The Place

The Place is called the Place because no one's ever dared to presume to call it any different. As for what it IS, well, people have dared to at least /postulate./
The existentialists in particular tend to be particularly pleased about it when they get there, mostly because they think the fact that the Place exists proves them right in a sense. They favour the idea that the Place is a place between realities, and you get there by slipping out of the reality you're usually fixed in.
They're almost right.
It's the most popular theory in general, really. Others have suggested that the Place was once part of a world and got separated from it the way many of its inhabitants were accidentally separated from their own. Or that it was a universe that ended, and the Place is a fragment of it, or a memory of a fragment.
They're almost right too.
The Place is all of those things. It is between realities. It is separated. It is a memory, and a fragment, and a regret, and a shadow, and a tomb, and a tombstone. It is all of these things and more. It is nearly the same thing for quite a lot of people, but when you get down to the details, it's different in little ways for each person. To some people, it's heaven.
To others, it's hell.
To most, it's purgatory, even if they don't know what that means, even if they don't believe in a heaven or hell.

For Ivan, it's a mixup. A mistake. A little bit of confusion that'll be sorted out eventually by the Right People, whoever they are, and then he'll be merrily on his way back to his own life in his own world. For now, he's just trying to get on, trying to pretend none of this is happening, and trying to pretend that he really will wake up before anything /serious/ happens. He's a waiter at the local tavern. The Local Tavern. There's only the one. The Place* isn't big enough for two. Literally.

For the gargoyle, it's home. The only one she's ever known. And she knows it's her home, because gargoyles have always been there, were probably born there, and intend to stay there. You don't see them in Higher Place that often anymore. Too much light and noise at night. If the gargoyle has a name, she hasn't shared it with anyone. Not even Ivan, and he's the only one who's dared talk to her. Though that conversation mostly included "Um, I, um, was just--the trash--I didn't mean to--are you busy? I don't mean to--I'll come back later." She didn't really mean to scare him like that. Gargoyles don't often intentionally scare people, it just happens. It also makes life more convenient, they've found, so they don't really discourage it. Most people aren't aware they're intelligent, and as a by product, are capable of speech. Some of the really stubbornly realistic humans won't even acknowledge they're possible. It's amazing the things you overhear when people are in denial about the fact that you really aren't a statue. It's downright shocking the things they'll /do/ in front of you.**

For Garth, it's just another place she's living in until she ends up in under place to live in until she ends up in another...well, you get it. So on. So forth. For creatures like Garth, peculiar places aren't that peculiar. After she spent a year in a dimension referred to by the inhabitants simply as "Gukk" where the sky was purple, the liquids were carnivorous, the dominant language consisted mostly of wiggling your fingers(or in the natives' case, thirty-six different sets of antennae) and scratching your nose in the wrong context could be taken as an insult deserving of death, nothing much fazes her anymore. Garth's odd penchant for dimension-jumping had nothing to do with her race(weergarlsh, which meant her body fluctuated between human and a type of furred troll with the waxing and waning of the moon)it's just that sometimes there are people that have a knack for slipping between the fabrics of reality***. Garth prefers Lower Place to Higher Place, as in Higher Place the people are more Civilized, and Civilization doesn't take kindly to individuals who fluctuate from being furry and having circular tusks as long as the diameter of the average tire rim to being a normal human being for only one day every month. Lower Place also has most buildings made out of brick, and brick has better pocks for sinking claws into.

For Azerith, it's one of many playgrounds. Like Garth, he's able to travel between realities--unlike Garth, he has total control over this. Azerith has total control over a lot of things. This is because his mother is a Chaeshr. You know how light cast shadows? Well, realities cast /un/realities. And those unrealities are Chaeshrs. Since they're unreality, they can do very much what they like, so even though if you had a map for all the realities, and you pointed to where an unreality was technically cast by a reality, and said "That's Nadime****, right there," it very well is. That doesn't necessarily mean Nadime is there, though. Well, she probably is. But she might also be wandering around Earth in the form of a little black cat. Or whispering over a magician's shoulder in Yrth as he attempts to summon something dastardly. Or sunbathing inside a star. Or, very rarely, providing parental guidance to one of her very many children.(1) Azerith is what's called an imp. There's a lot of Chaeshr-spawned imps running around. Unlike most of the Chaeshrs' children, they actually have a consistent appearance. They do have gender, though it's hard to tell, and their eyes and mouths are detached, enlarged, stylized things that float around and scare the shat out of people. Their Chaeshr stripes aren't very stable, and if an imp moes too quickly their stripes can be left a way behind. The same goes for their tails. An imp may choose to utilize tail or stripes as clothing, if the company prefers it, and the imp cares about what the company prefers. This is actually the most natural sort of form for them to have. It is possible to keep everything /stable/ and in its proper place, and it's not particularly difficult. It just takes thinking about, and imps are generally too absentminded to be bothered with it. Azerith is, like many of his brethren, a mercilessly carefree individual. He also tends to be very blatantly sexual, because it amuses him when people blush. Spluttering is a bonus. Garth, as previously mentioned, isn't fazed, and the gargoyle is practically downright boring. Nonetheless, he enjoys hanging around Garth, and occasionally the gargoyle. He has little to no interest in Ivan, who's too wrapped up in pretending none of it is real to be any fun.


