milliways_bar | (no subject)

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The door opens. Arcade slams it behind him. Then he thinks to look up.

"Okay. Not where I was planning to go today, but okay," he says. As one of the waitrats scurries up to him he says, "I'm going to need something to help wash the taste of dealing with a particularly overentitled brat of a nouveau riche cattle baron's son throwing a hissy fit all over the Fort today and disrupting people trying to get actual work done. Got a recommendation for me?"

The rat squeaks, races off to the Bar, and returns with a bottle of beer and a red plastic egg. Arcade hands over some caps and accepts the beer, but squints at the egg in puzzlement, especially since it cracks in half to reveal an odd pinkish goo.

"Uh, what am I supposed to do with this, exactly?"

The rat's job description does not include explaining silly putty to the post-nuclear patrons, alas.

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"Oh, cool."

...That came from just behind and a little below Arcade's elbow, young male, pre-adolescence.

"Hm?" Arcade turns around to look for the source of the voice. "Oh, hey. Do you know what this stuff is? It looks like some kind of... I don't know what."

The source is a very clean looking blonde boy, looking on the early side of nine years old.

"It's a non-newtonian fluid!" ...and the rest of the Ghostbusters will apologize for what 'Uncle Egon' taught the kid to say. "Silly Putty!"

"Oh. Huh."

Believe it or not he actually understood the first term better than the second.

"So... what am I supposed to do with it? Tempting as it is to take it back to the Fort and cram it into one or more of Ted Gunderson's orifices I don't think I can get away with that."

"Watch this......may I?" The kid looks to Arcade a moment before reaching for the blob. Manners first.

"Sure. Knock yourself out," says Arcade, and hands the stuff over. This should be good to watch.

Yup. That it will be as the kid finds a discarded newspaper and flattens the putty against it to lift up an image of the print it was just pressed to... Before the images oozes and melts with the putty.

"... huh," says Arcade thoughtfully. "Never seen anything do that before. Even if it's some kind of plant sap that takes paint off the wall it just... you know, takes paint off the wall. Is it supposed to do that?"

"It's part of the chemicals in the compound binding to the extra ink on the surface on the newspaper." Tyler replies, grinning and wadding up the putty into a ball and starting to make like he was going to bounce it on the floor..

Before he thinks better of it and hands it to Arcade. "You can bounce it too."

"I see," says Arcade, taking the ball back. "Bouncing, huh? I guess that makes sense, considering how elastic it seems to be..."

He tosses it at the floor, not really expecting it to bounce more than an inch or two. Clearly someone is utterly unfamiliar with this stuff's physical properties; there's involuntary flinching a moment later. "Whoa!"

And the kid is snatching it out of the air just a second later.

"Whoop! ...yeh...uh. It's kind of fun once you get the hang of it."

"I suppose I can see that," says Arcade. He's quicker at recovering than he looks. "Silly putty, you said? It's common enough to have a name?"

"Back home yeh..." Tyler's going to be giving Arcade an appraising look. "Kids can buy this stuff for a dollar or two at any general store or toy store."

One of these days Arcade is going to stop working from the assumption that people are from his world until proven otherwise, but today does not appear to have been that day. It takes him a moment to look Tyler over and remind himself that the other patrons here have a lot more to work with in terms of resources.

Either that, or there's somewhere in the NCR that's a lot better off than he remembers.

"I see," he says. "And home is...? If you don't mind my asking, I mean."

"Wonderburg, Kansas." Obviously, he doesn't.

Arcade's clothes look a little too aged and dirty to likely be from Tyler's world, and he definitely doesn't look like a mad scientist.

"I'm Tyler by the way."

"Ah. All right."

Yep. Definitely not his world. Anybody from Kansas would've had to make it through Caesar's territory to get to the Mojave and there's no way this kid could've done it without a bunch of scars at the very least.

"Pleasure to meet you, Tyler. My name's Arcade. I'm from New Vegas, in Nevada. Freeside, specifically."

Edited 2011-02-20 06:11 (UTC)

"....New Vegas?" He's heard about Las Vegas, and the incident with the flea and the guys in golden armor with Miss Kyle.

If only because the Flea has a big damn mouth.

"That's what they've been calling it for years now," says Arcade. "Ever since the local tribes got forced to move out of the ruins and civilize themselves."

...you know what, Tyler is just not going to ask.

If it involves ruins and tribes he really doesn't want to know.

....wait.

".....how long has your world had tribes and ruins that they'd live in?"

