strangetrip | [GP/EP] We are programmed to receive

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[GP/EP] We are programmed to receive

Fifteen days into this particular strange trip, Kitty had redistributed alcohol supplies between the cafe, restaurant, and night club to make it possible to easily tend bar wherever people decided to gather. Today, as most days, she settled into the lobby cafe after chivvying the cook into chicken tenders and french fries (after convincing him it was a single plate meal). It was the closest she could get to "bar food" from him and someone would probably arrive sooner rather than later to make something else.

A few people trickled in after awhile, but none of them demanding. Like her, they drank coffee from the samovar she'd put out. And also like her, most of them had something else to keep them occupied. At the moment, Kitty had a notebook open (from the gift shop; she kept her school notebooks separate in case she made it home during the term) and was sketching plans to upgrade the hotel's computer technology. She needed more raw computing power to work out the energy requirements to do what Illyana did with a thought.

She lifted her head periodically to check for new customers, and had just seated herself at the end of the bar after refilling the samovar when the first new new customer arrived. Immediately, she flipped to a fresh page in the notebook and headed it "Day 15" and made a hash mark for one new arrival. Then she looked up from her notebook and offered one and all her best bartending smile.

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"Nice to meet you, Wyatt." So far, anyway. Kitty knew better than to think she was a great judge o character. Sometimes she just got lucky, like with Lara. "'Where' is kind of complicated, so what I can tell you for sure is that this is the Madonna Inn. The Inn used to be near San Luis Obispo, California. Now... well, as far as we know, it's not really anywhere."

"Not really anywhere?" He was trying to make sense of that but she looked to be dressed, like the others with a few exceptions, for more close to his timeline. Which probably meant phone or some kind of communication. He would look into calling someone as soon as he got more answers.

"Are you saying that movers moved the Inn to an unknown location?"

Ah, okay. He didn't know as much as it seemed like he had at first. He was probably just one, like her and Lara, who took these kinds of things in stride (at least until the PTSD set in). She gestured to a seat at the bar, in front of her. "This is going to take a little explaining. Can I get you a drink or some coffee or something?"

Wyatt settled into the seat at the bar and looked at the offerings around her. As much as he'd love a beer after the day he'd had, Wyatt knew that he had to keep focus. "Coffee sounds perfect, thank you. And don't worry, I'm used to military briefings. Some of them have explanations, some don't." There was a hint of humor in the words.

"Thought so," Kitty murmured mostly to herself as she grabbed a mug, checked it for dust or worse, and finding nothing, gave it a quick swipe with a clean rag (just in case), before filling it up. "Black?"

She assumed a yes, as she set it down in front of him, but mentally prepared for a request for cream and immediately nudged a sugar caddy toward him. "The short answer is that as far as I can tell, the hotel is either in a dimensional warp-space or a bubble universe. Effectively, the entire world is about thirty empty miles in whatever direction you travel before you end up back at the hotel."

Wyatt would try it out for himself of course. It wasn't that he didn't believe her, but there were issues of trust in the not so distant past. His lips quirked ever so slightly just before he took a sip of the black coffee ignoring the cream and sugar.

"I would vote dimensional warp-space." Not that Wyatt knew what that was. "Someone explained time travel theory to me recently, something about it bending and touching. It sounds like that theory." Plus, Wyatt was sure that it might have been affected by whatever powered the time ship that he, Rufus and Lucy were using.

"Theoretically." Interesting. Not many people were conversant with the theories that permitted time/lightspeed travel. "A warp in the space-time continuum is a bend. It causes two formerly separate locations to become contiguous. Like so." She took a cloth napkin, lay it flat on the counter, then pushed the edges toward the middle until a fold formed and the inside bottoms touched. Blowing on the ridge, she flopped it over. "A warp space might be something like--" After stabilizing her creation, she poked a straw through the space formed from the flopped over ridge, its slope, and what remained of the napkin against the counter. "The problem is that the physics should be..." She shrugged, smiled, and substituted, "Wonky," for anything more 'scientific'. "And for the most part, they're not."

