voice testing

[greatestheroever]

Wow, mun. I can't say I'm the greatest hero just yet, but I'll try to live up to it!

Um. But do we really have to use this icon? It's embarrassing, and I think people might get the wrong idea.

Comments

[spideyfanone]

Yeah, that's not a thing even a little bit. And barring that context, you really don't make me think "evil" at all. ...Chess club, possibly. Not evil.

[greatestheroever]

Thank you. I do like chess.

People can be real jerks about it back home, though.

[spideyfanone]

Well, I can kinda sympathize. Mutants had legal equality at home, and everyone says that's weirdly good, but it didn't exactly extend to a mutant as obvious as me who was also king of the nerds. People'll find a way to be jerks, is kinda what I mean.

[greatestheroever]

Equality is always good! But it's not real equality if it doesn't apply to those of us who don't appear human.

[His brow knits slightly.] You did call yourself human before. Do you think of yourself as human?

[spideyfanone]

I'm more of a physics guy than biologist, one a single-gene difference within a freely interbreeding, sympatric population does not a speciation make. Homo Superior is a silly idea. ...Besides, my parents were human. They adopted the freak baby. S'the least I can do to adopt back, y'know?

[greatestheroever]

That makes sense. I'm not really sure how to think of myself. It matters a lot to most people at the school, but Ma and Pa never raised me any differently than any other kid, really.

[Er, ignoring that they never existed.]

[spideyfanone]

Yeah, same for mine. Besides, it just doesn't hold up logically, and I like logic. It helps... X-positive human, scientifically speaking. Politically, mutant is a legit identity thing, I guess.

[greatestheroever]

Yeah, I don't want to deny being a mutant or ignore the need to champion mutant rights, but I'm not sure that saying you're not human helps things.

[spideyfanone]

It's a Venn diagram, not two different columns on a chart. ...If that works for you. I guess not everyone thinks in graphs.

[greatestheroever]

I think in graphs!

[You are a wonderful person, Kurt who also thinks in graphs.]

But with everything that's going on people think you have to be on one side or another.

[spideyfanone]

Maybe it's 'cus I'm from the world where things sucked a little less until everyone died, but I never thought of it that way. I mean, there was a girl in my class who could fly, but she looked normal and was on the pom squad instead of the future engineers club. Nobody stole her lunch money. It's like... Mutant is just one way to kick people to the curb to feel better.

[greatestheroever]

I guess. I don't really know too much about this stuff yet. I haven't been out in the real world for very long. But I don't see why things have to be like this. There has to be a way to make it better.

[spideyfanone]

Take a look at the multiverse sometime. ...Okay, don't, because it's kinda broken. But if you did, yeah, there are better ways out there. There are also worlds with psychic horrors that project illusions of cupcakes and unicorns to fool you, but the point about infinite possibilities stands.

[greatestheroever]

Would that work? I mean, just because something works for another world doesn't mean it'd work for us. I guess maybe we could learn from it, but I don't think I'd be able to just watch without wanting to help them too.

I think I am kind of immortal though ...

[spideyfanone]

That probably helps? But no, it's not, like, a directly communicative property or anything. You have to change a lot. I asked Miz Blaire about you guys' earth, and my world started being different around the turn of the century, when a whole bunch of energy technologies were developed, probably because of stuff they pulled out of a crashed spaceship but no one ever confirmed that, so we cut the depression really short, and our World War II was only about a year long, and we didn't even have this cold war thing... So yeah, it's a chaos theory thing.

...Okay, I talk a lot. My point is things can change.

[greatestheroever]

Wow, that's awfully different.

We've got classes in things like time travel, butterfly effect and convergence, but it's pretty complicated even on paper. But it probably gets easier ... right?

[spideyfanone]

Yeah, everything gets easier. I did a project on ghost boxes in summer camp when I was eleven.

[greatestheroever]

Ghost boxes?

[spideyfanone]

They're for interdimensional exploration. They were still officially theoretical at home, but my mom was really into the idea, so she got me into the Forge Industries sponsored camp that summer. Usually she wasn't a fan of sleazy corporations pulling PR stunts like that.

[greatestheroever]

Wow, I have so much to learn.

I'm sure we have something like that, or that Professor McCoy could invent something, but right now we're having enough problems with time travel.

[spideyfanone]

Yeah, I haven't done that one. Just dimension travel. Though sometimes that kicks you back or forward in time. We went to the wild west one time. That was cool.

[greatestheroever]

We've fought cowboys. And dinosaurs. And robots. I'm not sure it was cool, though, it was kind of sad.

[spideyfanone]

Yeah, I can see that. Our wild west mission was one of the good ones. We saved everyone, I got to make friends with an eight-year-old Mr. Howlett, and Dazzler gave her first ever jury-rigged electric ukulele solo. Good day.

[greatestheroever]

[He looks really impressed. Wolverine was a child once? Dazzler played the ukulele?]

I can't wait until we start having the cool missions. Well. Or any missions. Right now we just do training exercises and get randomly attacked.

[spideyfanone]

[Kurt looks sheepish in turn.]

Well, I kinda wanted to wind up at the school if I ever get a shot at retiring, so, uh, cool missions can get kinda wearing. They don't usually go that well.