And now, as they say, for something completely different!

[chanter1944]

Spotted this meme in a long-ago post at someone else's journal and said... oooooh! XD Wording tweaked slightly to suit the new platform.

I would like my DW friends to comment about how you got to know me. But I want you to LIE. That's right. Just make it up. If you'd like, copy this to your journal so others can do the same.

Right, how did folken meet the resident long-haired nerdlady? I'm seriously curious to know. :)

Comments

[technoshaman]

At the annual Polar Plunge in Milwaukee back in '02; neither of us were wearing much for the plunge, and once we got back on shore both of us were looking for warmth; once in a pile of blankets and our teeth stopped chattering we each discovered that the other was interesting, and decided to go in search of more clothes, a warm drink, and place to talk. Twelve hours later we'd swapped emails, LJ handles, amateur radio IDs,and a whole snotload of stories, and I reluctantly caught a cab back to my hotel.

[chanter1944]

Ooooooh that day! It took me rather longer to stop shivering, if I remember correctly, and I'm the local! You were somewhere between impressed and bewildered by just how long it took my hair to dry, even before I accidentally showered you in ice water droplets that one time. I regret nothing. I'm carting you back to that hole in the wall cafe we found at the next opportunity, by the way; I've been there three times since, though never with such interesting company. How they manage *lemon* hot chocolate without ruining either flavor is a mystery to me, and yet they do.

The dinky little cross street with the fascinating bookstore is also still there. What was it, seven separate books you came away with? I have absolutely no room to talk, considering the armload of audio dramas I found in there. I still have every single one. I'd bet the proprietor remembers us, wouldn't you? Not that we were so horribly odd, just that he seemed the sort to recall... Takes one to know one?

[technoshaman]

Takes one to know one?

Heh, indeed it does. I wonder if the cafe does a white chocolate lavender mocha? The lemon hot chocolate was *memorable*, though. If I'd had enough thawed brain I'd've asked for the recipe... :)

How I found so many books without being in something the size of Powell's... :)

If you ever come out here, there's a whole LIBRARY in Belltown full of braille and audio books...

[conuly]

Don't you remember? We met when we were toppling the corrupt future government. Did you lose your memory in your trip back to the present?

[chanter1944]

Oh shards, I must've done! Wait, was it you who kept saying something about 'stood alone on Times Square'... Unless you're the blue-haired one who teleported General Warren out of that Marylander safe house just as it was compromised? That much I remember. Granted I had my head in comms traffic for most of that rendezvous; unless my memory's really been Swiss cheesed, we'd lost touch with half our connections in the Ottawa-Quebec City corridor the night before, atmospherics had tanked anyone and everyone on air in the Maritimes, trying to raise Montréal was a static fest, and I was tearing my hair worrying about them all until they checked in. Hard to miss someone with more cocksure authority than sense getting ready to blow a door, though, at least when you have active wards on said door. Funny, I don't remember just who put the intruder alert spell *up*, only that it wasn't mine.

The rest gets more than a little fuzzy. Let me guess: We lost contact with the Canadians for a reason? Did they end up fishing us out of the metaphorical toilet, in the end? I do recall Prime Minister Hadfield giving some sort of speech over the air on just about every frequency he could pull, but I couldn't tell you the content of the thing... and that is downright odd.

And did I leave my duster behind--er, forward? I can't seem to find it, but I know I was wearing it just before the wards triggered and everybody bolted for cover. Haven't lost my keys, at least, and all my handheld comms gear seems to be here, so I almost wonder if somebody didn't empty the pockets and just keep the coat. I wouldn't have ditched it without a reason; any ideas? Royal blue corduroy, silver fastenings, paired gold cheese wedge/red maple leaf insignia patched on one sleeve? I know that's a dual citizen or dual authority attachment emblem (I got claimed by the Ontarians and I claimed them right back), but I can't recall any of the other rebel-types minding that much...

((OOC: Uh, wow. This got away from me! You give good story hooks. Nod to Elizabeth Warren's rebel general, though I bet you caught that before I said anything, and note the name I used for the Canadian PM... Not random. Oh man, that was waaaaaay too much fun! Want to keep it going?))

[technoshaman]

hee hee hee... I caught both namechecks.. I wish the Canadians WOULD come pull us out of the two-holer...

[conuly]

Man, everybody wishes that, but are we talking about the dystopian future or the dystopian present now?

[chanter1944]

Darn pesky blurry lines... *sigh* *wist*

[conuly]

The duster is gone. So gone. The Canadians burned it out of sympathetic embarassment. Sorry, I told you it was a bad idea.

