strangetrip | [GP/EP] We are programmed to receive

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[GP/EP] We are programmed to receive

Fifteen days into this particular strange trip, Kitty had redistributed alcohol supplies between the cafe, restaurant, and night club to make it possible to easily tend bar wherever people decided to gather. Today, as most days, she settled into the lobby cafe after chivvying the cook into chicken tenders and french fries (after convincing him it was a single plate meal). It was the closest she could get to "bar food" from him and someone would probably arrive sooner rather than later to make something else.

A few people trickled in after awhile, but none of them demanding. Like her, they drank coffee from the samovar she'd put out. And also like her, most of them had something else to keep them occupied. At the moment, Kitty had a notebook open (from the gift shop; she kept her school notebooks separate in case she made it home during the term) and was sketching plans to upgrade the hotel's computer technology. She needed more raw computing power to work out the energy requirements to do what Illyana did with a thought.

She lifted her head periodically to check for new customers, and had just seated herself at the end of the bar after refilling the samovar when the first new new customer arrived. Immediately, she flipped to a fresh page in the notebook and headed it "Day 15" and made a hash mark for one new arrival. Then she looked up from her notebook and offered one and all her best bartending smile.

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Wyatt strained his ears to hear the sounds of the fighting back at the Alamo. He owed them that, to commit it all to memory, their last heroic moments. Everything inside of him had wanted to stay, to make the last stand that he hadn't made with his comrades. It would have been as much of an honor to die beside Jim Bowie as it would have been with his other brothers. Lucy was right,though, he couldn't abandon his team, not during this situation and he had to make sure that the women and children survived.

When there was silence and only Spanish voices, Wyatt turned his focus back to getting back to the ship alive, except there weren't any familiar voices. There wasn't even the sound of Rufus or the machine in the distance. Had he been abandoned? It was unlikely but Wyatt couldn't say that he cared if he had been trapped in the past.

Only this past was not Alamo or Texas past. It looked closer to California and he had no idea what was going on, but the building in the distance didn't look too far off of the architecture he was used to. "Well the best way to figure this out is to go get answers."

He stepped inside what was now obviously the lobby of a hotel but instead of going to the front desk, Wyatt went to the cafe. There were more people and more ways to get what he was looking for in there. He glanced down at his dusty clothes with Jim Bowie's knife in the waist of his buckskins and two six shooters on his hips. "Well so much for not standing out."

When Kitty saw the outfit, she immediately thought, "shit, where's Snow White?" because whether she was anti-Semitic or not, Kitty didn't want some buckskin wearing white man from the 1800s shooting her on sight. She didn't see Snow, so she set down her notes and smiled at the guy.

What he said surprised her, though. It sounded more modern than she'd have expected. She tilted her head a little, curious at how calm he seemed to be. "You'd be surprised. One guy showed up in a trench coat and nothing else. Another was bleeding from claw wounds. Buckskin's a new one on me, but not that weird. I'm Kitty."

Wyatt assumed she'd meant hotel guests and also assumed she probably worked there. Her manner of speech was what he was used to so that told him he was no longer in the distant past. "I bet you do see it all. I'm Wyatt." He didn't even pretend to be another name. It was always easier for him to be who he was, even when in the past. Lucy was the one that always gave false names to 'protect history'.

"So, where is here exactly?" He hadn't thought to grab a newspaper when he was in the lobby and figured where am I was a lot easier question to ask than when am I.

"Nice to meet you, Wyatt." So far, anyway. Kitty knew better than to think she was a great judge o character. Sometimes she just got lucky, like with Lara. "'Where' is kind of complicated, so what I can tell you for sure is that this is the Madonna Inn. The Inn used to be near San Luis Obispo, California. Now... well, as far as we know, it's not really anywhere."

"Not really anywhere?" He was trying to make sense of that but she looked to be dressed, like the others with a few exceptions, for more close to his timeline. Which probably meant phone or some kind of communication. He would look into calling someone as soon as he got more answers.

"Are you saying that movers moved the Inn to an unknown location?"

