As friendly as Leela had been, Rita was glad to be escorted away from her, for fear that some of that crazy might have been contagious. Abducted by aliens. Yeah, right
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Being mistaken for a crazy person really put a damper on a girl's day, and Leela was looking forward to talking to Elaine, who seemed to have had at least one experience as weird as some of Leela's own. She told herself not to mention aliens, spaceships, or anything else that might give her away as being from any time other than the twenty-first century. She'd been to the nineteen-forties, she could do this. Maybe she'd throw in something about cooking pot roasts.
And hey, if she really was in the past, Fry hadn't set the bar too high. As long as Leela didn't end up as her own descendant, she'd come out ahead of him.
"Can't I get a Femislim injection?" she asked her nurse, after listening to the announcement, which, while not a lot like the Orphanarium (they were lucky if the owl traps went off, there), put her in mind of the place. A diet of institutional food for very long was only going to give Amy plenty of ammunition when Leela got home
( ... )
Somewhere in between leaving the Game Room and arriving at the Arts & Crafts Room, Elaine had found time to go back and forth to the bulletin board in the big, open lounge-type area a couple of times. Honestly, she didn't even remember exactly how or when, but for whatever reason, she didn't feel inclined to think too hard on the matter. What mattered was that communication via that method seemed to work, and that it had snagged her a meeting with someone who could hopefully provide another angle on their situation. She didn't know exactly what Leela meant by "non-elective cosmetic surgery," but whatever it was, she had a feeling it was tied directly to arriving in the Institute
( ... )
"Turanga Leela, captain of the ship... Planet Express ship." She gave her own title instinctively, complete with snapping a salute. Elaine was as tall as advertised, and Leela got the feeling she didn't suffer jerkwads gladly either. "Nice to meet you."
Leela had become pretty certain that no one here really deserved to be locked up. The fact that these spleazeballs (now that she'd thought of the alien zoo possibility, she couldn't help but picture stereotypical grey aliens, probably watching through two-way mirrors) had kidnapped a politician was worrying. Was someone under the mistaken impression that she had friends who had money, and competence? Or was it as random as it seemed? On the one hand, if someone that important had been abducted, the regular joes and janes here were probably boned. On the other, it meant whoever was behind this was really going to get a kick in the face when everything got sorted out. But on the third hand, sorting it out wasn't happening nearly fast enough for Leela's taste. "Governor of what?"
[Sorry for the icon-switching. I'm indecisive. T_T]selfrescuerApril 29 2010, 03:40:04 UTC
Elaine raised an interested eyebrow as she returned the salute. "Pleasure to meet you as well, Captain." So Leela was the captain of a ship, was she? Did that mean she was a pirate? There were barely any female pirates sailing the seven seas, but they were out there. Granted, she had never heard of a Captain Leela in particular, but it was possible that she had made the scene sometime during the seven-year time gap (Elaine forced herself not to show her frustration at that). Who knew? Maybe in that seven years, purple hair had become a fad as well, along with cosmic-sounding names for vessels.
Either way, Leela was probably not from around the Tri-Island area; otherwise, the name "Marley" would have gotten a reaction of some sort. She took that into account when answering the woman's question. "Governor of the Tri-Island Area. It's quite deep in the Caribbean, a little ways away from the Gulf of Melange. Have you ever sailed near the area?" she asked, laying out her craft materials on the table in front of her.
No worries! XDshorttankApril 29 2010, 08:01:02 UTC
"Not... exactly." She'd been over it, plenty of times, but she was trying to sound normal here. Then again, when they got to the topic of Leela having been a cyclops until very, very recently, all that would go out the window anyway. Elaine was from Earth, though. That was a good start. "I've been to the moon
( ... )
Re: No worries! XDselfrescuerApril 30 2010, 19:02:44 UTC
"..."
Had Leela said something like that before Elaine had been transformed into a gold statue and apparently spirited away to an unfamiliar place at least seven years in the future, Elaine would probably have said "That's nice" and left the clearly insane woman to her own business. Even after said events, she was still tempted to do just that, and the "Are you quite serious?" expression on her face said as much. She could maybe believe in some voodoo power interfering in time a little bit, but bringing in people from over 1000 years in the future? She was pretty sure that even the blackest of magic didn't have a reach that far.
She didn't know for certain that it didn't, however, which gave her enough reasonable doubt to stay and perhaps let Leela explain herself further. "That's... not exactly the easiest thing in the world to believe, Captain, considering it was the late 17th century the last time I checked, " she answered back with her suspicious eyebrow raised extra high for good measure. "Do you have any proof of that?"
