Allison hated carrying things while running. Normally it wasn’t an issue; she simply didn’t buy running shorts or pants that didn’t have a key pocket, and left everything else in her apartment. Now, however, she needed assistance with her tattoo-of-the-day, and she hated having backpacks or messenger bags or purses banging into her back or legs even more than carrying anything, so she was carrying a ziplock bag in each hand, one containing two bottles or orange ink, and one containing a bottle of black and a bottle of blue ink. (Purses, on that note, were banned from her existence entirely. The bag she generally carried ink in... didn’t count. She certainly wasn’t using it as a purse, anyway, so it wasn’t.)

Also, carrying anything other than a water bottle while running tended to get Looks. Either sympathetic or disdainful, if she was carrying something that made the person watching think she might be heading to work, or simply bewildered if she was carrying something that didn’t look like work or an emergency. Such as ink.

...On the topic of looks, Allison also hated wearing anything less than jeans and a tee shirt. Long shorts could maybe be tolerated, if it was particularly hot out. Otherwise... but she liked her newest idea, she might even keep it a few days, so she was wearing the shortest running shorts she could find and a sports bra, both pure white. And both bought earlier that day, as she generally didn’t wear solid white anything if she could help it.

That might have to be changed soon. Pure white fabric just had too many dyeing opportunities for her to ignore.

Looks were still irritating, though, so Allison ran a bit faster than she should toward the nearest relatively popular park, and when she got there, immediately looked around for someone who’d be likely to go along with slightly weird requests. And mutant-ism. Art and music students were generally good for that.

It didn’t take long for Allison to spot someone; a girl who looked friendly, a bit artsy, and very much mutantish. Wings were hard for humans to get many other ways. She altered her run slightly to aim toward the girl, ran up, and held out the bottles of ink. “Could you humor me and throw these at me, please?”

To Gina, it was a hot day, and she was dressed like it-- loose, flowing dress, some bangles and some tights. She'd even dones something with her hair other than tie it into a ponytail (--today, it had been fastened into a large clip, in something of a sloppy bun). It was days like these that made pixie cuts seem like they weren't such a bad thing. This outfit-ensemble, paired with her typical messenger bag, may have seemed artsy, but Gina wasn't any the wiser to this. (Though, if anyone did ask, she did possess a sketchbook in her bag, containing poor-quality doodles of outfits, which were littered with sloppy notes that only she'd comprehend.)

Today, she was walking through one of many New York parks, enjoying the scenery and just the therapeutic lack of something to do. She had no company today, no distractions, no anything. And, it was kind of nice, particularly after all the mayhem that had recently arisen in her life. It was nice, not to have to think about much of any of it. But soon, Gina's reverie was broken by some other girl.

Just in the way she carried herself, Gina presumed she was only a little older than she. Her height was nothing to go by, for she was only maybe an inch taller than her. (Though, with Gina's bun, she was the same height.) Dark blue eyes, flyaway orange-ish hair. And her outfit-- oof, an athletic person, complete with skimpy athletic shorts and a sports bra. Gina tried not to cringe as the girl seemed to zero-in on her. At least she wasn't busty like Gina... If Gina tried to pull that off, she'd have to wear two sports bras. It wasn't that she didn't like athletic people, or even overly-athletic people... she just... hm... didn't like them, because that was an area in which she struggled. And she wasn't very fond of the choices in attire, either.

>> “Could you humor me and throw these at me, please?”

A couple of small bottles were shoved into her hands before Gina could even register what she was recieving.

"Umm..." she trailed off momentarily, more than slightly confused. She stared at the bottles in confusion.

"Throw... the bottles... at you?" she attempted to articulate, shifting her gaze from the bottles to the girl, "Are you sure? Wouldn't that hurt?" She shifted the bottles into one hand, scratched her speckled grey cheek. The girl really shouldn't have said, Could you humor me. That was kind of like saying bet you can't to Gina. It was like daring her to do it, and Gina was compelled to to take that dare, despite the consequences. But, throwing bottles of God-knew-what at perfect strangers wasn't exactly her cup of tea. For all she knew, the girl might try suing her for assault, just because she was a mutant. If she could really do that, Gina wasn't sure, but the teenager knew that stranger things had probably happened.

