15120/The Return of Wally West

The Return of Wally West
Date of Scene:	11 June 2023
Location:	Main Room - Titan's Tower
Synopsis:	Wally West returns to Titans Tower! He flirts with Caitlin (much to her irritation) and manages to convince Nadia to teach him martial arts. There's also COOKIES!
Cast of Characters:	Wally West, Caitlin Fairchild, Nadia Pym-van Dyne

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Wally West has posed:
A sun shines a brand new dawn on a brand new day on Metropolis, City of Tomorrow! Through the busy streets, the clear blue skies, past the guy eating the hot dog after he just complained about the price for the past five minutes, there's a red blur speeding through the streets and shattering every police officer's speedometers for miles!

Blue electricity surrounds the shape as he moves, grabbing cats from trees, politely hurrying little old ladies across the street, and spray painting that free wall off of Harrison Way, the Titan's proximity alert starts going off as that blur zooms on down the main way through those large doors and spiraling up the staircase.

Now...he's in the main room in Titan's Tower, bouncing on the heels of his feet, doing a spin, and outstretching his arms. "Honey! I'm hoooooome!"

The sleek edges of his red suit has revealed a slight update. Golden metallic accents most notably made famous by one Barry Allen has been replaced with sleek silver/white markings, the mask has been cut in half to let his red hair pour out the top, and instead of the white film over his eyes, he's cut them out to let his eyes show freely. Gloves are fingerless and goggles rest on his forehead to account for things potentially flying into his eyes.

He sniffs the air. Anybody cooking anything? Maybe he should check the fridge...

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
Caitlin's in her happy place: the kitchen. She's in comfortably decent jean shorts and a pink racerback athletic tee. Her hair's been mussily pinned up and back to keep it out of her face (and out of the food). The redhead hums quietly to herself while rolling out some dough in a pile of eggs and flour mix. White dust clings to her black apron, blotting out the 'Come To the Dork Side' lettering sewn into it.

"Okay, next page," she says, and her AI drone dutifully flips a page in the heavy textbook she has propped up in front of her. Dog-eared and heavily marked with notes and tabs, it's clearly a working textboook she's referring to. "Golly, I wish this stuff wasn't so cut-and-dry," Caitlin complains to Nadia. "Memorizing the muscles of the hand is important, I guess, but it's just soooo tedious."

When Wally walks in, Caitlin's face lights up with a beaming smile. "Wally! You're early, I don't have the pies made yet," she says with an apologetic tone. "Can you wait a bit, get them fresh out of the oven?":

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
    Some days, let's be honest most days, find Nadia in a lab working one mind-bending world-changing SCIENCE! experiment or another, others find her consulting for SHIELD in their continuing efforts to thwart super science threats and keep the Earth safe, and still others find her off in space visiting her friends on the planet Rann and elsewhere, but not today. Today, she is doing none of those things.

    Instead the genius young woman, dressed in a red and black plaid skirt and a t-shirt that reads 'Just a Girl Who Loves Wasps' in stylized pink, is relaxing on one of the couches in the Titans Tower common room. /Somehow/ whether through food based coercion or tying her up with secret Amazon Invisible Rope, Caitlin appears to have convinced Nadia to actually take a break for once. "Yeah, we had to do a lot of memorizing anatomy in the Soviet Assassin Kindergarten. It gets a little more interesting when you get to the part where different stimulus to the different muscles and varying levels of pressure can make the body react in all kinds of different ways..." She says before realizing most people probably don't learn that part.

    Something on the cellphone like device in her hands begins beeping and she looks down at it about to say something about Tower sensors detecting an increase in certain exotic forces, but before she can open her mouth Wally is already there and Caitlin is greeting him. "Oh! Hi Wally!" She echoes Cait's greeting.

Wally West has posed:
*SNIIIIIIIFFFF*

"Ooohhhhh yeah! Is that my favorite smell in the world?" That's right. The cooking of eggs and flour. He blurs and he runs around Caitlin, smiling from ear to ear as he witnesses her work. "Caitlin, you do love me!" Of course, he's just being dramatic and doesn't really mean it romantically, just that he loves the smell of cooking when he comes back to the Tower. It means he can recharge! A Wally with no energy is not really fast. The metabolism just CHEWS through everything.

"aaaaaggghhh." He groans more humorously than anything. 'Alright, just for you, I'll wait." He shoots a smile and a wink at Caitlin and he turns to see Nadia lounging on the couch. "Hey hey hey! If it isn't my favorite Wasp. How you doing, Nadia? Staying active and quick with it? You know, I've been meaning to pick your brain about something, since you're a massive genius."

He clasps his hands together, rushing over towards her. "Is it /possible/ to teach me hand to hand combat? I feel like I'd be so much better at it if I had a good teacher, you know? In case my speed gets...non-speeded."

Pause.

"Yeah?"

