milliways_bar | A penny gets you in, but it won't get you out

Teja is not in the habit of looking at women's chests; but the rings upon the flesh of that one catch his eye, and when he reads the text written upon her clothes, he almost smiles.

Almost, for Teja is a tall, pale, black-haired man dressed in black, with a sahs knife-sword upon his belt, and a Tyrian purple cloak slung over his shoulder: - he is a true Goth, and Ostrogoth of old, and a lifetime at war has made him forget how to smile.

Four and a half years in Milliways have almost, but not quite, taught him again.

"So these old tales are still known in your time," he says, keeping any hint of chuckle out of his voice.

She slides her headphones off as she glances up, with a vaguely distracted "Huh?"

Oh, her favorite game here. It's like she's been practicing all this time, meeting people, reading people, just so that one day she could be in an interdimensional bar and pop quiz: everybody from every time and place ever. There's nothing more enjoyable...well, maybe a few things, but this is also.

Well, his choice of weaponry suggests a time, a place and a people she knows all too well, and the purple to her implies royalty. Back in the day you could get some clues from a person's cleanliness but she's not entirely sure that security or somebody wouldn't find an excuse to hose down a particularly dirty patron and now that is something she sorta wants to try because what are boundaries if you don't try to push them?

So... yeah.

Teja, once king of the Ostrogoths, now is part of Milliways' Security, and cleanly on his own account: - he grew up in Theodoric's Italy, when the Roman baths were still working.

"Those tales," he says, "were known to my people. Loki, the original nithing, you might say. This place is full of those that my people would have called nithings, either to their faces or behind their backs, and I have come to value them; so one might guess that even Loki himself was not a guilty as he is made out to be, and your garment cleverly claims so."

"Loki got a raw deal," she says. "I mean, sure, everybody knows the thing with the horse. But the gods had no other plans. They're all 'Here, we're gonna go make a deal with this giant we have no intention of holding up our end of,' and then things go bad and who's got to save their asses? But he gets no respect for it. I'd have gone bad too."

...it's still a touchy subject, that.

"He's a bit of an obsession of mine. I got a tattoo, if you want to see it..."

The Goth is almost amused.

"If it is not in too indecent a place?" he agrees.

A tattoo about Loki? That is true dedication to the old tales.

She sets her notebook and pen down on the table, turns toward the back of the couch--it's not entirely decent, but she's not about to get in trouble for nudity today--and pulls up the back of her shirt to show the tattoo that covers her entire back.

It's really well done; she'd had it done once, years ago, when in this form she'd gotten involved with an artist, and had liked it so much that she wears it whenever she's in this shape. It shows the great tree Yggdrasil in the middle, roots and branches made of entwined knotwork, and standing beneath the tree are Loki and Odin, back when the world was young, swearing their oath as blood-brothers.

"Yggdrasil," Teja says. "The world-ash tree. I know of all these old tales, even though most of my people were Christian, at my time."

Pause.

"Amazingly done."

"I used to date the guy who did that," she says, returning her shirt to its proper place and herself to her earlier lounging position. "He did beautiful work, but mostly skulls and pin-up girls and things. That wasn't his usual style, but he said I inspired him, so..."

She shrugs lightly.

"He did other scenes too, but I can't show you those here. That one's my favorite. Makes you wonder how things could've gone differently."

"I think the tales about Loki came about to explain why the world is so much less than perfect and fair," Teja says, "and even the gods not all-powerful. He was set up by the story-tellers to take the blame, like the scape-goat of the Jewish and Christian tradition. Those stories were set to ever go that way."

Pause.

"Apart, of course, from those worlds where Loki is real. I have met Weyland the Smith, and Skaði, in this place; so you should not be amazed to meet Loki some day, and perhaps not 'fangirl' him too much, as those from the future call it."

...oh fuck.

Weyland's one thing; he's uptight but really easy to manipulate, if you know how. Skaði, though--she's hot but she's crazy. Scary crazy. The sort of woman who'd... okay, being chained up with the entrails of his own dead son with pointy rocks poking him in the back is bad enough, but the snake? That's the kind of ex Skaði is.

She hopes her reaction comes across as surprise that she might meet her idol here someday.

"I blame the Christians," she says. "Before then, you could have shades of grey. But after that? All black and white. And Baldur is Jesus, and Thor is Action-Figure Jesus, the stories got corrupted. You've really met Weyland and Skaði?"

