![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Airport Security (revised)
Airport Security
Series: Infinity Smashed
Word Count: 3000
Summary: M.D. makes it to the airport, meets a redheaded boy, and then reality unravels completely.
Notes: Some of you might be saying, “Wait, didn’t you post this before?” If so, yup, you got me. The first version of this story was posted years back, before I charted things out, and it aged abysmally. So I back-tracked and rewrote the second half, and this is why Number One and the United Dellan Coalition is late. Please accept my apologies.
Getting to the airport as an unaccompanied minor with a cat wasn’t nearly as difficult as I would’ve planned. It was about the only thing that went right for a while.
The hardest part was sneaking out the back of Vandorsky’s place and calling a cab. I was even worse with phones than I was with most electronics, but Bobcat not only insisted we not use Vandorsky’s phone, but carried only twenties in cash. Still, I scrounged up the correct amount of change for the payphone without too much trouble, and even managed to get a hold of a cab company that was willing to communicate with me at a near-shout. Then all we had to do was sit on the curb and wait.
Bobcat paced the sidewalk beside me. Every once in a while, he paused and his eyes rolled up in his head, which I would’ve found concerning if I didn’t get stray psychological chatter from him that made me realize he was checking some kind of mental watch.
When did you say they would get here? He asked me.
I shrugged. “Eventually.”
He made a sound of mental annoyance and returned to pacing.
“So where are we heading, anyway?”
Independent Libertarian Province of Canandria. Closest region with a favorable government.
“Not Mexico?”
Definitely not Mexico. My organization is on very bad terms with them.
“Yeah, who is this ‘organization’ exactly? You still haven’t told me who you’re with.”
Oh, of course. He sounded embarrassed at his manners, and three brilliantly colored IDs appeared in my mind’s eye, all with recent 3D full-body pictures of Bobcat and (somewhat) translated for my convenience. One was a “Jaunter’s License,” whatever that meant, apparently distributed by the Jaunter’s League Department of [Untranslatable] Transportation. Another I recognized as a kind of passport; it was stamped with a US visa that was due to expire in a week or so. The main one, placed front and center of my mental view, looked to be some kind of work ID, this one from the Jaunter’s League Department of [Untranslatable] Immigration and Social Work. All three displayed a holographic symbol of a group of intricately detailed planets strung together in a ring.
The name on all three of them was “Fluji 808C.” No wonder he’d let me call him Bobcat.
The IDs disappeared. The Jaunter’s League is an organization that regulates… well, a lot of things, really, but the part relevant to you is immigration within a group of local [untranslatable].
“Untranslatable?”
Hmm. I got that rummaging feeling in my head again, like he was searching for an alternate word. Local… worlds. Dimensions. A mental sound of exasperation. Close enough for now.
I snorted. “So I’m on the wrong planet?”
I was joking, but he replied, more or less.
“Oh no. No.”
I assure you, this will be taken care of with all due—
“Not that. You’re telling me I’m an illegal alien.”
Pause. Yes.
I closed my eyes and sighed. “Well, that settles it. No way I’m hallucinating this. Even my psyche couldn’t come up with a punch line that bad.”
I’m glad you’re maintaining a sense of humor about this. Bobcat sounded serious.
“So… what? Earth’s trying to deport me?”
No, just the country.
Another nasty thought occurred to me. “Deport me where, exactly?”
The thought Bobcat sent me I can only describe as a nonverbal, noncorporeal wince. That’s… a point of some debate, actually.
I was getting a bad feeling about all of this—his pacing, his impatience to get me out of the hospital and on a plane. “What exactly is the big hurry? You don’t do this for every random kid in the galaxy, do you?”
Of course not. His thoughts were tinged with discomfort.
I spread my hands expectantly, even though it stung.
Bobcat ceased his pacing. He came to me and put his front paws on my knee, which put him on my eye level. His mental voice was sympathetic. I’m sorry, Ms. Rawlins; there is no gentle way to say this. You’re property. Valuable property.
I just sat there.
Exactly whose property you are, and therefore where you’d be deported to, is currently being fought between multiple parties, and it’ll probably be some time before that’s resolved.
