milliways_bar | (no subject)

(no subject)

Ray makes his way in through the front door with a bag over one shoulder. It looks heavy. It rattles a lot.

It isn't too heavy to carry upstairs, thoguh, so it's gone when he comes back down.

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Guppy nods.

"One of my colleagues has MRSA, another drove her car into the sea the day before yesterday, taking two others with her. She drowned and they got out, but one is still in intensive care. The whole department is still in shock, as well as severely short-staffed.
"On top of that I have destroyed any chance I had of rebuilding some sort of relationship with my father by shopping him to my boss after finding out he was involved in a very dodgy drugs trial."

He sips his tea.

"The writers must have had a field day."

"Ooooh," Ray says, wincing. "Yeah, that sounds nasty. I wonder if you could apply for a transfer to a soap-opera hospital and have your problems involve gorgeous women instead."

"...that was really an incredibly insensitive thing for me to say, wasn't it? I'm sorry, Guppy."

Guppy puts his head in his hands. He'd only just managed to convince himself it wasn't a soap after his conversation with Peter yesterday.

"It's okay." he says after a moment. "Peter's reaction was more or less the same yesterday."

"Well, for what it's worth, I really don't think it's a case of writers making things happen anyway," says Ray. "And I'll tell you why..."

He nods to the rest of the Bar.

"If it were, there'd have to be some kind of collaborative agreement between all the writers and producers of all of the people here. There is no possible way to get that many copyrights straightened out. If you ask me, those of us who appear in movies and television are just being remembered by people in these other worlds as a sort of inspiration at a distance. We determine what happens to their writing, not the other way around."

"That wasn't exactly what I meant. But thank you for that theory, it is rather reassuring."

He sips his tea.

"What I meant was with that amount of plot going on in Holby, the writers must have thought they'd come up with some really great TV. Watching my friend die must have been very entertaining."

His voice sounds a little tight. He fiddles with his hair.

"Ah." Ray wrinkles his nose. "Yeah... yeah, I can see that being an uncomfortable thought. Although it kind of makes me wonder- have you talked to Eska Smith lately? There was something she told me..."

Guppy shakes his head. "No, I haven't seen her since the birth. And then we didn't have much time for a chat. What did she say?"

"Oh, she said in her world there's a mineral called narrativium. It apparently has the effect of warping reality around it to make people's actions conform to what would constitute a good story, unless they know enough to either fight back or subvert the story to their own ends."

"Good as in entertaining or good as in happy ending?"

Guppy doesn't really like the sound of that.

[ooc: mun has to go for dinner. Back around tennish, three and a half hours or so]

"Good as in forming a sound narrative structure. I believe in her world it tends to manifest as fairy tales, rather than- say- Shakespearean tragedies."

[OOC: OK. Might be here then, might not.]

"That's bizarre. But then again, the discworld does appear to be very different from Earth."

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