milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Once Kara got out of the cells and only kind of bolted for the Door, she couldn't get back to the Bar for a few days. She was sort of surprised she missed it, but hey, here it is. Coolness.

First things first - she leaves a long overdue note with Bar.

I turned myself in and did cell time for the fight in the woods. You don't have to, because I worked that out with the girl who took me in, so I'm hoping that you're satisfied with that.

I know it probably won't matter to you, but I am sorry. I hope you're doing okay.

- Supergirl

After that, Kara heads outside to study for Claire's math quiz. One small, blonde, cross-legged levitating girl in an entirely seasonable crop top and shorts is hanging out by the lake as she pours over her mostly borrowed notes.

This, she reflects, would probably be easier if she'd ever taken a test she could remember before that didn't involve hitting things with cars or identifying the silhouettes of weaponry.

Distractions will bring her grade down, but she'll be grateful anyway.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Just floating, Kara'd assure him if he asked or if she noticed him being there.

But unfortunately, strange muddy people are not enough, on their own, to grab her attention.

"Stupid calculator," she mutters, erasing a line of numbers as sulkily as it is possible to erase anything.

Definitely not. He's just a boring kid wandering around. Nothing unusual about him at all.

"Hello?" She doesn't seem very enthused to be there. Either floating or invisible rocks would be entertaining, you'd think.

"Mm?" Kara glances up, and hey, a sort of cute boy. Valid distraction! Her sulk disappears in favor of a grin as she waves at him.

"Hey!" She chirps. "Do you know anything at all about math? Anything at all, seriously."

"Hello," he says. "Yes, I know something on the topic. And excuse the question, but are you floating?"

Well, if he runs the risk of breaking his toes walking over, it's a good question.

"Yes?" Kara says, glancing down with a doubtful look. "I, um, am? What else would I be doing?"

Besides sneakily hiding the calculator her teacher told her she didn't need to add this question up.

Oo, sneaky.

"Sitting on a rock, most likely? I haven't met many people capable of floating." He dismisses that as not so important. "What's the problem?"

Dilemma time: admit to being dumb and get help, or fail the quiz?

"I can't figure this stupid graph out," she says, sighing, "I mean, okay, I do my slope equation and find my intercepts and that's all fine, but for some reason my points won't plot over it and I don't know what I did wrong."

She pauses. "There are invisible rocks around here?"

To be fair, Wesker's range of "dumb" is much wider than most people's. However, he tends to judge people on a variety of merits. It's one of his few rare good qualities.

"Oh?" He takes a few moments longer to study it than he means to. (It's less a kind strategy than it is a calculating one. He hates it when Birkin wanders up, looks at his notes, corrects two hours of struggling, and then wanders off again; and he's working on learning how to get along with people.) "I think you went wrong here. And maybe this could stand a comparison with the book.

"No, but it was possible, given how frequently this place changes."

"Yeah," Kara says, to...all of it, basically. "Um, thanks. I...just started doing this, honestly. It's still sort of not going so great, and I have a quiz tomorrow and...and I'm totally just whining to someone whose name I don't know yet. Utter fail."

Kara offers her hand. "Hi. I'm Supergirl, superheroic alien living on Earth in 2006. Pleased to meet you, math guy."

"Hello." He shakes it. "My name's Deitmar. I work in a lab in the late 1970s. It doesn't sound like it's quite so interesting as being a superhero." He glances at the bar again. "You could always stay to study for a few extra hours. I admit to taking advantage of time being frozen on my world myself."

"That is totally my plan," She says, with a smile. "And hey, labs? Science? I am all for science - and I actually kind of have a friend from your time period."

Look at all the ~~excuses not to study~~ things they have in common!

"Really? What does he do?" He's pretty relaxed about the question, since on his world superheroes are a theoretical concept. "Yes. I do a lot of cleaning, and there's the occasional burst of organizing."

"He, um, he used to work in a junkyard but now he's Bound here and works on a spaceship?" Kara offers, rubbing the back of her neck. "Besides that he's pretty normal. And still, it's cleaning and organizing for science."

"That's a change, yes. I assume he was used to spacefaring levels of technology before?

"Well, it pays," he says wryly.

"Not really, so he was pretty much geeking out and it was adorable." Kara uses the same inflection on 'adorable' as you would use for a particularly cute puppy. Clearly, this is a platonic friendship.

"That's never something that sucks," she adds, tilting her head, "Getting paid. And aren't you kind of young for the job?"

"Not for a lab assistant's work, certainly. It's one of the positions you can take part-time while you finish your training. If I were a research assistant, definitely."

"Oh, cool," Kara says, shifting her position just a little, "Kind of like being a sidekick? Which I...technically am, but only sort of. I work alone a lot."

He decides that gets a small smile. "I work in more of a group setting, so it's hard to guess who I'd be the sidekick to." (Insert Aquaman joke here.) "Is the superhero business usually sorted that way?"

"Not really?" Kara says, tucking her hair behind her ear, "Most people who get into it start off solo and as adults. There really isn't much of a formal training system - I was just kind of lucky. I mean, okay, there isn't any like - high organizing body that tells us what to do. There are people who get listened to, but they don't actually hold any authority they can't, um, beat into people."

"We have nothing like this, so I'm a little lost. So there's nobody paying you? No order to it? Teamwork?"

"No money," Kara says, holding up a finger for each point she makes, "No order. Vague teamwork."

She shrugs, bring her hand back to her knee. "It sounds like it shouldn't work, but it does. Go figure."

"If you were powerful enough, I can see how you could still force events to turn the way that you wanted them to. Security members here seem to work independently of each other."

"And work stupidly," Kara adds to that, only a little bit bitterly, "I mean, back home? We may not always get along but if someone's being a moron they get slapped down. Nobody on Security here would last like two seconds back where I'm from."

Of course, then she remembers Steph and now that's just all kinds of horrible, huh?

"Um, sorry," she says, wincing, "I mean, um, I'm...sort of not too happy with Security right now. But they're not really that bad, I'm just kind of irritated."

"I don't mind. I don't know most of them." He shrugs. "I only know Rachel." His tone says meeting her was not the best thing ever. (Which wasn't her fault.)

Of course it was her fault! Security sucks and is dumb. (Says the sixteen year old alien. Perhaps her view isn't exactly the most reliable?)

"Try to avoid them, then," Kara advises, "I mean, more than just for not breaking rules and getting celled. Don't get celled, either. That sucks a lot."