4th Floor Common Room - Sunday Morning

[once-a-traitor.livejournal.com]

There wasn't enough facepalming in the world to cover what had gone on over the past few days. That was why Edmund was in complete denial. Instead of dying of embarrassment, he was sitting on the floor in the common room, occasionally eating from a bowl of increasingly soggy cereal and trying to reply to a letter he'd received.

Comments

[once-a-traitor.livejournal.com]

"Good morning," Ed said, looking up. "There's not much milk left in the carton, but there's more hidden at the back behind the black thing." He wasn't sure what the black thing was, and wasn't very interested in finding out.

[a-demosthenes.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, something with a notable title such as "the black thing" was hard to help being curious about.

"The black thing?" Valentine asked, tilting her head as she set aside her bowl for the moment to open the fridge and inspect.

Half expecting it to be something technically alive.

[once-a-traitor.livejournal.com]

"I didn't think to ask it what it is. If it's alive, asking it that might be rude."

[a-demosthenes.livejournal.com]

"Not necessarily," Valentine said, looking over with a grin. "I mean, otherwise, you're just making an assumption, and you know what they say about when you assume..."

[once-a-traitor.livejournal.com]

"I don't, but I'm guessing it's not very pleasant. If you get a response, let me know. Or it could be a harmless black box."

[a-demosthenes.livejournal.com]

"Like the black box in airplanes?" Valentine wondered and then she shook her head. "I'm going to go ahead and not be surprised if the fridges in this place needed black boxes like airplanes."

She was also going to be very bold and brave and nudge the black box aside while reaching for the milk it was hiding beneath it.

If she wound up losing her hand in the process, she figured she could just go talk to Ben and he could hook her up with a fake hand.

[once-a-traitor.livejournal.com]

"What do black boxes do?"

[a-demosthenes.livejournal.com]

"They're recorders," Valentine explained, moving to put the milk on the counter while she found some cereal, "in the cockpit of a plane that can record information and cockpit conversations so that, if it crashes, people can discern what might have been the cause."

[once-a-traitor.livejournal.com]

Edmund eyed the fridge. "Now I'm worried about why our fridge has one."

[a-demosthenes.livejournal.com]

Valentine chuckled as she poured the milk over the cereal. "One day," she stated, "when they find all of our charred remains among the rubble, they might just be able to discern what caused this dismal, unfortunate carnage."

"Or," she added as she tucked the milk back in, "it's all just another way the squirrels spy on us for their love of gossip, bested only by their love of rum."

[once-a-traitor.livejournal.com]

"That's entirely likely. The squirrels at home are a fairly nosy bunch too, but not exactly discreet."

[a-demosthenes.livejournal.com]

"You have nosy squirrels where you're from?" Valentine, taking her bowl and moving to have a seat on the sofa, couldn't help her intrigue there. Considering what happened to squirrels where she was from, she was growing quite the fascination with them as a whole.

This fascination might have leaned toward an eventual, brutal revenge.

[once-a-traitor.livejournal.com]

"Well, to say that every squirrel is nosy would be stereotyping, but in general the ones I've met in person have a difficult time understanding the line between being naturally inquisitive and being nosy. Several are excellent scouts, but most of the squirrels who tried for scouting training weren't very good at the part where you have to be discreet coming back to the rest of the group. They mean well."

[a-demosthenes.livejournal.com]

"You train them for scouting," Valentine couldn't help repeating, shaking her head with a sort of odd fascination as she shoveled in a spoonful of cereal.

If Peter had known that they could be used for scouting, she wondered if he'd have spent all that time torturing and dissecting them.

"What about bunny rabbits?"

[once-a-traitor.livejournal.com]

"They're usually too busy breeding to commit to military action."

[a-demosthenes.livejournal.com]

Valentine laughed. "Which is too bad, considering how many potential soldiers that breeding will cause."

Really, Peter had clearly been missing out on a lot. It did her good thinking about just how wrong he'd been on that one.

[once-a-traitor.livejournal.com]

"It would be useful, but not entirely if all of our soldiers were too distracted to focus on the task at hand. I think they're safely civilian for now."

[a-demosthenes.livejournal.com]

"Perhaps better in the long run, then," Valentine agreed with a nod, "so long as they're keeping up helpful civilian jobs that keep things running well. I hate to sound almost communist on the matter, but if they're producing that many mouths to feed, they better be contributing more than just rapid-fire population growth."

[once-a-traitor.livejournal.com]

"They're not a burden," Edmund replied. "Everyone contributes in some way. We're very fortunate."

[a-demosthenes.livejournal.com]

"Well, that's very..."

Unusual. Idyllic.

"...fortunate, yeah. Not all societies can manage that. Of course, not all of them have covert squirrel co-ops, either."

[once-a-traitor.livejournal.com]

Ed grinned. "It's an unusual place."

[a-demosthenes.livejournal.com]

"And where is it?"

[once-a-traitor.livejournal.com]

"A different world to this one. You probably wouldn't know it."

[a-demosthenes.livejournal.com]

"That doesn't mean I won't be interested, though."

[once-a-traitor.livejournal.com]

Edmund blinked, but then conceded the point with a nod. "Narnia is everything from Cair Paravel on the Great Eastern Ocean to the Western Woods beyond Lantern Waste. It's as far north as the River Shribble and as far south as the continental divide that separates Narnia from Archenland."