This Party's Better Than it Seems (IC)

[Gizmo]

"Heh, well good!" Jill responded with a broad grin. The coltish girl gently picked up the cat in her lap so that she could swing her legs down, moving over to when Erin was unwrapping her presents and setting Oliver back down on the ground with a final scratch behind his ears. "I've gotta say, I was expecting you to be a lot more 'grr, argh'. Serves me right for listening to gossip in the first place. Clearly some haters jealous you're already doing what they're training for."

[Electra]

It was Erin's turn to wince this time, but she covered it by tucking her presents back into the box and picking it up. "Well, everybody has good days and bad days," she offered cryptically. "Today's a good day, so let's go have some waffles and celebrate. Just let me take this stuff to my room." She picked up the box and headed down the hall to the girls' dorms, Oliver following behind with the catnip pouch hanging from his mouth like a patchwork trophy.

[Gizmo]

"Lead on, birthday girl," Jill agreed amiably, following behind Erin down the hallway. She was vaguely pleased that the other girl was of a comparable height; her legs had lengthened considerably in the past few years, and she'd felt uncomfortably noticeable among Claremont's curiously petite female population. "So, what's the dorm like here? Sounds like all the cool stuff happens out of class."

[Electra]

"They're pretty nice," Erin said, "big enough, with room for storage and stuff, and the beds are okay. Alex and I bunked our beds because it makes the room seem bigger. I guess a lot of stuff does happen after class and on weekends, when the teachers aren't supervising us," she allowed with a half smile as she opened the door into her room.

The dorm room was kind of a funny dichotomy, with one half a riot of well-organized stuff, full of colors and sparkles. Jill recognized some of Alex's clothes and accessories easily enough, the petite senior had a style that could not be duplicated. A computer took up a lot of the room on the desk, along with a pile of notebooks and stacks of paper that spoke to a unique sort of filing system. The other side of the room looked empty by comparison, with Erin's books and papers stacked up on one corner of the otherwise empty desk, and only a few odd items sitting on the dresser. The battered pink jewelry box, the picture in the broken frame, and the very dirty teddy bear were obviously mementos of some sort, though they had no obvious connection. The room itself was reasonably spacious for a dorm, and the big window let in enough sunlight to make it cheerful .

"Alex must've gotten up and taken off," Erin observed. "I guess I'll catch up to her later." She set the box on her desk and turned to Jill. "You know, there's no reason you can't come over on a weekend or stay after school some time," she suggested. "Anybody who goes to school here is allowed on campus pretty much anytime as long as they obey the rules."

[Gizmo]

"I, uh, like what you've done with the place," Jill said carefully, peering back and forth from the doorway, hesitating to actually intrude into the physical space. To be honest, she liked Erin's side of the room a lot more than the bright colours and enthusiastic chaos of her roommate's portion of the dorm. "I keep pretty busy most of the time, but ah... yeah, that might be pretty cool, actually," she allowed, downplaying her minor surge of victory at the invitation.

[Electra]

"Alex and I have been roommates since we got here," Erin explained, "we've sort of got a system set up now. It's nice not to have to move around a lot and get used to new roommates." She opened the closet closest to the door, to reveal the same sparse neatness as her half of the room. There were a couple of uniforms, a jacket, a few pairs of pants and a few blouses and sweaters, along with an incongruous formal dress set aside by itself on one side of the bar and sheathed in protective plastic. She took a bag of premium cat food down off the shelf and poured some into a ceramic dish on the floor, nearly dumping some on Oliver's head when he dove onto the food like a starving wild animal. "All right, let's go. We've still got time before first hour. What's your first class?"

[Gizmo]

"Advanced Biology," Jill replied, stepping back from the doorway to give Erin room to close and lock it. "The prerequisite exam wasn't too bad, but I'm a little worried about the xenobiology chapter. Two hearts make things really, really complicated when you're trying to control blood flow." The curriculum at Claremont was fairly standard, but the teachers clearly weren't afraid to take advantage of the wealth of esoteric information such a gathering of metahumans and non-humans created.

