75 Godiva, Friday

[vdistinctive]

So. Hardison and Parker were officially going to be moving in. The first rush of "yes, please, be where I can keep an eye on you and make sure you're not turning into creepy zombie versions (or alien bug versions, or any other kind of creepy versions) of yourselves" had worn off, and Eliot was starting to realize what that actually meant, logistically. The house couldn't just be his place, anymore. He had to make sure that they had the space to make it their own, too. It wasn't as if Eliot's house was small, but, well. He'd been living there for coming up on three years now. It had stuff in it.

So today, Eliot was cleaning house. He'd cleared out the dining room (never used, they always ate in the kitchen, so that'd be great as, like, an office or study or something) and was now tackling the basement.

Which would be how a box full of bear traps ended up on his front stoop.

He had no idea what he was going to do with those.

[open!]

Comments

[vdistinctive]

"Really? Now you're gonna pitch a fit about me callin' a teenager a kid?"

[uncertain_dume]

Blink.

"I wasn't going to pitch a fit about anything," Kanan said slowly. "I was mostly wondering why you were calling a guy who has to be at least in his thirties a kid."

[vdistinctive]

". . . There more'n one Cecil runnin' around town with a giant pink bird?"

[uncertain_dume]

"... Space, I hope there isn't."

No offense, Cecil.

[vdistinctive]

"He as a student like, last year. He ain't thirty."

[uncertain_dume]

"He's got a scientist boyfriend trapped in a desert otherworld back home? And I'm not a great judge of a lot of things, but I want to think I know a guy who's actually older than I am when I see one."

[vdistinctive]

". . . I think we're gonna have to write this one off as a 'Fandom Thing'."

[uncertain_dume]

"I'm going to cling really hard to 'Fandom Thing,'" Kanan agreed. "Because otherwise I've been living and teaching classes with a teenager, and I don't think my mind can handle that."

[vdistinctive]

"And you'll have plenty of other stuff to carefully not think about. So you might as well get the practice." Eliot found the box of old surveillance equipment -- the stuff that had survived having boots thrown at it, anyway -- and offered it to Kanan. "I've lost track, personally."

[uncertain_dume]

"I get the feeling that this place does that to people eventually," Kanan mused, accepting the box and peering into it thoughtfully. "In the meantime... I guess I'll worry about figuring out what to make of this, huh?"

It was definitely...

...

It had cameras?

[vdistinctive]

It did! And weirdly large audio bugs. You had to go very old school when you were trying to set up a system your genius hacker friend couldn't hack into.

"If you don't end up needin' any of it, you can probably junk it. I'm not sure it's useful to anyone who ain't completely batshit crazy, these days."

[uncertain_dume]

"I'm going to see if I can repurpose it if it comes to that," Kanan decided. "It's not quite like anything I'm used to back home, but I'm saying that so often lately I'm starting to feel like a glitching holo."

[vdistinctive]

"Culture shock's a bitch, man." Not that Eliot had ever experienced quite as thoroughly as Kanan was. "You can turn me down, you know. I promise I won't be offended."

[uncertain_dume]

Okay, Kanan had to grin a little, again.

"I'm not going to lie, this stuff is..." He looked again into the box. "... Don't take it the wrong way if I say primitive. It's also the first significant amount of Earth hardware I've been able to get my hands on since getting here. I want to know what makes this stuff tick if I'm going to be around here a while. If you don't mind I'm taking it mostly just to take it apart, that is."

[vdistinctive]

"Nah, go for it." Eliot tilted his head. "You get 'primitive' was kinda the point, right? I wasn't just goin' caveman or anything. I got that stuff specifically because it wasn't gonna hook up to any external network or computer."

He'd been crazy, not stupid.

[uncertain_dume]

Kanan huffed a little bit of a laugh at that, and then shrugged his shoulders.

"I had no idea," he admitted. "I'm not joking when I say I haven't really gotten my hands on any Earth technology since getting here. One of these days I might replace my comm with a phone. I wouldn't know the difference between modern and ancient at a glance, just yet."

So, hey, he kind of felt better about all of... this.

[vdistinctive]

"You wanna get a look at actual Earth state-of-the-art, you should check with Hardison. He likes all the bells and whistles." Especially the whistles. "I'm guessin' that'll still look like child's play to a guy from a galactic empire, but it's at least digital insteada analog."

[uncertain_dume]

Kanan opened his mouth to correct Eliot mostly with a knee-jerk statement about how he really wanted nothing to do with the Galactic Empire, but caught himself before he could. That wasn't what Eliot had meant and he knew it.

Instead, he said, "Do they not use analog much around here anymore? How old is this stuff anyway?"

[vdistinctive]

"Not for most things," Eliot said. "We're big fans of digital in my world. Digital means it can connect to the internet, and we're real big fans of that."

Eliot, on the other hand, clearly wasn't entirely sold. He was an old soul. Or to put it less politely, kind of a luddite.

[uncertain_dume]

"Yeah, we have our HoloNet back home," Kanan noted. "Same idea, bigger scale. Way more cat pictures, mostly."

No, it was not all cat pictures.

"It has its uses too, but I try not to have much of a presence there myself, for the usual reasons."

[vdistinctive]

Eliot nodded. "You shoulda seen me tryin' to convince Hardison that gettin' my face all over the 'net was a bad idea." Admittedly, they possibly should have seen that coming, when they set Eliot up as the fiddle in the con.

[uncertain_dume]

"Space, on a planet this small? Was it ten or fifteen minutes before somebody recognized you?"

Kanan was also working on grasping things like Earth's scale. It was a work in progress.

[vdistinctive]

"You know Earth is a lot bigger'n this island, right?"

[uncertain_dume]

"Yeah," Kanan replied, "and it's a lot smaller than a galaxy, and unless I've missed my mark entirely, you've got at least a few people out there who aren't necessarily happy with you. Or is access to the internet not actually as common on Earth as I've been led to believe?"

He grew up on a city planet. He was also working on grasping just how diverse everything on Earth really was.

[vdistinctive]

"Pretty sure the Russian mob ain't spendin' all its time on YouTube," Eliot said. "So, yeah, it'd take 'em a little longer'n that to find out. Have you actually gone out and seen any of this planet?"