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Making his way to the target range through the jungle canopy was just a little too Viet Cong meets Tarzan for Gordon's tastes today. When he made his way back indoors he opted to take some time to make his next visit to the range worth all the fuss and bother- it's modding time. He might as well put the welding skills he learned for the bicycle to good use.

One almost-redheaded guy in nerd glasses and circled-lambda T-shirt doing terrible, terrible things to an unsuspecting Combine pulse rifle, over by the Window.

[tinytag: Gordon Freeman, Alyx Vance, John Vattic]

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"That's more than some of my students knew," Gordon says. "Back when I had students, anyway."

"Eventually everything makes sense." Hel says with a laugh, "I admit that the American tax system took a good two hundred years to start parsing, but give it enough time and everything makes sense."

... Gordon cannot even begin to conceive of the level of boredom necessary to be willing to spend two hundred years studying the tax code.

We regret only that we do not have a 'pity face' icon for this.

Hel shrugs and says, "It's better than dusting the dead?"

"Point," says Gordon. "Did it ever turn out useful?"

"Anything that takes up that much time is useful." Hel informs him with shadows of grimness in her voice, "I've been stuck in Niflheim so long that the mountains of my youth have fallen, raised, fallen, and raised again. The oceans, the continents, it's all changed."

That is-

It's not that he doesn't believe it. It's just that his mind shies away from having to encompass all of a stretch of time that big. It's one thing to conceive of it as the age of planets or landscapes or stars, but as the age of something aware, all that time-

not so much.

"You have my sympathy."

"Thank you." Hel says politely. She knows that he can't get it. She tries to avoid getting it and to take each century as it comes.

It doesn't always work.

"So... what does someone in your position do here?" Gordon asks, because honestly, he's having a little trouble picturing how you go about keeping yourself busy under the circumstances.

"Sewing, mostly." Hel admits, "It's really hard to find clothing my size. A lot of sewing, some talking to people, and a lot of sitting in the sun."

"... I hadn't thought of that," Gordon admits. "The clothing, I mean."

Not that it doesn't make sense, he just... hadn't considered the issue, really. At all.

"Why should you?" Hel asks, laughing softly, "There are not many my size, none here. Only amongst my mother's people am I average height, but they can get to me no more easily than I to them."

"Your mother's- there's a whole species your size? In this kind of gravity?"

... oh, right, not the most politic thing to say. Whoops.

"Jotun." Hel says, "Giants. My mother was a giant, my father is a god."

"Huh," says Gordon. "Didn't know there was any such thing."

Outside of storybooks and such, of course, but there's a difference between kids' fee fi fo fum stories and- well- this.

"My universe is arranged by a series of worlds aligned on a tree." Hel says mildly, "From Asgard to Niflheim. I really doubt that we're from the same one."

"Yeah, no," Gordon agrees. "I like to think I would've heard of that somewhere along the way if we were."

"Not to mention that probably according to the laws of science in your universe someone as large as I am couldn't exist." Hel points out, "It's not like the Jotun are hidden in my own, and your shock was far too honest."

"Something your size would have to have evolved in the oceans to exist at all," Gordon admits. "We've had land creatures your size appear in the past sixteen years, but they come from another universe- and they're probably genetically engineered and cybernetically enhanced anyway."

"I can't swim." Hel says with a laugh, "Which isn't that much of a problem as I don't need to breathe either, but it would be uncomfortable if I weren't able to be on land."

"The pressure alone at the bottom of anything deeper than about nine or ten feet would be a problem," Gordon agrees. "All right.I can see that."

"Not to mention the fact that my hair would tangle worse there than it does here." Hel agrees, "I get understandably nervous about cutting it terribly short, seeing as I generally have to use godkilling weapons to do so.

"Someday, perhaps, someone will make a pair of godkilling scissors. That would be nice."

Scissors are much safer than swords.

"This is probably a lost cause," Gordon says, "but would lasers work? Or monomolecular wire?"

Not that he's seen the latter, but he's seen cutting lasers in action and he still tries to block out the memory.

"Afraid not." Hel says, shaking her head, "If it can't get through my skin it can't get through my hair. I can't weave at all or I'd probably give up and just make clothing out of my own hair. It'd last longer."

"I can see where that would be a problem," Gordon agrees.

Ever find yourself in a conversation you never in your life imagined that you would even imagine having?

Edited 2008-08-21 15:56 (UTC)