strangetrip | GP: April Fools!

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GP: April Fools!

It didn't take any sort of precognitive abilities to predict some kind of shenanigans on the first of April. Many of the people stuck in the bubble world of the Madonna Inn were from times and places where April Fools' Day pranks were normal, expected... (in many cases) minor annoyances. And then there were the residents who remembered the strange egg hunt from a year ago, and the sometimes confusing explanations of the two holidays falling on the same day and how that related.

Also, life at the inn could be interminable. After a while, people started hoping for some kind of strangeness to happen, just to break up the monotony of being trapped in a kitschy no-snow globe.

So, no. You didn't have to be a mutant fortune teller to expect some kind of joke being pulled. But Emma was, and even she had no idea what was coming, other than it was going to be frustrating and topsy-turny, and the visions she'd been getting from the tarot – and way more reversals than was usual or healthy in her experience – were even less clear than usual.

She definitely didn't foresee waking up without the powers that were as much a part of her as her heart. Or just as suddenly having powers she had no idea how to control. But she did, and she had*, and she was far from the only one. The same thing was happening to people all around the inn.

(*Not to worry. The singe marks should be gone in a day or so. Right?)

[Powers swap GP! Tag in. Tag around. It's a time for out and about at the inn coping (or not) with powers gained (or lost).]

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Today was being unsettling and uncomfortable, and it had started early. Xavin generally went to sleep female, she’d gotten used to that, but this morning on waking, a decidedly he felt like going for a run or a fly, except... no shifting. That had been deeply uncomfortable, less because of the physicality, necessarily - male was male regardless - but shapeshifting was so integral to Xavin’s being that everything felt... wrong.

Rather than stay put, though, Xavin had gone about the day as normally as possible: getting breakfast, setting up for coffee, picking a book. At some point, Xavin relaxed back into female again. Which at least matched her shape, but didn’t help with being stuck as one thing.

Outwardly she was mostly as usual, if a little more fidgety and sticking more closely to her coffeecart than she generally did.

Connor didn't sleep, but he did have periods of being 'off' when he processed the day's events and ran self-checks in standby mode. There were some aspects of it analogous to a sleep-wake cycle, but it was generally much shorter. The flow of time processed differently for him than a regular human, but his days had been filled with tireless investigation and drunken lieutenant management. Now that his days were filled with far less, he ironically entered stand-by mode more frequently and dwelled there for longer periods.

When he came back from his last period of idleness, however, he found himself questioning if doing nothing for stretches was 'healthy' for his system. Nothing was running as it should. Aside from a keen sense of it all being 'off' he couldn't even enter standby mode if he tried. And he did. For an hour.

Resorting to visual checks, nothing seemed to be amiss with his body. Movement--nothing wrong but he felt far more than he should have. The tension and pull of something beneath his skin, warmth and humidity in his oral and nasal cavities, an ache spreading from the back of his head--distracted with all these sensations, Connor had ended up in the middle of the hall and bumping right into Xavin's cart.

His brown eyes found hers, and he simply gave an anxious nod and started out to be on his way, but his hand didn't follow the rest of him, still apparently grasping the edge.

Connor looked a little like she felt, Xavin thought, anxious and uncomfortable even before he was somehow unable to remove his hand from her cart. The fact that Connor, an android, looked anything like that was troubling - whether or not he truly lacked emotion as he claimed, he was a very controlled being in general.

Xavin walked around to investigate his hand, trying a 'reassuring smile' while she did so. It felt more or less normal, but as with everything there was an edge of discomfort: she couldn't adjust any part of it if she'd wanted to. "Are you all right?"

“Yes.” Managing an even tone so as not to raise further alarm to the kind barista, Connor was one to weigh his options before acting. Instead, he immediately yanked his arm again, making the cart itself tremble.

“Stop!” Xavin actually flailed a little, unreasonably upset at the idea of the cart being upended or damaged. Androids and other such synthetics tended to be strong. She couldn’t preserve herself, but the cart should be allowed to survive. “You are stuck somehow. I cannot tell how.”

