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

As the night at Caritas went on (and on and on) without Stark showing up, Summer started to get more and more (and more) antsy about it. Like, sure, okay, she got that not everyone could make it to the bar every Wednesday, and that was fine, but this was Stark they were talking about, who almost always showed up for jello night. Not to mention the fact that they'd specifically made plans. Add to the fact that he wasn't even texting her back or even answering her calls (because, yes, she even called!) and people were going missing left and right, it seemed?

Yeah. Something was definitely up.

But before she was going to jump to any conclusions about Stark having met the same fate as Gladio and Prompto and Watts and all the rest, she was going to at least swing by his apartment to make sure he hadn't found himself in the middle of some unrelated issue, because, knowing Stark, he very well could have been.

She knocked on the door and got no answer. She knocked again and called out and still no answer. She tried texting and calling again, and still, nothing, so she sighed and knelt down in front of the door to pull out her trusty lockpicking tools to let herself in.

It had been a while, since she got to do a little B&E. She kind of missed it, actually.

But there were more important things to worry about right now.

"Stark?" she called out into the darkness of the apartment as she finally got the door open and crept her way inside. She flicked on the light and was very relieved to not, like, find his body, like, sprawled out on the living room floor or anything, but the fact that he was clearly not here made her frown deeply. She moved in further, leaving the door open in case she needed to make a quick retreat, and started to poke around for clues or hints as to what might have happened, if he'd even managed to make it back to his apartment after Shenanigans or if whatever was kidnapping people got him en route.

And honestly? At this point? She was also going to just sort of look around for signs of raccoons. With everyone else being kidnapped, after all, it seemed like the perfect opportunity, didn't it, for certain obsessed trashed bandits to seize the chance to finally make off with him without anyone thinking too much about it, right? Just another disappearance, nothing to see here...

Or maybe that was just how she thought.

Either way, she might need to pay a visit to a certain raccoon-run distillery tomorrow and start asking some questions....

[[ mostly establishly, but, hey, if you want to catch her, she'd definitely there! ]]

To say that this week had been an off week felt like a bit of an understatement, and the fact that Summer didn't even think of this until she decided to do terrible things to eggs yesterday was a good indication of just how off it really was. But also, in a way, she'd had a week to sort of...process things and had a better understanding of where she was mentally, physically, spiritually, blah blah blah, so now it was just time to smooth out the rougher edges in the best way she knew how.

By making some pot brownies.

She considered trying to do something fancy with it, but since Stark would also be baking something (she was putting money down now on what color his baked goods would be), but decided to just stick with something nice and classic. And honestly? By the time she was pulling them out of the over, she was already feeling better than she had almost all week.

Whether that was from the catharsis of baking or some liberal taste-testing of the batter while she was working was impossible to determine for sure, but did it really matter anyway?

[[ expecting an alien, but open if anyone wants to @ her before he shows up, and, clearly, a little CW for recreational drug use ahoy ]]

As Summer had suspected from all the dreams she'd been having and that stupid urge to go traipsing through the woods to find some dumb rock, Morty had shown up at her apartment last night after getting ice cream for himself (you'd think, wouldn't you, that if you were going to come back from the dead temporarily to crash at your sister's place for a weekend, you could at least bring her some ice cream, too, but nooo~oooo), and they ordered pizza and she totally schooled his ass at Italian Plumber Franchise Racing Game, and she had to ban fighting games because he was such a button masher, and now it was Saturday, and she was just trying to figure out what to do with him now.

"Like," she said, as he sat on her couch, legs folded underneath him, tongue slightly out of his mouth as he intently button mashed against the video game itself since Summer refused to deal with it anymore, "what do you even want to do? Should I, like, take you to the park or something?"

"I'm fourteen, Summer, you don't need to take me to the park."

"I don't know!" she argued back. "It's been a while. Like, a really long time, you're practically a baby to me at this point. I don't know. There's an arcade at the bowling alley. I'm friends with the guy who runs the place, I can probably get you some free play in exchange for some weed, or something?"

There was a pause, filled with a clattering of buttons on the controller, before the computer totally demolished Morty, the fatality screen came up on her TV with a booming voice reminding him of how much he sucked, and then he sighed and set the controller down in his lap and looked up at Summer.

"We don't need to do anything, Summer," he said. "Maybe I...maybe I just wanted to come...and...and...and, you know, hang out with my sister again."

"Morty," said Summer, "we never hung out together."

Morty looked down at his hands and the controller in his lap for a moment, before looking over at her hopefully. "Sometimes we did!" he insisted. "Y-you know, not...often, or anything, but sometimes we did! And...and it was really nice, when we did and we got along, and I thought, y-you know, it's pretty cool, having a sister like you. You...you weren't perfect, and you're....you're definitely a bitch sometime, but you're not bad, either, and maybe....maybe I just wish...we could have spent more time just...just hanging out, you know?"

