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Enter Alyx Vance.

She's looking very subdued at the moment, and has a moderately-sized stack of papers under one arm.

"Bar? I need a map of North American rail lines in my world, circa 2001. The biggest one you can get me."

She takes the folded paper that materializes and heads for the biggest table in the Bar. Vance Prime has work to do.

[ooc: Open until it scrolls.]

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"That happened because of the fucker in the suit," points out Alyx. "I'm not ready to be grateful to him for anything."

"Even so," Gordon says. "You weren't there."

He looks down at the map, runs his finger over it until he finds Espanola, New Mexico.

"I'd come here a few times before the Incident. Maybe I'd've wound up here anyway without his interference. Either way, if I'd just wound up back on Earth..." He shakes his head. "It wouldn't've ended well."

Alyx lays her hand on top of Gordon's.

"I wish I could've been there to help."

He looks up and smiles at her gratefully. "If you thought I was unimpressive when we first met, it was even worse then," is all he says in reply, though.

A faint, wry smile.

"There's also the part where I hadn't turned three yet."

"There's that," Gordon agrees. "Although you were a very impressive two-and-a-half year old, vocabulary-wise."

"You think so?" Alyx quirks an eyebrow. "I never really spent time with other kids, so I wouldn't know..."

"I looked it up once," Gordon says. "A regular three-year-old's usually able to do sentences around three or four words long. And they're maybe able to stack up eight or nine ordinary blocks. Not build robots out of Legos, that's for sure."

"Huh." Alyx sounds genuinely surprised. "I never thought of myself as being all that smart."

"That's why I was so surprised when I first met you," Gordon says. "I thought you were five or six, and small for your age."

"I don't really remember that meeting," admits Alyx. "I remember that it happened, but that's mostly because of people telling me about it over the years."

"I'm not surprised," Gordon says. "Smart or no, you weren't even three yet. I only remember a few things from when I was three, and they sure weren't meeting some random adult."

"At least I managed to make an impression on you..."

"That's putting it mildly."

"--you didn't have a crush on me way back then, did you? Because that'd be just weird."

"..... bleah."

"That means 'no', I take it."

"Very much no," Gordon agrees. "It was more the kind of impression that left me in shock when you introduced yourself in City 17. You were supposed to be this tall-" He indicates an approximate three-year-old's height. "I didn't know how long it'd been."

Alyx nods, looking away for a moment.

"I try not to think about that aspect of things too much."

"... sorry."

"No, it's okay," says Alyx. "It's just... a little weird, y'know? Dating a guy who's technically twenty-five years older than me?"

"It's not that much easier from my side," Gordon says. "People used to make all kinds of comments about men in their forties or fifties who dated women in their twenties."

"But you're not, really," says Alyx. "I mean, chronologically you are, but..."

"But if you had to identify how old I was by biological or forensic markers, you'd say you were looking at a twenty-seven-year-old-" He pauses. "Huh. You know, if you count Bar time... twenty-eight-year-old male."

Alyx shakes her head. "It's so messed up here. I've had two birthdays here, and you haven't had any."