milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Well, this is new. And that's OK! New is good. Unexpected is not, particularly, and that's why this particular young man's surprise at finding himself wandering strange corridors has quickly melted to suspicion, and then anger.

He schools himself out of it by the time he finds the stairs. He waits at the bottom of them, perfectly still apart from large, dark eyes that flit over the whole place, taking it all in with no expression on his face. Only the Window gets a second look, and when he's finished his surveillance he walks over to it and stands there, staring in mute wonder, one hand pressed to the glass.

He can investigate the room later. This is more interesting for now.

[OOC: Open all weekend! <3]

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Tess scrunches up her nose at him. "Non, but Justin Collier said his Grandpère seen it once. I heard him tell it."

'Justin Collier's probably a liar.'

Most children are liars. Most adults too. Every adult, actually.

He looks at her again. She looks poor.

'Who're you?'

"Collier." Pronounced 'co-yay' and well, Jim just didn't say it right. It's not hard!

"Tess." Is this a trick question?

The correction earns her a dark glance, and then he turns back to the view. It's more interesting than girls anyway. More interesting than anything in his life so far.

'Have you been here before?'

She's not surprised. He's a strange boy to be sure, in her mind, just for talking to her. But in the end all the kids treat her the same. Ignore her, mostly, probably because she corrects them, too. She doesn't understand why everyone gets so upset about it.

"Non, I just come in and seen this," she nods to the window, which are not the mermaid drawings on her bedroom wall. "You know it? It's not Wonderland."

Jim is not used to getting corrected, and he was born resenting being wrong about anything.

'Wonderland? What's that, a story?'

He sneers towards the end of time. Maybe she'll miss it.

'It's called Milliways, this place. It's a pub, only not a proper one.'

"Alice in Wonderland." She didn't miss the sneer. She's used to those.

"A bar?" She raises her eyebrows and looks over her shoulder. She didn't expect them to look like this.

'Oh, yeah. That one.'

It crosses his mind as something he knows, but isn't interesting enough to remember. Stories are interesting for the moments they last, but do not have a great deal of long-term appeal at this stage of his life.

'You never been in a pub before? Real ones don't look like this.'

Not in the 1980s, that's for sure.

Books are Tess' favourite things ever. And not those stupid Baby-Sitters Club books all the other girls read. They're too easy.

"What do they look like?"

'Dark. Grey. Full of smoke, and they smell of old beer. Packed full of men, and the tables and floors are all sticky.'

There's no hint in his tone to give away what he thinks of any of this. It's just a recitation of the facts.

'They're stupid, but at least they're real. There's a hotel upstairs here. Real pubs don't have hotels in them.'

That sounds more like what she'd thought of. "Papa goes to 'em all the time. Come home smelling like sugar, smoke and bourbon."

"What's so wrong with a hotel? They supposed to all big and pretty."

'Not in a pub.'

He sighs. Is she stupid? He doesn't want to spend all his time explaining the obvious, he wants to know about the stars and why they're blowing up. But she's not going to be able to help him with that, and it's annoying. Why does no one know anything?

He turns and puts his back against the glass, wondering what it'd feel like to get sucked out there. Would it be worse to face it, or have it happen now he's not looking?

'Want to go and look around?'

"It's a nice idea." Maybe then all the Papas who sit in them all night could get some sleep and come home in a better mood.

She wants to go look around. Desperately. But, "Won't your Papa be mad if you gone too long?"

'No.'

He pushes off the wall with his shoulders, and walks past her.

'Come on.'

Her Papa will be mad if he notices, which is what she can never anticipate. On the other hand, another kid wants to play with her and that hasn't happened in a really long time.

Decisions, decisions.

She turns and follow. "Where we go first?"

'Down there.'

He points to a doorway next to some stairs. He saw one person wearing a badge go down them, and two more through the door. It must be some sort of staff area, which is bound to be more interesting than staying out here where anyone can go.

He doesn't wait to see if she's behind him, just walks over there. The door, when opened, reveals a corridor with doors off it. He starts trying them quietly, but they're all locked. All save one, which opens onto...some kind of storage area. Again, he doesn't wait for her. He just starts going through boxes.

She follows cautiously. It doesn't look like a place they're supposed to go, but then it doesn't look very special, either. So she chooses the way of acceptance, but hangs back in the doorway watching him.

he looks up eventually.

...ugh, he has seen that look on people's faces far too many times. He rolls his eyes.

'What?'

What look? She's just standing here watching the strange boy be strange! Nothing wrong with that!

"Find anything good?" She honestly wants to know.

It's what everyone else does, when he's not putting a charming face forward. It gets boring to look at.

'Just clothes so far.'

Half of him is tempted to pull it all out on the floor and leave it, but his better judgement has him folding it all and putting it back exactly as it was.

'Come and look, you might find something that fits you better.'

She starts to come in and then stops. Going home with new clothes might get Papa thinking she took money and that's the last thing she wants. But she goes to look anyway, not that she'll take anything.

"What they keep clothes here for?" She asks, peering into a box. "Not laundry, that's for sure."

'They belong to someone, obviously.'

All the same sort of style so far, all the same size. He huffs an annoyed breath, and starts on a new one. Electronics! He paws through wires and bits of old adapters, confused by things that haven't been invented in 1986 but interested all the same.

'Why aren't you taking anything? It's been here for years, no one'll miss it.'

She shakes her head adamantly. "Papa'll think I took money. He'll get real mad." Not that most of the electronics are familiar to her, or that she knows what to do with.

And then she finds a box of books and a moral dilemma begins.

James ignores this for a long time, because he's unearthed a Game Boy from his box. There's even a plug, and a Tetris cartridge. Needless to say, it has his attention.

'So tell him him you earned it,' he says eventually, hitting buttons at high speed, slotting everything together perfectly.

'Or you found it, or someone gave it to you, or you swapped something for it.'

What's difficult about this?

Eventually she decides a book isn't worth Papa's anger today, even though he'll probably be anyway.

She wanders over to see what he's found and watches over his shoulder.

"He won't believe me." And he'd take it away, probably try to sell it. "Don't your Papa ever get mad at you?"