fandomtownies | McCoppin Scrap, Sunday, All Day

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McCoppin Scrap, Sunday, All Day

You would think that with the heat the way it was, outside was the last place Dean would ever think to be. Especially not surrounded by reflective metals and black rubber tires. (The tires had reappeared sometime over the course of the week. Dean suspected strongly at this point that the junk yard just kind of re-filled itself based on whatever whims it had, day by day.)

Either way, if you thought that he was going to be inside out of this heat, you'd be wrong. He'd pulled out his lawn chair, grabbed a newspaper, pulled on his shades, and he was reading quite happily, having found a patch of shade that was just the right size, underneath the half-constructed armature for his Alot of Tires sculpture.

All he had to do was be here today. And if being here meant that he could kick back and drink ungodly amounts of iced coffee, then so be it.

[Open!]

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It took a few weeks before my inner 12-year-old kicked in and I realized how unintentionally hilarious the subject line for this OCD chunk really is.

And now it shall stay there forever.

Mod your junk, kids, if you don't want to deal with an artsy beatnik today.

He's hiring, though you'd never be able to tell just by looking at the scrap yard.

He's also willing to head into the office to make more iced coffee. Because he's a real giver, guys.

Kaidan had considered staying indoors, but that... just left him feeling antsy, and filing reports could only channel his energy for so long. When the constant exposure to bright screens started to stir up the beginnings of a headache, he put the work down and took his morning jog three hours late.

He took pause right outside the junk yard-- he had said he'd stop by, hadn't he?-- and took note of Dean.

Might as well.

"Morning," he called.

Dean glanced, once, over the top of his newspaper before grinning a little, folding it, and setting the paper to the side.

"Kaidan," he called back, giving a little wave hello as he stood and headed to the gate in order to let him in. "Not letting the heat get to you, I see."

"Maybe," Kaidan replied, slowing down, and finally walked into the junk yard. "But I'm starting to think I should've brought more water."

"There's a water cooler in the office," Dean reported, nodding toward the trailer. "And I've got a pot of coffee in there. Extra strong."

A beat.

"To ice. Even I'm not crazy enough to drink hot coffee on a day like this, man."

Edited 2012-07-08 15:29 (UTC)

"Thanks," Kaidan said, with a slight smile and a curt nod of his head. "I'll, uh... Come look at the art in a minute." He strode past, towards the trailer.

Dean followed along, mostly so that he could dig out a cup (or a mug, more likely) for Kaidan. Finding things in Dean's 'office' required a good amount of experience training with a 'Where's Waldo' book, somewhere along the line, generally.

He fished out the keys and opened the door. A few steps in, there were a couple of seats and the mandatory desk. Beyond that? It kind of looked as though the definition of art had exploded in there, and had dragged Feng Shui and caffeine along for the ride.

At least the water cooler wasn't too far beyond the counter.

"So, water, or coffee?"

"Water. I've got enough caffeine in my body to keep going for a while, I think." Of course, Kaidan burned through it faster than most, but he was worried he might aggravate his earlier headache and push things straight into a migraine. "So I guess you're not afraid of heat stroke, huh."

"I'm hanging out in the shade and drinking plenty of fluids," Dean replied, shrugging his shoulders casually as he ventured in and scrounged about for a clean mug. "When you spend as much time as I do crouched over a welding torch, heat like this isn't really all that much of a problem."

Well, that, and he made a point to escape indoors now and then to appreciate the glory of the oscillating fan.

"If I was actually hauling things around today, I'd be more concerned. But business is generally pretty slow on days like this one."

Your mug had a smiley face on it, Kaidan. Hope you don't mind.

Nah. He didn't mind. It was... quaint? It felt pretentious to think of it as 'quaint'. Cute, maybe.

"Fair enough," Kaidan said. He glanced towards the door. "Couple years ago, I might have minded the heat more," he said. "But I've been to enough planets that I know it can be worse, you know?"

Dean grinned a little as he filled the mug with water from the cooler, and then passed it over to Kaidan.

"I probably have some idea, anyhow," he allowed. "Interstellar travel's never really been my thing, but I've been living with Guy and Samus long enough to guess."

Guy had a magic ring and Samus could fold herself up into a beach ball. Dean had learned by this point to just kind of take 'space' with a grain of salt.

Kaidan could influence mass and gravity, but that was about as far as it went, Dean-- unless you counted all the aliens he knew.