I couldn’t digest the information. Somehow I’d just presumed that a place with talking cats and interplanetary government regulations (and instantaneous taxis!) wouldn’t have slavery, or whatever “valuable property” meant. Another part of me wanted to laugh hysterically; nobody on this whole stupid planet wanted me, and now I was a hot property?
“Why? And why now?”
The former was not disclosed to me. As for the latter, well, I can’t speak for the other parties involved, but we had long since presumed you dead until your ID tracker suddenly began broadcasting again and you became a source of media attention.
Got myself hit by lightning, he meant. Thanks a lot, Vandorsky TV antenna.
My job, Bobcat continued, is to find what’s best for you. I presume you don’t want to be property?
I couldn’t even find it in me to wisecrack. “No.”
Good, I didn’t think so. In that case, we continue following my plan, which is to buy you time. In less than two years, you’re age of majority and can buy your own ownership rights. All we have to do is keep you from getting deported or extradited until then. Canandria is just the place.
None of this meant anything to me, so I focused on the pragmatics: “What you’re saying is, I go to Canandria, hole up for a couple years, and everything will be fine?”
Pause. More or less.
“Good. Okay. I can do that.” I didn’t know much about the Independent Libertarian Province of Canandria, except that it was created by a bunch of rich mostly-American crackpots wanting to build their personal utopia out on the Canadian border. The only other thing I knew about the place was that it had one of the highest ratios of wild boars to humans on the planet. Said wild boars (which had grown to mammoth size after apparently crossbreeding with farm pigs) killed people every once in a while—and apparently ate them too, and vice versa.
Aside from the boars, I couldn’t imagine that surviving in Canandria would be much harder than surviving here, and I had my emergency pack. Sure, I would be cutting and leaving the caches I had scattered, but this was hardly the first time. My emergency pack was all I needed to start over, and starting over sounded really appealing about then.
Before we go in, I have a request of you.
“What?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.
Much as I would love for all of this to go smoothly, it may not. Thus, whatever happens, don’t let go of my carrier.
“What carrier?”
A shiny new one appeared next to him, seemingly from nowhere. Bobcat continued, I have an emergency transporter. I’d rather not use it, since it’s expensive and legally complicated, but if I must, I want to insure you’re in range. So stay close, and don’t let go.
It seemed a simple enough request. I sat on the carrier, he got inside, and we continued waiting until the cab pulled up. Both Bobcat and the carrier looked way more reputable than I did, but the cab driver didn’t seem to notice anymore than the last one had. She just looked at me with boredom and said, “Where to?”
The trip took a while, since Vago had the nearest international airport, and it was a good couple hours south. I spent the time digging through my pack, making sure everything was as it should be. It was nervous habit, double and triple-checking what I already knew. If I was going to the Land of Homicidal Pigs and Rich People, I was darn well making sure I had what I needed to survive there.
Bobcat saw what I was doing, saw the nails, multi-tool, matches, and rubbing alcohol scattered over my lap and the cab seats, and only barely managed to restrain himself from sounding aghast. You—why are you lugging all that with you?
I clutched my stuff possessively. “I need it. You got a problem with that?”
The airport will.
“What?” If I’d ever set foot in an airport, it was too long ago to matter.
Sharp things, flammable things, and fluids aren’t allowed on planes. Bobcat sounded like he was trying to sound reasonable but was clearly horrified he, the alien tourist cat, had to explain my own airports to me. Security measures. The Patriot Act. I was certain that this [untranslatable] had that…
“We have it, we have it. You never said anything about having to dump my stuff!”
I’ll replace the dangerous parts if they mean that much to you, he said in tones of strained patience. Look, I can nudge and distract people from minor things, but I’m not a miracle-worker. They’ll notice blatant stupidity. Now get rid of everything sharp, liquid, or flammable—you can keep the matches, but the water bottle has to be emptied, rubbing alcohol too—
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I whined. Maybe this sounded unreasonable of me, but give me a break; I’d been hit by lightning, thrown off a roof, stuck in a hospital, and now I was in the process of being abducted by aliens. (Or whatever the dimensional equivalent of an alien was.) I was exhausted, sore, and whatever clarity Bobcat had loaned me was wearing through. If you were in that shape, would you be eager to dump some of the few possessions you had left? Some of this stuff had outlasted multiple foster parents!