[Electra]

"Yeah, we didn't get much of that in regular biology, and that's probably good," Erin commented. "I had enough trouble following along without any of the extra hearts stuff. But it'll be good if you ever have to do first aid on an alien or someone with really weird body parts or something." She secured the door and they headed off towards the elevators. Erin nodded to a few people along the way, but it was pretty obvious that most people did believe the rumors, and tended to give her a wider berth than necessary. She didn't seem to notice, or it had ceased to bother her. "Advanced algebra first hour is bad enough."

[Gizmo]

Jill was considerably less apathetic to the reactions of their classmates to Erin's polite greetings. "Well, that's comforting, in a 'people are jerks no matter where you go' sort of way," she grumbled darkly, glaring at an unfortunate young man you attempted to flinch again in the middle of his first flinch and nearly tripped over his own feet. "Yeah? You didn't really strike me as the math type." Almost as soon as she'd said it, the coltish girl was rubbing the bridge of her nose with a wince. "Wait, lemme phrase that in a way that doesn't sound ridiculously condescending."

[Electra]

"It's okay, it's true," Erin said with a wry shrug. "'S why I'm not taking calc this year even though I'm a senior. Alex practically had to drag me through trigonometry last year, even though I spent hours studying. Math and science aren't really my thing, I like, you know, English and history and stuff like that. I help out backstage for the school plays." She cracked a smile. "I'm pretty good at physics, mostly because there's lots of real-life practical applications for me. Don't worry about them," she added in an undertone once they were out of the building and away from people. "It doesn't matter."

[Gizmo]

It's total bull," Jill insisted hotly, bangles clattering as she gestured emphatically. "There's zero reason you should have to put up with that. I mean, hello! Superhero!" Letting out a short breath, she blew a few unruly bangs off of her forehead, brushing them back with her hand. "Ticks me off. Anyway. It's cool that you still find time to do so much stuff. I'm still figuring out how to balance all this new stuff." Illustrating her point, the teen stifled a yawn.

[Electra]

"It helps that I only sleep every three days or so," Erin allowed, turning her steps towards the cafeteria. "Even so, it took awhile to figure out how to do everything I needed to do. I was taking a lot of extra classes for awhile too, so now that I'm just on a regular class schedule, it seems like there's a lot more time. You'll probably feel better by midterms, or you can go talk to the guidance counselor about it, maybe."

[Gizmo]

"Oh, not sleeping!" Jill exclaimed in an exaggerated tone of revelation. "Well there you go, that's where I was going wrong!" Laughing, she laced her fingers behind her head and followed Erin toward the cafeteria. "Honestly, I think a lot of it is just training up some endurance. The patrolling gets me a lot more than the all-night cram sessions. If you ever want to study group it up, lemme know."

[Electra]

"Alex is probably a better choice for a study partner, " Erin admitted. "If you're in mostly advanced classes, we won't be studying the same stuff. I took all regular classes, so I would have a lighter courseload. It makes sense for me, but since you're going to college and stuff, you want to do as much as you can in school. It's okay if you need to wait on the hero stuff till you're done with school or whatever. They're always reminding us of that here anyway. There's lots of time after graduation."

[Gizmo]

"Meh, the key qualities for a good study group partner are finding ways to slack off and taking turns making popcorn," Jill opined with a lopsided smirk. Bringing her hands back down, she shrugged. "I'm not exactly winning any landspeed records for making friends here anyway. Shocking, considering my staggering level of awesome, but true." Her tone was dryly sardonic, but the suppressed frown tugging at the corner of her mouth spoiled some of the humour.

[Electra]

"It probably doesn't help that you're not here on weekends and after school," Erin pointed out again. "Like you said, a lot more social stuff and training and studying goes on then. Maybe if you're worried about leaving your mom alone too long, you could like invite people over to your house sometimes or something like that. People like to get off campus, and they'd probably think it was cool to meet your brother too, if he was gonna be around." Erin had her own opinion of Jack of all Blades, but she knew he was fairly popular, as heroes went.

