Sock Puppetry
Okay, I've gotten requests for various combinations of Susan, Shaun, and Slarti, so I'm shoving them all in the same one. Warning: This is probably going to be long and rambling and otherwise made of random.
The Great Hall tended to be busy this time of day. It was between meals, but plenty of students hung around anyway; studying, cadging snacks, playing games. It was bigger and brighter than the library, and unlike the library you could actually eat while reading.
It was for this very reason that Susan sat on the end of the Ravenclaw table, plowing her way through a heavy Astronomy tome with a cup of sweet tea. It was on, rather than at--she sat cross-legged, elbows rested on her knees and chin rested on her hands, seemingly oblivious to all around her.
Only seemingly--she was well aware when a tall man in a rather disturbingly furry coat set up shop not far down the table. He had several books, a briefcase, and a model of what she’d come to recognize as this world’s solar system made out of--
Lint? It certainly looked like lint, of various shades and textures--some light and fluffy, some heavy and thick. The man had clearly gone to great pains to achieve accuracy--each moon was sized correctly, and she had no doubt that the orbital velocity of the planets had been factored in and scaled down as well. Each piece hung and moved in the air unsupported, circling a sun that looked, for all the world, like the yarn pom-pom off a slipper.
Once upon a time, even Susan might have considered something like that a bit…bizarre. Auditors, bogeymen, monsters--those were common enough, but someone who would sit down and, with great craftsmanship, reproduce the solar system with dryer lint was another story entirely. Now, however….
“Is that really lint?” she asked, bookmarking her page. She’d seen this gentleman in Ravenclaw before, but had not until now spoken to him--it didn’t surprise her that a man who would build such a thing would be in Ravenclaw. They were, she thought, the only people crazy enough to do such a thing.
Slartibartfast, not possessing Susan’s cognizance, had quite failed to notice her until she spoke. He nearly dropped Jupiter.
“It, uh, yes, it, it is,” he said, gently easing the little planet into its orbit. “Almost done…just need to fine-tune some of, of the, you know, the little fiddly bits. Of course, at this scale you can’t--I mean, really, you can’t reproduce the actual continents or, or, you know, anything. Had a hard time getting, ah, getting around that.”
He tapped Pluto into place and watched the whole thing critically, with a craftsman’s eye. “Almost there. Just a, a, a bit more.”
Susan was interested in spite of herself. “You like astronomy, do you?” she asked, having absolutely no idea just what she was getting herself into.
“Oh, yes, I, I do. Well, I mean, I mean, I ought to, it’s what I do--or, you know, did, before, before I came here--for a living.” Ah, there, just a bit slower on Saturn’s spin…There. “I worked on the, the, the big version of all this, and I, well, I wanted to see if it would, really if it would work quite properly if I shrank it.” He had a truly odd speech pattern--Susan almost wanted to call it a speech impediment, but it seemed to be less a stutter than a case of his words arranging themselves any old way they pleased.
She blinked. “Wait, what? Are you telling me you built this planet? And--and everything out there?” While she had absolutely no doubt that somebody had made it all, the idea that this elderly, absentminded gentleman had done it just didn’t quite compute. “What, by yourself?”
Slartibartfast laughed. “No, no, not, not by myself--there’s a whole company. I, I mean, I mostly just do the little crinkly edges of, of, continents and things--won awards for, ah, for the fjords round Norway, when we, you know, when we made this place.”
He touched the little lint model of earth--which looked to be mostly made up of bits of sweater fuzzballs--and a faint, transparent image appeared above it. It panned over a rocky, tumbling coastline, the kind of coast that seems to have a lot more geography compressed within it than should rightly fit.
“That, you know, that was Norway. Probably, I mean, probably still is. Haven’t been there yet.”
There were at this point a great many questions Susan could have asked. The man was obviously human, or something close enough as made no difference, but he was also old. The idea of a company that built worlds and bits of universe was not, on the whole, a terribly odd one, at least when compared with half the stuff in this place. Hmm…
“Did you ever do anything unusual?” she asked, sketching on a piece of notepaper. “Something more like this?”
Slartibartfast took the proffered paper, eying it with interest. Now that was a novel idea….