Allison blinked, then quickly shook her head. “No, the ink in the bottles. I want a kind of splattered pattern, but I can’t do it myself. Well, not without several hours or a Rube Goldberg machine, anyway, and I am so very much not an engineer of any kind.” Allison bounced ever so slightly on her toes. The girl hadn’t dropped the bottles and run, anyway, which was better than many people would have reacted. Hopefully she’d agree.

Allison paused and scratched her head. “Well, maybe. Not particularly much, anyway. At the moment the bottles wouldn’t have much distance to build up momentum, so they wouldn’t hit all that hard... anyway! Not what I meant.”

>> “No, the ink in the bottles."

"Oh," Gina replied flatly, looking at the ink in the bottles. She wanted her to throw ink at her? That would be very difficult to wash out. The girl spoke so matter-of-fact'ly that Gina felt like a fool. She went on staring at the bottles until the running-girl began speaking once again.

>> "I want a kind of splattered pattern, but I can’t do it myself. Well, not without several hours or a Rube Goldberg machine, anyway, and I am so very much not an engineer of any kind.”

Gina second-guessed herself as the girl made a request about the pattern, and Gina bobbed her head as if it wasn't a problem. Was she acutally playing along with this psycho? She realized this, and froze. There weren't many crazies in Mendocino. In fact, there was only one. The rest were druggies, or there problems simply weren't enough to make them stand out, or they kept these issues to themselves. Gina glanced from the bottles to the girl. She didn't want to piss her off, but she didn't want a crazy-girl to follow her back to the Mansion.

And, as the girl went on rattling about something beyond what Gina could grasp, she simply nodded, though without assurance. she looked more put-off than much else. The girl didn't seem to get the hint, and kept going.

>> “Well, maybe. Not particularly much, anyway. At the moment the bottles wouldn’t have much distance to build up momentum, so they wouldn’t hit all that hard... anyway! Not what I meant.”

She broke off and waited expectantly for Gina to throw the ink at her, and Gina simply stared, eyebrow quirked inquiringly. This girl was dead serious? She was really for real, here?

"You're... absolutely serious?" she clarified, as she began to unscrew the bottles hesitantly. Maybe, if she simply appeased the girl's wishes, she'd leave her alone afterwards and not follow her around. For some reason, Gina noted, all the weirdos were attracted her. It was as though she sent out some signal that said she was a nice girl and would be polite to weirdos.

Allison noticed when the girl froze, and attempted to present herself as not threatening. Which might have been easier if she had any ideas. So she babbled. “It’s just ink, it’s not that odd, there was someone in my high school who had her friends splatter her with paint so she could be a canvas for her Halloween costume.” Allison was still kind of jealous she hadn’t thought of that. “That’s kind of what I want to do, except it’s not Halloween, and not really a costume... but, a similar pattern anyway,” she concluded, having reached the decision that babbling was not making her seem any less threatening or more sane, and she should probably just shut up.

"You're... absolutely serious?"

Allison sighed and nodded. The girl still hadn’t run, but she didn’t seem too inclined to humor her either. “Yes, I am absolutely serious.” She nodded again, more definitely. “It’s honestly not that complicated of an idea. Or unusual. Seriously, I have come up with far weirder stuff than this.”

Gina was still unscrewing the bottles' caps as the crazy-running-girl went right on rambling. Would it be bad if Gina admitted to the fact that she wasn't actually listening? Because this girl was really hard to follow. She was saying something about a high school girl and Halloween. Had the girl perhaps told Gina that she was a mutant right off of the bat, that part of her mutation was ink manipulation and that she just wanted to experiment with it, Gina perhaps wouldn't have been so full of blank stares and confusion. But no. The girl just darted up, pushed some bottles of ink into her hand, and instructed the baffled gargoyle-girl to throw the ink at her. And then, as if that wasn't enough, the girl added on--

>> "Yes, I am absolutely serious-- it’s honestly not that complicated of an idea. Or unusual. Seriously, I have come up with far weirder stuff than this."

That made Gina smile faintly. If this wasn't that unusual, then New York was stranger than she'd thought possible. And she'd thought New York was very strange, particularly compared to her hometown, which was stuck in the freespirit feel of the 70's. No one even compared to how bizarre this girl was.

"If you say so," Gina trailed, having finally loosened the caps on the bottles that she'd been handed. She took a step back hesitantly, glanced up and down the sidewalk... why the heck shouldn't she do this? For all she knew, she could have been getting Punk'd at this very moment, and nothing more...

