Logs:Xavier's On Ice

Xavier's On Ice
Dramatis Personae Avi, Scott
In Absentia Nahida, Kyinha	2024-02-20 "This seems like a slip hazard."
Location <XAV> Boys' Hall - Xs Second Floor
The boy's dormitory is more densely lined with doors than the main thoroughfare, nearly all of which sport some kind of bulletin or dry-erase board, or some manner of poster. This hallway is slightly more cluttered than its counterpart across the hall, with door-hangings prioritizing posters and decorations and dry-erase missives marginally more likely to be composed of crude drawings. The weather has been fluctuating between Frigid and Practically Springlike, and though today it's settling more firmly on the cold side, it hasn't been nearly cold enough for long enough to render the lake safely skate-worthy. Probably Avi could do something to help this, but the lake is huge and it's been a busy week and probably this has to do with why he has elected for this lower-effort ice rink. This entire stretch of boys' dorm hallway has been given a slick new flooring, to the mixed delight and annoyance and resignation of its occupants. The goal on one side of the hallway is, nominally, being tended by an enormous wrinkly boulder of a bulldog who has fallen asleep in the doorway. Slightly in front of Chonk, Avi has just recently slapped a shot hard down the way to the open end-of-hall doorway that is serving as the current goal on the other side. The boy who's been tending goal does not actually live in that room -- are the occupants bothered by the sudden (thankfully, foam) puck that's flying through the doorway? WHO KNOWS. Who is winning? WHO KNOWS. Regardless, once the puck has been returned down the ice the other student is disappearing to his actual room and, for a moment, Avi is left idly batting the puck to himself in the chilly hallway. Maybe somebody on this floor is a narc, but it's probably not hard to imagine that Mr. Summers has a bizarrely accurate internal barometer for indoor ice storms, or a sixth sense that Somebody Is Up To Something Right Now. Whatever tipped him off, the door at the end of the hallway is opening just as the puck flies back across the hall to Avi, and Scott is poking his head in, his free hand in his pocket. Under the motorcycle jacket he's wearing blue on blue, his flannel shirt a slightly greener shade than his jeans, and a heather grey tee. He gives the ice sheet a tentative prod with the toe of one boot, and then lifts his head up, eyebrows rising above his opaque glasses. "This seems like a slip hazard," he observes. When the door opens Avi is pivoting towards it, reflexively slapping the puck towards the surprise new goal with a cheerful "Yo man think fa --" that dies abrupt on his lips when he sees who the new arrival is. His eyes go a little wider, and his wince is very sheepish. His grin is bright if a little crooked. "Sorry, Mr. Summers, but you seen the lake this season? It's an embarrassment to winter. 'sides, maybe this is like --" He's shifting his footing, one side and then the other in a small bopping kinda dance. "-- balance training." Scott stops the puck with one booted foot, seemingly without blinking. Of course, he does most things seemingly without blinking. He's not sending it back immediately -- he presses down tentatively with his foot, but quickly pulls back when he realized it's made of foam. "Mm," he says; after a moment, one end of his mouth quirks almost into a smile, as though with conscious effort. "I'm from Alaska, that lake always seems like an embarrassment to winter to me." He watches Avi's dance with raised eyebrows -- possibly his eyebrows just have not gone down yet. "Do you think your classmates need balance training?" Avi's brows go up, now, faintly impressed at the swift interception of the puck. "Wellll, sir," he's drawing this answer out slow and with just a touch of self-consciousness in his amused answer: "How many 'em been struggling getting down the hall without taking a spill, I think maybe." He's blithely moving on past this to an amiable: "I lived in Alaska. Once. Not so long but man it was gorgeous there." He tips his chin towards the squishy puck under Scott's boot. "You from the Arctic, I know your game gotta be strong, huh?" Now Scott presses his eyebrows down, suddenly, like he and Avi are on some kind of eyebrow see-saw. "Oh?" he says mildly. "And how many of them have been taking spills?" His slight smile twitches, though not in a discernably more or less smiley way. "It is gorgeous up there," he agrees. When he looks down at the puck, at