fandomhigh | Library, Saturday

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Library, Saturday

You know what was really fun when the island started thumping and shaking? Having sensory organs that were highly sensitive to vibrations.

Ahsoka was not a happy little Togruta when she opened the library today.

She also set up the tables in the middle and broke into that stash of library caf in the hopes it would summon people trying to fix this.

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"I spent about eighteen months studying it last year," Kathy said. "Just started picking it back up again after not being able to for about a year, so I've forgotten some stuff."

That was...a way to put it, Kathy, sure.

"You've got Spanish, though," Tip noted. "So that should help. My mom managed to be the point person for talking to Spanish speaking refugees in Arizona and she never studied Spanish at all."

She was admittedly still pretty sure that had mostly been the spanish speakers humoring the hell out of her mom.

Kathy nodded. "That's how I managed to learn as much Italian as I did, since I was basically learning it from mp3s in my dorm room. I grew up in Koreatown--" Her expression was shadowed by sadness for a moment before she pushed it away, "--and, like, at least half the residents were Hispanic."

"New York?" Tip guessed.

Sorry, Kathy. She was an East Coast girl.

"Better," Kathy said, thinking of all the times she and Raven had this argument. "Los Angeles."

Her LA might be filled with hordes of the walking dead at the moment, but a girl still needed to have hometown pride.

"What makes it better than New York?" Tip asked.

She had absolutely no dog in this fight.

"The weather and the beaches," Kathy said with a solemn nod. "And also habit. My roommate and I like to argue over which one's better just to be brats to each other."

Not that they'd been doing a lot of teasing lately.

Tip smiled. "Yeah, my best friend back home and I do stuff like that, too."

They're arguments tended more towards "is this cleaning fluid for eating?", but she got the point.

"Sometimes we argue over which city has the worst tourists, too," Kathy said with a wistful smile. "New York gets more tourists overall, but the ones who come for Hollywood are the most obnoxious."

"You both get a lot of them," Tip said. "But I'd wager the tourists at Gettysburg are worse than both."

"And a new contender has entered the ring," Kathy said. "C'mon, can't make that claim without backing it up."

Tip raised an eyebrow. "Two words: 'Confederate reenactors'."

Kathy shuddered. "Tell me they, like, only come around for a few weeks in the year or something," she asked. "Get their larp on, go home?"

"I don't actually live there," Tip admitted. "But I know they definitely have their big event weekends. Still, there's always the hardcore ones that like to harass little black girls who are just there on a school field trip."

"I know the type," Kathy said flatly.

Hmmm, did it count as superheroing if you took a quick trip to a city to hurt people who were assholes but didn't actually commit a crime? She might have to think about that a bit more.

"So where are you from?" she asked, because spacing out in the middle of a conversation to think about violence probably wasn't normal. "Philadelphia?"

Of the maybe four cities she could name in Pennsylvania, she was pretty sure that Philly was the closest. "Oh, and, I think I missed your name, sorry."

Tip shook her head. "A small town, these days. But I like Philly. J.Lo and I go visit whenever we can talk Mom into letting us go." She smiled. "I'm Gratuity. And J.Lo is an alien. Not the Latin popstar."

"These days?" Kathy asked, mostly because she was alert to that kind of language. She thought about her world in terms of 'these days' a lot. "...You have an alien friend also named J.Lo"

Okaaaaay then.

"He picked it off the internet," Tip said. "His people invaded my world about four years ago. Destroyed a lot of the infrastructure and relocated humanity to 'human preserves' . . . I mean, they had their reasons. We met their reasons. And humanity helped stop those reasons from utterly destroying the Earth, and in return J.Lo's people agreed to move to Titan instead."

Kathy shuddered. "There is nothing about the phrase 'human preserves' that doesn't send chills up my spine," she said. "...But these aliens could live equally at home either on Earth or on one of Saturn's moons? Then why settle the place where there were already people living?"

Why Titan? Why go all the way out there instead of Luna or something?

"...Amphibious?" she guessed, thinking of the one thing Titan and Terra had in common.

"Yep. And they can adjust to a new gravity super easily. They had to do a lot of work to get Titan a workable atmosphere, though. Earth was going to be . . . easier. They didn't have a whole lot by way of resources on their own."

"That makes sense," Kathy said. In as much as any of that made sense. "Refugees?"

"Kind of. Like . . . imagine how humanity might behave if we manage to make the Earth uninhabitable and have to go out into the universe to find somewhere new," Tip said. "And then throw in a race of giant, ugly, homicidal clone people who's language system is based on punching that starts following humanity around and literally eating whatever new planet they find to live on."

"Cockroaches followed by locusts," Kathy grumbled.

Her view of humanity was not at its most positive.

"Right," Top said, blinking. "And in this case, ine of the cockroaches made friends with one of the native beetles and together they discovered that the locusts were allergic to gnats."

Tip's world was weird.

"And what did the gnats turn out to be?" Kathy asked. "It wasn't the common cold, was it?"

Library, Saturday

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