highfunctioning | T-plus 50 hours

Sherlock had been among the first to leave the customs area, due in part to the fact that he didn't announce this plan to anyone. Just tried a door -found it unlocked. He didn't have time for decision by committee, nor for continuing to listen to them all snivel about being homesick.

The ship was dark and, just as the room he'd left, untouched for a significant length of time. He trawled in semi darkness and tried every door he bumped into with no success. He wasn't able to walk far enough in one direction to guess at the shape or size of the ship, which was incredibly irritating.

At last, a door yielded to him, and he walked a few steps into a room before cracking his shin on an unseen piece of furniture.

Oh bloody hell goddamn son of a bitch fuck!

As he reached out to see what needed to die, he bumped quite accidentally into the safety torch [so it seemed to him, having no buttons or sharp edges] which blossomed to light at his accidental graze. It gave him a good enough look at the room.

Welcome to outer space, furnished by IKEA. He for one didn't plan on staying, and as such wasn't all that interested in checking out the space loo. He grabbed the torch and moved on.

---MANY HOURS LATER---

Snarling and beginning to look damn rough around the edges [two days unshaven] Sherlock sat in a pile of debris in the hall outside one of the bedrooms. Space forks, space ottomans, and space chairs lay all around him, the discarded tools of his would-be breaking of the panel opposite him. It had seemed more likely than the ones in the customs room, but had rebuffed him thoroughly.

He had long since ditched the hooded shirt [it was part of the pile] and was gathering his strength for another go at the wall. Capitulation was not an option.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Oh? I was not aware that they were in need of saving," she replied tartly.

"And aside from that, I have little confidence in your methods. Doing a great deal of life saving on the floor? Looks more like a man who lost his temper to me," she said, still looking vaguely aghast at the scene.

Criticizing him and lacking confidence in his methods? Maybe she was his mother.

"I'm sorry not to meet with your approval. I suppose you've been, what? Baking magical biscuits that will transport us all home?"

She raised her brows at him. "Oh don't be so dramatic," she said.

"While I will support any reasonable effort to roll back the clock a few days or transport us home, but I do not see how the breaking of cheap furniture will accomplish that in any respect."

It was the old lady snobbery that made Sherlock change his mind about her. Just the absurdity of calling the furniture cheap was hilarious to him. He smiled rather in spite of himself.

"Yes. Not a flocked Satinwood inlay for millions of miles, I'm afraid. 1910 is rather a long way off."

"1919. And you need not remind me," she replied, although she was no longer looking at him, but at a length of wood on the floor. It was about the right size, she thought. It might do.

She picked it up and brandished it, testing the length by holding it in her hand and tapping and banging on the floor with it. It was hardly a comfortable shape, but it really might do.

1919? Someone should tell her to change her dusting powder more often. She fairly reeked of arsenic, which declined in popularity very early in the 20th century.

He saw what she was getting at with the cane, and immediately saw a way it might be improved. He stood and wrested the rounded foot off one of the broken chairs.

"May I?" He held his hand out for the debris in her hers.

Seeing his intent, Violet handed it over without a struggle. A rare thing indeed, but she could not resist a word. "An inventor of sorts, are you?"

She eyed him warily. Sarcastic from their moment of meeting, and yet he looked to be doing her a favor. She did not trust it. It was not in her nature.

He used the torch as a blunt instrument [having proved it basically unbreakable not long ago] and hammered the broken end of the chair foot into the top of the wood. The drawstring from the horrible sweatshirt served much better to tie the ugly but serviceable cane together.

"Detective, actually."

For all the good it's done me today.

"Scotland Yard?" she asked, watching as he constructed the thing. It was not that she needed to cane for everything. She could be quite quick when she chose to, but it was good to have something to lean on and to gesture with.

"Have you discovered anything?" She couldn't help but ask the question despite the obvious answer.

Other than a situation in which my only solution is to hurl myself against walls and contemplate the possible existence of vampires and other nonsense beings, not really.

"Only that it's a very well built mouse trap."

He gave a tight little smile as he handed her the finished cane.

"I don not see why. We have only been caught not killed. That sounds like a very poor excuse for a mousetrap to me. Even I know the mice only come back if you let them go again." Of course it was an analogy, but she did not see it as very accurate.

"Thank you," she said, taking the cane and trying it out. It would hold her, she thought. It would do.

Sherlock was fairly certain that this woman had never been fewer than three degrees from a mousetrap; no doubt dozens of ranks of servants stood between the lady of the house and vermin.

He had every confidence in her being exactly who she said, and from when. Still. Never hurts to test the data.

"So. Molasses! Who knew?"

"Molasses? What on earth are you talking about?" Violet said, going from grateful to prickly all over again in the space of a few seconds. Her mind made the jump as he intended. "You cannot be talking about that ridiculous business in Boston? Can you imagine, in the street up to your knees in molasses. Only in America indeed."

T-plus 50 hours

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