among her own kind

[she_sells_seashells]

Shell Bell finds Milliways once when she is eighteen. She has been there for two days now, setting up her sign ten minutes out of every waking hour, wiping down tables for her quarters in the staff area, eating buttery potatoes (she has been told that this is a complete nutrient package, for humans). Her wand is holding a bun of hair in place on the back of her head. Her shells are stashed safely in her room; she's budgeting carefully and she'll pay her tab when she leaves.

No one's talked to her due to the sign yet. They don't always. She sets it up anyway, like clockwork, so everyone gets the chance.

Comments

[ferratus]

"I trust me not to break it when I'm being really careful way, way more than I trust random chance not to break it sometime in the next hundred years," Tony points out.

[she_sells_seashells]

"Okay. But be really careful. I think it's cheap junk where it came from. It works so well because it's easy for that world to make stuff work well, not because they were trying."

[ferratus]

"Trust me," he says, smiling with trademark Stark confidence.

[she_sells_seashells]

Bell squirms.

But she gives him the recorder.

[ferratus]

"You wanna come hover over me while I work on it?"

[she_sells_seashells]

"Would that affect the likelihood of you breaking it?" Bell wonders. "If you don't like being watched or it'll make you liable to slip, then I won't. But I don't want to go talk to people while I don't have it on me to review the conversations later, either. So yes, all else equal."

[ferratus]

"It won't make a difference as long as you don't distract me right at a critical moment or throw stuff at my head or whatever," he says, "and I bet you won't do any of that."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Okay. Where are you working?"

[ferratus]

"I got a room, I'll show you."

[she_sells_seashells]

Bell is shown. She watches. Nervously.

[ferratus]

Tony opens up the recorder, oohs and ahhs at its inside parts, makes a quick run to Bar to get some stuff he didn't have on hand, disassembles the communicators he was working on, and builds Bella two backup drives with equal storage capacity to her recorder that are compatible with its existing backup function.

All in all, it takes him two hours.

[she_sells_seashells]

When he seems done, she says, "Do they have what the original had on it, or not?" Pause. "Oh. And thank you. Thank you so much."

[ferratus]

"Not yet," he says. "You'll have to do that part yourself; I can't touch the data without your authorization. The encryption tricks in this thing are flat-out sexy, I'm definitely stealing them."

[she_sells_seashells]

"The guy who gave it to me taught me to use it, but he didn't include an instruction for making backups. Do you know what I have to say to it?"

[ferratus]

"'Back up'," he says, "conveniently enough. And you already know how to specify a data set."

[she_sells_seashells]

"It'll be able to find the ones you made? Okay." She pushes the button that means she's talking to it, and not just talking, and says, "Back up from first entry to last entry."

Her recorder whirs. A little green light goes on.

Bell beams and spontaneously hugs Tony.

[ferratus]

Awwwwwwwwwwww.

Tony hugs back!

[she_sells_seashells]

"Thank you. My entire brain practically lives in this thing."

[ferratus]

"And now you have three of it," he says. "Keep one close by and one somewhere safe and synchronize them every so often, and let me know if I need to make you a new one."

[she_sells_seashells]

"I will," she says, letting him go at length. "I think I'll leave one in my room here, which is safe if not always particularly accessible - though more so soon, assuming we follow through with Sherlock's plan of me moving in with you and I can just slip through your doors sometimes."

[ferratus]

"It's a good plan," says Tony. "I like that plan."

[she_sells_seashells]

"I'm still sort of hoping we find a way to cheat massively before I go home and write a note to tell my parents I'm running away to Atlantis and stow myself on your train."

[ferratus]

"Cheating massively is a better plan," he agrees. "It usually is."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Yep."

She picks up her recorder. She pets it. She also picks up and pets the backups. She puts them all in her pocket.

[ferratus]

That is terribly adorable.