voice + action ✪ there must be some way to bring the hero home

[herotypical]

[ after a week of agonizing combat, buffy summers returns home with only exhaustion on her mind. despite all the excitement and crisis, there's little left to do other than collapse onto her bed and fall into a sleep fit for a weary, worn-out soul. morning sees her feeling no less -- shudder -- zombieish. the horror of the last week is bone-and-marrow deep and has yet to fully make itself known in her system. the slayer is running on auxillery humanity, stringing herself along from second to second until she can find a friendly face. find willow and...

and all she finds is an empty room. an empty closet. empty drawers. her best friend is gone. deported while she wasn't even looking. come the afternoon, after she's gotten the first onslaught of emotions out of her system, buffy sits alone on the empty bed. she addresses her journal: ]

Willow and I have this game we like to play. Willow Rosenberg. She was in town...but now she's not. [ a pause allows buffy to catch her breath. to stay strong. ] We call it 'Anywhere But Here' -- self-explanatory, really. Pick a fantasty-elsewhere to be and a fantasy-someone to share it with. I'm not talking about the obvious ones: home or family or anything even remotely whiffing of responsibility. I'm talking about fun. I'm talking about pure escapism. I'm talking Daniel Craig on the beach or Amy Yip at the waterpark.

I'll go first. Show you how it's done. [ but which escape route from reality should she take? ] The '88 Winter Olympics. The Saddledome. Calgary, of all places. Brian Boitano is taking the time to personally skate me through his gold medal routine. Perhaps there's hot chocolate involved. I, being made entirely of my own imagination, copy each move perfectly.

Got it? Good. Because now it's your turn.

[ when her broken little tribute to an absent friend is finished, she'll be searching out her injured pirate (wherever he may be convalescing) and it's off to good spirits, where she can be found working a shift behind the bar. ]

Comments

[godbent]

Oh, that's easy! I'd be following Oda Nobunaga with a campaign on Mars...! [...] Or wait, no, actually, let's make it King Arthur. The martians are probably peaceful, and I think he'd be more open to dealing with that than Nobunaga...

[herotypical]

[ oh. haruhi totally gets this game. that makes her feel a smidgen better. ]

King Arthur as in, like, the real King Arthur? Or that beardless phony we had here a while back.

[godbent]

The real one, obviously! It's just like that fake Merlin we had a while back, if they aren't old and veteran it hardly counts.

[herotypical]

Right. I get it...

Only -- who's this O-Cowabunga dude? Or possibly dudette?

[godbent]

O-dah Noh-buu-nah-gah. He's a famous general from Japanese history. The great unifier, even.

[herotypical]

A general and a warrior king. Feeling martially minded towards these martians?

[godbent]

They're both nation-builders! Who better to unify humanity with the martians... Oh! Except maybe someone like Yamamoto... Oh, or Rocky! I bet he could do it!

[herotypical]

...Balboa?

[godbent]

Yeah, of course! Have you ever seen those movies, they're inspirational!

[herotypical]

I suppose it is tough not feel a tug at your heartstrings during any version of the steps-scene. Okay. I'm sold. Rocky'll do.

[godbent]

[She starts humming Eye of the Tiger now. ...She hums a lot, honestly, so this isn't terribly unusual]

But on a different track... Atlantis with Johnny Depp.

[herotypical]

[ hah. well played, haruhi. buffy nearly almost smiles at the absurdity of it. ]

Johnny Depp would not...be unwelcome. But! Very important question: would there be mermaids?

[godbent]

Maybe, but I always pictured Atlantis as being a big bubble and having humans in it - super evolved humans, not fish-people. So maybe in the suburbs?

[herotypical]

No. I'm entirely okay with Depp and a mermaidless-Atlantis. The fewer mermaids? The better.

[godbent]

[You now... there's a set up and an obvious question here... and Buffy lost her friend, which Haruhi also pretty much liked. So she asks it, giving her the option for nostalgia, if she wants it-]

Why, are mermaids evil were you're from?

[herotypical]

Where I'm from? I dunno. But I've heard about ones that...eat people. From another world.

[ and she's half-convinced jack dated one, once. :| ]

[godbent]

...Wow, something which is actually worse not in your world.

[Lightly]

[herotypical]

Or so I assume. Never met the things in my world. [ perhaps she's met some sea-monster variant but she'd never call them mer-anythings. ]

Amazingly, my point of origin isn't the original hell. [ this last draft enforced this notion. ]

[godbent]

That's reassuring. [And it is, surprisingly. Every stupid story, every other thing had just made her more and more unsure on that world of violence and evil her and the others came from. An admittance if it not being the end-all for tragedy is a surprisingly welcome thing.

Still, not helping now. So after a distinct pause-]

Your turn.

[herotypical]

Hmm. [ a pause. ] The island of Capri. A guy who works with me once told me all about it. If you think about the boot that is Italy, Capri's supposed to be just smack-dab in front of the ankle. I hear there's killer shopping. All the big designers, wrapped up in quaint Italian streets.

But it wouldn't be worth it without a fashion guide. Possibly Tyra Banks.

[godbent]

I'm not sure I know who that is.

[herotypical]

You can simply trust that she's an adequately Western-famous fashionista.

[godbent]

Fair enough, that holds up. Then... I'm going to say New York City! I've never been there, but I've always wanted to see what it was like and the buildings there. As for who... let's say... Gackt might be funny for that but how about Ishihara? He'd be funny to see reacting to it.

[herotypical]

Funny-haha or funny-sad?

[godbent]

A little of both... Ishihara's this guy who's been the governor of Tokyo forever and he doesn't seem particularly good with foreigners or anyone different.