Thunder Bay

So, here's the thing about Thunder Bay.

You tell people that you live there, and they're all 'Oh man, that place sounds awesome!'. A few seconds later, they ask 'Where is that?'. Largest city in northwest Ontario, population of a hundred and eight thousand or so, and the only thing even remotely cool about it is the name.

Okay so sure, I've lived in worse places. There's a lot of green around, the people are mostly all Canadians which means they're really friendly and stuff, and the fact that you can take your allowance for the month and then walk to Lake Superior to rent a jet ski for the afternoon is, well, okay so that's pretty awesome.

But who the hell wants to live in the 46th most populous city in Canada? Famous people certainly don't. Celebrity TV show type people certainly don't. Hell, Thunder Bay sucks so bad that they don't even have a proper hockey team. What's the point of living in Canada if you don't get to go watch dudes on ice skates beat the crap out of each other and try to smack around a little slidey rock thingie?

Sometimes though, stuff happens in Thunder Bay. Like, we're talking seriously rare here. It'd probably be once in a blue moon, if I actually knew what the hell one of those things was. Whatever, it's not very often. But today? Whoa man, today is something special.

Today's the day when she finally agrees to go out on a date with me.

Okay, so maybe I'm getting ahead of myself a bit. Maybe I should explain things a little better. See, there's this girl. Not just a girl, but The Girl, the way that Irene Adler from Sherlock Holmes is The Woman. She is an unholy blend of pretty and popular with smart and actually, genuinely nice. Like, okay, so the school kinda made her hang out with me when I first moved here, but she didn't just do her time and then abandon me. She's like, actually my friend, and that's of her own free will rather than me having to inflict myself on unwilling victims like I do with just about everyone else.

There in lies the problem, though. She wants to be friends, and like, I have no idea if that's all. Sure, I could ask, but if she's not interested, or worse if she gets freaked out? I can't just charge in all claws-out like Ronan. I need to actually have a plan, a strategy. I need to do what Arges would do.

Except, you know. Not the being a total douchebag part.

So, the plan basically is to score enough bonus points that no matter how grievously I embarrass myself, it's still gonna be overshadowed by how awesome the stuff I've done was. Yeah, so I just humiliated myself in front of you, but it doesn't matter because I'm still the guy who did the thing.

Finding the thing though, that's been the hard part. This isn't the sort of girl you can win over by baking cookies, even if she did think my coconut slice was the most amazing thing she had ever tasted. You can't win her over with flowers or mix tapes or buying exactly the perfect present because you have an eidetic memory for everything she's ever said she likes or wanted. Trust me, I have already tried that, and besides: this isn't some girl you can just buy off. You need something so awesome there isn't even a price tag.

So, when Morgan shot me a text to brag that Eugene Beckett, celebrity Canadian astronaut had just walked into the bar, I knew that it wasn't the first line of some cheesy joke: more like the first line of perfection. Which is why I started running; and when I start running, I don't screw around.

I should probably have mentioned that. I kind of have this mutation thingy that means I have superspeed. Like, perceive the world in slow motion, reflexes so fast I can dodge bullets, speed so fast I can run up walls a little bit kind of superspeed. Which is both awesome, and a secret. Because if she ever found out what I am -

Yeah. I'd need more than just an autograph from one of her heroes for that.

Hi, by the way. Should probably have said that already. I'm Ryan Paisley, and I'm a mutant.

What do you miss while you're in space? is a question that gets asked a lot.

People expect you to say the obvious things. You miss your family. You miss fresh coffee. You miss bacon. They expect you to say things familiar to them, things that they themselves have gone without, so that by remembering what it was like for them to miss those things, they can in some small way feel like they're the same as the astronaut they are interrogating.

They don't expect you to say things like 'control'. They don't expect that, while strapped to the top of a rocket, or while floating around in a tin can hurtling around the Earth, you get anxious about the fact that you can't steer, can't stop, can't do anything to affect your fate lest you deviate from the terrifyingly narrow course between a fiery end on re-entry, and a frozen oblivion lost in space. They don't expect you to say that you miss not needing a vacuum fitting to suck out your bodily excretions and make sure they don't float around the cabin. They don't expect you to miss being able to crack a window, to miss being able to sleep in a bed without having to strap yourself into it, to miss being able to kick off your briefs and try to land them in the wash basket across the room. No one gets missing those things, because they've never had to miss those things; and saying that kind of stuff makes it seem like you're an ungrateful ass for not spending the whole time in awe of the fact that you're in space, where none of them get to be.

So you have to make up an answer. You have to practice something that sounds good to the press, and feels right to you. But when you're wife left you before NASA even managed to get a space shuttle in orbit, when your son can barely even stand to be in a room with you, and when you never really got what all of the fuss was about with coffee or bacon, you need to be a bit creative.

So this was the answer that Eugene went with instead; the thing that he missed while he was in space. It was this bar back home: this slightly murky, and yet somehow cosy little bar where he could sit on a stool and drink proper beer out of a proper glass instead of Yankee shit out of a bottle, and where people would talk to him like he was just another human being, regardless of whether they new who he was or not.

"A pint of whatever it is you're trying to get rid of, Sonny," Eugene grunted, abandoning his sunglasses on the bar and rummaging in the back of his pants for his wallet.

