Logs:PG Rating

PG Rating
Dramatis Personae Amo, Blink, Joshua
In Absentia Erik	2024-08-29 "I think it would be funnier if one of us dies off camera."
Location <MOJ> X-Men House - Mojoverse
This is a largish house that has been very unevenly appointed, its decorator gone somewhat heavy-handed with yellow and blue color theming in all the decor. The ground floor has a cramped kitchen that is nearly empty of any equipment or food. The adjacent sitting room is crowded with a baffling range of chairs and tables and cabinets all jockeying for space together with numerous televisions of varying sizes that all only receive Mojo's own baffling network all day. There is a sunroom beside this, seemingly devoted entirely to hammocks of varying sizes and styles. The upstairs has quite comfortably appointed bedrooms across the top two levels, enough for everyone to pair up. Ornately gilt-framed oil paintings of Scrat from Ice Age have been hung up prominently in each bedroom. The basement level has an extremely well furnished gym and leads out into an extensive yard where someone has halfheartedly begun working on a garden and then given up. There is quite a nice patio to sit on, though. The whole place seems to have just one tiny bathroom tucked up on the top level like some kind of afterthought, crammed in there with the shower under the slope of the roof so it's impossible to stand up straight if you are over 5'7" and even sitting on the toilet feels claustrophobic. At least there is a toilet. It's been while now since the opening ceremony, and a while, too, since the baffling array of what passed for dinner. Joshua has long since given up on his many (many) attempts at blipping out of here. That ship has definitively... not sailed. At some point he headed out -- who knows where. Maybe he was testing the teleportation reception elsewhere. It clearly hasn't been good, though. He's back now. Flopping in one of the infinite hammocks in jeans and a black tee, with an image of a large bird swooping down to drag away the silhouette of a person who looks to be clinging very hard to the earth as they are dragged, next to the Hebrew 'גַּם זוּ לְטוֹבָה', red and black-flag-embroidered kippah pinned to his hair. He has a small bag of chili olives that he is tipping carefully out of the pouch into his mouth. He does not, all things consider, look particularly more mournful than he usually does as he settles in comfortably with his snack. A flash of purple light outside deposits Blink in the yard. She's actually kind of dressed up -- maybe she was heading for a night out on town after training? -- in a rose tea dress with 3/4 length sleeves and a high-low hem, carrying her strappy spool-heel sandals in one hand. She frowns at the exterior of the sunroom, and when she finds nothing resembling an actual door just opens a portal from just outside the glass to just inside it and hops through. "Can't cut through the outer wall of this whole place either," she says, dropping into a hammock...chair? Or possibly just a very badly constructed hammock for a very small person. "If it even is a wall. It feels like space just ends there." Amo had done her fair share of scoping out the area--or what little there is of it--since the opening ceremony. Now, she's leaning back in one of the many chairs, sideways, legs over one of the arm rests and back pressed against the other. She's very firmly ripping a twizzler (the red flavor) between her teeth, lounging rather comfortably in her red tank top and black joggers, inside out crew socks and black sneakers, hair pulled into a ponytail with a scrunchy. She watches the tv currently broadcasting the Mojo Network, the skin around her eyes pinched, tongue resting on the top row of her teeth in a way that could mean intense concentration or sheer bafflement. In contrast to her relaxed posture, a rocky texture that ripples like a trail across her skin can be seen occasionally, which then disappears under the fabric of her clothes, antsy, expectant. She flips her head back upside down over the edge of the arm rest to get a look at Joshua and Blink. "Damn." She rocks her head in a sort of tilt, "Didn't find shit either. Didn't realize it was that locked down though." She huffs out a breath, then rips off two twizzlers and reaches out an arm in silent offer to the two of them, "Anythin' similar ever happen before? With being walled off." Joshua squints at the purple light, his mouth pulling just slightly thinner at Blink's report. He squeezes another olive into his mouth and munches it slow and contemplative. At length he shakes his head slowly. "We have the worst company retreats." His head falls back against the hammock, then slowly rolls to the side to peer at Amo. He is considering the Twizzlers, then considering his olives. Then the Twizzlers. Eventually he decides better than chancing this mix of flavors and shakes his head. His tongue pokes into the side of his cheek as he thinks over her question, long and hard. "Statistically..." There's a potentially unencouraging pause. "Define similar." Blink gives a kind of laugh that sounds like she's been punched lightly in the gut, but she brightens a little at the offer of candy. "Yessss." She tries to sit up but the hammock is kind of swallowing her, so she just swings it a little toward Amo and stretches out a hand to snag the Twizzler à la "Creation of Adam. "Thank you." She starts to nibble, brows pinched, and at length flops the candy rope at Joshua to indicate agreement. "Last year when we went to get the kids out of Lassiter, there was this merc who yeeted my whole --" Her lips press together tight. "-- most of my team into this kinda pocket dimension, I guess? I couldn't portal out of there, either." Amo stretches to meet Blink with the twizzler, then takes a bite of the one Joshua doesn't take with a shrug of their shoulder. She scans the two of them from her upside down view as she chews, contemplating, then points with the half bitten twizzler, "First've all. Concerning." She says, matter of factly, "Second. What'd you guys do then to get out?" She twists in her chair until she's now sitting upright in it. She spins it to face the two of them, and wipes the palms of her hands on the fabric of her pants, fingers stretched