to protect and serve

[eudorapatch]

WHO: Detective Eudora Patch
WHAT: the face-to-face option for her network post, looking for clothes and ammo and other necessities, learning her environment by hitting the streets walkways
WHEN: whole month of July for most of it, though an immediate response to her network post would happen on the 15th, and a belated response can happen any time after that
WHERE: room 020, but also kind of everywhere?
WARNINGS: anything in response to her network post may contain detailed and blunt discussions of violence/death/dying - anything at all with her runs a small risk of her at least thinking about her own death. if this will upset you, please tell me so before we begin so that i can avoid it.

NOTES: I don't like brackets/action-spam. It's not natural for me to write that way, and I much prefer prose. I can read it just fine (but please don't make your bracket text super tiny) and don't mind if styles don't match. So you're welcome to tag me in action-spam, but just be prepared for my responses to come back in prose.

option A
After Patch makes her post to the network, she feels an odd moment of disconnect. What if no one responds? What if she is the only one feeling overwhelmed and out of her depth? What if she just aired her trauma, and she's the only one going through it?

Well, if she did, then she did. Can't change it, and wouldn't even if she could. Because she might not be alone. It might help someone else. Which makes it worth it.

She goes to the door of her room, unlocks it, opens it. It closes again on its own. Right. She opens it again, waits for it to try and close, and sticks her hand in the way. She's prepared to yank it back quickly, lest she lose some fingers, but the door halts its progress, presumably in response to whatever is blocking it. That'll work. She comes up with a little squat metal container that used to hold something, but now is only home to a vaguely musty smell. With that placed along the recessed metal track, it leaves the door to room 020 open about a foot, unable to lock, and accessible to anyone walking past.

option B
She doesn't have much. The clothes on her back, main weapon, ankle weapon, and a few extra clips of ammunition. Plus the junk from her pockets. Never thought she'd see the day when taking stock of her possessions would include a mental tally of 'eight mint lifesavers' but the universe seems determined to keep tossing up hurdles in her path. Well, bring it on. High school track about to pay off in a big way. Metaphorically. She checks her weapons, tightens her ponytail, and runs her fingers over the gentle ridges and valleys of her badge where it's resting under her shirt, like a talisman. Time to go learn her new neighbourhood.

option C
Also time to go shopping. If you can call it that. Some extra clothing would be a good start. Boots, jeans, and jacket she can make do. But a spare shirt, a change of underwear, and something to sleep in, that would be nice. Toothbrush, hair brush, maybe a book. Anything to keep her occupied.

option !
Wildcard! You know how this works. Come at me, bro! :3

15 July
afternoon - Ben comes to talk about how he knows Patch - room 020
also afternoon - Drake stops by for more cheery death talk - room 020
late evening - Cole waits until everyone else has come and gone - room 020

16 July
afternoon - finding out just what a tiny thing Peter is - R & D

Comments

[itsnotaonesie]

Peter just. Rolls his eyes. Ah yes, good, this might as well happen too.

He's not actually upset about jinxing it, after rolling his eyes like a TEENAGER, he gives her a grin.

"That's fine, I blame me too. Uhhh..." He pauses for a moment, rummaging around in a tool box for a moment. He's not really coming up with anything useful, sooo.

I'm uh, not coming up with anything useful right now. Gonna have to look for that stuff later. But uh, lemmie- I can- I can just get that for now. One sec."

Another perk of his weird sticky power, it makes unscrewing stripped screws super easy. Using his pinky, he's able to unscrew the stuck screw, which he then then presents to Patch triumphantly. Still just stuck to his pinky. TAA-DAAAA.

"...I think this is cheating."

[eudorapatch]

Patch grabs Peter's hand, not hard, but enough to get a good look at his fingertip. "Wait. No no no. We don't just get to pretend like that was totally normal. How did you do that?" She shakes his hand, trying to get the screw to fall off. It's stuck on there really good. What is happening here?

[itsnotaonesie]

"My magnetic personality?"

HAH. Well, he thought it was funny.

"It's just this thing I can do. If I wanna stick to something, I can just like, do it. Kind of a weird ability? But eh."

He lets the screw drop from his pinky, catching it in his free hand.

