WiP amnesty
Yesterday was WiP amnesty day. I feel it's wholly appropriate that this post is late, given that so are the WiPs contained in it. RIP an' all that.
Drop the Dead Donkey, 1033 words
[This was going to be Helen/Joy, but I had so much fun writing gen interaction I never got round to the Hott Lezbyan Sexx bit. Shame, really. There's at least one obvious quote from the show and one reference to show trivia. I should probably have made it more accessible to people with no knowledge of canon. *sigh*]
There is a certain expression Joy appears to be cultivating. Half accusatory glare, half contemptuous scowl, Helen suspects it makes the men of Globelink's balls shrivel up and retreat back into their bodies. It almost makes her whimper, which is no mean feat in itself. That's the expression Joy has been wearing all day.
===
It started when Gus arrived at 10:30, just in time for the first editorial meeting of the day.
"Don't mind me!" he said, attempting to perch casually on a desk. "I'm not here!"
The entire staff indulged in a quick fantasy about killing him, with the possible exception of George, whose self-help books tell him not to do such things, and Damien, who was looking at porn on the internet.
"Right," Helen said, trying and failing to put a positive spin she certainly wasn't feeling on the proceedings. "We lead with Chechnya."
George, Dave and Henry nodded. Joy was too busy glaring at Gus to acknowledge Helen's decision, but it was felt that her silence implied approval. Sally was touching up her makeup and Damien was still looking at porn.
"Next item, either Princess Michael of Kent's speech or the French propo-"
"If I might interrupt," Gus interrupted. "Do we really need to start with Chechnya? I mean, isn't it a little gloomy?"
No one spoke. George looked imploringly at Helen who glanced at Dave who caught Henry's eye. Henry, finding nowhere else to pass the buck, took a deep breath. "Of course it's gloomy," he said, the phrase 'you gormless little tit' hanging unspoken in the air, "It's Chechnya. The only good news there is when a dog dies. Then, at least, they have something to eat."
Gus sighed. If a thousand Maths teachers had spent a thousand years perfecting the most patronising sigh in the world, they still couldn't have produced this. The sigh was to your run-of-the-mill patronising sighs what Shakespeare was to The Daily Mail, what Gödel was to accounting, what Gus was to gormless little tits. The sigh spoke of Gus's superior grasp not only of world affairs but of business matters and successful broadcasting.
Helen thought she could hear Henry's blood boil.
"Henry, Henry, Henry," Gus said. "Henry. Do our viewers really want to know about a crisis in a country they can't even spell? Really? Or would they rather know about the inspirational journey of a dog abandoned in Wapping that somehow hitchhiked its way to Birmingham?"
Joy spoke up, her voice a disturbingly cheerful tone not matched by her expression. "The dog?"
"Well done, Jane," Gus enthused. "We'll make a true journalist out of you yet!"
"Yes, Jane," said Henry, earning himself a soul-destroying glare. "Well done."
"Thank you," Joy simpered.
Everyone but Gus cowered in their seats. Even Sally hid behind her computer screen. Helen held her breath.
"Right, well, that's settled then?" Gus asked.
"I'll see if I can move the dog story to number four," said Helen. "But we'll have to do the princess second and the French third." So Henry doesn't fuck up again and call the wrong one a bitch, she mentally added.
"Now, Helen," Gus's voice took on a fatherly tone. "Are we sure we can't put Chechnya a little further down the listings?"
Fortunately, George chose that moment to speak up, leaving Helen to muse on the odd behaviour of the one other functioning member of the staff.
She hoped Joy wasn't having another of her breakdowns.
"...appreciate any help you give..." George could waffle for England. Then, she reflected, they could report on that and bump Chechnya still further. "...grasp of certain nuances in reporting style that..." There was a lot of advertising potential in the heartwarming story of a Globelink employee battling the odds to become Olympic champion waffler. "...keen, dedicated staff ready and willing to..." Well, if the Globelink employee young enough, slim enough and blonde enough. "...stir frying so many of our ideas in your think-wok..."
When Joy slipped out of the room, Helen didn't follow. After all, she had a fucking job to do.
===
At 12:30, Helen took in the room. Henry was asleep at his chair, his snores barely disturbing the paper stacked several feet high on his desk. George was frantically shoving what looked like an entire swim team's worth of towels up his nose to stem - if the state of his shirt was any indication - another nosebleed. Sally was fixing her make up. Damien was looking at porn on the internet. And Dave...
"Hey, Henry, you old fart!" Dave shouted across the room, waving a crisp purple note in the air. "Twenty quid says Chechnya gets bumped below the dog this evening."
Henry awoke with a series of snorts, then rallied furiously. "I'd take your money, my addle-minded friend, but not at the expense of Globelink's integrity."
Dave blinked. "What, really?"
"No, of course not really, you tit. Twenty quid, was it?"
Helen strode across the room to snatch the money from Dave's fingers. "I'll take your money, my addle-minded friend." Then, over their synchronised protests: "Chechnya stays top, boys, and not even Gus's most ignorant, da-" They were staring. Pointedly. Just over her shoulder. "-aaaring, challenging and fresh ideas should be ignored in the debate." She swung round, a fixed grin on her face, to see absolutely no one standing behind her.
"Da-aaaaring?" asked Dave.
"Challenging?" asked Henry.
"Fresh?" asked Damien, looking up from his porn.
"You're whipped," Dave concluded, "and Damien owes me a tenner."
"You let me down, Helen," said Damien, reaching into his jacket pocket for the money. "I really thought you had it in you."
Oh for crying out loud. "Has anyone seen Joy?"
No one had.
===
By 2:30, Chechnya had lost its top spot to a train crash in Brussels. Not even dead Belgians, however, could cheer up Joy, who had reappeared after a three hour absence as if she'd never been away.
No one looked up as Henry bellowed across the room "Tintin!"
"Nah," said Dave. "We've had Herge."
Sally put down her compact mirror, blinking to convey sincerity. "In this time of very real tragedy, I think it is inappropriate for you to-"
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Hitchhiker's Guide: Attack of the Towels, 1206 words
[carmarthen's fault. Also, afrai's fault. Definitely nothing to do with me. The style is very, very awkward in the first section - it reads more like amateur-Pratchett than anything else - but there are some nice bits later on.]
The nature of causality is a tricky business.
