The joy of spam (John, Josh, Bob, open)

[Ororo Munroe]

It's a beautiful morning, and Ororo unlocks the door to her office while trying to juggle her laptop, some file folders, and a cup of coffee. She succeeds, and sets her things down on her desk, which is situated facing her bookshelves. Originally, when she'd first moved her things in here, the desk faced the door, with her back to the window. She hadn't been able to bear it for long, and the new arrangement afforded her a view of the hallway and of the garden.

After plugging her laptop in, Ororo steps across the room, unlatching the windows. While she waits for it to finish warming up, she waters the various plants scattered near the windows. Ah, fresh air! It's fortunate that it's so warm out. She supposes she could help things out a bit, but manipulating the weather for her own personal enjoyment always struck her as rather narcissistic.

As soon as the computer finishes booting, it checks her mail for her, linking into the Institute's mainframe. A chime plays. Finished with her task, Ororo sits down in her chair and begins glancing through the new arrivals.

Mm. Don't need that.... don't have that... She's tempted to forward the latter to the rest of the male faculty. While Hank would probably find it humorous, she didn't appreciate clawmarks in in the woodwork, and she and Jake weren't quite on that comfortable of terms yet. She'd been waiting for him to make a move, anything, since Christmas, and she was getting tired of waiting.

Finally, she arrives on a nondescript email, that appears to have no sender. Hmm.

Miss Munroe – It may be to your advantage to investigate this site promptly.


She pulls up her remote link to the Map Room's database. Strange. Nothing much of interest appears to be at the coordinates, save for a half-finished building of unknown purpose. Ororo glances at her watch. She'd been planning on getting some paperwork done today, but this seemed likely to be much more interesting.

I should see if anyone else is interested in accompanying me. It wouldn't be a good idea to do this alone. Perhaps John... She'd felt somewhat badly about not allowing John to go to Time Square. While that hadn't stopped him, he had proved useful, and she felt he might finally be ready to for some missions. Ororo closes the screen on her computer, and steps out of her office in search of others.

[Bernhard Putzkammer]

[[All fixed. Sorry 'bout that folks ]]

Bernie scratches his hair amid a few swirling thoughts, making his way up the hall. The events of the invasion long since cleared up but the recent Times Square riot still fresh on all their minds, things had had very little time to slow down over the last few months. Couldn't they just have a normal week? Day even? They should have included the risks on the job description (Tasks involve: educating children in an ethical manner and running for your lives). But then again, would that have stopped him from accepting the job? Probably not.

"Ah, Ororo!" He says happily, grinning in that maniacal way that succeeds in coming off totally harmless. "Just the young woman I was coming to see." He leans against the wall, trying to avoid scratching the newly refinished paint with his bone extensions. "I've been meaning to ask you about a bit of a field trip. The kids have been wanting to visit that new museum in Mt. Vernon. It'd make for a great. Been there once or twice myself. Beautiful history."

History is Bernie's passion, if anyone hasn't been able to tell. He was the Institute's European and Post-1900's History teacher after all. A field trip was just what his class needed. After all the events in the recent months, they'd been on edge, convinced another disaster would befall them. Maybe Bernie would even be able to talk Ororo and Jake (and yes, he'd seen the longing looks and fluttering of eyelashes. About three times he'd been tempted to simply shove the two into a closet and lock them in there for the night) into letting all the children out for the day. They really needed to get back into civilization and realize that not all the humans were out to cure, kill, or torture them. Though Bernie did have some reservations about the way a certain blond-haired, fire-tempered new/old addition dealt with the students.

"The children would love it, Ororo. They need some history! Some culture!" He booms happily and enthusiastically, pumping a fist into the air for effect. If there was one thing Bernie was good at, it was convincing and riling others.

[Bobby Drake]

Robert still hasn’t quite gotten used to his new distributed cognitive network, but there’s no question that it’s proving useful.