[chanter1944]

Wha--HEEEEEEY! My favorite coat! Was it that towering jerk of an engineer from Alberta somebody seconded to the bunch at Ville de Québec who took a lighter to the thing, because I've half a mind to go forward again just to clobber him for it if so! Between that and the cracks about my hair...

Wait. How'd he get me to shed my coat in the first place? I... have a vague recollection of it being winter when we were, and an emergency evacuation into the half-frozen Maryland marshes doesn't usually mean one takes *off* layers. Besides, I was carrying half my portable gear in the pockets, so someone must've given me a reason to empty them.

...

...

OH CRAP, did I get captured?

[conuly]

You got captured the first go-around, but you should've forgotten all about it when we integrated your personalities during the fifth attempt.

To be honest, I'm a little concerned about this patchwork of what you do and don't remember. Have you been doing your meditation?

[ng_moonmoth]

While passing through the lobby of a hotel I was staying at, I noticed you sitting on a couch. You were wearing headphones and blowing into a nine- or ten- inch long green sticklike object that I recognized as a bagpipe practice chanter -- presumably electronic because of the headphones and the lack of sound from the pipe. I caught your eye, identified myself as a fellow musician, and asked about your experiences with the pipes. We swapped stories and songs for a while, and parted, having shared our handles.

[chanter1944]

Oh that's right, that was you! My playlist definitely expanded during that afternoon. I lost the instrument in question not long after, unfortunately or maybe fortunately, depending on who you ask. Oh, and by the way, someone deleted the video containing the lyrics to the (at least in my opinion) strangest of the songs I passed you. Intergalactic copyright violations, evidently. That's what I get for swapping music in the key of M...

((OOC: *cackling!* That's a marvelous take on my current DW handle, and you're not the first to think I might be a piper - nope.))

Ah, but I wasn't actually thinking you might be a piper

[ng_moonmoth]

After all, you encouraged me to lie like an oriental rug! But I tend not to use whole cloth, but rather make things up out of whatever scraps may be handy. Maybe "lie like a rag rug" instead.

That'll do for now.

Re: Ah, but I wasn't actually thinking you might be a piper

[chanter1944]

Aaaaaah ha. Lying like a rag rug. I *like* that!

[acelightning]

One of my dorkiest friends somehow put together a dinner party, which I attended out of sheer curiosity. You were the host's date, and you were the only person in the room who was geekier than Jacques, the host. Everybody commented on my purple hair (I'd only started dying it purple a few months before the party), but your comment was to ask what brand of dye I used. Somehow we immediately became friends, even though I was living in NYC and you were commuting back and forth between the Lunar Colony and Chengdu. And you left Jacques because he was way too normal for you. Remember how we filked "Matchmaker, Matchmaker" - "Matchmaker, matchmaker, find her a pal... make sure he's an extra-terr-es-tri-AL..."

[chanter1944]

I remember that night well! I think we confused half the party when we started throwing filk lines back and forth, and this before any of us had more than a first glass of anything under our belts. I distinctly recall Jacques looking at both of us like we'd sprouted fangs when we got to the verse about space pirates with gold hearts--was that one your invention? Incidentally, Jacques's back home in Yaounde; last I heard, he'd taken a research position with the university. Terrestrial geology, go figure. We're still on friendly terms. It's nobody's fault he didn't realize he was aromantic as well as asexual until we tripped over compatibility.

Speaking of that filk, I doubt either of us could have predicted my getting flirted with by a drunken Saturnian tourist on the way out of the apartment block later that night... talk about coincidence! Gentlebeing was on their first trip to Sol III, and had indulged in far too much citric acid in a hurry. What a disaster.

Oh, and I may or may not have introduced one of my cousins to your preferred shade of purple hair dye. She wears a streak of it through her curls to this day. It's visible in Terra's Women's Interplanetary Cup team photos, at least the ones where everyone isn't kitted out. Shows up nicely in the shot where they're all crowded around the championship trophy. That one's on one of my walls at Luna Colony comm station, and my entire family knows it.

[acelightning]

About the only thing more fun than tag-team realtime filking is a group pun chain, but very few of the other guests would have been able to understand one, let alone participate.

"Terrestrial geology" - Jacques always was something of a stick-in-the-mud :-)

I'm not surprised about the Saturnian - remember, I am a Witch! :-)

Congratulations to your cousin and her teammates! And the purple streak looks gorgeous in her beautiful ethnically-unspecified curly hair!

[siliconshaman]

We were sailing under Roberts command at the time, rounding the Cape in the teeth of a hurricane, and the Cursed Revenue Men were hard on our heels at the time. Half the crew were below-decks down with montezuma's revenge as a result of taco tuesday in Rio [damn their chili beef surprise, we learned the hard way what the surprise was!] and thee and me were the last two standing!

