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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"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?"

And that was sooooo much nerdier, woooow, but it was hard to not give Barry a pass for it because it was also, like, super validating.

"Ohmygod," said Summer, "I hope my actual flight instructor felt that even from a galaxy far, far away, because he would die. Also, he'd probably totally disapprove of that just now...at least officially."

And at least focusing on the flying would help her from getting too maudlin about this particular topic, too.

"It was Kanan," she offered, "the friend I was helping with the secret spy base jello shop. I mean, I knew how to fly even before I came here. I had my own ship for a little while," and that was all they needed to say about that, "and, obviously, I'd carjack Grampa Rick's P.O.S. on occasion, but he's the one who actually, you know, taught me how to actually do it, like, legit."

“Sounds like he was a cool guy,” Barry replied. “And clearly you picked up some serious skills. I remember taking Skywalker’s class back in the stone ages. I did all right but my buddy Joker could fly circles around us. You would have liked him. Swears even more than I do.

"He's the best," said Summer, with a firm sort of conviction that was also incredibly soft, her eyes focused entirely on their destination for a moment to force any reminder that it had practically been a whole year now since she'd even last talked to him, let alone seen him...

Then she laughed a little, just a small breath of a sound to go along with a grin. "That's not that hard to believe," she said, quirking an eyebrow at Barry. "You didn't even fucking swear once in that whole response."

“Well shit god damn fucking motherfucking fuuuuuuuuck. I missed my quota. Not sure how I’m going to fucking make up for it,” Barry joked. “So I got to ask... given the snippets you’ve mentioned to me, your life seems almost as fucked up as mine. So. I want to hear it. Top three fucked up moments that have made you laugh once you got past it.”

Yes. Another conversation topic he worked on.

That was a hell of a question, there, Barry.

Because when Summer's mind went to 'most fucked up things,' it wasn't exactly paired with laughing at it once you got past it. Maybe in the moment, sure, but that was just a coping method to push you to just get past it and not mention it ever again. It wasn't like any of it was really that funny, especially in retrospect.

Like, what could she say? She almost murdered her parents because she got super deep into a cult based on a misunderstanding regarding giant heads demanding their version of Galaxy Idol? That she threw herself into an apocalyptic cannibalistic wasteland for, like, a month because she just couldn't deal with her parents' divorce? That she almost participated in the near genocide of an entire alien race because her dad was too much of a fucking coward to just break up with his girlfriend?

Ha, ha, yeah. Hilarious.

So Summer kind of needed a moment.

"You first," she said, finding at least a convenient excuse to stall, "we're practically there and I should probably focus on re-entry, y'know?"

Edited 2020-08-19 00:46 (UTC)

Seeing Summer's reaction Barry frowned for a brief second. Then realized he probably wasn't clear enough by what he meant. Maybe a few examples would help

"Right. Sure. So when I first got here I got the bright idea of trying to make a gremlin vaccine. I had to catch a gremlin, get it's venom. Weeks of fucking study. Then the fucking gremlin escaped and I got the vaccine shot by accident. So, the vaccine worked, right? But unfortunately I couldn't determine any side effects before I got the shot. The side effect? Every time I swore I kept making sound effects with my mouth without being aware of it. By the time I got cured I was sneezing gummi bears and vomited a rainbow."

As they started their descent he checked a couple of readings just to make sure the solar battery and power inverters were still holding up. "Second fucked up thing? I had a date with this girl, I liked, right? Well earlier that day I turned a couple of coked up teachers into dinosaurs just for a laugh. Turns out that pissed off a couple of people who decided to barge in during our date and we were interrupted all fucking night. At the end one of my teachers showed up in the warehouse and told us which tables he and his girlfriend used to get busy on and not to use them because they were rickety."

And then moving on quickly to the next moment as he really didn't want to talk about his dating experience in front of a girl he was going on a first date with.

"And finally there was the parents weekend where my buddy Jeremy visited and thought a gremlin was the fucking alien from ~~meta-for~~ E.T. the Extraterrestrial. We got bit and showed up at the school talent show thinking we were George Michael and Freddie Mercury and sang a duet in front of some very fucking confused parents."

Good. The new panels and power source were doing quite well for their first shakedown trip.

"So there you go. Some of my embarrassing fucked up moments on the table. You are more than welcome to mock me relentlessly. I'm pretty sure Roxie still has footage from the talent show."

"I have got to talk to this Roxie," Summer decided with a grin, "because I would fucking love to see thatm"

And, yeah, examples were good, and Summer relaxed a little, as they made their way closer to a planet that had definitely seen better days.

"Also?" she added. "That involved a lot of Fandom stuff. I don't think that really counts, like, everyone's lives get fucked up and weird on Fandom."

Anything she could think of that involved Fandom just seemed kind of boring and tame, too. Fandom made her life less weird and bizarre, really.

"But okay, so. There was this one time when my parents were going away for this dumb ~~Meta-for~~Titantic simulator weekend, so Grampa Rick and me threw this, like, HUGE rager, it got so out of hand that we split reality at one point and it took, like, sixty-four more rifts in reality before we managed to get things back together. There's still a crack in our driveway from when the rift happened, we had to freeze time for like a month just to clean everything up so my parents didn't know after they came home early because guess what? Titantic sucks.

