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Paul and Cal - Backdated
Cal gets a roommate, and enjoys drifting mid-air some more.
Cal was an only child; he'd never had to share his room with anyone. He had just about settled into his room, and the school, when he was told he was getting a roommate. Fucking brilliant. Hopefully the guy wouldn't be too much of an asshole, and even more hopefully, his mutation would be a cool one.
He was on his laptop in his room, wondering at what time the guy would show up, and killing time by watching some College Humour videos. If the Cable Guy in Porn was from Time Warner was pretty funny, but there had to be better. He might just end up watching What if Google was a Guy again.
Sharing a room wasn't anything new to Paul. Everything else was new to him, though, which was why he was wary as he followed directions along the corridors of what had to be the biggest building he'd been in in his life. He hefted the bag on his shoulder more out of uneasiness than because of the weight, took another turn, and stopped outside the door.
Right. New room, new people. New person, that had to be easier to deal with than a whole group of people, right? Or not.
Whatever. It wasn't like he actually needed the room for shelter or for sleeping if the guy turned out to be a complete dick.
Taking a deep breath, he tapped his knuckles against the door, pushing gently to see if it would open, or if it had been latched or locked out of some need for privacy. He'd walked in on things he hadn't wanted to see before, and that wouldn't be a great introduction.
Was that him? Cal hit pause and leaned back in his desk chair as he called out, "Come on in!"
Okay. In, then. Paul bent his head for a moment, then carefully pushed the door open, dropping the bag off his shoulder to his hand to narrow his breadth as he leaned in to the room. "Hey. Are you expecting a roommate in here?"
"Yeah, yeah I am," Cal confirmed, studying the guy without any self-consciousness. White, blond, average height, no obvious physical mutation that Cal could tell. Pretty basic, at first sight. "I'm Cal Rankin. Come on in," he invited him, standing up from his chair.
"Thanks." Right room, then, and not a complete dick who'd get off on telling the new guy wrong information to send him off track. Not an obvious freak, either.
Paul moved into the room, glancing around for a moment for somewhere safe to put his bag down, then turned his attention back to Cal. Cal, who looking disturbingly normal. "I'm Paul Bolton. New guy."
"Figured," Cal confirmed, and walked forward to offer the guy a hand. His power did its thing when he stepped within range, and he suddenly felt warmer than he had, as if he was back in warm Cali rather than stuck here in freezing New York. "Obviously, I took that side," he added with a nod at the side of the room he had been sitting on, full of his stuff - although he was pretty tidy, at least.
"Obviously," Paul agreed, taking the offered hand with a certain amount of care not to squeeze too tightly, though he wasn't getting anything through the contact except, yeah, contact. Felt human, as much as Cal looked human as well. "You've, uh, I guess you've been here a while?"
"Not that long, actually," Cal answered, pushing his hands in his pockets as they chatted. "Just long enough to get settled in, pretty much." His side of the room, at least, seemed typical of a young American teenager. There was a Kings poster by his bed, and his laptop and phone (the new model, courtesy of Tony Stark) were on his desk, along with textbooks and notes from his classes. The only thing missing were pictures of anybody that might matter in his life; none were visible. "Did they warn you about my mutation?" He wasn't sure what the protocol was, here.
Paul shook his head, and tried to surreptitiously check that his feet were still in contact with the ground. "I guess they thought we'd work that out between us but I don't know how these things go. Like, is it rude to ask someone if it's not obvious? Did they warn you about mine?"
It probably needed warning. He wasn't sure how random flying and warmth would be a problem, but the strength thing was... yeah. That was potentially pretty scary.
"They didn't even tell me your name, dude," Cal replied with a shake of his head. "And I don't know about the etiquette. Some kids are way touchy about it, but for most, I think it's pretty much the basic get-to-know-you question." And he was really hoping Paul wouldn't end up in the touchy club, given what Cal's mutation was. "I copy abilities. Including mutations. I'm feeling warm all the way to my fingertips right now."
