Intro

[riptire]

As first impressions go, one could perhaps do worse than bursting through the door of the Bar with one's hair on fire, brandishing a grenade launcher and draped in the crown jewels of the United Kingdom.

Junkrat likes to stand out.

His manic laughter fades rapidly, though, adrenaline and bravado bleeding away as he takes in the unexpected massiveness of the space he's suddenly found himself in. He turns wildly to look for his bodyguard, only to find himself alone with a blank wall where the door had been.

"Roadhog?" As if that'll suddenly summon the big lug, when it's not like there's anywhere one could hide a man Roadhog's size. Not even here--and what a 'here' this place is! Junkrat's gaze doesn't even know where to land.

"Hooley fuckin' dooley," he says weakly. He's definitely not in the Outback anymore.

Comments

[dont_mention_the_tips]

Will is sitting nearby and has seen some interesting things since he's been here. He has also seen some really interesting uses of found items from the world before the Great Wars. This takes the cake though, first off he's never seen a grenade launcher, or a guy with his head on fire before. He is staring at the new guy with wide blue eyes trying to figure out what to say.

"Uh... hi," he manages.

The young man is wearing his hair tied back and his pointed ears are quite visible.

[riptire]

Pointed ears are not the weirdest thing in Junkrat's field of vision right now, though they won't go without comment once he manages to find his voice. At the moment, he's just relieved to have someone to question.

"What's all this, then?" he says, without even a perfunctory 'g'day' in return. Forgive him, he's usually...sort of politer than this. Or at least outwardly friendlier.

[dont_mention_the_tips]

"The Bar at the End of the Universe," says Wil, "Did you know your head is on fire?"

He is concerned about burns, you know the kind that are hard to treat with the primitive medicine he knows.

[riptire]

"Oh." That seems the only rational response to both of those statements. Junkrat doesn't usually concern himself much when his hair starts smoldering--but at the moment, he doesn't have the option of borrowing any of his bodyguard's healing nanotech. He's come to take that for granted lately, and now one of those embers really is getting to the point where it hurts. He quickly extinguishes it, running his metal hand through his hair with a twitchy sort of energy.

"I always did figure I'd blow meself up eventually, but I always thought bein' dead would involve more... I dunno. Angels and harps. Not so many giant rats. Unless this is the other place? Fire shouldn't hurt in heaven, should it? I know I stole some shit I probably shouldn't've, but sending me to hell for it ain't fair!"

[dont_mention_the_tips]

"This isn't the afterlife, for me anyway," Wil explains, "I mean I have heard that it is for some people here. Do you remember dying?"

[riptire]

"Well, not as such," he muses, "but how would I know, right? I ain't never died before. Any one of them explosions coulda done it and I'd probably be none the wiser. How does anyone know when they're dead?"

[dont_mention_the_tips]

"Do you have a door?" He asks with raised eyebrows.

Just as he points at the area with the door/doors a woman and man enter both wearing OD green BDUS, combat boots and the same patches. She has her long black hair pulled into pig tales and her uniform shirt tied around her waist. The man is doing his best to walk with his head in his hands.

"Vala, we are all uncomfortable," he was saying, "Oh look Milliways... look, we have one more day top in this dig. If you can put up without your curlers and makeup for that long we would all be very greatful. Now, would you please go away?"

"Daniel, I don't see why I had to come on this stupid thing, why are we digging on that planet anyway?"

"Vala...." The conversation is lost as they move away.

[riptire]

"What the--" The arguing pair appears to have materialized directly from the wall. "There's supposed to be a door there, if you're not dead? No, no, no--"

Junkrat will eventually be relieved to learn that he is not, in fact, dead. All available evidence at the moment suggests otherwise, however, and he is not taking it well.

"I can't be dead!" he wails. "I've got stuff to do! Places to be! Things to blow up! I'm too young to die! I was just gettin' started with the whole living thing!"

[dont_mention_the_tips]

"You might not be," says Wil, "It's called being bound. I've been bound here a few times."

He cocks his head and indicates the weapon, "What is that thing?"

[riptire]

Junkrat doesn't respond well to being cooped up in one spot for more than a few minutes at a time, either, but for now, he'll accept it as a preferable alternative to death. He brightens at the question, always eager to show off his destructive little toys.

"This? It's a frag grenade launcher. Built it meself out of scrap. Ain't it a beauty? All I do is I load one of these little bastards in here, look--" He pulls a grenade--painted with a large, lopsided smiley face; it's the little touches--from one of the belts across his chest and loads it into the launcher, aiming it at one of the less populated areas of the bar. "And pull the trigger, and kaboom!"

He pulls the trigger. It jams. Junkrat lets out a shrill noise of distress. "Come on, come on, come on...why's it not working? It was runnin' perfectly just a few minutes ago!"

[dont_mention_the_tips]

Wil had dived under the table.on emerging he wants too happy.

"For fuck's sake! Don't shoo that thing in here! There is a place outside for that!"

[riptire]

Junkrat looks nonplussed. He hadn't intended to hurt anyone by detonating a live grenade inside a crowded room, really, but now that he thinks about it, he supposes he could see how it might not be a fantastic idea.

"Is there? Like, actually meant for blowin' stuff up?"

[dont_mention_the_tips]

"Yeah, people use all kinds of weapons out there," he explains, "Also, you gotta be careful or you're gonna end up in the cells. I hear that even gods can't get out."

He runs a hand through his longish hair revealing his pointed ears.

"There are rules here about violence and stuff."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"... um?"

The grey-haired young woman in the blue and gold Vault 101 suit, with the big black hockey stick strapped across her back, wasn't expecting that from the direction of the door.

