strangetrip | Check-In: Not-Mother Hen

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Check-In: Not-Mother Hen

Kitty sat at the bar with a cup of coffee and her notebook, watching the 'welcoming committee' make themselves busy. Liz was here, as she'd promised Kitty she would be and Kitty gave her a quick smile of encouragement.

One of the worst things about Check-In Days was that you never knew whether it'd be a whole long day of no one arriving, one spectacular fall from the ceiling and dropping dead after another, or anything in between. It made it hard to know what to do with yourself. After awhile, you got used to it and just kept on with whatever you'd do otherwise, and know that if you didn't step up for a new arrival, someone else would. But for someone not used to treating it like a responsibility to be here, especially someone with Liz's anxious need to be perfect at it, Check-In Day could be emotionally exhausting.

So Kitty made sure to have milk warmed for hot cocoa and her plans for the obstacle course handy in case Liz needed something to do with herself. Otherwise, she was working on a modification of Cerebro to see if she could start detecting new arrivals.

[ooc: Regular check-in day gathering post. If you want Kitty, ping me.]

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"A little over six months," Sunny confirmed with a nod, keeping the way that made her stomach knot up off her face. Six months without her coven, without her family, was an eternity. She had friends here, good friends, and that helped her bear it, though some days only just. "Long enough to leave my phone in my pocket, though not always in my room."

He glanced to his phone one more time and then slid it into his pocket.

"This place is like other of an old movie." He said. "I saw a computer and I'm pretty sure those were around when my mom was in high school."

Sunny laughed brightly at that. Sometimes she was almost used to things like the lack of internet, but every once in a while... "Yeah, we're stuck in a bit of a 90s timewarp for some reason. Boxy computers, boxy TVs, VHS tapes... and for some reason it's pretty much nobody's era of origin."

Brad had not been born yet. He ran fingers through his mess of hair.

"Do you think this place really exists in California?" He asked, eyes looking around. "People actually choose to stay at this place?"

A beat.

"I know people say we can't leave.. have you tried?" He asked, looking at her now.

"Many times," Sunny confirmed, looking out toward the horizon momentarily. She'd even tried using her time manipulation abilities to try to push past the border, but it was no use. She could get a long way, but ultimately she got stopped about as far out as most people did. As though their pocket world had just looked at her abilities and decided on a flat no.

She looked back to Brad. "Haven't managed it yet, obviously. Some people around here make a regular go of it, but so far they keep showing up to dinner every night."

"So you're saying it's basically hopeless." Brad said after he made sense of what she said. "That people try, but in the end, no one ever gets out of their own."

He looked disappointed. He knew he shouldn't be because he had already been told as much.

"...this place really blows," he said quietly.

"No one's done it yet," Sunny corrected quietly. Whether or not she actually had hope of someone forcing a way out, she couldn't let herself give up on the idea. It was a functional kind of hope. It served a purpose more than being a true feeling. "But yes," she agreed, her expression going flat and annoyed, "Yes, blow it definitely does."

It probably won't be me who finds a way, that's for sure

A beat passed and he looked at her again.

"You're human, right? From Earth?" He asked. I never thought I'd ask that for real to someone.

Sunny flinched like he'd physically slapped her, closing her eyes for a second to let the knee-jerk anger work its way out.

She'd had her humanity questioned and challenged by enough idiots for several lifetimes.

"I'm going to let that go," she said evenly, "because you've been through a lot today and I'm assuming you either met or heard about some of the people around here who don't fall in those categories. In future, though, you might want to be more careful with how you wield that question."

Bradley looked confused in only a way a teenager could. It was equal parts genuine confusion and adolescent stubbornness like a part of him thought he had phrased the question just fine.

"What do you mean?" He asked with a furrowed brow. "Is there something wrong with being from Earth, or not from Earth? Or human or nor human?"

"No," she said, keeping her voice very deliberately calm. After the first few days Sunny would have torn him a new asshole, but he was too new. "There's nothing wrong with any of those things. There is however, a lot of ugly subtext in a white boy asking a black woman if she's a human. And further ugly subtext in asking an albino woman if she's a human since we're looked at as though we're not at least implicitly and sometimes still explicitly around the world."

