I do not own anything except the laptop this was writtin on and the illness that gave me time to write it. Everything belongs to T. Pratchett. This is short and fairly pointless, it's just something I used to wonder about when it appeared on every single quiz I took for giggles on the internet.
Polly Perks sat up in bed with an annoying thought.
"Mal?" she poked the vampire hanging from the ceiling until she got a grunt in response.
"I don't really know almost anything about you. I mean, I know you like coffee and cross-dressing, but that's really it."
"Cigarettes." Mal mumbled from the ceiling, not moving and refusing to wake up completely.
Polly frowned.
"I like those too."
"Well…I guess I already knew that too. What I mean is…" she waved her hands around in source of what she was trying to say, "I don't know…what your favorite color is, or anything." She finished unsatisfactorily.
Mal sighed and gracefully fell to an upright position beside Polly's bed. They'd just gotten back from a long, unhygienic, and altogether too interesting skirmish with Zlobenia that morning- well, the previous morning, at this point- and instead of going to debriefing and the meetings with Major Blouse (who enjoyed his new information-organizing desk job a little too much), they had silently agreed to clean themselves up and just go to bed and let the corporals Mary and Rosemary deal with the paperwork. That was what they had promoted them to do. Polly had been hoping for about two more hours to sleep, but of course the little voice in the back of her mind that still screamed 'vampire' when Mal hadn't had her morning coffee yet wouldn't shut up. So there they were.
"That's sort of a ridiculous piece of information to base judgment of a person off of," Mal said grumpily, sitting on the edge of Polly's bed. "What if you're walking down the street-."
"But this is the military. We march."
"It's a day off. Shut up. So we're walking down the street and someone comes up to you and says, 'Oi, you look like a nice lass'- or lad, depending- 'what's your favorite color?' and you say, 'Blue.' So what if he doesn't like people who like blue? You're down a friend because one dumb question got answered wrong."
"Are you out of coffee again?" Polly asked, watching Mal.
"Now maybe," Mal continued, ignoring her, "If we were walking down the street and someone said, 'Bloody hell, my son just fell into the sewer, can you get him out?' and you do, that would strike me as a much more accurate question to base an opinion of a person off of."
"You're out of coffee, aren't you?" Polly put her arms across her knees.
"So there could quite possibly be several other better questions you could be asking me in the middle of the bloody morning after a summer like the one we just had to waste."
She glared at Polly angrily, who smiled slightly.
"When did you run out of coffee?"
Mal narrowed her eyes. "Wednesday."
It was Friday. "Ah," Polly said. "I think there's some in my bag."
She gestured vaguely towards the corner of the room where they had tossed their stuff.
"I'll worry about it later. Thanks." Mal rubbed her eyes slowly, and climbed back into her upside down position on the ceiling.
Polly lay back down, and the room was silent.
The silence was broken. "You never answered my question," Polly said sleepily, her words muffled in her pillow.
Mal thought. "Brown."
The room grew quiet again for a few more glorious moments, and then was rudely reminded its occupants were still awake by Polly again.
"Why brown?"
"It reminds me of coffee. Now shut up and let me sleep."