milliways_bar | (no subject)

(no subject)

Jordan is supposed to stay and wait for the guards to come back. But maybe her friend Lincoln's curiosity is finally rubbing off on her because she can't sit still. She's going to the Island, but the wait is making her crazy. She has to get out of this white room, but how? She can't go out the way she came, and there might be guards on the other side of the door. She's about to give up when she spots a cracked bit of ceiling tile. Standing on top of the bench, she can just reach it...

She nudges it aside, and getting a good grip, hauls herself up. I'm just going to take a peek, then I'll go back, is the promise she forgets as soon as she hears strange noises that sound like people talking. She heads towards the noises until she finds another loose board overhead. Maybe someone else has been this way before? She repeats the process that got her into the ceiling and finds herself rising up out of the floor. Weird.

This place looks like the evening commissary--a bar, as one of the censors called it--but unlike the one from the Institute. She takes a seat on a stool, wincing at how dirty her uniform is and staring helplessly at a menu. Where are the fruit smoothies? There isn't even a vegetable-protein frappe. Time is short, and she isn't at liberty to puzzle out all the words she doesn't recognize all on her own. She has to get back soon, or she'll miss her ride to the Island (not to mention the fact she'd get in trouble for exploring without permission if the guards discover she's left) and she so wants to know more about this place.

Won't someone help her figure out what to do?

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What is the sound of one jaw dropping?
Oh, that'd be it right there. Convenient that.

At first he thinks she's just plain crazy, but then he remembers that not everyone is from Earth, no matter how Earth-Looking they might be. Silly Ex-turtle and your planecentrism.

"Well...okay. Um. Right. A turtle is a...here, I can draw it better than I can explain it."

He grabs a napkin and the pencil behind his ear. He draws a circle with four small ovals at the ten - two and four-eight positions. With a larger oval at noon, and a tiny triangle at six.

"They look sort of like that, and can be any color from green to brown to even black depending on species. As for virgin, in this case it means a drink that doesn't have alcohol. Like your smoothie, for example.
...
Sex? That ones not nearly as easy to define. It really depends on where you stand on a whole lot of different things."

Sex already seems really complicated, so complicated it depends on point of view. She knew that people standing in different places see things happen differently, and sometimes they don't agree what happened. She'd have more time for that question later.

Jordan picks up the turtle. It's really cute. Basically the same shape as a puppy, even with a tail, though a bit rounder than the one Dick and Jane have. She has never seen a green animal before, but then again, aside from pictures, she has never seen any animal before.

"Can I have this?" She wants to look for turtles when she goes to the Island. Terr-till. Turtle. Turtle. Turtle.

Experimentally, she sips her smoothie and switches for the sex-on-the-beach. There's something different about the second one. It has al-kah-hall in it. It makes her stomach warm even though there's cold smoothie running down ahead of it.

"I think I like al-kah-hall."

"Um...sure. Napkins are powerful things. Trust me on this."

He wipes down the bar, watching her with amusement. It's not a mocking type of amusement, just plain old amusement.

"A lot of people do, but you've got to be careful. That Fire Water can do some damage if you let it."

"Fire can't be water. That's just silly." But maybe it's not wrong even if it is contradictory. Right now, the warmth has risen almost to a burn, and her stomach is swimming a bit. She fears the damage Mike mentioned, but the smoothie is a balm and nothing feels injured. It feels all a bit unreal.

As ever, it has taken her a bit longer than it ought to have done to latch onto something, something he said and she let pass because she was too busy finding out what every other word out of his mouth meant. She blinked at the flimsy napkin in her hand and the sketch of the turtle, then looked at him, down at herself, and back at him.

"Why did you ask me if I was a turtle?"

"The silly doesn't reign around here, it pours."

He says with a smile and a wink.

"I asked because I was really curious about sex right after I changed...and so I thought I'd ask the obvious."

Mike leaves out the part where he's been curious about sex since pretty much the beginning.

"After you changed?"

Horrified, Jordan falls off the back of her stool when she tries to discreetly lean away. On the floor, head aching, she manages, somehow, to calm down. He isn't contaminated. He can't be. He works here. They wouldn't let him be here if it weren't safe...

Feeling stupid and undignified, she climbs back up to her feet and takes three tries to find the stool. Why is her balance so off? Normally, she's so nimble...

"Uh," she stutters, "I think I'll have another one of those." She points to the smoothie and attempts to brush off her own stupidity. "Changed?"

"Woah, are you okay Jordan?"

Mike leaps forward, extending a hand in her direction. When he's sure that she is all right, he returns to his original position, and begins to gather components for another smoothie.

He used to be used to reactions like that, but it's something he's forgotten about in the days since his birthday present.

"You know what? Forget I said anything. Everything is A OK. Here, while we're waiting for this to mix, maybe you should have some water."

One hand works on the smoothie, the other fetches her a glass of water. Nimble and ambedextrous is our Mike.

