InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Nevermore"

Connor Temple is accidentally in trouble (not_r2d2) wrote in wariscoming,
@ 2011-06-22 09:15:00

Entry tags:

allana solo, connor temple

Who: Connor Temple and OPEN
What: Toto, I have the feeling we're not in....wait.
When: Afternoon time
Where: Just outside a cafe near the complex
Rating: Give it a Teen rating for fear of Connor freaking out language
Status: Incomplete

That was less than normal. And Connor knew things that weren't normal, so it was definitely not normal.

One minute, he was holding Abby, letting her cry, trying not to himself and failing miserably. He let her go, turned to head to the car and then... Well. That wasn't London, he knew that much. And it wasn't Leeds, either. Where the hell was he?

If he'd stepped through an anomaly, he'd have known it. There was always a bit of a pull on the skin when passing through the rips in time, as well as the pulling he'd have felt on every magnetic object he wore. Not to mention it was sort of hard to miss a giant, glowing doorway of cracked light. No, he'd have known. So what the hell? No, really. What the bloody hell?

There were people passing. Lots of them. It wasn't as if he'd found a new dimension, a spirit plane or anything. That...would be extra awkward, thanks. So obviously, he was... Nope. Even Mr. Conspiracy Theory had nothing to explain what had just happened.

Feeling completely out of place, Connor attempted to stop the person closest to them. Well this was going to sound stupid. "Hi, sorry, excuse me," he offered, trying to make up for the insane person he was about to sound like with politeness, "this is going to sound completely nutters, I know, and I'm sorry, but where are we?"

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sanguinesolo
2011-06-22 03:44 pm UTC (link)

Allana had given up on looking for Ava in specific places. Clubs where Jen had dragged the two of them, the store where she usually stocked up on ice cream, and a couple other Ava-friendly locations had been tried multiple times unsuccessfully. The new idea was to find a demon and try to make it tell her where her newly-unpredictable friend was keeping herself while she furthered her addiction, but the demons seemed to be hiding from her, slipping away just as they appeared on the edges of her awareness. The new idea had, therefore, turned into a lot of wandering aimlessly around Lawrence, buying coffee from street carts and getting steadily more frustrated and annoyed and at herself.

She was midway through one of these unsuccessful expeditions and deep in her own thoughts (deeper than she should have been, she should have been concentrating, aware of her surroundings so that she would have sensed the other person’s intent to approach her before it ever happened) when the young man, probably only a handful of years older than her, stepped slightly into her path and spoke with what she knew, after almost a year on earth, was a British accent.

"Hi, sorry, excuse me…this is going to sound completely nutters, I know, and I'm sorry, but where are we?"

Way less ‘nutters’ than you’d expect, she thought wryly and gave him a slight smile as she mentally shook herself out of the sort of fugue the unsuccessful search had thrown her into and looked at the young man curiously. He wasn’t obviously out of place aside from his accent and she didn’t want to risk giving a speech about Biblical seals and the apocalypse to a lost tourist and so she responded carefully, “Oh, it’s fine, don’t worry about it. You’re at the corner of Manhattan and Seventh streets, near the library. What were you trying to find?”

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not_r2d2
2011-06-22 06:55 pm UTC (link)

Manhattan and Seventh street. Well. That didn't do him much good at all, really. That could be in any city, and country, and any time. The girl was pretty and he hated to look stupid in front of pretty girls. But it wasn't like he had a choice in the matter. He needed to figure out what had just happened so he could fix it. And he had to fix it. Helen Cutter had to be stopped. The artifact needed to be worked on. What was going to happen if he didn't?

Clearing his throat, he prepared himself for the worst possible reaction she could give him and then some. What the hell, it couldn't be worse than some of the things he'd been dealing with recently. "Ah, yeah. I'm not exactly sure what it is I'm looking for. See..." This was it. Off to the asylum for him. Did people even still get sent to asylums? Did they call them that anymore? "See, I honestly don't think I was standing here a minute ago. And I feel fine, so I doubt I've exactly blacked out or anything, either."

There. He'd just go crawl in a hole and wait to die. That would do. There were accents around him. Dozens. That didn't help his cause one bit. This, frankly, sucked. He should have just tried to figure it out himself. He was even regretting not having his trusty fedora to hide behind.

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sanguinesolo
2011-06-23 08:07 pm UTC (link)

Allana blinked as her conversational partner took in her directions like a kicked puppy and then seemed to steel himself for whatever he was going to say next. So either he actually did just come through the seal or he really, really does not want to be anywhere near the library, she thought and cocked her head slightly, waiting for him to reveal which one, exactly, it was.

