strangetrip | [EP/GP] Check-In: I Assure You We Are Open

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[EP/GP] Check-In: I Assure You We Are Open

The damp, cool, chilly morning clouded with fog seemed to fit the mood about the Madonna Inn. Nobody had been quite right since the undead invasion. Definitely not Vax'ildan. But for him, it was less about their sense of day-to-day calm and safety shattered, less about undead specifically. It was a lot more to do with losing Scanlan and Pike, and the new memorials installed in the Temple.

He wondered about it, not for the first time, even as he readied for the fresh arrivals that might be coming today - or not, because they didn't always. What decided who came and went? Was there any sense in how many and when or why? Not so far as he could tell, but he'd never been the brains.

Gathering up the great heap of cloth and rope in his arms, the lean figure summoned the wings of his armor, the black of his silhouette merging with the other dark and shifting shapes skulking about in the first light of dawn. With a crouch and a lunge from the roof, he spread his wings wide and circled through the air right up to the face of the main building, unfurling the massive banner he'd sewn of spare bedsheets and painted with dark dye to tie it up taut:

WELCOME NEWCOMERS
YES, THIS MEANS YOU
NO REALLY WE'RE SURE

Life kept going on around you, no matter how confused or scared or fucked-up you were. And the best thing, the kindest thing, the sanest thing he could think to do in all this was to start up the coffee machine, stack some decorated pumpkin-shaped cookies on a platter in the lobby, and prop open the doors for whoever would join them in being confused and scared and fucked-up today.

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"That's a big name for a library." He replied as he extended his own hand to shake hers. "Tyrone Johnson... and as you probably know I'm new. Didn't even know a place like this existed, to tell you the truth, and I'm pretty used to weird lately."

"Well," Sunny said with a shrug, her smile going a little sheepish. "I just work here. Illyana is the one with the actual library science degree, so she got to name it."

She glanced about the room, though in such a way as to indicate that she wasn't actually looking at it but was instead thinking of the expanse of their own tiny world. "I don't think most of us really had any idea that a place like this existed. Other realities some, but one that's entirely a kitschy hotel and sixty people?"

"Yeah, that sounds about right." he replied. "this is sort of a new level of weird. And my reality had aliens attack New York last year."

Tyrone watched enough movies to understand the concept of this place. It unsettled him, but when you got stuck inside someone's brain and attacked over and over again by terrors, it was easier to come to terms with strange happenings.

That got a little snort out of Sunny. "New York, always New York." Aliens never came to Lagos or something of the sort.

She tucked one of her braids behind her ear idly. "Did you get the full rundown on how this place works? Find your room?"

"I don't mind it always being New York," He said. "Means I don't have to deal with it. Although lately New Orleans hasn't been any better."

When Sunny asked him about his room, Tyrone visibly paused.

"Yeah. I think I understand this gist of this place," He continued. "But, uh. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but my room sucks. Can't tell if it's a joke or not, but there's like, zebra print in my bathroom and, I guess, the whole thing's supposed to look like a jungle."

As someone who had been called 'jungle monkey' before, he did not exactly appreciate the room by any degree.

All right, that was a good point.

Sunny's face twisted in disgust and she swore, though not in English. This was definitely a pattern, though she was almost more annoyed and disturbed that someone was tasteless enough to design rooms like these in the first place. "A lot of the rooms suck at least a little, but... yeah. They put me in 'Safari.'"

Which, congratulations, was indeed something in Africa. East Africa. Which was different in many ways from West Africa.

"Safari? Really?" He said, then shook his head. "The guy at the front desk said I couldn't change. I'm going to guess if you're still staying in yours then I probably can't, huh?"

Tyrone rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully.

"It's still kind of surreal to think I'm in some completely new place, you know?" He added.

"Set it on fire a couple of months back, too," Sunny said by way of confirmation, her arms crossing, eyebrows arching in an expression that wasn't sure if it wanted to be amusement or annoyance. "It restored itself right down to the cheap fake tiger skins. Can't control your room assignment or move out, but if you make friends you can always bunk with them when the racism starts to choke."

This spoken from more experience than she cared to have.

"It... takes getting used to all around. For what it's worth, most of the people around here are okay." And she'd trained Jackson to stop saying Negro, so that was something.

"Yeah, the ones I've seen seemed okay," He admitted. "I just had things to do back home and I thought I might be able to leave because... I can travel a different way than other people."

Tyrone knew that Sunny was here when he suddenly appeared, so he wasn't going to hide it.

Sunny for her part almost found it reassuring when the arrived with, or at least already knowing about, magic and other abilities. She let herself smile now, arms slipping into crossing across her chest. "Magic or mutant?"

Tyrone looked like he wasn't sure how to respond.

"I don't know," He said honestly. "I didn't always have these.. powers I have. There was an accident when I was little and a friend and I got these powers from it, I guess. They only showed up like, a month ago."

Sunny blinked, immediately and unwillingly flashing back to her initiation which was now half her life ago. "And has anybody been helping you with that? Teaching you at all?"

