milliways_bar | (no subject)

Still not broken. It's a Hypnagogic Hallucination as far as he's concerned. One that seems to be lasting a little longer then it should.

So the man who enters and who happens to look like Dan Akroyd doesn't get a second glance. The glass of blue stuff however does.

Two Looks.
Then Three.

"As a Doctor I feel compelled to say that possibly? Anything that color? Can't be good for you."

"Oh, you should see the green stuff if you think this is bad," Ray says cheerfully. "Mind you, the green stuff only looks self-motile. This? This actually teleports if you think about it too hard."

"...Drinks that-"

He stares at Ray as if he's insane.

"......Okay. Sure. Whatever. First bar I've been to where the drinks get up and walk away from you. Is that an anti-rowdiness measure? You think about another beer and it wanders away before you get truly fucking hammered? Good call."

"Oh, the beer doesn't do that. Only this stuff," says Ray. "I ordered it for the anniversary of the invention of quantum physics. You can either know where it is, or what it tastes like, but you can't have both pieces of information in your thoughts at the same time. Watch-"

He takes a sip and gets a thoughtful, analytical look on his face. A moment later, the glass vanishes from his hand entirely.

"This is the point where I say it tastes like a guarana-infused, berrylike version of Jolt Blue. It's somewhere else in the Bar right now. I'll find it later."

Block pulls his glasses off and puts them back on.

"....This is the part where you tell me you're a magician right? And pull a tiger outta your ass? Dreams always turn out like that." This one's a doozy.

"Oh, no, I suck at stage magic," says Ray. "I'm a parapsychologist, but I just study weird phenomena. I don't actually make them happen. Not like that, anyway. My name's Ray Stantz, and you are...?"

"William Block M.D." Block says with a curt nod, "...Either in the middle of the biggest Hypnagogic Hallucination I've ever had? Or....really really in trouble."

"Probably more the second than the first," Ray says. "This is your first visit to Milliways, huh? Been here long? It tends to catch people by surprise."

Block checks his watch, "Goddammnit."

"Would I be validly saying I have no idea? I mean-if this really is a fucking 'nother dimension? Then chances are it's Not October 18th is it?"

"It's only October 18th for you," Ray says. "For me it's March twenty-fourth, 2007. There's a local calendar around here somewhere- I think it's probably the first week of April here. It'll be October 18th when you go back, though. The door's funny that way."

"Funny? Funny's a guy who tells crippled jokes-"

Don't ask, it's a canon thing.

"...Funny's Neil the Paramedic trying to play a joke in the morgue and ending up getting locked in there. Well no, that's more ironic then funny. Doors pulling you from strange places aren't funny."

"The first time I came here, the door pulled me in from somewhere between floors twenty-four and twenty-three of 55 Central Park West," Ray says mildly. "Or rather, from the space about three yards away from between floors twenty-four and twenty-three, since I was on the outside heading down through no fault of my own."

Block? Still has his thermometer in his mouth. It shifts to the side as he chews on it's end thoughtfully, staring at Ray, "....Uh huh...."

Ray nods towards the door. "I landed out front. Knocked the wind out of me, but nothing worse. I can only assume the momentum bled off in the form of heat dispersal or something through the dimensions. I've been mostly coming here voluntarily ever since."

"You jumped off the roof of a building and landed in a fictional dimension."

"I, walked into my office and into a fictional dimension."

"....And neither of us are hallucinating, and or crazy, and or dead."

Block rubs at his eye, ".......Well shit. Maybe that explains why there's a wall where my door used to be."

"Fell off," Ray corrects. "I did say no fault of my own. It's a long story and you probably don't want to hear it right now."

Then he winces. "Bound, huh? I'm sorry about that."

Block looks disgruntled, "What's Bound and Why's it Bad?"

A number of really bad marriage jokes leap to mind, but he keeps them to himself.

"Bound is when for whatever reason you can't get out of the Bar on your own," Ray says. "It happens to a lot of people. The door comes back sooner or later, though. It's not particularly bad, since there's rooms upstairs and the Bar runs a tab and all."

"...The fictional dimension is keeping me here against my will."

Pause.

"...'nd if I explain that I have a job, a wife, and a son to go back to it's probably not going to do anything is it?"

"Not really," says Ray. "Considering that it's standard policy for the door to return you to the exact moment you left. Even if, like me, you were falling to the ground at the time."

"....It'll open to you falling through the air."

He frowns, "...What if you end up dying? Can you sue the bar's owner?"

"That hasn't happened yet, to the best of my knowledge, so there's no precedent to say."

Jim looks up from a a cup of coffee and a PADD and sees Ray's grand entrance. "Hello, Ray."

Ray waves. "Hi, Jim," he says, migrating over to the other man's table. "How's it going?"

"Things are going a lot better, Ray. One of the pluses to being a hero is that apparently I'm too popular to be court-martialed. The Federation Council - essentially the General Assembly of the UN, only interplanetary - will be conducting a hearing instead.

"Which means I will probably get off with just discharge, and maybe a good civilian assignment." He's happy with this, but just a touch uneasy.

"And how are things for you? How's that investigation going?"