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
Caitlin laughs merrily at Wally's brassy declarations. She pinks a bit at his lavish affections and sticks her tongue out at him while he saunters out of reach. "You know I do," she admits with a familial affection. "Not enough to do this more than once a week, though," she cautions. "As much as this is a de-stressor, I can't just hide from med school."

She finishes working over the dough, looking at the book in front of her while it's kneaded out. Once the desired consistency is reached she hauls over a few small pie tins. Using one of them as a stencil makes the job of cutting pie-shaped circles pretty easy. In short order she starts laying the base dough into the pie tins.

"Y'know Nadia, you could probably teach a really good combat course here," she suggests to the UNSTOPPABLE WASPETTE. "From what I know of military-style Sambo, it cuts out a lot of the polite rules and traditions of classic martial arts."

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
    Nadia blinks for a moment looking up at Wally from the couch as he speeds over to her. At first she seems puzzled, perhaps trying to puzzle out the connection between being a genius and teaching hand to hand combat. Caitlin brings her attention back to the conversation at hand though.

    "I'm not sure..." Nadia hesitates. "What exactly do you want to learn? I mean Cait isn't wrong about military Sambo, or Systema, or Krav Maga, the things I learned though were mainly focused on killing in the most quick and efficient ways possible..." There is perhaps a reason Nadia has never done much combat training instruction the tower.

Wally West has posed:
Caitlin's laughter always had a way of making Wally feel lighter. Not literally, the guy's like...barely heavier than a feather. Gotta be light to be that fast! Unless you're Superman, but don't tell anybody. Wally's full attention is on Nadia for a second, looking at her with his hands clasped in front of his face as if he was in prayer or about to say 'namaste'. When she hestiates, Wally looks put out with his exhale.

"I dunno, you're the superfighter!" Wally smiles. "You know, with the 'hiya'!" He throws out a very bruce-lee-film punch, followed by a uncentered looking kick. Both of them accompanied by Bruce Lee noises. "But, see, if I can run as fast as I do, I can dodge stuff easily. Problem is, no speed? No firepower. No firepower, can't exactly move around like Rob-" Robin. "Or you, ya know?" He pauses. "Sambo sounds really cool, if only because it rhymes with the best movie hero ever - Rambo."

Wally talks a mile a minute, but he tries to get his points across in more reasonable time. "Sooooo can you teach me how /not/ to kill in the fastest and most efficient way possible?" There's glitter in his eyes with the amount of puppy dog he's giving her right now.

He did NOT escape the notice of the pinkening of Caitlin's cheeks and he smiles. "Awwww, babe, you're the sweetest!" Oh yes, he's going to milk that joke until it's dead, because he has to see how red she can get. Insatiable flirt. "How's medical school going? You still kicking it's butt or is it kicking yours?" Asks a bit more seriously, genuinely interested in how that's going.

He looks between both women. "And honestly, I feel like I'm the only Titan with zero martial arts training. I'm left out of the club!"

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
Caitlin waits until Wally's looking at Nadia again, then picks up an orange from the fruit bowl on the kitchen island. As much as the girl trips over her own feet, Caitlin's aim is unerringly accurate. "You keep that up, and I'll text Iris that you're harassing upstanding young ladies in the Tower." There's still an embarrassed grin on her face, and she knows it, and it's all the funnier for how many years he's successfully flustered the Amazon redhead.

"School's going fine. I've got a little less than a year left," she tells Wally. "They're fast tracking me through residency since I'm not working clinic care." Caitlin opens the oven door and extracts two cookie sheets with her bare hands, ignoring the heat, and sets them on the cooling trays. "Hot," she announces, and gives Wally a pointed look.

Wally ignores heat warnings at his own peril.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
    Nadia leans back into the couch rubbing her chin for a moment as she considers Wally's request. "Hmmm, I suppose we could try Jiujitsu or Muay Thai." She muses. "Those are more striking and grappling, less removing someone's ability to breathe and disabling their central nervous system. Though most martial arts have similar fundamentals, it's a matter of eliminating wasted motion and using your biology as efficiently as possible for maximum speed and power. ...yeah, we can probably come up with something. I can program the Danger Room with some interesting challenges." Just what she means by interesting challenges is anyone's guess.

    "Caitlin, those pies look delicious!" She says eyeing the pies to be even as she breathes in the smell of the soon to be ready cookies. In truth Nadia has been waiting in rapt anticipation of the delicious baked good to come since Cait began the cooking process.

