Xaviers!

Shari had dipped into her remaining cash reserves to buy two train tickets to London. She'd been hesitant, but the fact that she currently has free room and board was making her a bit more generous in 'wasting' money. So she had dragged Natalie out to London while remaining annoyingly vague about their plans. Till they got close to XOYO, a Techno club near downtown London, and she pulls Natalie into an alley before slowly shifting into her previously practiced shape of Satchmo. The bass thumping from inside can be felt even out here.

"Just follow my lead." she winks at Natalie before heading down the alley, away from the main entrance where a line of people is waiting to be lead in and towards a back entrance where people are unloading equipment from a van. She saunters up to the door and the bulky security guy standing there. "Yo yo yo." Shari throws in the bouncer's general direction, aiming to waltz right past him, only stopping when she pretends to just realize something. "Oh yeah, she's with me." she thumbs over her shoulder at Natalie.

Natalie's a bit flustered by all this, but she does her best to follow Shari's lead. She smiles at the security guard and moves close to Shari-mo, wrapping her arms around one of Shari-mo's arms. As soon as they're inside, Natalie hisses at Shari, "What are we doing here?"

"Putting on a show! I figured they use computers for the music and the light and everything, so you can be hella flashy!" Shari half-shouts. Now that they're inside the music is significantly louder, if still a bit muffled on account of being backstage. "Bet I could get you on stage too, but if you don't wanna you can do it from off-stage too!"

"I... what? Oh no. No no no no. I can't possibly do that." 5.0 on the flustered scale.

"Sure you can! I mean... you don't have to if you don't wanna, but I bet you it'd be fun."

"But... there are people out there," she says, gesturing towards the stage.

"Well yeah. What's the point of being flashy is there's nobody to see it?"

"Well..." She bites her lip, looking towards the stage. She sighs, "What did you have in mind?"

"Entirely up to you. They got a whole light-system, I think there's even lasers involved. And the music, obviously. I looked it up, it all works with computers!"

She looks at the stage and then gets that far-away look again, "I can feel the computers, bouncing information around." She gulps, "Let's do this before I think better of it."

"Awesome!" Shari grins and gives Natalie a little nudge towards the stage as one song fades into the next. The DJ currently on stage glances over and Shari gives him a thumbs up before jerking 'his' head towards Natalie and nodding, banking on the fame of her assumed shape.

Natalie scoots towards the DJ, grabbing a hold of the light board and twisting the lights as her mind searches through the computer system, giving the song a couple of minutes before cutting to another track without actually having a pair of headphones. The transition isn't flawless, but in a noisy club, it's close enough. Her focus is all on the booth though.

The lights, at first, go unnoticed, at least in the sense that Natalie is manipulating them. The DJ notices that something is up though but after a glance over at 'DJ Satchmo' he seems to begrudgingly accept the fact that he's sharing the stage. When the song starts to transition he seems to at least kinda catch on to something weird happening and he takes his hands of his mix-board. First hesitantly, then he almost demonstratively raises them into the air like most of the audience that is now beginning to notice that something unusual is happening...

Natalie shifts position, taking more visible control of the board, her mind doing things that her fingers are just miming as she gets lost in the rhythm of the music and the signals. She doesn't take time to pick up headphones because she doesn't need them. And she doesn't look at the audience, because she knows that will make her panic. The electronics and the music are *everything* to her.

Music and lightshow begin to flow together as both react to Natalie's mind connecting to the signal. And to msot of the audience, that's what really seems to matter as they get into the show even more. Little by little some more attentive audience members point out to their friends that Natalie isn't actually doing anything, much less wearing headphones. But what might have otherwise been a divisive issue gets smoothed over by the fact that people are swept up in the music. And the Ecstasy. Still, the reaction of the crowd is overwhelmingly positive, even if Natalie is trying her best to put them out of her mind.

