The Bear Necessities (IC)

[GranspearZX]

"No problem. And... yeah, don't mind the artwork. I'm technically here on an art scholarship. Probably gonna do something like that when I go to college too. I guess it all depends..." His voice trailed off as he rummaged through his drawer, finally producing a small, gold-plated key. "Ah! Here it is."

He sat down on his bed and politely waited for Kat to be done drying herself off. "You sure you want to tag along? I don't suppose researching things like this is really all that exciting... but I could always give you a tour of the hotel. Visitors are always welcome. Just... don't mind the ghosts."

[Curious Key]

"Hey, I'll go if you'll take me." She held up a fist and smirked. "Whatever gets me to that runt fastest."

Kat's face blanched. "Last time I saw a ghost it tried to kill me." On top of trying to kill her friend, scaring half a hundred spectators from the theater and whining like the spoiled starlet she was to anyone who bothered listening. Silver Scream was the original drama queen, and she left something of an impression. Kat crossed her arms, dubious. "Do these just rattle chandeliers and set nudge paintings or what?"

[GranspearZX]

"They're harmless to guests. The hotel used to be a lot worse... Really nasty history."

Marcus decided not go to into it. Furthermore, he was certain that Kat wouldn't research it on her own; she had enough to worry about with chemistry. He brandished the key and headed to the door of his dorm room, waiting for Kat to come out as well. "I made this a couple of months ago, after studying another teleporter here at school. The magic behind it is really not that complicated..."

He tapped the key once against the door frame. A bell-like tone sounded; it was subtle and low-pitched, and for the briefest of moments, runic symbols appeared and then vanished against the door's frame. Marcus then stuck the key into the keyhole, turned it, and then opened the door again. This time, however, Marcus's room was gone, replaced by the lobby of the Parkhurst Hotel.

[Curious Key]

Kat couldn't help but wince at how he'd phrased that; not harmless, harmless to guests. "That's one helluva security system," Warp said, shoving hands into pockets, imagining grasping transparent hands and screaming spectres.

His key had Kat more impressed. Low whistle. "Neat parlor trick." She crossed her arms and looked at the place. This was some high class stuff, the kind of place whose silhouette belonged at the end of a long dirt road, framed by lightning. "Neat parlor. I can see why this place is haunted. Did you rent it from Dracula?"

[GranspearZX]

"Nah, the vampire keep is in Wharton. This is much tamer."

Marcus said that with the straightest of expressions; he wasn't entirely joking. Shutting the door behind them, there was another, identical chime, signifying the magic that had teleported them into the hotel had been spent. "My room's upstairs. We can get a better look at this thing from there... unless you wanna look around first?" It wasn't lost on Marcus just how vast and interesting the hotel looked to people who had never been there before. Despite the amount of time he'd spent at Parkhurst over the past year, he was still surprised at some of the things that were written off as 'normal'.

[Curious Key]

Kat tilted her head and knitted her brows together at Marcus, seriously? But he breezed straight past, like it wasn't worth the time. Maybe it wasn't.

Summoning an elemental must have been a lot more trouble than Kat had thought. Marcus was very chill with this whole thing. She was growing to expect 'there isn't much time, soon all of Hanover will be overwhelmed by blocks of sentient cheese!' "Well . . . As nice as this . . ." she gestured to her stomach. "I'm mostly hungry. Can we order some pizza?"

[GranspearZX]

"Pizza? Yeah, sure, why not? There's at least one place I know of that's not too scared of the hotel to deliver up here. In the meanwhile, we may as well hang out down here, since my lab and my glasses are up on the third floor."

Marcus pulled out his cell phone, dialing in one hand while studying the box in the other. Several feet away, a transparent human wearing a top hat came casually floating in through a wall. He noticed Marcus and Kat and politely tipped his hat to both before floating upstairs.

"...say, what do you want on these pizzas anyway?"

[Curious Key]

Kat felt a knot tie itself together in her stomach as see-through, dapper older man came floating through the wall. She stepped back, eyes opening a little wider and watched the spectre with the same wariness cats give strangers. The late gentleman, seeing her nervousness, stopped and gave her a good-natured wink before he vanished through the wall.

And Marcus didn't even seem surprised. Kat tried to buoy herself off of his surety, breathing in once, deep. "Peperoni, ham and sausage mostly." She gave the place a surreptitious look-over for the not-quite-dead, though if she found one Kat wasn't sure what she would do. "Who else lives here? Er . . . You know what I mean."

[GranspearZX]

"Huh? Oh, hey Mr. Warburton." He waved, somehow managing to keep up with the phone conversation, Kat, and what was happening around him. Barely. He ordered four pizzas and, once he was done there, stuffed his phone back into his pocket. "Well, there's the Parkhurst ghosts... and me. I don't know if you know Etain and Morgan from school, but I think they live here too. Lots of other magic-users from around the city stay here from time to time. This place is pretty huge... Sometimes I can go for days without seeing anybody. Kinda nice to have some company though, even if it is about business."

[Curious Key]

Kat tried to remember if she had seen or heard of either of those students at Claremont. She scratched at the back of her neck, looking askance to try to find something to break the silence. "I don't think I know them either." It seemed like these magicians were a pretty tight bunch. They had their own haunted clubhouse and everything, probably secret handshakes too. "Have you seen anything like this? People calling up big nasties from the weird to wreck stuff?" He'd called it an experiment. An experiment in what? Property damage?

