Meet the Parents

So, we all have our favourite characters that we know and love...and murder brutally on a weekly basis. But... how many people stop and wonder... "How did they get here? This is not their beautiful house, that is not their beautiful car, That is not their well manicured chatbox lawn..."

Alright, Alright all Talking Heads references aside, wouldn't it be fascinating to talk to the people who brought the characters into existence according to their own canon?

And so, without any more existensial pondering about how they got here and who's beautiful wife that is, I bring you...

MEET THE PARENTS.

Please note: In a shocking amount of backstories, characters have lost their parental units to horrible unsettling events that they may or may not have witnessed. We invite you to bring in your parental units from a time in canon when they would have been alive...seeing as a room full of dead people is not in most circumstances the source of the best conversation.

General layout info: So, this is going to be sort of Character Break Room like in nature, in that people can walk in and have a conversation and walk out...or not walk out or...whatever... have a conversation and linger indefinitely... etc. etc.

Additionally, we will not be providing you with character sheets, so you have to rely on your intro paragraphs alone to setup the show here.

"Amber... I have no idea why you thought it was a good Idea to go through that door that randomly appeared in the house...We're going to be murdered and then the kids will wake up all confused." I told her as we went down some random hallway that had apparently spawned out of the side of our house.

I hoped we weren't getting taxed for this. It wasn't our fault. Not like the dictator would understand that or be sympathetic anyway... but, It was worth a try to explain it wasn't it?

"Shut up, we're not going to die... We paid our taxes..." She rolled her eyes and continued to pull me... forward. She kind of had a point there though. As long as we paid our taxes and didn't do anything overwhelmingly illegal, the dictator didn't seem to care much about what else we did. "And besides, I left the kids a note. T.Morbid will take it to school and have someone read it to him if he wakes up and we're missing, don't worry."

I had no idea why she decided to name him T.Morbid, let me just say that right now. No frikkin' clue. I called him T.Mor, because really, naming your kid something with the word "Morbid" in it just seemed kind of...weird. But she really liked it...so... I didn't argue with her about it. I mean... at least she wanted to keep him at all.

"Come on, through this door. It says: "Parents" on it." Amber continued half pulling me along.

"I can read you know, honey..." I muttered as I went along with her.

"I know..." She smiled, and it lit up her pale face. She was really pretty... even for being under fed these days... I mean, back at school when we all ate semi-regularly she looked even prettier, but... she was still amazing. Grey eyes... blonde hair... And some kind of brain... even if it did confuse me and make me go: lolwut... some days.

She opened the door and it was some kind of... lounge thing. With sofas, and a wet bar and... It seemed amazing. "This is too good to be true. This is not our house." I said in shock.

"Of course it's not our house. That door never existed before today." Amber said, sitting down on the couch casually... as if it was completely normal to just... find some door in your house that leads to a lounge for parents. Like this kind of crap happened every day.

Meh. I'd play along. I sat down next to her on the sofa and put an arm around her shoulder.

Elana pushed open the door to her closet, she was a thin, petite woman in her twenties. She had curly black hair that was pulled up in a messy bun and had wide dark eyes. She sighed, droping the full laundry basket in her hands onto the floor. Picking up the clothes that fell out, she looked up, noticing something that stood out between the clothing on the racks. She pulled back the hangers and blinked when she saw a wooden door. Curiosity getting the better of her, she opened the door. It was a hallway, behind a door, that had never existed before in her closet. It was strange...but she considered it an adventure. Walking down the hallway, she spotted a door and put her hand on the knob. She hesitated, not sure what was behind the door. She took a deep breath and swung open the door, disappearing into the room inside.

"Where did this door come from?"

"Nod sure, mah'am. I've never seen id before."

The vrejnik flicked her ears back and forth, amber eyes narrowed perplexedly. Closer to the door, the human woman stood and tried to think of who could possibly have authorized a building expansion. She ran things around here, as denoted by her white robes and her number of red stripes. Anything concerning the place had to go through her, and she certainly hadn't heard about this before, let alone approved the plan herself.