"Yeah, that's probably me," Paul admitted, before getting caught up in the sheer weirdness of that. That he wasn't cold, wearing a t-shirt and jeans in a New York winter, and that he was standing across from a guy who was feeling that because he copied... mutations. Right. Better get used to thinking of himself that way. Mutant. Yay. "Are you just sort of automatic? Or can you, like, decide if you want to or not?"
"I've been working on shutting it off, but it's still in the experimental stages for now," Cal replied with a one-shouldered shrug, hands still in his pockets. "There's some maladaptive mutations out there, so the sooner I figure it out the better." He wouldn't be chatting with the Kevin kid for a while yet. Or that chick with the metal glove things.
Paul nodded slowly. "How far does it go? I mean, if I'm across the other side of the room am I not sort of spilling over onto you?" Probably should explain what was spilling over, but it was kind of important to know if it was going to be an inescapable problem for Cal.
"It's about ten feet right now," Cal replied, running a hand back through his hair. "But it was half that when I manifested, so it might keep increasing." There was no way of knowing when he would reach his limit, or if he even had one.
"So if we're in bed - uh, separately," Paul added hastily. "Opposite sides of the room. Then you wouldn't pick up on me?"
Cal shot a look at the two beds. "Probably not. Why?" He wasn't sure why it mattered so much.
"Because I don't seem to need sleep," Paul admitted, pushing both hands into his pockets. "So if I stopped you getting sleep and then you were further away so that stopped, I don't... that seems like it would be pretty bad."
"Right," Cal acknowledged as the knowledge came to him, confirming Paul's words. He looked back at the beds, then back at Paul. "Let's move them as much apart as we can?" Better safe than sorry, and he moved to do just that with his own bed, a lot more easily than if Paul hadn't been around. In fact, one hand was enough to push it where he wanted it. This could definitely come in handy.
Paul waited until Cal had moved his bed before moving to shift his own, out of the ten foot radius and pushing it back gently until it was pressed up against the wall, as far from the other bed as possible. "I sort of run on sunlight, it seems. So I can sleep and I can eat, but I don't need to. Sometimes I forget."
"Yeah, I get the knowledge that I need to use your abilities, so - yeah," Cal confirmed, needlessly. "Flight is pretty awesome. I already went with one of the kids here." As in he wasn't just saying that the concept of flying was cool, but that actually flying was.
"You might know more than I do, then." Paul offered a small smile, reaching to pull his bag back against the bed, out of the way. "It's still, uh. Pretty new."
"Yeah, no, I'm getting my knowledge off of you," Cal assured the guy, rocking on his heels slightly as he watched him move about the place. "Whatever you know about your abilities, I know, nothing more."
"Be careful about gravity, then," he said wryly. "Doesn't always do what I'm expecting any more."
"Yeah, I've been - having to think about staying on the ground," Cal confirmed with a half-smile. "Pretty novel."
Paul nodded, shrugged, bit his lip on a smile, and let himself drift up, slightly surprised still that it happened and that it was a fairly gentle move rather than having much force behind it. "Tends to freak people out a bit. Still freaks me out a bit, too."
"Are you kidding?" Cal asked, and let himself join his new roommate in mid air. "It's fuckin' awesome." It felt even more natural to do it with Paul's powers than with Eileen's. Eileen had to will herself off the ground. Paul's default seemed to be floating around.
Startled into laughter, Paul drifted higher for a moment before steadying, smile spreading to a grin. "You think?"
"One thing about this that isn't awesome," Cal challenged him with raised eyebrows, grin matching Paul's.
"Normal people freaking out when they see it," Paul said, dry and instant. "Most people, if they go over something, they come down again."
"Well, that's not gonna happen here," Cal pointed out without losing his grin. "And there's way weirder stuff around. There's a couple kids that look like lizards, dude."
Paul hesitated. "Do they fly, too?"
"Not that I know of," Cal replied, making it sound like you couldn't really rule it out anyway. "But at least one of them has the..." He tried to imitate it with his hand by his mouth. "Jar Jar tongue."
"The what?" Paul echoed, clueless. "Jar tongue? Like glass?"
"No, Jar Jar - Jar Jar Binks, Star Wars?" Cal explained - or thought he did, anyway. Everybody knew the atrocity that was Jar Jar Binks.
