doorway to nowhere

[perverses]

Who| Renzo Shima & open.
What| A new arrival contemplates immediately becoming a new departure.
Where| Threshold Hub, Legion World
Warnings/Notes| n/a


Arrival had been about as stellar as anyone could expect. A check-up in the medbay, an explanation handed out, an offer to become a hero, of all things, extended. An offer that had also been politely declined after struggling to keep from laughing in RJ Brande's face. Maybe if the offer had been given by the other one, that Shvaughn. He may have immediately accepted then, but faced with Brande instead, it was easier to distance himself from the idea, easier to say he would just consider it.

But no time to dwell on that, not when faced with not only one new world to explore, but, apparently, a ton of them! Shima's meandering pace through the various decks of the ship -- never in a rush, but also never in the way -- has landed him at the Theshold Hub. It's hard to call anything a strange feeling when everything is a strange feeling right now, but not standing out is another he can add to the list. Pink hair is hardly unique all of the sudden and he sure can't say he's the only one walking around in a uniform of some kind. His own including a black turtleneck, a jacket a shade of green on the bluer end of the spectrum with white trim, some bands of red and black over it. White pants, black gloves, and tall boots. It isn't adorned with any clear kind of rank. Honestly, Shima's wondering if he shouldn't have asked for a change of clothes, seeing as he doubts he's going to run into anyone from the Illuminati here.

Even if he did, would it matter? Who has time to complain about uniforms or no uniforms when they're on a artificial planet? Surrounded by aliens? With portals to real alien worlds?! Yeah, he's not going to dwell on the Illuminati, either. He's going to focus on this right here, right now, entire alien worlds to go wandering off to with no responsibilities following him around whatsoever. That in mind, he shoves off from the spot on a wall he'd been loitering at, watching, to raise an arm in the air.

Waving, trying to flag the next person he sees down.

"Hey there! You! Hello! Could you tell me where that one goes?"

By which he means the gate nearest to them, pointing at it once he's done getting their attention.

Comments

[whyarewehere]

Grif was having a good day. He was having a lot of those lately. He'd gotten very good at avoiding training (and attempts to guilt trip him into attending training), he'd been getting almost as much sleep as he wanted, and most importantly of all, Grif had pizza.

Pizza was not an especially weird thing to have on Legion World, but it had taken Grif until today to realize that he could just go to Earth and get a real, legitimate Earth pizza. It was almost embarrassing that he hadn't thought of it before.

Now, however? Now he was going to carry this pizza box back to his turf and eat the whole thing, and he was unstoppable.

That was, until someone did stop him. He squinted at the teenager just a little, because who was this guy, then at the gate.

"That one's Braal," he said. "I wouldn't go down there, they're still picking up from Galactus almost eating the planet."

[abrickhouse]

The woman he waved down didn't quite look like she belonged on a spaceship. She looked like she'd walked right out of a fantasy novel. Her clothes were purple and black and slightly wench-ey looking.

"I'm pretty sure that one goes to Narnia," she said, completely straight-faced. "It's animal people there. Animal people as far as the eye can see. And Santa."

She was new, too, so she had no idea where the portals went. 'Other planets' was what she'd been told, but she had no idea what those other planets were like.

[perverses]

Pizza. At least that was familiar! Shima didn't answer immediately, obviously taking a second or two to check out Grif's pizza box. Now that was something this guy might want to consider holding a bit more defensibly. Not that the kid was going to try and steal a pizza or anything, it was only a thought.

Inevitably, he did have to look up again and return Grif's squinting with an honestly puzzled look of his own.

"Picking up from... Uh, did you say someone tried to eat a planet? A whole one?"

[perverses]

The way she said that all with a straight face was off-putting for a few seconds, leaving him trying to figure out if she was making a joke or actually serious. This place was already weird enough, but Narnia? Santa? Shima settled on laughing a bit in response.

"Ha, what? Santa? No way, everyone knows Santa's not real," he said back. "Even if he were, he's s'posed to be human, right?"

[whyarewehere]

"Oh yeah," said Grif, a grin starting to spread across his face. "You're new, right?" he asked, though he plowed on with what he wanted to say without giving Shima a chance to answer. "We had this huge guy come through the rift a bit ago with his asshole henchmen, and we had to stop him from eating Braal. Literally eating it."

