driftfleet | Arrival broadcast

Entry tags:

Arrival broadcast

Who: Apollo + Others
Broadcast: Fleetwide
Action: Marsiva
When: Now? Until shuffle?

Broadcast
[The camera shows a handsome, very built man sleeping in a bed. And it continues to show that for a very long time. Either is started broadcasting very early, or he's doing a very good job of pretending to be asleep when he's not.

When he does move, he sits up carefully, pushing his hair back from his face. He's wearing cargo pants and a plain white t-shirt that seems somehow too... mundane on him.

He gets up after a brief stretch and moves over to the communicator, picking it up and clicking it off without offering a word.]

On ship
[Apollo eventually emerges from his room, a bit somber and subdued. He wanders around in bare feet, moving quietly along the metal hallways. When he finds a window, he leans his hands against it, looking at the distant star at the heart of this system with undisguised longing.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yeah, that part's unsettling. [If she hadn't already tried to rip it out with great failure, she would be trying that.]

I say that like the rest of it is totally normal and expected or welcome. [Which it's obviously not.]

[ His hand drifts up to under his hair and behind his ear where a few spots of silver appear on his skin, marking where the augment is. ]

I have a daughter. At home. She's only six and I'm a single father. We were home alone.

[Her gaze falls to the floor for a moment. That's not good. Kids shouldn't get caught in the middle of these things. Her mind rests on Charles for a moment before she moves on.] No one who comes here knowing people from home have been missing even if they've already been here for months. I'm not sure why, but maybe you're here and there somehow.

[And maybe he's not. She doesn't even know what the party line is on this for the Fleet or if there is one. The story at the prison was unsettling more than comforting. A duplicate who wouldn't commit crimes was supposedly in your place.]

Relative time disparity. Time passes faster in one place than another. The Narnia effect.

[ He takes a slow, deep breath, eyes closed, and then lets it out. ]

So long as she's not alone. She's had one dad walk out on her, I won't be another.

[She nods along. There's no way to be sure that's it, but it's...reasonable? Not a bad thing to hold on to when you can't do anything more proactive about it in the moment. She never likes hearing about parents being separated from their children. It came up with Castle and Beverly too even if Beverly's son is older than her.

Kitty also wasn't expecting a two dads situation, but it's nice it came up before she asked about her mom or something.]

It wouldn't be by choice. [Not that it makes losing someone hurt much less.] It's a lot to take in on top of everything else to take in.

She's six. I don't think choice really factors into it. She'll find a way to make it her fault. She blamed herself for not convincing her Daddy to stay; Angie and I spent nights sitting with her explaining that it wasn't her fault.

[ He rubs his arm with a hand, looking off somewhere else. ]

I'm Apollo.

[Interesting name. Probably not the time to comment.] Kitty.

I'm sorry they separated you from her. [She's adding it to the list of things the Atroma will pay for.]

It's probably the cruelest thing I've seen from them. [But it's only been a couple of months. She figures it gets worse.]

Good to meet you, Kitty.

You got any family you've been ripped away from?

[Is there a polite way of saying, no, they've all been dead for awhile?] Just from part of my team and friends from another multi-dimensional trap.

Team and friends are family. Or at least, mine are to me. Most of my friends are on my team. My current team.

[She can't disagree with that. She does think of them as family even if she doesn't always refer to them as such.] You have a team?

Yeah. The Authority. Well... I did. We split up, when my husband left us. Things were going wrong, it seemed like time to step back. But I still routinely see most of them. Angie comes over to babysit, we visit Shen's temple at least once a month and Jeroen lives nearby. It's good to have him nearby to help with Jenny's powers.

[ He pauses and gives another sheepish smile. ]

Yeah, those names mean nothing to you, sorry. We're a bit... famous, in our world.

Don't worry about it. Can't say I've ever been famous. [She has been recognized a few times by non-X-Men here, but they were people in the same line of work, so it hardly counts.]

The Authority, hm? [Sounds a little full of itself, doesn't it?] We're the X-Men.

A six year old with powers must make tantrums fun.

[ Whereas Apollo's wedding was covered by several major media outlets. ]

X-Men. What's the X for?

And honestly, three was much worse. Six year olds can be reasoned with, and she's a pretty grown up kid. But three? Three there is no reason, just I want and a quantum reality bending powers.

[Kitty's wedding wasn't even official because rabbis and judges were in short supply and civilization had fallen so who fills out paperwork?]

eXtreme? eXciting? I'm not sure. Possibly for the X-gene which gives us our mutations. Might have also been named partially after a friend of our boss' who died before the team formed.

A reality-bending toddler is now officially the most terrifying thing I can imagine.

[ Official is in the heart, not the papers. Especially after the apocalypse. ]

That's a lot possibilities. Was it in fact because it sounded cool? Because I think a lot of teams end up with names that just sound cool. I think that might be how we ended up being The Authority.

Oh yeah, it is. That's why I like having Jeroen nearby, he can smother down her powers. I might be able to fly tot he sun and back in under ten minutes, but I can't stop her rippling reality when I won't let her have chocolate icecream for dinner.

I was kind of late to the party. Maybe Kurt knows. He'd probably happily make something up.

[Jeroen has power-cancelling powers then? She's taking mental notes.] Chocolate ice cream is the perfect dinner though.

Chocolate ice cream is fine if you're an adult and prepared to deal with feeling sick. For my three year old daughter, it is not okay because I don't want to have to deal with her puking it all up and I can promise the other half would vanish just in time to miss it because of his tactical genius predicting it.

Sir, it sounds like you don't know how to handle your ice cream. You should probably leave that to the professionals.

[ He gasps with mock indignation. ]

You would be so right, I run way too hot to make icecream much fun to eat.

I guess the name isn't just for show then? [He'd certainly mentioned powers like flying to the sun, but she didn't know much about the extent of them.] Solar powers?

No, he named me for the sun god for a reason. Solar powered, rather than solar powers. More sun, more heat, more boom.

He? You didn't come up with your own codename?

No. I was made. Some guy volunteered to become a black ops superhero and they made him into me and gave me the name Apollo. It's not just a code name. It's my name.

You... [It's unsettling. It sounds like the kind of genetic manipulation going on back home except the guy volunteered and the result isn't a homicidal maniac.]

You don't remember anything about who you were before?

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