Thread for Namorita, plus an open post.

[epigrammatical]

[Details in the comment threads.]

Comments

Thread: Lord Henry and Namorita

[epigrammatical]

Characters: Lord Henry Wotton, Namorita Prentiss
Date: The day after Lord Henry's arrival and this thread.
Location: Henry's suite.
Situation: Namorita calls on Henry; Henry is always happy to make new friends.
Warnings/Rating: Will make a note in the main post if needed.

The change of situation had not significantly altered Henry's patterns of sleep and waking; it was nearly midday when he finally woke, and at least another quarter of an hour before he remembered he would have to attend to all the details of his toilet and breakfast himself. Being not entirely incompetent, washing-up, shaving, and dressing were no great trial, but the less said about his efforts in the kitchen, the better. He managed to boil water for tea without setting anything on fire and counted that a success.

This indignity managed, he ventured out to run a few more domestic errands on the unexpectedly tight budget permitted by his allowance, and returned home to wait for Miss Prentiss's visit, where he passed the time by perusing once again the copy of À rebours which had fortuitously turned out to be in his coat pocket.

[littlecousin]

Fortunately for Henry's sleep cycle, Nita had morning plans. While no more suited by upbringing than Henry was to taking care of herself, she had a far better attitude about it, and was perfectly happy to shop, cook, clean up, and otherwise perform the sort of menial labor from which money buys freedom even in the supposedly more egalitarian late 20th century. She'd never been terribly convincing as royalty, anyway.

After various housekeeping tasks and lunch (sandwiches were hard to botch no matter how questionable one's culinary skill) Nita scribbled a note to Favrielle about her afternoon plans, stuffed a few bottles from her well-stocked bar into a satchel, and quite literally took off for Fire Sector, tiny impossible wings at her ankles fluttering as she used her mutant power of flight. A mere few minutes later, she set down lightly, barefoot and bare-legged as always, on Henry's doorstep and rang the bell.

[epigrammatical]

At least this time, he remembered there was no butler to answer the door, and so Nita was not left cooling her heels for long at all before Henry opened the door.

"Miss Prentiss! How lovely to see you; do, please, come in." He escorted her through to the sitting room.

[littlecousin]

Fortunately for him. After about 30 seconds, the undignified shouting of his name would have started, or the peeking in at windows.

"Hi, Lord Henry!" Nita was optimistic at the worst of times. On a normal, non-zombie-infested day, she was positively sunny, and she greeted Henry with a cheerful smile, padding along beside him into his rooms. She had never been inside a Fire Sector apartment, and looked around with undisguised curiosity. It wasn't decorated to her style at all, but the quality of the furnishings was closer than her simpler Water Sector quarters to the standard she'd been accustomed to at home.

[epigrammatical]

Lord Henry was enough of a man of his time to still be fascinated by the fact that he had a young lady in his rooms who was entirely unchaperoned and who would apparently suffer no serious social consequences for being in this position. A brave new world indeed, as Miranda would have said.

"Please, sit. I have only so much to offer in the way of refreshment, if there is anything you would like." Unless they were to open any of the bottles she had brought, which he politely would not mention unless she brought it up. He waited for her to sit and then settled into his own chair and took out his cigarette case, offering her one. Only the most daring women in his set smoked; he assumed that the more ... liberated sorts here would follow suit.

[littlecousin]

One of these days, someone would have to walk Nita through the assumptions involved in Victorian gender relations so she could laugh incredulously.

"That's okay, I brought the refreshments," she said with a laugh, unloading her bag onto the most convenient flat surface. "This one's sort of brandy, this one's sort of gin, and this one's sort of vodka. You'll want to pour about half as much as you usually would, unless you want to last half as long as you usually would."

Too polite to show any disgust, Nita waved off the cigarettes. "No, thank you." Smoking had gone from common to gauche within her lifetime, but she had never liked the odor, and breathing something that wasn't water had been strange enough in the beginning without adding hot, concentrated smoke to the mix.

[epigrammatical]

He elected to forgo the cigarettes for now and put the case back in his pocket. The gin was slightly horrifying to Henry—it being perceived as rather low-class in his time—and he had little frame of reference for the vodka, but brandy at least made sense. "You are most generous, my dear, and I am infinitely grateful. I believe there are some glasses on the sideboard; I would be honoured if you would join me for a drink. Unless there is somewhere you must be?"

[littlecousin]

Nita's sharply limited knowledge of surface-world history led her to conclude that English people preferentially drank gin and tonics--making subtle cultural distinctions between a London gentleman of the 1890s and an officer of the Raj in the 1920s was beyond her. All surface dwellers were weird.

Though really, Henry ought to let her introduce him to that particular drink.

"Oh, sure! I haven't got plans." Nita settled back into her seat, courteous enough not to curl up in the chair in her usual fashion while visiting someone with rather more formal manners than her own. That sort of person tended to object to feet on the upholstery, even feet that rarely touched the ground. She did, however, cross her legs in the shockingly unladylike position in which one rests an ankle on the opposing knee, though in her case the arrangement had some slight modifications to accommodate her wings.

[epigrammatical]

Oh, Henry would almost certainly enjoy a gin and tonic once he got over his ridiculous Victorian prejudices. In the meantime, he retrieved a pair of glasses from the sideboard and poured two glasses of the brandy. He offered Nita her glass first—and just then noticed the wings.

