Chase Stein

So, as far as birthdays went, maybe this one was a little less terrible than it could have been. Or a lot less. Never so unsure in his sexuality as to turn away a girly drink, Chase had Kate and himself on their third round of daiquiris, and was feeling pleasantly buzzed. There was a breeze coming off the ocean as afternoon turned to late afternoon, and there was a lot of great old stuff playing on the jukebox, surfer tunes from the 50s and 60s, and he was hanging out and having a genuinely good time with a knockout who could easily knock him out.

Life didn't suck.

"I mean, I have definitely woke up as a six year old or whatever," Chase said, scratching his jaw, shaking his head a little.

"There is some wacky shit going down on funtime island, as you may have noticed from the tribbles that seem to be lying around everywhere? Cuz yeah, that's reasonable. Just want it on record- still no outbreak of Gremlins, because I am a good mogwai caretaker. Suck it, Zach Galligan."

It wasn't in Chase's nature to heed the advice of grown ups, but then, it wasn't in Chase's nature to do anything that could be construed as 'adult'. He'd given the mogwai to Wiccan and shoved OL off onto Lucy, much to what he was sure was the dinosaur's displeasure, and gone to the scrapyard with the fistigons and the ex-ray specs and gotten to work.

The flame throwers were cool. Of course they were cool, but they were limited. It had occurred to him that if he could create some sort of energy dispenser, he'd be able to do more stuff. Not that burning shit down and blowing shit up wasn't awesome on its own merits, but he could lift OL up to the tree house if he had an energy net, or he could catch babies falling out of trees or whatever. Not that he wanted to be a superhero- he didn't, if anything he was gonna start pillaging and whatever it was baddies got up to as soon as there was anything worth taking around, just to stir some shit up- but he couldn't get the idea out of his head.

Energy netting. Yeah. He could do that. He had pulled the frog apart, learned it, put it back together. Sure, he wasn't a genius, he couldn't just build shit out of nothing, but this was his family's tech, this was his, and he was going to improve upon the model his father had built come hell or goddamn high water.

Cuz fuck that guy.

So Chase had spend the morning assembling a battery. It was as close as he could get to the power source in the Leapfrog given his limited resources and his total lack of willingness to ask anyone for anything, but all in all, it wasn't bad. Not quite as powerful, not quite as stable, not quite as conventional as something that ran on Diesel- but there had been a surprising amount of stuff buried deep in the scrapyard that had all come together nicely.

There were two inputs, about the size of a giant metal fist. He'd inserted the gloves into them and tinkered into the late afternoon. The gloves only turned on when they were worn. He wasn't sure why, but had figured it they had to feed, somehow, off a person's electromagnetic field. Turned out to be true, he guess, because they were up and running as he worked, going more off of instinct than anything. It was this slightly less than scientific approach that moved him, when he was pretty sure he was done, to don the gloves to test them out immediately. Dropping a wrench and a slender, strong slip of a metal tool off to the side, he knelt and slid his hands into the fistigons. He made two fists, felt the gloves start to pull out of their grooves in the battery, and then felt the batter pull them back in and hold them fast. He sighed- Back to the non existent drawing board- and started to pulls his hands back out, but found he couldn't.

Couldn't.

His heart had barely had time to leap before the glow started, brightly white and almost blue, radiating silently out of the crevices in the welding before lashing out like some throw back 80s light show. Except bowling alley lasers, he was pretty sure, didn't make the massive heaps of metal around you start to tremor, and they sure as shit didn't start to form into very tangible-looking, curved walls of thrumming, almost crackling energy.

"....Cool," he breathed, eyes wide and lit up, heart pounding in his ears with fear and adrenaline.

It took a minute for Chase's brain to catch up with recent events. Progress was hindered by the continued state of contact and closeness and buzz that his body was in, with another body. Nico's body.

Yeah, there was a lot of catching up to do.

Letting out a deep, ragged breath, forehead still against the pillow that was available beneath her shoulder, he mustered up the energy to do anything other than collapse out of sheer, indomitable will, and pulled away to lie on his back, next to her. Bed, not his, ceiling, not his, tools for the interception of practically-teenage pregnancy, not his, but check and double check. Hot girl, considerably more than double check. Except it wasn't just a hot girl.

Chase's brain had caught up.

"...woah.'