And Summer looked at Morty for a moment, and she felt a little twinge of guilt for all the ways in which she'd made either of her Morty's life a living hell, and how it was kind of nice, wasn't it, that even despite all that, he still just wanted to come visit and hang out?

"Yeah, okay," she said, reaching over to ruffle his hair as she moved passed him on the couch and plopped down to pick up the other controller, "but I swear to god, if you just button mash again, we're switching back to a shooter."

"But I'm not as good at those!"

"Explain to me again how that's my problem."

He totally did start button mashing again, but Summer, for now, decided to let it slide.

[[ open! ]]

After a late night of partying around Baltimore and a few close calls with some idiots already jumping on the fireworks train for the Fourth, Summer had decided to hop over to her home dimension and her old stomping grounds to put out some feelers for anything interesting that might be going on that night with all her terrestrial friends, and if there were no bites there, then she'd start expanding her scope out into the stars. And she'd barely just finished getting her overly sugary, whipped cream suffocated technically-still-a-coffee blended drink with the intention to start shooting off texts when her phone started buzzing from someone trying to actually call her.

And if actual phone calls weren't bad enough...

( Grampa Rick? )

"Yeah," Summer grunted, pulling her phone away from her ear to end the phone call, "whatever."

And she'd go, she would, and she kind of hated herself for it, but she was absolutely going to finish her drink first, goddamn it. Rick could fucking wait.

[[ look, sometimes, you're doing a rewatch of your canon because you fell out of it and have a whole new season to catch up on, and you start getting scenes stuck in your head, okay. NFB for distance, obvi, but can be open for any further calls and/or texts or if you've got a weird reason to be at a Seattle coffee shop in Summer's home dimension! ]]

Summer and Stark were, at this point, on their third space bar, and the evening had been going well. There was a little bit of space shopping before hand, to ensure that they looked their space best, and the first two space bars had been great. This one, however, was not impressing Summer very much, so it might not be too long before they found their way to Space Bar #4. She was pretty sure those were strands of 'Get Schwifty' mixed into whatever god-awful dub-step garbage the DJ was pumping out, and she was having some issues with the jerk bartender.

"That's so speciesist!" she declared. "You can't just assume I can't handle it just because I'm from Earth. I once huffed an entire K-Zax Array!"

"You huffed a Marlazzeh Gay?"

"No!" said Summer. "Well...maybe. I've had some pretty wild weekends lately, but what I said was K-Zax Array! Do you know what that is? That's like smoking The Ring, okay? Most pilots die after three days!"

"I still can't serve that to Earthlings. Federation law."

"Bitch," said Summer, "I destroyed the Federation!"

The bartender looked unimpressed.

"Ugh! Fine! Just...get me two of those glowing smoking ones in the fancy glasses, then, I guess."

And, once she had those two glowing smoking drinks in the fancy glasses, she drifted back over to where Stark was waiting to hand him one and then liberally take a drink from her own. "That bartender," she announced, "sucks. I swear to god, if you tip him over ten percent, I'm leaving you here."

She knew it would probably be impossible to convince Stark not to tip at all, so she figured that was a good compromise.

"....okay, fifteen percent," she allowed, looking at her drink, impressed, "because, damn, that's actually really good. Or I'm already really drunk. One of the two."

[[ for the egregiously modded alien with her, and NFB for distance, obvi ]]

Summer may give Apu a lot of crap all the time about his random holidays celebrated on very specific days, but there was one of those holidays that Summer herself celebrated with even more religiosity than the actual religious holidays out there, and this year was absolutely no exception.

( CW for recreational drug use. SHOCKING, I knoooooow )

[[ open, open, open, if anyone wants to swing by and help celebrate, although I am almost definitely going to be on some SP shit. And of course, CW for continued drug use throughout the post, because, well...it's THAT day and I am legally obligated to have her make the most of it ]]

Welp. Summer had sort of figured she'd moved on from this stage of the break-up recovery progress, but, considering she was waking up on her own accord, not by the sound of her alarm or by a cat insisting that she'd spent the entire night starving to death, or even in her own bed...apparently not! Nor had very much sleeping been had, either, since she was being nudged out of sleep while still feeling very tired, and, admittedly, very comfy.

There were...probably a lot of things about this that she should probably be unpacking a little, and examining, and dissecting, but, in that moment of barely-awake still-sleepiness, but, in that moment, all that she wanted to register was that she felt really good about it right now, and that there was someone else still in the bed with her (the fact that that person just so happened to be Stark again was one of those things To Be Unpacked much, much later), and that she was going to just turn and shift until she was stealthily snuggling into that other person (as if maybe they wouldn't notice), to be just that slight extra bit more comfy with a soft, contented sound and her mind already slipping toward getting back to more sleep.

[[ for that glowy guy, obvi. ]]

Sooooooo....Annie's whole interdimensional time-travel briefcase thing was clearly going well.

