Re: first class - baths
"Well," he began, "no one said, exactly." It wasn't that anyone had told him what to do or what he needed to be. He simply had a very strong feeling that things were supposed to be a certain way just because, and he'd never thought to wonder why. Jack might have sought to be scary but he wasn't mean, those were two different things, and so it troubled him that being nice meant she wasn't having fun. He didn't want to ruin her fun, but wouldn't not being nice actually be nice anyway if he did it to cheer her up? "Oh. I--" But he stopped, because she didn't want him to apologize anymore. He scratched at his head as he tried to puzzle out the solution, which wasn't very easy when she went asking him why he needed to be scary. Oh, if he'd known, this would have been a lot less confusing. "I'm supposed to be scary," he repeated, less sure this time. "If I wasn't scary, then no one would know what to do. Everything would be chaos." He laughed at the thought of being green and growing things. "I don't know what I want," he admitted. He'd thought he wanted to be scary, but maybe he didn't. Why else would he look the way he did, though? What else could a skeleton man do?
Mister J sounded wonderful. Familiar, too, in the way that Gotham and B-Man did, but he didn't understand why. Jack was certain he'd never been to Gotham, not even in his dreams, but maybe he'd heard about it somewhere. Somehow. "Just because you're not smart like him doesn't mean you're not smart," he pointed out. "Wouldn't it be boring if you were exactly like your Mister J?" He felt as though he should want a Sally. But he didn't have one, he knew that, even if he was supposed to because it was part of the game. "A Sally would be nice," he said carefully, but a part of him scoffed at such romantic notions. Stupid. Not for the likes of him. "How would we find a Sally?" It couldn't hurt to play along, surely. Kidnapping wasn't very nice but they wouldn't hurt her.
Disappointing others, and his fear of it, was right. It was very, very right, inherent to who he really was, and so he nodded. "Yes. I don't want to, but I do." Family, he thought. He disappointed his family. He didn't say it aloud, though, wanting to keep that to himself. "You shouldn't be something you're not either," he told her, thinking that maybe she didn't have to be bad smart like this Mister J; she could just be herself. He liked her well enough that way. As he wasn't afraid of pain, Jack wasn't searching for a way out, but he thought looking for a Sally might be more fun for the both of them. "Alright," he agreed, clapping his hands together. "Can I get out of the water now?"