trans_9 | What Some Take For Magic At First Glance [Opentastic]

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What Some Take For Magic At First Glance [Opentastic]

Howard has avoided The Warehouse entirely for the last few days. Something about wandering around in it alone seems like a profoundly unsettling prospect. Even when he returns to it, he decides it's a better idea to work out in the front yard than actually lounge around the living room.

Today's project is a roller fridge. Having found three sets of identical rollerblades (for someone with six legs? Or just three right feet?), Howard's set to dismantling them and fixing them to a mini-refrigerator he found in an unclaimed house down the tracks. He eventually plans on recalibrating the fridge into a freezer and attaching a handle to drag it to and from Hydroponics, but actually putting wheels on it seems to be the most difficult task so far.

After several failed attempts to use a candle-lighter to weld some sort of axle on, Howard gets a drill and an extension cord out. The sound of the drill upsets the cat, whom he's zipped into an old backpack, bar her head. He doesn't want her to run off onto the tracks, after all, or leave her alone in the house, and despite all the random junk he's accumulated, he hasn't yet found a small leash or collar.

She growls at him and struggles to free herself, but he routinely calms her down with cat treats and a sock full of catnip when the noise scares her too much. To keep her attention, he slips one of the cat treats up his sleeve and out of sight. That's just sleight of hand.

The fridge, on the other hand, may require more creativity. He sits with the backpack full of cat on his lap, chewing on a hangnail, trying to figure out how exactly he's going to give it wheels that can swivel.

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"Thanks," Howard responds automatically, even though given that he sort of ended up saddled with it, he's not sure why he's taking it as a compliment. Upon seeing that it's Jr., who got to see that absolutely charming encounter with Harriet, he gets a bit more guarded.

"How's your head?" He taps the center of his forehead, where a brand would have been had he been a clone. It's not really out of concern so much as to cue Jr. into the fact that he's not the only one who had something to bother him back on Galilee.

Jr. crossed his arms with a smile. "Perfectly fine, now! It didn't take them too long at all to get'em off after we got back here." Something he was more than thankful for. And now that it was said and done, it wasn't really so aggravating to talk about. If anything, Jr.'s emotions lied more with what they left behind rather that something that was fixed now.

"Did they have to peel them off like stickers or scrub them? By the way, can you hold this up a minute?" He tilts the fridge and tries to kick a wedge in under it, but it's difficult to do as one person.

"Stacy gave the medical crew a quick and easy way to remove'em - think more needles." He shrugged. Though he wasn't really one to praise Stacy, those in medical had made sure to look over the method to make sure it worked okay. So he was thankful, in a frustrated sort of way. Two brands for the same thing was a bit much, and though the one on his head had been a little less ominous than the one on his palm (it was funny sometimes how the number 666 still made so many people double take), it was a lot more noticeable and the forcing of it was what annoyed him the most. Not that he actually liked the other one, but he had grown up always having it.

He leaned over, making sure to put more weight onto his left leg (his right felt more or less better, but he still wasn't chancing anything) as he slipped his hands underneath the fridge. "What are you even doing with this thing, anyway?"

"I was kind of busy trying to keep people from bleeding to death to get a chance to check out how they were taking off your bar codes, man."

He slides the wedge in underneath, although he notices that Jr. is favoring one leg. "Making a roller fridge." I mean, duh, Jr. Why else would he have roller skates, a candle-lighter, a cat and a fridge out here? "Why?"

"You asked," he pointed out.

"A ... roller fridge?" He raised both eyebrows. "The heck is a roller fridge supposed to do?"

"Be a fridge that rolls, obviously. Figure the Chancellor could use some way to drag around his ice cream." Besides, Howard might get extra ice cream out of it. "But I'll need to recalibrate it before it works as a freezer. Any ideas?"

"That'll be nice," he said more about the ice cream than the stunning innovation. Moving himself, he leaned down to look both under and behind the thing once the wedge was in place. And then opened the door to give the inside a quick, thoughtful look-over.

"Me not being much of a mechanic aside, I've never even seen ones like this before. It looks a little old."

"What time period you from? I'm from the twenty-first century, and this looks a bit old by my standards." He sticks his head in it. "Probably won't be hard to just ramp up the settings a bit. This looks pretty heavy-duty."

"Ah..." Jr. rubbed the back of his neck at the question. "I'm a little further than that. If you mean A.D. A few thousand years...? But that doesn't mean too much in a place like this."

"I guess not, but most people's Earths seem to be on kind of the same timeline. Moon landing in the sixties, ipods by the 2000's, yada yada. If you're even from Earth. Plenty of folks here aren't."

"I'm not. But we came from Earth, and me and ... my brother," he figured after Galilee, he could drop calling Gaignun his father, at least around those who had paid enough attention. Even though he was so used to doing it when he spoke to others. "We've got a pretty nifty collection of stuff from there!"

