milliways_bar | (no subject)

Sahaal's finishing off his dinner when he feels the chill on the back of his neck. He looks up, and he's certainly surprised.

So there's someone else in Milliways with a suit of power armour.

He's even more surprised when he sees who's under the helm.

"Ellen? I haven't seen you in months."

Ellen offers a rueful smile. "Sorry about that," she says. "The door hasn't been very cooperative for me, for some reason. I've always had trouble getting one to show up when somebody else was in my immediate vicinity. I think it might be responding badly to the constant presence of robots. Have I missed much?"

"It depends on how you define much. There was an attack by something called a Balrog, a very nice New Years party, and some festival called Christmas."

There might have been other things, but he's been out of the bar a lot recently.

"Huh. No idea what a Balrog is, but it looks like everything's still here and more or less in one piece," Ellen says after some consideration. "I'm going to guess somebody killed it? The last thing I need is to run across something with too many teeth the next time I bring my Brahmin here."

Seriously. That one incident with the giant bear made of fire was not her idea of fun at all, and that only affected her. Cattle faced with some kind of Milliways monster would... not end well.

"Thank you, regardless. How've things been for you?"

"To tell you the truth, I don't know either. It was big, on fire and carried a whip, that's all I can tell you." And, some of it's finger bones now hang from his armour, but he's not going to mention that. Some people are rather touchy about battle trophies.

"Yes, thankfully. I blinded it with some flash grenades and killed it while it was incapacitated." Sahaal's had worse challenges, but that thing was pretty hard to kill. Even for him.

"I've been fine, thank you. I think I'm getting accustomed to Milliways, which I'm not entirely sure is a good thing."

(OOC: Not sure how frequently I'll be able to answer, it's getting late where I am. Don't worry, I don't intend to abandon this, we just might need to slowtime.)

Edited 2018-01-08 21:51 (UTC)

"So something smarter than a deathclaw or a behemoth, then," Ellen says. "I mean, I've fought things that were on fire once or twice before, and huge things, but nothing smart enough to have a weapon of its own."

Well, to be fair, behemoths do use weapons. But there's a difference between successfully carrying a whip in a fight and just smacking people around with a length of sewage pipe with a fireplug on the end.

"Congratulations. On the winning thing, I mean. Getting used to this place can cause problems when you go home, I've found..."

(OOC: no worries, slowtime is awesome)

Edited 2018-01-08 21:52 (UTC)

Sahaal doesn't know what those are, but he can guess. "No, this thing was definitely smart. It knew how to handle that flail like it was trained with it." Besides which, a dumb beast flailing around wouldn't have been able to injure him like it did.

"Thank you." He doesn't often get thanked for killing things, but then again, he's usually not killing massive flaming monsters.

Behind his goggles, his eyes narrow. "What do you mean by that? What problems have come up for you?" He's been going back and forth between the 42nd Millennium and the end of the universe for months now, and it's been fine.

"Sleeping, for one," Ellen says with a shrug. "The beds here are so new and so nice that getting used to them puts me off being able to sleep on the ground properly when I go home. Seeing everything here as new and easy to get and accessible makes it harder to handle scrounging for the ruined bits of factories from two hundred years ago. The Bar makes things seem too easy, too safe..."

"Oh. I understand. Before I came here, I was sleeping in a bucket seat in a cramped Warp-capable shuttle. It took me a while to get used to pillows again."

He sighs, and orders a bottle of amasec. "To be honest with you, the only reason that I don't have that problem is that I'm basically living in the Bar at this point. Going back home is more of a day trip than anything else." He might call it a day trip. Most other people would call them guerilla actions.

"It can be useful that way," Ellen admits. "Especially if there's something medical going on. Easier to recover from an injury or radiation sickness or something if you spend recovery time here and go back just often enough that people think you're just a fast healer."

"I heal fast anyway, but it doesn't hurt to be able to make myself more able than my healing factor might be able to."

He takes a sip of his drink. "You mentioned scavenging in factories earlier. What exactly is it that you do in your world?"

"Me, personally?" says Ellen. "I'm a Paladin in the Brotherhood of Steel. We're an order of soldiers and scholars who're trying to recover as much of the advanced technology of the old world as possible, partly to develop new tech and partly to keep the really dangerous stuff out of the hands of people who'd just use it to make all the same horrible mistakes as before. Right now I'm in command of the Brotherhood mission to the city of Philly, where we're working through the remains of the old General Atomics world headquarters. They built robots and power systems, mostly."

