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person4Title: Lucy in the Sky
Fandom: Hitchhiker's Guide (movie)/Runaways crossover
Characters: Arthur Dent and Karolina Dean
Notes: For June Fic-a-Day
Ford and Zaphod had claimed that they'd stopped at Tarnax VII for supplies, but watching them made it fairly obvious what they'd meant was that they'd stopped because they'd heard the planet in question had a good bar and were in the mood to get rip-roaring drunk. Which possibly shouldn't be called a "mood" so much as a truth of their existence.
Which wouldn't really have bothered Arthur so much--he wouldn't mind getting tanked up himself since Trillian had up and taken a job as a reporter and was now off trawling around the universe without him, and even though she reassured him that she wasn't breaking up with him it wasn't hard to notice the longer and longer gaps between the times she got in touch with him--except that things on the planet they'd chosen to go to were tense. He never would have thought that he'd be especially good at reading the expressions of wrinkly green aliens, but the moment he'd gotten off the Heart of Gold and seen his first... Scrawl, he thought he'd heard Ford call them, he'd known that they were itching for a fight. Luckily all of their aggression seemed to be directed somewhere else, but Arthur wasn't entirely sure how long that would last when his companions had the combined social awareness of a cocker spaniel when they had to make the choice between paying attention to how other people were acting and getting drunk as soon as possible (and, at least in Zaphod's case and Ford was only really much better by comparison, at any other time at all).
So Arthur was left huddling down at the corner of the bar, trying his best to be inconspicuous after finally giving up on trying to convince Ford and Zaphod that it would be best just to leave quickly and find a different planet to get drunk on. He didn't have anything to drink himself, aside from a glass of water which had thankfully appeared exactly the same as the water found on Earth, something which hadn't been the case on every world they'd stopped on since he'd begun traveling around space with Ford.
He was just considering ordering another glass when he heard something so unlikely that at first he thought he was imagining things. When he caught the sound again he sat up straight in his seat, straining to hear over the noise of the bar, and grabbed Ford by his arm. "Ford! Ford, do you hear that?"
Ford shook him off with a hissed, "Not now Arthur," before turning back to the feminine-looking wrinkly green alien he was talking to, flashing her a smooth smile and saying, "Now, what where you saying about shape-shifting?"
He briefly considered trying to ask Zaphod instead, but that was overwhelmed by his desire to never speak with Zaphod if he was able to help it, which as the moment he was. So he settled for saying, "Well, if you need me I'll be... that way," with a vague handwave in the direction of the sound to the uninterested Ford.
As soon as he was out of the noisy bar the sound became much clearer, and for once curiosity was stronger than the survival instincts that usually told him not to go wandering around on alien planets by himself. He didn't have to go far anyway, just around two corners then a few meters straight ahead and he found it; a band of the same aliens he'd seen everywhere on the planet.
The band itself wasn't the interesting thing, although they were playing instruments that he'd never seen on Earth which might have been worth examining if he'd ever been a musical sort of person. What had caught his ear and lead him to them was what they were playing; the notes were twisted a little strangely by the alien instruments, the melody just the tiniest bit too high, but the song was unmistakable Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.
"The Beatles? Here?" he asked himself. He was tempted to write it off as one of those bizarre cosmic coincidences that popped up more often than he would have thought likely, except that the band had a singer and he rather doubted that another race would come up with not only the same tune but also lines like "where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies". It didn't exactly seem feasible.
"Oh, is it time to go back?" a quiet voice said behind him, and he whirled around to see what looked like a rainbow and a sunbeam that had been mixed together in a blender then poured into the form of a young woman. While he gawked, she drifted slowly closer, saying, "Are you new? I don't know if anyone told you, but you don't really need to make yourself look human for my--" She cut herself off suddenly when she got close, her nose twitching once, twice, and then her eyes widened, "Wait a sec! You're not-- are you from Earth?"
He nodded slowly, not quite trusting himself to say anything that wasn't along the lines of 'Ooh, shiny,' since that was what pretty much the entire fore part of his mind was taken up by. All across the galaxy he'd only seen aliens that came in various forms of either ugly or of oddly close to human. Suddenly coming across one that was entirely beautiful was something of a shock, enough of one that it took a moment for him to realize that he should be wondering how she knew what a human was.
