voidtreckerexpress | This and that

Who: Samata Mahto, Tony Stark, and you know whoever else is around
What: Various
When: Day after the party
Where: The Train

-1. Hangover-

Samata stumbled blearily into the kitchen train long after breakfast had been served with bags under her bloodshot eyes and awkwardly started searching for ingredients for tea. Her mission was complicated by absence of her left arm. The sleeve of her polo was completely empty.

-2. Meetings (For Tony)-

Later, when she felt and looked more human and had reattached the missing arm, Samata looked through the passenger roster (which involved about ten minutes of struggling to use the computer system), asked several people, and eventually hunted down one Tony Stark. He had been mentioned by several people as someone to talk to. Someone who knew something about technology, who was the leader of the red team, who was the leader of the whole band of travelers on the train, and who had his own workshop.

Samata interrupted whatever Tony was up to with a polite "Excuse me," when it looked like it was a good time to do so.

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"Better to handle it when we're more awake?"

That's as best as Nita can reason it right now.

"I guess it wouldn't be good to drop it..."

Though, wouldn't it be worse to drop the tea?

"Well, yes."

She hesitated, before continuing, forcing herself to wake up a bit more. "It's uncomfortable to wear. I got used to it pretty quick and having a second arm is always useful, but there's always a few minutes before the straps fade into the background that I don't look forwards to. It affects my center of balance a bit, it's heavy, and if I'm not careful to keep it dry it can rust, which isn't something I feel up to while hungover and making tea."

Nita herself isn't awake enough yet to have suggestions (let alone practical ones - ways to make the arm feel more natural, take away its vulnerability to rust and so on), but her response was one of more tact this time.

"I'm sorry. For, well, reminding you of all that."

For a few moments there was still silence, then, "You like it dark or sweetened? I think I can still remember where the flavors are."

Samata, who had had a dozen variations of this conversation in the past, patted Nita on the shoulder. "No harm done. It's something a lot of people don't think about until they suddenly find they have to."

Any harm she had done was more than made up for by offering to make the tea herself and breaking the awkward silence. "A few drops of cream, if we have any, would be lovely."

The shoulder pat wasn't quite reassuring to Nita by itself; Samata's tone put her more at ease.

"That makes sense, yeah."

Some sorts of understanding only came from shared experience, after all.

"And I think we do! Hopefully it's in the fridge, and no one's left it out overnight..."

Could cream spoil? Absolutely. Dry tea leaves, however, could not.

Samata spent a moment taking in the refrigerator. A handy device that would revolutionize the world back home, but it didn't even make the top ten list of strange things she had seen on the train. "Will the wonders never cease..."

It was said in an idle sort of way. She mainly wanted tea. And also to explore some concepts. "So I think you said you were 'chosen' to be a wizard?"

"Careful what you wish for," Nita snarked, but set about getting the ingredients for tea and a kettle boiling as best she could.

"More I stumbled upon my Manual in a library, and I believed enough that the Oath and magic could be real that younger-me thought it was worth risking being wrong."

Speaking of the matter seemed to breathe some life back into her. "I could have walked away, I guess - the point is that we choose to have the power; that's part of what allows anyone to be a wizard. No one's born with magic, or wizardry, at least on the Earth I know."

"So, to boil it down the the absolute simplest form: you found a magic book, and gained intuitive magic of some sort from it?"

Granting someone the use of magic was a feat she'd always thought of as the domain of a god. This was clearly an entirely new paradigm she would have to consider.

"That's the basics. There's a hell of a studying curve, though, because there's always more to learn!"

Nita was neck-deep in the fridge at this point, trying to find the cream; someone had gotten creative in hiding it, maybe...

"And not all wizards get it as a book, either; that's just the most common manifestation of it in my part of the world."

This and that

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