4377/The Colette O'Connail Fan Club

The Colette O'Connail Fan Club
Date of Scene:	11 December 2020
Location:	Colette's Costly Posh Pad
Synopsis:	Terry will destry Colette. And that is all you need to know.
Cast of Characters:	Terry O'Neil, Colette O'Connail

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Terry O'Neil has posed:
The text had come during the morning:

<<COLETTE! I am alive. But you already knew that. Thank you for saving my stuff!>>

Then:

<<COLETTE! When can we talk? We need to catch up. Text me back.>>

And even later:

<<COLETTE! I've never been to your place. I'd invite you to a place, but I no longer have one, so yours it is. Tonight at 7? I'll come alone. I'll bring food.>>


That was then, or severan 'thens', and this is now. Terry steps out of an Uber near the address provided. The reason he is using an Uber is because he had left his car parked in a public parking space right before the Warworld nonsense. Fortunately, nobody stole his car...

Unfortunately, the reason for that is because it ended up pinned down by a piece of rubble that had been shot off a building. If Terry had wanted to recover his car, he could have carried it in a manila envelope. Fortunately, Delaware allowed you up to two years to file an auto insurance claim for property damage- which is very generous. This would be even better if Terry's old clunker had been worth something...

"Hi, I'm Terry O'Neil. I'm here to see Colette O'Connail... she's expecting me." The concierge gives Terry a suspicious glare, and tells him to wait while he contacts The Resident to verify if this is true, or if someone needs to be shown the door.

It takes a little longer than Terry would have expected. He suspects Colette is taking her time verifying his arrival to make him nervous.

It's working. Sort of.

By the time the all clear is given, Terry steps out of the elevator in one of the higher floors, and walks over to the door in order to announce his presence.

He also texts Colette.

<<COLETTE! I'm at the door!>>

It was totally not getting back at her for making him nervous.

Totes.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    For once it's not Colette's fault. Sometimes the swanky concierges at a place like this can be real asses. They just don't approve of Terry, and don't like the idea of letting him in to their nice clean building. Perhaps he'll do the thing, perhaps he'll go public as Vorpal. That would probably change things quite a bit, but right now he's just some scruffy kid who's likely to scrawl grafitti on the walls and urinate in the corner of the elevators. Thus it is after Colette recieves the text from Terry that she contacts the front desk and learns for the first time that her visitor is already here. The one she had already told them to let in. Or as she points out to them, "I already fucking told you to let him in, stop fucking about."

    Thus it is that he is, finally, ushered in and accompanied by a polite but silent conceirge who operates the elevator for him ( probably in case his fingers are sticky or something) and ushers him out again on the correct floor, where Colette waits with a tapping foot. She nods to the concierge and leads Terry into her apartment.

    It's as fancy as you'd expect from a building like this. It's not that big, but it's nice. And clean - so unnaturally clean and tidy. It barely looks lived in, to be honest. There are bookshelves, but no random stacks of books leant up against them. There are posters on walls, but they are neatly framed and mounted. There is an absence of general junk, mess and clutter that makes the place look a little more like a film set than somewhere that an actual real, live human being lives.

    And there's a magnificent view. Colette leads Terry into her living room, which has an enormous window overlooking the lights of downtown St. Martins. If it was facing more southerly you could probably see Titans Tower from here. There's not a whole lot other than that in the room though - a couple of prints of Banksy artworks, an abstract sculpture about three foot tall artfully lit with miniature spots, an overly large TV, a coffee table with a natural wood and resin top, and a pair of armchairs and matching sofa, which Colette sinks into to before turning a vaguely amused stare at Terry.

    "So," she says finally. "How's it feel to be back from the dead?"

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry takes a moment to look around the swanky place, and his jaw drops just a little. "Wow... look at that view..." he says, a little breathless. Looking around some more, he notices the artwork, the posters, and huhs. "Even your waste basket looks more expensive than anything else I had in my apartment."

Giving her a toothy grin and a raised eyebrow, he says "Wait. That's all? No hug? No hello I am glad you're not dead? No fruits basket and a copy of our home board game? Do I need to die again and come back to see if I get a little bit more of a fanfare the second time around?"

