Logs:Hypothesis Testing

Hypothesis Testing
Dramatis Personae Lily, Peter
In Absentia	2021-10-25 "I swear to God... I better not have gotten my powers from some sort of frigging... radioactive spider or something."
Location <XAV> Medical Lab - Xs Basement'
Gleaming and sterile, the school's medical facility is all cool science in contrast to the mansion's old-world old-fashion. All stainless steel and antiseptic tinge, the room is filled with the quiet whir-click of the various implements that comprise its medical equipment -- all state-of the art. The hospital beds are curtained off for privacy when they have patients, and in one of the alcoves there is a small operating theatre visible. More heavy-duty equipment is visible in the lab in the back, where the securely locked cabinets keep sensitive equipment out of the reach of teenage fingers. There don't seem to be many emergencies in the medical lab today -- someone is taking a nap in one of the cots, the attending nurse seemingly absent. Dressed in a light grey henley long-sleeve shirt and dark barrel-cut jeans, a light sweater draped over one arm and a black daypack hooked on the other shoulder, Lily looks -- well, lost. She's clearly neither student nor faculty here at Xaviers, and has spent the last few minutes getting lost in the halls of the basement. She glances around the room, back down at her phone. Up again, squinting at the back of the room. Walks in that direction hesitantly. "Peter? You in here?" Peter, in contrast... well, actually, he doesn't look like he belongs here either -- he's just a bit too old to be a student, and definitely isn't dressed as a member of the faculty. He's got on a thick dark green long-sleeve shirt with the Zelda shield emblem and three heart-containers beneath it (two empty, one half-filled) and sweats. He's stashed somewhere in the back, peering at a tablet that's unfolded into a laptop (it looks like an outdated Surface Pro; the screen's got a number of cracks in it expanding out from one corner where it was firmly thwacked ages ago). He's furiously reading an article; something to do with 'physiological morphology and epigenetics'. His brows are crumpled in concentration, struggling to understand the material; when he hears Lily's voice, he drags his eyes up from the screen and swiftly slaps it down to close the makeshift laptop (more out of force-of-habit than any genuine desire to hide something). "Oh! Hey -- back here," he calls out to her -- he's near the back, close to the lab, seated at one of the stations there -- out of immediate sight. He slides up to his feet -- there's a notable manner to the way he shifts his weight to his right hand, gripping the desk, favoring his right foot. He gives her an awkward smile, and shifts his left hand to the desk -- steadying himself before offering his right hand while making no attempt to close the distance himself. "Lily, right? Sorry, still -- um, still healing." Lily makes her way to the back of the room, a tiny bit of tension easing out of her shoulders when she finally spots Peter. "Yes. Lily Allred. From the --" she stops, presses her lips together. "Well. Obviously you know." She shakes his hand, her touch light. "Sit. Rest." She sits herself, pulling on the lab bench stools over to Peter's side. "I've still got healing loaded up -- do you mind if I?" Lily gestures to his legs, where the borrowed healing power is already assessing what's left to be fixed. "If I can't answer your questions, I can at least help there." "--right, I... mh." Peter's grip is firm and quick; there's a fierce strength in his wiry frame that doesn't quite seem to belong there -- but it's kept tightly restrained. He settles back into the chair immediately, that crooked half-grin still lingering on his face: "Oh, I mean..." Underneath the sweats, the wound is long and scything; extending from his left flank down to his groin -- patched and stitched. Given the apparent extent of it, it's healed surprisingly well... and with quite a bit of speed, to boot. Faster than what you'd expect given how recently it was acquired: "You don't have to, it'll..." Something seems to occur to Peter. The awkward half-grin fades; his face grows... almost blank: "...actually, yeah -- if you don't mind. Since we'll be going back as soon as possible, and... apparently, I can tank." Lily's brow furrows, not in apparent response to anything Peter has said. "I can't imagine a little extra boost will hurt matters," she says after a moment. Her healing curls around the dead and damaged flesh, begins to coax out new blood and new cells to replace what has been hurt. "Besides, I can multitask. What went wrong? With the, um, suppression grid?" Peter grimaces, feeling the sudden flush of sensation into the long, hidden snarl of damaged tissue. His left hand drifts to his side. "...man, that's... a really handy trick," he murmurs, his fingers drifting across his flank, feeling along the wound as the tissue subtly changes. "Nothing," he tells her, then. "I think... um, I think that's the problem? It just gave me a headache." He pauses, realizes this is probably not enough, and then warily continues: "I... I've got a lot of different, um, mutations? Like, five or six. At least three of them aren't physiological -- at least, not as far as I'm aware. The suppression field didn't stop any of them." "The grid didn't work. That's the problem." Lily repeats the information slowly, like it will make more sense with more repetition. "Huh." She sets her sweater on the lab bench, crosses her arms in front of her. "And you have -- six mutations?" She presses her lips together for a moment, taps one finger against her elbow. "Can you show me one? Any of the physiological ones would do." Peter's hand plops down atop of the laptop -- just five fingertips, spread out like the legs of a spider. He lifts his hand up... and the laptop comes with it, as if it was glued to those fingers. Then, with a flick of his wrist, the laptop is sent spinning up into the air... only for him to snatch it as it descends with his opposite hand -- without ever looking away from Lilly. Then, he twirls it on the tip of one finger, balanced on a corner -- spinning like a top. "I'm strong, heal fast, have absurd reflexes... H-- uh, Dr. McCoy... figures those are maybe physiological. But I can also stick to things. We've never been able to