Buying a car turned out not to be a complicated or drawn-out process, at least not the way Joon-Yi did it. The CIA driver dropped them off at the dealership, they went in and stopped at the counter where Joon-Yi said, "Hi. I'm interested in buying a sportscar. I plan to spend about three thousand dollars and I'm paying cash." Less than an hour later, most of which was spent on a test drive, she was signing the papers on a two-door strawberry red coupe. It was an illustrative lesson on the power of money.
"Do you mind if I ask how you got all that money?" Raven wondered as they drove off the lot. Although Charles was generous and always willing to buy her whatever she wanted or needed, she never had more than pocket money. It was hard not to be a little envious of Joon-Yi's independence.
"I took what I earned at the Hellfire Club and hit the casinos just before I left Vegas. I figured I wasn't coming back, so I left nothing behind. If I didn't bring it, I sold it or gave it away, right down to my goldfish." She glanced over at Raven. "Frankly, I took them for so much, it's a good thing I was leaving town."
"Wow—How did you do that-? Oh, your powers. Of course." Raven reasoned.
"Uh-huh. I think we should all go, as a group, and do Atlantic City some weekend. Now do you mind if I ask you a question?"
"Go ahead." Raven shrugged.
"Why blonde? Your shade of red wouldn't raise an eyebrow with the general population." Joon-Yi stopped for a traffic light.
"Um. Charles thinks this shade of blonde is pretty," Raven explained.
"Ohhhh," her friend exhaled.
"Yeah. I always thought that…someday, we'd get married, because after all, it was only us, alone together. All that would change would be which bed I slept in." Raven bit her lip.
"Ray,—I am sorry, but in my opinion, that wouldn't work out well for you unless you went out and saw the world for a while on your own. Get out of your comfort zone and spread your wings first! That'd give him a chance to grow up, which he really needs to do." Joon-Yi told her. "Was that Third Street or Thrush Street? Urghhh—this eye patch!"
"I think it was Third," Raven turned around to have another look. "Yeah, it was."
"Good. I'm looking for Thrush."
"Joon-Yi?" Raven started. "You know about the future, at least some of it. Do you know what happens to me? Because yesterday you said something about blowing up bridges and taking kids hostage…Is that what happens? And if it is, then why bother with singing lessons now?"
"Uh—Yes and no. Damn. I was hoping you missed that. It's complicated—The future as I know it is the way the future happened without my interference. I don't suppose you've ever heard about Chaos Theory, have you?" Joon-Yi asked.
"Actually, I have. Hank was explaining it to me last night when we went for a walk in the woods. He talked about how this Lorenz guy was using a computer to try and recreate weather patterns, but because his computer rounded off to just three points right of the decimal or something, it made everything come out differently."
"Ah. Those woods." Joon-Yi nodded, and flashed a grin at her.
"What, did you and Erik—? When did you have the chance?"
"The first night we came here. Anyway, I'm the points that got rounded off." Joon-Yi grimaced. "I hope I am, anyway. Maybe I've already messed up the outcome enough, I don't know. I wish my vision would reset so I'd know when to stop. But the really bad thing that happens to all mutants down the road is that the humans come up with a cure for mutantcy, once which takes away all powers permanently. Which would be okay if it was purely voluntary, but that's not what happens. They start using it on troublemakers and on children to make sure they don't grow up to be mutants. Once that starts—."
"If that's what happens, I think I'll be out there causing a lot of trouble," Raven concluded. "How long do we have until then?"
"Forty-four years."
"But that's plenty of time! Meanwhile, I guess I ought to think about a career. Oh—that was Thrush Street!" Raven pointed behind them.
"Damn it!" Joon-Yi wailed. "Where?"
There were three criteria Charles was using to pick the mutants they approached. First, they had to be of age. The youngest so far was Sean Cassidy, the oldest (by surmise) , the man who was holed up in the bar they currently approached. Second, they had to be residing in America at the moment, and by strong preference, American. (The CIA had stretched about as far as they were willing to stretch in that respect regarding Erik, the Israeli citizen, and Joon-Yi, undocumented and debatable.) Third, they had to be powerful enough to combat Sebastian Shaw and his people.
The third criterion was difficult to define, but Charles and Erik were trying.
"Hank's feet on their own are not a power," Erik argued. "I would call them a physically manifested trait with functional purpose. His intelligence, I'll grant you, is impressive, but not a uniquely mutant quality. I would put him in no more than the second ranking, along with Angel Salvatore. Raven, to my mind, ranks higher, having more traits. I'll place Armando Munoz on the same tier with her."
"I believe he prefers to be called 'Darwin'." Charles commented.
"Darwin, then. You, Joon-Yi, and myself rank higher still, along with Alex Summers. In terms of sheer destructive force, he may out-do us all, yet he lacks versatility. As he is, he may be as much of a danger to us as he is to our foes. More so, given our proximity."
"He's untrained." Xavier said. "We are all of us works in progress, Erik. You. Me. Alex, Joon-Yi, Raven, Hank—all of us. Life ought to be one long learning process."
He pushed the door to the bar open, and a foul cloud of odors billowed forth—cigar smoke, stale beer, bad whiskey, old grease, partly and fully metabolized beer and whiskey as well (traces of vomit and a hint of urine). In short, it stank.
As did the man they sought, hunched forward over the bar, a cigar in his mouth and a line of empty shot glasses in front of him. He was muscular in the way of a fighter, not a mere bodybuilder. The two friends divided to come up on either side of him.
