milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Outside, in the darkest dark of the night...

There's a firework display going on, brilliant and lurid and red, red, red, the thunder of the rockets and firecrackers and crosettes rolling around the mountains like cannonfire, until the sky is full to dripping with crimson glitter.

Watch the excitement and the beauty for long enough, and you might come to find it unsettling. You might find yourself on edge, might even find yourself ... fired up. Raging, even.

And stood on the ground, at the very axis of the blood-red chaos above her, you might find a beautiful woman with a brilliant, glossy scarlet smile on her perfect lips, staring with glee at the wonderful destruction she's wrought. A slim taper is held lightly between her long ruby nails, lit with a smoky flame that never seems to go out.

...Well, a girl has to have some hobbies.

Happy Bonfire Night, Milliways.

[OOC: PAAAAAAARTY POST! So your pups don't have to get too close to Her if you don't want... Open til it scrolls!]

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Oh boy, fire! Fire is great.

Eden's watching intently, but appears largely un-raged, completely unfired up. But then, for anyone who can sense such things, he doesn't seem to be experiencing any emotions at all -- he's reacting, sure, giving whoops of childlike delight with every explosion, but it's an entirely hollow affect.

(Then again, for those who can sense such things, Eden barely registers as being present at all. He's like a mobile dead spot for emotion, thought, magic, all that jazz.)

Still! Fire. Red. What bliss.

The red is hard to miss through the windows and Cassian goes outside to stare up at the sky, one hand tight on his belt and the other curling into itself. He knows fireworks are for joy but these are on that fine edge of beautiful and horrifying.

Klaus, wandering because his high is evaporating and the ghosts are just stupidly annoying (and he's hating past-him just a ~~lot~~ little because someone didn't refill his stash here and so he's going to have to go back to his own world which is cold and currently contains the most recent ex that he's dodging because he's much more of an asshole than he was bargaining for and...) ...

Wait, what was his point again?

Oh, right.

So he's wandering, and feeling a ~~lot~~ bit like trash, and...

Wow.

The fireworks are really something else, just gorgeous, even in his current state he can see that. He bets they'd be even more amazing if he was high.

Tragically still not high.

He doesn't notice it, when he starts shaking with something other than cold. He doesn't notice at all, too busy with his spinning thoughts that trip and stumble and fall into memories that are entirely too real and present and now. He doesn't notice when he fails to differentiate the cold of a Scottish-esque night and the cold of not-at-all-empty mausoleum.

Crouching, hands buried in his hair, he doesn't notice when his hands glow an eerie, icy blue.

Head tucked between his knees, begging mercy from ghosts that aren't present, he doesn't notice the flicker-flash of ghosts that are present slipping into view of anyone who cares to look.

Edited 2019-11-06 18:15 (UTC)

A man curled into a miserable ball with flickering, barely-there apparitions pressing in around him? Uncomfortably familiar. This must be what it looks like from the outside in his world, when his own mental distress turns the nightmare creatures solid enough to draw blood.

Wilson jogs over to Klaus, holding what appears to be an old-fashioned radio attached to a long, bent metal handle, and shouts to be heard over the fireworks display. "HEY! Do you need help getting rid of these guys?!"

Klaus yelps, startled and wide-eyed and not sure about his where and when, falling back on his ass in the Scottish-esque mud.

Somewhere in there, the glow fades.

Somewhere in there, the ghosts disappear. To everyone that is not him, anyway.

Wilson winces at that yelp, but the things in the air are no longer visible, so... success? That's odd, though, the shadows don't usually back off on their own just from yelling at them.

He bends down and offers a fingerless-gloved hand to Klaus, resting the radio in the crook of his elbow. "Are you all right?"

It takes Klaus a few endless minutes to sort out the then from the now enough to realize a) he'd been asked a question, b) by a person that has a pulse (probably), c) that person is still waiting for an answer and d) his ass is cold.

Well damn.

"Um. No, not ever." He manages, with a self-deprecating smile that has nothing to do with mirth and enough tension in his voice to be almost painful.

