3582/(Intermezzo) When in Rome

(Intermezzo) When in Rome
Date of Scene:	27 September 2020
Location:	The Starport Hotel Bar, Planet Echon.
Synopsis:	Donna comes clean to Terry and Caitlin about the problems of having a girlfriend who was designed to break reality.
Cast of Characters:	Donna Troy, Caitlin Fairchild, Terry O'Neil

---

Donna Troy has posed:
    The Titans have now been on Echon for a day, and spoken to a grand total of only one Echonian. The locals seem to avoid the spaceport on the whole, but for a small number of specialist workers like Duvann, who by dint of a greater tolerance for offworlder nonsense than the majority of the population make their living by being a buffer between those offworlders and the delicate sensitivities of the locals.

    The starport hotel, if it really deserves the name, seems to be entirely automated. From what the Titans have gathered about life on Echon so far, it may be that rather a lot is. The Titan's 'credit card' seems to handle transactions with very little intervention, the cost of the overnight stay and of food and drinks taken from the hotel bar's automat dispensers being automatically debited by some esoteric process that is never entirely made clear. Apart from the four Titans, the only other people the Titans have seen in the building are Lucan, Khuff, and briefly Duvann, who had visited the Titans that morning to deliver them a crate of medical supplies. The terms of the trade had been negotiated by Duvann and Lucan, and the Commissar seems to consider discussing those terms, the costs, or the contents of the crate with the Titans to be in poor taste.

    It probably doesn't much matter. The trade goods that the Titans had brought for Lucan to deal with on their behalf have already been decided as surplus, and once the contents of the crate have been examined there's little to complain about. There are a wide assortment of wound dressings, antibiotics, disinfectants, sundry medicines for diseases nobody has heard of, neuropathic and anti-inflammatory pain killers, synaptic stimulants and supressors, and more.

    Donna had wandered off with some fresh dressings for her burns and a large dose of antibiotics. Terry was sporting a new and fancy ankle brace. Vic had gone into his room with a large amount of antibacterials, disinfectant and neural path stimulants to handle a bit of self-reassembly and system rebooting. Even Caitlin, the least damaged of the quartet, had benefitted from some anti-inflammatory cream.

    It's now lunchtime and the Titans who have finished their medical procedures are gathering in the bar to get something to eat. Donna is staring at a bank of small windows at the automat dispenser, behind each of which is a plate of... something. Food here is odd, and although the labels are written in English, the names are essentially meaningless. With a sigh she makes up her mind and presses her button. The small space behind the window flashes brightly for a few seconds, then steam issues from a vent and the window pops open. She pulls out a plate containing a heap of something purplish and vegetable looking, with a lump of probably-meat in some kind of beige sauce. She sniffs at it, sighs, shrugs, and takes it over to the table.

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
"Okay, so maybe it's the questions that did it? I mean, that did it," Caitlin says, amending the question mark with a shift in tone. She uplifts her chin in greetings to Donna when the Amazon sits down with her and Terry, both of whom are intently consuming a meal and having a low-voiced discussion about what the hell 'Fisk' really is.

"Because, Victor, he didn't get the stinkeye, right? And he didn't ask any questions. He just said 'Hey this is how it is, which is, y'know," Caitlin says, nodding. "How he do."

The attempt at feigned indifference collapses and a lifetime of social insecurity flashes across her face. "Oh criminy, you don't think he went and told everyone how lame I am right after, do you?" she inquires, and a look of horrified realization crosses her features at that possibility!

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"I'm thinking it's more than that, but it could be a part of it," Terry says. He is not in his feline shape- he switched back to human after making sure the ankle brace was applied properly... because he was starting to get loopy. He would switch back to his feline form to sleep and heal. Yes, that means it would take longer for his ankle to heal, but it was imperative that he regain his grounding first, ere he float away in a tide of nonsensical fancy.

"I mean, the Commissar did make a big deal of how they 'perceive reality differently' than we do, so it's not so much self-assurance as... well."

He looks around to make sure no-one but his friends are in earshot before continuing, "I suspect that 'fisk' may be old-fashioned Bulshytt. With a 'y', if you know what I mean... what do you think, Donna?" He takes a few bites and frowns, "Man... this tastes like the last time Gar tried to make dinner..."