Yep, there it was, that look that said the other person thought Leela was several tiny bananas short of a crudités tree. "I've been to around this time before. 1947. Which doesn't prove anything, I know. They changed the way I look, and my wrist thingy's gone! It's just got a lojackamator, and Tetris, and a laser, but it's more advanced than anything I've seen here so far." Of course, she could have made that up too, if she were determined in her insanity. Hm. How the hell could she prove it? Arguing you were totally normal, even boring, in your own time didn't carry much weight with people who obviously hadn't run into time travelers before.
"I could ax you the same thing, you know. Can you prove you're from the 1600s?" Leela wasn't entirely sure what the differences were between that time and when Fry had come from. They'd had hand-cranked televisions or something? Elaine looked modern enough, but if she'd started out wrapped in pelts, the hospital would've made her change anyway. "I've met one other person from Earth here, and he
( ... )
Elaine instinctively reached up to where her head scarf would normally have been, and frowned when her hand found only hair there. She was certain that the tag inside would have marked its maker, year, and proper washing instructions, but alas, she was out of luck. Right. Note to self: find new bandanna, she thought as she lowered her hand again, looking back down to the paper in front of her. With the safety scissors, she began cutting across the pages of her notes to make thin, vertical strips, and then horizontally across those strips to make a collection of tiny paper squares
( ... )
Leela didn't see a pattern in the squares, but she'd only seen a map on paper once, and had found it really odd. It hadn't talked or self-updated or anything. She was still having trouble wrapping her brain around the idea that she was in a time where everything was like that. But the evidence was piling up. All the things here were manual, and none of them looked a thousand years old. If only she could find someone else from around her time and compare notes.
"Some kind of experiment? To see how we react in a hostile environment?" She'd been in hostile-er, sure, but that didn't mean she was in a big hurry to settle down here. She had deliveries to make, and a chance to find out if it was possible for a guy she was dating to like her too much. She had meals for the next two weeks waiting in her freezer!
"But I don't have any idea why they'd change me." Maybe it had been to keep the other patients from freaking out even more, she thought, frowning slightly and picking up a purple marker. Or maybe it had been just more evidence of
( ... )
Elaine looked about at the child-friendly art tools, the coddling nurses, and the ultra-safe, non-toxic plastic tables and chairs around them for a moment before turning back to Leela. "...Define 'hostile
( ... )
"Maybe I'm too hostile for it, then," Leela joked. That was what happened when you took a woman's boots away. It pointed to a diabolical intelligence running this place. That, or someone with terrible fashion sense.
A battle was an interesting concept. Level the playing field by taking away everyone's stuff and making them all human. But something bothered her about it, and after a moment, she realized what. "The technology is wrong. If they're pulling people from all sorts of different times, they have to be able to control when they yoink us from. Or maybe they can't, and that's why we're all from different times and places." Or maybe they could, and just liked to mess with people
( ... )
Elaine raised an interested eyebrow at that idea. It wasn't a situation she hoped to be in, but it was a distinct possibility along with a few of the others. From what little she had seen of the hallways thus far, she could certainly see where a maze might enter the picture. With so many doors and identical, sterile-looking halls, it would be much harder for the "patients" to find their way around or get into anything potentially dangerous (read: useful). That still left her wondering what this big hub in the middle with the sunny area and the connected rooms was for, but that could be rationalized as simply a resting point in the center of the maze
( ... )
Leela didn't think Elaine meant the kind of voodoo Hermes meant when he talked about his zombie grandma. She was pretty sure zombies, like ghosts and pine trees, were mostly extinct, anyway. Now she wondered what sort of voodoo someone could do so well. There wasn't much that science hadn't explained in her time, but enough downright bizarre things had happened to her before this that she liked to think she had an open mind. It was refreshing that Elaine seemed to have one, too. But she did come from before the Stupid Ages.
"Good point. They wouldn't leave any of that sitting around where we could find it. I've only time-traveled by accident, but I guess it could be some kind of magic. That girl I was talking to before said she came from a place where it worked." Still, something like this probably had a more reasonable explanation. Leela snapped her fingers as an idea occurred to her
( ... )
'A place where it worked'? Elaine thought curiously. That implied that Leela was more familiar with a world where it didn't. Granted, Elaine wasn't too big on the whole magic and supernatural field herself, but even she could see that it worked, at least. If they were both from Earth, she couldn't easily imagine something as ancient and handy as voodoo dying out, even in the thirty-first century
( ... )
"I've poked my head into a few," Leela said. "This one doesn't really feel parallel to me." If it were some kind of Past-o-Verse, she probably would have run into an alternate Leela in a hoop skirt by now, and she didn't think they worked that way, anyway. The differences seemed to always be obvious at a glance, and as for the time, it had always been, well, parallel to her own universe's. Then there was the question of where the other people had come from. Elaine seemed to be from the past of Leela's own universe, but maybe that was a bit of Universe A elitism creeping in because she liked her. Leela didn't know enough about Mason to say what sort of universe his was (other than a rude one), but Rita and her belief in magic didn't quite add up, even assuming she'd been abducted from an unexplored planet.
