"Jen here.  Leave a message."

Another late night of work -- in her defense, she hadn't so much as headed into this wing of the building for the duration of the long weekend and she had a lot of catchup to do -- meant that Jen was humming to herself as she sat at her workstation.

The upbeatness of said humming, though, might have something to do with the perfect score on her latest module exam, after passing by a sub-Jen Scotts-standard margin of 18 out of 20 on the last one. One more module and she'd get to do weapons testing. Finally.

That fact in turn might have had to do with the celebratory chocolate cake on her desk, carefully secreted away behind a stack of papers in the event that --

"Hey, Jen!" came Boom's cheerful voice from somewhere over the cubicle wall, followed shortly thereafter by Boom's even more cheerful face peering over said wall.

In the event of that.

"Hey, Boom," she replied neutrally, squinting at her screen even though all she was doing at the moment was saving her file. "What's up?"

"I came to congratulate you on that test," he replied, full speed ahead on the cheer. "Kat says you usually get yourself a cake to celebrate whenever you pass one, and I was hoping, you know, maybe you had a little extra to share?"

"Sorry," Jen said, utterly straightfaced, because that was her cake, thank you very much, and she'd nearly gotten run over by an overenthusiastic C-Squad trainee for her trouble, and she wasn't about to share it. "I've been so busy playing catchup today, I haven't had time to go yet."

She couldn't help feeling bad about the crestfallen look on Boom's face, though. "The cake really is a lie, isn't it?"

"Yeah. Guess it is."

[OOC: . . . I couldn't help it.]

So she might not see active duty on a regular basis any more, but that didn't mean you were going to keep Jennifer Scotts away from keeping her skills honed.

She'd just finished up an hourlong stint at the shooting gallery with her usual goal of beating her last high score -- which she'd done this week, even if it was by three points -- and then, making sure no one else was around, set up a bunch of cardboard targets and pulled out a cheesy little toy dart gun to take aim at the cartoonish little monsters.

Just for old time's sake. Somewhere, Wes was laughing.

[OOC: Phone calls and visits from other Newtechians welcome, why not?]

Credit the time she'd spent in Fandom for the fact that Jen was actually stretched out on her bed relaxing tonight, not cooped up in her cubicle in the R&D sector and working. Granted, her relaxation-time amusement consisted of reviewing the video archive of last week's alien attacks, but tonight she wasn't going over them for analytical purposes.

"Oh, yeah, good thing that building was abandoned," she said in a slightly mocking tone. "Convenient. Back in my day we had to deal with the aftermath. Kids these days."

And even that, after a while, felt too much like work, so she grabbed her laptop off her nightstand and typed up an email.

From: jennifer.scotts@spd.gov
To: Fandom Friends
Subject: Hey, guys!
Time: 5:50 PM PDT, 8/17/2024

Hey, everybody. Just thought I'd let you all know I'm actually taking a break from work. I realize this may actually be surprising news where I'm concerned.

Things are about normal here. Researching, working out, your regularly scheduled giant alien stomping conveniently deserted sections of the city. (When did the convenient abandonment thing start being the standard? It was never that way in 2001.)

How's everybody been?

-- Jen Scotts
Space Patrol Delta Research and Development Associate

[OOC: Hey, if you want to say you got it, by all means, you did. Open for emails and calls and fellow Newtechians who want to barge in . . .]

Now that she'd passed the first three training module exams Jen had gotten a cubicle of her own. To celebrate this, she'd headed out into the city, found a bakery, and gotten herself a real chocolate cake, no Synthetron stuff. Being the workaholic that she was, though, she brought it right back to SPD HQ with her and had it at her desk, happily having a bite or two every so often as she typed up a report on the latest batch of tests she'd run.

She didn't notice at first that she was humming, but it was kind of hard not to notice when she started to actually sing.

( OMGWTF JEnDOS? )

Oh, crap, had anybody heard that?

"Did I hear something about cake? Who has cake?" Boom asked from somewhere across the room.

"Nobody," Jen yelled back.

"Aw. Bummer. Carry on, then."

Whew. Although really, if that didn't make anyone do a doubletake Jen had to wonder about her coworkers.

[OOC: . . . I'm going to hell. But someone had to do it.]

So she'd been here a week now, and her brain hadn't exploded from time displacement issues or a ton of new information yet. To celebrate getting through a week of orientation and training, Jen had staked out a couch in one of the common areas and was playing around with her shiny new SPD-issue laptop. It didn't have all the bells and whistles of a thirty-first century computer, no, but she'd spent two and a half years working with a clunker from 2001. To be fair, it had been pretty top of the line for its time, but still, she'd happily take a 2024 computer any day over it.

(Don't think she hadn't kept it, though. That thing had sentimental value.)

At the moment, she was busy setting up her Fandom network email on the machine, trying to transfer all her old mail over, and installing instant messaging software.

And being really, really glad that she didn't have to wear the uniforms that B-Squad did. The ventilation in some parts of this building were still kind of awful.

