milliways_bar | (no subject)

Entry tags:

ellen park,
katya

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In one of the chairs shaded into a corner, there is a human-shaped shadow, sleeping. On closer inspection, this is one Pavel Chekov, whose head is resting between his shoulder and the chair wing, legs tucked up to his chest with a stack of PADDs in idle mode between the arm and his left shin. He doesn't look particularly extraordinary as he sleeps, except for the dim circles under his eyes that indicate he isn't getting enough sleep--not that anyone in the Academy ever really does.

Balanced on one thigh and held there by a hand still lazily holding an ancient pencil is a paper notebook, the kind with a wire spiral holding everything together. Someone was in the middle of a series of complex equations taking up most of the current page before he fell asleep.

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Someone is studying the equations from over his shoulder. Don't bother looking, she slid into the Twilight to do so, making sure she wouldn't wake him up. Honestly, math is not really her thing. She never went in for the analytical section of the Night Watch, being utterly unsuited for it both by inclination and by temperment.

Silly boy.

Clearly he works too much. So clearly the answer is to nudge all of the numbers on the page to line up in a long, serpentine conga line over the page and down his arm.

Sorry 'bout the graphite stains. They'll... totally come out in the wash.

The tickling sensation from the letters and numbers and symbols being magicked up his arm is what drags him out of sleep, thinking it might be ants or some other rather annoying insect San Francisco has too many of.

Chekov's first real rational thought is that this must be a dream.

He still shouts and keeps trying to rub them off his arm to very little success.

Correction: this must be a nightmare.

Moving? No. Of course not. He must have just... written all over his arm.

Really.

They're just there.

Katya snickers to herself. He's so excitable! It is possibly bad that she's been cooped up this long.

It's a hell of a way to wake someone up, the narration will definitely give her that.

Chekov, meanwhile, is still brushing at his arm and blinking as if he can clear the letters away by properly waking up. It's not working and he's wondering when the hell someone had time to write all over his arm.

And he could have sworn he had written more than that on the page.

Nope! Clearly your sleep-addled brain only imagined all the equations, Pavel!

Katya waits until he's looking away before nudging the graphite over a little bit here, a little bit there.

There.

Now he has a pony.

A pretty line drawing of a pony. It is almost like the real thing!

The look on his face when he glances back at his arm is best described as shocked and suspicious when he sees the pony.

Very slowly he moves his arm out away from the rest of him--he could swear that wasn't there a moment ago. And now, he really needs to be able to get up and get soap to wash this creepy pseudo-tattoo off, but his legs are still a little sore from being bent in one direction and bearing resistance too long.

Not to mention he has PADDs and a notebook to retrieve and move first.

Awww, he doesn't like her pony! Well, she should have guessed that. He isn't the pony type. He clearly has better sense.

Look down. Look up. Your horse is now a tiger.

~~The tiger you could smell like if you smelled like Katya~~

When it transforms into a tiger drawn onto his forearm, Chekov noticeably pales a little and rubs at it harder, managing to smudge the graphite a little, but not enough to obscure the shape. It does, however, leave white-turning-to-red nail marks on his arm in four long stripes from elbow to wrist.

Pavel stands with relative ease and only wobbles once, but sits own on the arm of the chair again, picking up the fallen notebook and checking to see that the rest of the equation sets are still there. He'd been at that most of the afternoon.

Katya sulks a little at this. He tried to erase the tiger. Honestly. Does the boy have no taste at all?

Humph.

This may have something to do with the tigers drawn all over his notebook.

She'll erase them in a minute. Promise.

He drops the notebook like he's been scalded by it, but his brain is able to follow the leaps--however illogical they are--and quickly picks it back up again, carefully laying it in the chair with his non-drawn-on hand. Inwardly he's sure someone is screwing with him, but who?

No one is there when he looks around, and down and up too. (His sense of direction has always has three variables.)

"Is someone inwisible here?"

'нет' says his notebook. The tigers are gone, though. He doesn't deserve tigers, horrible boy who tried to erase her artwork.

The answer is in very nice, flowery script though. She spent a long time learning how to write script out so nicely.

...

...

...

"Aiy, aiy aiy." He shakes his head slowly, fairly sure he didn't have anything major happen in his sleep, and no prior injuries to his head explain this. "Vhere are you?" Answering 'no' to a query like that is sort of like answering 'yes' to the query of being asleep.

She considers this question very very carefully. After all, he's a smart boy (if horrible) and she did somewhat promise Olga to be discrete. But she's getting so stir-crazy, it's hard to not do anything at all.