“Where, I mean, where did you get this? The, the idea?”
“I live there. Or at least, I did, before I came here. It’s the Discworld.” Susan had set aside her book, nearly knocking over her teacup in the process. “Quite a lot of people would pay good money to know why it’s set up the way it is. Even Granddad doesn’t know.”
Slarti turned the paper this way and that. Simple though the sketch was, he could easily see the shape of it--it would have been a major, blinding headache to design, but the very idea of the challenge caught his fancy. One thing he knew--his company hadn’t built it. Honestly, he wasn’t sure they could have.
“No, we, we didn’t,” he said. “Though…hmm. I’d, really I’d love to try. Ordinary, I mean, ordinary physics wouldn’t do at all….”
He took out a pen and some paper of his own, and started sketching out a more detailed version of Susan’s picture. The solar system was almost done; he needed a new project, and if he could come up with something interesting enough he might actually get the funding to build it, rather than try to sell the design to some greedy idiot. If he could get a model to work….
Meanwhile, Susan wasn’t the only person whose attention his solar system had caught. Shaun, who was still hopelessly confused by the castle’s ever-shifting geography, had found his way to the hall and was busily devouring a pizza. This place was weird beyond all imagining, but mostly in a good way.
He wandered over as Slartibartfast muttered to himself, adding to Susan’s rough sketch with a bit of pencil.
“What’s he doing, then?” he asked Susan, seeing that Slartibartfast was far too busy to answer any questions.
“Designing a planet,” she said. “Or, more accurately, designing a copy of my home world. He says his company built the Earth.”
Shaun blinked. He’d heard some weird, weird shit here, but that definitely took the cake. “What, really? This Earth?”
Susan smiled. “What, there’s another one?”
“Hey, in this place, you never know.” Shaun peered curiously at Slarti (who seemed wholly oblivious to both of them). “Why’s it made out of lint, though? Does it have some deep meaning?”
“No,” Slartibartfast said, still sketching. “There’s just, you know, just a lot of it laying around.”
“He’s got a point,” Susan put in. “The house-elves probably collect it by the pound.” She eyed Shaun. “Why’ve you got that?” she asked, nodding to the cricket bat.
“Oh, this?” He looked at the bat as though just now realizing he held it. “Zombies,” he said seriously. “I heard there were a few here and, well, you can’t be too prepared. Nasty buggers, zombies.”
Susan blinked, and fought a laugh. “I’ve only met a few zombies here, but none of them are what I’d call nasty. Other than to look at, that is,” she added. “Why a bat? You’d think a sword would be more effective.”
“Well, I hadn’t got a sword,” Shaun said, somewhat defensively. “It was this or a shovel, and my mate Ed had the shovel.” Not that it had done him much good, in the end. “He’s a zombie now himself--lived in my garden shed, until we both showed up here.”
“He lived in your shed?” This world’s zombies really did sound a lot different than the ones on the Disc--back home, they didn’t let being dead keep them from having a good time. “Well, anyway, I hope you’ll be careful, using that here--we’ve got a fair amount of zombies, and most of them wouldn’t be happy getting thwacked in the head.”
“Yeah, I’d heard that. Haven’t met any of ’em yet.” Shaun hefted the cricket bat as he sat at the table, laying it on the seat beside him. He probably didn’t need it here, but he was just nervous enough that he’d rather have it with him. “Dunno if this is an off question, but is your hair natural?”
Susan laughed. “No, it’s one I hear a lot. Yes, it’s natural.” Unbeknownst to her, her hair, being somewhat shy under scrutiny, uncoiled from its bun and rearranged itself into…a slightly different bun. Its creativity was limited today.
Shaun stared. Out of all the bizarre things he’d seen here, a person’s hair moving on its own was definitely novel even by Hogwarts’ standards. Susan caught his look, and glanced irritably upward.
“Stop that,” she said, and her hair, chagrined, stopped. “Sorry--it does that sometimes. I know it looks a bit strange, but it’s harmless.”
“Does everyone’s hair do that, where you come from?” Shaun asked, rather weakly.
“Oh, no. It’s a peculiar freak of mine.” Freak was about the right word for it, too. “Tends to make social situations a bit awkward, but there’s not much I can do about it. My entire family tends to make social situations awkward.”
