Logs:All Saints' Day

All Saints' Day
Dramatis Personae DJ, Lily, Polaris	2021-11-01 "Heavenly Parents didn't put us on this Earth just to wait for the kingdoms of glory."
Location <NY> Montauk Point State Park - Long Island
Shagwong Point is not quite the farthest east you can get in New York State--that honor belongs to the famed lighthouse a mile down the coast--but it's certainly close. The low scrub forest that covers much of this remote state park thins out towards the coast into windswept shrubs and finally just beachgrass that thread the pristine dunes rolling down to the water. The beaches here are flat, the pale sand compact underfoot and marbled with black, littered here and there with sun-bleached driftwood. It is not a particularly popular destination even in summer, and this deeply into autumn it is deserted despite the sunny and mild weather. Almost deserted. The visitors do not seem to be here for fishing or beachcombing or observing the myriad bird species that congregate here along their migration routes. Polaris unslings her patch-covered backpack and drops it unceremoniously, through it eases down to the sand beside her without a thump. She's dressed in a black canvas jacket, black jeans, and heavy black boots all liberally festooned with steel hardware, her makeup metallic green and silver, her long green hair streaming in the steady wind. "Alright. Phones off." She's doing so with her own as she speaks. "Crap for signal out here anyway." She turns a slow circle to survey their surroundings, then looks up at the clear blue sky, blotting out the sun with her hand, brows furrowing in thought. "Crappier than usual, maybe." They may not have come here for birdwatching, but that hasn't stopped DJ from getting distracted by a white and black waterbird dabbling near the shore; he's drifted a little ways away, eyes a little wider and expression a little softer until Polaris calls him back to the task at hand. "Oh --" he says, and then, with a slight flush, "-- I didn't bring a phone." He's just in jeans and a flannel, workboots, sleeve pinned to his side. He follows Polaris's gaze toward the sky with a curiously prompting, "-- Moreso than usual?" Lily is absently shutting her own phone down, tucking it into the black fanny pack strapped to her hip. Her attention is wandering -- first, to DJ, with a soft sort of look at his approach to the bird, and then up to the sky as her power syncs with Polaris. Whatever Polaris is seeing, she's seeing too, and it makes her eyes grow wide with wonder. She's in a brown chore jacket over a grey long sleeve crop top, high-waisted black barrel cut jeans, and well worn hiking boots, light brown hair just twisted into a low ponytail. She whistles. "That's different. You see that all the time?" Hand still raised, Polaris turns to blink at DJ. Then her gaze shifts past him to the bird he had been looking at. She shakes her head as if to clear it and drops her hand, finally, flushing faintly. "A solar storm is coming, and even leading edge can mess with radio waves." She twitches a smile at Lily. "It's not usually this intense, but yeah. It's gonna get a lot more intense which--is both good and bad. Just wanted you to be prepared. Especially if we'll be working with his uh--" She nods at DJ. "--ball bearing trick." The thoughtful frown returns. "Which is super helpful, by the way. I just figured they were fidget toys." She tips her hand at his belt pouch. "City has a lot more ambient -- noise, too," DJ offers, almost offhand -- he's watching a different sea duck, white and black with a distinctive sloping bill, loop and circle to land near the black one. "They're not not fidget toys. "They're just, sometimes -- well." He's dropped his hand, come up with a handful of the small beads to roll around in his palm. "Figure if you're all going to be working at a distance it'll be much easier to, you know. Outline your targets." A piece of driftwood near his boot grows three small dotted-metal rings within it, one at each end and one at its center. "More intense?" Now Lily looks skyward, frowning in the general direction of the sun. "It's already, uh, a lot." She drops her gaze again, staring at the newly metal-infused driftwood. It trembles for a moment before floating up and over to hover at Lily's side. "Pretty neat trick. Wouldn't mind learning how to do that part of it." She pauses, watching the hovering driftwood. "Where did you learn it?" There's a little trepidation in her voice, but mostly