You manned the chase cannon while I lashed myself to the wheel, and we gave those scurvy dogs a fight they hadn't the stomach for...

[chanter1944]

Thee and me, is it? *complex, wistful look* A person with a different sense of humor might make a joke about never knowing you felt that way about me, but you know I wouldn't play that sort of comment for laughs. I'm getting obscure again. Should I explain myself?

Anyway! We were indeed under Roberts's command, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss it; he was occasionally terrifying, but he never hardened all the way through (no one that I know of was foolish enough to outright name the kindness visible in him) and oh, the voice he had. Has. Even when cursing, ridiculous though the admission sounds, which is precisely what he was doing during much of that infamous trip! I picked up a few interesting phrases I still use today--ahem. I certainly haven't forgotten how pitiful my aim with our cannon was, though I must not have done too incredibly badly, judging by the hole we blew in the Cursed Revenue Officers' deck and you, my dear, must've been hiding your pilot's skill up your sleeve! I'll gloss over the bit about your having lashed yourself to the wheel rather too well; didn't I have to cut you free, at the end?

And as for that beef chili surprise--eew, in a word. I love Rio, love Brasil, but I've been ever so slightly wary of waterfront eateries in that particular city ever since. The devilry someone slipped into the spicy prawns didn't show itself until the next day, if you'll recall... I wish I didn't. At least I avoided the galloping guts of horror issue, but between the chills, the fever and the all-over chisel stroke headache, I didn't leave my quarters for two days. How in the world didn't you get taken down by something, anyway? You were in the same hole in the wall as we were! I distinctly recall Joyce nearly upending Redroof's third? fourth? drink into your lap, and then apologizing all night! Poor man's worse than me.

((OOC: Spot the multiple references! XD))

[jesse_the_k]

I recall that Lake Superior had broken up only three weeks earlier. I was amazed and delighted that you were swimming without a wetsuit, when you fetched up on the shore of my cave. We admired the music of geese Vs traveling north at speed. We heated up the soup you’d brought and waited for sunrise.

[chanter1944]

That we did, and yes, ice off was barely accurate that morning. Would you believe I only stayed in water that cold as long as I did the better to satisfy the terms of a truly ridiculous dare? My brother-in-law, the younger one, gets the blame, surprise. I'm still impressed by your lack of either horror or Lovecraft references when you saw the webbing between my digits, and I've said this a dozen times, but I'm still going to thank you yet again for not screaming when I retracted it once it had dried. I've used your cat's claws analogy a time or two since, by the way.

I never did ask you just what you were doing in that cave, did I?

[jesse_the_k]

Ah, a dare! It makes much more sense now.

That "claw" is handy for winter walking in our parts.

The cave was an intermediate step for calving sea-serpents. Being cold-blooded, they needed a short-stay incubator. I've moved up to brooding velociraptors cranes.

[alatefeline]

Herded into a crowded room at a hotel by growling tigers, the short person wearing cat ears literally bumped into a long-haired nerdlady, and they struck up a conversation while waiting for the sensible, no-causualty, gentle removal of the tigers to a spacious habitat by trained personnel.

[chanter1944]

That one ranks among my happiest collisions, and I've been involved in more than a few over the years! :)

Thank goodness for whoever called the local big cat rescue instead of the police, although didn't you end up adopting the feline who turned out to be an exceptionally large, even for his breed, orange tiger tabby Maine coon? I have no idea how he slipped into the mix, and I can understand why someone mistook him for a tiger cub, especially amid a positive crowd of actual tiger adults, but it was pretty plain early on that his 'growl' was in fact a purr loud enough to rival a Lehr cat*. Then again, we both know domesticated kitties.

*The Legacy of Lehr is a fantastic novel, IMO.

[technoshaman]

What is it about you and collisions? ;)

[redsixwing]

We were both at work; as I recall, we were in the same meeting room by chance, both occasionally writing something down in notebooks, pen and paper, none of this fancy mobile device business.

After the meeting started droning into the sixth page of financials, I realized you were writing faster, not slower; you were doing the same thing I was, and using fiction in a notebook as a mental fidget toy. After all, nobody cares /what/ you're writing, if you're writing in a notebook during a meeting...

We swapped handles after that, and have been tossing paper airplanes with flash fiction payloads over the cubicle walls ever since.

[chanter1944]

What was it, another hour of overcomplicated financial details irrelevant to both of us before they finally let us out of there? I suppose it's no wonder one of the characters in the story I started that day turned into a cursed exchequer almost the minute he appeared on the page! Blustering mustachioed ball of dark magic and evil ideas that he is... You know the one I mean. Wasn't that the same meeting that resulted in your character with the ability to take temporary form as a pile of unstamped gold coins?

