I'm not a hardship. I'm awesome.

Kate had had long-ass day at work, and somehow she'd managed to be in the dark about the news throughout the day. Not so much now that she was at home, though. Nope. News illumination! That was totally a thing. And so was calling her little brother on the east coast.

Except he didn't pick up, of course he didn't, he was probably out having a party with his art school friends. Or possibly at some café talking about the pointlessness of the marriage institution. It was hard to know with the artsy types. She noted that in the rambly voicemail she left him. Among many other equally rambly things.

Then she danced around the living room for a bit. When Seamus barked excitedly up at her, she picked him up and danced with him in her arms for a bit. She'd had a long day. If there was something to gain happiness from, she'd take it.

[ooc: Obligatory celebratory post! NFB, but open for all the usual.]

Between work and birthday celebrations and whatever, Kate didn't feel like she'd had a lot of time to just veg out lately. So that was a pretty obvious plan for today since she had the day off. And she was a world class vegger so it was going to be good. She had her laptop, she had candy (the world's most nutritious late breakfast!), and she was in her pajamas. Everything was pretty much perfect. And her first order of the day? Scrolling back on her Tumblr dash for as far back as she could before her browser would inevitably freeze under the load. Hey, she'd missed a whole bunch of shit. Like all the way past Halloween. Maybe having been doing stuff other than Tumbling meant that she was an adult.

Of course she probably lost all her adult points by doing what she was doing right now. But whatevs. It was fun, and it passed the time, and she was seeing some pretty funny shit and snickering to herself. And then she came across a post collecting a bunch of highly obscure characters and internet phenomena Halloween costumes. And one of them looked familiar. Like, really familiar. Really, really, really, 'I ruined my life for a while over that costume' kind of familiar.

Kate clicked on the source link for the post in question. And yeah, there it was in the tags.

#princess valhalla hawkwind

So, Kate almost choked on her Twizzler. Once she was over her coughing fit and near-death experience, she typed the words into the search bar, because no way was there going to be anything else in there. Had to be just some random person digging up a low quality video from two years ago and making a costume 'for the lulz' or something. Had to be.

Except there was a bunch of recent fan art in the tag.

Some of it was actually pretty good.

"... Whaaaat."

[ooc: NFB, but open for all the usual stuff.]

Tara and Max had been spending their holiday weekend in a productive way, by finally cleaning the garage and sorting out the crap that had been accumulating in there for almost two decades now.

And long story short, after a quick trip to OP, Kate was now sitting on the bed safely back at the apartment going through a big box of stuff she hadn't seen in years and years. "Ohhh my God."

A diary from when she was five? Priceless.

[ooc: NFB, but open for the guy and calls and texts and stuff!]

After the grad brunch on Sunday, Kate had hopped a portal to a certain New York because Cinco de Mayo was just the perfect excuse to drag Hannibal out to have fun. So she'd done that. And then hung out with him yesterday, first nursing their hangovers, then out on the town where they'd made some great purchases and some even greater decisions involving permanent body art. Because you couldn't leave them together unsupervised. Not now that they were finally getting back into almost their pre-vampire days swing.

So Kate was pretty happy, coming home right now. Sure, she'd have to go to work in a couple of hours, but whatever. She was wearing some pretty spiffy new pants, and she had a bandage on the inside of one ankle. Things were pretty good.

Kicking off her shoes at the door because ugh, she just wanted them off, she called out into the apartment proper, "Honey, I'm hoooome."

[ooc: NFB, but open for that guy and texts and calls, yes. Dear dropped Hannibal modded with kind permission. Even if I was told I couldn't give him a tramp stamp.]

The winter storm that had snowed Kate and Bod in a couple of days ago was well and truly over. This meant Bod was at work again, while Kate was having a day off. Which was great for Seamus who didn't yet need to learn to stay home alone. Possibly less great for all of Kate's acquaintances who were getting moddable texts with puppy pictures. She was just excited, okay? And Seamus was amazing. Best dog ever.

And besides, at least she'd only invited just the one person to come see him in person. And while she waited for Mitchell to show up, she passed the time throwing a ball carefully across the living room area so the puppy with his stubby legs could run after it and bring it back.

"Aww, good boy!"

He was clearly also the greatest at playing fetch.

[ooc: NFB, and mainly for that one guy who knows who he is, but feel free to mod dog-centric communications and text/call back to react to them!]

Christmas had come and gone. So had Marshall who'd joined the holiday festivities (and stayed at Kate and Bod's place) for a week or so, but was already back on the eastern coast. His friends wanted him for New Year's. Charmaine, Neil and Wheels where intending to spend the turn of the year with Tara and Max since they'd been in no rush to get back to Texas after Christmas. And Kate had no idea what her personal plans were.

So she was obviously devoting a lot of thought to that right now.

Or, you know. She was sitting in her pajamas on the couch, eating Twizzlers for breakfast while playing video games. In deep thought.

[ooc: NFB, but open for the bf as well as texts and calls and whatever!]

A lot had happened since Kate had left Fandom and returned to Kansas City on Sunday evening. No, seriously, a lot.

The first odd thing she'd noticed had been that when she'd tried to arrange for a quick trip back to Fandom on the following night, to come and claim her promised drink from the club on the island, Portalocity had listed the connection as unavailable. Weird, but not unheard of, and she'd just given up on fake birthday drinks and gone about her business. And then they'd been busy, just settling into life in their new apartment (a separate bedroom, and a little bathroom with an actual bath, but everything else was one space), their new routines. And because Bod didn't really have too many people he kept in touch with anyway, and Kate didn't tend to talk to her Fandom friends daily or even weekly, it took them some weeks before Kate tried texting Mitchell and it didn't go through. She tried calling Jack. It didn't go through either. Luke, Emma, Hannibal, Bobby, Francine, Puck, Ramona, Leto, even Nathan. A dozen calls and texts, and none of them went through.

