"Probably not a good career move unless you like bosses who think that a teakettle would be vastly improved if it was intelligent and wanted to boil the oceans, though," Riaa said.
"Listen," Katters says. "What you're describing is a teakettle with enormous enthusiasm for its job, and I don't see a problem with that."
"If it's a Heterodyne teakettle I'm sure it could make its way to the seaside. Or possibly use whatever they made to water the garden to make a new ocean," Riaa replied.
"Have you two met before? Or are you from the same place?" Berit asks curiously, puzzled by the references the two seem to share.
Mina shakes her head. "Der master von´t let eet drown der ceety. Dey tek care ov dere own." "Hy don´t tink zo, vhy?"
"No, but I work in a place a bit like this. Liminal space, sort of thing," Riaa explained. "You meet a lot of people. My girlfriend's actually a Smoke Knight, though, so I know a bit more about Europa than some others. Or, formerly a Smoke Knight, I don't know."
"D'you work in a restaurant? You mentioned you were more familiar with these places as restaurants. I could probably come up with a clever name for the place referencing liminal spaces but it's always just been The Bar since I first stepped behind the counter. Haven't really needed another drinking establishment since." Riya leans against the counter and shakes her head a little, amused. Two people with the same name (mostly) working in a hub between worlds. The universe must be patting its own ass, thinking it's clever. Remi's sat down, drawing a naga and a beetle person. He's pretty good at it, but very slow. Every line takes forever and if it's not perfect he erases it and starts over, yet doesn't get frustrated at having to redo every other line.
"No - actually most of the food is pretty awful, so you learn how to get to other transdimensional places with decent food," Riaa said. "I meant that a startling percentage of liminal spaces are restaurants of some kind. There's the World's End Inn Free House, there's that coffeeshop that's run by tiny cat people... Anyways, nothing wrong with that name. Gets the point across."
"I wonder if it's that restaurants are highly frequented. Maybe there's a bunch of liminal abandoned shacks out there, and no one's noticed. Or port-a-johns, where people aren't prone to stopping and chatting."
"Liminal empty caves, full of regular, unpleasant giant spiders," Berit suggests. She's thinking about the nature of the place, now, and idly wonders whether she should tell her advisors about it. Which is her typical course of action, when faced with an unexplained magical phenomenon. It would fascinate Morrigan. Leliana.. hah, Divine Victoria, now, but as ruthlessly efficient as ever... would probably try to find a way to extract a tactical advantage from it. It's not as though the Bar is useful like an eluvian, though - for Berit, the door seems to only go in and out of a Skyhold courtyard. "I wonder what would happen if one of you tried to come back with me," she muses aloud.
Mina leers. "Hyu vant os to komm home vit hyu?" She gives Berit a once over for effect. "Vell hy vouldn´t mind..."
Berit looks startled for a moment, blushing, then starts laughing. "Ha! Sorry. Eheh. It's just that I meant.. in a .. travel between worlds sense." She takes a deep breath and rubs at her face. "I mean, for me, Skyhold is through that door. For you, presumably, it isn't. How does that work?"
"Well, the door isn't actually there, you know. It just," Riaa gestured vaguely. "Goes where it wants to, I think. Luckily this is apparently a nice place, so the door wants to go where you want, I'd assume? Where I work, the only way to get somewhere is to not think about finding your way there at all."
"There's a preliminary question that needs answering," Katters says. "What happens if two of us look out the door at the same time? I assume we'll both see different things — but if the door will take us where we want to go rather than where we came from, maybe, if we want to go to the same place, we'll see the same thing." Her ears flick back while she thinks. "This could be some very useful magic, if it could be convinced to behave," she muses.
"It's behaving now," Riaa said. "Trying to get it to act other than how it wants to is a good way to annoy it into dropping you into the middle of nowhere. These things usually have senses of humor."
Riya just laughs. "The Bar. Behave. Right. It'll get you home just fine. Anything more than that..." She shrugs. "I don't think it even follows its own rules." "UGH." Her response is a little disproportionate. "I have a friend who always wants meetings at a lost house and then complains when nobody manages to make good time." "I can find it!" Remi pipes up. "You're always a little lost." "Yep!" He gives a gap-toothed grin.
Katters shakes her head. "You're not going to see me testing it, no," she says. "This is all just hypothetical. You can't science magic — or, you shouldn't science magic." She pauses again. "Although, it would still be interesting."
Dom snickers. "Well, at least, in my world, the stuff that could be described as "magic" usually obeys some sorts of physical laws. Though I guess "it's funny" also qualifies as an internally consistent rule."
