milliways_bar | (no subject)

Entry tags:

ray stantz,
romana

(no subject)

Really, if he would just take off that suit jacket- and maybe muss his hair up a little- it would be almost impossible to tell Agent Rho from Ray. Especially at the moment, since he's doing something at his table involving quite a lot of screwdrivers, a few very peculiar tools, and what would appear to be Ray's proton pack.

Oh, he's also going to have to take the necktie off. But other than that.

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Romana wanders over to Rho's table and eyes him curiously. "That's a very smart suit you have."

Rho looks up, blinking. "Uh... thank you, miss," he says politely. And, perhaps, shifts his posture just a little; it's not a 'sucks in his stomach' gesture, as he's in good enough shape that this is unnecessary, but honestly, what guy doesn't want to present himself well when a strange woman compliments his looks?

She smiles brightly and doesn't do anything to indicate how sad she is that this is not the Ray she knows. Probably not a Ray at all. Such a pity.

"Call me Romana. Or Fred. And what shall I call you?"

Rho considers this, then nods. "All right," he says. "Fred it is."

What? He's used to this kind of thing.

"You can call me Rho, actually. I'm, uh..." He rubs at the back of his neck; for the first time since coming to the Bar, the Agent is just a bit nonplussed. "Ray Stantz is something of an interdimensional doppelganger of mine. Or I am of him, or we are of each other."

She is pleased.

"Rho. Interesting name." Romana smiles sitting down across from him. "I know. I'm dating Ray."

"Thank you. It was R, originally, but they made me change it after I made one too many pirate noises." He smiles as well, watching her sit; then he nods. "I... would have to say, then, that he's a very lucky man."

Romana smirks slightly. "He is. I take it you aren't seeing anyone then?"

Rho's eyes drop to the suddenly fascinating tabletop in front of him.

"No, ma'am."

She gently pats his hand. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. And you're supposed to call me Fred, remember?"

Rho glances up at that, though he still looks horribly embarrassed. "Sorry, ma- Fred, sorry." He lets out a sigh. "I... look, I should probably tell you that I've been in Ray's room; one of his friends is currently cursed and wandering around out of his body and needed some equipment from in there. And when I went in there, I saw that he'd left a letter to 'my alternate self from another dimension', just like that, so I read it before getting the stuff out. He mentioned you in there. A lot. He came pretty close to saying he considered himself the luckiest man alive..."

And somehow he bites down on the rest of what he was going to say. There's still at least some discipline in him.

Romana just looks pleased. "Ray tends to plan ahead."

"I shouldn't worry. He's you in a way so it's not like I'm upset that you read flattering things about me."

She fishes around in her pocket until she finds the plain brown bag she was looking for. "Jellybaby?"

"Oh, he does," Rho says. "He definitely does. Apparently he leaves these letters every time he ends up in a different world, so I can probably expect one when I get back to mine- I think that's where he is at the moment, though I can't be sure."

He nods. "Certainly. They from Terra or somewhere off-world?"

"What's your world like?"

Romana nods. "Harmless candy."

Rho accepts a couple. "Thank you."

"For most people it's fairly standard early twenty-first century Terra. Planes, trains, automobiles, the Internet, microwave ovens- all the usual stuff. And at any given time roughly fifteen hundred aliens from a wide variety of other planets living on Earth as well, the majority of them in Manhattan and nearly all of them disguised as humans. I work for an organization that licenses, monitors, and polices alien activity on the planet Earth, and I've been doing it since I was eighteen years old." He smiles, perhaps, just a touch. "They have me doing reverse-engineering- if it gets confiscated from an alien visitor, or if it gets left behind by mistake, it'll probably end up on my workbench to be taken apart so we at the headquarters can figure out how to replicate it and take out a patent on it."

"I see. How did you end up here then?"

"There's a portal on level 23, sub-level 19." He chews on one of the jellybabies for a bit. "Not that that's how I got through- I basically got knocked into my locker by a massively powerful stun weapon and the portal seems to've manifested there instead. I'm told that Ray vanished less than two minutes before I arrived here. It's currently being attributed to a fairly powerful and unpleasant being called The Other, who's out for revenge for some kind of war or something that happened several months ago."

Rho frowns a little and looks over towards the door.

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