milliways_bar | The Crew.

Eddie looks up, briefly, then glances at Roland and Ted, then back down at his clenched fists.

He's not inclined to be talky any more tonight either.

Roland nods. "Fair question." And he settles back in his chair.

"You all know what a wheel looks like. Spokes, and an axle. Existence is like this. The axle is the Dark Tower -- a tower at the end of End-World, in my where and when. And as you go up the tower...there are doors to many worlds. All the worlds. All the wheres and whens. It is the heart of everything. And it has ever been the task of the gunslingers of Gilead to protect the Dark Tower, and to see that it stands."

It is possible that Roland's tet-mates suddenly see a brief picture of a tower of soot-colored stone in a field of roses and huge fallen black stone faces, at sunset -- but it is gone, almost as soon as it appears.

"The Dark Tower is the axle, and the Beams are the spokes. Twelve spokes, and six Beams. If the Beams break, then the Tower falls. Just Before I was pulled into Milliways, the fourth Beam snapped. If another one goes, the Tower will fall into chaos and fire -- and all the worlds will go with it."

And now he is sitting straight in his chair. Now he extends his left hand to the left side of the table; his right to the right. "This is what we are working to prevent."

And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what Ted's role is in this, and Roland knows he shouldn't know -- but they can worry about that later.

"Dark Towers, Beams; all this stuff I ain't never seen in my life before, let alone heard of," Mal injects, breaking his silence that has persisted for quite some time during the conversation. He motions to the rest of the crew of the ship sitting around the table, asking, "Do you have an inkling of a concrete plan to do this, or is that where we come in? I'm out of practice tryin' to save anyone else but my own, but my crew has experience in sussin' out plans that get us on the side of things that we want to be on."

Susannah speaks, now.

Eddie is silent next to her.

"You understand, Mr. Reynolds -- we're not from your world. We don't know the particulars. We don't have maps of all the planets you and your crew travel to. If this is going to be done, we'll have to work together, because as handy as the Bar is, there's information that we just can't get here. But when we all have that information...we can come up with a plan, and a good one. As Eddie said, we took on a hundred and eighty with four, and lost one man."

Her voice and expression remain steady.

"And you folks look like you know what you're doin' around weapons, I'd say. It's got to be a collaborative effort if there's any way for this to work."

*Jayne was planning to keep his mouth shut, but even the best laid plans can go to waste, and Jayne was never any good at laying plans, say thankya.*

You're gorram right, we know our way around weapons. Took out a whole fèifèi de pìyăn space station by our lonesomes.

*His eyes are narrowed with the heat of a challenge, and he nods to indicate the gunslingers' weapons.*

You better believe we got enough firepower to match your frilly little antiques there.

Roland cuts into the sudden tension running along his side of the table.

Cordial: "Last I checked, sai, only took one bullet to stop a man." He inclines his head slightly. "We're content with our tools, say true."

The corners of his mouth turn up. It's not a smile. Not exactly.

Zoe's own mouth twitches upward briefly, and she cuts Jayne off with a look before he can say anything further.

She leans forward, then, looking from Roland to Susannah--who she already thinks it might be good to talk to outside of a group palaver.

"Mal and I are both war veterans, and Jayne, well--we don't exactly keep him around on account his winning personality. If there's any shooting to be done, the three of us usually handle it. The others avoid combat, mostly, but Wash and Book can both handle themselves with guns, and if push comes to shove, Inara's no lightweight with a sword. Far as non-combat goes, you won't find a better pilot than Wash, a better mechanic than Kaylee, or a better doctor than Simon."

There's distinct pride in her voice as she lists the crew's assets, pride for all of them--even Book, who's still a vexing mystery in many ways, and Jayne, who seems more trouble than he's worth some--well, all the time. Her crew. Her family. Her ka-tet--even if she doesn't know that term yet.

She looks from Susannah to Roland again, and nods. "We know what we're doing."

Book looks up sharply at Zoe description of him, but waits until she's finished to speak.

"You're asking us to take an awful lot on faith, Mister Deschain," Book says. "I'm sorry, but Beams and Towers and four against two hundred sound like a lot of fairy tales to me."

If he's at all aware of the irony, it doesn't show on his face.

"We may be in seven books -- or more -- but we're not fairy tales."

It's Ted who answers now.

"There's a man named Stephen King from your Earth-that-was. Maine, if that matters. He's been chronicling the story here. If you want proof of this, I can bring you my copies, and you can quiz any of the folks here on anything in there. Hell of a lot of third person close narration. King's fond of that. Overfond, maybe, but his books sell." And Ted shrugs. "And I can assure you of something -- in his world, we're fiction; but it's real as anything to us."

Book's face is a closed... well.