She approved of the way Elaine's mind worked as far as coping with the complex challenges and implications of their being here, and gave her a smile. "If you mean beat them up 'til they let us go, I'm so on board for that. I'll pin
( ... )
And hey, if she really was in the past, Fry hadn't set the bar too high. As long as Leela didn't end up as her own descendant, she'd come out ahead of him.
"Can't I get a Femislim injection?" she asked her nurse, after listening to the announcement, which, while not a lot like the Orphanarium (they were lucky if the owl traps went off, there), put her in mind of the place. A diet of institutional food for very long was only going to give Amy plenty of ammunition when Leela got home ( ... )
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Leela had become pretty certain that no one here really deserved to be locked up. The fact that these spleazeballs (now that she'd thought of the alien zoo possibility, she couldn't help but picture stereotypical grey aliens, probably watching through two-way mirrors) had kidnapped a politician was worrying. Was someone under the mistaken impression that she had friends who had money, and competence? Or was it as random as it seemed? On the one hand, if someone that important had been abducted, the regular joes and janes here were probably boned. On the other, it meant whoever was behind this was really going to get a kick in the face when everything got sorted out. But on the third hand, sorting it out wasn't happening nearly fast enough for Leela's taste. "Governor of what?"
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Either way, Leela was probably not from around the Tri-Island area; otherwise, the name "Marley" would have gotten a reaction of some sort. She took that into account when answering the woman's question. "Governor of the Tri-Island Area. It's quite deep in the Caribbean, a little ways away from the Gulf of Melange. Have you ever sailed near the area?" she asked, laying out her craft materials on the table in front of her.
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Had Leela said something like that before Elaine had been transformed into a gold statue and apparently spirited away to an unfamiliar place at least seven years in the future, Elaine would probably have said "That's nice" and left the clearly insane woman to her own business. Even after said events, she was still tempted to do just that, and the "Are you quite serious?" expression on her face said as much. She could maybe believe in some voodoo power interfering in time a little bit, but bringing in people from over 1000 years in the future? She was pretty sure that even the blackest of magic didn't have a reach that far.
She didn't know for certain that it didn't, however, which gave her enough reasonable doubt to stay and perhaps let Leela explain herself further. "That's... not exactly the easiest thing in the world to believe, Captain, considering it was the late 17th century the last time I checked, " she answered back with her suspicious eyebrow raised extra high for good measure. "Do you have any proof of that?"
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"I could ax you the same thing, you know. Can you prove you're from the 1600s?" Leela wasn't entirely sure what the differences were between that time and when Fry had come from. They'd had hand-cranked televisions or something? Elaine looked modern enough, but if she'd started out wrapped in pelts, the hospital would've made her change anyway. "I've met one other person from Earth here, and he ( ... )
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"Some kind of experiment? To see how we react in a hostile environment?" She'd been in hostile-er, sure, but that didn't mean she was in a big hurry to settle down here. She had deliveries to make, and a chance to find out if it was possible for a guy she was dating to like her too much. She had meals for the next two weeks waiting in her freezer!
"But I don't have any idea why they'd change me." Maybe it had been to keep the other patients from freaking out even more, she thought, frowning slightly and picking up a purple marker. Or maybe it had been just more evidence of ( ... )
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A battle was an interesting concept. Level the playing field by taking away everyone's stuff and making them all human. But something bothered her about it, and after a moment, she realized what. "The technology is wrong. If they're pulling people from all sorts of different times, they have to be able to control when they yoink us from. Or maybe they can't, and that's why we're all from different times and places." Or maybe they could, and just liked to mess with people ( ... )
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"Good point. They wouldn't leave any of that sitting around where we could find it. I've only time-traveled by accident, but I guess it could be some kind of magic. That girl I was talking to before said she came from a place where it worked." Still, something like this probably had a more reasonable explanation. Leela snapped her fingers as an idea occurred to her ( ... )
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She approved of the way Elaine's mind worked as far as coping with the complex challenges and implications of their being here, and gave her a smile. "If you mean beat them up 'til they let us go, I'm so on board for that. I'll pin ( ... )
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