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "I'm not really the hugging type, Terry. Besides I'm fairly sure you've spent the last few days being hugged by various reprobates in capes, you're probably bored of it by now." No hug, but there's a fairly large smirk.

    Colette glances at the window before looking back at Terry. "Yeah. View is nice enough, but don't forget I've been to that tower of yours a few times. It's not like you're lacking for views or expensive waste baskets there. You can't fool me, you're used to this crap by now. "

    She leans back in the sofa, getting comfortabe, and puts her feet up on the coffee table. Not being a /complete/ savage, she doesn't do this while wearing shoes so there is a relatively harmless sock to resin interface going on here. "So come on Terry, I'm agog. Last I heard you fell into a collapsing wormhole. How the fuck do you surivive something like that? Either you're at the mouth of the wormhole and you get fried by a whole lot of gamma radiation caused by sudden compression of the matter in the local gravity well, or you're actually inside the wormhole when it collapses, and get to enjoy the experience of a 3-dimensional space suddenly reverting to 2-dimensional space, which would be a great diet plan if you want to lose weight fast, but isn't exactly survivable."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"You do know that I don't have a room at the tower, right? I never thought to ask for one 'cause I had my apartment. I mean, sure, I've stayed over in Gar's room, but that bed isn't large enough for two people on the regular basis."

Terry, being the contrarian that he is, sits down on the floor, cross-legged, and smirks. "You are really asking the wrong dude You want to ask Caitlin, or Vic, the science nerds. All I know is that something happened, my Rabbit Hole malfunctioned, and we ended up -here-..."

He takes out his phone and quickly goes to some of the footage he took. The first one... the seven planets, orbiting a singularity. "Feast your eyes on this total upfuckery of the laws of physics."

He tosses the phone at her lap. "And if you think /that's/ the crazy part? The people in those planets were crazier."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "Well you might wanna get yourself a room there. Or you could camp out in the U-Store where all your junk got dumped, but that's not really a long term solution either."

    Colette picks up the phone and flicks through the photos for a few minutes in silence. "That's some serious engineering," she says finally. "I'm not a science nerd, so I think I'll give that conversation a pass, thanks. But I know enough to tell you that this ain't a naturally occuring... shit, I mean this has to be... I doubt there's any way this could be stable. There would have to be some kind of ongoing manipulation of gravity. Bet you there's some kind of big-ass gravitic field manipulators inside those planets."

    She shrugs and tosses the phone back to Terry. "I guess we'll be seeing those photos printed in every fucking newspaper and science journal on the planet in the next few days. That's quite a scoop, Scoops." That's a nickname she hasn't used for him in a while. Not since he became Vorpal, probably.

    Colette puffs out her cheeks and crosses her arms behind her head. "I'm... I'm glad Doctor Fairchild got back too. She's okay." She thinks for a while on how to expand that comment. "Nice," she adds eventually. "Naive, but nice. So. Uh, Terry. Have we learned a lesson about not sending out 'Hi I'm dead' messages until we are absolutely sure we are dead?"

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Not like it must have fazed you very much, right? I mean, since you are so blase and all, I bet you probably went 'Oh Terry for fuck's sake, couldn't you have waited to get killed some other time?'" he gives her a grin, very much showing that he's kidding. "Yeah... I've learned that I need to figure out how to make better conditions for dead man switches. But... I at least think that the message out to Gar did what it needed to do. From what I heard... he shut down hardcore right after."

He pauses and suddenly finds something to focus out the window. "I heard he received a visit from a certain someone..." he slowly glances over to Colette. "So... how did that go?"

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette frowns at the question, but she knew it was coming. "Asking me to be a light in anyone's darkness was really fucking stupid, Terry," she says with a sigh. "But you were right that he'd feel lonely. And you were right that I'd know what that means, though not in the way you thought. Being alone isn't the problem. Focusing on yourself to the exclusion of the world outside is the problem."

    She puffs her cheeks up and stands, walking to the door of the room. "I suppose he told you I'm the bitch queen from hell," she says as she disappears into the corridor beyond.

