Logs:Sparks

Sparks
Dramatis Personae Lucien, Rocket
In Absentia Damien, Sera	2024-08-01 "Feelings are stupid."
Location <PRV> The Belfry - Le Bonne Entente - Astoria
Nestled just below the belfry and above the gardeners' workshop and storage rooms, this penthouse apartment is accessible only at the proprietor sufferance via a special panel in the elevator and a locked utility stairway. The whole of it is psi-shielded, and equipped with a largely unused power suppression grid as well. Spanning one and a half levels, this space could be mistaken for an extension of the conservatory below, with plentiful bookshelves and greenery spilling from every nook, but even a cursory examination will reveal the personal touches that went into its design, softening the neoclassical aesthetic of the building at large with paradoxically fastidious whimsy. The elevator shaft bridging the full level and the loft is, save for the doors, encased in the coral reef of an immense cylindrical aquarium that houses a thriving tropical community. The sitting room immediately adjoining this is bright and airy, open to the empty half of the story above, with a plush circular sectional couch, a low tea table, a sideboard and a bar, its walls covered with lush trellises where not taken up with recessed bookshelves. Opposite the oceanic entryway on the western wall, tall french doors lead to a crescent balcony with views of the waterfront and city beyond as well as the restaurant terrace and garden far below. To either side of the doors, floor to ceiling waterfall windows feed twin pools connected under a thick glass floor panel, an indoor pond lined with smooth river stones and stocked with hardy freshwater fish. On the other end of the apartment, tucked under the loft and behind the elevator shaft, is a large kitchen bracketed by a pantry on one end and a breakfast nook on the other, its culinary conveniences--even the the refrigerator and ovens--hidden behind opaque glass panels that light up at a touch with lists of their contents. An elegant floating stairway spirals up around the elevator cum aquarium, its balusters and those of the loft's railing above twined with well-trained philodendrons. The long wall of the loft showcases a variety of bows from historical and modern, humble to ornate. A no-nonsense workshop at one end of this gallery stores the less picturesque archery paraphernalia as well as a wide range of tools, striking a quaint contrast with the cozier if no less utilitarian study at the other end. Open offset doorways at either end lead to a capacious bedroom with a king sized bed, its walls graced with myriad orchids and other epiphytes in Greek sconces. The generously sized bathroom is tiled with mosaic scenes from classical mythology and has an entire corner dedicated to the antique clawfoot tub. The walk-in closet is similarly generous, with specialized storage for every imaginable accessory, and a hidden staircase leading to the belfry above and the exit below. There's music playing in the apartment, right now, a violin singing the soaring notes of Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending. Lucien is up high in the loft, dressed comfortably in soft worn jeans and a heather-grey short-sleeved henley, leaning over the immense fish tank so that he can add some brine shrimp and fish eggs for the colourful fish to go wild over. Down below, there's a package, neatly wrapped in some fine green cloth that is impossibly silky to the touch and tied round with a thin silver cord; the note atop it just says Rocket in ~~sophisticated calligraphy~~ wiggly letters. The sound of the elevator arriving precedes Rocket's arrival, his ears alert at the sound of music that already plays in the penthouse apartment. His flight suit is black with yellow highlights, and he wears a light red scarf around his neck. While he doesn't immediately spot Lucien, he's already talking loudly enough that he can be heard, "I saw a raccoon, I don't look anything like that fat naked moron!" He sniffs around a moment and then approaches the package warily, until he sees his name on the note. He picks up said note, and turns it over a couple of times in one hand, and then pets the silky package. "Oh..." he says in clear delight at this texture, then touches his scarf in order to properly compare. "I have heard that among some raccoon cultures, a good hefty layer of fat is a sign of prosperity." Lucien isn't looking back down, either, still engrossed in making sure that the more timid fish are not left behind in the feeding rush. "I picked you up a little something while I was out. It is not much, but I was told you'd parted with your entire collection and I thought it would make a good new start." "I've never been able to put on weight," admits Rocket, "If I could, I'd make a good fat bastard. They'd cower before my girth." He places his hands again on the fabric, then slips one claw into the knot of the silver cord to unfasten it. "Where were you out to, anyways? I don't take you for a homebody, but I figured you'd check in once in awhile to look after your wet pets." He pauses a moment before the final unveiling to add, "I looked after them, they looked at me with pleading eyes. Pathetic." "I had a bit of a --" Lucien hesitates, but then, maybe he is just distracted closing the tank back up and returning the food to the small freezer tucked into the aquarium supply cabinet. "I stumbled into another dimension. I did not have plans to be gone so long but the time differential is, ah, tricky." He tucks the small stepladder away as well, heading back down the stairs. "Thank you, for checking in on them. They do not have a great deal of dignity, especially when you have food. -- Ah, have you eaten recently?" He is drifting toward the kitchen. Within the silken wrapping is a small box, sturdy dark wood with a spiderweb design inlaid into it in some sort of pearlescent substance. In the box, on a bed of soft clean-smelling grass, is a small and nondescript chunk of some gold-sheened ore. Beside it is a small marble, dark and glimmering with specks -- a close eye might notice that the