Logs:Here (Could) Be Monsters

Here (Could) Be Monsters
Dramatis Personae Nahida, Quentin, Roscoe
In Absentia	2024-03-31 "You gonna fight the power, Luke Skywalker?"
Location <XAV> Lake - Xs Grounds
Bright, bright, bright; the lake glitters wide and expansive here, stretching off into the distance. Sunlight, moonlight, starlight, it catches them all. Lapping at the rocky shore, its deep waters are frigid in winter and cool even in summer. A stone pier stretches out a ways into the water, wide and smooth, though often icy in winter. The water teems with life nevertheless, home to myriad species of fish that provide for ample fishing or just lazy watching on a slow summer day, for those who want to take a boat from the boathouse out to the center of the lake, or perhaps lounge on the pier and try their luck. Closer to the mansion, it's noisy, boisterous, plenty of students outside enjoying the mild spring warmth and the last gasps of the weekend. Down here it's considerably quieter, just now. The crew team was out here roughhousing by the lakeside but they've long past returned to the mansion for lunch -- there's only one boy lying face-down on the edge of the pier, now, and his skinny arms definitely do not look like he's done much rowing in life. Quentin is dressed currently in jeans and a peacock-blue HOLLAND WAS RIGHT tee, and is peering down intently into the murky surface of the water. A moment later a small test tube, already stoppered up, pulls itself out of the water and fits itself into its appropriate slot in the foam block insert of a small carrying case beside him. Roscoe probably was enjoying the mild spring warmth earlier, in a striped orange-and-blue tee and a pair of darker blue basketball shorts, but now he is grumbling to himself as he tromps alongside the lakefront -- his cheap wired earbuds have finally given out on him, so though he still has the chorus of 'She Wants My Money' stuck in his head in fragmented bursts of melody, it is overshadowed by his whining that << everything I own is garbage. >> He might have been aiming vaguely back toward the mansion at first, but he detours slightly when he sees the other boy, mounting the steps and crouching next to him, also squinting down at the water. "Can you see down there?" No doubt Nahida can be felt coming, out here. Her mind is a vibrant bright thing, cinematic clips stitched together in jarringly dissoant styles -- an excessively somber and artsy black-and-white imaging of her father's gentle disappointment at her most recent math test grade; animation in oversaturated Kipo-esque visuals where cartoons of Nevaeh and Sriyani are exploring an abandoned old stepwell that may or may not be as eerie in real life as it is in her colorful recollection; the Great Hall and its disappointingly American lunch options today filmed in extremely unflattering harsh lighting. Nahida herself is colorful, too, wide-legged pants stitched together from myriad brightly patterned fabric scraps, a cheerful yellow blouse, springlike pink and green and yellow layers to her neatly wrapped hijab. She was aiming for the boathouse but wanders nearer the pier when she spots People there. She draws near but not too near, rocking up onto her toes to look out at the water. Somewhere in her mind a new clip has started playing, this one featuring an improbably large water monster staring back up at Quentin from beneath the gloomy water. "-- is it true there are monsters? Some kids say." Her tone is very skeptical, but there's a hopeful flourish in the background music of her Monster Movie. Quentin is looking up sharp from the water before the other kids have properly arrived, shoulders tense and his eyes scrunching slightly. He looks back down quickly, albeit not quickly enough to mask the briefly startled discomfort. "Nah. Way too muddy after the rain last night. Can you see? How's your thing handle the sediment? -- What I'm looking for isn't visible, anyway." He's rolling just slightly onto his side so that he can better peer back over his shoulder at Nahida. "Here be monsters, huh? If Google was being honest they'd label this whole place like that on Maps. All a monster is is a creature you're scared of because you don't know it enough yet. There is," he's finally getting around to declaring, "weird shit down there. You scared?" It sounds too casual to be much of a challenge. "I can see," says Roscoe simply, his head ducking slightly between his shoulders -- though outwardly he just closes one eye, now he is rapidly sifting through infinitesmally thin layers of sediment for minnows and tiny shrimp. "Whatchu mean by not visible? If it's just too small to see, I can probably see it." He shifts on his feet in his crouch, pulling his gaze out of the water to squint at Quentin instead -- he is dwelling with confusion on 'if Google was being honest', << did Google add a Monster layer on Maps while I was gone?? >> but pulls through it to say, a little derisively, "Right, I bet you known a lot of monsters." Nahida's thoughts are shifting, though mostly in the direction of scaling her imagined Water Monster down to microscopic size, a lake now teeming with nightmarish creatures that only Roscoe can see. "Should I be scared?" She's moving just a little closer, little though this helps her own very normal eyesight catch up to Roscoe's. "You didn't answer." Quentin is studying Roscoe as the other boy peers into the water, his eyes gone just a little wider in intrigue. "That is pretty damn cool. Guess if you can see all the bacteria --" He's