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"Better than you'd think." He replied, smiling faintly, "Bats can make out microscopic details. I'm not that good, but I'm pretty good."

But you's not getting upset, my love.

His brow furrowed at that, puzzled, and he gave another low whistle just to make sure he wasn't missing anything, before he said: "I don't usually get upset at people who help me. Is there something I should know about?"

Mossst people flee from usss, my love. We bes warpeded and broken.

His eyes were already hard to read, aloof and remote, but now they almost go opaque. He almost looks as though he is seeing through the boy's injured wing, but when he speaks, his tone is anything but distracted.

"Come closer, boy. I would feel the nature of this injury with my own two hands."

"And I'm the blind guy with wings, so?"

It wasn't as if Iggy could see the shift in expression anyway, but the voice was easy enough to follow, stepping forward, "Not sure if it's broken or just dislocated, it's just a whole lot of pain right now."

Wingses be pretty. We bes not.

"Pretty, maybe, but not like I can just leave them out, not if I don't want to get taken away. Have to hide them."

Isss being better off than usss.

It takes Exodus a moment longer than he is accustomed to to realize that the boy is blind as well, something he would have realized from the start had he subjected him to one of his normal telepathic probes rather than the comparatively weaker quick scans he has been trying to default to.

Taking the wing in his hands, his bare fingers squeeze the flesh around the wound, the way a doctor might. "Mmm. Just dislocated, I think. A bad tumble, was it? Or something more onerous?"

Even as he is asking the question, Exodus closes his eyes and marshals his powers. Using them to heal is one of the more difficult tricks in his arsenal, as he must repair an injury manually, quite literally atom by atom. It took him a long time to learn how to do this, and even today it is a taxing process, but for the boy there will be no pain at all. The warmth of Exodus's aura suffuses his injury, stretching across the entirety of his wing, and then it is simply done, as quick as getting a shot. The lad will find his wing is good as new.

"Fog bank." He replied, "Totally missed the tree." A pause then, brow furrowing, managing to hold still throughout the process, though people handling his wings always made him a little nervous, even after this long with no Erasers coming for him, "Well, no, I hit the tree. I just missed that it was there because of the fog. Echoes come back wrong sometimes, messes with the sonar."

Another pause, brow still creased, "Echolocation. Sort of the same thing. Not even sure which I use. Both I guess."

"Echolocation?" he starts, confused. "Why would you... ah." It clicks easily, once he's allowed himself to make the connection, as surely as the boy's unease washes over him and he releases the now-healed wing. Even without actively reading the youth's mind he's still able to pick up emotions without even trying; such is the extent of his power. "Were you born blind then?"

There's none of the awkward pausing or hesitation Iggy might be used to from this one. He comes from a different time, one where the blind didn't usually live long enough for anyone to be compelled into showing them any forced sympathies.

He shook his head, letting his wings both settle down closer to his shoulders, used to keeping them folded down tight under a jacket, "No. But I've been blind now longer than I could see. I just learned how to cope as quickly as I could."

Mostly because while he knew the Flock wouldn't have left him behind, he hadn't wanted to be a burden on them if he could help it, and it had turned out that he was more capable than even he'd expected to be.

He nods, though he knows now that the boy can't see it. "You have adapted to your impairment. Refused to let it hinder you. This alone is proof that you are one of the chosen ones."

And for that, Exodus decides to extend the youth a new gift. Reaching out to Iggy's mind rather than his flesh, he opens a conduit between them, telepathically allowing him to look out through his, Exodus's own eyes. It will be a disorienting experience at first, essentially looking at the world through two pairs of eyes, but has no doubt that this lad will not succumb to the vertigo effect of it.

"This is who you are, James Griffiths who calls himself Iggy. A warrior. A survivor."

For someone used to dealing with frequent, sometimes sudden, changes in altitude, that vertiginous feeling didn't last long. Two things caught him more off-guard than that, the first being: "Damn, I am still all knees and elbows, huh?"

Though this was quickly followed by: "... you know my name." Both of them, for that matter, his given name and his chosen name. Which was right about when that first statement caught up to him, brow furrowing even as he went a little more still, quiet and preparing to bolt if he had to, "What do you mean 'chosen ones'?"

Even without reading the other's mind, his psychic sensitivity is so acute that he feels that spike of adrenaline almost the instant the boy himself does. It takes a bit more effort to show the lad his own appearance, projecting the image of himself rather than relying on borrowed senses, but he hopes the effort will be enough to calm him. Often he remains in midair when addressing potential recruits such as Iggy, but the effort seems wasted on someone who already spends much of time in the air. Instead he's on the ground like a normal man, his hands spread in front of him and his palms out in a universally-recognized gesture.

"Take heart, child. I am not your enemy." By now, he hopes the youth understands that if he had come as an enemy that they would not be having this conversation. "Rather, I am the voice of a man would be the salvation of you and your friends, you who call yourselves the Flock. Men know me as Exodus, for I have been chosen to be the bridge between my people's past and their future. You, Iggy, are one of my people, chosen for a higher purpose than to migrate aimlessly from one barren refuge to another. Our meeting this day was not a coincidence."

The adrenaline was definitely still there, not as sharp as that initial spike, but still there suffusing everything, keeping him steady, "That sounds great, and thanks for the help and all, but I don't know you from Adam."

He shook his head, "And I really hope you realize how creepy doomsday cult that sounds, because it really kind of does." And he'd run into plenty of those -as well as plenty of people fleeing those- in his few short years on Earth so far.

If this boy weren't so young and so jaded for one so young, he might have taken offense. As it is, he simply nods, keeping his hands in front of him and withdrawing his presence from the lad's mind. "Yes. I know how it must sound, given what you have seen and endured. But is it not also necessary? These are perilous times for our people."

