The Deck, Tuesday Morning

[rebelseekspizza]

Dante had a vague and nonspecific image of what Cassandra looked like - but in a school this small, she shouldn't have been so hard to spot. Still, he hadn't managed to run into her at all over the past few days, and it had left him frustrated, antsy and anxious. His two settings had always been 'do something' or 'forget about it'-- but he hadn't managed to do the former and he was having a hard time with the latter.

So after rolling out of bed on Tuesday, he'd gotten dressed, snagged his guns on the way out the door, and parked his ass on the deck.

After an hour of waiting, though, there was still no sign of her. He let out a sigh, slumped further into his seat, and parked his feet up on the divider. Great. Now even his efforts to do something were making him antsy. He should've brought the boombox and tossed on those Dead Kennedys albums Pretentious-Ass Starsmore had passed on. He found a pen in his pocket, fiddled with it. Fiddled with Ebony for a second, too. Looked up at the ceiling, counted the cracks. ... Finally, he tilted his head up and tried to balance the pen on his face.

Screw Hellfire Prison. This was hell.

[[ open! ]]

Comments

[rebelseekspizza]

"Hey, you seem to be really into judging what other people do with their time," Dante said, twirling the pen in his hand. "Thought I'd return the favor."

[intotheout]

"Right. So sorry for interrupting your clearly vital pen-balancing with my judgmentalness." Tip found herself a nice sunny spot and tugged a chair into it before sitting down and opening her book. "Please, don't let me disturb you further. Since it definitely doesn't look like you're bored, or anything."

[rebelseekspizza]

"Me, bored? Nah."

He put the pen back on his nose and tilted his head back--

... and it immediately went crashing down to the floor. "... Okay, maybe a little."

[intotheout]

Tip was actually pretty amused by that, but doing a half-assed job at trying to hide it behind her book. "Really?" she asked. "I totally wouldn't have guessed."

[rebelseekspizza]

"I'm waiting for someone and I got bored of playing Angry Birds," Dante admitted, shooting her book a quick glance.

Not that he was actually interested in it, because reading, meh. But her face was hiding behind it.

[intotheout]

It was a pulpy YA novel about elves. The cover was decorated in electric-teal vines. It was not even remotely serious reading, and Tip was mostly scanning the same paragraph over and over again, right now. "You're still playing Angry Birds?" she asked. "Isn't that game kind of old?"

It predated the Boov invasion in Tip's world, even.

[rebelseekspizza]

Dante shrugged. "I like wrecking shit," he said. "And it's free."

Which was helpful when you didn't have the ID required to get a bank account.

[intotheout]

"So it's sort of like the teenager version of knocking down block towers," Tip mused. Boys. "I suppose at least the little digital towers are built to be knocked down."

[rebelseekspizza]

"And the pigs look like assholes, so there's no guilt," Dante said, stretching his legs out and putting them back onto the divider.

[intotheout]

"They're cartoon pig heads," Tip pointed out. "What makes them look more like assholes than the birds do?"

[rebelseekspizza]

"They're green and they have pig royalty," Dante said. He shrugged. "Everybody looks like an asshole with a crown on their head."

Life lessons, right there.

[intotheout]

Tip thought of Smek and his squishy alarm/intercom hat. "That's true," she said. "But are the birds attacking the structures unprovoked? Because people who invade other people's homes are pretty assholish, too."

Was she discussing the political ramifications of Angry Birds? Was this what high school was?

[rebelseekspizza]

... Yeah. Dante squinted at her book. "Pretty sure they stole the birds' eggs or some shit," he said. "You don't get as angry as these birds do without a reason."

[intotheout]

"Everyone has a reason," Tip said. "The Gorg had a reason for going around the galaxy literally eating planets. That didn't make them not assholes. The question is, is it a good reason."

Which someone stealing essentially your children was. That was a pretty easy ethical question, actually.

[rebelseekspizza]

And now it was Tip who was getting the squinting - or whatever of Tip he could see at this angle. "Eating planets, the fuck?"

[intotheout]

"They had an unsustainable societal growth pattern based on a severe lack of genetic diversity," Tip said, answering a question he hadn't actually asked. "So they went around capturing and enslaving people and literally devouring their planets for natural resources." She looked up from her book finally and frowned at the deck edge. "I guess they still do. We drove them away from Earth, but we didn't, like, stop them from going off to do it to a different planet."

[rebelseekspizza]

"I got about half of that," Dante said, after a long pause. "Can you repeat the first part?"

[intotheout]

Tip set her book aside and turned to sit crosslegged, facing Dante. She was more interested in showing off her Gorg knowledge than reading right now, anyway. "The Gorg are actually a race of clones. They had a really violent culture, and the one who won in the end was the biggest and strongest and meanest, to the point where he literally wiped out all the other -- I don't remember what they were called. His name was Gorg, so when he got cloning technology and he made a bunch of clones of himself, they were all called Gorg. But the cloning tech was imperfect, and the more Gorg clones they made, the less healthy and stable they were. And if they cloned, like, their food too much, it ended up poisonous. So they went around attacking planets just to feed their own giant, twisted clone army, and once they used up all they could on the planet, their spaceship would open up like a mouth and -- eat the planet itself. For all the minerals and stuff in it, I guess." She shrugged. "Some of that might have been artistic license. I never actually saw the opening up like a mouth or anything, and J.Lo's not really an objective source."

[rebelseekspizza]

Dante mouthed 'Jennifer Lopez?' near the end, but didn't actually come out and say it. As such.

"Right," he said. "So a bunch of violent idiots kill almost everybody, they realize they fucked up, and then they double down on fucking up all over the place. Got it."

[intotheout]

"That's it in a nutshell," Tip said, smiling faintly at the mouthing there at the end. "And not Jennifer Lopez, my friend J.Lo. He thought it was a really common Earth name when he first got here. He does sometimes get her mail, though."

[rebelseekspizza]

"Huh." Don't mind Dante. He was just processing all that, and in the mean time-- "He ever get anything good?"

[intotheout]

"An invitation to the Latin Grammy's." Tip shook her head. "I still keep forgetting that none of that happened in most people's worlds. It was his coming out as a Boov-still-on-Earth party. . . . Jennifer wasn't super thrilled by it, though."

[rebelseekspizza]

"As far as perks go, not bad," Dante said. "Huh."

Huh.

"You get a lot of aliens back where you're from, huh?"

[intotheout]

"Just the two species. The Boov invaded and the Gorg followed them. We got rid of the Gorg and the Boov were so grateful they agreed to leave us alone."

[rebelseekspizza]

"So I should not get excited if someone stops by and asks to phone home," Dante surmised. "Sounds like a bunch of assholes all around."