Xaviers!

Imperia is, in many ways, a normal seaside tourist town on the Mediterranean. It's scenic, historic, known for growing flowers and olives, filled with beaches both sandy and rocky. A nice place for a summer trip, certainly.

Porto Oneglia is a little rougher than the main touristy area, though not too far off the beaten path. It's a commercial port, so it's legitimately busy, primarily with fishing, but there's enough restaurants and bars to make it not entirely out of the way for the curious traveler. And, slowly over the years, more expensive yachts and the like have begun making their home at the port, slowly converting it into a more upscale destination. That was very much a work in progress.

Probably not on the itinerary for those fancy-shmancy tourists was a dark alleyway, where a young woman with a baseball bat was standing off against three tough types -- bulky, swarthy, scarred, with knives. Three-against-one didn't exactly seem like fair odds, but the woman wasn't backing down. If anything, it seemed like the toughs were the ones being overly cautious.

"Well, boyos. We doin' this the hard way? Or the harder way?" the woman said, gripping the bat tighter in bandaged hands.

Robin had spend a while in Paris, longer than she'd expected to, but she blamed Claire for that. But they both had things pulling them in different directions. Claire had duties Robin still didn't quite understand but that seemed important in the same way that Auntie Nailah's things were. Meanwhile Robin had gotten restless and set out to follow her Wanderlust south. For a while she'd driven through the countryside as a clattering Citroën 2CV but eventually small-town Gendarmerie stopped the driver-less car and they had not been too thrilled to find themselves confronted with an unabashed mutant. Robin had let them book her because it amused her to think how mad they'd be upon finding the drunk-tank-like cell empty the next morning. Paris might have been somewhat equipped to deal with the likes of her but this sub10k town certainly wasn't.

So she'd continued on as a hitch-hiker rather than a vehicle herself, sleeping in hostels and occasionally setting up her tent in the wilderness on the vague notion Claire might be following her and show herself. Finally she hit the coast and followed it's curve towards the east. The French Riviera was noticeably less provincial and instead filled with tourists but Robin opted to stick to not showing herself to be too much of an obvious mutant. It bugged her but dealing with the consequences was becoming tedious and nobody would be helped by her being a little shit across France. A couple times she did leave a less covert mutant a scribbled note with X-Corp and University contact information but it was the best she could do unless she abandoned her travel plans.

Still, by the time she reaches Imperia there's just a little bit of a constant cloud of guilt hanging over her so when she's wandering along the harbor and strays from the touristy wharf into the industrial harbor and spots A Citizen In Trouble she doesn't hesitate for a moment. She hops the chainlink fence at the other end of the alley that separates her from the stand-off and lands with an intentionally loud thud a couple yards behind the thugs. "Three on one? That's hardly sporting!" she informs them with her best superheroics voice.

The sudden appearance of the wanna-be superhero would distract anyone, and the thugs turned in confusion. Just for a second.

And that was the only second the girl needed, launching forward and swinging her bat with a resounding crack right into the midsection of Thug #1. Even a wibbly-wobbly cartoon woman could recognize the sound of ribs cracking as the baseball bat made sharp, solid contact.

The second thug turned, jamming his knife towards the girl's shoulder -- but it just sort of bent as it crashed into flesh, crumpling into uselessness.

"Ouch! Maybe it is!" Robin exclaims and whips her arm forward to lasso it around thug #3 and yank him backwards. Before he could do something equally stupid as his knife-wielding friend and earn himself a cracked rib or two as well. To some extent they had it coming, attacking somebody with a knife, but she's been taught that responding with equivalent force' depends more on the potential damage and less the attack itself. An important lesson to learn when one can walk off being crushed by a boulder. Hurt them back as much as they can hurt you, not as much as they try to.

Robin Stanton wrote:"Ouch! Maybe it is!" Robin exclaims and whips her arm forward to lasso it around thug #3 and yank him backwards. Before he could do something equally stupid as his knife-wielding friend and earn himself a cracked rib or two as well. To some extent they had it coming, attacking somebody with a knife, but she's been taught that responding with equivalent force' depends more on the potential damage and less the attack itself. An important lesson to learn when one can walk off being crushed by a boulder. Hurt them back as much as they can hurt you, not as much as they try to.

Thug three, not immediately expecting his opponent to have a lasso arm, attempted to grab Robin by the arm and throw her over his shoulder in an impressive judo-type move. That would work on people whose arms were solid and of a steady, unchanging length! So, you know, it had a great chance of working here.

