(Untitled)

[lyra_silver]

A first-year student at St Sophia's College, Oxford (studying Rhetoric, with a special in Alethiometry), can get away from the dons and the Scholars and the other undergraduates whenever she wants, especially if she knows every corner and alley in Oxford. If she also knows of the existence of a certain door suspended on the fence of the Botanical

Comments

[sime_channel]

Pan zlins...weird. So. Suzi, head tilted slightly, is watching him. She's not staring, exactly. She's zlinning for all she's worth, laterals extended slightly to make that easier.

[lyra_silver]

Pan raises his muzzle, peering at the woman with tentacles, and trots towards her. Lyra stands, walking a little behind her daemon. "Hello," she smiles at the other woman. "My name is Lyra, and this is Pantalaimon. Pan."

Lyra's learned to shake hands, so she offers her hand to Suzi. She won't be surprised, if it turns out that people with tentacles don't shake hands the same way people in Will's world do.

[sime_channel]

"A, um. A pleasure?" She shakes Lyra's hand a little differently, indeed. Her hand goes in Lyra's perfectly normally...and then her tentacles wrap loosely around the other woman's wrist, "I'm, um. Suzi Darley?" Her other hand is offered to Pan in a gesture which could be smell me or shake hands with me.

[lyra_silver]

"I like your way of shaking hands," Lyra says. "Do I call you Suzi?" Pantalaimon lifts his nose and sniffs Suzi's hand, but doesn't quite touch it.

[sime_channel]

"That's how Sime shake." Her voice is cheerful, "Yes...the only time I'm called other things is if I'm working or its Whistler. And, um. You don't zlin as someone who needs Transfer so I won't be, um. Working with you?"

[lyra_silver]

"We learn new words every time we meet people from different worlds," says Lyra, equally cheerfully. "What does 'zlin' mean?"

[sime_channel]

"Sime have six senses." She says with the air of someone who is coming down with a pat answer just because of how often she's had to say it, "Sight, smell, sound, taste, touch, zlin. It doesn't translate because you don't have the laterals for it. It lets us do, um, lots of things? Including read the ambient emotional field."

[lyra_silver]

"An ambient emotional field?" Lyra repeats. "Let's see. Ambient means around us, doesn't it? It's like the word in Latin. And field, the way the experimental theologians use it, is a space. So does that mean you read the emotion in the air?"

[sime_channel]

"Something like that?" She agrees after untangling Lyra's statements, "Its...complicated? But that's the easy way to think about it?"

[lyra_silver]

"All right. We have strange things in my world, too. Well, not strange to us, but strange to people from other worlds. I guess you don't have a daemon? That you can see, I mean."

Lyra's forgotten to define 'daemon' again. Oops.

[sime_channel]

She glances at Pan, then back at Lyra, "No, we don't. I've never zlinned anything like him before."

Sometimes, with some people, you don't have to define.

[lyra_silver]

"He's me, and I'm him," explains Lyra. "In some worlds, they talk about humans having souls, and I guess Pan is my soul."

[sime_channel]

"Oh." She blinks between the two of them, then smiles, "No, we're...not like that? I am a symbiont, though? But a complete person without a second body?"

[lyra_silver]

Lyra tries to think through the Greek roots of 'symbiont', but eventually she has to ask. "What does that mean, symbiont?"

[sime_channel]

"It means that there are two kinds of human, in my time and world, and that if you seperate us we don't live long or well. My sub-species, Sime, have a lifespan of twenty eight days if there isn't a Gen around. It takes a lot longer for the effects of having no Sime around to affect a Gen." Her voice is matter of fact.

[lyra_silver]

"Twenty-eight days isn't very long," says Pantalaimon to Lyra. (He doesn't expect Suzi to hear him.)

Lyra, more tactfully, inquires, "Is there one of the other kind of people that you join with? I mean, do you stay with the same partner, Gen, all the time?"