Logs:Change the Channel

Change the Channel
Dramatis Personae K.C., Kelawini, Nanami
In Absentia	2020-08-17 "If your stuff's broken again I swear it wasn't us this time."
Location <PLC> Infinity Pool - Midtown East
On the corner adjacent to the garden is an infinity pool designed such that its almost invisible edge seems to extend past the bounds of the building itself. This may be disconcerting to the acrophobic and agoraphobic, but for others provides a charming backdrop to a leisurely swim. Though the pool is by no means built to competition standards, it's more than adequate for basic fitness, though still much better suited for lounging and socializing, as evidenced by the comfortable poolside rattan furniture. It's a delightfully warm summer day, the sun fierce on the skin but enough of a breeze up here to keep it from stifling. Kelawini had been doing laps for a while, but now she's just drifting lazily through the water with a graceful side stroke. Her swim suit is an athletic and practical two-piece, cropped tank top and boyshort bottom, both in sunny yellow that pops against her dark-tanned skin and the vivid blue of the water alike. "Get too much tall kine building here," she's saying as she rolls onto her back. "Ainolike dat. But the food I like plenny good." Nanami has a racerback one piece in pink and black, her hair tied up in a braid. At the moment she's just sitting on the pool's edge, legs dangling in the water and a glass of lemonade in hand. "This," she says with a sweep of her hand to indicate the pool, "not so bad either." K.C. is not dressed for swimming. She's not really dressed for anything in particular, baggy faded jeans and a blue tee with Captain America's shield logo on it. Her fingers are twitching at her side, tapping as if at some invisible piano keys. "You," she declares, when her eyes light on the others. She beelines towards the pool's edge, dropping to a crouch beside it. And, again, just, "You." "Not so bad," Kelawini agrees. She rights herself and starts treading water in place when K.C. approaches. "Me what?" Her frown is nonplussed as she glances toward her sister. "Or do you mean her?" Then, at a slight delay. "Or...us?" "Me?" Nanami tips her head back, looking slightly upside-down at K.C. until the other girl nears. "Wait her?" Her cheeks flush slightly as her question mirrors her sister's. "If your stuff's broken again I swear it wasn't us this time." K.C. blinks. Drops one hand to the damp floor to steady herself. "Broken? What you break?" Her eyes dart around as if expecting to see some imminent destruction, but soon return to the others. "My stuff's fine. Fine. All fine. I'm fine. Not broken. Just curious." "What're you curious about?" Kelawini drifts a little closer to K.C. where she's crouched at the side of the pool. Her eyes widen. "Oh! You -- you also have --" She lowers her voice slightly. "-- tech powers, right?" "Fo real? You too?" Nanami looks at K.C. with a brighter interest, now. "Is that common?" At first an excited edge to her voice that melts, on repetition, into an uncertain defensiveness: "Are we common?" Her brows pinch, frown settling onto her face through a slow sip of lemonade. "How does that work? How do -- you -- work?" "Not common." K.C.'s head shakes firmly. "I noticed. In Chicago. Fzzzzt. Broke a lot of things. I noticed." This statement comes with a small pleased bob of her head. "School helped me. I thought -- maybe -- you too." "Ohhh, that's how they found us." Kelawini nods knowingly. "Here I thought they just had someone who could like. Detect mutants." Her eyes glitter with interest now. "But you can sense things all the way out there? I have to be real close to stuff." "Damn! Girl, you felt us alla way over here? How strong are you? How strong are we?" The wide-eyed look Nanami gives Kelawini is equal parts impressed and aghast. "After all this --" Another wave around the room around them, "It's hard to know what to think about the school. It'd be nice not to fritz everything no more, though. Guess not a lot of other high schools have that on the class list. How'd you -- learn?" "Yes. No. Yes. No." K.C. frowns, head shaking as she bats at nothingness in the air in front of her. "Don't sense -- things. Only the signals. Sometimes it ripples." Her hand drops again, fingers drumming on the floor. "You break things. Then you stop. What do you see? Feel. What do you feel." "Ripples," Kelawini echoes, looking down at the smooth waves radiating out from her in the pool. "Neither of us breaks stuff on our own, it just happens when we--touch? I don't know. It's like this awful screeching pressure..." She squeezes her eyes shut. "And I can feel like all the tech nearby--like normal but farther away, the whole building, out on the street even. And it's like they're all...connected?" She looks to Nanami, uncertain. "It gets loud-loud," Nanami agrees with her sister, nose wrinkling. "It's already loud, most times. Like the whole world's humming when it didn't used to. Feeling the lights, the computers, everything. But when we together?" She waves a hand towards Kelawini. "Suddenly everything's shrieking instead of humming and then bam. Fried. Feels like all those things are yelling right through me." K.C.'s eyes open wider. "Stronger. When you touch. Huh. Huh." Her head bobs slowly as she considers this. Her fingers flick at the air again -- this time it comes with some distortion, invisible but all around them, as the signals running through the room -- wifi, the phone in her pocket -- warp and dampen, leaving them temporarily in a quiet bubble of relative electromagnetic silence. "You feel that?" "Never think of it like no 'stronger'," Kelawini hedges, uncertain, "but I guess? We are?" She chuffs a soft laugh. "Genetics can suck it, heh?" She swims up to the edge of the pool, carefully keeping her distance from Nanami. At K.C.'s question she frowns, tips her head one way, then the other. "I can't feel anything." She looks to her sister. "Can you?" Nanami's eyes get a little wider. She tilts her head back as if she might see whatever just happened, but looks afterwards to K.C. "Yeah! Yeah, she do some kine --" Her head shakes, hand fluttering in the air overhead. "It's quiet. Quieter, now. Like you have a mute button for some that noise." "Maybe. Maybe -- not mute. Change the channel though. Maybe." With a quick flap of hand the room returns to normal. K.C. eyes the pool water, edges back slightly. "What if you do it. The touching. Thing. What then." Kelawini is nodding slowly. "So you mean like, if we do that and you change the channel?" She shrugs her broad shoulders propping one arm on the tile and offering Nanami her other hand. "Maybe it not so loud, we pau before da kine break?" "Maybe you get out the water, 'ae?" Nanami is pulling her legs out of the pool first, holding her hand out to Kelawini second. What happens once they do touch comes in an escalating flood, a crash of increasingly large waves that batter not just at them but at all the electronics around them, amplifying and pulling signals together into an increasing -- and increasingly dangerous -- wall of clashing noise. K.C. scrunches her eyes closed, shoulders tensing at the beginning of this. Her teeth grit and she thumps back to sit down, heedless of the wet surface. She lifts a hand, fingers grasping at seemingly nothing, twisting here and batting there -- until there's just less around them to cycle through, feedback cut down to the singular strong pulse of the cellphone in K.C.'s pocket, still allowed to filter through the dampened bubble into the Māhoe's sphere of influence. "You feel that?" "Oh right." Kelawini hauls herself out of the water and sits beside her sister, legs crossed. Despite her utter lack of hesitation before she tenses on the contact, at the flood. Her eyes squeeze shut tight for a moment, but then as the world around them contracts she relaxes, the cresting wave receded to a stable swell, a standing wave: just Kelawini, Nanami, and K.C.'s phone. "I feel that," Kelawini says quiet, and the words echo in Nanami's mind--and in a pulse of interference on the phone's reception. Nanami's eyes have closed and her hand has clenched around Kelawini's, but this eases as the flood stabilizes around them. "Woah." It's quiet, and awed; she opens her eyes again to peek over at K.C. "We been here how many months -- first time, now, it feels like we could get a handle on this."