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

Entry tags:

!event: newbie shuttle

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

Fawn felt like a hummingbird, her heart was beating so fast. It took nearly everything she had to keep down the twitches that her body so desperately wanted to fall into. There she was standing (well, sitting, perched on top of her large steamer trunk that had been picked up at a rummage sale ages ago) on the edge of an adventure, and she wasn't sure she could even breathe. All these people...were they her new school mates? Were they kind? Mean? Would they see her for what she was or were they, like her, cast aside, sent elsewhere, on the merits of being a freak?

If she wasn't so nervous, she could see herself pulling her harmonica out of her pocket and playing soulfully for the passersby, just as she and her siblings did in the subways and bus stations back home. But her palms were too sweaty, her head buzzing, and she didn't want to draw any attention to herself. So she just sat, trying not to stare, trying to hide behind her curtain of hair and disappear. She wiped her hands on her skirt and, since she was wearing a skirt, she crossed her legs to better hide who she was, even though doing so made her yinandyango smush uncomfortably against her thighs and it hurt so bad.

She crossed her legs even tighter. So that whenever she did chance to look around, it was through the blurry lens of tears in her eyes.

She looked so sad!

"Are you okay?" Mina asked, hovering slightly and looking worried. "Motion sick? Do you want me to fetch some water?"

"What?"

Thing about trying to make yourself disappear into subtle pain was that you tended not to see when people actually noticed you and came up to you. Fawn lifted her head, blinked the tears out of her eyes as best she could, and sheepishly pushed some hair back behind her eyes. She crossed her legs tighter.

"No," she said. "I'm fine. Um, thanks."

"You don't look so fine," Minako pointed out, fussing slightly. "I mean, it's okay if you're nervous. You're going to the boarding school too, yeah?"

"I am fine," Fawn said, sucking in a breath and closing her eyes for a moment so her heart could maybe slow down a little, so that she could fight down a titch (though the twitch one), and so that, when she opened her eyes, she could attempt to affix them on the other girl with a semblance of confidence. She managed it for a second before the pain made the tears well up again. "And, yes, I am. You, too?"

Sia wasn't what one would call friendly, but the poor girl's nerves were so obvious even without powers that she wanted to help.

"First time away from home?" she asked with a small smile. See, she could look friendly, at least.

Fawn blinked a little, partly in an attempt to look as though she hadn't been about to cry, and partly because, when she thought about the girl's question, she realized that it was actually true.

"Yeah," she said, the realization lifting her shoulders up a little. "Actually, it is."

The hummingbird heart went into overdrive with excitement, as well as the anticipation for what could be a very terrible failure. She then eyed the other girl carefully, trying to determine what kind of person she might be.

"What about you?"

"I've been away quite a bit," Sia admitted. Usually she had someone with her, but she had no problem being on her own. "It gets easier. I'm Marasiah."

There was a long moment of reluctance before Fawn responded, shifting in a little in her seat, but she relaxed a little, the tension lifting a little from her shoulders, though her heart still beat so alarmingly fast she was afraid she was about to start twitching into her witch's face.

"I'm Fawn Farrell," she offered quietly. "Are you a new student at Fandom High, too?"

"I am. It will be my first time at a school of this sort, too." She knew that was abnormal for most people, so maybe sharing it would put the other girl at ease a bit? "It might take some getting used to."

She was sure she'd be fine, personally.

Some. There might have been a small scoff for the understatement of the century, but it was so subtle and quiet that it was barely noticeable. Fawn bit her lower lip a little bit in thought before she said anything else.

"You mean high school?" she asked. "Or boarding school? It's the first time for both for me."

And she was dreading it, half wondering if she should have tried harder to just go to Performance Arts, but then she'd be stuck in the same things her sisters and her brother dealt with but here, though she was outcast, she was free, free from everything, from everyone, almost free like Bobby McGee.

She was clutching at her skirt, realizing it suddenly, and quickly stopped, smoothing out her hand and hoping that Marasiah hadn't noticed.

If Sia noticed- and of course she did- she was at least too tactful to say anything about it.

"School at all," she clarified. "I've had tutors until now. Did you as well?"

"No," Fawn shook her head slightly. "I want to regular schools for elementary and middle school, but high school's different, and it's definitely different when it's a boarding school."

But knowing that the other girl might even be a little bit more out of her element made Fawn feel a little better.

