The dupe grinned and cast a ‘thumbs up’ gesture at her. He turned back at the Prime, raking a hand through his damp hair. “Okay. This is okay. Maybe we’re in business,” he relented hopefully. All they’d verified was that she mimic sounds, but maybe she could be taught the voices they needed to create new recordings of.
Jamie Prime hacked into his sleeve again, irritably waving at the dupe to go ahead and take over. The dupe scrambled over himself to check the blinds, unlock a cabinet, and pull out a manilla file, spreading its contents over the kitchenette table. “I mean, we can’t do anything about any of this if-- until-- Val comes through.”
He got out a calculator and notepad, and resumed an apparently uncompleted job decoding the files. It was right properly noir, perhaps, the Prime thought. Though Valerie Cooper was certainly no femme fatale.
The files held lists of every blackbird the ominously named “Project X” had purchased and where they had been shipped to. Blackbirds had never been subject to the same sets of rules the mainstream birds had. Mutants, mutates, word was sometimes even aliens found themselves sold in the black auctions. And sometimes the black auctions specialized in some real WMD bullshit.
“Project X”, Val had confidentially intimated to him, was spawned of a particularly anti-mutant faction in the government. Not all superhumans were birds, and there were people out there that justifiably worried the higher ups.
The spontaneous manifestation of mutant abilities accounted for far too many blackbirds on the market, and while the emergence of a slave system had done wonders to the crime rate, mutants were a threat to stability. Nobody wanted their child to be a bomb waiting to go off. And too many mutants were too dangerous to be sold in normal blackbird auctions.
The dupe gestured over at the parrot’s cage with his pen. “Should we name her?”
requested ficlet: Jamie Madrox a la the “My Drunk Kitchen” Youtube series
Pumpkins rolled all over the table. Jamie Prime didn’t even bat an eye as one fell off the edge and cracked against the floor with a THUMP. “Where did you get pumpkins? It’s the middle of March.” He tapped a pumpkin with the bottom of his beer bottle as if to verify it was, indeed, a gen-u-ine pumpkin and not an illusionary pumpkin or some other pumpkin-like object.
“What does this even have to do with St. Patrick’s Day?“ the other, seated dupe slurred, inspecting a small, misshapen and possibly un-pumpkin pumpkin scientifically by putting it two inches from his eye. “Terry is the most Irish thing I know. We should have brought her.”
“She doesn’t want to spend the day with you,” the pumpkin enthusiast Jamie informed the others, sitting down. He slammed another six pack of beer on the table in front of him with a cacophony of clinking and the thumps of more pumpkins rolling off the edge. “I also brought art supplies– like paint– because face it, we’re too smashed to decorate pumpkins with knives.”
Jamie Prime nodded his head slowly; that seemed reasonable. Drunk, lonely decorating pumpkins for St. Patrick’s Day seemed totally reasonable so long as no sharp objects were involved. He dragged one of the pumpkins over and gazed deeply into its speckled, white-orange rind. “These are ugly-ass pumpkins.” Slowly, he reached for a paintbrush.
The dupe next to him snatched the paints. “I’m going to make team portrait pumpkins.” The other Jamies opened their mouths in unison to comment, but the dupe continued without missing a beat. “And then I’m going to cook and eat them.”
The Prime had to think about that for several seconds, staring at the bug spots in the ceiling light fixture, then pursed his lips and shrugged. “I’m not sure what the message is behind that. But okay.” He got up, staggering once as the amount of alcohol he’d consumed hit him, and poured tap water into an empty beer bottle to wet the paintbrush.
The duplicates dug into the craft supplies, dumping out popsicle sticks, glue, glitter, pom poms, acrylics, clay, googly eyes, stickers, and in other words everything nobody should have drunk, ever.
Jamie returned and gave each other Jamie a beer bottle of water, then divvied up the paints and brushes. He eyed the set up critically, hands on hips. “One of us is going to drink paint-water sooner or later.”
“Nice. First one to do that has to eat glitter,” one of the dupes said, grinning and shaking hands with the dupe opposite in an intricate and utterly stupid ‘secret handshake’ that ended with both chugging beer from each other’s bottles with arms locked. At least these two seemed alright with being bros. Dupes usually fought.
“No. Nobody’s eating glitter. That’s dangerous.”
