milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Clara is rather proud of herself, actually. It's not every day you not only negotiate peace with an ancient sentient obstinate ship, but help save a lost time traveler and reunite long-lost lovers.

All while piloting said ancient, sentient, obstinate ship.

Twice.

She is so bad-ass.

Clara plops herself down on a barstool and debates if she wants to get a giant drink, a giant dessert, or both.

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"Good day, lass?" Sherral, a little way down the bar in his grey fatigues, asks, before coughing sheepishly at his informality. "... I mean, ma'am."

He's been lurking in the bar too long if he's starting to go all informal on people he's just met.

"Oh, hardly a ma'am, I think I'm somewhere between a 'hey you' and 'Clara' most days - you can call me Clara, to be polite." She retorts, grinning.

"Clara, then. I'd hardly want to cause offence," Sherral says, inclining his head. "It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance."

Clara of of a few months ago would have been a bit flustered by all of that but the Clara of now has been all over the world and argued with an alien general and played hide-and-go-seek with the scariest nannies in existence and has started to lose her 'flustered' reflex.

"Do you generally go around causing offence?"

Edited 2014-08-25 02:27 (UTC)

One corner of Sherral's lips twitches up, just a little. "Not intentionally, but I do have something of a natural knack for it."

"I have a friend like that - luckily he can talk faster than most people can take offence, so it evens out." She admits with a grin.

"Oh, aye? Handy. If I talk too fast, nobody understands me," Sherral grins. He offers a hand - a little uncertainly, because it's not the greeting of choice in his world. "I'm Sherral."

It feels weird not adding on his rank and surname.

"Clara." She shakes his hand cheerfully, either not seeing or not caring too much about his awkwardness.

"I hope I didn't interrupt any, er, celebration," he remarks wryly. "You seem in a fine mood."

"Oh, no interruption, since it isn't really a party, more of a reward - over a thousand years old and I swear he has this complete inability to fly us to a decent pub without landing in a half-dozen messes first, and I deserve a reward." She explains (sort of), waving a list of cocktails as further explanation (sort of).

"What are you rewarding yourself for?" Sherral asks. "And, er, who's over a thousand years old?"

"My friend is - I travel with him, though really I think he invited me along so he wasn't the only one getting into trouble. Though today I got him out of trouble, which is a teensy bit awesome." She explains, though she may be inheriting some of the Doctor's 'explaining' ability - lots of words, precious little information.

"What manner of trouble was it?"

"..." Clara scrunches her nose, trying to figure out the answer to that one.

"... Hopefully, one of a kind."

She'll be happy if she's never called upon to pilot the TARDIS ever again. Honestly. Once is fine. Twice was... trying.

"That bad?"

The woman seated two stools down the bar has both a drink and a dessert, though hers are on the small side.

Because it's coffee and a donut.

She's got flyaway dark hair, worn blue jeans, Union Jack Doc Martens, and a T-shirt that reads 'Never trust an atom, they make up everything'.

"Oh," she says, looking up and over, as if Clara's presence just pulled her out of her own thoughts. "Hi."

"Hullo. What do you suppose a 'Sex on the Beach Under a Martian Sunrise' is?" She asks in return, mulling over a list of drinks the Bar provided to help with her indecision.

"Either a pleasurably painful way to end a life, a drink that packs an unexpected punch, or some bartender's idea of a joke."

Michael cracks a grin.

"Just as a guess."

Edited 2014-08-25 01:13 (UTC)

She considers this with all the due caution it deserves.

"Bar, I'll have one. And a bowl of chocolate ice cream." Just in case the drink is actually option 'a', because everyone should get a last bowl of chocolate ice cream.

She's been travelling with the Doctor for months now, it's messed a little with her priorities.

"Those were pretty awesome guesses, by the way."

Michael laughs.

"Coming up with new and exciting answers is three-quarters of the fun of guessing. Thanks."

She'll send an interested look in the direction of Clara's order, just to see what it turns out to be.

A very tall glass of a strange multi-colored fluid appears, and it is smoking. Clara upgrades her caution-rating on the drink and obtains a swizzle stick to poke at it more effectively.

