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

There had been talk, earlier that week, of space booze that Summer had not tried yet, and that was always something to be excited about. Plus, this particular space booze also came with a recently returned friend from which to potentially pry all sorts of hot gos and space deets from in the meantime. If she was entirely honest, she had kind of hoped that maybe Stark would seem better when he got back...and he did, for sure, but she was hoping for something...more better? She didn't know, she just knew that it was good he was back, and that it seemed he was taking the steps toward recovery or whatever and blah blah blah, he was just kind of doing it at a snail's pace, but she also had to remind herself that her pace was basically breakneck and faster than the speed of light with these things, so...you know...

To each their own.

But she was getting space booze out of it, and to make up for that, Stark would also get snacks, both sweet, savory, and gelatin (adjacent). And if he didn't show up? Well. She'd make leftover rounds tomorrow, or something. She did not think it would be hard to find people to shove extra food at.

[[ expecting a sad alien at some point, but also definitely open if anyone else wants to swing by or get in touch! ]]

"Remind me again," said Beth, frowning for a moment at the screen in front of her before her fingers clacked over the keyboard, "why we're hacking into the scheduling database for a Luxureon space spa?"

Summer, watching carefully over her mother's shoulder, sighed and rolled her eyes. "Well, I thought you were doing it no-questions-asked because I'm your daughter and you love me and you have twenty-one years of misplaced resentment to make up for, but if you really have to know, two of my best friends just got dumped in, like, the harshest ways possible within an honestly worryingly close time frame, right on the cusp of February, so I really wanted to do something nice to help get their minds off of it for a while and treat themselves, but the whole fucking place is pretty much booked solid for months."

Beth arched a cool, scarred brow at Summer, and Summer continued.

"So I figured...we hack into their database, cross-reference it with the list of Federation sympathizers we collected both before and after the fall of the NaIGF, see if there's any matches, and if there is, bam, crotch-punt those Federation bootlickers off the list, put me and my crew in there instead, not only depriving them of a sweet ass spa day, but also making them super embarrassed when they show up expecting to get one and are rejected and shamed, and will probably make a whole scene that'll totally go viral on Space TikTok or whatever."

"I don't know whether to be proud of you," Beth admitted, shaking her head as she went back to the computer, "or worried about you."

"It's the first one," Summer assured her. "Or it should be. Anything else only reflects negatively on your as a mother and highlights your failings as a strong parental influence in raising me."

"In my defense," Beth countered, "we don't actually know for sure if I raised you..." But, thankfully, before she needed to go into that, there was a little blip from the screen. "We're in. Okay, now to upload and crossreference to our own database for a match..."

They both leaned in with eager anticipation at the little wheel circling around in the middle of the screen, and then there was another ding.

"Got one," Beth announced. "Krombopulos Amy. Reservation for four. February 10th."

"Perfect!" said Summer, who was not at all going to question why a different planet in a different galaxy somehow still managed to use the same calander as this one; it was apparently a thing even in different dimensions, don't @ her! "Scratch it, put my name in there instead. Wait! No! Not my name, then if it comes out who got their reservation, I don't want some stupid assassins coming after me. I'll make up an alias. Mmm, let's see. Put down....Autumn Jones.

"Wait, no!" Summer seemed to realize that was dumb just as Beth was about to point it out. "Make it...~WinterBlade~."

Her voice dropped into a mysterious hush as she said it, and it was clearly that this was clearly what she was going for and no argument on her mother's part was going to change her mind, so she just shook her head and made the adjustment. "Alright," she said, "reservation now for..." She might not argue, but she was going to sigh and shake her head. " ~WinterBlade~, party of four, for the tenth. Anything else?"

"Nope!" said Summer, beaming, and already on her phone to send out texts to the rest of this party of four. "Thanks, Mom! You're the beeeeeesssst!" And absently gave her a quick hug with one arm before going back to her texts.

"I still don't see why you couldn't have just gotten your boyfr--"

"Shhhh," Summer cut her off. "Mother-daughter bonding moment. Just soak it in."

[[ mostly establishly, NFB for distance, but totes open for calls and texts! ]]

One of the nice things about a sangria night was that there really wasn't a whole lot to it; all Summer pretty much had to do was mix up a shit ton of fruit and booze and maybe make sure the place was tidied up a bit. She had considered shipping off the cats to a catsitter (no, she hadn't asked him, but, yeah, Summer was pretty sure Prompto would not complain about her shoving Pancakes and Issa at him for the evening) to get them out of the way, but, considering the nature of this particular sangria night, it might not hurt to have the additional comfort and cuteness around. So they were pretty much just hanging out and staying out of the way, up until the exactly moment when summer moved the first pitcher from the fridge to the living room, which meant they were both suddenly, inexplicably, under her feet.

"Nice try, assholes," Summer told them, once she did successfully get the pitcher to the coffee table without incident, after which they both dispersed and would more than likely be oddly absent until the exact moment she went to get the second pitcher.

