Owner	Pose
Lonnie Machin	Imagine waking up and you're about two feet shorter... and wearing a getup you haven't put on for years. It's annoying, especially when you were always kind of sensitive about your height. Which is why someone is trying to figure out how to fix this, and demonstrating exactly how much technical know-how he keeps under his wide-brimmed hat, by stealthing his way through Outsiders central, and ripping apart tech in order to try and build a - something. Either way, someone's making a mess, having rapidly taken a bunch of sensitive tech, some of it Tim's, and left it lying scavenged and disassembled before moving on to elsewhere to do... elsewhat.
Tim Drake	Things were going well. That's what Tim keeps telling himself, at least. Admittedly it's hard to be positive when one of your best friends rolled a nat one on a spellcast and accidentally de-aged everyone in your secret superhero headquarters.     Thinking about it like really makes Tim question the insanity that is his life. Ahem. Moving on!     The good news is, they're all safe within the Roost. No one can hurt them inside a pillow fort, and that's where Tim leaves the rest of the team in a hurry, after a sudden and panicked squeak of "Lonnie!"     He's on the move, practically flying down the staircase... though he stops on the first landing and turns around. It'd be rude of him not to bring Lonnie some of the cookies he ordered.     "Lonnie? Uh, I can explain!" he calls out as he ducks his head into the lab levels. It sounds more like "eckthplain" because his parents were late getting him into speech therapy.
Lonnie Machin	It's just a trail of scavenged stuff. Meticulously scavenged. Some of Tim's favorite bat toys, taken apart for a single critical component, all of it leading a trail into the fabrication lab-     Which is when that weird, misshapen figure pops up, elongated neck first, from behind a workbench. There's silence, and then an indignant tweenish boy growl.     "Dis ain't FUNNY, Tim!" Yeah, once upon a time, Lonnie's street-level Otisberg Joisey accent was as thick as *peanut butter* and now it's come back with a vengeance and he can barely control it. "Just get outta my way 'coz I'm gonna build something to fix dis." And then all those robes are going around the bench to bull past Tim in order to take something ELSE apart, something doubtless expensive and hard to put back together.
Tim Drake	The more discoveries Tim makes along the way, the more concerned, almost panicked the "Oh no"s that he says to acknowledge them become. And then, the trail leads him right to Lonnie.     His eyes go wide. Tim looks very much like the actual, non-vigilante ten year old that Timothy Drake was back before his first encounters with the Bat, in his royal purple Brentwood Academy blazer and black slacks. He stares up at the fake Anarky head for the space of a heartbeat before his eyes lower to about where Lonnie's face actually is, within the costume. "No, it was Feebie. Her thpell went bad, but it'll be over in a little while!"     As he explains, he approaches the workbench. The first thing he does is set a carton of chocolate milk up on it, and then a brown paper package. "Peathe offering? Chocolate chip. And they're warm th--" His nose wrinkles. "They heated them up."     And then with little further preamble Tim takes a step back and then launches himself up onto the bench, which only takes him a moment. Now that he's vaguely accustomed to being tiny, he's learned how to use his momentum better. Otherwise, well. His upper body strength is garbage.
Lonnie Machin	It's funny, that voice comes from within the chest of the robed figure, which is at about the same height as Tim - the head just sort of swivels. "You ain't gonna sway me wit' dis bourgeois-" Lonnie reaches out and grabs a cookie and it vanishes into the chest cavity of the voluminous figure, and there's the sound of munching.     "I don't wait for tings ta be ova, I take *action*." The chocolate milk vanishes into the robes also, and then he crumples up the empty cardboard box and tosses it aside, before he's grabbing for a really sensitive piece of analytic equipment to get to the good stuff in it. He grabs a screwdriver.
Tim Drake	Tim fights back a smile, the corners of his mouth twitching, as Lonnie accepts first a cookie, and then the chocolate milk. "They're not fancy, I had them delivered from the bakery near the univer--near the college." Still, he pushes the rest of the cookies closer, inch by inch, across the workbench's surface.     Though when Lonnie brandishes the screwdriver, Tim squawks in a very ungainly sort of way and lays himself across the bench so that he gran grab at it, and Lonnie's hand. "No!" His mouth stumbles over the next few things he tries to say, before finally he manages to compose a sentence that he can actually get out: "No more tearing my tech apart! Lonnie, thoppit!"