"Some sci fi thing, right?" Carefully, Paul settled his feet back onto the ground. Practice at appearing normal was probably a good thing.
"Are you serious?" Cal asked before he could help himself. Everybody knew Star Wars. He remained in mid-air, and pretty happy to be there. "Dude, we're having a movie night some time soon. It's not a sci fi thing. It's the sci fi thing."
"I'm serious," Paul agreed, grinning at the disbelief. "Sci fi isn't really my kind of thing, it never has been. So I've never seen, like, Star Wars or Trek or whatever the other options for stars are. Dust?"
"Yeah, that probably exists as well," Cal agreed distractedly, because Stardust or no Stardust wasn't the question here. At all. It sounded more like a glam rock band than a movie, anyway. "Well, you wanna give it a try some day, you let me know. Wars or Trek, but like, the recent Trek." Those movies kicked ass. "And in the meantime, you got any questions about the school, you let me know?" Cal offered, drifting closer to his desk. "Even if I don't know the answers, we can try and figure it out together."
"Questions like what's the deal?" Didn't seem real, at all. Off the street and they'd given him clothes and shelter and offered food and talked about school and he thought someone might even have mentioned an allowance and he couldn't figure out what he was meant to be doing in return for all of that.
"Yeah, that's the one we're all wondering about," Cal agreed, rubbing a hand at the back of his neck as he hovered over his chair. "But the kids that've been here longer say it all seems kosher, so..." He shrugged. "Even their squad things aren't mandatory. Did you sign up for that?"
Paul nodded, backed up, and sat on the bed. Nearly on the bed, anyway. Just about an inch above it. He'd get better when he'd learned the height. "Yeah, I used to do military stuff at school, so... Made sense, sort of."
Cal nodded, "Cool." He'd signed up as well, mostly because he wanted to learn to use as many mutations as possible. "Where are you from, anyway?"
"Upstate," Paul said vaguely, and dropped the last inch onto the bed. "It's... I don't even know where it is from here. I'm not really sure where here is, honestly."
"Somewhere on the East Coast?" Cal offered with a self-depricating grin. He wasn't big on East Coast geography, never mind New York geography... but he was playing it up, because he'd looked into it since getting here. "We're actually in the way southern part of the state. Below us is pretty much just New York City and Long Island."
"Definitely upstate of here, then," Paul agreed. "Upstate New York, but not New Jersey. Are you from further away, then?" Sounded like it, from the vagueness. Anyone from New York state knew where it sat on the coast.
"Northern Cali," Cal confirmed. Bit further - other side of the country and all. "This feels like my first real winter." Well, not anymore really, not with all that warmth - it felt (fortunately) completely different from Alex's heat, in a very good way.
"Is it a cold one?" It was weird, a bit, not to feel the cold. There was warm and less warm, but not actual cold, never to the point of discomfort. Not any more.
"For me? Sure," Cal confirmed easily, as a smile stretched his lips. "Not so much right this second, but..." He shrugged, his tone and expression suggesting that he had no issue with that, on the contrary. "I can't speak for New York natives, though."
"I can't feel it," Paul admitted. "I guess you already know that, though, if you're picking up on what I am."
"Yeaaaah, all I'm feeling is warm all over," Cal confirmed. "Like hitting the beach on a sunny day, except it's all inside. It's nice." Between that and the way he was still hovering over his desk chair, he really didn't seem to have any trouble adjusting to his roommate's mutation.
Less trouble than Paul was having, apparently. "I guess it could be worse," he said slowly. "I mean, if I was shooting lasers from my hands or something and didn't know how to turn it off."
"There's this guy here, shoots concussive force blasts out of his eyes, and he can't turn it off," Cal agreed. "Ruby quartz glasses all the time. I give him a wide berth in the hallways," he added, his tone a mixture of warm and wry. "And he's just one of the kids with a maladaptive mutation. You're good. Really." As far as he was concerned, there was absolutely nothing wrong with Paul's mutation.
