bigapplesauce | Don't Panic [open]

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Don't Panic [open]

Iman practically drags her new friend to the East Village, wandering with intense focus until she finally comes across the bar Jodie had recommended to her, which looks just like it sounds, a proper English pub. It's been ages since she went to an English pub. She's looking forward to it. A little hysterically, actually. No wait. Scratch that. She does not get hysterical. She's a scientist.

"Here we are!" she says brightly, drawing Daniel in. Oh wow would you get a load of this place. The lady behind the bar is in costume. Adorable.

"Wow you can kinda tell it's for people from an alternate universe, can't you?" She snorts and takes stock of the people, looking for someone to talk to, or someone whose brain she (they) can pick. It's pretty early for anyone to be drinking, so there's not too many people there, except one guy who is drunk, slumped over the bar. Looking exactly like she feels, or rather how she wants to feel in an hour's time.

"That one," she says decisively, not bothering to check if Daniel's with her on the idea of approaching a drunk stranger and asking him questions about their mutual cosmic misfortune. He's probably not. She doesn't actually care.

She goes straight to the bar, assuming Daniel will follow, sits herself on the stool next to the guy, and nods to the tender. "I'll have what he's having."

[[ooc: Daniel's just gonna be here for the initial thread, but Iman will be here all day! Say hi if you wanna.]]

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Daniel has to suppress a shiver. Yep, Ascended instincts were correct. This thing is old. Possibly Ancient-old.

"But instead of oh, say, going out and traversing said wormholes," Daniel hears himself saying before he can decide whether or not talking is a good idea (it isn't), "you're here. In a bar." Trying to get drunk, Daniel supposes, though Nick seems incredibly sober. He's guessing the alcohol-to-bodily fluid ratio works differently for...whatever it is he is.

"Oh, get you. Formation of the fucking universe. ~Ooooh~." Iman wiggles her fingers, rolls her eyes aggressively and sits back up straight-ish. "So, Mr. Common Knowledge, I suppose that means it must be a cakewalk for you to get back home, huh?" Yeah, she's with Daniel on this one, too.

"I'm stuck here for the same reasons as the rest of you."

He's not even going to dignify Iman's childish gestures and eye-rolling with a response.

"Except that I wasn't blindly hopping around to other universes; I was pulled into this one. And if I wasn't at a fraction of my true glory, I wouldn't be having this conversation with you."

He would have been out of there faster than you could say 'Sam Winchester'. Instead, all the inhabitants of Manhattan are stuck with a disgruntled, slightly intoxicated Satan who's recently received some very upsetting news about his family. It is not an ideal situation for anyone involved.

It strikes Daniel immediately after he says it ~~(took him long enough)~~, and his bad habit of thinking aloud springs painfully back into play.

"You're not as powerful here, are you?" he says, slowly, and with the creeping understanding of why Nick keeps issuing casual threats without actually following them up. "Parlor tricks, that's what you've been reduced to. You can't access the full range of your abilities. And thanks to the Rift, you can't do anything about that. You're stuck here like the rest of us."

It only occurs to him after he says it, of course, that he might want to do a lot less deducing out loud and a lot more shutting up.

"Ahaaa." Iman lifts an eyebrow. "So that's it. Sucks for you then. Lucky for the human race, I guess." She drinks down more whiskey, a little more gently this time. "Soooo, let me guess. Like everyone else in this city you want me to figure out how to send you home. Hmmm?"

She snorts and pushes his bottle at him. "Come on, drink more. You clearly need it."

"Not just parlor tricks. All the Rift has managed to do is keep me from leaving as I please and from turning the greater metropolitan area into a barren crater simply on principle."

He still has some power up his sleeve; or did, anyway, before the Rift decided, apparently, to punish him. But thank you, no one needs to know about that, especially not until he figures out if it's reversible or not.

"And if I can't leave here on my own power, I have little faith that you'll find a way before me. I just find it interesting that, in some universe, at least, your kind has managed to drag itself out of the dirt a little."

