strangetrip | [GP/EP] Check-in Day

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[GP/EP] Check-in Day

It was a musical day at the Madonna Inn, both inside and out. Curnen had taken her usual place up on the roof and was singing charms to the sky to keep any wanderers from getting lost (though that part of it was not immediately obvious). Unrelated to that, Sunny was on the dance floor in the bar, summoning songs of her own with her knife to keep her moving before she went to do her shift at the library later. It was one of those days where if she thought about it too hard she’d start thinking about that empty bed in her shitty room and the person she most wanted to be there.

This of course eventually seeped into her magic. She knew better. Maybe she’d even wanted that to happen.

Because just once, between different pop hits and dance beats came a rather unexpected French love song. She sighed and rolled her eyes, but the exasperation didn’t last. Before the lyrics started up she was waltzing. By herself and not caring how it might have looked. And for those three and a half minutes, she dared let herself hope for the slimmest chance that Orlu might come through that door.

She didn’t let herself hope too hard, though. There was admitting to feeling things and there was setting yourself up for certain disappointment. She’d lived too long with disappointment to do that to herself.

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"Yeah, I'm good." Clarice said with a shrug. "Used to bein' on my own and I lived in an abandoned building with a group of outcast people. So I'm used to pretty small and people knowing what you're doing. Don't spend a lot of time at the Inn anyway. Too confining."

Trust was hard won and the Inn hadn't won it yet.

"Hey, me too." The abandoned outcast part. "It was more like an abandoned area of the city because for most people it's toxic and can kill them, but works fine for my friends and I." Alec paused. Sounded a lot like Kitty's world. "Mutant, right? X-Gene?"

"Got it in one and since you asked, I'll guess you got the same freak gene." Or maybe he was made like River was. Clarice was still wrapping her head around that.

"Your friends, you guys part of the Underground network?"

He shook his head. "Nah. I was made in a lab." And for once, Alec bent his neck down and revealed his barcode - a sign maybe he was growing as a person. Or maybe it was because Clarice reminded him of home more than the others. "But I know others here with the gene and I heard the story. Seems like the government hates us no matter what world or what kind we are, even if they made us themselves."

Clarice leaned in to get a good look at the bar code. That was harsh, "they brand you like that?" That was new and disgusting. She wondered if River had one of those, too.

"Not just the government." She made a face and moved to sit down on one of the loungers next to him. "There's a group called Purifiers. Mutant hating assholes."

"With a name like Purifiers, they have to be douchebags." He thought about Ames. "There's a breeding cult back home who think they're the solution to life, I guess. Hate not only us, but humans too. Also douchebags."

"A breeding cult? Sounds like the Purifiers if they could take their heads out of their asses long enough to figure out how to breed the 'pure race'." Clarice rolled her eyes. "Props to you for making the decision to stay with your friends in that wasteland even though you can pass for 'normal'."

Unlike Clarice with her pointed ears, green eyes and mark around her eye.

He shrugged. "Passing isn't the same as being." Plus he had sort of been forced into it, at the end of the day, when Joshua and the others showed up at Jam Pony and everything went to Hell. Though Alec knew he'd have done the same thing regardless.

"Must be hard, huh?" He meant looking the way she did, though not because of her attractiveness. "My friend Joshua's basically a dog-man. He has to hide all the time. Never gets to actually interact with people." And then he found a blind woman and it was great... until Ames murdered her.

"It's a pain in the ass. I was lucky and had a foster home that took in the mutants that couldn't pass for human." It still pissed her the hell off that they'd been murdered because of her

"We're an easy target for hate. Underground helps where it can, but a lot of us stay under the radar and on our own. It what I was doing when I got arrested for stealing food."

"God forbid you have something to eat." Alec rolled his eyes. He understood the kind of theft he did was shitty - he didn't really need a new plasma TV - but people stealing food was just for survival. "Plenty of that here, though. And people who don't pass off as human as even you do."

It was hard to miss the big pregnant red Tiefling at this point.

She hadn't had any issues with food. No one had told her no, but then no one had caught her taking it from the kitchen either. Clarice let her mind go over what he'd said about others. She had noticed a couple but that didn't mean they weren't part of whatever the hell was going on.

"You trust it here?" She was actually curious about his take since he seemed to come from the same kind of world.

He gave a bit of a shrug. "Trust is a big word." He looked out across the pool. "I used to think this place was some sort of training ground or experiment, but now I'm not so sure. I think whoever's in charge of this place likes to watch. But I make myself a big pain in the ass and no one other than people like you and me seem to care."

"Good for you." Clarice liked that mentality. "Still haven't ruled out that Trask is screwing with my mind but they're not this imaginative." Other mutants were however and the hound program was very real.

"Still don't stay in my room." He was the first person that she'd admitted that to. "I do fly-bys, like now."

"What the hell is Trask?" Sounded like an organization, but it could have been a person." He looked her over. "Do you actually... fly?"

Her fingers automatically went to her throat where the collar had been but there were only faint burn marks from when Xavin got it off.

"They're the assholes that would like to wipe out mutants. Trask Industries and Sentinel Services. Trask has a nice lab that they like to do experiments on mutants, combining powers and getting them hook on some drug, turning them on other mutants and tracking us down." As much as she didn't trust this place, sure that it was connected somehow, she was at least not a part of the Hound program.

"And no, I don't fly, though that could be useful. I teleport."

Edited 2018-05-25 16:37 (UTC)

Alec made a mental note that if anyone showed up from Trask Industries to punch them in the face. He had heard of Sentinels before fro Kitty. Seemed like mutants couldn't escape those things.

"Teleportation's pretty awesome. One of the few powers I think I'd actually like to have."

"It is pretty awesome when it works." Clarice made a face, "it's been spotty since I've been here, but truth was it's happened before for me." She pushed thoughts of Sonya and the fake memories she'd given Clarice out of her head. "What superpowers do you have? Besides swimming long distances without breathing."

"Nothing as impressive as you mutants." Not said in any derogatory way, but that was how Alec felt. "Enhanced speed, strength, sight, sound... they wanted the perfect soldier." He shrugged. "No teleporting or laser beams or whatever else there is."

"I have a friend, John, that would be described as that, too. Sage can tell you the exact statistics of anything." Clarice smiled a little thinking of them, "not sure which I'd rather have, my teleportation, or three for the price of one."

She actually would rather have her ability.

"From what I know, your world needs a lot more than most. Superheroes and bad guys and whatever. My world it's just shitty people being shitty."

Most of the time anyways.

Clarice shook her head, "yeah I don't have superheroes and bad guys either, I just have shitty people being shitty in my world, too. We might have powers but they're hunting us down. The superheroes that we did have ditched us to figure it out on our own. We have an underground and a shit ton of people that would like to see us dead."

The idea that the superheroes would ditch everyone seemed to really resonate with Alec. Like he knew that would happen all along.

"You have anyone in your reality called Iron Man?"

Clarice shook her head, "no at least I haven't heard of any mutant with that name. Does he walk through iron? Everything he touches goes to iron?"

"Pretty sure his power is being a gigantic douchebag." Alec shrugged. He had been wondering if Iron Man was a tool in multiple realities.

"I guess he's not around in your world."

She smirked, "well if that's his power, there are a lot of Iron Mans in my world."

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