Paul winced. "Poor guy. That sounds rough to deal with. For you too, I guess, if you get too close to him. Does yours work through walls and stuff, too? If someone walks past outside are you in danger of, uh, picking up on them?"
Cal pursed his lips thoughtfully. "I guess, if they're close enough?" he eventually settled on. "I get full up, though - like, when I'm in class, I can't pick up the mutation of everybody around me, my body seems to put a cap on that. And I'm figuring out how not to do it. Or how to drop it. Give me a sec." He lowered himself into his desk chair, then focused for a moment, and the very discreet little glow to his skin disappeared as he managed to drop Paul's mutation. "And here I am, gravity-bound and kinda chilly again. I can't pull it off every time just yet, but I'm working on it."
"That's pretty cool." Pun not intended, but acknowledged with a faint grin. "Does stuff stay with you, though? I mean, I... I don't know how to even say this without it sounding stupid. I seem to heal? Without doctors and stuff, I mean. So if you picked that up from me and then you weren't, would you keep that or would you get sick or hurt again?"
"I have no idea," Cal replied with a frown, thinking it over. "I doubt the wound would reappear. It seems unlikely my cells would remember that they're supposed to be hurt, although they remember what they're supposed to be like... Hey, let's find out," he offered, grabbing a nearby piece of paper. "Paper cut," he added, before Paul might think he was going to find out in a way dramatic fashion.
Paper cuts were bitches, but if it reappeared after he'd healed, it wouldn't be the end of the world. "You'd heal that in no time, right?"
"Seconds," Paul agreed, relieved, because that really could have been a lot more dramatic and a lot less practical. "Sure you want to do that?"
"Seems like the quickest way to find out," Cal answered with a shrug, and ran the pad of his left hand's ring finger along the edge of the paper (a history assignment). That wasn't a finger he used a lot, just in case it didn't stay healed. "And I'd rather find out ahead of time, in case I ever have to rely on somebody's healing powers."
He winced as the paper sliced a thin cut across his skin, and instinctively brought the injured finger to his mouth to suck on it for a second. As he did, he stopped ignoring the buzz of the mutation waiting to be copied and willingly went for it, pulling his finger from his mouth before his lips twitched at the return of that lovely warmth. He hoped this never got old.
He watched the cut heal on his finger, then looked over at Paul with a half-smile. "Moment of truth, right?" He let go of the mutation... and was very fucking glad to see that the cut wasn't making a comeback. Despite the loss of the warmth (and the return of gravity being a thing), he was smiling as he prodded at his fingertip. "I'm all good. You had me worried for a second there."
"Better to know now than if you need it, I guess." And Paul was hoping that would stay as an if, not a when. "And I guess there's probably someone out there who could cancel me out, too, so it's good for me to know as well."
"...huh," Cal let out thoughtfully, putting the paper back where it belonged, and copying Paul's mutation again, just because it felt damn nice. And he made zero effort to stay on his chair. "I don't think we have anyone that does that here."
Mostly he was wondering how it would work, his mutation and that mutation. Whoever was fastest, probably? But then would he keep having the power if he'd used it on the guy (or girl) before they could use it on him? There was so much about his own mutation he still didn't know, for all that his father and he had tried to figure out.
Paul was still trying to stay on the bed, working to give at least the appearance of being subject to gravity. "I don't know what it would feel like being without it now," he admitted. "I guess I'd be pretty hungry?"
Cal thought it over; yet another puzzle. "I don't know. It depends how the power loss goes exactly - you run on sunlight, you said? That solar energy inside you, it would have to go somewhere, if you were depowered. It wouldn't be crazy to think you wouldn't feel hungry straight away."
Then again, without really looking into it, Cal was pretty much talking out of his ass. His father would have frowned, but he wasn't fucking here, was he, so that was that.
"Anyway," he smiled again, friendly and perhaps warmer than it would have been if it weren't for his own current warmth. That shit was awesome. "Welcome to Mutant High."
"Here's hoping I don't have to find out," Paul said wryly, and smiled back. "Thanks. And thanks for not, you know. Freaking out."
"Nobody's gonna freak here, dude," Cal assured him just as warmly. "Everybody here makes up all the colors of the freaky rainbow, right?"
