Fighting the Still Life (Part Five)

TV had to be one of the worst inventions for productivity ever created. It didn't matter what you had planned that day to be useful, plop down in front of a TV and have your attention stray for a moment. The next thing you know, bam! Forty-five minutes flies past, and you don't care.

I was so comfortable where I'd been sitting on the couch, just hanging out and preparing my snack, felt like I had just melted into the cushions. It had to be illegal to be this lazy. I wasn't even tired. I was just content with turning my brain off for a moment. There wasn't even so much as a stray thought running through my head. There was only a feeling of lucid comfort.

My brain rebooted when a stray figure moved past my field of vision, catching my full attention. A girl wearing itty-bitty blue shorts and a pink tanktop that looked to be a tad tight on her chest. The metal gauntlets on her arms and her electric blue hair clued me in that it was Noriko. In her case, bravo.

Goddamn it, I love summer. Also, I was a shitty person to have as a boyfriend, jeez. Was it really that easy to distract me? I was supposed to be a superhero trainee, but I clearly had a weakness. Just stick a hot girl in front of me and watch me tune out everything else. An assassin could have rolled up and put a bullet in my head from up close, and I wouldn't have noticed it.

Maybe I just needed to get laid? I hadn't seen Megan in-person in almost two months. Keeping a trans-Atlantic relationship going, especially a new one, was a bitch.

Noriko walked up and stared at me with an odd expression on her face as she observed me. I froze like a deer in the headlights. Had she caught me checking her out?

She raised an eyebrow and pointed at what I was holding, "What are you eating?" She asked about my snack wrapped in aluminum foil.

"Baked potato," I said resuming my chewing after having gone still for several seconds to ogle her, "...It's good."

So lame. At least saying that had rebooted my brain enough to the point where there was more on my mind than T&A. Far too many fine women went to this school.

Noriko watched me munch on the morsel in my hand with distaste, "You microwaved a potato just to eat it straight up? No butter, cheese, sour cream? Nothing? Gross."

I looked down at the potato, then up to her, back and forth several times, "There's butter on it. Besides, I didn't use a microwave, or an oven. I cooked this stupid thing in my hands," I let a glow come to my hands to show how I heated it up, "Oh yeah. I've got it like that, baby."

Despite Noriko's initial misgivings, she did seem to be intrigued, "Huh. Do you think I could do that with these?" She asked, holding up her gauntlet-covered hands.

Maybe, if she didn't mind getting crud from food on those things, "I dunno. How much control you got over your output?" I asked, "Also, I have no idea what food cooked with pure electricity would taste like."

Her nose wrinkled up at the thought of probably burning whatever she cooked black, "Probably bad," She said with a sigh as she took a seat nearby further down on the long couch, "I'm bored, Bel."

That drew a scoff out of me. That made two of us. Why the hell else would I have baked a potato with my bare hands? I didn't come up with asinine, mundane ways to use my powers when I had tons of stuff going on.

"That sucks. Where's your crew? Mine are all off at home," I said, trying to make conversation. Not that I really cared about her being bored. My own entertainment took priority.

Nori gestured inconclusively, "Josh is around... somewhere. Everyone else is gone though."

It explained why she stopped to talk to me. We were cordial, but we weren't super-close. She was good friends with Hisako though, making us acquaintances by default. When we weren't getting chippy with each other, we got along well enough, "Not you?"

"Not me. Nowhere to go," She seemed to leave it at that, so I didn't bother trying to pry. Her problems were her problems. Unless she wanted to share, that was how they would be, "So how was your vacation?"

"It was alright when people weren't trying to kill me. But that was only like... three days of it," I said, waving off the life-threatening aspect of my time away. There were other pressing matters on my mind, and there was a chance that she could help, "...Hey, how many telepaths are in this place?"

My spontaneous question garnered a confused look, "Why do you care?"

I shrugged my shoulders in response, "Just humor me. I think I've got them all listed," I said, tapping my own head with my baked potato. I may or may not have gotten butter on my hat in doing so, "Just trying to make sure I have my bases covered."

Noriko remained pretty skeptical about my intentions, but I guess she couldn't find a reason to dig any deeper, "Fine. There's Emma Frost, the Cuckoos, Blindfold. There's Rachel Grey and Psylocke too, but they aren't around here much…"

I picked up on a pattern that leaned heavily toward my original hunch, "Are there any telepaths here that aren't chicks?" Nori narrowed her eyes and a stray bolt of electricity flicked away from her body. She must have been annoyed, "I'm not being sexist. I keep hearing a dude's voice in my head sometimes. It's not mine."

"You sure you're not just losing your shit?" She shot back as a joke. I didn't laugh or smile, "…Oh, you're serious."

"Dead serious," In addition to everything else, schizophrenia was the last thing I needed heaped onto my pile.

Nori crossed her arms, trying to wrack her brain to give me a hand, "I don't know any, other than Professor Xavier, but he hasn't been around here forever. I don't think I've ever met the guy."

I shook my head in the negative, "It wasn't some old dude, unless he can disguise the sound of his mind. The voice sounded younger," Besides, what would the guy who founded the damn school want with me?

She was running out of names, so she decided to throw out one more possibility, "Well… there was one other guy. This was before my time here though. I haven't been here much longer than you, remember?" I nodded and gestured for her to go on, "Right. Well, before I got here there was a big riot on campus. This one guy started it. Did you know there used to be more Cuckoos here?"

That was news to me. My eyebrows rose underneath the brim of my hat, "There were more of them? Jesus, that sounds terrifyingly hot."

Noriko rolled her eyes, letting my hormone-driven remark slide, "Yeah, well one of them died during the riot. I don't know any more. You'd have to talk to them about it for more details. I think Laurie is the only person who was around for that one, and she's not exactly here to ask about it."

Right. Laurie Collins. Wallflower. She actually had a mother that didn't live very far away from the school. But I wasn't going to go and bug a girl I barely knew to get some info to help chase shadows.

That left me one primary option – to talk to the Cuckoos. I didn't foresee that going well at all. To begin with, they were kind of intimidating, what with the whole psychic triplets hive mind thing they had going on. They didn't really like most people and seemed stuck up. Even worse, they could probably tell that I thought that, no matter how I approached them, and that would color whatever interaction we had after that point.

Well, what was a new school year without expanding one's horizons? Reaching out to new people, establishing contacts, and making friends. Learning from and about other people. And maybe having your brain melted by sexy psychic triplets. But by now I had gotten used to there being risks in any random thing I decided to do around there. Only at Xavier's.

...God, I love being at school.