nexus_crossings | +1 Lady Flame

It's been a while since Kinner saw a stranger in the Nexus. The small cook approaches, still wearing his winter coat, and waves hello. He grins himself, hoping his scarred features don't make him look too intimidating. He doesn't want to frighten her.

"Howdy, there. The name's Joseph Kinner. I don't reckon you're dead." He shrugs, hardly able to tell on his own whether someone's dead or alive. "Not that I'm an expert on these things, but I'm dead myself, or at least I died back in the world I came from. I can tell you 'bout it if you want. It's quite the story. But if you don't think you died, I bet you're just fine. Worse places to end up than the Nexus in either case, though."

Edited 2019-01-16 09:44 (UTC)

And Aubrey, being the smart little firebug she is, hones in on that last bit first.

"Nexus? A nexus of what exactly? Oh, and hi Joseph. I'm Lady Flame!"

She grins real big. She does love introducing herself with her stage name. She probably shouldn't, not here, but hey. Gotta have some fun while standing in a nexus of something or other while surrounded by strangers.

"Hello, Lady Flame. It's kind of a crossroads between universes," Kinner explains. "I'm from a different universe than you are, for example. Under normal circumstances, the two of us would never meet."

He doesn't totally understand how the Nexus works himself, but he has a better sense than he did.

"I used to work as team cook for an expedition in Antarctica. It ended badly."

Yeah, she was so into the "nexus" thing that she totally overlooked the "dead" thing and that is Very Important Information™.

"Oh. Um. I'm sorry? I mean, cool thing with the Antarctica stuff but, um. Sorry it broke bad?"

She's only ever spoken with ghosts before, so this corporeal and still dead thing is a bit of a bean freak.

Kinner shrugs, showing he doesn't mind at all. "Our team was attacked by a creature from outer space, and I was one of the people killed by it. We called it the Thing. Very dangerous."

He's okay with being dead, if only because not much about him has actually changed. He feels alive, at least.

"Before that, though, it wasn't so bad. I'm more upset about what the creature did after it ate me, to be honest."

Edited 2019-01-16 17:29 (UTC)

Now there's some little part of Aubrey that tells her that she shouldn't say the obvious thing. But then she goes ahead and says the obvious thing, because if there's one thing Aubrey's good at, it's acting on her first impulse.

"The Thing? Like the movie?!"

Yuuuuup. There's the obvious thing.

"Yeah, the Thing was just like the one in the movie."

Wait. They made a movie about the Thing? Maybe in Lady Flame's world it's only a story.

"Except in my world it wasn't just a movie - it was real. I wish it was just a movie. There's somebody else here who's run into the Thing, and you might meet him. His name's Palmer. Friendly guy - he's a mechanic. Our teams are slightly different, and I'm still wondering why."

"Huh."

She mulls this over for a moment, and honestly? People coming in from movies and stories isn't the strangest thing in her life. Hell, she's friends with vampires and Bigfoot and goat men. Fictional dead people? No big thang.

"I guess that makes sense. Sorta. Still real sorry you got eaten, tho."

"Yeah - could the creature in your movie copy people after it ate them? That's what ours did."

Kinner smiles. His own mind has been opened since he came here, and he counts sorcerers and aliens among his friends.

"Don't worry about me. It's all right. There's nothing anyone can do about it, anyway, and I'm setting up a new life for myself here in the Nexus. I run a fish shop - Kinner's Kippers. Best seafood in the Nexus, though I'm biased."

"Yup! Although I haven't seen it in like, five years? I'm not really a big horror movie buff. Like, the cheesy old schlocky '50s ones, sure, but I'm kinda squeamish."

It seems to register with her, what she just said, and winces a little.

"I mean, um, sorry, that sounds super insensitive, huh? Like, oh, I maybe watched you die but I'm super squeamish about it? Yikes."

"Ours was a blobby blue thing with tentacles and red eyes. My friend Palmer's Thing was a little different. As far as he can tell, it doesn't have a true form, just a twisted version of whatever it's pretending to be."

Kinner thinks for a moment, drawing on his knowledge of his world as well as Palmer's.