The above joins "if you pick it, it'll never get better" and "it never rains but it pours" in approximating closely to truth, but not being necessarily any more helpful in sentient life's fight against entropy than just ignoring the whole damned thing and hoping it goes away. It might be more useful if it went on to mention that not every story has a beginning, a middle and an end: some are just one constant loop of middle giving a quiet nod towards a beginning every second Sunday. It might be more useful if it went on to mention that time and space have a habit of playing silly buggers if you take your eye off them for a moment, and sometimes even if you don't. It might, some scholars argue, be more useful if it went on to mention the value of treating time as a game of six-dimensional chess. It is interesting to note that this is never argued by those scholars who can actually play the game in more than the usual five dimensions.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has some advice on how to cope with the more upsetting aspects of causality. This can be found under "Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters, the creation and consumption thereof".
However, for the time being, if such a spurious concept can be entertained for the sake of convenience, it is perhaps easier to accept that somewhere and somewhen in the universe, there is a young Jrtian with ink stains on his fingers and the shape of his notepad imprinted firmly onto his face who has just been woken up by an unutterably brilliant idea. Somewhere and somewhen else entirely, there is a ship crewed by two ape-descendants, a clinically depressed robot, the Guide's worst paid field reporter and the President of the Galaxy, all of whom are suffering horribly. The two events are linked.
===
Ford was getting more and more frustrated by the minute. Fifteen years on Earth had left their mark, and he still couldn't quite shake the belief that if he stared unblinkingly at someone for long enough, they would break out in a cold sweat and try - without making any sudden movements - to cover their neck. This trick didn't work on Zaphod, whose two heads, if they blinked at all, opened and closed their eyelids in three-eight time. Ford didn't know whether to be frustrated with himself for relying on such a stupid technique or his semi-cousin for not paying attention. In the end, as ever, he decided it was probably Arthur's fault.
"It is," said Zaphod, oblivious to his pain. "It's following me."
Ford focused on calming thoughts of black coffee, gin and saying things to Arthur that made the latter's face go very placid, his voice go very even and his blood pressure go through the roof. "It isn't."
"It is." Zaphod glared pointedly at a piece of cloth lying innocuously in a corner of the control room. "It's lurking, waiting to attack."
"Zaphod," began Ford, trying to think about coffee with a dash of gin served in a piece of crockery bearing the legend 'My planet blew up and all I got was this lousy mug'. "It's a towel."
"Shhh!" both Zaphod's heads said simultaneously, all three of his arms making hushing gestures. "It'll hear us."
"It's a towel," repeated Ford, correctly. His accuracy here is noted only as a stark contrast to the rest of his views on the subject. "Therefore, it can't hear you. It can't see you, it can't taste you, smell you or feel you. It doesn't think you owe it money because a) not even you are stupid enough to gamble with a towel and b) it doesn't think anything about anyone. It can't think. It's not alive."
"Then why is it following me?"
===
The towel that was following Zaphod had first met him several years ago (or, the nature of causality being what it is, several years hence) in a bar. Zaphod had had a shiny new deck of Megolithian jumping cards and an even shinier new credit card. The towel, nicknamed Percy by its young Jrtian creator, had bought him a drink and naively happened to remark on its ignorance of Megolithian jumping poker and its lust for knowledge in that area.
Zaphod had once had rather a lot of natural talent for languages, which makes it all the more of a shame that he spent his childhood Jrtian lessons brushing up on his card skills. If he hadn't, he might have known that "Percy" was common Jrtian slang for "conniving little fluffy bastard".
If Percy hadn't spent his childhood in a laundry basket, it might have known that "to Zaphod" was common intergalactic slang for "to shirk on gambling debts".
It never rains, scholars who never quite got the hang of chess in a mere four dimensions are often heard to mutter, but it pours.
===
"Thank you for making a simple door very happy."
Arthur wandered into the control room to find Ford glaring at Zaphod. One of Zaphod's heads was returning the favour, but the other seemed more concerned with out-staring a tea-towel. His tea-towel, come to think of it. Pointedly ignoring whatever childish alien battle of wills was taking place around him, he crossed the room. He was about to pick the towel up when an indrawn breath from Zaphod triggered his finely honed survival skills.
It wasn't, he often remarked to Ford when it was clear the bastard wasn't listening, that finely honed survival skills weren't useful. It was more that he'd rather they weren't quite so useful. Finely honed tea-making skills, great. Finely honed road-crossing skills, all well and good. But the ability to tell which large green slime monsters could be pacified by the correct application of a Marks & Spencers jam tart and which would only be irritated further, well, he wistfully remembered a time when it was possible to live without that. The bastard, who invariably had been listening, would smile and ask if those finely honed skills included shutting up.
Still, he didn't pick up the towel.
"Get away from that, Earthman," Zaphod called out.
Arthur, paying careful attention to the finest honings of his very finely honed survival skills, glanced at Ford for a cue.
"He thinks it's following him," Ford said with what Arthur decided was an unnecessarily condescending tone. After all, he wasn't the one trying to outstare a paranoid towel obsessive.
"Is it following him?"
For reasons he couldn't quite place, Arthur felt the sudden, urgent need to cover his neck.
"It's a towel, Arthur," Ford said, at much the same time as Zaphod gave a strangled yell and - radiating a surprising amount of cool for someone terrified by a small piece of cloth - ran out of the room.
"Have a nice day," the door advised him.
Gingerly, half wishing it would leap up and attack him just to prove bloody Ford bloody Prefect wrong, Arthur picked up the tea-towel. Granted, his back was to Ford, but he didn't need to be able to see the Betelguisian to take offence at his expression.
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Good Omens: Heaven's Penultimate Field Agent, 423 words
[The style is awful. Or, rather, it's comprised of at least four different styles, all of which would've been okay in their own way but. Yeah. I still like the idea, though.]
Aziraphale said writing was essential to man's salvation. Personally, Ephrael thought the other angel was just being difficult. They'd had a fight about it, the sort of long, boring fight that happened a lot around Aziraphale, where every time you think you're getting somewhere he goes off on a tangent which isn't quite tangential enough for you to call him out on it. Aziraphale claimed that since writing could pass information from generation to generation without all that pesky hearsay and memory loss, humanity could sow the seeds of its own enlightenment. Ephrael had started to point out that was what angels were for, but before long Aziraphale steered them over to a debate on the relative merits of two local prophets, and the momentum of the argument was lost.
