Logs:Ace in the Hole
| Ace in the Hole | |
|---|---|
| Dramatis Personae | |
| In Absentia | 2024-09-03 "How infinite?" |
| 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. Are the X-Men celebrating today? Should they be celebrating today? Jax is not so very long returned from claiming the team's second victory, and though there's little enough to gloat over there with his opponent so visibly badly injured still, probably the promise of some food that isn't a meagre handful of peanuts will be a relief. Though he's still sweat-sticky and gritty with dirt and slime and fluff and glitter from his foray into the baffling obstacle course and though he was definitely beelining to scrub off this sensory hell when he got in, now, instead, he is poking his head through one doorway and then another in search of -- "Oh! Scott." There's a relieved brightening in his tired voice. "-- sorry, sir, you got a minute? Joshua's got a thing." He disappears, but pops his head back in a moment later, probably fully unnecessarily given the extremely limited quarters they are all sharing, to add: "S'in my room," before he ducks back out again. Presumably, to his room. Scott is sitting straight-backed in a straight-backed chair pulled directly beside the slightly more cushiony armchair Jean claimed, one of his elbows propped up on the back of the armchair; though they're not even really looking at any of the myriad TVs in the sitting room they have been sitting in dead silence all the same, Scott's chin drooped a little drowsily against his fist. He doesn't lift his chin at Jax (though Jean does) but, after a moment, he gets slowly to his feet to follow him upstairs. He clears his throat before speaking, summoning up his usual brusque tone -- "Mmgh. Sure, what's up?" Up in Jax's room, Joshua has also been sitting in dead silence on the end of Shane's bed, but maybe that is par for the course. Both because it is Joshua and because his only companion here has been the large and elegant portrait painting of Scrat, pirouetting like a dancer and holding his acorn aloft. Joshua is regarding the squirrel with a very intent frown that he transfers to Jax and Scott as they arrive, though only for a moment before he transfers his frown uncomfortably to the floor. "I can fix the food. Problem." Jax closes the door behind them, and he's moving further in to slump a little uncomfortably against the wall. His fingers pick restlessly at a patch of caked dirt sticking to his arm. "Y'might want to back up just a smidge there and use your words, sugar," Jax's tone is patient but very carefully so, like someone leaning aggressively hard into being Very Gentle at this moment, "would this go quicker if I caught Scott up to speed?" Scott's brow scrunches low over his visor; he slides his hands into the pockets of his jeans and taps the thumbs outside the pockets. "I don't want to overtax you," he says, a little slowly, "we might need the healing for more serious things." "How would --" Joshua's brow furrows in a mild confusion, but he shakes his head quickly before his brain can tumble too far down this particular path. He scrubs at his cheek. "So you know Heroes," he starts, and then stops. Grimaces, ducks his head. Gestures instead to Jax, like, go ahead. "He ain't a healer," Jax says immediately, "and he ain't a teleporter. He copies other people's powers. There's a lot of caveats and I ain't quite sure there's no way to give you the full ins and outs anyway but the most important things you gotta know is the longer we're stuck here, the less he's gonna be able to grab from folks back home. The more he uses something, longer it's, I dunno, available to him, so there ain't a lot of danger of the healing or teleporting running out on him unless we..." He trails off here with a brief bite at his lower lip. "Well, we'll really be boned by then, but, I think the window's closing real fast for re-upping on none of the kids 'round school he ain't but touched on in passing here and there, yeah? Like, say, Nahida and an infinite supply of food?" Scott opens his mouth, probably to say that no he does not know Heroes, then shuts again. Opens again, once Jax has finished this explanation, and then shuts again. Aside from this (characteristic? uncharacteristic?) loss for words there is not much indication on his face of what he is thinking, as he glances from Jax back to Joshua, but he swallows, then says, "How infinite?" "Her thing?" Joshua shrugs, stiffly. "Copy small shit -- basically forever." He rubs at his cheek again, shifts a little uncomfortably where he's sitting. "I mean. Food'll vanish. Eventually. Copy it again, I guess. But." His brow is knitting, deeper. "We still might need the healing for more serious things," Jax says with an uncertain frown. "His powers don't stack infinitely. He can have a couple but too many and they get kinda useless until he gets rid of 'em and from what I understand the getting rid of 'em part is pretty taxing. But just at the moment food do seem like it's fixing to be our most pressing issue until we find a way out. And not just for us, like. Someone's losing these stupid games every day. Either we're going hungry or they are and it's just gonna keep adding up. 'Tween Heather an' the pups half our teams could give up their rations and someone might still be dead 'fore a couple weeks is through." Scott rubs one hand wearily over his chin, tilting his gaze up, then settling it back down somewhere between them. "I don't want to overtax you," he says again, quieter this time. "But -- yeah, food is -- that's an important problem to solve. For everyone here." He swallows again, his hand drifting back to settle at his hip, tucked into his back pocket. "At the very least, might get Mystique to put her claws away. For all our --" his lips press thin before he decides, diplomatically, "disagreements on Earth, the Brotherhood is not the real enemy here." "Eh." Joshua shrugs, heavily. "Wanted to take it easy, coulda stayed home." He is pushing slowly to his feet, rubbing two fingers against his forehead as if this will manually press the frown away. "... they the real enemy there?" Jax lets out a quiet hfff, tired and wry. "Might could set up some kinda shared food -- depot -- thing? -- somewhere in the wackadoo bar, maybe." He's just pressing his lips together at the question. "Gosh but it'll be exciting to get back to where that ain't just a rhetorical question. I'm gonna shower 'fore I scratch my skin all off." "Good thought," says Scott -- this bears the faintest trace of relief at having any plan to cosign. "Thank you both for bringing it up, I'll --" he shakes his head, his spine pulling up a little straighter to follow out the door. "Keep me posted if you find any other aces up your sleeve, would you?" "Mmm." Joshua lifts his chin to Scott, but he is saying, very seriously, before he vanishes: "-- usually that's the big one." | |