"Where are you from?"

"A place called Coruscant. I'm a long way from home." She wasn't sure how the explanation that she was from another planet would go over. "What about yourself?"

Courscant. If she was alone, Fawn would repeat the word to herself and revel in how it just sounded rich, well rounded and smooth, and she tried to picture what sort of strange and exotic place it might be. Her eyes went a little distant for a moment, and her face almost looked serene.

"New York," she said, and there was even a brief smile. "I guess I'm really not all that far from home. My sisters even talked about visiting me whenever they got the chance, so that won't be too bad."

Re: Wait for the Shuttle! [5/04]

notconflicted - 2012-05-05 02:55 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Wait for the Shuttle! [5/04]

yinandyango.livejournal.com - 2012-05-05 03:02 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Wait for the Shuttle! [5/04]

notconflicted - 2012-05-05 03:11 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Wait for the Shuttle! [5/04]

yinandyango.livejournal.com - 2012-05-05 03:16 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Wait for the Shuttle! [5/04]

notconflicted - 2012-05-05 03:20 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Wait for the Shuttle! [5/04]

yinandyango.livejournal.com - 2012-05-05 03:22 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Wait for the Shuttle! [5/04]

notconflicted - 2012-05-05 03:27 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Wait for the Shuttle! [5/04]

yinandyango.livejournal.com - 2012-05-05 03:31 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Wait for the Shuttle! [5/04]

notconflicted - 2012-05-05 03:44 (UTC) - Expand

Oh, yipes, crying girl. Ow.

"Excuse me? Is there anything anybody could do to help you?"

Victor sounded a bit uncomfortable, like he wasn't sure he should be invading, but -- crying girl

"No," Fawn answered without even thinking, "there isn't."

Of course, it wasn't exactly the most cheerful of answers, but this whole thing had put her into a terrible morose mood. She looked at the boy and blinked the tears away as best she could.

"Sorry," Victor said again, and hesitated for just a minute, both because of the generic crying girl thing and because of the more specific crying-really-pretty-girl thing. "I, uh ... usually things get better."

She had been sent away from home, surrounded by strange, scary people, because she was a freak, and she was excited and thrilled and terrified and breathless, which only prompted the next question:

"Better than what?"

Oh, ask the robot an easy question.

"Better than whatever has you here, looking like you're about to -- no offense -- either have a panic attack or try to sink into the floor," Victor suggested.

Fawn's lower lip trembled a little, her shoulders jumped as she tried to hold down a tic, and she let out a short gasp to fight back one of those things from happening, and it wasn't the latter option. The latter option she actually would have enjoyed. If she could sink into the floor, then no one could bother her, strange boys wouldn't talk to her, and she could become a part of the floorboards, constantly taking on the weight of other people as they passed by and boarded their buses and trains and planes to seek out grand adventures. They'd bring back with them the dirt of a thousand locations and grind their experiences into her without ever even knowing it.

"I..." She struggled to think of something to say, and most of what she came up with was mumbled and lost in her hair as she tilted her head forward to hide behind it. "I've never done anything like this before."

"That makes at least two of us," Victor told her. "I've pretty much spent my whole life in LA. I've been to New York twice, no place else on this coast."

He rummaged around in his head for something else. "Didn't even really go to school last year. Let alone boarding school. But, seriously, I bet it'll be fine."

Unless it was a trap. Victor still wasn't totally sure it wasn't.

The curtain of hair nodded a bit stiffly. "Better than some of the alternatives, yeah," Fawn said, fiddling with her fingers in her lap now and seeing just how tightly she could cross her legs before any of the pain became noticeable. She was doing a good job of not crying out, and when she felt she reached the threshold, she stopped, lifting up her head and drawing in a shaking breath.

"I live in New York," she offered, settling into something much less tense now. "Lived? I guess technically I live in Maryland now."

"I don't think we really live there till we move our stuff in," Victor argued. "I liked New York. Mostly. When it wasn't ... you know."

'Getting invaded by aliens' felt a bit obvious to mention.

"I used to think I'd end up living there, once I grew up."

Fawn frowned a little, wondering what New York did when he didn't like New York, but she wasn't going to press the issue.

"I don't want to live anywhere," she mused, tilting her head a little because the boy, while still strange, was starting to seem a little less so. She put her hands down to her sides, holding onto the edge of her trunk. "Always moving around, one place to another."