u(゚Д゚u) (oncechained) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2017-03-12 23:21:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, laura kinney (wolverine), stahma tarr |
I did not mean to alarm you. But your security is poor.
Who: Laura and Stahma
What: Talking about Nat
When: Early March
Where: Stahma’s
Rating: PG
Laura wanted a raise. She was into dangerous things and she thought that she deserved a little more money what with the whole espionage and near death thing. But Nat wasn’t answering her phone and she wasn’t at her home, so Laura dropped in at the next most likely place. Somehow, she got past all of Stahma’s security without alerting anything before she knocked at the door.
Really, the security was terrible, Laura thought. If she was still an assassin….
Stahma definitely needed better security, especially in relation to recent events. She had some things in motion, but she’d also confer with Natasha about security measures. She’d just gotten off the phone with someone regarding security measures when she heard a knock at the door. She frowned a bit, not having expected anyone, though what was even more odd was none of the security had been tripped. As a result, she quickly put her human disguise on and grabbed the charge blade she’d gotten from her dreams, activating the blade and holding it behind her back before she went and answered the door.
The young woman on the other side of the door caught her by surprise, but she didn’t show it.
“May I help you?” She asked a bit cautiously, still keeping the charge blade behind her back. In the event this was an assassination attempt, she wasn’t going down without a fight.
“I was looking for Natasha,” Laura said, her hands hanging stiffly at her sides. She had a smile on her face, the kind that indicated that she wasn’t used to smiling but was getting into the idea more and more. “She’s my boss.”
Natasha, unfortunately, had slipped out some hours before to destination unknown.
“Ah, in that case I cannot help you. She was here earlier, but she left.” Stahma responded. Her suspicion was still high, and the blade remained activated behind her back. “Did you attempt to call her?” Stahma had no idea where Natasha had gone, and she didn’t even really know when exactly she’d left. All she knew was that she had been there, but wasn’t any longer.
“No answer. Texts too.” She could hear something behind Stahma’s back, and smell her suspicion, so she kept herself relaxed and not dangerous appearing. “I’m Laura. You don’t need to be afraid. If I wanted to kill you you’d already be dead.”
Natasha not answering meant she was working. So either she was working on her own mission, or she was currently out seeking answers for Stahma’s current predicament. Stahma’s nose also picked up a different scent about Laura. She was...different from most humans. Different in a similar way that Natasha was different.
“That is reassuring, I suppose.” Stahma responded, still not certain what to make of Laura. She did finally bring the blade out from behind her back. The blade was blue and it was pure energy, the length of a dagger. The blade could extend to the length of a sword, but a dagger was far more deadly. Pressing a button on the handle, the blade fizzled out of existence. “I am Stahma, though I suppose you know that already as you are here.”
“I did not mean to alarm you. But your security is poor.” Laura held out her hand. “It’s nice to finally meet you. Natasha talks about you. Not a lot. But more than she talks about other people.”
Which said a lot for Nat’s feelings for Stahma.
“I am working to improve that.” Stahma had probably been a little too lax on that before, but this was definitely a time where she needed to tighten up her security. She took Laura’s hand and gave it a shake, a smile on her face as she inclined her head momentarily. “I am flattered that she speaks of me.” If Stahma had friends, she’d undoubtedly talk about Natasha as well.
“Forgive my manners, would you like to come in? May I offer you a drink?”
“She really seems to care about you.” Laura shook Stahma’s hand firmly, then nodded and stepped inside. “I’d love a drink. Beer if you have it.” She hoped she didn’t get carded, it wasn’t like she could get drunk. She just loved beer.
Stahma smiled. “I really care about her as well.” She was lucky to have found Natasha. They had the same method of communication, which helped bridge the differences they had. Though luckily they both tended to be on the slightly more illegal side of things so their morals rarely clashed. “I believe I do, yes.”
She led Laura into the living room. There was a bar on one side that Stahma walked over to. Opening the fridge, she pulled a beer out, then served it to Laura. “Please, sit. Are you alarmed by non-human appearances?” Stahma felt a lot more comfortable without her disguise on.
Laura shook her head as she took the beer and sat down. “No. One of my friends was basically a radioactive skeleton, and another boy who was a lizard. I had a crush on a girl who was shiny like metal.”
“Alright, I did not want to shock you. Though I look mostly human, I still wished to ask before taking the disguise off.” Stahma said before she did take the disguise off, revealing her normal appearance. Her dress gave enough away that her skin was pure white. It would put the fabled Snow White to shame. Her grey-ish white hair complimented her complexion. She looked at Laura with curious lilac eyes as she took her own seat. “It would seem as though you dream of an interesting world with people with many varied appearances.”
Stahma was very attractive, Laura noted. That was about the only reaction she really had. Aesthetically pleasing and very attractive. She thought if she got to know her better she might find her sexy, even. “You would fit in with the X-men. Some of us are blue.”