Normally there’s no way one person could monitor everything going on in the Institute for trouble without being overwhelmed by minutia. Even attempting to do so would be a major privacy violation, and he’s gotten chastised for that enough times already to understand the logistical difficulties of. But with copies of specialized subsets of his cortical processing systems resident in hardware throughout the Institute, both problems practically disappear: each node evaluates local data for relevancy and permanently discards everything else.

It’s like having a small army of analysts relaying him the information he’s interested in, except the “analysts” have no interests outside the narrow confines of their assignment, and their assignments are all directly related to Institute safety. Not that he expects this to reassure any of the Institute’s residents – after all, he could be using the capability to monitor all sorts of prurient activity – which is why he hasn’t told anyone about it.

All of which explains his presence outside Ororo’s office this morning, having received a blip about some strange anonymous email she received that seems relevant to X-Men operations. He arrives in the hallway as she’s talking to Mr. Putzkammer about a field trip.

> " The children would love it, Ororo. They need some history! Some culture! "

"Good morning… Ororo… Bernie" He feels a small spike of satisfaction that his automated nickname-indexing system is working… he hasn’t interacted very much with Mr. Putzkammer since his change, but apparently the majority of emails addressed to him use “Bernie.”

"Is there anything interesting happening?" Robert knows that acting is not his primary strength – truthfully, it never has been – but he’s been told by enough people that his new condition makes him difficult to “read” that he hopes Ororo won’t notice the disingenuousness of the question.

[Ororo Munroe]

> "The children would love it, Ororo. They need some history! Some culture!"

"Good morning, Bernard." She regards the other teacher. "A field trip sounds good to me. Just check into it and get back to me on it." As she's about to start explaining the unusual morning occurrence, Bobby approaches them.

> "Is there anything interesting happening?"

The fact that there is and that you approached me about it makes me highly suspicious. She studies Bobby for a moment. If it were anyone else, she was likely to write it off as a joke. Except, as far as she could tell, the 'new' Bobby had absolutely no sense of humor. Hm.

"In fact, there is. I received an email from an undisclosed entity this morning that pointed to GPS coordinates of an unfinished building, with no other information available. You wouldn't be able to look at it for me, would you?" She'd been furious with Bobby because of his actions at the Baxter Building, and had even suspended him from current team operations. But there couldn't be any harm from having him take a look.

Unless he had to use his powers, that is. Her whole rationale for suspending him was to avoid power usage in the first place, since it was slowly killing him.

She motions in the direction of her open door.

[Bobby Drake]

> " In fact, there is. I received an email from an undisclosed entity this morning that pointed to GPS coordinates of an unfinished building, with no other information available. You wouldn't be able to look at it for me, would you?"

Robert nods abruptly, completely unaware of Ororo’s suspicion. After a moment, one of his half-finished social-I/O routines alerts him and he adds "Certainly, I would be happy to" in a disturbingly flat tone of voice.

He frowns thoughtfully for a moment, ignoring the office door and rechecking the results of the various agents he'd dispatched to inspect the email thread. Of course, he’d already looked into it when he first became aware of the email, but he’d rather Ororo not be aware of that, and it can’t hurt to double-check. However, he learns nothing more than he’d established before.

"The mail was routed through an anonymous server three hours and seven minutes ago. The server itself is part of a distributed commercial anonymous network service… the most recent link in the chain is housed in a server farm in upstate New York, but beyond that I cannot trace it from here without extending my range past the threshold of previous experiments, which Dr. Richards has contraindicated for health reasons. Judging from a superficial scan of their traffic the service appears to be more popular among government clients than corporate or individual ones, but all three are represented. The spot referenced by the coordinates has no especially interesting properties I can determine. The surrounding area is owned by the state of New York but a lot was purchased November 1 of last year zoned for residential construction… and a contract for construction placed with Sturdy Construction, Inc. shortly thereafter. I am unable to uncover any electronic records relating to the construction details themselves."

