Chapter Text
There is someone on Stusan Trololol's beloved airship.
Not something, she feels instinctively, though it takes a few seconds for reasons to crystallize from the feeling. A shadow somewhere is wrong, but in a smooth way, not angular. The smell of the air inside is slightly off—in a way that further contemplation renders strange, like somehow they made cleaning fluid smell cute. The feel on the floor through her soles is correct, which momentarily throws her off; the weight distribution is the same as it ought to be.
Somethings in this world rarely float. Someones, though—that's another story. Especially someones who use bats and play in stadiums.
Stu could turn on a light and solve this now, but curiosity stays her hand. No one's ever sneaked onto the Seagull before. No one's cared. Which isn't what she's used to, but this year, this season, no one's been fighting epic sky-battles. That's a hard enough adjustment, but people aren't even curious.
It seems like people generally just don't take to the skies in this half-drowned world. What is, is on the ground, and people visit family and even date on VR-with-touch systems that her old world didn't have. Blaseball was one of the few exceptions; offline from time immemorial, she knew from Corn that they'd opened up broadcasting a few years ago, when they renamed it "Internet League blaseball." The games, though, were one of the few things on this Earth world to which people would travel. But only to the nearest stadium – VR projections handled away games, including simulating the weather. And some godlike working transported ILB players entering any stadium to the destination where they were meant to play. Magic seemed to have a handle on things.
So Stu's ships were always passion projects, but now they're truly the object of indifference. She'd been asking around for passengers, but other than Ziwa Mueller, who was going to visit Tyler Violet's grave in Whistler a week hence, no one wanted to go anywhere. Yet someone was on Stu's ship, apparently trying to stow away.
She sorts through the scents – benzyl acetate from the jasmine-pear perfume, shadowing fainter hints of ammonia and almonds – and suddenly guesses who this might be. Someone she'd actually quite like to meet, at least to sate her curiosity.
She'd like to call out, but she can't remember their name.
She wonders why. The blue-skinned Moist Talker is someone she knew from her other world, when she was a fan, soon renowned and powerful in her own field but still a fan of the gods' sport whose players did not naturally die. When she was playing rec games on skycity lots and running home afterward to her cabin, eventually the most executive suite with fine wine and two separate sets of notches above her bedpost for different kinds of conquests, but she would still watch, and watch until—
The memory is back, and she almost physically falls over.
Her own world, so different in other ways, but so uncannily parallel here. Tyler Violet incinerated by a rogue umpire – Tyler, Ziwa's best friend, the one she's going to help memorialize, but she never had the nerve to bring up the four-eyed player who sprinted with enviable speed out to the scene of the crime and started yelling at the homicidal umpire, while, behind, the flames only grew. Whose eyes went wide when they saw the umpire load another chunk of permanganate into their oxidization gun. Who couldn't get away in time.
The two had never played, not in all of season 5, and Stu has been preoccupied, with the ship, heists, with trying to work the ship into the heists, and, yes, with other personal things, but the point is that she hasn't had the chance to watch a single broadcast from a single other team. Not even watching playoff games, not even with the Talkers in and the Thieves at home – she's been too busy getting the ship ready. She was planning to catch up during today's long flight. It looks like she'll be starting now.
She takes a step forward, almost kicking over a bottle of hair-removal cream nestled in between a stack of emergency road maps Howell Franklin had in his storage closet and several vacuum-sealed pastries smuggled from Esme's contribution to the season afterparty on Day 99. Those aren't even the only rations on board. She had really, really been hoping to have a friend on board, but Corn had a business meeting, Briggs refused to believe Stu's reassurances that her very cool semi-rigid aerodyne was fire-resistant, Hotbox refused to go without Briggs, Esme had plans with her girfriend, and after a while she resorted to posting a signup sheet in the clubhouse, and obsessively checking it, even after the playoffs had started and most of the team had departed to some other Charleston using a team-specific magic trick that her teammates hadn't formally taught her yet, but Stu still knew.
There's time in the offseason, and she knows she'll get the Thieves on. But for now, she's glad for what she hoping will turn into company, and not just a Moist Talker running away. She hopes whatever interest sparked the expedition will keep them around long enough to have a conversation. After all, she's not quite sure if a determined, floating comet is something her semi-rigid aerodyne's envelope can keep in, even for a moment.
Stu takes several more steps forward, turns on a light – low, auto-adjusted – and is startled to see Simon Haley is still looking out one of the portholes, paying no attention.
