Xaviers!

One day, there was no Christmas Tree in the middle of the lobby, an obvious blank spot in the decorative scheme of things.

The next day, there WAS an absolutely massive Christmas Tree, going up both stories and brushing the top of the roof. A massive find of a tree, an easy 20 feet tall, with even branches going all the way up, complete with spaces for proper ornament hanging. It did have some tinsel and white lights wrapped around it, but there was still plenty of room for people to add their own things -- a touch of rationalization, as it were.

Underneath the tree there was already a decent selection of presents, each carefully wrapped with a green bow, and handwritten labels indicating who they were for, but not who they were from.

((open))

Natalie is texting on her phone as she walks through the lobby. Her normal, meandering route nearly takes her into the tree because she's not paying attention to the change in the environment. She pulls herself up short though, thankfully without stepping onto or into anything. She scratches her head as she looks at the tree and then down at the presents.

The tree was probably bigger than any Natalie had seen indoors before, though if she had been to London or another large central place, she may have seen larger ones in the past. It wasn't...immediately clear how anyone got it inside.

There were packages on the floor addressed to plenty of the people inside the dorms -- to Tosh and Sam and Tereza, to Haley and Shari and Shane and on and on. In addition to the presents that didn't have "from" labels, it seemed other people had started leaving a few gifts beneath the tree in their own right.

There was a package for Natalie, as well, naturally.

Natalie tilts her head, looking at the package and stowing her phone as she squats down to pick it up. She lifts it carefully, contemplating the package. She starts toying with the taped edges of the paper, debating opening it right now.

The package was pretty heavy feeling, and roughly square -- or, more accurately, a couple squares taped together in a shape that almost, but not quite, resembled a tapered right trapezoid.

Natalie finds a seat and slid her fingers under the tape, popping it slowly and methodically. She unfolds the paper carefully, peeking at what's inside like everyone does with presents.

Natalie, being the cheater mccheaterson who cheats, popped open one end of the package, subtly. The first thing she could see was some yellowed plastic on the fatter end of the trapezoid, taking up most of the edge she had opened.

Having come this far, Natalie unwraps the rest of the present, obviously a little confused about what it could be.

It turns out part of the confusion was that it wasn't one thing -- it was two things! Two things awkwardly packaged together, which is why the package was such an odd shape! How tricksy and crafty.

A techy like Natalie would recognize the first one pretty quickly -- an old Apple II! It looked fairly complete, too, though maybe not exactly as it looked in old photos she had seen.

The second was a significantly smaller black box, very sleek in design, without any obvious ports or other access areas. The only hint as to what it was was an etched in logo on the front, which looked vaguely like the Stark Industries logo but with a more Japanese styling.

Natalie can't help but grin at the Apple II, but then she sees the black box and tilts her head in puzzlement. No ports, no obvious access. She reached out with her powers, checking the object as she turns it about in her hand.

She can feel the strange box booting up -- faster than most computers she's familiar with, at that -- as her powers interact with it. It runs through a recognizable boot-up check, and then she "hears" a strange message in her head.

Code: Select all

Syncing Denisov_001
Synching iPhone 8_4323-5325-12421
ERROR: Apple II_443AB5F not compatible

A small green dot briefly appeared in the lower corner of her vision, before blanking out. The tone of her connection to the device seemed to switch, too. When she connected to a device using her power, it was clearly her power doing most of the work. Here, it almost felt as it was how the device was designed to work; like it was connecting to her rather than the other way around.

For most people, that would be sort of amazing. For Natalie, that was...sort of superfluous!

Rather than sit here with an Apple II in her lap, Natalie drops the device into her bag and heads back towards the dorms. As she walks, her power continues prodding at the object, trying to find its purpose. Another part of her brain takes the mental image of the logo and sets a Google image search to work trying to find it.

The google image search comes back blank, essentially. There were some news stories about Stark Industries possibly looking for an outside partner, and some of the firms listed were Japanese, but that was about as close as it got. The logo was, apparently, unique.

As she walked, she'd occasionally get little...well, it wasn't quite vision; it wasn't like something was obstructing her viewpoint. It was more of a general sense of things: there was wi-fi over here. That newspaper cost two pounds. That book that guy was reading over there got a terrible review from the London Times. The dining hall's potatoes weren't good today. Little things like that, as the black box merrily hummed away.

Natalie could tell it wasn't working at full power -- it felt like it was looking to connect to something that wasn't there. Like quite a bit of it was dormant.

Natalie pauses, contemplating the review of the potatoes. The other stuff was strange, though within the realm of publicly available information. She started walking again as she tried to chase the source of the potato review, trying to find where whatever it was had pulled that information.

