(Untitled)

[acts_of_gord]

[OOM: Gordon had a Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day once.

Yesterday, it had some competitionWhen Gordon finally came in from walking the lake last night and went upstairs, he found his note to Alyx about going outside undisturbed on the bed. More importantly, he found the bed undisturbed as a whole. This... didn't surprise him, all things

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[watching_you]

Gordon looks like a sad picture drawn in sidewalk chalk on a rainy day.

Veronica can sympathize.

"Hey." Her tone is gentler than her words might suggest: "Is this a private moping party or can anyone join?"

[acts_of_gord]

Gordon glances up a moment, then nods to the empty space on the couch. "Suit yourself," he murmurs, and then frowns. "I'm... sorry. You seem familiar, but..."

[watching_you]

"Veronica. Don't mind me, I've just spent all day taking stake-out photographs in the rain. Fire is my friend."

She holds out her hands towards it, and one of the improbable fish attempts to nibble a fingertip.

"We met... ages ago, yeah? I remember the glasses."

And the nerdy tie, but that's probably not worth mentioning right now.

[acts_of_gord]

"... the FBI agent," Gordon suddenly says. "Under the table. I remember now."

Damn. That was a lifetime ago.

"How've you been?"

[watching_you]

"Oh yeah. That was a strange day." She sighs at the memory.

"I've been... good. Little bit low on the job satisfaction right now, but that'll pass one way or another. What about you? How work at the, ah, lab?"

[acts_of_gord]

"...."

Hoo, boy, this is going to be a good one.

"It was good while it lasted," he finally says, "but things went... uff. It's going to take a while to explain." He absently reaches up to scratch at the narrow curving line of a months-old scar across one side of his forehead. "And it gets weird."

[watching_you]

"I should have known. It always gets weird."

She shoots him a sympathetic look. "Hey, I'm practically a stranger. I didn't mean to... I mean, you don't have to make this into share time if it makes you uncomfortable. I'm sorry."

[acts_of_gord]

"no, it's okay," Gordon says, "but there's two separate alien invasions involved, and some people look at you strangely if you talk about things like that."

[watching_you]

This earns a flat laugh from Veronica.

"I've been coming to this bar for nearly a decade. I seriously doubt anything you can say will surprise me."

[acts_of_gord]

"Point," Gordon acknowledges. "All right. Well... I got the job, like I said. They put me into the labs straight away. Junior associate, but everyone starts there, and the scutwork isn't so bad when your hazmat suit is basically power armor. I got to work inside the experimental machinery because of that thing. You don't often get a chance like that."

Heinlein fan. What can you do.

[watching_you]

"Well, naturally."

She gets the feeling there's going to be a lot of smiling and nodding in this conversation. Which is okay.

[acts_of_gord]

"Five months into the job we got a special sample to analyze," Gordon says. "The facility administrator wanted us to put extra effort into it- he wanted results immediately. A lot of safeties got disengaged." He rubs at his nose. "Remember Challenger?"

[watching_you]

"If you're referring to the space shuttle that broke up on takeoff a year and a half before I was born, then no, I don't exactly remember it. But I know what you're talking about."

A pause as this notion sinks in, then her eyebrows shoot up.

"Ah."

[acts_of_gord]

"Yeah," says Gordon dryly. "We used the new sample, we turned off the safeties, and we put half the equipment on overload. We got our teleportation, all right. And we got holes torn in reality all over the place- the kind of holes that let things in from other dimensions."

[watching_you]

"Alien invasion number one," she guesses, dryly.

[acts_of_gord]

"Bingo," says Gordon. "Lots of them. Very hostile. Very nasty. And Black Mesa was a secure underground facility, which meant nowhere to run..."