    About thirty seconds later she reappears with a bottle of champagne and a couple of flutes. "No arguments Terry. This is not the time to discuss whether you are under age or not. You somehow escaped death, that calls for champagne. So. I did as you asked. I made sure he wasn't looking inwards too much."

    Colette sits back down, unwiring the bottle with practised dexterity. "He hid out, at first. They didn't know where he'd gone at the tower. I tracked him down though, a property Dayton owns. Tried to help him find some kind of a sense of purpose, and to remind him that you weren't the only thing in his world. It didn't exactly go great, Terry."

    The cork comes out with a pop, but Colette is apparently not the type for showy cork-launches, as she takes it out with a twist and keeps the cork in her hand through the whole process. "You do realize he doesn't actually listen to me, right? He doesn't trust me. I wasn't the best person for the job."

    The wine is poured into the two flutes, and Colette pushes one across the table top towards Terry, while sitting back with the other and folding one leg beneath her. "He was angry at himself. I made him angry with me instead. If you're angry at someone else, you're not lonely."

    She shrugs, and sips her wine.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry makes no protest about the champagne- he's not one to follow the rules right now, after his stint in Crazyworld. Once you punch a high priest, there are a few things you are willing to be lenient on. "Right. You may have been the wrong person for that particular job, but did you ever stop to wonder which person I was choosing to do the job?" He takes a sip of his champagne, looking positively Sphinx-like, or as much as he can without being his feline self.

"He didn't say you were the bitch queen, but he doesn't terribly like you very much right now. That doesn't mean much, he's not angry at you so much as the things that he is reminded of when he interacts with you... though I have to admit that I'm still not sure why the banana hammock seems to be such a trigger for him."

He sets the flute down for a moment and leans back on his hands. "Of course, he may have been subconsciously angry about the /other/ thing..."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "No, I didn't stop to wonder," Colette says. "I assume that you thought it would be good for both of us. You concluded that I would feel obliged to follow your last wishes for some dumb reason, which you were kinda pretty much right about, and that it would be good for me to attempt to be a light in the darkness for someone rather than unhealthily thinking of myself as part of the darkness, which you were wrong about."

    She takes another sip of her wine, and shrugs her shoulders. "Not your fault. My fault for not explaining things properly. In my defense I'm really not comfortable explaining things properly to anyone, but I guess I have to sometime. "

    The 'banana hammock' thing? I figure he's just embarrassed about it. Also he doesn't like Harls. Things are kind of... he struggles not to see everything in black and white. What's the /other/ thing, though?"

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"You know, sometimes I wonder about you, Colette." He takes a sip from his flute, "It's true you haven't explained things clearly, but I am not exactly an idiot. Most of the time. I get shapes, even if I sometimes can't see the details. You care more than you know you do at times."

Vorpal pauses and scratches his chin, "So... the other thing? Well, I was gone for three months and... you talked much to birdy buddy Kian? Kian has been apart from /his/ boyfriend now for, what, six months? Well, Gar decided to try to cheer Kian up by taking he form of an Akiar, like that time at the beach, and... well."

He raises an eyebrow in a significant manner, "They sort of had a very strong connection. Ahem."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "Part of me cares," Colette says. "Part of me doesn't. And part of me tries to find a sane middle ground between the two." She stares at her glass for a moment, then downs the lot in one go and pours herself a refill.

    "Part of me was not made to care. That part of me knows what loneliness really is, because that part of me was never... completed. That part of me knew that there was such a thing as other people... other minds, other sentiences... out there. But it didn't understand what that meant. And it didn't run into them very often. I don't know how many, I wasn't counting. And when I did run into them, I didn't exactly... share. But that was over a very, very long time. I watched stars be born and die again, Terry. Then one day I gained another part of me. She had been a Martian. She... her mind gave me a sense of context, put words to the shapes of things that I had experienced. She cared. A lot. And she knew what it was like to touch other people in a way that few in this universe ever do, because the Martian race had this... they were telepathic. Like Kian's species, but in a more developed way. Each Martian mind touched every other Martian mind. There was some part of their minds that became almost like... almost something external, a shared experience for the entire species. We... they called it the Great Voice."

