strangetrip | [GP] Evening - Blinding you with science (and fireworks)

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[GP] Evening - Blinding you with science (and fireworks)

It had taken a good three weeks for Sora and Peter to gather enough materials and also enough nerve to put on the fireworks that Peter had felt were missing from New Year's. They'd filched, over time, a pile of steel wool pads and an embarrassing number of whisks. Why they needed those things, Sora didn't exactly know.

Once everything was gathered up, Sora and Peter met outside, a safe (probably!) distance from the Inn. Peter showed Sora how to stretch out a pad of steel wool and jam it inside a whisk, then he attached long ropes of webbing to the ends of the whisks and fastened them to the ground. While he did that, he cheerfully explained how the webbing worked and how he was sure it would stick to the ground right and everything would be fine. There was a lot of math and other things Sora did not understand at all, but he was absolutely confident that Peter was right.

Once everything was fastened properly, Peter gave the nod.

Sora called out the Keyblade, stood in the middle of the webby circle of stuffed whisks, and cast Aeroga. Swirling winds came out of nowhere to lift up the whisks and spin them in the air, held in control only by the webbing ropes. Next came Thunder - bolts of lightning to ignite the wool in the whisks as they spun. (Peter had been sure that Fire wouldn't work, it had to be Thunder. And he was so right!)

Then the boys settled, more or less, to watch their homemade fireworks spinning and throwing sparks.

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A smile crept on her face. "It sounds really complicated huh?" She knew it was because her life was complicated. "I don't think he was ever really a bad guy, you know? Just, scared and confused. I mean, things like aliens can be pretty scary." She had been scared at first, too, and Maria had literally gone running out of the Crashdown screaming.

"Things got really complicated really fast. Or at least it felt that way, you know? Being here.. it's the first time in a long time I've been able to just stop and breathe."

"Yeah, but it sounds like both of us have had pretty complicated lives." Though probably recently complicated, from the sounds of it.

"It's the same for me," Peter says. "Ever since I've gotten my powers, I haven't really had much time for rest. And now that I do, I don't really know what to do with myself."

She nodded in agreement. "But you and Sora made these fireworks and that's pretty amazing."

Liz looked at the sparkling night sky for a minute, a smile forming from it. It was hard not to like fireworks. She looked back at Peter. "Do you, um, miss using your powers?" She said it then realized maybe he always did use it and it was a dumb question but it was out there now.

It's hard for Peter to stop staring at Liz, so he forces his gaze up to the fireworks. He didn't want to be creepy.

"Yeah," Peter says. "I mean, I still have them. And sometimes I use them for stuff like this," he gestures to the webfluid-powered fireworks show, "or for making a hammock from the chandelier in my room to the wall. But... I don't ever get to use them for their real purpose. Not while I'm here."

Finally, he allows his gaze to wander back to Liz. "On one hand, I'm glad that it's peaceful here. But at the same time, if I had to be transported to some other place, I'd rather it be somewhere where I could really help people."

His thoughts trail off to Emma, and everything she told him back on New Years. None of that sounded pleasant, but... if he could, he'd want to help all the people back there.

She would miss him, Liz realized suddenly and almost said it out loud as a knee-jerk reaction, but her rational mind kicked in quickly and realized that would be selfish. Just like wanting to be with Max was selfish. Peter could save people, and he should. Not dating Max would save the world, so she shouldn't.

"You can make a hammock?" Liz decided to focus on something else. Besides, she couldn't quite picture it. "What does it look like? Or, um... feel like?" She never really studied how spiderwebs felt except for getting that sudden ick sensation and dancing around until you were certain it was no longer on you. Those couldn't really keep you up like a hammock though. "Can I... can I see it?" Asked quietly in an almost conspiratorial way.

"Y-you want me to show you?" Peter echoes, his voice cracking a little. "Yeah, sure. I mean, if you feel comfortable going up to my room."

Peter suddenly waves his hands frantically in front of him.

"And if you don't, we can make one in the lobby. It really shouldn't be hard to make one anywhere else. I mean, I can do one right in the corner from one wall to another."

Her eyes widened a bit when it looked like he was panicking a little, then she shook her head. "No, no. I wouldn't want - I mean, You shouldn't have to like, expose yourself just for me. If you feel more comfortable in your room then that's okay." She trusted him, after all. "Or, um. It's totally okay if you don't feel comfortable at all and you can just say no. I promise I won't be angry if you do." She followed that with a small, reassuring smile that was muddied with some awkwardness.