The music that Natalie cycles through seems to run the gamut from dance to techno to trance. She tries not to let any one song linger too long, sliding from one track to the next. Not finding what she wants to finale with on the computer, the computer suddenly initiates a request to pull down some additional music from her phone. In a moment, she has the track and as the current song ends, she slides into that track, weaving it with a couple of other similarly paced pieces that she picked up from the computer. The weaving is easy for her, so she focuses on the light show, her hand resting over the light controls, but everything happening in her mind. As the track comes to a close, she lets it finish out and then she steps back from the console with a deep breath. And that's when she finally notices the crowd.

As the music fades it's replaced by the cheers of the crowd as glowsticks and similar things are waved in the general direction of the stage. At that point Shari runs out on the stage, doing some mock-bows that feel kind of out of place. She's not so much trying to steal Natalie's thunder as she is trying to take some of the weight of the crowd off of her so she doesn't freak out. "Thank you, thank you! For giving my friend a chance to wow you with her skills! And big thanks to the DJ for ceding his spot for a moment! Appreciate it!" she shouts at the crowd as another track slowly fades in, courtesy of the original DJ making sure there's not just complete silence going on.

Natalie mouths the word 'thank you' to the DJ and raises her hands to the crowd before she exits quickly, stage left. She collapses against one of the walls, trying to slow her breathing.

Shari quickly follows her, clearly excited. "That. Was awesome!"

"As soon as my heart gets back where it belongs, I'll probably agree with you," she says, taking a few deep breaths.

Shari laughs. "You were awesome. And in front of a crowd too, well done!"

"Yeah, and the crowd seemed to enjoy it," she says, smiling nervously.

"They sure did! Didya enjoy it?" Shari grins.

"I think so. Still trying to process it." She glances around nervously, "We should probably leave before somebody catches on."

"Yeah, pretty sure the real Satchm--" Before Shari can finish her sentence she's interrupted by a loud "Hey!" from down the hall where someone looking suspiciously like Shari is standing, staring at them in confusion.

"Uh oh. Cheese it!" Shari laughs and grabs Natalie by the hand and pulls her along. As she's running her features change and fall away until she looks like a completely different person. Taking the first door that leads into the club proper she stops and just calmly wades through the crowd of people. "Just plays it cool, he can't find us in here and we'll just walk out the front door. Unless you feel like dancing!" she laughs.

Getting into the press of people, even people who were cheering her earlier, seems to close in on Natalie. "No, out is good. Out sounds wonderful."

"Figured." she nods as she forges a path through the crowd among plenty "Scuse me. Coming through. Watch it." On the upside, by the time they make it to the exit they almost certainly have lost any pursuers that might have tried to get to them. And even just getting out into the entrance area thins out the crowd significantly.

Natalie breathes a little easier and lets go of Shari's hand. "Hopefully they're not all that interested in chasing us," she says, glancing over her shoulder.

"Nah. I mean we didn't do anything bad."

"Depends on their assessment of 'bad'," Natalie says, walking further away from the club and the milling people. "Thanks for doing this. You didn't have to."

"Eh, guess not, but you seemed like you could use it." she grins.

"I guess I owe you one." She gives Shari another genuine smile.

"Don't worry about it!" she says, her grin mellowing out into more of a smile. "Question is, what are we gonna do now?"

Natalie wracks her brain for a moment, "Ummm... coffee?" That seems like a default response if Shari's ever heard one.

"Boooring. Oh I know where we can go. There's a cool thingie over in Battersea Park."

"Okay," Natalie says, not even looking around to get her bearings as she starts in that direction, "What's there?"

"This cool little Pagoda thing. Well, it's not that little really, but it's pretty cool. You can look across the river and see most of the city from there."

"Sounds like fun." She says, "Signals might be pretty clear up there too."

It's a little bit of a hike, mostly because they have to cross the Thames at one point, but soon after they're walking through a large park. Close to the water a handful of steps lead up to a small Pagoda, surrounded by a low stone fence. Shari immediately hops onto the fence and balances on top of it as they walk.

"During the day there's always a bunch of people here but at night there's almost never anybody here. It's some kinda symbolic site. There's one kinda like this in Munich too. That one's bigger though and you can, like, go inside and up the tower."

"That would be nice. I like the architecture," she says. "Some day, maybe, I'd like to travel to Japan."