"I'm going to see where it leads," she said, grabbing the doorknob.

"Would yu like me du go wid yu?" the vrejnik woman asked.

"Thank you, but it's not necessary," the human dismissed. "This shouldn't take long. Return to your work."

The vrejnik nodded and left, her midnight robes swooshing behind her. The human turned the knob and headed through the door, entering a hallway filled with many others. They were fantastically diverse, coming in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and colors. The woman turned and made a note of the one she'd just come through. Curious...it held the Sybek symbol surrounded by the symbols for the different types of control. It had what looked like a mirror in the center, but when the woman closed the door behind her, the mirror appeared to turn into some sort of screen. Brief moments from a variety of scenes played across its surface; intrigued, the woman inspected it closer.

Most of the scenes seemed to center around a group of four teenagers who appeared to be bonders. They slunk across rooftops, battled with Sybek, and...in that scene right there, was that Na'arsif? It had to be... There he was again, standing with Likel. The woman even glimpsed herself. And there was her family...and then the brown-haired bonder, though his face wasn't visible...and...these ones were from the past... She glimpsed a Kim maybe six years old, Rachel about ten...Peter at four. And then the three of them a few years later, running and playing and laughing with the other neighborhood children. Peter lost his balance on the bank of the river and fell in, but came up laughing anyway. Another glimpse of him turning and smiling. And another... The woman was struck by pangs of sadness. She wanted to keep watching, to relive all those moments, but at the same time she couldn't take them. It was all too much.

Then another glimpse. Peter at eight, ragged and filthy, his wide eyes full of terror and tears. Then nothing. It would show no more of him. The woman gripped her heart, taking a step back. She couldn't bear it. Why wouldn't it show her more...

Her own child, so afraid and alone... He was so young....

What was this place.

The woman suddenly wanted nothing to do with the door. She turned abruptly, heading off in some random direction and trying to cope with the pain. He would've been sixteen now...

A plainer door with simple writing on it: "Parents". Blindly, not even sure what she was doing anymore, the woman walked up to this new door, turned the handle, and headed inside.

I watched as two more people walked into the room. I briefly considered asking if they happened to know where we were exactly, but they seemed to have looks on their faces that showed that they had no idea where they were either.

Amber looked at me somewhat confusedly, probably wondering where these new people came from. I raised an eyebrow in return, informing her that I had no frikkin' idea either.

"Uhm... Hi." I stated articulately, and I could feel Amber staring at me. "Who are you?" I continued, just to prove to her that I didn't have some kind of ridiculous speech problem.

I really didn't you know, Just a bad case of: NEWPEOPLEWHATDO. I get over it eventually. I could feel her silently loling at me for the inability to coher formant sentences.

The place looked like some kind of lounge; there were comfortable-looking couches, a few soft chairs, a long coffee table, some kind of bar... There were a few other people in there, too. Parents as well, then? But in her current state, the woman found herself unable to care.

All she really wanted to know right now was what the hell this place was, where it came from, and why it showed her images of her deceased son.

Maybe these people could tell her more about it.

"Helen," she answered. "And you?"

"I'm Amber" Amber said, instead of waiting for me to remember how to introduce myself properly. She kind of had a habit of doing things like that. I didn't mind really, but... Still.

"And I'm [name]." I added after a minute of Amber staring at me. She just made these things worse, really. I knew that I was suppoused to introduce myself next, but she just had to go and point out that I didn't jump right in at the end of her sentence by looking at me like that. " Do you, uhm, by any chance know where... this place is?" I went ahead and asked, because I figured that someone was going to ask about it eventually.

"I'm Helen," the woman answered. "And I'd been hoping that you knew, actually..."