"Oh, my God!" she exclaimed at his confirmation, and all at once all the rainbow-tinted light seemed to be sucked into her body, leaving a blonde teenaged girl of the sort he'd never have had a chance at in school and Arthur suddenly feeling rather skeevy about having been ogling her. "I am too! I mean, I'm not, obviously, but I might as well be. ...It's kind've a long story." She seemed to realize that she was babbling a little then, took a deep breath, and thrust her hand out at him. "I'm Karolina Dean."
He took her hand, trying to ignore the way the utter routineness of the introduction just made this whole situation seem even odder. "Arthur. Arthur Dent. It's nice to meet you?"
"You're from England, right? I visited there once! Well, just the hotel in London mostly; my parents wouldn't really let me go out much. I'm from California myself." She was leaning towards him as if she were terribly interested in anything he had to say, which was something of a new experience for him.
The more she talked the more it became obvious that, yes, the girl really was talking about Earth, and the babel fish wasn't just confusing things by translating the name of a species close to human as human because it was what he'd understand. It was a bit of a shame that the first new might-as-well-be-human he was meeting since leaving the planet was one pretty enough to make him suddenly feel like a tongue-tied secondary school student again, wrong as that might be. And he wasn't actually any good at speaking with women at the best of times. "We're a bit far from California," he offered, feeling that it would be a safe topic of conversation, "Did you get abducted by a friend too?"
"Oh, no. I mean, not really. Is that what happened to you? I'm here because I'm getting married tomorrow." She laughed suddenly, blushing a little at the same time. "Now you're probably thinking, 'Oh, great, the only other human on the planet and she's the sort of redneck that gets married at sixteen,' right? Unless there are other humans with you?"
"No, but there's a Betelgeusian with me who can do a decent impression. And the thought never crossed my mind," he said honestly.
"Well, I was just out here to hear them practicing the song for our first dance. It must have surprised you to hear The Beatles out here, huh? My gi-- fiance thought that I'd like to have something from back home at our wedding, since my friends can't come." She looked up at the band, and her smile faltered a little. "So, how are things back on Earth? We haven't been able to get in contact with them in ages because of the solar flares."
"Uh." Arthur really wasn't sure how to answer that. If she didn't know that the Earth had been destroyed, did he have a right to tell her? Especially the day before her wedding; he didn't want to be the one responsible for making her think about something like that on what should be the happiest day of her life. And with the replacement Earth now up and running would it really matter if he didn't tell her? In fact, she'd probably be better off not knowing that everyone she knew was dead and she was speaking to manufactured copies of them the next time she was able to contact them. "Everything was fine the last time I was there!" he said, falsely bright.
"Oh good," she said, visibly relaxing, "That's great to hear." She smiled at him again, twirling a strand of hair around her finger. "Um, I know this sounds pretty crazy coming from someone you've never met before, but if you're still around tomorrow maybe you could come to the wedding? Xavin--that's my fiance--got them to work a couple of traditions from back home into the ceremony, and... I don't know, it would just be nice if there was anyone else there who actually got the significance. I mean, it's okay if you don't want to, though, I'd totally get it. It's probably going to be pretty boring, with the peace treaty being signed as part of it and everything."
"Peace treaty?"
"You didn't know about the war when you came here? It's been going on for... for a long time, between the Skrulls here and my parent's people down on Majesdane. The whole reason we're getting married now instead of waiting a few years is to stop it."
And suddenly the tense atmosphere made perfect sense, and Arthur's survival senses went into overtime yelling that he did not want to be on that planet when the people they'd been at war with showed up for the ceremony. If things were as bad on the other side as they were with the Skrulls things would not turn out well, he was sure of it. "I, ah, don't think we'll be staying. Sorry," he said, and immediately felt guilty that he wasn't telling her that she should get out of there too, for the sake of Earthling unity or something like that. But he didn't really have the right to tell a girl he'd just met to run away from her own wedding. Anyway, she must feel the same unease he did, right?
"Oh, that's too bad." She looked away again, and her glow began to seep from her again, still eye-catchingly lovely. "I really should go now--there's a lot we need to get done before the wedding--but if you change your mind just go to the palace and ask for me. We can talk about movies or something! You don't know how long it's been since I've talked to anybody who knows much about Earth culture!"
"Good-bye, then," he said, raising a hand to her as she flew away, then turning to return to the bar and do whatever it took to convince Ford and Zaphod that they needed to get out of there before the next day. He made it around the first corner, then his footsteps faltered and he paused. "Wait... the palace?"
