milliways_bar | (no subject)

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"You have GOT to be kidding me."

Standing in the open doorway, Cisco stares at the bar shaking his head.

With a sigh he tosses his toolbelt onto a bench beside the doorway and steps through into Milliways, letting the door close behind him.

His annoyance at what he had to go through to get here evaporates quickly, and when he takes a seat at the counter he’s all smiles.

"Hi, Bar. Remember me?"

That is absolutely not a squeal of delight when Bar produces a napkin with a cheerful greeting and a mug of Butterbeer to go along with it, anyone who hears one is clearly just imagining things.

Taking a drink, he turns on his stool to observe the bar at large, wondering just what exactly he can get into this time.

[ooc: link leads to a short oom.]

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And the horror continues. Cisco puts a protective arm around his side.

"Are you for real? Geez, and I was scared to buy a new ride because I was worried about car payments."

He shakes his head, "Yeah, no. Mm-mmm, you won't find me waking up in a bathtub full of ice."

"Oh, that's awful," Baze says, slurping his cream slush.

"I can't even imagine machines rising up. Someone here has a problem with killer robots, so he might not be surprised to hear that story."

"It's a really cool movie series, though," Cisco adds, in case that makes Baze feel any better.

"Who uh, who would that be?" he asks, fingers crossed that the name isn't 'John Connor'.

"A soldier named Gabriel Reyes," Baze says, picking up the Suicide cup and taking a gulp of slush.

"Droids in our galaxy are creepy as is, much less trying to kill people. I know during the war with the Separatists, droids were used in battle before clonetroopers."

Like Chirrut, Baze refuses to call those wars by their popular name: the Clone Wars.

Cisco thinks about the name for a minute, then shakes his head, unable to place it.

"Aww, you don't like droids? I think robots are kinda cool, as long as they aren't the killer take over humanity kind. Like Wall-E, you have to love Wall-E."

"Oh, I know Wall-E!" Baze says, grinning around his straw.

"The first half of that movie was great, but the second half suffered from pacing issues and a convoluted plot shoved into the latter part of the film."

Baze Malbus, film critic.

"No flavor. Really little sensation at all unless I am near starvation." Which happened too often. "Though taking in water can at least feel good, even if I don't have any taste buds."

Cisco beams when Baze says he knows Wall-E, it's always a great thing when people get Cisco's pop culture references.

The smile falters, though, on Baze's assessment of the movie.

"Bro, what are you even talking about?! Okay, granted, they got a little cutesy with the message, but the ending of that movie was beautiful. Two artificial beings finding love as humanity rediscovers its own connection with each other and the world they left behind? It's beyond poetic."

Hello, Baze Malbus, film critic, meet Cisco Ramon, film buff and romantic.

"Bummer. So what's the tradeoff? You can't eat, can you like, talk to trees? Grow uber tall like a redwood? Awesome topiary skills?"

Surely there must be something to make up for a burger-less existence, right?

Oh, no, a romantic? Baze has no idea how to deal with one of those.

"The film had several messages, and with the exception of 'don't trash your only home,' they were all clumsily delivered. They spent a heck of a lot of time establishing that the planet was destroyed, and not very much explaining how the humans would resettle a barren wasteland. I mean, I'm sure they were able to, but I bet a lot of them died off in the first year, which doesn't fit the tone of the movie as a whole."

"They had a gigantic spaceship that sustained them for literally centuries" Cisco counters, waving an arm as if the ship was behind him. "They could very easily have lived there while cultivating the earth around them before eventually branching out."

Slurping his slush in preparation to fight Baze on this, Cisco continues. "Besides that, they had all the robots to help with, and with the co-pilot out of the picture they could unseal all those hidden records and find the information they would need to learn how to adapt and survive. The plants in the ending shot showed the earth was already primed for regrowth, the people and robots would just need to help it along."

"Growth is one ability I have. It has its uses." Like scaring the goddamned Justice League out of the Parliament of Trees' sacred ground. "I can essentially become any plant anywhere, from the redwood to the salad you ate for lunch. Though that one is not a favorite.

