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"Perfect," Jiri read the post over, nodding with approval. "Though maybe we should say you've got a girlfriend, or something, so they don't--"

Eh, too late. The post was on its way to the interwebs, and the fangirls would soon be massing. It was just as well: if they held onto hope he was single, maybe they'd be less snarky.

Heh, what was he saying? This was the internet. No way they were avoiding the snark. 

The first reply was simple enough:


A minute or two ticked by. Then someone must have tipped off the site's chatroom, because the new questions started coming in fast. (Un)helpfully, the site's users were replying to each other, as well.

Jiri had found his niche in the Mansion. It wasn't with people his own age: they were creepy and most of them were psychologically scarred and a lot of them didn't even look human. Jiri was just a normal teen, he was way out of his depth dealing with that. He just... wanted to relax. Pretend like things were normal, for once.

"I am King of the Kindergarten!" The five year old boy proclaimed, precariously standing on the lower branch of a maple tree. "Bow before me, all you mortals! Shut the gates to my castle and secure my domain!" 

A squealing, giggling herd of underage minions ran to do his bidding. A little boy with leaves for hair worked together with another to slide the metal gates of the grounds shut, and then wove vines in place to keep them lashed together. The other boy tapped his hand against the back of the intercom, and something sparked and fizzled. A taxi was pulling up down the street when they ran giggling back to the King.

"Me next! Me next!" A girl with kangaroo feet sticking out of her shirt shouted, accompanied by excited hopping. 

"So it shall be!" The little boy pointed at her with a grin. In the next second, he was slumping, and blinking, but still grinning. "No fair, it was still my turn!"

The little girl straightened herself up to the tips of her tippy-toes, and put her chubby hands on her hips. "Know your place, plebeian, for I am... the Queen of the Kangaroos!" 

Meanwhile, back by the gate, a blonde woman with pink highlights in her hair was wrestling with her purse and the gate and the intercom. If she looked out onto the lawn, she would see about fifteen children, ranging from five to eleven in age, gathered excitedly around the kangaroo girl. If she looked a little bit further behind them, she'd see the body of a sixteen year old body unconscious on the lawn, and apparently tied up in leafy vines. 

Asking who had started it was a futile question. Maybe the kids had, when they'd started running from him his second day at the Mansion, squealing that the Body Snatcher was going to get them. Maybe Jiri had, when he'd taken to stomping after them with his best fee-fii-foo-fuum giant impression. But the kids had definitely been the ones to ambush him in the library an hour ago, and tie him up. We caught him, we caught him!

Kidnapping a body snatcher? Oh foolish youths.

It was only a matter of minutes before he'd made himself their king. Or queen. It really depended on who he was possessing at the moment. In the back of his head, the kangaroo girl was in hysterics as he directed his new minions with her voice.

She sounded a lot like his own little sister, back home. Why was it that little kids were so good at dealing with all this scary mutant crap? Jiri's sister had thought his body hopping was just a fun game, too.

Down at the gates, the new arrival was sounding a little impatient. The kangaroo girl stared at her with all the force a freckle-faced seven-year-old with pigtails could muster.

"You! You name yourself the Death of Stars? What business have you in my kingdom?"

The banister made a really satisfying crackle-pop, like rice crispies on a bonfire. 

"Cool." It was an airy expression of admiration, expressed through the air-hands clapped over their air-face. "Is it making you feel better when you punch things? Because It's making me feel better. Don't stop."

And now they were going to visit his body, sure, why not.

wait what

Wait NO wait what?

His fragile, floating calm shattered around him. I do not think this is a good idea. And I think I really should point out that the last time I thought something was not a good idea, it was coming here to give that thing a tour, and I think the burden of proof is with me when I say it was NOT A GOOD IDEA AND NEITHER IS THIS.

The way back to the kitchen was tragically short, much like his young life. He could at least go out with narration.

Jiri gestured expansively at the body on the floor, like a sign girl on The Price is Right.

"Susan, meet my undefended body. My undefended body, meet Susan." A little bit of jazz hands seemed appropriate at this interval. "Now taking bets on whether I will wake up from this nightmare when I am rendered unto putty."

Jiri paused, his arms crossed over his head for maximum safety. 

Someone was yelling. Someone was yelling and cursing. It sounded like a girl, and it sounded like she was doing something. Her voice was all authority-like. Jiri uncurled from his ball of safety, and risked crawling over to peer anxiously around the corner. There were images, so many, he couldn't tell if any of them was real--

(--if any of this was real--)

Flashes of yellow and blue from the clowns billowing sleeves, and a horrifying white-smeared face. Smaller images, other seven and eight and nine year olds running for their lives. There seemed to be fewer now. They were finding their way out of the maze. How were they finding their way out? This place was a hellish construct with no end. Cackling echoed all around them, punctuating the point.

There were a girl jumping around, chasing the clown and his reflections. She wasn't old old, just teenager old. And she was shooting things. With arrows.

Badass.

The clown, by contrast, was shooting laser beams. Which would have also made him a badass, except that he was a clown. Now he was just a laser death clown.

