fandomtownies | Atlas Gym; Tuesday [06/13].

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Atlas Gym; Tuesday [06/13].

When Gladio got in early that morning to open the place up, one of the staff members was getting in their own workout before the usual Tuesday rushes started. Which was fine. It was great, actually, Gladio loved to see that initiative, but there was just....one problem.

The weight machine they were using....was squeaking.

"What--" Concerned, and hoping he wasn't going to have to deal with a lot of obnoxious equipment stuff today, Gladio went over to have a closer look and ask why it was squeaking, and the staff member didn't know and explained that they were all like that right now, and so naturally, Gladio shoo'd them off the equipment to go work free weights or something instead while he looked into it.

And that was when he discovered the rubber chicken. Expertly, cleverly tucked into the equipment for max squeakability.

Gladio moved to the next piece of equipment to discover the same thing, another chicken, and a very strong realization of what had happened here.

"Dammit! Prompto!"

And now to find out just how many machines had been rubber chickened, but, hey, at least it'd be easy to tell if someone started using one, and, maybe, just maybe, in retrospect, Gladio would have to agree that it was kind of funny.

Atlas is open! And squeaky!

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When Annie came in today, she actually took a moment to pause in the lobby to eye that noodle machine she hadn't taken all that much advantage of since it'd been installed.

And since she didn't want to actually break anything, she did try it with money first! Just once, but still. Gave it the good college try!

And then, when conventional means didn't result in victory, she took a step back and drew the machine's power into herself, keeping a light touch as she carefully controlled the flow of electricity to work the arm correctly.

It was possible something was flickering somewhere, to tip off anyone who might have been wary of any electrokinetic cheaters. Possibly.

That possible flickering did catch Gladio's attention, maybe just because he was definitely hoping that he didn't have to deal with some electrical issues on top of hunting down all the rubber chickens scattered throughout the gym that day, so when he spotted Annie with some ~~totally presumed~~ ill-gotten Cup Noodle^TM gains, he was actually a little relieved.

"Annie," he greeted, with a nod.

And the offer of a silver star sticker.

"Good to see you're feeling better."

Hey, if there were electrical issues, Annie would have been able to help with them!

Or at least diagnose them.

Or maybe make them worse. One of the three!

"Thank you, Gladio," Annie told him, maybe a little proud as she stuck the sticker up on one shoulder. "Diego treated you guys okay last week? Morning sickness continues to be bullshit."

And neither confined to the morning or the first trimester! Pregnancy was full of lies.

"You have my sympathies," Gladio said, and he meant it, especially because he really could only imagine the level of bullshit that morning sickness truly was, but it was still heartening to know that it wasn't so bad that she couldn't make it in today, too. "And Diego was great. Maybe not quite up there enough to boot Tiny out of his spot on the bartender ranking, but not too bad for what I assume was his first time."

It probably helped that Gladio didn't usually care what he drank, his bar nights weren't really about the drinking anyway.

"It was his first time," Annie confirmed. "Five was always the family bartender."

Which was sort of funny, considering Annie was, you know, literally a bartender when she wasn't superheroing.

"But I'll have to let him know he came in second to Tiny," she added, tsking. "Diego's competitive enough that he might insist on taking this week too just to try to improve his bartender ranking."

"Well, I'm always one for helping to motivate people to improve and get better," Gladio pointed out with an amused snort. "But you'll have to tell him Tiny's going to be pretty hard to beat. I even got extra umbrellas last night."

He wouldn't even bother suggesting that Diego try to elbow his way up enough to displace his two favorite bartenders, because that would be pretty much impossible.

"He gave you extra umbrellas just because?" Annie asked, eyes narrowing. "And here Tiny's always telling me that there's an umbrella shortage. I swear, he's so hard to read."

No, he just transparently didn't like Annie and never had.

"Well, the shortage was probably because he was saving them all up to put on the tiki hut," Gladio offered, and then had to grin a little. "It's amazing what a few well place compliments about a guy's art'll get you, though, apparently."

"I gotta, like, pick Eric and Lucifer and Octavia's brains about what goes on earlier in the week," Annie noted, tilting her head. "'Cause I always just come in to the installation on Thursday," or the lingering smell thereof, in some cases, "and I think he's sick of praise or something by then."

Yes, because surely Eric and Lucifer both heaped praise upon Tiny for his artistic expressions. Annie could totally see that.

"Maybe that's the secret," Gladio mused, "I'm usually getting in on the ground floor on Mondays, before all those compliments starts to grow a little thin."

It was complete coincidence that Summer breezed into the gym that morning rocking some yellow gear, but, in retrospect, it was pretty funny, wasn't it?