    "Now I'm Colette. I really am, Terry. Despite all that. I am human. I was born on Earth, twenty one years ago. Just... well just not in the normal way. Because I had all that before. But that was then and this is now. I'm not drifting alone in space, unaware of what it means that there are other minds. Nor am I telepathic, in a constant communion with a racial mind that touches on the divine. I'm just a... a person with a /lot/ of memories other people don't have, and I try to make sense of those."

    She downs the next glass and pours herself a third, and exhales slowly while staring at it. "You don't sound terribly upset. I mean about Gar and Kian. Did you accidentally leave all your self-doubt inside that fucked-up singularity?"

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry laughs at the self-doubt quip. "If it were that easy! But no. Something else happened. Gar-bless his heart- came up with the idea of using a probe with a telepathic transmission to help us come back home, as per the prophecy bit... the part about threading the labyrinth. Nadia told me that was Gar's idea, all of his own. Of course, he downplayed that when he told me. Nadia and Kian figured out the 'how' to, being the little brainiacs that they are, but Gar came up with the 'what'. That probe saved us from being hopelessly lost... but it also gave me something few people on Earth have. I was able to /sense/ his thoughts, and sense his love for me. You know how most people only have their partner's words and they must decide if they'll take them at face value? I didn't have to do that. I knew. So when Gar and Kian became intimate... when I got the news, after I got over the surprise, I saw it very differently than I normally would have." He finishes his flute.

"Heck, I honestly don't mind if he is intimate with Kian again- goodness knows birdy buddy needs to feel less lonely, and if Gar can do that for him, all the better for his little heart- because I know. I know who his number one is. But... I figure, until I got back, he didn't know how I would react to the whole thing. You follow me?"

*Ding* goes his phone. He doesn't need to look at it. He knows it means the update is out.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette's phone makes its own chime a moment after Terry's, but she doesn't bother to look at hers either. Instead she empties the rest of the bottle into Terry's glass. "I'll go get another," she announces, though it seems she has something to say first.

    "Don't listen to Gar playing it down. I was there when he had the idea. I dragged him out to Giorgios. This was... uh that was before I *really* pissed him off, and I think he was trying to give me a chance because I'd gone to the effort of looking him up when he went to ground. This was just after we'd heard that you idiots had somehow failed to actually kill yourselves. He was frustrated that he knew you were alive but didn't know how to reach you. So... you know. I made him talk about it. Talk about the problem rather than just being frustrated by the problem. He knew he wanted to do something, but he was seeing it like... like there was nothing to do, it wasn't even worth trying. But once we started talking about it, he kind of channeled that feeling, you know? He wanted to do something, to be a beacon for you guys to guide you home. Lightbulb moment. Back in a sec."

    She gets up to leave the room again. Despite being on her third glass - and two of those drunk rather rapidly - she doesn't seem to be unsteady on her feet. She does seem to be taking a little while.

    When she returns with a second bottle, she's grinning. "Fuck Terry, were you going to mention that little announcement? I'm just pissed you didn't title it 'Letting the Cat out of the Bag'. Congratulations."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry grins as Colette returns, "I actually got my timing a little off. I was hoping it'd go off a little earlier in the conversation but... I underestimated how fast I could get here, for once. I THOUGHT about titling it that, but I honestly swear to you that I realized Lois would NEVER let me live it down. So I didn't." He chuckles, "And trust me. I don't let him play things down when I catch them. He tries to please everybody, make himself small. Some people do it because they're manipulators, but Gar does it because he genuinely wants to be liked..." he sighs softly and offers his flute for a second filling.