It'll be a few more minutes before he notices the hand.

He does have a pulse! It's a positive quality of his.

"I can believe that," Wilson says, bluntly but with no malice intended. "But it'd improve things to go inside where it's quieter and stop sitting in the mud, right?"

A multi-stage firework goes off above them, one large bang followed by lots of little bangs.

Klaus blinks up at the show of lights, distracted away from staring at what appears to be empty air (hahaha, it's not, dear Christ that one's ugly). He doesn't seem particularly unsettled by the explosions.

That's a problem for a different day, yay!

Oh. Right. Question. Whoops.

"Oh yeah, quieter, sure." He doesn't sound like he really believes the 'quieter' bit, because nope, he doesn't, it's all screaming from here on out, whee, shit he really does have to go back doesn't he? He's so fucked.

Also his ass is cold.

And oh look! A hand! Huh, how long has that been there?

Klaus takes it, levering himself up off the ground.

Wilson follows Klaus's gaze, doesn't register anything, but assumes there's something there that he can't see. That, too, would be in keeping with the shadow creatures' properties; in his spelunking expeditions he's seen them following him around even in the best possible mental state, made visible by the holes they created in a beam of daylight from the ceiling only to vanish completely once they reached the other side.

Now that Klaus has finally noticed the hand, Wilson pulls him to his feet. The radio-thing makes a faint, low buzzing noise. "You'll feel better after you eat something pleasant. It always works for me."

Klaus blinks bemusedly at Wilson - why is it so many people here try to get him to eat? He looks down at himself, seeing only the scrawny-ass frame he's had since puberty, and shrugs.

It is entirely possible he doesn't remember exactly what he looked like before he gave up mom's cooking.

It is entirely possible, given the 'training' he was given, he never was a particularly robust sort of fellow.

"I mean, I was thinking alcohol, but... sure, yeah." He was actually thinking molly with a chaser of whatever else he can get his hands on, but some liquor and... who knows, waffles?

Waffles are good.

Wilson digs around in his backpack and pulls out a handful of taffy, brightly coloured and individually wrapped in wax paper. "Take these first."

Eating a ton of candy is scientifically proven to drive away nightmare creatures.

"Alcohol sounds like a great solution right about now," Wilson says, starting off towards the building. It hadn't been his first thought, since it's not a convenient option in his world and hadn't even been one when he was on Earth, but the interdimensional bar is, in fact, a bar. Some waffles would be nice too, since he doesn't have to come up with the butter and eggs himself here.

Klaus stares at his handful of candy, flummoxed.

What... is he supposed to do with these?

Confused, he stashes them into a pocket of his fairly useless coat, and stumbles off into Wilson's wake.

"I mean, it pretty much answers anything you like." Klaus agrees, because... well. It's seen him through a lot over the years. Sorta. Kinda. Ben disagrees, he's sure, but Ben isn't here.

"It doesn't work unless you eat it," Wilson says.

The taffy is basically just boiled sugar with no magical or psychoactive components, so it's probably not going to work at all for the problem Klaus is actually having here. It is, however, delicious.

"Work?" Klaus echos, pulling out one of the candies to eye it curiously, absentmindedly dodging around a ghost as he does. "What is it then?"

"Concentrated honey, I suppose. I didn't use any fruit in those ones." Feeling like he may have answered the wrong question there, Wilson elaborates, "It's a snack. You eat it and you feel a little better, and then the shadows aren't as interested in you and it's easier to ignore them when you see one. That's what I do with it."

He'd feel sillier saying that if it weren't for that sidesteppy thing Klaus just did. It reminds him of when he can't quite bring himself to reach through a shadow apparition to get to his storage chests or his cooking pot, and either goes around or waits for it to scuttle out of the way.

"... Shadows?" Klaus echos, sounding, if anything, more confused. He unwraps the candy though, and shoves it in his mouth. Hey, free candy, right?

No, Klaus was never given the 'don't take candy from strangers' talk. He was given the 'here is how to defeat a variety of armed and unarmed strangers' series of lectures and practice sessions, however.

