1

"Look, I got a phone.", Todd announced.

Paige looked down at her ribbed shirt and tight jeans, then back up to the boy she was going on a date with. "um...that's...nice?"

X-23 and Rogue rushed to him. "Finally.", Rogue stated excitedly while starting to layer lipstick on. X-23 bounced from foot to foot. "Set it up, set it up."

"Okay. I am, yo.", Todd assured. He held it up and pointed its selfie camera at himself.

"You're going to have to time it exactly.", Rogue advised. "Three. Two. One." X-23 had already buried her nose into Todd's neck. Rogue pressed her lipstick with her lips on Todd's cheek fast enough for him to remain standing. "Still?", she asked. Todd shook his head to clear it but gave her a thumbs up and regarded her picture. "And what do you mean? You forgot?" Rogue stopped. "Did you forget?"

"Forget what?", Todd asked nervously.

"That Paige was going on this date with you with us.", Rogue reminded.

Todd looked to Paige. Then back to X-23 who nodded. Then to Rogue. "That's why she's dressed all nice?"

Paige's soon to be frown stopped sliding into frown territory.

"You didn't forget.", Rogue realized. "You didn't believe."

"Uh...", Toad slipped.

X-23 raised an eyebrow. "But we told you that a cute blonde wanted to date you."

"Yeah, but..."

"And that we three girls were going on a date with you today."

"Well, yeah. But..."

"So you didn't believe us?", X-23 put together. "You thought we were lying to you?"

Todd slumped. "No. Well. um. You see..."

Rogue sighed. "Three girls?"

Todd pointed at her while trying to bargain with X-23. "I mean 'come on'. Three? You and Rogue and a smokin' hot blonde? Sure, Tabitha because she thought it was funny or was messing with Kurt. But for real, yo?"

X-23 simply stared. She nodded slightly.

Rogue laid a gloved hand on his sleeved arm. "I get it, shug."

"I don't.", X-23 announced.

Paige was back to a slight smile. "It's just that Todd being attractive to three girls is a bit far fetched. So he couldn't really take it seriously."

"Why not?", X-23 asked softly. "I told you. Don't you trust me?"

Todd spun to X-23 as if to hug her but hesitated, holding his arms as if he was boxing her in. "Of course I trust you. You know how much."

X-23 stepped into the space his arms provided, but wrapped her arms around herself as if her leather jacket wasn't enough protection. "Did you want it back?"

"No. Definitely not.", Toad declared. "The only place I trust it is with you."

Paige shot Rogue a questioning look. Rogue shook her head and waved her hand to motion to dismiss the question until later.

"Then why won't you believe me when I tell you that there's another girl for your harem?", X-23 wanted to know. Rogue and Paige's breath caught in their throats for a moment but then they relinquished it to the truth in a collective shrug.

"The word 'harem', yo.", Todd replied quickly. "Really think about it. 'Toad has a harem.' Seems kind of surreal, right?"

"Todd doesn't have a harem yet.", Rogue interjected. She guided Paige next to him. "You need to woo this one well enough. Tell her she's pretty."

Paige blushed. "He already did." And not in that perfunctory start of the date way she did not add.

Rogue looked at her. "And give her something."

Paige touched her cheek that did not scar after X-23 slashed her in one of her gemstone forms. "He already did."

Rogue raised an eyebrow. "Are you going a-courtin' behind our backs, Mr. Tolensky?"

Todd backed away frightened, holding his hands out to ward danger away. "Yo! Where did that come from. I ain't done nothin'!"

X-23 asked from a completely different angle. "So you're just dating us three?"

Todd's hands turned pleading. "I guess? I mean yes?"

Jubilee's bubblegum burst a bubble behind him. "So you wouldn't mind four?"

"Ah!", Todd yelped and literally hopped over Rogue.

The Asian girl's gum dropped on the ground as she bent over laughing. "Don't worry, Toad. You still stink to me.", she assured as she walked off.

"Jubilee, you come back here and pick this nasty thing up off the ground right now!", Rogue called after her.

Todd's head turned back and forth on a swivel. Paige subtly sniffed cautiously and immediately became introspective. X-23 was reminded of what had become one of her favorite experiences and returned to Todd to breathe him in. "Isn't it great?", she asked Paige. Paige appeared mildly confused and looked to Todd who appeared somewhat apologetic. Paige looked to Rogue who was just waving a scolding finger at Jubilee's gum and Jubilee.

"Don't you children have an arcade to go to?", Mr. Lensherr reminded. The girls' "Yes, Mr. Lensherr." drowned out Todd's "Sure thing, Mags."

