Time travel and lousy life choices

[una_persson]

Who: Una Persson and OPEN (with threads for Niko and Niles)
What: Life in Blackstaff
Where: Various places; see threadstarters, or feel free to start your own
When: In the week or so after the witch den expeditions and Una's punitive assignment
Warnings: TBD

Comments

Travel Agency - Niles Pottinger

[una_persson]

It was a slow day at the Agency.

There had been some kind of power surge in the night, and everyone was barred from the transporters until the maintenance crew had a chance to make sure that nothing was severely damaged and to fix anything that was broken. As a side effect, the instruments used for trans-temporal and trans-dimensional scans were offline as well, so as not to introduce any potential power disruptions. So there wasn't really much to do. There was a general attempt to look busy in the form of research into potential expeditions based on whatever data had already been downloaded and stored, but mostly people were milling around aimlessly, gossiping, and taking long breaks.

Una was in her office, feet up on her desk, a Quintette du Hot Club de France album playing. She was throwing darts with alarming accuracy at a board she'd installed on the wall opposite her desk. When she ran out of darts, she got up, retrieved them from the board, and started over.

[truth_is_the_enemy]

The first day of work and the machines are down. He'd almost feel like a jinx except from his perspective it's actually very convenient. He wouldn't have been able to start hopping about the universe on his first day anyway, not until he'd completed training, and this way he had the resources of every person who worked in the Travel Agency office at his disposal. There was one Travel Agent in particular whom he was glad was being kept home bound for the moment.

Niles rapped on the door frame of Una's office and peeked his head in.

"I'm not interrupting a terribly important dart game, am I?"

[una_persson]

Una tossed the last dart and sat up straight, swinging her legs off the desk. "On the contrary, you're saving me from an increasingly dull one." She reached over to turn down the volume on her music. "Come in, have a seat. Not exactly the most thrilling first day, is it?"

[truth_is_the_enemy]

Niles sauntered in, sat the offered chair and crossed his legs. He was no longer in E-Rep uniform; here, his affiliation, his rank didn't matter. So instead he wore his civilian clothes, black trousers, waistcoat, jacket, and still the black gloves.

"Maybe not as exciting as being dropped in the middle of a war zone on day one, but I'm certainly not going to complain about that. Sometimes there's such a thing as too much thrill."

[una_persson]

"Can't disagree with you on that," she said, with some feeling. "In any event, this probably gives you a chance to get used to the place before your first assignment. How are you settling in otherwise, by the way? Place to stay at the resort and all that?"

[truth_is_the_enemy]

"The resort is more comfortable than the Reaches, that's for certain. And the technology..." His face lit up. "It's amazing. Back home, aside from some scavenged Votan tech, I haven't seen anything like this, not even in New York."

He pointed to her music.

"People have managed to bring back records and record players. But I remember when I was a child, there was i...music. Something like that. You could keep whole collections, hundreds of albums, in a tiny portable computer. We lost all that in the war. Coming here feels a bit like returning to the past. Not that we had spawners and androids, but technology. Civilization. It's what humanity used to have."

[una_persson]

The look on his face touched her. She reached behind her and hit "pause" on her little MP3 player, took it out of the speaker-stand, and passed it over to him, to look at as he pleased.

"Technology and civilisation don't always go hand in hand. But sometimes—if it means that I can listen to Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt uncountable worlds and times away from when that was recorded—well, I'll take that part of the technologt, at least."

[truth_is_the_enemy]

"Yes, yes, I had one of these!" He turned it over in his hands, the feel of it bringing back memories. "Or something very much like it."

A scrap of a tune popped into his mind, a musical phrase he hadn't thought about in decades. He hummed a few measures but couldn't remember the rest. It was on the edge of his thoughts, close, but he couldn't quite reach it.

"Even if technology itself doesn't make civilization, it feels to many like humanity has lost its heritage. Like Rome has fallen and we're all living in the Dark Ages now. Only instead of Moors, Celts, and Visigoths we have Indogenes, Irathians, and Castithans."

