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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Ace tried to pin the vagueness into an actual direction, because food. Food that didn't come fresh-frozen or from the back of a place where she'd unfortunately seen way too much of the kitchen. But her head whipped around toward the boy again when her brain caught up with her ears.

"You're...American?" It came out more confused than she'd like and more... hopeful... than she'd expected. Everybody on Iceworld sounded English, even though they weren't, but she'd never run into an alien who sounded like a Yank.

"A Los Angeleno," Victor confirmed with a nod. (And he could have shown Ace an alien who sounded like a Yank, if he could read narration.) "I ... kind of figured most people here would be American. My name's Victor."

He glanced her over. "You're English?"

Edited 2012-05-05 03:07 (UTC)

"Ace. I'm from London. Perivale." Though she doubted what part of London would mean anything to someone from California.

California. She needed a second here. Maybe two. Suddenly that question she didn't care about was oddly more interesting than crisps. "So, er, don't have me clapped in the nuthatch for asking, but...where are we?"

"BWI," Victor said, then realized the letters might not help. "Baltimore Washington International Airport. You, uh .... weren't trying to get here?"

"Wasn't trying to get anyplace but not where I was." Ace ran a palm over her nose and mouth, which she hoped would give her a moment to get undizzy, but mostly just served to smear the soot streak. "Washington," she repeated. "I'm on Earth."

You'd think the Los Angeles bit would've been a pretty good clue, but she couldn't be the only human who'd ever been timestormed into space, right?

"Yeah," Victor said. "And it's May 5, 2012, if that .... changed too."

He looked concerned. "Want water or a coke or something?"

"Twenty..." The frown wasn't because of the time travel, considering where and when she'd just been. It was because Ace was doing maths in her head, something she was surprisingly not bad at, but it still took a bit of concentration. "Cor, I'm forty-one years old now!"

The laughter that followed was partly just laughter, and partly relief. She was home, but not home. Nobody was going to try to dump her back in Perivale now. "Bet my probation's even run out!"

You think?

"Sure don't think they'd be looking for you," Victor said, with a weak smile. He was curious what she'd been on probation for, but wasn't sure you were supposed to ask. "So you had no idea you were going to come here? I'd be completely weirded out."

"Timestorm." Ace shrugged one badge-plastered shoulder. "Happened before; I was doing this brilliant chemistry experiment to extract nitro from gelignite, and BOOOM!" Complete with grin and double exploding hand-signals. "Suddenly I'm in another galaxy!"

"Like, on a totally different planet?" Victor had only the sketchiest idea how the science behind something like this would work, but did it matter? "Okay, and I thought getting here in a portal was pretty nifty. Time doesn't normally go storming around like that where I'm from."

"Different planet, sometime in the future," Ace confirmed. "Far future, not like this when I'm just out there in an old age home someplace." Because that totally happened when you turned forty-one, or maybe she was exaggerating just a little. "But timestorms don't exactly happen every day. Or every ever, so far as I knew before they happened to me. You've got portals in 2012?"

She was liking it better and better already.

"Not, like, on every street corner," Victor clarified. "But the school website said I could get here on a plane or via portal. I don't fly, so..." He shrugged. "It didn't really feel like anything."

"I've never been on a plane," Ace admitted, because that was the most important thing to focus on here. "Never even been in a spacecraft, 'cos I couldn't afford passage off Iceworld when I ended up there."

And somebody always said 'No sprogs allowed' when he showed up with a new load of dodgy cargo and she asked to join his crew.

"Wait, school?" Also on her list was 'What's a website' but the school thing seemed like it needed asking first.

"Fandom High," Victor -- who had also never been on a plane or in a spaceship, but could tell Ace all about traveling in a giant frog vehicle should the opportunity arise -- nodded. "It's some boarding school on an island in Maryland. We're all waiting for the shuttle bus."

Normally he wouldn't have bothered with that 'bus,' but it seemed like the kind of thing that might need clarifying at the moment.

"Why, you thinking about giving up the time storms and coming with us?"

Not exactly the most comfortable way to travel, and Ace doubted she'd ever manage to call down one of those on herself again anyway. Hell, she hadn't really expected it to happen again this time.

"Got nowhere else to go. Might as well, 'til they figure out I don't belong and chuck me out." At least she'd be able to say she'd been to an island in Maryland. Which sounded less exciting than outer space, but only to people who'd never been to Svartos. "I'll take five minutes if anybody's running a pool."

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

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