Logs:EXcelsior Investigations

EXcelsior Investigations
Dramatis Personae Avi, Naomi, Sera	2021-09-08 "What they got we don't got."
Location <NY> Salem Creamery - Salem Center
The main drag of Salem Center should by all rights be bustling today, both of the town's high schools quite recently back in session, but the sweltering summer sun isn't encouraging anyone to great heights of activity. In the muggy oppressive heat there are a few places more appealing than others, at least, and here on the patio of this tiny ice cream shop Avi has puddled himself into a wicker seat, his blue and red quick-dry tee sticking to his chest and beads of sweat ringing the hairline of his tight crop of coils. He has a double scoop of honey lemon lavender ice cream in a waffle cone that's starting to drip down one of his knuckles and he manages, just barely, to lick it off his fingers before it drips to the ground. "-- thought school was weird enough but summer," he's saying, "was maybe weirder. You think it's contagious, here?" “It better not be contagious, weird’s already genetic don’t we got enough goin’ on?” Naomi is sprawled in another wicker seat with too long limbs, summer growth spurt turning her jeans into capris and over-sized Blackbird tee into just a normal fitting shirt. Her scales have grown, too — the gap between the topmost row and her hairline is nearly gone now, with odd flyaways that didn’t make it into her box braids catching on the scales. The lowest edge of the scales rests atop her cheekbones now, looking almost like a helm. Naomi is resolutely ignoring any stares her scales might be garnering and is focusing on consuming her cookies-and-cream cone with haste. “What was your weird. Did you go to space I bet this year we going to space.” Perched primly in her own chair, Sera has been methodically keeping up with her watermelon elderflower sorbet, rotating it as it melts. Her cheeks and forearms are still faintly red from a mild sunburn, and her brown hair has weathered the summer notably lighter than before, newly cut short and choppy but not untidy. She wears a short sleeve green seersucker button-down and light stonewashed shortalls with purple low top sneakers, her pale (where not sunburned) skin faintly sheened with sweat. "This whole world is weird to me, so I don't think my summer is a good reference. Is what qualifies as weird, there days?." There's no challenge in this, only earnest and genuinely palpable curiosity. Then she adds, cheerfully off-handed, "If you're interesting in space travel, Spence can probably make it happen." "Wait, Spence goes to space? How he survive out there? Can we go to space?" Avi's eyes have gone wider, his ice cream temporarily forgotten. "I would be so in for that field trip dayam. I didn't go to no space, things just been --" He shakes his head, leaning back and draping one arm over the back of his chair. "Like just last week! I'm sitting in my room finna get chewed out by my moms everything's a mess then bam --" His fingers snap, "like that the whole place cleans itself! With a note! 'You're welcome' like there's some kinda magic cleaning fairies swooping through Harlem. What I'm supposed to make of that. You heard of some M-Kids?" “Spence can go anywhere, once,” Naomi says around a mouthful of ice cream. “Ionno ihe can bring his own air along though.” She tilts her head to the side, raises a shoulder in a half shrug. “’Sides, I’m gettin’ a lil too tall to ride with Spence — boy needs to catch up.” She leans in towards Avi as he talks, eyes going wide. “Wayment, M-Kids? I got a lil visit from ‘em too. Got my shit back from some bigots in Manhattan. This was way back though, like, July." She leans back, mumbles a little more info into her ice cream as she takes another bite; "Got me a present, too." "The Spence where I'm from could, but you'd need a space suit." Sera still sounds perfectly matter-of-fact about this, only a whisper of loneliness spilling over her words. Her head tilts slightly. "Oh! One of them stopped the F-train for me just the other day. Along with time itself, as far as I could tell." She's caught her schoolmates' excitement and is returning their investment with interest. "He had a mask and cape and everything! I figured he was just doing it for a lark, but if there are others..." Her eyebrows lift up. "They're a real teenaged superhero team!" "Stop time just for a lark?" Avi's slurping up another trail of melting ice cream before leaning forward in his chair, eyes bright with excitement. "You, too? How they find us?" He's wiggling around in his chair so that he can tug his phone from his back pocket, tapping at it while he talks. "How do you get to be a superhero team, anyway? You think they take -- hey look!" He's pulled up TikTok, dropping his phone down onto the table to show a video -- it's started recording halfway into a confrontation, a pair of large white teenagers confronting a very familiar face; they don't get far into their racist heckling of Kelawini, though, before they stutter as if someone has hit pause, stumble-trip ungainly into a pile atop one another. There's a boy in silver and green mask giving a cheerful THUMBS UP behind the pile of would-be bullies before the video cuts away. "What, just like, free range good deed doing? Where did they come from?" "Wait-wait-wait