Donna Troy has posed:
    Donna pokes at her meal dubiously with a fork. "I dunno. I thought most everything about America was B.S. when I first arrived," she says. She dips the tines of her fork in the beige sauce and tastes it cautiously. Her expression remains neutral. She stabs a chunk of the purple vegetable matter and tries it. After a few chews she shrugs, swallows, and comments "Not bad actually."

    "Cait, you were being deferential," Donna says distantly. "I suspect that doesn't go down well. Like... if everyone else talks themselves up, being too nice and too polite comes across like you don't think much of yourself, so why should they? I think titles are important too. Notice how Lucan became 'trader Lucan'? Maybe when you didn't give us titles he thought we must all be unemployed."

    Donne shifts her attention to the meat-like substance. It provides little resistence to her fork, flaking apart as she pushes the fork in. She tastes it, makes a face, and pushes the lump of whatever it is to the edge of her plate to concentrate on the vegetables.

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
Caitlin considers all this advice thoughtfully for a few seconds, chewing.

"Nope. Can't do it. I'm gonna die here if you guys abandon me," she concludes, and digs into her food. Caitlin's normally a tidy eater despite her appetite, but she's powering through her meal as fast as possible. Mostly because thanks to her steep calorimetric intake requirements, 'eating' on a budget means whatever is cheapest and comes in bulk. Even if it has all the curb appeal of rice pudding sans sweetener.

"Anyway. Important thing is that I've got enough supplies to make sure Vic won't have any rejections or reactions." She pauses mid bite, looks at Donna. "Golly, you remember that time Gar swapped his steroidal cream for Icy Hot? I thought Vic was going to literally die."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Cait, Cait, don't freak out," Terry says, putting a hand on her arm, smiling- "I can coax you. You might be nervous about speaking with self-assertion, but you know... there are ways to weaponize silence or speaking very, very few words into creating mystique. Louis XIV was famous for it. Give me a few hours tonight and we can come up with a routine. By the end of it we'll have people believing you are a queen from another world."

He glances at Donna, "Do you think I should try letting the cat out when we encounter the Echonians and see if going full cattitude will shift their perspectives? There's a lot of... self-importance waiting to be tapped, when I switch to that side of the mirror." He looks at his two friends, "I /usually/ manage to hold it back because I don't want either of you to drown me in the pool... wait. Gar did /what/?"

Donna Troy has posed:
    Donna looks over her fork at Cait, locking eyes with her for a moment, then shakes her head. "Cait. Don't talk nonsense, nobody's going to abandon you. We're all going home. We'll find the white hole, we'll fly through it, we go home. This only even looks like it's a challenge for us because right now we're being polite. If that doesn't work or starts to take too long, we will stop being polite. End of story. "

    Donna looks back down at her plate, glaring at the food as if to challenge it to /dare/ not taste any better when she starts eating it again. "I don't know, Terry. You have a way with words. The cat is random. Might be better being you."

    Donna resumes eating vegetables. Whether they have been intimidated into tasting better or not, she doesn't reveal, but she's not complaining at least.

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
"Right, because I'll starve to death," Caitlin says quite matter-of-factly. "And then I'll haunt you forever. So you're stuck with me forever either way." She shrugs one shoulder at Donna and takes a big bite of her food-- though there's a playful expression that suggests she's teasing her friend here.

"Ask Gar about it when we get home, Terry," she suggests to the Cheshire. "Anyway. I guess we need information one way or another. Vic and I can scour local databases if we can get access. If we can't make any headway here, we'll have to move on to the next place." Caitlin grimaces at her meal, then upends the bowl and just drinks it all down as fast as she can.

"There's got to be *some* record of people disappearing. This system is so tiny that everyone probably tracks all new arrivals for no other reason than salvage rights. They're dependent on it for trade and resources. So it stands to reason they'd be on the lookout for someone who disappeared, too. Right?"

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"That's an excellent avenue of inquiry, Cait. You and Vic can hunt for that. There's also something else that's come to mind... and it is that ships in this system are few and far between. Scarce, even. Finding the hole is only one part of the solution, we need something to go into the hole /with/, and I don't get the impression someone would just give up his or her ship if we ask nicely..."

