hh_mirror | Not Popcorn! ((Open RP))

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Not Popcorn! ((Open RP))

((This is to get John Amsterdam caught up with the end of season 1.))

John was pretty confident that while he had gone to bed naked, he hadn't been covered with butter at the time.

So now he was flat on his back, staring at the stone ceiling above him, and trying to figure out how he had gotten from his bed in New York to a room in a Scottish castle. Again.

He had left Hogwarts as suddenly as he arrived, and had dismissed it all as a bad dream. Life had gone on as usual. No, the pain in his back from hitting the stone floor told him that it was worse than usual. The bullet wound in his side was almost healed, but it still twinged a bit.

The bullet... John tried to wipe the butter out of his eyes as the last few weeks came back to him. He'd been shot, and he wasn't dead. Which meant that Sara wasn't the One, and that was why he had dumped her. Yesterday. Or what felt like yesterday. Thanks to Hogwarts time and popcorn, several weeks in New York had meant only five minutes as a kernel for him.

Something was licking his arm. John rolled over to find Thirty-Six in his own pool of butter. The damn dog must have been sleeping on the bed, and John couldn't be happier. "Hey, boy," he said, running his fingers through the dog's slicked-down coat. They both needed a shower. John just hoped that nobody would bother to ask questions as the naked guy and his dog made their way to Ravenclaw.

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A faint breeze rustled through the corridor, and a man in a glittery black bodysuit and full mask flew through. No, really - flew. Horizontally, like Superman.

The figure did a double-take, doubled back and hovered in front of the naked guy and the naked dog.

"You smell like food," he informed them.

The hovering would impress him if he didn't have more important things to worry about. "Really," John replied. "I never would have guessed." This was the sloppy-joe guy. Did he always have food on his mind?

"You're also naked. And goosepimpled."

Not necessarily. Sometimes he had sex on his mind. But his one-and-only was a couple of centuries in the future, so food was the default topic of thought.

"It's a bit cold," he said in his defense. "Not all of us get space suits like that." He pointed at the floor. "I bet the levitation burns calories, too."

"Not really. Flight ring. Runs on willpower. Natural fliers like Mon-El and Ultra Boy, they get a workout. Not so sure about Dawnstar. Do wings hold fat?" He flashed his Legion ring at John.

"The suit's easy to get, really. Tell the computer, it scans your measurements and replicates it right up!"

John took a second to look at the ring. "I don't think there's much fat on wings," he said absently. "Where do you get a ring like that?"

"Legion of Super-Heroes. Gotta be a member. It's' an honor." He leaned down and lowered his voice. "Superman has two rings."

"Two?" Superman? "How did he do that?"

Starman scratched his head. "He got one as Superboy, and then he got one later as Superman. Reality had changed then, because of the big Crisis. The details are a little fuzzy. At least it's clearer than the Legion of Three Worlds adventure. Nobody remembers much of anything about that one."

"Fuzzy." As somebody with a long life and a painfully long memory, a fuzzy memory sounded like a blessing sometimes. "Did you tell me about the Crisis before?"

"Mmmm...We were talking about history, weren't we? How the old stories get all muddled after a generation or three. The Crisis made it all much worse, 'cause so many multiple Earths got merged into one, all the different versions of the same stories got kind of blended."

He made a trumpeting noise. "Throw all the history books in the multidimensional Cuisinart, and hit Pulse!"

Okay. "So then how do you know which part of the story you are?"

"My case? Love, and destiny. My Dream Girl was coming back to this time for the Lightning mission so I had to find a way to come with, 'cause for me, she's the one. The other - the black hole - Dream Girl saw me make it in a vision and that hasn't happened yet, so I knew I couldn't go home with her. I'll get it done if - if? - it's the last thing I do."

Thom shrugged. "Some things, you do because somebody's got to. Like Earth-22, it was a mess. Nobody could tell the good guys from the bad guys anymore. Somebody had to fill the Starman-shaped hole in their Justice League, 'cause history says there was a Starman there when it all got fixed. I could do it, so I did it."

