Down Time

[The Future Warrior]

The early morning, artificial sunlight (something that was still a puzzle as to how that worked, exactly) filtered in through the window, barely managing to find a way to make themselves known through the shuttered blinds. Thin ribbons of amber poked through, falling over the floor under the window, across the bedside table, the (very messily-made) bed, and the small, blue creature sprawled haphazardly across it.

Despite having been back ‘home’ for quite a while now — all through the night, and a touch of the previous afternoon — after finishing her last assignment and parting company with her partners, she was still covered in dust, grime, and scorch marks from the rough and tumble events she had been wrapped up in. Thankfully, her unkempt appearance was the worst of it. Mercifully, she had gotten through the entire ordeal without much in the way of lasting injuries. A few scrapes, and a few walls with a little blue alien-shaped dent in them, a few blaster shots, but nothing that was any worse than what she’d already been put through in the past.

Despite that, it was all quite tiring, once the thrill and adrenaline had worn off. She had been a little out of it and had trouble making an accurate report when she went back to the EPD office where she had first gotten the assignment. Her boundless energy had lasted right up until they were returning to the upper tiers and she parted ways with Zedd while he went off to make sure his stormtrooper friend was alright after getting injured down below. And with the lack of energy came a profound feeling of just being tired. And with that pervasive feeling came the stern reminder: ‘You’ve been shot, kicked, punched, crushed, smacked into walls, electrocuted, and horribly abused and knocked around by aliens. That generally hurts.’

And once that thought clicked in her mind, she realized something: it did hurt. A lot.

It was lucky that she was used to fighting through a lot worse, so she could manage just fine. But wow, it was pretty telling that even something like the whole mess with the Vorticons down below could leave her so beat up. Back home, she wouldn’t even have broken a sweat about something like that! Though...that wasn’t saying much. Back home, she was pretty sure she could have just blown the whole Vortilaser and all the Vorticons away with one shot.

….and she was pretty sure she couldn’t sweat anyway, so couldn’t break one anyway. Whatever that meant. She’d just heard it around.

But now, here she was. Laying in bed, eyes only half-open as she stared blankly at the opposite wall. She didn’t really need sleep, so had spent the night more or less just sort of...there. Resting and letting the lingering aches and unpleasant pain from the scuffle ebb away. By the time the morning ‘sun’ jabbed at her night-sensitive eyes and forced her to blink and roll aside with a whine to shade her eyes from the glare, she was more or less all healed and pain free. A little stiff, from twelve or so hours of just lying just about completely still, and still covered in dust and grit, but injury and pain free.

Awkwardly she rolled over, first onto one side, then onto her back, to get out of the sunlight. Unfortunately, she overestimated how much more bed she had to roll over on, and ended up tumbling off the side with a surprised yelp. A rapid windmilling of arms, a rustling and flailing of dislodged sheets in a frantic effort to find purchase on something, and then gravity won out. There was a solid thunk and a dull “Oooow….” that followed shortly after. Bright pink (or maybe dull red, depending on who you asked) cracked open again, staring across the room toward the doorway of the bedroom, from the awkward vantage point of resting upside down, head-first on the floor.

“I miss flying…” she whined, as the sheet slowly drifted down and settled on her face.

[The Future Warrior]

For a long time she just laid there, tired and defeated after her embarrassing loss against the combined onslaught of an artificial morning and the omnipresent pull of gravity. Maybe it was just because of her sorry predicament, or maybe she just got lucky with the apartment she'd been assigned, but after a while the floor actually started to seem...pretty comfortable. Saying nothing of the awkward, very, very uncomfortable posture she had ended up in, which ruined any hope of actually enjoying the surprising comfort of laying on the floor in a disheveled heap.

Of course, the muffled, ringing sound of a call coming in over her scouter dashed any hope of that to begin with.

With a groan to announce her displeasure at this entire turn of events for the entire crowd of no one that was around to hear it, she struggled free of the confining cotton embrace she'd gotten herself embarrassingly entangled in, crawling slowly out of the mess of tangled sheets and back to her feet. Steadying herself against the wall for a moment, she shook her head, mess of head tentacles flopping about wildly. Boy, what a way to wake up... She strolled across the room to retrieve her scouter, stretching to work out the stiffness in joints she was almost entirely sure she didn't have (and which would have left more inquiring or aware minds wondering how they could be stiff at all, then) and managing to avoid stumbling over anything in her way. Like the floor. Or air.