"Oh, we haven't just dragged ourselves out of the dirt." Daniel's enthusiasm and velocity of speech have both increased as he grows more confident in the idea that his insides will not be immediately turned to cryogenic mush. "We've come quite a ways. Us, humanity, we're out there now, exploring that wide-open cosmos that you," he says pointedly, because what little instinct for self-preservation he's held has apparently evaporated, "can't come near. We've advanced between galaxies, dimensions. And you're stuck in a bar in Manhattan."

Iman rolls her eyes again, even more aggressively, at Daniel's bright-eyed fuckin idealism party, oh man what a precious little putz he is.

"So you've gone from basically asking him to mess you up to straight taunting?" she says. "Do you have a setting for like, 'making good decisions', or are you always like this?"

"You really are very confident that I'm not going to freeze the blood in your veins, aren't you? Arrogance doesn't become you."

Arrogant, and quite possibly terminally stupid. If he kills Daniel right here and now, he'd probably be doing the gene pool a favor.

"And, as it is, it doesn't really matter how far you hairless apes traverse in the galaxy. Cockroaches spread, but I don't hear anyone praising them for it. Distance from your planet doesn't make you any different from the base, miserable creatures that you were when you left it."

He narrows his eyes but withdraws. Yeah, he's always like this and, yeah, he's exceptionally lucky that it hasn't bitten him in the ass in any substantial way so far. It's one thing to be worried for the lives of everyone in the bar and quite another to deliberately taunt the ancient, indomitable horror sharing a drink with them.

"I just don't think we're as pathetic a race as you're implying," he finishes quietly, with considerably less aplomb.

"On that, we are in agreement," Iman chimes in, raising her glass to Daniel's nothing. "But unfortunately I don't think Nick is gonna cop to it."

She sips, and peers over at the cosmic asshole in question. "So how long have you been drinking?" she asks, all conversational curiosity. Because anything's gotta be more fun than talking in circles about this guy's disdain for her species. She rather likes her species. Not into that.

Lucifer snorts, an ugly, derisive sound, and drains the last of that bottle of whiskey into his glass. He knows humanity and what they're made of better than most; he was there for their creation, after all. And he's the one that made the first demon out of a human soul.

But he'll go along with the topic change, anyway.

"As long as it's taken to drink most of Manhattan," he says, and knocks back the whiskey. "I started in Upper Manhattan and worked my way down. So, a few hours?"

And at this point, he has enough alcohol in him to kill a small city.

Daniel freezes and stares. Ancient, unspeakable evil or not, he inwardly has to admit it: that's impressive. Also worrying, but. Impressive.

He blinks rapidly for a minute, trying to - no, no he can't really process it and he doesn't want to know what could've happened that would inspire Nick to drown his sorrows in an almost literal fashion.

"...Bad day?" he guesses weakly.

Iman reaches out and pats Nick, once, on the back. "You're a hero among ancient evil entities, Nick," she says. "Damn, the damage I could do with powers like that. I'd drink everything in the world." She considers this for a moment. "Well, no I wouldn't. It'd be no fun by myself anyway. You been drinking whole bars for hours, and what, all alone? Good thing we happened along, huh?"

"Biblical," he says to Daniel. It's true on multiple levels.

He looks at her hand for a moment when she pats him, and she could consider herself very lucky that she still has that hand when she's done. Also, the temperature of "Nick"'s skin is far below what the average human would be able to survive; he's practically chill to the touch.

"I wasn't looking for company."

Certainly not human company. See: his stellar opinion of the human race.

He is not yet drunk enough for this, but Dad as his witness, he would be.

"Okay!" Daniel says brightly, freaked out and seizing the opportunity, bouncing to his feet, going ninety miles a minute, in way too much of a hurry to not be in this thing's presence any longer. "We'll just go. Right, Iman? We'll just go? We'll be on our way? I think you've had enough to drink. Don't you think? I'm so glad you agree. Let's go."

