Why Not Having TV is a Good Thing
Jan. 23rd, 2007 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cinaed...Well, at least for me. *shifty eyes* See, the thing is that I? Get distracted REALLY EASILY. And I hate silence. So last semester, I always had the TV on, and, well, I'd get distracted, and the few hours I wouldn't be watching TV I'd be in class, sleeping, or frantically trying to catch up on homework I should've been doing while watching TV.
Now? With a broken TV? I have not procrastinated in the three weeks I've been back at college. In fact, I just finished writing an essay that's due on Thursday. Yes. Two days early. (If you knew my study habits, you'd be very, very impressed.)
I've also been writing. A lot. Heh. And right now? Since I did all of my homework early and have tonight and tomorrow free aside from 3 hours of classes? I am writing to my heart's content. And giving excerpts.
The Slow and Subtle Art of Drowning
MENSA-verse AU set during "Grace Under Pressure"
Status: 8,300 words, not even close to being finished *weeps* though all plotted out
It was when his hands started to feel stiff and unwieldy that Radek finally noticed the cold. Setting the tablet down in his lap, he rubbed his hands together briskly, trying to warm them and frowned as a shiver racked his frame. Why was it so cold?
Well, he was under, oh, a billion or so gallons of freezing water. That could just possibly be the problem. Radek resisted the urge to roll his eyes at his own folly, and then clenched and unclenched his fists to force away the stiffness before he set the tablet aside.
He eyed the side of the Jumper. “I need to heat this thing, unless you wish me dead,” he informed it, and then set to work at removing the back of one of the bench seats. “And I don't want it to cost me a lot of power.” The needed panel revealed, he peered at it, adding loudly, “Can we at least do that, please, without any problems?”
Disconnecting one end of a cable from a panel above his head, he knelt down and attached it to the panel behind the bench. A few quick commands on the tablet later, he could see the temperature rising on the heat indicator.
“Thank you,” he all but sighed. “I mean, I am not greedy. I just wish not to freeze to death while Rod plans some daring rescue and makes me look like a—”
REMAINING POWER AT LEVEL OF USE: 2:20, the tablet interrupted him.
“Forty minutes?” he said weakly, and then glowered at the wall. “Forty minutes, you—you—” He hauled himself upright. “So, I see what this is. You think that the captain should go down with his ship. Well, I am no captain, I am, I am just the navigator if I am anything, and the navigator gets to escape the sinking ship, understand?” He glared down at the tablet, directing his next snarled complaint to it instead. “I bet you don’t care either way if I live or die. No, you don’t care, and why? Perhaps because you are an inanimate object!”
He lifted his gaze to the ceiling of the Jumper, and resisted the urge to bare his teeth and snarl some more, if only because he didn’t think the Jumper would take his threat seriously. “Oh yes, you are an inanimate object, but I will still talk to you, I will still yell at you for wanting me dead, because—because—” Well, because he had a head injury, for one thing.
Radek scowled at the tablet and tapped forcefully on the screen, smiling a little in bitter triumph as the screen shifted and read, REMAINING POWER AT LEVEL OF USE: 2:35. The bitter angle of the smile increased as the number went up to 2:36 and then 2:37. It paused for a moment, as though listening to some drum roll only it could hear, and then settled on 2:39.
He let out a breath he didn’t even realize he’d been holding, and gazed up at the Jumper. “So. Twenty minutes of power for just enough heat to stave off hypothermia. You drive a hard bargain, my friend, but, ah, yes, yes, we have a deal.” He couldn’t quite catch his breath, but that was all right; Radek focused on the tablet, smiling down at it.
“Did you hear me? I just made a deal with you! You, an inanimate object!” Something was bubbling up from his chest, tickling at the inside of his throat, and it escaped his mouth as a loud laugh—all right, a loud giggle, one that made him automatically frown, because Radek Zelenka did not giggle. “And that isn’t funny.”
