Not the girl next door or a girl from France (Open RP)

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

It was early in the morning, perhaps an hour or so past sunrise (two hash marks on the Fantasyland sundial), and Miss Mrs Una Persson was out looking for ... something. She'd woken up from a vivid dream with the conviction that she really needed to find a Royal Albert gent's bicycle. Of course, as the dream faded, she couldn't remember why that could possibly important. But by then, she was already halfway across the park.

Well, sod.

Nothing for it, she decided, but to get something to eat and figure out what to do with the new day.

((Any and all are welcome to chat with or bother her at any point in the day.))

Comments

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"Don't I know that feeling," Una said. She glanced down at her hands as if surprised to find them tearing a piece of croissant into nervous little shreds. She forced herself to stop. "Have you been doing this for very long, then?"

[kit-invelvet.livejournal.com]

Ah. More explaining. She was starting to regret starting this conversation, "Well, since I got here, in some senses. In that I only ever used to do, um, this on stage. But I got stuck here like this and...er kind of panicked. At the time I didn't think I'd be here long." She shrugged and took another careful breath, wanting a cigarette more than anything, "But you know how lies snowball...mm."

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"Indeed they do," Una said. "It's understandable, though, your reaction. In a strange place, not sure how people will react, and so on. Although I've noticed that on the whole, people here tend to be quite tolerant of ... differences. It's a late-twentieth-century thing. Among the right-thinking sorts, anyway." She hoped that didn't sound smug.*

*"This was, she admitted with shame, her favourite moral climate for it encouraged in her an enormously gratifying sense of spiritual superiority: the advantage of having been born, originally, into a later and probably more sophisticated age. The 1960s. Some women, she reflected, were forced to have children in order to enjoy this pleasure." —Michael Moorcock, "Elric at the End of Time"

[kit-invelvet.livejournal.com]

Kitty nodded, as before she came here, she hadn't had any real concept of being tolerated, as a lot of the time, she struggled to tolerate herself, "I had presumed people hadn't changed that much in 100 years." She had always considered the people which believed that all that tolerance was possible a little naive. "And then again, not everyone is from then anyway." Then again, the other person she had remotely considered telling was from the 18th century. Just her luck to be from the conservative century of the millienum.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

Could've been worse. She could have been from the 1200s or so.

"Mm. Human nature doesn't change much, on the whole. It's the general notion of what's 'normal', what's 'acceptable'. People still fear what they find strange; it's the definition of what's familiar that changes. And broadens, hopefully. Though even in the most chaotic age, there are always forces of order and stagnation. And vice versa."

[kit-invelvet.livejournal.com]

She took a deep breath and sort of half laughed, "I really needn't have pretended at all, had I?" She'd half realised this a while back, but by that point, she'd lied to everyone she'd met, and in some ways, the lie was easier to maintain than the truth. "Not that I really knew it back then."

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"Completely understandable, though," Una said, soothingly. "Everyone when they first arrive tends to interpret what they see according to the rules of their native zone, and react accordingly. For my own part, I thought it was a folly of some kind. Well, which it is, I suppose, but I specifically thought it was something that a friend of mine would have built, in the world at the End of Time. Which I'm told made my answers very confusing to some of those who overheard them."

[kit-invelvet.livejournal.com]

"The end of time? That would make things exceptionally confusing, I could imagine." Not that she could really imagine the 'end of time', but it must be a rather confusing place to come from to here. "Then again, there is no time here, so maybe it would be more appropriate...not that I would really know."

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"It's a very different sort of world," Una said, and remembered poor Mrs Underwood and her confusion on finding herself in the place. "The stories I could tell ... well, I should, one of these days. Preferably over a good dinner and a glass of wine." Of course, she had done, and look where that had gotten her ... No, that wasn't up for consideration right now. "In any event, you needn't worry I'll say anything to anyone else. And I do expect you might find people might be more understanding of matters than not, in general."

[kit-invelvet.livejournal.com]

"Thank you." She had already worked that out, otherwise she wouldn't have mentioned a thing, "I am slowly coming to realise this, but I'm still rather worried that they'd be offended I felt the need to lie. Which, to be fair, they probably have every right to be." She had kept digging herself in that hole, but Una was giving her a sense that it might not be so difficult to get herself out, with a little work.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"Perhaps. But perhaps not. Many of us have our secrets here, I think, even if we haven't actively attempted to hide them." She took a thoughtful sip of coffee. "I suspect even the most ordinary-seeming folk here are exceptional somehow."

[kit-invelvet.livejournal.com]

"It does rather make me wonder what the exceptional ones are hiding." She laughed quietly and took a bite out of her rather neglected Danish, "I do wonder why it was us who ended up here, and not other people we knew? Or didn't know...it seems random."

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"Random and yet at the same time not at all," Una observed. "There is, for example, no one else from my multiverse here, but two of the Doctor's ... enemies? rivals? are here. And my friend Logan—two close friends of his are here as well. There's something very nearly intentional about those who do know each other."

[kit-invelvet.livejournal.com]

"Hm. So it's an intentional, planned kind of random?" She thought about this for a second, "Maybe the park just finds certain people more interesting, more amusing, than others. So throws them friends to reward them or enemies to see what they do."

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

Una nodded. "Precisely." She looked a little uncomfortable. "A sort of experiment. I'm not sure if this makes me feel better or worse."

[kit-invelvet.livejournal.com]

"Generally, the idea of being experimented on like some kind of animal is...disturbing." She pulled a disgusted face and looked around a little nervously, "But they don't seem intent on giving us infectious diseases, at least."

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

Una could have made a really lewd joke about that, but elected not to, mostly because it sounded horrible even in her own head. She laughed a little and said, "Well, yes. And keeping us reasonably comfortable seems to be important, so I suppose it could all be worse."

[kit-invelvet.livejournal.com]

"Nobody's died as yet, I suppose, so we're probably better off than rats in cages, or something similar." Which was the extent of her knowladge of scientific experiments, some how, rats in cages could cure diseases.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

Remembering what the Doctor had told her about the Rani, Una couldn't help being a little amused at that. "This is so. And until we find out who or what is running the experiment, we can't really do much except try and amuse ourselves as best we can."

[kit-invelvet.livejournal.com]

"Might as well make the best of it, I suppose." When you had little other choice, there was no use concerning yourself with things you couldn't control.