She still feels more than a little out of place among this crowd, but home is home, and Madelyne's slowly coming to grips with the fact that that sort of thing is really important. Nowhere near as easy to write off as she wishes, at the very least. Besides, even if the whole 'schmoozing with Avengers for Independence Day' thing gets to be too weird, she can always just look at it as a birthday party for her small-town art teacher, which is about as simple and blissfully boring a thing that she can possibly come up with.

"Charles," she nods in greeting, doing what she feels is an admirable job of setting aside her personal reservations to approach one of the few people from home who doesn't give her that strange sensation of precariousness that's been haunting more and more often of late. "So did your X-Men like a good party as much as the ones I knew? How universal are these things?"