He seems resigned to finish the foo, but he sure doesn't have to like it, "and although not being polite might be a viable option, just because we haven't seen security measures... doesn't mean they don't have 'em. Remember, there's a world that is all about scientific inquiry. And there's another one that's in perpetual war. And there's trade. I wouldn't be surprised if our snotty friends around here don't have a few guns up their tastefully-embroidered sleeves, out of sight."

Donna Troy has posed:
    Donna looks up from her plate with a frown. "Disappeared? What? No. No scouring databases. Too slow. Apparently everyone has heard of this Endovar guy, but we need hard data. Historians. Physical evidence. Anything else is wasting time. "

    "Of course they have weapons," Donna says with a raised eyebrow towards Terry. "We know at least two warships found their way here before, and they clearly have a reasonable industrial capability here. Doesn't matter. We just took on Warworld and won, remember? Let me be clear Terry, the only reason I'm not conquering the Seven Worlds and just demanding all the answers /right now/ is because I don't want to hurt people unless it's necessary. So we play their stupid games and try to do it their way, for now."

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
Caitlin blinks. There's a little edge to Donna's voice, and the violence of Plan B seems to strike her as a little excessive. The redhead exchanges an alarmed look with Terry, then ducks her head down into Donna's line of sight to address her between bites of her food.

"Uh, hey, Donna? You all right?" she inquires, trepidatiously. "That's kind of an extreme solution," she observes, as delicately as she can. "This place is weird and confusing but I'm not sure I'm on board with going full Warlord on this place unprovoked, y'know?"

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Whoa..." Terry returns Cait's glance, sensing that something is decidedly off. "... We're in the business of preventing conquering armies from another world, not in being them..."

He takes a drink of what he hopes is just water, to wet his lips, and then continues "I mean, yeah, we want to get back, but if it takes us two weeks... or three... fair. It's not like we're in some dead-set hard deadline here..."

He grows quiet, "I mean. I know that every day that passes in which they think we're probably dead is hard for them, but..."

He trails off, and he thinks about that for a second or two.

Donna Troy has posed:
    "I'm fine, Cait," Donna says. She chews another mouthful of purple vegetables calmly before continuing. "You're fine too. We're all fine. That's what I'm trying to tell you. We're all going home. I have no intention of going 'full warlord' on anyone if it can possibly be avoided, but /nothing/ is going to stand in the way of us going home. That's all."

    She washes down the food with a mouthful of drink, a local beer that actually tastes like beer. "No, they know we're alive," she corrects Terry. "But we do have a deadline. If we take too long getting back..." She sighs softly, puts her glass down and fixes the pair with her eyes. "I don't know. Not exactly. But there's a price."

    "Neither of you really understand Raven. Even I don't, really, but I understand better than you. If we take too long coming back, she'll bring us back. I don't think that's something we want to happen."

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
"Wait, what?"

Caitlin looks very confused by the left-field comment, and rests her palms on the table to look at Donna. "I'm sorry, you lost me," she apologizes. With Donna drinking beer, Caitlin opts to as well. "This is just for the calories," she mutters at her friends for at least the fifth time in the last few days.

"Raven's... I mean, how does she even know where we are? Can't she just, like, *blip--" Cait makes a gesture. "Magic us back home? I know Terry can't punch out with his portals, but Rae's kind of the expert when it comes to teleportingaround."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry narrows his eyes slightly, "Donna, how does... what Cait said. There's only one member of the team who could potentially punch through dimensions... and she'd still have to know where to go, as I understand it. How does Raven know? And how do you knkow that she knows? ANd does she know that you know that she knows?"

He takes another swig of water, "I don't... need to understand Raven to get an inkling. When Gar and I went to the tower to seek her out..." Colette was there, but there's no need to involve The MEddler, "She almost swallowed us. Our souls. The other part of me... it says she looked like an enormous, lidless sleep. Terrifying and incomprehensible, and... " his voice trails off, whatever he was going to say aborted in favor of "And then Gar hugged her and we somehow din't get eaten."