Helen had been thinking about the place. She hadn't realized when she first entered from the academy, but she knew now that she couldn't actually feel any other planes around her. It was as though the flow of life didn't exist here, as impossible as that seemed, and that this place was a world of its own. But that couldn't be right... That just didn't make sense.

But...what if...?

"Just to make sure we're all on the same page... Did you find this hallway somewhere inside your house...and like, decide to follow it...based on whim?" Amber asked, as though she was in control of whatever it was. No problem. Amber could fix anything. Or at least she always sounded like it.

I walked over to the bar and looked around in the mini fridge for something liquidy that didn't taste like bad coffee or bad water. I settled on something neon pink, and took one over for Amber and one over for Helen. "Random pink liquids in bottles?" I asked.

"...Eh, Why not. Can't taste worse than pineapple juice and spam with mustard." Amber said as she took one of the bottles I was holding out.

"I told you that would taste horrible..." I told her.

She rolled her eyes and took a sip of the pink stuff. It apparently was not bad, judging by her face.

"It wasn't in my house," Helen said. "I found it in the building where I work and went to investigate." She politely declined the offered drink.

Now that she was thinking about it more, the theory that this building existed in its own world was becoming more plausible. After all, this couldn't possibly have existed as part of the academy; there was no room beyond the building for it. Not to mention that, considering amount of space between each door, she would have seen the other doors going down the hall in the academy as well. Since that clearly wasn't the case...was it possible that this place was some kind of area that connected universes? Had some people on some plane developed a kind of energy technology that could allow that?

However...energy technology didn't explain the scenes displayed in the door she'd come from...

I returned the extra bottle of pink stuff back to its home in the fridge, and then sat back down. It did taste good, actually ...kind of impossible to explain, but... pretty good. "Huh... that's weird." I stated. It was weird. Our house was somehow connected to her work building? Freaky stuff.

"Maybe it's some weird Internet protocol." Amber suggested excitedly, taking a sip of the pink stuff.

"Oh yeah... because that makes sense." I replied sarcastically. Some anonymous hacker coding us a new hallway for the lolz.. unlikely. Divine intervention by the Internet for the sake of some... I didn't even... That seemed impossible at best. The Internet didn't work like that.

Marie cradled her swollen stomach gently, a fleeting smile crossing her face as she felt a light kick. A stirring of the living thing growing inside of her. A reminder of what she was fighting for.

Her smile quickly vanished as quick as it had come, with a flash of lightning that illuminated the small space she had confined herself too. The Hell her 'husband' had driven her to hide in. A roll of thunder followed the flash, and she closed her eyes, the sound rolling and reverberating through her mind. How long had she been here, now? Not just the old supply shed that she had fled to from her husband, but the compound itself.

Time had blurred together ever since the Hunters had tightened their force on the habui, sending them into permanent hiding. It was too late for most of them, anyway... and now it was just her and her family.

...Marie decided she needed to get out of there. Take a walk somewhere, anywhere. She'd have to be stealthy, of course, but she figured she could manage. Still holding her stomach protectively, she stood up, walking slowly through the door and out to the pouring rain. Another flash of lightning. Another rumble.

And then... out of the corner of her eye, she saw something. Another door to the shed she had just left...? In what world does that make any sense?! And how would she have not noticed that? Marie pushed some rain slicked hair from her face as she studied it. Slowly... hesitantly... she opened it and walked inside the mysterious new door, just out of curiosity.

Marie decided she definitely wasn't in the shed anymore.

She wandered through the hallway she found herself in, finding a door marked 'Parents'. Parent to be, more like it, her two step sons still absolutely hated her... still, she cautiously went through the door.

"I'm Elana...." She said, after the other two had introduced themselves. "I got here...from my closet in my house..." Huh...strange...a work place and another house...where exactly was this placce?

"...Then it stands to reason that this place is some sort of dimensional anomaly connecting different points of the multiverse together via strange doors," Helen stated. "Though as to why or how it exists, I have no clue." Then a pregnant woman walked into the room. "Hello."

