( OPEN ) what you don't know won't hurt you

[whatdidisay]

Who: Ivan Vorpatril & VARIOUS (including YOU)
When: the month of march (and stuff backdated into feb.)
Where: all around the ship
What: catch all log post and OPEN LOG
Warnings: none!


I. BAR

If his cousin is bartending, and even when he’s not, Ivan can be found at the bar most evenings. Some days just for a quick drink in passing, other nights he’s there until late in various states of inebriation, never crossing the lie into intolerably so. Affable and open, it’s no hardship to start a conversation with him; get near him and he might just start up one himself.

II. ON THE JOB

Ivan’s job is the least demanding on the entire ship, and he likes it like that. There’s days he fills with playing the non-terrifying games on his MID, at least between running around and making sure Navigation and Communications aren’t at odds with each other. Which they don’t ever seem to be, which makes his job that much easier.

Most days he can be found at his desk, slowly working on whatever demands have been made of him to stretch out his workday. The mealtimes that he doesn’t run off to the mess hall for, he takes in Navigation — munching on whatever food they managed to cough up while watching the stars pass them. Either way, it’s quite easy to pull his attention from his job should someone require it.

(( if you want something more specific, please feel free to PM me or PP @ robutts ))

Comments

[curiousnotmalicious]

It sounds like his experience with London wasn’t all that fantastic, so she doesn’t press for details. She does pick up on an unfamiliar word, though - Vor. “Vor,” She echoes. “Is that a... Race? It allows you to drink all you want?” If it does, Dutch is genuinely jealous. If she drank all she would like to drink her liver would pay the price. She might even die of cirrhosis. Such was the fate of someone who liked alcohol a little too much.

Dutch takes the glass and immediately sips at the beverage, raising her eyebrows in apparent approval. “Jobs behind desks can be just as interesting as any other job. My father never left his office and he used to tell me that every day was an adventure.” She smiles a little brighter when she brings up her father. Dutch misses him something fierce. He is the reason she took such a keen interest in computers, after all, even if that isn’t her job here on the Moira. She takes another slow sip of her wine.

[whatdidisay]

Ivan laughs at that, and shakes his head. "No, I'm as human as you. It's--" Difficult to explain, and something that Miles and Gregor could do a much better job at explaining than Ivan. "The Vor are a military caste on my planet. But it goes beyond that, into something cultural." The ideals of sacrifice and service, of putting something before yourself every day of your life. Things that, again, his cousins are not only better at explaining but better at doing. "And the entire lot of us are famous on our planet for drinking to excess at the smallest excuse. Vorishly drunk means wandering around at the end of a party, vomiting into the bushes in the dark."

The mention of an interesting desk job makes him grin, shaking his head. "I'm fine with as minimal excitement as possible, thank you." Life is hard when you're third in line for absolute power. Head down, keep out of trouble, that's how Ivan works. "Yeah? What did he do?" She looks happier when she mentions her father, so he might as well ask.

[curiousnotmalicious]

“Ahhh.” Dutch nods, feeling only slightly foolish for the confusion. “I had an uncle that could’ve easily fit in with you lot, at least in that respect.” She jokes with a smirk on her face. “He was military, too. I didn’t know him very well. He lived on the opposite coast. Only ever met him at my father’s funeral, but my dad talked about him a lot.”

“So, is that something you find yourself doing very often?” Dutch tilts her head and eyes him curiously. “Vomiting into the bushes in the dark?”

She welcomes questions about her father. He’s someone she enjoys talking about. Even though he’s gone it’s never really painful sharing stories involving him. “He started out working for a phone company, but he found his niche in web security. When I was a little girl he took me to all of these hacking conventions meaning to get to know the enemy.” She puts special inflection on the words because they’re his, not hers. “He wound up respecting the people he was working against.”

[whatdidisay]

So she's got a dead father as well. Ivan mentally raises a toast in his head for the both of them, but nods, understanding. Not that his uncle talked about his father, or his mother mentioning him more than in passing. As for her question, he grins. "No, because I know how to hold my wine." Unlike said uncle, thankfully.

Hacking convention? "Not to sound unknowing or anything but-- hacking?" For someone in the future, Ivan's grasp of technology sure does hover around things someone in the eighties could have imagined.

[curiousnotmalicious]

“An enviable talent! Not to mention a good one to have if one is to drink very often.” With that, she takes a sip of her wine as if talking about drinking reminded her that the glass was in her hand. “I suppose I’m fairly good at that, as well. I can’t remember the last time my night ended with me, well, you know. I do get hangovers from time to time, though.”

Surprise shows in Dutch’s expression. “Really? That term hasn’t stood the test of time? Huh. I suppose things do change... Well, hacking is sort of like manipulating a computer, usually through the internet-- Is the internet still a thing?” She wrinkles her eyebrows slightly. For all she knows ‘internet’ could be as outdated to Ivan as ‘ARPANET’ is to her.

[whatdidisay]

"They don't have instant hangover cure pills where you're from? They're not perfect -- partly because I think doctors want us to suffer the consequences out of some twisted idea of deserving it. But they're good when I have to go into work the next day." Doing Ops work, even paperwork, is never pleasant when your head can't stop pounding.

