Just when Locke was about to go into the details of who Mai was, because he could spend hours talking about his little sister, Chris spoke up. He seemed to have been hurt by what Locke had said. It had not been Locke’s intention to make Chris feel bad in any way, just to express that there was something that Chris had that the respected, and perhaps even wanted. He himself had been on the other side of some unintentionally painful remarks. Nobody had intended to make him feel bad about his blind eye, but sometimes it was the attempts at being nice that hurt more. “Look, I know what it’s like to have something about you that you aren’t happy about, and I know what it’s like to see people with something you want.”

It was going to be hard to convince Chris that he wasn’t happy with his own appearance without either hurting Chris’s feelings more, or saying why exactly he viewed himself as a monster. “But Cuz, you got to stop dissin’ on your powers. I think that we have them because there’s something more we need. Until my powers showed up I kept running into things I knew were there because I couldn’t tell how close I was. There’s got to be something that your powers do for you that they couldn’t for someone else.”

Chris immediately regretted that he'd said anything about it. He was sure Locke hadn't meant anything about it, he should have just nodded and left it at that. As it was he had probably sounded a bit whiny... and he hadn't really whined, just stated that having a skin covered with mucus was a bit uncool at times.

Actually, it made him feel a bit defensive. Chris hadn't seen Locke's left eye because it had been obscured by his hair every time they'd met, so he frankly had no idea what the other was talking about when he said that he knew what it was like to have something about you that he wasn't happy about. And the comment about how he'd been running into things just confused Chris.
He held his hands over the water in some kind of defiant gesture.
"Look, I wasn't... I didn't mean..."
He trailed off and realized that he didn't knew what he was trying to say. He took a deep breath and started over, and hated how it was sounding like he was trying to justify himself.
"I'm not saying that I hate my mutation. It's just... Is it so wrong to want to pass for normal sometimes?"
Small, flustered pink spots were appearing on his grey cheeks. And the fact that he didn't have a reason to be flustered just mad it worse - Locke had just been trying to make him feel better about his abilities. Somehow this had turned very awkward.
"You probably know that people treat you different if they know you're a mutant. Now imagine looking like one... or smelling like one. I'll never be able to hide what I am, or, or, blend in..."
Great. He was just making it worse - if he hadn't been whining before he certainly was whining now.

Locke had to shrug his shoulders, a sign of deference. Chris had a valid point. “Sorry to say that only my step-mother and I knew that I was a mutant, and acting like I wasn’t didn’t make things any better.” To give them both some time to think the Californian prodded the rock that had obeyed him, feeling it lift briefly off the river’s bed before he lost contact with it. “I don’t want to have to go back to that. This is who I am and I’m comfortable with it. Sure I may have to do laundry an absurd amount but hey, if it means that I’m not defenseless then might as well buy some stocks in Cheer and Snuggle.” The words probably didn’t mean as much to Chris but Locke had meant it. Trying to ignore what they were just made things more difficult. Did Chris understand that? Did his family ignore the elephant in the room? Did he know what the silence was like and what it brought?

“Stick with me on this, ‘cause it’s about to do some math stuff,” Locke was unable to hide the distaste in his voice from mentioning that dreaded subject, “This is my friend talking by the way. To be a mutant means that we’re weighed in three ways, how beneficial or detrimental our mutation is, how acceptable to society it is, and how detectable or obvious our mutation is. Nobody wants Fluffy running through their backyard. Besides, with how random being a mutant is can you call anything normal? I mean taking mutations out of the picture you still can rock the most important test known to man. So yeah, I can blend in with a crowd, but I won’t lie, I am not normal”

Chris listened to Locke when he explained his view on the subject. Then he said glumly:
"Yeah, I guess I see your point. But in my case, the only way to solve that equation would be to do... I don't know, I would have to do something crazy beneficial. Like, saving the president's kids from drowning, or something. Don't see that happen anytime soon."
He didn't really feel like talking about the subject anymore, so he changed subjects in a way that might have been a bit too obvious.
"You said you could move rocks under water? That's great. Does it feel different then when you do it on land?"

"Like I said, it goes into math stuff. I know you hate it as much as me. Who knows, maybe we're getting the wrong answer. I fail a lot of tests after all," There. The topic was put to rest and Locke had managed to insult himself which should make Chris feel a little better. It is one thing to feel insulted, another thing to hear someone insult themselves.

How best to describe how it felt to move a rock in the water? It was strange enough to tell people how dirt and such felt to him, that he wasn't just personifying them because he was strange. Locke honestly got the impression of different personalities from the things he worked with. He also found it hard to explain that he could feel vibrations from them. They didn't move, not in a way that you could see it, but Locke knew there was a vibe there, the same as when you pluck a guitar string. "It's weird. Like... you ever just know the answer to something, something you've known a long time, like your name, and when you get asked about it your mind goes blank? That's what it's like when the rock lifts up."

That reply actually made Chris brighten up a bit. It always felt better to think about familiar subjects, even if it was subjects you really loathed, like math, than to ponder what may or may not be. And it was good to know that even if he and Locke was different in some ways they were alike in others, like their common detestation for math.