"Oh, excellent," says Ray, who's maybe for the first time in his life genuinely practicing a pokerface. He's seen the movie. He's not about to give away the ending. "I wish you luck with whatever they wind up doing. As far as my investigation goes, I ran into a pair of part-human, part-Deep One college students while I was on the hunt. They offered to arrange a meeting with some of the adults of the nonhuman community in the hopes of clarifying a few things. Apparently Mr. Lovecraft did encounter their species in the past, but the man was a virulent racist towards human mixtures. The idea of nonhumans, even civilized ones, taking up with human women set him off- at least that's what these two said."

Jim listens closely. It's the sort of strange thing Ray sems to trip over all the time, but nothing that extreme to a man whose best friend is a hybrid. "These hybrids...how much of each race are they? And how did Lovecraft find them when it seems like, from what you told me before, they weren't looking to found?

"Or was that an incorrect working thesis?"

"I didn't get a percentage," Ray admits. "They looked enough like humans to walk around in daylight in a convenience store, although they had their hoods up- they didn't look like very healthy humans, to be honest with you. Optical hypertelorism like you wouldn't believe and functional gill slits in the neck, although they looked like wrinkles. One of them had partially webbed hands, and the other one had sort of bluish skin. Their voices sounded like there was some serious rearrangement of the throat's internal anatomy, too. From what Laken-Makai and Ost-h'ryth said, a couple of their ancestors thought that some old New England sea captains' daughters were sufficiently attractive by Deep One standards that they made bids for their hands in marriage. I guess Lovecraft ran into them on a visit to Newburyport."

"The reverse and partial corruption of the old tales about mermaids...that's certainly different, though not unheard of by any stretch in my time. Though it takes a long time before people like Lovecraft can no longer spread their lies." Jim recalls the ugly anti-alien movement of the previous century.

"So otherwise, though, there's no threat from the Deep Ones, as far as you can tell?"

"I don't think there is," Ray says. "Of course, these were just a couple of college students. It's entirely possible the adult population feels differently about Homo sapiens sapiens, since human demographics aren't the same across the board either- but I get the feeling we're probably all right as long as nothing catastrophic happens in the oceans any time soon."

Jim nods. "I've learned a bit more than I used to know about the possbilities of that. Especially in your era. I hope that the Deep Ones aren't as fond of whales as the aliens who sent that probe. Otherwise, you might be in trouble anyway."

Ray makes a face. "We're working on that," he says. "Although honestly, if it were up to me and I had access to a time machine that wasn't Romana's, I'd be sorely tempted to go back in time and break both Svend Foyn's hands before he ever invented that harpoon gun of his."

"I'm not sure it would do any good. Even if there weren't grave consequences to that alteration - there's no way to tell - I would say it's likely that someone else would invent that weapon. From what I've seen of time travel, events have a way of fixing themslves through one agent or another." He makes that face he only makes when he's trying not to think of Edith. He thinks of her too much.

"Yeah, I know," Ray says ruefully. "It's not like he was the only one working on the project. He just got a successful one made first. Someone else would've come up with one a few years later. As it stands the best I can do is work with the aquarium and with some of the organizations working on saving the whales at an international legal or commercial level."

"It's strange. I can tell you than at least in my timeline we corrected most of the ecological problems of your day - most ntoably global warming - but extinctions...you only get one chance to prevent them under most circumstances." It's simply a fact of his time. He's not truly mourning what was lost. But he does think Ray would.

"Believe me, I'm all too aware," Ray says. "I've done enough scuba diving and snorkeling to see just how fragile ecosystems overall can be. It's much too easy to kick the legs out from under any one particular species."

"You know, that's one thing I haven't tried. I guess it seemed too much like work, to wear that kind of apparatus. Though I'm also partial to dry land for my spare time anyway. It's not easy, diving with a horse." He smirks.

Ray grins. "As nice as the aquarium is, there's some species I won't ever get to meet any other way," he says. "They're just not the same in captivity. I can put up with a lot if it means I get a chance to see a real live barracuda or six-gill shark ten meters away."

"You want to meet those?" Klingons are one thing, sharks, quite something else.

"They're living fossils- well, the sixgills are, anyway. They're some of the most ancient and primitive fishes still swimming in our oceans, outside of the dwellers in the deepest abyssal waters. Granted, they don't rise out of the depths very often, but I'm never going to see one in an aquarium precisely because of that fact. Sevengill sharks are similarly primitive and ancient, but they're easier to find- although they also don't appear in aquariums." Ray grins happily. "You just don't get a crack at seeing into the planet's past unless you're willing to put out the effort to meet the locals."

Jim gives a small laugh. "You sound like more than a few biologists I've met along the way. We have a special branch of the fleet dedicated to exploring alien marine life, in fact. You'd fit it well with them.

"But there's more than one way to see the past without a time machine. I've been a rock-climber for some years, and most of the formations in California as as ancient as the sharks."

"I'm not that good at actual biology," Ray confesses. "What I've got is more like the old natural historians than a modern biochemist or molecular biologist."

Ray nods. "Oh, I'm well aware of that, just like the fact that the Catskill Mountains in my own state of New York are some of the oldest mountains on the continent. They used to be the size of the Himalayas, after all. Finding something living that came out of the ancient world's another matter entirely."

"I suppose. I guess everyone has their own ways of relaxing. And some would say we're both crazy."