legionworld | (no subject)

Who| Ina and you!
What| Technology is fascinating.
Where| Some corridor near the obs deck.
When| Before Tinker Tailor etcetc.
Warnings/Notes| idk

Really, a door ought to be the last thing on Ina's mind.

She was in a strange, unfamiliar place ("spaceship"??). She'd been torn away from one war, thrust into another (they didn't call it a war, but how else would she describe it?). Most of what she'd been told about her new circumstances didn't make much sense at all, and half the words might as well not have been translated, for all the sense they made. Eventually they'd given her very clear, simple directions to the observation deck, which they suggested might help her put things into perspective, and she'd set off down the hall and -

The door had slid open when she was a meter away, and she'd stopped.

How did it do that?

She moved backwards a couple of meters, and watched as the door slid shut again.

Stepped forward, watched it open.

Please interrupt her before she does this all night.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Foreigners couldn't be expected to know those sorts of manners, she supposed, but Grif did seem like the type who would neglect them even if he knew better. So she magnanimously did not point out his rudeness, and continued on beside him.

"I've gotten the impression that without understanding that, there's very little here I can hope to understand."

They'd used the word so much. How were they expecting her to follow?

"It... yeah, pretty much," Grif admitted.

They came up on the deck proper then and Grif stepped aside, making an after-you gesture toward the rail so Inahime could get a good look. He hadn't thought about the view from the deck in any detail in a month or two, really. There was the white and green and blue expanse of the Earth below, looking way too finite. There was the mess of the lunar debris field (because of course someone had blown up the moon, this universe had superheroes running around, why the fuck not?) glittering much closer than the cold, distant stars.

He still couldn't decide how it made him feel. Small, mostly. Very, very small. Grif pushed the thought away and instead focused on his chips.

"Space, Ina. Ina, space," he introduced between crunches.

Edited 2016-09-04 23:46 (UTC)

Stars were one thing. She'd seen stars, of course. Everyone had seen stars.

But stars were supposed to be up above you, not up and down and in every direction, and if that big ball below them was green and blue then it must be -

She made a sound of surprise that was somewhere between a gasp and a squeak, her hand moving up to cover her mouth.

Please hold, brain rebooting.

Crunch crunch crunch crunch.

Paper rustled.

"Chip?"

Grif offered her the open end of the bag.

She didn't answer. (Introducing her to strange modern foods was going to have to wait for another moment.)

"We're in the sky," she said, awestruck. "We're...all the way in the sky?"

Grif pulls the bag back with a little shrug to himself. In times of uncertainty, food has always been there for him. Oh well. It'll last longer if he's not sharing.

"It turns out the sky is really fucking big," he offers.

Grif the astronomer, everybody.

He was crude to be sure, but she was still a little too taken aback to comment on it.

"But we won't....fall?"

What went up had to come down. Even kites, sooner or later. And to be in some kind of humongous castle (?), that seemed like it ought to fall more quickly than most things.

"Okay so," said Grif, stalling for a second as he tried to remember how science worked, "it's like... the further you are away from a planet the less it pulls on you? It's gravity. You'd have to ask a nerd about this shit, I don't know, but nah we won't fall. Unless you jumped out, I guess. ...Probably."

His brow furrowed as he thought, trying to find something better to say than that, then he just gave up and shrugged.

"Science is kind of bullshit sometimes."

Thank you, Neil deGriffe Tyson.

Edited (tense) 2016-09-09 01:54 (UTC)

"It all looks more like magic, to me." Maybe that was a bit of exaggeration; she had a hard time imagining even the most powerful onmyoujitsu doing something on such a grand scale, but that, at least, was an idea she could even begin to place.

"Anything where you don't know how it works is basically magic." Grif kind of agreed, at least. "But you never admit that if you want to sound smart."

Which he did pretty often.

"I don't see how that should affect one's intelligence."

Magic was perfectly real, after all. (Said the woman from a world where people could temporarily make themselves invulnerable or cause their weapons to spontaneously burst into flame.)

"Because magic's not real?" said Grif almost automatically.

Wait a second.

Back up one.

"...Where I'm from, anyway. And maybe here too, I'm actually not a hundred percent sure on some of the crap they can do around here."

I mean, they did stop Galactus by loosing a scary space ghost on him.

"It's not terribly common, but it's perfectly real."

She meant it, despite the fact that she was from a place that would take light bulbs to be magic, too.

Grif eyed her with at least a little suspicion.

"Alright, shoot. What kind of magic do you have? Cause we just had some dudes who made you look the other way while they made elephants disappear and shit."

"Onmyōdō covers a fair range of things, to my knowledge. Use of the elements, shikigami...Kanetsugu used it to shoot energy from his sword in battle."

Falling to one of Yukimura's friends as an example was almost reflexive, but it left a bad taste in her mouth the moment the words came out. After the way the lines of battle had been drawn, after everything that happened...

"A-anyway, I'm far from an expert in the matter, but I've seen it used many times."

"I didn't understand most of that, so I'm just going to take it to mean that you guys have magic that's probably real."

Probably.

"I'm still going to call shit magic if I don't know how it works. I don't have to know how it works if it just does."

He shrugged almost apologetically, and then crunched another chip.

As crude as he was, perhaps he did have a point in that.

"So it's enough to know that it works. And if attributing it to magic makes some think me stupid, I doubt very much that their opinions matter anyway."