entrancelogs | Fresh air and Exercise [OPEN]

Entry tags:

Fresh air and Exercise [OPEN]

Who: Susan and Anyone (But particularly Athos.)
Where: Outside in the (arguably) fresh air.
When: Monday the 22nd (Last Day of the Truth Event)
Rating: PG?
Summary: Wonder Land is incredibly stressful and Susan has decided she's taking a break. She's going to cheerfully ignore everything magical and distressing and try to have fun.
The Story:

Susan hadn't found Wonder Land particularly enjoyable, even when it was all new and innocuous. At first, its quirks an eccentricities were eerie, but not particularly troublesome. Over time, that had changed, and her opinion of Wonder Land had changed with it. Now that she'd been stabbed, subjected to Medical Intervention, evaded a sinister duplicate of herself, witnessed a Living (for the most part) Chess Match between two ridiculously clad Magical Monarchs, and had been sent to an eerily familiar, sinister, duplicate version of this bubble reality, well, she was far less enamored with the lot of it. The fact that she was all too ready to spout the truth at people, lately, was the final half-brick in the bicycle path of her tolerance.

Susan Sto-Helit was Done for the moment.

Teatime could be wandering about, stabbing people and waving her Grandad's sword like his own personal banner, horrors could be springing from the woodwork like particularly resilient, toothsome daisies, and her other self could be setting reality aflame, Susan didn't care. She was Done and now it was time to take a break.

With the steadfast determination of a schoolteacher on holiday, Susan went about finding an appropriate way to relax. She'd never held well with aquatic sports and she was healed up enough that the regular sort of fresh-air-and-sunshine variety of entertainment was once again open to her. This was fortunate for a great many reasons, but mostly because that sort of entertainment didn't usually involve much talking (and tended to allow people to hit others with sticks, something she'd recently felt very inclined to do). So, grimly determined as she was, Susan changed into something appropriately athletic¹, extracted a bit of sporting equipment from her Closet, and promptly stalked out onto the Grounds.

¹Meaning flat shoes and a skirt that came up just above the ankle. She drew the line at short sleeves, but she did forego the vest and tie in an effort to be more fun.

(OOC: I've dropped a few prompts in here for anyone who'd like something more specific, but if you have an idea and would like your character to run into Susan anywhere else, please have at!)

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"Two weeks of relative convalescence is quite enough for any injury," Susan responded automatically, in the way of all stubborn patients who held reasonable suspicion for all things Medical. She sounded a touch out of breath, but given that their last conversation had happened while she was in the process of bleeding to death, comparatively, it wasn't that terrible an impediment. Susan caught the ball and paused in her drills to regard the Doctor. The point of all this had been to avoid exactly this sort of conversation, but it was just bad form to brush off one of the people who'd saved your life.

"Given that all of it's inside of me lately, it seemed about time my blood got back to pumping," she added, quietly cursed this particular event, took a breath, and continued, "It's doing wonders for the stiffness--

"Do you play?" Susan interrupted herself, before she could ramble on about being injured any longer. She wasn't wont to discuss her physical or emotional well-being on any day, even when gravely injured. Suffice to say, the fact that she felt compelled to share, now, was something she found intensely distasteful.

Two weeks for a deep stab wound did not sound like enough time to Martha, not in the slightest. That was the sort of thing that would keep most people confined to a bed for some time, but for all Martha knew, Susan went ahead and got herself some extra healing after they patched her up in the clinic. She hadn't been able to convince her to stay under her watch for very long at all; clearly, she was one of those stubborn types.

"I just wouldn't want you to reopen those stitches," Martha responded with a shrug. "People push themselves too hard, too fast, and then the clinic ends up having to deal with the fallout." She hadn't meant for her scolding to go quite that far, and Martha mentally berated herself for overdoing it. She clenched her jaw, considering Susan's question instead.

"I never have before. I've watched, but I wasn't much for sports when I was younger." She shrugged, glancing from the ball to the stick in Susan's hands. Lacrosse always struck her as something that would be difficult to learn, but she imagined she'd get to hear the opinion from an expert now.

