strangetrip | [OTA] S'more S'mores, Please (joint EP: Emma and Jag)

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[OTA] S'more S'mores, Please (joint EP: Emma and Jag)

Usually when Emma couldn't sleep, she cooked. Last night had been the opposite. She'd started trying out new marshmallow variations, completely lost track of time, and spent most of the night in the kitchen instead of doing reasonable things, like sleep. She'd grabbed a nap in the wee hours, though and another after lunch, and now was wide awake.

She also had batches and batches of homemade marshmallows.

Around sunset, Jag helped her set up a table near the pool and outdoor bar, that she loaded up with the marshmallows, graham crackers and other cookies, chocolate and berries and spreads and bacon. Anything somebody might think of that would make a good s'more, from the traditional basic graham, milk chocolate bar, plain marshmallow, to bourbon marshmallow s'mores with smoky bacon. If the inn was anything like the castle, word of mouth would spread quick enough, and the food wouldn't go to waste.

Jag had started a fire right beside the table, but after having had his own fill of s'mores, he had left Emma to meeting the demand of other hotel residents. He was sticking around to make sure the fire was behaving just right, though. So he was lying on his back a little way from Emma's table, and the fire he was still controling, weaving and sculpting additional fire between his hands, keeping a distracted ear on what was going on nearby.

[tag Emma or tag Jag. food and fire, what could be better?]

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The Clarice Emma was familiar with had her own sense of humor, that it took time to really recognize and appreciate. She'd also known about different realities and alternate versions of people you knew. "It's nice to meet you, Clarice. And to have another mutant around." She couldn't resist a brief glance over at Jag and the fire he was shaping, but mostly claiming the label for herself. And yes, there were mutants she wouldn't want to have anywhere near here, but she was going to go on the assumption this Clarice wasn't one of them, unless she learned otherwise.

"Eyes give it away?" Clarice smiled slightly as she said it. She also assumed by Emma saying another mutant that she was a mutant. "Were you part of the mutant underground, too?"

It seemed she was the only mutant here that couldn't pass for human, but she had seen a couple of guests that couldn't pass for human either. It was refreshing.

"The underground got me and my cousin out of the States after the registration act passed." Emma tried to remind herself that the underground as Clarice knew it might not be – probably wasn't – the same as the NAMUR she knew, but the 'too' made her feel better anyway.

"You can tell a lot about a person by their eyes," she said, drawing a card from her pocket. She glanced at it, and her eyes went a solid, empty white as a swan and hummingbird, minus the caging swords appeared beside her. "Psionic projections. I'm also a precog. But it wasn't your eyes, not really."

She bit her lip, looking away as she hesitated to say more, but feeling like she had to explain. "I, um..., in the reality I come from, I knew another Blink, although she was from an alternate reality from me already, and had been sent to mine. Well, a Clarice, I don't know if you use the same codename. Or if you have a codename at all."

"Blink?" Clarice cocked her head, "like I leave in a blink of an eye?" She could actually hear Lorna calling her that in a smart ass voice.

"No code name for me. I just arrived at the Underground a couple of months ago." She didn't mention it was after she escaped from jail. She also did't mention how the X-men abandoned them.

"So, there's another me out there?" That was kind of mind blowing.

"With infinite realities in the multiverse – which sounds like weird science fiction stuff, but so do mutants, and I know both are real – there are probably other versions of most of us. I know other versions of Kitty and Illyana too, if you've met them. Um, hold on."

Emma didn't go much of anywhere without a bag of the stuff she might need with her, habit from her time with the carnival and busking. It was hiding under the table now, and she bent down to find the tablet, which had of course fallen to the very bottom of the bag. As she stood again, she was already tapping through looking for one of the tarot cards she'd painted. "This is Blink. She and some of the other members of Excalibur saved me and my cousin when the Brotherhood tried to kidnap us. I never asked, but I think the name's from the sound her warp portals make when they close."

Clarice leaned in to look at the picture on the tablet and she arched a brow. "Are you kidding me? Another version of me turns purple? Like I don't stand out in a crowd already."

She couldn't help the smile because she could hear everyone's smart ass comments in her ear.

"Is purple," Emma corrected. "I'm pretty sure she was born that way. And there shouldn't be anything wrong with being purple. I know most worlds aren't there yet, but that sucks. We're all people, mutants or not." Emma knew it was different for her; she could pass, as long as she didn't project or one of the scanners or tests outed her. So she wouldn't say there was nothing wrong with being purple or having fur or any of those things that didn't affect her directly. But there shouldn't be a difference.

