Logs:Stepping Up

Stepping Up
Dramatis Personae Spencer, Sriyani
In Absentia Jax, Joshua, Shane, Nahida, Charles, Halim, Quentin, Avi, Nevaeh,	2024-09-02 "We keep us safe, right?"
Location <XAV> Spencer and Sriyani's Dorm - Residence Hall
This is a very generously sized double-occupancy room which, like the rest of the building, is shiny and brand-new. There are still finishing touches being added here and there, but this room and its very sturdy, very modular furniture is perfectly livable if a little spare. It looks slightly less empty now, with one of the residents in the process of moving in. Spence has rearranged the furniture a little and lofted the bed that he presumably intends to claim. The only actual belongings he seems to have brought are the backpack sitting in the chair at one of the desks, a suitcase open on the floor, and Spence himself sitting cross-legged beside it. He's wearing a red t-shirt with a black circle around the Hebrew letter aleph, black cargo pants, and red low-top sneakers, his kippah a familiar smiling yellow sun. He hasn't unpacked his clothes or toiletries or any other practicalities. He's just holding a brightly colorful fused glass mezuzah and a Command adhesive strip with which he presumably intends to secure it. "Oh my god." One of the closet doors is opening. Sriyani hasn't bothered to pack very efficiently (or, really, at all), because why would they; they're just kind of toting an armload of folded clothes through from their bedroom to dump them straight into their dresser, leaving the dresser drawer open before flumping down onto the floor beside Spence. They're in baggy jeans and a purple-trimmed orange kurti, their eyes wide and their phone clutched tight in one hand. "Is it true half the teachers decided to skip town like, right before class started? What's going on?" Spence looks up, not exactly startled at Sriyani's entrance. His smile comes a little slower, though, than usual. "Hey," he says, kind of brightly, trying to match his roommate's energy. "Yeah. Pretty much the entire resident faculty except for Professor Xavier and -- the new computer science teacher." He rolls the mezuzah between his hands, rubs his thumbs over its glossy smooth surface. "I don't know what's going on. I don't think they know, either." Sriyani's expression goes through several shifts, brows hiking then scrunching, mouth opening into an o and then twisting to the side, before they settle onto an expression of uncertain concern. Their voice drops a little lower. "Wait, you don't know? But isn't your dad one of the..." There's a definite hesitation here, now, and it takes a moment to marshal the clear disappointment from their voice when Spence fails to have The Gossip. For a moment they're just chewing on the inside of their lip, one knee bouncing rapidly. "You don't think something's wrong, do you?" "Yeah." Spence is trying to sound casual, probably. "My brother, too. And my..." His face scrunches a little. "...Joshua. Since Thursday night. I'm sure --" He breaks off and tries for Casual again. "Nobody knows, they're just gone. But I know they wouldn't want to scare the kids." He leans on this last word as though he were not, himself, one of The Kids. "I know you're community-minded, so I'd appreciate your discretion." He puts the scroll case down on top of his more-or-less neatly folded clothes and presses his hands down on his knees. "We keep us safe, right?" "Joshua?!" This is more of a startled yelp than Sriyani probably intended; they clap their hand over their mouth, head ducking guiltily. They are, we will confess for the reader's sake, already halfway through shooting off a furious text to Nahida when Spence is requesting discretion and hastily they tuck their phone under a flap of their kurti, expression scrunching up very determinedly serious. "Yeah!" But then, just, very serious. "I mean... yeah. But kind of, they do, too. And they're... gone?" They're shifting a little restless where they sit. "Did your dad tell you anything about the, um, pirates." "Thanks. Sorry if I'm being kind of a -- I don't know, killjoy?" Spence squares his shoulders a little. "But it's exactly because of that. Obviously they can't protect us from everything, but I think it's easier to notice when they fail than all the times they succeed." He looks up at Sriyani, startled. "Yeah. He didn't say much. I could have helped with that, I'm sure, if they didn't have this whole 'no superheroing until graduation' thing." He doesn't roll his eyes, but it's implicit in his tone. Then he frowns, suddenly intent. "Wait what do you know about it." "No, I don't mean that, I just mean..." Sriyani fidgets again. "Okay so we were out in Madripoor last month for this amazing festival they have it's wild if you haven't been you should go next year and we were on this carnival boat trying to win this big stuffed unicorn and then Quentin heard some kid in trouble and it turns out some of the pirates -- I mean, everyone there was pirates but most of them were just chilling because it was a holiday but some of them were not in the holiday spirit at all and were trafficking some mutant kid to slavers. But Nevaeh figured out where they were and I made a door and Quentin and Avi and Nahida held off the pirates like total badasses and we all rescued them." They stop here for breath, fidgeting with the hem of their kurti. "Oh but it'd apparently been like a whole thing with disappearing mutants so we told your dad and them and they were going to look into it and -- I mean," they're hastily backtracking again by way of flustered explanation, "that was a bunch of homeless mutants in Madripoor, I don't mean they got kidnapped like that or anything, I just mean that we helped someone and then the problem was bigger and they stepped up because they're bigger, right? But now they're not here so until they're back, probably, people are still going to need help, and someone still needs to step up." Spence nods slowly, brows furrowing in concentration as he tries to follow Sriyani's tale. At length he nods, though still a bit noncommittally. "Right. I guess I've just been in 'they'll be back any minute now' mode. And maybe they will be, but we can't count on that, or on people not needing help in the meantime." His conviction is growing, and he nods more firmly. "But we can't half-ass this. There are important things to consider. Like protocols, and training, and comms, and a base of operations..." He's ticking these points off on his fingertips, and hesitates briefly before allowing, "And code names." "Boy who you talking to?" Sriyani's tongue clicks sharp against their teeth. "We had a handbook and base and like, three backup bases." Though here they're scrunching their nose up thoughtfully and digging their phone back out. "Buuut Nahida says these new dorms do have a whole Batcave in the basement so maybe they actually kind of want us to help." The flat look that Spence gives Sriyani might well be the closest thing he has to a poker face, learned and honed at Lassiter. "I do value your experience," he says, so earnestly that it sounds kind of jarring coming his Spencer Fucking Holland face, "I just -- also have concerns about how your team operated in the past. Maybe I'm unfairly prejudiced, and I should deal with that." The expression does not last. He's jolted out of it in short order by "Batcave? What does that even mean I don't think they want us to help." Sriyani gives Spencer a sweet-bright smile that is not even in the least poker-facey. "You should deal with that," they say, just a little singsong as they hope to their feet. "Or do your own thing? I don't know. I didn't build us a Batcave. I am gonna check it out, though!" They are already mid-text as they dart back through a door that -- definitely no longer leads to their closet.