06 / 10 / 11 - Cleo, Jean-Paul
=XF= Empty Building - Training Facilities - Chemeketa Military Base
Though three stories tall, this building still manages to look squat and workmanlike. The walls are reinforced concrete, made to withstand damage - as the faint scorch marks along several prove - and the stairwells are narrow and filled with echoes. Though at a glance the building is a throwback to prison-like construction trends of earlier eras, its monitoring system is state-of-the-art, intercoms and cameras feeding into the control center on the top floor, in addition to any further surveillance equipment set up for the day's specific drills.
There is perhaps the tiniest bit of rust at the beginning. It wears off with the speed of instinct and muscle memory running deeper than conscious thought, and it is more a case of a brief moment of slight messiness before it cleans up to something tight and precise. The energy of victory, of never-quite-abandoned ability, thrums in her muscles as she slides the last cylinder into place in the last door with a well-worn set of lockpicks. Cleo slides in, footsteps quiet and precise as she moves carefully through to the last room.
"Not entirely perfect," says Jean-Paul without looking up. His head is bowed, black and silver, over the pen that moves smoothly across the page. Monitors track movements around and through the building, but he is -- for now, at least -- giving them no apparent attention. It is a great time to attack!! "But good enough." He dots a line, sets down his pen, and lifts his head to regard Cleo with a thoughtful narrowing of his eyes. "I'll mark you down for basic in stealth and breaking and entering. We'll test the others later this week."
Cleo frowns a bit, not in disagreement, but in frustration at the truth of it. She does not, however, take the opportunity to attack the speedster with the hand-to-hand cert. She wraps up her lockpicks as she approaches him and attempts to peek nosily at his report. Upside-down. "Sure," she says, stubbornly refusing to be discouraged by imperfection. "How do you test the infiltration stuff?"
Maybe she should. That would be an exciting first week! Jean-Paul is actually writing in French on lined notebook paper rather than filling out any kind of report. The paperwork is electronic, on the screen of his laptop. As she approaches, he closes the notebook and sets it to the side. He lifts his fingers to the keyboard and taptaps: grudging certification go. "I think I might double-test you, again. Find someone in intel that you could pass for with a disguise, then establish yourself there over the course of a day."
"What are you writing?" Cleo says, all thoughtless curiosity. Her weight shifts onto the balls of her feet at his testing suggestion. "Ooooh," she says, clearly a bit fascinated by the idea. "Pretty embarrassing for them if I manage."
"And pretty embarrassing for you if you fail," Jean-Paul adds with a glance back to Cleo touched by a reserved dry humor. He fails to answer her first question. "I'll give you a few days to prefer for that as a test of your ability."
"Cool." Cleo finds a bit of counter or table or whatever-space to lean up against. "So is this really just a whole building designed to sneak around in?"
Lifting two fingers in a close gesture that nevertheless angles out across the room and beyond to the whole building, Jean-Paul says, "More or less. It's a good place to practice basic concepts, but the best tests and more advanced work are better done in the field." He pauses, and gives her a bit of a sidelong glance. "Within the bounds of law." Lawful good rogues don't exist, JP.
Cleo tips her head and watches him with the hint of a smile in the corners of her mouth. "It is a magical field of legalness?" she wonders, humorously skeptical.
"No." Jean-Paul's tone is hinted with prim lecturing: "It is absolutely possible to make a test of ability without the need of breaking the law to do so. I expect that people who give and receive training in covert do so with respect for those laws."
Cleo hitches herself up completely onto the counter so she has room to swing her feet. Gaze curious but non-argumentative, she smiles. "You're the boss," she says. Head canting, she asks, "How'd you end up the boss?"
"Management in its ineffable wisdom assigned me to the area when the previous boss left the organization," Jean-Paul says, more with the dry and less with the lecture as he goes on.
"You like it?" Swingswing.
Jean-Paul sits quite still as she swing-swings away. His expression moves only in increments: incrementally, he arches an eyebrow. "Ask again after you've had the pleasure of guard duty."
"I think I have to figure out guns first," Cleo tells him, chewing on a hangnail.
Incrementally, he lowers his eyebrow. INCREMENTALLY, he blands. "I'm sure a clever girl like you can figure it out sooner or later."
Cleo laughs very briefly at his blandness. "Aw, you think I'm clever," she says, teasing touched with warmth. "How long have you been here?"
Jean-Paul has to think a moment. Adding is hard. When he hits a total, he looks a little -- pinched. "Two years come July. That's about in the middle, I suppose."
"Two years," Cleo echoes back, sucking briefly on the inside of her lip and sounding moderately impressed. "In the middle of what?"
"How long people have been here." Jean-Paul tips his chin at Cleo. "With you coming right at the end."
"Ohh." Cleo sets her hands on the edge of the table on either side of her and braces her weight in a lean. "So you're about average, then?"
"Mm." Jean-Paul thinks about that for not very long. He smiles. "No."
"Just in the middle," Cleo self-edits. "All those Ms in math: not the mean, but the median?"
Jean-Paul shakes his head at Cleo, waving off the correction, the middles, the means, the medians. "Never mind," he says.
Cleo grins, bright and musing. "Sure," she says. She leans forward a bit, expression all banked curiosity. "So what do you do?"
"Fend off questions from nosy newbies," Jean-Paul answers with a not /unfriendly/ snark.
Cleo laughs again. "Kind of a lame mutation," she says.
"And yet, I get a surprising amount of use out of it," Jean-Paul says, tipping his head to the side.
"You can tell me to shut up whenever," Cleo offers, unbothered.
Jean-Paul tests this: "Shut up."
"I mean about a /specific thing/," Cleo says, blithely continuing to speak. "Why does nobody want to talk about what they do? Alden totally wouldn't tell me about his."
"We're encouraging you to self-sufficience." Jean-Paul gestures at the computer. "It's all there in the files. Even Alden's."
"It's a lot of files to memorize," Cleo says, "and it's not the same as hearing people talk about it. I mean -- it's one of the reasons we're all here, right?"
Jean-Paul gives Cleo a look that has a little less humor and a little more exasperation. "I hadn't actually understood that your question referred to mutation, but your particular persistence is not the kind I'm happy to reward."
"Okay." Cleo shrugs and digs in her messenger bag and pulls out an orange, which she starts peeling.
Rubbing his brow, Jean-Paul reroutes back to business: "To give you time to settle in and get a fair idea of activity in the hub, I'll give you until next Tuesday, when we'll test on disguise and infiltration. Does that seem like enough time for you?"
"Sure," Cleo agrees, a little distracted as she focuses on trying to get the peel off all in one long piece. "Want a slice?"
"No." Jean-Paul then asks, with a very Beaubier-bluntness, "Don't you have anything else to do, now?"
"Sure, boss," Cleo says again, hopping off the counter and moving off towards the exit. She pauses at the door, chewing her lip, and then turns back. There is the hint of excited anticipation in her gaze, somewhat suppressed. "When do I get to start learning the new stuff?"
"Rounding out your field certifications should be your first priority," says the guy without basic firearms as he turns his attention back to his laptop computer. "After that, we'll look at what you are best suited for and most interested in."
"Right-o." Cleo's weight shifts on her feet from balls to heel. "Seeya later," she says after a moment, before popping an orange slice into her mouth and darting off.
NEW PEOPLE ARE SO EXHAUSTING. Jean-Paul relaxes a little when she finally leaves, but probably not as much as he would if he had a delicious orange slice to eat.
SHE WILL HAVE TO EAT THEM ALL.
New kid.