1-3), Intermediate (4-6), and Advanced (7-9), usually scheduled such that each cycles once per school year. Coursework focuses on practical fluency and literacy but also touches on history, culture, sociology, and other aspects of the Arabic-speaking world. Students may test into any level and take any number of these classes, in any sequence, but retaking a passed language class will not count further toward graduation requirements.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Chinese - Mandarin Track<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | variable<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | [[Tian-shin]]<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">There are 9 classes in the Mandarin track, divided into Beginning (1-3), Intermediate (4-6), and Advanced (7-9), usually scheduled such that each cycles once per school year. Coursework focuses on practical fluency and literacy but also touches on history, culture, sociology, and other aspects of the Mandarin-speaking world. Written instruction is in pinyin Simplified Chinese script. Students may test into any level and take any number of these classes, in any sequence, but retaking a passed language class will not count further toward graduation requirements.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | English as a Second Language Track<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | variable<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | NPCs<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">There are 3 classes in the English as a Second Language track: Beginning (1), Intermediate (2), and Advanced (3), each with highly modular curricula that instructors adapt to the needs of current ELL students. Coursework focuses on practical fluency and literacy but also touches on history, culture, sociology, and other aspects of the English-speaking world. At all levels, half of each class is given over to one-on-one tutoring, supervised independent study, or other instruction recommended by students' IEP assessments. Students may test into any level and take any number of these classes, in any sequence.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | French track<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | variable<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | [[Matt]], NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">There are 9 classes in the French track, divided into Beginning (1-3), Intermediate (4-6), and Advanced (7-9), usually scheduled such that each cycles once per school year. Coursework focuses on practical fluency and literacy but also touches on history, culture, sociology, and other aspects of the Francophone world. Students may test into any level and take any number of these classes, in any sequence, but retaking a passed language class will not count further toward graduation requirements.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | German track<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | variable<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">There are 9 classes in the German track, divided into Beginning (1-3), Intermediate (4-6), and Advanced (7-9), usually scheduled such that each cycles once per school year. Coursework focuses on practical fluency and literacy but also touches on history, culture, sociology, and other aspects of the German-speaking world. Students may test into any level and take any number of these classes, in any sequence, but retaking a passed language class will not count further toward graduation requirements.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Ancient Greek track<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | variable<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">There are 3 classes in the Ancient Greek track: Beginning (1), Intermediate (2), and Advanced (3), usually scheduled to cycle over the course of a school year. Coursework focuses on literacy but contain significant elements of history, literature, sociology, and topics relevant to the Classics and the ancient world. Students may test into any level and take any number of these classes, in any sequence, but retaking a passed language class will not count further toward graduation requirements.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Latin track<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | variable<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">There are 3 classes in the Latin track: Beginning (1), Intermediate (2), and Advanced (3), usually scheduled to cycle over the course of a school year. Coursework focuses on literacy but contain significant elements of history, literature, sociology, and topics relevant to the Classics and the ancient world. Students may test into any level and take any number of these classes, in any sequence, but retaking a passed language class will not count further toward graduation requirements.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Japanese track<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | variable<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">There are 9 classes in the Japanese track, divided into Beginning (1-3), Intermediate (4-6), and Advanced (7-9), usually scheduled such that each cycles once per school year. Coursework focuses on practical fluency and literacy but also touches on history, culture, sociology, and other aspects relevant to the Japan-speaking world. Students may test into any level and take any number of these classes, in any sequence, but retaking a passed language class will not count further toward graduation requirements.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Russian track<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | variable<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">There are 9 classes in the Russian track, divided into Beginning (1-3), Intermediate (4-6), and Advanced (7-9), usually scheduled such that each cycles once per school year. Coursework focuses on practical fluency and literacy but also touches on history, culture, sociology, and other aspects relevant to the Russian-speaking world. Students may test into any level and take any number of these classes, in any sequence, but retaking a passed language class will not count further toward graduation requirements.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Spanish track<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | variable<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">There are 9 classes in the Spanish track, divided into Beginning (1-3), Intermediate (4-6), and Advanced (7-9), usually scheduled such that each cycles once per school year. Coursework focuses on practical fluency and literacy but also touches on history, culture, sociology, and other aspects relevant to the Spanish-speaking world. Students may test into any level and take any number of these classes, in any sequence, but retaking a passed language class will not count further toward graduation requirements.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | AP Chinese Language and Culture<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-chinese-language-and-culture AP Chinese Language and Culture] curriculum. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | AP French Language and Culture<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-french-language-and-culture AP French Language and Culture] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | AP German Language and Culture<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-german-language-and-culture AP German Language and Culture] curriculum. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | AP Japanese Language and Culture<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-japanese-language-and-culture AP Japanese Language and Culture] curriculum. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | AP Latin<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-latin AP Latin] curriculum. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | AP Spanish Language and Culture<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-spanish-language-and-culture AP Spanish Language and Culture] curriculum. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | Language<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | AP Spanish Literature and Culture<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-spanish-literature-and-culture AP Spanish Literature and Culture] curriculum. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F2B707;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Mathematics<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Transitional Mathematics<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | variable<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Transitional mathematics courses are offered to help merge new students into the mathematics program at Xavier's. Courses are designed to help students adjust to seminar-table methodology and problem-based curriculum, and to fill gaps and cope with varied backgrounds in mathetmatics prior to Xavier's. Introductory courses give students and instructors additional information to determine placement for the following term. Typically, transitional courses last one term, but some extend for two or even three terms. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Mathematics<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Algebra<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">These courses develop facility in working with numbers, tables, equations, inequalities and graphs. The focus is on solving word problems and reading carefully, and thus the building of algebra skills stems from the need to solve problems in a context, rather than from drill and practice for its own sake. Students learn how to use the graphing calculator appropriately as an effective problem- solving tool. In addition, students may do a number of hands-on labs that require them to collect data, make conjectures and draw conclusions. Topics covered include equations and graphs that are linear and quadratic, distinguishing linear data from nonlinear data, inequalities, the basic rules of exponents, and other traditional Algebra I topics.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Mathematics<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Geometry<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Geometry develops logical thinking through proofs and attention to definitions. It gives students a new way of looking at the world by analyzing the symmetries and patterns around them, and it develops practical skills through applications. This course covers the standard topics in a college-preparatory course in Geometry. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Mathematics<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Trigonometry & Precalculus<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | [[Kyinha]]<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">An exploration of the circular functions: sine, cosine, and tangent. Topics include right triangle trigonometry, simple harmonic motion, applications, and proofs of trigonometric identities.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Mathematics<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Integrated Mathematics<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The purpose of these courses is to enable students to expand their view of algebra and geometry to include nonlinear motion and nonlinear functions. The investigation encompasses circular motion and the functions that describe it, ellipses and hyperbolas, exponential and logarithmic functions, dot products and matrices, and geometry on the surface of the Earth. In particular, logarithms are used to straighten nonlinear data; and matrices are used to describe geometric transformations and various patterns of growth. In preparation for higher level mathematics, two strands are introduced: first, combinatorics and recursion, leading to the binomial theorem; second, approximation behavior, especially instantaneous rates of change and slopes of nonlinear graphs.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Mathematics<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Linear Algebra<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | NPC-Dr. Samantha Deeb<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">In this class students will use matrices to learn how linear algebra is being applied in various fields. The class will cover content including matrix operations, row-reductions, determinants, vector space, eigenvalues, and transformations. From this course students will be able to further their understanding of the connection between geometry and algebra. In addition, students will further their logical thinking while being introduced to different abstract topics in mathematics. This course will expose students to higher-level mathematics that will better prepare them for the rigors of a college math program.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Professor Deeb is known to assign brutal amounts of homework. Tendency to drone a lot in class; is actually a helpful ''tutor'' one-on-one but not particularly interesting or useful in a classroom setting.<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Mathematics<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Multivariable Calculus<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | NPC-Dr. Samantha Deeb<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Students will learn how to differentiate and integrate functions with multiple variables. In this class students will cover topics such as vector functions, partial derivatives, multiple integrals, and vector calculus. As a result of this class, students will be able to better understand the connection between single-variable calculus and multivariable calculus. Students will further their logical thinking while also being introduced to different abstract topics in mathematics. Students will be exposed to higher-level mathematics that will better prepare them for the rigors of a college math program.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Professor Deeb is known to assign brutal amounts of homework. Tendency to drone a lot in class; is actually a helpful ''tutor'' one-on-one but not particularly interesting or useful in a classroom setting.<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Mathematics<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | AP Calculus AB<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | [[Kyinha]]<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This is the beginning of the three-term calculus sequence that covers the syllabus of the [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-calculus-ab AB Advanced Placement] examination.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Mathematics<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | AP Calculus BC<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | NPC-Dr. Samantha Deeb<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This is the beginning of the three-term calculus sequence that covers the syllabus of the [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-calculus-bc BC Advanced Placement] examination.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Professor Deeb is known to assign brutal amounts of homework. Tendency to drone a lot in class; is actually a helpful ''tutor'' one-on-one but not particularly interesting or useful in a classroom setting.<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Mathematics<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | AP Statistics<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This is the beginning of the three-term calculus sequence that covers the syllabus of the [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-statistics Statistics Advanced Placement] examination.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Mathematics<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Personal Finance<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Personal finance is a term that covers managing your money as well as saving and investing. It encompasses budgeting, banking, insurance, mortgages, and investments. Students will be introduced to the basic understanding of debit and credit, track their spending and even analyze some of the more challenging probability concepts that govern the trading of options on the stock market. The approach to this class will be project based with students able to work on a project that they find meaningful in the world of personal finance. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Mathematics<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | Economics in the World<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">What does it mean to live in a global economy? In this class students will be introduced to an overview of Micro Economics and Macro Economics. By analyzing market trends associated with historical events between the 1900’s and the present time, students will learn how changes in policies have shaped global economies.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#6BADF9;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#CE2029;" | Bioethics: Humanity in the Post-Genomic Era<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course examines current biological topics that challenge our understanding of humanity and provides a brief introduction to ethics and philosophical anthropology and their roles in setting public policy.<br />
<br />
We live in a modern age in which major scientific advances are the norm. Bombarded with stories in the news regarding ethical dilemmas pertaining to novel biomedical interventions, it is often difficult for us to make sense of competing arguments without having a basic command of the biological and philosophical issues involved. Questions to be addressed include: What is a stem cell? When does a developing human being first experience sensation? Show evidence of cognitive abilities? Acquire moral status? <br />
<br />
How does our modern, post-genomic understanding of human biology influence our philosophical understanding of what it is to be human? Which biological enhancements are ethical? Which are unethical? To what extent (if at all) should the use of biotechnology be regulated in our society? Historical and current readings will be assigned, and lively discussions encouraged. Students will be graded through a variety of assessments, including papers, presentations, journals, and class participation.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#CE2029;" | Power and Social Responsibility<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#CE2029;" | The Ethics of Power<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | [[Charles]]<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"></div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Introduction to Ethics<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Students in this discussion course will be introduced to a variety of approaches to ethical reflection. Through the use of classical texts and personal and literary stories, students will develop a common vocabulary with which to understand and critically evaluate their moral experience. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Ethics & the Environment<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">We are facing unprecedented environmental challenges to climate, life forms, human health and population, and essential resources. We tend to treat such issues simply as scientific or political problems. In reality, ecological controversies raise fundamental questions about what we human beings value, the kind of beings we are, the kinds of lives we should lead, and our place in nature. Sustainability is not possible without a deep change of values and commitment. In short, environmental problems raise fundamental questions of ethics and philosophy. This course seeks to provide a systematic introduction to those questions.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Social Ethics: Values in a Changing America<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Whether you read the paper, scroll Instagram or follow trends on TikTok, you will see people disagreeing about how to resolve some of society’s conficts. In this course, students examine various contemporary social issues such as pornography, reproductive rights, trans rights, immigration, the death penalty, CRISPR, mutant rights, privacy rights, political extremism, drug legalization and climate change. Through engagement with current events and contemporary public conversations, the course provides students with ethical frameworks, conceptual tools and contextualized understanding necessary to evaluate and respond to the social issues of an ever-changing world.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Global Ethics: What's Wrong with the World?<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Terrorism, wars, genocide, refugee crises, economic disparities, economic exploitation, propaganda including “fake news,” drug resistant pathogens, natural disasters, global warming, and so on — what kind of world do we live in? What kind of world ought we live in? How can we move from what is to what ought to be our world? These are the basic questions of global ethics. With consideration for a range of ethical theories, students study current global events in order to better understand why the world is the way that it is and what can be done about it. The course includes readings in anthropology, sociology, political theory, philosophy and the sciences, and it makes use of current news sources, investigative journalism, documentary and feature films, and new media. The course culminates with student projects on any topic concerning the world as it is and might be — or what we can do to get there.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Ethics: Medicine<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Modern medical research and practice present society with new opportunities and significant challenges. Students in this course will look at various case studies at the intersection of medicine, scientific research, health care, and ethics. Possible case studies may include debates about abortion, euthanasia, animal rights, mutant rights and experimentation, and broader environmental implications of scientific and material progress in the 21st century. Classical and contemporary philosophers will be read as part of our investigation into these topics. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Nonviolence & Moral Leadership<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | [[Charles]]<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course will examine major figures within nonviolent movements for social change, with a focus on the capacities of moral leadership possessed by these individuals. What characterizes an effective moral leader? How do these leaders motivate others in the face of injustice and oppression? Must moral leadership necessarily be nonviolent? What does 'nonviolence' even mean? Through a study of autobiography, letters, speeches, and case studies, students will come to a more complete understanding of nonviolent movements and the decisions made by individuals who led them. In addition to Gandhi and King, individuals studied may include Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi, Thich Nhat Hanh, Paul Farmer, Greg Mortenson. Critics of nonviolence will also be studied. The course will culminate in a substantial independent research project.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Law and Morality<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | [[Tian-shin]]<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">A critical examination of issues that arise out of the relationship between law and morality. Questions of concern include the following: For what reasons, if any, should an individual obey or disobey the laws of society? Which kinds of governments (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, etc.), if any, are legitimate? To what degree should society restrict the freedom of individuals through laws on matters like abortion, pornography, race, and sexual relations? Class discussions and written exercises are designed to encourage participants to develop views of their own against a background of basic understanding of the readings. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Introduction to Philosophy<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">What is really real? How do I know what I know? Do I have free will? What is the good? These and other speculative questions have troubled the Western mind for millennia. This course follows a topical approach to the history of Western philosophy and focuses on such issues as metaphysics, epistemology, the problem of evil, the existence of God and the philosophical roots of ethics. Students will read from the works of ancient and modern writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Hume, Bentham, Locke, Arendt and Hill Collins to assist them in coming to their own understanding of these topics. Students will discover what philosophy is and how philosophers question and reason.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Justice and Globalization<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">What does justice demand of us (as individuals and collectives) and how does it apply internationally? In this course, we will explore the following topics: (a) the possibility of individual and collective responsibility in the face of the polarities of great wealth and great suffering across our planet; (b) cosmopolitanism and internationalism as compared to nationalism as underlying different responses to global inequity and conflict; (c) colonialism and imperialism, and responses to them; (d) the arguments for colonial or environmental reparations; and finally (e) consideration and assessment of competing political-economic approaches to globalization and development. In all of this, we will ask ourselves what principles, practices, and institutions hold the most promise for securing a more desirable and just future. Through reading, writing, and collaborative discussion, participants will work together to develop a deeper understanding of how we should approach justice at a global scale. In short, we will explore what we owe others wherever they are on Earth.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Proof and Persuasion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> A practical introduction to informal logic and to the philosophical study of language. Some of the questions raised are the following: What is the difference between a good argument and a poor one? What are the common fallacies of thought? What are the limitations of logic? What are the meaning of “meaning” and the truth about “truth?” The course stresses the development of individual skill in argument and includes a critical examination of the patterns of thought one encounters every day in magazines, in newspapers, and on television.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy of Sport<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> Through common readings, journal entries, reflection papers, prepared essays, visitors to class, presentations, and open discussion, we explore answers to questions including: What is the contribution of sports to human flourishing?; How do sports contribute to the construction of individual, group, and national identities?; What role does aesthetic appreciation play in our response to sports as participants and observers?; What does the experience of flow—“being in the zone”—in sports reveal about possibilities of transcendence for humans?</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Christianities<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">What is Christianity? How has Christianity changed over time? Why are there so many diferent Christian groups? How are Christianity and power politics connected? This course explores these questions and others, with particular attention paid to diferent ways that Christian groups define themselves in relation to the wider culture, from the ancient world to today and from the Mediterranean through Asia, Africa, Europe, and South and North America. Students will have the opportunity over the term to study in more depth an area of interest. In addition to reading and discussion, the course will potentially include site visits, meetings with religious leaders and films.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Global Islams<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">With nearly two billion practitioners, Islam is one of the fastest growing religious traditions in the world today. Yet, with less than 1 percent of the American population identifying as Muslim, it is also one of the most misunderstood here in the United States. What is Islam? What is not Islam? And who gets to decide? This course aims to introduce students to the vast internal complexities of the Islamic tradition through an exploration of history, scripture, law, film, comic books, and social media. We will investigate and contextualize controversial (and popularly misunderstood) elements of Islamic tradition such as jihad, sharia, and veiling. From Malcolm X to ''Midnight Mass'', and from China to Cairo to Chicago, students will examine the practices, lives, and legacies of Muslims in history and today.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Judaism<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">What is Judaism? Contemporary Jewish communities forge unique identities, religious practices and spiritual paths in religiously and culturally diverse ways. This course introduces Judaism in a variety of forms and explores some of the many questions, challenges and affirmations of the many facets of Jewish identity, practices, core beliefs and ethics in the 21st century. For instance, Jews might practice yoga; sport tattoos; eat organic instead of kosher foods; grow up in an interfaith family celebrating Christmas and Hanukkah; become a rabbi; attend a Jewish LGBTQ wedding; identify as “spiritual” rather than “religious”; only attend synagogue during the Jewish high holidays; or voice doubts about Israeli politics. The class will explore these or other possibilities as a case study of how the Jewish people balance tradition and innovation to remain vibrant in a changing world.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Religions of the Book<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course will introduce students to the world of scripture and interpretation in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Students will explore the ways that communities look to sacred writings to answer questions such as: How does God communicate with humanity? How does one live a holy life (and why bother)? Is there life after death? What happened at the beginning of time? What will happen at the end? We will examine the scriptures themselves, but also documentaries, music, comic books, art, and films from religious communities around the world, and reflect on how the Bible and Qur’an created and shaped these three interconnected and diverse religious traditions encompassing more than half the world’s population.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Hinduism and Buddhism<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC-Lauren Briggs<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">What is Hinduism? What is Buddhism? This course explores Sanatana Dharma — the duties, practices and traditions that define a Hindu way of life — as well as the traditions, beliefs and spiritual practices based on original teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. As students explore these timeless ways of being and learn about people who embody them, they will encounter concepts of ultimate reality, the (non)self and the purpose of human life that have informed diverse ethical systems and cultures in India, China, Tibet, Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia. Historical and philosophical studies of prominent fgures, such as Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, will provide students spaces to refect on their own senses of what it means to live a devoted life. Students will also explore certain ways these religious traditions appear — through ideas, symbols and practices — in America and Europe, as they wonder about contemporary cultural representations of yoga and meditation in the West.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Overly woo white woman who loves to wear "Indian" inspired clothing (Indian from India? "Indian"-Native American? yes.) and greet the class with "Namaste". Smells of white sage a lot.<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Paganism Through History<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | [[Matt]]<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"></div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Has a reputation as a bit of a bird course; Matt a very easy teacher to sidetrack onto tangents and a very lenient grader.<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | East Asian Ways of Knowing: Zen Buddhism<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC-Lauren Briggs<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Zen Buddhism opens up to rich and varied practices of knowing and living. Through reading primary sources, both ancient and modern, and engagement with a range of Zen practices, students in this course gain an appreciation for the religious tradition and its history, as well as the types of knowing that it engenders. Students study koans (Zen training riddles) such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” and “What was your original face before your parents were born?” and other manifestations of Zen Buddhism across cultures and times, including contemporary derivations of “Zen” memes in popular culture and social media. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Overly woo white woman who loves to wear "Indian" inspired clothing (Indian from India? "Indian"-Native American? yes.) and greet the class with "Namaste". Smells of white sage a lot.<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Mysticism and the Contemplative Traditions<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">How does it feel to commune with the Infnite? What ecstasies can humans experience? What personal and communal transformations result? These are questions of mysticism. It has been said that all religions converge in the contemplative tradition — the great world illuminated by the swamis and yogis of Hinduism, the core meditation practices of the Buddha, the Kabbalist teachers of Judaism, the Sufs of Islam, and the Christian mystics. What can we learn by reflecting on their teachings and their practices? How do they connect with current research on the mind-body connection? How do these make possible a deeper sense of self, or what we might call the “unique self ”? What does it mean to speak of wisdom as a kind of knowledge? We will consider selections from a range of faiths, from the ancient texts of the Upanishads to the poets Rumi and Meister Eckhart to modern writers such as Thomas Merton, Howard Thurman and Pema Chodron.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Criticizing Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Is there a destructive side to religion? Religion and religions have undoubtedly shaped the lives of individuals and communities around the globe for millennia for the better, but would the world be a better place if we imagined, with John Lennon, a world with no religion? Contemporary examples of the destructive side of religion fill the news on a daily basis. On the other hand, religions around the world have been a driving force for peace, for justice, for compassion, for leading a purposeful life. Many people turn to religion to find resources that provide them with community, values and meaning in their lives. Is religion’s checkered past and present leading to increased secularism? Will science ultimately replace religion? The course will explore scientifc, economic, political, feminist and queer critiques of religion — and their responses — from thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Sigmund Freud, Ayn Rand, Mary Daly, Anthony Pinn, Dan Brown, Ursula LeGuin, A.C. Grayling, and the New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett), as well as films such as ''Spotlight'' and ''Jesus Camp''.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | One Nation Under God?: Religious Traditions in America<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The United States has always been a mix of various peoples and faiths. This course examines the religious traditions that make up the American religious and cultural landscape, focusing on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. The distinctive ethos and practices of each are explored, along with their presence in the daily news. To assist students in experiencing and examining these religious traditions, the course will use make use of visual materials, guest speakers, and church and potentially other site visits, as well as firsthand experiences such as observing Buddhist meditation, a Passover Seder or a Muslim prayer service. Attention is given to students’ understanding of their own background in relation to the diversity of religious expression today.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Philosophy, Ethics, & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | Comparative Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Religion is consistently a news item in our world today; it factors into conflicts in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and India, among other places. Catholics are divided on the wisdom of the pope, Jews on the policies of Israel, and Muslims on their relation to modern secularism. But none of these divisions makes sense to outsiders without a basic understanding of the religions involved. In this course, gain a basic understanding of the beliefs and practices of the world’s major religions. Explore the meaning of religious experience, the distinction between myth and history, and the appeal—or not—of ritual. We also will discuss important questions: Why do religious communities split, for example, Sunni and Shiite Islam? What does “law” mean to observant Jews? What do Christians mean by the “Trinity”? Can “nothing” be “something” in Hindu and Buddhist contexts? Is Confucianism a religion at all? These questions and more will enliven our explorations into the major religions of the world.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#C0F791;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Physical Education<br />
|style="background-color:#CE2029;" | Psionic Self-Defence<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | [[Charles]]<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The psionic self-defense class at XS is geared for all people, not just those with psionic abilities. While it is generally not possible for someone without psionic abilities to thwart a determined psionic assault, it is the case in this class -- as in many self-defense classes -- that the best protection is never getting into the fight in the first place. Given that it is not going to be possible for non-psionics to ''stop'' a psionic intrusion, the aim of this class is to help teach students mental discipline and techniques helpful for avoiding notice and keeping unwanted thoughts from surfacing too strongly.<br />
<br />
This class's goals are to help students order their minds enough to minimize stray surface thoughts that may be overheard by psionic eavesdroppers, to help keep thoughts under control so as not to attract mental scrutiny, to recognize the signs of psionic manipulation, and to learn grounding techniques for maintaining emotional stability in the face of mild psionic influence. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Physical Education<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Principles of Fitness<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> The Principles of Fitness course is designed for students of all physical abilities. The goal of this course is to provide students with lifelong fitness habits. Students will gain an understanding of the effects of exercise on health and well-being while being able to apply the learned skills to their everyday life. This will be accomplished by introducing students to facilities, equipment and resources that are available on campus. Topics will include resistance training, cardiovascular fitness, warm-up/cool-down, plyometrics and flexibility. Classes will be built around individual and group workouts.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Physical Education<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Running*<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The PE running program is designed for students who want to run for fitness. Beginning runners will receive thorough introduction to distance running. Experienced runners will further develop their speed and stamina. Daily runs of 2 to 5 miles will compose the bulk of the training, but alternate modes of training and drills that are essential to strong, injury-free running will also be part of the course.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Physical Education<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Strength Training & Conditioning*<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">In the strength and conditioning class, students are encouraged to define one or more training goals for the term. What is strength and conditioning? Strength is the ability to produce force, and it is a more durable adaptation than Conditioning, which is comparably transient, and is more concerned with work capacity- how much physical work can be done in a given time period. These two very different physical adaptations require different types of training. You can do either or both, but you must have a plan to improve them. The most important aspects of your goal-setting to consider are Specific, Measurable, and Timely. Students are expected to come to class in exercise clothing, ready to train. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Physical Education<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Self Defense*<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This self-defense course is open to all students. This course teaches practical self‑defense skills that give students the experience of facing their fears and finding their power. In this class, students are taught how to avoid altercations, resist intimidation, communicate assertively, and escape potential assaults. Students learn how to set verbal boundaries and de‑escalate potentially dangerous situations. The course will also teach ways to physically defend against a number of threatening scenarios including front confrontations, attacks from the rear, attempted sexual assault, and ground fighting. Scenarios will be empowering, practical, and useful.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Physical Education<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Pilates*<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">In our Pilates class, students are introduced to beginner level Pilates mat and reformer exercises, with emphasis placed on learning proper Pilates breathing, and developing “core” connection, strength, flexibility, and proper alignment. The class learns how to access their “powerhouse” muscles and how to maintain that engagement throughout movement. Students also become familiar with beginning safe ranges of motion and how to determine when they are ready to increase the challenge by increasing their range of motion. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Physical Education<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Bouldering*<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Bouldering is rock climbing stripped down to its raw essentials. Leaving behind ropes and harnesses and just using climbing shoes and a bag of chalk over safety mats. Your challenge is to climb short but tricky bouldering "problems" (a route, or sequence of moves) using balance, technique, and strength. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Physical Education<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Cardio-Boxing*<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Cardio-Boxing is a fun and energetic class where students use choreographed cardio-boxing combinations combined with calisthenics and jumping rope to obtain a great aerobic workout. In our state-of-the-art Health and Fitness Center, students go from being taught how to wrap their hands to eventually completing a boxing circuit of approximately 10 rounds using standalone punching bags. Be ready to feel the burn!</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Physical Education<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Swimming*<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Aquatics are a means to achieve cardiovascular fitness through stroke development and participation in a variety of swimming workout methods.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Physical Education<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Indoor Cycling*<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course is designed to increase muscle strength and improve cardiovascular endurance using state-of-the-art bikes. Students will experience rolling hills, sprints and other drills to give them a great interval workout.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Physical Education<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Horseback Riding*<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Physical Education<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | Outdoor Challenge*<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Outdoor Challenge is a group-oriented, teambuilding program for those who want to be active in the outdoors. Depending on weather conditions, activities may include snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, mountain biking, hiking, canoeing, trail running, high- and low-ropes challenges, obstacle activities, outdoor survival education, camping skills and orienteering. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#E14D3B;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | AP Biology<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | [[Kyinha]]<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-biology AP Biology] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | AP Chemistry<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-chemistry AP Chemistry] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | AP Environmental Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | [[Kyinha]]<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-environmental-science AP Environmental Science] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | AP Physics 1 (Algebra Based)<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-physics-1-algebra-based AP Physics 1] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | AP Physics 2 (Algebra Based)<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-physics-2-algebra-based AP Physics 2] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | AP Physics C (Electricity and Magnetism)<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-physics-c-electricity-and-magnetism AP Physics C] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | AP Physics C (Mechanics)<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-physics-c-mechanics AP Physics C] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Animal Behavior<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Why do some animals live in groups, and others singly? Why are some animals monogamous while others have multiple mates? Who cares for the young? Why do birds sing and wolves howl? In this course, we will begin to answer these questions. We will read a text that provides an introduction to all areas of animal behavior, as well as selected articles. Our focus will be on social behaviors. Using films, we will observe the social behaviors of animals as diverse as termites and wolves. We will use fieldwork to study the role of society in the foraging behavior of honeybees. Students will be required to write a research paper on a topic of their choice.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Astronomy<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Astronomy is the scientific study of the origin, structure, and evolution of the universe and the objects in it. Topics may include patterns and motions in the sky, gravity and orbits, telescopes and light, planetary systems, the birth and death of stars, galaxies, the Big Bang, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the fate of the universe. This class includes a 45-minute lab period one night a week at the Ptolemy Observatory, located on the Xavier's campus. When the lab period is used, compensation time will be given during a daytime class period.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Astronomy Research<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">In this course students will spend extensive time in the Xavier's Academy Ptolemy Observatory, where they will learn to operate the telescope, dome, and CCD camera. Students will learn techniques for visual observing, astrophotography, and photometry. Students will engage in research projects designed to provide an introduction to research techniques in astronomy. When appropriate, results will be submitted for publication. In addition to conducting ongoing research projects, the class will take time out to observe interesting current events (observing the pass of a near-Earth asteroid, a recent supernova flare-up, a transit of the ISS across the moon, etc.). In addition, students will be expected to spend several hours a week in the observatory (due to weather constraints, observing nights will vary.)</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Biology<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | [[Kyinha]]<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course is theme-based and focused on major biological topics. Studying a core text will be supplemented with other readings, writing assignments, and data analysis and interpretation. Students will learn a variety of study skills and will have an introduction to library research tools. Laboratory experiments and fieldwork are designed to acquaint students with fundamental biological principles and to build skills in the methods and techniques used to elucidate those principles.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Chemistry<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">An introduction to the chemical view of the material world, including atomic theory, atomic structure, chemical reactions, the nature of solids, liquids, gases, and solutions, general equilibria, acid-base theories. Emphasis is placed on developing problem-solving skills as well as on making connections between chemical principles and everyday life. A college-level text is used, but the pace of this course is adjusted to ensure that students have ample opportunity to ask questions and work through problems. Laboratory work is an integral part of the course.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Ecology<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Ecology is a field of biology dedicated to the interactions that organisms have with each other and with the nonliving components of their environment. The discipline of ecology helps to explain the abundance and distribution of organisms and issues of biodiversity and extinction and is grounded in evolutionary principles. In this course we will examine how ecological ideas play out in aquatic and terrestrial environments and students will develop skills in experimental design, data analysis and statistics, scientific literacy, and complex systems thinking. Students will also consider the impact of global climate change and other human impacts on the environment and they will have the opportunity to pursue an area of their own interest. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Electronics<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This introduction to electronics is a hands-on, project-oriented course. Students will build a variety of simple devices, including timing circuits, alarms, flashers, amplifers and counters. By designing, building and analyzing these circuits, students will gain a firsthand knowledge of a variety of basic electronic components, including resistors, capacitors, switches, relays, transformers, diodes, transistors and several integrated circuits. Students will use Arduinos throughout the course for analyzing and testing, and as a central piece of their circuit design. Though some experience in programming is helpful, it is not required for this course.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Introductory Genetics<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course considers the classical and contemporary views of the nature, transmission and function of the hereditary material. Laboratory investigations in plant and animal genetics supplement class discussion. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Molecular Genetics<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This advanced course examines the biochemistry of the gene in greater detail and considers the underlying principles of recombinant DNA technology. Because DNA science is experimental, much of the time available in this course will be devoted to laboratory work learning techniques of DNA isolation, analysis and manipulation.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Marine Biology<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> The goal of this class is to give students a field research experience in which they come to understand how to work as a team to conduct experimental studies in marine science. Students will frequently be off campus, where they will be involved in a variety of new and ongoing projects. They will study the structure of intertidal communities, develop hypotheses, and then implement a research study that will provide baseline data for future work in the area. The students will also study lobster biology and the historic management of the fishery so they can start to look critically at the current state of the Maine lobster industry. In the larval settlement project, students will study organisms that recruit on docks and in the intertidal of Penobscot Bay, and consider the role of invasive species and climate change in affecting biodiversity.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Mechanics<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> This course study of the natural laws relating space, time, matter, and energy. Topics include measurement, motion, forces, energy, momentum, and rotation. We want students to understand the behavior of matter, and to become aware of the importance of the physical laws of nature. The approach to the material is highly mathematical. Students will use spreadsheets and graphing programs to analyze laboratory data.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Biology of Cancer<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States and this disease affects many families. The profound impact of cancer on society has been the driving force behind major research advances and led to a better understanding of cell biology. Understanding the basic biology of cancer and its impact on the human body has led to more effective treatments, enhanced detection methods, and the development of prevention strategies. This course will provide an overview of the biology of cancer. The course will focus on the genetic and molecular basis of cancer. We will explore the role of mutations in cancer cells and how they lead to the deregulation of essential biological processes such as cell division, programmed cell death, and differentiation. We will also examine the interface of cancer and medicine. Classical treatment methods will be compared with newer treatment modalities, such as targeted therapies. The challenges associated with diagnosing cancers, preventing cancers, and curing cancers will also be discussed in light of current technological advances such as genomics and bio‑informatics.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Evolution<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in 1973 that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” and his statement still holds true today. Students in this course will read Jonathan Weiner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book ''The Beak of the Finch'', which documents an ongoing study of evolution in Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands. They will also read selected chapters from Sean Carroll’s text on the burgeoning field of Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Evo Devo), ''Endless Forms Most Beautiful''. We will also consider Darwinian fitness in human populations. Labs will include an investigation of avian comparative anatomy and a study of students’ own mitochondrial DNA using molecular techniques such as PCR and gel electrophoresis.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Science<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | Fluid Mechanics<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Students taking this course will learn about fluid statics and dynamics. Dimensional analysis and derivation of Bernoulli and Navier-Stokes equations will provide the methods necessary for solving problems.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#23D105;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | AP Comparative Government & Politics<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | [[Tian-shin]]<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-comparative-government-and-politics AP Comparative Government & Politics] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | AP Macroeconomics<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-macroeconomics AP Macroeconomics] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | AP Microeconomics<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-microeconomics AP Microeconomics] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | AP Psychology<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-psychology AP Psychology] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | AP US Government & Politics<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | 3<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Material is guided by the College Board's [https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-united-states-government-and-politics AP US Government & Politics] curriculum.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Cultural Anthropology<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Anthropologists study humans as both biological and cultural creatures. This scholarly orientation raises many fascinating questions. To what degree does culture shape our actions and ideas? Are we primarily products of biological nature or cultural nurture? Can cultural norms make rational people act irrationally? Are there universal human rights or do cultures dictate what we think is ethical? These debates are critical for understanding human interaction and have significant application in fields ranging from law to medicine. Among the topics considered are: “the mind” and epistemology; discipline, law and rules; human bodies and communication; social taboos; ritual patterns of meaning; notions of cleanliness and defilement; festivals; and mythology. These elements of cultural life will be explored in social settings spanning the globe, but also within our own community at Xavier's. Much of the course attempts to contextualize 20th- century anthropological methods against the foil of postmodern critiques.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Intro Psychology<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Students in this course study a range of explanations for human thought, behavior and emotion. Readings, projects, demonstrations and class discussions facilitate exploration of this fascinating and evolving field. Specifc areas of focus include: the nervous system and brain functions; human development; emotion; learning and memory; social psychology; and addiction. Case studies of psychopathology, as well as the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, round out the course. Independent research and projects allow students to focus on specifc topics of interest. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Environmental Economics<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course is a case-based introduction to using economics to look at some of the major environmental problems in the 21st century. In this topic-driven course, students will learn about the role of market failure in environmental issues, the challenges of pricing environmental goods, and ways in which economic theory can be used to help solve these problems. Topics such as overfishing, global warming, water pollution, and others will be covered from the angles of science and economics. Special consideration of the unique role that social justice plays in many of the topics will be considered as well. Students will be assessed on problem sets, essays, in-class discussions, and an individual research project. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Pink is for boys and blue is for girls. At least it used to be. We will explore the ways that our everyday lives are guided by socially prescribed gender norms. Through the study of the historical production and contemporary interpretation of the categories of “woman” and “man,” “female” and “male,” “heterosexual” and “homosexual,” we will seek to better under- stand how gender-based inequalities have evolved and are both supported and simultaneously contested in societies across the world. In addition, we will seek to gain a better understanding of the ways that gender, sex, and sexuality inform local, national, and global efforts to improve the lives of individuals and to achieve social justice for entire communities. We also will explore the intersection of sexuality, gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class, and other forms of identity. Through a variety of sources—written documents, social media, film—this course will introduce students to a wide variety of issues across disciplines, including historical, anthropological, medical, legal, and popular culture. We also will explore contemporary uses of social media as sites of research, activism, and networking. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Class is SUPER popular with a Certain brand of young feminist-leaning students but do Not take it if you are trans it is like a small incubator for baby terfs.<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Critical Race Theory: The American Dream Deferred<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Historically, American society does not recognize race as the language of class. In this discussion-based seminar, students will examine ways in which race and class intersect. Critical race theory eschews the goal of assimilation into current social structure and instead looks at the experience of the “outsider” as a lighthouse that illuminates structural problems within American Society. Students will use Critical Race Theory to analyze historical legal cases—including the nation’s first successful school desegregation in 1931 where Mexican Americans sued San Diego, CA public schools for access and the famous 1957 court-ordered desegre- gation of Little Rock, AR High school—in addition to contemporary legal cases of “reverse discrimination” such as Fisher v. The University of Texas in 2012. Students will ultimately explore the question, “Is the American dream a structural fallacy that has explanation for success but none for failure?” Assignments will consist of selected readings, reflection pieces, article reviews, and a research paper. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Urban Crisis<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">“All politics,” Tip O’Neill concluded, “is local.” In this seminar, students will put this oft-cited sentiment to the test by examining the dynamic relationship between local, state, and federal politics. American cities—the key sites of contestation for many policy debates in the decades following WWII—will serve as the lens through which students access the lived experience and ramifications of broader national political trends, events, crises, and movements. Students will deploy the methodological tools of urban history to contemplate the cultural, spatial, and social reality of urban environments, and examine the contingent historical development—and impact—of urban policies on social and economic inequality in modern American cities. Some of the issues covered include suburbanization in Detroit, the War on Poverty in Las Vegas, the War on Crime in New York, and the War on Drugs in Los Angeles.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | The Olympics<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course will examine the origins and evolution of the modern Olympic games via the following topics: impact on politics and society, equity and ethics, controversies and scandals, inspirational stories and the role of athletes as national icons, and lessons of sportsmanship. Students will engage with a variety of sources across disciplines. Independent research and analytical writing skills will be emphasized</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#F58104;" |<br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Vocational Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Collision Repair, Paint, and Refinishing* <br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | [[Scott]]<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> Students meet two hours daily for classroom and laboratory instruction. The students receive training in the fundamental and manipulative skills related to auto body repair and acquire the knowledge to become competent in the field of auto body repair. Areas covered are body frames, fender and bumper, removing windows and repairing damaged panels, replacing windows and windshields, welding light metals, filling with lead or plastic, estimating and pricing repair work, and spray painting. This course can be taken a maximum of twice for credit. This course provides instruction and training necessary for I-CAR student certification(s). </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Mr. Summers takes safety seriously -- almost every year someone is removed from his course for making the same dangerous error twice. Not a charismatic lecturer, often very blunt in feedback. Most students who make it to the end of the course pass the certification exams on the first try. <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Vocational Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Automotive Technology I: Maintenance and Light Repair<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | 2<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | [[Scott]]<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> The course offers students theory and experience in most all phases of automotive drive-train<br />
repair. Students spend approximately 75 percent of their time with hands-on training and the remaining time is devoted to classroom instruction. Shop management and youth leadership are also incorporated into the course of study. This course provides instruction and training necessary for ASE student certification(s). </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Mr. Summers takes safety seriously -- almost every year someone is removed from his course for making the same dangerous error twice. Not a charismatic lecturer, often very blunt in feedback. Most students who make it to the end of the course pass the certification exams on the first try. <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Vocational Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Automotive Technology II: Automotive Service<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | 2<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | [[Scott]]<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> This course is a continuation of Automotive Technology but also includes new concepts and innovations, new engine types, studies of anti-pollutant equipment on automobile engines, and computerized engine analysis. This course provides instruction and training necessary for ASE student certification(s). </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Mr. Summers takes safety seriously -- almost every year someone is removed from his course for making the same dangerous error twice. Not a charismatic lecturer, often very blunt in feedback. Most students who make it to the end of the course pass the certification exams on the first try. <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Vocational Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Welding<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | [[Scott]]<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> This course will allow students to fortify and increase their knowledge of welding procedures and skills used in project construction through class assignments and projects. Topics covered may include: oxyfuel cutting/heating/welding, Shielded Metal Arc Welding (SMAW), Gas Metal Arc Welding (GMAW), Flux-cored Arc Welding (FCAW), plasma arc cutting, safety, and metal fabrication. In addition, record keeping, communication, employability, and human relation skills will be<br />
taught. This course will allow students to gain knowledge and skills that promote personal development and career success through involvement in the FFA. This course provides instruction and training necessary for the ASW Certified Welder certification. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Mr. Summers takes safety seriously -- almost every year someone is removed from his course for making the same dangerous error twice. Not a charismatic lecturer, often very blunt in feedback. Most students who make it to the end of the course pass the certification exams on the first try. <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Vocational Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Metal Fabrication*<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | [[Scott]]<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> This hands-on course will build on skills developed in Welding in the form of guided fabrication projects. Course hours will be split between classroom instruction in reading and creating shop drawings and independent work on instructor approved projects. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Mr. Summers takes safety seriously -- almost every year someone is removed from his course for making the same dangerous error twice. Not a charismatic lecturer, often very blunt in feedback. Advanced students in this course are often connected with potential employers in New York City and surrounding areas. <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Vocational Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Carpentry<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Vocational Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Drafting<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Vocational Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Bicycle Maintenance and Repair<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Vocational Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Culinary Arts: Desserts and Baked Goods<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | [[Jax]]<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Vocational Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Culinary Arts: From Soups to Steaks<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Vocational Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Horticulture (Decorative)<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Vocational Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Horticulture (Edible)<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Vocational Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | Beekeeping<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#D291BC;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: History and Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Paganism Through History<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | [[Matt]]<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: History and Social Science<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Fashion in History<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPCs<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">“There is something about fashion that can make people very nervous,” remarks Anna Wintour in the 2009 film The September Issue. Fashion studies is an interdisciplinary field, but one that retains a study of the past as central. It asks the question, “Does what people wear matter?” More than any other facet of material culture, an interest in fashion is often dismissed as trivial or seen as an emblem of superficiality. However, clothing represents far more than narcissism or the physiological need to cover oneself for warmth and safety. From headwear to footwear, fashion can communicate what we do, who we think we are or would like to be, where we are from, and what we care about. Fashion can be used as a lens to consider change. Using iconic fashion items from history, this course will explore what they communicate about global cultures, historical moments, social and political status, economic clout, gender, and identity.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Science and Vo. Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Regenerative Agriculture<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPCs<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course will explore agricultural practices that aim to have positive environmental impacts, such as improving soil heath, increasing native species diversity and sequestering carbon. It will also explore agricultural practices that aim to have positive social impacts, such as reducing food insecurity, honoring ancestral farming practices and promoting economic wellbeing of local communities. Scientific topics such as conventional versus organic systems, seed banks, closed loop food production, permaculture, soil science, nitrogen cycles and plant physiology will be investigated. Emphasis will be placed on experiential learning on local farms and campus. The course includes a service learning component and potential for research projects. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Science and Ethics<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Medicinal Drugs<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPCs<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Medicinal chemistry provides a bridge from the periodic table to the array of natural and synthesized biologically active agents available today. The ongoing development of medicinal drugs aims to integrate new scientific discoveries with precision-based strategies for treating individuals as well as large populations. A key goal in the design of new drugs for the pharmaceutical industry is to treat symptoms without the harm of side efects. Moreover, the scale-up and production of medicines are dependent on public health investment, while social and economic factors underpin access. This course will take a deeper look at the major classes of pharmaceutical drugs, including hypertension, high cholesterol, oncology, depression, diabetes, asthma and vaccines. How companies currently distribute drugs, determine pricing and ensure equity of access will be examined. Widely used compounds such as nicotine, nonsteroidal anti-infammatory agents, contraceptives, cannabinoids and pain suppressors will be explored based on their chemical structure and its relationship to function. Lab activities will provide experience with computational drug design, controlled-release drug delivery systems, pharmacokinetics and nuclear medicine.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Science and English<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Nuclear Semiotics<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPCs<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Highly radioactive nuclear materials are an accumulating component of our physical world. These materials will be actively decaying and affecting living things for thousands of years to come, possibly even millions of years. Nuclear semiotics is about the semantics of nuclear science to answer the question: how can humans of the 21st Century warn humans thousands of years from now about the location and nature of these materials? Though this question has been asked since the late 1980’s, by minds including Carl Sagan, there is no conclusive answer to this. Solving the nuclear semiotics problem may involve combining knowledge of materials science, nuclear particle physics, linguistics, symbols and cryptography, artistic expression, data science, engineering, and sociology. This course seeks to explore the fusion of these concepts and develop ideas of how to answer the question: how do we warn our future selves about our current choices? </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Science and Computer Science<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Robotics<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPCs<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Students in this course will learn to use a microcomputer to control output devices and interpret input sensors. Students will complete a series of small projects that will culminate with a working autonomous robot. The initial focus of the course requires students to build and analyze several micro-controlled devices. Students will learn fundamental engineering skills such as programming the microcomputer and building simple electronic circuits. The middle portion of the course will feature the construction of an autonomous robot that uses a microcomputer and several sensors to make navigational decisions. The final weeks of the course will require students to independently research, design and implement a system or systems that will increase the capabilities of their robot. Previous programming experience is recommended, but not required.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Science and Ethics<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Water: The Science and Story of Water Around the World<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPCs<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">How has water and humanity intersected around the world? Using an interdisciplinary lens, explore the science and ethics behind water scarcity and access, the chemistry and ecology of water systems, and the role water plays in literature, art and religion of populations around the world. Students will use current data and news sources to understand the pressing issues surrounding water rights and the intersection with rights for marginalized groups, study primary sources from around the world to examine the way water weaves through religious ritual and artistic expression, and create their own water based installations. Students may also travel to see an Aga Khan exhibit centered on the role of water in Islamic culture. The course will culminate in a final independent project exploring one aspect of water from multiple lenses.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Science and Vo. Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Molecular Gastronomy: The Science of Food<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | [[Jax]] & NPCs<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> The “science of food” food may seem like a new fad, but it is really the logical extension of centuries of the study. The understanding of how grapes are transformed into wine and champagne has been known for centuries. The production of cheese by the use of acids, enzymes, and bacteria has likewise been handed down through generations and has only recently been both “lost,” and then “rediscovered.” This class will investigate both the traditional aspects of food science—like how cheese is made or bread is baked—as well as cutting edge ideas such as how apple juice can be made into “caviar” and how shrimp can be made into “noodles.” A significant lab component will allow students to create many of these foods, and laboratories will be held in the school kitchen so that results can be tasted.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Science and English<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Science as Story: Communicating Science in the 21st Century<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">What is science communication, and how can science storytelling both educate and entertain an audience? In this course, students will learn to define, recognize, and critique common science communication media ranging from TikToks to Ted Talks. Students will practice essential science communication skills including idea/topic generation, script writing and editing, graphics and video design, and hosting/presenting. In each of these skills, research methods will form the foundation of the exploration as students gain expertise in their particular field of science being communicated. Through discussions and readings, students will also work through the ethical framing of these media and engage in case studies involving equity on both the audience and creator sides of the field. By the end of the mod, students will have produced a science communication portfolio by working independently and in small groups, and will share these media products with an online audience platform of their choosing.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Science and English<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Astrobiology: Life Among the Stars<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">We invite you to embark on a journey to explore the field of astrobiology, the study of the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe, on and beyond planet Earth. We will begin our exploration by studying the fundamentals of relevant sciences—physics, astronomy, chemistry, and biology—and will then apply these sciences to understand the potential requirements and limitations of life on Earth as well as on other planets and moons in our solar system. As we learn about historical and current efforts to detect life on these bodies, we will consider objects resident in our own solar system, including Mars, the moons of Jupiter, the moons of Saturn, and other solar system bodies such as Ceres and Pluto. Next, we will expand our view to include other possible abodes of life outside of our solar system as discovered by modern astronomers and modern instrumentation (i.e., the Hubble and Kepler space telescopes). Finally, we will examine the role of fictional alien biology on the human imagination through literature, film, and music.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Science and Performance<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Applied Anatomy in Motion<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course combines the structural dynamics of physiology and dance as a means to investigate how the two disciplines interact. By approaching movement from the perspectives of both science and dance, the student will examine how anatomy informs dance and how dance is an expression of human structures and systems.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Science and Art<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Anatomy and Physiology<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This upper-level biology class explores the complexity of human physiology. Students will be asked to use visual arts and graphic design skills to document many aspects of the mystery and wonder of the human body systems. The course will involve independent research on the systems of students’ choosing, using visual and creative ways to present the information they find. Students will research one of the body systems in its entirety or in detail. The systems to be considered are the nervous, the cardiovascular, the respiratory, the skeletal, the endocrine and muscle, or the digestive, reproductive, and lymphatic systems. Students are required to think independently and devise a final project of their own design that incorporates very clear scientific understanding of the body systems and their form and function.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Philosophy & Phys. Ed<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Yoga as Meditation*<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC - Lauren Briggs<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Yoga at Xavier's is taught in several ways, and choosing one is a matter of preference. Yoga is an individual practice and all students are welcome regardless of previous experience. In both types of yoga, joints, muscles and internal organs beneft from movements that stimulate often-neglected areas of the body. You can expect to improve overall mobility, strength and balance and will probably enjoy stress reduction and a greater sense of well-being, too. Yoga as Meditation, a style sometimes referred to as “gentle yoga,” focuses on learning and holding classic asanas (poses), working with the breath (pranayama) and practicing mediation skills in a calm and peaceful environment, allowing the mind and body to quiet. Vinyasa Yoga is for the student who is seeking the same overall benefts as listed above but through a more active sequence of movements.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Overly woo white woman who loves to wear "Indian" inspired clothing (Indian from India? "Indian"-Native American? yes.) and greet the class with "Namaste". Smells of white sage a lot. Noticeably hesistant to correct form of physical mutants in the class. <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Philosophy & Phys. Ed<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Vinyasa Yoga*<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC - Lauren Briggs<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Yoga at Xavier's is taught in several ways, and choosing one is a matter of preference. Yoga is an individual practice and all students are welcome regardless of previous experience. In both types of yoga, joints, muscles and internal organs beneft from movements that stimulate often-neglected areas of the body. You can expect to improve overall mobility, strength and balance and will probably enjoy stress reduction and a greater sense of well-being, too. Yoga as Meditation, a style sometimes referred to as “gentle yoga,” focuses on learning and holding classic asanas (poses), working with the breath (pranayama) and practicing mediation skills in a calm and peaceful environment, allowing the mind and body to quiet. Vinyasa Yoga is for the student who is seeking the same overall benefts as listed above but through a more active sequence of movements.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Overly woo white woman who loves to wear "Indian" inspired clothing (Indian from India? "Indian"-Native American? yes.) and greet the class with "Namaste". Smells of white sage a lot. Noticeably hesistant to correct form of physical mutants in the class. <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | The Old Testament<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. ...” So begins one of the most infuential books in human history. From ancient times until the present, Jews, Christians and Muslims have grappled with the cosmic questions, universal myths, compelling laws and dramatic narratives of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old Testament. It is a book that is both timeless and timely. In this course, students will gain an appreciation of the historical, political and social context from which the Hebrew Bible emerged, and will explore the narratives’ eternal themes, such as creation and destruction, rivalry and loyalty, love and betrayal, doubt and faith, freedom and captivity, and forgiveness and revenge, as well as delve into the ethical and legal teachings that have served as a major foundation of Western civilization.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | The New Testament<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The New Testament, which has been called “the most widely read, quoted, debated, maligned and believed book in Western civilization,” will be the focus of this course. Students will read and explore the New Testament; study the life of Jesus, the travels and letters of Paul, and the book of Revelation; and consider these both in their historical context and in contemporary literature and films.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Science & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Epistemology<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Epistemology is a philosophical term meaning “the study of knowledge.” This course explores how we know what we know about the world around us and within us. Questions engaged over the term include: What is knowledge? What differentiates and connects scientifc, literary, philosophical and artistic ways of knowing? What makes someone good at “knowing”? For that matter, what does it mean to be a student? The class explores how different modes of inquiry and experience can be distinguished from each other and then integrated into our understanding of knowledge. Class materials include readings from the Western philosophical tradition of reason (Plato, Descartes and Kant), the scientifc revolution (Galileo, Newton and Einstein), postmodernism (Illich and Abram) and literature (Dostoyevsky and Woolf). Students will also experience the visual and performing arts, take a night trip to the observatory, and engage in contemplative or meditative traditions, including practices known as “mindfulness” or “mind-body work” (Zen Roshi Jan Chozen Bays).</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Religion and Popular Culture<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Images, ideas, stereotypes and symbol systems of religion surround us in popular culture, whether in movies, television shows, sports, fashion, the internet, music or literature. From Disney and Harry Potter to Black Panther, from rock ‘n’ roll to hip-hop, the materials for this course will be drawn from a wide range of media. Through the lens of American popular culture, this course introduces students to the academic study of religion by exploring the world’s religions and such topics as the problem of evil, the afterlife, myth and the nature of the sacred. The course will conclude by inviting students to explore an expression of religion and popular culture that deeply interests them.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Faith and Doubt<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course invites students to an exploration through fiction and personal narrative of the depth and complexity of religious experience in its many forms from traditional belief through skepticism. The texts we will read range from some classics in this field to contemporary cultural selections. We will explore the timeless questions of the human condition, such as self-discovery, sufering, mortality, goodness, faith and doubt, the quest for meaning and the development of a spiritual self. At the end of the term, students will have the opportunity to expound on these themes in their own lives as they write a mini-meditation or spiritual autobiography for their final class paper.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Philosophy & Science<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Science as a Human Activity<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Though often seen as a vast, impersonal enterprise, science depends upon the effort and intelligence of human beings. In this course we will ask fundamental questions about how and why people pursue scientific inquiry. To this end, we will read the works of Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and Baruch Spinoza, as well as works by scientists and scholars like Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber. We also will consult historians of science such as Thomas Kuhn and Steven Shapin in order to understand science as a social enterprise. In these ways, we will examine the moral and intellectual aspirations of scientific work and the nature of science, above all, as a human activity.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: History & Science<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Pox & Pestilence: Disease and Medicine in the United States<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">In recent years, historians have begun to understand the impact of disease on the human story and have incorporated it into the more traditional narratives. In common with other parts of the world, the history of the United States has been profoundly influenced by infectious disease. In this course we invite you to come along on a multi-disciplinary journey to explore the impact of disease on the American experience in the 19th and 20th centuries. After exploring the pre-contact situation in the Americas, we will focus on syphilis, smallpox, bacterial sepsis, cholera, yellow fever, malaria, tuberculosis, influenza, polio, HIV/AIDS, COVID-19 and bioterrorism agents such as anthrax. Students will research the role these diseases played in the social, military, and political history of the United States together with the science and medicine that developed in response to them. This is a research seminar and students will use a variety of sources to write a term paper. There is no final examination.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Ethics & Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Feminist Philosophies<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course will address feminist moral and political theories. There is no singular ‘feminism’, and feminists disagree with each other on the answers to many of those moral and political claims. We will survey a variety of feminisms, including liberal and radical feminisms, womanism, and others. The course will also cover topics including sex and gender, the nature of oppression, intersectionality (including discussions of race, disability, gender identity, and class), and sexual ethics. Special topics will be chosen by students for further focus, but could include topics such as body shaming, trafficking, or understandings of masculinity</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Ethics & Computer Science<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Silicon Valley Ethics: Case Studies in the High-Tech World<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">In a world where technology permeates almost every aspect of our lives — the internet, smartphones, thousands of apps, cloud-based voice systems, screens in our classrooms, artificial intelligence, robotics, the gig economy, video gaming, virtual reality, and numerous other products and applications currently under development — what ethical challenges are raised by their ubiquity? Through a series of case studies in an industry where a well-known motto is “move fast and break things,” this course will explore whether ethical considerations have kept pace with evolving technologies. Where does goodness fit in the knowledge revolution? If we have “outsourced our brain to Google,” as some would claim, have we also outsourced our ethics to it and other big tech companies? When we do a Google search, is Google also searching us? What are the ethical considerations of what companies do with our information in this so-called “surveillance economy”? What are the ethical consequences associated with posting personal information on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or WeChat, and who has access to that information and for what purposes? Using specific case studies drawn from the vast and complicated world of technology, this course will assist students in identifying these various ethical issues and in developing strategies to deal with them. To assist students in identifying some of the ethical challenges that technology presents, the course explores chapters from works such as Ruha Benjamin’s ''Race After Technology'', Safya Noble’s ''Algorithms of Oppression'' or Cathy O’Neil’s ''Weapons of Math Destruction''.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Mathematics & Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Media as a Mirror: A Statistical and Visual Approach to Deconstructing False Narratives<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Who does the media say we are? What does it mean if we are seeing our reflections in a false media mirror? How can we analyze and describe the types of distortions that we are seeing?<br />
<br />
Students will use a statistical and visual art approach to explore the portrayal of various demographics in the media. How are non-dominant groups such as women, racial and ethnic minorities and LGBT people in the media portrayed? How are dominant groups portrayed? How do these stories shape the narratives in which we all live?<br />
<br />
Students will examine metrics such as screen time, dialogue, and casting through statistical tools such as t-tests, chi-square tests, and linear regressions to reveal the underlying distortions in what we see. They will then use visual art techniques such as compilation, montage, and the film essay to explore and deconstruct clichés and stereotypes and create graphs of discovered data, trends and patterns to explore and process the data. The final project will be a self-portrait that explores the ideas of false mirrors versus authentic narrative.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Math & Visual Art<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Ordering Chaos<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | [[Jax]] & NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This class is an Integrated Studies course designed to explore the connections and overlap between math and art. Using math and visual arts skills, students will explore a variety of questions, assumptions, projects, and theories that challenge stereotypes about math and art. This class aims to build resilience in young scholars who enjoy problem-solving. Students are asked to take academic and intellectual risks by exploring ideas and approaches that are out of their comfort zone and to practice self-motivation by staying engaged with the class activities and homework assignments. This class is open to students of all grades. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Math & Computer Science<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Math Modeling<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The aim of this class is to introduce students to the basic concepts of applied statistics and data science. Students will learn how to clean and filter data, analyze large data sets, how to utilize math modeling programs, data visualizations techniques, and how to create and interpret math models. Though coding will be utilized in this course, no experience with coding is required. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & Spanish<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | The Sky Is Falling: Magical Realism in Latin American Literature and Beyond<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">What if you entered a library with infinite titles, endless corridors, and duplicate copies? What if a speck in the sky turned out to be a ceiling, one that got lower and lower with each passing day? What if your new next-door neighbor seemed remarkably—even eerily—like a future version of yourself? In this course, we will explore the broad umbrella of magical realism, a literary genre in which primarily realistic stories contain some element of magic, as well as varying alternative fictions. Each of our texts will take the recognizable world and add unsolved mysteries, the supernatural, or unexplained phenomena to complicate our understanding of reality, as well as our characters’ experiences and emotional states. We will explore how and why authors choose to manipulate reality and examine the effects on our understanding of a character’s motive and identity. Using a broad scope of writers and traditions, we will address Sigmund Freud’s “uncanny,” as well as Da <br />
Chaon’s “spooky” and Margaret Atwood’s “speculative fiction.” In keeping with magical realism’s roots, we will begin the term with midcentury Latin American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and then expand our scope to include Kelly Link, Shirley Jackson, and Jean Rhys, among many others.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: History & Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Borders: Immigration, Migration and National Boundaries<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course examines how borders shape our world. Whether these are internal or external, societal or national, we all encounter barriers, but we do not all experience them in the same way. From the establishment of Europe to the discovery of the North American continent, from the Scramble for Africa to the Islamic State, and from the declarations of independence by former colonies, the development of borders has played a key role in geopolitical, religious, racial, and cultural matters. The course looks at nationality, identity, and the meaning of nationalism. It examines the lines drawn by politics, race, religion, class, and education, that lead to the creation of separate communities. This course addresses the nature of rights; natural, national, and human that emanate from the recognition of borders and that determine their legitimacy. Rights give rise to conflict, and when it comes to living spaces, these disputes are even more contentious. <br />
</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: History & Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Decolonizing Women: Shattering Oppression<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course examines the colonization of women in disparate societies around the globe. Whether by imperialist forces, colonial occupation, war, patriarchy, dictatorship, or political movements among others, women have encountered a super-imposed culture that has warranted adaptations and transformations. This in turn has given rise to internal and external resistance. This course seeks to examine the origins and nature of these movements across the globe that have been generated by women for women. Incorporating their specific national, cultural, and traditional histories, this course will enable our students to learn about the impact colonization has had, and in some cases continues to have, on the development of women’s rights in regions far removed from their own. They will be able to make comparisons between their own (native) women’s movements, whether national or regional and establish underlying connections between the movements on the whole. This course will also focus on the question of location; how does the location of a women’s movement influence its success? What relevance do culturally specific laws, common law, and traditional societies have on the emergence of women’s rights and movements from within their communities?</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & History<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Revolutionary Russia<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course examines Russian history from the Decembrist uprising of 1825 to Stalin’s show trials and the destruction of the Old Bolsheviks in the late 1930s. After a brief survey of autocracy and orthodoxy in Old Russia and westernization under Peter the Great, students focus on the 19th and early 20th centuries, with emphasis on the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the development of the revolutionary tradition, the rise of Marxism, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Civil War, Marxist-Leninist theory in practice, and Stalin’s dictatorship. Special attention is given to Russian literature, with works by Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Koestler.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: History & World Languages<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Roman History for Latin Students<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course provides a deeper historical background to the world of the authors that students will read in their Latin courses. Beginning with Roman state and urban formation of the early Iron Age, students will use primary and secondary sources to study in depth a selection of topics from the first millennium BCE. Students will also read primary sources in the original Latin language and finish the term with a role-playing opportunity examining the collapse of the Roman Republic.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: History & Religion<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | The Holocaust: The Human Capacity for Good and Evil<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">How did the Holocaust happen? How could some people commit such heinous crimes, while others remained bystanders, and still others risked their lives to save innocent people? We will consider these questions and many more as we examine the Holocaust from the perspective of the human capacity for good and evil. Discussions of human psychology and behavior, as well as the religious and historical sources of anti-Semitism, will be examined as background to the events of the 1930s and 1940s. We will also consider the memory of the Holocaust in survivor testimony and in more contemporary efforts to memorialize, represent and reckon with the historical events. The course will culminate with a project of each student’s own design.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Queer Literature & Identities<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This course approaches American literature with an emphasis on the ways in which non-heterosexual and non-cisgender identities and experiences have been represented in post-Stonewall (post-1969) writing. Despite the actual lived range and combination of gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual practice, mainstream heterosexuality attempts to confine sexuality to a rigid duality where observation of a person’s secondary sex characteristics are supposed to infer hir (gender neutral pronoun) gender identity and sexual practice. In this context, the term “queer” is invoked to describe any possible combination of gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual practice that challenges the norm presented by heterosexuality. By reading essays and literature by self-identified queer writers, we will challenge and redefine the concepts of sex, gender, masculinity, femininity, diversity, oppression, and empowerment. By the end of this mod, we will have developed a greater awareness of issues concerning gender and sexual identity.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Lockdown<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Prisons are a growth industry today in the United States. This course, through a blending of literature, film, and social sciences, will examine incarceration. By reading novels, memoirs, and poetry and viewing a few films, we can gain a greater appreciation of the psychological effects of these institutions and the power of art as a means of coping with them (touching then on witnessing and testimonials). We will ask questions about ethics and justice, about self-expression, and about social control. The course will include some experiential learning in the form of trips to a nearby jail and a nearby youth court. Some possible titles may include: ''Orange Is the New Black'', ''Gould’s Book of Fish'', ''The Trial'', ''Brothers and Keepers'', ''A Place to Stand'', ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'', and ''Zeitoun''.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & History<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Change Agents: Examining Advocacy, Audience, and Impact in Literature and the Arts<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This course will focus on the intersection of literature and activism. After defining our key terms in relation to questions of representation, propaganda, branding, and witnessing, we will delve into case studies involving civil rights and social justice, and environmental activism. We will read fiction, poetry, and drama—thinking about questions of audience and impact. In addition, music, performance, and visual arts may provide further contexts to understanding the relationship between literature and activism. Writers may include James Baldwin, Don L. Lee, Alice Walker, Richard Powers, Annie Dillard, etc. Students will choose a cause and investigate a range of artistic acts of activism—and perhaps produce some of their own. Projects may include the potential for collaborations here on campus and beyond.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & History<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | History & Literature of the Haitian Revolution<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
Few events have been as transformative and far reaching in effect—yet so untaught and unlearned across the humanities—as the Haitian Revolution, which occurred from 1791 to 1804. This interdisciplinary course will investigate the revolution and its legacy and attempt to address, at least in part, the monumental significance of the only successful large-scale slave rebellion in the Atlantic World. By 1804, the newly independent Haitians, freed by their own hands, had won for themselves a unique inheritance: theirs was a society born of the Age of Revolutions and animated by the Enlightenment-inspired language of liberty, but equally theirs was a society deeply rooted in African and Afro-Caribbean slave culture. In its independence, Haiti became the center of a transnational black diaspora as it defended its existence at a time when the United States and European colonial powers viewed racial slavery as the pillar of their burgeoning capital economies. This elective aims to explore these complicated ideas through a variety of texts, digital archives, fiction and nonfiction, literature, and history.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & Social Sciences<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Crossing the Line: U.S.-Mexico Border Literature and Contemporary Politics<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
What does it mean to live on or near a border, and more importantly, what does it mean to read and write literature about border experiences? In this course, students will explore the U.S.-Mexico border and literature produced “on the line,” what Gloria Anzaldúa describes as “La Frontera.” Students will read works that identify as “border literature” and will be introduced to border studies, discussing themes such as immigration, hybridity, border militarization, and in general, issues concerning U.S-Mexico border politics. Possible authors to be studied: Yuri Herrera, Cormac McCarthy, Nicholas Mainieri, Cristina Henríquez, Luís Albero Urrea, Emma Pérez, Lucretia Guerrero, Sandra Cisneros, Reyna Grande, and Ana Castillo.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & Philosophy<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Existentialism<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
Existentialist philosophy asks us to think about what it really means to have control over who we are and what we do. In this course, we’ll look at some of the key texts of existentialism, both fictional and nonfictional, focusing on Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir. We’ll grapple with some of the biggest questions humans can ask themselves: What makes us who we are? How much choice and control do we have over our lives? What does it even mean to be a person who can think for themselves and interact with the surrounding world? You’ll leave the class not only with a clearer understanding of complex philosophy, but also with a way of thinking about yourself and the world that you can apply every single day.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Music & Performace<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | American Musical Theatre<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
Musical Theatre is an interdisciplinary and experiential class that will explore both the history and performance elements of American Musical Theatre. Beginning with the 1920s and culminating with present day, students will explore the historical context of a significant musical in a particular decade each week. Students also will perform a number from that musical each week, challenging themselves in the discipline of performance. Over the course of the term, students will gain knowledge of American history through the lens of the performing arts and gain experience in performing in the three elements of musical theatre (song, dance, and spoken word). Public performances will occur throughout the term, including a final project. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & Performace<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Play Writing<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
Creating the literature of the theatre requires a good ear for the way people communicate, a keen sense of imagination, an understanding of how theatre works, writing skills to give voice to one’s ideas, and speaking ability to give verbal life to written plays. The process demands the general willingness to venture into this specific genre of literature, patience, revisions, and humor. Plays created by this class may be selected by student directors and performed. This course will include reading, writing and theatre exercises to explore themes and topics.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & Performace<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Social and Political Theatre<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Students study important social and political literature of the theatre that addresses social justice issues, including experiences of war, personal and political freedom, assumptions, stereotypes, and responsibility. Readings may include the works of well‑known playwrights and contemporary playwrights as well some lesser known artists. Classes will include an exploration of how we use the world of theatre to analyze text and character, bringing text to life, and open discussions and reflections about how we can use theatre to bring important topics to light. We will explore our own relationship to themes we discover in the work we read and write as well as the possible meaning to society as a whole. This course will include reading, writing and theatre exercises to explore themes and topics.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Performance & Vocational Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Costuming<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;]" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">An introductory exploration into the areas of costume design and costume construction, this course will highlight primary design elements utilized in costume design for the stage and screen (i.e., line, color, tone, texture, movement, mood composition, balance, and focus). The course will examine historical period silhouette and the art and craft of the stage costume. Practical experience will be given in areas including construction, flat patterning, draping, and fabric manipulation.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & Philosophy<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Costuming<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;]" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Existentialist philosophy asks us to think about what it really means to have control over who we are and what we do. In this course, we’ll look at some of the key texts of existentialism, both fictional and nonfictional, focusing on Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir. We’ll grapple with some of the biggest questions humans can ask themselves: What makes us who we are? How much choice and control do we have over our lives? What does it even mean to be a person who can think for themselves and interact with the surrounding world? You’ll leave the class not only with a clearer understanding of complex philosophy, but also with a way of thinking about yourself and the world that you can apply every single day.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & Visual Art<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Graphic Narrative<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | [[Jax]] & NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The graphic novel is an extended comic book with similar subject matter to—and the sophistication of—traditional novels. By its very nature, the graphic novel challenges our assumptions of what a narrative and novel can be. For those tied to words, the comic offers a challenging visual text that forces us to read in new and surprising ways; much of this course will be about reframing our visual and narrative habits and expectations. While the graphic novel is increasingly mainstream, it often has offered voices from the margins about the margins. Its subject has been everything from the coming-of-age novel to historical memoir to cross-cultural conflict to the darker side of the superhero. We will read a variety of texts with the rigor accorded to more traditional texts while also stretching ourselves to understand the aesthetic visual choices the artist makes. By the end of the term, we will even attempt our own small comics. Texts may include Alan Moore’s ''Watchmen'', Chris Ware’s ''Jimmy: The Smartest Kid on Earth'', Marjane Satrapi’s ''The Complete Persepolis'', Art Spiegelman’s ''The Complete Maus'', Frank Miller’s ''Batman: The Dark Knight Returns'', and others.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & History<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | The Great Migration<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">“They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, desserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.” Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. Students will engage with art, film, literature, and music about the African American exodus from Southern regions of the United States into the northern cities of Chicago, Cleveland, New York City, and others. A few writers that students can expect to read are James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, August Wilson, Richard Wright, among others.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Performance Arts & Vocational Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Puppetry and Props<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;]" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">This hands-on laboratory course investigates the history, styles, tools, materials and techniques of puppetry. Students will bring imaginative ideas to life by engineering and constructing various puppets forms, experimenting with performative objects, and exploring puppet manipulation as a performer. Note: as part of this class, students will learn the use of small hand and power tools. <br />
</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Performace & English<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Screenwriting<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
In recognizing the important role that film has in the life of our culture today, this course focuses on the skills particular to writing in that medium. Using the Robert McKee classic text Story as our guide, we learn about elements of story substance and structure, and we look at principles of story design and style in screenwriting. We also analyze the way these principles reveal themselves in significant modern and classic films, as we read and discuss screenplays ranging from Casablanca to Fruitvale Station. Viewings of these films accompany class discussions. Students complete the course with a portfolio of scenes and the treatment and outline for their own original film.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Performace & English<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Identity<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
This course explores the intersection of writing and performance through an investigation of personal identity and will be taught collaboratively by instructors who specialize in each area. The course will culminate in a performance of a devised theatre piece of the student’s creation before a live audience. Designed for students with acting experience and a serious commitment to the art form, students will build off their existing skills through in-depth character work and scene study and push their understanding of themselves and acting by exploring their own identity. Students will be encouraged to think theatrically, engaging in a search for the connection between literary themes, historical context, and personal identity. Over the term, the class will gain insight into the roles that race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and faith affects our daily existence and live performance. Lastly, students will experience and examine how live performance interacts with public discourse, civil disobedience, and art.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: Performace & English<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | The Playwright's Playground<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
Theater-making often begins with the playwright’s script — and ends with the work of an entire community of collaborators: directors and actors, literary directors and dramaturgs, designers and stage managers, producers and marketers, community organizations and advocates, and more. Students will consider the following questions in discussions and writing: How do we stage a production in an ethical and responsible way about a community that is not one’s own nor represented by our audiences? Should it be done? Which collaborators are essential to preserving the integrity of the play’s meaning? How do we engage the playwright? How do we engage the communities represented as theater-makers and artists? Students will read plays by and about BIPOC characters, be in conversation with the playwright, and direct readings of Sahar Ullah’s plays, including ''Hijabi Monologues'' and ''The Loudest Voices''</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: History & Vocational Tech<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | History Through Food<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | [[Jax]] & NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
From the Neolithic Revolution through the emergence of the global food markets of the 20th century, this course examines the changing relationship between humans and food. Through a combination of readings, tastings and hands-on cooking, we will examine how food can help us understand various aspects of the<br />
past around the world. Topics include the relationship between food and the economy, food and identity, food and empire, and food and the environment. Come hungry to learn and to eat. We will be reading about, writing about, cooking and tasting food that can help us understand how humans shape what they eat, and how what we eat shapes us.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & Music<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Beats, Rhymes, and Narrative<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
Hip-hop music’s infuence on popular culture, literature, entertainment and politics is undeniable. This course will examine the relationship between hip-hop and storytelling. Course texts will consist of weekly listening sessions, scholarly articles on hip-hop theory and definitive text on hip-hop culture. We will listen to selected songs by a diverse array of artists and analyze their structures and traditional literary elements. A section of the course will be devoted to the study of a chosen album. Class discussions will examine hip-hop as a modern-day social justice tool and a narrative genre that explores gender, race, spirituality, class and resistance. Writing assignments will consist of original rap songs, which include recordings, and a final epistolary project. </div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|-<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | Interdisciplinary: English & Music<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | The Harlem Rennaisance<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | 1<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | NPC<br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">Class Description<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
Harlem, New York. 1920s. A constellation of African American writers, artists, performers and thinkers are changing American and world culture, pollinating African American art and literature. Between WWI and the Great Depression, Harlem was distinctly in vogue. The Harlem Renaissance became a landmark of American literary, artistic and intellectual history: the emergence of a distinctive modern black literature, a clustering of black artists who sought to give expression to the ambiguous and complex African American experience. The course centers on the distinctive voices and styles of Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Nellie Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes and others. We will honor African American achievements in music and visual arts during that period and examine the Harlem Renaissance’s legacy within the evolution of African American literature and American, Afro-Caribbean and global art and literature. Class will include a field trip to a performance at the Apollo Theatre.</div></div><br />
|style="background-color:#899499;" | <br />
|}<br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
==Extracurriculars ==<br />
<br />
Life at Xavier's is not all classwork and training. Between sports* and student organizations, the students have a wealth of opportunities to choose from to enrich themselves outside the classroom.<br />
<br />
Athletics (The Xavier Titans)<br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Fall Season'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
*Cross Country (BV/GV)<br />
*Field Hockey (V)<br />
*Football (V)<br />
*Soccer (BV/GV) (''Coach: [[Kyinha]]'')<br />
*Volleyball (GV)<br />
*Water Polo (BV)<br />
*Fencing (BV/GV)</div></div><br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Winter Season'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
<br />
*Basketball (BV/GV)<br />
*Ice Hockey (BV/GV) (''Coach: [[Scott]]'')<br />
*Swimming & Diving (BV/GV)<br />
*Wrestling (V)</div></div><br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Spring Season'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
*Baseball (BV)<br />
*Crew (BV/GV)<br />
*Cycling (V)<br />
*Lacross (BV/GV)<br />
*Softball (GV)<br />
*Tennis (BV/GV)<br />
*Track (BV/GV)<br />
*Water Polo (GV)<br />
*Gymnastics<br />
*Ultimate Frisbee</div></div><br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Student Organizations'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
<br />