curiosity. "Ding ding ding." Polaris snaps her fingers in DJ's direction. "That also helps you feel the uh..." Her blush deepens. "Earth. Being grounded helps me..." She runs her hand through her hair and makes a frustrated noise. "I dunno, it's hard to explain. Anyway, yeah! A clear outline and handles, too. Have you worked with magnetokinetics before?" One side of her face scrunches up. "Wow, it feels awkward calling it that." She reels her attention back in. "Oh, and with multiple points of contact, we can do this." Her own powers flex out, pushing at the center of the levitating driftwood and pulling on the ends. The dry, brittle wood snaps in half, freeing the middle ring of beads which she draws to her hand. "Not that we're um. Supposed to do that. To the guards." She cringes. "Soooooo, you gotta be careful. The storm makes this stronger and more wibbly." DJ's cheeks flush dark, and he turns away, drawing in a slow breath as he looks out to the ocean. He's rolling another handful of beads in his palm as he nods. "Side by side for years," he answers Polaris softly, gaze following the driftwood as it levitates. Shakes his head, looks back to Lily. "Uh -- Prometheus, and then a lot of practice. Took nearly a decade before I felt comfortable doing that in combat without worrying I'd kill someone I wasn't planning to kill so I'm not sure I'd recommend trying it on anyone mid-chaos any time soon, but I can show you on other things all the same." The two remaining pieces of wood fall before Lily catches them with the borrowed power, hand thrown out towards them but not actually touching anything. “I think I can manage not snapping people in half,” she says to Polaris, though she doesn’t sound super certain. “Same with not teleporting things into people. Not using powers is a lot easier than the other way.” The driftwood flys up, falls back down into the sand as Lily glances at DJ. “I should get a basic handle on your teleporting, anyway. Get better at switching generally. Any tips for the beginner power mimic?” Polaris's eyes widen. "You probably know other things about mentalbending that I've never even thought of." Her tone is a lot more sober and a lot less excited than the words might indicate. "I didn't learn to fight using my powers until I joined the raid team." She looks down at the beads not actually in the palm of her hand but slowly orbiting each other above it. "Though uh, yeah. Prometheus. Taught me a lot. Too." Glancing at Lily, she bites her lower lip. "Which is also where the only other mimic I know ended up. Again. Knowing how to not use powers is important, but you're gonna have to use 'em for what we're doing." The steel beads she's been fidgeting with shoot out at the nearer of the two halves of driftwood, striking the same spot one after another, until it rolls over onto another irregular face. "Trick is using them right, you know?" DJ shakes his head slowly. "If you take mine, not using it is hard. Not teleporting things into people, sure, that's easy. Not splicing yourself into a wall?" His hand -- empty, now, the beads disappearing just as quickly as he'd pluckeed them up -- turns up, gesturing out at the empty space around them. "This is probably the ideal spot to practice with it. I'm not going to say I was lucky to get locked up when I did, but I probably would've wound up dead in a city if I hadn't learned real quick when I manifested --" His shrug is small. "Not using it is like telling yourself to crawl everywhere and never walk. Like trying to hold your breath. Like -- I don't know, but if you want to keep your limbs the most important thing is to get really used to what a jump feels like where you can't hit anything until -- until it just feels natural." His hand drops back to his side, his toe digging into the sandy ground. "There's so much more to it than metalbending, isn't there? You could shut the suppression fields down before the team needs to smash through the walls and make the big entrance. Even in the dark like we were you still can track all the hostiles for us. I use these --" He turns his hand over, once more full of the ball bearings, "because it's easy but they could be copper and if you put your mind to it you could do the same thing -- heck," now he's gesturing to her boots, her whole outfit, "you don't even need all that to fly." His mouth skews to the side, his eyes tracking back to the ducks out on the water. "-- wish I didn't know it, though. Really wish there was more time to just come here and