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Where the universe is concerned, Olaf doesn't generally question its choices. Bad things happen. Good things happen. Strange things happen, but usually it all fits together in the larger pieces of the puzzle. It's why he doesn't really do so much more than shrug when instead of walking into Mike's bar, he walks into a party in full swing where he doesn't recognize a single guest.

It's not like this is the first time it's happened to Olaf. Generally, him recognizing someone in a crowd full of people is usually a start. Still, he has learned to go with the stranger events in the universe and no one's died as a result of this little left turn, so he grabs the joint he'd tucked away behind his ear and drifts into the throng of people, observing the summer-like nature of the party from the vibrant drinks to the decorations to the clothes everyone's wearing. Really, this could very well still be Auckland for all he knows and whatever he took earlier had been laced stronger than usual, but Olaf's sort of getting the feeling there's more to it than that.

With no shoes and a Hawaiian shirt fit for a king, Olaf feels like he fits right into the breezy, summer theme of the party around him. He might not know how he got here, but Olaf's never turned down a good party. This one holds a great deal of promise.

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"I know that look," April said as she ducked around a couple of people and stopped in front of the pretty stranger, half-empty drink in hand. Somehow, it was easier approaching someone when they looked as lost as she presently felt.

"I had that look like two hours ago. Did you try to get back yet? The people at the desk told me it works for some people."

Not her, though, of course. Stuck in a sewer for weeks, and now stuck someplace else.

Edited 2013-06-30 23:43 (UTC)

Martha managed to shake herself out of reverie in time to only be slightly startled by the girl speaking to her, though not apparently in enough time for the first thing she noticed to be her drink has one of those umbrellas. It was a rather Doctor-y thing to be doing, actually.

If this was due to Weeping Angels, at least this was less dire than 1968, she decided, at least from the clothes people like this girl were wearing, and the music, and the drinks. (Maybe someone had fun living in 1968; Martha Jones had not.)

"Um, look?" she said, and gathered herself. "Oh. I'm sorry, did you say 'try to get back'?" At the desk? Maybe not the damn angels, then, unless they'd suddenly shifted in dropping people to spin out their lives in cocktail parties instead of the out-of-own-time daily grind.

"Yeah, the door you came through?" April prompted, and cast a glance behind the woman despite that it was impossible to tell which door she'd arrived from. "Did you try using it to get back to where you came from? Assuming that you want to, I mean."

For all April knew, this was an improvement, although this chick didn't look like she'd arrived from a war zone or abject poverty or anything.

"I didn't know I came through a door," Martha said, though now that she thought about it, she'd been passing through one of the sets of fire doors that were (illegally) propped open on the ward, right before she'd found herself here.

Prompted by the girl's appraisal of the wall behind her, she turned and looked as well--there were indeed several doors back that way, but which of them she'd come through, she wasn't certain. "I was sort of out of it so I guess I...actually didn't notice. It's been a really long day, I was at work. Hospital," she felt compelled to explain, lifting the hand with the scrubs (oh ew, was there any kind of biohazard bin or even a fire around here?). "Not to be demanding, but you said the people at the desk told you what was going on?"

"The front desk," April clarified, and swung around so that she could point in that direction. "They are surprisingly helpful for employees of a hotel in an alternate universe. Well, unless you can't get home," she hastened to add with a little purse of her lips.

"If you just go up there and explain you just got here, they'll explain things way better than I could. And give you a room for free, which, hey. Bonus."

"Is this an alternate universe?" Martha asked, before she could stop herself from, you know, throwing a hundred questions at a teenage girl. "I mean, is that what they said? And they said there's a way out? I mean, sorry, I know you said you just got here..." In fairness, she'd been taught that when thrown into a situation, asking questions of anyone who'd talk to you openly was the best gameplan and how you learned anything worth knowing.

After a moment, she noted to herself, brow furrowing a little, "If the rooms are free, I wonder what the catch is."

"That's what I said," April replied with a motion toward the woman. "Logically, the other shoe has to drop sometime, right? But then I found out I couldn't get back home."

Better than being dead, but still not what she would have preferred to pay for the experience.

"Apparently, though, that doesn't happen to everyone. And they tell me that I might be able to get back home anytime, so who knows. But yeah, alternate universe. If you try a door and it gets you back to your hospital, congratulations."

Well. This was rather...

All right, it was not quite as devastating news as Martha had initially thought it might be. If anything, she found she felt...relieved, as if this kind of weird shit was the way things were supposed to be, and the mundane nature of everyday life was the bit that was wrong. It was an epic puzzle, and she didn't get nearly enough of those these days.

Though it was good to hear there might be a way out. "So some people can and some people can't," she mused. "I hope you find your...well, where were you from?"

"New York," April immediately replied. "Are you from England?"

She thought the accent was right, but with the people here arriving from virtually infinite dimensions, what was English to April could be something completely different to this woman. Like Donnie said, it was better to be precise.

New York. At least that was somewhere Martha had heard of (and been, though not recently). Somewhere on Earth. "Yes," she said with a touch of a smile. "London, actually. I was in New York once, it was..."

She wasn't sure what the best adjective was here, so she went with, "Fun." The girl's clothes looked about right to be from within, oh, forty years or so of Martha's own time, was her guess, and probably a lot closer. Definitely not the 1930s.

"It is the city that never sleeps," April replied with a point the woman's way, and boy, did she ever know how literal that saying was.

"I'm April, by the way," she added, and offered her hand. "Sorry I'm not more of an expert on this place."

"Yeah, I found that out," said Martha, thinking about the Empire State Building. Even that New York was still bustling and frantic, even more so than London. But at least there weren't Daleks, here. Yet.

She was a bit taken aback at the sudden introduction, because Americans were always throwing personal details around like candy at a parade, but she'd learned how to take that with a grain of salt, out in space and time. "Martha," she said, and shook the girl's hand. "It's okay, I'm sorry to have asked you twenty questions. Just...I hadn't spoken to anyone else yet. It's been a really, really long day."