The girl apparently did not have the same lesson on the usage of appropriate force as Robin had. She drove the butt of her bat into the gut of the second thug, buying an inch of space between the two of them, and then stepped forward and through the thug, passing straight through him like mist on the wind. And then she swung her bat again, hard, into the back of the thug's knee.

Robin lets the thug basically pull more of her arm around himself, then braces herself against the ground, grabs her noodle arm with her other one, leans forward and then reels her arm back to unspool it from the thug and send him spinning like a top. Or at least get a couple turns in to disorient him enough for Robin to land a clean punch to the chin.

Robin's fist connected with a solid, satisfying thunk, and the thug went to the ground in a heap.

"Obliged, lass," the girl said, resting herself on the bat and giving a kick to one of the groaning thugs on the ground.

"Well, thought you could use the assist but it looks like you had these guys handled pretty well, huh? What'd they do, try to mug the wrong person?" she chuckles. The wrong person who happened to be carrying a baseball bat. No, there was definitely something else going on here.

"What, mug little old me? Nah, these creeps have had it out for me and mine for a while now," the girl said, stepping over (and on top of) one of the thugs. "A damn right annoyance, they are."

"Oh, you from around here then? With the accent and all I kinda figured... But I guess these guys are gonna think twice about bothering you again. You roughed those two up pretty good."

"What, you one of those foreigners go-home types? Nah, lived here most of my life, with my pops an' all.

And there'll be more where these guys came from. Just thought they could get the jump on me this time. Weren't expecting you to...bounce over here. What, you some sort of wandering do-gooder?"

"Whoa hey, that's not what I meant at all! Just not a lot of Irish sounding folks around here, yeah?" Robin says, holding her hands up with her palms out.

"And yeah, I guess, kind of? Mostly just back-packing but I'm not gonna ignore three thugs coming down on somebody, you know? Just came all the way through France and, well, I thought either mugging or hate-crime." she says with a shrug. "And what do you mean this time? These guys been giving you trouble on the reg?"

"Yeah. They're a local business association," the girl said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "You know, trying to make sure everyone in the community is all friendly-like and working together."

"Ooh, I see." she says, then remembers where she is and she grins. "Wait! Does that mean they're for-reals Mafia?"

The girl groaned. "Don't tell me you're that kind of tourist. Danger-junkie? Listen, you wanna sleep with the fishes, I can dump you in a crate in the back."

"Nah. I got plenty of danger at home. Just never gotten to punch an actual Mafioso before is all." she waves her off. "I'm Robin, by the by. And getting stuffed in a crate sounds dreadfully boring. No offense."

"So what, these guys keep coming after you, hoping to catch you on a bad day?"

"Ryan," the girl (Ryan) replied. "C'mon, Robin, best be getting out of here before someone spots us," she said, leading the way out of the alley.

"Three-on-one can be a pretty bad day, if things go wrong. But they don't wanna kill me or anything; they just want to put the fear of God in me and pops, so there's not a lot they can really do unless they step things up."

"And you're not worried shrugging off a knife and cracking a couple ribs is gonna make 'em do just that?" Robin asks as she follows along. It's not like she has anywhere to be and she kind of feels bad for Ryan and her dad being shaken down by the mob. Ryan might have not sounded too thrilled when she'd called Robin a wandering do-gooder but that's exactly what she's doing, whether the tough girl with the baseball bat likes it or not. "Meatheads like that get real stupid when they get beaten up by a girl. But I guess you probably know that, huh?" she says, realizing that's probably a dumb thing to tell someone who obviously had an attitude and the chops to back it up.

"Yeah, I've never had to handle a fragile male ego before. You must be a guardian angel sent here to give me advice," Ryan deadpanned.

"Oh, I'm sure they'll send more guys. But unless they want to cross that line, what are they gonna do? Rough me up more? Try to break a leg? They're not gonna have much luck there. And we ain't givin in that easily. So I guess we're at a stalemate, y'know? At least I'll keep the doctors busy."

"Alright, alright, I get it." Robin chuckles. "So your dad's a mutant too then? If you're not worried about them coming after him?"

"Pops? Well, if he's a mutant, it's all in 'is 'ead, y'know? But, nah, he can take care of hisself. He's got Benelli, after all."

