Logs:Interdisciplinary Studies

Interdisciplinary Studies
Dramatis Personae Dallen, Quentin, Roscoe
In Absentia Horus, Jax, Charles, Bryce	2024-09-09 "Keep your bitch boy genius shit to yourself."
Location <XAV> Library - Xs First Floor
Xavier's librarian might hope the library is a quiet place to sit and study, but with a school full of teenagers that is not always the case. Nevertheless, it is certainly a treasure trove of knowledge, well-stocked with a wealth of books on its high shelves. Its reference section is vast, though its fiction is as well (much to the delight of many of its students.) The wide octagonal tables and smaller armchairs are often crowded with students, though the whispered conversations that often take place leave some doubt as to how much work is getting done at any given hour. It's dinnertime -- should Quentin be eating in the library? He was not eating anywhere around the school at breakfast, or at lunch, but now he is here, having whisked his mushroom pasta and soda off to a corner table where he's ensconced himself with several different biology texts as well as his laptop. The librarian, presumably having weekends off, is not here to scold him about it, anyway, and none of the other students currently scattered with their books or their homework around the various tables seem much to care. His fork is idly poking itself at his spirally noodles while he frowns between his pages, his mouse scrolling almost too rapidly to track through several various genetics articles on mitochondrial DNA evolution. His shirt today says 'school to prison pipeline' over a graphic of the Xavier's logo slowly morphing into Magneto's iconic helmet and then back; he's wearing it with plain jeans, mismatched black and red Chucks. He opens his mouth kind of absently to take a bite of his pasta when the fork delivers it. Dallen had been in the study, but now emerges carrying her laptop, history text, several other history books, and a sketchbook all in a bulky stack that makes her already unimpressive stature look even more slight. She's wearing a pale pink short-sleeve button-up with white chalk stripes, crisp blue jeans, gray and white sneakers, and a red paisley bandana tied as a kerchief to keep her somewhat unruly hair out of her face. She's still in the process of tidying away her studies, her mind a busy harmony of twining vines that she's teasing apart as she decides which books to check out and which to return. She doesn't exactly forget all of this when she spots Quentin -- and at least she knows what the fluttering in her chest means, now -- but other plants that have been sleeping in the garden all around her history homework are stirring to life now. She re-routes unselfconsciously to his table and sets down her stack of books. "Hi," she says, her hush a library habit and not any kind of bashfulness about talking to her crush, "can I draw you?" Roscoe eats like he plans to medal in it someday -- in and out of the cafeteria as fast as he can -- so he is already finished with his own dinner, sitting in a slouchy crouch at the adjacent table doing a math assignment, in shorts and running shoes and a peacock-blue sweatshirt with the hood pulled up. Every time he starts a new problem he recites the quadratic formula in his head, set to the tune of Pop Goes the Weasel, and though he's midway through a problem now, and the equation he's working through bears no resemblance anymore to x-is-equal-to-negative-b-plus-or-minus-et-cetera, he still has it stuck in his head and has thusly just been setting all of his thoughts to this melody, in a bouncy calliope-like tone that is aggravating even to Roscoe in his own brain. He still has it stuck in his head when Dallen walks in, has been sort of automatically setting this to Pop Goes the Weasel too (<< Dallen wants to draw Que-entin, what the hell does that mean >>) and now he's lifting his own head to just openly gawp at them both, eyebrows arching up. The telekinetic jabs of Quentin's fork at his pasta are getting a little more stabby as time goes on, his shoulders a little more hunched, his eye a little more twitchy. In between bites of pasta and tabs of articles he is digging hard at the hollows of his eye with his knuckles, and he drops this hand with some relief when Dallen arrives. He leans back in his chair, head tipping back as he flicks a brief frowning look to Roscoe. Then a curious one to Dallen. "Didn't you drop your drawing class? Thought you were taking that. Photography now." Dallen nods excitedly. "Oh, yes, but since I had already gotten the supplies for drawing class, I thought I could get a head start on it for next term." She's