"There are probably a few. Maybe they hang around the princesses. There are fairytales, we're just in the wrong place." And the wrong people, at least in Persi's case, but that was probably connected to being in the wrong place. Which was the cause of the other was less clear, though.

"Nice to meet you too." Automatic, though meeting her had at least not been unpleasant. So it wasn't like it was a lie.

"Not really." Wandering in random parks, he supposed, but that probably wasn't what she meant. "I didn't have anything to do, so I started walking, and ended up here.... That's prettymuch it." Also, he'd forgotten he told her he was drawing angels. Hopefully she wouldn't ask to see.

He didn’t give off any hiss of disgust at the word mutant, so it was safe to assume he wasn’t too much of a bigot, that was good, she was planning on dragging him to a coffee shop she frequented where the regular barista had vibrant purple stripes on her skin and fangs that were far too realistic to be clip-ons.

“I’m going to go get coffee, want to come, my shout?”

Truthfully, she was going to order a tea, but no-one just says ‘I’m going to get a cup of tea’ especially not in New York City… She hoisted up the box of apples and led the way to the coffee shop, pausing here and there to offload another apple on random passers-by.

Once they had settled into a nice sustainable walk she glanced over at him, he seemed a little younger, now he was standing, he had the weedy high schooler look, before they quite grew into their own awkward limbs. He was sweet though, and they were only going for coffee, not drinks, so she didn’t feel bad at all.

Before they passed the homeless shelter she was thinking of she had handed out all but three of the apples, and when they passed yet another sign outlining the reason that particular person was asking for loose change she gave him the whole box, partially for the apples and partially so he had some fresh cardboard, since his was looking rather worse for wear ‘Wife left me for mutie-octopus face. Can’t say I blame her. Took house and kids. There was a crude drawing of a man with tentacles for a beard underneath the words and she hid her grimace at the mental image of why the wife left him. The coffee shop was only a few doors down.

Once they were safely in the (relatively short) line she gave him a few minutes to decide on an order before indicating the drink on the menu she was going to have.

“They have a really good orange ice tea.”

True, it was a bit… girly… but the flavour was nice and the oranges were fresh. Purple stripes gave her a smile as they approached the counter to make their order.


[OOC: hope god-modding us to the coffeeshop was ok <3]

"Sure." Persi wasn't totally sure what a shout was, but from the context it probably meant paying for the coffee. And if not he still had enough money left over, so it would only be a little bit awkward if he'd misunderstood.

More apples were given out, which kind of made Persi happy that they had been given out, and kind of made him feel guilty for not having anything of his own to give, so all he could do was stand there next to Cara and be awkward. That was kind of stupid though, he really didn't have anything to give away, so he tried to ignore it.

Also, seeing a guy not blame his wife for leaving him for a mutant was... weird. Confusing enough to distract Persi from the guilt for a little while, too. He didn't even seem to be blaming the mutant, unless he was being really passive aggressive about it.

And there was another distraction at the coffee shop. Multiple, in fact. Persi read about half of the menu before his eye caught purple in the corner of it.

...That... was a mutant. A really, really typical mutant, the kind his parents had used in scary bedtime stories. Well, apart from being a woman; most of the scary story mutants were men, if it was mentioned. He pulled his eyes away and started at the floor once he noticed he was staring. He could almost convince himself he wasn't blushing. Staring was rude, even if it was really logical. Really, fangs? The stripes could maybe be tattoos, but fangs?

Cara's question distracted him and he looked back up at the menu. "Um...." Persi didn't feel like copying her exactly, but orange did sound good. And his brain was still a bit busy running in circles over other things. "Is the orange smoothie good too?"

He seemed a little quiet on the way there, but once they were at the coffee shop he asked a question about the orange smoothie. It was good, all icy and delicious, and just a little bit manlier than an ice tea.

“It is, a bit brain-freezy, but tasty.”

She ordered hers and, once he had decided, his as well. A shouting did indeed mean she was going to pay for his, and she did so. She wasn’t quite sure where she had heard it, one of her Australian classmates or something.

Once their drinks were ready, she led them to a table with cushy couches and good lighting. She took a sip of her ice tea and nodded towards the art book.

“So, angels, huh, can I see?”

