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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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."

"...huh," said Summer, blinking a little, because she'd never really thought about it before, but now she was.

"I'm sure," she came up with a moment later, "they've got some.sort of process all figured out from, like, evolution or whatever. Maybe that's where they're.migrating to? Someplace closer to the planet's core where it's all nice and warmer and they just nestle in together all cute and comfy..."

Which was adorable to think about, so she was just going to cling to that, because experience told her nature was never that fucking adorable and it was probably some serious ton-ton shit where they all decended on one of the big native cattle-like creatures to attack it to death and burrow into its warm rotting carcas, which they would then consume in the morning for breakfast...

"Food smells really good," Summer noted, which was a very normal line of thinking.

Barry would be lying if he wasn't thinking about the scene in Episode Five of Space Battles where Fluke got shoved into a carcass but that's not something you bring up right before dinner.

Besides the comfy and cute imagery was nice.

"Yeah, I didn't realize how hungry I was," he said looking back at the food containers. "We're good on time for the sunset right?"

"Oh, yeah," said Summer, smirking. "Definitely. That two minutes we shaved off really put us waaaay ahead of schedule."

"Hey, sometimes two minutes can be a very valuable thing," Barry countered cheerfully, "Especially if these sunsets are as beautiful as you say they are."

"I mean," said Summer, "there is always the chance that the weather might not be in our favor again," with a bit of a grin there because she was very much of the opinion that the weather had definitely been in their favor on Friday, "but I think we'll be good. This leg of the trip's a little shorter, too. Didn't want to put too much time between getting the food and getting to eat it."

"Oh. Right. The weather," Barry said with a slightly embarrassed cough. "I should probably come clean on that."

He cleared his throat a bit.

"The solar collector would have worked just fine on a cloudy day. I was just-"

Damn it. Was his ears turning red again?

"Just looking for an excuse to ask you out."

Oh that control panel really looked interesting! Hmm. Yes. Blinking lights and all of that. "Oh, hey is that the planet over there?"

Edited 2020-08-19 16:20 (UTC)

...this was one of the greatest things that had ever happened to Summer.

Also, her metric for those distinctions were a little bit skewed.

So she stared at Barry for a moment (word of advice, maybe don't break your pilot's brain when flying through unfamiliar space? But he could probably handle it, at least), before another grin slowly surfaced.

"Yeah," she said, carefully resetting focus and the course on the destination, "that's the planet over there."

And she paused for what she thought was just enough time for him to think that maybe he'd gotten away with her not mentioning anything, before adding, "And you could have gone your whooooole life without even telling me that."

She was very clearly loving it that he had, though.

Barry's ears were quite red by now. And yes, he caught Summer's smile from his peripheral vision but he wasn't quite ready to look her in the eye yet.

"Well, true," he said struggling for words a bit. "But you know if we're going to a planet where we have a few minutes to get on a ship before you freeze to death, a short cloudy day recharge time might be a good thing to know."

He was struggling with concentration at the moment and he hated that but he finally was able to push through that to see what some of the sensor readings were telling him. "Power levels are good including the thermal shielding for re-entry."

Which was totally obvious for anyone who flew a spacecraft but look a change of topic!

"Thanks," said Summer, with a grin, as she set to taking care of a few conveniently vague things she needed to do for said re-entry. "I appreciate the concern for us not freezing to death."

"Well, I figure surviving the first date is a key component to maybe getting to a second date," Barry said now venturing his line of vision to actually look at Summer. "And you know. Honesty too."

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