18113/She Was A Sk8er Gurl

She Was A Sk8er Gurl
Date of Scene:	30 May 2024
Location:	Xavier's School Front Yard
Synopsis:	Noriko and Jubilee briefly talk about the potential dangers of vampires in Westchester before deciding to break out the Crocodile Mile.
Cast of Characters:	Jubilation Lee, Noriko Ashida

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Jubilation Lee has posed:
    It's a bright evening, as a new moon hangs in the sky and marks the start of a fresh lunar cycle. It's late, so the Xavier's grounds are quiet and empty except for a single figure near the property's main gate. Jubilation Lee is occupying herself on a skateboard as the gears of eternity continue to spin. She handles the board with cautious ease, suggesting that her comfort comes from a natural talent with these kinds of things and not from any amount of experience or practice.

    She's trying to ollie the board -- the first trick everyone learns -- but it's not really working out. She keeps shifting her weight to her back foot so the board's nose lifts into the air, but that's it. "He was a skater boy... she said see you later boy..." she can be heard singing softly. Avril Lavigne's Sk8er Boi is a necessary tradition. Not only is the song stuck in the vampire's head, but she also borrowed some style choices from the song's music video before coming outside to skate. She's wearing a brightly colored pink t-shirt over a white long-sleeve, cut-off jean shorts, black skater sneakers, a sideways trucker hat, and a men's necktie loosely dangling from her neck.

Noriko Ashida has posed:
Noriko takes more cat naps throughout the night more often than the day.  They don't take long, but there's one that lasts for a good 15 minutes that if she doesn't get, she's just cranky till morning.  A deep, indulgent yawn lasts for all of a second before she's up and padding around the apartment, looking for Jubilation.

Not here.  Must be busy.  Maybe moonbathing again.  Didn't even bother to wake her?

Noriko grumbles and finishes up her getting ready routine, carefully carefully spitting her toothpaste out into the sink.  Basically letting gravity do most of the work followed by a thorough wipe from the hand towel.

Then the speedster is out the door, taking the stairs down, and out into the wide open space.  Somehow it just feels better out here, not in a room, free to run and roam, to be herself.  She planned on hitting up the pantry first, but the sound of the skateboard wheels reaches her first, causing her head to whip back toward the main gate.  She squints, tilts her head.

"Hey, so is this like-what's up?"  Noriko switches her approach mid-sentence.  She isn't immune to things like putting her foot in her mouth.  Apparently having extra thought cycles can't do anything for that, and Nori has no intention of creeping on Jubes to find out what she's up to.

Jubilation Lee has posed:
    At irregular intervals, every minute or two, Jubilation glances up at the main gate, closed and secured, that keeps Xavier's separated from the rest of Westchester, NY and establishes that it is not, in fact, a public space. She seems to look past it for some reason, as though searching for something or someone in the boundless shadows.

    "She had a pretty face, but her head was up in space..." Jubilee sings softly. "She needed to come back down to Earth..." She scoffs under her breath as the song's lyrics manage to poke at something. "Yeah right," she complains. "...Maybe once everyone stops fighting..."

    Still trying to do an ollie, Jubilation's attention is split with something on her phone screen. She rolls her eyes at the ongoing thread on social media, uses her thumbs to type something of her own, and then fires her response into the ether. Jubes laughs softly at her own cleverness and sticks the phone into her back pocket.

    The imperceptible smells of toothpaste and the hint of accumulated wipes from the bathroom hand towel announce Noriko's approach to the vampire's nose. "It's a skateboard," Jubilation answers even though Noriko changed her approach halfway through. Jubilation steps on the board's tail so the graphics on the bottom can be seen. "I found it in the lost and found."

    Jubilation's attention shifts to the gate again. She frowns at it, just for a moment, and then turns back to Nori. "What's up?" she replies, answering the question with a question. The same question.

Noriko Ashida has posed:
Noriko's eyes skitter to the gate after she notices Jubilation checking more than once.  "Just woke up.-or"  Noriko considers the other angles Jubilation could have meant.  What was the tone again?  She can't even really remember the nuance since her mind already chewed up the input and spit it out.

"I bet someone comes back for that.  How long do you have to wait before you have it forever?"  Noriko's eyes move to the gate again.  "Are you waiting for someone to come give you a lift or something?"  The question feels painful to ask, a reminder that she's on the outside of Jubilation's head.