been reading up on illustration techniques, and while she has not had a great deal of success bringing them down onto the page, she is sure Jax would approve of such exploration. She has a nebulous goal of drawing her advisor a nice sunflower card to welcome him back, but strongly hoping he's not gone long enough for it to be a particularly good drawing. "I haven't really drawn a lot of people yet. Mostly plants. Mostly." Some of the growth pushing up out of the dark soil in her mind are three-dimensional extrapolations of her somewhat crude sketches. Others are the usual fantastical mutant flowers that interacting with Quentin tends to inspire in her. Some are both. "I won't show anyone, if it's not a good likeness. And I'll try not to distract you." << Didn't you drop your drawing class, >> Roscoe's mind is echoing back, given a taunting air by the sing-song even as he drops his gaze back to his homework, not really all that abashed for his eavesdropping. The pause before 'photography' throws him off his rhythm enough to quiet, briefly, the mental whack-a-mole music. In its place comes, firstly, << gay >> and secondly << (wait, is it????) >> and then Roscoe is tilting his head just so again to side-eye Dallen through the draped fabric wall of his hood. << Try not to distract you, >> he is repeating to himself a moment later with high amusement, << he's a teep. >> "I'm a telepath." Quentin's reminder comes with a small and pointed hitch of eyebrows. "I can handle some distraction." His fork clatters down into his bowl and he thumps his chair back down onto its four legs, half-turning in his seat. "I'm pretty sure the bird-teacher's class is inherently less gay than Mr. Jax's class. But Dallen's a girl now either way, so --" Shrug. "You're obviously reaching." If Dallen had forgotten Quentin was a telepath, she has long since gotten past the reflex to quiet her vibrantly noisy mind at the thought it might distract him. One of the pencil-sketch flowers in her mind grows a smiling cartoon face and waves with a leafy arm. But she seems to take the non-refusal as permission, and extracts her sketchbook carefully -- she looks like she's very good at Jenga -- from the middle of the stack before pushing the rest of it aside, and sitting down across the corner from Quentin. "I don't know if Mr. Horus is gay," she says seriously, flipping past many sketches of plants to a fresh page. "He is quite stylish. Some people think that's gay. Some people think anything they don't like is gay." She frowns down at the blank page, abuse from bullies past echoing in her mind. "I think they are very sad people." Roscoe hunches his shoulders a little further up, darting his gaze to Quentin now with a baffled and vaguely challenging you-talking-to-me squint, << who said the bird was gay?? >> before glancing over his shoulder to try and guess, from the other students in here, who might have been the culprit. << Is the bird gay? How can you tell, it's a bird -- >> he's just back to eavesdropping again as he settles his chin back on his knee, considering the topic of Homophobic Bullying and very abruptly deciding that, unlike the earlier sappy drawing-each-other flirting he was trying to spy on, this seems like a private Dallen Thing. As he refocuses on his homework he is grudgingly spinning up the carnival-ride music again. "Please. Some gay people have no style at all. And the teacher," one of Quentin's pencils is drifting up to idly go poke Roscoe in the shoulder just in case Roscoe thinks he's talking to someone else this time, "is a person. He just has a really avian mutation." He is telling Roscoe with the deeply supercilious air of someone who definitely absolutely did not drop Horus's class like a hot potato upon finding out the teacher was a bird. "I'm sure Mr. Horus can be gay as any other teacher, we have a nondiscrimination policy for hiring. -- also what would it take to make you change the brain radio? I could do the rest of that homework for you in no time." "That's true." Dallen opens her pencil box and, also very seriously, selects a meticulously sharpened pencil. "I think Mr. Horus identifies as a bird. But he also said Dawson was a very good bird. So maybe 'bird' is in the heart." She feels deeply honored, in a way she cannot quite verbalize, by her big brother's honorary bird status. The shadow of wings flicker across her mind, and she gathers her body's shadow into three-dimensional wings -- feathered, at first, though they melt swiftly into butterfly wings as though that were somehow more natural to her, before dissipating again. "Does your studying have music, too? It helps me a lot." She's