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Xavier's is used to having odd sites. Students run around here with all kinds of powers, and every now and then even the teachers lose control. Erik once plowed every piece of cutlery in the vicinity into the backyard, and that's a professor level personage. Today? Today there are leaves, all the maple and oak detritus someone can possibly find in a forest.
Kids laugh and jump where they can, some roll around, and it's all fun and games until the piled up leaves really start impeding traffic. Knee-high, no problem. Thigh-high, better hope to be tall. The fact the leaves come with a breeze means people are pelted at playtime, and sporadically slapped about by saucer-sized foliage that's still somewhat damp and wet thanks to a resident water manipulator and a broken water fountain. Or, it can be said, Canada has finally lost its temper with New York claiming it has superior maple syrup and the Quebecois cartel figured out how to strike.
Someone wasn't smart and opened a doorway piled up with maple leaves. The inundation pours into the study room, causing four yelps and one distinct sigh belonging to Scarlett, for whom classes at Columbia are generously more arduous. She drags away a fellow student, switching out in time to be piled under. Leaves are heavy. Wet leaves, especially so, and piles of them getting up to the ceiling is a hazard. "Did someone invite Nero?" she quietly hisses, flailing about as the muffled sounds of her voice speak to being leaf-entombed.
Wicked wears a simple pleated A-line skirt in black. The collar of a white dress shirt is visible over the neckline of a thin sweater …which is also black. Hair kept loosely back out of her face by a shiny black ribbon, the new addition to the Institute slows as she rounds the stairs towards the lower-level hallway. She'd only had the vaguest semblance of someone who might have known where they were going— /before/ the leaves and everybody using their powers to avoid them. Coming to a full stop at the last few steps, the girl forces the throngs of students traveling in-between classes to break and step around her as she fumbles to produce (and stare vacantly down into) her crumpled-up class schedule.
Kaleb was the kid that the other kids avoided. He was tall, good looking, natty dresser, and not at all personable. Not even at a glance. 18 going on 60, Kaleb Miller, the young man known as 'Echo' was buried in a book on the history of the architecture of Edo Castle when 'shoosh. Something was hugging his legs. He didn't even look. His eyes squint shut , pained by what might be in front of him. he wiggled a foot and muttered something derisive and obscene under his breath that did not escape his personal space. He promptly turned with irritation and purpose to storm through the leaves like a sonic boom of foliage when even his March of Doom(tm) was halted by a confused Wicked." He took the moment and set his jaw. Donottakethisoutonher…Donottakethisoutonher Tersely he let his voice carry past her and up to Rogue, "Scarlett… not your doing?" The sonic shook his head, "I just had my Oxfords polished too." To Wicked's confusion he offered with less hostility, "You look lost. Whatever…or wherever you are looking for will be excavated by spring I'm sure."
Mind the four students swimming in leaves, thrashing around and having much less fun than first appears. No one likes drowning in foliage, especially damp maple or oak leaves stuck to their limbs. Shouts and unhappy noises abound from the study room, and another classroom possibly about to be released instead ends up atrociously barricaded by the teacher of the moment. The door's solid construction affords little likelihood of unexpected bursting at the sames. Still, someone clunks their fist off it painfully and Scarlett forces her way up through the sea of brazen hues, arms crossed in front of her face the better to deflect nature's wrath upon her. Sonic booms whither this way come do not help her orient, so much as reversing to strike the ceiling in what little breathing space around Mount Leaf remains. "Do you think I would perform something like this? Hardly my style." That's a damn twig, and she hurls it backwards with a casual toss, threatening none but the wall. "Hello, and I advise moving." The wind whines through the other end of the corridor. Fall is growing.
Through some intuition, Wicked looks up before she is addressed. Her eyes are brown but they might as well be glacial blue. Cold. Take this out on her, ye who dare! "Spring Semester or…" Her Genoshan accent is a mix of South African and British influences. She looks between Kaleb and the paper in-hand —and Scarlett. Oh, no! Taking her cue from how casually everyone seems to react to the onslaught of leaves, the new girl seems to have taken Kaleb seriously. What? She's seen weirder sh*t here already. It's mutant-school. "Is there some… /alternative plan/ for when this happens?"
Kaleb blinked at her. She was asking the important question here. With a glib deadpan he answered, "Well as starting a burn pile in the middle of the hall is frowned upon as we happen to have been gifted the rugs? I'd say some freshmen will be put on this… mess." He squint at the 4 younger kids having a blast of it. and then? well they were rustling about and seen but completely inaudible down to the cacophony of the leaves. One young man seemed to take protest to Echo silencing them and threw a fist full of leaves at their direction which traveled all of one foot before reaching potential apogee and falling to the floor in a shower of debris. He winced with a faint headache from it and put the back of his finger to his nose; nope. no blood. We were good.
Wicked got a look up and down and he surmised, perhaps for Rogue's benefit, "You're new." Scarlett knew this. She knew all the things but it didn't stop him from formalities. There was a slow pan from Wicked to Scarlett and an arch of an eyebrow. "Scarlett, you do lunch yet?" Which was as close to an invite as he'd throw out there. Back to Wicked he awaited the answer.
Whatever she knows, Scarlett is not exactly explaining as she slides down the slope of the accumulated piles. A kick here and there makes way for those who want to forge behind the bohemienne with her foxfire braids arranged in an elaborate net down her back. Eyes Aflame with general irritation, she surveys the new girl not unkindly. "This hardly constitutes a standard day, even around here. You are quite well?" Concern punctuates her voice, delicately laced by a wariness due to impending attack from an unknown nemesis. Can't trust those Canadians. Her own voice is polished, English to the core, an embellishment indicative of the Home Counties of the UK crossed with New York. It's an odd one, for sure, but not impossible to recognize. "I am half of a mind to build a large bonfire in the backyard and call for something suitable to grill on a stick. Barring that, food would be fine." She gestures lightly to the pair. "I'm Scarlett. Pleasure to meet you, and if you see acorns, we're about to be overrun by squirrelkind."
"Wicked," Wicked offers in response to Scarlett's self-introduction. She presses her lips crookedly together in a moment of concentrated thought before speaking again. "All set, I think. Thanks, though."
A ghoul mists up from around her ankles. Made up of what could be described as a translucent, swamp-green fog, the ghost-creation holds up both boney, menacing hands at face-level. Its jaw sags off of its half-exposed skull.
"We're looking for uhm. Room A-19," Wicked informs her creation before hop-stepping off of the staircase. She follows behind her spooky creation as it feverishly digs out a path from the mucky leaves… or at least tries.