milliways_bar | (no subject)

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The specials show up on the board the minute he gets there. Bartending's fun -- at least he had fun the last time he was back here -- and if nothing else, he'll have paid off that new set of clothes Bar gave him after his trip to Ellen's world. The last thing he wants is to be known as some kind of freeloader. He's always paid his way, ever since he was seventeen and found himself alone, and there's no reason he'd stop doing it just 'cause he's stuck here.

Tonight's Specials

Easy Action
Between the Sheets
A Goodnight Kiss

The specials make him laugh but hey, they're kind of appropriate and at least they go in progression. He adds one more thing to the board before setting up shop for the duration:

Pyramid advice & info always free

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"Your drinking vessels, too," says Thalestris, and indicates the one in front of her. "I'd thought them carved from crystal at first. But there was someone here who said no, they were blown by mouth; I've never heard of anyone strong enough to do that. I know I've never seen something so fine and clear to drink from, unless it was worked with gold as well."

"The glassware?"

No, Sam, he tells himself, the frakking golden goblets. Of course she means the glassware.

"These things start out as sand. Heat it up high enough and it turns into glass and yeah, you put a gob of the melted sand on the end of a long enough pipe and blow into it, and they take shape. Where I'm from they're made by machines, not all by hand, but a lot of artisans still do glass-blowing. Glasses, bottles" -- he points to the Kumiss bottle -- "lamp shades" -- he nods up" -- and jewelry. Probably a lot more stuff than that, too, but I'm no artist. Just a ball player."

A ball player turned resistance fighter, but no one cares about that. Not here.

She shakes her head in wonder and says, "I've seen glass jewelry. The harbor-folk had it, and sometimes glass beads reached us in the mountains, through this trader or that. But never anything so fine or clear as this; you could see forever through it."

Then she laughs and says, "My family were herders. Goats, mostly. What you know about the craft of these things is still more than I."

"And you know more about goats than I ever will, so we're even."

That's... kind of the way it goes. Everyone's knowledgeable about something, even if it's only themselves.

"And you've already told me more than I ever knew about what things are like where you're from. I haven't even heard of those places before, so you're still a step ahead of me."

He's not just being generous, he's being honest. It's a much bigger universe than he imagined. Much bigger.

"I've found it means very little here," says Thalestris. "Everyone here speaks of places I've never known and acts as if I ought to have heard of them, even if I never set foot there; and they have words here, too, that I've never heard. Not even Greek ones, which would at least sound like something I might hear in the Bull Court."

"Most people are from Earth. Which... I have to tell you, that's nothing more than a legend to people in my time. Most of us don't even believe it exists. It's only a myth. So I know what you mean when people talk about places you've never heard of."

Same thing with strange words, although he's not a kid and can usually infer some kind of meaning, somewhere along the line, sooner or later.

"It's why I try not to make any assumptions. But let me make you this offer: if there's something you don't know and you don't know who to ask or don't want to ask for whatever reason, you can always try me. If I know it, I'll explain it. If I don't, I'll tell you that, too."

Seems like a fair enough deal to him.

Her brow wrinkles at that. Eventually she says, "I would have thought- but none of them look as if-"

She looks over her shoulder at the mass of patrons.

"The first Earth Men made swords of stone, if that is what you mean, and none of these folk look as if they would be so desperate. And the Shore Folk call themselves Minyans, but the Hellenes call them Earthlings; but there are such folk in the Bull Court and not one of the people here looks anything like an Earthling at all. Or are they only taking a long way around to say that all men come from the Earth Mother and return to Her in the end?"

Should he tell her? Sure, what the frak, right?

"I'm from the planet Caprica, and that's... I don't even know where, in comparison to Earth, so I can't tell you what they mean. Maybe some of the gods here could tell you."

He's definitely no god. Never claimed to be, not even close. Despite what some of the people in the press used to call him.

She looks at him for a while.

Eventually she says, "I haven't much Greek yet, though I have been practicing. Perhaps not enough to understand what you're speaking. The... wanderer? The other word is a name, I suppose, it isn't any Greek I know. And it's no word of my people, either."