Be that as it may, they had orders. Michael had said it came from higher up, and it hadn't occurred to Ephrael to doubt him. Of course it hadn't. Angels didn't lie. And if discouraging humanity from developing the written word sounded suspiciously like the sort of plan that Michael and Raphael would have no trouble coming up with on their own, that just showed Ephrael had been letting all this contact with humanity get to him. Suspicions, indeed. It didn't hurt that this would piss Aziraphale off no end, too.
Right. Aziraphale would take Mesopotamia, whose merchants had a look about them the human race would much, much later learn to associate with traffic wardens and those whose jobs involve pinning words down so they can't get away. He himself would take Abydos, which was rather nice this time of year.
Abydos. Right.
He hadn't been there in generations. The last time he passed through, her granddaughter had been a wisened old woman. Humans, he thought not for the first time, age too quickly.
Apparently the snake had been in Abydos last year, tempting his way through the city's population remarkably quickly for a demon. The dukes took days on a single mind, worming their way inside until there was nothing left but the worm, but the snake was different. He thought tempting was a matter of mathematics - ten blemishes equal to one mortal sin, ten mortal sins equal to one blasphemy. It hardly seemed worth thwarting him, until you realised quite how many souls he left blemished.
Ephrael sighed. He hated to admit it, but Aziraphale was so much better at dealing with the snake than he was. They had a middle ground Ephrael didn't share, and didn't want to.
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West Wing: Toby = Zombie, 987 words
[nomadicwriter got there first and did it better. Still. There was a zombie challenge. It made me happy. Then see what happened. The Josh'n'Sam bit is weak, the Leo bit even weaker, but I have a lot of love for the Toby moments. Actually, I think the Leo bit was meant to be weak to show how distracted he was by something I can no longer remember. Zombification was going to be through the consumption of some rare fish, hence all the MFU stuff.]
"Toby's pissed," said Sam, automatically falling into step with Josh as they made their way to Senior Staff.
"Toby's always pissed," Josh pointed out.
"Yeah. But today he's really pissed."
"He's always really pissed."
"Yeah." Sam half smiled, half grimaced in resigned amusement. "But today he means it."
"He's al- Wait. Why?" Josh's stride didn't waver, but for the first time that morning he turned to look at the other man. "Calhoon and Skinner?" Sam pointedly ignored the way he said the second name.
"I don't think so. I don't think it's the fish thing, either. Best I can tell, it's because his skin's started flaking."
"What?"
"See for yourself," said Sam as Margaret waved them into Leo's office.
Toby was standing - lurking, Sam mentally amended - in a corner, obviously engrossed in some briefing notes. He made no sign of having noticed his deputy's entry, and even Josh's greeting didn't provoke the customary annoyed grunt of acknowledgment.
Sam turned to Josh, who appeared to be, for want of a better word, sidling towards Toby to get a better look. He tried to catch his friend's eye, but Josh was focused on Toby, clearly determined to see what all the fuss was about. Sam gave a mental shrug and started to read the notes in the folder Cathy had thrust into his hands earlier that morning. Apparently the price of fish oil was up, which was kind of interesting, but nowhere near as much fun as Josh's James Bond impression.
The Deputy Chief of Staff, who yesterday approved amendments with a total cost to the taxpayer of $50 million to a bill that had been the focus of six months' worth of staff-hours in the West Wing alone, had just bruised his shin on a chair. If Toby noticed his stifled groan of pain and subsequent cursing, it didn't register on his face. Josh, stealthy as Lionel Tribby's cricket bat, continued to sidle.
"Good morning!" Leo's voice shocked Sam out of his reverie on the size of Tribby's bat. From the look on Josh's face, he also hadn't noticed Leo's entry. Toby still didn't look up.
"In fifteen minutes I'm going to go next door and advise the President on the crisis facing the fishing industry. In sixteen minutes, I'm lucky if I understand one word in five coming out of his mouth."
Sam smiled dutifully. Josh couldn't have been listening, but maybe the cadences in his boss's voice clued him in on when to grin. There was no response from Toby.
"What do I need to know?" Leo frowned encouragingly at his staff.
"Calhoon and Skinner are threatening to vote against the education bill," Sam offered, concentrating on not noting Josh's full attention when he mentioned Skinner. "I think we wait them out - they want the money for their districts more than they want the attention."
Leo nodded. "Josh?"
Josh nodded. "I have a thing with Adams at lunch - I'll mention we're not budging on the new teachers. It'll get through. I want to bring up Sam's reform proposals wi-"
"Josh," Leo cautioned, "it's done. Next time, we'll... Next time, we'll see."
The deputies exchanged a glance Leo deigned not to see.
"Toby? Anything you need?"
Toby looked up.
At least, most of Toby looked up. His eyes, certainly, looked up. Most of his nose followed suit, although some of the skin flaked off and fluttered downwards. The rest of his skin and the muscle beneath paused for a moment, perhaps noting some detail in the documents that Toby's eyes hadn't managed to catch, before slowly travelling upwards to their rightful places on the man's skull. Skin disorders that were only hinted at when Sam had seen him earlier that morning were now in full bloom, as it were.
It wasn't a sight Sam thought he'd forget in a hurry.
"Braaaains."
No one responded.
"I'm working on Thursday's speech to the MFU." Clearly misinterpreting Josh's look of abject terror as ignorance, Toby elaborated: "The Maritime Fisherman's Union." His eyes did...something. They twitched, almost, then one glanced up and down, mimicked by the other a second later. He was...trying to roll his eyes?
Leo recovered first. "Right. Go! Do a job."
Sam, Josh and at least ninety-five per cent of Toby left the office.
===
Toby found that if he kept his expression fixed for long enough, eventually his entire face would settle there. Fortunately, he wasn't finding it too hard to maintain a scowl.
Ignoring the shocked glances of assorted aides as he strode through the West Wing to the communications bullpen, Toby recapped his situation. No pulse. No memory of what had happened between sitting down to take-away last night and waking up with the skin disorder from hell this morning. No inspiration for Thursday's speech. And a craving for the taste of spicy brains. Maybe his deputy could help him with some of that.
===
"Listen to me when I tell you that if you let this happen then the education bill won't be the story!" Sam heard CJ before he saw her round the corner, hands waving in some over-large gesture.
"The press aren't stupid, CJ -" Josh had lengthened his stride to match CJ's. "- they'll know what Calhoon and Skinner are doing."