patterning very much resembles the night sky overhead, but then, this is New York, so how much anyone has seen of the night sky above is an open question. "I am afraid I have no expertise in the matter of spaceship parts, but I was assured that this was one of the ores on your list. I do hope it is enough." "Oh, that's why you were asking about other dimensions? Probably should have warned you about the time thing," says Rocket. He evaluates the items in the package. The marble first, he turns it about in his hands and then holds it up towards the light. "I had to barter my others away-- this is a real good one. Bet it rolls like a dream." He rolls it around on the pads of his palms for a few additional moments and slips it into one of the pouches on his suit. Then he then looks at the ore, but it's not until he picks it up that he seems to recognize it. "Uru... You found this? This is more than enough, this is," a genuine laughter starts to bubble up in his throat, almost sinister in its unpracticed tone, and he assures the ore, "I've got big plans for you! Big plans!" This celebration is not enough, however, to prevent him from adding: "I could eat." "It was an extremely bustling market, but I had help tracking it down," Lucien admits. He's puttering about the kitchen, getting out eggs, herbs, soft cheese. "From Damien. Some of your other marbles went into bartering for that ore, so maybe in some roundabout way they are coming back to you." He is glancing over towards the ore as he starts to crack eggs into a bowl. "Can I ask what it does? In a spaceship context, I mean. I heard a great many potential uses for it from the seller but I was not quite sure which were exaggerations. Will it really make your ship travel through time?" "Glad he's getting some use out of them, his help went a real long way," says Rocket, nodding his head quickly, "And sort of, I've never got the kind of efficiency that you'd think of as 'time travel', even though..." He rubs his chin, "Do you know much about time dilation? Your planet knows it, I think it was Einstein? Is that a familiar name to you? Apparently, pretty famous guy here." He shrugs, but presses on anyways, pulling out the marble again to hold it up demonstratively, "When you look at the stars, you're seeing them from a long time ago, 'cause light has a speed. Your closest star is like, what, five light-years from here? So if I came from there, I'd take 5 years if I hustled fast. If you sent me a distress signal, it'd take ten years for me to respond. And usually, people don't stay distressed that long, they die instead. For me, 'cause of time dilation, I could get here in a snap if I got close enough to light speed, days, hours or minutes even depending on how close, but it'd still be five years late for you." He then points at the ore, "But what if I could pin down time? Make my travel time match up with your perception of the travel time? Match the frame of reference of the general universe to mine? If you do it from the perspective of light, that's gonna be the instant transmission of data, and if you do it from the perspective of an object at near light speed, it can get to you way faster than it should." He taps a claw against the ore again, "I can craft that 'pin' with this." "I have heard of Einstein, but I know embarrassingly little about physics." Perhaps for this reason, Lucien is following along intently with Rocket's explanation. He's nodding slow as he starts to beat the eggs. "Goodness, he wasn't overselling the matter, then. I am beginning to understand that adage about sufficiently advanced science and magic." Though here his mouth twitches small at the corners. "-- Though I'm given to understand that rock holds a bit of both. I do think you are being just a little optimistic, though. I've known people on earth to remain distressed for simply decades. Probably longer, if they work at it." "Well, people don't usually call me for emotional distress," says Rocket, a bit skeptically, "I'm better with the kinds of problems that can be solved with explosions." He makes his hands into a ball and then quickly spreads them apart and splays his fingers. "Usually when there's emotional distress, I get sent away, actually. I'm a small dose kind of guy. The kind of guy who people like better when far, far away. A light-year or two." "People come in so very many flavours, no? Sometimes if your flavour is very distinct it just -- takes some more searching to find the one the ones that harmonize with it." Lucien is adding a pinch of salt, cracking some pepper, tearing some leaves from a some odd silverleafed herb whose small lacquered pot is a new addition to his indoor garden and ripping them small to add them as well. "It took me quite a chunk of life to find -- the types of people I can stand." His eyes have lowered to the eggs, which he's beating again now to stir their seasonings in well. "For what it is worth, I've found you a rather refreshing roommate. I was -- quite cheered when the elevator called." "If you start looking to the stars for guys you can stand, you've gotta have real strange tastes," says Rocket, though he concedes: "Though that's where I've always had my eyes." He looks a few moments longer at the marble and tucks it away again, watching Lucien's preparations. "You seem like the kind of guy people like, though. You've got a bunch of people who seem to really care for and respect you. Hell, I like you, it was good to hear the violins when I was coming up. How do you do it?" "The stars hold endless fascination, but, I haven't actually had to look far afield for strange people, the universe brings them into my orbit with some regularity." There's a quiet shimmer of laughter in Lucien's words, but his expression is composed and serious. He beats the eggs a moment longer before going to heat some butter in the pan. He is quiet, eyes fixed on the pan as the butter starts to melt. "Seem to," he finally agrees, with a faint and short-lived twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth. "I cannot say that I have always been adept at telling appearance from reality. Perhaps an irony