out in a sort of tension that doesn't translate to the rest of her body. Joshua lifts his eyebrows, curious. "Sounds wild." He runs his tongue over his teeth, his mouth twitching. "Was on sabbatical. Missed that one." Though something in his tone carries a definite implication that there have been Other places to be captive that he didn't miss. "It was extremely trippy, and freaking huge." Blink frowns. "I'm not sure at what point something like that stops being a 'pocket dimension' and is just a -- dimension. But we didn't get ourselves out. The merc yeeted us back out when Prometheus handed us over to SHIELD for mystery reasons. Maybe Nick Fury is a secret Blackbird, who knows." She looks over at Joshua. "That one, but you've probably been more places you couldn't blip out from. I mean, for reasons other than suppression." She frowns again, deeper. "Have you ever encountered anything that's like psi shielding, but for teleportation? Because the boundaries of this whole -- village, whatever, seem very physically defined. Though I guess maybe that can be true of a pocket dimension, too. Handbag dimension. Whatever." Amo's eyebrows tick upwards at Joshua, but lower back down when they focus back on Blink. Her fingers idly pick at her nails, and rocky texturing dances around her palms and fingertips, bubbling up concentrated in a certain area when she digs a little too hard. Her eyes squint at Blink, and finally her brow furrows, "...Right. No dice, then. S'too bad." Is all she says in response, surely an over simplification. Her eyes focus down at her finger tips, but glance up occasionally towards Joshua, leaning forward slightly to rest her elbows on her thighs, "Yeah, S'weird how both your teleporting gets messed up..." Her mouth twitches into a brief wince, "Well. Maybe not. Clearly expecting you guys." Joshua shrugs. "Infinite dimensions, probably. Finite ways we." His hand makes a small flashing motion from one point to another in the air, and then he grimaces, slightly. "Split." He presses at the edges of his little bag of olives and looks extremely woefully inside it, hanging his head as if, of all things, the biggest tragedy of today has been finding it empty. He crumples up the empty bag with a small sigh and in comparison looks remarkably complacent when he looks back up to comment: "Squid Games Human Fetishist Alien Dimension, admittedly poor timing to fumble this." "Weird in some ways, not weird in others." Blink's hands glow purple with a look of concentration. The remainder of the Twizzler wobbles and twists weirdly, and then the glow fades. She shakes her head. "Like they know how to stop us teleporting out but they don't know how to make a functioning house? I guess that is kind of complicated, but come on." She gestures at the room full of hammocks and then the room so full of furniture there's hardly any space to walk. "Maybe they do know how but this is funny to them. Speaking of which -- maybe we don't get any say over it, but I can be 'Lickety'. Even if it's only in our hearts." She flashes a tight smile at Joshua. "I don't know much about Judaism, but I get this sense you might have um. Religious? Concerns? About being called something suggestive." Amo hums, idly watching Blink’s twizzler, “My bet’s they don’t know. Just watched one tv show from earth and called it good. So-” She abruptly kicks herself into standing, “-Fetishization it is.” She begins to attempt to pace around the room, but it’s unable to be as mindless as she wants it to be since she needs to wind carefully around the surplus of chairs. She ends up banging her shin harshly against one of the chair legs, but doesn’t react. In the end she ends up by the window and tilts down to look outside. “I would offer you guys ‘And Friends’ but I think I’ll keep that one. Maybe they’ll have a whole underdog story for it, get lots of donations from…” she snaps her fingers in an attempt to remember, “The Capital. That’s what it was.” Her palms go to rest against the window sill, and her fingers drum against it. Joshua lifts a hand, up and behind himself, palm pressing against the support of his hammock and rocking it wobbly to one side, then the other, with a quiet rattle of its chain. "Torah gets real horny," he does allow, "but a stage name like that." His tongue clicks, head shaking in deep regret. "Could lead to mixed dancing." He drops his hand back to his belly, drumming his fingers there. Eventually, snorts. "C'mon." He squints an eye shut and gives a very exaggerated waggle of both his thumbs that looks almost exactly unlike the overly cheerful edit made of him in the opening credits video. "Some slug kid been dying to see Magneto drop a tank on us. Gonna be heartbroken when some rando pyrokinetic torches us instead. This shit's hilarious." Blink grimaces. "I sure hope this isn't a Hunger Games type situation." Her shoulders start to tighten up and she relaxes them on a long breath out. "Wait, isn't the Torah your...Bible? I guess there is a lot of begetting in there." She's probably just trying to focus on Jewish law in lieu of thinking about whether this is a Hunger Games type situation. "Is 'mixed dancing' a euphemism?" She answers Joshua's impression of Split with two thumbs up of her own and kind of a troll face. "Okay, it's a little funny." “Kinda feels like it though, yeah?” Amo turns to lean back against the wall and face the two of them. “Careful. Might give the death show a pg-rating.” The corner of her mouth twitches upwards at their impressions, and her shoulders drop an inch, “I think it would be funnier if one of us dies off camera. Turns out earthlings are allergic to something they got in the food here. Imagine the disappointment.” Joshua shrugs. "Maybe we got hauled up here to play alien Double Dare." He turns his waggle of thumbs up towards Amo, now, his squinched-up eye now accompanied by a click of his tongue that still does not really make it cheerful or a wink. "Damn. You right." After a pause, a hefty sigh. "Could only be funnier if we did have Magneto here." Blink's laugh is again, a single sound, but this time it's a little bit high and a tiny bit hysterical. She also turns her Lickety impression on Amo, and through her rigid grin asks, "What makes you think we're off camera?"