"I know you tried to get him out of that inner sulk by getting a reaction out of him. I don't know if your approach with him is as effective as it could be, but I understand what you're trying to do. He is stubborn, and he is more likely to bottle everything up inside instead of ever admitting anything..." he smiles a little, "Seems to be a common trait with the people I end up surrounded by, apparently. You and I have a lot in common, on the surface. I also know what it's like to be me and be something else that existed before me. I have memories of someone else... and a part of me that doesn't /quite/ have the same approach to human relationships... that can take over if I'm not careful."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "I come at it from the other side really," Colette says. After she's finished pouring Terry's glass out, she tops up her own. "When I suddenly got all those memories... the Martian's mind, that is... I developed a perspective that was incompatible with everything that I had been up until that moment. It took me a while to figure out how to reconcile it. A few centuries I guess. What we... what I decided was that neither of us could really judge the totality. I needed a new perspective, a new framework. So I looked at the nearest planet, and created the body of an infant of the sentient species, sent it down to the surface and placed a block on my own memories so I would only start to remember who I was after I had the time to develop into a new person that had none of the biases of the old. A human body, a human life, and human perspectives. Just with memories that none of you /Thu'ulc'andran/ filth ever had." She breaks into a smirk.

    She leans back comfortably, folding an arm behind her head. It's surprisingly easy to talk about this stuff once you've started. "No, it probably isn't the best approach, but it's a functional approach. I suspect that he will somewhat forgive me for it in time, because he's not actually completely dumb and will conclude that there was no malice in it and that I have in my own weird way at least been trying to help. Any other approach would have taken a lot longer. Probably too long. It's better that he grows to hate me than that he grows to hate himself. That's harder to come back from."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"God. don't even get me started on the stuff I am trying /not/ to remember from Wonderland that'd make your Martian tear her hair out. THey're positively /infuriating/ over there," Terry says with a grin. "There was something wacky happening in that space. Every day I spent there as the cat, it was like ten days insofar as how chaotic it made me. Of the three months, I think I was the cat for no more than ten or fifteen days. Any more and I might have gone completely manxsome."

He exhales a little, "Well, I'll be working on him as well. I'd rather my friends not be at each other's throats, but sometimes you can't help that. I mean, he's uncomfortable around Harley as well... and I get it, Harley is wild and not sane. But she is trying in her own way, and I think it's very important that people who are trying know that there's someone in their corner cheering them on. He may fail to see it right now but you are trying to do some good for him. So am I. And that is how we have ended up here, failing the Bechdel test. Or, well, not exactly because I'm- you know what I mean." he smirks and raises his glass.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "Nothing wrong with Harls. I mean /apart/ from the insane thing that is, 'cos yeah she's insane," Colette counters. "She's fun. And having been in a bar fight with her, I can say she actually has some self-control. She didn't kill anyone, after all. Not sure that's going to be persuasive when it comes to Gar though. Like I said, black and white. It's going to take a lot for him to forgive an ex mass-murderer."

    She takes a thoughtful sip of her fix, thankfully not chugging it down as she had been earlier. "Remember that business at the museum? A bit before the invasion, when I tried to persuade you to steal the thing? That really put me in Gar's bad books. It doesn't matter that my motivations were what he would call 'good', and that going through 'proper channels' would have an outcome that had no advantages and put lives at risk. As far as he was concerned the simple fact that I proposed doing something that broke the law makes him suspicious of me. He doesn't trust me, he won't listen to me. So I had to take a route that bypassed that. But we're not at each other's throats. I'm not at his, anyway."

    She shrugs lightly. "You'd have to lose something for this to count as a Bechdel test fail, Terry. Mind you, being a manxsome cat would require you losing something too."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry rolls his eyes, "MANXSOME, Colette! Not Manx! One is a Wonderland word, the other one is a cat without a tail, which is kind of like a bicycle without pedals, to be honest."

"You have to remember that Gar was betrayed by someone that was supposed to have his best interest at heart. After his parents died, that Galtry dude... well, let's just say that Gar has reasons to feel wary of anyone he feels is not being completely straight and narrow. At this point, it's kind of a defense mechanism. I did a little looking into some of those past relationships he's had, the ones that lasted very little, and although he's not told me anything about them, I'm kind of suspecting that there were a bunch of opportunists who saw an insecure young man who wanted approval and tried to fleece him for his money and connections in exchange of it."

He leans back on his hands, "He's very pure of heart which, considerin what has happened to him, is a testament to him. Most people would be jaded and cynical."

