Logs:Of Artwork and Advice (Or, Fury on Ice)

Of Artwork and Advice (Or, Fury on Ice)
Dramatis Personae Avi, Fury, Jax, Kavalam, Lael, Naomi, FitzSimmons
In Absentia Spencer, Lucien, Kitty, Ryan, Kieow, Nanami, Kelawini, Scott, B, Marcus	2023-03-03 "Back then we had to labor all day long in the gender mines jus' to earn one pronoun."
Location <NYC> SHIELD HQ - Times Square
It's a outside its a drizzly grey day, wet and unpleasantly chill without being bitter, as the city slowly loosens itself from winter's stiff-jointed grasp. In here, though, it is cosy, warm, comfortable; Jax, dressed in soft overalls decorated with vividly colored venus flytrap plants, deep purple henley shirt, his hair its most common shades of peacocky purple-green-blue ombre and his eyepatch bearing a venus flytrap as well -- though this one occasionally snaps itself open and shut at very erratic intervals. Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is playing on the television, so soft it can barely be heard though the captions are on, and the entire room has transformed itself into a surreal and colorful landscape that mirrors the animation on the screen -- over-saturated pinks and purples, unearthly plants sprouting out of the walls. He currently has his laptop in front of him and his tablet in his lap, his attention mostly on the digital painting he is currently doing. On the screen, in progress, there's a young man lying beneath a surreal and colorful tree improbably laden with both fruits and flowers. A tangled mass of what looks like roots starting to grow up around him -- though several of these have very human-like hands at their ends, the woody tendrils digging unsettlingly into flesh as they pull the man half-into the ground. How long has Jax had company for? It's uncertain -- possibly they just arrived, but at least when Kavalam makes his appearance he is already leaning over the back of the couch right beside Jax, peering very intently at the drawing from behind his spectacles. Then at Jax. Then at the man on screen, again. "I do not think I understand gay fantasies." "Man," by the time the X-Kids poof into existence -- or at least into Jax's awareness -- Avi is already circling the room, poking a finger curiously at the otherworldly flowers blossoming out of the walls and looking first disappointed and then more excited when they prove to be insubstantial. "Your jail is, like, way nicer than the some of the places the army stashed us over the years. Wait --" His eyes are abruptly wide, "unless its not and this is all fake how far out can you make everything awesome, sir?" Naomi is taking pictures -- who knows if that's allowed! Her phone camera is aimed right at Avi and his bright-curious poking when she pops into Jax's awareness, flash off but fake-digital shutter snap audible. "These gorgeous," she earnestly tells the room at large, plopping down on the couch to get a different angle. Looks over at the laptop -- quickly looks away again, cheeks flushing dark. There is a brief sound of footsteps at the door, accompanied by a voice behind it: "--Mister Holl -- Sir -- Jax, uh, may I come in? I've got to ask you about..." The statement hasn't even been finished before the door is rattling, cracking open... revealing the face of Fitz, Sci-Tech Specialist, clad in a crisp cerulean-blue Oxford shirt. He gets it open about four or five inches before his face is peeking through the gap and seeing not just Jax, but... apparently, Jax has split apart into multiple tinier... Jax's? Jaxes? What's plural for Jax? Whatever it is, none of these look anything like the original. "Wh -- oh. Oh. Oh no," he mumbles. The door closes with a click; feet are heard scuffling down the hallway, along with a voice, distant and strained, mumbling: "--definitely not good--" Lael is--has been--standing not quite directly in front of Jax, his dreadlocks squirming hard and his expression pulling askew with something like embarrassment. "Good afternoon, Sir." Cradled in his long-fingered hands is a wooden chimera figurine, the carving rough but dynamic. "I know you ain't hurtin' for decorations, but I brought you a present." His eyes track aside to his schoolmates in turn, narrowing at last on his sister. "...and more folks than I probably shoulda brought." Jackson twitch-jumps in place at the sudden gaggle of children, a thick splash of magenta spreading itself across his painting when he fumbles his stylus. His accompanying eep is quite undignified, and he's kind of torn between grasping for the stylus he just dropped and reaching for the statuette Lael is holding out -- ultimately successful at neither, just a flustered kind of flail as he turns beet red. His confusion goes through several stages -- a mental image of Spencer simply teleporting all the kids in that dissolves when no Spencer is in evidence, followed by a mental image of Lucien smooth-talking his way past the guards that dissolves even quicker than that when he takes stock of which children are around -- followed by taking stock of Kavalam with a sudden understanding. "Oh gosh, oh -- oh gosh, I -- this is not --" kind of directed to Kavalam, his