2

Paige kept folding the tickets to something manageable along with the other girls. She leaned in close to Toad and whispered, "Are you sure you weren't using your...you know?"

They had claimed a booth at the restaurant that made way more of its money selling alcohol to parents of overeager children than it did running arcade machines. X-23, Rogue, and then next to Todd Paige, tried to organize his haul of tickets while Toad held onto their menus.

"What could I have possibly used, yo?", Todd asked.

The girl was still puzzled. "I don't know...toad timing? The whole Guthrie clan would go to the county fair every year and took prize hog most of them. And all of us combined never got as many tickets as these."

"I'm kinda curious myself, shug.", Rogue added.

"I'll give you a hint. 'Shug' and 'yo'.", Todd offered.

The two girls shrugged while X-23 kept with the mindless labor of folding the ticket tape. "You're from a burrow of New York, New York. Yo? yo? yyo? No. 'yo' Brooklyn? What does that have to do with these ticket games?"

"I grew up down the street from Coney Island.", Todd explained. "Before I manifested, when ma passed out drunk I could comb the streets and be able to find a few coins. It was either get really good at turning coins into tickets for toys or go without. So I know it's no carnival for me to try to win you each a big doll in one shot, but sometimes slow and steady wins the race."

"Ten jackpots in a row and making them shut down the machine isn't slow.", Paige commented.

X-23 agreed. "You would have blown your cover if you were trying to blend in."

Todd shrugged. "I wasn't trying to blend in. Toad's trying to make a splash, yo."

"Groan, Mr. Tolensky. Groan.", Rogue complained.

Todd smiled back at Paige. "What did you mean by the 'Guthrie clan'? Are you and Sam some type of secret ninjas?"

Paige scoffed. "No, silly goose. Sam and I are the only ones that have manifested yet. Back on the farm is Joshua, Melody, Jay, Joelle, Elizabeth, and the twins Lewis and Cissie. So far. Now that we're at the mansion, lord knows there's room for more and no lack of chores."

"Are all of them/"

She shrugged. "Who's to say. We're the oldest so we would come first, I suppose. But it's not like our parents are Mr. Lensherr or Mys...Dr. Darkholme. So who's to say whatever did us stuck around to do them?"

X-23 stacked the tickets in a neat block on the table. She looked past the seating area of the restaurant, past the lit up arcade machines through the crowd playing them, into the little store built against the wall and noticed something. "Huh. You beat the record."

A man with two toddlers that looked well practiced at temper tantrums and a woman that looked like the other half of those toddlers slammed his hands on his table. "I knew you muties were cheating."

Todd's yellow eyes clenched shut in resigned lamentation. Rogue pulled the sunglasses hanging from her shirt and slipped them over Todd's face with one hand and held a hand over her white streak with the other. "What mutants, sir?" X-23 looked confused. "You said we passed."

"You tell them, dear.", the woman said. "I'll get the manager."

Todd nearly broke the glasses as he thunked his head against the table. He looked up at the man. "How could I have possibly cheated this time? They're the same machines with the same button presses you can do."

"Well I got a little cheat of my own.", the man said. Then he drew out his licensed concealed firearm.

Todd cursed and grabbed Rogue and leapt over their booth to the cover behind it all at the same time.

The startled man pulled the trigger as the table of the booth came toward him. The bullet tore a hole in the skin of X-23's face and bounced off the adimantium underneath, tore a hole in the skin of the now titanium girl sitting across from her, and tore a hole in the man's toddler who was too young to have manifested anything that would have let him pass at such a young age.

X-23 slid out of her seat and stabbed a single snikted claw right down the gun's barrel. The titanium being Paige's tearing skin was revealing herself to be marched through the table, splintering it around her, and grabbed him by the belt buckle and lifted him into the air.

Todd's head popped up. "He still shoo/ Aw fuck, the kid yo!" Todd hopped over the booth, the table, and X-23 to the children. "Let me look at that."

"Don't touch my brother, mutie!", the other toddler spat.

"I'm not a mutant.", Todd said from his abnormal crouch while trying to sell it with his too large yellow eyes. "I was bitten by a radioactive frog and it gave me superpowers."

"Cool.", the bleeding child murmured.

Todd had to stick his footing in place to rotate around the child without moving him. The child had a hole in his shoulder where his clavicle had was broken and sticking out as well as a thin cut along his ear where the ricochet must have traveled. Todd followed the path and found the hole in the cushion of the booth the child was sprawled out in.

He looked to Rogue. She was busy on his phone. "Yes, officer. That is the arcade where the racist shot a little boy. Hold on. Now he's screaming about how he already shot two little girls. He's still got the gun and he's yelling a lot of racial slurs. Please send ambulances! Right away. Hurry."

