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glencolareef2023-05-31 07:07 pm
meadqueen) wrote in glencolareef2023-05-31 07:07 pm
Entry tags:
LOG | Day 003 | Night
WHO: Ishigami Senku, Randvi
WHAT: Food and conversation after a day exploring the resort
WHEN: Day 003 Night
WHERE: IX.T.9, outside one of the smaller hangars
WARNINGS: N/A
Despite both days following roughly the same trajectory for Randvi, the second and third days on this island feel markedly different from one another.
While the second day had been exciting, it had also been a bit tense and frightening, and for most of it she’d been on her own. This third day, Senku’s sense of wonder had been a bit infectious, and even with the difficulties they're still having sourcing food and water, and the uncertain future of a few of the others, Randvi finds her spirit buoyed as she builds the fire outside of 'her' longhouse.
While the turtle eggs are cooking in their flat metal pan, Randvi retrieves the long, tangled thread she had found that morning and starts methodically unravelling it. In some ways, it almost feels like being back home.
“Senku, what can you tell me about your world?”
He's talked a lot about many different things, but she still doesn't really know where he comes from.
WHAT: Food and conversation after a day exploring the resort
WHEN: Day 003 Night
WHERE: IX.T.9, outside one of the smaller hangars
WARNINGS: N/A
Despite both days following roughly the same trajectory for Randvi, the second and third days on this island feel markedly different from one another.
While the second day had been exciting, it had also been a bit tense and frightening, and for most of it she’d been on her own. This third day, Senku’s sense of wonder had been a bit infectious, and even with the difficulties they're still having sourcing food and water, and the uncertain future of a few of the others, Randvi finds her spirit buoyed as she builds the fire outside of 'her' longhouse.
While the turtle eggs are cooking in their flat metal pan, Randvi retrieves the long, tangled thread she had found that morning and starts methodically unravelling it. In some ways, it almost feels like being back home.
“Senku, what can you tell me about your world?”
He's talked a lot about many different things, but she still doesn't really know where he comes from.
no subject
How people would safely fly on a bird, no matter how large, is a question that remains unanswered.
“And the tower is meant to be a lighthouse of sorts. For these ships.” That part is at least imaginable, though the light clearly no longer functions. “It seems to me that fire is more reliable than whatever lights it.”
She looks up at the unfamiliar constellations with a heavy sigh, thinking again of the many weeks of travel involved in Eivor’s planned voyage to Vinland, and Sigurd’s long absences.
“My people have travelled far, but it is often dangerous and time-consuming.”
no subject
"Yeah, the aerodynamics and basic design are birdlike but that's not useful for understanding. Planes are vehicles. They let people fly through the air in them. So…I think it's easier to say it's like a ship. That's not helping you know what it looks like, I know."
He really will draw one, though that won't answer all the questions about it. He can explain how one works but it will all be scientific talk that won't mean a thing to even a lot of people from his own time.
"Kinda like a lighthouse. But it doesn't work with light, exactly…I mean, it would have had lights on it, but a lot of the way it works is with radar. It reads signals from the planes and the people in the tower can tell the planes where to go so they don't crash into each other. That's a super simplistic idea, but my point is that it's not literally a lighthouse."
He's amused by this, though. It's a good conversation, trying to explain things so they make more sense. He's done this kind of thing before. He can be impatient about some things, but not about explaining. If people don't get things, he can tell them again or he can just move on about it; depends on the audience.
"Fire spreads, though. Catch one thing and BOOM, everything goes up. Like that hotel, the tall building, looks like it caught fire. Electricity can cause fires but…it's ten billion percent safer and easier to keep running with the right infrastructure than just having a fire burning. But nothing is ever so safe it can't go wrong. That's just the nature of being alive, you know?"
He considers science extremely reliable, but there are always mistakes to be made, miscalculations, human errors. How long did it take people to get into space without blowing themselves up? How many dangerous things has Senku himself even done the past few years, including nearly getting everyone permanently petrified again? Things didn't always go to plan.
"Did you go on those voyages? Vikings would sail throughout what we would call Europe, sometimes all the way to the Americas, across the Atlantic Ocean."
He's not sure what they would have called it themselves, though. He knows history, but only through the lens he's read it through. It's different hearing it from someone who was actually there.
"In a plane you could cross the ocean in hours. But it took something like 900 years after when you're from for the first plane flight to even happen."
no subject
She nods at the description of the lighthouse. “Like the radio. The innards of those devices have been completely torn out. A fire is much easier to replace.”
