thecapitol | Backdate; Pre-Arena.

He was sitting at a table where a holographic chess game was set up, projecting the board and pieces.

When Xavier approached, he gave him no other acknowledgement than a nod.

Charles knew exactly who to look for when he stepped in. He spotted Brainiac, and approached him. The visual aspect of the network had allowed for Charles to recognize him the moment that he saw him. He offered him his hand in greeting, no need for introductions, but it was still good to practice some etiquette. "A pleasure to meet you."

Brainiac briefly started at his hand, as if a handshake was an alien gesture or just one that he wasn't accustomed to doing but then he held his hand out and briefly clasped Charles'.

"Likewise," he said simply, and then gestured to the board. "Black or white?"

"I'll play black," Charles answered. Sure, offering someone the first move advantage by giving them the white pieces meant that he was giving them the firs step. He did typically play white when with Erik, too. However, it was a chance to watch and see what he would do.

Brainiac adjusted the board accordingly, tapping something on the holographic display so the pieces on his side turned white and the ones on Charles' side turned black.

Then he tapped a pawn to move it two spaces.

"Have you been apprised of the particulars of our situation?" he asked. "There's quite a bit to take in. My presence alone, obviously, indicates the complexity of what the Capitol's done, how many worlds they've drawn from."

"Only what I have been told upon arrival, which is little, and the little information I have gathered by watching others," Charles moved one pawn - on the far right - one space. His movements in chess were always slightly more passive, as he was used to an aggressive opponent like Erik.

He watched Brainiac for a moment. Chess was about the opponent, not always the strategy. "We have many different types of individuals at home, as well." So his existence didn't do much in the way of confuse or startle Charles. "Where are you from?"

"That's a difficult question to answer," he said. "I was born on a planet called Colu but I spent quite a few years living on Earth. However, both Earth and Colu are now gone, because of the destruction of my universe. Now my team and I travel through the multiverse, hopping from world to world, trying to get by however we can," he said as he made his next move.

'However we can' was, naturally, by superheroing the crap out of everything they saw and sometimes taking monetary or material reward for it (while not demanding such payment up front or expecting it) but he left it vague on purpose.

"I suppose you could say I'm from everywhere, and at the same time, from nowhere."

They had no home anymore, just the one that they'd made with each other on their ship, and spent quite a bit of their time traveling between dimensions, not existing in any place at all.

Charles couldn't imagine living without a home. For himself, the fact that he had a place to go back to - to always claim as his - was important. It was where he knew Raven would be, it was where his future students would be. It was, he had once hoped (but now doubted), Erik would join him by working with others.

He looked over the board, carefully thinking over his next move, then looked up at Brainiac as he made it. He went through the next five moves in his mind, developing a strategy.

"Earth is still around where I am from," Charles answered. "I am sorry to hear that your homes are no longer there." Brainy had gave a more detailed answer than he had ever hoped for. It was appreciated.

"It's not my experience, but I do understand." He had met his share of wanderers in his time studying and trying to find mutants.

Charles got a small shrug in response, one that looked more like an effort to try not to care than a gesture that meant he actually didn't.

"A small loss, in some respects, a greater one in others. It was a shame what happened to Earth - the culture there was quite something. Beings from countless planets lived there and what little xenophobia that was left was considered by the majority of citizens - even humans - to be a societal ill that needed to be eradicated."

He put his bishop into play.

"My own world and people got what was coming to them, however."

He didn't say it with any sinister glee but there was a casual coldness there that sounded just a little off-kilter.

Charles moved his knight, the unique set of moves that it made always was an important part of strategies. The earth that Brainiac spoke of was so different from his own. He couldn't imagine how they'd react to aliens beings, considering how poorly they seemed to take slightly different humans.

He wondered how long it would take, but he didn't ask the year. He shouldn't know, nor did he need to know. Brainiac's world was different from his own. Very different. For all that he knew, it could have been like that since before Charles' time.

"Humans still...have problems with other humans," Charles answered. "I am still sorry," was his response. He couldn't imagine any world deserving a fate like that.

"Having a home to return to, it can make the effort worthwhile."

"I have a home," Brainy said, "On my ship, with my team. I believe the old human expression is 'home is where the heart is' and while it's perhaps overly saccharine, it holds true for us."

He took interest in what Charles had said about humans, though. The tone of his voice was intriguing.

