trainingwings | [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

[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.]

[Action/Video]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice] 1/2

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]