high-energy physics

[warpfairy]

Federation political prisons are not particularly uncomfortable. She's not going anywhere, but she can read, she's considering taking up an instrument, the only really awkward thing is that she doesn't particularly want to be supervised while she's sweating her way through her next pon farr one way or another but that's years off. That and she wishes she'd taken longer to get caught. But she was running out of the really low-hanging fruit anyway.

This is what she signed up for. She makes up imaginary profiles of people on the planets she got to, people who can live longer fuller lives with the stars in reach, one per day. One per day and she'll have loads of estimated impact left unused when she dies. Perfectly reasonable tradeoff and she can still read books.

Someone wants to interview her about Vulcan; they don't want to lose anything that anybody remembers; she gives the interview and then picks up some poetry.

Comments

[subtly_artistic]

"That would be great. T'Mir would know where to look," Bella says. "Or she might just have a spare pair of shoes in, y'know, my exact size. She says she's clumsy compared to a Vulcan but not that bad for a human," she adds. "It might be an us thing."

[lintamande]

"Oooh. Are there - other things that might be 'you things'? Your names, parents' names, ambitions..."

[subtly_artistic]

"Eerily similar personalities down to how we format our thoughts when we're working on problems and the notetaking habit. She's basically me with different starting conditions, and not all that different, similar parents except her dad was a Vulcan and they're apparently kinda odd."

[lintamande]

"I am very intrigued by what will result from our interplanar scrying for Bellas."

[subtly_artistic]

"It'll be exciting! I like having her around, she's great."

[lintamande]

"She's picking up magic very fast, and we couldn't do anything this ambitious without someone with local knowledge of the world."

[subtly_artistic]

"I know, so convenient! And of course she is delighted to be learning magic and founding an Elendil instead of catching up on her reading in prison."

[lintamande]

"I wonder if a lot of the Bellas are in - hmm, constraining situations. Since it seems like otherwise one of them would have invented interplanar scrying and found you. Unless no two worlds have the same magic systems, and yours is the only one that permits this kind of thing?"

[subtly_artistic]

"What seems likely depends on how many of us there are, how lucky we got. But Materia type wizardry being the only or nearly only solution to interplanar travel is not a bad guess."

[lintamande]

"We certainly wouldn't have developed it. And then - boats and swords."

[subtly_artistic]

"Boats. Swords." She shakes her head.

[lintamande]

"He's a good kid. But I can see how if you'd been banished to the Outer Lands instead of to Materia, and he needed a boat to get there -"

[subtly_artistic]

"...mm."

[lintamande]

"I just want to make sure we avoid situations where he could make the sort of mistakes he's apparently prone to."

[subtly_artistic]

"I mean, if they'd only banished me to the Outer Lands we still could have communicated. I could have said 'I am okay, you do not have to steal any boats, especially not by means of swords'. And I make sure I call him on it whenever he guesses something silly about what I'd say in some situation, so maybe eventually he'll have a model of me he can consult even if I'm not around..."

[lintamande]

"The fated version happened without you, I think the scary tendency is less 'recklessness for Bella' and more 'when fixing something requires doing something everyone tells him is a bad idea, he does it anyway'."

[subtly_artistic]

"Yeah, my point was that I could have reassured him about the extent to which it needed fixing, which I couldn't do from Materia. Hrm."

[lintamande]

"It doesn't help that he was right to fetch you and come here."

[subtly_artistic]

"- he could have left me. I wasn't, it wasn't awful after the first few days."

[lintamande]

"He was right. I'd have done it more carefully but we were not going to let that pass."

[subtly_artistic]

"What was your plan?"

[lintamande]

"Scout a suitable destination plane first, once we were there petition the Valar to 'help' us permanently gate it to Valinor so Fëanáro could go home at night and so forth."

[subtly_artistic]

"Do you think they'd have done that?"

[lintamande]

"I was pretty sure the worst they'd do was make interplanar transit out of Valinor stop working at all and I think they might have done it - they were under a lot of pressure, Fëanáro was so upset -"

[subtly_artistic]

"But you'd already have gotten here and I wasn't in Valinor so you could've gotten me, I suppose, it'd just - leave everyone else in Arda stuck. I guess unless they went to the Outer Lands."