"But his defenses also make it so that stuff also stays in. So the idea is to get him to open up some more, but not leave himself completely exposed..."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette stares thoughtfully at Terry for a while, then shrugs her shoulders. "You're the Gar wrangler, not me," she says. "I have enough trouble figuring out what makes me tick to worry about what makes anyone else tick. I'm not blaming him for distrusting Harls or me though. I'm just pointing out that's the way it is."

    Colette lifts a foot and rests it on the top of her coffee table. It's the kind of action that should make anyone with a taste for fine furniture wince slightly. "Yeah so what you're saying is he's damaged good, like the rest of us. That his reaction that damage is to want to see the world as a good and bright and happy place even when it is not, which means he reacts badly to things that have a scent of criminality even when they are the good and right things to do. And it means that he clowns around when he doesn't mean it because he wants to convince the world around him that it's the happy place he wishes it was. And it means that when he's faced with reality he withdraws from the world and gets angry at himself, because when you withdraw from the world there's nobody else to get angry at."

    "I can't be a light in the darkness to a person like that, Terry." Colette grins a little and takes another sip. "I mean I'm basically made out of darkness. Best I can do is make sure he doesn't turn it inwards too much. One way or other, whether my attempts helped or not, he survived long enough for his light to return. Which is ironic given that you fell into a black hole and the definition of a black hole is supposed to be a region of space beyond which even light cannot return. Trust you to find a black hole someone had fucked with so much it didn't even work right. "

    Here gaze drifts thoughtfully into the distance. "I wonder if I could travel through a black hole," she muses. "I must try it some time."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"I'd rather you didn't if it's all the same to you, people disappearing around the Titans seem to be a Thing now, and I don't want to encourage it," he smirks and tilts his head, "And I'd miss you. But if you do and don't come back, can I have this place?" he jokes.

"I need to figure out where I'm going to move into... I'm going to try to cash in a few favors and couch surf here and there until I have enough for lease and down payment. That should be... four, five months. Unless I get a raise at the Planet. Lois thinks that my name as a public superhero will mean my content will outperform half of the content on the web version. Who knows?"

He puts his shoe up on the table as well, to jokingly imitate his friend, even if the gesture makes no sense with him sitting on the ground. "Damaged goods is such a wrong way to look at it. If we were clay pots or whatever, okay... but people grow, and wounds close and scar over. Part of what you say is true, but you're looking at him only through one lens. I mean..."

He grows quiet. "His parents died in that... waterfall incident. Gar has never mentioned it, but if you look at the news and the reports way back when... I think Gar was there. He was just a child, a kid, and he probably didn't know what to do. But adult Gar looks back and thinks he could have done /something/ with those new powers. And because he didn't, his parents died. That casts a whole different light on things you know."

He leans on the table now. "I interviewed Spider-Man the other day, you know. Super nice guy, by the way. But... he told me a story about what made him go down the masked path. The regret of not having done something and someone losing their lives was in it. Some people live through that and go to a dark place. Others go the other way..."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "It's not something I was planning to do immediately Terry," Colette says with a laugh. "And honestly if I did it would probably take me a while to actually find one. So nothing to worry about, you'll be long dead before I get around to it. That is unless bonding with the Cheshire Cat makes you immortal, which is entirely possible. "

    Tact, thy name is Colette.

    "I knows someone he helped out," Colette says. "Spider-Man. Someone who's story isn't a million miles from yours, I guess. One day ordinary teen going through life, the next bonded with a strange and powerful alien entity. She got kidnapped by some crazy science guy who wanted to experiment entity or something. No wait, it was her father who was kidnapped, that was it. Spider-Man helped out, I think she became his number one fan or something. I put her up for a while at a little place I've been renting out on Staten Island. Not very convenient for you but if you need it, let me know."

    A smirk spreads across Colette's features. "You know the legend of how the Manx cats lost their tail? The legend is that a Manx cat was the last animal onto the Ark, and she cut it so close that the flood waters were rising and the door got slammed shut on her tail. That sounds like a pretty painful way to become Manxsome. Never be last onto the T-Jet, Terry."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Man, all of the folk legends around Noah's Ark are kind of terrifying. But not nearly as terrifying as when you try to think about what the *smell* inside that place must have been. Can you imagine?" He waves a hand in the air, as if already smelling it.

