Crowd in a Theater Watching Snakes on a Plane

God, I miss going to the movies.

Do you remember Snakes on a Plane? Jesus, what a weird one that one was. And I’m not even talking about the movie itself, just how it came out. The movie was exactly as advertised. There was a plane full of people, but that plane was also full of snakes. Previously you could only imagine the problems this would cause, but now you could watch a couple members of the Mile High Club get attacked by a large, venomous snake in all its Cinemascope glory. Thank all that’s holy this missed the 3D trend by a couple of years, or that viper would have been lunging at your dick. But before it came out, the internet was going crazy in anticipation. The hype train had become a party train, and everybody was hanging out the windows and doing shots.

Samuel L. Jackson is going to be in it! SLAM

He signed on based off the title alone!! SLAM

It’s going to be rated R! SLAM

Then it came out and did poorly and everyone just kind of forgot about it. The hype train didn’t even crash, it just sort of ran out of steam and ground awkwardly to a halt in the middle of the desert, leaving everyone on board to get off and walk to the next station so they could board The Dark Knight train. Because, ultimately, the movie isn’t that good. Or rather, it never reached the depths of ‘so bad it’s good’ it was actually aiming for. It wanted to be a cult classic, but just like you can’t give yourself a nickname, you can’t just give yourself cult status. It wasn’t just bad, it was bland. It was a movie-by-committee, making the decisions they thought would lead to cult status, but not understanding those decisions and half-assing most of them. True cult movies need some off-his-meds auteur just off camera chugging Red Bulls and screaming at PAs to find out how much it would cost to cover the cast in body paint every day because he had a dream last night about ‘sparkly silver people’ and it’s clearly a sign.

So, why am I talking about this? Because I miss going to the movies. And Snakes on a Plane was easily the best experience I’ve ever had at a movie theater. Not because of the movie, obviously, that would be a weird segue. Because of the crowd.

I usually don’t like other people in movie theaters, because in most of my experiences they are people who don’t even seem to want to be there. They arrive late. They talk with their friends. They’re texting, or just scrolling Facebook. I don’t get it. Everybody knows how much movie tickets are, so why did you pay fourteen dollars for the privilege of sitting in a dark room and perusing social media when you could have done that in your basement for free?

(One of the most baffling experiences I’ve had in a movie was in a sold out theater for La La Land. An older couple sat down right next to me just as the lights were going down, and as soon as he was sitting the husband pulled out his phone, looked at the time, leaned over to his wife, and in the huffiest voice imaginable whispered, “We’re already going to be late.” Like, what? What does that even mean? Forget the movie, I want more details on your shithouse relationship.)

And don’t even get me started on people who sit right next to me when the theater is mostly empty. There’s fucking rules, okay? You don’t sit directly next to, in front of, or behind someone unless you absolutely have to. Hell, I don’t even like it when people sit in my row when there are other empty rows. Why do you want to be near other people when you don’t have to? This theater is huge and it’s ten in the morning and we could have thirty yards between us if they wanted, but nooooooo, they’re going to be kicking my seat the whole time now because humans are social beings and life is pain.

My actual ticket, as proof? I guess? I’ve kept all my movie stubs since Charlie’s Angels.

This night was different. This was at the AMC at what was then Disney’s Pleasure Island at Downtown Disney, a full decade and a half before Disney would figure out that exhausted parents who spent the day carting their five kids (Kayleigh, Alix, Brayden, Jayden, and Okayden) around in the hell that is Orlando from April to October don’t want to party in loud nightclubs with strobing lights but would rather just sit at a bar with a cocktail while listening to live music and fending off souvenir requests from their kids like an Olympic soccer goalie. It was the Saturday of opening weekend, seven o’clock, and the theater was sold out. We had to sit all the way in the back to find five seats together, and I was probably dreading how this was going to go because I usually hate sold out shows. Again, most of my experiences are with people bored of the movie.

Nobody was bored. Nobody was even just, like, mildly interested. Remember, this was 2006, so there wasn’t really social media to be distracted by, let alone smart phones to let you do it in the middle of a public place. All you had to worry about was people texting or answering calls, and let me tell you, if someone had tried to answer a phone call during this movie whoever was on the other end wouldn’t have heard a god damned thing. Because as the movie started, everyone in the theater collectively decided this was already the best movie ever made, and they were going to be loud about it.

And I mean loud in the best way possible. Cheering at the good bits. Booing at the villains. Screaming at the jump scares. Everybody was feeding into everybody else’s energy until it became a frenzy. This wasn’t a movie anymore, this was a theme park ride, and we were loving it.

