6913/Come Out To The Country, They Said...

Come Out To The Country, They Said...
Date of Scene:	13 July 2021
Location:	Croton-on-Hudson, 22 Miles North of NYC
Synopsis:	On a trip north from the city, meant to be relaxation, a trip to a reservoir and a lovely park leads to near destruction -- but a certain liquid lady on trip with her students helps make everything all right.
Cast of Characters:	Michael Erickson, Aspen Matthews

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Michael Erickson has posed:
    For the being that calls himself Michael Erickson, it has been a very long, very violent week. Tannhauser agents. Unknown green-eyed women with taser bullets and bioelectric energy blasts. The Lincoln Tunnel. He needs to get out of the city, and more importantly, needs to get the Federal government looking elsewhere for the moment -- the FBI is like a toddler, keep off its radar just a couple of days and it forgets all about you for a while. He needs to regroup, to keep his mind off of the recent turmoil. To stop getting put in situations where he throws forks in people's eyes protecting random mysterious women.

    So he goes north, into Westchester County. To the village of Croton-on-Hudson, small but pleasant, near Mount Airy. Took the Amtrak up here, even, no special finagling. Took his armor, too, but it's packed away in the little cottage he rented for the weekend. Even spies get a break, right? Right? And so this evening, having visited way too many quilt stores and antique shops and whatever like a proper tourist, he walks the paths of the park at Croton Gorge, where the old dam and its spillway are lit up in the evening like the bones of an ancient, long-dead god by floodlights. Beautiful stuff, truly. A museum piece, but still functional. If he dreamt, it might show up in them.

    He walks a path that runs parallel to the mouth of the Croton Reservoir, the relative vastness of it stretching on into wood-lined eternity as it bends inexorably around the landscape toward the distant parkway. Maybe he should have rented a boat? It's been ages. The rustic charm of this planet in the wild suffuses him in the moment with a warmth that is not quite nostalgia, not quite longing. He wasn't born on a world like this, after all, never trod woodlands that hadn't been already splintered by concussion bomardment or atomized by antimatter cannons from orbit before coming here. But he's been on this planet longer than he ever lived in the Empire or its conquests. It's starting to claim him. He can feel it. And so he stops, standing on the causeway between the reservoir and the illuminated grandeur of the dam. Ponders what fortune has done to him.

Aspen Matthews has posed:
"It's always important to note both the similarities and the differences between sweetwater and saltwater ecosystems." The voice is feminine, vibrant, but with a certain professorial tone to it.

The professorial tone doesn't match its owner's look, dressed as she is in cut-offs, a halter top and a straw hat. She carries a shoulder bag slung over one shoulder, and by her stance a pretty heavy one, while her other hand holds some kind of display tablet.

"We are, yes, oceanographers, or oceanographers in training, at least, but lakes and rivers bring important things into the ocean from their silt and knowledge of how these are formed to feed the oceans is vital to understanding."

Aspen--she's not in skin-tight rubber, but it's still clearly her--is attended by about a dozen studious-looking individuals who are dressed far more conservatively than she: long pants, long-sleeve shirts with the sleeves rolled up, etc. Most of them have tablets with input styluses for writing and are taking profuse notes. One is using paper and taking even more.

"OK, so we're going to explore the water now. Get your VizuLink apps running and I'll give you the access code in a moment."

Aspen shucks her shoulder bag and starts to unpack from it a case containing, upon opening, a medium-sized submersible drone. "OK, the code is ... ZZ9PLZ... No, wait. That's the admin code. Viewer code is ... MM8MM257. Plug that in while I get the beast in the water."

Michael Erickson has posed:
    Ahh, the student experience! Of all the strange women he might have encountered up here in the relative country, thet woman in the traw hat is not what he would have expected. And of /course/ she's dressed for the beach while everyone is wearing slacks and button-downs; child of the water, that one, and literally. A smile lines his lips as he watches her work, having seen her only thus far as a beautiful dreamer of the seas he stands there on the causeway, taking a step back to get out of the spot of an overhead light, and monitors her work.