He looked to the other two girls. The titanium girl was pulling more and more skin out from under her shirt. X-23 was scanning the crowd for the woman. "X-23, go ask the kitchen for some towels and a hot mixing bowl of water. Something sanitary."

X-23 turned to metal being. "You attended Dr. McCoy's first aid class. Can you help Todd?"

A tinny voice rang out. "Can you keep him here so he doesn't hurt anyone else?" X-23 looked at a Todd in emotional distress and a bleeding toddler. She turned back and all her claws popped, along with a growl a girl her size shouldn't be capable of. The man went from flailing to collapsed in on himself. The metal girl set the man on the floor. "Be back soon."

"I'm so sorry kid.", Todd told the toddler. He then placed his hands on the child arm and neck as if he was trying to cling to a glass wall and pulled. The bone lined up as the child went from shock to bawling. Todd spit with accuracy and a white ooze slid into place on the bone and hardened as if blood was its quickener. He looked for a large vein or artery that was a major source of bleeding and did not find any, so he tried blowing a mist of coagulant over the general wound area. "I don't want to try a patch job on the skin in case the hospital has something better." Paige handed Todd a towel and placed the steaming water next to him. The boy nodded and pressed one towel over the shoulder wound. He dipped another towel in the water and started chasing away blood spatter.

"Thanks for saving my brother, Toad.", the other toddler said.

Todd turned his attention to the child. "Not 'Super Frog', not 'Frog Man'...straight to good ole 'Toad'." He shook his head wistfully.

"Down on the ground, mutie!", Todd heard from behind him.

The boy nodded. "Keep pressure on this towel for him, okay?", he asked while raising his hands to the top of his head.

3

Magneto stared down the same cop from the mall incident. "Yes, it turns out the arcade was paranoid of cheating so they have the place laced with cameras. Yes, they show no signs of cheating. Yes, they've gone over the machines and none seem to be tampered with. Yes, no one made a move on the man who started shooting until after he pulled out a gun and started shooting. Yes, the paramedic said that if the child had thrashed around without the bone being set he could have torn an artery and bled out, so the muti...mutANT's first aid probably saved the child's life."

"So?", Magneto prompted. He turned bodily to Todd squatting on the curb with three girls gathered around him.

The cop narrowed his eyes and sighed. "So, I'm forced to let him go. Again." The cop turned to the teens. "You try to stay out of trouble, young man. Try it. You might like it."

Todd clenched his eyes tight in an effort to head off a most epic eye roll. "Yes, officer."

Magneto leaned in on the cop. The cop slid back an inch, maybe not because he chose to move his feet but because of the metal shanks in his shoes and his ankle strapped back up piece and his belt buckle and his service fire arm and his mace can and his additional ammunition and his baton and his taser and the snaps on his shirt and his badge all pushed him back an inch in the wake of Magneto's lean. "And has your department afforded another Sentinel weapon?"

The cop continued to glare. "No."

"Mm.", Magneto agreed.

Todd looked up to see the man getting into the same ambulance as the child who was wounded from his violence. "Hey!", he yelled as he got up.

Then he noticed that he couldn't charge forward like he had intended. It was nearly as if the metal holes for his shoe laces were somehow bolted into three dimensional space, not letting even his legs move at all. "And what did you intend to do, Toad? Ask the government's police officer about the injustice you're continuing to witness? Or perhaps approach the violent racist being favored by the government's policeman and change his mind to treat the group he hates so much he injured his child with more tolerance in the future...with something like harsh rhetoric because you certainly don't intend violence? Maybe it was to ask the paramedic for medical aid for the girls who were shot by that man because the government's police man made certain to keep medical attention away from them?"

Todd's lips tightened.

"Hey, I'm just serving the community/"

Magneto turned on the cop. "You are a servant of a government that uses the threat of a monopoly of violence to collect the wages of its ruled populace in the form of taxes in order to protect a status quo that places a single certain group in control of the others of society by enforcing its told rules disproportionately on its non-white, non-economically privileged, non-heteronormative, non-Christian, non-conventionally attractive, more evolved citizens."

"You want to throw in non-female, Mr. Woke?", the cop challenged.

"Considering that the United States prison population has males imprisoned at a ratio of fifteen to one, why would I state something so ignorant? It's not your officiated subservience enforcing that portion of the kyriarchy no matter what statistics lend themselves to the suspect of the emergent culture. After all, I've been told that part of the path to a future of peaceful coexistence is an educated perspective.", Magneto informed.

"Tell me that I'm wrong."