If you saw The Avengers in theaters you probably experienced a moment of this, during the part at the end where the Hulk whips the crap out of Loki like some dandy ragdoll. I saw that movie in theaters twice, and I had no idea Hulk said ‘puny god’ afterward until I watched it at home by myself because there was so much cheering. Now, take that energy, and just stretch it for the length of the movie. That’s what this showing was.

And then? When Sam Jackson’s character finally utters the line that I swear was famous before the movie even came out? Holy shit. It brought the house down. It brought it down harder than anything I’ve ever seen live. Forget not hearing the next line, nobody heard anything for the next two minutes because we were too busy cheering and holding each other and painting our faces with the blood of our enemies and ripping the seats out of the floor. This wasn’t about snakes, nor planes anymore. This was about five hundred people from all over the country coming together to absolutely lose their shit.

Don’t get me wrong, the movie is still not good. I’ve never felt the urge to rewatch the movie since, and I rewatch movies a lot. But I’ve never experienced anything even close to that night, and even though I have way more bad memories about other people in theaters, that night is the one I keep thinking about.

Oh, and the Cobra Starship song still slaps.

The Type of Guy Who’s Always In a Quick Mart Parking Lot

Janet looked out the plate glass window, over the snack cakes and through the neon sign for the lottery, and stared at the two idiots outside. From one of the many pockets in his long black coat BJ had produced a butterfly knife, and he was attempting to spin it around his fingers. It was going about as well as Janet would have guessed. Must be a practice blade, she thought, just as the knife closed on the meaty edge of BJ’s palm. He yelled out and dropped the butterfly knife, putting his bleeding hand to his mouth.

“Psht, you suck. Let me show you how to use that thing.”

Kevin picked it up from the dark puddle it had fallen into and shook it to get the water off, all the while giving BJ a smug learn from the pros face while BJ flipped him off with the hand that wasn’t bleeding. He managed to spin it exactly twice before the blade of the knife lodged itself into the side of his first finger.

“Sheee-it!”

He pulled the knife free from his finger and whipped it at the ground. Bouncing between one foot, then the other, he loosed a wild parade of cursing that would have made a sailor cry. All while BJ held onto his own wound and laughed so hard he had to bend down and hold his knees to keep from falling over.

“It’s not funny, BJ! You cut yourself, too!”

But BJ was still laughing, even as he went to pick up the knife to try it again.

Janet turned back to Freddy. Standing on the other side of the box of snack cakes she was still trying to unpack, his face was still flushed red and he was panting. Sometimes when Freddy got excited by something he needed to tell someone else. Sometimes that someone else was blocks or even miles away. Sometimes Freddy forgot that he had a Vespa and ran the entire way. She’d have to give him a ride after her shift was over. But that wasn’t the important thing right now.

“Imps?” she asked, hoping that just by hearing the word from someone else he’d realized how ridiculous he was being. Instead he nodded.

“Yes.”

“Imps? Imps. Like…I don’t even know what an imp is.”

“The book I read said they are low level demons-”

“Demons?”

She asked it far too loudly, the word slipping out like a beer belch. The few customers in the store looked up at her sharply. An old lady with a floral hanky wrapped around her head crossed herself. No one else seemed to care as they went back to their shopping. Still, Janet ducked down below the shelves. She had to put the cupcakes away, anyway.

“What were you doing looking at a book about demons?” she asked, her voice now too quiet. Freddy had ducked down with her though, and he plucked one of the cupcakes out of her hand.

“Well, after…you-know-what happened,” he said, seeing her face. Janet didn’t want to talk about that. Janet didn’t even want to think about that, and the cutesy you-know-what shit wasn’t helping. “I thought, what if there’s other stuff out there? There’s lots more stories, you know? So maybe something else was real. So I was looking through some books at the library and I read this thing on imps and I immediately thought of Kevin and BJ.”

“I’ve known those two for years,” Janet said, taking back the cupcake and putting it away. “They’re morons but they’re harmless.”

“That’s the thing about imps. They’re, like, low level demons. Entry-level. They don’t kill people, or set fires or nothing. They don’t even seem like they try to collect souls.”

“Souls?”

“They’re just annoying. Cause mischief. Let air out of your tires, play their music too loud, be a bad influence on kids. You know, little stuff.”

They did bring that boom box around to play that awful, grinding metal music a lot. It always set Mr. Vellenti off, and he’d go out there screaming and cussing and run them off the parking lot. Actually…did they only do it on days Mr. Vellenti was working? She tried to remember a day with the boombox and a different manager on duty and couldn’t.

Janet shook her head and stood, picking up the now empty box. As she walked to the counter Freddy was quick on her heels.