[eudorapatch]

Patch gives him A Look, even though the corner of her mouth is quirking up at the terrible joke. It's good, yeah. Bad, but good.

"You just stick to things you want to stick to? Anything you want to stick to." It's not that she thinks he's lying, but she does think he might be playing a prank. He did ask her about stripped screws just moments before she found one. So, she pulls her satellite phone off of her belt, and holds it up. "All right." She shakes it a bit. "Stick to this." Something he can't have prepped ahead of time.

[itsnotaonesie]

"You think I'm making this up? Why would anyone make up a stupid power like this?"

But he does stick to it, just reaches a couple fingers out and sticks 'em right to the phone and starts tugging it away from her. Bam sticky powers.

"So far I've been able to stick to anything. Ice is tricky though, because of the like, melting."

[eudorapatch]

Patch lets him pull the phone away, and it's so insane that her mind is having trouble with it. Which is silly, really, because Diego can curve knives in the air, and his sister can make people do anything she wants just by talking to them, and one of his brothers can teleport. So it shouldn't surprise her, but somehow it still does. It's just so trippy, and maybe it's also rude, but Patch is not even close to done yet. She grabs Peter's other hand, and presses his palm and fingers against her own, skin to skin contact. "Stick to me."

[itsnotaonesie]

Well this went from kind of amusing to super awkward in about three seconds, huh.

"Oookay, out of context this would be super awkward, just-- just saying."

But he does it, he sticks right to her hand and gives it a gentle tug. See, stuck. Super stuck.

[eudorapatch]

That earns him another Look, this time with a raised eyebrow. "You are a teenage boy, I am twice your age, I am also not a predator, and I know I just met you but I think that pretty firmly establishes the framework for our relationship. Also, if the word cougar comes out of your mouth, I will absolutely flick your ears, and I am the youngest child in a very big family. I know how to make that really sting." She says it like it's a legitimate scary threat, even though she knows full well that it's not. Which is sort of the point. Things are often not as awkward as teenage uncertainty attempts to make them. Not if the adult in the equation it's a total scum bag, and Patch wants to be very clear from the word go - Peter is safe with her.

He is also something of an oddity, and she's sure that's super difficult to deal with on top of puberty and the absolute horror show of awkward that accompanies it, but she can't just set aside the interest. "Is this normal where you come from? Is this just... a way humans have adapted to... something?" She honestly wouldn't even begin to be able to speculate on what they'd have to evolve these skills to offset. She's just spit-balling, here.

[itsnotaonesie]

"...Okay, fair, but you have to agree that asking someone to stick to them is weird no matter what the context is, right?" Because it is, it's totally bonkers. And also teenage uncertainty is absolutely making things more bonkers than they need to be, it's true. He unsticks from her hand and stuffs his hands into his pockets, giving her a shrug.

"But uh, no, this isn't normal at all. I'm kind of a special case? See, I got bit by this radioactive spider, but instead of something horrible happening, I like, mutated. Like- like turbo puberty, only with superpowers. I can do this sticky thing, I'm really strong, I've got like, a sixth sense now, which took some getting used to."

[eudorapatch]

"You were exposed to radiation, and instead of cancer, you got superpowers?" Man, his world sounds wild. Considering what goes on in her own world, what she has dated from her own world, that is saying something.

She is peering very closely at the spots where their skin is stuck together, trying to see just what it is that's making it possible. It doesn't exactly feel like an adhesive. She's stuck, but there isn't a residue that she can detect. "What kind of a sixth sense? Like... psychic vibrations, or something? Can you tell what's going to happen before it happens?"

[itsnotaonesie]

Peter shrugs and gives her a nod. Eeeeyup, that's about the long and short of it right there, Patch. "As far as I know, I'm the only person where I'm from to get bug based powers that way. There was a guy called Ant Man, though, but I'm not sure what his whole deal was. I remember he could get really tiny," he holds his thumb and forefinger up, about an inch apart. Dude got really tiny, "and then really huge. Like, building huge."

It's been a couple years and Peter only met him once. But anyway, Peter's getting a little off track. Time to focus.

"Uh, the sixth sense is more of a... I can feel when something's about to happen. Like, say, you throw something at the back of my head from across the room. I just know that it's there, I can feel it coming and I'd have time to get out of the way or catch it."

