milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Ray had a fairly disquieting thought earlier today and wound up spending most of the afternoon in his room. He comes downstairs in search of food and actual conversation, since let's face it, it's a mess up there.

[Summary: Martin Miggs comes around and talks to Ray about food. Because, well- FOOD. But not pixy sticks.

Scribble the baby raptor comes by with her toy! There is tug-of-war and then the rope is torn to bits, so Ray deploys one of his flashyballs and gets himself some protection against pointy bits, and then there is feeding time for the ickle Mesozoic deathbringer.

Lysistrata also pops up, and there is some discussion of things like rings and faked deaths and Spartan idiocy, and on the idiocy theme Ray reveals that he's currently having an envy/jealousy problem, and can't quite seem to get over it. Even though he knows it's stupid.

Scary scary Tim Hunter comes by to ask about borrowing a PKE meter. Ray is somewhat reluctant at first, but when he hears what happened to Ace, he hands the meter over without a quibble.

Hurley comes around to ask Ray what he knows about freakydeaky numbers and good / bad fortune combinations. Ray adds another item to his research queue as a result.

And finally, Akito turns up, and there is discussion of ID cards and communications gaps before Ray boggles a little at the name of Nergal Heavy Industries. Give the man a break, he's been studying Sumerian for the past week...]

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"I see. Well... welcome to being Bound, then, I guess." He shakes his head a bit, but he still smiles. "I hope the Bar treats you well while you're here."

Then he nods. "They know the local trades, I imagine. Although from what I understand, Sparta eventually becomes everybody's absolute least favorite trading partner, at least for a little while. One of their leaders gets some whacko ideas about currency and yanks all the gold out of circulation, which makes trading with them just a pain in the neck, to put it mildly."

She rubs her eyes.
"Just like the Spartans. Honest to Zeus, they're just as stubborn as the Athenians. All of them. Although I think I would have enjoyed some of the military training, although not as strictly as they imposed it. I like my feather beds."
"And being Bound, I suppose I am, now. There are worse places." She shrugs.

"It gets worse," Ray says. "The gold gets replaced- by iron. Can you imagine trying to carry around enough iron to make up for all that gold? Lykurgos was insane, if you ask me. I mean, honestly- iron?"

"Yeah, there are... Although if you want military training, or anything like that, while you're here... hm. It probably wouldn't work too well until after you deliver the baby, but we could probably find someone here to teach you some of the forms of unarmed combat from the countries that lie farther east than Babylon. They make life very interesting."

Lysistrata facepalms.
"See what I mean? How did we *survive* until your time? How? Idiots! All of them!"
"I think I would like that, to have some basic fighting skills, at least for self-defense. I never want to be vulnerrable like I was at home.. I mean, in Athens. Guess it's home no longer."
She goes somber, considering this.

"I wish I knew," Ray says. "Although Greece's been through the wringer in more than a few wars after the fact... you guys do survive somehow. One way or another."

"You definitely want to find a teacher for the martial arts, then," he goes on. "Karate, or tae kwon do, or something like that- it's no substitute for a sword or a knife, but any advantage in a fight, you know? Especially when you're on alien ground and people don't know you."

Strata shivered, and fingered wher she knew a bruise once was.
"So what have been occupying your days and nights?"

It takes Ray a while to sort everything out for the speech queue.

"Studying the Sumerian language. Supervising the growth of photonic crystals in my room upstairs. Working on upgrading and refitting my car. Going through some testing for traits I turn out not to have. Working on helping my best friend get plans together for a school he intends to open. Designing a solar energy collection system to charge a man's energy weapon for him. Beating the stuffing out of an incredibly untoward sense of jealousy or envy that I seem to have developed; I'm not sure which of those it is. Uh, practicing cuneiform some more. Practicing Braille, too."

He thinks for a moment.

"I'm pretty sure that's it. I haven't seen the raptors yet today."

Strata's eyes glaze over for most of this; she doesn't understand enough of the terms to comprehend what he's saying.
"Wait, what are you jealous of? You're a brilliant man, kind, generous, what is there to be jealous of? Does it involve a girl?"

Well, that'll be another notch carved in his proton pack, then. Sooner or later Ray does that to nearly everybody he talks to. The eye-glaze thing, that is.

"It's stupid, I know," Ray says. "And no, it doesn't involve a girl. I'm set on that front. My best friend's developed psychic abilities that he doesn't know how to handle, and they've got him really uncomfortable, because he thinks they're unnatural and freakish. I'm glad he's finally starting to come to terms with them, but I keep wanting to slap him around until he comes to his senses- that, or shake him by the shoulders and tell him that if he doesn't want the ability to see spirits and 'read' people's emotions and sense impressions, then I'd be happy to take them. And there's the Jedi- you probably wouldn't know the term, but they're a type of spiritual warrior from stories from my childhood. I wanted to be one like you wouldn't believe when I was a kid, and I finally met them here, and one of their masters was kind enough to test me for their spiritual abilities today. I don't have any particular signs of any of their abilities- compared to the people they recruit for their Order, I'm as ordinary as they come."

