Logs:Good Bones

Good Bones
Dramatis Personae Hive, Scott
In Absentia	2023-12-10 "We can handle a bit of chaos."
Location <XAV> Roof - Xs Third Floor
The view from up here is phenomenal, a panorama of the expansive Xavier's grounds, forest and lake and rocky cliffs alike. Even without the view outwards, the rooftop itself holds its own delights, in the form of the tiny jewel of a flower garden tucked away up here, tended by one of the school's teachers. From the edge of the roof, with a veeery careful jump, it looks like it just might be possible to reach the treehouse in the old oak tree. It's chill on the ground and brisker still up here, a crisp rooftop breeze that really calls for a stronger jacket than what Hive is currently wearing. He doesn't seem to have changed much from his indoor bundling, soft old crimson sweatshirt with the greek letters Theta Tau in gold, old jeans -- at least he has workboots on over his fluffy socks. His blanket has traveled with him, bunched up and draped around his shoulders. He's pulled a chair over from the rooftop garden somewhat nearer to the edge, though he isn't currently sitting in it -- his laptop is, though, and its holographic attachment currently projecting a much-scaled-down building onto the roof. It's styled at once very like the mansion and very Not, borrowing enough from the existing architecture to complement it well but veering into its own distinctive flavor. Hive is circling the holographic blueprint, scowling at it like it has offended him as he stretches it larger, uses a specialized stylus to flick one of its walls away and add new notation into the room now exposed inside. From somewhere down in the mansion, rising tentatively above the usual psibabble of the students enjoying their weekend, comes a wordless << 🍻? >> and an accompanying but vague sense that Scott is sitting at the desk in his room, his ankle crossed over his knee, abandoning his laptop for a yawn and a half-hearted thought that he can just finish this later. He's already opening the mini-fridge. Hive's reply comes swift enough, though regrettably far less tentative than Scott's. It's a heavy thud of mental pressure that crashes in enthusiastic and ungentle agreement to Scott's offer: << 🍻! >> There's another, less tentative, wordless question a few minutes later, << ? >> when Hive is not in his room, but then eventually the door to the rooftop creaks open and Scott tromps over; he pulls a chair over from the garden too, then sits and sets a six-pack of Corona on the ground. He's dressed a little more appropriately for the weather in worn jeans, work boots, a buttoned blue flannel shirt under his unzipped motorcycle jacket, the worn black leather now painstakingly patched over where it was worn or burned through. "What're you working on up here?" he says, popping the cap off the first bottle with a keyring bottle opener, and holding it out for Hive to take; behind his opaque ruby glasses, he is giving Hive's holograph an appreciative but confused once-over. Hive's chin jerks up in greeting and thanks both. He scoots his chair and the accompanying blueprint a little bit farther from the edge of the roof before setting the stylus down beside his computer in order to take the beer with both hands. "Your overcrowding problem." He nods out towards the expansive grounds spreading around them. "All this damn space and you're all on top of each other in here, I dunno how you ever get work done." Scott's eyebrows rise slightly over the frames of his glasses; he looks back at the holograph with renewed interest, keen eyes picking at the room, trying to map dimensions and furniture onto it. "Huh," he says -- this is, somehow, clearly a compliment, infused with a complex blend of gratitude and guilt. "I manage," he says uncomfortably, though mentally he is glad to acknowledge that it has been difficult to work lately, that having more teenagers in tighter living quarters has filled his already scant free time with thankless, unrewarding crisis and conflict management, ranging from dangerous to petty to just kind of bizarre. His eyes tilt off the hologram to scan the vista of Xavier's grounds. "Where were you thinking you would put that? Is that for classrooms?" "Classrooms," Hive echoes with a faintly puzzled frown like perhaps this is the first he is considering that Xavier's might have a use for those. "...Do you need more classrooms." He braces the bottle against his chest now, other hand reaching to pluck at the holographic display and then abruptly expand it. The room he's been adjusting spreads out around them, the dorm sketched out at its full size now in glowing lines on the rooftop. "Thought it could sit across from the athletic building. Proper residence hall with some room to grow. Get you back to your baseline level of teenage drama. Maybe save on your Advil budget around here if there's a little space between Jean and Chaz and --" He does not finish that sentence aloud but the pained scrunch of his face and flick of his fingers towards his own temple is a clear enough indicator of the ambient noise. Scott tilts his head around the holographic dorm room -- he's no architect, but he's gauging these dimensions with relative accuracy, imagining the Tetris of hypothetical furniture around along the walls, comparing them with hand-drawn room layouts he spent the summer drafting in pencil on graph paper. His posture, though already pretty good, lifts slightly. "Hm," he says. "The kids would probably be glad to go back down to doubles," he says. He automatically cringes with amusement at Chaz, then lets out an apologetic chuckle. "I can't even imagine," he says. "They're giving me enough of a headache, and I only hear what they're willing to tell me to my face." Shaking his head, he goes to open his own bottle of beer, then adds, "Doesn't do psionic kids any favors, I guess, but I'm sure they'll