This is a sampling of student organizations that have been found among Xavier's students in the past. Feel free to add new ones that your char might be interested in or organize your own!<br />
<br />
*Classics Club (''Sponsor: [[Matt]]'')<br />
*Science & Tech Club<br />
*Math Club (''Sponsor: [[Kyinha]]'')<br />
*Chess Club (''Sponsor: [[Matt]]'')<br />
*GSA<br />
*Cryptology Club<br />
*Rock Climbing Society ''(Sponsor: [[Jackson]])''<br />
*Robotics Club<br />
*Jewish Student Union<br />
*Christian Fellowship<br />
*Muslim Student Union<br />
*Alianza Latina<br />
*Asian Student Alliance ''(Teacher: [[Tian-shin]])''<br />
*French Club (''Sponsor: [[Matt]]'')<br />
*German Club<br />
*Board Gaming Club <br />
*Women's Forum<br />
*Drumline<br />
*Unaccompanied Minors (a capella group)<br />
*Model UN<br />
*Astronomy Club<br />
*Debate Team<br />
*Mock Trial ''(Teacher: [[Tian-shin]])''<br />
*Peer Tutoring<br />
*Odyssey of the Mind<br />
*Culinary Society<br />
*Movie Club<br />
*Student Council<br />
*Yearbook <br />
*Phoebe's Oracle (Student Newspaper)<br />
*Literary and Arts Magazine <br />
*Archery Club<br />
*Martial Arts Club<br />
*Table-Tennis Club<br />
*Tabletop Society <br />
*Photography Club<br />
*Hiking/Nature Club<br />
*Wonderbolts (Equestrian Club) ''(Sponsor: [[Jackson]])''<br />
*Xavier's Players (Theatre Club)<br />
*Dance Dance Evolution (Dance Team)<br />
*Society for Creative Anachronism Student Group<br />
*Peer Support Group<br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
*Note that because of the vast discrepancy in abilities among the student body, joining an athletic team must be approved both in tryouts and by the Xavier's Ethics board.<br />
<br />
== XS Life ==<br />
<br />
=== XS Dorms ===<br />
<br />
Student dorms at Xavier's are segregated into two wings based on binary identified gender. Students who do not identify with a binary gender, regrettably, have to pick one of the two wings to live in.<br />
<br />
Nearly all dorm rooms are currently set up for two people; in some cases due to availability or extreme power related considerations, students may be assigned a dorm by themselves. <br />
<br />
The dorms at Xavier's are, as dorm rooms go, fairly comfortable. They are quite spacious, and come standard with a pair each of twin beds, dressers, nightstands, desks with bookshelf/hutch, and large closets. There is ample room in the dorms for students to customize their own half of their rooms as they like so long as it does not violate any school regulations.<br />
<br />
Bathrooms in the student dorms are shared with the wing; they have long rows of sinks and toilets on one side and, separately, the rows of showers, in their own enclosed booths with plenty enough space to bring all clothes and toiletries in and have them stay dry.<br />
<br />
The teachers' wing is on a different floor. Teachers who choose to live on campus get their own suites; they vary in size but all come with their own in suite bathrooms and some have small kitchenettes or small sitting areas as well.<br />
<br />
==== Roommate Assignments ====<br />
<br />
ICly, roommates at Xavier's are assigned by the administration, and cannot be specifically requested. Sometimes roommates do not get along; sometimes friction occurs -- usually these students will simply be told to learn how to get along. In cases of '''serious''', persistent hostility/incompatibility that is impacting the students' ability to thrive, the students may request a change of roommate, though they may still not request a ''specific'' new roommate. As of fall term 2023, rooms are triples, not doubles. <br />
<br />
OOCly, though, roommates at Xavier's are not assigned and are handled wholly and entirely by OOC agreement between players. Nobody will ever ''assign'' you a roommate here, so please do not ask. If you would like a PC roommate, you will need to a) see if there is someone who has a PC living in the same wing as yours who does not yet have a roommate and b) see if they are interested in being your roommate. If nobody is available, please either assume your PC has an NPC roommate or, if they are brand-new, may be one of the lucky few who has the double room to themselves until someone new shows up!<br />
<br />
Current PC room assignments at XS ('''check here to see if anyone is free/unassigned if you are looking for a roommate'''):<br />
<br />
*Girls' Wing:<br />
**[[Kelawini]]/[[Nessie]]<br />
**[[Naomi]]/[[Nahida]]<br />
**[[Ashlinn]]<br />
**[[Echo]]/[[Sriyani]]<br />
**[[Emilia]]<br />
**[[Kieow]]<br />
**[[Nevaeh]]<br />
**[[Rhydian]]<br />
**[[Sera]]<br />
**[[Cassy]]<br />
<br />
*Boys' Wing:<br />
**[[Harm]]<br />
**[[Lael]]/[[Avi]]/[[Bryce]]<br />
**[[Spencer]]/[[Dallen]]/[[Roscoe]]<br />
**[[Asva]]<br />
**[[Ford]]<br />
**[[Lucas]]<br />
**[[Marc]]<br />
**[[Quentin]]<br />
<br />
=== Advising at XS ===<br />
<br />
ICly, every student at Xavier's is paired soon upon arrival with an advisor. The job of the advisor is to make sure the student's needs at the school are being met and the student is being properly prepared for graduation/life after Xavier's. This means: helping them figure out their goals after high school, helping them a class and extracurriculars schedule that is manageable for them and will prepare them for a successful graduation, arranging that they get whatever access to coaching and therapy they might require (whether this is powers-based, medical, or psychological.)<br />
<br />
Please note that their advisor is '''not''' required to be the person who gives them powers-based coaching if it is needed, and advisors at Xavier's are, as a general rule, '''not''' selected based on similar powersets to students. When possible, students are matched with advisors based on personality and cultural competency -- meaning they try hard to pair students to advisors they think they'll get along with and talk to, not just advisors who can train them to use their powers.<br />
<br />
OOCly, similarly to roommates, advisors at Xavier's are not assigned and are handled wholly and entirely by OOC agreement between players. Nobody will ever ''assign'' you an advisor here, so please do not ask. If you would like a PC advisor, you will need to see if there is someone who has a PC faculty or X-Man who is interested in being your student's advisor. If nobody is available, '''please assume your PC has an NPC advisor''' -- there is no situation, period, where a student will not have an advisor, so do not RP that they have not been assigned one.<br />
<br />
When asking about advisor/advisee relationships, it is a good idea to check in OOCly and make sure you are on the same page about what you all want OOCly out of that RP relationship -- some people might want to actually roleplay out advising sessions on camera while other people are not interested in that genre of scenes and might only want that as a background to inform your characters' relationship for other types of scenes, and it is better not to set yourself up for frustration if you want very different things!<br />
<br />
Mentor Assignments:<br />
<br />
*[[Jax]] - [[Harm]], [[Lael]]<br />
*[[Joshua]] - [[Spencer]], [[Roscoe]]<br />
*[[Kyinha]] - [[Avi]], [[Nessie]]<br />
*[[Maya]] - [[Naomi]]<br />
<br />
(OOCly) Unassigned Students (remember that ICly, these students will still have an advisor, they will just be an NPC until you choose to pair with a PC advisor):<br />
<br />
*[[Ashlinn]]<br />
*[[Asva]]<br />
*[[Bryce]]<br />
*[[Cassy]]<br />
*[[Dallen]]<br />
*[[Echo]]<br />
*[[Emilia]]<br />
*[[Ford]]<br />
*[[Kelawini]]<br />
*[[Kieow]]<br />
*[[Lucas]]<br />
*[[Marc]]<br />
*[[Nahida]]<br />
*[[Nevaeh]]<br />
*[[Quentin]]<br />
*[[Rhydian]]<br />
*[[Sera]]<br />
*[[Sriyani]]<br />
<br />
=== Dining at XS ===<br />
<br />
The kitchen is run by Savita Chavan, who has been the cook for many, many years at XS. She is fully human; her daughter was a mutant who graduated long ago.<br />
<br />
Meals happen on a set schedule (breakfast at 7 am, lunch around 12/1p, dinner around 6:30; shifted an hour later on weekends), but there are always plenty of snacks and leftovers kept around the extensive pantry for students who need more food in between meals.<br />
<br />
Xavier's does its best to cater to the wide variety of cultural and physiological needs of its students. The dining hall is NOT a restaurant or cafeteria with a full menu that kids can order from it's a school dining hall. <br />
<br />
Mealtimes generally include one meat and one vegan entree with a number of sides that students can pick and choose from to make their own meal as best suits them. Entrees and sides at a given meal will generally all be along a similar cuisine for ease of mixing and matching, with a wide range of dietary choices represented among the available options. While Savita's specialty is South Indian food, she tends to ''try'' and cater her cooking to the (predominately whiter, more American) palate of the school body; though there's a wide variety of recipes on rotation, they skew towards Things That An Uncertain Immigrant Thinks Would Be Inoffensive To A Wide Audience Of American Kids. Less often palak paneer, more often ravioli.<br />
<br />
=== XS Tech ===<br />
<br />
*There is wifi everywhere throughout the mansion and covering a good portion of the grounds around the mansion. It reaches down to the boathouse and docks, but peters out soon into the woods.<br />
*The computer lab is open 24/7, with many machines available for students who do not have their own personal computers. It is well-equipped with computers, scanners, and printers for all students' computing needs.<br />
*All students are required to have smartphones. Students may not use cell phones during class, but must keep their phones with them at all times when they are signed out to leave school grounds. They are expected to use the cell phones in emergencies; they are all equipped with a 'panic button' which will send an alert with the student's location to the school, dispatching available X-types to respond. Hitting the panic button OUTSIDE of actual crises is a severe infraction and will result in disciplinary action.<br />
**Students are welcome to see the school's IT department if they have their own appropriately capable cellphone they would prefer to keep and use; they will install a similar panic-button app for them. Students who do not have/cannot afford their own phone will be provided one by the school.<br />
*All students, staff, and faculty receive Xavier's email addresses. The default format is first initial-lastname at xaviers.edu . So, e.g., Daiki Komatsu is dkomatsu@xaviers.edu. Alumnae keep their Xavier's email address for as long as they stay active with it; they can contact the school sysadmin to reinstate it if they let it go idle and it is deleted.<br />
**Staff, faculty, and alumnae are allowed to pick up to two mail aliases for their email as well. So, e.g., Jackson, in addition to being jholland@xaviers.edu, can also be reached by jax@xaviers.edu or littlemisssunshine@xaviers.edu. Mail aliases must have some modicum of propriety; nothing vulgar or profane will be allowed.<br />
*Xavier's internal network has extensive online support for all academics. Students can log in to check their class syllabus, assignments, announcements from teachers (which will generally also come with email notification), class discussions, lecture notes, grades, calendars, and any other media that the teacher has posted to help with class.<br />
**All teachers of academic classes are given instruction in how to use this system when they start teaching; it is pretty simple and intuitive and does not require much tech savvy. Teachers are ''required'' to post their syllabus and assignments, at the least, here.<br />
**For this reason, not knowing about assignments is never an excuse; if class is missed, the week's assignments and topics are posted online and all students have plenty of internet access. A teacher forgetting to post an assignment, however, ''is'' an excuse, so teachers should get used to being on the ball with this.<br />
*Xavier's sysadmin is very On The Ball, although nobody seems to ever have seen him. Any and all network problems can be directed to cerebro@xaviers.edu, though, and tend to be answered uncannily quickly. The network does not inherently have any constraints on it for things like file sharing and porn and general Misbehavior, but students will find that things outside of the school's Acceptable Use Policy (things like: attempted hacking, illegal activity, using obnoxious amounts of bandwith nonessentially, etc. ) are quickly discovered and quashed.<br />
*Students -- or malicious outsiders! -- will also find that their network is ''remarkably'' secure and resistant to malicious tampering and intrusion. Students attempting to test the network's security will even occasionally receive an email offering advice, and explaining what they did wrong, along with a suggestion that should they wish to practice their "1337 haxx0r skillz" they should take one of the many CS classes offered by the school.<br />
<br />
=== The Neighborhood, and Beyond ===<br />
<br />
Xavier's School is located in the town of Salem Center, a town of around 5000 people in Westchester county. Salem is a small and close-knit community, the type of place guidebooks probably call "charming" or "quaint". Its town center makes a deliberate effort to retain the same general feel it has kept for generations, old-fashioned storefronts and cobbled streets with a lot of eye for aesthetic and very little thought for accessibility. While there are some things to do in town -- an arcade, a diner that's popular with the students, a roller skating rink, a small movie theatre -- in honesty the primary recreational activities of the youth who live there are Getting High Behind the roller skating rink, movie theatre, etc. The Weirdo School up at the old Xavier place is something of an open secret in town; while people don't know for sure the full scope of the school they are well aware that there's a Higher Proportion Than Usual of freaks that come into town from there and have grown to a grudging mutual tolerance.<br />
<br />
At just under a mile from campus, getting to the town center is a middling walk on a pleasant day, or a very quick bike or car trip. <br />
<br />
Westchester County is just north of the Bronx. In zero-traffic conditions, it takes approximately an hour by car to get from the school to Manhattan -- in most ''actual'' New York City congestion situations, tack ''at least'' an extra half an hour onto that. Public transit is a more hit or miss prospect -- the school is served by commuter rail; the schedule is geared around people getting to and from day jobs in the city and not to the needs or desires of people wanting to get FROM Westchester TO the city on an after-school/weekend schedule. <br />
<br />
Timed correctly, the trip from Salem Center to Grand Central Station by train is often quicker than sitting in traffic and will run about an hour as well -- however on top of that needs to be factored in time to get ''from'' downtown Manhattan to wherever people ''actually'' want to be, as well as the fact that the train runs extremely intermittently on weekends and does not run late at night. The trip by buses (which are necessary to get back in between trains) requires several transfers and can take well over 2 hours from downtown, depending on transfer times and how behind the buses are.<br />
<br />
===Additional Trivia===<br />
The school colours are blue and yellow, though Xavier's branded apparel comes in different colours as well. <br />
<br />
The school teams are the Titans -- the mascot, when it is brought out, does not look ''much'' like a Greek god, but that's how it goes.<br />
<br />
The school motto is ''mutatis mutandis''. <br />
<br />
== Roster ==<br />
<br />
These are the current PCs who have some affiliation with Xavier's.<br />
<br />
*Faculty<br />
**[[Maya]] Mukhopadhyay<br />
*Faculty/X-Men<br />
**[[Charles]] Xavier<br />
**[[Jax]] Holland '10<br />
**Roberto "[[Kyinha]]" da Costa<br />
**[[Matt]] Tessier<br />
**[[Scott]] Summers '95<br />
**Hua [[Tian-shin]]<br />
*Staff<br />
**[[Cerebro]]<br />
*Students<br />
**[[Ashlinn]] Karibeanas<br />
**[[Asva]] Runí Tøro<br />
**[[Avi]] Micah Williams<br />
**[[Emilia]] Romanova<br />
**Rutherford "[[Ford]]" Reagan Rand Stonegate II<br />
**[[Leonidas]] Beauregard Thigpen<br />
**[[Bryce]] Layton Allred<br />
**[[Cassy]] Villeneuve<br />
**[[Dallen]] Elijah Allred<br />
**Ziyin "[[Echo]]" Lin<br />
**[[Harm]] Sun<br />
**[[Kelawini]] Māhoe<br />
**Sumalee "[[Kieow]]" Suphamongkhon<br />
**[[Lael]] Isaiah Winters<br />
**[[Lucas]] DiLaurentis<br />
**Marcellus Momprimier Marquette ([[Marc]])<br />
**[[Naomi]] Winters<br />
**[[Nessie]] Grace Pelayo<br />
**[[Paz]] Sepulveda<br />
**Quintavius Quirinius "[[Quentin]]" Quire<br />
**[[Roscoe]] Brendan Vo<br />
**[[Rhydian]] Lovkwood<br />
**[[Sera]] Tessier<br />
**[[Spencer]] Holland<br />
*X-Men<br />
**Clarice Ferguson ([[Blink]])<br />
**[[Daiki]] Komatsu '15<br />
**[[Joshua]] Salinas<br />
**[[Kitty]] Pryde '12<br />
**[[Shane]] Holland '16<br />
*Former Students<br />
**[[Anette]] Eccleston '10<br />
**Victor Borkowski ([[Anole]]) '16<br />
**[[B]] Holland '16<br />
**[[Desi]] Tessier '16<br />
**[[Gaétan]] Tessier<br />
**[[Kavalam]] Ramakrishna Neelakantan<br />
**[[K.C.]] Love '20<br />
**[[Kisha]] Dorogoi '17<br />
**[[Lyric]] Sagal Dirie '17<br />
**Taylor [[Marinov]] '20<br />
**[[Nanami]] Māhoe<br />
**[[Nick]] Thanh Gleason '17<br />
**[[Peter]] Parker '16<br />
**[[Rasa]] Djalili '15<br />
**[[Taylor]] Allen '17<br />
<br />
[[Category:Factions]][[Category:Xavier's School]][[Category:Information]] [[Category:In-Game Universe]]</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Who_Shall_I_Say_Is_Calling&diff=25674Logs:Who Shall I Say Is Calling2023-10-14T16:11:29Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Jax]], [[Joshua]], [[Scramble]]<br />
| summary = "Mighta overestimated my sanity meter. ''You'' seeing this?" (in the wake of [[Logs:Who By Fire|Neilah attack]], shortly after [[Logs:Who In This Mirror|Mirror intervention]].)<br />
| gamedate = 2023-09-25<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = cn: mention of Nazi violence, description of injuries, allusion to suicidal ideation<br />
| location = <NYC> [[Freaktown]] - Riverdale<br />
| categories = Jax, Joshua, Freaktown, Mutants<br />
| log = <br />
The plaza outside still looks like a war zone. Charred remnants of tables and food and personal belongings among other things litter the broken pavement, the water main torn from beneath lolling drunkenly, though at least it's no longer gushing, snapped and melted string lights festive no longer. Here in the makeshift clinic that has taken over the first floor of the common house it has quieted down somewhat. It's not a ''restful'' quiet -- more of a frightened, exhausted hush. There are volunteers keeping vigilant watch inside and out, volunteers tending to the wounded and the traumatized, volunteers just bustling around to keep themselves occupied.<br />
<br />
Scramble has been backed into a small study and surrendered herself to medical attention. It's not that she's been ''deliberately'' dodging Joshua, but as President of the Mongrels, Mayor of Freaktown, and a Black woman on the cusp of auntiehood she's had her hands full in the wake of the attack. Well. ''One'' of her hands, anyway. Her right arm is in an improvised sling that, like the rest of her, is smeared with soot and blood. The sleeves of her once-white blouse are torn to ribbons, and it's the testament to the quality of her leathers that the rest of her outfit is still more or less in tact.<br />
<br />
"I been known he ain't ''okay'', but how'd he seem?" Her good hand is clutching a bottle of apple juice someone handed her, but she hasn't opened it. "You don't gotta tell me his business, I just." She swallows hard and looks up at the ceiling. "Just worry he gon' chuck himself into the Hudson. Or fall out the sky. Or. Shit, Ionno."<br />
<br />
"Mmnh." At first this is all Joshua says, and the (haggard) (sooty) (bloodstained) lines of his face betray little else except the focused appraisal he's giving Scramble right now. His eyes are fixed on her arm sling although most certainly he isn't ''x-raying'' it, other senses entirely searching out the extent of her damage. He lifts a hand to rub fingers at the hollows of his eyes, and when he drops it reaches for juice of his own -- ''mostly'' drunk already somewhere through the grueling process of triaging the shocked community. His mouth twists into a grimace as he gulps down the last of it, and stays there after he's swallowed. He puts the bottle down, holds a hand out for Scramble's. "Man's got trauma."<br />
<br />
Scramble passes her juice to Joshua and leaves her empty hand propped on the padded arm of the chair she's collapsed into. "You need more than juice, or you just gon' keep running out of juice." That was solidly Auntie Scramble. "I should check on the emergency break fast crew's progress." And there's Mayor Scramble, probably. Then, just a little plaintive, "I coulda helped him with that. Not much, but." She considers Joshua momentarily. "Could help you with that, too."<br />
<br />
For a moment Joshua just gives the juice a blank stare. Then takes it, sets it aside, takes Scramble's ''hand'' instead. It's slower than usual, for him, but the damage starts to heal itself up. The clench of his jaw and narrowing of his eyes are hard and angry, though he's looking kind of unfocused ''past'' Scramble and not at her. "Mmnh." It's a little more ''mmnh'' than before. "... s'pretty deep fucking trauma."<br />
<br />
For just a second there are two Joshuas in the little study, but the second vanishes in short order. He's left behind cargo -- Jax is looking ''startlingly'' clean and uninjured given what people saw of tonight's events. Plain white button-down, plain white trousers, plain white eyepatch, his near-black hair a sharp contrast to his colorlessness otherwise. His eye has gone a little wider when he sees Joshua, and there's a sharp flood of red to his cheeks. "Oh --" he starts, just a soft relieved breath, but then blushes darker when he looks to Scramble. He backs away a step towards the door, head shaking. "Sorry, I --"<br />
<br />
"I ain't mean shit already done scarred deep." Scramble's mouth pulls hard to one side. "Could see to that, too. It be a whole process, though, like therapy 'cept it actually works. But shit that ''just'' went down? Not that hard to keep it scarring ''more''." She swallows, looks away from Joshua though not ''really'' at the bookshelf past him. "Ain't tryna get up in your business, neither, but I ''can'' help you. Coulda done for the team all along if --" If what? Possibly she doesn't even know anymore, the thought fully blasted from her mind by Jax's arrival. "What the ''fuck.''" She sits up straighter, flinching as the sudden movement stirs a cacophony of pain from her many injuries. Her hand tightens around Joshua's. "Mighta overestimated my sanity meter. ''You'' seeing this?" Her chin jerks up toward Jax.<br />
<br />
"Already-scarred shit's what worries me. Motherfucker nearly killed his ''own'' people. You can't quiet those ghosts." Maybe Joshua is too exhausted to be seeing this or maybe Scramble ''is'' hallucinating, because at first he does not even look up at the arrival of Second Joshua and Freshly Deceased Team Leader. He does wince, eye scrunching up tight at the clamor of pain running through Scramble's nerves, and the twitch of his hand ''tells'' of his instinct to pull back from it. He doesn't -- keeps his hand settled there, slowly lifts his eyes -- not to Jax, exactly, but to the space right ''beside'' Jax where the Other Him had just been. He huffs out a sharp breath, his eyes lowering again. "Fucker owes me a twenty." His other hand is lifting again, the heel of his hand digging hard against one eye. "... maybe. You staying?"<br />
<br />
Jax swallows, his arms wrapping tight around his chest. "I didn't -- know what to -- they said --" He doesn't finish this, just bows his head at the question, drawing in a slow breath. "Sorry," he says again, and this time it's to Scramble when he looks up, frowns at the sling on her arm. "I just --" The lights quiver briefly but the next breath actually seems to steady him. "Where do y'all need me."<br />
<br />
Scramble's eyes dart from Jax to Joshua and back, neatly adding "Math Lady" to her roles for the evening. "Jackson Connor Holland," she says with a flat look and a flatter voice that belies the glimmer she's trying to blink out of her eyes. "I thought you was ''dead'', Faggot!" This brings her up short. "Or, ''were'' you..." Her gaze slides back to Joshua. "...and got brung back?" But she's studying Jax's clothes now, frowning. "Nah, you just got here. Shit, was that ''Mirror'' saved our asses before going critical?" She narrows her eyes as they stray back to Joshua once again. "Are ''you'' Mirror?"<br />
<br />
"He was nearly dead," Joshua answers for Jax, his eyes once more fixed on Scramble's (slowly getting un-)broken arm. "You've been here this whole time. I took you home to heal you. Seemed like the dignified thing to do, between the sand and the explosion --" He's looking down at his ''own'' clothes, fresh and clean in contrast to his very much dirty and bloodied skin, "-- your clothes did ''not'' survive that shit." With his free hand he reaches -- where? -- and plucks his own NYCAM kit out of midair. Tosses it in Jax's direction. "Plenty out there still need a little bandaging."<br />
<br />
"No, I ain't -- he ain't --" Jax is looking, a little flustered, between Scramble and Joshua. He sounds almost pleading, here. "I come to help, not to -- ''you'' saved all these people. You can't just -- ''I ''can't just come in an' --" The end of this sentence comes out in a short puff of air as he catches the medic kit more against his stomach than with his arms, reaching up belatedly to snag it from falling.<br />
<br />
Scramble has receded into stillness somewhere in between Joshua's pronouncements and Jax's protestations. "Goddamn," she says quietly as she studies ''Joshua's'' clothes. "How the hell did that happen? Sure as fuck ''looked'' like you, how we gon' explain if it ''wasn't?''" Her brows furrow, slow but deep. "There was this Nazi pyro, showed up and murdered someone before you could bubble him. Erik lost his entire shit, ripped up half the plaza to chuck at the motherfucker, and knocked you upside the head in the process." Then, as kind of an afterthought, "'Bout nearly brained ''me'', too. Anyway, Nazis ran, you exploded, everyone been losing they shit since. Not that I'm unsympathetic." She looks to Joshua again. "What'd I leave out?"<br />
<br />
Joshua's eyes have squeezed closed somewhere during Scramble's explanation, and just look heavy-lidded and tired when he does open them again. He just nods his head heavily when Scramble looks back to him, shoulders sagging on a heavy sigh. His hand lifts, and though it stops short of actually touching where his shaggy hair is clumped at one side with burned and dried blood there's a slow slide of razor-sharp bone claws that slip from his knuckles and touch light against the matted hair. When they slide back in, it ''doesn't'' heal, blood trickling from fresh wounds in his knuckles.<br />
<br />
"Grabbed his bodyguard's power. You ''would'' have been dead, I --" He just swallows, hard, and does not quite manage to repress the shudder that runs through him, or the ragged hitch of breath that comes with it. His voice is just as flat as ever, though, when he continues. "People out there. Saw all ''that''. Saw that Nazi flay you ''alive''. Saw Magneto piss off after giving him an assist. Saw you fucking die. You come to help, get out there. Give people some fucking hope." He's pressing his bloodied knuckles hard against his trousers as if this will stem the pain. When his eyes lift from Scramble's now-healed arm, there are bright tears just spilling over; his abrupt attempt to wipe them away smudges red across his stubbled cheek. "... you see how much people need you, maybe I'll save one more."<br />
<br />
Jax's hand presses to his mouth, his other clutched tight around Joshua's medic kit. He's looking at Joshua's matted hair -- at the fresh wounds on his knuckles -- at the blood streaked down his face. "You --" he starts to say, but this just trails off into a barely-whispered, "... oh, God." He takes a step closer, hand lifting out towards Joshua but then dropping back to his side. There's a small flicker in the lighting, a brief dimming that for a moment wreaths him in wisps of shadow, but this levels out with a slow breath. "Okay." Kind of shaky, but then firmer, "Okay. Kinda sounds like you near the top of folks need some tending, though."<br />
<br />
"Shit." Scramble flexes the fingers of her newly healed arm experimentally in sympathy with Joshua's newly injured hand. Slips out of the triangle bandage that has served her for a sling. Turns it inside out for a (slightly) cleaner surface to wipe away Joshua's blood and tears to (slightly) better effect. Picks up the juice he'd set aside, opens it, and presses it back into his non-punctured hand. "Drink. I ain't playin'."<br />
<br />
She unfolds from her comfortable seat and beckons to Jax with a brusque, "Get your ass over here, medic." Then immediately intercepts him with an embrace so tight it hurts -- her more than him, probably. With it comes a ripple of calm clarity that does not ease his pain, but does loosen its suffocating grip temporarily as it evens out his dysregulated neurochemistry. "Since you missed it the first time: ''don't fucking die''." She releases him, blinking her eyes clear again as she makes for to door. "I'mma tell your kids you alive."<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Who_In_This_Mirror&diff=25673Logs:Who In This Mirror2023-10-14T16:10:59Z<p>Sunshine: Sunshine moved page Logs:Returning to Logs:Who In This Mirror without leaving a redirect</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Jax]], [[Mirror]]<br />
| summary = ""Goddamn shame you weren't there." (followed by [[Logs:Who Shall I Say Is Calling|checking in with Joshua & Scramble]].)<br />
| gamedate = 2023-09-25<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = cn: fosse don't look, mention of antisemitic violence.<br />
| location = <PRV> [[Holland Farm]] - Hiawassee<br />
| categories = Jax, Mirror, Holland Farm, Mutants, 8<br />
| log = <br />
<br />
One of many such family farms -- though fewer all the time -- in this little Appalachian town, the Hollands' 160-some rolling acres are divided about evenly between peach orchards and yearly rotations of crops. A burbling creek winds along one edge of the property, which extends up past the arable portions into steep, wooded mountainside. There are several acres of vegetable gardens nearest to the farmhouse, producing enough food to feed the family and often with excess to sell locally. The barn and pasture adjoining this are likewise mainly for the family's own use, with just a couple of dairy cows, a pair of horses, and plenty of chickens.<br />
<br />
The farmhouse itself is a big rambling white affair with a generous wraparound porch, full of rustic charm even in its no-nonsense practicality. The furniture is sturdy and plain and well-cared for, the walls adorned with handmade crafts, children's artwork, and some of Jackson Holland's more whimsical original paintings. The kitchen is vast and airy and superbly organized, always redolent of rich home cooking and of the herbs hanging in bundles to dry. In addition to the main house there are two smaller outbuildings, historically used to house farm hands during the harvest.<br />
<br />
The sun has set, but the gibbous moon is bright overhead, casting a sheen over the rolling farmland. In pajama pants and ancient Rainbow Brite tee Jackson is up on the roof, tucked on the gently sloping overhang outside his bedroom window with a sketchpad in his lap, illuminated by a soft glow that radiates out from around him. He's twirling his pencil in rapid flit between his fingers, and though the tip isn't touching to his page, hasn't touched to his page for some time, the drawing there is blossoming to life. Ryan (or a stylized version thereof) lying in a field of the verdant wildflowers from the artwork for ''Shelter'' run riot across the page in a spill of bright petals and sharp thorns -- only now the petals are fingers, the thorns are teeth, the flowers a ravenous crowd that tears hungry mouthfuls from his flesh, and from the wounds gaping in his scarred torso a spill of seeds ripples out to stretch new roots into the earth and start the process again.<br />
<br />
Jackson is alone on the roof, until he isn't anymore. Joshua, when he appears, is ''also'' dressed for a lazy evening at home -- baggy sweatpants, an ancient soft FDNY tee. He's humming quietly to himself -- Leonard Cohen's "Who By Fire" -- as he drops down to sit beside Jax. He takes the sketchpad off Jax's knees, brows hiking as he looks at Ryan being perpetually consumed by his <s>adoring fans</s> unearthly creations. "He does kind of bring it on himself."<br />
<br />
Jax tenses, startled -- then ''confused'' as "Joshua" nabs his sketchpad. He doesn't reach to take it back until the other man ''speaks'', and then a slow frown creeps across his face. He snatches the book back, the movement and color fading from it to leave a half-finished graphite sketch of the same. "''Joshua's'' prob'ly at Ne'ilah now." His reply isn't quite ''sharp'' but it's definitely far from warm.<br />
<br />
"Oh, he was! Is. Was." Mirror leans back against Jax's bedroom windowframe, hand turning up in a dissonantly casual gesture as he continues: "-- Swords swooped in looking to massacre some Jews." Joshua's form is melting and shifting as Mirror speaks -- smaller, now, ''swimming'' in their previous clothes, but the small sharptoothed blue face that peeks out is bleeding and raw, skin torn and peeled open like a ''particularly'' ugly spill onto the road. "Goddamn shame you weren't there. Could probably have saved a ''lotta'' lives."<br />
<br />
The sketchbook falls from Jax's hands, fluttering open as it drops off the roof. His mouth opens as he looks at Mirror!Shane, but nothing comes ''out''. As his hand flies to his lips, the glow around him is brightening to a ferocious heat.<br />
<br />
The unShane doesn't shy away from the crackling heat, though his clear inner eyelids do slide shut. "Shit, sorry, I'm misremembering. Stressful night. You ''were'' there. At least," they're growing, stretching back into their own lanky form, "everyone ''thinks'' you were there." Their head rolls back, eyes tipping up towards the moon overhead. "Joshua got flayed alive doing what you could have done much easier. ''Did'' save a lotta lives, though. Way that nightmare went, whole buncha people probably think ''you're'' dead." There's a sharp baring of teeth here that maybe, from the right angle, could be interpreted as a smile. "Convenient, I guess. You want to take that out now? Save your people a ''lot'' of disappointment."<br />
<br />
It's not hard, at first, to read the shift -- confusion, then fury, then sharp guilt -- that passes across Jax's expression. This last fades, slow, to a careful blankness. He's looking away and off the roof for a long silent stretch. The heat begins to ebb, and so does the glow that surrounds him, leaving only the bright moonlight to light the rooftop.<br />
<br />
Eventually he stands, slow and heavy as he pushes himself carefully up on the precarious slope. He's not looking at Mirror, just giving his head one small shake. "-- I'll get dressed," is all he says, quiet, before ducking back in through his window.<br />
<br />
Mirror doesn't reply. They're melting smoothly back into Joshua, though, and the smile that lingers a moment on his jowly features looks ''jarringly'' out of place. Their eyes linger up on the moon, the resuming of their quiet humming following Jax back inside.<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Who_In_This_Mirror&diff=25665Logs:Who In This Mirror2023-10-07T20:58:31Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Jax]], [[Mirror]]<br />
| summary = ""Goddamn shame you weren't there." (followed by [[Logs:Who Shall I Say Is Calling|checking in with Joshua & Scramble]].)<br />
| gamedate = 2023-09-25<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = cn: fosse don't look, mention of antisemitic violence.<br />
| location = <PRV> [[Holland Farm]] - Hiawassee<br />
| categories = Jax, Mirror, Holland Farm, Mutants, 8<br />
| log = <br />
<br />
One of many such family farms -- though fewer all the time -- in this little Appalachian town, the Hollands' 160-some rolling acres are divided about evenly between peach orchards and yearly rotations of crops. A burbling creek winds along one edge of the property, which extends up past the arable portions into steep, wooded mountainside. There are several acres of vegetable gardens nearest to the farmhouse, producing enough food to feed the family and often with excess to sell locally. The barn and pasture adjoining this are likewise mainly for the family's own use, with just a couple of dairy cows, a pair of horses, and plenty of chickens.<br />
<br />
The farmhouse itself is a big rambling white affair with a generous wraparound porch, full of rustic charm even in its no-nonsense practicality. The furniture is sturdy and plain and well-cared for, the walls adorned with handmade crafts, children's artwork, and some of Jackson Holland's more whimsical original paintings. The kitchen is vast and airy and superbly organized, always redolent of rich home cooking and of the herbs hanging in bundles to dry. In addition to the main house there are two smaller outbuildings, historically used to house farm hands during the harvest.<br />
<br />
The sun has set, but the gibbous moon is bright overhead, casting a sheen over the rolling farmland. In pajama pants and ancient Rainbow Brite tee Jackson is up on the roof, tucked on the gently sloping overhang outside his bedroom window with a sketchpad in his lap, illuminated by a soft glow that radiates out from around him. He's twirling his pencil in rapid flit between his fingers, and though the tip isn't touching to his page, hasn't touched to his page for some time, the drawing there is blossoming to life. Ryan (or a stylized version thereof) lying in a field of the verdant wildflowers from the artwork for ''Shelter'' run riot across the page in a spill of bright petals and sharp thorns -- only now the petals are fingers, the thorns are teeth, the flowers a ravenous crowd that tears hungry mouthfuls from his flesh, and from the wounds gaping in his scarred torso a spill of seeds ripples out to stretch new roots into the earth and start the process again.<br />
<br />
Jackson is alone on the roof, until he isn't anymore. Joshua, when he appears, is ''also'' dressed for a lazy evening at home -- baggy sweatpants, an ancient soft FDNY tee. He's humming quietly to himself -- Leonard Cohen's "Who By Fire" -- as he drops down to sit beside Jax. He takes the sketchpad off Jax's knees, brows hiking as he looks at Ryan being perpetually consumed by his <s>adoring fans</s> unearthly creations. "He does kind of bring it on himself."<br />
<br />
Jax tenses, startled -- then ''confused'' as "Joshua" nabs his sketchpad. He doesn't reach to take it back until the other man ''speaks'', and then a slow frown creeps across his face. He snatches the book back, the movement and color fading from it to leave a half-finished graphite sketch of the same. "''Joshua's'' prob'ly at Ne'ilah now." His reply isn't quite ''sharp'' but it's definitely far from warm.<br />
<br />
"Oh, he was! Is. Was." Mirror leans back against Jax's bedroom windowframe, hand turning up in a dissonantly casual gesture as he continues: "-- Swords swooped in looking to massacre some Jews." Joshua's form is melting and shifting as Mirror speaks -- smaller, now, ''swimming'' in their previous clothes, but the small sharptoothed blue face that peeks out is bleeding and raw, skin torn and peeled open like a ''particularly'' ugly spill onto the road. "Goddamn shame you weren't there. Could probably have saved a ''lotta'' lives."<br />
<br />
The sketchbook falls from Jax's hands, fluttering open as it drops off the roof. His mouth opens as he looks at Mirror!Shane, but nothing comes ''out''. As his hand flies to his lips, the glow around him is brightening to a ferocious heat.<br />
<br />
The unShane doesn't shy away from the crackling heat, though his clear inner eyelids do slide shut. "Shit, sorry, I'm misremembering. Stressful night. You ''were'' there. At least," they're growing, stretching back into their own lanky form, "everyone ''thinks'' you were there." Their head rolls back, eyes tipping up towards the moon overhead. "Joshua got flayed alive doing what you could have done much easier. ''Did'' save a lotta lives, though. Way that nightmare went, whole buncha people probably think ''you're'' dead." There's a sharp baring of teeth here that maybe, from the right angle, could be interpreted as a smile. "Convenient, I guess. You want to take that out now? Save your people a ''lot'' of disappointment."<br />
<br />
It's not hard, at first, to read the shift -- confusion, then fury, then sharp guilt -- that passes across Jax's expression. This last fades, slow, to a careful blankness. He's looking away and off the roof for a long silent stretch. The heat begins to ebb, and so does the glow that surrounds him, leaving only the bright moonlight to light the rooftop.<br />
<br />
Eventually he stands, slow and heavy as he pushes himself carefully up on the precarious slope. He's not looking at Mirror, just giving his head one small shake. "-- I'll get dressed," is all he says, quiet, before ducking back in through his window.<br />
<br />
Mirror doesn't reply. They're melting smoothly back into Joshua, though, and the smile that lingers a moment on his jowly features looks ''jarringly'' out of place. Their eyes linger up on the moon, the resuming of their quiet humming following Jax back inside.<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Who_Shall_I_Say_Is_Calling&diff=25664Logs:Who Shall I Say Is Calling2023-10-07T20:57:18Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Jax, Joshua, Scramble | summary = "Mighta overestimated my sanity meter. ''You'' seeing this?" (in the wake of Neilah attack,..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Jax]], [[Joshua]], [[Scramble]]<br />
| summary = "Mighta overestimated my sanity meter. ''You'' seeing this?" (in the wake of [[Logs:Who By Fire|Neilah attack]], shortly after [[Logs:Returning|Mirror intervention]].)<br />
| gamedate = 2023-09-25<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = cn: mention of Nazi violence, description of injuries, allusion to suicidal ideation<br />
| location = <NYC> [[Freaktown]] - Riverdale<br />
| categories = Jax, Joshua, Freaktown, Mutants<br />
| log = <br />
The plaza outside still looks like a war zone. Charred remnants of tables and food and personal belongings among other things litter the broken pavement, the water main torn from beneath lolling drunkenly, though at least it's no longer gushing, snapped and melted string lights festive no longer. Here in the makeshift clinic that has taken over the first floor of the common house it has quieted down somewhat. It's not a ''restful'' quiet -- more of a frightened, exhausted hush. There are volunteers keeping vigilant watch inside and out, volunteers tending to the wounded and the traumatized, volunteers just bustling around to keep themselves occupied.<br />
<br />
Scramble has been backed into a small study and surrendered herself to medical attention. It's not that she's been ''deliberately'' dodging Joshua, but as President of the Mongrels, Mayor of Freaktown, and a Black woman on the cusp of auntiehood she's had her hands full in the wake of the attack. Well. ''One'' of her hands, anyway. Her right arm is in an improvised sling that, like the rest of her, is smeared with soot and blood. The sleeves of her once-white blouse are torn to ribbons, and it's the testament to the quality of her leathers that the rest of her outfit is still more or less in tact.<br />
<br />
"I been known he ain't ''okay'', but how'd he seem?" Her good hand is clutching a bottle of apple juice someone handed her, but she hasn't opened it. "You don't gotta tell me his business, I just." She swallows hard and looks up at the ceiling. "Just worry he gon' chuck himself into the Hudson. Or fall out the sky. Or. Shit, Ionno."<br />
<br />
"Mmnh." At first this is all Joshua says, and the (haggard) (sooty) (bloodstained) lines of his face betray little else except the focused appraisal he's giving Scramble right now. His eyes are fixed on her arm sling although most certainly he isn't ''x-raying'' it, other senses entirely searching out the extent of her damage. He lifts a hand to rub fingers at the hollows of his eyes, and when he drops it reaches for juice of his own -- ''mostly'' drunk already somewhere through the grueling process of triaging the shocked community. His mouth twists into a grimace as he gulps down the last of it, and stays there after he's swallowed. He puts the bottle down, holds a hand out for Scramble's. "Man's got trauma."<br />
<br />
Scramble passes her juice to Joshua and leaves her empty hand propped on the padded arm of the chair she's collapsed into. "You need more than juice, or you just gon' keep running out of juice." That was solidly Auntie Scramble. "I should check on the emergency break fast crew's progress." And there's Mayor Scramble, probably. Then, just a little plaintive, "I coulda helped him with that. Not much, but." She considers Joshua momentarily. "Could help you with that, too."<br />
<br />
For a moment Joshua just gives the juice a blank stare. Then takes it, sets it aside, takes Scramble's ''hand'' instead. It's slower than usual, for him, but the damage starts to heal itself up. The clench of his jaw and narrowing of his eyes are hard and angry, though he's looking kind of unfocused ''past'' Scramble and not at her. "Mmnh." It's a little more ''mmnh'' than before. "... s'pretty deep fucking trauma."<br />
<br />
For just a second there are two Joshuas in the little study, but the second vanishes in short order. He's left behind cargo -- Jax is looking ''startlingly'' clean and uninjured given what people saw of tonight's events. Plain white button-down, plain white trousers, plain white eyepatch, his near-black hair a sharp contrast to his colorlessness otherwise. His eye has gone a little wider when he sees Joshua, and there's a sharp flood of red to his cheeks. "Oh --" he starts, just a soft relieved breath, but then blushes darker when he looks to Scramble. He backs away a step towards the door, head shaking. "Sorry, I --"<br />
<br />
"I ain't mean shit already done scarred deep." Scramble's mouth pulls hard to one side. "Could see to that, too. It be a whole process, though, like therapy 'cept it actually works. But shit that ''just'' went down? Not that hard to keep it scarring ''more''." She swallows, looks away from Joshua though not ''really'' at the bookshelf past him. "Ain't tryna get up in your business, neither, but I ''can'' help you. Coulda done for the team all along if --" If what? Possibly she doesn't even know anymore, the thought fully blasted from her mind by Jax's arrival. "What the ''fuck.''" She sits up straighter, flinching as the sudden movement stirs a cacophony of pain from her many injuries. Her hand tightens around Joshua's. "Mighta overestimated my sanity meter. ''You'' seeing this?" Her chin jerks up toward Jax.<br />
<br />
"Already-scarred shit's what worries me. Motherfucker nearly killed his ''own'' people. You can't quiet those ghosts." Maybe Joshua is too exhausted to be seeing this or maybe Scramble ''is'' hallucinating, because at first he does not even look up at the arrival of Second Joshua and Freshly Deceased Team Leader. He does wince, eye scrunching up tight at the clamor of pain running through Scramble's nerves, and the twitch of his hand ''tells'' of his instinct to pull back from it. He doesn't -- keeps his hand settled there, slowly lifts his eyes -- not to Jax, exactly, but to the space right ''beside'' Jax where the Other Him had just been. He huffs out a sharp breath, his eyes lowering again. "Fucker owes me a twenty." His other hand is lifting again, the heel of his hand digging hard against one eye. "... maybe. You staying?"<br />
<br />
Jax swallows, his arms wrapping tight around his chest. "I didn't -- know what to -- they said --" He doesn't finish this, just bows his head at the question, drawing in a slow breath. "Sorry," he says again, and this time it's to Scramble when he looks up, frowns at the sling on her arm. "I just --" The lights quiver briefly but the next breath actually seems to steady him. "Where do y'all need me."<br />
<br />
Scramble's eyes dart from Jax to Joshua and back, neatly adding "Math Lady" to her roles for the evening. "Jackson Connor Holland," she says with a flat look and a flatter voice that belies the glimmer she's trying to blink out of her eyes. "I thought you was ''dead'', Faggot!" This brings her up short. "Or, ''were'' you..." Her gaze slides back to Joshua. "...and got brung back?" But she's studying Jax's clothes now, frowning. "Nah, you just got here. Shit, was that ''Mirror'' saved our asses before going critical?" She narrows her eyes as they stray back to Joshua once again. "Are ''you'' Mirror?"<br />
<br />
"He was nearly dead," Joshua answers for Jax, his eyes once more fixed on Scramble's (slowly getting un-)broken arm. "You've been here this whole time. I took you home to heal you. Seemed like the dignified thing to do, between the sand and the explosion --" He's looking down at his ''own'' clothes, fresh and clean in contrast to his very much dirty and bloodied skin, "-- your clothes did ''not'' survive that shit." With his free hand he reaches -- where? -- and plucks his own NYCAM kit out of midair. Tosses it in Jax's direction. "Plenty out there still need a little bandaging."<br />
<br />
"No, I ain't -- he ain't --" Jax is looking, a little flustered, between Scramble and Joshua. He sounds almost pleading, here. "I come to help, not to -- ''you'' saved all these people. You can't just -- ''I ''can't just come in an' --" The end of this sentence comes out in a short puff of air as he catches the medic kit more against his stomach than with his arms, reaching up belatedly to snag it from falling.<br />
<br />
Scramble has receded into stillness somewhere in between Joshua's pronouncements and Jax's protestations. "Goddamn," she says quietly as she studies ''Joshua's'' clothes. "How the hell did that happen? Sure as fuck ''looked'' like you, how we gon' explain if it ''wasn't?''" Her brows furrow, slow but deep. "There was this Nazi pyro, showed up and murdered someone before you could bubble him. Erik lost his entire shit, ripped up half the plaza to chuck at the motherfucker, and knocked you upside the head in the process." Then, as kind of an afterthought, "'Bout nearly brained ''me'', too. Anyway, Nazis ran, you exploded, everyone been losing they shit since. Not that I'm unsympathetic." She looks to Joshua again. "What'd I leave out?"<br />
<br />
Joshua's eyes have squeezed closed somewhere during Scramble's explanation, and just look heavy-lidded and tired when he does open them again. He just nods his head heavily when Scramble looks back to him, shoulders sagging on a heavy sigh. His hand lifts, and though it stops short of actually touching where his shaggy hair is clumped at one side with burned and dried blood there's a slow slide of razor-sharp bone claws that slip from his knuckles and touch light against the matted hair. When they slide back in, it ''doesn't'' heal, blood trickling from fresh wounds in his knuckles.<br />
<br />
"Grabbed his bodyguard's power. You ''would'' have been dead, I --" He just swallows, hard, and does not quite manage to repress the shudder that runs through him, or the ragged hitch of breath that comes with it. His voice is just as flat as ever, though, when he continues. "People out there. Saw all ''that''. Saw that Nazi flay you ''alive''. Saw Magneto piss off after giving him an assist. Saw you fucking die. You come to help, get out there. Give people some fucking hope." He's pressing his bloodied knuckles hard against his trousers as if this will stem the pain. When his eyes lift from Scramble's now-healed arm, there are bright tears just spilling over; his abrupt attempt to wipe them away smudges red across his stubbled cheek. "... you see how much people need you, maybe I'll save one more."<br />
<br />
Jax's hand presses to his mouth, his other clutched tight around Joshua's medic kit. He's looking at Joshua's matted hair -- at the fresh wounds on his knuckles -- at the blood streaked down his face. "You --" he starts to say, but this just trails off into a barely-whispered, "... oh, God." He takes a step closer, hand lifting out towards Joshua but then dropping back to his side. There's a small flicker in the lighting, a brief dimming that for a moment wreaths him in wisps of shadow, but this levels out with a slow breath. "Okay." Kind of shaky, but then firmer, "Okay. Kinda sounds like you near the top of folks need some tending, though."<br />
<br />
"Shit." Scramble flexes the fingers of her newly healed arm experimentally in sympathy with Joshua's newly injured hand. Slips out of the triangle bandage that has served her for a sling. Turns it inside out for a (slightly) cleaner surface to wipe away Joshua's blood and tears to (slightly) better effect. Picks up the juice he'd set aside, opens it, and presses it back into his non-punctured hand. "Drink. I ain't playin'."<br />
<br />
She unfolds from her comfortable seat and beckons to Jax with a brusque, "Get your ass over here, medic." Then immediately intercepts him with an embrace so tight it hurts -- her more than him, probably. With it comes a ripple of calm clarity that does not ease his pain, but does loosen its suffocating grip temporarily as it evens out his dysregulated neurochemistry. "Since you missed it the first time: ''don't fucking die''." She releases him, blinking her eyes clear again as she makes for to door. "I'mma tell your kids you alive."<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Who_In_This_Mirror&diff=25641Logs:Who In This Mirror2023-10-03T00:54:54Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Jax, Mirror | summary = ""Goddamn shame you weren't there." | gamedate = 2023-09-25 | gamedatename = | subtitle = cn: fosse don't look, mention of an..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Jax]], [[Mirror]]<br />
| summary = ""Goddamn shame you weren't there."<br />
| gamedate = 2023-09-25<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = cn: fosse don't look, mention of antisemitic violence.<br />
| location = <PRV> [[Holland Farm]] - Hiawassee<br />
| categories = Jax, Mirror, Holland Farm, Mutants<br />
| log = <br />
<br />
One of many such family farms -- though fewer all the time -- in this little Appalachian town, the Hollands' 160-some rolling acres are divided about evenly between peach orchards and yearly rotations of crops. A burbling creek winds along one edge of the property, which extends up past the arable portions into steep, wooded mountainside. There are several acres of vegetable gardens nearest to the farmhouse, producing enough food to feed the family and often with excess to sell locally. The barn and pasture adjoining this are likewise mainly for the family's own use, with just a couple of dairy cows, a pair of horses, and plenty of chickens.<br />
<br />
The farmhouse itself is a big rambling white affair with a generous wraparound porch, full of rustic charm even in its no-nonsense practicality. The furniture is sturdy and plain and well-cared for, the walls adorned with handmade crafts, children's artwork, and some of Jackson Holland's more whimsical original paintings. The kitchen is vast and airy and superbly organized, always redolent of rich home cooking and of the herbs hanging in bundles to dry. In addition to the main house there are two smaller outbuildings, historically used to house farm hands during the harvest.<br />
<br />
The sun has set, but the gibbous moon is bright overhead, casting a sheen over the rolling farmland. In pajama pants and ancient Rainbow Brite tee Jackson is up on the roof, tucked on the gently sloping overhang outside his bedroom window with a sketchpad in his lap, illuminated by a soft glow that radiates out from around him. He's twirling his pencil in rapid flit between his fingers, and though the tip isn't touching to his page, hasn't touched to his page for some time, the drawing there is blossoming to life. Ryan (or a stylized version thereof) lying in a field of the verdant wildflowers from the artwork for ''Shelter'' run riot across the page in a spill of bright petals and sharp thorns -- only now the petals are fingers, the thorns are teeth, the flowers a ravenous crowd that tears hungry mouthfuls from his flesh, and from the wounds gaping in his scarred torso a spill of seeds ripples out to stretch new roots into the earth and start the process again.<br />
<br />
Jackson is alone on the roof, until he isn't anymore. Joshua, when he appears, is ''also'' dressed for a lazy evening at home -- baggy sweatpants, an ancient soft FDNY tee. He's humming quietly to himself -- Leonard Cohen's "Who By Fire" -- as he drops down to sit beside Jax. He takes the sketchpad off Jax's knees, brows hiking as he looks at Ryan being perpetually consumed by his ~~adoring fans~~ unearthly creations. "He does kind of bring it on himself."<br />
<br />
Jax tenses, startled -- then ''confused'' as "Joshua" nabs his sketchpad. He doesn't reach to take it back until the other man ''speaks'', and then a slow frown creeps across his face. He snatches the book back, the movement and color fading from it to leave a half-finished graphite sketch of the same. "''Joshua's'' prob'ly at Ne'ilah now." His reply isn't quite ''sharp'' but it's definitely far from warm.<br />
<br />
"Oh, he was! Is. Was." Mirror leans back against Jax's bedroom windowframe, hand turning up in a dissonantly casual gesture as he continues: "-- Swords swooped in looking to massacre some Jews." Joshua's form is melting and shifting as Mirror speaks -- smaller, now, ''swimming'' in their previous clothes, but the small sharptoothed blue face that peeks out is bleeding and raw, skin torn and peeled open like a ''particularly'' ugly spill onto the road. "Goddamn shame you weren't there. Could probably have saved a ''lotta'' lives."<br />
<br />
The sketchbook falls from Jax's hands, fluttering open as it drops off the roof. His mouth opens as he looks at Mirror!Shane, but nothing comes ''out''. As his hand flies to his lips, the glow around him is brightening to a ferocious heat.<br />
<br />
The unShane doesn't shy away from the crackling heat, though his clear inner eyelids do slide shut. "Shit, sorry, I'm misremembering. Stressful night. You ''were'' there. At least," they're growing, stretching back into their own lanky form, "everyone ''thinks'' you were there." Their head rolls back, eyes tipping up towards the moon overhead. "Joshua got flayed alive doing what you could have done much easier. ''Did'' save a lotta lives, though. Way that nightmare went, whole buncha people probably think ''you're'' dead." There's a sharp baring of teeth here that maybe, from the right angle, could be interpreted as a smile. "Convenient, I guess. You want to take that out now? Save your people a ''lot'' of disappointment."<br />
<br />
It's not hard, at first, to read the shift -- confusion, then fury, then sharp guilt -- that passes across Jax's expression. This last fades, slow, to a careful blankness. He's looking away and off the roof for a long silent stretch. The heat begins to ebb, and so does the glow that surrounds him, leaving only the bright moonlight to light the rooftop.<br />
<br />
Eventually he stands, slow and heavy as he pushes himself carefully up on the precarious slope. He's not looking at Mirror, just giving his head one small shake. "-- I'll get dressed," is all he says, quiet, before ducking back in through his window.<br />
<br />
Mirror doesn't reply. They're melting smoothly back into Joshua, though, and the smile that lingers a moment on his jowly features looks ''jarringly'' out of place. Their eyes linger up on the moon, the resuming of their quiet humming following Jax back inside.<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Teshuvah&diff=25636Logs:Teshuvah2023-10-02T23:13:08Z<p>Sunshine: Sunshine moved page Logs:Long Way Back to Logs:Teshuvah</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Charles]], [[Jax]], [[Ryan]]<br />
| summary = I'd rather search an orchard than a city any day 🍑 <br />
| gamedate = 2023-09-16<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = Texts & Holland Farm<br />
| categories = Charles, Jax, Ryan, Telecommunications, Holland Farm, Mutants<br />
| log = <br />
On Friday morning, a series of messages arrive in fairly quick succession for Ryan from a number his phone does not recognize but whose Signal profile is "Charles", with a yellow circled X on a black background as an avatar. <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): Good morning. I realize this is highly irregular, but when you've a moment I am in need of some assistance<br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): This isn't to do Spencer, and is no dire emergency in any event<br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): Ah, begging your pardon, this is Charles Xavier 🖐️<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
Charles's very final message regrettably does not get delivered; one single Signal tick the only quiet indicator that this number has been blocked.<br />
<br />
It's not ''very'' long after, though, that he has evidently been *un*blocked; a reply comes soon enough.<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Sorry, reflex. What's the non-emergency?<br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): A most sensible reflex. I quite forgot that my profile did not display my full name 😶🌫️ <br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): I would like to visit with Jackson, and thought it possible he might come back up this weekend, but he's not answered my messages nor, I'm given to understand, anyone else's beyond practical necessity<br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): I am willing to fly down, as well. I know not whether I can do him any good, but I owe him more than just an apology<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): You did give him several million dollars. A small start, but a start.<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): If you've any ideas on going bigger, as it were, I would be most appreciative. It does seem to be a particular strength of yours<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): That was not facetious, I've attended your performances 😎<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): It may not yet be too late for me to be the elder I ought to have been all along, but I need you to help me reach him<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Performances? Plural?<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Anyway I'm pretty sure you can afford your own plane ticket, where do I come in here<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): Oh, yes. I like good music, and like it best live<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): I'll try to get a spot up front next time 🙌 <br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): You do have the distinct advantage of knowing where to find him and when<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): It might take me more than a weekend to canvas all of Atlanta, even with fingers pressed firmly to head<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Please there's not even half a milion people in Atlanta<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Hive could do this in an hour, you need to study harder📚 <br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): I'm not actually sure what Jax does with his days, anyway, he just materializes like clockwork when I'm through with cripple practice<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): I am ever a willing student, but I fear it might be a while before Hive's up for teaching me<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): If you've any notion at all where I might find Jackson tomorrow evening, that was when I was hoping to arrive<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): Surely they're not making you do cripple practice on the weekends, in outpatient? I thought the physical therapists were vicious in my day 🫤<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Nah he'll probably be somewhere around the farm until we head back into town Monday morning.<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Farm is kinda big so maybe that doesn't narrow it down much for most people but I feel like you've got ways. Means, even.<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): Thank you 😌<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): I have both, and all-terrain wheels to boot<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): Though even if I didn't, I'd rather search an orchard than a city any day 🍑 <br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): My offer to listen wasn't restricted to you turning up in my basement at loose ends, you know<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Psssh I'm not that cruel<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): my therapists don't even want to listen to me anymore and they only hear a fraction of my bullshit<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): I'll just make a new album about it<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): I'mm'a tell Ma Holland you're coming, SHE'LL be at loose ends if a guest turns up and she doesn't have food ready.<br />
<blockquote><br />
<br />
<GA> Holland Farm - Hiawassee<br />
<br />
One of many such family farms -- though fewer all the time -- in this little Appalachian town, the Hollands' 160-some rolling acres are divided about evenly between peach orchards and yearly rotations of crops. A burbling creek winds along one edge of the property, which extends up past the arable portions into steep, wooded mountainside. There are several acres of vegetable gardens nearest to the farmhouse, producing enough food to feed the family and often with excess to sell locally. The barn and pasture adjoining this are likewise mainly for the family's own use, with just a couple of dairy cows, a pair of horses, and plenty of chickens.<br />
<br />
The farmhouse itself is a big rambling white affair with a generous wraparound porch, full of rustic charm even in its no-nonsense practicality. The furniture is sturdy and plain and well-cared for, the walls adorned with handmade crafts, children's artwork, and some of Jackson Holland's more whimsical original paintings. The kitchen is vast and airy and superbly organized, always redolent of rich home cooking and of the herbs hanging in bundles to dry.<br />
<br />
The Hollands received their guests with impeccable hospitality, which Charles Xavier and his valet in turn received with gracious appreciation. Afterwards, Charles bade a somewhat skeptical Ashok to take his leisure for a couple of hours before setting off alone out for the extensive woods at the edge of the property, confident in a rugged motorized chair that has always handled the woodland paths of his ''own'' extensive grounds without much difficulty.<br />
<br />
That was an hour ago.<br />
<br />
Presumably ''finding'' one mind on a rural farm poses little challenge for the world's most powerful telepath. ''Getting'' there is another matter, all-terrain wheelchair notwithstanding. Perhaps Charles should have considered that he's been intimately familiar since childhood with his own extensive grounds, which are maintained by a groundskeeper scrupulously aware of accessibility, and are ''not'' in the mountains. Perhaps he ''did'' consider these things and pride won out, which would also explain why he hasn't called for his valet's assistance as he picks his way with great difficulty along the rough and progressively steep bridle paths.<br />
<br />
By the time he finds his way to the creek he's looking a bit worse for wear, though at least the wide trails have spared his fine blue-gray tweeds. His psionic presence is at first barely distinguishable from the dappled September sunlight, but grows careful and measured to forewarn Jax -- perhaps unnecessarily -- of his approach.<br />
<br />
Charles is greeted somewhat before he actually ''arrives'' by a lumbering mountain of shaggy tricolored fur; Skittles is a little ''slower'' than the day Charles first came to this farm near two decades ago to find an uncontrolled young photokinetic, but otherwise looks much the same -- wagging, bright eyed, far more nimble on the rocky uneven terrain than the rugged wheelchair can manage. Probably having the dog eagerly frisking under~~foot~~wheel does not ''help'' his progress.<br />
<br />
Jax's noisy mind is certainly a clear enough beacon across the distance, though, no ambiguity about when Charles is getting closer. It's a jumble of sense-feel and shifting imagery rendered in a range of too-bright colors spanning ranges Charles's ''eyes'' have no capacity to see.<br />
<br />
The breeze rustling cool against his skin // a cityscape of New York fashioned out of sand and blowing away in a strong wind. The grounding feel of small rocks turning over warm and smooth in his palm // Ryan's rich voice singing a song nobody else has yet heard. The fierce-hot power streaming through him // the walls of Lassiter crumbling in -- and burying Dusk, Ion, Flicker, so many many others, crushed beneath the rubble. Water lapping cool at his skin // an image of ''himself'', now, fashioned out of sand and washing away with the tide.<br />
<br />
He's noticed Charles' approach shortly before the psionic presence becomes concrete -- clear ''enough'' when his mind starts to fold in on itself, now (equally painful-bright) glimmer of erratically scintillating colors with less immediately intelligible meaning. Jax is posted up just above the creek, where a small tree has fallen some time ago across the water. He's dressed simply, loose old overalls rolled up above his knees, an ancient Rainbow Brite tee shirt, his boots and socks abandoned on a rock by the bank. He's just tossing a small flat stone with a quiet ''plunk'' into the water as Charles hoves near; his hand closes tight around the two stones remaining in his palm. "You far from home, sir." His voice is quiet, but then, the woods are quiet, too.<br />
<br />
Charles rolls to a stop briefly when Skittles comes up to greet him. "Well, it's good to see I'm not the only one aging so gracefully." He is indeed not looking so ''terribly'' much older himself than when they last met, and he is just as dutifully now scratching behind the dog's ears. At length he persuades Skittles by a slow ''shifting'' of pets to walk alongside him the rest of the way to where Jax is perched.<br />
<br />
"I've been farther," he replies, admitting wordlessly that said reply came out more cryptic than he had really intended. "You are, too." The ''home'' in this is the Holland farmhouse (not so far away, really, though perhaps it seems so now to Charles), and also Ryan's rowhouse in Queens, and also Xavier Mansion. "I'm worried about you, Jackson. A lot of people are." There's no trace of accusation there, just a statement of fact that is sufficient in itself.<br />
<br />
"Think the path back's a bit easier for me." Jax's fingers press in, slow, turning the stones over around each other with a quiet scrape. He's turning these thoughts of ''home'' over, two, one by one -- the mansion, the Queens house, even the farmhouse all eclipsed in his mind by a blaze of light that in its formless intensity may as well be a void. "Ryan's still got a ways left to go 'fore he's outta all this intensive rehab. Figured until that's through --" He lifts his shoulder in a small hitch. "... did you need somethin'?" sounds abruptly more uncertain, more ''worried''. "Did somethin' happen back in New York?"<br />
<br />
"I'm not the first Yankee to underestimate these mountains and I'm sure I won't be the last. I should have brought the chair B made me." Charles reflects that his concerns about the impropriety of turning up with a flashily weaponized mobility aid were probably outsized in this case, given the sharkpup's grandparents are well aware of her...design proclivities. "But unfortunately, yes. Someone's gone missing, and I fear we'll lose him without your help, however unfair that is to ask of you, now of all times."<br />
<br />
There's a rapid fluctuation in Jax's mind, too bright to see the distinct ''shape'' of but limned with a stark taste of fear. "Ohno --" He's scrambling to his feet on the mossy log, already starting to make his way towards the bank. "Who's -- I can -- how -- it ain't one of the kids again, is it? Or..." ''Or'' just trails off as he clicks the stones in his palm together.<br />
<br />
Charles does not try to see past Jax's light, but he ''points'' to that fluctuation, his ''own'' light a different frequency altogether. "Please tell me what happened there." His warmth is soft and conciliatory. "Because it's ''you'', Jackson. You're not the only one I fear we might yet lose, but you ''are'' who I meant just now." His mouth presses into a grim line. "I came here to offer my apology and my assistance. I suspect you want neither, but if that reaction is what I think it is, then perhaps you ''need'' at least one of them."<br />
<br />
Jax pauses where he's gone to sit, one sock in hand that he hasn't yet put back on. He isn't ''quite'' making a math lady meme face but his brows do scrunch, deep, as he works his way carefully through the allistic verbal chicanery Charles has just pulled on him. "-- I ain't missing," he finally hazards, a little more defensively than he probably intended to sound. "You found me fine." A glance towards the wheelchair, a small apologetic correction: "Near fine an' I know these woods better'n nearbout anyone." His toes curl down against the damp rock. "What I need your assistance for?" is less defensive but a good deal more cautious.<br />
<br />
Charles bows his head. "My apologies," he says, though ''this'' is not the apology that brought him here. "I can dispense somewhat with the words, or dispense them more --" He stops, reconsiders, and starts again. "I mean that I am capable of communicating with very few words or no words at all. In fact, I ''prefer'' doing so if it is more intuitive for those I am communicating with." And he should be more proactive in offering to adapt in such ways rather than only deciding to do so when he notices someone struggling with the way he ''usually'' speaks.<br />
<br />
"This is not a judgment but an observation: you have been avoiding your family and community, and as with 'missing' I don't just mean ''physically.''" He gestures at the woods around them, then drops his hand to Skittles's fluffy head again. "I suspect you are depressed, blame yourself for the harm that's come to those you love, and fear you will bring more. I believe I've been in..." He studies Jax's boots, brows furrowing faintly. "...a comparable situation, long ago. I do not ''know'' if I can help you, or if you'll allow me to try. But I ''do'' know that your family and community need you, and it seems very likely you also need ''us'', even if not me in particular."<br />
<br />
Jax's shoulders are hunching in, his knees pulling up to his chest. He curls one arm around his shins; in his other hand, he's back to rolling the two smooth rocks in his palm. "I don't think nobody --" His teeth catch at a lip ring, wiggling it slowly. "I'd'a moved back here a decade an' more ago, if Prometheus weren't -- if I didn't have to --" There's a wisp of dark shadow starting to curl around him, twisting in slow coils around his arms before dissolving away. "I'm sorry you come all this way, sir," he finally says, eyes fixing down on the water where it splashes past the rock, "but I ''am'' home."<br />
<br />
"I never said you weren't." Charles agrees, his voice surpassingly gentle. "And I think you'd have addressed what I ''did'' say if it were entirely off-base. It's understandable you should want some peace and quiet -- whether just for a while or ever after, à la Katniss Everdeen -- else there'd be a lot more people coming to harass you." His expression shutters for just an instant, but he blinks rapidly, draws a slow breath, and goes on. "But this reads more like despair to me than rest, and I'm all the more alarmed to find you're holding your family ''here'' at arm's length, too." He looks around again. "So to speak. I do not fault you and, at least to a point, I ''do'' understand."<br />
<br />
He rolls up beside Jax, or as near as he dares to trust the stream bank beneath the chair's weight. "I am sorry, Jackson. You were right all along about Prometheus, but in my ''own'' despair I failed you, Dawson, and everyone who suffered in those cages. Whatever the cost, that burden should never have fallen to you, or to ''any'' child." His voice wavers but does not break, and where the warmth of his presence had been fading it steadies now, insistently and indefinably bright. "You don't have to tell me how to make amends, though I ''am'' listening if ever you should wish to. But we need you all the more now, I promise. Not just your skills or service or leadership, as valuable as those are. ''You.''"<br />
<br />
"I'm --" Jax starts, but then just falls into quiet. His head bows, his eye squeezing tightly shut. At closer range there's a fierce heat radiating from him that the cool mountain breeze can't quite dispel. "I ain't real sure," he finally offers, softly, "what I ''am'' 'cept those things."<br />
<br />
Charles is quiet for a moment, but not idle. The not-quite-brightness that's welled up around them flutters and comes to life. "You are your actions, yes." Flitting through the almost-light are memories of Jax through Charles's eyes, forever busy baking and teaching and caring and training. "But you are also how those actions change others." Now glimpses of the people -- schoolmates, children, coworkers, teammates -- he's inspired and loved and protected and grieved. "You are everything that you create and nurture and strive for and struggle with. But you are not static, or complete, or wholly your own, and there is so, ''so'' much more to you than anyone can perceive." All the things he's conjured assemble into an image stunning in dynamism and depth of every Jax he's ever known all at once. <br />
<br />
"There isn't one right way to know ''who you are'', but you can learn to see yourself in ''meaningful'' ways. It can be especially hard to see the ways you are needed when you usually see the picture with yourself ''in'' it." His portrait of Jax turns and walks away, leaving a shadow made up of his ''absence''. From it Charles refracts memories of Jax's desk at the school littered with gifts from students, of Hank grumping at him over the Health & Human Development, of Scott staring past the advising spreadsheet, unable to summon words, of Hive's mind curling away from the desperate warmth he offers, of Matt slumped blank and listless across a chess game he's ''winning'', of Ryan seeking comfort in his basement of all places, of his own string of unanswered texts.<br />
<br />
"You are a beacon of hope for our people, and if you find it in yourself to lead someday I will support you any way that I can." The shadow-portrait dissolves into motes of light. "But I'm here about the ''little'' ways you're needed now. I do not think you realize how much solace and comfort your mere presence -- even from afar -- can bring those who love you. Even if all you have to offer them right now is pain, there is strength in hurting ''together''."<br />
<br />
There's a slow shift in Jax's mind -- for just a moment, the formless bright intensity is dimming to something less blinding, something more legible. All the memories, all the ideas, all the bright-brilliant images that Charles has been rendering, taken in and turned over in a careful examination. And then they're crumbling, washing away under a flood of blood and shadow that blots out everything else in its path. It's this, now, that remains, dark and churning in place of the previous harsh sunlight. "I've brung them enough pain for a lifetime and then some already, sir. There'll be other hopes." It's Ryan he's thinking of, here, of his fiery passion on stage and his fierce eloquence in the face of an endless sea of media trying to tear him down. "There'll be other comforts." This -- comes up short in his imagination, just a murky darkness that is rent through by even darker silhouettes of fluttering bats and jagged lightning.<br />
<br />
Charles nods. "There will be others -- all the more if they have your guidance. That does not mean you can be replaced, and it does not mean they need you any less now." The motes of light lingering in his psionic aura grow brighter again, though still as soft as the warmth that they swell to fill. "I don't believe it helps to argue over blame, even if the despair would let you hear it. But this much is true: you carried each other through the pain. ''You'' have been Ryan's strength, and he yours, and on and on." The light pulses with myriad colors in time to "See it Through", song and synaesthesia alike rendered faithfully. "You're not beholden to the lives you save, but you are not separate from them, either. If you push them away, you are all diminished."<br />
<br />
"I gone from being a Catholic to almost a Jew, if there's some kinda Guilt Debate Team I'm going for a medal." A small shiver passes through Jax at the music, and there are echoes that ripple out into the air around him, a soft shiver of shifting colors that harmonize fluidly with the remembered echoes of Ryan's bright-toned synaesthetic sensing. "You been spending ''way'' too much time in Hive's brain, sir." Jax's answer comes a little slow, a little wry, after some time spent contemplating these words in quiet. He looks back down to the water and then sets his small stones down on the rock beside him. He picks up his boots, now, not bothering to put them ''on'' before he stands. "We should get. Way back don't get no easier after dark." It ''is'' getting easier right now, though; barely visible but certainly ''sensible'' to Charles, the deceptively casual flex of power that lays a firm and ''even'' path down over the mud and stones under Charles's rugged wheels.<br />
<br />
"Lest you think I dodged that argument out of any profound psychological insight," Charles confesses, "I'm just awful at debate, even without the religious handicap." There's a hitch in the not-light scintillating with the music, and "See it Through" gains a voice. Or maybe several. The soft susurrus of the Karaniya Metta Sutta doesn't exactly ''harmonize'' with Ryan's power ballad, but buoys up its fierce swells and gentles the quiet measures in between. Charles takes a slow breath and nods again. "Perhaps. More likely I did not spend ''enough'' time in there, before. Maybe I would not have taken so long to make teshuvah if I had." He pivots his chair and follows Jax slowly back up the path, not trying to hide his relief to find it smoother or his gratitude for the effort that made it so. "Your light is rather more practical here than mine. Light or dark, I don't think it's ever easy, but I certainly prefer it with you than without."<br />
<br />
Jax pulls in a slow breath, at the soft chanting that winds through the music. Something wrenches in his mind, an ache and a question that start to take the shape of Hive but splinters into pieces before fully forming. Instead, after shoving this half-thought roughly back down, he calls Skittles back to his side, curls his fingers down into the dog's shaggy fur. "Ryan thinks you come all this way for a hookup," he's saying in some distractable tangent off of Charles's last statement, offhanded and kind of amused. The path unfurls before them with what ''looks'' like ease but ''feels'' like a careful and continuous exertion. "Lotta maybes. Sometimes, returning is just --" He shakes his head, small. "-- a long process."<br />
<br />
Charles arches an eyebrow sidelong at Jax. "I can't fathom what might have given him that notion." The fluttering of his aura tells on his attempts at fathoming it anyway. "My hooking-up days are long..." He trails off into a frown, lips compressing to conceal some other expression. "Nevermind that, I have ethical considerations for my employees -- and young people I'm trying to take under wing, for that matter." His voice is quiet, but stirs bright ripples in his light without ruffling the music he's still sharing through it. "All too many maybes and what-ifs and ought'ves. Somewhere between them, I got so lost in despair I built a school inside and called it hope." He gazes down the glimmering path Jax is laying ahead into the darkening wood. "You and Ryan reminded me what ''real'' hope looks like. I will return that kindness if you need it, however long it takes."<br />
<br />
"He -- you --" Jax closes his mouth; he isn't looking at Charles but he doesn't ''need'' to, and Charles can feel the rapid flicker of dismissed replies that begin to surface. Can feel, too, that the faint flush that tints the air pink around Jax has ''nothing'' to do with the text messages -- he hasn't quite decided where to ''put'' his feelings, just yet, but they're wrapping that assertion of ''real hope'' close like a blanket. "When we get back in, I'm gonna explain you about some those emojis."<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Teshuvah&diff=25635Logs:Teshuvah2023-10-02T23:11:59Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Charles]], [[Jax]], [[Ryan]]<br />
| summary = I'd rather search an orchard than a city any day 🍑 <br />
| gamedate = 2023-09-16<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = Texts & Holland Farm<br />
| categories = Charles, Jax, Ryan, Telecommunications, Holland Farm, Mutants<br />
| log = <br />
On Friday morning, a series of messages arrive in fairly quick succession for Ryan from a number his phone does not recognize but whose Signal profile is "Charles", with a yellow circled X on a black background as an avatar. <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): Good morning. I realize this is highly irregular, but when you've a moment I am in need of some assistance<br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): This isn't to do Spencer, and is no dire emergency in any event<br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): Ah, begging your pardon, this is Charles Xavier 🖐️<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
Charles's very final message regrettably does not get delivered; one single Signal tick the only quiet indicator that this number has been blocked.<br />
<br />
It's not ''very'' long after, though, that he has evidently been *un*blocked; a reply comes soon enough.<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Sorry, reflex. What's the non-emergency?<br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): A most sensible reflex. I quite forgot that my profile did not display my full name 😶🌫️ <br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): I would like to visit with Jackson, and thought it possible he might come back up this weekend, but he's not answered my messages nor, I'm given to understand, anyone else's beyond practical necessity<br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): I am willing to fly down, as well. I know not whether I can do him any good, but I owe him more than just an apology<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): You did give him several million dollars. A small start, but a start.<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): If you've any ideas on going bigger, as it were, I would be most appreciative. It does seem to be a particular strength of yours<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): That was not facetious, I've attended your performances 😎<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): It may not yet be too late for me to be the elder I ought to have been all along, but I need you to help me reach him<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Performances? Plural?<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Anyway I'm pretty sure you can afford your own plane ticket, where do I come in here<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): Oh, yes. I like good music, and like it best live<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): I'll try to get a spot up front next time 🙌 <br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): You do have the distinct advantage of knowing where to find him and when<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): It might take me more than a weekend to canvas all of Atlanta, even with fingers pressed firmly to head<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Please there's not even half a milion people in Atlanta<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Hive could do this in an hour, you need to study harder📚 <br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): I'm not actually sure what Jax does with his days, anyway, he just materializes like clockwork when I'm through with cripple practice<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): I am ever a willing student, but I fear it might be a while before Hive's up for teaching me<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): If you've any notion at all where I might find Jackson tomorrow evening, that was when I was hoping to arrive<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): Surely they're not making you do cripple practice on the weekends, in outpatient? I thought the physical therapists were vicious in my day 🫤<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Nah he'll probably be somewhere around the farm until we head back into town Monday morning.<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Farm is kinda big so maybe that doesn't narrow it down much for most people but I feel like you've got ways. Means, even.<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): Thank you 😌<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): I have both, and all-terrain wheels to boot<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): Though even if I didn't, I'd rather search an orchard than a city any day 🍑 <br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): My offer to listen wasn't restricted to you turning up in my basement at loose ends, you know<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Psssh I'm not that cruel<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): my therapists don't even want to listen to me anymore and they only hear a fraction of my bullshit<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): I'll just make a new album about it<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): I'mm'a tell Ma Holland you're coming, SHE'LL be at loose ends if a guest turns up and she doesn't have food ready.<br />
<blockquote><br />
<br />
<GA> Holland Farm - Hiawassee<br />
<br />
One of many such family farms -- though fewer all the time -- in this little Appalachian town, the Hollands' 160-some rolling acres are divided about evenly between peach orchards and yearly rotations of crops. A burbling creek winds along one edge of the property, which extends up past the arable portions into steep, wooded mountainside. There are several acres of vegetable gardens nearest to the farmhouse, producing enough food to feed the family and often with excess to sell locally. The barn and pasture adjoining this are likewise mainly for the family's own use, with just a couple of dairy cows, a pair of horses, and plenty of chickens.<br />
<br />
The farmhouse itself is a big rambling white affair with a generous wraparound porch, full of rustic charm even in its no-nonsense practicality. The furniture is sturdy and plain and well-cared for, the walls adorned with handmade crafts, children's artwork, and some of Jackson Holland's more whimsical original paintings. The kitchen is vast and airy and superbly organized, always redolent of rich home cooking and of the herbs hanging in bundles to dry.<br />
<br />
The Hollands received their guests with impeccable hospitality, which Charles Xavier and his valet in turn received with gracious appreciation. Afterwards, Charles bade a somewhat skeptical Ashok to take his leisure for a couple of hours before setting off alone out for the extensive woods at the edge of the property, confident in a rugged motorized chair that has always handled the woodland paths of his ''own'' extensive grounds without much difficulty.<br />
<br />
That was an hour ago.<br />
<br />
Presumably ''finding'' one mind on a rural farm poses little challenge for the world's most powerful telepath. ''Getting'' there is another matter, all-terrain wheelchair notwithstanding. Perhaps Charles should have considered that he's been intimately familiar since childhood with his own extensive grounds, which are maintained by a groundskeeper scrupulously aware of accessibility, and are ''not'' in the mountains. Perhaps he ''did'' consider these things and pride won out, which would also explain why he hasn't called for his valet's assistance as he picks his way with great difficulty along the rough and progressively steep bridle paths.<br />
<br />
By the time he finds his way to the creek he's looking a bit worse for wear, though at least the wide trails have spared his fine blue-gray tweeds. His psionic presence is at first barely distinguishable from the dappled September sunlight, but grows careful and measured to forewarn Jax -- perhaps unnecessarily -- of his approach.<br />
<br />
Charles is greeted somewhat before he actually ''arrives'' by a lumbering mountain of shaggy tricolored fur; Skittles is a little ''slower'' than the day Charles first came to this farm near two decades ago to find an uncontrolled young photokinetic, but otherwise looks much the same -- wagging, bright eyed, far more nimble on the rocky uneven terrain than the rugged wheelchair can manage. Probably having the dog eagerly frisking under~~foot~~wheel does not ''help'' his progress.<br />
<br />
Jax's noisy mind is certainly a clear enough beacon across the distance, though, no ambiguity about when Charles is getting closer. It's a jumble of sense-feel and shifting imagery rendered in a range of too-bright colors spanning ranges Charles's ''eyes'' have no capacity to see.<br />
<br />
The breeze rustling cool against his skin // a cityscape of New York fashioned out of sand and blowing away in a strong wind. The grounding feel of small rocks turning over warm and smooth in his palm // Ryan's rich voice singing a song nobody else has yet heard. The fierce-hot power streaming through him // the walls of Lassiter crumbling in -- and burying Dusk, Ion, Flicker, so many many others, crushed beneath the rubble. Water lapping cool at his skin // an image of ''himself'', now, fashioned out of sand and washing away with the tide.<br />
<br />
He's noticed Charles' approach shortly before the psionic presence becomes concrete -- clear ''enough'' when his mind starts to fold in on itself, now (equally painful-bright) glimmer of erratically scintillating colors with less immediately intelligible meaning. Jax is posted up just above the creek, where a small tree has fallen some time ago across the water. He's dressed simply, loose old overalls rolled up above his knees, an ancient Rainbow Brite tee shirt, his boots and socks abandoned on a rock by the bank. He's just tossing a small flat stone with a quiet ''plunk'' into the water as Charles hoves near; his hand closes tight around the two stones remaining in his palm. "You far from home, sir." His voice is quiet, but then, the woods are quiet, too.<br />
<br />
Charles rolls to a stop briefly when Skittles comes up to greet him. "Well, it's good to see I'm not the only one aging so gracefully." He is indeed not looking so ''terribly'' much older himself than when they last met, and he is just as dutifully now scratching behind the dog's ears. At length he persuades Skittles by a slow ''shifting'' of pets to walk alongside him the rest of the way to where Jax is perched.<br />
<br />
"I've been farther," he replies, admitting wordlessly that said reply came out more cryptic than he had really intended. "You are, too." The ''home'' in this is the Holland farmhouse (not so far away, really, though perhaps it seems so now to Charles), and also Ryan's rowhouse in Queens, and also Xavier Mansion. "I'm worried about you, Jackson. A lot of people are." There's no trace of accusation there, just a statement of fact that is sufficient in itself.<br />
<br />
"Think the path back's a bit easier for me." Jax's fingers press in, slow, turning the stones over around each other with a quiet scrape. He's turning these thoughts of ''home'' over, two, one by one -- the mansion, the Queens house, even the farmhouse all eclipsed in his mind by a blaze of light that in its formless intensity may as well be a void. "Ryan's still got a ways left to go 'fore he's outta all this intensive rehab. Figured until that's through --" He lifts his shoulder in a small hitch. "... did you need somethin'?" sounds abruptly more uncertain, more ''worried''. "Did somethin' happen back in New York?"<br />
<br />
"I'm not the first Yankee to underestimate these mountains and I'm sure I won't be the last. I should have brought the chair B made me." Charles reflects that his concerns about the impropriety of turning up with a flashily weaponized mobility aid were probably outsized in this case, given the sharkpup's grandparents are well aware of her...design proclivities. "But unfortunately, yes. Someone's gone missing, and I fear we'll lose him without your help, however unfair that is to ask of you, now of all times."<br />
<br />
There's a rapid fluctuation in Jax's mind, too bright to see the distinct ''shape'' of but limned with a stark taste of fear. "Ohno --" He's scrambling to his feet on the mossy log, already starting to make his way towards the bank. "Who's -- I can -- how -- it ain't one of the kids again, is it? Or..." ''Or'' just trails off as he clicks the stones in his palm together.<br />
<br />
Charles does not try to see past Jax's light, but he ''points'' to that fluctuation, his ''own'' light a different frequency altogether. "Please tell me what happened there." His warmth is soft and conciliatory. "Because it's ''you'', Jackson. You're not the only one I fear we might yet lose, but you ''are'' who I meant just now." His mouth presses into a grim line. "I came here to offer my apology and my assistance. I suspect you want neither, but if that reaction is what I think it is, then perhaps you ''need'' at least one of them."<br />
<br />
Jax pauses where he's gone to sit, one sock in hand that he hasn't yet put back on. He isn't ''quite'' making a math lady meme face but his brows do scrunch, deep, as he works his way carefully through the allistic verbal chicanery Charles has just pulled on him. "-- I ain't missing," he finally hazards, a little more defensively than he probably intended to sound. "You found me fine." A glance towards the wheelchair, a small apologetic correction: "Near fine an' I know these woods better'n nearbout anyone." His toes curl down against the damp rock. "What I need your assistance for?" is less defensive but a good deal more cautious.<br />
<br />
Charles bows his head. "My apologies," he says, though ''this'' is not the apology that brought him here. "I can dispense somewhat with the words, or dispense them more --" He stops, reconsiders, and starts again. "I mean that I am capable of communicating with very few words or no words at all. In fact, I ''prefer'' doing so if it is more intuitive for those I am communicating with." And he should be more proactive in offering to adapt in such ways rather than only deciding to do so when he notices someone struggling with the way he ''usually'' speaks.<br />
<br />
"This is not a judgment but an observation: you have been avoiding your family and community, and as with 'missing' I don't just mean ''physically.''" He gestures at the woods around them, then drops his hand to Skittles's fluffy head again. "I suspect you are depressed, blame yourself for the harm that's come to those you love, and fear you will bring more. I believe I've been in..." He studies Jax's boots, brows furrowing faintly. "...a comparable situation, long ago. I do not ''know'' if I can help you, or if you'll allow me to try. But I ''do'' know that your family and community need you, and it seems very likely you also need ''us'', even if not me in particular."<br />
<br />
Jax's shoulders are hunching in, his knees pulling up to his chest. He curls one arm around his shins; in his other hand, he's back to rolling the two smooth rocks in his palm. "I don't think nobody --" His teeth catch at a lip ring, wiggling it slowly. "I'd'a moved back here a decade an' more ago, if Prometheus weren't -- if I didn't have to --" There's a wisp of dark shadow starting to curl around him, twisting in slow coils around his arms before dissolving away. "I'm sorry you come all this way, sir," he finally says, eyes fixing down on the water where it splashes past the rock, "but I ''am'' home."<br />
<br />
"I never said you weren't." Charles agrees, his voice surpassingly gentle. "And I think you'd have addressed what I ''did'' say if it were entirely off-base. It's understandable you should want some peace and quiet -- whether just for a while or ever after, à la Katniss Everdeen -- else there'd be a lot more people coming to harass you." His expression shutters for just an instant, but he blinks rapidly, draws a slow breath, and goes on. "But this reads more like despair to me than rest, and I'm all the more alarmed to find you're holding your family ''here'' at arm's length, too." He looks around again. "So to speak. I do not fault you and, at least to a point, I ''do'' understand."<br />
<br />
He rolls up beside Jax, or as near as he dares to trust the stream bank beneath the chair's weight. "I am sorry, Jackson. You were right all along about Prometheus, but in my ''own'' despair I failed you, Dawson, and everyone who suffered in those cages. Whatever the cost, that burden should never have fallen to you, or to ''any'' child." His voice wavers but does not break, and where the warmth of his presence had been fading it steadies now, insistently and indefinably bright. "You don't have to tell me how to make amends, though I ''am'' listening if ever you should wish to. But we need you all the more now, I promise. Not just your skills or service or leadership, as valuable as those are. ''You.''"<br />
<br />
"I'm --" Jax starts, but then just falls into quiet. His head bows, his eye squeezing tightly shut. At closer range there's a fierce heat radiating from him that the cool mountain breeze can't quite dispel. "I ain't real sure," he finally offers, softly, "what I ''am'' 'cept those things."<br />
<br />
Charles is quiet for a moment, but not idle. The not-quite-brightness that's welled up around them flutters and comes to life. "You are your actions, yes." Flitting through the almost-light are memories of Jax through Charles's eyes, forever busy baking and teaching and caring and training. "But you are also how those actions change others." Now glimpses of the people -- schoolmates, children, coworkers, teammates -- he's inspired and loved and protected and grieved. "You are everything that you create and nurture and strive for and struggle with. But you are not static, or complete, or wholly your own, and there is so, ''so'' much more to you than anyone can perceive." All the things he's conjured assemble into an image stunning in dynamism and depth of every Jax he's ever known all at once. <br />
<br />
"There isn't one right way to know ''who you are'', but you can learn to see yourself in ''meaningful'' ways. It can be especially hard to see the ways you are needed when you usually see the picture with yourself ''in'' it." His portrait of Jax turns and walks away, leaving a shadow made up of his ''absence''. From it Charles refracts memories of Jax's desk at the school littered with gifts from students, of Hank grumping at him over the Health & Human Development, of Scott staring past the advising spreadsheet, unable to summon words, of Hive's mind curling away from the desperate warmth he offers, of Matt slumped blank and listless across a chess game he's ''winning'', of Ryan seeking comfort in his basement of all places, of his own string of unanswered texts.<br />
<br />
"You are a beacon of hope for our people, and if you find it in yourself to lead someday I will support you any way that I can." The shadow-portrait dissolves into motes of light. "But I'm here about the ''little'' ways you're needed now. I do not think you realize how much solace and comfort your mere presence -- even from afar -- can bring those who love you. Even if all you have to offer them right now is pain, there is strength in hurting ''together''."<br />
<br />
There's a slow shift in Jax's mind -- for just a moment, the formless bright intensity is dimming to something less blinding, something more legible. All the memories, all the ideas, all the bright-brilliant images that Charles has been rendering, taken in and turned over in a careful examination. And then they're crumbling, washing away under a flood of blood and shadow that blots out everything else in its path. It's this, now, that remains, dark and churning in place of the previous harsh sunlight. "I've brung them enough pain for a lifetime and then some already, sir. There'll be other hopes." It's Ryan he's thinking of, here, of his fiery passion on stage and his fierce eloquence in the face of an endless sea of media trying to tear him down. "There'll be other comforts." This -- comes up short in his imagination, just a murky darkness that is rent through by even darker silhouettes of fluttering bats and jagged lightning.<br />
<br />
Charles nods. "There will be others -- all the more if they have your guidance. That does not mean you can be replaced, and it does not mean they need you any less now." The motes of light lingering in his psionic aura grow brighter again, though still as soft as the warmth that they swell to fill. "I don't believe it helps to argue over blame, even if the despair would let you hear it. But this much is true: you carried each other through the pain. ''You'' have been Ryan's strength, and he yours, and on and on." The light pulses with myriad colors in time to "See it Through", song and synaesthesia alike rendered faithfully. "You're not beholden to the lives you save, but you are not separate from them, either. If you push them away, you are all diminished."<br />
<br />
"I gone from being a Catholic to almost a Jew, if there's some kinda Guilt Debate Team I'm going for a medal." A small shiver passes through Jax at the music, and there are echoes that ripple out into the air around him, a soft shiver of shifting colors that harmonize fluidly with the remembered echoes of Ryan's bright-toned synaesthetic sensing. "You been spending ''way'' too much time in Hive's brain, sir." Jax's answer comes a little slow, a little wry, after some time spent contemplating these words in quiet. He looks back down to the water and then sets his small stones down on the rock beside him. He picks up his boots, now, not bothering to put them ''on'' before he stands. "We should get. Way back don't get no easier after dark." It ''is'' getting easier right now, though; barely visible but certainly ''sensible'' to Charles, the deceptively casual flex of power that lays a firm and ''even'' path down over the mud and stones under Charles's rugged wheels.<br />
<br />
"Lest you think I dodged that argument out of any profound psychological insight," Charles confesses, "I'm just awful at debate, even without the religious handicap." There's a hitch in the not-light scintillating with the music, and "See it Through" gains a voice. Or maybe several. The soft susurrus of the Karaniya Metta Sutta doesn't exactly ''harmonize'' with Ryan's power ballad, but buoys up its fierce swells and gentles the quiet measures in between. Charles takes a slow breath and nods again. "Perhaps. More likely I did not spend ''enough'' time in there, before. Maybe I would not have taken so long to make teshuvah if I had." He pivots his chair and follows Jax slowly back up the path, not trying to hide his relief to find it smoother or his gratitude for the effort that made it so. "Your light is rather more practical here than mine. Light or dark, I don't think it's ever easy, but I certainly prefer it with you than without."<br />
<br />
Jax pulls in a slow breath, at the soft chanting that winds through the music. Something wrenches in his mind, an ache and a question that start to take the shape of Hive but splinters into pieces before fully forming. Instead, after shoving this half-thought roughly back down, he calls Skittles back to his side, curls his fingers down into the dog's shaggy fur. "Ryan thinks you come all this way for a hookup," he's saying in some distractable tangent off of Charles's last statement, offhanded and kind of amused. The path unfurls before them with what ''looks'' like ease but ''feels'' like a careful and continuous exertion. "Lotta maybes. Sometimes, returning is just --" He shakes his head, small. "-- a long process."<br />
<br />
Charles arches an eyebrow sidelong at Jax. "I can't fathom what might have given him that notion." The fluttering of his aura tells on his attempts at fathoming it anyway. "My hooking-up days are long..." He trails off into a frown, lips compressing to conceal some other expression. "Nevermind that, I have ethical considerations for my employees -- and young people I'm trying to take under wing, for that matter." His voice is quiet, but stirs bright ripples in his light without ruffling the music he's still sharing through it. "All too many maybes and what-ifs and ought'ves. Somewhere between them, I got so lost in despair I built a school inside and called it hope." He gazes down the glimmering path Jax is laying ahead into the darkening wood. "You and Ryan reminded me what ''real'' hope looks like. I will return that kindness if you need it, however long it takes."<br />
<br />
"He -- you --" Jax closes his mouth; he isn't looking at Charles but he doesn't ''need'' to, and Charles can feel the rapid flicker of dismissed replies that begin to surface. Can feel, too, that the faint flush that tints the air pink around Jax has ''nothing'' to do with the text messages -- he hasn't quite decided where to ''put'' his feelings, just yet, but they're wrapping that assertion of ''real hope'' close like a blanket. "When we get back in, I'm gonna explain you about some those emojis."<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Teshuvah&diff=25634Logs:Teshuvah2023-10-02T23:11:25Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Charles, Jax, Ryan | summary = I'd rather search an orchard than a city any day 🍑 | gamedate = 2023-09-16 | gamedatename = | subtitle = | lo..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Charles]], [[Jax]], [[Ryan]]<br />
| summary = I'd rather search an orchard than a city any day 🍑 <br />
| gamedate = 2023-09-16<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = Texts & Holland Farm<br />
| categories = Charles, Jax, Ryan, Telecommunications, Holland Farm, Mutants<br />
| log = <br />
On Friday morning, a series of messages arrive in fairly quick succession for Ryan from a number his phone does not recognize but whose Signal profile is "Charles", with a yellow circled X on a black background as an avatar. <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): Good morning. I realize this is highly irregular, but when you've a moment I am in need of some assistance<br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): This isn't to do Spencer, and is no dire emergency in any event<br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): Ah, begging your pardon, this is Charles Xavier 🖐️<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
Charles's very final message regrettably does not get delivered; one single Signal tick the only quiet indicator that this number has been blocked.<br />
<br />
It's not ''very'' long after, though, that he has evidently been *un*blocked; a reply comes soon enough.<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Sorry, reflex. What's the non-emergency?<br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): A most sensible reflex. I quite forgot that my profile did not display my full name 😶🌫️ <br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): I would like to visit with Jackson, and thought it possible he might come back up this weekend, but he's not answered my messages nor, I'm given to understand, anyone else's beyond practical necessity<br />
*(Charles -> Ryan): I am willing to fly down, as well. I know not whether I can do him any good, but I owe him more than just an apology<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): You did give him several million dollars. A small start, but a start.<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): If you've any ideas on going bigger, as it were, I would be most appreciative. It does seem to be a particular strength of yours<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): That was not facetious, I've attended your performances 😎<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): It may not yet be too late for me to be the elder I ought to have been all along, but I need you to help me reach him<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Performances? Plural?<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Anyway I'm pretty sure you can afford your own plane ticket, where do I come in here<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): Oh, yes. I like good music, and like it best live<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): I'll try to get a spot up front next time 🙌 <br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): You do have the distinct advantage of knowing where to find him and when<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): It might take me more than a weekend to canvas all of Atlanta, even with fingers pressed firmly to head<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Please there's not even half a milion people in Atlanta<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Hive could do this in an hour, you need to study harder📚 <br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): I'm not actually sure what Jax does with his days, anyway, he just materializes like clockwork when I'm through with cripple practice<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): I am ever a willing student, but I fear it might be a while before Hive's up for teaching me<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): If you've any notion at all where I might find Jackson tomorrow evening, that was when I was hoping to arrive<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): Surely they're not making you do cripple practice on the weekends, in outpatient? I thought the physical therapists were vicious in my day 🫤<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Nah he'll probably be somewhere around the farm until we head back into town Monday morning.<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Farm is kinda big so maybe that doesn't narrow it down much for most people but I feel like you've got ways. Means, even.<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): Thank you 😌<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): I have both, and all-terrain wheels to boot<br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): Though even if I didn't, I'd rather search an orchard than a city any day 🍑 <br />
*(Charles --> Ryan): My offer to listen wasn't restricted to you turning up in my basement at loose ends, you know<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): Psssh I'm not that cruel<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): my therapists don't even want to listen to me anymore and they only hear a fraction of my bullshit<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): I'll just make a new album about it<br />
*(Ryan --> Charles): I'mm'a tell Ma Holland you're coming, SHE'LL be at loose ends if a guest turns up and she doesn't have food ready.<br />
<blockquote><br />
<br />
<GA> Holland Farm - Hiawassee<br />
<br />
One of many such family farms -- though fewer all the time -- in this little Appalachian town, the Hollands' 160-some rolling acres are divided about evenly between peach orchards and yearly rotations of crops. A burbling creek winds along one edge of the property, which extends up past the arable portions into steep, wooded mountainside. There are several acres of vegetable gardens nearest to the farmhouse, producing enough food to feed the family and often with excess to sell locally. The barn and pasture adjoining this are likewise mainly for the family's own use, with just a couple of dairy cows, a pair of horses, and plenty of chickens.<br />
<br />
The farmhouse itself is a big rambling white affair with a generous wraparound porch, full of rustic charm even in its no-nonsense practicality. The furniture is sturdy and plain and well-cared for, the walls adorned with handmade crafts, children's artwork, and some of Jackson Holland's more whimsical original paintings. The kitchen is vast and airy and superbly organized, always redolent of rich home cooking and of the herbs hanging in bundles to dry.<br />
<br />
The Hollands received their guests with impeccable hospitality, which Charles Xavier and his valet in turn received with gracious appreciation. Afterwards, Charles bade a somewhat skeptical Ashok to take his leisure for a couple of hours before setting off alone out for the extensive woods at the edge of the property, confident in a rugged motorized chair that has always handled the woodland paths of his ''own'' extensive grounds without much difficulty.<br />
<br />
That was an hour ago.<br />
<br />
Presumably ''finding'' one mind on a rural farm poses little challenge for the world's most powerful telepath. ''Getting'' there is another matter, all-terrain wheelchair notwithstanding. Perhaps Charles should have considered that he's been intimately familiar since childhood with his own extensive grounds, which are maintained by a groundskeeper scrupulously aware of accessibility, and are ''not'' in the mountains. Perhaps he ''did'' consider these things and pride won out, which would also explain why he hasn't called for his valet's assistance as he picks his way with great difficulty along the rough and progressively steep bridle paths.<br />
<br />
By the time he finds his way to the creek he's looking a bit worse for wear, though at least the wide trails have spared his fine blue-gray tweeds. His psionic presence is at first barely distinguishable from the dappled September sunlight, but grows careful and measured to forewarn Jax -- perhaps unnecessarily -- of his approach.<br />
<br />
Charles is greeted somewhat before he actually ''arrives'' by a lumbering mountain of shaggy tricolored fur; Skittles is a little ''slower'' than the day Charles first came to this farm near two decades ago to find an uncontrolled young photokinetic, but otherwise looks much the same -- wagging, bright eyed, far more nimble on the rocky uneven terrain than the rugged wheelchair can manage. Probably having the dog eagerly frisking under~~foot~~wheel does not ''help'' his progress.<br />
<br />
Jax's noisy mind is certainly a clear enough beacon across the distance, though, no ambiguity about when Charles is getting closer. It's a jumble of sense-feel and shifting imagery rendered in a range of too-bright colors spanning ranges Charles's ''eyes'' have no capacity to see.<br />
<br />
The breeze rustling cool against his skin '''' a cityscape of New York fashioned out of sand and blowing away in a strong wind. The grounding feel of small rocks turning over warm and smooth in his palm '''' Ryan's rich voice singing a song nobody else has yet heard. The fierce-hot power streaming through him '''' the walls of Lassiter crumbling in -- and burying Dusk, Ion, Flicker, so many many others, crushed beneath the rubble. Water lapping cool at his skin '''' an image of ''himself'', now, fashioned out of sand and washing away with the tide.<br />
<br />
He's noticed Charles' approach shortly before the psionic presence becomes concrete -- clear ''enough'' when his mind starts to fold in on itself, now (equally painful-bright) glimmer of erratically scintillating colors with less immediately intelligible meaning. Jax is posted up just above the creek, where a small tree has fallen some time ago across the water. He's dressed simply, loose old overalls rolled up above his knees, an ancient Rainbow Brite tee shirt, his boots and socks abandoned on a rock by the bank. He's just tossing a small flat stone with a quiet ''plunk'' into the water as Charles hoves near; his hand closes tight around the two stones remaining in his palm. "You far from home, sir." His voice is quiet, but then, the woods are quiet, too.<br />
<br />
Charles rolls to a stop briefly when Skittles comes up to greet him. "Well, it's good to see I'm not the only one aging so gracefully." He is indeed not looking so ''terribly'' much older himself than when they last met, and he is just as dutifully now scratching behind the dog's ears. At length he persuades Skittles by a slow ''shifting'' of pets to walk alongside him the rest of the way to where Jax is perched.<br />
<br />
"I've been farther," he replies, admitting wordlessly that said reply came out more cryptic than he had really intended. "You are, too." The ''home'' in this is the Holland farmhouse (not so far away, really, though perhaps it seems so now to Charles), and also Ryan's rowhouse in Queens, and also Xavier Mansion. "I'm worried about you, Jackson. A lot of people are." There's no trace of accusation there, just a statement of fact that is sufficient in itself.<br />
<br />
"Think the path back's a bit easier for me." Jax's fingers press in, slow, turning the stones over around each other with a quiet scrape. He's turning these thoughts of ''home'' over, two, one by one -- the mansion, the Queens house, even the farmhouse all eclipsed in his mind by a blaze of light that in its formless intensity may as well be a void. "Ryan's still got a ways left to go 'fore he's outta all this intensive rehab. Figured until that's through --" He lifts his shoulder in a small hitch. "... did you need somethin'?" sounds abruptly more uncertain, more ''worried''. "Did somethin' happen back in New York?"<br />
<br />
"I'm not the first Yankee to underestimate these mountains and I'm sure I won't be the last. I should have brought the chair B made me." Charles reflects that his concerns about the impropriety of turning up with a flashily weaponized mobility aid were probably outsized in this case, given the sharkpup's grandparents are well aware of her...design proclivities. "But unfortunately, yes. Someone's gone missing, and I fear we'll lose him without your help, however unfair that is to ask of you, now of all times."<br />
<br />
There's a rapid fluctuation in Jax's mind, too bright to see the distinct ''shape'' of but limned with a stark taste of fear. "Ohno --" He's scrambling to his feet on the mossy log, already starting to make his way towards the bank. "Who's -- I can -- how -- it ain't one of the kids again, is it? Or..." ''Or'' just trails off as he clicks the stones in his palm together.<br />
<br />
Charles does not try to see past Jax's light, but he ''points'' to that fluctuation, his ''own'' light a different frequency altogether. "Please tell me what happened there." His warmth is soft and conciliatory. "Because it's ''you'', Jackson. You're not the only one I fear we might yet lose, but you ''are'' who I meant just now." His mouth presses into a grim line. "I came here to offer my apology and my assistance. I suspect you want neither, but if that reaction is what I think it is, then perhaps you ''need'' at least one of them."<br />
<br />
Jax pauses where he's gone to sit, one sock in hand that he hasn't yet put back on. He isn't ''quite'' making a math lady meme face but his brows do scrunch, deep, as he works his way carefully through the allistic verbal chicanery Charles has just pulled on him. "-- I ain't missing," he finally hazards, a little more defensively than he probably intended to sound. "You found me fine." A glance towards the wheelchair, a small apologetic correction: "Near fine an' I know these woods better'n nearbout anyone." His toes curl down against the damp rock. "What I need your assistance for?" is less defensive but a good deal more cautious.<br />
<br />
Charles bows his head. "My apologies," he says, though ''this'' is not the apology that brought him here. "I can dispense somewhat with the words, or dispense them more --" He stops, reconsiders, and starts again. "I mean that I am capable of communicating with very few words or no words at all. In fact, I ''prefer'' doing so if it is more intuitive for those I am communicating with." And he should be more proactive in offering to adapt in such ways rather than only deciding to do so when he notices someone struggling with the way he ''usually'' speaks.<br />
<br />
"This is not a judgment but an observation: you have been avoiding your family and community, and as with 'missing' I don't just mean ''physically.''" He gestures at the woods around them, then drops his hand to Skittles's fluffy head again. "I suspect you are depressed, blame yourself for the harm that's come to those you love, and fear you will bring more. I believe I've been in..." He studies Jax's boots, brows furrowing faintly. "...a comparable situation, long ago. I do not ''know'' if I can help you, or if you'll allow me to try. But I ''do'' know that your family and community need you, and it seems very likely you also need ''us'', even if not me in particular."<br />
<br />
Jax's shoulders are hunching in, his knees pulling up to his chest. He curls one arm around his shins; in his other hand, he's back to rolling the two smooth rocks in his palm. "I don't think nobody --" His teeth catch at a lip ring, wiggling it slowly. "I'd'a moved back here a decade an' more ago, if Prometheus weren't -- if I didn't have to --" There's a wisp of dark shadow starting to curl around him, twisting in slow coils around his arms before dissolving away. "I'm sorry you come all this way, sir," he finally says, eyes fixing down on the water where it splashes past the rock, "but I ''am'' home."<br />
<br />
"I never said you weren't." Charles agrees, his voice surpassingly gentle. "And I think you'd have addressed what I ''did'' say if it were entirely off-base. It's understandable you should want some peace and quiet -- whether just for a while or ever after, à la Katniss Everdeen -- else there'd be a lot more people coming to harass you." His expression shutters for just an instant, but he blinks rapidly, draws a slow breath, and goes on. "But this reads more like despair to me than rest, and I'm all the more alarmed to find you're holding your family ''here'' at arm's length, too." He looks around again. "So to speak. I do not fault you and, at least to a point, I ''do'' understand."<br />
<br />
