^ [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]

"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?"

[tallyyoungblood]

"Yes. If it did, then they would have seen me stop somewhere for several weeks and come to destroy the Smoke right away." Tally's thought this through dozens of times. Sometimes it just feels easier to blame Shay for putting the thought in her head that she should pretend the locket was from a crush. But Shay wasn't even watching her with David that night. She'd never needed to destroy it. There's no way to get around the thought.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"How queer," says Susan, thoughtful. "It's rotten that there was an activation mechanism you hadn't been familiar with." She phrases it as a statement, but it's partly a question.

[tallyyoungblood]

"I could have guessed, if I'd thought about it for more than, like, two seconds," Tally says bitterly.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"There's a saying I've heard - hindsight is 20/20."

[tallyyoungblood]

Tally snorts. "Yeah. Especially since I totally have 20/20 vision now. You know, I'm really not mad at the operation for that."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"They've got an operation for perfect vision?" Susan asks, and then she shakes her head. "What am I asking, of course they have."

[tallyyoungblood]

"Yeah, it's not all about being pretty. Some of it is health stuff."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I should hope so!"

[tallyyoungblood]

"I mean, being pretty is all about being healthy. The things we think are pretty are indicators of health. Um, probably."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

At this, Susan looks thoughtful. "Is that so?"

[tallyyoungblood]

“Yeah. People want partners who look free from disease. Childhood stress and illness causes asymmetry.”

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Something about this seems rather off to Susan. "Is that so?"

[tallyyoungblood]

“That’s what they told me, at least. I don’t know. Maybe it was all totally lies. But I feel like people generally agree on who’s pretty, right? There’s differences in taste, but everyone thinks I’m beautiful.”