(no subject)

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

[Out of Milliways: "You're walking around in power armor with a guard animal named Dogmeat and you think I'M the dangerous one?"]

The door opens and an armored figure clanks in. After a moment, Ellen pulls her power helmet off and lets out a sigh of relief. "That's better," she says. "Not that I was expecting to come here, but..."

The Bar presents her with a napkin when she goes to get a drink. It's a small price to pay for a little change of scenery, in her estimation, so there's a short (5'2") Korean-looking, heavily-scarred, grey-haired young woman in power armor behind the Bar tonight. On the chalkboard she's written:

SPECIALS

Beer
Whiskey
Vodka
Anything That Has One Of Those In it

Tell the Bartender About The Hardest Thing You Taught Yourself And You Get 50% Off
(NO DENTISTRY STORIES)

... it's been a long day.

Comments

[hot_water]

"I like yer specials. Simple, and to the point," Tahno says, sauntering up to the petite woman behind the bar. At 6'3'', he towers over her, but he's reminded of Oswin, strangely enough. "Mind if I get a shot of vodka?"

[OOC: That's a fun OOM!]

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen's kind of used to being towered over; the Brotherhood's got a lot of tall guys and a fair number of tall women in it. "Not a problem," she says, even if she does have to lean back a little to get a better look at the customer before grabbing a shot glass. "Is there a specific kind you want?"

(Seriously. They have different kinds of vodka here. Back home there might well be multiple varieties but you wouldn't know it by looking at what's left on the bottles.)

[hot_water]

"Anything with cherry in it, if you got it," Tahno drawls, leaning on the counter with languid grace. "You always wear armor?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"When I'm on the road, yes," Ellen says. There's a bottle marked GREY GOOSE CHERRY NOIR; she takes that down next. "Although this is my heavy suit, so sometimes there are other options. It's just that it takes a long time to get into my civilian clothes, so it wasn't worth it to go upstairs and get changed before standing my shift."

[hot_water]

"Yeah, I get that," Tahno drawls, checking the armor out. "Yer pretty cute for a soldier."

He glances at the specials board again. "Oh, right, a story, for the discount. The hardest thing I ever taught myself was a waterbending move that it's easier to demonstrate," he drawls, flexing his fingers. "But the long and short of it is that I freeze a big wave of water, and do a flip off it while the ice dissolves."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Um. Thank you," says Ellen, a little startled. She doesn't get that kind of comment often. As for the armor, it's a decent make, if a little on the elaborate side. The Enclave made their Tesla gear well, and the Scribes who overhauled the captured equipment not only repaired it but painted it a respectably ablative silver before adding her rank markings and duty flags. "I... do my best, I guess."

(Seriously, what are you supposed to say to that? Jerald's compliments tend to run in very different directions.)

"Oh- bending! I know about bending- I mean, we don't have it in my world, but I've seen some of it done here," she says. "Is that what you do for a living, then? People do that professionally, right?'

[hot_water]

"Yer welcome," the boy drawls, unruffled by her reaction. He perks up, though, at her statements about bending. "Oh, you know about bending? That's good."

Truth be told, he's starting to like explaining what bending is to the uninitiated, watching their faces as he demonstrates his control over the water for the first time. "Yeah, people have all sorts of jobs with bending. You can work at the power plant if yer a firebender and can shoot lightening, or you can do what I do, and that's sparring with it. Probending."

He folds his arms. "Yup, I'm pretty much the champion probender."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Nice," says Ellen, and means it. "We don't have anything that even resembles bending at home, unless you count the kind of stuff they used to write about in comic books- super powers, psykers, things like that. What are the competitions like, anyway? All the sparring I've done's been with ordinary people."

Which is not entirely correct, given that no small part of her hand to hand training was done by Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 of the United Nations Space Command Navy, but in this case 'ordinary' just means 'non-bending', so.

[hot_water]

"So in probendin', yer on a raised platform over a tank of water--we call it the drink," Tahno begins, settling into a drawl suited for narrative cadence. He waggles his fingers, and calls his vodka out of his shot to wind around his knuckles. "And yer up against a team of a firebender, waterbender--that's me--and an earthbender. Ya try to push each other off the platform, but there's all sorts of rules based on which zone of the platform yer in, and like, no headshots and stuff."

But rules can be bent as well.

"Whatsa psyker?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen nods. "I'd been about to ask how much water you needed to actually do anything," she admits. "Does it work on any liquid at all? ... um, you can stop me if I'm asking too many questions, by the way."

"Oh- it's an old word for somebody with psychic powers. The ability to move things with their mind, for example." She makes a vaguely wiggly gesture with one hand; being completely without powers herself she can't really demonstrate. "Or to hear somebody else's thoughts, or speak commands into somebody's mind. I only ever met one, and he was just an awful person- he's dead now. I'm not sure how many of them there ever were to begin with, since he was the product of an experiment, not born with his powers or anything."

