strangetrip | [GP] Check-in Day

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[GP] Check-in Day

The wheel of the year turned and turned and Curnen found herself at an anniversary of sorts that she flatly didn't want to be remembering but got stuck on a loop of anyway.

This time there was no taking the hell off into the wilderness, though. Nor were there endless, circular recitations of "The Queen of Argyll." Rather than be poisoned by the memory of someone she still hated like everloving fuck, she focused on remembering the friend she'd lost. And besides this being Kash's song, she figured it was never a bad time around here for "John Barleycorn." Perched on the roof with her guitar, she sang of John Barleycorn's dying and rising again, subtle magic weaving into her voice to lead anyone lost in their little bubble world this way.

There was three men come out of the west their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow, John Barleycorn must die,
They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in, threw clods upon his head,
And these three men made a solemn oath John Barleycorn was dead.

It was Kash's song, in her mind, but you talked to half the people around here and it wasn't a bad fit for them, either. From her vantage point, she watched the road.

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Sam was taken aback from the colors in the lobby, but the absurdity of it reminded her of the Hotel Valhalla. She wouldn't be surprised if a spear went flying through the air.

Her eyes landed on Peter. He seemed nice. He seemed eager. She smiled politely to him.

"Hi. I'm Samirah. It's nice to meet you... And yes, someone has. An older gentleman. Mr. O'Neill?"

"Oh, yeah, Mr. O'Neill. I know him, kinda. Not a lot, though." They'd seen one another, said hello, made small talk, but that was about it. You couldn't really avoid talking with someone at the inn at some point unless you really, really tried.

"Where are you from?" He gestures to himself. "I'm from Queens, 2017. I've been here for two Julys now."

Samirah remembered that O'Neill mentioned other worlds and times so when Peter was from a year ahead of her, she was only somewhat surprised.

"2016. Boston."

She didn't have a typical Boston accent, but not everyone did in Boston. Peter appeared to have the Queen's accent she knew about from pop culture.

"You've been here for two years?"

She processed this quietly. She did not want to be here that long, she thought.

"A little over a year and a half," he says. "I arrived in July." Somehow it felt longer.

"No one I knew was here when I showed up, but a bunch of them started showing up later." Quill first, then others afterwards. Technically, he didn't know Quill, but Quill did know him and that seemed good enough.

"So there could be people from my world here as well."

She wondered if Magnus was here. While she might hope for someone like Amir, it would be more likely for Magnus or Alex to be here.

"Mr. O'Neill mentioned that people can come here from other worlds. What sort of worlds did he mean?"

"Some people, they come from other versions of Earth. There's I think three different Peter Parkers other than me that people here know."

Three more than Peter's sure he's ever thought about until his arrival. Sure, he thought Multiverse Theory was a possibility. He just never thought too hard about his place in it.

"Others are from other worlds, like Exandria or Tarnax VII or Asgard."

Sam understood the concept of the multiverse theory. When she learned she was a Valkyrie and that Norse gods were real, the multiverse took a backseat to the Nine Realms.

"Asgard?"

She tensed subtly in the shoulders and looked around with assertive eyes.

"Asgard is technically in the same world as Earth, just a different realm."

"Um," Peter says tentatively, because he doesn't know enough about it to speak with confidence. "Like the Nine Realms, right? I don't know all of them, but I know that Earth and Asgard are two of them."

She nodded in response.

"Do you know who is here from Asgard?"

She didnt think she was lucky enough to have someone helpful like Frigga.

"Yeah, there's three of them now. Thor, Loki, and Valkyrie," he says. He's not sure what to make of Samirah's curiosity. She wasn't from Asgard, but she seemed to know a lot about it. Maybe she really liked Norse Mythology.

"They're not quite like they are in the legends, though," he says, before she can get too excited about it.

Samirah looked the opposite of excited. Thor was not bad in the grand scheme of things, but he could be grating when he did not have access to his shows. Her body visibly recoiled at the mention of her father's name. Was he projecting himself, she wondered, or did he get himself free somehow? She also wondered why Peter would refer to a Valkyrie as if it were their name.

She fell silent as she tried to figure out what to say next.

"I am also a Valkyrie."

It was rare she shared who her father was.

"Wait, you're a Valkyrie?"

Peter stops there for a moment, hesitating. He dampens his lips.

"I thought you said you were from Boston."