"I'm not sure if you did watch me die. Palmer says there wasn't someone named Kinner on his team. We had a McReady and a Norris, though. And a Copper."

"...Um, sure?"

Yup, Aubrey's grasp of The Thing lore is super shaky and she's got no way to bullshit her way around it. Nor would she try.

"So you cook food here now? Isn't that, like....against the health code? Dead people handling food doesn't seem super hygienic if I'm being honest."

“Yeah, I do.”

Kinner’s knowledge of Thing lore is mostly what he was there to see and what Palmer told him. So he has some patches in his own knowledge about the creature. Maybe he’ll try and get his hands on the movie one of these days.

“Well, I was a cook when I was alive and I figure I may as well keep being one now I’m dead. I take food preparation very seriously, I assure you. I don’t know how it works, but I’m not a ghost or undead or anything like that. So my food is completely safe.”

"Um. Do you do sushi?"

She finally breaks down and asks it, because fuck yes she loves sushi. She doesn't care who prepares it, she'll murder an entire salmon roll, let's be real.

Kinner grins, happy to offer something Lady Flame will like.

“Yes, I serve sushi. It’s one of my most popular dishes, in fact, and if you want I’ll give you a sample for free. My shop isn’t too far from here.”

Ain't no party like a Kepler party! Okay, so two people may not technically make up an entire Kepler party, but it's a start.

(Somewhere, a goatman is looking for pizza.)

Ned is great at compartmentalizing. You have to be to smile warmly to a person's face and then steal their shit behind their back. And so, while he's had some memories crop up of late that make him distinctly uncomfortable about how he relates to his fellow Pine Guard member, right now all that shows is just that he's delighted to see her.

"Aubrey!" He comes shuffling through the snow wearing a ski jacket louder than he is and beaming. "I'm pretty sure if you were dead it wouldn't be worth the effort to hallucinate, so either we're having the same dream," wouldn't be the first time he's thought that, "or there's more than one gateway from Kepler to Weirdsville."

(Arguably, Kepler is Weirdsville, but let's not split hairs.)

"Ned?"

Her voice is basically a squeak, and her eyes are wide and super surprised. Mainly because....

"I just....saw you? Back in Kepler? Like literally two minutes ago?!"

What is happening. Sure, she'd been through some Weirdsville stuff, but the thought that Ned had a twin brother or something might just be her limit.

"I think it's like Narnia," he tells her cheerfully. Not that he's been in the Nexus a long time, but he's seen the PSA video, read some of the pamphlets, and chatted with an anthropomorphic fox.

"I mean, I think maybe days can go by here and only a few minutes pass back home. Pretty sure Kirby hasn't been worried about me, anyway. This is the second time I've visited."

He frowns, thoughtful. "Although, I wasn't anywhere near the Lodge when I left. How'd you get here?"

"Huh. Narnia. Okay. That's....something. I guess."

She's trying to mull it over, and then she nods a little. The shock is fading into something a little more sure. Which is the Pine Guard in a nutshell, basically. Ned's not the only one good at compartmentalizing.

"Um. I opened the door to the You-Know-What under the You-Know-Where to go see You-Know-Who and then I was here."

She mimes opening not a regular door, but a door that one would pull up and out. The door to the cellar under the lodge.

They're like Alice in Wonderland, if she'd stayed home and Wonderland came to her every couple months. They're learning to just accept what they don't understand and move on, because if they spent all their time going 'WTF' over every strange thing they encountered, they'd never get anything done.

He blinks at her and nods slowly, because he's not sure he does know all of the You-Knows, but he's pretty sure he's got the gist.

"Well, uh, you might want to let Mama or Barclay know about that when you do get back. I mean, I found my way here through an antique hope chest. Who knew it was magic, right? So, you just got here?"

Prying eyes and listening ears, Ned!

"Yeeeeeeah, I really hope that You-Know-Who doesn't try to, uh, get out of the kitchen. And through the door. Um. Anyway! I guess we should, um. Go looking for a talking lion or something? If this is really like Narnia. Or maybe we should tell Mama? I mean should I try to go back now?"

This is hellaciously confusing. But also kinda cool, and she's starting to warm up to the idea that they're in faux-Narnia.