"No," Peter says shaking his head. "Anywhere is fine. Did you -- did you wanna go now, or just do it some other time?"

Liz was really curious. There was the genuine excitement that usually came from a really cool experiment or discovery and the eagerness sparkled in her eyes. But then Sora made the sparking ball rise back up into the air. She glanced to it, then back to Peter. She was being selfish. A soft, warm smile spread across her lips. "This is. You helped make this really cool thing with Sora. You should get to enjoy it."

"No, it's no problem at all!" Peter rushes in to clarify. He gestures up at the fireworks. "I mean, Sora and I didn't get this all together in one night. There was some trial-and-error, so I got to see this a ton of times already."

From beneath the mask, Peter presses his lips together pensively.

"So it's fine if we do whatever you want to do."

She bit her bottom lip as she looked at him thoughtfully. Was he just being nice? Was she getting in the way of something?

"... Are you sure?" Because Liz wanted to be sure and her ton was a little hopeful that he was, in fact, sure it was okay to leave.

"Yeah," he says, nodding. "I'm totally sure."

Peter rises to his feet. "My room's over in that building over there," he says gesturing to the building in question. "Same building as you, I think, just third floor."

He begins to pad towards it, then stops briefly to let Liz catch up. And once she has, he adjusts his pace to meet her own.

"Peter, I am detecting a higher than normal heartrate," Karen says, from within the suit. "Should I run a bioscan to determine the root cause?"

"No, no need," Peter tells her quickly, before she can prod any more. He turns back to Liz to offer her an explanation as they make their way toward the building:

"My suit has an AI. Her name is Karen."

Liz followed, feeling a little fluttering in her chest though she told herself it was clearly because she was excited to see something new that she hadn't seen before and nothing else. When Peter mentioned an AI, Liz looked surprised. Those were things only in movies. Or maybe not, considering how much the government hid from people.

"Oh! That's, really cool." As they walked she leaned in a little, talking to the suit. "Um. Hi, Karen." Liz smiled because she felt a little silly, but also didn't want to be rude.

"Hello, Liz," Karen echoes amiably into Peter's suit.

"She says hi back," Peter relays to Liz. "I actually named her myself. It was really weird just calling her suit-lady all the time."

He pushes open the doors to the building.

"I still don't really get why Mr. Stark didn't have her in there from the get-go, though." Peter pauses, and then explains: "My best friend Ned had to disable the 'Training Wheels Protocol' before she was activated. Maybe he just wanted me to get used to the suit without anyone else's input or something."

Peter shrugs a little as he moves up the stairs.

She looked just a little surprised there was a response, but then immediately smiled like a little kid. She had just talked to a computer that thought for itself.

Liz had to agree that a name was better than not having one. If something was going to talk to her, she'd like it to have a name. Kyle always named his cars and they never talked back.

"Training Wheels Protocol?" She followed, thinking in silence for a moment. "That would make sense. I mean, if you gave me something like that and I'd never, um, saved a person or been in a scary situation I might just listen to whatever suggestions I was being told instead of deciding something for myself?" She glanced at him, then felt silly. She had no idea what it was like to have powers, save people, or get dragged down the street by a truck.

"Probably why I'm not a superhero." She added awkwardly then gave a small laugh before deciding to focus on walking up the stairs.

"Yeah," Peter says, in agreement with her assertion about the Protocol. "I mean, to the whole Protocol thing. By the time Mr. Stark had found me, I was already doing the whole superhero thing for awhile --" Peter starts up the next flight of stairs. "-- and I'd been filming it and putting it on YouTube."

Probably not the most intelligent decision Peter had made, but it wasn't exactly like he could ask Ned for help getting set up with a proxy. Ned didn't actually know yet.

"Oh," Peter says, as it dawns on him. "YouTube is this video website where you can watch videos other people uploaded straight from the web." He's pretty sure YouTube didn't appear on-set until the mid-to-late 00s.

As they approach the door to his room, Peter fishes out his keys. He's not sure why he still locks up. It's probably just out of habit.

"Wow. I can't even imagine what that might look like. Are there a lot of videos to watch?" She tried to picture what that would look like. The internet was still so new that there weren't a lot of websites to go onto and Liz didn't spend a lot of time on the computer as it was. Alex would be so excited if he found out what computers would become though. Liz was definitely going to fill him in when she saw him next.

