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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"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."

Before Jr. tackled that question, he raised an eyebrow. "You didn't live in a place like that your whole life, did you?"

Well, he called Gaignun his brother already, Galilee aside (though Galilee happening at all was why he ended up doing that anyway), and it wasn't as though the trip down there wasn't obvious enough about it. Jr. took in a small breath before speaking. "Yeah, clone." He figured if Howard was that interested, he'd ask more. "You mean Zouichi when you say synthetic human, right? Unless you've got Realians back where you're from, too - that's what guys like him are called in my world."

"Nah. Just the last stretch. I wouldn't have my unbeatable knowledge of Halo 2 without at least a little of a normal childhood." Come to think about that, he should try and find an X-Box in the media library.

"Clone of someone?" He nods. "Yeah, Zou. He calls himself a synthetic human, so that's what I'll call him. Besides, 'test tube baby' sounds douchey."

"Got'cha." Well. Not about Halo. Jr. wasn't really that much of a buff in the more technological side of Earth. Though he still liked playing games.

"And yeah, uh. My dad." Maybe Howard wasn't used to meeting many clones ... though Jr. wondered if any others called their creator father like he and his brothers and sister did. He technically was - and calling him dad didn't make much of a difference in him being #1 worst dad ever. "I guess you could call him a politically active scientist," he added with a voice dripping of the fakest enthusiasm ever.

Jr. preferred bastard or douche, though, to be quite honest.

Wow, Jr., Howard's impressed with the amount of vitriol you can fit into such innocuous words. "Not a huge fan of family reunions, huh?"

"Deeeeefinitely not the biggest," he said with a small, dry laugh.

Not that no good came out of them in the end, but said good usually being surrounded by death and destruction due to the ambitions of not only Jr.'s father wouldn't leave anybody very excited about the idea. "But I hear they're not very fun in most cases anyway."

Howard shrugs. "I don't know. I always got to look forward to getting beat up by my out-of-state cousins at mine. What's not to love about that?"

"Heh, well I guess if they're annoying enough!"

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What Some Take For Magic At First Glance [Opentastic]

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Jeez I am just a typomonger today.

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