Twenty-somethings gotta twenty-something

[mikangirl]

Who: Everyone invited, everyone gatecrashing (technically you're all invited, so...)
Broadcast: Who knows, maybe some drunken texting later on
Action: Iskaulit Pool!
When: 3 July

[It's a party for a narcissistic redhead who likes to be reminded she's alive.  Come celebrate!  Alternately, come sneak in and steal the food!  There's a bar set up for drinks drastically lowered to cost-price or to-be-paid-later-tab, a non-alcoholic punch in case of wandering minors (spike it and Nami will end you) and random snacks.

Oh, and a pool.  Which is heated.  Kind of important, that part.

Step right up, I'm reliably informed we'll have Thor with his shirt off, take pictures while you can.]

Comments

[watermarks]

[ She shakes her head. ] I'd imagine that it never thaws that much. But in the South Pole, even when we had those cities, we preferred to move into tents in the warmer season.

[candothat]

Neither of the poles have weather-independent cities? Buildings made out of stones or bricks? [That idea is so amazingly strange to him. He was a city kid before he was a space kid and he cannot conceive of a lifestyle where there aren't permanent, environment-controlled structures.]

[watermarks]

[ She puts her hand to her chin thoughtfully. ] I mean, it's possible that some of the buildings in the north had different building material and were just coated with snow? But no, we haven't had anything like that in the South Pole for years. When I was a kid, I remember that our village was bigger, but everything changed after the Fire Nation attacked.

[ She doesn't really want to talk about that time, though, so she gives a little shrug. ] Why, what's your city built out of?

[candothat]

[Pavel is pretty good at intuiting when people don't want to talk about something, so he just nods.]

Concrete, steel... glass and alloys and things. Sometimes wood, but that is mostly dachas outside of the city. Everything is constructed to last for a very long time regardless of what weather we experience.

[watermarks]

[ Well, now she feels like she has to defend her tribe's lack of... technology, for lack of a better word. Not because of his attitude toward it, but because of her own pride in where she comes from, and in the fact that they lived. ]

I'm... fairly sure that only the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom has access to steel, although it might be some other kind of metal. And I don't think I've seen concrete anywhere at home... maybe it hasn't been invented yet? Streets and houses in the Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation are usually just made of stone. It was the same with the Air Bender temples.

[candothat]

I'm not certain when concrete first happened, but your world is probably better without it. It sounds much more beautiful. [He sounds a little wistful.]

Is it uncomfortable, being in space? Or did the place that you were prior to this prepare you for an entirely artificial environment?

[watermarks]

It's not as bad as it could be. You should have seen me when Luceti first got electricity in houses - in my world, that's primarily associated with lightning and used as a weapon. I was really freaked out. [ And MICROWAVES. What. They still made no sense to her.

That didn't stop her from USING them, but they made no sense. (Laundry machines, though? Those erased any lingering doubts about the benefits of electricity.) ] And at least... the space here has stars. [ A little flicker of a smile, something haunted about it. ] I like to spend as much time as I can on the planets when we're by one, though. I miss fresh air.

[candothat]

I can't imagine being introduced to electricity for the first time. [He really needs to get a working replicator going. That would blow her mind.] Or space without stars. There were no stars in Luceti?

We visited a trinary system with a snow planet not so long ago. Were you here for that?

[watermarks]

[ She shakes her head. ] Not in space. It was just the sun. They shifted false stars in the night for the planet, because the blank sky was enough to make people go mad, but they couldn't hide the truth from us in space.

[ The replicator really would blow her mind, but this was, sadly, not her first time in space. ] No, my first system here was the desert. What's a trinary system?

[candothat]

Ah. That sounds... a little depressing, actually. But I suppose that the stars in Marina were also false since everything else was. [Speaking of depressing.]

A single solar system with three stars. It's remarkable that the system was stable at all--the stars should have exhibited more chaotic behavior than they did with their masses being what they were--and even more remarkable that there were multiple habitable planets. None of the planets even had elliptical orbits! It was the most improbable thing that I have ever seen.

