This was rather new.


Sure, he'd been accused of stealing before, but he'd actually done it.  Or at least been around to see someone else do it.


This...  How exactly was this supposed to work?


"I know you did it!"  The claimant was a middle-aged man, probably human since he was flinging spittle and oozing rage without anything mutant-level happening to him or around him, in a button-up shirt that definitely wasn't suit-quality, and he was very insistent on pointing at Adder.


That even Adder was taller than the sad, confused angry dude didn't seem to be smoothing things out at all.  Adder also wasn't inclined to sit here and argue, or even bother to defend himself to some crazy guy, but there was a crowd gathering and there were definitely some higher-risk people in the uncomfortably evenly spread group.


"Whatever you lost, I didn't take it," he retorted, a hint of an exasperated growl slipping out at the end.  He didn't even need to steal right now!  He had bigger things to worry about, like not getting murdered by pink fog.  He'd swapped out all the actual physical bills she'd given him, just in case, but he'd hardly relaxed.


Angry dude got a little redder in the face.  "My wallet!  It was just in my pocket, and then it was gone, and when I turned around YOU were right there!  GIVE IT BACK!"


Angry dude was coming closer hell no.  Adder darted backwards and to the side, dropping into a crouch and every appropriate nerve kicking into gear.  He watched, carefully: a finger twitch, fresh foam across the corner of his mouth, a shift in weight - there was the lunge, trying to grab him.


Adder rolled sideways, stray rocks digging into his shoulder and ribs hard enough to leave pinpoint bruises, and came up out of angry dude's reach only to smell someone new, and bigger, at his back.


And a hell of a lot closer than Angry Dude had been.

It is said an X-man can smell a fight from a mile away. This is, of course, false. They just had an uncanny knack for being nearby when one broke out. Sometimes stood right in the epicenter. This was not one of those.

Cafas broke into a run towards the unmistakable sounds of an altercation breaking out. The subtle change in the tone of the hubbub of Central Park he'd heard for too often.
He weaved through a stand of trees,cresting one of the park's well groomed hillocks. On the path ahead, he spotted the ring of onlookers. From his elevation he could just make out an angry looking man, short, fat, and balding. He appeared to be grasping at a teen that could only be described as malnourished. He heard something about of wallet, which he'd have been more inclined to believe if the teen didn't look so confused.

Been there...

A flurry of action led to the teen rolling into a man who seemed rather more well equipped to be fighting. Six foot tall and athletic. Cafas caught the hint of a disgusted scowl under well groomed hair that told him everything he needed to know about how the guy would react. He seemed the type to have a problem with the under-privileged youth even without the accusations of theft being thrown around.

Ah, from bad, to SO much worse.

Cafas caught the large man by the wrist as he made to take the teen by the back of the neck. His eyes swung angrily to Cafas' stern, unflinching gaze and the fight seemed to leave him. Classic bully, all it took was a real threat of losing, and they'd surrender. Likely an "untouchable" rich jock in high-school.

The spell on the crowd broke, and suddenly everyone was diving in to "rescue" the "poor kid" from the "overreacting" man.

Crowds...

The word was said with a level of exasperation only achievable in the mind of someone who'd fought riots.

Jockman had already made himself scarce. Cafas whipped out his badge to calm what was quickly becoming a mob, menacing the man who'd lost the wallet. "Ladies and gentlemen, NYPD, please disperse. I'll take it from here." He tried to catch the hungry kid's eye as people began to either disperse, give their accounts all at once, or worse, recognize him. "You Okay?" he mouthed, using hand gestures to shush and move along the crowd.

And only one more hand laid upon someone than Maya would have used...

Adder could smell the guy, in more ways than one, and it told him enough that he only glanced up to watch for the first strike - but it was interrupted by someone else. Someone who could put statues of athletes to shame.

The fight left the guy he'd rolled into, and Adder made to leave the fight. Quickly. So very, very quickly, except the crowd was too tight to dodge through easily and there was too much attention on him. He tensed up instead, ears back and attention flicking too quickly from one spot to the next, and then settled on the badge the new guy was flashing.

