Roadtrip

by enamis

Nerds

Author's Note:

New tags! Whoop!
New Cover! Whoop!
Bunch'o chapters sitting done! Whoop!
A 'Book' break comin'! Ehh? Wup?

Yeah, consider it a narrative break after Rain. You'll feel a certain shift the same way it happened for Souls. Whoop(?)

Time passed.

Not much. It might’ve been a few days. Long enough for us to ease from our recent discovery, but not long enough, so to still keep it in the back of our heads.

I was outside in the plaza right beside the McDonald’s, stretched across a lawn chair I had dragged out at some point. It was tilted back with me on my stomach on the butt bit, my wings spread to my sides, soaking up the sun. I had my favorite gray not-baseball-baseball cap on and new, dark red shorts that went with my overall colors better. Fashion could suck it most of the time but it was kinda nice to have things match every so often.

Kaja was upstairs taking a nap because for some reason she could never really keep herself awake during the day, especially on slow ones like this. Last I’d seen Bella she had joined the horse-woman so I assumed those two were still sticking together. Carl on the other hand was… fuck if I knew where he was, somewhere inside I was guessing.

At the moment I was wreaking ass at Sudoku on my Nintendo DS, blasting music all the while. I was feeling like rock that day. At least I think that was rock.

I’d been at it for a solid two hours, just chilling, as you do. I had torn through my two liters of Coke a while ago so I was running a bit dry at the moment but I didn’t exactly feel like getting up.

Of course the universe had a different idea, because the light on my DS suddenly went red.

Letting out a loud-ass noise of discontent I snapped the handheld shut and placed the stylus back in its hole. I laid there for the two minutes it took for the song to end and turned my Walkman off as well.

It had taken me a while to figure out how to properly fold my wings. I had mostly just mushed them shut and instantly regretted it the moment after. I had forced myself into surrendering my pride and asked Kaja for tips. She didn’t exactly have that much of a grasp on the subject, as one did, but between the two of us we’d figured something out. I had no idea how to put something so complex into words, so just trust me when I say ‘shit’s complicated.

Crawling off the lawn chair was an ordeal in and of itself.

With my tech in my pockets I trotted back to Home Base making a throaty ‘hhhuuuuuuuuu’ noise all the way. Stepping inside, one could instantly feel the change in air. It was cooler, but not by much. The real difference was the stuffiness. As best as we tried circumventing it, you really couldn’t get over the fact that the place functioned only with the air-conditioning on. Every window we could prop open had helped, but we didn’t exactly have that many open-able windows in the first place.

I circled around the support columns and left my DS ‘n MP4 on the taller counter by our ‘dining room’. Looking up at the stairs I paused.

“Fuck me.” I muttered under my breath.

With a defeated slump I made my way to the main counter and over it into the restaurant’s kitchen. Like it or not I couldn’t really do that much without Carl’s help.

Still.

Ever since whenever ago I had been… weary of him… like, I wasn’t scared of the guy, at least I think I wasn’t, but then again I wasn’t scared of Police officers either, but the we all know how they make ya feel when you're right next to them. But this wasn’t the first time I had had to deal with folks like that. A pinch of fake bravado usually did the trick.

“AYO, CARL WHERE YOU AT?!” I called out, strolling through the kitchen. There was a hallway off to the side and I took it. “If you’re jerking it just say so, I’ll come back in like twenty minutes!”

I heard a faintly muted ‘what the fuck’ from nearby.

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’!”

There were a few doors here. One was obviously the freezer, another marked ‘storage’. There were a few else but I followed the mess of wires running along the floor until I came to one marked ‘administration’.

It was ajar so I pushed it open with my shoulder and stepped inside. Only to see Carl on his knees in the middle of the room, half-buried in a black and gray pile and wearing a truly ‘wtf’ expression. I soon mimicked that expression when I looked around.

You could tell the room had relied on AC before because it felt like I had stepped into a jungle. Or at least the Tropical House in the zoo. The air was humid and smelled like sweat and dirty clothes and lots and lots of plastic. What I assumed to once been an office was cleared out besides the desks, a few shelves and a fancy looking desk chair that didn’t belong.

At least that’s what I assumed was there because everything was drowned in heaps and heaps of technology. The shelves were full of disc boxes and one of the desks had five different monitors piled onto it and at least two fullscreen TV’s. The other table had about a dozen laptops, all different brands and models and what looked to be at least there MacBooks’. Under it was a pair of printer-scanners and a couple of Wi-Fi routers and TV decoders. There were boxes overflowing with wires and five what I assumed were Xbox controllers hanging from a lamp. There were black boxy things all over the place with wires going in and out of everywhere. There were shelves stacked full of external hard drives, all of them labelled in scribbly handwriting. In another corner there was just a straight up stack of consoles just sitting there, another pile of wires and controllers by their side. Extension cords coiled all across the floor.

