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Susan has devised another activity to occupy her days. By the calendar's reckoning, the start of spring is roughly a week away. Between her and Tress, they've got the outline of a plan for the next Dark, and Susan is happy to rely on people who've got greater interest in and skill for growing things insofar as agriculture goes. But the growing season here shall be longer than usual, and Susan should like to have some idea about what that might mean for the ecosystem,

This is her flimsy excuse to pardon the latest stack of books she's currently carrying out of the library. There is a marginal off-chance that preparatory reading on soil biota could, potentially, be useful. Perhaps she might even talk someone else into reading on the subject as well, so that they might discuss it.

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"He didn't mind?" a touch surprised.

"No, of course not," says Susan; this is a matter of course for her. "He was impressed by her, ah, ingenuity." She leans forward. "In any case, the secret is that I've found rubber arrows with soft tips. I believe I might... surprise them during training one day."

His eyes widen minutely as he realizes what she means. The Lancelot he knew... would have been dangerous in the face of such a game. But this Lancelot is capable of being playful, it seems, and losing without flying into a rage.

It's not a surprise, exactly. Lancelot has been so much softer-spoken and gentler, and the fact that Susan loves him and Claudius has chosen to forgive him are both things that certainly couldn't have happened if he were anything like the Lancelot Galahad knew in Camelot. It's just a jarring remind of how far those differences go.

"I've told Janet as well," Susan continues. "But I believe I should like to thoroughly surprise Lancelot and Gideon, at the outset."

"I think you will."

"Oh, splendid."

Galahad is quiet for a little while, considering, and then says, "Thank you."

"Whatever for?"

"I enjoy our time together."

Edited 2024-07-01 12:01 (UTC)

She smiles at him, one of her practiced ones, but the sentiment behind it is genuine. "As do I."

"I would like to continue."

Susan is visibly pleased to hear it. They've established they're friends, but she's always appreciated solicitation of specific plans, and now that she's trying specifically to rebuild the social skills she'd let atrophy after the accident, this request feels like a small success. "As would I."

"May I bring you insects to look at?"

"Oh!" Susan has never been an entomologist, but it isn't as if there's much ethological work to be done here, and she does now have all those books on soil biota. "I should like that very much."

"I would like to take pictures of them, or draw them, and keep track of what we find. So we know what countries they're from, or whether they're new, and what they feed on. It would help Claudius in the garden. And it would be interesting."

"I thoroughly agree."

"Good."

"I ought to get more books," Susan says, thoughtfully. "We might establish a way of approaching taxonomical questions so that we can sort them more easily as we find them."

"Explain," he says, sounding uncannily like Lan Wangji, although he leans forward curiously.

"Do you know of taxonomy?"

"Very little. Claudius is more interested in evolution."

"Taxonomy has a great deal to do with evolution," says Susan, with surprise. "In ethology we are taught to consider phylogeny of entire taxa when sorting out why certain behaviors or physical features exist. For example--" she casts about. Her knowledge is much more squarely in the realm of animal life than plant. "Primates. I had a professor who studied the rhesus macaque, you know. They're Old World monkeys, which had a behavioral and evolutionary split with New World monkeys long before they split with apes. If we had a variety of troops of primates here," she says, with a little sigh - monkeys were never her passion animal, but she does so miss the opportunities she got to work with them now, "then we might start to distinguish between them by observing: which are more arboreal and which are more terrestrial; if they've got tails and if so, how those tails are used; whether they seem to have padded buttocks; their primary methods of communication; and the structures of their hands. This would allow us to more easily pinpoint their classification and cross-reference them with books."

"They're names," he says, understanding, "that tell you where something goes. What kind of thing it is. Like a library classification system."

"Just so. I assume your Claudius uses scientific names for plants? They refer to the plants' taxonomy." She pauses. "I haven't got a strong understanding, yet, of the systems used for insects. But we might review what's known, so we know what features ought to be focused on first when we're trying to sort out what's here."

"Yes. I know the ones he says often, and also the ones Mothwing uses for medicine. I would like to look at the insects."

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quote_gentle_unquote - 2024-07-02 20:09 (UTC) - Expand

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