“No it isn’t. It’s child-safe. It only makes your poop sparkly.”
“It’s metal bits.”
“You googled it once.”
“I’m not shitting sparkles. If either of you eat glitter I’m never reabsorbing you.”
Both dupes grabbed for the glitter at once and Jamie had to separate them, confiscate the bottle, and dump the entire thing out in the sink. “That’s a huge waste of glitter,” one of the dupes observed calmly, settling down and using white paint to even out the color of his pumpkin. “Now it will be everywhere.”
The other dupe was hard at work trying to violently shove a popsicle stick through a cracked gourd he’d rescued from the floor. “That’d better not represent anyone on this team,” the Prime warned, finally seating himself and plucking up a pack of markers. He decided that before doing anything, he really needed to have an orange pumpkin, and he started scribbling it accordingly.
The dupe had to think for a while. “Quicksilver?” He looked at the mutilated pumpkin, then squirted glue all over the top of it and went to the sink to roll it in silvery glitter. He brought back a terrifying mess.
Armed with a white pumpkin, the original pumpkin enthusiast began painting wobbly green circles, furtively peeking up at the Prime every so often, as if he was being sneaky about who he was modelling his artwork after.
For a minute all was quiet, then all three decided they needed to open a new bottle of beer at once. One of the dupes started giggle snorting. “Time! Everyone show off your pumpkin!” He tossed his cracked, blue, and glitter-infested pumpkin in the center of the table. Its googly eyes rattled. “Mine’s Pietro Maximoff.”
The other dupe pouted at being stopped in the middle of his creation, but he showed off the white and green creature he made. “I was making another one of us.” He turned the sloppily painted face back towards him. “My hand slipped but I think it works.”
Jamie Prime couldn’t decide if he’d been making Rahne or Terry, but his pumpkin was a scribbled mess that definitely looked like it was intended to have red hair. The dupes agreed unanimously that it was Terry, then the first one gathered up the gourd abominations. “I’m going to make pumpkin pie now.”
The dupe had already lined up the pumpkins on the counter and picked out a large kitchen knife. “We can just drink enough beer so we can’t tell how they taste. I think they should be pie.” He slammed the knife down on the counter, intending to slay his Quicksilver pumpkin first, but the pumpkin shot across the room. “Speedy jerk. Hold this still for me.” He pushed the Madrox pumpkin front and center.
The other dupe looked immediately alarmed. “This is why I said no knives,” he whined, wringing his hands. “Just cook them whole. We can crack them open afterwards.”
That seemed reasonable, so within a couple minutes all three pumpkins were balanced on the gas stovetop burners with blue flames underneath them.
They watched this set up for all of thirty seconds (and in their defense, possibly a few longer) before one of the dupes sighed longsufferingly. "I'm not watching these for an hour."
The kitchen door blew open and all the Jamies froze and for a few long moments they all stared at Rictor and Rictor stared back. The Mexican mutant blinked and slowly surveyed the damage, then back at the trio.
“Are any of you the Prime?”
“Nope,” the Prime said. Good cover story.
Rictor shook his head and backed out of the kitchen. Seconds later the cell phone the Prime left on the table started vibrating, and one of the dupes hurriedly chunked it into the refrigerator and slammed the door shut on that.
“Better get pie supplies,” the other dupe suggested, returning to order of business and started collecting flour and various spices. The other two Jamies anxiously decided to help, supposing in some odd line of thought that the faster they could get this done the less trouble they’ll be in later. Unfinished projects are just messes.
The first dupe squinted and tried to remember how to make the desert. He started ticking measurements off on his fingers as the others scrambled to find spoons and bowls. “We need to get two cups of pumpkin out of these pumpkins. That’s kind of a lot of pumpkin disemboweling.” He looked doubtfully at the small, decorative gourds slowly burning paint.
“Um. We can squish up some carrots,” the other dupe offered. “It’d probably be healthy.”
The Prime considered that thoughtfully, then opened another bottle of beer and took a swig. “No, we tried that in ‘85.”
“Don’t date yourself.”
The Jamies all looked at each other. “God forbid,” they said suddenly in unison.
The bag of sugar that was perched precariously on the edge of counter slipped over suddenly and exploded across the floor. Nobody moved.