“Why’s that?” Shaun didn’t really understand embarrassing family--well, okay, Philip had been a bit annoying, up until…until Z-Day, but his mum had always been good with the social thing. Even where Ed was concerned, and that took some skill. “They show pictures about you or something?”
Susan laughed again, rather more dryly, and shook her head. “No--my parents are dead. It’s my granddad who has problems in that area. I used to be a bit ashamed of him, to tell you the truth--” and don’t I feel like an idiot about it now “--but spending time here has given me a little…perspective. Family’s family, problematic or not.”
Shaun had to agree with that, even if he’d realized it too late to do much good. “What’s your granddad do, that was so embarrassing? Pick his teeth or something?”
Oh, here it went. “No, it’s not what he does, it’s what he is. His job tends to make him a bit unpopular with people, at least until they get to know him--not that most people have a chance to. He’s Death.”
Shaun blinked at her. Once upon a time, he’d have thought such a statement ridiculous, but after Z-Day, and after he’d come here…it was weird, but not unbelievable. “Death? As in, scythe, robes, the whole bit?” He couldn’t help but wonder, in the way of all who are forever mentally twelve, how exactly that would, well, work.
Susan nodded. “Exactly. Pale horse, the whole bit. Well, he’s Death on my world; this place seems to have its own Death, who is nothing like Granddad. He adopted my mother, and for a while he had an apprentice, and we all know where that goes. I’m the end result.”
That…explained a bit, he supposed. What were you supposed to say, in that kind of situation? And how, if her grandfather was Death, did her parents come to die? You’d think they at least would be exempt. He was curious, but he didn’t want to ask.
“So what about you? How did you wind up a zombie hunter?”
Shaun glanced at the bat. “Well, I wouldn’t say I was a hunter, exactly,” he said. “I mean, that would mean I would actually had to have gone looking for the bastards. There was a while, about a year ago, when all the dead people came back and started eating everyone who was still alive. I got my parents, flatmate, girlfriend, girlfriend’s flatmates, and we all went to go hole up in a pub.” He paused, momentarily silent. “My dad died, and my mum, and my mate Ed, and one of Liz’s flatmates got torn apart. Her other flatmate survived, and she and I got out, but…I dunno, the pub was a stupid idea. I just didn’t realize it at the time.”
Gods, how awful…the zombies here really weren’t like zombies on the Disc. “I’m sorry,” she said. Susan at least had known beforehand that her parents were due to die, and she certainly had never watched any of her friends get torn apart. (Strangers, now that was another story--she’d seen a few battlefields, during her brief stint as Death, and they were never pretty.) “You know, in a situation like that…right or wrong, you’ve got to do something. The witches back home say it doesn’t matter what you choose, so long as you make the choice.” By which she meant that Shaun and everyone with him were human, and humans fucked up. A lot.
“I guess so,” he said, unconvinced. He’d mostly moved past the whole thing, but coming to a place as weird as this…well, it made you think. And Ed was here…glad as he was that his flatmate had come with, he wasn’t sure just how they would deal with him. Ed might be Shaun’s best mate, but that didn’t change the fact that he’d try to eat people as soon as he was let.
“I know so. Sooner or later everybody dies--and believe me, no one is more aware of that fact than I--and unless you held a crossbow to their heads, you’ve no responsibility for anyone’s death. Look at it this way,” she said, casting about for a suitable method of articulation, “my parents are dead, right? And Granddad had to be there, when they died. He took their lives, but he didn’t kill them. And, however much he wanted to, he couldn’t save them.”
Shaun turned that over in thoughtful silence. Yeah, maybe that was a bit…jeeze. “Okay, when you put it that way….” He trailed off. “Look, all this philosophy stuff is making me hungry. You want to grab something from the kitchen? I’m sure I can find one of the--what are they, house elves?--who can make a decent toastie.”
“I wouldn’t mind that at all. We can get something for--I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think I heard your name?” This to Slarti, who was still sketching assiduously.
“My name?” he said, looking up. “It’s not important. I wouldn’t mind a toastie, though.”