Jr. was still a bit iffy on talking about much more than that. From what it sounded like, there were all sorts of weird and different timelines, so it might not ever come true in their universe ... but still. Saying 'oh, well Earth is kind of gone and lost' might have unnerved people all the same.

"From Earth? What, is it some kind of planet-sized thrift shop now?" From the hesitation, Howard wonders if Jr.'s talking about some sort of genetic donor for clone-making, but decides not to push it. "We're not technically sure if Earth still exists back on my Earth."

"Not exactly, but you know - homeland, antiques. Holds a lot more value, both sentimentally and not."

He tilted his head slightly. "What do you mean by that? If you're on it, wouldn't it ... exist?" The way he worded that was that confused him.

"So where you at if you're not from Earth? Some kind of settlement or something?"

Howard shrugs. "Honestly, we're not totally sure. A whole bunch of us thought we were in a separate dimension. Some kids thought we been zapped into Hell or Purgatory or something. I think we were still on Earth, but no one really knows."

"There are tons of other inhabitable planets out there! But as it happens, I don't actually live on one of'em. Gaignun and I've got a colony - but we're allied with Second Miltia in the Miltian star system, so I guess you can say I'm down there a lot ... though that's probably a name only familiar to me, on this ship." He gave a quick shrug. He would have actually been surprised if anyone came out one day and said they knew what he was talking about.

"And you came here before you could figure that out?" It sounded almost like that, from what Howard said. "Separate dimension sounds a little more fun than the other two."

Howard tilts his head so far to the left that his whole torso leans. "I understood...maybe five words of that. What the hell's a Miltia?" Is it an army? A race? A color? At least the idea of a colony makes sense, though Howard's now imagining Quaker-clad pilgrims on an asteroid somewhere.

"Pretty much. All we know is that everything about it sucks. Stacy grabbed me right after we had our first rain in over a year."

He couldn't help but barely conceal a snicker. "That's the case for everyone I've mentioned it to -- one day someone'll surprise me. Second Miltia's a planet, that's all."

He blinked, almost as if he heard what Howard said wrong. "A year?" He'd been on all sorts of different planets, and a lot of them did vary on abundance and lack of certain weather patterns, but never by that much. "That does sound pretty suck."

"Talking about Miltia's like your secret handshake? Recognize the name and you know they're from your world?" That'd mean Miltia's relatively well-known.

"Yeah, really. Try getting a bunch of middle schoolers to grow crops without rain. It's not easy."

"That's a good way to put it, yeah." Second Miltia, not so much. But Miltia itself? Yeah, pretty much everyone in that and surrounding star systems knew about the first abandoned then sought out, then destroyed planet.

"Maybe you'll get some more frequent rain if it happened right before you came here."

"Are you going to explain any more, or am I just supposed to assume it's such a cool kid handshake I don't get an explanation on?"

He shrugs. "Probably not. We killed the little kid who brought the rain, soooo...."

He puts a hand out. "Not me 'we', obviously."

"There's not that much to really explain. I mean, it's a well known place where I'm from because there was a war there, I guess it'd just be nice to run into someone who recognized it. Or anything else, for that matter." It wasn't bad, overall, with the people Jr.'d met so far on Stacy. Some of them he liked, and some of them he even trusted, even if his faith in trust in their situation wasn't always very strong. But sometimes there was an odd feeling of disconnect being the only guy from his universe - loneliness, even, though he'd take the lighter way around to ever admitting that. But he knew he was far from the only one in that situation.

And with Howard's little correction to the whole rain thing ... well that brought two questions immediately to Jr.'s mind. "Why would anybody kill someone like that? And uh ... what do you mean, brought the rain?"

"Must've been a big war or a good school system for you guys. We've had wars on my Earth and I couldn't tell you where half of them are. Was it over something important?"

He rolls his eyes. "Because some genius thought 'hey, that kid can make it rain' meant 'maybe we can bust out of this fishbowl we live in if we throw him off a building to get eaten by bugs'. Common freaking sense is kind of a rare resource where I'm from."

"Yeah, it was something pretty big. With a ton of repercussions people still feel fourteen years after the fact. You know, the usual crap. And crap with words and places that are probably as familiar as Miltia is to you."

Jr. let out a sarcastic snort, shaking his head. "Lack of common sense is sadly a common trait in places where it shouldn't be..."

"Sounds fun. Hey, at least it sounds like you guys had running water? Or you know, maybe didn't need it or something. So are you a clone or just some other kind of created, anyway?" He tilts his head again, to the right this time. "I mean, not that it matters to me besides just being curious, obviously. My best amigo's a synthetic human, so."

What Some Take For Magic At First Glance [Opentastic]

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Jeez I am just a typomonger today.

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