He rolls up beside Jax, or as near as he dares to trust the stream bank beneath the chair's weight. "I am sorry, Jackson. You were right all along about Prometheus, but in my ''own'' despair I failed you, Dawson, and everyone who suffered in those cages. Whatever the cost, that burden should never have fallen to you, or to ''any'' child." His voice wavers but does not break, and where the warmth of his presence had been fading it steadies now, insistently and indefinably bright. "You don't have to tell me how to make amends, though I ''am'' listening if ever you should wish to. But we need you all the more now, I promise. Not just your skills or service or leadership, as valuable as those are. ''You.''"<br />
<br />
"I'm --" Jax starts, but then just falls into quiet. His head bows, his eye squeezing tightly shut. At closer range there's a fierce heat radiating from him that the cool mountain breeze can't quite dispel. "I ain't real sure," he finally offers, softly, "what I ''am'' 'cept those things."<br />
<br />
Charles is quiet for a moment, but not idle. The not-quite-brightness that's welled up around them flutters and comes to life. "You are your actions, yes." Flitting through the almost-light are memories of Jax through Charles's eyes, forever busy baking and teaching and caring and training. "But you are also how those actions change others." Now glimpses of the people -- schoolmates, children, coworkers, teammates -- he's inspired and loved and protected and grieved. "You are everything that you create and nurture and strive for and struggle with. But you are not static, or complete, or wholly your own, and there is so, ''so'' much more to you than anyone can perceive." All the things he's conjured assemble into an image stunning in dynamism and depth of every Jax he's ever known all at once. <br />
<br />
"There isn't one right way to know ''who you are'', but you can learn to see yourself in ''meaningful'' ways. It can be especially hard to see the ways you are needed when you usually see the picture with yourself ''in'' it." His portrait of Jax turns and walks away, leaving a shadow made up of his ''absence''. From it Charles refracts memories of Jax's desk at the school littered with gifts from students, of Hank grumping at him over the Health & Human Development, of Scott staring past the advising spreadsheet, unable to summon words, of Hive's mind curling away from the desperate warmth he offers, of Matt slumped blank and listless across a chess game he's ''winning'', of Ryan seeking comfort in his basement of all places, of his own string of unanswered texts.<br />
<br />
"You are a beacon of hope for our people, and if you find it in yourself to lead someday I will support you any way that I can." The shadow-portrait dissolves into motes of light. "But I'm here about the ''little'' ways you're needed now. I do not think you realize how much solace and comfort your mere presence -- even from afar -- can bring those who love you. Even if all you have to offer them right now is pain, there is strength in hurting ''together''."<br />
<br />
There's a slow shift in Jax's mind -- for just a moment, the formless bright intensity is dimming to something less blinding, something more legible. All the memories, all the ideas, all the bright-brilliant images that Charles has been rendering, taken in and turned over in a careful examination. And then they're crumbling, washing away under a flood of blood and shadow that blots out everything else in its path. It's this, now, that remains, dark and churning in place of the previous harsh sunlight. "I've brung them enough pain for a lifetime and then some already, sir. There'll be other hopes." It's Ryan he's thinking of, here, of his fiery passion on stage and his fierce eloquence in the face of an endless sea of media trying to tear him down. "There'll be other comforts." This -- comes up short in his imagination, just a murky darkness that is rent through by even darker silhouettes of fluttering bats and jagged lightning.<br />
<br />
Charles nods. "There will be others -- all the more if they have your guidance. That does not mean you can be replaced, and it does not mean they need you any less now." The motes of light lingering in his psionic aura grow brighter again, though still as soft as the warmth that they swell to fill. "I don't believe it helps to argue over blame, even if the despair would let you hear it. But this much is true: you carried each other through the pain. ''You'' have been Ryan's strength, and he yours, and on and on." The light pulses with myriad colors in time to "See it Through", song and synaesthesia alike rendered faithfully. "You're not beholden to the lives you save, but you are not separate from them, either. If you push them away, you are all diminished."<br />
<br />
"I gone from being a Catholic to almost a Jew, if there's some kinda Guilt Debate Team I'm going for a medal." A small shiver passes through Jax at the music, and there are echoes that ripple out into the air around him, a soft shiver of shifting colors that harmonize fluidly with the remembered echoes of Ryan's bright-toned synaesthetic sensing. "You been spending ''way'' too much time in Hive's brain, sir." Jax's answer comes a little slow, a little wry, after some time spent contemplating these words in quiet. He looks back down to the water and then sets his small stones down on the rock beside him. He picks up his boots, now, not bothering to put them ''on'' before he stands. "We should get. Way back don't get no easier after dark." It ''is'' getting easier right now, though; barely visible but certainly ''sensible'' to Charles, the deceptively casual flex of power that lays a firm and ''even'' path down over the mud and stones under Charles's rugged wheels.<br />
<br />
"Lest you think I dodged that argument out of any profound psychological insight," Charles confesses, "I'm just awful at debate, even without the religious handicap." There's a hitch in the not-light scintillating with the music, and "See it Through" gains a voice. Or maybe several. The soft susurrus of the Karaniya Metta Sutta doesn't exactly ''harmonize'' with Ryan's power ballad, but buoys up its fierce swells and gentles the quiet measures in between. Charles takes a slow breath and nods again. "Perhaps. More likely I did not spend ''enough'' time in there, before. Maybe I would not have taken so long to make teshuvah if I had." He pivots his chair and follows Jax slowly back up the path, not trying to hide his relief to find it smoother or his gratitude for the effort that made it so. "Your light is rather more practical here than mine. Light or dark, I don't think it's ever easy, but I certainly prefer it with you than without."<br />
<br />
Jax pulls in a slow breath, at the soft chanting that winds through the music. Something wrenches in his mind, an ache and a question that start to take the shape of Hive but splinters into pieces before fully forming. Instead, after shoving this half-thought roughly back down, he calls Skittles back to his side, curls his fingers down into the dog's shaggy fur. "Ryan thinks you come all this way for a hookup," he's saying in some distractable tangent off of Charles's last statement, offhanded and kind of amused. The path unfurls before them with what ''looks'' like ease but ''feels'' like a careful and continuous exertion. "Lotta maybes. Sometimes, returning is just --" He shakes his head, small. "-- a long process."<br />
<br />
Charles arches an eyebrow sidelong at Jax. "I can't fathom what might have given him that notion." The fluttering of his aura tells on his attempts at fathoming it anyway. "My hooking-up days are long..." He trails off into a frown, lips compressing to conceal some other expression. "Nevermind that, I have ethical considerations for my employees -- and young people I'm trying to take under wing, for that matter." His voice is quiet, but stirs bright ripples in his light without ruffling the music he's still sharing through it. "All too many maybes and what-ifs and ought'ves. Somewhere between them, I got so lost in despair I built a school inside and called it hope." He gazes down the glimmering path Jax is laying ahead into the darkening wood. "You and Ryan reminded me what ''real'' hope looks like. I will return that kindness if you need it, however long it takes."<br />
<br />
"He -- you --" Jax closes his mouth; he isn't looking at Charles but he doesn't ''need'' to, and Charles can feel the rapid flicker of dismissed replies that begin to surface. Can feel, too, that the faint flush that tints the air pink around Jax has ''nothing'' to do with the text messages -- he hasn't quite decided where to ''put'' his feelings, just yet, but they're wrapping that assertion of ''real hope'' close like a blanket. "When we get back in, I'm gonna explain you about some those emojis."<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Tough_at_the_Top&diff=25569Logs:Tough at the Top2023-09-18T23:42:56Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Mystique, Regan | summary = "It is for us to ensure that their sacrifice is not in vain." | gamedate = 2023-09-17 | gamedatename = | subtitle = | lo..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Mystique]], [[Regan]]<br />
| summary = "It is for us to ensure that their sacrifice is not in vain."<br />
| gamedate = 2023-09-17<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <BOM> [[Front Porch]] - Main Lodge - Ascension Island<br />
| categories = BOM Front Porch, Brotherhood of Mutants, Regan, Mystique, Mutants<br />
| log = <br />
<br />
The front porch of the lodge unfurls its way across the entire front length of the building. Stained in a dark reddish finish, it seems to have been refurbished somewhat recently, the sturdy wood rather less weather-beaten than many of the buildings on the island. A half-height railing edges most of the porch, with a wide gated staircase centrally leading to the heavy front door, and ungated ramps at either side end. Protected from all but the most driving of rains by a sloped roof, the porch has been furnished with an assortment of furniture. Wicker rocking chairs, a pair of small square aluminum tables, a hammock at the far right end, a bench swing at the left. Despite the solid locks on the doors and windows, the front door holds a cheerfully flower-edged mat reading WELCOME. <br />
<br />
It's not a very ''nice'' day, grey and rainy, and as such the grounds by the common house are quiet. Regan has been seated on the front porch, dressed a lavender cap-sleeve tunic with an azure fabric belt, breezy teal culottes, and lavender block heel sandals, all in crisp linen. The wide overhang is keeping the rain off, at least, the tablet computer in her lap comfortably dry. She's been having a quiet conversation -- evidently with nobody, although as she finishes speaking a tiny metallic beetle takes off from where its been perched on the back of her rocking chair and flits off. Regan herself returns to the spreadsheet on her tablet, stylus tapping light at the screen as she reaches with her other hand for the mug of hot coffee sitting near to hand on an end table.<br />
<br />
After weeks spent in an assumed shape it's always a relief to be herself once again and relax her body into its true form. Raindrops spatter off scaly blue skin as Mystique makes her way up the path from the dock, the drenching gusts of wind and rain deeply refreshing to her mind, her pace languid as she navigates the path toward the lodge. As she approaches, her eyes fix on Regan the moment she comes into view, a smile playing on her lips as she ascends the stairs and turns aside from the door to approach the illusionist. "You're busy." It's not a question, her tone appreciative as her scales ripple, sloughing off the accumulated rain before she settles down companionably into one of the chairs nearby.<br />
<br />
"Things are usually busy around here. Especially lately." There's not a smile on Regan's face, but her warm tone sounds pleased all the same as Mystique draws near. It's a moment longer and another tap of her stylus before she looks up, eyes flicking up-down once appreciatively over the other woman. "Your trip was fruitful, I trust?"<br />
<br />
"Events have been moving faster lately and to our advantage." She agrees, crossing her legs casually and sitting back in the chair, her body language relaxed and open. "It was, evidence of some very illegal experimentation on both humans and mutants, the press will have a field day." A slight gesture to the metal briefcase she had been carrying, containing the incriminating evidence, before she returns her gaze to Regan. "What concerns you?" Whatever has her alone on a porch in inclement weather is unlikely to be anything good.<br />
<br />
"Everything on this island concerns me." This time, at least, there's a very small upward twitch of Regan's lips. She sips at her coffee again, slow and with a small narrowing of eyes, a small displeased ''hnn'', at Mystique's report. "Since this summer things have been..." She trails off, and though she doesn't finish this thought the small compression of her lips belies her worry well enough. "I think some new success -- that ''doesn't'' come at such a high cost -- might do a lot for morale."<br />
<br />
"It's tough at the top." Her smile is now distinctly a smirk, yellow eyes gleaming with amusement for a moment, which fades as Regan continues, her expression turning thoughtful as she considers what's been said. "A sound idea, are you thinking of a statement or something with practical impact?" The first would be easier to execute but ultimately less rewarding and the other vice versa. "Do you have anything in mind?"<br />
<br />
"Oh, with the right planning, do we need to choose?" Regan's brows lift slightly. She taps her stylus slowly against the edge of the tablet in contemplation. "Black's team managed a strong ''moral'' victory, undoubtedly." Her emphasis on this word is subtle, not ''exactly'' disdainful but certainly reserved. "But even as Prometheus sinks so many rats are fleeing the ship. An attack on Company X's ''offices'', I think, would feel like a cathartic blow to our Brothers in mourning." Does she class herself with one of those? From her tone and her expression it's very difficult to ''tell''. "''And'' be a warning to traitors who think they can skulk away unnoticed in the chaos."<br />
<br />
Cocking her head slightly, Mystique lapses into silence as she listens to Regan speak, watching and listening impassively as the illusionist lays out her thoughts. "It would send the right message, to both the rats and the traitors. I don't foresee major difficulties, provided the initial strike is fast, and the right Brothers participate."<br />
<br />
Regan tips her mug out towards Mystique in a gesture of agreement. "The quislings at Company X certainly know how to put up a good fight, but their offices are not anything like so heavily guarded as the facilities our Brothers have grown ''used'' to attacking. Some quietly planted explosives, detonated at the start of a business day, maybe --" Her shoulder hitches in a small shrug. "The loss of our Brothers should be repaid in blood."<br />
<br />
The plan draws a thoughtful nod from Mystique as she goes over the fallout in her mind. "You're right, and it will, but the explosion should be at a time when the leadership is meeting, cut off the head of this snake and the body will die, as it must." She observes, before adding thoughtfully. "Add the illusion of a toxic gas release and nobody will leave that building alive. Scorched earth will send the appropriate message."<br />
<br />
Regan opens her mouth briefly, but then closes it again, only giving a noncommittal hum. "I'm going to take this to Erik, see if we can refine it into a plan of action," is what she ''does'' say aloud. "It will take significant --" There's just a brief moment, easy to miss, where her eyes drop, her fingers tightening around the mug. "-- research," she continues smoothly. "But I am sure we will be up to the task."<br />
<br />
That reaction is not missed, but neither does Mystique show any sign of having noticed it. "I will be available if required." She offers simply, before taking advantage of Regan's mention of Erik to change the subject to him. "How is he?" A slight hint of concern in her multitoned voice that she would allow Regan to hear but certainly no other member of the Brotherhood.<br />
<br />
Regan doesn't give an immediate answer. She's slow over a long pull of coffee, draining the last of her mug while she gives this question careful thought. "He's Erik." This is not immediately ''very'' helpful, or maybe it is. Her carefully manicured nails tap very light against the side of the mug. "Solid action, a cathartic victory, these will be good for him, too."<br />
<br />
"Mmm." Mystique agrees, a neither positive nor negative comment on both of Regan's statements, her gaze shifting out to the sheets of rain whipping past for a moment before returning to Regan. "And you?" She can see the concern written in Regan's body language and mirrors it slightly in her question, probing gently.<br />
<br />
"Dusk's skills at digital infiltration are unrivaled on this island and Ion inspired a loyalty and ''passion'' in new recruits that would have been a great boon at times like these," Regan answers first, a simple pragmatism in her tone. "And Prometheans ''trusted'' them, which is no small thing when trying to reach out to those so abruptly ejected into the world." There's a tick here, a beat hesitating on the edge of saying something else, but it takes a stretch of silence and a very small lowering of her eyes before Regan adds, softer: "-- and they were my Brothers." Her lips press together, eyes lifting again to meet Mystique's. "They were fierce, and they were ''kind''. The first we have in spades, and we need it for fighting a war. The second --" Her shoulder hitches, small, and her tone is neutral: not a praise, not a condemnation, just a simple assessment. "It will be a grim new world if it is built by too many people like us and too few people like them."<br />
<br />
Regan's words draw a sigh from Mystique, sympathy in the twist of her mouth and a softening of her hard gaze. "In war there are always losses, but that never makes them easier to bear. More will die before we have built that world, we can deny it but there is no avoiding it." She meets Regan's gaze evenly and while she doesn't reach out to offer a sympathetic hand, her yellow eyes are glowing almost softly as she adds. "It is for us to ensure that their sacrifice is not in vain."<br />
<br />
Regan meets Mystique's eyes, and the slow exhale she gives, the faint softening of her ''own'' expression, is enough of a tell as to her appreciation for the other woman's brand of sympathy. "Well then." A corner of her mouth twitches up, and she tucks her tablet beneath her arm and picks up her empty mug as she rises. "I guess we'd better get to planning."<br />
<br />
Inclining her head in agreement, Mystique rises fluidly to her feet, plucking the briefcase from the floor and letting Regan lead the way, her mind already at work on potential angles for the tasks ahead.<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Next_Steps&diff=25320Logs:Next Steps2023-07-30T17:23:55Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Jax, Ryan | summary = "I guess we did it, then." | gamedate = 2023-07-30 | gamedatename = | subtitle = | location = Shepherd Center - Atlanta, Georg..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Jax]], [[Ryan]]<br />
| summary = "I guess we did it, then."<br />
| gamedate = 2023-07-30<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = Shepherd Center - Atlanta, Georgia<br />
| categories = Jax, Ryan, Mutants, Prometheus, Prometheus: TITANFALL<br />
| log = <br />
Jax isn't sleeping, but even at this small hour that's not unusual for this time of year. In plain denim overalls and a lightweight blue button-down, hair muted in a plain deep black that makes his skin look even paler, he looks a ''far'' cry from the sword-wielding hero striding through the gates of Lassiter. The charcoal sketch on the page in front of him -- in its later shading stages, he's been at it a ''while'' -- is Ryan, beard growing out too thick, hair a messy-dark halo around his head. In the sketch it is not electrodes or IV tubing or a Foley catheter that have been attached to him, not a hospital blanket that covers him, though perhaps ''more'' disturbingly the blanket of flowers in the drawing has grown right ''out'' of his body, and the slender fruit-bearing vines that snake up and away pierce his arms and run root filaments like veins branching out under his skin.<br />
<br />
Ryan is sleeping. Sleeping is mostly all he's ''been'' doing for the past week, helped along by ''copious'' painkillers through several surgeries, and sleeping is what he continues doing for a while longer. When he stirs it is small, first, head shifting on his pillow to turn his face like a sunflower towards the heat radiating from the side of his bed. His eyes crack open, and he studies the drawing first for a long few minutes before lifting them further. "Where's Spence?" His mouth has moved once, silently, and then given up on ''this'' effort; his voice sounds soft and clear and not nearly as tired as he probably ''is'', when the words come.<br />
<br />
"In my heart, the answer to that is ''sleeping'', but in reality he's probably back off bopping 'tween Lassiter and wherever the stragglers need to get to." Jax doesn't look up from his drawing, but the wash of relief that comes with his words is palpable to Ryan's senses. "Joshua's been takin' on a lion's share'a ''that'', though, so I ''hope'' he's back at the farm where I done left him."<br />
<br />
"''Joshua''." This does ''not'' come out as a bitter hiss, really; Ryan's mouth still isn't moving. There's a shiver steel-sharp and steel-cold of hurt and ''anger'' that comes with the name all the same as Ryan gives an incredulous snort. "''Now'' he shows back up." His eyes are bright with tears, though, at this reassurance -- no doubt it's not the first time someone has ''told'' him Spence Is Okay, but how cognizant he's been through any of it has been a bit of a crapshoot. He closes his eyes again, and waits a good while for the tears to pass before trying to open them. His brow creases when he does, and he's looking around the unfamiliar hospital room slowly, and with a steadily growing frown.<br />
<br />
"Man earned himself a sabbatical," Jackson answers, and his voice is soft and calm but there are echoes of that anger flickering hot in him all the same, and then flickering out. "He couldn't'a knowed how bad the timing was. -- ain't real sure when there's been ''good'' timing in our lives, in fairness."<br />
<br />
He quiets, and allows Ryan his tears; on his page the drawing is coming to vividly colorful life, surreal-bold shades sprouting into the flowers and faint luminescence blossoming in the fruits. A thorny tendril scrapes down against the sketch-Ryan's face, and where the thorn pierces skin sap wells up like teardrops to trickle down his cheek. He only glances up, now, when Ryan opens his eyes; his eye flits from corner to corner of the room, small and plain but comfortable, and then settles back on his page. "Atlanta," he answers, though Ryan hasn't spoken. "One'a the best centers in the country for spinal surgery an' rehab, so we're told."<br />
<br />
"Oh," Ryan replies softly, and this ''is'' with his mouth, a staccato-sharp puff of air followed by a softer, tired: "Oh." His hand smooths down against the sheets, pressing slow and firm where it comes to rest against the top of his thigh. He closes his eyes once more, and doesn't cry, this time. "The others --" It's back to a quietly projected speech, both hope and despair clenched in punishing chokehold where they are trying to come to blows under the words, his mouth pressed ''firmly'' closed.<br />
<br />
Jax's eye tracks the motion of Ryan's hand, slowly, and slowly, too, drags back to his page. He doesn't answer the question immediately, the aborted sentence putting a quick puzzled frown on his face like he'd ''been'' gearing up to answer something else and is having trouble, when the question doesn't come, switching tracks. The slowly shifting play of colors freeze in place on his page, and he twirls the charcoal pencil he's been holding, a rapid blur skimming up and down between his fingers.<br />
<br />
"All the team that ''got'' catched been freed. Most of 'em been depowered, but it'll wear off. Kitty an' Heather an' Steve all got fair hurt but they'll recover. The Professor's tryin' to wake DJ an' Hive back up, still. Ion -- disappeared, he didn't never make it back to the jet. Dusk's dead." His voice stays steady, but he can't keep the grief and rage from Ryan -- couldn't, probably, even ''without'' the empathy. The pencil falls from his agile fingers, clattering to the ground. He doesn't pick it back up, just sinks heavily back in his chair. "Everyone's out of Lassiter. Labs are all closing."<br />
<br />
Ryan's fingers scrunch slow and tight with each additional piece of news, and when Jax finishes he's still gripping his sheets in a hard clench of fist. "Well." His voice here is rough and creaky, and his eyes fix steadily on the ceiling. "I guess we did it, then." He swallows. Blinks. "Now what?"<br />
<br />
Jax draws in a breath -- and says nothing. As he lets it out, slow, he sinks forward until his head is resting on the mattress at Ryan's side. He rests his hand over the other man's, his fingers curling in gently, and until the nurses inevitably next interrupt, there is just silence.<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Operation:_S.O.L.S.T.I.C.E.&diff=25081Logs:Operation: S.O.L.S.T.I.C.E.2023-07-05T17:14:14Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Wendy]], [[Polaris]], [[Kitty]], [[Ryan]], [[Scramble]], [[Natasha]], [[Clint]], [[Fury]], [[Mirror|Not Matt]], [[Lucien]]<br />
| summary = "Was that not party ''enough'' for you, Director?" (Jax's birthday party part 1-- preceded by [[Logs:Joy springs all radiant in my breast; Though pauper poor, than king more blest,|disembarking]], [[Logs:The tide beats in my soul so strong that happiness breaks forth in song,|dancing]], [[Logs:And rings aloud the welkin blue With all the songs I ever knew.|deliberating]].)<br />
| gamedate = 2023-06-21<br />
| gamedatename = summer solstice '23 / jax's 31st birthday<br />
| subtitle = SHIELD Overtaken: Ludicrous Summer Tomfoolery Induces Chaotic Emotions<br />
| location = <NYC> Rooftop - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Wendy, Polaris, Kitty, Ryan, Scramble, Natasha, Clint, Fury, Mirror, Lucien, Humans, Mutates, Mutants, SHIELD HQ, NPC-FitzSimmons<br />
| log = <br />
There's an unexpected oasis at the top of this gleaming high-rise, the whole of it carpeted in thick, soft, layered ground cover of sedums, grass, and moss. A small, carefully manicured grove serves as the centerpiece, with benches, tables and chairs scattered around in the shade. Beside it, a professionally landscaped garden boasts a pond and quite a few planters that either used to hold plants or still hold dying ones. The greenhouse is somewhat sparsely and eclectically populated with tropical plants, flanked by garden beds even more sparsely planted. An open lawn on the side overlooking Times Square makes a great spot for a picnic. The otherwise unsightly structure housing the roof access, a single stall bathroom, and tool shed has been covered on three sides with turf and shaped into a little promontory offering a breathtaking view of the city.<br />
<br />
The lawn has been well trampled under the dimming stage, the wires to generators for some of the lights slowly being unplugged as the live music portion of the evening seems to be winding down. The DJ has shifted to some sort of "Last Songs" playlist, the energy more muted after so many hours of revelry. The sun is some hours gone, now, though the little suns of the fae-like uniforms of Jax's friends and Ryan's crew are easy still to pick out across the roof as they glow. Up on the promontory, transport crew is dutifully returning people to Times Square below, though in a slower, unhurried rush compared to when everyone first arrived. <br />
<br />
Fitz and Simmons have become ''more'' inseparable as the night has gone on -- now, stumbling towards the exit back to SHIELD HQ, the exact way they lean together seems to be all that is holding either of them upright. They're moving as one unit, at least -- or it looks like it until Simmons stumbles towards a Mongrel helping out by passing out water with ''all'' of his undulating arms again. "-- nervous system so distributed but clearly there is a main human-like brain ''how'' does he do it --" <br />
<br />
"No no no Jemma ''focus'' --" is too little too late before the uncoordinated limbs of FitzSimmons (unhelpfully unlinked by any nervous system across two bodies) tangle and they trip, stumble, fall onto the ground. Well, they nearly made it to the door this time! Maybe, if Simmons can tear her eyes away from Taylor, they can get downstairs ''some''time this evening. <br />
<br />
How long has Wendy been here? It's hard to say, but judging by the ''Captain America'' Playbill peeking out of her clutch, probably she was a ''fairly'' late arrival. Still, it's been long enough to warmly wish Jackson for his birthday, long enough to sample what remained of the delicious snacks before they get tidied back through the portals, long enough to find herself accosted by an excited trapeze artist from her circus troop who is tipsy enough to be thrown far off-balance when Wendy side-steps the hug he tries to come in for -- he recovers the near-topple with an acrobat's facility and is, now, gushing about the flowing green crepe jumpsuit Wendy is wearing, trying to reach for the wide belt that cinches it at one side, this time not stumbling when Wendy, with a small twitch of lips, side-steps that, too. She pulls out her phone. Texts him the boutique. Asks him, with a small tilt of head, if he has a buddy to get him home. After a consideration, also steers him in the direction of the friends he came in with, just in case.<br />
<br />
Polaris has been here all night, fluttering about spreading cheer--or at least chatter--amongst the partygoers. She's in a metallic purple-green duochrome corset dress, semi-sheer black blouse, wide v-shaped chainmaille belt, and black ankle strap pumps. Her long green hair is bound up in two crown braids woven together with a glowing flower crown, decked with intricate woven wire cuffs and choker, and an event workers' sun wands dangles from her belt beside a black velvet purse. Though she's fully sober at the end of a long evening, the excitement of the concert gone, there's a slightly frenetic edge to her energy, still. Maybe that will come in handy when it's time to break down the stage, but for now she's just--not quite ''pacing'' the lawn, but wandering in somewhat restive. She watches the drunk guy stagger away, eyes lingering long enough to see that he's cleared a table he looked liable to walk right into. Then, shaking her head, follows his path back whence he'd stumbled, eyes going wide an instant before her gaze actually finds--<br />
<br />
"Wendy!" She stares for a moment, expression frozen, then takes a few steps toward her. "Oh my God, you--you came back! Did you--" Her last few steps are more hesitant, her eyes still wide as she looks Wendy up and down. "Are you just here for the party?"<br />
<br />
Wendy has just been going to claim herself a glass of wine before it all vanishes from the open-bar-table as it gets backed away, but stops short of pouring herself any. She looks up, hand tight around the bottle, and sets it back down. She takes a few small steps back as Polaris closes in, her not-really-a-skirt swirling around her as her head tilts to one side. She grips her clutch ''just'' a little tighter. "Five months ago," she replies, quietly, and then, with a small-tight smile, "I told the friends I thought would care."<br />
<br />
Polaris stops, looks as though she'd been physically slapped. For the space of a breath she just glares at Wendy's hands around her purse, tears brimming. "Wow. I may be a shit friend where you get off acting like--what? I'm gonna rob you? ''Attack'' you?" Her voice trembles as it rises. "You know what, ''fuck'' you." She whirls around stalks away to the chorus of rattling, shivering steel.<br />
<br />
Not far away, Ryan has been draped across one of SHIELD's ''actual'' pieces of furniture, here, planted on a picnic table with boots on the bench, stretched languid back on the prop of one elbow. "I am too distressingly ''sober'' to deal with the --" His hand flutters towards where Polaris is leaving Wendy behind as she storms off; his words come with a very faint and muted echo of icy-hurt-fury borrowed from That Part Of The Roof. "Though I gotta admit I am ''dying'' to know what the tea is on -- hoooly shit." He's propped himself up a little higher, eyes wide as he tracks past Polaris's exit to a redhead ''entering'' from the hillock roof access door. "That can-''not'' be -- is that -- ''Damn'' but that woman got some balls on her."<br />
<br />
"I'll trade," Kitty replies, doing her level best to continue leaning ''against'' and not ''into'' Ryan's leg. Her commemorative HOLLAND WAS RIGHT shirt hangs loose over her dress, her grip on a bottle of water tight as though it might slip from her grip. "I'm not sober ''enough'' -- oh, ''oy''--" But she is alert enough to follow Ryan's gaze, her own eyes going ''wide''-wide. "-- I haven't seen her around shul, I thought she was ''gone''-gone. Maybe," is a little hopeful, but mostly resigned as Kitty looks around the rest of the roof, voice faltering when she ''sees'' the subject of her question, "Scramble's already headed out?"<br />
<br />
Nat is not dressed like it's a fancy-dance party, but then, she hasn't been here, dancing or otherwise. She's in black stretch jeans tucked into high leather boots, a black camisole under a gauzy white blouse fluttering open over it. She's clearly come out here looking for someone, a black tablet tucked under her arm and her gaze searching -- but who she finds ''first'' is Definitely Not her target. Her eyes open just a fraction wider, flicking -- the door she came from, one side of the roof, another side -- reflexive even though she really does not need to check for the exits up ''here''. Her forefinger taps lightly against the tablet she's holding, eyes continuing to flick for ''just'' another second like she is suddenly recalculating the urgency of this specific errand.<br />
<br />
Scramble might in fact be dressed up for a fancy-dance party, or maybe she just came as she was. She probably had a jacket at some point, but in deference to the dancing she's just in her ''formal'' cut over a purple button-down with an optically puzzling gold sheen, sharp black trousers stitched in gold, and black motorcycle boots with gold buckles. Her 'fro is teased out into a perfect soft halo, her makeup bold and black, accented with bright gold that matches her hoop earrings, bangles, and the simple ankh pendant framed by the unbuttoned collar of her shirt. She's just parted ways from some other revelers and turning, freezes when she sees Nat. Narrows her eyes. Stalks over toward her, not in a straight line but a sort of arcing spiral, looking the other woman up and down until they're close enough to touch. No closer. "Now, I must be some extra special kind of crazy thinking you have enough decency to answer this, but." Her voice is cold and sharp and tightly controlled. "What have you got to say for yourself?"<br />
<br />
Clint is dressed like it's a fancy-dance party only in the sense that he, like half the random Chimera punks and protesters from downstairs, is wearing a birthday edition HOLLAND WAS RIGHT tee (still crinkly from the cannon), some blue jeans, and sneakers. He ''had'' been on a pretty direct path to intercept Nat but mellowed out his approach a little so that he fetches up more meanderingly near the two women, looking slightly nonplussed. He lifts one eyebrow slightly at Scramble, then the other at Nat without lowering the first while he signs, subtle, one-handed, 'Need a moment?'<br />
<br />
Nat looks over to Clint -- then to Scramble on her approach. The shake of her head is very small. She tucks her hair (cut severe and sharp and sleek-straight, now, around her chin) behind her ear and just watches Scramble until she is close. "What do you want me to say, Scramble?" She's tilted her head just-so to look up at the taller woman. "I had a job to do."<br />
<br />
"You really pulling 'I was just following orders'?" Scramble laughs a quiet and breathy chuckle. "''NO!''" This roared so loud and sudden it feels like a physical blow. "Did your ''job'' tell you to fuck me? To hold me while I cried? You get paid extra when I fell in love?" The words come rapid-fire until her voice breaks on the last word, her eyes brimming. "Bullshit. You could have done your ''work'' without defiling me. Were you playing house to pass the time? Were you just curious how far you could string me along." She swallows, tears breaking loose and streaming down as her eyes track over to Clint. In sign to him, fast and fluid, 'She stole ''years'' from me, and I can't have one moment. You with this bitch, you might want to reconsider.'<br />
<br />
Clint blinks at Nat, then blinks at Scramble, slowly developing a frown as he tries to follow her rapid speech. The frown vanishes as his eyes go wide at the signing which is--possibly also too rapid for him to easily follow. "Thank you," he sim-coms, "for the advice." Then, after a small hesitation, "But I don't think this is quite on the level of the--" His lips compress and he drops the signing and just ''says'', "--Holocaust."<br />
<br />
"Oh, you really are crazy if you think that card's going to work on me," Natasha replies, and her voice doesn't have any of Scramble's icy-sharpness but it is flat and deeply unimpressed. "''Stopping'' you dumbasses from getting even more of yourselves killed makes me a Nazi? ''Saving your sister'' makes me a ''Nazi''? You catching feelings is not a genocide. You know --" She doesn't finish this thought. Just furrows her brow, slightly. Shakes her head, slightly. Gives Clint a small lift of brows, and turns to walk back inside.<br />
<br />
Kitty is not ''looking'' at the explosion of drama Over There, she's drinking water. Staying Hydrated. "-- how the ''hell'' did Nazis get involved over there -- did I ever tell you about this one time, I was back in Chicago --" She lifts her chin off Ryan's leg, turning her head to look at him more directly, but pauses when someone else enters her peripheral vision. "Oh -- I thought he wasn't going to make it." Kitty sinks just a little lower ''into'' the bench, hiding behind Ryan's leg. "Lucien isn't here to talk to you, is he?"<br />
<br />
"Nat did a genocide on their relationship?" is Ryan's ''very'' patchy-confused guesstimate of the current complaint. "Not how I'd put a breakup but I guess if I'd ever ''been'' dumped maybe I'd feel more -- uh." He does not supply a terminal adjective, here; he's following Kitty's gaze and sitting up ''just'' a little straighter to afford her better hiding spot. "If I had to guess he's here to wish Jax a happy birthday, same as -- well," he's wry, amusement bubbling through his voice, "a solid three percent of the crowd was tonight. ''Probably'' a minimally-explosive conversation."<br />
<br />
Fury is looking only slightly worse for his evening of (mostly) reluctant revelry as he comes away from grousing at Ryan's staff, eager for them to be packed up and gone. He settles heavily on a bench at the edge of the grove and watches the cleanup effort as though suspicious it might stop if he doesn't keep a weather eye. From somewhere inside his duster he produces a flask and drinks deep, presumably as a safeguard against sobriety sneaking up on him unawares. Perhaps he is guarding ''too'' well in that specific direction, because in his relief he heaves a long sigh and closes his eye -- just for a moment.<br />
<br />
Just for a moment is long ''enough'' to find himself lightly burdened by the languid drape of an arm, the languid drape of a ''Tessier'' against his side. Matt is suddenly upon him for the second time tonight, come up from behind Fury and leaning down ''over'' the older man to pluck at his flask, familiar and uninvited. Quiet, pitched in just a low murmur by the other man's ear: "It looks like ''my'' secondary power is catching you with guard down." It's not Fury he's looking at but the roof's latest arrival, though, while ''he'' drinks. Deep. And puts on a bright and familiar smile as Lucien approaches: "-- You never told me what a ''brilliant'' dancer the Director is. I can't believe you were keeping this man's charms all to yourself."<br />
<br />
The party is near wound down, so perhaps it's fine that Lucien is ''dressed'' down, stage-door casual in his cream poplin button-down and camel twill trousers. There's a package under one arm, light and flat and slender and wrapped in heavy matte-textured black paper with brilliant metallic sunbursts exploding across it. The ribbon has been tied in a simple bow, and tucked in the knot, a sunflower blossom and sprig of lavender preserved in gold. The envelope tucked beneath the flowers reads only, ''for Jackson'', in elegant calligraphed script on its front, and clearly it's ''that'' headache of Fury's that he's come here seeking, but almost instinctively he's drifting -- towards Matt? Towards Fury?<br />
<br />
His steps slow but do not stop entirely, when Matt(?) drapes himself against Fury, murmurs in his ear. There's a ripple and a tightening across his mind, brief, and even more fleeting, a small press of lips, a very small exhale. He keeps his usual soft cadence as he drifts to a stop on Fury's other side, though, thumb tracing light against one gilded petal-edge. "-- Ah. I see you two have been getting better acquainted."<br />
<br />
Fury tenses, going very still at Matt's touch. His hand reaches stealthily beneath the ''other'' flap of his duster, then just as stealthily withdraws when he realizes ''who'' has snuck up on him unawares. He does not relax, though. "Mister Tessier," he says, with an air of tremendous forbearance that admirably covers his nerves. "We are both ''drunk'', it doesn't mean anything..." He trails off, following Matt's sightline to Lucien. This time his "Mister Tessier!" is at once relieved and flustered, and somewhere in between his accent is slipping back toward his native Southern Appalachia. "Oh, your brother here was just..." What ''was'' Matt doing, anyway? "...bein' hospitable. For which I'm of course very much obliged."<br />
<br />
"I'm a gentleman," The Other Mister Tessier says, wide-eyed, as he sips again at Fury's flask and then returns it to its owner. "I wouldn't take advantage. Not until you're sober." He's pulling himself up, remarkably steady on his ''feet'' for all the drink-fuzzed warmth layered into Matt's voice and Matt's bright eyes. "I was enjoying the Director's hospitality. Not quite up to ''your'' snuff, my dear, but it's been an --" His eyes are tracking one of the boxes of brilliantly sun-themed decorations before it vanishes through a portal. "En''lighten''ing evening all the same."<br />
<br />
Inside Lucien's mind a further tightening, hard and twisting itself into knots. His eyes lower to the present he holds, finger still drawing slow against the flower -- before, ''abruptly'', snapping back up to -- not Matt. "My ''brother''," he says, lighter but ''sharper'' now than before, "was just leaving. This party or that --" He looks the other up and down, quick, "body or both, before I cast you out like some unwanted demon. ''Goodness'', but I hope he hasn't been giving you too much trouble, Director."<br />
<br />
Fury gratefully reclaims his flask and takes a swig, only barely ''not'' choking on it in the process. "I ain't been ''no'' kinda hospitable since your client done sprung this --" He breaks off and waves in the direction of the staff members packing up nearby. "You said it was gon' be a 'birthday party'," he says reproachfully, walking his accent back toward the coast, "that's talkin' out the side'a your mouth's what that is." Whatever curmudgeonly bluster he was working his way up to deserts him at Lucien's threat. "Whoa, now, hold on just a minute." He rises -- not ''quite'' so sure on his feet, especially when his eyes track too quick from one Tessier to the other. "He surely been a pain in my ass on Mister Holland's account, but he ain't done no ''real'' harm."<br />
<br />
The Not At All Matt is touching fingers to his chest, eyes open wider in ''wounded'' affront. "Daddy musta been a ''glassmaker'', way you see right through me," and it's not Matt's voice now but Fury's gruff one, The Other Tessier's skin darkening, hair receding, thin form filling out so tall and so broad it actively ''pops'' several of the buttons on his green shirt. And though it's still Fury's ''voice'', it's Matt's lilting cadence that jarringly delivers, now: "Was that not party ''enough'' for you, Director?" His broad hand trails lightly against the ''actual'' Director Fury's shoulder as he saunters off, past a knot of agents perhaps goggling at seeing Fury In Vivid Color, for once -- and then disappearing through a portal.<br />
<br />
Lucien's broad shoulders relax, just fractionally, and he slumps ''down'' into the seat Fury had just vacated, looking a bit ''wistfully'' at the older man's flask. "After all this time spent around Jackson I should think it a given, Director. In this crowd, around this company, it does not always suit to believe your eyes." His head is rolling back, and though he doesn't watch Mirror head off, a ghost of a smile trails over his face when they've gone. "''Your'' birthday is coming up, no? If this was not party enough for you, I am ''confident'' they can outdo themselves."<br />
<br />
"''Is'' that minimally explosive, shapeshifting in front of the Head World Cop seems a little explosive." Somewhere in this tomfoolery Kitty has peeked up over Ryan again -- just to make sure No Tessiers are heading her way, at first, though it subsequently devolved into some more unabashed people-watching. There is tension leaving Kitty's shoulders as she leans -- drapes, really -- her arms and head across Ryan's lap again. "When do you think Fury's birthday is, anyway?"<br />
<br />
Ryan's shoulders are shaking as he watches Mirror head off, though he's stifling his laughter fairly thoroughly. His hand rests lightly on her shoulder, fingers drumming lightly in idle thought. "You telling me this motherfucker's a Cancer?" A little light incredulity, there. The smile he turns down to Kitty is ''broad''. "Whenever it is, best believe we're going show him what a birthday party can ''be''."<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Joy_springs_all_radiant_in_my_breast;_Though_pauper_poor,_than_king_more_blest,&diff=25080Logs:Joy springs all radiant in my breast; Though pauper poor, than king more blest,2023-07-05T17:13:25Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Kitty]], [[B]], [[Hive]], [[Mirror|Tag 🤨]], [[Fury]], [[Ryan]], [[Alma]], [[Charles]], [[Scott]], [[NPC-FitzSimmons|FitzSimmons]], <br />
| summary = "Eat! Drink! Be Merry!" (Jax's birthday party part 1-- followed by [[Logs:The tide beats in my soul so strong that happiness breaks forth in song,|dancing]], [[Logs:And rings aloud the welkin blue With all the songs I ever knew.|deliberating]], and [[Logs:Operation:S.O.L.S.T.I.C.E.|drama]].)<br />
| gamedate = 2023-06-21<br />
| gamedatename = summer solstice '23 / jax's 31st birthday<br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Rooftop - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Kitty, NPC-FitzSimmons, B, Hive, Mirror, Fury, Ryan, Alma, Charles, Scott, SHIELD HQ, Mutants, Humans<br />
| log =<br />
There's an unexpected oasis at the top of this gleaming high-rise, the whole of it carpeted in thick, soft, layered ground cover of sedums, grass, and moss. A small, carefully manicured grove serves as the centerpiece, with benches, tables and chairs scattered around in the shade. Beside it, a professionally landscaped garden boasts a pond and quite a few planters that either used to hold plants or still hold dying ones. The greenhouse is somewhat sparsely and eclectically populated with tropical plants, flanked by garden beds even more sparsely planted. An open lawn on the side overlooking Times Square makes a great spot for a picnic. The otherwise unsightly structure housing the roof access, a single stall bathroom, and tool shed has been covered on three sides with turf and shaped into a little promontory offering a breathtaking view of the city.<br />
<br />
The peace of the rooftop has been Rapidly Disrupted -- fifteen minutes ago, some SHIELD staffers were enjoying an early supper under the balmy light of the solstice sun. Now --<br />
<br />
Well. <br />
<br />
The lawn has mostly disappeared under the newly assembled raised stage, wires for lighting and sound systems running through the grass to generators that definitely do ''not'' belong to SHIELD. The tables have been commandeered as food and drink stations, the promontory as the drop-off spot for guests arriving via Various Modes of Flight instead of signing in on the ground floor of the building.<br />
<br />
And there are ''so'' many guests already, people from all over the city, not just Jackson Holland's large collection of personal friends -- a collection of bikers in MMMC cuts, artists still with paint stains on their hands, teenagers who ''probably'' should still be up at Westchester and definitely didn't sign out, mutant musicians with guitars strapped to their backs. The chatter through the soundcheck is not so loud yet, but the volume is slowly rising.<br />
<br />
At one of the commandeered tables, Kitty is fussing with a huge water jug and stacks of paper cups. "-- Do you," she's asking earnestly, dipping her cup into the jug and pulling it out full of water as she does so, "know where I can get another trash can? I don't think we brought enough and Blink is really due for a break." <br />
<br />
Next to her, Leo Fitz's eyes are bugging out of his skull, staring at Kitty's immaterial hand. Blinks once, twice. "...Sorry, what did you say?" He is probably still not listening.<br />
<br />
In the background of the cheerful chatter there's a quiet droning hum, one tiny blue-and-silver hoverbike floating up to hover just over SHIELD's rooftop. In addition to the many other regulatory transgressions happening, B is not currently wearing her usual sharktooth helmet -- just a tight silvery-mesh tee shirt, fairly see-through over a lacy black halter crop underneath, a pleated miniskirt in black and silver, and very stompy metallic boots with matching wristcuffs. She has her Mongrels cut over top; her claws and the slender dotted liner limning her enormous eyes are actively ''glowing'' in a slightly luminescent silvery-blue. "Have fun!" she's chirruping to the pair of (''definitely'' not signed out!) X-Kids she lets off, who are promptly scampering off to explore the Drinks Options while they think enough adults are looking the other way that they can maybe sneak some booze. B is definitely not sneaking booze, but ze ''is'' taking a short break from ferrying duty to scarper off hirself, in order to locate Jax so that ze can deliver a quick hug to the Birthday <strike>Boy</strike> Dad.<br />
<br />
By dint of being connected at the brain, Hive has already found the birthday boy. Hive is slouched on a picnic bench, leaning against the table with a droopy-lidded expression that suggests he might already be half asleep despite the ongoing commotion. He's sipping on a lemonade, looking mostly drab in faded old jeans and a grey tee shirt with 'BLUE SUN<nowiki>|</nowiki>蓝日' printed on it in bold blue text, the brightest color to his attire the ornate and vivid multicolored spiral horns someone has affixed to his head. Despite this signifier that he is Probably A Volunteer, by all appearances he is doing Absolutely Nothing Useful through the hectic party deployment -- only the crew ferrying up excited would-be attendees from many many many floors below can hear his occasional commentary: << Not that one, he's a reporter. >> << Yeah those kids are good. >> << That's just some-ass tourist they'd freak the fuck out when they saw Taylor. >><br />
<br />
... okay, only ''Jax'' and the transport crew can hear the mental commentary. Right now Hive is directing a question to Jax, slightly judgmental: << ... that asshole tried to tank your fucking art show do you really want him here? >> Highlit in their mind, a skinny pink-haired Chimaera punk waiting eagerly for a ride below. His chin lifts jerkily when B arrives, a quiet warmth softening his mental irascibility.<br />
<br />
<< Hive that was like, sophomore year of college. >> Jax's amusement is bright at Hive stealing this long-since-dead grudge. Beside the telepath he's brighter, more dapper than his usual daily wear in a bright white dress shirt with a shimmering gold tie and a vest so black that the gold embroidered solar motifs on it appear to be floating in a void, plain front trousers in the same uncanny black, cinched with a golden belt, and gold wingtip derby shoes with broguing in abstract solar patterns. Somewhere along the way of setup his surprise has given way to delight mingled with a vague sort of surreality; at this point he is just rolling with Whatever This Party Is. He's perched on the edge of the picnic table though he bounces up to return B's hug fierce and hard. "Sugar, how long y'all been working this out, this is nonsense."<br />
<br />
Tag is just hopping down from the back of a ''second'' gleaming hoverbike -- less eye-catching than Jax, more eye-catching than Hive, he's in a rainbow midi skirt and a loosely cropped tee in sky-blue with a bright sun shining out from behind puffy white clouds. "Happy birthday!" << oh no ''is'' it happy it's probably not happy -- no wait we're ''making'' it happy. >> He's joined the line for HUGS while it's still short, and drapes an elbow against Hive's shoulder after he's dispensed Hug to Jackson. "More time than you think," he says with a fey smile, "and less time than we ''should'' have. Ryan's money makes a lot of things move faster, though!"<br />
<br />
A knot of partygoers lately emerged from a glowing purple portal are gazing about in delighted disorientation. At the gruff order to "make a hole!" from somewhere beyond them -- one of the ''proper'' access stairwells, concealed in the artificial promontory -- they hastily part to make way for one S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Nicholas J. Fury. << ...shit, and I thought he had Security eating outta his hand ''before'' that Heidlage business... >> ''His'' disorientation seems somewhat less delighted, his black duster fluttering in breeze and his single eye fixed balefully on Jax as he trundles up to the picnic table. "Mister Holland," he begins, in a note of long-suffering exasperation, "it might have escaped your notice, but you are in fact still under US federal detention by UN proxy. You can't invite a dozen..." His eye flits around the ground and he quails inwardly, ''just'' a little. "...''hundred'' some folks up where without sending 'em through security. That's for your ''protection'' much as anyone else's!"<br />
<br />
"He's very detained!" B protests, clawed hand gesturing insistently in her father's direction. "''Plus'' he didn't invite anyone, he didn't even know about all this, you can't be mad at ''him''. His friends," her immense black eyes are very-very big with this assertion as she briefly turns over Long Hours Of Raid Planning in her mind, "are ''pretty'' good at keeping secrets."<br />
<br />
"I think he's practiced at being mad at ''anything''." Hive is still sipping slowly at his lemonade. His voice comes out gruff, despite the clear amusement Jax can feel in their mind. "Part of the aesthetic. -- Would you really have let all ''these'' motherfuckers through security?" His eyes are skating sidelong to where one skinny teenager with coke-bottle glasses is trying hard to impress their friends by (after being summarily rebuffed by the current bartender who is, in fact, carding for the pop-up open bar) turning their cups of water into beer. << We've got security handled, >> his mental voice is an ''unsettling'' thing, an eerie susurrus that rustles through Fury as well as the others immediately nearby with the overlapping cadences of hundreds-of-voices whispering at once -- the odd effect it gives should probably be more suited to a ghost story, a prophesy from the past, ''something'' of more import than: << enjoy the fucking booze. >><br />
<br />
"If you didn't detain him so well we wouldn't have had to bring the party here!" Tag is only straightening ''very'' slightly at Fury's approach, and mostly only to better turn a brighter smile up to the much taller man. Fury's eyepatch, meanwhile, is growing a stylized iridescent sunburst pattern to offset All The Black.<br />
<br />
"I ain't going nowhere," Jax promises Fury, drawing a small X over his heart as he says it. "And I surely have noticed. -- Only person I ''invited''..." He trails off, here, ''his'' single eye scrunching up along with his nose as he scans the growing crowd. "... ain't here, actually. Guess all these folks is my consolation prize. Did you want cake? There's good cake."<br />
<br />
Fury clenches his jaw a little tighter. "Keeping secrets," he echoes, skepticism carved deep into his voice and his brow alike, "Y'all got whole passel'a -- ''teenagers'' up in here." He's quietly self-congratulatory that he bit back the impulse to say "Millennials" instead. "Even if you don't got anyone here for your ''life'', there's got to be reporters --" He stops cold. "What in tarnation." His eye sweeps back and forth before settling on Hive. << Get the hell out of my head >> does not sound much like his usual timbre of blustery curmudgeonry. It bristles instead with unreasoning fear as he replies, slow and measured. "The person you invited..." He's turning to look at the stage, nearly complete now. << Oh hell, no. >> Aloud, almost simultaneously, "Oh ''hell'' no. Least you coulda ''told'' me before you let Ryan Fucking Black make a fool of me. You know that ain't gon' end well for you, neither."<br />
<br />
The person Jax invited is ''about'' to be here. Ryan is, apparently, arriving not via hoverbike or glowing supplies-portal -- instead there's a light that is ''descending'' from the evening sky above. He's not dressed for stage ''yet'' but he is striking all the same in a black fishnet shirt that quiets the shimmer of gold lamé underneath, torn open in the back to accommodate intricate white gossamer wings, tattered and singed at the edges, a slender gold chainmaile belt slung low on his hips to frame black leggings dotted with shimmering stars, and chunky black ankle boots accented with golden sun buckles. The boots have had some also-gold hardware added aftermarket; it matches the cuffs he's wearing on his wrists and both boots and cuffs emit a radiant glow (... plenty identifiable to anyone familiar with the whole ''range'' of B's hovertech accessories) as he lowers himself neatly to Jax's side. "Reporters strictly prohibited," he's waggling a finger lazily in Hive's direction as he curls an arm around Jax's fiercely warm shoulders, "this ain't my first rodeo. He didn't ''let'' me do anything, this is a birthday party for a ''dear'' friend in a terrible fucking situation. If," he allows lightly, "you want to make a fool of yourself about it, that'll just be a little lagniappe. ''Could'' just enjoy the show, though."<br />
<br />
While Ryan is descending from on high, yet another swirl of purple light beside the stage disgorges Alma, who at a casual ambling pace ends up at the picnic table around the same time as Ryan. Tonight she's wearing a slim white three-piece suit, with neat diamond-shaped openings for inky black wings, birdlike but with knives (''probably'' not real like those under her jacket) for pinions, each edged in gold, black dress boots with subtle gold accenting. The fine twists of her long hair are laced with gold, too, meticulously coiled at the back of her head and held in place with the glowing sun-tipped wand that identifies her as <strike>a solstice fairy</strike> event staff, and the gold kippah at her crown is embroidered with a bold black sunburst. "Happy birthday," she tells Jax before leveling a flat, unimpressed gaze at Fury. "There are worse things to be than a fool."<br />
<br />
Tag(?)'s eyes have gone just a little wider at Ryan's words, and though it's hard outwardly to tell at which ''part'', internally ''reporters strictly prohibited'' is rotating in an oddly thoughtful contemplation. "Oh!" He's bouncing upright, up on his ''toes'' to press a peck to Jax's cheek. "Some of those fairies need some makeup adjustments -- save me a dance?" And then he's flitting off to disappear into the crowd.<br />
<br />
<< -- it's like a half-passel of teenagers >> is just a little bitter in B's mind, but on the outside she's chipper-bright: "Oh yeah! There's more on the way, too, thanks for reminding me." B's smile is quick, closed-lipped, cheery. "You really ''should'' enjoy the show, my brother's ''great'' -- uh, not that you're not great ''too''," she's adding hastily to Ryan, leaning in to bonk her forehead lightly against his arm, "and the jazz band after is ''fantastic'' if you like dancing." Though she sounds just a ''little'' skeptical of this last part as she looks over Fury And His Scowl. ''Does'' he like dancing? She'll leave this mystery for later -- she's dashing back off to her bike, ''probably'' to ferry more people, some of which may be teenagers, up to the revelry.<br />
<br />
Despite himself, Ryan's ridiculous entrance summons up something in Hive that is equal parts ''fondness'' in the exasperation. The telepath hasn't actually roused himself to watch it, but he's watching it all the same, through many (many) reflected stares from around the rooftop. Hive ''himself'' has scrunched his eyes closed like he's ''annoyed'' despite the fact his eyes weren't even aimed in Ryan's direction at the time, but there's a slow breath of laughter as the musician lands. "-- Half-passel of teenagers," he echoes, flat, a beat after B. He's sitting up as Tag (🤨) rabbits off, following the man's departure with a quiet ''huff''. "They're carding. -- I actually can't get out your head 'less you want to leave the building, let us handle this party, would you feel better if I lied to you about it?" << I'm out your head now. >> His knuckles dig slow at his eyes. "If it makes you feel better, Ryan's people are real fucking good at chaos."<br />
<br />
Fury's eye narrows impossibly further. "It ''is'' a terrible fucking situation, and I'm real keen on making sure it don't get worse. I got nothing against throwing him a birthday party --" << Shit, best not poke him ''too'' hard, that boy crazy as a peach orchard boar >> "Just -- keep this rodeo under wraps." His eye skates back over to Hive, making a mental note to check back in with Fitzsimmons in desperate hope for something -- ''anything'' to keep his thoughts his own. << ...''got''damn telepaths... >> "I'm real glad folks are being so conscientious about underage drinking and all, but it's the ''TikTokking'' I'm worried about." << Shoulda left well enough alone about the kids, poor bastard can't catch a break. >> But it's Lucien he's thinking about, hovering uncertain before his desk. "It'd make me feel better if they were ''real fucking good'' at order. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a ''whole'' passel'a agents I gotta ''order'' back for a second shift." He turns on his heel and walks almost directly into an older man in a wheelchair, startled into a flustered "begging your pardon" before he reroutes to stalk off in proper curmudgeonly fashion.<br />
<br />
Neither Charles Xavier nor his wheelchair seem particularly offended for having interrupted Fury's dramatic exit. He is wearing a light gray suit, casual by his standards, and riding one of his sleeker powered chairs. "Well, that gentleman seems to be enjoying himself already," he says lightly, rolling to a stop. The warmth he emanates is soothing and altogether different from the waves of heat rolling off of Jax. "Many happy returns." There is a certain ''gravity'' to the way he says this, a wordless knowledge that he means more than "happy birthday". All the same, he's offering a large envelope sealed with a golden sun and addressed simply to "Jackson" in his elegant, flowing hand. "And a thousand apologies for not coming to you sooner. It wasn't for lack of concern, ''or'' encouragement." He glances aside and up at his companion, a ''little'' sheepishly. "There's something in the post for you, too, whenever it gets past the UN's puzzled scrutiny. But if there's anything I can do to assist tonight..." He doesn't ''look'' at Hive, but his offer to the younger telepath is more explicit, a skillful and matter-of-fact shifting aside of his shields.<br />
<br />
Scott Summers looks slightly embarrassed to be participating in Fury's frustration of the day; he gives him a sympathetic grimace as he sidesteps to let him pass, before falling back into step with Charles. Evidently he can't beat 'Many happy returns' as a birthday wish; after Charles has finished speaking, Scott gives Jax a more standard, "Happy birthday." His gift is in a plain brown Hallmark envelope, lettered somewhat less elegantly than the Professor's; as soon as it's been handed over, Scott is looking curiously around this birthday shindig, gaze stuttering on the teenagers trying to sneak booze. His mouth quirks silently; his thought is pitched for Charles to notice, though probably Hive can hear it too. << Get a wand, too. >><br />
<br />
"Pretty sure he likes dancing." Jax is thinking back to a Mockingbird booth another lifetime ago, thinking back to twirling Ryan out on the familiar dancefloor -- he doesn't have time to get caught up in regret, Ryan's Very Splashy Entrance is pushing melancholy ''straight'' out of his mind. He tips his head up; his eye bugs cartoon-style out of his head with a briefly twinkling starry-eyed sparkle as Ryan descends. "I happen to know Ally'll be right excited about an intimate private Ryan Black concert." He curls his arm tight back around Ryan, squeezing hard. "Sugar, when you said a few of my closest friends, this --"<br />
<br />
-- the illusory twinkle has remained even if his eye has returned to its normal ''size'' when Charles and Scott arrive. "Gosh! Sure weren't all who I was expecting." He's giving Scott a ''bright'' smile, bouncing forward to lean in and curl an arm around Charles in hug before taking both his presents. "''Thank'' you! Tonight sure is full of surprises. You know they put all this together without a word to me, was y'all in on it?" Inwardly he is ''fully unsure'' whether to think that his staid advisor or the dignified old Boomer were in on this nonsense; he absolutely would believe Either Way. "What you can ''do'' is enjoy yourselfs," << if it's possible, >> he's fretting inwardly, << we could all use it, >> and here he's thinking of Dawson's bright-warm smile in his scarred face, of his fierce determination to keep Tuesday Nights carved out for Game Night for years through so much chaos and pain; thinking of Ryan's long-long hours creating an online arts festival in the early pandemic days, thinking of songs sung with Spencer fierce and (joyful) (hurt) (defiant) at vigil marches, thinking of the kids coming back to homes quiet and empty and mourning or alive and full of love, thinking --<br />
<br />
"-- there's plenty of booze," he's a little wry, here, "Ryan's payin'." He nudges Ryan with an elbow. "I assume."<br />
<br />
"It's fine," Hive kind-of-not-really rats out the kids nearby as Scott's gaze hitches on them, "Everett's getting good practice in. Probably take him like. Three solid more hours to get enough booze into that water to get even one of them tipsy. Probably won't stop them ''acting'' drunk earlier than that, though." His brows knit, and though his mind is reaching for Xavier's, it's Scott he's looking to Scott with a sudden frown. "-- he's not gonna ''explode'' that water, is he?"<br />
<br />
He's coiling firm roots, meanwhile, into the older man's mind with a smooth and seamless shift of identity-perspective that suddenly floods his<nowiki>|</nowiki>their awareness with an achingly familiar lightning-hypervigilant rapid-processing awareness of Every Mind not just here on the roof but down on the block below, out in Freaktown, out at the school, over in Chimaera, sorting at blinding speed through every request for entry and a complex array of desires and dangers and risks and needs before giving the okay to each of the transport crew.<br />
<br />
Where ''did'' the wand appear from. For most people it's probably hard to track the flicker-blink of motion, though Charles at least can feel Hive (rudely? Not rudely?) yoinking That Part Of Them over in a blur of teleportation from across the roof ''just'' long enough to drop a sunburst-wand onto Charles's lap. His "Thanks" is gruff, though through the vast forest that is ''them'' a warm glow of sun is shining, now.<br />
<br />
His head rolls back. Eyes ''roll'', at Jax. "Liar. How long you known this crazy-ass dipshit and his theatrics. You were expecting exactly this." After a beat, he adds, with a nod towards Xavier, "''Please''. ''This'' motherfucker is paying now."<br />
<br />
"We're anarchists," Ryan's telling Fury with a ''fiercely'' cheerful grin, "if there's one thing we're real damn good at it's bringing order outta chaos." His brows have hiked when Xavier arrives, and it's Scott he addresses first, Louisiana roots laid on thick in his accent ''now'' where previously it had hewed far closer to a broadcast-neutral: "''Well'' gar ici Scott Summers, I owe you one. Have you manage to get noted philanthropist Charles Xavier himself here to grace us with his presence? 'tween you and me if I had known what it took to wrangle a visit, I'd'a throwed Jax a birthday party each week, by now."<br />
<br />
Though he's given Scott a warm smile, it hews cutting-sharp when it turns to Xavier: "-- jail do get awful lonely -- but I know you gotta be a ''busy'' man up that school'a yourn, I'm sure." His arm has gone ''just'' a hair tighter around Jax for the moment before he releases his friend to his effusive greeting hug. Ryan's mind is bristling with protective ire the whole while. Possibly ''he'' might take Just A Smidge longer than Jax to forgive the tardiness of this visit, lavish presents notwithstanding. He does allow ''just'' a hint of amusement, ''slightly'' self-conscious, to soften his overprotective prickling, as he plucks Hive's lemonade for a sip. "Yeah? Well bless his heart, then, just tell me where I forward the bill."<br />
<br />
"-- I'd be very happy to talk about my ''research'' next time I'm visiting, L-- Fitz, ''would'' you excuse me." Kitty didn't actually take no for an answer before stepping breezily through the offending scientist and making her way to the knot of people around Jackson. Compared to everyone else, she's ''well'' underdressed -- oversized tee-shirt that is mottled with a variety of textures evoking bathroom tile, wood panelling, and floral wallpaper in patches, grey leggings. There's a drawstring bag on her back in a similar chaotic pattern to her shirt -- the only obvious cue she's a Friend of the Birthday Boy is the gold headband holding back her hair with squiggly sunburst lines emanating from it, and the fairy wand peeking out the top of her bag. <br />
<br />
Kitty comes up on Jax's free side, leaning in to hug her friend, tight and solid. "Happy birthday, sunshine -- Think I broke ''that'' little English guy's mind again," she says, wry, amused irritation sensible to the -paths among them, "can I stack that onto your ''actual'' present." She's rolled up ''just'' in time to hear Ryan speak to -- << hi Professor (hi dad) (Kitty ''be'' normal good lord) >> -- Charles, one eyebrow quirking up well before ''bless his heart'' can be deployed. "Huh. That's sweet -- late arrivals club going halvsies on the party. ''Probably'' you do not want to be calling the kettle black," is more squarely to Ryan, annoyance (at his past absences here and at ''Charles's'' absence, too) tempered by a broad blanket of affection towards most of the assembled, "that's probably, like, your own brand infringement. -- Alma," and this subject change is ''abrupt'', the smile sudden and bright across her face, "you look incredible, are you working all night or can I actually get a dance in sometime?"<br />
<br />
<< Just what we need right now at Xavier's, >> Scott is thinking, << instant-booze mutation. >> "Probably not. I'll keep an eye on it," he says, as much to Charles as to Hive, though he then pulls his eyes reluctantly away from Everett, settling on Ryan. There's a little irritation-indignation-amusement rising up as the raid team members address the Professor, a stray, hastily-smothered << they're not ''wrong'' (probably shouldn't say anything even if they were) >> that doesn't quite kill his defensiveness. He might feel more inclined (entitled?) to tell ''Kitty'' off, but -- another glance at the Professor, another silent decision to keep his trap shut where all of this who-visited-when stuff is concerned, and to flail back toward civil conversation. "I like the decorations," he says. "Very --" << sparkly >> "-- creative."<br />
<br />
As unflappable as she is, Alma still shakes her head when Fury storms off. "Not sure he's interested in dancing with freaks." She isn't sure he's ''not'', either, and wonders how far Ryan -- or any of them -- could push before he'd put his foot down. "His loss." Her disdain for Charles and Scott is considerably milder, already tempered by the thought they might be good to have on hand if something went sideways, and mollified further by Jax's reaction. When Kitty admonishes Ryan she quietly adjusts her estimation of Time Until Drama, and though the prospect does not ''frighten'' her, she says a silent bracha that they've made it this far without incident. Maybe that's why Kitty's question catches her off guard, and her eyebrows tick up. "I'm working all night, but there are a lot of us here and we get breaks." She allows a slightly indulgent smile. "I'll save you a dance."<br />
<br />
"Alas, I can take no credit for this spectacle," says Charles, and despite his mild tone, the word "spectacle" ''feels'' distinctly positive. "But I may take some small credit after Ryan sends my accountant the bill, and I do intend to enjoy myself." He produces a business card and leans forward to pass it to Ryan. His warmth is like dappled sunlight now, and there is both contrition and concern in it. << Please be gentle with him, Kitty. Be gentle with ''yourself'', too. >> "He can't explode the water," he adds, though Hive knew this without need for words the moment his mind became their. "At least not without help, and I trust you'll notice if the students get it in their heads to improvise a still." All the same, they are mentally noting those most likely to attempt such a thing (or other potentially disastrous shenanigans) out of the X-kids present. << They're not wrong, >> his agreement is quiet in Scott's mind, << and you needn't defend me, regardless, though I appreciate the sentiment. Tonight is for Jackson. >> He turns the sunburst wand over in his hands, his smile at the whimsical craftsmanship not altogether conscious. "They are lovely -- my compliments. I'm sure there's plenty more creativity yet to come."<br />
<br />
Ryan's brows hike right ''back'' at Kitty -- but it's with an easing of his smile, a dip of his head, and where warmth has been radiating from Charles there's a harmony now from Ryan, picking ''up'' that dappled-sun-warmth and twisting it into a playful violin trill that dances between them with a burst of lighthearted amusement before it dissipates into the bustle of the set-up. "Shiiiit," Ryan drawls, taking Charles's card, "can you sing? Guess my publicist ''would'' be pretty pissed if I tried turning the whole shebang over at this stage of the game." He tucks the card away, spreads his arms wide. "Thanks," is to the compliments on the decorations, "Had a whole army of artists to help out. Eat! Drink! Be Merry! -- especially you," he's saying this to Alma, brightly, "I'll hold off on dying till tomorrow."<br />
<br />
It's Sunlight^3, a flutter-glow when Kitty comes in for a hug that Jax returns fierce. "Oh ''gosh'' FitzSimmons gonna be having a ''constant'' freakout all night ''long'', I think, they don't hardly know what to do with any of us let alone -- oh gosh don't nobody let slip nothin' 'bout Scott, okay, I jus' been letting 'em think the glasses is because he thinks he's way too cool for everyone." His internal Caution Levels are making vague quiet adjustments at Kitty's admonishment and just as quickly adjusting them back at that light trill. "''Boy'' don't even joke." His ''bap'' is light, his ''tone'' is light, his thoughts -- well. He's doing a quick but thorough assessment of his layers of bright-illusory makeup, the touchups to the scars that warp his tattoos, leaning ''in'' to the parts of him better practiced at psionic shielding and plain Not ADHD Mental Discipline. Looping that playful violin trill until it sinks ''in'', looping his ''arm'' through Kitty's. Leaning into Ryan's and smiling. ''Bright''. "Y'all. Thanks for coming," and here it's not forced, not illusion, just a warm gratitude in the words. "Sure did brighten my day."<br />
<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:The_tide_beats_in_my_soul_so_strong_that_happiness_breaks_forth_in_song,&diff=25079Logs:The tide beats in my soul so strong that happiness breaks forth in song,2023-07-05T17:13:15Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Kitty]], [[Mirror|Leo?]], [[Jax]], [[DJ]], [[Steve]], [[Sam]], [[Polaris]], [[Hive]], [[Matt]], [[Fury]], [[Ion]], [[Dusk]], [[Maya]], [[Ryan]], [[NPC-FitzSimmons|FitzSimmons]]<br />
| summary = "May I have this dance?" (Jax's birthday party part 2 -- from [[Logs:Joy springs all radiant in my breast; Though pauper poor, than king more blest,|disembarking]] previously and forward to [[Logs:And rings aloud the welkin blue With all the songs I ever knew.|deliberating]], and [[Logs:Operation:S.O.L.S.T.I.C.E.|drama]].)<br />
| gamedate = 2023-06-21<br />
| gamedatename = summer solstice '23 / jax's 31st birthday<br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Rooftop - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Kitty, NPC-FitzSimmons, Mirror, Jax, DJ, Steve, Sam, Polaris, Hive, Matt, Fury, Ion, Dusk, Maya, Ryan, SHIELD HQ, Mutants, Humans, Mutates<br />
| log =<br />
There's an unexpected oasis at the top of this gleaming high-rise, the whole of it carpeted in thick, soft, layered ground cover of sedums, grass, and moss. A small, carefully manicured grove serves as the centerpiece, with benches, tables and chairs scattered around in the shade. Beside it, a professionally landscaped garden boasts a pond and quite a few planters that either used to hold plants or still hold dying ones. The greenhouse is somewhat sparsely and eclectically populated with tropical plants, flanked by garden beds even more sparsely planted. An open lawn on the side overlooking Times Square makes a great spot for a picnic. The otherwise unsightly structure housing the roof access, a single stall bathroom, and tool shed has been covered on three sides with turf and shaped into a little promontory offering a breathtaking view of the city.<br />
<br />
The lawn has mostly disappeared under the newly assembled raised stage, wires for lighting and sound systems running through the grass to generators that definitely do ''not'' belong to SHIELD. The tables have been commandeered as food and drink stations, starting to deplete as the long, long arc of sun on the longest day of the year meanders lazily towards the horizon. The fae-like uniforms of Jax's friends are easy to pick out in the crowd in front of the stage, glowing horns and sun-adorned wings catching light from the star in the heavens as well as on stage.<br />
<br />
Ryan Black, in a slim-fitting white suit so densely packed with optical fiber that it has a glossy sheen even with the lighting function off, a dress shirt so black it looks like a void amidst all the light, gold cowboy boots with solar designs picked out in bright EL wire, and a matching gambler's hat that shows a brilliant sunburst when viewed from above, is winding to the end of "Care Less", the slick ferocity of the violin line lighting up the fibers in a vibrant dance of colors. The slip into "Brighter" is subtle at first, but at the first lyric a cheer goes up from the crowd.<br />
<br />
Kitty, glittery and gold in a Gatsby-esque sequinned flapper dress, radiant sunbeams emerging from her headband, and a fairy wand with a sunburst topper in hand, is spinning out on the dance floor. Swing dance would probably be more appropriate for her outfit, but she's not letting the genre discrepancy stop her from laughing, cheering, and sliding in closer to her dance partner to kiss his cheek -- heedless of the slack jawed look Jemma Simmons is giving ''him'' from the drink table.<br />
<br />
"I cannae tell if she manipulates intramolecular force or nuclear force," Leo Fitz is bemoaning into his beer, "and she won't ''tell'' me which it is."<br />
<br />
"Uh-huh," Simmons replies absently, swirling her cocktail with one hand. "...You think Mr. Jax might introduce me to Mr. Concepcion if I ask nicely?" <br />
<br />
Morosely, lifting his beer to his lips, Fitz replies, "Probably not."<br />
<br />
Leo accepts his kiss with a faint flush, and his small smile has a glimmer of amusement as he spins Kitty back close to him. "That man," he's only ''lightly'' indicating Fitz with a small point of pursed lips in the engineer's direction, "has have his eyes on you all evening." There's no jealousy here though there ''is'' a healthy dose of appreciation when he adds, pitched quieter as if someone else might ''hear'' over the upbeat music: "You ''do'' shine."<br />
<br />
Had he ''planned'' to be at this party? Difficult to say, given the capriciousness of his schedule. But he seems to be well enjoying himself here, twirling his girlfriend on the dancefloor -- he's currently less eye-catching than her in ''outfit'' though no doubt his presence alone draws a few stares, but, currently, the neat and colorful button-down he is wearing has been largely obscured underneath an oversized tee shirt likely caught from one of the two t-shirt cannons a matching fairy-winged pair of Ryan's crew are shooting at the audience. ''His'' has the by-now very familiar HOLLAND WAS RIGHT text on the front, though the dragonfly it is usually styled around has now grown a stylized sunburst for a thorax in a design that is echoed smaller up by the back collar. Underneath the smaller back logo, printed in simple font: ''party like the day is long! summer solstice '23 <nowiki>|</nowiki> happy birthday, jax.''<br />
<br />
Jax has been on ''stage'' through the beginning of this song, ''getting'' even Brighter himself as Ryan takes off the sunburst-hat and bestows it upon him. In contrast to his BFF's radiance on stage, Jax himself is startlingly not glowing -- for now -- though his smile is bright enough he might as ''well'' be as he's helped down off the stage and back into the crowd. His very fierce heat is accompanied by a very fierce blush as he accepts a hand down, accepts a ''dance'' -- far from his first tonight but this one comes with a flush of mingled warmth and grief, an echo of memory summoned up of dappled sunlight in a faraway grove, a flicker of yellow feathers under rustling wings. The rhythm he falls into is familiar, unthinking. It's only after several measures when he looks up, lifts a hand to touch fingers light and brief against his dance partner's neat-trimmed beard which itself grows a sunny illumination -- that he lets the grief settle into a somewhat less complicated delight. "''Gosh'', but you you clean up good."<br />
<br />
There to help Jax off the stage is DJ -- the hand that turns over to takes Jax's is, as fits the theme tonight, resplendent in color; the prosthetic has been intricately painted in a pattern of feathering -- on the over side a more staid black-brown but on the underneath brilliant metallic emerald giving way to a bold scarlet with a very subtle metallic purple flash at the edges in the brilliant plumage of a scarlet-chested sunbird. He's in a sleek two-piece suit in crisp red-and-black striped seersucker over a neatly pressed white linen shirt cinched with an eye-catching tie styled very abstractly after a flight feather, its barbs forming fine chevrons in an iridescent red-purple-green-black ombre, and black oxford shoes polished to a shine. In ''his'' mind there's a hard-ingrained hypervigilance threading through the beat, out of sync with the environment but nevertheless threaded taut through the steps, tracking the crowd around them as intently as he tracks his partner's motions. His smile at the compliment is bright, buoyed by the company and the empathic vibrancy of the music. "Figured it was about time I --"<br />
<br />
As he drops his hand to signal an outside turn he's also dropped his sentence, also dropped his ''stance''; it all happens quickly enough anyone else might not have caught it at all if not for the fact that at the Very First Sight of someone beelining for Jax, Jax himself has abruptly vanished to reappear safely beside Ryan's bodyguard. DJ -- who just a second before was tensing, bracing for a fight, mind snapped to alertness, is now blushing fierce as he looks up at the very close proximity of "-- oh. Oh," his blush is only deepening, his wary look already shifted to a crooked smile that belies the butterfly-flutter inside him. "I'm sorry, I thought -- obviously. You wanted --"<br />
<br />
Standing off to one side, Steve is wearing a blue-and-red windowpane suit with a spray of heliotrope for a boutonniere and a magenta-violet-blue ombre tie. He only clocks the swinging beat in ''Brighter'' when he spots Jax swinging to it with DJ, and with a bright smile makes his way over. << Gosh I've never ''cut in'' before -- ''do'' people still cut in or -- >> He doesn't have time to be alarmed when DJ blips Jax away and pivots more or less right ''into'' him. Before he even knows what's happened he's sliding one foot back, then in almost the same moment checks the motion, amused and embarrassed. Quietly thankful DJ's swiftness also beat him to the awkward stuttering he was definitely about to do, he finishes the half-spoken sentence, "-- to dance. Obviously." This might have come out more suave if he weren't distracted by ''that smile'', at once soothingly and painfully familiar. <br />
<br />
His slow breath out hitches on a chuckle as they both try to lead. << How ''do'' two fellas decide... >> He dismisses his mental image of proposing rock-paper-scissors almost before it's formed. Instead, he settles his right hand onto DJ's brightly colored prosthetic and his left hand onto DJ's shoulder, confident and decisive and flushing pink nevertheless. His rhythm is imperfect and his steps sloppy on the turns, but he follows well for a beginner. "Thanks for bearing with me," he tells his partner earnestly as the song fades. A little hesitant, he adds, "Glad you made it out tonight." He dips his head and makes a leg -- luckily having released DJ's hand -- before stepping away, suddenly unsure what to do with himself. That uncertainty flees when he catches Sam's eye, and though his smile is still a little faint and his rhythm still a little off, he's nodding in time to the swelling music again.<br />
<br />
Sam has ''been'' in between partners, in between drinks, but after watching Steve take his leave from DJ he's ambling over. At once casual in stride and not-so in his seafoam green collarless suit, sleek and clean and unconventional with scrollwork embroidered on either side of the front opening in hunter green to match the lightweight tunic underneath, which is longer than the jacket and separates it visually from the trousers to striking effect, and black dress boots with hunter green spats.<br />
<br />
No paper-scissors-rock -- though his offered hand comes with a lift of brows, a tip of head, a "May I have this dance?" he seems confident enough of the answer and confident as well as he leads Steve back onto the floor, falling smoothly into the rhythm of "Save Me". His eyes follow ''pointedly'' after DJ, and return to Steve -- just a ''little'' searching. Maybe it's the music and its buoyant warmth; maybe it's whatever he finds (or doesn't) in Steve's expression, but the searching soon gives way to just a companionable ease in the steps, navigating tight-crowded dancefloor and inexperienced partner and Occasional Stares in Steve's direction with equal facility -- he ''eventually'' deigns to acknowledge this last when it's a gawky and gawk''ing'' Xavier's teenager whose stare has pulled them obliviously straight ''into'' the press of dancers to peer up-up-UP at Steve with eyes wide as dinner plates. The song isn't yet done but Sam is relinquishing his partner, patting him ''firm'' on the shoulder: "-- feel like this is your patriotic duty, Cap," and now ''he's'' left in the slightly awkward position of trying to weave through the floor unpaired --<br />
<br />
-- only to be swept up by Polaris, who was presumably just happening by, but in the press of bodies ''appears'' as though she materialized out of thin air precisely when Sam found himself stranded. She's wearing a metallic purple-green duochrome corset dress that would be ''quite'' revealing on its own but is only ''kind'' of revealing over a semi-sheer black blouse, a wide v-shaped chainmaille belt along with intricate woven wire cuffs and choker, and black ankle strap pumps. Her long green hair is bound up in two crown braids woven together with a glowing flower crown, and one of the event workers' sun wands dangles from her belt beside a black velvet purse.<br />
<br />
"You're wearing my color," she informs him, though the brightness of her smile belies the presumptive complaint even before she adds, "and wearing it ''well!''" Though not the most ''skilled'' dance partner, she is pouring enough grace and energy and fiercely determined joy into it to be a ''compelling'' one. There's no small amount of hypervigilance in her attention to the intricate shimmering fields--biological and technological--all around, enmeshed in an electrifying dance of their own. There's no small amount of love, too, her mind alight with music and motion and a profound sense of connection that cannot be wholly attributed to Ryan power. "You should be careful wearing green on midsummer night, you know?" She laughs as Sam spins her out into a turn, unabashed that she works an extra step into it. "Lest the fairies whisk you away!"<br />
<br />
The fairies ''are'' about to whisk, little though Sam or Polaris might know it. It isn't the ones that work the party wearing tattered wings or glowing horns or gleaming claws -- quiet, unfelt, a deft psionic force spreads its roots out, rides the beat, rides their minds; on one step they are a pair, on the next they're ''both'' dancing with new people. It feels like Polaris's decision -- and then, of ''course'' it did, because on the next step she no longer ''is'' Hive, but she ''is'' just dancing with him, and he's not smiling, same default-grump-scowl he always wears; but as his mental roots pull back she can feel the lingering amusement, warm and unabashed, he leaves in his wake. <br />
<br />
"Feel like I should get at least ''one'' dance in with my --" Just a beat, a small sideways twitch of mouth. "-- you." He isn't ''much'' of a dancer. There are times that the ''oneness'' of him smooths over for that, an innate proprioception of his partner's movements, but this isn't one of those times. It's not ''DJ'' he's stealing from now, with his ''actual'' dancing skill and confident grace; just turtling back into himself with the help of the Elder Telepath in his network; shielding he's not innately ''good'' at -- and, for the rest of the song -- just him. Just Polaris. Just dancing. It's warm. But as one song fades into the next, as he pecks Polaris on the cheek, it's warm, too, as his mind relaxes with something like relief back into its expansive openness. Is it the return of feeling his hundreds of selves that hits him deep, or the opening strains of "Little Wonder"? Either way he's stopped at the edge of the floor like he's temporarily forgotten what he's doing.<br />
<br />
It's also hard to say whether it's the shift in Hive's self(ves) that catches Matt's attention or the fiery adoration spilling through the song for the missing child--the missing ''children''. He's in a white oxford shirt, green linen vest, and gray slacks, the matching jacket nowhere to be seen, and had been draped languidly picturesque against a nearby picnic table, methodically getting drunk. Now he goes to Hive, gathering his friend close though he does not know if he has it in him to do much more than sway to the music. His mindscape is eerily flat, and he's trying to dredge something up from beneath its murky surface other than the jagged rage hungry for someone to sink into. "{Thank you, my dear.}" His words are soft with improvised gratitude and affected affection for Hive's tireless search. "{I have missed you, also.}" He isn't sure how true that was before now, but he's found his emotional stride and with it his rhythm, his feet light as whirls Hive and his borrowed steps around the dancefloor.<br />
<br />
"Little Wonder" acquires new dimensions as the jazz musicians of the next act seamlessly join in, one by one. Something reaches out from his turbid depths for Ryan's electrifying voice, and though sharp and rapacious it is not anger but desire that he immediately tamps back down. It might not have stayed down, but the ''song'' is winding down, not so much ''ending'' as morphing into improvisational jazz. Matt bends to kiss Hive's hand before sending him off in DJ's direction, as best he can estimate the path of the bright flickering beat in his mind. He is emphatically ''not'' paying attention to Ryan as he hops off the stage into the arms of the ecstatically awaiting crowd. He's leaning into his anger instead, searching and finding a suitable target, veering off giddy with (somewhat) playful malice to drag Fury up from where ''he's'' been methodically getting drunk. "I hear you're a fine dancer, Director Fury," he pipes with an impish grin. "''Prove it.''"<br />
<br />
With the generous support of the free booze, Director Fury ''had'' started to enjoy the concert despite himself -- little though anyone would be able to tell by his persistently baleful glare. << That Ryan Black steady ''wildin''', but he don't sound half bad tho. >> He tenses up at the prospect some telepath might have overheard that admission, and starts running through the psionic self-defense exercises he'd let lapse. The organic changing of the act on stage makes this harder -- the steady sweeps and capricious turns of the jazz blossoming from "Little Wonder" speaks to him in a deep way that Ryan, whatever his skill ''or'' powers, could not -- and the sudden appearance of the Other Mister Tessier shatters his precarious focus altogether.<br />
<br />
"Oh ''hell'' no," he blurts as Matt pulls him to his feet, and though he's sure he ''could'' prevail if he fought harder, he doesn't. A part of him is suspicious some psionic influence swayed him to accept the dance. A part of him is terrified of being surrounded by drunken mutants with God knows what powers. The ''rest'' of him is reversing Matt's grip on his hand and letting the music move through him and appreciating how readily the younger man follows his lead. And then he's suspicious of ''that'', too. << (does he know)(what's his agenda)(at least his ''power'' can't hurt me none) >> Aloud he just says, "I been dancing longer'n you been alive. I ain't got nothing to prove." Perhaps belying this, he embellishes his already elaborate footwork, challenging Matt to keep up and at once annoyed and impressed that he does. Somewhere between this absurd game and the technical demands of playing it out on a crowded floor, he forgets his wariness and just ''dances.''<br />
<br />
"{That's how he ''get'' you.}" Relaxing, evidently? Dancing, evidently? Enjoying yourself for a few brief moments -- on one outward spin Matt whirls away and blink-and-you-might-miss-it quick, a small static-shock ''zap'' in Fury's hand -- which is turning back ''over'', gripped now in a calloused-rough one. "{Secondary mutation, you know, make you ''lose'' yourself in them fairy-green eyes.}" Ion's grin is ''fierce'', his own dark eyes bright -- did he dress for this at all? ''Probably'', with his motorcycle boots and weatherbeaten cut there's his ''nice'' jeans and a lightweight linen button down, sunburst wand jammed through a beltloop, long pointed ears blended seamless over his own.<br />
<br />
Right here Matt ''should'' have been twirling back, ''should'' have been dipping, but instead Fury's getting Ion's ''aggressively'' cheerful energy -- can he dance? Can he ''swing''? He's sure got rhythm to ''spare'' but in the scheme of things, these may be secondary to the forceful exuberance with which he's turned this ship Right Around fully heedless (or perhaps enjoying) Fury's poleaxed horror ''or'' his long-acclimatization to leading. As his partner stumbles trying to rock-step the wrong foot Ion's grin ''sharpens'', as Fury starts to lose his balance Ion's grip shifts seamlessly to a harder clamp on the older man's forearm. The Director of SHIELD does not fall; as quickly as the tornado of a dance began it's ending as Ion deposits him in the questionably loving arms of another Mongrel to recoup his balance ''properly''. Ion's cheek clicks against his teeth, fingers snapping, pointing in quick-bang motion at Fury, taking his grin and exuberance ''with'' him as he dips out across the floor -- "{Careful, eh? Party just getting started and already you slipping.}"<br />
<br />
Ion is intercepted, across the floor, pulled in to loop in to a small knot of newer Prometheans who have formed their own circle by an outstretched wing, not dark today but painted rich and brilliant with sunburst-ombre flare. Dusk's wing drapes around the electrokinetic; a soft pleased rumble in his throat as he watches an elderly woman pulled out of Blackburn teach a much younger Dirac alum the basics of swing. As he drops his head to rest against Ion's and briefly just bops with the music -- his growl deepening when the elder ''almost'' stumbles after a group of slightly-too-eager (slightly-too-tipsy?) Xavier's students collides with their group, his growl subsiding just as quick when the Dirac kid steadies her easily and the dancing-clusters mingle into one. 'Eeeevery once in a while,' he admits, a teasing amusement in his face, in the motions of his hands, that heavily exaggerates the ''rarity'' of this as the excitement in the group ''grows'' oh my ''god'' he's coming ''here'' for ''REAL'' '-- he fucking nails it.' And then he's squeezing Ion a little closer, letting his wing trail against the other man's shoulders as he sways through the group -- not towards Ryan himself but one of the ''many'' (staring // trying not to stare) around them His smile is bright as he offers out a hand. "''He'' doesn't bite, you know."<br />
<br />
Maya has been here twirling with her sister, has been chatting, has been bright-bright-bright in her elegantly floral-embroidered yellow and orange salwar set, gold bangles, gold-sequined slippers, ribbons wound through her thick braids. ''Was'' she gawking, she was trying not to gawk! Certainly not in front of at least ''some'' of her students who are ''definitely also gawking oh gosh --'' And then there's Dusk in front of her and is she ''less'' flustered, looking up into his dark eyes, sharp-fanged grin, scruffy face? She blushes, takes his hand, a smile lighting up her slightly-tipsy-glowy face. "Oh! Oh but ''you'' -- no wait ''do'' you -- ''wow'' I shouldn't assume --" She's started to reach a hand for his other -- arm? Wing? Drops it to the side, lifts it again, blushes ''deeper''. "Oh ''wow'' were you even asking me to --" But she ''is'' getting on the dance floor with him, is kind of relaxing, even, more comfortable once he starts moving, once he starts ''her'' moving -- until another turn, and another, and then she is Face To Face with Ryan and her eyes have gone wide again, smile frozen in place, gaze darting between ''him'' and the crowd around, and ''maybe'' she'd have slunk back into the circle if not for the strong wings bolstering her at her back.<br />
<br />
From one set of wings to another; Ryan's gleaming stage costume has been luminescent between the enormous black-feathered wings of the woman who has been gyrating with him. He meets Maya's frozen smile with one warm enough to thaw, one hand turning up, beckoning with an easy confidence. "We on a dance floor -- you want to stare, stare; you want to move, then move, yeah?" He waits for her to take his hand before pulling her in, graceful but simple in the steps he leads until he's confident she ''does'' have the rhythm. Around them there are still Plenty Of Stares; excited Xavier's School teens, hipster artists pretending to be too cynical. "Don't even worry about them," there's brazen-cocky in his grin now, sure, but the first time ''she'' missteps from self-conscious watching The Crowd instead he's making the correction easily to keep the rhythm, ''his'' attention solely on his still-flustered partner. "They're not judging you, they ''all'' watching me."<br />
<br />
"Oh, ''all'''em?" As one melody slides into another, it's a very familiar face back at Ryan's side. Fierce heat in Jax's chin as he props it on his friend's shoulder. 'I can get you his number,' he's mouthing totally-not-at-all-surreptitiously to his coworker, as he snags an elbow through Ryan's. For all the fierce heat, bright outfit, sparkling makeup, the actual feelings that wash through his voice over the empath are muted and distant -- there's love there, a lot of it; there's anger, there's a ''heavy'' exhaustion, a stark horror, but all of it coming through a washed-out filter. "Jus' wouldn't'a been a birthday if you hadn't saved me a dance," he's saying with a small laugh, "if Mockingbird closes 'fore I get out we gotta riot."<br />
<br />
He's ''just'' pulling Ryan away, just finding a relatively open spot at the edge of the dance floor, when a small knot of fresh young agents from the SHIELD Comms division gets up the bravery to come over en masse, crowded too-close and too-touchy as is too-common for fans. Something dims -- just brief! -- in Jax's expression as he's jostled back. It brightens again, vivid and cheerful when he whirls to find -- "''gosh'', Leo! I didn't have no ''idea'' you was such a good dancer."<br />
<br />
<< I am? >> a startled question in Leo(?)'s mind, at once colored with his very-customary diffidence and something that is -- not. << ''am'' I? >> A deep blush has filled his cheeks as he looks up from his partner to Jackson -- back to his partner. Rock-steps back to let Kitty better face Jackson. "She makes it easy." The brief-sharp sting of ache this conjures up is entirely dwarfed by an entirely more uncomplicated swell of affection. "I should -- let you two --" He squeezes Kitty's hand and lets it go, stepping away into the mess of chaos.<br />
<br />
"''He'' learns fast," is Kitty's easy -- tipsy -- warm reply, the squeeze of her hand tight around Leo's before he pulls away. There's something faintly disquieted in her thoughts when Leo pulls away, not yet a question before she turns to slot herself easily into Jax's arms. More easily than maybe it ''should'' be, with their height difference, the air between Kitty's feet and the dance floor bringing her up closer to her best friend. <br />
<br />
Later, there will be worry and rage and exhaustion. Later there will be all the emotions Kitty, like so many others here, are pushing determinedly down down down so that tonight can be special. Later there will be time -- too much time, still -- for spinning and scheming and searching. Later this -- this bright smile, this flex of her mutation -- will be too hard to maintain. <br />
<br />
But right now -- fiery warm hand in one that is delicately cool -- Kitty dances, easy and almost-carefree, on nothing.<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:And_rings_aloud_the_welkin_blue_With_all_the_songs_I_ever_knew.&diff=25078Logs:And rings aloud the welkin blue With all the songs I ever knew.2023-07-05T17:13:03Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Kitty]], [[Scott]], [[Charles]], [[Mirror|iʞiɒꓷ]], [[Ryan]] [[NPC-FitzSimmons|FitzSimmons]]<br />
| summary = "You weren't asking for my blessing, but you have it for whatever it's worth to you. And if you find them, we will stand ready to help bring them home." (Jax's birthday party, part 3 -- from [[Logs:Joy springs all radiant in my breast; Though pauper poor, than king more blest,|disembarking]] and [[Logs:The tide beats in my soul so strong that happiness breaks forth in song,|dancing]], previously, onward to [[Logs:Operation:S.O.L.S.T.I.C.E.|drama]].)<br />
| gamedate = 2023-06-21<br />
| gamedatename = summer solstice '23 / jax's 31st birthday<br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Rooftop - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Kitty, Scott, Charles, Mirror, Ryan, SHIELD HQ, Mutants, Prometheus, X-Men, NPC-FitzSimmons<br />
| log =<br />
<br />
There's an unexpected oasis at the top of this gleaming high-rise, the whole of it carpeted in thick, soft, layered ground cover of sedums, grass, and moss. A small, carefully manicured grove serves as the centerpiece, with benches, tables and chairs scattered around in the shade. Beside it, a professionally landscaped garden boasts a pond and quite a few planters that either used to hold plants or still hold dying ones. The greenhouse is somewhat sparsely and eclectically populated with tropical plants, flanked by garden beds even more sparsely planted. An open lawn on the side overlooking Times Square makes a great spot for a picnic. The otherwise unsightly structure housing the roof access, a single stall bathroom, and tool shed has been covered on three sides with turf and shaped into a little promontory offering a breathtaking view of the city.<br />
<br />
The lawn has mostly disappeared under the newly assembled raised stage, wires for lighting and sound systems running through the grass to generators that definitely do ''not'' belong to SHIELD. The tables have been commandeered as food and drink stations, now being refilled as the long, long arc of sun on the longest day of the year begins to finally touch the horizon. The fae-like uniforms of Jax's friends and Ryan's crew are easy to pick out in the crowd in front of the stage and in the little groups of chatter spread across the rooftop, glowing horns and sunburst-adorned wings catching the light shining from the stage as the mutant-electro-swing band plays. Ryan himself is chatting in a corner that has gone oddly silent to the outside observer. Leo Fitz, face ruddy-red from beer, has commandeered Simmons's lip liner to scribble notes onto a napkin.<br />
<br />
"He's quite handsome, isn't he?" Simmons sighs, resting her cheek onto Fitz's shoulder. <br />
<br />
"He's a bloody enigma, s'what he is," Fitz mumbles, breaking part of the liner with the force of his writing. "''How's'' he got the sound waves bending like that, s'not like he's a -- a-- silica packet for sound, is he?" <br />
<br />
A little ways away from those scientists, a physicist has found an object for her ire. This current act does in fact fit Kitty's outfit, save for the commerative shirt draped around her shoulders, and if she returned to the dance ~~floor~~ lawn probably she would have no end of partners to choose from. But she's glittering not at a dance partner but at Scott Summers now, face curled and indignant, voice raised over the music and body raised over the floor, standing on a few inches of air to better holler into Scott's ear: <br />
<br />
"-- and he's been going absolutely ''nuts'' up in here with no news, probably since that first email you sent, so it's like, damn, is this how you handled it when ''he'' went missing? What is the point of being -- whatever the fuck the X-men are if we can't keep our own kids safe?" Kitty's eyes are wide and every-so-slightly bloodshot from drinking, the wine in her hand sloshing even at this low volume as she gesticulates. "Like, we all know you aren't ''trying'' to be a jerk but emailing to tell us you're going to fight your way through the Staten Island mafia or whatever when we already ''got'' people looking into that angle, that's not very efficient, is it? It kind of seems like you're trying to punish yourself about it and none of us need that right now, we need the kids ''back''." Familiar, perhaps, to people who have known her since childhood, is the fearful tremble of Kitty's words throughout this tirade, the clench of her currently-ghostly fingers around her glass. "So like, why are you ''here'', Scott? Are you ''actually'' just here to drive the Professor around or is this you punishing yourself, too?"<br />
<br />
Looking just at Scott, it's almost hard to tell that he's being yelled at -- his head is tilted to better hear Kitty over the music, and he's nodding along, but his face is mostly implacable, any tension or tightness in his expression mostly hidden behind his tinted glasses, his hands casually tucked into the pockets of his jeans. He is ''not'' wearing a Holland Was Right birthday-edition shirt, though he has one slung over his shoulder like he might take it home -- his own T-shirt is a disappointingly unsunny, undecorated navy blue.<br />
<br />
He lets Kitty's last question hang for a moment, straightening his neck again. Lets out a short exhale. "I am not punishing myself," he says tightly. "I'm here to celebrate Jax's birthday, same as you. Believe it or not, I don't think of that as some kind of self-punishment." His voice is quiet and controlled, but pointed -- the blurred edge of exhaustion it's had for weeks has sharpened into a defensive curtness. "Should I have expected you to just know telepathically that I was going to check out the Staten Island mafia? Because from ''my'' vantage point, email seemed more reliable. I am trying to find our kids. I don't know what else you expect me to do."<br />
<br />
"''Why'' would you fight the mafia in the first place? We know people for that, we ''got'' people for that -- ''God'' you're missing the point!" Kitty might also be missing the point -- or at least missing her mouth, wine sloshing up and over the sides to drip over her fingers. "It's just -- just -- it's been almost two months." Suddenly Kitty's voice has gotten very small, very tired. "Week five was about when I gave up hope of being ''found'', this is just -- if we haven't found them by now --" and abruptly the alcohol splashes up into the air as Kitty drops to the floor. She grimaces, wiping at a stain on her dress. "-- Sorry, this is -- morbid, this is supposed to be ''fun'', I'll -- " ''Go'' is unvoiced but clear as she turns on one strappy heel to walk -- unevenly, which for her is more of walking ''into'' the lawn and out of it than side to side -- off towards a cluster of her friends. << Hi Professor (hi, Dad) >> is pitched up and above her other thoughts automatically and oddly un-self-consciously as she stumbles by a familiar figure in a sleek wheelchair, though Kitty doesn't stop to chat.<br />
<br />
Charles does not press Kitty for conversation as she passes, though his brows do crinkle with concern and the warmth of his mind where it presses to hers in greeting lingers even after she's stalked off. At some point he's tucked his sunburst wand into the breast pocket of his suit jacket at a jaunty angle, carefully refolding the blue pocket square to frame it to better effect. He rolls up to Scott, lips compressed, though there's no reproach in his pale eyes, and the psionic warmth that blankets him is soothing and conciliatory. << I'll check on her later, but I think for now it's best to let her vent where she will. This isn't really about you. >> An image of Carmen Pryde rises unbidden in Scott's mind, annotated with new information: he's moved to New York, he's working at Lucien Tessier's hotel in Astoria, he's -- predictably -- trying to worm his way into Kitty's life here. He reverses and parks his chair beside his protégé and offers him a bottle of water of water he's produced from one of the startlingly capacious storage compartments in his chair. << She went to him for help finding the children, which I expect has not done her mental health any favors. >><br />
<br />
<< She's been drinking. >> This observation, though blunt, doesn't come with any accompanying judgment, just a weary resignation. Scott is watching Kitty go, not looking at Charles just yet, though his posture loosens slightly in the professor's reassuring presence. He is running through their exchange in his head -- ''we can't keep our own kids safe'' -- ''if we haven't found them by now'' -- ''is this you punishing yourself?'' -- but he pushes it reluctantly aside to consider annotated Carmen Pryde instead, before slotting that away for later too. Accepts the water bottle, unscrews the cap, and takes a sip, his movements measured. << I didn't know. >> A hint of abashment creeps in with that admission; now Scott looks at Charles, forehead pinching over his glasses. << She's right. I don't know what I'm doing. >><br />
<br />
After Yet Another Costume Change Ryan has shed his stage outfit -- now in one of the Limited Edition Birthday Shirts, clearly not got out of the t-shirt canon because it is in a size so tight it might well have been painted on him, paired now in this later-evening stage of party with comfortably wide-leg black jeans and a gold belt with sunburst buckle. His brows are knitting as Kitty exits past Charles and though he ''almost'' follows after her he's stopped short, instead, when Charles arrives. His hands tuck into his pockets. His weight settles. Around them the party is muted, sound warping -- just an odd quiet bubble of conversational privacy in a small sphere around where he's standing that, as he wanders over, has shifted to encompass Scott and Charles.<br />
<br />
He's lightly, idly, running brilliant-colorful-loops of songs through his mind, thinking about the party, thinking about the ''wildly'' complicated logistics that made it happen, of the admittedly petty hilarity of Fury's irritation, of So Many Fantastic Outfits ''co'' did people turn ''out'' tonight, of whether he remembered to water the plants today, of whether any of the people who've been hitting on him tonight would be fun to bring home, of whether any of the people who've been hitting on him tonight would be ''safe'' to take home, (of anything, anything except statistics on Finding Missing Children after this long, ''keenly'' aware that Jackson is currently Hive as he buries this morbidity in the psionic static.)<br />
<br />
"It's a big country. Not even ''you''," he's nodding to Charles, "can search it all. Knocking down doors and beating up gangsters --" One of his shoulders lifts. "Slow way to search."<br />
<br />
The evening is clearly winding on -- as the energy mellows, even Daiki is seeing fit to make a (re) appearance after disappearing into the designated Quiet Area (off in the picnic area within the grove) some time during the height of Ryan's energetic set. He's in the very same finely tailored light blue mandarin jacket he had been earlier in the evening and wearing it ''just'' was well, though somewhere along the way he's lost the graceful glowing horns that had been on his head; his sunburst staff wand is tucked into the pocket of his (grey? weren't they black earlier?) slacks.<br />
<br />
He gracefully sidesteps his teammate making her escape, and though the frown that follows Kitty out is small his quiet arrival grows that much more compelling with his -- worry? He ''looks'' worried, and there ''is'' a Worried Tinge to his thoughts when Kitty stumbles off but underneath it, a curiosity both analytical and deeply titillated. His eyes skip between Scott and Charles, and somewhere in his mind these people are shifting and changing in form, in psionic space at once themselves and characters from Chinese folklore. Kitty briefly merges with the figure of Lognu, young and precocious granddaughter of the Dragon King, reprimanding the much older and much more powerful Dragon Prince Ao Bing-who-is-also-Scott who is as per usual trying to fix the problems of mortals (but fucking up) for his father, Charles and/or Ao Guang the Dragon King of the East, most powerful of all the Dragon Kings, looking on from his court on high (where, surrounded by gods, he has come to underestimate mortals.) << (trouble at home?) >> is both a musing to himself and a note for later follow up.<br />
<br />
He makes his way into Ryan's bubble like he belongs well enough in its intimacy, and his head tilts slightly, his brows arching. He ''is'' thinking of Gaétan, of Two Months Gone, of Finding Missing Kid Statistics. Of ''maybe'' Ryan should have sent out the APB on this on Day One. He lowers his eyes, lowers his voice, though even so it's somehow commanding. "I'm sure he's doing the best he can. But --" He turns a hand over, a gesture that should be casual. Isn't. "Did you have another angle?"<br />
<br />
<< It's hard to know what to do because there's nowhere to start. >> Charles glances aside to Scott, then away. << We're all grasping at straws. >> The words on their own might seem fatalist, but for all the fear and frustration and helplessness in his thoughts, there's no despair. He looks up at Ryan as he approaches, then over at Daiki with the barest uptick of one brow. "I am doing my best." This isn't defensive, just a simple agreement, but there's a weariness in his voice that, however scrupulously he's trained his tone, he cannot keep from Ryan. "I am prepared to do better, and I am open to other angles." Beside and beneath this, he's offering the psionic equivalent of Ryan's privacy bubble, the concept communicated without words in the layered susurration of sun-dappled leaves.<br />
<br />
Scott looks from the professor up to Ryan as he approaches -- his lips press thinly together at the other man's words. With another set of companions his spike of shame might have gone unnoticed, marked only by the tiny crease forming between his brows. He screws the cap back onto his water bottle, lowering it slowly. Jax's ''other'' team is rising in his consciousness, Ryan at the head, with an accompanying sense of wariness and apprehension. << What other angle? >> he's asking -- warning? -- silently.<br />
<br />
Ryan misses the colorful mental imagery, but the worry-curiosity-titillation that comes with it pings him bright and clear. He's looking over with a tick of brow that nearly mirrors Charles's, his eyes lingering on Daiki(?) a long beat before he pulls himself back into the conversation. "Moment I say it, we gonna have people countrywide turning over stones we didn't even know of. And I'm going to say it." This doesn't sound like a threat -- it's direct, it's ''tired''; maybe all Ryan's wonted energy went into his earlier set. "But people are gonna have questions, when I do. God knows Luci pulls some goddamn ''magic'' in the fucking press but if there's something you want me to -- say. Or not say. I ''don't'' want to bring a world of trouble on..." He hasn't ''meant'' to hitch, here, but that compelling ''tug'' still niggles at his brain; images of X-Men overlapping with the faces of the missing children, ''Spencer'' most prominent; in here there's something ''dissonant'' where Daiki fits into the montage as he glances to his (teammate) (family) beside him. "-- you and yours."<br />
<br />
That dissonant tug is growing. Daiki, perhaps, is turning futures over in his mind, roads branching and branching after Ryan goes to twitter, goes to the press, goes to the top of a mountain and yells. Does the school get outed (maybe), do the ''children'' have normal lives again (probably not), does it ''matter'' (??), --. His hands fold behind his back, and he's weighing, lightly, the ''suggestion'' that a news report of A Dozen Dead Mutant Children, two months after they went missing, is its own world of trouble that per''haps'' if the school had its ''own'' media advisor they might have considered earlier. But then, weighs those small-hitched eyebrows, tilts his head ''very'' slightly to the side. "-- he should be here soon. Perhaps he has advice." There's a vague ''sense'' of Lucien in his mind, tranquil-glassy water that does not betray much, and it's somehow that ''same'' sense that he conveys -- just a soft ripple that barely parts the psionic auras around him as, quietly, he is melting back into the crowd.<br />
<br />
Charles closes his eyes briefly, just for the space of an inhale, and opens them again when he breaths out. "Alright." For a moment, just that; his eyes skip aside to ''start'' tracking Daiki's departure, then slide back to Ryan. "I know this is a tall order, and I'm sure it's one you anticipated, but I want the school kept out of this as much as possible. We are capable of deflecting a great deal of scrutiny, but at a certain ''volume'', that fact itself will become suspicious." He braces his helps on the armrests of his chair and steeples his hands. "The disposition of the other students' identities is technically up to their guardians, but most of them are human, and cannot understand what it means to be out and ''famous'' as a mutant in this world..." His forehead dips, the light filtering through the forest of their minds dims ever so briefly, as though a cloud had passed before the sun. "But you do, as does Jackson, and consequently Spencer is far better prepared for that than most of his peers. If Mister Tessier can find a way to protect the others students identities without compromising our chances of finding them, I would be most grateful." He spreads his hands now, the gesture almost shockingly ambiguous by his standards because ''he'' isn't fully certain if it bespeaks supplication, acceptance, or helplessness. "Whatever our disagreements, 'mine' and 'yours' are inextricably bound even when they are not one and the same. We will work with you."<br />
<br />
<< Is that even possible, >> Scott is wondering. He is not looking at either other man, still tilting his head in the direction Daiki left; he doesn't project the next question to Charles, but lets it rise through his recollections of the media outside Xavier's last January after the Prometheus exposé. << (Wouldn't it be worth it, if it's not?) >> He scratches his chin, where his stubble is just starting to show, and reminds himself, << Jax trusts him. >> Scott probably still doesn't, but much of his wariness is quietly drawing back. "What do you have in mind," he says.<br />
<br />
Ryan watches Daiki leave with a small furrow of brows. His head tips, nodding after him in indication. "We'll talk to each of their families individually, but probably the best angle is just that my --"<br />
<br />
The clench at the side of his jaw is small, a flurry of memories ringing in jarringly dissonant chord in his mind. Panic-shopping with Jackson for clothing for a kindergartner; sick-grateful-relief when Joshua shows up with such-a-tiny-Spence from ''where'' the fuck did he teleport to this time; laptop abandoned with a song-in-progress half-finished on the screen while he's sprawled, now, on Jax's apartment floor, middle-of-the-night and ''probably'' the seven-year-old should be in bed but Jax is at work so who's to say it's ''not'' time to build a huge K'nex rollercoaster in the living room; confused elementary school teacher at field trip time, ''wait, but, you're not a parent?''; crouched down with Spence and James Holland in the woods as Spence's grandpa points out the difference between wood blewit mushrooms (delicious!) and some ''cortinarius'' mushrooms (poisonous!); the silence stretching across miles on a video screen when Spencer was diagnosed, and getting back on stage the next day with as much thunder as ever; the narrowed eyes and cold tone of the medical receptionist when he finally made it back to New York: ''Are'' you ''family?''<br />
<br />
"-- that Spence and a bunch of his friends gone missing." The twitch of Ryan's mouth is a little wry, a lot humorless, when he looks to Scott -- gestures around the rooftop party. "I'm me, yeah? Jax is Jax. Spencer Holland Disappears is gonna grab the headlines no matter what. That'll take most the heat already off of you all, the school, the other kids, if we lean into it."<br />
<br />
Charles inclines his head as Daiki takes his leave, his eyes lingering only for a moment on the young man's figure, though his expression remains placid enough. << ''I'' trust him, in this, >> he tells Scott abstractly. << It's the rest of the world I'm worried about. >> Ryan's memories rustle the leaves of the forest, parts them to let in more warmth and light that whispers, wordless and matter-of-fact: you are family. "That is a solid approach, and one I expect Mister Tessier can take quite far."<br />
<br />
He sighs quietly and his voice lowers, weary but steady as he lifts a hand to rub at his temples. "I live in terror that the school should be found out and the children come to harm, but we always take some risks. We must, and we ''ought'', only it's hard to tell --" He glances aside at Scott, then drops his gaze. There's shame in his voice now, and fear, and resolution. "Sometimes, we ought to take more." His eyes lift to Ryan now, his expression placid but his psionic presence blazing fierce even through Hive's layered shade. "You weren't asking for my blessing, but you have it for whatever it's worth to you. And if you find them, we will stand ready to help bring them home."<br />
<br />
Scott's wariness still does not recede fully, though a dubious part of his mind duly alerts himself that ''Charles'' trusts Ryan. He slides one hand silently into his pockets, letting the water bottle drop in the other so that it hangs from just his fingertips. << Sometimes,>> he agrees, neither gloatingly nor conciliatorially. He looks back at Ryan when Charles offers his blessing -- says in a low, rough voice, "Mine too." After a pause, he adds -- not looking at the professor -- "the X-Men, too. Anything…" ''now'' he manages to meet Charles's eye around the glint of his glasses, "''Anything'' we can do."<br />
<br />
Ryan's eyes track to Charles with a swift and sudden startlement, and though he lowers them quickly again it's not quickly ''enough'' to hide the sudden bright shimmer of tears; certainly not enough to hide his frantic-anxious-panicked mental ''reach'' for ''Jax'', holy shit, the ''last'' thing he needs is some new Ryan Black Crying meme drawing attention from the shit he ''actually'' wants in the news; not enough to hide the ''fiercely'' grateful warmth blazing in his mind, clinging hard to Charles's. "Shiiiit," and even if the erratic flux of his emotional state has not settled in its careen his voice is level enough, wry, brows lifting as a smile crooks across his face, "y'all best be careful, or I might just take you up on that."<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:The_tide_beats_in_my_soul_so_strong_that_happiness_breaks_forth_in_song,&diff=25077Logs:The tide beats in my soul so strong that happiness breaks forth in song,2023-07-05T17:11:41Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Kitty]], [[Mirror|Leo?]], [[Jax]], [[DJ]], [[Steve]], [[Sam]], [[Polaris]], [[Hive]], [[Matt]], [[Fury]], [[Ion]], [[Dusk]], [[Maya]], [[Ryan]], [[NPC-FitzSimmons|FitzSimmons]]<br />