[eudorapatch]

She's just not even going to touch on Ant-Man. Can't, right now, actually. It's mental self-preservation at its most basic. "But you don't actually see the future. You couldn't tell me what I have hidden in my hand before I show you?" That would be incredibly useful. Just saying. Not that his abilities as he describes them don't sound super useful. "And your brain? Were you this smart before you got bitten, or is that new, too?"

[itsnotaonesie]

'Naaah, no. No seeing the future or psychic stuff. It's more like a physical thing. I haven't really had a chance to have this power analyzed by like, professionals? But, I dunno, I think I'd like to some day." Just to satisfy his own scientific curiosity, really. He's a gigantic nerd that way.

"Brain's always been me, though. That's the one thing that didn't change."

[eudorapatch]

Always a genius. Good. That doesn't make her feel at all inadequate or anything. Not in a bad way, though. She's still incredibly impressed, and very glad that he's here with them all.

"Physical. So you... what? Sense... air displacement?" Trippy as fuck, man. No doubt about it. Part of Patch wants to test it out by throwing something heavy at the back of his head. A much larger part of Patch is horrified that she wants to attempt to give a child brain damage. She honestly couldn't say which half is larger. It's been that kind of day.

[itsnotaonesie]

"I'm not... positive. It's not something I've been able to test with like, professionals or anything. The whole super powers thing was all a huge secret back home."

To be perfectly honest, Peter would most likely be the one to suggest something like that anyway. Don't feel bad, Patch. Besides, he has a really hard head, it's fine. If having a building dropped on him isn't enough to give him brain damage, neither is throwing a bowling ball at the back of his skull.

[eudorapatch]

"But I could blindfold you and throw something at your head and you would just... know?" She's not going to do it, but she can theorize about it. That's almost as good, right?

Something else, though. "Why was it a secret? Doesn't your world want heroes?" The Umbrella Academy kids had been celebrities, back before everything went wrong.

[itsnotaonesie]

I mean it's almost as good but it would be way cooler to see it in action y'know.

"Oh, we have other heroes, and their identities aren't big secrets. For me it's just... I'm still in high school, and I didn't want to freak my aunt out or put her in any kind of danger or anything. I've put a lot of bad people in jail, y'know? What if somewhere down the line they get out and decide they want some kinda revenge? If they don't know that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, then there's not a whole lot they can do."

[eudorapatch]

He wants to be the normal kid that Diego never got to be. Patch knows she gets attached to people way too easily, and that the quickest way to push most teens away is to be too eager to get to know them, but damn if this particular teen doesn't push some very endearing buttons. It's a tough one.

"Well. I think that's smart. The saddest thing about childhood is that so few people realize how wonderful it is until it's gone, and they can't get it back. Not that I'm calling you a child." She pairs the last statement with holding up her hands, palm out, in a gesture of good intentions. It also causes Peter's stuck hand to move, and this amuses her. "So, how about we un-stick and you can go back to showing me how to replace tiny little printer shocks, crazy genius spider kid?"

[itsnotaonesie]

Well the good news is that Peter isn't the kind of person who likes to push people away. If anything, he also gets attached way too easily. That's why it's always hard when people vanish from places like this.

"Nah, it's fine, I see where you're coming from," Peter says with a grin, un-sticking from Patch and turning back to what they were working on. "Toss me that screw driver over there and we can get started."

[eudorapatch]

Patch retrieves the requested screwdriver. Then she looks at it in her hand. Then she looks at the back of Peter's head. Oh man, she is going to be so furious if this doesn't work - with Peter for lying, but mostly with herself for buying it and then harming a teen.

She lobs the screwdriver at his head. It's a softball pitch, underhand, and very carefully released to put absolutely no spin on it, the heavier handle of the tool leading. If it does hit Peter, at least it won't be with the pointy bit.

[itsnotaonesie]

Peter can't help but grin just a bit when he realizes what she's done, easily moving his head out of the screwdriver's path and catching it just above his shoulder.

"Thanks. Next time I'll show you how good I am at dodging bullets."

He is 100% joking about that, at least. He doesn't actually wanna have to dodge bullets.