30 Day OTP Challenge, day 5: Kissing
Nov. 25th, 2012 02:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dianeduane
“Remind me why we’re here again?”
“Privacy.”
A rather prolonged silence. Then: “…Yeah.”
“I mean, you did say…”
“I did.”
“Be hard to get much more private than this.” A point it would have been hard to refute, as they are sitting on a lone nickel-iron asteroid floating in utter darkness, and the nearest other matter was literally millions of lightyears away.
“Uh, yeah. How many universes over?”
“I didn’t ask. I mean, the transport subsidy is unlimited until the Invitational’s over…”
“A lot of energy to be spending…”
“Yeah. But all the small print said was ‘Don’t waste it.’ I don’t think this is wasted. And it’s the user’s call.”
Another brief silence.
“And anyway, it’s not like we did it in actual distance. We’re right where Earth would be. This is just a much smaller continuum. That’s this whole inhabited universe, up there.”
“No wonder it’s a little on the dim side.”
“Yeah, well, these are the cheap seats.”
A little more silence, but more comfortable now. “It must be really small.”
A nod: two shoulders leaning together, as the two of them sit in the dark and what would be cold if it could be felt through their forcefields. In the stillness, one of them lifts a hand and holds it up, covering the small bright-burning patch way up there in the vast darkness, and by that gesture alone shutting it away from view.
“Who was it that said— I forget. Something I was reading. Whoever wrote this thing, she had a dream and said she saw the whole universe, the entire sheaf of khiliocosms, as a little thing like a nut, something you could hold in your hand. And something said to her, ‘Everything’s going to be okay. More than everything: every kind of everything. It’s all going to be okay…’”
The hand drops. The other wizard leans his head toward her a little: a sideways look. “Nice message. Kind of an antidote, I guess, for the times when you feel small.”
A sigh. “Yeah. Though they’re both true, I think. Sure, we’re small. But big, too. We can do a lot, with what we’ve got.”
“Sometimes even without it.”
“Yeah.”
After a few breaths, there (in the silence) comes a signal that only a wizard would be capable of noting or understanding, as one of the pair makes a slight change in the carefully tailored body-surrounding spell, and the two forcefields go conjoint. The two of them lean together still, but they’re breathing the same air, now.
The change is noted, but for the moment no one moves. One of them laughs, though.
“What?”
“Oh…” A snicker. “Carmela and Ronan. And all her after-dinner plans. I still remember her saying, ‘I refuse to even think about doing this anywhere that Google might see me.’”
A snort. “After all her big talk!”
“Yeah. All I could do was laugh. Does she think Google can see her from space or something?”
Laughter, but a bit wry. “Look, it’s Google. They have their own powers. Not to mention that there are wizards working for them, because how else would so much of their data make it into the Manual as secondary spin content? So she might have a point.”
“Well,” and a smile underneath the word, “I really doubt that Google’s made it out quite this far.”
“Hmm. No, don’t see any of those little cars…”
“Or spaceships…”
“Nope.”
“Nice and quiet out here.”
“Yeah.”
“Except…”
“What?”
“For some people who keep talking.” Another smile.
“Uh.”
“Nervous much?”
A voice gone quieter. “Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know. It’s stupid.”
“Yeah.”
“No reason for it…” And a shyish grin under the words, clearly audible.
“None at all.”
Silence. Stretching. Stretching long.
...Contact.
And then, in the quiet… something clearing its throat. Someone.
A brief stunned moment as two heads whip around in shock and embarrassment.
Then one voice says, “Chao??” And after an annoyed pause, and eyes almost audibly rolling, “Oh, all right, what is the—“
And the other says, “What is the meaning of this??!!”
The Transcendent Pig blinks.
Then blinks again. “That’s a new one,” it says. “Which by itself is nothing to sneeze at, when you’ve been around as long as I have.”
“Never mind that! What the f— Are you stalking us?”
The Pig rolls its eyes. “Please,” he says. “Like I can help being omnipresent. Or as if you’re interesting enough for me to stalk.”
“Chao,” Nita says, “what are the odds? Seriously. Some wizards go their whole lives without seeing you. The vast majority of wizards, in fact. And we see you… three times now?”
“Once might have been an accident. Twice looks like coincidence. Three times…”
“Oh, stop it! I’m nobody’s enemy.”
“Then this is worse. You’re just nosey.”