It tastes like honey, and it's incredibly chewy. It exemplifies the concept of taffy.

"The nightmare monsters. They look like shadows, except they can appear in midair instead of just on surfaces. Is it different for you?" Wilson seems puzzled too, now. "I've never seen them in the bar before, but they show up in all kinds of places in my world. They're attracted to mental anguish, and you looked pretty anguished."

Klaus grimaces at the reminder, the long shadow of the mausoleum heavy despite years of distance. There's just not enough distance to ever really get away, he's starting to suspect.

"Never heard of nightmare monsters." He shrugs, looking perfectly, almost unnaturally, innocent as he shoulders open the door to the bar. He's a fairly shit liar overall, but this is a theme he's perfected over the years. Ghosts? What ghosts? He doesn't know about any ghosts.

"Neither had I before they tried to bite my face off," Wilson grouses, following Klaus through the door. That was pretty much word-for-word the response he expected out of someone from a normal Earth without any shadow magic or semi-corporeal walking nightmares, and the stranger sure sounds unconcerned, but this is the same guy who was cowering in fear from spectral somethings in the air around five minutes ago.

Maybe he just wants to pretend it didn't happen. Wilson can't honestly blame him for it.

"Two spiked Spicy Vegetable Stingers, please," Wilson says, still not entirely over the awkwardness of talking to a countertop. He receives two copies of a red drink in a mason jar with a straw and a stalk of celery sticking out. "What do you want to eat?"

Klaus was kinda hoping Bar would just cough up a bottle of vodka or something, but no, sure, fine, let's be civilized, like he hadn't just death-spiraled back to ghostie hell. Bleh. At least it's a decent Bloody Mary-esque drink, he discovers with an experimental sip.

"Ever try waffles? Its sad really, how many people haven't." Klaus suggests, and if anyone is shocked, they haven't been paying attention.

Yeah, well, he can make his own order if that's what he wants to drink. This is Wilson's round.

"Waffles would be great. Two servings of waffles," Wilson says. The waffles that appear are square-shaped even on the outside and piled high with berries and whipped cream.

Edited 2019-11-11 04:38 (UTC)

"Yeah, that's the stuff." Klaus grins. He's not terribly hungry, isn't usually, but he can put away a plate of waffles no problem.

Now, whether he'll be seeing these waffles again if he waits too long to find his next high, that's a completely different question.

Wilson takes a seat with his waffles and his vegetable cocktail, picks up the top waffle of the stack with his hands and moves to bite into it, then visibly reconsiders what he's doing and starts cutting it up with a knife and fork. "By the way, what's your name? I'm Wilson."

"I'm Klaus." He admits after a moment of hesitation, and flinches when the ghosts that have meandered closer take up the name like some sort of chant. Ugh, why do they always figure that out? He's surprised his ears don't bleed.

Needing a way out of this particular auditory hell, he slugs back his drink.

Wilson gives Klaus a concerned look, but doesn't say anything and instead busies himself seeing how many individual waffle squares he can spear on his fork at once (he manages three; the fourth keeps slipping off). If the man doesn't want to talk about his selectively visible apparitions he shouldn't have to.

Searching for something else to discuss, he comes up with, "I can make these in my world but I have to get the butter from squishing butterflies."

Nailed it.

Bastion is aware of the concept of celebratory holiday pyrotechnics, and fortunate enough to be facing towards the fireworks when they begin rather than startled by an explosion from above and behind them.

They still really didn't need an unplanned stress-test of their combat protocols. If they had a stomach, the bottom would have dropped out of it at the first bang. Their threat identification module is malfunctioning even worse than usual and insisting that the aerial detonations are enemies closing in all around them, and it's all they can do not to switch into sentry configuration and shoot back. They can't reconfigure here. That's not a real attack. They can't. People would get hurt.

Ganymede swoops in to land on their finger, bringing their attention back to the world outside their head. They need to get indoors. Or back to their world. Anywhere these fireworks aren't. The omnic takes off running towards the bar building, their avian companion a little yellow-green blur in their wake.

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