[OOC: Open for emails, phone calls, and the people who live here too if they want!]

Jen's duffel bag was slung over her shoulder, the case containing her laptop and the metric ton of SPD paperwork was at her feet, and a wistful expression was on her face as she stood in the middle of the causeway, waiting for her portal. Said portal wasn't scheduled to arrive for another twenty minutes but typically, she was early.

Turning back toward the island, Jen raised her left wrist and used her Chronomorpher's imaging function to snap a few last pictures of what had been home for the past year and a half. This wasn't the same kind of business-as-usual breakaway that leaving Millennium City had been, and it wasn't the same heartbreak that had defined her departure from Silver Hills. If anything it was a combination of the two, mixed in with a new and bittersweet awareness that here in Fandom, where the strange was normal and the normal was strange, for the first time in her life she'd gotten to just . . . live. To have friends that were friends without being coworkers first, to enjoy moments with no particular concern for how they might affect her mission or go on her career record.

"It took me a while, but I finally get it, Wes," she murmured, thinking of both the young man she'd first met in 2001 and the teenaged version of him who'd been here for a short time. She thought of Alex, too: her former fiancé who'd died in her arms, the different and hardened one brought back by a temporal shift whose engagement ring she'd returned but who'd still risked everything to send her here, and yes, the adolescent in the fifth floor common room eating Cheetos like he was embarrassed about the fact.

There was no sadness in the thoughts, either, and Jen knew someday she'd be able to think back on this place the same way. To remember, and just smile. This whole business of letting go of the past felt good; from here on out it was all about the future . . . wherever that might take her. She'd be good with that.

[OOC: And yes, this is Jen's last post in Fandom; she's off to Newtech City to join bridge_carson, needsaparrot, and multiplez with Space Patrol Delta. Open if you like, standard SP-until-after-work disclaimer applies.]

She'd seen Dojima and Romeo off earlier in the day, and tomorrow it would be her turn. That meant tonight, according to her only halfway regimented -- where a year and a half ago it would have been obsessively so -- schedule of tasks was going to be spent packing up and cleaning what was left of her things. There wasn't a whole lot left: her few Time Force uniforms, which she wouldn't be needing, had been shipped off already in a box with her class textbooks and other nonessentials, what few clothes she did own would fit in her duffel bag, and her computer would be coming with her.

As a matter of fact, with her time ship's fate taken care of, all Jen had left was that duffel bag, the computer, her Chronomorpher, and all the paperwork she'd be needing to start her job with Space Patrol Delta the following week. It would be an interesting transition, going from Jennifer Scotts, Time Force Police officer, to Jennifer Scotts, Space Patrol Delta Research and Development Assistant.

Being able to make an actual transition at all was strange, now that she thought about it; she'd fled Millennium City on a wild chase after Ransik with no time to make goodbyes, and the scant few belongings she'd accumulated in Silver Hills had been destroyed when the clock tower had blown up. This business of packing up one stage of her life to move on to the next one was new to Jen.

. . . and yes, it was funny to her, too. Time Force had, after all, evolved from SPD, which meant Jen was going to be in a very literal sense making her own future. And she'd even be staying on with Time Force, too -- she'd gotten a message from Captain Logan informing her that her "mission" to Fandom had been retroactively sanctioned, and she'd be staying in the past as a Time Force special operative, on call for special missions.

It all could have been a huge time headache, if she let it. Jen decided she was going to consider it just another day in the life, and call it good.

[OOC: Door and post are open -- Jen is leaving tomorrow and there'll be a post then too, but no idea what my availability will be like (again), so if you wanna say goodbye tonight feel free, and feel free to assume she let you know she'd be leaving tomorrow.]

Go figure, after a year and a half of mostly using the ship as her private getaway, the closer Jen got to relinquishing it the more time she spent working on it. In her defense, she'd done an obsessive study of the ship's manual and exhaustively gone over every bit of information she could possibly scrounge up about its specs before she'd so much as cracked an access panel. Still, she'd really put it off, and she was kicking herself about that.

With the time circuitry dismantled, the biggest worry about the ship had been off her mind for a while, but there were still a few things left to do. Mostly it was drudge work: double and triple checking wiring, making sure various systems were in good working order, hard-resetting the external shielding, and so forth. She'd spent all morning today, though, going over the communications systems to make extra sure Time Force couldn't trace the ship back here; not that they had so far, but why take the chance?

Once that was finally done to her satisfaction, Jen headed back outside the ship to relax for a while, sitting on a rock with her back against the hull, to watch the ocean.

The middle of the day seemed like an odd time for a bonfire . . . but the fire was fueled by the pages of the ship's manual detailing the time travel circuitry, so that was fine as far as she was concerned.

[OOC: You know those occasional tiny, nagging details that nobody notices but you, but that'll annoy you until you do something about them anyway? Yeah. Eh, open anyway, I suppose, why not? I gotta do something to keep from falling asleep here.]