theresnodoor | (no subject)

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milliways

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Picture it: a bar, at the end of the universe, warm and cheerful and filled with the quiet murmur of voices. At a table in the corner, specifically set aside from all the other patrons, is a blonde, pretty teenager.

Or maybe that scene is a little too broad for a bar like Milliways.

Add in a scowl and a National Geographic.

Rachel's wondering if there'd be any point in making it out of somebody's door to a zoo. Though she's finding there are depressingly few animals that don't already have memories attached.

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Jamie, in a word, is bored.

Bored, and under-stimulated. He's been stuck on a beast of a world for the last month, in a village with forty people, three-quarters of whom have taken vows of silence. All he wants right now is a conversation -- friendly or not.

The bar counter is probably a better place for that than a random table, and that's where he'd be headed, if he hadn't tripped over a waitrat's tray on the way and gone flying straight into Rachel's table.

"Ow!" He scrambles up to his feet, rubbing his bruises. "Sorry. And ow."

"Hey!" is Rachel's protest when her table is knocked, her magazine goes flying, and her Coke is just barely saved from a crash on the floor.

She'd be glaring a little harder at Jamie if she hadn't saved that drink, though, so small favors.

"Watch it."

"No one's yet told me," Jamie complains -- half to Rachel, half to the world at large -- "who thought it was a good idea to have six-inch-tall animals running around with great big trays at ankle height."

Milliways! Someone made some real funny choices when they designed this place.

"-- right, is this yours?" He reaches down to grab up the magazine, and then squints at it before passing it over to her. "What is it then, Elephants Monthly?"

No one's told Rachel the answer to that either, and they're unlikely to so long as she keeps steadfastly ignoring the rats.

Jamie's getting an honest glare now while she reaches out to take the magazine with a snap of her wrist. "It's National Geographic," she replies, snippy.

...mostly because she'd read a magazine called Elephants Monthly and is now annoyed with herself for not requesting that one at the bar.

"It's not just about elephants."

"I'd rather read about elephants than geography," Jamie says, laughing. "Though I suppose if they did one that'd do more than one world's geography sets, that'd be useful."

He glances over to the bar. "Well, come to that, maybe I ought to ask. If you could get it anywhere it'd be here."

(Not that he'd actually read it ever. Too much like studying.)

Rachel would berate him for saying so and then never consider reading it herself for the exact same reason.

"They'd have to put out more than one issue a month to cover all the worlds out there," Rachel points out, pulling the magazine back and flipping through a few more pages. She'd been ignoring anything that wasn't featuring possible morphs, but now that Jamie's called her attention to it, the whole issue's apparently about Tanzania.

Who knew?

"Well, they could get the important ones out of the way first. Like, 'here's this one, don't go there, they'll throw you under a slag-heap for a month.' Or 'here's this one, they've got a war on all the time, avoid if you don't like getting shot.'"

He props his elbows on the back of the chair opposite, and grins at her. "And then save the 'look here, they're dead dull and only talk about cows all the time' for later issues, see?"

Rachel narrows blue eyes at him, lips pressed together to keep from smirking.

"Gee, any experience with worlds like that?"

"Me?"

Jamie, himself, has no qualms against smirking.

"Course not. Every world I've ever been to is one hundred percent ice cream and showers of money."

"How many?"

It sounds a lot like a challenge.

Jamie loves a challenge! If it's a challenge he feels he can win, and on this one he's fairly sure he's got anyone beat.

"Oh," he says, with studied casualness, "I've far and away lost track. About two hundred, I'd reckon? No, it must be nearer three hundred now."

How's that, Miss National Geographic?

There's a brief pause as Rachel takes this in, before offering any reaction.

Her reaction of choice today is: one lifted eyebrow.

There was a little too much casualness for such a fantastic answer.

"Really."

"Really," says Jamie, slightly stung. "What, d'you want a tally sheet?"

"Ugh, no, I'm bored enough," Rachel protests, giving the magazine a glare as she leans back in her seat. "Why do you travel around that much, then?"

Jamie weighs whether or not it would sound too much bragging if he said 'to save the universe!'

The answer is, yeah, probably, and anyway she'd probably just raise her eyebrows at him again.

"Well, I can't go home," he says instead, with a shrug.

And then, since this is a multiple-sentence explanation and his elbows are beginning to et sore, swings himself around and into the chair. "So I had to wander about for a while and -- well, it's all a bit complicated, but it turns out the worlds sort of need someone to keep at it, and that someone's me. Universes? I'm not one for the technical terms."

. . . well, it's not that he minds a bit of bragging.

A little bragging is healthy, you know! Rachel's an avid believer of this.

