Alice Liu (krakatoa) wrote in theinvincibles, @ 2015-08-30 20:46:00 |
|
|||
Those last few weeks of summer were never really the last few weeks of summer for Cody. They were the stress weeks. He always felt a lot of pressure about having a nicely decorated classroom and he wasn’t much of an artist. The basics were done though, all the bulletin boards had been covered in paper and had borders put on them although they still lacked actual content. Now he just needed to get some interesting things. He was absolutely positive that all the kids, no matter how too cool for school they were, would love a volcano in the room. Cody had gotten to his classroom a few minutes earlier than he had told Alice to get there. He pushed four desks together so they’d have ample amount of space to work on, then waited for her arrival. Alice burst into the room right on time -- it wasn’t like she had very far to travel, after all. She had to push the door open with her shoulders, her hands too full of old newspapers, cardboard, and crafting supplies to be much use. She tripped over to where Cody was sitting and deposited her payload on the desks. "Oh, you haven't been waiting long, have you?" Cody was too amused by the sight of Alice to react the way he should have by helping Alice with the materials she’d brought. “No, no, no, not at all,” he assured her. “I got here early to give us crafting space.” Cody motioned to the area she’d just dumped all of her supplies onto. "And you got the paint and the papier-mache?" Alice asked. She glanced around the room, but then went back to fishing around in her hoard of supplies for the sturdy piece of cardboard she'd designated as the volcano's base. At Alice’s question Cody walked back to his supply closet and took out what she’d instructed. He brought them over to their table. “Does this look like enough? If not, I can run to the commissary. I checked yesterday that they still had some things as a last resort.” Although Cody does remember doing these kinds of projects in the past he definitely didn’t have enough experience to be totally confident about how much was just enough, so he’d erred on the side of getting too much. "That's perfect!" Alice beamed. She plopped the empty Gatorade bottle she'd procured in the middle of the base (the wide mouth of a sports drink bottle would make be easy to pour "lava" in). "So I guess we should tape this in place or something," she said. "Oh my god, this will be so great. I wish I'd had a teacher as cool as you when I was in school back in LA." “Uh, would hot glue work?” Cody asked. He was already moving back towards his supply closet. It took some rummaging but what he was looking for and set it up. He shook his head when Alice called him ‘cool’. “I’m not sure that anyone would call me the cool teacher. But I do prefer to keep things a little interesting. And, you know, borrow my friends to make those things happen.” Cody smiled at her. "Believe me, you are tooootally the cool teacher," Alice reassured him. She busied herself crumpling up pieces of newspaper and arranging them around the base of the soda bottle, nudging it into a conical shape. "I would have gone crazy for a volcano model as a kid, and like, I didn't even like volcanoes then. Not any more than anyone else anyway." Cody shook his head back and forth, in disagreement about his coolness status, while copying the steps she was taking to form their volcano. “I guess that’s irony or something with your powers then,” he mused. Cody hadn’t exactly been a weather nerd before he’d grown into his powers either, but what kid could you really expect to be weather nerd? “If you weren’t into volcanos, what were you into as child?” He asked. Alice shrugged. She cocked her head at a crumpled piece of newspaper and rearranged it more to her liking. "I dunno, just like normal kid stuff, I guess," she said. "Disney movies and games and things." She sighed. She'd wanted a bicycle, but the closest she could get in the facility where she grew up was the machine at the gym. "Did you ever play that game here, where you try to guess what your friends' powers will be?" “Yea, of course.” Cody nodded his head. That’d been really popular when he was younger, especially as more and more of his friends matured into his powers while he felt her lagged behind. “I mean, everyone that grows up here expects that they’re going to get powers at some point. There’s a squib here and there, but, well, no one wants that to happen to them.” “There was this one time,” Cody interrupted himself with a laugh, “that a few of us made a pact to see if we could fly. Depending on how the person landed...it didn’t end that well. I wasn’t very adventurous though, only stood on a couch. But, I mean, that was fairly high up when I was five.” Alice giggled, trying to imagine a pile of five-year-olds falling off a couch. "You know what Woody said, flying is just falling with style." Cody chuckled along with her. “Toy Story was one of my favorite movies as a kid.” She could identify with Cody, though. By the time she had developed her powers at age 13, most of her friends had already had theirs for years. "I remember before I got my powers, every little thing made me wonder. Like if the lights flickered, maybe it meant I was an electrokinetic." “Yea.” He nodded his head. It had gotten harder as he got older and then once he’d figured it out...it’d be such a let down. Cody’s power was useless in the scheme of the world. People without his ‘power’ could do what he did and it made him feel like a waste of space. But that wasn’t one of those things that you verbalized. Even to your friends. “I kinda wished I’d had one like that. Or some kind of pyrokinetic so I’d never be cold again.” "I sort of have that!" Alice exclaimed. "Except it's more like the other way around. I can't like, make fire or anything to keep me warm, I just can't get burned." Which makes me a good roommate for Ariel, she almost added, before remembering that things were still weird between Cody and her roommate. "It's the only useful thing I can do." She handed Cody a newspaper. "Okay, now we have to cut this into strips." He took the newspaper from her her immediately and followed her instruction. “Yea, that’s super useful. Although, one of the new girls has the power of invincibility. And, I mean, who wouldn’t want that? That’s probably one of the smartest ones to wish for.” "You might be better off wishing for nothing," Alice muttered, her voice losing some of its usual chipper quality. "Like for me, I can still feel when things are hot, but because it doesn't hurt me, it doesn't feel as hot as it used to. And like, if you were invincible, would that mean that you wouldn't feel everything as much? Sometimes, I think pain can be good." She supposed she could just ask the invulnerable girl about her powers, but Alice could be hesitant with people she hadn't known very long. Alice resumed cutting paper into strips alongside Cody, and she promptly gave herself a paper cut. "Ow!" she exclaimed, and she shook her hand to ease the sting. "I take it back." |