"And plants can 'talk' to me but only in the sense that they can let me know when they are in danger, or what is going on around them.

"And beyond all that, I can protect the Green. It's a difficult, thankless task, but it needs to be done."

"But why did the film need the copilot going chaotic evil in the first place? The focus shifted between droid vs. nature and loneliness to man vs. computer, and eventually man vs. nature," Baze says, drinking a bit of the butterbeer.

"Wall-E wasn't invested in the copilot conflict, that was all the pilot's doing. In the first half of the film, Wall-E was the clear protagonist. In the second, he was a catalyst, sure, but he lacked agency and focus."

Cisco runs his hands through his hair, not quite believing what he's hearing.

"No, he is absolutely still the protagonist in the end! He totally completes the Campbell's hero arc through the second and third acts."

Hunching up on his stool so that his feet rest on a higher rung, Cisco counts off on his fingers.

"He went through the tests, allies and enemies when he freed the other robots and took on the security drones, the trash compactor scene was him approaching the innermost cave, he 'died', sacrificing himself to save the plant was his moment of choice and crisis, he went back to Earth, was reborn, and in the end 'returned with the elixir' by bringing the people back to Earth so that they could recolonize based on the knowledge that he helped them to gain. Boom, full hero arc. And that's a mic drop."

The declaration is made by the miming action of said mic dropping.

Cisco makes a face when he hears Alec talk about the salad, but it turns interested as the man goes on.

"Okay, for the most part that all sounds pretty cool. Still, I'd miss food, too."

Baze has never heard of Campbell's hero's arc, but clearly Cisco knows what he's talking about. The Guardian laughs, picking up his butterbeer for another drink.

"All right, all right. Clearly I need to watch this movie again, and pay closer attention. I concede the point."

"Hey, I know what I'm about," he assures Baze, taking a drink from his own butterbeer. "Before Barry came along and Caitlin came out of her shell again all I'd do is watch movies and game."

"Oh, yeah? What games?" Baze says, moving on to the cream slush.

"I should teach you Sabaac."

"Video games, both retro and new school. Lots of fantasy free-roaming games, but also the occasional first person shooter," he replies then asks, "What's Sabaac?"

Baze has only tangentially heard of video games, so Cisco might as well be speaking a different language. "Shooter" makes sense to Baze, but why would someone want to virtually shoot someone else, when guns are so plentiful? Maybe shooting people in real life is frowned upon. Weird.

"Sabaac is a card game with a special table with a suspension field. There are face cards--including the Idiot, the Queen, the Evil One, and the Star--and four suits of fifteen pip cards: Flasks, Sabers, Staves, and Coins."

"Yeah, it's, you know, pretty shitty," he says. "I mean, most people have no choice, they get sick and they gotta get work done, or they get hooked on the painkillers and go in for more and more to keep the hits coming, so it's pretty fucked up. Not much to be done about it, I guess, but that's what it is."

Baze wouldn't be the first one to think Cisco is speaking another language, so it's okay if he does.

"Huh. Sounds kind of like poker. Minus the suspension field."

"Seriously sick," he says, shaking his head. "That is way messed up."

Cisco sees even more now why this guy would want to be drinking.

"Glad you got Milliways to come to and get away from that scary."

Cisco isn't going to ask, because it'd probably be rude, but he sincerely hopes this guy doesn't have an organ he's making payments on.

"I tend not to use the word 'cool' to describe my life that often. But thanks." People in the Bar tend not to be weirded out that much, but Cisco seems incredibly relaxed about this.

Cisco is really good friends with a guy who was struck by lightning and can now run super fast, and he spends at least part of his day taking care of a metahuman prisoner who can turn into a poison gas cloud. As long as Alec doesn't try to kill Cisco or convert him to vegetarianism, Cisco is totally cool with the dude.

"What about booze? Does alcohol have any effect if you like, watered yourself with that?"

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