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xp_logsKyle, Sharon and Doug visit the vending machine in search of 'screaming crackers', which leads to a more serious discussion of the quantum realities and the previous Catseye.
Doug made his way to the chapel that housed 'Clinto's wormhole stuff', as he tended to call the collection of monitoring equipment and various oddments that eXcalibur had lying around. He jingled a pocket full of mismatched coins - he still hadn't figured out how the vending machine categorized what it accepted as currency and what it didn't. For that matter, where did the coins go? He was pretty sure they didn't stay in the machine to be collected by the mansion denizens. He'd have to remember to ask Clint. Preferably over a lot of vodka.
"I gotta ask, how does the screaming part work?" he asked as he came to the vending machine, where Kyle and Catseye were already examining the machine's offering.
Kyle had two bags of the snacks, the one he'd originally opened and sent photos to Doug, and another that the vending machine had spat out after he put in a couple of dollars. Sometimes the machine was pretty random, but today it was remarkably consistent, at least with back to back snacks.
"I dunno, last time I got them, they screamed like most of the way down.' He opened the bag, and pulled out a little tan snack that looked like a plump animal cracker. "Even if you bite their heads off, screaming. All the way down.' The cracker was immobile, until Kyle brought it up to his mouth and then it opened it's own little jaws and started making a high pitched tinny scream, even as he crunched it into pieces. The scream modulated between his teeth, and was audible as he swallowed, growing quieter as he swallowed. "Ooh, still mincemeat too. "
He handed the other bag to Sharon.
Eagerly, Sharon seized the bag with both hands. "Head first is only proper way to consume animal crackers. Much more humane to kill them instantly." She fished around in the bag, tail flicking, and extracted one.
"No moose to be found," she concluded. "Shame. Camel will have to do." She brought the cracker close to her nose to sniff. It had a pleasant meaty smell not unlike the treats of freeze dried offal her mother had sometimes bought. She gave the top of its head an experimental lick.
The moment her tongue touched the camel's head, it screamed.
"It shrieks like prey," Sharon exclaimed, with slightly worrying delight.
Doug took Sharon's delight with his usual amount of 'not even the weirdest thing I've seen this week'. He grabbed one, examining it as it shrieked. "It's just...so many questions," he announced after sending it down the hatch. "Like, how does it know when to start screaming? And when to stop?" The noise tailed off halfway down his esophagus. "Like, that's the thing that really gets me about this vending machines. The weird snacks? Almost invariably pretty tasty. The -logistics-, on the other hand...that gives me a headache."
Kyle ate another, without examination or pause. "Doug, man, you take all the joy out of being fuckin' weird about food when you science it." He said, but with a grin. "The point is that they make weird noises. I wonder if we can convince Jean and Clarice to hide the anti-parasite pills in these instead of the fake liver." He ate a lot of raw to rare meat, Kyle was a regular visitor at the infirmary for liver-flavored anti-parasite pills. "They're snacks from another dimension, do we need to really know how they work?"
Sharon, meanwhile, was conducting her own experiments. She had tucked the bag under her arm so she could hold the camel by the hump in one hand while she extended a claw on the other. With great care, she inserted the claw into the equivalent of the animal's abdomen and sliced.
"It recognizes disembowelment also," she announced as the cracker shrieked in her grip.
"I mean, that just makes sense, though," Doug decided. "If it recognizes eating the head off, one of the classic ways of 'murdering' a cracker like this, it stands to reason that any of the other methods should be recognized. Ripping in half-" He demonstrated on another cracker, getting a tailed off scream in response. "-biting off the extremities, and so on." He was perfectly capable of being scientific -and- morbid at the same time.
"Do you think we need the clipboard for this? We're gonna need more screaming crackers." The clipboard was currently on a command hook next to the vending machine - it moved around a lot and had several items printed out on it. Kyle pulled it down and handed it to Doug. "Here, Namor hates my handwriting, plus you're up. I wanna see if it gives you the same stuff if you use my money." He also handed over three dollars to Doug.
