in the middle of summer [ OPEN MINGLE ]

[postictal]

Who: Anyone!
What: Catch-all Denny mingle for the last week or so of July
When: Anytime between July 25th and July 31st
Where: Denny
Warnings: Label your stuff if it comes up



[Feel free to use this as a catch-all for whatever your character might conceivably be doing here. Are they loitering outside? Delivering supplies/food? Helping improve the place because god it certainly needs it? Cooking? Socializing? Eating? Just wanting to booze it up? GO WILD.]

[There are nominal rules but if you don't get caught you don't have to deal with them, so you do you.]

Comments

[crystallying]

[ ... That certainly is a giant spider lady! Lucas just stares at her for a few seconds, eyes wide, and not so much surprised as resigned. Life has been crazy enough these last few weeks, why wouldn't there be a giant spider lady in charge of a bar? That makes as much sense as everything else about these islands. ]

I guess all those extra arms must be handy in the kitchen.

... Is it just me, or are there a lot of kids here? What's with all the teens? I landed on two of them when I first got here, that just seems statistically improbable.

[postictal]

Noticed that too, did you?

[For half a second, he's back. Back to that initial disorientation, to being inducted into a war he didn't care to fight. Hearing about it, for the first time. Funny thing, kids in a warzone. 'Cept the fact that it ain't funny at all.]

[It was never funny.]

Guess the universe doesn't really care about probability.

[crystallying]

[ For a second, Lucas thinks of Upsy the Elevator, and just barely manages to hide a flinch. The odds of that following him here were ridiculous. ]

I mean, we ended up here. That's proof enough, right? The fact that this place even exists at all?

[postictal]

How about the fact that some of us ended up somewhere else before coming here?

[How unlikely is that? How very fucking far down the ladder of statistical improbability does that put him, and anyone else?]

[crystallying]

[ ... wait, does that mean...? ]

What the hell? Are you saying you were interdimensionally kidnapped twice?!

[postictal]

More or less. Once to fight a war, and then I show up here.

[He died in between Point A and Point B, but that's hardly an important thing to bring up. Particularly since he's living with the person that killed him.]

[crystallying]

... What the actual fuck!

[ It almost comes out in a screech, and Lucas clamps a hand over his mouth once he realizes how loud he's being. Attracting too much attention is never a good thing, and his eyes dart around the bar for a second before settling back on Tim. ]

Sorry, sorry, just, that's... how does that even work?! Did something actively take you before, or did you just wake up in the middle of a shitshow?

[postictal]

[That's actually kind of a refreshingly exuberant reaction to something that usually gets a skeptical eyebrow raise or a tired nod of yeah, same here. It actually straightens Tim's weary slump somewhat.]

[Well, hell. Now he's rattled him.]

War, technically. I got...interdimensionally conscripted, I guess. Only the guy in charge wasn't real good at picking good soldiers, or he wouldn't have bothered grabbing me.

[crystallying]

[ If it helps any, Lucas is the one who rattled himself, he's pretty jumpy these days! ]

Jesus... I'm sorry, that's one hell of a raw deal. They must've gone through everyone available in their home dimension, if they had to resort to the drafting equivalent of interplanar blind boxes.

[postictal]

It wasn't ideal, [Tim concedes wearily, but mostly out of rote admission.] But it could've been worse. I could've been turning into a monster.

['Cause that was a...thing that happened to some people here. Yeah. Good stuff.]

[crystallying]

[ There is a long, baffled silence before Lucas speaks up again. ]

... Excuse me, what? You just said that like it was a Thing. A thing that isn't completely batshit insane. Is that... is that something that actually happens to people here? Should I be trying to figure out how to make anti-transmutation fields out of rocks and dirt or something?

[postictal]

Not here. [To his knowledge, anyway.] It's just a thing some people have dealt with before showing up here.

[Anti-transmutation fields. That's a thing?]

You do magic?

[crystallying]

[ He brightens up a bit, shoulders straightening. Here's a subject he's a little more at home with! ]

Sssssort of? I'm not a wizard or anything, I'm a scientist. I don't actually do magic, but I understand all the principles and workings behind it. My family specializes in arcane science, which kinda mixes the two.

[postictal]

Yeah, I have no idea what that means.

[He'll be frank here - and, honestly, it serves his purposes if people think he's as dumb as Tim himself thinks he is.]

But it sounds...important?

