strangetrip | Check-In: Not-Mother Hen

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Check-In: Not-Mother Hen

Kitty sat at the bar with a cup of coffee and her notebook, watching the 'welcoming committee' make themselves busy. Liz was here, as she'd promised Kitty she would be and Kitty gave her a quick smile of encouragement.

One of the worst things about Check-In Days was that you never knew whether it'd be a whole long day of no one arriving, one spectacular fall from the ceiling and dropping dead after another, or anything in between. It made it hard to know what to do with yourself. After awhile, you got used to it and just kept on with whatever you'd do otherwise, and know that if you didn't step up for a new arrival, someone else would. But for someone not used to treating it like a responsibility to be here, especially someone with Liz's anxious need to be perfect at it, Check-In Day could be emotionally exhausting.

So Kitty made sure to have milk warmed for hot cocoa and her plans for the obstacle course handy in case Liz needed something to do with herself. Otherwise, she was working on a modification of Cerebro to see if she could start detecting new arrivals.

[ooc: Regular check-in day gathering post. If you want Kitty, ping me.]

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A teenage boy with puppy-dog eyes.

"Fair point." He paused. "But drinking's only fun if someone else is getting drunk too." Which was an invitation.

"I have a lot of experience with elves, dark and light," he says. "Mostly good with the light elves, mostly bad with the dark ones."

A beat, and then:

"Are they from Alfheim, then? Or are they from some other place, too?"

It was probably better for Thor that they weren't.

She listened and nodded. "I don't think... I think they came from a time when things were bad. I don't think me telling him that he's safe but his brother isn't would have gone over well." At least that was the sense she had picked up on with Brad. "And I think he's really tired, too." Liz did think the Inn might be good for him, even though she didn't like the whole 'his brother isn't here' thing.

"Well, then," Thor says, "let's get this started!"

And with this particular pronouncement, Thor jovially lifts the bottle, then guns down the rest in one go, his Adam's apple bobbing with every swallow of the beverage.

He sets the bottle down. "Another!"

Drinking with a god was an interesting experience and lent itself to actually getting his buzz on. He hadn't been that drunk since he first arrived and Moana found him outside in a bush.

"So, I shit you not, there actually is a mermaid at the strip club. I'm talking underwater and gills - no tail though. She's smoking hot. And while we're casing the joint, Max has to pretend to be a stripper because that's the only way girls can get inside. So we're about to break her out, right? And this guy shows up. We think he's the bad guy so we kick his ass. Turns out, he's her mate. By the time we get back inside, she's been taken by the actual bad guys and we have to break into this water plant, kick a bunch of douche-bag's asses. We get her and her mate or whatever out. Big happy family. Who just happen to have a bunch of fish/human hybrid eggs to take care of." So eventually the ocean really would have mermaids in them.

Thor lets out a bark of laughter at that. "Is that a normal day for you? Mermaids and strip clubs and such?"

Thor, like Alec, is enjoying a bit of a buzz. This is not a normal day for him. First Thanos, then arriving here, then meeting a bunch of weirdos.

Okay, maybe the meeting a bunch of weirdos part was normal. At any rate, he's happy to get toasted. Especially given the day he's had. And the week. And the last two weeks.

"More or less." He nodded. "Strip clubs most definitely." All the time possible, really, especially if Sketchy had money he wanted to burn. "Sometimes I have to go on missions with a surly lizard man who likes to smoke cigars." Alec's world was... weird.

"On Sakaar, I met this insect with knives for hands. Miek was great. I'm glad he didn't get crushed."

Thor smiles lightly.

"Your friends, are they aliens or something?" Technically, he's an alien to the people of Midgar, too, but he considers anyone who isn't Asgardian to be alien.

"We're made in a lab. Home grown aliens, maybe, if you want to look at it like that. Made to be good fighters and whatever." Uncharacteristically, perhaps because he was buzzed, Alec turned his back and ducked his head, revealing his barcode on the back of his neck.

Brad takes a moment to answer and uses looking at the placement of their tokens as an excuse.

"North of Sudbury, Ontario." He answered. "In Canada. It's like, the middle of winter there, not like it is here, and we got stranded in the woods a few days ago."

The next red token is placed beside his others. It creates three in a row.

"Not really." He replied. "I've been in a cabin in the middle of nowhere for almost three days."

He took another sip of the hot chocolate and enjoyed the comfort in it.

Hurley slips his piece right on the other side of his 3. He's got him blocked in for now.

"What, the snow strand you or something?" he asks.

Thor examines the tattoo, curious, then lets out a "huh" at it.

"Do you like fighting?" he asks, taking another long swig of his drink.

"Now's the part where I tell you people here are from dozens of different worlds, and the twins are from mine. There's no Alfheim in Exandria," he says and makes a mental note to warn the twins the big guy might have an axe to grind with elves.

