Who: Captain Carswell Thorne and Derek Hale What: New Arrival When: Night time Where: Portal Room Status/Warning: Completed via Gdoc / Low... Thorne arrives after a head injury.
Thorne left Cinder, Scarlet and Wolf on the Rampian and took the podship to the Satellite to pick up the girl with the hair. It was a fairly short trip, and he didn’t expect any problems. Only, when he arrived, there was nothing but problems. One of the Queen’s Thaumaturges was there waiting for him, and sent him, the girl, and the satellite into a free fall toward the planet. After a short struggle, they managed to get out of their bonds. Before crashing down, Thorne could have sworn he saw some kind of weird light. Something struck him hard in the head, and he thumped down to the ground.
When he lifted his head, he was in some weird room. The satellite wasn’t there, nor was the girl with all the hair. His head was throbbing and his vision was blurry as he tried to sit up. A groan escaped him. What had just happened? Where was he??
What was it with people coming through the portal unconscious when Derek was on shift? This was twice now, and this time he had the forethought to grab the First Aid kit and hope no weird universal stone shit hit at the time as he walked in. Again. If it happened again, he was going to be forced to quit and try to find some other way to be a contributing member of the society he'd found himself in. These thought carried him into the portal room itself, where he was very relieved to find the latest refugee awake.
He approached carefully, scenting the stranger with a subtle sniff just to get an idea of a) how likely it might be that he was about to be attacked, and b) if he could figure out whether the man was injured or now. "Hey, I know you're confused, but it's going to be okay. I'm Derek. What's your name?"
“Thorne,” he said with something of a frown. Should he be telling this other man his name? His actual name? He was wanted in the Eastern Commonwealth, American Republic, and the European Federation. And he didn’t know where he was now. This wasn’t the satellite, and definitely wasn’t Luna. He must be on Earth somewhere.
But Spades, his head felt like it’d been split open. Thorne blinked up at the other man. Well, he’d been given a name, so he gave one. “Carswell Thorne. What… what happened?”
The guy was throwing off fear pheromones bad enough to set Derek’s teeth off edge, but that wariness wasn't dangerous. In fact, Derek almost admired him for it, even while he didn't envy him in the slightest. "You went through a portal and landed here. Are you familiar with a planet called Earth? And/or can you tell me what year you're from and if you can read and/or write in English."
“A portal?” This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. Did Luna have some kind of freaky technology that he didn’t know about? They were freaky enough to have some kind of freaky tech, that was true. “Uh… It’s September twelfth, 126 T.E.” He looked around the room, frowning. Now he was a little more confused than scared. This Derek guy hadn’t just come out and arrested him, so that was a start. Thorne lifted a hand and felt the part of his head that had been hit when the satellite was falling. No blood. “Yeah, I can read and write. Where am I? On Earth?”
Derek had no idea what kind of time basis that was, but the fact that he knew what Earth was made things a little easier. "Upstate New York, Earth, Early-ish twenty-first century—2018, to be precise." He gave Carswell the basic rundown of the Avengers Facility, and the Avengers themselves, all while watching the man's pupils for signs of a head injury.
They could swing by medical while Derek contacted Pepper to arrange for a room, but he wanted to catch anything before it became a full blown emergency. He handed over the data pad and ran through the registration process as quickly as he could. "It's a lot, I know. You're handling it a lot better than I did. Now, we've got a couple of options: one, I can take you to get that head checked out, or two, I can get you to your room and hope that you don't die from some undiagnosed aneurysm because you're like me and are too stubborn to let people take care of you."
“Tw-Twenty-first… century?” Thorne listened, his heartbeat rapid, but slowed at the explanations of what was going on here. Avengers Facility. Portals. Rooms. Registration. By the time he was entering his information into the data pad, he’d calmed. This was just some kind of bad dream. He was unconscious on the satellite, spiralling and barreling down toward the planet, probably about to die wrapped up in miles and miles of hair.
“Medical is fine. Should probably check out my noggin.” If Thorne had stayed on the satellite, he would have knocked his optic nerve loose and gone blind. But as it was, it was probably just a mild concussion. He attempted to stand, and felt a little wobbly, but managed. One arm shot out to maintain balance.
“So… I went back in time? This is before the colony on Luna? Before World War Four?” Thorne asked.
Derek caught the newcomer's arm before it could make contact with the wall and directed his hand to Derek's own shoulder instead. It made things easier to get them out of the portal room, at any rate. He wasn't sure when he'd become okay with strangers in his personal space. Probably had something to do with the lost look in their eyes that perfectly reflected his own. "We're only up to two so far, although the presence of three and four doesn't actually surprise me. Fills me with a kind of directionless dread, sure, but it's not the most shocking thing I've heard since coming here."
He chuckled low and glanced toward the ceiling in an affected way, knowing full well that the moon was nowhere close to overhead at the moment. As for the moon, we've barely landed there and started really exploring, so a colony might be a long time in coming. I guess from your perspective, yeah, you've done some time traveling. Hard to say if you'll get along okay with the tech here or not. Some people from the future have a hard time with it, while others think its easy. What's your time like, anyway?"
