2015-11-05 - Supergirl Learns Magick

Leah comes in the front door, bumping it closed with her butt. Which is a necessary thing, since her arms are full. With a couple of what appear to be playing cards in her mouth, she's got boxes of plexiglass cases and sealed starter kits and other junk. Some of it looks kind of heavy. File folders, card binders...she's got the works. All of it with the title: Magic.

"Mmm mmm mmm!" she calls out as she comes in, talking around the stuff she has in her teeth. She stumbles a little as she dodges the cat, then appears in the entryway to the main room in a triumphant exultation! "MMMM!"

Kara Zor-El is wearing an oversized shirt with the Wonder Woman logo on it, half off the shoulder, and some sweatpants. Because she wanted to be comfortable. What? Invulnerable people can want to feel extra comfortable too!

What is not comfortable is when your roommate and best friend comes home with all sorts of cases and boxes and cards in her mouth, motioning at you and Mmm'ing like a madwoman.

Kara had today already stopped a terrorist attack on STAR Labs, fought Mole Man and some giant monsters and a small army of mole people who tried taking over the Hamptons for some reason, stopped 4 planes from falling and prevented one mid-air collision from happening, ended a white slavery ring in Singapore, ended 2 forest fires, stopped 5 bank robberies, foiled 17 muggings, and caught one baby that fell out of a high-rise apartment window.

But this was unsettling. "Uh..... " she says, skirting back on the couch a bit. "Whaaaat?" she asks slowly.

Leah immediately dumps the lot of her booty, not that booty, the stuff she's holding. In a pile on the floor at the side of the table by the couch. She doesn't seem to be being very careful about it, which suggests that this isn't one of her personal projects. Since she's been known to bite people's heads off for breathing on her patterns on the off chance they'd move it out of place and ruin her work.

"Gah, so much better! Hi! I brought junk." She immediately settles into the couch with Kara, either making Kara make space for her butt or snuggling into the Kryptonian. Either way, win. "Openable junk, but still. What've I missed?"

Kara Zor-El smiles with a look of utter confusion and bewilderment on her face. "Oh... cool. I think? Nice ... junk?" she says in an asking way. She wasn't sure if it was a good thing or if Leah wanted her to help return it as she gets snuggled and smiles. "Well um.... " and she recounts all the things she did this morning before taking a break. "... and luckily the baby was just fine, but the mother was annoyed that I told her that she should probably put bars or a screen or window guard on the window if she was going to leave it open with a baby in the house. No 'thank you for saving my baby' ... weird huh?" She pauses. "So anyway I figured I should take an hour or so off because I was annoyed." The perks up. "Oh, and me and Dedrick made up! He said he talked to you so I guess I have you to thank. He even wrote me this song and sang it and played it on the guitar! I mean it went like...." And she says some of the lines. Dedrick sang to her 'Amazed' by Lonestar and she thought Dedrick made the song up. She says, "So .... um.... this junk...?"

Leah carefully schools her face, glad that Kara's powers don't include body language reading. Because she's heard the song before. "Sounds like he's being more awesome, you two should almost break up more often. I was wondering how it was going, but since nobody was yelling...thought it was safe to come home." Yes, she called this 'home'. Which feels nice.

"The junk...meh. I got given it by someone to see if they couldn't make me come to a card convention and play against their top players. They think it'd be a draw if they could have hot cosplay girls on the actual gaming tables." The fact that they think she's a hot cosplay girl, that's nice. The fact that it's kind of exploitive? Not so much.

Kara Zor-El nods smiling. "I never realized that making up after a breakup could be so nice." She says that with an embarrassed smile. "I mean... the last few times I had boyfriends who I broke up with.... it ended with stuff like... having to fight him REALLY. As in punching and ... dropping a building on one of them. But not Dedrick. He's so great..."

Kara switches topics. "So... what is that stuff anyway?" She peers at the boxes and, with x-ray vision, sees a bunch of cards inside. "Oh is that that tarot card stuff? Zatanna told me about them. Do they really tell the future?"

Leah gives a little headshake as she wraps an arm around Kara. Her own boyfriend breakup history hasn't been very soft and gentle, so she's got no right to judge. But the tarot question gets her laughing. "Oh gods no, I so wish! No, it's...well, it's another game. No special meaning to it, but...here, let's open some. I honestly haven't played it yet, so this is just as new to me. Well, almost."

She leans down, snagging a starter kit and passing it to Kara as she herself gets some little foil packs and starts inspecting them. "I'm told it's fairly basic, it's the cards themselves that add complexity to the game. What you draw makes new rules apply."