She just assumed they were definitely going to need the second pitcher.

[[ mostly for a certain sad glowfaced alien, but can be open before him in the timeline if anyone wants/needs to poke at her! And, yes, I do have actual cats, how can you tell? ]]

Well. Summer had said she'd be available in her office this week if in case anyone needed to see her more privately, and so she was definitely making good on that claim, although she kind of wished she'd taken into consideration the fact of who her office used to belong to and the fact that there was a big mural on the opposite wall of a certain familiar Loth-cat that she now had to stare down while she just tried to kill time and not think about the exact things she was surrounded by.

She sighed, leaned back in her chair, put her feet up on her desk and whipped out her phone, because if there was anything she was never not good at, it was wasting a shit ton of time on bullshit social media endeavors, occasionally dipping her hand into one of the desk drawers because it also helped that this office did come equipped with a bizarro drawer of endless snacks.

Really, sometimes Summer really didn't know how good she had it, when it came to what else could be coming out of bizarro desk drawers around here.

[[ door and office are open! ]]

Now that Summer had gotten some sleep after her late night return and impromtu mini-wine party, it was time to sort of get things in order now that she was back. Pancakes had already done her thing by rolling around on every surface imaginable just so that it knew it was her territory again, and Summer was taking stock for a grocery list, sipping on some coffee from the Perk and making plans to swing by T&C to see if it was bad as Apu made it out to be and also stopping by the Forge to see if Amaya was still growing pot (priorities!). Then probably some brainstorming for thr Christmas Rager^TM as well as planning out her big jello re-debut on Wednesday, figuring out what to do for classes (if she was even still going to teach?)....

So, basically, she'd just returned, and was already filling up her days to stupid capacity like she never left.

It was good to be back.

[[ it's open, my dudes! ]]

Because of course Summer got to the be the special snowflake with an office that existed outside of a certain cluster of offices held by people with some mysterious unifying force, she got to also have her own post. Not that her mind was actually on meeting with the guests of her students very much that weekend, since she had her own to focus on, and the whole weekend was going to be all sorts of talking and planning and probably a few drinks and manicures in there, too.

It helped, though, that this office did hold kind of a special meaning for Summer, and one that was pretty appropriate to why Beth was even here in the first place, and it opened the door to tell her mom a little bit more about her time in space with the jello shop, what she was doing out there, why she had to come back, and, subsequently, the times she got to help with Rey and the resurgence of that empire, not to dissisimilar to the resurgence of the empire that Beth was dealing with.

There was, of course, also the issue of Summer's dad, who Summer was starting to suspect hadn't come to see her at all, and that, actually, he was here to latch onto Barry. Which was really sad and pathetic and not at all surprising, and Summer almost felt as if she should do something about that, but, look, she had some important stuff to talk to her mom about, and, really? Barry had to learn somehow. This is what you got, Ween, if you wanted to be a part of this family, and the best way to teach that lesson was to just let him suffer.

Beth, meanwhile, was still rather fascinated by the mural on the wall.

"So you said it's called a loth-cat?" she asked, turning back to her still-beaming daughter behind her desk. "I can't decide if Squanchette would be offended by this or not."

"Wait," said Summer, "Squanchette? You have a Squanch on your team??"

"Well, I mean," Beth sounded casual, but she had to chuckle a little, "it was her planet that got razed during the wedding massacre, remember? She's got even more of a beef with the Federation than most of us. But it's a good team, Summer, I think you'll like them. And..." She paused to give her a fond smile. "I think they'll like you, too."

It was a good thing Summer had been working on keeping all of her excitement about all this bottled tightly inside, because otherwise, she would be releasing a high-pitched happy squeal of just one long, sustained sound that would carry all the way over to that big clump of offices.

Goddamn, her space mom was so cool!!

[[ open door, open office, open post! Same SP vibes apply here as with all those losers in the clump ]]

"And, so, like," Summer was saying, as the narrative caught up to the small vessel that Morty had stolen approaching the NX-5, "it turned out that, this whole time, Tammy was just a plant for Galactic Federation, and she used her wedding to Bird Person as a super honey trap to massacre a bunch of galactic criminals and put Grampa Rick in space jail. That's when the Federation took over Earth and I started to get rebellious about the whole thing, and my parents sent me to Fandom before I started a massive insurrection! So I guess, in a way," here she turned a bright, beaming, absolutely disgustingly sacchine smile toward Barry, "if Tammy wasn't actually a stupid duplicitious bitch," she reached a hand over said stupid duplicitious bitch's corpse for his hand, "we may have never met."

“Well, I wish I could have thanked her before your grandfather splattered her brains all over the ground,” Barry said cheerfully.

( No one cares if you pee on the floor of a Death Star. )
________________________________________________

It didn't take long before the trio turned a corner right into an armed Gromfromlite, but it didn't take long, either, for Morty to pull the pin on the device Rick had given him and lobbed it forward toward the soldier, exploding him into guts and goo all over the floor and walls.