Picking up the familiar electronic, she fumbled it into place, securing it to the side of her head by some unknown means. Even she wasn't really sure how it stayed in place. Something about securing to the wearer's ear or something, but she didn't have ears. Probably some kind of weird space-y science-y magic. Maybe because she was made of rubber or something. Then again, the thing that fit over most people's ears did kind of look like a suction cup... Ah, well. Something to worry about later. Call to answer. From her secondary partner, no less. With only two fumbled attempts to get it right, she managed the act of answering it. And she gave a simple, mumbled "Hello..." as a greeting.

"Well, don't sound too thrilled about the wake-up call, now, or anything," came the far too chipper and awake voice of the stormtrooper. Elliot Hunt was not a morning person, but for some reason or other, he was wide awake and in his usual cheery mood. The one that was usually reserved for hours after the clock struck noon. Or when he'd been given good news. "What's got ya so down, Blue?"

"Fell out of bed..." Graowr mumbled, flopping back down to sit on the edge of the bed. "Tried to get away from the sun."

There was a long moment of silence, during which the sounds of the city outside were clearly heard. Screeching of tires as the usual chaos went on in the streets. Glass breaking in the distance. It reminded the blue alien, in the back of her sleepy mind, to see about finding a better place to live, for the times when she was in the city. Which was all of the time, lately.

"Well, hell," came the eventual reply, full of amusement. If nothing else, Hunt was good at filling in a mental image, and the one he'd scrawled up of the current situation was apparently pretty good for a laugh. "Fell out of bed, when?"

"I dunno," Graowr mumbled, running a hand through what passed for her hair, trying to settle it into something that didn't end up falling over her eyes. "Ten minutes ago, I think? Maybe..." She paused, finally bringing both hands up to mess with the unruly mess of tentacles, stretching and twisting them this way and that in aggravation before pulling them taut and over the back of her head. "...maybe fifteen minutes ago. Didn't have my scouter on until you called, wasn't..." There was a faint snap, not at all unlike a rubber band being suddenly released, and the messy mass of blue psuedo-rubber-bubblegum material that made up her body settled into place...kind of. She had managed to fight it into a semblance of obedience, pulled back over her head and out of her face for the moment, at least. The whole experience was a good reminder that it was hard for her to really control her body when she was tired.

"...wasn't really keeping up with the time," she finished, letting her hands drop back to her sides, satisfied for the moment.

"....jeeze, blue, you just now getting up? And people tell me I'm lazy!" Hunt joked. "How long were you up last night?"

"Whaddya mean 'just now' getting up?" she grumbled. "The sun just came up!"

There was dead silence for a good ten seconds. "...blue, it's almost noon. Sun's been up for almost six hours now."

This time, it was the majin's turn to be dead silent, for even longer. Nearly half a minute passed, with her just staring blankly, wide-eyed at the wall in front of her, trying to process that. She wasn't really the best with numbers or time or anything, but she knew a couple things. Noon was twelve o' clock. The sun usually came up around six o' clock, or between five and seven o' clock. Usually. She vaguely recalled some parts of some worlds getting earlier or later sunrises and sunsets for some reason. Something or other to do with curvature of the planet or whatever.

But slowly, it clicked in her head. That just didn't add up at all. And she responded with the only thing that could adequately express her confusion about the matter: "What."

[The Future Warrior]

Several questions of varying importance and magnitude swirled at random in her head. Quite literally, in this case, as she felt her balance deserting her and she swayed precariously on her edge-of-the-bed perch. "Okay, okay... It's almost noon. What, uh...what day is it? I didn't loose that along with the time, did I?"

"Well, don't ask me what day it is. We don't get a calendar until we make it long enough to get at least one promotion." The joke was evident, but it was quickly brushed aside. "Whole mess with the Vorticons down on tier 7 was just yesterday, though. So at worst you're missing a few hours, don't worry. Listen, speaking of that, I want you to do me a favor."

"A favor?" That gave her something to clamp down on and focus her mind on. "Okay." Her mood quickly hairpinned into positive again, the prospect of something to do livening up her tired mind. "Whatcha need?"

