The Bonding Continues

[chaseandoldlace]

Who: Chase Stein and Uther Pendragon (again, yes)
What:  The Morning After
When: Mid Morning
Where: Around the castle grounds
Rating: Chase has a bit of a potty mouth
Status: Closed/ Complete

Comments

[chaseandoldlace]

"Got that, brother. I'm beginning to think my habit of being such a disobedient little fuck gave my 'rents a thing about having everything they built be programmed to kiss their ass and enjoy it." He laughed to himself a little.

"Though, if the Frog is any indication, she'll be taking orders from you in no time. The 'rents were big on user friendliness too. Bus, say hello to Uther Pendragon."

'Hello, Uther Pendragon. If you wish to learn how to operate me, I am capable of instructing--

"Hey, hey, that's enough flirting from you." Chase cut the Bus off. There was a loud, cranking wrench from deep within the engine and when he appeared again, he was holding a long, cracked length of metal tubing. "What is this and how do I replace it?"

'The fuel injection matrix must be reconfigured, the current configuration is insufficient to power utilization. Consult alternate configurations in holo records.' The Bus said in a tone that was slightly more demure than it had been a moment before

[chaseandoldlace]

'Beast, there's never just one.' Chase thought sourly, remembering when they first discovered the daemons, how they tended to come in droves.

But the Stein Bus sat silent. He took a deep breath.

"Bus?" He asked tentatively, taking only a few cautious steps closer and waiting for a response.

"Yes Master Stein?"

"Are there any more emergency security protocol active?"

"I am equipped with over 500 currently active security protocol." The bus answered evenly.

Chase whimpered. "Any more daemons?"

"There is an inter-dimensional box located behind my back bumper containing...9 daemons. Do you wish to deactive this measure?"

"Yes! De-active all of them!"

"That is inadvisable, Master Stein--

"ALL of them, bus, now!"

"As you wish. Security protocol deactived."Chase let out a deep, revealed breath

[pendraeg]

Uther was looking his sword over, checking it for damage--surprisingly, it was fine--before sheathing it. He sidled over to the van, more wary than he would like to admit.

"What would you like me to do?" he asked. Breakfast sounded good. He had left Merlin feeding the twins, but he had not eaten yet.

[chaseandoldlace]

"Just drag the toolbox over in case I need anything more sophisticated than a wrench. Something tells me 'inter-dimensional box' will have handle with care written all over it."

Chase grabbed a bite-lite from the box and pulled himself under the back bumper. A moment later he held an open hand out.

"There's a thing that looks like pointy dull scissors, yellow handles. Hand 'em over and I'll have this puppy out faster than you can say International House of Pancakes."

[pendraeg]

The tool box was full of things Uther did not recognise and could not entirely divine the use of. A few of them looked like they might be useful around the castle, however. Eventually he spotted the flash of yellow and retrieved a tool. Did they look like pointy dull scissors? He had no idea.

[chaseandoldlace]

"Awesome." The wire cutters vanished beneath the bumper again, and a moment later, very, very carefully, Chase handed up a thin, rectangular box with strange markings all over it--some were recognizable runes, others, what looked to be advanced mathematical equations. "Be really careful with that bro, or else we'll have a platoon of fuzzy and unfriendlies on our ass again. Just stick it in the back for now."

Wiggling out from his place, the blonde put the wire cutters back and dusted himself off.

"Bus, bring up that alternate fuel injection matrix again from the holo records."

"Yes, Master Stein."The bus's headlight hummed to life, and the image of a series of delicate interconnected parts covered in front of the windshield. "We get this sorted out and then we're ready to rock." Moving to the front of the bus, Chase inspected the image for a long moment before propping the hood open

[pendraeg]

Uther unbuckled his sword belt and slid into the passenger seat, carefully tucking the scabbard and weapon at his feet, the hilt in his hands.

As Chase took his own seat and turned the key, Uther braced himself for further ominous warnings, but nothing happened except the return of the engine's vibrations.

He breathed out.

In many ways, he would have preferred a horse, or at most a cart. He felt closed in and claustrophobic in the van, as he always had in carriages, and liked to be able to see and to control where he was going. Although the Stein Van seemed to have much more personality than most vehicles, it had, perhaps, a bit too much.

He had been in one of these moving vehicles before, but never with such a direct view, and never with the prospect of truly coming to grips with it. His eyes moved regularly from window to driver, trying to watch how it was done and where they were going at the same time, jolted and jarred as they shifted almost immediately into the unfamiliar motion, bumping away from the castle.

[chaseandoldlace]

Chase grinned as he took note of how Uther was trying to watch him and the road at the same time.

"Okay, I'm gonna try to keep this simple-stupid for you at first. You got your steering wheel--" He squeezed the wheel. "Gas pedal makes it go," Chase rocked his left leg, "Brakes make you stop," he rocked his other leg, "and the clutch."

"Parking brake is here, shift box--but this can be an automatic too, which is gonna be easier for you to learn, so don't pay too much attention to this." Fingers resting on the shift stick waggled. They pulled up to the edge of the park and Chase nudged two bars sticking out of either side of the wheel.

"Signal lights, really, really really important. Any time you turn, you move these guys. I know it seems like a lot to take in, but you'll get a hang of it. And since the Stein Bus practically drives itself we can start you off easy."

