midpointsaloon | Big City Living (Midpoint Mingle)

The town of Midpoint: called thus because it is at the exact center of the game arena, a busy little Western town full of strange people, many of whom don’t look remotely human, because this is where all the players gather and live. Midpoint Saloon: called thus because it is the only bar in Midpoint. It’s also the biggest building in town, four stories high, dotted with windows, painted a jaunty yellow and decorated with red and green flowers in all the window boxes.

This is where your veteran teammate points you. Or just stomps off to and hopes you follow.

Downstairs is a bar and tavern, Old West style, right down to the upright piano in one corner and a raucous crowd of locals - largely locals, but with a healthy smattering of unusual or downright alien faces that clearly indicate the presence of other Players - eating, drinking, gambling, and getting into trouble. There’s a broad, bearded man behind the bar, waving cheerfully at you as you enter.

The rest of the night and the next day is yours to do with what you see fit. Explore the town, take a long nap in your new room, try to get to know people... everyone is here for the next twenty-four hours before travel to the mission site, so it’s a good chance to scope out the competition, at the very least.

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"I run a restaurant," Hajime says flatly. "Lots of responsibility there."

Inara had been addressing Ryo about keeping Hajime from smashing up every bar he passes, but is too polite to say so. "A restaurant?" she asks instead. "What kind of food did you serve there?"

Really, it's a shame that Ryo lacks the vocabulary to tell her that being Hajime's impulse control is all sorts of an important responsibility.

"Japanese food, mostly. It's where my family's from." And he'd really rather be back home with them after finally getting out of the last place he was stuck in, thanks.

"Japan." Somehow it never really gets easier, meeting people who had lived on Earth-That-Was back when it, well, was. "I admit I'm not very familiar with Japanese food. What kinds of dishes did you serve?"

There are areas on her home planet of Sihnon that still practice some form of Japanese culture, but generally, they didn't like people like her showing up there as they'd employed a competitor of sorts.

"Lots of fish. Lots of rice." Hajime shrugs. "Some noodles, some curry dishes, we'd change the menu up from time to time."

"Makes a good sushi!" Ryo says. "But probably hard to get ingredients here."

"Japan is an island, isn't it?" She's pretty sure Haruka told her that once. "I can see why you'd serve a lot of fish."

"It's a chain of them, yeah. Seafood's easy to get." Hajime nods. "Where are you from?" He's assuming somewhere the geographical education isn't that great.

"I'm from Lu’Weng originally. On Sihnon. If you're from Japan then your people don't know it exists yet." To be fair he's sort of right, Earth-related geographical education is terrible because no-one remembers it.

Hajime frowns slightly. "Never heard of it. Some other world?" Because why not, he's been through enough parallel universes at this point, what's one more?

"Indeed. We left Earth centuries ago." Even records of the exodus itself are patchy at best, so the old world is barely remembered.

"The future, then." Well. That's reassuring, he supposes. "You just...abandoned the planet?"

"The twenty-sixth century, " Inara confirms. Fuwa bragging about being from 2020 had amused her a great deal. "We didn't abandon it, it could no longer sustain life."

"Did it get overrun by giant cockroaches?" Ryo asks, sounding alarmed. "Is that why there was no more life?"

Hajime's just going to take that moment to massage a temple. "Probably just global warming, Ryo. Something like that." Far more plausible than Joker running amok and forcing everyone off the planet... "Damn, that's...farther along than I would have thought."

Edited 2020-05-15 03:36 (UTC)

"I... couldn't properly say." He'd managed to say something that Inara hadn't been expecting. "We say we used it up. I assume it means resource depletion."

Ryo excels at that, really. It's one of his special skills whether or not he or Hajime actively realizes it.

"Makes sense." Hajime frowns. "There were signs of trouble in my time, but I supposed I hoped people could figure it out."

"It seems we still haven't, I'm afraid." Inara would hate to think that it's just human nature to destroy things, but it does seem to follow them around. "Does your world have giant cockroaches?"

"Legend says that's how the world ends," Hajime says grimly. "Overrun with giant roaches." He does not appear to be joking and in fact looks a little pained.

"I see. It's not completely outside the realm of possibility, but one would think such an event would stick around a bit longer in the historical record." It could always be a metaphor as well. From what Inara understands, Earth-That-Was had had some severe problems with waste disposal.

"You never know." Hajime shrugs. "Some things have a way of getting forgotten." It's not like the Battle Fight had been widely known ten thousand years later.

"That's true. Forgotten or erased." Millions had died on Miranda and that had been forgotten in under a decade. If the right people didn't want them to know about giant bugs, they wouldn't.

Hajime grimaces. "History has a way of doing that if people aren't careful."

"Another thing we haven't learned yet." It's unbelievable how much she had missed that had been right under her nose. "I don't think we have those now, though."

"Not having them is for the best, I'd say." Does anyone truly need giant world-destroying roaches? Aside from Ryo inevitably wanting to try to befriend them.

"Oh, I agree. The normal-sized ones are bad enough." Something she had learned quickly living on a ship like Serenity.

There's a short almost-laugh from Hajime. "But of course the normal-sized ones survived and traveled that far. Of course."

"Very hard to kill," Ryo muses.

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