Template:Featured Articles/50-2017

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Moment of Awesome - Kevin Sydney/Changeling : An old jaded spy talks to a younger frustrated spy about the job and what it demands.

"Out late" she noted, something to say, rather than because she felt he needed to be informed of the time. "What would your mother say?"

"No idea. She died long before I started to drink." Kevin said blandly. "Although, in my experience, mothers usually tell me 'oh god', 'more more' and in one interesting night, 'my sister first'."

"You do that a lot, ya know," Jubilee said, wrinkling her nose slightly after taking a drink of her beer. Not her normal drink, but she hadn't wanted to go out and Kurt kept a supply in the suite fridge. "That whole bringing everything back to sex. Always wondered if that was just like, a tick of yours, or something operational?"

"You're a spy. You should know better. The simplest answer is that I like sex a lot and I'm too old to care what people think. Small talk, my dear, is for the young and optimistic. Cynical perversity is for the jaded, world weary alcoholic."

"Sit down and keep me company then, old man." Jubilee said with a laugh, pushing herself over to give him space. "Sometimes I like not being a spy when I'm here. I'm not sure it's a good idea to always think that way, even when you're home."

"This..." Kevin indicated around them. "Isn't home. You think you have the luxury of being about to not be a spy. I know better."

Jubilee took another drink and cracked her neck before her mouth twisted in what could only be described as the difference between a real smile, and what wanted to be a frown.

"It wasn't like this before, you know."

"What, the mansion or the job?"

"Both," Jubilee said, her tone almost a snap from her certainty. "That fucking event. It wasn't just that nobody can go a foot now without someone falling over themselves to condemn mutants. It's that we had more people, more time to think through everything. Maybe it was just that our bosses were workaholics who tended to deal with all the really difficult shit themselves. I'd whine more but it's not like he didn't give me the whole 'this is your life now, be certain' speech before I even started."

"Ah, the mysterious former heads of Snow Valley." Kevin shook his head. "M-Day changed the circumstances. In 1945, we dropped two bombs that changed the global socio-political landscape and redefined how nation states operated for the next half century. That was the deaths of a quarter of a million people. Almost ten million died as a result of M-Day, and they still don't have the slightest clue why it happened and whether or not it could happen again. You're going to be an old lady before you see that change. So that, Jubilation Lee, is why I drink constantly and talk about fucking a lot. Because I've become an old man living through this once, and staring at doing it again, sex and booze are far more attractive focuses."