Bobcat and I were still arguing about it when we arrived at the airport, and we called a brief armistice to check the panel of arrival screens, just to make sure our plane was still coming. (It was.) The screens were flickering badly, forcing me to take a couple steps back, and I was winding up to take up the debate again when suddenly Bobcat hissed, The PIN are here!
“Who?”
Peripheral Immigration and Naturalization; I was hoping to avoid them.
“Where?”
The security line—don’t stare!
I took a quick glance, then made a double-take.
“Guys in suits,” I muttered.
Pardon?
“Nothing.” Well, at least I knew who those guys badgering Vandorsky had been. They were large, official-looking, dressed in navy blue, and the airline staff and TSA guys didn’t seem happy to see them. They seemed to be having a quiet but intense argument, and maybe thanks to that (and Bobcat’s telepathic camouflage), they hadn’t noticed us… yet.
“What do we do?” Then I brightened up. No airport meant no stuff abandonment. “This is an emergency, right? So…”
This is not an emergency, Bobcat scolded. This is merely—
“Excuse me? Um, are you okay?”
I turned and immediately had to ratchet my gaze upward. The white, freckly boy standing there was giving me a politely alarmed look, and I realized too late that even though I hadn’t been speaking aloud, I’d probably been standing there making weird faces for a while. Also, I looked like a disaster, even post-shower and change.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, tugging at his red bangs. “It’s just that you look kind of… not okay, and…”
Behind me, one of the screens died. I really, really wasn’t in a good condition for this. If this guy was noticing me, despite Bobcat’s don’t-notice-me shtick, then those pinhead guys wouldn’t be far behind. Plus, now that I was thinking about it, I was pretty sure I couldn’t stay upright much longer.
There was only one place where I was sure I could sit in privacy in this situation.
“I need a bathroom,” I announced. “Right now.”
I will give Tall, White, and Nerdy credit; he turned the color of a strawberry but he immediately put down his wheeled luggage, tucked the paperback under his arm, and led me to the nearest bathroom. Apparently he’d spent a good amount of time in this airport already.
We’d just reached the door of the lady’s room when the door began to open. I saw a flash of navy blue and instantly reversed course, striding into the men’s room like I’d planned it from the start and dragging the tall boy with me by the collar. (Don’t ask me why. I wasn’t thinking clearly by that point.)
We got lucky—no one was there. Ignoring his sputtering, I hauled the boy into the handicapped stall with me, locked the door, and flopped on the toilet. Ah, much better.
“We need a plan,” I said—to Bobcat, but I slipped and said it aloud.
The boy had surpassed red and was rapidly approaching mauve. “You can’t be in here!” he hissed.
I snorted. “Too late.”
“With me? I’m a stranger! I—”
“What’s your name?”
The question at least derailed the rising freak-out. I think he said, “Rage?”
“Really? Fine, I’m M.D. Congratulations; we’re no longer strangers.”
For a moment, he seemed to grapple with some internal struggle, but apparently he’d been well trained; he said, “nice to meet you,” in a tone of some befuddlement and shut up.
Etiquette satisfied, I turned my attention back to Bobcat. “Plan?”
As I was saying before, this is not an emergency, Bobcat insisted. It’s not ideal, but the PIN, I can negotiate with.
“Negotiate?” I didn’t like the sound of that.
You might be momentarily inconvenienced.
“Momentarily inconvenienced?” I knew what that meant. It was the social work equivalent of “mild discomfort.” And suddenly, I found myself fed up with the whole business. I had known Bobcat for a day tops, depending on how long I’d been out, and he was already asking me to be “momentarily inconvenienced” by whatever “peripheral immigration and naturalization” authorities were, none of whom looked particularly friendly. And to top it off, he was asking me to ditch some of my remaining most prized possessions, all because he didn’t want to deal with the trouble of whatever issues his stupid emergency transporter had. Forget it. No way. Why was I going along with this at all? Had his stupid psych-camouflage been working on me too? If so, all the more reason to not go along with whatever he was pulling.
“Um, do you mind telling me exactly what’s going on?” Rage asked, which was the most sensible thing I’d heard since leaving Vandorsky.