Susan hadn't gotten any extra healing but, like most people from her relative time period and cities of similar cleanliness, convalescence was measured more by tolerable levels of pain than any actual amount of healing. When the pain was no longer crippling was, usually, when people got out and about again, and Susan embraced this tradition wholeheartedly. That said, the idea of returning to a doctor because she'd done something silly and required more Medical Attention was utterly intolerable. She'd been especially kind with it for the first week and attentive the second, but she was't an exceptionally patient person and two weeks was a long time. Nevertheless, she took Martha's scolding silently and, rather than admit the other woman had a point, transitioned the conversation entirely to sports.

"I can't say I enjoy most of them, Foot-the-ball in particular mystifies me, but I've always found this one very satisfying," Susan replied and shifted her grip on the stick. She flipped the ball upward just slightly and then caught it, like an oversized ball and cup game. "The actual process of scoring is terribly boring, just a simple matter of precision and intimidation, but there is something to be said for any game that lets you shoulder classmates into the mud after a nice run up."

Susan paused after she'd said it and her brow dipped slightly. She definitely wasn't the sort of person who went on about violence or sports, and yet she'd just done exactly that. She was quite tired of this compulsion, but there was no getting around it. Try as she might to fight it, this event had rendered her positively chatty.

"Of course, I don't intend to go around checking people until I've had my stitches removed," Susan added after a beat. "I expect I might also need to find other players, but that's another matter."

With no outward signs of pain from Susan, Martha had to accept that she had recovered enough to do as she pleased. It still wasn't a good idea. Even if she was playing alone, there was still the chance that she could tear her stitches, which would be an even greater mess. But when it came down to it, Martha couldn't go too far in treating the other people around here like patients. She wished she could, but she wasn't about to put her foot down unless she really had reason to.

At the mention of "foot-the-ball," Martha raised an eyebrow. Did Susan mean regular old football? Why did she refer to it in such a strange way? Martha was about to ask, but Susan continued on, offering her opinion on the game of lacrosse. Martha couldn't say that she found any satisfaction in pushing friends into the mud, but she'd seen enough football matches (and rugby, for that matter) to know that a large percentage of people got some enjoyment out of it.

As Susan finished, Martha was quick to nod. "Speaking of which, you should be due for getting those removed. Fourteen days should be long enough. Not sure if you want me to do that, but..." She shrugged. As for finding other people to play with, well, that was simple enough. "I'm sure you could ask around on the network, see if anyone else plays." With how often people complained here about being bored, it seemed likely Susan could find some takers.

Susan actually looked somewhat glad about the stitches. She wasn't particularly familiar with the whole process, honestly. In Ankh-Morpork, the only way to get stitches and survive (with reliable odds) was to go to an Igor. Unfortunately, Igors were never very keen on removing stitches once the lot had healed up. Generally, they felt the more stitches than a handbag look was fairly fashionable and demanding they undo them always made a bit of a scene.

"If you don't mind, I would actually prefer you do it, or one of the other two," Susan said casually. "Finding competent doctors, in my experience, is usually harder than just obtaining eternal life."

Susan shifted the stick in her hand and leaned the end of it against the grass.

"As for the game, I shall have to see," Susan added with somewhat less enthusiasm. "Compiling a rulebook will likely be difficult, given the wide array of everywheres represented in Wonder Land's populace...but, I shall look into it."

That did come as a surprise. For all that Susan hadn't been that willing to do more than the bare minimum when it came to her recovery, now she went so far as to call her, Simon, and Helen competent doctors. Which was true, of course, but it did make Martha wonder what Susan had dealt with in the past, that she was so distrustful to begin with.

"I'd be happy to do it. Just come by any time and one of us should be around." And if not, well, Martha could always be reached by mobile. While most doctors worried about that sort of easy contact being abused, Martha found that no one here overdid it. Everyone was too much of a martyr. Wonderland apparently had a type.