"Thanks," he said again as he took the mug, and took a quick drink. "Space is... well, it's still unbelievable even to me some days," he added thoughtfully. "I mean, we haven't been a part of the galactic community for more than thirty years. But it's hard to be the starry-eyed kid for too long when everyone else in the galaxy is treating it like it's old hat."

Dean's influence on mass and gravity was mostly achieved using things like 'perspective' and 'composition,' so really, Kaidan was a few steps ahead of him.

"I'm pretty sure I could find a way to stay the starry-eyed kid for a while," Dean mused, deciding that, since they were inside, he might as well get himself some water, too. In his yin-yang mug, because that was just how he rolled. "But then, I've never left America. Leaving Earth still seems like a bit of a stretch, for me."

"Hey, my parents are almost the same," Kaidan said. "I mean... they've been out of the country, but they've never really left the planet."

"I'm willing to bet that the process is a little more complicated than buying a bus ticket, hm?"

Dean was smirking at Kaidan over the top of his mug.

"Or are people going to other planets on vacation, by that point? In the era I came from, people were half expecting that there would be summer homes on the moon by now."

Dean hadn't been terribly surprised to learn that it wasn't really the case, mind, when he'd wound up in the here and now.

"It's not as expensive as it used to be. Not as hard to break atmosphere, either."

He shrugged idly, taking another sip of his water. "A friend of mine has--" He caught the slip, corrected it, tried not to think about it, "Had a vacation home on a planet in the... Argus Rho cluster, I think?"

And Dean, tactful as he was, made a point to not let it show that he had caught that slip. He just nodded, knowingly. Sort of.

"I have no idea where that is," he reported. "What's it like?"

Talking about the planet itself might be a bit of a distraction from whatever that correction had meant, at least.

Kaidan was grateful; if Dean had asked, he'd have felt obliged to own it. (And it wasn't that he didn't, but it was... well, it was complicated.)

"I've only been there once or twice," Kaidan admitted. "One of the local systems has a gas giant called Sharblu that's quite a sight. The planet that place was on, though... well, it gave these temperatures a run for their money."

And hey, Dean could sympathize with complicated. He wasn't about to push.

Nah, he was going to just whistle a bit, shaking his head.

"And people have vacation homes on this place? There must be one hell of a market there for chilled drinks and air conditioning units."

"Well, you know what it's like," Kaidan said, shrugging a little. "Vacation. You always wind up going somewhere that's either warmer or colder where you're at."

Not that Shepard had been much for vacations anyway. Last thing Kaidan had heard, he'd mostly used the place to tap into the local weapons market.

"Depending on the time of year and how masochistic you're feeling," Dean agreed with an easy nod. "So, how are you settling in? Nobody tried to throw some sort of wild teenager revolution during your first class?"

"It's been touch and go," Kaidan admitted. He drained the rest of his water and put the mug - smiley-face and all - back down. "I didn't anticipate having an actual AI in my class."

Dean tilted his head a little while he parsed that. There'd been a late night horror movie or something that he'd caught a few months back, otherwise he'd never have known what in the world those words stood for. But as it was, he was mostly just absorbing the fact that there was one here.

Huh. Not that it was really a big deal, considering all the other types that Fandom attracted. But huh.

"And is that a problem?"

"He seems like an okay guy," Kaidan said. "I mean, I'm not going to judge someone for what they are, it's just... well, the last AIs I met spent an awful lot of time shooting at me."

So that got complicated, too.

"Ah." Dean wasn't terribly surprised at that, either, considering the sorts of things that his housemates tended to do while they were in space. "Well, for what it's worth, the people that tend to take classes around here are far more often the selfless heroic type. And for all of the different times and places they could come from, I don't imagine your AI student probably has much in common with the ones you're more familiar with."

... Don't go all Ultron on the island and prove Dean wrong, Victor.

"I know," Kaidan said. He hadn't let any prior incidents influence his thinking about individual aliens, and he wasn't about to start doing otherwise. It'd just been... something. "It's just an adjustment period," he settled on. "So-- you said you had some art lying around here?"

Dean raised an eyebrow a little, and then gestured toward the rest of his mess beyond the counter.

"In here, it's mostly sketches," he shared, "and smaller versions of the things I hope to do full-sized. Plenty of mess, but hey, you don't really create art without getting a little sloppy."

That was his story, and he was sticking to it.

"I was working on a sculpture of one of Fandom's local species," he added, nodding toward some tacked-up sketches of the alot of tires that had wandered onto the lot a few weeks back. "Figured, when in Rome, and all that."