She's not really sure what she was expecting, but that wasn't it.

"Were, um, you... were... your hair's kind of...." She wiggles one hand in the direction of her own scalp. "Are you doing that on purpose?"

[riptire]

"Doing what?" Various parts of Junkrat are so habitually on fire that he barely notices anymore. A good thirty percent of his body is made of metal at this point, anyway. One flame does manage to make it down a lock of hair to burn his scalp, though, and he quickly rubs it all out with a yelp of pain.

"Oh. That. Must've been the big kaboom. Is that how I got here? Am I dead? That pig-faced bastard owes me a damn refund if I'm dead, seein' as I was paying him specifically to make sure I wouldn't be..."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Well, you might be dead," Ellen says, relaxing a little as the fire is dealt with. "I mean, some people here are. If you don't actually remember dying, though, you're probably not- I know I'm not. This is Milliways, not the afterlife. It's a bar."

She's introduced a couple of people to the place before, but usually they're not the dead ones.

[riptire]

"I don't remember anything that felt like dying," he says, still scrubbing at the back of his hair with a restless hand. "But the door I opened didn't look like it was gonna lead to no pub, that's for sure. And now it ain't there anymore, so I don't know where the exit's supposed to be. I wouldn't mind havin' a bit of something as long as I am here, but I was on some important business and all..."

He pauses, mentally rewinding. "What do you mean, some folks here are dead?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"It's, um... kind of a... I'd say it's going to sound like something out of a comic book, but I have no idea what the comic books are like where you come from," Ellen admits. "You didn't go through a regular door, you went through a door that opened up into another dimension. One that happens to have this bar and a whole bunch of land in it. It's supposed to exist at the end of time and space, and people wind up coming here from all parts of history and all different versions of history. And, well, sometimes they come here when they die, before they go on to wherever it is they're supposed to go. Sometimes they just come here when they're alive, and they go home after a while. I'm led to understand the living sometimes can't get the door to open, or find that the door disappears behind them for a while before they can leave."

[riptire]

"...That don't sound like no comic book I ever read," says Junkrat. "I don't hold with all that sci-fi mumbo-jumbo. That all sounds like--"

Junkrat isn't a terribly religious guy, but there are certain things he clings to in an attempt to define himself against the robots he feels are taking his world over, and the idea of a vaguely Christianish afterlife is one of them. All of the time and space and multiple dimension what-have-you is just intimidating, and it makes him uncomfortable the same way the robots' religion does.

"--bollocks," he finishes, unable to come up with anything more eloquent. "Maybe I'm just hallucinating. That's got to be it. Somethin' funny got into the hogdrogen supply and I'm just trippin' me balls off."

Much better.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Well, that's possible too," Ellen concedes. "I know there's one man who used to come here when he was dreaming. I'd say I don't know how that works, but I don't know how any of the stuff to do with the door works, so if you want to go with 'hallucination' as an explanation I'm in no position to argue."

She glances around and adds, "Although I've inhaled plant spores that made me hallucinate before this, and the kind of stuff I remember seeing didn't make anywhere near this much sense. My name's Ellen, by the way. Welcome to Milliways."

[riptire]

"Oh, sure. Hallucinating usually involves more giant talking spiders and shit like that, but who knows what I might've inhaled this time." He does come into contact with a wide variety of exciting toxic fumes.

Then again, he's from Australia. The giant mutant spiders are usually real.

As long as nothing's directly trying to kill him at the moment, and there aren't any omnics in sight, Junkrat will do his best to take this in stride. He offers Ellen a handshake, with his rather battered metal prosthetic arm. "Good ta meetcha. Name's Junkrat. Where'd you come here from, then?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen doesn't see a whole lot of people in her world with prosthetics, but she does deal with metal hands on a regular basis. They're just usually a little bigger, because they're power armor- anyway, the point is that she smiles and shakes the hand. "The city that used to be Philadelphia, on Earth," she says, "in the year 2281, if that means anything to you. It doesn't always."

[riptire]

"Oh, sure. I was going to go there meself someday, maybe try and put a bigger crack in that busted-up old bell they got. But wait, what happened to it? The bots came back and flattened it, didn't they? I fuckin' knew they would, and nobody listens to me."

Junkrat, though wrong about this, has some reason for his paranoia. He knows better than most what it's like to come from a place that 'used to be,' for similar reasons to why Philly no longer is.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Um. The only place in Philly that's got a robot problem is the old General Atomics world headquarters," Ellen says, blinking. "The security robots repair themselves and build new ones from parts, and from the occasional unfortunate person who goes over the wall- they call it the suicide zone. What got the rest of the city was world-wide atomic warfare back in 2077."

[cassiefuckingcage]

"Well," remarks a nearby Cassie. "I'll say this - you're the second-most on-fire dude I've ever seen walk in here."

[riptire]

To Junkrat, this is a perfectly nice compliment, and he sets his complete bafflement aside long enough to smile.

"Hey, thanks, mate. Good of you to say. Where is 'here,' exactly?"

[cassiefuckingcage]

"This is Milliways, the Bar at the End of the Universe," Cassie says. "It has a habit of pulling in people from other universes. I think there's a pamphlet that explains most of it."

[riptire]

"A pamphlet?" Junkrat lets out a shrill burst of giggles, an almost reflexive reaction. "Think you'd need more of an encyclopedia to explain something that weird. I'm dreamin', right? Probably ate something off."

[cassiefuckingcage]

"Maybe," Cassie says. "Try slapping yourself in the face really hard. See if that works."