"Oh, I'm sorry," said CJ, who wasn't. "I'm underestimating the press? Good thing my job doesn't require me to have much contact with them."
"I'm saying-"
CJ cut him off. "Of course they'll know what Calhoon and Skinner are doing. Everyone knows what Calhoon and Skinner are doing. The point is this: they don't care. If you let them do this, that's what the story will be."
In the lull while both staffers caught their breath, Sam greeted CJ. "CJ! Hey! Where were you during staff?"
"I-" For the first time in days, she looked flustered. "I- Have you seen Toby?"
"This morning? Yeah."
"Me too."
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Discworld: Leonard of Quirm and Vetinari have a conversation, 312 words
[They were going to go to Ephebe and have lots and lots of sex. The style is wrong here - out of habit I've made the third person far tighter than Pratchett tends to. I'm also unconvinced by the dialogue. And I haven't brought the funny. So, really rather irrideemable.]
Leonard always got the feeling Vetinari expected him to make some inference from that frantic up and down motion of his eyebrows. He idly wondered if that was what was missing from his new Device For Removing The Holes From Cheese - up and down motion. That would certainly explain the dimensions of the holes removed, although he wasn't entirely sure if some of the larger holes didn't have more to do with the mice he was training to perform simple circus feats than with any failures in his device.* Although now he came to think of it, if he only removed the sprocket, he could easily include the device in his latest version of the--
"Ahem," said Vetinari.
"What? Oh, yes." The inventor struggled to remember where his thoughts had been some time ago. "Ephebe. Terribly nice this time of year."
"Ah." The Patrician nodded, his eyebrows moving independently of each other and, indeed, the rest of his face. "Nice?"
"Yes," said Leonard, already mentally redesigning the sprocket he intended to remove from the Device For Removing The Holes From Cheese to serve as a rudimentary gardening aid. "Terribly clever chaps over there, I've heard. Who's that...that fellow? Didactylos?"
"Didactylos." There was something in the Patrician's voice indicating that Leonard had said the right thing. So proud was he of his achievement, the inventor soldiered on.
"Didactylos - wonderfully good with levers. Had a bit of trouble a while back with...some religious trouble. Never understood why a nice chap like him would get involved in something like that."
[*Leonard of Quirm's Fantastic and Fabulous Performing Mice, having spent far more time near the waste deposits of the Unseen University than could be considered healthy, were, in fact, strict vegans. They were stealing the cheese not for their own consumption but to feed the needy, who were less enlightened in such matters.]
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Yes Minister / West Wing, 707 words
[I think I've posted the first section before, but not the second. phlebjorn says jump, I don't even wait to ask how high. I don't, it appears, even wait to get my facts about the structure of the government right. I'm sure there was a plot-point reason for the misinformation given in the second section. Either that or I really am that stupid.]
Perhaps the single remaining legacy of Hacker's period at the Department for Administrative Affairs was a reduction in the office space allotted to visiting foreign governmental parties. At the time, the then minister has reasoned that if the enemy (by which he was presumed to mean foreign delegations) wanted more space, they could use their own bloody embassies. This move was motivated entirely by administrative concerns and not at all because Sir Humphrey had heard that Sir Arnold, the then Cabinet Secretary, would look favourably upon the reappropriation of an office that could be used for certain delicate meetings. Even if Sir Humphrey had wished to help Sir Arnold, he would never have abused his position as a trusted ministerial aide to- Yes, well. Quite.
The fact remained that the office space generously provided by Her Majesty's Government for the use of the President of the United States' staff could reasonably have been expected to house two small voles, as long as they didn't mind physical intimacy.
Toby Zeigler and Sam Seaborn, if the voices floating through the closed door of their shared office were any indicator, did mind.
"I did not- I- Did I ask you to call him?"
"No, but-"
"Or did I specifically ask you not to call him? Did I not stand in this very office and ask you not to call him?"
Bernard allowed himself a quiet smile. Sir Humphrey had been right: this reduction in office space really did foster a unique closeness and quite unparalleled sense of good will with our foreign cousins.
"Toby, it was the only way to get the job done. I didn't-"
Toby, presumably, mumbled something Bernard couldn't quite catch. This seemed as opportune a moment as any to interrupt. His knock on the door was answered with a sharp "Yeah!" from lower voice, which Bernard was now almost certain belonged to Toby Zeigler.
"Mr Zeigler? Mr Seaborn? Sir Hu- Uh, the Prime Minister asked me to see if you needed anything not already provided." Bernard noted that while Zeigler was fixing him with a faintly malevolent stare, the other man, Seaborn, had not looked up since he had entered the room. Sir Humphrey had been oddly insistent that Seaborn be well looked after, perhaps hedging bets of which Bernard was not aware. Still, it was wiser not to disobey a direct order from the Cabinet Secretary himself, especially when the order had been framed as such desperately casual advice.
"Mr Seaborn?"
Seaborn looked up. "Sam." There was a pause, during which time Bernard carefully didn't raise an eyebrow. "Call me Sam," Seaborn elaborated.
"Indeed. Is there anything you need?"
"No." Seaborn smiled alliteratively. "Thank you."
Bernard resisted the urge to click his heels together as he left the office.
==
Toby was confused. In his naturally kind and generous manner, he chose to delegate this confusion.
"That was Bernard Wooley," he said.
Sam didn't seem concerned. "Yeah?"
"The British Prime Minister's personal aide."
"Principle Private Secretary," said Sam. Looking up from a draft of his speech to meet Toby's glare, he continued. "Not Personal Aide. Principal Private Secretary. He's involved in policy discussion; in terms of political clout he'd be more on a level with CJ or me than with Charlie. Oh."
"Yes." Toby put on what he thought might be an encouraging expression.
"So why did he come all the way over here to check up on us?"
Toby nodded. "Yeah." Satisfied his deputy would do the worrying now, he transferred his attention back to his briefing material.
Only a few moments passed before Sam broke the silence. "I'm meeting with him later."
"What?"
"Bernard Wooley. I'm due to meet with him at two."
Toby scowled. The point of delegating confusion was so that he could get on with his work. "So?"
"So maybe that's why he came to see us. Maybe he's checking out the opposition - he didn't meet with us when we arrived. But then he did say the Prime Minister had asked him to see us. Maybe they want to make sure we're not offended by the cramped office space."
