Kellach had a certain curiosity; the kind that could get someone into trouble if it wasn’t properly checked. And Kellach, currently, was not properly checked. He’d done a fair share of wandering around Vallo since he’d arrived and was now currently lost. He found himself standing outside a bar. Kellach was pleased to discover that over 100 years later, bars were still very similar to the bars and pubs he’d frequented in Ireland and Australia. Mostly similar. And some of the names? Amazing. The Rusty Nail being a great example of that. How could Kellach not want to go inside?
He made his way to the bar. While he waited his turn to order, he glanced around the bar. He knew there was no threat here, but he couldn’t help checking anyway.
Leon was working on cutting back on his drinking. At the very least, he’d decided to stop getting drunk by himself in his apartment. Getting drunk in a dive bar was totally different. Even if no one was necessarily drinking with him didn’t mean that he was drinking alone.
Anyway, he wasn’t planning on getting drunk in any case. He was having a glass of whiskey and a beer or two after work, which was different.
Leon had watched the man come in from his stool at the bar, watched him as he took stock of the bar. It wasn’t an especially great bar – the floor looked like it got mopped with dirty water maybe once a week, and the lighting was dim, likely so you were less likely to notice the suspicious stains on the hardwood or on the tables. It wasn’t quite seven, but already there was a troll in one of the back corners who looked like he was about to pass out over his cups. But the beer was cheap, and you didn’t normally run into too much trouble here, so Leon wasn’t one to complain.
He raised his pint glass in greeting when the man’s eyes alit on him. “Haven’t seen you around here before.”
Kellach hadn’t expected anyone to speak to him and he was a little surprised when the man next to him raised his glass in greeting (and also a bit embarrassed -- he felt as though he stuck out like a sore thumb). But the surprise quickly gave way to a friendly nod in return. “Aye,” he answered, an Irish lilt thick in his voice. “I’m new. Only arrived…” Kellach paused to mentally count the days. “...a week, more or less?”
The bartender handed Kellach his whiskey, which Kellach promptly paid for. The price of the simple drink astounded him. Then again, everything cost more in 2022. He’d thought he'd struck it rich when the DOA gave him $1,000 when he arrived. He had quickly discovered that didn’t go far in this day and age.
“Sorry if I was starin’,” he said to the man next to him with a sheepish look.
Leon waved a dismissive hand at the apology. “Hard not to stare the first couple weeks, especially if this place is especially different from home,” Leon said, and then, “You’re an Outlander, I take it?”
Vallo wasn’t big enough to really have people who just moved to town who hadn’t moved from a different dimension. He didn’t have the fishy look of people from Atlantis, or the ethereal look of people from the fae realms, and while he could have been from one of the more rural communities of the forest or the mountains, Leon doubted it. Besides, his accent was decidedly Irish. Or Scottish or something, Leon didn’t really know the difference.
“Leon Orcot,” he said, offering a hand. “I ended up here a little over a year ago now.”
“Nice to meet ye, Leon,” Kellach said, accepting the handshake firmly. “My name is Kellach Donnallen.” Whiskey in hand, Kellach settled in on the bar stool in front of him. “And, aye, I’m an Outlander.” His expression turned a little sheepish. “A lotta ways I feel like a fish outta water. I like to think I’m startin’ to get used to it, but…” he shrugged as though to say he wasn’t sure if he was ever truly going to. Then he laughed, “at least the whiskey’s good.” He raised his glass to Leon before taking a healthy drink.
“It took me months to start feeling like I actually belonged here,” Leon said. He huffed out a breath of air. “Actually, I spent my first few months here trying to get back home. So I’d say you’re already ahead of the curve there.”
He touched his glass to Kellach’s before knocking back the rest of his own drink, and he made a gesture to the barman for a refill. “What’s Vallo like compared to your own home? A lot alike? Not at all?"
“A little bit o’ both,” Kellach answered after a moment of thought. “I’ve talked t’ some of the folks on that forum on the network-thing and from what I’ve read Vallo isn’t that much different than where I’m from, just…more advanced?” Kellach wasn’t sure if that was quite right. “I was runnin’ around Australia in the 1860’s before I got dropped here. All this technology ‘as been a lot to take in.” He drained his glass and also motioned for a refill.