given how much of my livelihood has been built on seeming to be the type of man people like." He shakes his head as he pours the beaten egg carefully out, tilting the pan one way and then the other to make sure it is covered. "Lie quite a lot, I suppose. Wear a hundred different faces for a hundred different people. I am not sure I can wholeheartedly endorse my methods." His brows lift, curious. "What parts of you have people had issue with?" "Not sure how much difference there even is between appearance and reality." Rocket crosses his arms, though one drifts up to rest on his collarbone lightly. "I could lie a lot, I'm okay at it. Say I don't want to take a big bite out of that butter. Say people take issue with me 'cause of how goddamn cool I am." He sniffs a couple of times at the air and shuts his eyes, "I don't think it's any part of me that people have issue with. When you take a machine apart, the individual parts are usually solid things, in single great pieces. But even if you've got a bunch of perfect parts, if they don't fit together, if they're sloppily slapped together. Then you got this... this thing never meant to be." He brushes his shoulder off, though there is nothing on it. "That was a tangent. People don't like that I'm rude, I think." Lucien is spreading a thick line of herbed Boursin down the center of the nascent omelette before he folds it closed. He is turning to his cutting board but detours, brief, to get a clean knife and cut off a small slice from the end of the unused butter. He sets the knife and its butter pat nearby Rocket on the counter and nudges over one of the several small stepstools that have sprouted around his apartment in recent weeks. Then turns to neatly chopping a line of fresh chives. "Rudeness is very contextual, I think. Manners so very different from one place to the next. New cultural norms can be learned, but for those people who will not like you for what you are..." There's a small strange tightening between Lucien's shoulders, rolling like he's adjusting the weight of a pack he isn't actually carrying. "I think in those cases there is little to do but to find people who don't try putting the world in such small boxes. A lot of the most wonderful parts of the universe were never meant to be, I think." Rocket steps up on the stool to take a look at the butter that's cut off, "Why don't people seem to eat these butters on their own anyways? Seems pretty nutritionally dense." He picks up the knife and licks it tentatively, nodding approval of the appetizer, though his head stays bowed as he looks motionless down to the butter. "There's no box big enough to hold the world I believe in. The universe is this big, big explosion that's always happening, and we've got our chance to be a little spark in it. And I like it, I like vegetable pets and night skies, I like big cities, spooky plant fields, and I like that dumbass looking fish." Here, Rocket points towards said fish. "You're right, nothing's really meant to be. And it's cool to be not meant to be. I just--" He clenches his hand tightly around the knife a few moments, then relaxes to cut through the slice. "Feelings are stupid." "Oh --" Lucien just breathes this out, quiet and wondering, his breath hitching for a moment. "Yes, the universe is --" He turns to look at the fish, and then back to his work. He is tucking his mixing bowl and cutting board and utensils into the dishwasher; washing the nonstick pan is quick work. "Cool, maybe, but also, I imagine, quite lonely." He touches the omelette very light with his spatula to test it before slicing it in two and sliding it neatly onto two plates. He sprinkles the chives delicately on top and offers one of the plates of omelette together with a fork down to Rocket. "Feelings are certainly often inconvenient, though I've just come from a world that gave me some new perspective on their utility." He is frowning down at his own omelette like he's forgotten quite what he meant to do with it. "How do you -- what do you do. When you don't fit together quite right, and don't fit in anywhere quite right. Where do you go when it gets -- too much?" Rocket picks up the fork in his free hand and starts cutting the omelette. "I felt more lonely out there when I was little. I missed my friends. But eventually, I got used to it. What's this called, anyways? I like how you combine foods together to make different foods." He nods approvingly, and his whiskers twitch. "I don't know how to do, where to go, when it's too much. Drugs? Try and get the adrenaline running?" He stabs the square he's cut. "Sometimes when I get involved in other people's shit from the space heroics, it's nice, because I have a place in their little explosion. For a little while." He makes a grunt that is almost a laugh. "It makes me forget everything else." "I think I know the feeling," Lucien admits, a little wry. "I somewhat recently learned that --" He hesitates, here, fingers pressing harder against the countertop. "I got some -- slightly jarring news. But, very politely, my sister went and got herself in a good deal of trouble at the time and in some ways it helped. When I am juggling so many other people's crises my own seem fairly trivial in comparison." He picks up his plate, now, and stops to get some variety of lightly-sweetened probiotic watermelon soda from the fridge and a bag of potato chips from the pantry before taking his plate to the breakfast nook. He sets the plate on the table, the drink on a lovely glass coaster, and tucks himself by the window. "This is an omelet. I could teach you, if you like. There are some basic tricks to combining food but once you learn them you can try all kinds of combinations. Sometimes they are disastrous and sometimes they are sublime, but there's a small delight each time in playing around with them." He's crushing the potato chips within the bag before opening it, sprinkling some of the crunchy rosemary-truffle crumbs atop before offering the bag out to Rocket with a lift of his brows. "And as long as the end result feeds you, it's a bit of a success no matter how disjointed the components."