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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Well, no, but that's because Thomasina really hadn't had much experience with brochures.

They weren't really a thing in the early nineteenth century, and though she was sure she'd come across others during the last few days, they hadn't been something on which she'd spent much thought.

"If it is as bad as that," Thomasina said, "I am certain my..." Whatever Hannah was. "Friend will help me away from here. You, too, I'm certain."

"Me too, huh?" Sparkle looked kind of amused at that, at least, pulling a Twizzler from the bag and holding it out to her. "Are you saying your friend would help me get out too, or that I'd help you out?"

Because those were two pretty different things, there.

One sounded like way more fun.

"The former," Thomasina clarified, "although I do hope that someone so averse to his own imprisonment would be willing to aid someone else in need of escape."

Not that she expected to need escape; she was still seeing this all as a grand adventure, the purpose of which she hadn't quite yet figured out. That was part of the adventure itself, really.

"Well, yeah, I guess. What quality sheets do you think they put on the beds there? We could probably tie them together and use those to make our way out of the building, right down the outside wall. We'd have to go at night, of course, or else we'd get caught."

A beat.

"Well, you might get caught. I've been doing this for ages."

Thomasina thought back to her last flight through a window -- the last rather more literal -- and giggled. "We might find ourselves somewhere we least expect, should we use that egress," she suggested. "Windows do not always lead where one expects."

To be fair, she didn't yet understand the 'unorthodox portal' that Portalocity had arranged for her; that it had never been the window itself hadn't yet occurred to her.

"Like... outside?" Sparkle offered her a smirk, and then pulled another Twizzler from the bag and stuck it into his mouth. "I don't have very high expectations of windows, you know. But that one is usually a given. I mean, unless someone had some weird renovations done or something. Or, I dunno. Like a hospital."

Maternity ward. Operating theatre? Places that Sparkle generally had no interest in, anyhow.

"Why, where do your windows go?"

'Two-hundred years into the future' was probably a bit much to mention.

"It is a... bit of a story I was reading," she explained, laughing; she thought Hannah would approve of the lie. "The thought of escaping through the window brought it to mind."

"Huh. Sounds like a good story. I'll have to borrow it sometime."

Maybe. If he was feeling extra bored. Maybe he'd wait for them to adapt it into a movie.

"So... what brings you here, then? Get into trouble back home? Someone want you out of their hair for a while?"

"Actually, I was offered a-" It had been bursary in the letter, but Hannah had referred to it fairly consistently as a... What was it? Right. "-scholarship. In fact, it appears to be viewed as a somewhat prestigious school. It is, to be sure, no Cambridge," and if she were biased there, that was not without reason, "but worthwhile to attend nonetheless."

"... Huh. I didn't think summer camp was so academic," Sparkle noted. "So, what, you figure I'm actually going to learn something while they have us wrapping yarn around popsicle sticks and gluing macaroni to tin cans?"

Oh, say it isn't so.

"... Is that likely to be what they'll have us do?" Thomasina asked.

She hadn't done arts and crafts like that even as a child; she'd been learning advanced mathematics since she was eleven.

"I dunno. I've never been to summer camp before. But that's what it's like in all the movies. Or, all the ones where the kids aren't trying to find a way to break out, anyhow. I wonder if there are bears there. Most of the movies have bears, too."

No, Sparkle. There... usually weren't bears.

Well. Maybe in December, with bottles of Coke.

Mmm, Coke. The kind with real sugar? The bears likely had to come through Canada, after all; they could pick it up on their way through!

"I haven't seen any-" No, that would sound odd, Thomasina thought; Hannah had explained films, shown her one on the television set in the living room. She self-corrected mid-sentence. "-of those movies. Are there likely to be bears? It seems a small island, and the brochure indicated that most of the proceedings were to take place in the school proper rather than in any sort of wilderness."

Well, naturally. The American stuff was syrupy crap. All flat and... flat.

"How am I supposed to know? As far as I can tell, we're in 'Murrica, they've probably already shot them all. Hunting trophies, you know? The bears probably weren't heteronormative enough. Maybe a few were even women or something."

"... Is there a reason to prize female bears over male while hunting?"

Give her a bit of a break, Sparkle; Thomasina hadn't gotten to social justice yet in her mad desire to read everything written since 1812. She'll get there soon!

"... Yeah. They're... meaner. Guarding their cubs and all that crap."

But seriously, what?

"You don't get out much, do you?"

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

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