strangetrip | [GP] Check-In Day: What a nice surprise; bring your alibis

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[GP] Check-In Day: What a nice surprise; bring your alibis

Every check-in day conjured memories of her first, and all of the others, which inevitably meant she spent the day with Lara on her mind, and Petey, Illyana, and Wyatt. She'd been blessed with dear friends and loves arriving, and yet she never stopped hoping she'd figure out the mess that was this pocket universe and get home.

It was starting to become complicated, though, almost a year later. It would hurt to lose the people she'd grown fond of here, almost as much as it would be good to get home. She didn't know what to do with that feeling, but it was what it was. All she could do was tend the bar with patience and understanding, and keep an eye on the readings her crude energy measuring devices out on the road sent to her.

For all the people that came in and out, it was a quiet day. So between drinks, she spent most of it bent over a notebook with a cup of coffee in her hand, trying to design better instruments to dismantle Yana's shackles. Maybe Percy could help her build them.

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"Sorry." Emma shook her head and took a deep breath. "I'm fine... or as fine as I can be. Traveling the world isn't quite the same as traveling worlds." She was just a fortune teller; she didn't have any way to get home. But that could wait. She wasn't going to cry in public.

Part of her felt like this called for Mikhail's vodka, but until she knew more, she should probably avoid getting that drunk. "Wine? Something white and dry, if that's possible." The specificity helped. Head now, heart later.

"Don't apologize--" Kitty frowned when she realized that she hadn't yet been told the other woman's name. "It's a totally normal reaction." She gave her a tiny, sympathetic smile then and said, "If I bring you wine, will you tell me your name? Or at least, whatever you want me to call you until you're ready to tell me your name?"

In London, there was a hotel reservation waiting for her, under the name Emily Fournier, and Emma carried the identification and credit cards to go with it. But this was a Kitty. But this also was a California.

"Sorry." She winced for apologizing again so soon. "People call me Em."

"Hi Em." She didn't hassle her about the apology this time. The girl had enough to deal with right now. And Kitty wasn't the world's best at emotional conversation either, God knew.

"I promise I'll be right back, but if anyone else comes over to talk, don't worry. I know everyone here. You're safe." And with that, Kitty took off at a quick clip for a bottle of white wine and two glasses. She didn't always drink with newcomers, but another mutant (probably) needed the moral support.

Kitty had barely gone for the wine before Emma had a tarot deck in her hands. Not to do a reading, too many questions and worries crowding her head for any sort of clear answers. But the feel of them, muscle memory weaving them together from a simple riffle building up to intricate flourishes, it straddled a line between comfort and meditation, and just something to do with her hands to feel less awkward as she waited. When Kitty got back, Emma squared the cards to put them back in her pocket for easy access later. "Habit," she explained, shrugging.

The tarot deck rang a bell too, and it meant she was probably one of the mutants she'd run across at some point in her career but not one she'd ever read a file on. She decided it was Em's story to tell when she was ready to tell it.

After setting the glasses down on the table and pouring, Kitty slid back into her own seat and spread her hands. "Anything you want to know about me or this place, ask. I'll tell you everything I can. If you've met any version of me, you probably know already that me trying to tell you everything with no guidance from you is a bad idea."

Most of what Emma had heard Kitty explaining in detail had involved complaining about Pyro giving mutant names to people who didn't want them and how she wasn't a boy ghost anyway, some very confusing discussion of werewolves and something called mpreg that was some fanfic thing, and some boy in a band Emma had never heard of and wasn't sure she wanted to. This Kitty didn't look like she'd be the same, but no guidance, still probably a bad idea. Like doing a deep reading without a specific question in mind.

"You said this is California. Or it was." Something like that. And that meant the most important question, before she got into anything else was, "Does MRA mean anything to you? Do they have that in this world?"

MRA? What kind of MRA could be significant enough to be... oh. "No," Kitty said, shaking her head firmly. "There's no superhuman registration act of any kind. I assume the M is specific to mutants, but no. There's nothing here but the Inn and as far as you can travel in four hours and one second, no matter how you travel."

It occurred to her they didn't have a speedster and they were usually good for busting these sorts of things, but she doubted it'd be any different with one of them.

"So even if the world the Inn came from had a registration act, we don't. Most of the people here are different in some way. Some aren't even human."

That was one less thing to worry about, and Emma couldn't say how good it was to hear. "This didn't seem like their style, but I don't know, maybe somebody had gotten creative with..." Kitty was Jewish; Emma remembered the younger Kitty talking about discovering cheeseburgers weren't kosher. And Emma was adopted Roma. There was weight to what she'd been about to say, and while the relief was still there, her tone sobered as she continued, "With one of the camps. A way to keep us complacent or something."

"I thought so, too, at first." Kitty's own voice had sobered at the comment. Whatever word Em came from, it was definitely a bad one if she had to ask that question. "But, if anything, it seems more like a quarantine. Like maybe we're needed for something in some world to stop something terrible from happening. Or maybe that's just what I tell myself because I haven't figured out how to get out in almost a year."