"I can't believe you didn't come wake me up to give you a boost."  Jubilation could be bobsledding through Westchester for dear life right now!  And apparently this is something to be pursued without question in Noriko's mind.  Who wouldn't want to do that?

Jubilation Lee has posed:
    Jubilation hasn't been /avoiding/ Noriko, per say, but she's been leveraging her alone time. Instead of returning home right after work, maybe she'll waste some time downstairs in the recreation room. Instead of waiting for Noriko to wake up, maybe she'll putz around for a while on a skateboard she took from the lost and found. Why does the caged bird skate?

    "I dunno..." Jubilation answers, looking down at the board. "I'm not gonna keep it..." In fact, the idea of skateboarding didn't even occur to her until she already grabbed the board.

    "I'm just hanging out," Jubilee lies, shrugging her shoulders as though this is her answer for why she didn't wake Noriko up. Just wiling away the hours. "It's not like we were gonna do something and I left without you."

    Jubilation glances at the gate again and, this time, bares her fangs and hisses quietly at it for a second before turning to look at Noriko again.

    "Well. Aren't you gonna give me a kiss or something?" Jubilee asks, both eyebrows hiked over her sunglasses. Different sleep schedules can make that tradition a little challenging sometimes and Jubilation is doing neither of them any favors by approaching the subject with absolutely zero discretion.

Noriko Ashida has posed:
"I'm trying to figure out if you're going to pounce on something in the dark so I don't get in the way," which is absolutely true.  Jubilation can move faster than she used to, especially when she wishes to, and this is Noriko's speedster equivalent of the hesitant this-way-that-way movement while passing (only she's not passing).

"That's not-I didn't mean it like that."  Noriko has this horrible habit of jumbling her responses as if they all come in in order but get processed differently on the way out.  It doesn't happen all the time, but it's an indication that she has to explicitly order things sometimes to pass as more normal when it's triggered.

"Aren't you going to kiss me?"  Noriko tilts her head and pops her hip out as she folds her arms awkwardly.  Stupid gauntlets.  It ruins the whole coquettish flavor when she fails to find an appropriate place to anchor them.  They end up on her hips in the end.  She just sighs.

"Why do you keep looking at the gate?!" Noriko finally lets out, though not at a yell, there is a measure of exasperation in her delivery as she throws her hands out to the gate in a gesture.  She can't let it go.

Jubilation Lee has posed:
    Jubes rolls her eyes from behind her sunglasses. "No, I'm not gonna pounce on something in the dark," she answers, gently mocking the suggestion by deepening her voice slightly and repeating Nori's words verbatim.

    Jubilee releases the board and lets it go back down on four wheels. She steps on and rolls towards Noriko using the momentum from just that single push. After rolling to a halt near Nori, Jubilation leans in and plants a kiss on the speedster's cheek, letting that be the final resolution to their weird disagreement about it.

    Both of Jubilee's eyebrows peek over her sunglasses in response to Nori's outburst about the gate. She folds her arms across her chest and remains silent for a couple of seconds, really dragging it out so Noriko can wallow in the discomfort of the moment. "Gideon Ravenwood is there on the left..." Jubilation explains, turning towards the gate and the darkness on the other side. "Old Maggie Montegue, too." She hisses and bares her fangs again, just for a moment, before extending a middle finger at the gate.

    "I know you're there, Maggie! And your familiar! The one that always smells like potatoes!" Jubilee shouts.

    A response hiss comes from the shadows.

    Jubilation turns to Noriko and folds her arms across her chest, as if this moment speaks for itself and, perhaps, settles some of their earlier arguments about why Jubilee hasn't been going out lately.

Noriko Ashida has posed:
Jubes is the only one that can do something like mock Nori without her head being chewed off.  Instead, the speedster grits her teeth for a pulse of time, perhaps because she was wrong but it looked OH SO LIKELY.  Her pettiness throws her off for just enough time that she doesn't come up with any snarky reply.  And just like that, the moment is gone.

There's a soft little buzz to the speedster's cheek, as if the residual minor embarrassment has only hung around electrically.

Noriko juts her lower lip out as if in judgement while Jubilation-wait, yeah, she'se definitely just staying silent!  It takes Noriko a moment or two to realize it when Jubes passes the normal amount of time to reply, and then Noriko goes through a I guess we're not talking moment, and then finally some light is shed on the whole thing.  No matter how long she waited, she isn't prepared.  She blinks when everything falls into place even as Jubilee is yelling out to these lurkers.

