Mask Or Menace - IC Contact Post

[helpdesk_hero]

This is David Alleyne, I'm not available at the moment.
Please leave your name, contact information, and what this is regarding after the beep.

Comments

[besainted]

You kept in contact, right?

[helpdesk_hero]

For as long as I was in upstate New York, yes. My parents came to family weekend, my sister came to spend a few days at the school as well.

[besainted]

Do you miss them?

[ and then sent immediately after: ] Sorry, that's personal. You don't have to get into that.

[helpdesk_hero]

I had a falling out with my parents. As such I hadn't spoken with them in a while before I came here.

[besainted]

I'm sorry to hear it.

[helpdesk_hero]

It is what it is. But thank you.

[besainted]

[ There's a pause; this feels a bit like having overstepped, but this wait sometimes pushes him into being maudlin. And it definitely has his nerves feeling raw, so he can't just stop texting.

After a moment: ] How about mutant boarding school, how was that? I have no idea what to picture.

[helpdesk_hero]

[He will absolutely give Damian this time. Has to be scary.]

Picture a large mansion, the sort you have ‘wings’ in. I lived at the school, roommates with Josh actually. I arrived that summer. Before him.

[besainted]

What were the classes? Was it all relating to learning to manage your powers?

[helpdesk_hero]

Oh it was also a normal high school. My favorite class was drama actually. The teacher was a teleporter. Always made for great entrances.

[besainted]

Drama. What kind of assignments are there in drama?

[helpdesk_hero]

Study of plays. Performances. Soliloquies. All sorts of stuff.

[besainted]

At my school, we called that leisure time.

[helpdesk_hero]

Well we were teens displaced from homes and families. A lot of us couldn’t go home. Me Included. We needed the outlet. The fun. So yeah, it wasn’t leisure time, but it helped.

[besainted]

Well I hope you aced all of the drama tests.

[helpdesk_hero]

I'm perfectly dramatic.

[besainted]

I don't know, you haven't met my boss's dog.

[helpdesk_hero]

I never work with children or animals.

[besainted]

I would usually agree with you, but he's five feet tall and talks, so I'm inclined to cut him a little slack. Even if he is ridiculously dramatic.

[helpdesk_hero]

And... that's not where I expected this to go.

[besainted]

That was about my thought process when she introduced us.

[helpdesk_hero]

At least you lived an interesting life back there?

[besainted]

I enjoyed it. And I guess I'll get back to enjoying it, at some point.

It's strange to think everything has been put on pause, reportedly. It puts me in mind of an entire frozen universe, just waiting for me.

[helpdesk_hero]

Perhaps it isn't waiting on you. Perhaps this place exists in the space between moments of time. But yeah. It's sometimes hard to consider this place when you realize that in the end you go back like nothing happened.

[besainted]

It's like a spare lifetime. Like

[ a pause as he tries to remember this ANCIENT SLANG ]

YOLT

No, that really doesn't get across, nevermind.