"What's the other quarter?"

"The occasional moments when you are inevitably right."

Her grin fades slightly, and she shoots a particularly sharp look at the smoking drink.

"Do you want someone else to try it first?"

Edited 2014-08-25 02:35 (UTC)

"I think I'm going to give it a pass." She reports, holding up the swizzle stick, its tip partially dissolved from where she dipped it in the drink. "Something tells me this would give me a pretty nasty case of indigestion."

"I'm not sure melting your internal organs into soup counts as indigestion. But I support your conclusion, regardless."

Seriously.

"Yeah, certain amount of self-preservation is required in a place like this." The Doctor would be proud! Or already coming up with a way to make the drink ingest-able, or using it to save the universe. One of those, anyway.

"And here observation has taught me that the opposite is true."

Opposite, inverse, reverse.

Name it.

"... That... sounds unfortunate. I hope they have quite a lot of doctors. Or at least a Doctor." Though they don't seem to have one of those. There's a certain level of chaos missing here.

"Doctors, healers, medmages, angels -- "

Michael flicks her fingers in a quick, dismissive gesture.

"It takes all kinds."

"Angels? Really, like... halos and things?" She asks, caught somewhere between incredulousness and wistfulness. Her mum would make a fantastic angel, if there were such things.

"I haven't seen any halos," Michael observes wryly.

"But if I do, I'll let you know. So far it's just been wings, both physical and . . . metaphysical."

"... Metaphysical? How do wings get metaphysical?" Why not, when there's planet-eating sun parasites, but Clara just can't see it.

"Some things are more symbol than fact, despite looking that way from the outside."

Her smile is crooked.

"Which is to say, 'carefully', I guess."

"... Symbolic metaphysical wings. They almost sound more trouble than they're worth, but I suppose it's better than no wings at all. Flying could be useful." Clara muses thoughtfully.

"Useful and fun."

Michael's smile remains crooked.

"If not, yes, occasionally more trouble than they seem to be worth."

Edited 2014-08-28 23:06 (UTC)

"..." Clara considers Michael for a very long moment.

She's dealt with long-frozen alien homicidal generals. Crashing planes taken over by the wi-fi. Evil sun-parasites.

...

"So you're an angel."

"Only when I need to be. The rest of the time I get my hands dirty just like everyone else."

Well.

Almost everyone else.

"Being an angel is a part-time job?" Clara... doesn't actually know why it couldn't be, but it just seems... odd. Somehow.

"Not precisely. But if I were using my angelic powers all the time, I would be bound not to interfere on Earth at all, unless and until demons were involved."

The fall of her face into stern and uncompromising lines suggests her feelings about that pretty clearly.

Probably.

"And given all the terrible things people can do to each other -- doing what I can without such magic seems a better option than watching from afar, full of grace."

Once upon a time, Clara would have come up with a rather snarky answer for that - by and large, the human race isn't doing too badly, thanks.

But then there was a mad man in a blue box and actually, the whole universe is full of awful things (some of those things being other people) as well as wonderful things, and frankly the universe needs all the help it can get.

"Thus the metaphysical symbolic wings. At least they aren't always symbolic?" She's pretty sure she could have a lot of fun with a pair of wings.

"No," Michael says, smile coming out again.

(It's still crooked, though.)

"Otherwise I'd hardly be able to hold myself aloft with them, and I do enjoy flying."

"You know, I've never really gone flying. Well, the once, but... that doesn't really count."

One does not count 'two minute trip to a crashing plane that you helped make not crashing' as flying. Mostly you count it as screaming.

Michael raises an eyebrow.

"Are you counting flying machines in that total, or is it a more free-standing version of flying you're referring to?"

"It was an airplane, but it wasn't really flying, it was more... crashing, but we fixed that." She explains, sort of. It was a bit of a blur to be honest.

"I'm glad you fixed it, and no one had to ride that to its usually inevitable conclusion."

She means that.

"But yeah, I wouldn't count that as flying, either."

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