Hee hee.

"I wonder if he's in here..." flip flip. Any mention of Azazel?

He's in the index with a further reading suggestion but doesn't have an actual paragraph.

She's not sure she really wants to know, anyway, considering which side he would have been on. She does not request the book.

"Do you even know anyone who isn't a mutant?"

"Most of the people I go to college with aren't. Growing up...not so much. Well, there was Ms. MacTaggert."

"Mm?"

"Oh, she's a friend of the Professor's. Moira MacTaggert. Used to work at the CIA with Dr. McCoy, that's the resident genius, left not long after the fight I mentioned."

"Ah. Must be interesting having so many mutants around in one place. I don't think I'd met any besides the telepaths I shrugged off when I was yea high," she gestures, "till I went to space."

"Well, I grew up in a boarding school for them. For us. It seems strange not to but I'm well aware I'm biased."

"Renée - my mom - wouldn't hear of putting me anywhere but in her own kindergarten class. I think there are still mutant schools, but I wouldn't have fit in especially well in one anyway, I don't do anything."

"True. Not everyone does something that has an active effect at the Xavier Institute, though. And--sometimes when I mention I went to boarding school people are surprised that someone like I tend to describe my dad would send me away and I have to explain, no, he teaches there."

"Who else have you got with passive powers?"

"Well, there's Professor Munoz, although I suppose it's inaccurate to describe his power as passive, defensive though it is. He can basically adapt to survive anything, including disintegration. There's a kid with an immune system that can fight off pretty much everything--we haven't exposed him to anything beyond the normal, but apparently some of his T-cells in a petri dish have won some pretty impressive grudge matches."

"All right, maybe it'd've worked better than I thought. And I can pretend I have a power that does something with the exo, anyway."

"Well, you have a power that lets you use the exo."

"I have a power that makes it legal. Anyone could use it."

"I meant more that you couldn't have gotten your hands on it if it wasn't legal. If you could have then the power that lets you use the exo would presumably be called 'being rich.'"

"True. Is that a power that qualifies for admission into the school?"

"No, not on its own."

"Didn't think so."

"I wonder if it would be safe for me to use one, I'm on the high end of telepaths and could probably swat anyone who tried to hijack it."

"Nobody on your world will stop you if you want to try it, anyway. It's only a real issue if someone notices how it works and decides to attack you and you can't beat them."

"Yeah. It might be a little hard to pull off if I can't get it reverse-engineered, tho'. ...And I wonder if it blocks magnetists sensing as well as pulling it, because my sister emphatically does not need that kind of feedback about the topography of my body."

"It doesn't go everywhere. But I don't know, I've never asked one."