fandomhigh | BWI Airport Portalocity Lounge, Saturday morning

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!event: newbie shuttle

BWI Airport Portalocity Lounge, Saturday morning

"You are sure you do not wants me to wait with you?" J.Lo asked, pressing his squooshy frog face against Slushious's passenger window.

Tip's mom leaned past him to wave. "Text when you get there safe, Turtlebear."

Tip rolled her shoulders back, putting on her absolute bravest face. "I will." They'd already done the tearful goodbye part, J.Lo just hadn't read the memo. Tip resolutely turned away, heading toward the lounge where the school instructions said to wait for the shuttle bus.

"I am changing my minds!" J.Lo called after her. She heard her mom start Slushious's engine up, then start to putter away. "I am not too many olds for high schooooooooooooool!"

Tip made it all the way onto one of the lounge's benches, her suitcases tucked underneath, before her shoulders sagged again. Which was good, because if she hadn't, it'd be one of those legs-gone-away, dropped-on-her-ass moments. Pardon her language.

"C'mon, Tip," she told herself, swiping quickly at her cheeks. "Chin up. You drove across the US with an alien when you were 11. High school should be easy."

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Roscoe swanned into the lounge in the manner of someone who had no idea he was making a conspicuous entrance.

Sunglasses. Headphones blaring music loud enough for people to hear it other than Roscoe himself. And the high-heeled boots he was wearing happened to be pretty loud on the tile floor.

As soon as he sat down, he yanked his headphones out of his ears and smiled broadly. "What up, boarding school people?"

Tip smiled slightly. Well, at least her fellow students were nice and distracting. "Hey," she greeted, nodding towards the headphones. "Your music was really loud." That could cause ear damage, as Tip's mother had been careful to remind Tip repeatedly, especially over the last year of being-an-actual-mother. Then, since she didn't want to get a "mom" rep before she even got to school, she added: "What were you listening to?"

"Sorry," Roscoe said, somewhat ruefully. "I can't get enough of Lemonade, you know?"

Which reminded him to turn off the music now that the headphones were out of his ears and all.

"You're waiting for the school bus too, right? 'Cause if not then I am in the wrong place."

Tip's smile widened at the mention of Lemonade. Beyonce wasn't her favorite, but there was a girl in the trailer video who looked just like her. "I'd better be. I'll never hear the end of it if I managed to be waiting in the wrong spot and need Mom and J.Lo to drive me all the way down to the school." She paused. "Not the singer J.Lo. The Boov."

J.Lo had made his Earth premiere at the Latin Grammy's by coming out of the singer J.Lo's nose in an expanding spaceship. It'd been pretty big news.

Roscoe didn't know what a Boov was, but he laughed anyway. "Okay, good, 'cause I was gonna say, if you were tight enough with J.Lo for her to be driving you to school, we would definitely need to talk about that. But I'm sure your J.Lo is cool too."

"He's my best friend." Roscoe gained several points in Tip's book for not immediately reacting negatively to J.Lo being a Boov. They'd had a lot of trouble with that, back home. Which, understandable, what with them trying to colonize Earth and all, but it still wasn't very nice for poor J.Lo. "So I'm a little partial. But he's actually a giant nerd."

Even if Roscoe was clued in on the whole aliens thing, he probably wouldn't mind. It wasn't like someone could help being an alien, right?

"Nerdy best friends are always the way to go," Roscoe said immediately with a fond grin, thinking of Coltrane back home. "Plus he gets points for the name. Speaking of which, what's yours? I'm Roscoe."

"Gratuity," Tip said, and then in an unusual bit of friendliness, added "But my friends call me 'Tip'."

She hadn't actually expected to offer the nickname to someone the first day. But Roscoe seemed pretty cool, so far. And it was always weird when there wasn't anyone around to call her that.

"Ha. I get it. That's a cool name too," Roscoe said. This from a kid who had a friend named Tom-Tom, but whatever. "So where're you from, Tip?"

"Pennsylvania. Hence the getting a ride really easily. You?"

"LA. Hence the being totally exhausted from waking up early to fly here." On the plus side, his dad's elite status with the airline meant he had been able to fly business class, which eased the annoyance a little. "My grandpa was gonna fly with me, but I managed to convince him that I'm old enough to follow the signs in an airport by myself."

"I've had that conversation so many times," Tip empathized. "How's the rebuilding been going out there? I heard the Hollywood sign got totally wiped out in the invasion. I was going to try to see when we went to the Latin Grammy's, but we had to rush to make sure J.Lo didn't accidentally explode J.Lo's head."

That was a set of sentences that would (mostly) make sense to someone from Tip's world. Once she worked out that there were alternate worlds, she'd get better at not sounding like she was insane.

Edited 2016-05-06 23:28 (UTC)

"Uh." That was... some interesting crazy-talk right there. "What invasion would that be now?"

He hoped it wasn't some super obvious current events thing he just hadn't bothered to learn about.

Well. It was in her world.

". . . The Boov invasion? Giant bubble ships all over the world? Destruction of national landmarks with creepy eraser guns? Human preserves?"

Maybe this kid had spent that year in a very remote cave?

Re: Wait for the shuttle

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Re: Wait for the shuttle

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Re: Wait for the shuttle

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"Oh, just waiting for the bus I guess," Steven replied, punctuated with a little chuckle. "Pretty cool how we all get to go to school, huh?"

Steven was really excited about going to a school.

Roscoe interpreted that as sarcasm and responded in kind. "Oh yeah. It's gonna be the best summer ever," he said. "I love summer school."

"Is it better than regular school?" Steven asked, genuinely curious. "I know Connie said normally people get to take the summer off from school, but I guess we're lucky that this place goes year round!"

Weird, but okay. "Seems like it," Roscoe said, shrugging. "I've never done the summer school thing before but it's gotta be better than having nothing to do for three whole months, right?"

"Right!" Steven said with a smile. He was absolutely genuine with his excitement. "Though there's always lots you can do. Even on a rainy day you can play a board game, or watch cartoons, or all sorts of things!"

Okay, the enthusiasm was becoming a bit odd now. "Yeah, and I know that and all but I still get totally bored," Roscoe sighed. His life was so hard. "Don't you?"

"Not really," Steven said with a shrug. "If I feel like I'm getting bored I just go out to the Big Donut and see my friends."

"Oh, I guess I won't be able to do that anymore."

Yeah, Roscoe had been thinking about that too - all the cool hangouts he was going to miss. "FOMO, huh?" he said sympathetically. "I hear that. But the cool thing is at least everyone here is going to be in a brand new town with no pre-existing friends nearby either, right? You'll meet people to get donuts with."

"Yeah, I really hope the local donut shop has nice people. Or, whatever place I start going to. Oh no, I really didn't think about how much stuff I was leaving behind in Beach City!"

"Where am I gonna get my bits?"

Wow, Roscoe was starting to really wonder about this kid.

"You know, I travel a lot with my mom and you'd be surprised the kinds of stuff you can find in other cities," Roscoe said, trying to be comforting. "Like taco bowls in Cleveland? Actually not too bad. And my standards were, like, so low."

"That's good," Steven said. "I guess the important thing is to keep an open mind, right? If you do your best, and try new things, what's the worst that could happen?"

Ta-da, a moral lesson for Steven.

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