She breathes, to steady herself. "Welcome a-boahd!" she says, too loud. She's doing the accent. The affected Cockney accent that she does with outsiders. She thinks maybe she doesn't need to be doing the accent, but it makes it easier to start talking if she isn't quite representing herself. "I'm the captain of this ship—"
"Stu Trololol," says Simon, smiling and turning. "Good to meet you. Pine said you probably wouldn't mind." You know Sebastian Woodman? She quickly wonders, then quickly realizes that she's heard this voice before, Simon's inside voice, so different, coming out of Seb's phone between games; reading poetry, laughing musically. Yes, ae knows Pine. "Do you, though? Mind?"
Stu pauses. Takes in the sheer normality of the situation, such as it is. The comet-person is floating a quarter-inch above the floor, dressed in a soft T-shirt and slacks, with a pendant, turquoise embedded in wirework, hanging around their neck. Ae is relaxed, and completely alive.
"I— no, not at all," she says, and as her nervousness drops, her accent lessens. "What brings you aboard the Seagull, though?"
Simon smiles again, wider, like ae's realized ae isn't going to get kicked off now. That this is not an interrogation. More like a dance, the kind celestial bodies are used to. "Is the name…?"
"Not what you're—probably thinking, right?" Though Farrell is cute, and kisses well. "My old crew actually came up with that one. Wrote it onto the side in huge, fuck-off letters. I'd gotten into the habit of rising late, some days, so safe was I in their hands, so they flew it around the city until all of Charleston knew the name, and by then I couldn't change it." Her accent's gone now.
"Your old crew? From… before, right? I remember an interview. You're from somewhere else."
"I am, yeah. I liked my world. I was satisfied in it. I don't think it was better, but I knew where… I belonged. Do you know what I mean?"
"Yes," says Simon with surprising vehemence. "So they thought… you were…" Simon looks slightly confused. Like ae doesn't know what they could possibly be making fun of.
"Loud, obnoxious and big-beaked," she says in a voice that doesn't match those things. She's still looking at Simon so oddly.
"I'm sorry," says Simon, heartbreakingly.
"It's a… badge of honor," says Stusan, a little haltingly, then finding her footing. "Seagulls go where they want, you know. Fucking free. And now I am, too." Season 5 finally over; Mooney helping with the fuel mix. "Do you…" Pointless to ask know what I mean? She knows why Simon is here. "You were stargazing."
"Yeah." Quietly.
"Do you… miss something, up there?" Or someone?
Simon seems suddenly very weary. "It's hard to explain."
"I'm from a parallel universe where I constantly duelled other lesbians for the throne of Charleston. Try me."
Simon laughs. "You know, fair enough. So… I was… part of something, out there. This huge, integrated intelligence. I tell people sometimes that I had a mother or a father or something up there, but it's more like I was plugged into the universe. And then I… wasn't. Everything that was me drifted away from all that, and I wound up here. So I find myself looking back a lot. Looking up. Pine hard you mention a special coating on the windows that reduced the light pollution."
"He remembered that? Shit." Stu couldn't stop talking about these little details, of course, but she'd just assumed no one was listening. She'd have to take Pine to a used bookstore when this was all over.
‘I thought maybe if I could see more clearly, I could… somehow see something in the sky, something that might help me figure out how to get back some of what I was. I've seen things, I think – but not clearly enough. And if I were everything that I was, I… maybe I could help, somehow. Save people."
"You're doing all you can. I can hear it in your voice." Stusan places her hand on Simon's back. Ae startles briefly, but quickly relaxes.
"But all the petitions, the League doesn't… the gods don't care."
"They don't. Not about us." It's not the right time for Stu to admit she hasn't been watching the broadcasts, doesn't know the details of Simon's activism in this universe. There will be time for that. Because Simon already saved aerself. She takes a deep breath. "They didn't give either of us a choice but to be here, but to play. But as long as you're here, as long as you're looking, and seeking, and striving, you're a part of this. And I want to say right here and now that I'll do all I can to find a way for you to get plugged back into that power. I don't know how it will work or what you need for it, but I will search high and low. Because if they don't want you have it, you should." Because if you're alive now, what else could change?
Simon's eyes… Stusan hadn't seen eyes do what they did. All four of them seemed to call up something from another universe into this one–a haunting beauty, a constellation, a fire-fierceness.
"That is very much what I want," ae says, taking Stusan's hand. "Thank you. And… maybe this is selfish of me, but honestly, I wish I was on your team."
"Well… hey, the fates work in strange ways. Maybe it'll happen." Stu shrugged. "In the meantime, I'm flying this thing all the way to L.A. I've been missing the views, and the tacos. If you're up for a day trip, let's go unhoist the moorings from the water tower and fly this joint."
Simon grins. The sun, just starting to rise, catches in aer eyes.
"Lead the way, Captain."