milliways_bar | (no subject)

Sewing? Why not. Some things have to be made of fabric, after all.

"What are you making?" Asar-Suti asks, walking up, coffee in hand.

Curious as ever.

"A lightsaber training outfit," Ray answers. "I'm fastening some flexible solar energy collection panels- basically, photosensitive resistors spread out over a much wider area than usual- to this shirt and to a pair of trousers. I'm then going to retreat to a suitable room and turn off the lights, and I'll take out a maglite- which is to say, a flashlight of approximately the same mass as a standard lightsaber handle- and practice some of the forms of Chinese sword-based martial arts with the light turned on. If the beam of light from the flashlight ever intersects one of the panels, it'll close the circuits I've already built into the shirt, and a warning alarm will go off. That's my cue that if I had been using a real lightsaber, I'd have just cut off my arm or my leg or something."

"Oh, uh, for reference's sake, a lightsaber is an energy-bladed sword used by the Jedi around here. Hi, Sooty. How're you?"

Asar-Suti nods, interested. "I met Jedi; they're the ones who have magic and technology on an equally high level. I really must go to their universe at some point."

He nods, looks at the rafters, and tries to imagine what Ray described.

"That's not just good for lightsabers, it's good for any kind of bladed weapon," he muses. "Sounds like an ingenious swordfighting device."

"Well, the thing with other swords is that they have mass in the blade," Ray points out. "It wouldn't be good to teach yourself reflexes with a flashlight if you were trying to learn the moves necessary to swing a bastard sword. It's just too heavy. You need one and a half hands at the very least for that, and getting your wrists used to cutting out and pulling back at the point of manipulating something that weighed at best a third of a bastard sword's weight would only end up with you needing stitches or an Ace bandage later on."

"Hmmm - perhaps putting something very heavy on the flashlight would help?" Asar-Suti suggests. "At least to emulate a shorter and lighter sword, that is."

Ray shakes his head. "Air resistance," he says. "The 'sabers don't have that to worry about because of the energy blade thing, but a sword's got air resistance and balance issues to worry about. Better to just build up your wrists and stuff through ordinary exercise and practice with a stick until your trainer say syou're good to go with the real thing."

Asar-Suti shrugs, grinning. "You see I'm just a sorcerer, not a sword-fighter," he admits.

"In any case, it's a good idea. At least for the lightsabre world."

Ray nods. "Yup. And since I've been trying to build one off and on since I was about eight, it's not exactly the kind of thing I was able to resist trying, you know?"

"Oh, of course, you know the lightsabre world as fiction," Asar-Suti nods, realising.

"You seem to know many, Naraht's as well, and Middle-Earth, anyway. Have you ever heard of mine?"

Ray rubs at his face. "I... uh... sorta," he finally confesses. "I, uh... saw the word 'Cheysuli' on a book once. Really recently. When I found the book that Red is from, in fact. Never read that book, though. I'm sorry, Suti."

"Who is Red?" Asar-Suti asks, absentmindedly, just to say something.

A book. It is a book. And it's about the Cheysuli...

He looks stunned.

"Red's a dinosaur, a Utahraptor, who's been comign in here for a while. I'm working on taming one of her chicks. It's very cute, but I don't want it thinking of people as food sources so much as food givers."

He winces a little at the look on Sooty's face. "If it helps at all, to a pretty fair portion of the people in this bar, I'm a character from a movie that they loved and watched when they were kids. Or, possibly, a cartoon." He doesn't mention the comic book; no one seems to have read that yet.

"You mean, a creature like Cera? She is totally lovely, but I didn't think she was carnivorous?"

He shakes his head. "I knew I had to be fictional somewhere, most likely on many of the more technological versions of Earth," Asar-Suti says. "It's just odd to finally know we're in a book - I was wondering. Book, movie, computer game?"

"Cera is just one representative of the taxonomic class Dinosauria- there were thousands upon thousands of different species of dinosaurs in the millions of years before humans walked the Earth," Ray says. "The full classification scheme for Cera is superkingdom Eukaryota, kingdom Animalia, phylum Chordata, subphylum Vertebrata, class Dinosauria, subclass Ornithischia, order Marginocephalia, family Ceratopsidae, genus Triceratops, species... oh, probably horridus, though hatcheri is a real possibility. I can't tell with juveniles. Red is order Saurischia, sub-order Theropoda, family Dromaeosauridae, genus Utahraptor, species ostrommaysorum as far as I can tell. She's distant kin to a lot of other dinosaurs that eat species similar to Cera. Hence the need for training."

"Uh... as far as I know, it's a series of books on my world. Took up a fair portion of the bookshelf at Barnes & Noble."