And well, that comment about eternal life was more or less like bait on a hook for Martha. "So obtaining eternal life... that's something that's actually possible where you come from?" There were definitely aliens she'd come across who were extremely long-lived, and then -- well, then there was Jack, but Martha didn't know if she'd call his state eternal life. It was more like eternal death.

"Well, more or less, I suppose," Susan answered and made a vague motion with her free hand. It was hard to say what she was trying to get across, but it looked rather like she was chopping something from side to side, like a tree, or wheat. "It depends on your definitions of 'Eternal' and 'Life', really."

Surprisingly, the Discworld didn't have too many people who tried to achieve immortality. Sure, there was the occasional explorer who wandered around looking for eldritch fountains, or the odd fellow who sapped power out of pyramids, but their sort popped up everywhere. All in all, most people on the Disc generally accepted that death was a thing that was bound to happen...they didn't have to be happy about it, mind, but inevitability was hard to argue with.

"If you're just looking for a bit of extra time, there are hundreds of little loopholes that will weasel a century or two out of something, so long as you think ahead. Once your time's run out, well, there's nothing for it."

This had been a very odd change in topic, but given her general distaste for Medical things, she didn't fight the urge to keep talking. All things considered, she knew a great deal about how Eternity worked (on the Disc, at least) and took little issue with sharing.

"Achieving Eternity is a different matter, but it's not really Life at that point. Most people who go throwing around the word 'Eternal' don't seem to think about that. It's quite odd."

There was always some kind of catch, wasn't there? Not that Martha would ever want to be immortal. It wasn't something she had even thought about much, because Susan was right. Everyone's time had to come eventually, and trying to outrun that would likely only lead to a huge mess of some kind.

Even Jack, eventually, had found his peace. Martha hadn't known it was him at the time, but thinking back on it, she was glad that she'd been there with him when he'd taken his last breaths.

This was a melancholy topic to be sure, but Martha didn't let that stop her from asking questions. Not when there were so many other universes to learn about here. "You speak about it so casually. An extra century or two. No big deal." She smirked. But was Susan older than she appeared, as Helen was? Of course, there was no polite way to ask that.

"What is Eternity? That is, I obviously know what the word means, but you speak about it like it's... I don't know, something more than that." Martha had been through conversations like this enough times to know when there was more to something than met the eye.

Edited 2013-08-13 14:23 (UTC)

Susan stared at Martha in confounded silence for a moment. She wasn't certain what to make of that question and the explanation after it, and even the encouragement of Wonder Land couldn't quite get her to be honest or forthcoming when she couldn't think of anything to say. After the moment passed, Susan blinked and continued, slowly, as though she was testing her sentences to find the points of failure between the words.

"You can't actually have anything more than Eternity," Susan replied gradually and then her normal talking speed caught her up. "Well, you and I can't. Eternity is everything from the Start to the Finish.

"The hand on the clock that only goes round once," Susan added, a slightly hopeful tinge to her voice. Unfortunately, she could hope all the long-lived day that Martha would understand that analogy and it wouldn't happen, that particular story didn't exist outside of the Discworld.

"That's the part people don't have a handle on," Susan continued, moving back a bit to the part of their conversation with context. "Just how few things are actually Eternal, Start to Finish, as it were, and how the very last thing anyone ought to want is to be among them."

The idea was one Susan had clearly considered, at length, and explaining it was unnerving.

"A century or two, by comparison, is hardly any Time at all."

While Martha had endured her fair share of rambles from the Doctor that went over her head, this still left her feeling like she was out of her element, like she didn't have all the information she needed to follow along with what Susan was saying.

She tried to make sense of it where she could, though. Start to finish. Something that had existed before the beginning of Time, and would continue after it. Was such a thing even possible? Martha had seen the end of the universe. She'd felt the desperation, the fear, the inevitability even as all of those humans had hoped for something more. That had all gone so, so wrong.

But then there were other universes, other streams of time. Martha didn't know if there would ever be a true end.