He's spooked enough just being in Nick's immediate presence, but the nonstop flow of idle threats, even if they were primarily directed at him rather than Iman, has Daniel worried enough. There's no telling when this thing's already questionable patience will snap and he starts backing up those threats.

"Hold up," says Iman distractedly, looking at her hand. She did feel the cold, though for a moment she'd just thought she was suddenly having some kind of bad reaction to the crossover, nerve numbness or something - but no, it was him. He's cold as ice. Not too surprising, given what he did to her glass.

"I'm not going anywhere," she says firmly. "Danny boy, if you wanna scoot, I think we can all agree that might be the best thing. But I have more drinking to do. With or without this asshole."

She glances over and cocks an eyebrow at him, challenging him not to trust her.

This is Lucifer.

This is Lucifer filling his glass up to the very, very top with alcohol again, ignoring the humans around him who are doing whatever it is that humans do.

You can practically see the fucks that he does not give littering every available surface.

This is Lucifer draining the glass with blatant disregard for both taste and the physical capacity of his stomach.

"I'm not going to leave you here with him," Daniel hisses through clenched teeth. "He's mad. And, yeah, okay, that's probably all my fault but that doesn't mean you should have to deal with it."

He's not actually one hundred percent sure if Nick is "mad" or not in the strictest sense of the term, but he doesn't want them to have to stay and find out.

Points docked. Her eyes narrow. "What exactly are you gonna do, huh?" she says, all but putting her hands on her hips. "Gonna save me from big grumpy evil by standing there and being manly, and asking stupid questions? Or are you saying you're gonna forcibly carry me outta here? Cause boy, you may be tall and I may be drunk, but I can lay you out, you better believe that." She turns coolly back to the bar and her drink. "I'm staying right here."

This feels a little mean. Not everyone can translate her general attitude to the affection it often actually is; Daniel is dumb as hell, but he's also cute and interesting, and it's not exactly a bad thing knowing such a ridiculous straight-arrow moral compass. She sighs and says, "Where you staying? I'll come find you later and show you how none of my limbs have been detached." She could make such a good joke about her arm here, but again, keeping that shit to herself.

Satan's just going to keep on sitting here, draining the bar of all its alcohol. Watching Daniel dig himself deeper and deeper with every poorly phrased comment is just an added bonus-- drinks and a show.

If Iman wants to keep drinking, she might want to get her alcohol while she can, because the bartender's looking nervous.

"What? No, I'm - I'm not gonna carry you, that, that's -" Ridiculous, absurd, whatever words Daniel's brain can't scramble for presently because he's feeling as nervous as the bartender looks. Maybe more so.

And he casts a worried look at Nick, who doesn't seem to care one way or the other - is he amused at this? - and then back at Iman, who apparently doesn't care who she drinks with as long as drinking is getting done.

"I just want to help," he says, because he doesn't know what else to say even if nothing he's said so far has done anything to illustrate that point.

She sighs heavily. "I know you do," she says. "But this time you can't. All right?"

She leans forward and grabs clumsily at his hand, giving it a firm pat. "I will be okay. You go do whatever it is you do when you're not making a huge ass of yourself."

That's right, Daniel. Lucifer is amused at the way you so masterfully take your foot and shove it right in your mouth.

The bartender is looking around, confused as to why all the whiskey is gone. There is a row of empty bottles in front of the Devil, and he's in the process of cracking open the flavored vodkas. He doesn't care that most of them taste like sugary diabetic death-- something his brother Gabriel would love, no doubt-- he cares about the alcohol content.

"Yes, Daniel," he says, and his pour is slightly less neat than it has been. "Go on. She'll be fine."

Daniel is so reassured.

"Pretty much my full-time job," he replies truthfully, shrugging, flat-out not trusting himself to even address Nick at this point. It's not like he trusts Nick to walk her home, and -

"Hang on, you don't even have a place to stay yet, do you?"

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