"Oh."  Right.  The vampires.  For Nori, it feels so long ago, and she has forgotten about checking her tail, assuming long ago that her speed obviously is doing the trick.  "I-Well I can just throw them really far away if you want..." she meagerly offers, a strong indication that she realizes the problem goes much deeper now.

"We've got to figure something out..."  Her expression has melted to one of concern.  Concern for the fact that Jubilation is so isolated.  That really she has no choice but to hang out with Noriko during her waking hours and probably can't make any new friends like her.  All of these angles start to careen into Noriko the moment her perspective shifts slightly to the left.

"Does it really smell like potatoes?" her brain can't help but interject the rolling silence.

Jubilation Lee has posed:
    "Oh yeah, big time, potatoes. Plus it cheats at Uno. No one gets that many Wilds," Jubilation mutters, frowning at the gate.

    "Yeah... I've been scoping it out for now, but I'm not really sure what to make of this," Jubilation answers, glancing up at Noriko for a second before facing the gate again. There's a sense that she's not telling the whole truth. Until she opens her mouth and keeps going.

    "I don't think they're here for me. This place is, like, a five star restaurant," Jubes explains, revealing that she might view herself as a guard dog. The vampires of Westchester know what Xavier's is and mutant blood is no longer forbidden.

    Jubes shrugs and adjusts her trucker hat so it's more sideways. It started recentering a little.

    "Let's not worry about them," Jubilation suggests hopefully.

Noriko Ashida has posed:
"So they're coming here to drool at the window?"  Noriko squints, trying to see if she can make anyone out, any movement from the tableau of background.   This is a lot harder than it might seem for a speedster.  Outdoors there are all sorts of little breezes and animals that go bump in the night, each disrupting small corners of the foliage just beyond.

When Jubes turns towards the the gate, Noriko rests her gauntlet on the vampire's shoulder, still looking on with her.  Her eyes slide to Jubilation when the feeling something else is there digs at Nori.

"Westchester may be someone else's now, but this school is yours."  That might not strictly be true, since it falls within Westchester, but this is a statement of belief.  If it isn't yours, it should be, kind of statement, mildly territorial on behalf of Jubilation.  "...I was kind of hoping we were more like an acquired taste," she admits.

Noriko knows Jubilation can't spend her unlife guarding the school at night, alone, but she doesn't say anything about it.  Now isn't the time.  She sighs.

"We can try," Noriko says with a little bit more upbeat tone, "but that might be difficult without a distraction."

Jubilation Lee has posed:
    "I dunno. Maybe," Jubilation answers with a casual shrug. "I mean, dusting me would probably be a nice little bonus, too, but I think it's not just that. And, like, no, you're not an acquired taste. That's why it was forbidden to, uh, acquire it." She grins and shrugs one shoulder at her awkward turn of phrase. Deal with it.
        A distraction. Jubilation peeks at Nori from the corner of her eye. She purses her lips to dilute the conspiratorial smile that forms. "A distraction..." she repeats quietly, leaning in to invade the speedster's personal space. Jubilation reaches out and hooks both of her index fingers into two of Noriko's belt loops and closes the gap between them. "...I think I know what you're getting at..." Jubilation gives Noriko a ~LOOK~ that can mean only one thing...

    "Crocodile Mile!" she whispers.

Noriko Ashida has posed:
"Damn.  I thought I was the best wine in the house," Noriko smirks, not thrown off by Jubilation's overloaded use of acquirement.  "Yesss, a distraction," Noriko intones when she sees that mischievous smile at Jubilation's lips.

Staying in this moment?  It's easy.  Jubilation has gathered all of Nori's attention span to a point.  Nothing exists.  Not even the potato smell, if she could smell it from here.  That finger at her belt loop-what even are potatoes really?  In this moment, they don't matter at all....and Nori wishes she hadn't thought of them.  To banish their remnants she leans forward a little in unconscious anticipation.

Any moment...any moment.  Noriko's head even tilts down just slightly...and...

Nori freezes at the whisper for just a moment as all of her anticipation cascades into a canyon of despair and love for Jubilee.  Of course.  Crocodile Mile.  She chuckles softly, trying not to show any disappointment.  Maybe after Crocodile Mile Jubes will feel up for...other distractions.  "We should setup some blowup bowling pins this time so I can bowl against someone strong."  Yeah, she means bowling the kids.  "Then maybe can we get distracted in other ways?"  She couldn't help herself.  It eventually had to come out and she can't be thinking about that the whole Crocodile Mile (she can and she will).