Paradise Threatened - Chasing Normal, Arc 2

Scene 8: Getting Ready

Travis fingered her tattoo as she walked into Sai Anto Productions. She was becoming obsessed with it. It was little more than a subdermal light show, but Travis wanted to know its limitations. So far, she'd worn a lightweight long-sleeved shirt on one day and several metal bangles on another, curious to see if her tattoo was still scannable. The doors and her workstation weren't stumped. She wanted to try a heavier shirt, but the weather was just too warm.

"Travis!" Lorraine greeted her, a little too enthusiastically. "Are your parents here yet?"

Travis bit back the urge to reply, Do you see them?, and shook her head. "They'll be here by the end of the week."

"Oh, won't that be wonderful? You must be so excited!"

"Yeah..." She made her way through the security door as quickly as she could.

##

The animation team was working on batches as they came from the engineering pods, which left Travis with plenty of time to sketch personal projects at her workstation. Brice didn't like it, but he couldn't really say anything about it either until the workflow picked up.

But the workflow wouldn't pick up until her parents got there. So when she knew Brice was on a tear, Travis would slip down to the arena balcony and watch. She'd watch the actors, all suited up, move about the arena. She'd watch the techs change out lights, adjust camera placements, and mock the actors from the other side of the divider walls. Some of the techs almost moved better than the actors, and Travis had to be careful to not laugh while watching them.

Watching both groups together pointed out just how little the suits really did capture. Despite how well they controlled themselves, the actors had little bounces and wobbles in their movements that were just too small. But it was those imperfections, exaggerated by the techs, that Travis found the most interesting. Maybe there's some way to add that back into the animation.

##

There wasn't anything to distract her from life in her grandparents' house. Oma was cleaning and rearranging, trying to figure out where to put Travis' parents when they arrived.

"It's okay, Oma. They can take my room and I can sleep down here on the couch."

"Nonsense, dear. That's your room, and it will be until your family finds a place in the city."

The fact that her grandmother wasn't willing to displace her for a few days after she'd been displaced for a couple of weeks after a lifetime of moving an average of two or three times a year was comforting. Her parents had always expected her to roll with their ever-changing plans, and she had done so without much complaining. They probably wouldn't even notice that she wasn't being displaced for them.

Another benefit of getting to keep her room for the time being meant she had time to help her grandmother take things up to the attic, which meant getting to dig around in the things already up there.

"Surely, there's some of my mom's old stuff up here," she mused as she shifted around a few things on a table to make room for the knick-knacks her grandmother had sent her up with.

"There isn't, sadly," Opa was stabilizing piles of books along one wall. "Shiri took most of her things with her when she left to pursue her acting."

"Really?" Travis knew they hadn't hauled around much. "Does she maybe have a storage somewhere?"

The lines in Opa's face strained. "No."

"Oh."

##

It took a day or two for work to flow from the arena to the animators, and another couple of days for it to reach Travis. She was grateful when she finally found herself on the daily agenda. There was something restful in working on smoothing out the animation and fixing consistency issues.

When she was between files, she would take a file she already cleaned up and start tweaking it to make the figures move more like the tech crew had. It was hard to strike a balance between "natural" and "smooth", and she was having a blast trying to get it right.

##

"Is there anything we should set out for your parents?" Oma asked as she and Travis finished cleaning up the living room.

"No. If they need anything, they'll figure it out." It was true. Her mother had cobbled together some of the most effective solutions for problems Travis never would have thought about when a hotel room wasn't adequately supplied.

"Are you happy that you'll all be home soon?"

Travis smiled, although it didn't make it to her face. Her grandparents had learned quickly to not assume she would be happy to be back together with her parents. "I'm looking forward to seeing where in town we end up. I hope I can still walk to work."

"That would be nice," her grandmother agreed, "because then you'll be able to come visit us periodically."

"Count on it," Travis grinned, and this time it reached her eyes.

But by the time she fell into bed, Travis was dreading waking up.