He was clearly delighting in being the one to tell part of this story.

"I mean, we won," he explained with a modest little shrug, "but Braal's still kind of a mess from keeping that from happening."

[perverses]

"Yeah, new, but not stupid. C'mon, no one's big enough to eat a planet," Shima said, not quite buying the story. It was a hard one to imagine and that was from someone pretty used to seeing weird things already.

"I mean, okay, let's assume that really did happen for a second! How would you fight someone like that in the first place?"

[whyarewehere]

"We dealt with him the same way you deal with any other cosmic space asshole: You find a bigger one," Grif said. "And yeah he was totally going to eat it. Apparently he converts them into energy first? So that's not as cool as actually chomping a planet in half or anything, but... yeah, it's still a really good thing we got rid of him."

He paused, realizing he was still holding a cooling pizza box.

"...Look, this thing's getting cold. I'll tell you more about it if you want, but I'm on my way back to my part of the habitat deck?"

It was totally just Grif doing something for his own convenience, not an invitation. Totally.

[perverses]

"Hey, I could tag along! Not like I'm in any rush."

To get lost on distant alien planets or anything. The gates would still be here later, whereas a rapidly cooling pizza had a limited lifespan. Assuming Grif raised no complaints, he would trail along after him once he started out towards, well, whatever a habitat deck was.

"Too bad about the no chomping part. That would've been funny. So where'd you find the bigger cosmic jerk?" Shima wasn't saying he fully believed this or anything. Just a maybe. Enough that he was at least curious. "Some kind of giant planet eater eater?"

[whyarewehere]

Grif led the way to the habitat deck, traipsing through a few other Legionnaires' personal biomes on a shortcut to his own. Was that a part of New York? Yes. Did they cut through a section of what looked like the deepest North American backwoods possible? Also yes. Grif confidently blazed a trail through all of it, pizza firmly in hand.

"Well, I didn't go find him. That was Hal and Vance and Dipper and Gwen," he said, rattling off the names casually as if anyone would know who they were. "Hal's idea. He's called the Spectre and he's some kind of oogy boogy justice... thing." Grif shifted the box to free up one hand so he could waggle his fingers in a gesture of oogy-boogyness.

"So they let him loose and told him Galactus was being extremely un-justice-like. You know, with the eating people thing. So he bounced him out of the universe."

He stopped once they arrived on a perfect imitation of a stretch of Hawaiian beach.

"Here's our stop," he said cheerfully.

[perverses]

"Soooo, a justice ghost. Super-ghost?"

New York was almost familiar. An American city, sure, Shima could tell that much off the bat, but which didn't matter. They were passing out of it before he had a chance to make a few educated guesses. The woods were even more obscure. He could tell they weren't the kind of forest you'd find in Japan, but that was about it. Lack of knowing wouldn't stop him from taking in every detail he could, though, working on memorizing the shortcut through to Grif's beach.

Now, a beach, no matter where it was technically from, was something anyone could enjoy! Overall, the other parts had been surprising on their own, but they could fit a beach in here?

"Whoa," he exhaled the word, a grin eventually spreading across his face. "They let you have an entire beach in this place? That's awesome!"

[whyarewehere]

"Yeah dude," Grif replied, grinning a little. It wasn't like he'd built this thing, but it had been fed in from his memories.

"If we get to pick anywhere from home it might as well be somewhere good."

Grif's final destination was a table with an umbrella. Normally that might be some concern due to blowing over in the wind, but the habitat deck was a place of convenience and comfort over brutal accuracy. Grif put the box down, tucked the napkins under it so they wouldn't fly off, and opened it up.

"Okay so, the thing about the super justice ghost," he said, getting back on topic as he pulled a slice of pizza out and struggled valiantly with a long string of cheese, "is that he's kinda just... around now? In space somewhere? Which is bad? But it was one of those times when the thing happening right now is so bad you just kind of accept some shit going down later to make the first thing stop."

[perverses]

"Lesser of two evils, that kind of thing?"

The bigger evil being someone eating an entire planet. Shima couldn't argue that wasn't a bigger evil than, well, most things. While talking, he also tried to scope out what kind of toppings Grif had gone with. Were future pizzas normal pizzas? Were there weird space ingredients?

