Summary:After dinner, Nathaniel walks Kelly home and they run into trouble Log Info:Storyteller: None |
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One of the upsides to a good Italian place is that the portions are really big. And pasta, being so carb-heavy is certainly filling. Despite all that, Nathaniel definitely had room for desert and Kelly introduced him to tiramisu. She might have started a love affair between him and eating.
When they leave, Kelly doesn't let Nathaniel stand around looking awkward about 'what now'. She (a bit carefully, no make sure of no additional spontaneous interfaces) loops her arm through his and heads home with him in tow.
"I'm not going to let you live in the park." Kelly gives him a stern look as they walk. "And after getting… bits of your memories, I'm pretty assured you're not going to steal all my stuff or murder me in my sleep so… You can stay with me."
Ever seen a guy melt in complete pleasure. Between the tiramisu and the coffee, Nathaniel might as well been a little puddle of future guy when it was all said and done. Though she takes his arm and starts to lead him off, there's a bit of confusion and a laugh. Nervously, it seems.
"Yeah. Everything seems really odd about this place. But I don't think I'd want to steal from you even if I could." The stern look brings a chuckle. "But I promise to behave." he assures her as they walk along. "I was going to follow the other ones home, but after one of them stuck a gun in my face.. well, I don't think I was going to feel very welcomed there."
"You can't be so far from home, be it space or time and not have things feel very unfamiliar." Kelly says, musing, and then chuckles at his assurances. "Even if you were to take stuff for me, I don't think you'd know what to *do* with it. And if you need money, I bet our computer systems are a bit of a joke to you and money is all just data these days." Which has her thinking. "You don't have any sort of ID or legal presence, do you?"
His story about his arrival and those he met gets a frown of disapproval. "Well. Doesn't sound like the folks you met were any sort of heroes then." One thought leads to another and then she looks up at him as they walk. "You said the guy you were fighting to sucked back to where he came from. Are others likely to come after you here?"
"Yeah. I was trying to figure out the whole monetary system.. I mean, it seems just.. odd." Nathaniel admits. He has a lot to figure out. "Like, you paid more tonight than for the meal itself. Was that something you were supposed to do?" he asks her, his eyes glancing over to hers for a moment. Then perhaps in a moment of bravery, his hand moves to finds her gloved one again. Holding her hand reminds him that he's grounded here. That this isn't some strange simulation.
"And the data, it's like looking at Egyptian heiroglyphics, all those ones and zeroes." he offers to her before he shakes his head. "I don't think a school ID counts?" comes the amused question. "Though it's all embeded within .." he trails off at that, and sighs. "I studied the heroes of this time when I was younger. The Avengers have statues - Captain America, Iron Man.. but I didn't recognized any of the people that showed up." They weren't even the mutants that he had read about.
Though when she asks will others come after him, his hand tightens in hers for a moment. "I don't know. I won't think so.. but I don't want you in trouble, Kelly." he admits quietly, his brown eyes meeting her green ones in slight worry of the young woman. As much as he has enjoyed her company, he doesn't want to her in trouble,
Kelly Dehaven squeezes his hand reassuringly. "Well, we're not going to operate under 'what if'. We'll just deal with anything as it comes up."
There's a light laugh as he voices his confusion over their 'antiquated' ways. "Don't worry. I have confidence you'll figure out the day-to-day stuff. Just… careful of what you read on the internet, hmm? A lot of it is wrong."
That he didn't recognize anyone that showed up gets a slight shrug. "There's a lot of costumed sorts in the city, especially after the attack. The Avengers are here, but I think they tend to respond to like, city-scale threats most of the time. We've got everything from a guy that dresses like a bat down in Staten Island, to a guy that thinks he's a spider over in Queens."
Without warning, there's the sound of shots fired. A bit up the street there's the sudden sound of screaming and glass breaking while two ski-masked men spill out onto the street with guns in hand.
"Attack?" That brings a rise of his brows. "You mean the Great War's already begun…?" he starts to ask Kelly, "Spider-Man. I remember reading about him." But he's not going to go any further on that discussion, when the sound of firing shots rings out and the men come around the corner.
And for the first time, Kelly gets to see exactly how neuorkenetic armor reacts - from the belt, the armor seems to flow from him, forming around the young man - the red and silvers of the armor taking shape.
When it finishes, Kelly will recognize the design - it seems that the nerdiness is free-form when it comes to it. The red and silver of a young version of the Iron Man Mk. 2 armor stands next to Kelly - but only for a moment as he rockets forward, interposing himself between the two criminals and the woman.