"Morty," said Summer, "we had one grenade!"

( An Intermission for Exposition )


______________________________________________________

"What do you think they do with all those jeans?" the first Gromfromlite mused. "Make them into jackets?"

"It's not about conserving denim," the second informed him. "It's marketing. Like...uh....'The NX-5...destroys the whole planet! Except for Wrangler jeans."

"Because they're so tough?" the first guessed. "Tougher than the laser? That's stupid."

"But you're talking about it."

Crestfallen, the first Gromfromlite seemed to have his whole world opened up for him, but he wasn't sure he liked what he saw. "They..." he slowly realized. "They got me..."

( There's a bit of the West in all of us. Or at least on the butts of two complete and total nerds. )

_________________________________________________

"Mom! Dad!" Using the locator watch to track down exactly where they could find Beth, Summer, Morty, and Barry rushed into the room, and a grisly scene that had occurred in the A plot that doesn't concern enough people reading this to bother going into full detail about. What was clear was that quite the battle had taken place: Jerry stood awkwardly over the corpse of Tammy, and both Beths were there, one of them absolutely covered in blood, both of them standing over the fallen hulk of what could only be described (incorrectly) as some sort of cybernetic Bird Person. The wall behind them was blasted open, revealing an even more grisly scene of a bullet-ridden, scorched Rick, in a pool of his own intestines and various mechanical parts and almost placidly trying to put them all back in place.

( A Reunion with Cloned Moms and Morty's Little Balls. )

[[ continued from here and the bulk of the action from S04 E10 of Rick and Morty, "Starmort Rickturn of the Jerri," modified slightly and with appreciation to badassprodigy for allowing me to steal his pants. Usual alphabet soup applies. Surprisingly actually not officially sponsored by Wrangler jeans. ]]

"Barry!"

Summer hadn't been difficult to track, but, by the time Barry caught up with her, she was distinctly visible again, and running toward him, carrying a pair of broken goggles and a belt, grabbing his arm and directing their course elsewhere.

"That little twerp tricked me!" she explained, carefully avoiding mentioning the part where she had been just as guilty as trying to trick Morty in this instance, but details, details. "Come on, we don't have much time!"

( Shower Fires, Sibling Rivalry Beat-Downs, and ALMOST getting arrested by the new, IMPROVED Galactic Federation! )

[[ continued from here, a bit more on the way! Usual NFB/NFI/OOC ok ABCs apply. Void where prohibited, Taken and modified from S04 E10 of Rick and Morty, "Starmort Rickturn of the Jerri" with a little help from badassprodigy, of couuuurse! ]]

So, it came to Summer's attention that her most recent school-assigned friend had never been to space, and, since she apparently couldn't meet a person who had never been to space without offering them a ride in her ship, there was a little jaunt up to the moon or maybe past Mars in order, because unlike all those other times, they actually decided to do it the next day so that Summer didn't get caught up in the million other things she threw herself into and forget and/or forget to make time for it.

(S'up, Moon Date with Tisarwat and Lucille from a million years ago!)

She got there a little early, though, with a thermos full of the promised coffee (because that's what you needed in your stomach, the first time you went into space, coffee) so that it didn't get cold while she got started on the basic checks and overview to make sure everything was in working order before they headed out. Clipboard and checklist and everything, baby! She was totally going to blame T&C for this, but she did love a good checklist-on-a-clipboard montage sequence.

[[ expecting the aforementioned school-assigned friend, but it can definitely be open before him in the timeline! ]]

A blonde, a brunette, a redhead, and a mannequin walk into a space spa...

(Stop me if you've heard this one before...)

A blonde, a brunette, a redhead, and a mannequin walk into a space spa, because it was time for some major pre-party, post-move, post-Nazi-fighting pampering, and there was no way they weren't going to be making the most of it! There was a reason this place was one of Summer's favorite places in the multiverse. The experience was diverse and extensive, everything from mani-pedis with polish made from elements that could glow or sparkle in certain ways that Earth paints just could not pull off, to space hot rock massages, space seaweed wrap, space mud baths and hot springs (which were, you know, by their nature, way better than the terrestrial versions!). And just imagine how much more a massuesse with six arms could do over one with just two! The robes and towels were a soft space-cotton blend that felt like you were literally wrapped in a cloud, and the view was gorgeous, as the whole restort was nestled neatly at the top of the tall trees on a planet where the skies were almost always a gorgeous array of beautiful colors.

This was so, so overdue, but Summer was glad she finally had the chance to drag Rey and Annie (and Dolores!) here.

Summer, for her part, was definitely spending a good deal of her time just soaking it up in the space onsen, sipping away at some sweet space wine, and just soaking it all uuuuuuup.

[[ for the expanded hot girl squad to come do hot girl shit! NFB for distance, obvs, and a special thanks to apocalypsehow for the inclusion and modding of the newest, greatest member of this HGS. ]]