somethingwithturquoise | Syndulla Scrap, then Parts Beyond; Tuesday Evening [08/18].

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Syndulla Scrap, then Parts Beyond; Tuesday Evening [08/18].

Even though she knew everything was fine, Summer was a little tempted to get to the scrapyard early and fiddle with the ship before things got started for her daaaate, but, on the other hand, she did not turned her bedroom into a warzone of rejected outfits (which were surely now collecting enough cat hair to knit a sweater as Pancakes inevitably assumed all those clothes were strewn about specifically for her to sleep on) until settling on something seemingly effortless just to risk messing it up. She also thought about being 'fashionably late' andm making Barry wait for her at the ship, but, ugh, no, did we really want to be that person? So she got there early enough to just check some of the basic diagnositics (especially with the new power source) and got her started to warm her up, reminding herself of what Rey had said about her overthinking it.

So she figured she might as well just delve into the most mindless thing possible to counterbalance it by scrolling through Instagram for potential shot ideas for this apparent Girls Night Out that was going on tomorrow.

If there wasn't at least some karaoke involved, she was going to be so disappointed in this generation (which was still technically also pretty much her own generation, but shhhh).

[[ for that guy! ]]

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Lucky for Summer and Barry, Barry had one female friend who was smart enough to call him two hours before their date to remind him he should wear something better than jeans and a t-shirt.

For all his smarts, Barry was still a "guy".

Despite a lot of swearing and flailing, Roxie was still able to guide Barry to a look she called 'casual but sophisticated' which Barry considered just semantics but in the end he agreed he looked good.

What was really irritating him was that he had planned out his route to the scrapyard to meet Summer exactly on time. But then some doofus in white armor got in his path which involved both of them shifting in the same direction to avoid each other multiple times which caused him to be late by exactly 8.3 seconds. Now he had to make a decision on whether to apologize for being late or ensuring he complimented Summer's outfit.

But when he arrived at the scrapyard, he was able to put most of those anxieties aside when he actually saw Summer. That allowed him to take a breath and for once clear his thoughts for a second or two.

"Hi," he said breaking into smile. "You... you look fantastic. Sorry I'm late."

By 8.3 seconds mind you.

It was a detail that mostly just caused Summer to look up from her phone somewhat blankly for a moment, blink to clear away the rainbow array of jello recipes forefront in her brain, then glance back down at the clock on her phone.

...um.

"Don't worry about it," she said, thinking maybe he was on some different time for whatever reason, she didn't know how all that time jump shit affected people. But now shots and time disparities were drifting out of her attention, being replaced very firmly by the significant glow up from a worn old Space Battles t-shirt, and all that hard work toward trying to be all super chill and not gushy threatened to be thrown right out the window.

"You look...pretty good, too," she said with a grin of her own. "You ready? The ship didn't blow up when I started her, so that's a pretty good sign the solar converter took."

Which was good because that kind of explosion would have been bad. Very bad.

"Good!" Barry said cheerfully, "Nothing ruins the mood more than a solar powered explosion. I, um, did pick up something for you when I was home this weekend."

He reached into his messenger bag which for some reason took more of his arm than should have been possible. He then pulled out two compact (but still too big to have fit in that bag) ion cannons. "I figured we could hook these up for you sometime later. The mount will have to be modified as well as the power output. Is this weird? My friend told me to bring flowers but who doesn't want ion cannons?"

Barry looked down at the weapons.

"Okay. Maybe this is weird."

There may have been, for a fleeting millisecond, a small part of Summer that may have felt the tiniest bit of disappointment over a lack of flowers, but that blip didn't even stand a chance.

"No, this is great," Summer gushed quickly, holding out her hands to take one of the cannons for closer inspection and a definite appreciation for the sheer hotness of a guy pulling big-ass guns out of a too-small bag and those guns were for her.