"Well, I can't vouch for when people started organizing themselves into tribal groups, but it had to have been sometime relatively soon after the War," Arcade says. "Seeing how there wouldn't have been much chance of isolated individuals surviving in the wastes otherwise. As far as ruins, those would pretty much be the War again, so a little over two hundred years."

There's a reason Arcade doesn't interact with the patients at the Fort much.

...

"Lemme guess, this war involved a big dang group called the Enclave messing with the government to go for full-out nuclear war with China."

....

.........

".... yes. How did you-"

"You're not the only person from your world I've run into." Tyler replies. "Little stuff just kept adding up, but the big W, War 200 years ago kinda..."

"Oh. Yeah. I suppose... yes, I suppose that makes sense," Arcade says slowly. "I've met at least one other person here from back home, I know that much... funny, considering how many other people from other places that've never even heard of the Great War there seem to be. The distribution's more than a little strange."

"Not when you think about it..but you probably don't want to think about it either." Tyler replies. "There are a lot of worlds where your Great War never happened, and isn't going to happen."

"Yes, I've been getting that impression," says Arcade. "Which is simultaneously reassuring and a little depressing, but I don't think you want me to go into detail about that."

That's good, since he already has a pretty good idea.

"So why did Bar give you Silly Putty to play with?"

"Probably to distract me. We had a particularly obstreperous patient at the place where I work today, and when someone's obnoxious enough to disturb the researcher who normally stays out of any line of direct contact with the sick and the wounded, he's seriously obnoxious," Arcade says. "If Mr. Gunderson isn't out of the Fort by tomorrow I may find an excuse to go on an extended supply run to anywhere else in the Wasteland but the Freeside region."

"...sure you don't want someone to just kick him in the shins a bit?"

"Actually, I'd love to do that myself, but we have rules against giving the patients what the worst ones deserve," Arcade says. "It'd just end up making things harder for all of the others, and they need us more than we need the catharsis. Good offer, though. I like the way you think."

"I've got people like that at school." He makes a face. "They've got a good foot on me or more for height and the teachers kinda frown on me kickin em in the shins."

"I don't need to spend another Saturday morning staring at a chalkboard."

Arcade nods. "There's always somebody who just has to go around making things miserable for the rest of the world," he says. "You have my sympathies. At least you'll probably never see them again when they're older, or at least I hope you won't."

"If I see em when I'm older, at least then no body is going to give me detention if I slap manners into them."

"That's true," Arcade agrees. "On the other hand, if they stay ahead of you on the growth curve there may be other issues, so... make sure you're absolutely certain that whatever it is you're going to do is going to work on the first try. Sometimes you don't get a second chance."

"I'll do that." Tyler smiles. "Being fair to Bar, she did pick out a pretty nice distraction."

"I suppose she did at that," says Arcade. "is there anything else this stuff can do that you can show me?"

"Mostly those things, though you can sculpt it a bit.. It won't hold it's shape though, technically it's a very viscous fluid."

Arcade nods and starts fiddling with the stuff, tugging at it until it starts pulling into a taffylike sheet. "Interesting," he says. "I wonder how they stumbled no the formula in the first place."

"Maybe they were looking into ways to replace rubber for tires."

"I suppose that's possible. There were a significant number of discoveries made in the 2040s and 2050s when it suddenly became important to discover alternatives to petroleum products," Arcade says, and starts squishing the stuff back together into a ball. "How long does something like this last? Is it prone to falling apart if it's worked with for too long?"

"It lasts a really long time, so long as you don't dunk it in oil or alcohol."

"Hmm."

He tosses it a little more lightly than before at the surface of a nearby table, and catches it on the rebound. It's not long before he's got it going at a pretty good bounce-and-catch-and-toss-again pace.

"Interesting stuff. I wonder if it ever surfaced in our world somewhere and just got forgotten by the histories..."

"Probably did, it's been a children's toy back home since I think the 1960's at least." Rummage sales bring out the weirdest things.

"Wow. That's practically ancient history... what year is it where you come from?" Arcade pauses. "And did that question sound as peculiar to you as it did to me?"

"2007, and not really, it's kind of common around the regulars here to ask the year."

"I don't think I'm ever going to get used to this place," Arcade mutters as he snatches the Silly Putty ball out of the air. "Not that it's not a vast improvement over my evening entertainment alternatives at home, you understand."

"Dude, why do you think I come here?"

Arcade's pretty sure that Tyler's entertainment options don't include places that routinely get called 'dens of iniquity' on their best day, so he just nods and says, "Point."

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