A mostly ordinary-looking woman, except for the iridescent tentacles growing from her sides, pauses on her way through the doorway, five of six tentacles held up as if in guard, and touches the wall in the room behind her with the sixth, which fades into invisibility on her side of the door.

"Oh dear. I do trust you, but won't you tell Evelyn?" she says before stepping inside and walking towards the bar.

"Your premises appear to have borrowed my sitting room door," she says, frowning.

"It does that," Sam says easily. "It borrowed the door to exile, in my case, so I am almost grateful. Drink?" He doesn't seem particularly phased by the tentacles, and his empty sockets make it hard to track his gaze. "There is more to this place than the bar, but it's as good a start as any." 

"Hardly the worst party I've been to Outside, I suppose. Tea? If you aren't charging in souls or something horrifically morbid like that."

"Souls? No. Milliways will take your money, whatever it is. What sort of tea? I have some from all over, but I don't mean to assume." He leans an arm on the bar. "What's your name, miss? You seem less surprised than most that a place like this exists, and that reminds me almost of home."

He isn't flirting, actually. He seems genuine, and when he says home there as almost sad cast to his face. It's more expressive than it really should be, given what he is.

"Can't imagine I can tempt you with some red wine? Bar stocked up on Italian vintages, the kind you mix with water, in honor of our present guests." 

There are no boxes of tea among the bottles on display, but he bends down to rummage under the bar, showing where they're kept."

"I'm Heather. I'm used to going Outside, though it isn't usually a nice bar out there. This place is a little odd. It's sort of like it's high up, and I could leap off a cliff and leave, but I think I'd have trouble getting back if I did. Ah, just an afternoon black tea, it is around that time. Yes, that one you're looking at is fine."

Heather is not actually facing the bar as she says this, but has turned to survey the party.

"I won't apologize if I'm crashing a private party, since your door is breaking and entering into my house. If your home is inhabited by skeletons, I don't think I know it, sorry."

"The private party sort of crashed into this place, and I really am sorry about your living room." He doesn't notice that she isn't looking, or at least doesn't comment. He takes the black tea out and sets an out of place looking electric kettle to boil. "And my home is not particularly full of living skeletons, or at least I have not met many others. This is, one might say, a battle scar, although that would imply my whole body is scar tissue." He offers a bony hand. "Sam Day Break, at your service." 

He's decided he likes this Heather person. She reminds him of Lady Love Dies, as painful as those memories might be.

He regards the tentacles again. "I suppose it's a good thing you aren't from my world, or I'd have to ask if you were a demon." 

He's become much more comfortable with demons than he'd once been, but old instincts die hard.

Heather accepts the handshake with a human hand.

"I try to go by 'angel', I suppose, though there's not exactly a higher power I'm the messenger for. I'd like to think I live up to the cultural expectations, about benevolence, wisdom, and so forth. Some of my friends and family are demons, at least how we use the word, but they're lovely people. I've travelled the abyss, but I certainly wasn't born there. Just a very ordinary nine months inside my mother."

Sam cracks a smile, or at least opens his mouth. "Fascinating," he says. "I don't think we had those, anymore. The gods were all dead, and there were no more messages to recieve."

The kettle beeps. He'll hand her her tea when he's done making it. "Sugar?"

"Just a bit, thank you. Are these the sort of gods where one offers condolences or congratulations?"

"Both, I think," he says. "I have been doing a lot of thinking since I arrived in this place. You say you feel you could return to your world?"

The door he and Lydia stepped through was strictly one way, that much he was certain of. But could he go through other doors? 

He'd never thought to ask. 

"My condolences, then. Ordinarily, I can go to any world I want. It's this place that's odd, because I can't exactly figure out where it is. It might not even be a world."

Heather frowns. "Looking at it, that door is doing something very strange." (She's not looking at it.) "I feel like I'm about to be haunted by three spirits. Any moral lessons hiding out in here?"

"Don't do foolish things for love?" He mostly sounds like he's joking. "This place does not exactly have seasons, but seeing as there's only ever one day to it, but the stable time loop allows some flexibility and so the folks in charge have declared it the winter season. Three spirits?" 

He genuinely does not seem to get the reference. Wherever he's from, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carole is not a well-known pop culture artifact. 

"Oh, I suppose they don't have Dickens where you come from, though it really is surprising how many things Outside do know about English literature. He wrote a novel where a miserly old man is visited by the three spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future to help him repent of his greed and misanthropy. It's probably been adapted into more different films than any novel ever written, very well known story. Christmas is a winter religious holiday, if you've never heard of Christianity, though it's generally popular even with those who aren't religious."

Heather smiles. "If you don't do foolish things for it, is it really love?"

He digests this. 

"I think I remember Christianity," he says slowly. "It was popular before the gods arrived. Christmas I know because of my work here."

At her final comment his face goes a little strange. "Don't facilitate the murder of an entire organization," he says. "Even if they deserve it." He sighs. "You don't need to know the full details, I think."

The young gods in the background have been getting drunker and drunker, until one of them seems to split off from his group, abruptly developing a separate identity and identifiable features. If Heather is up on her Greek pantheon, she's pretty sure this one is something like a Dionysus. 

"Sammy," the drunk god slurs. "Sammy we need your help."

"Yes, let's choose our murders judiciously."

Heather spares a polite glance for the Bacchian interloper.

"In the end, I think that's what saved my life," Sam says. 

"What are you individuating for?" he asks the drunk god. 

"One of us has... hash..." the drunk god of wine hiccups. "Hash died." 

He doesn't look particularly bothered. 

"He'sh all better now, but it wash touchhhh touch and go there." 

He wanders off to the group without elaborating further, or even necessarily noticing Heather. 

"Well, Heather," he says, turning to her. "How do you feel about a little detective work? If someone's died on the premises, for real, Bar'll want us to investigate, or at least will want me to do so."

"Oh dear. I didn't look too closely, but those are interesting beings. Not very biological, are they? Sevens, are you here?"

Heather touches her shoulder.

"Hmm. I have my limits, but I do have a talent at looking at things. I do think I can avoid looking dangerously hard. Oh, what is Sevens doing?" She rolls her eyes and smiles.

"From what I can tell they're more... ideaforms? Is what I'd call them. They're allowed for now because they've mostly kept themselves to themselves. Wonder how one of them could possibly die." 

He would be smirking if that were a possible facial expression. 

"Sevens?" 

He's going to ask Bar if he can leave his shift early to go noddle around the restaurant. 

(He can.)

"Whenever something seems like plot, I always suspect Sevens. She did tell me going in that door would be 'fun', after all. One of my wives. Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight. I'm sure she's hiding in the background somewhere."

Heather looks at the crowd. She is not especially trying to use more than human senses, but hers is a very keen gaze. Trying would run the risk of encoding the object of her attention as information on the holographic boundary of her own psyche, after all.

"Interesting," Sam says. "I have to say, it's the first time in a while I've heard a name that makes me think of home. Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight. What's she like?" 

He's saying all this but also clearly keeping an eye on the party, watching her watch them and so on. 

Eventually, he steps out from behind the bar and makes his way towards the gathered group of divine. "'Scuse me," he says. "I heard there was a murder?" 

Another god--it's hard to tell if it's the same one from before, though it might be--peels off from the group, like a soap bubble forming. "Follow me," it says, and starts to walk without giving an answer. 

Heather, if she's really paying attention, would realize that this is the murdered god. He's all better, but there's an aura of recent endings about him, and it doesn't fit with the vibe he's clearly going for. 

Sam will wait for Heather, but the god won't. 

There's no sign of Sevens.