fandomhighdorms | Second Floor Common Room; Saturday Afternoon [11/24].

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Second Floor Common Room; Saturday Afternoon [11/24].

Astrid had ~~handwavily~~ spent almost the entirety of her Thanksgiving down in the pool, so perhaps she'd missed it, but she didn't recall anyone making or bringing in nearly as much food as to create the sheer amount of Thanksgiving-related leftover that seemed to be in the fridge right now.

Not that she was going to complain, of course. Easy access to food was one of the first things she took to liking about this place, and since there were no names on anything and she highly doubted anyone would miss it if she took some for herself, she made a plate, popped it in the microwave, and went to sit at the table with a book to distract her between bites, thinking that this was probably the most Thanksgiving-y Thanksgiving meal she'd ever really had before.

[[ ubiquitous "please save me from work but now that I posted something I'll probably get busy" post is open! ]]

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It was one of those days where Sabine had too many little things going on tofocus, and so she was taking a few minutes' break to get away from it by getting a Coke.

"Reading anything good?" she asked, heading for the fridge.

Astrid looked up, smiled faintly at Sabine before marking her place with her thumb, and turning the cover of the bookto look at it as if that would have more bearing on her answer than the actual text she was just reading. She shrugged a shoulder.

"It's okay," she decided, then shook her head a little. "My mom sent me here with a reading list that I've been kind of neglecting, so I thought maybe I'd try to get back into it again. There's worse ways to spend a day."

[[ahahaha, sorry. Sure enough, it has been A. Day. ]]

"I really should do more of that," she admitted, peering at the book. She'd mostly been reading non-fiction here, trying to get caught up on things. "Is that Russian?"

...She also liked languages.

"The original was," Astrid said with a faint laugh. "This is thankfully a translation, I haven't quite gotten around to learning Russian yet. And even out of the languages I do know, I'm not nearly fluent enough to get through a book this dense in any of them but English."

She wasn't just talking about the size of it, either.

"Sounds like a goal to me," she teased, opening her soda.

"You obviously haven't seen the list my mom sent me here with," Astrid snorted, rolling her eyes a little. "That's goal enough for one lifetime. Maybe even two."

And she wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if she found Now read them all in their original languages hidden in there somewhere down the line, either.

"How big's the list?" Sabine wondered.

"Four hundred," said Astrid dryly. "I actually counted them."

Okay, she hadn't expected that.

"What? How would you ever have time for anything else? Including school?"

Astrid just shook her head and shrugged again. "Even if I read a book a day for a year," she noted, "I wouldn't be able to get through the whole thing, and you can bet a good handful of them are bricks like this."

You'd think that laying it out like that would help Astrid realize just how lofty the goal of the booklist actually was, but it just seemed like a normal, expected thing, really.

"At least there's no time limit. I can reasonably pull it off by the time I graduate; four hundred books in four years is a lot more do-able."

"So... a hundred books in a year?" Sabine asked. "What if you wanted to read something else? Like for fun? Or, have a life?"

That was a thing people had here!

It was almost as if Ingrid wanted to ensure that her daughter was just as entrapped by something as she was, or something.

"At least I'm a fast reader?" Astrid offered, almost apologetically. "And I've definitely read a few things off list, too. I mean, especially once I found out that there's twenty-six years worth of books that haven't even been published yet back where I'm from. Tip made some good recommendations when I first got here, even, and I was doing a few from the list, and then something off-list, kind of a pallet cleanser, but then I just kind of...stopped."

Which had been a bad idea, really. She'd gotten so far off track, and it wasn't much, but it was at least a step back in the right direction, she hoped.

"What if you just read the ones you actually wanted to?" Sabine asked.

She didn't want to say that this was nuts, but it was.

"I mean," Astrid said after a moment, looking down at the book and wrinkling her nose slightly, "I kind of want to read all of them? Eventually, I mean. She wouldn't have bothered putting them on a list if there wasn't something of value in each of them, right? And it would be kind of nice to be able to say I actually did it, too."

"Okay, that part I can see," Sabine conceded. "This might just be me needing more flexibility, personally."

As someone who expected classes to be classes but still wanted to learn on her own terms, too.

"I'm not good with a lot of flexibility," Astrid admitted, shaking her head with a small breath that was almost a laugh, but not quite. After all, she'd never really had the chance to be. "I've gotten a lot better about it, being here. But I...like having something to do, something to focus on."

Even if it was a little bit ridiculous.

Four hundred.

"Focus is good. Can't say I haven't found that hard here," Sabine admitted. "As long as you like doing it."

She wasn't sure how it wouldn't end up feeling like a chore. Again, that was her.

"They're not all bad either," Astrid added. "Some of them I've really liked. Not all of them, though. And the few random selections in between helps, too. I've always spent a lot of time reading, though. Usually, if it wasn't drawing, it was reading."

