Christmas Formal log

[lastconfessor]

WHO: Everyone

Comments

HI BABY.

[deusexmechanic]

Seamus had not bought a new suit in the port. Between failing to pick up chicks, failing to get Rex to come and try and pick up chicks with him, and passing out in the jacuzzi while his inmates doomsday plans floated around him in the bubbling water, he just hadn't had the time to go out clothes shopping. So what he'd ended up wearing to the ball, was the exact same thing he'd worn to all those stupid formal events he'd had to attend when he was on the Andromeda. A hand me down formal suit that was a good four or five sizes too big for him, kindly donated by his generous and broad shouldered former captain. The unfortunate effect of this was eerily close to that of a preteen boy dressing up in his dads suit, and Harper was uncomfortably self aware of that fact.

So, what do you do when you're looking scrawny, scruffy and shorter than anyone else in the room, and you're surrounded by the great, the good, and the obnoxiously tall? The exact same thing that he'd done on the Andromeda in these situations. Harper grabbed a drink and scanned the room for someone either familiar, attractive, or interesting enough for him to latch on to. It only took him a couple of minutes to pick Toshiko out of the crowd, and for his mood to brighten instantly, "Hey! Toshiko Sato, right?" He called over to her as he started off towards her.

[hopeless_hacker]

Toshiko commanded the self-control necessary to only flinch on the inside; without her laptop to hide behind, she just folded her arms instead. The presence of mind-altering mistletoe on the Barge and the consequences thereof were still in mind.

"Mr. Harper." For a man who apparently considered himself something of a ladykiller, he looked sort of....cute.

[deusexmechanic]

"Just Harper, please. The whole Mister thing is uhh, a little more professional than I usually shoot for." Harper winced, giving a wave of his hand, as if to try and shake the formality away. He gave a little grin and lifted his glass to her, "So, happy christmas! Did you, uh, have fun in the port?"

[hopeless_hacker]

"Yes, I did, thank you. I'd never been to New York before." It was tempting to just stop talking there and hope the conversation would die prematurely, but she supposed this man was a colleague of sorts and it wouldn't kill her to be civil. "Did you?"

[deusexmechanic]

Harper gave a small shrug, taking a swig of his drink, "Ehh, it was okay. I thought it'd be... I don't know, weirder. It was just like any other well off world, only with crappier technology." He grinned, "Hey, the hotel we got though? Oh man that was incredible! The beds alone were bigger than my cabin, there was a mini-bar, complimentary breakfast, en suite everything, I haven't eaten so well in years." Harper pushed his sleeves back absent mindedly, before clearing his throat, "I mean, before I came here I worked on a ship for years, so, you get used to, uh, there's just a certain standard of living that goes along with that."

He decided to skip over mentioning where he'd been after the Andromeda, no point in painting himself up as a charity case, after all.

[hopeless_hacker]

"I can imagine," Toshiko said quietly. Her own period of living on the absolute basics had been blessedly short, but she remembered how jarring the sudden shift back to normality had been.

She inclined her head. "What year are you from?"

[deusexmechanic]

"I'm from three hundred and seven years after the fall of the Systems Commonwealth. You'll have to forgive me if I don't know exactly where that falls on historical calendars. Or future calendars for that matter. Or alternative dimensional calendars, so uh, if you've never heard of the Commonwealth then I can't be much more specific. From Boston, originally." He downed the last of his drink and eyed the tower of glasses on one of the nearby tables, before deciding that he'd wait until he could chivalrously get a drink for Toshiko as well. He glanced back to her, "How about you?"

[hopeless_hacker]

Toshiko looked at him for a moment, then silently lodged him in the 'miscellaneous distant future' category which also contained most of the Starfleet contingent.

"2008 AD. I'll assume you know what that means, unless our versions of Earth are very different." And since he'd tacked on the geographical detail, she did the same: "I was born in Osaka."

[deusexmechanic]

Harper nodded, he honestly didn't know that much about ancient history, but he could at the very least file her into context with the latest port, "Oh yeah, so, I guess you were all on top of the currency and the culture and stuff back there in New York?"

