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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"The important thing is that they know they can't stop you from having your water on the plane," Tip agreed. "Then the aliens win."

Aliens had usurped terrorists as the classic bad guys in Tip's world. Though J.Lo would pout at Tip to see her using them that way, even in jest.

"I hadn't heard anything about aliens messing with the FAA. Must be Skrulls," Mayday suggested. Aliens were quite as common in Mayday's world, but there were a few races who were extremely well known. "They could sneak in there."

"Skrulls?" Tip hadn't heard of them, yet. But she'd already learned about one new alien species, today, so it didn't entirely surprise her. "Do they look like humans?"

"They're normally green with bumpy chins," Mayday said, a little surprised. Maybe Gratuity wasn't big on alien history? The Skrulls hadn't invaded recently. And maybe she just didn't pay that much attention to the Fantastic Five somehow? "But they shapeshift, so they can look human."

"They shapeshift?" Tip blinked. "That's a new one, for me. I mean, the Boov can sort of inflate and deflate, but they're still six-legged frog things, just with more or less air in them."

"Boov?" Mayday asked. "Never heard of them. That's... some special talent they have." She was being diplomatic because that sounded weird.

To a girl who was just talking about bumpy-chinned green shapeshifters.

"Okay, how do all of you not know about the Boov?" Tip asked, frustration boiling over. "They took over the Earth for a year."

"... When was this?" Mayday checked. Either Gratuity was crazy, playing a weird prank, or something else was up. And she followed the Fantastic Five as closely as every teenage girl with a poster of Franklin Richards did, so she knew just how weird some of those somethings could be.

"Three years ago," Tip said. "They haven't even decided if they're going to rebuild the Statue of Liberty or leave her headless as a memorial."

"That definitely didn't happen where I'm from," Mayday noted. "I'd have noticed. Do you have time travel or alternate reality theory where you're from?"

"J.Lo says he managed time travel. A version of him chased us across New Booveworld trying to kill him to stop him from inventing it."

Because that definitely would cause a universe-destroying paradox.

"I'm guessing that's not Jennifer Lopez?" Mayday checked. "We have a brilliant scientist, Big Brain - Reed Richards - of the Fantastic Five who's written a lot about his trips into space, time, and other realities. That could be part of what happened here." Mayday's interest in science was a little more grounded than that, but her dad had always been a fan of Doctor Richards.

"Nope. People get confused over it all the time, though. He chose it as his Earth name because he saw it all over the internet and decided it must be really common." As you do. "He's actually started getting a lot of her mail."

Tip wasn't going to go into all the science stuff. That was J.Lo's area of expertise. Tip did the adventure planning.

"Oh! Is he one of those aliens?" Mayday checked. "Or some kind of alien? The phrase 'Earth name' seems like a tip-off."

"He's Boov," Tip confirmed. "He was an engineer for the invasion force. But we ended up teaming up to get rid of this other creepy alien force and he realized that the Boov were being dicks. So when they left he stayed on Earth with me and my mom."

"That'll happen. Ms Fantastic was a Skrull sent to infiltrate the Fantastic Five years ago and now she's one of Earth's greatest heroes," Mayday said. It was fun to find a trope common between canons before the bus even showed up. "Is it too Earth-centric to wonder if the planet's just so great that it's bound to attract defectors?"

"Well, I know I'm pretty amazing," Tip said cheerfully. "But there are probably other planets where it happens, too."

BWI Airport Portalocity Lounge, Saturday morning

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