Soooooo shiny. It had been a while since she had quite the massive weapon like this was (not dirty!) in her arms so if she wound up clinging to it a little, that was why.

"How was your trip home, by the way?" she asked, once she was able to pull herself out of Big Guns, Summer Like mode enough to remember what they were doing, and then she shook her head. "Wait, no, you can tell me on the way. We should figure out where we're going first."

Barry let out a sigh of relief. Okay. He couldn't wait to tell Roxie she was wrong.

Which was no doubt going to be a very long conversation in which he will never admit to being wrong. But did that mean he had to bring weapons on the next date? Ok. That's going to haunt him for a bit.

Shake it off, Barry. You're on a date and need to interact.

"Oh yeah? We have options?" Barry asked cheerfully. "I'm pretty down with whatever you have in mind. I mean... I'm not picky or anything."

Summer was just going to need a moment to think ack fondly on the nice kickback a gun this size had when blasting through walls and aliens , even though she knew they were, you know, for her ship and wielding around in a way that let you skip arm day for, like, a month afterwards.

But, oh, hey. Right. Daaaate.

The grin on Summer's face turned a little sheepish. "Let's go throw these in one of the storage compartments," she said, cocking her head toward the ship. "I used to smuggle weapons in them all the time, so they should be fine in there for now, right? But anyway, yeah," the sheepishness...mostly left the grin again, "we've got options.

"But I need your help narrowing it down." Taken pretty much verbatim from Rey's advice, and her smile was more for having nailed it (she had practiced!) than anything else. "We've got a world entirely inhabited by bird people, so it's mostly worms, except these eggs that could honestly literally blow your mind, or I was thinking of this nice vegetarian place on this planet that's a real dump, so we can snag it to-go and picnic it up elsewhere. Also, how do you feel about dumb action movies?"

Yeah, she figured she already knew the answer to that one, but it didn't hurt to check!

"Well don't judge but I am an actual fucking vegetarian. Not going to lie: the grab and go picnic sounds pretty good," he said carefully watching Summer's reaction to ensure he was making the right choice. "And dumb action films are fucking awesome. Pure guilty pleasure on my part. That's not too stupid right?"

Honestly the dumber the action film, the better. Barry found dumb distractions to be the best way to relax.

Which explained his initial friendship with Jeremy.

"I take it you have something in mind?"

Well, yeah, duh, she knew you were vegetarian, Barry, because you shouted it over everyone when you flew over the pole last week, and Summer paid attention, so that was why she picked it.

She did suppose he could have been being facetious, too, but that was a risk she was willing to take, and she was pleased to see that it had paid off.

"There's this show," she said, "that I really like that's popular enough in a few dimensions that it got a movie franchise, so I figured we'd head over to one of those after dinner and catch a showing. Not one of the best ones," she admitted, because she did not need to deal with 'oh, hey, aren't you that girl that incited a war with the giant spiders that took over our planet?' on a first official date, "but still pretty good. So, grab some.food, catch some sweet space scenery on Venzenulon 9 before night sets in," because then they would kind of freeze to death, "then hit up a movie in a dimension with far better appreciation for the fine action arts than this one."

Would that work? WAS THAT GOOD ENOUGH? Was it WORTHY? Or was she better off faking a problem with the ship and saving herself the humiliation now???

Although even then, she suspected trying to fake a problem with the ship with Barry wouldn't be easy, anyway.

"That sounds... Fucking. Awesome," Barry said looking like he just won the lottery.

And don't fake a problem with the ship, Summer. Barry could probably tell and no doubt think you were adorable for trying.

And then his brain started to bug him. Fucking brain.

"I mean, as long as you're cool with it. Shit, this is perfect for me but only if this is what fucking interests you too. I don't want you to be bored halfway through the opening credits. If it is, Jesus, I'm glad we left the details up to you."

Otherwise Summer might have been stuck watching the Sharknado documentaries.