Aspen Matthews has posed:
After getting clearance from people struggling with tablets and/or phones, Aspen lugs the drone over to the edge of the walkway and unceremoniously dumps it into the water. Playing with her own tablet a few moments, she fires up the engines and tests the manoeuvering jets before selecting the widget that turns on the camera feeds to the student tablets.

The students lean toward their tablets. Then away, looking vaguely disappointed.

"Silty, isn't it?" Aspen asks with a laugh. "That's one of the first major differences. Sea water is usually pretty clear, outside of some algae blooms and other such phenomena. River and lake water can be clear, but more often, in slow-moving waters especially, or in reservoirs formed by dams, natural or artificial, will be pretty hard to see through. But that silt is the lifeblood of the oceans. The rivers carry important nutrients to the sea that filters take in, beginning the circle of ocean life."

She starts to move the submersible around, with a deftness that comes as a surprise to more than one student. Like she has a supernatural feel for water motion. (And like the water is helping the submersible move along...)

"So who here can tell me what the silt consists of?"

Michael Erickson has posed:
    Were this a work of literature, it might be the time when he would pop in and say something witty from across the way about something something silty nonsense and look clever in front of a beautiful girl. But alas, though he /is/ very intelligent, he is not a scientist - and so he lingers, watching and listening. Amused.

    After all, his only real experience with silt is keeping out of radioactive water.

Aspen Matthews has posed:
"Quartz?" The only one with a paper notebook raised his voice and hand simultaneously.

"Ooh! Check out the big brain on Brad!" Aspen says, laughing, teasing tone in her voice. "Someone read the extra reading instead of only the assigned. That's right. Silt is made primarily of quartz grains, smaller than sand, bigger than clay. And that is all the difference."

The submersible bottoms and an instrument cluster extends forth from it with the camera. Lenses swivel and a microscopic view comes in, glaring lights bringing a sample into view. The sample shows the crystaline structure of the silt components.

"Now look here. You can see the quartz ... but what else can you see?"

She looks up. "Alicia. You've got eyes. Tell me what you see?"

The named student looks up in a panic, then down. "Uh ... the quartz, yes, Dr. Matthews..." "Aspen." "Aspen. But also there's smaller constituents. The black stuff looks like some form of clay precursor, and I think I see some ... organics?"

"Excellent! And it's those last two things that feed the ocean. Silt carries in its sharp edges and crannies little bits of nutrition both mineral and organic."

The submersible pulls back and the camera switches back to wide view.

"So let's find us some river shrimp!"

Michael Erickson has posed:
    Towers of Chandilar, he actually /got/ that reference. And he laughs softly to himself, watching the lady with her students. Behold! The wild scholarly water-nymph in her natural habitat! He thinks of the mollusks back home, the enormous, whip-tentacled things the staff would fish out of the family pond and flay and grill over a fire. Good times as a child eating that extragalactic seafood. He sighs, thinking about those long-ago days, and then decides to be social.

    Silt and organic material. Well, at least he's learning something. Hands tucked behind his back, the leather of his jacket creaking softly as he goes, Michael approaches the lady and her flock as they go about learning Important Things. He doesn't call out - well, not yet - but at least now he's in general proximity if Aspen, like Alicia, has eyes. It's almost weird seeing her do this, like when he saw his old teachers in the military cadres on the street once he'd graduated. A different sort of secret identity, almost.

Aspen Matthews has posed:
She has eyes. Eyes that spot his approach (FAR too late by his trainers' standards, VERY unobservant!) and greet him with a pair of raised eyebrows. She shakes her head and focuses back on her pad, deftly moving the controls around until she reaches a certain point. "The shrimp are in this area. I'll tell you how I know that later, but here's your chance. Brad, since you did the extra reading, you get the helm." She reaches the tablet out, earning the hapless kid some dirty looks from classmates. "Hunt in the nooks and crannies here. You focus on navigation. Let your team focus on spotting shrimp. It's called 'division of labour' and you'll learn rapidly that if you plan to survive ocean work you need to know it intrinsically.

Brad, after experimenting some with the controls, starts clumsily manoeuvring it around the patch Aspen had selected while the other students watch on their screens as Aspen steps back out of their joint field of vision. Then she turns to look at Michael. Peering back at the students a bit to ensure they're not doing anything too stupid, she walks over to Michael.