Cal was an only child; he'd never had to share his room with anyone. He had just about settled into his room, and the school, when he was told he was getting a roommate. Fucking brilliant. Hopefully the guy wouldn't be too much of an asshole, and even more hopefully, his mutation would be a cool one.
He was on his laptop in his room, wondering at what time the guy would show up, and killing time by watching some College Humour videos. If the Cable Guy in Porn was from Time Warner was pretty funny, but there had to be better. He might just end up watching What if Google was a Guy again.
Sharing a room wasn't anything new to Paul. Everything else was new to him, though, which was why he was wary as he followed directions along the corridors of what had to be the biggest building he'd been in in his life. He hefted the bag on his shoulder more out of uneasiness than because of the weight, took another turn, and stopped outside the door.
Right. New room, new people. New person, that had to be easier to deal with than a whole group of people, right? Or not.
Whatever. It wasn't like he actually needed the room for shelter or for sleeping if the guy turned out to be a complete dick.
Taking a deep breath, he tapped his knuckles against the door, pushing gently to see if it would open, or if it had been latched or locked out of some need for privacy. He'd walked in on things he hadn't wanted to see before, and that wouldn't be a great introduction.
Was that him? Cal hit pause and leaned back in his desk chair as he called out, "Come on in!"
Okay. In, then. Paul bent his head for a moment, then carefully pushed the door open, dropping the bag off his shoulder to his hand to narrow his breadth as he leaned in to the room. "Hey. Are you expecting a roommate in here?"
"Yeah, yeah I am," Cal confirmed, studying the guy without any self-consciousness. White, blond, average height, no obvious physical mutation that Cal could tell. Pretty basic, at first sight. "I'm Cal Rankin. Come on in," he invited him, standing up from his chair.
"Thanks." Right room, then, and not a complete dick who'd get off on telling the new guy wrong information to send him off track. Not an obvious freak, either.
Paul moved into the room, glancing around for a moment for somewhere safe to put his bag down, then turned his attention back to Cal. Cal, who looking disturbingly normal. "I'm Paul Bolton. New guy."
"Figured," Cal confirmed, and walked forward to offer the guy a hand. His power did its thing when he stepped within range, and he suddenly felt warmer than he had, as if he was back in warm Cali rather than stuck here in freezing New York. "Obviously, I took that side," he added with a nod at the side of the room he had been sitting on, full of his stuff - although he was pretty tidy, at least.
"Obviously," Paul agreed, taking the offered hand with a certain amount of care not to squeeze too tightly, though he wasn't getting anything through the contact except, yeah, contact. Felt human, as much as Cal looked human as well. "You've, uh, I guess you've been here a while?"
"Not that long, actually," Cal answered, pushing his hands in his pockets as they chatted. "Just long enough to get settled in, pretty much." His side of the room, at least, seemed typical of a young American teenager. There was a Kings poster by his bed, and his laptop and phone (the new model, courtesy of Tony Stark) were on his desk, along with textbooks and notes from his classes. The only thing missing were pictures of anybody that might matter in his life; none were visible. "Did they warn you about my mutation?" He wasn't sure what the protocol was, here.
Paul shook his head, and tried to surreptitiously check that his feet were still in contact with the ground. "I guess they thought we'd work that out between us but I don't know how these things go. Like, is it rude to ask someone if it's not obvious? Did they warn you about mine?"
It probably needed warning. He wasn't sure how random flying and warmth would be a problem, but the strength thing was... yeah. That was potentially pretty scary.
"They didn't even tell me your name, dude," Cal replied with a shake of his head. "And I don't know about the etiquette. Some kids are way touchy about it, but for most, I think it's pretty much the basic get-to-know-you question." And he was really hoping Paul wouldn't end up in the touchy club, given what Cal's mutation was. "I copy abilities. Including mutations. I'm feeling warm all the way to my fingertips right now."
"Yeah, that's probably me," Paul admitted, before getting caught up in the sheer weirdness of that. That he wasn't cold, wearing a t-shirt and jeans in a New York winter, and that he was standing across from a guy who was feeling that because he copied... mutations. Right. Better get used to thinking of himself that way. Mutant. Yay. "Are you just sort of automatic? Or can you, like, decide if you want to or not?"
