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Gar and Shen - Backdated
Shen invites Gar to join her for a little flying, and they make plans for the activist club.
Shen jogged up the hallway when she noticed the green boy a little ahead of her. "Gar, wait up!" She grinned at him when she reached him, barefooted, in her usual shorts and racerback tank top. "Hey. It's too beautiful a day to spend it inside. Wanna come fly with me?"
The day was beautiful, with just enough wind that it would be fun up there, and Shen had yet to go flying with Gar. Clearly this was meant to be.
Gar was wearing jeans but was barefoot as well (grass felt great, as far as he was concerned) and a purple-and-grey striped shirt. He'd actually been meaning to go enjoy the weather with a good fly as well, and so when Shen caught up to him, he grinned at her. "Yeah! I was gonna go do some flying myself, but company's always great," he said.
"What were you thinking? Animal-wise," Shen specified as they fell in stride together.
"Tie between peregrine falcon and albatross," he said, as they walked. "I like the diving speed of the falcon, but I haven't played with how fun the wingspan of the albatross might be."
"And here I was hoping for a pterodactyl," Shen stated with an amused smile. "Birds of prey are the best, though. I'm totally not biased."
"I can do pterodactyl," Gar offered with a bit of a grin. "And birds of prey are fun. But I haven't done pterodactyl before."
"You haven't?" Shen asked with raised eyebrows. "You've got to try it!" Not literally, of course; he could do what he wanted. But come on, pterodactyl!
"I think I will," Gar said, already convinced, if only because Shen was so enthusiastic about it. It was contagious. "I only shifted into it once, and then I saw a village in the distance and I didn't want to scare anyone. But I think we're pretty remote out here."
"I'm pretty sure people would've noticed the flying teenagers," with or without wings, "if we weren't," Shen assured him with a grin. Pterodactyl was a go! "How big are pterodactyls, anyway?" She'd always pictured them as bigger than humans for sure, but not all dinosaurs were big. Maybe they were chicken-sized. That would be a letdown.
Gar pulled out his smartphone and started googling. "Good question," he said, as he did some searching. "This'll just take a sec. Believe it or not, I'm not really a dinosaur expert. Parents were biologists, not paleontologists."
"How big were you when you shifted into it?" Shen asked curiously, and opened the front door, holding it for him before following outside.
"This might sound weird, but," he chuckled, as he looked up images. "It's hard to tell, sometimes, if I don't have something relative to compare myself to. I think I was about the same size as I normally am? But it's hard to tell, sometimes." He held up his phone, showing a comparison that made it clear that pterodactyl adults were pretty small.
"Looks like they're about bird-sized. Which isn't surprising. Big things have a hard time flying."
"Hey, we do all right, thank you very much," Shen told him with a chuckle. So, less cool than she'd expected, but whatever. It'd be fun anyway.
He chuckled and started doing some more searching. "Well, maybe I can find something else that's bigger. But yeah, I can be a dino-chicken."
Now that they were outside, Shen stretched her wings slightly, and they bristled before settling down again. "Dino-chickens are still super cool. Because dinos."
"Yeah, dinosaurs are really fun," he said, stretching his arms before his form melted and shrunk into the form of a green pterodactyl, coming up roughly to Shen's knee. He let out a croaking 'squak!' to let her know he was ready to fly.
Shen grinned. Her hands and feet shifted into talons as she took a few running steps, then launched into the air, a smooth take-off she had perfected by now.
Gar's takeoff was a bit less graceful, but hey, he wasn't used to the form, but the mode of flight wasn't something he was unaccustomed to on his own. He wasn't as fast as Shen could be, at least not right now. But he was trying to keep up as best he could.
Shen slowed down when she noticed that Gar was lagging behind some - and then she slowed down even more, and playfully swiped up at him, ready to get out of the way if he couldn't get out of hers first.
Gar did a swift little roll out of the way, all the while thinking to himself There was a bigger version of this, I could've sworn. In that book of dinosaurs. It wasn't a pterodactyl, though. It was similar... He was searching his memory, and then he remembered. Pteranodon. Right, because the wing ratio was similar to an albatross... That's why he'd had albatross on the brain, maybe.
Out of his roll, Gar's form twisted and became larger, wings unfolding to six meters, his standing form getting to be that of a full-grown human male. He let out a louder, more guttural "squak!" as he gained altitude, going after Shen.
Shen laughed in delighted surprise. "Now you're talking!" she yelled over at him as he rushed her. She dropped, checking over her shoulder whether he would follow her.
