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Making his way to the target range through the jungle canopy was just a little too Viet Cong meets Tarzan for Gordon's tastes today. When he made his way back indoors he opted to take some time to make his next visit to the range worth all the fuss and bother- it's modding time. He might as well put the welding skills he learned for the bicycle to good use.

One almost-redheaded guy in nerd glasses and circled-lambda T-shirt doing terrible, terrible things to an unsuspecting Combine pulse rifle, over by the Window.

[tinytag: Gordon Freeman, Alyx Vance, John Vattic]

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"I've seen worse, but you still don't want to use it on full auto for long," says Gordon. "Wanders like an ADHD kid on sugar."

"Probably wouldn't bother me, since I could steady it, but I could see the problems," John says with a rare laugh at the analogy. "Don't be hard on those ADHD kids, you know. Some of them can lead normal lives; I've seen it." Though, those kids in Dubrensk...

(Oh, you don't know the half of it, John.)

"I'm thinking of one who was in the same class as me when I was in fourth grade," says Gordon. "Bright kid, but Lee could not stay in his seat for more than ten minutes at a time. The teacher wound up just letting him roam up and down the aisles as long as he could still answer questions- so you get my point."

"Yeah, I get your point. I've worked with some of them; they can definitely be a handful, that's for sure. I'd really love to get my hand on one of those to take a closer look sometime, if you have another one or something." Though he still doesn't like to kill, he can at least admire firearms. Besides, there's a part of him that likes them more than he'd like to admit.

"This is the only one I've got now, but if that changes you'll be the second to know," Gordon says. "After Alyx, anyway. Once something gets done about that jungle I'll show you how it goes on the range."

"Alright, fair enough. I tried going out there... it was easier than life back where I'm from, but I was left with dough all over my head, and cuts from holly plants... not my idea of a good time. Didn't seem to be affected by my psi attacks, either. The plants, at least. Kept the dough away... probably because the plants are rooted." John shrugs. He gives up with those things.

"I tried going over the top. Navigating the branches isn't all that different from crossing a bridge on the underside," says Gordon. "Although the dough things... those were different. We didn't have those."

"Oh, man, they're horrible. Stick to you like glue, and it makes the plants that much harder to fend off. Compacted with the point that I forgot to bring my guns... yeah. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone."

"I never really wanted to trade in my crowbar for a machete, but adding one to the arsenal's starting to look tempting."

"Not worth it, probably. Just give you a false sense of hope out there," John says with a laugh. "So, what's new?"

"Spent some time doing maintenance and going over the circuits in my hazard suit the other day," Gordon says. "Some yo-yo cross-wired it to make the blood ox monitor, the flashlight, and the boosted sprint function all drain the same power source. I had to spend an hour and a half undoing their damage."

"Wow, that's pretty stupid, but glad you could fix it. I mean, I'm not into advanced circuitry, but even I can realize the stupidity there. Wish I could rewire my brain so I could be invisible and use telekinesis at the same time, but oh well. Pick your battles, I suppose."

Gordon smiles wryly. "It used to have a built-in stealth function, but that got removed sometime between Black Mesa and now," he says. "Made room for the antivenins, I guess. Anyway, I couldn't engage that and move any faster than a crawl, let alone a sprint. That's as close as I ever came to invisibility myself."

"Yeah, I can't do real invisibility, just tricking people into not thinking I'm there. Doesn't work on cameras, though... found that out the hard way. I was fighting through those goons for ages." He sighs, remembering. "Oh, well, nothing's perfect, I guess."

His mind takes this opportunity to give him a rather splitting headache, to which he takes his head in his hands and massages it.

Up go the eyebrows at that. "Do you need to sit down or anything?" Gordon asks. "That looks nasty."

"Eh," John says, grunting through his teeth, "You get used to it. One of the very short list of side effects to being a psychic powerhouse." The others being target practice for government goons and a tendency toward memory loss.

"I'll take your word for it," Gordon says dryly. "Armor and guns got me this far. They should be enough to get me the rest of the way."

"Yeah, I wish... well, I would say I wish things were that simple for me, but that would be doing you a great injustice, my friend."

And yet... he says it, but there's another layer of him under the surface; many layers. He's connected to something. I wonder if he himself even knows it.

"I understand the sentiment," Gordon says with a wry twitch to the corners of his mouth. "As long as we're both engaging in wishful thinking, I'd like a pony."

"Hmmm... I want... I'd have to say get rid of the past six months, whatever they were. I mean... I don't remember anything except the broadest details about my life... I don't even remember my... preferences in company, for lack of a better term. What friends I like to keep at MIT, the sort of people I went on dates with... hell, I don't even remember my sexual preference. Then again, I suppose that's yet another non-problem for you."

Pause.

"But a pony might be nice, too."

Gordon's... not gonna answer that first part. He's just not. It's safer.

But he nods. "You get the idea,t hen."

"Yeah, I'm... sorry to rant at you like that, at any rate. Sound like I never got over being 13 or something."

"Do you need any help with that, or anything?" John indicates the weapon.

Gordon just shakes his head, his expression almost but not quite a smile. He's not about to give anyone a hard time for venting.

"I don't think I'm going to be able to weld this on after all. My equipment isn't capable of that kind of heat. Got any ideas on how to stick the sight to the barrel?"

"Well, I'm not sure if the research would ever be completed in my world, since it's pretty much in the experimental stages right now, but there's this tape that the guys in Bio were engineering that mimics the properties of gecko feet to have a permanent stick, but it can also be removed if the mood strikes you (http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/18966/?a=f). It's pretty strong actually, from what I can recall."

John shakes his head. "Why do I remember things like this, but not others."

"Hmm." Gordon considers the pulse rifle. "I might have to ask around about that. There's probably somebody here from a timeline that did produce the stuff."