[GranspearZX]

"I saw it in a book once. Another reason you should study," he said half-jokingly, moving over towards the chairs positioned near one side of the lobby. "It's not weird at all. In the book I was reading, I saw it done with a ring. You make an agreement with an entity, called a pact, and then it allows you to summon it. That's a little different though... That method lets the summoned being come to this plane directly from theirs. This is more like... smuggling. Kidnapping, really."

Talk about the different planes made him consider something else. Given the amount of downtime, he just had to ask. "Speaking of planes... I know when some people teleport, they pass through somewhere else. Usually. When we left the library, it was... different. Never seen anything quite like it before. What was that?"

[Curious Key]

Kat hmmed and haaed for a bit. "Well, I'm a mutant. When they took a look at what I did at Claremont they said I can tunnel through entropic space." Uncomfortable shrug. "It's not really a nice place." Understatement of the century, that. "I can leave things in there to pick up later," a flash of red and Warp was holding her bag again. Another and it was gone. "I can move through it to go somewhere else. Or I can let some of the entropy out and point it at something I don't want there." The 'and totally annihilate it' went unsaid.

[GranspearZX]

"Huh."

Marcus blinked a few times, letting that sink in. He wasn't quite sure what 'entropic space' was, but if its energy could be directed like that... "To be honest, I'm not sure what the difference is. Mutants, metahumans... I mean, I was technically born with what I can do. The magic part I'm still learning, but my... oh wait, you haven't seen it yet, have you?" It suddenly occurred to him that during the entire ordeal, he never shifted forms. It was largely because the Beast Rune would have had him swiping at nothing.

"Just try not to freak out."

He stood back up and changed into his towering bear form. The transformation wasn't really physical; his entire body turned into a green silhouette, changed shape, and then he was standing there covered in fur, all in a matter of seconds.

[Curious Key]

"Someone who knows their chemistry tables a little better than me could could probably explain it, but my best guess? Mutants are probably caused by . . . mutations?" Warp said in jaunty tone, one eyebrow rising, both hands clasped behind her back. The ghosts were gone, she thought, and nothing there had tried to kill her, which was an excellent vote in this place's favor. Walking in Claremont's halls had inured her to some pretty weird stuff.

The Beast Rune wasn't quite what Kat had expected. Her lizard brain rebelled at the sight of claw and maw, urged her to make the leap for somewhere, anywhere that wasn't here. The lizard was stupid, so it didn't get a vote, but Kat felt something hard squeeze around her heart as she watched Marcus' body turn predatory. "So." She put both hands on her hips and spread her footing and realized looking up in Marcus' eyes was hurting her damn neck. One step back. Two. There. "So you're a giant bear."

She chewed on the inside of her lip. "How the hell did that happen?"

[GranspearZX]

"Well, if I focus... there's a lot I can turn into besides a bear. This is just what happens when I don't think about it."

He really did half-expect her to run off screaming. He really didn't know what it looked like when he transformed, but he was very much aware that there was an imperceptible aura of a predator that radiated from him every time he did it. It didn't affect metahumans and mutants as much but normal people tended to have an instant fight-or-flight response.

"Apparently I've always been able to, but an incident about three years ago jump started it. Someone pushed me, I got mad, and then... well..." He shrugged. "He healed up okay though, so it was fine. I can more or less control it at this point."

There was certainly more to the story than that, but somehow telling Kat that AEGIS agents had come for his father--whose Beast Rune form was far scarier than a bear--seemed like a very bad idea.

Luckily, explanation was at least temporarily postponed by the front door opening. In as much time as it took for Marcus to turn into his bear form, he returned to his human form. Not even his clothes seemed to have been affected by the change, and the pizza delivery guy didn't seem to have noticed a thing.

[Curious Key]

It was difficult to pay attention to what Marcus was saying when all the while he exposed long, vicious canines. The sort meant to rend and tear and kill. Her lizard brain was screaming again, and it was hard to hear over its wailing. She tried to remember the quiet girl in class with needle-teeth, the boy in algebra that was probably a half-demon. Just cause he was scary didn't mean he wasn't on the side of the angels.

Kat looked at his claws and understood how nasty it could have really turned out. "I-I was lucky," she said, because talking was easier than looking. "Well . . . Luckier. I didn't have a clue what I could do till I woke up one day in a dumpster halfway across the state."

She was saved by the visitor and spared further conversation with Bear-Marcus. A little too shaken up to go bounding to the door, Kat hung back, shaking her head as she tried to push her distress aside.

[GranspearZX]

Marcus wasn't going to say anything, but in bear form he could all but smell her fear. It was as familiar to is bear-senses as magic was to his normal ones--not anything overt, but in bear form he could see the changes in her body language and hear the tone of her voice change. If she'd seen Richard, Marcus was fairly certain she'd faint.

"We can probably relocate to the library," he said, holding four pizza boxes in one hand and two bags with two-liter bottles in the other. "Tables in there are bigger and it's closer than the dining hall."

Marcus motioned to a door just past front desk. As he stepped towards it, it opened on its own. "I was lucky I didn't end up in jail," he continued. "Headmaster Summers gave me something to do with this... ah... 'gift'. There's still some kinks to work out, but nothing I can't deal with."

[Curious Key]

Kinks? What, exactly, counted as kinks in the ability to metamorphosis into a giant beastman? Somehow Warp figured it wasn't something so little and straightforward that people'd call it a kink. She grimaced and pinched at the bridge of her nose until it hurt. Giant bear? At least he didn't throw little bits of the end of all things around at people, not like one teenager she could name. "I know the feeling. If Mr. Summers hadn't found me, I'd probably be stumbling around still." She stared at her hands. "Causing a whole bunch of property damage, I'd bet."