"I've been working on shutting it off, but it's still in the experimental stages for now," Cal replied with a one-shouldered shrug, hands still in his pockets. "There's some maladaptive mutations out there, so the sooner I figure it out the better." He wouldn't be chatting with the Kevin kid for a while yet. Or that chick with the metal glove things.
Paul nodded slowly. "How far does it go? I mean, if I'm across the other side of the room am I not sort of spilling over onto you?" Probably should explain what was spilling over, but it was kind of important to know if it was going to be an inescapable problem for Cal.
"It's about ten feet right now," Cal replied, running a hand back through his hair. "But it was half that when I manifested, so it might keep increasing." There was no way of knowing when he would reach his limit, or if he even had one.
"So if we're in bed - uh, separately," Paul added hastily. "Opposite sides of the room. Then you wouldn't pick up on me?"
Cal shot a look at the two beds. "Probably not. Why?" He wasn't sure why it mattered so much.
"Because I don't seem to need sleep," Paul admitted, pushing both hands into his pockets. "So if I stopped you getting sleep and then you were further away so that stopped, I don't... that seems like it would be pretty bad."
"Right," Cal acknowledged as the knowledge came to him, confirming Paul's words. He looked back at the beds, then back at Paul. "Let's move them as much apart as we can?" Better safe than sorry, and he moved to do just that with his own bed, a lot more easily than if Paul hadn't been around. In fact, one hand was enough to push it where he wanted it. This could definitely come in handy.
Paul waited until Cal had moved his bed before moving to shift his own, out of the ten foot radius and pushing it back gently until it was pressed up against the wall, as far from the other bed as possible. "I sort of run on sunlight, it seems. So I can sleep and I can eat, but I don't need to. Sometimes I forget."
"Yeah, I get the knowledge that I need to use your abilities, so - yeah," Cal confirmed, needlessly. "Flight is pretty awesome. I already went with one of the kids here." As in he wasn't just saying that the concept of flying was cool, but that actually flying was.
"You might know more than I do, then." Paul offered a small smile, reaching to pull his bag back against the bed, out of the way. "It's still, uh. Pretty new."
"Yeah, no, I'm getting my knowledge off of you," Cal assured the guy, rocking on his heels slightly as he watched him move about the place. "Whatever you know about your abilities, I know, nothing more."
"Be careful about gravity, then," he said wryly. "Doesn't always do what I'm expecting any more."
"Yeah, I've been - having to think about staying on the ground," Cal confirmed with a half-smile. "Pretty novel."
Paul nodded, shrugged, bit his lip on a smile, and let himself drift up, slightly surprised still that it happened and that it was a fairly gentle move rather than having much force behind it. "Tends to freak people out a bit. Still freaks me out a bit, too."
"Are you kidding?" Cal asked, and let himself join his new roommate in mid air. "It's fuckin' awesome." It felt even more natural to do it with Paul's powers than with Eileen's. Eileen had to will herself off the ground. Paul's default seemed to be floating around.
Startled into laughter, Paul drifted higher for a moment before steadying, smile spreading to a grin. "You think?"
"One thing about this that isn't awesome," Cal challenged him with raised eyebrows, grin matching Paul's.
"Normal people freaking out when they see it," Paul said, dry and instant. "Most people, if they go over something, they come down again."
"Well, that's not gonna happen here," Cal pointed out without losing his grin. "And there's way weirder stuff around. There's a couple kids that look like lizards, dude."
Paul hesitated. "Do they fly, too?"
"Not that I know of," Cal replied, making it sound like you couldn't really rule it out anyway. "But at least one of them has the..." He tried to imitate it with his hand by his mouth. "Jar Jar tongue."
"The what?" Paul echoed, clueless. "Jar tongue? Like glass?"
"No, Jar Jar - Jar Jar Binks, Star Wars?" Cal explained - or thought he did, anyway. Everybody knew the atrocity that was Jar Jar Binks.