Fandom: Hitchhiker's Guide (movie)/Runaways crossover
Characters: Arthur Dent and Karolina Dean
Notes: For June Fic-a-Day
Ford and Zaphod had claimed that they'd stopped at Tarnax VII for supplies, but watching them made it fairly obvious what they'd meant was that they'd stopped because they'd heard the planet in question had a good bar and were in the mood to get rip-roaring drunk. Which possibly shouldn't be called a "mood" so much as a truth of their existence.
Which wouldn't really have bothered Arthur so much--he wouldn't mind getting tanked up himself since Trillian had up and taken a job as a reporter and was now off trawling around the universe without him, and even though she reassured him that she wasn't breaking up with him it wasn't hard to notice the longer and longer gaps between the times she got in touch with him--except that things on the planet they'd chosen to go to were tense. He never would have thought that he'd be especially good at reading the expressions of wrinkly green aliens, but the moment he'd gotten off the Heart of Gold and seen his first... Scrawl, he thought he'd heard Ford call them, he'd known that they were itching for a fight. Luckily all of their aggression seemed to be directed somewhere else, but Arthur wasn't entirely sure how long that would last when his companions had the combined social awareness of a cocker spaniel when they had to make the choice between paying attention to how other people were acting and getting drunk as soon as possible (and, at least in Zaphod's case and Ford was only really much better by comparison, at any other time at all).
So Arthur was left huddling down at the corner of the bar, trying his best to be inconspicuous after finally giving up on trying to convince Ford and Zaphod that it would be best just to leave quickly and find a different planet to get drunk on. He didn't have anything to drink himself, aside from a glass of water which had thankfully appeared exactly the same as the water found on Earth, something which hadn't been the case on every world they'd stopped on since he'd begun traveling around space with Ford.
He was just considering ordering another glass when he heard something so unlikely that at first he thought he was imagining things. When he caught the sound again he sat up straight in his seat, straining to hear over the noise of the bar, and grabbed Ford by his arm. "Ford! Ford, do you hear that?"
Ford shook him off with a hissed, "Not now Arthur," before turning back to the feminine-looking wrinkly green alien he was talking to, flashing her a smooth smile and saying, "Now, what where you saying about shape-shifting?"
He briefly considered trying to ask Zaphod instead, but that was overwhelmed by his desire to never speak with Zaphod if he was able to help it, which as the moment he was. So he settled for saying, "Well, if you need me I'll be... that way," with a vague handwave in the direction of the sound to the uninterested Ford.
As soon as he was out of the noisy bar the sound became much clearer, and for once curiosity was stronger than the survival instincts that usually told him not to go wandering around on alien planets by himself. He didn't have to go far anyway, just around two corners then a few meters straight ahead and he found it; a band of the same aliens he'd seen everywhere on the planet.
The band itself wasn't the interesting thing, although they were playing instruments that he'd never seen on Earth which might have been worth examining if he'd ever been a musical sort of person. What had caught his ear and lead him to them was what they were playing; the notes were twisted a little strangely by the alien instruments, the melody just the tiniest bit too high, but the song was unmistakable Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.
"The Beatles? Here?" he asked himself. He was tempted to write it off as one of those bizarre cosmic coincidences that popped up more often than he would have thought likely, except that the band had a singer and he rather doubted that another race would come up with not only the same tune but also lines like "where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies". It didn't exactly seem feasible.
"Oh, is it time to go back?" a quiet voice said behind him, and he whirled around to see what looked like a rainbow and a sunbeam that had been mixed together in a blender then poured into the form of a young woman. While he gawked, she drifted slowly closer, saying, "Are you new? I don't know if anyone told you, but you don't really need to make yourself look human for my--" She cut herself off suddenly when she got close, her nose twitching once, twice, and then her eyes widened, "Wait a sec! You're not-- are you from Earth?"
He nodded slowly, not quite trusting himself to say anything that wasn't along the lines of 'Ooh, shiny,' since that was what pretty much the entire fore part of his mind was taken up by. All across the galaxy he'd only seen aliens that came in various forms of either ugly or of oddly close to human. Suddenly coming across one that was entirely beautiful was something of a shock, enough of one that it took a moment for him to realize that he should be wondering how she knew what a human was.
