[Charles is back, and while he doesn't look any different - he doesn't look older, he's got the same hair cut and navy blue sweaters - there's still something different. He seems... happier, more enthusiastic than he's been in a long time before Erik graduated.]

Well, I'm glad to see the ship hasn't burned down in my absence. [And if he sounds mildly surprised about that, can you really blame him?

Anyway, moving on.]

I'm very happy to report that things are moving along quite smoothly at home. Erik says hello, [Or some variation on that to some of you, let's be serious graduation didn't suddenly turn him into a super fluffy fun guy who particularly cares about 90% of you.] Although he remains fairly adamant that he's absolutely not coming back in this lifetime, if at all possible.

[Which kind of begs the question of what the hell is he doing back here, but that's for him to know and you guys to find out at some point maybe.

And with all that said and done, he sobers a little, although he's still looking pretty upbeat and generally pleased.]

I've spend two years on this ship, and in that time, I've had too many people tell me some variation of "you can't change your future", or that I was wasting my time putting my faith in someone who's too incompetent to ever do anything right, and I understand where all of that stemmed from. It's incredibly easy to lose hope here, especially in regards to both those things, and if anyone tries to tell you you're weak for doing so, they're wrong.

But it does work, and you can change your future. This place has done everything it could to drag me and the people I love under, but we've still managed to overcome it, and you can, too.

[And he means that, seriously. He's got the proof to back it up now, too.]

For any new arrivals, I'm Doctor- or I suppose it's really Professor Charles Xavier, now. I'm a warden, I'm a telepath, [Mutant and proud, right?] and I'm one of the wardens in charge of the garden, if anyone's interested in lending a hand. I'm also available as a counselor for anyone - warden or inmate - who feels they need someone to talk to.

( Spam for Jonah )

[It might surprise some people to see that Charles has some mud on his shirt, which is clearly the result of having some of it thrown at him, versus from falling on his face. His daemon, Hypatia, isn't in frame, but she's obviously not far and is currently in much the same state.

He looks... well, irritated probably isn't the right word for it. Exasperated might be better.]

I understand that everyone's very fond of their war games, but I think we'd all appreciate it if you kept any mud slinging activities safely away from noncombatants.

[And then a wry smile spreads across his face.]

That goes double for any adults playing along.

[YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.]

[Spam]

[Charles and Hypatia have always been a little bit unusual amongst the academic crowd from Jordan College. They're friendly and active and eager to get out and do research and get involved with people of all walks of life, instead of being content to just stick to the stuffy, closed off world of some of the other scholars. So while they can both certainly be found on the college grounds and in the library, it's just as likely to catch him out on the streets of Oxford doing research.

His particular area of interest has always been understanding and raising awareness and tolerance towards other cultures and ethnic groups, so he's just as likely to be at a society party exchanging stories with explorers and business men as wandering the markets, browsing the wares and talking to street children.

But his most common haunt - as long as they're in town, anyway - is visiting with his best friend Erik and his family, either just by wandering Oxford with him or dropping by the family longboat for dinner, as he's done ever since he was a teenager. He's by no means been adopted as Gyptian, or anything close to that, but he's been working to improve relations and general attitudes towards them amongst the non Gyptian population, and so anyone with a particular interest in that would likely at least know his name.

And then, of course, he checks in on his cousins Nathan and Alex occasionally. Never mind that Nathan is actually older than him and probably doesn't need looking after.

Most of the time, anyway.]

[He's almost not sure if he wants to put himself out there considering the last time this happened, he was pretty much miserable afterwards, but as much as that's true, he's in a much better place this time around, and he does really miss quite a few people from back home.

And you know, always good to make sure Hank and Darwin haven't let Sean destroy the house by accident in their absence.]

This is Dr. Charles Xavier. If there's anyone out there from home- [You know who you are.] I'd appreciate hearing from you.

[Private to Zane]

[Someone's been keeping an eye on Kelsier's post, and he's definitely noticed that things seem to be getting sort of out of control. He's concerned, and decides to shoot Zane a message.]

Where are you?

[Since the event ended, Charles has more or less been holed up in his room sleeping it off, and still sounds pretty drained when he actually starts talking, voice not quite droning, but definitely more tired and worn out - almost disappointed, really - than enthusiastic.]

An old Grandfather said to his grandson, who came to him with anger at a friend who had done him an injustice, "Let me tell you a story.

I too, at times, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do.

But hate wears you down, and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times." He continued, "It is as if there are two wolves inside me. One is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him, and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way.

But the other wolf, ah! He is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is helpless anger,for his anger will change nothing.

Sometimes, it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit."