Chance doesn't make a habit of lingering around the popcorn room to play welcome wagon. It so happens that she's been hunting for Tribbles. Rumor has it some of the Tribbles from COMC classes of yore got loose and may be breeding in the walls. She hasn't found any thus far, and is beginning to wonder whether the rumors are some kind of spontaneous Hogwarts equivalent of an urban legend. Things that go bump in the night, Tribbles getting busy in the woodwork ...

Instead she finds a buttersoaked man and his buttersoaked dog. Oh, and the buttersoaked man is quite statuesque and impressively naked. However, because the man also looks a hell of a lot like Dieter Prohl, this doesn't come as much of a shock. Most of the school has seen most of Dieter.

It's more surprising that there's a buttery dog.

"First time I've seen an unpopcorned dog," she comments, averting her eyes partly out of politeness and partly out of a reaction that's some species of reticent unease. "I didn't know you had a dog."

She isn't looking at him, and when she was looking she didn't look closely enough to see the scarred skin under all the popcorn grease (the sheen is rather eye-dazzling), so she hasn't realized this is probably not Dieter.

"I didn't know that I knew you," John replied. The New York accent was probably also a clue that this was not Dieter. However, they both shared a disturbing lack of shame.

Poor Thirty-Six was trying to lick the butter off himself. It was probably going to make the dog sick. "This is what the guy gets for jumping up on the bed," Amsterdam said, trying to wipe some of the grease off the dog. "So if I have to come from my nice, warm bed to this place, so does he."

The accent does indeed clue Chance in. Thanks to the uncanny similarity between her boss and the Antichrist, she's familiar with the Hogwarts phenomenon of lookalikes. (She's also intensely grateful she hasn't got a lookalike wandering around. Imagine trying to explain that to Emmie, who barely knows Chance as it is.)

"I didn't know that you weren't the guy I knew," she answers, level and not laughing but the oddness of it all strikes her as a little funny, and that takes away a little of the awkwardness inherent in the situation. "Not that I really know him, just everyone's seen him around. The German guy from Ravenclaw who wanders around in a towel."

"Yeah, I know him," John said. "I'm in Ravenclaw, too, and he's taken all the fun out of it. John Amsterdam." He'd shake her hand, but the poor woman didn't deserve melted butter.

"So how do you get back to there from here, Ms...?"

Chance doesn't have any real desire to shake a buttery hand, either. "Silvey. Dr. Chance Silvey. A fellow Ravenclaw. Ravenclaw Tower is that way," she points in the direction she's come from. "Take a right at the suit of armor a little way down the hall, and you'll come to a flight of stairs. Go down that, then take another left, and you'll be on the right path. If you want, your dog can come have a bath at the Care of Magical Creatures shed."

Being a teaching assistant has so many perqs.

John turned to the dog. "Did you hear that, Thirty-Six? We both get to take a bath." He had to pull the dog's attention away from the butter again.

"Thanks for the directions. The Care of magical Creatures shed is that barn out there, right?"

"The only outbuilding sizable enough to be called a barn, yeah." The groundskeeper's hut is big enough to have housed a half-giant, but it's still just a hut. "Did you just call your dog 'Thirty-Six'?"

"Yes." The dog's ears perked up at his name. "Replacement for Thirty-Five, who was a good dog. Predecessor of the eventual Thirty-Seven."

It's a sequential thing? "You've had a succession of thirty-six dogs?"

That's a lot of dogs.

"Yeah. Or, you know, 252 if you're using dog numbers."

Ba-dum tsh.

Chance doesn't exactly roll her eyes, but the sentiment is there. "Maybe I shouldn't say this in front of Dog Thirty-Seven, but what is that, a dog for every year you've been alive?"

Oh, Chance, if only you knew.

He frowned. "Oh, no. Thirty-Six is only four. Thirty-Five was thirteen when he died. Veterinary science has come really far in the last century."

"And that makes you how old?" She can't actually total it all up, since all the dogs won't have had equal lifespans, and she doesn't know how old he was when he got his first dog.

She's all but forgotten she's standing here talking to a naked man covered in butter. Hey, it's Hogwarts. You get used to this kind of thing.

For John, standing around talking to someone while naked just makes it Tuesday. It's the butter that makes it Hogwarts.

"Four hundred." He shrugged. "Almost four hundred and one."

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Not Popcorn! ((Open RP))

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