"Humanity overcame their differences with each other by my time, for the most part, but due to time travel, I got a glimpse of how they acted in...less enlightened times," he said as he moved his rook. "Are you from an Earth in such a dark age?"

"Good, then," Charles answered. The home he had grown up in, and always come home was where his heart was, he supposed. It was where everything that had truly mattered to him happened. Where he had met Raven, bonded with Sean, Hank, and Alex, and became close friends with Erik. "It does ring true."

"I am from an Earth during this dark age," Charles couldn't help but chuckle, "1962, actually."

He pulled a face. He wasn't the most up on his human history but when the Legion had been stuck in the 1990s, they'd made sure to do their research on recent history to understand the culture a little better.

Truth be told, that entire section of that millenia on many Earths read as a mess of primitive attitudes and behavior to Brainy.

"My condolences. I've engaged in time travel and frequent interdimensional travel, which has put myself and my team in contact with a variety of planets and alternate timelines, some of them variations of Earth. We're a group of people not easily phased by cruelty, but the prejudices we've sometimes encountered against aliens, metahumans, or even race and sexuality of our human or human-passing members has been...eye-opening, to say the least. While our central government was highly corrupt, only some of the species from our universe and time time, like my own people, were predisposed to such rampant bigotry."

Brainy's assessment of how it was, seemed correct. People of Charles' time did have many prejudices against other humans. It should not have been a surprise that they didn't take kindly to mutants. Charles' desire to have peace for mutants and mutant kind was a barrier that kept him from seeing, sometimes, the things he would need to accomplish before it became a possibility.

"You are correct, in many ways. People are always evolving, though. They learn, they adjust, they accept. Education in my era, though, is still a very large work in progress. While you have what you call metahuman. We have mutants."

Edited 2014-06-24 04:31 (UTC)

His interest was piqued and despite his best efforts to hide it, some of the stoniness faded from his expression.

He'd been trying to be unreadable, but this was a very personal subject for him.

The lines of tension around his eyes, constantly maintained so he looked irritable and imposing relaxed.

"How are these mutants treated by the rest of society?" he asked, nudging one of his pieces with the tip of his finger.

"It's hard to say," Charles answered. He looked over the pieces on the board. "When I left, the general population may have just found out Mutants exist. The military didn't seem to much like them, though." Charles understood the interest.

Edited 2014-07-24 11:18 (UTC)

"You seem unsure if they know it, which suggests that's not how you found out about them and you hardly have military bearing."

Yes, he was digging, but the man was smart enough to put up a good fight at chess, cautious with his words, and could potentially be metahuman.

All of those things could possibly be useful.

"So how do you know about these mutants?"

"Don't assume, I could be military," he answered. Charles didn't say a word for a few moments considering how to answer his question as to how; he simply raised an eyebrow. An action, he hoped, was small enough for the cameras to not notice it, despite the constant observation. Invisible mutations, like his, could stay hidden here. At least hidden from other residents. "It's my area of study and expertise," he said, "if I didn't know about them, I wouldn't be very good at my area of study, would I?"

Brainiac hadn't made his status as something different from other Coluans much of a secret. In fact, he'd spoken to Bashir about it on screen during his first arena.

It might have seemed suspicious to immediately volunteer it, though, and he was curious about this man. Tossing that out there from the start would've seemed like over-sharing, like he was egging for something in return. He had to be subtle. There had a be a give and take. He wanted to find out more about him - especially given how well he was keeping up with him in chess (for a human, at least) but people didn't' just spill everything about themselves when you asked.

The conversation was at a more natural point for him to let a few facts dangle.

"Are you a geneticist, then? I had to deal with a few geneticists growing up. Always rude. They were always distracting me from my experiments whenever they came to observe me and take their tests - and you know how children get when an obstacle gets between them and their toys."

"I'm a teacher. A teacher who teaches genetics and biology," Charles said. Never had he thought lying would come so naturally to him when in the middle of a conversation. Still, he thought it was best to keep facts about himself hidden. After all, secrecy was one's first line of defense...and they didn't really have any privacy here.

"I prefer to help them understand the science before they apply it," Charles smiled, considering his next move carefully before he did.

"So I do know how children get." Not so much from teaching, but his own self.

"What applications do your teachings ultimately result in?" Brainiac asked. "Substantial damage could be done to these mutants if highly educated individuals were to set themselves against them."

He still hadn't done more than entertain the idea that Charles was one of them but he wasn't so much concerned about his genetic status as trying to get a measure of the man. He was ever on the lookout for potential allies and potential enemies.