Doug grinned. "Time to get my Adam Savage on," he announced, his voice and posture shiting to what was clearly going to be an impression. "Remember, kids," he shifted the clipboard up near his face as he spoke, "the only difference between screwing around and science is -writing it down-." Holding the clipboard and pen with his left hand, he grabbed the money from Kyle with his nanite hand and fed it into the machine.
The packet that the vending machine dispensed was clearly a different color and shape from the one that had contained the screaming crackers, and Doug's eyes widened as he fished it out. "Sweet baby Thor, I haven't had these in years." He took a puffed snack of some kind out and tossed it into his mouth, making a satisfied sound. "Thai peanut lemongrass coconut puffs. I figured the place that made them just never went into business this time around."
There was a brief scream truncated by a crunch as Sharon put her food out of its misery. "Thought this candy was pulled from beyond time and space," she said, licking her lips. "You are speaking of a cross-time caper, maybe?"
"Not so much a caper as..." Doug looked up at the ceiling and grunted before leveling a Look at Kyle. "Has no one seriously explained the frankenberry-" he barely thought to leave off the word 'cat' from Angie's usual expression about the patchwork universe, "-to her?"
Somewhere Pete and Remy were laughing at him, he knew it. "Okay, so there was this big 'end of existence' thing, and a super-powerful mutant who basically stitched reality back together with pieces of several different ones, and I am glossing over a metric butt-ton of information here, but the long and short of it is that some of us," and here he waved a hand to indicate himself and Kyle, "were around for all of that, and in some cases knew different versions of some people who are here now."
He sighed. "Including you." He grimaced. "You owe me so much vodak, Gibney."
Sharon considered herself a connoisseur of screwing with people, and as such the look she gave Doug was full of suspicion. Her tail dropped to a more cautious position.
"Impulse is doubt," she said, as if turning the possibilities over in her mind, "but have seen the Wormhole also. So does not do to dismiss out of hand." Sharon drew a bear cracker from the bag and took a thoughtful bite, then paused. She turned to Kyle.
"You cheated," she said.
"And that's why I don't owe Doug vodka. Because he just totes outed me as a cheater." Kyle said, with an affirmative nod. He tossed a pair of his own crackers into his mouth, and the little screams echoed against each other. "I knew you could shapeshift, or at least suspected pretty hard. The other you was different though. More catlike, less - " He trailed off, and his mouth worked on words for a moment. "Less educated, less articulate. So I cheated a little, but I could've been wrong. A Catseye who was raised by a human mom, instead of cats, you might not have ever figured it out, but then you asked me if I could shift."
Sharon's smugness could have been cut with a knife, and even then it would have dulled the blade. "Was cheating. I knew it. I am the most subtle." Triumphantly, she tossed another handful of crackers into her mouth. She gulped down the chorus of screams and cocked her head at him. "This is why you asked about my estrus cycle? We were mated, maybe? I remain uninterested, but two ferals, suppose this would make sense. Or was it casual sex only? This seems more likely. How casual was the sex, Kyle?"
Doug was going to protest that Kyle still owed him vodka, but the opportunity for absolute chaos was definitely worth letting the other man off the hook about booze. "Yeah, Kyle, how casual -was- the sex?" he asked in his most enthusiastic 'I am a chaos gremlin stirring some shit' tone.
Kyle had just tossed a handful of the screaming crackers into his mouth, and then went from a barking laugh to a cough, and then a choke as he processed the entire conversation as he waas chewing and attempting to swallow. He thumped on his own chest hard twice, as his face went pink, and then doubled over, retching out a handful of the crackers. Despite that the screaming had mostly ceased, it increased in timbre as he vomited a few chewed pieces of cracker, ceasing a few seconds after they hit the floor.
Only then did Kyle look up. "I hate both of you. So much."
Sharon dropped into a crouch to inspect the half-chewed crackers.
"They do scream when you vomit them," she observed with obvious delight. She tilted her face to Kyle with a benign smile. "Much Science has been accomplished today by Kyle-who-did-not-answer-the-question."
