^ [open post]

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan doesn't believe in the mansion spirits, but she is being followed by something in a way that makes little sense.

It begins when she wakes up. Opening the drawer to the sideboard in her room to retrieve tea, she finds another gold chess piece wrapped neatly in ribbon. Lancelot didn't put it there - it hadn't been there when she made her pre-sleep cuppa the night before, and she woke up when he did and sleepily saw him off to his training; he hadn't gone near the drawer. She shuts the chess piece firmly away, makes her tea, and dresses blearily for her own archery practice.

There's a new bow in the closet, too. To her pleasure, it's a heavier one that requires a stronger pull - she's quite got used to the draw of the ones the closet first supplied to her.

After her shooting routine, she finds a lipstick in the precise shade Ingrid used to wear on the bathroom vanity. When she's showered and dressed for the rest of her day, she finds her favorite pastry - a sort of breakfast roll she used to get from the shop by the tube station she'd walk past on her way to work, back in London - on a platter in the kitchen.

It's when she opens one of the closets in the hall off the library to return a pile of laundered wash-cloths that she receives both some clarity and a deepening of the mystery: a jumble of assembled balloons tumbles out, made of some queer material and filled with a gas that keeps them afloat. The writing on them reads: HAPPY BIRTHDAY SUSAN PEVENSIE.

She stares at them, perplexed.


Susan's birthday post! Three days (by our reckoning) and eight months (by her reckoning) early! Feel free to have your puppets run into her in any reasonable location at any point during the day; she's just going to be accumulating more Stuff she can't get rid of as the day goes on.

Comments

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan considers protesting that Crowley had described himself as married-but-not-but-actually-rather-ineffably-married, and then wonders why she would protest. She is not, in fact, married. Nor has she got any particular intention to change that. "I see."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I beg your pardon!"

[aflashbastard]

Good, because Crowley's going to pause for a second before executing a complete conversational 180. "Say, do you know anything about chore charts?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Interesting. Any particular varieties?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan swallows the naturally brimming at her lips. "Yes, I do," she says instead. "Why do you ask?" If he wants to know where the chore chart is, she shall have to bluster. She mocked up a rough draft after her conversation with Sagramore, but hasn't put the entire thing together yet.

[sporesprouter]

"It's how the seas... work, basically. There's a stream of air bubbles that rise up from the seafloor and let the spores move in a way that they can be sailed on. Sometimes it stops for a while. That's called a Stilling, and ships just freeze in place."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Air bubbles from the sea floor," Susan murmurs. "I don't suppose there's any books about the geology of your home in the library here?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"She's very knowledgeable." The kinds of science Constance studies are very different from the behavioral and life cycle observations that make up the majority of Galahad and Susan's work.

[sorrowandsorrow]

"I'm thirty. I think." She shrugs, sipping her coffee without concern. "Like I said, I lost track of time for a while."

[lightbearinglord]

"Dates and pears, perhaps. Walnuts." Without admitting that he feels any particular way about this, Lan Wangji adds, "I have seen several fruits here that I had never seen before."

[sporesprouter]

"I don't know. I haven't looked for any."

[vineleaves]

He laughs at that, loud and warm. "While having a party every day does sound like a lot of fun, I do think everyone else here would get pretty tired of it pretty quickly."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"If you find any, I should very much like to read them."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"She is, isn't she? I'm pleased you said she might use our laboratory space for her own projects."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"There's ever so many, aren't there? And from such queer places," says Susan, thinking of the moment Laertes was first able to draw at toffee-tree fruit from the icebox.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"That hardly makes you a cradle robber."

[sporesprouter]

"I'll keep an eye out, then. It's probably a better idea than whatever I can muster up to explain it."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Oh, I suppose," Susan allows. "Though I do think we might benefit from more social events, generally speaking."

[aflashbastard]

"Long story short... I did the dishes. 4 out of 10, I'd say?" Is this a rating of how well he did the dishes or a rating of how much he likes that chore? And what does he want Susan to do about it? Who knows.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I suppose I might look, too, but I'm afraid I mightn't know where to start."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Did you! Well done," says Susan, and then, tremendously curious: "Where did you find the chore chart?"

[sporesprouter]

"I haven't looked too much for books from home, but I'll see what I can find. And if you stumble on something just from being lucky, that works too!"

[vineleaves]

"That's true! Maybe I should do -- y'know, a weekly thing. Or even a monthly thing. I don't throw nearly enough parties, come to think of it, not sure what's wrong with me."

[aflashbastard]

"There isn't one. That's the problem, isn't it?¹ One of those children insisted that I needed one -- and that's when I thought to myself, who would know all about chore chores? Susan might -- and when I told Aziraphale, he said," affecting a stellar Aziraphale impression, "Crowley, it'd be ever-so dear if you could do the dishes for me-- get those hands back on the wheel, you scoundrel! ...And here we are."

¹Is it?

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Bacchus," says Susan, a flash of that businesslike tone of hers, tinged with an edge of sternness, coming through in her voice. "You do a tremendous amount for our little community. You produce more social events than most. Though," she adds, thoughtfully. "We ought to get back to the play, soon."