Samson's reply was the kind of glare that would have made a lesser man weep. From it's towering perch atop a set of shoulders that were already higher than the heads of most men, his expression twisted into a grim and dour display that focused solely on stern, leaving the edge of aggression and threat to the growl that he injected into his voice.

"If you want to pay for drinks," he warned, his eyebrows twitching with disapproval as his gaze drifted from Eugene's rummaging hand to the astronauts eyes, "There's a perfectly good bar three streets over that will be more than happy to deprive you of your money -"

A faint flicker of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth and crinkled at his eyes, but Samson kept it at bay through sheer force of will.

"- but if you plan on drinking in my bar, then your space dollars stay in your goddamn pants. We clear?"

Eugene heaved out a sigh. "As crystal," he muttered, settling onto the same stool he always picked, from force of habit more than anything else.

Okay, so not everyone in this place treated him like a normal human being. Though you'd never guess it to look at the gracefully ageing bastard, he'd known Samson for more of his life than he hadn't. In fact, it had been Samson who'd served Eugene his first ever drink: a glass of just tonic water, because of how laughably sub-par Eugene's fake ID had been. Samson had been the one who helped get him drunk after his first girlfriend had left him and had, as Eugene understood it, carried his unconscious ass home. Samson had been the one on the other side of the whiskey bottle when Candice had left. Samson had been the one who'd talked him into leaving little Mikey with his grandparents so that he could go live his dream of becoming an astronaut; which hadn't been great advice as far as parenting was concerned, but it had allowed him to become the man he'd always wanted to be before the baby got in the way.

And, truth be told, it was Samson who he needed right now; the sounding board he needed to throw his thoughts at in the hopes of hearing the ringing of truth echo back.

He tried to collect himself as Sonny poured the pint; tried to muster the opening gambit of conversation that would steer them in the right direction without just blurting it out from the get-go. Unfortunately, while he could find his way into orbit with ease, navigating his way through the atmosphere of conversation was not a skill he'd mastered.

"Anything interesting happen since I've been gone?"

Samson looked at Eugene as if he'd just asked why the sky was purple and tasted like cherries.

"It's Thunder Bay," Samson countered, setting the beer down in front of him with a thunk. "So no."

His eyes glanced away from the spaceman for a moment, sweeping protectively around the bar. It wasn't concern for himself or his profits that motivated them, but rather concern for the wellbeing of his patrons, both physically and emotionally. There weren't dangers lurking in this out of the way corner of Thunder Bay, save for whichever ones his customers carried through the doors with them. While sadly not psychic like some of the mutants he'd read about in the papers, Samson was practised and astute enough to pick up on the subtleties of body language, and read the neon flashing road signs that ignorance usually blinded most people to.

There was Mason, huddled in the booth in the corner, staring into his beer as if he were trying to divine some sort of prophecy in the bubbles; but no amount of mystical insight would inform him of when his wife might be coming back. There was Erica, much quieter than the ever-speaking Stacy, nervously fidgeting with the label on her bottle as she tried to muster the courage to tell Stacy how she felt the next time the chatterbox paused for breath. There was Jamie and Paul, so overtly affectionate that Samson might have told them to get a room were it not for the fact that celebrating the purchase of their first house together was why they were even here. He'd told Morgan to take over a complimentary bottle of Rosé when their food was ready; Paul wasn't a fan, but Jaime couldn't get enough of the stuff, and there wasn't a single thing in all the world that Paul wouldn't tolerate with a willing smile if it made her happy.

Letting his attention drift back to Eugene, he took a sip of his own drink - some god-awful green stuff that Morgan had assured him would double his stamina during workouts. Samson didn't buy it, but at least his gag reflex was getting a decent amount of stress training.

"So," he asked, stashing the vile liquid back beneath the bar. "You met any aliens yet?"

Eugene chuckled into his beer; it was a rehearsed reaction, but then what could you expect in reply to a question he'd been asked a few thousand times over.

He mustered a frown, and allowed himself a moment to relish beer filling his whole mouth instead of being tossed past half his taste buds and down the back of his throat out of a bottleneck designed more for speed of consumption than enjoyment of flavour. He half remembered a conversation with a guy from some bottling company at a charity gala a few years back, obsessing over the idea of mouth feel as an explanation for why they still bothered selling soda in glass bottles instead of the presumably cheaper and easier to recycle plastic ones. The phrase had sounded dirty as hell at the time, but ever since, Eugene had found himself buying into it. Glass bottles, plastic bottles, cans, open glasses; crazy as it sounded, what you drank from made a difference. It was a psychological trick maybe, like the way that you only found yawning infectious after someone had told you it was supposed to be infectious; but whatever.

"I think," Eugene said diplomatically, choosing his words with the utmost care, "That if we're really interested in discovering new life and new civilizations, we need to be paying more attention to the ones springing up in our own back yard, instead of walking around with our eyes to the sky. If aliens ever do come to visit, you can bet your ass they'll be more interested in the species we sideline and ostracise than they will be in us baseline human folks. Whether they come as conquerors, explorers, or something else entirely, it'll be the exceptions they give a damn about, not the rule."