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Tweak says, "Furry eyebrows, anyone?"

Ray Palmer is the (_atom) wrote in paradisolog,
@ 2016-03-30 18:24:00

Entry tags:

~patty spivot (detectivespivot), ~ray palmer (_atom)

WHO: Ray Palmer and OTA
WHERE: Overlooking the beach
WHEN: Mid-day Wednesday
WHAT: His arrival
WARNINGS: TBD
STATUS: OPEN, incomplete

So say "Geronimo!" Say "Geronimo!"

All right, so...the timing could have been better. To be fair, being stuck in the 1958 unexpectedly wasn't ideal either, but Ray sort of hoped that the goddess who had come to him in a vision he kept secret and to himself would have waited until a more opportune moment. ...then again, maybe that was the opportune moment. Maybe he, Sara, and Kendra were going to be stuck in the 1950s and the goddess who called herself Kamari thought it best to do him a favor. So yeah, okay. Maybe it's better, actually. Who's Ray to question it, really?

He likes to find the bright side of things, anyway, so why stop now?

Ray gets to his feet and heads out toward the sound of the ocean, stopping to admire the view from where he finds himself standing in a clearing on the outskirt of the jungle in which he'd awoken and if that isn't real beauty, Ray doesn't know what is. The sun is shining, the air is warm and smells sweet and salty all at once; the ocean's almost impossibly blue about a mile below and the sand is white and perfectly manicured. Ray has seen a lot of things, but he's never seen something quite like this.

Sure, what he was doing with the team was important. He wouldn't have signed up if he didn't think that it was, but this is a whole new level of incredible and it's an opportunity he couldn't pass up. If saving the world is legendary...what did that make having a hand in creating a whole new utopian one? Whatever it is, Ray wanted to be a part of it. He feels bad, in retrospect, that he hadn't had really much — if any — advanced notice to tie up loose ends back home and he hates that he's unwittingly left Sara and Kendra to fend for themselves in the '50s, but there isn't much he could do about that now. Now, he just has to move forward and hope that some higher powers are looking out for them, too, and that they'll be okay.

"Wow..." he breathes, grinning as he looks out over the landscape. This is going to be the start of something new and amazing and Ray can't wait to start.

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_atom
2016-03-31 05:23 am UTC (link)

Once she'd steadied herself and started to try to get on her feet on her own, Ray helped her upright and then let go of her, shaking his head and smiling. "Don't be sorry, you're fine," he said sincerely. "I think it's pretty cool that you think what I do is pretty cool," he added, that charming smile that most people knew from television making its way onto his face by reflex, because it wasn't a fake, TV smile at all. That was just Ray.

Ray opened his mouth to respond to her going on about being a good cop and he stopped himself when she abruptly changed the subject, getting the hint that she didn't want to keep falling down that rabbit hole.

"I wanted to do something that mattered," he replied honestly. "I wanted to know that I was making a difference and that my life had meaning. My tech, it's...sure, it's revolutionary, but it's technology. By the time I die, fifty more people will have done more amazing things than I ever could. But those fifty people can't say that they had a hand in starting a whole new world," he pointed out. "...what about you? Why did you volunteer?"

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detectivespivot
2016-03-31 05:48 am UTC (link)

His explanation and reasoning for agreeing to be on the island was so altruistic, and it caught Patty off guard. Despite how hard she tried to not judge people, it was difficult to not get a sense of a person after seeing them so thoroughly covered on the news and in science magazines, she thought that he would have a more calculating reason to be there. Not a compassionate one. She liked that, though, because it was nice to know that even famous people could be good, sometimes.

"But those fifty people wouldn't have been able to do those amazing things without the stepping stones that you built though, right?" She asked him hesitantly, as if nervous to disagree with him. Patty looked at Ray curiously. "I mean, everything that you've accomplished so far, none of it would have been possible if Tesla didn't make the strides in electricity that he did. And then you have Einstein's atomic science, without that you wouldn't have even been able to conceive nanotechnology." She looked away again with a sheepish little shrug. "I think that your life already has meaning. ...And even if you think someone else would have come along and invented those things anyway, I was a cop. I've seen some pretty terrible things that people have had to go through, and I've seen little girls get caught in bad crossfires who still got to go home because of your medical equipment in the hospitals that they were brought to. Maybe your life doesn't have meaning on a global scale the way you want it to but..." Patty trailed off as she turned her head to look at him once more, nose wrinkled and eyes squinted a little against the sun as she pushed her hair behind her ear, "I think that your differences meant a lot to them. It depends on what scale you really look at everything on."

She looked away and let it drop, not wanting to make an idiot out of herself by talking about something she obviously didn't know much about compared to what he probably knew, and instead moved forward to respond. "I don't know," she admitted, which sounded so terrible now after his own reasoning. "I guess, I mean, I recently kind of accomplished something big for myself. Sort of. And I've been trying to do it for so long that I didn't really know what to do after I had reached my goal. I guess I just saw a new purpose." A little smile rose to her face again. "So yeah, I guess I wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself, too. A whole new world."

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_atom
2016-03-31 02:55 pm UTC (link)

Ray's eyebrows lifted and the corners of his mouth drew down in something of a thoughtful facial shrug. She did have a point. Patty sounded like she looked at his accomplishments the way that he used to. ...before Rip Hunter walked into his life and told him just how insignificant to the future Ray really was. She looked at his accomplishments as a stepping stone to future ones and he had always sort of felt that way, too, but then things changed. Ray "died." The world kept spinning, completely unimpacted by the loss. His employees kept churning out more tech; most people hadn't even noticed he was gone because Felicity kept running the company so smoothly.