rolling his head back up so that he can glance toward Nahida, and for a moment her mental image is shared to Roscoe, its context transferring seamlessly along with the moving imagery, "-- she's not so far wrong, huh?" From his kit another test tube is floating out, unstoppering itself to dip into the water. "I guess technically some of what I'm looking for you could technically see but if you don't have anything to compare it too we might not know what to look for. Mostly I'm trying to get a reading on the water composition here and a lot of that will be chemical reactions, though, not just the water." He's shifting upward a little more, propping himself more solidly on an elbow. His brows lift. "I said. There's hella weird shit down there. I'm pretty sure some of those fish species are entirely new. Obviously there's some mutant nonsense happening but I want to know what kind. Did someone mess with the lake? The fish? Are they eating mutant algae? Not sure yet." His fingers are drumming lightly against the stone, and its only now that he gets around to answering Roscoe, with a small shake of his head. "I've never even met a single monster. I'm not scared of the unknown. Most of the world, though, if they got a glimpse into these walls they'd be terrified." Roscoe squints, which doesn't actually help him differentiate potential tiny water monsters from individual grains of sediment floating in the lake -- at the sudden imposition of Imaginary Tiny Water Monsters he startles, shaking his head like he's trying to get water out of his ears, and loses this carefully focused frame of vision entirely. "Ick," he says, in response to either the telepathy or the science or the bacteria (it's the telepathy.) But then he is settling cross-legged on the pier and, rather than looking over the end, just staring straight down through the stone, bowed over his lap with his chin propped on his hands, << what do these new fish species even look like >> mingled with doubt, << (hotshot here seen every fish species in the world) (hotshot here ain't scared of monsters) >> Is Roscoe scared of monsters? Yes Definitely but now he is considering with vague anxiety, << am I just a little bitch??? >> He weighs several increasingly defensive options of response before he says, "Ooh. Big man." "Tch, how do you know every kind of fish?" Nahida is asking with a greater skepticism even as Roscoe is doubting this more silently. She is trying to envision how many fish she knows of -- how many fish she knows well enough to identify -- and in her mind this tally is merging into one somewhat homogenous silvery school with a bright Nemo clownfish incongruously cheerful in the center. "We do have a superpowered militia in the basement. Would they be so wrong to be scared?" "Tch," Quentin is saying right back, "you don't have to know every anything to know how to start narrowing things down. If you saw this perched on the treehouse --" In the others' minds there's an image of a bird, though certainly not one from around here, somewhat reminiscent of a phoenix in its flowing-long swoop of fiery red-orange tail, wicked sharp talons and a hooked curve of sapphire-bold beak, "would you need an exhaustive list of the world's birds to know something's out of place? Getting a list of the lake fish in the Northeast United States is simple enough and from there it's pretty easy to tell something is wildly out of whack in our lake. Also," maybe he should have led with this but it's only coming now, "some of them glow. Outside of those GMO tetras that's really not a freshwater fish thing." His other test tube is extracting itself from the lake to tuck neatly back into his kit. He rolls himself properly upright, knees propped up and one arm wrapped loosely around them. His head tips slowly one side and then the other, considering, and finally he rolls a shoulder in a small shrug. "What's the point? In being scared of the unknown? The things we do know are dangerous enough, and those aren't monsters. They're just people doing crappy people things. You all should know that well enough. I don't think we need to make them more than they are. -- If they want to be scared of us, though," and here his smile is just a quick flash to Nahida, "good." "They glow?" Roscoe sits up straighter; his frame of vision zooms to the bottom of the lake but -- alas -- his eyes adjust so quickly to the scant ambient light deep-down that he can detect no glowing, << (no fair!) >> His posture slumps again and he lifts his head back to look out over the lake, though his eyes drift shut like he's just taking in the sun. << He can't just arbitrarily redefine 'monster' to win arguments, >> he is complaining internally, << he knows what tf a monster is, >> but on a more honest point of confusion, he says, "Well why wouldn't you be -- at least a little afraid of what you don't know." The fish swimming through Nahida's mind turn bright, luminous. She's making a mental note to look up "GMO tetras" later, and then immediately forgetting the note as her underwater landscape dries up, the fish now flopping, gasping, on the floor of a drab Lassiter cell. "You could have simply said the glowing straight off." There's not really much criticism in her mind; she's trying to stop her thoughts from running away to the labs. "I don't think anyone would be scared of me." She's unsuccessfully trying not to think of the M-Kids' wildly popular TikToks, their intentional effort to seem Cool and Relatable and Heroic and totally not intimidating, the baffling hateful