Ladies in Looks, Gypsies at Heart (svenna)

Christine Svenna had taken quite a liking to the strange black box from the future known as ‘television,’ with its moving pictures and music, and general ability to play out scenes like one would see at a theatre… but without the theatre! It was quite a fascinating and entertaining contraption, and had become one of her favorite pastimes there at the Manor. There were so many things that one could watch on it, from sports, to dramas, to comedies, to music performances. It was all so wonderful and foreign compared to back in nineteenth-century Paris, France.

There was yet another strange contraption that went with the television, known as a DVD player. The DVD player (as its name would suggest) played DVDs, which were little silvery disks that usually had a colored label on one side with a title of what movie the disk contained. You could put the disk into the DVD player and the movie would start playing on the screen of the television. It was astounding, really, and a quick and easy source of entertainment.

Svenna had put in a DVD called The Hunchback of Notre Dame and had gone off to go pop some popcorn in the kitchen. The salty, buttery taste of the popcorn she had taken quite a liking to, and the snack had become sort of a guilty pleasure of hers, especially when it was dipped in chocolate! Granted, there wasn’t any chocolate-covered popcorn around the Manor at the moment, and so she’d forced herself to settle with the plain “movie theatre style butter” variety.

After popping a huge bowl, she set back toward the TV room, not realizing that the disk she’d inserted was ‘enhanced with Disney’s fast-play’ and so the movie (along with a previously selected set of bonus features) had already begun to play. When she entered the room, it was about two or three minutes into the film already and so she scrambled in, setting her popcorn down on the coffee table, and quickly grabbed the remote to pause it and then put it back to the beginning of the opening scene.

“Gaaaah!” she said in frustration. “Darned thing… Thought you could start without me now, did you? Haha! Well now, I won’t be so easily taken…” After she’d set it back to the beginning, she waited to start it again and turned to pick up her popcorn, but then noticed somebody else in the room. “Oh… Hi there! You new around here? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before… My name is Christine. Christine Svenna Daaé. What’s yours?"

Christine grinned victoriously when she was able to start the movie back from the beginning. She’d forgotten that this was one of the discs with ‘Disney fast-play’ on it when she went to go make some popcorn. It was a good thing she’d had the remote handy though. That could have proven to have been a bit challenging to put it back to the beginning while still otherwise avoiding all of the commercials, had she been forced to do so from the player itself.

“Well hi there, Luciana!” he said with a friendly smile. She pressed the double-lined button on the remote to pause the movie. It seemed to be distracting the girl. There was no reason why either of them should miss it when it could easily be started at any time. “This? Oh! This is a television,” she said. “You can watch movies and junk on it—like this one!” and she gestured to the paused screen where The Hunchback of Notre Dame had been playing.

She giggled a little at the girl’s reaction to part of the film. “You know this story?” she asked, looking at her and the book she was holding. “I haven’t had the chance to watch the whole thing through yet. Last time I tried I ended up having to stop it early because I had to head out for work…”