Nora had been blue so it wasn't surprising, but she assumed an alternate version of her would at least have the same physical resemblance. Clarice's mind was officially blown.

"I'd like to see a world where they were it didn't matter. I don't think it exists." She was a realist. People hated different and mutants were certainly different.

The Exiles, including the Blink Emma knew, were sent to timelines that were broken in one way or another. That was the point of sending them; to fix what had gone wrong. So she couldn't say definitively there was a world where it had already happened. But she had hope.

She shrugged. "It's possible, but I'm a look to the future type. The village I was living in before here had been around for centuries before it was opened up as a sanctuary for mutant refugees. People mostly got along, mutant and not. And it doesn't matter as much here. Mutants aren't going anywhere, so people will have to get used to us. What was different for one generation becomes normal for the next. I'm not giving up hope."

Clarice's lips twitched, "prepare for the worst but hope for the best?" While she was more of a just prepare for the worst. She was also aware that it was because she'd never be able to pass for normal that colored her world view.

"More like... What will be, will be, but do the work to make the world better than it is." Nathan, and therefore Dani, would say what is, is. For Emma it made as much sense to say what will be, is, since she couldn't change what she Saw. What will be, will be was true too and easier for some people to understand, although there was a higher risk of earworming.

"The problem being people have different ideas of what better should look like and how to get there."

She thought of what she'd gone through before arriving at the Inn and had to agree. "That's the root of a lot of problems, getting people to agree on the same end result." Never mind the routes to get there.

That was the truth, and one of the reasons Excalibur had been fighting on two fronts instead of one. Both against the US and Canaanites who wanted to lock up mutants, experiment on them, or worse; and the Brotherhood, that were at best mutant separatists. She nodded.

"That's part of why, once I was pretty sure this wasn't a world with the MRA, I stopped hiding what I can do, or that I'm a mutant. Just because I could hide doesn't mean I should have to, and the more people get used to us, the less they're going to come after the ones who can't hide." Emma had almost forgotten about her projection, holding it while talking or doing other things so familiar to her now. She let it go, the swan and hummingbird disappeared and the color came back into her eyes.

"MRA?" Clarice asked not sure what it stood for. She got the M was mutant and she could guess about the A, but it would only be a guess. Of course if it had to do with mutants it wouldn't be good.

"Mutant Registration Act. The US's first step to dealing with 'the mutant problem'. Find out who the mutants were and what they could do." Nothing about Emma's tone suggested she was okay with that. "Of course knowing who and what wasn't going to be enough, so it was followed with camps and experimentation, scanners and tests to identify us, even before manifesting sometimes. All that kind of thing."

It was sad that Clarice could easily see that on the horizon in her world.

"Damn. That sounds like a few years in my future." She made a face. "I can easily see one of the Senators pushing something like that through. We already have the experimentation in a lab.'

Ugh. Why couldn't people just them them live? "There were other parts of the world that weren't like that, though. The US declared war on the UK, in my world, because the UK was providing sanctuary for mutants... okay, and a mutant strike force that helped mutants where they could, including missions in the US sometimes."

"Sounds like something the US would do." Clarice made a face. "Maybe there was more out there, but to be honest I'd only been with the underground a couple of months before I came here, but I know they didn't have much resources so I'm going to guess if the UK was a 'safe place' in my worlds, too, I would have heard about it."

It was a nice fantasy though.

Emma nodded. "None of the other mutants here have come from the same reality as me, from what I've been able to tell. Close enough alternates of the same people – like you and the Clarice I knew – show up in more than one of them, but not the same."

"Makes sense." Clarice thought about it. "I mean if the Clarice you know had a different life than mine, the choices would be different."

"But at least we aren't alone. And nobody here seems to have a problem with mutants, which is good. We can just be ourselves."

She looked around, at the spread of s'mores goodies, at Jag with his fire, at Clarice who wasn't the Clarice she knew but maybe could be another in time.

"My mutation isn't always the most useful, especially here, but if you need my help, or if you just want to talk sometime, come find me."

"Thanks." Clarice meant that sincerely and glanced over toward the Inn. "I'll definitely hook you up with some mutant time. But right now, I should probably let you get back to tending the s'mores bar."

And she should probably load up some food from the kitchen to take with her.

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[OTA] S'more S'mores, Please (joint EP: Emma and Jag)

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