^ [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

[tallyyoungblood]

“It’s in a book, probably. Ugh. I miss interfaces.”

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Interfaces?"

[tallyyoungblood]

"Like... um... computers?" Tally struggles to remember when exactly they were invented. "They make it totally easy to search for stuff."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan knows of computers, of course, from books and from conversation, but her knowledge is tremendously far off from what computers truly are. "The devices they use for complex calculations and photograph storage?"

[tallyyoungblood]

"Yeah! They're also great for being databases. Like, you just say what you want to know and it finds it for you. No need to flip through paper books or anything."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Hmmm," says Susan, who rather likes paper books. "I see. So you'd use one to establish the curvature of this slice of world?"

[tallyyoungblood]

"Yeah. Since I can't remember the formulas or whatever off the top of my head."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"...I suppose that does sound tremendously useful."

[tallyyoungblood]

"I totally respect paper books, though. They should just come with search functions."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Such as, for example, an index?"

[tallyyoungblood]

"An index doesn't find every single example of a word, though," Tally points out. She's familiar with them by this point, having leafed through lots of library books.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"No, but every individual instance is surely less helpful than a guide to the contextualized and pertinently useful applications of the words."

[tallyyoungblood]

"You can have both," Tally counters.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Perhaps," though perhaps not here, "but if I had to choose one."

[tallyyoungblood]

"It's good you're a Rusty, then."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Yes," says Susan, amused. "I suppose it is."

[tallyyoungblood]

"Do you think I could make it as a Rusty?" Tally asks.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I can't imagine that it would be terribly different from living here."

[tallyyoungblood]

"Um, what about all the war? And the capitalism?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I suppose it is nice to not have everything rationed," Susan allows, "but I don't believe anyone else comes from a time of rationing. The, ah, 'Rusty times' had quite a bit of variation, you know."

[tallyyoungblood]

"Did they?" Tally asks skeptically. "I mean, I guess they probably did. They just didn't really teach us that in school."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"You are from rather far in the future," Susan points out. "Things tend to get flattened in historical accountings over time."

[tallyyoungblood]

"They do? I've never heard that." Tally's only beginning to realize that maybe her schooling wasn't as neutral as it seemed.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Certainly! One of the first things I did after arriving - once I realized that many people here are ones I'd read of as historical figures, and that what I'd read was wildly inaccurate - was read several histories of the time I arrived from. They universally lacked appropriate detail and accuracy."

[tallyyoungblood]

"What's an example?"