I looked at Bobcat. I looked at Rage. Specifically, I looked at Rage’s T-shirt, which read “di magni, salaputium disertum! Vago Teen Classics League 2001” and the purple paperback under his arm, which depicted a woman smooching a very handsome robot. I made my decision.
“I’m an illegal alien from space and all those guys in suits are here to keep me from leaving,” I said brightly. I tapped my foot on top of Bobcat’s carrier. “The cat’s helping me. He’s my caseworker.”
Dead silence for a couple seconds. (Asides from Bobcat’s telepathic wordless wave of horror.)
“Okay,” Rage finally said.
Why are you telling him that? What are you doing? Bobcat wasn’t shrieking, but it was clear he wanted to.
“And I’m telling you this because the only way I’ve ever made any progress with authority figures like them is by making a scene until they’re desperate to get rid of me,” I continued with a toothy grin.
“Okay,” Rage said again, more slowly.
All right, all right, you’ve made your point, Bobcat said. But I can’t use my transporter here.
It was obvious that Rage still wasn’t hearing any of this, but I kept talking aloud. If it irritated Bobcat, maybe it’d get him to act faster. “Why not?”
Because I would take the toilet, Raige, (somehow he was able to express the I) and possibly part of the wall with us, Bobcat explained through the mental equivalent of clenched teeth. Now please—
The bathroom door opened, cutting the conversation off. The stall was way too crowded for me to get up and look through the gap in the door, but Raige did it for me before I could ask, and Bobcat didn’t need to look at all to know who it was.
PIN agent. Just wait for him to leave, Bobcat said.
After what seemed to be the world’s longest urinal visit, accompanied by weirdly intense sighs of relief, the guy did. (Not that I was complaining; the more I got to sit, the better.) After waiting some extra time, just in case the guy lollygagged right outside the door, we got up to go.
“Welp, this is my stop. Nice meeting you, milquetoast,” I said, waving a hand at Raige. Bandages trailed from my sleeve; I shoved them back in, grabbed Bobcat’s carrier despite the pain in my hand, and breezed out as gracefully as I could when what I really wanted to do was keel over and take a nice long nap on the carpet.
The moment I was out the bathroom door, I stopped dead, and Raige crashed into my back.
Two people navy suits (a man and a woman) were standing not ten feet away, talking to a woman in a cloak. All three turned to stare at me, and it was clear that while none of them expected me, they certainly recognized me.
“Sister!” the cloaked woman said with a smile.
Wow, Vandorsky was right; even on first sight, something about her gave me the screaming meemies. Her accent was weird. And she did look a bit like me.
Her eyes dropped to Bobcat and her face froze with a look of intense concentration. Whoever she was, whatever she was doing, it suddenly got Bobcat on my side in a hurry.
Run, Bobcat ordered. This is an emergency!
Easy for him to say. He wasn’t half-dead or lugging a pet carrier and all his earthly possessions. Still, I dug my boots into the tile, made to move—and the suits tackled me.
This didn’t work out too well, since I was still in the bathroom doorway with Raige immediately behind me. Instead of pinning me to the door, they smashed me back into Raige, and the whole heap of us crashed back into the men’s bathroom in a pile of limbs and shouting.
Well, the suits and I were shouting. With Raige, it was more like shrieking. As for Bobcat, I don’t know what he was doing, except that it was certainly not helping me, and I was busy trying to kick and wriggle my way out of the pile, as though I had somewhere to run even if I did get free. I kicked someone, hit someone else with Bobcat’s carrier, took an elbow to the nose from someone, and all through this, the woman in the robes didn’t move at all; she just stood there with a frozen smile, apparently lost in thought.
Well, until the male suit pulled a Taser. Then she went, “no!”
But it was too late. For the second time that day (days?) I got to be a human lightning rod. And this time, I stayed conscious long enough to feel it.
At the time, I didn’t know what I did. All I knew was that everything hurt and I’d had enough. Somehow, I felt my body take the electricity, absorb it—and then blast it out again.
The suits got shoved off me. Raige, since he was already on the floor, had nowhere to go. Bobcat cried out with pain, and then—
And then I was out cold again, leaving a last sensation of the smell of burning ozone. Honestly, by that point, I was relieved.
Series: Infinity Smashed
Word Count: 3000
Summary: M.D. makes it to the airport, meets a redheaded boy, and then reality unravels completely.