Okay, so Ned has been known to be less than discreet. He's pretty sure no one here is going to bat an eye at real magic, though.

"Are you kidding? This is an opportunity! Did you see the PSA video? All kinds of worlds meet here. Not just ours and potentially Narnia, but...you know, parallel universes. Maybe even--"

He's less than discreet but he's not going to just babble about Sylvain in a public place, either. He coughs meaningfully. "Maybe familiar places we don't usually get to look around. If we're really lucky we might learn something!"

"Last time I was here I talked to a fox wearing a shirt and tie. It's wild. And hey, if worst comes to worst I can let you back home through the hope chest I came through."

"That sounds like a story waiting to be told." There's a kid hanging around the Plaza with a cigarette, which is lit, and he's definitely smoking it, and he's definitely too young to be doing so. Danny might look 18 on a good day, but today is Wednesday and he seems to be sixteen at best.

His ensemble screams 'street kid', for whatever that's worth. Layers of threadbare clothing accented with electrical tape and safety pins, fingerless gloves, lots of pockets full of hard-to-tell-what, and battered sneakers. He's got silver and black nail varnish on, though, and a skull-shaped ring with red gems set in the eyes.

"Were you just doing something that should've ended with you dead? Because that might be your answer. But, I mean, I hope not?"

She seems cool, and he thinks that whole 'live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse' thing is probably overrated.

Ooh, fellow punk aesthetic, they should be friends. Although Aubrey does stay mostly upwind of the cigarette smoke. (She miiiiiiiiiight vape tho, shh.)

"No, I literally just opened up a door. And nothing exploded, I don't think. But, um. Then I was here? And it's nice and cool, don't get me wrong! I just....I'm used to dealing with a different sort of weirdness. Um."

And she really shouldn't say too much more. Yeah, sure, there's a lot of people about, and they all seem like they're in on this secret place, but that doesn't mean they know about Kepler and the Bom Boms and Sylvain.

Man, she has no idea how much he needs friends.

He smokes like a guy who is mostly just doing it to keep his hands busy. It's cold, anyway, and he's prone to fidgeting.

"Okay, so, like, spontaneous interdimensional passage generation, then? That's one for the books, innit?" His accent speaks of the East end of London, and he looks pleasantly interested in this quantum-mechanical-slash-magical phenomenon. "Take it you don't get a lot of that where you're from?"

Okay, so his arrival here was via a very similar method, but he's going to just pretend he came in on purpose now because he likes to pretend he knows what he's doing at any given moment. "I'm Danny, by the way. Daniel Gladstone, but everyone calls me Danny."

"Hi, Danny. I'm La-....Aubrey. I'm Aubrey. Nice accent."

She was gonna go with her stage name but some little instinct stopped her.

"And, well, the whole interdimensional thing, I mean, uh. Well? No?"

That's a flat out lie, because Kepler totally gets that spontaneous interdimensional passage generation. It's just usually things coming rather than going. But she's still not sure about what exactly she can confess to people, everything's supposed to be so secret.

Well, secret in Kepler. And this isn't Kepler.

Some little instinct? That same thing might gradually draw her attention to the ring on his hand. The gems are red, not orange, but there is definitely some kind of arcane energy there. The basic skull design isn't anything you couldn't pick up at a Hot Topic, but usually Hot Topic doesn't sell enchanted jewelry.

Regardless, he seems to be pretty innocently enjoying this conversation so far, especially the compliment. "Thanks! Came by it honestly, I swear. I can do BBC and Brooklyn, too."

He takes a last drag on his cigarette and then carefully stubs it out on his shoe, then knocks the ashes off the end. There's still about an inch left and he's evidently saving it for later, tucking it in some pocket or another in his layers of shirt.

"I guess it's not exactly common anywhere. But sounds like we can safely assume you're alive. Where're you from? Somewhere-America, right? Not Midwest, I'd recognize that accent."

"Howdy there." Palmer comes by to introduce himself. "You're new here, ain't you? I don't think I've seen you around before. Welcome to the Nexus. My name's Palmer. It's nice to meet you." The mechanic offers a hand. It's not too often he's around to greet newcomers, so he may as well say hello while he's here to. "I run a shop not too far from here."

