2013.07.13 - Just Another New York Morning

It's a beautiful Friday morning in July. The sun is shining. There's a light breeze off the harbour that, okay, might not smell so sweet, but it's a little cooling, where it courses between the buildings. Of course, in the middle of midtown, it's perhaps not as noticeable as it might be a little closer to shore.

Nevertheless, the advantage of summer is that it provides days off and a wonderful lack of classes to contend with (especially since Storm is in charge of Summer School, this year. Not... Mr. Summers.) Consequently there's time for that most hallowed of summer traditions: Summer Sale Shopping.

Jean, returned from vacation with Scott, agreed to help a couple of residents of the Institute get their tails into the City for a day of hanging out, hitting tourist spots, and -- more importantly -- shopping followed up by ice cream. (Because who doesn't like ice cream?) And, it looks like poor Scott got dragged along with her.

You'd think that two weeks in the Mustang would be enough. But, apparently, it wasn't. Jean flashes him a light grin as she steps into the shade of a store-front awning, not so far from the sale racks placed outside to entice shoppers to stop. As if the shade wouldn't be enough. She, at least, is enjoying herself, and looking a damned sight more relaxed than she has for a while.

That relaxed look hasn't gone unnoticed by at least one of Jean's former students. Cessily follows along, behind Jean and Scott, carrying a bag with her first kill of the trip. With luck this stop will get her a second. She squints some, as the sunlight comes down and smacks into her eyes. A hand jumps up to shade them, which just sends the light shooting out other directions. "Oh, hey, Jubilee?" she says, finally remembering. "I ran into Fern a few days ago. She totally wanted to call you and do coffee or something. I said I'd let you know," she says, doing just that.

Scott gives a half grin towards Jean as they walk up under the awning to look at the sales racks. The hangars screech as Scott moves each to the side, looking for the perfect outfit. He pulls up and off and stands with a lavender dress, looking at her. "Is it me?"

Jocelyn had the day off work today. Something about getting into a brawl with a bunch of dark elves, in Jocelyn's mind, meant that it was a perfectly fine day to take off work. Jocelyn really wasn't much into clothes shopping, if only because she didn't usually have a lot of disposable income. Unlike Cessily, Jocelyn lacks any bags so far. She'd save what disposable money she had for something that really caught her eye. And that might not even be on this trip. Who knows?

The teen glances over at Scott and raises her eyebrow. "I think you're more of a teal or yellow guy, Mr. Summers," Jocelyn comments to the man. She still wasn't calling him by his first name, even if he was no longer her teacher. Some habits die hard. There is a small grin on the tall woman's face, however, as she speaks.

This is Jubilee's favorite time of year. Lots of time for relaxing, traveling, or shopping as she chooses, popsicles and ice cream never feel too cold on the first bite, and best of all, NO SCHOOL! So this outing? In the words of the song, lovin' every minute of it.

She looks up as Cessily calls her name. "Fern... oh fudge, I meant to call her, but my phone ran down. I'll have to try later. Thanks, Cess. Owe you one, totally."

She catches the sound of Scott's voice, blinking as he holds up that dress. Scott joking around? Blink and you might miss it. She takes a step, another, 'til she's behind him, and darts a tickle into his ribs on both sides. "Just watch out for sneaky girls trying to look under that, Scottdog!" she teases, and darts out of reach.

"Oh, no," Jean says to Jocelyn, her green eyes dancing. "The lavender totally goes with his shades." The bright red shades. Uh-huh. Really. The red-haired telepath grins at Scott as she says it. "At the very least," she quips, "it'll show off your figure so nicely." As Jubilee then proves by spearing him in the sides.

If the telepath knows what Scott Summers prefers to wear under his kilt, she's not telling. As it is, she glances past him for a moment, watching the people moving in various ways along the street -- the guy with the deep dish pizza sign trying to get people to try the two-for-one special, the taxis darting in and out of traffic, the scraggly homeless guy pretending to be a street preacher on top of a wooden box at the corner and shouting at the well-meaning, clean-cut do-gooders passing out pamphlets a little further down, someone running for a bus... It's a momentary distraction, all those minds shouting out for attention. She can't help it.

"No problem," Cessily tells Jubilee. She laughs faintly at Scott, then tilts her head and huhs and darts forward, reaching out to take the dress. "This could work for me. Mind?" she asks, and holds it up to herself, checking it with her peers. "Does it work with the hair?" she asks, concerned about that, and a few other potential clashes.