"Oh, my God!" she exclaimed at his confirmation, and all at once all the rainbow-tinted light seemed to be sucked into her body, leaving a blonde teenaged girl of the sort he'd never have had a chance at in school and Arthur suddenly feeling rather skeevy about having been ogling her. "I am too! I mean, I'm not, obviously, but I might as well be. ...It's kind've a long story." She seemed to realize that she was babbling a little then, took a deep breath, and thrust her hand out at him. "I'm Karolina Dean."
He took her hand, trying to ignore the way the utter routineness of the introduction just made this whole situation seem even odder. "Arthur. Arthur Dent. It's nice to meet you?"
"You're from England, right? I visited there once! Well, just the hotel in London mostly; my parents wouldn't really let me go out much. I'm from California myself." She was leaning towards him as if she were terribly interested in anything he had to say, which was something of a new experience for him.
The more she talked the more it became obvious that, yes, the girl really was talking about Earth, and the babel fish wasn't just confusing things by translating the name of a species close to human as human because it was what he'd understand. It was a bit of a shame that the first new might-as-well-be-human he was meeting since leaving the planet was one pretty enough to make him suddenly feel like a tongue-tied secondary school student again, wrong as that might be. And he wasn't actually any good at speaking with women at the best of times. "We're a bit far from California," he offered, feeling that it would be a safe topic of conversation, "Did you get abducted by a friend too?"
"Oh, no. I mean, not really. Is that what happened to you? I'm here because I'm getting married tomorrow." She laughed suddenly, blushing a little at the same time. "Now you're probably thinking, 'Oh, great, the only other human on the planet and she's the sort of redneck that gets married at sixteen,' right? Unless there are other humans with you?"
"No, but there's a Betelgeusian with me who can do a decent impression. And the thought never crossed my mind," he said honestly.
"Well, I was just out here to hear them practicing the song for our first dance. It must have surprised you to hear The Beatles out here, huh? My gi-- fiance thought that I'd like to have something from back home at our wedding, since my friends can't come." She looked up at the band, and her smile faltered a little. "So, how are things back on Earth? We haven't been able to get in contact with them in ages because of the solar flares."
"Uh." Arthur really wasn't sure how to answer that. If she didn't know that the Earth had been destroyed, did he have a right to tell her? Especially the day before her wedding; he didn't want to be the one responsible for making her think about something like that on what should be the happiest day of her life. And with the replacement Earth now up and running would it really matter if he didn't tell her? In fact, she'd probably be better off not knowing that everyone she knew was dead and she was speaking to manufactured copies of them the next time she was able to contact them. "Everything was fine the last time I was there!" he said, falsely bright.
"Oh good," she said, visibly relaxing, "That's great to hear." She smiled at him again, twirling a strand of hair around her finger. "Um, I know this sounds pretty crazy coming from someone you've never met before, but if you're still around tomorrow maybe you could come to the wedding? Xavin--that's my fiance--got them to work a couple of traditions from back home into the ceremony, and... I don't know, it would just be nice if there was anyone else there who actually got the significance. I mean, it's okay if you don't want to, though, I'd totally get it. It's probably going to be pretty boring, with the peace treaty being signed as part of it and everything."
"Peace treaty?"
"You didn't know about the war when you came here? It's been going on for... for a long time, between the Skrulls here and my parent's people down on Majesdane. The whole reason we're getting married now instead of waiting a few years is to stop it."
And suddenly the tense atmosphere made perfect sense, and Arthur's survival senses went into overtime yelling that he did not want to be on that planet when the people they'd been at war with showed up for the ceremony. If things were as bad on the other side as they were with the Skrulls things would not turn out well, he was sure of it. "I, ah, don't think we'll be staying. Sorry," he said, and immediately felt guilty that he wasn't telling her that she should get out of there too, for the sake of Earthling unity or something like that. But he didn't really have the right to tell a girl he'd just met to run away from her own wedding. Anyway, she must feel the same unease he did, right?
"Oh, that's too bad." She looked away again, and her glow began to seep from her again, still eye-catchingly lovely. "I really should go now--there's a lot we need to get done before the wedding--but if you change your mind just go to the palace and ask for me. We can talk about movies or something! You don't know how long it's been since I've talked to anybody who knows much about Earth culture!"
"Good-bye, then," he said, raising a hand to her as she flew away, then turning to return to the bar and do whatever it took to convince Ford and Zaphod that they needed to get out of there before the next day. He made it around the first corner, then his footsteps faltered and he paused. "Wait... the palace?"