GLoG 94: Good place to grow up

[Ironsmith]

[Aspen Cabin]

The pod opens with a hiss, flooding the room with vanilla-scented white smoke as Miranda steps out to greet the demon queen, stretching and breathing in some amount of fresh air. She then pops open her Hotbox and produces a fluffy white bathrobe, which she slips on and ties tight, visibly annoyed at how much it still leaves exposed thanks to her new proportions. She'll throw on some additional modesty wear just to be safe.

"So... sleep well?" She asks, trying to make conversation with the queen. Badly. For some reason, she can't quite think straight... every time she looks at Sekhmet or catches a glimpse of her reflection, she gets weirdly anxious, which results in a lot of nervous fidgeting. "Have you eaten yet? I've got some good breakfast recipes in my Hotbox." She says, shakily getting herself a bowl of oatmeal from the same.

[bc56]

Aspen Cabin
"I've already eaten, thanks." It's completely natural to feel intimidated by the demon queen. She's really toning down her supernatural presence right now (and most of the time she's in the mortal world), but a little bit will always leak through. "So, uh, what will you do now?"

[Ironsmith]

[Aspen Cabin]

"Right. Well." Miranda clears her throat and pulls out a chair for Sekhmet. "I still want to follow up on that Inquisitor lead. But given how many moving parts that plan already has, I want to consider some other options, as well." She takes a seat for herself, giving a little squeek of surprise when she smashes her tail against the back of the chair. "I, um... I think the isolation plan might be my best bet for now. If I can get Vlad to loan me the shuttle, there are some absurdly out-of-the-way places I could take Lizzie. That really just leaves the problem of getting her out of me. I don't suppose there's a, uh, potion or anything I could take with me for that purpose? I'd hate to trouble you much more than I have."

[bc56]

Aspen Cabin
"I can probably force her out, but, uh, I don't know of another way to do it." Sekhmet answers. "Don't, uh, worry about me. She can't harm me." Technically not true, but as long as Lizzie doesn't have full control of a physical body, it might as well be.

[Ironsmith]

[Aspen Cabin]

"At this point, it's a little more worrisome that I might be able to harm you." Miranda points out, stirring her oats around with a little plastic spoon. "If the only way to get her out of me is for you to come with, we can't take anyone else because she's a risk to them, and there's a risk she might try to override my bodily functions at any time... that's not a recipe I'm eager to follow." She sighs and scoops some of the hot, soggy grains into her mouth, letting the implied questions hang in the air for a minute.

[bc56]

Aspen Cabin
Sekhmet looks unconcerned. "Maybe if she took control of you, you could." Lizzie laughs at Miranda's suggestion. Even if we worked perfectly together, we would not be nearly a match for her raw power. We would have to trick her, and we'd need your magic conjuring box. She seems excited that Miranda is even considering harming Sekhmet. "Erzsébet, if you're even thinking about it, you'll be sorry."

[Ironsmith]

[Aspen Cabin]

"She is. Give me a minute." Miranda flashes Lizzie a memory of her days back in elementary school; specifically, on the back of the bus, where a number of the students had started up a chorus of:

This is the song that never ends
It just goes on and on, my friends
Somebody started singing it, not knowing what it was
And they'll keep on singing it forever just because

Miranda's sat through a lot of those bus rides. The first time, it was a novel little oddity, which her classmates brought to her attention, and she thought was interesting. By the end of the year, the first line alone was enough to set her screaming. Lizzie can have fun chewing on that for a while.

"Anyway." Miranda continues. "If you're not worried about risk to yourself, we can start picking out a destination somewhere."

[bc56]

Aspen Cabin
Tsk. How childish. Lizzie is unimpressed with the song.
"That, uh, seems like more of a question for you than, uh, me. I don't go out in the wilderness often."

[Ironsmith]

[Aspen Cabin]

Of course it's childish. Miranda picked it up in elementary school.

It's also still going.

"There are a couple of secluded spots out here in the woods." Miranda points out. "Though if she can possess animals, that might not be as safe as it sounds. I'd suggest the bottom of an ocean, but that runs into similar problems and might give her some kind of leviathan to work with. Deep space?" She runs her fingers over her chin as she considers this. "I mean, that would take her pretty far from any life..."

[bc56]

Aspen Cabin
"Uh, what's a deep space?" Sekhmet doesn't seem like the type of person to know anything about space.