Bold all that apply to you and your blog. Italics if you’re on the fence about something. Either reblog or repost. Feel free to add anything I may have missed in the appropriate category, or recategorize something that is in the wrong place!
My blog is _______
Open to all
Semi-selective
Selective
Highly selective
Exclusive
Only going to RP with mutuals
Indie
Affiliated with a group
Spoiler free
Spoilers tagged
I will RP with ______
Any fandom
Most fandoms
Only fandoms I know
Only people in my fandom
OCs
OCs with no fandom ties
OCs who are related to/know my character in their backstory
Only one version of any particular character
People who have the same muse as me
People who do not have a rules page
Multimuse blogs
Only people in my RP group
Indie RPers
When RPing, I like to use _______
Paragraphs
Shorter forms of text
*Action*
Icons
Gifs
Gif icons
Formatted text
Whatever my partner is using
My own style regardless of my partner’s reply
I will ship with _______
No one
Anyone
Chemistry
Select ships
OCs
Others of my own muse
Crossovers with characters from different fandoms
Only one version of a particular character
A plotted ship
My blog may contain ______ in it’s content
Fluff
Angst
Gore
Violence
Smut
Blood
Torture
Shipping
Death
Dark humor
Cheating
Assault
I will follow ______ back
Everyone
Only some people
Only people in my fandom
Every RP blog
Only people I actively wish to RP with
People who do not post a lot of OOC
People whose posts I am comfortable with on my dashboard
To RP with me, you should _______
Follow back
Answer an open
Message me OOC
Message me IC
Make a starter
Answer my starter
Send in a meme
Other:
I practice reblog karma with memes
I expect reblog karma with memes
I expect my rules/about to be read
I always read the rules/about before following
If you follow me, I would like needles tagged
I expect all smut to be beneath a readmore (or tagged)
I am a multiverse blog
I am multi-muse
I do not wish for my OOC posts to be reblogged
I do not wish for my threads to be reblogged by those not involved
I expect post length to be matched
I expect icons/gifs to be used in a reply if I have used them
‘ these sonic the hedgehog commemorative plates don’t clean themselves, and since i don’t believe in dishwashers they don’t get cleaned other ways either. ‘
‘ personally? i think the old lady who dropped the priceless diamond into the ocean at the end of titanic should have given it to me instead. ‘
’ i don’t have time for these questions, and i don’t have time for answers either. ‘
’ the nature of man is best described as ‘a thing i don’t care about’. ‘
’ hell, if i had a chip on my shoulder i’d be pretty happy. its a free chip to eat. ‘
’ my class to learn how to tell time starts at one thousand and thirty. ‘
’ this kills me every time, but who can resist jumping in a good spike pit? ‘
’ its adam and eve, not woody and buzz, if you want a real toy story read the bible. ‘
’ chainsaw hacky sack is all fun and games until someone loses a ponytail ‘
’ hunting for meat is a fun, important life skill. all you have to do is find a smaller animal and bite it until it is dead. ‘
’ the next person who tries to hit my brain out of my skull with a piece of metal will get a big surprise, i function perfectly fine without it. ‘
’ actually i can see both the forest AND the trees. even your average idiot can see forests and trees, all you need is a working pair of eyes. ‘
’ yeah, as soon as that caterpillar went into the cocoon, i knew there was going to be a butterfly coming out of it, not much of a surprise. ‘
’ i’m not good at making friends, but i am good at sitting silently alone. so in a way it works out. ‘
’ why do birds suddenly appear every time i crash a tractor into a silo full of bird seed? ‘
’ hurled my bible at the paper boy and knocked him off his bike with the real news. ‘
’ everywhere you look, there’s a heart. stop screaming, i killed a lot of people to get all these hearts. ‘
‘ have yet to receive any accolades, will wait patiently. ‘
‘ i survived everything the world threw at me. except the knives, saw blades and acid. ‘
‘ we let the bodies hit the floor, then what? next we’ll have bodies hitting walls, roofs… you name it, bodies will be hitting it! ‘
‘ no, i didn’t drop all this on the floor. i dramatically knocked it out of my own hands because i have something to prove. ‘
’ $19 for 100 glow in the dark pebbles? i don’t know man, this could be the deal that changes the game for me. ‘
’ the best way to solve problems is to create more problems until you are dead. ‘