“They’re just idiots.”

“Okay, fine. Just idiots. You’ve known them for years. Ever since you started working here, right? They were already there?”

“Right.”

“Okay, so where do they live? They have to live somewhere.”

“If you think I ever want to know where they live you have seriously lost your mind.”

“What about a job. Have they ever mentioned a job? Have you ever seen them at a job?”

“Well…no…but I’m always here.”

“Do they even pay with money?”

“Yes, Freddy. They pay with money,” she said, relieved she could answer a question. How could they be imps if they pay with money?

“Cash every time, right? No bank cards?”

Fuck. Yes. Cash every time. And…oh.

“Two dollar bills and dollar coins,” she said. “Every time.”

Freddy stood back from where he had been leaning on the front counter and held his palms out like she had just answered the riddle of the universe.

Janet huffed. “That doesn’t mean they’re…that! They probably just…I don’t know. Robbed the mint, or something.”

Freddy looked back out the window, and Janet unwillingly followed this gaze. Kevin and BJ had each other in headlocks and were attempting to wrestle the other to the ground. The butterfly knife was sticking out of Kevin’s shoulder.

“Yeah, they seem capable of that.”

Under the Overpass

“This can’t be right.”

“I’ve followed the directions to the letter.”

“Then, let me see.”

With an eye roll and a sigh so over the top anybody down the block could have seen it, he handed the little pink notecard to Eloise. As great a show as Dell put on, Eloise made an even greater one of pretending not to notice. She pulled the card from him so it bent between her fingers and made a whip noise through the air, and held it up in front of her face. Dell resisted the urge to stick the tip of his tongue out at her. Barely.

Instead, he spun slowly in place. The two of them had lived in the city for their entire lives, except for those two years Eloise refused to talk about, as though even mentioning them would cause Dell to pack up and take the next train east again. They had been to the beach and most of the parks. To the planetarium and the zoo. They had grown up in the south and lived near the college and then moved to the north. They had seen the city in the pink-sky mornings, under heavy clouds booming with thunder, and lit up orange at night by the sodium vapor lamps. But in all their time, they had never been here.

‘Here’ was the bad part of town, quite literally on the other side of the train tracks. Following the blocky letters on the little pink card had taken them away from the soaring glass buildings of downtown and down long streets lined with small row houses, each a different flavor of dilapidation. This one had its paint peeling. That one had its windows boarded up. The one on the corner two blocks back had part of its roof caved in. It looked like the set of a disaster movie, but the world hadn’t ended here. Music came from windows and folks sat on porches watching them walk by. The bodega they had hustled past had been filled with people. Loud, tough people that barely looked at them as they walked by, but had made Dell check behind them for blocks to see if they were following.

Of course they weren’t. They had never been to this side of the town, but that didn’t mean either of them had money. He could watch the runs in Elise’s stockings stretch as she walked, and he had to be careful how he bent his left arm or the hole there in his sleeve could get bigger. No one was going to jump them. At least, that’s what the logical brain said. Prejudices didn’t live on the logical side and, perhaps like them and this place, had never even seen it.

Now they were standing at an edge. The row houses were behind them. In front of them, on the other side of a tall, ugly fence, was the distribution yard, filled with big men putting bigger boxes onto even bigger trains, all the while making the biggest noises. A couple of stories above them, blocking the sun, the passenger rail soared over them. Dell had been on it plenty. It was the very train he had taken east. Had he ever looked down? If he had, he didn’t remember.

Eloise pushed the card under his nose, close enough to tickle his mustache. She didn’t wait for him to take it before letting the card go so she could dramatically wave her arms above her head before crossing them tightly in front of her.

“We did everything right,” she said, miffed.

Dell followed the card as it fluttered in the air, catching it inches before it hit the puddle at his feet.

“You mean I did it right, and you don’t have to sound so surprised about it.”

Eloise straightened her coat and didn’t look at him.

“Well, does it look like the right place?”

“How am I supposed to know, but-”

“It doesn’t look right,” Eloise spat, “so you can’t blame me for making sure-”

“Making sure?” Dell asked, stepping out of the puddle. “Making sure what? Making sure I didn’t fuck up?”

“Dell-”

“No, Eloise, I’m sick of this. You’re always doing this. I…it just feels like you don’t trust me to even read directions.”

“Dell-”

“And don’t say you’re just analytical, that’s bull. You just think I can’t do something simple like read directions, directions you wrote so if we’re in the wrong place-”

“Dell, shut up! We’re not in the wrong place. Look!”