"Most smoothies are." Persi was used to brain freezes. Not fond of them, of course, but used to them. He could deal with brain freezy.

And oh thank God he was right about assuming what that meant. That made it much less awkward. Still fairly panic-inducing until he was sure that was what she meant, but less awkward. Thank you adrenaline, you can go away now.

And the couch was nice. He wasn't particularly tired, but the dose of adrenaline was making it seem kind of like it, so sitting down was nice. Until she asked about the angels, at which point he squirmed. "Um... yes. Falling angels, technically." Falling, or fallen; the second was more of what he was concerned about. His last few ideas had been a bit... demonic. And gruesome. Not that he was good at drawing headless corpses, but the idea was still there. "You can see if you want...." He'd already told her, after all, so it didn't matter if she saw that much.

A sad fact of life, the better a smoothie was, the more likely it was to give you a massive brain freeze that felt like your skull was imploding on itself. Yummy. She took her own ice tea (much less brain-freezy) in its tall glass to the table and settled in. She probably should have asked if he wanted to get them to go, but they were settling in now as sit-ins.

He seemed a little sleepy until she asked about the angels, then he seemed a bit uncomfortable. Falling angels it was. Not so bad really, it could have been far worse, she had stumbled on some unfortunate things in her time on the internet.

She took the book and opened it to the page he had been on when she first interrupted him. A partially completed sketch of an angel impacting with the ground was what she saw (at least, she thought it was the ground, it was mostly just guidelines there, not much detail filled in). The wings of this falling creature were what drew her eyes the most, obviously a lot of effort had gone in to making them look right, the feathers streaming back away from his body, as if trying their hardest to stay in heaven.

“Someone has to fall, otherwise there would never be any good guys.”

It was something she thought of often, when some villain or another was demonised. Without villains, there could never be heroes, and who wanted to live in a world where everyone was average anyway?

[[OOC: I used a reference picture for describing the fallen angel, all kudos goes to the owner, kobaltmaster of deviantart <3 ]]

"Hm." Persi found himself looking away from the drawing, and his eyes landed on the smoothie. That was a comfortable place to stare. "Maybe."

He was pretty sure not, though. There had only been good guys, once. Someone had to fall for good to be exceptional, sure, but not for good to be good. And good being exceptional because most people were bad... was not a desirable world. Even if it was the only world that Persi could exist in.

He couldn't change it, though. That was a mercy. Persi couldn't go back and undo sin, and he couldn't get rid of it now that it existed. All he could do was try to avoid as much of it as possible himself, which was much easier.

It also wasn't something he needed to worry about all the time, which was a relief. He certainly didn't want to think about it now. "It's probably bad to appreciate that they fell, though."

He seemed a little non-commited. He wasn’t really opposed to her ideas, but neither did he agree with them. She was fairly sure she was right though; there was nothing, then there was something and the something called itself good (as it would, who would just say they were bad if they were the only one around?). Then when someone rebelled against him, chose a different path, he called them evil and told everyone else that they were the “bad guys” and to reject them.

“Creating something fallible and then complaining when they failed was just rude”.

Appreciate was probably the wrong word, it was more like a mix of sympathy and empathy. She would have kicked up quite a fuss if her parents had suddenly started playing favourites with her younger sisters. And who was The Maker to decide who got knowledge and who didn’t? Persi seemed like he was a bit uncomfortable with the topic though, so she decided to let is along for a while and change the subject.

“I’m studying journalism at the moment, how about you?”

Persi couldn't think of an answer to that. Or, he could sort of think of one, a little vaguely, but not well enough to put it into words and answer. Which was unfortunate, because he knew she was wrong--not that it wouldn't have been rude, but that it had happened; there was no way God could fail, He had just chosen to give humans free will, and humans had abused it. That wasn't God's failure.

That was a safer topic. Not Persi's favorite at all, but better than what they had been talking about. "I do art. Not really study it, formally, right now...." It was summer, after all. "But I have when I've had room in my schedule, with other classes." Which wasn't nearly as often as Persi would like, but that was... it had been supposed to improve. He had no clue whether the Mansion even had art classes, or how he'd get into them, or what classes they had.... He was going to have to figure that out.

She was glad that he took the subject change, not that she couldn’t have continued the discussion, but getting into the whole fact that there were living proofs of evolution (including herself) wandering around the city might have been a little awkward, if not borderline offensive.

