Thalia Grace (wasatree) wrote in witchinghour, @ 2015-09-24 07:03:00 |
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When some people get kidnapped and taken off to far off places, they got witches and ruby slippers or a black and white 50s era Stepford town. Thalia got haunted buildings and monsters that wanted to eat her. So pretty much like home, then. She felt ripped off. She could use some lollipops from the Guild just about now. Or a cheeseburger. Or heck, any kind of food. Thalia was no stranger to starvation, but she didn't like going without if she could help it. There had to be food around here. Getting food in Grimoire, however, presented different challenges than on the mean streets of Philly. There had never been ghosts trying to trip her every other step in Philly. "Seriously?" she demanded as she dodged yet another trap. "All restless and dead and the best thing you can do with your time is try to get people to face plant?" It seemed as if Logan had an uncanny ability to be in the right spot at just the right time. Or at least he found a way to be in the right area. It happened with Claire when he stumbled upon her in the diner in Marrowood and saved her from the zombie-like cook and waitress. He had volunteered to help out Captain Rogers but only because he was headed in the same direction, and now the hospital was on his patrol route thanks to the nurse asking for help against the otherworldly noises. Logan wouldn’t have called himself a hero, but he sure as hell was doing a hero’s work here in Grim. He caught sight of the young girl in the distance as she deftly dodged various overturned trash bins, flying trash, and yes, even banana peels on the ground. The ghosts in this place could be vicious when they wanted to, but today it seemed as if they were in a playful mood. “There ain’t much else for a ghost to do with its time,” Logan said when he was closer to her. “Better than trying to kill you.” This place was hellish, but it was more of a prison than anything else. A prison with a fucked up sense of humor, and an even more bloodthirsty appetite. Logan would rather shit rattle and moan than have them trying to claw your face off, but that was just him. “If they were corporeal I could at least fight back,” Thalia muttered as she ducked a flying trash can lid that was flying her way. She had no idea who this hairy stranger was, but she was glad for the company. She hadn’t seen or talked to anyone since she’d come here. The folks on the network didn’t really count. Who knew if they were just robots on the other side of the screen? This guy was the first living, breathing person she’d seen. At least he seemed to be living and breathing. In this place, you never knew. “Hey, you got any iron or salt?” she asked. “Sounds like that’s the way to get rid of these things.” Logan arched a brow at the young girl, and let out a quick “heh” under his breath. “Nah, kid. Left that in my other jacket.” It sounded like she had been talking to Claire, or at least the Winchesters with the salt and iron idea. Logan found that the best to get the ghosts to leave you alone was just to ignore them. They never bothered him much, but he supposed he was never in one place long enough for them to bother him. He spied another trash can lid flying toward the girl, and quickly reached out to grab it mid-flight. “The’ll knock it off eventually,” he said to her as he let the lid drop to the ground. “Just ignore it the best you can. ‘Sides, there are worst things in this place.” Logan didn’t elaborate on what those worse things were. The girl would find out soon enough. They were overdue for a shitstorm to hit them. “So where you from,” he asked as he walked with her. He wasn’t headed in the direction she was going, but that wasn’t going to stop Logan from tagging along. A girl alone on the streets wasn’t a good thing, even if she could probably take care of herself. "Kinda hard ignoring ghosts using your head as target practice," Thalia pointed out. Another trash can lid flew her way, and this time she didn't bother dodging; she held up her wrist, and her bracelet expanded into a shield just in time to deflect it. The shield retracted back into bracelet form when she lowered it, and Thalia continued speaking as if they hadn't been interrupted. "Everywhere, but most recently? Puerto Rico." She looked over at her unexpected companion curiously. "What about you?" He arched a brow again at the shield that formed from the bracelet around her wrist. It was impressive. Logan was mostly used to using his own body as a shield, but that looked helpful. He didn’t say anything about it though, and shrugged loosely when she asked about his past. “Before here, New York. Before New York… well I was just roaming around then.” He didn’t mention the X-Men because sometimes it was hard for Logan to mention the people that had become his family. “On vacation with the parents,” Logan asked. He couldn’t imagine a young girl traveling to Puerto Rico by herself. But then again she had some powers by the looks of that bracelet around her wrist. Maybe she did go by herself. Logan didn’t know, and he wasn’t going to pry. Not very much, at least. So he was a wanderer too. Thalia recognized that kind of response. She was about to say something about it when he asked about her parents, and she burst out laughing instead, because the very thought of Zeus on vacation was...well, it would probably be awkward and embarrassing and terrifying in real life, but the idea was hilarious. And her mother...well, the less Thalia thought about her, the better. "Yeah, no," she said, still snickering. "They are not the vacation type. I was fighting a war, actually." She threw that out there casually. How he reacted would tell her what kind of guy he was, and whether she wanted to stick around. Okay, so parents were out of the picture. Logan liked to say that he was surprised by that fact, but he had met too many young people that were in that exact situation. Not that he was any different. He didn’t know much about his own childhood, and what Xavier had helped him remember was only bits and pieces. And he was never imaginative enough to fill in the blanks on his own. Her other answer, though, wasn’t all that out of the ordinary either. The kids at the school were put in the middle of a war between humans and mutants, and as much as the adults tried to protect them from it they couldn’t. It was as much their war as it was the adults because they were fighting for their future. He just gave her a knowing glance, and nodded. “I’ve been in a few of those myself.” He figured she was a fighter with the way she carried herself. And the shield was a dead give away. “Wanna talk about it,” he asked as he pulled a cigar from the inside pocket of his jacket. He’d been smoking more lately, but what did it matter in a world that would bring him back to life if he ever did bite the big one? He lit it slowly, the tip glowing brightly once he was done. Thalia