I'm gonna move to the southwest, and, I don't know...

It had been a while since Summer and Rey got together for one of these sangria nights, and Summer was really feeling like it was needed. But the nice thing was that the unwinding and conversation that had this time around should be way more positive and uplifting than the last time they did this.

Boy, she certainly hoped so anyway! That last time had gotten dark.

But tonight, there was plenty of sangria to be had, the cats had been isolated in the bedroom with plenty of catnip and their fifty billion different toys that they usually just ignored for pieces of string and packaging tape unless it was decided that what this evening really needed was some cute cat snuggling, she'd set up a pretty relaxing multidimenional playlist that featured heavily on the snake jazz, the space jizz, and the lo-fi hip-hop beats to chill to, there was a small army of hopeful nail polish bottles stationed on her coffee table, and while she waited for Rey to swing by, she was in the kitchen, looming over the glowing screen of her phone in the attempts to mix up an experimental mud mask that she was hoping to convince Rey to at least try once they were a few glasses in.

Dry winter weather was coming for their skin soon; they needed to be prepared.

[[ for the space bestie! ]]

Sure, Summer would be tending to the all-important task of getting Seivarden back to her home universe later that evening, but there was at least one thing she needed to get done before then. Luckily, it wouldn't take very long at all.

And that would be taking a moment to crash Sunday morning breakfast at the Smith household to maybe rub a certain shiny new portal gun right in someone's face.

(What? You didn't expect her to just leave well enough alone, did you?)

( Cut for length and me just being a self-serving neeeerd )

"I...I *braap* told you you should've never sent her to that school..." he murmured, before stalking out of the room, toward the garage, where he needed to make sure that his portal gun was, in fact, still in tact and not turned into that horrible monstrosity in Summer's hands and to reconsider more than a few of his safety precautions...and maybe update some of them to ignore the whole 'Do Not Kill' protocol on certain redheaded granddaughters...

[[ Establishly and NFB, obvs ]]

So, Barry was coming over again for another movie night, although, for Summer's intents and purposes, it really didn't have much to do with a movie at all. Which was maybe why a stupid amount of time was spent between her class that morning and now figuring out a clever way to get the lighting in her living room down to a nice moody setting, why she'd made the most out of some nice vanilla-floral candles, and why Pancakes was pretty much blazed out of her mind on catnip in the other room, which she figured should buy them significantly fewer rude and poorly timed interruptions than last time...

And the best part was that she didn't really feel nervous, or anything like that, just excited and pleased, which was just sort of...nice. And she was even a little curious about what kind of movie Barry would actually pick, despite her hopes to not really get the chance to watch much of it.

[[ for that guy, of course, and thus concludes my spamming you with Summer ]]

It was just a regular, boring, uneventful evening in the Smith household that Thursday, and Rick and Morty were pissing away the time, channel surfing through the interdimensional cable. You'd think, with infinite realities and infinite possibilities, it would be a little easier to find something to watch, but the pickings seemed pretty slim that night, and Rick was almost passing through them with a mechanical boredom that meant not a whole lot on the screen was registering.

Morty, however, seemed a little more perceptive.

"H-hey," he stuttered, leaning forward a little, "w-wait, Rick, go back. I-I think....was that...was that Summer?"

"Probably, Morty," said Rick, interrupting the words with a burp in between. "Infinite dimensions, remember? If there's..." Another belch. "If there's realities where your loser father is a hot shot celebrity, there's probably a least...at least a few where your sister's probably on some lame reality show."

"Go back!" Morty insisted. "I want to see."

With a groan of irritation and a roll of his eyes, Rick reluctantly switched back a few channels and blinked. "Holy shit, that is Summer."

"D-do...do you think that's our Summer?" asked Morty.

"Could be," said Rick, who then slipped a device out of his pocket and pushed a few buttons. "Let's see. Increased levels of seratonin, cortisol and...ew, Summer...dopamine, a very weird, stupid, and confusing fixation on jello...yup," he slid the device back into his pocket, "that checks."

