[I told some of my colleagues at work about my Sir Patrick encounter and found out that they had seen him in the West End once too, at a restaurant where he was sitting at the next table! They said he was there doing this performance of "an ordinary person" clearly trying not to be noticed and I realized that's the perfect description for what he was doing when I saw him too. He was performing a working class British man on his way to/from a job. It was like his "cover." (They also told me that at their joint performance of Waiting for Godot a few years back, Sir Ian had stepped outside during the interval with a cup of tea...and someone walked by and took him for an actual homeless man begging and dropped a coin in his tea cup! /dies) Also, 1980s era TV--ahh, those were the days...when the cable box had two rows of buttons and luxury was having 36 channels.]
"I won't deny the possibility," Aurus joked back, also knowing that he'd be fine with the children but wanting to encourage the idea that Charles ought to turn up to "rescue" (really just to join) him.
As to mesmer magic, he would have liked to show Charles some, but these were not skills that he personally had. Perhaps, he thought, within the Dream they might chance to see someone working them. Of course he didn't want to promise, but as he pulled the door closed and the conversation turned towards the topic of television, mesmers and their ways temporarily fell by the wayside anyway.
Head cocked at an angle as he approached the box that Charles was indicating, Aurus tried to parse the explanation as best he could. Honestly though, he was quite out of his depths. This "broadcasting," he thought, sounded vaguely like projecting--the sort of thing one saw with holograms where an asura (it was almost invariably an asura) had recorded themselves into some kind of a device for later play-back (usually to warn that lab security measures had been triggered and the self-destruct sequence activated). At the same time, though, it sounded like something completely different, and Aurus might have said so had Charles not turned on the television just then.
Whatever the sylvari had been expecting, it wasn't at all what he saw. It wasn't a box that held a perfect miniaturized world, with multiple people moving and speaking, both them and their surroundings in full detail and accurate color. If Charles had been wanting to surprise him, then he had certainly succeeded: for a long moment Aurus was actually speechless, staring open-mouthed at the box and its moving pictures. He couldn't even decide what question he wanted to ask.
In part, he realized, it was because he couldn't understand how anyone (or anything) could draw fast enough and with such minute precision that they could produce millions of images to be shown in sequential order in the first place. Especially considering that the pictures the television showed didn't seem to quickly loop back on themselves and repeat the same sequence over again.
As he'd watched, he'd moved closer so that he was now standing just beside Charles, leaning down to see the television more clearly (and then discovering that actually that didn't help at all and pulling back again).
Finally, after thoroughly exhausting his ability to sort the whole question out for himself, he looked back at Charles, jaw still hanging open and managed: "Perhaps it would help if I understood photography a bit better--am I to believe that someone somewhere has drawn all of this, like a flip book?"
I don't have an icon that looks nearly gobsmacked enough for this tag.
"I won't deny the possibility," Aurus joked back, also knowing that he'd be fine with the children but wanting to encourage the idea that Charles ought to turn up to "rescue" (really just to join) him.
As to mesmer magic, he would have liked to show Charles some, but these were not skills that he personally had. Perhaps, he thought, within the Dream they might chance to see someone working them. Of course he didn't want to promise, but as he pulled the door closed and the conversation turned towards the topic of television, mesmers and their ways temporarily fell by the wayside anyway.
Head cocked at an angle as he approached the box that Charles was indicating, Aurus tried to parse the explanation as best he could. Honestly though, he was quite out of his depths. This "broadcasting," he thought, sounded vaguely like projecting--the sort of thing one saw with holograms where an asura (it was almost invariably an asura) had recorded themselves into some kind of a device for later play-back (usually to warn that lab security measures had been triggered and the self-destruct sequence activated). At the same time, though, it sounded like something completely different, and Aurus might have said so had Charles not turned on the television just then.
Whatever the sylvari had been expecting, it wasn't at all what he saw. It wasn't a box that held a perfect miniaturized world, with multiple people moving and speaking, both them and their surroundings in full detail and accurate color. If Charles had been wanting to surprise him, then he had certainly succeeded: for a long moment Aurus was actually speechless, staring open-mouthed at the box and its moving pictures. He couldn't even decide what question he wanted to ask.
In part, he realized, it was because he couldn't understand how anyone (or anything) could draw fast enough and with such minute precision that they could produce millions of images to be shown in sequential order in the first place. Especially considering that the pictures the television showed didn't seem to quickly loop back on themselves and repeat the same sequence over again.
As he'd watched, he'd moved closer so that he was now standing just beside Charles, leaning down to see the television more clearly (and then discovering that actually that didn't help at all and pulling back again).
Finally, after thoroughly exhausting his ability to sort the whole question out for himself, he looked back at Charles, jaw still hanging open and managed: "Perhaps it would help if I understood photography a bit better--am I to believe that someone somewhere has drawn all of this, like a flip book?"