Euphoria, elation, there was something that he vaguely recalled Carson talking about once, something medical condition, but the name escaped him. Still, at least he remembered the source of the condition and hunkered down next to the panel behind the bench, setting the tablet down and peering at the crystals and frowning. “I have to dial up the CO2 scrubbers or I’ll die before—before—” Another giggle escaped his lips, with enough force to scrape his throat on its way out, even as he began working on the panel. He giggled again, struggled to get a hold of himself. “Concentrate, Zelenka, you have to—”
He choked back another giggle, but the soft, hysterical sounds wrenched themselves from his throat even as he got back to work on the panel, his shoulders quivering with out of control laughter even as he searched for a way to dial up the scrubbers.
After a long moment, he sighed and reached for the tablet. “CO2 scrubbers operating at—at one hundred percent.” He couldn’t quite help the cynical snort that escaped his lips. Well, cynicism was better than hysteria, he supposed. “At least something is.” He took a deep breath, began to type. “Now, let's see, I need to—”
A new, loud sound filled his ears; it sunk into his very bones and made them ache with its intensity. The noise was a mixture of a groan and a wail, echoing through the Jumper. It took Radek a moment to realize that the deep sound was coming from outside, and he ventured a tentative, “Hello?”
The wailing groan seemed to almost swell, though perhaps that was merely Radek’s imagination. He scrambled to his feet, listening intently and trying to ignore the ache in the hollow of his bones. There was definitely something out there, swimming near the Jumper.
“Are you, ah, angry? Perhaps you are hungry,” he called. “I wish to point out that this Jumper would be a most unpleasant meal, so, ah, if you could just go—”
The creature outside groaned again, louder, and this time the sound reminded Radek of whale songs—Miko was always listening to nature music, and he remembered the eerie songs drifting from her headphones. But why was the whale-creature— “Oh, of course. The transmitter. It must be broadcasting at a, at a frequency you can hear!”
This time he smiled when the whale-creature moaned, though the smile slid from his mouth when the Jumper began to shake, convulsing as though something had just sideswiped it. He grabbed onto the side panels to keep his balance, cursing under his breath.
“Look, I am sorry!” Radek shouted. “I am sorry if the noise, ah, bothers you, but, but I must leave the transmitter on, if I wish to survive! Look, perhaps you could, ah, tell my friends where I am—you could, ah, could you do that? Would you go for help, perhaps? Maybe?” He stopped, realizing the futility of this all, and cursed again. Knowing his luck, the whale-creature would tear apart the Jumper and—
The whale-creature groaned again, and Radek snarled, “Look, if you are not going to help me, then swim away!”
The whale-creature went silent even as a sudden idea struck Radek, and he couldn’t help but laugh a little, because the whale-creature had helped him in the end.
“Swim,” he murmured to himself, almost like a prayer. “Perhaps the Jumper can swim.” He scurried over to the front of the compartment and put his hands against the bulkhead doors, resisting the urge to rest his head against it for just a moment. Time was of the essence, after all. “So, so, cockpit is inaccessible, but most of the control conduits run back here, so if you were really meant to be submersible—” Radek looked up at the ceiling, picked up the tablet, then pulled the cable out of the panel behind the bench. “If you were really meant to be submersible, then your drive pods should function underwater too, hmm?”
Attaching the ends of the cable to crystals in a panel above his head, he added, almost cheerfully, “Which means I can fly you from back here—well, not fly, but I can surface. And even if I get close to the surface, then the emergency transmitter won’t have to penetrate so much ocean.” Pulling up a few images up on the tablet’s screen, he smiled. “Now we are truly getting somewhere.”
In the Black
AU, sequel to 'Scorecards'
Status: 200 words, but I've got the entire plot figured out
Rodney was certain he could convince the police that it had been a justifiable homicide. Well, reasonably certain, anyway. He glowered. “For the last time, Sheppard, that is my desk. Get out of my chair!”
Sheppard just smiled and spun slowly in the pilfered seat, slouching even more until it was a wonder that he didn’t slide to the floor. “Oh, this is your desk, McKay? I had no idea,” he drawled, and Rodney snorted.
“That has been my desk for three years now. You know damn well—can you believe this?” he snapped, turning to appeal to his lone ally even as Simpson, the traitor, snickered.
Radek looked up and blinked owlishly, then rolled his eyes and gestured pointedly towards the cell phone at his ear before he went back to muttering rapid-fire, irritated Czech.