And the Sharknado documentaries ran the risk of leading to Summer ranting through the whole thing about her room being the only one in the whole dormitory to have a goddamn shark crash through it and have you ever had to shove a dead shark out of your bedroom in the middle of a storm before? That was a sight and sound and smell you didn't forget for a very long time.

But Summer's swell of satisfaction at the supposed perfection of her plan was starting to put her own fucking brain into a nosedive toward a whole 'lady doth protest too much' situation.

"I mean," she reasoned, hoping to put off the feeling creeping in that Barry was just being nice, because that was something about him, he was really nice, probably way too nice for someone like her, but she also couldn't just let a whole 'nother Pastor Carter situation happen over here, not at this point!, "I'm the one with the ship, and there's literally countless of options available, so if I wasn't cool with it, that's on me at that point."

How could anyone get bored over the opening credits of a Ball Fondlers movie? Even the end credits.were over the top adrenaline fueled joyride of carnage and big ass guns.

Okay. Barry felt his anxieties ease up and realized that if he let his brain and anxieties keep going he was going to fuck this first date up.

"Then I'm going with what I originally said. This is fucking awesome," he said earnestly. "I just wanted to make sure this for the both of us because is our fucking date. Not just for me."

He gave her a grin.

"Cool?"

See? Nice. Like, super nice. Nice enough that if she let her brain go that way, she'd start to wonder what the catch was.

You know, the vibrant red flags of particular implications, issues, experiences and hang-ups notwithstanding.

It wasn't like Summer was thinking about any of that right now, because there was someone (okay, okay, not just someone, but a guy that she liked) showing her a modicum of respect and consideration and basic human decency, and that always got her way more than it probably should.

"Very cool," she breathed out, grinning back, until her brain reminded her of a thing called moving.

"So we better get going!" She then said brightly, and was moving quickly for the interior of the ship and the cockpit. "Like I said, we'll want to try to get plenty of time on Venzenulon 9 before nightfall, because once it's night, it drops to, like, negative three hundred degrees, but the sunsets are a-maze-ING."

Better than the ones on Venzenulon 7? Well, they better get going.

Barry put the remaining ion cannon into the storage locker and followed Summer to the cockpit. "I'm looking forward to it," Barry said as he strapped himself into his seat. Looking over the console he did double check the primary power inverters just to make sure there wasn't any issues but even at a glance he could tell they were running fine.

Again, solar explosions are a total buzzkill.

"So where is this place with the great vegetarian food?"

That extreme temperature disparity made a surprisingly big difference!

"Planet ~~Blah blah Handwavey~~," said Summer, settling into the pilot's sear with the small, inevitable satisfied sigh about it that she was never going to get rid off, then tapped a few things on her phone to confirm the time and coordinates for the portal once they got going out of atmo, "in the ~~Because I'm Making This All Up~~ Nebula." Her hands moved with swift knowledge over the dash as she talked. "They were waaaaay far up the Galactic Federation's butt, so they got boned pretty hard when we dismantled it a few years ago. Which means we're supporting a recovering local economy, too!"

Edited 2020-08-18 19:07 (UTC)

"Does it count as shopping local if it's on another planet?" Barry joked as he essentially did what a co-pilot should do and monitor the ship's current status and sensor readings. "Not that Fandom needs help with the shop local thing. For a small island it pretty much has fucking everything."

As he settled back in the chair and let Summer do her thing, he brought one if the 2,000 bits of prepared conversation topics he had been dwelling on for the last 48 hours. "So I don't think I asked you. How did you end up in Fandom? I know you were a student but everyone I've met ended up here by accident or got sent here somehow."

There was a small moment of glowing pride for the comment on Fandom's vast availability of pretty much everything, since she kiiiiinda felt pretty instrumental in that, with the store and all, and then snorted a little at the question, passing a wry smirk over to Barry as the ship got moving.