"I know not what an Action Figur is," Teja says, "even though I know what a fangirl is; information in this place is eclectic."

Pause.

"I do not know Skaði very well, having only met her in passing; but Weyland I would count as a friend, even though he was gone for a long time."

"Action figures are... you know, these cheap plastic toys of soldiers, or characters from some movie or TV show. They're like dolls for boys, they've usually got tiny toy guns or swords or whatever so they can play war."

They're not her thing, but she's a little outside the target age range for them.

"It must really be something, you know, meeting actual gods here. I haven't had the pleasure, but I sure hope I do."

"They are gods," Teja says. "But they are also people. There are monsters and demons, also, that make good friends. Nothing is as expected, and you cannot count upon good and evil in the same way as you find it in a world's story. Evil is often set up to be so, I suspect, just like Loki in my world's old tales."

The way he says the name now is somewhat softened, more Gothic than Norse, Loge or perhaps Lauga, as the Goths spoke.

"I do not believe in them any more, even I know they are real in this place; but so are many other things from tales old and new. Or rather, there is only one god here that I believe in."

"I don't know," she says. "I've often wondered--usually around four AM, after I've been drinking, but I wonder all the same. What about free will, and what about fate? The Christians say their god gave everybody free will, but Judas had to do what he did in order for the rest of the picture to fall into place. And for gods, do they have to be what's in their nature or do they get to choose? If the people in your world have free will but you as a god don't, that would suck."

"Many things that I have pondered upon at night, also," Teja says. "It depends upon the world, and the way you look upon it. If it is a world of tales to you, then there is fate at work, so that which happens will make sense, and thread like pearls upon a string. But reality has no such meaning: - in the real world, is just that what happened, and stays happened, and one must deal with it. Free will only applies to the future; railing against the past is ever useless and disgraceful."

"I've never really been the kind to dwell on the past like that," she says. "I don't believe in regret. Sure, I've done things that other people might not like, but I had reasons at the time, and if you're going to do something, you may as well stand behind what you do."

Which probably explains how she ended up in that cave, with the rocks and all. She can't work up any remorse.

"It's appealing to think that the world's a bunch of stories, but who would want to read most of them? The thrilling arc of somebody getting up, going to work and going home again. That's not fate, that's just drifting."

"Only those things are picked as tales that people wish to hear or read," Teja returns. "All else must consider themselves scenery."

"I'd hate to be someone's scenery," she says. "But can you imagine--to somebody else, we all are. There's people over there having coffee, and right now we're their scenery. We could be, I don't know, planning the end of the world, but it doesn't matter because we're not in that story."

Teja looks at the random people with the coffee, and nods.

"Theirs is an utterly different story, that they are taking a time-out from in this place, and were we planning the end of the world, it would likely not be their world."

"It could be," she says. "We could all be from the same world, just different times. And we could very well be planning to destroy it."

She waves a waitrat over, orders herself a cherry Coke.

"Where do you stand on the old fire-and-ice debate?"

"Either kills," Teja says. "And no, we are not from the same worlds. There are those here from almost the same tale, but subtly, painfully different."

Pause.

"The world is not only moderation, but extremes."

"What if there's only one world?" she asks. "What if there was only ever one world, but we all walk around with our own worlds in our heads and we never notice the world next door. There are people who wake up one day and don't even recognize their husband or wife anymore, even though they've known each other for years. We never really know anybody."

Which makes her job a lot easier.

"That is a strange philosophy, and not an observation many make," Teja says. "Indeed, most that fall through a crack in their own perception thus, will be thought crazed and addle-minded by those that know them."

Pause.

"But indeed, if we peer underneath that which me think we safely know, there is not much we know. But it is neither safe nor practical to do so. It might help with magic, though."

"I know I know a lot of things," she says with a grin. "I know rock beats scissors, I know a good cure for hiccups, I know the best diner in New York for when you wake up with a bad hangover, and I know I like a man who can discuss philosophy even when sober. But there's at least one thing I know I don't know."

She offers a hand. "Name's Pyrrha."

Teja takes her hand, and shakes it, as people from the future do.

"I am Teja, son of Tagila," he says. "I was the last king of the Ostrogoths in Italy and died in battle upon the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, in the year 552 of Christian reckoning."

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