"Oh." He said, his expression stunned. I hadn't even thought about it like that. "...Sorry. I didn't ask it because of the way you looked or anything. Lots of supernatural things like vampires and stuff look like people, or that's what it's like in the movies anyway."

This was all new to Bradley.

"I'm sorry," He repeated. "I can see how that can be upsetting."

Sunny nodded, her expression actually softening now instead of carefully controlled neutrality. "Thank you."

She put that mess away. It wasn't worth doing anything right now, and somebody had taught him how to apologize not like a complete tool. Good.

Instead, she answered the questions in her own way, without yeses or nos. "I was born and raised in New York to Nigerian immigrant parents. We went back when I was nine. I found out I had magic when I was twelve."

Bradley was about to ask about Nigerian. He had never met anyone who had been to Africa. All he knew of the place was what he saw on TV ads to 'help the children' and from brief mentions in history textbooks. However, it was the mention of magic that distracted him.

"You can do magic?" He asked, fascinated. "Like, actual magic, magic? Harry Potter kind of stuff?"

It was hard to resist that genuine childlike fascination, and Sunny smiled almost in spite of herself. "Like actual Harry Potter magic, magic," she confirmed.

"Wow, that's crazy," He said. "I mean, in a good way. There's no, you know, like real magic back home. Just people who use slight of hand, like Criss Angel."

"Crazy was about what I thought when I first learned about it," Sunny admitted, her mouth quirking in a way that was simultaneously wry and amused. "I thought the friends I'd recently made were secretly barking mad. Of course, half the time I still think the magic people I know are secretly barking mad."

Bradley smiled. She sounds like she has nice friends... It was how Bradley spoke about his own friends.

"Is it rude to ask someone to show you magic?" He asked, wanting to avoid his previous mistake.

"Not at all," Sunny assured him, then, "Don't freak out," she warned before pulling out her juju knife seemingly from nowhere. Few people took a sudden knife well. "I can show you the first thing that I learned how to do?"

He took a half-step back from instinct, but tried not to look as apprehensive as Bradley felt. He peered at the knife briefly, then back to Sunny.

"Uh, yeah, sure." He replied. I wonder what the first thing she learned was.

She couldn't blame him for reacting badly to a knife. It was why she'd given any forewarning at all. Still, Sunny only continued like it was something that happened every day, because for her, it was.

She slashed at the air and said simply, "Bring music of Brad's heart."

This was not exactly the first magic she'd ever cast, but it was the first spell she'd cast with this knife. The results were not exactly predictable--sometimes it summoned a person's favorite song, or something they just really liked, or a work from a band they followed, or something that matched their mood. When she'd first cast it, she'd been giddy with finally having a juju knife of her own and it had summoned a bit of fast, high-pitched highlife music by Nyanga Tolotolo. She could never predict what would play for someone else.

Suddenly the music of Mikky Ekko started to play and Brad looked shocked. The magic first and then the song itself. His eyes were wide and his lips formed a tightly line before dipping into a subtly frown.

I woke up, I was stuck in a dream You were there, you were tearing up everything And we all know how to fake it baby And we all know what we've done We must be killers Children of the wild ones Killers Where we got left to run?

Sunny wasn't familiar with this song, and in the way of all first listens didn't grasp everything but the words she did pick out were... interesting.

"Never heard that one," she said neutrally, not wanting to lean one way or another as far as interpreting why that piece of music.

"It's, uh," Bradley started, looking uncomfortable. "on the radio sometimes."

He shifted his weight to his other foot and rubbed the back of his neck.

But it had hit a nerve. And so Sunny didn't ask. In fact she very deliberately went in another direction entirely.

"That was the first spell I ever learned to cast with my knife," she said. "My friend Chichi did it for me the very first time I saw it done. Classical. It was to help me cross the bridge into Leopard Knocks without the... thing living in the river from dragging me down. It almost did anyway. It's older than time, it can do what it likes."

Check-In: Not-Mother Hen

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