So far, Randvi hasn't been overly impressed with electricity. Most of it seems to fall apart very easily, and the other parts lock her out of a building while beeping uselessly or trap people in places where they may die. At least fire is predictable.
“The fire in the large tower may have been set deliberately. Either to rout the people barricading themselves inside to try and endure a siege or as a reaction to putting the military and luxury classes so close together.” It may have become a symbol to the people who burned it.
“I haven't travelled as much as I’d like, but two winters past my clan travelled from Norway to England to flee the rule of King Harald Fairhair. Styrbjorn Jarl had abdicated to him, and we did not wish to be another man’s subjects.”
It had been difficult to uproot her life again for the second time in three years, but she could never have stayed behind. What little power she’d had then, she’d needed to hang onto it with both hands.
“My husband travelled to Constantinople and back, which was a two-year voyage, and I've recently sent my own scouts to Vinland. I believe that may be your ‘Americas’.”
She shakes her head. “It is hard to imagine the trip so short. I will need to send someone I - someone very dear to me on that voyage soon, and she will be gone for so long.”
no subject
"No, people gather inside them. Commercial flights — big planes, seating a few hundred people — are the safest way to travel, actually." He likes plane travel, though he hasn't really done that in a long time now. Well, there's a limited exception but they sure as hell don't have big commercial jets anymore. Someday, he's sure they'll have them again.
He wants to argue about electricity. He loves technology, the advancement of it, science making everyone's lives better. It's hard in a place like this where everyone has been screwed up and burned out, though.
"When we get some really cool tech working, I'll show you some exciting stuff. Way better than plain old fire," he promises. That will have to do for now.
"Vinland," he says, thinking. "Yeah, I think that's North America somewhere. Japan, where I'm from, is much farther east than Constantinople." If only they had a globe or a world map or a working cell phone or something.
He knows the trip across the Atlantic was pretty dangerous even in the 1700s or something. All the way back in Randvi's time? No wonder she's worried about it.
"Then I better get you home as soon as possible so you can see her off, huh?" He's not sentimental, not really, but he's not an unfeeling island either.
no subject
Randvi smiles at the promise. “If one day we are able to open that small house at the resort, I’d imagine there will be something ‘cool’ in there.”
Hopefully not something that will kill them instantly, but who knows?
On her map at home, Vinland is so far from everything and across such uncertain waters that it sits on its own scrap of paper on her table. “If everything goes perfectly from start to finish, I expect her to return in nine weeks. But there's no way to know whether anything has gone wrong.”
no subject
Of course all of that is gone now, crumbled away into mostly nothing since there was no one to maintain it for more than three millennia but YOU KNOW.
He grins at her comment about the locked house.
"Ten billion percent likely we're gonna find something cool as hell in that house," he says. "Wouldn't be locked if it wasn't hiding something cool."
Of course, his definition of "cool" might be a little skewed. Even something dangerous would be cool as far as he's concerned. He thinks things are exciting that normal people would run far away from.
"Nine weeks is a long time, especially with no way to communicate," he says. He'd re-invented the cell phone and radio communication at home before a big chunk of the kingdom of science went gallivanting off around the world, but even then they hadn't been sure when they'd get back to Japan.
"Guess you just prepare best you can, huh?"
Maybe he can send something back with her that will help. He's not sure how this multiverse travel stuff works, but that's a question to solve once they figure out how to do it at all.
no subject
It seems like an ambitious undertaking, but that isn't out of character for Senku, she thinks.
“Perhaps the lock is merely automated and nothing remains inside.” Randvi doesn't really believe this, but she wants to show off her new vocabulary a bit. “I must admit that I'm excited to see inside it as well.”
Nine weeks is forever, and while she knows all of the reasons that it's necessary (or at the very least inevitable) nerves have driven her to prepare as much as possible.
“I have to send her alone, nearly unarmed and in disguise. We can't justify sending a team of raiders to sea for months while my husband is also away. I have a trader who has agreed to handle the sailing and I'm doing my best to coordinate with our allies who may know about the activities of our target there, but...” she laughs helplessly. “I apologize, I think about this far too often.”
no subject
It's too ambitious, really, and there are some who can't be saved. He's aware of that. Some are too broken, too degraded, stuck in weird places or whatever. But every single person that is able to be saved, he plans to save them once they have the infrastructure and all of that.