But Morty's attention had shifted away from the TV and toward Rick's pocket. "H-hey," he said, frowning, "what was all that? W-what was that thing?"

"Don't....don't worry about it, Morty," said Rick.

"W...wait a second," Morty continued, "h...how could have known that? And h-how would that apply, anyway, don't they tape these things way in advance? A-actually, the more I think about it, there are some really big flaws in this whole concept--"

"S-shut up, Morty," said Rick, "it's interdimensional cable, it doesn't need to make sense." He finished it was another impressive burp. "Now just...just sit back and...watch your sister lose at this dumb reality game show. I gotta tell you, we've only been watching this for a few seconds, but I'm already really rooting for this Chip guy."


[[ establishy and all that because this is literally just me being a giant fucking nerd. ]]

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! ]]

It had been a long night for Summer there in space jail on some unfamiliar planet in some unknown dimension. Seivarden had eventually fallen asleep, laid out on the single cot in their cell, which worked out fine, because Summer couldn't sleep even if she'd wanted to. Her brain was a whirlwind of activity, trying to figure out something, anything that might help them get out of here, while trying not to think of the torture poor Mr. PB was enduring right now at the hands of his insatiable fans. And what made it worse was that he'd trusted her, that's why he'd turned to her, she was the only one he could trust and she failed him.

She had to do something.

"I've got to keep it together," she murmured, to herself, quietly, trying not to disturb Seivarden as she paced a little. Maybe Rick would realize something was up and show up at the nick of time? But she couldnt' depend on that. She didn't want to depend on that. She was Summer Smith. She'd gotten out of way worse pickles than this before, she blew up a whole section of Coruscant, she could certainly blow her and Seivarden's asses out of some rinky dink space jail...

As she paced, her foot squashed onto something thick and gooey, and Summer, dreading what she'd find, looked down and pulled her foot slowly out of some unindentifiable gunk on the floor.

"Gaaaaaah!" She sucked in the scream of frustration to keep it down. "I'm no good behind bars! I need to get out of here!"

With a sigh, she dropped down on the floor against the wall again, looking mildly over at where the little bowler hat that Mr. PB had used for his disguise, which she'd managed to keep even though they confiscated most of their things. Seeing it sitting there was like a stab into her heart, a reminder of how much she totally sucked right now, and she picked it up sadly.

"What would Mr. Poopybutthole do?" she asked herself quietly, then went to go put the hat on top of her head, as if that might somehow inspire her to think more like her friend and what he might do to get out of this sticky situation.

And that was when something fell out of the hat and clunked onto Summer's head, and then clattered on the floor.

"What...the hell." She reached down to pick it up and gasped. "The portal gun!"

Her exclamation sent a series of little feet pattering down the hallway. "Is everything alright in there, ma'am?" asked the guard, clearly annoyed by this disturbance, with his billy club already out threateningly.

Summer swiftly hid the gun behind her back. "Wh-what?" she laughed a little. "Aha, sure!!"

"Well," said the guard, the grin on his face maniacle in its sadistic glee, "lemme tell you, missy, you won't be for long. For the crimes you've committed, you'll either rot in here forever...or far, far worse!"

"Haha," said Summer, grinning through the sweat now dappling her forehead. "O-oh, okay, then! Thanks."

The guard took a few moments to glare at her longer, probably imagining her horrible death in a million different ways, before, finally, he turned to talk back down the hall on his patrol. Summer watched him, waiting until he turned a corner before rushing over to the cot.

"Seivarden!" she whispered loudly as she tried to shake her awake. "Seivarden, wake up, you're not going to believe what I just found!"