"I wouldn't mind getting some recommendations. I haven't been great with picking up the fiction since I've been here." And she wanted to be, it was just what happened when there was so much to pick up from a world you were stuck living on.

"I'd avoid the Russians," said Astrid, making a face for both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. "But I really enjoy when Virginia Woolf shows up on the list, Kurt Vonnegut, too. And Anias Nin. It's really easy to see how she was such an inspiration to my mother.

"She's a poet," she added, an afterthought, almost, with the realization that she probably hadn't told Sabine much about Ingrid. "My mom."

And, since she didn't want to tell Sabine too much more than that, she added a little more. "Tip's recommendations were all really good, too, and you can tell she loves sharing what she likes to read, so you should see her for some, too. And if I read anything else really good, I'll leave of for you."

That was really the most she'd ever heard about Astrid's mom, yes, but as someone who wasn't talking about her own...

"I'll check them out," she promised, and realized, "It sounds like I'm going to end up starting my own list."

"But only read the ones you want," Astrid teased a little as she returned Sabine's words right back to her.

"Hey," Sabine said, and admitted, "okay, that was actually pretty good."

And Astrid was just going to meet that with a sweet, serene sort of smile.

One of the best things about being so quiet and reserved more often than not was how much easier it was to impress people when you decided to actually snark a little.

Lana nodded at Astrid as she walked in, then paused. "What is that? It smells good."

"Leftovers," Astrid offered with a little shrug, swirling a piece of turkey in a puddle of gravy on her plate. "From Thanksgiving, I guess. The fridge is packed with them, if you want to help yourself."

Lana went to check out the fridge. "That's the holiday we just had, right? Do you celebrate it?"

She took out a few of the unlabeled containers and opened them to check them out.

"Not usually," Astrid said, after a bit. "I mean, I'm from here," not exactly, but a lot more than most, "and I'm American, but it was never really a thing we did. My mom couldn't get over how it's basically just a glorification of the exploitation of this land's native people by the English settlers."

Which wasn't false at all, but Astrid always suspected Ingrid was actually just bitter that the Vikings never got their due for really finding this place first.

"I hadn't heard that part before," Lana said. "I just gathered it was about the food."

Which she was taking out now - the turkey and gravy, the potatoes, and the...green mush thing.

The green mush thing was one of the best parts!

"That's mostly what it's about now," Astrid allowed. "Food and family and football for some people, but it's all based on a traditional harvest festival feast, so I guess it was about the food back then, too. They say that the natives brought food to share with the Pilgrims, so that's why big meals and sharing food is such a big deal on Thanksgiving, but, I mean, the stories really sort of gloss over how the Europeans decided this was their land now and the natives could just go bug off."

"So it's about colonialism?" Lana asked. "Or started that way, anyway." She made a note to maybe look that up. "Which sport is football?" There always seemed to be some sport on the television, but she couldn't remember which was which.

"That's right," Astrid nodded. "Colonialism. And football, in this case, is American football, which is the one with the oblong shaped ball, that the players mostly toss and carry back and forth across a field. For everywhere else in the world, football is a different sport, with a round ball that you kick back and forth across a field, which makes way more sense for something called football, but us Americans, we've got to make everything weird."

"Why is that?" Lana asked, heating her plate and putting the rest back. "About your football being different, I mean, though if there's a reason for Americans making things weird, feel free."

Astrid just shrugged again. "I don't really know sports to know exactly why we insist on calling it football," she admitted, "but I think Americans have just developed this strong sense of independence and individuality. Obviously, it's not true across the board, but we like to stand out, to be different. We even use a whole different measurement system than the rest of the world. It's kind of bizarre."

"I've heard of miles and feet," Lana said. "It still seems a little odd. My galaxy uses meters, and so does most of this world, but a part doesn't?" Talk about strange.

"Yup." Astrid looked a bit useless to explain it, because, if there was an explanation, she definitely didn't know it. "That's exactly right. Who even knows why? I'm just glad the conversions are easy enough, if you're used to them."

"I'm still working on that," Lana said. "It hasn't come up much. It's so strange, though, all these different countries and languages and cultures, all on one planet."

"And yet," Astrid mused, "it's the only planet out this way that has anything at all."

As far as they knew, anyway. It was still weird for her that a statement like that even made sense as a part of normal conversation around here, really, so it was with a little bit of hesitation that she asked, "Is it different where you're from?"

"That's strange, too," Lana said. "I'm used to any number of planets, and all of them are Imperial. Even what I've learned of the Republic - individual planets or systems might have their own culture, but not like this one. There are, what, hundreds? Thousands? It's like a galaxy in microcosm."

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Second Floor Common Room; Saturday Afternoon [11/24].

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