Donna Troy has posed:
"There are... walls. Reality is made up of walls and spaces," Donna says slowly. "We call the spaces between those walls universes. Some of the walls are thin, some are thick. Some can be 'punched through' easily, some can't. Sometimes the wall is thicker for some people than they are for others. Sometimes the walls have doors in them, because the spaces they close off aren't meant to be fully closed off. On Themyscira there is a doorway that leads to Tartarus. That's a different 'universe' too, but the walls between that one and ours are thin. There are a number of beings who see an advantage in passing through that wall, for various purposes. If transit between Tartarus and our world were easy it would be a bad thing. The places where the walls are thinnest, where there are gates - they must be guarded."

    Donna places a finger on the rim of her glass, pushing it slowly backwards and forwards across the table top as she speaks, her eyes focused on the glass, avoiding Terry and Cait's eyes now. "There are other universes where the walls are not so thin. This is one of those. It's less in sync with our universe than some... you spend an hour in Tartarus and the same hour has passed in our universe. Yet people from the future of our universe arrived here before we did. The walls here are thick, and the door is something very odd that might have changed us in ways we don't even know just because we passed through it. Places like this... they are on the edge of things. Distant in more ways than people like us can really ever understand."

    "Sometimes those walls are a blessing. There are things that would make their way to our universe if they could, but the walls are thick, and the nature of who or what they are makes them incompatible with our reality. They would need to cross over in very difficult, very specific ways. Raven is... Raven isn't a sorceress who is good at punching through dimensions. She was created to be a magical wrecking ball for smashing those walls down, and every day of her life is a struggle to be a person instead."

    She picks up her glass, takes a drink, and places it down again carefully. "We don't want her to embrace what she was created to be rather than what she has become."

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
"But--" Caitlin looks stricken. "But that could kill her. Kill us," she says. "Couldn't it?" She looks back and forth from Terry to Donna. "That's the whole reason the universe doesn't like..." She looks for words, then makes a 'thbbut' and collapses her hands on top of one another. "Because the structure holding everything from folding in on itself. It's got something to do with quantum resonance, but like, I only remember that 'cause of a paper I saw once in college, and I honestly understood about a tenth of the theory and almost none of the math."

"And this is Raven, this is... that's not good, if she's... I mean, Trigon..."

"Wait, how do you know this for sure? How does Raven even know we're not, just, like--" Caitlin gestures. "Y'know. Dead?"

Donna Troy has posed:
    Donna shakes her head slightly. "I don't know what it could do, Cait. I'm hardly an expert in magic /or/ science. But I have heard enough to be pretty sure that even the experts don't really know. I mean Trigon... yeah. Trigon is what Rae focuses on, obviously. But Trigon isn't exactly unique. Honestly... I wouldn't be confident that if Rae somehow did manage to avoid Trigon taking advantage of whatever she did, that there wouldn't be someone or something else that she isn't paying attention to that did. Magala once told me - when I was five or six - that reality is a pool of light in an infinite darkness, and there are things that live in the darkness too. That terrified me then and it terrifies me even more now."

    Donna lifts her glass, stares at it for a moment, then drains it. "I talked to Rae in a dream. I know how that sounds. But she wasn't part of my dream. She was really there."

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
Caitlin just... stares at the tabletop and her empty food bowl for a few seconds. "Okay. Well, that's bleak and horrifying, and I'm going to go pray for a while before I collapse under the weight of all my existential dread. Then, I'm going to find some intestinal fortitude, and we're going to figure out how the heck we're getting off this rock and back home to Earth," she promises the others. Caitlin scoots her chair back and gathers her bowl, tidying up the area as she does.

"Y'know, before your girlfriend loses her patience and kills everyone." But that last is a mumbled whisper that is likely inaudible even to her sharp-eared allies.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"... I had a dream about Gar..." Terry trails off. But it wasn't like Donna's, not at all. That he knows of. "Okay... I see your point. We need to get back ASAP before Raven decides to remodel reality and open an expressway, with catastrophic consequences for all involved. Well..." he taps the table, "Then I guess we better get our asses into gear and our souls into whack, to completely misquote Meatloaf. I mean... I'm not exactly phlegmatic about going back- I want to see everybody again. I've been torturing myself because by this point the videos have gone out and... if Raven can tell them we're alive, that's something at least."

He stands up, "I'm going to think about things... call me when we're ready to brainstorm or put a plan into action. In the meantime I'll practice sounding grandiloquent and elf-confident. Jus in case."