listen to the earth." “Kind of wish you had Joshua right now. Or any mimic that Prometheus actually trained.” Lily’s voice is quiet — as DJ talks about manifesting, her eyebrows quirk up. “You weren’t at home? When you manifested?” In the sand, the other piece of driftwood moves again, drawing a circle in the compact sand before lifting back up. Her eyes dart to Polaris, to DJ, back to the sky and the sun for a moment. “You sound like you’re the metal bender, here.” The driftwood falls back to the sand. Polaris's eyes dart to DJ's empty left sleeve. "Yeah, not everyone manifests nice and weak and undramatic." She quirks her eyebrows at Lily. "I mean, obviously I wish we had Joshua, but like..." Her frown is less thoughtful now, troubled, with an edge of anger. "Prometheus doesn't makes us better at using our powers. They just make us better at doing what they want. And anyway, you can do things he can't. Own that." She's quiet for a moment, staring at DJ until she catches herself and looks down at the circle Lily had drawn in the sand. "Copper," she echoes, soft and incredulous. "Maybe your comrades were just more badass than me. I have heard Magneto can fly without wearing a whole scrapheap, though." She pulls the ball bearings out of the sand and returns them to DJ in a slow, graceful spiral, her gaze following his out over the water. "Gosh, that's..." Her voice hitches and her breathing goes a touch ragged, but she does not weep. "That's exactly--" She sucks in a deep breath and lets it out. "I want that so, so badly." "Oh, I was, just -- not for long. Why, how did you -- figure out what you do? It's not really the kind of thing you just wake up one day and really obviously --" DJ blinks into the center of the circle Lily's just drawn in the sand. His arm curls around his chest, eyes fixing down on the line around him. "Didn't know the guy. And my comrades were badass because they had to be. Guessing you all will be, too. Would rather things were otherwise, but --" A small shrug. "I figure we keep everyone alive long enough to get a chance to slow down again." He tips his hand up, curling fingers loosely around the ball bearings as they float back to him. They've vanished from his hand again a moment later -- this time embedded within a nearby rock, vanished from sight but sensible to Lily and Polaris in the familiar shapes of the Big and Little Dipper. "And in the meantime we just have to find our pieces of heaven where we can." "Oh." Lily is quiet for a moment, her gaze dragging up from the circle in the sand to DJ's face. "It was -- later. After he did, and -- I'm not sure when, exactly. We noticed when I was sixteen, seventeen. I was on, uh, auto-copy." She yanks the ball bearings free from the driftwood, pulls them to land in her open palm before tucking them into a pocket. "Guess Prometheus got what they wanted out of me, too." Her attention turns to the rock, which shifts just a little bit out of the sand before her grip on it loosens. Lily blinks towards it, appearing a little above the sand and landing on it heavily. "Jeez what's slow to you?" She jumps again -- away, then back to the same place in the sand. "I don't know any kingdoms of glory around here. But maybe -- if this raid works -- we can make a piece of heaven here on earth." "I guess a lot of my--" Polaris stops, fidgeting with a zipper on the sleeve of her jacket. "--our comrades are pretty badass, already. For the same reason. Next time I'm bored at work, I'mma start working on the...copper." This time she sounds less incredulous than just curious. She watches Lily's first jump with clenched teeth, then relaxes a little when the other woman doesn't immediately blip herself into any solid objects. But when her eyes track to the rock, her smile comes warm delighted and unreserved. "We got a lotta work to do, but I think we don't have to wait," she tells Lily. Then, after a moment's consideration, "I don't think we should wait." Her feet leave the ground and she rises up--just a dozen feet or so. Her face tips up toward the sky again, then then back down at the beach. The vague swirls of black sand mingled with the white start shifting into bold, dramatic lines that sweep and curve and flow around each other. To Lily's eyes, even if only by remembering the senses she'd borrowed earlier, it looks like the aurora above written in iron beneath their feet. Polaris eases herself back down. "Heavenly Parents didn't put us on this Earth just to wait for the kingdoms of glory."