[crystallying]

[ There are two things that Lucas Miller loves above all else: geeking out over arcane science, and explaining it to other people (feeling like the smartest person in the room comes at a distant third.) The enthusiasm in his voice is obvious; Tim may have a hard time getting him to stop talking at this rate. ]

It's the future! It's... okay, my world is primarily magic-based, right? The level of technology is, ehhhh, [ he waves a hand, indicating 'so-so,' ]
middling, at best. I'm talking pre-Industrial Revolution, horses and carriages, only just figured out steam trains. What technology we do have is generally powered by magical energy sources. Arcane science combines the two disciplines. My family is--

[ He hesitates for a second, because with that sentence comes remembering the fact that he's the last of the Millers. That lurching feeling is promptly squashed down and buried. ]

... We're responsible for most of the technological advances that have taken place in our world. Engines, elev-- [ NOPE, NOT MENTIONING ELEVATORS, HE'S KEEPING THAT ON THE DOWNLOW ] ... electricity, robots, you name it, we probably invented it.

[postictal]

[Tim is not the right kind of guy to be tracking this conversation. He more or less just watches Lucas go on at his leisure, does his best to follow the thread to its conclusion, and in the process ends up assuming that he's losing a lot more of the important bits than he actually does.]

How do you know it's pre-Industrial? I mean...if it's pre-Industrial, that means the Industrial Revolution never happened, right?

[crystallying]

We're making it happen, and trust me, I know what an Industrial Revolution looks like. One of our... [ ... 'his mother's' ] ... our projects involved interplanar research.

[ ... Wait, Tim probably doesn't know what the planar system is. Damn! ]

Researching other of other planes of existence, I mean. Like... other worlds? We were working our way up to observing other universes, but that's... that project is on hold indefinitely. Anyway, the plane that we observed most often was much, much farther ahead than us, technologically speaking, but we're catching up.

[postictal]

[Tim would be inclined to agree; this is far, far above his pay-grade. But he also has a tendency of underestimate his own value in conversation.]

You can't manage anything like that now, right? Looking at other planes of...universes, stuff like that?

[He's not optimistic enough to sound hopeful that there might be a way home. Places like these tend to nip that sort of thing in the bud on arrival. But there's no harm in asking, so he asks.]

[crystallying]

I...

[ Lucas opens his mouth, hesitates... and then his face falls, and his shoulders slump in defeat, like a puppet whose strings have been cut. He leans forward, slumping against the bar with his arms folded in front of him, and rests his chin in his arms. ]

... Not unless you happen to have a perfectly circular emerald disc in your pocket. That's what we used for scrying crystals. Different gemstones for different planes of existence, but... yeah. No dice.

[postictal]

You could always ask for one. Offer something to the Storyteller, or ask them if it'd work.

[He doesn't sound very hopeful as he says it; it's not liable to be a workable solution, he's willing to bet, but it's not as if it isn't possible to retrieve objects across space and time. Presumably.]

[crystallying]

... Shit, really?

[ That gets him to sit up again, or at least prop himself up on his elbows to stare at Tim in disbelief. ]

That's a thing? The bunny takes requests? I mean, I don't know what I could necessarily do with it if I actually got my hands on a disc, but...

[ ... But it would be nice to have a piece of his home that wasn't his labcoat, or a giant rampaging vorelevator. ]

[postictal]

You gotta give 'em some stories, depending on how big it is, but yeah. That's how I got these.

[He digs his cigarette tin out of his pocket and flicks it open.]

They refill for three months, and then I gotta request more. [His pills are a less conditional offering - only requiring one story to get that consistent outpouring of chemical shielding against the irregular receptors in his brain - but he doesn't go around proclaiming himself to need them.]

[crystallying]

... Huh.

[ He rests his chin in the palm of one hand, eyeing the cigarettes. ]

That's a pretty sweet deal, considering the lack of resources around here. Whatever's trapped us in this dimension doesn't seem to want us to go nuts.

[postictal]

I think it's more the Storyteller helping us out than whatever brought us here. If you believe them, anyway.

[Tim doesn't believe anything anyone says, just as a rule, but he's also a self-admitted paranoid, hypocritical jerk. He wouldn't trust anything that comes out of his own mouth either.]

[crystallying]

I'm not really inclined to believe talking bunnies without damn good reason, so... yeah.

[ He shrugs. Lucas is much the same, especially when he can't use his lab equipment to get a solid read on any given situation. ]

This whole deal is pretty messed up.