[Ironsmith]

[Aspen Cabin]

Miranda gives the demon queen a skeptical look, as though the couldn't quite believe that Sekhmet had no idea what she meant, before giving her response. "Okay, so." She begins, pulling up a napkin. "Right now, we're on a world, right? Not Earth exactly, but close enough." She represents it by drawing a little circle on the napkin. "And this world orbits a star of some kind, clearly. Or does something similar." She draws a much larger circle to describe the "sun". "The distance between these two is immense. 93 million miles or so, if it's at all like Earth. We can go to a point that's somewhere between them, around here-" she draws a line, "-which is about 900,000 miles from where we are now. At that point, if she were a physical object or in a physical object, we could leave her there and she'd never make her way back to the ground, or anywhere else, without outside assistance... which is unlikely, because nobody else knows she's there or can even necessarily survive the trip. At the same time, if she ever learns her lesson, this is a very specific point we can travel to in order to recover her, so she's not just floating out in the void forever." She gives a little shrug. "All I would need from you is to live with me in the shuttle for two weeks- one to get there, one to get back- without either of us subcumbing to the urge to strangle the other."

[bc56]

Aspen Cabin
Sekhmet smiles and nods her way through that lecture. She knows about the Earth orbiting the sun (who doesn't?), but the exact numbers don't matter to her. She's a little surprised at the idea of going up there, but there's something more relevant. "Two weeks!?" She's clearly shocked. "I, uh, have to run my kingdom, and, uh, my husband wouldn't be happy. But, uh, to get Erszébet out of my hair for good, uh, it might be worth it." That statement implies that the two of them have a history of being opposed to each other.

[Ironsmith]

[Aspen Cabin]

"I know it's a big ask." Miranda says, putting a conciliatory hand on Sekhmet's shoulder. "But if we pull this off, yeah, it doesn't look like she'll be coming back to bother either of us, or anyone else, any time soon." She smiles. "I'm sure you have a steward or regent or someone you could turn to while you're away, right? And this can't be the first time your job's gotten between you and your husband..."

She's kind of screwed if the answer to either of those questions is "no". At least as far as the space plan is concerned. So Miranda gives Sekhmet her most confident smile and hopes she's got a solution for both.

[bc56]

Aspen Cabin
"I do have someone, and, uh, it's not the first time, but for two weeks? Even if I left a message, just, uh, leaving for two weeks would be a lot." A queen isn't exactly the type of figure who can just step out for a while. Sekhmet could do it, but it feels irresponsible. She's more worried about what Prumathe will think. "Uh, I think I have an idea. Do you have any jewelry I can use?"

[Ironsmith]

[Aspen Cabin]

"Not with me, but printing some off should be trivial." Miranda replies, standing and heading to her Hotbox to do just that. "We'll go with... diamond necklace? Diamond necklace." She reaches in and pulls out the delicate-looking chain of gold with a series of diamond studs around the front, tapering into a thumbprint-sized gemstone at the very bottom. "Will this work?"

[bc56]

Aspen Cabin
"Perfect, uh, thanks." Sekhmet turns the necklace over in her hands. She begins burning arcane glyphs into the chain using one of her claws. Scoot over so I can see! Lizzie demands, trying to push Miranda's body into a position to watch Sekhmet work.

[Ironsmith]

[Aspen Cabin]

Miranda, naturally, resists this "request", resulting in much spastic twitching as Lizzie moves her into position and she moves back. Eventually, Miranda gets tired of this and mentally turns up the volume on that song that doesn't end; even if Lizzie gets the last word on her position, she's not getting out of that scott-free.

[bc56]

Aspen Cabin
Lizzie doesn't stay in the watching position for long. Ugh. I thought she'd do something interesting. That's amateur work. "Done! I, uh, just need to go put this in my cabin. I'll be right back." She leaves, and returns a few minutes later. "Okay, uh, that's set. So, uh... What happens next?"

[Ironsmith]

[Aspen Cabin]

"That would depend on what you actually did." Miranda replies. In the time Sekhmet was gone, she hadn't done much... mostly just finished eating and put in a call for the shuttle. "But broadly speaking, if your needs are covered, we can leave in a few minutes."

[bc56]

Aspen Cabin
"My husband is at work, so I, uh, left him a message and told him how to contact me. Uh, that's all." Sekhmet doesn't see why it matters. "So soon? Uh, okay."

[Ironsmith]

[Aspen Cabin]

"...Oh." Miranda smiles and gives a little shrug. "Somehow I was expecting something more impactful than a note. I guess that's magic for ya. Anyway, yeah, the shuttle should arrive in a few min-"

Miranda is cut off by the high-pitched whine of her shuttle landing just outside the cabin. Despite its airplane-like shape, the vehicle doesn't seem to abide at all by the principles of drag or lift, descending straight down where it needs to be. A hatch on the back opens, revealing a small cargo bay; Miranda will move her pod into that space and likely be spending most of the trip there.