own mind taking the image in the painting and inserting himself into the place of his hapless protagonist with a deep inward horror that oddly, has less to do with Dismemberment By Tree and more to do with imagining the scratchy-rough feeling of bark against his skin. "Thank -- thank you?" at both Winterses, the present and the compliment to the flowers both registering at the moment kind of distantly -- the actual warm flush of gratitude is slow to catch up once everything sinks in, a few beats too late to make his tone sound any less confused. And just a helpless "-- uh -- ah -- well this ain't much like a --" He blinks, scrubs his hand against his face, and looks toward the door. Back to the kids. Dimly, a vague hope that there is no imminent crisis is tangling itself up with a deeply amused thought of Fury having to deal with All This. "Gosh but it's good to -- how did y'all all get up here, I -- hi." "The couch is not an illusion," Kavalam helpfully informs Avi, squishing his fingers down against its plush back. Thoughtfully, pokes a finger lightly against the side of Jax's head. "Mr. Holland is also real. -- if I were an illusionist in jail," he is adding, a bit critically like he is Slightly Disappointed in Jax, "I would put one decoy here and go do what I liked." CLICK! Naomi has just captured the fumble-drop-scramble for the stylus, flush receding as her last thought ( << that's a PENIS 😱 >> ) is replaced by << what did I do Kavalam is the one poking at him I got real questions >>. She does put her phone in her lap, now. To Jax, veeeeeery seriously: "We signed in." "'course' he's real he don't make no sound illusions," Avi clicks his tongue dismissively against his teeth, but immediately afterwards is looking exceptionally uncertain. In his vividly imagined concept of Jax Taking On Prometheus, Mr. Holland has not just the shields and lasers but all Superman's powers as well, and to this he is tentatively adding in sound-manipulation, the walls of a giant steel fortress crumbling before Super!Jax like the walls at Jericho: "Do you, sir?" There is a flutter of frantic thoughts <<this is bad>> approaching the doorway again. But this time, Agent Fitz is no longer alone. A woman's voice -- Agent Simmons -- can be heard on the other side of the door, speaking in hushed tones: "--okay, what's so important you had to show me?" For a moment, Fitz's thoughts pull inward like an iris constricting upon the pupil... but like a pupil, it finds nothing there. <<what was the problem? I'm sure there was-->> "He's... painting...?" Silence. "And..." The crumpling of his brow can almost be felt through that door: "...it's... a very neat... use of color?" Eyeroll. The door cracks open again. Now, Fitzsimmons -- a single unit -- peeks through. They both stare, gawking, before shutting the door and hushedly whispering <<kids, there are-->> <<how did they-->> <<do they have powers too would it be rude to assume but how else did they-->> "We have to tell someone," Simmons says, voice hushed, and Fitz quickly nods: "We've gotta tell someone that there's..." Fitz's voice trails off; he finds himself waiting, perplexedly, for Simmons to fill in the gap. Simmons mirrors Fitz's expression: "...um. He's painting? We need to tell someone... that." Lael blushes deeply, his hair coiling itself into uncomfortable knots. "You ain't ask permission to take them pictures," he tells Naomi reproachfully, though he sits down beside her, anyway. "We just walked in. They was so busy not payin' Kavalam any mind they didn't pay us any, neither." His brows furrow, his hair suddenly extending out to wave slow and hypnotic in the air as he turns toward the door. "Uh, Sir. There's some folks outside your door. I think they're a mite confused on account of the not-minding." Jax is finally getting his fluster somewhat in check -- at least enough to pick up his stylus again and hit undo on the big splotch he just splotched onto the screen with a stark gratefulness that, for some reason that his immediate thoughts do not helpfully elaborate on, takes the image of Kitty in his mind. He's setting the tablet aside on the laptop keyboard, now, freeing his hands up to accept the carved statue with a more earnest: "Thank you, honey-honey, this is lovely. An' my room can always use more decorating." He scuffs his hand through his bright hair, shakes his head with a laugh. "Gosh, no, my pretendin' is visuals only." There's an odd melancholy behind this that doesn't carry through to his smile, his warm voice, but in his mind Ryan Black is an easily identifiable figure, in Jax's imagination at once more and less flamboyant than his typical stage presence, dressed down in jeans and a tee shirt and sprawled in a hammock on a farmhouse porch, conducting an exuberant symphony with a knotty stick picked up off the ground while Jax's brilliant animations shift and iridesce in time with the fiercely joyful music. Jax is turning the little chimaera over in his hands, staring at it for longer than perhaps necessary before looking up again with an amused smile and a small wrinkle of his nose. "I mean -- I'm allowed to have