om_main | Polaris and Havok, Friday Night

Alex falls for Lorna (literally), and they have a little chat.

Today, Lorna had decided to do some working out in the gym. Wearing some sneakers with a purple tank top and black pants, she walked inside and began doing some stretching before she'd actually get to the working out part. She couldn't sense anyone around yet, but that was fine. Working out was better on your own sometimes, as it felt like you could get more done without people there to watch you. Bending over, she went to touch her toes a few times before doing anything else.

Already, she was feeling good. Stretching really helped loosen her up, she thought.

Okay. Cool. Getting settled in at a new school, new kids, (practically) new older brother that he hadn't seen since forever. Nothing he couldn't handle. So what if he was a thousand miles from anything even remotely familiar? He'd deal. Not like he could just stay in his room all day bugging the hell out of Vance, because that would be lame. Even for him.

Getting a routine going. That was the key. Establish something normal, and the rest would fall into place. God, he hoped the rest would fall into place. Something had to, eventually, right?

It was with that thought in mind that he hit the gym, already wrestling his way out of the bulky-ass containment suit Doc MacTaggert and the Professor had whipped up for him. Damn thing was like one of those fucking antique diving suits, the kinds with the hose coming out of the top, all buckles and zippers and straps and gauges and--

Holyshithtatwasthehottestasshe'deverseen--

And that was Alex's last, sort-of coherent thought as he tried to step out of one leg of the suit, got the skin-tight under-layer hooked on one of the random metal tabs, and went sprawling face-first on the unforgiving gymnasium floor. Fortunately, he managed to break his fall. With his fucking elbow.

Ow.

The sound made Lorna stand up straight, and she noticed that Alex had fallen. Of course she'd sensed him when he came in, but since she hadn't recognized it, so she hadn't stopped her stretching to acknowledge him. However, when he'd fallen, Lorna decided to walk over to see if he was okay. She hadn't seen this kid before, so he must have been new. New, and a little cute.

"Are you okay?" Lorna asked, and held her hand out so she could help him up.

Ow. And again ... ow. No, Alex was most definitely not okay. He was bruised and sprawling in front of the girl whose incredible ... attributes had been the root cause of his tumble, and there was no way he could see to reclaim his dignity. Flushing bright red, he risked a glance up ...

Holy hot damn. Green hair? Were you fucking serious? Life was just too goddamn unfair. Why, why, why had he just made a colossal fucking ass of himself in front of the hottest girl he had ever seen. Was just a few seconds of cool too much to ask for? Fuck.

"Yeah," Alex replied at last, sheepishly, taking her hand and stumbling back awkwardly to his feet, the containment suit now halfway around his ankles, leaving him clad in the skintight black neoprene under-layer. "Only thing hurt was my pride, y'know? Alex Summers. Probably could have thought of a better ice-breaker than, you know, nearly face-planting on the floor, but whatever works..." He managed a weak laugh.

"I'm Lorna Dane, and it's okay," Lorna grinned, letting go of Alex when he was standing up. Folding her arms, she smiled. She felt for the guy because he was probably embarrassed as hell, but it was kind of adorable in a strange way. Poor guy. Luckily for him, Lorna wasn't the gossipy type. She wouldn't tell anyone that the first time they'd met was because Alex fell face first onto the floor. However, she'd never forget it, either.

"What's that suit thing?" she asked, and gestured to the containment suit.

Lorna. Wow. Hot girl had a hot name. And was ... still talking to him, for some reason. Must have been the sympathetic type. She'd just about have to be, after that ass-tacular entrance he'd just made. Damn. Why did the awesome ones always see him looking like a total fucking tool.

She'd noticed his fucking tool suit, too. Jesus. It was like ... headgear, but for his whole damn body. Not really what anybody would have called fashionable. Unless they were blind and had no hands. And retarded.

"This?" Alex asked lamely, finally getting one foot free, then bending down to struggle with the other one a bit. "Keeps my powers, y'know, stable. Otherwise I just kinda ..." He trailed off, looked up, made a vague exploding gesture with his hands. "Kaboom. It's happened before, and it got messy." Annnnnd now she was probably gonna freak out and get the hell away like her cute butt was on fire. Fantastic game you got there, Summers.

"You explode? That's a new one," Lorna mused. No, Lorna didn't get scared by anyone's powers. She was fairly interested in the mechanics of them, and what they meant for each individual person. Hell, if she didn't want to eventually go into archaeology she thought that she'd be a geneticist. Though exploding wasn't a power she'd heard of before, it did intrigue her quite a bit. One way to get Lorna's attention was to not only talk about academics and sex, but to talk about powers.

