Robyn fidgeted near the bar, rolling a pint glass of beer back and forth between her hands.

The Toybox was back in her quarters. She felt a little naked without its weight in her arms, and overdressed at the same time, out of her layers of Goodwill finds and in a simple red and black dress.

Part of her wanted to retreat to the control room and check the systems again.

Pete is the exact opposite of overdressed. He is, in fact, dressed in a way that would only be appropriate if he had some farming planned. He doesn't.

"It's really pretty awesome," he tells her.

Pete's taste is suspect, but it's an earnest compliment.

Robyn turns to him and grins.

"Pete! You made it." She doesn't give his outfit a second look; fashion in Neopolis was utterly impossible to follow and she'd seen much stranger things than overalls at a nightclub.

"Yeah, thanks! I'm really glad the weather cooperated." She turned towards the strip of windows lining one side of the room. More of the guests were looking out over the City than were on the dancefloor.

"Yeah, well. Yeah."

Nothing Peter is wearing has anything to do with fashion in any city or dimension.

He eyes the windows as well.

"Uh. What happens when it don't cooperate?"

Pete isn't a huge fan of flying. Although he's slightly less uncomfortable with it at the moment.

"Just spoil the view, mainly. If it were really windy it might rock a bit, probably not great for business." Robyn looks back at Pete and it occurs to her that some people aren't crazy about heights, and Pete might be among them.

"Don't worry, this thing's tough, it's not going anywhere we don't want it to."

She comes back to the bar for her beer. "Hey, want anything? It's on me."

Pete relaxes visibly. He's far enough away from the ground already, is what it is. That and commercial flight is impossible for him, considering he is an electronic device.

Was.

"Oh, I didn't mean...I mean, I'm sure it is. I don't think you'd put folks in anythin' unsafe, or make anythin' accidentally unsafe or...I'm here off the clock," he assures her.

"A beer'd be great," he adds, gratefully.

Anything is easier to deal with with a beer in your hand.

They'd hired servers for the opening (which ones were permanent? Any? Robyn hadn't paid as close attention to the business side as the technical), but she scooted behind the bar herself. They had a Serious Beer Snob Assortment on tap but she grabbed a bottle from one of the fridges, popped the cap and set it in front of Pete.

"Brooklyn Lager. The closest thing I've found to All-Star so far."

Pete smirks lightly.

"We'll see about that."

He raises the bottle in her direction. Salute. And down the hatch.

"Pretty close," he decides. "Not bad at all. I've been stickin' with Bud, 'cause it's cheap, but it ain't great. And I got stuck with a can of PBR one night, which I don't recommend at all."

He eyes the bottle.

"Although, since Starsmore disappeared I haven't been out. Drinkin' by yourself ain't a great habit."

And Pete was already well aware he had more than enough nasty habits before his brain cells got a super speed assisted boost.

Edited at 2009-10-10 03:39 am (UTC)

"Yeah, there's something about beer in a can I just can't abide."
She leans on the bar and gives her glass a long look, then glances at Pete and raises it.

"Jono Starsmore, here's hoping he's back home and happy there." Sips her IPA. She hadn't talked much with Starsmore but he'd taken the job seriously and Pete liked him.

"Maybe when things settle back down we can get a regular group together to go out nights or something."


Edited at 2009-10-10 03:54 am (UTC)

Pete nods vaguely.

"Maybe."

He takes another drink in the name of dropped friends.

"What d'you think of the force here?" He asks, curiously.

Robyn raises an eyebrow at him. He's asking the rookie?

"Considering half of it is learning on the job, not bad, I guess." She pauses.

"I miss the Sarge. Sometimes I feel like we're all just haring off wherever."

"What do you think?"

There are way more rookie rookies than Robyn 'round these parts.

"I think we all gotta make sure we're on the same page with each other, so as to give folks as little amunition against us as possible," Pete admits.

"I worry about somebody comin' in and kickin' all our top brass out and takin' over, like what happened back home. I dunno."