"And even though I know perfectly well that I'm probably the luckiest man alive, and even though I know that right up until Peter broke out in those damn powers of his I was probably the happiest man in the bar, I still find myself feeling envious of him and people with gifts like that. It's possibly the most idiotic thing I've ever done that didn't actually involve setting someone on fire, and I can't help it- it just happens." He shakes his head. "I've been practicing my Sumerian writing for the past four hours by repeating the same phrase over and over again- the name of a legendary hero from my world who had no powers at all, only a quick mind and an excellently trained body. 'Batman has no powers. Batman has his brain.' Over and over again. Maybe if I repeat it often enough it'll get through my thick skull."

"I think I understand. But your friend, he has all of these talents that he has to deal with, that will make his life difficult. Like he will always be able to tell what people think of him, and of those he loves. I would not like that responsibility."
She squeezes his hand.
"And indeed, you are an incredibly learned man. I feel honored to have your friendship. You are a wonderful man."
To emphasize this point she kisses his forehead.
"Sometimes it helps hearing it from someone else."

Ray rubs at his face with one hand. "I know," he mutters. "About Pete, I mean. I just need to make the whiny little brat at the bottom of my brain understand that."

He blushes a little- he's very easily embarrassed- but smiles a bit. "Thank you, Lysistrata. I appreciate it."

With true Athenian fatalism, Strata comments, "We're all caught in the web in our fate; we can struggle to face the spider dead-on, but we can do nothing to avoid it. Your fate is your fate, and you're meant to be a normal human being."
She looks around the bar.
"We could use some of them in here."

"I was never very big on the deterministic view of existence," Ray says. "You should know that about my time: the Greeks've survived, and even Athens still stands- and holds the Olympic games now and again, when they're not being held in other cities instead- but fate? A lot of people've given up belief in fate."

"But it was our best export! Better than olive oil! The belief that life is going to such, and you can do nothing about it! It's the stuff of great drama!"

"I didn't say everyone had given up," Ray points out. "Just a lot of people. I should probably mention that there are two hundred and seventy million people in my country, so probably at least as many of them as ever lived in Greece, and then some, still do believe."

"And frankly, your best export was either your philosophers or your goat cheese. Some of the brands of feta they sell these days are nearly as good as an evening with the writings of Democritus."

Strata blinks at the number. "How many? How, where, wha....???"
Congratulations, Ray, you have completely made Strata tongue-tied.

"You heard me," says Ray. "The mainland of my country is about three thousand miles across, although we have a bunch of islands and an entirely separate chunk separated from the rest by several thousand more miles. We hold an area of something like three million, seven hundred thousand square miles. There are two hundred seventy million people in my country- eight and a half million of whom live in my city. That's why there are more than twenty thousand Greeks living in my city. We're just that big."

"And we're not the biggest country in the world, either. We're not even the most heavily populated country in the world. We're just damn big."

"Ray, what's a mile?"

"A little over eight and a half stades. Five thousand, two hundred and eighty feet."

"So your country is..." she does the calculation in her head." "24,000 stades across? How is that...possible? How do you cross it? How on earth do you get a city with eight million people? *Eight million*."
Strata looks dangerously close to exploding.

"Machines again, I'm afraid," Ray says. "Not that we don't have horses in some places, but for the most part, if it's too far to walk comfortably then you ride in a device called a car, or a bus, or a train. Or other machines, but you probably don't wanna know about them yet. It's not unusual for cars to cover more than fifty-five miles in an hour, on the main roads. In the cities they're slower, of course, since they've got to stop for pedestrians and stuff, but otherwise..."

Strata's completely zoned out, having way too much brain explosion.
The mun told you so.

Yes, well, Ray had to earn that notch in his pack, dammit.

"Did I mention we're a democracy? No kings?"

She snaps out of her stupor.
"Of course. Only the barbarians have *kings.*" she sneers.

"Yeah, well- the country is mostly composed of the descendants of barbarians. My own ancestors come from..."

He pauses a moment, trying to translate the modern map into terms she'll understand.

"Farther to the north and east than Pontos, or Halicarnassus- from the lands at the back of the north wind, among the blood-drinking, horse-riding, hemp-smoking Scythians. Most of them, anyway. My friends' ancestors come from similar places, or from the island that your time would probably call Albion, north of Europe- except for Winston, whose ancestors were brought out of Africa in the time when my country still had slaves. We ended slavery a hundred and forty years ago, though, but I already told you that."

"Only a very few people in my country are actually descended from the natives of the land. Everyone else- everyone- is descended from people who left their native country to come to mine. So, really, we're all barbarians. We just liked your style of government, so we ran with it."