"Funny you should ask that after I mentioned the Fed," she said. "They're kind of the whole reason I'm here. Right, so, there was this whole thing, where my grampa turned himself in to the Galactic Federation, and ~~spoiler alert~~ they took over Earth, and it was total bullshit, and I couldn't believe we were just letting that happen. So I wanted to figure out how to break him out of there, you know, because it was bullshit, they couldn't just do that, but my conformist, weak-spined parents were all, 'Summer, the Federation has been so good to us now!' Which it, like, wasn't, but whatever. Anyway, so their solution was just to be all, 'let's send Summer away until she gets this out of her system,' so I kid you not, I totally thought this place was a complete Federation brainwash summer camp, or some shit, for the first few weeks. You should have seen me lose my mind when I found out we had real food here instead of pills!"

And a whole obsession with pancakes was this born, although there was plenty of evidence to suggest that the pancakes thing had deeper roots.

"Anyway, my brother and me eventually managed to bust Grampa Rick out of space prison, and we dismantled the Galactic Federation, and I decided to finish up school here because I liked it so much."

Summer shrugged a little, shaking her head slightly as she marveled at how that seemed, like, FOREVER ago, then smiled over at him.

"What about you? What's your Fandom story?"

Barry listened to that story unfold and was giving Summer a look of admiration. "I know I've said this before, but you are a total badass."

He paused for a moment before starting his own story. "Well, I found Fandom on my own actually. I was in my own dimension on my Earth when I came across a stream of interdimensional transmissions which turned out to be the podcasts coming from the radio station. Right after that one of my experiments had gone absolutely fucking wrong. Like... killed my friends dead wrong. I had to go back in time ten times until I got it fixed right. After that I didn't want to endanger them. So I enrolled myself in school the summer before my senior year. I figured it was safer to do my shit in a place in an interdimensional nexus where things were already fucked up and, bonus, my friends wouldn't get hurt. I didn't count on the freedom I had to do what I wanted without the government turning me into a one person braintrust or a science experiment. I also didn't count on making as many friends as I did."

He smiled and chuckled a bit to himself. "I think I told you some of that. That's why I'm back. Because maybe there's a kid who's fucked up like me and I can pay it back."

Summer almost managed to miss the first part of that; she was sort of stuck glowing at the badass comment while also focusing on the atmosphere breech and shifting to space mode, but then her focus was on listening to Barry.

Well, and hitting them portal cords.

"I mean," she said, encouragingly, "that's pretty badass, too. I'm sorry about your friend, though. That...couldn't have been easy."

Barry thought about Jeremy, Roxie and everyone else he had met on the island before and smiled.

"I couldn't have been who I am without them," Barry admitted. "It was worth the risk. And as much as that island drives me nuts I'm looking forward to seeing what else is in store for me here."

As they exited the atmosphere, Barry checked the coordinates and again the sensors (like a good co-pilot should) to make sure everything was working correctly and there weren't any energy dips from the conversion.

"So, in between taking down galactic empires, running a convenience store, tending bar, teaching a class and god knows what else because I think you sleep less than I do.... what do you do for fun? Beside come up with insane jello shots."

Yes. Another set of conversational topics he had worked on in the last 48 hours.

Summer grinned a little, wondering if he'd just really done his research, or if it was pretty much impossible to spend more than a few days on the island anymore without her infamous jello shots coming up.

Either way, she felt it was a win for her.

"I don't know," she said with a laugh, "the normal stuff? Which just sounds boring and lame after all that. I have a cat?" Which meant there was a good chance Barry wasn't leaving this ship without at least a little cat fur getting on him, because for a supposedly short-haired breed, Pancakes shed a lot. "I really like Instagram and discovering new music, shopping, fashion, cute animals, the Bachelor, partying with my friends..."

God, the more she went on, the more vapid it all sounded, especially following all that other stuff. You didn't really have to think about how it sounded when you usually just threw it up on a Tinder profile.

"...exploring the various intricacies of of the endless variety that exists in the infinite interdimensional multiverse?"