The Pig sighs a put-upon sigh. “You have to admit,” he says, “there’s some popular interest in this particular prospect…”
“What?”
“Popular where?”
“Oh no, not a word! I do not want to know about this meta stuff!”
“It’s not like it’s exactly new theory,” the Pig says. “The odds are strong that if you exist somewhere, then someplace down the yottabillion branchings of the khiliocosm, you’re fiction—”
“Lalalalalalalalalala, not listening to this, not listening…!”
“…But wait a minute. ‘Yotta’? There’s a limit to the number of possible universes?”
“Oh no, you’re not getting me to go there, this could be so disruptive—”
“No, seriously, this is interesting! Because if you say ‘yotta’ then it implies that the next prefix up wouldn’t be any good, it wouldn’t be precise enough, and that means—”
“Kit, listen, I’ll help you do that lalalala thing if you want.”
“Oh no, dude, you got her started. Now she’s going to chase you all over the landscape ‘for Science’ until you answer her. And you’ll deserve it. Way to ruin the mood!”
A snort. “Sweet Powers that Be in a bucket, I’ve lived long enough to have a mere snip of a mortal call me ‘dude’—!“
“Yotta or not, Chao? Were you hedging your bets? Speaking figuratively? Or did you accidentally paint yourself into a corner? What’s smaller than infinity but bigger than 10-to-the-24th? Come on, let’s have it —”
“Speaking figuratively, of course that’s a preferred mode for me, everybody knows that—”
“Everybody who doesn’t see you often enough to start picking up on your patterns! And anyway, you used the Speech word for it, which implies—”
“It doesn’t imply anything. What it does suggest is that somebody’s doing a whole lot of inferring—“
One of the participants in this discussion covers his face. “How is this happening to me? I was just about to k— We were about to— There was something going to happen and instead we’re having a fight about metric prefixes?!”
“It’s not a fight. He’s trying to distract me, that’s all, and he’s doing a real bad job of it! Admit it, Chao, it’s plain that—”
Then, suddenly, an outbreak of irrepressible laughter. “Plain that the geeks have a new Queen, because only you would be doing this to who you’re doing it to!”
“Doing what? He won’t answer that question, the usual question, fine, so let him answer this one! Come on now, Chao, how many universes, how can telling somebody this possibly be a problem—”
“Chao.”
“Uh, yes, cousin?”
“Taking any advice today?”
“All the time, actually. Right now in fact.”
“Good. Cut your losses and run.”
“Good advice, that. High-end advice. Best I’ve had all day. Dai stiho, you two—”
And the Transcendent Pig is suddenly much less there than he is everywhere else.
And Nita… just snickers.
“What?”
“Well, he’s gone, isn’t he?”
After a moment, Kit laughs too. “Every other wizard in the universe wants to keep him around… and you…”
A snort. “His fault. He keeps showing up without warning? Fine, I’m getting used to him doing that now. If he wants to be treated with more respect, he should call first, or text or something.”
“He’s got hooves. How would he text?”
“He’s been here since before the beginning of the universe. I’m sure he’d figure something out.” And then a sigh: but an amused one. “Where were we?”
“Discussing metric prefixes.”
“Before that.”
“Google.”
“No,”
“Spacesh-hhhmmf!”
And then…
…silence… almost. A warm silence: a close silence. One in which breath simply gets forgotten about, a couple of times.
And then some gasping, not very well controlled or concealed. And finally:
“That was way better than the first time.”
“Anything would be better than the first time.”
“I don’t know, if you think about it we weren’t reallymmffff—“
Silence. More of it, and still more. And then at last some breath, as all parties involved finally work out the ever-fraught question of what to do with their noses.
“Mff.”
“Yeah.”
“…On a scale of ten?”
“Too soon for an answer. We need a bigger statistical sampling.”
“For you, or for Scien-mmmfff!”
…silence…
“…Heh.”
To the master post and links to the other days of the challenge
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-11-25 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-25 04:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-25 04:18 pm (UTC)yes, Kit, this is in fact your life. sorry, bro. :D
no subject
Date: 2012-11-25 06:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2012-11-25 06:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-25 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-25 08:38 pm (UTC)yeaah. heh.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-25 11:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-04 05:06 pm (UTC)The best thing about this storylet is not the Transcendent Pig.
The best thing about this storylet is WIZARD JULIAN OF NORWICH. Was she an abdal? I could totally see it.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-16 07:52 am (UTC)