Eloise had her hands in her pockets and she was walking away from him. No, not exactly. She wasn’t walking away, she was walking toward. Dell traced the path she was making. He gasped.

Built into the overpass, now shaking as the passenger train blew by overhead, was an impossible wooden door.

World’s Best Grandma

I have no idea why I’ve become fixated on this, but I have, so here we go!

Scott Lang, yes, “Mr. Ant-Man” Scott Lang, is a good dad.

No, you know what? He’s a competent dad, and I think that’s the really important bit.

Scott Lang is a Competent Dad.

No.

Scott Lang is the Best Dad in the MCU.

Fucking hell, is this even a question? Who are the other dads in the MCU, anyway? Hank Pym shipped his daughter off to a boarding school after her mom ‘died’ because he couldn’t handle the grief, and let her keep that bob haircut for God knows how long. Odin spent centuries in a blood frenzy with his oldest daughter and then when he sobered up he just locked her away in a metaphysical prison for, like, a millennia and a half, and then just makes really shitty decisions with his other kids in general. T’Chaka seemed like a good dad, but he made questionable foreign policy decisions, and he was a terrible uncle. Clint says he loves his family, but he keeps fucking off to do Avengers stuff. Tony seems fine, but there was about ten minutes of parenting in that movie so I’ve got basically nothing to go on there. The only contender here is Rocket Raccoon. Okay, wait.

Scott Lang and Rocket Raccoon Are the Best Dads in the MCU, But I Want to Talk About Scott.

Setting aside the trope of absentee/abusive/emotionally unavailable dads, even the dads who are portrayed as good dads are still…kind of not good at it? Sitcom dads can obviously love their kids and still do stuff that’s so stick-in-eye stupid, like, gee, Susan, how was I supposed to know I shouldn’t have used Kayleigh’s prom dress to buff out my car?!? And then we, as an audience, have to sit there and watch while his wife teaches this chucklefuck, this bridge troll, this absolute waste of carbon and hydrogen, that his daughter has feelings or some such bullshit. And then the rest of the family – the mega-hottie wife, the mid-twenties teenage daughter, and the hyperactive teenage son who still has his hair spiked up even though it’s not 2004 anymore – they all gather in a circle around this prehistoric rat monster perpetually wearing a foam dome and forgive him and tell him it’s okay and someday he’ll learn to stop waxing cars with clothes but, I mean, it’s unlikely. Super unlikely.

Action hero dads are pretty similar. Love their kids, but they’re so bad at either being a parent or an action hero that the kid usually ends up kidnapped and strapped to a bomb.

Then comes Scott Fucking Lang, Super Dad. He’s a superhero in an action comedy and he’s an ex-con, so whether you know it or not you’ve already been primed on what to expect. He’ll say things about loving his daughter and wrap her in big hugs, but it’s all downhill from there. He’ll be creepy and weird with his ex-wife. He’ll demand that he get joint custody even though he’ll live somewhere completely inappropriate, like a no-tell motel. He’ll sneak her out of the house for an Ant-Man field trip, endangering her and ultimately learning a lesson about being a better dad, a lesson he should have already known in the first place because why would anyone have to learn not to bring your six year old daughter on a caper through experience? You know where this is going, because this is where it’s always going.

Then the first movie takes all of that and tells you where you can cram it (it’s your butt. It’s always up your butt). In the first third of the movie:

  1. Scott never tries to get back with his wife. He’s over it, and he just wants to see Cassie.
  2. He never insists Cassie come live with him or even argues for split custody, just the right to see her. It’s not a no-tell motel, but he does live in a shitty apartment with another ex-con on top of what appears to be a 24 hour rave, and Scott knows full well he can’t have Cassie there.
  3. He’s actively trying to pay his child support, thus the shitty job at the Baskin-Robbins and agreeing to Luis’ plan in the first place.

These things already put Scott in, like, the 98th percentile of movie dads. These are all unselfish decisions, motivated by Cassie’s best interest and not in Scott getting a new caper buddy. The first part of the first movie also includes the birthday scene (Yes, he does show up without being invited, but that makes him more a shitty ex than a shitty dad) where Scott gives Cassie the Ugly Pink Bunny, which she fucking loves. This can be read as a little girl who misses her dad just loving whatever it is he gives her, like, he could have given her gardening gloves and she would have lost her mind. But given all of my other highly-compelling evidence, I think Scott knew specifically she would love it.