With a few heavy wingbeats, Gar changed course to follow her. He wasn't much faster in this form, but he was big and that was exciting. Besides, she was clearly impressed, and he liked that.
Shen dropped low, razing the ground for a dozen meters before shooting back up into the sky, zigging and zagging this way and that to see how well he did.
Gar wasn't quite as daring, but he got close to the ground, giving his wings plenty of clearance as he flapped back upward. Flying as something this large was hard, but it was built for it... ish. He didn't do the zigzags like she did, but he at least was trying to keep pace with his speed. It was clear she was having fun, at least.
They played around a while longer, and eventually Shen landed easily on the grounds, sweaty and happy as she smiled up at the arriving... whatever this larger flying dinosaur was called.
The flying dinosaur came in for a lazy landing, and the form melted into Gar's, and he flopped down, breathing heavily and sweating a little as he lay on the grass. "That was fun!" he said, breathing heavily. "Pteranodon! It's... got a similar wingspan," he said, spreading his arms wide and leaving them to lay on the grass. "To an albatross. Must've been... why I was thinkin' albatross. Or somethin'."
"Pteranodon," Shen repeated, to commit the word to memory. "Gotta remember that one." She joined him on the grass, lying on her stomach with her wings spread slightly across her back. "You were awesome!"
"Not as awesome as you," he returned, sort of breathless. "Beating wings that big is hard work! You must be really strong," he said. "To be able to fly that fast."
"I'm built for speed," Shen replied, and then had to laugh at how action-movie-clichéd that sounded. "Whatever. I mean, my mutation. I'm still not as fast as I'm going to be."
Gar caught that bit, and he chuckled. "It's still awesome," he said. "Your agility is... really amazing, too," he said, giving a sigh and curling his toes a few times. "Phew. Gonna need a nap after that," he chuckled. "I haven't worked out that hard in a long time."
"You should come out and fly with us more often," Shen suggested. "Agility takes practice. I've been up here every day since I could, and I've started hitting the Danger Room for agility programs, too."
"I should," Gar agreed. "I haven't even been in the Danger Room, myself. What's it like in there? Is it dangerous, like the name suggests?" he asked, chuckling a bit.
"Some of the programs are, but you can't get to them without supervision," Shen answered seriously. "I haven't tried those out yet."
"Maybe we can try them together, sometime," Gar said. "I wanna, y'know. Learn how to use my powers to help people. Protect people, if I can," he said.
"We can talk to one of the teachers," Noriko nodded, then paused. "Speaking of asking teachers for stuff. I was thinking back on what we said about starting an activist club. I really think it'd be a good idea. I was wondering about asking Stevie to be our faculty sponsor. What do you think?"
"I think we should," Gar said, sitting up. "Stevie's a good pick. She was there, y'know, when..." When the thing happened that he didn't want to talk about, much. "And she seems like she'd be down with it, and help us out, y'know?" he grinned at her. "I'm not gonna lie, I hadn't forgotten, but I was just.... figured you were busy with other stuff."
"I didn't forget either, I just - yeah," Shen admitted with a small moue. "Got busy with other stuff. But it feels even more necessary now. I'm sure most kids don't know much about the different fights of minorities, and we're gonna need that experience going forward. But yeah, Stevie - between having been there, and being a Black woman, I figured she'd be a good choice. We can ask her next time she's on campus?"
"Yeah, though I don't know when that is," he said. "Maybe she has a school email we could hit up, too?" he asked. "And we can use the school's message... board... thing... to help recruit members," Gar said.
"We can make an announcement on the boards once we've set up the club and we've got a time and place for our first meeting," Shen confirmed with a nod. "I've already mentioned it to a couple of people, and they were excited. I'm not worried about recruiting, we'll get at least a few people, and that's all we need to start."
"Yeah. I hope we can do a lot of good, or even just a little. If it makes people happier, and makes the world better, it'll... y'know, help us. People will see that we can do good things," Gar said, hopefully.
Shen frowned slightly at his conclusion. "Yeaaah. Not gonna lie, I'm not about making people happier. They've gotta let go of their privileges and grow. Checking your privileges is never a very happy thing to do." Nobody liked to realize that they were part of the problem.
"I mean, I get that, but... part of it is also, y'know... helping people who don't... have... privilege?" Gar was kind of wondering if he'd gotten the wrong idea about their idea, but he understood where she was coming from.
