milliways_bar | (no subject)

Current Mood: calm

(no subject)

Barry comes downstairs, in civvies, and gets his usual cup of something - decaf with cream today. He's in a good mood. He looks outside and notices it's a nice day.

He heads upstairs and then back, grabbing the maroon windbreaker with a Justice League logo on the left sleeve that the bar gave him some weeks ago, and then emerges into the pseudo-sunshine and relatively mild air.

[ooc: You know the drill - slowtime ever-more likely.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Some time afterwards, the door to outside opens and admits another figure: Ray, in his everyday clothes, but with his proton pack slung over his shoulders anyway. He blinks a bit as his eyes get accustomed to the light.

"Good afternoon, Ray. Nice pseudo-weather, eh? I hear it's apparently keyed to England."

Ray glances over at Flash and smiles a little. "Never been outside here before," he says. "I'm not really sure what I was expecting in the way of weather, but this isn't half bad. I think I was sort of bracing myself for the light of a red supergiant or something. How're you?"

"Very well indeed. Things are looking up." He doesn't get more specific than that.

"And you? Have you managed to return the mind-swapping transmogrifier?" Of course he asks this, but he does so with a genial smile.

"Not yet," Ray says. "Although my Japanese pronunciation's getting really good. I'm probably going to have to send it back with Ryo-oh-ki, though. It's getting kind of annoying. I had to leave it locked in my room when I went home for a while the other day..."

He shakes his head, settling himself down on a convenient rock. "That was a disturbing experience in and of itself."

"You're from New York. Shouldn't locking your room be second nature?" He smiles, not meaning much by that, but showing a hidden midwestern bias.

"What happened back at home?"

Bias? Ray wouldn't know. "No, no, the room was locked, but I also locked the device in the closet so it wouldn't get out and try to follow me. Even though it understands 'stop' and 'stay' it has the attention span of a concussed puppy."

He leans his head back and looks to the 'sky' for a while. Eventually, he says, "I hit another reality. Not the animated one this time... just another one that wasn't home. It probably could've passed for home for a while, though. Very similar to everything I remember, right down to the people, except for the part where it was about twenty years before."

"Oh. So you entered some sort of alternate dimension where the events of your life occured early? That sounds rough. And oddly familiar." Somewhere in Barry's mind are memories of life before the Crisis, of alternate universes and a Golden Age Superman, but he has only a hint of this.

"And how long were you there this trip?"

"Three months this time," Ray says. "It was 1985. It didn't take as long to figure out how to get back here on this go-round, but I didn't want to leave immediately. The company had run into some financial trouble and I figured it might be a good idea to try and get that sewn up before I left."

He rubs at his face with both hands. "1985. I was maybe ten in 1985, tops, and my parents were trying to get me into Oratory early. And here I wound up in the middle of the same year, only everything I remembered from 2003 had already happened, and I was still this age. And apparently all of us except Egon smoked. You should've seen the look on Pete's face when I turned down my first cigarette. I haven't touched the stuff since college. . . It was weird, Barry. Especially when I went out for a walk and saw the Twin Towers were still there. They're long gone by my time."

"Oh god. You're from after...

"I hadn't thought about that much. Some things you learn about from history and shove aside. Well, a lot of them. Still..." Barry lets the subject of the Twin Towers pass.

"Sounds to me like every time you leave, something else goes haywire. But I think that's rather obvious."

"Yeah," Ray says, looking up. "After. Trans-Ocean 66 changed everything."

Aside from that, Ray too seems willing to let the subject drop.

He exhales. "I don't know what's going on, Barry, but I really wish that I did. This is twice now that I've tried to go home. At least when I went with Ryo-oh-ki all that happened was that I got a malfunctioning device to come back with me, but that wasn't me trying to go home. I hate to think what would've happened if I took Bart up on his offer to see the year 3000. At least if I go with Romana I'll be traveling inside a causality-shielded mechanism, but I’m starting to think that might be my only fighting chance of ever locating my native reality again." He pauses. "That, or building the doorway Egon managed to put together in the animated continuum. Although I don't think people would like that much."

"Dare I ask what doorway?"

He thinks for a moment.

"The bar apparently wants you to go on this wild goose chase, Ray. I can't guess as to why, but since it's my theory that the bar's sentience is connected to something larger, you might be stuck in this for a while.