Ant-Man and the Wasp has my two favorite scenes that point to Scott Lang being MCU’s Greatest Dad. It opens with Scott and Cassie working their way through a homemade cardboard box maze that dumps out into a multiple-story slide to the backyard (Scott earns less points for this than another dad might because he’s under house arrest and, as we all know at this point, boredom is the greatest muse). But that doesn’t even matter, because the point is not the maze and the slide. The point is that before they go down the slide, Scott makes Cassie put a bicycle helmet on. It’s such a small gesture. The writers didn’t have to add that in, except they did, because Scott Lang is a great dad who would never send his daughter down a homemade slide without head protection.

The final scene is my absolute favorite, and maybe a little less obvious. It’s when they have to retrieve the World’s Best Grandma trophy from Cassie’s classroom. They get to the school, and there’s some hijinx and drama from the suit Scott’s wearing fucking up, but there is absolutely no hijinx and drama from Scott not knowing which classroom is Cassie’s, because he knows her teacher’s name. He knows her teacher’s name. Jesus Christ, do you think Mr. Prehistoric Rat using his son’s basketball uniform like a Sham-Wow knows anything about his kids’ schooling, let alone a teacher’s name? And he can’t leave his house, so he’s never been to the school or met the teacher, he just knows because he’s paying attention to his kid and her schoolwork. Holy shit. I’m hyperventilating just thinking about it. A movie from twenty years ago definitely would have turned it into a joke.

Nineties Hope: Okay, which room is Cassie’s?

Nineties Scott: Uhhhhh….

Nineties Hope: The teachers’ names are on the doors, this should be easy? Do you not know your daughter’s teacher’s name?

Nineties Scott: Uhhhhhh….it starts with an S?

Uproariously laughter turned into barf-inducing laughter when we find the teacher’s room and the name is like Mrs. Murphy or some shit, and the only reason they figure it out is because they see Cassie physically come out of the room for some reason.

But none of that happens. They easily find the trophy because Scott knows the name of Cassie’s teacher, and also can identify which backpack is hers (“Duh, I could have sworn she had a purple bag” says Nineties Scott before he chugs a Zima and smashes it on his forehead). There’s even an in-movie acknowledgment of it. Because

Scott Lang is the Best Grandma in the MCU

Snow

And that’s when the snow began to fall.

It fell lightly, at first, from the starless black sheet of sky. It danced and twisted with every brief wind and puff of air. Each snowflake was its own being, cold, unique, perfect. They filled the black black night like polka dots, white where the faint shine of the lamps, far but not too far, from the back of the highway rest stop cut through the trees in slices both thin and thick, and gray in the dark patches, in the darkness. They moved in slowed motion, careful scouts, who drifted and fell and landed, on the trees, on the dark picnic table, on them, on the ground, nestling between the individual blades of grass that were already brown and dead from the last ice bitten month. And when the first did not melt and proved the world cold enough for sustenance, the rest followed, and the slow dance became a crowded torrent.

It fell like a curtain, striped white and gray, and when the curtain fell it brought with it a hush, and the world muted. There was only one sound now, the unfixed yet unmistakable drone of fast cars on a highway a quarter mile away. Everything else was hidden by a short hill – no headlights, no reflections of windshields, no sound of windshield wipers just starting to clear away the ever increasing drop of snowflakes. Just the drone, ungrounded and ghostly, that became quieter and more unfocused as the snowfall grew heavier. It came from all directions. It filled the air equally, just like the snow.

The flakes were no longer alone. They clumped together to keep each other cold. They did not land gracefully but hit the ground in sops. Piled on top of one another. The white and the gray ate away at the black, changing the colors like age, first salt and pepper and then whiter and whiter as the night grew old. ‘Pure,’ they say. This snow was not pure. It had eaten the black and would never be pure. The white and gray were dull with darkness and the world, at least the patch of woods behind the rest stop, was no brighter for it.

They that were standing in this patch of woods did not care for the dark or the snow. And the snow did not care for them. It fell in their hair and stayed there. It fell on their clothes and piled on their shoulders. It landed on their exposed flesh and did not melt. Their skin became colder. There was no breath to move the snowflakes, to create little gray puffs of condensation. Their eyes, as sharp and as dead as the rocks and stones that were lodged in the soil, saw through the snow and ignored it. They were, perhaps, alive only as a tree is alive. Perhaps no more alive than a picnic table.

He that was lying in the patch of woods was not alive in any sense. The snow that fell on him melted, at first, as it found his hair, his skin, his eyes, his blood that had escaped and made a small pool in the crook between his shoulder and his head. He grew colder and the snow grew heavier and sooner rather than later it stopped melting, and the snow that had melted started to freeze. He became glazed, slick and shiny, and soon he would be blanketed by a white and gray comforter that would only grow fluffier as the night grew older. The air was filled with snow now.

