The Gym - Tuesday Morning

[my-names-max.livejournal.com]

Max had been going running, which was all well and good, but she decided it was time for her to become acquainted with the gym.

She found it early Tuesday morning and began running drills with the punching bag.


[open, as gyms tend to be]

Comments

[time-flyer-5.livejournal.com]

Jen was still getting used to having so much downtime, and as a result she was restless today. What better way to work off all that restlessness than putting it to productive use in the gym?

She grinned, a little ferally, when she saw the sparring dummy. "This beats a rope-wrapped tree trunk any day."

[my-names-max.livejournal.com]

Max looked up. "You've sparred with a tree?"

[time-flyer-5.livejournal.com]

Jen, already taping up her hands, shrugged. "It was the best equipment I had all last year."

[my-names-max.livejournal.com]

"Wow, that's pretty bad," Max said. Not that she'd really had much better, but still. "Where you from?"

[time-flyer-5.livejournal.com]

Jen started into a stretching routine. "Millennium City, handwavey location of OMFGIdunno, originally, but the tree was in Silver Hills, Washington. Not a whole lot of money while we were living there."

Or now, for that matter, but that didn't need to be said.

[my-names-max.livejournal.com]

Max nodded. "Sounds like where I'm from," she said. "Or maybe I should say when I'm from. That's still a little weird to get used to."

[time-flyer-5.livejournal.com]

Jen glanced over and smiled wryly. "Trade you your year for mine, then."

[my-names-max.livejournal.com]

"2017," Max said. "You?"

[time-flyer-5.livejournal.com]

"3000, originally." Jen took an experimental half-speed swing at the dummy and decided to warm up a little more thoroughly first. "I was in 2001 most recently, though."

[my-names-max.livejournal.com]

Max blinked. "Wow. So, have you ever heard of the Pulse?"

[time-flyer-5.livejournal.com]

"Only," Jen said slowly, "if you're talking about the club that burned down in an accident in 2993, which I doubt."

[my-names-max.livejournal.com]

"Nope. Terrorist attack that occured in June 2009, wiping out all computer systems in the US," Max said.

[time-flyer-5.livejournal.com]

"Didn't happen for me," Jen said decisively. She'd obsessively studied the history of any and all terrorist attacks of the 20th century onward in preparation for her Academy entrance exam; she'd have remembered hearing about this.

[my-names-max.livejournal.com]

"That's so weird," Max said.

[time-flyer-5.livejournal.com]

"What, multiple timelines and possibilities? Yeah, it's headache-inducing. Even I had a hard time staying awake in elementary quantum physics," Jen admitted.

[my-names-max.livejournal.com]

"So you travel through time on purpose?" Max asked.

[time-flyer-5.livejournal.com]

She had to consider that for a moment.

"I guess I do, yeah," Jen said finally. "It's not a general practice, but on rare occasions it has to be done."

[my-names-max.livejournal.com]

Max cocked her head, curious. "What kind of occasions?"

[time-flyer-5.livejournal.com]

Chasing an evil criminal back in time before he rewrote history?

Well, yes, but that probably wasn't a story to tell in the middle of the gym.

"How about . . . getting away before I was forced to have my memory altered?"

[my-names-max.livejournal.com]

"Sounds like a good reason to me," Max agreed.

[time-flyer-5.livejournal.com]

Jen grinned a little fiercely. "Glad I'm not the only one who thinks so."

[my-names-max.livejournal.com]

Max smiled. "You need to protect yourself."

[time-flyer-5.livejournal.com]

"But my friends couldn't protect themselves." She lashed out at the bag with a vicious backhand.

[my-names-max.livejournal.com]

Max nodded. "I understand how that goes," she said, thinking about the brothers and sisters she had left behind at Manticore.

[time-flyer-5.livejournal.com]

Jen sent another quick flurry of punches at the dummy not bag, hi, pretend that said dummy up there before turning to look at Max. "How'd you end up here, anyway? Getting away from something too?"