[hot_water]

"Depends on what you wanna do with it, yeah," Tahno drawls, cocking his head. "And it works on all liquids, as far as I can tell, but not like, metal in a liquid state--that's for a metalbender. It also works on some gels."

He brings his knuckles up to his lips and drinks some of the globules of vodka. "Questions are fine. Shows yer thinkin'," he drawls. "Huh. That guy sounds creepy. I wouldn't want anyone in my head. Why'd you meet 'em?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Huh. I wonder- could you separate water from stuff that was contaminating it?" Ellen says. "Or would the mud and other stuff just come along with it? I mean, I'm just- if you're fighting alongside an earthbender, there's probably going to be a lot of mud all over by the time the match is over, and it just seems like leaving it mud instead of separating the water back out would be a waste. But you probably have plenty anyway..."

She shakes her head. "Part of the soldiering, unfortunately," she says. "Professor Calvert was holding two of my fellow Paladins prisoner, basically, and also using his powers to make this bunch of tribals think he was some kind of god. I was one of the people sent to find our people and bring them back."

[hot_water]

"I can pull water out of flowers," Tahno replies, scratching his neck. "Kills the flower, but when you need it, y'need it, y'know? Purifyin' it ain't a problem."

He raises a brow. "You sound like you ain't got plenty of water at home. That's..." Frankly, that's terrifying; Tahno grew up in a swamp and now lives in a port city--water is all he's ever known. "Brutal."

The boy also shakes his head at her story about Calvert. "Glad ya made it out alive. Sounds like you deal with some nasty shit."

[pro_patria_mortuus]

Oh, hey, it's the woman he spoke to about Rousseau, and about her world's devastation and it's near-total lack of any government at all.

And an interesting special. Huh.

Well, Enjolras had been feeling thirsty. "Pardon," he says, when she's free, "what do you have without alcohol?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Oh," Ellen says. "Um- hm. Let's see... there's water, of course, but there's also milk, several fruit juices, a couple of different kinds of soda- those are fizzy, I don't know if you'll like that- um... coffee, there's always coffee, and there's tea, too, if you'd rather. And some other things but I'm not sure what they are exactly, just that they're marked non-alcoholic."

[pro_patria_mortuus]

"Coffee would be fine, thank you."

With Bar or with a friend, Enjolras will sometimes leave the choice up to them, but that seems rude with a stranger or acquaintance tending bar.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"All right," says Ellen readily, and goes to fetch a mug and the pot. "Did you want sugar or milk with that? ... it's... shoot, I'm trying to remember, we met the once... Enjolras, wasn't it?"

[pro_patria_mortuus]

"Sugar, please. --Yes, I'm Enjolras. You're Madame Park, aren't you? -- or is it properly another title?"

Paladin, or something along those lines? He remembers being bemused by it.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Paladin, officially, but Madame is technically appropriate, since I'm married and all," says Ellen. After some rummaging she finds a container of sugar cubes and adds two to the coffee before passing the mug over. "I don't think too many people here need to address me as military."

[pro_patria_mortuus]

Madame fits a lot better with Enjolras's habits -- and, sad to say, Enjolras's expectations of women -- so it's the one he'll go with, given that response.

"Thank you." For the coffee.

"I don't think I have anything especially interesting for your special," he adds, a little apologetically. "It's far easier to think of things I've learned from others than things I've had to teach myself. I've been very fortunate in friends."

He has taught himself things, here and there, but he's not in the habit of thinking about it. He's in the habit of gushing about his friends and their talents, instead. Also, one of those friends had the kind of life that puts Enjolras's self-instruction into perspective.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"That's quite all right," Ellen says. "I'm on a mission in my world at the moment, and we met a man who apparently taught himself dentistry by reading old textbooks, and I guess by practicing on people who were desperate enough to let him. I was just... I don't know, kind of hoping to hear about other people who'd taken it on themselves to learn things. Things that didn't involve pliers to the mouth."

[pro_patria_mortuus]

There's a great deal that's noble in teaching yourself medicine, and there are worse things than pliers to the mouth. (A relevant consideration here: Enjolras is from an era when anaesthetic didn't exist. Surgery was not fun for anyone. And there was a whole lot of experimental medicine going on.) So he doesn't entirely understand her squeamishness, unless it's about the pain that preceded the dentistry, but if it's that he understands entirely.

Or maybe, despite the horrors of her world, the medicine there is more advanced just as the weaponry is. He can hope so.

"I know a man who taught himself to read and write. A remarkable man, one of the finest I've ever known."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Really?" says Ellen. "That's got to've been difficult. What drove him to it? Most people in the Wasteland who haven't learned to read by the time they're adults don't really bother."

[pro_patria_mortuus]

"He was an orphan. He had no mother, no father; the orphanage didn't teach him his letters, they didn't expect much of poor children. He adopted the world for his mother, and virtue for his father. He learned to read so that he could teach himself history. History of his own country, and of all humanity."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen whistles. "Nice," she says. "For someone to be willing to put in that kind of effort... I hope it worked out well for him, I really do. That seems like the kind of thing that you really want to have pay off, for you and the people around you."