"Gonna need you to get up, go to your window," the trooper instructed.

And dubiously, the prime hopped up, making her way across the room to her window. "'Kay. At the window."

"Great. Now I need you to open the blinds if you got 'em. Look outside, tell me what you see."

Confusion continued to mount in her mind, but she did as instructed. She hopped up to grab hold of the pull cord for the blinds, giving it a quick tug to draw them open. A bright glare of unrestricted, artificial sunlight assaulted her eyes, from which she recoiled, one hand shading her eyes. "Gah...okay...all I see is bright. Bright light." She waited for the initial glare to subside in her eyes, squinting at the glass. "And...buildings. Big wall just across the way."

That was met with a deep, resounding chuckle from the other end of the call. "Yep. That'd do it..." A moment of silence. "Things can get packed together pretty tightly down there, on Tier 4. Sun's probably been up for a while, but just managed to clear the other buildings and shine on in for your wake-up call."

This simple explanation stuck in the small, blue prime's head. It left her struck dumb, blinking slowly and staring at her faint reflection in the window glass. "That, uh..." she started, trailing off with a huff. "That...makes sense, I guess..."

"Restful night, huh?" the secondary quipped, cutting off her further mental meandering. "Look. I know you said you don't sleep or...whatever. But that doesn't mean you don't need some rest now and then. And I mean good rest, not just flopping down and not doing anything for a few hours." Graowr couldn't help but cringe at how accurate that assessment had been. It was pretty much spot-on, word-for-word what she'd done last night. "Look, you're supposed to be on some down time anyway. Little leave of absence, y'know? After that whole ruckus and all the damage we caused down on Tier 7, we're all kinda supposed to lay low for a while. So take you some time, have some rest. Take it easy."

There was a moment of silence, as if Hunt was waiting on a response, or about to hang up, before he spoke up again. "...and hey, while you're at it. Make sure you remember to take a shower and clean up. Things got pretty messy yesterday, don't wanna see you lookin' like you just crawled out of a hole in the ground, y'hear?"

"Uh, yeah. Yeah, right. That, definitely." She nodded to herself, giving the pull cord for the blinds another tug to try and get them closed. "I can definitely do that."

"And see about getting something to eat. Dunno how you, uh..." He paused for a second, and the floundering over his words was evident. "...work, whatever you are, but a good bite to eat does wonders for me when I'm on the fading end of a rough night. Just a suggestion." There was a muffled voice in the background, and Hunt sight. "Alright, listen...much as I'd love to keep helpin' you out, gotta get goin'. Apparently I'm gettin' called back in for a bit more training. Apparently they caught wind of my flubbed first aid training and I got hit with the big 'WHAT?!' from the Sergeant. Who knew that was required?" He chuckled weakly. "Be seein' ya. Don't do anything too dumb now, y'hear?" And with a faint click the call went dead.

"Y-Yeah...see ya," Graowr mumbled. The entire situation was compounded with a light thonk as the blinds finally cooperated and came sliding down, landing right on her head.

[The Future Warrior]

Thirty some odd minutes later, and all traces of a poor mood had already been forgotten. A mostly consumed stick of candy just barely peeked out of one corner of her mouth, the intensely sweet thing seemingly forgotten in a bizarre twist as she intently studied her current object of attention. Projected from her scouter, a small keyboard of shimmering blue light 'rested' in her lap as she sat on the edge of her bed. Now and then she would fumble over the keys, working at typing something and continuing her efforts. The blue-tinted screen of the device was displaying the results of a minutes-long search into the primary thing that lingered in her head after her talk with her (for now, at least) erstwhile teammate. "Make sure you remember to take a shower and clean up." he'd said. She had fully intended to do just that, and it wasn't until she was turning around (after managing to disentangle herself from the blinds) that she made a realization which stopped her dead.

She had no idea what that meant. What a shower was, or how she could 'take' one. It had occupied nearly five minutes of her time, pondering and figuratively scratching her head over it, before she had given it up as fruitless. She had then done what seemed to make the most sense: turn to the biggest source of information she knew of that she could access the quickest. That meant the Dataverse. She was quite thankful, in hindsight, she'd taken the time to get talked through (slowly, ever so agonizingly slowly) how to go about connecting her sole piece of technology to the dataverse. Spending the time to be taught the basics of how to use it properly was also very much a boon. She would have spent ages fumbling over it otherwise, completely lost in the intricate (to her mind, at the least) workings of even the most mundane, simplistic of tasks in the digital verse of information.