He shrugs.

"You're probably right, if maybe just so the civilians aren't scared of us."

"A reorganization - I guess there's that. It kinda sounds like if anyone was going to come in they'd have done it by now. It's like the whole country wants to pretend we're not even here."

Robyn polishes off her drink and lets the server take the glass away.

"How are you settling in with Sentinel and them?"

"It's tough seein' 'em complain on the network," Pete sighs. "Like they think we don't mind seein' stuff go down."

That's the sort of statement Pete would normally spit bitterly. Today he just sounds sorry. That's not to say he doesn't normally feel sorry; everything just comes out differently through an electric filter.

"It's, uh, it's alright," he lies.

It was alright. Now he's not sure.

Edited at 2009-10-10 05:39 am (UTC)

"Hnn. The network makes things a little hard. Not that a little transparency is bad - but it's galling to get heckled by a crowd with the means to do something. And sometimes they do do something but with no rhyme or reason. I sort of wish we had something like registration here."

She eyes a blond kid who occasionally stares at the stabilizer rails in a way that makes her sort of want to tackle him.

"Good. I was worried they'd be all cliquey and make you feel weird."

"I don't exactly get why, if this transporter thing went and brought us all here to police this city, right? Why we don't just enlist every last body onto the force, y'know?"

Although there is still the little matter of supervillains.

"Mmm," he says, brilliantly.

It wasn't weird. Then the Warden...Sentinel is a weird name, and it still holds all those kid-touching connotations when Pete thinks about it.

It might be weird now. He has a weird feeling like Sentinel knows.

He follows her gaze.

"Oh, uh, hey if you wanna chat somebody else up, don't let me stop ya. It's your night."

She looks away from the two teenagers at the table and regards Pete again.

"Hm? Oh, I might go talk to that kid if he looks like he's going to touch anything, that's all. I'm fine here."

Another beer? But she's feeling the first one and she's been too nervous to eat much; another one might make her loopy.

"I have no idea what to do at these things, to be honest. I just wanted this place to exist."

Pete is not feeling the first one: super fast metabolism means good luck getting drunk.

He laughs. Not a supervillain laugh this time: just a big, goofy, sweet Southern-boy laugh.

"Well, it sure does. Good job."

They went to all the work of getting dressed up, and Billy's been sort of worried about that -- not sure how out of place it would make them seem -- but in the end it worked out okay. Tank's wearing a dress, after all. A few guys in suits weren't going to stand out in comparison.

Usually, Billy would be sticking pretty closely to Teddy anyway, but tonight he's basically glued to his side, making sure that he's fed a steady diet of sugar to keep him from trying to take anything in the club apart.

"How you doing on gummy bears?" he asks, eying the pocket that should contain gummy bears to see if there's any indication that it's getting low on them.

Teddy is halfway chewing through a handful of them when Billy asks so instead of answering, he simply opens his mouth -- his tongue stained an unnatural color from all of the candy Billy seems intent on feeding him tonight. He rolls the sticky, technicolor mass of chewed-up jelly around to give Billy a better look.

Snapping his mouth shut again, he smiles lazily and reaches out to straightens Billy's tie. "No desire to dismantle the room yet, Bill, don't worry."

Billy blinks, cross-eyed, down at his tie and then lifts his face back up to Teddy. He makes a face that acknowledges that he is being needlessly neurotic but after a second, he glances off to the side in the direction of the sound system, which ruins the effect a bit.

"I know," he says, tugging on the bottom of his jacket because it doesn't seem to want to lie flat. "But you know me. I worry."

"Don't," Teddy says, leaning close and knocking foreheads with Billy briefly. He can smell the sugar on his own breath which is equal parts kind of funny and totally gross. With two of his fingers he fishes around the inside pocket of Billy's suit jacket and -- with a quiet "ah" -- eventually pulls out a pixie stick. "We're supposed to be having fun tonight and if I've got to check my own shiny new brand of neurosis at the door, so do you, got it?"