comments they got anyway mixed in with the fans. "What we do," she gestures between herself and Roscoe, "is cool but it's not --" Only a little apologetic, she's gesturing now towards Quentin. Mostly towards his head. "Please, flatscans would be scared of Elmo if Sesame Street announced he had an X-Gene. -- C'mon, man, I know you're smarter than that." Quentin is directing this latter to Roscoe with a small click of his tongue against teeth, his brows hiking. "The news, the media, the teeming masses online, the world is constantly reshaped because someone successfully redefined reality and won. Why do you think everyone hates Magneto but Mr. Holland's a hero? Two years ago he was public enemy number one but then he got a good P.R. team. But if you want to stick to the dictionary, fine. Monster. One who deviates from normal or acceptable behavior or character. A threatening force. For decades, normal and acceptable behavior was locking you all up and poking you like guinea pigs because flatscans can't stand anyone who's different. And what did the superpowered militia do about it then? It wasn't monstrous. It was everyday. Maybe I'm not scared of the monstrous because the world could use a few more people deviating from what's acceptable. You deserved a little more monstrous. We all do. I'm more afraid of getting used to what I do know and thinking it's -- acceptable." << Dude he did it again, >> this time there is some grudging admiration mixed into the rest of Roscoe's faint irritation, << what kind of dork has a dictionary definition memorized? >> (Roscoe is definitely planning to go memorize some definitions later.) He dwells just for a moment on the teeming masses online, far from the M-Kids' TikTok comments, in ugly-coded forums; his teeming masses are not as numerous but no less cruel. << It was everyday, >> is kind of in agreement and kind of not; Roscoe's thoughts do not run away to the labs so much as they glance boredly back, but he is considering his hasty adjustment -- (acceptance?) -- period with sudden, uneasy self-consciousness. It is not enough self-consciousness to make him reconsider the starkly-drawn lines in his mind between humans and bogs and monsters. "Big talk from a bog," he decides, but then -- sort of incongruously -- he grins broadly, like this is a compliment (it is not.) "But they did --" Nahida is starting to say, and it's an image of Scott's tired eyes that come to mind, in the utter chaos that was Camp Lassiter just after the fall, this vision not nearly as perplexing or novel to her as it was to the Xavier's students. She glances to Roscoe, though, practiced in his ingratiation and knowing the ins and outs of Lassiter so invaluably well, and her mouth closes again tight. Instead now she's rethinking old news and old memories, recontextualizing them -- the first time the shocking news of Prometheus broke, the protests while Mr. Jackson sat in jail, the stories that have circulated in Prometheus community of his team and their efforts over the years. She's fidgeting just a little uncomfortably with the hem of her blouse, and frowning down at the lake. Old videos of Brendan cheerful in his mask and cape splice dissonantly into her father and (stern) (terrified) warnings about what can happen in this country if you do not fit in. "Okay," is what comes out aloud, slow and dubious despite the intrigue in her mind. "Then how would you choose to be monstrous?" "Sure, there's definitely privileges I have. But I'm sure when they start using the Registry to round us all up, everyone with that lil P is going to get the cushiest treatment. Not," Quentin is continuing with a small wave of his hand, "like I plan to wait and find out. You think the government's gonna back off after that whole humiliation? Things are gonna get way worse and this place --" He waggles a finger back towards the mansion. "I don't know if they're ready." Has this answered Nahida at all, no it has not, but he's still saying with confidence: "I'm not going to buy into all that kumbaya with the people who want us all dead or in cages, I'll tell you that much." Roscoe slouches back on his hands, tilting his head out across the lake, his face scrunching against the sun. "Not ready for what?" he says, a little offhand, a little amused. In his mind, he is dispassionately sorting through jarring, disjointed memories of the Lassiter raid, odd glimpses at odd angles from curling under his bed in his cell -- the guards firing into a body on the floor outside his cell, the buildings in B-wing crumbling, lightning strikes hitting the building, one lone raider staggering out of the building to the waiting plane -- and drawing, silently, the same conclusion. But he scrapes onto his knees, then gets to his feet -- "So, what's your plan?" he says, a little skeptical, now very amused. "You gonna fight the power, Luke Skywalker? Damn. Force be with you." Nahida huffs a soft laugh at this. Her head is shaking, though past outward skepticism she's already thinking through new M-Kids outfits, what role these two with their very different brands of attitude might play on an (older! wiser!!) team. "Mmm," she hums, lightly dismissive despite this pondering. "I suppose someone has to." "Are you not? Cuz see," Quentin is clicking his tongue again, head shaking, "that's just the problem, though. Nobody has to. And when the boot's pressing down and nobody's fighting back --" He shrugs a shoulder as he starts to collect his things. "Well. I don't have to tell you what that world could look like."