visitors, I'm sure they'll..." He trails off, here, thinking of windows exploding inward, of heavily armed fascists storming the floor, and abruptly shakes his head. "If they got a issue they can come say it, yeah? -- meanwhile tell me how y'all been?" A genuine and warm curiousity behind this, even if it is very much undergirded with a continuing fervent hope that this is Not A Crisis, flashes of images of the pups in a fighting ring and Spencer in a bare Prometheus cage and the children haggard and worn after returning from Some Other World Entirely. Kavalam makes his way back to the door, opening it to stare owlishly at the agents on the other side. "My friends need advice," he informs them very seriously -- not from them, of course, his mind makes it clear enough that they have come for advice from Jax but does he say this? No. << eavesdropping is rude >> << no respect for privacy >> as if Eavesdropping and Invading Privacy are not his topmost Finely Honed Skills these past years. He closes the door again in FitzSimmons faces. "Oh!" Avi looks eager, now, bright and excited as he races across the room to join Kavalam by the door, "we need privacy, I could --" What could he do? In his mind there's a thick solid ice-wall forming to barricade the door closed, which in a meant-to-be-secure prison situation will certainly raise no alarms. In this real actual world, there is not a thick solid ice wall barricading the door closed, which might be for the best given the jumpy state of SHIELD in the wake of the attack. However, what is forming is an incredibly slick carpet of ice that, at the moment, is staying firmly on this side of the door, the common room floor -- at least in the area by the door -- growing considerably more treacherous. Kavalam is correct, Naomi Definitely Needs Advice. She's glancing down at her phone again, though, choosing to ask, "I can delete them if you want Mr. Holland I ain't gonna post them nowhere," instead of the question pressing the most against her brain ( << how much you gotta like girls to be gay why are there so many ugly flags am I a transphobe if I'm not gay and date Harm >>) that she's been anxious about the whole trip down to the city. "Hey Avi you want me to delete this photo you look great in -- Oh no." She's stifling a laugh at the creeping cold. "You might be glad you been missing that, Avi been running hockey tournament in the dorms for a minute now." Perhaps Jax's unconcern about the agents is enough to reassure Lael, or perhaps he's just too distracted by the subsequent horrifying flashes of his thoughts to be much worried about the perplexed scientists. "I'm alright, Sir. Ain't got much to complain about, though school sure ain't nearly as bright without you." He glances aside at his sister and bites his lower lip, his hair twisting in on itself again. << You want me to herd the boys outta here so you can talk proper? >> his not-voice whispers in Naomi's mind alone. The closing of the door in their faces fails to calm either half of Fitzsimmons. Their thoughts are increasingly frantic and entangled with their exchanged words, making it difficult to tell one from the other: "--some sort of situation--" <<over a painting?>> "--saw some sort of--" <<penis? I think the painting had a penis.>> "--maybe it's a new psionic ability that makes you think there's a situation--" <<which is, itself, a situation-->> Fitz and Simmons make eye-contact, speaking simultaneously in a hushed tone: "We need to report this." Neither have noticed the subtle change in temperature, or the faint edge of condensing mist crawling out from beneath the base of the entrydoor -- as they rapidly flee together, in tandem, down the hall. "Hockey -- oh gosh you been straight freezing the whole dorms?" Jax is met with a brief (horrified) (amused) mental image of Kieow and the Māhoes and the rest of the tropical bbys having to bundle up tight just to go back to their rooms, clashing up against an imagined unabashed delight from the Tessier Corner. "I'm sure that's makin' Scott no end of pleased." He sets his statuette down beside his computer -- it is sprouting brilliantly vivid fur to match the room's current decorations, lashing its tail, beginning to prowl the tabletop with a toss of its mane. Jax glances back to Kavalam, then to the Winterses. "Wait, who come for advice? My current top-choice advice is stay outta jail but I can tailor as needed." “No!” is Naomi’s very out loud reply. She ducks her head, looking wide eyed at the prowling chimera as a distraction. << Then they gonna know right now they ain’t even paying attention. >> Faintly under that, Naomi is pushing away the disquiet that she hasn’t talked to Lael about this yet with the belief that once she asks Jax, then she’ll know what to say to Lael, even though he already knows, probably, maybe, right? Naomi is also just a Little Bit worried about the logistics of Leaving, now that Avi has Avi’d over the path to Out Of Here. She turns more fully to Jax, sitting cross legged on the couch beside him. She’s picking up her phone again though, pulling up some screenshots from the LGBTQIA+ Fandom Dot Com page to