"See, I honestly don't think I was standing here a minute ago. And I feel fine, so I doubt I've exactly blacked out or anything, either."

“Right,” she said as she scrambled mentally for what exactly they said in that welcome post she’d linked people to, “so not a tourist then. Okay, well, believe it or not you’re actually not the first person this has happened to. We’ve had a lot of people show up here who were just somewhere completely different and can’t explain how they got here. It’s…” she looked around, conscious that a random street corner wasn’t exactly the best place to have this conversation, “…kind of a long story,” she finished a little lamely. She wasn’t so much a fan of people deciding that she was insane and needed to be locked up or run away from herself, and telling someone who had just come through the seal that they were in the middle of a Biblical apocalypse on a street where they could just run off and get into who knew what with demons seemed like a bad idea. On the other hand I can always just stop him with a Force barrier or something until I at least give him an amulet if he does decide to run off into traffic, she decided, weighing up the young man’s generally nervy demeanor as she decided how to approach this.

“The short version? There’s a seal, a sort of…well, it’s a whole thing, but it tends to pluck people out of different realities and times within those realities and sort of deposit them in Lawrence, Kansas, which is where we are. It’s sort of an effect of the apocalypse that’s going on right now. There’s an apartment complex set up for displaced people, I live there and so do most other people who get dragged into this, and I can explain more on the way there if you’re not about to start yelling at me about how I’m insane and running off down the street?” she finished with what she hoped was her best ‘look-how-stable-and-trustworthy-I-am’ smile.

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not_r2d2
2011-06-23 09:54 pm UTC (link)

Okay, fine. At first, Connor did give her the 'yeah okay you're crazy' look. Why shouldn't he? She'd just told him something about a seal and the Bible and bleeding Kansas while she was at it. Yeah, he was a little freaked out. And frankly, he had every right to be.

But then, it wasn't as if this was a normal situation anyway. He was definitely not in London. He wasn't in the Jurassic, either. Something had happened. So why not what the pretty redhead was suggesting? Hell, if he told her what he would have experienced through an anomaly, she'd be giving him the same look. And it was like he'd just walked into the best conspiracy theory of all time.

"Okay..." he began slowly, looking her over. If she was mentally unstable? Then so was he. "So I'm guessing turning around and going in the opposite direction isn't going to make a difference." Because it hadn't happened for directional reasons. Fair enough. "Okay. I'm game. You said there's an apartment somewhere? Lead the way!" Worst case scenario, he walked around with a pretty but crazy girl for a bit. Fair enough. "I'm Connor, by the way. Thanks for your help. Does this sort of thing happen a lot around here?"

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sanguinesolo
2011-06-27 06:31 pm UTC (link)

“Not much,” Allana answered, her smile turning relieved as it became evident that Connor was going to be reasonable, if listening to a random teenage girl babble at you about the apocalypse could be considered reasonable. “I mean, unless you’ll feel better being on the west side of Lawrence, Kansas? It does have a nice coffee shop,” she joked.

At his agreement she turned and pointed down the street the way she’d come. “Complex is this way, and, yes, this happens…pretty much every few weeks. The way this whole thing works, in a vague sense, is that every so often the seal basically taps people from other realities and times to fight in the apocalypse here. We’re at the stage where Lucifer is out and starting to make trouble, but most of the civilians, you know, the average people in Lawrence, have no idea what’s going on. Everyone the seal grabs just sort of has to deal, and most of us try to help in the fight because if the world ends while we’re on it then it…probably won’t work out so well for us, you know?” They reached the end of the block and Allana turned left and tucked her hands into her pockets, teeth worrying at her lower lip in a way that drove her grandmother back home crazy when she did it automatically in a moment of concentration. As a child she’d moved with a sort of graceful authority that made her relatives worry she’d be recognized as Hapan royalty, but years of being told to hide it and eventual teenage rebellion against her Hapan roots (especially the royal bit) had finally made gracelessness automatic. ”Just as you’ll be needing it” the Leia on another side of the seal would sigh. Now, however, she was too taken up with wondering what to explain next to worry about any of that.

“There are threats, of course, but since I can handle it if anything comes up on our way to the complex… probably, the thing that I wish someone had told me? Don’t google yourself. In this reality? Apparently some of us are fictional, and apparently people get rather disturbing about Star Wars characters.” She made a face and then gave him a rather cautious sideways look, “Do they have Star Wars where you’re from?”

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not_r2d2
2011-06-29 02:00 am UTC (link)

Other times, Connor could deal with. Time, in a way, was his specialty. He'd been working with Professor Cutter for so long that it had become second nature to just assume you could move in and out of different times. Other realities, though? That was...odd. Not impossible, he reasoned, considering the whole Claudia Brown thing. His mentor insisted something they'd done had changed the past and a whole person had been wiped out, a person none of them remembered even existing. That would be another reality, right?