"Interesting coincidence," she says quietly while the students start gesticulating and giving the hapless pilot instructions. ("No! LEFT! YOUR OTHER LEFT!" "It's called starboard! No, port!" "Would you two shut up and just let him drive?" "Pilot." "Whatever!" "Are those the shrim... YOU OVERSHOT, TURN BACK!") She giggles a bit at their antics. "Never gets dull watching," she says. "They take things so seriously so young."

Turning her attention back at Michael. "So what brings you out in the middle of Croton Gorge Park on the day I happen to be teaching on a field trip?"

Michael Erickson has posed:
    No explosions, no rains of fire. Yet. Michael does not have the luck of casual meetings with people, certainly not superpowered women. Usually. "Interesting coincidence," he echoes, nodding at the lady's words with a smile - he looks past her at the kids clustered around the drone sub, hands tucking into the pockets of his jacket. "What are you doing all the way up here from Metropolis, Doctor? I'm here for a weekend getaway. Surely the silt can't be that interesting up here."

    Michael's about to say something else, but then he catches himself being distracted by the kids and their driving. A moment of concern. "...they can't /break/ that thing," he asks her. "Can they?"

Aspen Matthews has posed:
"This is my honours class. We were actually in New York for a symposium I was presenting at. They acted well, so I took them on a side trip to show them an important point." She gestures at the lake. "This is a far more persuasive approach to education. They had the foundational work, but seeing it living and breathing in front of you just ..." She shrugs. "Makes it come literally to life."

At his question she laughs again. "Oh, I think theoretically they could, but these are deep sea submersibles. They're pretty rugged. The ground here is silty. Biggest risk is that it gets stuck." Her mouth presses together suppressing a smile. "Somehow I don't think that's going to be a problem here today."

She winks at Michael before turning back to monitor the antics of her students. Who are going gaga over a cluster of shrimp Brad is now trying to chase after and keep in view in the silty water.

Michael Erickson has posed:
    "They're students," Michael points out, grunting faintly as he watches the young people fuss over the controller and their own data feeds. How many times did he break things in the youth cadres? Supposedly indestructable equipment, built and rated for years of continuous use in the field. Thwarted by a fifteen-year-old military student. The young carry their own potent entropy fields.

    "You're a good teacher, I think." He looks back to her, even as she watches her students. "Trial by exposure and experience. The best form of education."

Aspen Matthews has posed:
"The best form is mixed," Aspen gently corrects. "Coming out here and mucking around is showing them valuable things, like how chaotic the real world is ..." There's some less-than-mild profanity coming from Brad as an ill-considered motion sends the submersible off in a random direction, losing complete sight of the shrimp. "...compared to nice, clean theory. But you need the theory too, so you can understand the pieces of what you're looking at as part of a system, not incoherent, unpredictable, random events."

She looks back at Michael. "There's a fine line to be drawn there. Too much of this is horseplay with no educational merit. Too much theory is dry and ill-prepares students for facing the vagaries of the real world. And since in their case their real world is going to be the ocean ... I ... really would rather not they die because they got surprised at how out of control their world can get in a minute."

Beat.

"Hold on a second."

She heads back to the crowd of people berating Brad. "It's really not as easy as it looks is it?" she says with a cheerful voice. "Anybody who thinks they can do better than Brad can come on up and be humiliated." She puts out her hand for the controller and, with a deft touch, brings the unit back around and finds some shrimp for the students to gape at again.

"OK, Brad, this time... Slow hands. Easy touch." She winks. "Keep that in mind for dates too," she adds before handing the controller back and trying desperately not to laugh at Brad's choking sounds and red face.

Rejoining Michael, "I can be a bit of a bitch too, but it's all in good fun."

Michael Erickson has posed:
    Check out the mouth on Brad! Michael smirks as he looks on whilst the folks remain at it, as their teacher drifts hither and back as she sees to this additional bit of their education. "You know I think they're going to go far, you know," Michael muses as she comes back. "It's the bit of a bitch that's the special ingredient, don't you think?"