"Is it, like, a fiery kind of exploding?" she asked curiously, obviously quite interested in the subject. "Or is it some kind of energy?"

Just like that, Alex's self-consciousness receded. It didn't go away completely--he still felt like an absolute tool--but talking about his powers with someone who wasn't going to look at him cockeyed then run away was a great way to get him engaged. "Not like fire, exactly," he said, finally kicking his way free of the suit and nudging it back against the wall with his foot. "You know the four states of matter, right? Solid, liquid, gas, plasma? That last one is what I give off. Like, constantly. Usually, it's too little to notice, except in the presence of a really powerful electromagnetic field--that'll tend to concentrate it along one direction. But sometimes it builds up and discharges with a whole lot of heat and energy."

He toed the ground thoughtfully. "The Prof thinks I might be able to concentrate it along a specific path--like a filament in one of those plasma globe things?--if I practice at it. Right now, I'll settle for not exploding anything by mistake." Alex looked up at her, eyes brightening suddenly. "What do you do?"

Lorna grinned at that. Well then, Alex was a little powerhouse, now wasn't he? Though physical mutations had her attention more than other ones did, the idea of plasma powers really made Lorna think. She wanted to learn more about something like, especially if his powers reacted in the presence of powerful electromagnetic fields.

"Along with being born with green hair, I can control metal," she told him. Lorna not only loved talking about powers, but she loved showing her own off and impressing people with the amount of control she had thanks to working with her father. "There's a lot more to it than just that, though. I can sense metal, I can sense magnetic fields. I can even sense you. I could probably pick you up and throw you across the room if I really wanted to."

Lorna smirked, and made her eyes glow just for him.

"That is so cool!" Alex gushed. 'Cause the green hair and the glowy eyes? That was made of a thousand different shades of awesome. Then his brain managed to catch up with the rest of what she'd said, distracted as it had been by the extremely cute girl with the amazing electromagnetic powers. "Uhm, you wouldn't actually do that, right? 'Cause I'm pretty sure I'd squish just like anybody else, walking Chernobyl or not ..."

His expression quickly brightened again, though. "Oh! Your powers are like Mr. Lensherr's, then? He told me a little bit about him, when he and the Prof visited. He's, like, crazy powerful. I had to concentrate to keep the plasma I just give off normally from zeroing in on him. Really hard." It had given him a headache later, actually. But he'd still thought it was pretty interesting.

"I won't throw you, I promise," Lorna laughed, shaking her head. She just liked telling people that she could do that, but she had yet to really throw someone. "But yeah, my powers are just like Erik's, except he's way more powerful than me. It makes sense, you know, 'cause he's my dad and everything. He's been teaching me a lot about them. It's insane the stuff someone with control over metal can do."

Alex was a pretty cool guy, Lorna decided. The more she talked to him, the more interesting he became to her.

"Wow. Your dad? That's--" Well, Alex really didn't have a word for it, and if he just kept on saying things were "awesome" or "cool", she'd probably start thinking he was a complete idiot in addition to being a massive tool. And just one of those labels was enough to have to work against, thanks.

"Do you come from some kind of big mutant family, or something?" he asked, genuinely curious. As an orphan, he tended to naturally ask questions like that. His dad and mom hadn't been mutants, he was pretty sure, but it was probably kinda the best thing ever to have a bunch of people you were related to that could do similar kinds of stuff. Probably made her feel less alone.

Of course, her powers didn't explode randomly, so she had that going for her, too. And the green hair. Which he was absolutely not going to obsess over. At all.

"Well my dad's a mutant, my brother's a mutant, and my sister's a mutant. My mom's a human, and totally scared of me, but it happens," Lorna explained, watching him, but going back to stretch. She linked her hands together, and stretched them upwards, going on her tiptoes to do so. "My siblings have a different mom than I do, though. I actually only found out I had them a few months ago because this place is pretty intense about family reunions, it feels like."

Lorna then stretched backwards, still talking as she did so.

"What about do? Do you have any mutant family members?"

Now, see that? That thing she was doing, where she was stretching and arching and generally showing off some pretty amazing limberness? That just wasn't fair. Especially if she was going to try to hold a conversation with him at the same time. Because there was only so much blood in his teenage body, and right then it was getting pulled in opposite directions.

Why did boobs have to be so goddamn fascinating? Not that he was staring. Okay, maybe a little. But he was going to stop. Any second now.