She tried her best to dismiss it as a random disturbance in the multiverse.

The weeks dragged on. Bod got a job in a graveyard. Kate got a teeny-tiny raise. Marshall graduated from high school. Charmaine kept sending pictures of the ever-growing Wheels. Kate and Bod had dinner with her parents and brother a lot, and avoided questions about their friends elsewhere. No word from any other universes. The few workers employed at the small Portalocity hub at Kate's airport (past the Kloudklimber Klub entrance, behind the fake palm tree) kept coming to work every day, but they couldn't get through to anywhere else. Kate visited them every day.

The weeks turned into months. The summer was nice enough, and Kate and Bod took to having breakfast on their little balcony. Tara got a part-time job illustrating article for a women's magazine she couldn't stop making fun of. Kate and Bod took Marshall on a Kansan road trip of shitty motels and even shittier tourist attractions. It was probably the best time they had all summer – though whether that was hard for a summer where Kate spent so much time fretting over whether they'd gotten cut off from the multiverse for good, it was hard to say. Eric's shirts were still hanging in their closet. The Portalocity workers kept shaking their heads at her.

Summer turned into fall. They saw Marshall off to a film school on the east coast. Tara and Max started talking about selling the house and moving somewhere better suited for two, but decided not to. (Like Tara said, it was never going to be just the two of them, was it? T and Buck and Alice popped up from time to time.) Kate repainted the kitchen area with her mother's help. There were sunflowers on the wall, now. And not a single sign of life from other parts of the multiverse.

And today, it was finally October first. Kate was turning nineteen. Six months since she'd last spoken to anyone in Fandom and she knew it, so her mood was maybe not the greatest, hard as she tried. She looked at her phone, and found a few texts. A birthday greeting from Marshall, a request for a shift change from a coworker – and a message from one of the airport Portalocity people.

She read the last message.

And then she screamed.

And then she found her words, if not too many of them: "Bod! Bod! Oh my God!"

[ooc: NFB, but open for the boy and calls/texts! Also, she'll be in Fandom again later today. Bouncing around because she hasn't heard from anyone in six freaking months because we are horrible people. Also, Bod modded with permission!]

Time was relative. For instance, from a Fandom perspective, it had been five days since Kate had come home from her second failed attempt to leave for Japan. For her, it had only been two. Time was slowing down in one universe in relation to the other, and she was not aware of this.

She was, however, aware that Ray the SkyKans guy had called her this morning to inform her that her other bag had finally returned to Kansas, and she could come pick it up, so back at the airport she was. She made an excited little noise once she saw Ray approaching, pulling her wheeled bag behind himself.

( Chicago, Boston, Frankfurt, Madrid, and back. Also, Bridgette. And applications. )

Then time, that relative bastard, slowed way down. Or continued on as it always had.

All a matter of perspective.

[ooc: NFB, NFI (unless the boy wants to respons to the text, not that Kate will get said response in a while), once more taken with tweakage from USoT S03E04. Kate's being saved from dealing with the Nothing by timey-wimey wackiness, yes. It might look like she's been Nothing'd to Fandom because no communication will go through until further notice, but she's really just stuck in the world's slowest 15 minutes for the duration of the BDE.]

Kate was having a hard time shutting up today, it seemed. Maybe she was having a kind of a breakdown. Meltdown. Something like that. As you do, when you're just changing your plans in a major way. Whatever it was, it was big and Kate wasn't sure she was handling it all that well. It was weirdly liberating and yet totally terrifying all at the same time. And, having skipped out on her flight, she was now trying to reclaim her luggage, which meant that her current victim to babble at was a teenaged SkyKans employee called Ray. While they waited for her bags to hopefully appear on the luggage carousel thing, she paced back and forth and she talked. And talked. And talked.

She couldn't help it, the world was still sort of spinning and she was trying to make sense of this whole thing, whatever revelation she'd had that had made her drop her plans. "It was pretty intense," she said. "I mean, it's a lot going on... Very hard to explain, sort of really intense."

( Yeah, you said intense. )

[ooc: NFB, NFI, OOC-okay! Taken from USoT S03E04, 'Wheels'.]

Last night, Kate had promised her family would get to say a proper goodbye to her this morning.

... Yeah, that wasn't happening. It probably made her a bit of a hypocrite, considering last weekend, but she didn't care because she was pretty sure she'd never make it off Oak Avenue is she let her family cry all over her. It'd be hard enough to say goodbye to Bod, and they'd at least be able to see each other a little more frequently, Portalocity willing. So, last night, she'd told him of her plan to leave the house while Char and Neil were still asleep, and this morning they'd shuffled around the house as quietly as they could while she packed the last of her things and wrote a letter that she left on the kitchen table for her aunt and her babydaddy to find.

Kate had been pretty good about keeping her voice down in the house, so it was only in the cab to the airport that she'd started letting her utter excitement show. She'd been bubbly and bordering on hyper the whole way, and even as they got to the airport, it showed no signs of abating. "Oh my God," she said, bouncing a little bit on the balls of her feet, once they were in the terminal. "It's happening. It's really happening!"

[ooc: NFB, for the (heartbroken, I'm sure) boyfriend and some epic SP. Certain elements borrowed from United States of Tara S03E03, 'The Full Fuck You Finger'.]