fandomhigh | BWI Airport, Portalocity Lounge, Saturday morning

Billie perched on top of a pile of luggage that looked suspiciously like it could have come out of the back of an upscale garage band's van. (It . . . kind of had. She'd managed to pack a few non-musincal essentials, but they were all shoved into the corners of the various road cases. She had her priorities, okay?) She had her phone out, scrolling through her latest playlist, when a video call request came in and she grinned.

"T!" she greeted.

"B!" said Thea from the phone. "You landed!"

"I landed!" Billie agreed. "I am so totally in Baltimore, dude!"

"You're so totally in Baltimore!"

They proceeded to run through everything that had happened to each of them since they last talked -- about an hour ago, before Billie's flight landed.

"I know it's totally too early to call," Thea admitted eventually.

"Dude, I was so totally going to call you." Billie grinned. "How cool is it that we're both on our own epic adventures?"

"It is most, most egregiously nonbogus," Thea said. "Oh! That's the opening bugle. I gotta go!"

"Yo, I cannot believe you moved to the Alaskan military school."

"That's the Alaskan musical conservatory, thank you!"

Billie laughed and nodded. "Right, right, excellent!" They both gave each other a one-handed air guitar. Which anyone walking by would somehow be able to hear.

You're welcome, passersby.

"Talk to you later, T!"

"Talk to you later, B!"

Billie deflated slightly as she hung up with her ~~soulmate~~ ~~other half~~ best friend, then went back to tooling around on her playlist, one ear of her massive, audiophile headphones slid back so she could hear if/when anyone else came to join her in the lounge. Or when the shuttle eventually arrived.

"Righteous," she muttered, bopping along to the music on her headphones. "First day of grad school playlist complete." She kept bopping, then looked around at her stack of luggage in the otherwise empty lounge. ". . . Now what do I do?"

[open! And a little earlier than normal, perhaps, because I managed to completely forget that I have an event tonight. :P]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"No, I mean brownies. Some people think they're actually more powerful than the fae, but they keep to themselves. And yeah, the fae took over...over a hundred years ago? They decided humans were screwing up the world too much, so they didn't get to be in charge of the rest of us any more."

“That must have been a most egregious war,” Billie said. “I’m afraso far I am standing by my estimation of your universe as ‘bogus’.”

"It wasn't so much a war as, uh..." Well, a lot of people had died. A handful of species that were deemed more trouble than they were worth had been exterminated for the greater good. "It wasn't a great time, no. But I think it was probably necessary? Who knows what humans would have done if they hadn't?"

World War II, nuclear weapons, most single use plastics, gen AI...the list of horrors prevented by the fae takeover went on and on.

Okay, but humans also eliminated smallpox. Did the Fae eliminate smallpox?

“We invented rock and roll!” said Billie, who unlike the narrative couldn’t see the bad examples in Erasmus’s narrative, and thus went . . . a different direction with her examples. “And electronic music! Does your world even have theramins?”

"I don't know what that is," Erasmus said, because he wasn't a musical person to know instrument names. "So maybe? We definitely have rock and roll." And vaccines. The fae hadn't banned useful technology. "They banned stuff like...things that are going to be really bad for the planet. What are those things called? Weapons of mass destruction? And like, discriminating against other people because of their race or species." Somehow that last one didn't usually apply to necromancers.

“Oh.” Billie blinked. “Excellent! But then why is being a necromancer bad?”

"It's...a long story." He was just gonna go with that, yeah.

“One most filled with cognitive dissonance,” Billie agreed.

She was a little worried about your u, Erasmus.

"Probably they all are," Erasmus said with a shrug. People were gonna people, no matter where you were.

“Not necessarily,” Billie said. Though now she wasn’t sure. “But I can’t think of any to prove you wrong right now.”

Her story was packed with it, when you came right down to it.

BWI Airport, Portalocity Lounge, Saturday morning

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