"I don't think I'd even want to live for a few centuries. Time takes its toll," she said, surprisingly open. "I've made a few friends who are hundreds of years old, and they all have this sadness, this... weight to them. I don't think that being eternal is really possible, is it?"

She'd never heard of such a thing. Time Lords died. Jack had eventually died. Time was the only thing that truly lasted forever.

"It is," Susan answered simply, but her expression fell to a sympathetic sort of frown. She knew, all to well, what the sorrow of years looked like. In fact, she'd seen it coming and going, and it was always intensely disturbing. Each instance was different, of course, but there was always that sense of infinite melancholy that permeated everything.

"Rare, mind, but possible," Susan clarified and her brow furrowed as she thought. Before she could stop herself, she said, "I've only met three...well maybe not people, specifically, who qualify."

She paused and, honestly, looked a bit surprised that she'd said that. The urge to be truthful and forthcoming was one thing, but having a Personal discussion with someone she barely knew was something else, altogether. After her pause, Susan cleared her throat and settled her free hand on her hip.

"I'm sorry, we were talking about good Doctors and how hard they are to come by. They must be in abundance where you're from, if people are living hundreds of years."

It's something that was difficult for Martha to swallow. How could it even be possible? How could something exist for that long, and that absolutely? She wasn't surprised that Susan specified that they weren't exactly people, because there was no way something could be conscious and present for that long and still be anything like a human -- or anything else, for that matter.

She wanted to ask more about it, get the details, but the way that Susan changed the subject on her made it fairly obvious that she didn't want to talk about it anymore. Maybe this wasn't the best thing to be discussing for a first conversation, anyway.

"Well, it's not humans who are living that long," Martha clarified. "I was speaking more of... other species. I've traveled a bit -- outside of Earth, that is, so I've met a few long-lived people." And non-people, but she was trying not to get too caught up in the terminology.

Normally she would have stopped there, but Martha ended up adding a bit more. "The person I traveled with is a Time Lord... he's at least nine hundred years old, I think."

Considering the fact that Susan's sensibilities and dress clearly reflected an era before air travel was relatively common, she seemed strangely nonplussed about the idea of traveling outside of a world. True, this was partly due to the fact that they were currently outside any particular world, and partly due to the fact that Martha hadn't specified that she'd done so without magic. In any case, extra-terrestrial adventures didn't occur to Susan as a viable topic.

The way she'd said 'other species' was a bit odd, but the idea wasn't odd. Susan was from a place where the term People (and, indeed, human, usually) encompassed a wide array of creatures that most other worlds would have dubbed anything from Pests to Building Materials. Given that she was bound to be truthful, that area of conversation was, perhaps, best left untouched.

"A Time Lord?" Susan asked and couldn't keep a note of mild skepticism out of her voice. "And he's earned that title in only nine hundred years, has he? Bit of a social climber, eh?"

It was a terribly rude question and Susan looked apologetic once she'd said it. She couldn't help herself. Unfortunately, there was no going back and claiming she'd meant to say something else, so she winced and soldiered on.

"Ah, sorry," Susan added, a touch awkwardly. "What in the world is a Time Lord?"

Martha took zero offense at the comment. In fact, she had come out with a similar response when she'd heard what the Doctor was. Not pompous at all, then, she'd said. It was a ridiculous title when she thought too hard on it, but she'd interacted with the Doctor for so long at this point that she was frankly used to it.

"It's fine," she said with a shake of her head. "Though honestly, that's just what his species is called. Time Lords or Time Ladies. They're from a planet called Gallifrey." A place that no longer existed, and that she'd never be able to see with her own eyes. But the Doctor had told her about it, and that had been enough.

"They have some amount of control over the flow of time, and they're also charged with keeping time in order... seeing to it that things don't get all mucked up, you know?"

Maybe Susan didn't. Maybe she hadn't encountered temporal problems before. But Martha could tell that Susan had at least seen her fair share of odd things, so maybe...

"Oh," Susan said with all the polite surprise of a person who'd just watched the cogs of the universe snap, accidentally, into perfect alignment. The idea that there were people running around, making sure Time didn't get too carried away, that was one Susan was very familiar with.¹ Susan gave Martha a short nod of confirmation.