Notes: Some of you might be saying, “Wait, didn’t you post this before?” If so, yup, you got me. The first version of this story was posted years back, before I charted things out, and it aged abysmally. So I back-tracked and rewrote the second half, and this is why Number One and the United Dellan Coalition is late. Please accept my apologies.
Getting to the airport as an unaccompanied minor with a cat wasn’t nearly as difficult as I would’ve planned. It was about the only thing that went right for a while.
The hardest part was sneaking out the back of Vandorsky’s place and calling a cab. I was even worse with phones than I was with most electronics, but Bobcat not only insisted we not use Vandorsky’s phone, but carried only twenties in cash. Still, I scrounged up the correct amount of change for the payphone without too much trouble, and even managed to get a hold of a cab company that was willing to communicate with me at a near-shout. Then all we had to do was sit on the curb and wait.
Bobcat paced the sidewalk beside me. Every once in a while, he paused and his eyes rolled up in his head, which I would’ve found concerning if I didn’t get stray psychological chatter from him that made me realize he was checking some kind of mental watch.
When did you say they would get here? He asked me.
I shrugged. “Eventually.”
He made a sound of mental annoyance and returned to pacing.
“So where are we heading, anyway?”
Independent Libertarian Province of Canandria. Closest region with a favorable government.
“Not Mexico?”
Definitely not Mexico. My organization is on very bad terms with them.
“Yeah, who is this ‘organization’ exactly? You still haven’t told me who you’re with.”
Oh, of course. He sounded embarrassed at his manners, and three brilliantly colored IDs appeared in my mind’s eye, all with recent 3D full-body pictures of Bobcat and (somewhat) translated for my convenience. One was a “Jaunter’s License,” whatever that meant, apparently distributed by the Jaunter’s League Department of [Untranslatable] Transportation. Another I recognized as a kind of passport; it was stamped with a US visa that was due to expire in a week or so. The main one, placed front and center of my mental view, looked to be some kind of work ID, this one from the Jaunter’s League Department of [Untranslatable] Immigration and Social Work. All three displayed a holographic symbol of a group of intricately detailed planets strung together in a ring.
The name on all three of them was “Fluji 808C.” No wonder he’d let me call him Bobcat.
The IDs disappeared. The Jaunter’s League is an organization that regulates… well, a lot of things, really, but the part relevant to you is immigration within a group of local [untranslatable].
“Untranslatable?”
Hmm. I got that rummaging feeling in my head again, like he was searching for an alternate word. Local… worlds. Dimensions. A mental sound of exasperation. Close enough for now.
I snorted. “So I’m on the wrong planet?”
I was joking, but he replied, more or less.
“Oh no. No.”
I assure you, this will be taken care of with all due—
“Not that. You’re telling me I’m an illegal alien.”
Pause. Yes.
I closed my eyes and sighed. “Well, that settles it. No way I’m hallucinating this. Even my psyche couldn’t come up with a punch line that bad.”
I’m glad you’re maintaining a sense of humor about this. Bobcat sounded serious.
“So… what? Earth’s trying to deport me?”
No, just the country.
Another nasty thought occurred to me. “Deport me where, exactly?”
The thought Bobcat sent me I can only describe as a nonverbal, noncorporeal wince. That’s… a point of some debate, actually.
I was getting a bad feeling about all of this—his pacing, his impatience to get me out of the hospital and on a plane. “What exactly is the big hurry? You don’t do this for every random kid in the galaxy, do you?”
Of course not. His thoughts were tinged with discomfort.
I spread my hands expectantly, even though it stung.
Bobcat ceased his pacing. He came to me and put his front paws on my knee, which put him on my eye level. His mental voice was sympathetic. I’m sorry, Ms. Rawlins; there is no gentle way to say this. You’re property. Valuable property.
I just sat there.
Exactly whose property you are, and therefore where you’d be deported to, is currently being fought between multiple parties, and it’ll probably be some time before that’s resolved.
I couldn’t digest the information. Somehow I’d just presumed that a place with talking cats and interplanetary government regulations (and instantaneous taxis!) wouldn’t have slavery, or whatever “valuable property” meant. Another part of me wanted to laugh hysterically; nobody on this whole stupid planet wanted me, and now I was a hot property?