“What about you?” He asked. “Vallo a lot like were yer from?”
Leon snorted. “Closer than 19th century Australia, that’s for sure,” Leon said. “I’m from Los Angeles, California.” He frowned, thinking over what he knew of history; he didn’t have the exact dates, but he thought that Los Angeles probably because a city around when Kellach mentioned, so he added, “It’s on the West Coast of the United States. I spent the last few years before I wound up here travelling around the world though, and ended up coming to Vallo via Tokyo, Japan, 2006. Used to be called Edo back in your day. Vallo’s a little more advanced than when I came from, but not too much. We don’t have trolls or pixies or stuff like that. Not out in the open, at least.” He shrugged. “Turns out we have some so-called mythical animals roaming around, but they keep themselves under the radar and whatever magic might exist in my world is less… flashy than all of this.”
Kellach had only passing knowledge of the American West Coast. As in he knew it existed, but he didn’t know any cities or even what the states were called. He also had barely heard of Tokyo and that was largely due to a few of the immigrants they had met in Perth, the immigrants who didn’t think Kellach himself was a piece of Irish filth.
As impressed as Kellach was to hear that Leon had actually been to Tokyo, he was more interested in learning that mythical animal existed in the world the other man came from. “Oh, aye?” he asked. “What kinda animals?”
Leon frowned, thinking it over. “Mermaids, for one,” Leon said. “Though the first one I met was more like a giant, man-eating… eel? Shark? Something like that, then what you’d expect from a mermaid. Its victim saw a beautiful woman though, half-human, half-fish. And… and I met an actual mermaid once,” he said, brows furrowing. That had been a memory of a dream, more than something he ever experienced. For over a decade, there had been a blank spot in his memory: he knew he and D had taken a tropical vacation, had the plane tickets for it, had seen the article that the townspeople had put out in the L.A. Times thanking him for saving them, but he’d had no memory of the experience. It wasn’t until he’d gotten the memories of his other life, his life in Orange County, and his Orange County self had dreamed of the incident and, inexplicably, remembered it, that Leon had any memory of it at all.
It made his head ache.
“Let’s see. There was a Medusa? It was just a little lizard, but it allegedly killed a man when it made eye contact with him. Didn’t turn him to stone or anything though. She might’ve been the last of her kind, but they were used for assassinations in ancient times, apparently. There was the dragon. A kirin, which I think is supposed to be this horse thing that grants wishes. There… might’ve been some vampires,” he added uncomfortably; he still wasn’t sure about that, but looking back knowing what he knew now, it didn’t seem entirely out of the realm of possibility. And a totetsu, this obnoxious little dog-goat-tiger thing that liked to make my life hell.”
Okay, so maybe he missed T-Chan a little bit too. He’d never admit it.
“You got much magic in your world?”
Kellach’s eyes widened as he listened to Leon. He had grown up on tails about mermaids and selkies and faerie folk. In fact, the Donnallens were rumored to have ties to the Fae courts, though Kellach didn’t exactly know how. All he knew was that he’d once accidentally sucked his pack into some ethereal plane in which fae creatures were locked in a loop of combat during the day, and partying at night. He still had no idea how that had even happened.
“Aye, we got magic of a type,” he said. “Vampires an’ the like.” He hesitated revealing to Leon that he was a werewolf. It was fortunate that the people of Vallo didn’t seem to be affected by the amount of Rage Kellach had and while it was made clear to him that he didn’t have to hide what he was like he did back in his world, he wasn’t sure how Leon would react. “I never met a mermaid, though,” he said instead. “My friends and I came ‘cross a group of, uh, lizard people, I s’pose you might call’em a couple of times. Had to fight them since they were causing trouble fer a town.”
“We’re they causing trouble for a town, or was the town setting up shop in their habitat?” Leon asked, and then grimaced at the question. He knocked back the rest of his whiskey. “Sorry. That was rude. It’s just, once you start paying attention, most of the time when other species give human’s trouble, it’s because the humans started giving them trouble first.”