| summary = "May I have this dance?" (Jax's birthday party -- from [[Logs:Joy springs all radiant in my breast; Though pauper poor, than king more blest,|disembarking]] previously and forward to [[Logs:And rings aloud the welkin blue With all the songs I ever knew.|deliberating]], and [[Logs:Operation:S.O.L.S.T.I.C.E.|drama]].)<br />
| gamedate = 2023-06-21<br />
| gamedatename = summer solstice '23 / jax's 31st birthday<br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Rooftop - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Kitty, NPC-FitzSimmons, Mirror, Jax, DJ, Steve, Sam, Polaris, Hive, Matt, Fury, Ion, Dusk, Maya, Ryan, SHIELD HQ, Mutants, Humans, Mutates<br />
| log =<br />
There's an unexpected oasis at the top of this gleaming high-rise, the whole of it carpeted in thick, soft, layered ground cover of sedums, grass, and moss. A small, carefully manicured grove serves as the centerpiece, with benches, tables and chairs scattered around in the shade. Beside it, a professionally landscaped garden boasts a pond and quite a few planters that either used to hold plants or still hold dying ones. The greenhouse is somewhat sparsely and eclectically populated with tropical plants, flanked by garden beds even more sparsely planted. An open lawn on the side overlooking Times Square makes a great spot for a picnic. The otherwise unsightly structure housing the roof access, a single stall bathroom, and tool shed has been covered on three sides with turf and shaped into a little promontory offering a breathtaking view of the city.<br />
<br />
The lawn has mostly disappeared under the newly assembled raised stage, wires for lighting and sound systems running through the grass to generators that definitely do ''not'' belong to SHIELD. The tables have been commandeered as food and drink stations, starting to deplete as the long, long arc of sun on the longest day of the year meanders lazily towards the horizon. The fae-like uniforms of Jax's friends are easy to pick out in the crowd in front of the stage, glowing horns and sun-adorned wings catching light from the star in the heavens as well as on stage.<br />
<br />
Ryan Black, in a slim-fitting white suit so densely packed with optical fiber that it has a glossy sheen even with the lighting function off, a dress shirt so black it looks like a void amidst all the light, gold cowboy boots with solar designs picked out in bright EL wire, and a matching gambler's hat that shows a brilliant sunburst when viewed from above, is winding to the end of "Care Less", the slick ferocity of the violin line lighting up the fibers in a vibrant dance of colors. The slip into "Brighter" is subtle at first, but at the first lyric a cheer goes up from the crowd.<br />
<br />
Kitty, glittery and gold in a Gatsby-esque sequinned flapper dress, radiant sunbeams emerging from her headband, and a fairy wand with a sunburst topper in hand, is spinning out on the dance floor. Swing dance would probably be more appropriate for her outfit, but she's not letting the genre discrepancy stop her from laughing, cheering, and sliding in closer to her dance partner to kiss his cheek -- heedless of the slack jawed look Jemma Simmons is giving ''him'' from the drink table.<br />
<br />
"I cannae tell if she manipulates intramolecular force or nuclear force," Leo Fitz is bemoaning into his beer, "and she won't ''tell'' me which it is."<br />
<br />
"Uh-huh," Simmons replies absently, swirling her cocktail with one hand. "...You think Mr. Jax might introduce me to Mr. Concepcion if I ask nicely?" <br />
<br />
Morosely, lifting his beer to his lips, Fitz replies, "Probably not."<br />
<br />
Leo accepts his kiss with a faint flush, and his small smile has a glimmer of amusement as he spins Kitty back close to him. "That man," he's only ''lightly'' indicating Fitz with a small point of pursed lips in the engineer's direction, "has have his eyes on you all evening." There's no jealousy here though there ''is'' a healthy dose of appreciation when he adds, pitched quieter as if someone else might ''hear'' over the upbeat music: "You ''do'' shine."<br />
<br />
Had he ''planned'' to be at this party? Difficult to say, given the capriciousness of his schedule. But he seems to be well enjoying himself here, twirling his girlfriend on the dancefloor -- he's currently less eye-catching than her in ''outfit'' though no doubt his presence alone draws a few stares, but, currently, the neat and colorful button-down he is wearing has been largely obscured underneath an oversized tee shirt likely caught from one of the two t-shirt cannons a matching fairy-winged pair of Ryan's crew are shooting at the audience. ''His'' has the by-now very familiar HOLLAND WAS RIGHT text on the front, though the dragonfly it is usually styled around has now grown a stylized sunburst for a thorax in a design that is echoed smaller up by the back collar. Underneath the smaller back logo, printed in simple font: ''party like the day is long! summer solstice '23 <nowiki>|</nowiki> happy birthday, jax.''<br />
<br />
Jax has been on ''stage'' through the beginning of this song, ''getting'' even Brighter himself as Ryan takes off the sunburst-hat and bestows it upon him. In contrast to his BFF's radiance on stage, Jax himself is startlingly not glowing -- for now -- though his smile is bright enough he might as ''well'' be as he's helped down off the stage and back into the crowd. His very fierce heat is accompanied by a very fierce blush as he accepts a hand down, accepts a ''dance'' -- far from his first tonight but this one comes with a flush of mingled warmth and grief, an echo of memory summoned up of dappled sunlight in a faraway grove, a flicker of yellow feathers under rustling wings. The rhythm he falls into is familiar, unthinking. It's only after several measures when he looks up, lifts a hand to touch fingers light and brief against his dance partner's neat-trimmed beard which itself grows a sunny illumination -- that he lets the grief settle into a somewhat less complicated delight. "''Gosh'', but you you clean up good."<br />
<br />
There to help Jax off the stage is DJ -- the hand that turns over to takes Jax's is, as fits the theme tonight, resplendent in color; the prosthetic has been intricately painted in a pattern of feathering -- on the over side a more staid black-brown but on the underneath brilliant metallic emerald giving way to a bold scarlet with a very subtle metallic purple flash at the edges in the brilliant plumage of a scarlet-chested sunbird. He's in a sleek two-piece suit in crisp red-and-black striped seersucker over a neatly pressed white linen shirt cinched with an eye-catching tie styled very abstractly after a flight feather, its barbs forming fine chevrons in an iridescent red-purple-green-black ombre, and black oxford shoes polished to a shine. In ''his'' mind there's a hard-ingrained hypervigilance threading through the beat, out of sync with the environment but nevertheless threaded taut through the steps, tracking the crowd around them as intently as he tracks his partner's motions. His smile at the compliment is bright, buoyed by the company and the empathic vibrancy of the music. "Figured it was about time I --"<br />
<br />
As he drops his hand to signal an outside turn he's also dropped his sentence, also dropped his ''stance''; it all happens quickly enough anyone else might not have caught it at all if not for the fact that at the Very First Sight of someone beelining for Jax, Jax himself has abruptly vanished to reappear safely beside Ryan's bodyguard. DJ -- who just a second before was tensing, bracing for a fight, mind snapped to alertness, is now blushing fierce as he looks up at the very close proximity of "-- oh. Oh," his blush is only deepening, his wary look already shifted to a crooked smile that belies the butterfly-flutter inside him. "I'm sorry, I thought -- obviously. You wanted --"<br />
<br />
Standing off to one side, Steve is wearing a blue-and-red windowpane suit with a spray of heliotrope for a boutonniere and a magenta-violet-blue ombre tie. He only clocks the swinging beat in ''Brighter'' when he spots Jax swinging to it with DJ, and with a bright smile makes his way over. << Gosh I've never ''cut in'' before -- ''do'' people still cut in or -- >> He doesn't have time to be alarmed when DJ blips Jax away and pivots more or less right ''into'' him. Before he even knows what's happened he's sliding one foot back, then in almost the same moment checks the motion, amused and embarrassed. Quietly thankful DJ's swiftness also beat him to the awkward stuttering he was definitely about to do, he finishes the half-spoken sentence, "-- to dance. Obviously." This might have come out more suave if he weren't distracted by ''that smile'', at once soothingly and painfully familiar. <br />
<br />
His slow breath out hitches on a chuckle as they both try to lead. << How ''do'' two fellas decide... >> He dismisses his mental image of proposing rock-paper-scissors almost before it's formed. Instead, he settles his right hand onto DJ's brightly colored prosthetic and his left hand onto DJ's shoulder, confident and decisive and flushing pink nevertheless. His rhythm is imperfect and his steps sloppy on the turns, but he follows well for a beginner. "Thanks for bearing with me," he tells his partner earnestly as the song fades. A little hesitant, he adds, "Glad you made it out tonight." He dips his head and makes a leg -- luckily having released DJ's hand -- before stepping away, suddenly unsure what to do with himself. That uncertainty flees when he catches Sam's eye, and though his smile is still a little faint and his rhythm still a little off, he's nodding in time to the swelling music again.<br />
<br />
Sam has ''been'' in between partners, in between drinks, but after watching Steve take his leave from DJ he's ambling over. At once casual in stride and not-so in his seafoam green collarless suit, sleek and clean and unconventional with scrollwork embroidered on either side of the front opening in hunter green to match the lightweight tunic underneath, which is longer than the jacket and separates it visually from the trousers to striking effect, and black dress boots with hunter green spats.<br />
<br />
No paper-scissors-rock -- though his offered hand comes with a lift of brows, a tip of head, a "May I have this dance?" he seems confident enough of the answer and confident as well as he leads Steve back onto the floor, falling smoothly into the rhythm of "Save Me". His eyes follow ''pointedly'' after DJ, and return to Steve -- just a ''little'' searching. Maybe it's the music and its buoyant warmth; maybe it's whatever he finds (or doesn't) in Steve's expression, but the searching soon gives way to just a companionable ease in the steps, navigating tight-crowded dancefloor and inexperienced partner and Occasional Stares in Steve's direction with equal facility -- he ''eventually'' deigns to acknowledge this last when it's a gawky and gawk''ing'' Xavier's teenager whose stare has pulled them obliviously straight ''into'' the press of dancers to peer up-up-UP at Steve with eyes wide as dinner plates. The song isn't yet done but Sam is relinquishing his partner, patting him ''firm'' on the shoulder: "-- feel like this is your patriotic duty, Cap," and now ''he's'' left in the slightly awkward position of trying to weave through the floor unpaired --<br />
<br />
-- only to be swept up by Polaris, who was presumably just happening by, but in the press of bodies ''appears'' as though she materialized out of thin air precisely when Sam found himself stranded. She's wearing a metallic purple-green duochrome corset dress that would be ''quite'' revealing on its own but is only ''kind'' of revealing over a semi-sheer black blouse, a wide v-shaped chainmaille belt along with intricate woven wire cuffs and choker, and black ankle strap pumps. Her long green hair is bound up in two crown braids woven together with a glowing flower crown, and one of the event workers' sun wands dangles from her belt beside a black velvet purse.<br />
<br />
"You're wearing my color," she informs him, though the brightness of her smile belies the presumptive complaint even before she adds, "and wearing it ''well!''" Though not the most ''skilled'' dance partner, she is pouring enough grace and energy and fiercely determined joy into it to be a ''compelling'' one. There's no small amount of hypervigilance in her attention to the intricate shimmering fields--biological and technological--all around, enmeshed in an electrifying dance of their own. There's no small amount of love, too, her mind alight with music and motion and a profound sense of connection that cannot be wholly attributed to Ryan power. "You should be careful wearing green on midsummer night, you know?" She laughs as Sam spins her out into a turn, unabashed that she works an extra step into it. "Lest the fairies whisk you away!"<br />
<br />
The fairies ''are'' about to whisk, little though Sam or Polaris might know it. It isn't the ones that work the party wearing tattered wings or glowing horns or gleaming claws -- quiet, unfelt, a deft psionic force spreads its roots out, rides the beat, rides their minds; on one step they are a pair, on the next they're ''both'' dancing with new people. It feels like Polaris's decision -- and then, of ''course'' it did, because on the next step she no longer ''is'' Hive, but she ''is'' just dancing with him, and he's not smiling, same default-grump-scowl he always wears; but as his mental roots pull back she can feel the lingering amusement, warm and unabashed, he leaves in his wake. <br />
<br />
"Feel like I should get at least ''one'' dance in with my --" Just a beat, a small sideways twitch of mouth. "-- you." He isn't ''much'' of a dancer. There are times that the ''oneness'' of him smooths over for that, an innate proprioception of his partner's movements, but this isn't one of those times. It's not ''DJ'' he's stealing from now, with his ''actual'' dancing skill and confident grace; just turtling back into himself with the help of the Elder Telepath in his network; shielding he's not innately ''good'' at -- and, for the rest of the song -- just him. Just Polaris. Just dancing. It's warm. But as one song fades into the next, as he pecks Polaris on the cheek, it's warm, too, as his mind relaxes with something like relief back into its expansive openness. Is it the return of feeling his hundreds of selves that hits him deep, or the opening strains of "Little Wonder"? Either way he's stopped at the edge of the floor like he's temporarily forgotten what he's doing.<br />
<br />
It's also hard to say whether it's the shift in Hive's self(ves) that catches Matt's attention or the fiery adoration spilling through the song for the missing child--the missing ''children''. He's in a white oxford shirt, green linen vest, and gray slacks, the matching jacket nowhere to be seen, and had been draped languidly picturesque against a nearby picnic table, methodically getting drunk. Now he goes to Hive, gathering his friend close though he does not know if he has it in him to do much more than sway to the music. His mindscape is eerily flat, and he's trying to dredge something up from beneath its murky surface other than the jagged rage hungry for someone to sink into. "{Thank you, my dear.}" His words are soft with improvised gratitude and affected affection for Hive's tireless search. "{I have missed you, also.}" He isn't sure how true that was before now, but he's found his emotional stride and with it his rhythm, his feet light as whirls Hive and his borrowed steps around the dancefloor.<br />
<br />
"Little Wonder" acquires new dimensions as the jazz musicians of the next act seamlessly join in, one by one. Something reaches out from his turbid depths for Ryan's electrifying voice, and though sharp and rapacious it is not anger but desire that he immediately tamps back down. It might not have stayed down, but the ''song'' is winding down, not so much ''ending'' as morphing into improvisational jazz. Matt bends to kiss Hive's hand before sending him off in DJ's direction, as best he can estimate the path of the bright flickering beat in his mind. He is emphatically ''not'' paying attention to Ryan as he hops off the stage into the arms of the ecstatically awaiting crowd. He's leaning into his anger instead, searching and finding a suitable target, veering off giddy with (somewhat) playful malice to drag Fury up from where ''he's'' been methodically getting drunk. "I hear you're a fine dancer, Director Fury," he pipes with an impish grin. "''Prove it.''"<br />
<br />
With the generous support of the free booze, Director Fury ''had'' started to enjoy the concert despite himself -- little though anyone would be able to tell by his persistently baleful glare. << That Ryan Black steady ''wildin''', but he don't sound half bad tho. >> He tenses up at the prospect some telepath might have overheard that admission, and starts running through the psionic self-defense exercises he'd let lapse. The organic changing of the act on stage makes this harder -- the steady sweeps and capricious turns of the jazz blossoming from "Little Wonder" speaks to him in a deep way that Ryan, whatever his skill ''or'' powers, could not -- and the sudden appearance of the Other Mister Tessier shatters his precarious focus altogether.<br />
<br />
"Oh ''hell'' no," he blurts as Matt pulls him to his feet, and though he's sure he ''could'' prevail if he fought harder, he doesn't. A part of him is suspicious some psionic influence swayed him to accept the dance. A part of him is terrified of being surrounded by drunken mutants with God knows what powers. The ''rest'' of him is reversing Matt's grip on his hand and letting the music move through him and appreciating how readily the younger man follows his lead. And then he's suspicious of ''that'', too. << (does he know)(what's his agenda)(at least his ''power'' can't hurt me none) >> Aloud he just says, "I been dancing longer'n you been alive. I ain't got nothing to prove." Perhaps belying this, he embellishes his already elaborate footwork, challenging Matt to keep up and at once annoyed and impressed that he does. Somewhere between this absurd game and the technical demands of playing it out on a crowded floor, he forgets his wariness and just ''dances.''<br />
<br />
"{That's how he ''get'' you.}" Relaxing, evidently? Dancing, evidently? Enjoying yourself for a few brief moments -- on one outward spin Matt whirls away and blink-and-you-might-miss-it quick, a small static-shock ''zap'' in Fury's hand -- which is turning back ''over'', gripped now in a calloused-rough one. "{Secondary mutation, you know, make you ''lose'' yourself in them fairy-green eyes.}" Ion's grin is ''fierce'', his own dark eyes bright -- did he dress for this at all? ''Probably'', with his motorcycle boots and weatherbeaten cut there's his ''nice'' jeans and a lightweight linen button down, sunburst wand jammed through a beltloop, long pointed ears blended seamless over his own.<br />
<br />
Right here Matt ''should'' have been twirling back, ''should'' have been dipping, but instead Fury's getting Ion's ''aggressively'' cheerful energy -- can he dance? Can he ''swing''? He's sure got rhythm to ''spare'' but in the scheme of things, these may be secondary to the forceful exuberance with which he's turned this ship Right Around fully heedless (or perhaps enjoying) Fury's poleaxed horror ''or'' his long-acclimatization to leading. As his partner stumbles trying to rock-step the wrong foot Ion's grin ''sharpens'', as Fury starts to lose his balance Ion's grip shifts seamlessly to a harder clamp on the older man's forearm. The Director of SHIELD does not fall; as quickly as the tornado of a dance began it's ending as Ion deposits him in the questionably loving arms of another Mongrel to recoup his balance ''properly''. Ion's cheek clicks against his teeth, fingers snapping, pointing in quick-bang motion at Fury, taking his grin and exuberance ''with'' him as he dips out across the floor -- "{Careful, eh? Party just getting started and already you slipping.}"<br />
<br />
Ion is intercepted, across the floor, pulled in to loop in to a small knot of newer Prometheans who have formed their own circle by an outstretched wing, not dark today but painted rich and brilliant with sunburst-ombre flare. Dusk's wing drapes around the electrokinetic; a soft pleased rumble in his throat as he watches an elderly woman pulled out of Blackburn teach a much younger Dirac alum the basics of swing. As he drops his head to rest against Ion's and briefly just bops with the music -- his growl deepening when the elder ''almost'' stumbles after a group of slightly-too-eager (slightly-too-tipsy?) Xavier's students collides with their group, his growl subsiding just as quick when the Dirac kid steadies her easily and the dancing-clusters mingle into one. 'Eeeevery once in a while,' he admits, a teasing amusement in his face, in the motions of his hands, that heavily exaggerates the ''rarity'' of this as the excitement in the group ''grows'' oh my ''god'' he's coming ''here'' for ''REAL'' '-- he fucking nails it.' And then he's squeezing Ion a little closer, letting his wing trail against the other man's shoulders as he sways through the group -- not towards Ryan himself but one of the ''many'' (staring // trying not to stare) around them His smile is bright as he offers out a hand. "''He'' doesn't bite, you know."<br />
<br />
Maya has been here twirling with her sister, has been chatting, has been bright-bright-bright in her elegantly floral-embroidered yellow and orange salwar set, gold bangles, gold-sequined slippers, ribbons wound through her thick braids. ''Was'' she gawking, she was trying not to gawk! Certainly not in front of at least ''some'' of her students who are ''definitely also gawking oh gosh --'' And then there's Dusk in front of her and is she ''less'' flustered, looking up into his dark eyes, sharp-fanged grin, scruffy face? She blushes, takes his hand, a smile lighting up her slightly-tipsy-glowy face. "Oh! Oh but ''you'' -- no wait ''do'' you -- ''wow'' I shouldn't assume --" She's started to reach a hand for his other -- arm? Wing? Drops it to the side, lifts it again, blushes ''deeper''. "Oh ''wow'' were you even asking me to --" But she ''is'' getting on the dance floor with him, is kind of relaxing, even, more comfortable once he starts moving, once he starts ''her'' moving -- until another turn, and another, and then she is Face To Face with Ryan and her eyes have gone wide again, smile frozen in place, gaze darting between ''him'' and the crowd around, and ''maybe'' she'd have slunk back into the circle if not for the strong wings bolstering her at her back.<br />
<br />
From one set of wings to another; Ryan's gleaming stage costume has been luminescent between the enormous black-feathered wings of the woman who has been gyrating with him. He meets Maya's frozen smile with one warm enough to thaw, one hand turning up, beckoning with an easy confidence. "We on a dance floor -- you want to stare, stare; you want to move, then move, yeah?" He waits for her to take his hand before pulling her in, graceful but simple in the steps he leads until he's confident she ''does'' have the rhythm. Around them there are still Plenty Of Stares; excited Xavier's School teens, hipster artists pretending to be too cynical. "Don't even worry about them," there's brazen-cocky in his grin now, sure, but the first time ''she'' missteps from self-conscious watching The Crowd instead he's making the correction easily to keep the rhythm, ''his'' attention solely on his still-flustered partner. "They're not judging you, they ''all'' watching me."<br />
<br />
"Oh, ''all'''em?" As one melody slides into another, it's a very familiar face back at Ryan's side. Fierce heat in Jax's chin as he props it on his friend's shoulder. 'I can get you his number,' he's mouthing totally-not-at-all-surreptitiously to his coworker, as he snags an elbow through Ryan's. For all the fierce heat, bright outfit, sparkling makeup, the actual feelings that wash through his voice over the empath are muted and distant -- there's love there, a lot of it; there's anger, there's a ''heavy'' exhaustion, a stark horror, but all of it coming through a washed-out filter. "Jus' wouldn't'a been a birthday if you hadn't saved me a dance," he's saying with a small laugh, "if Mockingbird closes 'fore I get out we gotta riot."<br />
<br />
He's ''just'' pulling Ryan away, just finding a relatively open spot at the edge of the dance floor, when a small knot of fresh young agents from the SHIELD Comms division gets up the bravery to come over en masse, crowded too-close and too-touchy as is too-common for fans. Something dims -- just brief! -- in Jax's expression as he's jostled back. It brightens again, vivid and cheerful when he whirls to find -- "''gosh'', Leo! I didn't have no ''idea'' you was such a good dancer."<br />
<br />
<< I am? >> a startled question in Leo(?)'s mind, at once colored with his very-customary diffidence and something that is -- not. << ''am'' I? >> A deep blush has filled his cheeks as he looks up from his partner to Jackson -- back to his partner. Rock-steps back to let Kitty better face Jackson. "She makes it easy." The brief-sharp sting of ache this conjures up is entirely dwarfed by an entirely more uncomplicated swell of affection. "I should -- let you two --" He squeezes Kitty's hand and lets it go, stepping away into the mess of chaos.<br />
<br />
"''He'' learns fast," is Kitty's easy -- tipsy -- warm reply, the squeeze of her hand tight around Leo's before he pulls away. There's something faintly disquieted in her thoughts when Leo pulls away, not yet a question before she turns to slot herself easily into Jax's arms. More easily than maybe it ''should'' be, with their height difference, the air between Kitty's feet and the dance floor bringing her up closer to her best friend. <br />
<br />
Later, there will be worry and rage and exhaustion. Later there will be all the emotions Kitty, like so many others here, are pushing determinedly down down down so that tonight can be special. Later there will be time -- too much time, still -- for spinning and scheming and searching. Later this -- this bright smile, this flex of her mutation -- will be too hard to maintain. <br />
<br />
But right now -- fiery warm hand in one that is delicately cool -- Kitty dances, easy and almost-carefree, on nothing.<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Joy_springs_all_radiant_in_my_breast;_Though_pauper_poor,_than_king_more_blest,&diff=25076Logs:Joy springs all radiant in my breast; Though pauper poor, than king more blest,2023-07-05T17:10:10Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Kitty]], [[B]], [[Hive]], [[Mirror|Tag 🤨]], [[Fury]], [[Ryan]], [[Alma]], [[Charles]], [[Scott]], [[NPC-FitzSimmons|FitzSimmons]], <br />
| summary = "Eat! Drink! Be Merry!" (Jax's birthday party -- followed by [[Logs:The tide beats in my soul so strong that happiness breaks forth in song,|dancing]], [[Logs:And rings aloud the welkin blue With all the songs I ever knew.|deliberating]], and [[Logs:Operation:S.O.L.S.T.I.C.E.|drama]].)<br />
| gamedate = 2023-06-21<br />
| gamedatename = summer solstice '23 / jax's 31st birthday<br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Rooftop - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Kitty, NPC-FitzSimmons, B, Hive, Mirror, Fury, Ryan, Alma, Charles, Scott, SHIELD HQ, Mutants, Humans<br />
| log =<br />
There's an unexpected oasis at the top of this gleaming high-rise, the whole of it carpeted in thick, soft, layered ground cover of sedums, grass, and moss. A small, carefully manicured grove serves as the centerpiece, with benches, tables and chairs scattered around in the shade. Beside it, a professionally landscaped garden boasts a pond and quite a few planters that either used to hold plants or still hold dying ones. The greenhouse is somewhat sparsely and eclectically populated with tropical plants, flanked by garden beds even more sparsely planted. An open lawn on the side overlooking Times Square makes a great spot for a picnic. The otherwise unsightly structure housing the roof access, a single stall bathroom, and tool shed has been covered on three sides with turf and shaped into a little promontory offering a breathtaking view of the city.<br />
<br />
The peace of the rooftop has been Rapidly Disrupted -- fifteen minutes ago, some SHIELD staffers were enjoying an early supper under the balmy light of the solstice sun. Now --<br />
<br />
Well. <br />
<br />
The lawn has mostly disappeared under the newly assembled raised stage, wires for lighting and sound systems running through the grass to generators that definitely do ''not'' belong to SHIELD. The tables have been commandeered as food and drink stations, the promontory as the drop-off spot for guests arriving via Various Modes of Flight instead of signing in on the ground floor of the building.<br />
<br />
And there are ''so'' many guests already, people from all over the city, not just Jackson Holland's large collection of personal friends -- a collection of bikers in MMMC cuts, artists still with paint stains on their hands, teenagers who ''probably'' should still be up at Westchester and definitely didn't sign out, mutant musicians with guitars strapped to their backs. The chatter through the soundcheck is not so loud yet, but the volume is slowly rising.<br />
<br />
At one of the commandeered tables, Kitty is fussing with a huge water jug and stacks of paper cups. "-- Do you," she's asking earnestly, dipping her cup into the jug and pulling it out full of water as she does so, "know where I can get another trash can? I don't think we brought enough and Blink is really due for a break." <br />
<br />
Next to her, Leo Fitz's eyes are bugging out of his skull, staring at Kitty's immaterial hand. Blinks once, twice. "...Sorry, what did you say?" He is probably still not listening.<br />
<br />
In the background of the cheerful chatter there's a quiet droning hum, one tiny blue-and-silver hoverbike floating up to hover just over SHIELD's rooftop. In addition to the many other regulatory transgressions happening, B is not currently wearing her usual sharktooth helmet -- just a tight silvery-mesh tee shirt, fairly see-through over a lacy black halter crop underneath, a pleated miniskirt in black and silver, and very stompy metallic boots with matching wristcuffs. She has her Mongrels cut over top; her claws and the slender dotted liner limning her enormous eyes are actively ''glowing'' in a slightly luminescent silvery-blue. "Have fun!" she's chirruping to the pair of (''definitely'' not signed out!) X-Kids she lets off, who are promptly scampering off to explore the Drinks Options while they think enough adults are looking the other way that they can maybe sneak some booze. B is definitely not sneaking booze, but ze ''is'' taking a short break from ferrying duty to scarper off hirself, in order to locate Jax so that ze can deliver a quick hug to the Birthday <strike>Boy</strike> Dad.<br />
<br />
By dint of being connected at the brain, Hive has already found the birthday boy. Hive is slouched on a picnic bench, leaning against the table with a droopy-lidded expression that suggests he might already be half asleep despite the ongoing commotion. He's sipping on a lemonade, looking mostly drab in faded old jeans and a grey tee shirt with 'BLUE SUN<nowiki>|</nowiki>蓝日' printed on it in bold blue text, the brightest color to his attire the ornate and vivid multicolored spiral horns someone has affixed to his head. Despite this signifier that he is Probably A Volunteer, by all appearances he is doing Absolutely Nothing Useful through the hectic party deployment -- only the crew ferrying up excited would-be attendees from many many many floors below can hear his occasional commentary: << Not that one, he's a reporter. >> << Yeah those kids are good. >> << That's just some-ass tourist they'd freak the fuck out when they saw Taylor. >><br />
<br />
... okay, only ''Jax'' and the transport crew can hear the mental commentary. Right now Hive is directing a question to Jax, slightly judgmental: << ... that asshole tried to tank your fucking art show do you really want him here? >> Highlit in their mind, a skinny pink-haired Chimaera punk waiting eagerly for a ride below. His chin lifts jerkily when B arrives, a quiet warmth softening his mental irascibility.<br />
<br />
<< Hive that was like, sophomore year of college. >> Jax's amusement is bright at Hive stealing this long-since-dead grudge. Beside the telepath he's brighter, more dapper than his usual daily wear in a bright white dress shirt with a shimmering gold tie and a vest so black that the gold embroidered solar motifs on it appear to be floating in a void, plain front trousers in the same uncanny black, cinched with a golden belt, and gold wingtip derby shoes with broguing in abstract solar patterns. Somewhere along the way of setup his surprise has given way to delight mingled with a vague sort of surreality; at this point he is just rolling with Whatever This Party Is. He's perched on the edge of the picnic table though he bounces up to return B's hug fierce and hard. "Sugar, how long y'all been working this out, this is nonsense."<br />
<br />
Tag is just hopping down from the back of a ''second'' gleaming hoverbike -- less eye-catching than Jax, more eye-catching than Hive, he's in a rainbow midi skirt and a loosely cropped tee in sky-blue with a bright sun shining out from behind puffy white clouds. "Happy birthday!" << oh no ''is'' it happy it's probably not happy -- no wait we're ''making'' it happy. >> He's joined the line for HUGS while it's still short, and drapes an elbow against Hive's shoulder after he's dispensed Hug to Jackson. "More time than you think," he says with a fey smile, "and less time than we ''should'' have. Ryan's money makes a lot of things move faster, though!"<br />
<br />
A knot of partygoers lately emerged from a glowing purple portal are gazing about in delighted disorientation. At the gruff order to "make a hole!" from somewhere beyond them -- one of the ''proper'' access stairwells, concealed in the artificial promontory -- they hastily part to make way for one S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Nicholas J. Fury. << ...shit, and I thought he had Security eating outta his hand ''before'' that Heidlage business... >> ''His'' disorientation seems somewhat less delighted, his black duster fluttering in breeze and his single eye fixed balefully on Jax as he trundles up to the picnic table. "Mister Holland," he begins, in a note of long-suffering exasperation, "it might have escaped your notice, but you are in fact still under US federal detention by UN proxy. You can't invite a dozen..." His eye flits around the ground and he quails inwardly, ''just'' a little. "...''hundred'' some folks up where without sending 'em through security. That's for your ''protection'' much as anyone else's!"<br />
<br />
"He's very detained!" B protests, clawed hand gesturing insistently in her father's direction. "''Plus'' he didn't invite anyone, he didn't even know about all this, you can't be mad at ''him''. His friends," her immense black eyes are very-very big with this assertion as she briefly turns over Long Hours Of Raid Planning in her mind, "are ''pretty'' good at keeping secrets."<br />
<br />
"I think he's practiced at being mad at ''anything''." Hive is still sipping slowly at his lemonade. His voice comes out gruff, despite the clear amusement Jax can feel in their mind. "Part of the aesthetic. -- Would you really have let all ''these'' motherfuckers through security?" His eyes are skating sidelong to where one skinny teenager with coke-bottle glasses is trying hard to impress their friends by (after being summarily rebuffed by the current bartender who is, in fact, carding for the pop-up open bar) turning their cups of water into beer. << We've got security handled, >> his mental voice is an ''unsettling'' thing, an eerie susurrus that rustles through Fury as well as the others immediately nearby with the overlapping cadences of hundreds-of-voices whispering at once -- the odd effect it gives should probably be more suited to a ghost story, a prophesy from the past, ''something'' of more import than: << enjoy the fucking booze. >><br />
<br />
"If you didn't detain him so well we wouldn't have had to bring the party here!" Tag is only straightening ''very'' slightly at Fury's approach, and mostly only to better turn a brighter smile up to the much taller man. Fury's eyepatch, meanwhile, is growing a stylized iridescent sunburst pattern to offset All The Black.<br />
<br />
"I ain't going nowhere," Jax promises Fury, drawing a small X over his heart as he says it. "And I surely have noticed. -- Only person I ''invited''..." He trails off, here, ''his'' single eye scrunching up along with his nose as he scans the growing crowd. "... ain't here, actually. Guess all these folks is my consolation prize. Did you want cake? There's good cake."<br />
<br />
Fury clenches his jaw a little tighter. "Keeping secrets," he echoes, skepticism carved deep into his voice and his brow alike, "Y'all got whole passel'a -- ''teenagers'' up in here." He's quietly self-congratulatory that he bit back the impulse to say "Millennials" instead. "Even if you don't got anyone here for your ''life'', there's got to be reporters --" He stops cold. "What in tarnation." His eye sweeps back and forth before settling on Hive. << Get the hell out of my head >> does not sound much like his usual timbre of blustery curmudgeonry. It bristles instead with unreasoning fear as he replies, slow and measured. "The person you invited..." He's turning to look at the stage, nearly complete now. << Oh hell, no. >> Aloud, almost simultaneously, "Oh ''hell'' no. Least you coulda ''told'' me before you let Ryan Fucking Black make a fool of me. You know that ain't gon' end well for you, neither."<br />
<br />
The person Jax invited is ''about'' to be here. Ryan is, apparently, arriving not via hoverbike or glowing supplies-portal -- instead there's a light that is ''descending'' from the evening sky above. He's not dressed for stage ''yet'' but he is striking all the same in a black fishnet shirt that quiets the shimmer of gold lamé underneath, torn open in the back to accommodate intricate white gossamer wings, tattered and singed at the edges, a slender gold chainmaile belt slung low on his hips to frame black leggings dotted with shimmering stars, and chunky black ankle boots accented with golden sun buckles. The boots have had some also-gold hardware added aftermarket; it matches the cuffs he's wearing on his wrists and both boots and cuffs emit a radiant glow (... plenty identifiable to anyone familiar with the whole ''range'' of B's hovertech accessories) as he lowers himself neatly to Jax's side. "Reporters strictly prohibited," he's waggling a finger lazily in Hive's direction as he curls an arm around Jax's fiercely warm shoulders, "this ain't my first rodeo. He didn't ''let'' me do anything, this is a birthday party for a ''dear'' friend in a terrible fucking situation. If," he allows lightly, "you want to make a fool of yourself about it, that'll just be a little lagniappe. ''Could'' just enjoy the show, though."<br />
<br />
While Ryan is descending from on high, yet another swirl of purple light beside the stage disgorges Alma, who at a casual ambling pace ends up at the picnic table around the same time as Ryan. Tonight she's wearing a slim white three-piece suit, with neat diamond-shaped openings for inky black wings, birdlike but with knives (''probably'' not real like those under her jacket) for pinions, each edged in gold, black dress boots with subtle gold accenting. The fine twists of her long hair are laced with gold, too, meticulously coiled at the back of her head and held in place with the glowing sun-tipped wand that identifies her as <strike>a solstice fairy</strike> event staff, and the gold kippah at her crown is embroidered with a bold black sunburst. "Happy birthday," she tells Jax before leveling a flat, unimpressed gaze at Fury. "There are worse things to be than a fool."<br />
<br />
Tag(?)'s eyes have gone just a little wider at Ryan's words, and though it's hard outwardly to tell at which ''part'', internally ''reporters strictly prohibited'' is rotating in an oddly thoughtful contemplation. "Oh!" He's bouncing upright, up on his ''toes'' to press a peck to Jax's cheek. "Some of those fairies need some makeup adjustments -- save me a dance?" And then he's flitting off to disappear into the crowd.<br />
<br />
<< -- it's like a half-passel of teenagers >> is just a little bitter in B's mind, but on the outside she's chipper-bright: "Oh yeah! There's more on the way, too, thanks for reminding me." B's smile is quick, closed-lipped, cheery. "You really ''should'' enjoy the show, my brother's ''great'' -- uh, not that you're not great ''too''," she's adding hastily to Ryan, leaning in to bonk her forehead lightly against his arm, "and the jazz band after is ''fantastic'' if you like dancing." Though she sounds just a ''little'' skeptical of this last part as she looks over Fury And His Scowl. ''Does'' he like dancing? She'll leave this mystery for later -- she's dashing back off to her bike, ''probably'' to ferry more people, some of which may be teenagers, up to the revelry.<br />
<br />
Despite himself, Ryan's ridiculous entrance summons up something in Hive that is equal parts ''fondness'' in the exasperation. The telepath hasn't actually roused himself to watch it, but he's watching it all the same, through many (many) reflected stares from around the rooftop. Hive ''himself'' has scrunched his eyes closed like he's ''annoyed'' despite the fact his eyes weren't even aimed in Ryan's direction at the time, but there's a slow breath of laughter as the musician lands. "-- Half-passel of teenagers," he echoes, flat, a beat after B. He's sitting up as Tag (🤨) rabbits off, following the man's departure with a quiet ''huff''. "They're carding. -- I actually can't get out your head 'less you want to leave the building, let us handle this party, would you feel better if I lied to you about it?" << I'm out your head now. >> His knuckles dig slow at his eyes. "If it makes you feel better, Ryan's people are real fucking good at chaos."<br />
<br />
Fury's eye narrows impossibly further. "It ''is'' a terrible fucking situation, and I'm real keen on making sure it don't get worse. I got nothing against throwing him a birthday party --" << Shit, best not poke him ''too'' hard, that boy crazy as a peach orchard boar >> "Just -- keep this rodeo under wraps." His eye skates back over to Hive, making a mental note to check back in with Fitzsimmons in desperate hope for something -- ''anything'' to keep his thoughts his own. << ...''got''damn telepaths... >> "I'm real glad folks are being so conscientious about underage drinking and all, but it's the ''TikTokking'' I'm worried about." << Shoulda left well enough alone about the kids, poor bastard can't catch a break. >> But it's Lucien he's thinking about, hovering uncertain before his desk. "It'd make me feel better if they were ''real fucking good'' at order. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a ''whole'' passel'a agents I gotta ''order'' back for a second shift." He turns on his heel and walks almost directly into an older man in a wheelchair, startled into a flustered "begging your pardon" before he reroutes to stalk off in proper curmudgeonly fashion.<br />
<br />
Neither Charles Xavier nor his wheelchair seem particularly offended for having interrupted Fury's dramatic exit. He is wearing a light gray suit, casual by his standards, and riding one of his sleeker powered chairs. "Well, that gentleman seems to be enjoying himself already," he says lightly, rolling to a stop. The warmth he emanates is soothing and altogether different from the waves of heat rolling off of Jax. "Many happy returns." There is a certain ''gravity'' to the way he says this, a wordless knowledge that he means more than "happy birthday". All the same, he's offering a large envelope sealed with a golden sun and addressed simply to "Jackson" in his elegant, flowing hand. "And a thousand apologies for not coming to you sooner. It wasn't for lack of concern, ''or'' encouragement." He glances aside and up at his companion, a ''little'' sheepishly. "There's something in the post for you, too, whenever it gets past the UN's puzzled scrutiny. But if there's anything I can do to assist tonight..." He doesn't ''look'' at Hive, but his offer to the younger telepath is more explicit, a skillful and matter-of-fact shifting aside of his shields.<br />
<br />
Scott Summers looks slightly embarrassed to be participating in Fury's frustration of the day; he gives him a sympathetic grimace as he sidesteps to let him pass, before falling back into step with Charles. Evidently he can't beat 'Many happy returns' as a birthday wish; after Charles has finished speaking, Scott gives Jax a more standard, "Happy birthday." His gift is in a plain brown Hallmark envelope, lettered somewhat less elegantly than the Professor's; as soon as it's been handed over, Scott is looking curiously around this birthday shindig, gaze stuttering on the teenagers trying to sneak booze. His mouth quirks silently; his thought is pitched for Charles to notice, though probably Hive can hear it too. << Get a wand, too. >><br />
<br />
"Pretty sure he likes dancing." Jax is thinking back to a Mockingbird booth another lifetime ago, thinking back to twirling Ryan out on the familiar dancefloor -- he doesn't have time to get caught up in regret, Ryan's Very Splashy Entrance is pushing melancholy ''straight'' out of his mind. He tips his head up; his eye bugs cartoon-style out of his head with a briefly twinkling starry-eyed sparkle as Ryan descends. "I happen to know Ally'll be right excited about an intimate private Ryan Black concert." He curls his arm tight back around Ryan, squeezing hard. "Sugar, when you said a few of my closest friends, this --"<br />
<br />
-- the illusory twinkle has remained even if his eye has returned to its normal ''size'' when Charles and Scott arrive. "Gosh! Sure weren't all who I was expecting." He's giving Scott a ''bright'' smile, bouncing forward to lean in and curl an arm around Charles in hug before taking both his presents. "''Thank'' you! Tonight sure is full of surprises. You know they put all this together without a word to me, was y'all in on it?" Inwardly he is ''fully unsure'' whether to think that his staid advisor or the dignified old Boomer were in on this nonsense; he absolutely would believe Either Way. "What you can ''do'' is enjoy yourselfs," << if it's possible, >> he's fretting inwardly, << we could all use it, >> and here he's thinking of Dawson's bright-warm smile in his scarred face, of his fierce determination to keep Tuesday Nights carved out for Game Night for years through so much chaos and pain; thinking of Ryan's long-long hours creating an online arts festival in the early pandemic days, thinking of songs sung with Spencer fierce and (joyful) (hurt) (defiant) at vigil marches, thinking of the kids coming back to homes quiet and empty and mourning or alive and full of love, thinking --<br />
<br />
"-- there's plenty of booze," he's a little wry, here, "Ryan's payin'." He nudges Ryan with an elbow. "I assume."<br />
<br />
"It's fine," Hive kind-of-not-really rats out the kids nearby as Scott's gaze hitches on them, "Everett's getting good practice in. Probably take him like. Three solid more hours to get enough booze into that water to get even one of them tipsy. Probably won't stop them ''acting'' drunk earlier than that, though." His brows knit, and though his mind is reaching for Xavier's, it's Scott he's looking to Scott with a sudden frown. "-- he's not gonna ''explode'' that water, is he?"<br />
<br />
He's coiling firm roots, meanwhile, into the older man's mind with a smooth and seamless shift of identity-perspective that suddenly floods his<nowiki>|</nowiki>their awareness with an achingly familiar lightning-hypervigilant rapid-processing awareness of Every Mind not just here on the roof but down on the block below, out in Freaktown, out at the school, over in Chimaera, sorting at blinding speed through every request for entry and a complex array of desires and dangers and risks and needs before giving the okay to each of the transport crew.<br />
<br />
Where ''did'' the wand appear from. For most people it's probably hard to track the flicker-blink of motion, though Charles at least can feel Hive (rudely? Not rudely?) yoinking That Part Of Them over in a blur of teleportation from across the roof ''just'' long enough to drop a sunburst-wand onto Charles's lap. His "Thanks" is gruff, though through the vast forest that is ''them'' a warm glow of sun is shining, now.<br />
<br />
His head rolls back. Eyes ''roll'', at Jax. "Liar. How long you known this crazy-ass dipshit and his theatrics. You were expecting exactly this." After a beat, he adds, with a nod towards Xavier, "''Please''. ''This'' motherfucker is paying now."<br />
<br />
"We're anarchists," Ryan's telling Fury with a ''fiercely'' cheerful grin, "if there's one thing we're real damn good at it's bringing order outta chaos." His brows have hiked when Xavier arrives, and it's Scott he addresses first, Louisiana roots laid on thick in his accent ''now'' where previously it had hewed far closer to a broadcast-neutral: "''Well'' gar ici Scott Summers, I owe you one. Have you manage to get noted philanthropist Charles Xavier himself here to grace us with his presence? 'tween you and me if I had known what it took to wrangle a visit, I'd'a throwed Jax a birthday party each week, by now."<br />
<br />
Though he's given Scott a warm smile, it hews cutting-sharp when it turns to Xavier: "-- jail do get awful lonely -- but I know you gotta be a ''busy'' man up that school'a yourn, I'm sure." His arm has gone ''just'' a hair tighter around Jax for the moment before he releases his friend to his effusive greeting hug. Ryan's mind is bristling with protective ire the whole while. Possibly ''he'' might take Just A Smidge longer than Jax to forgive the tardiness of this visit, lavish presents notwithstanding. He does allow ''just'' a hint of amusement, ''slightly'' self-conscious, to soften his overprotective prickling, as he plucks Hive's lemonade for a sip. "Yeah? Well bless his heart, then, just tell me where I forward the bill."<br />
<br />
"-- I'd be very happy to talk about my ''research'' next time I'm visiting, L-- Fitz, ''would'' you excuse me." Kitty didn't actually take no for an answer before stepping breezily through the offending scientist and making her way to the knot of people around Jackson. Compared to everyone else, she's ''well'' underdressed -- oversized tee-shirt that is mottled with a variety of textures evoking bathroom tile, wood panelling, and floral wallpaper in patches, grey leggings. There's a drawstring bag on her back in a similar chaotic pattern to her shirt -- the only obvious cue she's a Friend of the Birthday Boy is the gold headband holding back her hair with squiggly sunburst lines emanating from it, and the fairy wand peeking out the top of her bag. <br />
<br />
Kitty comes up on Jax's free side, leaning in to hug her friend, tight and solid. "Happy birthday, sunshine -- Think I broke ''that'' little English guy's mind again," she says, wry, amused irritation sensible to the -paths among them, "can I stack that onto your ''actual'' present." She's rolled up ''just'' in time to hear Ryan speak to -- << hi Professor (hi dad) (Kitty ''be'' normal good lord) >> -- Charles, one eyebrow quirking up well before ''bless his heart'' can be deployed. "Huh. That's sweet -- late arrivals club going halvsies on the party. ''Probably'' you do not want to be calling the kettle black," is more squarely to Ryan, annoyance (at his past absences here and at ''Charles's'' absence, too) tempered by a broad blanket of affection towards most of the assembled, "that's probably, like, your own brand infringement. -- Alma," and this subject change is ''abrupt'', the smile sudden and bright across her face, "you look incredible, are you working all night or can I actually get a dance in sometime?"<br />
<br />
<< Just what we need right now at Xavier's, >> Scott is thinking, << instant-booze mutation. >> "Probably not. I'll keep an eye on it," he says, as much to Charles as to Hive, though he then pulls his eyes reluctantly away from Everett, settling on Ryan. There's a little irritation-indignation-amusement rising up as the raid team members address the Professor, a stray, hastily-smothered << they're not ''wrong'' (probably shouldn't say anything even if they were) >> that doesn't quite kill his defensiveness. He might feel more inclined (entitled?) to tell ''Kitty'' off, but -- another glance at the Professor, another silent decision to keep his trap shut where all of this who-visited-when stuff is concerned, and to flail back toward civil conversation. "I like the decorations," he says. "Very --" << sparkly >> "-- creative."<br />
<br />
As unflappable as she is, Alma still shakes her head when Fury storms off. "Not sure he's interested in dancing with freaks." She isn't sure he's ''not'', either, and wonders how far Ryan -- or any of them -- could push before he'd put his foot down. "His loss." Her disdain for Charles and Scott is considerably milder, already tempered by the thought they might be good to have on hand if something went sideways, and mollified further by Jax's reaction. When Kitty admonishes Ryan she quietly adjusts her estimation of Time Until Drama, and though the prospect does not ''frighten'' her, she says a silent bracha that they've made it this far without incident. Maybe that's why Kitty's question catches her off guard, and her eyebrows tick up. "I'm working all night, but there are a lot of us here and we get breaks." She allows a slightly indulgent smile. "I'll save you a dance."<br />
<br />
"Alas, I can take no credit for this spectacle," says Charles, and despite his mild tone, the word "spectacle" ''feels'' distinctly positive. "But I may take some small credit after Ryan sends my accountant the bill, and I do intend to enjoy myself." He produces a business card and leans forward to pass it to Ryan. His warmth is like dappled sunlight now, and there is both contrition and concern in it. << Please be gentle with him, Kitty. Be gentle with ''yourself'', too. >> "He can't explode the water," he adds, though Hive knew this without need for words the moment his mind became their. "At least not without help, and I trust you'll notice if the students get it in their heads to improvise a still." All the same, they are mentally noting those most likely to attempt such a thing (or other potentially disastrous shenanigans) out of the X-kids present. << They're not wrong, >> his agreement is quiet in Scott's mind, << and you needn't defend me, regardless, though I appreciate the sentiment. Tonight is for Jackson. >> He turns the sunburst wand over in his hands, his smile at the whimsical craftsmanship not altogether conscious. "They are lovely -- my compliments. I'm sure there's plenty more creativity yet to come."<br />
<br />
Ryan's brows hike right ''back'' at Kitty -- but it's with an easing of his smile, a dip of his head, and where warmth has been radiating from Charles there's a harmony now from Ryan, picking ''up'' that dappled-sun-warmth and twisting it into a playful violin trill that dances between them with a burst of lighthearted amusement before it dissipates into the bustle of the set-up. "Shiiiit," Ryan drawls, taking Charles's card, "can you sing? Guess my publicist ''would'' be pretty pissed if I tried turning the whole shebang over at this stage of the game." He tucks the card away, spreads his arms wide. "Thanks," is to the compliments on the decorations, "Had a whole army of artists to help out. Eat! Drink! Be Merry! -- especially you," he's saying this to Alma, brightly, "I'll hold off on dying till tomorrow."<br />
<br />
It's Sunlight^3, a flutter-glow when Kitty comes in for a hug that Jax returns fierce. "Oh ''gosh'' FitzSimmons gonna be having a ''constant'' freakout all night ''long'', I think, they don't hardly know what to do with any of us let alone -- oh gosh don't nobody let slip nothin' 'bout Scott, okay, I jus' been letting 'em think the glasses is because he thinks he's way too cool for everyone." His internal Caution Levels are making vague quiet adjustments at Kitty's admonishment and just as quickly adjusting them back at that light trill. "''Boy'' don't even joke." His ''bap'' is light, his ''tone'' is light, his thoughts -- well. He's doing a quick but thorough assessment of his layers of bright-illusory makeup, the touchups to the scars that warp his tattoos, leaning ''in'' to the parts of him better practiced at psionic shielding and plain Not ADHD Mental Discipline. Looping that playful violin trill until it sinks ''in'', looping his ''arm'' through Kitty's. Leaning into Ryan's and smiling. ''Bright''. "Y'all. Thanks for coming," and here it's not forced, not illusion, just a warm gratitude in the words. "Sure did brighten my day."<br />
<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Joy_springs_all_radiant_in_my_breast;_Though_pauper_poor,_than_king_more_blest,&diff=25075Logs:Joy springs all radiant in my breast; Though pauper poor, than king more blest,2023-07-05T17:09:55Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Kitty]], [[B]], [[Hive]], [[Mirror|Tag 🤨]], [[Fury]], [[Ryan]], [[Alma]], [[Charles]], [[Scott]], [[NPC-FitzSimmons|FitzSimmons]], <br />
| summary = "Eat! Drink! Be Merry!" (Jax's birthday party -- followed by [[The tide beats in my soul so strong that happiness breaks forth in song,|dancing]], [[Logs:And rings aloud the welkin blue With all the songs I ever knew.|deliberating]], and [[Logs:Operation:S.O.L.S.T.I.C.E.|drama]].)<br />
| gamedate = 2023-06-21<br />
| gamedatename = summer solstice '23 / jax's 31st birthday<br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Rooftop - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Kitty, NPC-FitzSimmons, B, Hive, Mirror, Fury, Ryan, Alma, Charles, Scott, SHIELD HQ, Mutants, Humans<br />
| log =<br />
There's an unexpected oasis at the top of this gleaming high-rise, the whole of it carpeted in thick, soft, layered ground cover of sedums, grass, and moss. A small, carefully manicured grove serves as the centerpiece, with benches, tables and chairs scattered around in the shade. Beside it, a professionally landscaped garden boasts a pond and quite a few planters that either used to hold plants or still hold dying ones. The greenhouse is somewhat sparsely and eclectically populated with tropical plants, flanked by garden beds even more sparsely planted. An open lawn on the side overlooking Times Square makes a great spot for a picnic. The otherwise unsightly structure housing the roof access, a single stall bathroom, and tool shed has been covered on three sides with turf and shaped into a little promontory offering a breathtaking view of the city.<br />
<br />
The peace of the rooftop has been Rapidly Disrupted -- fifteen minutes ago, some SHIELD staffers were enjoying an early supper under the balmy light of the solstice sun. Now --<br />
<br />
Well. <br />
<br />
The lawn has mostly disappeared under the newly assembled raised stage, wires for lighting and sound systems running through the grass to generators that definitely do ''not'' belong to SHIELD. The tables have been commandeered as food and drink stations, the promontory as the drop-off spot for guests arriving via Various Modes of Flight instead of signing in on the ground floor of the building.<br />
<br />
And there are ''so'' many guests already, people from all over the city, not just Jackson Holland's large collection of personal friends -- a collection of bikers in MMMC cuts, artists still with paint stains on their hands, teenagers who ''probably'' should still be up at Westchester and definitely didn't sign out, mutant musicians with guitars strapped to their backs. The chatter through the soundcheck is not so loud yet, but the volume is slowly rising.<br />
<br />
At one of the commandeered tables, Kitty is fussing with a huge water jug and stacks of paper cups. "-- Do you," she's asking earnestly, dipping her cup into the jug and pulling it out full of water as she does so, "know where I can get another trash can? I don't think we brought enough and Blink is really due for a break." <br />
<br />
Next to her, Leo Fitz's eyes are bugging out of his skull, staring at Kitty's immaterial hand. Blinks once, twice. "...Sorry, what did you say?" He is probably still not listening.<br />
<br />
In the background of the cheerful chatter there's a quiet droning hum, one tiny blue-and-silver hoverbike floating up to hover just over SHIELD's rooftop. In addition to the many other regulatory transgressions happening, B is not currently wearing her usual sharktooth helmet -- just a tight silvery-mesh tee shirt, fairly see-through over a lacy black halter crop underneath, a pleated miniskirt in black and silver, and very stompy metallic boots with matching wristcuffs. She has her Mongrels cut over top; her claws and the slender dotted liner limning her enormous eyes are actively ''glowing'' in a slightly luminescent silvery-blue. "Have fun!" she's chirruping to the pair of (''definitely'' not signed out!) X-Kids she lets off, who are promptly scampering off to explore the Drinks Options while they think enough adults are looking the other way that they can maybe sneak some booze. B is definitely not sneaking booze, but ze ''is'' taking a short break from ferrying duty to scarper off hirself, in order to locate Jax so that ze can deliver a quick hug to the Birthday <strike>Boy</strike> Dad.<br />
<br />
By dint of being connected at the brain, Hive has already found the birthday boy. Hive is slouched on a picnic bench, leaning against the table with a droopy-lidded expression that suggests he might already be half asleep despite the ongoing commotion. He's sipping on a lemonade, looking mostly drab in faded old jeans and a grey tee shirt with 'BLUE SUN<nowiki>|</nowiki>蓝日' printed on it in bold blue text, the brightest color to his attire the ornate and vivid multicolored spiral horns someone has affixed to his head. Despite this signifier that he is Probably A Volunteer, by all appearances he is doing Absolutely Nothing Useful through the hectic party deployment -- only the crew ferrying up excited would-be attendees from many many many floors below can hear his occasional commentary: << Not that one, he's a reporter. >> << Yeah those kids are good. >> << That's just some-ass tourist they'd freak the fuck out when they saw Taylor. >><br />
<br />
... okay, only ''Jax'' and the transport crew can hear the mental commentary. Right now Hive is directing a question to Jax, slightly judgmental: << ... that asshole tried to tank your fucking art show do you really want him here? >> Highlit in their mind, a skinny pink-haired Chimaera punk waiting eagerly for a ride below. His chin lifts jerkily when B arrives, a quiet warmth softening his mental irascibility.<br />
<br />
<< Hive that was like, sophomore year of college. >> Jax's amusement is bright at Hive stealing this long-since-dead grudge. Beside the telepath he's brighter, more dapper than his usual daily wear in a bright white dress shirt with a shimmering gold tie and a vest so black that the gold embroidered solar motifs on it appear to be floating in a void, plain front trousers in the same uncanny black, cinched with a golden belt, and gold wingtip derby shoes with broguing in abstract solar patterns. Somewhere along the way of setup his surprise has given way to delight mingled with a vague sort of surreality; at this point he is just rolling with Whatever This Party Is. He's perched on the edge of the picnic table though he bounces up to return B's hug fierce and hard. "Sugar, how long y'all been working this out, this is nonsense."<br />
<br />
Tag is just hopping down from the back of a ''second'' gleaming hoverbike -- less eye-catching than Jax, more eye-catching than Hive, he's in a rainbow midi skirt and a loosely cropped tee in sky-blue with a bright sun shining out from behind puffy white clouds. "Happy birthday!" << oh no ''is'' it happy it's probably not happy -- no wait we're ''making'' it happy. >> He's joined the line for HUGS while it's still short, and drapes an elbow against Hive's shoulder after he's dispensed Hug to Jackson. "More time than you think," he says with a fey smile, "and less time than we ''should'' have. Ryan's money makes a lot of things move faster, though!"<br />
<br />
A knot of partygoers lately emerged from a glowing purple portal are gazing about in delighted disorientation. At the gruff order to "make a hole!" from somewhere beyond them -- one of the ''proper'' access stairwells, concealed in the artificial promontory -- they hastily part to make way for one S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Nicholas J. Fury. << ...shit, and I thought he had Security eating outta his hand ''before'' that Heidlage business... >> ''His'' disorientation seems somewhat less delighted, his black duster fluttering in breeze and his single eye fixed balefully on Jax as he trundles up to the picnic table. "Mister Holland," he begins, in a note of long-suffering exasperation, "it might have escaped your notice, but you are in fact still under US federal detention by UN proxy. You can't invite a dozen..." His eye flits around the ground and he quails inwardly, ''just'' a little. "...''hundred'' some folks up where without sending 'em through security. That's for your ''protection'' much as anyone else's!"<br />
<br />
"He's very detained!" B protests, clawed hand gesturing insistently in her father's direction. "''Plus'' he didn't invite anyone, he didn't even know about all this, you can't be mad at ''him''. His friends," her immense black eyes are very-very big with this assertion as she briefly turns over Long Hours Of Raid Planning in her mind, "are ''pretty'' good at keeping secrets."<br />
<br />
"I think he's practiced at being mad at ''anything''." Hive is still sipping slowly at his lemonade. His voice comes out gruff, despite the clear amusement Jax can feel in their mind. "Part of the aesthetic. -- Would you really have let all ''these'' motherfuckers through security?" His eyes are skating sidelong to where one skinny teenager with coke-bottle glasses is trying hard to impress their friends by (after being summarily rebuffed by the current bartender who is, in fact, carding for the pop-up open bar) turning their cups of water into beer. << We've got security handled, >> his mental voice is an ''unsettling'' thing, an eerie susurrus that rustles through Fury as well as the others immediately nearby with the overlapping cadences of hundreds-of-voices whispering at once -- the odd effect it gives should probably be more suited to a ghost story, a prophesy from the past, ''something'' of more import than: << enjoy the fucking booze. >><br />
<br />
"If you didn't detain him so well we wouldn't have had to bring the party here!" Tag is only straightening ''very'' slightly at Fury's approach, and mostly only to better turn a brighter smile up to the much taller man. Fury's eyepatch, meanwhile, is growing a stylized iridescent sunburst pattern to offset All The Black.<br />
<br />
"I ain't going nowhere," Jax promises Fury, drawing a small X over his heart as he says it. "And I surely have noticed. -- Only person I ''invited''..." He trails off, here, ''his'' single eye scrunching up along with his nose as he scans the growing crowd. "... ain't here, actually. Guess all these folks is my consolation prize. Did you want cake? There's good cake."<br />
<br />
Fury clenches his jaw a little tighter. "Keeping secrets," he echoes, skepticism carved deep into his voice and his brow alike, "Y'all got whole passel'a -- ''teenagers'' up in here." He's quietly self-congratulatory that he bit back the impulse to say "Millennials" instead. "Even if you don't got anyone here for your ''life'', there's got to be reporters --" He stops cold. "What in tarnation." His eye sweeps back and forth before settling on Hive. << Get the hell out of my head >> does not sound much like his usual timbre of blustery curmudgeonry. It bristles instead with unreasoning fear as he replies, slow and measured. "The person you invited..." He's turning to look at the stage, nearly complete now. << Oh hell, no. >> Aloud, almost simultaneously, "Oh ''hell'' no. Least you coulda ''told'' me before you let Ryan Fucking Black make a fool of me. You know that ain't gon' end well for you, neither."<br />
<br />
The person Jax invited is ''about'' to be here. Ryan is, apparently, arriving not via hoverbike or glowing supplies-portal -- instead there's a light that is ''descending'' from the evening sky above. He's not dressed for stage ''yet'' but he is striking all the same in a black fishnet shirt that quiets the shimmer of gold lamé underneath, torn open in the back to accommodate intricate white gossamer wings, tattered and singed at the edges, a slender gold chainmaile belt slung low on his hips to frame black leggings dotted with shimmering stars, and chunky black ankle boots accented with golden sun buckles. The boots have had some also-gold hardware added aftermarket; it matches the cuffs he's wearing on his wrists and both boots and cuffs emit a radiant glow (... plenty identifiable to anyone familiar with the whole ''range'' of B's hovertech accessories) as he lowers himself neatly to Jax's side. "Reporters strictly prohibited," he's waggling a finger lazily in Hive's direction as he curls an arm around Jax's fiercely warm shoulders, "this ain't my first rodeo. He didn't ''let'' me do anything, this is a birthday party for a ''dear'' friend in a terrible fucking situation. If," he allows lightly, "you want to make a fool of yourself about it, that'll just be a little lagniappe. ''Could'' just enjoy the show, though."<br />
<br />
While Ryan is descending from on high, yet another swirl of purple light beside the stage disgorges Alma, who at a casual ambling pace ends up at the picnic table around the same time as Ryan. Tonight she's wearing a slim white three-piece suit, with neat diamond-shaped openings for inky black wings, birdlike but with knives (''probably'' not real like those under her jacket) for pinions, each edged in gold, black dress boots with subtle gold accenting. The fine twists of her long hair are laced with gold, too, meticulously coiled at the back of her head and held in place with the glowing sun-tipped wand that identifies her as <strike>a solstice fairy</strike> event staff, and the gold kippah at her crown is embroidered with a bold black sunburst. "Happy birthday," she tells Jax before leveling a flat, unimpressed gaze at Fury. "There are worse things to be than a fool."<br />
<br />
Tag(?)'s eyes have gone just a little wider at Ryan's words, and though it's hard outwardly to tell at which ''part'', internally ''reporters strictly prohibited'' is rotating in an oddly thoughtful contemplation. "Oh!" He's bouncing upright, up on his ''toes'' to press a peck to Jax's cheek. "Some of those fairies need some makeup adjustments -- save me a dance?" And then he's flitting off to disappear into the crowd.<br />
<br />
<< -- it's like a half-passel of teenagers >> is just a little bitter in B's mind, but on the outside she's chipper-bright: "Oh yeah! There's more on the way, too, thanks for reminding me." B's smile is quick, closed-lipped, cheery. "You really ''should'' enjoy the show, my brother's ''great'' -- uh, not that you're not great ''too''," she's adding hastily to Ryan, leaning in to bonk her forehead lightly against his arm, "and the jazz band after is ''fantastic'' if you like dancing." Though she sounds just a ''little'' skeptical of this last part as she looks over Fury And His Scowl. ''Does'' he like dancing? She'll leave this mystery for later -- she's dashing back off to her bike, ''probably'' to ferry more people, some of which may be teenagers, up to the revelry.<br />
<br />
Despite himself, Ryan's ridiculous entrance summons up something in Hive that is equal parts ''fondness'' in the exasperation. The telepath hasn't actually roused himself to watch it, but he's watching it all the same, through many (many) reflected stares from around the rooftop. Hive ''himself'' has scrunched his eyes closed like he's ''annoyed'' despite the fact his eyes weren't even aimed in Ryan's direction at the time, but there's a slow breath of laughter as the musician lands. "-- Half-passel of teenagers," he echoes, flat, a beat after B. He's sitting up as Tag (🤨) rabbits off, following the man's departure with a quiet ''huff''. "They're carding. -- I actually can't get out your head 'less you want to leave the building, let us handle this party, would you feel better if I lied to you about it?" << I'm out your head now. >> His knuckles dig slow at his eyes. "If it makes you feel better, Ryan's people are real fucking good at chaos."<br />
<br />
Fury's eye narrows impossibly further. "It ''is'' a terrible fucking situation, and I'm real keen on making sure it don't get worse. I got nothing against throwing him a birthday party --" << Shit, best not poke him ''too'' hard, that boy crazy as a peach orchard boar >> "Just -- keep this rodeo under wraps." His eye skates back over to Hive, making a mental note to check back in with Fitzsimmons in desperate hope for something -- ''anything'' to keep his thoughts his own. << ...''got''damn telepaths... >> "I'm real glad folks are being so conscientious about underage drinking and all, but it's the ''TikTokking'' I'm worried about." << Shoulda left well enough alone about the kids, poor bastard can't catch a break. >> But it's Lucien he's thinking about, hovering uncertain before his desk. "It'd make me feel better if they were ''real fucking good'' at order. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a ''whole'' passel'a agents I gotta ''order'' back for a second shift." He turns on his heel and walks almost directly into an older man in a wheelchair, startled into a flustered "begging your pardon" before he reroutes to stalk off in proper curmudgeonly fashion.<br />
<br />
Neither Charles Xavier nor his wheelchair seem particularly offended for having interrupted Fury's dramatic exit. He is wearing a light gray suit, casual by his standards, and riding one of his sleeker powered chairs. "Well, that gentleman seems to be enjoying himself already," he says lightly, rolling to a stop. The warmth he emanates is soothing and altogether different from the waves of heat rolling off of Jax. "Many happy returns." There is a certain ''gravity'' to the way he says this, a wordless knowledge that he means more than "happy birthday". All the same, he's offering a large envelope sealed with a golden sun and addressed simply to "Jackson" in his elegant, flowing hand. "And a thousand apologies for not coming to you sooner. It wasn't for lack of concern, ''or'' encouragement." He glances aside and up at his companion, a ''little'' sheepishly. "There's something in the post for you, too, whenever it gets past the UN's puzzled scrutiny. But if there's anything I can do to assist tonight..." He doesn't ''look'' at Hive, but his offer to the younger telepath is more explicit, a skillful and matter-of-fact shifting aside of his shields.<br />
<br />
Scott Summers looks slightly embarrassed to be participating in Fury's frustration of the day; he gives him a sympathetic grimace as he sidesteps to let him pass, before falling back into step with Charles. Evidently he can't beat 'Many happy returns' as a birthday wish; after Charles has finished speaking, Scott gives Jax a more standard, "Happy birthday." His gift is in a plain brown Hallmark envelope, lettered somewhat less elegantly than the Professor's; as soon as it's been handed over, Scott is looking curiously around this birthday shindig, gaze stuttering on the teenagers trying to sneak booze. His mouth quirks silently; his thought is pitched for Charles to notice, though probably Hive can hear it too. << Get a wand, too. >><br />
<br />
"Pretty sure he likes dancing." Jax is thinking back to a Mockingbird booth another lifetime ago, thinking back to twirling Ryan out on the familiar dancefloor -- he doesn't have time to get caught up in regret, Ryan's Very Splashy Entrance is pushing melancholy ''straight'' out of his mind. He tips his head up; his eye bugs cartoon-style out of his head with a briefly twinkling starry-eyed sparkle as Ryan descends. "I happen to know Ally'll be right excited about an intimate private Ryan Black concert." He curls his arm tight back around Ryan, squeezing hard. "Sugar, when you said a few of my closest friends, this --"<br />
<br />
-- the illusory twinkle has remained even if his eye has returned to its normal ''size'' when Charles and Scott arrive. "Gosh! Sure weren't all who I was expecting." He's giving Scott a ''bright'' smile, bouncing forward to lean in and curl an arm around Charles in hug before taking both his presents. "''Thank'' you! Tonight sure is full of surprises. You know they put all this together without a word to me, was y'all in on it?" Inwardly he is ''fully unsure'' whether to think that his staid advisor or the dignified old Boomer were in on this nonsense; he absolutely would believe Either Way. "What you can ''do'' is enjoy yourselfs," << if it's possible, >> he's fretting inwardly, << we could all use it, >> and here he's thinking of Dawson's bright-warm smile in his scarred face, of his fierce determination to keep Tuesday Nights carved out for Game Night for years through so much chaos and pain; thinking of Ryan's long-long hours creating an online arts festival in the early pandemic days, thinking of songs sung with Spencer fierce and (joyful) (hurt) (defiant) at vigil marches, thinking of the kids coming back to homes quiet and empty and mourning or alive and full of love, thinking --<br />
<br />
"-- there's plenty of booze," he's a little wry, here, "Ryan's payin'." He nudges Ryan with an elbow. "I assume."<br />
<br />
"It's fine," Hive kind-of-not-really rats out the kids nearby as Scott's gaze hitches on them, "Everett's getting good practice in. Probably take him like. Three solid more hours to get enough booze into that water to get even one of them tipsy. Probably won't stop them ''acting'' drunk earlier than that, though." His brows knit, and though his mind is reaching for Xavier's, it's Scott he's looking to Scott with a sudden frown. "-- he's not gonna ''explode'' that water, is he?"<br />
<br />
He's coiling firm roots, meanwhile, into the older man's mind with a smooth and seamless shift of identity-perspective that suddenly floods his<nowiki>|</nowiki>their awareness with an achingly familiar lightning-hypervigilant rapid-processing awareness of Every Mind not just here on the roof but down on the block below, out in Freaktown, out at the school, over in Chimaera, sorting at blinding speed through every request for entry and a complex array of desires and dangers and risks and needs before giving the okay to each of the transport crew.<br />
<br />
Where ''did'' the wand appear from. For most people it's probably hard to track the flicker-blink of motion, though Charles at least can feel Hive (rudely? Not rudely?) yoinking That Part Of Them over in a blur of teleportation from across the roof ''just'' long enough to drop a sunburst-wand onto Charles's lap. His "Thanks" is gruff, though through the vast forest that is ''them'' a warm glow of sun is shining, now.<br />
<br />
His head rolls back. Eyes ''roll'', at Jax. "Liar. How long you known this crazy-ass dipshit and his theatrics. You were expecting exactly this." After a beat, he adds, with a nod towards Xavier, "''Please''. ''This'' motherfucker is paying now."<br />
<br />
"We're anarchists," Ryan's telling Fury with a ''fiercely'' cheerful grin, "if there's one thing we're real damn good at it's bringing order outta chaos." His brows have hiked when Xavier arrives, and it's Scott he addresses first, Louisiana roots laid on thick in his accent ''now'' where previously it had hewed far closer to a broadcast-neutral: "''Well'' gar ici Scott Summers, I owe you one. Have you manage to get noted philanthropist Charles Xavier himself here to grace us with his presence? 'tween you and me if I had known what it took to wrangle a visit, I'd'a throwed Jax a birthday party each week, by now."<br />
<br />
Though he's given Scott a warm smile, it hews cutting-sharp when it turns to Xavier: "-- jail do get awful lonely -- but I know you gotta be a ''busy'' man up that school'a yourn, I'm sure." His arm has gone ''just'' a hair tighter around Jax for the moment before he releases his friend to his effusive greeting hug. Ryan's mind is bristling with protective ire the whole while. Possibly ''he'' might take Just A Smidge longer than Jax to forgive the tardiness of this visit, lavish presents notwithstanding. He does allow ''just'' a hint of amusement, ''slightly'' self-conscious, to soften his overprotective prickling, as he plucks Hive's lemonade for a sip. "Yeah? Well bless his heart, then, just tell me where I forward the bill."<br />
<br />
"-- I'd be very happy to talk about my ''research'' next time I'm visiting, L-- Fitz, ''would'' you excuse me." Kitty didn't actually take no for an answer before stepping breezily through the offending scientist and making her way to the knot of people around Jackson. Compared to everyone else, she's ''well'' underdressed -- oversized tee-shirt that is mottled with a variety of textures evoking bathroom tile, wood panelling, and floral wallpaper in patches, grey leggings. There's a drawstring bag on her back in a similar chaotic pattern to her shirt -- the only obvious cue she's a Friend of the Birthday Boy is the gold headband holding back her hair with squiggly sunburst lines emanating from it, and the fairy wand peeking out the top of her bag. <br />
<br />
Kitty comes up on Jax's free side, leaning in to hug her friend, tight and solid. "Happy birthday, sunshine -- Think I broke ''that'' little English guy's mind again," she says, wry, amused irritation sensible to the -paths among them, "can I stack that onto your ''actual'' present." She's rolled up ''just'' in time to hear Ryan speak to -- << hi Professor (hi dad) (Kitty ''be'' normal good lord) >> -- Charles, one eyebrow quirking up well before ''bless his heart'' can be deployed. "Huh. That's sweet -- late arrivals club going halvsies on the party. ''Probably'' you do not want to be calling the kettle black," is more squarely to Ryan, annoyance (at his past absences here and at ''Charles's'' absence, too) tempered by a broad blanket of affection towards most of the assembled, "that's probably, like, your own brand infringement. -- Alma," and this subject change is ''abrupt'', the smile sudden and bright across her face, "you look incredible, are you working all night or can I actually get a dance in sometime?"<br />
<br />
<< Just what we need right now at Xavier's, >> Scott is thinking, << instant-booze mutation. >> "Probably not. I'll keep an eye on it," he says, as much to Charles as to Hive, though he then pulls his eyes reluctantly away from Everett, settling on Ryan. There's a little irritation-indignation-amusement rising up as the raid team members address the Professor, a stray, hastily-smothered << they're not ''wrong'' (probably shouldn't say anything even if they were) >> that doesn't quite kill his defensiveness. He might feel more inclined (entitled?) to tell ''Kitty'' off, but -- another glance at the Professor, another silent decision to keep his trap shut where all of this who-visited-when stuff is concerned, and to flail back toward civil conversation. "I like the decorations," he says. "Very --" << sparkly >> "-- creative."<br />
<br />
As unflappable as she is, Alma still shakes her head when Fury storms off. "Not sure he's interested in dancing with freaks." She isn't sure he's ''not'', either, and wonders how far Ryan -- or any of them -- could push before he'd put his foot down. "His loss." Her disdain for Charles and Scott is considerably milder, already tempered by the thought they might be good to have on hand if something went sideways, and mollified further by Jax's reaction. When Kitty admonishes Ryan she quietly adjusts her estimation of Time Until Drama, and though the prospect does not ''frighten'' her, she says a silent bracha that they've made it this far without incident. Maybe that's why Kitty's question catches her off guard, and her eyebrows tick up. "I'm working all night, but there are a lot of us here and we get breaks." She allows a slightly indulgent smile. "I'll save you a dance."<br />
<br />
"Alas, I can take no credit for this spectacle," says Charles, and despite his mild tone, the word "spectacle" ''feels'' distinctly positive. "But I may take some small credit after Ryan sends my accountant the bill, and I do intend to enjoy myself." He produces a business card and leans forward to pass it to Ryan. His warmth is like dappled sunlight now, and there is both contrition and concern in it. << Please be gentle with him, Kitty. Be gentle with ''yourself'', too. >> "He can't explode the water," he adds, though Hive knew this without need for words the moment his mind became their. "At least not without help, and I trust you'll notice if the students get it in their heads to improvise a still." All the same, they are mentally noting those most likely to attempt such a thing (or other potentially disastrous shenanigans) out of the X-kids present. << They're not wrong, >> his agreement is quiet in Scott's mind, << and you needn't defend me, regardless, though I appreciate the sentiment. Tonight is for Jackson. >> He turns the sunburst wand over in his hands, his smile at the whimsical craftsmanship not altogether conscious. "They are lovely -- my compliments. I'm sure there's plenty more creativity yet to come."<br />
<br />
Ryan's brows hike right ''back'' at Kitty -- but it's with an easing of his smile, a dip of his head, and where warmth has been radiating from Charles there's a harmony now from Ryan, picking ''up'' that dappled-sun-warmth and twisting it into a playful violin trill that dances between them with a burst of lighthearted amusement before it dissipates into the bustle of the set-up. "Shiiiit," Ryan drawls, taking Charles's card, "can you sing? Guess my publicist ''would'' be pretty pissed if I tried turning the whole shebang over at this stage of the game." He tucks the card away, spreads his arms wide. "Thanks," is to the compliments on the decorations, "Had a whole army of artists to help out. Eat! Drink! Be Merry! -- especially you," he's saying this to Alma, brightly, "I'll hold off on dying till tomorrow."<br />
<br />
It's Sunlight^3, a flutter-glow when Kitty comes in for a hug that Jax returns fierce. "Oh ''gosh'' FitzSimmons gonna be having a ''constant'' freakout all night ''long'', I think, they don't hardly know what to do with any of us let alone -- oh gosh don't nobody let slip nothin' 'bout Scott, okay, I jus' been letting 'em think the glasses is because he thinks he's way too cool for everyone." His internal Caution Levels are making vague quiet adjustments at Kitty's admonishment and just as quickly adjusting them back at that light trill. "''Boy'' don't even joke." His ''bap'' is light, his ''tone'' is light, his thoughts -- well. He's doing a quick but thorough assessment of his layers of bright-illusory makeup, the touchups to the scars that warp his tattoos, leaning ''in'' to the parts of him better practiced at psionic shielding and plain Not ADHD Mental Discipline. Looping that playful violin trill until it sinks ''in'', looping his ''arm'' through Kitty's. Leaning into Ryan's and smiling. ''Bright''. "Y'all. Thanks for coming," and here it's not forced, not illusion, just a warm gratitude in the words. "Sure did brighten my day."<br />
<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:And_rings_aloud_the_welkin_blue_With_all_the_songs_I_ever_knew.&diff=25074Logs:And rings aloud the welkin blue With all the songs I ever knew.2023-07-05T17:07:59Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Kitty, Scott, Charles, iʞiɒꓷ, Ryan FitzSimmons | summary = "You weren't asking for my blessing, but you hav..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Kitty]], [[Scott]], [[Charles]], [[Mirror|iʞiɒꓷ]], [[Ryan]] [[NPC-FitzSimmons|FitzSimmons]]<br />
| summary = "You weren't asking for my blessing, but you have it for whatever it's worth to you. And if you find them, we will stand ready to help bring them home."<br />
| gamedate = 2023-06-21<br />
| gamedatename = summer solstice '23 / jax's 31st birthday<br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Rooftop - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Kitty, Scott, Charles, Mirror, Ryan, SHIELD HQ, Mutants, Prometheus, X-Men<br />
| log =<br />
<br />
There's an unexpected oasis at the top of this gleaming high-rise, the whole of it carpeted in thick, soft, layered ground cover of sedums, grass, and moss. A small, carefully manicured grove serves as the centerpiece, with benches, tables and chairs scattered around in the shade. Beside it, a professionally landscaped garden boasts a pond and quite a few planters that either used to hold plants or still hold dying ones. The greenhouse is somewhat sparsely and eclectically populated with tropical plants, flanked by garden beds even more sparsely planted. An open lawn on the side overlooking Times Square makes a great spot for a picnic. The otherwise unsightly structure housing the roof access, a single stall bathroom, and tool shed has been covered on three sides with turf and shaped into a little promontory offering a breathtaking view of the city.<br />
<br />
The lawn has mostly disappeared under the newly assembled raised stage, wires for lighting and sound systems running through the grass to generators that definitely do ''not'' belong to SHIELD. The tables have been commandeered as food and drink stations, now being refilled as the long, long arc of sun on the longest day of the year begins to finally touch the horizon. The fae-like uniforms of Jax's friends and Ryan's crew are easy to pick out in the crowd in front of the stage and in the little groups of chatter spread across the rooftop, glowing horns and sunburst-adorned wings catching the light shining from the stage as the mutant-electro-swing band plays. Ryan himself is chatting in a corner that has gone oddly silent to the outside observer. Leo Fitz, face ruddy-red from beer, has commandeered Simmons's lip liner to scribble notes onto a napkin.<br />
<br />
"He's quite handsome, isn't he?" Simmons sighs, resting her cheek onto Fitz's shoulder. <br />
<br />
"He's a bloody enigma, s'what he is," Fitz mumbles, breaking part of the liner with the force of his writing. "''How's'' he got the sound waves bending like that, s'not like he's a -- a-- silica packet for sound, is he?" <br />
<br />
A little ways away from those scientists, a physicist has found an object for her ire. This current act does in fact fit Kitty's outfit, save for the commerative shirt draped around her shoulders, and if she returned to the dance ~~floor~~ lawn probably she would have no end of partners to choose from. But she's glittering not at a dance partner but at Scott Summers now, face curled and indignant, voice raised over the music and body raised over the floor, standing on a few inches of air to better holler into Scott's ear: <br />
<br />
"-- and he's been going absolutely ''nuts'' up in here with no news, probably since that first email you sent, so it's like, damn, is this how you handled it when ''he'' went missing? What is the point of being -- whatever the fuck the X-men are if we can't keep our own kids safe?" Kitty's eyes are wide and every-so-slightly bloodshot from drinking, the wine in her hand sloshing even at this low volume as she gesticulates. "Like, we all know you aren't ''trying'' to be a jerk but emailing to tell us you're going to fight your way through the Staten Island mafia or whatever when we already ''got'' people looking into that angle, that's not very efficient, is it? It kind of seems like you're trying to punish yourself about it and none of us need that right now, we need the kids ''back''." Familiar, perhaps, to people who have known her since childhood, is the fearful tremble of Kitty's words throughout this tirade, the clench of her currently-ghostly fingers around her glass. "So like, why are you ''here'', Scott? Are you ''actually'' just here to drive the Professor around or is this you punishing yourself, too?"<br />
<br />
Looking just at Scott, it's almost hard to tell that he's being yelled at -- his head is tilted to better hear Kitty over the music, and he's nodding along, but his face is mostly implacable, any tension or tightness in his expression mostly hidden behind his tinted glasses, his hands casually tucked into the pockets of his jeans. He is ''not'' wearing a Holland Was Right birthday-edition shirt, though he has one slung over his shoulder like he might take it home -- his own T-shirt is a disappointingly unsunny, undecorated navy blue.<br />
<br />
He lets Kitty's last question hang for a moment, straightening his neck again. Lets out a short exhale. "I am not punishing myself," he says tightly. "I'm here to celebrate Jax's birthday, same as you. Believe it or not, I don't think of that as some kind of self-punishment." His voice is quiet and controlled, but pointed -- the blurred edge of exhaustion it's had for weeks has sharpened into a defensive curtness. "Should I have expected you to just know telepathically that I was going to check out the Staten Island mafia? Because from ''my'' vantage point, email seemed more reliable. I am trying to find our kids. I don't know what else you expect me to do."<br />
<br />
"''Why'' would you fight the mafia in the first place? We know people for that, we ''got'' people for that -- ''God'' you're missing the point!" Kitty might also be missing the point -- or at least missing her mouth, wine sloshing up and over the sides to drip over her fingers. "It's just -- just -- it's been almost two months." Suddenly Kitty's voice has gotten very small, very tired. "Week five was about when I gave up hope of being ''found'', this is just -- if we haven't found them by now --" and abruptly the alcohol splashes up into the air as Kitty drops to the floor. She grimaces, wiping at a stain on her dress. "-- Sorry, this is -- morbid, this is supposed to be ''fun'', I'll -- " ''Go'' is unvoiced but clear as she turns on one strappy heel to walk -- unevenly, which for her is more of walking ''into'' the lawn and out of it than side to side -- off towards a cluster of her friends. << Hi Professor (hi, Dad) >> is pitched up and above her other thoughts automatically and oddly un-self-consciously as she stumbles by a familiar figure in a sleek wheelchair, though Kitty doesn't stop to chat.<br />
<br />
Charles does not press Kitty for conversation as she passes, though his brows do crinkle with concern and the warmth of his mind where it presses to hers in greeting lingers even after she's stalked off. At some point he's tucked his sunburst wand into the breast pocket of his suit jacket at a jaunty angle, carefully refolding the blue pocket square to frame it to better effect. He rolls up to Scott, lips compressed, though there's no reproach in his pale eyes, and the psionic warmth that blankets him is soothing and conciliatory. << I'll check on her later, but I think for now it's best to let her vent where she will. This isn't really about you. >> An image of Carmen Pryde rises unbidden in Scott's mind, annotated with new information: he's moved to New York, he's working at Lucien Tessier's hotel in Astoria, he's -- predictably -- trying to worm his way into Kitty's life here. He reverses and parks his chair beside his protégé and offers him a bottle of water of water he's produced from one of the startlingly capacious storage compartments in his chair. << She went to him for help finding the children, which I expect has not done her mental health any favors. >><br />
<br />
<< She's been drinking. >> This observation, though blunt, doesn't come with any accompanying judgment, just a weary resignation. Scott is watching Kitty go, not looking at Charles just yet, though his posture loosens slightly in the professor's reassuring presence. He is running through their exchange in his head -- ''we can't keep our own kids safe'' -- ''if we haven't found them by now'' -- ''is this you punishing yourself?'' -- but he pushes it reluctantly aside to consider annotated Carmen Pryde instead, before slotting that away for later too. Accepts the water bottle, unscrews the cap, and takes a sip, his movements measured. << I didn't know. >> A hint of abashment creeps in with that admission; now Scott looks at Charles, forehead pinching over his glasses. << She's right. I don't know what I'm doing. >><br />
<br />
After Yet Another Costume Change Ryan has shed his stage outfit -- now in one of the Limited Edition Birthday Shirts, clearly not got out of the t-shirt canon because it is in a size so tight it might well have been painted on him, paired now in this later-evening stage of party with comfortably wide-leg black jeans and a gold belt with sunburst buckle. His brows are knitting as Kitty exits past Charles and though he ''almost'' follows after her he's stopped short, instead, when Charles arrives. His hands tuck into his pockets. His weight settles. Around them the party is muted, sound warping -- just an odd quiet bubble of conversational privacy in a small sphere around where he's standing that, as he wanders over, has shifted to encompass Scott and Charles.<br />
<br />
He's lightly, idly, running brilliant-colorful-loops of songs through his mind, thinking about the party, thinking about the ''wildly'' complicated logistics that made it happen, of the admittedly petty hilarity of Fury's irritation, of So Many Fantastic Outfits ''co'' did people turn ''out'' tonight, of whether he remembered to water the plants today, of whether any of the people who've been hitting on him tonight would be fun to bring home, of whether any of the people who've been hitting on him tonight would be ''safe'' to take home, (of anything, anything except statistics on Finding Missing Children after this long, ''keenly'' aware that Jackson is currently Hive as he buries this morbidity in the psionic static.)<br />
<br />
"It's a big country. Not even ''you''," he's nodding to Charles, "can search it all. Knocking down doors and beating up gangsters --" One of his shoulders lifts. "Slow way to search."<br />
<br />
The evening is clearly winding on -- as the energy mellows, even Daiki is seeing fit to make a (re) appearance after disappearing into the designated Quiet Area (off in the picnic area within the grove) some time during the height of Ryan's energetic set. He's in the very same finely tailored light blue mandarin jacket he had been earlier in the evening and wearing it ''just'' was well, though somewhere along the way he's lost the graceful glowing horns that had been on his head; his sunburst staff wand is tucked into the pocket of his (grey? weren't they black earlier?) slacks.<br />
<br />
He gracefully sidesteps his teammate making her escape, and though the frown that follows Kitty out is small his quiet arrival grows that much more compelling with his -- worry? He ''looks'' worried, and there ''is'' a Worried Tinge to his thoughts when Kitty stumbles off but underneath it, a curiosity both analytical and deeply titillated. His eyes skip between Scott and Charles, and somewhere in his mind these people are shifting and changing in form, in psionic space at once themselves and characters from Chinese folklore. Kitty briefly merges with the figure of Lognu, young and precocious granddaughter of the Dragon King, reprimanding the much older and much more powerful Dragon Prince Ao Bing-who-is-also-Scott who is as per usual trying to fix the problems of mortals (but fucking up) for his father, Charles and/or Ao Guang the Dragon King of the East, most powerful of all the Dragon Kings, looking on from his court on high (where, surrounded by gods, he has come to underestimate mortals.) << (trouble at home?) >> is both a musing to himself and a note for later follow up.<br />
<br />
He makes his way into Ryan's bubble like he belongs well enough in its intimacy, and his head tilts slightly, his brows arching. He ''is'' thinking of Gaétan, of Two Months Gone, of Finding Missing Kid Statistics. Of ''maybe'' Ryan should have sent out the APB on this on Day One. He lowers his eyes, lowers his voice, though even so it's somehow commanding. "I'm sure he's doing the best he can. But --" He turns a hand over, a gesture that should be casual. Isn't. "Did you have another angle?"<br />
<br />
<< It's hard to know what to do because there's nowhere to start. >> Charles glances aside to Scott, then away. << We're all grasping at straws. >> The words on their own might seem fatalist, but for all the fear and frustration and helplessness in his thoughts, there's no despair. He looks up at Ryan as he approaches, then over at Daiki with the barest uptick of one brow. "I am doing my best." This isn't defensive, just a simple agreement, but there's a weariness in his voice that, however scrupulously he's trained his tone, he cannot keep from Ryan. "I am prepared to do better, and I am open to other angles." Beside and beneath this, he's offering the psionic equivalent of Ryan's privacy bubble, the concept communicated without words in the layered susurration of sun-dappled leaves.<br />
<br />
Scott looks from the professor up to Ryan as he approaches -- his lips press thinly together at the other man's words. With another set of companions his spike of shame might have gone unnoticed, marked only by the tiny crease forming between his brows. He screws the cap back onto his water bottle, lowering it slowly. Jax's ''other'' team is rising in his consciousness, Ryan at the head, with an accompanying sense of wariness and apprehension. << What other angle? >> he's asking -- warning? -- silently.<br />
<br />
Ryan misses the colorful mental imagery, but the worry-curiosity-titillation that comes with it pings him bright and clear. He's looking over with a tick of brow that nearly mirrors Charles's, his eyes lingering on Daiki(?) a long beat before he pulls himself back into the conversation. "Moment I say it, we gonna have people countrywide turning over stones we didn't even know of. And I'm going to say it." This doesn't sound like a threat -- it's direct, it's ''tired''; maybe all Ryan's wonted energy went into his earlier set. "But people are gonna have questions, when I do. God knows Luci pulls some goddamn ''magic'' in the fucking press but if there's something you want me to -- say. Or not say. I ''don't'' want to bring a world of trouble on..." He hasn't ''meant'' to hitch, here, but that compelling ''tug'' still niggles at his brain; images of X-Men overlapping with the faces of the missing children, ''Spencer'' most prominent; in here there's something ''dissonant'' where Daiki fits into the montage as he glances to his (teammate) (family) beside him. "-- you and yours."<br />
<br />
That dissonant tug is growing. Daiki, perhaps, is turning futures over in his mind, roads branching and branching after Ryan goes to twitter, goes to the press, goes to the top of a mountain and yells. Does the school get outed (maybe), do the ''children'' have normal lives again (probably not), does it ''matter'' (??), --. His hands fold behind his back, and he's weighing, lightly, the ''suggestion'' that a news report of A Dozen Dead Mutant Children, two months after they went missing, is its own world of trouble that per''haps'' if the school had its ''own'' media advisor they might have considered earlier. But then, weighs those small-hitched eyebrows, tilts his head ''very'' slightly to the side. "-- he should be here soon. Perhaps he has advice." There's a vague ''sense'' of Lucien in his mind, tranquil-glassy water that does not betray much, and it's somehow that ''same'' sense that he conveys -- just a soft ripple that barely parts the psionic auras around him as, quietly, he is melting back into the crowd.<br />
<br />
Charles closes his eyes briefly, just for the space of an inhale, and opens them again when he breaths out. "Alright." For a moment, just that; his eyes skip aside to ''start'' tracking Daiki's departure, then slide back to Ryan. "I know this is a tall order, and I'm sure it's one you anticipated, but I want the school kept out of this as much as possible. We are capable of deflecting a great deal of scrutiny, but at a certain ''volume'', that fact itself will become suspicious." He braces his helps on the armrests of his chair and steeples his hands. "The disposition of the other students' identities is technically up to their guardians, but most of them are human, and cannot understand what it means to be out and ''famous'' as a mutant in this world..." His forehead dips, the light filtering through the forest of their minds dims ever so briefly, as though a cloud had passed before the sun. "But you do, as does Jackson, and consequently Spencer is far better prepared for that than most of his peers. If Mister Tessier can find a way to protect the others students identities without compromising our chances of finding them, I would be most grateful." He spreads his hands now, the gesture almost shockingly ambiguous by his standards because ''he'' isn't fully certain if it bespeaks supplication, acceptance, or helplessness. "Whatever our disagreements, 'mine' and 'yours' are inextricably bound even when they are not one and the same. We will work with you."<br />
<br />
<< Is that even possible, >> Scott is wondering. He is not looking at either other man, still tilting his head in the direction Daiki left; he doesn't project the next question to Charles, but lets it rise through his recollections of the media outside Xavier's last January after the Prometheus exposé. << (Wouldn't it be worth it, if it's not?) >> He scratches his chin, where his stubble is just starting to show, and reminds himself, << Jax trusts him. >> Scott probably still doesn't, but much of his wariness is quietly drawing back. "What do you have in mind," he says.<br />
<br />
Ryan watches Daiki leave with a small furrow of brows. His head tips, nodding after him in indication. "We'll talk to each of their families individually, but probably the best angle is just that my --"<br />
<br />
The clench at the side of his jaw is small, a flurry of memories ringing in jarringly dissonant chord in his mind. Panic-shopping with Jackson for clothing for a kindergartner; sick-grateful-relief when Joshua shows up with such-a-tiny-Spence from ''where'' the fuck did he teleport to this time; laptop abandoned with a song-in-progress half-finished on the screen while he's sprawled, now, on Jax's apartment floor, middle-of-the-night and ''probably'' the seven-year-old should be in bed but Jax is at work so who's to say it's ''not'' time to build a huge K'nex rollercoaster in the living room; confused elementary school teacher at field trip time, ''wait, but, you're not a parent?''; crouched down with Spence and James Holland in the woods as Spence's grandpa points out the difference between wood blewit mushrooms (delicious!) and some ''cortinarius'' mushrooms (poisonous!); the silence stretching across miles on a video screen when Spencer was diagnosed, and getting back on stage the next day with as much thunder as ever; the narrowed eyes and cold tone of the medical receptionist when he finally made it back to New York: ''Are'' you ''family?''<br />
<br />
"-- that Spence and a bunch of his friends gone missing." The twitch of Ryan's mouth is a little wry, a lot humorless, when he looks to Scott -- gestures around the rooftop party. "I'm me, yeah? Jax is Jax. Spencer Holland Disappears is gonna grab the headlines no matter what. That'll take most the heat already off of you all, the school, the other kids, if we lean into it."<br />
<br />
Charles inclines his head as Daiki takes his leave, his eyes lingering only for a moment on the young man's figure, though his expression remains placid enough. << ''I'' trust him, in this, >> he tells Scott abstractly. << It's the rest of the world I'm worried about. >> Ryan's memories rustle the leaves of the forest, parts them to let in more warmth and light that whispers, wordless and matter-of-fact: you are family. "That is a solid approach, and one I expect Mister Tessier can take quite far."<br />
<br />
He sighs quietly and his voice lowers, weary but steady as he lifts a hand to rub at his temples. "I live in terror that the school should be found out and the children come to harm, but we always take some risks. We must, and we ''ought'', only it's hard to tell --" He glances aside at Scott, then drops his gaze. There's shame in his voice now, and fear, and resolution. "Sometimes, we ought to take more." His eyes lift to Ryan now, his expression placid but his psionic presence blazing fierce even through Hive's layered shade. "You weren't asking for my blessing, but you have it for whatever it's worth to you. And if you find them, we will stand ready to help bring them home."<br />
<br />
Scott's wariness still does not recede fully, though a dubious part of his mind duly alerts himself that ''Charles'' trusts Ryan. He slides one hand silently into his pockets, letting the water bottle drop in the other so that it hangs from just his fingertips. << Sometimes,>> he agrees, neither gloatingly nor conciliatorially. He looks back at Ryan when Charles offers his blessing -- says in a low, rough voice, "Mine too." After a pause, he adds -- not looking at the professor -- "the X-Men, too. Anything…" ''now'' he manages to meet Charles's eye around the glint of his glasses, "''Anything'' we can do."<br />
<br />
Ryan's eyes track to Charles with a swift and sudden startlement, and though he lowers them quickly again it's not quickly ''enough'' to hide the sudden bright shimmer of tears; certainly not enough to hide his frantic-anxious-panicked mental ''reach'' for ''Jax'', holy shit, the ''last'' thing he needs is some new Ryan Black Crying meme drawing attention from the shit he ''actually'' wants in the news; not enough to hide the ''fiercely'' grateful warmth blazing in his mind, clinging hard to Charles's. "Shiiiit," and even if the erratic flux of his emotional state has not settled in its careen his voice is level enough, wry, brows lifting as a smile crooks across his face, "y'all best be careful, or I might just take you up on that."<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:The_tide_beats_in_my_soul_so_strong_that_happiness_breaks_forth_in_song,&diff=25073Logs:The tide beats in my soul so strong that happiness breaks forth in song,2023-07-05T17:03:22Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Kitty]], [[Mirror|Leo?]], [[Jax]], [[DJ]], [[Steve]], [[Sam]], [[Polaris]], [[Hive]], [[Matt]], [[Fury]], [[Ion]], [[Dusk]], [[Maya]], [[Ryan]], [[NPC-FitzSimmons|FitzSimmons]]<br />
| summary = "May I have this dance?"<br />
| gamedate = 2023-06-21<br />
| gamedatename = summer solstice '23 / jax's 31st birthday<br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Rooftop - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Kitty, NPC-FitzSimmons, Mirror, Jax, DJ, Steve, Sam, Polaris, Hive, Matt, Fury, Ion, Dusk, Maya, Ryan, SHIELD HQ, Mutants, Humans, Mutates<br />
| log =<br />
There's an unexpected oasis at the top of this gleaming high-rise, the whole of it carpeted in thick, soft, layered ground cover of sedums, grass, and moss. A small, carefully manicured grove serves as the centerpiece, with benches, tables and chairs scattered around in the shade. Beside it, a professionally landscaped garden boasts a pond and quite a few planters that either used to hold plants or still hold dying ones. The greenhouse is somewhat sparsely and eclectically populated with tropical plants, flanked by garden beds even more sparsely planted. An open lawn on the side overlooking Times Square makes a great spot for a picnic. The otherwise unsightly structure housing the roof access, a single stall bathroom, and tool shed has been covered on three sides with turf and shaped into a little promontory offering a breathtaking view of the city.<br />
<br />
The lawn has mostly disappeared under the newly assembled raised stage, wires for lighting and sound systems running through the grass to generators that definitely do ''not'' belong to SHIELD. The tables have been commandeered as food and drink stations, starting to deplete as the long, long arc of sun on the longest day of the year meanders lazily towards the horizon. The fae-like uniforms of Jax's friends are easy to pick out in the crowd in front of the stage, glowing horns and sun-adorned wings catching light from the star in the heavens as well as on stage.<br />
<br />
Ryan Black, in a slim-fitting white suit so densely packed with optical fiber that it has a glossy sheen even with the lighting function off, a dress shirt so black it looks like a void amidst all the light, gold cowboy boots with solar designs picked out in bright EL wire, and a matching gambler's hat that shows a brilliant sunburst when viewed from above, is winding to the end of "Care Less", the slick ferocity of the violin line lighting up the fibers in a vibrant dance of colors. The slip into "Brighter" is subtle at first, but at the first lyric a cheer goes up from the crowd.<br />
<br />
Kitty, glittery and gold in a Gatsby-esque sequinned flapper dress, radiant sunbeams emerging from her headband, and a fairy wand with a sunburst topper in hand, is spinning out on the dance floor. Swing dance would probably be more appropriate for her outfit, but she's not letting the genre discrepancy stop her from laughing, cheering, and sliding in closer to her dance partner to kiss his cheek -- heedless of the slack jawed look Jemma Simmons is giving ''him'' from the drink table.<br />
<br />
"I cannae tell if she manipulates intramolecular force or nuclear force," Leo Fitz is bemoaning into his beer, "and she won't ''tell'' me which it is."<br />
<br />
"Uh-huh," Simmons replies absently, swirling her cocktail with one hand. "...You think Mr. Jax might introduce me to Mr. Concepcion if I ask nicely?" <br />
<br />
Morosely, lifting his beer to his lips, Fitz replies, "Probably not."<br />
<br />
Leo accepts his kiss with a faint flush, and his small smile has a glimmer of amusement as he spins Kitty back close to him. "That man," he's only ''lightly'' indicating Fitz with a small point of pursed lips in the engineer's direction, "has have his eyes on you all evening." There's no jealousy here though there ''is'' a healthy dose of appreciation when he adds, pitched quieter as if someone else might ''hear'' over the upbeat music: "You ''do'' shine."<br />
<br />
Had he ''planned'' to be at this party? Difficult to say, given the capriciousness of his schedule. But he seems to be well enjoying himself here, twirling his girlfriend on the dancefloor -- he's currently less eye-catching than her in ''outfit'' though no doubt his presence alone draws a few stares, but, currently, the neat and colorful button-down he is wearing has been largely obscured underneath an oversized tee shirt likely caught from one of the two t-shirt cannons a matching fairy-winged pair of Ryan's crew are shooting at the audience. ''His'' has the by-now very familiar HOLLAND WAS RIGHT text on the front, though the dragonfly it is usually styled around has now grown a stylized sunburst for a thorax in a design that is echoed smaller up by the back collar. Underneath the smaller back logo, printed in simple font: ''party like the day is long! summer solstice '23 <nowiki>|</nowiki> happy birthday, jax.''<br />
<br />
Jax has been on ''stage'' through the beginning of this song, ''getting'' even Brighter himself as Ryan takes off the sunburst-hat and bestows it upon him. In contrast to his BFF's radiance on stage, Jax himself is startlingly not glowing -- for now -- though his smile is bright enough he might as ''well'' be as he's helped down off the stage and back into the crowd. His very fierce heat is accompanied by a very fierce blush as he accepts a hand down, accepts a ''dance'' -- far from his first tonight but this one comes with a flush of mingled warmth and grief, an echo of memory summoned up of dappled sunlight in a faraway grove, a flicker of yellow feathers under rustling wings. The rhythm he falls into is familiar, unthinking. It's only after several measures when he looks up, lifts a hand to touch fingers light and brief against his dance partner's neat-trimmed beard which itself grows a sunny illumination -- that he lets the grief settle into a somewhat less complicated delight. "''Gosh'', but you you clean up good."<br />
<br />
There to help Jax off the stage is DJ -- the hand that turns over to takes Jax's is, as fits the theme tonight, resplendent in color; the prosthetic has been intricately painted in a pattern of feathering -- on the over side a more staid black-brown but on the underneath brilliant metallic emerald giving way to a bold scarlet with a very subtle metallic purple flash at the edges in the brilliant plumage of a scarlet-chested sunbird. He's in a sleek two-piece suit in crisp red-and-black striped seersucker over a neatly pressed white linen shirt cinched with an eye-catching tie styled very abstractly after a flight feather, its barbs forming fine chevrons in an iridescent red-purple-green-black ombre, and black oxford shoes polished to a shine. In ''his'' mind there's a hard-ingrained hypervigilance threading through the beat, out of sync with the environment but nevertheless threaded taut through the steps, tracking the crowd around them as intently as he tracks his partner's motions. His smile at the compliment is bright, buoyed by the company and the empathic vibrancy of the music. "Figured it was about time I --"<br />
<br />
As he drops his hand to signal an outside turn he's also dropped his sentence, also dropped his ''stance''; it all happens quickly enough anyone else might not have caught it at all if not for the fact that at the Very First Sight of someone beelining for Jax, Jax himself has abruptly vanished to reappear safely beside Ryan's bodyguard. DJ -- who just a second before was tensing, bracing for a fight, mind snapped to alertness, is now blushing fierce as he looks up at the very close proximity of "-- oh. Oh," his blush is only deepening, his wary look already shifted to a crooked smile that belies the butterfly-flutter inside him. "I'm sorry, I thought -- obviously. You wanted --"<br />
<br />
Standing off to one side, Steve is wearing a blue-and-red windowpane suit with a spray of heliotrope for a boutonniere and a magenta-violet-blue ombre tie. He only clocks the swinging beat in ''Brighter'' when he spots Jax swinging to it with DJ, and with a bright smile makes his way over. << Gosh I've never ''cut in'' before -- ''do'' people still cut in or -- >> He doesn't have time to be alarmed when DJ blips Jax away and pivots more or less right ''into'' him. Before he even knows what's happened he's sliding one foot back, then in almost the same moment checks the motion, amused and embarrassed. Quietly thankful DJ's swiftness also beat him to the awkward stuttering he was definitely about to do, he finishes the half-spoken sentence, "-- to dance. Obviously." This might have come out more suave if he weren't distracted by ''that smile'', at once soothingly and painfully familiar. <br />
<br />
His slow breath out hitches on a chuckle as they both try to lead. << How ''do'' two fellas decide... >> He dismisses his mental image of proposing rock-paper-scissors almost before it's formed. Instead, he settles his right hand onto DJ's brightly colored prosthetic and his left hand onto DJ's shoulder, confident and decisive and flushing pink nevertheless. His rhythm is imperfect and his steps sloppy on the turns, but he follows well for a beginner. "Thanks for bearing with me," he tells his partner earnestly as the song fades. A little hesitant, he adds, "Glad you made it out tonight." He dips his head and makes a leg -- luckily having released DJ's hand -- before stepping away, suddenly unsure what to do with himself. That uncertainty flees when he catches Sam's eye, and though his smile is still a little faint and his rhythm still a little off, he's nodding in time to the swelling music again.<br />
<br />
Sam has ''been'' in between partners, in between drinks, but after watching Steve take his leave from DJ he's ambling over. At once casual in stride and not-so in his seafoam green collarless suit, sleek and clean and unconventional with scrollwork embroidered on either side of the front opening in hunter green to match the lightweight tunic underneath, which is longer than the jacket and separates it visually from the trousers to striking effect, and black dress boots with hunter green spats.<br />
<br />
No paper-scissors-rock -- though his offered hand comes with a lift of brows, a tip of head, a "May I have this dance?" he seems confident enough of the answer and confident as well as he leads Steve back onto the floor, falling smoothly into the rhythm of "Save Me". His eyes follow ''pointedly'' after DJ, and return to Steve -- just a ''little'' searching. Maybe it's the music and its buoyant warmth; maybe it's whatever he finds (or doesn't) in Steve's expression, but the searching soon gives way to just a companionable ease in the steps, navigating tight-crowded dancefloor and inexperienced partner and Occasional Stares in Steve's direction with equal facility -- he ''eventually'' deigns to acknowledge this last when it's a gawky and gawk''ing'' Xavier's teenager whose stare has pulled them obliviously straight ''into'' the press of dancers to peer up-up-UP at Steve with eyes wide as dinner plates. The song isn't yet done but Sam is relinquishing his partner, patting him ''firm'' on the shoulder: "-- feel like this is your patriotic duty, Cap," and now ''he's'' left in the slightly awkward position of trying to weave through the floor unpaired --<br />
<br />
-- only to be swept up by Polaris, who was presumably just happening by, but in the press of bodies ''appears'' as though she materialized out of thin air precisely when Sam found himself stranded. She's wearing a metallic purple-green duochrome corset dress that would be ''quite'' revealing on its own but is only ''kind'' of revealing over a semi-sheer black blouse, a wide v-shaped chainmaille belt along with intricate woven wire cuffs and choker, and black ankle strap pumps. Her long green hair is bound up in two crown braids woven together with a glowing flower crown, and one of the event workers' sun wands dangles from her belt beside a black velvet purse.<br />
<br />
"You're wearing my color," she informs him, though the brightness of her smile belies the presumptive complaint even before she adds, "and wearing it ''well!''" Though not the most ''skilled'' dance partner, she is pouring enough grace and energy and fiercely determined joy into it to be a ''compelling'' one. There's no small amount of hypervigilance in her attention to the intricate shimmering fields--biological and technological--all around, enmeshed in an electrifying dance of their own. There's no small amount of love, too, her mind alight with music and motion and a profound sense of connection that cannot be wholly attributed to Ryan power. "You should be careful wearing green on midsummer night, you know?" She laughs as Sam spins her out into a turn, unabashed that she works an extra step into it. "Lest the fairies whisk you away!"<br />
<br />
The fairies ''are'' about to whisk, little though Sam or Polaris might know it. It isn't the ones that work the party wearing tattered wings or glowing horns or gleaming claws -- quiet, unfelt, a deft psionic force spreads its roots out, rides the beat, rides their minds; on one step they are a pair, on the next they're ''both'' dancing with new people. It feels like Polaris's decision -- and then, of ''course'' it did, because on the next step she no longer ''is'' Hive, but she ''is'' just dancing with him, and he's not smiling, same default-grump-scowl he always wears; but as his mental roots pull back she can feel the lingering amusement, warm and unabashed, he leaves in his wake. <br />
<br />
"Feel like I should get at least ''one'' dance in with my --" Just a beat, a small sideways twitch of mouth. "-- you." He isn't ''much'' of a dancer. There are times that the ''oneness'' of him smooths over for that, an innate proprioception of his partner's movements, but this isn't one of those times. It's not ''DJ'' he's stealing from now, with his ''actual'' dancing skill and confident grace; just turtling back into himself with the help of the Elder Telepath in his network; shielding he's not innately ''good'' at -- and, for the rest of the song -- just him. Just Polaris. Just dancing. It's warm. But as one song fades into the next, as he pecks Polaris on the cheek, it's warm, too, as his mind relaxes with something like relief back into its expansive openness. Is it the return of feeling his hundreds of selves that hits him deep, or the opening strains of "Little Wonder"? Either way he's stopped at the edge of the floor like he's temporarily forgotten what he's doing.<br />
<br />
It's also hard to say whether it's the shift in Hive's self(ves) that catches Matt's attention or the fiery adoration spilling through the song for the missing child--the missing ''children''. He's in a white oxford shirt, green linen vest, and gray slacks, the matching jacket nowhere to be seen, and had been draped languidly picturesque against a nearby picnic table, methodically getting drunk. Now he goes to Hive, gathering his friend close though he does not know if he has it in him to do much more than sway to the music. His mindscape is eerily flat, and he's trying to dredge something up from beneath its murky surface other than the jagged rage hungry for someone to sink into. "{Thank you, my dear.}" His words are soft with improvised gratitude and affected affection for Hive's tireless search. "{I have missed you, also.}" He isn't sure how true that was before now, but he's found his emotional stride and with it his rhythm, his feet light as whirls Hive and his borrowed steps around the dancefloor.<br />
<br />
"Little Wonder" acquires new dimensions as the jazz musicians of the next act seamlessly join in, one by one. Something reaches out from his turbid depths for Ryan's electrifying voice, and though sharp and rapacious it is not anger but desire that he immediately tamps back down. It might not have stayed down, but the ''song'' is winding down, not so much ''ending'' as morphing into improvisational jazz. Matt bends to kiss Hive's hand before sending him off in DJ's direction, as best he can estimate the path of the bright flickering beat in his mind. He is emphatically ''not'' paying attention to Ryan as he hops off the stage into the arms of the ecstatically awaiting crowd. He's leaning into his anger instead, searching and finding a suitable target, veering off giddy with (somewhat) playful malice to drag Fury up from where ''he's'' been methodically getting drunk. "I hear you're a fine dancer, Director Fury," he pipes with an impish grin. "''Prove it.''"<br />
<br />