[[ for the other jailbird! The bulk of this and the initial post were lifted straight from Rick and Morty: Lil' Poopy Superstar by Sarah Graley, and many, many thanks to 1000yearstoolate for allowing me to drag her into my very special canon that forced you all to be exposed to the word 'poopybutthole' way more times than anyone ever should be <3 ]]

This was probably a terrible idea and wholly unnecessary, but Summer had never let that stop her from doing things before, and even the slim possibility that their worst fears were actually right, they couldn't feel that bad about it. Besides, it would just be a real quick thing, just break in and look around for the dog, hopefully not find the dog, and then bam. Done. Mystery solved, and both she and Seivarden could sleep better that night.

Even if she had her doubts about Seivarden's motivation being about the dog. She wasn't the one who had to try to sleep thinking there might be a poor dead dog in the apartment next door to her!

So in the wee hours of the night, after her shift at Caritas, Summer made her way down the hallway of her floor in MHA, glanced down both ways of the hallway and listened carefully for sounds of stirring or midnight piano from Lucille's apartment, and then moved forward toward Rosa's door, gesturing for Seivarden to follow.

"Okay," she whispered, "coast is clear. You stand watch while I try and see what I can do about this lock."

This was a super terrible idea, but they were already here, sooooooo....

[[ for the partner in literal crime, apartment totally modded with permission, and NFB, please, not only for the hour but also because Summer totally promised Leroy another date if he kept his squirrel mouth shut ]]

That afternoon, before getting ready to go out again tonight and maybe considering doing some actual chaperoning (hey, it was still early in the week! She'll get to it eventually!), Summer was just going to shoot off a quick email/text so that everyone knew that there was something coming up tomorrow.

Or else she and Amaya were going to have a lot of jello shots between the two of them, which...actually wouldn't be too bad. But still!

PUB CRAWL PREGAME IN ROOM 304 TOMORROW (WEDNESDAY!)

Just because we're not on Fandom Island doesn't mean we can't have Wednesday Jello Shot Specials!

Swing by room 304 tomorrow night for a pre-game with jello and sundries before hitting the pub crawl!

Let me (Summer!) or Amaya (my intrepid roommate!) know if you have ???????s!! Hope to see you there!

It was, of course, followed by a significant amount of hearts, but, since this was sort of a professional thing (at least, these were mostly all her coworkers), she kept it to a decent minimum.

And now back to figuring out just what to wear when she went out tonight!

[[ and it's open for responses or anyone who wants to swing by! I'm kind of shocked I didn't think of this for her sooner! ]]

Hopefully no one needed to immediately get down the causeway that afternoon, because there was a small, violently pink spaceship accented with turquoise flames blocking a good portion of it right now. But, come on. There was no way in hell Summer was going to haul all her crap across the island to the scrapyard where it had previously been parked when MHA was right there by the causeway and it was so much closer and she could literally just move it up a little if it was a problem. It was bad enough she had so much stuff to drag down anyway, and Pancakes was already making a racket, not exactly pleased with being stuck in a carrier for the time being to make sure she stayed out of the way of all the last minute loading.

Anxiety was also a big thing right now, but Summer was trying to ignore that, and, though she felt she'd settled everything for the most part, she felt like she might be missing something. She didn't know what, and it was probably just nerves and sadness that she was also trying to ignore, but, either way, she felt she couldn't just up and leave, even if she'd been building up to this for ages, so she sent out a text to some of the more frequently texted numbers in her phone (and perhaps a few not-so-frequent) that went something along the lines of "LAST CHANCE TO BE AWESOME AND HELP ME LOAD MY CRAP! This ship is set to sail in T-minus how is it already go time? -<3, S."

Sure, she had Rey coming to help her out, both here and when she got to Coruscant, but extra hands didn't hurt, especially when it was probably the last time she'd see some of those hands for a while...

[[I HATE THAT I'M TYPING THIS RIGHT NOW BUT IT'S SUMMER'S LAST OFFICIAL ON-ISLAND POST FOR A WHILE NOW. If you think you'd have gotten a text, you totes did! Small OCD and entirely open post! ]]