"Oh yeah, intersectionality, totally," Shen nodded. "That is way important. But I don't think it should be our priority. We can get to that once we've educated ourselves and figured out, together, how we wanna go about things. Gotta do this step by step, or it's gonna be a mess." She paused, wrinkled her nose. "Well, even more of a mess than it's bound to be anyway." She smiled cheerfully to counteract that conclusion.
"Well, I'll follow your lead," Gar said, nodding. She seemed to have a better idea of how to run things anyway. "And I'll help however I can."
"Honestly, we have to build our fight together, really," Shen stated. "We all have to be united if we want our message to be strong." She smiled again. "We're gonna have some fun meetings." Full of debates and arguments. Their own Dear Baseline People.
"Yeah," Gar agreed, nodding once more. He just hoped he wasn't getting in over his head. "Definitely have to put a strong front up," he agreed. "And we have to... y'know. Be careful. About making sure our message is clear, y'know? And that nobody misrepresents it."
"Oh, somebody'll misrepresent it," Shen stated without a second's doubt. "But we can do our best to keep that misrepresentation down to a minimum, for sure. This is gonna be hard, but it's gonna be awesome."
"Someone once said that things that are worth doing are usually hard," Gar said. "Or something like that. So at least we'll know it's worth it, right?"
"And awesome," Shen repeated with a grin. "I'm sticking with awesome. We're gonna be paving the way for future generations of mutants. How freaking cool is that?"
"Really awesome," Gar agreed, grinning wider. "It's gonna be great."
Shen nodded. "I can e-mail Stevie about it tonight." They'd see about the next steps once they had their faculty sponsor. For now, she grinned at him as she pushed up to her knees, stretching her wings. "You gonna have that nap, or you wanna come back up with me?"
"Nap can wait," he said, hopping up as well, stretching his arms some. "Gonna go for something faster, this time, I think. And maybe just a bit smaller."
"So I won't have to hold back this time, huh?" Shen stated with a playful grin, definitely up for a game of tag. As she pushed up to her feet, she touched his arm and told him, "You're it!" before flexing her legs to jump up, beating her wings to hurry off into the sky.
Ah, she loved this.
"Ah, jeez!" He laughed, though, as his form melted into that of a red-tailed hawk as he took to the sky. He'd have to get clever to even so much as keep up with her, but he'd try his best. If only he could shapeshift into a jet plane...
Shen jogged up the hallway when she noticed the green boy a little ahead of her. "Gar, wait up!" She grinned at him when she reached him, barefooted, in her usual shorts and racerback tank top. "Hey. It's too beautiful a day to spend it inside. Wanna come fly with me?"
The day was beautiful, with just enough wind that it would be fun up there, and Shen had yet to go flying with Gar. Clearly this was meant to be.
Gar was wearing jeans but was barefoot as well (grass felt great, as far as he was concerned) and a purple-and-grey striped shirt. He'd actually been meaning to go enjoy the weather with a good fly as well, and so when Shen caught up to him, he grinned at her. "Yeah! I was gonna go do some flying myself, but company's always great," he said.
"What were you thinking? Animal-wise," Shen specified as they fell in stride together.
"Tie between peregrine falcon and albatross," he said, as they walked. "I like the diving speed of the falcon, but I haven't played with how fun the wingspan of the albatross might be."
"And here I was hoping for a pterodactyl," Shen stated with an amused smile. "Birds of prey are the best, though. I'm totally not biased."
"I can do pterodactyl," Gar offered with a bit of a grin. "And birds of prey are fun. But I haven't done pterodactyl before."
"You haven't?" Shen asked with raised eyebrows. "You've got to try it!" Not literally, of course; he could do what he wanted. But come on, pterodactyl!
"I think I will," Gar said, already convinced, if only because Shen was so enthusiastic about it. It was contagious. "I only shifted into it once, and then I saw a village in the distance and I didn't want to scare anyone. But I think we're pretty remote out here."
"I'm pretty sure people would've noticed the flying teenagers," with or without wings, "if we weren't," Shen assured him with a grin. Pterodactyl was a go! "How big are pterodactyls, anyway?" She'd always pictured them as bigger than humans for sure, but not all dinosaurs were big. Maybe they were chicken-sized. That would be a letdown.
Gar pulled out his smartphone and started googling. "Good question," he said, as he did some searching. "This'll just take a sec. Believe it or not, I'm not really a dinosaur expert. Parents were biologists, not paleontologists."
"How big were you when you shifted into it?" Shen asked curiously, and opened the front door, holding it for him before following outside.