"Some sci fi thing, right?" Carefully, Paul settled his feet back onto the ground. Practice at appearing normal was probably a good thing.
"Are you serious?" Cal asked before he could help himself. Everybody knew Star Wars. He remained in mid-air, and pretty happy to be there. "Dude, we're having a movie night some time soon. It's not a sci fi thing. It's the sci fi thing."
"I'm serious," Paul agreed, grinning at the disbelief. "Sci fi isn't really my kind of thing, it never has been. So I've never seen, like, Star Wars or Trek or whatever the other options for stars are. Dust?"
"Yeah, that probably exists as well," Cal agreed distractedly, because Stardust or no Stardust wasn't the question here. At all. It sounded more like a glam rock band than a movie, anyway. "Well, you wanna give it a try some day, you let me know. Wars or Trek, but like, the recent Trek." Those movies kicked ass. "And in the meantime, you got any questions about the school, you let me know?" Cal offered, drifting closer to his desk. "Even if I don't know the answers, we can try and figure it out together."
"Questions like what's the deal?" Didn't seem real, at all. Off the street and they'd given him clothes and shelter and offered food and talked about school and he thought someone might even have mentioned an allowance and he couldn't figure out what he was meant to be doing in return for all of that.
"Yeah, that's the one we're all wondering about," Cal agreed, rubbing a hand at the back of his neck as he hovered over his chair. "But the kids that've been here longer say it all seems kosher, so..." He shrugged. "Even their squad things aren't mandatory. Did you sign up for that?"
Paul nodded, backed up, and sat on the bed. Nearly on the bed, anyway. Just about an inch above it. He'd get better when he'd learned the height. "Yeah, I used to do military stuff at school, so... Made sense, sort of."
Cal nodded, "Cool." He'd signed up as well, mostly because he wanted to learn to use as many mutations as possible. "Where are you from, anyway?"
"Upstate," Paul said vaguely, and dropped the last inch onto the bed. "It's... I don't even know where it is from here. I'm not really sure where here is, honestly."
"Somewhere on the East Coast?" Cal offered with a self-depricating grin. He wasn't big on East Coast geography, never mind New York geography... but he was playing it up, because he'd looked into it since getting here. "We're actually in the way southern part of the state. Below us is pretty much just New York City and Long Island."
"Definitely upstate of here, then," Paul agreed. "Upstate New York, but not New Jersey. Are you from further away, then?" Sounded like it, from the vagueness. Anyone from New York state knew where it sat on the coast.
"Northern Cali," Cal confirmed. Bit further - other side of the country and all. "This feels like my first real winter." Well, not anymore really, not with all that warmth - it felt (fortunately) completely different from Alex's heat, in a very good way.
"Is it a cold one?" It was weird, a bit, not to feel the cold. There was warm and less warm, but not actual cold, never to the point of discomfort. Not any more.
"For me? Sure," Cal confirmed easily, as a smile stretched his lips. "Not so much right this second, but..." He shrugged, his tone and expression suggesting that he had no issue with that, on the contrary. "I can't speak for New York natives, though."
"I can't feel it," Paul admitted. "I guess you already know that, though, if you're picking up on what I am."
"Yeaaaah, all I'm feeling is warm all over," Cal confirmed. "Like hitting the beach on a sunny day, except it's all inside. It's nice." Between that and the way he was still hovering over his desk chair, he really didn't seem to have any trouble adjusting to his roommate's mutation.
Less trouble than Paul was having, apparently. "I guess it could be worse," he said slowly. "I mean, if I was shooting lasers from my hands or something and didn't know how to turn it off."
"There's this guy here, shoots concussive force blasts out of his eyes, and he can't turn it off," Cal agreed. "Ruby quartz glasses all the time. I give him a wide berth in the hallways," he added, his tone a mixture of warm and wry. "And he's just one of the kids with a maladaptive mutation. You're good. Really." As far as he was concerned, there was absolutely nothing wrong with Paul's mutation.
Paul winced. "Poor guy. That sounds rough to deal with. For you too, I guess, if you get too close to him. Does yours work through walls and stuff, too? If someone walks past outside are you in danger of, uh, picking up on them?"
