Who: Jess and Kenzi What: Drinking, and an intro to the OC When: Early May Where: Local bar Rating/Warning: Low/None Status: Complete
Under normal circumstances, Jess would generally avoid things like meeting strangers online and agreeing to meet them for drinks. Not only did doing so read like the opening act of an episode of Law & Order: SVU, she’d gone through that phase in college already. One spontaneous trip to Amsterdam, a shit load of joints, and three slightly regrettable tattoos later, she was over it. No need to relive it.
But, try as she might, she couldn’t stop herself from liking the idea of maybe actually having a friend in her new home. Business trips aside, she was going to be stuck here for two years. Being alone served her well when she was continent hopping, and wouldn’t even be in the same time zone as potential friends, but if she was staying put? She needed people to share the monotony with her.
And that’s what it’d been so far: Monotony. How many pictures could she take of beautiful beaches? And, really: Was all of the sun necessary?
(She really needed to get over the sun thing.)
She walked into the bar like the thirty-one year old loner she was, clutching her purse and looking for reasons to use her pepper spray. She really needed to just chill and take a look around. Surely Kenzi couldn’t be that hard to find.
Naaaah. Finding Kenzi wasn’t difficult - look for the personification of a gothic pinup spinning in her stool, sipping her fruity and barely alcoholic cocktail (she was cutting back, preparing herself for their twisted version of a Disney cruise). For her, meeting people from the internet was sort of the new norm anyway; everyone who joined the network was subject to experiencing some weird shit, whether it’s dreams bitchslapping you in the face with another reality or this place going whacko with its attempts to kill you.
Tonight, she’d play the welcoming committee.
It was also a safe assumption that the brunette that stepped in, looking a tad bit awkward, and not being able to find the person she was looking for immediately was probably the same Jessica she agreed to meet.
Arm in the air, she waved her over. “Heeeey, Jessica? Jessycakes? Photographer person?”
With that aid, Jess finally found who she was looking for, almost laughing at the sight. She'd never been the type of photographer to carry her camera around with her at all times - did Yo Yo Ma just whip out his (...Violin? Cello? Who the hell cares?) stringed instrument of some kind and play impromptu concerts in public? No, he didn't - but she couldn't help but wish she'd brought it this time. Kenzi’s loud enthusiasm in relation to the blatant irritation of the patrons surrounding her, coupled with her obvious indifference to their wants or needs, made for quite the shot.
Much more relaxed now that she actually had a reason to be here, Jessica made her way over to the bar, squeezing her way into the seat next to her new companion. “Kenzi, I take it? Your voice really carries.” Though that was hardly a surprise, given the personality behind it. “I suppose that comes in handy when you meet up with Internet strangers. You know. Just in case they're serial killers.”
Yeah, yeah, she got some odd looks, most of them annoyed because, well - she may have smacked a neighboring patron or two for that enthusiastic wave of her arm but whatevs, they’d totally get over it. It helped that she was easy on the eyes, and the one approaching was also worthy of crude cat calls.
“I’m my own rape whistle,” she quipped nonchalantly, crossing those fishnetted legs. “You’ll get more comfortable with the idea of meeting internet strangers, and I promise I won’t leave you unconscious in an alley and steal your shoes.” Thief’s honor! Sort of.
Another animated wave and a ‘yahooooo, cutie pie’ to attract the bartender’s attention. Kenzi promised a drink, and she’d keep her word. “What’s your poison, sweetcheeks?”
“Gin and tonic,” Jess said, not bothering to put up a fight about who was paying for the drinks. Kenzi had offered, after all. It was only polite to accept, and she could be polite. Sometimes.
“So. What’s so special about this town that it required drinks?” She wasn’t one to beat round the bush, and she saw no reason to start now. If she was walking into the middle of a gangland of some kind, she’d like to know. She didn’t get that vibe, though. ‘Blood rain’ read more Stephen King than Tupac Shakur. “And if you say anything about the ‘breathtaking views,’ I might kill you.”
Everything about this place required drinks. It had maimed her now-deceased brother, and cursed him to the point that killing him was the only way to give him peace (yet they were going to barge into the Underworld to carry his merry ass back to the living world in X amount of days). It turned one of her closest friends into a succubus, it had given the dude she made awkward flirtatious advances towards a tiny device in his head that could fry his brain at the push of a button.
It had also given her poison from eating contaminated foot soup, but that was hilariously embarrassing to mention despite the almost-death scenario it put her in.
“This place is craycray,” she began, a general summation that would lead to the rest of the nitty-gritty details. All that watered down fruit juice and liquor she’d been sipping was stirred with a straw. “Ever heard of the Multiverse theory?”
Most of Kenzi’s knowledge in regards to that came from Wikipedia but, hey, it made sense to bring it up in regards to explaining this place.
She didn’t know why in the world she was hanging onto the word of someone who used ‘craycray’ unironically, but Jess found that she kind of was. Kenzi seemed genuinely convinced that there was something so unique about this place that it could honestly cause the impossible to happen. The skeptic in her wanted to enjoy her free drink and then leave the crazy goth girl to her own devices, but it turned out that the greater part of her just wanted to hear her out. She was really starting to lose her cold European intolerance for the fanciful. Her mother would be so disappointed.
