^ [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]

"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?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"What isn't an example? The accountings of the Blitz are surface-level at best. Speeches are misquoted, specifics are wrong. Entire lives are reduced to simple statistics. While I do understand why, it isn't as if they convey the true feeling and experience of, for example, being sent from one's home to live safely with a stranger, knowing that while you're gone, your home might be bombed."

[tallyyoungblood]

"That happened to you?" Tally asks. "I'm so sorry. That sounds terrifying."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"It's in the past," briskly, with that businesslike tone she gets when she's having an emotion.

[tallyyoungblood]

"Was your home bombed?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"No. It wasn't."

[tallyyoungblood]

"Thank goodness. It's awful, to lose your home. It was the worst day of my life when the Specials destroyed the Smoke."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Yes. It's terrible to lose your home."

[tallyyoungblood]

"At least the bombs weren't your fault. The Smoke being destroyed was mine," Tally says.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan had, in that last comment, been referring to Narnia, but she doesn't care to bring attention to that fact. "In what way?"

[tallyyoungblood]

"I called the Specials. By accident, but I should have known."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Ought you have done? How so?"

[tallyyoungblood]

"I knew I was being tracked. I tried to destroy the tracker, but I should have just buried it or something. I was being dramatic."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"A tracker... how does that work, precisely?"

[tallyyoungblood]

"Oh, geez. Um... well, satellites? In orbit around the planet? They're, like, right after your time, I think. They can communicate with computers on Earth and locate stuff. So, um, Special Circumstances gave me a position-finder I was supposed to activate when I found the Smoke, but I decided not to do it. But it turned out burning it made the computer send the signal anyway."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"And these devices only communicate with satellites if activated?"

[tallyyoungblood]

"Most communicate with them all the time. That one only did when activated so that it wouldn't show up when I was scanned for trackers."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"And you're certain it didn't have the functionality of continual communication?"