Asar-Suti listens to the taxonomy of those two dinosaurs like Ray would, most probably, listen to a learned dissertation about the Ihlini rune of ori'neth. Held in the Old Tongue.

"Erm, yes. Can all of them speak, like Cera, or was her kind the intelligent one?" he asks, guilelessly.

He shakes his head again, still wondering. "A series of books," he says, darkly. "Well, that would explain why there were so very many different Cheysuli before our story was done, and why they went through three of my Dark Overlords. Because from time to time, the evil Ihlini leader would have to be killed for reasons of narrative causality..."

Ray has, as has been noted more than once, a tendency to do that to people.

"Actually, the majority of her kind can't talk at all," Ray says. "The average Triceratops in my world had a brain not a whole lot larger than, um... actually, smaller than the brain of a pygmy chimpanzee, a species incapable of learning more than about fifty words of sign language. And a pygmy chimp's brain only had to pilot a body weighing around thirty-nine kilograms, whereas Triceratops had a mass of around sixty-five hundred kilograms. I believe Cera may be from some form of children's entertainment, though I really can't say for sure."

"It's possible," Ray says. "I couldn't really say. I've never read the books. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the people are real, and that the authors in this universe or that are drawing on some kind of inter-universal collective unconscious to produce stories about them- that those of us who're here or who're back in our own universes are casting the shadows on the cave walls, and the shadows are all most people ever get to see of us."

"You are contradicting yourself," Asar-Suti points out, less than polite - but then, geeks tend to be. Politeness takes a back seat to precise definition.

"If she's from some children's entertainment, then she is fictional, because real dinosaurs were far too stupid to talk and used all their brain to move their huge muscles," he argues. "On the other hand, the Plato stuff makes lots of sense; we are all real, and some stream of narrativium in the multiverse carries stories of us from one world to the next. But then there is a world where Cera's kind of dinosaurs did speak."

"I... don't know that that's really contradicting myself," Ray says. "Just phrasing it way less than precisely on my part. From where I'm standing, she's from a form of children's entertainment, I should probably say. From where she stands, I don't even exist, unless dinosaurs tell stories about the descendants of the little fuzzy scavengers growing into big hairless apes who fight ghosts."

"Yep, that way around, it makes sense," Asar-Suti says, nodding.

"And who knows - their kind of dinosaurs might like Science Fiction as well?"

He grins.

"Entirely possible," Ray says. "Although it does lead to the mental image of a comic strip from my world called Calvin and Hobbes- it's about a six year old boy with tremendous imagination and very little patience, and his imaginary tiger friend, Hobbes- anyway, Calvin gets in trouble a lot for drawing the wrong thing in art class. And he's very, very fond of drawing dinosaurs in rocket ships and high-technology aircraft..."

"That sounds very cute," Asar-Suti says. "An imaginary tiger friend - I like the idea. And drawing dinosaurs in space ships. The multiverse is wild and funny, and somewherre, I am sure they exist."

[[OOC: Oh ha ha ha!! The very first RPG this mun was ever in, back on CompuServe in 1995, did have them - space-faring raptors!]]

Ray nods. "I wouldn't be the least bit surprised."

Asar-Suti nods.

"The multiverse has the weirdest things and throws them in here, spooky sockpuppets and cute cabbits," he agrees.

"Oh, you met Ryo-oh-ki?" Ray asks. "She's neat. I need to start carrying carrots with me moer often."

"Yep, I met her. Lovely creature. I con conjure carrots, of coure, being a lazy god of magic," Asar-Suti grins. "And I like to do that, for her."

Ray nods. "I usually just carry supplies. That's why I've got turkey jerky in my pockets most days- in case Red's chicks show up. Scribble, the littlest one, likes the stuff."

"Do they talk, or how do you know their names?" Asar-Suti asks, curiously.

"They don't talk. I named them." Ray smiles. "Red does sort of have a name- the book she comes from calls her Raptor Red- but I tapped her with the name before I knew about that. It's the big red patches down her nose that do it. The chicks are Kona, because he's darker than the other two, Tiger, because she has much more pronounced stripes, and Scribble largely because it's cute."

"Why is Kona a reference to being dark?" Asar-Suti asks, curiously.

Ray stares at Sooty for a moment.

"It's a type of coffee," he says. "I thought you knew."

"Sorry, no, I didn't - I don't yet know all the coffees there are," Asar-Suti admits.

He has these glaring gaps in his knowledge of the modern world yet, and it always makes him rather embarrassed to be found out.

Ray nods. "Yeah. It comes from Hawaii. Strong stuff, bit on the expensive side- nothing like kopi luwak, though. It's straight off the trees, not through anything's gut. I could get you some the next time I go home, if you like."

Asar-Suti smiles.

Whee, he is being offered some new and interesting kind of coffee!

"Yes, please; that would make me happy!"