Adder took advantage of the crowd's shifting attention and made for the distance, aiming to at least get out of the cop's reach before anyone else had a chance to react.

Cafas was going to take the retreating as a no. His badge found his pocket once more as he moved people aside to go after the kid. He had the hunted and hungry look Cafas had seen often in his years on the streets. He could use the Mansion as much as anyone Cafas had ever taken back there.

Maybe even more...

What was left of the crowd barely put up a fight as he moved through. He had learned long ago the value of moving with authority and seeming like he'd as soon walk through someone as look at them. They dispersed, some more disappointed than others.
He cast a glance around when he hit the edge. The bald man had already disappeared. Cafas couldn't blame him, anyone that had seen the riots could recognize the beginnings of a mob.

His eye went back to the retreating form of the kid he was following. He followed until they were out of sight of the clustered people, tracking him with more than a little difficulty through the tourists and New Yorkers alike that littered the Central Park paths.

Shouldn't these people be huddled somewhere with cocoa?

When he was fairly confident there was no-one around who'd seen the scuffle, he called out. "Hey, kid, you okay? I'm not going to arrest you, I just wanna talk."

Adder didn't run, but moved with the flow of pedestrians once he was free of the tangle. His ears might have been focused on the guy trailing him - and his nose, now that he had enough space to identify individual scents again - but his eyes seemed casually focused on his hands. All young people walked with their phones out, wasn't that obvious? Even if Adder didn't have one, and never had. He could still fake it, and draw less focused attention.

But not shake the attention that had clung to him. His ears shifted subtly, a quiet cocktail of stress and wariness, and he mimed pocketing his 'phone' with all the casualness of a standard city teenager.

He turned towards the cop but kept walking, trusting his ears and nose to lead him around all the people he couldn't see - and drifting around them without incidence.

"Rolling on the ground isn't going to break me," he said. His tone was a bit clipped but it wasn't openly aggressive. "And I didn't do anything, so there's nothing to talk about."

Cafas would have rolled his eyes, he nearly couldn't hold it in, but it really was SUCH a teenage behavior. Combative and surly. Now who did that sound like? "Maybe not, but I recognize your situation." Cafas' eyes flickered over the gaunt features, to the pointed ears, and back to the kid's eyes. "It's not easy, and I'm just trying to offer you an out."

Same one I flew here for... Hopefully he wont repeat my mistakes.

The way the kid moved confidently around and past people confirmed a suspicion he'd had from the beginning. When combined with the ears, it was a no brainer. The kid was a mutant. That was really the only requirement for consideration at the Mansion. He had to at least offer. It would feel wrong not to.

Plus, what would I tell Maya? She'd be upset with me...

"We can get lunch, if you're willing to hear me out." Cafas' body language was as gentle as he could manage, given his size. Placating even. He really was just trying to do the kid a solid, but he had a sense it wasn't going to be just that easy.

Recognize your situation.

Those might not be the exact words he'd heard before, but there was an eerie similarity to what the mirror-teleporting not-cop had said. Coincidence?

Adder made a point of not relying on coincidence. Coincidence was, by nature, unreliable. How could it not be coincidence? Was this guy working with the not-cop? The badges supported that. They might not be working together with respect to him, although that possibility was extremely concerning, but they might just work together. People in groups tended to do things similarly. And his poking around the place the not-cop had talked about had been reassuring.

..........lunch in exchange for talking, or at least listening?

He wasn't especially hungry, by his standards, and he still had some money left... but food was still food. Food was always food. And cops who weren't dirty had a level of reliability. And cops who were dirty had a level of predictability, and the option to flip the situation by involving clean cops and exposing the dirty one. Not that Adder had actually done it, but he'd seen the setup for it before.

"Keep it public and short," he said, and made sure he gave every indication of being unwilling to take any idiocy - and able to handle it in his own way if it was tried.

"Great! How do you feel about burgers?"

If shrugs were a language, teenagers were bilingual. Still, until they had burgers in front of them, Cafas supposed the kid was entitled to ignore him as much as he wanted. Cafas led the way to a burger joint he frequented, happy that he'd even gotten the pointy eared kid to agree to listening.