actually looking at Roscoe now, then at Quentin. "Maybe he can have my channel. It's very good for math." Roscoe twists away from the pencil, grabs at it in midair (his pencil now?) -- now Quentin has his attention again. "Wow, it never occurred to me that one of our teachers here might actually be a mutant," he says. "We might have the world's most nondiscriminative policy for hiring here but I don't think they'd hire an actual bird." He slides his notebook paper a little closer to himself on the table, with a sudden defensive spike of self-determination -- "I can do my own homework," he says. "Jeez, if it was bothering you, you could have told me to take a hike, I wouldn't have fought you over the library." He's trying nevertheless to just turn the radio off entirely, which just leaves his brain quagmired in an uncomfortable pins-and-needles-ish static. "Might depend on the bird, this term. They're in kinda a bind on the teacher front." Quentin's fork lifts again, pokes a little halfheartedly into his pasta. "I don't think bird is the kind of thing you can just declare..." His hand waves somewhat vaguely in the air. "I mean, it's probably different for him." He takes another bite of the pasta, but then scrunches his eyes shut tight, digging his knuckles against his temple. "Dude, it was even bothering you. -- I'm not kicking anyone out of the library, though. It's for those of you who need to study." "I think some birds would have a lot to teach us, if they could communicate with us." Dallen tilts her head and studies Quentin, then starts putting pencil strokes down on the blank page. The music in her mind has quieted and shifted as her history studies fade into the background and the mutant flowers -- sketched and otherwise -- pick up the melody. "You can use different songs," she says, very sincerely, "if the one you have was bothering you. I don't always like mine, either." Roscoe lets out a snickery, huffily amused hah, "Ask Moab if she wants a teaching gig." Now he is just using Quentin's donated pencil, his own disgarded in the center of his open textbook, though he's not getting back to work yet, just tapping the eraser end almost-silently against the table. "If you don't need to study, you're not taking hard enough classes," he tells Quentin dolefully -- this is with a very slight wrench of guilt and envy over a long-gone pre-Lassiter Roscoe who hadn't needed to study and who had frankly been a total baby about his parents piling him with extracurricular tutoring once they'd realized it. He pushes away a petty urge to tell Dallen he doesn't need her study advice and says, "I don't think I study with -- music or whatever, it's just one formula and then it gets stuck in my head." "They don't have hard enough classes here," Quentin answers loftily. "My parents thought it would be better for my emotional growth to make friends my own age instead of going to college early." He's polishing off the rest of his dinner, hungrily. "That bird could teach a religion class. I'd give it a week at least before anyone noticed the mix-up, everyone in charge has their hands too full to care." Quietly (and unmelodiously) the rest of Roscoe's homework is starting to work itself out neatly in Roscoe's own mind -- does this count as 'doing it', Quentin is just busying himself with chugging a large amount of soda. "Still think it's pretty dumb we have to study at all when all this stuff could get Matrixed into our brains like --" His fingers snap together, "-- if the Professor wanted. Kind of a waste doing everything the slow way." Dallen nods her understanding. "Oh no, I don't like it when things get stuck," she says, sympathetically. "I don't think Moab actually has a very good grasp of our theology or history." She feels a little disloyal for this, and so adds, "She's very inspirational, though." Perhaps because she's thinking about math already, "matrixed" gets mapped onto a piping melody that describes all the matrix operations she knows and attempts to apply them to learning things rapidly. "It is an efficient way of managing multiple linear equations and geometric transformations,"she allows. "But you can't do that with everything." Then, at a small delay, startled and delighted, she tries clumsily to fold her drawing music into a matrix -- she only knows how to do linear transformations with polygons, unfortunately, and her drawing is decidedly full of open curves. "Can you?" She's sure Quentin could do it so much better. << Emotional growth, >> Roscoe scoffs mentally, << like it's sooo hard to have friends who are older than you, >> his notion of multigenerational friendship has none of the ivy-draped