Not for the first time that day, Toby silently cursed whoever was responsible for not getting him a private office.
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Drop the Dead Donkey, 1033 words
[This was going to be Helen/Joy, but I had so much fun writing gen interaction I never got round to the Hott Lezbyan Sexx bit. Shame, really. There's at least one obvious quote from the show and one reference to show trivia. I should probably have made it more accessible to people with no knowledge of canon. *sigh*]
There is a certain expression Joy appears to be cultivating. Half accusatory glare, half contemptuous scowl, Helen suspects it makes the men of Globelink's balls shrivel up and retreat back into their bodies. It almost makes her whimper, which is no mean feat in itself. That's the expression Joy has been wearing all day.
===
It started when Gus arrived at 10:30, just in time for the first editorial meeting of the day.
"Don't mind me!" he said, attempting to perch casually on a desk. "I'm not here!"
The entire staff indulged in a quick fantasy about killing him, with the possible exception of George, whose self-help books tell him not to do such things, and Damien, who was looking at porn on the internet.
"Right," Helen said, trying and failing to put a positive spin she certainly wasn't feeling on the proceedings. "We lead with Chechnya."
George, Dave and Henry nodded. Joy was too busy glaring at Gus to acknowledge Helen's decision, but it was felt that her silence implied approval. Sally was touching up her makeup and Damien was still looking at porn.
"Next item, either Princess Michael of Kent's speech or the French propo-"
"If I might interrupt," Gus interrupted. "Do we really need to start with Chechnya? I mean, isn't it a little gloomy?"
No one spoke. George looked imploringly at Helen who glanced at Dave who caught Henry's eye. Henry, finding nowhere else to pass the buck, took a deep breath. "Of course it's gloomy," he said, the phrase 'you gormless little tit' hanging unspoken in the air, "It's Chechnya. The only good news there is when a dog dies. Then, at least, they have something to eat."
Gus sighed. If a thousand Maths teachers had spent a thousand years perfecting the most patronising sigh in the world, they still couldn't have produced this. The sigh was to your run-of-the-mill patronising sighs what Shakespeare was to The Daily Mail, what Gödel was to accounting, what Gus was to gormless little tits. The sigh spoke of Gus's superior grasp not only of world affairs but of business matters and successful broadcasting.
Helen thought she could hear Henry's blood boil.
"Henry, Henry, Henry," Gus said. "Henry. Do our viewers really want to know about a crisis in a country they can't even spell? Really? Or would they rather know about the inspirational journey of a dog abandoned in Wapping that somehow hitchhiked its way to Birmingham?"
Joy spoke up, her voice a disturbingly cheerful tone not matched by her expression. "The dog?"
"Well done, Jane," Gus enthused. "We'll make a true journalist out of you yet!"
"Yes, Jane," said Henry, earning himself a soul-destroying glare. "Well done."
"Thank you," Joy simpered.
Everyone but Gus cowered in their seats. Even Sally hid behind her computer screen. Helen held her breath.
"Right, well, that's settled then?" Gus asked.
"I'll see if I can move the dog story to number four," said Helen. "But we'll have to do the princess second and the French third." So Henry doesn't fuck up again and call the wrong one a bitch, she mentally added.
"Now, Helen," Gus's voice took on a fatherly tone. "Are we sure we can't put Chechnya a little further down the listings?"
Fortunately, George chose that moment to speak up, leaving Helen to muse on the odd behaviour of the one other functioning member of the staff.
She hoped Joy wasn't having another of her breakdowns.
"...appreciate any help you give..." George could waffle for England. Then, she reflected, they could report on that and bump Chechnya still further. "...grasp of certain nuances in reporting style that..." There was a lot of advertising potential in the heartwarming story of a Globelink employee battling the odds to become Olympic champion waffler. "...keen, dedicated staff ready and willing to..." Well, if the Globelink employee young enough, slim enough and blonde enough. "...stir frying so many of our ideas in your think-wok..."
When Joy slipped out of the room, Helen didn't follow. After all, she had a fucking job to do.
===
At 12:30, Helen took in the room. Henry was asleep at his chair, his snores barely disturbing the paper stacked several feet high on his desk. George was frantically shoving what looked like an entire swim team's worth of towels up his nose to stem - if the state of his shirt was any indication - another nosebleed. Sally was fixing her make up. Damien was looking at porn on the internet. And Dave...
"Hey, Henry, you old fart!" Dave shouted across the room, waving a crisp purple note in the air. "Twenty quid says Chechnya gets bumped below the dog this evening."
Henry awoke with a series of snorts, then rallied furiously. "I'd take your money, my addle-minded friend, but not at the expense of Globelink's integrity."
Dave blinked. "What, really?"
"No, of course not really, you tit. Twenty quid, was it?"
Helen strode across the room to snatch the money from Dave's fingers. "I'll take your money, my addle-minded friend." Then, over their synchronised protests: "Chechnya stays top, boys, and not even Gus's most ignorant, da-" They were staring. Pointedly. Just over her shoulder. "-aaaring, challenging and fresh ideas should be ignored in the debate." She swung round, a fixed grin on her face, to see absolutely no one standing behind her.
"Da-aaaaring?" asked Dave.
"Challenging?" asked Henry.
"Fresh?" asked Damien, looking up from his porn.
"You're whipped," Dave concluded, "and Damien owes me a tenner."
"You let me down, Helen," said Damien, reaching into his jacket pocket for the money. "I really thought you had it in you."
Oh for crying out loud. "Has anyone seen Joy?"
No one had.
===
By 2:30, Chechnya had lost its top spot to a train crash in Brussels. Not even dead Belgians, however, could cheer up Joy, who had reappeared after a three hour absence as if she'd never been away.
No one looked up as Henry bellowed across the room "Tintin!"
"Nah," said Dave. "We've had Herge."
Sally put down her compact mirror, blinking to convey sincerity. "In this time of very real tragedy, I think it is inappropriate for you to-"
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Hitchhiker's Guide: Attack of the Towels, 1206 words
[carmarthen's fault. Also, afrai's fault. Definitely nothing to do with me. The style is very, very awkward in the first section - it reads more like amateur-Pratchett than anything else - but there are some nice bits later on.]
The nature of causality is a tricky business.