“Toasties it is, then.” Susan packed up her books as Shaun picked up the bat. “What exactly is a toastie, anyway?”
The Great Hall tended to be busy this time of day. It was between meals, but plenty of students hung around anyway; studying, cadging snacks, playing games. It was bigger and brighter than the library, and unlike the library you could actually eat while reading.
It was for this very reason that Susan sat on the end of the Ravenclaw table, plowing her way through a heavy Astronomy tome with a cup of sweet tea. It was on, rather than at--she sat cross-legged, elbows rested on her knees and chin rested on her hands, seemingly oblivious to all around her.
Only seemingly--she was well aware when a tall man in a rather disturbingly furry coat set up shop not far down the table. He had several books, a briefcase, and a model of what she’d come to recognize as this world’s solar system made out of--
Lint? It certainly looked like lint, of various shades and textures--some light and fluffy, some heavy and thick. The man had clearly gone to great pains to achieve accuracy--each moon was sized correctly, and she had no doubt that the orbital velocity of the planets had been factored in and scaled down as well. Each piece hung and moved in the air unsupported, circling a sun that looked, for all the world, like the yarn pom-pom off a slipper.
Once upon a time, even Susan might have considered something like that a bit…bizarre. Auditors, bogeymen, monsters--those were common enough, but someone who would sit down and, with great craftsmanship, reproduce the solar system with dryer lint was another story entirely. Now, however….
“Is that really lint?” she asked, bookmarking her page. She’d seen this gentleman in Ravenclaw before, but had not until now spoken to him--it didn’t surprise her that a man who would build such a thing would be in Ravenclaw. They were, she thought, the only people crazy enough to do such a thing.
Slartibartfast, not possessing Susan’s cognizance, had quite failed to notice her until she spoke. He nearly dropped Jupiter.
“It, uh, yes, it, it is,” he said, gently easing the little planet into its orbit. “Almost done…just need to fine-tune some of, of the, you know, the little fiddly bits. Of course, at this scale you can’t--I mean, really, you can’t reproduce the actual continents or, or, you know, anything. Had a hard time getting, ah, getting around that.”
He tapped Pluto into place and watched the whole thing critically, with a craftsman’s eye. “Almost there. Just a, a, a bit more.”
Susan was interested in spite of herself. “You like astronomy, do you?” she asked, having absolutely no idea just what she was getting herself into.
“Oh, yes, I, I do. Well, I mean, I mean, I ought to, it’s what I do--or, you know, did, before, before I came here--for a living.” Ah, there, just a bit slower on Saturn’s spin…There. “I worked on the, the, the big version of all this, and I, well, I wanted to see if it would, really if it would work quite properly if I shrank it.” He had a truly odd speech pattern--Susan almost wanted to call it a speech impediment, but it seemed to be less a stutter than a case of his words arranging themselves any old way they pleased.
She blinked. “Wait, what? Are you telling me you built this planet? And--and everything out there?” While she had absolutely no doubt that somebody had made it all, the idea that this elderly, absentminded gentleman had done it just didn’t quite compute. “What, by yourself?”
Slartibartfast laughed. “No, no, not, not by myself--there’s a whole company. I, I mean, I mostly just do the little crinkly edges of, of, continents and things--won awards for, ah, for the fjords round Norway, when we, you know, when we made this place.”
He touched the little lint model of earth--which looked to be mostly made up of bits of sweater fuzzballs--and a faint, transparent image appeared above it. It panned over a rocky, tumbling coastline, the kind of coast that seems to have a lot more geography compressed within it than should rightly fit.
“That, you know, that was Norway. Probably, I mean, probably still is. Haven’t been there yet.”
There were at this point a great many questions Susan could have asked. The man was obviously human, or something close enough as made no difference, but he was also old. The idea of a company that built worlds and bits of universe was not, on the whole, a terribly odd one, at least when compared with half the stuff in this place. Hmm…
“Did you ever do anything unusual?” she asked, sketching on a piece of notepaper. “Something more like this?”
Slartibartfast took the proffered paper, eying it with interest. Now that was a novel idea….
“Where, I mean, where did you get this? The, the idea?”