"Her story does kind of sound like mine. It seems to be A Thing that happens to people more often than I thought..." he chuckles, "imagine that. But about Gar... I'll try and feel how things go. He's going to be sore at you for a while, but maybe if I get him to think about some things..." he shrugs, "We'll see. He can be incredibly stubborn when he wants to be, you know?" he grins.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "I had noticed that about him," Colette says with a wry smile. "They say opposites attract, but that can't be true becuase you're definitely part Cheshire mule. Gar's never going to trust me, Terry. The best we an hope for is tolerate."

    "So." Colette gets the bottle and tops up both glasses, while it's necessary or not. "Talking of you being obstinate as hell, what persuaded you to finally stop trying to live parallel lives and come out of the cape closet? Spending that time stuck over the rainbow just make you think... not worth the effort, better things to do with your life? And have you considered the less obvious consequences? I'm sure you've gone over the whole thing with your family and talked about risks and so on. We discussed that before. How about the fame side of things? Have you considered how you're going to deal with that yet? 'Cos now you're famous. At least a bit famous. I mean probably like C-list famous or whatever, but you'll probably have to get used to signing autographs. And you could probably do talk shows if you want. Vorpal would probably be a popular talk show guest. You could make a career about it."

    Colette takes out her phone and starts tapping away. "I bet the hero geeksites are buzzing over the news already. Not that often a cape comes out. At the very least you'll be geek-famous for a while. You realize that as we speak there's probably bad fanfic writers racing to be the first to do Vorpal slashfic. Probably someone's got a chapter one up already, it has been half an hour. Let's see who they are slashing you with."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
wTerry gives Colette a baleful stare, "Colette O'Connail... I swear to you that if you keep pushing this, /I/ will write a slashfic of you with Captain Marvel. And it will be the purpliest thing you will have seen in your entire life!" he smirks. "And I'll deal with being 'famous' by not caring about it. It's a flash in the pan and I'll soon be forgotten for another story. I'm on the same team as Wally frickin' West, Gar Logan and Donna Troy, among others. I blend in the crowd and you can rest assured I am not the first target anyone has for an autograph. Now..." he claps his hands together and looks around.

"You got board games around here? Something we can have fun with? And tell me about this Staten Island place. Distance is not an issue when you can Rabbit Hole, you know."
5r

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "Don't be stupid, Terry. I'm not famous, nobody wants to read a slashfic of me and Carol. Literally the only person who'd read that would be Carol, and then she'd kill you so at least I wouldn't have to. "

    Colette puts her phone away, though judging by the amount of smirk on her face it's because the joke already landed rather than fear of fanfics. "I told Carol, by the way. About me. Her and Gar, and now you. They got a kind of expurgated edition, you got a bit more detail. Please don't share."

    "When I went to find Wally and encourage him to go visit Gar at the tower, he was working as a glorified courier. Your Hollywood boyfriend has worked in one terrible TV series and some cheap movies that hired him because he saved on the special effects budget. The most famous thing about Donna Troy is her sister. You know what those guys have in common though? They're part of the Titans. Like you. Sorry Terry, you can't go around saving the world and expect to not get a bit famous. Life doesn't work that way. Still, if you need to drown your sorrows you know I'm always good for it."

    Colette gestures with her glass towards the television. "Not much of one for board games, but there's an X-Box. Press the top right corner of the doors under the TV and it'll open up. I don't have a huge selection of games, but pick whatever. The Staten Island place has a Playstation instead. Otherwise nothing special, just somewhere I have close to the school so I don't have to take the Hyperloop after work if I'm feeling lazy. Kinda pokey, but livable, and the neighborhood is pretty nice. I can spare it a while if you need somewhere. The shower is a pain to get the temperature just right and you sometimes get Nightwings infesting the garage, but otherwise it's fine.

    Colette sits up, grinning. "Just think, someone famous living in my spare place! That makes me almost a celebrity too. Well Terry, you're alive and now your famous." She raises her glass. "That's worth drinking to. Cheers!"

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry stops with a pair of controllers in his hand to stare at Colette for a few moments. He takes a deep breath and calmly says "I will destroy you, Colette O'Connail."