"For instance, a particularly influential geneticist speaking of them as a threat to sentient society could set whole governments against them."

Edited 2014-07-31 08:42 (UTC)

Charles was indignant at the implication. He had a hard time hiding that indignation in the way he answered, too. "I would never allow my studies to be used to harm mutants." He was trying to work his mind around the idea. The only thing that was causing them harm was the knowledge that they existed.

"I'm also not particularly influential. I'm fairly new to what I do," Charles answered, "as a teacher."

The indignation was hidden by not quite entirely gone and it was enough for Brainy to make a judgment call and decide to start dangling things to see how the man reacted.

"I'm a supervillain, you know," he said quietly. "It's quite a ridiculous-sounding proclamation, but my teammates and find the word 'criminal' somewhat ineffective in describing the kinds of crimes we commit. When you're in brightly colored spandex and using a death laser to open the confiscated goods safe on a prison ship while flinging mini-black holes at the police, it seems the kind of very specific criminality that requires its own very specific definition."

He took one of Charles' knights.

"Yet despite that, we have always held crimes fueled by intolerance over genetic differences in...distaste. Many of us were considered aberrations on our homeworlds for various reasons, myself included."

He avoided Charles' eyes.

"What I'm trying to say is that I'm not a particularly soft-hearted man but I can appreciate it when I see sentients that understand the nature of hatred and fear and how damaging it is to those who don't deserve to be damaged. You've been guarded about it but you wouldn't call the time you come from a dark age if it was a time of tolerance and if you didn't value such tolerance. Don't ever lose that attitude. If more people had thought that way on my homeworld I might not have resorted to a life of crime as my only option for survival."

Charles listened to what Brainiac was saying about crime, and being a Supervillain. He couldn't imagine needing to resort to crime, and he'd never want it for himself, his students, or even Erik. He wanted mutants to stand among humans, and crime would only set them apart from them.

"I find crimes fueled by intolerance are reprehensible," he said. Erik was a victim of crimes like that, so he felt close to them personally, although he had not been a victim himself. He knew of his friend's agony and suffering as a result of hatred.

He couldn't let the same thing befall his own people.

"It's a shame you had to take to that," he said. He moved to take a pawn with one of his.

His expression softened ever so slightly. Even if the villain act was false, the way he'd been treated was real. Really, it was almost a miracle he hadn't truly turned out to be a villain.

"My family line was primarily known for its criminal inclinations. After my ancestor, the first Brainiac, had his intelligence genetically altered, that mutation was passed down to each of his descendants. Most of them became supervillains, though Colugov continued the breeding program in the hopes of achieving Brainiacs that could contribute something to the planetary interest. I was the only one that didn't have the gene express to the same extreme as the others - which made Colugov deem me as relatively useless. They still didn't want to let me go, of course. They figured that there could, after all, be future Brainiacs that could have possibly proven useful."

He briefly pressed his lips together.

"It was a choice between being state property and living a life of my own with people who I had eventually come to consider friends. That is to say: I don't see it as a shame at all. Bettering oneself sometimes has its price," he said, nudging his bishop. "A few wanted bulletins is a small one."

His voice was a little quieter. "But I do appreciate the sentiment. As I said, it's...refreshing. For the sake of your world, I hope your students become teachers of those sentiments in turn."

Edited 2014-08-13 05:46 (UTC)

"That's not a choice," Charles said, without really even thinking. At least, it didn't sound like there was any choice involved to Charles. He eyed the pieces on the board. He couldn't even start to imagine the feeling of being someone else's property. No person would make the choice to belong to someone. Being de-personified was a horrible crime which he hoped never befell Mutants. "That is why it is a shame."

He sighed. "Having to commit crimes to be better isn't a choice. When presented with one option..." he said. "Well, you're smart enough to understand how I see it, I think."

The future for him was not predictable, not even the slightest.

Logically, he knew this. Logically, he'd espoused the same thing on more than one occasion. The Legion sometimes ran afoul of criminals whose crimes were borne of desperation rather than ill will. Looters, desperate for supplies during disasters and people sometimes forced away from their planets as diaspora or exiles. Back when his universe had existed, rather than punishing them all, the Legion sometimes jumped in to fight the source of the problem, the reason that people had been cast out as refugees or been forced to escape their own society for safety.