"And then," she offered after a little more thought, "there was the time we were running from the Federation, and there were, like, three planets out of Federation space that were habitable: one had a screaming sun that would scream literally all day, and the days were, like, 42 hours long. On one of them, everything on the whole planet was on a cob. Like, everything. Grampa freaked the fuck out about that one; we still have no idea why." And they probably didn't want to. "So all tgatbqas left was this little tiny planet that took, like, an hour to walk around the whole thing, so we were living on this tiny little planet for a little while. Like, sure, we got closer as a family, but we didn't really have a choice."

She was still having difficulty with a third one, because it was sort of hard to shift past the hard stuff to find those little nuggets of absurdity that she now has a lens of normalcy to look at and realize were really pretty fucked up.

"And, this one time, my dad ate some of the ice cream in Grampa Rick's freezer and had to be rushed to a space hospital to have his stomach pumped, and while we were there, they tried to get him to give up his junk to save some big shot alien humanitarian....alienitarian? Whatever, point is, he freaked the fuck put and was not having any of it, and we still give him shit for that one to this day."

Yeah, Summer was just going to skip over the fact that it had ended in an intergalactic incident that involved watching her father get shot fifty-seven times right in front of her eyes on that one. None of these were that bad if you just cut big portions of them out...because, yeah. Okay, it sucked watching your dad get eviscerated by space security, but still! That was pretty funny.

But as she talked, they made it down to the city and Summer pulled into a drive-thru because this was space, so why not?, and said, "This is the place. What do you think you want?"

Edited 2020-08-19 08:34 (UTC)

"Uhhh. Right," Barry said looking over the menu as he fished for his wallet. "They take Nexus Express, right?"

He called out his order which involved the alien equivalent of hummus, crudite, falafel and a green salad.

And after Summer placed her order he immediately started jabbering again. "If we can jump back a bit to your Dad, are you telling me with all the alien technology in the world they couldn't re-grow your Dad's junk? Shit, it's all there in the fucking gene profile. Your Dad deserves the shit he gets from you guys."

He shook his head in amusement. "Man. It's so nice to hear someone else's life is about as wacked out as mine was. So fine. Let's see... There was the time I knocked the planet off its axis and almost caused another fucking ice age. Jeremy gave me shit for weeks about that. Another time I accidentally spliced the reproductive ability of rodents into hippos. Jeremy actually liked that one because when hippos take a shit their tails spin around like helicopter blades. Took weeks to get the shit stains out of my parent's carpet. Annnd... Geez. So much to choose. Oh. Right. There was the time I turned my aunt into a Cronenberg nightmare blob and had to give her a suppository to cure her. That all happened before the fourth grade. I gave up the Fandom shit first as that's more recent."

"Oh, and you can probably meet Roxie when the entire universe shows up for parents weekend. You'd like her. She's a former Sasquatch who helped me rescue my parents one time. I did some permanent hair removal on her so she could join me and Jeremy at school. She's 6'3" and full of sass. She already wants to meet you."

There was so much that Summee had queued up to say in response to that, but it was all swept very swiftly away by that last part, which sort of hit in a way that made her nearly drop the order being passed over to her in what was already a complicated process, trying to pass a drive-thru order over to a ship with the wingspan of an auxiliary starfighter.

"You talked to your friends about me?"

Oh.

My.

God.

Barry paused a moment and tried to take the response in. He wasn't expecting that because most people freak out over the axis thing. Or the Sasquatch thing. Or-

Okay there was a lot to unpack in his list of fucked up things in his life.

"Um. Yeah. That's okay right? It's not some weird social taboo on your planet that I talked to my friends about you, right?" he said looking a bit concerned. "Because I'm going to play the fucking ignorance card on that one. If it helps, they already think you're a badass."

He told his friends about her and that she was badass?

Considering she was planning on piggy-backing on the whole Cronenberged aunt thing with the fact that her brother Cronenberged a whole world over some super gross love potion ploy during flu season and the Summer in that dimension totally tried to kill her that one time, all that other stuff was very much yeah whatever compared to that.

But she was definitely hearing how that sounded now.

"No!" she said quickly, grateful for the brilliance of take the shil out because it gave her something to focus on other than flailing, as they needed to get back up and coordinate the next portal. "It's okay. It's definitely okay, it's...pretty great actually..."

A small smirk slipped out. "I mean, I guess I'll totally have to meet them now, right? You can't just tell them I'm awesome and then go deprive them of getting to experience my awesomeness first hand, Barry."

Nice. A+ recovery on that one, Summer. Boo-yah.

"Well, I wasn't planning on it," he said returning the smirk. "Though fair warning if you pull that slingshot maneuver with Jeremy in the ship he'll probably piss his pants in excitement. I'll make him wear Depends if you decide to take them for a spin."

As Summer started the next round of coordinates for navigation, Barry secured the food and did a quick run through of the sensor readings. Meanwhile in the back of his head he was trying to think of a solution to resolve the drive-thru giant fighter wings issue they just experienced.

"Next stop Venzenulon 9?"

"If that happens," said Summer, who definitely kind of wanted that to happen now, "he is so responsible for cleaning it up.

"But, yeah," she grinned faintly, "next stop, Venzenulon 9, where we can enjoy some bomb ass food and take in some sweet space vistas. I think their bird population is, like, in migration this time of year, and it's just...like, super moving and shit."

"I'm assuming they don't all freeze to death when night comes," Barry said thinking of all the physiological changes that would need to happen to survive a temperature dip. Not that he'd say them out loud right now because who needs that much of a nerd in a first date? "Because that would be a total buzzkill."

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