Posters covered the walls, mostly that of various gam-oh shit, was that the Wicther, where did he even get that? There were Collector’s Edition statues all over the free surfaces which was frigen’ cool. In the far right corner there was a nest-bed, like the one Kaja and I shared, of three mattresses and a lot of pillows and blankets. There was a tower of either coverless books or magazines or user manuals or something precariously stacked higher than it should. I ignored the three unopened boxes of tissues haphazardly half-hidden under a pillow. A multitude of fans were strategically placed all throughout the room. What surprised me was that some of them were actually working, and a few of those had colourful little led lights in them.

But the centrepiece of it all…

In the middle of the room against the far wall atop the biggest desk that seemed to be almost buckling under the weight sat one godly Battlestation. Three screens next to one another in a half-circle and the biggest TV somehow mounted to the wall above bathed the room in a soft blue light. Wires and three backlit keyboards and four mice (one of each seemingly crushed) and fancy headphones and speakers and controllers and USB fans and even a mic’ and both top consoles wired up, that all together created a cacophony of technology. Beneath the desk a veritable stack of black boxes that I realized were those UPS power things or something of the ilk.

.

Then I realized I had just barged into a Man-cave.

Oops.

.

Carl was still staring at me with an indescribable expression. Double oops.

Whelp’. Time to salvage the situation.

I made a show of looking around, trying my best to whistle but that just made it worse because I couldn’t fucking whistle. My gaze eventually wandered back to the room’s owner who was still frozen in place, hands full of wires.

We locked eyes for a moment.

“Hey.” I did the up-nod and wiggled my eyebrows.

“Uhh… hey…” Pause. “Did ya’ need something?”

I looked around for a bit more. For what it’s worth this place was genuinely cool.

“Kinda’ sorta’ ye’.” I twiddled my fingers and tilted my head to the side. “Awesome fucking room by the way, but no, egh, think you can power up the generator? I need to charge my shit again so I don’t feel like killing myself via knife or boredom.”

Well now he looked worried. Probably from the dead tone I said that last line with. Triple oops?

“I’ll probably just sit on my ass and rewatch Rick and Morty for the ninth time, but whatever… That’s how you know you’ve made something great, thing still makes me laugh.”

“Oh shit, you like Rick and Morty?!” his entire face lit up in an instant. Honestly, I don’t think I’d seen the guy smile for the last few days.

“Fuck yea’ I like Rick and Morty!” I'm pretty sure that was the most enthusiasm I had expelled since the Rapture.

“I… crap,” he looked for words, “what's your favorite episode? I'm like fifty-fifty between Lawnmower Dog and the Meeseeks one.”

I chortled, hand over beak. “Ffff the Meeseeks one was fucking great, but no. I, uhh, shit I forgot which was which.” I wracked my brain while Carl stealthily put away whatever he was doing. “Th-the one with the Council of Ricks, that was like the best one!”

“Wait, really?”

“Dude! Multiverse theory! That shit’s my JAM!” I excitedly hopped in place. “I'm still waiting for them to R-63 it next season!”

“R-si-oH! OH! The ‘everything will be the other gender’, oh my god yes I didn’t even think of that!”

“Yeeeeessss, you have no idea how bad I want it, just imagine lady-Rick…”

“Yeah and she’d just be the exact same asshole, f-hah!”

At some point we had sat down on the scraggly ass carpet, facing each other in the dark - giggling.

“I-I mean, besides the headcanons the episode was just overall awesome.”

“*Snrkt* people-chairs.”

We burst laughing once more. I suppose they could have been considered in-jokes. Well, for those that watched the show at least.

I didn’t even register what was happening until we were already deep in conversation. We both agreed on how we loved the natural-sounding dialogue and I rambled about my love for the heaps and heaps of dark stuff and black humor crammed into the show while Carl went on about the Sci-fi aspect, which I adored but obviously not as much. We traded theories on the return of Evil-Morty and how he might’ve been Rick’s original due to universe-shenanigans.

There was a beanbag and fluff throne opposite of the Battlestation that we migrated into and tore into a boxful of Pringles while we rambled about how the R63 universe might’ve played out. Well, it was me letting the writer inside pilot my mouth, but still. He had some nice ideas but it was more of me rambling and we traded ideas for names and I lamented how Reddit had nicknamed lady-Rick Rita while I stuck with Rachel. At least Carl agreed with me when I explained the idea that they might be the same person they weren’t the same person.

We joked about how we would live like Kings and Queens if we had the Meeseeks Box and at some point we agreed to rewatch the show together. While I ran outside to pee and get drinks Carl set everything up so we could watch on the wall TV. When I got back he explained how he used the portable power banks or whatever they were called to run his desktop and I tried whistling in amazement again. And fail again.

We watched and laughed and after a bit, when he was switching over to episode two I was hit with a world-shattering realization that made me legitimately burst into tears. As I lay on the dirty floor bawling, I managed to choke out the fact that we would never find out what happened to the Author in Gravity Falls since ‘Tale of Two Stans’ was supposed to air this month or so.

That’s when I learned Carl was a Faller just like me and we both held each other and cried for a pretty long time whilst I shouted every possible theory, shattered and un-shattered which I had spent a solid two years obsessing over, never to be confirmed nor denied. Goodbye Mystery Trio. Goodbye Grunkle4Grandpa. Goodbye Dipper's name. Maybe. Probably. Possibly.

