milliways_bar | (no subject)

"Me name is Spoon. Yorkshire, England, 2005. I, uh. Ask a lot of questions." Spoon allows, cheerfully, "Easily confused, see. It's a pleasure to meet you, ma'am. Me mum cooks foods from Afghanistan, and surrounding areas, a lot."

"Everyone is, sometimes, no? I know I was; especially when I had to learn English after a move to the States.
A pleasure to meet you, too, Spoon. Is your mother a chef, then?" taking a guess as to his meaning.

"Relearning it wasn't bloody easy either." Spoon can relate to learning English. He had to do it a second time, up from canine. "She's a baker. The rest of us are hopeless in the kitchen, though, so she does all the cooking for the pack."

Sooraya now has a few questions of her own. She tilts her head at him,
concern flickering in her eyes, at the 'relearned'.
"I can imagine. One of my team is forbidden to even TOUCH the oven at home, after we spent a week scraping 'fish and chips' off the ceiling.
'Pack'?"

Spoon is good at body-language. (His specialty is "I am going to shoot you now") At the concerned look he says, "Massive amounts of brain damage. Grew the brain back, having to relearn most of the other stuff. I chop the vegetables for mum most nights, and I'm learning to make candy. Pack. Werewolf, see."

Sooraya, if she had a specialty, it would probably be "I'm lying my ass off" or "you scare me, mutant."

Her eyes widened. "[Allah, have mercy...]That must have been dreadful," soberly. "Yet, I wouldn't have known you were still a learner, if you hadn't said so.
Werewolf? Of the supernatural kind, or by birth?" She knows shapeshifters who can take a wolf's form, and so she doesn't immediately infer 'magical' or 'supernatural cause' from what he's said.

Spoon's no good at either lying or being scared. He tends to get angry if he's scared. Call it a survival instinct. He shrugs and says, "It was. Started trying to rehabilitate me in, mmm. December of '02. Started talking again in '04, and they let me go last February." Most of this he doesn't remember. At her questions he holds up his left arm; the one that looks like something very, very large ate most of the flesh off of it; leaving a perfect ring where the skin tore when Sarge's wrist-watch caught before the whole thing ripped off. "Bit, ma'am. Uh. Rather a lot."

Those are good instincts. One could wish some people in the X-Verse had a better developed survival sense.
She hissed softly between her teeth, started to reach a hand toward his arm before stopping herself. "It must have taken a great deal of strength to overcome that. You have others helping you, you said?" She's still not smelling afraid. There's worry, but it's not self-directed.
She grew up in a part of the world where 'peaceful' was the exception, not the rule. Scars are sickeningly familiar territory.

"Do now. Mum, da', and me mate Ace. Friends, too. Things are better. Dunno if I'm strong, but I'm the stubbornest son of a bitch you're going to meet. Not going to let anyone kill me after I survived them once." His arm isn't the worst of it. The rest of it, though, only his pack and his girl see. Spoon doesn't do swimsuits, ever. Or shorts.

"Good people then. I know family or friends can matter more than almost anything," her own eyes darken, as she pushes away old memories of her own. " Are they all 'pack' too, if I may ask that?" She almost grins at his description. "Oh, I believe you."

"Only Sarge and Muldoon." Spoon says, "Mum's human and me girl is part cat. The puppies are dogs." There are, in fact, too medium-small gray fluff balls with big blue eyes sprawled around him.

She likes animals, though she's not too used to puppies. "I'd wondered," she admitted. "Hello," offers them a smile with the words, the tone of voice friendly. "Are they named?"

"Rasia is the bitch, Stepan is the cur." Rasia is also the one with gray on her chest, and the slightly more delicate muzzle. Stepan is slightly bigger. Say hallo, kids.
Hi!
Hi!

The man did, in fact, make canine noises there. "Got asked, once, if they were my puppies." Spoon sounds bemused over that, although the rest of the conversation was...painful.

This? is the noise Sooraya makes when you say something like that right after she's got a mouthful of tea.
She coughs, splutters, and clears her throat after a minute. "Yours. That's...an imaginative question."

"She wanted to know," Spoon says blandly, "if they were shifted werewolves. Not withstanding the fact that Ovcharkas don't look a bloody thing like fuckin' wolves."

"Yes," she'd caught the implication. There may be some blushing, but she goes on, "Would they not be in human form, if so, unless it's full moon? Or maybe your world's version has different rules."
She moves closer, offering a hand for the puppies to sniff gingerly.

"Oh, I'm bloody special." Spoon says bitterly, "Can change outside of the moon, thanks to me government's tender care." The puppies sniff her hand and then give it polite licking.

Pet us now? is the canine request from two wiggly bodies.

Sooraya obliges, patting Stepan and then Rasia alternately.
"Are there any governments that don't mistreat their people?" she mutters, exasperated on his behalf. Between him and Muldoon, she's begun to think that anarchy sounds more appealing. Or some creative object lessons.
"Not everyone from my world is all that ordinary, either," wondering if she scents differently to him than an ordinary human. "Far from it, in some cases. So this place...isn't as strange to me as it might have been." She looks up and smiles tiredly.

She smells like herself. She is human, mutants are evolved humans, and he's met so few (two) mutants - with different powers - that he couldn't tell if she was special or not by that. "Power breeds corruption, I think. Why I'm glad I'm not an alpha. Beta's enough power and more than."

That gets an emphatic nod. "My teacher at home, or one of them, says that 'anyone who goes looking for power deserves to have it find them'."

"We've some unusual abilities, but most are inborn rather than gained from outside. And I've yet to meet anyone whose "powers" included common sense, which is a lot more useful." There may be an eyeroll at that.

"Can't help you there, ma'am." Spoon says, "I'm bloody insane, I am. Don't think I had common sense before they took me apart."

"Uncommon sense?" she suggests, trying not to laugh. "Times I'm not so sure I do either. Being X-marked and sensible may violate some rules, I think." Such as the fandom's Thou Shalt Angst Incessantly,
which Sooraya is not so fond of, in a meta sense.

Spoon's not big on angsting either. He hits a certain point and starts making terrible jokes about pretty much everything, "X-marked? Dunno what that means, ma'am."

Sooraya looks a bit relieved, oddly enough. Though an explanation's only fair. Cryptic Version 3.7 is Laura's specialty, not hers.
"It's. Where I'm from, there's a group of people called X-Gene carriers, or mutants. They're a bit off the normal curve; enhanced abilities, or altered
physiology from human baseline."

"Oh." Spoon nods, "Sarge teaches a bunch of girls like that, but they're magic. Slayers, see. Go off and hunt shite like me, gone wrong."