Exodus speaks on, his voice rising. "I believe I do not have to tell you, of all people, of the peril that I speak of. You have seen it and faced it many times before now. For we who are born different, there is no other way to survive but to come together. Why should you fear me or I fear you? We are brothers, Iggy. Brothers not from the same womb, but of the same birth and the same blood. The X-factor that runs through your blood runs through mine as well."

"Oh!" That actually went a long way towards explaining what was going on, and he shook his head, "No, I'm actually functionally human." His wings rustled just a little as he folded them down again, "These are after-market parts."

A gentle shrug, "Recombinant DNA hybrid, 98% human, 2% bird, 0% x-gene." Granted, none of them knew that for certain, as it wasn't something they'd tested for, blood type, sure, but not specific gene markers like that. He suspected they would have found that out by now if they were, and given the way that Angel collected abilities like they were going out of style, and his own ability to feel colors he had considered it, but they'd never tried to figure it out for sure, being freak bird kids was enough.

"Are you?" His smile is knowing, as if he knows something Iggy isn't privvy to, and though the boy can no longer see that expression, it still creeps into his tone in a way only someone who's grown used to relying on their other senses to carry on conversations without the benefit of body language can understand.

He rubs his chin, "We have some of the world's best scientists on Avalon, they would be able to confirm with absolute certainty if your DNA is truly as human as you believe." True, for all his great power and the way he spoke just now, he himself has no real way to know for sure, but he is a man who trusts his instincts, and those tell him now that this boy is his kin. Someone who deserves the ascension. "If you come to our sanctuary and then wish to leave, none shall stop you. I will return you back here to Earth myself if that is your wish."

"Avalon, like King Arthur?" He'd read a lot when he was younger, he still did when he could, though he was busy more often now than he had been when they were actively on the run all the time.

He reasoned with himself that he'd been stranger places, he'd even lived in stranger places, and the fact that this man seemed genuinely certain of the fact. There was also the reasoning that if he himself did end up having an x-gene, it didn't necessarily mean that any of the others did, since only Gazzy and Angel were related by blood, and he knew knew that it was going to bother him forever if he didn't find out for sure. He didn't like not being certain about that kind of thing.

"Aye, just so." Now his smile is that of genuine approval, for even he read those legends as a boy (or had them read to him, at any rate; he learned to read and write largely just so he could parse Geoffrey's Historia Regum Britannia for himself) and counts it a tragedy today that Le Morte d'Arthur was written 300 years too late for him to have also enjoyed in his youth.

For all that, of course, it was not his decision to name their sanctuary such; it was the decree of Magnus, and rightly so, for it was him who lifted Avalon from the earth and made a sanctuary of it, that which otherwise would have been a barren rock. But he did assist Magneto in Avalon's construction, and privately, suspects the Master of Magnetism may have chosen the name in fancy after awakening his greatest disciple in an ancient Swiss crypt.

He extends his hand to the boy. "Will you come with me then, James Griffiths who calls himself Iggy? The gates of Avalon stand open to you. All you need do is take my hand."

Edited 2015-03-22 16:52 (UTC)

"You know, you can just call me Iggy. No reason to use the whole list." And he'd left James Griffiths behind for a reason, he wasn't that person anymore, maybe he never had been, but the chance he'd had to be hadn't turned out, and he didn't regret it. Either the trying, or the failure.

There was a brief hesitation, as if still making up his mind, before he reached out, fingertips bumping against the other man's palm just briefly before he actually clasped that offered hand, "Alright, but if this is all some elaborate setup and I'm going to end up waking up in a crummy hotel bathtub full of ice, I can tell you right now that my organs won't really make much on the black market, not compatable with anybody."

"Iggy it shall be, then," he agrees, surprisingly amiable about the request. But then, why wouldn't he be? He knows well what it means to leave one name behind and carry on under a new one. Names have power; an old one to bind, a new one to release. That inherent power is a large part of why he makes a point of it to telepathically scan for a person's name (or names) first, literally before anything else. Even their powers, as often for his kind a chosen moniker alone is enough to deduce the rest.

He waits patiently as the boy considers, neither retracting his hand nor even letting it sag where it hangs, until finally Iggy commits himself and reaches for it. And though he does not smile at the boy's dour remark, something in his eyes seems to, if not soften, at least become a little less hard. "Believe me when I tell you this, of all the uses Avalon might have for you, harvesting your organs is the last of them."

This said, he draws himself up, standing taller and straighter as the messenger of hope should, and his voice is a sonorous boom when next he speaks. "Prepare yourself now, boy... for heaven awaits!"

The moment he speaks the words a great vortex of earth and wind kicks up around them, lifting them both into the air and then into the stratosphere at dizzying speeds. Faster and higher by far than Iggy has ever ascended under his own power, and yet his personal field of protection extends to his companion now too, guarding him from the effects of motion sickness and the g-force being exerted upon them now, though the sheer speed of their ascent alone might be enough to give Iggy some major vertigo. In literally seconds they are high enough for cities to become specks and counties to become continents. There is little if any air left now, yet Iggy will find himself able to breathe regardless.

Something soon looms in the dark recesses of space above them, something that is neither the moon nor any mere satellite. It appears suddenly, as if by magic, just suddenly there where moments before there was seemingly only emptiness: a space station of truly colossal size, larger by far than any building on Earth. Hardly even space station so much as a spacebound colony, this orbiting behemoth could swallow up two dozen of the ISS whole and still have room left over.

Without breath to speak in the void, Exodus projects his thoughts directly into his companion's mind.

< Behold, good young Iggy. Behold Avalon. This is the future-- our future. >