trans_9 | when did this place become like home? [closed]

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when did this place become like home? [closed]

They'd gotten back. In the end, that's all it felt like. A group of thirty had gone to a planet, have things gone poorly since being greeted, then found themselves lied to, exploded, and abducted in the same twenty-four hours. Then they'd set up a confrontation that'd taken days to reach fruition, broken into teams to achieve mission objectives that were, at heart, still not entirely the mission, and ended up in a fight involving clones of themselves, clones of people on Galilee, and the clones who ran everything under the guise of not having been clones at any point at all.

Here she'd thought Orochimaru had come up with a convoluted way of attaining immortality.

Still, they were back, she didn't have any official duty to file anything, she ached and hurt like hell, and after the shower she'd just taken (she'd discovered far more bruises, nicks, cuts, and really taken a look at the big burn on her upper thigh) she was ready for some selective downtime before reporting back in for duty at Medical Bay proper. She figured she needed to look at the Active Crew registry, too, after hearing mention of a recent pod release.

It just felt like effort she wanted to postpone spending for a good half hour nap or something, to take the edge off the uncertainty of walking into open combat with this group of misfits in the future. They'd survived, but they'd been lucky. No one'd been unscathed, and they weren't even facing the Ohm. Four days on one world, and this is how they'd come out?

Walking gingerly into her room, towel wrapped around her, she contemplated reviewing the files Kanner had left on the datapad she'd found in her medical kit. Different from any of the ones they had on ship, but there none-the-less. Actually...

Sakura looked over to the medkit itself, part of what she'd dragged back without paying attention once everyone had been sorted out to where they needed to be. It reminded her to do the responsible thing and finish dressing her wounds, if part of her grumbled and knew that the only reason she wasn't doing this in Medical Bay was a stubborn wish to be disassociated from the alien (familiar, she couldn't lie anymore) environment for a little while longer. "I hate breaking new boots in."

Yes. Focus on the simple realities. "The blisters you get are so annoying." She moved toward her bed after closing the door firmly behind her.

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Marco grinned slowly, not at all perturbed by her grumpiness. He just looked at her, with a mischievous glint in his eye. "I got a dragon morph," he said, ignoring her remark. Somehow, his grin widened. "I could take you flying."

Her eyes widened, thinking back to what dragons she knew on board. She wasn't quite jaded enough to not be curious as to the details. Or the temptation, if it was hard to imagine the current mechanics. "Who?" she asked, turning a bit more toward him. Followed shortly after was, "Really?" And a pause. "Just like that?"

No strings attached?

"Celena. You know, the giant flying casino. You must have seen her flying around doing her crazy stunts over the city sometime," Marco said, still grinning. He had her attention now. "And why not? Flying's fun."

She had to think for a while before her brain came up with a possible match for who he was talking about. "I don't know," she said slowly, "That sounds like it could be a bit of a gamble."

She made herself smile, if it wasn't as forced as she'd expected it to be. "Trusting you to fly straight and true."

Marco snorted. "Hey, you saying I can't fly in a straight line?" he said, teasing. But then he frowned slightly. The morph was still new, and he hadn't tried to actually carry anyone with it before. "Though maybe you should tie yourself on or something," he admitted. "You know, just in case."

She stared at him, eyebrow twitching. What a stupid... Sakura shook her head and smiled. "At least you're honest," she said, if the way she did made it seem like some general addressing of the space between them. If it was actually meant for him, or to describe him, was up for interpretation.

"What makes you think I have rope, anyway?" She pushed off the bed, moving back to the dresser. The funny thing in having anything meant to hold clothes she didn't have was the tendency that something fell into of collecting everything she did have, or found during the course of her movement around the city. So much of it was still unexplored, if she thought about it.

The thought was largely unrelated, if it occurred to her that at greater height, you could get a great sense of scope.

Part of her was glad for the distraction, since one thought caused another, keeping her from dwelling on the slow digestion of the last few days, and what had happened to everyone during them. The pod pop, the Tapestry that she didn't understand, and so many other things. Stupid arguments over healing her damn leg or not.

She pulled open the lower drawer, frowning as she looked at her rather interesting stock. (Sparse, too.) "This should work," she said, pulling out some kind of rope. Different material than anything they had at her home, but lighter, too. Strong, durable, and entirely bought on XaXing.

Edited 2011-07-31 13:47 (UTC)

Marco raised an eyebrow. She keeps rope in her bedroom drawer? Seriously? But at least it meant that Marco didn't have to figure that part out. Admitedly, he hadn't really thought about that part before offering to take her flying.

