Xaviers!

Shane was seated on the common room couch with his laptop computer, tooling around on the internet trying to find more information about the UKIP fundraiser. It felt more suspicious the more he thought of about it. But he needed something tangible to take to Kinney or Minamida. Unfortunately, he had no idea what he was doing and kept ending up with useless official press releases.

"Ugh! Do what I want you stupid piece of shite Google!" he half-shouted at the indifferent machine.

"You should be nice to it," Natalie says, fiddling with her backpack as she comes in from the Point. Charitably, she looks like hell, like someone who has been stuck in the office for days. "It's doing the best it can."

"Or is it holding back so we'll underestimate it?" he grumbled before looking to her. "Or I'm just that rubbish."

"I would have gone with 'shrubbish'," she says, looking at the air above his laptop. "Let me see what you're trying to do."

"If you think your brain can filter out political bullshite then knock yourself out."

"You're looking in the wrong places," she says, snagging his searches and analyzing them. "Like this..." She modifies his search terms, adding a few of her own that would take his searches to more speculative places on the internet.

"Not even going to ask why?" he asked curiously.

"UKIP is the spawn of the literal Devil in my opinion. You don't look like the type to be one of their supporters, so I figured you're looking for something more."

"First: My idiot father is a member. Second: During a visit to see if he was one of the politicians targetted by those aliens, he received an odd phone call about this fundraiser where Farage asked about the PM's suit size. That strikes me as rather odd. How about you?"

"Little weird," she acknowledged. "But suit sizes are hardly state secrets." Her mind continued to race through the search results and the information his computer got raced with her.

She mostly finds what you'd expect on this kind of topic on the internet. Horrible racism and general awfulness, especially directed towards humans. And then the party's official stance of trying to put a nice coat of paint over the horribleness. Which seems to be at least the immediately obvious reason as to why they tried to get the PM to make an appearance, trying to legitimize the whole thing in the eyes of the public. Digging deeper more articles pop up, Farage apparently having made bit of a hubbub about the whole thing in parliament and, in an odd showing of letting up on partisanship, pushed for the PM to meet with the heads of all of the other parties at their respective conventions, which seemed to be how he managed to get him to agree to the whole thing in the first place. And in an odd bit of timing, the next day UKIP moved the date of their convention a couple days up to be the first of the various parties to hold theirs

"Well, that's a weird series of coincidences," she mutters as she digs deeper into the convention date moving.

Shane watched with some fascination as information raced by on his laptop screen faster than he thought it was capable of. Faster than he could read much of it. But he saw enough to affirm his hunch that something was amiss.

"Coincidence my left foot."

There's very little information she can find on it, aside from people being generally upset about their plans being disrupted. It seems like the decision was unilaterally made by Nigel Farage without much consideration for anybody else.

Natalie slows down for a moment as she ponders and then she looks for changes to the guest list for the convention. "Something certainly smells fishy, but Farage is a complete self-important bastard, so that's still a plausible explanation for moving the convention."

"And buying the PM a new suit because he's such a nice guy? Color me a skeptic."

"It wouldn't be the first time someone gifted a suit as a bribe," Natalie says with a shrug, continuing to dig around.

"Think I'm reading too much into it because of the alien thing?"

"I'm not sure we can take anything for granted, but I haven't seen anything that couldn't be explained by plain old corruption or political grand-standing."

"Maybe I just want an excuse to punch Farage in his ugly face."

"A lot of people want an excuse to do that," Natalie comments, pulling up the relevant supporting evidence for that on his laptop as she works.

He leaned back and stroked his chin in thought. "Still... this feels... as the Yanks might say... hinky. Maybe if I could get some of us in there we can see what's what..."

"In where?"

"The fundraiser. I might be able to sell it as a mutually beneficial PR move."

She frowns, "You do realize what that would look like, right? You'd essentially be legitimizing the assholes. Bad enough the PM's doing it."

"That right there is why I hate politics. Simply being seen near people you don't like is seen as a betrayal of principles. Besides, if I'm right then we look like bloody heroes."

"I'd be of no use at the fundraiser. They might have some surveillance servers, but unless they're holding it at their headquarters, there's not going to be any deep dark secrets for me to dig into. And that's assuming that they don't already just air all their asshole laundry in the open."

"Yeah, they'd... probably freak out about you as much as a telepath anyway. I might not even have enough sway with the old man to get myself in."