milliways_bar | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Sometimes you just want to bless the end of term, and the lack of distractions it brings.

For Max, this is not one of those times.

Instead, it just means the opportunity to go racing all over the world, trying to string together some level of support (discrete or not) for a mission whose timeframe is fast approaching. Whether he likes it or not.

Which is why, when Max enters Milliways today, he murmurs a word of thanks to the landlord, and asks the bar for something to help him stay awake a little while longer.

What he gets, is a glass of Ray's Green Stuff.

He's now awake. And staring.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Is that drink made of bogey?" Asks a small child, peering at him.

"Fry, that's rude." Guppy says, sitting down on the adjacent barstool. "Are you okay?" he asks the man.

Max glances over at Guppy. "I am. I just wasn't expecting something like this to appear when I asked for something to help keep me awake."

"And," he looks at Fry, "I don't know, but I doubt it."

"Are you new?" Guppy asks. "Dangerous thing to ask around here."

Fry climbs up on a barstool the other side and taps the glass, to see if it's slime...

"Second time, so yeah, and I've just come off a twelve hour flight. I will admit to expecting to be offered a coffee, though."

It reacts like a fluid, rather than a semi-fluid.

"N00b." Fry comments.

"Bar, can I have a coffee for this gentleman, a tea for myself, and an orange juice for Fry please?" Guppy says. "Guppy Sandhu, nice to meet you." He offers a hand.

"Max Epper. The same to you."

Fry's comment just gets a look. He's not heard that term before...

He smiles as a simply brewed coffee appears in front of him. He breaths in the fumes before taking a sip.

"My cyclist is called Max." Fry says. "But he's less... beardey."

"Where are you from?" Guppy asks, sliding the juice over to the kid.

Max smiles slightly, it's a good name.

"Well, I was born in Canada, I spend most of my time in Ireland, and I'm currently in Australia."

Squeezing all these meetings with heads of state/senior officials into four weeks that also include Christmas and New Year, has been a challenge, though he thinks he's done it.

"That's a lot of air travel." Guppy says. "Fry, don't touch his beard, come and sit over here."

"I didn't touch it." Fry says, moving over.

"You were about to."

"I wanted to see if it was real."

Max smiles genially and gives the tip of his beard a small tug. It's real enough, all right.

"It's less than you'd think, I have no family left in Canada. But, I have been doing a lot just recently, yes."

"The man dressed as Father Christmas at school didn't have a real one." Fry says.

"You shouldn't have pulled that one off either. Some of the other kids were very upset." Guppy says.

"Why do men have beards and ladies not?" Fry asks, directing the question at Max, as Daddy doesn't have a beard.

Max does his best not to show his amusement at Fry's antics. It's not good to encourage them to do that sort of thing.

It's a good question. One Max doesn't know the answer to. (He's not a biologist, let alone an human anatomist).

"I don't know," he replies. It's one of the odder sexual dimorphisms of the human species.

"Men and ladies have different hormones." Guppy says. "If you give a lady a man's hormones they can grow a beard too."

Max smiles gratefully at Guppy and nods. He has no idea how he would have explained the theories about history and evolution producing sexual dimorphism that did come to his mind.

Guppy's explanation is much simpler.

Beat.

"Why do grown-ups have beards and kids don't?"

"Same reason." Guppy says. "You don't make hormones until you're older."

"I'm glad one of us can explain it simply enough," Max says to Guppy.

"Fry asks an average of ten 'why' or 'what' questions an hour." Guppy says, with a wry grin. "You get used to them."

"What's a naverage?" Fry asks, on cue.

"It means... er... if you add them all together and divide by the number of days. Like if you have two biscuits today, three tomorrow, and one the day after, you have an average of two a day."

Guppy suspects this one won't have made sense. Fry blinks suspiciously at him.

"I don't have three biscuits on Friday."

He smiles at Guppy. Sometimes, he wishes his students would ask more questions.

"As another example. I sometimes feel like I don't need coffee, and I can go several days without having any. And then there are days where I have a cup every hour. And there are days in between that. But, if you were to look at the total number of mugs of coffee I had in a month, say, November, it would probably end up somewhere in the region of 90. Which means that, on average, I have three cups a day."

"I can then use this sort of knowledge to plan things like making sure I have enough coffee in, so that I don't run out."

Guppy looks at Fry to see if this worked. The little boy frowns for a minute then says:

"If you have twenty four coffees in a day you must do a lot of weewee."

"I'd do the same if I had twenty-four glasses of water in a day. Though, I was only thinking really about the time that I'm in my office. From about nine am until five pm."

Those are the days he refuses alcohol with whatever wonderful dish Doris has cooked up.

"So you have nine coffees." Fry says. "Which days?"

"The days when I feel like everything I'm researching is too big for me, and I'm trying to prepare to fight forces that can't be fought, except by each other. Those are the days I need to be alert enough that my students can't tell the difference."

In other words, it really, really depends.

"Are you like... a ninja teacher?" Fry asks.

Max grins. "I wish. No. I'm a teacher of Ancient history. I also study the same subject, to try to work out more about it."

"Ohh..." Fry nods. "A time lord."

"I don't think Max meant actual fighting." Guppy says.