She cannot help but to parallel Peter's response to Magnus'. Normally people commented about her obvious clash in religion over where she was from.

"I am. Valkyrie's are chosen by Odin. Two years ago, he chose me."

Sam still felt the need to prove herself worthy of such a title since she was the only Valkyrie whose father was Loki. She knew that Peter would have no way of knowing that she there was little chance he would judge for for that.

"Our job is to take the dead who died valiantly in battle to Valhalla, so technically we travel through all the realms."

"Yeah," Peter says, nodding. "Like in the myths." Peter hadn't spent nearly as much time looking into Norse mythology as he did spend on the Superhero subreddit reading theories as to where Thor had gone after leaving Earth after the Sokovia incident or why Avengers Tower had relocated, but he knew just enough about Norse tales to know that.

The rest he had managed to glean here. Those myths might not have matched reality perfectly, but neither did the internet's tales about the Avengers, either.

But first...

"Do the Avengers exist in your timeline?" he asks. That was the start of the litmus test for determining whether or not someone was potentially from the same timeline as him. Not that that helped all of the time; there were others from other timelines in which the Avengers existed where he didn't, but it was at least something.

"No. We don't have the Avengers. We have Einherjar, those are the ones who died valiantly in battle. They get increased strength and stamina after death. And demigods. New York apparently has those too, but of the Greek variety."

She gestured with a vagueness as if to say this is my life, things just keep getting weirder and I need to accept it and move on.

Peter has never heard of the Einherjar before. He stores that name and information away for later. He might have asked about them had Greek gods and demigods had not been brought up. It was hard not to be distracted by that.

"So you have Greek gods and Norse ones?" he asks. He's not sure he can imagine more gods on Earth than they had already. "Whoa."

Peter attempts to refocus. "So how did you become a valkyrie?"

"I have never met the Greek gods, but a friend of mine has a cousin who's mother is Athena."

Sam didn't think it was stranger than anything else in the world at this point. She was, quite frankly, surprised that the Norse gods and the Greek gods could share space together. The gods she had met were anything by humble.

She debated on how to answer his question.

"When I was fourteen, I saved some people from a frost giant. Odin appeared and asked and I agreed."

"So you're a superhero too?"

It sounds like it. Valkyrie, too, was something of a superhero if the tales he'd heard about her were true. It didn't seem too far off that an entire legion of them could be their own superhero team -- not much unlike the Avengers.

"I'm not sure I'd call myself that."

She smiled politely, but she felt like she wasn't good enough to be a "superhero."

"Back home, people can't really see through what we call glamour. Basically, their brains can't really handle what they're seeing so they see normal where I might see a frost giant. Most of the time, everyone is oblivious to what's going on around them. My friend fought a fire giant on a bridge in public and everyone ten minutes later called it a freak storm."

"That's really cool!" he says. "It's gotta come in handy when you're trying to keep your identity a secret." Costumes could only do so much and as far as Peter knows, he's the only masked superhero in his timeline.

"You said most of the time. What happens during that not-most of the time?"

"Sometimes they go crazy or they see what's really there and think they're crazy. Usually it means they're either a demigod or touched in some way by them."

She glanced down at her axe hanging by her side. There were Norse ruins all over the handle and blades.

"I'm assuming you can see my axe. If this place is as strange as it sounds, everyone here must already accepted strange as common occurrence otherwise your brains would have melted by now."

Peter peers at the weapon. He knows enough from Loki's antics to know that those are Norse runes, but not enough to know what any of them actually mean.

"Yeah, things are -- you know, they're pretty crazy," he says. "Back home, there weren't really people who had powers or anything. There were a few, but nothing like here. Now it's weird if you don't have some sort of special power or ability."

"Are there any people here who don't?"

It sounded to Sam that it might be a pattern worth investigating if everyone here was special in some way.

"Does that mean you have something special about you?"

"Me?" Peter gestures to himself. "Yeah, I was bitten by a spider and now I have spider powers."

He's not exactly sure how weird that sounds to Samirah, but if she comes from a place where gods give people powers, it's probably not terribly weird.

Hopefully she doesn't hate spiders.

"You got bit by a spider and now have spider powers."

Samirah looked Peter up and down, but she knew well enough appearances were deceiving. She wondered what powers a spider might have.

"So then, are you a superhero in your world?"

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