He's surprised by automated. Who taught her that word? Good for them and good for her, really. She's a pretty fast learner and he's impressed. Though Senku doesn't tend to offer much praise about things like that beyond his flippant ten billion points remarks.
"You think about people you care about. Makes sense. But if we were all zapped here outta time and space anyway, logically to get us back we should all be able to go back to the point we were taken from. So you don't have to worry too much about your friend. Ideally, I get you back to as close to when you came from as I can. Don't ask me how yet, 'cause I dunno. But I will. I'll solve this multiverse question as we get more info. It's gotta be on this damn island somewhere."
no subject
She nods at his talk about their return. Of course she has no idea how it would work, but even now she trusts Senku to figure it out.
“She’s like you, a bit,” Randvi says, smiling. “Noble spirit. A big crack in her face.”
no subject
"The life I have sure as hell isn't what I thought it would be. I mean…I'm ten billion percent gonna do what I've been saying I was gonna do since I was a kid. I'm gonna go to space. The timeframe and circumstances just changed a little."
He tilts his head, considering how to explain that one.
"Space is…well, I'll be specific: I'm gonna go to the moon. It would probably take me a lot of explaining and specifics and going against some mythology, so you might argue with me about the possibility of it, but people went to the moon for the first time decades before I was born."
The way he talks about space is slightly less matter-of-fact than the way he talks about everything else. There's something else there in his voice. This is his dream. He's wanted to do this since he was a kid. It's the reason he became a scientist, in fact, and one of the only things he's ever close to getting nostalgic or sentimental about.
A half-cocked grin spreads at the mention of Randvi's friend. He touches one of the scars above his eyes.
"These are leftover from petrification," he says. "How'd your friend get her scars?"
no subject
“I wish you success in your endeavour, then.”
“Were they painful?” Randvi grimaces, imagining fissures forming in the stone over centuries. “My friend has terrible scars on her neck and skull from being mauled by a wolf as a child, but the one here -” she uses her finger to draw a slash from the left corner of her mouth to just below her eye - “She will not tell me how she got it, so I imagine it's embarrassing.”
no subject
"Thanks. I'm ten billion percent guaranteed to get there." He's been dedicated to this since before petrification, in fact. SPOILERS, he will eventually get there. You know, if he doesn't die on this island, whatever!
"Nah, they didn't hurt or anything. When I revived from being petrified, they were already there. They don't really feel like anything to me. Everyone else from my time that we've revived has something like this somewhere on them from being in the stone for so long. Seems to be a byproduct of corrosion after all the years we spent like that."
He looks surprised by her answer, but he's not used to stories like this, warriors and things being real. Then again, he knows a guy who literally punched a lion to death, so maybe he shouldn't be that shocked.
"Shit. That sounds way more painful. Sounds like she's lucky to be alive. Pretty tough and all, too. The kind to make it home from long ass voyages to who knows where."
That's his way of being reassuring, even if he's not great at it.
no subject
The attempt at reassurance makes her smile. “They call her Wolf-Kissed, a name she wears with pride. They say she killed the wolf herself.” The blacksmith Gunnar had told Randvi the tale, beaming with pride as if he were Eivor’s own father.
“She met me at the docks when I sailed to Fornburg to meet my husband - I was so frightened!” She laughs now, remembering it. “Two hands taller than me, all those scars, a voice like two stones scraping together... I think when the people on the radio say ‘Viking’ she is what they imagine.”
no subject
"Killed a wolf as a kid? That's pretty badass," he says with a grin. It is! He's seen fairly young people do wild shit, so he believes this as easily as Randvi believed him about being petrified.
He tries to picture this friend of Randvi's. He also doesn't tell her that most people think of Vikings as men, because history is sexist as hell. The most capable fighter the Kingdom of Science has is a woman, too, though she's small and fast, not big and fierce like Eivor.
"Well…I did think you'd be taller when I was picturing Vikings," he says, his grin shifting a little. He's clearly teasing.
no subject
She laughs, used to some ribbing about her height from the other warriors. “If you can believe it, my sister Thora is even smaller. She was furious when I surpassed her!”
no subject
Technically he's been petrified twice now but DETAILS.
He grins back. "Is she like you, ready to fight if she has to? I guess most of you guys probably are. From what I read about when you come from, it was pretty dangerous."
no subject
"She says that things are more stable in Norway now - with the clans united under Harald Fairhair there is much less internal raiding than when I lived there. However, she has four children, so I'd imagine so."