“X-Men?” Stahma asked. She inferred that it was a group of people. Though she wasn’t entirely certain what it meant beyond that. It intrigued her that there were people of different colors, though it didn’t sound like they were aliens like she was.
“In our world, some of us are born with abilities,” Laura explained, calmly unsheathing one metal claw and cutting her forearm. It healed up quickly. “Mutants. Some banded together. For protection, and to show the world we’re not the enemy. Mutants have...civil rights issues.”
The metal claw surprised Stahma, though she barely had a physical response. All the years of keeping such things under a mask served her well sometimes. Her head tilted a bit, in an almost animalistic way, like how a reptile might examine something that got its attention. The healing also piqued her interest. “I understand. You are different from other humans, and they fear what is different from them. Humans can be less than accepting at times, especially when acceptance means their view of the world, and indeed the universe, must change.”
Stahma was no mutant, but she had dealt with the effects of human fear in her dreams. Though it had gone both ways, there was fear and dislike of humans on the Votan side as well. Only after the devastation of the Pale Wars had they finally all found some measure of peace and relative acceptance. Though both varied depending on the place someone was in.
“When they don’t hurt us, they want to use us,” Laura replied. “I’m sure they’d want to use someone like you, if they had half a chance.” Trusting people had come hard for Laura. Sometimes she still didn’t. But she was learning.
“It is one reason I do not show my true self to anyone that is not accustomed to the things that come with Dreaming. I do not wish to be used in that way.” The only reason humans hadn’t experimented on the Votans when they’d arrived had been because they’d arrived in vast numbers. Had only a handful of them arrived on Earth, things might have been vastly different.
“They like to do that.” Laura frowned, and took a swig of her beer. “What are you? Not human. Extraterrestrial? Extradimensional?” The multiverse was a strange, yet wondrous place and Laura was willing to believe just about anything at this point.
“Extraterrestrial. I am a Castithan. My people come from the Votanis star system in the Milky Way galaxy. Though we were one of several races living there.” Just by looking at Stahma, it was easy to infer that Castithans, on the whole, tended to be more graceful and elegant. Stahma was moreso because she’d been born to the highest caste, and thus she’d been raised to be so. Her posture was perfect. Her back never touched the back of the chair she was sitting in.
Laura nodded. “Were you visitors, or conquerors?” It was a fair question, and there was no judgement in her voice. She’d encountered both kinds of aliens. And both kinds of aliens had things to like and hate.
But she liked the Castithan’s already. That elegance and order was nice.
“Neither. We were immigrants. The twin suns in our star system were dying, so huge space ships called Arks were constructed to carry a portion of each Votan race to a new world that we could live on. At the time, we believed Earth was unpopulated, so we set course for it. Much of the time we spent in hypersleep, as the journey took thousands of years to make. We arrived in the early part of the 21st Century. At first, there was confusion as we tried to communicate. Then there was tense peace. The Votans gained recognition in the United Nations and we appointed an Ambassador. In 2023, our Ambassador was assassinated and that ignited what we refer to as the Pale Wars. It lasted for ten years.” Stahma explained. It was a complicated situation to explain. “Despite the tense peace we’d had for the first ten years we were on Earth, there was intense anti-alien sentiment among the humans, and equal anti-human sentiment among the Votan. There was fault on both sides.” Stahma wasn’t so blind as to not see that both sides had a hand in what ultimately happened to Earth and to all of their races.
It was a lot of information to take in, and to her credit Laura listened intently, memorizing it and filing it away for later. What that later was, she didn’t know, but you never knew!
The assassination sounded like something the Facility would have made her to do. Destabilize the peace. War was profit. “No one likes people who are different at first. We all have to learn to coexist. That is easier said than done. I’m sorry it was not easy for your worlds. Either of them.”
“Indeed. Some lessons are not easily learned. It is compounded by us Votans suddenly arriving with our own cultures that are very different from human cultures.” Stahma gave a little nod of her head. “It was a difficult time, and war breeds much destruction. The humans destroyed many of our Arks that were in orbit, many Votans still being in stasis at the time. Some of the Arks carried terraforming technology, and when some of that crashed to the Earth, it terraformed the entire planet. The Earth I came to call home you would not recognize as Earth, save for some of the ruined cities. But eventually, the Pale Wars ended and there was relative peace, depending of course on where in the world one lived.”
Laura wondered if that terraforming equipment had been intended to be used by the Votans. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had wanted to change the planet. She recalled something about the Inhumans. “Could Mars have been terraformed?”
“Yes, but it had no atmosphere we could survive in. Likewise, Venus was a dead planet and not viable to us either. Like humans, our ability to survive requires specifics that other planets do not necessarily have.” The so-called Goldilocks zone and so forth. The Votans were surprisingly similar to humans in that they breathed the same atmosphere and required the same climate Earth had because of its proximity to its sun.