I'm just grateful one of our flash fiction planes hasn't gone off course as yet... I worry every time I send something your way and the ventilation system kicks in.

[redsixwing]

Oh, I know the one quite well. If he hadn't begun in a financial meeting, he might not have ended up where he did. Woe, indeed, unto the grasping hand that cannot be satisfied...

It was the very same! The financials got turned fantastic and thus the fidgets got finance-ified. They're a real mystery still, and I'm not sure where that ability is going - perhaps once they retrieve all the pieces the exchequer squirreled away, they'll tell me.

Maybe we could set up a little line to send them down - a string with a paper clip, a flash-fictional zipline. Of course, if we do that, I'm going to have to learn some more origami.

[lb_lee]

We hid the body together. ;p

Nah, nah, I kid. We saved a horde of kitten-nuns from a tragic fate involving a bus, Batman, and a bomb.

[chanter1944]

I'll never forget that day! I still don't know who gave Batman the bum steer, unless it was the villain behind the bomb itself in the process of setting Batman up for a fall; kitten-nuns are *not* the sort of beings to whom he'd offer violence unless they were evil kitten-nuns, and these weren't. To this day, I can't decide what was cooler, Miranda defusing the situation with the caped crusader, Mac defusing the kerboom device (which Batman absolutely did not plant, the villain who did actually signed the thing with an honest to God pen, remember?) at the destination site, Mori hot-wiring the broken-down clunker of a bus the fuzzy order were using as transport, or Sneak and I getting in that five-way conversation with three of the furry sisters while handling the temporary evacuation. Does that tiny little tortie still send xyr sparkle ball cat toys every Christmas?

((OOC: If I flubbed your pronoun, I apologize, Sneak! I was fairly sure I had it right, but if I goofed, I'll fix it.))

[lb_lee]

It's okay! I like all gender-neutfal pronouns! And yes, the Catmas cards and gifts are still ongoing! They most recently sent photos of all the tiny kitten orphans, playing with their new toys. Adorable!

--Sneak

[mirrorofsmoke]

Ok. I think it’s obvious. We met you at a Star Trek convention. You were dressed as a Vulcan, and were for some reason carrying a rainbow sherbet popsicle, which was very illogical. :P

[chanter1944]

Yep. That's the first and last time I've ever dressed as a Vulcan; the affect was far easier than the underlying outlook, which was nigh on impossible. Well, I tried. Didn't one of you snitch that illogical popsicle before I could enjoy it? :P

[mirrorofsmoke]

But of course. Asra's favorite ice cream is rainbow sherbet, so it was likely him, but seeing as we were dressed as a hoard of variously-sized tribbles all sharing one fuzzy tribble body, you may never know. I choose to think it *was* Asra. He made it up to you by inviting you over for tea and rainbow sherbet the next week, I believe. :P

[mdlbear]

How could I forget? Ten years ago in 'Vegas, at the Luxor. That was an impressive bit of wall-climbing you did! I'm still not certain how we got out of there alive, let alone without being caught, and I was still picking bits of glass out of my arm a week later. The diamonds were worth it, though.

one embarrassingly belated reply

[chanter1944]

Oomph! I've never been a fan of Vegas, and I'm still not; as you no doubt remember, it took you, a certain bright sorceress (cleric, if we're going for classes) of a musician, and a silent magician with a line on two sorts of friendly magic at once to talk me into turning up in the first place! If I'd known they, and you, were working toward the same ends, I'd have hurried it up instead of booking a flight with such a long layover in Omaha.

As it was, the city's not the most amazing of that trip's details. It's a good thing I was plastered in two senses of the term - covered in the dust of a thoroughly obliterated ancient false door, and thanks for that, it made an excellent getaway doorway for us - and tipsy on brandy courage, or I'd never have managed to climb that wall without either freezing up and bailing out or having a fit of the screaming flashbacks. Perhaps literally. I'm still grateful the booze didn't shake loose any unpleasant wall-related memories... anyway. I never could've managed it sober. And yes, the diamonds were worth it. Returning them to the family they'd been stolen from during the war was twice that. Watching the cleric and magician shatter the evil pair of glamored gems concealed among the harmless stones, one each, and each via a different application of spellwork, was equally so. Agreed?

But wait just a second! I thought one of the two Drs Franklin running around that day would've insisted on sorting out your arm? She saw the window incident in the lobby at the end of things, even if he didn't, but I know his portal home didn't open until much later. Man's got sharp eyes; how'd he miss it?

Boosted!

[jesse_the_k]

How We Met: the Lie to Me Meme