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The Perk- Thursday morning

Kitty had needed coffee, and hadn't felt like making it, which felt like a good excuse to head off to the Perk for a while. She hadn't been super social since getting back from Japan, and that was weird for her, so getting out was probably a good thing.

Besides, she had her list of class ideas for the upcoming semester in front of her and was hoping something would inspire her. Or at least that the coffee would kick in and give her an idea she felt like sticking to.

[Trying to get back into playing after a busy few weeks. So open!]

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"You didn't oversell his arms," Irene greeted Kitty, wandering over after she'd ordered her own coffee. She was assuming that Clint had already told her they'd met. Hopefully. Otherwise oops, totally just blew that surprise.

"They're amazing, right?" Kitty said happily.

What, she liked the arms.

"Not my cup of tea, honestly, but absolutely beautiful to look at," Irene agreed with a firm nod. "Like a statue of Apollo, or something."

Because seriously. Arms.

"He's got pretty much the perfect amount of muscle," Kitty nodded. Not that she had a problem with too much muscle, because she'd dated a guy code named Colossus, but Clint was never going to literally crush her with those arms. "I'm the luckiest ever. Hello."

"Hello," Irene replied with a smile, going ahead and helping herself to a seat at Kitty's table and nosily peeking at what she was doing. "You're the luckiest ever, I'll agree to that. What're we working on, today?"

"Trying to figure out what I'm going to teach this semester," Kitty said, frowning at her paper. "Nothing's really jumping out at me so far."

"What d'you usually teach?" Irene wondered. "They just let you change your curriculum every semester? That's...interesting."

Teaching was becoming increasingly tempting, if it was that unrestricted. Hmmm.

"I taught history all last year, and during the summer I've taught about sentient pets, and dance this time," she explained. "The classes are pretty eclectic, so you can teach to your strengths rather than a standard curriculum."

"Sentient pets? That's a thing?" Sorry, that kind of stood out. For some reason.

"I have a little purple dragon from outer space as a pet/best friend," Kitty said, totally seriously. "Someone here has a dinosaur."

"You have a dragon?" Irene looked a little amused, and added, "And here I thought you were like me -- just your average lady in a strange place."

It was a probably a sign of growth that she hadn't assumed Kitty was on drugs after hearing that, honestly.

"Nooope. I mean, I'm in a strange place but my life is way weirder than most people's," Kitty told her, pulling out her phone to show Irene a picture of said little purple dragon that she took in Tokyo. "That's Lockheed."

"Hello, Lockheed," Irene said to the photo, leaning in close to peer at Kitty's phone. "I've never seen a dragon before, if you'll believe it. I mean, aside from CGI ones and the like. He's adorable, if that's not...condescending, or something."

"Oh, he's cute and he knows it," Kitty assured her. "If you meet him and tell him that you'll make it onto his list of favorite people."

"Just what I've always wanted," Irene said with a grin. "To be on a dragon's list of favorite people. It can go on my CV, if I ever spruce the thing up."

She leaned her chin in a hand, peering at Kitty's paper again. "So you can really teach anything, huh?" She was maybe getting ideas. Maybe.

"More or less," Kitty said. "What're you thinking?"

Irene waved a hand. "I had a girl come into the shop with a lot of questions that ought to have already been answered, that's all. Got me thinking that there ought to be some sort of course, since sex ed was mandatory when I was running around in schoolgirl skirts and kneesocks. But I'm not patient enough to teach a bunch of teenagers."

Or she could just bring her riding crop to class for when they acted out. But that seemed inappropriate, probably.

"They're really not so bad here," Kitty told her honestly. "And I know we've had sex ed here in the past, but there always new kids coming in who are new to learning all that stuff."

"They're not bad?" Irene asked, lifting her brows. "I mean, I know how I acted at that age."

Irene was probably worse than the average bear in that regard, though.

"Though I suppose that if I'm going to accept the existence of dragons, I'll have to also accept polite teenagers."

"You know how everyone's freakishly nice here? I think it ties into that," she said.

"The freakish niceness starts at an early age," Irene mused. "I suppose that makes sense. If I had to fight monsters or woke up the wrong gender at fifteen, I probably would've dropped a lot of my general angst, too."

Probably not, though. It had been the nineties, when angst was exceptionally stylish.

"Really? That stuff just added angst for me," Kitty said thoughtfully.

Because who didn't finally just have it and retire from superheroing at seventeen? Really.

"I'd think it'd put a lot of my 'wah, I'm so misunderstood' stuff in perspective," Irene offered, then frowned, actually thinking about what Kitty had said. "Wait a tick, you didn't go to high school here, did you?"