Kelly Dehaven looks down the street at the sign of gunfire, green eyes going wide. She doesn't have any time to do anything more before Nathaniel's armor starts to flow up and over him, which gets a squeak of surprise and spurs her into action. Which would be ducking off to the side for some damned cover, even if Nathaniel's interposing himself between them and shooting off down towards the danger.
"Nathaniel! What are you doing?!" She whisperyells at him while ducking behind some concrete stairs. The shooters are scrambling for their vehicles when there is the sudden appearance of the costumed variety. The guns are instantly turned on Iron Lad as they squeeze off several shots his way.
The bullets slam into Iron Lad - and they're /stopped/ cold. If Kelly could see it, she would see the slugs just floating there in mid-air. "Keeping you from getting hurt!" comes the yell back to Kelly. "And the name is… Iron Lad." Raising his hand, he spreads it palm open. "Now, for these two.. just a little bit of magnetic force…" And the beam that comes around his hand is colored in purple, as it wraps around the men's weapons, ripping them out of their hands and crushing them.
"You two should go ahead and surrender now." he orders. "I mean, we could do this the much harder way, but I don't want to hurt you. And cause you to have to go to the hospital." Nathaniel sounds /confident/ when he's in the suit - as if he's taken on a whole other persona. "Your choice, though."
"But *you* could get hur—" Kelly squeaks and ducks again as the shooters fire on Iron Lad. Not like she could see the bullets stopped from this angle, but the fact that he's unhurt is pretty apparent as he disarms them. Kelly peeks out again to watch, not giving up her cover.
The crooks do that thing where they stand there in bafflement as they're disarmed before looking at each other and then, instead of listening to Iron Lad, they rush towards their car to make an escape. In the distance, there's the sound of sirens. Perk to living in a nice part of town.
It's the sound of sirens that spurs Kelly into action, coming out of her cover and running over towards Nathaniel to grab at whatever she can reach. "Unless you want to spend all night repeating your story a million times for the cops, that's our cue to go too!"
The crooks make a run for it. Nathaniel knows he can stop them, it would only take a moment, some applied physics, and a little magnetism, he could rip out the differential, stop the engine — but he doesn't get a chance to make any of those decisions as the young woman grabs his arm. And when she tells him to go - he goes.
But it's not running, he pulls her to him and lifts her off the ground with ease before cradling her close. "Hold on!" he tells her before he rockets skywards, taking off into the night sky.
After a few minutes in the air and rocketting away from the area, he pauses as he realizes something.
"Where are we going again?" he asks, the silver face that's so much like Nathaniel's own as glowing yellow eyes meet her green ones.
If he thought she squeaked in surprise before, that's nothing compared to when he lifts her up and shoots into the air with her. She throws her arms around his shoulders and holds on for dear life as the ground falls away beneath them, burying her face against his neck as though if she doesn't see it, she's not really flying. Well. Being carried while flying.
When those minutes have passed and she hasn't suddenly and rudely met the ground again, she lifts her head to first look around, and then at him. She lets go enough to smack his chestplate with one hand. "You scared the *life* out of me!" Then she winces and shakes her hand. Owwwww.
She rattles off her address for him while caaaarefully leaning over and looking down a bit. Well, carefully as though she might fall. What she's not so mindful of is that leaning out like that causes her sleeve to ride up, putting metallic flesh in direct contact with his armor.
"You said we had to leave - it was the most expedient way to do it…" Nathaniel starts to respond, before she smacks him, and his face pulls in concern. "You alright?" he asks, as the armor comes away from his face, so that they're eyes meet again. "Didn't mean to scare you." And then she's rattling off an address, and he nods his head as he starts to orient to the GPS on the local link — when her bare skin touches his armor.
She said she needed to touch to get a psionic link - usually the head. As the armor is neurotically linked to Nathaniel, the connection is immediate and intense. His whole life is laid bare to her - not just that, but the history of his world as he knows it - of the Great War - a war that nearly destroyed the world before the man known as the Benefactor arrived, bringing peace to the land - stopping all wars, creating a peaceful utopia for the most part.
Then Nathaniel's life - youth, such high marks in school and his genuis and then Morgan. The bullying, the pushing around, the abusing of him. Then the arrival of the visitor. The man that shared the armor with him- the armor that bonded with him quite easily and neatly. She knows that part already. What she may not realize is that her closeness to him has his heart racing as he finally orients and heads towards the apartment.