show Jax. “Lael got real advising he need doing but.” She shoves the phone at Jax. “You’ve been gay forever is this a real kind of gay?” Her phone screen shows the page for skoliosexual, ugly flag and all. "Well I couldn't 'zaktly just freeze one side of the dorms that would be unfair." In his mind Avi is getting exaggeratedly indignant at the (totally sexist!) idea of leaving the girls out of the hockey evenings while simultaneously assuming that if only one side got the hockey, obviously it would be the boys. "Holy sh... oot, that is amazing you see that shit Kav?" His eyes have about bugged out of his head at the prowling chimaera. The ice is spreading now out of excitement rather than intention, creeping further along the floor and up the nearer furniture, likely soon to encroach on Jax's cozy couch as well. He is kind of tangentially paying attention to Naomi's conversation but only enough to wonder: "How long you been gay?" with a distant skepticism that they even allowed high schoolers to be gay back when Jax was at Xavier's. It is likely good that Kavalam has been frozen over by the door because he cannot, from here, see the hideous flag or the identity it represents. There's a slow-stiff crackling as he wiggles his boots free of the ice, vaguely internally fretting about whether being encased in ice will damage the leather and when he will find time to steal a new pair, if so. "I cannot," he informs Avi in an excessively patient tone, "see very much, from here." "And it was just the hallways," Lael sounds surprisingly defensive of the dorm-floor hockey league for someone who does not skate. "...mostly just the hallways." He looks at the ice creeping into Jax's suit. "I -- well, I know I coulda asked over the email." He laces his fingers together and looks down at his hands sheepishly. "Guess I'm just tryna decide about college. Still." He hesitates, frowning at his sister's phone. "Just a lot of teachers been telling me I ought to go to regular college instead of art school. I reckon you heard the same, Sir, when you was in high school." "Nearabout a thousand years now," Jax is answering Avi reflexively, "back then we had to labor all day long in the gender mines jus' to earn one pronoun." His outfit is shifting, transforming itself into a coal miner's uniform stained and flecked with rainbow dust. In in his mind is doing some brief and amused mental calculation of what real advising vs. gay advising is that he brushes aside in order to school his mind into something more Serious for Naomi's question. He studies the page on the phone with a stark inward cringing at the flag, mentally rearranging it -- the heart axed, the shades of pink-yellow-green shifting into more complementary pastels, before giving up altogether. It's only then that he studies the definition -- his next cringe even harder << what kinda fetishizing -- >> and accompanied by a flutter of protectiveness as he thinks about B. "I'on think there's no real or not real kinda gay," he answers aloud, slow and thoughtful as he attempts the right words. "I think that labels can help when it comes to finding other folks with your experiences, but with or without 'em we're still gonna be us. If someone comes an' tells me how they feel, how they are, I'mm'a trust them on that whether or not they pick the right words for it. I also think that nonbinary is an awful big umbrella that can mean a million different things to a million different folks, an' occasionally that gets a little bit flattened when people -- maybe try to just make the gender binary into a gender..." His brow wrinkles. "Tri-nary." He's shivering just faintly as the cold begins creeping its way closer, vaguely thinking about grabbing a blanket off the back of the couch and then, apprehensively, considering how frosted the blanket will be as well. Lael's question makes his brow wrinkle further, a brief flutter of a lifetime of criticisms of his choice to go into art school rather than A Real Trade surfacing in his mind and then aggressively shoved back down. "People sure did tell me the same, but I'm glad I ain't listen to them. I think a lotta people only put stock in one way of lookin' successful in this society, and that's to their detriment. I will say that with your grades, you could have your pick of nearbout any college, an' that may well open some doors for you, job-wise. But these days it sure ain't no guarantee. Capitalism is gonna be a crap ride whether you're at Harvard or at RISD, but maybe starting out doing something you really love might make it a little bit smoother." “Huh,” Naomi says, pulling her phone back and looking at the flag again with some obvious distaste. “So this ain’t necessary then.” She works through this wisdom slowly, focused on untangling the gender trinary or lack thereof instead of her brother’s faintly anxiety-inducing question. Turns << with OR without labels? >> around curiously. “It ain’t disrespectful to not know?