It said something that they actually surprised him more than the way she was sitting. And then he smiled. "My goodness. Like the sandals of Hermes—and yet they are part of you, are they not?"

[littlecousin]

Nita accepted the glass with murmured thanks, then laughed at Henry's question, extending one leg to show off the wings. (The leg itself wasn't bad, either.)

"They run in the family." Concentrating a little, Nita flapped the wings on her outstretched leg--it was tricky to move only one side at a time, and to keep from taking off. "Our patron is Neptune, though. I think there might have been a miscommunication somewhere along the line." She giggled at what seemed to be a joke she'd told more than once.

[epigrammatical]

"And upon what manner of people has the god Neptune seen fit to bestow his favour?" Henry inquired, entirely fascinated. "Are they all so charming as you?"

[littlecousin]

No, they were really, really not. Nita laughed again, this time with an air of incredulity at the thought of the vast majority of Atlanteans being described as 'charming.'

"We're from Atlantis. And, uh, you're sweet, but most of us are a lot more...formal than I am." It was quite clear that 'formal' was covering for a less flattering (by Nita's standards, anyway) assessment of the national character.

apologies to any Classical scholars watching if I screwed up the bit that I copypasted.

[epigrammatical]

"Atlantis?" Henry smiled. "ἐν δὲ δὴ τῇ Ἀτλαντίδι νήσῳ ταύτῃ μεγάλη συνέστη καὶ θαυμαστὴ δύναμις βασιλέων͵ κρατοῦσα μὲν ἁπάσης τῆς νήσου," he said, recalling with surprising clarity the relevant passage from Plato's Timaeus. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others. "I had believed that it was a legend or a parable."

I just make my historical quotes up. ~comics~

[littlecousin]

Nita listened to the quote with no hint of comprehension save when the Greek version of 'Atlantis' came up. Her surface tongues were limited to English and the ungrammatical smattering of other languages one could't help but pick up in such a multicultural city as New York if one paid the least bit of attention.

"No, it's real." First clearing her throat, she said something in an extremely alien language that made her sound more like a dolphin than a person--Atlantean was only ever intended to be spoken underwater. "'Magma from the deeps carried great Atlantis home, to slumber in the life-giving sea, awaiting a people who would be worthy of her.'" She shrugged. "The old sagas aren't all that clear, and they're like ninety percent myth, anyway. They agree with Plato that there was some kind of fiery cataclysm, and modern scientists say it was a volcanic event that caused huge earthquakes."

hee. just my luck to have the guy with the classical education and the big brain.

[epigrammatical]

The sound of Nita's native tongue actually succeeded in denting Henry's otherwise impeccable composure; despite how much of Keeliai was alien to him, this was something entirely new. But not undesirably so.

"I wonder how many old legends will be found to have a kind of truth within," he murmured. "But if the city survives below the waves—I beg your pardon for asking—surely it must be less than comfortable for you to be on dry land."

only having to know as much as a not-very-studious mermaid is relaxing

[littlecousin]

Nita grinned, both at having rattled Henry and his question. "I'm half human. But you're right, full-bloods can't breathe air."

[epigrammatical]

"We are all the more fortunate at your being exceptional, then," Henry replied with a smile. "It is a wonderful thing to meet a remarkable lady and through her, learn that Atlantis was not simply a story in one's old Greek textbooks."

[littlecousin]

False modesty--or indeed, any modesty whatsoever--was not something with which Nita's family found themselves burdened. At least with a royal upbringing, one learned to accept compliments with grace, even if one had to think back to one's childhood to remember how it was done.

"It's been a while since I've had the pleasure of speaking with anyone so adroit in conversation, Lord Henry." Hanging around with American teenagers did tend to lower the discourse...not that she cared one way or another. Nita raised her glass with a smile. "To new friendships."

[epigrammatical]

He raised her glass to her in return. "And to charming conversation, my dear."

[littlecousin]

"Oh? Where you were planning to find that conversation?" Nita grinned as she drank the toast. She wasn't fishing so much as acknowledging that she tended to be blunt--which, while some people found it a charming personality trait, was not particularly conducive to the art of graceful banter.

[epigrammatical]

"I have found far more of it than I would have expected," he replied with a smile. "Conversation need not be artful to have art within it."

[littlecousin]

"It helps if at least one side is being held up by someone artful," she said with a nod at Henry. Shaking her head, Nita laughed at herself. "I had a lot of lessons when I was a kid, but I paid more attention to the ones that involved swords than the ones that involved manners."

[epigrammatical]

The comment about the swords won her a surprised look. "Swords? That has the sound of something of rather more force than perhaps a fencing foil. Are you a warrior amongst your kind, my dear?"

[littlecousin]

"Runs in the family." Nita shrugged and set down her drink. She certainly had an athlete's build, but her skin was as unmarked by scars as a baby's. "By surface standards we're pretty much all warriors, even the scientists and common laborers. If there's a single Atlantean who doesn't at least know how to use a spear, it's an oversight."

[epigrammatical]

"'O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in't'," Henry said, finally voicing the line from The Tempest that had occurred to him earlier. It was the most fitting response he could arrive at, really. "You will forgive my surprise, I hope, for I come from a world where most women find the selection of a hat to be an exceptionally strenuous activity."