"Okay, but is the super ghost actually a ghost?" Which might be an odd thing to want to know specifically, but for future reference, he really needed to figure out where hellfire versus space might fall. "The spirty, jump at you in a horror movie kind?"

[whyarewehere]

"Yes, that!" Grif points when Shima says "lesser of two evils". That's the phrase he was looking for in there somewhere.

Grif's pizza looked and smelled normal (and delicious), but the most notable detail was, cheese aside, it was all veggies. Some battles he just had to let the space future win. Stupid PETA space future.

He could've sprung for some weirder toppings from other planets, but Grif had been feeling a little homesick and stuck with the Earth basics this time.

"I don't know if he was a ghost ghost. But according to Hal, he possesses people. I don't know man, if something like him jumped out at me I'd probably scream."

He took a bite of the pizza, burning himself a little bit but valiantly ignoring it. He chewed some (but not enough), then said, "I'm Grif, by the way. You want some of this or nah?"

[perverses]

"I'm sort of used to ghosts. If he can possess people, then he probably is some weird kind of space spirit," Shima can only offer a tentative opinion on that, though. He hasn't met this space justice ghost. "Still sounds pretty scary. I sure hope he decided to float off somewhere far away."

Because if they used the guy to fight off something that can eat planets, Shima has no idea if he can manage a spirit that big and bad. Here's hoping he didn't just jinx them all. More importantly, the offer of pizza, something that he's quick to answer.

"Uh, yeah, sure!" The toppings pass the normality check, so of course he'll have some. He'll just help himself to a slice, carefully so not to lose too much cheese. "I'm Shima. Renzo Shima, but mostly everyone just called me Shima back home."

[whyarewehere]

"Me too. Ghosts are assholes," Grif said with considerable authority. There weren't actually ghosts in his world, the guy that died was actually an AI capable of overriding people's armor systems, but none of them (AI included) knew that.

He cheerfully worked his way through another bite of pizza while Shima introduced himself, then asked, "So, you got a code name yet or are you still working on it?"

He just assumed people were in the Legion, it helped that he was usually right.

[perverses]

Shima took his time answering, making short work of half his pizza slice while considering the code name question. In the end, however, he shook his head.

"Code name? Nah," Shima admitted, although somewhat falsely. He'd since had a few ideas when it'd been brought up during his briefing, even if he wasn't sure on what his actual plans were just yet. "I mean, I haven't actually signed up for the Legion thing yet, so do I still need one?"

[whyarewehere]

"Oh, you're not in the Legion?" That surprised him a little. Grif had kicked his own ass for a while after making that decision, but in the end he had signed on. It made him immediately think back on all the reasons he regretted that.

...And the handful of ones why he didn't.

"Then nah, I guess you don't. Think you're gonna?"

He was curious to hear somebody else do the mental gymnastics instead. Then he could compare.

[perverses]

"Maybe? I dunno. Time Guy had a whole lot of better choices if he wanted a hero from my universe, ya know?"

Well, no, Grif wouldn't know, but Shima sure did. Pretty much any of the other exorcist students would have fit the role better. Renzo was the worst choice, which he knew about himself, too. Not that he was going to explicitly state as much, instead settling on general confusion.

Something like that could be expected.

"It's not that I don't think superpowers and all that stuff isn't kind of cool, but what am I going to do? Save kittens in trees? Help little old aliens cross the street?"

[whyarewehere]

Grif had to get quiet and eat some more pizza before he had what felt like an adequate response to that.

"I'm not really my first choice either, honestly. I'm still not totally sure how they talked me into this.

He shrugged.

"But here I am. Sometimes I get a break and get to stay on the ship and eat pizza while other people save the world, though, so that's cool I guess."

[perverses]

"You're not sure, huh? But there must have been some catch you actually liked," Shima pointed out. Could be there hadn't been one, could be there just wasn't much else to do all on your own, which had been a thought that had crossed his mind a few times already.

"Is the hero stuff at least fun sometimes?"

[whyarewehere]

"Kinda," Grif admits. He's not brave or noble or any of those other ideal heroic traits, but if he's honest it's difficult to beat maybe saving the world when it comes to job satisfaction.

He shrugs.

"I mean, a lot of it sucks too, but what else am I gonna do in life that gets you your own action figure?"