Then, with the air of a woman who had been told this directly, had verified the accuracy of it, and had no idea that the word had any other possible applications, Susan said: "Dongs."

She paused a moment and furrowed her brow.

"Or Jims. Something rather enlightened." Susan shrugged, casually, and shot Martha a knowing look, as one does when they believe that they are on the same page with the person they are speaking to. Unfortunately, as usual, Susan was reading out of another book entirely.²

"I hadn't heard 'Time Lords', but I suppose it's more respectable sounding than 'History Monks,'" Susan continued and added, rather chattily: "That Universe mustn't have a Time, or if it does, a very relaxed one, if people are allowed to go about calling themselves Lords and Ladies--Hang on.

"Nine hundred, you said? This person isn't a small bald man with a penchant for sweeping, are they? About so high? Quotes ridiculous folksy sayings on a regular basis?"

1 Daresay, Intimately.
2 One that had been taken from another section, in another library, on a distant continent, possibly off the restocking cart.

Dongs? Jims? Just where had this conversation gone, and how had they gotten there? The moment that Martha felt like they might be on the same page, something sent her flipping forward or backward. It was the result of being from different universes, of course, but it could get a bit frustrating.

Either way, she didn't return that knowing look with anything more than a raised eyebrow.

"Well, time still has its rules. But it can certainly be molded or altered depending on the situation." Which was far too complicated to get into now, when this was supposed to have just been a friendly chat.

Susan seemed to have a nine hundred year old alien of her own in her life, but the description wasn't anything that Martha recognized. On the other hand, the Doctor switched faces and personalities on a semi-regular basis, so there was always the chance of it...

"No, he isn't, but the Doctor's changes his appearance from time to time. If he had a blue police box he traveled in, then that's definitely him. If not, then it may just be a coincidence." But the more that Martha heard about Susan, the more interested she became. She was going to have to get her story out of her at some point.

Edited 2013-08-20 15:40 (UTC)

Oh dear, a History Monk--rather, a Time Lord and a Doctor. Susan's expression went flat faster than an unlucky mouse during a Troll parade. The good news was that this Doctor didn't sound much like Lu-Tze, the bad news was that now she knew there were two nine hundred year old, self-satisfied men meddling in the affairs of Time and Space.

Lovely.

"I sometimes suspect that, of all things, the only thing that truly doesn't exist is Coincidence, but you may be right. I doubt they're the same person, in any case," Susan agreed with a short sigh.

Unfortunately, as she ran the conversation back, Susan found that she had additional questions. Additional questions would, inevitably, lead to answers and conversation. While this was generally the idea behind having a conversation, now was probably not the best time. Much as Martha was pleasant to talk with, Susan wasn't eager to discuss things that were so very nearly Personal while she was compelled to be forthcoming.

Case in point:

"This has been a lovely chat, but, frankly, I expect we've shared quite enough for one day," Susan said, despite herself, and fought the urge to cluck her tongue in disapproval. After a beat she continued, "So, I'll stop by and have you see to these stitches, then? Perhaps later today?"

Susan made a good point. Very often, things that seemed like they were coincidence could easily come around and bite you if you weren't careful. Martha would have to ask the Doctor if he'd ever been bald, but the fact still remained that she was almost positive that Susan was from some other universe.

If given the chance, Martha could have asked loads more questions herself, but she didn't really mind when Susan cut the conversation short. They'd already delved further into all of this than she'd ever intended, and the fact was that she'd interrupted Susan's lacrosse practice.

"That's fine by me," she said in response to both things. "I'll make sure to be there, so feel free to swing by and we'll take care of that."

And maybe then, she could also determine if it was really safe for Susan to be exerting herself this much at this point. She didn't seem to be in all that much pain, but there were some people who were shockingly good at hiding it.

"Enjoy!" Martha said as a parting comment, offering a wave before she headed off to finish her walk.

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Fresh air and Exercise [OPEN]

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