Kara Zor-El again looks confused. "So... it's a game?" she asks. "I'm not really someone who knows a lot about magic." she says. "I never understood that Guild on Krypton even. There weren't many of them and they always weirded me out." She watches as Leah starts inspecting the cards, getting passed some of the foil packs. "Okay um... what are we doing with these? They're not dangerous or anything right? So far a lot of the time I've had to deal with magic stuff, it winds up being dangerous."

Leah finds a rulebook, holding it up. Then she says, "Bleh. I'm going to need soda to do this. No actual magic, Kara. At least I hope not." She hops up, then heads to the kitchen for sodas as she peruses the instructions. "Want anything? By the way, am I interrupting your show? I should totally have asked." She looks back in through the door, actually looking at Kara with concern. Because that's what friends do. "Though I admit, this is probably approached with a guild-level of seriousness by some of the people involved..."

Kara Zor-El looks back at the TV, then at Leah. "What? Oh... no, I wasn't really watching anything. I was just being lazy... I'll have an orange soda?" she says as Leah goes to get sodas. She flips through some cards. "So what do you want to do with all these cards? Want to show me how to play?"

Leah's head vanishes into the kitchen, returning with sodas and a bag of Cheetohs. "Nature's perfect food," she proclaims as she drops the bag, then flops down. "I don't read as fast as you do. Let's try it. Okay, we need two quickstart decks. They're all colored, apparently." She lets Kara open things and look, as she opens the bag and her pop.

"White, the color of Justice. Blue, wisdom. Black, ambition. Red, chaos, and Green, nature. Y'all gotta pick apparently."

Kara Zor-El pauses and is looking at each of the foil decks without opening them. "Okay... one second, I'l just looking to see which one have useful cards on it. I sort of skimmed the instructions." she say as she takes one closed deck, then puts it down, then another, and puts it down. "Oh okay that one has a nice card in it..." and she takes that one.

Apparently she's not aware that it's cheating to use X-ray vision to make sure you have good cards before opening the foil.

Leah rolls her head back, resting it against Kara's shoulder, and says, "Pick me a good one too. You're green, apparently." She lets Kara pick another and ends up with a black deck, shrugging without comment. She really doesn't seem to be too into it, to be honest. And without much real thrill, the game doesn't end up being very fun.

Twenty minutes later, Kara's beaten Leah at their first ever game of Magic. And Leah looks up at Kara over the cards, one eyebrow raised, and says, "Yeaaaaah...I don't think their investment is going to pay off with me. I mean, it was sweet to bribe me and all, but..." She tosses the cards down and gives a little hand-wave. "You want them? They said that they were pretty expensive."

Kara Zor-El looks at the cards after she wins the game. It probably helped that she knew exactly what every card was, and with her eidetic memory, it might as well have been like when she counted cards in Atlantic City while undercover with Robin. She nods a little as she wins the game and is given the cards. "So.... we had fun, right?" she asks, unsure. Then when offered the cards, she smiles. "Sure um... maybe it's something me and Dedrick can play." Because that couldn't possibly start another nerd fight if she beat him at this game too.

Kara smiles. "Thanks." then shrugs a little, looking a all the cards around them. "You know this would probably be more fun if there were hard light displays as well."

Leah chuckles. "Smiling or not, you don't sound as happy as if it were something you wanted. Maybe we could give them to a charity auction or something." She rolls over onto her back, looking at a card that depicts some four-headed animal of some sort with curiosity, and says, "You mean like holograms?" She doesn't really seem like she's been having what she considers to be fun.

"Sounds like you're chafing against the science again." Leah's eyes wander over to Kara, ignoring the possibility of a panty shot or whatever from this angle. Which only proves that she's not bi. Because Kara has been known to get looks from nearly anyone. "Tell the truth, what would you make of this if you had free rein?"

Kara Zor-El nods a little. "Sort of like holograms. Well... more like um..." She shrugs. "Holograms were a big thing on Krypton. But they also sometimes had hard light constructs. Sort of like... holograms you could touch. Mainly for games." Then she listens "What would I make of what? This game?"

Leah thinks while Kara's talking, and you can almost see the gears turning in her head. What to DO with this junk. Hm. Then she smiles, eyes lighting up, and suddenly reaches over to the table to get a pen. "Here. I've got an idea how we can make this shmozzle of a card game do some real good."

She starts looking through the cards for the decent ones, and putting them in a pile. "Write your name on these. We can't get much for them opened, but with your autograph on them they become collector's items. Can get thousands and donate THAT to a charity. And yeah, like the holograms in the Millenium Falcon in Star Wars. Sounds like you want to make something like that out of this." She's got that detail wrong, the Millenium Falcon game wasn't hard light. But Kara might not have seen it.

And she's not perfect. Just nerdy.