They sat, burgers in hand, Cafas with a shake it was FAR too cold to actually be drinking. He waited for the first bite before starting. "Three square a day cooked for you, more if you're happy to get them yourself. Heating. Education at your fingertips if you want it, a fully stocked library. A pool, tennis courts, a gym if they're more your thing. Company if you want it, your own room with a proper bed, if you don't. Free." Cafas took a bite of his own burger, chewed, swallowed, sipped his shake.

Brain freeze!

"Security too. No more watching your back every second, sleeping with one eye open. They got me back on my feet in life, and if you let them, they can do the same for you. Xavier's is a pretty sweet deal, and I can have you in a room there tonight, if that sounds good to you." Cafas watched the kid expectantly. He'd have to be out of his mind to refuse, really. Not that it wasn't a possibility.

If shrugs were a language, Adder was trilingual. Still, burgers were food and Adder wasn't paying - and he was relieved to recognize the place. It added a certain reliability and assurance that his food wasn't going to come out of the kitchen contaminated.

Of course, he'd eaten some pretty nasty stuff before and survived, so he could at least recognize the initial symptoms of recognizable poison. He didn't want to have to.

Adder still worked through his first bite slowly, letting his tongue work as much as his nose to hunt for any out-of-place ingredients. It worked for a bit, but there was, er, something to be said for properly made food and its interactions with salivation. Once he ran into the intersection of satisfied-with-safety and can't-taste-through-the-drool-in-his-mouth, he ripped through the remains of the burger in very, very short order. His teeth were better for tearing and shearing than human teeth, after all, and he didn't have a problem eating like a dog.

He sat back, examining the cop for a long few moments after he finished eating and the cop finished talking. "There a new reward for recruiting or something?" He was... actually almost amused. True amusement was pretty rare, but this at least made it into passingly worthy of a snort. He did snort, and rolled his shoulders a bit to stretch.

"Just how many people with badges run around for this place?"

Cafas quirked an eyebrow dangerously close to his hairline. So the kid had run into an X-man before? That was interesting. He had to wonder what side of the law he'd been on that time. An idle thought stirred around the back of the X's head, something about a file he'd read recently.

Danica really rattled my head with that blast...

"Just the X-men that I know of. There's no recruitment bonus that I know of, we just care." It also helped that it tended to keep the rate of mutant youth crime lower. Remove them from the streets, suddenly they don't need to steal. You couldn't help the ones that just enjoyed the rush of breaking laws, but you could certainly keep a closer eye on them. Cafas chewed through another bite of burger, taking it far more slowly than the kid in front of him, who had wolfed his down in seconds.

Wolfed... Wolfed. Hmm.

"So, who was the other person you ran into?" Cafas leveled the question with an indifferent curiosity, but if they'd scared the kid off of the Mansion, they'd be getting a firm talking to from Cafas. They couldn't afford to be ostracizing mutant kids, it was bad enough the world treated them how it did without mutants turning on each other. God forbid they turn youth towards the Order with heavy handed law enforcement strategies.

Adder watched, and in this instance didn't try to hide that he was watching. He might as well let this cop know that he was evaluating him - judging him, and everything he represented - and see how that affected his responses as much as Adder's words.

And the colourful guy who smelled a bit of metal took that comment seriously. Was he so literal? Hm.

He probably shouldn't mess with the guy, all things considered, but he still wanted to. Messing with cops of any sort wasn't on his list of useful, safe pastimes. It was on a different list, along with pretending to sell fundraiser cookies and throwing shoes into the river.

That train of thought kept him from thinking too much about the idea of people caring, which wasn't a foreign concept do much as a nostalgic one. It wasn't something he'd been able to rely on in many years.

"Oh, just some women," Adder answered casually, poking through the empty wrapper from his burger for stray bits of toppings but quietly keeping an eye on the cop-slash-x-man. He wanted toooooo but he shouldn't. But wait! The response would be valuable.

...

He continued as if he hadn't been debating the wisdom of this tract. "The glowing pink one made an interesting case for your place."

