milliways_bar | (no subject)

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[OOM: One commission, two gifts and an unexpected visitor. Small warning for a bit of blood and gore.]

Weyland returns to the bar sometime later, when he has recovered enough to appear calm again, and he carries the gifts he has made up to the bar. It looks like it's going to be another Atlantean night.

He takes a seat at the bar, and waits. There's one person in particular he's waiting for and several others he'd be very happy to see, but really any distraction would be welcome.

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"Ah."

She stares out over the water. Then:

"When's it coming? The end, I mean."

"I don't know," he says quietly. "But it's growing, and it's growing stronger--and the world seems colder. I tried to bring my mechanical woman here, but she couldn't cross the threshold. It was an unearthly cold, when I tried to carry her through."

"Why can't she leave your world?"

"That I don't know either," he says. "I would think that she sensed the cold--it isn't just cold like winter, it's cold like the primordial void. And I don't know why that would be. But she is terrified to pass through the door, and having felt the cold, I will not try to force her."

"We should go there, still."

Her words have a forcefulness that, maybe, wasn't there before.

"I brought a woman from here to my world, to do some work for her," he says. "She had no trouble passing through the door, either way. She saw the egg hatch, in fact."

"Well, that's good," she says. "I probably wouldn't want to stay there forever, by the sound of it."

"You wouldn't," he agrees. "I certainly don't, and it's my world. For now, anyway. I am its only god, so far as I know."

"But would more divine influence would change things, do you think?"

"I don't know," he says after a moment. "I'd like to think it would change things for the better, but odds are it would just make it worse--but different, certainly."

"I guess you never know."

"It would depend on who it was, naturally. There are some I'd get along with better than others."

"Really?" She glances at him, poker-faced. "And here I thought you were the sort of fellow who could get along with anyone."

"Normally, yes," he says dryly. "But the people of my youth--it's a bit like sibling rivalry. We know each other too well, and pick at each other's faults."

"Clearly you need fresh blood."

"And that's where you come in, it seems," he says. "The fresh blood--shaking up the world order. It will end in tragedy of course, but everything does, if you follow the story long enough."

She gives him a small, wry smile.

"That's how it always goes."

"There will always be work for you to do, my dear one, as long as there are people--and as long as there is anything living, there will be work for me."

"And who knows how much longer that will be?"

She takes a sip of the wine, appreciatively.

"There aren't any true seers anymore either," he says. "Not who can see all the way to the end. There used to be. Now there's just pay-line psychics."

"And I doubt they're worth too much," she says, with a smile.

"They are entertaining enough, if you want to toy with them," he says. "The in person ones, not over the phone--in person, that still takes at least a showman's skill."

"I've done that before, it's true. Reached inside the mind, told them all about themselves..."

She shrugs. "But it gets old, you know. Most things do."

"I like to give them nothing," he says, "no leading clues, nothing at all to work with, and see what they tell me about myself. Or sometimes I will be much more open and see whether they believe. They rarely do."

She smiles.

"For that matter, I can hardly believe you, sometimes."