legionworld | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Who| Ina and you!
What| Technology is fascinating.
Where| Some corridor near the obs deck.
When| Before Tinker Tailor etcetc.
Warnings/Notes| idk

Really, a door ought to be the last thing on Ina's mind.

She was in a strange, unfamiliar place ("spaceship"??). She'd been torn away from one war, thrust into another (they didn't call it a war, but how else would she describe it?). Most of what she'd been told about her new circumstances didn't make much sense at all, and half the words might as well not have been translated, for all the sense they made. Eventually they'd given her very clear, simple directions to the observation deck, which they suggested might help her put things into perspective, and she'd set off down the hall and -

The door had slid open when she was a meter away, and she'd stopped.

How did it do that?

She moved backwards a couple of meters, and watched as the door slid shut again.

Stepped forward, watched it open.

Please interrupt her before she does this all night.

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"Are you worried it's going to close on you, or it's--"

Tadashi almost said "cool", but she looked more fascinated by the door than concerned by it; and if it was technology from beyond her era, "cool" probably wasn't going to make a lot of sense to her.

"--interesting?"

Tadashi was wearing his uniform without his helmet, so the technological gauntlet on his right forearm might also get her attention.

Grif was on his way to the observation deck. The observation deck was a great place to sit and eat an entire bag of chips, which he had every intention of doing. This would have been completely unremarkable if someone hadn't been in the way.

He didn't recognize her, but that didn't mean it was fine to just obstruct hallway operations.

"Did your mom not tell you not to play with doors, or what?"

Oops.

She turned to look at him, a bit guiltily, but he didn't sound like he was trying to make something of it, at least...and once she got a look at him, this was definitely someone who'd already had the chance to acclimate. Or just came from such a strange time in the first place.

"I've never seen such a thing," she said, her gaze dropping to the gauntlet he was wearing.

Door, or gauntlet? She could've been referring to either, at this point. (Or both. Both is good.)

Startled, she whirled to face him, ponytail whipping around her with the motion. This - she was just -

- that was rude and this was strange enough that she had every reason to question it and she didn't know anything about this man except that she really didn't like the idea of him seeing her figure out automatic doors.

"Doors don't do that!" she snapped. Was she blushing? Please, let her not be blushing.

Grif's brow furrowed.

"Yeah they do?"

He made a little please-stand-back gesture with the hand that wasn't holding the chip bag, and took a step doorward.

It opened.

He looked back at the stranger, eyebrows raised. See?

Okay, now she was definitely blushing, and that just made her even more irate, because she didn't want to be embarrassed! Not in front of someone this rude!

"They don't where I come from. Don't be so - so pedantic."

She was already flustered about this. Success. Grif decided he liked her, which meant she was probably not going to like Grif much.

"You don't have automatic doors? You were so deprived as a kid," he said.

There was also the being-from-the-past-or-something-weird-like-that possibility, he'd met several people like that and her clothes were hinting in that direction. But no, this was more fun.

"I was very well-provided for as a child!"

Was he insulting her father? Nobody insulted her father.

"I don't know how things work for you, but where I'm from? Messing with the automatic door while your mom tries to get you to cut it out is like some kind of rite of passage."

Okay, so he was exaggerating. But only a little.

"Actually, forget what I said. Play with the door. Knock yourself out, you have lost time to make up for."

Grif was a generous soul. A generous soul who was grinning ear to ear because he'd found a new victim.

"I don't know what sort of customs could possibly use opening doors as a sign of adulthood -"

The bow at her side flashed out in a low arc, smacking him in the calves to knock him off his feet. By the time he hit the floor, she'd snapped it back up into a ready position, arrow nocked and pointing down at him.

"But where I'm from, our rites of passage take place on the battlefield."

Flustered and blushing sure went out the window fast.

And then, as suddenly as she'd struck, she lowered her bow and tucked the arrow back in her quiver. She wasn't such a barbarian that she'd shoot someone over a disagreement about a door.

...probably.

Grif might have had speed powers, but he was not expecting that. He hit the floor with a whump and an undignified yelp.

"Jesus!"

He only moved to get up after the arrow wasn't pointed at him. Yikes.

"What the hell was that for?!" he demanded, as if he didn't have some idea. Okay. So he'd probably deserved that. But it still hurt.

"If you insult my upbringing, you insult my father. He may have taught me nothing of your automatic doors, but he taught me how to defend my clan's honor."

As serious as a heart attack. There was clearly no joke in how Ina was taking this; doors were apparently very serious business.

Grif sighed. Alright, the jig was up, that was fun but now it was over and his legs hurt.

"Look, I don't know anything about clan honor and stuff," he said. Grif and honor didn't really belong in the same sentence.

"It's just most people have seen an automatic door before. I take it you guys just don't have those?"

It wasn't a huge improvement, but a little less mocking and more conversational this time. Truce? Maybe? For the moment?

Edited (tense) 2016-08-29 18:41 (UTC)

And with his switch to less mockery and more conversation, she was back to less fire and more embarrassment. "No. We don't have anything like that, or..."

