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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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."

"Really?" Victor frowned at that. "I'd get lonely, doing that. I need people around. Guess you're more adventurous, um ..."

And that was where he realized he didn't actually know her name, so the sentence just hung there awkwardly.

"Fawn," she offered, her head ducking again, but this time to hide a smile rather than to simply disappear. "And I wouldn't be lonely. There would always be people, where ever you went."

And she would always have herself, and that was all she needed. Or wanted, for that matter.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Victor," Victor replied. "Mancha. And yeah, there are always people, but it's different, people you know versus total strangers. But, I guess if that doesn't matter..."

He shrugged. "What would you do while you were traveling?"

Fawn bit her lip as she thought about the questions, her eyes drifting skyward as though to penetrate through the terminal's ceiling and map out her plans in the clouds.

"I don't know," she admitted, then dropped her eyes as she shrugged. "Anything, I guess. I'd go where the wind takes me and I'd do whatever it lead me to. You'd be be completely free, of everything."

Victor shrugged. To him it mostly sounded like a good way to end up hungry and lost, but the idea clearly made Fawn happy.

"I can see where that might be nice, sometimes," he said. "Fewer ...responsibilities?"

"Almost no responsibilities," Fawn said. "And freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose."

It was mostly a throw-away line, just to see how Victor might respond to it, if he might recognize it or to find out if she would be disappointed if he didn't.

"That's a Joplin song, right?" Victor was uncertain: He knew the song enough to be almost sure he'd placed it correctly, but he wouldn't exactly call himself a classic rock fan. "Maybe you're right. Maybe she was on to something."

"It's actually a Kris Kristofferson song," Fawn informed him. "Joplin did a version of it; so did Willie Nelson." She gave a faint smile. "I like his version better."

And she was half tempted, half, to reach into her pocket and offer to play it, but she stayed her hands. "And they didn't need anything but each other in the world. It sounds perfect."

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

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