"My only suggestions would be to either stay here for a while, or try to go home with Romana."

"Based on what I told him about my travels, and the information I'd gathered and readings I'd taken in the bar, and in no small part on Val's philotics text, Egon figured out how to construct a dimensional gateway that isolated connections to Milliways on the sub-sub-quantum level. The goal was to force all of my subatomic particles into roughly the same quantum state, so that the resulting dimensional resonance would send me back here and give the animated continuum a fighting chance of getting their own Ray back. It worked pretty well for me, but I have no way of knowing whether the other Ray ever got back to where he belonged."

Ray scratches at the side of his neck. "I don't want to stay here if I don't have to," he says, staring into the middle distance. "Not that I don't love the place and welcome all the opportunities it offers, but I'm feeling like Gozer kicked me out of my own reality and locked the door behind me. That's not a good feeling." The corners of his mouth twist wryly. "Now there's an idea. Gozer shows up at the Bar. I'd break the bar's rules six way from Sunday if that happened. . ."

He sighs. "I think I'll go with Romana, at least for a while. She did make the offer, and if Egon ever found out that I passed up a chance like that I'd get a Vulcan dopeslap upside the head so hard that my nose would end up in one of my ears. Besides, she's cute, and I promised I'd take her out for pizza." That, at least, looks like a real smile on Ray's part.

"Sounds like, somewhere in there, you have the beginnings of a plan.

"My advice beyond that is to relax a little. The bar has a way of making what it wants to happen, happen, and I think it tries to do it for the best. Go with the flow.

"By the way, you are aware you've been gone something like only a week Milliways-time."

"If I've got the beginnings of a plan now, it's more than I usually have," Ray murmurs. Then he nods. "Speaking of relax... I came out here to try my hand at a little target practice. I wasn't able to get hold of Tim, so I was thinking of asking the bar for one of those setups skeet-shooters use. Nobody's going to be upset if I fry a couple of clay pigeons, right?"

He blinks. "Well, that's about par for the course. Six months in the animated continuum was three or four days here, according to Bart."

"It seems to vary. My friend Sara seems to pass time at the same rate here and back home. Eska seems to come and go without missing anything on the Disc. And Hal apparently lands here in between the moments of his life at home.

"All things considered, I would still check with security. Tim has been a bit creepy of late and i wouldn't want to set him off by accident."

Ray nods. "He offered to make some wraiths of some kind as targets for me a while back, before I went out. I haven't seen him lately, though, so you're probably right."

He detaches the thrower from its hooks on the side of the proton pack and looks at it with a mixture of pride and regret. "At least I wasn't as rusty as I thought when I got to 1985," he says. "The supernatural activity level in New York had dropped pretty low, but we still got a couple of calls. I like to think I acquitted myself pretty well despite being out of practice. I hardly set anything on fire."

Barry raises an eyebrow at this.

"Have you ever looked into recalibrating that so it's less volatile? A gun that leaves holes in the secenery is never going to be all that popular."

"It's been recalibrated," Ray says absently. "The original model had the potentiality of either turning a human being into a rapidly dissolving entity of pure spirit, or setting off a total conversion molecular-level explosion. Egon and I modified them so they're less dangerous. And we don't want it to be popular. We already had the EPA come sniffing around our doors. We don't really want the Department of Defense to decide that we're going to be their next contractors whether we want to be or not."

"Ah. Good point.

"One of the advantages of being a super-hero is that for the most part, no one obthers you about your individual powers. And for reasons I can't explain, but won't argue with, the public always opposed any attempt to use us as guinea pigs by the Defense Department."

Ray nods. "Good for you. I wouldn't have thought of the Feds myself, but Venkman pointed out that if there's ever anybody in the world who would put a portable nuclear accelerator to purely destructive use, it'd be them. I really don't want to see the day when the guys who tried to stick my head in the toilet at Oratory and went on to go ROTC for college because they couldn't hack a sports scholarship are armed with proton packs, do you?"

"No. But not everyone in the government is that bad. And I've met many people far worse than the Army for having one of those.

"Like Gorilla Grodd. And he's already as strong as his name implies.

"Anyway, Ray, I think I'm going to head in to get lunch. Have a good one."

Ray nods. "You too," he says, leaning back to study the 'sky' again.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only