milliways_bar | (no subject)

(no subject)

Trillian's back at her booth, furiously writing.

That magazine will feel the Wrath of Demosthenes, for certain, and also of Trillian, astrophysicist and friend.

She also has a glass of merlot. Yes, before noon.

Perhaps it's inspiration.

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"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."

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