Logs:Improving

Improving
Dramatis Personae Nanami, Sera
In Absentia	2021-05-11 "Our 'you must be this normal to play' rules are so arbitrary, though!"
Location <WES> Rye Country Day School - Rye, New York
It's been a grueling game, at 21-10 the latest in a string of resounding defeats for Xavier's school. Nanami is chewing on an orange slice as she helps load the gear back onto the small Xavier's bus, a little bit of drag in her motions. The orange peel is plastered in bright colored smile across her teeth as she offers, a little muffled and a little resigned: "'least we score more today." Sera gives a relieved sigh as she sets the water cooler down. "We are improving." She is trying gamely to sound chipper, but exhaustion rolls off of her in steady waves. "I think we'd have an easier time setting up plays if you guys weren't running yourselves into the ground." Her eyes skid back toward a small knot of their teammates dragging themselves back toward the bus. "I mean I know that's kind of what you do, but we just have too many turnovers." Nanami spits the orange peel out into her palm, opening up Sera's cooler so she can dig out another segment of orange. "I still think the school policies are lolo we could do so much better if they let everybody play who wanted." She helps hoist the cooler onto the luggage compartment once she's yoinked the orange, wiping her hands against her shorts after and wandering up onto the bus. She tosses both orange peels into a trash bag by the front of the bus as she clambers aboard. "You think any other schools have tryouts and go oh no sorry you run too fast, disqualified." Sera nods, slow and thoughtful, as she trails Nanami onto the bus. "I don't think..." She frowns, fear and discomfort coloring her weariness. "Actually, I have no idea. This is the only school I've gone to here. Mutants are banned from professional sports, so I imagine some schools might?" She collapses gratefully down into a seat. "But probably even the ones that do aren't as strict as ours. Our 'you must be this normal to play' rules are so arbitrary, though!" Her voice drops lower. "If it were really about how powers might affect the game, I should have been disqualified." Nanami drops down to sit beside Sera with a wave of relief taking the edge off her exhaustion, slouching low and resting her knees up against the seat in front of them. "It is a little weird," she agrees, casting a sidelong glance to Sera. "Like couldn't you just make everyone tired? Or clumsy? You could be the cheatyest. Not," she hastens to add, blushing, "that I think you do that. Just like, they trust you on here." The corner of Sera's mouth twitches faintly. "I could. I don't, and if I did it would be a total mess until I learned how to aim." Even as she speaks she is beginning to recover her usual vim, gently drawing Nanami along with her. "It's actually really distracting, I have to concentrate on not collecting or distributing feels." She looks out the window, at the light softening over the lush fields with the sinking sun. "But you're right. Even if coach trusts me not to do anything on purpose, he knows my control isn't good." One of her hand turns palm up, her shoulder hitching slightly with the gesture. She radiates discomfort, faint and uncertain. "Do you think they bent the rules for me?" "Iono." Nanami's nose scrunches up while she considers this. "Maybe? Your brother a teacher and besides people always breaking the rules for pretty white girls. I don't see them letting Nessie on the soccer team, huh?" Sera frowns, drawing breath to reply but then letting it back out, words unspoken. A confused overlapping jumble of emotions ripple from her: embarrassment, worn, hollow grief, prickly indignation, startled pleasure, and a different, more thoughtful kind of indignation. She squeezes her eyes shut and the overflow eases. "Sorry." Her fingers lace together primly in her lap. "I guess there's a lot of reasons they might. I like playing, I like being on the team, but that's really unfair." "Well I don't know they bend the rules for you. Maybe the rules is just dumb as shit, right? Maybe they don't even think how you can be dangerous and they stopped after be strong, run fast." Nanami shrugs, her mood skewing more thoughtful as well. "Administration got some weird ideas sometimes." Sera slides down a little in her seat. "Maybe. I just hadn't really thought about it before. I'm not about to quit in protest or anything." She ducks her head slightly. "I feel kind of stupid