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Making his way to the target range through the jungle canopy was just a little too Viet Cong meets Tarzan for Gordon's tastes today. When he made his way back indoors he opted to take some time to make his next visit to the range worth all the fuss and bother- it's modding time. He might as well put the welding skills he learned for the bicycle to good use.

One almost-redheaded guy in nerd glasses and circled-lambda T-shirt doing terrible, terrible things to an unsuspecting Combine pulse rifle, over by the Window.

[tinytag: Gordon Freeman, Alyx Vance, John Vattic]

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Gordon's expression is a very tired, very wry sort of look.

"Somehow I figured as much," he murmurs. "It's all right."

She lets the hair drop back down. (In general it's braided such that it's pulled back tightly from the living side of her face and loosely on the left.)

"Bleßun." she says softly, drawing a little run in the air between them. She's nothing at all like a peace goddess, but a little bit of extra help tends not to get backs up.

And if he gets pissy, eh, like she hasn't dealt with that before? "I can still be sorry."

That gets a peculiar look, but nothing more. There are things in this world that Gordon doesn't know how to interpret.

(If he finds that he gets six hours of sleep tonight, rather than three, he's not likely to remember this; but nevertheless...)

"If you like," he says. "Ah... thank you, I guess."

Hel laughs a little bit, softly, and says, "You're welcome, little Man. I like to give back, when I'm here. This place has been good for me."

Gordon nods. "Seems to do that for a lot of people," he says. "Weirdest borderworld I've ever seen."

Out of, y'know, all two.

"I don't know that term." Hel says. Being thirty feet tall, invulnerable to almost everything, half-dead, and the mortal terror (literally) of the gods of your universe means never having to be ashamed of ignorance. "Could you explain it please?"

Normally Gordon goes right into his explanatory lecture when someone asks him about that word. But normally? The person asking him isn't THIRTY FEET TALL.

"... do you know anything about dimensional math?" he asks, somewhat hopelessly.

"Yes." Hel says firmly, "There isn't much to do besides dust the dead at home and I've been working my way through as much reading material as possible for the last several hundreds of thousands of years."

"All right," says Gordon, somewhat relieved (and not thinking about the age number she gave, very much not thinking about it). "A borderworld is a universe that lies exceptionally close to two or more other universes in eleven-dimensional space, so much so that it's energetically more convenient to portal into the borderworld, then open another portal into one of the other universes, than it is to go straight from Universe A to Universe B."

"Alright." is the answer, "And how many of them have you seen thus far?"

".... two. Still."

"Lots and lots and lots of time on my hands." Hel informs his expression, "If not for minn lítill köttur and his gift of information I probably would have been quite mad by now. I know enough to know what to ask for next, you see."

"That's more than some of my students knew," Gordon says. "Back when I had students, anyway."

"Eventually everything makes sense." Hel says with a laugh, "I admit that the American tax system took a good two hundred years to start parsing, but give it enough time and everything makes sense."

... Gordon cannot even begin to conceive of the level of boredom necessary to be willing to spend two hundred years studying the tax code.

We regret only that we do not have a 'pity face' icon for this.

Hel shrugs and says, "It's better than dusting the dead?"

"Point," says Gordon. "Did it ever turn out useful?"

"Anything that takes up that much time is useful." Hel informs him with shadows of grimness in her voice, "I've been stuck in Niflheim so long that the mountains of my youth have fallen, raised, fallen, and raised again. The oceans, the continents, it's all changed."

That is-

It's not that he doesn't believe it. It's just that his mind shies away from having to encompass all of a stretch of time that big. It's one thing to conceive of it as the age of planets or landscapes or stars, but as the age of something aware, all that time-

not so much.

"You have my sympathy."

"Thank you." Hel says politely. She knows that he can't get it. She tries to avoid getting it and to take each century as it comes.

It doesn't always work.

"So... what does someone in your position do here?" Gordon asks, because honestly, he's having a little trouble picturing how you go about keeping yourself busy under the circumstances.

"Sewing, mostly." Hel admits, "It's really hard to find clothing my size. A lot of sewing, some talking to people, and a lot of sitting in the sun."

"... I hadn't thought of that," Gordon admits. "The clothing, I mean."

Not that it doesn't make sense, he just... hadn't considered the issue, really. At all.

"Why should you?" Hel asks, laughing softly, "There are not many my size, none here. Only amongst my mother's people am I average height, but they can get to me no more easily than I to them."

"Your mother's- there's a whole species your size? In this kind of gravity?"

... oh, right, not the most politic thing to say. Whoops.