He rips the end of the pixie stick off and sticking out his tongue, pours a little bit of it onto it. The pale purple powder begins to dissolve into a bit of grape-flavored goo on his tongue. Smirking, Teddy tips his head forward towards Billy, like he's offering.

Billy wrinkles his nose. Teddy's somehow managed to get a sticky spot on his foreheads, and it's made Billy's forehead feel tacky too. It's not surprising giving all the sugar Teddy's been knocking back (by necessity). Billy knows that the emergency stashes of things he has secreted away in his pockets are starting to feel slightly sticky too.

If he were his grandmother, he knows that this would be the point where he'd lick his thumb and start trying to scrub that sticky spot away. Billy is very glad he isn't his grandmother and leans in to give Teddy a quick, sticky kiss instead.

"Next time I see a bouncer, I'll get him to kick my neurosis out," he says. "For now, I'll just try to, uh. Not talk about it."

Teddy snorts and, not quite satisfied with the quick kiss that Billy gave him, dips in for another one before slinging an arm over Billy's shoulders and tugging him in sideways to him. "Yeah, well, tell that to your face. Apparently it didn't get the memo."

He laughs and gives Billy a sideways look. "Don't worry. I'm cool. Promise. Any sign of itchy fingers you and me'll just go home, alright?" Teddy holds a finger up. "But. In the meantime. We're cool."

Billy settles in against Teddy's side as casually as he can. His comfortable, and the weight of his arm along Billy's shoulders is comforting in its own way. It's been a few days since Teddy's been focused enough to pay anything like this much attention to something without gears or wires.

But Billy doesn't let his weight shift entirely into Teddy. If nothing else, he has his suit to think of. He doesn't want it to get wrinkled or messy because, honestly, he has no idea how to deal with cleaning a suit. In the last few months that he's been here, he's only barely got normal laundry down.

Still, he reaches up and gives Teddy's finger a scratch (to prevent it from becoming itchy). "We're cool," he agrees. "We are flying in a giant air-blimp nightclub named after a British mathmatician, so we're also surreal. But we're cool."

"I know, right?" Teddy says, lifting his head up towards the ceiling, through which is the large zeppelin responsible for shutting them through the night sky. There's a tinge of breathless excitement to Teddy's voice -- something that normally could be dismissed as general enthusiasm but which (at least recently) has come to indicate a pull at his attention towards things more mechanically minded. His mouth hangs open in distracted amazement as one of his hands fumbles in a pocket for a few more gummi bears.

"I wonder if I could build one of these myself..."

Billy reaches out and pinches Teddy's chin between his thumb and index finger to pull his head back down. His eyebrows rise up in general sympathy but also a clear sense of I see what you're doing there. He resists the urge to shove some candy in Teddy's open mouth only because he can see that he's already going for something himself.

Instead, he just nods approvingly and says, "You probably could. But if everyone is going to start owning blimps and flying around in them then sooner or later we're going to end up in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and that was not a very good movie."

Teddy frowns, his eyes rolling up in their sockets to see if there's a chance of still checking out the ceiling when his chin has been tugged down like this, but it's no go. The bottom lip of his frown threatens a pout instead. "Oi. Sky Captain wasn't totally lame. It was trying to rock some sort of sci-fi art deco vibe like Blade Runner only with more Chrysler Building tossed in." He nods and then slowly -- as if trying to sneak it past -- poked a gummi bear in through the corner of his mouth.

"Besides, it had Lemony Snicket in it. Don't you wanna grow up to be Lemony Snicket, Bill?"

Billy's eyebrows both rise up together in preparation for what will obviously be a round of I have a very strong opinion on this topic. But before he says anything, he hooks his fingers into the closest pocket of Teddy's pants and produces one lonely gummy bear which he pops into his own mouth.