“ The gender-sexuality mine is forming in her head after Jax's transformation, Harm and incongruously Marcus carving out rainbows and pink-blue-purples and yellow-pink-blues along side the main characters of Naomi's unacted crushes. “Like. If you say you’re a straight girl but then you date a girl, isn’t that, I’onno, rude?” Her voice is dropping quieter so Avi and Kavalam can’t hear, a faint chattering in her teeth as Avi’s chill draws closer. It occurs to her somewhat belatedly that in trying to take Kavalam’s roommate out she might have to talk to Kavalam at some point, and then, oh no what if they already had and she embarrassed herself? Her cheeks, at least, are warm for the moment. Not very sensitive to the needs of advice-seeking youths, one S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Nicholas J Fury is barrelling through the common area, preceeded by his irritation and wariness and << (what are his goddamn friends up to this time) >>. He's not wary enough to avoid the floor panels that Avi has rimed with ice. He looses a somewhat undignified "whoooooa" as he slides toward Jax's door. He fumbles the handle open and loses most of his momentum in so doing, but that just makes his slow-motion anticlimactic drift into the room look that much sillier. "What --" He stops fully, not so much for dramatic effect as out of sheer bafflement as his eyes take in first Avi, then Lael, then Naomi. "-- the hell --" He finally looks at Jax as he glides to a stop against the coffee table. "-- are you painting?" "That man is getting dismembered," Kavalam helpfully supplies from where he's just recently dislodged himself from the ice by the door. For the very brief moment that he speaks, his presence becomes much more completing, drawing attention his way only to just as quickly reverse its effect and shed attention, his presence now slippery as Avi's ice slick. He's taken advantage of Fury's slo-mo slide to take a brief video, which he is now in the process of sharing with the group chat -- the dings on the others' phones, the five-seconds-ago video, at the moment the only sign that he's even still here. "Hello, sir!" Avi is chirping readily to Fury; though his mind is bright with amusement at the sliding some Very Long Habit ingrained by years around Army men very sensitive of their machismo does not translate this amusement into his politely earnest tone. "He's our art teacher, he paint a whole lot. There's not any prison rules against that, is there?" It's dismembered that finally draws Avi's attention over to the actually look at the painting, taking it in with an internal shudder and a reflexive protective tightening of his thighs. << -- ain't allowed no porn in jails I bet >> is a sympathetic thought, Avi Quite Sure this grizzled old man is about to confiscate Jax's laptop. "Wo-o-oah. That ain't nobody you know, is it? Who do that tree thing?" He's picturing Kieow grown into a huge and voracious red mangrove, roots stretching out to devour her classmates. << pretty badass >> << be like Poison freaking Ivy >> He is starting, now, to turn Naomi's questions over in his mind with some questions of his own rising -- is Naomi finna date a girl? Maybe these are questions-by-proxy and Nanami is tryna get her date on? What girl would either of them date? The chirp of his phone distracts him and he pulls it out to look at the video with a smirk. << does S.H.I.E.L.D. have a TikTok? >> In his mind he definitely thinks they should. Lael's frown does not ease; it does not deepen, either. He does nod, very slow and uncertain, his hair writhing slow, too. "Half the faculty thinks I'd be 'wasting my potential' going into sculpting, 'specially being as I don't even know know if that's what I wanna do." He shrugs. "Funny no one thinks going to school for history or English would be a waste, when they ain't much more like to put food on the table." His frown does ease when he looks over at Naomi. "Kinda seems to me that's up to the girl you'd be dating. If you dated a girl. Not," he adds hastily with a glance at...someone his eyes start to search for but cannot find, his brows furrowing deeper. "Not that I'm saying--" What was he saying? Perhaps it's lost to the ages with Nick Fury's entrance. Lael leans away from the old man as he coasts to a stop, his hair writhing fast and agitated. "He ain't in any trouble is he, Sir?" "I think what's respectful's prob'ly between the folks who are dating," Jax agrees with Lael. "The language we use to talk about gender an' attractions, I think -- sometimes words ain't quite enough to capture how big an' varied those things can be." His brow is creasing after this; he's thinking of So Very (very) Many articles mocking millennials for being foolish enough to go to college and become English majors. "I think the correlation between college degrees an' job success ain't what it used to be," he tells Lael regretfully, "an' whether you pick art or --" This breaks off when the door opens, when Fury glides in; Jax's eye widens, the room around them losing its color and instead limning itself in a glittering array of ice-crystals far beyond where Avi's power has frozen for real. He's picturing Fury in actual ice skates and a heavily sequined figure skating outfit, triple Lutzing with a deep scowl on his face. At dismembered he flushes, and only