She maneuvered the bottle into both of her hands, gave a precautionary, "You ready for this?", and then splash! she doused the girl with the first bottle before she did the same with the other. It all seemed to move in slow-motion, but once the ink had settled on the other girl's skin, Gina stared expectantly-- she didn't expect anything to happen, per se, she just wanted to say what the crazy-runner-girl would do next. She hesitantly replaced the caps on the bottles, and cautiously inquired, "Like that?"

“I say so.” Allison nodded, though it didn’t appear to be entirely necessary, and the girl was looking away anyway. She Started to answer the girl’s (really, in her mind, unnecessary) question before snapping her mouth shut and spinning so that the ink would splash all over her, and not only the front. She took a moment to grab control of the ink and hold it in place--that was the issue with ink, she had to either control it or absorb it into something immediately, or else it would always drip--so she could inspect the splashes.

"Like that?"

Allison answered with an overly cheerful “Yep! Like that,” and held up a hand, beginning to slowly absorb small areas of the ink at a time, while holding the rest of it in place. It was far from the simplest of tasks, but she couldn’t absorb it all at once... or, well, she could, but that much concentration on so many slightly different thoughts tended to give her a headache. And still take forever. So, small sections of ink at a time it was, progressing down from her hand to her elbow, repeating on the other arm, then starting from the elbow to shoulder....

The girl twirled underneath the torrents of ink so that it splashed evenly, and Gina watched with an uncontained look of interest. The girl seemed to approve, holding up a hand to show that she was slowly absorbing the ink through her skin. She could have just told Gina that she was a mutant, her peculiar antics would have made more sense-- not absolute sense, but it would have clarified things a little bit more.

Gina crossed her arms speculatively, watching as the ink sank into her skin along one arm, and then beginning to twine down the other.

"So you're a mutant, too," Gina mused aloud, shifting a speculative gaze towards the runner-girl, "Are you making a tattoo?" It was always so hard to tell who was mutated and who wasn't, when it came to those human-looking types. You never knew who was who, in big cities like this.

“Yep,” was about as much attention for conversation as Allison could spare while dealing with the ink. She finished a bit more--about half the ink, total--and paused to answer more accurately. “Well, mostly. I don’t generally keep them very long. Normally just a day, but I’ll probably keep this one for a few days. I like the pattern.” She paused for a moment to, outwardly, work on more of the ink, and, inwardly, try to think of something to say.

“So.... How are you? And that is an incredibly bad start to a conversation, but I can think of absolutely nothing else to say. Except maybe that I need a better social brain.” And, better abilities to keep my mouth shut, possibly.

Gina listened as she explained briefly what she was going to do with the patterns of ink, to which Gina simply replied, "I'm glad to have been of some assistance, then."

She was about to walk away, but now the crazy-runner-girl seemed to want to begin a conversation, and Gina was far too polite to walk away when someone else had begun a conversation.

>> “So.... How are you? And that is an incredibly bad start to a conversation, but I can think of absolutely nothing else to say. Except maybe that I need a better social brain.”

She made Gina look like a quiet person... funny, how talkative people could do that to another talkative person.

"I'm doing well, thanks," Gina replied, "Yourself?"

She continued watching, listened for the girl's response. But, now that she was watching her absorb the ink into her flesh, questions were beginning to arise in her mind.

"You said you don't keep your tattoos very long-- but if you wanted to, could you keep them forever, like real tattoos?"

It was a naive question, for how would running-girl know about "keeping a tattoo forever", if she was only a little bit older than Gina. It was a naive question, but Gina didn't realize this until the words had left her mouth. She clammed up in mild embarassment.

“More schoolwork than I want, but I’m good otherwise.” And moving, and feuding with my entire family over said move, but you don’t need to know that. Which really does make ‘how are you’ a somewhat absurd pleasantry.

Allison paused again, with about half a leg of ink left to absorb, to answer. And think through the answer, since she’d never considered it. “Well, probably. They won’t seep out or anything like that, at least. But some types of ink fade quickly, or are toxic, so it’d depend on what kind of ink I used, I think. Like, all those 'carcinogen in California' type fancy inks, would probably not be good to keep for very long, even if they did stay.” She gave a slight, and probably invisible, shrug as she went back to absorbing the remaining ink. “I’m not patient enough to keep one, but I can't think of any reason why I couldn’t.”

>> "More schoolwork that I want, but I'm good otherwise."

