Once the date of the first lesson was organised she took it upon herself to collect a few bits and pieces to take to the class. A sketchbook to practice in. An ‘artists set’ of lead pencils varying in dark and/or squishiness. Children’s basic coloured pencils she had snagged from a post-school-prep sale a while back and a fittingly artsy bag-slash-pencil case-slash-laptop protector. She organised and reorganised the contents of the artsy slash-slash, unsure whether she would need more, or less, and just what was the perfect arrangement of pencil:paper layers.

Finally pleased with the careful systematisation of slash-slash, she set it carefully on the bed while she moved to considering what clothing was appropriate. She had seen some of the arty types wandering around in overly loose clothing, while others seemed to prefer overly tight and lacy. The younger ones were harder to tell, being frequently splattered in paint so heavily that the original clothes were difficult to determine under the mess. She decided on a less-than-favourite pair of jeans, figuring that if they became so paint-flecked, pencil-shavinged or ink-stained that she felt she could no longer wear them in public it would be no great loss. True, they were an incredibly comfortable pair of jeans, but surely comfort could only be improved by a ‘lived in’ look. Besides, it might do her some good to have the air of an arty type, possibly attract some friends she could see beside the money swapping between her and Cafas, and the polite but not overly friendly nods of people she saw frequently walking their dogs when she was out with Jack. She could use a couple friends. Once the pants were decided on it was relatively simple to choose a shirt. There was one lurking in the bottom of her draw that she had pulled from a 50c pile in some Yard sale or another. It was black and had sleeves, the kind with a little loop and a button to keep them rolled up at shoulder height. It was a designer type shirt made suitable for art-projects due to the serious moth-gnawing that had happened while it was in storage. She paired it with a light grey tank top so the moth holes wouldn’t reveal anything untoward and she was right to go, an older pair of holey Chuck Taylors completing the arty look.

She swung the slash-slash off the bed and over her shoulder by its strap, hearing the disconcerting high-pitched rumble of escaping pencils running wild in a contained fabric space. Shrugging it further onto her shoulder and resolving to find a less precarious system of organization, she set off to the designated room for her first lesson.

With normal classes, Nate could usually cling to a lesson plan, and from there he could take each student on a more comprehensive bases based on their understanding of the material and how much help or how many new challenges he or she might need.

With an individual lesson, Nate had to pretty much make things up on the fly, especially when he only knew an iota of his student's artistic abilities. Verdigris was a nice girl, but he only recently met her and her first showing of "talent" was... she had a lot of work to do.

He would start with something simple. He had a few options in his head, so it would be up to her. If she was looking to gain a better understanding of real dimensions, there would be sketching an object and dealing with proportions and shading (to a very basic degree.) If she wanted to focus on basic drawing of things like people, they could work on the appropriate proportions and dimensions of bodies.

He would leave the choice up to her since it was her money and her interest, and he wanted to give her the experience she was looking for.

In the meantime, he was sure he had some time to kill before his student showed up, and his shirt was paint-stained from his most recent project. While the markings did give him the "art teacher" aura, he'd rather look presentable if it was a sketching class. Pulling a buttondown from a personal closet, he set it on the table. He unbuttoned and tossed his current shirt in the closet before picking the clean shirt from the table.

They met once before, but it was still important to make a good first professional impression in a classroom setting.

It had taken some time and on-the-move shuffling around in her bag, but finally she had got the pencils to stop cascading around making a high pitched clatter. By the time she arrived the only aural warning of her presence was the gentle swish-swish of denim against denim as she walked. She reached the door, and as she was a little early, pushed it open, expecting the room to be empty.

The room was not empty.

She was confronted first with the bare back of her soon to be teacher (a very nice back, as far as backs go). Then as she made a startled noise that was meant to come out as an apology, but instead manifested in a squeak of surprise, he turned to look at her and she was confronted with his bare front too (also a very nice front, as far as fronts go).

“Sorry!”

She should have knocked. You always knock.

She backpedalled into the hallway a more brilliant shade of red than the primary coloured pencil somewhere in her bag. It wasn’t really that bad. It could have been much worse, much, much worse. Still, it was not exactly the opening to the lesson she had been expecting. She waited what she thought was an appropriate shirt-donning duration before cautiously peeking back into the room.

“My bad.”

Nothing quite like a little embarrassment to start things off. Still, it was quite the icebreaker, or in the case that her cheeks were burning, melter. She fumbled with her bag awkwardly for a second until she could feel the flush cooling from her cheeks and neck. Right, so, that was that then.