That coincidence almost made Gladio wonder if Summer and Prompto may have been in cahoots over this whole rubber chicken thing; they did work together, after all, and they had been doing some conspiring over Wednesday shenanigans...

Still, there were more important things to get to here, one of which was obviously their weekly training session, but also...

"I think I owe you a few of these," Gladio said, just holding out a small square of a gold star sticker sheet for her. He'd contemplated actually figuring out just how many he owed both her and Nell at this point, but realized that was going to be too much work to backtrack and do the math.

The first thing Nell heard when she entered the gym was the squeaking and she stopped in her tracks, then burst out laughing when one of the employees pulled out a rubber chicken from the equipment.

Nell was looking a little banged up after her session with the warrior women yesterday, but it had left her very cheerful. "Are these prizes you get for working out?" she asked.

"No," said Gladio, with the faintly withering grunt of a man who had a whole day of pulling squeaking chickens from equipment ahead of him, but the gruffness did sort of soften into a grin as Nell did set him up pretty good for continuing with, "But these are."

He handed her a small square of several gold stars on a sticker sheet.

"And you've got a little bit of a backlog."

And there, with that, all of his regulars were properly being stickered each week.

"I'm pretty sure you can thank Prompto for the chickens, though."

Nell laughed at that. "Oh Prompto. His daughter must be sleeping better if he's rested enough to do all this."

Then she looked down at the square of gold stars with mild confusion. "Thank you...? Um... What are these?" This would be Nell's first exposure to stickers.

"I'm not sure about that," Gladio huffed, shaking his head, but there was a faint grin in all of it. "This definitely could be the result of too many ideas and not enough sleep.

"And they're stickers," he explained. Thank you, Gladio, very helpful. But he seemed to realize that and rolled his eyes a little bit in an almost self-deprecating way. "They started as a joke as a motivation to get Marc in, but then other people started getting wind of 'em and asked about them. And now almost all my regulars were getting them except you and Summer, because the two of you have been coming in consistently for so long without needing the motivation, but you two are probably the ones who've earned the the most, so I'm making up for lost stickers."

And it was generally just getting harder to keep track of who earned what stickers, so if he just did it across the board, it made his life easier.

"Oh..." She looked at the square. "Well, thank you." Not quite sure what to do with them, since she still didn't know what they were for, she just smiled at him and tucked them away in a pocket. "I appreciate the thought."

Gladio nodded, with a faint grin for Nell's apparent bewilderment at the whole concept, which was pretty damn endearing, too, and not even just because it solidified his theory that the last person who would need the stickers for motivation was probably her.

And now that that was out of the way, he could see a bit more of the signs of her current condition and asked, with a lift of his brow, "Tai Chi get a little intense last night?"

Oh, and now she was beaming!

"We got to go to Lana's world again," she said, "Because there were problems elsewhere, which is sad, but I got to spend time sparring with her warrior woman again. I'm a total beginner compared to them, but I've gotten better and they certainly have taught me a lot!" Including what it felt like to be welcomed into a group that supported her as a woman and wasn't afraid to knock her around to teach her skills.

"I always feel so much more confident about myself and what I can do after I work with them," she said. "It's pretty incredible that they like me and welcome me whenever I come to see them."

"I don't see what's so incredible about that," Gladio said, but, well, he also liked Nell and would welcome her whenever she came to see him, so...but even more, found it much more mystifying that anyone wouldn't. He grinned at her, both for the chance to sneak a little compliment in there and also just to see her looking so pleased an excited. "Anything particular new you picked up on while you were there to show off?"

"Never had many woman friends, 'cept Lana and a librarian back home - who was more an acquaintance and a maybe someday friend," Nell said. "Most of 'em back home just looked down there noses at me 'cause I was living outside the church and causing so much ruckus among the menfolk."

She considered. "Not sure how well it'd work against someone your size, but we worked some on flinging ourselves along the ground to take out someone's legs."

"I have a feeling," Gladio muttered, with a shake of his head and a slight sigh for the fact that any mention of Nell's home would probably always get him a little tense and wanting to fight something, "that most people back there would actually look down their noses at a lot of things..."

Though at least they might need to get themselves a ladder if they wanted to pull that on him.

"And that's actually work great on someone like me," he added. "I'm pretty top-heavy. Part of why when I fight, I try to keep low to the ground. Bigger they are, harder they fall, right?"

"You wouldn't be wrong," Nell said with a rueful smile. "Especially on people like me who speak up and won't follow their 'rules'."

