legionworld | (no subject)

Who| Barry Whoever, and later Grif.
What| Musicals, Training Grif
Where| Quarters, Sim Room
When| During Time Ripples
Warnings/Notes| Will update if needed.

♪Sit down, John!♪
♪Sit down, John!♪
♪For God's sake, John, sit down!♪

Music wafted it's way out of Barry's quarters, his door being somewhat ajar. Inside, Barry was munching on a large bowl of popcorn and was obviously watching 1776 starring William Daniels. He'd managed to track down a recording recently, along with a copy of Singin' in the Rain, and was having something of a double feature before he was due to track down Grif for training. The door had been left open as something of an invitation to anyone who wanted to join him in it.

Once his mini-marathon was done, he headed over to the Sim Room. Grif had wanted to learn wall running, and the Speed Lab wasn't the best place to do so. It could be used for it, certainly, but with only one wall to run on it would get boring quickly. Half the issue with training Grif was motivating Grif, even if the other speedster was actually managing a lot of that on his own. More motivation certainly couldn't hurt, though, which is why Barry had decided to come up with a training regimen Cisco would be proud of. That was why the current sim looked uncannily like something out of a Sonic the Hedgehog game, complete with rings to act as a scoring mechanism. There were no Badniks present to fight yet, but they could be added in later to up the difficulty.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

When the music caught Thad's attention, it struck a chord with him and temporarily stopped him in his tracks. It was oddly familiar, though for a moment he wasn't quite sure why; finding it hard to place. After a moment of absorbing the lyrics, he was sure that he hadn't actually heard the song before but he'd certainly hear ones styled like it.

It was like something out one of those movies Helen sometimes liked to watch. The kind she would try to get Bart to watch with her despite the fact that he never had the patience for them.

Curious, he followed the melody to the open door of someone's quarters and cautiously looked in. He wasn't quite sure what he expected to see, it wasn't as if Helen was going to be in there...but then again, maybe?

But no, that definitely wasn't Helen.

Barry turned from the screen as he spotted Thad in his peripheral vision.

"Hey," he said with a slight wave, "Did you need something, or did you want to watch? It's 1776."

Edited 2017-06-14 02:54 (UTC)

"Oh my god," says Grif, his reaction practically pained as he looks around the sim room.

"If you're gonna do video games, can't they at least be good video games?"

He's already teased Sam about Sonic the Hedgehog, he is at least consistent. Grif is sort of surprised by the effort put into this on his behalf, it's... nice. It's something a friend does. But he can't cop to that.

The kid stiffens when he's caught, and for a moment he contemplates simply bolting but decides against it. This was a teammate, someone he very well might have to work with in the future, and the last thing he wanted was to make a first impression that might paint him as a suspicious snoop (even if that's exactly what he was), or worse, some frightened little wallflower.

He takes a few cautious steps into the room, enough to see the television better but close enough to the door that he could easily sneak back out if he felt like it. Ignoring Barry's question he instead asks one of his own.

"They actually base some of these off of historical events?"

"Hey, if you've got a better idea for wall-running training, I'm all ears." Barry said, kicking a ring to make sure the object was working properly. It disappeared with a bell-like tone.

"I can't teach you the way I learned, because that involved having to catch a guy falling from a building. And forcing you to try and get around Legion World with no flight ring would be kind of a jerk move. So, Sonic the Hedgehog seemed like the best answer."

Barry cocks an eyebrow at Thad's apprehension, but doesn't press. Instead he chooses to focus his attention back on the film, but not so much that he ignores Thad's question.

"They do. It's shouldn't be surprising, really. History as theater has been a thing for centuries. Shakespeare wrote a ton of historical plays. This is just a natural, if occasionally weird, extension of that."

He'd never really thought of that before. Then again, literature (despite still finding it entertaining) and theatrical arts had never really sparked a particular interest, and certainly hadn't been very far up his list of research topics.

"I suppose I'd just never thought of musicals delving into the subject." They had always just seemed rather frivolous from what little he'd seen of them. More designed for pure humor or dramatics, though from the looks of it, this one still had some of that, too. "Are there a lot like this one?"

Grif rolls his eyes, but fine. He supposes. If this will make him better at superheroing, he will tolerate the bad video game references. They've been doing this long enough, though, that Barry knows he doesn't really mean anything by it. Grif is just being Grif. He has to be contrarian and persnickety, that's his job around here.

"So what do you want me to do?" he asks with open resignation.

Barry takes a breath and claps the other mans shoulders. "Run, Grif, run."

"Really, that's basically it." he adds, dropping his hands, "Run as fast as you can, and try maintain velocity on the way back down the loops, otherwise you'll fall flat on your face. Hit as many rings as you can so I can get a decent idea of how well you're doing. Once I think you've got the hang of it I'll start tossing in enemies for you to dodge and punch."

"Alright, fine. Here I go."

It's much less effort than it used to take to get him to participate. Grif actually does try, but he's definitely prioritizing avoiding a facefall over accurately hitting any rings. He comes down faster than necessary, way overshooting the momentum he needs, but it's much better in his mind than embarrassing himself.

"Sort of," Barry says with a shrug, "There's musicals like this and Hamilton, which go heavily into history. Some of them, Annie get your Gun comes to mind, focus on the romantic relationships of historical people. There's musicals about relatively less important moments in history, like the King And I. And there's musicals like Allegiance, which is about how regular Japanese-Americans dealt with their internment during World War II."

For a moment he simply nodded, and seemingly gets absorbed in the movie, before chiming in again.

"The King And I, I forgot about that one. It was based off of 'Anna and the King of Siam', wasn't it?" Though it was clearly stated like a question he sounds confident enough in his assumption that it probably doesn't require an answer. "That one bothered me."