“So much for being my ally,” Rodney muttered under his breath, and then refocused his glare upon Sheppard. “Look, shouldn’t you be, oh, harassing Elizabeth or something? I don’t know, maybe even doing your job? I know that’s a difficult concept for you to grasp, but—”
Sheppard lazily waved a thick folder at him. “I have all the numbers for the end of the year. I just couldn’t resist saying hello to you before I went to see Liz.”
“Liz?” Simpson muttered in abject disbelief.
Those Left Behind
Radek-centric, story set during "The Return I and II"
Status: 4,400 words, about 2/3 of the way done, with a vague idea about the ending
When Radek collects his bags and emerges from the Brno airport, he cannot help but stop and stare. People glance sideways at him, a few wearing smug, superior smirks as they label him as an ignorant tourist, but he cannot help it; every muscle in his frame locks in place and his heart flutters in his throat.
He ignores the looks and closes his eyes for a moment, trying not to feel overwhelmed. It is difficult, though, not to feel a sort of pressure against his skin, a sensation of being smothered by too many bodies on these busy streets, when he’s lived in Atlantis with so few souls for so long. Radek is exceedingly grateful that he’s in Brno, which has a population of 300,000. If he were in Prague--
Just the thought of Prague and all those people dries out his mouth and tightens up his throat, and he struggles to take in a breath. After a moment, he forces himself to open his eyes and looks out at the masses, which rush by like some unstoppable, never-ending flood. He tightens his grip on his belongings, takes in a deep breath, and then heads towards where several taxis are idling. He will just have to get used to so many people, that’s all. After all, Masaryk alone has 37,000 students, plus faculty.
He is lucky that Masaryk accepted him on such short notice, especially since he has not published anything since before Atlantis, and even if he wished to publish anything now, all his research is unusable thanks to the word classified. But that is all right. As he told Rodney and Carson, he will be glad to focus on a single problem for a while without the distraction of having to save Atlantis from imminent destruction.
Unfortunately, as he learns in the following weeks, it seems he has gotten addicted to the sensation of his brain working at quicksilver speeds, leaping from one problem to the next, and by his third week, he is so bored he could almost weep. It doesn’t help that his peers at the university are curious about what he’s been up to for the past few years -- “Seems like you dropped off the face of the earth!” -- and all their unsubtle attempts to pry leave him feeling sick to his stomach. Soon, he finds himself going to a doctor and getting a prescription for what he describes as migraines but what he knows are headaches from all the withheld secrets that are cluttered in his head.
Time and time again, Radek finds himself tempted to send an email to Rodney. He harshly represses the urge. This is both because he’s not certain that Rodney is even allowed to discuss Atlantis or at the very least Ancient technology with him anymore and also because he knows no matter how carefully he words the email, Rodney will figure out that he misses him and if that happens, Radek will never ever hear the end of it, because the fact is that Radek does miss the man, miserable and irritating though he may be. Radek misses him with an intensity that both amuses and alarms him all at once, because he hadn’t realized how much he’d come to rely on Rodney for companionship until it was gone.
There is no one here who is at Rodney or Radek’s level of intelligence, and he misses the synergy, how their thoughts had collided and bonded like ions, their thoughts moving seemingly faster than the speed of light so that they both tripped over their own words, until Radek could almost see the sparks as ideas leapt from one brain to another, back and forth, back and forth.
He doesn’t give into the temptation to contact Rodney though, and contents himself with emailing Carson and Elizabeth instead. Carson is all too happy to keep him up to date on everyone -- Sheppard is going crazy at the SGC, something about his team being ‘nothing like SGA-1,’ and Rodney is apparently about to murder the sycophants that are working under him at Area 51 -- and it is Carson he contacts when his three emails to Elizabeth go unanswered. His concern is only slightly lessened by Carson’s assurances that he’ll check in on her, but it will have to do. He certainly can’t cancel class and fly to Colorado to check in on Elizabeth, no matter how worried he is for his friend or how much the idea of walking away from this campus appeals to him.
By the end of week six, the prescription that the doctor gave him for the migraines isn’t really working anymore, and he’s tempted to tell his peers that they can go to hell, and so he is almost relieved when two men in black suits appear at the back of his classroom.