“Why? And why now?”
The former was not disclosed to me. As for the latter, well, I can’t speak for the other parties involved, but we had long since presumed you dead until your ID tracker suddenly began broadcasting again and you became a source of media attention.
Got myself hit by lightning, he meant. Thanks a lot, Vandorsky TV antenna.
My job, Bobcat continued, is to find what’s best for you. I presume you don’t want to be property?
I couldn’t even find it in me to wisecrack. “No.”
Good, I didn’t think so. In that case, we continue following my plan, which is to buy you time. In less than two years, you’re age of majority and can buy your own ownership rights. All we have to do is keep you from getting deported or extradited until then. Canandria is just the place.
None of this meant anything to me, so I focused on the pragmatics: “What you’re saying is, I go to Canandria, hole up for a couple years, and everything will be fine?”
Pause. More or less.
“Good. Okay. I can do that.” I didn’t know much about the Independent Libertarian Province of Canandria, except that it was created by a bunch of rich mostly-American crackpots wanting to build their personal utopia out on the Canadian border. The only other thing I knew about the place was that it had one of the highest ratios of wild boars to humans on the planet. Said wild boars (which had grown to mammoth size after apparently crossbreeding with farm pigs) killed people every once in a while—and apparently ate them too, and vice versa.
Aside from the boars, I couldn’t imagine that surviving in Canandria would be much harder than surviving here, and I had my emergency pack. Sure, I would be cutting and leaving the caches I had scattered, but this was hardly the first time. My emergency pack was all I needed to start over, and starting over sounded really appealing about then.
Before we go in, I have a request of you.
“What?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.
Much as I would love for all of this to go smoothly, it may not. Thus, whatever happens, don’t let go of my carrier.
“What carrier?”
A shiny new one appeared next to him, seemingly from nowhere. Bobcat continued, I have an emergency transporter. I’d rather not use it, since it’s expensive and legally complicated, but if I must, I want to insure you’re in range. So stay close, and don’t let go.
It seemed a simple enough request. I sat on the carrier, he got inside, and we continued waiting until the cab pulled up. Both Bobcat and the carrier looked way more reputable than I did, but the cab driver didn’t seem to notice anymore than the last one had. She just looked at me with boredom and said, “Where to?”
The trip took a while, since Vago had the nearest international airport, and it was a good couple hours south. I spent the time digging through my pack, making sure everything was as it should be. It was nervous habit, double and triple-checking what I already knew. If I was going to the Land of Homicidal Pigs and Rich People, I was darn well making sure I had what I needed to survive there.
Bobcat saw what I was doing, saw the nails, multi-tool, matches, and rubbing alcohol scattered over my lap and the cab seats, and only barely managed to restrain himself from sounding aghast. You—why are you lugging all that with you?
I clutched my stuff possessively. “I need it. You got a problem with that?”
The airport will.
“What?” If I’d ever set foot in an airport, it was too long ago to matter.
Sharp things, flammable things, and fluids aren’t allowed on planes. Bobcat sounded like he was trying to sound reasonable but was clearly horrified he, the alien tourist cat, had to explain my own airports to me. Security measures. The Patriot Act. I was certain that this [untranslatable] had that…
“We have it, we have it. You never said anything about having to dump my stuff!”
I’ll replace the dangerous parts if they mean that much to you, he said in tones of strained patience. Look, I can nudge and distract people from minor things, but I’m not a miracle-worker. They’ll notice blatant stupidity. Now get rid of everything sharp, liquid, or flammable—you can keep the matches, but the water bottle has to be emptied, rubbing alcohol too—
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I whined. Maybe this sounded unreasonable of me, but give me a break; I’d been hit by lightning, thrown off a roof, stuck in a hospital, and now I was in the process of being abducted by aliens. (Or whatever the dimensional equivalent of an alien was.) I was exhausted, sore, and whatever clarity Bobcat had loaned me was wearing through. If you were in that shape, would you be eager to dump some of the few possessions you had left? Some of this stuff had outlasted multiple foster parents!
