fandomhigh | BWI Airport | Portalocity Lounge | Saturday Morning

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!event: newbie shuttle

BWI Airport | Portalocity Lounge | Saturday Morning | August 28

In most instances, no one would bat an eye at seeing a boy and his dog. In this instance, some people might actually run away screaming at the sight of this boy and this dog. Percy Jackson didn’t look all that intimidating on his own. He was average height, dark haired and carried a ball point pen in the pocket of his jeans.

Of course, the huge hellhound sitting behind Percy might have turned a few heads if not for the Mist. Thankfully, most mortals didn’t see Mrs. O’ Leary, Percy’s inherited hellhound sitting lazily in the BWI airport lounge (how the hellhound had fit, Percy didn’t know).

Percy himself didn’t look as relaxed as his dog. His eyes were jumping left to right, almost as if he expected something to attack him or for Luke to emerge from the crowd with that more smirk than smile look on his face.

This was about the fourteenth school Percy had been to since age twelve. He didn’t expect it to last. He wanted to be at Camp Half Blood. Instead, he was waiting in an airport lounge for a shuttle to cart him and his hellhound to a place called Fandom.

Percy frowned. He didn’t think this day could get worse.

[Open shuttle bus! Mrs. O’ Leary is a big ole hellhound that most mortals probably would not see because of something called the Mist. If you’re not exactly all the way mortal, you’d see her though. She’s not going to attack anyone, I promise.]

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If the skinny girl with the leather duffle over her shoulder looked like whatever airline she'd flown in on hadn't bothered to land, just shoved her out the door without a parachute, it was a fairly accurate impression. Cally supposed she ought to be happy just to be alive, and she was, but she'd tumbled out of a swirl of light directly into a wall, so even if she'd felt like smiling, it would have hurt.

Her head ached anyway, she was dizzy and confused, and the uniformed man in the corridor had simply stared at her when she asked -- three times -- where she was and where the nearest spaceport might be. Until she said it slowly and out loud -- then he finally muttered something about her being one of those and directed her to the room she was currently entering.

//Hello?// she sent as she pushed the door open and leaned for a moment against the frame for balance.

Percy immediately tensed at the sudden sound in his head and his hand curled around Riptide instinctively. He didn't know where it had come from but voices in his head tended only to happen when something bad was approaching.

Unfortunately, he couldn't blame this on a dream since he was wide awake. His eyes darted around, looking for whoever had done that, trying to pick them out of the growing crowd. He didn't say anything though, just in case someone was trying to figure out who he was.

Cally was scanning the group as well, waiting for an answer in her head from anyone. When, just as before with the man in the uniform, there was none, she stepped further in and repeated herself. //Hello?// And then, for good measure, "Hello?"

"Was that you?" Percy asked, still looking a little unsettled by what had just happened.

"It was." Well, it was was a fair reaction; she was so used to everyone around her knowing who she was that she'd abandoned anything like manners when introducing oneself to strangers. "My name is Cally; could you tell me where we are, please? I had to abandon my shuttle mid-flight, and I've no idea where I ended up."

Edited 2010-08-28 01:34 (UTC)

"Shuttle?"

Percy's first thought was that she was some kind of astronaut. Percy's second thought was that he'd never do that because of Zeus and his freaking lightning bolt.

"You're in an airport lounge," Percy provided eventually. "We're waiting for a shuttle. How did you abandon a shuttle mid-flight? Wouldn't there be the lack of air to deal with?"

"You would think," Cally agreed, her mind racing as she tried to figure out what an airport was, sent the... she'd lost count of the unanswered calls to her sister by now, but she sent another, and attempted to make enough sense of what had happened to her to explain it to someone else, all at the same time.

"I didn't so much abandon it as get ripped away by some odd spatial disturbance. I'm rather surprised to be alive myself; I don't understand how I got here. Or where here is." Or where this shuttle was meant to be going, though she hoped the answer would be a base or port she was familiar with.