A vague wave of her hand (the one still holding her bow, but it neatly stayed clear of anyone's face) to indicate everything around them. The doors. The computer terminals on the walls. The ceiling lights. "Nothing like any of this."

"Well in that case..." Grif grinned and spread his arms to indicate the ship too, like he was presenting it.

"Welcome to the fucking space future," he said. "Part space, part future, sometimes part bullshit."

Grif's relationship with the space future had its definite ups and downs.

"They've got so much crazy technology going on here that you're lucky you're not a nerd, cause it might've killed you."

Edited (this tag had too much space) 2016-08-30 05:25 (UTC)

There was still plenty she questioned (what in the world was a "nerd"?), but while the future made sense enough (they'd suggested she was from a time long past when she was clearly confused by ninety percent of what they were trying to tell her), and bullshit made plenty of sense (even if it was an awfully crass way to describe their circumstances) -

"I keep hearing about space, but I'm not...entirely certain I'm following."

Ina didn't think of the stars as space. Space was empty room in a castle, an open field with no obstructions. Space was a concept, not a place. But trying to put that meaning to everything she kept hearing the word paired with didn't make much sense.

(Which was why they'd been trying to send her to the obs deck to get the idea, naturally.)

"Space is like..."

Grif's face twisted up a bit as he thought about it. The Great War had started before he was even born. He couldn't remember a time in his life when he hadn't had some kind of awareness of space and how that worked.

"Space is space," he finished. "C'mon. I was going to observation anyway, I'll show you."

Grif gestured for her to follow him.

"And I guess before I introduce you to space: I'm Grif, just so you know."

"Automatic doors are wonderful, are they not?"

Reinhardt had come up behind few a few minutes ago, having been on his way to the gym. However, the sight of the girl playing with the door had been amusing enough that he decided to stick around, if only to see how long it'd last. It wasn't until afterward that he realized she had probably just arrived here, and probably didn't have automatic doors where she came from. Which was when he decided to make his presence known, if only to see if he could help her out.

"When I was a child, these kinds of doors were not common yet," He continued, stepping past her, and watching the door open for him. "But I always dreamed of living in a world where technology was really advanced."

Finally, he turned back to her, and offered her his hand. "I am Reinhardt Wilhelm. It is a pleasure to meet you, miss."

Space is space.

Well, that explained a whole lot of nothing.

But perhaps he wasn't all bad. (Still frustrating, certainly, there was no arguing about that.) So she nodded, and made to follow, and then paused to bow after he introduced himself. "My name is Ina."

...titles and allegiances didn't seem like something worth getting into, with him.

She jumped, slightly, when he finally spoke up. Embarrassing, really; she usually had better awareness when someone was there. (Kunoichi still had no trouble getting the jump on her, but Kunoichi was a ninja. That was to be expected.) This might not be a battlefield, but that had still been inexcusably lax of her.

What would her father say?

"I never dreamed of anything this advanced," she said, a bit sheepishly. "It seems we still have much to learn."

(Polite understatement.)

She looked at his hand, confusion clear on her face, but he seemed to be expecting...the same, from her? So she held out her own hand (although she didn't realize to take his for a handshake), bowing as she said, "I am Ina."

It was a little weird having someone bow, even if it seemed like a basic courtesy. Was he supposed to bow back? Maybe? He decided to just leave it alone and if it was a problem, well, he'd already established he was kind of a dick anyway. Grif didn't do effort, and he barely did not being a dick.

He certainly didn't ask for more detail than that, proving Inahime was already getting a good grip on what he was like, and they were off.

"It's not real complicated, it's just space is like automatic doors for me," he said, taking the time to pop the seal on the chip bag as he walked.

"We've got them when-slash-where I'm from," Tadashi said. Noticing her glance down at his wrist, he gave her a lopsided smile. "The doors, I mean. They don't have these--" he raised the arm with the gauntlet and gestured to it with his other hand, "--where I'm from because nobody has super powers. But I can tell you how the door works, if you'd like."

"Could you?"

That would be a good thing to know. She had a feeling people were going to laugh if she just blamed it on magic, but...it looked like magic!

Foreigners couldn't be expected to know those sorts of manners, she supposed, but Grif did seem like the type who would neglect them even if he knew better. So she magnanimously did not point out his rudeness, and continued on beside him.

"I've gotten the impression that without understanding that, there's very little here I can hope to understand."

They'd used the word so much. How were they expecting her to follow?

"It... yeah, pretty much," Grif admitted.

They came up on the deck proper then and Grif stepped aside, making an after-you gesture toward the rail so Inahime could get a good look. He hadn't thought about the view from the deck in any detail in a month or two, really. There was the white and green and blue expanse of the Earth below, looking way too finite. There was the mess of the lunar debris field (because of course someone had blown up the moon, this universe had superheroes running around, why the fuck not?) glittering much closer than the cold, distant stars.

He still couldn't decide how it made him feel. Small, mostly. Very, very small. Grif pushed the thought away and instead focused on his chips.

"Space, Ina. Ina, space," he introduced between crunches.

Edited 2016-09-04 23:46 (UTC)

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