Logs:Of Classmates and Culpability (Or, Family Ties)

Of Classmates and Culpability (Or, Family Ties)
Dramatis Personae Kavalam, Lael	2020-09-18 "You had some trouble with Naomi?"
Location <XAV> Treehouse - Xs Grounds
Built by enterprising students of yesteryear, this treehouse has weathered generations of Xaviers' students coming up here to study -- or escape from studying. A cozy retreat, its wood planks are sturdy and well-sanded, fit snug together to keep out draft. Snacks occasionally find their way up here, and the roof keeps the rain off well enough to pass a night -- so long as the teachers don't catch any students at it. For anyone agile enough to make the jump, a lucky leap juuust might carry them from here to the school rooftop, so long as they're careful of the drop... It's not quite dinnertime, but it's close enough that some are headed dinner-ward anyway on this glorious autumnal evening. Not Lael, who is dragging his entire bookbag up the ladder into the treehouse. He's wearing a heather gray Xavier's School hoodie, blue jeans with tattered cuffs, and heavy brown boots, the squirming mass of his hair reasonably calm at the moment. Slipping inside, he sinks gratefully onto a pile of cushions and leans back against the wall "Do powers run in families?" Surely, when Lael got up here, the treehouse was empty -- it has in the time that he's been settling sprouted one wiry boy in jeans and a yellow polo shirt, tucked into one corner with backpack and a calculus textbook. Kavalam has left off his math, instead peering at Lael intently from behind half-frame glasses. "Obviously it is genetic. To be a mutant. But, in type as well. Do families have tendencies to psionics like they have a gene for brown eyes?" Lael had just reached into his bookbag for a binder which he promptly drops when Kavalam speaks, his locs coiling around themselves and standing straight out from his head. "Wha--" He stares at Kavalam, at the book and backpack, the distance from the door. "Was you invisible, before?" he demands. Then, "I ain't a geneticist, but it don't seem unlikely. Why?" This last a bit defensively. "Only a little bit." Kavalam's head wobbles briefly side to side. "Do you control minds, also?" Lael frowns, his hair squirming uncomfortably fast. "I don't think so. I can read minds--not well. Can't really turn it off, neither." He studies Kavalam more closely. "You had some trouble with Naomi?" "No, none." Kavalam hasn't looked that tense, but at Lael's assurance there's a flutter of relief in his mind. "And I don't intend to. I have trouble with very few people. Easy to avoid when nobody can see you." There's a resignation in the small hitch of his shoulder. "But you see a lot, too, when nobody sees you. She is very free and easy with that control of hers. I feel --" Though Kavalam's thoughts are not, primarily, in English, the mental image that surfaces -- several students tense-angry-anxious faces sitting around the conversation pit in the Pure Life Center -- is clear enough. "-- as though we just recently had a scare about this. Not that she seems to care." "Oh no." Lael scrubs a hand over his face. "I was afraid of that--or, something like that, anyway." His hair coils reflexively around his fingers and he has to wiggle out of their tenacious grasp, his face twisting hard to one side. "I'm sorry. She's very new to having powers, an' being out from under our parents. Ain't no excuse, but..." He shakes his head. "I'll talk to her about it." "Good." Kavalam looks back down at his textbook. "If you didn't, my next step was to talk to everyone else about it, and somehow after this summer I do not think that would win her many friends."