"I--huh?" Alex replied belatedly, blinking. Then his brain finally managed to overcome the lag. "Oh! Yeah. I've got an older brother, Scott. Maybe you've seen him around. Tall, skinny. Red shades. Never smiles. Smashes stuff with his eyes."

Lorna knew Alex was staring at her. It was a little hard to ignore, but it was kind of funny that he was trying so hard not to make it obvious. Sigh, boys were so distracted sometimes!

"Ohh, that guy!" Lorna said, standing up straight again. She hadn't talked to Scott before, but she had seen him around. After all, there were only so many people in the school. It was kind of funny to her that they were brothers, too, because already they seemed pretty different. "Was he your brother in the same house, or did you guys have some massive family reunion here? Because those happen a lot in this place."

Alex grinned, mostly because he couldn't stop it. He knew that there were others recently-reunited (or long-lost) siblings in the school, but it was funny to think of the place like that, like a depot for picking up stray relatives. It probably wasn't appropriate, given how sad a lot of their stories were, but he just couldn't hold it back. He figured it was probably the cute girl's fault. Somehow. With her cuteness.

"Our parents have been gone a long time," he explained, not without some small pang of grief. It was more for ... memories of memories than anything really concrete, though; he remembered what they looked like, little snippets of disconnected events and images, but nothing really solid. "Scott grew up in the system, I got adopted." He lowered his voice conspiratorily. "By crazy people."

It probably sounded ungrateful to say it, but they were. Not throw-shit-at-the-walls-and-then-eat-your-skin crazy, but, yeah. Not quite right, either.

"Well, you're lucky to be here, then. I don't think there's that many crazy people in the school," Lorna told him, and flashed him a grin in return. She wasn't sure what to make of that, but she had never been adopted herself, so she couldn't say she knew any of what Alex had gone through. Maybe Lorna had grown up without a father, but her mother had always been good to her. She also wasn't expecting this guy to just drop his whole life story to her within their first meeting.

"I think you'll fit in here, Alex," she decided. "You match to the place, family reunions and all!"

He grinned broadly--and probably a little stupidly--to hear that, right at first. But then he thought about it a little harder, and his face slowly screwed up into as close to a thoughtful expression as he was ever likely to get. "Don't get me wrong, Lorna, it's really cool you think so," really, really cool, "but I've had a look through some of the public journals. I think the ratio of crazy to not-crazy might be a little skewed."

Alex's smile was quick to return, though; how could it not, when a pretty girl was talking to him, and (apparently) not getting bored or immediately deciding he was a nutjob? "Guess it's all relative, though. And I've never really fit a type before, so that's a little bit awesome. Anyhow, it beats the pants off my old school in Nebraska. Even with the body condom, and all." He glanced back at the containment suit.

Lorna smirked at that response. It was too bad that he had to wear that thing, but it was better than what happened without it, right? The guy was right about this place being better than whatever his school had been, too. Lorna may have never seen it for herself, but she knew that mutant school trumped every human school in existence. She may have liked the academics, but the students and teachers had always been something undesirable for her.

"It beats out my old school, too, and I'm from San Francisco--it's supposed to be a pretty good place to live, but yet---no," Lorna told him. "We're just all better off sticking together, especially now."

She tilted her head just a bit, and gave Alex a curious look. "Has it been crazy out there because of the video?"

Alex suddenly looked uncomfortable, shifting restlessly. "Yeah. I mean, the Blandings--that was my adoptive family--they knew I had manifested before that, and that had them freaked enough, but when that video started making the rounds online ... Well, yeah. It got kinda crazy."

He knew that they hadn't really wanted him around after that; it had been pretty obvious. But they were too nice (even if they were a bunch of weirdos) to actually do anything about it--it wasn't like they'd have actually thrown him out on the street, or anything. But they had definitely been relieved when the Prof and Mr. Lensherr had come by and offered to take him off their hands.

"That was probably a special case, though," he added. "I was so wrapped up in my own shit, I don't think I really noticed what the rest of the world was doing. I was scared as hell, but I probably wasn't in the best kind of headspace then, you know? I could have
just been jumping at shadows."

"Mhmm," Lorna hummed. It was a little interesting to see someone's reaction to the video who hadn't been living here when it had been released. After her conversations with Pietro and with Tessa, comparing Alex's reaction seemed so different. Alex seemed a little more uncomfortable with it than a lot of kids, she noted, and that was likely due to circumstance. After all, it was one thing to watch when you were protected in a safe place, but alone in the world? It'd be like finally seeing someone like you, and watching hatred being thrown. It'd be disconcerting, Lorna thought.

