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.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Madre de dios.

Victor could have said a hundred things, but what came out when he saw that smile was --

"Has anybody ever told you you look kind of like Tony Stark?"

Thank you, fanboy programming.

"...no, I believe that would be a new one," Holmes admitted slowly.

"You do," Victor told him, like the enormous dork he was. "Oh. Uh, what year did you think it should be?"

He would have to keep that in mind should it be of use later on. God help everyone. "Eighteen ninety-one."

Victor let out a low whistle. "Wow. That might not be good. Any idea how you did the time travel thing?"

From the way he said it, it was clear he regarded unintended time travel as something unusual and undesirable, but far from impossible.

"Well, I took a boat. Which had seemed perfectly normal until the arrival here."

Damn you, Fandom.

".... huh," Victor said. "See, I went back to 1907, but that was this whole thing with an artifact. So ... probably a little different."

He shrugged. "People were pretty nice. I mean, most of them, until we had to go."

"You time travel often?" Because this was a perfectly reasonable conversation to have.

"Isn't once enough?"

Totally reasonable.

"But I kind of knew this girl whose folks did it, like, constantly. Me, I get nervous about the whole butterfly effect thing."

"Butterfly effect?" A little past his time, thank you.

"Chaos theory," Victor said, then realized that might not help. "Basically it means that if you change something small in the past, like stepping on a butterfly, you could ... sort of break the future. And if you do that you can't really go home."

"Unless the time travel was meant to happen all along," Holmes said thoughtfully. "In which case, there would be no chance for free will."

"And sometimes the changes are good," Victor said. "Like -- if someone is supposed to do something bad, and their life is changed so they don't."

Just by way of example.

"But I still feel like it's not for amateurs to mess with, y'know?"

"I can promise that, from now on, I will only leave it to those who know better," Holmes said with the utmost sincerity.

Victor snorted. "Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're making fun of me. But I might have earned it."

Holmes both shrugged and nodded in a manner that implied he didn't hold it against Victor. Well, not too much.

"You haven't attempted to shoo me away yet, so I believe you've already beat your classmate."

"I didn't know it was a contest," Victor said, amused. (And blushing a bit -- the truth was, he'd stuck around to some extent because OMFG IRON MAN LOOKALIKE. Even if he'd met Stark and he was kind of a dick, the cool principle remained.) "I'm Victor, by the way. You work at the school?"

"I will be shortly," He replied, inclining his head. "The name is Holmes. Sherlock Holmes."

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

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