“I wonder if we could plant trees on Mars. As long as nutrients could be added to the soil, they would convert CO2 to oxygen. With enough trees, or a dome, it would be habitable.”
She thought about those kinds of things sometimes. Laura was very smart, it just never got noticed.
Laura’s intelligence didn’t go unnoticed by Stahma. She tilted her head a bit. “I suppose it is possible, though that is not my area of expertise. I would leave that to the scientists. Perhaps we could have attempted to settle Mars instead, though confrontation with humans would have happened eventually regardless.” Life on Mars and a fleet of huge spacecraft would not go unnoticed by the telescopes, satellites and probes they sent into space.
“Yes. But maybe it would have been easier. Who can say.” Laura finished her beer, and set the glass aside. Time for another reason she’d come. The third degree. “Do you care about Natasha?”
Stahma didn’t have the answer to that. She hadn’t been the one to make the ultimate decision on what to do and where to go. She was simply a passenger. Though at the question, Stahma looked at Laura and didn’t hesitate in her response. “I love her.” There was no reason to mince words here, so she didn’t. Her tone, while it had been more submissive before, now had a distinct backbone to it. She wasn’t going to shy away from her feelings or shy away from whatever Laura had to talk to her about.
“Okay.” There was sincerity there, and strength, and that was what Laura wanted to hear. “Natasha is like me. Maybe who I could be. She’s closed off, she doesn’t let people in. I think she’s afraid she’ll lose them.”
“In that, she and I are similar. I do not let people in either.” Stahma wasn’t afraid of losing people, she’d simply always been alone, more or less. She’d always been someone else’s pawn in a grand scheme. Now she was taking full control of her own life. “It is not an easy way to live, always being closed off. But I know what it means that she has let me in.”
“I worry about her. She’s more obsessed with things in Russia than she lets on. I don’t think our last mission is the last.” Laura didn’t know what else Natasha had planned, only that she knew how unhealthy obsession could get. “She needs a vacation.”
“Then perhaps I shall take her on a vacation one of these days. How crazy do you think she would get if I do not allow her to do anything work related, phone calls or otherwise?” Stahma had a note of amusement in her voice, but she would forbid Natasha from working while on vacation. A vacation was supposed to be just that, a break from work.
“She’d lose her mind. That means you have to do it.” Laura grinned at her. It sounded like the perfect, greatest idea. Natasha needed a vacation. And Laura had come to understand how important time off actually was. While there might always be an emergency, one shouldn’t plan their life around that.
“Then I shall find a nice place to vacation with her. And if something were to happen that Natasha is absolutely needed, you can contact me. I will undoubtedly need to confiscate her phone, computer and any other means of communication she might have.” It would be funny to see how stir crazy Natasha would get being unable to work. But that was also why Stahma would find a place that was both far away and had enough things to do that could keep Natasha mostly busy while also relaxing.
“Yes.” If there was an actual end of the world thing, they would need to be called. “Three days. No less. Four if you can manage it.” She didn’t know about the murder thing, but she’d suggest staying in the country for that, or waiting until Stahma was cleared.
“I will make certain it is no shorter than three days. Perhaps if I find a place that can keep Natasha busy enough that she doesn’t get as stir crazy, that will make it easier to stretch it to four days.” Stahma said with a smile. The only trick would be how to take a vacation in the middle of Stahma’s current situation. She hadn’t been proven innocent and couldn’t exactly go anywhere overly far.
“Someplace just exciting enough. But where there is few opportunities to see the news.” Laura was enjoying the plotting. “Keep her… exhausted.”
“That should not be a problem,” Stahma replied with a gleam in her lilac eyes. “A place that has enough activities to occupy her during the day. Then the evening shall see other, more private activities.” And oh, Stahma had ideas. Natasha had stamina, but so did Stahma. Not nearly to the extent Natasha did, but she was learning ways to make up for that. Perhaps if she blew Natasha’s mind a few times during the vacation, that could certainly do it.
“I’m not sure I want to know,” Laura said. While she could think of a few things, she was rather private where that was concerned. Her and sex were a complicated subject.
“I will not share details, do not worry.” Stahma said with a chuckle. She was open about sex, but she didn’t share exact details on what she did with her lovers with others. “Though I promise you that I shall see to it that she relaxes and doesn’t do anything involving work for a few days in the near future.”
“Thank you.” Laura liked Stahma. It was like she’d passed a test. “I think this is where we gossip with embarrassing stories. I’m still...new to social things.”
“I think that is the normal thing to do. Though I am not that keyed into such things. I have not had many friends before.” Stahma admitted. “I think you are doing quite well at this.”
“When we were on the boat,” Laura started, certain that where ever Nat was at this time, her ears were burning.