    But even as he says it, he's thinking of the tromp of boots, the hours-long marches through the high-gravity training runs, battle training under the crushing anvil of repulsor beams directed on young people barely halfway through their teens. Made him strong. Stronger than that humanoid form would ever suggest. But it certainly taught him that the reality of the world was hollow bones snapped and smashed at the slightest mistake in movement. Compared to that, being a bit of a bitch was endearing.

Aspen Matthews has posed:
"Well, it's fun at least," Aspen laughs. "I..."

Her smile fades and her eyes scan out to the waters as if looking for something. Without any further word to Michael, she rejoins the students. "OK, I think we've traumatized the water shrimp enough for now, let's head over to ... uh ... that pagoda over there, right where that rise is. It's time for proper class."

Gently taking the controller from Brad, she beelines the submersible back to their location while the students mill around, confused.

"Go ahead! I'll get this out of the water and join you. Get your tablets open to lecture Supp17a. That's where you watch me give you the boring shit about what I just showed you, including my usual environmental degradation rant."

That causes more than just a few loud, melodramatic groans. Groans she takes in good stride ... or, rather, groans she ignores as she stares out over the waters while the submersible returns.

Michael Erickson has posed:
    He doesn't have to know her well to pick up those cues. Something's wrong. And hes' short of his armor. All he has, in fact, is the telescoping combat blade he carries in his jacket pocket - and that, in itself, is absolutely not what one wants to pull in front of a bunch of co-eds and a lady he barely knows. He grits his teeth for a long moment as she stares out across the water and gathers together her proverbial chickens. Something bad is coming. What? Who knows?

    The water currents shift, twist, forever elastic - and then, suddenly, snap into a straight and inexorable line. Unnatural. Menacing. A path of budding destruction leading straight up to the spillway. Wuh-oh.

Aspen Matthews has posed:
Something unnatural is about to strike. Something unnatural may as well at least get her students out of harm's way. Ahead of the arrival of the straight-line current a large wave suddenly sloshes over the spillway, sweeping from behind the slowly-departing students and speeding behind them, dousing the slowest of them with lakewater before it all collapses back into the lake.

A whole of of profanity beginning with "what the" starts up, followed by laughing and happily-screaming students who view this as a freak wave that's doused them. Worried, Aspen monitors their progress and visibly relaxes as they start to run off the spillway. Now she can concentrate. For that, however, she has to get...

...her slim form, without hesitation, slips over the edge and down into the chill waters below, accelerating rapidly on entering the water to meet whatever is coming in head-on.

Which causes, naturally, one of the bulkier students, who happens to see this, to go all heroic. "Dr. Matthews!" the student who later will be known--hopefully not posthumously--as Ahmed calls out. He turns around to run toward where Aspen slipped in, and near where Michael is standing, to render aid.

Michael Erickson has posed:
    Above, Michael walks casually up the path, following where the lady leapt into the water - wherever she's going, he should probably be there. You know, for science. And for science he goes.

    Meanwhile, one with the waters, the sheer force of the jet coming down from the spillway means trouble -- its source, of course, is a cropping of old masonry who has lost all material cohesion and crumbled away. Doom will soon follow, were one not to swiftly deal with it...however one does. It isn't alien creatures or high-tech sabotage which is soon to kill a /lot/ of people down the reservoir if it isn't resolved; time and entropy are the universe's greatest saboteurs.

Aspen Matthews has posed:
"Shit!"

Aspen's voice can be clearly heard ... to any other who might be in earshot of her under the water. Her head briefly breaks the surface. "Michael! Get rid of everybody on the spillway. Get them off and far away!"

She pops under again, then reappears.

"There's a hole breaching and at this rate it's going to expand to cover a big slice of the dam!" she continues. "I'm going to see what I can do about it, but I ..."

She pauses in horror at seeing one of her students coming back. "AHMED! GET TO SHORE YOU IDIOT! NOW! GO CALL THE RANGERS OR SOMETHING, BUT GET OFF THE SPILLWAY!"

Ahmed, brave thickie that he is, chooses to ignore this and is preparing to leap the side down to help "Dr. Matthews!" as he keeps calling.

Michael Erickson has posed:
    God damn it, Ahmed.