Kyle picked up a bottle of water from the nearby desk and washed his mouth out before answering, and managed to glare daggers at Doug the entire time. It waas pointless to glare at Sharon, it would change nothing. "I hate both of you. There was no sex, casual or romantic or like, any of that. That Sharon was...." Kyle cocked his head, clearly searching his memory. "Not... I mean not... " He screwed up his face. "Look, she was awesome, but I tend to uh, like my partners kind of more ... " He took another drink, definitly avoiding the answer. "Um. Look, god I adored her, she was a great friend, but she was... not... "
Doug's grin widened and became a bit more toothy. "I think the word Kyle's hunting for is 'assertive'. Put more bluntly, 'able to kick his ass'. He likes his partners capable, maybe a bit bossy at times, and able to hold their own in a fight or argument." He shrugged. "The other Catseye was...kind of a ditz. Nice enough, for sure. But definitely a lot less...you," he said, waving a hand to encompass all the dimensions of Sharon's personality.
Sharon wrinkled her nose in disapproval. "You are saying my other self did not fulfil Kyle's obvious wish to be stepped on by his partners? This is disappointing. Was raised by cats, you said? A case of nature versus nurture, maybe. What became of her?"
"I'm right here!" Kyle protested.
He ignored the other question. Doug could take the brunt of that, there was already enough trauma for Kyle, he was done.
"She died." There was no easy way to say that. "On a mission during that whole 'end of existence' bit. And when things got stitched together, the universe had you instead." Doug hoped that sounded as kind as he could manage.
"Oh." Sharon's tail stilled as her face went blank. It was difficult to tell if it was from shock or she simply couldn't figure out what was an appropriate expression. "Suppose this makes sense. Assume two versions of one individual cannot coexist in single dimension. If I am here, is to fill the hole she left. Yes." She turned to Kyle, face still unreadable. "I am sorry about your friend."
"It's... I mean not okay, okay, but..." Kyle's hands were everywhere for a few seconds, and ended digging through his bag of screaming crackers until he found the shape of one that felt right on his fingers to fidget with. He turned the snack around between his fingers, sometimes rolling it around and sometimes twisting it end over end. "Thanks. It's... actually easier that you're different. I can think of you as just like, another different person, just one I can guess secrets about."
He stopped twirling the cracker around between his fingers, and popped it into his mouth. "Like your final form."
The corners of the girl's mouth didn't rise, but her eyes crinkled in a smile.
"All in good time."
Doug made his way to the chapel that housed 'Clinto's wormhole stuff', as he tended to call the collection of monitoring equipment and various oddments that eXcalibur had lying around. He jingled a pocket full of mismatched coins - he still hadn't figured out how the vending machine categorized what it accepted as currency and what it didn't. For that matter, where did the coins go? He was pretty sure they didn't stay in the machine to be collected by the mansion denizens. He'd have to remember to ask Clint. Preferably over a lot of vodka.
"I gotta ask, how does the screaming part work?" he asked as he came to the vending machine, where Kyle and Catseye were already examining the machine's offering.
Kyle had two bags of the snacks, the one he'd originally opened and sent photos to Doug, and another that the vending machine had spat out after he put in a couple of dollars. Sometimes the machine was pretty random, but today it was remarkably consistent, at least with back to back snacks.
"I dunno, last time I got them, they screamed like most of the way down.' He opened the bag, and pulled out a little tan snack that looked like a plump animal cracker. "Even if you bite their heads off, screaming. All the way down.' The cracker was immobile, until Kyle brought it up to his mouth and then it opened it's own little jaws and started making a high pitched tinny scream, even as he crunched it into pieces. The scream modulated between his teeth, and was audible as he swallowed, growing quieter as he swallowed. "Ooh, still mincemeat too. "
He handed the other bag to Sharon.
Eagerly, Sharon seized the bag with both hands. "Head first is only proper way to consume animal crackers. Much more humane to kill them instantly." She fished around in the bag, tail flicking, and extracted one.
"No moose to be found," she concluded. "Shame. Camel will have to do." She brought the cracker close to her nose to sniff. It had a pleasant meaty smell not unlike the treats of freeze dried offal her mother had sometimes bought. She gave the top of its head an experimental lick.
The moment her tongue touched the camel's head, it screamed.
"It shrieks like prey," Sharon exclaimed, with slightly worrying delight.
