After about nine hundred delays that had had Gert anxiously tapping her foot for so long that she was starting to develop blisters, the portal finally dropped off Gert, Bay and Old Lace at the top of the stairs at the new and improved hideout under the La Brea tar pits, where a cacophony of arguing voices awaited them.

"You don't know what you're talking about, Victor!" Chase snapped. "The dude who attacked us was in his twenties, tops. And along with being an old dude, Alex Wilder's dad is also dead. Trust me, I saw him get blown up before watching an entire ocean get dropped on his corpse."

That was chilling, but Gert only raised an eyebrow, motioning for Bay to follow her down the stairs toward where her friends had gathered.

"Trust me, I saw a portrait of the guy when he was younger," Victor said impatiently. "And I have a photographic memory. Literally."

"He's right, Chase," said Nico. "I'd recognize Mr. Wilder's baritone anywhere. I don't know how, but he's definitely the one who kidnapped Molly."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Gert said, holding up her hands as she descended the last stair and stepped into view of her friends. "Is this actually a mirror universe, or did I miss something big?"

( More sniping behind the cut! )

[[preplayed with the amazing justbeingbay. taken and adapted from runaways volume ii, issue 16. nfb/nfi, ooc-okay, and part one of five today!]]

"I know that your bureaucratic worldview can barely accept the notion of extenuating circumstances, but I'm telling you that's what I have," Gert snapped, switching her phone to her other ear. "The idea of a no-portal list is stupid, first of all, especially when I'm already outside of my home, and secondly, I'm almost seventeen, which is legally old enough to make decisions for myself in a third of known dimensions, according to your stupid manual."

She waited for a response to that. When one came, it wasn't anything helpful.

Gert snapped, "Yeah, well, so are you."

It wasn't her best comeback, but she slammed her phone closed and flopped down on the bed.

[[open, expecting one]]

Gert hadn't been feeling super cheerful the past few days. Even though she was pretty firmly agnostic, and even though she thought Thanksgiving was a stupid, unjust holiday that celebrated horrible crimes and had no business being marketed as some kind of celebration of friendship, the looming approach of Hanukkah and Thanksgiving on her iCal was making her feel... not homesick exactly, but maybe a little nostalgic. Which was stupid, because now that she knew that her parents had been freaking supervillains for her entire life, she knew that she hadn't exactly had a perfect childhood worth being nostalgic for. But nonetheless, she couldn't help feeling a little bummed out about not having latkes and presents to look forward to this year.

Still, she did have a dinosaur to curl up with, so she guessed it wasn't all bad. At least that was what she was internally chiding herself as she scooted over on the bed to make more room for Old Lace.

This was going to break the bed one of these days and it was going to be fantastically awkward to explain to the school administration, she knew that much.

Gert woke up early and did not want to get out of bed.

Strictly speaking, she really should, because she'd put dye in her hair last night and should really be getting up to wash it out soon. But she was comfortable and Old Lace was half sprawled over her and it was nice, even if the dye smell detracted from the niceness of it somewhat.

Anyway, one of the many upsides to being an orphan at boarding school was that no one was going to drag her out of bed anytime soon. Well, unless the smell was really getting on Maddie's nerves. But she didn't think it would come to that.

[[door shut, post open!]]

Gert's one and only saving grace was that she didn't have a roommate this semester, because she woke up with a song in her head and it only took minutes for that song to reach her lips, too.

Well, there was Old Lace. But she could sleep through this, probably.

"No more waking up to innocence, say hello to hesitance to everyone I meet, thanks to you months ago, I guess I'll never know what love means to me, but oh, I'll keep on running along this road, but I've got a bad, bad feeling..."

She got up, and -- probably a bit too loudly -- kicked the door shut before anyone could hear this, because she didn't seem able to stop.

Definitely too loudly.

[[door newly shut, post open!]]

Gert had heard a lot about her future lately, and the more she heard about it, however much each new tidbit seemed to contradict the old, the less excited she was to get there.

Victor's warning a few weeks ago had been one thing: as much as it obviously sucked, she could at least envision how that version of herself had gotten there and try to circumvent it herself by being more careful. But these past few days, being the leader of the Avengers? That had nothing to do with who Gert was now. And as comfortable in her new role as future-her had felt, Gert wasn't comfortable with the idea that that might be where she ended up.

She dragged her stuff from the bouncy castles back into the dorms and up the stairs, then flopped on her bed in a fairly dramatic gesture. Into her pillow, she mumbled a decisive, "Ugh."

[[door cracked, post open with workday SP!]]

On the outside, the club looked pretty seedy, and it was hard to tell whether the small number of cars in the parking lot was a good sign or a bad one. For at least a few of the cars already there - including a limousine with tinted windows and a very sad-looking sports car that still had half of a JUST MARRIED sign affixed to its rear bumper -- it was probably good, but for any Fandom students looking for a positive strip club experience, it was a little harder to tell.

At the door, there was a bouncer checking IDs (or fake IDs, as the case almost universally was with this crowd), and inside... well, inside was a strip club. There was a stage, there were dancers (of multiple genders, even!), there was a breakfast buffet that looked like it served bacon, and there was a bar. And there was glitter. Lots and lots of glitter.

The night was young, the bouncer was easily fooled, and The Silver Glitter Club was open. Enjoy, Fandomites. Or at least try not to pick up any diseases.

[[open for business! feel free to have tagged along whether or not you were part of I Never; i'm deliberately not specifying whose idea this was and how people were notified, 'cuz it definitely was not gert's, so handwave away.]]

There were a lot of things that Gert was too stubborn to do. Trying to train Old Lace out of accidentally scratching her when Gert rubbed her belly was one. Getting a newer iPod that didn't have real buttons and the rolling wheel in the middle was another. But the one that caused her the most irritation on a regular basis was her refusal to refrain from reading Internet news article comments. Painful or not, whenever she read the news and there was a comments section attached, Gert felt like she had to read every single one.

Her door was cracked, and that was as close as she was going to come for pleading for a distraction, but otherwise she was just going to be making a grossed-out face as she scrolled through the comments on a Huffington Post article that had attracted so much vitriol in the comments section that she couldn't even remember what the article itself was about. Ugh.

[[method RP? who, me? door/post open.]]

Well, Old Lace had eaten something weird while out hunting with Gert today, which meant that by the time she and Gert got back to their room, Gert was mid-lecture and Old Lace was looking especially sad-eyed.

"I don't know what your problem is, but you can't eat the tiny rodents," Gert lectured. "They don't even fill you up, for one thing, and I'm pretty sure they're forty percent alcohol, which is probably why your stomach is hurting. Deer only, okay?"

Old Lace whimpered, stretching onto her back on the floor.

Gert sighed and dutifully rubbed the dinosaur's belly.