milliways_bar | (no subject)

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The Spokane Indian Reservation is outside the town of Wellpinit, Washington. That's the eastern part of the state. Its residents don't leave often.

Not even the weird ones.

So that's why when the front door opens and a man -- fairly average-looking, hair long and unbound -- walks in, he blinks. Mostly because there's never been a bar in Thomas Builds-the-Fire's bathroom before, but also because this place is not the Spokane reservation. It is, in fact, white. Very white.

Weird he may be, but Thomas Builds-the-Fire knows better than anybody that weird and stupid don't mean the same thing. Not all the time, anyway.

For the moment he's just standing, and looking, and listening. Because this? This is weird.

Maybe he walked into a story.

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Loki shakes his head. "Not on this ur-Yggdrasil. This is Milliways, the bar at the end of the Universe. Well, multiverse, really."

Thomas listens to this.

"What was that? Something about eggs?"

Loki chuckles. "Basically, all the worlds come together here. All of them."

"...first through fourth and fifth? All them?"

He knows the stories.

"And many more than that. And all times."

"There haven't been all that many yet," says Thomas.

Loki smiles. "There aren't just the tales of your people."

Thomas blinks.

And then shrugs.

His logic process is the following:

1. His bathroom is on the reservation, which isn't quite like anywhere else. Even if there's a bar.
2. It's not exactly an Indian's world. Except when it is.
3. The bar is full of white people.

"Guess not."

Loki nods. "I think I have seen some of your people's gods around."

Thomas tilts his head to the side. "I saw Big Mom down by the Trading Post this morning. She isn't a god, though. Mostly they left."

Pause.

"So this is where they went, huh? Figures."

Loki shrugs. "So far as I can tell, your only real requirement is to have done something of note to be here."

"Like opening the door to your bathroom?"

Thomas looks...alternately confused and amused by this.

Loki shakes his head. "No, I mean to end up here. Getting here is usually just something otherwise boring. I got here while crossing a bridge."

"So what did you do?"

Thomas smells a story.

Loki smiles. "I'm a god."

"Yeah? Whose?"

Loki smiles. "Oh, I like to think that anyone who wants to can worship me, but if you're asking what pantheon I'm from... I believe you'd call it the Norse pantheon."

Thomas blinks. "...that's Norway, enit?"

Loki nods. "And Svea, and Daneland, and Jutland, and all the rest of those."

"Never heard of those."

Thomas will look them up next time he's in the library.

Maybe they have the D volume of the 1958 Encyclopedia Britannica. They have lots of weird things in the library.

Loki shrugs. "The names may have changed by your time."

"You know what they changed into?" Beat. "It'll help in looking it up."

Loki shrugs. "I think... Scandinavia includes them all."

"Oh." Sudden clarity. "I heard of that. Never been there, though. I hear it's cold."

Loki smiles. "I hear the same of Vinland, what you know as America."