Xaviers!

"Well, you can practice at either one of them, I suppose," Will laughed, tossing the music player to Shari. "Either way, you might find this helpful to borrow for a while."

"Are you trying to get me to babysit your mopey twin?" she asks with bit of a mischievous smirk.

"Look, sometimes things have benefits for both parties. Is that a crime?

Right, you're not from here. No, that's not a crime."

"Fine, but he's gonna be real cranky afterwards."

Will blinked for a second, and then cracked up laughing.

"You really think so? Honestly and truly?"

"I mean he's cranky now. He seems to always be."

"Oh?" Will said, grabbing the music player back from Shari and flicking through it. "I've been out of the loop--tell me about it."

"You mean you haven't noticed? He's kinda whiny and... I dunno, needy?"

"Have you tried giving him what he needs?" he asked, continuing to flip through. "Damn, the Wi-Fi is bad in here."

"I'm not really sure what that would be."

"Eh, you fall into the category of 'normal people', and he just wants to be useful. Probably hoping someone would need a vacuum cleaner or a mop when he stashed himself away in the janitor's closet, and of course no one obliged, because that would be fucking weird. Without my sense of...you know, self-confidence and purpose, he's probably just looking for someone to tell him what to do, when to do it, and then pat him on the head and tell him he's a good widdle boy. You know, a little bit of fuel to fight back the never-ending sense of worthlessness present in his weak-ass psyche.


Now, if you were Sam, it'd be slightly different. If Sam decided what she really needed was a new buttplug, this guy would be so far up her ass before you could say Jack Robinson. It's unhealthy, actually -- when Miriam split us, she left all the bits of me that were devoted to Sam behind -- which is a problem, as we're sort of married to the alternative universe Sam -- long story -- and worship her role as the Morrigan. Combine that worship and love, and take away all the self-respect that belongs to yours truly, and well, he'd love to be a fetish object in pretty much every sense of the term, rather than any sort of equal partnership. And since our Sam neither loves him nor wants followers, he's got no outlet for all that, so you get this whiny leftover."

"Mhmm. Mhmm." Shari says, tapping her lips, pretending to be smarter than she is.

"He's... devoted. With nobody to be devoted to. That stinks. I think I get that. My gods aren't what they used to be either."

"This sort of thing ever happen on Skrullania Prime? Some sort of non-humanizing...err...skullenizing psychosis? Going too deep into shifting?"

"What do you mean too deep? That's not really a thing, is it? I don't think anybody's tried to go that deep into being an object but that's cause how would you even do that without, like, memory imprints and stuff to do a proper ritual of infiltration."

"Oooh, right, you guys use shortcuts like that. Can't brainscan an MP3 player. Ah well. You guys have rituals for everything; thought you might have something for this. Eh, no big loss."

"It's not a... whatever. What do you mean 'for this'?"

"You know, him being lame and mopey and whiny, and wanting to be an inanimate object. Some kind of ritual to either...fix all of that, or mess with it or somethin."

"I don't think so... But we could try mixing in some happy stuff like, I dunno, cake frosting and sprinkles. You know, with that big Build-a-Will tub."

"...The what?" Will asked, raising an eyebrow.

"You don't know about this? Oh man, lemme show you. Come on, we'll swing by the art room and grab some glitter to mix in."

Will blinked, then shrugged, shoving Will into his pocket. "Alright, I'll trust the third-best shifter on campus. Lead on, MacDuff."

"Pff." Shari responds dismissively.

And so they make their way over to the dorms and the big sci-fi hot-tub bread-maker. "How have you not noticed this? Have you even been to your room?"

"How am I supposed to know what the hell this is? It looks weird and alien; I assumed it was yours!"

"Sure, cause everything you don't understand has gotta be weird and alien. Here, what you want are the mixing controls on that panel. Just gotta set them to maximum churn and toss in one lump of Will and sprinkle in whatever the hell you want."

"And he absorbs their properties, because he's got no core properties of his own. Brilliant. You make this? I'm really impressed," Will said, really impressed.

"Yep. Definitely. My people are very technologically advanced after all." Shari nods.

Will squatted over, examining the controls. "What have you done so far? How has it worked? How long does it last?" he asked, filled with questions.

Shari shrugs. "I made him real sassy with some jerky and ultra hyper with cupcakes and coffee."

"Oh good lord, put enough coffee in here and he'd be bouncing off the walls.

Just food items, huh? Playing right into his neuroses, so I bet they worked like gangbusters. Did they taste alright?"

"For human food, yeah. I think it works with other stuff too. Here, let's try this glitter and..." she fishes out her backpack from under the bed and rummages around in it for a while until she finds a worn yellow smilie pin. "This. That oughta make him less mopey, right?"

"Hrm. Could do, could do," Will mused. "It's certianly not a bad place to start.

Are we trying to just make him perky, or are we trying to ween him off SamAndCo? Or are we doing something else? Put enough anise in here, and the dog pound around here won't be able to let him go free," Will smirked, taking out the music player and shaking it around a bit.

"Hmm, not sure how you'd get rid of the SamCo brand additives. You can only really add stuff. Maybe if we add something that replaces it?"

"That's a fair point -- if we fuck it up too much, we might end up with something worse. Like, rather than pining for Sam, he might pine for, I don't know, a rock, or the color puce or the concept of harmony or something."

Will paused, and thought, looking down at the music player.

"Ah, fuck it. Let's just fuck around and see what happens; we can always clean it all out if it gets too messy, right? Can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs."

"Yuuuup! Let's see what happens. Toss him in." she says as she drops the smilie-face pin into the tub and then empties the entire container of glitter into it. Whatever self-cleaning mechanism Tosh built into it was probably going to be put to the test by that.

"Let's see what else we can find here to toss in to make him less of a sourpuss, yeah? The smiley-face pin is a good idea, though," Will mused, as he squeezed his hand around the music player.

It cracked at first, as Will's vice-like grip overcame the plastic shell. Then clay oozed out of his fingers as the music player reverted to Will's base form, and he tossed it in.

As soon as Will is in the tub Shari punches the 'Mix Thoroughly' button.

"Neither of us really has a lot of stuff..." she says, looking around the room. "You think just writing stuff down would work?" she adds, grabbing a piece of paper and writes down 'Morrigan, more like Bore-igan' and crumples it up so she can toss it into the tub.

"I mean, who knows? That's what testing is for..." Will said, looking around the room. "What goes with glitter...

...We could either raid the arts room and get some more arty supplies, or we could try to be a bit more thematic and go with other glam and glitzy things..."

"Oh, hang on, I got an idea." she says before running off.

After a couple minutes she returns with an used paint palette covered in various splotches of old, dried paint. "Here, this is all colorful and stuff." she says before chucking it into the tub.

"It's also used," Will pointed out, as he watched the grey clay swirl into a bright variety of colors. "But it'll probably be fine. Probably."

"Does that matter? I didn't check whose it was..."