... Okay.

Kaidan squinted at the drawing in question. "So... what is it?"

Look, it was a perfectly accurate representation of the mighty alot, okay? It wasn't Dean's fault if Kaidan didn't know it for what it was.

...

It wasn't like Dean had any idea.

"No clue," he admitted, shrugging. "But it's huge, and there are at least a few of them around the island. They seem to like places where there's a bunch of one thing. I've spotted a few of them hanging around the beach from time to time, though they're kind of more like sand, there. Or water."

"I've been off-planet for a while, but I'm pretty sure that's not ordinary Earth fauna," Kaidan said. He leaned away from the drawing. "It's probably a good likeness, but-- how does a small peninsula like this wind up with its own species?"

Beat.

"I shouldn't ask, should I?"

"On an island that rains sunblock?"

Dean shrugged his shoulders.

"I'm sure Darwin would have had a party if he'd ever stumbled across Fandom. There are fish with fur on them in the preserve, so I've heard. And the deer are teal. No clue about the flamingos, though."

Those were an introduced species, Dean. Don't fret over the flamingos.

"Maybe I'll head out into the preserve once I'm done with the jog," Kaidan said. He glanced at some of the other drawings. "...or maybe I should save that until it cools down a little."

"Barring some sort of cataclysm, I'm pretty sure the preserve will be there later in the evening, once the heat breaks a little," Dean assured him. "If you want to see the deer, I hear the best way to lure them out is to just keep talking."

They were kind of like the antithesis of deer, that way.

"...Really? Huh."

Kaidan... wasn't much of a talker. Most of the time.

"Yeah, I haven't seen much of them either," Dean replied with a shrug. "I think the... big... hairy..."

He waved a hand at his sketch.

"That was probably really the first of the local wildlife that I've ever spotted out here. I'm all for the great outdoors, but I guess when it comes to spotting the extra weird, I'm a bit out of touch."

"Yeah, all I'm thinking is that I need to walk around more," Kaidan admitted. "Is it usually this hot out here? We're in... Maryland, right?"

"We're in Maryland," Dean confirmed, "and I'm pretty sure this is some kind of national freak heatwave. The paper was saying that it was breaking records clear across the country. So... no, it's not usually this hot here. Thank God."

They were just... lucky this year. Or something.

"So I guess we're just lucky, huh," said Kaidan - not really agreeing with the narrative on purpose, but, well. "I forgot how hot it can get down south. Guess we'll have to hold out until September."

"That's only... pretty much the whole summer away. I'm sure we can pull through."

Freak blizzards were welcome to hit the island any time, Fandom. Really.

"Like I said, the heat doesn't really get to me," Kaidan said. "It's the... well, it's the seasons? I mean, I used to spend most of my time on a ship-- climate controlled, always the same."

"Ah, so it's the constant shifting that'll get you," Dean noted, nodding, and then re-filling his mug. "I can see how stepping into weather like this could be a bit jarring. More water?"

"Thanks," Kaidan said - automatically. "One more mug, then I'll head back out."

He kind of felt like he was drawing this out to... well, to have something to do, instead of sitting around his room thinking and trying to stave off a migraine.

Well, there were probably worse things to do than hang around a scrapyard, drinking complimentary water. Avoiding the migraine alone probably made it worth it, right?

"One more it is, then." Dean had the happy mug in hand and was filling it up in an instant. "Any part of the island that appeals to you most yet?"

Small talk. It was what was for dinner.

Considering the vast seas of experience Kaidan had with migraines?

Yeah. It was worth it.

"I just moved into a new place," Kaidan offered. "It's not too bad. You staying nearby?"

"Yeah. Guy, Samus and I are just a few streets over, on Chimera Court," Dean confirmed. "The only house down that street, actually. Next door to the little French cafe and the community center. And you? Staying at the hotel, or did you find some housemates in town?"

"Got an invite to a place at 33 Apocalypse," Kaidan said. "It's nice. And cheaper than the hotel, which is what the Alliance likes to hear. I've only met one of the other tenants, but he's good people."

"Oh, yeah? Maybe I've met him," Dean mused, raising his mug as he passed Kaidan's back to him. "I walk down that street pretty often on my way to the Perk, and you're actually pretty much around the corner from me."

Clearly, this called for some kind of block party or something. One fuelled by coffee and food.

... But seriously. It's way cooler up here and even the cats are puddles of furry goo.

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McCoppin Scrap, Sunday, All Day

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OOC!