And really, were different realities so hard for a sci-fi nerd to grasp? All sorts of movies and television shows and books involved time travel that created another reality or dimension crossings or people facing off with themselves from another dimension. Connor considered it while Allana seemed to be thinking and decided that no, it wasn't that difficult a concept to deal with.

But all of his worries about that flew right out the window when she had the nerve to ask if they had Star Wars where he was from. Did they? That was like asking if they had water where he came from! Though he supposed there were places that didn't, especially if this place was pulling in people from other planets, and really, why wouldn't it? It never even occurred to him that there might not be life on other planets. He was a firm believer in Roswell and plenty of other theories leading to alien life.

"Do they?" he asked, incredulous. "It's like a way of life! I mean, yeah, the movies are great and all, but then there's action figures and comic books and novel tie-ins, and it's like..." He sighed a little dreamily, then blushed. He had to look like an absolute fool, he knew. She was probably about to give him that look that Abby usually did, where she was merely tolerating his 'issues' until she could slide away without coming off as a great big jerk. Shame he loved her for that. "I mean... Yeah. My mates and I have watched it a couple of times." Nope, there was no turning back from that point.

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sanguinesolo
2011-07-11 08:02 pm UTC (link)

Allana smiled slightly as she watched Connor mull it all over. For all that he seemed about as high-strung as some of the smaller earth lapdogs she could tell he was also capable of intense concentration. Only, it seemed, that concentration was rather selectively applied. Which is pretty much what Grandma used to say about me, she realized, remembering several lessons that had only been rescued from a descent into pre-adolescent anarchy by the sudden introduction into the curriculum of a lecture on the planet-of-study’s more dangerous forest animals. So maybe I shouldn’t get to feeling superior just yet, she reminded herself, her smile turning wry.

Then, rather abruptly, she had a torrent of Star Wars information and enthusiasm, the like of which she had never experienced, even when she and Cade had taken their Beatdown Tour of Star Wars Fandom, unleashed upon her. Then again, there wasn’t so much time for talking during that. It was pretty much—open door, start to explain why we’re there, and then sigh as Cade kicked them in the head. She looked sideways at Connor who was practically glowing as he enumerated the wonders and products of the Star Wars extended universe. Right, so, note to self: Connor and Cade should probably never meet.

“Ah, yes,” she said when he’d trailed off, “so, like I was saying, some people here are fictional in their own realities. None of us knew about that when we got here though, and then plugging our names into search engines was…slightly traumatic. So you might want to just, you know, check around carefully with your own name to see if you’re fictional here. Which is also sort of, um, preparation for introductions. I’m Allana Solo, nice to meet you?” She held out a hand to shake and gave Connor a slightly tentative smile, unsure if she was more worried about an outpouring of fanaticism or this being what finally pushed him over the edge into disbelief and running off away from the crazy girl.

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not_r2d2
2011-07-12 03:11 am UTC (link)

"That had to be pretty traumatic," Connor said simply, trying to not squeal and dance around with glee. Even if this woman was crazy, and lying, and whatever else, she knew who Allana Solo even was. Which earned her loads of geek cred if she was lying. And made her a bloody princess if she wasn't. Good god, Jacen Solo's daughter? Which would make her Han and Leia's granddaughter, which was just... Wow.

It took every single bit of restraint he had to calmly take her hand and give it a light shake. She was being so kind to him, helping him out in this insane place he'd wound up in. And he'd ended up in some really weird places, so this was kind of a big deal. And he'd basically just fanboyed all over her about her 'world' and yet she was still smiling, even if she looked like he was in danger of pouncing her at any moment. Which...he might have. If he weren't so desperate for help and all. And if she didn't seem like a genuine human being.

God. Was she really Allana Solo? Fictional character, one he'd read about plenty of times and whose grandparents he'd cheered for from the very first film? Bugger. This was... "It's a pleasure," he finally said, smiling genuinely so she didn't feel quite so much like she was with a stalker. Which she wasn't. Exactly. "Really, though. How weird was that for you? Finding out you've a life people have read about before? Or that your family is famous for a movie someone else made?"

Once the initial elation started to pass, Connor could actually understand how hard that had to be. And to feel like your life was written for you? Like you had no control over your own actions? It sent a little chill through him as he considered the possibility. "All right. Fair enough. I won't be googling myself. Wait. They still have google here? Genius! I never bought into those other search engines, it's all about google."

There. Old reliable Connor was back in action. Rambling at thirty miles a minute and talking about things people really didn't care about.

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