"I'd like to see that very much, I think."

"We've all seen impossible things happen here," says Simon.

He looks around the table, meeting Wash's eyes, and Kaylee's, and the captain's, and briefly Eddie's. And finally Shepherd Book's.

"And some things in our own world that didn't seem possible at the time."

His hand closes over River's, not hard but firmly.

"If you want to talk about fairy tales, I've met an eight-foot-tall monster who can talk to rocks. And a woman who can move through things like a ghost, and a --"

(demon)

"--man with wings. I've seen them with my own eyes. I've seen what these people, the gunslingers, can do ..."

(commala-come-come)

"...and I think we may as well start believing in fairy tales, Shepherd.

"We're in one."

Very softly, Susan says,

"The stories are true, sai." A beat, and she shrugs slightly. "All of them, do'ee ken?"

Book meets the doctor's eyes calmly--although there's a flicker when he talks about men with wings. "I reckon I believe in a great many things you would consider impossible, Simon. But that doesn't mean I have to believe everything I'm told by men I hardly know."

He turns to Susan when she speaks. "If you believe that, child, I'm afraid you're going to have some cruel disappoinments in this life." He looks away from her, to River. "Not all stories are true. People lie. Sometimes they lie damnably well."

Cuthbert's been silent for a while. Now, something sparks in his eyes, and he leans forward.

"We all know that, sai Book. Susan as much as any of us. She's no child, and no stranger to life's disappointments, say true. But if you won't take her word for the truth of what we speak, or Ted's, then you have mine. My oath on the guns of my father, the most sacred I can swear. Or take Roland's word, or Alain's, or any gunslinger's."

He looks around at the Serenity tet now, adressing not just Book, but all of them.

"And if the word of a gunslinger isn't enough at this point--for most of you, at least, if not all--then we're not going to get very far with each other."

And now Wash, who has been half listening to the exchange, half mulling over his own thoughts,

(like throwing a dart, and hitting a bull's-eye six thousand miles away)

raises one tentative hand, fingers twitching and eyebrows going up as he looks around the assembled group.

"Can we go back to something here?" he asks. "Namely, that I don't think the Academy's on a planet and the fifty-eight thousand kinds of badness that's going to ensue if that's the case? On top of the other eighty-six million other kinds, anyway?"

Zoe gives Cuthbert a long, assessing look. He seems easier to read than Roland, and he looks and sounds sincere.

But...she doesn't see how she can trust these people when she's never met them or even heard of a gunslinger before tonight.

But she's gathered that some of the others know these people better, and she'll wait to find out what they know before questioning the gunslingers herself.

So she doesn't resist the subject change, nodding to Wash's words instead. "That does make any action we take a mite problematic."

"...you don't think it's on a planet? Why?"

"And even if it's not...we've done stuff on a skyplex before. Ain't no reason we couldn't do it again."

(can't look can't look)

Kaylee can believe that River is like these people across the table.

Oh yes she can.

Quietly: "That isn't like Niska."

Zoe's hand is still covering his. Unconsciously, Wash turns his own hand palm-up and laces his fingers through hers.

"Look, Setebos has been uninhabitable for years now," he continues, emphatic. "If this place really is there, it ain't gonna be dirtside. It'll be in orbit. And if that's true -- this isn't a privately owned station here. You're talking about flying a transport up to an Alliance-fortified complex.

"Not a military-class boat. A transport.

"We don't have anything fitted on her: no cannons, no shields, and even if this wasn't some top secret, ending-the-'verse-for-fun-and-profit thing, it's Alliance -- we wouldn't get within two sectors of the place without somebody picking up on us."

"Isn't there."

River's voice is curiously flat. She's staring at the table -- at the rose, or through it.

"Security breach. Not safe any more. Burn the land and take to the skies."

And when River speaks, Ted blinks.

He'd told Alain once that it was difficult to make sure you kept the touch under wraps all the time in Milliways. Only with him...it's facilitation.

This is what you get for listening too closely, and not paying attention to your own mind.

"Isn't there, meimei?"

He's still holding her hands, and turns to speak to her in a lowered voice, deliberately soothing.

"The Academy? It's moved?"

Roland says, equally softly, "Do you say so, River?"

His eyes go to Simon for a moment.

You tell the truth under hypnosis. There's struggle, if you don't. And there wasn't any when River told him that the Academy was at a place called Setebos.

"Shift the students. Tighten the perimeter."

Her head lifts. She looks at Simon, at Roland, at Roland's hands. Then her eyes squeeze shut, and her face twists a little. Her breath starts to come faster.

"Rational course of action," she mutters.

Simon follows River's gaze to Roland's hands, and looks up at Roland.

It's not an accusing look, not exactly.

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