//001// stop me if you've heard this one already.

[knightoflight]

This was...not what he expected the afterlife to look like.  That's the first thought, the first conscious thought, he has as he steps inside, gold optics wide with surprise as he looks around. 

He rubs the center of his chassis idly, as though over an old, aching wound. This isn't death. Or Braid's ship, either.

"So," he muses, quietly, "where am I?"

Comments

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

[OOC: How tall is Wing? Some folks who bring Cybertronian characters in here have the Bar scale them down to human size and some of them leave their bots full-sized, so I figured I'd check first.]

[knightoflight]

_{((ooc: roughly 16 feed? Bayverse carbot is the frame of ref I'm using. and sorry for my fail. .__. ))}

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

[OOC: No worries at all! It's all good. You're doing fine.]

[basic_powers]

"...depends...who're you?"

...yeah that voice came from a little bit above, in the wooden rafters. From a small person, peering over the edge of one of them.

[knightoflight]

"The answer depends on who I am?" He's halfway bemused, halfway hoping that this isn't some case of discrimination.

But first, he has to find the source of the voice, his optics flicking around. Oh. He's not used to looking for life forms so...small.

"Wing. And you are...?"

[basic_powers]

"Tyler, Tyler Marlocke. Welcome to Milliways, Wing." Tyler's just watching, a little curious, there's been a LOT of new people coming in since the apocalypse. "You wanna learn six impossible things before breakfast?"

[knightoflight]

"Is this your world? Are there others like you?" Too many questions, all piling up in his vocalizer.

He tilts his head. "Do I?" He has no idea. This sounds like a password challenge, perhaps?

[basic_powers]

"Not my world of origin, but I call this place home, and there's lots more humans like me around." Tyler answers, clambering down one wooden rafter to get to proper eye-level.

Talking downward was putting a crick in his neck.

"And that six impossible things is sorta from a little introduction pamphlet I found while I was cleaning a while ago. The first impossible thing is that this place has/is/will exist at nearly every point in time at once, including the end of the universe."

[knightoflight]

"How long have you been here?" He watches as the other moves, curious, putting the name to the type. Human. All right. At least thinking about that, taking in the new, was helping him not get overwhelmed with all he didn't know.

But everything the other says just adds more questions to the pile. "That does sound impossible," he says, laughing, almost in spite of himself. "At least for my world."

[basic_powers]

"It just gets weirder and more impossible from there really." Tyler replies when he finally gets to a rafter near eye-level and sits down comfortably, legs swinging.

"I've been here for...well by the calenders used here for nearly five years now....and for reference, I'm almost 10 years old."

[knightoflight]

That did not sound encouraging. "But are they important, these things?"

"You've been here for half your life, then?" He's not quite sure of the conversion to a 'year' but he could do fractions. "Is there no way home?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Oh. Wow. You're way smaller than Liberty Prime."

This is the human who's just stood up from one of the nearby tables. She's perhaps a third of Wing's height at best- 5'3", in human terms- and dressed in dark green fatigues with some kind of silver emblem embroidered on one of the top's pockets.

"Um. Sorry about that... this is a place called Milliways, and I don't know where you came from, but you're in another dimension now."

[knightoflight]

He's used to being outsized by other mechs: Dai Atlas loomed over him. But this Liberty Prime...? "Is he the successor then? What happened to the other Prime?" Or the one they had called Prime, the former police captain.

"Another dimension." He shakes his head. If he's here, he's not dead, right? "Is there a way back?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"He's not anybody's successor that I know of," Ellen says. "He was offlined for two hundred years and they only got him operational again recently. About forty feet tall. Shouts a lot."

About Chinese communists. And how the last domino falls here. But that can be discussed later, once she realizes they're talking at cross purposes.

"Usually most people use the door," she says, indicating the way Wing came in. "And there's the elevator, that leads down to a garage that I think has an exit. I've never found that, myself. I don't know how the portal is controlled but it usually works pretty well."

[knightoflight]

"Really? They are all successors, bearers of the Matrix." The pinions on his shoulder engines twitch. "That sounds like a Prime." Zeta, definitely.