“I live there. Or at least, I did, before I came here. It’s the Discworld.” Susan had set aside her book, nearly knocking over her teacup in the process. “Quite a lot of people would pay good money to know why it’s set up the way it is. Even Granddad doesn’t know.”
Slarti turned the paper this way and that. Simple though the sketch was, he could easily see the shape of it--it would have been a major, blinding headache to design, but the very idea of the challenge caught his fancy. One thing he knew--his company hadn’t built it. Honestly, he wasn’t sure they could have.
“No, we, we didn’t,” he said. “Though…hmm. I’d, really I’d love to try. Ordinary, I mean, ordinary physics wouldn’t do at all….”
He took out a pen and some paper of his own, and started sketching out a more detailed version of Susan’s picture. The solar system was almost done; he needed a new project, and if he could come up with something interesting enough he might actually get the funding to build it, rather than try to sell the design to some greedy idiot. If he could get a model to work….
Meanwhile, Susan wasn’t the only person whose attention his solar system had caught. Shaun, who was still hopelessly confused by the castle’s ever-shifting geography, had found his way to the hall and was busily devouring a pizza. This place was weird beyond all imagining, but mostly in a good way.
He wandered over as Slartibartfast muttered to himself, adding to Susan’s rough sketch with a bit of pencil.
“What’s he doing, then?” he asked Susan, seeing that Slartibartfast was far too busy to answer any questions.
“Designing a planet,” she said. “Or, more accurately, designing a copy of my home world. He says his company built the Earth.”
Shaun blinked. He’d heard some weird, weird shit here, but that definitely took the cake. “What, really? This Earth?”
Susan smiled. “What, there’s another one?”
“Hey, in this place, you never know.” Shaun peered curiously at Slarti (who seemed wholly oblivious to both of them). “Why’s it made out of lint, though? Does it have some deep meaning?”
“No,” Slartibartfast said, still sketching. “There’s just, you know, just a lot of it laying around.”
“He’s got a point,” Susan put in. “The house-elves probably collect it by the pound.” She eyed Shaun. “Why’ve you got that?” she asked, nodding to the cricket bat.
“Oh, this?” He looked at the bat as though just now realizing he held it. “Zombies,” he said seriously. “I heard there were a few here and, well, you can’t be too prepared. Nasty buggers, zombies.”
Susan blinked, and fought a laugh. “I’ve only met a few zombies here, but none of them are what I’d call nasty. Other than to look at, that is,” she added. “Why a bat? You’d think a sword would be more effective.”
“Well, I hadn’t got a sword,” Shaun said, somewhat defensively. “It was this or a shovel, and my mate Ed had the shovel.” Not that it had done him much good, in the end. “He’s a zombie now himself--lived in my garden shed, until we both showed up here.”
“He lived in your shed?” This world’s zombies really did sound a lot different than the ones on the Disc--back home, they didn’t let being dead keep them from having a good time. “Well, anyway, I hope you’ll be careful, using that here--we’ve got a fair amount of zombies, and most of them wouldn’t be happy getting thwacked in the head.”
“Yeah, I’d heard that. Haven’t met any of ’em yet.” Shaun hefted the cricket bat as he sat at the table, laying it on the seat beside him. He probably didn’t need it here, but he was just nervous enough that he’d rather have it with him. “Dunno if this is an off question, but is your hair natural?”
Susan laughed. “No, it’s one I hear a lot. Yes, it’s natural.” Unbeknownst to her, her hair, being somewhat shy under scrutiny, uncoiled from its bun and rearranged itself into…a slightly different bun. Its creativity was limited today.
Shaun stared. Out of all the bizarre things he’d seen here, a person’s hair moving on its own was definitely novel even by Hogwarts’ standards. Susan caught his look, and glanced irritably upward.
“Stop that,” she said, and her hair, chagrined, stopped. “Sorry--it does that sometimes. I know it looks a bit strange, but it’s harmless.”
“Does everyone’s hair do that, where you come from?” Shaun asked, rather weakly.
“Oh, no. It’s a peculiar freak of mine.” Freak was about the right word for it, too. “Tends to make social situations a bit awkward, but there’s not much I can do about it. My entire family tends to make social situations awkward.”
