trainingwings | [Action/Video]

Entry tags:

[Action/Video]

[Not necessarily every day Luceti gets an emperor incognito running around. Or really, just walking around with the slightest slump as if to carefully disguise his military upbringing. He's pretty good at it, too. He appears to be soaking things in, his black-and-silver wings folded as tightly as possible against his back, betraying a heck of a lot of tension in this new and nervous environment. Green foliage betrays Earth; ergo, Luceti must be somewhere on Earth. Held by someone who has a use for a twenty-five-year-old foreign ~~mascot~~ head of state. Could be anyone. Simon Illyan must be having conniptions. He can't even imagine his Prime Minister.

He doesn't expect to be recognized by galactics. Barrayar is so backwoods by galactic standards that he'd be a lot more surprised if he was recognized. Still, his name itself is plenty widespread--not everyone has a planet named after their family--so it'd be best to use the Bleakman alias he'd cooked up while trying to go to sleep.

Still. Wings. If this makes him count as a mutant, his anxieties over being Emperor are officially moot. There's a disturbing amount of comfort in that.

Round and round he goes, getting dizzier and dizzier from hunger until he finally heads into Seventh Heaven and offers to work to pay for food.

Imagine his surprise.

Other than that, he'll be around town, starting no conversations, examining things a little too long, and mostly looking preternaturally blank. Or, to some eyes, just plain glum.

At some point, he'll finally say something over the journals, which are easy enough to figure out.]

Excuse me. [The slightest lift to one eyebrow as he realizes how weird and liberating it feels to address a question to an entire network of people without a full security team, monitors, holoprompter, etc.] Is anyone looking for hired help?

Player Name: Tori
Are you new?: No!
Character Name: Gregor Vorbarra
Character Fandom: The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

What sort of payment do you expect? No money here, so no need to concern yourself about that if that's the problem.

Right. [There's an indecisive pause.] I guess I just want to work.

[Find out what he's good at. Besides the state crap that's been drilled into him since his father died.]

Running errands requires no real intelligence or skill.

[A contemplative pause. No intelligence or skill? Misses the point of this exercise.]

Anything else?

[...No, it doesn't.]

Carton of milk.
Pack of eggs.
Loaf of wheat bread.
A pack each of Swiss, mozzarella, and cheddar cheese.
Pound of ham.
Pound of roast beef.
Pack of cigarettes-- not low tar.

And you get a gold star if you're at Community House 2, room 21 in an hour.

[Not to Sherlock, at least!]

[A grocery list. Cute. Gregor considers this. Navigating a grocery store by himself. No ImpSec guards patiently humoring him on some little domestic fantasy. Would he be able to find everything?

Still, playing errand-boy isn't greatly appealing with or without being used to being the one ordering errand-boys around. He can always attempt the grocery store later.]

I might. But I meant if there's any other work.

You asked for work. You have it.

Now, let's see you actually prove you can manage simple tasks before we worry about anything more taxing.

[...Wow. WOW.

He's being asked to prove himself before he's given anything else. This is...actually pretty amazing. He's not starting at the top, so he can actually work his way up. On his own merit.

And yes, he's being bossed around by some guy he doesn't know, but damned if he's not tempted to get groceries for him anyway.

Aral would swallow his own tongue. Simon would establish a perimeter and pray the Emperor got over this madness.

Cordelia would say it's good for him. That's the voice that finally spurs him.]

House 2, room 21?

2-21, yes.

Now, shall we test your memory, while we're at it? Or should I write it down?

[Either way?

There's the grocery shopping done and one less thing John can nag him about this week.]

[A vaguely impatient sigh.] Just write it down. [Gregor has no drive to prove himself to this man.]

[ And, magically, there it is, in a tidy, if stunted scrawl. ]

Carton of milk (2%)
Pack of eggs
Loaf of wheat bread
A pack each of Swiss, mozzarella, and cheddar cheese
1lb sliced ham
1lb sliced roast beef
Breakfast tea (usually a large box of tea bags but if you can find them triangular that is even better)
1 pack of cigarettes (low tar)

To Community House 2, flat 21

Thanks for the help! :) [ Yes, he has even scrawled a small smiley, although it is right side up ]

Edited 2012-03-06 06:24 (UTC)

[Legible but not quite as neat, though with a heavier press of the pen, three more words appear.]

Not low tar.

You're on a diet.

[Gregor watches this exchange with growing intrigue and amusement. Who are they? Friends? Family? Partners? Somewhat vitriolic, regardless. So much so that he's reminded of Miles and Ivan. Okay. First to find the grocery store. As small as the town is, it doesn't take him too long. After that, he has to start figuring out the whole system to the grocery store--oh, all the fresh produce is at one end, which makes sense, so you only have to install refrigeration on that end. Or wait...then there's refrigeration over here for frozen things. This makes no sense. And then all along one wall for dairy, meat, eggs. Breakfast teas are not in the same place as other beverages, and he stares at a prepackaged box of tea bags in his hand, perplexed. Just how much was being spent back home to ensure he always had loose-leaf tea? Heaven forbid anything cheap wind up in the Imperial Stomach.

All the while, he pauses to crack the journal open to keep reading this fascinating conversation. The more he knows, the better he can get along.

Eventually, he goes back to the conversation to discuss the item that would make his Betan foster-mother wince the most.]

Which is it to be? Tar or low tar?

[No gold star for him--he's been here fifty-eight minutes by the time he writes this.]

Low tar, please? He's just going to chew them anyway.

