Xaviers!

"Well, I'm sure that if you tried to teach me a Skrull thing, you'd go to Baby's First Snorblax or whatever!" Will laughed.

"Nooo." Shari says in a resigned voice. "You're so good at shifting it's unfair. Also there's no such thing as a Snorblax. You start out with Quarbles and Baru-barus."

"Again, I don't speak Skrulli," Will said, giving her third name for the Skrull language in as many utterances. "So, you've got that one up on me. As well as your whole...shifting philosophy thingy."

"They're just names, ya dingus. And the language is called Skrullos anyway. You know, like the planet."

"Maybe that's why you guys lack a sense of creativity," Will teased back. "One planet, one language, same name."

"I think that's more the other way around/" she chuckles. "No creativity, that's why we named things that way. What, you're telling me this planet isn't called 'Humanos 3'?"

"You'd be surprised what simply having a word for things can do to help you think about it. If the rest of your people had your flexibility in mind, and not just body, we'd all be speaking Skrullabic by now."

"Okay now you're just doing it on purpose. But you are right, you guys outclevered them. Who builds a time-rewinder out of temporal shielding? Or how? Cause I watched it happen and I still couldn't tell."

"...Who did build a time-rewinder out of temporal shielding?" Will asked, scratching her chin. "I can't quite remember..."

"Cam, the crazy blonde kid. Haven't seen him around in a while."

Will scrunched up her face. "Cam? Was that one of the new kids, transferred in midyear or something? I don't remember him."

"I... don't think so. Are you sure your head's working alright? Didn't leave too much thinking meat in the mirror?"

Will smiled and shrugged. "It's a big campus. I can't meet everybody."

She paused. "I probably could meet everyone now, with multiple copies, but I think that might be more offputting than anything else."

"Yeah, how weird. Getting to know people." Shari chuckles.

"Well, imagine it. You're new here, you walk in, and you meet a guy with green hair who shakes your hand and welcomes you to school. Great!

And then you look around, and you see the same thing happening, five, ten, fifty, a hundred times all around you. Gonna get some real Stepford vibes there."

"Okay maybe don't meet everyone new all at once."

Will tapped her nose in agreement.

"Well, we're still getting people used to this. Some mutations are weirder than others and all that," she shrugged.

Shari nods. "Humans might be weird and creative but they sure like hating on each other about exactly that."

"Yeeeah," Will sighed. "You can see why part of me wants no part of that."

"Is that part of being human? The creativity and the friction? Are they linked?"

Will thought about it for a minute.

"That might be a bit of an...oversimplification? But it's not wrong?

I mean, being creative is a pretty fundamental part of being human; we've got ancient cave paintings and whatnot that backs that up. And the more you express yourself, the more you risk outing yourself as different, and being different is the key driving force for friction so...yeah, you're not wrong there. And a lot of great art comes from people suffering from that friction; from groups who are oppressed or looked down on, expressing those frustrations and whatnot through music and writing and art."

She paused for a moment, pieces clicking together in her head. Uh, figuratively, not literally.

"Aha! Yes! That's the kind of stuff I always wanted to learn about from new planets and races. So art is like a... struggle for being yourself and setting yourself apart!" she deduces.

"That's one purpose, yeah!" Will said, nodding eagerly. "A way to express things you have trouble expressing in other ways."

"I'm not sure what I was trying to express with this. If anything." she says, looking at her piece with her hands on her hips.

"Well, you were just kinda getting used to the paint and the brushes, right? Gotta know the stuff you're working with before you can really use it.

Or maybe painting's not for you," Will shrugged. "Or you need to try painting something that actually exists; some sort of model. People paint landscapes and bowls of fruit and stuff like that all the time."

"To express their love for fruits and bowls. of course." she nods like the excellent student she is. "Okay, what else we got? I should try all the art before deciding if I like any of it more than the rest. Where's the saxophones of art?" she looks around the room trying to discern what other mediums there might be. "Can a chair be art? Can 'sitting on a chair' be art? Is asking a lot of questions about art art!?"

"Well, I suppose saxophones are the saxophones of art. Music is art! It's a performing art, like dance and theater, but it's art notwithstanding. Even playing just one note over and over again is art; check out Big Jay McNeely for some examples of great squealing saxophone battles; that should be right up your alley.


But, man, if you're just talking about visual arts, you could go your entire life and not get at everything. Painting, in all different sorts of mediums and styles. Drawing. The plastic arts -- sculpting, ceramics, working with glass and steel and anything you can mold into something else. Uh, shit, uh, there's architecture and photography and all sorts of things. Then there's writing, books, novels, short stories, plays, poems...

Really, anything can be art, as long as there's intent behind it. Could a chair be art? Sure -- you can shape some chairs all sorts of crazy ways, and that's above and beyond just the craftsmanship that goes into making a fine chair. Could sitting on a chair be art? Well, I guess it could be some sort of performance art, though you'd have to come up with some kind of intent; why you're sitting on a chair and why people are looking at it. I once went to a museum and saw that someone had bought just, like, an ordinary wine rack and stuck it on display. It was art, they said, because they had chosen it and put it in a place where you go look at art.

...I'm fairly sure he was full of shit, but then, not everyone is supposed to understand everything, I suppose. I usually check out the sculptures more when I'm in that sort of place, and let the weird conceptual art take care of itself. That's definitely into the 'asking a lot of questions about art art', but I think if you're doing that, you're either a beginner trying to understand things, or have gone off the deep end past expertise and into the pondering of one's own navel department.



...I have thoughts on art," Will admitted, after her mini-monologue.

"I hadn't noticed. Okay so it's self-expression but through the medium of changing things. Paint gets smeared around, you shape one thing into another thing. That makes sense! And you shape words or soundwaves and by making people observe something you change a quantum state! That's hard to get across though. Unless you put a measuring tool there but then you can't observe the initial change and it just keeps changing unless that is the art! Ooh, I see. Very tricky. I think that winerack guy was on to something!"

"I think the focus on 'changing things' is our shifter brains at work, but you're on to something. Generally, at least; I'm not sure about this whole 'quantum state' thing," Will chuckled.

"To me, the point of art is to create or show something that's never existed before. A painting of a fruit bowl might be technically great, but if it's just a true-to-life painting, it's not saying something. It's gotta do something above and beyond what you'd get from just looking at a thing. It's to make people feel feelings and think thoughts and experience experiences they wouldn't have had otherwise."

"Oh! Hmm... Like giving a non-shifter a glimpse into what being another person or thing is like!"

Will got a little awkward at that statement.

"S-something like that could work, yeah," she said, attempting to regain a little composure. "Seeing things from a different point of view."

"That's what Skrulls do! Well... what we should be doing, only the other way around!"

"It sounds like you're beginning to understand this stuff," Will nodded.

"At least the general idea. I still don't really get how to translate that into..." she gesticulates at the room at large. "What about you? Are you an Art when you shift?"

"Just when I'm shifting? No, I wouldn't say so," Will said, shaking her head. "There's not really intent there. Most of the time when I, uh, 'art', it's through music or acting. When I'm shifting, it's usually for some sort of more practical purpose, for varying definitions of practical."

"But it could be, yeah?"

"I mean, yeah, I suppose it'd be some combination of performance art and...sculpture, I guess? Fleshcraft? No, that sounds dirty."

"Shapecraft!"

"An unexplored medium, to say the least."

"Hmm. That doesn't really solve my problem of how to make new things, but maybe I just need to mess around some. Do you need to make yourself all mushy or are you always?" she asks, giving Will a testing poke in the stomach.