When they approached his room, Liz's hands slid into her back pockets of her jeans as he fished the key out.

He unlocks the door, and pushes it open, revealing Morning Star in all its glory. The room, like all of the rooms in the Madonna Inn, is remarkably gaudy, its primary colors gold and pink. A few random articles of clothing litter the floor of the first room they enter; his bed, too, is unmade. But other than that, the room seems to be in order.

Peter quickly rushes in to pick up a few shirts of the floor. "Excuse the mess," he says, quickly shoving them into a drawer and out-of-view. Atop the drawer sits a simple completed dinosaur LEGO set -- one he and Ned planned to put together before he arrived at the Madonna Inn.

Clothing hidden, he turns around to face Liz. "Feel free to sit anywhere," he says, gesturing out at the room. "Or look around. I mean." He swallows. "You should -- you should do whatever you want."

Even though her room was equally as gaudy, it still surprised her when she walked into the room. The mess didn't bother her since she had dated Kyle Valenti and he was kind of an all around mess. Her eyes took in the room. "All the rooms really are like this then, huh?" More of a rhetorical question as she moved to take a seat on the couch. She had noticed the LEGO dinosaur and it made a smile appear.

"Yours at least looks like a hotel room. Mine looks like I'm inside some sort of cave or something." But it was kind of cute, too, she thought, if you could get over the upholstery.

"Do you, um. Have a roommate?" She gestured to the other room.

"Yeah?" Peter looks up and over at Liz at that. "I wanna see it sometime. I've seen a few rooms. Most of them are a lot weirder than this one."

Peter sends a string of websling fluid up in the space between the chandelier and the wall. There's a setting he can turn on to shoot a web-net which functions almost as well as the hammocks he's long become accustomed to making, but ever since he's arrived at the inn, he hasn't had much else to do except perfect his webbing skills. And what better way to improve your accuracy than literally webbing together a hammock the way a spider might string together their own web?

"I guess," Peter says, as he continues to work his webbing. "Sorta. He's a ghost. He comes and goes though, and doesn't really say much."

Peter turns his eyes to the other room for a moment. "Hey, Gary? You there?"

When there's no response, Peter explains apologetically: "He's not very social even when he is around. Apparently that's how most ghosts in the Inn are."

The moment Peter started shooting out his web, Liz was back on her feet. Her eyes widened with wonder and amazement. It looked like giant spider silk and the way he was stringing it looked like he knew what he was doing

She took a few steps closer, but not too close since she didn't want to hinder what he was doing. All questions about a roommate seemed to disappear. "Wow! This is, really cool. And you made it?"

"Yeah," Peter says, continuing to web together the hammock. "It wasn't like I got it right on my first try, though. There were a lot of mistakes, most of them made during chemistry class. My teacher wasn't really happy."

Before long, the hammock is finished, but too far out of reach for Liz -- or even Peter -- to reach it without a little extra help.

"You want me to take you up there?"

Liz hadn't really thought about the height thing until he was done. She had been too busy watching him create it like a child watched a magician perform an amazing trick. When he asked, she looked at him. The smile that formed was slow at first, but then turned quickly into a wide, excited one as if he asked her to go on a new ride at Disney Land or something.

"Um. Yeah. Yeah, I'd really like that."

"Great!"

Peter only realizes then that he hasn't really thought out the logistics of this at all. Normally, he just crawls up the walls and then throws himself into the hammock. Doing this with another person probably would involve totally intruding on Liz's personal bubble.

Which is probably why Peter hesitates.

"Is it okay, to -- to hold you for a second?" He shoots a little bit of webslinger fluid up at the ceiling in preparation, then gives it a little tug. It's definitely stretched thinner than usual. This should probably work. I mean, it worked with that bike thief that one time, right?

Liz hadn't thought it all the way through either. She had thought maybe there was a ladder or a way to climb up. When he asked about holding her and then shot up some spider web, she realized this was a lot more like a ride that she thought. She couldn't resist. She really wanted to know what it was like and now she wanted to know what it felt like to use the web too to get up there.

She nodded to him, her smile still filled with excitement. Unlike Peter, Liz's brain hadn't caught up to how his question meant he would have to be close to her.

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