They that were standing moved. Their steps were unhurried. They made no sound. One of them carried car keys, the metal no colder than the hand, but there was no jangling. The hush made it so. Behind them, as they walked toward the light and the gray brick rest stop and the highway, they left tracks in the thin layer of snow that had declared itself owner of the ground. There was no need to care. More snow would follow, all this night and perhaps into morning, not that they would see any of the morning. They would take the dead man’s car and drive away and leave it somewhere. Abandon it in a lake, perhaps.

Winter would take care of it. Snow tonight would bury the man in the woods. It would bury their tracks. It would bury the road and the road would be plowed but even as people came to this rest stop, as they paced to keep warm as they smoked or waited on friends, the snow would be the body’s protector. And more snows would come. And more. And the lake where they might leave the car will freeze, and then the snows will cover the ice and the car will be protected too.

The snows will fall and there will be no trace.

Will Smith and Aliens

In case you weren’t there, we as a culture were obsessed with aliens in the nineties. I don’t know how it happened, but I suspect it started with those douchebags in England who started laying down ‘crop circles’ with ropes and boards and then countless TV specials like Unsolved Mysteries and whatever the History Channel morphed into went into these breathless, hour long, hyper-edited tin foil ravings about how there was no way in hell all these crop circles were made with a bunch of ropes and boards and by the time these douchebags came out and said, ‘We made them with ropes and boards’ it was too late and Fox was airing specials about alien autopsies and pretending it was real.

Another thing we were all obsessed with was Will Smith, and that was going great right up until the giant mechanical spider. So it’s unsurprising we got two movies that mush aliens and Will Smith right at the peak of the decades. What’s surprising, maybe (to losers), is that both of them are still worth watching.

 Independence Day is a doomsday action movie that allows the viewer to have fun and have a happy ending with fireworks, something sorely lacking in the next decade dominated by ‘grimdark’ and ‘gritty reboots.’ Will Smith got to be an action star, and Jeff Goldblum continued to be Jeff Goldblum because there is only one Jeff Goldblum and when you hire Jeff Goldblum, you get Jeff Goldblum. Everybody’s wearing flannel, including the president and a good portion of the aliens, and there’s a dog named Boomer. 11/10 must watch.

Men in Black came out a year later and we all just accepted it! We said, yes, please, more Will Smith and aliens! And we were right to, and it was great. This movie is peak Will Smith, specifically the ‘series of simple tests scenes’ culminating in the Tiffany soliloquy, which should have won the man a damn Oscar and the fact that it didn’t is the main reason the Oscars are the Grammys of the awards world. Vincent D’Onofrio is a delight and there’s a pug wearing an “I (heart) NY” sweater, 14/10 absolutely necessary.

On the Road to Galdin

They were supposed to be at Galdin Quay tonight. Galdin wasn’t Insomnia, of course. Nothing was Insomnia. But he’d heard descriptions of it. It was picturesque. The salt air was refreshing. The seafood was the best on the continent. Their room, the room rented for them before they left, was said to be directly over the water, and offered a southern view towards Accordo. Noctis could picture it now. Warm and breezy with soft beds and linen sheets and just the faintest scent of sea salt in the air. He wondered who was sleeping in that room tonight, now that everything had just gone to complete and utter dogshit.

First the car had broken down. Then they had to push it all the way to Hammerhead through Leide, Eos’ sandy asscrack. And then that other sandy asscrack, Cid, had taken all their money to fix the car and his granddaughter was taking her sweet time fixing the thing, and then they had the audacity to put them to work for money! His father had made him take jobs while he was in high school, he wasn’t averse to a little work. But they could have just billed the Citadel and fixed the car and let them get on their way. The old man apparently went way back with his old man, he should have known the money would come. Instead they spent all day in the dirt and the scrub, first using their fine Lucian weapons to kill giant scorpions, and then looking for some hunter who can’t even do his own job and then they almost gotten eaten by the biggest…anything he’d ever seen, and what do they get at the end of the day? A little money slipped on the down low from Cindy, a promise for more work if they want it, and an invitation to rent the caravan for the night.

Sweet peanut butter and jelly Bahamut on a pink chocobo, a caravan.

“Ooh, it’s retro,” Prompto had said.

“That’s one word for it.” He had honestly tried hard to keep the sneer out of his voice, but could tell from the look he had gotten from Gladio that he hadn’t been successful.

“It’s got all it needs – four walls, beds, and protective lights-”

“A chocobo shower curtain!” Prompto had called from down the hall.