Meanwhile...

Tosh approached the tree, two presents under his arms. He placed them under the tree and surveyed the growing hoard of presents for anything intended for him.

"Huh... someone's certainly being generous. One of the rich kids maybe?" he thought aloud as he inspected the green bowed package with his name on it.

Toshiro Narumi wrote:Meanwhile...

Tosh approached the tree, two presents under his arms. He placed them under the tree and surveyed the growing hoard of presents for anything intended for him.

"Huh... someone's certainly being generous. One of the rich kids maybe?" he thought aloud as he inspected the green bowed package with his name on it.

Tosh's package was more or less rectangle shaped, and not quite as heavy as some of the others around the tree. Other than that, it looked vaguely present-shaped.

Natalie Denisov wrote:Natalie pauses, contemplating the review of the potatoes. The other stuff was strange, though within the realm of publicly available information. She started walking again as she tried to chase the source of the potato review, trying to find where whatever it was had pulled that information.

Natalie reached out with her powers, chasing down source after source, until she found an instagram post of a "Rose Dashwood" making a frowney face as she pointed down at her meal. Clearly taken in the last 45 minutes, clearly taken in the dining hall.

Code: Select all

OMG this is what passes for food here?  Can't we get a mutant with the power to grow decent vegetables #comediewithme #potatofamine #morelikesomesortofpaste

Narrator wrote:Tosh's package was more or less rectangle shaped, and not quite as heavy as some of the others around the tree. Other than that, it looked vaguely present-shaped.

Tosh performed an acoustic test to get data on the contents. (Saying he shook it and listened didn't sound very scientific.)

The things inside the packages went "clunk".

Didn't sound like a bunch of moving parts or anything breakable or anything like that.

Tosh contemplated what to do with that information.

Dude. Take a peek.

I can't. Someone probably put a lot of thought into this.

Nobody'll know Bro.

Yeah, but...

Nobody.

Sometimes you're a terrible influence.

He looked around the room before carefully peeking under the paper.

Tosh, being the sort of cheaty mccheaterson who cheats, carefully peeked under the edge of the wrapping paper.

He had opened the wrong end. All he could see here was the foreedge of three books, with the spines being on the other side.

While Tosh certainly enjoyed his nerd books, he didn't have the desire to spoil the entire surprise. He stuck the edge back down and put the present back. On his way out, he briefly wondered how exactly someone got the impressive tree inside.

Haley stared in wide-eyed wonder at the tree, a kid-in-the-candy-store grin spreading across her face as she surveyed the pile of presents and spied her name on one. "Fuck yes. This is way better than the tree I made out of string lights on the wall in my room," she murmured to herself as she bent over to look more closely at her own present.

Haley's box was a thin rectangle, fairly light but not, like, empty-light.

Haley picked up the box to inspect up close. "... Wonder who this is from... Or if anyone would care if I just open it right now...."

There was no outwardly obvious labels or anything defining who they were from.

The room was fairly empty for now, except for her and the strangely strange tree, which gave her strange strange sensations.

Haley eyed the tree suspiciously, but decided to just go for it and take a peek. She went to a secluded corner of the room and took a seat, focusing her will on the edges of the wrapping paper and carefully trying to separate the tape from the paper to non-destructively peek at the present within.

If Haley could control her telekenesis, she would be able to carefully unwrap the packaging to reveal a plain white clothes box, without mark or label of origin.

If Haley could not control her telekensis, she'd be able to WILDLY unwrap the packaging to reveal a plain white clothes box, without mark or label of origin.

Despite her excitement, the extensive practice this semester had paid off—the paper was almost completely unharmed by the peek.

A useless peek!

Haley tried another tactic after resealing the package carefully: she closed her eyes and reached out to see if there was any residual traces of psychic energy on the package to see who might have wrapped it.

The feeling WAS very familiar -- not entirely off from that weird green-haired guy she'd bumped into from time to time.

For that matter, the same feeling was coming from the general direction of the tree.

“What the...” she murmured, looking over at the tree and then closing her eyes once again to focus.

"Will...? are...you in that tree?" she asked mentally.

Technically speaking, no. the tree thought back at her.

“This is super sweet...should I wait to open it? I haven’t finished like any of my Christmas shopping yet.”

Haley looked at the tree cheerfully, ignorant that she probably looked a bit weird sitting alone in front of the tree, smiling happily at it.

"don't you get stiff standing up...well...like a tree?

"if you think I'm ever *good* you clearly don't know me especially well," she smirked.

"And I guess you're right...as...trippy as that is. You...you literally are a tree right now. I'm talking to a pine tree. With my brain."