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Suzi is settled down with brown fluff in her lap, attempting to untangle blue fluff. Fifteen minutes ago it was a hyper puppy and a ball of fluffy blue yarn. Now? Joy is asleep, and Suzi is glad she hadn't started on actually knitting anything. She's talking to the snoring brown ball while she works at the tangles with all ten fingers and eight handling tentacles,

"I thought cats were supposed to attack yarn, not puppies! And now you're going to be up all night, aren't you?" Her only answer is another puppy-like snore.

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Sometimes, ten year old boys have cute dog radar.

This is definitely one of those times, so Caleb heads across the room to say hi to the dog.

And its owner too, I guess.

"'Scuse me, ma'am, can I pet your dog?" he asks, in his strong Southern twang.

"Hmm?" Ten is old enough for the possibility of Establishing or Changing over in Suzi's world, so her mind automatically slots him into potential adult. "Let's see if she's going to wake up, okay?" Suzi's own accent is that of New Orleans...circa 4870. She removes one tentacle from the mass trying to untangle the yarn, and scritches under Joy's chin.

"Yip?"

"Whoa...tentacle..."

Caleb stares. Then he blushes as he remembers his manners and tries to backtrack.

"Uh...I mean...uh..." he stumbles inarticulately over his apology. "Sorry," he finally mutters, "didn't mean to stare."

Besides, the dog is cute, and the tentacles seem non-threatening.

"Eight of them." She corrects, wiggling them around, "I'm from the future...a long, long ways in everyone's future so far. My kind of human is called a Sime, and I'm a symbiont. Her name is Joy."

"Oh," says Caleb, going very wide-eyed. The future is going to be one crazy place.

"I'm Caleb," he offers. "I'm from 1995."

He reaches out and scratches Joy behind the ears.

"I never met a future-person before," he admits.

"I'm from 4870." She says cheerfully, as her puppy goes PETTINGS! and makes the happy rumble, "But I live in 1993, San Francisco."

"How can you be from one time and live in another?" he asks. "Ain't they the same thing?"

The logic makes sense in his head, but he's also pretty sure there weren't people with tentacles in 1993. Of course, he's never been to San Francisco, so he could be wrong.

"How can you be from one time, and be at the End of the Universe?" She asks in return, "I was born in 4848, came here in 4870, was severed from my world, fell in love with a man from 1992, and live with him now."

That's the easy version.

Caleb wrinkles his nose to think about this one for a minute. Then he nods.

"Ok. Time is real weird in this place anyway. Is the future cool?" he continues, with almost no segway at all, "Like with flying cars and stuff? In movies they always have flying cars."

Suzi was an adult at twelve years old. She has friends who made their first Kill at ten, and had friends who were killed at ten...as adults. His age? Doesn't mean that he should be sheltered, not where she's coming from,

"No." Her voice is soft, "Most Sime aren't symbiotic, they're parasitic. So a lot of people die, every month. Technology was destroyed in about 2000, by dragons, and then there were thousands of years of chaos before things got started again. We have horse-and-carriage set ups, mostly."

That doesn't sound like the movies. Not even a little bit.

"Oh," he says, a little deflated. He pets the puppy again. It helps. But then he looks up at Suzi again.

"2000's only five years away," he says, more than a little worried. "Is it gonna be really awful?"

While everyone else is waiting for Y2K, Caleb will be on the lookout for dragons.

"You're not from my universe." She says promptly, "There's a chemical we have that you don't...I can tell, I'm designed to be able to notice it. Only three people other than me zlin with selyn; my lover, Ilyana ambrov Rior, and Quinn. So you probably won't have dragons."

"I guess that's good then. For me anyway," he says with a shrug. "I'm sorry about yours. It sounds kinda like a hard place to be. Harder'n where I come from anyways."

"I'm glad you like it in 1993," he says, trying to find a silver lining.

"I was doing good where I was...my biology is designed to save lives." She hates it here. She hates it here, "But San Francisco is really beautiful to live."

"So you're like a kind of a doctor?" Caleb grins. He likes doctors.

"I live with this doctor named Doctor Matt. He saves a lot of people's lives too at the hospital." And Caleb thinks he's just the best guy ever.

"I never went to San Francisco. Only saw it on TV. But I went to Charleston on a field trip once."

"A little." She says after a moment of thought, "It's a biology thing, though, not a learning thing...and I can only heal people with selyn at all well. I tried with Dr. Stantz, but it was a lot harder."

"So you can only heal people if they come from the same place that you come from?" hazards Caleb. "That's too bad. Maybe you could learn to be a doctor with medicine too, if you wanted. And then you could heal both kinds of people."

"Maybe." She says with a smile, "But I like my current profession too...I make jewelry."

"Yeah?" says Caleb, "That's good too. I don't know too much about jewelry. Mostly only that's a girl thing, you know."

[ooc: sleep calls. is slowtime ok? thanks for the thread!]

"Oh, no...it really isn't. See my ring?" She offers her left hand, with a fine gold ring bearing delicate engraving and a blank red stone, "This is a Household ring. My lover wears one too. Back in my time what ring someone wears lets you know what ideals they follow. Keon, mine, is the only true freedom is choice of chains."

"Your ring says all that?" asks Caleb, a little skeptically.

"I guess it's like how a wedding ring says you're married, only with a lot more words. Also, yours kind of prettier. The red is nice."

He grins, "I think my sister woulda liked yours a lot."

"See the chain engraved on the side?" She says, "And red is Keon's color. Thank you, I made matching ones for myself and my lover." She's not really sure what to say about his sister, as it sounds like she's died.

He looks more closely at the engraved chain, which is more intricate than any other jewelry he's really ever seen before.

"You made that?"

Caleb is perhaps beginning to think that jewelry isn't completely girly. But he could never tell you that, or he'd have to kill you.

"I think you did a real good job on it."

"Uh huh." She says with a smile, "Whistler's is heavier, of course. It's more like a signet ring. Sometimes he wears it on a chain around his neck, though, because he works with soldering irons and could hurt himself badly if he accidentally touched that to his ring."

Caleb nods, "My friend Boone's brother's got a soldering iron that he uses for making model rockets, but we're not allowed to touch it 'cause it could burn us."

He smiles, "Your, uh..." no way he's going to say 'lover,' "Your guy make rockets?"