milliways_bar | (no subject)

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An exile wanders into the bar, carrying a loaded crossbow and wearing an animal skin that doesn't cover very much of her at all.

She has just bid farewell to a good friend and a great warrior whom she suspects will soon die in vain, so her mind is uncharacteristically elsewhere as she walks through the portal. It takes several seconds before she notices the change of lighting and the absence of foliage.

Leela blinks several times. Her eyes narrow as she hefts her crossbow to waist height and scans her environs.

"What is this place?" she demands of no one in particular.

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The first question is completely driven out of Corazon's head by the second. "You don't know what booze is? Seriously? Seriously? I mean, do you have stuff that you drink and it makes you feel kind of happy and wobbly? Because if you don't that's very sad."

"The fruit of the janis vine makes a drink that lifts spirits and weakens the mind."

She scowls, keeping her crossbow trained on Corazon. "You are a stranger to me. You are not of the Sevateem, but I do not think you are Tesh. What are you?"

"Uh, I don't know what either of those things are, chica," Corazon says. "I'm not a mutant or a ghoul, if that's what you mean. My name's Corazon Escobar. I come from a little mountain village in Mexico. And now you have me at a disadvantage, as they say." And she's not talking about the crossbow.

"Leela," she says. "I was a warrior of the Sevateem before my exile."

She lowers her crossbow as she thinks more on what the stranger has said. "I do not know of such a place. Is it very close to here? Or did you arrive here suddenly as I did?"

"Where I came from isn't close to here," Corazon says, relaxing a little now that Leela is no longer drawing a bead on her. "This place isn't really close to anywhere that anyone comes from, I think. Pretty much everyone gets here by accident, at least at first. Bright side, though, is that you get a free drink if you're a new visitor. Say, I'll bet you've never had tequila before, but whether it's to your taste or not, the next drink's on me."

"Then I must be very far from home," she says. "The door to this hall must be very powerful magic indeed.

"I've not had tequila before, and how can a drink be free? Are beverages normally imprisoned in this place?"

"What? Imprisoned? Nonononono, that's not what I mean," Corazon says. She runs a hand through her hair as she tries to think of a tribal-friendly explanation. "I mean, you don't have to pay or barter anything for your first drink. That's what I mean by 'free.' After that you can run up a tab, which means the Bar will give you stuff now and you can pay for it later, but you have to make good every so often. Comprende?"

Leela frowns. "I'm not sure I understand. Do you mean in exchange for goods or for work? Among the Sevateem food is distributed in order of their contribution the tribe and the hunt. First the leader, then the hunters and preparers, and so on. So it is for all who are not too young or too old to work."

The Sevateem don't do a whole lot of trading, on account of there not being any other non-hostile human tribes on their world.

OOC: Yeah, I know fuck all about pre-agrarian economics. Had to fill in the details that Chris Boucher didn't, though.

Corazon thinks, but fortunately does not say, goddamn tribals. "Well, you can work here to earn bar credit," Corazon says, "but you can also trade in goods for things of equivalent value." She doesn't feel up to explaining the concept of currency.

"I can hunt," she says, "or mend holes in the building. I shall do this to earn my keep for as long as I am stuck here."

"I think there are already people who fix the roof and stuff but yeah, hunting game for the kitchens is good. Just don't bring them those freaky-looking demon rabbits - I've heard they taste gross," Corazon advises. "You might not be stuck here, though. Can you still see the door you came in through? I know, sounds like a stupid question, but humor me."

She turns her head toward where she came in. "I do not see a door. It seems that whatever or whoever brought me here intends to keep me here."

She had already been operating under the assumption that there was no way out. Whoever was in control of this door's sorcery would hardly go through this much trouble just to let her escape.

"Uh-oh. You're Bound then. That happens," Corazon says apologetically. "But you'll eventually get back to the same time and place you left. Eventually."

"The same time?" Her brow furrows as she ponders for a moment what that might mean. "Do you mean that...time stands still when one is in this place?"

"Yeah. For you, anyway. Nobody'll notice you've been gone."

"They already know," Leela says quietly. "They have cast me out."

"Shit, that's harsh," says Corazon. "I mean, unless you did something really bad, like murdered someone. Although if you did, I guess you wouldn't tell me."

"I did not kill anybody," she says. "I was exiled for profaning the god Xoanon."

"Oh, you mean for heresy," Corazon says. "I've heard that happens in some towns back in Mexico, but only the really fucked-up ones."

"The leader of the tribe has a great assault on the Tesh to free him from the Evil One. It will fail, many will die, and Xoanon is not real."

"I get it," Corazon says. "It's that kind of thinking that caused the Great War way back. And you got yourself in trouble for being the only sane one in the room."

"I do not understand why none of the others speak against it. There are elders in the tribe who remember many of these attacks. The man who was leader before Andor took charge after one of them. He was fourteen."

She swallows deeply. It was going to happen again. But it hasn't happened yet.

"And your Great War was similar?"

"Kind of. It happened a very long time before I was born. But basically there were these two big tribes, the Americans and the Chinese. All the other tribes were kind of divvied up between them, because they'd either allied with or been conquered by one of the big tribes." That actually took a few generations and was rather complicated, but Corazon's trying to summarize here.

"Anyway, the Americans and Chinese both developed these really powerful weapons - weapons that could burn and flatten miles of land in the blink of an eye, and leave deadly poison in the air and water for years to come. They built lots and lots of these weapons, and eventually, after a couple of generations, the leader of one or the other of the tribes got stupid enough to use them. Nobody's really sure who fired first, but it doesn't really matter."

"Your world is very different from mine," she says, "But I think I understand. Few would be left alive after such a war. At least the smallest of our children are spared from participating in our attacks."

"Yeah, so they can grow up to die in a stupid war when they hit puberty," Corazon says sourly. "Sorry. Now and again I say things I really shouldn't, on account of getting shot in the head a while ago."