[Gizmo]

Jill looked as though she was about to be physically ill. "Yeeeaaano. There's a reason I stopped having sleep overs as soon as my friends started liking boys. I'm not here to be 'Jack of all Blades' sister', y'know?" She shoved her hands in her pockets and scrunched her shoulder closer together. "Anyway, we're still working the whole secret identity angle, so Casa d'Cure isn't exactly going to be party central anytime soon."

[Electra]

"You're keeping a secret identity even from the people at school?" Erin asked with some surprised. "That might make it harder to make a lot of friends," she admitted. "I mean, people understand needing secret IDs and stuff, when it comes to dealing with the public. But we're all sort of in the same boat here, being superheroes or getting ready to be superheroes. Somebody who knows everybody's name but who won't give theirs might come off as kind of, you know, untrusting. But you can maybe work through that once people get to know you, I guess."

[Gizmo]

"Well, that's mostly just 'cause I don't trust people," Jill replied glibly, glancing over to Erin when she realized the other girl's concerns deserved a more serious reply. "Hey, it's not like I'm wearing a mask to class. Says 'Jill Pique', right on my student card," she lied by omission. "But I don't really want random people to know where my family sleeps, either. Taking college prep lit together doesn't exactly make somebody my bestie."

[Electra]

"Well, it's your choice how you want to do it," Erin said with a shrug, pushing open the cafeteria doors, "nobody's going to make you give up your secret identity if you don't want to. Makes it more important that you hang out at school though. If you're never here and no one can go see you, that doesn't leave a lot of opportunity to meet people." The whole cafeteria smelled like waffles and fruit syrup in a very appetizing way, so Erin didn't waste any time grabbing a tray and heading for the waffle bar.

[Gizmo]

"Oh, sure, logic," Jill grumbled as she followed quickly after Erin, retrieving a tray of her own. "Well, it's not like I can't be found," she pointed out insistently. "I'm at the brownstone a lot of the time, you know where that is." She retrieved a pair of waffles, considered for a split second and pile another two squares onto the stack before moving onto the fruits. "You're right though; I should try to be around here more if I can."

[Electra]

Erin carefully layered fruit and waffles into a structure that looked more like a cake than breakfast, then completed the illusion with whipped cream and chocolate syrup over top. "Your brother can be home sometimes too, right?" she suggested. "And you've all got phones and stuff, and you can't throw a rock here without hitting a teleporter. If anything were to happen, you could be right there in just a few seconds." If nothing else, she could understand the protective instincts that could overwhelm everything else, even good sense. Grabbing a glass of milk from the dispenser, she carried her tray to an empty table and sat down, nodding cordially at a few people who said hello to her.

[Gizmo]

"It's not so much that," Jill admitted as she took a seat across from Erin, breaking out her knife and fork. "My mom's in a wheelchair, she's not an invalid. I've just, y'know, I've got stuff and..." With a sigh, the teenage girl poked at half a strawberry with her utensil. "...and I'm not really used to making time to hang out with friends. Just gotta suck it up and get over it, obviously."

[Electra]

Erin gave Jill a wry half-smile. "Believe me, if I can make friends here, pretty much anybody can. There are a lot of people here who were kind of weird where they come from, so it's kind of easier to make friends now that they're in with all the other weirdos from everywhere else. And we haven't even had first quarter finals yet. You've still got a lot of time before the end of the year and graduation and all that." She dug into her sugary breakfast with relish, working neatly despite the mountain of toppings.

[Gizmo]

Jill considered Erin's words as she cut into her waffles with considerably less enthusiasm or precision, oddly distracted by the other girl's artful eating method. "That actually makes a lot of sense," she admitted, moving her fork midair to keep the precarious balance of berries atop the wedge of flat cake. "Weirdness being relative, I mean. I dunno, though, wouldn't it be kinda weird to just show up randomly on the weekend?"