“Um, no. Enlighten me.” She said flatly, picking up the drink that had just arrived in front of her and preparing for what was sure to be truly craycray.
Sluuuuuuurp. Ladylike, right? It was the sound of Kenzi finishing her lightly boozed koolaid. “It’s the idea that multiple universes exists. Multiple worlds, multiple lives, multiple yous. Or other yous. In other lives.” Sounded nuts when talking about it to someone who might be resistant to the phenomenon, but that was the curse of every newbie - to be in denial until proven otherwise. “And heeeere, well, it’s the center of that kind of clusterfuck. You snooze, thinking you’re going to sleep in the next day, and bam. Dreams of a parallel world through the eyes of a parallel you like you’re living another life.”
Pushing her empty glass to the side, she also felt the need to point out these very important details: “I haven’t been roofied, and I haven’t done LSD, peyote, or shrooms.”
Jess let out a disbelieving laugh, trying to find the correct response to what Kenzi was trying to convince her was the truth. How did one respond to ‘moving to an area that shares its name with a type of fruit juice has suddenly unlocked your parallel lives’? It frankly sounded like complete nonsense, and if quacked like a duck…
And it wasn’t just an unfamiliarity with different points of view that held her back. She’d explored many of the world’s religions; she’d even spent a few years as a buddhist, right after college. But there was a difference between embracing the idea that life has meaning and buying the fact that California held some kind of multi-dimensional brain hub. Namely, only one of them read like network TV show.
“Oh, so you’re just grossly mentally ill, then. What a relief.” Jess said flatly, without thinking. She cringed as she registered how that likely came across, cursing her tendency to get mouthy when she was confused. “Sorry. My mouth does not always ask me before responding. As you’d obviously anticipated, I’m a bit skeptical.” She fiddled with her glass, trying to find a reasonable way to ask for more information. After a few moments, she settled on, “So what makes you so sure of this?”
“No harm done, sweetcheeks, it’s a normal reaction,” Kenzi assured, unsurprising that Jessica met her explanation with blatant skepticism - anyone with a healthy mental state would, right? Unfortunately she didn’t have any super-duper powers to demonstrate how colossally freaky this place was. It’d make things so much easier, ugh. The woes of plain humanity. “But I’ve experienced it, and so have tons and tons of others. My best friend turned into a succubus and feeds off sexual energy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Another friend summons dead people to fight for him. It kinda bleeds over, all of it - the cool stuff and the bad.”
There was a lot to read up on when it came to the network. Everyone and their mom talked about all that; their dreams, who got dumped when, every single annoying detail that was sometimes a little bit TMI but, hey, free speech, right? “My brother lost a hand to these things, too. It’s a joke up until someone gets maimed, y’know?”
“Dammit. This is exactly what I get for deciding to settle down.” Jess said, groaning and sitting her drink down so that she could cover her face with both hands. There was a part of her that was still very skeptical about what Kenzi was saying, but she’d been on the network - there’d been talk of strange happenings and crazy dreams that manifested in actual physical items since she’d joined the bloody thing. Either the entire town was suffering from mass psychosis (note to self: don’t drink the water), or everyone in town was suffering from some weird parallel life attack. It still sounded ridiculous, and beyond believable, but damn her - Kenzi was very believable.
Sighing, she finally lowered her hands and reclaimed her drink, taking a heavy pull before turning her attention back to her companion. “So, okay. Say I believe you. Two questions: One, what was your parallel life like? And, two, will you buy me another drink, or should I just invest my first paycheck in the upkeep of this bar?”
Just accept your fate, sweetcheeks. Kenzi snickered, spinning in her stool once more before straightening again. “Mine’s about fae people - it’s about an underground species, mostly human-like but aren’t, and they tend to either feed off humans in some way or use them for their own gain. Some are cool, some are totes shitheads.” Slowly, she was finding her place among them. Kinda hard to be a human when you were tits deep in the problems of the supernatural variety and didn’t have the supernatural skills to take it on easy, but she had bite - lots of it.
But, hey, the second question was valid. “I’ll buy you another drink,” she submitted, smirking. “And that’s probably a good idea. I’ve been trying to cut back but this place suuuuurely challenges your liver.”
Human-like? She’d seen things in the network that people posted about superhuman powers or strange things happening, but the idea that her very humanity might be in question? That chilled her in a way that very few things ever had. It occurred to her that if this really was happening - that she was really going to start remembering a life that she’d never lived - that maybe it was something she couldn’t avoid, (Weird, cosmic intervention was rarely optional, right?) but dammit did this conversation have her wanting to pack up and get the hell out of the OC as soon as possible.
“Okay, you’re going to need to explain that,” she said with a sigh of resignation. She was going to get very drunk, and she was going to learn about what the hell she’d walked into. She really should have listened to her agent. “But I’m going to need that drink first.”