He felt like when Rufus was explaining to him how time travel worked, but her example was better. Not to mention she was cuter. "Maybe there's a machine that keeps it from being 'wonky'." Wyatt offered. "But I'll be the fist to admit that I know nothing about this or if that would work." He didn't even hesitate to let her in. If there was any way for him to be able to get back to his team or at least to give them a message to let them know that he was okay, it would be someone like Kitty.

"I was part of a time traveling team. I was the one that kept them safe, the soldier. Rufus, he was the pilot and the one that helped to develop the program before I got called in. My gut tells me that there's something at work here, something that keeps the science from reacting to the reality. Even if it's just the stuff that has to be connected to us traveling through time." Wyatt shrugged, "Every time my team and I went back in time to save it, small things were changed."

Some of them not so small like Lucy's sister never existing. Or no matter how many times he tried, he couldn't save his wife from dying that day.

That explained the clothes, and the calm. "Dangerous business, time travel. You must've had a really good reason, if you'd take that risk." She really hoped he did, because if he didn't, that could put them on opposite sides--except her gut told her, just like it had with Lara, that he was one of the good guys.

"Not my first time either," she admitted quietly, trying not to attract any other attention. "Although it's usually less time and more dimension or space for me. And there's almost always a Big Bad at the other end of the journey. So far, there's nothing sinister here." Which didn't mean she'd come off red alert. She wasn't sure she knew how anymore.

Hypervigilance was a bitch.

"So far. They're good at hiding. We have been on the trail of our own Big Bad that set out to change history. I've been doing this for three months and he keeps slipping through our fingers." And it irritated the hell out of him. "It's hard to put yourself in their mindset so that you can figure out what they're up to."

Except he knew that Flynn was out to destroy Rittenhous.

"Tell me about it." Her dry tone belied the anger crackling in her eyes and the haunted depths beneath it. "If the villains I've fought are less subtle, they're no more comprehensible. Who slaughters sixteen million people for having a single genetic mutation?" And murdered her human father along with them.

Kitty's fingers tightened around the cup she was holding until she had to either phase or stop or shattered the mug. She almost did neither. She didn't plan to apologize for her anger either.

Wyatt felt a muscle tick in the side of his jaw, his anger building at the thought of someone, anyone, doing that for any reason. "There's a part, deep, or maybe not so deep, that would like to be around when karma takes care of assholes like that. That's when I strongly believe in an eye for an eye."

His time in World War Two was still fresh and the helplessness of not being allowed to do anything to help. History would be changed. Sometimes Wyatt thought that history should have been changed, but that wasn't up to him.

Like she had with Lara, Kitty felt a sudden, deep compulsion to be truthful with Wyatt. To push him away before she gave a damn, in case he ended up being a hateful jerk, probably.

Kitty sighed and refilled his coffee. "Part of me would like for you to ask for something stronger, so I could join you. It's not buried particularly deep at all, since I'm telling you about it." Her anger had subsided again, down to simmer below the surface from where it might erupt again at any moment. "Because I'm pretty sure you think I'm talking about World War Two, but I'm not."

It wouldn't surprise Wyatt that what had happened in World War Two happened again. There were too many incidents with bigots in charge throughout history and the present. He straightened his shoulders almost subconsciously to ward against what she was about to say.

"If not World War Two then when?" It was said with curiosity as well as a bit of dread.

Kitty took a quick look around to see who might be listening, then topped off his coffee and poured a cup for herself. She nodded to a table at the back of the cafe where she can see everyone and modulate her voice accordingly. "Not a conversation for the bar counter. Care to take this somewhere less exposed?"

That was an interesting turn of phrase for an area with not that many people, which in turn led him to wonder what she must have dealt with. Wyatt gave her a quick nod and picked up his coffee cup to head in the direction that she'd indicated.

Once at the table, he paused, allowing her to sit with her back to the wall and vantage point to see all of the activity in the room. While he took the seat that allowed him to see to her side and any activity toward the kitchen.

Quick on the uptake, it seemed, and Kitty appreciated it. She didn't have Pete's paranoia, but her time with him and Logan besides, had given her a healthy appreciation for being able to see what was going. Less for her own sake than for defending others, since a wall or a floor posed an equal obstacle to her.