Kellach’s brows furrowed. “No,” he said. “They were causing trouble fer the town.” His brows furrowed harder. “In my world there is a creature known as the Wyrm that is the embodiment of corruption and decay. Without goin’ into a detailed history lesson, it’s one of three major powers and it, more or less, went insane and started corruptin’ the world. This particular group of lizard people were workin’ fer the wyrm.” Kellach looked into his whiskey, a frown pulled on the corners of his mouth. “An’ we had to fight them in order to save the town. Not to mention our own skins. That’s more or less our purpose -- fightin’ the Wyrm.” He knocked back his drink and raised his glass for the bartender to come fill again.
As his glass was refilled, Kellach switched subjects. “I met a group of Vampires once. They seemed nice enough fer bein’, you know, vampires.”
There was more questions Leon wanted to ask there, but he recognized a change in topic when he saw one.
“The vampire I met back home was a serial killer,” Leon said flatly, and then grimaced again. “I mean, there was this other guy, and he might have been one too. He seemed like a good enough guy.” Even if he had spent his entire visit to L.A. flirting with Count D. “There’s some Outlander vampires here too. They’re… interesting. I was trapped in a murder house with some of them for days and they kept things entertaining at least. I don’t think they’re that bad, if you don't mind a lot of conversations featuring whips and orgies.”
Kellach was about to talk a bit more about the Vampire doctor he’d met in Perth and how he didn’t seem like a bad guy either, but then Leon mentioned something about a “murder house” that put thoughts of Perth and vampires right out of his head. “Pardon? Didja just say ‘murder house’?”
“Oh, yeah, murder house,” Leon said. “Some of us got sucked into this house a few months ago, run by a cannibalistic frat boy.” Did they have frats in the 19th century? “A rich boy who likes to party and doesn’t care about anyone but himself. It was in a time loop, so we had to keep reliving the same 24-hours until we managed to find the way out. I think one of the vampires seduced the fuckhead who was running the place.” He frowned thoughtfully. “She made me get her a whip; I think that had something to do with it.”
Kellach stared at Leon, his mouth slightly agape as he processed all the words Leon had just said. “Uhh…” he said then took a gulp of his whiskey. “….right…did anyone…? No one got eaten, right? The lass that helped out -- she managed to get away too?”
How did that even happen, Kellach wondered. How does one get sucked into a house? “Did he suck you in?” Kellach asked next. “The frat cannibal. Did he choose who it was he was suckin’ or did you jus’ get caught up in it?”
Leon winced. “I actually don’t know? Most of us died in at least one Loop, but people’s bodies would disappear when they died, so if it just got instantly transported to the buffet table, well…” He shrugged. “I try not to think about it very much. I like to think that we didn’t though. And the lass was the vampire, I think the only person who might not have gotten away in that scenario was Alexis. The frat-douche. Who absolutely did not suck me, let’s just clear that up now.” He pinched his brow. “No, I don’t think he had any say in the matter. I doubt he would have wanted us there in the first place, if he did. It was just Vallo… you know,” he waved a hand. “Doing its thing. Sometimes people get sent to alternative dimensions for no reason whatsoever.”
Kellach was thoroughly confused. People dying, but not really dying? Bodies being transported to buffet tables? Cannibals? Kellach didn’t blame Leon for not wanting to talk about the whole thing. It seemed good to just blame it on Vallo and keep going. So he nodded his head and drank his whiskey. “Does anythin’ good happen here?” He asked. “Or is it all weird transportation holes an’ murder houses?”
“Oh yeah, there’s as much good as bad,” Leon said. “Depending where you come from, some people’d say there’s more good than bad. “Sometimes people get to see loved ones they thought long lost. You know, people who might be dead back wherever they come from show up here right as rain. And sometimes Vallo likes to be nice. Gives you a glance of your future, like, kids you might have in the future coming through to the past. People make lives for themselves here, decent ones, ones they might’ve not had the chance for back home. It’s not so bad, if you’re willing to put up with the bullshit a couple times a month.’
Kellach frowned. Those did sound like nice things, but things Kellach wasn’t likely to experience. There wasn’t anyone who had passed away that he had any desire to meet again. His family (as far as he knew) were all still alive back in Ireland. As for any possible future children…Kellach just couldn’t see anyone wanting to settle down with him to raise a family. He firmly believed he wasn’t anyone’s idea of a good mate. But the idea of making a decent life in Vallo raised a question that had been nagging at the back of Kellach’s mind for a little while now: what if he never went back? What if he was here forever and never saw his pack again…?