He doesn't seem like he's going to go on a genocidal rampage, but he could be a good liar.

"Exandria," Thor says, musing to himself. "I don't think I've ever been there."

He's been to many different worlds, but not that one.

"I'm from Asgard," he says. "It's part of the nine realms." He says this as though Kashaw might have heard of it. He has no reason to believe he hasn't.

He finished off the bottle and reached for scotch this time - they were running out of whiskey. "Who doesn't?" Because, really. "I used to do cage fighting back home. My name was Monty Cora." An inside joke that Max had not found funny, but he thought was hilarious.

Thor too, enjoys fighting. It was part of what got him into trouble with his father to begin with, back when he couldn't let go of the Frost Giants' intrusion. His father had cast him out.

"I got captured and sold into slavery once, to this man called the Grandmaster," Thor drones on. "I think my brother might have been sleeping with him, I was never really sure about that. Anyway! The only way you could earn your freedom was by fighting and beating the current Champion in the Contest of Champions which was basically this whole gladiator thing. The current champion turned out to be a friend from work. I gave him a thrashing."

Thor neglects to mention he didn't win, but that detail doesn't seem important, especially since it was the Grandmaster's intervention that stopped him from defeating the Hulk.

Thor reaches for the glass with the bobbing eyeball until he finds himself and picks up the bottle instead.

"Yeah," He affirmed with a nod. "I'm from a place called Sudbury in Canada..... but I guess you probably haven't heard of either."

I never thought I'd be answering a question like 'are you from Earth?'

"Where are you from?" He asked.

Bradley was about to ask about Nigerian. He had never met anyone who had been to Africa. All he knew of the place was what he saw on TV ads to 'help the children' and from brief mentions in history textbooks. However, it was the mention of magic that distracted him.

"You can do magic?" He asked, fascinated. "Like, actual magic, magic? Harry Potter kind of stuff?"

He looked at the tokens for his next strategic placement.

"My, uh..." He said, visibly pausing with a deep inhale. Brad's shoulders rose and fell and his next two words came out careful like walking on ice "... My dad. He was letting me drive back home because he had been drinking. He was teaching me. But my brother Caleb was being a jerk and we started fighting and we hit a tree. Our car was stuck in the snow."

Bradley held the token between his thumb and middle finger and spun in slowly with his index.

"I came here in a different truck a few days after that." He added, then placed the red token over the black on in the middle.

Hurley frowns at Bradley's artful placement of his token.

"That sucks, dude," Hurley pronounces, surveying the board thoughtfully. "I kinda crashed a car before I came here, too. It's not fun."

Hurley finally places his token.

"Are you and your brother pretty close?" he asks.

"Who calls themselves the 'Grandmaster'?" What was with Peter's world and all the names? "And how does 'Thor, son of Odin, King of Asgard, Protector of the Nine Realms, Savior of Midgard, Twice-Holder of Mjølnir, Wielder of Stormbreaker, the True Champion of Sakaar, Bringer of Ragnarok, Admirer of Snakes, and the Strongest Avenger... and god of Thunder' get captured and sold into captivity?"

Having an Eidetic memory meant being able to repeat nonesense as well, even while slightly drunk.

"My brother, Loki, and I -- we were on Earth, looking for my father, who he had been impersonating for the last four years after he cast a spell on him and dropped him off at a retirement home."

Thor is completely unaware that he's rambling and could probably sum this up much quickly by cutting out the preface.

"But then we found him and he told us we had a secret sister who he'd been keeping trapped for like, thousands of years or something, I don't know. I never met her."

Thor finishes the bottle, then stacks it in a row with the others. Like little soldiers, those bottles.

"In any case, he died and then she appeared and broke my hammer and tried to kill Loki and I. I wanted to fight her, but Loki summoned the Bifold, which is this bridge that transports you between the Nine Realms. And long story short," he says, though this story has already gone on long enough, "she cast us both off the bridge and I landed in a trash heap in Sakaar where I ended up fighting off a bunch of scavengers and then they trapped me in this net covered with these things called Obedience Discs, and then this other person, Valkyrie -- she's a friend now, by the way -- showed up and killed all them and then brought me back to the Grandmaster."

A beat.

"She got paid 10 million for me," he says, proudly. He hadn't been proud of that at the time, but now with some distance, he could appreciate being sold for a fine price.

"Congratulations." Which was directed to the money amount he had been sold for. "Sounds like a place I don't want to visit." Not that he could.

"What was the other champion like? Which friend from work?" Peter would probably be surprised to find out how much Alec actually listened.

"Not so much," Vax agreed. "We call our world Exandria, where I'm from. My friends and I have traveled all over, but we mostly come from a kingdom called Tal'Dorei, the capital city of Emon. ...Which all probably sounds as silly to you as Kahl-ee-Fornea sounds to me."

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Check-In: Not-Mother Hen

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