now quite belatedly thinks to close the screen on his laptop. "I don't -- think, uh --" He's thinking of Kieow, too, now, bright with the same unearthly foliage that his illusions around the room have, though not a mangrove but a banyan tree with roots a tangled web of connection between many minds rather than bodies. His sentence doesn't quite finish itself. He is scrubbing his palm against his cheek, giving Fury a warm smile. "A meditation on the fear of connection," he tells Fury, "why, did you like it? -- I hope we weren't bothering nobody none in here, s'jus' some of my students come by for a check in." Naomi will probably go over that conclusion later! Right now she’s flushing dark, frantically hoping Avi and — Avi? didn’t hear the you in Lael’s advice, and anyway she isn’t dating a girl she’s barely dating anyone! “I ain’t I was jus’ saying like what if—“ Fury’s bellowing pulls her attention with a surprised “eep!” that also comes with a sudden glow of emerald green, a shift of her eyes to match her brother’s. She’s remembering the last time she saw this man in person, trying to reconcile that imposing figure with the man about to comically spin out here and failing. The glow fades, her pupils resolving to a human shape. In her head she’s counting to three, breathing deliberately and checking that her power is coiled fully away. “If you ain’t like painting, sir,” Naomi says, tone very respectful and very earnest, “we could play hockey. Or curling!” Fury whips around toward...wasn't there another kid here? No, couldn't be. << Why's it got to be kids? At least them grown freaks know what they doing >> The violence of the motion nearly sends him sprawling and he slides away from the safety of the coffee table. "No rules against painting," he says, his voice severe. "I got a report there was something concerning about the painting, but I suppose," he's raising his voice and projecting it generally in the direction of the still-open door, "some of my subordinates just don't know how to appeciate..." << (weird porn) >> "...how some folks prefer to...connect." His eye flicks to each of the (Black) children in turn again. << Wasn't there a fourth one? Getting senile, Fury. >> "I do apologize for the intrusion, but you need to clean up this mess." This as he carefully starts picking his way back toward the door. "Curling ain't even a real sport, and this is a big fu --" He looks at Naomi and sighs. "-- friggin' safety hazard." Has Lael ever noticed Jax having telepathy before? PROBABLY not, but after Yet Another mental comment about the existence of penis in his artwork, Jax is picturing the others in turn having absolute breakdowns if they ever went to an art museum. All he's saying, though, is, "we'll make sure to clean it up, sir." Can Avi even undo ice he has made? He has no idea. He's vaguely pondering exactly how much things might end up on fire if he melts it all himself -- an idea he considers with more amusement than alarm. "It's just ice, sir, it'll melt." Avi can definitely not undo ice he has made although he is now strongly considering -- "-- though if that'd be too long to wait!" The ice is crackling, breaking into pieces in a creaky reshaping. It pulls inward -- haphazardly -- many patches of ice still left in its wake as it clumping itself together into a rough statue of -- perhaps that is Fury? It is considerably lacking in finesse or artistic merit, but, definitely a very bald very eyepatched ice-figure in an ungainly slide. The effort has not, notably, improved the treachery of the footing in the room. “It’s just water,” comes not quite in time with Avi’s declaration but close enough that the words overlap, “and curling is a real sport.” Does Naomi even know what curling is? Unclear, the image in her head looks a bit like dodgeball but On Ice. She stands up and begins penguinwalking her way across the floor to the snowFury, this time remembering to ask as she gets her phone camera out: “Avi may I? It’s so lifelike.” She’s not just taking an action shot there, oh no — Naomi is setting up for a selfie. Fury watches the ice shape itself into another Fury, his eye very wide. "Alright, Elsa, that's real impressive and I got to give your art teacher credit, but..." He looks down at the still-iced floor beneath his feet. "Oh, never mind. Just don't go running on this before it's proper dry." He resumes shuffling toward the door, pausing for a moment to stare down his icy doppelganger...and the teenage girl taking a selfie with it. "I will never understand you Millennials with your social media." << Got to get out of here before I end up on the Internet again. >> As he hastens toward the door again, there's a sort of twined warbling cry from the hallway outside. << (?!) >> He comes up short, but continues sliding forward, crossing the threshold just in time to intercept Fitzsimmons sailing down the hall, clutching each other for dear life. Their screaming ramps up an octave and stutters when they plow into Fury, all three of them vanishing from view. A moment later there's a distinct crash from the end of the hallway and a low, pained, rumbling "Fitzsimmons!"