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

[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?"

[uncertain_dume]

"Only the parts with food," Kanan admitted, shrugging. "Doctor Lecter had a sort of world tour class through the Community Center, focused around food. So I've tasted fish from all around the world, more or less."

Lots of cultures had a hard focus on seafood. Who knew?

[vdistinctive]

"And you didn't happen to notice that the place is made up of all different cultures with all different approaches to tech?"

When 71% of your planet was covered in water, fish got to be a big commodity.

[uncertain_dume]

"It was a class on cuisine. The grand sum total of all the tech I saw along the way mostly consisted of ovens and deep fryers," Kanan pointed out. "We have literally billions of variations of those around our galaxy, but most places still have HoloNet access anyway."

[vdistinctive]

Eliot was pretty sure he would have noticed. Of course, Eliot was also a) a native of Earth and b) naturally paranoid enough that it took three weeks and a series of bear traps for his best friends to notice he'd gone nuts.

"The internet ain't entirely proliferated yet," he explained. "Some places can't afford it. Some are culturally just not that into it. And some places have it restricted or even banned by the government." Eliot smirked faintly. "My point bein', the Earth's still a little too big and diverse for findin' me to only take someone fifteen minutes."

[uncertain_dume]

"Someday this planet is going to start making sense to me," Kanan said, after a moment's pause. "Someday. And when that day comes, I'll know for a fact I've been here too long."

As if he didn't already think that. Honestly.

"Most of the technologies I'm used to, we've had for thousands of years. I've never really seen much in the way of an entire world working on figuring out what to do with its own equivalents. It's as fascinating as it is confusing."

[vdistinctive]

"Y'all haven't advanced technologically for millenia?" Well, at least some of the culture shock went both ways. "Good lord."

[uncertain_dume]

"There have been improvements on what we've got," Kanan replied, shrugging. "But there isn't much around nowadays that wasn't around in some fashion back in the days of the Old Republic. I guess we have bacta now. That's a step up from kolto?"

Sure, that meant a whole lot on Earth, Kanan.

[vdistinctive]

"Yeah, there're kids back home who don't even recognize the state of the art stuff from my childhood. Can't imagine still usin' the tech from a thousand years ago."

[uncertain_dume]

"I guess there isn't really anywhere to go after mastering interplanetary travel and a galaxy wide shared information Network," Kanan mused. "At least you guys have figured out artificial intelligence, right? That's a start."

... He was assuming, because Hal.