Why was this word so ungodly cruel?

Having cried ourselves out we agreed to talk Gravity Falls another day, maybe even rewatch and analyze whenever we got the time and returned to our original goal of Rick and Morty whilst barely hearing anything over the industrial-sized bag of strawberry-caramel-popcorn Carl had torn open.

I mentioned how Anatomy Park wasn’t that funny to me and during it we exchanged the list of other shows we were fans of. Carl, turned out, was an anime person, me on the other hand, not as much. When I said I liked Steven Universe he made a sour face but nothing else. I could guess what he was thinking, fandoms being cancer and such.

We continued marathoning and I was a little put off by how much food Carl could put away. We joked about jokes or simply sat in silence, enjoying the cartoon.

Kaja came down at some point but we were busy watching the Cronenberg episode and when she saw those fleshy abominations she just turned around and walked out. We laughed about that too.

By the time we’d made it to the second to last episode I was almost out of it and I think Carl was too. We made it five minutes in and mutually called it a day. I was busy reminding my limbs that they were supposed to have blood circulating through them while Carl powered down his setup. We crawled out his room like cave-trolls emerging into sunlight and I came to the realization that oxygen was a thing that humans even mythology-people needed.

We sat down to eat, but it turned into me nibbling a few dried fruits while Carl chowed down a couple of three-day-old-opened cans of whatever. We watched through the window Kaja and Bella playing what almost looked like tag in the open space before the Freedom Monument and we decided to let them be, as the sun was beginning to turn the sky orange.

We sat outside on the steps leading to our main door as the colors of the world faded more and more. We talked about the different fandoms we were in while the Internet was still a thing. Carl didn’t consider himself apart of any except Fullmetal Alchemist and maaaaybe Gravity Falls while I chastised him for missing out on so much fun.

Kaja came over and sat with us for a bit while she caught her breath. We asked what she watched and she mentioned some Estonian rom-com or something. Then she mentioned one of the CSI series and we chatted about that. I brought up that I used to watch Bones a few years back and Carl ranted about how it had gone to shit which was hilarious to listen to.

Kaja left to wander about and we forced her to take Bella with her despite the doggo wanting to cuddle with me and after a while we returned to the topic of anime. Carl said he had torrented every last one he could think of before the power had gone out and I guessed correctly that that was what the hard drives had been for. He promised he was gonna get me to watch everything I had missed out on and I joked that he would never turn me into a Weeaboo alive.

The conversation wound down after a while as we ran out of frantic topics to exchange so we sat side by side in silence.

Carl grumbled how he couldn’t see anything despite the half-moon we still had. I mentioned my eyes were like a cats’ and he sighed and said he was jealous.

Unnaturally humongous birds passed overhead and for some reason that made me uneasy.

.
Silence.

I offhandedly mentioned he was the first person I had ever met that shared at least a few of my interests.

He jokingly asked what about the internet.

I said that didn’t count, as much as I wanted it to.

He softly agreed.

.

I mentioned how nice it was to…

.

He muttered ‘same’ and we listened to the crickets.

.

After a long time he said he was cold and I guided him inside and found a flashlight. We parted ways with a smile and left for our rooms. Kaja was still out but I didn’t feel worried.

I turned myself into a blanket burrito and closed my eyes.

.

I don’t think I’d gone to bed that happy in years.

o.O.o

Comments

[Celefin]

Nerd bonding... beautiful. That was some surreal slice of life here and I had to smile all the way through. Even if I have zero idea what they're talking about. You just effortlessly emptied a ton of character detail over your readers' head and I love it. And a happy griffon!

mythology-people

And damn, you're productive.

[Krazyfan1]

dawwww!

[enamis]

7869672 To be completely honest I had the worst time trying to figure out what to replace MLP with. I ended up just mashing like five different fandoms into a blender and this happened. I put Rick and Morty in the heart of it since it seemed the most well known so I figured..
Make no mistake, they would've been talking pony. Well... Dia would have brought it up first and like most closeted bronies Carl would have come around soon enough.

[Dances With Unicorns]

“As I lay on the dirty floor bawling, I managed to choke out the fact that we would never find out what happened to the Author in Gravity Falls since ‘Tale of Two Stans’ was supposed to air this month or so.”

If that episode was going to be aired that month, in a number of different languages, it would probably exit somewhere. All our named characters need to do is find a copy in some national broadcasting center’s office or a local language dubbing studio. Now that would make an epic quest!

http://gravityfalls.wikia.com/wiki/Gravity_Falls:_International_Versions

[Dances With Unicorns]

7869735

Please consider adding to your story Lauren Faust’s proposed series “Milky Way and the Galaxy Girls”. This Sailor Moon inspired series, considered and then rejected for development by Hasbro, has many ideas that Lauren transferred to generation four, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Thus, Milky Way would be a cool substitute for MLP: FiM on this world. As May 23rd, 2015 was a Saturday, you could have a Milky Way convention, similar to the My Little Pony conventions, at a local hotel or convention center.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Toys/MilkyWayAndTheGalaxyGirls