He remembered the time they'd run into a Carggite thief, someone similar to his teammate, Luorno, who was able to triplicate into three separate bodies but they all had separate personalities instead of three identical ones. It was something that was freakish by Garggite standards. Just like Luorno, she'd run away from her home planet, but unlike Luorno she hadn't had someone as kind as RJ Brande - the Legion's financial backer and surrogate team uncle - to take her in and adopt her as his own.

Instead of taking her to the police, with RJ's help they'd given her a new job and a fresh start, taking measures to help her seek asylum so that her criminal record would be wiped clean. What choice had she had, after all? When her only choices had been a life of crime, starving to death, or being institutionalized and receiving treatment that was tantamount to medical torture back on Cargg?

The difference this time was that he wasn't making the argument, he was on the receiving end of it, and the backstory here wasn't someone else's and it wasn't fiction. It was his own. It was strange to explain his life as if it was fiction, to use it for his cover story, and to hear back from someone that it wasn't a choice.

But it hadn't been, had it?

The truth was Colugov had nudged him around wherever they wanted him to go when he'd been young, like a chess piece on a game board, until they'd grown sick of him and fobbed him off on RJ Brande and his company because he was the only one who'd wanted him. He'd obeyed RJ when he suggested the Time Institute on Talus without question as if it was a tacit command rather than a suggestion, and then he'd been conscripted into the Legion back when it had been forced by the UP planetary governments. If they had turned villainous and not been a force for good - and a team full of individuals that had been infinitely patient with him long enough that he could call them friend - he might have turned out a villain.

If the Legion hadn't worked out and his homeworld hadn't wanted him back, where could he have gone? Back to Talus? By then his reputation of being terrible to work with had traveled far and wide, and while his friend and fellow scientist Rond Vidar might have welcomed him back, he knew the Time Institute Supervisory Staff most likely would have put their foot down after he'd blown up so many labs. It was only on RJ's recommendation that he'd gotten the job at all. His reputation of being a Brainiac had always colored more than just his people's view of him. Before he'd made a name for himself in the Legion as a hero people had always cringed away from him when they'd found out his title. That he was an innocent child at the time had never mattered and never had the species of the people doing the cringing. Carggites, humans, Braalians, Titanians, it was all the same; the name "Brainiac" had been etched into the ancestral memory of more than one species.

Maybe there was a reason anyone he even hinted about his past to as part of the villain rigmarole spoke and acted as if they pitied him. He'd never told his team-mates about his upbringing to see how they'd react to it, and he'd never made any mental attachments of his past to the pasts of people like Luorno and that Carggite thief, but what if it was something just as pitiable? Why did he pity others who dealt with such things and not see himself the same way?

All of this and thousands of other thoughts went on in the space of a second in his head. For just a moment, his attention was elsewhere, lost in his own thoughts, but he didn't stop playing. Somehow, while seemingly not paying attention to the game or even looking at the board, he reached out a hand and moved his knight.

"Checkmate."

Most people had to look at the board to make their final move. And do things like, oh, make sure they were moving the right piece. Especially since the board was a hologram and he wouldn't have been able to tell what piece it was by touch. The only way someone would be able to reach out and do what he'd done was if they'd memorized the board and the location of every piece on it.

Edited 2014-08-23 07:28 (UTC)

Charles watched him for those several quiet moments. He wasn't going to ask what was going through Brainiac's mind. He didn't think that he necessarily needed to know. It was odd for him, though. Usually when people are sitting in thought, he becomes the most privy to each of those thoughts. Now, he had to watch as those thoughts passed through his mind. It was unusually nice to not feel the need to know things about people.

To feel like that even for these few moments he could be someone who wasn't a mutant.

"Good job, friend," Charles answered. His tone was friendly. He was pleased with the competition. He was always pleased by it. People who kept up with him in these games were rare back home, and to know there was someone who could provide a challenge excited him.

It made him miss Erik. More than anyone, really.

Brainiac stood, still seemingly lost in his own thoughts, and clasped his hands behind his back as he faced Charles.

"Better luck next time," he said to Charles. "Don't hesitate to contact me if you want a rematch. This was...engrossing."

With that, he gave him a slight nod and walked away, still lost in his own thoughts.

Backdate; Pre-Arena.

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totally handwaving the actual chess moves if that's okay with you?

naturally :D

Re: naturally :D

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sorry for the long wait, lost the notif and omg this got long but Charles made him think things

oh goodness <3

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