Ryan walked along, stretching her arms behind her head as the two of them walked away from the alley.

"Who's Benell--wait... that's a gun, isn't it?" Robin frowns as she scampers after Ryan to catch up and match her pace. "You sure that's not gonna escalate things?"

"Two barrels of compelling arguments. They're not gonna scare us out of our shop, no matter how much they want it. They're finding us a bit tougher to deal with than they hoped."

"Well, it's none of my business to tell you what to do buuut I find people like that tend to not take no for an answer very well, shotgun or not-gun." she says and has the audacity to give Ryan double finger-guns over that atrocious joke.

Ryan audibly groaned at that one. "You were sent by them, weren't you. This is some kind of new psychological warfare on top of everything else."

"You got me!" she says, holding her hands up for a moment. "Devious mental schemer, that's me. Pun-ishment for being a tough nut to crack. But I bet these go right through you." she grins.

"Oh, is that what we're doing now? You show me yours, I show you mine?" Ryan said, with a barking laugh. "You're what, some kind of India rubber lady? That's pretty cool. Didn't get a great look while I was beating heads in, but it seems like that'd be pretty useful."

"To not be compared to Reed Richards, be still my heart!" she laughs with her hand jokingly placed on her chest. "Though it's really more a side-effect of being a shapeshifter." she adds and reshapes herself into a vague approximation of Ryan, complete with exaggerated tough girl walk that sways from side to side a lot more than any reasonable person would.

That got Ryan to stutterstep. "Oy, really? You just, like, look at somethin' and copy it? Kinda, at least?" she asked, somewhat taken aback by her new doppleganger.

"People, things, stuff that I come up with in my noggin'. I can even shimmy my way into stuff and make it walk around." she says, quickly snapping back to her (current) normal brown-haired self. "My power is what many have described as 'some bullshit'." she laughs.

"What, like, you can possess people like a ghost or somethin'? Yer right, that's crazy. Bet it's crazy useful, too," Ryan said, trying to tamper down the level to which they were obviously impressed.

"Oh no no no, nothing that already has someone in it or is, you know, alive. I don't even know how that would work." she says as if possessing inanimate objects somehow makes more sense than puppeteering a human being. And as if to illustrate a point she hops onto the seat of a parked scooter but instead of landing on it just lets herself sink into all the porous spaces of the seat cushion and from there the rigid patterns of metal and chrome until she finds what she needs to flex to make the engine come to live without a key. The scooter hops a little and then putters alongside Ryan with a soft 'honk honk' of the horn.

Ryan's eyes went wide, and she bent over to examine the seat where Robin had vanished, as if expecting to see some sort of...residue or something.

"That is...that is rapid," she said. "And you're really in there, huh?"

The scooter stops, let's out another 'honk honk' and then Robin pops back out of the seat. Paying as close attention as she is, Ryan can probably see Robin's pink goo extruding from the surface like someone had wrung a sponge. And that rapidly growing pile of goo swiftly assembled into a humanoid shape before details emerge. "Ta-dah!" she says, striking a pose on the scooter's seat. "Had a lot of practice with this kinda stuff. The trick is to become the scooter." she says with a drawled out tone that mimics that of new-age hippie.

"Yeah, I don't think that's gonna work for me," Ryan said, hesitantly poking the scooter again even as Robin popped out, seeing if it was still working.

"So, like...how big of a thing can you take over, then? Does it have to be, like, you sized? That's certainly not a Reed Richards thing."

"You sure? Maybe you haven't tried hard enough?" Robin chuckles as she parks the scooter at the curb. It's owner might be a little confused as to how it wandered a couple yards down the road but oh well.

"I've gone pretty big but that's exhausting. Twice my size is pretty doable. Easier with more porous stuff. Wood, some concretes oddly enough, plastic feels funny but works real well."

"Huh. That....must come in handy," Ryan said, scratching her chin.

"You got a place to stay, or are you hosteling it?" Ryan asked, apparently changing subjects rapidly.

"Hostels, camping, just kinda winging it." she shrugs one shoulder with a grin.

"Eh, if you want, come back to the bar tonight. Pops makes a good cioppino, and you don't have to worry about a roof over your head for a few days. Least I can do for you saving my butt, right?" Ryan said, trying to keep it casual.

"I mean, I'm not gonna say no to that, yeah? Thanks!" she says, then realizes something. "Uh, where is your pops bar?" she chuckles, rubbing the back of her head.