Claudia and Kitty, Mid-Halloween Party

[om_shadowcat]

Kitty and Claudia meet at the party. It's a little awkward, but the girls try?

After sheepishly skulking back up the stairs from the basement with Sokka, Kitty had retreated to the concessions to try and contain her excitement at the discovery that she could, in fact, take someone with her when phasing. Of course, she'd never wanted to try before, because it was risky, but her and Sokka's little accident had proved that it was perfectly safe - well, okay, maybe not perfectly - and that maybe she could try it again on purpose after the party was over.

Think of the possibilities, Pryde!

Grinning maniacally to herself and grabbing up a plateful of goodies, Kitty made her way down the table toward the punch, hoping that someone hadn't spiked it. Not that it had been spiked at the masquerade, but at this school, you never knew!

Claudia had been half-waiting for Kitty to return, just because she'd wanted to meet her since they'd sorta talked online. It was utterly cool to have other people to talk tech with, and even though she hadn't really been keen on the whole party thing, it had turned into a way to get to know her fellow students. Maybe even she could eventually trust one or two. But she hadn't gone up to many, since she didn't really know anyone well yet.

After that accident on the dancefloor, though, she hadn't been able to help herself feeling a little excited. That had been pretty awesome, but a little scary. Even knowing that it was theoretically possible to take advantage of the fact that even the most solid of matter was mostly empty space didn't prepare you for seeing it happen. So, a little curiosity and initiative had her filling two plastic cups with the punch, and offering one to Kirry.

"You all right?"

"Oh!" Kitty took the punch with a grin. "Yeah! I mean, awesome, really. More than awesome. I just like, love learning new stuff about my power, you know? But yeah. Food. Have you seen this spread? You're Claudia, right?"

"Might have noticed a bit, yeah," Claudia said, grinning. "And yeah, that'd be me. Didn't really have time to pick out much of a costume."

She had sampled just about everything, because it was there and nobody was going to yell at her for pigging out. "The food here is amazing."

"Isn't it? I swear it's like, we're lucky that mutant metabolisms are crazy because I would be huge right about now if not!" Kitty proclaimed. Leading the way over to some tables and chairs brought in, she plopped down into one and reached for a ghoulishly decorated cookie.

"How are you settling in to Mutant High?"

"Could be worse, I guess," Claudia admitted. "Everyone's so nice. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Although I think Mogwai might unnerve my roommate." She pulled a chair around, perching on it backwards with her arms crosssed over the back.

"Once upon a time, he was a Furby. Most of his insides have been replaced by now, though. I still need to see about getting him hooked up to the internet here."

Kitty's face lit up and she straightened, waving her cookie around. "Mogwai! That's awesome! Can you get him wet?"

Eyes laughing as she munched on her treat, she waved toward her 'date', dressed in ordinary Tony attire with fiber-optics running up his back in true Cylon style. "Tony's networked into about everything right now, and there's a girl here who can operate any tech just with her mind! I've even got Lockheed networked in, so he can tell me when classes are cancelled or, you know, Tony's blown something up."

"Nah, he's still surface clean only," Claudia said. She was trying to hide her discomfort at the idea of explosions, especially lab related. "So that's the great and terrible Tony Stark, huh? Is he really that dangerous in the lab? I've never blown anything up. Sometimes there's a little overheating, but that's why you test things along the way.

"And who's Lockheed?"

"We joke about the explosions," Kitty smiled warmly. "Personally, I don't think Tony would ever let anything blow up that he didn't want it to. He's pretty sharp about keeping things controlled. Besides, he's never done anything like that in our workshop. Mostly, he's just working on a holographic interactive matrix."

After finishing her cookie, she reached into the pocket of her Ninja (yoga) pants and pulled out her phone, setting it on the table between them. On the screen, the animated image of a dragon peered back at Claudia, puffing smoke from his nostrils.

"Claudia, meet Lockheed, my AI dragon assistant."

"Dude, that's totally awesome," Claudia said. "Mogwai's more like that Siri app on the iPhones. Speech analysis and response to cues. So I didn't have to fight for the one computer in the house when I needed to looks something up. He does have my version of the Eliza conversation matrix, but that's totally shallow, mostly just restating what you said as a question when it doesn't match any of his normal functions."

But she'd had what she'd had, and aside from being able to salvage EPROMs off broken calculators, or the occasional trip to an electronics or hardware store, she liked working in limited scenarios.

"Hi, Lockheed. What are you up to?" she asked, grinning into the phone to see how this one worked. Nothing like seeing how others interpreted a common problem.

"Qusss," the phone responded, and beside Lockheed's head, an icon shaped like a camera appeared in a talk-bubble beside his head.

"He, uhm," Kitty grinned sheepishly, "Doesn't speak English, cause, you know, dragon. But he's telling you that he's taking pictures and video of the party."