"The Brotherhood of Steel." Sahaal tries it out on his tongue. "It sounds like a Space Marine chapter. Not that's necessarily bad. It sounds like you're doing the right thing. Some technology just shouldn't be out in the universe. You have to ensure that the guardians who decide what is and isn't safe are competent, though." That isn't an underhand insult. He's seen Mechanicum magi bring utter disaster through poorly understood tech-relics.

"Robots? As in, automata?"

Edited 2018-01-09 23:10 (UTC)

Ellen nods. "Some of the old tech should be recovered, recorded, and destroyed rather than stored any lomger," she says. "Even the Elders and senior Scribes can make very bad judgment calls if they aren't careful. We do our best to make sure that doesn't happen, but..." She shrugs. "We also train to make sure we can respond appropriately in the event that things go horribly wrong. Just in case."

"Mostly? I think? I mean, when I hear 'automata' I tend to think of machines with a few preprogrammed tasks and sets of behavior. The robots General Atomics made tended to have more autonomy and built-in decision capacity," Ellen says. "They were still built to serve and obey, though."

There's a lot Sahaal could say. Warnings of doom from his home universe, about the dangers that come with thinking machines. Horror stories from the Dark Age of Technology, and fragments of history made into whispered myths. He could lecture with what little knowledge he has. He could give his approval, which would mean little. This Brotherhood of Steel seem to know what they are doing, and it's no business of his how they conduct their universe.

He settles for a nod and a smile. "I should have said this earlier, but thank you. You helped greatly in orientating me with Milliways, and I owe you for that."

Ellen nods soberly. "You're welcome," she says. "This place... it can be confusing for anybody new. It's only fair to try to make it easier for people to handle."

"In some ways, I'm quite glad I haven't had to ease anyone into Milliways," he says, "I have no idea how I'd explain some if the aspects of the bar."

The malevolent karaoke machine. What's outside the warpshitting window. How Bar works. To name but a few.

"I think they composed a written introduction once," Ellen says, "but even if you handed it to someone they'd still have questions. And that's assuming they can read whatever language it was written in. As it stands I'm just glad people believe what I tell them about the bar. It's easier than trying to get them to understand conditions back home, even with how weird it is here."

"I know, I read the booklet. Someone should update it, I could barely understand it. Half the information was outdated, the other half referred me to individuals I've never heard of." Sahaal would do it himself, but he's not really that much of a writer.

He chuckles. "You're serious? I can't see how a version of Earth could be more insane and reality-defying than the quite literal end of the universe."

Ellen sighs. "I think-" She glances over at the window. "I think for a lot of people the end of the universe is just too much to comprehend. They just... they either blank it out, or they go 'oh, okay' and don't really think about it much after that. But if you're from Earth, and someone else is from another version of Earth, you've got the idea in your head that Earth is supposed to be a certain way. Any kind of change from the way Earth is supposed to be strikes you as really, really wrong, because it's not the way things are at home. So they don't understand that going from one city to another isn't as easy as packing up a few possessions and driving in a vehicle for a few hours, because in their world there are always working vehicles and there are no deathclaws or radscorpions or yao guai or slaver gangs along the way to make sure you never reach your destination, and there's enough resources to make moving around an easy thing in the first place. The idea that someplace with the same name as home is that different really bothers people."

"I don't understand. Really, I don't. You say people get confused over tiny changes between Earths. Let me give you an example of what my universe is like. For the more advanced patrons, space travel seems to be just engaging a hyperdrive and getting where they need to go. Not where I come from. Space travel is basically using an arcane drive to tear a hole into an alternate dimension called the Warp, or the Sea of Souls, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a cross between a pagan hell, the afterlife, the literal realm of the Dark Gods, which exist and hate humanity, and which drives men insane when they look at it. The ship you use to travel through the Warp is the size of a city, has a crew of thousands at least, and functions through technology so ancient we don't know how it works anymore. People die going through it every day, because daemons manifest inside the ship even through the shields and slaughter entire decks of crew ratings. I could go on, there's plenty about my universe, including myself, that I've found out isn't just different to other worlds, but quite literally breaks the laws of reality."

He sighs. "Sorry. I...I shouldn't rant at you like that, it's just that I feel that if I can get used to this place and the multiverse and everything else, then other people should be able to handle what seem to me to be small changes. I know it's hard for some of the patrons here, and for others they see it as a massive change, but... I don't know.

