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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Ah, yes, Thomasina hadn't thought about how she'd answer that.

A few days at Fandom and she would do so with the truth, but she wasn't quite ready yet to go that route.

"The opportunity arose," she decided on -- that was a fairly neutral way of putting it -- "to come to the school, and it seemed an opportune time to... make myself over?" If she hesitated on the phrasing, it was because it was Hannah's, and not her own; the concept of a makeover hadn't exactly been around in 1812.

"That's about what got me here too," Victor told her. "I mean, there was a break-up in there, and I don't so much want to reinvent myself as to just, like, get back together, but ... the opportune time part. That's true."

"A breakup?" Thomasina asked.

He didn't look like he'd had any particularly egregious injuries, but she didn't have any context for other potential meanings -- and even that one seemed a stretch, unless it was contemporary slang.

Hannah's 'this is the future' lessons hadn't included relationship etiquette, no.

Victor winced. "Yeah, I fell hard for this girl and circumstances kind of didn't work for us," he said. "Lost my girlfriend at home over it, too, but that was probably going to end anyhow. So..."

He shrugged, awkward. "Sorry. Promise I don't usually dump my relationship problems on people right off."

Oh -- the dissolution of a romantic relationship! That made sense, and was an easy enough term to use for it. It seemed appropriate, given the much more casual treatment of relationships in the 21st century, Thomasina mused.

"It's quite all right," she insisted. "I... just left someone else behind."

He'd been dead for a hundred and fifty years -- more -- at this point. Thomasina was doing her best not to think about that at all; she had to assume, at this point, that she was going home at some point. No matter that Hannah's book told her about her death in that fire.

"Sucks, doesn't it?" Victor said sympathetically. "They say all you can do is wait, but it's not like that is some easy thing."

He shrugged. "Anyhow, they're all a long way away, now."

Thomasina resolutely pushed thoughts of Septimus aside and concentrated on the present.

It was all she had, at least for now.

"It does," she agreed. "But we have Fandom to look forward to, whatever it comes to be."

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

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