milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Faith comes into the bar in high spirits, dressed casually - she's been training - but still wearing that somewhat ridiculous circlet in her hair. It comes off as soon as she's in the bar, and she goes up to Bar to get a cup of coffee.

This procured, she goes over to read the notice board, and sees Kaylee's note.

The coffee cup drops from suddenly-nerveless fingers, and Faith, staring in pale, wide-eyed horror, doesn't even notice the waitrats that scamper to clean up the mess.

River and Simon. Taken. Her friends - her good friends - in terrible danger.

The horror gives way, slowly, to the cold, killing fury of a very angry Slayer, and she turns on her heel and stalks over to Bar, acquiring paper and pen and writing a very brief note, which will be delivered to whichever member of Serenity's crew happens to come into the bar next.

If I can help, I will. - Faith

Then she gets another drink - whiskey this time - and stalks over to a table with a carefully blank expression on her face.

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"Thank you," Ray says. "I appreciate it."

"...I should see those movies. But having met Luke, and Leia, I'm not sure my brain could take it."

"I've seen my own movie," Ray says. "Twice. It's kind of strange."

Pause.

"In the way that the Dead Sea is kind of salty."

Faith snorts.

"I've seen one season of the TV show I'm apparently from, but it wasn't one I was in. Didn't have the guts to watch myself."

"I didn't have a choice the first time," Ray confesses. "I was in one of the alternate universes I keep winding up in. The animated one. And they were filming a movie based on our story, and they called us in to check over the script and the set, and then to bust a ghost trying to break up the shoot... and then, bam, tickets to the New York premiere, and next thing I know I'm sitting in the front row watching myself on screen. Only since I'm in the animated continuum, the movie is live action me, while I'm stuck with the animated me's .... face.... uh, I did tell you about the animated continuum, right?"

".................................................................................no."

"Okay." Ray gestures to one of the waitrats. "I'm gonna need a big glass of the green stuff... anyway. You know about my little problem with walking into other universes sometimes when I open the door, or no?"

"I met Rho," Faith says, a little dryly.

That's a yes.

"Okay," Ray says, unperturbed. "The first time I walked out the door after coming here, I was in the middle of falling off the Shandor Building. That was how I"d arrived here- Gozer blew me off the rooftop. I got a Legion of Superheroes flight ring from Bart Allen and used that to not die, but I conked my head on the building a few times on the way up, so my head was sorta spinny when I got back up again. I didn't realize until we were on our way out of the building that everything looked animated. Cartoony and flat. Seriously- I had no depth perception at all. The whole world looked like someone drew it and colored it in, just like an animator. It was tactilely three dimensional, it just didn't look that way. And the other weird part was that Peter and Winston and Egon and Janine looked different, too- Egon especially. For one thing, he was blond..."

"........................good ghod, Ray."

Faith is blissfully ignorant of the fact that she was almost a cartoon herself. And has been a comic book character.

"The blond Egon comes here every so often for drinks," Ray notes. "And both my Egon and the Egon from Peter's world came along with the blond Egon on the trip to exact vengeance. You might see any of them in here- anyway, I was stuck there for six months the first time. Wound up building a portal with Val Wiggin's philotic physics textbook that returned me here, did okay, eventually walked into that world again, and that's when I got stuck there for the filming of the movie."

He rubs at his nose and accepts the drink from the newly arrived rat. "Now, understand- the Ray Stantz in that universe is a little shorter than me, a little pudgier, and has red hair and pokier ears. Understand that I looked like that the whole time I was there- both times. And try to imagine what it's like looking like that, as a cartoon, and looking up at a movie screen- and seeing live-action going on, and some actor's got your real face. You can see where it might be just a little bit weird."

".....................yeah," Faith says, trying and failing to picture this. "Yeah. I. Geeze, Ray. How are you still sane at all?"

"Well, my initial state of sanity was sort of debatable to begin with if you ask most people from my initial universe, but my friends and I used to speculate about this kind of thing when I was in college," Ray says blithely. "The existence of as many potential alternate universes as there are potential alternate outcomes to any given situation was postulated in a Larry Niven short story called All The Myriad Ways. In Niven's work, the discovery of the existence of all these alternates caused widespread societal breakdown as people assumed that their particular choices didn't matter because some other version of them, somewhere, was choosing something else- so they did whatever the hell they wanted, or went nuts. I've always assumed since reading that story that my actions were the ones that mattered, regardless of what any other me might or might not be doing, or how other universes might be structured. It helps, in situations like that."

"In Andrew's reality, I'm living on the Cleveland Hellmouth with a high-school principal," Faith says, thoughtfully, after considering this for a while. "I think I like my reality better."

"I think Egon has some relatives near Cleveland," Ray says after some thought. "Or in Ohio, anyway. I've never been to Spengler Labs."

"I hope it's not on a Hellmouth in your world."

"Not likely. Most of Egon's relatives don't accept the existence of the supernatural as a valid field of scientific endeavor. They would if it was as obvious as a Hellmouth in the vicinity, I think."

"You'd be surprised," Faith says dryly. "Hellmouth's underground, you know. They build cities on them, Sunnydale and Cleveland and Westport, Conneticut that I know of and more I'm sure that I don't, and people generally speaking have no clue. They walk around in a haze of blissful stupidity, writing vampire attacks off as barbecue fork stabbings and gangs on PCP, and until the Hellmouth opens and the giant worm demon with a half-dozen heads pops out, there's really no reason for them to think their town is any different at all."

"You haven't met the Spenglers," Ray says dryly. "If it was in their vicinity they'd wind up studying it, if only to keep their experimental results consistent. They're picky people."

Faith snorts.

"Well, fair enough, I suppose. Probably you'd know if your world had Hellmouths. Probably it doesn't at all. I hope it doesn't, anyway, as it sounds like your life is weird enough."

"My world has a hole permanently burned in the barrier between the prime material plane and the ectoplasmic entity planar interfaces thanks to the existence of the Shandor Building," Ray says. "I'm probably going to be spending the rest of my life dealing with the fallout and training up kids to handle the mess afterwards until someone can figure out how to seal the breach. Plus I have my suspicions about the territory off the southern tip of Brooklyn, but all my readings indicate that the likely weak point is somewhere a good distance out into the water and quite a ways up in the air, so I can't actually get in close enough to be certain."

"............right," Faith says, weakly. "Uhm. Ow."

Beat.

"I think you win."

Ray smiles a little. "It could be worse," he says. "The animated continuum's weak spot off Coney Island was used by a bunch of cultists to summon up Great Cthulhu, plus that world had the doomsday door under Manhattan. Literally. As in 'do not open until'."