Down Time

[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.