The above joins "if you pick it, it'll never get better" and "it never rains but it pours" in approximating closely to truth, but not being necessarily any more helpful in sentient life's fight against entropy than just ignoring the whole damned thing and hoping it goes away. It might be more useful if it went on to mention that not every story has a beginning, a middle and an end: some are just one constant loop of middle giving a quiet nod towards a beginning every second Sunday. It might be more useful if it went on to mention that time and space have a habit of playing silly buggers if you take your eye off them for a moment, and sometimes even if you don't. It might, some scholars argue, be more useful if it went on to mention the value of treating time as a game of six-dimensional chess. It is interesting to note that this is never argued by those scholars who can actually play the game in more than the usual five dimensions.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has some advice on how to cope with the more upsetting aspects of causality. This can be found under "Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters, the creation and consumption thereof".
However, for the time being, if such a spurious concept can be entertained for the sake of convenience, it is perhaps easier to accept that somewhere and somewhen in the universe, there is a young Jrtian with ink stains on his fingers and the shape of his notepad imprinted firmly onto his face who has just been woken up by an unutterably brilliant idea. Somewhere and somewhen else entirely, there is a ship crewed by two ape-descendants, a clinically depressed robot, the Guide's worst paid field reporter and the President of the Galaxy, all of whom are suffering horribly. The two events are linked.
===
Ford was getting more and more frustrated by the minute. Fifteen years on Earth had left their mark, and he still couldn't quite shake the belief that if he stared unblinkingly at someone for long enough, they would break out in a cold sweat and try - without making any sudden movements - to cover their neck. This trick didn't work on Zaphod, whose two heads, if they blinked at all, opened and closed their eyelids in three-eight time. Ford didn't know whether to be frustrated with himself for relying on such a stupid technique or his semi-cousin for not paying attention. In the end, as ever, he decided it was probably Arthur's fault.
"It is," said Zaphod, oblivious to his pain. "It's following me."
Ford focused on calming thoughts of black coffee, gin and saying things to Arthur that made the latter's face go very placid, his voice go very even and his blood pressure go through the roof. "It isn't."
"It is." Zaphod glared pointedly at a piece of cloth lying innocuously in a corner of the control room. "It's lurking, waiting to attack."
"Zaphod," began Ford, trying to think about coffee with a dash of gin served in a piece of crockery bearing the legend 'My planet blew up and all I got was this lousy mug'. "It's a towel."
"Shhh!" both Zaphod's heads said simultaneously, all three of his arms making hushing gestures. "It'll hear us."
"It's a towel," repeated Ford, correctly. His accuracy here is noted only as a stark contrast to the rest of his views on the subject. "Therefore, it can't hear you. It can't see you, it can't taste you, smell you or feel you. It doesn't think you owe it money because a) not even you are stupid enough to gamble with a towel and b) it doesn't think anything about anyone. It can't think. It's not alive."
"Then why is it following me?"
===
The towel that was following Zaphod had first met him several years ago (or, the nature of causality being what it is, several years hence) in a bar. Zaphod had had a shiny new deck of Megolithian jumping cards and an even shinier new credit card. The towel, nicknamed Percy by its young Jrtian creator, had bought him a drink and naively happened to remark on its ignorance of Megolithian jumping poker and its lust for knowledge in that area.
Zaphod had once had rather a lot of natural talent for languages, which makes it all the more of a shame that he spent his childhood Jrtian lessons brushing up on his card skills. If he hadn't, he might have known that "Percy" was common Jrtian slang for "conniving little fluffy bastard".
If Percy hadn't spent his childhood in a laundry basket, it might have known that "to Zaphod" was common intergalactic slang for "to shirk on gambling debts".
It never rains, scholars who never quite got the hang of chess in a mere four dimensions are often heard to mutter, but it pours.
===
"Thank you for making a simple door very happy."
Arthur wandered into the control room to find Ford glaring at Zaphod. One of Zaphod's heads was returning the favour, but the other seemed more concerned with out-staring a tea-towel. His tea-towel, come to think of it. Pointedly ignoring whatever childish alien battle of wills was taking place around him, he crossed the room. He was about to pick the towel up when an indrawn breath from Zaphod triggered his finely honed survival skills.
It wasn't, he often remarked to Ford when it was clear the bastard wasn't listening, that finely honed survival skills weren't useful. It was more that he'd rather they weren't quite so useful. Finely honed tea-making skills, great. Finely honed road-crossing skills, all well and good. But the ability to tell which large green slime monsters could be pacified by the correct application of a Marks & Spencers jam tart and which would only be irritated further, well, he wistfully remembered a time when it was possible to live without that. The bastard, who invariably had been listening, would smile and ask if those finely honed skills included shutting up.
Still, he didn't pick up the towel.
"Get away from that, Earthman," Zaphod called out.
Arthur, paying careful attention to the finest honings of his very finely honed survival skills, glanced at Ford for a cue.
"He thinks it's following him," Ford said with what Arthur decided was an unnecessarily condescending tone. After all, he wasn't the one trying to outstare a paranoid towel obsessive.
"Is it following him?"
For reasons he couldn't quite place, Arthur felt the sudden, urgent need to cover his neck.
"It's a towel, Arthur," Ford said, at much the same time as Zaphod gave a strangled yell and - radiating a surprising amount of cool for someone terrified by a small piece of cloth - ran out of the room.
"Have a nice day," the door advised him.
Gingerly, half wishing it would leap up and attack him just to prove bloody Ford bloody Prefect wrong, Arthur picked up the tea-towel. Granted, his back was to Ford, but he didn't need to be able to see the Betelguisian to take offence at his expression.
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Good Omens: Heaven's Penultimate Field Agent, 423 words
[The style is awful. Or, rather, it's comprised of at least four different styles, all of which would've been okay in their own way but. Yeah. I still like the idea, though.]
Aziraphale said writing was essential to man's salvation. Personally, Ephrael thought the other angel was just being difficult. They'd had a fight about it, the sort of long, boring fight that happened a lot around Aziraphale, where every time you think you're getting somewhere he goes off on a tangent which isn't quite tangential enough for you to call him out on it. Aziraphale claimed that since writing could pass information from generation to generation without all that pesky hearsay and memory loss, humanity could sow the seeds of its own enlightenment. Ephrael had started to point out that was what angels were for, but before long Aziraphale steered them over to a debate on the relative merits of two local prophets, and the momentum of the argument was lost.
