trade my soul for a wish

[from_scratch]

This is a successor to "call me maybe", which is getting crowded.

Cam is dipping a grilled cheese sandwich into a bowl of tomato soup when he feels the summons. He goes ahead and grabs it. Doesn't even drop the sandwich.


with Mark (kappa)

with Adanya (Aestrix)

with Sable (kappa)

with Ari (andaisq)

with Metella (kappa)

with Miles (kappa)

with Isabella (Eva)

with Steel (Rockeye)

with Daphne (Maggie)

with Edie (Maggie)

Comments

[from_scratch]

"Noted."

[unmarred]

"Mm... this'll work," he says, of a building they are approaching. "Please don't talk while I'm getting a room. I don't want them hearing anything interesting."

In they go. Mark exchanges an absolute minimum of words with the receptionist, obtains a keycard, and leads Cam into the lift tube and up.

It seems like a very nice hotel, much nicer than the intelligence agent's.

[from_scratch]

"Swanky," comments Cam in the lift tube. "So what is it that you do besides leave little mysteries for your pursuers?"

[unmarred]

"Not a whole lot."

[from_scratch]

"Doodling on the floor and such takes up most of your time?"

[unmarred]

"By time the thing I do most is probably read."

[from_scratch]

"Reading's a lot less depressing than you're making it sound, in my experience."

[unmarred]

"It's not the reading that's depressing."

[from_scratch]

"You're being cryptic," Cam observes.

[unmarred]

"Am I?"

He alights from the lift tube and proceeds down the corridor.

[from_scratch]

"No, I said that at total random, it's a tic I have."

[unmarred]

"I have a poorly calibrated sense of what counts as cryptic."

[from_scratch]

"Grand. This will be fun."

[unmarred]

"Sorry."

[from_scratch]

"Eh, if you don't want to be cryptic then accidental crypticism just means a few extra layers of increasingly precise question-asking before I learn things. If you wanted to be cryptic I'd probably flip you off and wander around to eavesdrop and browse bookstores until I knew what I wanted to do next."

[unmarred]

"It's possible there are things I won't want to tell you even once I'm made aware that you don't know them and would like to. But I don't expect it to come up all that often."

And here is the room. It's medium-sized and cozy and has a little sitting area with a couple of armchairs and a round table. Mark sits.

"And now I'm close to certain that no one knows we're here or could listen in if they did."

[from_scratch]

"Cool. So pretend that I'm from - mm, history's obviously diverged considerably - pretend I am from 1990, and give me the executive summary of things that have happened as pertinent to the modern-day layout of this-and-that?"

[unmarred]

Mark laughs.

[from_scratch]

"And of course I expect wordcount-conscious emphasis on the important parts. I'm immortal, not patient."

[unmarred]

"Don't jog my elbow," he suggests dryly.

"All right, let's see... sometime in the early twenty-third century, ballpark of 2230, humanity invented jumpships and immediately started colonizing every system they could find that was more than barely habitable. Emphasis on the ones that already supported some form of life, because clearly they could be made to support ours. I'm not sure exactly which planets were established in that first wave - Escobar and Tau Ceti, I think, and maybe Zoave Twilight and Illyrica. And Barrayar. But Barrayar suffered a mishap: a collapsed wormhole cut off their route home while the first bunch of colonists were still settling in. So while the rest of the wormhole nexus kept right on merrily exploring and colonizing and advancing, Barrayar descended into near-Bronze-Age near-anarchy and then started over from there. Some centuries went by. Plenty more planets were colonized. I'm going to deliver a shamelessly skewed perspective and mostly talk about the ones that feature in my or my family's history: Jackson's Whole, Beta Colony, Komarr, and the Cetagandan Empire."

He pauses, then asks, "I don't suppose you can conjure me up a map of the wormhole nexus? This will be a little easier with pictures. Holo, please; two dimensions never feel like enough."

[from_scratch]

"I need slightly more to go on than 'holo'. A brand name should do." But he does conjure up an instance of his own computer and start taking notes.

[unmarred]

"Let me see... I think the last decent map cube of the wormhole nexus I saw for sale was AstroCart. Now there's a company that is aware of its niche. Although they also offer system, planetary, and subplanetary maps."

[from_scratch]

Cam hands Mark a cube. "Please do not attempt to abuse my ignorance about what things there are to conjure, by the way."

[unmarred]

"Mm?"

[from_scratch]

"As in, if you ask me for a make and model of something and I hand you a mystery object shaped like a Platonic solid and then it turns out I didn't really want you to have that sort of object and only didn't recognize what it was supposed to be, I will not be best pleased."