ataraxionlogs | All right, stop. Collaborate and listen. [closed]

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All right, stop. Collaborate and listen. [closed]

CHARACTERS: Elsa and Tadashi
LOCATION: A pool area on an upper level, backdated to May 18th
WARNINGS: Disney crossover fanfic?
SUMMARY: Don't accidentally freeze Tadashi, Elsa.
NOTES: n/a

The last time someone had tried to board the Tranquility, there had been monsters everywhere, and they had been indiscriminate in who they attacked. Elsa did what she could to help hold them off, but it had seemed to be the worst it's ever been, in volume and ferocity. It gave her a lot to think about.

A few people from the government are still on the ship, and it sounds like their people are still out there. That means more of them could come anytime, couldn't they? If they caught up again? That could mean more monsters.

The bits and pieces she's been remembering of the vivid, terrible dream she'd had a few months ago, when she'd slept through a jump, aren't helping. They're thick with fear and they haunt her as they come back to her.

If she's frightened, she's no good to anyone -- she might actually be accidentally harmful. So she sets herself towards trying to be sure she's not.

Over the time she's been on the ship, and especially in the last six weeks, she's been refining her skills. She can send a blast of ice out, or make a wall form, but can she make the ice creep towards something gently and quickly? Can it sneak up on an enemy and then quickly encase them, or worse? Can she create other traps, or drop a flat sheet of ice on an attacking creature? All of this will take work and experimentation, and even if she can develop the abilities, she doesn't know if she'll be able to maintain the level of calmness that she needs to be able to to do these things in a situation where it counts. What if she has to attack people, and not creatures, to defend her fellow passengers? That thought still twists her stomach.

Today, she stands in one of the big rooms with a swimming pool in it. She's frozen the water in the pool; its surface has a delicate tracing of snowflakes and swirls, and she's in the center. She's always been able to form ice or snow with speed and ease, but maybe learning how to go more slowly, more deliberately, is the key to all of this. She's good at it, but can she become better?

She reaches her hands down towards the surface of the water under her, and tries to make herself rise a few feet in the air by thickening the ice under her. The first time, it goes too fast and she almost loses her balance and has to shoot out an icicle to grab onto to steady herself. She lets the hill flatten. The second time, it's more controlled, and she rises two feet in the air. She tries it again, again, until she gets used to it. When she can do reliably, she'll go for three feet.

It would be easier without the headache that tears at her temples.

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Today made two weeks.

No matter what Tadashi did, his thoughts continued to circle back to that fact. It had been two weeks, and he was no closer to finding a way home. Every time he closed his eyes for another night, he had trouble forcing his mind to shut down. The need to get back was growing more urgent by the day, especially with the headache he'd been plagued with for a few days now. His main worry was that Hiro would start experiencing symptoms. His inability to do anything to prevent that left Tadashi with the urge to do something, but there wasn't really anything to do, so he walked.

Hands stuffed into his pockets, Tadashi allowed his feet to take him wherever they wanted. It gave him time to think, and he was able to see parts of the passenger quarters that he hadn't yet had time to explore. He took the lifts to different floors, poking around on the other levels, but never straying too far from the beaten path. He remembered the warning that the communicator didn't work sometimes in the endless hallways. If something came up with Hiro, Tadashi planned to be available and ready to sprint to the rescue.

Now that his thoughts had drifted that way, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to jury-rig a few small trackers to slip into the lining of Hiro's hoodie again -- not because he didn't trust him, but because he didn't trust this place.

That would have to wait, however.

Tadashi's footsteps slowed and his eyebrows furrowed. The air had grown colder the farther he walked down the current corridor. Somewhere along the way, he had lost track of the floor he was on, but he didn't think he'd gone into dangerous territory. Still, caution was the name of the game here.

Slipping his communicator from his pocket, Tadashi crept lightly forward, moving toward the doorway it seemed the chill was emanating from. Inside was....

He didn't know.

Confused more than alarmed now, Tadashi stood in the doorway, watching the blond girl as she -- was she creating the ice? She appeared to be concentrating intensely, directing it in various ways that shouldn't have been possible. He couldn't see any sort of machine or logical way she was controlling it. This... he needed to take a closer look.

Stuffing his hands back into his pockets, Tadashi stepped into the pool area, looking around in disbelief at the crystalline formations and swirls.

Finally, he stopped, coughing into one hand to get the girl's attention. "Is it okay for me to be in here?"

There's a polite cough behind her, but it doesn't startle her -- not much, anyway. She tries to work with the idea that someone might see, so that she won't do anything erratic if she's taken by surprise.

Her confidence has been growing for a while now: she doesn't have to hide what she can do from these people. If anyone had a problem with it, others would have a problem with them. She's worried about the idea that she might one day act under compulsion again, do things she might not otherwise do, but if that happens, the best way to handle it will be to apologize and atone, not to stifle and smother herself until she feels like half a person again, the way she did for so many years, and not to make herself useless.

She doesn't make the ice vanish or smooth over back into itself, but she does turn, hands at her sides, palms turned consciously in against her upper thighs.

It's a young man with dark hair. Nobody in Arendelle really looks like him, but in some ways he reminds her a little of someone -- it will be hours before she places the feeling of familiarity with Kristoff, probably because of their ages. That means he's probably also around her own age.

If she's going to do this, refine her control of her powers, she needs to be able to do it in front of people. It wouldn't hurt to have an observer now and then.

"I don't know." Her voice is crisp, dry, curious, not unfriendly; she peers at him from across the ice. Her blonde braid slides against the shoulder of the jumpsuit she'd turned lavender that morning. "Can you handle the cold?"