Nate was just getting ready to put his arm through the sleeve of his shirt when an unexpected high pitch sound caught his attention and caused his heart to plummet into his stomach.

So much for making a good professional impression, then!

His young student (who was thankfully not a very young student, really,) arrived sooner than Nate was giving her credit for. It was probably a law of the universe; people only arrive when you are doing the thing you do not want them to show up during. Like changing. Changing was a popular one.

Verdigris popped out of the room and Nate assumed she was giving him the proper time to remedy his half-nakedness. He gladly used the time, hastily donning the shirt and doing the buttons from bottom to top.

She returned as he was finishing the top button, quickly apologizing for her timing. He shook his head, laughing it off, "No, you're fine. I was just asking for it by assuming I had the time to do that." Now that he thought about it, the situation was certainly similar enough to one of his run-ins with Xavia. Next time he was changing in a bathroom. With a lock. And maybe a guard or something.

"But yeah, moving on." As awkward as it was, Nate now felt a bit more comfortable knowing things would probably get better from there. "Nice to see you didn't change your mind!" Well, she did pay up front, so chickening out would have been silly and cost-inefficient.

Nate looked the student up and down; he could not help but feel like she was the example of a girl you would put in an art school brochure. "You definitely look ready for drawing at least. Right down to the Chucks," he teased, looking down at her feet, before glancing down to his feet.

He was also wearing Chucks!

My God, I'm a stereotype.

“Nice to see you didn’t change your mind”

She grinned. She had almost chickened out at one stage during a particularly confusing trip to the stationary store. She had passed staplers six times already in the hunt for a sharpener and the obnoxious youth at the register merely shrugged and continued picking his nose when she asked him. In a final act of desperation she had left the store, and sharpened her pencils with a knife until she found a different store with the sharpeners easily locatable.

He approved of her look. That was good. She had briefly considered a hat of some kind, a beret perhaps, but had decided against it, opting for a simple pony-tail and tucking her bandanna into her bag in case it seemed like it was going to get messy. He was actually wearing a similar combo, just a manlier version.

Was it odd to classify one’s teacher as ‘manly’? she decided it wasn’t, bcause he was and with that she snirked and plopped her bag onto the floor next to the seat she was planning to occupy.

“I did some research. And by research I mean, I cornered some young ‘uns and made them tell me what the ‘cool kids’ wear to class. Nothing but scales wasn’t an option for me, so I went with the next best thing.”

Said young ‘uns were much more partial to doling out fashion advice when she was doling out milkshakes, and it had taken a solid half hour in the kitchen mixing up an assortment of flavours from raspberry to cream cheese before they had come to an agreement to help her select an appropriate outfit. They had done well.

“So, what’s the plan, Stan.”

She knew his name wasn’t Stan, but the saying didn’t quite work with Holloway. Too late she figured she could have said ‘what’s on today, Holloway’ and it might have worked a little better.

>> “I did some research. And by research I mean, I cornered some young ‘uns and made them tell me what the ‘cool kids’ wear to class. Nothing but scales wasn’t an option for me, so I went with the next best thing.”

The girl had a sense of humor, and one that was almost as corny as Nate's own at that. "I wouldn't trust the advice of kids these days. They're all about their MTVs and their Nicky Gagas." It was almost funnier to be making a joke like that to a girl who was still pretty young in her own right. And he would ignore that because he was dedicated to not feeling like an old man in his classroom for once.

"And it takes a certain person to pull off the scales look. You're a bit too..." he quickly erased any of the more risque jokes or comments that could be made about walking around as bare as a lizard mutant, before realizing that she basically walking in on him in a similar situation. "Well, probably best we didn't both show up in the same outfit."

>> “So, what’s the plan, Stan.”

Nate sat on the edge of his desk, presenting the two options. "Up to you. Do you want to sketch objects and deal with shading and dimensions, or would you like to work sketching human figures with appropriate proportions?"

To be honest, he was starting to worry that their tutoring session was quickly beginning to involve human figures a bit too frequently.

She smiled, it was true that many of the words the younger kids used she wasn’t certain of. She was confident now about ‘planking’ and she had even paid enough attention to know that MySpace was no longer cool, but things like pop culture and trending clothes she was clueless about.

A bit too…?

Girly? She was pretty sure from the way the younger kids spoke about scales that he was a guy, and that it was true, she probably couldn’t, or at least wouldn’t, wander about like that all body parts considered. He covered by making a joke at his own topless expense and she smiled.

While it was true that humans would be awesome to draw, her extremely limited experience told her that they tended to move around too much. Maybe she better start with something a little stiller. Like a bowl of fruit or something.