Scott jerks his arms close to his body as Jubilee moves to tickle him. He chuckles as he looks back at her after she flees and then looks to Jocelyn, "You're right. I /am/ really kind of a teal or yellow guy."

He nods, then, to Jean. "You're right. Showing off my figure is what I'm going for." Scott notices Jean looking past him and as he grows a bit more serious the dress lowers slightly just as it's snatched away by Cessily. He doesn't seem to notice or mind. "You good?" he asks Jean, hoping she's alright.

Not picking up on anything weird on the street just yet, simply because all she could see were the usual street activities, Jocelyn laughs as Jubilee goes in for the tickle attack on Scott. She then looks over at Cessily when the woman snatches the dress. "I can see it," Jocelyn says after a moment. The whole redhead thing was a problem she knew about. There were certain colors you just didn't wear to avoid the clash with the hair.

"It's you," Jubilee comments, with a smile for the silvery girl. "Maybe with a sash to set off your eyes."

She follows Scott's gaze as Jean goes distant for a moment, frowning thoughtfully. Some things distract her like that, but most of them don't try to crawl inside your brain like a too-catchy pop-song that gets stuck in your head. "You okay, Miss Grey?" she asks, concerned.

She glances over at Jocelyn, as if asking wordlessly if she's seeing this, too. As the lone raven-haired girl amidst Redhead-Palooza, she feels a little outside as it is.

Jean's attention returns to the present and she shakes her head swiftly as if to clear it. "Yeah. Yeah," she smiles, letting out a soft breath and giving them all a reassuring smile. "I was just distracted, sorry." She gestures lightly down the street, to that homeless guy and the do-gooders. "He's just really upset with them." A beat. "And loud about it."

True. He can be heard shouting -- the usual crazy tripe about 'the end is nigh' and 'the coming of the Anti-Christ' and 'the mark of the Beast'. But... c'mon. It's New York. What else is new?

For their part, the kids handing out pamphlets are generally trying to ignore him. They're fairly clean-looking. The girls are in dresses. The boys in button-down shirts and nice trousers. They'd look almost Mormon, except it's not the usual white-and-black you usually see with them, nor are the girl's dresses unfashionable, though they are modest. No. Generally, these kids are just clean-cut youth-group types. Probably from the suburbs, down in the city to do some urban ministry work.

They sure do have the homeless preacher worked up, though.

So, yes. It was something of an intrusion into the telepath's thoughts.

"Hey, I'm not trying to steal Ruth's look," Cessily tells Jubilee. "I'm gonna go try this on," she says excitedly, handing her bag to Jocelyn and then turning to look into the store, with much energy bouncing around inside her. Yup, Cess is in a good mood, a mood which dampens when the silver girl finally catches sight of the look on Jean's face. "Miss Grey?" she asks. Then a nod as it's all explained away. "I....he's very loud, it's true," Cessily says, spying the preacher from a distance, and her skin crawls. Those looking might actually see a ripple over Cessily's metallic surface. "Right, trying this on. Back in a minute!"

Scott nods to Jean, seemingly satisfied with the answer and says nothing more about it. Instead, he idly watches the street preacher for a moment.

"Wonder if the pamphlets go against what he's preaching," Jocelyn observes as she glances in that general direction. She's not expecting to see anything weird, but then again, you never know when something weird might happen. She'd mostly dismissed the preachings already. She was used to hearing people go on about such things. Then Cessily is passing her a bag, which Jocelyn takes with an easy nod. "No problem Cess," Jocelyn tells her friend casually. The crawling skin is noted, but Jocelyn doesn't comment on it for the time being.

"Huh?" Jubilee blinks, looking after Cessily and then at Jocelyn. "Did I just Tourette's something about Ruth's look? I totally don't remember saying anything," she says, shrugging. "I just thought it'd look good on her."

She follows Jean's gaze to the youth-group types and the homeless guy doing the agitator act. "At the risk of being a major cliché, that soapbox stuff is /so/ yesterday. Didn't people stop doing that about fifty years ago? Or more?" She tries to listen closely to what he's saying. Not easy for a girl who spends so much time with a music player clamped onto her ears.

The only odd thing, really, about the homeless preacher is that he's not so much competing with the youth group as he is challenging them. After all, if they're both preaching about the same God, it'd make more sense if he was effectively lending them unwanted support. But, he's not. If you listen closely enough, snatches of what he's saying seem to be warning people away. He points and calls the kids false prophets, a vanguard of darkness whose very existence is the promise of a coming apocalypse.