With the generous support of the free booze, Director Fury ''had'' started to enjoy the concert despite himself -- little though anyone would be able to tell by his persistently baleful glare. << That Ryan Black steady ''wildin''', but he don't sound half bad tho. >> He tenses up at the prospect some telepath might have overheard that admission, and starts running through the psionic self-defense exercises he'd let lapse. The organic changing of the act on stage makes this harder -- the steady sweeps and capricious turns of the jazz blossoming from "Little Wonder" speaks to him in a deep way that Ryan, whatever his skill ''or'' powers, could not -- and the sudden appearance of the Other Mister Tessier shatters his precarious focus altogether.<br />
<br />
"Oh ''hell'' no," he blurts as Matt pulls him to his feet, and though he's sure he ''could'' prevail if he fought harder, he doesn't. A part of him is suspicious some psionic influence swayed him to accept the dance. A part of him is terrified of being surrounded by drunken mutants with God knows what powers. The ''rest'' of him is reversing Matt's grip on his hand and letting the music move through him and appreciating how readily the younger man follows his lead. And then he's suspicious of ''that'', too. << (does he know)(what's his agenda)(at least his ''power'' can't hurt me none) >> Aloud he just says, "I been dancing longer'n you been alive. I ain't got nothing to prove." Perhaps belying this, he embellishes his already elaborate footwork, challenging Matt to keep up and at once annoyed and impressed that he does. Somewhere between this absurd game and the technical demands of playing it out on a crowded floor, he forgets his wariness and just ''dances.''<br />
<br />
"{That's how he ''get'' you.}" Relaxing, evidently? Dancing, evidently? Enjoying yourself for a few brief moments -- on one outward spin Matt whirls away and blink-and-you-might-miss-it quick, a small static-shock ''zap'' in Fury's hand -- which is turning back ''over'', gripped now in a calloused-rough one. "{Secondary mutation, you know, make you ''lose'' yourself in them fairy-green eyes.}" Ion's grin is ''fierce'', his own dark eyes bright -- did he dress for this at all? ''Probably'', with his motorcycle boots and weatherbeaten cut there's his ''nice'' jeans and a lightweight linen button down, sunburst wand jammed through a beltloop, long pointed ears blended seamless over his own.<br />
<br />
Right here Matt ''should'' have been twirling back, ''should'' have been dipping, but instead Fury's getting Ion's ''aggressively'' cheerful energy -- can he dance? Can he ''swing''? He's sure got rhythm to ''spare'' but in the scheme of things, these may be secondary to the forceful exuberance with which he's turned this ship Right Around fully heedless (or perhaps enjoying) Fury's poleaxed horror ''or'' his long-acclimatization to leading. As his partner stumbles trying to rock-step the wrong foot Ion's grin ''sharpens'', as Fury starts to lose his balance Ion's grip shifts seamlessly to a harder clamp on the older man's forearm. The Director of SHIELD does not fall; as quickly as the tornado of a dance began it's ending as Ion deposits him in the questionably loving arms of another Mongrel to recoup his balance ''properly''. Ion's cheek clicks against his teeth, fingers snapping, pointing in quick-bang motion at Fury, taking his grin and exuberance ''with'' him as he dips out across the floor -- "{Careful, eh? Party just getting started and already you slipping.}"<br />
<br />
Ion is intercepted, across the floor, pulled in to loop in to a small knot of newer Prometheans who have formed their own circle by an outstretched wing, not dark today but painted rich and brilliant with sunburst-ombre flare. Dusk's wing drapes around the electrokinetic; a soft pleased rumble in his throat as he watches an elderly woman pulled out of Blackburn teach a much younger Dirac alum the basics of swing. As he drops his head to rest against Ion's and briefly just bops with the music -- his growl deepening when the elder ''almost'' stumbles after a group of slightly-too-eager (slightly-too-tipsy?) Xavier's students collides with their group, his growl subsiding just as quick when the Dirac kid steadies her easily and the dancing-clusters mingle into one. 'Eeeevery once in a while,' he admits, a teasing amusement in his face, in the motions of his hands, that heavily exaggerates the ''rarity'' of this as the excitement in the group ''grows'' oh my ''god'' he's coming ''here'' for ''REAL'' '-- he fucking nails it.' And then he's squeezing Ion a little closer, letting his wing trail against the other man's shoulders as he sways through the group -- not towards Ryan himself but one of the ''many'' (staring // trying not to stare) around them His smile is bright as he offers out a hand. "''He'' doesn't bite, you know."<br />
<br />
Maya has been here twirling with her sister, has been chatting, has been bright-bright-bright in her elegantly floral-embroidered yellow and orange salwar set, gold bangles, gold-sequined slippers, ribbons wound through her thick braids. ''Was'' she gawking, she was trying not to gawk! Certainly not in front of at least ''some'' of her students who are ''definitely also gawking oh gosh --'' And then there's Dusk in front of her and is she ''less'' flustered, looking up into his dark eyes, sharp-fanged grin, scruffy face? She blushes, takes his hand, a smile lighting up her slightly-tipsy-glowy face. "Oh! Oh but ''you'' -- no wait ''do'' you -- ''wow'' I shouldn't assume --" She's started to reach a hand for his other -- arm? Wing? Drops it to the side, lifts it again, blushes ''deeper''. "Oh ''wow'' were you even asking me to --" But she ''is'' getting on the dance floor with him, is kind of relaxing, even, more comfortable once he starts moving, once he starts ''her'' moving -- until another turn, and another, and then she is Face To Face with Ryan and her eyes have gone wide again, smile frozen in place, gaze darting between ''him'' and the crowd around, and ''maybe'' she'd have slunk back into the circle if not for the strong wings bolstering her at her back.<br />
<br />
From one set of wings to another; Ryan's gleaming stage costume has been luminescent between the enormous black-feathered wings of the woman who has been gyrating with him. He meets Maya's frozen smile with one warm enough to thaw, one hand turning up, beckoning with an easy confidence. "We on a dance floor -- you want to stare, stare; you want to move, then move, yeah?" He waits for her to take his hand before pulling her in, graceful but simple in the steps he leads until he's confident she ''does'' have the rhythm. Around them there are still Plenty Of Stares; excited Xavier's School teens, hipster artists pretending to be too cynical. "Don't even worry about them," there's brazen-cocky in his grin now, sure, but the first time ''she'' missteps from self-conscious watching The Crowd instead he's making the correction easily to keep the rhythm, ''his'' attention solely on his still-flustered partner. "They're not judging you, they ''all'' watching me."<br />
<br />
"Oh, ''all'''em?" As one melody slides into another, it's a very familiar face back at Ryan's side. Fierce heat in Jax's chin as he props it on his friend's shoulder. 'I can get you his number,' he's mouthing totally-not-at-all-surreptitiously to his coworker, as he snags an elbow through Ryan's. For all the fierce heat, bright outfit, sparkling makeup, the actual feelings that wash through his voice over the empath are muted and distant -- there's love there, a lot of it; there's anger, there's a ''heavy'' exhaustion, a stark horror, but all of it coming through a washed-out filter. "Jus' wouldn't'a been a birthday if you hadn't saved me a dance," he's saying with a small laugh, "if Mockingbird closes 'fore I get out we gotta riot."<br />
<br />
He's ''just'' pulling Ryan away, just finding a relatively open spot at the edge of the dance floor, when a small knot of fresh young agents from the SHIELD Comms division gets up the bravery to come over en masse, crowded too-close and too-touchy as is too-common for fans. Something dims -- just brief! -- in Jax's expression as he's jostled back. It brightens again, vivid and cheerful when he whirls to find -- "''gosh'', Leo! I didn't have no ''idea'' you was such a good dancer."<br />
<br />
<< I am? >> a startled question in Leo(?)'s mind, at once colored with his very-customary diffidence and something that is -- not. << ''am'' I? >> A deep blush has filled his cheeks as he looks up from his partner to Jackson -- back to his partner. Rock-steps back to let Kitty better face Jackson. "She makes it easy." The brief-sharp sting of ache this conjures up is entirely dwarfed by an entirely more uncomplicated swell of affection. "I should -- let you two --" He squeezes Kitty's hand and lets it go, stepping away into the mess of chaos.<br />
<br />
"''He'' learns fast," is Kitty's easy -- tipsy -- warm reply, the squeeze of her hand tight around Leo's before he pulls away. There's something faintly disquieted in her thoughts when Leo pulls away, not yet a question before she turns to slot herself easily into Jax's arms. More easily than maybe it ''should'' be, with their height difference, the air between Kitty's feet and the dance floor bringing her up closer to her best friend. <br />
<br />
Later, there will be worry and rage and exhaustion. Later there will be all the emotions Kitty, like so many others here, are pushing determinedly down down down so that tonight can be special. Later there will be time -- too much time, still -- for spinning and scheming and searching. Later this -- this bright smile, this flex of her mutation -- will be too hard to maintain. <br />
<br />
But right now -- fiery warm hand in one that is delicately cool -- Kitty dances, easy and almost-carefree, on nothing.<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:The_tide_beats_in_my_soul_so_strong_that_happiness_breaks_forth_in_song,&diff=25072Logs:The tide beats in my soul so strong that happiness breaks forth in song,2023-07-05T17:02:49Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Kitty]], [[Mirror|Leo?]], [[Jax]], [[DJ]], [[Steve]], [[Sam]], [[Polaris]], [[Hive]], [[Matt]], [[Fury]], [[Ion]], [[Dusk]], [[Maya]], [[Ryan]], [[NPC-FitzSimmons|FitzSimmons]]<br />
| summary = "May I have this dance?"<br />
| gamedate = 2023-06-21<br />
| gamedatename = summer solstice '23 / jax's 31st birthday<br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Rooftop - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Kitty, NPC-FitzSimmons, Mirror, Jax, DJ, Steve, Sam, Polaris, Hive, Matt, Fury, Ion, Dusk, Maya, Ryan, SHIELD HQ, Mutants, Humans, Mutates<br />
| log =<br />
There's an unexpected oasis at the top of this gleaming high-rise, the whole of it carpeted in thick, soft, layered ground cover of sedums, grass, and moss. A small, carefully manicured grove serves as the centerpiece, with benches, tables and chairs scattered around in the shade. Beside it, a professionally landscaped garden boasts a pond and quite a few planters that either used to hold plants or still hold dying ones. The greenhouse is somewhat sparsely and eclectically populated with tropical plants, flanked by garden beds even more sparsely planted. An open lawn on the side overlooking Times Square makes a great spot for a picnic. The otherwise unsightly structure housing the roof access, a single stall bathroom, and tool shed has been covered on three sides with turf and shaped into a little promontory offering a breathtaking view of the city.<br />
<br />
The lawn has mostly disappeared under the newly assembled raised stage, wires for lighting and sound systems running through the grass to generators that definitely do ''not'' belong to SHIELD. The tables have been commandeered as food and drink stations, starting to deplete as the long, long arc of sun on the longest day of the year meanders lazily towards the horizon. The fae-like uniforms of Jax's friends are easy to pick out in the crowd in front of the stage, glowing horns and sun-adorned wings catching light from the star in the heavens as well as on stage.<br />
<br />
Ryan Black, in a slim-fitting white suit so densely packed with optical fiber that it has a glossy sheen even with the lighting function off, a dress shirt so black it looks like a void amidst all the light, gold cowboy boots with solar designs picked out in bright EL wire, and a matching gambler's hat that shows a brilliant sunburst when viewed from above, is winding to the end of "Care Less", the slick ferocity of the violin line lighting up the fibers in a vibrant dance of colors. The slip into "Brighter" is subtle at first, but at the first lyric a cheer goes up from the crowd.<br />
<br />
Kitty, glittery and gold in a Gatsby-esque sequinned flapper dress, radiant sunbeams emerging from her headband, and a fairy wand with a sunburst topper in hand, is spinning out on the dance floor. Swing dance would probably be more appropriate for her outfit, but she's not letting the genre discrepancy stop her from laughing, cheering, and sliding in closer to her dance partner to kiss his cheek -- heedless of the slack jawed look Jemma Simmons is giving ''him'' from the drink table.<br />
<br />
"I cannae tell if she manipulates intramolecular force or nuclear force," Leo Fitz is bemoaning into his beer, "and she won't ''tell'' me which it is."<br />
<br />
"Uh-huh," Simmons replies absently, swirling her cocktail with one hand. "...You think Mr. Jax might introduce me to Mr. Concepcion if I ask nicely?" <br />
<br />
Morosely, lifting his beer to his lips, Fitz replies, "Probably not."<br />
<br />
Leo accepts his kiss with a faint flush, and his small smile has a glimmer of amusement as he spins Kitty back close to him. "That man," he's only ''lightly'' indicating Fitz with a small point of pursed lips in the engineer's direction, "has have his eyes on you all evening." There's no jealousy here though there ''is'' a healthy dose of appreciation when he adds, pitched quieter as if someone else might ''hear'' over the upbeat music: "You ''do'' shine."<br />
<br />
Had he ''planned'' to be at this party? Difficult to say, given the capriciousness of his schedule. But he seems to be well enjoying himself here, twirling his girlfriend on the dancefloor -- he's currently less eye-catching than her in ''outfit'' though no doubt his presence alone draws a few stares, but, currently, the neat and colorful button-down he is wearing has been largely obscured underneath an oversized tee shirt likely caught from one of the two t-shirt cannons a matching fairy-winged pair of Ryan's crew are shooting at the audience. ''His'' has the by-now very familiar HOLLAND WAS RIGHT text on the front, though the dragonfly it is usually styled around has now grown a stylized sunburst for a thorax in a design that is echoed smaller up by the back collar. Underneath the smaller back logo, printed in simple font: ''party like the day is long! summer solstice '23 <nowiki>|</nowiki> happy birthday, jax.''<br />
<br />
Jax has been on ''stage'' through the beginning of this song, ''getting'' even Brighter himself as Ryan takes off the sunburst-hat and bestows it upon him. In contrast to his BFF's radiance on stage, Jax himself is startlingly not glowing -- for now -- though his smile is bright enough he might as ''well'' be as he's helped down off the stage and back into the crowd. His very fierce heat is accompanied by a very fierce blush as he accepts a hand down, accepts a ''dance'' -- far from his first tonight but this one comes with a flush of mingled warmth and grief, an echo of memory summoned up of dappled sunlight in a faraway grove, a flicker of yellow feathers under rustling wings. The rhythm he falls into is familiar, unthinking. It's only after several measures when he looks up, lifts a hand to touch fingers light and brief against his dance partner's neat-trimmed beard which itself grows a sunny illumination -- that he lets the grief settle into a somewhat less complicated delight. "''Gosh'', but you you clean up good."<br />
<br />
There to help Jax off the stage is DJ -- the hand that turns over to takes Jax's is, as fits the theme tonight, resplendent in color; the prosthetic has been intricately painted in a pattern of feathering -- on the over side a more staid black-brown but on the underneath brilliant metallic emerald giving way to a bold scarlet with a very subtle metallic purple flash at the edges in the brilliant plumage of a scarlet-chested sunbird. He's in a sleek two-piece suit in crisp red-and-black striped seersucker over a neatly pressed white linen shirt cinched with an eye-catching tie styled very abstractly after a flight feather, its barbs forming fine chevrons in an iridescent red-purple-green-black ombre, and black oxford shoes polished to a shine. In ''his'' mind there's a hard-ingrained hypervigilance threading through the beat, out of sync with the environment but nevertheless threaded taut through the steps, tracking the crowd around them as intently as he tracks his partner's motions. His smile at the compliment is bright, buoyed by the company and the empathic vibrancy of the music. "Figured it was about time I --"<br />
<br />
As he drops his hand to signal an outside turn he's also dropped his sentence, also dropped his ''stance''; it all happens quickly enough anyone else might not have caught it at all if not for the fact that at the Very First Sight of someone beelining for Jax, Jax himself has abruptly vanished to reappear safely beside Ryan's bodyguard. DJ -- who just a second before was tensing, bracing for a fight, mind snapped to alertness, is now blushing fierce as he looks up at the very close proximity of "-- oh. Oh," his blush is only deepening, his wary look already shifted to a crooked smile that belies the butterfly-flutter inside him. "I'm sorry, I thought -- obviously. You wanted --"<br />
<br />
Standing off to one side, Steve is wearing a blue-and-red windowpane suit with a spray of heliotrope for a boutonniere and a magenta-violet-blue ombre tie. He only clocks the swinging beat in ''Brighter'' when he spots Jax swinging to it with DJ, and with a bright smile makes his way over. << Gosh I've never ''cut in'' before -- ''do'' people still cut in or -- >> He doesn't have time to be alarmed when DJ blips Jax away and pivots more or less right ''into'' him. Before he even knows what's happened he's sliding one foot back, then in almost the same moment checks the motion, amused and embarrassed. Quietly thankful DJ's swiftness also beat him to the awkward stuttering he was definitely about to do, he finishes the half-spoken sentence, "-- to dance. Obviously." This might have come out more suave if he weren't distracted by ''that smile'', at once soothingly and painfully familiar. <br />
<br />
His slow breath out hitches on a chuckle as they both try to lead. << How ''do'' two fellas decide... >> He dismisses his mental image of proposing rock-paper-scissors almost before it's formed. Instead, he settles his right hand onto DJ's brightly colored prosthetic and his left hand onto DJ's shoulder, confident and decisive and flushing pink nevertheless. His rhythm is imperfect and his steps sloppy on the turns, but he follows well for a beginner. "Thanks for bearing with me," he tells his partner earnestly as the song fades. A little hesitant, he adds, "Glad you made it out tonight." He dips his head and makes a leg -- luckily having released DJ's hand -- before stepping away, suddenly unsure what to do with himself. That uncertainty flees when he catches Sam's eye, and though his smile is still a little faint and his rhythm still a little off, he's nodding in time to the swelling music again.<br />
<br />
Sam has ''been'' in between partners, in between drinks, but after watching Steve take his leave from DJ he's ambling over. At once casual in stride and not-so in his seafoam green collarless suit, sleek and clean and unconventional with scrollwork embroidered on either side of the front opening in hunter green to match the lightweight tunic underneath, which is longer than the jacket and separates it visually from the trousers to striking effect, and black dress boots with hunter green spats.<br />
<br />
No paper-scissors-rock -- though his offered hand comes with a lift of brows, a tip of head, a "May I have this dance?" he seems confident enough of the answer and confident as well as he leads Steve back onto the floor, falling smoothly into the rhythm of "Save Me". His eyes follow ''pointedly'' after DJ, and return to Steve -- just a ''little'' searching. Maybe it's the music and its buoyant warmth; maybe it's whatever he finds (or doesn't) in Steve's expression, but the searching soon gives way to just a companionable ease in the steps, navigating tight-crowded dancefloor and inexperienced partner and Occasional Stares in Steve's direction with equal facility -- he ''eventually'' deigns to acknowledge this last when it's a gawky and gawk''ing'' Xavier's teenager whose stare has pulled them obliviously straight ''into'' the press of dancers to peer up-up-UP at Steve with eyes wide as dinner plates. The song isn't yet done but Sam is relinquishing his partner, patting him ''firm'' on the shoulder: "-- feel like this is your patriotic duty, Cap," and now ''he's'' left in the slightly awkward position of trying to weave through the floor unpaired --<br />
<br />
-- only to be swept up by Polaris, who was presumably just happening by, but in the press of bodies ''appears'' as though she materialized out of thin air precisely when Sam found himself stranded. She's wearing a metallic purple-green duochrome corset dress that would be ''quite'' revealing on its own but is only ''kind'' of revealing over a semi-sheer black blouse, a wide v-shaped chainmaille belt along with intricate woven wire cuffs and choker, and black ankle strap pumps. Her long green hair is bound up in two crown braids woven together with a glowing flower crown, and one of the event workers' sun wands dangles from her belt beside a black velvet purse.<br />
<br />
"You're wearing my color," she informs him, though the brightness of her smile belies the presumptive complaint even before she adds, "and wearing it ''well!''" Though not the most ''skilled'' dance partner, she is pouring enough grace and energy and fiercely determined joy into it to be a ''compelling'' one. There's no small amount of hypervigilance in her attention to the intricate shimmering fields--biological and technological--all around, enmeshed in an electrifying dance of their own. There's no small amount of love, too, her mind alight with music and motion and a profound sense of connection that cannot be wholly attributed to Ryan power. "You should be careful wearing green on midsummer night, you know?" She laughs as Sam spins her out into a turn, unabashed that she works an extra step into it. "Lest the fairies whisk you away!"<br />
<br />
The fairies ''are'' about to whisk, little though Sam or Polaris might know it. It isn't the ones that work the party wearing tattered wings or glowing horns or gleaming claws -- quiet, unfelt, a deft psionic force spreads its roots out, rides the beat, rides their minds; on one step they are a pair, on the next they're ''both'' dancing with new people. It feels like Polaris's decision -- and then, of ''course'' it did, because on the next step she no longer ''is'' Hive, but she ''is'' just dancing with him, and he's not smiling, same default-grump-scowl he always wears; but as his mental roots pull back she can feel the lingering amusement, warm and unabashed, he leaves in his wake. <br />
<br />
"Feel like I should get at least ''one'' dance in with my --" Just a beat, a small sideways twitch of mouth. "-- you." He isn't ''much'' of a dancer. There are times that the ''oneness'' of him smooths over for that, an innate proprioception of his partner's movements, but this isn't one of those times. It's not ''DJ'' he's stealing from now, with his ''actual'' dancing skill and confident grace; just turtling back into himself with the help of the Elder Telepath in his network; shielding he's not innately ''good'' at -- and, for the rest of the song -- just him. Just Polaris. Just dancing. It's warm. But as one song fades into the next, as he pecks Polaris on the cheek, it's warm, too, as his mind relaxes with something like relief back into its expansive openness. Is it the return of feeling his hundreds of selves that hits him deep, or the opening strains of "Little Wonder"? Either way he's stopped at the edge of the floor like he's temporarily forgotten what he's doing.<br />
<br />
It's also hard to say whether it's the shift in Hive's self(ves) that catches Matt's attention or the fiery adoration spilling through the song for the missing child--the missing ''children''. He's in a white oxford shirt, green linen vest, and gray slacks, the matching jacket nowhere to be seen, and had been draped languidly picturesque against a nearby picnic table, methodically getting drunk. Now he goes to Hive, gathering his friend close though he does not know if he has it in him to do much more than sway to the music. His mindscape is eerily flat, and he's trying to dredge something up from beneath its murky surface other than the jagged rage hungry for someone to sink into. "{Thank you, my dear.}" His words are soft with improvised gratitude and affected affection for Hive's tireless search. "{I have missed you, also.}" He isn't sure how true that was before now, but he's found his emotional stride and with it his rhythm, his feet light as whirls Hive and his borrowed steps around the dancefloor.<br />
<br />
"Little Wonder" acquires new dimensions as the jazz musicians of the next act seamlessly join in, one by one. Something reaches out from his turbid depths for Ryan's electrifying voice, and though sharp and rapacious it is not anger but desire that he immediately tamps back down. It might not have stayed down, but the ''song'' is winding down, not so much ''ending'' as morphing into improvisational jazz. Matt bends to kiss Hive's hand before sending him off in DJ's direction, as best he can estimate the path of the bright flickering beat in his mind. He is emphatically ''not'' paying attention to Ryan as he hops off the stage into the arms of the ecstatically awaiting crowd. He's leaning into his anger instead, searching and finding a suitable target, veering off giddy with (somewhat) playful malice to drag Fury up from where ''he's'' been methodically getting drunk. "I hear you're a fine dancer, Director Fury," he pipes with an impish grin. "''Prove it.''"<br />
<br />
With the generous support of the free booze, Director Fury ''had'' started to enjoy the concert despite himself -- little though anyone would be able to tell by his persistently baleful glare. << That Ryan Black steady ''wildin''', but he don't sound half bad tho. >> He tenses up at the prospect some telepath might have overheard that admission, and starts running through the psionic self-defense exercises he'd let lapse. The organic changing of the act on stage makes this harder -- the steady sweeps and capricious turns of the jazz blossoming from "Little Wonder" speaks to him in a deep way that Ryan, whatever his skill ''or'' powers, could not -- and the sudden appearance of the Other Mister Tessier shatters his precarious focus altogether.<br />
<br />
"Oh ''hell'' no," he blurts as Matt pulls him to his feet, and though he's sure he ''could'' prevail if he fought harder, he doesn't. A part of him is suspicious some psionic influence swayed him to accept the dance. A part of him is terrified of being surrounded by drunken mutants with God knows what powers. The ''rest'' of him is reversing Matt's grip on his hand and letting the music move through him and appreciating how readily the younger man follows his lead. And then he's suspicious of ''that'', too. << (does he know)(what's his agenda)(at least his ''power'' can't hurt me none) >> Aloud he just says, "I been dancing longer'n you been alive. I ain't got nothing to prove." Perhaps belying this, he embellishes his already elaborate footwork, challenging Matt to keep up and at once annoyed and impressed that he does. Somewhere between this absurd game and the technical demands of playing it out on a crowded floor, he forgets his wariness and just ''dances.''<br />
<br />
"{That's how he ''get'' you.}" Relaxing, evidently? Dancing, evidently? Enjoying yourself for a few brief moments -- on one outward spin Matt whirls away and blink-and-you-might-miss-it quick, a small static-shock ''zap'' in Fury's hand -- which is turning back ''over'', gripped now in a calloused-rough one. "{Secondary mutation, you know, make you ''lose'' yourself in them fairy-green eyes.}" Ion's grin is ''fierce'', his own dark eyes bright -- did he dress for this at all? ''Probably'', with his motorcycle boots and weatherbeaten cut there's his ''nice'' jeans and a lightweight linen button down, sunburst wand jammed through a beltloop, long pointed ears blended seamless over his own.<br />
<br />
Right here Matt ''should'' have been twirling back, ''should'' have been dipping, but instead Fury's getting Ion's ''aggressively'' cheerful energy -- can he dance? Can he ''swing''? He's sure got rhythm to ''spare'' but in the scheme of things, these may be secondary to the forceful exuberance with which he's turned this ship Right Around fully heedless (or perhaps enjoying) Fury's poleaxed horror ''or'' his long-acclimatization to leading. As his partner stumbles trying to rock-step the wrong foot Ion's grin ''sharpens'', as Fury starts to lose his balance Ion's grip shifts seamlessly to a harder clamp on the older man's forearm. The Director of SHIELD does not fall; as quickly as the tornado of a dance began it's ending as Ion deposits him in the questionably loving arms of another Mongrel to recoup his balance ''properly''. Ion's cheek clicks against his teeth, fingers snapping, pointing in quick-bang motion at Fury, taking his grin and exuberance ''with'' him as he dips out across the floor -- "{Careful, eh? Party just getting started and already you slipping.}"<br />
<br />
Ion is intercepted, across the floor, pulled in to loop in to a small knot of newer Prometheans who have formed their own circle by an outstretched wing, not dark today but painted rich and brilliant with sunburst-ombre flare. Dusk's wing drapes around the electrokinetic; a soft pleased rumble in his throat as he watches an elderly woman pulled out of Blackburn teach a much younger Dirac alum the basics of swing. As he drops his head to rest against Ion's and briefly just bops with the music -- his growl deepening when the elder ''almost'' stumbles after a group of slightly-too-eager (slightly-too-tipsy?) Xavier's students collides with their group, his growl subsiding just as quick when the Dirac kid steadies her easily and the dancing-clusters mingle into one. 'Eeeevery once in a while,' he admits, a teasing amusement in his face, in the motions of his hands, that heavily exaggerates the ''rarity'' of this as the excitement in the group ''grows'' oh my ''god'' he's coming ''here'' for ''REAL'' '-- he fucking nails it.' And then he's squeezing Ion a little closer, letting his wing trail against the other man's shoulders as he sways through the group -- not towards Ryan himself but one of the ''many'' (staring''''trying not to stare) around them His smile is bright as he offers out a hand. "''He'' doesn't bite, you know."<br />
<br />
Maya has been here twirling with her sister, has been chatting, has been bright-bright-bright in her elegantly floral-embroidered yellow and orange salwar set, gold bangles, gold-sequined slippers, ribbons wound through her thick braids. ''Was'' she gawking, she was trying not to gawk! Certainly not in front of at least ''some'' of her students who are ''definitely also gawking oh gosh --'' And then there's Dusk in front of her and is she ''less'' flustered, looking up into his dark eyes, sharp-fanged grin, scruffy face? She blushes, takes his hand, a smile lighting up her slightly-tipsy-glowy face. "Oh! Oh but ''you'' -- no wait ''do'' you -- ''wow'' I shouldn't assume --" She's started to reach a hand for his other -- arm? Wing? Drops it to the side, lifts it again, blushes ''deeper''. "Oh ''wow'' were you even asking me to --" But she ''is'' getting on the dance floor with him, is kind of relaxing, even, more comfortable once he starts moving, once he starts ''her'' moving -- until another turn, and another, and then she is Face To Face with Ryan and her eyes have gone wide again, smile frozen in place, gaze darting between ''him'' and the crowd around, and ''maybe'' she'd have slunk back into the circle if not for the strong wings bolstering her at her back.<br />
<br />
From one set of wings to another; Ryan's gleaming stage costume has been luminescent between the enormous black-feathered wings of the woman who has been gyrating with him. He meets Maya's frozen smile with one warm enough to thaw, one hand turning up, beckoning with an easy confidence. "We on a dance floor -- you want to stare, stare; you want to move, then move, yeah?" He waits for her to take his hand before pulling her in, graceful but simple in the steps he leads until he's confident she ''does'' have the rhythm. Around them there are still Plenty Of Stares; excited Xavier's School teens, hipster artists pretending to be too cynical. "Don't even worry about them," there's brazen-cocky in his grin now, sure, but the first time ''she'' missteps from self-conscious watching The Crowd instead he's making the correction easily to keep the rhythm, ''his'' attention solely on his still-flustered partner. "They're not judging you, they ''all'' watching me."<br />
<br />
"Oh, ''all'''em?" As one melody slides into another, it's a very familiar face back at Ryan's side. Fierce heat in Jax's chin as he props it on his friend's shoulder. 'I can get you his number,' he's mouthing totally-not-at-all-surreptitiously to his coworker, as he snags an elbow through Ryan's. For all the fierce heat, bright outfit, sparkling makeup, the actual feelings that wash through his voice over the empath are muted and distant -- there's love there, a lot of it; there's anger, there's a ''heavy'' exhaustion, a stark horror, but all of it coming through a washed-out filter. "Jus' wouldn't'a been a birthday if you hadn't saved me a dance," he's saying with a small laugh, "if Mockingbird closes 'fore I get out we gotta riot."<br />
<br />
He's ''just'' pulling Ryan away, just finding a relatively open spot at the edge of the dance floor, when a small knot of fresh young agents from the SHIELD Comms division gets up the bravery to come over en masse, crowded too-close and too-touchy as is too-common for fans. Something dims -- just brief! -- in Jax's expression as he's jostled back. It brightens again, vivid and cheerful when he whirls to find -- "''gosh'', Leo! I didn't have no ''idea'' you was such a good dancer."<br />
<br />
<< I am? >> a startled question in Leo(?)'s mind, at once colored with his very-customary diffidence and something that is -- not. << ''am'' I? >> A deep blush has filled his cheeks as he looks up from his partner to Jackson -- back to his partner. Rock-steps back to let Kitty better face Jackson. "She makes it easy." The brief-sharp sting of ache this conjures up is entirely dwarfed by an entirely more uncomplicated swell of affection. "I should -- let you two --" He squeezes Kitty's hand and lets it go, stepping away into the mess of chaos.<br />
<br />
"''He'' learns fast," is Kitty's easy -- tipsy -- warm reply, the squeeze of her hand tight around Leo's before he pulls away. There's something faintly disquieted in her thoughts when Leo pulls away, not yet a question before she turns to slot herself easily into Jax's arms. More easily than maybe it ''should'' be, with their height difference, the air between Kitty's feet and the dance floor bringing her up closer to her best friend. <br />
<br />
Later, there will be worry and rage and exhaustion. Later there will be all the emotions Kitty, like so many others here, are pushing determinedly down down down so that tonight can be special. Later there will be time -- too much time, still -- for spinning and scheming and searching. Later this -- this bright smile, this flex of her mutation -- will be too hard to maintain. <br />
<br />
But right now -- fiery warm hand in one that is delicately cool -- Kitty dances, easy and almost-carefree, on nothing.<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:The_tide_beats_in_my_soul_so_strong_that_happiness_breaks_forth_in_song,&diff=25071Logs:The tide beats in my soul so strong that happiness breaks forth in song,2023-07-05T17:02:15Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Kitty]], [[Mirror|Leo?]], [[Jax]], [[DJ]], [[Steve]], [[Sam]], [[Polaris]], [[Hive]], [[Matt]], [[Fury]], [[Ion]], [[Dusk]], [[Maya]], [[Ryan]], [[NPC-FitzSimmons|FitzSimmons]]<br />
| summary = "May I have this dance?"<br />
| gamedate = 2023-06-21<br />
| gamedatename = summer solstice '23 / jax's 31st birthday<br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Rooftop - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Kitty, NPC-FitzSimmons, Mirror, Jax, DJ, Steve, Sam, Polaris, Hive, Matt, Fury, Ion, Dusk, Maya, Ryan, SHIELD HQ, Mutants, Humans, Mutates<br />
| log =<br />
There's an unexpected oasis at the top of this gleaming high-rise, the whole of it carpeted in thick, soft, layered ground cover of sedums, grass, and moss. A small, carefully manicured grove serves as the centerpiece, with benches, tables and chairs scattered around in the shade. Beside it, a professionally landscaped garden boasts a pond and quite a few planters that either used to hold plants or still hold dying ones. The greenhouse is somewhat sparsely and eclectically populated with tropical plants, flanked by garden beds even more sparsely planted. An open lawn on the side overlooking Times Square makes a great spot for a picnic. The otherwise unsightly structure housing the roof access, a single stall bathroom, and tool shed has been covered on three sides with turf and shaped into a little promontory offering a breathtaking view of the city.<br />
<br />
The lawn has mostly disappeared under the newly assembled raised stage, wires for lighting and sound systems running through the grass to generators that definitely do ''not'' belong to SHIELD. The tables have been commandeered as food and drink stations, starting to deplete as the long, long arc of sun on the longest day of the year meanders lazily towards the horizon. The fae-like uniforms of Jax's friends are easy to pick out in the crowd in front of the stage, glowing horns and sun-adorned wings catching light from the star in the heavens as well as on stage.<br />
<br />
Ryan Black, in a slim-fitting white suit so densely packed with optical fiber that it has a glossy sheen even with the lighting function off, a dress shirt so black it looks like a void amidst all the light, gold cowboy boots with solar designs picked out in bright EL wire, and a matching gambler's hat that shows a brilliant sunburst when viewed from above, is winding to the end of "Care Less", the slick ferocity of the violin line lighting up the fibers in a vibrant dance of colors. The slip into "Brighter" is subtle at first, but at the first lyric a cheer goes up from the crowd.<br />
<br />
Kitty, glittery and gold in a Gatsby-esque sequinned flapper dress, radiant sunbeams emerging from her headband, and a fairy wand with a sunburst topper in hand, is spinning out on the dance floor. Swing dance would probably be more appropriate for her outfit, but she's not letting the genre discrepancy stop her from laughing, cheering, and sliding in closer to her dance partner to kiss his cheek -- heedless of the slack jawed look Jemma Simmons is giving ''him'' from the drink table.<br />
<br />
"I cannae tell if she manipulates intramolecular force or nuclear force," Leo Fitz is bemoaning into his beer, "and she won't ''tell'' me which it is."<br />
<br />
"Uh-huh," Simmons replies absently, swirling her cocktail with one hand. "...You think Mr. Jax might introduce me to Mr. Concepcion if I ask nicely?" <br />
<br />
Morosely, lifting his beer to his lips, Fitz replies, "Probably not."<br />
<br />
Leo accepts his kiss with a faint flush, and his small smile has a glimmer of amusement as he spins Kitty back close to him. "That man," he's only ''lightly'' indicating Fitz with a small point of pursed lips in the engineer's direction, "has have his eyes on you all evening." There's no jealousy here though there ''is'' a healthy dose of appreciation when he adds, pitched quieter as if someone else might ''hear'' over the upbeat music: "You ''do'' shine."<br />
<br />
Had he ''planned'' to be at this party? Difficult to say, given the capriciousness of his schedule. But he seems to be well enjoying himself here, twirling his girlfriend on the dancefloor -- he's currently less eye-catching than her in ''outfit'' though no doubt his presence alone draws a few stares, but, currently, the neat and colorful button-down he is wearing has been largely obscured underneath an oversized tee shirt likely caught from one of the two t-shirt cannons a matching fairy-winged pair of Ryan's crew are shooting at the audience. ''His'' has the by-now very familiar HOLLAND WAS RIGHT text on the front, though the dragonfly it is usually styled around has now grown a stylized sunburst for a thorax in a design that is echoed smaller up by the back collar. Underneath the smaller back logo, printed in simple font: ''party like the day is long! summer solstice '23 | happy birthday, jax.''<br />
<br />
Jax has been on ''stage'' through the beginning of this song, ''getting'' even Brighter himself as Ryan takes off the sunburst-hat and bestows it upon him. In contrast to his BFF's radiance on stage, Jax himself is startlingly not glowing -- for now -- though his smile is bright enough he might as ''well'' be as he's helped down off the stage and back into the crowd. His very fierce heat is accompanied by a very fierce blush as he accepts a hand down, accepts a ''dance'' -- far from his first tonight but this one comes with a flush of mingled warmth and grief, an echo of memory summoned up of dappled sunlight in a faraway grove, a flicker of yellow feathers under rustling wings. The rhythm he falls into is familiar, unthinking. It's only after several measures when he looks up, lifts a hand to touch fingers light and brief against his dance partner's neat-trimmed beard which itself grows a sunny illumination -- that he lets the grief settle into a somewhat less complicated delight. "''Gosh'', but you you clean up good."<br />
<br />
There to help Jax off the stage is DJ -- the hand that turns over to takes Jax's is, as fits the theme tonight, resplendent in color; the prosthetic has been intricately painted in a pattern of feathering -- on the over side a more staid black-brown but on the underneath brilliant metallic emerald giving way to a bold scarlet with a very subtle metallic purple flash at the edges in the brilliant plumage of a scarlet-chested sunbird. He's in a sleek two-piece suit in crisp red-and-black striped seersucker over a neatly pressed white linen shirt cinched with an eye-catching tie styled very abstractly after a flight feather, its barbs forming fine chevrons in an iridescent red-purple-green-black ombre, and black oxford shoes polished to a shine. In ''his'' mind there's a hard-ingrained hypervigilance threading through the beat, out of sync with the environment but nevertheless threaded taut through the steps, tracking the crowd around them as intently as he tracks his partner's motions. His smile at the compliment is bright, buoyed by the company and the empathic vibrancy of the music. "Figured it was about time I --"<br />
<br />
As he drops his hand to signal an outside turn he's also dropped his sentence, also dropped his ''stance''; it all happens quickly enough anyone else might not have caught it at all if not for the fact that at the Very First Sight of someone beelining for Jax, Jax himself has abruptly vanished to reappear safely beside Ryan's bodyguard. DJ -- who just a second before was tensing, bracing for a fight, mind snapped to alertness, is now blushing fierce as he looks up at the very close proximity of "-- oh. Oh," his blush is only deepening, his wary look already shifted to a crooked smile that belies the butterfly-flutter inside him. "I'm sorry, I thought -- obviously. You wanted --"<br />
<br />
Standing off to one side, Steve is wearing a blue-and-red windowpane suit with a spray of heliotrope for a boutonniere and a magenta-violet-blue ombre tie. He only clocks the swinging beat in ''Brighter'' when he spots Jax swinging to it with DJ, and with a bright smile makes his way over. << Gosh I've never ''cut in'' before -- ''do'' people still cut in or -- >> He doesn't have time to be alarmed when DJ blips Jax away and pivots more or less right ''into'' him. Before he even knows what's happened he's sliding one foot back, then in almost the same moment checks the motion, amused and embarrassed. Quietly thankful DJ's swiftness also beat him to the awkward stuttering he was definitely about to do, he finishes the half-spoken sentence, "-- to dance. Obviously." This might have come out more suave if he weren't distracted by ''that smile'', at once soothingly and painfully familiar. <br />
<br />
His slow breath out hitches on a chuckle as they both try to lead. << How ''do'' two fellas decide... >> He dismisses his mental image of proposing rock-paper-scissors almost before it's formed. Instead, he settles his right hand onto DJ's brightly colored prosthetic and his left hand onto DJ's shoulder, confident and decisive and flushing pink nevertheless. His rhythm is imperfect and his steps sloppy on the turns, but he follows well for a beginner. "Thanks for bearing with me," he tells his partner earnestly as the song fades. A little hesitant, he adds, "Glad you made it out tonight." He dips his head and makes a leg -- luckily having released DJ's hand -- before stepping away, suddenly unsure what to do with himself. That uncertainty flees when he catches Sam's eye, and though his smile is still a little faint and his rhythm still a little off, he's nodding in time to the swelling music again.<br />
<br />
Sam has ''been'' in between partners, in between drinks, but after watching Steve take his leave from DJ he's ambling over. At once casual in stride and not-so in his seafoam green collarless suit, sleek and clean and unconventional with scrollwork embroidered on either side of the front opening in hunter green to match the lightweight tunic underneath, which is longer than the jacket and separates it visually from the trousers to striking effect, and black dress boots with hunter green spats.<br />
<br />
No paper-scissors-rock -- though his offered hand comes with a lift of brows, a tip of head, a "May I have this dance?" he seems confident enough of the answer and confident as well as he leads Steve back onto the floor, falling smoothly into the rhythm of "Save Me". His eyes follow ''pointedly'' after DJ, and return to Steve -- just a ''little'' searching. Maybe it's the music and its buoyant warmth; maybe it's whatever he finds (or doesn't) in Steve's expression, but the searching soon gives way to just a companionable ease in the steps, navigating tight-crowded dancefloor and inexperienced partner and Occasional Stares in Steve's direction with equal facility -- he ''eventually'' deigns to acknowledge this last when it's a gawky and gawk''ing'' Xavier's teenager whose stare has pulled them obliviously straight ''into'' the press of dancers to peer up-up-UP at Steve with eyes wide as dinner plates. The song isn't yet done but Sam is relinquishing his partner, patting him ''firm'' on the shoulder: "-- feel like this is your patriotic duty, Cap," and now ''he's'' left in the slightly awkward position of trying to weave through the floor unpaired --<br />
<br />
-- only to be swept up by Polaris, who was presumably just happening by, but in the press of bodies ''appears'' as though she materialized out of thin air precisely when Sam found himself stranded. She's wearing a metallic purple-green duochrome corset dress that would be ''quite'' revealing on its own but is only ''kind'' of revealing over a semi-sheer black blouse, a wide v-shaped chainmaille belt along with intricate woven wire cuffs and choker, and black ankle strap pumps. Her long green hair is bound up in two crown braids woven together with a glowing flower crown, and one of the event workers' sun wands dangles from her belt beside a black velvet purse.<br />
<br />
"You're wearing my color," she informs him, though the brightness of her smile belies the presumptive complaint even before she adds, "and wearing it ''well!''" Though not the most ''skilled'' dance partner, she is pouring enough grace and energy and fiercely determined joy into it to be a ''compelling'' one. There's no small amount of hypervigilance in her attention to the intricate shimmering fields--biological and technological--all around, enmeshed in an electrifying dance of their own. There's no small amount of love, too, her mind alight with music and motion and a profound sense of connection that cannot be wholly attributed to Ryan power. "You should be careful wearing green on midsummer night, you know?" She laughs as Sam spins her out into a turn, unabashed that she works an extra step into it. "Lest the fairies whisk you away!"<br />
<br />
The fairies ''are'' about to whisk, little though Sam or Polaris might know it. It isn't the ones that work the party wearing tattered wings or glowing horns or gleaming claws -- quiet, unfelt, a deft psionic force spreads its roots out, rides the beat, rides their minds; on one step they are a pair, on the next they're ''both'' dancing with new people. It feels like Polaris's decision -- and then, of ''course'' it did, because on the next step she no longer ''is'' Hive, but she ''is'' just dancing with him, and he's not smiling, same default-grump-scowl he always wears; but as his mental roots pull back she can feel the lingering amusement, warm and unabashed, he leaves in his wake. <br />
<br />
"Feel like I should get at least ''one'' dance in with my --" Just a beat, a small sideways twitch of mouth. "-- you." He isn't ''much'' of a dancer. There are times that the ''oneness'' of him smooths over for that, an innate proprioception of his partner's movements, but this isn't one of those times. It's not ''DJ'' he's stealing from now, with his ''actual'' dancing skill and confident grace; just turtling back into himself with the help of the Elder Telepath in his network; shielding he's not innately ''good'' at -- and, for the rest of the song -- just him. Just Polaris. Just dancing. It's warm. But as one song fades into the next, as he pecks Polaris on the cheek, it's warm, too, as his mind relaxes with something like relief back into its expansive openness. Is it the return of feeling his hundreds of selves that hits him deep, or the opening strains of "Little Wonder"? Either way he's stopped at the edge of the floor like he's temporarily forgotten what he's doing.<br />
<br />
It's also hard to say whether it's the shift in Hive's self(ves) that catches Matt's attention or the fiery adoration spilling through the song for the missing child--the missing ''children''. He's in a white oxford shirt, green linen vest, and gray slacks, the matching jacket nowhere to be seen, and had been draped languidly picturesque against a nearby picnic table, methodically getting drunk. Now he goes to Hive, gathering his friend close though he does not know if he has it in him to do much more than sway to the music. His mindscape is eerily flat, and he's trying to dredge something up from beneath its murky surface other than the jagged rage hungry for someone to sink into. "{Thank you, my dear.}" His words are soft with improvised gratitude and affected affection for Hive's tireless search. "{I have missed you, also.}" He isn't sure how true that was before now, but he's found his emotional stride and with it his rhythm, his feet light as whirls Hive and his borrowed steps around the dancefloor.<br />
<br />
"Little Wonder" acquires new dimensions as the jazz musicians of the next act seamlessly join in, one by one. Something reaches out from his turbid depths for Ryan's electrifying voice, and though sharp and rapacious it is not anger but desire that he immediately tamps back down. It might not have stayed down, but the ''song'' is winding down, not so much ''ending'' as morphing into improvisational jazz. Matt bends to kiss Hive's hand before sending him off in DJ's direction, as best he can estimate the path of the bright flickering beat in his mind. He is emphatically ''not'' paying attention to Ryan as he hops off the stage into the arms of the ecstatically awaiting crowd. He's leaning into his anger instead, searching and finding a suitable target, veering off giddy with (somewhat) playful malice to drag Fury up from where ''he's'' been methodically getting drunk. "I hear you're a fine dancer, Director Fury," he pipes with an impish grin. "''Prove it.''"<br />
<br />
With the generous support of the free booze, Director Fury ''had'' started to enjoy the concert despite himself -- little though anyone would be able to tell by his persistently baleful glare. << That Ryan Black steady ''wildin''', but he don't sound half bad tho. >> He tenses up at the prospect some telepath might have overheard that admission, and starts running through the psionic self-defense exercises he'd let lapse. The organic changing of the act on stage makes this harder -- the steady sweeps and capricious turns of the jazz blossoming from "Little Wonder" speaks to him in a deep way that Ryan, whatever his skill ''or'' powers, could not -- and the sudden appearance of the Other Mister Tessier shatters his precarious focus altogether.<br />
<br />
"Oh ''hell'' no," he blurts as Matt pulls him to his feet, and though he's sure he ''could'' prevail if he fought harder, he doesn't. A part of him is suspicious some psionic influence swayed him to accept the dance. A part of him is terrified of being surrounded by drunken mutants with God knows what powers. The ''rest'' of him is reversing Matt's grip on his hand and letting the music move through him and appreciating how readily the younger man follows his lead. And then he's suspicious of ''that'', too. << (does he know)(what's his agenda)(at least his ''power'' can't hurt me none) >> Aloud he just says, "I been dancing longer'n you been alive. I ain't got nothing to prove." Perhaps belying this, he embellishes his already elaborate footwork, challenging Matt to keep up and at once annoyed and impressed that he does. Somewhere between this absurd game and the technical demands of playing it out on a crowded floor, he forgets his wariness and just ''dances.''<br />
<br />
"{That's how he ''get'' you.}" Relaxing, evidently? Dancing, evidently? Enjoying yourself for a few brief moments -- on one outward spin Matt whirls away and blink-and-you-might-miss-it quick, a small static-shock ''zap'' in Fury's hand -- which is turning back ''over'', gripped now in a calloused-rough one. "{Secondary mutation, you know, make you ''lose'' yourself in them fairy-green eyes.}" Ion's grin is ''fierce'', his own dark eyes bright -- did he dress for this at all? ''Probably'', with his motorcycle boots and weatherbeaten cut there's his ''nice'' jeans and a lightweight linen button down, sunburst wand jammed through a beltloop, long pointed ears blended seamless over his own.<br />
<br />
Right here Matt ''should'' have been twirling back, ''should'' have been dipping, but instead Fury's getting Ion's ''aggressively'' cheerful energy -- can he dance? Can he ''swing''? He's sure got rhythm to ''spare'' but in the scheme of things, these may be secondary to the forceful exuberance with which he's turned this ship Right Around fully heedless (or perhaps enjoying) Fury's poleaxed horror ''or'' his long-acclimatization to leading. As his partner stumbles trying to rock-step the wrong foot Ion's grin ''sharpens'', as Fury starts to lose his balance Ion's grip shifts seamlessly to a harder clamp on the older man's forearm. The Director of SHIELD does not fall; as quickly as the tornado of a dance began it's ending as Ion deposits him in the questionably loving arms of another Mongrel to recoup his balance ''properly''. Ion's cheek clicks against his teeth, fingers snapping, pointing in quick-bang motion at Fury, taking his grin and exuberance ''with'' him as he dips out across the floor -- "{Careful, eh? Party just getting started and already you slipping.}"<br />
<br />
Ion is intercepted, across the floor, pulled in to loop in to a small knot of newer Prometheans who have formed their own circle by an outstretched wing, not dark today but painted rich and brilliant with sunburst-ombre flare. Dusk's wing drapes around the electrokinetic; a soft pleased rumble in his throat as he watches an elderly woman pulled out of Blackburn teach a much younger Dirac alum the basics of swing. As he drops his head to rest against Ion's and briefly just bops with the music -- his growl deepening when the elder ''almost'' stumbles after a group of slightly-too-eager (slightly-too-tipsy?) Xavier's students collides with their group, his growl subsiding just as quick when the Dirac kid steadies her easily and the dancing-clusters mingle into one. 'Eeeevery once in a while,' he admits, a teasing amusement in his face, in the motions of his hands, that heavily exaggerates the ''rarity'' of this as the excitement in the group ''grows'' oh my ''god'' he's coming ''here'' for ''REAL'' '-- he fucking nails it.' And then he's squeezing Ion a little closer, letting his wing trail against the other man's shoulders as he sways through the group -- not towards Ryan himself but one of the ''many'' (staring''''trying not to stare) around them His smile is bright as he offers out a hand. "''He'' doesn't bite, you know."<br />
<br />
Maya has been here twirling with her sister, has been chatting, has been bright-bright-bright in her elegantly floral-embroidered yellow and orange salwar set, gold bangles, gold-sequined slippers, ribbons wound through her thick braids. ''Was'' she gawking, she was trying not to gawk! Certainly not in front of at least ''some'' of her students who are ''definitely also gawking oh gosh --'' And then there's Dusk in front of her and is she ''less'' flustered, looking up into his dark eyes, sharp-fanged grin, scruffy face? She blushes, takes his hand, a smile lighting up her slightly-tipsy-glowy face. "Oh! Oh but ''you'' -- no wait ''do'' you -- ''wow'' I shouldn't assume --" She's started to reach a hand for his other -- arm? Wing? Drops it to the side, lifts it again, blushes ''deeper''. "Oh ''wow'' were you even asking me to --" But she ''is'' getting on the dance floor with him, is kind of relaxing, even, more comfortable once he starts moving, once he starts ''her'' moving -- until another turn, and another, and then she is Face To Face with Ryan and her eyes have gone wide again, smile frozen in place, gaze darting between ''him'' and the crowd around, and ''maybe'' she'd have slunk back into the circle if not for the strong wings bolstering her at her back.<br />
<br />
From one set of wings to another; Ryan's gleaming stage costume has been luminescent between the enormous black-feathered wings of the woman who has been gyrating with him. He meets Maya's frozen smile with one warm enough to thaw, one hand turning up, beckoning with an easy confidence. "We on a dance floor -- you want to stare, stare; you want to move, then move, yeah?" He waits for her to take his hand before pulling her in, graceful but simple in the steps he leads until he's confident she ''does'' have the rhythm. Around them there are still Plenty Of Stares; excited Xavier's School teens, hipster artists pretending to be too cynical. "Don't even worry about them," there's brazen-cocky in his grin now, sure, but the first time ''she'' missteps from self-conscious watching The Crowd instead he's making the correction easily to keep the rhythm, ''his'' attention solely on his still-flustered partner. "They're not judging you, they ''all'' watching me."<br />
<br />
"Oh, ''all'''em?" As one melody slides into another, it's a very familiar face back at Ryan's side. Fierce heat in Jax's chin as he props it on his friend's shoulder. 'I can get you his number,' he's mouthing totally-not-at-all-surreptitiously to his coworker, as he snags an elbow through Ryan's. For all the fierce heat, bright outfit, sparkling makeup, the actual feelings that wash through his voice over the empath are muted and distant -- there's love there, a lot of it; there's anger, there's a ''heavy'' exhaustion, a stark horror, but all of it coming through a washed-out filter. "Jus' wouldn't'a been a birthday if you hadn't saved me a dance," he's saying with a small laugh, "if Mockingbird closes 'fore I get out we gotta riot."<br />
<br />
He's ''just'' pulling Ryan away, just finding a relatively open spot at the edge of the dance floor, when a small knot of fresh young agents from the SHIELD Comms division gets up the bravery to come over en masse, crowded too-close and too-touchy as is too-common for fans. Something dims -- just brief! -- in Jax's expression as he's jostled back. It brightens again, vivid and cheerful when he whirls to find -- "''gosh'', Leo! I didn't have no ''idea'' you was such a good dancer."<br />
<br />
<< I am? >> a startled question in Leo(?)'s mind, at once colored with his very-customary diffidence and something that is -- not. << ''am'' I? >> A deep blush has filled his cheeks as he looks up from his partner to Jackson -- back to his partner. Rock-steps back to let Kitty better face Jackson. "She makes it easy." The brief-sharp sting of ache this conjures up is entirely dwarfed by an entirely more uncomplicated swell of affection. "I should -- let you two --" He squeezes Kitty's hand and lets it go, stepping away into the mess of chaos.<br />
<br />
"''He'' learns fast," is Kitty's easy -- tipsy -- warm reply, the squeeze of her hand tight around Leo's before he pulls away. There's something faintly disquieted in her thoughts when Leo pulls away, not yet a question before she turns to slot herself easily into Jax's arms. More easily than maybe it ''should'' be, with their height difference, the air between Kitty's feet and the dance floor bringing her up closer to her best friend. <br />
<br />
Later, there will be worry and rage and exhaustion. Later there will be all the emotions Kitty, like so many others here, are pushing determinedly down down down so that tonight can be special. Later there will be time -- too much time, still -- for spinning and scheming and searching. Later this -- this bright smile, this flex of her mutation -- will be too hard to maintain. <br />
<br />
But right now -- fiery warm hand in one that is delicately cool -- Kitty dances, easy and almost-carefree, on nothing.<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:The_tide_beats_in_my_soul_so_strong_that_happiness_breaks_forth_in_song,&diff=25070Logs:The tide beats in my soul so strong that happiness breaks forth in song,2023-07-05T17:01:51Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Kitty, Leo?, Jax, DJ, Steve, Sam, Polaris, Hive, Matt, Fury, Ion, Dusk, Maya, Ryan, Alma, [..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Kitty]], [[Mirror|Leo?]], [[Jax]], [[DJ]], [[Steve]], [[Sam]], [[Polaris]], [[Hive]], [[Matt]], [[Fury]], [[Ion]], [[Dusk]], [[Maya]], [[Ryan]], [[Alma]], [[Charles]], [[Scott]], [[NPC-FitzSimmons|FitzSimmons]], <br />
| summary = "May I have this dance?"<br />
| gamedate = 2023-06-21<br />
| gamedatename = summer solstice '23 / jax's 31st birthday<br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Rooftop - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Kitty, NPC-FitzSimmons, Mirror, Jax, DJ, Steve, Sam, Polaris, Hive, Matt, Fury, Ion, Dusk, Maya, Ryan, SHIELD HQ, Mutants, Humans, Mutates<br />
| log =<br />
There's an unexpected oasis at the top of this gleaming high-rise, the whole of it carpeted in thick, soft, layered ground cover of sedums, grass, and moss. A small, carefully manicured grove serves as the centerpiece, with benches, tables and chairs scattered around in the shade. Beside it, a professionally landscaped garden boasts a pond and quite a few planters that either used to hold plants or still hold dying ones. The greenhouse is somewhat sparsely and eclectically populated with tropical plants, flanked by garden beds even more sparsely planted. An open lawn on the side overlooking Times Square makes a great spot for a picnic. The otherwise unsightly structure housing the roof access, a single stall bathroom, and tool shed has been covered on three sides with turf and shaped into a little promontory offering a breathtaking view of the city.<br />
<br />
The lawn has mostly disappeared under the newly assembled raised stage, wires for lighting and sound systems running through the grass to generators that definitely do ''not'' belong to SHIELD. The tables have been commandeered as food and drink stations, starting to deplete as the long, long arc of sun on the longest day of the year meanders lazily towards the horizon. The fae-like uniforms of Jax's friends are easy to pick out in the crowd in front of the stage, glowing horns and sun-adorned wings catching light from the star in the heavens as well as on stage.<br />
<br />
Ryan Black, in a slim-fitting white suit so densely packed with optical fiber that it has a glossy sheen even with the lighting function off, a dress shirt so black it looks like a void amidst all the light, gold cowboy boots with solar designs picked out in bright EL wire, and a matching gambler's hat that shows a brilliant sunburst when viewed from above, is winding to the end of "Care Less", the slick ferocity of the violin line lighting up the fibers in a vibrant dance of colors. The slip into "Brighter" is subtle at first, but at the first lyric a cheer goes up from the crowd.<br />
<br />
Kitty, glittery and gold in a Gatsby-esque sequinned flapper dress, radiant sunbeams emerging from her headband, and a fairy wand with a sunburst topper in hand, is spinning out on the dance floor. Swing dance would probably be more appropriate for her outfit, but she's not letting the genre discrepancy stop her from laughing, cheering, and sliding in closer to her dance partner to kiss his cheek -- heedless of the slack jawed look Jemma Simmons is giving ''him'' from the drink table.<br />
<br />
"I cannae tell if she manipulates intramolecular force or nuclear force," Leo Fitz is bemoaning into his beer, "and she won't ''tell'' me which it is."<br />
<br />
"Uh-huh," Simmons replies absently, swirling her cocktail with one hand. "...You think Mr. Jax might introduce me to Mr. Concepcion if I ask nicely?" <br />
<br />
Morosely, lifting his beer to his lips, Fitz replies, "Probably not."<br />
<br />
Leo accepts his kiss with a faint flush, and his small smile has a glimmer of amusement as he spins Kitty back close to him. "That man," he's only ''lightly'' indicating Fitz with a small point of pursed lips in the engineer's direction, "has have his eyes on you all evening." There's no jealousy here though there ''is'' a healthy dose of appreciation when he adds, pitched quieter as if someone else might ''hear'' over the upbeat music: "You ''do'' shine."<br />
<br />
Had he ''planned'' to be at this party? Difficult to say, given the capriciousness of his schedule. But he seems to be well enjoying himself here, twirling his girlfriend on the dancefloor -- he's currently less eye-catching than her in ''outfit'' though no doubt his presence alone draws a few stares, but, currently, the neat and colorful button-down he is wearing has been largely obscured underneath an oversized tee shirt likely caught from one of the two t-shirt cannons a matching fairy-winged pair of Ryan's crew are shooting at the audience. ''His'' has the by-now very familiar HOLLAND WAS RIGHT text on the front, though the dragonfly it is usually styled around has now grown a stylized sunburst for a thorax in a design that is echoed smaller up by the back collar. Underneath the smaller back logo, printed in simple font: ''party like the day is long! summer solstice '23 | happy birthday, jax.''<br />
<br />
Jax has been on ''stage'' through the beginning of this song, ''getting'' even Brighter himself as Ryan takes off the sunburst-hat and bestows it upon him. In contrast to his BFF's radiance on stage, Jax himself is startlingly not glowing -- for now -- though his smile is bright enough he might as ''well'' be as he's helped down off the stage and back into the crowd. His very fierce heat is accompanied by a very fierce blush as he accepts a hand down, accepts a ''dance'' -- far from his first tonight but this one comes with a flush of mingled warmth and grief, an echo of memory summoned up of dappled sunlight in a faraway grove, a flicker of yellow feathers under rustling wings. The rhythm he falls into is familiar, unthinking. It's only after several measures when he looks up, lifts a hand to touch fingers light and brief against his dance partner's neat-trimmed beard which itself grows a sunny illumination -- that he lets the grief settle into a somewhat less complicated delight. "''Gosh'', but you you clean up good."<br />
<br />
There to help Jax off the stage is DJ -- the hand that turns over to takes Jax's is, as fits the theme tonight, resplendent in color; the prosthetic has been intricately painted in a pattern of feathering -- on the over side a more staid black-brown but on the underneath brilliant metallic emerald giving way to a bold scarlet with a very subtle metallic purple flash at the edges in the brilliant plumage of a scarlet-chested sunbird. He's in a sleek two-piece suit in crisp red-and-black striped seersucker over a neatly pressed white linen shirt cinched with an eye-catching tie styled very abstractly after a flight feather, its barbs forming fine chevrons in an iridescent red-purple-green-black ombre, and black oxford shoes polished to a shine. In ''his'' mind there's a hard-ingrained hypervigilance threading through the beat, out of sync with the environment but nevertheless threaded taut through the steps, tracking the crowd around them as intently as he tracks his partner's motions. His smile at the compliment is bright, buoyed by the company and the empathic vibrancy of the music. "Figured it was about time I --"<br />
<br />
As he drops his hand to signal an outside turn he's also dropped his sentence, also dropped his ''stance''; it all happens quickly enough anyone else might not have caught it at all if not for the fact that at the Very First Sight of someone beelining for Jax, Jax himself has abruptly vanished to reappear safely beside Ryan's bodyguard. DJ -- who just a second before was tensing, bracing for a fight, mind snapped to alertness, is now blushing fierce as he looks up at the very close proximity of "-- oh. Oh," his blush is only deepening, his wary look already shifted to a crooked smile that belies the butterfly-flutter inside him. "I'm sorry, I thought -- obviously. You wanted --"<br />
<br />
Standing off to one side, Steve is wearing a blue-and-red windowpane suit with a spray of heliotrope for a boutonniere and a magenta-violet-blue ombre tie. He only clocks the swinging beat in ''Brighter'' when he spots Jax swinging to it with DJ, and with a bright smile makes his way over. << Gosh I've never ''cut in'' before -- ''do'' people still cut in or -- >> He doesn't have time to be alarmed when DJ blips Jax away and pivots more or less right ''into'' him. Before he even knows what's happened he's sliding one foot back, then in almost the same moment checks the motion, amused and embarrassed. Quietly thankful DJ's swiftness also beat him to the awkward stuttering he was definitely about to do, he finishes the half-spoken sentence, "-- to dance. Obviously." This might have come out more suave if he weren't distracted by ''that smile'', at once soothingly and painfully familiar. <br />
<br />
His slow breath out hitches on a chuckle as they both try to lead. << How ''do'' two fellas decide... >> He dismisses his mental image of proposing rock-paper-scissors almost before it's formed. Instead, he settles his right hand onto DJ's brightly colored prosthetic and his left hand onto DJ's shoulder, confident and decisive and flushing pink nevertheless. His rhythm is imperfect and his steps sloppy on the turns, but he follows well for a beginner. "Thanks for bearing with me," he tells his partner earnestly as the song fades. A little hesitant, he adds, "Glad you made it out tonight." He dips his head and makes a leg -- luckily having released DJ's hand -- before stepping away, suddenly unsure what to do with himself. That uncertainty flees when he catches Sam's eye, and though his smile is still a little faint and his rhythm still a little off, he's nodding in time to the swelling music again.<br />
<br />
Sam has ''been'' in between partners, in between drinks, but after watching Steve take his leave from DJ he's ambling over. At once casual in stride and not-so in his seafoam green collarless suit, sleek and clean and unconventional with scrollwork embroidered on either side of the front opening in hunter green to match the lightweight tunic underneath, which is longer than the jacket and separates it visually from the trousers to striking effect, and black dress boots with hunter green spats.<br />
<br />
No paper-scissors-rock -- though his offered hand comes with a lift of brows, a tip of head, a "May I have this dance?" he seems confident enough of the answer and confident as well as he leads Steve back onto the floor, falling smoothly into the rhythm of "Save Me". His eyes follow ''pointedly'' after DJ, and return to Steve -- just a ''little'' searching. Maybe it's the music and its buoyant warmth; maybe it's whatever he finds (or doesn't) in Steve's expression, but the searching soon gives way to just a companionable ease in the steps, navigating tight-crowded dancefloor and inexperienced partner and Occasional Stares in Steve's direction with equal facility -- he ''eventually'' deigns to acknowledge this last when it's a gawky and gawk''ing'' Xavier's teenager whose stare has pulled them obliviously straight ''into'' the press of dancers to peer up-up-UP at Steve with eyes wide as dinner plates. The song isn't yet done but Sam is relinquishing his partner, patting him ''firm'' on the shoulder: "-- feel like this is your patriotic duty, Cap," and now ''he's'' left in the slightly awkward position of trying to weave through the floor unpaired --<br />
<br />
-- only to be swept up by Polaris, who was presumably just happening by, but in the press of bodies ''appears'' as though she materialized out of thin air precisely when Sam found himself stranded. She's wearing a metallic purple-green duochrome corset dress that would be ''quite'' revealing on its own but is only ''kind'' of revealing over a semi-sheer black blouse, a wide v-shaped chainmaille belt along with intricate woven wire cuffs and choker, and black ankle strap pumps. Her long green hair is bound up in two crown braids woven together with a glowing flower crown, and one of the event workers' sun wands dangles from her belt beside a black velvet purse.<br />
<br />
"You're wearing my color," she informs him, though the brightness of her smile belies the presumptive complaint even before she adds, "and wearing it ''well!''" Though not the most ''skilled'' dance partner, she is pouring enough grace and energy and fiercely determined joy into it to be a ''compelling'' one. There's no small amount of hypervigilance in her attention to the intricate shimmering fields--biological and technological--all around, enmeshed in an electrifying dance of their own. There's no small amount of love, too, her mind alight with music and motion and a profound sense of connection that cannot be wholly attributed to Ryan power. "You should be careful wearing green on midsummer night, you know?" She laughs as Sam spins her out into a turn, unabashed that she works an extra step into it. "Lest the fairies whisk you away!"<br />
<br />
The fairies ''are'' about to whisk, little though Sam or Polaris might know it. It isn't the ones that work the party wearing tattered wings or glowing horns or gleaming claws -- quiet, unfelt, a deft psionic force spreads its roots out, rides the beat, rides their minds; on one step they are a pair, on the next they're ''both'' dancing with new people. It feels like Polaris's decision -- and then, of ''course'' it did, because on the next step she no longer ''is'' Hive, but she ''is'' just dancing with him, and he's not smiling, same default-grump-scowl he always wears; but as his mental roots pull back she can feel the lingering amusement, warm and unabashed, he leaves in his wake. <br />
<br />
"Feel like I should get at least ''one'' dance in with my --" Just a beat, a small sideways twitch of mouth. "-- you." He isn't ''much'' of a dancer. There are times that the ''oneness'' of him smooths over for that, an innate proprioception of his partner's movements, but this isn't one of those times. It's not ''DJ'' he's stealing from now, with his ''actual'' dancing skill and confident grace; just turtling back into himself with the help of the Elder Telepath in his network; shielding he's not innately ''good'' at -- and, for the rest of the song -- just him. Just Polaris. Just dancing. It's warm. But as one song fades into the next, as he pecks Polaris on the cheek, it's warm, too, as his mind relaxes with something like relief back into its expansive openness. Is it the return of feeling his hundreds of selves that hits him deep, or the opening strains of "Little Wonder"? Either way he's stopped at the edge of the floor like he's temporarily forgotten what he's doing.<br />
<br />
It's also hard to say whether it's the shift in Hive's self(ves) that catches Matt's attention or the fiery adoration spilling through the song for the missing child--the missing ''children''. He's in a white oxford shirt, green linen vest, and gray slacks, the matching jacket nowhere to be seen, and had been draped languidly picturesque against a nearby picnic table, methodically getting drunk. Now he goes to Hive, gathering his friend close though he does not know if he has it in him to do much more than sway to the music. His mindscape is eerily flat, and he's trying to dredge something up from beneath its murky surface other than the jagged rage hungry for someone to sink into. "{Thank you, my dear.}" His words are soft with improvised gratitude and affected affection for Hive's tireless search. "{I have missed you, also.}" He isn't sure how true that was before now, but he's found his emotional stride and with it his rhythm, his feet light as whirls Hive and his borrowed steps around the dancefloor.<br />
<br />
"Little Wonder" acquires new dimensions as the jazz musicians of the next act seamlessly join in, one by one. Something reaches out from his turbid depths for Ryan's electrifying voice, and though sharp and rapacious it is not anger but desire that he immediately tamps back down. It might not have stayed down, but the ''song'' is winding down, not so much ''ending'' as morphing into improvisational jazz. Matt bends to kiss Hive's hand before sending him off in DJ's direction, as best he can estimate the path of the bright flickering beat in his mind. He is emphatically ''not'' paying attention to Ryan as he hops off the stage into the arms of the ecstatically awaiting crowd. He's leaning into his anger instead, searching and finding a suitable target, veering off giddy with (somewhat) playful malice to drag Fury up from where ''he's'' been methodically getting drunk. "I hear you're a fine dancer, Director Fury," he pipes with an impish grin. "''Prove it.''"<br />
<br />
With the generous support of the free booze, Director Fury ''had'' started to enjoy the concert despite himself -- little though anyone would be able to tell by his persistently baleful glare. << That Ryan Black steady ''wildin''', but he don't sound half bad tho. >> He tenses up at the prospect some telepath might have overheard that admission, and starts running through the psionic self-defense exercises he'd let lapse. The organic changing of the act on stage makes this harder -- the steady sweeps and capricious turns of the jazz blossoming from "Little Wonder" speaks to him in a deep way that Ryan, whatever his skill ''or'' powers, could not -- and the sudden appearance of the Other Mister Tessier shatters his precarious focus altogether.<br />
<br />
"Oh ''hell'' no," he blurts as Matt pulls him to his feet, and though he's sure he ''could'' prevail if he fought harder, he doesn't. A part of him is suspicious some psionic influence swayed him to accept the dance. A part of him is terrified of being surrounded by drunken mutants with God knows what powers. The ''rest'' of him is reversing Matt's grip on his hand and letting the music move through him and appreciating how readily the younger man follows his lead. And then he's suspicious of ''that'', too. << (does he know)(what's his agenda)(at least his ''power'' can't hurt me none) >> Aloud he just says, "I been dancing longer'n you been alive. I ain't got nothing to prove." Perhaps belying this, he embellishes his already elaborate footwork, challenging Matt to keep up and at once annoyed and impressed that he does. Somewhere between this absurd game and the technical demands of playing it out on a crowded floor, he forgets his wariness and just ''dances.''<br />
<br />
"{That's how he ''get'' you.}" Relaxing, evidently? Dancing, evidently? Enjoying yourself for a few brief moments -- on one outward spin Matt whirls away and blink-and-you-might-miss-it quick, a small static-shock ''zap'' in Fury's hand -- which is turning back ''over'', gripped now in a calloused-rough one. "{Secondary mutation, you know, make you ''lose'' yourself in them fairy-green eyes.}" Ion's grin is ''fierce'', his own dark eyes bright -- did he dress for this at all? ''Probably'', with his motorcycle boots and weatherbeaten cut there's his ''nice'' jeans and a lightweight linen button down, sunburst wand jammed through a beltloop, long pointed ears blended seamless over his own.<br />
<br />
Right here Matt ''should'' have been twirling back, ''should'' have been dipping, but instead Fury's getting Ion's ''aggressively'' cheerful energy -- can he dance? Can he ''swing''? He's sure got rhythm to ''spare'' but in the scheme of things, these may be secondary to the forceful exuberance with which he's turned this ship Right Around fully heedless (or perhaps enjoying) Fury's poleaxed horror ''or'' his long-acclimatization to leading. As his partner stumbles trying to rock-step the wrong foot Ion's grin ''sharpens'', as Fury starts to lose his balance Ion's grip shifts seamlessly to a harder clamp on the older man's forearm. The Director of SHIELD does not fall; as quickly as the tornado of a dance began it's ending as Ion deposits him in the questionably loving arms of another Mongrel to recoup his balance ''properly''. Ion's cheek clicks against his teeth, fingers snapping, pointing in quick-bang motion at Fury, taking his grin and exuberance ''with'' him as he dips out across the floor -- "{Careful, eh? Party just getting started and already you slipping.}"<br />
<br />
Ion is intercepted, across the floor, pulled in to loop in to a small knot of newer Prometheans who have formed their own circle by an outstretched wing, not dark today but painted rich and brilliant with sunburst-ombre flare. Dusk's wing drapes around the electrokinetic; a soft pleased rumble in his throat as he watches an elderly woman pulled out of Blackburn teach a much younger Dirac alum the basics of swing. As he drops his head to rest against Ion's and briefly just bops with the music -- his growl deepening when the elder ''almost'' stumbles after a group of slightly-too-eager (slightly-too-tipsy?) Xavier's students collides with their group, his growl subsiding just as quick when the Dirac kid steadies her easily and the dancing-clusters mingle into one. 'Eeeevery once in a while,' he admits, a teasing amusement in his face, in the motions of his hands, that heavily exaggerates the ''rarity'' of this as the excitement in the group ''grows'' oh my ''god'' he's coming ''here'' for ''REAL'' '-- he fucking nails it.' And then he's squeezing Ion a little closer, letting his wing trail against the other man's shoulders as he sways through the group -- not towards Ryan himself but one of the ''many'' (staring''''trying not to stare) around them His smile is bright as he offers out a hand. "''He'' doesn't bite, you know."<br />
<br />
Maya has been here twirling with her sister, has been chatting, has been bright-bright-bright in her elegantly floral-embroidered yellow and orange salwar set, gold bangles, gold-sequined slippers, ribbons wound through her thick braids. ''Was'' she gawking, she was trying not to gawk! Certainly not in front of at least ''some'' of her students who are ''definitely also gawking oh gosh --'' And then there's Dusk in front of her and is she ''less'' flustered, looking up into his dark eyes, sharp-fanged grin, scruffy face? She blushes, takes his hand, a smile lighting up her slightly-tipsy-glowy face. "Oh! Oh but ''you'' -- no wait ''do'' you -- ''wow'' I shouldn't assume --" She's started to reach a hand for his other -- arm? Wing? Drops it to the side, lifts it again, blushes ''deeper''. "Oh ''wow'' were you even asking me to --" But she ''is'' getting on the dance floor with him, is kind of relaxing, even, more comfortable once he starts moving, once he starts ''her'' moving -- until another turn, and another, and then she is Face To Face with Ryan and her eyes have gone wide again, smile frozen in place, gaze darting between ''him'' and the crowd around, and ''maybe'' she'd have slunk back into the circle if not for the strong wings bolstering her at her back.<br />
<br />
From one set of wings to another; Ryan's gleaming stage costume has been luminescent between the enormous black-feathered wings of the woman who has been gyrating with him. He meets Maya's frozen smile with one warm enough to thaw, one hand turning up, beckoning with an easy confidence. "We on a dance floor -- you want to stare, stare; you want to move, then move, yeah?" He waits for her to take his hand before pulling her in, graceful but simple in the steps he leads until he's confident she ''does'' have the rhythm. Around them there are still Plenty Of Stares; excited Xavier's School teens, hipster artists pretending to be too cynical. "Don't even worry about them," there's brazen-cocky in his grin now, sure, but the first time ''she'' missteps from self-conscious watching The Crowd instead he's making the correction easily to keep the rhythm, ''his'' attention solely on his still-flustered partner. "They're not judging you, they ''all'' watching me."<br />
<br />
"Oh, ''all'''em?" As one melody slides into another, it's a very familiar face back at Ryan's side. Fierce heat in Jax's chin as he props it on his friend's shoulder. 'I can get you his number,' he's mouthing totally-not-at-all-surreptitiously to his coworker, as he snags an elbow through Ryan's. For all the fierce heat, bright outfit, sparkling makeup, the actual feelings that wash through his voice over the empath are muted and distant -- there's love there, a lot of it; there's anger, there's a ''heavy'' exhaustion, a stark horror, but all of it coming through a washed-out filter. "Jus' wouldn't'a been a birthday if you hadn't saved me a dance," he's saying with a small laugh, "if Mockingbird closes 'fore I get out we gotta riot."<br />
<br />
He's ''just'' pulling Ryan away, just finding a relatively open spot at the edge of the dance floor, when a small knot of fresh young agents from the SHIELD Comms division gets up the bravery to come over en masse, crowded too-close and too-touchy as is too-common for fans. Something dims -- just brief! -- in Jax's expression as he's jostled back. It brightens again, vivid and cheerful when he whirls to find -- "''gosh'', Leo! I didn't have no ''idea'' you was such a good dancer."<br />
<br />
<< I am? >> a startled question in Leo(?)'s mind, at once colored with his very-customary diffidence and something that is -- not. << ''am'' I? >> A deep blush has filled his cheeks as he looks up from his partner to Jackson -- back to his partner. Rock-steps back to let Kitty better face Jackson. "She makes it easy." The brief-sharp sting of ache this conjures up is entirely dwarfed by an entirely more uncomplicated swell of affection. "I should -- let you two --" He squeezes Kitty's hand and lets it go, stepping away into the mess of chaos.<br />
<br />
"''He'' learns fast," is Kitty's easy -- tipsy -- warm reply, the squeeze of her hand tight around Leo's before he pulls away. There's something faintly disquieted in her thoughts when Leo pulls away, not yet a question before she turns to slot herself easily into Jax's arms. More easily than maybe it ''should'' be, with their height difference, the air between Kitty's feet and the dance floor bringing her up closer to her best friend. <br />
<br />
Later, there will be worry and rage and exhaustion. Later there will be all the emotions Kitty, like so many others here, are pushing determinedly down down down so that tonight can be special. Later there will be time -- too much time, still -- for spinning and scheming and searching. Later this -- this bright smile, this flex of her mutation -- will be too hard to maintain. <br />
<br />
But right now -- fiery warm hand in one that is delicately cool -- Kitty dances, easy and almost-carefree, on nothing.<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Joy_springs_all_radiant_in_my_breast;_Though_pauper_poor,_than_king_more_blest,&diff=25069Logs:Joy springs all radiant in my breast; Though pauper poor, than king more blest,2023-07-05T16:57:31Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Kitty]], [[B]], [[Hive]], [[Mirror|Tag 🤨]], [[Fury]], [[Ryan]], [[Alma]], [[Charles]], [[Scott]], [[NPC-FitzSimmons|FitzSimmons]], <br />
| summary = "Eat! Drink! Be Merry!"<br />
| gamedate = 2023-06-21<br />
| gamedatename = summer solstice '23 / jax's 31st birthday<br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Rooftop - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Kitty, NPC-FitzSimmons, B, Hive, Mirror, Fury, Ryan, Alma, Charles, Scott, SHIELD HQ, Mutants, Humans<br />
| log =<br />
There's an unexpected oasis at the top of this gleaming high-rise, the whole of it carpeted in thick, soft, layered ground cover of sedums, grass, and moss. A small, carefully manicured grove serves as the centerpiece, with benches, tables and chairs scattered around in the shade. Beside it, a professionally landscaped garden boasts a pond and quite a few planters that either used to hold plants or still hold dying ones. The greenhouse is somewhat sparsely and eclectically populated with tropical plants, flanked by garden beds even more sparsely planted. An open lawn on the side overlooking Times Square makes a great spot for a picnic. The otherwise unsightly structure housing the roof access, a single stall bathroom, and tool shed has been covered on three sides with turf and shaped into a little promontory offering a breathtaking view of the city.<br />
<br />
The peace of the rooftop has been Rapidly Disrupted -- fifteen minutes ago, some SHIELD staffers were enjoying an early supper under the balmy light of the solstice sun. Now --<br />
<br />
Well. <br />
<br />
The lawn has mostly disappeared under the newly assembled raised stage, wires for lighting and sound systems running through the grass to generators that definitely do ''not'' belong to SHIELD. The tables have been commandeered as food and drink stations, the promontory as the drop-off spot for guests arriving via Various Modes of Flight instead of signing in on the ground floor of the building.<br />
<br />
And there are ''so'' many guests already, people from all over the city, not just Jackson Holland's large collection of personal friends -- a collection of bikers in MMMC cuts, artists still with paint stains on their hands, teenagers who ''probably'' should still be up at Westchester and definitely didn't sign out, mutant musicians with guitars strapped to their backs. The chatter through the soundcheck is not so loud yet, but the volume is slowly rising.<br />
<br />
At one of the commandeered tables, Kitty is fussing with a huge water jug and stacks of paper cups. "-- Do you," she's asking earnestly, dipping her cup into the jug and pulling it out full of water as she does so, "know where I can get another trash can? I don't think we brought enough and Blink is really due for a break." <br />
<br />
Next to her, Leo Fitz's eyes are bugging out of his skull, staring at Kitty's immaterial hand. Blinks once, twice. "...Sorry, what did you say?" He is probably still not listening.<br />
<br />
In the background of the cheerful chatter there's a quiet droning hum, one tiny blue-and-silver hoverbike floating up to hover just over SHIELD's rooftop. In addition to the many other regulatory transgressions happening, B is not currently wearing her usual sharktooth helmet -- just a tight silvery-mesh tee shirt, fairly see-through over a lacy black halter crop underneath, a pleated miniskirt in black and silver, and very stompy metallic boots with matching wristcuffs. She has her Mongrels cut over top; her claws and the slender dotted liner limning her enormous eyes are actively ''glowing'' in a slightly luminescent silvery-blue. "Have fun!" she's chirruping to the pair of (''definitely'' not signed out!) X-Kids she lets off, who are promptly scampering off to explore the Drinks Options while they think enough adults are looking the other way that they can maybe sneak some booze. B is definitely not sneaking booze, but ze ''is'' taking a short break from ferrying duty to scarper off hirself, in order to locate Jax so that ze can deliver a quick hug to the Birthday <strike>Boy</strike> Dad.<br />
<br />
By dint of being connected at the brain, Hive has already found the birthday boy. Hive is slouched on a picnic bench, leaning against the table with a droopy-lidded expression that suggests he might already be half asleep despite the ongoing commotion. He's sipping on a lemonade, looking mostly drab in faded old jeans and a grey tee shirt with 'BLUE SUN<nowiki>|</nowiki>蓝日' printed on it in bold blue text, the brightest color to his attire the ornate and vivid multicolored spiral horns someone has affixed to his head. Despite this signifier that he is Probably A Volunteer, by all appearances he is doing Absolutely Nothing Useful through the hectic party deployment -- only the crew ferrying up excited would-be attendees from many many many floors below can hear his occasional commentary: << Not that one, he's a reporter. >> << Yeah those kids are good. >> << That's just some-ass tourist they'd freak the fuck out when they saw Taylor. >><br />
<br />
... okay, only ''Jax'' and the transport crew can hear the mental commentary. Right now Hive is directing a question to Jax, slightly judgmental: << ... that asshole tried to tank your fucking art show do you really want him here? >> Highlit in their mind, a skinny pink-haired Chimaera punk waiting eagerly for a ride below. His chin lifts jerkily when B arrives, a quiet warmth softening his mental irascibility.<br />
<br />
<< Hive that was like, sophomore year of college. >> Jax's amusement is bright at Hive stealing this long-since-dead grudge. Beside the telepath he's brighter, more dapper than his usual daily wear in a bright white dress shirt with a shimmering gold tie and a vest so black that the gold embroidered solar motifs on it appear to be floating in a void, plain front trousers in the same uncanny black, cinched with a golden belt, and gold wingtip derby shoes with broguing in abstract solar patterns. Somewhere along the way of setup his surprise has given way to delight mingled with a vague sort of surreality; at this point he is just rolling with Whatever This Party Is. He's perched on the edge of the picnic table though he bounces up to return B's hug fierce and hard. "Sugar, how long y'all been working this out, this is nonsense."<br />
<br />
Tag is just hopping down from the back of a ''second'' gleaming hoverbike -- less eye-catching than Jax, more eye-catching than Hive, he's in a rainbow midi skirt and a loosely cropped tee in sky-blue with a bright sun shining out from behind puffy white clouds. "Happy birthday!" << oh no ''is'' it happy it's probably not happy -- no wait we're ''making'' it happy. >> He's joined the line for HUGS while it's still short, and drapes an elbow against Hive's shoulder after he's dispensed Hug to Jackson. "More time than you think," he says with a fey smile, "and less time than we ''should'' have. Ryan's money makes a lot of things move faster, though!"<br />
<br />
A knot of partygoers lately emerged from a glowing purple portal are gazing about in delighted disorientation. At the gruff order to "make a hole!" from somewhere beyond them -- one of the ''proper'' access stairwells, concealed in the artificial promontory -- they hastily part to make way for one S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Nicholas J. Fury. << ...shit, and I thought he had Security eating outta his hand ''before'' that Heidlage business... >> ''His'' disorientation seems somewhat less delighted, his black duster fluttering in breeze and his single eye fixed balefully on Jax as he trundles up to the picnic table. "Mister Holland," he begins, in a note of long-suffering exasperation, "it might have escaped your notice, but you are in fact still under US federal detention by UN proxy. You can't invite a dozen..." His eye flits around the ground and he quails inwardly, ''just'' a little. "...''hundred'' some folks up where without sending 'em through security. That's for your ''protection'' much as anyone else's!"<br />
<br />
"He's very detained!" B protests, clawed hand gesturing insistently in her father's direction. "''Plus'' he didn't invite anyone, he didn't even know about all this, you can't be mad at ''him''. His friends," her immense black eyes are very-very big with this assertion as she briefly turns over Long Hours Of Raid Planning in her mind, "are ''pretty'' good at keeping secrets."<br />
<br />
"I think he's practiced at being mad at ''anything''." Hive is still sipping slowly at his lemonade. His voice comes out gruff, despite the clear amusement Jax can feel in their mind. "Part of the aesthetic. -- Would you really have let all ''these'' motherfuckers through security?" His eyes are skating sidelong to where one skinny teenager with coke-bottle glasses is trying hard to impress their friends by (after being summarily rebuffed by the current bartender who is, in fact, carding for the pop-up open bar) turning their cups of water into beer. << We've got security handled, >> his mental voice is an ''unsettling'' thing, an eerie susurrus that rustles through Fury as well as the others immediately nearby with the overlapping cadences of hundreds-of-voices whispering at once -- the odd effect it gives should probably be more suited to a ghost story, a prophesy from the past, ''something'' of more import than: << enjoy the fucking booze. >><br />
<br />
"If you didn't detain him so well we wouldn't have had to bring the party here!" Tag is only straightening ''very'' slightly at Fury's approach, and mostly only to better turn a brighter smile up to the much taller man. Fury's eyepatch, meanwhile, is growing a stylized iridescent sunburst pattern to offset All The Black.<br />
<br />
"I ain't going nowhere," Jax promises Fury, drawing a small X over his heart as he says it. "And I surely have noticed. -- Only person I ''invited''..." He trails off, here, ''his'' single eye scrunching up along with his nose as he scans the growing crowd. "... ain't here, actually. Guess all these folks is my consolation prize. Did you want cake? There's good cake."<br />
<br />
Fury clenches his jaw a little tighter. "Keeping secrets," he echoes, skepticism carved deep into his voice and his brow alike, "Y'all got whole passel'a -- ''teenagers'' up in here." He's quietly self-congratulatory that he bit back the impulse to say "Millennials" instead. "Even if you don't got anyone here for your ''life'', there's got to be reporters --" He stops cold. "What in tarnation." His eye sweeps back and forth before settling on Hive. << Get the hell out of my head >> does not sound much like his usual timbre of blustery curmudgeonry. It bristles instead with unreasoning fear as he replies, slow and measured. "The person you invited..." He's turning to look at the stage, nearly complete now. << Oh hell, no. >> Aloud, almost simultaneously, "Oh ''hell'' no. Least you coulda ''told'' me before you let Ryan Fucking Black make a fool of me. You know that ain't gon' end well for you, neither."<br />
<br />
The person Jax invited is ''about'' to be here. Ryan is, apparently, arriving not via hoverbike or glowing supplies-portal -- instead there's a light that is ''descending'' from the evening sky above. He's not dressed for stage ''yet'' but he is striking all the same in a black fishnet shirt that quiets the shimmer of gold lamé underneath, torn open in the back to accommodate intricate white gossamer wings, tattered and singed at the edges, a slender gold chainmaile belt slung low on his hips to frame black leggings dotted with shimmering stars, and chunky black ankle boots accented with golden sun buckles. The boots have had some also-gold hardware added aftermarket; it matches the cuffs he's wearing on his wrists and both boots and cuffs emit a radiant glow (... plenty identifiable to anyone familiar with the whole ''range'' of B's hovertech accessories) as he lowers himself neatly to Jax's side. "Reporters strictly prohibited," he's waggling a finger lazily in Hive's direction as he curls an arm around Jax's fiercely warm shoulders, "this ain't my first rodeo. He didn't ''let'' me do anything, this is a birthday party for a ''dear'' friend in a terrible fucking situation. If," he allows lightly, "you want to make a fool of yourself about it, that'll just be a little lagniappe. ''Could'' just enjoy the show, though."<br />
<br />
While Ryan is descending from on high, yet another swirl of purple light beside the stage disgorges Alma, who at a casual ambling pace ends up at the picnic table around the same time as Ryan. Tonight she's wearing a slim white three-piece suit, with neat diamond-shaped openings for inky black wings, birdlike but with knives (''probably'' not real like those under her jacket) for pinions, each edged in gold, black dress boots with subtle gold accenting. The fine twists of her long hair are laced with gold, too, meticulously coiled at the back of her head and held in place with the glowing sun-tipped wand that identifies her as <strike>a solstice fairy</strike> event staff, and the gold kippah at her crown is embroidered with a bold black sunburst. "Happy birthday," she tells Jax before leveling a flat, unimpressed gaze at Fury. "There are worse things to be than a fool."<br />
<br />
Tag(?)'s eyes have gone just a little wider at Ryan's words, and though it's hard outwardly to tell at which ''part'', internally ''reporters strictly prohibited'' is rotating in an oddly thoughtful contemplation. "Oh!" He's bouncing upright, up on his ''toes'' to press a peck to Jax's cheek. "Some of those fairies need some makeup adjustments -- save me a dance?" And then he's flitting off to disappear into the crowd.<br />
<br />
<< -- it's like a half-passel of teenagers >> is just a little bitter in B's mind, but on the outside she's chipper-bright: "Oh yeah! There's more on the way, too, thanks for reminding me." B's smile is quick, closed-lipped, cheery. "You really ''should'' enjoy the show, my brother's ''great'' -- uh, not that you're not great ''too''," she's adding hastily to Ryan, leaning in to bonk her forehead lightly against his arm, "and the jazz band after is ''fantastic'' if you like dancing." Though she sounds just a ''little'' skeptical of this last part as she looks over Fury And His Scowl. ''Does'' he like dancing? She'll leave this mystery for later -- she's dashing back off to her bike, ''probably'' to ferry more people, some of which may be teenagers, up to the revelry.<br />
<br />
Despite himself, Ryan's ridiculous entrance summons up something in Hive that is equal parts ''fondness'' in the exasperation. The telepath hasn't actually roused himself to watch it, but he's watching it all the same, through many (many) reflected stares from around the rooftop. Hive ''himself'' has scrunched his eyes closed like he's ''annoyed'' despite the fact his eyes weren't even aimed in Ryan's direction at the time, but there's a slow breath of laughter as the musician lands. "-- Half-passel of teenagers," he echoes, flat, a beat after B. He's sitting up as Tag (🤨) rabbits off, following the man's departure with a quiet ''huff''. "They're carding. -- I actually can't get out your head 'less you want to leave the building, let us handle this party, would you feel better if I lied to you about it?" << I'm out your head now. >> His knuckles dig slow at his eyes. "If it makes you feel better, Ryan's people are real fucking good at chaos."<br />
<br />
Fury's eye narrows impossibly further. "It ''is'' a terrible fucking situation, and I'm real keen on making sure it don't get worse. I got nothing against throwing him a birthday party --" << Shit, best not poke him ''too'' hard, that boy crazy as a peach orchard boar >> "Just -- keep this rodeo under wraps." His eye skates back over to Hive, making a mental note to check back in with Fitzsimmons in desperate hope for something -- ''anything'' to keep his thoughts his own. << ...''got''damn telepaths... >> "I'm real glad folks are being so conscientious about underage drinking and all, but it's the ''TikTokking'' I'm worried about." << Shoulda left well enough alone about the kids, poor bastard can't catch a break. >> But it's Lucien he's thinking about, hovering uncertain before his desk. "It'd make me feel better if they were ''real fucking good'' at order. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a ''whole'' passel'a agents I gotta ''order'' back for a second shift." He turns on his heel and walks almost directly into an older man in a wheelchair, startled into a flustered "begging your pardon" before he reroutes to stalk off in proper curmudgeonly fashion.<br />
<br />
Neither Charles Xavier nor his wheelchair seem particularly offended for having interrupted Fury's dramatic exit. He is wearing a light gray suit, casual by his standards, and riding one of his sleeker powered chairs. "Well, that gentleman seems to be enjoying himself already," he says lightly, rolling to a stop. The warmth he emanates is soothing and altogether different from the waves of heat rolling off of Jax. "Many happy returns." There is a certain ''gravity'' to the way he says this, a wordless knowledge that he means more than "happy birthday". All the same, he's offering a large envelope sealed with a golden sun and addressed simply to "Jackson" in his elegant, flowing hand. "And a thousand apologies for not coming to you sooner. It wasn't for lack of concern, ''or'' encouragement." He glances aside and up at his companion, a ''little'' sheepishly. "There's something in the post for you, too, whenever it gets past the UN's puzzled scrutiny. But if there's anything I can do to assist tonight..." He doesn't ''look'' at Hive, but his offer to the younger telepath is more explicit, a skillful and matter-of-fact shifting aside of his shields.<br />
<br />
Scott Summers looks slightly embarrassed to be participating in Fury's frustration of the day; he gives him a sympathetic grimace as he sidesteps to let him pass, before falling back into step with Charles. Evidently he can't beat 'Many happy returns' as a birthday wish; after Charles has finished speaking, Scott gives Jax a more standard, "Happy birthday." His gift is in a plain brown Hallmark envelope, lettered somewhat less elegantly than the Professor's; as soon as it's been handed over, Scott is looking curiously around this birthday shindig, gaze stuttering on the teenagers trying to sneak booze. His mouth quirks silently; his thought is pitched for Charles to notice, though probably Hive can hear it too. << Get a wand, too. >><br />
<br />
"Pretty sure he likes dancing." Jax is thinking back to a Mockingbird booth another lifetime ago, thinking back to twirling Ryan out on the familiar dancefloor -- he doesn't have time to get caught up in regret, Ryan's Very Splashy Entrance is pushing melancholy ''straight'' out of his mind. He tips his head up; his eye bugs cartoon-style out of his head with a briefly twinkling starry-eyed sparkle as Ryan descends. "I happen to know Ally'll be right excited about an intimate private Ryan Black concert." He curls his arm tight back around Ryan, squeezing hard. "Sugar, when you said a few of my closest friends, this --"<br />
<br />
-- the illusory twinkle has remained even if his eye has returned to its normal ''size'' when Charles and Scott arrive. "Gosh! Sure weren't all who I was expecting." He's giving Scott a ''bright'' smile, bouncing forward to lean in and curl an arm around Charles in hug before taking both his presents. "''Thank'' you! Tonight sure is full of surprises. You know they put all this together without a word to me, was y'all in on it?" Inwardly he is ''fully unsure'' whether to think that his staid advisor or the dignified old Boomer were in on this nonsense; he absolutely would believe Either Way. "What you can ''do'' is enjoy yourselfs," << if it's possible, >> he's fretting inwardly, << we could all use it, >> and here he's thinking of Dawson's bright-warm smile in his scarred face, of his fierce determination to keep Tuesday Nights carved out for Game Night for years through so much chaos and pain; thinking of Ryan's long-long hours creating an online arts festival in the early pandemic days, thinking of songs sung with Spencer fierce and (joyful) (hurt) (defiant) at vigil marches, thinking of the kids coming back to homes quiet and empty and mourning or alive and full of love, thinking --<br />
<br />
"-- there's plenty of booze," he's a little wry, here, "Ryan's payin'." He nudges Ryan with an elbow. "I assume."<br />
<br />
"It's fine," Hive kind-of-not-really rats out the kids nearby as Scott's gaze hitches on them, "Everett's getting good practice in. Probably take him like. Three solid more hours to get enough booze into that water to get even one of them tipsy. Probably won't stop them ''acting'' drunk earlier than that, though." His brows knit, and though his mind is reaching for Xavier's, it's Scott he's looking to Scott with a sudden frown. "-- he's not gonna ''explode'' that water, is he?"<br />
<br />
He's coiling firm roots, meanwhile, into the older man's mind with a smooth and seamless shift of identity-perspective that suddenly floods his<nowiki>|</nowiki>their awareness with an achingly familiar lightning-hypervigilant rapid-processing awareness of Every Mind not just here on the roof but down on the block below, out in Freaktown, out at the school, over in Chimaera, sorting at blinding speed through every request for entry and a complex array of desires and dangers and risks and needs before giving the okay to each of the transport crew.<br />
<br />
Where ''did'' the wand appear from. For most people it's probably hard to track the flicker-blink of motion, though Charles at least can feel Hive (rudely? Not rudely?) yoinking That Part Of Them over in a blur of teleportation from across the roof ''just'' long enough to drop a sunburst-wand onto Charles's lap. His "Thanks" is gruff, though through the vast forest that is ''them'' a warm glow of sun is shining, now.<br />
<br />
His head rolls back. Eyes ''roll'', at Jax. "Liar. How long you known this crazy-ass dipshit and his theatrics. You were expecting exactly this." After a beat, he adds, with a nod towards Xavier, "''Please''. ''This'' motherfucker is paying now."<br />
<br />
"We're anarchists," Ryan's telling Fury with a ''fiercely'' cheerful grin, "if there's one thing we're real damn good at it's bringing order outta chaos." His brows have hiked when Xavier arrives, and it's Scott he addresses first, Louisiana roots laid on thick in his accent ''now'' where previously it had hewed far closer to a broadcast-neutral: "''Well'' gar ici Scott Summers, I owe you one. Have you manage to get noted philanthropist Charles Xavier himself here to grace us with his presence? 'tween you and me if I had known what it took to wrangle a visit, I'd'a throwed Jax a birthday party each week, by now."<br />
<br />
Though he's given Scott a warm smile, it hews cutting-sharp when it turns to Xavier: "-- jail do get awful lonely -- but I know you gotta be a ''busy'' man up that school'a yourn, I'm sure." His arm has gone ''just'' a hair tighter around Jax for the moment before he releases his friend to his effusive greeting hug. Ryan's mind is bristling with protective ire the whole while. Possibly ''he'' might take Just A Smidge longer than Jax to forgive the tardiness of this visit, lavish presents notwithstanding. He does allow ''just'' a hint of amusement, ''slightly'' self-conscious, to soften his overprotective prickling, as he plucks Hive's lemonade for a sip. "Yeah? Well bless his heart, then, just tell me where I forward the bill."<br />
<br />
"-- I'd be very happy to talk about my ''research'' next time I'm visiting, L-- Fitz, ''would'' you excuse me." Kitty didn't actually take no for an answer before stepping breezily through the offending scientist and making her way to the knot of people around Jackson. Compared to everyone else, she's ''well'' underdressed -- oversized tee-shirt that is mottled with a variety of textures evoking bathroom tile, wood panelling, and floral wallpaper in patches, grey leggings. There's a drawstring bag on her back in a similar chaotic pattern to her shirt -- the only obvious cue she's a Friend of the Birthday Boy is the gold headband holding back her hair with squiggly sunburst lines emanating from it, and the fairy wand peeking out the top of her bag. <br />
<br />
Kitty comes up on Jax's free side, leaning in to hug her friend, tight and solid. "Happy birthday, sunshine -- Think I broke ''that'' little English guy's mind again," she says, wry, amused irritation sensible to the -paths among them, "can I stack that onto your ''actual'' present." She's rolled up ''just'' in time to hear Ryan speak to -- << hi Professor (hi dad) (Kitty ''be'' normal good lord) >> -- Charles, one eyebrow quirking up well before ''bless his heart'' can be deployed. "Huh. That's sweet -- late arrivals club going halvsies on the party. ''Probably'' you do not want to be calling the kettle black," is more squarely to Ryan, annoyance (at his past absences here and at ''Charles's'' absence, too) tempered by a broad blanket of affection towards most of the assembled, "that's probably, like, your own brand infringement. -- Alma," and this subject change is ''abrupt'', the smile sudden and bright across her face, "you look incredible, are you working all night or can I actually get a dance in sometime?"<br />
<br />
<< Just what we need right now at Xavier's, >> Scott is thinking, << instant-booze mutation. >> "Probably not. I'll keep an eye on it," he says, as much to Charles as to Hive, though he then pulls his eyes reluctantly away from Everett, settling on Ryan. There's a little irritation-indignation-amusement rising up as the raid team members address the Professor, a stray, hastily-smothered << they're not ''wrong'' (probably shouldn't say anything even if they were) >> that doesn't quite kill his defensiveness. He might feel more inclined (entitled?) to tell ''Kitty'' off, but -- another glance at the Professor, another silent decision to keep his trap shut where all of this who-visited-when stuff is concerned, and to flail back toward civil conversation. "I like the decorations," he says. "Very --" << sparkly >> "-- creative."<br />
<br />
As unflappable as she is, Alma still shakes her head when Fury storms off. "Not sure he's interested in dancing with freaks." She isn't sure he's ''not'', either, and wonders how far Ryan -- or any of them -- could push before he'd put his foot down. "His loss." Her disdain for Charles and Scott is considerably milder, already tempered by the thought they might be good to have on hand if something went sideways, and mollified further by Jax's reaction. When Kitty admonishes Ryan she quietly adjusts her estimation of Time Until Drama, and though the prospect does not ''frighten'' her, she says a silent bracha that they've made it this far without incident. Maybe that's why Kitty's question catches her off guard, and her eyebrows tick up. "I'm working all night, but there are a lot of us here and we get breaks." She allows a slightly indulgent smile. "I'll save you a dance."<br />
<br />
"Alas, I can take no credit for this spectacle," says Charles, and despite his mild tone, the word "spectacle" ''feels'' distinctly positive. "But I may take some small credit after Ryan sends my accountant the bill, and I do intend to enjoy myself." He produces a business card and leans forward to pass it to Ryan. His warmth is like dappled sunlight now, and there is both contrition and concern in it. << Please be gentle with him, Kitty. Be gentle with ''yourself'', too. >> "He can't explode the water," he adds, though Hive knew this without need for words the moment his mind became their. "At least not without help, and I trust you'll notice if the students get it in their heads to improvise a still." All the same, they are mentally noting those most likely to attempt such a thing (or other potentially disastrous shenanigans) out of the X-kids present. << They're not wrong, >> his agreement is quiet in Scott's mind, << and you needn't defend me, regardless, though I appreciate the sentiment. Tonight is for Jackson. >> He turns the sunburst wand over in his hands, his smile at the whimsical craftsmanship not altogether conscious. "They are lovely -- my compliments. I'm sure there's plenty more creativity yet to come."<br />
<br />
Ryan's brows hike right ''back'' at Kitty -- but it's with an easing of his smile, a dip of his head, and where warmth has been radiating from Charles there's a harmony now from Ryan, picking ''up'' that dappled-sun-warmth and twisting it into a playful violin trill that dances between them with a burst of lighthearted amusement before it dissipates into the bustle of the set-up. "Shiiiit," Ryan drawls, taking Charles's card, "can you sing? Guess my publicist ''would'' be pretty pissed if I tried turning the whole shebang over at this stage of the game." He tucks the card away, spreads his arms wide. "Thanks," is to the compliments on the decorations, "Had a whole army of artists to help out. Eat! Drink! Be Merry! -- especially you," he's saying this to Alma, brightly, "I'll hold off on dying till tomorrow."<br />
<br />
It's Sunlight^3, a flutter-glow when Kitty comes in for a hug that Jax returns fierce. "Oh ''gosh'' FitzSimmons gonna be having a ''constant'' freakout all night ''long'', I think, they don't hardly know what to do with any of us let alone -- oh gosh don't nobody let slip nothin' 'bout Scott, okay, I jus' been letting 'em think the glasses is because he thinks he's way too cool for everyone." His internal Caution Levels are making vague quiet adjustments at Kitty's admonishment and just as quickly adjusting them back at that light trill. "''Boy'' don't even joke." His ''bap'' is light, his ''tone'' is light, his thoughts -- well. He's doing a quick but thorough assessment of his layers of bright-illusory makeup, the touchups to the scars that warp his tattoos, leaning ''in'' to the parts of him better practiced at psionic shielding and plain Not ADHD Mental Discipline. Looping that playful violin trill until it sinks ''in'', looping his ''arm'' through Kitty's. Leaning into Ryan's and smiling. ''Bright''. "Y'all. Thanks for coming," and here it's not forced, not illusion, just a warm gratitude in the words. "Sure did brighten my day."<br />
<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Joy_springs_all_radiant_in_my_breast;_Though_pauper_poor,_than_king_more_blest,&diff=25068Logs:Joy springs all radiant in my breast; Though pauper poor, than king more blest,2023-07-05T16:57:08Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Kitty]], [[B]], [[Hive]], [[Mirror|Tag 🤨]], [[Fury]], [[Ryan]], [[Alma]], [[Charles]], [[Scott]], [[NPC-FitzSimmons|FitzSimmons]], <br />
| summary = "Eat! Drink! Be Merry!"<br />
| gamedate = 2023-06-21<br />
| gamedatename = summer solstice '23 / jax's 31st birthday<br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Rooftop - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Kitty, NPC-FitzSimmons, B, Hive, Mirror, Fury, Ryan, Alma, Charles, Scott, SHIELD HQ, Mutants, Humans<br />
| log =<br />
There's an unexpected oasis at the top of this gleaming high-rise, the whole of it carpeted in thick, soft, layered ground cover of sedums, grass, and moss. A small, carefully manicured grove serves as the centerpiece, with benches, tables and chairs scattered around in the shade. Beside it, a professionally landscaped garden boasts a pond and quite a few planters that either used to hold plants or still hold dying ones. The greenhouse is somewhat sparsely and eclectically populated with tropical plants, flanked by garden beds even more sparsely planted. An open lawn on the side overlooking Times Square makes a great spot for a picnic. The otherwise unsightly structure housing the roof access, a single stall bathroom, and tool shed has been covered on three sides with turf and shaped into a little promontory offering a breathtaking view of the city.<br />
<br />
The peace of the rooftop has been Rapidly Disrupted -- fifteen minutes ago, some SHIELD staffers were enjoying an early supper under the balmy light of the solstice sun. Now --<br />
<br />
Well. <br />
<br />
The lawn has mostly disappeared under the newly assembled raised stage, wires for lighting and sound systems running through the grass to generators that definitely do ''not'' belong to SHIELD. The tables have been commandeered as food and drink stations, the promontory as the drop-off spot for guests arriving via Various Modes of Flight instead of signing in on the ground floor of the building.<br />
<br />
And there are ''so'' many guests already, people from all over the city, not just Jackson Holland's large collection of personal friends -- a collection of bikers in MMMC cuts, artists still with paint stains on their hands, teenagers who ''probably'' should still be up at Westchester and definitely didn't sign out, mutant musicians with guitars strapped to their backs. The chatter through the soundcheck is not so loud yet, but the volume is slowly rising.<br />
<br />
At one of the commandeered tables, Kitty is fussing with a huge water jug and stacks of paper cups. "-- Do you," she's asking earnestly, dipping her cup into the jug and pulling it out full of water as she does so, "know where I can get another trash can? I don't think we brought enough and Blink is really due for a break." <br />
<br />
Next to her, Leo Fitz's eyes are bugging out of his skull, staring at Kitty's immaterial hand. Blinks once, twice. "...Sorry, what did you say?" He is probably still not listening.<br />
<br />
In the background of the cheerful chatter there's a quiet droning hum, one tiny blue-and-silver hoverbike floating up to hover just over SHIELD's rooftop. In addition to the many other regulatory transgressions happening, B is not currently wearing her usual sharktooth helmet -- just a tight silvery-mesh tee shirt, fairly see-through over a lacy black halter crop underneath, a pleated miniskirt in black and silver, and very stompy metallic boots with matching wristcuffs. She has her Mongrels cut over top; her claws and the slender dotted liner limning her enormous eyes are actively ''glowing'' in a slightly luminescent silvery-blue. "Have fun!" she's chirruping to the pair of (''definitely'' not signed out!) X-Kids she lets off, who are promptly scampering off to explore the Drinks Options while they think enough adults are looking the other way that they can maybe sneak some booze. B is definitely not sneaking booze, but ze ''is'' taking a short break from ferrying duty to scarper off hirself, in order to locate Jax so that ze can deliver a quick hug to the Birthday <strike>Boy</strike> Dad.<br />
<br />
By dint of being connected at the brain, Hive has already found the birthday boy. Hive is slouched on a picnic bench, leaning against the table with a droopy-lidded expression that suggests he might already be half asleep despite the ongoing commotion. He's sipping on a lemonade, looking mostly drab in faded old jeans and a grey tee shirt with 'BLUE SUN<nowiki>|</nowiki>蓝日' printed on it in bold blue text, the brightest color to his attire the ornate and vivid multicolored spiral horns someone has affixed to his head. Despite this signifier that he is Probably A Volunteer, by all appearances he is doing Absolutely Nothing Useful through the hectic party deployment -- only the crew ferrying up excited would-be attendees from many many many floors below can hear his occasional commentary: << Not that one, he's a reporter. >> << Yeah those kids are good. >> << That's just some-ass tourist they'd freak the fuck out when they saw Taylor. >><br />
<br />
... okay, only ''Jax'' and the transport crew can hear the mental commentary. Right now Hive is directing a question to Jax, slightly judgmental: << ... that asshole tried to tank your fucking art show do you really want him here? >> Highlit in their mind, a skinny pink-haired Chimaera punk waiting eagerly for a ride below. His chin lifts jerkily when B arrives, a quiet warmth softening his mental irascibility.<br />
<br />
<< Hive that was like, sophomore year of college. >> Jax's amusement is bright at Hive stealing this long-since-dead grudge. Beside the telepath he's brighter, more dapper than his usual daily wear in a bright white dress shirt with a shimmering gold tie and a vest so black that the gold embroidered solar motifs on it appear to be floating in a void, plain front trousers in the same uncanny black, cinched with a golden belt, and gold wingtip derby shoes with broguing in abstract solar patterns. Somewhere along the way of setup his surprise has given way to delight mingled with a vague sort of surreality; at this point he is just rolling with Whatever This Party Is. He's perched on the edge of the picnic table though he bounces up to return B's hug fierce and hard. "Sugar, how long y'all been working this out, this is nonsense."<br />
<br />
Tag is just hopping down from the back of a ''second'' gleaming hoverbike -- less eye-catching than Jax, more eye-catching than Hive, he's in a rainbow midi skirt and a loosely cropped tee in sky-blue with a bright sun shining out from behind puffy white clouds. "Happy birthday!" << oh no ''is'' it happy it's probably not happy -- no wait we're ''making'' it happy. >> He's joined the line for HUGS while it's still short, and drapes an elbow against Hive's shoulder after he's dispensed Hug to Jackson. "More time than you think," he says with a fey smile, "and less time than we ''should'' have. Ryan's money makes a lot of things move faster, though!"<br />
<br />
