ArchivedLogs:Sneakshot

Sneakshot
Dramatis Personae Claire, Lyric, Taylor, Hope
In Absentia	2014-04-07 '
Location <XS> Rec Room - FL2
School this may be, but life for Xavier's students certainly isn't all studying. Outside classes, this is a popular spot to find students in their downtime. An enormous tribute to slacking off, this room is a wealth of fun and relaxation. Comfortable armchairs, couches, and beanbags offer plentiful seating scattered throughout the room, and the cushioned windowseats by the high windows offer a cozy nook to curl up and look out on the grounds. The room is often filled with the noises of gaming -- whether it comes from the big-screen television (tall racks of DVDs beside it, if nothing can be found on the multitude of cable channels), tricked out with consoles from retro to the latest releases, or the less electronic clatter and thump of the pool table, air hockey, or foosball. For those a little more subdued in their gaming, the cabinets hold stacks and stacks of board and card games, ranging as classic as chess and go to as esoteric as Dixit, Catan, and Gloom. More days than not, there's some variety of snacks to be found on a table beside the gaming cabinet -- quite often in the form of fresh-baked desserts. It's lunchtime at Xavier's, and that means things are rather bustling. Downstairs even moreso, with the Great Hall packed with people grabbing food, but even up here it's fairly busy. There's the rapid clack-clack-clack of a foosball game going on (one of the participants has an easier time of it than the other, his massive array of black tentacles making it easy to man all his handles at once, though the girl playing opposite him -- tall and skinny with a curling protrusion of bone-horns growing from her head and sharp bony spikes jutting out of her arms and shoulders -- doesn't seem to be bothered by his advantage) and the cheerfully catchy music of Katamari Damacy coming from the television. Lyric isn't yet participating in any /rec room/ type activities. She's grabbed herself a bowl of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich and is, now, hovering by the table of snacks and sweets at the side of the room, loading up her plate with /many/ citrus cookies. The teenager is colourfully dressed, a knee-length seafoam-green tunic elaborately embroidered at its hem in intricate vinelike patterning, tiny mirrorwork glittering among the designs. Her grey trousers scrunch up around her ankles, beaded slippers on her feet and a gauzy pink-and-green headscarf wound over her extravagantly poofy mass of black curls, tucking them neatly away as she loads up her lunchplate with cookies. There's another girl just coming in, a younger one than lyric, and she's got her own bowl of tomato soup. There's bits of bread torn to pieces floating in the soup, which is being kept warm by the burning fingers of the girl holding the ceramic bowl. Claire sits down on a couch, carefully making sure the mass of fire on her head doesn't damage the couch. She has noticed lyric, and the foosball game, but just gives everyone a nervous smile. Lyric's head turns, gaze attracted by the dancing flames; a faint widening of her eyes looks more /impressed/ than scared. Her own smile is quick and bright in response to Claire's, wide and friendly-warm in answer to the other girl's nervousness. She brings her lunch over towards the couch at a trot, settling down on the floor and setting her bowl down in front of her. She offers Claire a cheerful wave. Claire returns the wave nervously, fingertips still on fire. "Hi." She looks at the other girl, her smile slowly grows warmer. "I'm Claire." And that said, she sticks a spoon into her soup and takes a bite, and then another. Hungry hothead is hungry. 'C-L-A-I-R-E', Lyric is fingerspelling this in the air; the C and L are pretty easily identifiable as the letters that they are, though the rest are harder to grasp without knowing sign language. She dips the end of her sandwich into her soup, taking a few hungry bites too. Her eyes peek up towards Claire's head, with a quicker brighter smile. Appreciative. After a moment she picks up one of the cookies from her plate, offering it towards Claire on a palm. Unfortunately, Claire doesn't know sign language. She kind of gets that it's probably an attempt to spell her name, and so she smiles and grabs the cookie. "I'm sorry, I don't know how to communicate like that. Maybe you should write things down instead?" She eats the cookie, "Thank you." Lyric tips her head to one side, brows rumpling together faintly as she watches Claire speak. Her lips purse, and after the suggestion to write things down she just shrugs, giving her head a small shake. Her hands lift, tipping up and down as if weighing options, and then she picks up her sandwich to dip it in the soup again for another bite. Her eyes linger for a moment on Claire's burning fingernails with open curiosity, but pull away with an apologetic dip of her head, looking back to the television as the boy playing Katamari abandons his game to go get food. She glances from Claire to the unused controllers, eyes lighting as her brows lift in silent invitation. Claire looks at the controllers, then at her fingers, then back at the controllers. "I'm afraid I'd damage the controller." She keeps looking at the controllers, though, apparently she does -want- to play. Lyric's brow furrows at this, smile falling as she considers. She finishes the rest of her sandwich, eying the controller uncertainly, and then Claire's hands. Eventually she accepts the truth of this statement with a small sigh, an apologetic nod. Her fingers drum against her knee, eyes slicing around the room. Her gaze lights eventually on the air hockey table, and she smiles wider, lifting a hand to point instead to that. Claire takes another spoonful of soup, swallows, and nods. She heads over to the air hockey, and takes to one side of the table. She smiles and waits for Lyric to join her, "Are you good at this? I'm not sure I remember all the rules..." Lyric picks up her bowl of soup, putting the bowl straight to her lips to gulp half of it down. She brings her empty plate and mostly-empty bowl with her, setting them down on the floor underneath her side of the table as she takes up a spot to one side. The question of if she is good earns a giant grin, a very small rasping-bark of breath that might be a laugh. Lyric shakes her head. /Eagerly/. NOPE. Terrible. She switches the table on, waiting for it to disgorge the puck onto her side as she takes her mallet, setting the