"Hey, as long as it's enough that you don't fall off," he said. "Usually, falling is bad. Falling is very bad. Unless you also happen to have some kind of secret ninja parachute technique."

Shaking her head, she moved toward her door. "No, nothing for falling -- if I do have something better than rope for staying on." She grinned. Chakra training exercise? Why not use it as an opportunity. "The rope can act as backup. How big is Celena?"

Opening the door, she stepped out into the hall. She wondered if anyone else was home at the moment, not remembering who was or wasn't in when she'd gotten here. That tiredness was still around, but she forced it away out of sheer willpower. Time for it to catch up later.

"Really? What?" Marco said, raising an eyebrow. What, was she Spider-man now too?

"She's about fifteen feet long," Marco said as he followed her out of the house. "She's actually meant to be larger, but Stacy does something to keep her smaller. Whatever it is, it works on my morph too."

"Chakra," she said, raising an eyebrow.

She was back to doing mental math as she began knotting the rope, thinking up some basic supporting harness for herself. The means and ways of attaching it to Marco she was waiting on, wanting an actual visual for herself. "Nose to tailtip? Aah, I'll see in a moment." Sizes around there would be better designing something around the neck, if that was really going to rub (and run a choking hazard) depending on Celena's physiology.

Another nice, humid day in the City. Sakura glanced up at the sky and its generated cloud cover, making a mental note at the approximate time of day regardless of what it didn't mean for timekeeping.

Marco thought back. "What, like that wall running thing? You can maintain that?"

He started walking away from her, leaving her to fiddle with ropes while he moved to somewhere with a bit more room to move. Then, he started to morph.

About a minute later, Marco had turned into a fifteen foot long dragon. Yup, he hadn't been kidding about this, Sakura.

"Water walking's a better example." He had at least a concept of what she could maintain with that while actively trying. She didn't linger on the thought, considering it veered into sudden dives into ocean waters, and she didn't feel like any sudden dives through the air.

Blinking and taking a step back, Sakura surveyed his new morph after completion. Celena was a dragon very different than the concepts Sakura knew back home, much more similar to Analog in that she had wings obviously meant for flying. While this was more sensible than the wingless dragons of home-legend, it was still odd to come back around to.

Thankfully, Marco was smaller than Analog, and also (hilariously) less irritating. Even when he tried to be irritating, in a not-at-all helpful manner.

"Right," she said after a long moment, expression smoothing out from the contemplative wonder she'd been feeling before to one of speculation. "I can totally figure this out." Knotted portion over her shoulder for now, Sakura approached with the other end of her rope in hand, mostly to get a sense of how much she had to play with.

Marco grinned at her, which probably looked somewhat more intimidating now that he was fifteen feet long and had much larger teeth.

It was probably a good thing he didn't know about her comparing him to Analog. He wouldn't know whether to feel complimented or insulted at the assertion that he was apparently less irritating than that overgrown cog.

<Just tie it on somewhere and get on, Barbie,> he said, amused, as he crouched down so that she'd be able to get up. <It's not like I'm going to be pulling barrel rolls.>

Sakura rolled her eyes at him, looping the rope around his neck -- her neck -- sex got really confusing with all of this going on -- twice. When she tied off, then she dropped the part she'd been knotting earlier down, stepping into her make-shift harness and adjusting a few knots and lengths.

"Can I get that in writing?"

She looked funny, honestly, in her rope-knot harness, leaning forward to run a hand contemplatively over Marco's (Celena's) scales. Going with the general direction was smooth. Going against was rougher, and she'd probably feel that.

Thinking back to her bracelet form plantsuit up in her room, she sighed inwardly before climbing on. "Ready when you are." She was adapting to holding onto him with her own energy, which might have been an interesting play with how energy manifested on the body of Celena's species... if Marco had been Celena. As it was, he'd likely feel her own adjustments on something more than a surface level.

Her? Her?! Better not let Marco know that you were thinking that Sakura, because he sure as hell wouldn't appreciate being referred to as a 'her'. This was just a morph; it didn't make him actually a girl.

He wasn't exactly unfamiliar to what Sakura's chakra stuff felt like (he still remembered that one time when she kept poking him with it that one time when he was in mole morph after she'd destroyed the Great Wall of China), but it did feel a little different while in dragon morph. Probably because of the whole energy manipulation thing Celena had going on - maybe if he'd had more experience with the morph he'd be able to tell more about what it meant, but right now all he could tell was that it was different.

Rising up on his haunches, he extended his wings, getting ready to take off. <Good, because we're going!> he said, before launching into the air.