[Tobias Smith]

Tobias rarely asks for help on anything, be it homework, his social life, life in general, or using his powers. However, Ms. Munroe's class, in Tobias' opinion, is the lone exception. There are a number of reasons, a few of them being: He doesn't quite get it, the only reason he cares is because he owes it to his mother, he doesn't quite get it, he knows when he can't do it alone most of the time...and he doesn't quite get it.

So that leaves us with Tobias, wearing his trademark black cargo jeans, shirt, boots, plain black fingerless gloves, along with a black, Columbine-esque trenchcoat. Again, he is wearing contacts rather than his glasses, and is looking over his latest assignment for the seventeenth time in the past half-hour. As he approaches Ms. Munroe's office, he sighed, rubbed his eyes, and breifly remebers that she caused quite a bit of chaos when pissed off during the invasion. As such, he really hopes she's in a good mood. Tobias makes a left to face her doorway, which is hanging open, just in time to hear "Robert's" rant.

> "The mail was routed through an anonymous server three hours and seven minutes ago. The server itself is part of a distributed commercial anonymous network service… the most recent link in the chain is housed in a server farm in upstate New York, but beyond that I cannot trace it from here without extending my range past the threshold of previous experiments, which Dr. Richards has contraindicated for health reasons. Judging from a superficial scan of their traffic the service appears to be more popular among government clients than corporate or individual ones, but all three are represented. The spot referenced by the coordinates has no especially interesting properties I can determine. The surrounding area is owned by the state of New York but a lot was purchased November 1 of last year zoned for residential construction… and a contract for construction placed with Sturdy Construction, Inc. shortly thereafter. I am unable to uncover any electronic records relating to the construction details themselves."

Tobias is still stopped, and looks at Robert with his mouth slightly open. He looks confused, furrows his brow, then shakes his head and mutters, "I'm not even going to ask..." But then he remembers why he came and he realized he probably came in at the wrong time, seeing how it looked like it was a meeting between "Robert", Mr. Putscammer...Puzcammer....P.T. Hammer.......Bernie, and Ms. Munroe.

He scratches the back of his head and says quietly, "Yeah, I probably came it at a bad time...I was going to ask about that last assignment, but uh....yeah, I'll-I'll just wait outside.....awkward." With that, Tobias steps back and gets ready to leave.

[Bernhard Putzkammer]

"Good morning… Ororo… Bernie" The eldest teacher raises a skeptical eyebrow at the student. None of the students had ever called him by his nickname before, especially none as usually well behaved as Bobby. But then, of course, he's forced to remember that this isn't the same Bobby that he's used to.

"Morning my lad!" With the awkwardness of being called 'Bernie' by a student promptly brushed off, the afore mentioned teacher clamps a hand on Bobby's shoulder and gives him a little happy shake. He can't help but note the stiffness in the boy's body...probably a side effect of being hooked up to a computer all the time.

"I received an email from an undisclosed entity this morning that pointed to GPS coordinates of an unfinished building, with no other information available. You wouldn't be able to look at it for me, would you?"

And then Bobby rambles on monotonously about something pertaining to the construction of a building, but not being one for tech-babble, Bernie's lost after hearing the words 'anonymous server'. Scratching his head while exchanging glances between Bobby and Ororo, Bernie remains silent.

"Yeah, I probably came it at a bad time...I was going to ask about that last assignment, but uh....yeah, I'll-I'll just wait outside.....awkward." He turns to see Tobias, clad in an inappropriate amount of black clothing, gaping at Bobby before hurrying out the door.

"Bob, you've become quite the frightener. Ever thought of speaking English? Might go over better with the younglings." Bernie tosses a thumb over his shoulder towards the recently vacated entrance.

[Bobby Drake]

Robert remains oblivious, as usual, to the social byplay (Bernie’s skeptical eyebrow, Tobias’ abrupt departure, etc.), concentrating primarily on ways to extract more information from the data he has without attempting to exceed his existing power-threshold.