In the give and take, as Nate's neuorkentics are feeding her his history and life, his is querrying her, finding out about her, the world, trying to adapt, get them used to the world they are in now.
Kelly Dehaven doesn't normally just jump into someone's life. Honestly, she hasn't used that side of her powers much, so it's much less controlled than her actually more limited ability with machines.
She's suddenly dropped into his life, and it's a good thing he's holding her else she might have fallen down. Instead, like grabbing a live wire her hold on him tightens, which just keeps the connection open. Certainly, her conscious mind can't keep up with all of it. Most of it is a jumble she'll need to tease apart to make heads or tails of but she gets those flashes of highlights.
The unexpected connection is left open, Kelly never having dealt with anyone trying to reach back into her mind to learn to put up any sort of internal firewalls. Also, she's hella distracted by the deluge of information. It isn't hard for his systems to peruse her memories like any other sort of data files to see the Kelly's background from an affluent family able to support a ravenous intellect. Like him, much of her life has been focused around school and excelling, but unlike him her peers were all much older so there was less of the physical bullying.
Perhaps of more interest to his neurokinets are the background bits of her life. The day-to-day things. Social conventions. American culture. The history of the Avengers in the headlines.
As they combine and share network to network, the sudden feedback from Kelly's own kinetics causes a neural overload - sure, Nathaniel's /armor/ can handle the transfers, but it's eagerly trying to show everything it found to him - and he's not ready for it. There's a shared feedback from between the two, and it sends Nathaniel tumbling.
It's a good thing they were already near the apartment as Nathaniel manages to turn himself at the last moment to crash into the apartment's rooftop as the two slide along the ground, the armor moving to cocoon the pair. Only once they have hit the ground and come to a stop, does it allow them to free the pair, and Nathaniel lies there, staring over at Kelly as he catches several breaths. "Are you alright?" he asks her.
The crash had the upside of jostling Kelly loose from Nathaniel, breaking the link. As they land, Kelly's left lying there a moment, staring up at the evening sky. "I think my brain ate too much."
Another long moment and then she scrubs at her eyes with the back of one hand and pushes herself up into a sitting position, taking the time to do a self-assessment. "Uh, yeah. Don't think anything's busted." She looks over to him. "You?"
Kelly lifts a hand and cradles her head a bit. Ow. Note to self, internal firewalls so they stop having these uncontrolled moments. "Sorry. Guess you were right. We are kinda dangerous to each other." She seems contrite. "I didn't mean to go digging into your head… Was it your head? Kinda?" Her own brain tries to make sense of it, having never run into that kind of blend of mind and machine. It's not fitting into the usual boxes of How Things Work.
"Yeah. Armor's part of my head, and stuff.." Nathaniel considers for a moment, and then he holds up a hand. "Can I try something?" he asks her. It takes a moment, but the armor folds back down into it's belt. Reaching down, he takes off the belt, and sets it aside. "May I?" he asks, reaching for the unprotected part of his arm.
Because well, he needs to know. If he touches her without the belt, and things get weird, he may just very well run away, so he doesn't hurt her anymore. It is dangerous. And he doesn't want to be a danger to her.
There's a bit of hesitation as Kelly mulls it over, and then she nods. "At least we're on the ground now. Can't fall too far." She jokes. She pushes up her sleeve a bit more, her arm a bit reminiscent of his faceplate. Chromed metal but flexible. "Maybe you missed it, but I'm prone to spontaneous experimentation." She says dryly, a reference to the incident which got her her powers in the first place.
"Is that all you're spontaneous at?" Nathaniel asks her playfully, though perhaps that was more to hide the nervousness than any bolster at the idea of flirting with her. Perhaps. There's a shaky breath as he sits up on his knees, and then moves his hand. His fingertips lightly brush over the metallic skin, just to see if the connection between the pair is reformed. When it's not, his hand gently grips her wrist, just to assure himself they aren't about to start downloading each other all over again.
Kelly Dehaven lets out a laugh that's touched by the nervousness she felt as well. She lets out a sigh of relief. "OK. Good. That gives us somewhere to start so we can try to get a handle on this." She looks thoughtful. "It might be as simple as asking Jonas to *not* immediately allow a connection? Or y'know, something more restricted so I'm not getting everything and the kitchen sink thrown at me?"
At his joking Kelly smacks him again, though lightly. And not for fear of hurting her hands this time. She pushes herself to her feet, dusting herself off and looking around. "I've never come into my building from the *roof* before." She says absently before shaking her head. "Come on."