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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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?

Roscoe blinked. "Not really jogging anything," he admitted. "Is this, like, a... I'm trying to come up with a not rude way of saying 'conspiracy theory.'"

Tip was now giving him pretty major side-eye. "No," she said. "The conspiracy theory is that the Boov were all puppets. Or that the government sponsored their invasion." There were actually a lot of conspiracy theories about the invasion. Even one that the whole Gorg army had been sent packing by a preteen with a common housecat.

J.Lo swore up and down he hadn't leaked that story. Tip believed him, but only because he was so mad that they didn't include the preteen's helpful Boov partner.

"Here," Tip said, leaning down and digging into her backpack. She had her photo album in there somewhere. She pulled it out and flipped to a photo of one of the ships. "See? They were pretty big." She pointed to the photo on the facing page. "That's J.Lo," she said. "With the koobish."

Now it was Roscoe's turn to side-eye. "Uh... wow. You know, sorry for this look on my face, but I'm really surprised that something like that wasn't in the news or something."

His look of horror, and some confusion, too. That would be the look he was referring to.

"'Cause, see?" he said, grabbing his phone and opening a tab to Google, where he quickly typed the words Boov invasion. "No results."

A little silver bug-looking thing drifted up from where it had been sitting on Tip's hair like a barrette and angled itself for a better look. "Down, Bill," Tip said, in that resigned way pet owners got when they didn't even need to look to tell that their dog had gotten into the neighbor's gardenias. The bug settled back down onto her hair.

"It was on the news," she said, her own look of confusion, and some horror, too, reflecting Roscoe's right back. "It was all over the news. We had to elect a new president because the old one decided he'd rather stay a farmer even after the Boov left." She pulled out her own phone and tried. Hers, still tuned to her universe, churned out a long list of links, mostly reflection pieces about the upcoming third anniversary of "Moving Day", when humanity had been shuttled off to their "preserves". "This is weird. Maybe it's that weird search engine you're using?"

Tip's world had Happy Mouse Kingdom instead of Disney World. Google looked kind of like a cheap knockoff, to her.

"Okay, I know something's up if you've never heard of Google," Roscoe said at once. "Biggest company in the world? You've really never heard of it?"

Wait. He looked up from her phone and up at the top of her head. "Did your barrette just move?"

Sure, proof of alien life was weird. But you know what was more important? Fashion.

"Bigger than the Happy Mouse company?" Tip didn't believe that. Happy Mouse was enormous. "And that's just Bill. As long as he's on my hair I know he isn't wandering off and getting lost." Bill floated up again at the sound of his name and dropped down to float in front of them. He spewed an elaborate pattern of bubbles from the horn on his tail. "He says 'hi'," Tip said, tilting her head a little at the bubbles. "Or possibly something rude. I'm still not very good at written Boovian."

"Oh my god, what is your life?" Roscoe squealed, clapping his hands against his face and then sliding his hands downward. he was able to compose himself enough to say, "Hi, Bill," and then back to Tip, "I'm going to guess that Bill has something to do with Boov technology? Because hairclips don't do that where I'm from."

For the most part, he was taking it in stride. But he wasn't ruling out the possibility that they were both stoned.

Tip had never been stoned in her life. Though she was sort of hoping to find something that would affect both humans and Boov the same way so she and J.Lo could try it together, someday.

"He's a billboard, actually," Tip said, glad to be back on somewhat more familiar ground. Most people back home didn't have Boov billboards, either. "I adopted him when I went to New Boovworld a couple years ago. He got tired of no one there ever paying attention to him, and since I was gawking at everything like a tourist, he decided he liked me."

...So not the normal kind of billboard, then.

"Well, I can't blame him," Roscoe said, deciding to just roll with the weirdness already and ask questions later. "Kind of like when I find some shoes in a thrift store that just need some love. Except in my case they don't really have feelings."

Tip smiled a little ruefully. "Yeah, like that. I'm not 100% sure Bill actually does have feelings? J.Lo's theory is that he developed semi-sentience because of his frustration, but that doesn't entirely work in human logic, so." She shrugged. "When I was younger, I refused to have a favorite outfit because I didn't want my other clothes to get jealous."

"Me too!" Seriously, pre-teen Roscoe didn't play around when it came to clothes. "When I was in elementary school, I convinced my parents to each buy me little purses for all the days of the week and then I could switch between them evenly. I made up all these rules about not repeating the same one two days in a row."

Okay, kind of showing his hand there as far as the whole 'spoiled brat' thing.

Tip's mom definitely never made enough money to buy Tip a purse for every day of the week. Even if she had, their apartment back then wouldn't have been anywhere near large enough. "I totally would have done that," she said. "But Mom worked in a grocery store. And I was never that into purses." She smiled. "But I would have done it with shoes or -- cameras or something."

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BWI Airport Portalocity Lounge, Saturday morning

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