ten_fwd_ooc | TEST DRIVE #1

Consider the jackrabbit. Desert hare, if you will. Masters of disguise, really. When danger looms, they go stock-still, dust and tawny coat blending so perfectly into their dust and tawny background they're damn near impossible to see.

Now consider how this same jackrabbit -- desert hare -- would find it damn near impossible to blend in with an elegantly lit, gracefully designed room, glowing with soft blues and purples. Even standing very, very still.

Sundance's coat is tawny, and dusty. He's got dirt on his face and nobody else is wearing a hat and his hair ain't been washed in days, and even though he's standing very, very still, all wary lines and taut cautious stance, he's pretty damn sure there's nothing that's standing out worse, right now, right here, than him.

He's even more sure he shouldn't've had that last drink.

His eyes are round and getting wider by the second, and in his chest, that jackrabbit is making a break for it, running circles, thumping panicked paws on the inner rungs of his ribcage.

But he don't move. There's nowhere to make a break for.

At least no one's tried to shoot or arrest him. Yet.

Edited 2014-03-30 15:39 (UTC)

Well, almost nobody else is wearing a hat. He might not see her, yet. She's off to one end of the room, sitting down because her knees won't quite work, saucer-wide blue eyes darting between the nearest window—my, but there are a lot of stars out there—and the room at large.

She's had a bit more time to get used to her surroundings than the panicked stranger, but not by much. She looks shell-shocked, to be sure; confused and, just maybe, the slightest bit intimidated. But she's calm, and the sixshooter on her hip hasn't left its holster.

She sees him first, and lord almighty but does it feel good to see someone familiar. She may not know him, but she knows that look.

Swallowing down as many of her nerves as she can, she straightens those rickety old knees and makes her way over. If she keeps an eye on somebody who could be from home, maybe the rest of this will make more sense.

He snaps towards the motion, hand hovering at his hip without dropping quite yet to the butt of the sixshooter there, eyes blue and wide and cautious, but then the stir resolves itself into a petite woman with a familiar looking silhouette, and he straightens, pulls back just enough to size her up.

Blonde. Red-cheeked. Pretty, in a hard-edged sort of way. Hat and duster and the glint of metal at her hip, walking like she's got a purpose.

He sucks his teeth and drops his hand back away from his hip, wondering if this makes the situation better or worse. On the one hand, she looks familiar, and that's a relief. On the other hand, women keep expecting him to talk to them, and Butch is nowhere to be seen to step in and do the talking, like he's good at.

It's a dilemma.

This dilemma is fast approaching, because as soon as she's within speaking distance, that's just what she does.

"Howdy. Kate Barlow."

She pauses, an unusual air of uncertainty hitching her movements. Generally speaking, she's spit and vinegar with a hellfire glint in her eye, but at this moment she's thrown just far enough off her game to debate whether she should offer him a handshake before she eventually does.

She's small, standing no taller than five-foot-one-inch, but her hands are strong and calloused, lips tucked into the shallowest frown, and she's giving off the distinct air of a woman you don't want to trifle with.

Damn.

There's a faint, resigned press of his lips together, and a twitch of his mustache, and he casts a fast glance at the offered hand. When he reaches to take it, it's for a quick, firm shake that allows him to drop it right away. "Miss."

It's good manners to introduce himself, ask after her, make some sort of...commentary on her...on her...hat, maybe? He tries to think of what Butch might say, comes up against a blank sandstone wall, like that time they got stuck in a box canyon and he just knew Butch got the path wrong, no matter what he said about shortcuts.

Besides, she's so tiny and neat-built, like a bird, she makes him feel even more out of place than ever. To cover his confusion, he glances up and around the room, stares down someone wearing a too-tight black and blue bodysuit until they look away. "You..."

There's a pause while he wracks his brain for what might be an appropriate question, wishes heartily Butch was here to do the figuring out for him, like he oughta be, lands a little haphazardly on: "This place got a name?"

Edited 2014-03-30 17:52 (UTC)

On any other occasion, she'd find some amusement in his stiff manner. If she felt kindly, she'd help him out and finish his question for him; if she felt mischievous (the more likely of the two), she'd smirk while he sweats it out. Sadly, both options are blotted out by an ink stain of shock.

"The U.S.S. somethin'-r-other. Enterprise? They say it's a ship that sails the heavens, rather'n the seas."

She nods, shorthand for the nice to meet you that isn't passing her lips, and glances back out a window. She laughs after a minute, quick and breathless.

"Sounds crazy, but I hafta admit that's just what it looks like."

Hey, look at that--must be an outlaw convention, here. Nobody tell the Pinkertons. Don't want to make their work any easier.

Unless this is their doing. But they couldn't... could they?

No. No, it would be in the papers. They'd have heard about it in Galveston. Somebody would talk. This must be something else altogether.

So don't mind Butch, all dressed up like he's trying to pass himself off as civilized people. And certainly don't mind the pretty blonde in widow's clothes who's clinging to his arm like if she lets go she'll vanish. Whatever Butch has been up to since their last job, it's certainly... well, this isn't the most confused he's been, let's put it that way. But it's up there.