She waits for a moment he's looking away, between one heartbeat and the next.

'Моё судно на воздушной подушке полно угрей' says the notebook. In the same elegant script. Katya is proud of her handiwork, and admires it from over his shoulder.

This development just makes him stare, and he picks up the notebook to study the handwriting, quickly tearing the page in half and swiping his hand over the new sheet once pressed to the graphite, picking up a faint impression of the words and handwriting.

He has every intention of checking on who writes like that. "...Eels."

It won't occur to him for another minute to get a fixative for the graphite impression, just to make sure it doesn't move. Just to be certain.

Katya snorts, and twists her fingers. A lick of flame catches on the torn-out page, a basic trick taught to children.

Well.

Children who are Others.

To her, anyway, but seeing as it was Ignat who taught her, it's probably not something all of them learn. At least, not the civic-minded ones.

The next page is torn out and replaced in the next second (she has to go down a level into the Twilight for that for a moment, time is slipping by too quickly otherwise) with a very neatly folded origami tiger (http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2001/2346743485_8261a58944.jpg). Erase that, smart boy.

Well that cements the idea that he's not crazy... Pavel drops the paper on fire--very quickly, at that--and stares at the folded tiger, touching it with a fingertip.

It's cold for paper, nearly frosty.

He's thinking maybe seeing McCoy would not be a bad idea.

She snickers, taking a perch on a nearby table, swinging her feet idly. He's interesting, this smart, horrible boy. He can think, and can make unconventional jumps in logic - always makes things challenging. She likes challenge. She hasn't had one in a while.

She tears off another fresh sheet and dips farther down again, and then replaces the page (http://www.origami-resource-center.com/images/manFleetingBaggi1964.jpg).

He looks at the two figures with a critical eye, and it takes maybe half a minute to put them together as he picks up both with long, slender fingers. Him running from the tiger while he'd been outside, and nearly into the blonde Russian woman with the fondness for sparkles and denim jackets.

"Katya," he whispers under his breath, brow furrowing. She was the only one he'd told about that--the story was a little fantastical for him to consider really telling anyone else. Pavel nearly slaps his palm to his forehead, but doesn't outright assume it's her doing the tricks. She could have told someone else; or, she could be non-human. There were really quite a few choices.

She raises an eyebrow at that - really? She's the only option?

Little smart boy needs to get out more. How has he not gotten drunk and told lots of people about it yet? There were tigers! ... Tiger, whatever. Surely it is a story worth telling.

It's possible she misses being known, if only by rumor.

But silence would be giving the game away, so she shifts some of the graphite over to the little origami man to decorate him.

She isn't the only option, but she is a piece of the chain, so to speak.

Katya's also correct in thinking he needs to get out more, but Pavel really isn't the type to go get drunk much; it's no fun to be the only one still half-sober when everyone else is falling over inebriated. He keeps his stories to himself, mostly. Pavel sits down again, replacing the stack of PADDs on the floor beside the chair and moving the notebook to his lap. It's almost possible to see the gears in his head working as his thoughts whizz by.

Humph. It is harder to do the detail work necessary with him all hunched over the notebook like that.

So she nicks one of his PADDs instead, drawing it into the Twilight with her.

She's still working on turning it on. She's never actually seen one of these before.

"Hey!"

He needs that one, it has his backup equation outlines on it! He sets the notebook aside, and picks up the stack with a progressively more unhappy look, saving progress and turning them all off via the simple press-and-slide switch on the bottom of the illumination bar. "Stop zat."

Honestly, just because he was tired while studying is no excuse to do all this.

Humph. This is just not working right. She's figured out Anton's tape player, and she can make her radio work, no problem, and motorcycles aren't a mystery.

But she tends to stay away from most of the computers - they're fiddly, and don't tend to come into her daily life too often. She steals the notebook entirely, and leaves him the fiddly PADD.

Her fiddling might have screwed with some of the settings.

He sighs, picking it up and resetting it.

"I do need zese in vorking order, if you do not mind."

Another snort from Katya, who has settled behind his chair, studying his equations. Frankly, they make very little sense to her - math is not her strong suit, never has been. But maybe there's something in here about why smart horrible boys never seem to have any fun.

She hasn't found it yet.

People fall asleep around here all the time. Ellen's seen it happen plenty of times. thus, when she goes to find herself a spot to sit tonight, she does her best to keep Dogmeat from annoying the sleeper.

This may or may not work. you know how dogs are.