She looked him up and down (not a hardship) and nodded. "I s'pose you're right. I'll just have to be real careful to get out of the way so you don't land on me."

"They sound like pretty terrible rules, anyway," Gladio said, wondering if that could have possibly be any more understated, and he looked at Nell now with a faint grin on his face. "Good on you for giving 'em hell.

"But yeah," and now he'd even worked up to a faint chuckle, "I do kinda give the idea of 'fall damage' a bit of a different spin, huh?"

Nell put her hands on her hips and looked up at him. "I'll chance it," she said with a smile.

See, now, hands on hips like that was just, categorically, an unfair move.

"You know I should probably be advising you to take it easy today," Gladio hedged, more like he was covering his bases rather than making a genuine argument. "I got a feeling those warrior women didn't give you just a light run."

"Hmmm... Maybe just once?" she suggested with a teasing glint in her eye.

Steve was there for his sticker! And a workout, but he was pretty goal oriented. "Gladio," he said, smiling as he came in.

"Steve," Gladio greeted back, and, look at that, there was a gold star headed his way.

He thought about putting it off and making him wait for it, but he'd had enough silliness with all the rubber chickens, the most recently located and extracted one still in his hand.

"How's it going?"

"Well, I'm not holding a rubber chicken, so better than you?" Steve teased.

"Are you telling me," Gladio said, giving a Steve a vaguely affronted and surprised look, "that having a rubber chicken on hand isn't a significant lifestyle improvement?"

"Well, maybe not for my life, but it's bringing you joy," Steve replied with a grin.

"I mean," said Gladio, now holding out the chicken for Steve, "don't knock it until you try it, man."

Steve gave it a good squeak. "We had these on Wednesday and then again in paintball," he said. "Is this going to be Fandom's summer fad?"

Gods help them all if it became the new singing fish.

"I bet the Wednesday thing is where Prompto got the idea," Gladio murmured with a shake of his head. "And hopefully this is the last we'll see of 'em, but not that you've mentioned it..."

Steve would be happy to help send them all to the moon!

"I'll warn the department about calls," Steve said, laughing.

"I guess we should be grateful, then," Gladio snorted, "that we'reb getting you guys in on the ground floor on the now inevitable rubber chicken invasion."

Better or worse than 80 year old Chinese women? Only time may tell.

Maybe rubber chicken-wielding Chinese old women?

"I'll have to see if we have a plan already written for that," Steve said with a grin.

Marc arrived at his now usual late morning time. He wasn't sure what he was in the mood for today. However, upon seeing the chickens everywhere, he was now wondering if the punching bags would squeak when you hit them.

This wasn't necessarily a bad thing if so.

Oh, gods, please don't tell him Prompto even put chicken in the punching bags.

But if the thought had occurred to Gladio, he would not at all have been surprised. He'd just been too irritated/impressed by how he'd managed to even get them into the machines the way he did.

But, whether or not the afternoon crowd would be graced with a some well-timed squeaking to the tune of Marc's fists, he was still here, and so Gladio was still coming around at some point to offer up a gold star and a nod.

Marc took the sticker and added it to the next open spot on his water bottle. "So does somebody really like chickens or hate them?"

"Somebody," Gladio grumbled, "thinks they're hilarious, apparently."

And Gladio would actually have agreed if it had occurred anywhere other than his gym.

"Is it the chickens?" Marc asked.

Look, on this island you couldn't rule out rubber chickens doing this kind of thing of their own volition.

"No," Gladio sighed, "but just about as close as you could get."

Chocobo-butt haired son of an actual bitch.

"So, well," he added, his tone dismissive to mostly leave Marc to it, "if you find something squeaking, just let us know so we can come take care of it."

"Chicken or not," Marc said, by way of saying he would.

Stark was there again. He didn't want to ruin his routine or miss out on his sticker.

He headed for the elliptical, hopped off immediately after it started making terrible squeaking noises.

He was going for the weights instead. Maybe someone else would be there. For encouragement.

Gladio could have heard that squeak from across the gym. Thankfully, he wasn't that far away, so he could easily mark that elliptical for chicken-removal later, but, first things first.

"Sorry about that," he said, offering Stark's gold star out to him. "Prompto hid a bunch of rubber chickens in the equipment."

What a fun and normal thing to have to say!

"From Anakin?" Stark asked. Blaming Anakin was just expected at this point. "Why would he put them in the machines? Are the weights safe?"

"From the Wednesday thing, I assume," Gladio said, "yeah. And as far as I know, the weights are fine. And I'm sure he did it because he thought he was being hilarious."

And it would be! If it was happening to anyone else.

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Atlas Gym; Tuesday [06/13].

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