Logs:I ❤️ I ❤️ NY

I ❤️ I ❤️ NY
Dramatis Personae Bryce, Joshua, Nahida, Scott
In Absentia	2024-10-31 "We're just so excited to get to participate in this human custom on our vacation and thank you so much for your, um, help."
Location <XAV> Great Hall - Xs First Floor
The largest room at Xavier's, the Great Hall is designed to hold all of the mansion's residents and then some. Built for the mansion's bigger functions, it serves as the school's dining halls on ordinary days, and ballroom when needed. On school days, long trestle tables stretch across the hall, high-backed chairs with plush cushions offering seating for the students. The Great Hall has been decorated -- adequately enough, if not lavishly. The decorations are fine, even though they aren't coming to life around the room. Plenty of kids here seem plenty determined to have fun tonight, and one of them -- welllll, is that a kid, actually? Bryce is looking astonishingly, monstrously far from his usual colorful chimaera self, courtesy of Sriyani's help and a Halloween Prep trip to several invertebrate houses. He's stalking in, clicky, on taaaall armored spider-crab legs, connected oddly to a gleaming iridescent blue-black wasplike body with bright viciously sharp stinger. Two huge clawed mantis arms improbably connect to a segment of this thorax, together with vivid orange wings. Somewhere under all the additions there's a foundation of human skull, human mouth, but it's hard to make out behind the huge black mandibles, the gleaming metallic-looking enormous compound eyes on short waggly bright blue stalks, the twitchy feathery feeler-antennae, the long downcurled scorpionfly beak. Absurdly softening all this, a large floppy cloth sunhat dangling by its cord around his neck, a folded subway map clasped (a little chewed up and ragged) in one claw, a tee shirt (extra holes cut for extra appendages) reading 'I ❤️ NY', oversized khaki shorts that are only sitting, absurdly baggy and absurdly short, on the foremost two of his huge and spindly legs. Skitter-click, skitter-click. His eyes are wiggling in opposite directions as he looks around for his group, stinger-tail swaying small to the music. Joshua -- is that Joshua, actually? Lurking in Bored Chaperone periphery at a non interfering but vaguely watchful distance against a wall, today what he looks like is a more or less Joshua-height figure of clay, grey and not overly detailed in the sculpting, save for the letters 'אמת' etched deep into his forehead. The plain off-white linen shift of a shirt he's paired with his plain linen pants does have telltale knotted tassels on it that he's been, at rest, fidgeting with in also dead giveaway, and there's a kippah (bordered today with an embroidered DNA chain) on his smooth clay head. Despite his features being none too defined he is still managing to look dour, the line of mouth that's cut into the clay face flat and slightly downturned. Can he see from the odd triangular depressions cut there for eyes? Evidently, because he's pulled distractedly out of his current conversation and turning, a little, fixing them, a lot, on Bryce. "...What," comes out first, and though it's a little lower and a little more gravelly, it does more or less sound recognizably like Joshua. Less identifiable is the abrupt wet squelchy sound in his throat. Then: "... need help?" In lieu of an actual costume Mr. Summers is just wearing a cowboy hat with the same clothes he always wears, at least this is sort of in the Halloween spirit? With the broad brim of his hat casting even more of his face into obscurity than his opaque wraparound glasses, for the most part he has been surveying the Halloween Dance somewhat rotely, skulking by the wall with his Fellow Chaperone, hands in his pockets, not at all bopping along to the boppy dance-y music. The complete dearth of rhythm he was displaying makes his double-take slightly more noticeable, though he's disciplined enough that this is his only outward reaction. "That you, Bryce? Whoa. Let me guess." Is he going to guess? He's just kind of frowning, head tilting at the crab legs, the stinger, the scorpionfly beak. Nahida is breaking off from their group when she catches sight of Bryce -- goodness but he's hard to miss! She waves one arm (wrapped in gleaming teal lamé to resemble a tentacle, though a clever lower seam does allow her also lamé-gloved hand to slip out if she might inconveniently need fingers) to catch one of those wiggling eyestalks, but she's flitting over quick. She's far less monstrous, draped in metallic greenish with gold biomechanical Giger-inspired accents; several green and gold and black headscarves have been layered over some kind of ornate structuring beneath to look strikingly spiky and backswept, her intricate makeup continuing the biomech theme. She, too, has an 'I ❤️ NY' shirt over her armor and flowing layers, a green foam Statue of Liberty crown propped awkwardly atop her alien headpiece, a Fujifilm Instax Mini camera in her other hand (protruding from its tentacle sheath), a large tote bag with NEW YORK printed in red stylized like a large red apple (the CITY, in green, is the leaf coming out the top) currently serving as her purse. "Oh, yes," she is fluttering gratefully at the chaperones, "thank you so much, your kind have been -- oh well! So kind! Do you think you could take us a picture it's our first time here and we want to capture everything." She's holding the camera out, her other tentacle reaching out towards Bryce. Bryce's eyes wiggle. His stinger wiggles. His wings wiggle. What emotion this might tell of is anyone's guess, and in this vastly shifted form even his voice is not much help today, an oddly clicky-raspy thing that has lost a good deal of his usual bright tone. There's a little of his habitual bright spill, though, in the eager rush of them: "Oh thank you, sirs, yes, this is our first time to this planet and I'm a little lost but -- oh! oh! There's my -- " Another small wiggle as Nahida approaches; he's giving an ungainly little sideways skitter to put himself closer to her. "Oh yeah yeah we've been looking forward to this trip for so long we have heard so much about your earth -- what do you call this? Hallows-een? -- We're just so excited to get to participate in this human custom on our vacation and thank you so much for your, um, help." He's very carefully crouching himself down beside Nahida. When he says cheese, nothing at all like a smile happens on his face. Joshua is starting to reach for the camera, but pulling his hand back. The clay at the end of his arm shifts, a little less mudlike, a little more fingerlike, He takes the camera properly, now, only leaving small clay smudges on it. He holds it up, focuses. Click. Whrrrr. He yoinks the slip of paper that is emerging and hands it to Scott. Clicks a second, and this time hands the camera back to the kids as it starts to spit out a photo. "Sorry. Keeping that. Politest alien tourists I ever met." Cowboy Scott pulls a hand from his pocket to accept the Polaroid, shakes it out -- though he's only managed, for the costume, a sort of slimly amused smile, he barks a huffy laugh at Joshua. "Sure are," he says. Nahida doesn't say cheese -- it would disrupt some of the stark and dramatic lines of her makeup, but once the pictures have both been taken she is smiling bright. She plucks the camera back and dips her head in an elegant bow. "Thank you," she says again, "we're just so very glad that we have you here --" For a second she falters, dark eyes wider in her metallic-pale makeup, stuck looking from one of the men to the other. "... to welcome us back to earth. To -- to earth." She blinks, and reaches into her bag to pluck out a chintzy Manhattan snow globe and offer it to them like it is a treasured prize. Then she's touching her tentacle gingerly to the least precarious-seeming spot on Bryce's odd carapace and ushering them both along back to get lost in the cheerful noise.