“Have ye made a life here fer yerself, Leon?” Kellach asked. “Is it better’en the life ye had before?”
Jesus H. Christ, what a question. He downed the rest of his whiskey, and signaled for a top up, and then lit up a cigarette. “I’ve never been very good at making a life for me anywhere,” Leon admitted. Except that life he lived in Orange County, apparently. He wasn’t sure if that counted. “But yeah, I think it might be better than what I left. I left my life back home behind ten years ago to chase this guy, Count D. Spent the last decade travelling the world and sleeping under bridges. Here, you know, I’ve got a place to lay my head down at night, and friends. You know, all the stuff I decided to give up back home. It’s not the life I thought I’d have by my late 30s when I was a teenager, but it’s not such a bad one.”
Kellach couldn’t decide if that was a happy story or a tragic one. Maybe both? At least in the end Leon did have a place to stay and people to call friends. As far as Kellach was concerned, that last one was the most important. He turned his attention back to his empty whisky glass, giving it a hard look as he tried to put his thoughts in order. “I’ve never had the chance to make my own life.” He wasn’t even sure how he’d go about doing that.
He glanced up as the bartender topped off his drink again. They were very attentive here and Kellach appreciated that. He looked back at Leon, his eyes falling on his cigarette. God, he hadn’t had a smoke in so long. He motioned to the cigarette. “D’ya mind?” He asked. “If I have one o’ those?”
Leon didn’t answer with words, but tipped the open cigarette pack toward Kellach so he could pluck a cigarette from it, and offered him his lighter.
“Well, Vallo’s a good time to take that chance,” he said, shooting Kellech a half-grin. “I mean, this place has its pitfalls, but if nothing else, it gives you the freedom to choose what you want. I think there’s a lot of people here who are living lives they wouldn’t have thought possible back home, for this or that reason.” He tilted his head, giving Kellach a once-over. “What did you do back home?” he asked.
Oof, that was a question Kellach wasn’t sure how to answer. He thought about the best way to describe what it was he did as he lit the cigarette and handed Leon his lighter back. He took a drag and let out a puff of smoke when he spoke. “That’s not so easy to explain,” he said. “The story I normally give folks is that I’mma blacksmith – which is true.” He paused and took another thoughtful drag. “It’s what I do t’ make money whenever we’re in town, but it's not exactly what I do.”
Kellach was aware that what he was saying probably didn’t make much sense. He looked at Leon carefully. The other man had said mythical creatures existed in his world and that he’d come across vampires. If that was the case, then werewolves were not that farfetched for him to believe, right? After a glug of his drink, Kellach decided to just come out with it. “I’m a Garou,” he said in a lower tone. “What most people would call a werewolf. The world I come from Garou -- </i>most</i> Garou -- are tasked with protecting Gaia from destruction and corruption from the Wyrm. It’s our purpose. Most humans in my world are unaware of Garou, Gaia or the Wyrm, which is why I usually just say I’mma blacksmith.”
“Garou, that’s French, isn’t it?” Leon asked. He didn’t speak much French, but he’d picked a little bit up in the weeks he’d lived in Paris trying to hunt down D. “And Gaia, is that the Earth? Or like, mother nature?”
In Leon’s own world, he’d have thought any mention of Gaia would just be a personification of the Earth, something someone said if they wanted to be romantic about it, in the same way that someone might talk about Mother Earth call the ocean Posiedon. But it didn’t sound like that was how Kellach was using it; not if most people didn’t know about her.
Kellach’s eyes squinted in thought. “Garou is the Garou word we used t’ call ourselves. It’s possible the French borrowed it? I was called a loup garou by a Frenchman once while we were in Perth. I don’ think it’s the same thing, though. Not really…”
Kellach took a drag off the cigarette. Even the cigarettes in this time period were different, though Kellach was starting to get used to the filters. “As fer Gaia. Gaia is the Earth an’ all her related realms. She’s the Great Mother of all living things. It’s…uh…a bit more complicated than that, but that’s kinda the gist o’ it.”