Lonnie Machin	"Hey! Lemme go, ya Elitist *douchebag*-" Man, he had a mouth on him. Also, he just called tim a douchebag. Either way he does not thoppit, he very much trieth to continue ith. Which is why when Tim grabs at him he does the simplest possible thing and tries to bop Tim one, right in the nose. *POW*     "I TOLJA, LEMME FIXIT." He's still trying to get the screwdriver away from Tim. The urge might be to punch Lonnie in the face right back, except that Tim is well aware that his face isn't his face, it's that goofy scaffolding.
Tim Drake	If the shock of Lonnie calling him a douchebag wasn't already shocking, getting booped hard on the nose is enough to send Tim reeling. It's a wonder he doesn't go tumbling right off the workbench. "AHHH!" he cries out, hands immediately pulling away from the struggle to claim the screwdriver so he can clutch at his face. "You hit me!"     His eyes are watering, and Tim blinks back tears so that he can glare at Lonnie. Well, Lonnie's dumb mannequin head. And then he does the only sensible thing, which is to launch himself right at Lonnie's center mass with all the force his tiny, transformed body can manage.
Lonnie Machin	Which is when they go catapulting across the room, in a clatter of stuff, and in the ensuing scuffle Lonnie loses his head, so he's forced to actually stick his real head out of that mass of red robes - big green eyes, freckles, a comical pouf of red hair, now all mussed, and an expression like a cornered cat.     "You an' the outsiders SUCK, Tim." Then he... sniffles. "Some of us din' WANNA be twelve again, you know?"
Tim Drake	There's absolutely nothing graceful about how he and Lonnie are propelled, like a tiny cluster of chaos, halfway down onto the floor. If this were a cartoon, they'd have one of those big fight dust clouds surrounding them. Once the fake head comes loose Tim punts it into the wall. "We don't THUCK! Take that back!" he says, with the kind of tremulous tone that suggests he might actually be offended by that.     And then he falls back onto his butt. Man, aren't little kids supposed to have a ton of energy? Ugh. "I don't want to be a baby either, Lonnie! But look at me!"     Technically, he's not a baby.     "I have a lithp," and whoever invented the word for said condition was certainly a very cruel person, "And my hair thill growth in funny, and I can't! REACH! ANYTHING!" He lets out a plaintive yell that echoes off the walls, and then dramatically flops backwards, arms spread out. "I hate thith."
Lonnie Machin	Lonnie sits on a workbench, and surls. "Yeah, well, at least YOU were cute. I look like some alley-cat dat washed up after a bad rainstorm. An' my accent's back! You know how hard I hadda work ta get rid of it? Nobody takes ya seriously when ya sound like you're tryinna sell 'em a used car!" He crosses his arms, dramatically, and looks like... a little Gotham City Tough Kid, which is what he was.     "An' my brain doesn't work right - I know what I SHOULD be doin' ta fix this but I can't - make it work, it's like a puzzle where ya know all the pieces an' they still won't fit. I figger my IQ's what, only 200 right about now. If ya gotta rely on that outdated system o' quantifyin' intellect. I USED to be rockin' over a three-oh-oh, but whatever dis is, when it flipped my age back it undid th' bicameral fusion experiments I did."
Tim Drake	After a moment of wallowing in despair, Tim lets out a great heaving sigh and then hauls himself back upright. He clambers up onto the bench again, sitting next to Lonnie as he rubs his nose. "I can't believe you punched me in the fayth." Very carefully, he sniffs, and then his eyes blink against the pain but he doesn't flinch. "What am I thaying," he grumbles, "Of courthe I can believe you punched me in the fayth." He reaches for the bag of cookies and pulls one out for himself, then offers the bag--and its lone remaining occupant--to Lonnie.     "It'll all be over thoon. Five hourth." And then glumly, Tim takes a wee little bite of his cookie. Because it's a good cookie, and even upset, Tim wants to savor it. "IQ ith dumb and juth a way for people to feel thuperior to otherth, anyway."
Lonnie Machin	"What'd dey track yours at da last time you got it tested." Lonnie says, before he takes the cookie. He stares at it, deep in thought, as if pondering something, and he says, "Dis is real equitable of you, sharin' your cookie wit' me. Thanks." He rubs his nose, and gives a grim little street kid scowl.     Then he turns and kisses Tim on the cheek. "I believe ya." He says, with a sigh. "I jus' really hate dis. Reminds me o' seein' everyting wrong wit' da world and feelin' powerless ta fix it."