Kara Zor-El sits there. "Sh... shmozzle?" she asks before Leah starts looking through the cards. "Oh um... okay? You mean like Kara or write Supergirl or something?" she asks as she starts signing cards. "I don't know what a Millenium Falcon is by the way."

Leah goes very still, very suddenly. She opens her mouth, then closes it again, and closes her eyes. Then she takes a deep, slow breath, and says, "Write Supergirl. And I need to not mess this up." Opening her eyes, she looks at Kara, and says, "You. Have not seen. Star Wars. Do not for any reason short of the end of the earth, google it or look it up in any way. Okay?"

Kara Zor-El starts signing the cards with 'Supergirl' one after another. She looks at Leah. "Um......... okay? I'm not really into war movies though anyway."

Leah sits and crosses her legs, looking up at Kara from the floor. "It wasn't named for the war, and you don't really see much of the war itself." She purses her lips, thinking, then starts to talk.

"In 1977, a movie was released. At the time, science fiction was about fictional planets with huge barbarians and ridiculous special effects. The movie had something unique, that changed the way that earth thought of space. It had an actual story, with characters that made sense. This movie changed my world, Kara. It made over half the population of my PLANET start to think that there could be more to space than fear and a quick death.

"The actual Star Wars movie was the fourth in the series, but the first three didn't get made into actual movies until just recently. The fourth, fifth and sixth were made first. It's just the order they were written in, but got produced into movies in an odd order. Trust me, they made the right choice. Episodes four through six were by far the most interesting stories. But that's the point, it was the first real space epic. It spanned generations of the lives of the people in it, and there's some things I can NOT let you know or it'll ruin the experience."

Kara Zor-El sits there. "Um... I'm from another planet, Leah. I already know there's a lot of stuff in outer space."

Leah grins. She nods, then reaches and takes Kara's hand. "I know. So do we, now. But back then, it was a game changer. Making people think that there could be whole civilizations. Now, it's..well, it's basically permeated our lives. Believe it or not, Star Wars is indirectly the reason we were ready to be able to handle your showing up in our lives. It changed us as a species. Also the music is some of the best known music in all of history. That's not the point though."

She says, "Honestly, the big thing for me is the fact that there's basically no more than five hundred people this world who haven't already seen this. So finding someone who hasn't yet, that'd be you, is a very big deal. I know that Derrick and probably Kal are going to want to be there when you do. I haven't actually seen anyone on their first time, ever. I mean, it can only happen once." She bites her lip, hoping that it's okay. "I mean, I can be there can't I? You don't have to. But it's a very special thing."

Kara Zor-El doesnt seem to understand what's so important about this movie Leah's describing, but she seems to really like it. Kara smiles. "Sure you can be here when I watch it. You're my best friend. I wouldn't have it any other way?"

Leah is suddenly hugging Kara. Fastest she's ever moved. "Thank you thank you thank you!" This seems very important to her, and she's grinning as she pulls back. "Don't worry, if you over-analyze it you're not...well, actually you'll fit right in with most of the people I know." That seems amusing to her too, and she eventually sits down again. "The whole freaking world has theories about this stuff. Anyway. You're telling me your world never had a cultural event that changed its outlook on life? I'm actually curious."

Kara Zor-El smiles awkwardly as she's suddenly hugged by Leah. She says. "Um... well... the Science Guild taking over the planet from the Military Guild pretty much changed our outlook on life. They went from ... um... colonizing about 80 planets to being isolationist, except for Kandor, where we had our center of intergalactic trade." She pauses. "I mean this is all history though. It was like... 300 or so years ago. But we didn't have any movies that did that."

Leah sits with one leg on her other knee, the remaining foot dangling off the couch. "Yeah, sounds like a major turnover of things. Your world sounds so different than this one. I'm glad you came, though...we need you" I need you, my friend. Her eyes say it, even if her mouth said something else.

"Oh. One thing. Not a spoiler, but it'll make things make more sense. The Kessel Run is an eighteen-parsec route through space. Just keep that in mind when you get around to watching."

Kara Zor-El looks at Leah confusedly. "18 parsec run? So... that's pretty huge. Do they use a hyperspatial bypass?"

Leah holds up her hand. Then she gives Kara a kiss, and says, "Your science-fu is stronger than mine. You tell me once you've seen it. Deal? I promise that the science won't be perfect, but it's from my culture. We don't KNOW enough science to make it perfect. Yet."

Leah pauses, her face screwing up as she thinks of something completely related. She says, "Just...keep in mind, the actual first few episodes are...nnngh. I mean, the stories are fine, but the science there annoys even me. And I LIKE this stuff."

"And if anyone tells you about something called mitichlorians? Slap them. For me."