He blinks. "I meant, home? Back to my world. I have...things I need to see through, there."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"That's what I mean," Ellen says. "The door opens back onto whatever world you came in from, assuming you came in through the door. For me, it opens onto Earth. For other people, it opens onto their worlds. I don't know what planet you're from, but that's where the door will go, if you can get through it."

[knightoflight]

"Then why do people stay here?"

He's turning, looking for the door. He thinks of his last memory, the battle outside, the sun shining over his armor, glinting off their weapons, the steady rhythm of swordwork.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Some people stay. Most people just come for a few drinks and a meal and some company," Ellen says. "Then they leave, and then they come back again. It's not a prison or anything, although the door sometimes stops working temporarily- it always comes back online eventually, though."

"Personally, I tend to come here because the resources are a lot better than what we have available at home, and the people are usually pretty helpful. Sometimes it helps to study here, or work on projects."

There's a pause.

"My name's Ellen Park. I'm a human, from a planet called Earth. I don't know if any of that means anything to you."

[3nanashi]

. . .



Okay, no one's ever come into the bar in a mobile suit before, so far as Trowa knows.

(That wasn't his first thought. His first thought wasn't in words; it was the instant, automatic assessment of silhouette and presence and trajectory and threat that a lifetime of warfare in mecha suits teaches you. The war may have ended years ago -- and this mech may be a third the size of the ones Trowa piloted -- but some survival skills last.)

Someone watching Trowa might have seen his head snap around, and his body tense for movement -- subtly, but still with more visible tension than he usually displays in a public space.

When the moment passes, though, with no motions to attack anyone, and then the pilot (Trowa erroneously assumes) speaks through the external speakers . . .

Trowa rises from his table, moving very deliberately, and heads towards the mech.

Eeeee, Gundams! *flail*

[knightoflight]

Wing's still taking it all in: the scale, the furniture, the fact that no one here is like him. And they'd fled the war, but he practiced enough with his swords to have a fencer's awareness of movement.

He turns toward the movement, raising his hands. Everyone has been kind so far, but he is aware, suddenly, that he's carrying his weapons: the enormous Great Sword on his back, his two plasma blades sheathed on his hips.

*cackles* I HAD TO. I COULDN'T NOT.

[3nanashi]

That's usually Trowa's move!

It backs up the general air, though. This pilot is confused, but not hostile; not uncontrolled. Trowa (imperceptibly) relaxes a fraction more.

He doesn't lift his own hands in surrender, but turns them palm-up (and visibly empty) as he halts a comfortable distance away. Trowa's unarmed -- not even anything concealed, very little of which would be useful against a mobile suit anyway -- and his body language, if Wing can read a human's, is saying I'm not a threat.

Not I'm harmless, because Trowa knows perfectly well he's never that, and people who are really harmless don't have this sort of deliberate setting-aside-potential air. But I'm not a threat to you.

"You can stand down," he says, clearly. The mech's external pick-up should be more than good enough to pick up words even over the background noise of the bar, but you never know with unfamiliar tech. "This is a neutral territory. It's a bar called Milliways."

Start with the basics!

[knightoflight]

Oh, confused describes Wing pretty well. More confused when the human seems to want to console him that he is not a threat.

"But there is a war outside of here, then?" Not what he wants to hear. But if there is, he must fight.

[3nanashi]

Trowa tilts his head slightly, in an equivocating gesture like a shrug.

"If there is wherever you came from, it's still there."

"But not here. It's neutral for everyone. That's one of the basic rules."

[knightoflight]

"Oh that...will be there. Always, I fear."

"And...where you're from? What is that like? You're not from here, either." He's guessing, but thinking about how and why he's here is distressing.

[3nanashi]

Trowa shakes his head slightly.

(And doesn't react visibly to the mech's response. Internally: he knows the feeling. Or a feeling like it, anyway. Trowa tries not to project overmuch; it blinds you to what the other person's really thinking.)

"We had war." Wars. "But it's been over for a few years."

The other pilot hasn't gotten out yet. Which is certainly not unprecedented, when your suit's speakers and pick-ups work fine, but kind of at odds with his general attitude. It's still entirely possible that he's just feeling insecure about getting out or about leaving his mobile suit standing in a room, but Trowa is also remembering Quatre and Duo's mentions of Cybertronians.