"...Or it could arrive now." She smiles and starts rolling her pod toward the door.

[bc56]

Aspen Cabin
Sekhmet knows nothing about airplanes, except that she's seen them occasionally while flying around, so the shuttle doesn't seem notable for its advanced propulsion system. "Uh, do I just go inside?" She approaches the shuttle with all the trepidation of someone who has never set foot in any sort of heavier-than-air flying machine before. Since she has wings, she's never had the need to use one, but she doesn't think she could manage a 14 day long flight.

[Ironsmith]

[Aspen Cabin]

"Well, I wasn't planning on dangling you off the back." Miranda jokes, giving Sekhmet an encouraging nudge toward the shuttle hatch. "Don't worry, it's perfectly safe. I've flown in this thing hundreds of times." She tactfully omits the part about her not actually being the one to fly it; that's what autopilot's for and she doesn't want to give Sekhmet any more reason to be nervous. "Go on. I think we can take some time for you to get used to it first if you like. We don't need to get to thirty thousand meters and learn the shuttle makes you unbearably anxious."

[bc56]

Aspen Cabin
Sekhmet opens the door, looks inside, and nervously climbs into the shuttle. Unbearably anxious could be her middle name (it's not).
Naturally, the inside is like nothing she's ever seen before...

[Ironsmith]

[Aspen Cabin => Shuttlecraft]

Once Miranda has the pod in place, the shuttle's cargo area looks something like someone tried to cram an apartment's worth of amenities into a walk-in closet. Against the back wall, there's a hydraulically-sealed door that leads into the pilot's cabin, where there are two comfortable-looking cushioned seats in front of a blank panel; in-flight, the screen would light up to include all sorts of instruments and readouts. The bay itself is sort of rectangularly-shaped, the approximate size of Miranda's den. She'll already be installing her cylindrical pod in a corner opposite the bay entrance. The right side of the bay is dominated by a sort of sit-in booth, the kind that would be found at a mid-class restaurant, with a round-cornered table and a pair of cushioned benches, all fixed to the floor. The left side of the bay is mostly empty, except for a marked-off square with a flat-screen television fixed to the wall nearby, and a VR headset and handpieces plugged into it. There's a scrunched-up carpet between the two, the fibers pressed flat as someone had dragged a heavy object over it. And finally, overhead there's a black box, labeled "atmospheric decarbonizer", which has a series of green lights along its side and is giving off a gentle hum.

"So... what do you think?" Miranda asks.

[bc56]

Aspen Cabin Shuttle
"It's, uh..." cramped "...Cozy." She has a realization. "Oh! I should bring clothes and, uh, sleeping things. And toiletries." Is there any sort of bathroom on the shuttle or is Sekhmet in for a rude awakening?

[Ironsmith]

[Shuttle]

The toilet is noticeably absent. Flights with this shuttle are usually only expected to last a few hours; the decarbonizer is a recent installment that only vaguely hints at the possibility of a lengthier voyage. Miranda had intended to get around this through the use of a catheter system, but hasn't yet mentioned that to Sekhmet.

Hence the awkward hiss and grimace when Sekhmet mentions toiletries.

At least the other bathroom functions (such as, say, an actual bath) are actually covered by the sleeping pod... that Sekhmet has already shown herself to he uncomfortable with. Joy.

[bc56]

Shuttle
Miranda's silence is telling. "Uh, there is a bathroom, isn't there?" Sekhmet stops right before stepping out the door. "It's just hidden, right?" She's very uncomfortable with this development.

[Ironsmith]

[Shuttle]

Miranda slowly shakes her head. No. No there is not. Where could they possibly hide that in a space this small, anyway?

"Most of that stuff kind of relies on gravity to function." She points out. "Which we're not going to have much of. Once we're away from the planet, we'll still be under constant acceleration, in the direction you'd expect... but it'll only be a tiny piece of what you're used to. A bath or shower is out of the question, since both are a good way to drown. And, um... no toilets. Putting aside the complication of plumbing, we'll be in a recycled atmosphere for most of the trip. Any, ah, odors would linger throughout the entire voyage."

And if there's one thing worse than spending two weeks in cramped close quarters, it's spending two weeks in cramped close quarters that smell like last week's burritos.

[bc56]

Shuttle
"Then where do we, uh, you know? Uh, and how do we stay clean?" Two weeks in cramped quarters without showers will start to smell regardless of what you eat (although Sekhmet has some advantages in that department because of her origins).