stepford cuckoos

“I’ll head over to your place for some free candy though,” she added with a grin. And to pester them, of course. Especially the little purple haired kid they had hanging around. She was fun to bother.

“I hope that there’s no blackout or fish turning or time jumps or anything coming up.” She said with a sigh, exhausted by all that had happened. However, as is the Brotherhood way, she wouldn’t say no to a fight if FoF started something. “Although if there is I’ll know that there’ll be no trick or treating at your place.”

Anyone else might have to worry about surly teenagers seeking revenge after the fact, which was how so many of them probably got away with it. Telepaths had a few more options to work with. They could simply press the rabblerousers to forget that their house was there entirely. Not that Lorna was likely to break their windows.

“Assassins,” said Phoebe.

“Boots and everything were tailored to fit, with the understanding that this would be our only costume for a while. We were invited to a party last year and...well, you know how it is with old faces,” said Celeste.

“A pathological, entirely irrational desire to impress them with signs of status,” Phoebe supplied.

Hearing Sophie’s thoughts being shared, Cole was thinking on this wondering himself, but he soon shook his head, not out of disagreement but rather to keep himself from going off on a mental tangent. “It would be interesting to know how The Bugle determines what they’ll focus on and if they’ll try to present information from an unbiased lens or not. I know from a radio standpoint, our stations occasionally survey the listeners and try to cater to the feedback they get, but I don’t know who, if any of the television networks, or media outlets like The Bugle do the same.”

“We did take psychology, so that covered some statistics and bias in surveys,” Phoebe said thoughtfully. She tapped her mobile phone against her chin as she thought back. “First, the survey targets are already people consuming your media.”

“Like when television shows poll their listeners and get ridiculous approval margins for the host’s point of view?” Celeste suggested.

“If you’re offering a viewpoint, they’re there in the first place because of that,” Phoebe continued. “There’s also the matter that people who respond to surveys do so because they feel strongly about the issue. People who have no strong opinions on a topic are less likely to provide any response.”

“Were we meant to be confined to our house in perpetuity?” 

They had gone in force to the sort of meeting they didn’t inform SHIELD agents about, even ones that were typically more forthcoming with them. It wasn’t only because they had some longstanding issues with the organization and its reflection, but because it let Pietro avoid liability. He didn’t need to be responsible for what he didn’t know.

“But we take your point -”

“- let’s not summon amateur superheroes we’d need to shame -”

“- the coffeehouse might just try to ban the lot of us, for safety.”

“Not that we cause a great deal of property damage.”

“They are annoyingly resourceful,” he commented in regard to the mutant hate group, “So I get you wanting to be careful and cover your tracks with them. Honestly I’m not exactly sure how they get as much of the publicity that they get. The Bugle has mutants working at it, and no doubt, other media outlets do too. A little bias here couldn’t hurt them that badly.”

“Generating outrage sells,” Celeste said. Her expression was indifferent, tossing the thought out like a phone book: technically functional but likely discarded as soon as it landed.

“None of us took any journalism classes in college. Philosophy was a much easier way to get those general requirements out of the way,” Phoebe said thoughtfully.

“I’m good, though. I think I’ve finally settled back into normalcy—or well as normal as I was before the whole time mix up,” she reassured with a nod, trying to tell herself she had returned back to normal, but could there be and return back to the way things were after knowing what could be your potential future?

They vacillated sometimes between paranoia about causation and resentment of the happy lives they had glimpsed in that nightmare. Those lives might not have been as idyllic as they seemed, even to telepaths looking in. Who knew what skeletons might have been buried along the way in ten years. But wandering out of a gym storage room to a world they half-recognized had to be some bar of low achievement. Few of the others had quite so much to fear from the future as they did.

But fear wasn’t something they ever showed to the outside world. They hashed it out, let it run through their shared mind until a small anxiety became enough to topple everything, but they didn’t let it out into the light to be judged. They had to find some other way to cope while they decided what to do about all of this.

“We were going to hand out candy, since we have a proper house with a front door. But that will require that no one starts a rolling blackout in the city before Halloween, or turns us all into fish. The lack of thumbs would be unhelpful,” said Phoebe. “Maybe wear last year’s costume, it was a bit expensive. Far too complicated when you tried to extricate yourself at the end of the evening as well.”

“That’s so true. I do admire that about them.” Not only was she reminded of Alma but of her son Cole in the future. It had been a few days since she had thought of him and it still pulled at her heart strings when she did. 

Celeste shrugged, but offered no further comment on the subject. They hadn’t been invited to very many birthday parties, and whenever they were it was because parents had insisted upon inviting the entire class. Then their parents would insist that they attend and ‘socialize’. No one actually wanted them there, so everyone go to spend an afternoon being displeased about controlling adults.