"No, not really." He said. "No one really knows, back home. It's sort of all happened really fast and it's weird, you know? Plus other than Tandy and then a bunch of actual super heroes that live far away, no one else has these powers so it's not like anyone can actually help, you know? We've been sort of figuring it out as we go along."

Sunny's face softened in sympathy. She had been fortunate; when her powers had suddenly be dumped on her and none of the adults in her life had been helpful (because apparently that was just how things were among Leopard People), she'd had Orlu and Chichi and Sasha to guide her. No one should have to do this alone. "That's messed up. There's dropping people in the deep end and there's leaving them to drown."

He shrugged. He had a lot of experience with being in the deep end drowning.

"I don't think it was really supposed to happen to either of us, you know?" He said. "It was an accident when we were kids. Wrong place, wrong time. But now that we have these powers, we've been trying to use it to be useful."

Most of the time, anyways

"Well, fortunately," she went on easily, "there are several people here with some sort of teleportation ability who'd be happy to help you explore that power if you want it. Our own head librarian being one of them. Varieties include portals, puffs of purple smoke, and swinging around big damn warhammers to summon the Rainbow Road level of Mario Kart."

The Bifrost probably deserved more respect that than, but she enjoyed gently mocking Thor.

None of those descriptions sounded like him, but he was looking forward to talking to someone who had some experience. He wasn't ready to mention he had other powers yet. Tyrone thought of the other power as a burden.

"Can you do any of that?" He asked. "You seem really comfortable with the strange stuff."

Sunny smiled slowly and answered simply, "I'm a witch. I can do many things."

Up until a few weeks ago, Tyrone didn't believe in witches. Then his powers started happening and he met Evita's aunt.

"I met a woman who can do voodoo," He said. "Probably not the same, but I guess what I'm saying is, I believe you."

Tyrone felt it was important to acknowledge that.

The nature of Sunny's smile shifted from one of faint teasing to genuinely, almost girlishly pleased. He had said New Orleans, but she had encountered enough people from other worlds to know that not all magics were real in all worlds that had magic. "Voodoo's a kind of cousin to the school of magic I was trained in, actually."

Her schooling had necessitated learning about the local folk beliefs, as well as their descendants--Voodoo, Hoodoo, Obeah--and it struck her that she should explain. "I was raised in Nigeria. Though I know I don't sound it right now."

He shrugged.

"I don't sound like I'm from New Orleans," He said. Everyone thinks we all have Cajun accents and speak Creole. "But that's cool. I'd like to hear about what it was like growing up there. My parents sort of kept a lot of cultural stuff away from me, so I couldn't even tell you where I'm originally from."

He shook his head. Tyrone wasn't sure he agreed with his parents' choices.

_Could most African American people say where they were from, though? That was something (more) that had separated Sunny from other black girls when she'd lived in New York. She was Nigerian American. She had a country. Most of them didn't and would never know._

_"I grew up among black people looking like this," Sunny said in her thickest Nigerian accent, but there was still lightness and even a hint of amusement in her tone. After all, if she couldn't laugh at her hilariously abusive childhood, she might just start screaming. And no one needed that. "You can probably imagine a good chunk of it well enough." Certainly better than most people here could._

_But she switched back smoothly to her American accent when she added, "What kind of cultural stuff?"_

Edited 2018-10-20 04:26 (UTC)

Tyrone wondered briefly how much harder it would be for him to be Sunny where he lived. It was not a pleasant thought.

"Simple things," He said. "Like we moved so we could be around the 'right people'."

He hoped she would understand that meant he moved into a 'white neighborhood'.

"And I only just found out my dad used to be apart of this Mardis Gras tribe called the Wild Red Hawks," He explained. "He still won't really say why he distanced himself from that for so many years, but most of the stuff my parents do is to 'protect me'... I haven't even told them the girl I like back home has a family into voodoo because I'm pretty sure they'd freak right out."

Which sounded not unlike Sasha's parents. Which had led to Sasha acting out to his mostly white and Lamb neighbors.

"Parents do that," Sunny agreed. Being the baby, the only girl, the albino in a highly superstitious culture, her mother had been highly protective of Sunny for years despite the fact that she was objectively the child with the most sense (and the least to be afraid of, but Mama couldn't know that). She was still overprotective, though overseas she couldn't do very much other than fuss over Skype.

God Sunny missed her mother's fussing.

"And in my experience, they don't take things like that well. My mother suspects a lot of things, but even if she could accept the weird, her faith makes it all the more complicated." She pulled out a knife, the handle silver and the blade something like green glass. "You may not have rules not to, but if your gut says don't spill, trust that instinct."

Edited 2018-10-26 06:40 (UTC)

"Wait..." He said, wondering if he picked up on it right. "Do you mean your mom doesn't know you can do magic and stuff?"

Tyrone considered Sunny's apparent age. She was older than him, but he knew nothing more than that. Has she hid this from her for that long?

He eyed the knife. It didn't look like any knife he had ever seen before.

Edited 2018-10-28 02:13 (UTC)

[EP/GP] Check-In: I Assure You We Are Open

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