fandomhigh | 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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"Um, sort of?" Tip offered. She was doing a little bit of staring at that armor, but not as much as she might have pre-Boov. "We're waiting for the bus to go to high school. So it's a kind of training."

She was pretty sure he must be in the wrong spot, though. Maybe there was some sort of space training place nearby.

FN-2187 would take it! Even if he didn't know what a 'bus' or a 'high school' were. "Oh, good," he said, relieved. "I was beginning to think I was lost." Since everyone else was out of uniform, he decided to take the risk of pulling off his helmet without being authorized. "FN-2187."

Tip had not expected him to look human. The staring increased just a little, but she covered by offering her hand for a shake. Maybe he'd been abducted young by an alien species that used numbers for names?

She wished J.Lo were here. He'd probably know all about them.

"Gratuity," she said. "Nice to meet you, uh, FN."

No way was she going to remember those numbers. She hoped that wouldn't offend him.

Her theory was not as far off as it could have been, sadly. "2187," he supplied helpfully, as he shook her hand, thinking maybe she just hadn't caught his full designation the first time. "But if you would prefer just FN that's fine."

FN-2187 was not clear on whether 'Gratuity' was her name or a greeting of some kind among her people. Even if he'd been under the impression 'Gratuity' meant something else, there were so many different cultures in the galaxy.

"Oh good," Tip said, smiling. "I mean, I'm not bad at numbers, but I've always been better at words and stories. 'FN' almost sounds like it could be an Earth name. 'Effen.' Not, um, that I'm assuming you're not from Earth."

She was absolutely assuming he wasn't from Earth, though.

What was an Earth?

"I'm not from anywhere." Well, presumably he had been from somewhere originally, but he wasn't supposed to think about that. "I'm a Stormtrooper Cadet in the First Order." Because that didn't sound at all ominous.

"First Order of what?"

Maybe it was a religious thing? It didn't seem super likely, but you never knew.

That was an excellent question FN-2187 had never considered before. "Just...the First Order. The true successors of the Empire." You know, the Empire?

Tip shook her head. She was pretty sure he didn't mean the British Empire. Or the Empire State. "Sorry," she said. "I haven't heard of it. But we mostly deal with media empires around here. And I'm pretty sure they only mean 'empire' metaphorically."

FN did not seem like he meant it metaphorically.

Definitely not. "How could you have never heard of the Empire?" They only ruled the whole galaxy for a while there, Gratuity.

"Maybe you just need to be more specific?" Tip said. "I've heard of lots of empires. Was this a Gorg one?"

"No, this was the Galactic one. Ruled by Emperor Palpatine? Darth Vader?"

Tip shook her head. "Maybe it's from a different galaxy."

She was pretty sure even the Boov hadn't worked out intergalactic travel, not when Slushious still took a day just to get to Titan. But that didn't no one else in the universe had.

"A different galaxy, that's funny," FN-2187 said. "Then I'd really be in the wrong place."

"Should have made a left turn in Albuquerque," Tip said. "Would that be really bad?"

Because she was really sure that he was in the wrong place.

BWI Airport Portalocity Lounge, Saturday morning

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