This place was slowly starting to become populated. Helen wondered how many more parents across the multiverse would find their way here. It occurred to her that she should probably return to the academy at some point soon, but she didn't care.

Marie glanced around the strange new room, certain this wasn't even part of the compound. The possibility of fleeing seemed like a good idea, but she felt herself walking forward. She brushed more wet hair out of her face as the neared the others, and smiled pleasantly

"Hello. What is this place?"

There it was again. The dull pound of something tiny jostling her from the inside. Lady's back was pressed against a rotting door, and she was pinching the bridge of her nose as she tried to suppress the feeling. "Shhh." Her lips parted around whistled words, light as a butterfly's wing: Quiet now, baby. Be still and nonexistant for just a few more moments. Mama doesn't have room for you in her life right now.

There it was again. Lady's coin-round eyes slid open, heavy with guilt. She was oddly pretty. Though she was several months pregnant, it hardly showed at all.

This was wrong.

Finally, her thin fingers drifted to the corset ties that squeezed against her stomach, and she let out a gasp as it loosened away. There was no need to hide it anymore, hm? Most everyone already knew. She couldn't deal with a baby right then . . . she loved it, whoever it was, that was inside of her. It was a tiny person, boy or girl, a stranger, and she loved them more than anything she'd ever had. It was only that she wasn't ready to have a baby. So, she risked killing it in an attempt to hide it from the world.

There it was again. "Shhhh." She laid a comforting hand on her belly. I'm sorry. Quiet, now. Everything will be alright, baby.

It was then that she realised that the door she was leaning on . . . had it always been there? She turned to face it, and for one blissful moment forgot about the guilt. A new door. Interesting. How hadn't she noticed it before? And the distraction of curiousity called to her, saying that it was alright to forget the baby for a while. She could explore.

It was a moment before she let herself turn the handle. She slipped through, caramel hair sweeping over her shoulder, and left the corset behind. What an odd hall. It must have been a dream. Out of pure fate, she happened apon one particular door, and cautiously walked through.

Elana introduced herself, the other lady who'd walked into the room near the same time as Helen... And then two more people came in. One was clearly pregnant, and the other.... could have been? Possibly? I couldn't quite tell exactly so I didn't stare.

"Wow, it's getting busy isn't it? How did you all get here?" Amber asked the new people, ever the conversationalist.

I sipped my pink beverage in a bottle, simply waving instead of trying to figure out what else I could say.

I hesitated when I saw the other people in the lounge, but my expression didn't change. I wasn't quite smiling, but I was curious. It was such an odd room. Such odd people in it. "A door," I replied to the lass who'd asked, and swayed up to the group. "That's all I 'ave to say." I was thouroughly convinced that I was dreaming. I mean, that's the only way any of this would make sense, aye? Doors appearing out of nowhere, leading to neverending hallways.

And who were they? I watched them patiently, waiting for someone else to speak up.

... *runs to third person* >.> *insecureee...*

Dark blue eyes were storming, focused only on the space in front of him as he walks through Wayne Manor in an attempt to solve the current problem quicker. Deadshot had another contract with someone, and was killing major players in a court case that would imprison one of Gotham's crime lords. It was obvious, in that regard, who was paying him off, but Bruce's main concern was to stop Deadshot's actions before the trial was impossible to continue.
He upgraded, however. A different gun, homemade bullets... harder to track where he might end up next. Deacon may finally be getting smarter, but he still left his clues. His gunpowder had a specific element one could only get in a few half dozen locations in the city. Trace amounts found where he had sniped the second official from...
Bruce stops, however, looking up. Now... a more important matter... He was not in the mansion anymore. A lounge with a couple and four women...

"Hello..." Elana said, looking up at the new commer. She sat down, rubbing one hand over her tired eyes. He'd probably start wondering where she was, he always kept track over her, then probably send someone to go find her. Never did anything himself...