"It's all right," Ellen says after a few minutes of blinking. "I'm just- I had someone here, once, yell at me for practicing out back with my shotgun. Because it was too dangerous, he said. Even though I was at the firing range. When I told him I was acting safely and I was trying to keep up my skills for defending myself back home, he thought I lived in some particularly dangerous city on an otherwise civilized Earth. And when I told him how bad the Capital Wasteland was he started shouting at me that if things were so terrible I ought to move to Canada, which is a country on Earth so far north of the Capital that I have no idea whether anyone even knows if there's anything still standing there."

No, Ellen is never going to forgive Nick Angel for that.

"And I've tried to understand why people are that stupid about things, I really have, why they don't seem to understand that my world is the way it is but they're happy to accept that this place exists, and what I told you before was just... the best I could come up with."

Pause.

"I probably ought to be more shocked about the hell daemon warp thing, I know. But I've fought alongside some beings here... I can believe stuff like that is out there."

Sahaal takes a swig of his drink. The idea of something equalling a daemon is worrying, but he's not surprised. "Be very, very glad you will never see one. Even I wouldn't want to take one on in battle." He pauses. "You know, I'd quite like to see your world someday. It sounds... different. To most of the places I've heard about here, and to where I come from, certainly. Besides, I've always wanted to see what my homeworld looked like in the past. Or, really, at all."

"I'll have to see about bringing you through at some point, then," Ellen says. "I've brought people from Milliways across before, although I have orders not to tell people other than my husband and a handful of superiors about the place- it'd touch off a lot of argument over whether the Brotherhood was obligated to try and reach Milliways en masse if too many people knew about it. Mostly I just bring people in from the Bar and let the others around me draw their own conclusions if they see me with someone unusual." She smiles a little. "I have it on good authority that the primary rumor is that I'm in contact with a civilization of highly secretive underground-dwelling mole people who surface to help me in time of need, if they surface at all."

Sahaal smiles. "Well, I'm originally from a glorified cavern, so it's not much of a lie."

He pauses. "Thanks. Is there anything I should keep in mind in your world? Basic ground rules, people I shouldn't kill, that sort of thing?"

He doesn't blame her for not telling others about the Bar. If anyone else ever came through from the 42nd Millennium, there would be chaos. Quite literally Chaos, if it was extremely unlucky.

"If they attack you first you're okay to fight back," Ellen says, "almost always. I'll show you what the symbols and colors are for the Brotherhood and a few of our allies just in case. I doubt they'd actually attack, but accidents happen and it's best to know who you're dealing with. There'll be people who look like humans with next to no skin and varying degrees of hair or cartilage left; some of them are just regular people with chronic cutaneous radiation poisoning and some of them are completely feral maniacs who'll try to tear your face off even though you're in power armor and about two feet taller than they are. The feral ones can be killed without a real problem, but the others are treated like anyone else, so they fall under the heading of 'if they attack first go ahead and fight back'."

"If it's alive and it glows, it probably either gives off gamma radiation or moves at an abnormal speed for its species. If it doesn't speak, doesn't glow, and doesn't walk on two feet, and you kill it, let me know and I'll see if it's fit for butchering. We try not to waste a kill if we can avoid it."

"I'm currently in the Philadelphia area, which is mostly ruled by ice gangs under the leadership of a man who's called the Blood Prince, but he holds his position by fighting the other gangs to a standstill in a gladiatorial tournament on ice every year. If someone decides to try challenging you to a fight, make sure to ask whether they mean 'here or in the rink', because it's bad form to get into a fight on the spot if what they mean is an ice throwdown. Those are almost always meant to be fought to submission rather than first blood or a kill."

"I'll get some more info together for you before I bring you across, just to be on the safe side."

"Right, so if someone looks like an irradiated and burnt human, but can speak and understand me, I only kill them if they're a threat. But, if they don't have any higher motor function, then I can kill them first with no problems. Is that about right?" Sahaal doesn't want to make a bad impression on Ellen's people, and killing the wrong thing is a very good way to do that.

So there's edible wildlife. That immediately puts this expedition above most of the campaigns Sahaal's waged down the years. No survival rations means a happy Night Lord.

"I can deal with gangs, and I've participated in duels before. Just as long as they aren't too picky about how I win, I'll be fine on that front too. Don't worry, I'll read whatever extra you bring me beforehand."