But when Locke tried to answer how it felt to control rockes under water, Chris just gave him a polite but blank look.
"I... I kind of think I understand," he said hesitantly. But that gave him an idea for how they could continue with their underwater experiment, and he brighted up.
"Hey, how about I dive underwater and then you can try to localize me? If I shift some of the rocks on the bottom, or... or stomp on the bottom or anything, do you think you could... I don't know... sense where I am?"

At long last the horrid math class had a real life application. Locke had doubts that their teacher would be happy to know that it was only useful for mocking and making the two of them feel better. He could care less about how to find cosine, let alone the definition. As long as he and Chris continued to flounder about with mathematical principles that for the most part wouldn't be used in their life. If only the class came with a filter so he would know what was really important.

The experiment seemed doomed at first, but now Chris was giving a suggestion of how to keep it alive. "Sounds like a good idea. Test to see how easy it'd be to pick you out, then I guess we can do that Marco Polo thing.". If Locke would be able to pull together a golem from the loose river rocks and be able to fight against the current was unclear, but if nothing else maybe he could make it harder for Chris to see in this already gross looking water..

Chris nodded and took a deep breath before he disappeared under the water. The water was murky and not very fresh, but still the familiar feeling of being in his right element made him feel something that was like a mixture of satisfaction and exhilaration. Maybe Locke had been right about what he'd said before - when Chris was underwater he wouldn't dream of changing his ability to swim and stay under water for anything, not even a proper nose or hair.

Chris swam to a part of the river that were about ten feets away from Locke. He swam all the way down to the bottom - it was really dark down there - and started to rummage through some of the rocks. It was hard work, harder than he'd expected.
When he was shifting through the rocks he realized that their plan had a flaw - he had no way of contacting Locke to see if it was working. So after moving rocks around for almost two minutes he swam up to the surface again.
"Did you feel that?" he asked, feeling that it was a kind of stupid question.

Locke took a deep breath and closed his eyes as if it was him that was diving under and not Chris. The water muted the vibrations, made it hard to tell what was what, and some of the smaller pebbles were struggling to stay where they had landed. With his eyes open Locke was getting too much information to be able to pick out the rock's vibrations under the water. About the only thing that he could sense were the own stones he stood on. He had to stretch his mind farther then before. With his eyes closed and his focus underwater Locke tried to catch where Chris was.

Again the problem was that Chris wasn't making contact with anything solid at first. Locke felt the water pushing against his legs, trying to catch him off balance. He felt as if it was smoothing his edges. Maybe that was the reason why he couldn't sense things as well. Sound apparently traveled differently in water than in air. Sound was some sort of wave, Locke knew that much. Maybe those different waves were masking the rocks' waves? The Californian didn't put much thought behind that. It went into both more math and science then he could deal with and would only give him a headache.

This is so stupid. I'm turning into an icicle, Chris is getting covered in sludge, and Fluffy doesn't want to play. When he comes up I'm going to call it quits. No point in wasting our....[/i] There! It was very faint, and very hazy but Locke felt something. When he had lifted the rock himself earlier there had been that forgetting sensation, but it was the sudden forgetting. This was more like waking up slightly in the middle of the night and realizing that you kicked off your blankets. It was a gradual realization that something was missing. It had happened when Chris moved a particularly large rock, which was the only reason why Locke felt it. When Chris popped back up again Locke smiled and gave him a thumbs up. "That big one, I just barely felt it, but yeah. It sort of works."

One look at Locke was enough to tell Chris that the experiment had been a success - and that the other guy was freezing. Maybe it was getting time to finish up and head back to the mansion.
Chris wiped some of the grime away from his face and head.
"Good! How about we try this one last time - I can be a bit closer and only move around big rocks - and then we call it a day? I love swimming but I wouldn't say no to a shower right now."

“Yeah, one more time,” Locke agreed eagerly. They were so close to getting it and he wanted to test himself. Locke also wanted out of the river as quickly as possible. He let his mind slip out of his body and through the mud and rocks that lined the river’s bottom. The sensation made him feel light headed and distracted, like he had just gotten off of a rollercoaster that was running way too fast. The Californian was spreading himself too thin.

Spread out as he was Locke once again barely felt it when Chris touched bottom. This much water moving at this speed just made everything he tried ineffective. Even though he’d been standing in the cold water for a long time now Locke’s legs felt as if they were freezing into icicles. A great shiver took over him and he lost his focus. “It’s no good,” he said, stepping back and out of the water. “Next time, we try this in a hottub.”

Chris surfaced for the last time, shaking his head and sending water flying from his scalp. To get away from the water actually sounded like a good idea to him.
"Sure," he agreed. "I think I've had my monthly dose of mercury anyway."
He started to swim towards the shore, or side of the river as it probably should be called.

Because it wasn't fun to getting dressed while soaking he'd brought towels. He started to wipe of the worst from himself, grimacing slightly when he noticed how grimy the towel got.
"Oh, man. I'm definitely going to need a shower when I get back."
But even though he was complaining it was clear that he wasn't very upset - it had been fun training with Locke, even if they hadn't made ginormous breakthroughs with the whole under-water rock-finding thing. Actually, he was in such a good mood that he felt talkative.
"I think it went okay anyway, what do you think?" he asked before holding up a clean spare towel that he'd brought with him.
"Towel?" he offered in case Locke had forgotten to bring his own. Which he probably hadn't, since he wasn't a moron, but you never knew.