Bobcat and I were still arguing about it when we arrived at the airport, and we called a brief armistice to check the panel of arrival screens, just to make sure our plane was still coming. (It was.) The screens were flickering badly, forcing me to take a couple steps back, and I was winding up to take up the debate again when suddenly Bobcat hissed, The PIN are here!
“Who?”
Peripheral Immigration and Naturalization; I was hoping to avoid them.
“Where?”
The security line—don’t stare!
I took a quick glance, then made a double-take.
“Guys in suits,” I muttered.
Pardon?
“Nothing.” Well, at least I knew who those guys badgering Vandorsky had been. They were large, official-looking, dressed in navy blue, and the airline staff and TSA guys didn’t seem happy to see them. They seemed to be having a quiet but intense argument, and maybe thanks to that (and Bobcat’s telepathic camouflage), they hadn’t noticed us… yet.
“What do we do?” Then I brightened up. No airport meant no stuff abandonment. “This is an emergency, right? So…”
This is not an emergency, Bobcat scolded. This is merely—
“Excuse me? Um, are you okay?”
I turned and immediately had to ratchet my gaze upward. The white, freckly boy standing there was giving me a politely alarmed look, and I realized too late that even though I hadn’t been speaking aloud, I’d probably been standing there making weird faces for a while. Also, I looked like a disaster, even post-shower and change.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, tugging at his red bangs. “It’s just that you look kind of… not okay, and…”
Behind me, one of the screens died. I really, really wasn’t in a good condition for this. If this guy was noticing me, despite Bobcat’s don’t-notice-me shtick, then those pinhead guys wouldn’t be far behind. Plus, now that I was thinking about it, I was pretty sure I couldn’t stay upright much longer.
There was only one place where I was sure I could sit in privacy in this situation.
“I need a bathroom,” I announced. “Right now.”
I will give Tall, White, and Nerdy credit; he turned the color of a strawberry but he immediately put down his wheeled luggage, tucked the paperback under his arm, and led me to the nearest bathroom. Apparently he’d spent a good amount of time in this airport already.
We’d just reached the door of the lady’s room when the door began to open. I saw a flash of navy blue and instantly reversed course, striding into the men’s room like I’d planned it from the start and dragging the tall boy with me by the collar. (Don’t ask me why. I wasn’t thinking clearly by that point.)
We got lucky—no one was there. Ignoring his sputtering, I hauled the boy into the handicapped stall with me, locked the door, and flopped on the toilet. Ah, much better.
“We need a plan,” I said—to Bobcat, but I slipped and said it aloud.
The boy had surpassed red and was rapidly approaching mauve. “You can’t be in here!” he hissed.
I snorted. “Too late.”
“With me? I’m a stranger! I—”
“What’s your name?”
The question at least derailed the rising freak-out. I think he said, “Rage?”
“Really? Fine, I’m M.D. Congratulations; we’re no longer strangers.”
For a moment, he seemed to grapple with some internal struggle, but apparently he’d been well trained; he said, “nice to meet you,” in a tone of some befuddlement and shut up.
Etiquette satisfied, I turned my attention back to Bobcat. “Plan?”
As I was saying before, this is not an emergency, Bobcat insisted. It’s not ideal, but the PIN, I can negotiate with.
“Negotiate?” I didn’t like the sound of that.
You might be momentarily inconvenienced.
“Momentarily inconvenienced?” I knew what that meant. It was the social work equivalent of “mild discomfort.” And suddenly, I found myself fed up with the whole business. I had known Bobcat for a day tops, depending on how long I’d been out, and he was already asking me to be “momentarily inconvenienced” by whatever “peripheral immigration and naturalization” authorities were, none of whom looked particularly friendly. And to top it off, he was asking me to ditch some of my remaining most prized possessions, all because he didn’t want to deal with the trouble of whatever issues his stupid emergency transporter had. Forget it. No way. Why was I going along with this at all? Had his stupid psych-camouflage been working on me too? If so, all the more reason to not go along with whatever he was pulling.
“Um, do you mind telling me exactly what’s going on?” Rage asked, which was the most sensible thing I’d heard since leaving Vandorsky.
I looked at Bobcat. I looked at Rage. Specifically, I looked at Rage’s T-shirt, which read “di magni, salaputium disertum! Vago Teen Classics League 2001” and the purple paperback under his arm, which depicted a woman smooching a very handsome robot. I made my decision.
