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After a busy morning, Sooraya comes in through the lake door. She drops wearily into a seat at the Bar, rubbing at her temples.
Bar takes her order for a serving of qabili pilau and cold tea. She takes them to a quiet corner, someplace where neither door is in her line of sight.

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"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."

"Are they chosen, or is it up to them?" she asks. "There's people who use magic where I'm from, too, but not many at all." Sooraya doesn't altogether approve of magic in any guise, though she's aware a lot of her
American friends only think of it as a tool, a useful one.

"I have no idea." He says with a shrug, "Born that way, I think. Stronger and faster than normal humans, the lot of them. Might be going to teach them sword. Sarge is teaching them the basics, but I'm better than he is."

She quirks an eyebrow. "What kind of sword do you carry?" A friend of hers uses a longsword, on occasion. Though if any X-Men in her team use weapons, they're more likely to be high tech or defensive only. They are weapons, from one point of view.

"Hand and a half bastard sword." Spoon says with a shrug, "Looking for something that's more me than that sword, but I'm in no hurry. The girls use them for fighting...I use mine for meditation. I can teach them to fight, but it's not my purpose anymore."

"Meditation? How exactly, if that's not a private matter?"

"Mine would seem to be fighting, for now," she says ruefully. "I'm needed," and she may shoot a truly annoyed glare at the door-that-isn't on those words.

"Patterns." He says, then stops, "Any sword work, oriental or occidental, has patterns. If you learn those, you know how to fight. Sparring is later. Was a guy named Marozzo, he came up with the Progressions that have been standard since, uh. Since he designed them. Just like anything else doing them over and over is a form of meditation. I started using a sword when I was a kid...wanted to be Will Scarlett. Met him here, he's a good lad...and it was something the government didn't know about me. So me body remembers it because it was never tortured out of me like everything else was."

She understands, and she won't say what she thinks of Spoon's government aloud; if only because that sort of language(yes, she knowsplenty of it) would go to waste as they aren't here. The topic's more interesting just now.
"I learned unarmed, so far, and defense for some weapons. What you describe sounds more like art than what we'd do." There are a few older people who have a greater level of skill, but she's not there yet, if ever.
"Perhaps if you would, I'd enjoy seeing that. Sometime." Not now, as her stomach's growling faintly at her, and not at all if he'd feel uneasy at it.

Spoon turns the air blue himself, very often. "'Course. I'm outside most days between lunch and dinner. Get six hours in, daily. Got a teacher, too. Lan. He's, uh. Tall and stone faced. Doesn't give much of anything at all away. Makes me look like a fuckin' beginner." He jerks his head toward the back door, "An' if you see me walking through with it, feel free to come out. Do warm-ups first, then start the patterns."

"Thank you." The smile brightens her eyes. "Excuse me for now, sir. I think I should finish this...I'm glad to have met you, and you and you," looking at the puppies. "[Good day.]"

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there-is-a-me.livejournal.com - 2007-04-29 21:48 (UTC) - Expand

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