It was likely wise both of them had a filter between the thoughts in their head and what they actually said.

Very wise.

His launch into the air provoked her into throwing her arms around his neck, yelping in surprise. Expecting him to move was a different thing from the actual feeling once he was moving. Tucking her face into shoulder, scales rubbing awkwardly as he fought to gain altitude, Sakura closed her eyes.

She was pretty sure they'd just left her stomach twenty feet below them. It'd catch up any minute now!

Better home that stomach catches up soon, because Marco was climbing much higher. High enough that he was now well over the top of any of the buildings below.

With enough altitude now, he leveled out, just gliding along lazily. Now if only Sakura were to actually open her eyes, she'd be able to see the whole city below them.

Sakura opened her eyes just enough to see when they'd cleared anything from a level she'd been at before. They were closed again while she waited, heart hammering, for him to stop climbing up, and start leveling out. Her stomach came under control once he was gliding.

Much more awake now than she'd been earlier, Sakura let go of her death grip on Marco's neck, sitting up a little. Adapting her chakra the whole time was actually a good way of focusing, making sure she didn't injure him by using too much force to hold to him. That one thrill, paired with the adrenaline thrill that hit her system as she registered how high up they were, had her smiling.

It was a little wild, like this entire situation.

"Oh." More of a breath out than a statement, Sakura slowly moved into more of a sitting position. "Oh."

All her nice and effective thoughts about taking advantage of this opportunity for recon had temporarily flown out the window. This was... "Amazing."

Marco grinned, not that Sakura could see it from where she was. <See, I told you flying was awesome, didn't I?> he said, amused.

"You did." Not sure what his hearing was currently like, she resorted to patting the side of his neck for acknowledgement.

Everywhere she locked, things were different. The perspective was shifting, something that she might have been more used to if she'd been with the scouting division, on one of Sai's ink birds.

"How much of this have we still not mapped out?" By now she was speaking to herself, smiling stupidly while trying to get her mind on a more serious track. She wasn't having all that much success, distracted by different sights, continuing to make minor adjustments as he did. "You'd think we'd have set up an exploration team by now."

There was enough reason to, in her mind. Her train of thought derailed quickly enough, having a hard time focusing on anything more than the sensations. This was frightening, in a toe-curling, exciting way.

<Oh no you don't,> Marco said - he could hear her perfectly fine, thank you - <We are up here for fun. Remember fun? You know, that thing which doesn't involve work and involved actually enjoying yourself?>

He tilted slightly to the right, just enough that he could turn in a wide circle, but not enough to risk Sakura falling off. <You can think about mapping and whatever other boring work you want to do later.>

"It's not boring," she groused, gasping as he started the turn. Not out of fright; it was exhilarating, and she was having a hard time not focusing on that fact. Then again...

"Does that mean you'll take me up again?" She was leaning forward again, hunching down. This was suddenly very important to know.

Edited 2011-08-02 04:20 (UTC)

<Are you saying you want me to take you up again?> Marco said, sounding entirely too smug and mischievous.

<And even if exploring isn't boring, it's still work. And no way are you working right now. This is a work-free flight.>

She didn't even seem to pause at his tone of mental voice. "Yes," she said, like it were the most obvious thing in the Bleed. "That's exactly what I'm saying."

She snorted, then ducked her head down and laughed. It wasn't that what he was saying was particularly funny. Even the insistence on doing something non-productive as far as mission objectives (personal ones) wasn't inherently amusing. The mix of adrenaline and relief, on some level, that things had been okay enough after Galilee was starting to have an effect. Laughter was one way of getting it out, one she usually didn't use. Worry and tears were things she was used to, her own form of catharsis when things were overwhelming.

"Fine," she said, blaming the wind and height and cold for any water in her eyes. "It's a work-free flight."

She was quiet for a while, shutting down the parts of her that wouldn't shut up long enough to let her concentrate. Until she did ask something else, entirely unrelated. "So," she said, "Does this make you a flying monkey?"

<Well if you want to, then maybe I can> he said, teasing. <As long as you're still on for that video game date.>

Oh, if it was the last thing he did, he was going to teach Sakura how to actually have fun, and not spend all her time reading textbooks and doing work. Seriously, who wants to live like that? They might be fighting a war here, but that didn't mean they had to be focusing on that all the time.

<Totally work free,> he agreed, still gliding around. He should get a bit more altitude though, so he beat his wings once, then twice, to get them a little higher.

<Ah, but I don't work for the Wicked Witch of the West,> he said, laughing.

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