fandomhigh | Newbie Shuttle, Portalocity Terminal, BWI (Saturday Morning Fandom Time)

After everyone was done shouting at and/or hugging him to say goodbye – and there had been a lot of both –Victor Mancha had two choices in getting from Los Angeles to BWI. The first was taking a commercial flight, which would have been reassuringly normal.

The problem was that, even if he somehow got past the metal detectors, he suspected his circuitry might count as the kind of portable electronic device that wasn’t very takeoff-and-landing-friendly. He didn’t exactly have an easy off switch, and crashing a plane by mistake seemed like a big step towards super-villainhood.

Which meant he got to the Baltimore airport via portal. He’d never been through one before so he didn’t have much to go by, but it seemed like a nice portal: If nothing else, it smelled far better than Cloak’s ... cloak had. Victor was grateful to know that hadn’t been the state-of-the-art in teleporting.

And now he was on the East Coast other than New York for the first time. Once he’d exhausted the little potential for exploration the terminal had, he sat in a semi-comfortable airport chair, suitcase at his feet, and tried to break the Tetris high score on his phone while keeping watch for any other kids.

[OOC: Operation newbies: Go! I will be slow for a few hours after 5:30 EST, but otherwise around all night.]

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Karolina looked at him like she had no idea what he was talking about. It was easy, because... she had no idea what he was talking about.

Then she decided she probably just looked a lot like someone else. Some people seemed to think all Californian blondes looked alike, after all.

"Sorry, you must be mistaking me for someone else," she said, with a friendly little smile. She even stuck her hand out. "I'm Karolina. Hi."

Yeah, except for how they did this a year ago, only with fewer polite smiles and more attempted kidnapping. There was a long pause as Victor tried to process this.

Not the time to bluescreen, Vic. He shook his head to focus and took her hand, lightly.

"Victor," he said, sounding dazed. Was this amnesia act some plan? If it was, it would have been nice to let him in on it. "I, uh ... thought I knew you from home. Maybe I was wrong."

He sounded like he didn't believe what he was saying in the least.

"Must've been," Karolina said, and sounded like she definitely believed it. She did give him a curious, almost concerned look, though. Maybe he was just having a hard time with this boarding school business, too?

"So where are you from, Victor?"

"Los Angeles," Victor said, trying to figure out if she was waiting for him to say some code phrase. (Or could this be a Skrull or a clone? Mostly, it was weirding him out, especially given the look on Karolina's face. Almost like she really was meeting him for the first time.)

"I went to East Angeles High. I thought I met you there."

This was technically true.

Karolina paused for a bit, then shook her head. "No, I never went there," she said. "I mean... I'm from Los Angeles, too, but I didn't go to that school."

And she had to admit the LA thing made this a little freaky. But then, how many people lived in Los Angeles, exactly?

Victor, thanks to Ultron, could have told her it was 3.8 million as of July 2009.

"It's a big city. Maybe you have a clone somewhere," he said, and tried to smile even though it didn't reach his eyes. "So ... how did you end up here, anyhow?"

Edited 2012-05-04 21:37 (UTC)

"Oh," Karolina said, fiddling with her hair because she was kind of crap at lying, "some people just said this could be a good fit for me."

'Some people' was a nice and vague way to say Captain America and child services, right?

"How did you?"

Victor could tell Karolina was lying, but it was hard to know what about when she was acting this way.

"Things got weird at home," he answered, frowning because she should know this. "Seemed like a good time for a break."

A pause, then -- "Not 'some people' like your parents, right?"

Because if Frank and Leslie Dean were still around through some screwy dimensional warp or time travel or secret alien power thing and were influencing what Karolina did, Victor was pretty sure that was a much larger problem.

Karolina bit on her lip, any traces of a smile vanishing as soon as he asked that.

"Uh, no," she said, shaking her head quickly. "Not my parents."

Good. Whatever was wrong, things were not that wrong. (Probably, at least. It was hard to say anything for certain right now.) Victor looked relieved, then as if he realized he shouldn't look relieved.

"Sorry I asked," he said apologetically. "The person you reminded me of had problems with her parents, so ..."

And here he was running out of things to say. He was pretty sure she wasn't an evil clone who should be zapped on sight, but that left a whole host of possibilities on the table.

Possibilities that maybe he should ponder from across the terminal, before he freaked her out any worse.

"Anyhow. It was, uh, nice to meet you."

Yeah, Karolina was going to feel guilty about it later, but right now this was kind of... an odd situation. One she would be glad to be out of.

Still, she mustered up a little smile. "You too, Victor. I'll talk to you later."

Once she was done casting curious glances at him from afar, that was.

Newbie Shuttle, Portalocity Terminal, BWI (Saturday Morning Fandom Time)

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