He thought he saw the real one run past--there was briefly two of them in front of a mirror, and that meant it was the real clown and a reflection clown, right? He cowered around the corner, to be safe. 

Footsteps followed, in hot pursuit.

Jiri took a deep breath, and flung himself from hiding, hoping the legs he collided with were the arrow girl's and not the evil clown's.

"I don't know who my parents are!" The eight year old wailed, his eyes screwed shut. "And you are lying, you lying lie-face, clowns always follow children that's what they do!"

It was kind of the mutant stereotype, wasn't it? Whenever they were showing news clips of a mutie unloading into a crowd, killing people, being arrested, that was always what the reporters were saying.

Unstable home life. Kicked out or left home. Had no one to turn to except other fringe mutants. And that, viewers, is why they're so screwed up in the head, why they've got to be put away, put down, for public safety. 

Jiri hadn't appreciated how lucky he'd been. His mom had been a little... freaked, and his dad was praying for him like he'd prayed when grandma was sick, but they both still loved him. Wanted him. And his sister--she loved him better. The toddler thought it was the best game ever when he helped her draw things, using her own hands. If the courts hadn't made him come here, his family would have found a way to make things work at his normal school, when he went back in the fall. 

Alex didn't have any of that. He didn't have it even before his powers kicked in, and he didn't have it after. He'd been on his own since he was thirteen? In the back of Jiri's head, he'd known there were kids like that out there, making a living on the streets, staying off the grid. But... he couldn't picture it. The day-to-day. How did that work? 

When Alex glanced over, he'd find that Jiri wasn't taking the information well. He was trying to picture himself in Alex's shoes. He just... couldn't. Maybe he was too sheltered, but who could live like that? 

Alex kept talking. For the second time since he'd come to the Mansion, the shadow of the Registration Act passed over him. The camps. He'd seen in Ghost's head what they'd been like towards the end, a little. He... couldn't blame the guy for taking that deal, if it kept him out of the place. 

What worried him is that he might have taken a deal like that, too. If he'd been older then, had his powers. Jiri still felt like himself, even with all the craziness around him, but... body snatching showed up in horror movies for a reason. His wasn't a benign power. There really wasn't a nice use for it.

That... worried him, now that he thought about it. Once he got a handle on controlling it, once people stopped being nice to the new guy--then what? 

What was he supposed to do with this power?

He noticed the shift in tense as Alex continued speaking: from the safe distance of past, to the immediacy of present. 

He knew all too well what the other teen was talking about, when he said he'd used material. He'd been inside that thug, on the night Alex had to do it again. The night Jiri had made him.

"You did what you had to do," Jiri said quietly. "S***. I'm sorry about your friend. Did you... did you get a chance to bury him, at least? Or did you have to get out of there too quick? Do you even know who did it?"

"I am such a privileged asshole. Sorry for making you talk about it. Relive it. If I ever hit on something like that again, awake or asleep, feel free to tell me where I can shove it."

Probably timeline (pending Rummy's input) is something like...

- Stalker bots announced and deployed (these would have taken a lot of time to get developed/pitched to city leaders/funded, so they should precede the trigger incident--or rather, MRO's entire history is the trigger incident, the cops know they need help  >.>)
- Buggy AIs start causing issues, people start protesting
- Aura/others cause big public incident
- Curfew enacted
- More shenanigans follow as tensions escalate

As someone who lived (and survival-mode-Modded) through the last Registration Act, with full-on internment camps: they are a good idea for about two weeks, then they get reeeeeeally bad for overall site involvement levels. Really bad. We just about killed the site with the last one. That is not an exaggeration. Very good idea on paper, very bad idea when we have a low number of players, as we currently do (segregating the player base such that it becomes harder to RP with anyone you want for any reason, and much harder for newbs to just drop into things == decrease in activity and newb retention).

I do love the idea of having the stalker robots and curfew like Rummy proposed, putting pressure on mutant/human relations--I think that'll be excellent for threading, and creating conflict.

So to get the convo back on track from the overall world building to the plot starter being proposed here: what sort of timeline were you thinkin' for getting the stalkers implemented, Rummy? And is everyone good with nixing the stop-and-frisk/no-reason-braceleting and introing buggy AIs, or do we want more discussion there? Scanners in other locations (airports, government buildings, etc) sound like something that could be introed as we go along if folks want to, but which don't need to be in the plot kick off (logistically, it would take a decent amount of time, budget, and political support to get those in place--though we could certainly have them announced to the IC public as planned changes, so that people can freak out about them <3).

Speaking on my end, I can have Calley RP the NYPD briefing its officers about the coming changes to establish things from that end, and it sounds like Aura and Scorch have good thread ideas for giving us an inciting incident for the curfews.

Are people good to start this in the next week or so, or do we need more time to put pieces in place?

Rummy--as a head's up, site-wide plots are usually run as a combo of the creator (you) and the Mods, just to make sure things stay organized/folks stay on the same page. Once we're ready to run this thing and folks have their opinions put out, we'll take it to PM/email to get details totally smoothed out before the official plot launch. I'm hearing no opposition here, so that should hopefully be soon. <3