He.... still didn't know how to take what he was seeing, but a prickle of intuition told him that Hiro was going to protest Tadashi wandering off on his own a lot more when he found out about this. For now, he concentrated on the girl, trying to get a read on her. She didn't seem overly hostile, and that last question almost struck him as a challenge. He found a smile tugging at the corner of his lips despite himself.

"Guess I'll find out," he answered, tucking his hands back into his pockets where they would be protected from the cold as he strolled to the edge of what should have been the pool. He lifted one eyebrow as he stuck out a foot, cautiously prodding the ice with his shoe before retreating back to solid ground. After a moment's hesitation, he crouched with one arm draped over one knee and reached for the ice with his free hand.

It was, predictably, freezing. This established, he curled his fingers into a fist for a moment before stuffing them back into his pocket.

Tadashi looked up at the girl, expression still puzzled. "Are you doing this?"

The young man doesn't look unfriendly -- in fact, he looks distinctly interested. She feels a tiny swelling of pride as he examines her ice, and when he glances up with an expression of curiosity, she's returning his smile from a moment earlier.

"Yes. It's real ice, by the way... are you used to it? Sometimes there are people here who have never seen snow."

"Not really," he admitted, standing back up and taking it all in again.

While it got chilly some evenings in San Fransokyo, it wasn't the sort of city that saw ice often. Even in the depths of 'winter', it rarely got close to freezing temperatures. It had almost snowed one year -- he had vowed to build his own snow machine after that disappointment.

"I've seen the fake stuff, but... we don't get a lot of real snow and ice in San Fransokyo. Too far south." He considered crossing the ice to meet her for a moment, then thought better of it. Still, he offered a smile. "I'm Tadashi Hamada. By the way."

Her smile grows a little bit wider and more genuine, and she raises her hand to her waist in a little wave, then takes a few steps closer.

"I'm Elsa -- just Elsa. It's nice to meet you." A few people on the ship have known exactly who and what she is, and she doesn't really mind admitting it, but it seems to her that most of the time, her powers will set her apart enough in any crowd. Her hereditary position means absolutely nothing here, with no subjects and none of the associated responsibilities, so she's still reluctant to introduce herself by it.

"The country I come from is very far north: we're used to heavy winters. What else do you have in -- San Fransokyo?" Did she get the name right?

Tadashi grinned a little at the wave, feeling a little more at ease. At her question, though he splayed his hands wide and shrugged as he tried to come up with a good response. It had taken him a while, but at this point in the month, he'd finally accepted that not everyone knew about his home city like they did back... on Earth, he guessed. Tadashi wasn't convinced this was a spaceship, but he would allow himself the shorthand of thinking of it that way until further proof told him one thing or the other.

"Well.. a lot," Tadashi admitted, reaching up to rub the side of his neck. "We've got the San Fransokyo Institute for Technology. Krei Tech is fairly famous, too. The city itself has a lot to do, and a lot of tourists come to see the wind turbines at night."

"Ohhhh, so it's a big city. What do the wind turbines do, grind grain? Wait --" (her brow furrows) "-- no, what year is it? It was 1845* in Arendelle."

She's learned, in the time since she found herself on the Tranquility, that when people talk about "tech" or "technology," they're probably from somewhere very different from her home, and the dates tend to be almost unimaginably far in the future, times she never expects to live to see. Maybe Arendelle could be like that someday, with everyone carrying a communicator in their pocket, but it's hard to imagine.

She walks a little bit closer, but seems to be moving towards one of the seats near the side of the pool.

* Accuracy of date not guaranteed.

Tadashi was brought up short for a moment -- 1845? That... was a long, long time ago. It made him look at Elsa in a new light, uncomfortably aware that where he was from, she would be long since gone.

"Twenty-thirty-two," he answered, biting the inside of his lip. A part of him wondered what it would feel like to be in Elsa's shoes -- to meet someone far in his future. It was possible here, maybe. He might have already met someone like that. What was ethical in that situation? Should he... ask about disasters? Try to use the information to save lives?

Tadashi shook his head, clearing it of those thoughts. "Not grain. They're for electricity. To help run the city."

The wind turbines had actually always been one of Tadashi's favorite parts of the city. The ones shaped like fish were the best, in his opinion. He liked designs that took something overly mechanical and somehow made it feel softer -- friendlier. That was a big part of why he'd designed Baymax the way he had.

She knows she's studious, intelligent, a fast learner, but she often feels foolish here on this ship: even if she's gotten used to things like electrical lights and doors that slide open when she approaches them, so many things that other people take for granted are novelties to her. 2032 is so distant in time that it's hard to imagine.

If people come to see wind turbines that create power at night, they must be decorative. That's what she would do. If you have to have a sled or a carriage, it doesn't have to be a dull one. You need a house, or a room, but making it beautiful is better if you can do it.

"What do the turbines look like?"

She can hear the eager interest in her own dry voice.

Tadashi couldn't help a wistful smile and gestured with one hand to draw a vague shape in the air. "It's actually a sweet design. They look a little like those carp kites if you've ever seen those?"

He paused, waiting curiously to see if she had any basis for comparison before going on:

"Some of them are plain -- just advertisements, but the carp are the best. Most of those have strips of neon lighting running along the underside, but they're all high above the cities. High enough that the cables keeping them from floating away look like kite strings."

It added to the light pollution, but in a good way. That explanation given, Tadashi thought it was only fair to ask a question back.

"Does your town have any big attractions?"

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