[Public | Audio]

I've noticed that with all the bickering among us, we've often made pronouncements about the differences between who we are and everyone else aboard the ship. The capacity for mystical powers, psychic ability, physical excellence, or technical skill. Some of this is given by our genetics, through training and dedication, through love and support, through anguish and mad accident.

And yet despite these declarations. Someone standing a universe away can be remarkably like you in thought and presence, and someone who grew up in your own home can be as strikingly separate as an alien creature stepping out of its pod to introduce itself for the first time. It's a mystery of the tallest order.

As many of you might know, I ran away from my own home when I was far younger. I stole a TARDIS and left. I was caught, did my time, paid my dues, had her taken and returned. Since then I have lived moving about for what feels like more of my life than I've spent settled in one location. This is the longest I've spent stationary in a long time, and even then I'm still moving. I've often wondered if those people, the ones that grew up in our houses, share our genetics, the ones we occasionally see a glimmer of our shared selves in their faces are as much a part of us as those people a universe away that we know immediately with a few shared words and a look of utter understanding.

I've quite a bit to think about.

[Private to Jesse | Audio]

Pick out a movie of your choice and I'll bring refreshments. We can talk or we can not. I'd simply like the company.

[Absent Spam for Arkady]

[Before going to meet Jesse, he stops in front of her room and leaves a bouquet of Schlenk blossoms as discretely as possible, checking the hall in either direction to ensure that he won't be caught.]