Yes, it did have all that. A kitchen, a sitting area, two sets of bunk beds, and a bathroom. All in a space that could have fit in his closet. Hard surfaces were dirty. Soft surfaces were ratty. There were ants in the sink, duct tape on one of the windows, and the undeniable funk of old BO in the air. If it were up to him he would dose the entire thing in antiseptic and then light it all on fire. At least Prompto was enjoying himself.

“Ooh, bunk beds! I haven’t slept in one of those in….a long time, anyway. I call top bunk! Ooh, someone left books in this drawer. Scintillating Daemon Succubi. What’s a succubi? Oh…Oh, no, never mind. Hey, look, an oven! Ignis, look at this thing!”

Ignis had been outside figuring out how to put gil into the rental box, and when he came in Noctis was relieved to see him wearing a face that matched his own.

“Yes, it’s, ah…something,” Ignis had said, pushing his glasses up his nose.

“What do you say? Think you could cook on it?”

“Well, I…let’s see.”

Ignis had examined the oven, wincing at the creaking sound the door had made as it opened. Then he’d tried the stove. It had clicked, but there was no gas.

“It appears to be broken,” he’d said, with obvious relief. “We’ll just have to see what the, ah, Pit Stop has for us tonight.”

“I’ll go scope it out!”

Prompto had been out the door before anyone could stop him.

“At least someone’s having fun,” Ignis had said.

“Is it really broken?”

Ignis had given him that ghost of a sly smile he had.

“Tell him or Gladiolus and I will be forced to extreme measures.”

Takka’s food hadn’t been bad, but it was just too different for him to really enjoy it. The meat was tough and the dish was too heavy on spices, and he was sure he was going to have a continued ally against this madness in Ignis, but Iggy apparently liked the food. Just a few bites in and he had already forgotten his disdain for the caravan and was instead trying to recreate the dish for later.

Then came the last ugly straw. The list of things they didn’t have outside the city had been growing all day, but once he found out it included Iron Giant Ale, he was ready to throw in the towel and just walk back to Insomnia.

Right. And say what to his father?

“The car broke down and people were mean to me and they didn’t have my favorite beer. You sent me into a sandy squalor filled with backwoods heathens.”

Yeah. That’d fly.

He’d kept his peace, eating their meal, chatting with Cindy outside the caravan for a little bit, shuffling about the interior of the caravan as everyone fought for the bathroom. Thankfully, after finding those books, even Gladiolus admitted they should probably strip the beds and use their own sheets and blankets. He’d been so exhausted from the car pushing and the running and the varmint huntin’ that he’d assumed that even on those cheap mattresses he’d be asleep before he could start imagining the bed bugs.

Well, you know what they say about assuming. Hours later and he was still staring at the bottom of the top bunk. He could hear Ignis lightly snoring and Gladio doing that weird clicking thing in the back of his throat. From outside, he could faintly hear the canned, tinny music from the gas station and the occasional clanging coming from the garage. There was no lapping of the waves. No sea smell.

“Noct? Are you still awake?”

“Yeah, Prompto,” Noct said, matching his friend’s half-whispered volume.

“I can’t sleep, either,” he said. “It’s too quiet.”

“Too quiet? Even with that awful jangly music and Cindy banging around in the garage?”

“I live above the fish market, dude. If there isn’t at least four separate screaming conversations about the freshness of bass, it might as well be the middle of the day.”

“There’s no one screaming about fish. But, there’s always someone working. Trucks coming in and out. And the sound of the crystal. And on nights when it’s warm enough to leave the windows open, I can hear the city. Yeah, maybe it is too quiet.”

“Still, though. Cool caravan.”

“Yeah,” Noct said, glad Prompto couldn’t see his eye roll. “Cindy seems nice.”

“Oh, for sure! Better than nice, I think.”

“Nicer than her grandfather.”

“Seriously,” Prompto said, and then turned his voice into a low, grizzly grind. “Stand up straight boy.”

“Look at them city clothes,” Noct said, trying the same. “Ought to teach you boys a lesson from being from the city.”

Prompto snickered. When he spoke again, it was own voice, serious this time.

“Hey, Noct? I’m sorry. About today.”

“Why? Wasn’t your fault.”

“Right, I mean, I know…I just mean…it sucks. I know you were excited to see Lady Lunafreya. Now who knows how long it’ll take us to get down to Galdin.”

He’d been trying very hard not to think about Luna, mostly because he didn’t like the way his brain went with it. They’d kept in touch through Umbra. He remembered loving her when they were kids, the way kids do. But they hadn’t seen each other since they were eight, and just like that, they were supposed to get married? He wanted to see her, it just…felt like a lot.