He cleared his throat again a little self consciously, and pushed his sleeves up again. The conversation wasn't exactly going as easily as he'd been expecting it too, and it couldn't help but feel a little forced. Harper glanced towards the alcohol again for a split second, before returning his attention to Toshiko, and in a desperate grope for something positive to say, blurting out, "You know, I once accidentally collapsed a part of the space time continuum on top of itself?"

[hopeless_hacker]

That won him a surprised splutter of laughter because really, who said that as if they were trying to show off?

"You - how?" She paused. "Why?"

I'm pretty sure I'm getting my technobabble all wrong here!

[deusexmechanic]

Success! Responsiveness! Harper perked up immediately, "Well, obviously my intention wasn't to collapse a part of the space time continuum, I was only trying to build something that could make a tangible object temporarily intangible, and pull stuff out from behind it, there was only going to be some minor, minor manipulation of physics involved at the very most, and it was only supposed to effect a really very modest area. Unfortunately it, uhh, kind of worked on a slightly larger scale than planned, and a little less predictably than planned, and we ended up with this whole mess of time travel, overlapping realities, and these universal shifts tearing the ship apart."

All of this was delivered in a brisk, slightly cocky unending stream of information, before Harper lifted his finger and jabbed it meaningfully in the air, "But hey, if it wasn't for the slight multi-planal collapse distracting me? I would totally have gotten all the bugs out of that thing before we switched it on. The math was sound, it was just... the execution that got a little pre-emptively messed up."

[hopeless_hacker]

"A little pre-emptively messed up," Tosh echoed, incredulous, "and you undermined the stability of space and time? We never got that far but surely inducing intangibility in a solid object would involve temporarily forcing it into a state of quantum nonexistence - partially merging your own universe with a parallel version in which that object doesn't exist in that place and time. You're already dealing with some device that introduces an overlapping reality into your own, it's no small bloody surprise that a 'distraction' would mess things up so dramatically. Widening its field of effect must have been nothing short of catastrophic. I'm amazed you're still alive."

[deusexmechanic]

"That's pretty much exactly how it went, actually. The ship temporarily merged with pockets of it's past and it's future and itself, so all the time that I'm supposed to be spending finishing the machine and fixing all the bugs out of it? I end up running away from former owners and trying desperately to find my way back to the engine room while the corridors were in a state of temporal flux! We had the original crew shooting at us, doors opening into deep space, the slipstream engine was just-- man, I don't even want to think about what happened in the slipstream engine."

Harper grimaced, she didn't even sound particularly impressed. Why hadn't he just chosen one of the million stories of his glorious victories over the realms of possibility? Because he'd just chosen an impressive sounding anecdote at random and blurted it out to give himself something to say, right. He should definitely cross that one of the list of ice breaking techniques. Time to deploy damage control, "Still, it was already kind of a life or death situation before hand, so, uh, we were in the acceptable risk territory." That was at least partially true.

[hopeless_hacker]

Toshiko felt like saying that he had very irresponsibly turned a life or death situation into a 'life, death or the end of the universe as we know it' situation, but as someone who'd made her own fair share of stupid decisions she was silent for a moment. And what she really wanted to say was that the mistletoe incident left her with no concept of how to communicate with him and she'd much rather conduct any hint of a professional relationship from opposite ends of the Barge.

But that was no good, either.

"Obviously I'll have to take you at your word," she said crisply. "I never got quite as far as space travel."

[deusexmechanic]

A smarter man would have just dropped it already, but despite the fact that yes, Harper could recognize that Toshiko had spent the better part of the conversation oozing disinterest in him and the remaining part in a state of sheer disapproval, Harper had never been any good at just dropping this kind of thing. Instead he just smiled, "Hey, look out a window and say that again."

[hopeless_hacker]

"I never got as far as space travel within my lifetime, then," Toshiko amended. "But I suppose you're right."

Why wouldn't he just go away? It wasn't even as if she wasn't interested in him, on an intellectual level - she could recognise genius when she saw it, and under any other circumstances she would happily talk his ear off about space-time manipulation - but while the elephant was still in the room she just wanted to be somewhere else.