The open palm of desire wants everything, it wants everything...

[techniclybrill]

Shilo is curled up in the common room of the Conrad, flipping through a history book written in the looping handwriting of some angel of knowledge or other. She's doing her best to think about the book, instead of how much she misses home, or her dad, or even her stupid room. Because she doesn't. Really.

Martin is at the coffee shop, staring at

Comments

[nowinprint]

How, exactly, Dmitri Lang manages to find people she knows, in a city the size of Chicago, without asking where they'll be or planting tracking devices on their person or anything of the sort may well be the mystery of the ages. Maybe she's preternaturally lucky. Maybe she and Chicago have worked out an agreement. Maybe she's developed a unified theory of personal behavior capable of predicting decisions with Hari Seldon-like proficiency for individuals instead of populations. Who knows?

Whatever the case, though, she spotted a certain black-haired distracted wonder wandering around the park, and (because she does have a reputation to maintain, after all) stealthily looped around to find a vendor and liberated a couple of sno-cones. And then CLOSED IN FOR THE KILL.

Here defined as a sno-cone being shoved directly in front of Tosh's face with a cheerful "Moya camaya lubuimaya knizhka. It has been entirely too long since I've ambushed you."

[techniclybrill]

Tosh starts, stumbling back a few steps and then registering that it's Dmitri. Dmitri and a sno-cone. ...you know what, Tosh isn't even going to ask how this happens.

She accepts the sno-cone, looking slightly confused, but no more so than usual when Dmitri's around. "You do know you don't... have to ambush me, right? You could just come... visit me." You know, like a normal person. ...Dmitri is not a normal person.

[nowinprint]

"For someone who works for Torchwood, you have absolutely no sense of adventure," Dmitri says. "But fear not, Dmitri is here, armed with confectionery, ready and eager to make your life less ordinary. I descend without warning, approach with neither rhyme nor reason, unless rhyme or reason happens to be the style of the day. I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical; I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical. About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news, with many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse. And advance warning is for squares."

She shrugs.

"Unless you'd like me to come visit. Then I can do that, too."

[techniclybrill]

Tosh has learned that you don't interrupt Dmitri while she's talking, just sort of stare in wonder until she pauses for breath. "Well, I wouldn't mind if you did..."

Dmitri would probably still show up if Tosh did mind, but still. Maybe her idea of "visit" involves some kind of advance warning. ...for a member of Torchwood, Tosh doesn't tend to have too much spontaneity in her life. Naturally, she'd be adopted by the one person who's practically spontaneity incarnate.

"Are you ever going to tell me how you keep finding me?" In the Tower is one thing. There are only so many places a Tosh can be there. Out in the park, on the other hand... Well, that's fairly impressive.

[nowinprint]

"Well, you know about the birthday problem," Dmitri says. "Seems counterintuitive, but by the time you get sixty people in a room, odds are in the high nineties that there'll be a pair with the same birthday. In an almost entirely dissimilar skew comparison," which basically means the birthday problem had no relevance to what she's about to say, but if she talks fast enough people will draw a connection anyway, "in the Conrad, if you were trying to find someone, regardless of the size of the place odds were always about sixty percent that they'd be in the commons room

[techniclybrill]

"Monitoring Rift activity. Which is a bit more difficult with the basement inaccessible, but..." She shrugs a little. "It's not terribly interesting, but I thought I might be able to reconstruct the Rift predictor system I was working on in Cardiff."

Also, Tosh is running out of things to do with herself, so at a certain point, wandering around the wilder parts of Grant Park sounds like a good idea. These things happen.

[nowinprint]

Dmitri takes a bite from her snocone, considering that. Not terribly interesting, Tosh says. Thought she might be able to reconstruct the Rift predictor, she says. Not Gwen asked if I could or I thought it might be useful to but apparently this is what she's doing these days. Which is, you know, a big old cry for entertainment if Dmitri has ever seen one.

"Do you want to go clubbing?" she asks. "Possibly not your scene, but I know friendly places. Failing that, I know a guy who knows a gal who can get us up in the projector booth of the Navy Pier IMAX, and failing that, there must be something actually interesting for you to be doing around here. Do I need to ask Gwen for permission to start building a Mars rover in your basement? I'd invite you to help."

[techniclybrill]

"You really don't have to... I've just been-" She cuts herself off with a little frown, and a hint of a bemused smile. "A Mars rover in the basement?" So much for that not questioning the things Dmitri says.

[nowinprint]

Dmitri shrugs. "I kinda missed out on the whole home-robotics fad," she says. "I got about up to lego robotics and then took a focus in sociology and politics. No time like the present to make up for one's mis-spent youth, though, right? And if I can't find a guy who knows a guy who has all the moving parts for sale, my mother is a pigeon and my networking skills aren't half as good as I like to think they are."

She hops a little, breaking out a 100-watt grin. C'mon. Girls' night out, girls' night in, either way they're two girls with the combined brain power of a think tank or a Time Lord. It'll be good!

"So what do you say, eyes to the skies? The moon's lost much of its mystery, but Mars retains the tang of the unattainable."

[techniclybrill]

Tosh smiles just a little more. Building a Mars rover in the basement may not be necessary for any reason, but it certainly sounds interesting, particularly if Dmitri's there. "I guess I could... Though I wouldn't recommend actually doing it in the basement. There's an insane computer there, last I checked..."

[nowinprint]

Dmitri tilts her head at Tosh. "Insane computer? How do I miss these things?"

Because the fact that she hasn't been snooping around in Torchwood's basement is surely more inexplicable than her freakish knowledge of everything else.

"Just out of curiosity, has anyone taught it to play Tic-Tac-Toe yet?"

[techniclybrill]

"It's built spy robots and sent them out into the Tower. I think it's a bit past Tic-Tac-Toe at this point." GLaDOS bothers her - she's considered shutting it down, but she's not sure it's worth the effort. And it's been... mostly quiet lately...