"This might sound weird, but," he chuckled, as he looked up images. "It's hard to tell, sometimes, if I don't have something relative to compare myself to. I think I was about the same size as I normally am? But it's hard to tell, sometimes." He held up his phone, showing a comparison that made it clear that pterodactyl adults were pretty small.
"Looks like they're about bird-sized. Which isn't surprising. Big things have a hard time flying."
"Hey, we do all right, thank you very much," Shen told him with a chuckle. So, less cool than she'd expected, but whatever. It'd be fun anyway.
He chuckled and started doing some more searching. "Well, maybe I can find something else that's bigger. But yeah, I can be a dino-chicken."
Now that they were outside, Shen stretched her wings slightly, and they bristled before settling down again. "Dino-chickens are still super cool. Because dinos."
"Yeah, dinosaurs are really fun," he said, stretching his arms before his form melted and shrunk into the form of a green pterodactyl, coming up roughly to Shen's knee. He let out a croaking 'squak!' to let her know he was ready to fly.
Shen grinned. Her hands and feet shifted into talons as she took a few running steps, then launched into the air, a smooth take-off she had perfected by now.
Gar's takeoff was a bit less graceful, but hey, he wasn't used to the form, but the mode of flight wasn't something he was unaccustomed to on his own. He wasn't as fast as Shen could be, at least not right now. But he was trying to keep up as best he could.
Shen slowed down when she noticed that Gar was lagging behind some - and then she slowed down even more, and playfully swiped up at him, ready to get out of the way if he couldn't get out of hers first.
Gar did a swift little roll out of the way, all the while thinking to himself There was a bigger version of this, I could've sworn. In that book of dinosaurs. It wasn't a pterodactyl, though. It was similar... He was searching his memory, and then he remembered. Pteranodon. Right, because the wing ratio was similar to an albatross... That's why he'd had albatross on the brain, maybe.
Out of his roll, Gar's form twisted and became larger, wings unfolding to six meters, his standing form getting to be that of a full-grown human male. He let out a louder, more guttural "squak!" as he gained altitude, going after Shen.
Shen laughed in delighted surprise. "Now you're talking!" she yelled over at him as he rushed her. She dropped, checking over her shoulder whether he would follow her.
With a few heavy wingbeats, Gar changed course to follow her. He wasn't much faster in this form, but he was big and that was exciting. Besides, she was clearly impressed, and he liked that.
Shen dropped low, razing the ground for a dozen meters before shooting back up into the sky, zigging and zagging this way and that to see how well he did.
Gar wasn't quite as daring, but he got close to the ground, giving his wings plenty of clearance as he flapped back upward. Flying as something this large was hard, but it was built for it... ish. He didn't do the zigzags like she did, but he at least was trying to keep pace with his speed. It was clear she was having fun, at least.
They played around a while longer, and eventually Shen landed easily on the grounds, sweaty and happy as she smiled up at the arriving... whatever this larger flying dinosaur was called.
The flying dinosaur came in for a lazy landing, and the form melted into Gar's, and he flopped down, breathing heavily and sweating a little as he lay on the grass. "That was fun!" he said, breathing heavily. "Pteranodon! It's... got a similar wingspan," he said, spreading his arms wide and leaving them to lay on the grass. "To an albatross. Must've been... why I was thinkin' albatross. Or somethin'."
"Pteranodon," Shen repeated, to commit the word to memory. "Gotta remember that one." She joined him on the grass, lying on her stomach with her wings spread slightly across her back. "You were awesome!"
"Not as awesome as you," he returned, sort of breathless. "Beating wings that big is hard work! You must be really strong," he said. "To be able to fly that fast."
"I'm built for speed," Shen replied, and then had to laugh at how action-movie-clichéd that sounded. "Whatever. I mean, my mutation. I'm still not as fast as I'm going to be."
Gar caught that bit, and he chuckled. "It's still awesome," he said. "Your agility is... really amazing, too," he said, giving a sigh and curling his toes a few times. "Phew. Gonna need a nap after that," he chuckled. "I haven't worked out that hard in a long time."
"You should come out and fly with us more often," Shen suggested. "Agility takes practice. I've been up here every day since I could, and I've started hitting the Danger Room for agility programs, too."
"I should," Gar agreed. "I haven't even been in the Danger Room, myself. What's it like in there? Is it dangerous, like the name suggests?" he asked, chuckling a bit.
"Some of the programs are, but you can't get to them without supervision," Shen answered seriously. "I haven't tried those out yet."