red-brick lush-lawn trappings of college as Roscoe imagines it, but is lingering with complicated gratitude on an erstwhile and eclectic social network of criminals and crazies and cops that had been at turns threatening or condescending or entertaining or abusive or aggravating and the only real alternative to which was sheer defenselessness. He spins his pencil around his fingers. "All she needs to be able to do is stand at the front of the classroom and talk for an hour, I think she --" he cuts himself off, shakes his head like he has water in his ear, now staring with confusion back down at his math homework before his mind sweeps with comprehension, then with frustrated, wounded pride. Further below this is a wealth of much more incoherent disgust and paranoia and anger, a phantom itch of electrodes on his scalp and a raw feeling of shame and violation, long-seated hatred of telepathy writ large, but it is pro-o-obably the wounded pride that's driving Roscoe to whirl on Quentin now -- "Keep your bitch boy genius shit to yourself," he says, in a hissy but still library-appropriate sotto voce. "Huh, can't you?" Quentin's hand has started tapping absently at the table's edge in time with the music in Dallen's head. He's kind of absently scripting some of the biology he's been studying up on onto a complex set of matrices of his own, weaving it into Dallen's music with a quiet thumping beat of its own. Possibly on its own this unconnected injection of genetics would not hold much meaning, but here and now it's coming with a blend of what Quentin's learned about Bryce's forays into animal transformations and what he's working on extrapolating about what the other Smallred might be capable of, how this could be most useful to Bryce past a Weird Aesthetic. "Brains are pretty much just computers and computers are pretty much just --" He cuts himself off here, eyes snapping to Roscoe -- his brows furrow, at first almost like apologetic in the flicker of concern that crosses his expression at that flood of mingled feeling. Almost. It's bleeding away in a swift roll of eyes, his head shaking as he pushes to his feet. "Whatever, man. Half our teachers might be dead, but if you want to keep sitting around and pretending that studying algebra is a great use of time, more power to you. Look around. It's not gonna make your life normal again." His things are collecting themselves into a pile, his pencil whipping itself back sharp to tuck itself with the rest. When Dallen tilts her head this time it's to listen to Quentin's music, even if it's in her head and has nothing to do with her ears at all. She's adding here and there her own knowledge of Bryce's power, more extensive in volume even if less informed in genetics, brightly colored with pride and affection. She's bobbing her head along gently to the beat until Roscoe's outburst makes her go still, shocked at his language and perplexed at what could have inspired such animosity. Quentin could probably stand to be a tiny bit more modest, but he can't help being brilliant, and it's not as if he was insulting Roscoe or anyone else for being less brilliant. She's not any less perplexed at Quentin's retort, though. "We're here to learn. What's wrong with trying our best until our teachers come back?" She looks up at Quentin, real curiosity behind wide guileless eyes. "What would be a better use of time?" "Draw each other like Leonardo da-fucking-Vinci, that'll help," Roscoe snaps at her -- he's grabbing his things together in a pile too, though rather haphazardly, just slamming his textbook shut on top of his single pencil (sorry to the binding) and yoinking his backpack up by its handle to drop it with a (surprisingly heavy) thunk on the desk beside him. Is Quentin leaving too, Too Bad, Roscoe has not thought this through at all past the urgent need to seclude himself immediately and is paying very little mind to the fact that their dorms are in the same wing. "Nothing. You just really believe that our best is --" Quentin is flinging a hand out, maybe at Roscoe's textbooks, maybe at Dallen's sketchpad, maybe at the library in general. "We're here because we're all gifted. I'm tired of pretending there's some value in doing things flatscan way if we can do it better." He's storming out (presumably to their shared wing), his things trailing him in a more-or-less neat orbit. Dallen flinches, the music in her mind cutting out abruptly to leave a hurt and flailing confusion. Her shadow sprouts sharp if intangible spikes and claws and fangs as it rears up around her, but she doesn't look at either of the boys as they storm off. Just down at her barely-begun sketch.