souffle_girlek | (no subject)

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Oswin is not really up for 'socializing'.

And she didn't want to report that she spent her day (sensibly) in her rooms either, because then she has to talk about it, and she doesn't want to talk about it.

Really not.

So she's in the garage, deconstructing a car's engine (mostly with skill, sort of with brute force and mechanical aid). It's active, it's not in her rooms, and she can threaten anyone she feels threatened by with the electric drill.

It's a win-win, really.

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Clint laughs, letting the door close behind them. He walks towards the kitchen, talking as he does. "I, uh -- kind of mapped out a roadtrip up the coast, then back down through the natural wonders section of this side of the country," he says. He kicks a chair out for Oswin at his kitchen table, while he swings past it towards the fridge. There's a thick guidebook open, with the start of a planned route drawn in pencil, and an open laptop. "But I figured we should Google -- do a web search -- of tourist attractions outside of San Diego. That's where we are," he adds. "But maybe we should do the city when we get back."

He's just -- itchy. He wants to move, to get the fuck out of places where people know him and look at him with concern.

Clint pulls the fridge open, grabbing a can of beer. "You want anything? I've got water and juice, too."

Her fingers itch to explore his computer, but she resists. She hopes Bar packed her tablet - she supposes Bar would, Bar is highly sensible most of the time.

"You're the native, I'm following your lead here. Oh, is it near Christmas? I heard there's an avenging spirit that people leave cookies out for as offering so it won't take their children in the night." She reports with a sort of cheerful fascination. "And, um... juice?" Earth juice!

In another mood, Clint would splutter theatrically. Still, he's grinning as he comes back out of the fridge with a jug of pineapple-orange juice.

"Christmas is during the winter, here," he says, pulling a clean glass out of the dishwasher and pouring the juice as he speaks. "Santa Claus -- well, I guess he's kinda creepy, and who knows what happens to the story between my time and yours -- but mostly he just has flying reindeer and goes around giving kids toys. It's a good excuse to send the kids to bed early, so the parents can wrap them in secret."

Or so he hears.

"I guess we could just go without a plan," he says, handing her the juice. "Maybe hit the major national parks, and if we see any roadstands or interesting signs we can take off to check them out."

"I'm excellent without a plan, tend to do my best work without a plan." Oswin agrees cheerfully, taking the juice. It's... welp, she doesn't exactly know what kind of fruit this came from, but it's tasty and she can stand by that. "The last time I was on an Earth I pretended I was a French teacher at a German school. Somehow that worked."

"-- Really? How'd you make that work?"

Is Oswin magic?

"I have a French patch - it was a bit out of date for the time, but it worked well enough. And I just said I was new to Germany, so my German could be as horrible as I liked. Which is good, because it is. Horrible, I mean."

She shrugs, sipping her juice.

"... Wait, you don't think I actually grew up speaking Earth English, do you?"

"I'm realizing that was really stupid of me," Clint says, and rubs his hand over his face. He's embarrassed, but leans against the counter with something like real relaxation. "In my defense, Dee's the linguist."

"Pretty soon after moving to the Bar I got a patch for the most common form of English spoken there - I figured it'd come in handy if for some reason the translating field broke down." Or, as it turns out, in case of dinosaurs. Sometimes paranoia is useful.

"I got the French patch for Carmen."

"We still have to learn languages the old fashioned way," Clint says. "How do patches work?"

"Well, I'm not a scientist, so I'm probably wrong on the details, but it's like the mood patches that were so popular for a while - you put them on and the thing you want changed... does? It can last a few days to a few years, depending on which one you get." She explains, sort of. "They're really popular with tourists, obviously, and I hear the Time Agents use them a lot."

Not that she knows many Time Agents.

Tragically.

They're pretty much all adorable.

Patches that actually reprogram you -- that's clicking in unpleasant ways with Clara's brain-hacking software she mentioned...

But he swallows that, and lets himself be distracted by the new concepts. (He tucks the rest into a mental back pocket, for later.)

"What, do they keep people from killing Hitler?"

"... I... imagine they would?" She hasn't the foggiest what he's talking about, but is now putting 'Hitler' on the list of things to not talk about until she figures out if he was someone who deserved a lot of killing or someone who's killing would cause a lot of problems. "You don't hear much about what they do, really. I imagine if you ran into them on a professional basis it'd be a pretty bad day."