Doug took Sharon's delight with his usual amount of 'not even the weirdest thing I've seen this week'. He grabbed one, examining it as it shrieked. "It's just...so many questions," he announced after sending it down the hatch. "Like, how does it know when to start screaming? And when to stop?" The noise tailed off halfway down his esophagus. "Like, that's the thing that really gets me about this vending machines. The weird snacks? Almost invariably pretty tasty. The -logistics-, on the other hand...that gives me a headache."
Kyle ate another, without examination or pause. "Doug, man, you take all the joy out of being fuckin' weird about food when you science it." He said, but with a grin. "The point is that they make weird noises. I wonder if we can convince Jean and Clarice to hide the anti-parasite pills in these instead of the fake liver." He ate a lot of raw to rare meat, Kyle was a regular visitor at the infirmary for liver-flavored anti-parasite pills. "They're snacks from another dimension, do we need to really know how they work?"
Sharon, meanwhile, was conducting her own experiments. She had tucked the bag under her arm so she could hold the camel by the hump in one hand while she extended a claw on the other. With great care, she inserted the claw into the equivalent of the animal's abdomen and sliced.
"It recognizes disembowelment also," she announced as the cracker shrieked in her grip.
"I mean, that just makes sense, though," Doug decided. "If it recognizes eating the head off, one of the classic ways of 'murdering' a cracker like this, it stands to reason that any of the other methods should be recognized. Ripping in half-" He demonstrated on another cracker, getting a tailed off scream in response. "-biting off the extremities, and so on." He was perfectly capable of being scientific -and- morbid at the same time.
"Do you think we need the clipboard for this? We're gonna need more screaming crackers." The clipboard was currently on a command hook next to the vending machine - it moved around a lot and had several items printed out on it. Kyle pulled it down and handed it to Doug. "Here, Namor hates my handwriting, plus you're up. I wanna see if it gives you the same stuff if you use my money." He also handed over three dollars to Doug.
Doug grinned. "Time to get my Adam Savage on," he announced, his voice and posture shiting to what was clearly going to be an impression. "Remember, kids," he shifted the clipboard up near his face as he spoke, "the only difference between screwing around and science is -writing it down-." Holding the clipboard and pen with his left hand, he grabbed the money from Kyle with his nanite hand and fed it into the machine.
The packet that the vending machine dispensed was clearly a different color and shape from the one that had contained the screaming crackers, and Doug's eyes widened as he fished it out. "Sweet baby Thor, I haven't had these in years." He took a puffed snack of some kind out and tossed it into his mouth, making a satisfied sound. "Thai peanut lemongrass coconut puffs. I figured the place that made them just never went into business this time around."
There was a brief scream truncated by a crunch as Sharon put her food out of its misery. "Thought this candy was pulled from beyond time and space," she said, licking her lips. "You are speaking of a cross-time caper, maybe?"
"Not so much a caper as..." Doug looked up at the ceiling and grunted before leveling a Look at Kyle. "Has no one seriously explained the frankenberry-" he barely thought to leave off the word 'cat' from Angie's usual expression about the patchwork universe, "-to her?"
Somewhere Pete and Remy were laughing at him, he knew it. "Okay, so there was this big 'end of existence' thing, and a super-powerful mutant who basically stitched reality back together with pieces of several different ones, and I am glossing over a metric butt-ton of information here, but the long and short of it is that some of us," and here he waved a hand to indicate himself and Kyle, "were around for all of that, and in some cases knew different versions of some people who are here now."
He sighed. "Including you." He grimaced. "You owe me so much vodak, Gibney."
Sharon considered herself a connoisseur of screwing with people, and as such the look she gave Doug was full of suspicion. Her tail dropped to a more cautious position.
"Impulse is doubt," she said, as if turning the possibilities over in her mind, "but have seen the Wormhole also. So does not do to dismiss out of hand." Sharon drew a bear cracker from the bag and took a thoughtful bite, then paused. She turned to Kyle.
"You cheated," she said.
"And that's why I don't owe Doug vodka. Because he just totes outed me as a cheater." Kyle said, with an affirmative nod. He tossed a pair of his own crackers into his mouth, and the little screams echoed against each other. "I knew you could shapeshift, or at least suspected pretty hard. The other you was different though. More catlike, less - " He trailed off, and his mouth worked on words for a moment. "Less educated, less articulate. So I cheated a little, but I could've been wrong. A Catseye who was raised by a human mom, instead of cats, you might not have ever figured it out, but then you asked me if I could shift."
