Brick by Brick

[Leo Eskandari]

Leo groaned with effort as he bent a thick signpost straight. It wasn't particularly hard for him, it was just difficult to get the right grip. Some kid experimenting with his powers had knocked it so hard it had nearly been at a right angle and crouching low enough was challenging for a guy as huge as Leo.

"Good job, kid. You made that look easy," said Aaron, the supervisor for the work crew he was assigned to help out. He was old enough to be the big guy's dad, maybe even his grandfather. But the man knew how to use every tool at his disposal to get the job done properly, including his subordinates.

"Thanks. I gotta say, I don't hate having this strength," Leo responded with what passed for a smiling smirk. He straightened his work clothes. "So, what next?"

"Think you can handle the power washer? Those damn punks tagged another building."

Leo groaned. "Again? Yeah, I got it."

"Good man. Let me show you where."

---

After laboriously scrubbing the wall in question with cleaner, Leo flicked on the power washer. The combination worked like a charm, melting the unwanted artwork away. He hated destroying someone's art, but you couldn't just go around painting what didn't belong to you. Still, maybe there was a better way to handle it than cleaning up after the fact. Some of the graffiti was quite good.

Wait, why not find the tagger and try getting permission for them to do something for the community center? Sure it was new and shiny, but maybe it could stand to look more like part of the community. He'd have to run the idea past Miss Allaire.

---

The beastman rapped on the door to Lisette's office, hoping she was in.

[Lisette Allaire]

Mutants didn't, generally, live long lives. The ones who grew old had powers that were easy to hide or that were so strong or versatile that they made them actively easier to survive, in a world full of angry normals with chips on their shoulders. More often than not, super-strong mutants or ones with visible 'combat mutations' - a term that Lisette hated with all her soul - ended up finding out how vulnerable they really were, getting bottled in back-alleys or murdered by gangs of teenagers. Beating up a bad guy is one thing - being gentle enough with that bad guy not to catch a murder charge was an art that many found fatal. Lisette, herself, just doesn't out herself to normals; she lets it be an open secret among her immediate reports. She isn't certain what the volunteers know, but she doesn't bother to confirm or deny that she is a mutant. The official tagline is that it shouldn't matter.

Leo is one that she recognises if only because he's fucking huge. With a semi-grim mirth, she knows in the privacy of her own mind that he must be ridiculously popular with a specific brand of terminally-online furries. As, in fact, are many animalesque mutants; she knows about these subcultures from her experiences with both mutants and queers. Lisette doesn't see the appeal, but she's known what it is to be targeted by such shitbags. She only hopes that Leo, who apparently is young, knows how to handle himself in the face of such potential manipulations.

This all flashes through Lisette's mind as she hears him shake the floor of the first-floor office she is set up in, then knock as daintily as he can on her door. She sighs and rubs her temples; while she's trying to automate a great deal of this process, right now she's still in a stage where a huge amount of the paperwork is done by hand, and she's on very little sleep. Leo is fine, he's a good kid, but he's small fry that she's too busy bailing out the much-neglected processes and training documents to bother with. Still, she rises, steadying herself for a moment - she really needs to take a nap after this - to step out of her door into her still-absent secretary's office, making her way to the other set of double-doors to find the cartoonish, leonine figure of Leo waiting beyond it. Sometimes she wonders if he picked that name himself - a thought she never entertained for long enough for a telepath to make drama out of it.

"Oh, hi. I had places to be anyway; walk with me. What can I do for you?" she asks, by way of greeting, stepping out of the office into the wood-and-glass catwalk. Ashlie really put thought into this, for it to comfortably accomodate Leo, however barely. It shook under his heavy footfalls, of course, but it didn't complain even a little.

[Leo Eskandari]

The large lad deftly made room for her on the catwalk. He was just about used to being so big, enough not to put himself in the way of foot traffic. But there was a sense that he still thought about each step in such narrow confines.

After a brief hesitation brought upon by his usual self-doubt, he said, "Yeah, so... I was thinkin' about the graffiti issue and it hit me that, well, maybe we could staht a community aht project to channel that creativity productively. Like, through a mural." He was clearly nervous, judging by his thicker-than-usual Boston accent.