strangetrip | [EP] a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life*

Yasmeen "refused to be bored, because she wasn't boring."**

She'd read that in a book in Gotham. But then, Gotham had a library, bookstores, and her Lady. Not being bored was a lot easier. So, when the city opened, Yasmeen all but bolted through the portal into the wet jungle heat in search of anything interesting to do.

It didn't take long for her to discover there were no airships, no weapons modern even by her standards, and very little for non-natives to do. But there was always work in a port city, even in a river port, and she knew how to find it.

On day two, she met Ek Sothea, a young woman with a gift for spotting an opportunity. By day three, she'd agreed to front her the gold for a salvage operation in the river. It barely touched the reserves of what Yasmeen had with her when she arrived from Gotham, but it was enough to finance the operation and get Yasmeen a tip on a bar by the docks where Ek Sothea had gotten the initial information and the name of the man who'd supplied it. Soksan.

The third night, she staked out the bar and by the fourth, she'd met Sar Peou and his contact Hu Chariya who needed an ancient and valuable map retrieved from the business partners who'd kept it after a deal went bad. Early on the morning of the fifth day, she'd slipped into the third floor above the Phann Raksmei bank, picked the locks on the safe chest, and obtained the map. On the evening of the fifth day, she met Sar Peou at Soksan, slipped into his back corner booth and delivered the map in exchange for a healthy payment that covered her investment in Ek Sothea's salvage operation.

Business transacted, she bought herself an ale to nurse while scoping out her next job.

~*~*~*~
* Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf
** Zelda Fitzgerald

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I'm not unwilling, but I do wonder why you want to know." And what she got out of sharing.

"What you've got in there," Vax pointed to where she'd put the bag she'd been given, "is a mystery. I've always had a bit of a weakness for them. Opening boxes I've been told not to peek into, unlocking doors, that sort of thing," he confessed. He'd got very good at it, too.

That made her laugh, because it was genuine and it sounded so much like the Doctor.

"I know someone like that, gets him into trouble more often than not." She opened her pocket and pulled out the pouch. "You're sure you want to know? What if it's something deadly or illegal?"

"Well I'd rather not find myself in prison on this other-world," Vax admitted. "And I look even more suspicious than you do. So I guess it'd be in my best interest not to go telling the local authorities, wouldn't it?"

"Prison's not so bad," she teased, and it was impossible to tell if it was a joke or experience speaking.

She opened the pouch and showed the contents to him, inside were stones of multiple colors. Amber, jade, turquoise.

And it was possible they really were made of amber, jade and turquoise.

"I still think I'd rather not find myself there." Vax peered into the pouch, considering the stones. "Very pretty," he pointed out, for whatever else they may be.

"What did they run you?"

"A bit of coin, they aren't worth much. They keep them at the small shrines all over the city. You're meant to toss them in." She closed the pouch and returned it to her pocket.

"They won't sell them, I gather it's meant to be bad luck. Nor do they like it much if you take one, as they're an offering for the Goddess."

So she'd found someone willing to sell her some.

That explained the somewhat covert nature of the transaction. It hardly answered the larger question though. "If that's the case - why'd you feel compelled to buy them?"

"Because they told me I couldn't." She is fully aware of what this says about her personality, and is obviously more than willing to admit it.

"...That's it? You're just determined to be contrary?" Vax found himself smiling with an incredulous humor. Part of him supposed he shouldn't encourage sacrilege, all things being what they were, but who hadn't stolen a few wishing coins in their youth? It was mostly absurd because the woman was well past old enough to know better.

"Best hope their goddess has enough other rocks that she won't mind you taking a few."

"I was born contrary." Technically River was WAY too old to not know better, but also she hadn't actually had much of a youth. Even when she'd been living in Leadworth with Amy and Rory as mates she hadn't been a youth in the typical sense.

"And it's seven Goddesses. Like the Pleiades. Which tells me we're probably in earths galaxy at a minimum. And if they have problem with it, they are welcome to complain."

"You just said a whole lot of words," Vax'ildan suggested after a beat, "and I understood maybe half of them." He assumed it just had to do with the differences between worlds - Pleiades? Galaxy? He'd learned by now that the world most of the residents of the inn called home was 'Earth' to them. They used the word in Exandria, too, but 'earth' meant soil or land, not the place entire. It stuck him as a rather boring name for a world.

He didn't point out that if a goddess felt like it, she very well could issue a complaint, at least where he was from.

"But now that you've got your sacrilegious rocks, what are you even going to do with them?"

She laughed more at the way he said it than at his not understanding, then she sobered slightly.

"I don't know. Take them back to the inn, maybe I'll put them in a bowl by one of the fountains. Bring a little of this place back to that place." The Doctor collected bits like this, not intending to but ending up with them nonetheless, cluttering up rooms in the TARDIS with mementos that looked useless.

[EP] a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life* - backdated

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