milliways_bar | (no subject)

"Sleep well, Val?" Trillian calls, laughing slightly.

She takes a long drink of tea before she blinks over at Trillian and laughs lightly. "Merf. I would have slept better if my husband wasn't snoring." She waddles over, and plunks down at her friend's booth.

"How kind of him. I'm glad Jasin is silent as silent gets and Zaphod only occasionally talks to himself."

Trillian's totally innocent.

"Ah, tea. Solution to the world's problems."

It's good, really, that Val's mostly asleep. She really didn't catch the strange implications of that. More tea!

"Luke says I mutter in my sleep every so often. Rather disconcerting, really." A pause, and she takes another long sip of tea. "Very much so. This is why I never go anywhere without my handy tea." ... right, Val.

"Anywhere you might find me or Arthur or Fenny, you'll find tea. Tea does solve problems, even if the problems are just stress-related."

Many of Trillian's problems are.

"Does he ever tell you what you mutter?"

"I can't write without tea. I haven't figured out why on that one yet, but it's true." A pause. "I don't think I've actually met Fenny yet. I've heard about her from you all, but one of these days I should actually meet her."

A grin, and another long drink of tea. "Um. He says he can't understand me, which could mean that I'm just incomprehensible, or I could be muttering in some other language. You never can tell with me."

"Fenny ... she's difficult. If you want to hold onto your grasp of reality, you don't want to talk to Fenny. She defies it, seeing as she doesn't believe in it. I've only seen her walk about three times - normally, she's floating. People tend to miss it, though."

Shrugging, Trillian takes a sip of her drink.

"Tea's cathartic."

Val pauses. "I've been here almost a year, Trillian, I've been to, I think, four universes, and got married to someone I thought was a character in an old vid. Reality's all relative." A wry smile. "Perhaps we would get along."

And perhaps she's still more sleepy than she's letting on.

"Tea is lovely. I think it fixes everything that ails one."

"And I believe it very well may."

She smiles.

"... yeah, seeing Luke threw us for a loop too. But the history of his world's being marketed isn't their fault, of course. And must be rather nervewracking."

"I think that seeing him threw just about anyone from the end of the twentieth century of Earth onwards for a loop. Well, other than the Earth-based civilzations which have lost pop-culture references." She pauses, and chuckles. "Did you know he walked into the bar for the first time during a showing of the first vid? It was horrible, from what I've heard."

"... oh, Zarquon."

Trillian suddenly looks very, very sorry for Luke.

"That really must have been terrible. They look so dreadfully similar, too."

"Oh, yeah. Everyone was staring. Because, there's Luke on the screen. In farmboy clothes. And there's Luke at the bar. In farmboy clothes. To make it all -worse-, the first time he looked at the screen, he saw his home on Tatooine burning." Val winces. Empathic connection not helping at this moment. "He never told me about it, actually. I learned about it from a couple other people who were there." She pauses. "And frankly, if you somhow got a young Mark Hammil in here, and stood him next to Luke, I don't think very may people could tell the difference. It's really scary how alike they look."

"That's ... really just awful. I'm not quite sure how to say it besides 'really just awful.' Good thing he pulled through."

Trillian spins her merlot about in its glass a bit.

"Poor Luke. If I had seen tapings of my home getting blown up - while I know they exist, because Vogons are Vogons - I'd probably have cried, and I don't do it much."

Val winces. "Um, yeah. I kinda know how he feels, though. After Ender's battle, there were vids all over the 'nets. Vids of Ender and Bonzo fighting, and then Ender killing Bonzo." She shivers. "It just wasn't pretty." Perhaps it hit harder than she's admitted to anyone.

"Oh, hon."

Trillian gets it. She gets it well - she studied, which she can tell Val knows. Especially considering her calling her a second, earlier.

"I figure Demosthenes had nothing to say on the subject."

"Demosthenes had plenty to say about the bloody stupid IF, actually." She pauses with a sigh. "It took me a couple weeks to get things set up so that the idiots wouldn't send Ender back to Earth. Can you imagine? He'd just won a battle, he was all over the 'nets, showing how he'd killed someone. Every country would be vying for him. He would have just been another weapon in their arsenal. No one should be used like that." And Val know that one. Perhaps a bit too well. "They sent him off to govern a colony. I went along for the ride. And that's when we started planet-hopping. Stayig in one place just doesn't work for us."

"This is the colony where Syfte was born that hasn't happened yet, correct?"

Trillian tries to follow her friends' stories, at any rate.

"And that was bright work of you. Really good at handling the way things work, aren't you -- how old were you when you started writing, anyhow?"

When Val tells her the actual answer, she'll probably have some amazing surprised reaction.

"Well, not really. I have no clue where Syfte was born." She pauses. "See, here's the thing. My world doesn't have either lightspeed or Improbable travel. We go at right below the speed of light, so when we get somewhere, it's about fifty years on the planet since we left. So, technically, I think, Syfte was born about three thousand or so years after I was. Right now, if I went back to when I left my world, it was between two and three hundred years after I was born. Kriffing lightspeed."

She pauses. "And, uh. I was ten when Peter and I really started working on Locke and Demosthenes." Yup. That's a blush.

"Must really take forever to get somewhere. I have to use the Drive or at least regular hyperspace mode to travel in any sort of reasonable -- ten?"

Trillian's soft smile forms into a proud grin.

"You are an amazing woman, Valentine Skywalker."

Val shuffles her feet a bit in her seat. "If you say so, Trillian. I'm just me, really. I do what I can, and what I'm good at."

"The thing is, you're not just slightly good at it. You're spectacularly good at it - and the Star is going to be sorry it messed with Zaphod, whether it's a trashy tabloid or not."

Beam. So innocent.

Now that gets a grin. "Oh, the trashy tabloids are the best to have fun with." She cackles. "Actually, only one news media ever connected Locke and Demosthenes. It was a tabloid who said they were sleeping together." Val's eyes twinkle. "Oh, Peter and I had fun with that one. Yes. I think that poor newspaper isn't going to know what hit it."

"Good Zarquon."

Trillian actually looks rather ill.

"The two of you must have felt sick. I'm sure I would, if I had a brother and had been in that situation."

"Well, I think if we'd really sat down and thought about it, neither of us would have eaten dinner that night. Granted, at that age, any thought of anything like that would have made me lose my dinner." She pauses. "We were actually more shocked that someone connected Locke and Demosthenes. Force, we had to deal with a new 'sex scandal' involving one or the other of us almost monthly." She pauses. "We couldn't take it personally. It was all characters. Locke and Demosthenes were rumoured to have slept with so-and-so, not Peter and Valentine Wiggin."