gave him a measuring look out of the corner of her eye. He hadn't freaked, which was good. She'd run into too many well-meaning busybodies who'd stuck their noses into her business to make themselves feel good about helping a poor young delinquent. And he said he'd been there. She could believe it. He had a haunted look in his eyes, one that suggested he had seen a lot of horrors. She recognized that look; she often wore it herself. Didn’t mean she was ready to share her life story with him, though. “Nah,” she said, shaking her head. “Too long to get into. Now you I wanna hear about. How long’ve you been here and what crazy things have you seen?” Logan laughed. He liked this kid. In a weird way she reminded him of himself. A weathered warrior that had seen too much, and wasn’t quite ready to share that with anyone. He could respect that, and unlike others he wasn’t going to pry. People’s stories were intimate things, and she didn’t know him from the guy across the street. It was going to take time to get to any level of trust, for him as well. “Almost a year,” he told her. He actually surprised himself with the answer especially since it didn’t really feel like a year. It felt longer, and he supposed that was just part of this universe’s charm. Make the misery feel like forever even if it isn’t. “You just missed the fucking dinosaurs we had here,” he said with a chuckle. “But we’ve have it all. Demons coming from the sky. Fucking wendigos in the forest. Shit ton of folks that decided to maim and kill anyone left in the streets.” He took a long breath on his cigar, and blew out the smoke slowly. “This place exists to torture us, and all we can do is survive. Even if we don’t - well this place sees fit to bring us back from the dead, good as new.” "Seriously?" That unsettled Thalia more than being plunked into an unknown world did. Death was the domain of Hades. You just didn't come back from the Underworld without a lot of consequences. Then again, the Doors of Death had been left wide open back at home. Maybe some of that had leaked into this world. "Hey -" She looked at him intently. If he'd been here that long, he must've known if any of the gods had shown themselves. "Have there been any gods or demigods showing up here? Titans? Hyperborean Giants?" Death was nothing to this universe. Many people had died only to come back in their beds. Logan had yet to meet that fate, but he was there when others had made that journey. He always blamed himself for it (somehow), but mostly got over it when he saw them back alive. That didn’t mean they weren’t traumatized by it - they still had to live with the memory of it all. He had heard that they often felt phantom pains associated with their passing. “Nah, kid,” he said, shaking his head. “No gods or titans or giants. I mean, we had Thor and Loki here for a while, but they were more superhero than god.” He shrugged and gave the girl a sideways glance. “I’m guess that you have real life gods in your world?” "Oh." Thalia wasn't sure whether she should be disappointed or relieved. Having the gods around would be pretty handy when it came to rampaging dinosaurs. But that meant having gods around. Nobody wanted that. "Yeah, we do. Zeus is my dad, actually." There was a distinct tinge of pride in her voice. For all her qualms about having the gods around, there was no denying she was proud of her heritage. Logan thought he heard some disappointment in her voice when he told her there weren’t gods in Grimoire. He didn’t care one way or another, but as she continued to talk about her heritage he understood why. “Ah I get it, kid,” he said with a grin. “You miss your dad.” It didn’t matter much to Logan if he was a god or not. His experience had always been that those with godlike powers always wanted more than they had, and that in turn made other people want the same powers. It was an endless cycle, and he was glad that there wasn’t any of that in Grimoire. Even if there were their powers would be diminished in the same way as everyone else’s. He gave her a quick smile before he stuck the stogie back in between his teeth. “So now you got me wondering, kid, why are you fightin’ a war when you got Zeus in your corner?” The thought was so ridiculous Thalia burst out laughing. It lasted almost a hundred yards, and when she finally spoke, she was still chuckling. "Sorry, but that was just really funny. See, Zeus isn't in my corner. He's off in the back aisle shtupping the beer girl. So no, I don't miss him, actually. I never see him enough to miss him. But it might've been nice having the Lord of Thunder hanging around if those dinosaurs hit again. Can't have them eating up the women folk when Zeus wants to do it himself." Logan laughed at Thalia’s comment, and shook his head. He wasn’t one to judge since he had his fair share of women in his life, but he doubted he was anywhere on Zeus’s level. Despite the number of women he might have bedded, his heart still belonged to the one redhead that had died right in front of him. He still couldn’t get that image out of his head at night when he closed his eyes to attempt sleep. “That’s too bad, kid,” he said to her. “If I had a kid I’d fight alongside them. Not trying to sound heroic here ‘cause I ain’t, but blood isn’t something you toss away lightly. You fight for the people you love. Die for them if you have to.” If there was anything anyone needed to know about Logan it was that he was completely loyal. A friend and teammate for life, and a hell of a fighter to boot. It was always best to have Logan fight with you rather than against you. "Yeah, well, Zeus has other things to do." Thalia's reply was half-defensive of the father she had only seen twice in her life, and bitter about the fact she had only seen him twice in her life. And the second time she'd had to kick her best friend off a cliff for that to happen. She stopped in front of a diner where robot waiters were bustling around empty booths. She jabbed a thumb at the door. "If I asked for a burger there will I be eating Soylent Green?" He shook his head at her question. “Nah, this place is legit,” he said. “The fries ain’t half bad either.” There were only a few places that weren’t questionable in Grimoire, and this was one of them. He smiled at her before he dug into his pocket to give her some Grimoire money. “This place don’t take regular cash, and it don’t like trade all that well either.” He practically shoved it into her hands before she had a chance to say anything. “Get outta that hotel quick, too. You said you could take care of yourself, but there ain’t no reason to take a chance.” Logan nodded his head at her. “Take care, kid. I’ll see ya ‘round.” Thalia had been on the streets long enough that any money, no matter the source, was accepted. She wasn't too proud to take charity. Not the monetary type, anyway. She took the bills even before he had a chance to pull his hand away, and tossed him a wave. "Thanks for the chat and the food. See ya." |