His first thought was that Brainstorm was... absent. Odd, since he liked to wake Perceptor up with a suffocating reminder that he weighed at least three regular people.

His second thought was that it was strange that he wasn't freezing. Despite his best efforts on this trip, he usually woke with icecubes for toes and fingers gone terribly stiff with cold.

Preceptor blinked at the white hotel ceiling for a second. Then leaned over to pat the bedside table until his glasses materialised in his hand. His phone was next. There was an SMS, which had come through in silence at 2:31 AM: Dear valued guest, hotel management has been made aware that the electricity supply to this block is currently unavailable...

That wasn't good. Perceptor knew Brainstorm would probably be fine even if the power stayed out for a while, but his belly still did a nervous little flip about it. Getting too hot would be bad news for a polar mermaid.

Brainstorm was truly a creature of the ice and cold, well-armed with all his weight of blubber and fur to swim in waters that would kill Perceptor in minutes. But that meant that he couldn't tolerate a lot of heat. Sixteen degrees was fine, but eighteen was pushing it, and over twenty made him feel sick, which in turn made him cranky and rude.

It being high summer, their selection criteria for hotels on this trip had pretty much started and stopped at climate control. And now, evidently, the power was out.

Perceptor skimmed the rest of the message: utilities supplier working on it, management apologises for the inconvenience. Right. He turned the phone screen dark.

"Brainstorm?" He rolled out of the bed. It was a tall, luxurious hotel bed, set so high off the ground that he kind of just spilled into a standing position. He'd taken to sleeping in soft trousers and a hooded sweater, in red and black respectively, for the cold. They were warm and cosy—a little too warm now, actually. He pulled the sweater off and left it on top of the rumpled covers.

Outside the master bedroom, which was pretty much 90% enormous bed, the hotel suite was... kind of a mess. There were long snaking trails of water over the floor and furniture displaced at random. He glanced into the kitchenette and found the refrigerator and freezer units completely absent, but most of their contents spread across the benches.

"... Brainstorm?" he called, a little louder. Weirdly, the hotel room didn't sound as though the power was out. The heavily glazed windows kept most of the traffic muted outside but he could hear the dull humming of something. "Are you alright?"

"Bath tub!"

The sound of his voice was a relief. Perceptor turned towards the bathroom instead. It was, like the rest of the suite, perfectly palatial and on-trend. In this case that meant it was an awful lot of big marble slabs, and that the room came fitted with the strange, voyeuristic vibe of walls that were half clear glass.

That meant that Perceptor should have been able to see in straight away, but he couldn't: what had once been clear glass had evidently not remained so, and when he touched the surface he pulled his fingers back fast at the biting cold of it. It had become frosted the hard way, he guessed.

A mass of dark smudgy shapes were vaguely visible on the floor. One of them, he assumed, had to be Brainstorm's furred back flippers and tail.

Perceptor was more curious than worried, now. He opened the door and paused in the threshold, and although he was braced for the temperature change, it still smacked into him like a wall of frost. He was suddenly very, very awake.

It was freezing in here.

The remains of several kitchen appliances lay strewn about, cannibalised. Strange mechanical parts littered the marble floors, the exposed organs of systems he rarely contemplated right out in the open. The humming was louder than he expected. There was evidently no grid power in use. Instead, Brainstorm had rigged something with a system of wires, boxes, electrical tape and mysterious coloured fluids: crude chemical batteries, he supposed.

In the sunken tub itself, Brainstorm was half-buried beneath icy water. His long claws were delicately manipulating a length of copper wire that Perceptor felt probably did not belong around so much moisture.

He rolled around when Perceptor came in, turning so he could prop his spined elbow on the lip of the tub and rest his chin upon his hand.

"Percy! Good morning," he crowed, letting the wire tumble from his off-hand casually. His attention was suddenly laser-focused on Perceptor. Heady. "Come inside, you're letting all the cool out."

Perceptor looked at the machinery. His toes already hated him, but he took a step inside the bathroom and closed the door.

"This looks..." Advanced. Dangerous. Necessary, perhaps. Also, very much like an inappropriate use of hotel property. "... creative," Perceptor suggested, instead of any of those things.

"What, this old thing?" Brainstorm crooned, picking up a chunk of ice, examining it and letting it splash back into the water. "I'm a creative problem solver. Also, it started getting really hot at about three am and I had to put my unmatched genius to the task. Are you coming over here?"

Perceptor eyed the icy water in the tub. It was very, very cold in here. At some point, there had been a bath mat, which might have insulated his toes a little—but it was basically a block of ice, so he assumed that had gotten soaked at some point before the... unmatched genius situation... had unfolded in here.

He took another step closer to the tub. One of Brainstorm's damp hands wrapped around his ankle. His claws were as cold as steel in winter and the chill bit straight into Perceptor's skin.

"I won't be able to stay in here for too long," he cautioned, hoping to manage Brainstorm's expectations. He knew Brainstorm loved to brag about his successful inventions, but Perceptor might have to listen from the other side of the glass.

"That's a shame. That looks interesting." Brainstorm nodded at Perceptor's chest, where his nipples had beaded up tightly, obvious under his tee-shirt. He pressed his thumb gently into the big muscle of Perceptor's calf. Beneath the sting of the cold, it felt nice.

Perceptor hummed. "Freezing is less sexually interesting to me than you may imagine."

Brainstorm let his ankle go, rolling his yellow eyes extravagantly.

"I've heard," he said, sounding perilously close to whining. "Believe me, I've heard."

Perceptor's teeth were starting to chatter. He leaned down just enough to smooth his hand over the cold bone of Brainstorm's helm. "It's very impressive. I'm glad you're not overheating."

"Of course! I'm just that good." Brainstorm beamed "Let me know when they get the electricity on again?"

"Certainly." And that was about all Perceptor could manage, barefoot in this cold. He shut the bathroom door behind him, feeling the warmth of the rest of the hotel suite hit him like a wall. He shivered all over and his glasses fogged at the edges.

At least that meant Brainstorm was still taken care of. Perceptor headed into the carnage of the kitchenette to make his depredations on the steadily warming contents of the fridge. It would go too waste, otherwise.

Probably, he should be more concerned about who was going to take care of the bill for damages to an absurdly expensive hotel room. Brainstorm seemed unlikely. The university, possibly. Insurance, maybe. Wasn't the tourism department sponsoring part of this trip...?