“Maybe do some fruit then move onto people?”

Oh yeah, totally moving away from the awkward there, girl.

“Draw. Maybe I should draw fruit… it doesn’t run away.”

And she never felt the need to blush from prolonged periods of time staring at every curve and groove in an orange. A body on the other hand, might provoke a little more of the embarrassment. She fumbled in her bag and produced one of the lead pencils, holding it up for his approval like a child. Realising her action was a bit… weird, it was too late to put the pencil down and pretend she was merely getting it out to set it on the desk. She rolled the pencil around in her fingers until the type was revealed.

“Erm, 2B ok?”

>> “Maybe do some fruit then move onto people?”

Nate probably could have let the phrasing of the remark slide without noticing if it were not for Verdigris's quick and obvious reaction to her own mouth, both in her cheek color and her hasty self-edit.

>> “Draw. Maybe I should draw fruit… it doesn’t run away.”

Nate fought the urge to grin, but it was a strong urge not caring for his desire to remain the teacher and the professional in the room. "Oh, I don't know. Maybe you just haven't gotten a grapefruit pissed enough." There he was, back to some more appropriate humor.

Nate was rather surprised to see Verdigris's preparedness, ready with a sketching pencil. There were plenty in the classroom, but he did have some respect for her enthusiasm. "For some, yeah. It'll depend on the darkness of the shading. You'll probably be switching to different pencils based on shading."

Nate started digging through the closet before he found a large bag. "Thankfully, I apparently run a cliche art classroom, so I have--" he pulled out a shiny red apple from the bag, "plastic fruits. Apple." He placed the fake fruit on the table in front of Verdigris, proceeding to pull out and place new fake fruits as he announced them. "Grapes. An Orange. And a lemon."

I'm honestly shocked I didn't find a banana or melons or some other terrible innuendo. The worse was probably past.

"Start on the outlines in a light pencil, and then try and match the darkness of shadowed areas with the right pencils. You can try them out on scrap papers."

As she got started, Nate thought about how quickly she dismissed the idea of human drawing that it might be worth it to explain an important fact to her: "And when it comes to human sketching, I swear it was just going to be based on pictures." He was not going to throw the girl right into the fire with some live figure drawing. That would have been mentally damaging for an actual art student.

He diffused her slip up with a play about citrus and she settled herself into learning mode, now it was time to focus on the fruit. Of which there were thankfully no disgruntled grapefruits. She had started the outline of the orange, a nice, simple circle when he claimed his innocence with the human sketching.

Suuuure he was going to use pictures. She suddenly wondered if she hadn’t freaked out when she arrived if the drawing class might have gone a bit differently… The thought made her a little uncomfortable, and she tried to distract herself by peering critically between her ovoid shape and the sphere that was the real orange. Well, real in a manner of speaking.

New page.

“So, Mister Holloway,”

Pause to line up the next fruit, the apple, in her mind and on the page.

“How long have you worked at the mansion?”

Probably, like, a hundred years or something.

Content with her apple outline she started on the lemon leaving a gap for where the grapes overlapped. It seemed that the shape of the lemon was not the shape of a lemon that resides in your head, because every time she spent more than a few seconds looking at the page instead of the fruit the shape started to go wrong. She was on her sixth lemon by the time she was satisfied with it. Now that she had figured out that the way she visualised the shapes in her head wasn’t actually the shape they were her head kept flicking up and down, checking and re-checking the shapes as she drew them.

>> “So, Mister Holloway. How long have you worked at the mansion?”

Nate was glad to have an invitation for such normal small talk. She continued with her outlining, so he was going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she could handle multitasking her drawing and a conversation.

"It's only been..." It took him a second to de-hyperbolize his way down from "forever' before he realized how untrue the thought was. "Damn, only like half a year actually. To be honest, it feels like it's been way longer."

Nate looked down at the paper she was working on, and judging by her eraser marks, she was realizing how different the picture in her head was compared to reality. When she was not looking, he smirked; if she was going to be a perfectionist, it was a good thing he suggested a lighter pencil.

A half a year? That really wasn’t that long, in fact she had been here herself far longer. Eight times as long. She inspected the drawing, rotated the paper a little, then began the complex outlining of the grapes.

“Do you have any pets?”

A little more safe small talk. Cats vs dogs, all that.

“I have a dog, called Jack. The mansion’s really cool about pets. I guess with all the mutant mess a little dog hair here and there isn’t that big of a deal.”

She erased the wonky curve she had made and tried again, this time coming up with a more suitable shape, more like a grape and less like an uncracked walnut.

“What’s your mutation?”