[watermarks]

Oh wow. That sounds amazing. [ She thinks of bending, and what the firebenders on that world might have been like, and is glad that she didn't have to deal with that. ] With so much sun, I'm surprised it was a snow planet. I heard of an Earth once with two moons, and I always thought that would amazing to see, but three suns... it's hard to imagine.

wow, I actually meant two but forgot how counting works?

[candothat]

It was. I'm glad to have seen it. [In retrospect. At the time, he was mildly irritated because the system made no mathematical sense and none of the local scientists seemed interested in talking about that.] The snow planet was currently at aphelion relative to both stars. It was beautiful midday when both suns could be seen in the sky.

No worries! We can just pretend he said the right thing, if you likle :)

[watermarks]

...aphelion? [ That... was not a word she was familiar with, and didn't mind asking about. ] What does that mean?

much appreciated, thank you!

[candothat]

The point in it's orbit when the planet is farthest from the suns' common center of mass. [He really, really doesn't mind talking about it.] You are interested in astronomy?

[watermarks]

[ She shrugs a little. ] We are in space. It seems like a good idea to learn all I can about that while we're here, don't you think?

[candothat]

Yes, sensible.

I know a little [a lot] about the subject, if you would ever like to discuss it? [He's trying--and failing--not to sound too eager about the prospect of future conversations on one of his favorite things of all time.]

[watermarks]

[ A little wry twist of her mouth - yup, there she is. Sensible all over. But Pavel seems to be genuinely enthusiastic about this, so she puts a lid on her issues (she's good at that) and smiles more genuinely. ] Honestly, I wouldn't know where to start. Is astronomy something you learned about back home?

[candothat]

[It's okay to have issues, don't put a lid on them! Unless putting a lid in them results in talking about astronomy, in which case...]

It isn't always necessary to know where to start in order to start.

Astronomy was one of the very first things that I learned about. Right after talking. [He smiles like he's exaggerating (he is not).]

[watermarks]

[...no, she's pretty sure you need to know where to start in order to... start. Which is... hmm. Well, anyway, she'd rather not argue hypothetical when there's something more interesting to ask.]

Really? Why is that? Were your parents astronomers?

[candothat]

[Shh. Shh.]

No, not at all. My grandparents had a winter home on the moon, in the Mare Imbrium Colony, and seeing the stars from there made me interested in learning about them. [At the ripe old age of one and a half, when people normally decide what they want to focus on for the rest of their lives.]

Did you experience that at all, when you first saw the stars without a planet's atmosphere in the way? A need to know more about what they are and how they function?

[watermarks]

[...pfff, aww. Cute. She wonders if he and Sokka ever talked about this.]

No, not really. I kind of had other things on my mind when I woke up at the Marsiva. And I can't really say it's occurred to me since.

[candothat]

[Alas, no! The tragedy is real.]

Yes, okay, I suppose that being abducted again was something of a distraction. [A slightly sheepish smile.] And of course there are more interesting things like planets and alien civilizations.

[watermarks]

[ ... ]

I do find those things interesting. But that's no reason to put down your interest. I tend to look for things with - practical application, or something that has a good story or history behind it. But if you want to study the way stars work, Pavel, I think that's beautiful.

[ As long as he's still contributing to their weird community, and was to his weird space future community, studying things with no practical application she can see is perfectly valid. It's like art, but science. ]

[candothat]

[Astronomy is a perfectly practical thing to study! But it isn't the most practical of the many, many things that Pavel has studied, and Katara's so ready to accept his interests as valid that he's disinclined to protest.]

Have you found any of those things that you look for in your time here?

[watermarks]

Ah, no, not really. [ And she's a little embarrassed to admit it. ] I just spar with Nami on Sundays and work in the garden most days and practice at night. And cook for the ship, of course. In Luceti there was a school and a general medical center where we could go for training. Here... I wouldn't even know who to ask, if I wanted to continue practicing becoming a surgeon, or who's interested in training people in what they know. And then it seems like every time we get set into a pattern, we stop off at a new system.

[ ...excuses, mostly. If she really wanted to, she probably could put out a general transmission... it's just... this place seemed so disconnected to her in many ways, and so alien and cold -- tins of meal, shuttling through space. She doesn't really know what to do here. ]