The kids' words can't be heard. They're not shouting. They're just passing out their pamphlets and trying to engage passers by -- particularly young people, those with a 'street kid' or 'alternate lifestyle' look to them -- in conversation. A couple of them look mildly distressed at the abuse the preacher heaps on them, but it only really serves to make people more sympathetic to them... if still not overly inclined to pay them any more mind than they would have otherwise.

Jean pauses a moment and lets her telepathy drift out so she can actually Hear what's happening. Her ears rise a little and her brows gather, her expression perplexed. "He's afraid of them," she tells the others, while Cessily goes to try on the dress. She's not reacting as if she expects an attack any time soon. So, the kids might as well keep trying on clothes. "He thinks they're demons in disguise." A beat. She closes her eyes, trying to sort out the confusion in the guy's head. "Or something... something else. I don't know." She opens her eyes and gives a dry chuckle. "He's nuts," she says with a mild, New Yorker shrug. "His thoughts... it'd take me days to sort them all out, they're so jumbled."

Cessily ducks into the store and finds her way into the changing room. She's fairly quick about things, and re-emerges in the lavender dress, holding out her now-bare arms and smiling at her friends. "Good?" she asks. She found a strip of matching cloth and says to Jubilee, "I meant..." and she holds the strip over her eyes, smiling. But then she shifts it up and goes about tying it as a headband. "Too eighties?" she asks. Jean weighs in on the whole street preaching/pamphleteering issue. "Do you think he's dangerous?" she asks. He doesn't look dangerous to Cess, just /loud/. Sounds loud, that is.

Perhaps throwing caution to the wind, Cessily looks both ways and then crosses the street, heading for the situation to check out what those pamphlets actually are, and maybe hear some more of the Hobo Gospel.

"He's afraid of them, I'm afraid of him. It's a vicious circle of spirituality and insanity." Scott's eyebrows flicker at Jean as he turns his back to the fracas, apparently moving on. A few screeches of hangers later he hands over a swimsuit. It's black and white, and whoever made it seems to have forgotten large pieces that probably should have been there. "Dress for me, swimsuit for Jean. This has been a successful trip."

"Not bad at all, Cess. Though the headband is maybe a touch too eighties, but I think the eighties are on their way back in," Jocelyn comments to Cessily casually. Wrinkling her nose, Jocelyn looks over in the direction of the kids, trying to get a read on them. "They look normal to me," Jocelyn offers with an easy shrug. She notices Cessily head off, of course, but she figures Cessily will be safe. If anything, Cessily was a tough cookie, and Jocelyn wasn't really expecting any problems.

"Huh," Jubilee says, glancing between Jean and the crazy homeless guy. "I guess he's been on the street too long." Then a thought strikes her. "What about the kids with the pamphlets? I mean... maybe /I'm/ crazy to worry, but it couldn't hurt to look, could it?"

Then Cessily comes out, with her lavender dress and sash. The Asian girl stifles giggles as the silver redhead tries the sash in different places. "Leave your M-60 in the dressing room?" she teases gently. "But it's cute. I think it's a good look for you." She nods, agreeing with Jocelyn on that note.

But then Cessily hurries across the street. "Cess..? Hey, wait!" She looks after her. "Did she /pay/ for that yet?" Filching things, that's not something Jubilee has a problem with. Getting into trouble for filching things you didn't mean to filch? That's a whole other story.

"Cess!" Jean calls out. "Wait! You haven't changed out of the dress!"

And shopkeepers don't like it when people run off with their merchandise -- as is evidenced by the clerk that starts to run after her, yelling, "Hey!"

The telepath opens her purse and pulls out a credit card, reaching out to snag the clerk's shoulder. She holds up the Visa. "I'll take care of it," she smiles to the woman. "She just gets a little excited, sometime." And, yes. Jean puts a nice little mental push behind her words to make the woman more amenable to settling without a fuss. Indeed, the clerk seems mollified by Jean's offer and gestures for the woman to follow her to the cash register, which she does -- leaving the others to deal with what's happening across the street.

Cessily's just going to owe Jean after this, that's all.

As the silver girl approaches the group, she can hear Rev. Hobo clearly shout, "Beware! Beware the Vanguard of Darkness! Don't! Don't listen to them! They'll trap you! Destroy your soul!" He actually leaps down from his box to try and intercept Cessily, the sun glittering off her silver skin. "No! You mustn't! What they would do to you! Stay away! For God's sake, stay away!" There's no question he's singled the mutant out for her obvious appearance.