"Interesting choice," Claudia said, grinning. "Furbish was the second thing I took out, after that demonic chuckle. But then, I wasn't even really trying for AI any more than the original programming was. Even the whole learning words thing was a total fake out. And that's pretty cool. Pictures and video for embarrassing montages come graduation?"

She was mostly joking, but she wouldn't have minded having video of her family, or even more than the handful of pictures that remained. "So, what else have you done, and what needs improving around here? Besides common kitchen appliances."

Kitty sat back, munching on another cookie as she set her phone upright on the table and facing the crowd. Lockheed would target suitable photo opportunities when he wanted to. "Um, just some upgrades to different electronics really. Most of mine time's been spent working on my AI. I added voice activation to the DVD player, and created a breakfast appliance for mine and Dana's room that has coffee, toast, and a waffle ready when you wake up. I've been taking a look at the Danger Gym and have been helping Tony with some of his projects too."

"Well, I got the toaster in the last place I was living to use an optical scan of the inserted object to determine what kind of bread or pastry it was and adjust the heating times appropriately, so you wouldn't have to keep changing settings," Claudia pointed out. "I guess I play a little more with what things do than just code. Not that I can't crack a system wide open if I want to. Mostly I just try and make things run the way I find best, and then improve performance or function. I wish I had access to fuel cells and the like. Miniaturizing common things. With the sensitivity in the modern bone conduction microphones, and voice activated interfaces, you might be able to make a cell phone the size of a largish hearing aid, for example. Battery life and signal strength might be problematic, though."

"Yeah, you definitely need to meet Tony," Kitty grinned. "For both the access to parts and the phone thing. He's working on a design himself, actually. Well, technically he's already got a working prototype, but, you know, Tony's always tweaking. You really need to come see our lab!"

"I was talking with Scott about doing something for keeping calls under the radar. I guess to coordinate when something happens out there," Claudia said, with a vague gesture implying the world beyond Xavier's. "I was thinking that if you do a tight-band encryption and piggyback in the video portions of satellite and broadcast television, it'd be a long time before anyone realizes there's something more than sunspots or other natural problems with signal. It wasn't the kind of thing I let myself think much about because it'd be too easy to misuse. Everyone knows cell phones are easy to tap, so anyone doing anything underhanded would love to fix that problem."

"Hrrrrm," Kitty tapped a lip thoughtfully as she worked through the problem in her head. "There'd be the telltale blip in the video, but probably not enough to be too noticeable. Hacking the encryption for satellite would actually hide better than terrestrial feeds due to the technology available. That's especially true for satellites with fewer security protocols than American systems."

"A few dropped pixels or a lag in the keyframing at worst," Claudia said, a little dismissively. "And I'm not worried about security. The part that bugs me is that a satellite signal generally doesn't have enough power to go beyond line-of-sight. And if we up the gain, that's going to beg to be noticed. We'll need to plan on some kind of local repeater if we want it to work within buildings or underground. Same problem you get with cell phones."

She liked the puzzle, and building a set of prototypes would be fun. Tackling the programming for the hack was actually going to be the hardest part, as near as she could tell. A transmitter was a transmitter was a transmitter, after all.

"You know, depending on whether we were doing this with the headmasters' knowledge or not, they've got the funds and resources to make the repeaters no problem at all," Kitty pointed out. "But. Uhm, did Scott say we want to keep this under the faculty radar?"

"I don't think so. I mean, I think he wanted a way to coordinate team stuff. Like if there was another major rescue needed," Claudia said, frowning. "He seems pretty paranoid about safety. Not that I blame him, there's plenty of folks out there who either hate or fear us for being different."

"So no problem!" Kitty smiled. "Between you, me, Tony, and the Ninja Hacking Squad, we've got that totally covered. We can probably come up with something stellar and sneaky."

"Who said I needed help hacking?" Claudia protested, but she was still grinning. "If there's rules I understand, I can totally bend them to do whatever I can think up. But some things do go faster with more hands. And it will give me time to figure out how to put some kind of identity detection on the super-toaster."

Kitty raised her hands in surrender. "Hey, I'm not stepping on anyone's hacky-toes. I'm better with the mechanical side anyhow. Now that I'm getting better with my phasing, I'm thinking of diving headfirst into the Danger Gym's circuit boards and seeing about what could use a bit of a boost."

"I needed it when I thought I could sell some of my stuff," Claudia admitted. "Nobody's going to buy bleeding edge tech from someone who just started high school."

Kitty thought that there were all types of creeps out there that would buy that kind of stuff, but she didn't bother expressing that opinion to Claudia, especially because she wasn't sure what the girl was doing trying to sell it in the first place, and wasn't sure she wanted to know. At least not until she knew her a little better. "Well, whatever. I can just stay out of your way," the brunette smiled.