'Someday I'm going to be teaching Molly how to do this.'Suddenly, Chase was more grateful than he could put into words that he had a chance to practice

[pendraeg]

Most of Chase's words meant nothing to Uther, but he could follow the motions, as he had done to learn countless things in the past. He knew that what he understood would mean little until he put it to the test, at any rate.

It was nice that the van was so big and consistently shaped. Somewhere between a loaf of bread and a battering ram, just a slightly rectangular metal box on wheels.

The ride was far smoother on the road than it had been on the grass, and Uther relaxed a bit, though the vehicle also picked up speed with the more compatible surface. They sped along, and between the space of two breaths they had arrived, and Chase was doing something complicated whose outcome was a neatly aligned stop in front of the diner.

[chaseandoldlace]

The bus rocked lightly on worn shocks before settling into it's space in front of the diner. Old Lace had tried to dumpster-dive them dinner outside of it their first night, but by the time they arrived, the garbage had mostly all been hauled away, and Chase handed wanted to spend what little cash he had that first night, not knowing where they'd end up sleeping.

"Was that your first time in a car?" Chase asked, shouldering the doors open for them to get inside. "You looked a little edgy back there." For once, he'd driven responsibly, not wanting to give the young, temporally displaced king a complete phobia of cars

[pendraeg]

"Not my very first time, no. Perhaps the second," he admitted. Cars smelled funny. Really, much of the future did. Some things smelled less. People, for one thing, though on the whole the people of Camelot were quite unusually clean already. Middens, sewers. But other things smelled more, and generally of things he had never smelled before. The material they made the road with, in the summer's heat. Electricity. Cars. It was heady stuff.

Inside the restaurant, there were smells too. Uther had never smelled these while sober. He'd come here once or twice in the dead of morning, when even pizza was no longer available, and it had been almost, almost as good as pizza dipped in ranch dressing.

It would be interesting to see how this food tasted sober. For the most part, they had been eating as much as they could as they had at home, making use of the ingredients they were able to procure from the supermarket and the occasional unfortunate deer or goose. (There were so many. They practically walked up and asked you to eat them

[chaseandoldlace]

"Wow, and you've been here how long? Gotta get you with times, bro."

It was almost a shame that Chase recognized the particular way in which Uther observed his surroundings; seeing things clearly for the first time, without that vague, happy alcoholic haze. There were weeks, when things were particularly bad a home, where he'd steal a few six packs from the house and escape to The Hostel for the duration of however long his parents would fight. By the time he was fifteen, he'd timed it down to the day. He knew exactly how long to disappear for things to die down, even if it meant the beating of the century when he got back.

Even for how insane things had been since killing his parents, he could actually say he enjoyed being sober

[pendraeg]

"You've done this before?" Uther sat back contently; the food would come to him, all arranged by someone else. He hadn't had that luxury in a long time. Merlin did a great deal of the cooking (though Uther could, after a battlefield, campfire kind of fashion) but Uther brought home the raw ingredients most of the time. He liked supermarkets, despite the plenty. Well, he liked the little supermarket in Aternaville. It was...manageable, and strangely enjoyable.

Chase ordered, and the waitress came back with the coffee almost immediately, pouring the steaming black liquid into sturdy ceramic cups.

"No television, but we have computers." He smiled with self-satisfaction. "When I use emoticons, it turns Arthur skittish as a colt on a windy wash day."

[chaseandoldlace]

"Yeah, few months ago, thanks to another one of the 'rents little toys we ended up about a hundred years in the past. Stumbled into a real clusterfuck with that one. Turned out Gert's parents were there at the same time. Long story short we ended up bringing Klara back with us. She's a little younger than Molly, not by much. She had powers too--she could talk to plants and make them grow. That little potted rose in the Stein Bus? That's for her in case we got backed into a corner. Saved my sorry ass more than once." There was more than a hint of amazement in his voice as he spoke of the girls, which turned into amused credulity when Uther mentioned having computers in the Castle

[pendraeg]

Uther sniffed at the aromatic drink. "I do not know who installed it. I suppose it came with the advent of electricity and plumbing." He took a tentative sip and winced. People drank this voluntarily? It was like steaming hot medicine.

"It was a complete mystery at first, but I took to it quickly enough. Perhaps that is the reason it bothers Arthur. Though I think it was the faces, specifically, that caused the reaction. It always takes him longer to respond when I use one. I do not think I took to the computer when I was...old."

[chaseandoldlace]

"Try it with cream and sugar, goes a long way." Chase said with an amused up-turn of the mouth, planting the sugar dispenser and cream bowl in front of Uther when he winced at the coffee. "There's about as many flavors of that stuff as there are types of beer, so don't judge it too harshly."
Not that Chase himself was very picky, as long as it didn't taste like the tar pits he spent the last year sleeping over, he was happy.

He listened intently as Uther decribed his forays with the computer and his eldest's reaction to them--from the sound of it Arthur was having a hard time reconciling that 'young' Uther was more willing to adapt (however superficially) while as an adult he had refused to adapt much at all. Strong shoulders rose and fell in a shrug.

"So Arthur still wants to think of your little bit of the park as Camelot. Let him. There's a whole world out here that he's missing, doesn't mean you should too." Driving was a good start, then the occasional bar, then the real fun: paintball, arcades, IMAX. Uther would be the very