“Uhhh,” Thorne was thankful for the hand on the other man’s shoulder. It was strong, warm, and surprisingly comforting. He lifted his free hand to his head where he’d been struck again, trying to think. “There’s been peace on Earth. Though, we can’t fight the thing that’s killing us. A disease. Letumosis. The Blue Flu, or Blue Plague.” He couldn’t believe this turn of events, couldn’t wrap his head around it.
Thorne’s hand tightened on Derek’s shoulder as he nearly stumbled again. “Sorry.” In a very uncharacteristic turn, Thorne felt… what was the opposite of confident? Thorne felt that.
The man's continued unsteadiness left Derek with no other recourse than to step in closer and put his arm around the other's back. "Don't be. I've bled on people plenty in my life, and passed out on a few of them. All this portal security work feels like payback somehow. Tell me more about this Blue Flu, if you're up for it. Is it called that because of where it came from, or what it does to people?"
The arm around him was comfort and support, and Thorne leaned into the other man. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Letumosis. First the victims have red boils rimmed with purple--like a bruise. Then they waste away, losing all their strength. They get hot and sweaty. Finally, the skin goes yellow, the boils turn to lavender patches, and the fingers go blue. Then death. There’s no cure, no treatment. And it’s highly infectious.” Thankfully, Thorne had been safe from it… but he’d seen the news feeds. He knew how terrible it was.
"Jesus," Derek muttered lowly. His mind very helpfully gave him all kinds of lovely mental images, and none of them were all that great. "Sounds delightful. Definitely makes me glad to be a werewolf. I've never been sick from a germ or a virus a day before in my life. I'd offer up my blood as a potential cure, but none of us are sure you can go back with anything you had here, or even if you'll remember it at all. Also, not sure if a generation of lycanthropes is going to be what the world needs after a pandemic."
He broke off with a half-chuckle. "Sorry, that was probably pretty insensitive of me. I'm sorry about what's happening in your time. It sounds like it really sucks."
Thorne turned to look at him at the word werewolf and raised an eyebrow. His head was still swimming, but that word caught on something. Wolf. Wolf and Scarlet. Back on the Rampian. With Cinder. His friends.
“I… I have no idea,” he said, letting his eyes linger on the other man’s jaw, before turning them to the hallway ahead. “For all I know this is some hallucination, and I’m actually on that satellite. Or… the other world has been a long hallucination, and I’m just now waking up from a dream. Spades, this hurts my head.”
Derek wasn't completely devoid of sympathy, even though his first inclination was to bristle at the idea that his entire life was a work of fiction. If that was the case, he wanted to have fucking words with the writer. Namely "fuck off" and "go to therapy, you sick piece of shit." "There's a lot of us who've been where you are. You'll be all right as soon as the staff get a look at you. And the rest—well, maybe you won't be here for long. And we don't know what happens when you go away again. You could get dropped right back where you were. There's no rhyme or reason behind the appearances and disappearances. And the people from here don't know what, why, or how yet either, but they're working on it. I'm sure you have questions, and I can't promise to have answers, but I'll do what I can."
Thorne nodded. He wasn’t sure he liked the idea that people were appearing and disappearing, but what was he supposed to do about it? He’d only been here all of ten minutes. He had a lot of catching up to do on everything. “I just… I want to make sure I have this straight. I’ve been pulled through some kind of time vortex, and now I’m in the twenty-first century on Earth. No one knows how or why, but it’s been happening to a lot of people. And no one knows how or when I’ll be able to get back to my own time. Is that it?” He didn’t sound angry, just confused. A young man desperately trying to understand something incredibly foreign and alien to him.
...and space, Derek wanted to add, but didn't. That was just quibbling over semantics, and the guy had been through enough. "You got it in one. Maybe you should be the one giving the Welcome to this Place speech. Once you get settled some more, in a couple of days or whatever, if you have an actual interest in security around here, look up a guy named 'James Barnes' on the net and drop him a line to say you'd like to maybe help out. God knows, this place can be a fucking zoo sometimes."
Thorne nodded again. His head was swimming both from the absurdity of the situation, and the fact that he probably had a mild concussion. He really just wanted to lay down and sleep. Were people supposed to sleep when they were concussed? He couldn’t remember. Probably not the best sign. But hey, he was hanging off some handsome guy as they wandered toward medical help. Could be worse.
“I’m… probably not going to remember that, but I appreciate it.” He could barely remember Derek’s name as it was. In ten minutes he might forget it, too.
"I'll plug it into your pad before I go." The more the new guy stayed upright, the more obvious it became that he was hanging onto consciousness by a thread. Derek hurried their pace a bit; he could have carried the man, but most people didn't enjoy that nearly as much as movies and TV would make a person believe. "Let's just concentrate on getting you someplace to get checked out."