A knot of partygoers lately emerged from a glowing purple portal are gazing about in delighted disorientation. At the gruff order to "make a hole!" from somewhere beyond them -- one of the ''proper'' access stairwells, concealed in the artificial promontory -- they hastily part to make way for one S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Nicholas J. Fury. << ...shit, and I thought he had Security eating outta his hand ''before'' that Heidlage business... >> ''His'' disorientation seems somewhat less delighted, his black duster fluttering in breeze and his single eye fixed balefully on Jax as he trundles up to the picnic table. "Mister Holland," he begins, in a note of long-suffering exasperation, "it might have escaped your notice, but you are in fact still under US federal detention by UN proxy. You can't invite a dozen..." His eye flits around the ground and he quails inwardly, ''just'' a little. "...''hundred'' some folks up where without sending 'em through security. That's for your ''protection'' much as anyone else's!"<br />
<br />
"He's very detained!" B protests, clawed hand gesturing insistently in her father's direction. "''Plus'' he didn't invite anyone, he didn't even know about all this, you can't be mad at ''him''. His friends," her immense black eyes are very-very big with this assertion as she briefly turns over Long Hours Of Raid Planning in her mind, "are ''pretty'' good at keeping secrets."<br />
<br />
"I think he's practiced at being mad at ''anything''." Hive is still sipping slowly at his lemonade. His voice comes out gruff, despite the clear amusement Jax can feel in their mind. "Part of the aesthetic. -- Would you really have let all ''these'' motherfuckers through security?" His eyes are skating sidelong to where one skinny teenager with coke-bottle glasses is trying hard to impress their friends by (after being summarily rebuffed by the current bartender who is, in fact, carding for the pop-up open bar) turning their cups of water into beer. << We've got security handled, >> his mental voice is an ''unsettling'' thing, an eerie susurrus that rustles through Fury as well as the others immediately nearby with the overlapping cadences of hundreds-of-voices whispering at once -- the odd effect it gives should probably be more suited to a ghost story, a prophesy from the past, ''something'' of more import than: << enjoy the fucking booze. >><br />
<br />
"If you didn't detain him so well we wouldn't have had to bring the party here!" Tag is only straightening ''very'' slightly at Fury's approach, and mostly only to better turn a brighter smile up to the much taller man. Fury's eyepatch, meanwhile, is growing a stylized iridescent sunburst pattern to offset All The Black.<br />
<br />
"I ain't going nowhere," Jax promises Fury, drawing a small X over his heart as he says it. "And I surely have noticed. -- Only person I ''invited''..." He trails off, here, ''his'' single eye scrunching up along with his nose as he scans the growing crowd. "... ain't here, actually. Guess all these folks is my consolation prize. Did you want cake? There's good cake."<br />
<br />
Fury clenches his jaw a little tighter. "Keeping secrets," he echoes, skepticism carved deep into his voice and his brow alike, "Y'all got whole passel'a -- ''teenagers'' up in here." He's quietly self-congratulatory that he bit back the impulse to say "Millennials" instead. "Even if you don't got anyone here for your ''life'', there's got to be reporters --" He stops cold. "What in tarnation." His eye sweeps back and forth before settling on Hive. << Get the hell out of my head >> does not sound much like his usual timbre of blustery curmudgeonry. It bristles instead with unreasoning fear as he replies, slow and measured. "The person you invited..." He's turning to look at the stage, nearly complete now. << Oh hell, no. >> Aloud, almost simultaneously, "Oh ''hell'' no. Least you coulda ''told'' me before you let Ryan Fucking Black make a fool of me. You know that ain't gon' end well for you, neither."<br />
<br />
The person Jax invited is ''about'' to be here. Ryan is, apparently, arriving not via hoverbike or glowing supplies-portal -- instead there's a light that is ''descending'' from the evening sky above. He's not dressed for stage ''yet'' but he is striking all the same in a black fishnet shirt that quiets the shimmer of gold lamé underneath, torn open in the back to accommodate intricate white gossamer wings, tattered and singed at the edges, a slender gold chainmaile belt slung low on his hips to frame black leggings dotted with shimmering stars, and chunky black ankle boots accented with golden sun buckles. The boots have had some also-gold hardware added aftermarket; it matches the cuffs he's wearing on his wrists and both boots and cuffs emit a radiant glow (... plenty identifiable to anyone familiar with the whole ''range'' of B's hovertech accessories) as he lowers himself neatly to Jax's side. "Reporters strictly prohibited," he's waggling a finger lazily in Hive's direction as he curls an arm around Jax's fiercely warm shoulders, "this ain't my first rodeo. He didn't ''let'' me do anything, this is a birthday party for a ''dear'' friend in a terrible fucking situation. If," he allows lightly, "you want to make a fool of yourself about it, that'll just be a little lagniappe. ''Could'' just enjoy the show, though."<br />
<br />
While Ryan is descending from on high, yet another swirl of purple light beside the stage disgorges Alma, who at a casual ambling pace ends up at the picnic table around the same time as Ryan. Tonight she's wearing a slim white three-piece suit, with neat diamond-shaped openings for inky black wings, birdlike but with knives (''probably'' not real like those under her jacket) for pinions, each edged in gold, black dress boots with subtle gold accenting. The fine twists of her long hair are laced with gold, too, meticulously coiled at the back of her head and held in place with the glowing sun-tipped wand that identifies her as <strike>a solstice fairy</strike> event staff, and the gold kippah at her crown is embroidered with a bold black sunburst. "Happy birthday," she tells Jax before leveling a flat, unimpressed gaze at Fury. "There are worse things to be than a fool."<br />
<br />
Tag(?)'s eyes have gone just a little wider at Ryan's words, and though it's hard outwardly to tell at which ''part'', internally ''reporters strictly prohibited'' is rotating in an oddly thoughtful contemplation. "Oh!" He's bouncing upright, up on his ''toes'' to press a peck to Jax's cheek. "Some of those fairies need some makeup adjustments -- save me a dance?" And then he's flitting off to disappear into the crowd.<br />
<br />
<< -- it's like a half-passel of teenagers >> is just a little bitter in B's mind, but on the outside she's chipper-bright: "Oh yeah! There's more on the way, too, thanks for reminding me." B's smile is quick, closed-lipped, cheery. "You really ''should'' enjoy the show, my brother's ''great'' -- uh, not that you're not great ''too''," she's adding hastily to Ryan, leaning in to bonk her forehead lightly against his arm, "and the jazz band after is ''fantastic'' if you like dancing." Though she sounds just a ''little'' skeptical of this last part as she looks over Fury And His Scowl. ''Does'' he like dancing? She'll leave this mystery for later -- she's dashing back off to her bike, ''probably'' to ferry more people, some of which may be teenagers, up to the revelry.<br />
<br />
Despite himself, Ryan's ridiculous entrance summons up something in Hive that is equal parts ''fondness'' in the exasperation. The telepath hasn't actually roused himself to watch it, but he's watching it all the same, through many (many) reflected stares from around the rooftop. Hive ''himself'' has scrunched his eyes closed like he's ''annoyed'' despite the fact his eyes weren't even aimed in Ryan's direction at the time, but there's a slow breath of laughter as the musician lands. "-- Half-passel of teenagers," he echoes, flat, a beat after B. He's sitting up as Tag (🤨) rabbits off, following the man's departure with a quiet ''huff''. "They're carding. -- I actually can't get out your head 'less you want to leave the building, let us handle this party, would you feel better if I lied to you about it?" << I'm out your head now. >> His knuckles dig slow at his eyes. "If it makes you feel better, Ryan's people are real fucking good at chaos."<br />
<br />
Fury's eye narrows impossibly further. "It ''is'' a terrible fucking situation, and I'm real keen on making sure it don't get worse. I got nothing against throwing him a birthday party --" << Shit, best not poke him ''too'' hard, that boy crazy as a peach orchard boar >> "Just -- keep this rodeo under wraps." His eye skates back over to Hive, making a mental note to check back in with Fitzsimmons in desperate hope for something -- ''anything'' to keep his thoughts his own. << ...''got''damn telepaths... >> "I'm real glad folks are being so conscientious about underage drinking and all, but it's the ''TikTokking'' I'm worried about." << Shoulda left well enough alone about the kids, poor bastard can't catch a break. >> But it's Lucien he's thinking about, hovering uncertain before his desk. "It'd make me feel better if they were ''real fucking good'' at order. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a ''whole'' passel'a agents I gotta ''order'' back for a second shift." He turns on his heel and walks almost directly into an older man in a wheelchair, startled into a flustered "begging your pardon" before he reroutes to stalk off in proper curmudgeonly fashion.<br />
<br />
Neither Charles Xavier nor his wheelchair seem particularly offended for having interrupted Fury's dramatic exit. He is wearing a light gray suit, casual by his standards, and riding one of his sleeker powered chairs. "Well, that gentleman seems to be enjoying himself already," he says lightly, rolling to a stop. The warmth he emanates is soothing and altogether different from the waves of heat rolling off of Jax. "Many happy returns." There is a certain ''gravity'' to the way he says this, a wordless knowledge that he means more than "happy birthday". All the same, he's offering a large envelope sealed with a golden sun and addressed simply to "Jackson" in his elegant, flowing hand. "And a thousand apologies for not coming to you sooner. It wasn't for lack of concern, ''or'' encouragement." He glances aside and up at his companion, a ''little'' sheepishly. "There's something in the post for you, too, whenever it gets past the UN's puzzled scrutiny. But if there's anything I can do to assist tonight..." He doesn't ''look'' at Hive, but his offer to the younger telepath is more explicit, a skillful and matter-of-fact shifting aside of his shields.<br />
<br />
Scott Summers looks slightly embarrassed to be participating in Fury's frustration of the day; he gives him a sympathetic grimace as he sidesteps to let him pass, before falling back into step with Charles. Evidently he can't beat 'Many happy returns' as a birthday wish; after Charles has finished speaking, Scott gives Jax a more standard, "Happy birthday." His gift is in a plain brown Hallmark envelope, lettered somewhat less elegantly than the Professor's; as soon as it's been handed over, Scott is looking curiously around this birthday shindig, gaze stuttering on the teenagers trying to sneak booze. His mouth quirks silently; his thought is pitched for Charles to notice, though probably Hive can hear it too. << Get a wand, too. >><br />
<br />
"Pretty sure he likes dancing." Jax is thinking back to a Mockingbird booth another lifetime ago, thinking back to twirling Ryan out on the familiar dancefloor -- he doesn't have time to get caught up in regret, Ryan's Very Splashy Entrance is pushing melancholy ''straight'' out of his mind. He tips his head up; his eye bugs cartoon-style out of his head with a briefly twinkling starry-eyed sparkle as Ryan descends. "I happen to know Ally'll be right excited about an intimate private Ryan Black concert." He curls his arm tight back around Ryan, squeezing hard. "Sugar, when you said a few of my closest friends, this --"<br />
<br />
-- the illusory twinkle has remained even if his eye has returned to its normal ''size'' when Charles and Scott arrive. "Gosh! Sure weren't all who I was expecting." He's giving Scott a ''bright'' smile, bouncing forward to lean in and curl an arm around Charles in hug before taking both his presents. "''Thank'' you! Tonight sure is full of surprises. You know they put all this together without a word to me, was y'all in on it?" Inwardly he is ''fully unsure'' whether to think that his staid advisor or the dignified old Boomer were in on this nonsense; he absolutely would believe Either Way. "What you can ''do'' is enjoy yourselfs," << if it's possible, >> he's fretting inwardly, << we could all use it, >> and here he's thinking of Dawson's bright-warm smile in his scarred face, of his fierce determination to keep Tuesday Nights carved out for Game Night for years through so much chaos and pain; thinking of Ryan's long-long hours creating an online arts festival in the early pandemic days, thinking of songs sung with Spencer fierce and (joyful) (hurt) (defiant) at vigil marches, thinking of the kids coming back to homes quiet and empty and mourning or alive and full of love, thinking --<br />
<br />
"-- there's plenty of booze," he's a little wry, here, "Ryan's payin'." He nudges Ryan with an elbow. "I assume."<br />
<br />
"It's fine," Hive kind-of-not-really rats out the kids nearby as Scott's gaze hitches on them, "Everett's getting good practice in. Probably take him like. Three solid more hours to get enough booze into that water to get even one of them tipsy. Probably won't stop them ''acting'' drunk earlier than that, though." His brows knit, and though his mind is reaching for Xavier's, it's Scott he's looking to Scott with a sudden frown. "-- he's not gonna ''explode'' that water, is he?"<br />
<br />
He's coiling firm roots, meanwhile, into the older man's mind with a smooth and seamless shift of identity-perspective that suddenly floods his|their awareness with an achingly familiar lightning-hypervigilant rapid-processing awareness of Every Mind not just here on the roof but down on the block below, out in Freaktown, out at the school, over in Chimaera, sorting at blinding speed through every request for entry and a complex array of desires and dangers and risks and needs before giving the okay to each of the transport crew.<br />
<br />
Where ''did'' the wand appear from. For most people it's probably hard to track the flicker-blink of motion, though Charles at least can feel Hive (rudely? Not rudely?) yoinking That Part Of Them over in a blur of teleportation from across the roof ''just'' long enough to drop a sunburst-wand onto Charles's lap. His "Thanks" is gruff, though through the vast forest that is ''them'' a warm glow of sun is shining, now.<br />
<br />
His head rolls back. Eyes ''roll'', at Jax. "Liar. How long you known this crazy-ass dipshit and his theatrics. You were expecting exactly this." After a beat, he adds, with a nod towards Xavier, "''Please''. ''This'' motherfucker is paying now."<br />
<br />
"We're anarchists," Ryan's telling Fury with a ''fiercely'' cheerful grin, "if there's one thing we're real damn good at it's bringing order outta chaos." His brows have hiked when Xavier arrives, and it's Scott he addresses first, Louisiana roots laid on thick in his accent ''now'' where previously it had hewed far closer to a broadcast-neutral: "''Well'' gar ici Scott Summers, I owe you one. Have you manage to get noted philanthropist Charles Xavier himself here to grace us with his presence? 'tween you and me if I had known what it took to wrangle a visit, I'd'a throwed Jax a birthday party each week, by now."<br />
<br />
Though he's given Scott a warm smile, it hews cutting-sharp when it turns to Xavier: "-- jail do get awful lonely -- but I know you gotta be a ''busy'' man up that school'a yourn, I'm sure." His arm has gone ''just'' a hair tighter around Jax for the moment before he releases his friend to his effusive greeting hug. Ryan's mind is bristling with protective ire the whole while. Possibly ''he'' might take Just A Smidge longer than Jax to forgive the tardiness of this visit, lavish presents notwithstanding. He does allow ''just'' a hint of amusement, ''slightly'' self-conscious, to soften his overprotective prickling, as he plucks Hive's lemonade for a sip. "Yeah? Well bless his heart, then, just tell me where I forward the bill."<br />
<br />
"-- I'd be very happy to talk about my ''research'' next time I'm visiting, L-- Fitz, ''would'' you excuse me." Kitty didn't actually take no for an answer before stepping breezily through the offending scientist and making her way to the knot of people around Jackson. Compared to everyone else, she's ''well'' underdressed -- oversized tee-shirt that is mottled with a variety of textures evoking bathroom tile, wood panelling, and floral wallpaper in patches, grey leggings. There's a drawstring bag on her back in a similar chaotic pattern to her shirt -- the only obvious cue she's a Friend of the Birthday Boy is the gold headband holding back her hair with squiggly sunburst lines emanating from it, and the fairy wand peeking out the top of her bag. <br />
<br />
Kitty comes up on Jax's free side, leaning in to hug her friend, tight and solid. "Happy birthday, sunshine -- Think I broke ''that'' little English guy's mind again," she says, wry, amused irritation sensible to the -paths among them, "can I stack that onto your ''actual'' present." She's rolled up ''just'' in time to hear Ryan speak to -- << hi Professor (hi dad) (Kitty ''be'' normal good lord) >> -- Charles, one eyebrow quirking up well before ''bless his heart'' can be deployed. "Huh. That's sweet -- late arrivals club going halvsies on the party. ''Probably'' you do not want to be calling the kettle black," is more squarely to Ryan, annoyance (at his past absences here and at ''Charles's'' absence, too) tempered by a broad blanket of affection towards most of the assembled, "that's probably, like, your own brand infringement. -- Alma," and this subject change is ''abrupt'', the smile sudden and bright across her face, "you look incredible, are you working all night or can I actually get a dance in sometime?"<br />
<br />
<< Just what we need right now at Xavier's, >> Scott is thinking, << instant-booze mutation. >> "Probably not. I'll keep an eye on it," he says, as much to Charles as to Hive, though he then pulls his eyes reluctantly away from Everett, settling on Ryan. There's a little irritation-indignation-amusement rising up as the raid team members address the Professor, a stray, hastily-smothered << they're not ''wrong'' (probably shouldn't say anything even if they were) >> that doesn't quite kill his defensiveness. He might feel more inclined (entitled?) to tell ''Kitty'' off, but -- another glance at the Professor, another silent decision to keep his trap shut where all of this who-visited-when stuff is concerned, and to flail back toward civil conversation. "I like the decorations," he says. "Very --" << sparkly >> "-- creative."<br />
<br />
As unflappable as she is, Alma still shakes her head when Fury storms off. "Not sure he's interested in dancing with freaks." She isn't sure he's ''not'', either, and wonders how far Ryan -- or any of them -- could push before he'd put his foot down. "His loss." Her disdain for Charles and Scott is considerably milder, already tempered by the thought they might be good to have on hand if something went sideways, and mollified further by Jax's reaction. When Kitty admonishes Ryan she quietly adjusts her estimation of Time Until Drama, and though the prospect does not ''frighten'' her, she says a silent bracha that they've made it this far without incident. Maybe that's why Kitty's question catches her off guard, and her eyebrows tick up. "I'm working all night, but there are a lot of us here and we get breaks." She allows a slightly indulgent smile. "I'll save you a dance."<br />
<br />
"Alas, I can take no credit for this spectacle," says Charles, and despite his mild tone, the word "spectacle" ''feels'' distinctly positive. "But I may take some small credit after Ryan sends my accountant the bill, and I do intend to enjoy myself." He produces a business card and leans forward to pass it to Ryan. His warmth is like dappled sunlight now, and there is both contrition and concern in it. << Please be gentle with him, Kitty. Be gentle with ''yourself'', too. >> "He can't explode the water," he adds, though Hive knew this without need for words the moment his mind became their. "At least not without help, and I trust you'll notice if the students get it in their heads to improvise a still." All the same, they are mentally noting those most likely to attempt such a thing (or other potentially disastrous shenanigans) out of the X-kids present. << They're not wrong, >> his agreement is quiet in Scott's mind, << and you needn't defend me, regardless, though I appreciate the sentiment. Tonight is for Jackson. >> He turns the sunburst wand over in his hands, his smile at the whimsical craftsmanship not altogether conscious. "They are lovely -- my compliments. I'm sure there's plenty more creativity yet to come."<br />
<br />
Ryan's brows hike right ''back'' at Kitty -- but it's with an easing of his smile, a dip of his head, and where warmth has been radiating from Charles there's a harmony now from Ryan, picking ''up'' that dappled-sun-warmth and twisting it into a playful violin trill that dances between them with a burst of lighthearted amusement before it dissipates into the bustle of the set-up. "Shiiiit," Ryan drawls, taking Charles's card, "can you sing? Guess my publicist ''would'' be pretty pissed if I tried turning the whole shebang over at this stage of the game." He tucks the card away, spreads his arms wide. "Thanks," is to the compliments on the decorations, "Had a whole army of artists to help out. Eat! Drink! Be Merry! -- especially you," he's saying this to Alma, brightly, "I'll hold off on dying till tomorrow."<br />
<br />
It's Sunlight^3, a flutter-glow when Kitty comes in for a hug that Jax returns fierce. "Oh ''gosh'' FitzSimmons gonna be having a ''constant'' freakout all night ''long'', I think, they don't hardly know what to do with any of us let alone -- oh gosh don't nobody let slip nothin' 'bout Scott, okay, I jus' been letting 'em think the glasses is because he thinks he's way too cool for everyone." His internal Caution Levels are making vague quiet adjustments at Kitty's admonishment and just as quickly adjusting them back at that light trill. "''Boy'' don't even joke." His ''bap'' is light, his ''tone'' is light, his thoughts -- well. He's doing a quick but thorough assessment of his layers of bright-illusory makeup, the touchups to the scars that warp his tattoos, leaning ''in'' to the parts of him better practiced at psionic shielding and plain Not ADHD Mental Discipline. Looping that playful violin trill until it sinks ''in'', looping his ''arm'' through Kitty's. Leaning into Ryan's and smiling. ''Bright''. "Y'all. Thanks for coming," and here it's not forced, not illusion, just a warm gratitude in the words. "Sure did brighten my day."<br />
<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Joy_springs_all_radiant_in_my_breast;_Though_pauper_poor,_than_king_more_blest,&diff=25067Logs:Joy springs all radiant in my breast; Though pauper poor, than king more blest,2023-07-05T16:56:39Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Kitty, B, Hive, Tag 🤨, Fury, Ryan, Alma, Charles, Scott, FitzSimmons, | summary = "Eat! Dri..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Kitty]], [[B]], [[Hive]], [[Mirror|Tag 🤨]], [[Fury]], [[Ryan]], [[Alma]], [[Charles]], [[Scott]], [[NPC-FitzSimmons|FitzSimmons]], <br />
| summary = "Eat! Drink! Be Merry!"<br />
| gamedate = 2023-06-21<br />
| gamedatename = summer solstice '23 / jax's 31st birthday<br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Rooftop - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Kitty, NPC-FitzSimmons, B, Hive, Mirror, Fury, Ryan, Alma, Charles, Scott, SHIELD HQ, Mutants, Humans<br />
| log =<br />
There's an unexpected oasis at the top of this gleaming high-rise, the whole of it carpeted in thick, soft, layered ground cover of sedums, grass, and moss. A small, carefully manicured grove serves as the centerpiece, with benches, tables and chairs scattered around in the shade. Beside it, a professionally landscaped garden boasts a pond and quite a few planters that either used to hold plants or still hold dying ones. The greenhouse is somewhat sparsely and eclectically populated with tropical plants, flanked by garden beds even more sparsely planted. An open lawn on the side overlooking Times Square makes a great spot for a picnic. The otherwise unsightly structure housing the roof access, a single stall bathroom, and tool shed has been covered on three sides with turf and shaped into a little promontory offering a breathtaking view of the city.<br />
<br />
The peace of the rooftop has been Rapidly Disrupted -- fifteen minutes ago, some SHIELD staffers were enjoying an early supper under the balmy light of the solstice sun. Now --<br />
<br />
Well. <br />
<br />
The lawn has mostly disappeared under the newly assembled raised stage, wires for lighting and sound systems running through the grass to generators that definitely do ''not'' belong to SHIELD. The tables have been commandeered as food and drink stations, the promontory as the drop-off spot for guests arriving via Various Modes of Flight instead of signing in on the ground floor of the building.<br />
<br />
And there are ''so'' many guests already, people from all over the city, not just Jackson Holland's large collection of personal friends -- a collection of bikers in MMMC cuts, artists still with paint stains on their hands, teenagers who ''probably'' should still be up at Westchester and definitely didn't sign out, mutant musicians with guitars strapped to their backs. The chatter through the soundcheck is not so loud yet, but the volume is slowly rising.<br />
<br />
At one of the commandeered tables, Kitty is fussing with a huge water jug and stacks of paper cups. "-- Do you," she's asking earnestly, dipping her cup into the jug and pulling it out full of water as she does so, "know where I can get another trash can? I don't think we brought enough and Blink is really due for a break." <br />
<br />
Next to her, Leo Fitz's eyes are bugging out of his skull, staring at Kitty's immaterial hand. Blinks once, twice. "...Sorry, what did you say?" He is probably still not listening.<br />
<br />
In the background of the cheerful chatter there's a quiet droning hum, one tiny blue-and-silver hoverbike floating up to hover just over SHIELD's rooftop. In addition to the many other regulatory transgressions happening, B is not currently wearing her usual sharktooth helmet -- just a tight silvery-mesh tee shirt, fairly see-through over a lacy black halter crop underneath, a pleated miniskirt in black and silver, and very stompy metallic boots with matching wristcuffs. She has her Mongrels cut over top; her claws and the slender dotted liner limning her enormous eyes are actively ''glowing'' in a slightly luminescent silvery-blue. "Have fun!" she's chirruping to the pair of (''definitely'' not signed out!) X-Kids she lets off, who are promptly scampering off to explore the Drinks Options while they think enough adults are looking the other way that they can maybe sneak some booze. B is definitely not sneaking booze, but ze ''is'' taking a short break from ferrying duty to scarper off hirself, in order to locate Jax so that ze can deliver a quick hug to the Birthday <strike>Boy</strike> Dad.<br />
<br />
By dint of being connected at the brain, Hive has already found the birthday boy. Hive is slouched on a picnic bench, leaning against the table with a droopy-lidded expression that suggests he might already be half asleep despite the ongoing commotion. He's sipping on a lemonade, looking mostly drab in faded old jeans and a grey tee shirt with 'BLUE SUN|蓝日' printed on it in bold blue text, the brightest color to his attire the ornate and vivid multicolored spiral horns someone has affixed to his head. Despite this signifier that he is Probably A Volunteer, by all appearances he is doing Absolutely Nothing Useful through the hectic party deployment -- only the crew ferrying up excited would-be attendees from many many many floors below can hear his occasional commentary: << Not that one, he's a reporter. >> << Yeah those kids are good. >> << That's just some-ass tourist they'd freak the fuck out when they saw Taylor. >><br />
<br />
... okay, only ''Jax'' and the transport crew can hear the mental commentary. Right now Hive is directing a question to Jax, slightly judgmental: << ... that asshole tried to tank your fucking art show do you really want him here? >> Highlit in their mind, a skinny pink-haired Chimaera punk waiting eagerly for a ride below. His chin lifts jerkily when B arrives, a quiet warmth softening his mental irascibility.<br />
<br />
<< Hive that was like, sophomore year of college. >> Jax's amusement is bright at Hive stealing this long-since-dead grudge. Beside the telepath he's brighter, more dapper than his usual daily wear in a bright white dress shirt with a shimmering gold tie and a vest so black that the gold embroidered solar motifs on it appear to be floating in a void, plain front trousers in the same uncanny black, cinched with a golden belt, and gold wingtip derby shoes with broguing in abstract solar patterns. Somewhere along the way of setup his surprise has given way to delight mingled with a vague sort of surreality; at this point he is just rolling with Whatever This Party Is. He's perched on the edge of the picnic table though he bounces up to return B's hug fierce and hard. "Sugar, how long y'all been working this out, this is nonsense."<br />
<br />
Tag is just hopping down from the back of a ''second'' gleaming hoverbike -- less eye-catching than Jax, more eye-catching than Hive, he's in a rainbow midi skirt and a loosely cropped tee in sky-blue with a bright sun shining out from behind puffy white clouds. "Happy birthday!" << oh no ''is'' it happy it's probably not happy -- no wait we're ''making'' it happy. >> He's joined the line for HUGS while it's still short, and drapes an elbow against Hive's shoulder after he's dispensed Hug to Jackson. "More time than you think," he says with a fey smile, "and less time than we ''should'' have. Ryan's money makes a lot of things move faster, though!"<br />
<br />
A knot of partygoers lately emerged from a glowing purple portal are gazing about in delighted disorientation. At the gruff order to "make a hole!" from somewhere beyond them -- one of the ''proper'' access stairwells, concealed in the artificial promontory -- they hastily part to make way for one S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Nicholas J. Fury. << ...shit, and I thought he had Security eating outta his hand ''before'' that Heidlage business... >> ''His'' disorientation seems somewhat less delighted, his black duster fluttering in breeze and his single eye fixed balefully on Jax as he trundles up to the picnic table. "Mister Holland," he begins, in a note of long-suffering exasperation, "it might have escaped your notice, but you are in fact still under US federal detention by UN proxy. You can't invite a dozen..." His eye flits around the ground and he quails inwardly, ''just'' a little. "...''hundred'' some folks up where without sending 'em through security. That's for your ''protection'' much as anyone else's!"<br />
<br />
"He's very detained!" B protests, clawed hand gesturing insistently in her father's direction. "''Plus'' he didn't invite anyone, he didn't even know about all this, you can't be mad at ''him''. His friends," her immense black eyes are very-very big with this assertion as she briefly turns over Long Hours Of Raid Planning in her mind, "are ''pretty'' good at keeping secrets."<br />
<br />
"I think he's practiced at being mad at ''anything''." Hive is still sipping slowly at his lemonade. His voice comes out gruff, despite the clear amusement Jax can feel in their mind. "Part of the aesthetic. -- Would you really have let all ''these'' motherfuckers through security?" His eyes are skating sidelong to where one skinny teenager with coke-bottle glasses is trying hard to impress their friends by (after being summarily rebuffed by the current bartender who is, in fact, carding for the pop-up open bar) turning their cups of water into beer. << We've got security handled, >> his mental voice is an ''unsettling'' thing, an eerie susurrus that rustles through Fury as well as the others immediately nearby with the overlapping cadences of hundreds-of-voices whispering at once -- the odd effect it gives should probably be more suited to a ghost story, a prophesy from the past, ''something'' of more import than: << enjoy the fucking booze. >><br />
<br />
"If you didn't detain him so well we wouldn't have had to bring the party here!" Tag is only straightening ''very'' slightly at Fury's approach, and mostly only to better turn a brighter smile up to the much taller man. Fury's eyepatch, meanwhile, is growing a stylized iridescent sunburst pattern to offset All The Black.<br />
<br />
"I ain't going nowhere," Jax promises Fury, drawing a small X over his heart as he says it. "And I surely have noticed. -- Only person I ''invited''..." He trails off, here, ''his'' single eye scrunching up along with his nose as he scans the growing crowd. "... ain't here, actually. Guess all these folks is my consolation prize. Did you want cake? There's good cake."<br />
<br />
Fury clenches his jaw a little tighter. "Keeping secrets," he echoes, skepticism carved deep into his voice and his brow alike, "Y'all got whole passel'a -- ''teenagers'' up in here." He's quietly self-congratulatory that he bit back the impulse to say "Millennials" instead. "Even if you don't got anyone here for your ''life'', there's got to be reporters --" He stops cold. "What in tarnation." His eye sweeps back and forth before settling on Hive. << Get the hell out of my head >> does not sound much like his usual timbre of blustery curmudgeonry. It bristles instead with unreasoning fear as he replies, slow and measured. "The person you invited..." He's turning to look at the stage, nearly complete now. << Oh hell, no. >> Aloud, almost simultaneously, "Oh ''hell'' no. Least you coulda ''told'' me before you let Ryan Fucking Black make a fool of me. You know that ain't gon' end well for you, neither."<br />
<br />
The person Jax invited is ''about'' to be here. Ryan is, apparently, arriving not via hoverbike or glowing supplies-portal -- instead there's a light that is ''descending'' from the evening sky above. He's not dressed for stage ''yet'' but he is striking all the same in a black fishnet shirt that quiets the shimmer of gold lamé underneath, torn open in the back to accommodate intricate white gossamer wings, tattered and singed at the edges, a slender gold chainmaile belt slung low on his hips to frame black leggings dotted with shimmering stars, and chunky black ankle boots accented with golden sun buckles. The boots have had some also-gold hardware added aftermarket; it matches the cuffs he's wearing on his wrists and both boots and cuffs emit a radiant glow (... plenty identifiable to anyone familiar with the whole ''range'' of B's hovertech accessories) as he lowers himself neatly to Jax's side. "Reporters strictly prohibited," he's waggling a finger lazily in Hive's direction as he curls an arm around Jax's fiercely warm shoulders, "this ain't my first rodeo. He didn't ''let'' me do anything, this is a birthday party for a ''dear'' friend in a terrible fucking situation. If," he allows lightly, "you want to make a fool of yourself about it, that'll just be a little lagniappe. ''Could'' just enjoy the show, though."<br />
<br />
While Ryan is descending from on high, yet another swirl of purple light beside the stage disgorges Alma, who at a casual ambling pace ends up at the picnic table around the same time as Ryan. Tonight she's wearing a slim white three-piece suit, with neat diamond-shaped openings for inky black wings, birdlike but with knives (''probably'' not real like those under her jacket) for pinions, each edged in gold, black dress boots with subtle gold accenting. The fine twists of her long hair are laced with gold, too, meticulously coiled at the back of her head and held in place with the glowing sun-tipped wand that identifies her as <strike>a solstice fairy</strike> event staff, and the gold kippah at her crown is embroidered with a bold black sunburst. "Happy birthday," she tells Jax before leveling a flat, unimpressed gaze at Fury. "There are worse things to be than a fool."<br />
<br />
Tag(?)'s eyes have gone just a little wider at Ryan's words, and though it's hard outwardly to tell at which ''part'', internally ''reporters strictly prohibited'' is rotating in an oddly thoughtful contemplation. "Oh!" He's bouncing upright, up on his ''toes'' to press a peck to Jax's cheek. "Some of those fairies need some makeup adjustments -- save me a dance?" And then he's flitting off to disappear into the crowd.<br />
<br />
<< -- it's like a half-passel of teenagers >> is just a little bitter in B's mind, but on the outside she's chipper-bright: "Oh yeah! There's more on the way, too, thanks for reminding me." B's smile is quick, closed-lipped, cheery. "You really ''should'' enjoy the show, my brother's ''great'' -- uh, not that you're not great ''too''," she's adding hastily to Ryan, leaning in to bonk her forehead lightly against his arm, "and the jazz band after is ''fantastic'' if you like dancing." Though she sounds just a ''little'' skeptical of this last part as she looks over Fury And His Scowl. ''Does'' he like dancing? She'll leave this mystery for later -- she's dashing back off to her bike, ''probably'' to ferry more people, some of which may be teenagers, up to the revelry.<br />
<br />
Despite himself, Ryan's ridiculous entrance summons up something in Hive that is equal parts ''fondness'' in the exasperation. The telepath hasn't actually roused himself to watch it, but he's watching it all the same, through many (many) reflected stares from around the rooftop. Hive ''himself'' has scrunched his eyes closed like he's ''annoyed'' despite the fact his eyes weren't even aimed in Ryan's direction at the time, but there's a slow breath of laughter as the musician lands. "-- Half-passel of teenagers," he echoes, flat, a beat after B. He's sitting up as Tag (🤨) rabbits off, following the man's departure with a quiet ''huff''. "They're carding. -- I actually can't get out your head 'less you want to leave the building, let us handle this party, would you feel better if I lied to you about it?" << I'm out your head now. >> His knuckles dig slow at his eyes. "If it makes you feel better, Ryan's people are real fucking good at chaos."<br />
<br />
Fury's eye narrows impossibly further. "It ''is'' a terrible fucking situation, and I'm real keen on making sure it don't get worse. I got nothing against throwing him a birthday party --" << Shit, best not poke him ''too'' hard, that boy crazy as a peach orchard boar >> "Just -- keep this rodeo under wraps." His eye skates back over to Hive, making a mental note to check back in with Fitzsimmons in desperate hope for something -- ''anything'' to keep his thoughts his own. << ...''got''damn telepaths... >> "I'm real glad folks are being so conscientious about underage drinking and all, but it's the ''TikTokking'' I'm worried about." << Shoulda left well enough alone about the kids, poor bastard can't catch a break. >> But it's Lucien he's thinking about, hovering uncertain before his desk. "It'd make me feel better if they were ''real fucking good'' at order. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a ''whole'' passel'a agents I gotta ''order'' back for a second shift." He turns on his heel and walks almost directly into an older man in a wheelchair, startled into a flustered "begging your pardon" before he reroutes to stalk off in proper curmudgeonly fashion.<br />
<br />
Neither Charles Xavier nor his wheelchair seem particularly offended for having interrupted Fury's dramatic exit. He is wearing a light gray suit, casual by his standards, and riding one of his sleeker powered chairs. "Well, that gentleman seems to be enjoying himself already," he says lightly, rolling to a stop. The warmth he emanates is soothing and altogether different from the waves of heat rolling off of Jax. "Many happy returns." There is a certain ''gravity'' to the way he says this, a wordless knowledge that he means more than "happy birthday". All the same, he's offering a large envelope sealed with a golden sun and addressed simply to "Jackson" in his elegant, flowing hand. "And a thousand apologies for not coming to you sooner. It wasn't for lack of concern, ''or'' encouragement." He glances aside and up at his companion, a ''little'' sheepishly. "There's something in the post for you, too, whenever it gets past the UN's puzzled scrutiny. But if there's anything I can do to assist tonight..." He doesn't ''look'' at Hive, but his offer to the younger telepath is more explicit, a skillful and matter-of-fact shifting aside of his shields.<br />
<br />
Scott Summers looks slightly embarrassed to be participating in Fury's frustration of the day; he gives him a sympathetic grimace as he sidesteps to let him pass, before falling back into step with Charles. Evidently he can't beat 'Many happy returns' as a birthday wish; after Charles has finished speaking, Scott gives Jax a more standard, "Happy birthday." His gift is in a plain brown Hallmark envelope, lettered somewhat less elegantly than the Professor's; as soon as it's been handed over, Scott is looking curiously around this birthday shindig, gaze stuttering on the teenagers trying to sneak booze. His mouth quirks silently; his thought is pitched for Charles to notice, though probably Hive can hear it too. << Get a wand, too. >><br />
<br />
"Pretty sure he likes dancing." Jax is thinking back to a Mockingbird booth another lifetime ago, thinking back to twirling Ryan out on the familiar dancefloor -- he doesn't have time to get caught up in regret, Ryan's Very Splashy Entrance is pushing melancholy ''straight'' out of his mind. He tips his head up; his eye bugs cartoon-style out of his head with a briefly twinkling starry-eyed sparkle as Ryan descends. "I happen to know Ally'll be right excited about an intimate private Ryan Black concert." He curls his arm tight back around Ryan, squeezing hard. "Sugar, when you said a few of my closest friends, this --"<br />
<br />
-- the illusory twinkle has remained even if his eye has returned to its normal ''size'' when Charles and Scott arrive. "Gosh! Sure weren't all who I was expecting." He's giving Scott a ''bright'' smile, bouncing forward to lean in and curl an arm around Charles in hug before taking both his presents. "''Thank'' you! Tonight sure is full of surprises. You know they put all this together without a word to me, was y'all in on it?" Inwardly he is ''fully unsure'' whether to think that his staid advisor or the dignified old Boomer were in on this nonsense; he absolutely would believe Either Way. "What you can ''do'' is enjoy yourselfs," << if it's possible, >> he's fretting inwardly, << we could all use it, >> and here he's thinking of Dawson's bright-warm smile in his scarred face, of his fierce determination to keep Tuesday Nights carved out for Game Night for years through so much chaos and pain; thinking of Ryan's long-long hours creating an online arts festival in the early pandemic days, thinking of songs sung with Spencer fierce and (joyful) (hurt) (defiant) at vigil marches, thinking of the kids coming back to homes quiet and empty and mourning or alive and full of love, thinking --<br />
<br />
"-- there's plenty of booze," he's a little wry, here, "Ryan's payin'." He nudges Ryan with an elbow. "I assume."<br />
<br />
"It's fine," Hive kind-of-not-really rats out the kids nearby as Scott's gaze hitches on them, "Everett's getting good practice in. Probably take him like. Three solid more hours to get enough booze into that water to get even one of them tipsy. Probably won't stop them ''acting'' drunk earlier than that, though." His brows knit, and though his mind is reaching for Xavier's, it's Scott he's looking to Scott with a sudden frown. "-- he's not gonna ''explode'' that water, is he?"<br />
<br />
He's coiling firm roots, meanwhile, into the older man's mind with a smooth and seamless shift of identity-perspective that suddenly floods his|their awareness with an achingly familiar lightning-hypervigilant rapid-processing awareness of Every Mind not just here on the roof but down on the block below, out in Freaktown, out at the school, over in Chimaera, sorting at blinding speed through every request for entry and a complex array of desires and dangers and risks and needs before giving the okay to each of the transport crew.<br />
<br />
Where ''did'' the wand appear from. For most people it's probably hard to track the flicker-blink of motion, though Charles at least can feel Hive (rudely? Not rudely?) yoinking That Part Of Them over in a blur of teleportation from across the roof ''just'' long enough to drop a sunburst-wand onto Charles's lap. His "Thanks" is gruff, though through the vast forest that is ''them'' a warm glow of sun is shining, now.<br />
<br />
His head rolls back. Eyes ''roll'', at Jax. "Liar. How long you known this crazy-ass dipshit and his theatrics. You were expecting exactly this." After a beat, he adds, with a nod towards Xavier, "''Please''. ''This'' motherfucker is paying now."<br />
<br />
"We're anarchists," Ryan's telling Fury with a ''fiercely'' cheerful grin, "if there's one thing we're real damn good at it's bringing order outta chaos." His brows have hiked when Xavier arrives, and it's Scott he addresses first, Louisiana roots laid on thick in his accent ''now'' where previously it had hewed far closer to a broadcast-neutral: "''Well'' gar ici Scott Summers, I owe you one. Have you manage to get noted philanthropist Charles Xavier himself here to grace us with his presence? 'tween you and me if I had known what it took to wrangle a visit, I'd'a throwed Jax a birthday party each week, by now."<br />
<br />
Though he's given Scott a warm smile, it hews cutting-sharp when it turns to Xavier: "-- jail do get awful lonely -- but I know you gotta be a ''busy'' man up that school'a yourn, I'm sure." His arm has gone ''just'' a hair tighter around Jax for the moment before he releases his friend to his effusive greeting hug. Ryan's mind is bristling with protective ire the whole while. Possibly ''he'' might take Just A Smidge longer than Jax to forgive the tardiness of this visit, lavish presents notwithstanding. He does allow ''just'' a hint of amusement, ''slightly'' self-conscious, to soften his overprotective prickling, as he plucks Hive's lemonade for a sip. "Yeah? Well bless his heart, then, just tell me where I forward the bill."<br />
<br />
"-- I'd be very happy to talk about my ''research'' next time I'm visiting, L-- Fitz, ''would'' you excuse me." Kitty didn't actually take no for an answer before stepping breezily through the offending scientist and making her way to the knot of people around Jackson. Compared to everyone else, she's ''well'' underdressed -- oversized tee-shirt that is mottled with a variety of textures evoking bathroom tile, wood panelling, and floral wallpaper in patches, grey leggings. There's a drawstring bag on her back in a similar chaotic pattern to her shirt -- the only obvious cue she's a Friend of the Birthday Boy is the gold headband holding back her hair with squiggly sunburst lines emanating from it, and the fairy wand peeking out the top of her bag. <br />
<br />
Kitty comes up on Jax's free side, leaning in to hug her friend, tight and solid. "Happy birthday, sunshine -- Think I broke ''that'' little English guy's mind again," she says, wry, amused irritation sensible to the -paths among them, "can I stack that onto your ''actual'' present." She's rolled up ''just'' in time to hear Ryan speak to -- << hi Professor (hi dad) (Kitty ''be'' normal good lord) >> -- Charles, one eyebrow quirking up well before ''bless his heart'' can be deployed. "Huh. That's sweet -- late arrivals club going halvsies on the party. ''Probably'' you do not want to be calling the kettle black," is more squarely to Ryan, annoyance (at his past absences here and at ''Charles's'' absence, too) tempered by a broad blanket of affection towards most of the assembled, "that's probably, like, your own brand infringement. -- Alma," and this subject change is ''abrupt'', the smile sudden and bright across her face, "you look incredible, are you working all night or can I actually get a dance in sometime?"<br />
<br />
<< Just what we need right now at Xavier's, >> Scott is thinking, << instant-booze mutation. >> "Probably not. I'll keep an eye on it," he says, as much to Charles as to Hive, though he then pulls his eyes reluctantly away from Everett, settling on Ryan. There's a little irritation-indignation-amusement rising up as the raid team members address the Professor, a stray, hastily-smothered << they're not ''wrong'' (probably shouldn't say anything even if they were) >> that doesn't quite kill his defensiveness. He might feel more inclined (entitled?) to tell ''Kitty'' off, but -- another glance at the Professor, another silent decision to keep his trap shut where all of this who-visited-when stuff is concerned, and to flail back toward civil conversation. "I like the decorations," he says. "Very --" << sparkly >> "-- creative."<br />
<br />
As unflappable as she is, Alma still shakes her head when Fury storms off. "Not sure he's interested in dancing with freaks." She isn't sure he's ''not'', either, and wonders how far Ryan -- or any of them -- could push before he'd put his foot down. "His loss." Her disdain for Charles and Scott is considerably milder, already tempered by the thought they might be good to have on hand if something went sideways, and mollified further by Jax's reaction. When Kitty admonishes Ryan she quietly adjusts her estimation of Time Until Drama, and though the prospect does not ''frighten'' her, she says a silent bracha that they've made it this far without incident. Maybe that's why Kitty's question catches her off guard, and her eyebrows tick up. "I'm working all night, but there are a lot of us here and we get breaks." She allows a slightly indulgent smile. "I'll save you a dance."<br />
<br />
"Alas, I can take no credit for this spectacle," says Charles, and despite his mild tone, the word "spectacle" ''feels'' distinctly positive. "But I may take some small credit after Ryan sends my accountant the bill, and I do intend to enjoy myself." He produces a business card and leans forward to pass it to Ryan. His warmth is like dappled sunlight now, and there is both contrition and concern in it. << Please be gentle with him, Kitty. Be gentle with ''yourself'', too. >> "He can't explode the water," he adds, though Hive knew this without need for words the moment his mind became their. "At least not without help, and I trust you'll notice if the students get it in their heads to improvise a still." All the same, they are mentally noting those most likely to attempt such a thing (or other potentially disastrous shenanigans) out of the X-kids present. << They're not wrong, >> his agreement is quiet in Scott's mind, << and you needn't defend me, regardless, though I appreciate the sentiment. Tonight is for Jackson. >> He turns the sunburst wand over in his hands, his smile at the whimsical craftsmanship not altogether conscious. "They are lovely -- my compliments. I'm sure there's plenty more creativity yet to come."<br />
<br />
Ryan's brows hike right ''back'' at Kitty -- but it's with an easing of his smile, a dip of his head, and where warmth has been radiating from Charles there's a harmony now from Ryan, picking ''up'' that dappled-sun-warmth and twisting it into a playful violin trill that dances between them with a burst of lighthearted amusement before it dissipates into the bustle of the set-up. "Shiiiit," Ryan drawls, taking Charles's card, "can you sing? Guess my publicist ''would'' be pretty pissed if I tried turning the whole shebang over at this stage of the game." He tucks the card away, spreads his arms wide. "Thanks," is to the compliments on the decorations, "Had a whole army of artists to help out. Eat! Drink! Be Merry! -- especially you," he's saying this to Alma, brightly, "I'll hold off on dying till tomorrow."<br />
<br />
It's Sunlight^3, a flutter-glow when Kitty comes in for a hug that Jax returns fierce. "Oh ''gosh'' FitzSimmons gonna be having a ''constant'' freakout all night ''long'', I think, they don't hardly know what to do with any of us let alone -- oh gosh don't nobody let slip nothin' 'bout Scott, okay, I jus' been letting 'em think the glasses is because he thinks he's way too cool for everyone." His internal Caution Levels are making vague quiet adjustments at Kitty's admonishment and just as quickly adjusting them back at that light trill. "''Boy'' don't even joke." His ''bap'' is light, his ''tone'' is light, his thoughts -- well. He's doing a quick but thorough assessment of his layers of bright-illusory makeup, the touchups to the scars that warp his tattoos, leaning ''in'' to the parts of him better practiced at psionic shielding and plain Not ADHD Mental Discipline. Looping that playful violin trill until it sinks ''in'', looping his ''arm'' through Kitty's. Leaning into Ryan's and smiling. ''Bright''. "Y'all. Thanks for coming," and here it's not forced, not illusion, just a warm gratitude in the words. "Sure did brighten my day."<br />
<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Jax&diff=24893Jax2023-05-19T20:48:20Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| width="100%"<br />
| colspan="2" | <center><br />
{|<br />
| style="text-align:center;" | '''''Don't blame me if I'm smiling when it all comes crashing down.'''''<br /><br />
|}<br />
</center><br />
|-<br />
| width="100%" |<br />
{| width="100%"<br />
! Introduction <br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}One god, no masters.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Description<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Thick straight hair, often dyed brilliantly unnatural colours, falls shaggy-floppy to frame graceful features: eyebrows arch dark against extraordinarily pale skin, lips full, cheekbones set high, thick dark lashes around one startlingly vivid blue eye; there is a sunken empty socket where the other should be, though this is often hidden beneath eyepatches in a variety of colours, or mirrored dark glasses. Clean-shaven, his face also sports a wealth of metal, a generous number of piercings over most places that can hold them. Much of his skin neck-down plays host to tattoos in bright colours. His right hand has four fingers, only scar tissue remaining where the pinky should be. He stands average height at just a hair shy of 5'10", with a trim swimmer's body; lithe, lean musculature is carried with a dancer's easy grace.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Reputation<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Widely known around the country by name and often face to anyone who follows the news even a little bit, following his very publicized arrest and terrorism charges after news broke of the Prometheus Project, a research program that has been experimenting on mutants for many years -- Jackson was accused of terrorism for leading a team that for over a decade has been working to attack and break in to these facilities and free the mutants inside them. Jax did not deny any of the charges but claimed only that the facilities were a gross violation of human rights, that his team never killed a single person in the course of their actions, and that freeing the prisoners inside from nonconsensual experimentation was a necessary moral duty. The subsequent campaign to release him from jail and drop his charges was a deeply politicized and highly visible nationwide topic.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Around Xavier's, known for being obnoxiously COLOURFUL, obnoxiously cheerful, and a constantly reliable source of delicious desserts. Art teacher/baking teacher/sex ed teacher at XS. Known to be highly averse to giving homework, but with high expectations of Not Slacking Off in his actual classroom. Is a bit of a wildcard in terms of faculty/administrative relations; he's an unswervingly polite presence on the faculty but his outspoken anarchism (including frequent run-ins with the law and ''highly'' notorious terrorism charges), and his fiercely anti-assimilation views cause a bit of a headache for the administration and other faculty who maaaay not always be his biggest fan. Additionally his sex ed class earns more complaints from parents than probably any other class in the course catalog -- though this may have as much to do with Xavier's appointing their first openly queer teacher to teach a very radical sex ed curriculum as it does with any ''geniune'' problems with his teaching. No end of stirred feathers among the administration on his behalf means that he has often rocky relations with other teachers and admin as a ''coworker'', no matter how much they might (or might not) like him as an individual.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Among mutants coming out of Prometheus, known for helping organize the team that keeps breaking people out of the labs (and subsequently finding people medical care, shelter, etc.) Practically a mythical figure among who have been in the labs in the past years as the raid team's reputation has grown, and with it no end of stories about the more prominent figures among them; among the rescuees out in the world generally known to be a patient ear to listen and a source of constant food.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}An active and familiar face among far-left activists in general (the anarchist community isn't that big); the kind to turn up with food or offer childcare at meetings, a longterm member of New York City Action Medical and frequent face medicking at protests.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}He also not-infrequently shows up in celebrity gossip pages -- even before his notoriety he had been ''well'' as the be the BFF/partner-in-crime of his ''extremely'' famous BFF, queer mutant celebrity [[Ryan|Ryan Black]]. Plenty of gossip pages frequently try to romantically link them (they're both queer! Obv they must have dated!), a phenomenon that only got more salacious ever since Jax began dating [[Steve|Captain America]] -- Ryan's ex.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! History<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Born the only child to farming parents in a tiny town nestled in at the base of Appalachia, Jax's early life was a pleasant enough one. Sheltered, for sure, a combination of living in a tiny backwater Georgia town and growing up with very conservative parents who were rather overprotective of their only child. Devout Catholics, they passed their faith on to him from early on. His life was simple, but full. Church, school, learning how to take care of the farm, these were foundations; on top of which there was swim team, dance lessons, and above all art, for which he showed a great aptitude from an early age.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Though in classes he tended to do reasonably well, out of classes things were harder; being a somewhat flamboyant boy in a highly conservative town did not go over well, and even less so once his mutation manifested. It was a blessing the day that a Xavier's representative found him and brought him to New York to be able to continue his schooling normally. In the new environment he thrived, once he got over homesickness, learning to control his powers and applying himself to practice with the same diligence he gave the rest of his schoolwork. <br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Though always politically bent and heavily involved in activism (focused around environmental justice and animal rights, largely) it was his abduction by Prometheus that focused this activism in more ''aggressive'' ways. In the wake of his rescue from there, he and some of the other rescuees have attempted hunting down other similar facilities and liberating their occupants. <br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Outside of being a vigilante he keeps busy. Between work -- part-time as a tattoo artist and body piercer, part-time as a teacher at Xavier's; between life as an X-Man and the various activist groups he's involved in, he doesn't find much time for sleep. Single fatherhood doesn't help with that either; he's raised a [[B|pair]] of [[Shane|twins]] and a [[Spencer|younger son]] rescued from Prometheus and subsequently adopted.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Powers<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Photokinetic. Eats light, turns it into art. Has a small star burning inside him; would rather nobody find out what that might really mean.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Art Crime!<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
Together with [[Tag]], Jax has been painting a series of intricate murals around the city, focusing on New York's mutant community -- their lives, their deaths, their joys and their struggles.<br />
<br />
*'''August 2020''' -- Manhattan, Corner of Duane & Hudson, formerly [[Happy Cakes Bakery]], TriBeCa; the site where seven years ago a young mutant was [[ArchivedLogs:Shadow Puppets|killed]] by a police officer. The entire mural is enclosed in an immense scroll that contains mountains (low, familiar upstate mountains) in the background and a wooded riverbend in the foreground where a freckle-faced sandy-haired young man is sitting in a bed of moss with a a quill in his hand, its nib dipped in glimmering white ink. Alanna is draped across his shoulders like a living stole, and he's smiling up at the inscription across the sky in wisps of glimmering high cloud that reads "Roll for initiative, party mine!"<br />
*'''October 2020''' -- Manhattan, 6th St. Between A & B, several stories up on a brick face across from the Creative Little Garden. A [[Dawson|dark-haired young man with twisting scars down his face and a prosthetic arm intricately painted in a lifelike birdfeather pattern, beige with black speckles and a bright flash of yellow feathering on the underside.]] The man has kneeling, halfway through the process of constructing a beehive box, glancing up with a delighted expression as a northern flicker crosses the sky overhead, a flash of yellow bright underwing. There's a handful of honeybees, dotting a winding path from background to foreground, tracing a visual line from the bird to where the man is kneeling.<br />
*'''April, 2021''' -- Brooklyn, 46th & 5th, across the wall of a daycare. A small sailboat out on a rough sea; [[Leo|Leonid Concepcion]] is very recognizable where he sits within it, head slightly bowed to clasped hands and a jade rosary held loose between his fingers.<br />
*'''June, 2021''' -- Manhattan, Suffolk St, between Grand & Broome, on the side of a taqueria just across from Evolve Cafe. [[Taylor|Evolve's many (many!) armed barista]] leaning across the counter to hand a slice of pie to a customer, several tentacles still at work making drinks behind him<br />
*'''July, 2021''' -- The Bronx, Alexander Ave & 138th, the wall of an apartment building opposite the 40th Precinct. A middle-aged Latina woman with large black-feathered wings sits perched on the back of a park bench beside a younger Latina girl, both looking up towards the clouds; the older woman is pointing up, one of the fluffy clouds above shaped almost like an orchid overhead.<br />
*'''September, 2021''' -- Brooklyn, Van Siclen Ave, along the wall of a food bank across from Henrix Creek Park. A [[Ion|man with broad grin and Mutant Mongrels cut]], distributing school supplies out of the large saddlebags of a black and silver chopper to a cluster of waiting children and parents.<br />
*'''October, 2021''' -- The Bronx, Independece Ave & W 246th St, a large wall just outside a farmer's market opposite the boundary between Freaktown and Not Freaktown. [[Dusk|A man with large dark bat wings and a sharply fanged smile, haloed in soft multicolored light by a backdrop of erratically strung fairy lights. He is standing at the edge of a small cluster of people who have not been drawn in detail, turned to a smaller woman with yellow-green scales along her skin. She is watching him intently, his hands raised -- those versed in American Sign Language might recognize the shape and direction of his current handshape: ''revolution''.<br />
<br />
|-<br />
! Body Mods<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Jackson has become much more colourful over the years; in addition to the vividly coloured hair he sports three seasons out of the year, he has a WEALTH of piercings and tattoos. The current complete list:<br />
<br />
'''Piercings''' -- Ears (earlobes 0g, 8 up the side of the left ear, 9 on the right; industrials, tragus, daith, rook), eyebrows (3 right, 4 left), teardrop (right). Lip (5 in his lower lip). Labret. Both nipples (twice), tongue (twice), left nostril (twice, one stud, one ring), right nostril (stud), septum, bridge.<br />
<br />
'''Ink''':<br />
<br />
*Back:<br />
**Most of his back is taken up by a large geometric design resembling the panels of a stained glass window. Most of it is empty, only black and white lines. There are a few panels filled in in full color and detail, though their imagery is eclectic: a hamsa; a pair of knitting kneedles stuck into a ball of rainbow yarn; a red umbrella; a small black cat; a bright-eyed jumping spider; a star of life with a raised fist replacing the center staff; a writing quill that trails a wisp of smoke from its nib; a northern flicker in flight, the flash of color underneath its wings a pink-purple-blue ombre.<br />
**Two stars, the right one a little bigger and brighter, at the base of his neck.<br />
*Front: <br />
**Over his heart: A dove in flight, olive branch in its beak, ringed by an excerpt of the words to the prayer of St. Francis in a spiral of small black print ("Make me an instrument of Your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy. Master, grant that I may never seek so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love with all my soul.")<br />
**Most of the rest of his chest+the majority of his right side: A large peach tree climbs up his right side, the branches taking up most of the leftover room on his chest; it has both fruit and flowers at once, and there's a small fairy (an elfin humanoid male, with blue hair and large red-and-black butterfly wings) perched on one of the lower limbs.<br />
**Left shoulder: A dragonfly, bright-bright blue with veined very slightly multicoloured wings.<br />
**Right shoulder: The ''Neverending Story'''s AURYN.<br />
*Skull: A chimaera. Large bat-wings, black panther body, heads of a goat, a dragon, a raven, a segmented scorpion's tail. Obviously, can only be seen if his head is shaved.<br />
*Arms:<br />
**Right elbow: Two bicoloured stars, red/black (front) and purple/black (back)<br />
**Left elbow: Two bicoloured stars, green/black (front) and pink/black (back) on the left<br />
**Left elbow: Just above the star on the front there is a simple black line segment, one inch long.<br />
**Right inner wrist: A rainbow-colored cross with a circled-A superimposed over it, the letter circled with a crown of thorns<br />
**Left inner wrist: A raised fist in a circle, clutching a carrot.<br />
**Forearms: Paintbrushes on the right side and charcoal drawing pencils on the left, drawn to look like they are worming their way in and out of the skin.<br />
**Right half-sleeve (shoulder to elbow): A lot of medicinal herbs.<br />
**Left half-sleeve (shoulder to elbow): Fruits and veggies! Lots of them.<br />
*Legs:<br />
**Right half-sleeve (knee to ankle): Illustrations from The Lorax<br />
**Left half-sleeve (knee to ankle): CARE BEARS. But only the original characters. Also a large rainbow. For the Care Bears to slide on. And puffy clouds.<br />
|-<br />
! Connections<br />
|-<br />
| <br />
<br />
'''Standbys'''<br />
<br />
* [[B]] - Tomato-pesto galette. Most people think sweet when they think of pies, but you'll fall in love with the complex flavors in this one.<br />
* [[Daiki]] - Sweet potato bun. Understated, rich with flavor, will carry any meal and then some.<br />
* [[Dawson]] - Mexican hot chocolate snickerdoodles. You think you know and love this one already but the burst of spice surprises and delights every time.<br />
* [[Dusk]] - Rum raisin bread pudding. Sweet, creamy, just a bit decadent; a delight on your tongue and a warm comfort to cosy up with when the days get rough.<br />
* [[Hive]] - Raspberry tiramisu cupcakes. A bitterness here that might not be to everyone's tastes, but I revist this one again and again.<br />
* [[Ion]] - Citrus glitter cookies. Bright, refreshing; you'll fall in love with this burst of zest.<br />
* [[Kyinha]] - Smoked tahini and dark chocolate chunk cookies. Well worth a second glance to appreciate the rich layers and smokey-sweet goodness of these ones.<br />
* [[Kitty]] - Peach-Basil Pie. One of the first I learned and still one of my favourites; that touch of fresh herb really makes it something magical. <br />
* [[Lucien]] - Earl Grey cassis macarons. An elegant burst of perfection; well worth the challenge of learning to tackle this batter!<br />
* [[Matt]] - Sponge cake with orange blossom curd filling. Don't be fooled by the Twinkie-knockoff appearance; there's a brightness at the center here that you'll want to savor.<br />
* [[Peter]] - Triple chocolate chip cookies. Something almost overwhelming about the sweetness here but it works all the same.<br />
* [[Ryan]] - Peach bourbon beignets. You don't have to be Southern for this to be a comfort, but for me it's always gonna taste like home.<br />
* [[Shane]] - Roasted strawberry thyme shortcake. Homey and sophisticated all at once.<br />
* [[Spencer]] - Strawberry-ginger-rhubarb pie. A lot of zing here, and the patience it takes to get a lattice crust set careful is rewarding work. <br />
* [[Steve]] - Chai spiced apple pie. Bit of zing in this old classic makes it comforting and fresh all at once.<br />
* [[Tag]] - Mango passion fruit custard tart. An absolutely perfect pop of sweetness to bring summer into your life anytime.<br />
* [[Tian-shin]] - Apple chamomile tea cake. A little sweet, a little tart, takes a tried-and-true home remedy and spins it into a wonderful pick me up.<br />
<br />
'''Sometimes Food'''<br />
* [[Alma]] - Marionberry lavender scones. Elegant and sensible at once; I've pulled these out several times when I need a little something unexpected to round out a brunch.<br />
* [[Avi]] - Funfetti cake. This one's a crowd pleaser but whew! Love it, but even my huge sweet tooth needs small servings here. <br />
* [[Erik]] - Peanut butter brownies. Probably get sick if you ate these every day but it's one you should learn early if you're gonna learn anything about baking. Against popular wisdom, still tastes as good now as when I was little. <br />
* [[Gaétan]] - Blueberry mint tartlets. I'm not usually one for mint but my kid loves it and it's really grown on me. I know chocolate's usually the go-to for desserts but I feel like mixing it up some gives it a better chance to shine.<br />
* [[Isra]] - Halva brownies. Don't overlook these; the depth of flavor here is out of this world.<br />
* [[Joshua]] - Pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. I always forget how much I love these until they're in season.<br />
* [[Lael]] - Pumpkin cornbread. Folks might think it's simple but it's anything but. Rich and textured, solid enough to hold its own place in a meal.<br />
* [[Leo]] - Chocolate babka. Always a little unsure if I'm making this right and make a whole entire mess in the process, but gosh is it a treat once I get there. <br />
* [[Melinda]] - Espresso chip muffins. Steady and reliable doesn't have to mean boring; the pop of sweet chocolate and sharp coffee will kick your day into gear.<br />
* [[Marinov]] - Fig, chocolate and almond financiers. Sounds like a lot but these blend it all with flair.<br />
* [[Naomi]] - Zucchini banana cupcake. I know what everyone says soon as you say ''zucchini'' in dessert but trust me on this one. Sweet but not too cloying, got a surprising depth of flavor -- give it a chance and you'll see!<br />
* [[Rasa]] - Coconut lime lavender cupcakes. It's a bit of a jumble, but it might surprise you.<br />
* [[Rasheed]] - Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. A classic; delicious and filling, I can almost pretend they're a meal.<br />
* [[Taylor]] - Pumpkin pecan pie. If you can't choose between two good things, why not both! Sure to be a hit year round.<br />
<br />
'''Needs Adaptation'''<br />
* [[Charles]] - Peanut butter blondies. So close to being satisfying but it always feels like something's missing.<br />
* [[DJ]] - Roasted maple-walnut napoleon. The flavors are familiar but it's been a frustrating challengs getting all those layers right. Gonna have to keep working before I can get these down, but I know they'll be worth it.<br />
* [[Harm]] - White chocolate speculoos merveilleux. Still trying to figure this one out.<br />
* [[Kieow]] - Pineapple cream cheese bundt cake. A little cloying on the sweetness; doesn't play well with my allergies.<br />
* [[Lily]] - Ginger-orange anisette cake. ''Definitely'' not the liqueur for me, but this could be fantastic if I find the right combination. <br />
* [[Marrow]] - Pine nut honey anise pie. A very distinctive combination but not sure I want to revisit it.<br />
* [[Nanami]] - Brown sugar buttermilk spice tart. A bit sweet and a bit sour; gotta keep working on how this fits into my repertoire.<br />
* [[Sarah]] - Strawberry cheesecake. Widespread appeal, but not to my tastes.<br />
<br />
'''Inedible'''<br />
* [[Eric]] - I don't do pig.<br />
* [[Fury]] - Brown sugar glazed ham. Look, you can dress it up, but I still don't...<br />
* [[Malthus]] - ...doubly not when it's gone spoiled.<br />
<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Trivia<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
*Maintains several blogs with varying levels of activity; one focused on sex & relationship education, one focused on teaching & parenting from a non-authoritarian perspective; one focused on mutant-related issues, and one more personal art blog. Used to have an animal rights one but that hasn't been updated regularly in years.<br />
**Also totally keeps a tumblr though this, like many tumblrs, is unfocused and just full of Whatever On Earth He Feels Like. Pretty pictures. Cute puppies. Religious musings. Random banter with his friends. Cooking tips. Whatever is on his mind. Totally also a sprinkling of things found in all four of the above, but in a far less organized fashion.<br />
*Much like half of his friends, his one-eyed beagle was ''also'' an ex-labrat; some of his animal lib friends nabbed Obie in a raid on an animal testing lab back in his college days. He had been fostering all the beagles that came out of the raid but for perhaps obvious reasons got extra attached to that one and never rehomed him.<br />
*His advisor in high school was Scott Summers which led to no ''end'' of Cyclops jokes when he returned from Prometheus.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Gallery<br />
|-<br />
| style="text-align:center;" |<br />
[[Image:Jax1.jpg|x150px]]<br />
[[Image:Jaxorchid.jpg|x150px]]<br />
|}<br />
|<br />
{|<br />
! Jackson Connor Holland<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{| width="100%" class="infobox" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #000"<br />
| colspan="2" | [[Image:Jax.jpg|x300px|center]]<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Codename'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Sunshine<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Birthdate'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| June 21, 1992<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Species'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Mutant<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Affiliation'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Xavier's<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Alignment'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Effervescent<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Powers'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Photokinetic<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Occupation'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Anarchist<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Registration Status'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Unregistered<br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
{| width="100%" class="infobox" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #000" <br />
! style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" | RP Hooks<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Sugarfairy''' - ''Tends to bake and bake and BAKE. When class is in session, his desserts can be found almost daily in the XS rec room and Teachers' Lounge. His neighbors are frequently plied with desserts, too.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Needlepoint''' - ''Will prick you with so many needles. Inks people and does body piercing at Inkline, a studio in the Lower East Side.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Artsy''' - ''Paints, draws, graffitis. Started an art collective in Brooklyn. ''Looks'' like an artist, too. Often lurks the city at night Arting illicitly. Whether you want art lessons or want to do some art crimes (... or want lessons in doing art crimes!) he might be a good person to hook up with.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Radical''' - ''Anarchist, activist, he's been a vocal and active presence in leftist community for years, whether organizing rallies or teaching workshops or out in the streets during actions as a medic; anyone in anarchist/communist/general leftist community is likely to run into him at Some Point.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''X-Man''' - ''The COLOURFULLEST X-Man. His uniform's bedazzled with a smiling sun. Students at the school probably know the not-so-secret school superheroes; outside the school if you need a rescue or are the kind of person someone might need rescuing ''from'', maybe Your Local Mutant Vigilantes will drop by.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''THAT teacher''' - ''Teaches at XS -- art, baking, and also one of the mandatory Sex Ed classes. Plenty of his students adore him, plenty think he's a total weirdo who should probably be Less Queer, plenty think he is either the most badass or most disturbing teacher at the school since his terrorism arrest. Regardless, he's ''probably'' the teacher students have The Most Opinions about.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Prometheus Bound''' - ''Once a labrat himself, now he spends a good deal of energy trying to find others and free them. On very public record in the news as an ex-labrat and liberator of other labrats. Freedom fighter or terrorist, it is pretty likely folks have some thoughts about him before ever meeting him.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Saw you at Mount Sinai''' - ''Ex-Catholic, been in the process of converting to Judaism for some years, to the chagrin of some in the local Jewish community and the warm welcome of others. Likely to see you around if you spend time in Jewish circles, especially more radical ones.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''May I Have This Dance?''' - ''When there's time, enjoys social swing & ballroom dance. Whether you're just learning or an experienced dancer, he'd probably love a spin around the floor.''<br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
! colspan="2" | Logs<br />
|-<br />
| colspan="2" | {{RP Logs | name = Jackson{{!}}Jax | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Archived Logs'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
{{ RP Logs | name = {{BASEPAGENAME}} | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate | namespace = ArchivedLogs }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
[[Category:Active PCs]][[Category:Xavier's School]][[Category:Mutants]][[Category:X-Men]][[Category:Mendel Clinic]][[Category:Prometheus]]</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Jax&diff=24887Jax2023-05-19T04:23:20Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| width="100%"<br />
| colspan="2" | <center><br />
{|<br />
| style="text-align:center;" | '''''Don't blame me if I'm smiling when it all comes crashing down.'''''<br /><br />
|}<br />
</center><br />
|-<br />
| width="100%" |<br />
{| width="100%"<br />
! Introduction <br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}One god, no masters.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Description<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Thick straight hair, often dyed brilliantly unnatural colours, falls shaggy-floppy to frame graceful features: eyebrows arch dark against extraordinarily pale skin, lips full, cheekbones set high, thick dark lashes around one startlingly vivid blue eye; there is a sunken empty socket where the other should be, though this is often hidden beneath eyepatches in a variety of colours, or mirrored dark glasses. Clean-shaven, his face also sports a wealth of metal, a generous number of piercings over most places that can hold them. Much of his skin neck-down plays host to tattoos in bright colours. His right hand has four fingers, only scar tissue remaining where the pinky should be. He stands average height at just a hair shy of 5'10", with a trim swimmer's body; lithe, lean musculature is carried with a dancer's easy grace.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Reputation<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Widely known around the country by name and often face to anyone who follows the news even a little bit, following his very publicized arrest and terrorism charges after news broke of the Prometheus Project, a research program that has been experimenting on mutants for many years -- Jackson was accused of terrorism for leading a team that for over a decade has been working to attack and break in to these facilities and free the mutants inside them. Jax did not deny any of the charges but claimed only that the facilities were a gross violation of human rights, that his team never killed a single person in the course of their actions, and that freeing the prisoners inside from nonconsensual experimentation was a necessary moral duty. The subsequent campaign to release him from jail and drop his charges was a deeply politicized and highly visible nationwide topic.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Around Xavier's, known for being obnoxiously COLOURFUL, obnoxiously cheerful, and a constantly reliable source of delicious desserts. Art teacher/baking teacher/sex ed teacher at XS. Known to be highly averse to giving homework, but with high expectations of Not Slacking Off in his actual classroom. Is a bit of a wildcard in terms of faculty/administrative relations; he's an unswervingly polite presence on the faculty but his outspoken anarchism (including frequent run-ins with the law and ''highly'' notorious terrorism charges), and his fiercely anti-assimilation views cause a bit of a headache for the administration and other faculty who maaaay not always be his biggest fan. Additionally his sex ed class earns more complaints from parents than probably any other class in the course catalog -- though this may have as much to do with Xavier's appointing their first openly queer teacher to teach a very radical sex ed curriculum as it does with any ''geniune'' problems with his teaching. No end of stirred feathers among the administration on his behalf means that he has often rocky relations with other teachers and admin as a ''coworker'', no matter how much they might (or might not) like him as an individual.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Among mutants coming out of Prometheus, known for helping organize the team that keeps breaking people out of the labs (and subsequently finding people medical care, shelter, etc.) Practically a mythical figure among who have been in the labs in the past years as the raid team's reputation has grown, and with it no end of stories about the more prominent figures among them; among the rescuees out in the world generally known to be a patient ear to listen and a source of constant food.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}An active and familiar face among far-left activists in general (the anarchist community isn't that big); the kind to turn up with food or offer childcare at meetings, a longterm member of New York City Action Medical and frequent face medicking at protests.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}He also not-infrequently shows up in celebrity gossip pages -- even before his notoriety he had been ''well'' as the be the BFF/partner-in-crime of his ''extremely'' famous BFF, queer mutant celebrity [[Ryan|Ryan Black]]. Plenty of gossip pages frequently try to romantically link them (they're both queer! Obv they must have dated!), a phenomenon that only got more salacious ever since Jax began dating [[Steve|Captain America]] -- Ryan's ex.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! History<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Born the only child to farming parents in a tiny town nestled in at the base of Appalachia, Jax's early life was a pleasant enough one. Sheltered, for sure, a combination of living in a tiny backwater Georgia town and growing up with very conservative parents who were rather overprotective of their only child. Devout Catholics, they passed their faith on to him from early on. His life was simple, but full. Church, school, learning how to take care of the farm, these were foundations; on top of which there was swim team, dance lessons, and above all art, for which he showed a great aptitude from an early age.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Though in classes he tended to do reasonably well, out of classes things were harder; being a somewhat flamboyant boy in a highly conservative town did not go over well, and even less so once his mutation manifested. It was a blessing the day that a Xavier's representative found him and brought him to New York to be able to continue his schooling normally. In the new environment he thrived, once he got over homesickness, learning to control his powers and applying himself to practice with the same diligence he gave the rest of his schoolwork. <br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Though always politically bent and heavily involved in activism (focused around environmental justice and animal rights, largely) it was his abduction by Prometheus that focused this activism in more ''aggressive'' ways. In the wake of his rescue from there, he and some of the other rescuees have attempted hunting down other similar facilities and liberating their occupants. <br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Outside of being a vigilante he keeps busy. Between work -- part-time as a tattoo artist and body piercer, part-time as a teacher at Xavier's; between life as an X-Man and the various activist groups he's involved in, he doesn't find much time for sleep. Single fatherhood doesn't help with that either; he's raised a [[B|pair]] of [[Shane|twins]] and a [[Spencer|younger son]] rescued from Prometheus and subsequently adopted.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Powers<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Photokinetic. Eats light, turns it into art. Has a small star burning inside him; would rather nobody find out what that might really mean.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Art Crime!<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
Together with [[Tag]], Jax has been painting a series of intricate murals around the city, focusing on New York's mutant community -- their lives, their deaths, their joys and their struggles.<br />
<br />
*'''August 2020''' -- Manhattan, Corner of Duane & Hudson, formerly [[Happy Cakes Bakery]], TriBeCa; the site where seven years ago a young mutant was [[ArchivedLogs:Shadow Puppets|killed]] by a police officer. The entire mural is enclosed in an immense scroll that contains mountains (low, familiar upstate mountains) in the background and a wooded riverbend in the foreground where a freckle-faced sandy-haired young man is sitting in a bed of moss with a a quill in his hand, its nib dipped in glimmering white ink. Alanna is draped across his shoulders like a living stole, and he's smiling up at the inscription across the sky in wisps of glimmering high cloud that reads "Roll for initiative, party mine!"<br />
*'''October 2020''' -- Manhattan, 6th St. Between A & B, several stories up on a brick face across from the Creative Little Garden. A [[Dawson|dark-haired young man with twisting scars down his face and a prosthetic arm intricately painted in a lifelike birdfeather pattern, beige with black speckles and a bright flash of yellow feathering on the underside.]] The man has kneeling, halfway through the process of constructing a beehive box, glancing up with a delighted expression as a northern flicker crosses the sky overhead, a flash of yellow bright underwing. There's a handful of honeybees, dotting a winding path from background to foreground, tracing a visual line from the bird to where the man is kneeling.<br />
*'''April, 2021''' -- Brooklyn, 46th & 5th, across the wall of a daycare. A small sailboat out on a rough sea; [[Leo|Leonid Concepcion]] is very recognizable where he sits within it, head slightly bowed to clasped hands and a jade rosary held loose between his fingers.<br />
*'''June, 2021''' -- Manhattan, Suffolk St, between Grand & Broome, on the side of a taqueria just across from Evolve Cafe. [[Taylor|Evolve's many (many!) armed barista]] leaning across the counter to hand a slice of pie to a customer, several tentacles still at work making drinks behind him<br />
*'''July, 2021''' -- The Bronx, Alexander Ave & 138th, the wall of an apartment building opposite the 40th Precinct. A middle-aged Latina woman with large black-feathered wings sits perched on the back of a park bench beside a younger Latina girl, both looking up towards the clouds; the older woman is pointing up, one of the fluffy clouds above shaped almost like an orchid overhead.<br />
*'''September, 2021''' -- Brooklyn, Van Siclen Ave, along the wall of a food bank across from Henrix Creek Park. A [[Ion|man with broad grin and Mutant Mongrels cut]], distributing school supplies out of the large saddlebags of a black and silver chopper to a cluster of waiting children and parents.<br />
*'''October, 2021''' -- The Bronx, Independece Ave & W 246th St, a large wall just outside a farmer's market opposite the boundary between Freaktown and Not Freaktown. [[Dusk|A man with large dark bat wings and a sharply fanged smile, haloed in soft multicolored light by a backdrop of erratically strung fairy lights. He is standing at the edge of a small cluster of people who have not been drawn in detail, turned to a smaller woman with yellow-green scales along her skin. She is watching him intently, his hands raised -- those versed in American Sign Language might recognize the shape and direction of his current handshape: ''revolution''.<br />
<br />
|-<br />
! Body Mods<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Jackson has become much more colourful over the years; in addition to the vividly coloured hair he sports three seasons out of the year, he has a WEALTH of piercings and tattoos. The current complete list:<br />
<br />
'''Piercings''' -- Ears (earlobes 0g, 8 up the side of the left ear, 9 on the right; industrials, tragus, daith, rook), eyebrows (3 right, 4 left), teardrop (right). Lip (5 in his lower lip). Labret. Both nipples (twice), tongue (twice), left nostril (twice, one stud, one ring), right nostril (stud), septum, bridge.<br />
<br />
'''Ink''':<br />
<br />
*Back:<br />
**Most of his back is taken up by a large geometric design resembling the panels of a stained glass window. Most of it is empty, only black and white lines. There are a few panels filled in in full color and detail, though their imagery is eclectic: a hamsa; a pair of knitting kneedles stuck into a ball of rainbow yarn; a red umbrella; a small black cat; a bright-eyed jumping spider; a star of life with a raised fist replacing the center staff; a writing quill that trails a wisp of smoke from its nib. <br />
**Two stars, the right one a little bigger and brighter, at the base of his neck.<br />
*Front: <br />
**Over his heart: A dove in flight, olive branch in its beak, ringed by an excerpt of the words to the prayer of St. Francis in a spiral of small black print ("Make me an instrument of Your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy. Master, grant that I may never seek so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love with all my soul.")<br />
**Most of the rest of his chest+the majority of his right side: A large peach tree climbs up his right side, the branches taking up most of the leftover room on his chest; it has both fruit and flowers at once, and there's a small fairy (an elfin humanoid male, with blue hair and large red-and-black butterfly wings) perched on one of the lower limbs.<br />
**Left shoulder: A dragonfly, bright-bright blue with veined very slightly multicoloured wings.<br />
**Right shoulder: The ''Neverending Story'''s AURYN.<br />
*Skull: A chimaera. Large bat-wings, black panther body, heads of a goat, a dragon, a raven, a segmented scorpion's tail. Obviously, can only be seen if his head is shaved.<br />
*Arms:<br />
**Right elbow: Two bicoloured stars, red/black (front) and purple/black (back)<br />
**Left elbow: Two bicoloured stars, green/black (front) and pink/black (back) on the left<br />
**Left elbow: Just above the star on the front there is a simple black line segment, one inch long.<br />
**Right inner wrist: A rainbow-colored cross with a circled-A superimposed over it, the letter circled with a crown of thorns<br />
**Left inner wrist: A raised fist in a circle, clutching a carrot.<br />
**Forearms: Paintbrushes on the right side and charcoal drawing pencils on the left, drawn to look like they are worming their way in and out of the skin.<br />
**Right half-sleeve (shoulder to elbow): A lot of medicinal herbs.<br />
**Left half-sleeve (shoulder to elbow): Fruits and veggies! Lots of them.<br />
*Legs:<br />
**Right half-sleeve (knee to ankle): Illustrations from The Lorax<br />
**Left half-sleeve (knee to ankle): CARE BEARS. But only the original characters. Also a large rainbow. For the Care Bears to slide on. And puffy clouds.<br />
|-<br />
! Connections<br />
|-<br />
| <br />
<br />
'''Standbys'''<br />
<br />
* [[B]] - Tomato-pesto galette. Most people think sweet when they think of pies, but you'll fall in love with the complex flavors in this one.<br />
* [[Daiki]] - Sweet potato bun. Understated, rich with flavor, will carry any meal and then some.<br />
* [[Dawson]] - Mexican hot chocolate snickerdoodles. You think you know and love this one already but the burst of spice surprises and delights every time.<br />
* [[Dusk]] - Rum raisin bread pudding. Sweet, creamy, just a bit decadent; a delight on your tongue and a warm comfort to cosy up with when the days get rough.<br />
* [[Hive]] - Raspberry tiramisu cupcakes. A bitterness here that might not be to everyone's tastes, but I revist this one again and again.<br />
* [[Ion]] - Citrus glitter cookies. Bright, refreshing; you'll fall in love with this burst of zest.<br />
* [[Kyinha]] - Smoked tahini and dark chocolate chunk cookies. Well worth a second glance to appreciate the rich layers and smokey-sweet goodness of these ones.<br />
* [[Kitty]] - Peach-Basil Pie. One of the first I learned and still one of my favourites; that touch of fresh herb really makes it something magical. <br />
* [[Lucien]] - Earl Grey cassis macarons. An elegant burst of perfection; well worth the challenge of learning to tackle this batter!<br />
* [[Matt]] - Sponge cake with orange blossom curd filling. Don't be fooled by the Twinkie-knockoff appearance; there's a brightness at the center here that you'll want to savor.<br />
* [[Peter]] - Triple chocolate chip cookies. Something almost overwhelming about the sweetness here but it works all the same.<br />
* [[Ryan]] - Peach bourbon beignets. You don't have to be Southern for this to be a comfort, but for me it's always gonna taste like home.<br />
* [[Shane]] - Roasted strawberry thyme shortcake. Homey and sophisticated all at once.<br />
* [[Spencer]] - Strawberry-ginger-rhubarb pie. A lot of zing here, and the patience it takes to get a lattice crust set careful is rewarding work. <br />
* [[Steve]] - Chai spiced apple pie. Bit of zing in this old classic makes it comforting and fresh all at once.<br />
* [[Tag]] - Mango passion fruit custard tart. An absolutely perfect pop of sweetness to bring summer into your life anytime.<br />
* [[Tian-shin]] - Apple chamomile tea cake. A little sweet, a little tart, takes a tried-and-true home remedy and spins it into a wonderful pick me up.<br />
<br />
'''Sometimes Food'''<br />
* [[Alma]] - Marionberry lavender scones. Elegant and sensible at once; I've pulled these out several times when I need a little something unexpected to round out a brunch.<br />
* [[Avi]] - Funfetti cake. This one's a crowd pleaser but whew! Love it, but even my huge sweet tooth needs small servings here. <br />
* [[Erik]] - Peanut butter brownies. Probably get sick if you ate these every day but it's one you should learn early if you're gonna learn anything about baking. Against popular wisdom, still tastes as good now as when I was little. <br />
* [[Gaétan]] - Blueberry mint tartlets. I'm not usually one for mint but my kid loves it and it's really grown on me. I know chocolate's usually the go-to for desserts but I feel like mixing it up some gives it a better chance to shine.<br />
* [[Isra]] - Halva brownies. Don't overlook these; the depth of flavor here is out of this world.<br />
* [[Joshua]] - Pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. I always forget how much I love these until they're in season.<br />
* [[Lael]] - Pumpkin cornbread. Folks might think it's simple but it's anything but. Rich and textured, solid enough to hold its own place in a meal.<br />
* [[Leo]] - Chocolate babka. Always a little unsure if I'm making this right and make a whole entire mess in the process, but gosh is it a treat once I get there. <br />
* [[Melinda]] - Espresso chip muffins. Steady and reliable doesn't have to mean boring; the pop of sweet chocolate and sharp coffee will kick your day into gear.<br />
* [[Marinov]] - Fig, chocolate and almond financiers. Sounds like a lot but these blend it all with flair.<br />
* [[Naomi]] - Zucchini banana cupcake. I know what everyone says soon as you say ''zucchini'' in dessert but trust me on this one. Sweet but not too cloying, got a surprising depth of flavor -- give it a chance and you'll see!<br />
* [[Rasa]] - Coconut lime lavender cupcakes. It's a bit of a jumble, but it might surprise you.<br />
* [[Rasheed]] - Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. A classic; delicious and filling, I can almost pretend they're a meal.<br />
* [[Taylor]] - Pumpkin pecan pie. If you can't choose between two good things, why not both! Sure to be a hit year round.<br />
<br />
'''Needs Adaptation'''<br />
* [[Charles]] - Peanut butter blondies. So close to being satisfying but it always feels like something's missing.<br />
* [[DJ]] - Roasted maple-walnut napoleon. The flavors are familiar but it's been a frustrating challengs getting all those layers right. Gonna have to keep working before I can get these down, but I know they'll be worth it.<br />
* [[Harm]] - White chocolate speculoos merveilleux. Still trying to figure this one out.<br />
* [[Kieow]] - Pineapple cream cheese bundt cake. A little cloying on the sweetness; doesn't play well with my allergies.<br />
* [[Lily]] - Ginger-orange anisette cake. ''Definitely'' not the liqueur for me, but this could be fantastic if I find the right combination. <br />
* [[Marrow]] - Pine nut honey anise pie. A very distinctive combination but not sure I want to revisit it.<br />
* [[Nanami]] - Brown sugar buttermilk spice tart. A bit sweet and a bit sour; gotta keep working on how this fits into my repertoire.<br />
* [[Sarah]] - Strawberry cheesecake. Widespread appeal, but not to my tastes.<br />
<br />
'''Inedible'''<br />
* [[Eric]] - I don't do pig.<br />
* [[Fury]] - Brown sugar glazed ham. Look, you can dress it up, but I still don't...<br />
* [[Malthus]] - ...doubly not when it's gone spoiled.<br />
<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Trivia<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
*Maintains several blogs with varying levels of activity; one focused on sex & relationship education, one focused on teaching & parenting from a non-authoritarian perspective; one focused on mutant-related issues, and one more personal art blog. Used to have an animal rights one but that hasn't been updated regularly in years.<br />
**Also totally keeps a tumblr though this, like many tumblrs, is unfocused and just full of Whatever On Earth He Feels Like. Pretty pictures. Cute puppies. Religious musings. Random banter with his friends. Cooking tips. Whatever is on his mind. Totally also a sprinkling of things found in all four of the above, but in a far less organized fashion.<br />
*Much like half of his friends, his one-eyed beagle was ''also'' an ex-labrat; some of his animal lib friends nabbed Obie in a raid on an animal testing lab back in his college days. He had been fostering all the beagles that came out of the raid but for perhaps obvious reasons got extra attached to that one and never rehomed him.<br />
*His advisor in high school was Scott Summers which led to no ''end'' of Cyclops jokes when he returned from Prometheus.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Gallery<br />
|-<br />
| style="text-align:center;" |<br />
[[Image:Jax1.jpg|x150px]]<br />
[[Image:Jaxorchid.jpg|x150px]]<br />
|}<br />
|<br />
{|<br />
! Jackson Connor Holland<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{| width="100%" class="infobox" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #000"<br />
| colspan="2" | [[Image:Jax.jpg|x300px|center]]<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Codename'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Sunshine<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Birthdate'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| June 21, 1992<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Species'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Mutant<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Affiliation'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Xavier's<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Alignment'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Effervescent<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Powers'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Photokinetic<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Occupation'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Anarchist<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Registration Status'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Unregistered<br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
{| width="100%" class="infobox" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #000" <br />
! style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" | RP Hooks<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Sugarfairy''' - ''Tends to bake and bake and BAKE. When class is in session, his desserts can be found almost daily in the XS rec room and Teachers' Lounge. His neighbors are frequently plied with desserts, too.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Needlepoint''' - ''Will prick you with so many needles. Inks people and does body piercing at Inkline, a studio in the Lower East Side.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Artsy''' - ''Paints, draws, graffitis. Started an art collective in Brooklyn. ''Looks'' like an artist, too. Often lurks the city at night Arting illicitly. Whether you want art lessons or want to do some art crimes (... or want lessons in doing art crimes!) he might be a good person to hook up with.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Radical''' - ''Anarchist, activist, he's been a vocal and active presence in leftist community for years, whether organizing rallies or teaching workshops or out in the streets during actions as a medic; anyone in anarchist/communist/general leftist community is likely to run into him at Some Point.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''X-Man''' - ''The COLOURFULLEST X-Man. His uniform's bedazzled with a smiling sun. Students at the school probably know the not-so-secret school superheroes; outside the school if you need a rescue or are the kind of person someone might need rescuing ''from'', maybe Your Local Mutant Vigilantes will drop by.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''THAT teacher''' - ''Teaches at XS -- art, baking, and also one of the mandatory Sex Ed classes. Plenty of his students adore him, plenty think he's a total weirdo who should probably be Less Queer, plenty think he is either the most badass or most disturbing teacher at the school since his terrorism arrest. Regardless, he's ''probably'' the teacher students have The Most Opinions about.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Prometheus Bound''' - ''Once a labrat himself, now he spends a good deal of energy trying to find others and free them. On very public record in the news as an ex-labrat and liberator of other labrats. Freedom fighter or terrorist, it is pretty likely folks have some thoughts about him before ever meeting him.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Saw you at Mount Sinai''' - ''Ex-Catholic, been in the process of converting to Judaism for some years, to the chagrin of some in the local Jewish community and the warm welcome of others. Likely to see you around if you spend time in Jewish circles, especially more radical ones.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''May I Have This Dance?''' - ''When there's time, enjoys social swing & ballroom dance. Whether you're just learning or an experienced dancer, he'd probably love a spin around the floor.''<br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
! colspan="2" | Logs<br />
|-<br />
| colspan="2" | {{RP Logs | name = Jackson{{!}}Jax | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Archived Logs'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
{{ RP Logs | name = {{BASEPAGENAME}} | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate | namespace = ArchivedLogs }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
[[Category:Active PCs]][[Category:Xavier's School]][[Category:Mutants]][[Category:X-Men]][[Category:Mendel Clinic]][[Category:Prometheus]]</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Jax&diff=24857Jax2023-05-18T22:06:47Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| width="100%"<br />
| colspan="2" | <center><br />
{|<br />
| style="text-align:center;" | '''''Don't blame me if I'm smiling when it all comes crashing down.'''''<br /><br />
|}<br />
</center><br />
|-<br />
| width="100%" |<br />
{| width="100%"<br />
! Introduction <br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}One god, no masters.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Description<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Thick straight hair, often dyed brilliantly unnatural colours, falls shaggy-floppy to frame graceful features: eyebrows arch dark against extraordinarily pale skin, lips full, cheekbones set high, thick dark lashes around one startlingly vivid blue eye; there is a sunken empty socket where the other should be, though this is often hidden beneath eyepatches in a variety of colours, or mirrored dark glasses. Clean-shaven, his face also sports a wealth of metal, a generous number of piercings over most places that can hold them. Much of his skin neck-down plays host to tattoos in bright colours. His right hand has four fingers, only scar tissue remaining where the pinky should be. He stands average height at just a hair shy of 5'10", with a trim swimmer's body; lithe, lean musculature is carried with a dancer's easy grace.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Reputation<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Widely known around the country by name and often face to anyone who follows the news even a little bit, following his very publicized arrest and terrorism charges after news broke of the Prometheus Project, a research program that has been experimenting on mutants for many years -- Jackson was accused of terrorism for leading a team that for over a decade has been working to attack and break in to these facilities and free the mutants inside them. Jax did not deny any of the charges but claimed only that the facilities were a gross violation of human rights, that his team never killed a single person in the course of their actions, and that freeing the prisoners inside from nonconsensual experimentation was a necessary moral duty. The subsequent campaign to release him from jail and drop his charges was a deeply politicized and highly visible nationwide topic.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Around Xavier's, known for being obnoxiously COLOURFUL, obnoxiously cheerful, and a constantly reliable source of delicious desserts. Art teacher/baking teacher/sex ed teacher at XS. Known to be highly averse to giving homework, but with high expectations of Not Slacking Off in his actual classroom. Is a bit of a wildcard in terms of faculty/administrative relations; he's an unswervingly polite presence on the faculty but his outspoken anarchism (including frequent run-ins with the law and ''highly'' notorious terrorism charges), and his fiercely anti-assimilation views cause a bit of a headache for the administration and other faculty who maaaay not always be his biggest fan. Additionally his sex ed class earns more complaints from parents than probably any other class in the course catalog -- though this may have as much to do with Xavier's appointing their first openly queer teacher to teach a very radical sex ed curriculum as it does with any ''geniune'' problems with his teaching. No end of stirred feathers among the administration on his behalf means that he has often rocky relations with other teachers and admin as a ''coworker'', no matter how much they might (or might not) like him as an individual.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Among mutants coming out of Prometheus, known for helping organize the team that keeps breaking people out of the labs (and subsequently finding people medical care, shelter, etc.) Practically a mythical figure among who have been in the labs in the past years as the raid team's reputation has grown, and with it no end of stories about the more prominent figures among them; among the rescuees out in the world generally known to be a patient ear to listen and a source of constant food.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}An active and familiar face among far-left activists in general (the anarchist community isn't that big); the kind to turn up with food or offer childcare at meetings, a longterm member of New York City Action Medical and frequent face medicking at protests.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}He also not-infrequently shows up in celebrity gossip pages -- even before his notoriety he had been ''well'' as the be the BFF/partner-in-crime of his ''extremely'' famous BFF, queer mutant celebrity [[Ryan|Ryan Black]]. Plenty of gossip pages frequently try to romantically link them (they're both queer! Obv they must have dated!), a phenomenon that only got more salacious ever since Jax began dating [[Steve|Captain America]] -- Ryan's ex.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! History<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Born the only child to farming parents in a tiny town nestled in at the base of Appalachia, Jax's early life was a pleasant enough one. Sheltered, for sure, a combination of living in a tiny backwater Georgia town and growing up with very conservative parents who were rather overprotective of their only child. Devout Catholics, they passed their faith on to him from early on. His life was simple, but full. Church, school, learning how to take care of the farm, these were foundations; on top of which there was swim team, dance lessons, and above all art, for which he showed a great aptitude from an early age.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Though in classes he tended to do reasonably well, out of classes things were harder; being a somewhat flamboyant boy in a highly conservative town did not go over well, and even less so once his mutation manifested. It was a blessing the day that a Xavier's representative found him and brought him to New York to be able to continue his schooling normally. In the new environment he thrived, once he got over homesickness, learning to control his powers and applying himself to practice with the same diligence he gave the rest of his schoolwork. <br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Though always politically bent and heavily involved in activism (focused around environmental justice and animal rights, largely) it was his abduction by Prometheus that focused this activism in more ''aggressive'' ways. In the wake of his rescue from there, he and some of the other rescuees have attempted hunting down other similar facilities and liberating their occupants. <br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Outside of being a vigilante he keeps busy. Between work -- part-time as a tattoo artist and body piercer, part-time as a teacher at Xavier's; between life as an X-Man and the various activist groups he's involved in, he doesn't find much time for sleep. Single fatherhood doesn't help with that either; he's raised a [[B|pair]] of [[Shane|twins]] and a [[Spencer|younger son]] rescued from Prometheus and subsequently adopted.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Powers<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Photokinetic. Eats light, turns it into art. Has a small star burning inside him; would rather nobody find out what that might really mean.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Art Crime!<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
Together with [[Tag]], Jax has been painting a series of intricate murals around the city, focusing on New York's mutant community -- their lives, their deaths, their joys and their struggles.<br />
<br />
*'''August 2020''' -- Manhattan, Corner of Duane & Hudson, formerly [[Happy Cakes Bakery]], TriBeCa; the site where seven years ago a young mutant was [[ArchivedLogs:Shadow Puppets|killed]] by a police officer. The entire mural is enclosed in an immense scroll that contains mountains (low, familiar upstate mountains) in the background and a wooded riverbend in the foreground where a freckle-faced sandy-haired young man is sitting in a bed of moss with a a quill in his hand, its nib dipped in glimmering white ink. Alanna is draped across his shoulders like a living stole, and he's smiling up at the inscription across the sky in wisps of glimmering high cloud that reads "Roll for initiative, party mine!"<br />
*'''October 2020''' -- Manhattan, 6th St. Between A & B, several stories up on a brick face across from the Creative Little Garden. A [[Dawson|dark-haired young man with twisting scars down his face and a prosthetic arm intricately painted in a lifelike birdfeather pattern, beige with black speckles and a bright flash of yellow feathering on the underside.]] The man has kneeling, halfway through the process of constructing a beehive box, glancing up with a delighted expression as a northern flicker crosses the sky overhead, a flash of yellow bright underwing. There's a handful of honeybees, dotting a winding path from background to foreground, tracing a visual line from the bird to where the man is kneeling.<br />
*'''April, 2021''' -- Brooklyn, 46th & 5th, across the wall of a daycare. A small sailboat out on a rough sea; [[Leo|Leonid Concepcion]] is very recognizable where he sits within it, head slightly bowed to clasped hands and a jade rosary held loose between his fingers.<br />
*'''June, 2021''' -- Manhattan, Suffolk St, between Grand & Broome, on the side of a taqueria just across from Evolve Cafe. [[Taylor|Evolve's many (many!) armed barista]] leaning across the counter to hand a slice of pie to a customer, several tentacles still at work making drinks behind him<br />
*'''July, 2021''' -- The Bronx, Alexander Ave & 138th, the wall of an apartment building opposite the 40th Precinct. A middle-aged Latina woman with large black-feathered wings sits perched on the back of a park bench beside a younger Latina girl, both looking up towards the clouds; the older woman is pointing up, one of the fluffy clouds above shaped almost like an orchid overhead.<br />
*'''September, 2021''' -- Brooklyn, Van Siclen Ave, along the wall of a food bank across from Henrix Creek Park. A [[Ion|man with broad grin and Mutant Mongrels cut]], distributing school supplies out of the large saddlebags of a black and silver chopper to a cluster of waiting children and parents.<br />
*'''October, 2021''' -- The Bronx, Independece Ave & W 246th St, a large wall just outside a farmer's market opposite the boundary between Freaktown and Not Freaktown. [[Dusk|A man with large dark bat wings and a sharply fanged smile, haloed in soft multicolored light by a backdrop of erratically strung fairy lights. He is standing at the edge of a small cluster of people who have not been drawn in detail, turned to a smaller woman with yellow-green scales along her skin. She is watching him intently, his hands raised -- those versed in American Sign Language might recognize the shape and direction of his current handshape: ''revolution''.<br />
<br />
|-<br />
! Body Mods<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Jackson has become much more colourful over the years; in addition to the vividly coloured hair he sports three seasons out of the year, he has a WEALTH of piercings and tattoos. The current complete list:<br />
<br />
'''Piercings''' -- Ears (earlobes 0g, 8 up the side of the left ear, 9 on the right; industrials, tragus, daith, rook), eyebrows (3 right, 4 left), teardrop (right). Lip (5 in his lower lip). Labret. Both nipples (twice), tongue (twice), left nostril (twice, one stud, one ring), right nostril (stud), septum, bridge.<br />
<br />
'''Ink''':<br />
<br />
*Back:<br />
**Most of his back is taken up by a large geometric design resembling the panels of a stained glass window. Most of it is empty, only black and white lines. There are a few panels filled in in full color and detail, though their imagery is eclectic: a hamsa; a pair of knitting kneedles stuck into a ball of rainbow yarn; a red umbrella; a small black cat; a bright-eyed jumping spider; a star of life with a raised fist replacing the center staff; a writing quill that trails a wisp of smoke from its nib. <br />
**Two stars, the right one a little bigger and brighter, at the base of his neck.<br />
*Front: <br />
**Over his heart: A dove in flight, olive branch in its beak, ringed by an excerpt of the words to the prayer of St. Francis in a spiral of small black print ("Make me an instrument of Your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy. Master, grant that I may never seek so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love with all my soul.")<br />
**Most of the rest of his chest+the majority of his right side: A large peach tree climbs up his right side, the branches taking up most of the leftover room on his chest; it has both fruit and flowers at once, and there's a small fairy (an elfin humanoid male, with blue hair and large red-and-black butterfly wings) perched on one of the lower limbs.<br />
**Left shoulder: A dragonfly, bright-bright blue with veined very slightly multicoloured wings.<br />
**Right shoulder: The ''Neverending Story'''s AURYN.<br />
*Skull: A chimaera. Large bat-wings, black panther body, heads of a goat, a dragon, a raven, a segmented scorpion's tail. Obviously, can only be seen if his head is shaved.<br />
*Arms:<br />
**Right elbow: Two bicoloured stars, red/black (front) and purple/black (back)<br />
**Left elbow: Two bicoloured stars, green/black (front) and pink/black (back) on the left<br />
**Left elbow: Just above the star on the front there is a simple black line segment, one inch long.<br />
**Right inner wrist: A rainbow-colored cross with a circled-A superimposed over it, the letter circled with a crown of thorns<br />
**Left inner wrist: A raised fist in a circle, clutching a carrot.<br />
**Forearms: Paintbrushes on the right side and charcoal drawing pencils on the left, drawn to look like they are worming their way in and out of the skin.<br />
**Right half-sleeve (shoulder to elbow): A lot of medicinal herbs.<br />
**Left half-sleeve (shoulder to elbow): Fruits and veggies! Lots of them.<br />
*Legs:<br />
**Right half-sleeve (knee to ankle): Illustrations from The Lorax<br />
**Left half-sleeve (knee to ankle): CARE BEARS. But only the original characters. Also a large rainbow. For the Care Bears to slide on. And puffy clouds.<br />
|-<br />
! Connections<br />
|-<br />
| <br />
<br />
'''Standbys'''<br />
<br />
* [[B]] - Tomato-pesto galette. Most people think sweet when they think of pies, but you'll fall in love with the complex flavors in this one.<br />
* [[Daiki]] - Sweet potato bun. Understated, rich with flavor, will carry any meal and then some.<br />
* [[Dawson]] - Mexican hot chocolate snickerdoodles. You think you know and love this one already but the burst of spice surprises and delights every time.<br />
* [[Dusk]] - Rum raisin bread pudding. Sweet, creamy, just a bit decadent; a delight on your tongue and a warm comfort to cosy up with when the days get rough.<br />
* [[Hive]] - Raspberry tiramisu cupcakes. A bitterness here that might not be to everyone's tastes, but I revist this one again and again.<br />
* [[Ion]] - Citrus glitter cookies. Bright, refreshing, a you'll fall in love with this burst of zest.<br />
* [[Kyinha]] - Smoked tahini and dark chocolate chunk cookies. Well worth a second glance to appreciate the rich layers and smokey-sweet goodness of these ones.<br />
* [[Kitty]] - Peach-Basil Pie. One of the first I learned and still one of my favourites; that touch of fresh herb really makes it something magical. <br />
* [[Lucien]] - Earl Grey cassis macarons. An elegant burst of perfection; well worth the challenge of learning to tackle this batter!<br />
* [[Matt]] - Sponge cake with orange blossom curd filling. Don't be fooled by the Twinkie-knockoff appearance; there's a brightness at the center here that you'll want to savor.<br />
* [[Peter]] - Triple chocolate chip cookies. Something almost overwhelming about the sweetness here but it works all the same.<br />
* [[Ryan]] - Peach bourbon beignets. You don't have to be Southern for this to be a comfort, but for me it's always gonna taste like home.<br />
* [[Shane]] - Roasted strawberry thyme shortcake. Homey and sophisticated all at once.<br />
* [[Spencer]] - Strawberry-ginger-rhubarb pie. A lot of zing here, and the patience it takes to get a lattice crust set careful is rewarding work. <br />
* [[Steve]] - Chai spiced apple pie. Bit of zing in this old classic makes it comforting and fresh all at once.<br />
* [[Tag]] - Mango passion fruit custard tart. An absolutely perfect pop of sweetness to bring summer into your life anytime.<br />
* [[Tian-shin]] - Apple chamomile tea cake. A little sweet, a little tart, takes a tried-and-true home remedy and spins it into a wonderful pick me up.<br />
<br />
'''Sometimes Food'''<br />
* [[Alma]] - Marionberry lavender scones. Elegant and sensible at once; I've pulled these out several times when I need a little something unexpected to round out a brunch.<br />
* [[Avi]] - Funfetti cake. This one's a crowd pleaser but whew! Love it, but even my huge sweet tooth needs small servings here. <br />
* [[Erik]] - Peanut butter brownies. Probably get sick if you ate these every day but it's one you should learn early if you're gonna learn anything about baking. Against popular wisdom, still tastes as good now as when I was little. <br />
* [[Gaétan]] - Blueberry mint tartlets. I'm not usually one for mint but my kid loves it and it's really grown on me. I know chocolate's usually the go-to for desserts but I feel like mixing it up some gives it a better chance to shine.<br />
* [[Isra]] - Halva brownies. Don't overlook these; the depth of flavor here is out of this world.<br />
* [[Joshua]] - Pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. I always forget how much I love these until they're in season.<br />
* [[Lael]] - Pumpkin cornbread. Folks might think it's simple but it's anything but. Rich and textured, solid enough to hold its own place in a meal.<br />
* [[Leo]] - Chocolate babka. Always a little unsure if I'm making this right and make a whole entire mess in the process, but gosh is it a treat once I get there. <br />
* [[Melinda]] - Espresso chip muffins. Steady and reliable doesn't have to mean boring; the pop of sweet chocolate and sharp coffee will kick your day into gear.<br />
* [[Marinov]] - Fig, chocolate and almond financiers. Sounds like a lot but these blend it all with flair.<br />
* [[Naomi]] - Zucchini banana cupcake. I know what everyone says soon as you say ''zucchini'' in dessert but trust me on this one. Sweet but not too cloying, got a surprising depth of flavor -- give it a chance and you'll see!<br />
* [[Rasa]] - Coconut lime lavender cupcakes. It's a bit of a jumble, but it might surprise you.<br />
* [[Rasheed]] - Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. A classic; delicious and filling, I can almost pretend they're a meal.<br />
* [[Taylor]] - Pumpkin pecan pie. If you can't choose between two good things, why not both! Sure to be a hit year round.<br />
<br />
'''Needs Adaptation'''<br />
* [[Charles]] - Peanut butter blondies. So close to being satisfying but it always feels like something's missing.<br />
* [[DJ]] - Roasted maple-walnut napoleon. The flavors are familiar but it's been a frustrating challengs getting all those layers right. Gonna have to keep working before I can get these down, but I know they'll be worth it.<br />
* [[Harm]] - White chocolate speculoos merveilleux. Still trying to figure this one out.<br />
* [[Kieow]] - Pineapple cream cheese bundt cake. A little cloying on the sweetness; doesn't play well with my allergies.<br />
* [[Lily]] - Ginger-orange anisette cake. ''Definitely'' not the liqueur for me, but this could be fantastic if I find the right combination. <br />
* [[Marrow]] - Pine nut honey anise pie. A very distinctive combination but not sure I want to revisit it.<br />
* [[Nanami]] - Brown sugar buttermilk spice tart. A bit sweet and a bit sour; gotta keep working on how this fits into my repertoire.<br />
* [[Sarah]] - Strawberry cheesecake. Widespread appeal, but not to my tastes.<br />
<br />
'''Inedible'''<br />
* [[Eric]] - I don't do bacon.<br />
* [[Fury]] - Brown sugar glazed ham. Look, you can dress it up, but I still don't...<br />
* [[Malthus]] - ...doubly not when it's gone spoiled.<br />
<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Trivia<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
