Night 50: Activities Shed

[autophoenix.livejournal.com]

[ from here ]

As difficult as it was, especially given her constant need to outperform Elle, Claire tried her best to bat down the looming arrogance that she'd been able to get them in while Elle stood around being useless. It was the little things, really, that made all the difference, and this little thing happened to make Claire just a little more full of herself.

But, they needed to deal with the situation at hand, and this particular situation made Claire suddenly grateful for the cleanliness of the institute proper. The shed was dirty -- it looked like it had probably been months since they'd last cleaned it, and the cobwebs that hung from the ceiling and the equipment racks and tied up corners of the small shed made her scowl.

Maybe it was a little cliche, and maybe it was silly to worry about compared to what else was crawling around the institute that could actually hurt her, but Claire hated spiders.

The shard of glass she'd been bringing around got tossed into one of said cobwebbed corners and she got the chance to finally examine her hand. It looked disgusting, and through all the blood it was hard to make out just how bad the cut was, but she tried to squint at it, shining her flashlight's beam directly on it to examine it anyway.

When she remembered that Elle had followed her, though, she went back to browsing the baseball equipment.

"You should probably grab something, too." As if it hadn't already been a given. The flashlight beam moved over a collection of aluminum and wooden bats and Claire tried to decide which to grab. The metal one seemed the obvious choice, but there was something to be said for a Louisville Slugger in that it was the only bat brand she knew by name. Suddenly, she regretted how boring she'd always found sports to be.

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[highvoltagegirl.livejournal.com]

"Gross." was Elle's snap judgment on the inside of the shed and all the disgusting wonders it held inside. Her upbringing made her pretty disinclined to be fond of anything as filthy as this shed was.

While Claire examined her hand with the flashlight and deprived the rest of the shed from light, Elle stood stalk still, afraid to move because she could walk right into a snake or a spider or something. Whatever demonic monsters were lurking outside would become the least of her worries, then. She was just as much of a stereotypical girl inside as Claire was.

"Yeah, maybe." Her tone indicated that Elle thought she was being dumb for thinking she even needed to suggest that Elle take something too, even though the creep factor of the shed had weirded Elle out so much she might have completely forgotten otherwise.

She ran her fingers over the different bats as Claire shone the light on them. Metal ones were usually hollow, right? She didn't know anything about sports but she could have sworn she had a vague memory of something like that. As her fingers grazed the metal, she got a strong jolt of static shock and recoiled.

Never mind.

In an attempt to overcompensate pretend that didn't happen at all, she yanked one of the wooden ones out of the collection and started waving it around experimentally, to get a feel for how it worked. Well, it was better than nothing.

[autophoenix.livejournal.com]

Elle's snappy cover-up attempt wasn't enough to hide the light of her sparks from Claire, though, and her gaze quickly flickered over to where the girl was selecting her bat. Her brow wrinkled, scrutinizing.

"Can't you keep that under control?" She criticized, grabbing a wooden bat for herself off the rack. "It's seriously getting annoying." She couldn't help but think that the fact that her powers were limited alone should help that along, but didn't all Company agents get some kind of training, too? It seemed like something she should have been able to control, anyway.

Then again. Claire didn't have the option of turning her ability on and off like that. There was no way she could know how difficult that was or wasn't. But that wasn't something she wanted to admit. She much preferred just being arrogant and considering herself better in some way than Elle. That was easier.

[highvoltagegirl.livejournal.com]

"Don't you think if I could, I would?" She hissed, her bat dropping abruptly to her side. "I hate it. I hate this. It's not as bad as it was before I was here, but it's still ... wrong."

It was embarassing. Even when she was a failure in most other ways when it came to being an agent, she had been really good at controlling her power. Kind of. For the most part. And now she didn't even have that going for her.

She wiped the thin layer of sweat that had formed on her forehead off with the back of her hand. Arguing with Claire was tiring her out.

"Are we done here?"

[autophoenix.livejournal.com]

When she was bitching like that, it was kind of hard for Claire to resist the urge to use her bat on Elle. But, she'd made it this long without getting fed up and winding up in a physical altercation with her in the institute, it would be a shame to lose patience after all that time.

"Yeah. Yeah, we're done." She said dismissively, deciding it was better to terminate the interaction rather than extending it to ask the questions she wanted answered. She wanted to know what Elle meant about her ability acting weird before she was here. She wanted to know what she meant by wrong -- was it like Claire's problem? Not feeling pain was probably less annoying than sparking off at random moments, but for Claire, it was a lot more important.

Instead, she just pushed past Elle and out of the activities shed so that she could dwell on what a freak she'd become alone.