Xaviers!

Cam was in the foyer of the manor proper -- the big, open room with multiple dramatic staircases. Good for photo ops, that room.

Cam was NOT, however, taking a photo. He was wearing a lab coat and, unusually for him, safety goggles. He had a clipboard, a stopwatch, a measuring tape and a large piece of chalk. And a small, black box.

It was with this large piece of chalk, as people stopped and stared, that he drew a large circle on the floor -- about ten feet wide, though he didn't seem to be precisely measuring it. Shooing a couple people back, he opened the box to reveal a small, multi-colored ball, maybe two inches in diameter. Dramatically, he held his hand out in front of him, the ball at arm's length...and he dropped it.

*THUNK* went the ball, as it hit the floor, and bounced back up again. Gravity took over, and *THUNK*. The process repeated several times. Cam looked down at his stop watch and started rapidly taking notes.

**Open**

Tosh led the way as he and Haley showed his cousin Shogo around. The surfer was looking around at the mansion with admiration.

"Dude. You live swaaank," Sho said.

"Yep. Well, except for the explosions," Tosh responded before noticing Cam. "Speaking of explosions..." he added.

He watched the ball for a moment. "Okay Cam. I give up... What are you researching now?"

"Uhh... bounceology?" Sho guessed.

"Gnnnn," Cam said, waving his hand in their general direction.

"Friction. Mankind's greatest enemy. Constantly sucking away our energy and turning it into useless, meaningless heat. The vampire of the universe, sucking away hard-earned energy and causing all systems to stop.

I will defeat it."

The bouncy ball kept on bouncing -- notably, headed back to Cam's head level on each bounce, rather than gradually coming to a stop like most bouncy balls.

"You've made a super bouncy ball? Fuck yes!" she grinned. "Can I play with it?"

"That should be slowing down... right?" Shogo asked.

"Yes Sho," Tosh answered as if talking to a child who wasn't paying attention.

"What about gravity?"

Tosh raised a brow at his cousin and looked at Cam. "That's... actually a good question."

"It is slowing down," Cam frowned. "Ever so slightly, but it's there. There's some inefficiencies in the energy transfer that shouldn't be there; it should be redirecting the energy efficiently back into the rebound.

Gravity isn't the issue; the ground provides an equal and opposite force on the ball, so if all forces were accounted for, it would have an equal push off the ground back into the sky. Gravity just would keep it from soaring off and hitting the roof. Gravity's meaningless; a mere trifle; an energy source to be used and manipulated. As it's dropping a few fractions of a millimeter each time, however, it's failing," Cam frowned.


He didn't seem to notice Haley looking-slash-reaching for the ball, as he tried to explain this to the vastly inferior scientific minds.

"That's because your influence on the basic laws of thermodynamics can't possibly be unlimited. The energy involved has to come from somewhere," Tosh said.

"Not if it's recycled! Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If we can eliminate all drains of energy, then each trip down into the ground should provide an equal and opposite bounce back up! Perpetual motion! Infinite energy! Flying cars! Self-cooking pancakes!"

"Forgetting for a moment that creating infinite energy would fundamentally alter if not break reality itself... it's... well... making a noise."

"It's...I mean, that is to say..." Cam started, raising a finger, and pausing.

"Well, shit."

Tosh secreted a request for a low-five from his cousin, who obliged with a smirk despite obviously not getting it.

"Well if anyone can make a bouncy ball not go thunk, it's you," he grinned.

"Yes, yes, yes, I'm incomprehensibly important," Cam said, turning away from the bouncing ball.

"Who's this?" he said, gesturing vaguely at Tosh's cousin.

Haley seized the science nerd argument to take the lack of response as an invitation to play with it. She tried to pull it into her outstretched palm with her TK and planned to then do exactly what every impulsive person confronted with a bouncy ball does--throw it hard into the ground to get it to bounce really high.

"Cam, meet my cousin Shogo. Sho, meet my roommate Cam," Tosh responded.

"Sup?" Sho asked just before the colossal THUNK.

"Oh, there's two of you? That's convenient, I suppose," Cam shrugged.

Haley was able to control the ball, briefly, into her hand, and then slammed it into the ground as hard as she could!

The ball bounced up, as one would expect. It was a big room, but it still flew up and up and hit...

...one of the rafters making up the arched roof. Unfortunatley for Haley, she was standing not quite directly underneath the rafter, so the ball hit it an odd angle. That meant, instead of bouncing straight back down, the ball shot off at an angle.

And that's when everything went topsy-turvy. The ball, not (naturally) slowing down, shot off the wall and careened in a wild direction, striking the center of an ancestral painting of John Braddock and leaving a small but noticable hole in the man's collar. From there, it continued it's careening down, striking the banister of the stairs and then the floor. From there, it hit the face of a student who was too slow to react, causing them to fall over and drop their books and papers, which flew everywhere. The ball continued flying, smashing into a suit of armor and knocking it over.