The boy looked intently into his Grandfather's eyes and asked, "Which one wins, Grandfather?"

The Grandfather smiled and quietly said, "The one I feed."

[There's a short pause, and he continues, now almost sounding distracted.] It's an old Cherokee fable. For those of you who aren't from Earth, or are unfamiliar with this particular subject, the Cherokee are a Native American people who have historically settled in the south eastern parts of North America.

[There's another short pause, like he's considering maybe saying something else, but the feed clicks off without any further elaboration after a few seconds.]

[Private to Merlin & Arthur]

I don't know if you've been told, [Or care. :V] but Morgana's vanished.

[Private to Alex]

[This he actually manages to sound more or less like himself for, because he really is happy for Alex.]

I hear some congratulations are in order.

That was a bit of a rougher landing than usual. Has anyone been keeping track of who's gone missing? [An official head count of who fell overboard and who got lucky seemed like a good idea, in theory.]

[Private to the X-Fam]

I was thinking, considering our history with this sort of thing, [And yes, he's including himself in this, but he's allowed to >C at you kids/Erik for not being safer, too even though Erik's been pretty good at not doing stupid shit like almost getting strangled/beat up/stabbed to death, good job Erik.] it would probably be best to establish some kind of telepathic link to make sure we can still communicate with each other and call for help if necessary.

[Or, you know, stick together, that would be good, too.

And yes, he is planning on going out whether you guys are or not because SCIENCE!!]

[Open Spam]

[It's probably ridiculous, to venture out into a port, especially considering his history with this sort of thing, but he has his telepathy and gear to survive underwater - thankfully no gills - and that's good enough for him.

He's a scientist, and despite past scares - anything involving the Vanquish was safely boxed up out of sight, out of mind for the time being - he does get a little stir crazy on the Barge. There's only so much reading and revising and chess you could stand before you wanted a change in scenery, and so he'd left the ship, and started exploring. He can feel the hum of intelligent minds somewhere out in the blackness, but they seem distant and largely nonthreatening, so he doesn't bother them, even if he keeps a mental ear out, just in case.

Just because he's willing to take a risk doesn't mean he's going to be stupid about this.

While he doesn't wander too far from the light of the Barge, the ruins end up interesting him more than the wrecks. He's no archaeologist, but he's still got questions about how this city wound up on the bottom of the ocean, and he's careful in handling any artifacts, generally just brushing off grime rather than picking them up and playing with them.

And maybe mentally chattering to Erik occasionally about anything particularly interesting, or any theories he might have about it. Maybe Atlantis really was real in this world, wherever it was.]

[ooc: Feel free to play with the timeline a little if it works better for you/your character, I don't have anything super specific planned for Charles for this port, so multiples/fuzzy time/etc. is totally cool with me. c:]

[Hi, Barge, someone else really doesn't want to talk about the flood, so Charles is taking this opportunity to talk more about science. Everyone loves science, especially when it's a distraction from things like promising your best friend you'd come rescue him from Auschwitz and sincerely meaning it because you're a telepath and can pretty much do what you want. :\

Science is generally easier to talk about than feelings. :c]

I'd imagine most of you are familiar with the concept of mass extinctions, wherein the population of all living things on Earth is decreased by over fifty percent. It is, after all, what helped propel mammals into being the dominant life forms on Earth after the dinosaurs went extinct. But despite the widespread devastation each time, some species do survive, and can remain largely unchanged since they originally evolved. The horseshoe crab, for example, is virtually identical to its relatives that have been preserved as fossils from several million years ago.

Others are considerably less well known and familiar to us, and some potentially have yet to even be rediscovered. Although it's quite rare to rediscover a species after it's been thought dead for thousands if not millions of years - for example, it's highly unlikely that a Brachiosaurus has escaped the attention of modern science while roaming the woods of North America - it has happened before.

One such species was considered extinct by the scientific community until December 23, 1938. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer - a museum curator in South Africa - told local fishermen that if they ever found anything unusual in their hauls to call her in immediately. On this particular day, she was called down to the docks to investigate a captain's haul and discovered a five foot long fish with navy blue scales and white spots that looked like nothing she'd ever seen before. After hurrying the specimen back to the museum and preserving it as best she could after the local morgue refused to help preserve the body, she began to go through her books trying to locate the fish, but couldn't find any information about it. When a friend from Rhodes University was finally able to come look at the specimen, he immediately recognized it as a coelacanth, an ancient fish thought to have gone extinct since the end of the Cretaceous period. A population of fish had apparently been living on the east coast of Africa for potentially millions of years, largely unnoticed by human populations because they spend most of the day very deep under water. Occasionally a fish would be caught by a fisherman, but as the flesh is incredibly oily and often makes people sick, they were often tossed away as trash without a second thought. A second population was more recently discovered in Indonesia.