Technically true. Avoiding her was a very strong motivation.

Cafas frowned, suddenly confused. Surely he couldn't mean the glowing pink woman Cafas knew. There had to be a different one. There was no way Aura was making a case for people going to the Mansion. Well, she certainly made a good case for living in a house protected by X-men, but that probably wasn't what he'd meant.

Not that we can really do much about her without an adapted far too close to her for their own safety.

Cafas also couldn't think of a glowing pink X-man. Maybe Kat, if she chose to, but given the frequency with which Aura was shot at, he doubted Kat would be silly enough to make herself glow pink. Must have been a student Cafas hadn't met. So who had the X-man been? Female narrowed it down somewhat, but not quite enough. Ultimately, it didn't matter. It seemed the kid was interested in the Mansion.

Probably Maya, or Maya.

Cafas' face softened as he spoke, an eyebrow quirking inquiringly, "Can't say I know any glowing pink women at the Mansion. Sounds like you might be interested though?" Interested was good. Interested could get him off the street. Off the street was safer, and much less likely to result in crimes.

Reassuring. The cop wasn't being especially hard to read, didn't seem to be faking his reaction, and didn't appear to like Aura one bit. Adder had been right about how well known she was to law enforcement, and it had paid off.

"I never said she was at the mansion," he replied drily. Regardless of his individual reliability, this cop at least matched everything else he'd learned.

His face hardened at the blunt mention of interest, though, and he turned his shoulder a little bit towards the cop. Like he was just going to quietly follow at his heels back there like a lost and lonely puppy.

"Thanks for the food," he said shortly, and made to slide out from the table.

>"I never said she was at the mansion,"

Well, that could certainly be Aura then. Cafas wasn't utterly convinced, mostly because the kid was clearly not dead. That was a rare trait for people that interacted with Aura, in Cafas' experience. He could have asked, but it really didn't seem to matter that much.

>"Thanks for the food,"

"No problem. If you do get sick of being cold every night and fancy hot meals on a daily basis, you know where to find us." Cafas wasn't going to stop him. He had to want to go to the Mansion. Even if Cafas wanted to, forcing him would do no good. He could just leave. Then he'd never want to go there.

"I'm Cafas, by the way. Feel free to ask for me if you do go to the Mansion. I may or may not be there, if I am though, I can get you all signed in." IT was a remarkably easy process, really. He just knew it could be nice to have a friendly face around when doing all that paperwork. The forms, and the Mansion itself, could be quite imposing.

Also he was fishing for a name.

Calling him kid forever wouldn't do.

Sick of living out and about in the city?

That was just what he was used to; there was no being sick of it or looking for an escape from that life. That was his life, and had been for the vast majority of it. All he was looking for was a shield from a specific threat, a specific person. He'd given up on wishing he still lived with his parents within a week of losing them. He was, after all, naturally focused on the moment rather than some wishy-washy future or past.

Except when it came to food. He wanted food to be a now thing as well as a future thing. An always thing, really. Come on, it was food.

And now he had a burger in his stomach and wanted more. Tch. As long as the cop guy didn't notice that ear twitch, then there was no harm done.

Maybe he'd wander around the back of this place on his way out. Sometimes he got lucky and a food place had stupid customers who turned away their food; when that happened, he didn't even have to dig much.

Cop guy was Cafas, Cafas was that scent. Eh, he was distracted but not completely so. This was where most people would reply with their own name, but Adder didn't always determine his actions by what most people would do. He wasn't trying to blend in with 'most people' right now, so he had no intention of pretending he was one.

He shrugged, a hint of a nod caught up in the movement, and padded out of the restaurant. The sidewalk outside was cooler on his bare feet, and more so when he circled around behind the building. Dumpsters were very easy to find with a nose like his, but there was nothing fresh in this one.

He sighed and glanced around as he carefully inhaled. If Cafas the metal cop who wasn't a robot even if he smelled of metal weren't nearby, weren't stalking him or doing anything suspicious, then he'd head off towards that mansion place.

On his own terms, using his own routes through the city, and by himself.