That seems to be the key to using MGH-derived abilities without risking overload… according to Dr. Richards the abilities get stronger the more they’re “pushed”, and become more dangerous the stronger they get. Which means that Johnny Storm’s overload happening in the middle of their battle was no coincidence; in a manner of speaking they had caused it, although the Richards family didn’t seem inclined to blame them for it. (Which is just as well, he supposes; their interactions could become awkward otherwise.)

> " Bob, you've become quite the frightener. Ever thought of speaking English? Might go over better with the younglings. "

Bernie’s comment surprises him, and the resulting cascade of puzzlement breaks his link to the email server. He considers re-establishing it but decides not to bother; he’s already learned everything he’s likely to. "I thought I was speaking English… what did you – oh. I understand; you mean I should speak more colloquially. Actually, I have – I mean, I’ve been working on that. It…’s difficult, however, to know exactly when and what is appropriate… the line between overly formal and overly informal is difficult to establish with any clarity, and I’ve established that erring on the informal side tends to cause more awkwardness. It used to be an unconscious operation, but after my transition that sort of data has become more difficult to access."

After a moment’s thought he calls out after Tobias’ retreating back " I apologize for frightening you, Tobias – is there something you wanted?"

[Tobias Smith]

> "I apologize for frightening you, Tobias – is there something you wanted?"

Tobias stops dead, rolls his eyes, sighs, and turns around to face the trio. Again, like always he has the bored/apathetic experssion on his face, and says, "Well, first off: I wasn't frightened. Slightly creeped out that Bob's a walking computer, but not frightened. Second," He glances at Mr. Putzkammer, "Youngling? And back to the point, I came in to ask about this World History assignment...but I can see that you three are in the middle of something......and Bob, you REALLY need to stop talking like a damned dictionary. Try coming out of cyberspace for once."

[Ororo Munroe]

> beyond that I cannot trace it from here without extending my range past the threshold of previous experiments, which Dr. Richards has contraindicated for health reasons.

He just… looked into my mailbox? She’s thrown off, and had been expecting him to, well, go into her office and look at it on the computer. More disturbing was the apparent lack trouble her password had given him. Ororo looks slightly stern. “Thank you. And I’ll also thank you in advance for adhering to Dr. Richards' limits on your abilities. It’s for your own good, Bobby.”

She mulls the information over for a moment. He hadn’t found anything particularly interesting, but it confirmed, at least, that it wasn’t anyone playing a practical joke on her. Or, at least, she assumed the students around here wouldn’t go to the lengths Bobby had described to keep the joke running…

> ...but I can see that you three are in the middle of something......and Bob, you REALLY need to stop talking like a damned dictionary. Try coming out of cyberspace for once."

“Good morning, Tobias. A question? Go ahead, we’re not actually in the middle of anything…yet.” Ororo smiles at him, humor apparent in her eyes at his reaction to Bobby’s recent personality changes. She turns to Bernie. “Would you go like to investigate the coordinates? I’d rather enjoy a bit of a mystery instead of the pile of exams sitting on my desk… And perhaps a telepath would be useful?”

Ororo tries to ‘think’ out loud in the direction of Jake’s office. Good morning, Jake. I’ve received a rather odd email pointing me to a location in upstate New York that ‘may’ be of interest to us. I was wondering if you’d like to come along? Your telepathy might come in handy.

[Josh Dalton Worthington]

In the headmaster’s office, Jake is startled to pick up Ororo’s ‘voice’ via his telepathy, and promptly falls out of his chair, where he’d been staring out the window in a daze only moments before. Go on a potentially combat-oriented mission with Ororo? Haha, as if I haven’t already made enough of an ass out of myself already. What do I do? Jake casts around wildly for a solution. Ah!

He half-crawls across to a nearby table, where blueprints and bits of wiring are strewn across a table. A partially-finished model of Cerebro made entirely out of a grapefruit is swept aside in his panic (made only the night before, in the throes of sheer boredom) and he stations himself wildly in front of the entire project.

