Coffee and Shopping

[spindown]

Who: Rosalind and any soul who is unlucky enough to run into her.
Where: Sand Dollars and the Sundries Shop
What: Harassing her roommate, shopping, having coffee.
When: June, before the camping excursion.
Warnings: Science nonsense and rudeness, probably quantum shenanigans and blood.



Locked to Phil

Rosalind woke up on this boat in a room that both is and is not her own, without her partner that both was and was not herself. The sequence of events that lead her here were harrowing but, in the face of a strange cruise liner and stranger occupants, she finds she actually misses them. She caught glimpse of her roommate when she first arrived, a strange fellow that she hadn't given more than a passing glance as he lie in bed, largely because he was not Robert and that was her greatest concern. Now, having finished muster and being freed from the bonds of whatever force compelled her to attend, she returns to find that she is, somehow, roomed with a non-biblical angel.

She considers the winged fellow as one might consider a particularly curious looking grandfather clock. She knows all the parts involved and, whether she approves of the aesthetic or function, it will continue existing just to spite her. Still, there's no call to be rude, and if she's to be stuck with a roommate it tracks that she should, perhaps, know his name.

"What are you called?" she asks primly, by way of greeting, and crosses the room to examine the bed and the various technological amenities.



Open - Sand Dollars

This ship may lack proper library facilities, be run largely on magic, and be staffed by ghosts, but at least it has coffee. It would have truly been intolerable without some ready source of caffeine and, frankly, she couldn't abide tea. So she sits in the little cafe, Sand Dollars it's called, and reads a terrible, trashy fiction novel about time travel while sipping a very strong, very hot cappuccino. She has a small plate before her filled with madeleines and, every few minutes, makes a derisive hum as she turns the page of her book.



Open - Sundries

The sundries store has a number of useful and useless items, but lacks quite a lot of the amenities she is accustomed to. Or, at least, the versions of those amenities she is accustomed to. It appears to have the lot of them in some more modern format, but they are not things she recognizes immediately. So, with a great deal of frustration, Rosalind spends quite a long time sorting through the items on sale at the shop. She turns over the packaging, reads the labels, reads the chemical composition information (one of the few modern touches she wholly approves of) and then moves down the line.

If you've never seen a Gibson girl reading various convenience store groceries like they're a fascinating novel, now you have.

Comments

[spindown]

Rosalind nods and makes a small 'ah' sound. She had refrained from comment, largely because it was terribly rude to talk about physical features that one cannot adjust. If he dislikes them, however, and they are not native, then they are fair game for commentary.

"I used to have an intern who suffered from something similar," Rosalind tells him, sympathetically, or as close to sympathetically as she is capable of being.

"Industrial accident," she clarifies because it naturally follows that she should tell the tale. She debates whether or not to continue and her expression goes a bit strange as she does. It doesn't shift so much as, suddenly there's two of her and, when she moves, they fall out of sync leaving a ghostly sort of afterimage in her wake.

She decides: yes, she probably should tell the tale. The other Rosalind, however, decides no, and moves away from the conversation, talking about something else. Something neither of them are currently privy to as she is entirely silent.

"He got too close to a quantum anomaly I was researching and got a nasty jab from what was, previously, a harmless sea slug. The effects the entangled creature had on him were rather stunning. His extra appendages did not manifest quite as...nicely as yours. It is unfortunate that you must suffer them, of course, but they aren't made of keratin and spare index fingers so...at least you have the aesthetics."

Did I mention she is bad at conversation and being personable?

cw for implications of suicide

[goodweather]

Yes, you did very much mention.

Given the, uh... the whole sternness of this woman, the aloofness of that second image, and the quite severe topic at hand, Phil comes to the conclusion that maybe he should probably not make mention of... this? At some point he'll have to ask--if they're stuck living in the same space, he'd prefer to know--but. Not now. It feels improper.

So, despite his uneasy glancing at her second image, instead he addresses what he's actually being told.