There are plenty of other examples of so called "living fossils", and Lazarus taxa, both plants and animal, but a discovery like this is generally unheard of, especially considering the coelacanth is generally considered to be a step in understanding how land based animals developed locomotion, as fossil evidence suggests that tetrapods evolved from fish whose fins eventually developed into legs and allowed them to walk out of the water and onto dry land. I've often wondered if another similar discovery might be made with further exploration. Living things are, after all, incredibly resilient, and we still haven't mapped the entirety of our planet's surface.

[Private to Steve]

Do you have a minute? There's something I need to discuss with you.

[Private to Jean]

Merlin tells me you two have been experimenting with the limits of your abilities.

So much of what we just accept as a given about our physical characteristics is the direct result of adapting to better fit the environment we live in. Some of it's fairly obvious - having a roughly symmetrical body makes things like movement easier and vision more useful, that sort of thing - but some of the adaptations humans have made since the first homo sapiens was born are a bit more complicated to find specific cause for.

For example, eye color is generally considered a polygenic trait, which means that more than one gene pair is involved, versus just one, but blue eyes are the result of one very specific genetic mutation that occurred less than ten thousand years ago. That means there was one founder mutation that gave rise to everyone in Europe with blue eyes.

The trait spread rapidly across the European subcontinent, and while DNA generally gets shuffled and reshuffled each time a new generation is born, people born with this mutation not only have a remarkable number of other genetic markers in common, but this particular stretch of DNA remains so similar suggests that not only are blue eyes a relatively modern mutation, but also that evolutionarily speaking, the mutation had something to offer, otherwise the rapid spread and preservation of the DNA sequence probably would have been less pronounced and perhaps not even have been preserved to the modern era.

It's next to impossible to know what happened ten thousand years ago that made this trait beneficial to early Europeans, but it did, at some point, apparently have some desirable to offer evolutionarily. [He pauses for a moment, chuckling a little.] Or perhaps early Europeans just found blue eyes attractive.

[Private to Erik]

What do you think of David? [He isn't lying in a heap in a hallway somewhere, is he. :|]

[Private to Merlin]

Have you spoken to Arthur?

[Private to Arthur]

I have a favor to ask.

[Private to Barbara]

Do you have a moment?

[Charles is sitting in his office, which looks both neat and a little cluttered, and looks more or less exactly the same as he does on the Barge, although without the wheelchair, since there was no getting shot on a beach in Cuba in this world. He's been grading papers, which are neatly stacked off to the side and a little hidden from the camera, so you can't see how your classmates have been doing.]

I suppose we should count ourselves fortune the earthquake didn't seem to cause any damage. Unfortunately - for some of you, I suppose - I plan on holding classes as usual, which means I hope you've all studied for your quiz this afternoon. [He's teasing a little bit, the quiz won't be that hard and they all know it, but seriously guys you're not getting a free pass out of this. You need to know how things like evolution happened instead of just saying a wizard did it.]

For anyone who missed my last announcement, we'll be doing Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses this fall, and again, auditions are at three o'clock on Friday. and I still haven't made a final decision on the musical, so if anyone has any suggestions - that aren't Oklahoma!, thank you very much, Mr. Lensherr, that joke's gotten a bit tired - feel free to bring them up with me. I've been considering a few adaptations of The Fountain of Fair Fortune or Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific, but nothing's quite jumped out to me just yet.

Set work begins for Metamorphoses in two weeks, but the first meeting for the technical crews is this Saturday in the auditorium at two, if any newcomers are interested in getting involved. Please be reminded that part of the meeting will be a seminar on safely enchanting set pieces and props, and other important details to keep this a fun, safe production for anyone involved.

[ooc: Charles Xavier was a student at Floodholme several years ago, went on to get like three different degrees in things just because he could and decided to come back to teach here with your flying teacher, who's bff since freshman year. He was in Cockrel, was kind of a show offy know it all who nevertheless was suave and popular with the ladies and had his moments of being a douche. He's a talented wizard, but he's here to teach you all biology and run the theater program after school. He's that teacher who seems like a huge softy and does really care about his students - and thus is fairly popular - but also isn't afraid to push them hard academically. He writes killer college recommendations, and you're free to call him Professor X if you so desire. It caught on a while ago and the name seems to have stuck.

Oh, he's also a really talented legilimens, but only a handful of people know about it. With great power comes great responsibility and everything.]