“I’m an illegal alien from space and all those guys in suits are here to keep me from leaving,” I said brightly. I tapped my foot on top of Bobcat’s carrier. “The cat’s helping me. He’s my caseworker.”
Dead silence for a couple seconds. (Asides from Bobcat’s telepathic wordless wave of horror.)
“Okay,” Rage finally said.
Why are you telling him that? What are you doing? Bobcat wasn’t shrieking, but it was clear he wanted to.
“And I’m telling you this because the only way I’ve ever made any progress with authority figures like them is by making a scene until they’re desperate to get rid of me,” I continued with a toothy grin.
“Okay,” Rage said again, more slowly.
All right, all right, you’ve made your point, Bobcat said. But I can’t use my transporter here.
It was obvious that Rage still wasn’t hearing any of this, but I kept talking aloud. If it irritated Bobcat, maybe it’d get him to act faster. “Why not?”
Because I would take the toilet, Raige, (somehow he was able to express the I) and possibly part of the wall with us, Bobcat explained through the mental equivalent of clenched teeth. Now please—
The bathroom door opened, cutting the conversation off. The stall was way too crowded for me to get up and look through the gap in the door, but Raige did it for me before I could ask, and Bobcat didn’t need to look at all to know who it was.
PIN agent. Just wait for him to leave, Bobcat said.
After what seemed to be the world’s longest urinal visit, accompanied by weirdly intense sighs of relief, the guy did. (Not that I was complaining; the more I got to sit, the better.) After waiting some extra time, just in case the guy lollygagged right outside the door, we got up to go.
“Welp, this is my stop. Nice meeting you, milquetoast,” I said, waving a hand at Raige. Bandages trailed from my sleeve; I shoved them back in, grabbed Bobcat’s carrier despite the pain in my hand, and breezed out as gracefully as I could when what I really wanted to do was keel over and take a nice long nap on the carpet.
The moment I was out the bathroom door, I stopped dead, and Raige crashed into my back.
Two people navy suits (a man and a woman) were standing not ten feet away, talking to a woman in a cloak. All three turned to stare at me, and it was clear that while none of them expected me, they certainly recognized me.
“Sister!” the cloaked woman said with a smile.
Wow, Vandorsky was right; even on first sight, something about her gave me the screaming meemies. Her accent was weird. And she did look a bit like me.
Her eyes dropped to Bobcat and her face froze with a look of intense concentration. Whoever she was, whatever she was doing, it suddenly got Bobcat on my side in a hurry.
Run, Bobcat ordered. This is an emergency!
Easy for him to say. He wasn’t half-dead or lugging a pet carrier and all his earthly possessions. Still, I dug my boots into the tile, made to move—and the suits tackled me.
This didn’t work out too well, since I was still in the bathroom doorway with Raige immediately behind me. Instead of pinning me to the door, they smashed me back into Raige, and the whole heap of us crashed back into the men’s bathroom in a pile of limbs and shouting.
Well, the suits and I were shouting. With Raige, it was more like shrieking. As for Bobcat, I don’t know what he was doing, except that it was certainly not helping me, and I was busy trying to kick and wriggle my way out of the pile, as though I had somewhere to run even if I did get free. I kicked someone, hit someone else with Bobcat’s carrier, took an elbow to the nose from someone, and all through this, the woman in the robes didn’t move at all; she just stood there with a frozen smile, apparently lost in thought.
Well, until the male suit pulled a Taser. Then she went, “no!”
But it was too late. For the second time that day (days?) I got to be a human lightning rod. And this time, I stayed conscious long enough to feel it.
At the time, I didn’t know what I did. All I knew was that everything hurt and I’d had enough. Somehow, I felt my body take the electricity, absorb it—and then blast it out again.
The suits got shoved off me. Raige, since he was already on the floor, had nowhere to go. Bobcat cried out with pain, and then—
And then I was out cold again, leaving a last sensation of the smell of burning ozone. Honestly, by that point, I was relieved.
no subject
(And heh, I was inordinately, ridiculously pleased to see very-early-storyline Raige. And further amused that M.D. is already calling him milquetoast. <3)
no subject
Poor guy really isn't the action and adventuring sort!
--Rogan
no subject