She has a feeling she's missing something fundamental here, as badly as that mad fellow the older dancers spoke of, who had apparently died believing there was only the Sky Father and that the Earth-shaker and Mother Api (or Dia, or whatever name you liked for her) and all the rest were only dolls that men had made.

It's not all that hard. He takes one empty glass, sets it down, then does the same with another a little distance away. "Earth," he says as he points to the first glass. "And this one's Caprica. Planets where we live, floating around out there." He nods to the window, the one with the spectacular frakking light show, the one that's the end of everything or so he's been told.

A third glass goes out on the bar. "This place. You live there, I live there, and we come together here. When you say Earthling you're talking about a term for a specific and small group of people, but I'm talking about the population of an entire planet."

Oh, yes, the scrying crystal, in which one can see visions even without having breathed the smoke or drunk the oracles' cup. She doesn't watch it much. It gives her a headache. If some goddess wants to send her a vision, she's sure it'll catch her eye when the time comes.

She looks down at the clear cups and nods slowly, uncertainly. "I'm sorry," she says. "I still- the word isn't-"

She scowls in frustration, folding her arms over her chest. "If the cups are countries, or tribes or clans or some such, that I understand. If they are islands, maybe, that also I understand. Your Caprica, it's very far away, in the-" It takes some thought to remember the words of the sailors' tales on the long voyage to Crete. "In the blue seas that drowned Atlantis, beyond the Pillars of Herakles. A floating island, maybe? Is that why you call it that word?"

She looks up at him and says, in very careful Greek, "πλανήτης. Planetes. It means 'wanderer'. That is the only thing I have ever heard anyone mean, when they speak that word."

Oh.

Oh. She doesn't--

"Let's just say for now that yeah, the glasses are countries. Island nations, discrete entities. This one's yours, this one's mine, and this third one is this place." Maybe she doesn't even know what a bar is, or a booth or a bathtub or even some of the clothes people here are wearing. That's...

Wow.

"And the blue seas, they're all around us. So to get from your world to mine, the travel would take a really long time. And then when you got there, all the customs and people and clothes and food would be different from what you know. Each of these is like its very own little world."

He could take it a step further and say that the blue seas are really blue skies, but one thing at a time.

"Does it make sense that way?"

Well, she does know what a bathtub is, in a way. But only because the Cretans had them. Her people bathe in rivers or rain. As for the rest... well, there are foreigners from every corner of the world here, in every color man is made in, and so there will be every kind of custom to contend with. That much, she grasps.

But she nods a little, as it makes much more sense than the person who had tried to say that this wine-shop was floating in the sky somewhere. As if anything so big could stay up, when thunder-stones smaller than a man's fist must fall!

"Sense enough, I think, yes."

"Okay." They can go with that for now. He knows when he first got here the place pretty much threw him for a loop, and he knows bars and bar patrons and even if he wasn't expecting one to show up in place of that market, he wasn't putting anything past the Cylons.

He can't imagine showing up here without that much of a frame of reference, even though it's not her first time here. Frak it, it might as well be.

"Sorry about the confusion over the words." Ultimately it doesn't matter what someone calls a world away, it's still a world away. Whether in someone's mind it sits in the skies or in the heavens or in the oceans really doesn't matter when you don't have a way to get from one to the other. "It's just that different people have different ways of saying things, that's all."

She calls the representation of the planets a cup, he calls them glasses, but they both serve the same purpose.

"But you got it right: my Caprica, it's very very far away."

"It's all right. In the Bull Court they speak more languages than I know how to count," says Thalestris, "so we all learn what Greek we can, and have that in common. But even then we confuse each other with the words as like as not. So that is nothing new, and I'm only sorry I didn't understand."

"No, no, it's good. It's all good. No one's fault, just different ways of saying things."

Frak, but he's no teacher. He can take someone from rookie ball player to pro, but he can't take someone from I don't know what a planet is to space travel. Lucky for him, that's not his job.

"Tell you something, though: you're gonna be great at what you do. You've got the right attitude." Talk about taking the bull by the horns: she'll do that literally. "I think you're gonna be able to do anything you set your mind to, Thalestris."

At least he hopes so. It'd be a frakking shame if it didn't work out, 'cause it's not like she has any kind of choice in the matter. Other than to stay here, he guesses.

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