Peter's apartment, Saturday night

[2_old_for_this]

This morning, Peter had really thrown his hands up and the towel in. He could change shape the same as always, but whenever he stopped thinking about it, it was like he defaulted to female.

So fine, island, you won. That didn't mean he wasn't going to have pizza, beer, and movie night.

It just meant he was wishing a bit more than usual that the beer did anything for him.


[Open post!]

Comments

[uncertain_dume]

"If you picked a cartoon or a musical this week, Peter, I swear I will never let you live it down," Kanan announced as he peered in the open door. So, three guesses who that was, right? "I am exercising movie night veto power on any kriffing cartoon or musical you can muster."

[2_old_for_this]

"Forget it," Peter said. "I looked up 'mindless movies' and picked the first one I recognized. Shakespeare may be occasionally bloody, but unless you've got a thing for evil princes or the thought of infidelity, everybody ends happily in this one, and there's absolutely no trauma."

He tossed Kanan (and Hera behind him) beers.

[futurespacemom]

"Thanks," Hera said. One thing about being the only twi'lek around - at least it was hard to miss who she was.

[uncertain_dume]

"I can honestly say I have absolutely no infidelity trauma," Kanan declared, lifting his beer in appreciation. See? Today was going better already. "And a surprisingly little amount of experience with evil princes."

Emperors were something entirely different.

"Hell, I can even handle a bit of blood. That part isn't an issue."

[2_old_for_this]

"Good." Peter started the movie and passed over the pizza box. "This is a play a few hundred years old, written in verse, so that's why the language is different than usual. But it's romance and comedy. No explosions, no trauma."

[uncertain_dume]

Kanan turned a little sideways glance at Hera at that, and offered a faint grin.

"You would not believe how much this planet has changed in a few hundred years," he offered. "They couldn't even fly a couple hundred years ago. Earth is young."

It was cute. The word he kept using was 'cute.'

[futurespacemom]

"Huh. I wonder if all planets go this fast when they're young," Hera mused. It wasn't like she'd ever met a pre-spaceflight civilization before.

She was going to flop on the couch, drink her beer, and try not to play with her ears.

[uncertain_dume]

Hey, at least her ears were the most socially appropriate part of herself to fiddle with, at the moment.

"Could be," Kanan mused. "I mean, it's hard to tell going by our galaxy alone. There'll always be shipwrecks and explorers stepping in on developing civilizations, giving them technology that Earth had to figure out on their own."

He took another swig of his beer and smirked at Peter.

"I maintain that it's adorable that you haven't gotten a person past your own moon, though."

[2_old_for_this]

Peter rolled his eyes. "We only got someone to the moon half a century ago. And don't look at me - I'm not an engineer or anything."

[uncertain_dume]

"See," Kanan said, smirking and settling back on the couch, and then pausing and reaching forward for some pizza, "adorable."

Earth, you were so tiny and backrocket.

[2_old_for_this]

"I'll pop some popcorn just to throw it at you," Peter threatened. "How long did it take you guys to make it to space?"

[futurespacemom]

"No-one knows, it was so long ago," Hera said. "Don't worry; you're doing fine." She toed Kanan's leg. "Stop picking on Earth."

[uncertain_dume]

Kanan shot Hera a shameless little grin, and then settled in with his pizza.

"Okay, okay, I'll behave," he promised. "But yeah, the galaxy has seen a lot since somebody first found their way into space and then dragged everyone else down with them. But that sort of thing is prehistoric in the sense that every few thousand years, somebody does something stupid and we lose a lot of that history."

Why, they were in the process of something like that happening right now, in fact.

"Maybe there's something about that sort of thing somewhere, but hunting down those records are pretty far down on my list of priorities."

He did say that with a sort of wistful 'maybe someday' vibe to it, at least.

[2_old_for_this]

"You haven't exactly got a monopoly on that, either," Peter said with a shrug. "There's quite a few civilizations here we've lost all knowledge of except a few old monuments. There's even a famous poem about it. We've just got, what, a few less millennia to lose?"

Great. Now the movie was fine, and they were depressing themselves.

[uncertain_dume]

Maybe the trouble wasn't the movies, but the movie nights themselves...

"People," Kanan muttered, visibly disgruntled about that one. Because seriously, people. Seriously. "Kark 'em. Let's just watch the movie."

And sulk into beer.

[2_old_for_this]

Peter toasted Kanan. "Movie it is."

Beatrice and Benedick were much more fun than Ozymandius.

[uncertain_dume]

And more fun than Palpatine!

... This wasn't hard.

Kanan settled in with his beer, wrinkled his nose, and watched. And squinted a bit.

"That's... definitely Basic," he noted, tilting his head a little. "I can hear words in Basic coming out of their mouths."

[2_old_for_this]

"An earlier version, yeah," Peter said. "Told you it was a bit different. Is it a problem?"

[uncertain_dume]

Kanan shook his head slowly.

"It's archaic, but there's a sort of pattern to it that makes sense if you give it a minute," he said, carefully. "A lot of unfamiliar words, though. I imagine that's less a language barrier and more a cultural thing."

Really, he could comprehend Master Yoda, and he'd not only made Basic into his personal playground, he'd done it almost exclusively in mysterious Jedi rhetoric and frustrating riddles.

[2_old_for_this]

Peter waggled his hand. "Little of both. Modern Earth folks can have trouble with it, too."

[uncertain_dume]

"So it's all about taking what you recognize and applying context," Kanan surmised. "Gotcha."

That made him feel better, honestly. There were enough different languages back home that if he basically treated this like that, he'd probably at least get the gist of it.

"Might have to stop you now and again to translate anyway, though."

[2_old_for_this]

"Pretty much," Peter agreed. "Ask whenever you like. I've got an advantage, since I lived through the time it was written."

[uncertain_dume]

"That... would do it." Kanan settled back, and smiled wryly at the screen. "Those accents are going to throw me, though."

He figured at least Hera could probably guess at why. He couldn't help but notice that her own Generic Middle Rim accent was practically flawless, for the daughter of Cham Syndulla.

[futurespacemom]

"They're really Core, huh?" Hera turned to Peter to explain. "People from the Core Worlds sound like that."

[2_old_for_this]

"Huh? Oh, the British accents? That's a little island west of here," Peter explained. "They colonized a lot of places. People from there tend to sound like that."

For values of "that" being "one of hundreds of localized accents" that Peter wasn't going to get into.