Avi's nod, it is like he forgot he was standing on it. Apparently, even in the middle of disapproving of this unapproved indoor rink, he can't resist shifting his weight and giving it a careful soccer pass toward Avi and his sleeping goalkeeper. But then he adds, "So do you have a plan to defrost this, or am I gonna get an email in a few hours about a flood?" "Nobody got hurt," Avi is quick to reassure in blatant non-answer. "-- d'you play? Bet you'd be real intimidating on the ice." He commandeers the puck with a quick shift of his stick, and maybe he was going to shoot it again but Scott's question turns his attention to the floor like he's somehow just noticing the thick coating of ice. "Uh -- my thing don't really go backwards." He definitely did not have a plan but in the next moment is deciding on one confidently: "I'mm'a ask Nahida if she can magic me up a mountain of paper towel. No waste and they all gon' disappear so no trash either. And no flood. Oh! Or I could see if Mr. da Costa --" But he's thinking better of this one before he even gets that far, hastily backtracking to: "Nah I'll hit up Nahida first." "Uh-huh," Scott says, slowly. "I think maybe..." Whatever he thinks maybe, his brain seems to stall before it can formulate words. When Avi speaks again, there is a semi-definite sense that Scott blinks at him. "Eh. Me and contact sports are a bad mix most of the time," he says. He seems much more at ease at the prospect of discussing Avi's lack of foresight in this matter -- he leans casually against the doorframe, folding his arms across his chest. "Well, you're cleaning this up regardless," he says with amusement. "You're sure it doesn't work backwards? The water has to come from somewhere, right?" "That's part of the intimidation," Avi is encouraging cheerfully. "Who's gonna step to you if it might, you know --" One hand lifts, fist closed then flaring open to make a definite explosion gesture just in front of his own eyes. "sides, I hear there's wild new technology designed for keeping glasses on your face. Goggles with headbands and all." He's sliding closer, offering his own stick out to Scott -- in his other hand a second one is forming, thick and cold and crystalline. "It's gotta be fine here at least, right, sir? Like --" He gestures with the growing icicle-stick towards the faintly snoring dog in the doorway. "Chonk's not about to body check you, anyway." He's looking down at his new and improvised hockey stick now, more thoughtful than before. "Huh, guess it does. I haven't really tried much to -- I mean, I don't usually want to be less cool." Scott almost laughs. "It doesn't seem sporting," he says. After a slightly awkward pause, he takes the proffered stick, passing it between his hands a few times as if testing how it feels, giving it a vague, rueful grin. The next almost-laugh is only a tiny bit warmer, but warmer nonetheless. "Not all powers are reversible. Yours might not be, either," he says. "But chances are you're going to have this ability for the rest of your life, so it might be good to start thinking about it practically, or you're going to spend a lot of your life mopping floors." Somehow he manages to make this only a little lecture-y. "You don't have to try right now. Just think about it." "Chances are?" Avi's brows hike up, and he sounds amused as he glides back down by Chonk. "You know someone who grow out of this? -- Anyway by the time I'm old we're probably gonna have entire smart houses with their own self-cleaning self-drying floors, I'm be telling my kids back in my day if we wanted to turn the house into an ice castle we had to beg paper towels off a wizard-friend to do it. They gonna be like, 'what's paper' and I'll have to explain what a tree was. -- Now, I gotta warn you, sir," Avi is saying this extremely seriously to Scott, lifting his stick briefly away from the puck so he can gesture to the slumbering dog, "Chonk's not gonna go easy on you just 'cuz of your disability. Gotta bring your A-game you wanna make it to the Xavier's Cup." "I don't," admits Scott, stepping one foot carefully onto the ice as well; he keeps his other foot firmly planted on dry ground. "But you never know." He tilts his head, eyebrows raised again, downward like he's considering the practicality of self-cleaning self-drying floors. "One goal, and then you're cleaning all this up," he says, the sternness of this decree belied immediately when he adjusts his grip on the borrowed stick, mouth pressed into a slimly amused not-quite-smile, and adds, "Oh, I'm bringing it."