He didn't like skulking in dark places, empty places, or dirty places. On the other hand, he couldn't risk being caught and shoved back across the border. As such, he put up with the required skulking, at least at night and quiet hours of the day.

At other times, however, he tried to seem normal. Normal was, of course, a very relative term in his case, but so long as he kept his hood up and didn't make eye contact with anyone, he didn't consider himself to be too noticeable. At least, not visually. If someone had the desire and time to stalk him long enough to notice his other quirks, well, he was already a goner. One thing about being stalked, though: it was much harder to be reliably observed and followed in a crowd. Which was why Javian Ainscothwaite was sitting under a tree in a park in broad daylight, sipping out of an opaque water bottle and watching a group of young men and a girl playing with a frisbee.

Javian leaned back against the tree and set his bottle down for a moment as the frisbee caught one of the spring day's fickle breezes and drifted up, up, and then suddenly sideways and into the tree Javian was leaning against. He watched it knock against one branch, then another, gradually slipping and sliding and bouncing down, until it plopped down on his foot. He awkwardly bent forward to grab it and tossed to the player that had approached. The man caught it and raised a hand in thanks, bright red braids bouncing, and then suddenly grinned. "Sweet locks, dude," he said, and returned to his friends.

The faint warmth of the sun faded, and he quickly closed his water bottle, tossed it into his backpack, and stood as soon as he had both bags gathered. Time to find somewhere else to be.

He lurched out from under the tree, and looked up just in time to see something kind of in front of him and notice a distinct pain in his nose. Then he was wobbling backwards and, while his nose soon stopped hurting, he saw it on the ground. Not good. He scrambled for it and shoved it back on, hopefully before anyone could actually see what had happened. He never should have come to this park. This park was bad luck.

Warm spring afternoons were meant to be spent at the park, that was Skydancer's philosophy. She hadn't always felt that way; when she was younger she barely had time for an hour in the park let alone an afternoon. Between training for the Olympics and needing to do well enough at school to get into a decent University, there simply hadn't been time. Now, however, things were different. She was a mutant now and not allowed to enter the Olympics so there was no reason to continue training for it. Combine that with the fact that she was no longer at school and had no idea if she even wanted to go to university and, well, it all amounted to having a lot more spare time than she used to have.

In the beginning, Skydancer never had an opportunity to enjoy having actual spare time because she had been living on the streets, struggling just to survive. Once she came to The Mansion, however, she realized that she profoundly disliked the lack of direction in her life and, just as a deep depression had begun to set in, inspiration struck and she began to pursue training for the circus. Now she trained a couple hours every single day in order to be ready for her first performance, though that was still a ways away and soon she intended to begin learning martial arts with Koga in order to be able to defend herself better. Still, even with consistent training she still had more spare time than she was used to and, as she never had the opportunity to enjoy it growing up, she decided to try and enjoy it now.

Once her day's practice was complete, Skydancer had made her way to a park and promptly lifted herself up a nice comfortable tree with assistance from her purple mutant tubes and proceeded to open a book and start reading. For several hours she remained up there, content with the sun shining upon her chosen perch and the humans having their fun around her, down below. Her wig helped her to blend in a little bit more and that, combined with the foliage from the tree, meant that no one was inclined to bother her over a little thing like having purple skin. Life was good, for once.

Only when the sun began to set and her perch began to cool did Skydancer decide it was time to return to the earth and make her way home. Not bothering to look carefully down below her, Skydancer shot two tubes out of her chest and into the ground in order to lower herself down safely. Or at least, that was the intent anyway. One tube made it to the ground, impaling itself a few inches into the soft dirt, and the other one hit something hard and brittle first before it too buried itself in the dirt a few inches. Looking down to see what was below her, Skydancer gasped in horror.

"Oh my god I'm so sorry! Did I hurt you? Are you all right? Can I do something?" Mortification was clearly in her voice and she lowered herself to the earth, looking fearfully at the person she had accidentally hit with a wayward tube. They were strong and dangerous, probably dangerous enough to kill someone and that was the very last thing she ever wanted to contemplate, let alone do. She didn't think she could live with herself if she crippled someone by mere carelessness.

Still bent over, Javian frantically felt around his nose, but much to his relief the damage seemed to have been repaired already. He swallowed. Now to get out of here before anyone started asking questions. He stood up into a barrage of desperate questions, and quickly stepped backwards. He raised his hands reassuringly. "I'm fine, I'm fine," he said. "You just... startled me, that's all. Yes. That's all." That was reasonable. It was far safer than admitting that she had actually hit him.

Hit him with what? He spared a short glance away from the ground, but that was all he needed to see that the stranger was about as human as he was. What to make of that? Would she be less likely to turn him in? More? Neither? He had no idea. She was probably a whole lot more likely to notice him, though, and for that alone getting away was important.