    It has been a very, very long time since Michael has used the voice that he uses now - the last time he bellowed across a field at a group of early twenty-somethings it was across the blasted field of Toxin Zone Beta-227 on Rellonan, seemingly a million years ago. It's a voice drilled into him from years of military education and active duty - the mixture of theory and practice that the two of them had only just discussed. "YOU! BOY!" His bellowing voice is a thunderclap waving a switchblade threateningly in the direction of the students, especially /that damned Ahmed/. "STUDENTS! OFF THE DAM, NOW, MARCH! ONE! TWO! THREE!" And it is...it hits any of the ROTC kids first, or those with military family. The rest? Well, who knows? But it is a voice to make men and women /move/, civilians or others.

    Beneath the surface of the water, the breach is about the size of a basketball - a breach that will explode if not diverted, possibly taking the rest of the dam with it in that section of the dam. Likely it'll take the whole thing down in a matter of a half an hour, but the first major gush is coming, and soon.

Aspen Matthews has posed:
The ROTC students do, in fact, catch that snap of command and speed up, most helping others along, spreading that sense of urgency. Ahmed, however, is too focused on 'saving' the professor who 'fell' into the water to pay attention. He leaps into the water, after kicking off his shoes (he's impulsive, and stupidly brave--not plain stupid) and with decent swimming strokes goes to where Aspen just ducked under again.

You know. Where her clothes have just floated to the surface.

All of them.

Yes, including the intimates.

Befuddled upon reaching the sight of her disappearance, Ahmed looks around in disbelief at the cutoffs there, the bra there, the halter top there, and yes, the most intimate of the intimates ... right there. He gathers them up while calling out Aspen's name. "ASPEN!" he calls (not "Dr. Matthews").

Under the water the extra body of water that was once Dr. Matthews tries to hold back the current at the basketball sized hole.

This doesn't work. She's holding back the entire weight of the water down to that level, a feat well beyond her current strength.

Thinking the problem through as she gets thrown into a dizzying spiral from interacting with the sheer forces at the edge of the strong current, she tries something different.

Redirection.

Can she send the current crossways to 'miss' the hole?

The travails of poor Ahmed go unnoticed beneath the surface.

Michael Erickson has posed:
    By the black flames of --

    Ahmed is brave, but he isn't Michael. That is, he isn't able to jump like the Shi'ar can, hasn't got the same geometrically prodigious stamina. So when Michael leaps into the water and executes a swim like a dolphin and a bullet had a glorious love child, he might be taken aback. But you know, he isn't looking at that, because the Sexiest Marine Biologist Or Whatever Ever wears lacy lacies and he's too busy staring at that. And why wouldn't he? He's seen the arse that's filled 'em, why not have a little bit of a schoolboy miracle moment when the world is falling down?

    /AHMED/.

    And there, in an alarmingly swift moment, there's an angry white man popped up behind poor Ahmed, a hand on his shoulder in a death grip. "YOU," Michael bellows in that grim doom-squad drill sergeant voice he's wielding, "SHOULD LISTEN TO YOUR TEACHER, BOY. COME." And the next second he hauls that poor young man away with him, one-arm stroking the two of them toward the shore in an absolutely Olympian display of bodily puissance that /nobody is going to see/ and thank the Flame for that.

    Redirection. The water responds. But that's holding it back. How to /fix/ it?

Aspen Matthews has posed:
Think, Aspen. Think. You can do this. You're smart. You...

Right.

Ice.

Aspen makes ice not by merely chilling, but by compression. It's not Ice I (ordinary garden-variety ice) but rather more like a strange form of Ice III: able to retain its crystalinity even above its theoretical melting point. And its creation is endothermic, making water touching it while it's being formed freeze into Ice I in the process, acting as a form of shell around it.

That should hold off the water long enough to think more deeply.

Exerting herself, she freezes the water in the hole, then freezes a cap over top of that, letting the pressure of the lake push the plug in solidly.

There. She's given herself a few minutes. Maybe as many as fifteen.

How to make this more durable?

She comes to the surface. "There's a hole in the dam! Make sure it's clear. It's been blocked for the moment, but that's a temporary patch. I need ideas for something more permanent!"

An idea is forming in her head as she speaks, but it's not fully formed.