"Excuse me, I'm Erik Lensherr," Erik introduced himself.
"Charles Xavier," Charles offered.
The man took the cigar out of his mouth long enough to say, "Go fuck yourself."
Charles immediately turned on his heel and left, having had enough of a glimpse into his mind.
Erik followed. "A pity," he said as they stepped back out into the fresh air. "He was the only one who actually looked as though he could fight."
Behind them, James Logan Howlett, better known later as Wolverine (who did not even know his own full name), looked after the two men, puzzled. Did he know them? Did they know him? His past was a whirlpool of darkness, his future, the same. The brief moment of curiosity passed; he finished his current round, and lifted a finger for the bartender to serve him another.
The sign painted on the window read The Dumont School of Piano, Dance, and Voice, but it was actually just another row home on a street of row homes. Bright pots of geraniums sat on the porch, making it cheerful and attractive. Joon-Yi parked on the street, turned to Raven and asked. "Ready?"
"No."
"It's okay. This isn't Juilliard. It's just a place where families send their daughters in the hope they'll pick up a few ladylike accomplishments. You can do it. And I'm here for either moral or immoral support, whichever one you need."
"I'm going to imitate again, I know I will." Raven put both hands on the dashboard and dug her fingernails in until they stopped turning blue.
"Well, everybody imitates their favorite or the most famous version of a song when they're amateurs, even without knowing it. If you sound exactly like Judy Garland, they'll just think you're a very good imitation. Nobody is going to judge you harshly. You think these folks make a living by ripping into students until they quit? They'll be very supportive, you'll see. And if you're going way off somehow, I'll fiddle with my pendant, so you'll know to pull back. Deep breaths now. Come on."
They got out of the car and made their way up the walk to the door, where a friendly-looking woman opened it. "Hello, are you my two o'clock? Come on in, I'm Irene Dumont." She was slim and pale, with a braid of brown hair down her back, her face freckled like a slice of toast with cinnamon sugar on it. "Which one of you is my victim?" she smiled.
"I—I guess that's me," Raven said. "Raven Xavier."
"And you're the one who made the booking, right? Jenny Song? I wasn't expecting—." she trailed off, awkwardly. She was obviously a very nice, even a kind woman who simply didn't know what to say when faced with someone who was handicapped and of another race.
"It's okay, neither was my mother," Joon-Yi said, smiling to let her know there was no offense. "I'm here because I'm the one who thinks Raven should do this."
"Well, step right this way." She led them past a room where an older woman, obviously her mother, played the piano while another instructor in leotards led a flock of little girls in fluffy tutus around the room, swooping like birds.
The studio was small, just a piano with its bench, a pair of chairs and a music stand. "Raven, I'm going to start you off with some scales to warm up, okay?" She touched the keys. "Like this: 'AaaaAAAAaaaah.' Beginning with middle C."
Raven obeyed, and the notes went up and down, then changed keys. She went up and down, then one higher and up and down again. And again. It didn't take much effort on her part, but the expression on Irene Dumont's face grew puzzled, and she paused in her piano playing. "You've trained before, right?"
"No. Never," she confessed. "I was—privately educated, and my guardian—I never studied music."
"Ah. Let's keep going." Raven complied, until the teacher abruptly held one note. "That note, that note you were just now singing, is F6. That is the highest note in the Queen's arias in Mozart's Magic Flute. Yes, it's possible for someone to hit that without training. But—not to hit that and sound like you sound—I would have said that God doesn't allow it. But—you're doing it. And—nobody trained to that point would gasp like they're running up stairs and heave while they're breathing, like you are. By the time you're trained that much, breathing correctly is second nature. You really haven't trained at all."
It was a statement, not a question. "No. I haven't. Um—would it be better if I sang a song? We worked on 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow' last night." she offered, a little desperate. Their 'work' had consisted of getting Raven not to sound exactly like the movie version, with the help of the borrowed tape recorder.
"Okay," Irene Dumont said, looking a little stunned. Obviously it was as familiar to her as to them, as she didn't even bother to look for sheet music.
Raven began. "Somewhere over the rainbow. Way up high-." It was such a familiar song that it wasn't just difficult not to imitate Judy Garland, it was difficult to attach any meaning to the well-worn words, made clichéd and campy with overuse, but…if you thought about them, about the longing for a place where everything was all right, where the world was someplace wonderful—that was something Raven knew very well indeed. She sang it as simply as she could, and kept the corner of her eye on Joon-Yi's pendant, watching for her to start fiddling as a signal.
When she was done, she saw that Irene Dumont was wiping her face. Joon-Yi was wiping her face. The entire class of little girls was there, crowded into the doorway, their instructor and Mrs. Dumont as well, and the adults were crying too. The little girls weren't crying, they were looking up with big wide eyes, and one of them asked, loudly, "Is that you, Dorothy?" Then one started clapping, and the rest followed.
"Okay, that's enough," Mrs. Dumont said after the claps died down. "We have our lesson to get back to, and this young lady has hers. Let's all say thank you to—."
"Miss Xavier." Irene Dumont filled in.
"—to Miss Xavier for her lovely singing."
"Thank you, Mizzavier." the class chorused, and shuffled out.
"Miss Xavier," Irene said, closing the door. "Yes, your friend is right, and you should do this. It would be a crime if you didn't. You have the greatest potential as a singer that I have ever heard, and I will be very glad to do my part in developing it. But you have to learn to walk before you can fly, and now I'm going to teach you how to breathe. Not from the chest as you've been doing, but from the diaphragm, here…"