milliways_bar | (no subject)

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[Pre-Milliways: It's business as usual for Mission as another chapter in her life begins.]

"Huh."

That would be the sound that Mission Vao made as she stopped in mid-stride and stared around in wonder. She had been expecting Glun's Cantina, a rundown sort of place filled with mercenaries and bounty hunters and the like, in Coronet City and not an uptown sort of bar.

Vaguely she wondered if she had lost more blood from the wound on her arm than she thought and she fingered the makeshift bandage that she crafted while on the run from the two Gamorreans. Or maybe she took a wrong turn?

She frowned in thought.

No, she was certain that the door she walked into had been leading to Glun's Cantina. She distinctly remembered the cantina rats and the foul smelling Rodian hanging around by the door outside.

"Huh?"

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"Oh, hey, you're new," says the dark-haired human sitting near the door. He really doesn't look like much of anything, just one more human. "Welcome to Milliways."

Mission blinks at the dark-haired man. "Huh? Milliways? But what happened to Glun's?"

"Nothing really. It'll be there when you go back. There's just this little blip in space and time that brought you here instead for a while. When you go back out, you'll be exactly when and where you came in from. It happens a lot around here." He smiles. "My name's Ray Stantz. I'm from a planet called Earth- I don't think you'd have heard of us. We're a little bit backwards by Galactic standards."

Because honestly, what kind of fan would he be if he didn't know a Twi'lek on sight?

"Good," she remarks at Ray's explanation though she didn't quite follow most of it. Blips in time and space, what? "Because there's a Duros there that owes me some credits." She holds out a gloved hand. "I'm Mission Vao. Never heard of Earth before, no."

She wrinkles her nose. "Is it in the unknown regions? I've always wanted to go out there and tried to get a ship commissioned to do that after the whole saving the galaxy thing but couldn't get it. I think Carth sabotaged my plans. He's always trying to get me to find honest work."

She takes a breath. "So what's this about blips in space and time?"

Ray reaches up to shake the hand; he's not really up on his galactic gestures of greeting, so he's just going to make the assumption. "Oh, it's out on the very fringes of the galaxy. The surface is two-thirds water and we're orbiting a fairly small yellow star called Sol. It'd take a lot of looking to find us even if you had your own ship. Saving the galaxy, huh? Not bad at all."

He shrugs a little. "The Bar's somehow located at the end of the Universe. I'm not sure how they managed to pull that off, but we're at the chronological end of space and time, and everything's collapsing down to its final point. We're protected by some kind of space-warping bubble so that we can exist here almost indefinitely, but still get a view of what's going on out there."

On 'there' he indicates the Window.

It would be the right and fair assumption to make as indicated by Mission when she shakes Ray's hand in return. "I guess the fun would be in the looking for the planet then," she says, cheerfully. "And I didn't save the whole galaxy on my own. There were others involved and I wasn't even in charge or anything."

Then she gets distracted by the view from the window and she falls quiet. But she only remains quiet for about two seconds before she speaks again, "Huh. A bar at the end of the universe, what do you know? I guess it all makes sense in some weird dream sort of way. I mean," she pauses as she points back to the door, "all I have to do is walk out that door and I'm back on Corellia? That's a little weird. I'd think I were about to be spaced or something."

"It gets weirder when you find out that the back door leads to a viable ecosystem with no view of the destruction," Ray says. "There's a forest, a lake, and a couple of mountains, but none of that." He points to the window again. "But, yeah, open the door and it'll take you back to Corellia. If I were to open the door it'd take me back to Earth. It works like that for everybody who comes here- when it works. Sometimes the door doesn't let people out for a while. It does dump them back at the moment they left, though. Even under those circumstances."

She frowns though at the mention of the door not opening for some people. "You mean, they're stuck here? What do they do?" Her brows furrows. "I guess this place is nicer than most cantinas I've been in, but sleeping in booths hurts after awhile. Believe me, I know. And you've aliens poking and prodding or trying to steal things. You're not stuck here, are you?"

"Oh, there's rooms upstairs for people who get stuck. They get more business that way," Ray says. "I'm not stuck here, no. That's never happened to me. Bar sometimes throws me out the door and onto the wrong world, but that doesn't happen unless I've messed up something I was supposed to do here. People who're stuck do things outside, or use the library, or practice 'sabre and other techniques out by the lake. Some of them go with people to visit other worlds, since you can walk through the door if someone else holds it open, generally. It's very convenient."

"Way better than your average cantina," concludes Mission as she takes in all this information. She'll probably get to exploring every inch of the place soon enough.