"That's... terrible. I'm very sorry for him. Yes, I do consider myself fortunate, knowing that it could have been worse--" (like tentacles, Jesus, he'd heard krakens and jellyfish were an option for some people) "--and that I got a gift out of it. I don't make much use of it, though. I don't usually have a reason to fly, and I have sort of a problem with heights."

A "problem," he says, as if he hadn't repeatedly dropped himself from five stories up until it became routine. It would've been higher if Punxsutawney had any taller buildings.

[spindown]

"I felt similarly in my youth," Rosalind admits and feels like that is quite a secret. Phil, however, entirely lacks the context around that. "Ironic, perhaps, that my legacy was predominantly tied to making a city fly. I was never terribly fond of living in it, but one works where the opportunities are."

She has been standing for some time just speaking, and while she's entirely comfortable with this, she had been made to understand that most people were not. Most people, for some reason, didn't like to stand in one place for a long time and speak. (Strange, but not explicitly inconvenient.)

"Would you like a cup of coffee, I'm given to understanding we have some in the room? I should like to compare it to the shops to see if I need walk down every morning or not."

[goodweather]

Phil's eyebrows shoot up when Rosalind mentions her legacy. He'd already entertained the thought when she'd started talking about building her own professional weather machines in a day, but he's more sure now that he's just been roomed with one of those once-in-a-generation firecrackers that become part of the general schooling curriculum. Now, he could have taken it as a euphemism, but given his experience, he's far more willing to treat it literally these days. The woman literally has a double image wandering around the room.

"I... yes, it would be appreciated, thank you."

Should he sit? That seems impolite.

"If--if you don't mind me asking, you say you made a city fly? People, buildings, infrastructure and all?"

[spindown]

Rosalind putters, as does the other version of herself. She seems a little surprised when she spots the variation but says nothing as she sets about filling and activating the small coffee maker on the dresser. Once it has burbled to life and she is sorting through the many small packets in the dish next to it, she answers his questions.

"If we are speaking technically," she begins and its very, very clear that she prefers to speak technically. "Each structure that required suspension began with a layer of entangled material that was then encased in a great many helium balloons, steel beams, and propellers. People, it turns out, are considerably more comfortable if there is an apparent apparatus by which they assume levitation operates, you see. Atop that bit of theatrical frippery any and all facilities were built.

"The vertical position of the suspended molecules were my doing, as were the controls to adjust that position in space. The rest of the city taking flight was...more or less incidental. Like hanging a shelf and then having...someone build a city on it."

She's not given to diminishing her own work, but she's also not given to letting people credit her for more than is her doing. She can't make just anything take flight...well...she can but the process is rather unfriendly to most living creatures and better suited to advanced preparations.

"I will say, some of the secondary engineers were quite clever, in their way. The Battleship Bay false beach and shoreline was an exceptionally interesting attraction amid all the interlocking platforms. I've never been one for the outdoors but the fact that they were ambitious enough to build it was almost worth the energy to keep it suspended and heated."

[goodweather]

Phil, of course, can only halfway keep up, but he gets the gist. Lots of science and physics-defying stuff, potentially quantum judging by that "entangled material" line, to suspend things mid-air with a whole lot of propellers and what-have-you attached to ease the minds of the people living on top of a city hovering in the air.

And yet she's not dressed a bit like all of those cyberpunk sci-fi icons all the movies tout. He thinks he might be finally starting to get a proper grasp on where she's from.

"Christ," he huffs. "We haven't got anything like that. As far as things in the air go, we've got jet planes and commercial airliners, but that's as far as it gets. Space... well, we only just got a photo of a black hole just a little while ago."

He's surrounded by so many extraordinary people in these alternate dimensions it's hard not to feel a little inadequate, but most of them also usually come saddled with some terrific unresolved trauma. Phil's just happy he got all of that out of the way before he got here.

"You make it sound as though the making and suspension of this city wasn't something you had in mind when you were... developing all of this technology. Were you conscripted, or?"