rewind it pause it right there." The frame Naomi is looking for is right at the end, the Black boy in silver and green. "I know him he was at the music store with this girl who like, you know in Harry Potter in the bank when the treasure all multiplies? I think she did something like that? What's the at?" She's pulling out her own phone now, connecting impatiently to the shop wifi while her ice cream begins to melt onto her fingers. "Man why ain't we teen superheroes. What they got we don't got. We could make costumes." "Maybe one of them has some kind of clairvoyant ability? That lets them find mutant kids in trouble?" Sera leans forward and watches the video with rapt attentiveness. "Oh! Yes, that's the boy I met!" She very nearly drips melting sorbet onto the tabletop before slurping it from where it's pooled in the cone. "I wouldn't make a very good superhero -- at least not yet. But maybe if we had a team...who knows?" She's still mid-shrug when she perks up, a thrill rippling from her to the others. "They know. Maybe we can track them down and ask?" "We oughtta be doing more'n we are. We could have costumes. You'd look good in like a metallic red," Avi rewinds obligingly, pausing the video and setting it on the table in view of all of them. "How many of us they pop up 'round now? Maybe," he suggests with a growing excitement, "we go find some trouble, they'll turn up again." Naomi snorts. "Red with the eyeglow gonna make me look like a Christmas tree." She's only a little dismissive of the idea -- there's a faint flush in her cheeks as she tucks a stray braid behind her ear. "You'd be real great at superheroing one day I bet, calming folks down in an emergency and then they slide down Avi's Frozone slide. Teamwork." The little joking grin fades. "What kinda trouble." "Not with the right shade of red," Sera assures Naomi confidently. "Accented in obsidian. There, I'm convinced." It's hard to say by this point whether she's sweeping the others along to her curiosity and enthusiasm or the other way around, but certainly her powers are amplifying them all the same. "Ooh! What if we go sneak into the --" She comes up short. "Oh wait. Do you have that haunted hospital on Roosevelt Island here? I don't suppose it has to be haunted. We could just take the last ferry and get stranded somewhere..." "Wait y'all have that too?" Avi looks to Sera with sudden curiosity. "Weird if we have the same ghosts -- anyway there's loads of haunted places we could totally get lost in. Maybe these kids show up we get some superhero pointers, maybe they don't we just wing it, figure out on on own this superhero business, it's win-win either way." It’s definitely not Naomi’s own enthusiasm for trouble carrying her along now, her spikes of anxiety and fear getting bulldozed by the other emotions swirling in the air. “Ghosts ain’t real,” she declares with maybe too much confidence, biting into her ice cream again. “If we go we gotta bring someone else too though ionno if I can boss around ghosts if we get into trouble. They had like four people right? Seems like a good number.” Sera blinks, eyes wide and wondering. "Is that more weird than having the same people?" The question feels intensely sincere. "Or...very similar people. Anyway, I don't know if there are actual ghosts there, but I definitely think there could be ghosts generally." She starts nibbling on the sorbet flavored edges of her cone, a faint, thoughtful furrow between her brows. "I'm partial to parties of five, but I agree three isn't enough? How about Nanami? Oh! Or both the Mahoēs?" Avi considers all of this, then shakes his head decisively. "We can't bring no both Māhoes I wasn't born yesterday you think I'm going into a haunted hospital with the negroes outnumbered?" His tongue sucks dismissively against his teeth. "One Hawaiian tops or we gotta reinforce our numbers." One slightly sticky finger is waggling between himself and Naomi. "You think your brother can see ghosts with his weird brain stuff?" Naomi snorts, coughs as the snort sends ice cream down the wrong way. “At least none Māhoes are blonde then we really in trouble.” She considers the question, tilts her head slightly towards the direction of the school like her brother might hear the question if she just leans a liiiiittle more left. “‘Pends if the ghosts got thoughts I guess? I’ll ask.” Sera blink again, glancing between Avi and Naomi. "Oh! That's very important. A lot of factors to consider here." She leans even farther forward, a conspiratorial gleam in her eyes. "Maybe it's premature, but we could give our band of intrepid superheroes-to-be have a name. We can't just be 'X-Kids', that could be anyone who goes to our school, but 'X' should...probably be in there somewhere?" She chews on her bottom lip and hums. "It has to sound adventurous, and maybe a little mysterious." "No kidding. We pushing it with this one as it is." Avi gestures with his ice cream cone towards Sera, though this fact hasn't seemed to put him off the plan at all. "X-kids would just be ripping them other kids off anyway. Why's X gotta be in there, we aren't finna get the Professor involved are we?" He's slurping his melting ice cream down into its cone before crunching into it. Despite this objection he's scrunching his face up in thought before declaring, "Excelsior."