*Maintains several blogs with varying levels of activity; one focused on sex & relationship education, one focused on teaching & parenting from a non-authoritarian perspective; one focused on mutant-related issues, and one more personal art blog. Used to have an animal rights one but that hasn't been updated regularly in years.<br />
**Also totally keeps a tumblr though this, like many tumblrs, is unfocused and just full of Whatever On Earth He Feels Like. Pretty pictures. Cute puppies. Religious musings. Random banter with his friends. Cooking tips. Whatever is on his mind. Totally also a sprinkling of things found in all four of the above, but in a far less organized fashion.<br />
*Much like half of his friends, his one-eyed beagle was ''also'' an ex-labrat; some of his animal lib friends nabbed Obie in a raid on an animal testing lab back in his college days. He had been fostering all the beagles that came out of the raid but for perhaps obvious reasons got extra attached to that one and never rehomed him.<br />
*His advisor in high school was Scott Summers which led to no ''end'' of Cyclops jokes when he returned from Prometheus.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Gallery<br />
|-<br />
| style="text-align:center;" |<br />
[[Image:Jax1.jpg|x150px]]<br />
[[Image:Jaxorchid.jpg|x150px]]<br />
|}<br />
|<br />
{|<br />
! Jackson Connor Holland<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{| width="100%" class="infobox" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #000"<br />
| colspan="2" | [[Image:Jax.jpg|x300px|center]]<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Codename'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Sunshine<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Birthdate'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| June 21, 1992<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Species'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Mutant<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Affiliation'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Xavier's<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Alignment'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Effervescent<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Powers'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Photokinetic<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Occupation'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Anarchist<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Registration Status'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Unregistered<br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
{| width="100%" class="infobox" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #000" <br />
! style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" | RP Hooks<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Sugarfairy''' - ''Tends to bake and bake and BAKE. When class is in session, his desserts can be found almost daily in the XS rec room and Teachers' Lounge. His neighbors are frequently plied with desserts, too.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Needlepoint''' - ''Will prick you with so many needles. Inks people and does body piercing at Inkline, a studio in the Lower East Side.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Artsy''' - ''Paints, draws, graffitis. Started an art collective in Brooklyn. ''Looks'' like an artist, too. Often lurks the city at night Arting illicitly. Whether you want art lessons or want to do some art crimes (... or want lessons in doing art crimes!) he might be a good person to hook up with.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Radical''' - ''Anarchist, activist, he's been a vocal and active presence in leftist community for years, whether organizing rallies or teaching workshops or out in the streets during actions as a medic; anyone in anarchist/communist/general leftist community is likely to run into him at Some Point.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''X-Man''' - ''The COLOURFULLEST X-Man. His uniform's bedazzled with a smiling sun. Students at the school probably know the not-so-secret school superheroes; outside the school if you need a rescue or are the kind of person someone might need rescuing ''from'', maybe Your Local Mutant Vigilantes will drop by.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''THAT teacher''' - ''Teaches at XS -- art, baking, and also one of the mandatory Sex Ed classes. Plenty of his students adore him, plenty think he's a total weirdo who should probably be Less Queer, plenty think he is either the most badass or most disturbing teacher at the school since his terrorism arrest. Regardless, he's ''probably'' the teacher students have The Most Opinions about.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Prometheus Bound''' - ''Once a labrat himself, now he spends a good deal of energy trying to find others and free them. On very public record in the news as an ex-labrat and liberator of other labrats. Freedom fighter or terrorist, it is pretty likely folks have some thoughts about him before ever meeting him.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Saw you at Mount Sinai''' - ''Ex-Catholic, been in the process of converting to Judaism for some years, to the chagrin of some in the local Jewish community and the warm welcome of others. Likely to see you around if you spend time in Jewish circles, especially more radical ones.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''May I Have This Dance?''' - ''When there's time, enjoys social swing & ballroom dance. Whether you're just learning or an experienced dancer, he'd probably love a spin around the floor.''<br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
! colspan="2" | Logs<br />
|-<br />
| colspan="2" | {{RP Logs | name = Jackson{{!}}Jax | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Archived Logs'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
{{ RP Logs | name = {{BASEPAGENAME}} | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate | namespace = ArchivedLogs }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
[[Category:Active PCs]][[Category:Xavier's School]][[Category:Mutants]][[Category:X-Men]][[Category:Mendel Clinic]][[Category:Prometheus]]</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Jax&diff=24856Jax2023-05-18T22:05:32Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| width="100%"<br />
| colspan="2" | <center><br />
{|<br />
| style="text-align:center;" | '''''Don't blame me if I'm smiling when it all comes tumbling down.'''''<br /><br />
|}<br />
</center><br />
|-<br />
| width="100%" |<br />
{| width="100%"<br />
! Introduction <br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}One god, no masters.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Description<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Thick straight hair, often dyed brilliantly unnatural colours, falls shaggy-floppy to frame graceful features: eyebrows arch dark against extraordinarily pale skin, lips full, cheekbones set high, thick dark lashes around one startlingly vivid blue eye; there is a sunken empty socket where the other should be, though this is often hidden beneath eyepatches in a variety of colours, or mirrored dark glasses. Clean-shaven, his face also sports a wealth of metal, a generous number of piercings over most places that can hold them. Much of his skin neck-down plays host to tattoos in bright colours. His right hand has four fingers, only scar tissue remaining where the pinky should be. He stands average height at just a hair shy of 5'10", with a trim swimmer's body; lithe, lean musculature is carried with a dancer's easy grace.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Reputation<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Widely known around the country by name and often face to anyone who follows the news even a little bit, following his very publicized arrest and terrorism charges after news broke of the Prometheus Project, a research program that has been experimenting on mutants for many years -- Jackson was accused of terrorism for leading a team that for over a decade has been working to attack and break in to these facilities and free the mutants inside them. Jax did not deny any of the charges but claimed only that the facilities were a gross violation of human rights, that his team never killed a single person in the course of their actions, and that freeing the prisoners inside from nonconsensual experimentation was a necessary moral duty. The subsequent campaign to release him from jail and drop his charges was a deeply politicized and highly visible nationwide topic.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Around Xavier's, known for being obnoxiously COLOURFUL, obnoxiously cheerful, and a constantly reliable source of delicious desserts. Art teacher/baking teacher/sex ed teacher at XS. Known to be highly averse to giving homework, but with high expectations of Not Slacking Off in his actual classroom. Is a bit of a wildcard in terms of faculty/administrative relations; he's an unswervingly polite presence on the faculty but his outspoken anarchism (including frequent run-ins with the law and ''highly'' notorious terrorism charges), and his fiercely anti-assimilation views cause a bit of a headache for the administration and other faculty who maaaay not always be his biggest fan. Additionally his sex ed class earns more complaints from parents than probably any other class in the course catalog -- though this may have as much to do with Xavier's appointing their first openly queer teacher to teach a very radical sex ed curriculum as it does with any ''geniune'' problems with his teaching. No end of stirred feathers among the administration on his behalf means that he has often rocky relations with other teachers and admin as a ''coworker'', no matter how much they might (or might not) like him as an individual.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Among mutants coming out of Prometheus, known for helping organize the team that keeps breaking people out of the labs (and subsequently finding people medical care, shelter, etc.) Practically a mythical figure among who have been in the labs in the past years as the raid team's reputation has grown, and with it no end of stories about the more prominent figures among them; among the rescuees out in the world generally known to be a patient ear to listen and a source of constant food.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}An active and familiar face among far-left activists in general (the anarchist community isn't that big); the kind to turn up with food or offer childcare at meetings, a longterm member of New York City Action Medical and frequent face medicking at protests.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}He also not-infrequently shows up in celebrity gossip pages -- even before his notoriety he had been ''well'' as the be the BFF/partner-in-crime of his ''extremely'' famous BFF, queer mutant celebrity [[Ryan|Ryan Black]]. Plenty of gossip pages frequently try to romantically link them (they're both queer! Obv they must have dated!), a phenomenon that only got more salacious ever since Jax began dating [[Steve|Captain America]] -- Ryan's ex.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! History<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Born the only child to farming parents in a tiny town nestled in at the base of Appalachia, Jax's early life was a pleasant enough one. Sheltered, for sure, a combination of living in a tiny backwater Georgia town and growing up with very conservative parents who were rather overprotective of their only child. Devout Catholics, they passed their faith on to him from early on. His life was simple, but full. Church, school, learning how to take care of the farm, these were foundations; on top of which there was swim team, dance lessons, and above all art, for which he showed a great aptitude from an early age.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Though in classes he tended to do reasonably well, out of classes things were harder; being a somewhat flamboyant boy in a highly conservative town did not go over well, and even less so once his mutation manifested. It was a blessing the day that a Xavier's representative found him and brought him to New York to be able to continue his schooling normally. In the new environment he thrived, once he got over homesickness, learning to control his powers and applying himself to practice with the same diligence he gave the rest of his schoolwork. <br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Though always politically bent and heavily involved in activism (focused around environmental justice and animal rights, largely) it was his abduction by Prometheus that focused this activism in more ''aggressive'' ways. In the wake of his rescue from there, he and some of the other rescuees have attempted hunting down other similar facilities and liberating their occupants. <br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Outside of being a vigilante he keeps busy. Between work -- part-time as a tattoo artist and body piercer, part-time as a teacher at Xavier's; between life as an X-Man and the various activist groups he's involved in, he doesn't find much time for sleep. Single fatherhood doesn't help with that either; he's raised a [[B|pair]] of [[Shane|twins]] and a [[Spencer|younger son]] rescued from Prometheus and subsequently adopted.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Powers<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Photokinetic. Eats light, turns it into art. Has a small star burning inside him; would rather nobody find out what that might really mean.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Art Crime!<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
Together with [[Tag]], Jax has been painting a series of intricate murals around the city, focusing on New York's mutant community -- their lives, their deaths, their joys and their struggles.<br />
<br />
*'''August 2020''' -- Manhattan, Corner of Duane & Hudson, formerly [[Happy Cakes Bakery]], TriBeCa; the site where seven years ago a young mutant was [[ArchivedLogs:Shadow Puppets|killed]] by a police officer. The entire mural is enclosed in an immense scroll that contains mountains (low, familiar upstate mountains) in the background and a wooded riverbend in the foreground where a freckle-faced sandy-haired young man is sitting in a bed of moss with a a quill in his hand, its nib dipped in glimmering white ink. Alanna is draped across his shoulders like a living stole, and he's smiling up at the inscription across the sky in wisps of glimmering high cloud that reads "Roll for initiative, party mine!"<br />
*'''October 2020''' -- Manhattan, 6th St. Between A & B, several stories up on a brick face across from the Creative Little Garden. A [[Dawson|dark-haired young man with twisting scars down his face and a prosthetic arm intricately painted in a lifelike birdfeather pattern, beige with black speckles and a bright flash of yellow feathering on the underside.]] The man has kneeling, halfway through the process of constructing a beehive box, glancing up with a delighted expression as a northern flicker crosses the sky overhead, a flash of yellow bright underwing. There's a handful of honeybees, dotting a winding path from background to foreground, tracing a visual line from the bird to where the man is kneeling.<br />
*'''April, 2021''' -- Brooklyn, 46th & 5th, across the wall of a daycare. A small sailboat out on a rough sea; [[Leo|Leonid Concepcion]] is very recognizable where he sits within it, head slightly bowed to clasped hands and a jade rosary held loose between his fingers.<br />
*'''June, 2021''' -- Manhattan, Suffolk St, between Grand & Broome, on the side of a taqueria just across from Evolve Cafe. [[Taylor|Evolve's many (many!) armed barista]] leaning across the counter to hand a slice of pie to a customer, several tentacles still at work making drinks behind him<br />
*'''July, 2021''' -- The Bronx, Alexander Ave & 138th, the wall of an apartment building opposite the 40th Precinct. A middle-aged Latina woman with large black-feathered wings sits perched on the back of a park bench beside a younger Latina girl, both looking up towards the clouds; the older woman is pointing up, one of the fluffy clouds above shaped almost like an orchid overhead.<br />
*'''September, 2021''' -- Brooklyn, Van Siclen Ave, along the wall of a food bank across from Henrix Creek Park. A [[Ion|man with broad grin and Mutant Mongrels cut]], distributing school supplies out of the large saddlebags of a black and silver chopper to a cluster of waiting children and parents.<br />
*'''October, 2021''' -- The Bronx, Independece Ave & W 246th St, a large wall just outside a farmer's market opposite the boundary between Freaktown and Not Freaktown. [[Dusk|A man with large dark bat wings and a sharply fanged smile, haloed in soft multicolored light by a backdrop of erratically strung fairy lights. He is standing at the edge of a small cluster of people who have not been drawn in detail, turned to a smaller woman with yellow-green scales along her skin. She is watching him intently, his hands raised -- those versed in American Sign Language might recognize the shape and direction of his current handshape: ''revolution''.<br />
<br />
|-<br />
! Body Mods<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Jackson has become much more colourful over the years; in addition to the vividly coloured hair he sports three seasons out of the year, he has a WEALTH of piercings and tattoos. The current complete list:<br />
<br />
'''Piercings''' -- Ears (earlobes 0g, 8 up the side of the left ear, 9 on the right; industrials, tragus, daith, rook), eyebrows (3 right, 4 left), teardrop (right). Lip (5 in his lower lip). Labret. Both nipples (twice), tongue (twice), left nostril (twice, one stud, one ring), right nostril (stud), septum, bridge.<br />
<br />
'''Ink''':<br />
<br />
*Back:<br />
**Most of his back is taken up by a large geometric design resembling the panels of a stained glass window. Most of it is empty, only black and white lines. There are a few panels filled in in full color and detail, though their imagery is eclectic: a hamsa; a pair of knitting kneedles stuck into a ball of rainbow yarn; a red umbrella; a small black cat; a bright-eyed jumping spider; a star of life with a raised fist replacing the center staff; a writing quill that trails a wisp of smoke from its nib. <br />
**Two stars, the right one a little bigger and brighter, at the base of his neck.<br />
*Front: <br />
**Over his heart: A dove in flight, olive branch in its beak, ringed by an excerpt of the words to the prayer of St. Francis in a spiral of small black print ("Make me an instrument of Your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy. Master, grant that I may never seek so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love with all my soul.")<br />
**Most of the rest of his chest+the majority of his right side: A large peach tree climbs up his right side, the branches taking up most of the leftover room on his chest; it has both fruit and flowers at once, and there's a small fairy (an elfin humanoid male, with blue hair and large red-and-black butterfly wings) perched on one of the lower limbs.<br />
**Left shoulder: A dragonfly, bright-bright blue with veined very slightly multicoloured wings.<br />
**Right shoulder: The ''Neverending Story'''s AURYN.<br />
*Skull: A chimaera. Large bat-wings, black panther body, heads of a goat, a dragon, a raven, a segmented scorpion's tail. Obviously, can only be seen if his head is shaved.<br />
*Arms:<br />
**Right elbow: Two bicoloured stars, red/black (front) and purple/black (back)<br />
**Left elbow: Two bicoloured stars, green/black (front) and pink/black (back) on the left<br />
**Left elbow: Just above the star on the front there is a simple black line segment, one inch long.<br />
**Right inner wrist: A rainbow-colored cross with a circled-A superimposed over it, the letter circled with a crown of thorns<br />
**Left inner wrist: A raised fist in a circle, clutching a carrot.<br />
**Forearms: Paintbrushes on the right side and charcoal drawing pencils on the left, drawn to look like they are worming their way in and out of the skin.<br />
**Right half-sleeve (shoulder to elbow): A lot of medicinal herbs.<br />
**Left half-sleeve (shoulder to elbow): Fruits and veggies! Lots of them.<br />
*Legs:<br />
**Right half-sleeve (knee to ankle): Illustrations from The Lorax<br />
**Left half-sleeve (knee to ankle): CARE BEARS. But only the original characters. Also a large rainbow. For the Care Bears to slide on. And puffy clouds.<br />
|-<br />
! Connections<br />
|-<br />
| <br />
<br />
'''Standbys'''<br />
<br />
* [[B]] - Tomato-pesto galette. Most people think sweet when they think of pies, but you'll fall in love with the complex flavors in this one.<br />
* [[Daiki]] - Sweet potato bun. Understated, rich with flavor, will carry any meal and then some.<br />
* [[Dawson]] - Mexican hot chocolate snickerdoodles. You think you know and love this one already but the burst of spice surprises and delights every time.<br />
* [[Dusk]] - Rum raisin bread pudding. Sweet, creamy, just a bit decadent; a delight on your tongue and a warm comfort to cosy up with when the days get rough.<br />
* [[Hive]] - Raspberry tiramisu cupcakes. A bitterness here that might not be to everyone's tastes, but I revist this one again and again.<br />
* [[Ion]] - Citrus glitter cookies. Bright, refreshing, a you'll fall in love with this burst of zest.<br />
* [[Kyinha]] - Smoked tahini and dark chocolate chunk cookies. Well worth a second glance to appreciate the rich layers and smokey-sweet goodness of these ones.<br />
* [[Kitty]] - Peach-Basil Pie. One of the first I learned and still one of my favourites; that touch of fresh herb really makes it something magical. <br />
* [[Lucien]] - Earl Grey cassis macarons. An elegant burst of perfection; well worth the challenge of learning to tackle this batter!<br />
* [[Matt]] - Sponge cake with orange blossom curd filling. Don't be fooled by the Twinkie-knockoff appearance; there's a brightness at the center here that you'll want to savor.<br />
* [[Peter]] - Triple chocolate chip cookies. Something almost overwhelming about the sweetness here but it works all the same.<br />
* [[Ryan]] - Peach bourbon beignets. You don't have to be Southern for this to be a comfort, but for me it's always gonna taste like home.<br />
* [[Shane]] - Roasted strawberry thyme shortcake. Homey and sophisticated all at once.<br />
* [[Spencer]] - Strawberry-ginger-rhubarb pie. A lot of zing here, and the patience it takes to get a lattice crust set careful is rewarding work. <br />
* [[Steve]] - Chai spiced apple pie. Bit of zing in this old classic makes it comforting and fresh all at once.<br />
* [[Tag]] - Mango passion fruit custard tart. An absolutely perfect pop of sweetness to bring summer into your life anytime.<br />
* [[Tian-shin]] - Apple chamomile tea cake. A little sweet, a little tart, takes a tried-and-true home remedy and spins it into a wonderful pick me up.<br />
<br />
'''Sometimes Food'''<br />
* [[Alma]] - Marionberry lavender scones. Elegant and sensible at once; I've pulled these out several times when I need a little something unexpected to round out a brunch.<br />
* [[Avi]] - Funfetti cake. This one's a crowd pleaser but whew! Love it, but even my huge sweet tooth needs small servings here. <br />
* [[Erik]] - Peanut butter brownies. Probably get sick if you ate these every day but it's one you should learn early if you're gonna learn anything about baking. Against popular wisdom, still tastes as good now as when I was little. <br />
* [[Gaétan]] - Blueberry mint tartlets. I'm not usually one for mint but my kid loves it and it's really grown on me. I know chocolate's usually the go-to for desserts but I feel like mixing it up some gives it a better chance to shine.<br />
* [[Isra]] - Halva brownies. Don't overlook these; the depth of flavor here is out of this world.<br />
* [[Joshua]] - Pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. I always forget how much I love these until they're in season.<br />
* [[Lael]] - Pumpkin cornbread. Folks might think it's simple but it's anything but. Rich and textured, solid enough to hold its own place in a meal.<br />
* [[Leo]] - Chocolate babka. Always a little unsure if I'm making this right and make a whole entire mess in the process, but gosh is it a treat once I get there. <br />
* [[Melinda]] - Espresso chip muffins. Steady and reliable doesn't have to mean boring; the pop of sweet chocolate and sharp coffee will kick your day into gear.<br />
* [[Marinov]] - Fig, chocolate and almond financiers. Sounds like a lot but these blend it all with flair.<br />
* [[Naomi]] - Zucchini banana cupcake. I know what everyone says soon as you say ''zucchini'' in dessert but trust me on this one. Sweet but not too cloying, got a surprising depth of flavor -- give it a chance and you'll see!<br />
* [[Rasa]] - Coconut lime lavender cupcakes. It's a bit of a jumble, but it might surprise you.<br />
* [[Rasheed]] - Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. A classic; delicious and filling, I can almost pretend they're a meal.<br />
* [[Taylor]] - Pumpkin pecan pie. If you can't choose between two good things, why not both! Sure to be a hit year round.<br />
<br />
'''Needs Adaptation'''<br />
* [[Charles]] - Peanut butter blondies. So close to being satisfying but it always feels like something's missing.<br />
* [[DJ]] - Roasted maple-walnut napoleon. The flavors are familiar but it's been a frustrating challengs getting all those layers right. Gonna have to keep working before I can get these down, but I know they'll be worth it.<br />
* [[Harm]] - White chocolate speculoos merveilleux. Still trying to figure this one out.<br />
* [[Kieow]] - Pineapple cream cheese bundt cake. A little cloying on the sweetness; doesn't play well with my allergies.<br />
* [[Lily]] - Ginger-orange anisette cake. ''Definitely'' not the liqueur for me, but this could be fantastic if I find the right combination. <br />
* [[Marrow]] - Pine nut honey anise pie. A very distinctive combination but not sure I want to revisit it.<br />
* [[Nanami]] - Brown sugar buttermilk spice tart. A bit sweet and a bit sour; gotta keep working on how this fits into my repertoire.<br />
* [[Sarah]] - Strawberry cheesecake. Widespread appeal, but not to my tastes.<br />
<br />
'''Inedible'''<br />
* [[Eric]] - I don't do bacon.<br />
* [[Fury]] - Brown sugar glazed ham. Look, you can dress it up, but I still don't...<br />
* [[Malthus]] - ...doubly not when it's gone spoiled.<br />
<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Trivia<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
*Maintains several blogs with varying levels of activity; one focused on sex & relationship education, one focused on teaching & parenting from a non-authoritarian perspective; one focused on mutant-related issues, and one more personal art blog. Used to have an animal rights one but that hasn't been updated regularly in years.<br />
**Also totally keeps a tumblr though this, like many tumblrs, is unfocused and just full of Whatever On Earth He Feels Like. Pretty pictures. Cute puppies. Religious musings. Random banter with his friends. Cooking tips. Whatever is on his mind. Totally also a sprinkling of things found in all four of the above, but in a far less organized fashion.<br />
*Much like half of his friends, his one-eyed beagle was ''also'' an ex-labrat; some of his animal lib friends nabbed Obie in a raid on an animal testing lab back in his college days. He had been fostering all the beagles that came out of the raid but for perhaps obvious reasons got extra attached to that one and never rehomed him.<br />
*His advisor in high school was Scott Summers which led to no ''end'' of Cyclops jokes when he returned from Prometheus.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Gallery<br />
|-<br />
| style="text-align:center;" |<br />
[[Image:Jax1.jpg|x150px]]<br />
[[Image:Jaxorchid.jpg|x150px]]<br />
|}<br />
|<br />
{|<br />
! Jackson Connor Holland<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{| width="100%" class="infobox" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #000"<br />
| colspan="2" | [[Image:Jax.jpg|x300px|center]]<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Codename'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Sunshine<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Birthdate'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| June 21, 1992<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Species'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Mutant<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Affiliation'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Xavier's<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Alignment'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Effervescent<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Powers'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Photokinetic<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Occupation'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Anarchist<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Registration Status'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Unregistered<br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
{| width="100%" class="infobox" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #000" <br />
! style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" | RP Hooks<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Sugarfairy''' - ''Tends to bake and bake and BAKE. When class is in session, his desserts can be found almost daily in the XS rec room and Teachers' Lounge. His neighbors are frequently plied with desserts, too.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Needlepoint''' - ''Will prick you with so many needles. Inks people and does body piercing at Inkline, a studio in the Lower East Side.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Artsy''' - ''Paints, draws, graffitis. Started an art collective in Brooklyn. ''Looks'' like an artist, too. Often lurks the city at night Arting illicitly. Whether you want art lessons or want to do some art crimes (... or want lessons in doing art crimes!) he might be a good person to hook up with.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Radical''' - ''Anarchist, activist, he's been a vocal and active presence in leftist community for years, whether organizing rallies or teaching workshops or out in the streets during actions as a medic; anyone in anarchist/communist/general leftist community is likely to run into him at Some Point.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''X-Man''' - ''The COLOURFULLEST X-Man. His uniform's bedazzled with a smiling sun. Students at the school probably know the not-so-secret school superheroes; outside the school if you need a rescue or are the kind of person someone might need rescuing ''from'', maybe Your Local Mutant Vigilantes will drop by.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''THAT teacher''' - ''Teaches at XS -- art, baking, and also one of the mandatory Sex Ed classes. Plenty of his students adore him, plenty think he's a total weirdo who should probably be Less Queer, plenty think he is either the most badass or most disturbing teacher at the school since his terrorism arrest. Regardless, he's ''probably'' the teacher students have The Most Opinions about.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Prometheus Bound''' - ''Once a labrat himself, now he spends a good deal of energy trying to find others and free them. On very public record in the news as an ex-labrat and liberator of other labrats. Freedom fighter or terrorist, it is pretty likely folks have some thoughts about him before ever meeting him.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Saw you at Mount Sinai''' - ''Ex-Catholic, been in the process of converting to Judaism for some years, to the chagrin of some in the local Jewish community and the warm welcome of others. Likely to see you around if you spend time in Jewish circles, especially more radical ones.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''May I Have This Dance?''' - ''When there's time, enjoys social swing & ballroom dance. Whether you're just learning or an experienced dancer, he'd probably love a spin around the floor.''<br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
! colspan="2" | Logs<br />
|-<br />
| colspan="2" | {{RP Logs | name = Jackson{{!}}Jax | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Archived Logs'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
{{ RP Logs | name = {{BASEPAGENAME}} | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate | namespace = ArchivedLogs }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
[[Category:Active PCs]][[Category:Xavier's School]][[Category:Mutants]][[Category:X-Men]][[Category:Mendel Clinic]][[Category:Prometheus]]</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Jax&diff=24855Jax2023-05-18T22:05:06Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| width="100%"<br />
| colspan="2" | <center><br />
{|<br />
| style="text-align:center;" | '''''Don't blame me if I'm smiling when it all comes tumbling down.'''''<br /><br />
|}<br />
</center><br />
|-<br />
| width="100%" |<br />
{| width="100%"<br />
! Introduction <br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}One god, no masters.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Description<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Thick straight hair, often dyed brilliantly unnatural colours, falls shaggy-floppy to frame graceful features: eyebrows arch dark against extraordinarily pale skin, lips full, cheekbones set high, thick dark lashes around one startlingly vivid blue eye; there is a sunken empty socket where the other should be, though this is often hidden beneath eyepatches in a variety of colours, or mirrored dark glasses. Clean-shaven, his face also sports a wealth of metal, a generous number of piercings over most places that can hold them. Much of his skin neck-down plays host to tattoos in bright colours. His right hand has four fingers, only scar tissue remaining where the pinky should be. He stands average height at just a hair shy of 5'10", with a trim swimmer's body; lithe, lean musculature is carried with a dancer's easy grace.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Reputation<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Widely known around the country by name and often face to anyone who follows the news even a little bit, following his very publicized arrest and terrorism charges after news broke of the Prometheus Project, a research program that has been experimenting on mutants for many years -- Jackson was accused of terrorism for leading a team that for over a decade has been working to attack and break in to these facilities and free the mutants inside them. Jax did not deny any of the charges but claimed only that the facilities were a gross violation of human rights, that his team never killed a single person in the course of their actions, and that freeing the prisoners inside from nonconsensual experimentation was a necessary moral duty. The subsequent campaign to release him from jail and drop his charges was a deeply politicized and highly visible nationwide topic.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Around Xavier's, known for being obnoxiously COLOURFUL, obnoxiously cheerful, and a constantly reliable source of delicious desserts. Art teacher/baking teacher/sex ed teacher at XS. Known to be highly averse to giving homework, but with high expectations of Not Slacking Off in his actual classroom. Is a bit of a wildcard in terms of faculty/administrative relations; he's an unswervingly polite presence on the faculty but his outspoken anarchism (including frequent run-ins with the law and ''highly'' notorious terrorism charges), and his fiercely anti-assimilation views cause a bit of a headache for the administration and other faculty who maaaay not always be his biggest fan. Additionally his sex ed class earns more complaints from parents than probably any other class in the course catalog -- though this may have as much to do with Xavier's appointing their first openly queer teacher to teach a very radical sex ed curriculum as it does with any ''geniune'' problems with his teaching. No end of stirred feathers among the administration on his behalf means that he has often rocky relations with other teachers and admin as a ''coworker'', no matter how much they might (or might not) like him as an individual.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Among mutants coming out of Prometheus, known for helping organize the team that keeps breaking people out of the labs (and subsequently finding people medical care, shelter, etc.) Practically a mythical figure among who have been in the labs in the past years as the raid team's reputation has grown, and with it no end of stories about the more prominent figures among them; among the rescuees out in the world generally known to be a patient ear to listen and a source of constant food.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}An active and familiar face among far-left activists in general (the anarchist community isn't that big); the kind to turn up with food or offer childcare at meetings, a longterm member of New York City Action Medical and frequent face medicking at protests.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}He also not-infrequently shows up in celebrity gossip pages -- even before his notoriety he had been ''well'' as the be the BFF/partner-in-crime of his ''extremely'' famous BFF, queer mutant celebrity [[Ryan|Ryan Black]]. Plenty of gossip pages frequently try to romantically link them (they're both queer! Obv they must have dated!), a phenomenon that only got more salacious ever since Jax began dating [[Steve|Captain America]] -- Ryan's ex.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! History<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Born the only child to farming parents in a tiny town nestled in at the base of Appalachia, Jax's early life was a pleasant enough one. Sheltered, for sure, a combination of living in a tiny backwater Georgia town and growing up with very conservative parents who were rather overprotective of their only child. Devout Catholics, they passed their faith on to him from early on. His life was simple, but full. Church, school, learning how to take care of the farm, these were foundations; on top of which there was swim team, dance lessons, and above all art, for which he showed a great aptitude from an early age.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Though in classes he tended to do reasonably well, out of classes things were harder; being a somewhat flamboyant boy in a highly conservative town did not go over well, and even less so once his mutation manifested. It was a blessing the day that a Xavier's representative found him and brought him to New York to be able to continue his schooling normally. In the new environment he thrived, once he got over homesickness, learning to control his powers and applying himself to practice with the same diligence he gave the rest of his schoolwork. <br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Though always politically bent and heavily involved in activism (focused around environmental justice and animal rights, largely) it was his abduction by Prometheus that focused this activism in more ''aggressive'' ways. In the wake of his rescue from there, he and some of the other rescuees have attempted hunting down other similar facilities and liberating their occupants. <br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Outside of being a vigilante he keeps busy. Between work -- part-time as a tattoo artist and body piercer, part-time as a teacher at Xavier's; between life as an X-Man and the various activist groups he's involved in, he doesn't find much time for sleep. Single fatherhood doesn't help with that either; he's raised a [[B|pair]] of [[Shane|twins]] and a [[Spencer|younger son]] rescued from Prometheus and subsequently adopted.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Powers<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Photokinetic. Eats light, turns it into art. Has a small star burning inside him; would rather nobody find out what that might really mean.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Art Crime!<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
Together with [[Tag]], Jax has been painting a series of intricate murals around the city, focusing on New York's mutant community -- their lives, their deaths, their joys and their struggles.<br />
<br />
*'''August 2020''' -- Manhattan, Corner of Duane & Hudson, formerly [[Happy Cakes Bakery]], TriBeCa; the site where seven years ago a young mutant was [[ArchivedLogs:Shadow Puppets|killed]] by a police officer. The entire mural is enclosed in an immense scroll that contains mountains (low, familiar upstate mountains) in the background and a wooded riverbend in the foreground where a freckle-faced sandy-haired young man is sitting in a bed of moss with a a quill in his hand, its nib dipped in glimmering white ink. Alanna is draped across his shoulders like a living stole, and he's smiling up at the inscription across the sky in wisps of glimmering high cloud that reads "Roll for initiative, party mine!"<br />
*'''October 2020''' -- Manhattan, 6th St. Between A & B, several stories up on a brick face across from the Creative Little Garden. A [[Dawson|dark-haired young man with twisting scars down his face and a prosthetic arm intricately painted in a lifelike birdfeather pattern, beige with black speckles and a bright flash of yellow feathering on the underside.]] The man has kneeling, halfway through the process of constructing a beehive box, glancing up with a delighted expression as a northern flicker crosses the sky overhead, a flash of yellow bright underwing. There's a handful of honeybees, dotting a winding path from background to foreground, tracing a visual line from the bird to where the man is kneeling.<br />
*''April, 2021'' -- Brooklyn, 46th & 5th, across the wall of a daycare. A small sailboat out on a rough sea; [[Leo|Leonid Concepcion]] is very recognizable where he sits within it, head slightly bowed to clasped hands and a jade rosary held loose between his fingers.<br />
*''June, 2021'' -- Manhattan, Suffolk St, between Grand & Broome, on the side of a taqueria just across from Evolve Cafe. [[Taylor|Evolve's many (many!) armed barista]] leaning across the counter to hand a slice of pie to a customer, several tentacles still at work making drinks behind him<br />
*''July, 2021'' -- The Bronx, Alexander Ave & 138th, the wall of an apartment building opposite the 40th Precinct. A middle-aged Latina woman with large black-feathered wings sits perched on the back of a park bench beside a younger Latina girl, both looking up towards the clouds; the older woman is pointing up, one of the fluffy clouds above shaped almost like an orchid overhead.<br />
*''September, 2021'' -- Brooklyn, Van Siclen Ave, along the wall of a food bank across from Henrix Creek Park. A [[Ion|man with broad grin and Mutant Mongrels cut]], distributing school supplies out of the large saddlebags of a black and silver chopper to a cluster of waiting children and parents.<br />
*''October, 2021'' -- The Bronx, Independece Ave & W 246th St, a large wall just outside a farmer's market opposite the boundary between Freaktown and Not Freaktown. [[Dusk|A man with large dark bat wings and a sharply fanged smile, haloed in soft multicolored light by a backdrop of erratically strung fairy lights. He is standing at the edge of a small cluster of people who have not been drawn in detail, turned to a smaller woman with yellow-green scales along her skin. She is watching him intently, his hands raised -- those versed in American Sign Language might recognize the shape and direction of his current handshape: ''revolution''.<br />
<br />
|-<br />
! Body Mods<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Jackson has become much more colourful over the years; in addition to the vividly coloured hair he sports three seasons out of the year, he has a WEALTH of piercings and tattoos. The current complete list:<br />
<br />
'''Piercings''' -- Ears (earlobes 0g, 8 up the side of the left ear, 9 on the right; industrials, tragus, daith, rook), eyebrows (3 right, 4 left), teardrop (right). Lip (5 in his lower lip). Labret. Both nipples (twice), tongue (twice), left nostril (twice, one stud, one ring), right nostril (stud), septum, bridge.<br />
<br />
'''Ink''':<br />
<br />
*Back:<br />
**Most of his back is taken up by a large geometric design resembling the panels of a stained glass window. Most of it is empty, only black and white lines. There are a few panels filled in in full color and detail, though their imagery is eclectic: a hamsa; a pair of knitting kneedles stuck into a ball of rainbow yarn; a red umbrella; a small black cat; a bright-eyed jumping spider; a star of life with a raised fist replacing the center staff; a writing quill that trails a wisp of smoke from its nib. <br />
**Two stars, the right one a little bigger and brighter, at the base of his neck.<br />
*Front: <br />
**Over his heart: A dove in flight, olive branch in its beak, ringed by an excerpt of the words to the prayer of St. Francis in a spiral of small black print ("Make me an instrument of Your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy. Master, grant that I may never seek so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love with all my soul.")<br />
**Most of the rest of his chest+the majority of his right side: A large peach tree climbs up his right side, the branches taking up most of the leftover room on his chest; it has both fruit and flowers at once, and there's a small fairy (an elfin humanoid male, with blue hair and large red-and-black butterfly wings) perched on one of the lower limbs.<br />
**Left shoulder: A dragonfly, bright-bright blue with veined very slightly multicoloured wings.<br />
**Right shoulder: The ''Neverending Story'''s AURYN.<br />
*Skull: A chimaera. Large bat-wings, black panther body, heads of a goat, a dragon, a raven, a segmented scorpion's tail. Obviously, can only be seen if his head is shaved.<br />
*Arms:<br />
**Right elbow: Two bicoloured stars, red/black (front) and purple/black (back)<br />
**Left elbow: Two bicoloured stars, green/black (front) and pink/black (back) on the left<br />
**Left elbow: Just above the star on the front there is a simple black line segment, one inch long.<br />
**Right inner wrist: A rainbow-colored cross with a circled-A superimposed over it, the letter circled with a crown of thorns<br />
**Left inner wrist: A raised fist in a circle, clutching a carrot.<br />
**Forearms: Paintbrushes on the right side and charcoal drawing pencils on the left, drawn to look like they are worming their way in and out of the skin.<br />
**Right half-sleeve (shoulder to elbow): A lot of medicinal herbs.<br />
**Left half-sleeve (shoulder to elbow): Fruits and veggies! Lots of them.<br />
*Legs:<br />
**Right half-sleeve (knee to ankle): Illustrations from The Lorax<br />
**Left half-sleeve (knee to ankle): CARE BEARS. But only the original characters. Also a large rainbow. For the Care Bears to slide on. And puffy clouds.<br />
|-<br />
! Connections<br />
|-<br />
| <br />
<br />
'''Standbys'''<br />
<br />
* [[B]] - Tomato-pesto galette. Most people think sweet when they think of pies, but you'll fall in love with the complex flavors in this one.<br />
* [[Daiki]] - Sweet potato bun. Understated, rich with flavor, will carry any meal and then some.<br />
* [[Dawson]] - Mexican hot chocolate snickerdoodles. You think you know and love this one already but the burst of spice surprises and delights every time.<br />
* [[Dusk]] - Rum raisin bread pudding. Sweet, creamy, just a bit decadent; a delight on your tongue and a warm comfort to cosy up with when the days get rough.<br />
* [[Hive]] - Raspberry tiramisu cupcakes. A bitterness here that might not be to everyone's tastes, but I revist this one again and again.<br />
* [[Ion]] - Citrus glitter cookies. Bright, refreshing, a you'll fall in love with this burst of zest.<br />
* [[Kyinha]] - Smoked tahini and dark chocolate chunk cookies. Well worth a second glance to appreciate the rich layers and smokey-sweet goodness of these ones.<br />
* [[Kitty]] - Peach-Basil Pie. One of the first I learned and still one of my favourites; that touch of fresh herb really makes it something magical. <br />
* [[Lucien]] - Earl Grey cassis macarons. An elegant burst of perfection; well worth the challenge of learning to tackle this batter!<br />
* [[Matt]] - Sponge cake with orange blossom curd filling. Don't be fooled by the Twinkie-knockoff appearance; there's a brightness at the center here that you'll want to savor.<br />
* [[Peter]] - Triple chocolate chip cookies. Something almost overwhelming about the sweetness here but it works all the same.<br />
* [[Ryan]] - Peach bourbon beignets. You don't have to be Southern for this to be a comfort, but for me it's always gonna taste like home.<br />
* [[Shane]] - Roasted strawberry thyme shortcake. Homey and sophisticated all at once.<br />
* [[Spencer]] - Strawberry-ginger-rhubarb pie. A lot of zing here, and the patience it takes to get a lattice crust set careful is rewarding work. <br />
* [[Steve]] - Chai spiced apple pie. Bit of zing in this old classic makes it comforting and fresh all at once.<br />
* [[Tag]] - Mango passion fruit custard tart. An absolutely perfect pop of sweetness to bring summer into your life anytime.<br />
* [[Tian-shin]] - Apple chamomile tea cake. A little sweet, a little tart, takes a tried-and-true home remedy and spins it into a wonderful pick me up.<br />
<br />
'''Sometimes Food'''<br />
* [[Alma]] - Marionberry lavender scones. Elegant and sensible at once; I've pulled these out several times when I need a little something unexpected to round out a brunch.<br />
* [[Avi]] - Funfetti cake. This one's a crowd pleaser but whew! Love it, but even my huge sweet tooth needs small servings here. <br />
* [[Erik]] - Peanut butter brownies. Probably get sick if you ate these every day but it's one you should learn early if you're gonna learn anything about baking. Against popular wisdom, still tastes as good now as when I was little. <br />
* [[Gaétan]] - Blueberry mint tartlets. I'm not usually one for mint but my kid loves it and it's really grown on me. I know chocolate's usually the go-to for desserts but I feel like mixing it up some gives it a better chance to shine.<br />
* [[Isra]] - Halva brownies. Don't overlook these; the depth of flavor here is out of this world.<br />
* [[Joshua]] - Pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. I always forget how much I love these until they're in season.<br />
* [[Lael]] - Pumpkin cornbread. Folks might think it's simple but it's anything but. Rich and textured, solid enough to hold its own place in a meal.<br />
* [[Leo]] - Chocolate babka. Always a little unsure if I'm making this right and make a whole entire mess in the process, but gosh is it a treat once I get there. <br />
* [[Melinda]] - Espresso chip muffins. Steady and reliable doesn't have to mean boring; the pop of sweet chocolate and sharp coffee will kick your day into gear.<br />
* [[Marinov]] - Fig, chocolate and almond financiers. Sounds like a lot but these blend it all with flair.<br />
* [[Naomi]] - Zucchini banana cupcake. I know what everyone says soon as you say ''zucchini'' in dessert but trust me on this one. Sweet but not too cloying, got a surprising depth of flavor -- give it a chance and you'll see!<br />
* [[Rasa]] - Coconut lime lavender cupcakes. It's a bit of a jumble, but it might surprise you.<br />
* [[Rasheed]] - Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. A classic; delicious and filling, I can almost pretend they're a meal.<br />
* [[Taylor]] - Pumpkin pecan pie. If you can't choose between two good things, why not both! Sure to be a hit year round.<br />
<br />
'''Needs Adaptation'''<br />
* [[Charles]] - Peanut butter blondies. So close to being satisfying but it always feels like something's missing.<br />
* [[DJ]] - Roasted maple-walnut napoleon. The flavors are familiar but it's been a frustrating challengs getting all those layers right. Gonna have to keep working before I can get these down, but I know they'll be worth it.<br />
* [[Harm]] - White chocolate speculoos merveilleux. Still trying to figure this one out.<br />
* [[Kieow]] - Pineapple cream cheese bundt cake. A little cloying on the sweetness; doesn't play well with my allergies.<br />
* [[Lily]] - Ginger-orange anisette cake. ''Definitely'' not the liqueur for me, but this could be fantastic if I find the right combination. <br />
* [[Marrow]] - Pine nut honey anise pie. A very distinctive combination but not sure I want to revisit it.<br />
* [[Nanami]] - Brown sugar buttermilk spice tart. A bit sweet and a bit sour; gotta keep working on how this fits into my repertoire.<br />
* [[Sarah]] - Strawberry cheesecake. Widespread appeal, but not to my tastes.<br />
<br />
'''Inedible'''<br />
* [[Eric]] - I don't do bacon.<br />
* [[Fury]] - Brown sugar glazed ham. Look, you can dress it up, but I still don't...<br />
* [[Malthus]] - ...doubly not when it's gone spoiled.<br />
<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Trivia<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
*Maintains several blogs with varying levels of activity; one focused on sex & relationship education, one focused on teaching & parenting from a non-authoritarian perspective; one focused on mutant-related issues, and one more personal art blog. Used to have an animal rights one but that hasn't been updated regularly in years.<br />
**Also totally keeps a tumblr though this, like many tumblrs, is unfocused and just full of Whatever On Earth He Feels Like. Pretty pictures. Cute puppies. Religious musings. Random banter with his friends. Cooking tips. Whatever is on his mind. Totally also a sprinkling of things found in all four of the above, but in a far less organized fashion.<br />
*Much like half of his friends, his one-eyed beagle was ''also'' an ex-labrat; some of his animal lib friends nabbed Obie in a raid on an animal testing lab back in his college days. He had been fostering all the beagles that came out of the raid but for perhaps obvious reasons got extra attached to that one and never rehomed him.<br />
*His advisor in high school was Scott Summers which led to no ''end'' of Cyclops jokes when he returned from Prometheus.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Gallery<br />
|-<br />
| style="text-align:center;" |<br />
[[Image:Jax1.jpg|x150px]]<br />
[[Image:Jaxorchid.jpg|x150px]]<br />
|}<br />
|<br />
{|<br />
! Jackson Connor Holland<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{| width="100%" class="infobox" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #000"<br />
| colspan="2" | [[Image:Jax.jpg|x300px|center]]<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Codename'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Sunshine<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Birthdate'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| June 21, 1992<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Species'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Mutant<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Affiliation'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Xavier's<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Alignment'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Effervescent<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Powers'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Photokinetic<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Occupation'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Anarchist<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Registration Status'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Unregistered<br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
{| width="100%" class="infobox" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #000" <br />
! style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" | RP Hooks<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Sugarfairy''' - ''Tends to bake and bake and BAKE. When class is in session, his desserts can be found almost daily in the XS rec room and Teachers' Lounge. His neighbors are frequently plied with desserts, too.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Needlepoint''' - ''Will prick you with so many needles. Inks people and does body piercing at Inkline, a studio in the Lower East Side.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Artsy''' - ''Paints, draws, graffitis. Started an art collective in Brooklyn. ''Looks'' like an artist, too. Often lurks the city at night Arting illicitly. Whether you want art lessons or want to do some art crimes (... or want lessons in doing art crimes!) he might be a good person to hook up with.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Radical''' - ''Anarchist, activist, he's been a vocal and active presence in leftist community for years, whether organizing rallies or teaching workshops or out in the streets during actions as a medic; anyone in anarchist/communist/general leftist community is likely to run into him at Some Point.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''X-Man''' - ''The COLOURFULLEST X-Man. His uniform's bedazzled with a smiling sun. Students at the school probably know the not-so-secret school superheroes; outside the school if you need a rescue or are the kind of person someone might need rescuing ''from'', maybe Your Local Mutant Vigilantes will drop by.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''THAT teacher''' - ''Teaches at XS -- art, baking, and also one of the mandatory Sex Ed classes. Plenty of his students adore him, plenty think he's a total weirdo who should probably be Less Queer, plenty think he is either the most badass or most disturbing teacher at the school since his terrorism arrest. Regardless, he's ''probably'' the teacher students have The Most Opinions about.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Prometheus Bound''' - ''Once a labrat himself, now he spends a good deal of energy trying to find others and free them. On very public record in the news as an ex-labrat and liberator of other labrats. Freedom fighter or terrorist, it is pretty likely folks have some thoughts about him before ever meeting him.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''Saw you at Mount Sinai''' - ''Ex-Catholic, been in the process of converting to Judaism for some years, to the chagrin of some in the local Jewish community and the warm welcome of others. Likely to see you around if you spend time in Jewish circles, especially more radical ones.''<br />
|-<br />
|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| '''May I Have This Dance?''' - ''When there's time, enjoys social swing & ballroom dance. Whether you're just learning or an experienced dancer, he'd probably love a spin around the floor.''<br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
! colspan="2" | Logs<br />
|-<br />
| colspan="2" | {{RP Logs | name = Jackson{{!}}Jax | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Archived Logs'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
{{ RP Logs | name = {{BASEPAGENAME}} | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate | namespace = ArchivedLogs }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
[[Category:Active PCs]][[Category:Xavier's School]][[Category:Mutants]][[Category:X-Men]][[Category:Mendel Clinic]][[Category:Prometheus]]</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Chimaera_Arts&diff=24854Chimaera Arts2023-05-18T22:04:41Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| width="100%"<br />
|-<br />
| width="100%" |<br />
{| width="100%"<br />
|<br />
! Description <br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}This is one of the many converted warehouses in DUMBO, but unlike most of them, it does not have some corporate developer's sign out front promising transformation into luxury condominiums or a boutique shopping center or the latest concept restaurant. The entrance to its grounds is marked by a wildly colorful double helical arch with a steel scroll sign that reads "Chimaera Art Space!" above "chimaera.org" in smaller letters.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}The warehouse is moderately large and heavily decorated with graffiti art in various styles--some of it recognizable as the work of renowned local street artists. A pair of monstrous scrap metal sculptures, perhaps still works in progress, flank the entrance. The building itself has undergone significant renovation recently, complete with wiring, plumbing, and a modular partitioning system. The grounds, too, have been cleaned up, ramshackle fences torn down and rusting detritus removed in favor of reclaimed (and brilliantly repainted) outdoor furniture ringing an impressively engineered firepit.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Structure and Purpose<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Founded in 2014 by a small group of anarchists, Chimaera has outgrown its origins as a small art skills- and equipment-sharing space. The collective that runs Chimaera seeks to provide an affordable space for artists and community members to teach and learn, create art, host events, and build community.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}The Chimaera collective maintains a wide range of art equipment available for community rental, studio space, event space, as well as offering low-cost classes in things from painting and carpentry and glassworking and circus arts to direct action organizing and community first aid.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Chimaera is a worker-owned collective. All members are joint and equal co-owners of the organization and space, and have an equal say in collective decisions.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}It is '''not required''' to be a member of Chimaera to use their space, take their classes, or hold events there -- the overwhelming majority of people who interact with Chimaera will never be members. Becoming a member of Chimaera is either a) an enormous time commitment (think, taking an unpaid second job) or b) very expensive; membership is an ongoing commitment to putting in the necessary work of maintaining the project.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Classes cost money, but are offered on a sliding scale; the same for renting time (or training) on some of the specialized equipment or private studio time. People who want to simply come and hang out, bring their own tools, chill on the couches, sketch, socialize with other artists, are free and welcome to do so without joining.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Space<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}The only standing space the collective maintains is a large converted warehouse in DUMBO with an also-large semi-enclosed courtyard space out back. The warehouse has several dedicated classroom spaces, an industrial kitchen, a second floor with private studio space as well as storage space and bathrooms with showers. There are dedicated work spaces for woodshop, metalsmithing, glassworking, screen printing, and bike repair; there are modular work spaces that can be left wide open for practices such as dance or partitioned for privacy as people work on projects like painting; there is a wide range of prop and fiber arts tools. They have been looking recently into purchasing the adjacent warehouse to expand and have room for a better darkroom as well as a machine/welding shop and digital fabrication.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Chimaera's event space is available for public rental, though they do have a very stringent nondiscrimination policy and will not rent space to anyone whose event or organizational goals contradicts it. Members can also block the renting of the space to anyone they think is too out of line with their general ethos; in practice this tends to mean that outside of apolitical art events/shows/parties a lot of what events they host tend to come from organizations that lean left to ''extremely'' left.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Chimaera '''is not''' an explicitly mutant-run or mutant-targeted space -- mostly just a bunch of punks and hippies and artists from all sorts of demographic backgrounds. They do have a number of extremely high-profile mutants and mutant activists among their members, which has gotten them A Reputation in the community for being a safe place to hold mutant-friendly events, but the majority of Chimaera's members ICly are still human.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Important Events<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
*Evolympics - A series of mutant-only athletic games meant to raise funds for Evolve Cafe.<br />
*Something Different - An art show specifically meant to showcase the talents of obvious mutants.<br />
*Artfight - Monthly art event, a kind of dueling live art show sort of like a cross between Pictionary and pro wrestling.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Roster<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
*Members<br />
**[[Dawson]]<br />
**[[Jax]] - Co-founder<br />
**[[Marinov]]<br />
**[[Ryan]]<br />
**[[Steve]]<br />
**[[Tag]] - Co-founder<br />
*Comrades<br />
**[[B]]<br />
**[[Lyric]]<br />
**[[Taylor]]<br />
|}<br />
|<br />
{|<br />
! Chimaera Arts<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{| width="100%" class="infobox" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #000"<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Neighborhood'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| DUMBO, Brooklyn<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Type'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Arts Co-Op<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Hours of Operation'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| n/a<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Mutant-friendliness'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| A+<br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
{| <br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
! colspan="2" | Logs<br />
|-<br />
| colspan="2" | {{RP Logs | name = {{BASEPAGENAME}} | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Archived Logs'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
{{ RP Logs | name = {{BASEPAGENAME}} | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate | namespace = ArchivedLogs }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
[[Category:Places]][[Category:Factions]][[Category:Chimaera Arts]]</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Sword_and_SHIELD&diff=24823Logs:Sword and SHIELD2023-05-16T02:22:18Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Fury]], [[Jax]], [[Shane]]<br />
| summary = "I'mma go pour myself a drink or five and count my blessings it wasn't a gun for you to keep under your pillow." (Followed by [[Logs:A Light in Dark Places|preparing for a quest]].)<br />
| gamedate = 2023-05-13<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Detention Facility - [[SHIELD Headquarters]] - Times Square<br />
| categories = Fury, Jax, Shane, Humans, Mutants, SHIELD Headquarters, SHIELD, Sunbeam<br />
| log = <br />
<br />
It's late -- late enough that probably, much of the non-essential personnel have gone home. Probably, the prisoners here are largely asleep. Probably, visiting hours are ''supposed'' to be over. Probably, there shouldn't be a small black and silver hoverbike gliding its quiet way down to alight on SHIELD's rooftop. Probably it shouldn't be dispensing one tiny blue rider bearing one even tinier robotic cicada and one long sword. ''Probably''.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately for one Nicholas J. Fury, it is just going to be That Kind Of A Night.<br />
<br />
Shane -- crisply pressed dress shirt, pale vest and slacks, tie in an impeccable trinity knot -- only stops briefly at the door, the little robot cicada skittering over it shortly before he actually ''enters''. He has to wrangle the sword in its scabbard into a slightly more ergonomic position for his small size before trotting down the stairs, toward the detention floor, casting only a brief glance to the security cameras as he goes. He pushes the next door open with a shoulder and a small ''hngh'', resettling his sword Again as he heads off towards Jax's room. Knock? Knock, knock? "Special delivery!"<br />
<br />
No alarms are going off, no sign at all SHIELD's highly sophisticated electronic security system has noticed Shane's trespassing. All the same, when he gets down to the detainment level, Fury is sitting right smack in the middle of the common room couch in all his black-on-black dustered solemnity. When Shane just continues past him to Jax's door his eye narrows, ever so slightly. He clears his throat pointedly and rises to follow him. "Mister Holland," he rumbles, low and impatient and like a man who badly needs a good night's sleep, "you just won Leo Fitz some money in the 'next unauthortized visitor' pool." He crosses his arms and looks suitably unimpressed, though he does not raise his voice. "It is the middle of the ''god''damn night. You got some news so urgent you couldn't text or email or ''video chat'' him about?"<br />
<br />
"Shane, sugar, I was just on with your sister." Jax, on the other hand, looks ''wide'' awake when he opens the door. Kind of like a man who may as well be here, letting in his son in The Middle Of The Goddamn Night, where else does ''he'' have to be, what else does ''he'' have to be doing in the morning. In bright counterpoint to Fury he's in a vivid green tee with neon pink lettering splashed across the chest ("NOT GAY AS IN HAPPY, QUEER AS IN FUCK THE POLICE"), iridescent purple-blue-green colorshift makeup, his kilt black with rainbow paneling between each pleat, mismatched vividly colorful knee-high socks. His eyepatch has ''been'' pink to match the lettering on his shirt, a peacock feather embroidered in it, but it shifts now -- sprouting instead one wide googly eye which turns to regard Fury. Unsteadily. Kind of wobbly, as is its nature. "Aw," he says with a (... mildly) apologetic crinkle of his nose, dip of his head (the eye remains, bobbling, but pointed still at Fury as his head tips down), "ain't like he's troublin' none of your folks to have to let him in, right? We're gettin' halfway to June, I won't even be sleeping at ''all'' before long. Middle on the night don't mean much. If you're feeling run down," he suggests, earnestly, "you could try photosynthesizing, some."<br />
<br />
Shane doesn't startle at Fury's pointed throat-clearing; doesn't seem surprised in the least at his appearance. He bonks his head lightly up against his father's arm with a soft flutter of gills, only then turning. Rising up slightly on his toes, lifting the ridge of his brows and baring many -- many -- many of his teeth in a sunny smile that splits much of his face disconcertingly wide open. "Tell him he should share, then. Was ''almost'' B but she got busy. -- Calling you, ''apparently'', she's supposed to be working." Kind of half-turning back to Jax, here, before he glances back to Fury. He hefts the scabbard off his shoulder, explaining to the Director with a tone of ''great'' patience: "You can't deliver a sword over ''video'' chat." But then, with a ''suspicious'' curiosity: "Unless y'all have invented that here? If he has I'll take that over my cut of his bet."<br />
<br />
Fury's resting scowl does not recede at Jax's suggestion, nor advance at Shane's disturbingly toothy smile. "You should worry less about troubling me or my folks and more about DHS finding out and pitching an almighty fit. You think I give a rat's ass when you get visitors? It'd look bad for me but go a lot worse for you." He must be even more tired than he looks because it takes him a moment and a slow blink to catch up to Shane's explanation. "What the -- did you say a ''sword?''" He narrows his eye at the scabbard. "You can''not'' have a motherfucking sword in here!"<br />
<br />
"You 'bout to rat yourself out to DHS?" Jax asks Fury, wide-eyed (albeit, not so wide as the other, wider, bobblier eye.) "I sure weren't planning to tell 'em. I admit I don't ''ask'' none of my folks to come 'round this hour -- ''been'' asking 'em to try an' keep proper hours as fits y'all's schedules -- but this past week things been getting a little hectic on account of Spence's -- well." His lips compress, and he doesn't finish this. He ''does'' peer around at Shane's back, now, and the googly eye vanishes. Replaces itself with just one single wide cartoon eye, which makes a very startled blink-blink-blink. "...I think he quite clearly ''do'' got a sword, sir." ''His'' brows are creasing. Head tipping just a little to the side. "Sweetie pie, ''why'' do you got a sword? That ain't even one of your fencing things."<br />
<br />
"You've been at SHIELD ''all'' this time." Shane still has the very patient tone of someone who doesn't think he should ''have'' to be explaining all this, really, but, out of sheer magnanimity, will help out. This time he's aiming it at Jax rather than Fury, at least. "I think it's bordering on criminal that nobody's had a sword yet. I'd give it to him --" He's tipping a hand out toward Fury, "but he already ''runs'' SHIELD so that really seems unbalanced. Like, if you ever have to save his ''life'' again this will be picture-perfect, and if you ever have to have a dramatic nemesis show down, it'll be -- picture-perfect." Dropped in like a trivial postscript: "Besides, if I gave it to him, Magneto would kill me."<br />
<br />
"You think I'm an idiot? Of course not, but sooner or later some two-bit reporter with a drone will." Some of Fury's more visible vexation bleeds away. "Look, I ''am'' sorry your kid's missing, honest, just... Try to let security know, at least. And park somewhere ''discreet'' for God's sake, we got a whole garage down there." He runs a hand over his smooth pate, not evidently too impressed or put off by Shane's sword-and-shield talk, but then he comes up short. "I don't need a sword," he says mildly, not entirely successful in his attempt to contain his sudden keenness, "but why the hell would he kill you for giving me one? He the mutant sword distribution police?"<br />
<br />
"If the news was gonna they probably woulda already 'roundable the tenth time Dusk Batmanned himself over, Luci's probably --" Jax starts, but then stops, mouth quirking slightly to the side, and reconsiders whatever he was about to say with a faint blush that flutters more in the tinge of rose around him than in his cheeks. It shimmers, fades away -- in it's place now a puzzled frown, a quick-darted glance to Fury. Then back to Sword, which is starting to take on a faintly luminous glow. "Oh, I reckon he wouldn't touch ''you'' none if that sword got --" He clears his throat, tries a ''new'' sentence once more. "What is the sword for?"<br />
<br />
"Idiot?" Shane blinks, first one clear set of inner eyelids, sideways, and then the blue pair. "He thinks you're a cop." Finally, he is wresting the scabbard -- pretty ''awkwardly'', still, even carrying it slantways the large sword has been tricky to carry this whole ''time'' -- off of his back to hold it out to Jax. "I ''told'' you. It's for you. I mean, not for fighting Fury that was total bullshit." His forehead creases, heavy ridge pulling downward as he looks to Fury. "Why would he be a sword cop? It's a ''present'', he ''made'' it for Pa. -- Is he really," he's directing this slightly quizzical question to Fury, by all appearances in earnest, "not allowed to have a sword? It's just, you know he's like -- ''full'' of lasers, right? This is like --" The razor-sharp claws on one webbed hand are extending -- just long enough to be demonstrative before retracting again, "-- when they only let us have plastic knives in Prometheus."<br />
<br />
Fury's eye narrows again, but he does not dispute Shane's evaluation. "Magneto, the Master of Magnetism, made him a sword," he says all of this with an air of only mild incredulity. "You know, I didn't buy Malthus saying y'all was in cahoots and I'm still not sure I buy it now, but that'll raise some eyebrows for sure." He rubs the bridge of his nose. "I wasn't born yesterday, I know damn well he could walk out of here completely unarmed if he wanted. I also know he ain't sup''posed'' to have no motherfucking ''sword'' in here on account of all this --" He gestures around, at the common room, the hallway, at Jax's suite. "-- is theoretically us standing in for federal detainment. Just --" He shakes his head. "You know what, I never saw it. This never happened. If someone at some point broke in here to bestow a Magneto-forged blade upon Jackson Holland, it's news to me." He checks his (analogue!) (also black) watch. "I'mma go pour myself a drink or five and count my blessings it wasn't a gun for you to keep under your pillow."<br />
<br />
"I don't go ''cahootin'''," Jax answers, only ''slightly'' indignantly, as he takes the sword from Shane. "''My'' hootin's been real open, s'why I'm here to begin with. That's part of the problem, you know. You done seen my room --" He's gesturing -- with the pommel of the sword -- back towards the room behind him, "I'm running out of space for the things folks been sending me now from far an' wide after they heard 'bout all this. Guess it was only matter of time before Erik Lensherr himself seen fit to send a thank-you-for-freeing-them-folks trinket."<br />
<br />
He's hefting said 'trinket' thoughtfully, now. Giving the scabbard a curious look -- it's a simple thing, a wooden sheath wrapped in brown cactus leather by someone who clearly doesn't actually know how to work with the material and topped with a steel bracket where it meets the hilt of the sword inside. Gleaming strands of wire are inlayed -- no, ''woven'', into the leather, in patterns of Celtic knots up through the center. He's slow to draw it, slow to heft it, the soft wash of glimmer-glow that plays along its length ''definitely'' not coming from the hallway lights overhead.<br />
<br />
The sword itself gleams -- finely polished steel blade, both sides sharp, solid and ''long'' at five feet from hilt to point. The blade is fairly thin for a longsword, and tapers consistently to the point at the end -- clearly a blade for running someone through. The hilt (wrapped in scraps of cactus leather again, sewn to itself by more steel wire) is a further six and a half inches including the pommel, which bears a dragonfly with wings spread in flight etched on each side. The crossguard slopes forward, a V shape pointing away from the wielder, lacking the quatrefoils that might otherwise evoke a number of swords hanging on the walls of Xavier's School.<br />
<br />
"''Huh''." From the pommel ''another'' dragonfly is unfurling itself from the finely smithed one, polished steel as well, taking wing to flutter through the hall; it grows bigger as it flies until it flits back around and settles down, wings folding and reshaping themselves -- wrapped now into a dragonfly-motifed helmet, burnished bright and fitted to Jax's head. He turns the sword in his grip, the glow now brightening ''just'' shy of painful to look at. "Think I might call it Sunbeam."<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:A_Light_in_Dark_Places&diff=24822Logs:A Light in Dark Places2023-05-16T02:21:45Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Jax, Lucien, Matt, Ryan | summary = "The gods themselves would fear to cross us." (set in the wake of Logs:Sword and SHIELD|a special delive..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Jax]], [[Lucien]], [[Matt]], [[Ryan]]<br />
| summary = "The gods themselves would fear to cross us." (set in the wake of [[Logs:Sword and SHIELD|a special delivery]].)<br />
| gamedate = 2023-05-15<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Detention Facility - Jax's Suite - [[SHIELD Headquarters]] - Times Square<br />
| categories = Jax, Lucien, Matt, Ryan, SHIELD, Prometheus, Mutants<br />
| log = <br />
A bit larger than the other detainee's rooms, this one has been converted from a small corner lounge for the guest rooms. Tall windows with a southern exposure let in copious sunlight if the unnecessarily high-tech curtains are drawn. The sitting area is small but comfortable and the sleeping area beyond it is screened off with interior partitions. There's a bulky desk in one corner with a computer rigged up nicely for video calls and a kitchenette tucked into another. A video comm panel by the front door allows for quick communication with both in-person visitors just outside the door or the security staff down the hall.<br />
<br />
The room decorations have been proliferating wildly -- the bed is now home to a menagerie of stuffed animals, mostly all Very New except for one old much-loved Cheer Bear perched atop the pillow. Greenery spills over from pots by the window ledge and hanging baskets. Art in many people's varied styles has been hung on the walls, with numerous of Jax's own sketches -- portraits of friends mingling with anthro characters and surreal cityscapes and nightmarish body horror, a large drawing of a stained glass window bearing an image of Apollo done in traditional church-window style -- tacked up on the desk. A number of stained-glass hangings refract colorful light in from the expensive windows.<br />
<br />
It was late, and it has gotten no earlier. Or it's gotten a lot earlier. Kinda a matter of perspective. It's ''definitely'' not a respectable time to be awake, though, and so it's a pretty safe bet that Fury's night is ''not'' going any better, because right about now there's a bigass dragonfly munching her way through a bigass tray of hamburger meat on SHIELD's rooftop, and not long before now, one of the most recognizable celebrities on the planet dismounted her and made ''his'' way into the detention wing at SHIELD.<br />
<br />
Let's hope that by this point Fury is too drunk to care.<br />
<br />
At this ''exact'' moment, Ryan Black is perched on Jax's desk, in well-tailored black jeans and dark purple tee (it reads 'Social Justice Bard' and, beneath, 'rallying the revolution'), sturdy purple Doc Martens. His languid posture -- boot propped on the desk chair, elbow propped back against the hutch -- is nothing noteworthy, but the gleaming longsword in one hand is. "Tea?" It's a very critical question. "How you gonna go just bring ''tea'' when we got a whole quest to do, tch!" He is pointing the sword, kind of lackadaisically in contrast to his critical tone, toward the door. "Jax just got plucked out of obscurity by the Hand of Destiny y'all not even ''half'' prepared. Next you gonna tell us you ''drove'' here, not even proper steeds at all. Jax," His head is rolling to the side, his tone ''very'' serious, "we might need a new party. Here I was, ''ready'' to turn my long held role over --" Despite professing his ''total'' lack of faith he is, in fact, now, stripping off his shirt, shifting the sword from one hand to the other so that he can remove it properly and toss -- shirt, ''thankfully'', not sword -- towards their newest guests. "And all they bring for our journey is tea."<br />
<br />
The room overall has been wildly transformed, a dark and tangled forest overgrowing the furniture -- vines dropping low to snatch with gleaming-sharp thorns at clothes as they enter, strange dark-winged shapes fluttering through the trees, odd shadows scurrying beneath the bed, sharp-toothed creatures with malice in their eyes clawing and scrabbling at the windows, leaving bloodstains in their wake.<br />
<br />
Jax, in contrast, looks terribly prosaic in bright green tee -- its text matches Ryan's in style, 'SOCIAL JUSTICE PSION' in large capital letters, and under that in cursive, 'changing the way you think' -- and black kilt with rainbow paneling between the pleats. He has been flopped face-down at the edge of his bed, arms hooked over the edge of the mattress and chin resting on his hands. He clicks his teeth absently against a lip ring. Taps fingers lightly against the comforter.<br />
<br />
The sword in Ryan's hand scintillates, brighter than even the deadly-sharp steel should be glinting, rays of light coruscating from it to drive back some of the shadowy vines that are snaking hungrily out from the tangle of trees. Ryan sprouts, for a moment, a full set of exquisitely-wrought lightweight armor.<br />
<br />
Jax shrugs a shoulder. "Oh, I think we'll find what we need. Somewhere along the way. Kinda have to, what other choice we got?"<br />
<br />
Who knows what Very Urgent Text has summoned the Tessiers here at this ungodly hour. Lucien looks -- as put together as he generally does, actually, if casually so in soft blue short-sleeved henley and neatly tailored jeans. He does, as observed, have a thermos of tea in hand, but had not ''quite'' gotten around to sipping it when he entered. Instead he is looking -- not at the forest, not at the murderbeasts outside the window, ''that'' is par for the course. Not ''too'' much at Ryan stripping, that, also, more or less par for the course. His eyes drift to the sword. To Jackson. To the sword. To Ryan. To the ''sword''. "We took a cab," is what he first says, one hand lifting to press forefinger and thumb to the hollows of his eyes. For a moment he rubs there, slowly, then passes the tea off to his brother. He is shedding his shoes even before he starts crossing the room, nudging Jackson aside as he drops himself heavily into the bed. "{You will have to keep minutes, tonight.} Our new bard can fill me in on what dragons we will be slaying. Once the ''sun'' is up."<br />
<br />
Matt, in an Elphaba-green tee with the classical silhouette of a broom-riding witch passing before a full moon, captioned with 'Yes, I can drive stick' and soft, threadbare jeans, looks more asleep than his brother when they enter, though seems to take the scene they find there in easier stride. "I know you didn't call us here to dis our Potion of Speed." He quaffs said potion deeply and hesitates an almost imperceptibly brief moment before stripping off his own shirt to don Ryan's, offering the one he's just shed back. "You can be the witch, then, unless you are invoking the Law of Inverse Armor to distract our foes. What," he's finally getting around to asking, curious and rapidly shedding his somnolence, "are we questing for?" He sinks into the chair at the desk, not dislodging Ryan from his footrest but draping himself against his leg instead. He studies the sword, brows furrowing, though his curiosity is entirely untroubled when he says, "That's...a real sword. Did you get a visit from the Lady of the Lake?"<br />
<br />
"Called you here for a quest. I thought we made that pretty clear." Unfortunately for Matt's shirt, Ryan props himself up ''just'' enough to catch it on the point of the -- very! pointy! ''very!'' ''real!'' -- sword. Fortunately for Matt, Ryan has actually been sober since Spence vanished, and there will ''probably'' be a new shirt on his doorstep as soon as one can reasonably be delivered. "Sword's Jax's. Magneto smithed it for him. ''Pretty'' sure we're questing for vengeance." Ryan tips the recently-skewered shirt delicately onto the ground and, at least, slides the sword carefully back into its simple wooden sheath ''before'' handing the scabbard down to Matt. "I look like a fucking witch to you, man? It is role swap AU tonight." He is beckoning, lazily, with one finger to Jax, his other hand dropping to curl fingers idly through Matt's hair.<br />
<br />
Jax moves himself willingly when Lucien arrives, shifting himself up enough to allow some manner of comfortable sleeping spot. "Fury weren't none too pleased 'bout bringing a sword in here but it seems a bit silly to fuss, well -- considering." His eyepatch shifts, a smiling-sun emoji beaming cheerfully from it, then blinking -- so quick it's easy to miss, into 💥 -- then back to the bright happy 🌞 once more. "Magneto did forge it and far as I can tell that's 'bout as close as I'm ever gonna get to an actual Wizard handing me a magical weapon." Obliging Ryan's beckoning, he's peeling off ''his'' Psion tee, tossing it to the audiokinetic before draping himself back down beside Lucien where he sleeps. "Missing children, magical weapon, wizard, I'd say we done got ourselves a quest."<br />
<br />
"Lucky for our quest, I have venge enough to spare, in the unlikely event anyone should run low." Matt accepts the scabbard gingerly and turns it over in his hands. "Mag''neto''. Goodness, but that certainly is a statement! This is for disposing of whoever took the children, then?" His terror and his rage alike are strangely--though not so very strangely for ''him'', really--muted and hollow. "Does ''Fury'' know who made this? If so I'd wager he's desperately trying to trace it back to its maker as we speak, little help though ''your'' phone is like to be." There's smugness here, and fondness, too. "I'm assuming he didn't soar up to your window to bestow this." He leans into Ryan's hand, catlike, and there's a trace of solace threaded into his words when he adds, "'May it be a light to you in dark places', as it were."<br />
<br />
Ryan reaches up and snags the shirt out of the air but doesn't bother to put it ''on'', pfft. Just lies back again, kind of drapes an arm over Matt's shoulder. Kind of drapes Shirt aesthetically over his own shoulder. Just ''enough'' shirt to highlight exactly how little shirt he has, though admittedly the twisted network of knotted-thick scars gracing his torso are less beguiling than Jax's vivid panoply of art. "Jax doesn't know the first fucking thing about using a sword, do we think that's -- gonna be a problem? You all have more genre savvy here than I got, I was pretty much only allowed to read the Bible until I graduated high school."<br />
<br />
"You didn't never graduate high school." Jax eyes the sword in its sheath pensively. "I'm pretty sure part of the quest is the learning. Besides, I know where the pointy bit goes, that's the real thing. And if someone's done ''took'' the children --" He doesn't finish this thought, but the cold fury beneath his voice is palpable, and not ''just'' to Ryan. "--Shane brung it in, anyhow, not that his phone'll help much neither. Fury was ''not'' real pleased about midnight sword delivery and ''not'' real pleased about midnight ''Magneto'' sword delivery but --" His shoulders tense, the strange forest-scape around the room melting into just shadows. He curls back, slightly, against where Lucien lies. "Been a real weird time. Someone out there wants to show me they got our back through this nightmare I'm gonna take up that arms an' keep moving." His eye darts to Matt, and his smile returns, somewhat ''fiercer'' than before. "I'm calling it Sunbeam."<br />
<br />
"Oh, ''not'' knowing how to use the sword when you receive it is ''absolutely'' essential for a Chosen Hero." Matt sounds incredibly serious on this point, balancing the sword across his lap now as if his arms are too tired to hold it up, though maybe it was just to one hand to take his tea back up and the other to indicate his sleeping brother with a flourish. "Your fellow adventurers will help you learn as you go, though this isn't ''quite'' Luci's style of swording. Dai's either, really. Tian-shin, maybe?" His head tilts and looks up at Ryan critically, then adjusts Shirt to drape ''just'' so. "You also can just shoot lasers from it, Link-style." He lifts up the sword--scabbard and all--and levels it at one of the monsters at the window. Jax can feel the deft touch of Matt's power twining through his to illuse a dazzling pulse of light rippling along Sunbeam and then speeding out to strike the also illusory monster. "Someone out there having your back is excellent, also, but the kinds of mortals who would rally to Sunbeam if you but gave the word? The gods themselves would fear to cross us."<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Sword_and_SHIELD&diff=24801Logs:Sword and SHIELD2023-05-14T21:35:25Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Fury, Jax, Shane | summary = "I'mma go pour myself a drink or five and count my blessings it wasn't a gun for you to keep under your pillow." | ga..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Fury]], [[Jax]], [[Shane]]<br />
| summary = "I'mma go pour myself a drink or five and count my blessings it wasn't a gun for you to keep under your pillow."<br />
| gamedate = 2023-05-13<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Detention Facility - [[SHIELD Headquarters]] - Times Square<br />
| categories = Fury, Jax, Shane, Humans, Mutants, SHIELD Headquarters, SHIELD, Sunbeam<br />
| log = <br />
<br />
It's late -- late enough that probably, much of the non-essential personnel have gone home. Probably, the prisoners here are largely asleep. Probably, visiting hours are ''supposed'' to be over. Probably, there shouldn't be a small black and silver hoverbike gliding its quiet way down to alight on SHIELD's rooftop. Probably it shouldn't be dispensing one tiny blue rider bearing one even tinier robotic cicada and one long sword. ''Probably''.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately for one Nicholas J. Fury, it is just going to be That Kind Of A Night.<br />
<br />
Shane -- crisply pressed dress shirt, pale vest and slacks, tie in an impeccable trinity knot -- only stops briefly at the door, the little robot cicada skittering over it shortly before he actually ''enters''. He has to wrangle the sword in its scabbard into a slightly more ergonomic position for his small size before trotting down the stairs, toward the detention floor, casting only a brief glance to the security cameras as he goes. He pushes the next door open with a shoulder and a small ''hngh'', resettling his sword Again as he heads off towards Jax's room. Knock? Knock, knock? "Special delivery!"<br />
<br />
No alarms are going off, no sign at all SHIELD's highly sophisticated electronic security system has noticed Shane's trespassing. All the same, when he gets down to the detainment level, Fury is sitting right smack in the middle of the common room couch in all his black-on-black dustered solemnity. When Shane just continues past him to Jax's door his eye narrows, ever so slightly. He clears his throat pointedly and rises to follow him. "Mister Holland," he rumbles, low and impatient and like a man who badly needs a good night's sleep, "you just won Leo Fitz some money in the 'next unauthortized visitor' pool." He crosses his arms and looks suitably unimpressed, though he does not raise his voice. "It is the middle of the ''god''damn night. You got some news so urgent you couldn't text or email or ''video chat'' him about?"<br />
<br />
"Shane, sugar, I was just on with your sister." Jax, on the other hand, looks ''wide'' awake when he opens the door. Kind of like a man who may as well be here, letting in his son in The Middle Of The Goddamn Night, where else does ''he'' have to be, what else does ''he'' have to be doing in the morning. In bright counterpoint to Fury he's in a vivid green tee with neon pink lettering splashed across the chest ("NOT GAY AS IN HAPPY, QUEER AS IN FUCK THE POLICE"), iridescent purple-blue-green colorshift makeup, his kilt black with rainbow paneling between each pleat, mismatched vividly colorful knee-high socks. His eyepatch has ''been'' pink to match the lettering on his shirt, a peacock feather embroidered in it, but it shifts now -- sprouting instead one wide googly eye which turns to regard Fury. Unsteadily. Kind of wobbly, as is its nature. "Aw," he says with a (... mildly) apologetic crinkle of his nose, dip of his head (the eye remains, bobbling, but pointed still at Fury as his head tips down), "ain't like he's troublin' none of your folks to have to let him in, right? We're gettin' halfway to June, I won't even be sleeping at ''all'' before long. Middle on the night don't mean much. If you're feeling run down," he suggests, earnestly, "you could try photosynthesizing, some."<br />
<br />
Shane doesn't startle at Fury's pointed throat-clearing; doesn't seem surprised in the least at his appearance. He bonks his head lightly up against his father's arm with a soft flutter of gills, only then turning. Rising up slightly on his toes, lifting the ridge of his brows and baring many -- many -- many of his teeth in a sunny smile that splits much of his face disconcertingly wide open. "Tell him he should share, then. Was ''almost'' B but she got busy. -- Calling you, ''apparently'', she's supposed to be working." Kind of half-turning back to Jax, here, before he glances back to Fury. He hefts the scabbard off his shoulder, explaining to the Director with a tone of ''great'' patience: "You can't deliver a sword over ''video'' chat." But then, with a ''suspicious'' curiosity: "Unless y'all have invented that here? If he has I'll take that over my cut of his bet."<br />
<br />
Fury's resting scowl does not recede at Jax's suggestion, nor advance at Shane's disturbingly toothy smile. "You should worry less about troubling me or my folks and more about DHS finding out and pitching an almighty fit. You think I give a rat's ass when you get visitors? It'd look bad for me but go a lot worse for you." He must be even more tired than he looks because it takes him a moment and a slow blink to catch up to Shane's explanation. "What the -- did you say a ''sword?''" He narrows his eye at the scabbard. "You can''not'' have a motherfucking sword in here!"<br />
<br />
"You 'bout to rat yourself out to DHS?" Jax asks Fury, wide-eyed (albeit, not so wide as the other, wider, bobblier eye.) "I sure weren't planning to tell 'em. I admit I don't ''ask'' none of my folks to come 'round this hour -- ''been'' asking 'em to try an' keep proper hours as fits y'all's schedules -- but this past week things been getting a little hectic on account of Spence's -- well." His lips compress, and he doesn't finish this. He ''does'' peer around at Shane's back, now, and the googly eye vanishes. Replaces itself with just one single wide cartoon eye, which makes a very startled blink-blink-blink. "...I think he quite clearly ''do'' got a sword, sir." ''His'' brows are creasing. Head tipping just a little to the side. "Sweetie pie, ''why'' do you got a sword? That ain't even one of your fencing things."<br />
<br />
"You've been at SHIELD ''all'' this time." Shane still has the very patient tone of someone who doesn't think he should ''have'' to be explaining all this, really, but, out of sheer magnanimity, will help out. This time he's aiming it at Jax rather than Fury, at least. "I think it's bordering on criminal that nobody's had a sword yet. I'd give it to him --" He's tipping a hand out toward Fury, "but he already ''runs'' SHIELD so that really seems unbalanced. Like, if you ever have to save his ''life'' again this will be picture-perfect, and if you ever have to have a dramatic nemesis show down, it'll be -- picture-perfect." Dropped in like a trivial postscript: "Besides, if I gave it to him, Magneto would kill me."<br />
<br />
"You think I'm an idiot? Of course not, but sooner or later some two-bit reporter with a drone will." Some of Fury's more visible vexation bleeds away. "Look, I ''am'' sorry your kid's missing, honest, just... Try to let security know, at least. And park somewhere ''discreet'' for God's sake, we got a whole garage down there." He runs a hand over his smooth pate, not evidently too impressed or put off by Shane's sword-and-shield talk, but then he comes up short. "I don't need a sword," he says mildly, not entirely successful in his attempt to contain his sudden keenness, "but why the hell would he kill you for giving me one? He the mutant sword distribution police?"<br />
<br />
"If the news was gonna they probably woulda already 'roundable the tenth time Dusk Batmanned himself over, Luci's probably --" Jax starts, but then stops, mouth quirking slightly to the side, and reconsiders whatever he was about to say with a faint blush that flutters more in the tinge of rose around him than in his cheeks. It shimmers, fades away -- in it's place now a puzzled frown, a quick-darted glance to Fury. Then back to Sword, which is starting to take on a faintly luminous glow. "Oh, I reckon he wouldn't touch ''you'' none if that sword got --" He clears his throat, tries a ''new'' sentence once more. "What is the sword for?"<br />
<br />
"Idiot?" Shane blinks, first one clear set of inner eyelids, sideways, and then the blue pair. "He thinks you're a cop." Finally, he is wresting the scabbard -- pretty ''awkwardly'', still, even carrying it slantways the large sword has been tricky to carry this whole ''time'' -- off of his back to hold it out to Jax. "I ''told'' you. It's for you. I mean, not for fighting Fury that was total bullshit." His forehead creases, heavy ridge pulling downward as he looks to Fury. "Why would he be a sword cop? It's a ''present'', he ''made'' it for Pa. -- Is he really," he's directing this slightly quizzical question to Fury, by all appearances in earnest, "not allowed to have a sword? It's just, you know he's like -- ''full'' of lasers, right? This is like --" The razor-sharp claws on one webbed hand are extending -- just long enough to be demonstrative before retracting again, "-- when they only let us have plastic knives in Prometheus."<br />
<br />
Fury's eye narrows again, but he does not dispute Shane's evaluation. "Magneto, the Master of Magnetism, made him a sword," he says all of this with an air of only mild incredulity. "You know, I didn't buy Malthus saying y'all was in cahoots and I'm still not sure I buy it now, but that'll raise some eyebrows for sure." He rubs the bridge of his nose. "I wasn't born yesterday, I know damn well he could walk out of here completely unarmed if he wanted. I also know he ain't sup''posed'' to have no motherfucking ''sword'' in here on account of all this --" He gestures around, at the common room, the hallway, at Jax's suite. "-- is theoretically us standing in for federal detainment. Just --" He shakes his head. "You know what, I never saw it. This never happened. If someone at some point broke in here to bestow a Magneto-forged blade upon Jackson Holland, it's news to me." He checks his (analogue!) (also black) watch. "I'mma go pour myself a drink or five and count my blessings it wasn't a gun for you to keep under your pillow."<br />
<br />
"I don't go ''cahootin'''," Jax answers, only ''slightly'' indignantly, as he takes the sword from Shane. "''My'' hootin's been real open, s'why I'm here to begin with. That's part of the problem, you know. You done seen my room --" He's gesturing -- with the pommel of the sword -- back towards the room behind him, "I'm running out of space for the things folks been sending me now from far an' wide after they heard 'bout all this. Guess it was only matter of time before Erik Lensherr himself seen fit to send a thank-you-for-freeing-them-folks trinket."<br />
<br />
He's hefting said 'trinket' thoughtfully, now. Giving the scabbard a curious look -- it's a simple thing, a wooden sheath wrapped in brown cactus leather by someone who clearly doesn't actually know how to work with the material and topped with a steel bracket where it meets the hilt of the sword inside. Gleaming strands of wire are inlayed -- no, ''woven'', into the leather, in patterns of Celtic knots up through the center. He's slow to draw it, slow to heft it, the soft wash of glimmer-glow that plays along its length ''definitely'' not coming from the hallway lights overhead.<br />
<br />
The sword itself gleams -- finely polished steel blade, both sides sharp, solid and ''long'' at five feet from hilt to point. The blade is fairly thin for a longsword, and tapers consistently to the point at the end -- clearly a blade for running someone through. The hilt (wrapped in scraps of cactus leather again, sewn to itself by more steel wire) is a further six and a half inches including the pommel, which bears a dragonfly with wings spread in flight etched on each side. The crossguard slopes forward, a V shape pointing away from the wielder, lacking the quatrefoils that might otherwise evoke a number of swords hanging on the walls of Xavier's School.<br />
<br />
"''Huh''." From the pommel ''another'' dragonfly is unfurling itself from the finely smithed one, polished steel as well, taking wing to flutter through the hall; it grows bigger as it flies until it flits back around and settles down, wings folding and reshaping themselves -- wrapped now into a dragonfly-motifed helmet, burnished bright and fitted to Jax's head. He turns the sword in his grip, the glow now brightening ''just'' shy of painful to look at. "Think I might call it Sunbeam."<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Bones_Not_Bombs&diff=24718Logs:Bones Not Bombs2023-05-02T01:54:19Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Jax, Lucien, Steve | summary = "Expediting the downfall of your enemies through incompetence on an unforeseeable scale. Audacious, but intriguing...."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Jax]], [[Lucien]], [[Steve]]<br />
| summary = "Expediting the downfall of your enemies through incompetence on an unforeseeable scale. Audacious, but intriguing."<br />
| gamedate = 2023-04-30<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Rooftop - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Jax, Steve, Lucien, NPC-Flèche, NPC-Obie, NPC-Zenobia, Mutants, Mutates, SHIELD<br />
| log = <br />
<br />
There's an unexpected oasis at the top of this gleaming high-rise, the whole of it carpeted in thick, soft, layered ground cover of sedums, grass, and moss. A small, carefully manicured grove serves as the centerpiece, with benches, tables and chairs scattered around in the shade. Beside it a professionally landscaped garden boasts a pond and quite a few planters that either used to hold plants or still hold dying ones. The greenhouse is somewhat sparsely and eclectically populated with tropical plants, flanked by garden beds even more sparsely planted. An open lawn on the side overlooking Times Square makes a great spot for a picnic. The otherwise unsightly structure housing the roof access, a single stall bathroom, and tool shed has been covered on three sides with turf and shaped into a little promontory offering a breathtaking view of the city.<br />
<br />
It's warm up here, bright, and on the SHIELD rooftop three dogs are -- okay, no, ''two'' dogs are romping, massive brindle pitbull and sleek shepherd mutt having themselves a ''real'' proper wrassle. The greying one-eyed beagle that snuffles along pleasantly in the wake of their tumbling seems pleased enough to be up here, ''maybe'' he's even excited that the playing is happening -- certainly his tail wags faster when he happens to bump into the other two -- but the bumping is really as far as his successful engagement seems to go. Occasionally he does try to pounce. Usually it is in the wrong direction. This does not dampen his good spirits.<br />
<br />
Over in the grove, Jax is perched on the table rather than at it, in colorfully flower-patched overalls, rainbow-and-silvery-glitter Chucks, a bright red tee shirt screen printed with 'ALL MY HEROES HAVE FBI FILES' around an image of a monkey wrench. His hands rest flat on the table beside him, and the large hat on his head -- currently straw, currently festooned with large sunflowers, though this is indecisively waffling together with his sunglasses, going through several incarnations before the glasses settle on a large red-rimmed pair with mirror lenses, the flowers showy red amaryllis -- sits just slightly askew, tipping up to give him just that much better view of the dogs. His nose has crinkled up, his smile amused. "... always do feel I should help him 'long just a bit, but he seems like he's havin' so much fun all the same. Y'think there's some kinda cut-off age for learnin' how to dog proper?"<br />
<br />
''On'' the bench, if at its very edge where he can turn outward and so not have suffer such trials as Temporarily Looking Away From Dogs, Lucien is giving serious consideration to Jackson's question. "I am sure I was quite past the age anyone expected ''me'' to learn how to be a ''person'' properly when I..." His finger taps lightly once, twice, against his cheek, the faintest of creases briefly troubling his brow. "-- Oh, no," he dismisses that thought with slightly wider eyes, the hint of amusement in his voice contradicting the mild dismay in his expression, though easily discernible to those who know him well, "that is a ''terrible'' example, isn't it? I'm sure for Oberon there is yet hope, though."<br />
<br />
Steve is actually just sitting on the ground, presumably to make it more convenient for the dogs to trample him when their tussling drifts them near enough. He's dressed in a too-tight purple Chimaera Arts t-shirt, dark indigo jeans, and black combat boots, his shield propped against the bench where Lucien is sitting. "I think," he says, brows furrowed faintly as he studies Obie, "if we apply the principle that all does can be 'puppy' regardless of age, then there's no cut-off. Even the ones who ''seem'' very properly doglike?" He tips his hand at Flèche and Zenobia. The former has got the upper hand of the latter for the moment, which looks slightly comical with their difference in size. Zenobia's giant paws are flailing in the air, and Flèche's dainty ones barely touch the ground where she's gamely trying to pin her playmate. "Utter nonsense. They're still learning, too." Obie, for his part, is continuing to wag. Glances back at the People, panting happily. Turns back to the epic Proper Dog Battle unfolding before him.<br />
<br />
"Skittles ''definitely'' puppy and he's --" Jax furrows his brow, uncertain. "... 'bout ten million in dog years by now, I think that pup's a mutant too, ain't no ''way'' he oughta be alive." He leans slightly down, slightly over, his arm bumping playfully against Lucien's shoulder. "I don't think none of my friends ''all'' the way proper else they wouldn't'a lasted long 'round here." The text and graphic of his tee shirt, now, is printing itself bold and faintly ''glowing'' across the chest of Lucien's -- far more ''proper'' -- clothing. "... even Obie done come from doggie mad science jail, y'know," he's telling Steve earnestly, as a very overly-complex and very cartoonish series of flasks and beakers and twisting-spiraling connecting tubes, bright green fluid bubbling and smoking through it, spreads itself across the table. At one end an equally-cartoonish beagle wearing an eyepatch is looking alarmed as the green liquid forms a large droplet about to splash down on him; at the other a stereotypically goggle-eyed messy-white-haired labcoated scientist is cackling soundlessly. "Honestly, he should be an inspiration to alla us, they stucked him in testing and he took one look at Science and was like, from here on out I'mm'a just never be a single use to anything, ever. If we managed collective ineptitude on his level we'd be havin' this playdate at home now."<br />
<br />
Lucien glances at the words by now quite familiar on Jackson's shirt and then the same ones -- somewhat less so on the subtly striped button down he is currently wearing. A very small twitch pulls up at his lips. The languid shift of his posture to lean back a little further against the table only serves to broaden his chest just so, pull the glowing message that much more conspicuous. "Expediting the downfall of your enemies through incompetence on an unforeseeable scale. Audacious, but intriguing." He's eying -- first the ''cartoon'' beagle and then the real one, panting somewhat vacantly in front of them. "Possibly-Oberon, you are a true revolutionary. You have much to teach these callow youths, I believe." One finger is lifting to somewhat lazily indicate the bigger dogs wrestling behind Obie.<br />
<br />
Steve looks up at Jax, eyes wide. "Wait, ''he'' was --" Looks at Obie, studying the dog's blank if somehow still ''pleased'' expression. Back at Jax. "I thought you were joking about him being a mutant." Then, quickly, but not quickly enough to avert blushing, "You were definitely joking." He admittedly does not sound quite as confident about this as he feels he should. "Just regular, non-mutant mad science, on dogs." His head gives a short, jerky shake. "Not sure what scientists like that might want out of Zenobia, but whatever it was she would cave immediately for treats and scritches. And then she would see a squirrel outside and accidentally liberate herself trying to chase it. Not quite as exportable as a strategy of resistance, though."<br />
<br />
"''I'' think finding out the optimal number of scritches and treats to keep a dog happy is ''real'' important science. Zenobia could provide some important data points." The glowing droplet coming from the bubbling beakers is falling now, falling -- it bursts when it hits the cartoon beagles, turning into an entire pile of bones and sausages and bacon strips that the dog begins nomming his way through happily as the scientist continues to tap steepled fingers together and cackle. "May have to give up my art career, go into STEM after all." His face tips up, slightly, sun glinting with an exaggerated cartoon twinkle off of his large sunglasses. "... may not ''break'' the cages, but I think finding yourself some joy is a real underrated part of the revolution."<br />
<br />
"He was not joking about Skittles, though, that dog may yet outlive us all." Lucien does finally bring himself to look away from the other pups, if only to watch the ongoing horrors Obie's cartoon counterpart is being subjected to on the table. He opens his mouth -- quite quickly closes it again, fingers pressing briefly much harder against the table -- and watches the dog gobbling up its cartoon snacks with a somewhat undeserved solemnity. "Bones not Bombs. -- Oh, no," he sounds just faintly ''dismayed'', "that works a little too well, that could end up quite a successful New Leash fundraiser."<br />
<br />
"I don't know if it's your parents doting on him or the clean mountain air or if he actually ''is'' just a mutant dog, but I'd love to meet him." Steve's shoulders tighten, but this doesn't stop him breaking into a smile at the cartoon scientist's fiendish experiment. Arches an eyebrow aside at Lucien. "Well, if Jax doesn't want 'Bones not Bombs' for his anarchist mad science petcare collective, I'll gladly pitch it to New Leash, not that they're hurting for funds these days." His smile softens when his gaze slides back over to Jax. "Yeah. It sure is."<br />
<br />
"I'onno 'bout no ''mad science'' but a pet collective sounds like a ''fine'' sorta thing. Could collaborate, anyhow. Collect pet food, toys, treats an' all, to give out 'longside what we already done, for folks struggling to buy their own. ''Does'' kinda got a ring to it." Jax's illusory hat is fading, and though his sunglasses stay firmly in place they lose some of their cartoonishly accentuated gleam, as he hops down from the table to go give Obie a scritch behind his floppy ears. The dog's vacantly pleased panting continues. "The air ''is'' nice up there an' my ma is a ''chronic'' doter," he agrees thoughtfully, "but Skittles was there takin' ''me'' to my first day of school and I don't think no amount of chicken soup an' clean country living'll see no dog through that long." The Doggie Mad Science has given way, on the table, to glimmering-light silhouette, now, an enormous shaggy dog with very small backpack'd child riding it up to an old-timey school house. The whole scene shimmers and fades away. "Anyway, who knows. If I'm ever back out in the world maybe you'll meet 'em all."<br />
<br />
A small crease pulls at Lucien's brow, but it is fading away with Jackson's ephemeral light show. "''When'' you're back out in the world, I will make it my personal mission to remind you of this conversation, before you go filling twenty hours of each day back up with work. I'll pencil it into your calendar myself. ''Very'' important to the revolution that you leave time for joy."<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Fight_Club&diff=24590Fight Club2023-03-18T23:38:33Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| width="100%"<br />
| colspan="2" | <center><br />
{|<br />
| style="text-align:center;" | '''''Page subtitle'''''<br /><br />
|}<br />
</center><br />
|-<br />
| width="100%" |<br />
{| width="100%"<br />
! Introduction <br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}A twice-weekly gathering of mutants to fight and practice their combat skills in a supportive, (relatively) safe environment.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Reputation<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Contrary to popular trope, Fight Club attendees talk about Fight Club with other mutants all the time. Police are vaguely aware it exists and not particularly bothered as long as they keep to themselves -- breaking up a club of very powerful mutants whose biggest legal transgression is gambling is more trouble than it is worth. In normal human community, it's very unlikely to have heard of it. <br />
{{Tab}}Among mutants, it's quite reasonable (though by no means guaranteed!) to you have heard gossip about the rough-and-rowdy mutant-only fight club run by that rough-and-rowdy mutant biker gang. Some More Respectable mutants think This Is The Kind Of Thing That Gives Mutants A Bad Name, others think it sounds like a great time.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Structure<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}} All fights at Fight Club, no matter what, end ''the moment'' an opponent goes unconscious, taps out, OR any of the organizers, medics, or safety crew call for a stop. Breaking this rule will at minimum earn you a lifetime ban from the premises and depending on violation, may earn you a swift and violent retribution.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}} It is forbidden to ''deliberately'' cause structural damage to the building OR to deliberately harm any spectators who are not currently competing. Anyone who demonstrates that they do not have sufficient control over either their powers or their temper and are incapable of following this rule is forbidden from fighting.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Friday nights are sparring night at Fight Club. Friday night fights are sparring rules only, two people in the ring at a time, no serious injuries to your opponent(s) allowed. While Fight Club is a good place to hone fighting and mutation skills, it is not a Teach Baby Mutants To Use Their Powers place -- anyone who does not ''already'' have enough control over their powers to use them without danger to those around them is not allowed to fight. However, provided that people already have enough control over their powers to fight safely, there are often experienced fighters on hand at sparring nights to offer guidance and tips for improving.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Wednesday nights are a bit more chaotic -- fights can (by agreement of those fighting) be more than two competitors at once, two-on-one, every man for himself, w/e. Wednesday night fights involve a higher degree of risk, as there are very few rules about what kinds of attacks are allowed on your opponent -- while fighters are not allowed to intentionally simply straight-up murder each other (i.e. no beheading, stabbing someone directly through the heart, etc.) they are allowed to be far more brutal in their attacks. Wednesday night fights have a powerful mutant healer on site at all times to deal with more serious injuries -- though the healers are likely to just stabilize people to a point where they can safely go home and no further, so people still may end up with some pretty ugly scars.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}With that said, the ''ethos'' behind Fight Club is to get practice fighting as you would in a real fight -- and given that most people are not in fact comfortable or eager to kill people, ''extreme'' life-threatening damage is not as common as its reputation would suggest. It does get pretty bloody, though.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}While fighters are not allowed to deliberately injure spectators, it is presumed that there is Some Risk inherent in spectating a mutant powered fight. Additionally, people whose mutations can in some way control others (e.g. metamutants who can yoink other mutants powers, telepaths who can mind control others, etc.) are fully allowed to utilize their powers on spectators -- so it is not unheard of for a spectator to suddenly find themselves mind-controlled into being a competitors champion and fighting on their behalf, for example! Anyone who does not want to be at risk of such should remove themselves from the immediate vicinity of the fight.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}The healers are strictly off limits for yoinking into fights, though.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Betting on fights is liberal and encouraged. The Mongrels run the big betting pools and plenty of people come just to bet and not to fight. <br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Spaces<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Formerly lived in the [[BoM Safehouse]], until it outgrew that location; as of 2023, lives in [[Abandoned Warehouse|a warehouse]] in Red Hook.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Recruitment<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Fight Club is run by the [[Mongrels|Mutant Mongrels MC]], a well-known mutant bike gang. Specifically, [[B]], [[Shane]], and [[Ion]] are ultimately in charge of All Things Fight Club -- they run the betting pools, they have final veto over who is allowed to fight and who is allowed in the space at all. ''Only'' members of the Mongrels are allowed to vouch people into Fight Club, but it is fairly easy if you are a mutant who has not directly antagonized them in any way to get invited -- they are pretty liberal about inviting anyone who shows an interest. All newbies have to fight at at least one Friday night fight ''first'', and if they demonstrate they can fight with control and respect, they can if they wish fight on Wednesday nights. Plenty of people only ever fight on Fridays and that is perfectly fine!<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}It is equally easy to get kicked ''out'' of fight club -- in general, ''any'' transgression of Fight Club rules or even mild disrespect to the organizers is an immediate and permanent ban from the space (and anyone trying to return WILL be ejected violently.) They are unlikely to entertain any appeals to return.<br />
|-<br />
! Roster<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
*Organizers (have the final say on all Fight Club matters):<br />
**[[B]]<br />
**[[Shane]] <br />
**[[Ion]]<br />
**Any member of the [[Mongrels]] can extend invitations<br />
*Safety Team (monitor fights, ensure every person present (actively fighting or not) is acting safely and with respect, help out newbies):<br />
**[[Akihiro]]<br />
**[[Heather]]<br />
*Healers (patch everyone up -- at least one is always present at midweek fights, may or may not be on hand for Friday night fights):<br />
**[[Joshua]]<br />
**[[Mirror]]<br />
*Regular competitors:<br />
**[[Taylor]]<br />
*Regular spectators:<br />
**[[Jax]]<br />
**[[Regan]]<br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
! Errata<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}[[Flicker]] is the reigning undefeated champion of Fight Club, and tragically will likely remain so forever. Certainly nobody will win a fight against him, at least -- whether anyone will beat his record for undefeated streak, only the future will know.<br />
<br />
|-<br />
! colspan="2" | Logs<br />
|-<br />
| colspan="2" | {{RP Logs | name = Fight_Club | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Factions]]</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Fight_Club&diff=24589Fight Club2023-03-18T23:38:00Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| width="100%"<br />
| colspan="2" | <center><br />
{|<br />
| style="text-align:center;" | '''''Page subtitle'''''<br /><br />
|}<br />
</center><br />
|-<br />
| width="100%" |<br />
{| width="100%"<br />
! Introduction <br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}A twice-weekly gathering of mutants to fight and practice their combat skills in a supportive, (relatively) safe environment.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Reputation<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Contrary to popular trope, Fight Club attendees talk about Fight Club with other mutants all the time. Police are vaguely aware it exists and not particularly bothered as long as they keep to themselves -- breaking up a club of very powerful mutants whose biggest legal transgression is gambling is more trouble than it is worth. In normal human community, it's very unlikely to have heard of it. <br />