Now? With a broken TV? I have not procrastinated in the three weeks I've been back at college. In fact, I just finished writing an essay that's due on Thursday. Yes. Two days early. (If you knew my study habits, you'd be very, very impressed.)
I've also been writing. A lot. Heh. And right now? Since I did all of my homework early and have tonight and tomorrow free aside from 3 hours of classes? I am writing to my heart's content. And giving excerpts.
The Slow and Subtle Art of Drowning
MENSA-verse AU set during "Grace Under Pressure"
Status: 8,300 words, not even close to being finished *weeps* though all plotted out
It was when his hands started to feel stiff and unwieldy that Radek finally noticed the cold. Setting the tablet down in his lap, he rubbed his hands together briskly, trying to warm them and frowned as a shiver racked his frame. Why was it so cold?
Well, he was under, oh, a billion or so gallons of freezing water. That could just possibly be the problem. Radek resisted the urge to roll his eyes at his own folly, and then clenched and unclenched his fists to force away the stiffness before he set the tablet aside.
He eyed the side of the Jumper. “I need to heat this thing, unless you wish me dead,” he informed it, and then set to work at removing the back of one of the bench seats. “And I don't want it to cost me a lot of power.” The needed panel revealed, he peered at it, adding loudly, “Can we at least do that, please, without any problems?”
Disconnecting one end of a cable from a panel above his head, he knelt down and attached it to the panel behind the bench. A few quick commands on the tablet later, he could see the temperature rising on the heat indicator.
“Thank you,” he all but sighed. “I mean, I am not greedy. I just wish not to freeze to death while Rod plans some daring rescue and makes me look like a—”
REMAINING POWER AT LEVEL OF USE: 2:20, the tablet interrupted him.
“Forty minutes?” he said weakly, and then glowered at the wall. “Forty minutes, you—you—” He hauled himself upright. “So, I see what this is. You think that the captain should go down with his ship. Well, I am no captain, I am, I am just the navigator if I am anything, and the navigator gets to escape the sinking ship, understand?” He glared down at the tablet, directing his next snarled complaint to it instead. “I bet you don’t care either way if I live or die. No, you don’t care, and why? Perhaps because you are an inanimate object!”
He lifted his gaze to the ceiling of the Jumper, and resisted the urge to bare his teeth and snarl some more, if only because he didn’t think the Jumper would take his threat seriously. “Oh yes, you are an inanimate object, but I will still talk to you, I will still yell at you for wanting me dead, because—because—” Well, because he had a head injury, for one thing.
Radek scowled at the tablet and tapped forcefully on the screen, smiling a little in bitter triumph as the screen shifted and read, REMAINING POWER AT LEVEL OF USE: 2:35. The bitter angle of the smile increased as the number went up to 2:36 and then 2:37. It paused for a moment, as though listening to some drum roll only it could hear, and then settled on 2:39.
He let out a breath he didn’t even realize he’d been holding, and gazed up at the Jumper. “So. Twenty minutes of power for just enough heat to stave off hypothermia. You drive a hard bargain, my friend, but, ah, yes, yes, we have a deal.” He couldn’t quite catch his breath, but that was all right; Radek focused on the tablet, smiling down at it.
“Did you hear me? I just made a deal with you! You, an inanimate object!” Something was bubbling up from his chest, tickling at the inside of his throat, and it escaped his mouth as a loud laugh—all right, a loud giggle, one that made him automatically frown, because Radek Zelenka did not giggle. “And that isn’t funny.”
Euphoria, elation, there was something that he vaguely recalled Carson talking about once, something medical condition, but the name escaped him. Still, at least he remembered the source of the condition and hunkered down next to the panel behind the bench, setting the tablet down and peering at the crystals and frowning. “I have to dial up the CO2 scrubbers or I’ll die before—before—” Another giggle escaped his lips, with enough force to scrape his throat on its way out, even as he began working on the panel. He giggled again, struggled to get a hold of himself. “Concentrate, Zelenka, you have to—”
He choked back another giggle, but the soft, hysterical sounds wrenched themselves from his throat even as he got back to work on the panel, his shoulders quivering with out of control laughter even as he searched for a way to dial up the scrubbers.