“Where abouts are you studying?”

It was mostly small-talk, with only a little bit of ulterior motive; she wasn’t a private-school snob, but she could see his mentality possibly coming from somewhere like that. Somewhere that religion was a compulsory part of the curriculum. It was possible that he had come to this conclusion by himself, but it had the echoes of teachings rather than personal research about it.

“I’m about to do an internship at a news firm (I don’t know which one yet) but usually I’m at the Uni in the city.”

"Um." That was a question that Persi did not want to talk about. But he couldn't think of a way to answer without being really, really obvious about not answering. "Just... high school. Nowhere special yet." Persi had heard of high schools dedicated to art, but had known better than to bother looking at them, even when he was in middle school. There was no way his parents would've wasted money on sending him to an art school, even if there had been one nearby. "I just switched schools, so I don't really know what art classes the new one has."

"Oh." That was a much safer topic. "Do you know what you're doing for the internship?" Persi had a vague impression as internships being basically very short apprenticeships where you did all the work no one wanted to do and weren't paid, but didn't have any idea what work journalists wouldn't want to do.

Evasion tactics again! He was a tough nut to crack. Maybe all teenagers were though. She tried to remember how she acted in highschool, probably a bit antisocial but not to this degree. Although, she had been lucky enough to have a small group of friends that had stuck together since elementary school, while he seemed like more of a loner.

“You should talk to the class coordinator, or careers advisor or someone. Most schools would have art classes. Or you could just watch for kids with painty hands and ask them…”

He switched the focus back on to her, and she thought for a moment before answering.

“I’m not sure really, I’m going to try and do some work for Wolf News, try and get in at the lower levels so when I graduate they might take me on. They tend to have an ok mutant policy, and I’d rather go somewhere that isn’t anti-mutant.”

Even humanny humans could still want equal rights for the x-geners, the same way even the straightest of straights could want marriage equality. Right?

"Yeah." Persi was putting that off, a bit. He still didn't really like thinking about staying at the Mansion. "I don't know who that is yet, though. And the only person I know who also draws is... kind of weird, basically everything she says is like... I don't know. Some kind of psychologist or something." That was really a bad description of Evelyn, but Persi couldn't think of a better one without actually using the word mutation.

"They do?" That was... extremely confusing. It explained why his parents complained about them, though. Apart from the mutant reporter, anyway. "But they're supposed to be conservative." Clearly not conservative enough.

“Oh, yeah, well I mean they have a known mutant on the program, that’s about as pro-mutant as news companies get these days.”

And she didn’t want to get a job somewhere that would kick her out the moment she seemed different enough to be borderline mutant. Or if her mutation developed a more visible side effect than crazy-eyes.

The school he had transferred to didn’t seem to have a very good welcoming service for new students. Shouldn’t there have been a welcome package given to him with his timetable or something? At the very least he could ask at the front office, or admin, or whatever it happened to be called at that particular school. He couldn’t ask his arty friend because they would just analyse him, he wasn’t sure who to talk to…

“You should get your parents to call and find out who the organiser is so you can enrol in art.”

Hmm, that could have been a bit insensitive, he hadn’t actually said how old he was, and teens had a thing about being independent and looking after themselves without parental influence.

“If you like I could call and ask for you, if you know the school’s number?”

Or their name, then they could look them up in the phonebook.

Persi supposed that was true. Also really, really weird--what was a conservative news company doing being pro-mutant? It was basically their purpose to be anti-mutant. There must be an explanation for it; there was for everything, technically. A very good explanation, to justify it. And Wolf News's mutant was really recognizable as a mutant, too, if Persi remembered right. Maybe someone had threatened them? Or the mutant--or a mutant, really--had some way to influence, them, mind conr--what.

What? Had she just--no. No, Persi could not answer that. No. He froze, staring at Cara for a moment, before jumping (and squeaking, though he didn't notice) and managing to move again. Which, mostly, meant awkwardly jumping up and backing away. "I, um, don't think they'd do that, I don't know the number, sorry, I have to go!" Back away, get to the door, and leave as fast as he possibly could without running. That his sketchbook was still there had been completely forgotten. So had the smoothie, but he was still holding that.