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WHO: Those who have been invited & anyone who would have a reason to visit Maurtia Falls #010! Wondering if you fit into that category? Just contact anyone with an involved character (Andy; Rex; Martin; Cassandra Igarashi; Dio; Archie) and ask!
WHERE: Maurtia Falls #010
WHEN: TONIGHT? TONIGHT.
WHAT: The soldierfam has decided that regular group dinners are good for Martin, and this time they've got a few party crashers!
WARNINGS: None anticipated; will change if necessary!

At a glance, one could easily mistake Maurtia Falls #010 for being entirely uninhabited. Dio rarely returns home and Rex and Marty only have a handful of belongings between the two of them and Rex is meticulously tidy, returning everything to exactly where it ought to be - if anything, it's Andy who makes the biggest mess around the place, and she doesn't even live here.

Despite every sign to the contrary, however, they do live here, and it winds up being a hub of activity whenever one of Martin's guardians - if that's truly what they can call themselves - decides that it's about time to get everyone together for dinner. In Anderson's absence, Rex has taken on the opinion that cooking can't be that hard, which is how they wind up with one window open, a casserole dish burned black soaking in the sink and an assortment of take-out on the table.

(As it turns out, it is that hard - and he found a combination pizza & Chinese food take-out place, whiich means that it can only be better.)

In all, there's not much to do or see here; there's food, Rex the goldfish in his tank, a soccer ball neatly tucked close to the house in the backyard, and a mysterious shelf called "Martin's Things" in the cupboard. Otherwise, you're stuck with nothing more than some potential awkward conversation. Have fun, kids!

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"Couple months."

Flash in the pan, really. Months pass for her in the blink of an eye. She hardly keeps track of them anymore — and why bother? Even a lifetime isn't so very long. But admittedly, she has done more to adapt here than she has for ages in her home world. Maybe the nature of this place just necessitates that.

"And I like my privacy, so I don't feel like I need to get to know everyone else." Not to mention she's been friends with the same three fucking guys for the last several centuries. "Just the relevant people." Rex, Martin, and people around them. Then the immortals. And sometimes the gods. "Why, you think I should branch out or something?"

"Plenty of people do. Some of them become flat-out socialities. Hell," -she waves a hand into the living room, at the rest of the people here- "At this point it looks like Rex and Martin have pulled that off themselves just fine."

It's sort of fascinating, honestly; Rex doesn't seem like an especially social man, and Martin's an entirely different matter. The amount of people who have entered their lives this closely, so fast, surprises her. Particularly considering Cassandra's own social circle has never been the widest.

"Maybe I just thought their other friends would be more like that. But I'm surprised more people aren't like you. You'd think people wouldn't be making so many connections when they could leave at any time."

It is sort of a remarkable phenomenon. She dwells on it from time to time — how Martin has inadvertently gathered around him the most unlikely group of guardians. People that would probably not normally seek to add child care to their routine, or even associate with each other. She remembers their first "family dinner" — how strange it was for her, standing there in the kitchen with Cassandra Anderson and Rex with their unspoken vow to protect Martin from anything and everything.

Honestly, she doesn't know how it happened. She isn't sure she likes that it happened. But she does know she would kill for Martin Darkov, and it's too late to take back a sentiment like that.

"That's the fucking crux of it, isn't it," Andy responds with an exhale and another slight shrug. "I was already living my life knowing relationships are fragile and fleeting and usually not worth the damn trouble. Didn't have to change my habits much here." Except she did. When it came to Martin. "But I'm here. And you're here, so you must be making friends too."

She shrugs. She doesn't often think of herself as someone with a lot of friends, not that she never had them. But even she will admit to herself that she has few close confidants. Despite that, she can't deny that she's gotten to know a surprising number of people here, compared to her life before. She'd say the sheer number of imPorts dragged her out.

Deep down, she's starting to think it's more than that- so many of them are friendly or concerned in specific ways she hadn't seen back home, at least not in person. That, or they're stubborn. Rex was a strange case of simply being a sane guy who'd gotten caught up in the Pantheon's crap, and everyone else got sucked in from there.