Leon nodded, and took a thoughtful drag from his cigarette. “Where I come from, it’s humans who are destroying and… what was the word you used? corrupting? the Earth. They build and build and build, taking up everyone else’s territory and then getting pissed off when say, the leopards that always used to live near the lake suddenly wind up in the cities they built there. They pour chemicals and pollution into the air, and clog up the water with their trash and their microplastics, and just take and take until there’s nothing left to take.”
“Doesn’ sound so different than my time period,” Kellach said with a snort. “Consider yerself lucky ye’ve never had t’ go to one o’ the Empire’s industrialized cities.” The term “empire” was uttered with more than just a little disdain. Kellach took a quick gulp of his drink, as though trying to wash the term from his mouth. “Some Garou consider humans not worth payin’ attention to. Their problems are their own business and not worth gettin’ involved with unless it infringes upon us.”
Leon frowned. He remembered something about the Industrial Revolution from high school, but not a lot. He knew things had been bad in London with all the factories for a while, but that a lot of pollution regulations had been passed since. He wondered if that was the kind of city that Kellach was talking about. He’d been to some cities where the air pollution was so thick you could see it, where the sun was filtered through a haze of chemicals, but he thought that that had probably been better than the black-smoke spewing factories he’d read about.
“They’ve probably got the right of it,” Leon muttered, and then ran a hand over his face. “No, sorry, that wasn’t fair. We’re not all so bad. I just spent the last ten years at home really taking in just how hazardous to the planet humans can be, and I’m a little jaded, I guess.”
“There are good an’ bad in every lot,” Kellach said with a shrug. “Humans can be terrible. I’ve seen plenty at their worst, had their worst done to me. But my own brethren haven’t always treated me well, either, so…” another glug of his whiskey. “‘Tis the fate of being born kinfolk, they say…” he glanced at Leon out of the corner of his eye. “Kinfolk are those humans and wolves related to Garou who lack the ability to change.”
Kellach set his now empty glass down on the bar top and motioned for a refill. He took a drag from the cigarette before ashing it. He mused over what Leon had said about his home. “Ten years be a long time to do anything,” he said thoughtfully.
“Yeah, too long, maybe,” Leon muttered, rubbing the side of his head. “Can you not change, then?”
Kellach shook his head. “Nay, I can change, it’s just that no one expected me to. The Donallens weren’t exactly known fer the changers they produced,” he explained. “We hadn’t had a changer in several generations by the time I came along. So I and me sister were raised to be Kin as our Ma and Da had been.”
Leon tilted his head. It was interesting, he thought, that they were still considered part of the whole society if they hadn’t produced a changer in a long time, but it was probably lucky that they did: having Kellach and his sister change without knowing what was going on was undoubtedly worse.
“It must have been something when you did end up changing though. So I take it that you’re not the sort of person that’ll change a person into a werewolf with a bite, huh?”
“Aye, it was somethin’.” Kellach muttered into his glass before taking another hearty gulp. His eyes darted over the glass towards Leon when the other man asked him about biting people. At first the thought struck him as absurd, but then he remembered that Garou weren’t the only types of werewolves running around Vallo. “Nay mate,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s not how it works where I’m from. Yer either born a Garou or yer not. Besides, bitin’ humans is against The Litany – the Garou Law fer lack of a better term. It’s kinda like the Ten Commandments. It dictates a lot o’ what we can and can’t do, which includes combat, dealin’ with each other, dealin’ with humans among other things.”
Leon snorted. “People don’t follow the Ten Commandments as closely as you might imagine,” he said, but he shot Kellach a grin to show he meant it lightly. “But that’s a relief.” He knew there were other werewolves around, but he didn’t think, at least, that Vallo had a werewolf problem. He hadn’t heard of any attacks, or anything like that.
He glanced at his watch and then sighed. “I should probably head out though,” he said, knocking back the rest of his drink. “But it was nice meeting you, Kellach. We should get together for drinks again sometime soon.”
Kellach blinked and glanced at his own watch as well. He uttered a few words in gaelic before downing the rest of his whiskey. “It is late,” he said. “It was nice meetin’ ya, Leon. I’m sorry I took up so much of yer time gabbin’ away. If yer up fer it, let’s get together again. I promise not t’ monopolize the conversation.”
Leon waved a hand dismissively. “Pretty sure I took up just as much of your time asking questions,” he said, shooting him a grin. “But yeah, I’m up for it. I’ll see you around soon.”