HIs eyes keep darting from her to the room and back again, where they settle for a good long few seconds before they're off again; tracking the movement around them, watching the people who are watching them. The pistol slung low on his thigh is a welcome, friendly weight, but no one's making any sudden, stupid moves, or even paying much attention.

Apparently, this is something that happens all the --

He looks back at her, brow creasing. "Ship?"

He doesn't know a whole lot about ships, but he's pretty sure this isn't like any sailing the world he knows. His mouth opens to make the words heaven?, but before he can, he's caught by the sight of them.

Stars.

Millions of them. More than he can count. More than he can keep track of.

He wonders if he's dead. How the hell else would he find himself surrounded by stars, nowhere near anything he knows?

Well, it's a relief.

Butch, he knows, will know what's happening, and where they are. He's probably got some fancy name for whatever happened to get them here to begin with, and a whole theory on the whys and wherefores of it and if he doesn't, he'll figure it out. Butch is always figuring things out, talking them to death and coming up with a plan.

For all Sundance knows, this is the plan.

He doesn't pay the blonde much notice as he comes up, walking a little careful with so many people around, feeling too tall and too conspicuous. The air doesn't smell right, and there's fancy carpet and sleek upholstery every where. It's all wrong.

Which doesn't stop him from giving Butch's get-up a quick and faintly questioning once-over when he gets close enough. Sundance doesn't look like civilized people. Sundance probably barely looks housebroken.

But all he says is: "There a funeral?"

Butch is dressed up. And his companion, she's in widows weeds. And -- Sundance supposes there could be other reasons, but that seems most likely, even if it's a little far from the main question currently at hand.

"That's what they say. Can't tell if we're movin'."

Kate's entertained the same thought her own self. Death. Heaven. How on earth she got here, when the last thing she remembers is the washcloth-heavy heat of Texas, and then there was something like a flash, and people all demanding to know where they were.

Her sharp eyes follow the slant of his, grazing the deep black sky, shifting quickly to some sort of fella walking by who's distinctly not human. She blinks, swallows hard, and looks back.

"Where you from, cowboy?"

She don't talk like a proper lady, but propriety went out the window several light-years ago.

Somebody must be putting one over on him, and it makes him mad.

He gives her a quick look, like it might be her, but Kate Barlow's still watching the room with the same wary uncertainty that keeps gnawing at the back of his neck, so she's probably innocent.

As much as anyone ever is.

He's still staring at the stars outside when he answers her, a little absent. "Wyoming."

Not where he was born, but she didn't ask that. It does send an unpleasant tingle down along his spine to think how very far from Hole-In-The-Wall he is, if she's right. If she's not putting one over on him.

Something in her relaxes. Not by much, but enough to ease her shoulders a titch and take her from that feet-planted offensive stance into something slightly more casual. It shows on her face, too. Confusion makes way for recognition — Wyoming, now that's familiar.

"East Texas," she offers.

She might even be smiling, a bare-bones upturning of the corners of her mouth.

"Can I ask how y'got here?"

Butch may aim for 'civilized,' but the best he can usually do ends up somewhere around 'overgrown schoolboy dressed up for church, but probably forgot to wash behind his ears.' Charm helps a bit, when he can't quite get it right.

"Oh, no, we were going to a concert--they got some fella all the way from Vienna to play the piano, and Miss Mireille here wanted to go. It wasn't here, though."

That much of the story makes sense. He's confident in that much. Beyond those facts, it gets into gods and giant metal birds and he's not rightly sure what happened.

But the fact that they were going to a concert and did not end up there? He's got a handle on that.

"Oh."

He looks around, anyway, hands going to his hips, like maybe there is a concert getting set up here, just in case.

There's not, though. There's not even a piano, and he looks back at Butch, nudges his hat back on his forehead with the pad of his thumb, temporarily lost for conversational starters. "Looks like you'll miss it."

Considering he's not at all sure how to get back, or if there's a way at all.

East Texas, that's a place he knows. He knows nothing about ships or stars or whatever this is, that's so sleek and gently-lit, where no one seems to be playing cards and the girls are wearing the same strange skin-tight get-up as the fellas (he wants to stare at one, is made vaguely uncomfortable by the other, and ends up just looking back out the window again), but he knows East Texas, so that gets a nod, and as she relaxes, he does, too. A little.

He can't really answer her question, though; even crinkling his face up in thought doesn't really help all that much. There was a bar with rooms upstairs, and he'd planned to take the top one, with the best vantage point of the street, and he'd somehow walked in here, instead, but try as he might he can't figure the moment between old creaky wood under his boots and this tasteful carpet and tile. Was there a flash of light, or did the door just open here? "Not sure."

He half-turns again, to look around. "You?"

It takes some doing to keep her face from falling.

She shakes her head.

"I was outside, then — here. Some fella, I reckon a crewman, told me what I told you. Said t'sit tight, an' he'd find some answers. But there's a lotta confused folk."

Who knows what's going on, or when they'll find out? She's still pinching herself every couple of minutes, just to see if she might wake up.