The kids, however, are just handing out pamphlets. "Do you need a place to stay?" one girl asks a passing goth, thrusting the pamphlet out at him. "The New Life Shelter over on Bowery has beds and meals available." In fact, all the kids are spouting much the same type of thing. They offer meals, clothes, a safe place to stay or hang out. All the usual street ministry offerings. There are no strings attached, at least none that the kids mention.

And, should Cessily grab a pamphlet, it's a black and white design typical of people without an excess of graphic design experience, advertising the same thing. The New Life Shelter is run by New Life Ministries, their logo a cross with a halo around the top of of it like a sunburst.

All in all? If those kids are threats, they sure don't look like it.

Cessily did kind of space on that, it's true, but her curiosity has gotten the better of her. Curiosity and suspicion. It's not that ranty preachers are /always/ denouncing mutants, just that that's where Cess tends to go when she hears that sort of thing.

More's the pity that she's right. Cess throws up her metal hands, which sets off another riot of reflections in the daylight. "Musn't what?" she asks, sputtering and looking defiant. She drops her arms and turns away from the man. He's not armed, clearly, and words...Cess has a tough skin, most of the time at least. "Uh, no, I'm good," Cessily says as she's asked if she needs a place to stay. "Thanks, though," she says, taking the pamphlet and flipping it over, reading it as she heads back across the street towards the other X-People. "Just a crazy anti-mutant hobo guy," she says. Cessily pauses and then her eyes widen. "Oh no!" she declares. "I didn't pay. Crap!"

Jubilee starts to open her mouth, but Jean's got the situation well in hand. And probably in mind, too. Sighing in relief, she turns to hurry after Cessily... and nearly meets her head-on! "Um, yeah... I was trying to tell you," she says, a little sheepishly. "And that means your stuff's still in that dressing room, too. We'd better go get it." She gestures to the store's entrance. "By the way, you /totally/ owe Jean for a Don't Go To Jail card."

Scott wrinkles his nose at Cess as she runs off, "Even when our kids try not to, they still find a way to create trouble." He takes a look into the store to see if this is going to be an issue or not.

"Doctor Grey is on it," Jocelyn tells Cessily when she talks about not paying for the dress. A shrug is offered when Cessily talks about the hobo. "Well, there you go then". Jocelyn wasn't intending on pursuing things further. Not every wacko on the street was inherently dangerous, and that was just fine by her. "So, where to next?" Jocelyn asks. "Once Cess gets her stuff out of the dressing room, that is".

Indeed. Dr. Grey's on it. She apologizes to the clerk, once again, as the woman returns her credit card to her. The clerk waves a hand lightly, wishing Jean a good day as the telepath turns around to re-emerge from the store... just in time for Cessily to return. "You better get your stuff out of the change room," she tells her, handing her the receipt, having missed Jubilee's same suggestion. "And apologize to the clerk," she adds. She does smile, however, in that tolerant 'way-to-go-doofus' sort of way. She's not upset. Just dryly amused.

She returns to stand by Scott, eyeing that bathing suit from earlier. "Cute," she says dryly. "Should put you in it, and see what happens." Yeah. Missing all the wrong parts.

Across the street, the Rev. Hobo looks absolutely relieved as Cessily retreats. Indeed, he puffs out his chest. Anti-mutant? Hardly. He feels like a hero. He saved one of them!

The boy who gave Cessily the pamphlet, however, follows her with his eyes to the small collection of (not so obvious) mutants at the store. He cants his head for a moment, but then turns away with a smile, resuming his work.

An evangelist's work is never done.

Cessily rubs her face, in fact, face-palmed. "Ugh, I'm so sorry," she says. She ducks into the store again, and quickly collects her things, apologizing to the manager briefly and then re-emerging. She takes the bag back from Jocelyn and stuffs her previous clothes into it. "Sorry, Miss Grey," she says. She flips the flyer over. "Hobo man seemed pretty terrified of these people, but...I don't know," she says with a faint shrug, "It seems pretty innocuous to me, unless you're worried about tooth decay."

"Oh, don't be ridiculous, Miss Grey. You know I'd look absolutely fabulous in this." Scott hangs the suit back up again. "So, Ice cream?"

Jean is happy with her modest one-piece -- the dark green one she used while they were vacationing. She doesn't need a new one. She has the grace to chuckle to him, however, and she nods to Cessily's assessment. She takes the pamphlet and looks at it. There's nothing about it that flags anything special for her. She lets Scott look at it, too, but, really? It's just another sunny morning in New York.

"Ice cream!" she declares, slipping her arm through Scott's at his suggestion. She smiles at the three girls that are with them. "Our treat. Let's go."

And it's off to the nearest parlour to refuel for more shopping later.