"You usually want to avoid cops," Clint says, and hesitates. He hasn't quite grasped that a culture could remember Carmen and Jane Austen, and forgotten WWII. But he's already been proven wrong on one thing about Oswin's world today. "Dictator, killed a few million people. Not the most of anybody, but he was... memorably horrible, and was a driving force in the war that shaped the world to be how it is now. Kind of known for being a likely target of hypothetical time travelers."

He crosses over to close his laptop down, and put it in his backpack, slung across the back of the seat. His ~~go-bag~~ ~~duffel~~ go-bag is already in the trunk.

"Huh, yeah, bad dude." She... neglects to mention her own kill count. Besides. No one cares about a bunch of dead Daleks. They'd probably give her a medal.

Right?

Oh look, she's going to go with 'so not thinking about it' as a tactical choice.

"Is that all you're taking? Because while I'm all for a steadily diminishing wardrobe...

What? No one said she can't look, and hot damn he's got a body worth looking at.

Clint looks surprised for a moment, then laughs. "Uh, no, I--"

He hesitates, looking suddenly uncomfortable. "I put my bag in the car already," is what he lands on. "Just -- because I didn't know when we'd be headed out."

Or when he'd be headed out.

"... Well, unless there's some other warnings I need, I'm good with now." Because Clint, there's a whole world out there and she's been cooped up for a while.

He breathes a laugh, adjusting the backpack on his shoulders, grabbing his sunglasses and windbreaker off the counter, pulling his keys out of the windbreaker pocket.

"C'mon, then," he says, headed toward the door. "Time's wasting."

Oswin scurries with alacrity, abandoning her glass in the sink and trailing after him with her luggage in tow.

"So, Clint, you said car, you said I'm not allowed to take apart this car, this better be one hell of a car." Oswin informs him as she trails in his wake in the garage. Of course, this is Oswin, newbie to cars in general other than what she's ~~destroyed~~ discovered in Milliways - there's pretty much no wrong choices here.

Edited 2016-08-22 06:10 (UTC)

"It is one hell of a car," Clint says, grinning back at her.

It's parked in the multilevel garage tucked between his apartment complex and a few others -- the vehicles in it ranging from a couple stunningly colored exotic sports cars to a slew of Camry-equivalents and a few beat-up pickups.

On the second level, there's a sleek but somewhat out of place looking car.

Clint pops the hood open manually, holding it up for her to fit her suitcase in.

(It is, in fact, the trunk. He loves this stupid car.)

Oswin stands, staring, a little spooked. Slowly she eases closer and peers into the...

Trunk?

It's a trunk.

In the front.

"... Clint, what did you do to that poor car's engine?" It's really not where it's supposed to be, in her limited car experience.

"It's in the back," Clint says, entirely too pleased with himself. "There's more space behind the front seats, if we need it -- it was modified back in the 80s. Uh, thirty-plus years ago."

To make more room for carrying weapons and generally smuggled goods, of course. And to make it lighter.

Clint mostly uses it as a convenient place to nap. And, uh, store weapons under the locked panels.

"That's just wrong." Says Oswin Oswald, ultimate car authority, but she puts her suitcase in the trunk anyway. "Is anything else backwards in this car, or does the rest make sense?"

"I think the rest'll make sense." Clint waits for her hands to be clear before shutting the trunk and re-locking it. "Though I'm not sure what weird car assumptions Milliways has given you. Oh, I guess -- the back doors open the opposite direction from usual."

He unlocks her door before getting into his.

She does not say 'Clint, your car is weird' because they haven't gotten out of the garage yet and she does very much want to see this new world.

...

Her face says it eloquently. Clint, your car is weird.

She gets in anyway. It's a weird card that'll start an adventure so weird is alright by her!

The first twenty minutes of the trip might be boring, depending on how easily wowed Oswin is by palm trees and clear blue skies and the low-key bustle of San Diego.

It's not quite rush hour, thank goodness, but Clint's still quiet as he's focused on the traffic lights-and-potential-pedestrians.

Once they're out of city traffic, he glances at her with a grin. "Okay, navigator. Tell me where you want to go."

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