"Maybe we can try them together, sometime," Gar said. "I wanna, y'know. Learn how to use my powers to help people. Protect people, if I can," he said.
"We can talk to one of the teachers," Noriko nodded, then paused. "Speaking of asking teachers for stuff. I was thinking back on what we said about starting an activist club. I really think it'd be a good idea. I was wondering about asking Stevie to be our faculty sponsor. What do you think?"
"I think we should," Gar said, sitting up. "Stevie's a good pick. She was there, y'know, when..." When the thing happened that he didn't want to talk about, much. "And she seems like she'd be down with it, and help us out, y'know?" he grinned at her. "I'm not gonna lie, I hadn't forgotten, but I was just.... figured you were busy with other stuff."
"I didn't forget either, I just - yeah," Shen admitted with a small moue. "Got busy with other stuff. But it feels even more necessary now. I'm sure most kids don't know much about the different fights of minorities, and we're gonna need that experience going forward. But yeah, Stevie - between having been there, and being a Black woman, I figured she'd be a good choice. We can ask her next time she's on campus?"
"Yeah, though I don't know when that is," he said. "Maybe she has a school email we could hit up, too?" he asked. "And we can use the school's message... board... thing... to help recruit members," Gar said.
"We can make an announcement on the boards once we've set up the club and we've got a time and place for our first meeting," Shen confirmed with a nod. "I've already mentioned it to a couple of people, and they were excited. I'm not worried about recruiting, we'll get at least a few people, and that's all we need to start."
"Yeah. I hope we can do a lot of good, or even just a little. If it makes people happier, and makes the world better, it'll... y'know, help us. People will see that we can do good things," Gar said, hopefully.
Shen frowned slightly at his conclusion. "Yeaaah. Not gonna lie, I'm not about making people happier. They've gotta let go of their privileges and grow. Checking your privileges is never a very happy thing to do." Nobody liked to realize that they were part of the problem.
"I mean, I get that, but... part of it is also, y'know... helping people who don't... have... privilege?" Gar was kind of wondering if he'd gotten the wrong idea about their idea, but he understood where she was coming from.
"Oh yeah, intersectionality, totally," Shen nodded. "That is way important. But I don't think it should be our priority. We can get to that once we've educated ourselves and figured out, together, how we wanna go about things. Gotta do this step by step, or it's gonna be a mess." She paused, wrinkled her nose. "Well, even more of a mess than it's bound to be anyway." She smiled cheerfully to counteract that conclusion.
"Well, I'll follow your lead," Gar said, nodding. She seemed to have a better idea of how to run things anyway. "And I'll help however I can."
"Honestly, we have to build our fight together, really," Shen stated. "We all have to be united if we want our message to be strong." She smiled again. "We're gonna have some fun meetings." Full of debates and arguments. Their own Dear Baseline People.
"Yeah," Gar agreed, nodding once more. He just hoped he wasn't getting in over his head. "Definitely have to put a strong front up," he agreed. "And we have to... y'know. Be careful. About making sure our message is clear, y'know? And that nobody misrepresents it."
"Oh, somebody'll misrepresent it," Shen stated without a second's doubt. "But we can do our best to keep that misrepresentation down to a minimum, for sure. This is gonna be hard, but it's gonna be awesome."
"Someone once said that things that are worth doing are usually hard," Gar said. "Or something like that. So at least we'll know it's worth it, right?"
"And awesome," Shen repeated with a grin. "I'm sticking with awesome. We're gonna be paving the way for future generations of mutants. How freaking cool is that?"
"Really awesome," Gar agreed, grinning wider. "It's gonna be great."
Shen nodded. "I can e-mail Stevie about it tonight." They'd see about the next steps once they had their faculty sponsor. For now, she grinned at him as she pushed up to her knees, stretching her wings. "You gonna have that nap, or you wanna come back up with me?"
"Nap can wait," he said, hopping up as well, stretching his arms some. "Gonna go for something faster, this time, I think. And maybe just a bit smaller."
"So I won't have to hold back this time, huh?" Shen stated with a playful grin, definitely up for a game of tag. As she pushed up to her feet, she touched his arm and told him, "You're it!" before flexing her legs to jump up, beating her wings to hurry off into the sky.
Ah, she loved this.
"Ah, jeez!" He laughed, though, as his form melted into that of a red-tailed hawk as he took to the sky. He'd have to get clever to even so much as keep up with her, but he'd try his best. If only he could shapeshift into a jet plane...
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