AT THE XAVIER INSTITUTE:
IT'S SPIRIT WEEK!! A myriad exciting things will be going on all week, presumably, although your friendly neighbourhood mods aren't doing the organising for that – if your character is organising an event, feel free to either plan it in the comments to this post or in posts to xi_ooc. If not, keep an eye out for other people's updates!

The weather continues on the colder side. It rains on Wednesday and Friday.


NEWS:
On Sunday October 18th (that's today), news reports air of a large, unidentified object that appears to be a spacecraft, observed by several parties to plummet into the Atlantic Ocean. The stretch of ocean it supposedly crashed into is searched – there are signs of severe disruption on the seabed but nothing is actually found.

On Tuesday 20th, a group of three youths are caught graffiti-ing pro-mutant messages on the property of Allen Sherrdit, Harvey Thompson's running mate in the upcoming election. (In, like, two game weeks, guys, omg!) One of them, having previously been using her pyrokinetic abilities to let the group see what they were doing, panics when Sherrdit's security apprehends them and hurls a fireball at one of the guards, who is severely injured – the guards retaliate by shooting. The pyrokinetic mutant, Fiona Mackintosh, 21, is killed – the others, Cody Ziemba, 19, and Saundra Bahe, 24, are unharmed, but are arrested – whether they are mutants is not being publicised.


WHAT WOLVERINE DID THIS WEEK:
Battles the Slow Loris on the edge of a mile-high African cliff. A narrow victory.


OOC NOTICES:
• Applications open this coming Wednesday, December 16th. They'll stay open for a week, until December 23rd. Any app we get before we wake up on December 24th will be valid. On that note, we'd like to remind you about the recent post on character limits. To clarify: staff apps will be open this week, but not next app period. If you have any other questions about limits feel free to IM a mod.

• On a vaguely related note, from this app period onwards, the activity requirement for characters based outside the Institute is going to be lower than the one for those studying or working there. Whilst during an activity check all characters are currently required either to have tagged somewhere during the week before the check or to tag while the check is going on, from now on that will only go for characters at the Xavier Institute – others will only need to have tagged somewhere during the month before the check, and we'll be much more lenient in cases where they haven't depending on the individual character and what they're up to. This isn't to say that non-Institute characters can't be hecka active if you want them to be, but we do recognise that it's not as easy to get activity for a lone villain, for example, or for someone working in a shop in Salem Center, as for a student at Xavier's. This is also to remind you that characters like this are totally allowed and encouraged.

• Speaking of villains, we're starting to get back to people who've emailed us about this (very belatedly in some cases, we're afraid!) but we need some bad guys for a specific plot event in the near future and more can't hurt. Email us at xavierinstitutemods@gmail.com or IM a mod, if you're interested.

• As ever, this post is open for talking about what's going down for classes and mentor groups this week. Now that first-person action logs are permitted as well as prose, we'd encourage people to thread more classes and mentor group activities rather than just handwaving all of them, but if you don't want to do a thread or you want to plan something &c., this is the place!