"I'm sure there are a lot of good things to being Lemony Snicket," he says. "Including having lots and lots of money for writing books about horrible things happening to children. But I'm just not sure I'd be able to deal with being named Lemony Snicket. I'd probably get depressed and take up drinking."

Teddy takes a swipe at Billy's hand as he attempts to abscond with one of his gummi bears. He doesn't really bother with much follow-up because it's already gone past his lips before Teddy even has a go, but at last the effort's been made. "I need those, you know," he protests before swallowing the one that's been dissolving on his tongue.

He presses his lips together thoughtfully, draping an arm over each of Billy's shoulders and leaning forward, into him. "Spoiler. I'm pretty sure Lemony Snicket's actually some random dude named Bob, Bill. Or quite possibly J.K. Rowling on a super-bad day."

Billy bites down on the gummy bear he's just stolen so that its little gummy head is just over his tongue and its little gummy body is sitcking out toward Teddy. Then he grins around it for a moment before chewing on it properly.

"Rowling, huh. Scandal of the century," he observes. "Though it would explain the whole orphan, evil uncle, incompetent government, and constant attempts at child abuse."

Teddy laughs. One of his hands slip round to the knot of Billy's tie and pinches it between his thumb and forefinger before tugging him along, taking a roundabout path along the perimeter of the room. Every so often Teddy looks in front of him or out towards the center of the room, but mostly he just grins back at Billy over his shoulder. All the candy in his system has made his head clearer than it has been all week, not to mention the semi-euphoric spikes in blood sugar that happen every time another pixie stick goes down.

"You'd think somebody would've been quicker on the draw about that one, but noooo," he laughs, before finding a deserted table and pulling out a chair for Billy to sit in. "Want me to get you something to drink?"

There's no good reason someone should be wearing overalls and t-shirt in a dance club. There are reasons, like, say, someone has recently lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time and doesn't have anything else that fits. Or someone has never actually set foot in a club before in his life. Or someone has always had really questionable taste in clothing regardless of waist-size. Something like that.

Pete looks equal parts impressed with the place, and like he wishes he had stayed home.

There was no way he could have not been impressed by the zeppelin. It had a cool name, which was an equally cool reference in the first place, and, okay, it was a flying club. He was a little reminded of Vicious hovering her concerts places through less mechanical means.

Unfortunately for his company, his being impressed came out in the form of verbal diarrhea. "Wow," he said, turning back to Sera (he would have mumbled if not for the music that required talking over) "this is neat, isn't it?" Stating the obvious: one of Kelton's few fortes.

That, however, gave way to his constant worrywarting. "Are you, y'know, is it... alright? Not too big of a crowd or anything?" He had been half surprised Sera'd agreed to go in the first place.

The flight up had been cold, but uneventful. Considering that Serenity was ready to deal with ground-to-air missiles, given the public opinion on 'Ported (always assume the worst!), she'd been pleasantly surprised by how easy it had been to get up to the club.

Kelton had, of course, whimpered the whole way up.

"Mmm. Yeah, it's okay." She winced as a stranger bumped into her, pulling away at the contact. Arms wrapped around her torso and knees together, Sera's body language was screaming "DO NOT WANT" as she tried to slide through the crowd.

She shrugged off Kelton's yammering - she knew by now that it was just how he talked. "Really neat. Uh." She glanced nervously around the ballroom, squinting in light harsher than she'd seen in ages. "I might. Just tell me when you want to go, okayt?"

"Okay," he nodded, "yeah, good." His fretting was placated enough by her answer to shut him up. Outwardly, at least. Even if it had to only be inwardly, he just couldn't close his stupid yap.

Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe I shouldn't have bothered her. Maybe she really isn't okay.

"No, no, it's - it's fine, if you don't want to, uh, stick around for very long," he hastened to add, "we can go if you want to go, I don't mind. So. Whenever you wanna."

He managed to go quiet again, save for a constant stream of small "sorry"s he handed out to the others jostling into him by accident.