Milliways may have recently been busy, judging from the confetti all over the place, the usual array of mug stains and dirty napkins and crumbs, and nacho cheese that ended up on the wall for some reason, but it's pretty slow right now.
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the scenery seen was exceedingly dull
characters who don't have multiple gallery icons meet in milliways
Bar
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Clarinda Kittson
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There is, at least, a slightly translucent woman cleaning up the mess.
Valsin be-Ana de-Tirev
Someone who looks like a human, but very young to have hair that grey, comes down from the rooms above, yawning, to return a book and see who's around right now.
Clarinda Kittson
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The person cleaning nods at him. She doesn't look particularly startled by his appearance. (Aside from the translucency, she has mildly pointed ears, black hair that's barely beginning to grey, and her irises are rather large compared to a human's.)
Clarinda Kittson
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She will make sure she is doing a cleaning task compatible with ongoingly looking at him a solid chunk of the time. "Greetings, how are you?"
Valsin be-Ana de-Tirev
"Worried about my sanity but assuming this place is real I’m really excited about it."
Clarinda Kittson
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"Oh, huh. Finding this place made me a lot less worried about my sanity, but I was already out of touch with reality before I got here, so my baseline was lower."
Valsin be-Ana de-Tirev
"When I got up yesterday I didn’t think this kind of thing happened in real life."
Clarinda Kittson
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"Huh. I wouldn't have predicted this exact thing but it's not a shock to me that extraplanar bars exist or that you can occasionally reach them by dreaming if you're imprisoned."
Valsin be-Ana de-Tirev
"I don’t think anyone on my planet does any kind of magic, at least openly. Where are you from?"
Clarinda Kittson
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"The planet's called Suaal but there aren't any other planets in the universe that we know of, so I wouldn't really expect you to run into it even if you do space travel."
Clarinda Kittson
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"Does space travel work well for you? I hear that things break down really easily out there."
Clarinda Kittson
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"What do you do with it, anyway? I hear the moon is a weird kind of rock, are the planets you can get to made of more useful materials?"
Clarinda Kittson
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"That's pretty cool. Wait, moons, plural? What's that like?"
Valsin be-Ana de-Tirev
Shrug. "It's hard to think what I'd compare it to. I guess it probably makes it more complicated to travel on the ocean."
Clarinda Kittson
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"I guess that's not an easy question to answer, it's not like you've lived on planets with varying numbers of moons such that you can do a comparative review for me."
Clarinda Kittson
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"Good luck! Bar lends out lots of nonmagical books, if that helps!"
Clarinda Kittson
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Clarinda nods and puts a cloth in a bucket and gets another one.
"Are there any poems or prayers or meditation topics or other mental exercises you particularly like?"
Valsin be-Ana de-Tirev
"Um. I have some favorite poems but what are you talking about? I know what meditation and poetry are..."
Clarinda Kittson
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"Praying is a mental thing you do in order to try to get a god to do things. They can sort of engage with it sometimes, there are definitely limits but the details aren't clear to me. Sometimes people formalize it. If you haven't heard of it it probably doesn't work very well where you are or something."
Clarinda Kittson
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"A god. Powerful being, grants their favorite followers the ability to create water and heal people along with some other magic, reasonably often involved in afterlives?"
Clarinda Kittson
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"At least in my world, usually when people's bodies die their souls go to places. …usually places with lots of dead people. Not here."
Valsin be-Ana de-Tirev
"I... don’t think I’ve heard of anything like that? How do you know about it and, uh, are the afterlives... clean...?"
Clarinda Kittson
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"Sometimes they send visitors, or people get visions. And the nice ones are clean, I think?"
Clarinda Kittson
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"Strange and infrequent! I haven't personally spoken to any that I know of, it's more … sometimes you go to a temple and there's a lantern archon in the area who might give a speech at services or who might just be there on an errand, the Asmodeus Corporation office has at least one imp, that sort of thing."
Clarinda Kittson
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"I haven't personally gone on a quest to verify it but they're things I hear dead people can become?"
Clarinda Kittson
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"You can borrow books from Milliways about other peoples' worlds if you want to do a research project. Or buy them, if you can take things home, but the translation effect won't go with you."
Valsin be-Ana de-Tirev
Nod. "It's really useful. I haven't read stuff from every world yet, though."
Clarinda Kittson
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"The ones where I'm from tend to make people evil, but maybe Milliways offers better ones?"
Clarinda Kittson
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"They tend to make people do horrible things. They hunger for people's flesh or blood, or they lose all ability to care for anyone, or such."
Clarinda Kittson
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"Yeah, it's not great. I think to be those kinds of things you need to catch them like a disease, or do a ritual to transform yourself into one. Most people are just the sort of thing that dies and those are some of the easier things to become. What would you expect to be a non-weird thing?"
Valsin be-Ana de-Tirev
"...If... you had a drug that made your DNA go back to not being damaged? And so you didn't get cancer? And maybe if you genetically edited people with something you found in axolotls you could make a next generation that grows back limbs they lose? And if you had enough things like that you would just never die of natural causes?"
Valsin be-Ana de-Tirev
"It's the instructions that tell your body how to grow. You might not have it but everything that lives on my planet does."
Valsin be-Ana de-Tirev
"Yes, but the individual cells are constantly wearing out and being replaced."
Valsin be-Ana de-Tirev
"Well... when I get cut, new skin eventually grows over the cut. I slowly shed retired skin so I bathe every day even if I don’t touch anything dirty. Sometimes people on my planet have parts start growing too much and get cancer."
Clarinda Kittson
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“I’m not properly here in the flesh, though, so I don’t think you could check.”
Valsin be-Ana de-Tirev
"That’s really cool, honestly. It would be really useful to be able to send a fake body to do things and then get rid of it."
Clarinda Kittson
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"That’s very expensive. I don’t think I can hold a sponge here because I’m special, I think it’s because Milliways is."
Valsin be-Ana de-Tirev
"Maybe I should hold my door open and invite people to move in. It's just... I'd get government attention and I don't really want it."
Clarinda Kittson
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"I don't think this happens if you move to Milliways, it's more that being here as a dreamer is weird. And I suspect your government probably imprisons people already."
Valsin be-Ana de-Tirev
"No, it's just - having people around using fake bodies to clean things is great, you could use it for worse messes than you're dealing with, and on my planet the biggest problems are that we don't have any space and that we don't have a good way to deal with unclean things - I'm clean, I promise I'm clean - "
Clarinda Kittson
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"I'm not going to scrub you! Bar doesn't ask me to wash patrons! – I guess I don't know how the dreaming thing works but I think using Milliways for space might be a better bet than using it for that. There's also cleaning magic, I never got the hang of it and wouldn't know where to start teaching you but it does exist."
Clarinda Kittson
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"Wizardry is learnable, if you're good enough. Any real wizard can magically clean objects in about this area in six seconds." Clarinda gestures at a volume somewhat larger than her head.
Clarinda Kittson
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"I know that you need to be both intelligent and good at raw memorization – diagrams, gestures, phrases, that sort of thing. You need some manual dexterity, if you can't make the gestures you can't cast the spell. You really want to have good hearing and both your hands, if you don't it's easy to make mistakes. Being an elf helps. Focus and diligence helps but sometimes people are prodigies. There's a spell wizards cast to tell if someone's good enough, but it doesn't always work, it said I probably would be."