her_imperial_radiance | Milliways Again

her_imperial_radiance

It lurks. Oh how it lurks.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

her_imperial_radiance

"Oh. Okay. I'm still gonna live in the past."

From:

prima_sequentem

"Barring catastrophe, yes," she says. "This alternate universes thing does have its upsides."

From:

her_imperial_radiance

"Have you been to lots of them?" he asks. "I've been all around the world but I've never seen the inside of Milliways. Everything I know about it is secondhand from Jake."

From:

prima_sequentem

"I haven't gone visiting like this before, but I've had some bizarre encounters there. The most bizarre was definitely the time I met Elspeth, though."

From:

her_imperial_radiance

"Just because her mom is a duplicate of your Empress of Mars?"

From:

prima_sequentem

"Empress of the Stars," she corrects absently. "Mars is just the first stop. No, in fact, there was some coincidental timing too. Milliways likes its coincidental timing. See, when the door caught me, I was in the middle of having coffee with my Bella for the first time, and she wasn't empress of anything yet, but I was trying to find out what she wanted and I'd joked about giving her the planet for Christmas. And then I met Elspeth, whose mother actually does rule the world, and I chatted with her for a while until I felt like I had enough of a handle on the inner workings of Bellas in general to be confident that mine really did want the planet for Christmas and would be likely to take extremely good care of it."

She grins reminiscently.

"At which point I told Elspeth that she had been unknowingly interviewing for world dictator on my Bella's behalf, and had passed. Oh, and then we found out Elspeth's dad's mom was probably an alternate of me. Which is why you may occasionally hear Elspeth call me Grandma."

From:

her_imperial_radiance

"You don't look like Esme," says Orfeo quizzically.

From:

prima_sequentem

"Biological," she explains. "Her name—well, her maiden name—was Elizabeth Kirsch, same as me. And she looked reasonably like me and acted reasonably like me, as far as I can tell."

From:

her_imperial_radiance

"Oh. Interesting. But you don't actually have a little His Majesty running around at home, do you?"

From:

prima_sequentem

"No," she confirms. "No kids. I am toying with the notion of naming a hypothetical eventual son after him, but he probably wouldn't like the idea, so maybe I won't."

From:

her_imperial_radiance

Orfeo laughs. "I don't think he would, no. A few supernaturals have named kids Isabella - I think there are three, now, a puppy and an adopted human and a quarter-vampire - but no one has tried naming anyone after Edward."

From:

prima_sequentem

"What would you name your kids, if you had any?"

From:

her_imperial_radiance

"Haven't really thought about it," he said. "Would be up to my - well - heh. I didn't exactly forget you were my imprint when I started that sentence, but I have a script for this kind of question, you know? And wolf guys are pretty much not supposed to date apart from imprints. Too much potential for predictable heartbreak and drama. So I've always figured if I ever had kids at all..." He shrugs. "Then by that point I would be pretty thoroughly bossable on that or any other question."

From:

prima_sequentem

"I don't intend to be particularly bossy," says Libby. "I never exactly said why I run a massive international organization, did I?"

From:

her_imperial_radiance

"I don't think you did," he agrees.

From:

prima_sequentem

"Well, there are a lot of reasons, but the most relevant one is this: I like to find where people fit, and put them there. Not just in terms of location, but in terms of what they're doing, who they know, the whole situation of their life. Which is also why I am doing all the recruiting for Bella's new government. I'm your imprint; where you fit, the place you'll be happiest and most productive, is with me. But there's a lot of leeway for fine details once that's settled. And even though I bet you'd be satisfied with pretty much anywhere I decided to put you as long as it was nearby and doing me some good, I don't just want you to be satisfied because it's what your imprint wants. I want to find where you fit, as yourself; the best place you can be, given the obvious constraints."

She smiles slightly.

"Does that make sense?"

From:

her_imperial_radiance

"Maybe?" he hazards.

From:

prima_sequentem

"Can you tell me what parts don't make sense, so I can try again?"

From:

her_imperial_radiance

"I don't mean partly, I mean maybe," he says. "I have a working mental picture, I just don't know if it's sensible or not."

From:

prima_sequentem

"Okay. Why might it not be sensible?"

From:

her_imperial_radiance

"I'm not clear if people have 'fits' in the sense I'm picturing," he says. "I mean, single ones per person even setting aside the fine details, anyway. Maybe I do, but if you don't have werewolves, that's not something you're usually using as a guideline. And if people have fits, I'm not sure what 'putting' them there would mean, and I'm coming up with weird guesses that involve more physically picking them up and depositing them places than you probably use."

From:

prima_sequentem

"All right... how about I give you some examples," she suggests. "Besides the most obvious one of Bella, who is mostly putting herself in the place she fits, which is benevolent sorcerer-empress of the universe in case you were wondering. I'm just giving her the occasional hand there. For a better example: I had this student a few years back who was an absolutely brilliant cryptographer, but cryptography was absolutely the last thing she wanted to do with her life. I had a certain amount of fellow feeling for her, one math genius to another, and I hated to see her heading straight for a career path where learning the subject made her happy but the work was going to make her miserable."

She taps her fingers together in her lap.

"So I asked her about her other hobbies, and she said she liked listening to music, which didn't immediately set any wheels turning. But then I was talking to another friend of mine who was trying for the third time in two years to put a band together. Incredibly talented musician, perpetually disorganized, enthusiastic but bad at follow-through. And I realized that if I put the two of them in a room, they would probably get along really, really well. And she was more than organized enough for the both of them. So I introduced them to each other, and he convinced her to try playing the keyboard, which she took to with all the energy and capacity for mathematical analysis she had been putting into her schoolwork up to that point; they called up the guitarist I'd suggested on this guy's second try, she was willing to give it another shot, and the three of them are now a successful indie rock band."

From:

her_imperial_radiance

"Huh," says Orfeo. "It probably wouldn't have occurred to me to call that sort of thing 'fit' but it's cool."

From:

prima_sequentem

"It's not that I believe every single person has exactly one spot they're meant to go," she says. "It's not like a jigsaw puzzle, it's more like... a mosaic. I have this field of coloured rocks in front of me and every single one is a different shape, and I can see that if I move this one over here it'll fit in way better than it does where it's sitting. Except that people are obviously a lot more complicated than rocks, and their 'shapes' change over time. Like you, for example. If you'd never laid eyes on me, you definitely wouldn't fit best in my universe. But you did, so now you do, and we have to figure out how and where."