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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Holmes opened his eyes at that, frowning down at the coin in his hand. Then back up at the girl. Back to the coin again.

"God bless, miss," he said dryly.

And, really, Fawn should have left it at that, since everyone knew that you didn't talk to bums. Really, everyone knew that you shouldn't give them money, either, but she felt so bad for him, and then she realized that she would be taking a risk talking to him. Considering that she was being shipped off to boarding school for being a freak, she felt like doing something risky.

"Do you get a lot of traffic here at the bus station?" Fawn asked, after taking a moment to try to think of something interesting to say to a bum, and not really coming up with anything good.

"I can't say that I can complain so far," Holmes said with the utmost honesty as he flipped the coin with his thumb, catching it again as it started to descend.

"Do people give you a lot of change?" Fawn asked, tilting her head slightly as she watched the coin-flipping and wondered if it was hard to do. Something about it seemed disingenuous; if she were a bum and someone gave her a coin, she would try to hide it in her hand, hold it close to her heart, and not let anyone see that she had it. But she tended to be that way with a lot of things.

A bum would have also attempted to steal from her, given the chance. But that was hardly the point.

"I think that would depend on the kindness in their hearts."

"Not necessarily," Fawn pointed out. "Some people might do it not out of kindness, but out of obligation or guilt. And some people might be kind, but too afraid to give money to a stranger."

"And here you are," Holmes replied. "Having a conversation with a vagrant. So, is it obligation or kindness that spurs you on?"

"Maybe it's guilt," Fawn offered. It wasn't. She supposed, if any of them, it would have to be kindness, but that didn't seem as impressive.

"Obligation, guilt. Aren't we simply arguing semantics here? Obligation is simply a social guilt."

Fawn considered this for a moment.

"You're a vagrant in a bus station," she pointed out. "I think you have bigger things to worry about than the semantics of a fourteen year old girl."

"Then the--" He produced the coin again with a waggle of his fingers. "--coin was to make you feel better about yourself," Holmes decided, leaning back against the wall as silver flashed back and forth over his knuckles.

"Because, at least you're not a vagrant in a bus station."

"Anymore," Fawn added with a slight shrug of her shoulder.

Okay, the Southern Constellation Band weren't vagrants, but they relied on their bus station money for quite a chunk of their income.

Holmes was just going to give you a look Fawn. Deal with it.

You were being judged by a homeless person. Kind of.

Fawn sort of blinked at the homeless person for a second, and then reached into her pocket to pull out another quarter and hold it out to him.

Which Holmes promptly took. Because it was there, really.

"Thank you again."

"You're welcome," Fawn said, with a nod, before shuffling back over to sit on her trunk again.

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

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