Tim Drake	"No," is all Tim says to Lonnie's question about his IQ. Of course, he says it mumbled around a bunch of cookie crumbs, but the point still stands.     He sits there, feet dangling off the edge of the workbench, and stares contemplatively at his scuffed dress shoes. "I don't like it either, but magic is tricky. You thould know, you have more eck--eth--you're more familiar with it than I am." Tim chomps down on another bite of cookie, and licks melted chocolate from his thumb.     Then he turns to look, wide-eyed, at Lonnie. Before he ducks his head to bump it against Lonnie's shoulder. "Ith okay. It'll be over thoon, and then you can get back to your anarchieth," he says, then jumps down from the workbench. He holds a hand up to Lonnie. "Come hang out with the team?"
Lonnie Machin	"Yeah, dat's why I was trynna build a glyph engine dat'd let me charge up dese here symbols o-" He pauses, and rubs his nose with the back of his hand. "Aw. Never mind." He crosses his arms, and then looks away.     "No. Coz I'm mad. Dis wasn't very t'oughtful o dem." He kicks one leg, and looks a little bit like a surly Pingu for a moment, and then he takes hold of Tim's hand. "But I'll hang out wit'chu."
Tim Drake	Tim only stares at Lonnie. STARE. He is thoroughly nonplussed by this talk of glyph engines and other things he just doesn't understand. Instead he wiggles his fingers up expectantly, and smiles when Lonnie takes them. "Hi mad, I'm Tim," he says, and then with his free hand (cookie now fully consumed) he slugs Lonnie in the arm.     "That'th for calling me a d-bag, you... jerk!" Then he tugs at Lonnie until they're both standing. "Well... wanna boot up my laptop and play old computer gameth? I just downloaded Myth again!"     Pause. Frown. Tim's brows furrow. "Myth. MyTH. My-" He takes in a breath. Carefully, with his mouth formed into a grimace, Tim slides his tongue back until--- "Mythhhhhhhhsssssssssst. The game where you go into bookth." He sniffs.
Lonnie Machin	Lonnie raises a red eyebrow at Tim, and then he sniffs. "Naw. I'd prefer ta go throw a baseball aroun', you know?" He looks down at himself. "Boy am I glad I grew outta dis t'ing." He tugs at the robes, "I keep trippin' over dese. I don't REMEMBER doin' that before. How did I avoid it back den?" He shakes his head.     "So when dey put 'precocious' in da dictionary, was your picture next to it? Also, I can unnerstan' why the thpeech impedimenth-" That's MEAN Lonnie, "Is frustratin'? But ya wear it well, Timmy."
Tim Drake	"Lonnie, ith thnowing out right now. And we don't have coath--ja--" Tim makes a wordless noise, angry and frustrated, and then flails his free hand down at himself to indicate his clothes. Which are currently tiny-Tim-sized. Unlike all of his winter gear. Though Lonnie's robes might offer decent cold resistance.     He swings his hand, still holding Lonnie's, and frowns. "Rude!" Lonnie gets another punch to the arm for that, though Tim is lacking a lot of his usual muscle mass right now. Significantly less bruising force. "I wath quiet in th--at the academy," he explains. "No one notithed for a long time." He shrugs as he drags Lonnie over to the elevator (and away from the expensive tech).
Lonnie Machin	"In other words," Lonnie says, "Ya were embarassed, so ya outsmarted everybody, including yerself?" He lets Tim drag him along, in a swirl of robes. Man, he took apart a lot of stuff, and fast. "I mean at dis age I was really inta Marx an' Bakunin and-" He shrugs, "...Le Guin. You know, da important philosophers. Dat and a lotta engineering textbooks."     "I never played Myst. Didn't own a computer till right about dis age."
Tim Drake	Tim grumbles something that is probably not the nicest thing (but also G-rated) under his breath. "Yeah yeah. I juth wanted to read in clath!" He lifts a hand to smack the elevator call button, and then frowns. "Anything. I didn't care what. Any kind of book wath okay with me."     And when Lonnie admits he's never played Myst, Tim shrieks. "Then we gotta! The puzzleth--they're tho good!" He turns to shake Lonnie lightly in his excitement, just as the elevator doors slide open. Then he's dragging Lonnie in, and onwards to one of the best computer gaming experiences of all time.