“The wedding’s not supposed to be for a few weeks. I’m sure we’ll make it in time. I did want some extra time in Altissia, though.”

“Me, too. Good food. Waterfalls. I hear the fishing’s good there, too.”

“Really? I-”

“Ladies,” Gladio’s voice made them both jump. “I hate to interrupt this sleepover before the hair braiding starts, but if the two of you don’t shut up you can take it outside with the daemons.”

“Sorry.”

Yola

The place where they fell was nothing but corn and stars, the two trading places rapidly in Yola’s vision as they tumbled through the thick stalks. Her arms were wrapped around Calvin, so tight she could feel the tension in every muscle. Her feathered wings were wrapped around both of them, and with every bounce off the earth a new place hurt. Silently, in broken and jumbled thoughts, she prayed to whatever god was out there listening. If something broke, they might never get out of this cornfield alive.

Finally their momentum ran out with one last slow tumble. They stopped with Yola on her back and Calvin on top of her, still strapped into the tandem harness. Afraid of finding a break the hard way, Yola began to pull her wings up and away from them in a slow, fluid motion. The stars above them popped into the black sky. There were some bits that were sore. She was going to bruise for sure. But nothing felt broken. Positives, focus on the positives. Well, that would be easier if Calvin stopped screaming.

“Hey, we’re on…we’re ON the GROUND NOW. YOU CAN STOP SCREAMING.”

Calvin didn’t stop screaming. He did start trying to scramble off her and get away. Something infinitely easier without the tandem harness. Rolling her eyes, she found the latches at either side and unlocked them. Yola doubted he even noticed why he was finally able to pull away, to stand up, to walk backwards away from her across the corn they had broken. Yola thought about screaming at him to stop screaming again, but the irony was too much. He’d run out of steam eventually. Right?

While he had his little panic attack, Yola stood up. She tested her arms and legs. Bent at the waist and stood up straight, then rolled her neck. There wasn’t enough room in the corn to spread out her wings to fully check them, but as far as she could tell they were okay. Her feathers were a little ruffled, and there were corn stalk leaves stuck in them. In her hair, too, stuck in her thick and fluffy braids. She had gotten all the green bits she could find and was beginning to check her pockets when Calvin finally ran out of noise to make.

Yola held her hands out. “What the fuck, dude?”

“You’re asking me that?” Besides having a bloodless fishy look that was not helped by the rapid way he opened and closed his mouth, he looked fine. There wasn’t any corn stuck in his hair. She supposed the thank you she deserved wouldn’t come.

“I hit an air pocket,” Yola said. “If you had stayed still, we would have dropped, like, twenty feet and I would have had control again.”

He made that guppy look at her for a few more seconds before pushing his blond hair out of his eyes. “How was I supposed to know that?”

“Everyone knows about air pockets! Haven’t you ever been on an airplane before?”

“I’m just supposed to know air travel and flying with a bird-lady is the same? I didn’t know what to expect! Is it the same? Should I have gotten some peanuts and an in-flight magazine?”

Her heart had finally begun to slow, but now it began to beat faster again. And she could feel the blush creeping up her otherwise pale cheeks. She hated how easily she blushed. But, damn it…

“You’re right.”

“No, I was just thrown into this, and-” He stopped. “Wait, what?”

Yola crossed her arms, her wings bobbing behind her. “You’re right. We didn’t prepare you enough. I’m sorry.”

Calvin shoved his hands in his pockets, his eyes darting between her face and the ground.

“There was a sense of urgency, I suppose. Not a lot of time…Thanks for not getting us killed on the landing.”

She turned away from him, hoping he thought it was to inspect their surroundings. It was, mostly, but a little of it was to hide the surprised smile she couldn’t suppress. It was the same as when they landed. Corn in every direction, illuminated only by the stars above and the hangnail moon to the south. It wasn’t close to harvest yet, the corn only came up to her chin. Still, in every direction she could only see the same thing. Darkness. And more corn.

“We must be in Kansas,” Calvin said.

“Nebraska, I think. When we were falling, I saw train tracks. This way. I think.”

“Train tracks? Can’t we just go back to flying?”

Turning back to him, she gestured wildly at the corn surrounding them. They had crushed some of it as they landed, but they were still tightly surrounded.

“You think I can take off from here? I can barely stretch out here. We find the train tracks, I’ll have plenty of room.”

Yola started walking north, pushing her way through the corn. After a few seconds she heard Calvin following, pushing the stalks and muttering. Most of it she couldn’t make out, but from the tone she could get the gist. Well, Calvin, she didn’t want to be out here walking through the corn in the middle of the night, either. Shit like this was why she hated transporting people.