"Besides you, I think I know everyone in this house already. Hell, Dio's from my world. I've known him for a while." Fairly well, actually; he's one of the few members of the Pantheon she'll call a friend with no caveats, maybe the only one. "There's no one here from yours?"

"There might be. Fuck if I know, world's a big place," she responds, "Nobody that I know, but that's not saying much. I've been running with the same three other people for ages." Literal ages. "And it's not like I come from a universe populated with mainstream gods and superheroes."

Not like some of the other ImPorts, where it seems like there are powers left and right. She's known a handful of people like her in the entirety of her life — which is, of course, not an insignificant amount of time. Most spent a few centuries with her, maybe a couple millennia before the permanent death happened. The pseudo-immortals in her crew now are young, the oldest still coming up on a thousand years old. Then there's her, the de facto leader on merit of just being fucking old as actual dirt.

"Mainstream gods, as opposed to...?"

Maybe that's a silly train of thought, but any talk of another world's mythology has her intrigued. You never know where you'll find a link. Or perhaps the academic in her still shows; it's a habit that's hard to break, particularly considering how passionate of a student she was.

The former journalist in her has also kicked in, and she files the information about Andy staying with one group for years in the back of her head. If only because what she knows of Andy's background implies that was some sort of secret murder squadron or...something.

"I don't know. Gods that don't walk around in broad daylight?" With the exception of herself and her crew, the world she comes from is painfully ordinary compared to other places she's heard of. The threats there are the usual depressing shit — terrorists, shootings, hate crimes. "Back in my day, gods had the decency to let us fuck our own shit up without showing up, no matter how many girls or goats anybody sacrificed."

The secret murder squadron thing isn't too far off base either. In her lifetime, she's definitely been a member of secret murder squadrons, even if what she has now is a little more legitimate than that. Covert ops, they say. Dirty work for the CIA or MI5. Suits with codenames. As if that makes it better. Cleaner somehow.

No gods back home. Not any that answer prayers anyway. No divine intervention — just Andy's team, suited up in tactical gear and armed to the teeth.

"You're implying any of the Gods walking around this place are actual gods."

This is a familiar topic, but one that she's always interested to see how people respond to. She's so sure that whatever the members of the Pantheon are, none of them are true divinities- after all, they could be brought here by Lachesis, and none of them are omnipresent. Not to mention that they're primarily fuck-ups.

"I definitely don't think Dionysus and I are- let alone the rest of the people from our world that got dumped in here. I'm guessing that means your world is like ours in that there's no exact proof of godhood." She pauses. "And I hope you're not implying that ritual sacrifice is common there."

She's worshipped in a lot of different ways over the years. There were periods in her life when she was religious. It's hard to be inexplicably immortal and not look to some supernatural power for answers now and then. It's hard to live through as many wars and deaths as she has and not wonder about a higher power. But these days, she only invokes the names of gods profanely. Athena's tits are a favorite.

"Honestly? I don't fucking know what 'actual god' even means."

A little pause then. She probably shouldn't have mentioned the sacrifices.

"Anyway, the goats were metaphorical. What is this, 1700 BC?"

"As in- omnipresence. Reality-altering powers, things we don't comprehend...Lachesis level bullshit. That's what people usually say when they talk about gods, right? And I'm definitely not that, for one."

If only, she thinks. It'd solve a lot of her problems. She's hoping and assuming Andy has done her reading on Lachesis- this woman seems keen enough to want to get the lay of the land.

"You never really know what's a joke or not around here. I mean, we're in a house with a man from outer fucking space." She likes Rex, but that's never not weird as hell. "And, frankly, there's probably someone from 1700 BC here somewhere."

Andy probably knows less than she should. She's done some of her homework, but there's also this attitude a person starts to build after being alive a couple thousand years — that you'll weather whatever, that it doesn't matter because in a century or so, nobody will remember what happened today. Maybe not even you.

"I think it'd be a little more obvious, if someone was from 1700 BC," she responds wryly, deflecting a little. It's not totally dishonest if she's avoidant of the truth, right? And it's not as if she's actually from 1700 BC. She's from earlier. "They'd probably take one fucking look at the place and have an aneurysm."