"Water's good," she agrees. Alcohol is good but not a lot, like bacon or UV bathing. It's too bad.

"Can I ask you something?" She realizes she already has, and blushes, frustrated, "Do you ever wish that you could win the lottery? Aren't you sad you can't leave this place?"

The smile that appeared when she righted herself and took the water, only grows when she catches her punnish mistake. She's quick, this one.

"The lottery?"
Mike shrugs.

"I guess sometimes. I mean, who doesn't like winning things? But you know, I've always sort of lived by the idea that one should be with who one is, and not where one is. If you don't have the first, the second doesn't matter at all."

"With who," she repeats, dully, saddened to think of Lincoln. For the first time ever, she thinks she might be jealous of the people who get to stay here. The Island may have sunshine, maybe even turtles, but there are people here.

"I'm glad I met you," she says, honestly. "You're pretty smart. And you talk about things. None of the others talked about things." She shook her head, sipping her water. "Do you have friends you're happy to be with?"

"I can't help but talk about things. Things are my life. I collect them....and people. Don't ask."

He grins.
What can we say? The man is all smiles.

"Friends and family. Some are here, others aren't. Doesn't mean they make me any less happy."

He gestures her closer for a stage whisper.

"i'm a happy guy"

Jordan giggles. She can't stop herself. He's close enough to touch and that just doesn't happen very often.

But his words are just as exciting.

"Family?" She thinks of Lima 1-Alpha and the baby she has yet to see. She has no family, she is special but not so lucky as Mike. A fragment of fantasy flits across her mind--her staying here, serving drinks, collecting things, too.

But first things first: family! Excitement!

"Do you have kids?"

"I don't think so. I doubt that sample will ever get used, but it'd be interesting if it did."

"Sample?" Jordan thinks about the breeders back in the Institute. No one ever talks about how they get pregnant. Men were needed for something, that she could make out using common sense--else, why have them at all? "How does that work? Do you have a breeder picked out? Do you get to pick?"

"Oh no. We're not really designed for breeding. It wouldn't work anyway, I don't think. It was more of a gag than anything else. I mean, I'd like to have kids someday, and I've found the perfect woman to have them with it just wouldn't work out."

"Wouldn't work? Contamination problems?" She realizes she knows even less than she did before coming into this place. No, that's not right, she knows more, it's just that she has more questions. But the bits about not being able to breed make sense in a way, answering a question about the nature of contamination that she had never thought to ask.

She wants to comfort Mike, so she tries to repeat the gesture her friend Lincoln did for her. She reaches out and grabs his arm just below his elbow and gives it a squeeze.

"I bet it will work out," she says, decidedly. "Believe in the good, and that's what you'll get." She laughs because this goofy, happy-go-lucky guy hardly seems to need that advice.

"Contamination could be one problem, yeah. No matter how well we fit, we're just from totally different worlds. Plus, you know, I used to be a turtle."

She really is a sweet kid.

This is...unexpected. Dumbly, Jordan looks at the napkin in the one hand and the man she holds onto with the other.

"Is this...a joke?" She never did have much of a sense of humor.

[ooc: gotta hit the hay here, but will pick up tomorrow if interested...it's been swell! Thanks for showing a new girl the ropes!]

"Only in the Gee, the world is sometimes a funny place to be sort of way. In my case the term Human Comedy takes on a whole new meaning."

[ooc:i'd be delighted. thanks for playing!]

"The world?"

At this point, she is both battered by curiosity and suspicion. He talks about the world at large as if it weren't merely the extent of the contamination-free Institute or the Island. As if it really was the whole world. Maybe that's the secret Lincoln thought he found with the bug. Maybe.

"Where do you...live? In Sector Five?"

"Well, for the time being I live upstairs. But I'm from New York originally.
...
Planet called Earth."

He adds hastily.

"Well, of course you're from Earth," she laughs a little loudly, wildly relieved. He lives upstairs, in the Institute after all. Another tiny bit of jealousy crops up. He remembers his original home; she can only recall it in brief flashes. And she had never been to New York.

"New York? Do you actually remember it? What was it like?"

"Well, yeah. Of course I do. It's um...it's kind of hard to explain it to someone who's never been there. I guess it's big, smelly, and the most beautiful thing you've ever seen at night.

What planet are you from?"

By now, the combination of smoothie and smoothie-diluted alcohol has made her quite sedate; otherwise, she might understand this to be a serious question.

"Earth, of course, but I'm from Kansas." That is cemented in her memory unlike so much else. "I used to have a bike with pink streamers from the handle bars. I've never been to the city." At night, the only things she sees are the inside of the bar and her room. "I would have liked to have seen the lights. New York was so bright...before."

"Well I guess that makes us even then, I've never been to Kansas. Or had a bike with pink streamers before. Forget that even stuff, you win."

Something bothers him about her tone...well, her tone and the use of the word....before.

"Before....what, exactly?"