Be that as it may, they had orders. Michael had said it came from higher up, and it hadn't occurred to Ephrael to doubt him. Of course it hadn't. Angels didn't lie. And if discouraging humanity from developing the written word sounded suspiciously like the sort of plan that Michael and Raphael would have no trouble coming up with on their own, that just showed Ephrael had been letting all this contact with humanity get to him. Suspicions, indeed. It didn't hurt that this would piss Aziraphale off no end, too.
Right. Aziraphale would take Mesopotamia, whose merchants had a look about them the human race would much, much later learn to associate with traffic wardens and those whose jobs involve pinning words down so they can't get away. He himself would take Abydos, which was rather nice this time of year.
Abydos. Right.
He hadn't been there in generations. The last time he passed through, her granddaughter had been a wisened old woman. Humans, he thought not for the first time, age too quickly.
Apparently the snake had been in Abydos last year, tempting his way through the city's population remarkably quickly for a demon. The dukes took days on a single mind, worming their way inside until there was nothing left but the worm, but the snake was different. He thought tempting was a matter of mathematics - ten blemishes equal to one mortal sin, ten mortal sins equal to one blasphemy. It hardly seemed worth thwarting him, until you realised quite how many souls he left blemished.
Ephrael sighed. He hated to admit it, but Aziraphale was so much better at dealing with the snake than he was. They had a middle ground Ephrael didn't share, and didn't want to.
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West Wing: Toby = Zombie, 987 words
[nomadicwriter got there first and did it better. Still. There was a zombie challenge. It made me happy. Then see what happened. The Josh'n'Sam bit is weak, the Leo bit even weaker, but I have a lot of love for the Toby moments. Actually, I think the Leo bit was meant to be weak to show how distracted he was by something I can no longer remember. Zombification was going to be through the consumption of some rare fish, hence all the MFU stuff.]
"Toby's pissed," said Sam, automatically falling into step with Josh as they made their way to Senior Staff.
"Toby's always pissed," Josh pointed out.
"Yeah. But today he's really pissed."
"He's always really pissed."
"Yeah." Sam half smiled, half grimaced in resigned amusement. "But today he means it."
"He's al- Wait. Why?" Josh's stride didn't waver, but for the first time that morning he turned to look at the other man. "Calhoon and Skinner?" Sam pointedly ignored the way he said the second name.
"I don't think so. I don't think it's the fish thing, either. Best I can tell, it's because his skin's started flaking."
"What?"
"See for yourself," said Sam as Margaret waved them into Leo's office.
Toby was standing - lurking, Sam mentally amended - in a corner, obviously engrossed in some briefing notes. He made no sign of having noticed his deputy's entry, and even Josh's greeting didn't provoke the customary annoyed grunt of acknowledgment.
Sam turned to Josh, who appeared to be, for want of a better word, sidling towards Toby to get a better look. He tried to catch his friend's eye, but Josh was focused on Toby, clearly determined to see what all the fuss was about. Sam gave a mental shrug and started to read the notes in the folder Cathy had thrust into his hands earlier that morning. Apparently the price of fish oil was up, which was kind of interesting, but nowhere near as much fun as Josh's James Bond impression.
The Deputy Chief of Staff, who yesterday approved amendments with a total cost to the taxpayer of $50 million to a bill that had been the focus of six months' worth of staff-hours in the West Wing alone, had just bruised his shin on a chair. If Toby noticed his stifled groan of pain and subsequent cursing, it didn't register on his face. Josh, stealthy as Lionel Tribby's cricket bat, continued to sidle.
"Good morning!" Leo's voice shocked Sam out of his reverie on the size of Tribby's bat. From the look on Josh's face, he also hadn't noticed Leo's entry. Toby still didn't look up.
"In fifteen minutes I'm going to go next door and advise the President on the crisis facing the fishing industry. In sixteen minutes, I'm lucky if I understand one word in five coming out of his mouth."
Sam smiled dutifully. Josh couldn't have been listening, but maybe the cadences in his boss's voice clued him in on when to grin. There was no response from Toby.
"What do I need to know?" Leo frowned encouragingly at his staff.
"Calhoon and Skinner are threatening to vote against the education bill," Sam offered, concentrating on not noting Josh's full attention when he mentioned Skinner. "I think we wait them out - they want the money for their districts more than they want the attention."
Leo nodded. "Josh?"
Josh nodded. "I have a thing with Adams at lunch - I'll mention we're not budging on the new teachers. It'll get through. I want to bring up Sam's reform proposals wi-"
"Josh," Leo cautioned, "it's done. Next time, we'll... Next time, we'll see."
The deputies exchanged a glance Leo deigned not to see.
"Toby? Anything you need?"
Toby looked up.
At least, most of Toby looked up. His eyes, certainly, looked up. Most of his nose followed suit, although some of the skin flaked off and fluttered downwards. The rest of his skin and the muscle beneath paused for a moment, perhaps noting some detail in the documents that Toby's eyes hadn't managed to catch, before slowly travelling upwards to their rightful places on the man's skull. Skin disorders that were only hinted at when Sam had seen him earlier that morning were now in full bloom, as it were.
It wasn't a sight Sam thought he'd forget in a hurry.
"Braaaains."
No one responded.
"I'm working on Thursday's speech to the MFU." Clearly misinterpreting Josh's look of abject terror as ignorance, Toby elaborated: "The Maritime Fisherman's Union." His eyes did...something. They twitched, almost, then one glanced up and down, mimicked by the other a second later. He was...trying to roll his eyes?
Leo recovered first. "Right. Go! Do a job."
Sam, Josh and at least ninety-five per cent of Toby left the office.
===
Toby found that if he kept his expression fixed for long enough, eventually his entire face would settle there. Fortunately, he wasn't finding it too hard to maintain a scowl.
Ignoring the shocked glances of assorted aides as he strode through the West Wing to the communications bullpen, Toby recapped his situation. No pulse. No memory of what had happened between sitting down to take-away last night and waking up with the skin disorder from hell this morning. No inspiration for Thursday's speech. And a craving for the taste of spicy brains. Maybe his deputy could help him with some of that.
===
"Listen to me when I tell you that if you let this happen then the education bill won't be the story!" Sam heard CJ before he saw her round the corner, hands waving in some over-large gesture.
"The press aren't stupid, CJ -" Josh had lengthened his stride to match CJ's. "- they'll know what Calhoon and Skinner are doing."