She plays it off. Doesn't really make eye contact.

"I'd say that before I got here...but the way some of the people around here adjust? Maybe human minds actually can weather whatever bullshit gets thrown at them."

Admittedly, most of the cases she's seen are of people from the future- Rex is just one example, if his world counts as something like that. Still, the sheer amount of people who've just started to take all of this in stride eventually fascinates her.

"Frankly? All I get from people around here is that most people can get used to anything, eventually. Even when they really shouldn't."

"Maybe."

Andy's answer is noncommittal. Not that Cassandra is wrong — if anything, the other immortals she's known are absolute evidence that it's a fact: People adapt amazingly well. It's maybe the one thing humans do best. She has spent the past century or so being purposefully resistant, but take Booker for example. Used to serve in Napoleon's army — now a whiz on the computer, and the person she always turns to when she needs her stupid iPhone fixed.

"Not much choice though, is there? Unless you want to live in a cave and wait it out. Which honestly gets pretty fucking boring after a while."

She's tried it.

"I guess there isn't. I've known someone who claimed to be at least hundreds of years old before, and she seemed just fine. Not that I'm sure I believed her."

Fucking Ananke. What was the beginning or the end with that lady? Her story seemed so preposterous, but the more weird shit happens to her, the more she wonders if she shouldn't have doubted it. Not that she wants to believe her. She doesn't want to give Ananke anything.

Despite her train of thought, the journalist in her pays close attention to Andy's wording.

"You say that like you've got experience hiding in a cave."

"Listen, sometimes you just need to find a nice cave and be the fuck away from everybody," Andy responds with a little frown. Sometimes you do this for several years at a time. Sometimes you do this repeatedly, to the point where you have multiple caves in remote locations all over the world with all your shit stashed in it. "If that's not a universal feeling, it should be."

She eyes Cassandra for a moment.

"Who was the person you knew who claimed to be hundreds of years old?"

"I mean, I get it, but you can also be somewhere with electricity." Andy very much seemed a rugged person, but that's more extreme than Cass thought. "Do you have caves around here? Do those even exist?"

But Andy's curiosity is more interesting than that- it's an unexpected direction for this to take, and it tells her more about Andy herself.

"Her name was Ananke. She's the evil old lady who gave Dio and I powers- along with all the other godly teens you see fooling around. Well, the ones from our world, at least." There's way too many demigods around here. "She turned out to be completely out of her mind, tried to sacrifice a child for some unknown bullshit reason, and got herself killed. So why are you asking?"

"Electricity is overrated. People lived fine for centuries without it," Andy responds dismissively with a wave of her hand. People lived without proper plumbing for centuries too, but it's still nice having a toilet instead of a hole in the ground — she's just being a crotchety grandma about it. "There's also a distinct lack of child-killing old bitches around when you spend the majority of your time in your own private cave. Just saying."

Ananke is a pretentious fucking thing to call yourself too, she thinks. Goddess of inevitability or some shit like that, right? Still inevitably dead, if Cassandra's account is to be believed.

"...What, you don't get curious when someone says they know somebody who lived a couple centuries?" Not that it's very long, honestly. Booker's young by their standards, and he's at least two hundred years old now. "Maybe I just wanna know how she pulled it off. If she even did. Doubt she was all that powerful if she got offed."

"Yeah, and then the world could fucking end and you'd barely know it. I get the appeal, but I'd rather stay in the know."

That and she's somewhat addicted to acquiring new information and the pursuit of it, so perhaps being cut off just isn't for her. The topic of Ananke is one she's somewhat tired of discussing at this point, but she is curious as to why Andy is so into it. She seems evasive, in a way that Cassandra always tends to cling to. Who knows what she'll find, after all.

"If anything, she was weaker than the rest of us, and not just because she was old. She didn't have the same powers we have, and she acted like she'd made some great sacrifice giving those up to watch over us." That said, when she thinks of Ananke? She primarily thinks of a killer. "But that didn't mean she wasn't dangerous. She killed people just for her so-very-mysterious plans. Fuck her."

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