"You should look before you jump," he said, almost idly. "Might hit someone next time." Again. And maybe next time she would hit someone who couldn't just shove their nose back on their face. A fresh burst of paranoia struck him and he tried to be surreptitious about feeling his nose again. Good, it did seem to be on straight and all. Unfortunately, he also probably had to practice his sneaky manoeuvers more, but that thought hadn't made it into his paranoia yet. Probably a good thing too; he was just shy of twitching with the need to get away from this person who was paying attention to him, and that was without any further paranoia.

"I'm fine, I'm fine," he said. "You just... startled me, that's all. Yes. That's all."

In relief, Skydancer let out the breath she hadn't been aware that she was holding. It was one of the scariest moments of her life, the prospect of accidentally impaling someone without even meaning to. The tubes currently embedded in the ground removed themselves and coiled back under her skin, the openings healing in a matter of seconds and her skin returning to its previously flawless state. There had been a time, not so long ago, that she would have been petrified at the fact that people were around not only to see that she was a mutant, but to see just how freakish her power was. Now, however, she was starting to settle into actually being more comfortable with her state.

Apology completed and as she prepared to leave, Skydancer took one more careful luck at the guy just to double check that he wasn't lying about his uninjured state of affairs for some reason because sometimes when humans encountered mutants they did that sort of thing. That's when she noticed his skin was more golden in colour than naturally tanned and did it have a strange rough sort of texture to it as well? "You're a mutant!" Oops, she hadn't meant to say that out loud and certainly not as audibly as it had actually come out of her mouth.

With a furtive glance around to check if anyone had heard her little outburst, Skydancer was relieved to note that no one seemed to be staring at the pair of them. That was good; just because she was starting to become more comfortable with her mutation and standing out didn't mean she wanted everyone staring at her now and certainly didn't mean the other person was comfortable with such. She spoke again, her voice significantly quieter this time. "I'm sorry, its just that I don't see many mutants around, outside of The Mansion you know. And you're skin is an amazing shade of gold." Her own insecurities stemmed from her unusual purple skin, so perhaps complimenting a fellow mutant on his colour would help put him at ease.

Okay, this wasn't so bad. She didn't seem to be overly suspicious so far, no one seemed to be scrutinizing him for associating with her, and he could just -- about -- leave. He started to edge away, and made for a brisk, outwardly polite-and-therefore-not-drawing-attention walk just as she went and shrieked to the world that there was something attention-worthy about him.

He wanted to run. He really, really did. He should have run. Of course, he couldn't. He froze. He was somewhere between screaming at himself in his head to move, get away from here, leave behind this person who had noticed him. get somewhere quiet and safe and anonymous, and being as stiff-jointed as his body was being so infuriatingly.

A tiny little piece of him waited for her to do something, start demanding information that would undoubtedly lead to him getting shipped back north to the people who didn't care about him and just wanted to grind everything his parents had done for him into the ground with their bodies, leave him empty and abandoned and completely alone, because the system didn't bother to know anyone, didn't bother to know him, it just went and took the last ties he had with his parents and cast them into the bottomless mud pit of bureaucracy.

But she didn't. She apologized, and Javian was reminded of his school, of all the random people there that he really didn't know, but most of whom really didn't care if he went around with lime-green un-dyed hair and purple eyes and golden prickly skin. And hey, she wasn't exactly human-looking herself. Still, even if she didn't care that he was a mutant, he was still at risk if she found out that the government was looking for him, even a different government, or happened to let his name or location slip to someone who could use it to catch him. On the other hand... it would be nice to actually talk to someone again... even for a little bit. Information was always good too. "What mansion?" he asked, briefly confused. "Rich parents or something?" Rich people were the ones who lived in mansions, after all.

Something in the golden skinned guy's expression keyed Skydancer off to the fact that she had made something of a larger error in judgement than she had realized. She understood all too well what it was like to be a visible mutant, one of the freaks. There were dangers by their very nature, people who would do them harm simply because they looked a little different and could do things that most other people couldn't. She was learning, slowly, to come to terms with her own state and learning to defend herself better when it came to it, but perhaps not everyone could be so fortunate.

"You know, if you need a safe place to stay or something, there are options available." Skydancer's voice was soft and unsure. She knew what it was like to be homeless and to have nowhere else to turn to and what that such a story wasn't uncommon among mutants. It was a sad and unfortunately al too common experience, from what she had gathered from talking to people. As for bringing people to The Mansion, that she wasn't nearly so certain about but it felt like the right thing to do to at least suggest the place.

"No rich parents," Skydancer shook her head. Not that her parents had been poor exactly, but rich wasn't a word to describe them either. "The Mansion is a school for mutants, a safe place to stay if you have nowhere else to go. They took me in when I was homeless." It was still painful to talk about that time in her life, but now that it was in the past it was getting better.