And apparently inclined to believe Jamie, too, her smile gentler while he explains. It's a lot more noble than what she was doing, but she understands the sentiment here.

"I don't know, I was still working on understanding multiple 'worlds' when I got pulled here. Multiple universes are out of my league."

She's not making a big deal of it, which Jamie finds something of a relief.

"Mine, too. I still don't really understand most of it, to tell you the truth. I'm just the fellow does the grunt work."

There's a certain anti-intellectual pride in the way he says it; nothing wrong with being the one who does the grunt work, anyway. He leans back again, crossing his hands behind his head, and grins. "Well, how many have you got under your belt, then?"

Rachel pauses for a moment before opening her mouth - then shutting it again, frowning thoughtfully.

There were the Visser ships, which probably don't count. The world with the Iskoorts and Howlers. Going back in time - several times - does that count? Z-space, though she still couldn't say exactly what that was. The Leeran homeworld. Helmacron ships alone should count as universes, jeez, not to mention the not-space the Ellimist hauled her to.

After a while, she realizes her silence has been going on too long and flashes a smile and a shrug. "Not that many, I guess. Mostly, they came to us."

Now it's Jamie's turn to raise his eyebrows.

"That's a trick."

"That's an invasion," Rachel corrects, raising her eyebrows right back.

Jamie lets out a low whistle.

"That's a step above the wars They usually --"

He breaks off; They are an explanation he's not sure he wants to get into.

"-- I mean, invading a whole world takes some real ambition."

Rachel stares at him for a moment. Her expression mostly blank but her hands, resting on the table, pull back to fold in her lap.

Where she can clench her fingers together until knuckles turn white, tell herself he didn't just say that in an admiring tone.

"I have a feeling we weren't meeting the same aliens."

"Mostly I've not," Jamie admits. "Mostly just people. People fighting people, usually, over this bit of land or that."

. . . he means human people.

"Demons, sometimes -- though I wouldn't say I've met them, exactly, or at least I've tried not to if I could help it. Those wars are less about land, more about not wanting to get eaten."

(There's always a war, or several wars. Almost always. Less so, now that They're gone, but it doesn't change as much as you would think.)

"Though you might call demons aliens, I suppose. They come from another place, anyway."

"...yeah, really different."

But he's surprised her enough for Rachel to relax her hands and just blink at him. "So you go to all these different worlds and there are humans on all of them?"

"Well, it's the same world, sort of, it's just -- look," Jamie says, fidgeting a little, "I'm going to make a botch of this, I've told you I'm no good at it."

Helen tried to explain it to him often enough. How would Helen have explained it?

"It's like -- you know how people say, 'well, what if I hadn't kicked that football off the field through the neighbor's window, I might've won that match and everything would've been different?' So say there's a world where you did win that match and a world where you didn't, and whenever you kick a football there's both at once. Well, that's a stupid example, you'll say, probably kicking the football doesn't change anything much."

He shrugs. "But then it goes back and back -- say to the first caveman who kicked a rock. And then there's a split, so you get a world where that caveman won his big caveman match, and went on to be sports king of the cavemen, and a world where he kicked it into his neighbor's cave and stayed a sort of rubbishy caveman all his life. And down and down the line, the world where the caveman became sports king is the one where, I don't know, everyone's sports-mad and gathers around watch gladiator football matches to the death, and in the one where he stayed rubbishy it's something totally different. And it's all like that -- and there's hundreds and thousands and millions of them."

Rachel listens, calm.

She's thinking about meteors and dinosaurs. About rifles and a president crossing the Delaware. She's thinking about machines buried away to keep people safe from their own ambitions.

"No, I get it. And you just... what? Watch the football wherever it goes?"

'Watch the football' -- Jamie likes that. He grins again. "Right. You'd be amazed how many different kinds of worlds there are, just from people doing things different. I reckon some are as strange as aliens."

Rachel thinks of Taxxons and smiles, dry. "If they're still physically human, I'd guess not."

"You'd think that, wouldn't you," Jamie says, looking sage.

"It tricks your head, when you're new. You see people that look mostly like what you know -- and they usually do, because you're always in the same geography, generally -- and you think, well, I know how to handle this lot, don't I? And then it turns out you're all off. I met a fellow once who looked just like my old maths teacher, it turned out he'd got lizard legs surgically attached to his knees. Everyone did in that world -- when they were fifteen, that was the rule. Did I lie about my age there!"

Rachel snorts, head ducked. She doesn't really have to imagine it and there's no parallel to attach memories to. For that, more than anything in a conversation about world-hopping, she can grin.

"That's definitely a new one for me, yeah."

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