{{Tab}}Among mutants, it's quite reasonable (though by no means guaranteed!) to you have heard gossip about the rough-and-rowdy mutant-only fight club run by that rough-and-rowdy mutant biker gang. Some More Respectable mutants think This Is The Kind Of Thing That Gives Mutants A Bad Name, others think it sounds like a great time.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Structure<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}} All fights at Fight Club, no matter what, end ''the moment'' an opponent goes unconscious, taps out, OR any of the organizers, medics, or safety crew call for a stop. Breaking this rule will at minimum earn you a lifetime ban from the premises and depending on violation, may earn you a swift and violent retribution.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}} It is forbidden to ''deliberately'' cause structural damage to the building OR to deliberately harm any spectators who are not currently competing. Anyone who demonstrates that they do not have sufficient control over either their powers or their temper and are incapable of following this rule is forbidden from fighting.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Friday nights are sparring night at Fight Club. Friday night fights are sparring rules only, two people in the ring at a time, no serious injuries to your opponent(s) allowed. While Fight Club is a good place to hone fighting and mutation skills, it is not a Teach Baby Mutants To Use Their Powers place -- anyone who does not ''already'' have enough control over their powers to use them without danger to those around them is not allowed to fight. However, provided that people already have enough control over their powers to fight safely, there are often experienced fighters on hand at sparring nights to offer guidance and tips for improving.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Wednesday nights are a bit more chaotic -- fights can (by agreement of those fighting) be more than two competitors at once, two-on-one, every man for himself, w/e. Wednesday night fights involve a higher degree of risk, as there are very few rules about what kinds of attacks are allowed on your opponent -- while fighters are not allowed to intentionally simply straight-up murder each other (i.e. no beheading, stabbing someone directly through the heart, etc.) they are allowed to be far more brutal in their attacks. Wednesday night fights have a powerful mutant healer on site at all times to deal with more serious injuries -- though the healers are likely to just stabilize people to a point where they can safely go home and no further, so people still may end up with some pretty ugly scars.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}With that said, the ''ethos'' behind Fight Club is to get practice fighting as you would in a real fight -- and given that most people are not in fact comfortable or eager to kill people, ''extreme'' life-threatening damage is not as common as its reputation would suggest. It does get pretty bloody, though.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}While fighters are not allowed to deliberately injure spectators, it is presumed that there is Some Risk inherent in spectating a mutant powered fight. Additionally, people whose mutations can in some way control others (e.g. metamutants who can yoink other mutants powers, telepaths who can mind control others, etc.) are fully allowed to utilize their powers on spectators -- so it is not unheard of for a spectator to suddenly find themselves mind-controlled into being a competitors champion and fighting on their behalf, for example! Anyone who does not want to be at risk of such should remove themselves from the immediate vicinity of the fight.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}The healers are strictly off limits for yoinking into fights, though.<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}Betting on fights is liberal and encouraged. The Mongrels run the big betting pools and plenty of people come just to bet and not to fight. <br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Spaces<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Formerly lived in the [[BoM Safehouse]], until it outgrew that location; as of 2023, lives in [[Abandoned Warehouse|a warehouse]] in Red Hook.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Recruitment<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Fight Club is run by the [[Mongrels|Mutant Mongrels MC]], a well-known mutant bike gang. Specifically, [[B]], [[Shane]], and [[Ion]] are ultimately in charge of All Things Fight Club -- they run the betting pools, they have final veto over who is allowed to fight and who is allowed in the space at all. ''Only'' members of the Mongrels are allowed to vouch people into Fight Club, but it is fairly easy if you are a mutant who has not directly antagonized them in any way to get invited -- they are pretty liberal about inviting anyone who shows an interest. All newbies have to fight at at least one Friday night fight ''first'', and if they demonstrate they can fight with control and respect, they can if they wish fight on Wednesday nights. Plenty of people only ever fight on Fridays and that is perfectly fine!<br />
<br />
{{Tab}}It is equally easy to get kicked ''out'' of fight club -- in general, ''any'' transgression of Fight Club rules or even mild disrespect to the organizers is an immediate and permanent ban from the space (and anyone trying to return WILL be ejected violently.) They are unlikely to entertain any appeals to return.<br />
|-<br />
! Roster<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
*Organizers (have the final say on all Fight Club matters]]:<br />
**[[B]]<br />
**[[Shane]] <br />
**[[Ion]]<br />
**Any member of the [[Mongrels]] can extend invitations<br />
*Safety Team (monitor fights, ensure every person present (actively fighting or not) is acting safely and with respect, help out newbies:<br />
**[[Akihiro]]<br />
**[[Heather]]<br />
*Healers (patch everyone up -- at least one is always present at midweek fights, may or may not be on hand for Friday night fights):<br />
**[[Joshua]]<br />
**[[Mirror]]<br />
*Regular competitors:<br />
**[[Taylor]]<br />
*Regular spectators:<br />
**[[Jax]]<br />
**[[Regan]]<br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
! Errata<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}[[Flicker]] is the reigning undefeated champion of Fight Club, and tragically will likely remain so forever. Certainly nobody will win a fight against him, at least -- whether anyone will beat his record for undefeated streak, only the future will know.<br />
<br />
|-<br />
! colspan="2" | Logs<br />
|-<br />
| colspan="2" | {{RP Logs | name = Fight_Club | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Factions]]</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:The_Straight_Dope&diff=24572Logs:The Straight Dope2023-03-18T05:11:49Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Jax]], [[Ryan]], [[Spencer]]<br />
| summary = Where did we go wrong.<br />
| gamedate = 2023-03-14<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Detention Facility - Jax's Suite - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Jax, Spencer, Ryan, Mutants, Telecommunications, SHIELD HQ<br />
| log = <br />
<br />
A bit larger than the other detainee's rooms, this one has been converted from a small corner lounge for the guest rooms. Tall windows with a southern exposure let in copious sunlight if the unnecessarily high-tech curtains are drawn. The sitting area is small but comfortable and the sleeping area beyond it is screened off with interior partitions. There's a bulky desk in one corner with a computer rigged up nicely for video calls and a kitchenette tucked into another. A video comm panel by the front door allows for quick communication with both in-person visitors just outside the door or the security staff down the hall.<br />
<br />
The room decorations have been proliferating wildly -- the bed is now home to a menagerie of stuffed animals, mostly all Very New except for one old much-loved Cheer Bear perched atop the pillow. Greenery spills over from pots by the window ledge and hanging baskets. Art in numerous people's varied styles has been hung on the walls, with numerous of Jax's own sketches -- portraits of friends mingling with anthro characters and surreal cityscapes, a large drawing of a stained glass window bearing an image of Apollo done in traditional church-window style -- tacked up on the desk. A number of stained-glass hangings refract colorful light in from the expansive windows.<br />
<br />
The many (many) lamps in the room are shining bright. There's music playing loud from the computer -- Daniel Kahn's "Freedom is a Verb" on repeat. Dressed in a vivid green tee reading in bold pink letters, "NOT GAY AS IN HAPPY, QUEER AS IN FUCK THE POLICE" under very old and paint-splattered overalls, Jax is in front of his easel, plastic palette balanced on his right hand and his paintbrush held in his left. The painting on his canvas has come quite a ways, now, a tree vivid and otherworldly as is often his bent -- this one flinging a thick shelter of branches farflung overhead, spreading a complex system of roots far below; there are faces that seem to be blooming out of flowers from the branches, developing figures with skin brown and barky woven seamless into the trunk and roots like dryads nourishing-and-nourished-by the huge tree.<br />
<br />
Where there was no Spence before --<br />
<br />
-- now there is Spence. He's wearing a gray-and-black striped long-sleeve shirt under a lavender t-shirt with a twist of rainbow DNA splashed across the front, bracketed by the words 'B'tzelem Elohim' in Hebrew, blue jeans, and gray sneakers, his kippah adorned with a smiling sun. The travel mug clasped in both his hands smells richly of coffee. He'd started to draw breath to speak, but then seems to register what his father is doing and just. Holds the breath.<br />
<br />
There's a startled flutter throughout the room when Spence arrives -- a tangle of roots spreading underfoot, long gnarled branches creeping across the ceiling with green faces peering out of their leaves. The illusions begin to recede almost as soon as they've grown -- as the color melts from around the room it seems to get absorbed ''into'' Jax, dark hair blossoming into a vivid peacocky ombre, splashes of glimmering eyeshadow on his eyes and chrome polish on his nails -- all the starker against the extreme pallor of his skin. It's a moment even longer before he lowers his brush, peering critically at the canvas. Whatever dissatisfaction he has there has vanished from his face, replaced with a small but warm smile when he looks at Spencer. "Breathe, honey-honey."<br />
<br />
Spence breathes. "Sorry Pa," he mumbles, "I should have texted." He holds out the mug, a peace offering, though his attention has already moved on to Jax's work in progress, his imagination trying to superimpose Kieow onto the tree on the canvas. "I can come back..." He's sure he's just going to lose his nerve if he comes back another time. But then, he's growing increasingly sure he's going to lose his nerve ''right now''. << He's got enough stress shouldn't stress him out more aaaaah >> The images that accompany << enough stress >> are decidedly of Ryan, in various stages of lucidity and steadiness. He's not quite done fretting about Ryan when by a series of ADHD associations too fast to follow he arrives at "I jumped with ''people!''" The ''plural'' there is proud and faintly giddy, described in rapid flashes of a burnt out building, a half-collapsed roof frozen in time, Spence blipping the injured people out, then going back for Beau and Brendan, his simultaneous thrill and grief at << ''this was what Flicker did'' >>.<br />
<br />
"Oh, that painting ain't going nowhere," Jackson assures Spence, carefully setting his palette aside and swapping for the mug instead. He takes a large swig of the coffee as he moves to clean his brush -- though gets distracted halfway to the sink by Spence's revelation. His expression has lit up when he turns back around, eye wider. "Spence! Oh, gosh, that's ''amazing'', who -- what -- why --" His lips clamp together tight, but only for a second. "-- I knowed you'd get there, I'm so proud. When'd this happen?"<br />
<br />
"Like, last week?" Spencer is squinting into the middle distance as his mind tries to process the amount of time that elapsed, not with calendars but a disjointed flip of fragmentary recollections. "The week before that? After it snowed, anyway!" He bounces on the balls of his feet, beaming with satisfaction at Jax's expression of pride. Even so, he gets ready to explain how he'd wanted to say earlier but was worried ''Jax'' would worry about him Being a Superhero and actually is ''still'' worried enough he hadn't meant to say anything, except that now it's way less scary than the ''other'' thing he was ''planning'' to tell Jax. But he manages to intercept himself at "I wanted to say earlier but I didn't want you to worry. Like. It was dangerous!" << How is this better?! (but he's ''proud'') He can definitely be worried ''and'' proud >><br />
<br />
He stops. Mentally reviews one of the many scripts he'd thought up for describing this event. Takes a deep breath. Tries again. "Okay so. This building had caught fire and it got put out but the fire department didn't even try to rescue this mutant family. And the M-Kids -- you've heard about those folks right -- the M-Kids came to the school to get me and Beau to help with the evacuating. One them had literally ''paused time'', and Beau lifted up half the like...''literal roof'', and I had to get the injured people out of there as fast as I could right and I ''knew'' I could do it, I'd ''practiced'' so much, so I just." He pauses. It's possibly the longest pause he's taken this entire visit. "I just ''went''. And then I had to go right back and get Beau and Brenden and ''then'' back down." He sounds kind of winded just recounting it. "But I ''did'' it and nobody died and everybody was in one piece."<br />
<br />
Jax's eye goes just a ''little'' wider as he listens to this. He turns aside to start cleaning the paint out of his brush, kind of absently wiping the bristles against the soap cupped in his palm. If ''incidentally'' this turns his expression away from Spence for a time, well. He's shifted back into a gentle warmth by the time he's rinsed the brush again and turned back around. "Sounds like you done a real good thing for those people, Spence. Brave, too. I'm mighty glad you was there to help. Sure wish ''none'' of y'all had to be in a situation like that but --" He shakes his head quickly. "I always did expect when the time come, when someone needed it, you'd step up. An' you been working for ''so'' long to know your limits -- I'm proud of that, too, you know." <br />
<br />
His teeth catch against his lip ring, wiggling at it slowly. "Them M-Kids, they..." His brow wrinkles momentarily. "They ''careful'', with what they doing? Safe?" The wrinkle is growing deeper. "They got anyone lookin' after 'em?"<br />
<br />
Spence bites his lower lip. Bounces harder, more agitated now. << Oh no he's freaked out I shouldn't have told him all that >> Which doesn't dim the warm that blooms in him at the praise. "That's the first time I actually ''met'' the M-Kids so I dunno like. There's a lot of rumors at school but they're ''rumors'', you know?" He shrugs tightly, then hastily adds, "''Mostly'' it's like, little things. Not really dangerous at all. Some of it ''is'' dangerous. I didn't have any time to talk with them cuz they had to get the injured people to a hospital, but I don't ''think'' they got like. ''Adult supervision'' or anything. They seemed ''pretty'' unimpressed with adults." He blushes slightly, reflecting on his many adult friendships. << Just one more way to be weird and uncool but who's counting >> "I guess. Most kids are. I wanna talk to them sometime when there ''isn't'' an emergency, but I don't know what to even ''tell'' them like. What they're doing, it's ''good.''" << ''We'' should be doing stuff like that. >> He's not ''worried'' about what the administration will think, but he ''is'' imagining the look on Xavier's face when he finds out with amusement.<br />
<br />
"S'fair enough, I know there's a real tragic number of adults who ain't done much in life to earn no trust from young people. But I feel like then it's a case of needing to find the right ones, not --" Jax hesitates, biting down on his lip as he hangs his brush to dry and washes his hands clean. "It ''do'' sound like they're doing a lot of good," he agrees, wandering back over to offer Spence the coffee mug as he takes his seat on the painting stool that he rarely seems to actually sit in ''while'' painting. "I ain't sayin' you should be talking 'em out of it or nothing -- Lord knows our community can use good folks looking out for each other. I just want them to know that there are folks out there who been doing this kind of thing a long while -- and being able to have folks you can turn to for advice, or if something goes real wrong -- that can be important, you know?" There's just a faint tremor in the air around him, a brief greyish flutter of shadow that soon evens out. "Trying to build that kind of operation from the ground up without no guidance -- it can just. Be a real rough path to go, you know?" His voice is softer, here, his fingers curling down tight against his knee.<br />
<br />
The worry hasn't quite ''cleared'' from his face when he looks back to Spence, but his smile is returning. "I'm sorry, sugar, I coulda stopped at 'I'm proud of you'. I really am. There's ''always'' gonna be a balance in life -- tryna keep yourself safe ''while'' doing what you can to help folks around you. I feel like it's a balance we're ''all'' constantly tryna work out."<br />
<br />
Spence nods, rapidly and emphatically. "Yeah! Yeah, I know you wouldn't -- I mean -- know what you mean." << (I want to ''help'') (not fair to ask him) (raids are even happening) >> He takes a deep breath and takes the coffee back, his fingers fluttering over its smooth finish. "They did say ''you'' were cool but I can't exactly send them ''here'' for advice. ''Can'' I? They may not want to talk to you I guess but also probably I shouldn't just like volunteer you to solve every mutant kid's problems." He shuffles over and leans on his father. "And I ''had'' kind of meant to come here for advice. Sorta. Or maybe just like, tell you something." << ohnoohno >> "But it can totally wait if that was like. A lot to process."<br />
<br />
"I... don't think them coming here is, uh, technically against the ''rules''," Jax doesn't sound very sure, "but 'go talk to some strange terrorist in ultra-mutant-jail' is probably a real hard sell." He sits up straighter on his stool, brows hiking with interest. "For ''you'' though I am chock-full of advice. Uh, probably. What's it you needed to say?"<br />
<br />
"I mean, come on. You are the ''awesomest terrorist'' in ultra-mutant-jail, and they're teenage mutant superheroes." Spence explains, very earnestly. "And they ''have'' to know how the government sees mutant superheroes. If they don't want your advice, that's their loss." He's vaguely thinking up ways to backpedal out of asking for advice, now. But he doesn't want to ''lie'', either. Maybe some kind of distraction... << Oh no this is so dumb why did I even want to tell him -- >> "I'm straight," he blurts. Then, almost a full beat later. "I think."<br />
<br />
All thoughts of the M-Kids have quite clearly flown Jax's mind. Whatever revelation he had been expecting, it was evidently not ''this''. He blinks -- blinks again, for a moment just frozen in place on his stool. "You -- think?" Probably shouldn't sound ''hopeful'', but it does. Immediately afterwards Jax is flushing, deep, lifting a hand to scrub at his face as if to scrub the redness away. "No, I mean -- I mean, that's -- thank you for --" His brows are scrunching, slowly. "-- Spence, is that stressin' you out? Being, um. Li--" He catches himself with a deeper blush and corrects to simply, "-- being straight?"<br />
<br />
"I mean. Yeah I've been ''suspecting'' it for a ''long'' time and I keep thinking maybe if I just ''try'' to --" Spencer stops mid-sentence and turns fiercely red. "Not like -- I don't mean try -- I'm not having sex. With anyone! Of any gender!" << If I were maybe I wouldn't feel so ''silly'' because there would actually be something to talk about? >> "But I don't think I'm ''ace'' and I've had this crush on a girl and I guess that's not stressful ''because'' she's a girl, exactly, but also like I ''shouldn't'' be stressed!" He starts pacing. "Most people are straight, right? Society ''caters'' to straight people! I should just say a bracha that I got Easy Mode for sex. And stuff."<br />
<br />
"I don't think there's no should about it, sugar." Jax's leg is bouncing, now, rapid and quick against the rung of his stool. "''Most'' people's straight but you don't really hang out with ''most'' people an' it makes sense to -- but honey-honey, I promise ain't Ryan an' I gonna kick you out or send you to no turn-gay camp or sneakily try to bring guys home to set you up with. 'sides, don't worry, you might be straight but I ''gotta'' tell you," here his mouth is twitching just a bit upward, "you're still a ''whole'' entire weirdo an' I can think of at least three different ways society's gonna think so too."<br />
<br />
Spence flushes even deeper. "I know, I know I'm not worried about being kicked out." He really isn't. Faith in his family aside, he has no shortage of resources and support even if Ryan and Jax did somehow decide they couldn't have a straight boy under their roof. "I don't know. It just feels ''weird'' and I kind of always figured I would be..." His mouth pulls hard to one side. "...like my family. Oh no this is ''just'' like when I wanted to grow up blue and sharky." << ''Is'' it just like that?? >> He scrubs one hand over his face and takes a gulp of the coffee he's holding. Then frowns at it. "Hey, I brought this for ''you!"'' He offers the coffee back. "Sorry I freaked. I think maybe this wouldn't feel as overwhelming if I didn't have a ''massive'' crush on ''Gae's girlfriend''."<br />
<br />
"Oh, no, sugar, you been straight for like five minutes an' you already speedrunning the dating drama?" Jax takes the coffee back for a large gulp. His nose crinkles up and he scrubs at his face again, this time with the back of the knuckles curled around the travel mug. "I'm sorry, sugar, that's a tough break. You got some time? I can't fix that particular conundrum but I ''can'' bake you some cookies about it an' we could watch something distracting? Think the new season of ''Shadow and Bone'''s just out."<br />
<br />
"I don't think it counts as dating drama if I don't ''do'' anything about it." Spence is definitely trying to convince himself. "Or like. Tell anyone about it." << (oops) >> "Okay, tell anyone ''else'' about it. Point is she's off limits. I just have to play it cool, now that we're kinda talking again oh no I should ask to hang out!" Inwardly he's already dreading how awkward he's likely to be, but also looking forward to it. He's easily and willingly steered away from these concerns, though. "''Whoa'' cookies and YA fantasy is literally exactly what I need right now. My straight drama's got ''nothing'' on Alina's. Thanks Pa you're the best!" He wraps Jax in a tight hug and --<br />
<br />
The room is abruptly uninhabited, neither father nor son anywhere to be seen. But from beyond the door and down the hall in direction of the kitchen, there comes a distant whoop of joy and triumph.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
Much, much later that night, on Signal:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): HELP<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
Answer comes almost immediately:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): omw<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): Should I send Joshua?<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): What?<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): Oh gosh no it's not that kind of emergency<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): You can stay put!!!<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): I didn't even think you were in town<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): There's this magical new technology called planes! Joshua's faster, though.<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): What's your non-emergency emergency then?<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): Spence just visited<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): He's fine but he wanted to come out to me? he was very stressed about it<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): has he talked to you?<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): Aww! No but I'll make sure to act surprised.<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): > very stressed about it<br />
Makes sense because you are a raging homophobe<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): Come out AS STRAIGHT<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): It is not April yet but are you sure he's not trolling you?<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): he did mention he'd made up with Gae so maybe Gae put him up to this...<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): But no I think he was pretty serious he seemed like he'd been trying to work through it a while already<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
This time, Ryan's answer is slower in coming.<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): ...<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): Where did we go wrong.<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): Are we sure it's not just a phase?<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): "we" sir i physically cannot get any gayer<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): You show him all those Disney movies, though. CHOCK full of heterocentrism and unhealthy relationship models.<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): sdlakfjdaklg<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): OK but for real tho<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): I don't think it matters if it is a phase this is important to him right now<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): But there is like Zero information out there about How To Be Supportive for your heterosexual teen<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): Guess that just means we write the guide.<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): Whatever we do I'm sure cookies are involved.<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): <image of a mostly-empty plate -- One Lone Snickerdoodle, many crumbs> I am way ahead of you<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): See? You got this.<br />
</blockquote><br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:The_Straight_Dope&diff=24571Logs:The Straight Dope2023-03-18T05:11:39Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Jax, Ryan, Spencer | summary = ''Where did we go wrong.'' | gamedate = 2023-03-14 | gamedatename = | subtitle = | location = <NYC> Detention Fac..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Jax]], [[Ryan]], [[Spencer]]<br />
| summary = ''Where did we go wrong.''<br />
| gamedate = 2023-03-14<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Detention Facility - Jax's Suite - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Jax, Spencer, Ryan, Mutants, Telecommunications, SHIELD HQ<br />
| log = <br />
<br />
A bit larger than the other detainee's rooms, this one has been converted from a small corner lounge for the guest rooms. Tall windows with a southern exposure let in copious sunlight if the unnecessarily high-tech curtains are drawn. The sitting area is small but comfortable and the sleeping area beyond it is screened off with interior partitions. There's a bulky desk in one corner with a computer rigged up nicely for video calls and a kitchenette tucked into another. A video comm panel by the front door allows for quick communication with both in-person visitors just outside the door or the security staff down the hall.<br />
<br />
The room decorations have been proliferating wildly -- the bed is now home to a menagerie of stuffed animals, mostly all Very New except for one old much-loved Cheer Bear perched atop the pillow. Greenery spills over from pots by the window ledge and hanging baskets. Art in numerous people's varied styles has been hung on the walls, with numerous of Jax's own sketches -- portraits of friends mingling with anthro characters and surreal cityscapes, a large drawing of a stained glass window bearing an image of Apollo done in traditional church-window style -- tacked up on the desk. A number of stained-glass hangings refract colorful light in from the expansive windows.<br />
<br />
The many (many) lamps in the room are shining bright. There's music playing loud from the computer -- Daniel Kahn's "Freedom is a Verb" on repeat. Dressed in a vivid green tee reading in bold pink letters, "NOT GAY AS IN HAPPY, QUEER AS IN FUCK THE POLICE" under very old and paint-splattered overalls, Jax is in front of his easel, plastic palette balanced on his right hand and his paintbrush held in his left. The painting on his canvas has come quite a ways, now, a tree vivid and otherworldly as is often his bent -- this one flinging a thick shelter of branches farflung overhead, spreading a complex system of roots far below; there are faces that seem to be blooming out of flowers from the branches, developing figures with skin brown and barky woven seamless into the trunk and roots like dryads nourishing-and-nourished-by the huge tree.<br />
<br />
Where there was no Spence before --<br />
<br />
-- now there is Spence. He's wearing a gray-and-black striped long-sleeve shirt under a lavender t-shirt with a twist of rainbow DNA splashed across the front, bracketed by the words 'B'tzelem Elohim' in Hebrew, blue jeans, and gray sneakers, his kippah adorned with a smiling sun. The travel mug clasped in both his hands smells richly of coffee. He'd started to draw breath to speak, but then seems to register what his father is doing and just. Holds the breath.<br />
<br />
There's a startled flutter throughout the room when Spence arrives -- a tangle of roots spreading underfoot, long gnarled branches creeping across the ceiling with green faces peering out of their leaves. The illusions begin to recede almost as soon as they've grown -- as the color melts from around the room it seems to get absorbed ''into'' Jax, dark hair blossoming into a vivid peacocky ombre, splashes of glimmering eyeshadow on his eyes and chrome polish on his nails -- all the starker against the extreme pallor of his skin. It's a moment even longer before he lowers his brush, peering critically at the canvas. Whatever dissatisfaction he has there has vanished from his face, replaced with a small but warm smile when he looks at Spencer. "Breathe, honey-honey."<br />
<br />
Spence breathes. "Sorry Pa," he mumbles, "I should have texted." He holds out the mug, a peace offering, though his attention has already moved on to Jax's work in progress, his imagination trying to superimpose Kieow onto the tree on the canvas. "I can come back..." He's sure he's just going to lose his nerve if he comes back another time. But then, he's growing increasingly sure he's going to lose his nerve ''right now''. << He's got enough stress shouldn't stress him out more aaaaah >> The images that accompany << enough stress >> are decidedly of Ryan, in various stages of lucidity and steadiness. He's not quite done fretting about Ryan when by a series of ADHD associations too fast to follow he arrives at "I jumped with ''people!''" The ''plural'' there is proud and faintly giddy, described in rapid flashes of a burnt out building, a half-collapsed roof frozen in time, Spence blipping the injured people out, then going back for Beau and Brendan, his simultaneous thrill and grief at << ''this was what Flicker did'' >>.<br />
<br />
"Oh, that painting ain't going nowhere," Jackson assures Spence, carefully setting his palette aside and swapping for the mug instead. He takes a large swig of the coffee as he moves to clean his brush -- though gets distracted halfway to the sink by Spence's revelation. His expression has lit up when he turns back around, eye wider. "Spence! Oh, gosh, that's ''amazing'', who -- what -- why --" His lips clamp together tight, but only for a second. "-- I knowed you'd get there, I'm so proud. When'd this happen?"<br />
<br />
"Like, last week?" Spencer is squinting into the middle distance as his mind tries to process the amount of time that elapsed, not with calendars but a disjointed flip of fragmentary recollections. "The week before that? After it snowed, anyway!" He bounces on the balls of his feet, beaming with satisfaction at Jax's expression of pride. Even so, he gets ready to explain how he'd wanted to say earlier but was worried ''Jax'' would worry about him Being a Superhero and actually is ''still'' worried enough he hadn't meant to say anything, except that now it's way less scary than the ''other'' thing he was ''planning'' to tell Jax. But he manages to intercept himself at "I wanted to say earlier but I didn't want you to worry. Like. It was dangerous!" << How is this better?! (but he's ''proud'') He can definitely be worried ''and'' proud >><br />
<br />
He stops. Mentally reviews one of the many scripts he'd thought up for describing this event. Takes a deep breath. Tries again. "Okay so. This building had caught fire and it got put out but the fire department didn't even try to rescue this mutant family. And the M-Kids -- you've heard about those folks right -- the M-Kids came to the school to get me and Beau to help with the evacuating. One them had literally ''paused time'', and Beau lifted up half the like...''literal roof'', and I had to get the injured people out of there as fast as I could right and I ''knew'' I could do it, I'd ''practiced'' so much, so I just." He pauses. It's possibly the longest pause he's taken this entire visit. "I just ''went''. And then I had to go right back and get Beau and Brenden and ''then'' back down." He sounds kind of winded just recounting it. "But I ''did'' it and nobody died and everybody was in one piece."<br />
<br />
Jax's eye goes just a ''little'' wider as he listens to this. He turns aside to start cleaning the paint out of his brush, kind of absently wiping the bristles against the soap cupped in his palm. If ''incidentally'' this turns his expression away from Spence for a time, well. He's shifted back into a gentle warmth by the time he's rinsed the brush again and turned back around. "Sounds like you done a real good thing for those people, Spence. Brave, too. I'm mighty glad you was there to help. Sure wish ''none'' of y'all had to be in a situation like that but --" He shakes his head quickly. "I always did expect when the time come, when someone needed it, you'd step up. An' you been working for ''so'' long to know your limits -- I'm proud of that, too, you know." <br />
<br />
His teeth catch against his lip ring, wiggling at it slowly. "Them M-Kids, they..." His brow wrinkles momentarily. "They ''careful'', with what they doing? Safe?" The wrinkle is growing deeper. "They got anyone lookin' after 'em?"<br />
<br />
Spence bites his lower lip. Bounces harder, more agitated now. << Oh no he's freaked out I shouldn't have told him all that >> Which doesn't dim the warm that blooms in him at the praise. "That's the first time I actually ''met'' the M-Kids so I dunno like. There's a lot of rumors at school but they're ''rumors'', you know?" He shrugs tightly, then hastily adds, "''Mostly'' it's like, little things. Not really dangerous at all. Some of it ''is'' dangerous. I didn't have any time to talk with them cuz they had to get the injured people to a hospital, but I don't ''think'' they got like. ''Adult supervision'' or anything. They seemed ''pretty'' unimpressed with adults." He blushes slightly, reflecting on his many adult friendships. << Just one more way to be weird and uncool but who's counting >> "I guess. Most kids are. I wanna talk to them sometime when there ''isn't'' an emergency, but I don't know what to even ''tell'' them like. What they're doing, it's ''good.''" << ''We'' should be doing stuff like that. >> He's not ''worried'' about what the administration will think, but he ''is'' imagining the look on Xavier's face when he finds out with amusement.<br />
<br />
"S'fair enough, I know there's a real tragic number of adults who ain't done much in life to earn no trust from young people. But I feel like then it's a case of needing to find the right ones, not --" Jax hesitates, biting down on his lip as he hangs his brush to dry and washes his hands clean. "It ''do'' sound like they're doing a lot of good," he agrees, wandering back over to offer Spence the coffee mug as he takes his seat on the painting stool that he rarely seems to actually sit in ''while'' painting. "I ain't sayin' you should be talking 'em out of it or nothing -- Lord knows our community can use good folks looking out for each other. I just want them to know that there are folks out there who been doing this kind of thing a long while -- and being able to have folks you can turn to for advice, or if something goes real wrong -- that can be important, you know?" There's just a faint tremor in the air around him, a brief greyish flutter of shadow that soon evens out. "Trying to build that kind of operation from the ground up without no guidance -- it can just. Be a real rough path to go, you know?" His voice is softer, here, his fingers curling down tight against his knee.<br />
<br />
The worry hasn't quite ''cleared'' from his face when he looks back to Spence, but his smile is returning. "I'm sorry, sugar, I coulda stopped at 'I'm proud of you'. I really am. There's ''always'' gonna be a balance in life -- tryna keep yourself safe ''while'' doing what you can to help folks around you. I feel like it's a balance we're ''all'' constantly tryna work out."<br />
<br />
Spence nods, rapidly and emphatically. "Yeah! Yeah, I know you wouldn't -- I mean -- know what you mean." << (I want to ''help'') (not fair to ask him) (raids are even happening) >> He takes a deep breath and takes the coffee back, his fingers fluttering over its smooth finish. "They did say ''you'' were cool but I can't exactly send them ''here'' for advice. ''Can'' I? They may not want to talk to you I guess but also probably I shouldn't just like volunteer you to solve every mutant kid's problems." He shuffles over and leans on his father. "And I ''had'' kind of meant to come here for advice. Sorta. Or maybe just like, tell you something." << ohnoohno >> "But it can totally wait if that was like. A lot to process."<br />
<br />
"I... don't think them coming here is, uh, technically against the ''rules''," Jax doesn't sound very sure, "but 'go talk to some strange terrorist in ultra-mutant-jail' is probably a real hard sell." He sits up straighter on his stool, brows hiking with interest. "For ''you'' though I am chock-full of advice. Uh, probably. What's it you needed to say?"<br />
<br />
"I mean, come on. You are the ''awesomest terrorist'' in ultra-mutant-jail, and they're teenage mutant superheroes." Spence explains, very earnestly. "And they ''have'' to know how the government sees mutant superheroes. If they don't want your advice, that's their loss." He's vaguely thinking up ways to backpedal out of asking for advice, now. But he doesn't want to ''lie'', either. Maybe some kind of distraction... << Oh no this is so dumb why did I even want to tell him -- >> "I'm straight," he blurts. Then, almost a full beat later. "I think."<br />
<br />
All thoughts of the M-Kids have quite clearly flown Jax's mind. Whatever revelation he had been expecting, it was evidently not ''this''. He blinks -- blinks again, for a moment just frozen in place on his stool. "You -- think?" Probably shouldn't sound ''hopeful'', but it does. Immediately afterwards Jax is flushing, deep, lifting a hand to scrub at his face as if to scrub the redness away. "No, I mean -- I mean, that's -- thank you for --" His brows are scrunching, slowly. "-- Spence, is that stressin' you out? Being, um. Li--" He catches himself with a deeper blush and corrects to simply, "-- being straight?"<br />
<br />
"I mean. Yeah I've been ''suspecting'' it for a ''long'' time and I keep thinking maybe if I just ''try'' to --" Spencer stops mid-sentence and turns fiercely red. "Not like -- I don't mean try -- I'm not having sex. With anyone! Of any gender!" << If I were maybe I wouldn't feel so ''silly'' because there would actually be something to talk about? >> "But I don't think I'm ''ace'' and I've had this crush on a girl and I guess that's not stressful ''because'' she's a girl, exactly, but also like I ''shouldn't'' be stressed!" He starts pacing. "Most people are straight, right? Society ''caters'' to straight people! I should just say a bracha that I got Easy Mode for sex. And stuff."<br />
<br />
"I don't think there's no should about it, sugar." Jax's leg is bouncing, now, rapid and quick against the rung of his stool. "''Most'' people's straight but you don't really hang out with ''most'' people an' it makes sense to -- but honey-honey, I promise ain't Ryan an' I gonna kick you out or send you to no turn-gay camp or sneakily try to bring guys home to set you up with. 'sides, don't worry, you might be straight but I ''gotta'' tell you," here his mouth is twitching just a bit upward, "you're still a ''whole'' entire weirdo an' I can think of at least three different ways society's gonna think so too."<br />
<br />
Spence flushes even deeper. "I know, I know I'm not worried about being kicked out." He really isn't. Faith in his family aside, he has no shortage of resources and support even if Ryan and Jax did somehow decide they couldn't have a straight boy under their roof. "I don't know. It just feels ''weird'' and I kind of always figured I would be..." His mouth pulls hard to one side. "...like my family. Oh no this is ''just'' like when I wanted to grow up blue and sharky." << ''Is'' it just like that?? >> He scrubs one hand over his face and takes a gulp of the coffee he's holding. Then frowns at it. "Hey, I brought this for ''you!"'' He offers the coffee back. "Sorry I freaked. I think maybe this wouldn't feel as overwhelming if I didn't have a ''massive'' crush on ''Gae's girlfriend''."<br />
<br />
"Oh, no, sugar, you been straight for like five minutes an' you already speedrunning the dating drama?" Jax takes the coffee back for a large gulp. His nose crinkles up and he scrubs at his face again, this time with the back of the knuckles curled around the travel mug. "I'm sorry, sugar, that's a tough break. You got some time? I can't fix that particular conundrum but I ''can'' bake you some cookies about it an' we could watch something distracting? Think the new season of ''Shadow and Bone'''s just out."<br />
<br />
"I don't think it counts as dating drama if I don't ''do'' anything about it." Spence is definitely trying to convince himself. "Or like. Tell anyone about it." << (oops) >> "Okay, tell anyone ''else'' about it. Point is she's off limits. I just have to play it cool, now that we're kinda talking again oh no I should ask to hang out!" Inwardly he's already dreading how awkward he's likely to be, but also looking forward to it. He's easily and willingly steered away from these concerns, though. "''Whoa'' cookies and YA fantasy is literally exactly what I need right now. My straight drama's got ''nothing'' on Alina's. Thanks Pa you're the best!" He wraps Jax in a tight hug and --<br />
<br />
The room is abruptly uninhabited, neither father nor son anywhere to be seen. But from beyond the door and down the hall in direction of the kitchen, there comes a distant whoop of joy and triumph.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
Much, much later that night, on Signal:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): HELP<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
Answer comes almost immediately:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): omw<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): Should I send Joshua?<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): What?<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): Oh gosh no it's not that kind of emergency<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): You can stay put!!!<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): I didn't even think you were in town<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): There's this magical new technology called planes! Joshua's faster, though.<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): What's your non-emergency emergency then?<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): Spence just visited<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): He's fine but he wanted to come out to me? he was very stressed about it<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): has he talked to you?<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): Aww! No but I'll make sure to act surprised.<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): > very stressed about it<br />
Makes sense because you are a raging homophobe<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): Come out AS STRAIGHT<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): It is not April yet but are you sure he's not trolling you?<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): he did mention he'd made up with Gae so maybe Gae put him up to this...<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): But no I think he was pretty serious he seemed like he'd been trying to work through it a while already<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
This time, Ryan's answer is slower in coming.<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): ...<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): Where did we go wrong.<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): Are we sure it's not just a phase?<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): "we" sir i physically cannot get any gayer<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): You show him all those Disney movies, though. CHOCK full of heterocentrism and unhealthy relationship models.<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): sdlakfjdaklg<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): OK but for real tho<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): I don't think it matters if it is a phase this is important to him right now<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): But there is like Zero information out there about How To Be Supportive for your heterosexual teen<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): Guess that just means we write the guide.<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): Whatever we do I'm sure cookies are involved.<br />
*(Jax --> Ryan): <image of a mostly-empty plate -- One Lone Snickerdoodle, many crumbs> I am way ahead of you<br />
*(Ryan --> Jax): See? You got this.<br />
</blockquote><br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:The_In-Betweens&diff=24570Logs:The In-Betweens2023-03-17T17:18:21Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Anahita, Toni | summary = "I believe that if you fill them up with stories, they don't ever have to lose the magic." | gamedate = 2023-03-14 | gamedat..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Anahita]], [[Toni]]<br />
| summary = "I believe that if you fill them up with stories, they don't ever have to lose the magic."<br />
| gamedate = 2023-03-14<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> [[Conservatory]] - [[Le Bonne Entente]] - Astoria - Queens<br />
| categories = Anahita, Toni, Le Bonne Entente, Mutants<br />
| log = <br />
<br />
Above the bustle of the clerestory restaurant, tucked at the base of the bell tower, this indoor garden and library is out of the way and easily overlooked, sure to become a favored "hidden gem" of travel guides. Low bookshelves full of mythology, fairy tales, and folklore ring the central elevator shaft and the stairway spiraling around it like an easily navigable labyrinth. Beyond these are plants in a variety of tastefully whimsical containers, each with its own engraved plaque giving the common name, the scientific name, and their significance to various traditional stories and practices. The walls have been done away with so that the room extends beyond the doric columns into a surreal rooftop garden enclosed with glass stretching between the tower's massive buttresses. <br />
<br />
The arrangement of plantlife becomes less formal as one moves out into the four arms of the conservatory, visible containers giving way to beds and terraces and eventually landscapes carefully cultivated to look wild. There is plentiful seating scattered along the paths and just off of them, from proper benches to picturesque logs to surprisingly comfortable boulders. By day, myriad butterflies dance amongst the enchanted vegetation, and likewise moths by night. A shallow stream weaves throughout, feeding ponds that host plants of their own alongside fish, frogs, and turtles. Wandering the outer edges of the conservatory, one could almost feel lost in a mystical forest but for the stunning views of the cityscape beyond the glass.<br />
<br />
Anahita has been working her slow way through each wing of the conservatory, stooping to read the plaques. She's wearing a sage green tunic over a brown corduroy skirt and heavy black engineer's boots, a beaded satchel over one shoulder and a book she'd picked from the labryinth library tucked against her chest. She rounds a bend in the path and stops in her tracks, giving a quiet gasp at the view through the west-facing glass wall. The greenery of the magical garden looks all the greener against the gray sky, and though it's still snowing, the sun has broken through the clouds and set the city, the river, and the drifting snowflakes all a-glitter. She walks toward the glass and sinks down onto a mossy log placed exactly to let visitors enjoy the view. Her fingertips play over the soft compound leaves of the acacia tree next to her, but her eyes are fixed out at the snow swirling through shafts of sunlight.<br />
<br />
There's a click of heels on stone, crisp and punctuated with an occasional low voice, soft but firm in the one-sided conversation. By the time the actual speaker has rounded a boulder and come into sight the bluetooth headset in her ear has switched back off, her phone in one hand but not currently active, a coffee in a to-go cup in the other. Toni is dressed in a crisp black business suit, immaculately tailored, her blouse in a pattern of unevenly distributed green-black-and-gold vertical stripes and a pair of red-heeled gold pumps on her feet. Her hair is done up in an elegant spiral of braids wound round her head and swept up to gather into a loose spill of thick curls at her crown. She's slowed her steps considerably from that initial hard click, drifting more leisurely through the plants until her orbit draws close to the acacia tree. "Can you believe this place?" Her voice is at once hushed and awed -- like a library, like church. "I figured you see one fancy set of hotel conference rooms you seen them all but --" This ends with a low whistle.<br />
<br />
Anahita turns at Toni's voice, though she's clearly not surprised. "I haven't seen much in the way of fancy hotels. If beautiful conservatories are a common feature, I've been missing out." Her eyes stray to a slender laurel tree bending its branches over Toni's head, then back to her. "Are the conference rooms here as extraordinary as this?" The sweep of her hand is expansive and ends in a flourish at the capacious log beside her.<br />
<br />
"I gotta tell you I have not seen much extraordinary as ''this'' it's like a little bit of fairytale." Toni's gaze follows the sweep of Anahita's hand out around the conservatory. "The rooms are nice but this is another league." She looks back to Anahita, now, an up-down sweep of eyes no less evidently appreciative than the one she was just giving the garden around them. "You staying here?"<br />
<br />
Anahita gives the barest glimpse of a smile and looks down at the book she's been carrying. Then turns it around so Toni can see the gold embossed letters on the blue hardcover: ''Fairy Tales of the Ancient World''. "So I have been discovering. From the plants and the books, both." She sets the book down in her lap. "Oh, no, I live in town. The builder of this garden wanted my opinion as a fellow gardener, and I was intrigued. I admit I didn't expect much of the hotel the garden was attached to, but it turned out a pleasant surprise. I have seen many kinds of beauty today." Her gaze lingers on Toni. "You are here for business? Perhaps this is a stereotype. I am sure conference rooms have other uses."<br />
<br />
"Whew, you ''know'' the person responsible for this? Hope you're gonna tell them they've made a slice of paradise, here." Toni takes a sip of her coffee, her mouth curling into a wide smile behind the cup at Toni's gaze. "Oh, stereotype away, I been stuck in meetings ''all'' the morning." She strides closer, settling herself on the log beside Anahita, half-turned toward the other woman. She studies the book cover first -- then Anahita -- then the greenery around them, with an inquisitive lift of eyebrows. "Which is your favorite?"<br />
<br />
Anahita's head sways side to side, though it isn't quite a shake. "Not well. Our paths crossed a couple of times. I do mean to tell him so, just as soon as I work out how to do it without coming off as mere flattery." There is a soft touch of laughter in her voice. "If I had to pick just one, it would be the lotus." She indicates a nearby pond where the lotus's elegant pink flowers bloom above the surface, while below koi weave between its submerged stems, glimpses of red and gold and white between broad green leaves.<br />
<br />
"But today, I'm rather taken with this one." She tips her head at the acacia growing lush and thorny beside her. "Or the story I was just reading about it, anyway." She's leafing leisurely through the book now, but looking at Toni again. "I don't think my business stereotypes will get me far with you. Most of them involve poorly dressed white men who haven't got time for magic gardens or fairytales." Her smile is perhaps just a little self-conscious. ''Very'' little, though. "Do you have a favorite?"<br />
<br />
"Little bit of flattery's gotten me a long way with ''some'' kinds of men," Toni's reply comes on a warmer spill of laughter, her face lighting with the sound. "You know," her voice drops lower like this is a ''confession'', though she looks hardly abashed, "-- I don't know the first thing about plants 'cept they make a day brighter. There ''is'' a clump of flowers just over there --" She's pointing, fingernail elegantly manicured in emerald with just a slender hint of gold French tips, to a distant cluster of bold purple and white devil's trumpet, "twisty long flowers really caught my eye. Smell nice, too." She takes another slow sip of coffee, glancing down towards the open pages of Anahita's book -- then lifting a hand to trace lightly against an acacia leaf. "So what story's this tree got?"<br />
<br />
Anahita does laugh, this time. "You know the most important thing, then." She studies the plant Toni indicates. "Datura. I can't say which without a closer look, but they've been used for magic and medicine all over the world down through history." She looks back at Toni and drops her own voice. "For entertainment, too. And they're all ''highly'' poisonous." Her hands finally settle on a page: "Tale of the Two Brothers" reads the title, and beneath it, "Egypt, New Kingdom (ca. 1200 B.C.)"<br />
<br />
"It's about two brothers, once close as close can be, who have an epic fight over a woman and come to be separated by an enchanted sea of crocodiles. I'm leaving out some gruesome if mythologically common dismemberment." She turns the page, fingrtips brushing the heavyweight paper but skirting the whimsical marginalia. "One conceals his heart in an acacia tree so that he would be invulnerable as long as the tree stands. He tells the secret only to his estranged brother as a gesture of trust, and to his wife, crafted for him alone from clay by the gods themselves." She looks up from the page, arching both eyebrows. "Who do you want to guess betrays him?"<br />
<br />
"Datura," Toni repeats. "Beautiful, magical and deadly. I picked good." She leans just slightly closer, arm braced across her knees as she listens rapt to Anahita's summary. "''Well'', I gotta say that in my life siblings been way more of a constant than spouses, so my money's going to have to be on loyal brother, treacherous wife, and the moat of crocodiles ''should'''ve been put up between her and the tree instead." Her brows lift, intrigued. "How's it end? Does one of them avenge him?"<br />
<br />
"You are absolutely right." Anahita turns the page again, even though she isn't reading, exactly, and has turned further toward Toni. "And you could say he avenges him''self''. See, when his brother learns of his death, he braves the crocodile infested waters and searches the land beyond for seven years to retrieve his heart from the fallen acacia and resurrect him." She glances aside at the acacia tree again, then back at Toni. "Moat or no moat, he probably should have thought to tell his brother ''where'' the tree was."<br />
<br />
She drops her voice slightly, tense and hushed now. "Furious, he seeks his wife out in the royal court and and changes himself into a series of animals. Each time his wife recognizes him and the pharoh kills him, until at last he takes the form of the acacia tree. When the pharoh cuts down the tree again, his wife eats one of the seed pods and becomes pregnant...''with him''." She gives a small lopsided smile. "In time he becomes the pharoh and elevates his brother to nobility, and they lived together, happily ever after." The edges of the pages whisper over her fingertips as she closes the book. "I'll have to think about how tell that story properly, but thank you for indulging me on the quick and dirty version."<br />
<br />
Toni lays her fingers lightly over her lips, her eyes wider and a small amused smile pulling at her mouth. "That is gonna be one ''gnarled'' family tree," she declares, slapping at her knee. "Whew but those old folk tales do not mess ''around'', I feel like you wouldn't get half that story past the FCC today. Who's your audience, because I think I'd pick and choose details ''pretty'' differently if this was a bedtime story for my kids or some entertainment at a girls' night." Her smile remains as she lifts her coffee to drain the last of it. "Thank ''you'' for broadening my plant education. Now I know one more plant fact and that's you never ''know'' what drama is living in the heart of these things." She's very lightly batting at some of the acacia leaves in indication.<br />
<br />
"You're most welcome." Anahita hums and looks up toward the join between the glass roof and the glass wall, nearly invisible against the sky. "My audience runs the gamut, these days. Just folks from the neighborhood who happen to be around for story time." She looks at the book's cover and shakes her head. "I might come up with a PG-13 version, or leave it off the rotation entirely when there are little ones." She smiles gently. "How old are yours?"<br />
<br />
"Oh!" Toni's face lights up, her posture perking. "They're getting so ''big''," is immediately contradicted by, "my oldest just started ''preschool'' I can't even believe it." She is already taking out her phone to proudly display to Anahita a photo, a very small toddler with hair in colorfully beaded braids and a not ''very'' much bigger child in overalls and a Daniel Tiger tee shirt, curled up against a long white Borzoi who is managing to still look dignified even as a toddler-pillow. The larger child is holding a picture book (''Thank You, Omu!'') open for the younger to look at. "Absolute fiends for new stories -- though I think," she says with amusement, "this one might have to wait a few years."<br />
<br />
"Oh, they are precious!" Anahita leans in a little closer, breaking into a much more organic smile. "Now I'm going to be a stereotype and say 'it's a magical age'. Mine spent his entire second year making as much noise as physically possible, and I still think that." She grips the book a little tighter, and then lets go of it and folds her hands primly atop it. "They do get big fast. But I believe that if you fill them up with stories, they don't ever have to lose the magic. You certainly don't seem like you've lost yours, even after half a day's worth of meetings."<br />
<br />
"It ''is''," Toni agrees brightly, "people warned me about toddlers but please ''I'' got big emotions too, we can work that shit ''out''." Her eyes flutter wider at the mention of meetings, and her laugh comes with a brief apologetic pat of hand against Anahita's shoulder. "Thank you for that reminder I got a half a day ''left''. Magic may not have to end but it ''do'' get put on pause, time to time. This has been a ''lovely'' interlude, though, I am so glad I ran into you and your stories and your heart-tree here." She is rising, regretfully, starting to turn away -- then turn back, bapping her cellphone lightly against her opposite palm. "-- I was going to ask if you'd want to swap more stories some time in future then I realized I didn't even get your ''name'' here I'm about to ask your number. I'm Toni."<br />
<br />
"Two half-days of meeting is a lot for one day," Anahita pronounces seriously. "But in-betweens have their own kind of magic, too. It was really wonderful talking to you. May your business go quickly and as pleasantly as such things can." She beams at Toni's not-quite-asked question. "Oh! I'm Anahita, and I would ''love'' to do just that, except..." She rises, too, produces a rather new smartphone from her bag and unlocks the screen (a slowly shifting overhead view of waves lapping a stretch of sunny shoreline), frowning at it in concentration. "...I still haven't memorized my number. There's probably a higher tech way of doing this." Perhaps there should have been a "but" after that, but she does not seem in any way abashed to be presenting Toni with a blank contact entry.<br />
<br />
"Anahita -- how you spell that? Actually, text it to me then I'll have it right for sure." Toni takes the phone, entering in her first name and her phone number before handing it back. "Enjoy the plants ''twice'' as much for me, yeah? I'm 'bout to be bored out my mind." She waggles her fingers in a small wave, starting to turn away -- then turning back ''again'' to remember to snag her empty coffee cup. ''Then'' clicking her way crisply away For Real, this time.<br />
<br />
"I will apply my plant-enjoying skills to the utmost," Anahita promises, accepting her phone back with a single serious nod that's most of the way to a bow. She watches Toni disappear down the path before sitting back down. She stares at the screen of her phone until it goes dark, then turns it back on and saves the contact. For almost a full minute she hardly moves at all. Then the stillness leaves her and she starts typing.<br />
<br />
<nowiki>*</nowiki>(Anahita --> Toni): It's Anahita<br />
<br />
She switches seamlessly to email and taps out a message with admirable rapidity for two thumbs and no swiping.<br />
<br />
<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
Dear Lucien,<br />
<br />
I hope this message finds you well. Your conservatory is even more amazing than I'd imagined, and I fancy myself quite an imaginative person. When we spoke I don't fully understand the decision to build an entire hotel around it, but the hotel does bring people here who might not otherwise go out of their way to find it. All chance encounters are gifts, wanted or not, but I had a very lovely one today for which your garden and by extension you deserves some credit. I have so many questions about it, but I am comfortable with mystery, too. May the gods grant you relief from the other demands on your time so that you might spend more of it enjoying this magical place you have made.<br />
<br />
Yours in horticultural appreciation,<br />
<br />
Anahita<br />
</pre><br />
<br />
She hesitates again upon signing the message. Then looks out at the flurrying sky framed by the acacia's thorny branches and hits send.<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Trading_Up&diff=24548Logs:Trading Up2023-03-05T17:57:20Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Jax, Luca, Skye | summary = "I didn't even know they ''made'' showers this fancy." | gamedate = 2021-11-15 | gamedatename = | subtitle = | locat..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Jax]], [[Luca]], [[Skye]]<br />
| summary = "I didn't even know they ''made'' showers this fancy."<br />
| gamedate = 2021-11-15<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> [[Freaktown]] - Riverdale<br />
| categories = Luca, Skye, Jax, Mutants, Freaktown<br />
| log = <br />
<br />
It's a pleasant enough day, for November, bright and mild. This little corner of the once-posh neighborhood now recently turned into a mutant enclave is bustling -- not, at the moment in this exact yard, with mutant refugees but chickens scrabbling at the fresh vegetable scraps Jax (colorful as he often is, in vivid galaxy-print overalls, strapped only on one shoulder, a purple henley dotted with silver stars, and rainbow high-top Chucks, his hair its usual green-blue-purple ombre; there's a purplish nebula on his eyepatch, too -- swirling very slowly, for those observant enough to catch the motion) has just set out for them; there's stew simmering on the kitchen stove just inside the adjacent mansion, no doubt the source of the bits and bobs of leafy greens and veggie peels the chickens are now enjoying. He doesn't immediately return to his cooking; he's got a bucket of ''meat'' scraps, too. These don't go to the chickens, but off beyond there pen to where a gleaming metallic blue dragonfly somewhat larger than a drafthorse has been ''eying'' the birds. "Ain't for you, Sugar, but this is." He's offering the meat to the giant insect with a small ''pat-pat'', like Enormous Dragonflies are just a normal part of life.<br />
<br />
Her injury mended, Skye has been seen more around Riverdale and particularly around her recently liberated labmates. Though she has been perhaps a bit diffident by the standards those who know her better, she's been offering her services where she can--helping to set up donated mobile devices and computers, tracking down families, making Costco in her ancient yet startlingly functional van. It's this last one that she's just completed, the unloading made quick by many hands. She's wearing a red hip-length coat over a black tee with a rainbow brain captioned "neurodiversity", blue jeans, black Doc Martens. Maybe it's the glint of Sugar's wings or carapace that's caught her eye, or maybe it's Jax, but either way she drifts toward the yard and squints kind of dubiously at the fence before vaulting it kind of clumsily. "Sup," she offers, "need a hand? Or...wheels, or whatever?"<br />
<br />
“I’ve got two,” A voice of slowly increasing familiarity rings out from behind the two figures in the yard - three if you count the ginormous dragonfly munching on some kind of meat in its pen, “hands, I mean. Let my wheels back in Brooklyn.” The voice, along with the light chuckle that accompanies his last statement, belongs to Luca; one of the liberated labrats who took residence in Riverdale after the most recent raid. His smile is aptly radiant for someone of a newfound freedom, bringing a softness to the somewhat chiselled features of his face and harsh purple glow of his eyes. He approaches the other two from the direction of the mansion, dressed in a checked flannel shirt that’s undone over a simple black tee, and paired with the comfiest pair of corduroy trousers he’s ever worn. They’re rolled up slightly at the ankle, showing a pair of white socks and black converse. “Saw you guys from my window,” He adds, calloused hands placed behind his head as he ties the damp, brown locks into a rough ponytail, before letting them drop once more and slip into his pockets “I gotta say, Jax, the shower in that house is insane. Thanks for the digs, even if it is gigantic.” He nods in acknowledgement to Skye, who he’d met in the labs briefly, and spoken to on the odd occasion afterwards.<br />
<br />
"Oh thanks! Um --" Jax's brow creases at the offer of help, but the uncertain frown clears up at Luca's comment, his eye going wide-wide. "Isn't it ''wild''? That whole, like --" His hand gestures at -- nothing, in the air in front of him, but a moment later there's a rainwater showerhead floating in front of where he gestures with a fancy panel beneath it, ''several'' different knobs around a digital display reading the precise water temperature. "What! What-''what''! Luxury showering experience."<br />
<br />
The illusory showerhead vanishes as soon as it's served its demonstrative purpose, though Jax's excited expression is slower to fade. "I hope the rest of the place is servin' alright, too. Can be a bit of a system shock re-adjustin'" He glances to Skye, teeth wiggling at one of his many lip rings. "''Even'' if it ain't been all that long, I think."<br />
<br />
"Heeey." Skye's greeting for Luca is probably made even more casual sounding by her languid slouch against the fence. "Oh man are these like elegant early 20th century fancy bathrooms or more like wetrooms that make a ''statement?''" Her smile skews a little. "Adjusting -- oh yeah. It's not so bad for me, though. I got to go back to my own place." She shrugs and turns both hands upward. "Wait, you were local?" She asks Luca, eyebrows raised. "I mean. Before Dirac."<br />
<br />
"I didn't even know they ''made'' showers this fancy." Luca chuckles, his smile never wavering, "I think it's a wetroom. If that means there aren't any glass barriers or anything to keep the water from going everywhere - now that was wild." He thinks back to how he'd left a pile of his clean clothes along with his towel on the floor of the wetroom before turning on the shower head; not realising that everything in there was inevitably going to get soaked. The concept of a ''wet room'' hadn't quite settled into his head at that moment in time. "Mhm, BK born and raised baby," He exclaims as Skye reminds him of his family home, "I think I should give it some time before visiting my mom though. Ya know, lay low for a week or two."<br />
<br />
"Yeah these are definitely some modern designer gone wild in here I get the feeling some'a these houses had ''so'' much personality before they let a contractor have free reign and several millions of dollars." Jax's nose wrinkles up at the thought of the renovation -- then wrinkles further at the mention of Luca's family, a little sympathetic. "Oh -- oh, that's always a difficult one. I'ono if any parent really does well with the well I was in a torture lab for a while talk no matter ''how'' they feel about -- well." His brow scrunches, briefly. "If they even know about the rest of it."<br />
<br />
"Yep, that's pretty much what a wetroom is! Which like, seriously, I've lived in plenty of firetraps where 'water getting all over the floor' was just part of the bohemian charm." Skye chews on her lower lip, nodding at Luca's explantion. "It's a lot to process without having to explain it ''and'' deal with how upset theyr'e probably gonna get, right? I hope you get to take the time you need." She glances aside at Jax, then drops her gaze to the chickens still pecking away. "I'm in a pretty weird situation where my mom knew ''exactly'' where I was. "Maybe someday we'll have a conversation that doesn't start with her telling me 'I told you so', but today is not that day."<br />
<br />
Luca rests his forearms on the other side of the fence as he leans against the wooden panels, granting him a better view of the chickens at Jax's feet and the gargantuan dragonfly nearby. In the past, such a sight would freak the young man out and raise a million questions, but after all he's seen in his many years at the labs, Luca is somewhat desensitised nowadays. "I'm not even sure my family know just yet, unless the big boys at Prometheus gave them the run-down." Although saddened by not being able to see his family, something tells him that the same might not be said for the two peers in front of him, "I'm sorry to hear that, Skye. Our mom's sound like they would get on like a house on fire. Too well, in fact."<br />
<br />
"If you're rich then all the inconveniences the poors live with wrap back 'round to being chic. That," Jax explains earnestly, sketching a small loop in the air with his forefinger; it comes to life in glimmering gold briefly in a small O where his finger describes, "is what we call the circle'a life." He shoots Skye a slightly guilty look, his head bowing. "Always did know it was gonna be risky, but -- I'm still sorry. Shouldn't'a gone down how it did. ''Shoulda'' got y'all sooner. Should -- a lot of things, I guess."<br />
<br />
"I don't think Prometheus is in the habit of helpfully informing people whose family members they've kidnapped, but these days who can say?" Skye shrugs, plucking at the cuffs of her coat. "My mom...well, I hope she didn't harass you all ''too'' much over the whole. Losing her daughter thing." She straightens up earnestly. "You got us out. If you'd rushed it, maybe it would have been a disaster."<br />
<br />
"But yeah, she's tough to get along with, but I try to cut her some slack about this stuff anyway. She was in Prometheus, too --" Her eyes widen. "Oh shit, I'm a ''legacy'' labrat!" She scrubs the side of her face with one hand, embarrassed. "I'm lucky to have her, and we'll work things out." She gives Luca an encouraging smile. "I hope things work out okay with your family, too. If it'd help to have some backup -- and a ride -- hit me up."<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Stables&diff=24459Stables2023-02-12T05:24:07Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| width="100%"<br />
|-<br />
| width="100%" |<br />
{| width="100%"<br />
! Description <br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}The distinctive smell of hay and sawdust and horses greets visitors to this large barn, kept well-tended by the stablehand and those who have a passion here for equestrianism. The horses at Xavier's are well cared for, stabled in comfortable stalls. The walls host a plethora of tack for those who wish to take a jaunt around the grounds.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Notes & Trivia<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
*Animals housed here<br />
**Adagio - Morgan gelding, born 2003. 14.5 hands high, solid black coat. Calm and quiet, kind of aloof.<br />
**Aragorn - American Quarter Horse stallion, born 2018. 15.9 hh, brown coat. Loves to go Fast.<br />
**Blackjack - AQH gelding, born 2019. 15.5 hh, sorrel coat. Friendly but tends to be skittish.<br />
**Cato - American Paint Horse, born 2002. 16.1 hh, grey-and-white coat. Cranky and bad-tempered. Does like raisins though.<br />
**Afriel - APH gelding, born 2005, 15 hh, brown and white coat. Very easygoing, one of the best horses for beginners.<br />
**Equinox - AQH stallion, palomino colouring, 15.7 hh, born 2002. Good dressage horse.<br />
**Grace - APH mare, born 1999. 14.8 hh, black and white coat. Old and easygoing; will deign to give slow rides to those who she likes. Is not bad-tempered to those she doesn't like; will simply stand still, though, till they get bored and give up.<br />
**Jonas - Appaloosa stallion, born 1998. 15.3 hh, White and bay blanket coat. Mellow and aging, not allowed to be ridden anymore but very friendly to those who bring him treats.<br />
**Mika - AQH mare, born 2009. 15.2 hh, sorrel coat. Friendly and laid-back, also a good beginner horse.<br />
**Ramiel - Thoroughbred mare, born 2005. 16.4 hh, black with white star and socks markings. Friendly, but not a good horse for beginners; high spirited, tends to be finicky about being ''ridden'' by unfamiliar riders. Favourite treats: apples and carrots.<br />
**Rarity - AQH filly, born 2016, 14.1 hh, all white coat. Temperamental with her affections, may bite those who get in her space without making sure she is comfortable with that first, very friendly to those patient enough to win her over.<br />
**Zenith - Hanoverian mare, born 2008. 17.1 hh, sorrel coat. Friendly, affectionate, very energetic. One of the best dressage horses. Favourite treats: watermelon rind, sugar cubes.<br />
**Sugar - not a horse at all. An extremely large dragonfly, big enough to be ridden by two adults, bright metallic blue in colour. Carnivorous, unlike the horses. Will bite almost anyone who tries to ride her without one of the Hollands around to assist.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Important Events<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Anything particularly noteworthy happen in this spot? Note it here!<br />
|}<br />
|<br />
{|<br />
! Stables<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{| width="100%" class="infobox" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #000"<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Neighborhood'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| XS<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Type'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| PONIES<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Mutant-friendliness'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Xavier's<br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
{| <br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
! colspan="2" | Logs<br />
|-<br />
| colspan="2" | {{RP Logs | name = {{BASEPAGENAME}} | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Archived Logs'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
{{ RP Logs | name = {{BASEPAGENAME}} | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate | namespace = ArchivedLogs }}<br />
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<br />
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<br />
[[Category:Places]]</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Stables&diff=24458Stables2023-02-12T05:23:33Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| width="100%"<br />
|-<br />
| width="100%" |<br />
{| width="100%"<br />
! Description <br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}The distinctive smell of hay and sawdust and horses greets visitors to this large barn, kept well-tended by the stablehand and those who have a passion here for equestrianism. The horses at Xavier's are well cared for, stabled in comfortable stalls. The walls host a plethora of tack for those who wish to take a jaunt around the grounds.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Notes & Trivia<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
*Animals housed here<br />
**''Adagio - Morgan gelding, born 2003. 14.5 hands high, solid black coat. Calm and quiet, kind of aloof.<br />
**Aragorn - American Quarter Horse stallion, born 2018. 15.9 hh, brown coat. Loves to go Fast.<br />
**Blackjack - AQH gelding, born 2019. 15.5 hh, sorrel coat. Friendly but tends to be skittish.<br />
**Cato - American Paint Horse, born 2002. 16.1 hh, grey-and-white coat. Cranky and bad-tempered. Does like raisins though.<br />
**Afriel - APH gelding, born 2005, 15 hh, brown and white coat. Very easygoing, one of the best horses for beginners.<br />
**Equinox - AQH stallion, palomino colouring, 15.7 hh, born 2002. Good dressage horse.<br />
**Grace - APH mare, born 1999. 14.8 hh, black and white coat. Old and easygoing; will deign to give slow rides to those who she likes. Is not bad-tempered to those she doesn't like; will simply stand still, though, till they get bored and give up.<br />
**Jonas - Appaloosa stallion, born 1998. 15.3 hh, White and bay blanket coat. Mellow and aging, not allowed to be ridden anymore but very friendly to those who bring him treats.<br />
**Mika - AQH mare, born 2009. 15.2 hh, sorrel coat. Friendly and laid-back, also a good beginner horse.<br />
**Ramiel - Thoroughbred mare, born 2005. 16.4 hh, black with white star and socks markings. Friendly, but not a good horse for beginners; high spirited, tends to be finicky about being ''ridden'' by unfamiliar riders. Favourite treats: apples and carrots.<br />
**Rarity - AQH filly, born 2016, 14.1 hh, all white coat. Temperamental with her affections, may bite those who get in her space without making sure she is comfortable with that first, very friendly to those patient enough to win her over.<br />
**Zenith - Hanoverian mare, born 2008. 17.1 hh, sorrel coat. Friendly, affectionate, very energetic. One of the best dressage horses. Favourite treats: watermelon rind, sugar cubes.<br />
**Sugar - not a horse at all. An extremely large dragonfly, big enough to be ridden by two adults, bright metallic blue in colour. Carnivorous, unlike the horses. Will bite almost anyone who tries to ride her without one of the Hollands around to assist.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Important Events<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Anything particularly noteworthy happen in this spot? Note it here!<br />
|}<br />
|<br />
{|<br />
! Stables<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{| width="100%" class="infobox" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #000"<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Neighborhood'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| XS<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Type'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| PONIES<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Mutant-friendliness'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Xavier's<br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
{| <br />
|}<br />
|-<br />
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| colspan="2" | {{RP Logs | name = {{BASEPAGENAME}} | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate }}<br />
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<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Archived Logs'''<br />
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br />
{{ RP Logs | name = {{BASEPAGENAME}} | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate | namespace = ArchivedLogs }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
[[Category:Places]]</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Stables&diff=24457Stables2023-02-12T05:22:10Z<p>Sunshine: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| width="100%"<br />
|-<br />
| width="100%" |<br />
{| width="100%"<br />
! Description <br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}The distinctive smell of hay and sawdust and horses greets visitors to this large barn, kept well-tended by the stablehand and those who have a passion here for equestrianism. The horses at Xavier's are well cared for, stabled in comfortable stalls. The walls host a plethora of tack for those who wish to take a jaunt around the grounds.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Notes & Trivia<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
*Animals housed here<br />
**''Adagio - Morgan gelding, born 2003. 14.5 hands high, solid black coat. Calm and quiet, kind of aloof.<br />
**Aragorn - American Quarter Horse stallion, born 2018. 15.9 hh, brown coat. Loves to go Fast.<br />
**Blackjack - AQH gelding, born 2019. 15.5 hh, sorrel coat. Friendly but tends to be skittish.<br />
**Cato - American Paint Horse, born 2002. 16.1 hh, grey-and-white coat. Cranky and bad-tempered. Does like raisins though.<br />
**Afriel - APH gelding, born 2005, 15 hh, brown and white coat. Very easygoing, one of the best horses for beginners.<br />
**Equinox - AQH stallion, palomino colouring, 15.7 hh, born 2002. Good dressage horse.<br />
**Grace - APH mare, born 1999. 14.8 hh, black and white coat.<br />
**Jonas - Appaloosa stallion, born 1998. 15.3 hh, White and bay blanket coat. Mellow and aging, not allowed to be ridden anymore but very friendly to those who bring him treats.<br />
**Mika - AQH mare, born 2009. 15.2 hh, sorrel coat. Friendly and laid-back, also a good beginner horse.<br />
**Ramiel - Thoroughbred mare, born 2005. 16.4 hh, black with white star and socks markings. Friendly, but not a good horse for beginners; high spirited, tends to be finicky about being ''ridden'' by unfamiliar riders. Favourite treats: apples and carrots.<br />
**Rarity - AQH filly, born 2016, 14.1 hh, all white coat. Temperamental with her affections, may bite those who get in her space without making sure she is comfortable with that first, very friendly to those patient enough to win her over.<br />
**Zenith - Hanoverian mare, born 2008. 17.1 hh, sorrel coat. Friendly, affectionate, very energetic. One of the best dressage horses. Favourite treats: watermelon rind, sugar cubes.<br />
**Sugar - not a horse at all. An extremely large dragonfly, big enough to be ridden by two adults, bright metallic blue in colour. Carnivorous, unlike the horses. Will bite almost anyone who tries to ride her without one of the Hollands around to assist.<br />
|<br />
|-<br />
! Important Events<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{{Tab}}Anything particularly noteworthy happen in this spot? Note it here!<br />
|}<br />
|<br />
{|<br />
! Stables<br />
|-<br />
|<br />
{| width="100%" class="infobox" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #000"<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Neighborhood'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| XS<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Type'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| PONIES<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px" class="left" | '''Mutant-friendliness'''<br />
| style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px"| Xavier's<br />
|}<br />
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{| <br />
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| colspan="2" | {{RP Logs | name = {{BASEPAGENAME}} | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate }}<br />
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<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">'''Archived Logs'''<br />
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{{ RP Logs | name = {{BASEPAGENAME}} | columns = 3 | ordermethod = gamedate | namespace = ArchivedLogs }}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
</div></div><br />
<br />
[[Category:Places]]</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Flat-footed&diff=24447Logs:Flat-footed2023-02-10T16:21:32Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Fury, Jax, Steve | summary = "I'm sorry to interrupt, Mister Holland, but I have urgent need to speak with you." | gamedate = 2023-02-07 | gamedat..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Fury]], [[Jax]], [[Steve]]<br />
| summary = "I'm sorry to interrupt, Mister Holland, but I have urgent need to speak with you."<br />
| gamedate = 2023-02-07<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> Detention Facility - Jax's Suite - SHIELD Headquarters - Times Square<br />
| categories = Fury, Jax, Steve, SHIELD, SHIELD Headquarters, Private Residence, Mutants, Humans, Mutates<br />
| log = <br />
<br />
A bit larger than the other detainee's rooms, this one has been converted from a small corner lounge for the guest rooms. Tall windows with a southern exposure let in copious sunlight if the unnecessarily high-tech curtains are drawn. The sitting area is small but comfortable and the sleeping area beyond it is screened off with interior partitions. There's a bulky desk in one corner with a computer rigged up nicely for video calls and a kitchenette tucked into another. A video comm panel by the front door allows for quick communication with both in-person visitors just outside the door or the security staff down the hall.<br />
<br />
The room decorations have been proliferating wildly -- the bed is now home to a menagerie of stuffed animals, mostly all Very New except for one old much-loved Cheer Bear perched atop the pillow. Greenery spills over from pots by the window ledge and hanging baskets. Art in numerous people's varied styles has been hung on the walls, with numerous of Jax's own sketches -- portraits of friends mingling with anthro characters and surreal cityscapes, a large drawing of a stained glass window bearing an image of Apollo done in traditional church-window style -- tacked up on the desk. A number of stained-glass hangings refract colorful light in from the expensive windows.<br />
<br />
Jax himself is not at the desk currently but at his easel, set up in one corner. Dressed in faded and much-paint-splattered overalls hanging off one shoulder over an ancient threadbare Rainbow Brite tee, plain dark hair and plain black eyepatch making his unusually pale skin look even more washed out, he's focused and intent as he works. The computer is playing music -- Tsibele's version of "Mir Veln Zey Iberlebn" -- filling the room with the defiant tune (on repeat, and has been for Quite Some Time). Jax is holding his palette loose in one hand, in his other his paintbrush is gripped more like a sword than a pen, whole hand curled around it as he adds color in broad sweeps to the canvas. So early on there is not much hint in the abstract shading of what the layers of oil paint will build ''up'' to, but every so often flickers of outline form on the canvas and then just as quickly fade -- a spreading of roots here, a branch there, something almost like a face over there.<br />
<br />
Across the room, Steve is sitting kind of crookedly on the bed, propped against the headboard, ankles crossed and dangling off the side, sketchbook cradled in the crook of his left arm. He's wearing a black t-shirt (at ''least'' one side too small) with the words "None of us are free until all of us are free" in bold white letters across the chest, comfortable straight-leg jeans, and well-worn black combat boots. The sketch taking shape beneath the quick strokes of his pencil depicts Sam looking fondly exasperated as he moves his laptop to make space for the huge pitbull climbing into his lap. Zenobia, for her part, looks very pleased with herself, the little curl of a smile at the corner of her offsetting the mournful expression she usually wears. He looks up at Jax, no exasperation to be seen in his own fondness. Opens his mouth. Promptly closes it again. Returns to his sketch with a small smile of his own, sheepish but pleased.<br />
<br />
The door chimes, the tones soft and serene. Then chimes ''again'', which rather ruins the flimsy pretense that it's a request and not a command. The intercom comes to life a moment later, no video, just Nick Fury's voice, his drawl heavier than usual but sounding calm as you like, "I'm sorry to interrupt, Mister Holland, but I have urgent need to speak with you."<br />
<br />
For his part, Jax has been paying Steve admittedly very little mind for a time. Paying the ''world'' very little mind, too, it seems -- when the door chimes at first it doesn't even seem to sink in. The second chime does register, or at least pulls away ''enough'' of his concentration that the small flickers of tree life that blossom and vanish on the canvas are now ''spreading'', walls shifting gnarled and wooden, branches crawling their way across the ceiling. It's only the sound of the actual ''voice'' breaking through that pulls his attention away from the painting -- first with a sharper ''frown'' to Steve that melts apologetically a moment later when his brain catches up enough to realize that Steve has been obediently innocent of breaking the silence. He turns his attention to the intercom instead -- no frown but an oddly ''chipper''-bright smile, his hair blossoming into its trademark peacock-ombre, a glimmer of makeup spreading across his face ''just'' enough to make him look actually alive and colorful instead of just spectral.<br />
<br />
"Don't worry," he reassures Fury cheerfully once he's set his palette down, ambled over to pull the door open, "I already had a firm talk with Spence and that thing with all the crickets will ''not'' happen again."<br />
<br />
At the first tone from the door chime, Steve sits upright and starts to reach for the shield leaning against the bed at his side. Does not pick it up. ''Does'' narrow his eyes at the door, but seems content to ignore it even when it chimes again. Lowers his hand at the sound of Fury's voice, though he doesn't look any less baleful when he gets up to trail after Jax. "Sounds like it's ''still'' happening, on and off."<br />
<br />
"I appreciate that," sounds utterly perfunctory. Fury does not look even slightly concerned about the thing with all the crickets. It's an open question whether he's even registered Jax's promise at all. His eye tracks aside to Steve only briefly before returning to Jax, his expression firmly set in his light perennial scowl. He's in his shirtsleeves, though still black on black, and definitely looks like he just got up from his desk a minute ago.<br />
<br />
He hesitates before stepping inside -- looks ''almost'' like he's about to ask permission before he thinks better of it. "I've just been informed someone in our ranks leaked surveillance footage of this room to the press, including a photo of you in the nude." Was he looping that line on his way down? He delivers it very smoothly, though his scowl deepens all the while. "And of you gentlemen -- kissing. On behalf of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the U.N., I take full responsibility."<br />
<br />
The bright smile slowly melts away from Jax's expression as his eye widen, his pierced brows hiking way up. On this paintbrush his grip has tightened, looking now even ''more'' like he's readying the tool for stabbing. A ''furious'' crimson has darkened his cheeks, the space around him tinging pink as though reflecting the burning. "''Which'' one'a your pigs --" His voice is lower here, but the sentence cuts off with an abrupt ''click'' of teeth, his gaze lowering to the floor.<br />
<br />
Steve opens his mouth (again) and closes it (again) without actually speaking. His hand curls into a fist at his side, and then abruptly it's not at his side anymore. He telegraphs the right hook plainly, but even if Fury sees it coming, the blow is almost certainly too fast for him to avoid flat-footed.<br />
<br />
''Is'' Fury flat-footed? He did start to drop his weight and shift back, but his eye is ''just'' a little too slow to shift from Jax's paintbrush to Steve's fist. Said fist catches him squarely on the jaw, snapping his head hard to one side. The rest of him follows, and though he breaks the fall reasonably well he's slow to rise. An alarm is going off, in here and out in the hallway. "Belay that!" Fury bellows. The rush of booted feet in the hallway outside quiet, and the klaxon follows a moment later. "That's fair. Jesus, but you hit hard." His eye patch has come loose somewhere in the middle of all this, the gnarled scars it usually covers writhing as his face contorts with pain, the eye in their midst clouded over. He doesn't bother looking for it, and doesn't sway ''too'' egregiously when he finally straightens up. "We're carrying out a full investigation. I promise you, we will find those responsible and deal with them harshly."<br />
<br />
Somewhere in the middle of this, ''Jax's'' posture has eased, a flicker of ''amusement'' cutting into the anger that was growing in his expression. There's a stripey movie-theatre bag of popcorn that has materialized in one hand in the middle of Fury's recovery. "We got a whole entire ''child'' up in here while your peeping Tom --" He doesn't ''look'' at the security cameras where they're tucked into the corners of the room, where they sit overhead in the hall, but it's very clear he's been quite well aware of their locations when a moment later there's a series of flashes, quiet sizzle-crackle--pops, curls of acrid burning-plastic smoke. Somewhere, monitors have gone dark as neat and precise spears of light make quick work of the cameras. "Well. Sure won't happen again, now, will it, sir?"<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Fantasy_and_Reality&diff=24406Logs:Fantasy and Reality2023-02-06T15:05:00Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Akihiro, DJ, Regan | summary = "Peace, I like just fine. Sometimes you just have a hell of a fight to find it." | gamedate = 2023-01-15 | gamedate..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Akihiro]], [[DJ]], [[Regan]]<br />
| summary = "Peace, I like just fine. Sometimes you just have a hell of a fight to find it."<br />
| gamedate = 2023-01-15<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> [[Freaktown]] - [[TP-Riverdale|Riverdale]]<br />
| categories = Akihiro, DJ, Regan, Riverdale, Freaktown, Mutants, Brotherhood of Mutants<br />
| log = <br />
The Mid Atlantic seems to have suddenly remembered that it is ''winter''; far from the practically balmy 50s earlier in the week, this weekend has been punctuated with flurries and deep overnight chills. As the sun sinks below the horizon it's just started flurrying again, a sharp biting swirl of pinpoint ice-flecks that do not seem eager to linger.<br />
<br />
Currently, melting into the distance nearly as fast as the vanishing snow are a trio of vehicles -- two motorcycles alongside one large SUV. It's hard to tell from the current distance ''who'' the riders are -- but the two white-crossed jackets in DJ's hand are a dead giveaway. One brief flutter of motion later and the jackets have joined a very long string of other accoutrements -- vests, jackets, a couple dogtags, several baseball caps with the bright-striped FOH eagle silhouette, a few tee shirts, one patch-covered pair of jeans -- all strung across or embedded ''into'' a metal cable strung between two tall poles to either side of the road. The poles themselves are more cheerfully decorated -- strung about with fairy lights and colorful hand-made lettering reading WELCOME TO on one pole and FREAKTOWN down the other.<br />
<br />
Regan is dressed for the cold, deep red duffel coat over warm lined leggings, tall black boots, a very soft red-pink ombre cashmere scarf wound around her neck. She pauses near one of the poles, straightening the K where it hangs slightly askew as if this will significantly elevate the overall ''vibe'' of this entryway arch. "If only we could have you here full time, they might stop even trying their luck." She's glancing up towards the string of collected bigot-detritus with an impressed lift of brows. "If it weren't a health hazard I might suggest graduating to some more ''severe'' trophies."<br />
<br />
Akihiro is also dressed for the cold, in a fur lined denim jacket over a red and black flannel shirt, boot cut blue jeans, and a pair of black biker boots with a buckle over the ankle. Currently he's knelt next to a vintage Honda Dream, fiddling at something with tools while a cigarette hangs out of his mouth (an ashtray set up nearby this time). "If you want us to up the intensity, I ''do'' know a thing or two about keeping other groups in check." he says loud enough for Reagan to hear, pushing up to his feet and wiping his hands off on his pants. "Don't even have to kill too many of them. Unless you'd prefer it that way." He takes a drag from the cigarette and turns to admire the new trophy's, nodding to DJ. "Great work as always."<br />
<br />
DJ is just wiping his hands against his jeans when Regan approaches. He follows her gaze back up to the haphazard collection, a verrrrrry small smile pulling at his mouth. "I'd stick around more if it seemed like they ''needed'' the help here, but --" His one good shoulder hitches, eyes flicking to Akihiro. "Figure people can handle things just fine. Besides, we start throwing limbs up there and the cops might start hassling the neighborhood in ''earnest''."<br />
<br />
"Tempting," Regan allows with a small tip of her head, eyes briefly lighting at Akihiro's suggestion. On the wire overhead, some of the jackets have now morphed -- a severed arm, a severed ''head'' dangling gruesomely alongside the collected clothing and accessories. "You are probably right about the police, though. I ''suppose'' we'll have to make due with just scaring them away." ''Just'' a touch of disappointment, there, as she leans up against the pole. "-- Where ''do'' you stay, when you aren't here? Half of what I hear about you is transposed and the other half --" She doesn't finish this thought, just studying DJ with a frank curiosity.<br />
<br />
"Part of being a good leader is knowing when to step back and let the new generation handle things." Akihiro says with a small grin, taking another drag from his cigarette before putting it out in the ashtray. "We might be competent, but that doesn't mean we don't need all the help we can get. Solidarity is important." He falls quiet when the topic changes to DJ, a hand disappearing into the pocket of his jacket.<br />
<br />
There's a small easing in DJ's smile, at Akihiro's words. He nods, unconsciously drifting closer to the other man to examine the motorcycle he's been working on. "That it is," he agrees, though he's looking ''Akihiro'' over, too, with a curious lift of brows. "... new generation." Half questioning, half surprised.<br />
<br />
A faint flush darkens his cheeks, and he lifts his hand, fingers raking along the side of his head. "Oh, anywhere. Nowhere. My goat's been staying here, though. She's a big hit with the kids." ''This'' last comment is light, albeit not quite light ''enough'' to obscure the twinge of regret that had accompanied his initial answer. His gaze shifts away from the others, lifting up overhead and catching with a grimace on the newly bloodied display above. "... shouldn't you be good at sorting fantasy from reality?"<br />
<br />
"Oh, Akihiro has been around long enough to have picked up -- a few things. Part of the community before there ''was'' a community." Overhead, the bloody trophies are vanishing, severed limbs replaced instead with high-tech prosthetics. "With our people it can be hard to distinguish, sometimes. Aged samurai in young men's bodies. X-Men reborn from other universes -- for so many of us, fantasy and reality are often one and the same."<br />
<br />
“Wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a samurai.” Akihiro chuckles, taking a few steps closer to the group. “Just an old biker that grows food and makes repairs now.” He pulls his hand free along with a pack of cigarettes, putting one between his lips but not lighting it. “I’m about four years older than Charles I believe. Well, this Charles at least.”<br />
<br />
DJ's eyes narrow, his jaw tightening momentarily. "I am ''not'' an X-Man." This is immediate, a little clipped. His shoulders have gone tense -- oddly more noticeable where it sets his empty sleeve to swaying than in his ''actual'' arm. "I hope you're a few years wiser, too." Though the heat drains out of his voice soon enough, head dipping in mild apology. "-- I shouldn't make assumptions. I don't even know the man, here." His smile returns, a little bit crooked. "The other universe part, though, ''that's'' true enough."<br />
<br />
Regan's eyebrows lift at DJ's reaction to being called an X-Man. The line overhead melts back into its ''actual'' collection of stolen tokens as she pulls herself straighter from where she's been leaning. "Not a ''fan'' of Charlie's Angels? I suppose," she muses, "people who are looking for a path to ''peaceful assimilation'' don't end up back here, over and over."<br />
<br />
Akihiro actually chuckles softly at DJ’s reaction. “Wise enough to know that playing hero isn’t going to help us. Regardless of the good they hope they’re doing, they’re still labeled criminals and used to fan the fires of paranoia and mistrust. They need to know that we wont go gently into that good night.” He reaches down to his waist to grab the lighter leash hanging from his belt loop and drags it up to the cigarette between his lips. “I know I didn’t have my bones pumped full of adamantium just so I can sit back and watch these kids get thrown into cages or harassed by fucking murder bots and bikers.”<br />
<br />
DJ exhales slowly, looking away from the others, now -- back towards the boisterous sprawl that has taken over the once-stately neighborhood. "Peace, I like just fine. Sometimes you just have a hell of a fight to find it." His eyes flick back to Akihiro, though only briefly, a very faint snort flaring his nostrils at ''murder bots''. "''Whole'' lot of kids still ''in'' cages. Only man I've seen stepping up to ''do'' something about it is behind bars, now." His voice is mild, at least.<br />
<br />
"Mmm." The ''pleased'' gleam in Regan's expression has only sharpened, as DJ talks. "His bravery is unquestionable -- but those kids, are they getting any ''freer'' while he waits for the government to ''approve'' of his heroism? They will always build more cages. They will always stick more of our children in them. Unless you stop destroying the cages and start destroying the systems that build them." She's starting away, now, back down the walk toward the center of Riverdale. "In ''that'' work, we could use a man like you."<br />
<br />
Akihiro simply nods towards Regan. “We aren’t resting on our laurels. We know there’s a lot left to be done, and a lot of injustices being committed. A number of us are intimately familiar with the government’s cages, and do what we can where we can. I’m sure you don’t have to walk far here to meet Prometheus survivors.” He heads back over to his bike, puffing on the cigarette. “Just think about it, yeah? We’re always open to suggestions.”<br />
<br />
DJ's brows crease, slow. He tucks his hand into his jacket pocket, lips pursing thoughtfully. He does not actually give the others any ''answer'', though. Only a last pensive look before, with a ghostly flutter, he has vanished.<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:HOA_Regulations&diff=24405Logs:HOA Regulations2023-02-06T15:01:57Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Akihiro, Scramble, Toni | summary = "Worth it though, even if most the neighbors hate it." | gamedate = 2023-02-01 | gamedatename = | subtitle =..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Akihiro]], [[Scramble]], [[Toni]]<br />
| summary = "Worth it though, even if most the neighbors hate it."<br />
| gamedate = 2023-02-01<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> [[Riverdale]]<br />
| categories = Akihiro, Scramble, Toni, Mutants, NPC-PointyBoy, Riverdale<br />
| log = <br />
<br />
February seems to have suddenly remembered winter, once again; after a stretch of time in which the city simply moped through vaguely chill and intermittently slushy weather, last night it has ''snowed'' -- not ''deep'' but enough to blanket the quiet neighborhood in a picturesque glittering mantle. There's a deep bite in the air this morning even though the sun has returned bright overhead. Along this stretch of street there is dissonance -- to one side, stately mansions in diligently manicured yards wear their drapery of snow elegantly. To the other, the riot of color and ''life'' that has sprung up in Riverdale offers a cheerful and brazen retort to the rest of the staid neighborhood -- a ''mostly'' un-seasonal mix of spooky-skeletons and colorful-fairy-lights and blue and white metallic garlands and the like butting up happily against the red lanterns and bunny decorations that are the newest never-to-be-removed additions. Some enterprising Freaktown youngsters have been up early making an entire diorama of snowpeople, some with horns or several extra stick-limbs or twenty eyes stuck into their more traditional three-snowball bodies. The growing collection of souvenirs -- dogtags, patch-covered vests, shoes, baseball caps -- collected from those who would seek to ''harm'' Freaktown are strung liberally overhead in a border that may be warning or welcoming, depending on who you are.<br />
<br />
Toni, at the moment, is on the ''opposite'' side of the street from where the current Freaktown border is demarcated, looking fashionably and appropriately wintry in black boots, vintage jeans in a patchwork of different shades of denim, a long lined coat, deep red and trimmed in a paler shade. Her intricately braided hair is swirled up into a high updo tucked neatly into a red and pink scarf that conveniently also serves to keep her ears warm. She has lingered, for the moment, at a long strip of the sidewalk tree border, where an ''equally'' elegant pure-white Borzoi wearing a red coat of its own has stopped to give a long and careful investigation of a flower box, its very long and pointy snoot poking repeatedly at the ground and snuffing, each time, as if the snow there is a startling new surprise.<br />
<br />
On the freakier side of the street strolls Akihiro, his attention split between watching the border and admiring the souvenirs that dangle overhead, "A lot of these I don't recognize, glad we don't really have to encourage them to keep this place safe." he says mostly to himself, his hands tucked into the pockets of an oversized blue colored jacket with the hiragana for 'Immortal Hanayama' running down the back. He's wearing a matching pair of baggy blue pants tucked into combat boots. Upon spotting Toni his paces slows before eventually stopping, a slightly too wide grin splitting his face open and showing off his wolfish canines, an obligatory slow blink offered to the dog snuffling around, "Lovely morning for a walk, isn't it?"<br />
<br />
"For sure. I'd be gladder if it ''dis''couraged bigots coming here, too." Scramble doesn't sound ''too'' disheartened about this, all told. She's got her hands tucked into the pocket of her gold puffer jacket, a bright red scarf draped around her neck, black leather jeans with lace-up outseams, the strips of red tights underneath showing through grommets and between laces, and heavy black lace-up boots with fluffy turn-down cuffs. Scramble keeps pace with Akihiro, her gaze sweeping over Toni, casual and appreciative. "Ionno 'bout the morning, but ''you'' are looking fine, Sister." She gives Toni a short upward nod of greeting. "What's good?"<br />
<br />
The dog offers enthusiastic greeting first -- an upward lift of looooong snoot, a longlegged lope across the street that pulls Toni (a little flustered) in her wake, a tail flagging high in relaxed swooshes as she presses her nose with no respect for boundaries right intuí Akihiro at approximately crotch-level.<br />
<br />
"''Girl'' -- lawd -- you can't just --" Toni is reclaiming a tighter grip on the leash as she finds her footing, stepping out of the messy-gritty street-slush onto the sidewalk. "I am ''so'' sorry," she's telling the others (with considerably less heavy-Southern flavor now than when she'd been addressing the dog), "I only just got her from the rescue, I'm still getting used to..."<br />
<br />
It's about here she looks up, looks ''at'' Akihiro's sharp toothed grin, a noticeable widening to her eyes and a hitch in her apologetic-warm words. She's standing just a little straighter, pulse just a little faster -- but her smile recovers in good time, and her nod is still friendly for all her breathing is a ''little'' faster. "First ''real'' snow of the year feels like you're stepping out of time a little, doesn't it?"<br />
<br />
When she looks over Scramble it's with a similar appreciation, and the dip of her head in acknowledgment of the compliment is both pleased and unsurprised. "I see you, all ''radiant'' in that gold jacket. ''Good'' is thinking it'd just be me and this weird horse --" She's indicating the tall dog with a tip of her hand outward, "then running into some ''fine'' company instead."<br />
<br />
Just a ''little'' more hesitant, as her eyes skip between the two others and the garish Freaktown demarcation -- "You two -- live here?"<br />
<br />
Akihiro drops to a crouch, diverting the sniffing upwards and scratching the dogs cheek. “Don’t mind me, I just look like that.” he says when Toni pauses, giving the dog a few more pats while she speaks to scramble. <br />
<br />
“More or less. Few places I stay, but there’s always work to be done here.” he confirms with a nod, standing back up to his full height. “It’s a lot of work keeping the lights on and making sure everybody is warm, fed, and safe. Worth it though, even if most the neighbors hate it.”<br />
<br />
"Exactly! Or out of this ''world'', sometimes. A fresh layer of snow is like a blank backdrop for your imagination." Scramble smiles bright and doesn't quite ''preen'', but there's a suggestion of it in the roll over her shoulders. "I like bringing some bright colors to it, being as winter don't need me help with the dark ones." She looks back over her shoulder at the Freaktown decorations as if she'd forgotten they were there. "Oh, I meant my snow day outfits, though I do help put those up if the mood strikes me. I live here." Simple, pleased, no qualification. "It feels a little bit out of this world sometimes. I'm guessing you don't live too far, neither, unless this fairy steed done spirited you away from home." Her smile pulls just a little askew, mischievous, as she reaches to scritch behind the dog's ear. "Can't ''fully'' blame her if she did."<br />
<br />
There's a complicated flitting shift of ''something'' in Toni's face when Akihiro notes her brief (teeth TEETH ''TEETH'') fluster -- her smile ''warms'', at first, brighter -- then falters in a very uncertain dip of brows -- then reasserts itself with a small puff of laughter frost-white in the air in front of her. Her posture, at least, is more at ease -- she's watching with a small fondness as the dog presses into the dual scritches, her long nose pressing up against Akihiro's jacket with a pleased snorfling huff. "Yeah -- ''yeah'', it -- from what I've seen, there's a ''lot'' of people in there for who, place like that is a ''real'' blessing." Though here she stops with a small shake of her head. "-- though this country how it is, people 'round gonna keep you fed, sheltered, ''looked'' over, ''every'' community could use more of that spirit."<br />
<br />
The laugh that spills out of her is bright, and she waves her hand, leash waggling from it, down the street. "Oh, I'm just down the road there. Moved in just a hot minute before you all did, actually." There's a conspiratorial amusement in her voice as she adds: "-- you ever want to see the absolute ''conniptions'' folks were having I can show you some of the emails going 'round the HOA. I gotta tell you," the Very Serious shift in her voice is belied by the ongoing twinkle in her eyes, "you all violating ''several'' guidelines."<br />
<br />
“I’m glad I didn’t become one of the home owners association old people.” Akihiro says more to himself than either of the women, continuing to scratch above the nose of the dog. “It’s not really for lack of trying. The police and government do their best to bust the camps up and destroy resources. Thankfully it seems like people are starting to fight back more, hopefully I live to see some real change.”<br />
<br />
"You ain't wrong." Scramble looks across the street and the human side of Riverdale. "If every community had that spirit for all folks, the world would look real different. We'd probably still want places of our own, but it wouldn't be the same ''need.'' But most of 'em can't even bring that energy for the 'right' kinda folks." She arches her eyebrows skeptically at Akihiro. "C'mon, you on an HOA would be comedy gold. The more guidelines you know..." Her smile widens, "...the more of 'em you can violate. Can you believe this guy sleeping on his potential?" She directs this complaint about Akihiro to the dog, but then looks back up at Toni. "I'd love to see your HOA drama, anyhow. Be happy to walk with you a bit, too, while we outside of time."<br />
<br />
"You ''are'' living here," Toni suggests, amused, "you might qualify to join the meetings. I'm sure it would go ''great''." She is twining her leash more securely around her wrist, trying to nudge the dog back into moving instead of simply soaking up affection (which ultimately takes an offer of treat extracted from her pocket to sweeten the deal.) "Alright, gather round," she's taking her phone from her pocket as she falls back into stride on the icy sidewalk, "because these are going to be timeless."<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Seeking_Companionship&diff=24236Logs:Seeking Companionship2023-01-17T00:53:47Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Sam, Steve, Toni | summary = "Be happy to talk to you --" | gamedate = 2023-01-14 | gamedatename = | subtitle = | location = <NYC> New Leash o..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Sam]], [[Steve]], [[Toni]]<br />
| summary = "Be happy to talk to you --"<br />
| gamedate = 2023-01-14<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <NYC> [[New Leash on Life]] - Kingsbridge<br />
| categories = Sam, Steve, Toni, New Leash on Life, Mutants, Mutates, Humans, 8<br />
| log = <br />
<br />
New Leash's new home in the Bronx has come a long way from its humble origins, spacious and well-lit and and clean. There's patch of artificial turf out front, an actual lobby, and the kennels are still kennels but generously sized, with blocks separated out animals with high anxiety, reactivity, or need of quarantine for whatever reason.<br />
<br />
The fenced area out back has modular barriers and plentiful play equipment, but volunteers still regularly take the dogs out alone or in small groups at all hours of the day. There are also offices, a break room for the volunteers and paid staff, and even a consultation area where people can meet and interact their prospective four-legged adoptees.<br />
<br />
Steve has just arrived back with an oddly shaped pug mix whose bulging eyes seem to roll with disdain every time he looks up, an expression all the more humorous for the silliness of his face. "This fella," he informs Sam earnestly, "just tried to eat one of those new-fangled e-scooters." He stoops down to scruff the dog's ears, earning an (adoring!) eye-roll. "Not sure it qualifies as an 'incident', though. He didn't have any success or seem very ''committed'' to it."<br />
<br />
Sam has been holding down the fort during this walk -- which, in an absence of actual ''visitors'' to greet, has mostly meant tossing a ball back and forth across the front room for an eager young boxer who shows no signs of losing interest in this activity. At Steve's announcement he underhands the ball lazily towards the back down and crouches, chucking the little pug under the chin. "I'm gonna have to write you up," he tells the dog, Very Seriously. "On ''top'' of this morning with your water bowl -- gonna have to look into some serious disciplinary action." Is 'disciplinary action' extra pettings? Because that is what the pug is receiving.<br />
<br />
While the dog is getting this very stern reprimand, the door is opening again, letting in a gust of cold air and a small Black woman, dressed in elegantly tailored red dress with tall black boots and a warm coat in a blocky patchwork of different fur textures, her hair done up in an ornate maze of braids sweeping close to her head until they spill at the back into a riotous crown of poofy curls. Toni is glancing from the pug -- to ''Steve'', her eyes stuttering there with a light of recognition, a small upward pull of neatly-shaped brows, a small O forming at her lips. If she's starstruck or not, it is soon pushed away as she's looking to ''Sam'' instead, broad smile blossoming across her face. "Can't say that dog looks ''real'' cowed." There's amusement there, and just the ''faintest'' hint of a Southern accent. "Are you gentlemen who I speak to about adding one of these little ones to my home?"<br />
<br />
"Welcome!" Steve says, straightening up with a smile for their guest and without much apparent sympathy for the punishment Sam is bestowing on the dog. "Rumba here isn't much afraid of anything. Even things he probably ''ought'' to concerned about." He glances at Sam, then back at Toni, thoughtful. "We'd be happy to help you with that, Miss. What kind of pet are you looking for? Whether you need to find one who fits your living situation or free time or if you just have preferences."<br />
<br />
The boxer is returning with the ball, now -- though not dropping it for Sam, too intrigued by the new visitor. The dog's whole body is set a-wiggle, stumpy tail flicking fast and ludicrous gremlin underbite only exaggerated by the ball still protruding from her jaw as she snuffles her short snout up against Toni's coat.<br />
<br />
"Yeah, we got some real hardened reprobates up in here." Sam's smile is bright in return. "Be happy to talk to you --" There's just a beat of pause here as he straightens too, wiping his hand (now slightly damp -- pugs' faces seem to be ''interminably'' drooly) against his jeans. "-- about the dogs. ''Plenty'' of them looking for a home."<br />
<br />
Toni tips her head slightly to one side at that small pause, smile warming. "Mmm, well, my oldest's just been making preschool friends who have dogs at ''their'' house and is starting to ask if we can get one, too, but I didn't want to give him an answer until I sussed out what's involved there. He's just coming up on five so any dog's going to be my responsibility until he can grow into it." Toni has tipped her head down to scrutinize the wriggly boxer, amusement brightening her face at the dog's funny smushed-up nose. She plucks a glove off one hand, then lowers it to scritch at the boxer's head with deep red nails. "You all keep pets? I mean, ''yourselves'', obviously here you have plenty."<br />
<br />
"Oh, My Zenobia is a New Leash grad! Giant pitbull, strong as an ox but sweet as anything." Steve's smile goes a little brighter and less polished, talking about his dog. "But yes! We have a whole list of kid-friendly dogs." He retrieves a tablet from the reception desk. "Bebe over there is one of them." He indicates the boxer leaning into Toni's hand, wiggling all the enthusiastically for the attention. "She's got a lot of energy, which is great if you want a jogging companion, though there's plenty of homebodies back there, too." He holds the tablet out for Sam. "I gotta go put a note in Rumba's file about his latest shenanigans, but maybe Sam can go over some likely candidates with you?"<br />
<br />
Sam's brows quirk up at Toni's mention of her eldest, but his smile hasn't faded. "Oh, I make do with showering Zenobia in love when Steve's not around." He takes the tablet from Steve with an amused twinkle in his eyes. "Yeah, we had ''just'' been talking 'bout keeping his incident log up to date. -- but you want to have a seat over here, miss, I am ''more'' than happy to talk over what kinda company would fit in your life."<br />
}}</div>Sunshinehttps://xmenrevolution.com/w/index.php?title=Logs:Gentlemanly_Intentions&diff=24235Logs:Gentlemanly Intentions2023-01-17T00:50:48Z<p>Sunshine: Created page with "{{ Logs | cast = Jax, Steve | summary = "We're in the witches' house tonight. Let it be magical." (Some time after Logs:SHIELD vs. The Power of Friendship|Jax's kidn..."</p>
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<div>{{ Logs<br />
| cast = [[Jax]], [[Steve]]<br />
| summary = "We're in the witches' house tonight. Let it be magical." (Some time after [[Logs:SHIELD vs. The Power of Friendship|Jax's kidnapping]].)<br />
| gamedate = 2023-12-18<br />
| gamedatename = <br />
| subtitle = <br />
| location = <PRV> Tessier Residence - Greenwich Village<br />
| categories = Jax, Steve, Mutants, Mutates, Private Residence<br />
| log = <br />
<br />
Understated opulence claims this spacious and well-kept townhome, the decor throughout the whole of it of the highest quality and carefully chosen. The front door opens onto the entrance hall, a closet close at hand to receive coats and shoes -- the pale hardwood floors gleam underfoot, unsullied by tracked-in mess from outside. The living room beyond the entrance is all dark woods and pale earth tones, comfortable couches and armchairs and a thick soft rug laid down beneath. Two large and painstakingly aquascaped aquariums flank the entrance to the dining room, with several brightly coloured species of fish within. Most of the rest of the wall space, notably, is taken up with shelves -- shelves crammed with books of every subject and genre.<br />
<br />
A study branching off of the main hall is cozy, small, done in pale blues and lined with books as well around the large computer desk and smaller futon, though these rarer books are cased behind glass. Another securely locked door leads to the basement, and another to the full bathroom downstairs. The kitchen connects to the living room; in contrast, it is sleek and modern and well-appointed, stocked by someone who takes their cooking seriously. And takes their alcohol equally seriously -- to one side of the kitchen there is a fully-stocked bar. The back door to the kitchen looks out on a small well-kept garden.<br />
<br />
There are signs here of beautifully planned aspirations to a romantic date -- fiery roses (strewn across the floor), candles in elegantly wrought holders (toppled, unlit), delicate gold-leafed fine china (swept aside, at least one bowl in several pieces on the floor), a sumptuous dinner spread on the sideboard (untouched and long grown cold.)<br />
<br />
Jax ''has'', at least, moved off the table at some point in the last hours, into the plush cushioned window seat in one corner. He's gotten back into a scant semblance of A Clothing and though he is vaguely eying the no doubt delicious food he seems in little hurry to ''move'' from his current post draped (boneless, exhausted, more than a little bruised) against Steve. "... gosh. All these years an' I didn't even realize this room ''had'' doors." One more small gratitude to add to tonight's pile.<br />
<br />
Steve did pull his boxers back on at some point, but hasn't bothered with anything else and looks entirely ready for another round. He also does not seem in any rush, though, one arm curled around Jax. "Used to be more common. I didn't pay it much mind when I ''lived'' here." His fingers tighten on Jax's shoulder, just for an instant. "Luci put so much work into helping me --" The rueful tug of his smile flashes through the pause. "-- ''woo'' you, and I genuinely cannot tell if I've snubbed all his efforts or hit all my cues tonight." His fingertips trail down Jax's arm, careful now of the bruises he'd made so enthusiastically earlier. "I came here with more ''gentlemanly'' intentions. But then I saw you." He blows a shaky breath out. "Sorry it took me so long."<br />
<br />
Jax's eye flutters closed, and ''he'' musses Steve's efforts at care by subtly pressing bruised skin up into the touch with a reflexive shiver. "Gosh but we ''are'' kinda goin' about this all cattywampus, ain't we?" He doesn't sound put ''off'', saying this with just a touch of laughter. "I sure ain't complaining. -- Not," he adds, brightly, "that you can't still do me some woo going forward. Ain't nobody ever ''done'' wooed me, before. I never really thought --" He cuts this line of thought off with a blush and a small kiss pressed to Steve's cheek. "-- my current window's a bit high up for serenadin' but I'm sure we can figure something out."<br />
<br />
Steve obligingly tightens his grip again, though still measured even. "Oh, I will. Don't expect too much trouble with the serenading, but the ''media'' will take some figuring out." He gives a small, quick shake of his head. "You know, I thought you weren't dating because of -- well, not ''choice'' exactly. Circumstance, maybe. But nobody, ''ever?''" There's a touch of incredulity and affront in his voice. He gathers Jax a little closer, massaging his arm now, still none too gently. "No accounting for taste. And so you never thought anyone would want to..." He scrunches his brows. "'Woo' is starting to sound made-up. Romance you? Or just never thought ''I'' would?"<br />
<br />
"I mean, I spent years tending bar in a gay club, I've had no ''end'' of men wanting to get in my pants but it ain't quite the same, you know? I don't really like just --" Jax stops again, a ''ferocious'' blush filling his cheeks. "... usually. ''Usually'' ain't so much into just falling into bed with guys I ain't actually in a relationship with. And not so many people really eager to explore something steady with some dumb hick who come with a pack of kids an' anxieties in tow. Keepin' myself real busy just made it easy to --"<br />
<br />
He hitches a shoulder, shaking his head with a spill of floppy dark hair down over his missing eye. "Gosh, but I'm making it sound real sad an' that's not -- it ain't, it's just this -- ''you'' -- this is magical." His eye widens. He sits up -- abruptly enough to regret it with a wince -- scanning the space around them. "Oh ''gosh'' we should -- Joshua'll be comin' back for me ''some'' time soon I expect an' here we've left poor Luci's beautiful dining room a ''wreck'' I should -- oh ''gosh''."<br />
<br />
"It's not the same," Steve agrees easily enough. "Lucky thing there wasn't a bed here for us to fall into, huh?" His smile goes a little crooked. "But we had best get to exploring something steady, in case we end up in one next time. We can try something new. Maybe share a nice meal before I rip your clothes off."<br />
<br />
He glances at the clock, lips compressing. "Got a ''little'' while yet, but that's time better spent --" Evidently thinking better of what he was going to say, he blushes and amends it to, "-- getting a bite to eat. You know Luci and Matt will judge me harshly if I let you clean this up. Hey." He cups Jax's cheek, traces the line of his jaw, and tips his chin up. Softer, "Hey. We're in the witches' house tonight. Let it be magical."<br />
<br />
}}</div>Sunshine