By this point, many of the people who had been watching Cam had scattered for cover as the ball continued it's rampage.

Haley's eyes widened as the chaos unfolded in front of her, and she covered her mouth in embarrassment.

"...oops."

"I've got it! I've got it!" Shogo proclaimed as he jumped to catch the ball. It brushed just past his fingers and hit a wall, rebounding into the back of the athlete's head as if in revenge. As he was in the middle of landing, this knocked him down.

"I don't got it."

Cam, meanwhile, had dove behind Tosh just as the ball went crazy, and was roughly trying to position the larger boy between him and the rapidly bouncing ball.

"WELL," Cam shouted over the noise of the ball smacking into things and the various concerned student onlookers beginning to scatter. "AT LEAST IT'S NOT PERFECTED YET, SO, IN THEORY, IT SHOULD STOP BOUNCING. EVENTUALLY.

PERHAPS WE SHOULD TAKE THIS OUTSIDE?"

"HOW FAR DO YOU HAVE TO GO FROM IT FOR YOUR POWERS TO STOP AFFECTING IT?" Tosh asked.

"It's really more of a time thing, more than a raw distance. There are many other variables that need to be taken into account as well!"

Tosh groaned. He quickly looked around and considered various options before pointing at a small couch in the corner. "Sho! Grab two of those decorative pillows!"

Sho dashed to the couch to do so. "...and?" he asked confusedly.

"Think umpire but with both hands!" Tosh called over.

"Oh!" Sho nodded as the plan clicked. He proceeded to try and catch the ball with the impact absorbing pillows.

The ball continued it's erratic path, creating havoc and smashing through things as it ricocheted around the room.

Finally, though, it's path came close enough that Sho could make an attempt for it. Assuming he wasn't a total klutz, he could probably manage to stop the ball before it did any more damage than it already had.

Unlike his shark-based caricature, Shogo Gunderson was quite capable of quick, precise movements. He caught the ball between the two pillows and whooped. "And he's got it, ladies and gentlemen! Victory goes to the Giants!" he said in a passable impression of a sports announcer.

Tosh breathed out with a chuckle. "You're such a dork," he smirked.

"Pot. Kettle," Sho countered.

"Well! Yes. Yes, that's all good then," Cam said, quickly taking some notes. "Yes, just what I thought would happen. Yes. Exactly."

"Whatever you say, dude," Sho smirked.

"Told you he was real," Tosh said.

"Remind me never to doubt you," Sho responded.

"There was a question as to my existence on this plane?" Cam said, raising an eyebrow.

Haley looked around the room, eyes wide--several students holding their heads and groaning, dents and holes in several walls and pieces of art.

"...holy shit."

The helmet of a decorative suit of armor fell to the floor with a clang, punctuating her statement as she cringed.

"The way Bro described you I thought he was pulling my leg," Sho explained.

After the clang that wasn't entirely Cam's fault, Tosh added, "Time-travel he believes, but m... highly eccentric reality-bending scientists is where he apparently draws the line." His exact description may have been "sociopathic Steve Urkel," but he didn't like Cam then.

"Hey, we do sometimes try to fool each other with tall tales for giggles," Sho said.

"Mermaid," Tosh smirked.

"That totally happened," Sho maintained.

"See, that's a good way to make sure no one ever believes you. I'm always serious."

"And why you're hard to like," Tosh added.

"Sounds boring and kinda sad to me," Sho frowned pityingly.

"Oh no, the selachimorph has trouble with honesty. I'll make sure to mark that down in my journal."

Tosh sighed, "It's just a game we play Cam. Not a behavioral pattern."

"For the record, we both kinda suck at it," Sho provided.

"The games people play are often the most illuminating behavioral patterns, I believe you'll find."

"I'm not a compulsive liar any more than you are for pretending you planned for your experiment to tear up the foyer," Tosh countered calmly. His temper was rising but he was instantly glad he restrained a worse retort about pretend scientists.

"It was an acceptable risk when starting the experiment. You can't break a few eggs without making an omelette."

"You won't say that after you're stuck working off the damages," he smirked.

"I'm sure the headmistress has scientific research in her budget."

"Yeah. I'd love to see that excuse fly. If it does, maybe I'll build a zero gravity machine in the dorms and see what happens."

Shit... he'll probably do that now.

"Are they always like this?" Sho asked Haley.

The question seemed to stir Haley from her shell-shocked stare at the destruction she'd apparently wrought, "them? Oh. Yeah. All the time. I zone out or start playing on my phone most of the time when they start throwing out words I barely understand.

"I'm afraid it's true. Your cousin is always trying to stand in the way of scientific progress."