midpointsaloon | Another Day, Another Dollar (post-round mingle)

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Another Day, Another Dollar (post-round mingle)

PLAYERS: Everyone!
LOCATION: Midpoint, and anywhere else people want to explore
GOAL: Time to relax after some hard-won rounds.
WARNINGS: None
OTHER: The setting post for those who want to explore

The stagecoach reaches the Ranch... and the cargo isn’t with it. A large, feathery dinosaur reaches the Ranch a little later, with only some of their cargo, having been hit mid-route and between transformations by the bandits.

“Well, we’ll take what we can get,” Lee says sourly at what’s left after the bandits’ raiding - maybe half of the empty crates. He hollers at his ranch hands, “Come get 'em, boys!” Between him and the other workers, and any of the remaining driver team able to be pressed into service (which is mostly just Groot), the crates are unloaded and stacked and filled with supplies for the next train out. Looks like they were useful, after all.

At the end of the day, Lee sends the drivers on their way back to Midpoint, and the bandits can do what they will with their portion of the cargo. Got any use for sturdy wooden crates, friends?

In Tycoon Depot, Tiffany Jamesson has spent a(n enjoyable) day and a half in hiding with Inara, Daylight, and Irene, peppering Daylight with questions and flirting demurely with Inara and Irene, presumably out of boredom. The hand-off with her father goes pretty smoothly, with only Fuwa on the outside - he might be furious, but he's not willing to interrupt and risk the target’s life in a firefight.

Exchange made, kidnappers and bodyguards are free to head back to Midpoint.

In the saloon, North has laid out a buffet of everyone’s favorite foods to choose from, with beer and wine on the house for two days only: the traditional post-round congratulations-or-consolations feast. There’s someone on the piano almost all night providing music, and extra hot water for baths whenever people finally retires to their rooms. Most Players make good use of the additional free food and drink for as long as it lasts; whether for enjoyment, self-medication, or to stave off boredom is their own call.

The dead don't remain so for long, and wake up in jail cells - the same ones they started their round at - at the edges of the game arena around the same time as the round ends, ready to be collected by friends - if there’s anyone who wants to come get them.

The next week and a half belong to the Players to do with what they please, be it sleep all day, spend their hard-earned points on more alcohol, ask lots of questions, or explore the arena. There are no events planned, nothing to steal, no one to murder (unless you really want to, anyway), and plenty of things to learn about and try to get to the bottom of, for any Players not too jaded to try and search. Good luck with that, anyway.

Oh - did you want to know if you won, or how badly you lost? Gonna have to ask North or Booker for your points totals, because there’s nobody who actually announces whether you won or lost...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"My best friend, " Inara offers. She knows it's hard for him to talk about and it might be a little easier to know he's not alone. "I was taken to another place before this. My best friend from home was there, but she had been somewhere else first and fallen in love in the meantime. Her husband knew me but I'd never seen him before. It was... strange."

Soldat shifts, straightening in their chair, brows coming together. "You were in another place like this. Before. And your friend. Were you dead, too?" They'd remember her, if she was from Beacon, but... wait, wasn't there someone in Beacon, too, who had been kidnapped somewhere else first? Shit, who was that.

That last question is enough to give Inara pause for a moment. The way he says it makes it sound a lot more final than what had happened to her. "No. I died there once, but I don't think that's what you mean."

"It wasn't like this, " she clarifies carefully. "A kidnapping. I fell through some sort of rift and was rescued. We were being held in stasis until we could return, I think, but the ship crashed."

"A rift. A rift? Not a portal?" Soldat frowns. Maes. It was Maes, they think, who'd been somewhere else first. Who died again early on. Jesus. "Sounds different than mine. Especially if you weren't dead."

Then, because this is clearly not going to make any sense to her, Soldat explains, waving the tiny folded dog a little as if for emphasis. "I died. Then someone with a portal caught the last bits of me, and stuck it into a. Thing. And made me a new body. So I could help save her world. It's weird."

She's starting to see why he hadn't had a straightforward answer when she’d asked him if they were real. Is he his original self in a new body, or an entirely new person with the same history, the way that Kaylee had been? "I'm sorry. That must have been... traumatic." That hardly feels like a strong enough word, but it's the only one she can come up with.

"It wasn't like that for me. I was at home, preparing for an appointment, and then suddenly I was waking up in a stasis pod in the ruins of a crashed ship I’d never seen before. From what I understand there were some issues with the general stability of reality. Things were disappearing - if I hadn't been rescued I don't think I'd be dead. I would never have existed at all."

And Inara doesn't even know about their issues with realness before dying. Soldat's relationship to reality and personhood is very complicated. "Better than the life I'd been in," they shrug a little. "For a long time. Figured it was the best thing to ever happen to me. Until I wound up here."

They take in her own explanation with some mild confusion. "That sounds terrible. If reality was getting unstable. Just the one universe? Or multiverse?" Jesus, is that something they had to worry about here?

"It's terrible, that you'd built a life from that and these people took that away from you." To lose everything twice could be too much to bear.

