longer.blue

Every waking moment was her dealing with at least three other voices in her head. The ramblings of her aunt, the ramblings of her classmate, and some kind of coding language she could not, for the LIFE of her, figure out what it meant or where to start. It was out of desperation that she set out from home to try and figure out what happened to her "adopted" father figure. The heavy steps of the VEN#M suit moving out the launch bay to step through a portal created by her gizmo, the neon lights and vaguely hexagonal form of the controlled dimensional rip sealing up noisily behind her while she emerged in the snowy backdrops of Canada. Her tech was from the far future, and she knew how to look through local machines to find any kind of sign of him. Peni grumbled to herself while she looked through local security cameras and parsed audio files. Any hint of him, anyone short of build but also built like a truck made her heart skip a beat - only for it not to be him. The hair's wrong, he doesn't say 'bub'... It took the better part of 6 hours to find something useful. A security feed of a parking lot, with a red figure approaching a familiar bike with saddlebags. The bike, she recognized. Unfortunately, the man in red—Deadpool, she thought—took it not longer after that. On one hand, she was relieved other people were looking after him. On the other hand, it'd been a few days since Deadpool had gotten there. More grumbling. There was only one thing to do; ask around. Walking around a small Canada town with a mech was not a good idea, so Peni ejected herself from the mech, then trotted into town, her arms wrapped around her thin frame, the suit she wore doing the best it could against the cold. It was thermo-adaptive, sure, but that didn't always work as well in real life as the statistics projected on a screen. "You look like you're in some cold pajamas," the bartender murmured when she walked in the front door, her built-in shoes crunching some snow against the wood planks, leaving behind wet spots while she walked in. She could feel the eyes of the other patrons on her back while she approached the counter, but being in the public eye was not something she had the ability to avoid, especially growing up. This was nothing new. "I'm cosplaying someone," Peni grumbled back before shuddering. "Have you seen a smelly guy with a jacket and a motorcycle come by through here?" "Gary's smelly enough for all of us," one patron spoke up, and four other men laughed loudly. She couldn't tell which one was Gary. The bartender chuckled at the joke, then nodded to the motorcycle parked outside the diner. Wait. If he was a bartender, was this a bar or a diner? Whatever. "He made it clear his motorcycle was not to leave that spot." He jerked his thumb at it. "We get some weird folk around here, but that was one of the ... stronger 'requests' that I've gotten. A guy in red promised he'd take care of it and took off with it. Said he was a friend of the fellow. He made sure I knew what he meant." Peni nodded. From here, things could be easier, or, much more difficult, depending on if there was any other information she could dig up. "Thanks for the tip." "Tip? I'm just telling you how it is." He snorted, then moved off to help a customer while she turned around and walked out of the establishment, feeling a migraine settling in while her shoes crunched on the freshly-fallen snow. 💭Logan left because he had something wrong with him. But he can heal extremely fast, to the point that he's almost unkillable. So whatever was hurting him, it was either a kind of radiation that he couldn't shake, or something that was constantly around him. Not a person, because he's got no problem telling people what he thinks. Peni snorted loudly. 💭Unless it's how he actually feels and if he feels any kind of familial relationship to them. So how would he have- no, WHY would he have run off? It was something he couldn't heal from. What's something he's always in contact with? It's not like he suddenly developed a severe beer allergy. ... he'd just heal from any kind of tobacco poisoning. Maybe it's not something he ingests? What's physically with him like, every moment of every day? "アダマンチウム。" It hit her like a train. The realization that his adamantium could've been the thing hurting him. Peni grit her teeth, then looked off into the distance in a random direction. "He ran away because he went looking for help? What if it was someone he knew we couldn't trust? But he was desperate? He hates feeling desperate, I think. So driven by everything else that he had to act in a way that- no, make it make sense. He was desperate, so desperate, he'd do something he'd never do otherwise." Peni walked back to VEN#M, hidden off in a clump of snow and some trees nearly two miles away from the town, then hopped back inside of the cockpit. "Why wouldn't you just tell us?" she murmured, then hopped in VEN#M and started exploring. "I got three days' worth of rations in here, the Parker luck," her voice dripped with sarcasm, "a Spiders' stamina and relentless drive, and a futuristic mech ran by a weird synthetic alien that only speaks in what almost sounds like Python. What's the phrase? Have mech, will travel?" Peni sealed the cockpit and the Mech began to move as she pumped her legs. "I'm gonna find you, Logan... and then I'm gonna find some answers." Exhilaration at finally being out and actively looking filled her, warred equally by a strangling anxiety that it was too late.