After a long moment, he sighed and reached for the tablet. “CO2 scrubbers operating at—at one hundred percent.” He couldn’t quite help the cynical snort that escaped his lips. Well, cynicism was better than hysteria, he supposed. “At least something is.” He took a deep breath, began to type. “Now, let's see, I need to—”
A new, loud sound filled his ears; it sunk into his very bones and made them ache with its intensity. The noise was a mixture of a groan and a wail, echoing through the Jumper. It took Radek a moment to realize that the deep sound was coming from outside, and he ventured a tentative, “Hello?”
The wailing groan seemed to almost swell, though perhaps that was merely Radek’s imagination. He scrambled to his feet, listening intently and trying to ignore the ache in the hollow of his bones. There was definitely something out there, swimming near the Jumper.
“Are you, ah, angry? Perhaps you are hungry,” he called. “I wish to point out that this Jumper would be a most unpleasant meal, so, ah, if you could just go—”
The creature outside groaned again, louder, and this time the sound reminded Radek of whale songs—Miko was always listening to nature music, and he remembered the eerie songs drifting from her headphones. But why was the whale-creature— “Oh, of course. The transmitter. It must be broadcasting at a, at a frequency you can hear!”
This time he smiled when the whale-creature moaned, though the smile slid from his mouth when the Jumper began to shake, convulsing as though something had just sideswiped it. He grabbed onto the side panels to keep his balance, cursing under his breath.
“Look, I am sorry!” Radek shouted. “I am sorry if the noise, ah, bothers you, but, but I must leave the transmitter on, if I wish to survive! Look, perhaps you could, ah, tell my friends where I am—you could, ah, could you do that? Would you go for help, perhaps? Maybe?” He stopped, realizing the futility of this all, and cursed again. Knowing his luck, the whale-creature would tear apart the Jumper and—
The whale-creature groaned again, and Radek snarled, “Look, if you are not going to help me, then swim away!”
The whale-creature went silent even as a sudden idea struck Radek, and he couldn’t help but laugh a little, because the whale-creature had helped him in the end.
“Swim,” he murmured to himself, almost like a prayer. “Perhaps the Jumper can swim.” He scurried over to the front of the compartment and put his hands against the bulkhead doors, resisting the urge to rest his head against it for just a moment. Time was of the essence, after all. “So, so, cockpit is inaccessible, but most of the control conduits run back here, so if you were really meant to be submersible—” Radek looked up at the ceiling, picked up the tablet, then pulled the cable out of the panel behind the bench. “If you were really meant to be submersible, then your drive pods should function underwater too, hmm?”
Attaching the ends of the cable to crystals in a panel above his head, he added, almost cheerfully, “Which means I can fly you from back here—well, not fly, but I can surface. And even if I get close to the surface, then the emergency transmitter won’t have to penetrate so much ocean.” Pulling up a few images up on the tablet’s screen, he smiled. “Now we are truly getting somewhere.”
In the Black
AU, sequel to 'Scorecards'
Status: 200 words, but I've got the entire plot figured out
Rodney was certain he could convince the police that it had been a justifiable homicide. Well, reasonably certain, anyway. He glowered. “For the last time, Sheppard, that is my desk. Get out of my chair!”
Sheppard just smiled and spun slowly in the pilfered seat, slouching even more until it was a wonder that he didn’t slide to the floor. “Oh, this is your desk, McKay? I had no idea,” he drawled, and Rodney snorted.
“That has been my desk for three years now. You know damn well—can you believe this?” he snapped, turning to appeal to his lone ally even as Simpson, the traitor, snickered.
Radek looked up and blinked owlishly, then rolled his eyes and gestured pointedly towards the cell phone at his ear before he went back to muttering rapid-fire, irritated Czech.
“So much for being my ally,” Rodney muttered under his breath, and then refocused his glare upon Sheppard. “Look, shouldn’t you be, oh, harassing Elizabeth or something? I don’t know, maybe even doing your job? I know that’s a difficult concept for you to grasp, but—”
Sheppard lazily waved a thick folder at him. “I have all the numbers for the end of the year. I just couldn’t resist saying hello to you before I went to see Liz.”
“Liz?” Simpson muttered in abject disbelief.