"It is safer here. I'd say you don't have to worry, but I'd be lying, so you know," Lorna continued, then gave Alex a tiny smile. "Parents can be weird about it, though. They act like they're scared of you, but at the same time, they try to pretend they're not. Well...at least the ones that don't throw you out, anyways."

"Yeah," Alex agreed vaguely. Somehow, it felt ungrateful to be saying these things out loud. Sure, they hadn't been his real family, but ... "The Blandings ... well, it wasn't always easy, but they always looked out for me. I don't think they would have, you know, tried to return me, or anything. I guess they just didn't know what to do. We were all kind of in a panic, but trying to act like everything was fine."

He glanced over at the containment suit. But you're right. It's safer for me, safer for everyone, if I'm here. Less likely anyone will get hurt." Whether deliberately or by accident. Frankly, Alex wasn't sure which thought scared him more.

"As long as you wear your containment suit, right?" Lorna asked as her eyes flickered over to the very object. She was in the same boat as Alex when it came to keeping people safe, she thought. Since Lorna's powers were tied to her emotions, she needed very badly to learn not only how to balance the two, but to make sure she didn't get overly emotional. There were a lot of control issues in her path to learning about her powers, and though she was doing fairly well now, she still had a long way to go in order to make sure no one got hurt by her accidentally because she was having a bad day. "Where did you even get that from?"

"Doctor MacTaggert and the Professor cooked it up," he replied, tugging self consciously at the tight black under-lining. "It helps keep my energy output stable, so I don't have anymore accidents." And that made it sound like he'd pissed himself, instead of knocking over and/or incinerating half a gymnasium. Christ. "Gotta wear it at least five hours a day for it to be effective, though. It's totally lame--like being stuck in one of those fat-guy suits. But I guess it's better than the alternative."

"Don't feel bad about it," Lorna told him, shaking her head. "It's just part of who you are now. If that's what you gotta do to keep your powers controlled, then that's what you gotta do. Powers are different for everyone, destructive or not. You're lucky that you have a suit like that to help you get control. Me? I have to control my emotions, or else things start flying."

She reached out and touched his shoulder just for a moment. "Remember, it could always be worse."

Yeah, that pretty much summed up Alex's whole life philosophy, to that point. It could always be worse. And usually, that was the way things tended to trend. Still, he appreciated that she cared enough to try to help--and she was touching his arm, which was nice. Plus, she had her own shit to deal with, so it wasn't like she didn't know what she was talking about, the way most people who'd said that to him before hadn't.

He smiled. "Gotta do what we gotta do, huh? I can get behind that, I guess." He rocked back on the balls of his feet, then stretched a bit. "So, what did I interrupt with my spectacular entrance? You hang out in the gym a lot?"

Lorna pulled back and smiled, placing a hand on her hip. "Usually I try for a workout every day, but my favourite thing to do is go to the library and check out every genetic or archaeology book available. I'm a total geek, okay, but I still like to stretch and burn energy. It's helpful, and it makes me feel good. If my body feels good, and my mind feels good, then my powers are tip top!"

It was hard not to grin at that description. "I get you. I'm a geek, too, but mostly for the earth sciences, like geology and plate tectonics and all that stuff. I can get wrapped up in it for hours, even though I know it's kind of lame." Alex checked out the empty gym. "Maybe a regular workout would help with my powers issues, too. Couldn't hurt, right?" Of course, having a cute gym buddy that didn't seem to mind talking to him that much would definitely help. With sticking to a workout routine, at least. "That is, if you don't mind. If I join you, I mean."

Lorna's face brightened at Alex's response, and she gestured from herself, back to Alex. "Okay, you and me are gonna be friends, because I love that science stuff! We can geek out together, and I promise I won't ever think it's lame, because it's interesting. So on top of that gym stuff, you got a study buddy, too."

Lorna chuckled, and walked a few feet over to the side, so she could sit on the floor and start some sit ups. "Maybe you'll even stop staring at me eventually, too," she mused, shooting him a smirk before she started her exercising.

"Heh! Yeah, maybe." Not too likely, but he supposed anything was possible. He could go blind, or something, like Mrs. Blanding had always told him he would, if he didn't stop ... but no. Not going there.

Instead, he joined her on the floor and began his own set of sit ups. This was, in spite of all expectations, turning out to be the Best Day Ever.