puck down so that she can bat -- pretty /wildly/ at the puck, sending it careening across the table with absolutely no aim, a crazy ricochet that rattles from one wall to the next as it zooms over towards Claire. Meanwhile, Claire is more concerned about not letting Lyric get away with scoring than with scoring herself, she bats the puck away from her side of the table, with about as much concern about where it is going as Lyric had, it bounces of one wall and onwards. "Good luck." She wishes Lyric, focusing on the puck. Lyric's grin stays wide; she hunches over the table, very /determinedly/ focused in on the puck as she thwaps at it again. Or -- tries to thwap at it, it doesn't really work and she misses, accidentally knocking it into her /own/ goal as she pulls her arm back in. Undaunted, she pulls it out of the goal, setting it back on the table to slamit over towards Claire again, evidently with the philosophy that enough sheer force will make up for anything like aim. Or skill. Claire fistpumps when she kinda sorta scores, and then she's back to defending her own goal. Unsuccessfully, and it's tied again. "I don't know how to defend against plays like that." She hits the puck with her mallet, at high speed, trying to get it into Lyric's goal by bouncing it off the corner. Her aim is way off though. Lyric /actually/ manages to hit this one this time, a rough bark of sound that doesn't actually manage to be /words/ escaping her. Kind of /gleeful/-happy as her mallet gives a resounding thwack against the puck, sending it skittering-slamming clack-clack-clack from one wall to the next as it careens at an angle back towards Claire. Over to the side, the foosball game has ended; the teenager (pitch-black skin, shaved head) with the enormous mass of tentacles (He's dressed in a Atlanta Hawks tee shirt and black jeans) wanders over closer. One tentacle snaaaakes beneath the table to steal a cookie off of Lyric's plate. "Defending with a lot of /enthusiasm/ seems to be working out okay," he offers cheerfully. Claire doesn't seem to be particularly grossed out or otherwise reacting to any weird physical mutations. Maybe she's just pushing that instinct back, or maybe she really doesn't care. She tries to block Lyric's puck, and does manage to move it the side, but when she tries to get it to go towards Lyric, she accidentally hits it wrong and it enters her own goal before she realizes what happened. "Man, I suck." "It's okay," the boy answers with a warm smile, "you're in pretty good company. Plus, once Hope made the puck fly off the /table/ and break a window --" He points with a tentacle over towards the windows behind the tables, "so so long as you don't do /that/ you're pretty much not the worst person here." The girl he'd /been/ playing foosball with /baps/ him on the back of the head in passing. "Fuck you Taylor I /won/ that game," Hope reminds him. "Once we went down to the /playground/ and got the puck back," Taylor replies with a chuckle. Lyric is not particularly tracking this exchange, her eyes fixed on the tables. She does look up, a little triumphant, when Claire's puck enters her own goal; she bounces in place on the balls of her feet, hand leaving her mallet to clap together happily. Her eyes flick to the scoreboard and then back. "I'm Claire." And that's basically Claire's only comment on that exchange, since she heard theirs. She fishes out the puck while Lyric is clapping, aiming /right/ for Lyric's goal with a fairly fast play, she only dares playing like that because Lyric's hands aren't on the puck. Lyric /squeaks/, eyes opening wider and her hands -- clamping to her /mouth/ in surprise, only belatedly remembering to drop back to her mallet. Her eyes stay wide, mouth opening into a startled O as the puck shoots in to her undefended goal. /She/ laughs, apparently more delighted than upset by this sneaky play. "Cheeeeap shot," Hope comments, leaning up against Taylr's side. And stealing the uneaten half of the cookie he already stole from Lyric. "Sneaky." Taylor sounds amused, though, and /approving/. Lyric drops the puck back onto the table, whapping it back straight towards Claire's goal. Not that this move is as useful given that Claire's mallet /is/ in hand. Claire fistpumps again when she scores, using her free hand to keep her other hand on the mallet. When Lyric plays again, she does manage to block this shot, slows down the puck into sliding horizontally on the table, and then does another sneaky play, she hits the puck as though trying to bounce past Lyric on the left side, then very quickly hits the puck again, altering the trajectory for a straight shot. She isn't talking, just focusing on her play. Lyric's eyes stay fixed wide on the puck. She whips out her hand fast, as it approaches, successfully managing to /bap/ at it though she's unsuccessful in putting any kind of aim to the shot, just knocking it wildly away from her goal without much hope of directing /where/ it's heading. Out in the hall there's a familiar trill of school-bell; a short burst that does not /quite/ signal classtime but signals the five-minute warning before lunch is over. It comes accompanied, in here, with a soft flash of lights, briefly, once, twice, and then shutting off. Lyric doesn't look up at the bell though she does look up at the lights, wrinkling her nose in displeasure. "Lots of sneaky." Now /Hope/ sounds approving of this trick-shot, regardless of whether or not it worked. "You'll fit /right/ in here." When Lyric looks up at the lights, Claire makes one more attempt to score. A shot aimed to bounce from the side into Lyric's goal. It can be stopped with a fast response. To Hope, Claire smiles nervously. "Hope so. At least people won't call me a freak here, right?" Lyric tries to stop the shot but, briefly distracted by the bell, misses. Her nose wrinkles again as the puck slides into her goal, head shaking as she sets the mallet back down. She offers Claire a very bright smile, hand touching to her chin and coming away before she stoops to pick up her dishes, and then scurry off. "-- says 'thanks'," Taylor reflexively translates for Lyric. And then grins, too. "I don't know. Some people might, maybe." Four of his tentacles nearest his shoulders lift in a quick shrug. "I use the word a lot with my friends. But the difference," he adds warmly, leaning in to switch the air hockey table back off, "is that here? We're /all/ freaks." His fingers touch to his forehead in a lazy sort of salute, arm looping around Hope's boney-spikey shoulders as they, too, head for the door.