Ah, okay. He didn't know as much as it seemed like he had at first. He was probably just one, like her and Lara, who took these kinds of things in stride (at least until the PTSD set in). She gestured to a seat at the bar, in front of her. "This is going to take a little explaining. Can I get you a drink or some coffee or something?"

Wyatt settled into the seat at the bar and looked at the offerings around her. As much as he'd love a beer after the day he'd had, Wyatt knew that he had to keep focus. "Coffee sounds perfect, thank you. And don't worry, I'm used to military briefings. Some of them have explanations, some don't." There was a hint of humor in the words.

"Thought so," Kitty murmured mostly to herself as she grabbed a mug, checked it for dust or worse, and finding nothing, gave it a quick swipe with a clean rag (just in case), before filling it up. "Black?"

She assumed a yes, as she set it down in front of him, but mentally prepared for a request for cream and immediately nudged a sugar caddy toward him. "The short answer is that as far as I can tell, the hotel is either in a dimensional warp-space or a bubble universe. Effectively, the entire world is about thirty empty miles in whatever direction you travel before you end up back at the hotel."

Wyatt would try it out for himself of course. It wasn't that he didn't believe her, but there were issues of trust in the not so distant past. His lips quirked ever so slightly just before he took a sip of the black coffee ignoring the cream and sugar.

"I would vote dimensional warp-space." Not that Wyatt knew what that was. "Someone explained time travel theory to me recently, something about it bending and touching. It sounds like that theory." Plus, Wyatt was sure that it might have been affected by whatever powered the time ship that he, Rufus and Lucy were using.

"Theoretically." Interesting. Not many people were conversant with the theories that permitted time/lightspeed travel. "A warp in the space-time continuum is a bend. It causes two formerly separate locations to become contiguous. Like so." She took a cloth napkin, lay it flat on the counter, then pushed the edges toward the middle until a fold formed and the inside bottoms touched. Blowing on the ridge, she flopped it over. "A warp space might be something like--" After stabilizing her creation, she poked a straw through the space formed from the flopped over ridge, its slope, and what remained of the napkin against the counter. "The problem is that the physics should be..." She shrugged, smiled, and substituted, "Wonky," for anything more 'scientific'. "And for the most part, they're not."

He felt like when Rufus was explaining to him how time travel worked, but her example was better. Not to mention she was cuter. "Maybe there's a machine that keeps it from being 'wonky'." Wyatt offered. "But I'll be the fist to admit that I know nothing about this or if that would work." He didn't even hesitate to let her in. If there was any way for him to be able to get back to his team or at least to give them a message to let them know that he was okay, it would be someone like Kitty.

"I was part of a time traveling team. I was the one that kept them safe, the soldier. Rufus, he was the pilot and the one that helped to develop the program before I got called in. My gut tells me that there's something at work here, something that keeps the science from reacting to the reality. Even if it's just the stuff that has to be connected to us traveling through time." Wyatt shrugged, "Every time my team and I went back in time to save it, small things were changed."

Some of them not so small like Lucy's sister never existing. Or no matter how many times he tried, he couldn't save his wife from dying that day.

That explained the clothes, and the calm. "Dangerous business, time travel. You must've had a really good reason, if you'd take that risk." She really hoped he did, because if he didn't, that could put them on opposite sides--except her gut told her, just like it had with Lara, that he was one of the good guys.

"Not my first time either," she admitted quietly, trying not to attract any other attention. "Although it's usually less time and more dimension or space for me. And there's almost always a Big Bad at the other end of the journey. So far, there's nothing sinister here." Which didn't mean she'd come off red alert. She wasn't sure she knew how anymore.

Hypervigilance was a bitch.

"So far. They're good at hiding. We have been on the trail of our own Big Bad that set out to change history. I've been doing this for three months and he keeps slipping through our fingers." And it irritated the hell out of him. "It's hard to put yourself in their mindset so that you can figure out what they're up to."

Except he knew that Flynn was out to destroy Rittenhous.

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