multiversallogs | How many goodly creatures are there here!

How many goodly creatures are there here! :: GAME OPENER

Welcome to Baedal.

These are the first words newcomers hear when the door opens and they are invited into their new world. Some fuss, some fight, some need time before they have the courage to step outside. Others, shell-shocked or jaded, go quietly along with the proceedings.

They are given brief instructions; a repeat of what's described in the pamphlet and a door key.

Please stay in your room. There will be dinner soon.

It's been almost a day for some. For others, only an hour's wait. The latest newcomer is lead straight from the arrival room to the dining hall where candles and lanterns have been set out to compensate for failing electricity. (Those who have been here longer explain about rolling blackouts.) The food, however, is warm, varied and plentiful. Seating is open, and less conventional chair are available to those who need them.

There are many strange faces around the table, the majority of these recent arrivals. The proprietor of the Valhalla Inn is here, as is some of her staff. The Sheriff of Mog Hill is introduced, his function detailed. The reason for the dinner is explained:

It's a celebration. A new cohort has finally been officiated; CeidaryBlue523. Your cohort. Please. Introduce yourself. Mingle. Get to know your fellows, they will be your brothers and sisters for as long as you live in this city.

((OOC post for discussion and coordination.))

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A third time. A third time? It was too much, too, too much. So much too much that Cassandra had spent the better half of the morning laughing. Perhaps crying a bit too, but mostly laughing. All things told, it took her several hours to pull herself together enough to venture outside of her room. Still, she walked with an unsteady gait, a colt's first steps.

Entering the public room, she was immediately overwhelmed by the number of strange-looking, new people. It was just too much. A laugh gurgled up in her throat before she could stop it and she had to clamp a hand over her mouth.

Why was this always happening to her?

Her dark eyes scanned the room, searching for a familiar face, anyone she could recognize from home or from one of the other worlds she had visited. She needed that, right now. She needed a flash of familiarity to keep her steady, to ground her. Someone she knew. She would even have settled for an enemy.

"Othryoneus," she muttered to herself, "what am I going to do?"

It was helping to see that he wasn't the only one who was having a hard time adjusting to ... this. Wolfgang noticed her come in, the look on her face familiar to him; he looked about as out of sorts as she did, although at least having been down here a little longer had enabled much of the shock to wear off. It was still plenty shocking, though -- he swore he'd seen some huge red guy wandering around. Then again, that could be any number of things, and it only occurred to him now that his meds were in his messenger bag... on the floor of his apartment... in Izmir.

Fuck.

He'd worry about it later; for now it was best to take things one thing at a time. One person at a time, maybe. He offered her a smile, slightly concerned and very sympathetic. "Are you all right?"

Cassandra looked up. Someone was speaking to her. She laughed. It was a mirthless laugh, an empty, hollow laugh. Was she all right? That was a question! But laughing was inappropriate in these sorts of situations, wasn't it? Wasn't it? Yes, yes, she was quite certain she remembered something to that extent.

"What is that expression? Third time is the charm?" She couldn't quite remember where she had heard that one. "Is that from Rowan? Or Willaknapp? Or is it from earth's future, three thousand years after me? I can't remember."

She swept a hand through her wild curls. It was important to keep it together. She had to regain some semblance of calm. Cassandra turned to catch his eyes. Hers were dark and wide, like black holes. "What's your name?" she asked.

"Third?" he said, sounding a good deal more surprised and dismayed than he intended -- he'd been trying to go for reassuring and calm, but his composure kept being broken by... well, things like that. He ran the fingernails of one hand along the opposite palm, wishing that worked better to steady himself, since it was apparent it wasn't going to wake him up. Third. Christ.

"I'm Wolfgang." Which was a hell of a name for someone who looked so frail -- pale everywhere, even his eyes, which seemed nervous, moving constantly, like he was trying not to stare at anyone or anything. He held out his hand to shake haltingly like he wasn't sure if that was the proper thing to do, here. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Miss...?"

A frightened bird. Interesting.

"I think it was from Rowan," she decided, reaching out and clasping his wrist, the way she often saw men do back home. "My name is Cassandra."

She supposed, at this point, it might almost be prudent to add a sarcastic, 'Yes, that Cassandra,' but she refrained for the time being. There were, shockingly enough, people out there who didn't think she was some exotic, mythological figure.

Time would tell.

"You must forgive me, I'm not in my right mind tonight. Wolfgang." She paused. "That's a funny sort of name. Does it mean something?"

Well that was ... different. He'd have to get accustomed to changes like that -- shouldn't be too hard, with all the traveling he'd done of late, this was just ... on a bigger scale. Much bigger. "Cassandra, all right. I'll remember that." The smile he gave then was more genuine, a little more relaxed. He was least likely of all the assembled people to assume her name was significant, as he was still ignorant of the existence of anything beyond the very mundane.