After the true explanation for Rip's selections for the team, though, Ray didn't feel remarkable anymore. Patty's statements were forcing a perspective he hadn't looked at in a short while and, admittedly, it made him feel a little bit better about himself and the way he'd chosen to spend his life back home. Maybe Anna would be proud.

"I guess you're right," Ray agreed, a subtle nod to acknowledge both what she was saying and that he thought she was right about it. "Maybe I'm being a little selfish in searching for a larger-scaled impact all the time..." It hadn't ever occurred to him that wanting to be too altruistic could be somehow considered selfish, but maybe it was.

Ray looked over at her as she tried to put her choice into words. Sometimes that was harder to do, Ray knew that all too well. He matched her smile and nodded. "A whole new world," he agreed. "I don't know about you, Patty Spivot, but I personally can't wait."

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detectivespivot
2016-04-01 02:01 am UTC (link)

"I don't think it's selfish," Patty reasoned, her nose wrinkling again but this time in thought as she looked up at the sky. "I think it's just wanting to do so much good, you don't stop and appreciate the good that you've already done. I mean, that's why I went into CSI, it would be nice to change the world. But," she turned to look at Ray with a tilted head, her hair falling over her shoulder and hanging loosely, "even if I just saved one person and changed one family for the better, that's just as good, right? And I can't wait either. This is going to be one of our biggest adventures, I can tell now." Patty could tell that she had said something that made Ray really think, and she didn't want to bring him down when they were in such an amazing place. So, she gave a little spin on the spot, settling with walking backwards once more before reaching out and grabbing his hand suddenly.

"Come on, I want to show you something." Her voice wavered with excitement as she squeezed before turning again and this time pulling him with her toward the water, having recognized a large rock that was jutting out of the sea a few hundred feet away as a landmark. "It's the coolest thing," she promised, and alright, it probably wasn't the coolest thing, but Patty grew up in a city. So, for her, it was definitely the coolest thing. She kept running until she had him at the shore and she let him go, but Patty kept moving into the water with bare feet - shoes were useless when you were just walking on the beach - and she bent down to grab something before turning to slowly walk back to him with cupped hands and an enthusiastic smile.

"Look!" She reached her hands out a little for Ray to see the live starfish in her palms. "Look, it's alive! It's a real one! They're all over the place, they just walk around! Well... I think they do... they're so slow that you can't really see them move but I swear this one was like, a half a foot to the left last time I saw him. Touch it!" She looked up at him with a delighted little giggle. "It's all rough and slimy. But cool! In a cool way!"

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_atom
2016-04-01 06:27 am UTC (link)

Ray decided to let the question surrounding his altruism fall by the wayside. It was something he'd rather not talk about so much as maybe reflect upon another time. So when she gave him an out of the conversation, Ray was more than happy to take it. "Me too," he agreed.

Patty took his hand, which surprised him, and her sudden excitement caught him off guard and happened to be more than a little contagious. Ray's grin grew and he moved with her when she started to pull him down the beach. Once she let go, Ray slowed his pace, but kept walking to continue closing the gap between them, curious to see what she had to show him.

His eyebrows raised and there was a fascinated light in his eyes as she held it out to him. "Oh, wow," he breathed, looking up at her for a second before looking back down at the starfish, reaching out with a tentative hand — he wanted to touch it, but he didn't want to hurt it — and running a finger down one of the legs. "This is so cool, I've never seen one in real life!"

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detectivespivot
2016-04-01 06:48 am UTC (link)

"Right?!?" Patty practically bounced on the spot when Ray seemed just as excited as she was, and if she looked at the situation somewhat objectively, it was sort of ridiculous. They were both adults, she had seen some terrible things because of her job and Ray had seen some amazing things because of what he had done, and yet the two of them stood there petting a starfish like children at a touch tank in the aquarium. "What do you think his name is?" She asked it so seriously that it was hard to tell whether or not she actually expected a response. She stared down at the fish with a thoughtful hum, as if trying to get a feel for it's personality, before she stood up straight and grinned down at the creature with a satisfied look.

"Orion." She gave a decisive nod. "That's a good star name. For a good starfish." She glanced up at Ray as if to see if he approved or not before stepping back a few paces when the salt water in her palms started to seep through her fingers. "I should put him back, I don't want to hurt him," she reasoned apologetically before turning and bending down, placing Orion back on the rock where she had found him. Her attempt seemed to work... Ray didn't look like he was deep in thought anymore, and in Patty's opinion, that was a good thing. People came here to get away from the serious worries in their life, she found. She didn't want him to suffer from them as soon as he arrived.

"Come on, the camp is just up this way, it's not far now," she promised, wiping her wet hands on her jeans. "You can meet everybody and relax a little before we put you to work. Everyone is still building stuff, I think we're late arrivals but it looks like the others only got here a few days ago."

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_atom
2016-04-01 04:18 pm UTC (link)

It wasn't lost on Ray that they were a grown man and woman acting like a couple of excitable children, but that childlike enthusiasm felt good once in a while. Beyond that, it was endearing to see someone else being willing to embrace that piece of themselves in an appropriate situation. Seeing a real, live starfish for the first time was plenty appropriate for the reaction, in Ray's opinion. "So cool..." he murmured, a firm smile in place and a gleam in his eyes.

When Patty named the fish, Ray huffed a soft laugh and nodded. "Yeah, I like that," he agreed. His smile didn't actually fade at all when Patty realized that she'd need to put the starfish back; he waved it off and nodded. "No, you're right. We don't want to hurt him just because we're excited to see him, you should put him back," he agreed.

She returned and suggested that they head to the camp. Relax was not what Ray planned to do at all when he got there — he'd need a shelter, so that meant he'd have to start working on finding and making the materials for it, but all the same he smiled and nodded. "All right, lead the way, Patty Spivot. I'm looking forward to it."

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