For Theo, Higher Place is all she can remember. Her older sister Brass claims to remember another place, and her younger sister Gus is too busy partying to care. Theo doesn't much care either. She's a weerraptor. Unlike Garth, though, Theo has chosen, through a variety of meditation and mental exercises, to keep her body locked in a constantly transformed state. As a velociraptor.
In Higher Place, it is by no means convenient to be an animal 24/7. But for Theo, it's the only way she can cope with the world. A city full of confused, addled people milling around until they can get kicked back to their own reality. If they're lucky. To them, the Place is a train station. A stop. Practically tourists, in Theo's mind. She hates tourists.
Despite her dislike for these strangers in her world, though, Theo writes about them. Every week she finds an average joe that's lost their way and interviews them, then writes about them, and submits that blog to the Higher Place newspaper. It doesn't bring in much, but it's steady work, and it keeps the meat on her plate.
Higher Place is a place to live, and it's the place she happens to live. It has its good days, it has mostly bad days, but in the end, what choice do you have?

For Brass, it's what she's stuck with. She remembers another place, from before. She vaguely remembers parents. She's under the impression they were separated from them when they arrived at the Place, and that it's a miracle she managed to keep track of her sisters, and keep them safe, and keep them together. Brass has managed to settle down, make a living. She owns a bar, and not a bad one, either. Like Theo, she's also trained herself to control her transformations. Unlike Theo, Brass perfers being mostly human. Mostly. Claws are always convenient things to hang onto, no matter what species you are.
It's also not where she intends to stay. Unbeknownst to her sisters, Brass has hired a P.I. to find out about their parents. If Brass can find them...well. It'll make things better. And then they can figure out together what to do about getting home. Brass doesn't want to live here. She doesn't want to find love here. She doesn't want to stay any longer than she has to. But she can be patient. She's managed it for this long.

For Gus...well, it's life. It's the moment. It's the party, the food, the drink, the friends. She has a hazy awareness of an undercurrent of desperation at each party she attends, in each person she meets, in each drop of alcohol she swallows. Gus, however, somehow manages to remain entirely unaffected by it. The Place is the Place, what do you want from it? Take what you can get. If you can get good, good for you. If you can't, well, you're doing something wrong, and there's always room for improvement. For Gus, it's all about being content with what you have, to the extent you ignore the idea of there being anything else. To everyone else, it's called laziness.
After the shooting, though, things change for Gus. They change for everyone.


The Place has been around for a long time. A very long time. People have come and gone. People have murdered. People have raped. People have stolen. People have, in general, been people.
But this...this is different. For one thing, it's always been provoked. Someone needed something. Someone had a grudge. Someone was really just fucked up in the head. For another, the Place doesn't like guns. If people arrive with them, they usually lose them, quickly. Or they get broken. Or they just plain don't work. And bad things have, in the past, always been done privately. Thieves wait till nightfall, when everyone's asleep. Murderers corner their victims where no one can hear them, or find the body. Rapists have done the same. Bad things have happened, but in the hesitant, shuffling, dreamy-like waiting-around of the Place, nothing has ever been so blatantly /public./
This is different. It changes everything. Everything anyone ever thought they knew about the Place--even the gargoyles' ancient memories have been challenged. People are scared, and not in the disoriented-denial sort of way they are when they arrive, or refuse to accept what's happened. They're scared in the get-indoors-before-dark, stay-away-from-alleys, never-let-them-get-behind-you sort of scared.
The Place isn't meant to withstand this level of intensity of one emotion, one mind, one thought.
The Place is about /waiting./ But it's become filled with Fear. It's become filled with the tautness of a hivemind. And the hivemind is focusing on one thing:
/Getting out./
People are afraid of the Place in a way they never were before. Before it was being stuck in the mud; now it's being stuck in the tar with predators circling in, waiting until you fall asleep to pounce. And they're going to start pushing. They're going to start clawing. They're going to start tearing at the very boundaries of the Place itself.
Things are going to start happening that were never meant to happen.





*In this context, I am speaking of Lower Place, which is where the fog lingers and the beer is a bit warm, and the sky is always cloudy, and machines run on steam if they run at all, and everyone tosses and turns at night whether they're in beds or not. Unless they're dead, or drugged.
**We tend to assume it shocks the gargoyle who's witnessing it, though they tend to stay straightfaced for most things. It's not that they're emotionless. It's just they've been around for a long time. Been there, done that, if you've seen it once, you've seen it a thousand times--that sort of thing. It takes a lot to genuinely shock, amuse, or upset a gargoyle to the point they'll show it.
***these are the same people that have an uncanny knack for finding gratuitous amounts of change between couch cushions and under car seats, can always find the remote, and never lose socks in the washing machine. And if they do, they know exactly where to go to get them back.
****Mother of Azerith, and many, many others
(1) It's not hard for Chaeshrs to have children. Not painful, really, if they just make them. Or they can try going about it the reality way, in which case it may or may not be more difficult for them.