Morning, ‘Ro. I’d love to, really, but I’m in the middle of an extremely delicate step on the Cerebro construction, and I ought to keep on with it. Jake hastily sticks a toothpick into Grape-rebro. Perhaps Josh is available? I can check for you. He catches Ororo’s assent and sags in relief. One crisis averted.


---------------------------------------------------------

Josh and Warren are eating breakfast in the kitchen together when Jake’ telepathic instructions begging message arrives. As Josh spoons up some more yogurt, Jake’s voice fills his mind.

Ororo’s got some kind of mystery-thingie on her hands and wants a teep. I’d love to go - Josh feels a tinge of embarrassment at that - but I’m buried in paperwork and…er… well…

A smile works its way onto Josh’s face. You mean, you’re barely able to walk without tripping in her presence, let alone in possible combat situations?

Well… pretty much. Josh’s smile turns into a grin. Alright… just let me finish breakfast… you’re awfully lucky Warren and I didn’t have much of anything planned.

Warren’s eyebrow rises slightly - it’s generally easy for him to tell when Josh is communicating telepathically. “Ororo’s got some kind of investigation going that she wants help on. You had papers to grade today, right?” At Warren’s nod, he continues. “Sure you don’t mind?”

Warren drops a hand to ruffle it through the puppy’s fur. “Not a problem. I was looking to get some work done, anyway. We’ll be here if you need us.” Puppy’s joyful bark sounds from underneath the table.

Josh breaks into a smile. “Thanks, hon. I should get going…” After he drops his bowl in the sink, he starts towards the door, but a wing slips into his way.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Warren’s eyebrow lifts again, this time suggestively.

“Oop.” As he’s swept up into a kiss, he throws out a mental signal to those gathered in the foyer. Be there in a second…

[Tobias Smith]

>“Good morning, Tobias. A question? Go ahead, we’re not actually in the middle of anything…yet."

...

"Would you go like to investigate the coordinates? I’d rather enjoy a bit of a mystery instead of the pile of exams sitting on my desk… And perhaps a telepath would be useful?”

Tobias' intrest perks at the word 'investigation.' At heart, he is a procrastinator. As such, he will do just about anything to delay writing about the culture of ancient Mesopotamia. In his mind he weighs, the options rather quickly. One one hand, I stay here, talk about a boring dead culture nobody misses, and probably scrape out a B+. On the other hand, I can try and go with them, maybe be useful, and put off the project. Everybody wins. On the other hand, I'd be stuck with CyberBob......back on the other hand, I'd get to see a day in the life of an X-Man. On the other hand, I'd still be stuck with CyberBob.....descisions descisions....

Tobias looks down at the paper in his hands, it only being one of many copies of an outline, then back up at the others, before crumpling the paper up and tossing it in the trash.

Well I WAS going to ask for some help on this Mesopotamian crap...BUT this little investigation sounds much more intersting...could I come? Please? You already got me to say please. You said yourself you'd rather go than grade papers, and I'd rather go than write one. Besides, I can be useful. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in this school that can stop time and do this.

Tobias speaks in his typical sarcastic fashion and closes his eyes to focus. Almost immediately he begins to feel the pressure of the time stop, and opens his eyes to find everyone frozen. The pale youth smiles grimly, and steps over to Bob, and searches through his pockets before pulling out his wallet. He then walks over to one of the bookshelves, and pulls out the largest book he can, and places it in Bob's hands. He has to put the other boy's arms and hands in the right position, but it only takes a few seconds. He is so tempted to 'pants' Bob, but resists due to the presence of the teachers. It begins to become harder for Tobias to move, so before returning things to normal, he raises Mr. Putzkammer's hand and makes his palm flat and drops Bob's wallet on top before stepping behind Ms. Munroe and allowing time to flow again.

Tobias ALMOST has a begging expression on his face...and waits for the reactions.