Cal pursed his lips thoughtfully. "I guess, if they're close enough?" he eventually settled on. "I get full up, though - like, when I'm in class, I can't pick up the mutation of everybody around me, my body seems to put a cap on that. And I'm figuring out how not to do it. Or how to drop it. Give me a sec." He lowered himself into his desk chair, then focused for a moment, and the very discreet little glow to his skin disappeared as he managed to drop Paul's mutation. "And here I am, gravity-bound and kinda chilly again. I can't pull it off every time just yet, but I'm working on it."
"That's pretty cool." Pun not intended, but acknowledged with a faint grin. "Does stuff stay with you, though? I mean, I... I don't know how to even say this without it sounding stupid. I seem to heal? Without doctors and stuff, I mean. So if you picked that up from me and then you weren't, would you keep that or would you get sick or hurt again?"
"I have no idea," Cal replied with a frown, thinking it over. "I doubt the wound would reappear. It seems unlikely my cells would remember that they're supposed to be hurt, although they remember what they're supposed to be like... Hey, let's find out," he offered, grabbing a nearby piece of paper. "Paper cut," he added, before Paul might think he was going to find out in a way dramatic fashion.
Paper cuts were bitches, but if it reappeared after he'd healed, it wouldn't be the end of the world. "You'd heal that in no time, right?"
"Seconds," Paul agreed, relieved, because that really could have been a lot more dramatic and a lot less practical. "Sure you want to do that?"
"Seems like the quickest way to find out," Cal answered with a shrug, and ran the pad of his left hand's ring finger along the edge of the paper (a history assignment). That wasn't a finger he used a lot, just in case it didn't stay healed. "And I'd rather find out ahead of time, in case I ever have to rely on somebody's healing powers."
He winced as the paper sliced a thin cut across his skin, and instinctively brought the injured finger to his mouth to suck on it for a second. As he did, he stopped ignoring the buzz of the mutation waiting to be copied and willingly went for it, pulling his finger from his mouth before his lips twitched at the return of that lovely warmth. He hoped this never got old.
He watched the cut heal on his finger, then looked over at Paul with a half-smile. "Moment of truth, right?" He let go of the mutation... and was very fucking glad to see that the cut wasn't making a comeback. Despite the loss of the warmth (and the return of gravity being a thing), he was smiling as he prodded at his fingertip. "I'm all good. You had me worried for a second there."
"Better to know now than if you need it, I guess." And Paul was hoping that would stay as an if, not a when. "And I guess there's probably someone out there who could cancel me out, too, so it's good for me to know as well."
"...huh," Cal let out thoughtfully, putting the paper back where it belonged, and copying Paul's mutation again, just because it felt damn nice. And he made zero effort to stay on his chair. "I don't think we have anyone that does that here."
Mostly he was wondering how it would work, his mutation and that mutation. Whoever was fastest, probably? But then would he keep having the power if he'd used it on the guy (or girl) before they could use it on him? There was so much about his own mutation he still didn't know, for all that his father and he had tried to figure out.
Paul was still trying to stay on the bed, working to give at least the appearance of being subject to gravity. "I don't know what it would feel like being without it now," he admitted. "I guess I'd be pretty hungry?"
Cal thought it over; yet another puzzle. "I don't know. It depends how the power loss goes exactly - you run on sunlight, you said? That solar energy inside you, it would have to go somewhere, if you were depowered. It wouldn't be crazy to think you wouldn't feel hungry straight away."
Then again, without really looking into it, Cal was pretty much talking out of his ass. His father would have frowned, but he wasn't fucking here, was he, so that was that.
"Anyway," he smiled again, friendly and perhaps warmer than it would have been if it weren't for his own current warmth. That shit was awesome. "Welcome to Mutant High."
"Here's hoping I don't have to find out," Paul said wryly, and smiled back. "Thanks. And thanks for not, you know. Freaking out."
"Nobody's gonna freak here, dude," Cal assured him just as warmly. "Everybody here makes up all the colors of the freaky rainbow, right?"
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And Sage just Arthurfaces. Because Sage. :|
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