figure out how, there's nothing about my body that explains it, I can just..." He tosses the laptop up and slaps it out of the air with his hand -- leaving it firmly attached to his palm. He shrugs, then drops it lightly back to the table in front of him. "...stick to things. Also, uh, I've got this... um, it's... hard to explain, but..." Peter waves a finger around his ear. "...like, hyper-awareness? I feel the hit before the swing. None of that should work, but it did." "Mutations often don't make sense." Lily sounds calmer than she looks; her eyes have gone wide-wide, her arms reaching out for the laptop instinctively as it fell and now are just kind of hanging out in the space between her and Peter. She pulls her arms back into her lap after a moment. Her healing retracts too for a moment, though the reactions it has begun keep on afterward. "But that's -- yes. That works well. Because I should be able to --" She doesn't finish the explanation, just reaches out and rests her hand on the laptop. Pulls her hand up: no laptop. "Huh." A beat, then -- "Have you ever had the genetic testing done?" A hint of amusement mixed with concern flickers across his face, interrupting Peter's otherwise blank expression. He mutters, apologetically: "Sorry, it's been a while. I forget how dangerous it looks." His eyebrows dart up as Lily fails to lift the laptop... and continue going up at her next question. They go up so high they risk vanishing underneath his hairline -- though not quite. "What? Why? I mean, I'm sure that I'm--" His brows crumple together into a single point at the center of his forehead. He frowns. "...I don't... know." Lily is peering around Peter at the facility, gaze flicking over the equipment visible behind Peter. "Hm. Have you ever been in Prometheus? Long-term, not like the other day." There's a little bit of excitement in her voice. Her healing snakes back around Peter's wound, picking up where it left off. "Because, well. I should have been able to do that, right? The sticky hand thing." "No. I mean..." Peter's fingers drift back down to his side again, rubbing at it as he feels the flush of warmth and itching sensation that accompanies the accelerated healing. "I've never been in a place like that, no." His frown deepens; there's a tension in his voice, but an undercurrent of excitement, too: "And yeah, you -- you should have." His eyes briefly flick back toward the equipment too; almost like a nervous tic. Distractedly, his voice suddenly low, he adds: "...I manifested when I was 15. Got really sick for a few days... a week. Almost died." "I'm glad that you weren't." This comes a little bit softer. "Was there a trigger for the sickness? Something else? Becoming ill on manifestation isn't abnormal at all, but --" Lily's eyes flick to Peter's hair, to the centrifuge at the far bench. "We could do a test, I don't know what PCR reagents might be here, but I'm sure we can run something to confirm that you don't have an X-gene." The subdued excitement in Peter's tone flutters to something almost wounded at Lily's phrasing. There's a hint of defensiveness in his tone: "I'm sure that I have -- I mean, I'm not..." He closes his eyes and exhales from his nostrils, lifting a hand to rub at his brow: "...hhnh. No, you're right. That's a good idea." Then, with reluctance -- eyes still closed -- he mumbles: "There was a triggering event, yeah. I got... God." The rubbing intensifies. He slumps back in the chair, head leaning back. "Goddammit." "I don't want to say for sure you don't have it. People seem to get upset at me when I say that." Now Lily gets up and starts to case the lab, pulling out items as she finds them -- micropipettes, gloves, Falcon tubes and micro tubes. "But, in my experience, the only people I can't copy are perception mutations -- stuff I can't see or experience from the outside -- and. Well. Non-mutants." Opens the fridge, sticks her head in and rustles for glass bottles. "What was it? The event, I mean." Looks up over the door of the fridge -- "Are you... good, man?" "Yeah, I'm good. It's fine. Just..." Peter freezes, then turns to look back at Lily, one eyebrow slinging up toward the stratosphere: "...wait... you've told other people they might not have the X-Gene?" He shakes that off, then spins around in the chair to fully face her, already rolling up one sleeve: "...I got bit by..." He sighs. Loudly. "I got bit by a lab-specimen." A dramatic pause, and then -- almost as if he was apologizing: "...a spider." “It came up!” Lily sounds a lot indignant at that. Rattle rattle rattle. Bottles of liquid of various sizes hit the black countertops before the fridge closes. “I don’t like being a walking gene test,” she grumbles. “This never came up before I came to New York.” She loops back to Peter, dumping her bag on top her sweater and pulling out her own lab goggles. “A spider. Do you happen to still have it? On ice or something?” Should she be disturbed by the news? Maybe; but she sounds more and more excited by the second. More eyebrow raising at the array of lab equipment which seems to be manifesting in his immediate vicinity. Peter's crooked half-grin pops back into view at the mention of keeping the spider on ice: "You kidding? This was eons ago -- don't even know what happened to it. I started going into convulsions, they thought I had an allergic reaction to it. I just... presumed the stress was the trigger for my mutation to express itself." He makes a fist, massaging his arm, then produces an exasperated sigh: "I swear to God... I better not have gotten my powers from some sort of frigging... radioactive spider or something." Lily's tone has been light, lighter than it was during the mission pre-meeting, lighter than it has been in Riverdale this whole week. She seems to notice this, tamps it down into something serious. "This is good, though. The Prometheus equipment only accounts for X-Gene mutations. You're like -- our secret weapon." A bottle of Unidentified Powder joins the assortment of supplies, along with a bunsen burner, a squirt bottle of alcohol, and a metal plate full of very small holes. "I can hope! Maybe you thought it was a tick, stuck it in the freezer." Lily pauses, contemplates for a moment. "That is pretty reasonable -- the reaction, not the, uh, radioactive spider. How would you even keep a spider that's abnormally radioactive alive?"