[Bobby Drake]

> (Tobias) " I wasn't frightened. Slightly creeped out that Bob's a walking computer, but not frightened."

Robert nods, taking the disclaimer at face value, and turns back to Bernie. "I appear to have misunderstood something… who was I frightening?"

> (Storm) " Thank you. And I’ll also thank you in advance for adhering to Dr. Richards' limits on your abilities. It’s for your own good, Bobby. "

He nods again. "I know. I am just as motivated to avoid catastrophic power-overload as you are. Instructions to the contrary notwithstanding, I am in no hurry to die." He doesn’t add out loud what they both already know – that regardless of what he does or doesn’t do, it’s really only a matter of time before the MGH in his system triggers a fatal cascade. He only hopes that, when it happens, it’s not as catastrophic as Johnny Storm’s was.

> (Tobias) " Bob, you REALLY need to stop talking like a damned dictionary. Try coming out of cyberspace for once."

Growing even more puzzled, Robert attempts to correct the misunderstanding. "No… it is not an issue of being ‘in cyberspace,’ I merely have difficulty with social and affective cognitive operations, including the selection of appropriate lexical registers. And ‘cyberspace’ is a misnomer anyway, although there are certain analogies to topological properties – " he stops short, realizing he’s doing it again.

It occurs to him that the “nickname database” strategy he adopted for people’s names can be adapted to solve this problem as well… cross-indexing an online thesaurus with a table of word frequencies should make it easy to find more common, if less precise, equivalents for the words he chooses naturally. So the rest of the discussion drifts past him unattended as he mentally composes the database specifications, allocates an appropriate storage buffer, and projects a new software agent into the Institute’s IP layer to begin appropriate data downloads.

His attention is dragged back to the physical here and now by Tobias’ prank, though if the timestopping teen was expecting some kind of overt reaction, Robert likely disappoints him. The sudden heavy weight startles him, but other than an unconscious processing spike noticeable only to him, he hardly reacts at all.

"He’s certainly right about the usefulness of that talent in a combat situation," he comments to Ororo, "although admittedly it didn’t prevent him from suffering significant injury when the government invaded."

[Ororo Munroe]

> You said yourself you'd rather go than grade papers, and I'd rather go than write one.

Ororo looks at Tobias closely. Despite what Bobby had mentioned, Tobias had done very well for a student in the Institute Invasion at the end of the previous year. It might not be a bad idea to take him along on what seemed to be a mostly investigatory endeavor.

"Well... you'll have to talk to Mr. Putzkammer here about ancient Mesopotamia. But I don't see a harm in having you come along, as long as you're cautious and do what we say. I'm not really sure what all of this is about, so we'll have to keep a sharp lookout."

> Be there in a second...

Ororo recognizes Josh's mental voice, and nods. "Apparently Jake is too busy with the new Cerebro they've been working on, so he's sending Josh along with us." She was slightly disappointed, but Josh was a welcome addition to the team.

[Tobias Smith]

>"He’s certainly right about the usefulness of that talent in a combat situation, although admittedly it didn’t prevent him from suffering significant injury when the government invaded."

Tobias rolls his eyes, sighs, and mutters just under his breath, "Alright, lesson learned, never hijack a government attack helicopter when I can't pilot it. Somehow, he senses the odds of him going dropping everytime Bob opened his mouth. It is now assured in Tobias' mind that he liked Frosty or Normal Bob over Cyber Bob, despite hardly knowing him.

>"Well... you'll have to talk to Mr. Putzkammer here about ancient Mesopotamia. But I don't see a harm in having you come along, as long as you're cautious and do what we say. I'm not really sure what all of this is about, so we'll have to keep a sharp lookout."

At this point, Tobias smiles a small, hidden smile, and chuckles slightly to himself. However, in his mind, the reaction is slightly...less controlled. SWEET! HA! This is going to kick ass! This definitely beats writing that god damned report.