Michael Erickson has posed:
    "Keep yourself under the water to the neck," Michael bellows back at yonder woman as her head pops up, somehow able to do this /and/ haul Ahmed across the water at that rather impressive clip. "Ahmed here's got your bloody clothes!" Because he /had/ to, that glorious idiot. How the hell /does/ one repair a thing like that? He's not a bloody scienist, he's just very smart. And uneducated about all things hydrowhatnot.

    What about putting in another mass to plug the hole," he bellows back at her. He and the sputtering Ahmed are already almost to the shore. "Can you do that?"

Aspen Matthews has posed:
"If I had a big slab of rock or concrete or something, I could make something that would last a lot longer, yeah!" Aspen calls up. Keeping herself at head-above only. And, despite the seriousness of the situation, grinning. This is funny. Even under life-threatening circumstances.

"Find me something flat that's about twice the surface area of a basketball. I've got to prepare some stuff down below."

With that she's back under.

With alacrity she builds a shelf of ice under the icy patch to catch a slab slid down the retaining wall so she can slip it into place over the hole. She then uses currents to bring her a large pile of silt which she stashes on the shelf. Inspecting the patch and cringing, she reinforces it as best she can and heads back to the surface.

"OK, I hope you got something for me..."

Michael Erickson has posed:
    In the meantime, Ahmed has been thrown bodily onto the shore - and Mike comes up with him like a savage vision. "Listen to me, boy," he tells the student, towering over poor Ahmed in the moment. "Tell anyone what you see here and I'll come and make sure there's nothing left of you but gelatin, do you understand?" And while that particular term is a bit antiquated, when he reaches down and bodily pulls a hundred-pound paver stone from the walk lining the shore as if it were a piece of garden pathway shale and carries it back to the waterline as if toting a plate, at his side and in one hand.

    "I've got something for you," he bellows. "It's heavy!"

    Sploosh! Into the water. Apparently he feels she must be...one with the hydrosphere. Whatever. Confident she'll know what to do.

Aspen Matthews has posed:
Working fast, Aspen uses the water to push the stone against the side of the slipway, letting it slide down to her shelf. She then goes more substantial--and unfortunately for her at this depth the fact that she is utterly devoid of clothing is visible, albeit no detail can be worked out (small favours)--and physically slips and slides it along to the ice patch. Holding it barely in front she dissolves the ice and lets the current slam the stone against the side for the brief flash of a second that takes.

Scooping up the collected silt then, she quickly smushes it around the edges of the rock where it meets the dam wall, freezing it behind her like a form of welding. For good measure she covers it completely with ice in a hemisphere.

Finally she swims back to the surface, breaking water near the spillway, looking a bit exhausted.

"OK, this should last longer. I mean I wouldn't want to be downstream right now, but it'll hold long enough hopefully for them to get engineers out."

Beat.

"Could I have my clothes please?"

Michael Erickson has posed:
    He's just going to assume she knows what she's doing - after all, she's the lady who turns into water, is one with whatever, etcetera. /Doctor/ Watery Tart. Lingering by the water, yonder very unclothed Doctor Watery Tart breaks the surface of the water some twenty feet from him and the likely traumatized Ahmed, and Michael turns to level a finger at the poor fellow where he stands.

    "You heard the lady, get over there and give her back her clothes! You were so obsessed with grabbin' them." Which isn't fair or accurate, he knows, but assumes that fear and worry and a litle bit of outrage will carry Ahmed to the task. Back to the Doctor, then. His brows arch. "I might have traumatized your students a little bit," he offers. "Ahmed a little more than that."

    He does not offer an explanation.

Aspen Matthews has posed:
Poor Ahmed, now so pale he could pass for a Morlock, steps over uncertainly, averting his gaze in a display of belated gentlemanly behaviour, and drops the clothing down to Aspen. Aspen dives. The clothing dives with her. Aspen's body disappears in the water. The clothing arranges itself in a line before starting to fill: panties first in line, then the brassiere, then the cutoffs, then the halter top.

Then Aspen's body reappears inside the clothing as she rises back up to the surface.