That was assuming he had one, most of the staff did. The same issues, or similar ones, that prevented the mutie kids from attending ‘normal’ schools usually kept teachers with the same ‘problems’ from teaching there. If he didn’t have one he was hardly likely to take offence, you had to be a special kind of open minded to work in the mansion and she was sure the screening process was vigorous.

The assumption that she could multitask was proving to be a correct one, as Verdigris was now firing off question after question. It felt almost less like she was trying to get to know him and more like he was being interrogated.

And if that second one was the case, she picked a hell of a topic to lead off with. Pets. "I have... um, one pet. I got him since I've been in New York actually. He's... special, for sure." For damn sure. "His name is Parker and he's... well, a mutant spider the size of a small dog." The last bit certainly came off his tongue quicker than the first portion.

"And for my mutation," hoping to change the subject quickly, "I can control and shape my shadow. Oh, and sometimes I become shadow. When I'm in danger. Or startled."

Those two topics were usually not together in his conversations, but reflecting now, with a giant pet spider and a mutation that turned him into a shadowman, Nate was one step shy of the freaking Boogeyman.

"And what is your mutation?" He looked down at her paper. "I'm guessing it is not instant shape recognition?" Hopefully she realized that was light teasing because she was a beginner and not a blunt insult. He added a chuckle at the end, which was pretty much the vocal version of what "lol" did in text: an afterthought reminder not to take a comment the wrong way.

A spider, the kind of pet a teenager might keep to freak out freidns or school chums. A spider the size of a dog, the kind of pet an adult might keep to freak out home intruders or muggers. Also not related to his mutation, interesting.

“One shady character description there.”

Still, no-one gets to choose their mutation, and all round it was not the most terrifying she had seen or heard of. He joked about her shapes and she eyed them critically, his chuckle suggested they really weren’t all that bad, and besides it was her first go.

“I have wormhole shotgun hands…”

Nice and simple that. The details about the size shape and weight of her projectiles, plus the limitations based on people looking at projectiles to be used were a little more complex.

“I bet you have a mean shadow-puppet show.”

She was reminded of camping trips with James, where they would use the torches to make shapes on the tent walls of dogs or rabbits or even, as they became more skilled, t-rexes.

He was not sure if she was taking a shot at him or making a "shade" pun at his expense or both, but he was trusting that most of what Verdigris said was all in good humor, so he would actively try not to take it personally.

>> “I have wormhole shotgun hands…”

It sounded like a very weird description that she expected to explain her power with tidily, but when he thought about the brief combination, he could piece it together on paper: wormholes took something from one place instantly to the other. If she was a "wormhole shotgun," it was reasonable that she pulled an object through one hole (probably her hand) and shot it out the other hole, (hopefully the other hand.)

Nate took a moment before finally replying, "That makes a surprising amount of sense." Sure, it was surprising that a pretty young woman like her was a dimensional weapon, but nature was funny sometimes.

>> “I bet you have a mean shadow-puppet show.”

Nate could have tried, but he would have failed; it was just impossible to resist the urge to be a snarky show-off.

His shadow discretely crept up the leg of the table until it maneuvered to the top of the desk and quickly materialized upward. "You tell me." The shape formed the typical shadowpuppet figure of a hand making a dog, but after a moment or two, it seemingly dissolved and reformed as a miniature example of a puppy in three-dimensional glory.

Yeah, he was pretty awesome.

“That makes a surprising amount of sense.”

It did, and it had taken a long time to get there. She found it was easier to explain a mutation shorthand first, then elaborate, and diving straight into portals whisking unnoticed items away and out one of her palms, which could be alternated with chosen objects should she put them in her other palm, that the portal was controllable but only to a degree, as were the objects… it was all a bit much for a simple description.

“It’s a bit weird but sometimes not being a visible mutant can make a lot of things go smoother.”

Like catching a cab, or eating at a buffet.

Oooh, they were doing show, as well as tell. The shadow pup-pet started out cool, as he didn’t need to move his hands, then became even cooler as it formed something that no amount of readjusting the flashlight could accomplish.

“That is indeed a mean shadow puppet. My turn.”

She spent a second inspecting the room, noting breakable vases, windows and the like and settled on using her eraser rather than one of the marbles in her pocket. She held up the rubber for him to see, then placed it flat on her left palm, closing her fingers shut tightly around it. Taking a second to choose an appropriate target she let loose on a dried splodge of paint on the floor.

The little eraser flung out of the portal in a blur, hitting dead on the centre of the paint splatter and ricocheting off a few desks before tumbling to a halt.

She too, was pretty awesome.