lucetilogs | (no subject)

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Who: Anyone who wants to come!
What: Autumn (Equinox) Celebration
When: Today, at 9PM to Midnight (and maybe even after)
Where: Around the Rec Center
Summary: Brigade party! There's food! There's lights! There's music! There's fireworks!
Rating: A for Abacus

There were lights! Autumn-appropriate decorations! There were tables of food (though very little of it is vegetarian friendly)! There was even a stage for music and entertainment! Still waiting was the fireworks to take place at midnight, but otherwise things were set up to more or less respectable Brigade standards. Maybe Haruhi hadn't done it herself, but it was done well enough, thanks to the efforts of being coordinated by Mikage.

The stage was left open for anyone to perform that wanted to. The karaoke machine had been dragged outside for people to sing along to, regardless of talent, or otherwise just to play music when no one was on stage. Naturally inside the Rec Center itself is a variety of pool tables, foosball, air hockey, and a TV with some video games. Just enough to keep things a little fun. If only there was a pool.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm glad any day I don't have to make the choice.

It's not a choice I could make. I know that well enough.

[He is too passionate a man to be regimental. But all who know Guy Burgess know this all too well. He even carries his emotions in the way he walks, and at the moment, his steps are slightly more lumbering through his terribly large clothing, nights of being fraught with imaginative terror, and being so very tired. None of them could sleep still. He hopes liquor will help, for although his friends will never say it, they don't sleep when he can't. They're far too worried they'll catch him in front of the mirror again, trying to scrape away his own skin where the tattoo rested on his neck.]

[They reach Good Spirits. Archie pulls open the door.] There's also a night club here, if you know what that is. Someone from the nineteen fifties established it and I worked there for a little while. After you, sir.

I'm quite familiar with clubs. I spent quite a bit of my time in them back in England. Best place to meet old boys and the posh for all purposes.

Thank you, Lieutenant.

[He walks inside and turns to face Archie.]

You worked in the club? Might I ask what you did?

[Archie comes in after him and closes the door.] I waited tables. I didn't like it at all, but it was something to do.

I don't think I could wait tables. I'm far more comfortable in the kitchen and I'm the sort of person who's a bit too honest for humouring people who demand things of you constantly.

[Guy looks around.]

Nice bar. I like it.

Good. It's the only one, besides the one in the club. I don't much like the person running it now, or I would still work there, I expect.

No?

[He walks over and takes a seat up at the bar, a nondescript stool without putting much thought into the choice.]

Is it terribly indecent of me to wonder why?

It's a bit difficult to explain. You know about the shifts round here, don't you?

[At first Guy gives him a bit of a strange look. He's never been to these places, and obviously wouldn't know a damned thing about shifts of workers other than that they all wanted to work there. It all seems very suspect, even now.

Then he remembers the guide. His mind fumbles over the word. Shift, shift. A shift. The shifts. After sorting his face through a few expressions he seemingly understands.]

I've read something about them. They sound simple but I'm sure they're all absolute flaming hell.

I wouldn't say that. Some of them are quite silly, actually. This one made everyone believe they'd always lived in Luceti. We had families, here. I didn't even have anyone I knew from back home in Luceti at the time, and suddenly for ten days I had a brother and two sisters. Didn't remember anything from back home, just thought I'd had an entire life here. Didn't make sense that my daughter was a small wooden doll and my grandson a polar bear, or even that I'm a bit too young to have a grown grandson. None of it struck me as odd at the time.

[... now that's just bloody mad. Though all of this is.]

I would call that mass hysteria, though from the sounds of it the scope of the effect and the results of it were complacency. What I don't understand is how they stop, or why. Were people hysterical afterwards?

It made things a bit awkward, but nothing worse. Come now, Mr. Burgess. You're in another world. Is it really so hard now to believe someone can make you believe something that isn't true?

[Guy frowns.]

No. It's bloody disturbing. There are powers out there that are clever enough to make you believe damn near anything. This just makes everything possible.

[If they all could do this, if even one power, the wrong power could manipulate its people this way, he would be in an entirely different game. Stalin would have him infiltrating the Anglo German Fellowship far deeper, rooting himself in Germany in a desperate attempt to give him the same ability. The war would dissolve away from political movements and become warfare of the mind, and military movements would drone the deaths of thousands more. Hitler has already near perfected this.

If this is a glimpse of Malnosso capabilities...

He needs to remember this. This could be the destruction of Communism, Socialism, Democracy, any political movement outside totalitarian dictatorship. Hysteria is the least of his worries now.]

I hope most of them are ridiculous.

Most are, in my experience. They rarely last longer than a week. Mind you, this one didn't change anyone's personality, just their history. Getting back to what I was saying before, the current owner of the club was married to...well, to whom I believed was my sister. I'm not sure what went on behind closed doors, exactly--I only remember what happened during the experiment, not the entire history I was given--but I know she wasn't herself. He treated her badly. I know it sounds a bit petulant, but it wasn't the experiment making him do it.

It doesn't sound petulant at all. If I ever had a sister, I would have been very protective of her. I don't think that would have changed with this experiment, either. So, if I am to think anything of this at all, you've your reasons, and they're well formed.

I suppose the experiment made literal something that was already there. We were all very close before, and even closer after. Once, Leonard--Dr. McCoy--and Jilly both took me captive for a camping trip, which is essentially to sleep out in the wilderness for fun. Evidently it's something you do with your siblings in your century and after.

[He leans against the bar and orders a brandy.] It took a bit of getting used to. We slept in very long, narrow sacks that didn't accommodate the wings very well.

I don't think I could ever go camping without expecting there to be scotch and toothpaste.

[Not that Archie will have any idea why the devil those things would be on a camping trip. He orders himself a gin, neat.]

Camping is something people typically enjoy as a way to get out of the city and into something we hardly spend time in any more: nature. Some might say it's a rather poetic thing, immersing oneself into greens and browner hues of a world meant to be looked at through a windowpane. There was an American who talked all about it. Tried to tell us all that it's good and necessary for a man to abandon himself and go transparent. He was an advocate for solitude and finding an Almighty in considering oneself as a mere particle of him.

I never tried it.

I grew to like it, actually. It reminded me of things I like about being on board a ship. Everyone together but alone together as well, if it makes any sense. Lost in something much greater that doesn't give tuppence about you, it's actually very reassuring compared to the great wave of society sometimes.

[Guy thinks about that as he cups a hand around the glass placed in front of him.]

You know, I think it would be damned good thing to be truly no one for a time.

[A coarse chuckle.]

[Archie sips his brandy.] For a little while. Not for long.

There's little you can do as nobody. There's so very much to be done.

[He says it thinking of London, then drains the glass thinking of that city.]

What do you do, then?

I'm a producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation, which puts on programmes over the radio. Not unlike the journal's voice messages, only live and you can't talk back to it.

I also work in the Foreign Office and for the British Intelligence Services.

I do so very many things, and I try to do them all.

Oh, the radio. I know something of it. The way you describe it makes it sound like Admiral Norrington.

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I just can't see Guy as a transcendentalist. He's the sort of ass who'd make fun of it.

Totally.

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/returns to this still

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