He chuckles quietly. "I was thinkin' the first thing when I first turned up here in the Nexus, that I'd died or somethin', but going here actually saved my life. Amazing, huh?"

"Ooooooh! Are you the Palmer that Joseph was telling me about? I mean, he was telling me about The Thing and I thought it was just a movie but apparently it's real?"

Yup. There she goes again, bending the entirety of the fourth wall.

"I'm starting to wonder if it saved my life too? But I don't know."

"Yeah, that's me. I'm takin' it you met Kinner? Nice guy. The Thing exists in my world, if we're talkin' about the same creature. Horrible-looking dog-thing with tendrils that looks like it's been turned inside out? That one almost had me for lunch. I hid in a closet to get away, and I found myself here." He raises an eyebrow. "There's a movie about the Thing? Am I in it?" Priorities.

Palmer wonders if there are timelines where he wasn't so lucky. He doesn't think much about those.

"How'd you end up here? I'm guessing you were hidin', like me."

"I think so? I haven't watched it in forever so some of the details are a little lost on me. I remember Kurt Russel looking hella fine, tho."

She's really taking this whole 'fictional' thing in stride. Then again, she's met the actual literal MothMan, so.

"I wasn't hiding. I was just, uh, going down to the cellar of the Lodge where I live. For reasons."

"Wait. Who did he play?" Palmer wants to narrow down some possibilities, though he won't breathe a word of this conversation to anybody on his team. Especially since the person named didn't exist in his world.

Maybe MacReady was this person's equivalent in Palmer's world? It would make some sense.

"You live in a lodge? Interestin'." Palmer figures he'll explain a bit about himself. "I'm from sunny California. Long way from Antarctica, I know."

Edited 2019-01-16 18:26 (UTC)

"I....don't remember?" she asks, and it's not supposed to be a question. "Like, I'll be real, dog. I was super high when I watched that movie. I just remember Kurt Russell's beard and a couple of really nasty jump scares. Sorry."

She scratches the side of her head that's shaved, a nervous gesture, and grins sheepishly.

"I'm in West Virginia now. It's real pretty. I like it there. The lodge....it's called Amnesty Lodge. There's a hot spring, and a great kitchen, and good people around. It's nice."

“High, huh?” Palmer smiles. “Don’t worry, I ain’t one to judge. I’m somethin’ of a stoner myself, and if you’d ever like some good-quality stuff I can help you. I prefer to grow my own weed.” He’s happy that people in the Nexus seem to be relatively accepting of his habit. “This is a bit of a secret, but I’m planning to sell cannabis outta my shop.”

He listens to the description of Amnesty Lodge.

“That does sound like a nice place. I was a city kid. San Diego. Had a bit of a rough start - ran with a biker gang for a while, then went to rehab for drugs. Did harder things than weed back then.”

She giggles a little, and spreads her hands.

"I was a rebellious teenager, what can I say? I don't....really smoke anymore. For reasons."

Because if she lost control of her faculties she might just burn everything down. Which....yeah. She can't.

"But uh, you do you, dog. Sell that good shit. Get that paper. Uh, unless slang is different here?"

Palmer winks. “We’ve all got pasts. I know I ain’t totally proud of who I was. I was a bratty little punk back in the day.”

Well, he still is at times, but it’s a work in progress. And running his own business is a solid start. He feels more mature.

He’s grateful for the good wishes in his business. He’ll need them.

“Thanks. I also run a mechanic’s shop here. Gear Today, Gone Tomorrow. I know, it’s a lousy pun.”

It's probably not at all comforting when one is questioning if they arrived here via dying to meet what looks by all accounts to be an angel when they spin around to get their bearings in this place. The creature herself is pale with towering white wings larger than she is and platinum blonde tresses that float and cascade around her person.

Most angels don't wear combat gear though, or have a gun holstered low across the small of her back.

"Some people do arrive here upon their untimely demises. You would not be the first if that was the case." Nike offers a polite bow of her head by way of greeting before she flutters over to a much more conversationally convenient distance between them. "Were you in mortal peril before you found yourself here?"

+1 Lady Flame

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eeeeeeEEEE Aubrey!!

omg Ned!

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