[The camera catches the slightest grin that's still a grin ever.]

All right.

[He offers a humored grin at that, at least. Hasn't been around long, but he's already well aware of the lack of meaningful work to grab on.]

Place can be pretty underwhelming when it comes to jobs; for a while I thought it'd be a pretty nice vacation, but dammit if I'm not already itching to throw myself into any kind of work.

Mm. [A noncommittal sound. Being a conversationalist takes effort on Gregor's part.] I take it if you knew of anything, you'd be doing it.

[That melancholy glaze to his eyes gets glazier.]

Aaaah, I wouldn't say that. It just depends on how desperate you start getting. There's doing things like working shops, and then there's extreme measures. [Shruuuug] Like... reading to people because they're too lazy to.

[Not that he heard the above conversation. Nooo sir.]

If you're any good at fighting, then you'll have a hell of a lot better chance at finding things to do. A lot of people here aren't too savvy, and in a place where war can be around the corner? It helps to know things.

[The slight lift of one eyebrow. Being the head of a military caste--the Vor, in a sense--Gregor's starting to wonder if he's about to feel right at home. Except not, because even in the military, he had a cushy station job with ImpSec eyes on him at all times.]

I wasn't aware Earth was having internal conflict. [Absolutely everything he knows is filtered through Simon Illyan, head of Imperial Security, but Illyan can generally be trusted to let him know when something like that goes down.]

Not just Earth; this place, too. We could have a batch of angel-people fall on our heads, considering how half-competent the leaders here are. [He shakes his head. What can ya' do?] My Earth's a little more difficult to handle, though, so... I can manage this place. Definitely.

Edited 2012-03-07 01:33 (UTC)

[If Doyle is looking closely, he might see a flash of doubt on Gregor's face. It's something normally only the people closest to him would catch.]

You don't think this is Earth.

... Earth?

I'm sorry to throw you off, but this place? It's not earth. Unless I've hit my head and I'm hearing and seeing things different, because everyone's said otherwise, and I've got no room to doubt them.

[A pause, like he's about to conspire.

And then he loses out to a dull humor in his expression. ]

Besides, I saw a giant talking wolf and people who can sling water and fire around with their minds. I don't have enough imagination to just be dreaming this up.

So maybe it's the Cetagandan Empire. [A pause.] That makes more sense than Earth.

[Genetic engineering being a lifestyle for Cetagandans, to the point where the haut may or may not be considered human any longer. Maybe they're on a little patch of Eta Ceta, or more likely, some poor conquered terraformed outlying moon or planet, cultivated to look like Earth to throw off the inhabitants. But when the Cetagandans keep prisoners, they don't generally have them in such posh conditions. Moreover, no one has better reason to kidnap and mutate the Emperor of Barrayar than the Cetagandans. Quite brilliant on their part. Are they planning to send him back to his mutanophobic planet as-is? Or is this a purely surgical change?

He suddenly does not want to imagine his heirs being born with tiny wings. Not that they would be heirs to anything at that point. With him no longer Emperor, the last Vorbarra, there would be an upheaval. Civil war. Aral Vorkosigan would never make a claim to the throne, his son would never be allowed it, and both would probably wind up assassinated before the Cetagandans flew in to pick up the pieces...

This is making him need antacids. Of course, if it's really the Cetagandans, killing him would be cheaper and quicker and just as efficient. Unless they really were trying to engineer wings into, say, the haut genome, in which case, waste not.]

A lot more sense.

... [Dear god. No. Why did he have to keep running into all these science-fiction-y people. His brain is prone to melting, if he keeps surrounding himself in what his world would consider a hideous acid trip.

Or a LARP. But Lord knows there was no time for that nerdy stuff when there were raging virus-infected people trying to poke your eyeballs out.]

You're from a crazy-ass place, aren't you.

Mm. [Which is all Gregor is going to say on the subject. A noncommittal noise. He thinks what Doyle said was rather succinctly put. Still, contemplating his crazy-ass home and his crazy-ass place as a very potentially crazy-ass feudal lord over all of it is giving him an even blanker look. The snapshot the camera captures could be construed as either extremely strict or unbelievably depressed.]

I don't know about hired, but... if you're willing to help me out, I'm trying to start a garden on the roof of one of the buildings! Do you know anything about plants?

[Gregor doesn't look too closely at the picture on the journal. Mostly, he peers up at the rooftops of the community buildings, trying to determine how viable such a venture would be. All his gardens were done professionally.]

Not really.

That's okay! Neither do I, actually. But I bet you could still help, and if we manage to grow anything, you can even have some!

[The roofs of the apartment buildings are fairly flat, and he might see some trellises at the edge of one of them, as if someone is, indeed, trying to start a vegetable garden.]

Flowers or vegetables?

Vegetables. I've promised some to the birds, too, as long as they leave the plants alone while they grow! I mean, if they grow, that is.

But if I could find some Lunar Tears, I might try growing those, too. They're the prettiest flower I ever saw!

[Talking animals here. Right. Another genetic alteration, except he didn't know such a thing was physically possible. He wonders what kind of vocabulary they have.]

I guess I could try.

Great! Thank you so much! I'm on the roof of C4, it's straight south of the fountain.

[He's draw a crude little map, circling the building with a slightly uneven circle.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Action/Video]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[ Written ]

[ Written ]

[ Written ]

[ Written ]

[ Written ]

[ Written ]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice] 1/2

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[writing]

[writing]

[writing]

[writing]

[writing]

[writing]

[writing]