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Who: ~~Bruce Wayne~~ Tom and you.
What: Creeping out from the fringes and the shadows, investigating the city through a closer lens.
Where: Various areas in Baedal, mostly the central districts, and along the river.
When: Coardi (Wednesday), or any day this week after that, I'm easy.
Notes: OPEN LIKE AN OPEN THING. I want your cr and I want your revenge, tag in under whatever scenario your dark heart desires.
→ new note: if you'd like to start a new thread please come up with a new setting on another day, Coardi has hit critical mass of things Mr Hermit BatCrab would put up with before vanishing back into the shadows. :E
Warnings: TBA. (Swearing? Not much else.)

Bruce doesn't want to admit it at first, but after he gets a decent night's sleep and has a real conversation with someone, he feels a lot better. It took him an hour of silent reflection on Hasi's little balcony to come to terms with having felt awful to begin with - it's not being here, it's everything else, being here is a strange misstep but it isn't enough to throw him, not really - and to accept that attempting to remain a ghost in the machine wasn't an acceptable plan of action. For a whole armful of reasons. Also on that balcony, struck by the view at night, with oddly-powered lights set into strange buildings like scattered candles and gems, Baedal reminded him of Baku, maybe Lahore, and the inoffensive memories chided at him from quiet corners about his aseptic behavior.

He still isn't social when he goes out. He's quiet, unassuming, and spends hours wandering, watching without truly interacting. He keeps to the edges of the river, then, walking alongside it off the roads, going under bridges where he can. There are people washing the dye out of great, bright reams of fabric in the still shallows, speaking a language he guesses must have once been of Earth; he practices with them for a time, talking of the river's current and temperament and the goddess that lives within instead of about the tenure of their citizenship.

He walks up into the city proper when he comes to the water's split, skirting the arena - there are men and women practicing familiar-but-not-quite movements in a great lined rectangle. It's an experience on a scale Bruce never had even during his own time as a student, and so he sits and watches for a while. A woman speaks to him about a guild that trains and dispatches warriors to serve as private guardians; he keeps the paper she gives him, but invests in nothing further. It isn't anything he'd truly consider, but he's curious in an academic way about what lies inside their doors.

There's a library he'd like to see, but a group of children with wildly varying ages (and genetic markers) end up kicking multicolored rocks into the cobblestone street - he kicks one back, artfully, and ends up engrossed for the next hour learning a game with rules he suspects are not actually written down anywhere. With few words, he teaches one of them how to hold his arm to balance anything on his hand, and laughs a little, privately.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Penelope narrows her eyes at him. This should not be an unfamiliar look crossing her face, here.

"Considering you're here, I'm guessing that leans towards the 'not fucking good' side of the spectrum."

"Considering some of the stories I've heard from other people about other worlds," because he's not copping to having been anywhere else himself, you see, "I think I've lucked out, more or less."

If it had to happen at all, anyway.

"Mine was alright," she mutters, grumpily for a second, staring at the ground. There is a pause.

"...I mean it was bullshit, but it wasn't all bad. I mean, it was my life, back there. Now I'm here. Coming here, it's like your life goes upside-down and you have to start over, except all your shit's on the ceiling and nobody knows who the fuck you are and won't loan you a fucking ladder."

"That's not too bad of a metaphor."

Baedal is, compared to Gotham, safe, wholesome, and quaint. He misses home; Bruce lives and breathes his city and every time he's stuck outside of it he's inherently unhappy. But comparatively... well. He's mostly pissed off he's stuck at all.

"I guess not. Metaphors are stupid but can you blame me? Looking for reasons for anything in this place is a bullshit effort anyhow. One thing you notice, the people who survive are the people who can roll with it. Everybody else drops away like so many leperous toenails. How's that for a goddamn metaphor."

Somehow their conversation has gotten entirely too serious. How is it that's happened? How has this random stranger inspired her to have such ~feelings~ about stuff, and why is that okay? It isn't, really, it's exactly the sort of situation Penelope has spent years practicing how to avoid, and this guy just sidesteps all that and is like 'hey, what's up, i'm going to fuck with your mind', and she lets him, because seriously part of her kind of likes it.

Goddamn troll.

It's possible she can sense whatever kinship her elseworlds twin has, or it's possible she's just projecting - lonely people will do that, sometimes; Bruce does it, but never with openness. He's always the one slamming doors and railroading people who know too much about him.

"Mm." He sticks his hands in his pockets. "There's got to be a reason though. Even if that reason is 'accidental cosmic randomness.'"

Shut up with your persistent desire for logic, Wayne.

"Yeah, maybe," she mutters, and allows the two to walk in silence for a while. Talking about her world has made her unexpectedly a little homesick, and that has made her uncomfortably vulnerable, so she does what she does best, and represses the shit out of it in the hopes that it will go away on its own.

That gets her thinking about what he said, though, about the accidental cosmic randomness thing. And that just reminds her of home again.

"Where I come from the world kind of operates on balance. Black and white, positive/negative, that kind of shit. Maybe that's got something to do with it. Not that I've asked anybody, but I mean, there's people who have been here for generations and they still don't know what the fuck, so IMHO it's kind of not worth worrying about. Just as long as you don't piss off the Gods, pretty sure you'll be fine. And avoid giant ants."

"That's probably about the size of it."

Even faking it, even in his mask of a human persona, it sounds like a lie. There's something about him, soft-spoken nearly-humorless nerd or not, that says to anyone paying attention that this man is not the sort to be satisfied with complacency.

But he isn't the sort to torture someone in conversation, either.

"When I'm less broke, I'll get you to make a shirt for me."

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