That was better.

"What about you?" Summer asked. "It's not all experiments and lab work and being, like, super smart all the time, is it? Well..." She really couldn't help herself with this one, as evident in her smirk, "and also working at our quaint local sex shop..."

Barry’s face turned a bright red at the mention of Dite’s. He coughed a bit just in order not to address that part of his life.

“Honestly I spent the last five years turning a world that was in the Bronze Age through a clean energy industrial revolution. So... yeah. It was mostly science and theories and thinking. I know it sounds ridiculous but I can’t stop thinking. So I don’t have pets. Just personal projects. I do try to read anything I can get my hands on. Non fiction, fiction, sci fi and everything really. Not just science shit. But lately... I guess it’s been me stuck in my warehouse doing science and shit. I do have companies but that’s mainly to funnel my research into the world-“

So yes, Summer, that hundred at T&C wasn’t him flexing.

“-I don’t manage the day to day. I use to do some black hat hacking stuff but I’m only donning the white hat and doing it to help others.”

Barry stopped and facepalmed himself. “Fuck. I sound like a fucking hermit and bragging at the same time. Honestly though, none of that means anything unless you can take some time off and hang out with a bad ass; watch a beautiful sunset and then watch a shitty action movie.”

He motioned around the ship. “Or. You know. Overhaul a ship’s engine. This is... nice. I haven’t had fun like this in a long time.”

He paused feeling awkward. And looking at Summer he realized he didn’t have anything prepared to say at that moment. “What’s your cat’s name?”

Toward the end of all that, the ship accelerated as they hit those sweet portal coords; it wasn't necessary to accelerate, obviously, but there was just something about speeding up through a portal that gave Summer a little thrill enough to the point where it became a habit with her, that slight lurch of the engines followed by the sudden, sometimes subtle shift in the space around them.

"Glad I could help," she said, a little too genuine to be fully cocky about it, but it was kind of hard not to be after all that, as she took a moment to reorient the ship and her sense of navigation. Good, they weren't too far off course at all.

"And it's Pancakes," she offered, her expression going warm and adoring and maybe a little sheepish now. "Because her fur is the exact color of a perfectly cooked pancake."

IT WAS A THING, OKAY?

"You'll have to come meet her sometime," she added, because, you know, then he'd have to come by her apartment...and stuff.

And because Barry is a giant fucking nerd the first thing he thought of when he heard about the perfect color of a pancake was "#f5dc87". Which is weird. So he didn't say that out loud.

And then when he heard the invite he got very interested in looking at the sensors regarding engine power throughput. Mostly so Summer might miss his face turning red because of the 'other stuff' that his thoughts might have led to."I'd... I'd like that," he said meekly.

"That was pretty cool piloting," he said trying to hide his embarrassment. "And looking at the star chart for those coordinates there's a planet right... here that if you did a quick orbit you can use the inertia to fling us there about two minutes faster."

Which might sound like him being nerdy but he also thought the maneuver would be pretty cool.

"Okay, nerd," said Summer, because it really did sound like him being nerdy, and she couldn't exactly help pointing it out with a smirk, even if it, really, it wasn't like there hadn't been pretty nerdy things before then, either.

And, now that he'd pointed it out, she definitely saw it, too. And could hardly just ignore it now that it was there, and so her eyes narrowed a little on the chart, then out the window and considered the planet, made a feeeew quick adjustments, and then gunned it toward the orbit.

Let's see if she could try and make it fewer than two.

Barry had been called many worse things in his life. Mostly by his friends. And to him just being called a nerd was a compliment.

As she gunned the engine and sped the ship around and slingshot them, Barry couldn't help but throw his arms up in the air like he was on roller coaster.

"FUCK YEAH! WOOOO!"

Because an inertia sling shooting spaceship deserved a cheer.

"Where did you learn to fly? Anakin Skywalker's class or somewhere else?"

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