"Odd spatial what?" Percy repeated, confused now. "Like a comet? Or a meteor or something?"

"Or something." Cally shook her head. "Not a meteor or comet; it seemed to be made of energy, not matter. Whatever it was, though, it was very powerful. I thought my ship was going to be torn apart, or I was."

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"What in the *world*?" by now, Will had taken a seat and was fiddling nervously with his hat, which was sent tumbling as he jumped halfway out of his chair in surprise.

Cally swung her head around to face the boy who'd spoken, and gave in, as she did, to a sinking knowledge in the pit of her stomach: her greeting would never have received reactions like this on Auron, or any planet within a day's travel of it.

"I'm sorry if I startled you," she said aloud. "I had hoped I was still among my people; it's the way most of us speak."

"And how," Will was just going to go scrambling after his hat, which had ended up underneath the row of chairs across the aisle, "exactly is that?" he finished, having retrieved his hat. Telepathy just wasn't in his experience.

They were evenly matched in that, for even as rare as it was outside her planet, people who'd never heard of telepathy weren't in Cally's experience. "Telepathically. I'm from Auron." Please have heard of it. Please? Whatever that spatial disturbance had been, it couldn't have tossed her that far away.

"Telepathically," William repeated, not quite ready to believe what he was, well. Hearing. The concept was one that had been floated in a few of the rather less reputable psychology journals he read, but had been dismissed by the scientific community at large as impossible. "I can't say I've heard of Auron- is it a city, or a country?" Perhaps it was best simply to humour her?

Oh, no. No, and a few more noes for good measure. "It's a planet." Her face fell. "And I must be very far away from it if you don't know the name."

"Perhaps someone else here has?" William offered, his tone kind. "I've only just arrived in the States myself, and I'm afraid I was hardly the well-travelled sort before this."

"The...States?" A planetary system, perhaps? Though if so it was one she didn't know. (And whose accent she came nowhere near sharing, if the other boy she'd spoken to was a native of the place.)

Edited 2010-08-28 02:27 (UTC)

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George's reaction was immediate, and leaning towards hostile.

"What the fuck?" she asked, jumping to her feet and glaring around her. "Who did that!?"

She hoped someone had done that. Otherwise she was losing her mind.

Could reapers be insane? Did Mason count?

That was certainly the most...energetic... reply that Cally had received. She lifted a hand towards the girl. //It was me.// She suspected she was going to be saying this a lot, judging from recent evidence. //If I caught you off guard, I apologize. My name is Cally.//

"You're talking in my head," George said, completely unnecessarily. "What are you doing in my head?"

Please. Like George had any interesting secrets to be spied on.

Edited 2010-08-28 03:20 (UTC)

"As you said, talking." Cally couldn't spy on them even if they did exist, since talking was all she could do. "Only talking; it's what my people do. I have no wish to make you uncomfortable, though."

"Oh." George was really trying not to let on how massively fucking creeped out she was. The shudder didn't help. "You guys just all ... talk in your heads?"

Which lead to the, in her mind, obvious question. "Why?"

She could pick up the creep-out factor, yes, and understand it to an extent. Offworlders tended to be unnerved by telepathy; yet another reason for Aurons keeping to Auron, said her teachers.

The question, though, had never in her life occurred to Cally. "Because... we can, I suppose? Most of us; a few of the older generation aren't telepathic, but it's existed on our planet for centuries."

"I guess it would come in handy, if you don't feel like shouting," George mused. "Sorry I ... flipped out on you. I don't like people in my head."

Not that it happened all that often. It was a first, to be honest.

"Then I will stay out of it," Cally answered as gently as her own distraction and worry would allow. "I had hoped I hadn't traveled far from home, but I can't even reach my sister, which should have told me otherwise. We can usually communicate from well beyond shouting distance." Like the other side of a solar system - but not the other side of a galaxy.