"Like..." What was it the Exiles had called him? "The Timebroker? Or another timebroker?" She'd never been entirely clear on that. Just that the Exiles had been ripped from their timelines supposedly to fix ones that were even more broken. And he'd screwed over Pyro, making him think he could do some good somewhere else. (Pyro did plenty of good at the castle, once he worked through a few things, but Emma couldn't let herself think about that right then."

Her cards had found their way into her hands again, and this time she shuffled with purpose. As she began to lay them out, she said softly, "Marie-Ange Colbert. Emma. Precog and psionic projections. It sounds more useful than I actually am."

Timebroker didn't mean anything to Kitty, but she recognized it wasn't the important part of what Emma had said. "Precog, like Domino. Psionic projections, like Moonstar?" There were others, but Nina and Dani were the two who came to mind most readily, for various reasons. "Whatever you do, don't sell yourself short. You're valuable because you're a person, not because of what you can or can't do."

That was one of the things Kitty hated about the way X-kids learned. "I'm serious about that."

It was one thing, talking to a mutant, some alternate of the Kitty Emma knew. Another to hear her talk about versions of people Emma was close to.

"Dani's family." Not by blood, which would probably be obvious to look at her, but family anyway. "And Nina... her powers give mine a literal headache, but she taught me to fight."

"Dani and I didn't get along when we were teenagers." Understatement of the century. X-babies. Kitty laughed at the memory. "But we both grew out of it. Yana was of big part of that." She glanced at Emma. "Did you know an Illyana? She's here. Not mine, but she might be yours if you did."

As for her and Nina, the history was complicated, but Kitty could easily say, "I respect the hell out of both of them."

"Dani didn't get along with most people when she was a teenager." Except Dare. "And older than that. But does that mean, did you know her at school?" Emma tried to picture Dani at the school, but kept getting stuck on the epic fury she'd have unleashed on the professor. (It was better than thinking of teen Dani with both Bobby and Pyro.)

"I know an Illyana. She's friends with my cousin." But if Illyana was here... "Can she go through Limbo?" No, that wouldn't work either, Emma realized as she was asking the question. "Not that it would help, since that's another plane, not reality." Still, it wasn't good if Magik couldn't get out of here. If she was anything like the Illyana Emma knew, she'd be working on it, though.

Kitty breathed a small sigh of relief that the issue of her past with Dani hadn't been the beginning of a rift with a friend she'd only just met. "Mostly we clashed because I was the youngest member of the original X-team and I had my head up my ass about it. I wouldn't stop calling her team 'X-babies', even though we're about the same age. It didn't help any that she still hated white people at the time, and she didn't know dick about the Holocaust." Kitty smiled, actually fond, at the memory. "God that's ancient history."

"Yana, the one here, is a different kind of problem. You'll probably run into her before I fix it, so you might as well know, she was in a maximum security prison in her universe and they had her bound in lethal restraints. Do you know her brother?"

Emma wondered what, if anything, this Illyana had done to wind up in prison, but she couldn't help the flare of anger of a mutant she sort of, yet not at all, knew being caged and restrained. It wasn't the sort of thing the Illyana she knew would want a stranger asking about, though, so for now, she didn't. She could check the cards later.

"Mikhail? I know his vodka, and he does a lot for the village, but I don't really know him."

Kitty blinked. She couldn't think the last time she'd heard anything of Mikhail. "No, Piotr. Colossus. I ask, because he's here." The village, though, that made her think of someone else. "Hey, do you know a girl named Laynia?"

She'd been vaguely aware there was another brother, but Emma didn't remember much more about him than that. "Layn- There's a Laynia here?" Kitty was proof enough Emma couldn't assume it would be the same Laynia she knew. But if it was, Nate wouldn't stop searching worlds until he found her, and it was hard not letting hope grow.

"Yeah. She's from...well, she's probably Russian, but she was living in Moira MacTaggart's castle in Scotland." Kitty tried to think what else Laynia had said about her life before she got here. She didn't talk much at all, for as nice as she was. "I don't think she'd been there very long. She didn't have very much training with using her abilities."

"I've been living in the castle for," Emma paused to think, but she didn't really need to, "almost two years. The Laynia I know had been there a lot longer than that. I think she was one of the first of us to end up there, maybe, and one of the first members of Excalibur too."

"Hm, yeah. She probably won't know you, unless it's a divergent timeline. But I'm sure she'd be glad to talk to someone from home. She's pretty lonely." And Kitty had tried to break through, but she hadn't gotten there yet.

Emma wondered if the loneliness was tied to missing certain people in particular, or if she hadn't bloomed into the friendly bartender with a smile for everybody and as universally adored that Emma remembered. "I'd like that. Maybe once I get more settled, I'll go looking for her. Is she tending bar here?"

"Sometimes, yeah. And baking. She keeps to herself a lot." Which now that she said it made Kitty feel pretty guilty. She really should be trying harder with Laynia. They were friends, but she couldn't quite get her to open up to the other people in the inn.

"The Laynia I know is a very good baker." Baking was also something Laynia did when she was upset or needed a distraction. Emma remembered lots and lots of cookies during one of the tough times. If not baking, then making soup; that was something Nate had learned from Laynia.

"That makes five of us. Any others that you know of?"

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[GP] Check-In Day: What a nice surprise; bring your alibis

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