One simple question had been posed in her mind, and then to a search on the dataverse: What is a shower?

Her lack of any truly advanced reading comprehension soon enough came back to take revenge upon her, though. She could read well enough to get by, and understand the basics. But she had always focused much more on other facets of life. Specifically things which actively caught her interest. She could run calculations and figures in her head and tell you with a fair degree of accuracy how big of an explosion an energy blast would make and where it would probably hit within the space of time it took for it to be launched and hit something. On the other hand, she couldn't read as well as some children who had just begun learning how to do so. She had learned that lesson all too well, a number of times in the past. Still, she could usually manage if she took her time and some active effort to slowly, methodically, pick out the words one by one and try and mull them over and pick out a simpler meaning. Which was her current focus.

"A shower is a place in which a person...bathes under a spray of typically warm or hot water..." she mumbled aloud, reading to herself. It was slow and halting, stumbling precariously over unfamiliar words. "Indoors, there is a drain in the floor." She blinked slowly, nodding to herself. That much made sense, at the least. Had to have somewhere for the water to go. "Most showers have temperature, spray pressure and adjustable showerhead nozzle." That was where she was officially lost, just staring at the words she was reading with an almost accusing cast to her (almost complete lack of) expression. This was some kind of joke. It had to be! Why did that have to use so many big, complicated words to explain what this was supposed to be?

She kept it up, making a valiant effort to continue her learning, such as it was, on the terminology and construction of showers. Eventually, though, the lack of an expansive vocabulary and sentence comprehension got to her, and she gave it up in frustration. She turned to alternate sources that would require minimal reading, and quickly enough came across other means that fulfilled that criteria very nicely. They required no reading at all, in fact. It was what ended up occupying the next hour and then some of her time, watching one video after the next. All of them of varying length and actual useful content, but she did feel eventually that she had learned enough, when her mind eventually rolled back around to the thought of 'you're supposed to be learning about this so you can do it, so don't get too distracted'.

Another ten minutes or so after that, she finally set about closing the myriad various windows and collection of links and information she had pulled up and then forgotten about. They had really piled up, when she wasn't paying attention. When the last one closed, she messed about with the strange little holographic keyboard to shut that down too, before pulling her scouter off and just staring down at it for several long, silent moments. "Getting clean without magic is...weird," she finally said, hopping up to her feet. She dropped the scouter off on her bedside table, and a moment later, it was joined by her gloves. Which, as she skipped away out of the bedroom, shortly poofed into blue smoke, trailing after her. When she paused to untie her scarf from about her neck, the blue vapors caught up to her, drifting up to cloak her and slowly vanishing into the holes in her arms.

Her scarf was soon enough untied, the stubborn knot having proved an irritating trouble to manage, and likewise puffed into light blue smoke shortly after it was set aside. She reached the bathroom, pushing the door open, and closing it behind her once she was in, as she had learned was generally a good idea to do. And in a process which took several minutes, owing to all of the times she had ever done so, her clothing slowly came off, piece by piece, and as it was deposited aside, dissipated into clouds of blue smoke with a light, comically cartoonish pop and drifted toward her as she fumbled with the shower. It took far longer than it probably should have, owing to a sense of unfamiliarity, to get the thing going. But eventually, as the last of the smoke her 'clothing' had become was re-absorbed into her being, the water coming on with a sputtering.

And the noise of surprise she made when it hit her back was something that would probably never be forgotten. Or identified. Certainly not a sound anyone or anything human could make, far too high-pitched and in something that might have been language, but was far too inarticulate to guess. The whistling of steam, sounding like an indignant teapot left on the boil for too long, didn't help matters any.

A cloud of swirling steam surrounded her as she quickly stepped back from the edge of the shower, staring accusingly at the innocent stream of falling water. "That is way too cold..." she mumbled to herself, once she collected what she could of her composure.