"Oh, no, it's all right, this is very -- unsettling?" His English was very good, but he hadn't had a reason to speak it in years and he was concerned he might have forgotten some vocabulary. Now that he was here and people seemed to speak English (which, if he thought about it too much, weirded him out a little) he was probably going to lose all his Turkish. Sigh. "Ah -- it does, but I'm afraid I've forgotten. It's Old German and I'm certain it probably means something silly."

Cassandra tilted her head to one side, like a curious cat. She had already withdrawn her hand from his, so her anxiety about skin-to-skin contact was minimized, but still, it took her a moment to find her words again. "I'm afraid I don't know what German is," she said. It probably wasn't a Greek city-state. She was certain she would have remembered that. Unless all of this world jumping was making her forget.

Now that was a truly horrifying notion.

"Where do you come from?"

"Ah --" Well. That was also different. He shouldn't be surprised, he'd seen people so far who looked like something out of a science-fiction movie, so why shouldn't he assume people might come from places entirely different from his own? "It's a, ah, country. To the north."

There was a pause at her question. Should he be honest? If she didn't know what Germany was, it was likely she wouldn't know the difference between anything he told her anyway -- and if this was a dream it didn't matter at all, and if it was not, well, who was going to give a fuck here? Who was going to be looking for him here?

He was pretty sure the police's jurisdiction did not extend outside of the known universe.

"A country called Israel, in the Mediterranean... near Egypt?" he ventured, not sure if she'd know what that was. ... maybe she was from space. Oh Lord, what if she was from space? "Yourself? Originally. I mean. Before the --" He gestured at the room, meaning before all this dimensional insanity.

Cassandra's eyes lit up in surprise. "Yes, I know Egypt!" She was utterly delighted. It had been so very long since she had encountered anyone from the world she knew. "I've never heard of your Israel, but to be honest, there are a lot of city-states I'm unfamiliar with in the east. Most of my knowledge of geography is in the west."

She bowed her head politely. "I'm from Troy," she explained. "At least, I was from Troy before it was sacked. Given the way things are with this world jumping, I suppose I don't know if you're from before or after it was sacked. But it was."

"Troy--" Another pause. "Greek Troy?" What. Okay, no, he should have expected this kind of weirdness, and all things told it wasn't as strange as it could be... (she wasn't blue!) "What year are you from?" he asked, sounding more interested than weirded out, because there was a part of him (a large part of him, actually) that was a gigantic nerd and actually really fascinated by the idea of speaking to people potentially from the past.

He ran a hand through his hair thoughtfully. "I lived in that general area before I came here," he explained. "A little to the south, in a city called Izmir. The country's called Turkey now, or, well, the now that I come from."

She bristled slightly. "Troy was not a Greek city-state." Cassandra's anger was fleeting, however. She was far too used to being treated as a relic of this so-called 'Greek mythology.' To be fair, she had ended her life in Greece, but that wasn't the point. The Greeks had destroyed her world long before they took her life and she didn't care to be associated with them. But that was just the way history would remember her and who was she to argue with history?

"We do not keep track of the years the way most from earth do," she sighed. "Presumably, I am from close to three thousand years before your time. You caught me off guard. I did not expect to hear that Egypt had survived that far into the future." It seemed so unfair. Troy was a glorious as Egypt, as beautiful, as rich, as famous. Why did it get to survive? The gods, she supposed.

"Perhaps we are distantly related," she mused. "The survivors of Troy cover the earth like stars cover the sky. I can imagine many of them went west." It was a nice thought, if not somewhat superficial.

When Apollo saw the back of Cassandra's head, he knew who she was in a moment. He knew those curls. Those untamed, wild, wonderful curls. Without preamble, he crossed the room.

Things could have been worse after all. He didn't have to face her disappearance a second time.

"Cassandra," he spoke, stepping in close behind her.

Cassandra whirled around at that. If she were blind, she would have known who that was.

And yet...

Well, her experience with Bret and Ianto and Jack had taught her not to assume anything. For all she knew, this was the same Apollo who had told her two days ago that he was going to condemn Othryoneus to Tartarus. She had to find a way to make sure who he was.

"Have you seen any ghost turkeys?" she asked.

Perhaps not the most coherent test, but Cassandra wasn't exactly operating at full mental capacity right now.

Of all the things he had been expecting her to say, ghost turkeys were definitely no higher than seven or eight on the list.

"Thankfully not," Apollo calmly responded, arching an eyebrow. "And I do believe after the shower--and lookout--experiences, that a warmer greeting than that would be out of order right now."

Cassandra was so relieved she forgot to bristle at mention of the shower or the lookout. This was the Apollo she had been with in Willaknapp. All of those confusing feelings she was experiencing--had been experiencing--he was experiencing too. True, there was a whole separate set of issues to worry about now, but for the moment, Cassandra decided to stick with relief. It was just easier.