Her question makes him remember the discussion he had with Allison earlier, and he shakes his head. "We don't have it. It could work in our universe on a planetary level, but if Captain Illyan got word of it he'd first have a fit and then aim to control it with an iron fist and succeed." The casualness with which Ivan makes this statement indicates that he sees approximately nothing wrong with that idea. "We've got security in place to prevent people from digging where they're not supposed to with closed networks, if that's similar." So then hacking would be getting around that? Maybe it's a good thing that doesn't happen regularly, or there'd be a lot more people spending time in ImpSec HQ.

Although Ivan's heard that the cells have been recently renovated into something that isn't obviously dungeon-like. Nice.

[curiousnotmalicious]

Dutch’s eyes go wide and her jaw drops for a moment. “Instant what now??” She leans forward just slightly. “You have instant hangover cure pills?” A big smile spreads across her face. “Oh, Ivan, I am jealous of you.” All she could think of were the miserable mornings after she could have avoided if she could have only gotten her hands on some of those pills. Of course, it sounded like there were some side effects to taking them, but there were side effects to everything, it seemed.

“Simply put, yeah, hacking would be people digging where they’re not supposed to. My dad worked against that, trying to patch holes and keep people out, so to speak. He’s the reason I got into technology.” She smiles faintly. Her father probably wouldn’t have been so proud of some of the things she’d done back home. Planting malware in the fiber optics center to all but shut down the internet in New York City for a time... It hadn’t been Dutch’s finest moment. She’s grown since then, though, and look at her, now! Patching holes in spaceships and sharing wine with wonderful almost-strangers!

“I can’t imagine a world without the internet. It must be so different from the one I live in.” Dutch finds herself staring off into space as she sips at her wine. After a moment she snaps back to reality, looking to Ivan with a charming smile. “I bet it’s amazing in some ways.”

[whatdidisay]

He grins, laughing at her expression. "I'm from the future," he says by way of explanation, spreading his hands and arms out. "We've got to have something besides the flying cars." Which they also have, thank you. As for her father, well, "He seems like the sort of guy you'd want to have around."

At least on Barrayar. And, speaking of Barrayar -- "We've got comm consoles, secured and unsecured. And access to information in various databases if you know where to look on the secured ones. But Barrayar itself?" Hm. How to describe his home planet... "It's different than most of the galaxy. We were isolated from the rest of the Nexus for seven hundred years, see."

And then they got rediscovered and then were thrown into a twenty year long occupation against a planetary force using nukes while they still used a horse calvary.

[curiousnotmalicious]

“You lucky dog.” She gives him a playful shove. “I was truly born in the wrong era.” Dutch gives a jokingly woeful sigh and shakes her sigh, but then nods her head at the comment about her father. “He certainly was very good at his job. Very passionate. His superiors loved him.” There’s a nostalgic smile on her face. She was only a child when he died, but her memories of him are very vivid.

“Was that isolation a good thing or a bad thing?” Her eyebrows wrinkle slightly as she listens, quite interested in learning more about all of it - his world, his era. Ivan didn’t seem all that different from many of the people Dutch had met on Earth, but his world sounded incredibly different. It amazed her.

[whatdidisay]

Ivan grins wider, laughing. "Well we've got ways for you to survive into the future, if you're careful. Although I wouldn't recommend cryofreezing yourself for no good reason." Part of him wonders if he should ask what happened to her father -- although if she turned it around on him he's not sure he'd like mentioning it in detail. Better leave that, then.

"Depends on who you ask," he says, as apolitically as possible. He didn't survive to twenty-five by blabbing about his Progressive leanings, although Ivan's not sure what the rest of his planet expects from him. He's a Vorpatril, he's related to the most progressive Regent they've ever had. Not to mention the most progressive Emperor. "The Conservatives like the way things were back then, socially -- mostly because I don't think even they'd have a leg to stand on if they tried to argue that horses were better than lightflyers, or that we should continue using swords while the rest of the galaxy has nerve disrupters. The Progressives tend to embrace galactic culture as a whole, picking up the parts of it to use for Barrayar's benefit." Ivan shrugs, considering. "The Time of Isolation is what it is, Bloody Centuries and all. You'd have to ask a historian for an expert opinion."

[curiousnotmalicious]

“Cryofreezing. You really have everything, don’t you?” She waggles her eyebrows. Dutch is jealous, of course. She’s always been on the pulse of new things. What else can one expect from a person whose career is centered in technology? Still, she takes comfort in knowing that Ivan doesn’t have the internet like she does.

“I suppose that’s how it is with most things. Everyone has an opinion. There are at least two sides to every issue.” She shrugs and takes a sip of her wine. “I’m not sure how I’d get along in your time. I’ve always leaned more towards liberalism politically and I have a hard time keeping my mouth shut. I’ve known many people who have told me that’s a fault, but I’ve never managed to correct it.” Dutch sighs. It’s the truth. Saying too much or saying the wrong thing has gotten her into many a fix. Surprisingly, even though it’s still true to this moment, she’s gotten better. She’s more tactful than she was as a teenager. Perhaps once she hits thirty she’ll be alright.