"Oh, I'm sorry," said CJ, who wasn't. "I'm underestimating the press? Good thing my job doesn't require me to have much contact with them."
"I'm saying-"
CJ cut him off. "Of course they'll know what Calhoon and Skinner are doing. Everyone knows what Calhoon and Skinner are doing. The point is this: they don't care. If you let them do this, that's what the story will be."
In the lull while both staffers caught their breath, Sam greeted CJ. "CJ! Hey! Where were you during staff?"
"I-" For the first time in days, she looked flustered. "I- Have you seen Toby?"
"This morning? Yeah."
"Me too."
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Discworld: Leonard of Quirm and Vetinari have a conversation, 312 words
[They were going to go to Ephebe and have lots and lots of sex. The style is wrong here - out of habit I've made the third person far tighter than Pratchett tends to. I'm also unconvinced by the dialogue. And I haven't brought the funny. So, really rather irrideemable.]
Leonard always got the feeling Vetinari expected him to make some inference from that frantic up and down motion of his eyebrows. He idly wondered if that was what was missing from his new Device For Removing The Holes From Cheese - up and down motion. That would certainly explain the dimensions of the holes removed, although he wasn't entirely sure if some of the larger holes didn't have more to do with the mice he was training to perform simple circus feats than with any failures in his device.* Although now he came to think of it, if he only removed the sprocket, he could easily include the device in his latest version of the--
"Ahem," said Vetinari.
"What? Oh, yes." The inventor struggled to remember where his thoughts had been some time ago. "Ephebe. Terribly nice this time of year."
"Ah." The Patrician nodded, his eyebrows moving independently of each other and, indeed, the rest of his face. "Nice?"
"Yes," said Leonard, already mentally redesigning the sprocket he intended to remove from the Device For Removing The Holes From Cheese to serve as a rudimentary gardening aid. "Terribly clever chaps over there, I've heard. Who's that...that fellow? Didactylos?"
"Didactylos." There was something in the Patrician's voice indicating that Leonard had said the right thing. So proud was he of his achievement, the inventor soldiered on.
"Didactylos - wonderfully good with levers. Had a bit of trouble a while back with...some religious trouble. Never understood why a nice chap like him would get involved in something like that."
[*Leonard of Quirm's Fantastic and Fabulous Performing Mice, having spent far more time near the waste deposits of the Unseen University than could be considered healthy, were, in fact, strict vegans. They were stealing the cheese not for their own consumption but to feed the needy, who were less enlightened in such matters.]
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Yes Minister / West Wing, 707 words
[I think I've posted the first section before, but not the second. phlebjorn says jump, I don't even wait to ask how high. I don't, it appears, even wait to get my facts about the structure of the government right. I'm sure there was a plot-point reason for the misinformation given in the second section. Either that or I really am that stupid.]
Perhaps the single remaining legacy of Hacker's period at the Department for Administrative Affairs was a reduction in the office space allotted to visiting foreign governmental parties. At the time, the then minister has reasoned that if the enemy (by which he was presumed to mean foreign delegations) wanted more space, they could use their own bloody embassies. This move was motivated entirely by administrative concerns and not at all because Sir Humphrey had heard that Sir Arnold, the then Cabinet Secretary, would look favourably upon the reappropriation of an office that could be used for certain delicate meetings. Even if Sir Humphrey had wished to help Sir Arnold, he would never have abused his position as a trusted ministerial aide to- Yes, well. Quite.
The fact remained that the office space generously provided by Her Majesty's Government for the use of the President of the United States' staff could reasonably have been expected to house two small voles, as long as they didn't mind physical intimacy.
Toby Zeigler and Sam Seaborn, if the voices floating through the closed door of their shared office were any indicator, did mind.
"I did not- I- Did I ask you to call him?"
"No, but-"
"Or did I specifically ask you not to call him? Did I not stand in this very office and ask you not to call him?"
Bernard allowed himself a quiet smile. Sir Humphrey had been right: this reduction in office space really did foster a unique closeness and quite unparalleled sense of good will with our foreign cousins.
"Toby, it was the only way to get the job done. I didn't-"
Toby, presumably, mumbled something Bernard couldn't quite catch. This seemed as opportune a moment as any to interrupt. His knock on the door was answered with a sharp "Yeah!" from lower voice, which Bernard was now almost certain belonged to Toby Zeigler.
"Mr Zeigler? Mr Seaborn? Sir Hu- Uh, the Prime Minister asked me to see if you needed anything not already provided." Bernard noted that while Zeigler was fixing him with a faintly malevolent stare, the other man, Seaborn, had not looked up since he had entered the room. Sir Humphrey had been oddly insistent that Seaborn be well looked after, perhaps hedging bets of which Bernard was not aware. Still, it was wiser not to disobey a direct order from the Cabinet Secretary himself, especially when the order had been framed as such desperately casual advice.
"Mr Seaborn?"
Seaborn looked up. "Sam." There was a pause, during which time Bernard carefully didn't raise an eyebrow. "Call me Sam," Seaborn elaborated.
"Indeed. Is there anything you need?"
"No." Seaborn smiled alliteratively. "Thank you."
Bernard resisted the urge to click his heels together as he left the office.
==
Toby was confused. In his naturally kind and generous manner, he chose to delegate this confusion.
"That was Bernard Wooley," he said.
Sam didn't seem concerned. "Yeah?"
"The British Prime Minister's personal aide."
"Principle Private Secretary," said Sam. Looking up from a draft of his speech to meet Toby's glare, he continued. "Not Personal Aide. Principal Private Secretary. He's involved in policy discussion; in terms of political clout he'd be more on a level with CJ or me than with Charlie. Oh."
"Yes." Toby put on what he thought might be an encouraging expression.
"So why did he come all the way over here to check up on us?"
Toby nodded. "Yeah." Satisfied his deputy would do the worrying now, he transferred his attention back to his briefing material.
Only a few moments passed before Sam broke the silence. "I'm meeting with him later."
"What?"
"Bernard Wooley. I'm due to meet with him at two."
Toby scowled. The point of delegating confusion was so that he could get on with his work. "So?"
"So maybe that's why he came to see us. Maybe he's checking out the opposition - he didn't meet with us when we arrived. But then he did say the Prime Minister had asked him to see us. Maybe they want to make sure we're not offended by the cramped office space."
Not for the first time that day, Toby silently cursed whoever was responsible for not getting him a private office.
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