Sharon's smugness could have been cut with a knife, and even then it would have dulled the blade. "Was cheating. I knew it. I am the most subtle." Triumphantly, she tossed another handful of crackers into her mouth. She gulped down the chorus of screams and cocked her head at him. "This is why you asked about my estrus cycle? We were mated, maybe? I remain uninterested, but two ferals, suppose this would make sense. Or was it casual sex only? This seems more likely. How casual was the sex, Kyle?"
Doug was going to protest that Kyle still owed him vodka, but the opportunity for absolute chaos was definitely worth letting the other man off the hook about booze. "Yeah, Kyle, how casual -was- the sex?" he asked in his most enthusiastic 'I am a chaos gremlin stirring some shit' tone.
Kyle had just tossed a handful of the screaming crackers into his mouth, and then went from a barking laugh to a cough, and then a choke as he processed the entire conversation as he waas chewing and attempting to swallow. He thumped on his own chest hard twice, as his face went pink, and then doubled over, retching out a handful of the crackers. Despite that the screaming had mostly ceased, it increased in timbre as he vomited a few chewed pieces of cracker, ceasing a few seconds after they hit the floor.
Only then did Kyle look up. "I hate both of you. So much."
Sharon dropped into a crouch to inspect the half-chewed crackers.
"They do scream when you vomit them," she observed with obvious delight. She tilted her face to Kyle with a benign smile. "Much Science has been accomplished today by Kyle-who-did-not-answer-the-question."
Kyle picked up a bottle of water from the nearby desk and washed his mouth out before answering, and managed to glare daggers at Doug the entire time. It waas pointless to glare at Sharon, it would change nothing. "I hate both of you. There was no sex, casual or romantic or like, any of that. That Sharon was...." Kyle cocked his head, clearly searching his memory. "Not... I mean not... " He screwed up his face. "Look, she was awesome, but I tend to uh, like my partners kind of more ... " He took another drink, definitly avoiding the answer. "Um. Look, god I adored her, she was a great friend, but she was... not... "
Doug's grin widened and became a bit more toothy. "I think the word Kyle's hunting for is 'assertive'. Put more bluntly, 'able to kick his ass'. He likes his partners capable, maybe a bit bossy at times, and able to hold their own in a fight or argument." He shrugged. "The other Catseye was...kind of a ditz. Nice enough, for sure. But definitely a lot less...you," he said, waving a hand to encompass all the dimensions of Sharon's personality.
Sharon wrinkled her nose in disapproval. "You are saying my other self did not fulfil Kyle's obvious wish to be stepped on by his partners? This is disappointing. Was raised by cats, you said? A case of nature versus nurture, maybe. What became of her?"
"I'm right here!" Kyle protested.
He ignored the other question. Doug could take the brunt of that, there was already enough trauma for Kyle, he was done.
"She died." There was no easy way to say that. "On a mission during that whole 'end of existence' bit. And when things got stitched together, the universe had you instead." Doug hoped that sounded as kind as he could manage.
"Oh." Sharon's tail stilled as her face went blank. It was difficult to tell if it was from shock or she simply couldn't figure out what was an appropriate expression. "Suppose this makes sense. Assume two versions of one individual cannot coexist in single dimension. If I am here, is to fill the hole she left. Yes." She turned to Kyle, face still unreadable. "I am sorry about your friend."
"It's... I mean not okay, okay, but..." Kyle's hands were everywhere for a few seconds, and ended digging through his bag of screaming crackers until he found the shape of one that felt right on his fingers to fidget with. He turned the snack around between his fingers, sometimes rolling it around and sometimes twisting it end over end. "Thanks. It's... actually easier that you're different. I can think of you as just like, another different person, just one I can guess secrets about."
He stopped twirling the cracker around between his fingers, and popped it into his mouth. "Like your final form."
The corners of the girl's mouth didn't rise, but her eyes crinkled in a smile.
"All in good time."