thinking this school would actually get at least the mutant stuff right." There's a flutter of guilt from Nanami. She kicks at the back of the seat in front of them, lifting a hand to twist at the end of her long braid. "I mean mebbe they fine, you know? You shouldn't listen to shit I say, I don't know what's in the teacher's heads." Her mouth twists to the side, and she slouches down in the seat. "Anyway it's way better than a flatscan school." "Back home I had to drop out of school when I manifested so I didn't get thrown in a camp." Sera blushes, though she manages to contain the emotion behind it. "Sorry. You actually went through that, and I never did. I just mean I have a hard time imagining what it's like to stay in a flatscan school, as a mutant." There's a discomfited stirring of several things in Nanami; a flutter of nausea, a prickle of irritation, a sudden spike of her pulse. Her nostrils flare; she takes in a deep breath, reaching forward to pick at the cracking vinyl of the bus seat. "Iono." She shrugs jerkily. "Worse than here. Better than prison." Her brows furrow deeply. "How you stay out of a camp, anyway. Those robots hunt us everywhere and your thing's always leaking." Sera tenses and in the very same beat shifts restlessly in her seat to cover it. She draws a breath in tandem with Nanami's, though quieter. "I kind of just didn't leave the house except with Matt or Spence, but..." She's frowning again, and her control wavers enough to let slip a whisper of troubled uncertainty. "Still, you're right, about the Sentinels." She tries and fails to conceal a shiver of terror. "It didn't seem weird at the time, but looking back on it, I was unbelievably lucky." "Huh." Nanami is digging a pair of earbuds out of a pocket together with her phone, but she pauses with only one of them in, eyes skipping suffering m sidelong to Sera. Her echoeed fear is followed by a distant, muted curiosity. "Good. I mean, not good that your world was hell. Just that you got lucky. Had people to look out for you. That's not all luck, yeah? They were good people. Looked out for us and they didn't hardly know us." Sera nods, slow and abstract. "Maybe not even mostly luck. My brothers worked with the Resistance, and had a lot of connections outside of it, too. Maybe they got the Sentinels to avoid our house or something." She's warming to this theory. "They never talked to me in depth about their Resistance work, but after seeing the strings Luci pulled to get you -- to get us -- here, it doesn't seem that far-fetched." Her shoulders hunch tight, perhaps with the effort of quieting her powers, for only a faint suggestion of her sorrow escapes, this time. "I miss them so much. I wish they'd have come with me, the whole family, but...they were needed there." "I'm sorry." Nanami fidgets with the earbud still in her other hand. "I mean, I can't imagine. Going away fo school, that's plenty far enough from family for me and you wen -- gone and went to a whole other world." She looks down at her nails, the polish (hot pink tips on a nude base) starting to chip as get fingertips worry at each other. "Must have care a lot about you, though. Pull a lot of string to keep you safe." Sera's gaze settles briefly on the earbud in Nanami's hand, though her frown a moment later probably hasn't got much to do with the object. "Maybe you can, a little. It was different, but you didn't know you would get to come home, when you were over there. I'm glad you got to." She looks up, her eyes wide and sincere. "I'll never know what was really going on, why he was so scared and so sure he had to send me away, but I think it was more than keeping me and the rest of my family safe or helping you all get home, maybe even more than closing the hole between our worlds." Her head shakes. "That sounds so weird to say out loud, but it's getting so it doesn't feel weird for me to -- be on the lacrosse team, or talk to a classmate about being a mutant. I probably should appreciate that more." Nanami's still toying with the earbud, a flutter of discomfort rising and then ebbing from her. "Yeah. Sound like you all had. A lot going on over there." She's looking down at her hands, still, but glances up at Sera after. "Good. I mean. This school kinda a place for people been uprooted and tossed around. Everybody here a little-bit-weird. Maybe good that little-bit-weird don't feel so weird anymore." She tucks the other earbud into her ear, settling back against the seat as she pages through her music.