[The Future Warrior]

For what felt like several minutes (but in reality was scarcely more than ten seconds), she had sat crouched there, peering suspiciously at the stream of water falling from the showerhead, before managing to work up the drive to try messing with it again. And after a few still unpleasant, but nowhere near as shocking or surprising, brushes with icy water, she finally got her mind wrapped around working it. And when she did, the water slowly but surely warmed, first losing the bitter chill (at least, in her mind it was bitingly cold; only things you were supposed to drink were supposed to be that cold!) and took on a coolness that was far from unpleasant. Then slowly it grew warmer still, until finally it started to reach a temperature she would personally judge as 'hot'. That was when she knew she'd finally mastered this whole business, and slowly climbed her way into the shower properly.

Most of the accumulated dust and dirt she'd been intending to wash off had been on her clothes, which had by now been re-absorbed. When they were made up again to be put on, they would be clean as the day she imagined them. Not so for the rest of her, though. Just looking down at herself, her arms especially (and though she couldn't see it, she also could take a pretty good guess her face wasn't in much better shape) were especially coated in grit and the lingering remnants of her trip down to the bottom of Coruscant, and the trudge through the muck and battles down there. In fact, now that she really thought about it...ugh, yes, she could still smell the particular stink of Tier 7 clinging to her, tenaciously. It was faint, and probably easy enough to miss if she wasn't paying attention (and with her wandering focus, that was not an uncommon thing at all), but now that she had taken notice of it, it was persistently hanging around and making itself known, quite aggressively. Times like this she really wished she had a nose to wrinkle in disgust, because that seemed an appropriate reaction to this turn of events.

Hygiene and cleaning had never really been her strong suit. Or...her weak suit, really. Before, back home, she'd always just sorta been able to...magic it all away. All the dirt, grit, dust, grime, and smell of all the trouble she got up to. Just a quick poof into smoke, and when she reformed again, it was gone, good as new, like she'd never been marred or dirtied in the first place. And so, while she had never actually had to go about washing or cleaning herself the conventional way, she had always been pretty clean. She assumed that she'd also always smelled fine, though she was never really into the habit of checking. Pretty easy to stop by a mirror and make sure there were no traces of dirt or something left where you could see, but...kinda harder to get a good smell-check in.

So this was a wholly new experience for her, all things considered. And after her laborious, slow introduction to it, she was finding it to be...not bad at all, really. Probably for the best, given the prospect of being unable to just resort to her old standby of magic'ing away all the accrued unpleasantry associated with constantly rolling around and fighting in massive dust clouds and who knows what kind of sludge and toxic fumes. But as she stood there, quietly pulling her head-tentacles this way and that, carefully scrubbing any trace of stubborn dust and dirt out of them, she came to the conclusion it wouldn't be so bad.

[The Future Warrior]

Several hours later, the majin had gotten herself free of the shower, and re-dressed. And long since occupied slowly looking over and reading (as much as she really could read, anyway) some rumors and stories over the dataverse about this and that happening around and about the Omniverse as a whole. All sorts of chaos, things about darkness and some doctor or other seeking help about something. Seemed like something that she should see about looking further into. It sounded like there was going to be plenty of trouble associated with it. And given what trouble seemed to mean around this place, that just meant a fight waiting to happen.

...of course, that train of thought lasted until she came across something else to dominate her interest. Something about...star pieces? For some reason she couldn't quite place, it struck her as just odd enough to warrant looking into. The sheer oddity of their appearance, so sudden and out of nowhere, just falling out of the sky... It reminded her of something else. Looking deeper into it, scouring over rumors, accounts of varying and dubious authenticity, and stories of only tangential relation to the actual star pieces, she only grew more and more interested.

The final nail in the coffin for her was stumbling across the news that, at around the same time the star pieces were reported falling -- though that was hard to judge, with time being so in flux and unsteady as it was across the different verses -- 'something' had also happened in Coruscant. That in and of itself was curious enough. But the real kicker was not managing to find any actual solid, concrete details of what that something was.

Several minutes, which quickly turned into well over an hour, of intent thinking and pondering over it, searching out anything that even might be relevant lead her to nothing. And that was enough to get her moving again. She had a sneaking suspicion she knew someone who might know a little more.

Or maybe it would just turn out to be nothing. Either way, she'd get out of the house for a while.