milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Some days you get explanations, and some days you do not. This is one of the latter days; there is a man in a respectable sportcoat, tumbler, and pants behind the bar, and he is wearing a sparkling silver spandex wrestling mask.

"Señora Bar is asleep for the next few hours," Santo announces. "I will be serving as tender tonight."

He would have come sooner, but it's been a very busy week in Mexico City.

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Coyote is leaning against the bar, staring at him.

She is apparently completely fascinated by the spectacle.

"And what are you, when you are at home?"

"A luchador, señorita," says Santo pleasantly. "Professional wrestling in the arenas of Mexico City, mostly. And yourself, if I may ask?"

"Are you really?" Coyote says, delighted. "How marvelous. Are you any good?"

Apparently she left her tact at home this evening.

"I am Coyote."

"So they tell me," says Santo, "and I have a good number of belts and trophies to show for it."

This is something in the way of modesty for him. It's one thing to have a reputation, but when it doesn't follow you to a place talking about your record sounds like bragging.

"A pleasure to meet you, Señorita Coyote. They call me El Santo."

She chuckles. "Then it is a pleasure to meet you as well. Do you prefer your whole title, or do you let close friends drop the 'El'?"

Admittedly, if Coyote had a title like that, she might make everyone keep the 'El'. Like 'Doctor', or 'Esquire'.

"People who know me call me Santo," he says. "It's a different matter in the ring, of course. Or being introduced to reporters or other professionals. Mostly here they just call me Santo. You can, if you like."

"Then I will!" Her grin is bright, white, and full of teeth that are just a little too sharp. "And what are you serving tonight, Santo?"

"Anything the lady's heart desires," says Santo, "so long as I can read the label, of course. There are bottles here from countries I've never had to visit, and I fear I can't vouch for their contents."

"Other universes too, I should think. And planets." But Coyote doesn't care about alcohol from other planets. Earth has enough.

"Tell me your favorite beer, and pour me a glass. One for you too, if you don't mind drinking on duty."

Edited 2013-11-07 04:09 (UTC)

"Negra Modelo goes down very well, I think," says Santo, and fetches down two glasses. "I have no objection to the idea, although I plan to make it last a while. If I were just a patron it might be another story."

"I have to ask- do you come here often? I find myself in and out of the place from time to time, but... not so frequently as I might. If there are regulars here, I'm afraid I don't know them."

"Not as often as I used to," Coyote confesses. "It used to be you could find me here almost every week. At least a few times a month. But then again, there were people here that I could not meet anywhere else."

Cross-universal romance sucks, and not in the good way. Especially after the end of the universe explodes, and comes back together just that little bit different.

Edited 2013-11-07 04:51 (UTC)

"Good company makes a great difference," Santo agrees, and passes the full glass Coyote's way. "I take it they no longer come here? My sympathies. Losing touch with people important to you sits hard on a parson."

She takes a long swallow before replying. "Yes. It does. I find other amusements here, now. And Milliways does not lack for interesting scenery. However, the nostalgia does sometimes win out."

"A thing I think we can all understand," says Santo. "I spend enough time traveling from one wrestling match to another, or on the trail of this danger or that, to appreciate a place worth coming back to now and again."

"Danger?" Coyote says, perking up. "Outside of wrestling?"

Not that the pop culture version of wrestling most common in the present can't be dangerous, but it's not quite the same.

"Oh yes," says Santo. "We were briefly invaded by the Martians about a year ago. And there have been other creatures- usually the result of some mad scientist, or some fellow who never quite got over the way the Second World War ended. I have been called on to intervene in a few of these situations."

"...Martians." Her lips twitch. "Really?"

This guy would be unbelievable if he weren't so...believably sincere.

"Monsters I get too, sometimes. But no Martians."

"One ship's worth, but very dangerous nonetheless," says Santo. "They had a disintegration ray they were only too happy to use. If Earth's atmosphere had not been so very dangerous to them that they had to take medicine repeatedly in order to breathe, we would have had a much harder time of it."

He tilts his head curiously. "What sort of monsters have you had to face?"

Coyote really likes this guy.

"Bears, monsters shaped like mountains that eat people, witches, giant skunks, that sort of thing."

"More than I have had to face, then," says Santo. "Although the giant skunks seem like the sort of thing someone might try to create and turn loose on an unsuspecting world. What did you do?"

"The first time, we plugged him up with a rock, and he exploded."

A pause.

"The second time, I was more proactive and used a grenade."

"The second time?" Santo says, eyebrows rising behind the mask. "Tough creature, to come back from something like that."

"It...was a thing. A Milliways related thing, I think. It might have partially been my fault," Coyote admits in a sudden fit of veracity.

"So I needed to clean it up. So to speak." She and Raven emphatically did not stay and clean up the corpse, but it was very definitively dead when the left.

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