subsystem | voice

[ Kitty's voice is cheerful, girlish, and energetic. She hasn't been around lately: the effects of getting out the warning about the invasion of Olympus had intense physical effects on her, and a long period of unconsciousness has been followed by a period of working hard to recover from that physical weakness. So this post's chipperness is partially motivated by the fact that Kitty's persona/alias Lizzie is just a chipper person, and it's partially motivated by the fact that Kitty wants to prove to herself that she's recovered and in good health and spirits. So...Honestly, that energy is frankly bordering on manic. ]

Hullo, Zion! Or at least the network-users of Zion. It's Lizzie again.

A few things. The first of these things, I think, is going to make some of you quite happy. I expect a lot of you remember the restaurant I work at - Cafe Modak - it's the one with the best food in the whole city, so you might have heard of it. If you pay attention to those sorts of things. Anyway, Chef and Mrs Dutt - that's our owner - are putting together a little celebration dinner, for the people who helped defend Olympus. And also when I say little celebration dinner, I actually mean that it's going to basically be a feast. Everyone's invited, but people who helped out get to eat free. So if you've got any dishes to request, just request them here, and I'll pass it along to the two of them.

Anyway, the second thing is that we really don't all know each other so well, do we? I mean, we do all use this, but I hardly know any of your names. Or anything about you. So we ought to play one of those silly games like they make you do, to get comfortable with the people around you. So...How about we play a few rounds of two truths and a lie? If you all know that game. Or you could do a little introduction speech. Or just talk about your favorite sims, if you do sims.

[ Translation: let me pick your brains and figure out what sorts of people you are. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

( anna sounds a little awkward, when she responds; partially because she's english fifteenth language and partially because it's such a studied effort to be sociable that it veers between either endearing or a little sad, depending on your perspective. she doesn't know the game, but she observes long enough to get the gist of it, and then-- )

My surname is Stolsbord. I have scar in shape of rose. I wrote travel book once.

Hm.

[ With a little laugh, she confesses: ]

Oh, I really hope it's the first one, because the other two are just so brilliant I desperately want them to be true.

It was never proper book, ( with a hint of cautious warmth, not quite as ready as kitty's laugh but making the attempt, ) only letters I write to my parents, from places I go.

Oh, but that's good too!

[ There's no manipulation there. No lies. This is the honest, real excitement of a girl who never had the chance to go more than twenty miles from where she was born until she found herself in a new world altogether. ]

Have you traveled many places, then? Many remarkable places?

I travel very much in make-believe places. ( and she is scrupulous about avoiding legitimizing her matrix, however difficult it can sometimes be to separate what she considers to be real in its impact on her (her own choices - her own feelings) and what is simply a false thing, a nothing thing to be left behind and disowned. ) Some beautiful. Some remarkable. Some just roads to other places.

Well - tell me about the best one you've seen. Make-believe or real. Or one of each. That can be your next truth.

There is tree that I am not allowed to climb, for all the years that I was small. On the grounds, where I grow up. It becomes habit not to climb, even when I am a little grown; I go to it, when I have come of age--

( that is a euphemism for something that involved a knife )

--and I see my home from the highest point to which I can climb. And then I make my papa catch me, like I am small again.

[ There's a weird little twinge of bitterness at I make my papa catch me. The phrasing and imagery raises a faint memory of a bitter speech - talking cruelly of the girl he used to sit on his shoulders when she was small, how she'd grown up into an unrecognizable traitor that he wanted nothing to do with...

Enough, Kitty. She's been having so many flashes of memory like that - since Olympus. She wants them to stop. ]

Yeah? [ If that comes out a little weak, it gets stronger as she continues. ] That's such a lovely memory. Where did you grow up, then?

( she has lots of those - lovely memories. some of them she can even think of without wanting to break something.

she misses him so fiercely, and it's so much less complicated than how badly she sometimes wants her mother. and how foolish, to be this old, to have spent this many years running to catch up, and when finally she discovers that ayse had been wrong all along--

she wishes she were here, to turn around and say of course i always knew, benevenuta without turning a hair, and to tell her that she'd been unplugged for many years, obviously, and it had been a program in her place, and see these lines in her face, now she will say mother and no one will think it's strange, and she can show her how to do everything-- )

In France.

( if it's abrupt, so was the first message. )

In what is called France, there. It was - quiet.

( she doesn't sound french - she sounds russian - and stolsbord is not a french name. but there are stranger things in the many false worlds of the matrix than the things in anna's explanations that don't entirely jive. )

Edited 2015-08-31 13:05 (UTC)

[ Kitty doesn't have much experience with foreigners - her xenophobic country accepts tourists but keeps them cordoned off and separated. Kitty's only experience with them was the few times, when she was younger, that she posed as some girl hawking little trinkets in the market, serving as distraction while her comrades picked pockets. But she does know what a French accent sounds like: that's one of the few. And she's not particularly polite. So: ]

You don't sound French.

Because I am not French, ( she agrees, unfazed. ) I learn the language of the servants, it is not mine.

You had servants?

[ Which - she oughtn't sound so incredulous. Obviously there are lots of people in lots of worlds who had servants. It's just weird to speak with one. ]

( anna's answer is a verbal shrug; )

It is a different life. It is not real. I don't have now.

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