Gina bobbed her head to show that she was listening, but said little else while she watched the girl absorb the ink like a sponge. She seemed rather intent, and Gina wasn't going to distract her with too many questions. She seemed to be contemplating the answer, which was straightforward and by no means condescending.

>> “Well, probably. They won’t seep out or anything like that, at least. But some types of ink fade quickly, or are toxic, so it’d depend on what kind of ink I used, I think. Like, all those 'carcinogen in California' type fancy inks, would probably not be good to keep for very long, even if they did stay. I’m not patient enough to keep one, but I can't think of any reason why I couldn’t.”

Gina nodded as the girl broke into a litany about the inks and their properties. Her ears perked up at the "carcinogen in California" inks, not because she knew what they were, but because of the mention of her home-state. Gina blinked faintly, eyes flickering from the part of the girl's leg where the ink was sinking in, to her face.

"What would they use the carcinogenic inks for? Not tattooing, I hope?" she said with a crack of a smile. It seemed like an awful lot of risk to color your skin with something that was toxic? What if you died? Gina wasn't exactly an expert on tattooing and the processes surrounding them, but that simply sounded dangerous. She was glad to have found an outlet of conversation that wasn't nearly so awkward, but the discussion was still more fragmented than what Gina found comfortable.

Allison finished absorbing the ink, straightened, and stretched before answering. “Nah, those are mostly art stuff. A lot of pens and paint markers, mostly. Generally, anything shiny or pearlescent, or... well, anything special, is probably a carcinogen. Although, I think at least part of it is the fumes, not the ink itself.” She frowned, thinking about that. She knew that the ‘carcinogen in California’ label was due to California being geographically placed so toxic fumes wouldn’t blow away like they would from other states, which indicated that the poison was in the fumes, but the fumes would have come from the ink anyway....

That led to a good question. Did her inks evaporate when she controlled them? She’d have to find a way to test it, at some point.

And, there was always the chance that California just had stricter laws for carcinogens because of fumes from other things, and the poison was all in the inks....

Way too much thinking. Allison’s head was beginning to hurt. It was too early for her to be overthinking things like that yet; that was reserved for after dark. “Really, basically anything in an art store can kill you somehow. If it’s not sharp or poisonous, it’s a choking hazard.”

The girl explained the inks and their purposes, how they were mostly in pens and paint markers, among other things-- oh, Gina had known that information, just not by such technical terms. She bobbed her head as if it were new information though, to show that she comprehended. The girl broke off then, as if suddenly entertaining a good many thoughts, and Gina only stood there and waited. Was that it? Was she free to go?

But then, the girl spoke up.

>> “Really, basically anything in an art store can kill you somehow. If it’s not sharp or poisonous, it’s a choking hazard.”

Gina couldn't restrain the genuine laugh that parted her lips, laughing at the shear absurdity at what the girl had said. She didn't doubt her expertise, by any means-- it was just that, how she said it--

"I can't imagine why anyone would want to try eating art supplies," Gina admitted, hoping that the other girl didn't get the wrong impression by her laugh. The only rational reason she could think of for someone to eat art supplies was if it were part of a mutation, but if it were, they wouldn't choke on it, now would they?

Allison grinned when the girl laughed, then laughed herself when she admitted not being able to imagine anyone wanting to eat art supplies. ?Have you ever babysat a little kid? They try eating anything. Crayons, glue, glitter, cardboard bricks, drawings of food... I babysat one kid who tried eating soap, because he?d gotten the rest of himself clean but he didn?t think the inside was clean enough yet.? She rolled her eyes. ?Talk about future OCD. I told his mother she ought to get him a therapist for that, but I?m not sure if she did. For some mysterious reason she never needed me to babysit him again after that.? Which ended up making sense later; apparently the boy had had an older sister who was a genius, didn?t get along with her peers, went to a therapist, and the therapist decided that her (as far as anyone could tell, completely natural) genius was obviously a mutation. The eventual result was the girl running away when she was twelve, after several years of prejudice from humans, for ?being a mutant,? and mutants, for being a human and ?trying to fake being a mutant.?

Sometimes Allison thought the story almost proved the therapist right. Humans were stupid at times. Really the only reason it didn?t was that the mutants in the story had been just as idiotic over the whole situation. Possibly more, as at least one of them ought to have thought that maybe, possibly having a all-around, once-in-a-generation genius on your side could potentially be useful at some point.

So maybe it was just proof that mutants are, in fact, also human, whatever anyone tried to claim.