"I was hopin' someone might know what happened t'me."

Miss Mireille may be a little disappointed at the lack of a concert--at least when she gets done being confused by the sudden change of location--but she'll be all right. There'll be other concerts.

"Well, I got a harmonica," he says. "And I bet I can play it better than that fella from Vienna can play the harmonica, even if I can't play the same Beethoven he was gonna do. So there you go. We get a concert anyway."

But he'll refrain from bothering the other folks nearby with his harmonica for now, because he has noticed something. He knows a bar when he sees one. Observant, is Butch Cassidy.

"After some drinks, though. I wonder if they got Old Taylor."

"You play the harmonica?"

He's not totally clear on Beethoven, either, although it sounds familiar -- could be it's a kind of piano, though he thinks it's probably not -- but Butch says it like he says everything else, like Sundance oughta know, just like that, and Sundance can always ask him later.

For now, though, he's relieved to have a task in sight, even if it's nearly as unsettling to think of trying to drink something here as it is to pay too much attention to the vast emptiness out the window, speckled with all those millions of stars. Butch is always good for that. Perspective. Nothing ever seems to trip him up completely.

Still, Sundance casts a pessimistic eye over the shining bar, the glass bottles behind it filled with strange, colorful liquids. "I doubt it."

In fairness, Butch isn't all that clear on Beethoven either. Mireille had seen a sign advertising the concert and she recognized the piece and wanted to go, and he figured he could refrain from swearing or spitting on floors for a couple hours to escort her.

"Oh, yeah, I've been playing since I was a kid. If you give folks a choice between my harmonica playing and my singing, they almost all pick the harmonica. It's better for dancing to, anyway."

And it's cheap and it's portable. Not like a piano.

"...I hope our money's good here."

He peers at her, then looks away, uncomfortable in the knowledge that he probably ought to offer some kind of comfort. It's the sort of thing Etta might tell him is right, or Butch would do easy as breathing, but Butch is good with people, and Etta's a woman and generally better at these sorts of things, and Sundance is...

Best when left to his own devices.

He clears his throat, wishes he'd thought to refill his pouch of chaw. "Seems there oughta be somebody in charge."

To give them answers, or to direct this milling crowd of confused arrivals. He's seeing others who look like they don't belong, now that the first shock is over, but when one walks by, head entirely obscured by a darkly-tinted fishbowl, he looks back at Miss Barlow right quick.

Sundance would never take that bet, but then, Butch is a rotten gambler.

He's mostly mulling over this newest information, while Butch waxes thoughtful about funds and whether or not they can get used here, until Sundance gives him a mildly surprised look.

He hadn't considered their money might be no good here, He hadn't considered Butch would have money, seeing as it's been kind of a stretch since their last job.

The thing is, compared to the sun-dried cowpokes out in Texas, Sundance is practically cuddly. Sure, he's about as huggable as cacti, but Kate's used to reading silences and grunts in place of words. That's why Green Lake needed her touch, back during her schoolteacher days. Take the farmers and the ranch hands, try to civilize them a bit, teach them their letters, discuss poetry. She don't scare easy.

Never has.

"I'd reckon so."

She pauses, gears grinding away. She gives his gun a second look, then ponders the glint in his eyes.

"Maybe we should find them."

It doesn't fall off the tongue natural—we—but that's what they are for now. She don't know him and he don't know her, but they know Wyoming, and Texas, and that's better than anything this ship's got to offer so far. Besides, he looks like the resourceful type. Maybe even the type that'll come in handy in a shootout.

He's got some money.

Mostly because escorting a lady around doesn't leave a lot of time for gambling. If not for her, he wouldn't even have the five dollars he's got in his pocket. He wanted to get nice seats at the concert.

And now it may be the only money he's got here, for however long they're here, wherever this place is, and if it even counts as money here. Good thing he's not afraid of hard work. He may prefer easier work, but he's not afraid.

"Well, it might not be. This doesn't look like any place I've ever been, and melting pot or not, some of these folks don't exactly look... American."

He'd say human, but that might be rude.

It's like he's doomed to spend all his life chasing his girl from one world to the next.

He'd seen her disappear--seen her pass through a gap in reality, into who knows where, and he'd thrown himself after her. But he wasn't fast enough, he never is; and wherever he's ended up, she's nowhere to be seen.

And he's been dropped into a room full of people just going about their business like nothing's happening. This isn't a situation that calls for violence, not yet.

He doesn't shout for her. Maybe it's not safe, maybe that would alert people to their presence, maybe she'd get hurt. All he can do is try to stay calm, try to blend in, and try to find her.

Easier said than done.

There is a girl. A young girl all alone by the counter-height (head-height for her) bar. This wouldn't be unusual if she weren't dressed so obviously out-of-place, and creeping slowly closer to the nearest wall. Her grey shirt and black jumper are cut for movement, and her tights and shoes are clean of dirt and mud, though there is a splatter of blood across her face and neck

When her outstretched hand reaches it, her fingertips melt into the wall.

TEST DRIVE #1 - Ten Forward

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