Claudia felt a little guilty about the way the other girl looked right now. "Sorry, it's just that I've been on my own for a long time," she said. "It's still a little weird having people wanting to get to know the freakazoid in their midst."

At the name Claudia used, Kitty's smile finally faltered. "Well, here, we all are. Freakazoids. Or, you know, whatever."

"I was a one of the outcasts long before I found out I was a mutant," Claudia admitted. "When you can explain the theory of relativity using playground equipment in kindergarten, you kinda stick out. But that was because of my brother's research. He was a physicist."

"That's. Uhm, cool," Kitty tried, but a sinking feeling had settled in her stomach. She'd been an outcast before she'd come to Xavier's too, and the reminder kind of dulled the excitement of meeting someone new. She supposed it might have been jealousy tinting her reaction too. No one had ever tried to compete with her in terms of intelligence before, but this new girl had all the skills she had, plus a mutation that helped it along. She bit down on the urge to worry about that, and instead experimented with a friendly smile again. "You must be really proud of him."

"He...died," Claudia said, looking away. She didn't want to talk about that. The day she'd become truly alone. "It was a long time ago, and I don't talk about it much. S'not like I can change anything."

Kitty's inadequacies fled in the face of that announcement, and her mouth opened in a round little 'o.' "Claudia, I'm so sorry. I...that's. Is there anything I can do?"

Claudia hated how people always tried to be sympathetic and asked stupid questions like they could change anything. For months she'd held on to a belief that since they hadn't actually found a body, maybe the experiment had worked, at least a little, but Joshua wouldn't have left her behind, not like that.

"Like I said, it was a long time ago. Ancient history, even," she said, although it was a bit of lie. Claudia wasn't sure she'd ever be over what had happened to her family, but it just made her determined not to let anyone else get hurt because of her. "I do have all his journals and stuff. From what he was working on. So maybe I can finish what he started."

Recognizing that she wasn't making anything better with her sympathies, Kitty quickly stuffed a cookie in her mouth and started munching to keep herself from saying anything else immediately. She nodded vigorously at the suggestion about looking over Claudia's brother's research, though, attempting to say through the munching that she would love to!

Claudia smiled, a little shyly. "Call it a trade? You show me your lab and all that, and I'll bring his research? Not that it's really a bargain kind of thing."

"Sure," Kitty smiled, as soon as she finished chewing.

"Then it's a date," Claudia said, grinning. Not in the romantic sense, of course, because, well, not her thing. She wasn't sure why anyone would look twice at someone like her, except maybe to get at what she could do. "Oh, right, you mentioned a ninja hacking squad. Anyone I might have met?"

"Uhmmm," Kitty tapped her lips, and tried to point out the kids as she saw them. "So there's Tessa, who's kind of scary serious and can think like a computer - like seriously, she processes information faster than I can talk! And then there's Barbara, who is gorgeous, ohmygosh, and she can talk to computers with her mind, so has like, her hands in all the security pies ever. Finally, there's the kid over there? That's Jensen. He's a telekinetic, but he spends like, 75% of his day breaking into top-secret facilities or something. He's awesome at it even without the mutant power."

"Nothing wrong with peeking around a few places where you shouldn't be looking," Claudia said, a little shiftily. "I've done it a time or three. For research, only, of course. I did notice the firewalls here were above par. Not hacker-proof, but then, nothing is if you're willing to put in the time, but it'd take someone months if not years to find a crack worth exploiting."

"The firewalls might not be, but between Babs, Jensen, and Tessa, there ain't nobody getting through," Kitty shrugged with a smile.

Claudia looked a little nervous at that. "I guess it's a good thing all I did was look, and not touch."

Kitty pushed up from her seat, starting to get the feeling that this was a game of sorts, and not sure she felt like playing. Besides, she had Tony to get back to, and at this point, she was actually starting to feel a little possessive about being his minion. Which...was weird, and she would never admit to anyone. "I'm sure it's fine! They're all awesome people. Swear. But uhm, I should go find the cylon before he starts plotting to take over the universe or something."

"Does he really need a babysitter that much?" Claudia asked, honestly curious. "Anyway, I'll see you around for sure."

She knew an exit line when she heard it, and as much as she wanted to know everything she could, she didn't really know how to ask, without being weird about things. Claudia didn't understand why she wanted to connect with these people, since the ones around her tended to get hurt. After Joshua, she hadn't wanted to let anyone in, but she didn't want to just use these folks for what she could learn.

"Babysitter? Nah. Spy...probably!" Kitty grinned. "It was good to meet you. Email me when you wanna see the lab."

Claudia gave her a sharp, almost military salute in affirmative, then spoiled it by laughing. "We'll make the appliances so useful people will forget what normal ones can't do."