Not a perfect metaphor, but it conveyed the sense that once there was order and stability and power and greatness...and then there wasn't.

[una_persson]

The tune seemed distantly familiar, though she couldn't quite place it, and frowned slightly in mild puzzlement. His description of his world as a new Dark Ages distracted her.

"'Barbarism triumphs'," she murmured, a fragment of a long-ago conversation with her friend Major Nye coming to mind, accompanied by a memory of St James's Park in London, ruins and reduced to an encampment for refugees. Her expression went a little odd in that moment—faintly distant, difficult to read, and apparently fixed on something not in the room.

[truth_is_the_enemy]

"For now, yes. But the Earth Republic is changing that. Slowly, perhaps, but it's bringing back civilization one little town at a time. And someday," he raised the mp3 player, "we might even have things again. Or maybe something even better."

He observed as Una's expression took on the cast of one whose thoughts were elsewhere.

"Have you seen similar destruction and devastation?"

[una_persson]

She blinked, coming back to herself, and nodded.

"I'm afraid I have. If there's one constant in the Multiverse, it's that humans never quite run out of ways to destroy their own worlds—and for 'humans' you may very well substitute any alien race you like. Sentience seems to come part and parcel with an instinct toward self-destruction." A pause. "That's terribly morbid. I'm sorry."

[truth_is_the_enemy]

Niles leaned forward.

"Not at all. I quite agree. Perhaps the curse of intelligence is the capacity to look at oneself and see everything that is vile. The mythical knowledge of good and evil that we got in the garden of Eden leads inevitably to the better parts of our nature wanting to smite ourselves right out of existence because evil is so intractably prevalent."

By the end of his words, his gaze was intense, lit up like either a madman or a preacher. His hands were fists, held close to his chest.

Ruins - Niko Bellic

[una_persson]

Since the whole affair with Belloq, Una hadn't been out to the ruins at all. Going there made her feel sad and guilty, and in cases where guilt feelings could be avoided with relative ease, she tended to do so.

But she happened to be at the museum when one of the curators—the one who was handling most of the things from the library that Ben had discovered—came hurrying up to her and asked her if she could carry a message and some gear to the workers down there. Una couldn't very well refuse, but she made up her mind to get the work done as fast as possible.

She made the delivery and started to head back into town, but paused for a moment on a small rise that afforded a good view of the site. Gloomy, irritable thoughts flickered through her mind, and she tried to not dwell on them.

Re: Ruins - Niko Bellic

[vengeance_driven]

Thankfully Niko had been here enough prior to Belloq that he wasn't his main association with the place, and on top of that a harrowing encounter with a creeper in that swamp had left him with something more fresh on his mind. Still, he looked a little sad as he remained settled on one of the rocks and stared out at the dig.

It seemed lonely- people used to live here. They lived in the village now, but they used to live here. Have families. Lives. People like Belloq; they had some magical ability to see those lives long after they passed. He couldn't really understand how someone with that sort of insight could separate themselves from the living people so cleanly. Wasn't that soldier's work?

Well, let that shit go back to the Nazis he owed. Niko stood up and dusted himself off, in time to see Una working her way down to the site.

"Hey," he greeted in his usual, simple tone.

[una_persson]

She looked up and smiled, oddly glad to see him. "Niko, hello," she said, diverting her course to meet him. "How are things?"

[vengeance_driven]

"Okay, for the most part. The biggest asshole I have had to worry about in past week is a creeper." He made an 'explode' motion with his hands, before leaning lazily against a rock.

"The new Travel Agent guy said he met you."

[una_persson]

"New—oh, Pottinger." She nodded. "I was the one who recruited him, actually. So you've met?" She smiled a little. "He's settling in, then."

[vengeance_driven]

"Yeah. Seems like he has a whole bucket of problems that he still needs to deal with." He couldn't even claim to be the pot in the situation. Niko had been working hard on saving himself- he at least hadn't killed anyone. Fights, yes, but this had been the longest he had gone without putting a bullet in someone's skull, and he hoped he was happily done with that business.