She sat and sipped her coffee, watching him for the moment over the rim of the cup. "Do you have superheroes in your world?" It seemed like the easiest place to start.

He immediately thought was of Ian Fleming. The memories were a lot fresher than his time reading comics as a kid so his mind drifted there. "We have some that people would call superheros, but if you mean people that have extraordinary abilities, no." He paused thoughtfully before adding, "at least not that I know of. I didn't know about time travel in my world until I was drawn into it."

Kitty nodded. She hated this part. Always. When someone figured out she wasn't like them, and suddenly everything cool about them vanished into the mist of prejudice or well-intentioned paternalism.

"In my world, we do. We're called mutants." We. Not 'they'. Even here. Maybe especially here, Kitty wouldn't deny who she was. No matter what happened. If she lied, all those voices were lost forever.

Wyatt wondered about the term mutant. It sounded too derogatory but he kept his opinion to himself. He didn't think that she needed to hear something that she already knew. "And the mutants were the ones rounded up and sent to 'ghettos' like in World War Two?"

He would have liked to have heard that one place at least didn't go down that road.

"An island of our choosing," Kitty appended. It had been a ghetto, even if it was one Magneto had chosen, and even if recruitment wasn't exactly voluntary. Not that it ever was, with a ghetto.

"We painted a target on the broad side of the barn." We did. Not they did. Would he hear it, or would she have to spell it out? It was almost better that he hadn't said yet. At least he wasn't so much of a hater he saw mutants everywhere, or a groupie, which was almost worse.

Wyatt wondered st the significance of the target on a barn beyond the ironic of hitting the broad side of a barn. "It sounds like you got sent to a prison that happened to be an island. And the target on the barn? That was symbolic enough to get the regime upset at you and the others?" It wasn't anything that he understood.

As a soldier you followed orders and didn't question, he got that, except some orders demanded questions.

His confusion provoked a small smile. It was kind of cute, which wasn't something she should be thinking, especially right now. "Where there are superheroes there will be super-villains. Even if there weren't, millions of people with special abilities forming a nation..." She shrugged, sure she didn't have to explain that.

"It wasn't straightforward or any one group of people's fault. Genosha got caught in a battle between humans and mutants, and mutants and mutants. It couldn't have happened without anti-mutant hatred, but I don't even really know who to blame."

That...was possibly the first time she'd said that out loud. Or even "in-loud," because the way it all sounded inside her head was still screams and crumbling buildings.

Edited 2017-01-30 17:50 (UTC)

Wyatt sat silent for a moment, thinking through what she said and hadn't said, before he commented. "When I was young and growing up in Texas, my heroes were John Wayne and Gary Cooper. I loved the old westerns where there were good guys and bad guys. The world was black and white. I went to war in Afghanistan and the first thing I learned in combat was that those movies were wrong. There isn't black and white in the world, there are all kinds of grey and the lines between who you thought was wrong and what you thought was right, gets blurred. Don't get me wrong, there are some lines and area that are sharply defined and always will be, but most of the lines are blurry. Sometimes it's harder to cope when there isn't just one area to focus the anger on."

He sat quietly for a minute before he added, "sometimes when it's hard to focus that anger, you turn it on yourself. It's easier to see your faults and what you think you should have done differently to change the outcome that actually happened."

Or that was just him.

Once Kitty figured out what he was going to say, she mostly tipped her head to listen to how he said it. When your brain moved fifteen times as fast as most peoples', you had to teach yourself to slow down and hear. So she noted that he didn't sound judgmental, or preachy, or condescending, that he did sound like he knew from experience, that it didn't sound like he was trying to solve her problems or tell her something she already knew, but that he wanted her to get that he understood.

When he'd finished, though, it left her fiddling with her coffee cup, turning it between her hands. "Don't take this wrong, but--" She tried to put a smile in her eyes at least. "You sound like my shrink. I'm gonna guess that's because you've been there, or maybe you are there. What sucks is that it's just gonna get worse while we're stuck here. Like the car ride to forever."

[GP/EP] We are programmed to receive

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