Those Left Behind
Radek-centric, story set during "The Return I and II"
Status: 4,400 words, about 2/3 of the way done, with a vague idea about the ending
When Radek collects his bags and emerges from the Brno airport, he cannot help but stop and stare. People glance sideways at him, a few wearing smug, superior smirks as they label him as an ignorant tourist, but he cannot help it; every muscle in his frame locks in place and his heart flutters in his throat.
He ignores the looks and closes his eyes for a moment, trying not to feel overwhelmed. It is difficult, though, not to feel a sort of pressure against his skin, a sensation of being smothered by too many bodies on these busy streets, when he’s lived in Atlantis with so few souls for so long. Radek is exceedingly grateful that he’s in Brno, which has a population of 300,000. If he were in Prague--
Just the thought of Prague and all those people dries out his mouth and tightens up his throat, and he struggles to take in a breath. After a moment, he forces himself to open his eyes and looks out at the masses, which rush by like some unstoppable, never-ending flood. He tightens his grip on his belongings, takes in a deep breath, and then heads towards where several taxis are idling. He will just have to get used to so many people, that’s all. After all, Masaryk alone has 37,000 students, plus faculty.
He is lucky that Masaryk accepted him on such short notice, especially since he has not published anything since before Atlantis, and even if he wished to publish anything now, all his research is unusable thanks to the word classified. But that is all right. As he told Rodney and Carson, he will be glad to focus on a single problem for a while without the distraction of having to save Atlantis from imminent destruction.
Unfortunately, as he learns in the following weeks, it seems he has gotten addicted to the sensation of his brain working at quicksilver speeds, leaping from one problem to the next, and by his third week, he is so bored he could almost weep. It doesn’t help that his peers at the university are curious about what he’s been up to for the past few years -- “Seems like you dropped off the face of the earth!” -- and all their unsubtle attempts to pry leave him feeling sick to his stomach. Soon, he finds himself going to a doctor and getting a prescription for what he describes as migraines but what he knows are headaches from all the withheld secrets that are cluttered in his head.
Time and time again, Radek finds himself tempted to send an email to Rodney. He harshly represses the urge. This is both because he’s not certain that Rodney is even allowed to discuss Atlantis or at the very least Ancient technology with him anymore and also because he knows no matter how carefully he words the email, Rodney will figure out that he misses him and if that happens, Radek will never ever hear the end of it, because the fact is that Radek does miss the man, miserable and irritating though he may be. Radek misses him with an intensity that both amuses and alarms him all at once, because he hadn’t realized how much he’d come to rely on Rodney for companionship until it was gone.
There is no one here who is at Rodney or Radek’s level of intelligence, and he misses the synergy, how their thoughts had collided and bonded like ions, their thoughts moving seemingly faster than the speed of light so that they both tripped over their own words, until Radek could almost see the sparks as ideas leapt from one brain to another, back and forth, back and forth.
He doesn’t give into the temptation to contact Rodney though, and contents himself with emailing Carson and Elizabeth instead. Carson is all too happy to keep him up to date on everyone -- Sheppard is going crazy at the SGC, something about his team being ‘nothing like SGA-1,’ and Rodney is apparently about to murder the sycophants that are working under him at Area 51 -- and it is Carson he contacts when his three emails to Elizabeth go unanswered. His concern is only slightly lessened by Carson’s assurances that he’ll check in on her, but it will have to do. He certainly can’t cancel class and fly to Colorado to check in on Elizabeth, no matter how worried he is for his friend or how much the idea of walking away from this campus appeals to him.
By the end of week six, the prescription that the doctor gave him for the migraines isn’t really working anymore, and he’s tempted to tell his peers that they can go to hell, and so he is almost relieved when two men in black suits appear at the back of his classroom.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 11:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 11:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 04:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 04:38 am (UTC)yay your continuing those left behind. i remember that from awhile ago... the conspiracy theory kids!!! i was wondering what happened to that story.
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Date: 2007-01-24 05:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 05:09 am (UTC)Of course I'm continuing Those Left Behind. *grin* Just needed to get inspired. (Unfortunately "The Return II" was...lame, and didn't inspire me, heh, but that's okay, Radek's just in the fic anyway.) I love those conspiracy theory kids.