all be grateful to go back to double rooms." "Figured it'd free you up to have -- wild -- X-Man keggers in here or -- whatever you all do for bonding time." Hive flicks the building back down to scale, tapping at it here and there to highlight a couple of the prospective rooms. "See, I figured here and there we could fit some of the rooms with psi shielding. Couple dorms, maybe a rec room or study room, fucking -- meditation room, whatever. Some place where those kids can take a break if they need to get away from the noise, you know? Maybe take some of the pressure off when they first show up." Before Hive suggests keggers, Scott was happily filling << classrooms? >> into that sentence; the actual trajectory of Hive's thought interrupts Scott's first sip, causing him to hastily gulp back a scandalized laugh. With a vague thought that, for all he knows, everybody else does have wild X-Man keggers without him, he sits forward in his chair, nodding slightly. "Huh," he says. "You know, I feel like I've had students suggest dorming them based on powers, but I never really saw the logic of that until now." He is trying, without any success whatever, to remember the student who suggested this and what their power was, in case this can provide him with any more insight, but after a moment he has to give this endeavor up. "Wish we could do that for everybody, it's a bit of a nightmare trying to fireproof rooms or make them superstrength-proof." "Can't speak for the others, but," Hive's smile is a little lopsided, "Dawson never went to any X-Man ragers either." He takes a larger swig of his beer, then sets it down beside his seat. He picks up his laptop so that he can actually sit back in his chair. "Be hard to customize rooms for all the crazy-ass powers you see through here, but --" But here he falls into silence, his shoulders going tighter and his fingers clenching down against his knee. His eyes have fixed on his blueprints, and stay there when he continues, "... wouldn't be cheap, but if it'd help, we probably could switch the fire off in some of the rooms." Scott's mouth presses into a grim smile too and an << ah yeah. >> He taps one finger against the neck of his bottle thoughtfully, ticking mentally through the worst or most destructive accidents he's seen at the school over the years, all the safeguards or processes they've put into place only after the disasters that prompted them. "A lot of the mansion's --" he stamps one foot on the roof, "-- pretty well-fortified already, I could only explode my room so many times before Charles started reinforcing things." There's a slight pause, then -- only now is realization dawning on him, as he looks back over at Hive. He doesn't say anything for a while, though mentally he is floundering somewhat. "Money probably isn't an issue," is what he finally comes up with. Hive exhales slowly. He leans down to pluck his beer back up, drinking slow and deep. "Tech's out there. Gonna stay out there. Might as well make some people's lives better instead of --" His teeth click against the lip of the bottle. He picks his stylus back up, slowly rotating the design in front of them. He taps at a dorm here, a dorm there, adding notes to re-structure them for a suppression grid. "Where do you think the kids could use these most?" And then, with a small frown and a sidelong glance to Scott: "... where could you use them?" "I'll talk to Charles," Scott is saying, on automatic; a small, thoughtful crease is forming between his brows. Everything he knows about the grids is abstracted through raid preparation plans and schematics, but he has no real concept of what they're like to live with, and the vague wonderings about which students would be grateful for them runs up quickly against this lack of understanding. "They turn off, right?" he says. "I'd say a few dorms, for sure, especially for kids who might lose control in their sleep, in their dreams. Might be helpful in classrooms, if we're going to shift things around in the mansion too." He is trying to remember the time he spent depowered at the end of the summer, the trivial unexpected joys -- after a moment he adds, "Maybe the gym too, some kids get really excited about sports. Oh -- video games, too." This is the closest Scott's even tone ever gets to obvious kids-these-days exasperation. "They turn off." The stylus bobs loosely between Hive's fingers. He sinks back in his chair and pulls his blanket into a better drape. "Be a bit of a chaos renovating but some of the mansion could be refit, sure. Classrooms. Your rooms, you want to stop seeing red now and then. -- Did the Professor really never get you a goddamn Nintendo or anything, there are definitely," he's considering this with a scrunch of his brows, "some bro-ass video games out there for you. Fucking, Gran Turismo or some shit." Scott does like to stop seeing red now and then, though he takes it as read that Hive knows this. "We can handle a bit of chaos," he says. He shrugs at the mention of Nintendo -- "I never asked," he says. "Wasn't interested." He's trying to imagine what a Gran Turismo video game would entail -- either racing a car, which he can imagine appealing somewhat to him when he was seventeen or whatever, or building a car, which might have appealed even more. Even these hypothetical games still seem rather less worthy of excitement than sports, to Scott. He settles back in his chair, crossing his ankle over his knee, even his mind lapsing into easy quiet as he looks out over the grounds, imagining Hive's new building design, slightly misremembered, rising up by the athletic center. "Room to grow, huh," he says. There's a heavy nudge at Scott's brain, roughly jostling the building design out of its mental place by thumping down a corrected version instead. Hive takes a deep swig of his beer, gaze following Scott's out toward the grounds. << Room to grow. >>