milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Clint's putting an unlit cigarette in his mouth when he enters the bar; he stops for a brief moment before shrugging and putting the cigarette back in its box, tucking it away in his blazer. Unlike last time, he's dressed like an office worker just off work, loosened tie included. If you don't notice the concealed holster and his shined black combat boots, and people usually don't.

He grabs a beer from the bar, and leans back to watch the crowd.

[OOC: Aaaand I am asleep! Slowtimes all around? ♥. No new threads, please.]

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She grins back, patently ignoring the Bar's list of damages.

"Hello! ... Suppose I have, got chased by a book with teeth, found cars." Oswin kind of adores the cars. She hasn't the first idea how to properly work one, but... cars.

"Did... the book with teeth have legs?"

His brow is furrowed, because. What, Oswin.

"... Just teeth. And a lot of fur, someone had an odd sense of humor." She's slightly sad he's missed the point - cars, cars are way cooler than books with teeth, books with teeth are fairly useless except as a slightly bizarre library security measure.

He's getting there. (Though he sees parking garages every day. Milliways's, on the other hand... well. One can appreciate a fine car.)

"Wait, let me get this straight. It chased you into a parking garage? Or did you find that later."

"No, I found the garage the next day. I jumped on the book after it bit someone."

After they ran from it.

After she opened it.

After someone tragically re-organized the card catalog and she found an entry under 'bitey book'.

"Okay. That makes more sense."

He figures. What is this place, even? (Don't answer that.)

"Cars are cool," he offers, after a moment. "Well, you know. Cool cars are."

"No, not actually." She scrunches her nose, leaning against the bar (and unfortunately highlighting her tragic shortness). "Haven't any cars where I'm from, so they're all rather cool."

"... The future sucks." Clint says this very definitively. "Cars are one of the great inventions of mankind."

She's hardly in the position to argue the point of non-suckiness in the future, but still, she shrugs.

"There's starliners, at least. But I couldn't figure out how to make the car we'd found the keys to move without crashing it in to something, so."

There's other reasons, but really, they aren't hers to share. After all, as far as she knows, Autor hasn't breathed a word about her... little slip-up.

Clint laughs, shaking his head.

"Well, you ever want to take a ride in a car, let me know. I'm pretty good at not crashing. And, uh, I might know a thing or two about hotwiring."

She side-eyes him thoroughly.

And then, with utmost innocence:

"I know a truck with the keys in the side pocket."

Utmost innocence shouldn't grin like that, but oh well. Cars, Clint.

"Huh," Clint says, setting down his beer on the Bar. It disappears. "I seem to've found myself with some free time."

When she smiles - actually smiles, not grins or smirks or something else sarcastic or witty, she could light up a room.

Like now.

"Really?" Oswin asks, a little dumbfounded and disbelieving in her good fortune. "Really properly driving cars?"

Clint can't help the grin that spreads across his face. He wouldn't want to, but he also genuinely can't.

"Really properly. If it's some weird alien truck, I'm sure I can get something I'm familiar with running."

There might a super-excited happy squeak there. Maybe. She'll deny it to her dying day. What she can't deny is how she reaches out and grabs his hand to pull him, like a tiny determined little tug boat, towards the elevators.

Cars, Clint.

She's very quick; she manages to be just a shade under the speed at which Clint would automatically break her hand, but he's still a little tense as she starts to tug.

He follows, though, shoulders loosening intentionally as he does. Sure, being tugged around isn't exactly his favorite activity (outside of highly delineated circumstances), but Oswin clearly doesn't mean any harm by it.

Thankfully the elevator isn't far away, and it is fairly fast as it descends down into the garage, Oswin fairly vibrating in place with excitement the entire trip.

The garage itself is practically a cavern, and as the lights come up in sections it seems to go on for ever.

It might, actually. Who knows if it's ever been properly mapped.

"That one there, the... truck thing, that's a truck, right? Or do they all need to have big boxes on the back?" Look, all of her car knowledge is deeply theoretical.

"That's a truck," Clint acknowledges, her enthusiasm keeping the smile on his face. "A pick-up, actually; the back is a cargo bed so you can move things things that wouldn't fit in a normal car."

Thankfully, it's a model he recognizes. The Ford F-150 is pretty normal to the early 21st century.

"That's the one we found the keys in." And the one she's heading towards, though there's enough interesting prospects in this place to keep them busy for days - that row over there appears to be given over entirely to various Batmobiles and Batcycles and Batvehicles of various sorts, there's a heavily modified and beat-up DeLorean down that way, there's a sleek silver 1927 Daimler right next to a green flower-painted Volkswagen van...

The Batvehicles catch his attention, and he slows for a moment before following her. Probably safe to stick with something he knows how to drive.

"Sure." He's cheerful, even though most of his smile's dropped. Hopefully it actually starts; it's been awhile since Clint's had to pull apart a truck and these newer models are all computers.

She has to literally climb to get into the cab (thank the fluffy fates for running boards), and she might be in danger of deactivating the passenger-side airbag as she settles into her seat.

She also, and quite obviously, hasn't the first idea about seatbelts. She's too busy eyeing ALL THE BUTTONS, and trying to remember which ones turned on the Mariachi band so that doesn't happen again.

Clint levers himself more easily into the driver's side, and pulls his seat forward a bit.

"Hey, Oswin," he says, to catch her attention after he fishes out the keys. He's holding the top of his seatbelt. "You got one of these on your side. Put it on, yeah?" He pulls his across and buckles it.

He hopes she crashed at pretty slow speeds before, because he's seen many variations of the aftermath that happens when people don't.

Yeaaah, no. The Alaska went down in a high-velocity impact that drove at least one of the survival pods deep underground. Thankfully, the designers of said survival pods fully realized the pods would be full of panicking, non-military-trained people who couldn't be relied upon to remember things like restraints in the heat of the moment.

Not that any of the lovely technical advances in the pods did much for the long-term survival of the crew.

She eyes the strap with vague dubiousness of 'and what, exactly, is this supposed to achieve', but puts it on anyway. Hey, no arguing with the guy who's gonna show her how this thing moves.

"So, can this thing actually, y'know, move without hitting anything?"

"Here's hoping," Clint says, as he finishes adjusting the mirrors. He starts to F-150 up, and grins when it does. Always nice when your transportation actually works.

He pulls out of the parking space, and starts to drive down the row. On the left, because chances are those're the rules if Earth rules are being followed at all.

In between being absolutely in love with that engine noise, and being super excited about moving (the truck rumbles, how cool is that?) she's watching him like a hawk.

...

The driving certainly doesn't look hard.