"Nah. I showed up a whopping year late for that," Kitty said. "I went to school somewhere just as weird, though. I mean, I have a space dragon."

"And the self-awareness to realize that that is not normal," Irene noted. "There's two places as weird as this one? I'm starting to feel a bit left out. All we have back home are tourists and conspiracies, but that's everywhere, I think."

"More than two. A bunch of people here are from different versions of where I come from," she explained. "Superheroes and bad guys and people needing to save the world all the time, that sort of thing."

"...are you a superhero?"

Irene had never asked anyone that before. Be proud, Kitty.

"No." Technically true! For a little while. "Probably should be. I am a mutant."

She always worried about telling people that, but people here had been really good about it.

Irene's brows shot nearly to her hairline as she eyed Kitty a little more critically, because clearly 'mutant' didn't mean what she had previously thought it meant.

"Um. You're a mutant?" she repeated, obviously trying to process this. "How so?"

Maybe she had an extra toe, or something, and was being funny about it?

"My body's intangible unless I will myself into being solid," she replied, totally casually.

Irene was just going to keep staring at her, because what.

"What?"

"Like this," Kitty said, sticking her fingers through the table.

So, okay, forgive Irene for bolting back at that initially -- she had never seen an intangible person before. But once she realized she was actually seeing what she thought she was seeing, she leaned in a little closer, her shock being replaced by fascination.

"Incredible," she breathed. "It doesn't...hurt?"

"Nope," she said, pulling her hand out of the table and picking up her coffee to sip. "It doesn't really feel like anything to me, most of the time."

"Must come in handy, though," Irene said, still a bit dazed but more admiring than anything else. "The having to will yourself to be tangible bit sounds like a drag, but I bet there're loads of perks to that."

Spoken like someone with a bad case of powers envy, yep.

"There are some downsides, but I know I more or less lucked out powerswise," Kitty admitted. "I never have to worry about forgetting my keys."

She rarely carried keys.

"Or not knowing what's behind a locked door, in general," Irene noted. "I bet it's hard to keep secrets from you, if you're determined."

She also, because it was hard to turn that part of her brain off, was thinking that it probably made getting out of restraints a bit easier. That'd rather take all the fun out of it. Poor Kitty.

Try phasing through the bed during sex.

"If I'm determined," she agreed. "I try not to abuse it without a reason. Well, not too much, anyway."

"I would have a tough time with the ethics of it," Irene admitted. "Which is probably why it's for the best that I don't have...special powers."

So jealous. So, so jealous.

"I can't believe that's real, still, by the way. We don't have people like you where I'm from." If it wasn't obvious.

"Yeah, it doesn't seem like mutants are much of a thing outside my universe," she said. "Clint's from a different version of the same universe and they don't have mutants there, either."

Which was weird.

"This alternate universe thing is confusing," Irene said with a frown. "How is there a different version of your universe? I mean, how do you know it's the same as yours, if it's also different?"

"Well, okay, here's the multiverse in a nutshell," Kitty began. "Pretty much any version of the universe you can imagine probably exists on another plane. They're the same, only there have been differences that set everything else on a different path than the one you're on here. There are versions of mine where I'm the bad guy, where my world gets totally destroyed, where I'm already dead by now, where my powers are different, whatever. It's always essentially the same, but different."

Ahem. Someone had been through a few AU's in the last eight years.

"So there's a version of my world out there where I'm a loving housewife, or where I never came here, or...the dead one wouldn't be far off," Irene said, thinking it through. "That's still ridiculously confusing. And it makes one feel rather small, doesn't it?"

She was used to feeling much more significant, honestly.

"It does. It gets easier, realizing all this stuff happens elsewhere. Sometimes you see different versions of yourself or futures here on weird weekends, and it just gets sort of... normal," Kitty shrugged.

Or, you know, your mind got taken over by an AU version of your fortysometing self in an attempt to save mutantkind when you were thirteen and after that not a lot was weird anymore.

Irene smiled a little. "I'm not sure it'll ever be normal," she admitted. "But it's nice to think about the other versions of me that maybe made different choices, at least. Better ones. It's like having infinite do-overs, in a way, even if I don't get to enjoy them."

"Also it's nice to see that even when the other realities go terribly wrong, you can feel better about your own life choices and situation." Seriously. Kitty was a forced Nazi monster in one.

"It would take seeing myself as something really terrible to do that." Oh, hello latent guilt. "I'm not sure I'm ready to see myself as someone that awful. Really, I'm not sure I'm ready to be all that aware of any other versions of myself, but I'd rather start with the nicer ones if I get a preference."

"I'm crossing my fingers for you," Kitty told her sincerely.

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The Perk- Thursday morning

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