"I tend to think so," Ray says. "Especially since the door doesn't seem to care whether you're from the past, present, or future. There's people here from all kinds of time frames. Half the Jedi I've met here're from generations before my Master was even conceived."

"Your Master?" She peers at him. "You mean, you're a Jedi?"

For answer, Ray holds up his 'saber. It's a little crude compared to other people's designs- he did use a bicycle seat post for the central tube- but it's recognizable.

"Head-blind and adopted very late in life as a padawan, but yeah," says Ray. "The only representative of the order on Earth, in fact. I wouldn't even have met my Master if it weren't for this place."

"Huh. Didn't know they did that," she remarks as she eyes the lightsaber. "There's no Sith representative on Earth too, is there?" She may ask this rather warily, looking at Ray with unease.

"Not a one," Ray says. "We've got other issues. The Sith haven't turned up, and I don't intend to let 'em."

"Good, because they'll bring a whole mess of problems with them. They bombed the world I was raised on. Bombarded Taris until there was nothing left. Malak, I don't know if you've heard of him but he was a Sith Lord and that was his doing. He ordered it. And then there was Telos before that."

She shakes her head somewhat sadly at the memories.

"Things are getting better now though. What sort of problems does Earth have?" she asks with genuine curiosity.

"He sounds familiar. I may have been told about him somewhere in the course of my education."

Ray rubs at the back of his neck, thinking. "Well, for one thing, we haven't got star drives yet. All our space exploration's been within our own solar system, and we haven't put any off-world colonies down yet. Just a couple of temporary orbital stations. Which is fine, everybody has to start somewhere, but we've just had to repel an initial surveying run by a race called the Mi-Go. They're the kind of being who thinks nothing at all of studying a species by taking out the subject's brain and shipping it back to their home planet in suspended animation. Fun people. Not."

"'Least you were able to stop them though, right? Think they'll come back?"

"They might try," Ray says. "I'll be getting my planet ready for them in the meantime. Somebody has to."

"Huh. You do kind of sound like a Jedi," remarks Mission, quietly, before saying, "Well, I guess, like you said, you can go through to other places and get help from somewhere if you need it too. There are good weapons dealers on Nar Shaddaa."

Ray nods. "I've had to do that a couple of times in the past when we've had other incursions," he says. "This place isn't half bad for gathering up assistance either. You certainly get a lot of volunteers for dangerous missions if you speak up around here. I haven't had the chance to go out and buy anything offworld yet, but at the rate the visits are escalating I might just have to check Nar Shaddaa out at some point..."

"Sometimes the best missions are the dangerous ones," chirps Mission. "If you ever do get around to going to Nar Shaddaa, be careful. It's pretty much the criminal haven of the galaxy: bounty hunters, mercenaries, smugglers, criminal organizations. They've some of the best, possibly slightly illegal, stuff there though."

"Sounds like the kind of place where I'd be well advised to take a guide," Ray muses. "Considering."

"If you ever need to go, I can take you. Strictly speaking I'm not supposed to go, but..." She shrugs. "Well, it's not like I've never been there before yah know?"

"True enough," Ray says, and grins. "I'll definitely look you up if I ever have to go...Oh! Oh, that reminds me. There's three rules in this place. No violence in the Bar- if you have to fight somebody, take it out back. No 'business' from home, which mostly means grudges or longstanding struggles. If a Sith Lord were to turn up here, we wouldn't be allowed to lay a finger on him except in self-defense. And no nudity in public parts of the Bar; people swimming without clothes during the warmer months might be okay, but that's as close as it gets."

"Fair enough rules to follow. I'm not the violence starter type." A pause and then, "Okay, maybe not all the time at least. And I don't think I'd try to take on a Sith Lord if one of them did turn up here. As for the no nudity, well, I'm not some busty cantina rat."

"There you go, then," Ray says. "The first drink is free; after that they take any currency, from anywhere in the Galaxy. The bar's voice activated, so if there's no tenders on hand, just ask the Bar for what you want. And there's no droids on staff, but those little brown guys-" He indicates a wait-rat. "-do most of the work around here, so they take drink and food orders too.'

"Small guys work here, any kind of currency, voice activated bar, first drink free, and - hey, wait, does that mean I can order any kind of drink?"

"Yeah, pretty much," Ray says. "Although the Bar sometimes won't give people intoxicants they're not legally supposed to have. But other than that? Pretty much anything."

"And all I have to do is going over to the bar-" and she points "-and...and talk to the counter? Seems easy enough."

"Yep," Ray says. "It usually works pretty well. I've even seen species that can't manage standard speech place orders successfully, so you should be fine in any language you want to use."

Mission shrugs. "I usually go with Basic. Much easier when dealing with trading goods."

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