"You're you," she whispered with a long exhale.

She wondered what sort of warm welcome he wanted. Certainly not that. Certainly not now.

"Are we the only ones?"

A glance to his left, and then a glance to his right. No familiar faces. No singing men with shaggy hair or tiny redheads bouncing up and down or dark haired men who were trying too hard to look aloof.

"Not that I see," Apollo responded before turning back to face Cassandra. "Of course I'm me. Who else would I be?"

"Another you," she replied. "One from an infinite number of points in history." The more she thought about it, the more staggering, she realized, the odds that of all the possible Apollos that this place could have 'chosen,' it had chosen this one. She wondered what that meant. She wondered if that meant anything at all. It was quite possible it was simply one of the more unusual quirks of existence.

"Have you read the papers we've been given?" she asked, deciding that her head hurt too much to consider those possibilities right now. "The..." she struggled to find the right world, "the propaganda of it all? We've been 'chosen?'" She shook her head. "It's Rowan all over again, I think." Not as nice as Rowan, but it felt the same.

Of course, at least they weren't naked.

"Well, we'll be out of here soon enough." Apollo dismissed her concerns with a wave of his hand. "No need to get upset over it, Cassandra. Look how quickly you're zipping from one world to another. I give this place a two weeks at most."

Feeling bold, he reached out and took Cassandra's hand in his own, giving it an affirming squeeze.

Cassandra went rigid when he took her hand and a small hiss escaped her lips. She pulled her hand back and it took everything inside of her not to immediately strike him across the face. That was, of course, an over-reaction, she knew. It was only her hand. But still, her emotions were heightened as it was right now. She didn't need the added stress of an unwelcome touch.

"Maybe," she said, fighting to keep her voice level. "Maybe not. But jumping from world to world is no way to spend the rest of one's life." She paused, looking up at him with her dark eyes. "It's maddening."

She let the weight of the word hang in the air for a moment before she spoke again.

"What are you going to do first?"

What Apollo actually planned on doing first was finding another woman who wasn't going to push him away at the slightest touch. It would probably be easy enough. They were surrounded by other lost, misplaced, confused people. Emotionally vulnerable people. It was just a matter of picking off one of the weaker members of a herd.

"I suppose we should figure out what this place is," he decided to say instead. "And figure out what they expect from us. How long they plan to keep us."

She calmed down, nodding slightly. "Yes," she murmured, "yes, that would be logical. They expect us to find our own employment, be self-sufficient." That was the most significant difference from life in Rowan and life in Willaknapp. Of course, in Cassandra's case, it was a significant departure from her life as a Trojan princess. But Troy was nothing more than mythology now and she was as much a princess as she was a soldier. Which was to say, not very much at all.

Cassandra twisted one of her curls, tighter and tighter around her finger until the tip turned white. "Maybe this is Tartarus," she mused, more to herself than to Apollo. "Maybe hell is just being bounced from corner to corner of existence, never to rest, never to find peace."

Abruptly, she let out a laugh. It was explosive and ended as quickly as it began. "But why would you be in Tartarus?"

"Careful," he warned. "You're hovering on the edge of another crazy spell. It's not going to impress me."

With his mood right now, it would mostly just annoy him.

He reached up to pull her hand away from her hair but paused halfway, recalling her reaction when he took her hand a moment ago. Probably not the best move. "You think everywhere you go is Tartarus," he said tersely. "It's not."

Cassandra's breakdown was inconvenient. What a pity.

She pulled on the curl, tighter and tighter. Why was it that she was always so delightfully miserable when talking with Apollo? Probably because she couldn't hide herself from him. And, more recently, probably because any time she smelled him, all she could think about was that night in the showers. It haunted her.

"No," she said softly, "it's not."

Her eyes danced about, looking at all the unfamiliar faces. The thought of starting over again seemed so enormously complicated. "Where is your room?" she asked.

"That way," Apollo said unhelpfully. "Did you wake up in a tiny green room that wouldn't open from the inside as well?"

He folded his arms, face contorting into obvious displeasure. "I though Simon Simone was in charge of it all at first." He wasn't sure if he was pleased or upset at being somewhere new. Willaknepp had been terrible, but who was to say this world was any better?

She nodded slightly. "Green room. No windows and only a door opening from the outside." In some ways worse than arriving naked. There was a lack of dignity to being caged up like a tiger in a sultan's court. Then again, there was a lack of dignity to being stripped. Really, all things told, her arrival in Willaknapp had been the most graceful. At least until that scene during the masquerade.

"We won't have to worry about Simon again," she murmured. "Whatever he was. I doubt there's any returning to Willaknapp."

Cassandra let go of her curl, feeling the tingle as her finger turned pink again. "I suppose I can go back to being a barmaid," she sighed. It wasn't an attractive notion, but she saw no alternative. "And you? What will you do?"

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