But Niles was a junky, and someone that obviously craved some support. It certainly took the edge off knowing him because he knew any kindness would be valued, but it seemed like a long time before it would not be needed in excess.

"Eventually I think he'll be alright."

[una_persson]

"I hope so. The place where he came from—" She shook her head. "Bloody awful. And he, of course, was being wasted out where he was. There ought to be others we can fetch from that zone as well. I think he'll do all right as an agent, in any event. He's got the right sort of charm."

This was simply a straightforward assessment of Niles's skills, to her mind.

[vengeance_driven]

Niko barked a laugh at that, not even attempting to hide it. Because it didn't just sound like someone assessing skills- no one hardly ever noticed "charm" in a person unless they had either noticed it romantically or noticed it resentfully.

Oh he was sure that a few children could be charming in their own way, but grown men? Not unless the lady was charmed by them.

"You have a type, don't you?" He snorted, though he didn't know actually how right he was. "Just ah... I suspect he's got a lot of adjusting to do yet."

[una_persson]

She looked at him with an expression on her face that was something halfway between a frown and a laugh.

"Are you trying to warn me off him?" she said. "Because it's not like that at all. Charm and charisma is practically in the job description. And I do not have a type."

She was ruefully aware, nevertheless, that she almost certainly sounded like she was protesting too much; that she did think Niles was an attractive man; and finally that Niko, hilariously enough, was right. She was almost impressed that he'd noticed after such a relatively brief acquaintance.

[vengeance_driven]

"A little, yeah." He spread out his hands. "Look, I ah, I knew this woman once, who very terrible about her choices in men. I mean, She dated me and thought I was the most sweet man in the universe, one that the world did completely wrong.

"That is most of her boyfriends. I got so she would tell me about an ex, and the first thing I would ask is, 'What did he do?' She met them as a lawyer, meant to make the world a better place in her career, and instead she is in love with saving us bad symptoms of it."

"Or maybe you don't like well-spoken sad men who smile a lot." He did notice those similarities between Niles and Belloq, and the way he said it along with the tense roll of his shoulder showed he was still a little unsettled. "In any case, he has good personality but is still a symptom of a bad world."

[una_persson]

Una just couldn't be annoyed with Niko, because, well—he had a point. She snorted, amused, and proceeded to light a cigarette, offering one to Niko.

"My men are charming, dangerous, or doomed—or some combination of the above," she admitted with a self-deprecating shrug. "Another way of putting what you said, I suppose. Arguably my women are much nicer and I really ought to stick to them, but the heart wants what it wants, I suppose." She drew on the smoke, inhaling it in the French style. "My friend Lobkowitz—" and here she laughed a little, because well-spoken sad men who smile a lot described him nearly exactly, and they had been lovers, "—he would say that it's inherently feminine, to want to save everything. The world, a class, a single hapless man—all of it. We all have a mother within us." She made a waving-away gesture with her hand. "He's an old-fashioned man, is Lobkowtiz."

Quantum Rhythm - Open

[una_persson]

Una generally avoided the dance club, having very little patience for most of what called itself dance music that post-dated the Sixties. Not that she disliked rock and pop music on principle; there was some she enjoyed. But her preferred tastes were emphatically those of the music hall, musical theatre, and jazz.

So she was pleasantly surprised to hear that there was actually a 1930s Earth jazz night in the offing. It had been a long time since she'd been out, so she decided it was about time to put on something nice and go. It didn't matter who else was there, or if she danced; it would be a pleasure just to listen.

Xyma's - Open

[una_persson]

Well, it wasn't as if there was anywhere else to get a properly trashy chicken tikka masala, was there? Una was sometimes slightly embarrassed about her taste for London-style curries that were more properly appreciated when a bit drunk (which she wasn't just now, the hour being midday), but sometimes there was nothing for it but to give in to the craving.