It's only really because he hasn't gotten any great deal of sleep in the last week and a half that Pavel doesn't wake up at the first nudge of a cool, wet nose to his hand. It takes a minute.

But when he does wake it's with a start, the thoughts of 'I missed my alarm' and 'what time is it' jolting through his brain and making his body jerk almost out of the chair. Pavel normally isn't so startled on waking, really.

And he'll explain that and try to apologize for whapping Dogmeat on the nose just as soon as he calms down.

"Yipe!"

Dogmeat skitters backward, wide-eyed and startled, and reflexively growls.

"Dogmeat. Stop it. I told you not to bother him," Ellen snaps, and gets up to haul the dog away. "I'm so sorry, Pavel, he's usually better than this."

"Aiy!"

Pavel snatches his hand back, waiting to reach for the pencil after Ellen has pulled the dog off. "Am sorry," he murmurs sleepily, and it becomes apparent that his accent is thicker than pancake batter when he's sleepy. "I did not mean to hit him. He startled me, zis is all. I should not hawe fallen asleep anyvay."

Dogmeat whimpers as Ellen crouches down and murmurs something to him firmly. Eventually he heaves a sigh and she settles back on her heels, satisfied. "He'll behave now," she says. "What were you doing, that you dozed off like that?"

"Eqvations," he says, once he's yawned and blinked fully awake. "For compensation of grawitational force vhen using a transporter lock."

If most of this goes over her head, Ellen shouldn't worry. The narration rarely gets it either. "Is just some math," he corrects. "I vas not expecting to be falling asleep."

"... okay," says Ellen, and nods. "I'm going to assume that's future science and just kind of leave it at that. Have you been studying for a long time? We used to drink Nuka-Cola in the Vault when we had to stay awake for hours on end to keep studying."

(Vault 101 ran out of coffee very early on, but there was always, always enough Nuka-Cola to go around.)

"Is acceptable," he says, semi-tiredly. "Zis soda, Nuka-Cola you said, is not drugged to keep you avake, yes?"

"No, it's just soda," Ellen says. "Carbonated water, caramel color, aspartame, phosphoric acid, potassium benzoate, natural flavors, citric acid, and caffeine. Not that there weren't some bizarre variants out there but we only had the normal kind in the Vault."

"Bizarre how?"

He wonders what sort of 'natural flavors' she means, and if any come from offworld. He very, very much doubts it, but one can wonder. Secretly, anyway, Chekov harbors a fondness for cherry coke, but asking for that in the cafeteria just gets him funny looks.

"Well, Nuka-Cola Quantum was a version with twice the carbohydrates, twice the caffeine, and enough strontium-90 that it made the drinker's urine glow for a week," Ellen says. "I've found a few bottles of it. I used one for a nightlight for a while."

We only wish she was kidding.

He takes a minute to respond, sure she's joking.

"You are...how do you say, yanking my rope?" Chain, whatever. He mostly gets the metaphor.

Ellen looks at Chekov blankly. After a moment she says, "I don't think so, no. It makes for good explosive components."

We really wish she were kidding.

Edited 2011-02-22 12:35 (UTC)

"I do not think...ve hawe any soda zat functions zis vay in my world."

He'd hopefully be aware of it if they did.

"You're probably better off," Ellen says. "I've been to the factory. The mixing vats broke long ago, but the building itself was built water-tight and lead-cladded, and it's still full of the stuff. And things that've been living in it all this time. I don't think you want that in your world."

"Oh. I...I do not, no."

"It's okay," Ellen says. "I know my world's a mess. You don't have to be polite about it. It's not going to get any better if somebody doesn't do something about it, that's all."

He breaks a smile, but shakes his head. "I vas raised to be polite. Is not a difficulty."

"Fair enough," Ellen says. "So was I. I just know it's hard to find a way to say some things without coming off as insulting somehow, even when you really don't mean to."

"I do not wish to insult you, or vhere you are from. My vorld has it's own oddities."

"It would be hard to insult my world, honestly," Ellen says. "I mean, I don't think it exactly counts if you're saying something true. But thank you, I appreciate the effort... what kind of oddities, can I ask?"

"Ve hawe many offvorlder species, and many technologies zat other places cannot replicate," he says. "Zey are not much. And our history is slightly different, but not wery noticeable."

"Different from whose?" Ellen says, cocking her head. "I mean, I'm pretty sure it's going to be really different from mine, it's not my fault you're all from weird alternate universes with cheap transistors and micro-chips and things."

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