Summer was not really that surprised, but it did kind of bum her out that, instead of having a post-break-up sangria night with her bestie last night, the only sangria she had was in the form of gorging herself on the rest of Stark's cupcakes (you know, the ones she had previously insisted should be shared in the spirit of sangria) after getting high and going between giggling over everything and crying over everything else, while sending more and more texts to Annie's phone that she knew she wouldn't receive. Well. She hadn't eaten all of Stark's cupcakes, there were still two left, which she was having right now for breakfast.

(Yes, breakfast, in the afternoon).

But it wasn't all just substance abuse and feeling sorry for herself! Summer was busy at her laptop, pouring over some ideas and making arrangements for the party on Monday, which was a frustrating challenge in its own right. Having up until very recently been dating a super-genius billionaire, she had certainly gotten used to a certain...lifestyle, i.e. literally endless funds for all her whims, and while Summer was definitely pulling in some respectable bank through her various jobs and channels, she was working with a much tighter budget than she was use to.

Although....she did still have access to Barry's credit cards. And as she eyed the final total on all of her ideal party supply purchases, she found herself in the midst of quite the moral quandary.

And then promptly typed in that familiar number that she knew by heart by now.

Which meant she wasn't surprised when her phone buzzed with an incoming message a few minutes later, but she couldn't help being a little annoyed, too, because, oh, sure, now all of a sudden, you're paying attention? Summer thought about ignoring it, but that only lasted about two-point-five seconds and she lifted up her phone to read it, bracing herself for a good old WTF, but what she found instead somehow made her feel worse.

Throwing a party?

yeah for purim. didn't u know? im jewish now.

Mazel tov!

Summer just sort of stared at her phone dully for a long time, not really sure how to respond, if she should respond, or if she should just do the one thing she really wanted to do in that moment, which was portal over to his lab and take it all back, but then she reminded herself that he wouldn't be making it to this party, either, but, hey, at least he was willing to foot the bill for it. She needed more than that, though, she could foot the damn bill herself, she'd only used his card just to see if she could get away with it, and she could, but it wasn't nearly as fulfilling or self-satisfying as the thought it would be, but maybe, just maybe, if they just talked about it some more...

Her thumbs had been poised over the first letters of her next response before another text came in, from some gym bro from Tinder she'd been chatting with, one whose muscles would be very impressive had not Summer lived on Fandom.

looking forward to seeing u tomorrow

Followed by a picture. The kind of picture that made Summer very glad she was at her apartment and not out in a public place. A picture that she was going to need to inspect very thoroughly before responding, a response that came much easier and much more quickly than the one she'd been struggling with when this one came in:

let's make it tonight actually


[[ open post is open! though work-related sp is to be expected ]]

When Summer woke up that morning, curled up with her cat in her ship in the parking spot of some space trucker pitstop, she realized that one of two things were happening: 1) she'd somehow ended up in some sort of weird gender-sex flux of time and space or 2) Fandom shit was leaking into her dimension again. It could have been some sort of third option involving Rick, too, and that third option convinced her that it was probably better to head back to Fandom, whether or not the pollen had run its course, although honestly? If this whole waking up as a dude thing was happening back on the island and the pollen thing was still in the air?

Not gonna lie, hilarious. Of course, that was coming from the perspective of several days removed from it and blowing up asteroids instead.

Honestly, she had to pack for the trip and get Pancakes set up for her stay at the shelter while she was gone, anyway, so she headed back, parked her ship, and planned to spend the rest of the day trying to figure out if she wanted to lean into cute and breezy for her wardrobe or comfy casual, and also sort of wonder what happened if she originally set out to have a Plus One, but the Plus One bailed at the last minute, and really hoping that meant she'd just get a nice private room instead of being sidled last minute with someone random...

...and then she realized that if this was more than a day thing, she literally had hardly any clothes to look cute in with this body, and, ohmygod, she needed to go shopping, like, STAT.

[[ ooooopen! ]]

There were a lot of things that led Summer to having the feeling that Annie had been kind of going through some stuff lately. She could probably say that for a couple people, actually, but, when it came to Annie, she liked to think that if something was up, she would let Summer know. That she knew she could come to Summer to talk about whatever, and that Summer would try not to be too judgy, or, if she was, that she would do so in a very loving way. So it was kind of a relief, almost, when sangria did come up at the bar on Wednesday.

Like, she knew it probably wasn't good, if they were sangria'ing over it, but it was good that Annie wanted to talk about it.

So, for the occasion, she actually made not just one but but TWO different sangrias (and fully intended, by the end of the night, to just say fuck it and mix them both together), as well as a little spiced sangria with rum for the squirrels to have their own little sangria moments and forget all about her and Annie's.

And then she just needed an Annie, because otherwise that was a lot of sangria going to waste.

[[ for the super bestie! Sangria night itself is fine for broadcast, but all sangria details are NFB sangria secrets~ ]]