Pausing, Connor gained the wherewithal to analyze the point of contact—

—Only for nothing to happen save for a painful squint he was inflicting on himself. He shook his head and instinctively—instinctively?— rubbed his eyes. “This isn’t intentional.”

Xavin pried at his fingers entirely uselessly. As with her shapeshifting, the Thing’s strength and Invisible Woman’s force fields had deserted her. “Did you... get glue on your hands, somehow?”

A reply in the negative would have been appropriate, but the sensation of warmth and weight on his fingers was...distracting. Not only that, but did coffee always smell that strongly? There was another aroma lingering close by, but Connor couldn't identify it--

"No?" He blinked, as if suddenly remembering he was supposed to answer. "No."

While she picked and tugged at his fingers, they felt... different. Connor's skin had been smooth enough, but not skin, when they'd shaken hands before. This felt.... "...are you human somehow?"

It wasn't unbelievable. She was human somehow.

The question Xavin put forth was enough to distract Connor from the alien sensations and he shot her a perplexed look. "That's not possible."

Why not? She was!

Instead of arguing verbally, though, Xavin just pinched the skin on his hand briefly, just below the knuckle. Pain wasn't something an android would have programmed in, she thought - not pain like a biological felt.

"Ow." Monotone, but there it was. He rubbed his hand with his other one and frowned even further.

"Humans don't do... this... though." Xavin poked again at his hand, satisfied for the moment that her point was made. Perhaps Peter could do it? He climbed walls and ceilings, which implied he could stick to things. Certainly that was how the Spider-Man in Xavin's home universe worked.

If he then stuck to something, and could not un-stick, how would that work? She frowned slightly, then abandoned his hand and started making a drink instead, on the theory that a distraction might allow his hand to be removed while he wasn't paying attention. "Do not move."

Connor followed her with his gaze but kept dutifully still, even while his now-existent adrenaline glands fired off. He trusted Xavin, and if she had a plan...it was still more than he had.

Hot chocolate wasn’t her favorite, but it had virtually none of coffee’s bitterness. Also, you could add whipped cream. Xavin kept the drink small, though, non-threatening - It might be the first food or beverage Connor had ever had, after all.

Once it was done, she all but put the cup in his non-stuck hand and pointed at it. “Drink that.”

His eyes were full of doubt, but Xavin issued her order with enough authority that Connor’s subservient nature got the better of him. He slowly brought the mug closer to his lips, it’s heat and rich aroma filling his nostrils. He couldn’t analyze it, but he didn’t need to, his senses filling in all the blanks. The hot liquid touched his tongue and he immediately brought his other hand in to stabilize the mug as he brought it away, the heat stinging.

Xavin literally bounced a little, she was so happy to see the hand come off her cart. Distraction had worked! Cunningly, she didn’t call attention to it, lest he touch her cart again and get re-stuck. “What do you think?”

“It’s hot.” Connor tried to stick more into his mouth to inspect, but the temperature made the delicate nerve endings on his tongue sizzle. Now invested, he claimed a stirrer and encouraged the heat energy to transfer out of it.

“Many people blow on it. That cools the surface enough to sip,” Xavin offered.

Gathering air in his lungs, Connor blew into the cup—and with more force than intended, some of it splattering across his face and the floor. He simply grabbed a napkin and patted his skin dry, and then the floor, before resuming his sampling. The sweetness wasn’t unpleasant, especially now that it had cooled to a more agreeable temperature.

“I apologize for startling you.” He said through small mouthfuls of the hot chocolate.

“No harm was done, therefore no apologies are necessary.” And, as was so often the case, a hot beverage was an aid to calm. Xavin started making herself one, too - not hot chocolate but her favorite caramel macchiato.

Remembering his predicament, Connor turned his hand over to inspect it. It seemed...normal. For a human hand. It was his nature to investigate, but puzzling over himself forever wouldn't accomplish much, so he turned his attention to the barista. "Has anything out of the ordinary occurred for you?"

“I am stuck,” she acknowledged, directly if not quite easily. “Like this. I cannot change my shape or do... anything else I normally can.”

"From your tone, I take it this hasn't happened before." Though things like it had, Connor was aware.

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GP: April Fools!

Xavin - OTA

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