Wally West has posed:
"YES!" Wally exclaims loudly as he jumps in the air for a perfect freeze frame. "Can't wait to get started. That all sounds perfect for me. Immobilizing, no killing. You lemme know when you got some free time and I'll be right on down, Mr. Miyagi!" Wally pauses, standing up and rubbing his chin. "...or would it be MISS Miyagi? Because-"

*BONK!*

The unfailing accuracy of Caitlin still doesn't fail, flustered as the Amazon may be, to hit Wally right in the noggin with an Orange. "Ow!" Wally has a hand going through his red hair as he turns to pointedly look at Caitlin. "Aww come on, that's not fair. Iris is a good kid!" She really is. "I can't help it if you know the quickest way to my heart!" Case and point, the cookies! "Dibs!" He zooms across the room again to reach for the cookies, the 'hot' warning ignored. "I could kiss ya, thanks Cait!" Can't stop, won't stop! Though any kind of flirty confidence immediateky ends as he plays hit potato with himself as soon as he grabs a cookie.

"Hot hot hot hot hot hot!"

Almost got it, nope not yet, little more, aaaaand he finally catches it long enough to bite into it, a satisfied hum on his face. "Delicious!"

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
Caitlin rolls her eyes and tosses up her fingers in exasperation as Wally immediately almost scalds his fingertips. "Toldja," she reminds the other redhead. And just to one-up him, she takes a cookie hot off the plate and without any theatrics, takes a bit of the gooey chocolate chip treat. It's immediately followed up by her pulling a face and setting the cookie aside. "Needs to cool," she says again.

"I wonder how well some of those pressure point strikes would work against my tier of bruiser," Caitlin muses, and looks over at Nadia. "I mean, hypothetically. Aside from aliens with non-conventional nervous systems. Like, I have no idea if it would work on Tamaraneans or not. Kori might know," she reflects a beat later. "It would be nice to be able to put down someone like Rhino or Zod's soldiers without just beating them senseless. Very indelicate," she says, and wrinkles her nose in distaste.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
    Nadia hops up off the couch when the cookies come out, "Oh! I can fix that!" She grins when warned that the cookies are too hot. Reaching into a pocket, she pulls out of a spray cannister of liquid nitrogen. "Cooling things down is easy!" She just kind of stares at Wally for a moment. "What's a Miyagi?"

    She then regards Caitlin with a thoughtful expression after her question, "With more advanced uses of Pym Particles I've been experimenting with we could probably test that in the Danger Room if I enhance my own strength... alien physiology... there is probably /something/ but it would depend greatly on how their biomechanics actually function..."

Wally West has posed:
"I thought you were exaggerating! It's not like you can feel it. You could get hit by a train and it'd feel like a massage." Wally sticks his tongue out at Caitlin as he takes another bite of cookie. "I can't stay mad at you. The cookies are too good!" Wally was too easy to please. His teeth bite into cookie and his nonstop talking is finally ceased. Normally he'd talk with good in his mouth, but he's not dying for a charge up right now. He's just always hungry.

Then he's choking. He manages to cough hard enough to clear the obstruction, but the shock in his eyes tell the story as he looks at Nadia. "You've NEVER seen Karate Kid?!" He holds his hands over his mouth in shock. "Okay, this is DEFCON 1! Forget cooking things off because I'm hot right now!" He looks at her. "We're gonna steal the TV today and I'm gonna show you the original karate kid. This is classic cinema!"

He looks between them.

"I'd pay to see that. Science versus superpowers? That's Super Bowl worthy."

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
"I can /feel/ it, I just know I'm not going to be injured so I don't mind it," Caitlin corrects Wally. "It's like jumping into a super hot tub, it stings for a minute then it feels great. It's just a question of mind over matter," she declares with a self-satisfied tone. "And for the record, getting hit by trains sucks. Being strong can only take you so far in the face of physics. Three hundred pound me, versus three-hundred ton train? I don't know if I'd get smushed, but I definitely don't think I could brace well enough to stop it cold."

It's time to start pouring out the pie filling, which Cait's prepared already and has sitting in the fridge. Cherry, apple, and strawberry rhubarb-- the latter being, of course, the objectively superior option. "And Nadia-- I appreciate the offer, but maybe we shouldn't jump *right* into live subject testing," she suggests with a grin for the Waspette. "Especially if you're messing around with Pym Particles. One wrong move and you could break your neck!"

Wally West has posed:
"Hold up, hold up, hold up.. if we're gonna talk physics?" He gestures to Cait. "You're what, 6'6" of superhuman muscle who can lift 100x her physical mass? I think physics got seriously redefined as soon as metahumans came up on the scene. And also, Captain America's shield! That thing doesn't follow physics /at all/! If just bounces off everything! But I see what you mean. Superhuman durability and sensations don't equal the same thing." Wally stuffs about two more cookies in his mouth. "But also-" Yes, mouth fool. Because age doesn't equal maturity. Probably why he doesn't have a girlfriend.

"I REALLY want to see this pym particles versus Caitlin Fairchild thing, but I have to run a quick delivery and I'll be right back. I have first dibs on the pie!" He zooms away. Then he comes right back, gives Cait and Nadia a hug if they allow it with a big smile. "I love you guys. missed you both so much okay-thanks-Byeeee!"

And Wally zooms out the door with two more cookies in tow!