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[minded]

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[minded]

For what it's worth, the whole estate had been very English, on account of Charles's family buying up the whole thing to be a summer home. Certainly he has the ancestral house back in England, and he maintains it well enough, but the estate-turned-campus in Westchester is as much his home as it is for his students.

It is a little overbearingly large, Charles supposes, even for a privately funded school for troubled youths. The converted mansion is just one part of it; there's the freshly installed basketball court, the running track a little further out, the archery target fields and the obstacle course, to say nothing of the expansive garden. It has a proper greenhouse and groundskeeper.

Yes, it's all quite a lot.

A teenager greets Muldoon when he knocks, too—ordinary-looking by most standards, except this child has iridiscent blue hair and reptilian eyes, with fully-developed nictitating membranes when she blinks - true third eyelids. You're the beastmaster guy? She remarks almost impolitely, before pointing down the hall. I'll sort the animals while you guys talk things.

Down the hall, and it's more of the same strangeness. There's a girl with antler horns coming out of her forehead, peeking through the banisters with a boy whose hair is moving on its own. A pair of teenagers duck into a classroom; one of them has bird wings on his back. A young woman with red hair is staring intently at a cardboard panel with a slightly older young man, himself with a shock of white hair, and both look up to Muldoon with mild curiosity.

To your left, welcome to the academy, the redhead politely indicates, before returning to the panel in her hands—but she hadn't actually spoken, has she?

By the time Muldoon's entered, Charles is just finishing up a phone conversation. "—And we'll continue tomorrow, yes? Thank you. My guest is here, I'll have to let you go now."

Charles sets the phone down, then wheels himself around the desk and towards Muldoon. "Welcome to the acadamy, my friend. I hope the drive wasn't too awful?"

[allbedestroyed]

The closest comparison he has is the big houses in his homeplace, though they are nothing like this. Or perhaps the great homes he's visited briefly which used to belong to Indian Rajas. None had the suffocating decorum of an English manor. He'd never felt as at ease in his mother's homeland. Perhaps thankfully, there are bigger things to focus on.

The warden is almost mesmerized by his greeter's eyes, until she mentions his own words. "Don't touch the animals," he instructs a little belatedly. "I'll sort them out in a minute."

Pondering what he'd just seen, and questioning his own eyes a bit, the rest of his walk to the professor is just as battling. It's not disgust or horror with which he stares, but confused curiosity. Perhaps Charles has spoiled these kids, and given them expensive prosthetic toys, he tries to reason. It's a meagre attempt to rationalise what he's seeing, and it helps him stop staring quite so much, quite so directly, but it falls short of actually explaining what his eyes are telling him.

The helpful directions aren't any better.

"Thanks," he says reflexively, and starts down the hall before what had happened catches up with him.

By the time he approaches Charles, he's rubbing his temple, feeling like he's just walked through a dream and is in a horribly disorientating half-awake state. It takes all of his focus to pull his mind back to the present. In this case it's a good thing his mother instilled traditional British over-politeness in him. He'd never been as good at it as she'd liked, picking up the roughness from his father, but it does make it easier to pretend he hadn't seen... everything he'd just seen, and continue as per normal. He can ponder what it all means later. Right now he's on the job, and he'll be damned if he lets himself be unprofessional.

"No." He pauses to clear his throat and focus better. "No the drive was alright."

Followed by the obligatory (and fair), "This is a lovely place." More truthfully he adds, "It isn't what I was expecting."