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 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."

"We got snow, yeah. Not all the time, though."

What Thomas has seen of Scandinavia involves sleighs. All year round. And waving red-cheeked people wearing fur and wool.

Blame crappy textbooks.

What Loki has seen of Scandinavia involves a lot of giants. Go figure.

"Ah. So, what do you do, back home?"

"Tell stories."

His answer is prompt.

Loki nods. "A good profession, storytelling. Someone has to tell the stories."

A flash of a smile. "Yeah. It's just getting people to listen that's the hard part."

Until you get arrested and put on trial by the BIA.

Loki blinks. "That's odd. Are people so petty in the future that stories mean nothing to them?"

Thomas shakes his head. "No. They just got other things to do, enit?"

"What?" Loki seems genuinely curious.

"I don't know. I'm the one who tells the stories. They're the ones who listen, or don't. I tell 'em anyway. It don't matter."

Loki nods. "Are you at least part of a tradition of storytellers?"

Thomas blinks.

"Every story comes out of tradition."

Loki shakes his head. "New traditions must start somehow."

"Out of the old ones," says Thomas.

Loki shakes his head. "Every tradition started out as something that was new, but seemed a good idea."

"It wouldn't have occurred to people if they hadn't had something to work from," says Thomas.

Loki smiles. "You underestimate people's capability for imagination."

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