“Why’s that?” Shaun didn’t really understand embarrassing family--well, okay, Philip had been a bit annoying, up until…until Z-Day, but his mum had always been good with the social thing. Even where Ed was concerned, and that took some skill. “They show pictures about you or something?”
Susan laughed again, rather more dryly, and shook her head. “No--my parents are dead. It’s my granddad who has problems in that area. I used to be a bit ashamed of him, to tell you the truth--” and don’t I feel like an idiot about it now “--but spending time here has given me a little…perspective. Family’s family, problematic or not.”
Shaun had to agree with that, even if he’d realized it too late to do much good. “What’s your granddad do, that was so embarrassing? Pick his teeth or something?”
Oh, here it went. “No, it’s not what he does, it’s what he is. His job tends to make him a bit unpopular with people, at least until they get to know him--not that most people have a chance to. He’s Death.”
Shaun blinked at her. Once upon a time, he’d have thought such a statement ridiculous, but after Z-Day, and after he’d come here…it was weird, but not unbelievable. “Death? As in, scythe, robes, the whole bit?” He couldn’t help but wonder, in the way of all who are forever mentally twelve, how exactly that would, well, work.
Susan nodded. “Exactly. Pale horse, the whole bit. Well, he’s Death on my world; this place seems to have its own Death, who is nothing like Granddad. He adopted my mother, and for a while he had an apprentice, and we all know where that goes. I’m the end result.”
That…explained a bit, he supposed. What were you supposed to say, in that kind of situation? And how, if her grandfather was Death, did her parents come to die? You’d think they at least would be exempt. He was curious, but he didn’t want to ask.
“So what about you? How did you wind up a zombie hunter?”
Shaun glanced at the bat. “Well, I wouldn’t say I was a hunter, exactly,” he said. “I mean, that would mean I would actually had to have gone looking for the bastards. There was a while, about a year ago, when all the dead people came back and started eating everyone who was still alive. I got my parents, flatmate, girlfriend, girlfriend’s flatmates, and we all went to go hole up in a pub.” He paused, momentarily silent. “My dad died, and my mum, and my mate Ed, and one of Liz’s flatmates got torn apart. Her other flatmate survived, and she and I got out, but…I dunno, the pub was a stupid idea. I just didn’t realize it at the time.”
Gods, how awful…the zombies here really weren’t like zombies on the Disc. “I’m sorry,” she said. Susan at least had known beforehand that her parents were due to die, and she certainly had never watched any of her friends get torn apart. (Strangers, now that was another story--she’d seen a few battlefields, during her brief stint as Death, and they were never pretty.) “You know, in a situation like that…right or wrong, you’ve got to do something. The witches back home say it doesn’t matter what you choose, so long as you make the choice.” By which she meant that Shaun and everyone with him were human, and humans fucked up. A lot.
“I guess so,” he said, unconvinced. He’d mostly moved past the whole thing, but coming to a place as weird as this…well, it made you think. And Ed was here…glad as he was that his flatmate had come with, he wasn’t sure just how they would deal with him. Ed might be Shaun’s best mate, but that didn’t change the fact that he’d try to eat people as soon as he was let.
“I know so. Sooner or later everybody dies--and believe me, no one is more aware of that fact than I--and unless you held a crossbow to their heads, you’ve no responsibility for anyone’s death. Look at it this way,” she said, casting about for a suitable method of articulation, “my parents are dead, right? And Granddad had to be there, when they died. He took their lives, but he didn’t kill them. And, however much he wanted to, he couldn’t save them.”
Shaun turned that over in thoughtful silence. Yeah, maybe that was a bit…jeeze. “Okay, when you put it that way….” He trailed off. “Look, all this philosophy stuff is making me hungry. You want to grab something from the kitchen? I’m sure I can find one of the--what are they, house elves?--who can make a decent toastie.”
“I wouldn’t mind that at all. We can get something for--I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think I heard your name?” This to Slarti, who was still sketching assiduously.
“My name?” he said, looking up. “It’s not important. I wouldn’t mind a toastie, though.”
“Toasties it is, then.” Susan packed up her books as Shaun picked up the bat. “What exactly is a toastie, anyway?”