"I’ll admit that physics isn't a particularly strong suit of mine. The ship’s artificial intelligence tried to explain things to me, but..." But figuring anything out from that is like following a map without the legend, and that's on a good day. "It was some kind of anomaly that was spreading through other universes. The ship that rescued us was designed to disrupt anomalies like that, so I'm sure that once it's fully repaired there won't be anything to worry about."

Except for the fact that none (or at least not all, not even most) of them can ever return to their original homes, but that isn't really his concern. If one really can buy their freedom here, Inara isn't sure what she’d do with it. Go back to her original universe, with the family she’d left behind, or return to the new family she’d been building on Verdana?

Soldat's freedom means dying for real, as far as they're aware. For a long time, that was good enough, but even then it was out of reach. They frown at her explanation. "So the ship was being repaired. Okay. I'm just. Not going to worry about that, then. Not like there's much I could do about it even if I did."

They set down the dog origami, finally, and pick up a new piece of paper to start making something else. A flower, this time. "How long were you there? Away from your real home?"

"Some of the best mechanics I've ever seen are working on it. I'm not worried." Though being calmly told that the man you're searching for no longer exists, or looking up and seeing different constellations because some stars are gone were still extremely worrying situations, it's going to end.

Inara studies the small paper dog, impressed by the detail. "I was awake there for slightly more than a year. In stasis for... significantly more than a year, but I have no memories of that." Thinking of herself as over a hundred years old is still a little bit much.

Well that's terrible. Soldat gives a little shudder, the metal arm buzzing under the flannel shirt. "I was at the dead world for two years, almost. Even one is more than enough time to make friends."

"Friends, yes, and..." It's surprising that some of it is still so difficult to talk about. "There are debts that I'll never be able to repay. I hope they don't think a rift took me." She's always disappearing on poor Kaylee, it seems.

Soldat's expression, looking down at the flower they're creating, is carefully neutral. "Yes. I know about debts like that. Two years is more than enough time for debts like that, too." They got one of theirs back, when they thought they would never see her again.

The flower is set in front of Inara. "For you."

Other people had helped her too, of course, but Doctor Solus had given Inara a future, opened up a universe full of nearly endless possibilities, and how can you repay someone for that? He had never wanted repayment, defeating something incurable was enough of a payment for his outsized ego all on its own, but she will probably always carry that debt with her. "Yes, I’d imagine so."

She holds the flower in the palm of one hand and examines it closely. "It's lovely. You have a real talent for this."

"I enjoy it. It's calming, having defined steps to follow, and getting something nice at the end. Like cooking, only I can't do that here so much." North is pretty protective of his little kitchen area, there. "Kinda the only thing I really did, for me, for a long time."

Which is to say, they are very, very practiced at it, now.

"Ah, I take it those sabres aren't just for show, then?" All things considered, it's probably better for him to be armed than not, and to keep people who might be looking for revenge out of the kitchen.

"I understand, though. That's why I like music, though I haven't had a chance to play in a long time." Instruments don't take well to all the nearly crashing their ship tends to do, it seems, and the shuttle has a pretty strict weight limit.

Soldat shuts their eyes a moment. They miss music, too. There's the demon-kid playing at the piano now, but it's not really the same as curating their own music experience. "Booker might have an instrument to buy. And there's the piano." They look back over in her direction, not starting a new origami piece yet. "What do you play?"

"I mostly trained on string instruments: guzheng, harp, dulcimer, that sort of thing." The dulcimer at the guild house had met an unfortunate end thanks to Nandi, but Inara hadn't really minded it. "I can play a bit of piano, but I don't know many songs for it." They had mostly used it to practice scales.

Wow, the only one of those Soldat recognizes is a harp. Either she's very fancy or very eclectic. "I picked out a little on the piano, my first year here. Mostly I don't play anything, though." They hold up the metal hand, wiggling the fingers a little. "These don't really. Work well. For music. But I can dance."

(Jesus, we ain't danced in-- Forty-eight rounds. --yeah, wow. You still remember? Shut up, Sarge, of course I remember. If HYDRA couldn't wipe it out of me, a stupid murder game won't do it. Just askin'!)

Inara isn't particularly surprised that the metal hand makes music difficult. She's honestly impressed that it has the fine motor control to create the delicate origami creatures. It probably also resonates against the keys a bit, on the piano - he could likely handle mallets, but she can't quite picture him playing a dulcimer.

"Oh, really? A gentleman?" She's teasing a bit, but they had danced a lot on Verdana. It was fun, but also a form of cultural exchange: people seemed to at least have a bit in common no matter where they came from.

Soldat ducks their head a little. "I. Dunno about that. You might know fancier dancing than I do." And they don't remember a lot about how to treat a lady in a public place, anymore.

"Oh, I'm sure I do. But that isn't really my style anymore." A lot has happened in two years.

(Are you actually considering dancing? Not... really. Not out here in public. Aw. I know. Sorry.)

"Not sure what counts as a gentleman for you, anyhow," they admit.

Inara smiles wryly. "If you can get through a whole dance without punching someone in the face, you're already doing better than some men I know."

"I've done that," they say with a blink. "I've done a lot of that. Is that all it takes?"

"It seemed the most applicable to dancing." Though there hadn't really been any gentlemen involved at all in that situation. "Courage, integrity to one’s convictions, respect for others... I've met more than one self-described gentleman who can't even claim one of those."

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