"I'm going to go ... uh ... over there," she says, pointing to the shore with its ladder, it being much easier to climb there than up the side of the dam. "Why don't you take Ahmed and meet me there?"

Michael Erickson has posed:
    "Aye," he announces, and getures to Ahmed. hasn't even had to draw his knife. "You hear the lady," he announces, leveling a point in the direction of the ladder. "Do not stand there gawping. March!"

Aspen Matthews has posed:
In a smooth arc, Aspen slips underwater and swims toward the ladder. At the ladder she surfaces. Eyes twinkling with amusement she starts lugging something up out of the water. "Look what almost made it through that hole!" she says, lying so baldly the lie could be Lex Luthor. She presents the underwater drone. "That was a wild and crazy coincidence!"

Pushing the submersible ahead of her, she sighs in relief as Ahmed pulls it up the rest of the way while she climbs, dripping water in a huge almost waterfall behind her.

And bone dry once on the actual slipway.

"That was a refreshing swim. Now ... did someone call the rangers or whoever or am I going to have to do everything else myself?"

One of the students who'd left the slipway, but hadn't fled up the hill holds aloft a phone. "I called already, Dr. Matthews!" she exclaims excitedly. "Did you really fix it?"

A question Aspen doesn't seem to have heard. Or maybe doesn't want to answer. Instead she watches Ahmed packing up the submersible.

"Thanks for the help," she says to Michael as he arrives.

Michael Erickson has posed:
    With Ahmed picking up the drone and making himself very busy so that the shouty man doesn't shout at him further, Michael again has time with the lovely liquid lady. It must be said, of course, that /he/ isn't dry. Far from it. He's a wet rat, all those layers still no problem for him in the swimming and hauling away of young Ahmed; he sweeps his comb of wet black hair back over his head, slick and glistening. "You'll have to tell me about it later," he advises Aspen, taking off his jacket and shaking it out as best he can. Water, water everywhere. "We should get dinner next time you're in town, eh? I know a couple places you might like. I assume that seafood's off the menu, yeah?"

    He's mad at himself, of course, though his general stoniness conceals it. He shouldn't have tried so damned hard. He should have just...made it harder. But nobody was there to look, at the very least. Nobody but Ahmed, and hopefully he won't be stupid enough to open his face. And Aspen was busy, yes? Surely she didn't see his acts of questionable strength and stamina.

Aspen Matthews has posed:
"That rock you dropped was a real chore to put in place. You must have been really high on adrenaline to carry that!" Aspen says as she **LOOKS** at Michael.

Busted!

And then all the water flows out of his clothes and away from him, leaving him as dry as she is.

OK, that's what the look was about. Phew!

"It's actually pretty amazing what we can do when we're under stress. I was having a Hell of a time wrestling that around underwater, even though there was a great ice shelf there to rest it on. But I got it done. It should hold long enough for engineers to fix properly."

She pauses and looks at Michael with her head cocked. "Why would seafood be off the menu? I love seafood!" She grins. "Saying that someone who loves the sea wouldn't eat seafood is like saying someone who loves the prairies won't eat beef!"

She heaves a deep sigh and looks over at the gaggle of students. "Time to go deal with my immediate responsibilities though. It was nice--and a bit freakishly coincidental--to see you again. I'd love dinner sometime."

And with that she's off to fend away questions she can't comfortably answer.

Michael Erickson has posed:
    Busted. Yes. Well. "Well you know me," he says, frowning very slightly as he runs his hand through his wet hair once more. "Full of surprises. So dinner, yeah? You've got my number, give me a call."

    He looks past her to the knot of students, getting so that Ahmed can see him -- one last time, locking eyes, and he makes that 'I'm watching you' gesture with crooked fingers over his eyes and then pointing to the poor guy's, all while Aspen walks away. "See you around, Doctor!"

    And then...she's gone. He's wet. And it's just him and the cold air, soaking in on him like the ancient stone hand of time. The chill isn't what his people like, or last long in. He starts off down the walk toward the parking lot, where a rental car and a swift trip home - and a hot bath - awaits him. Bah. He needs to think about how to get around this. And then there's bloody Tannhauser.

    Better just to go home to the city and find some heads to stomp. He'll feel better all over.