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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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It was probably testament to Martha's generally confused state of mind and exhaustion that she didn't immediately tell the guy to bugger off. Instead, she stared at him for a moment or two more, then looked at the drink, which was very, very green in colour, and did sort of smell very brightly (if a drink could smell brightly) of apple.

"All right. Do you have an allergy?" she asked, deciding when in Rome--she'd used to be good at this playing it by ear and living on the wild side thing, hadn't she--and took the drink from him. The sip she took was very tiny (she knew that roofies couldn't really impact her at that small an amount, and maybe she was already hallucinating this?) and startlingly appley.

Martha cleared her throat and handed the drink back, still half-tasting the swallow. "I would say yes, that is quite fruity. If you do have an allergy, I'd say you should probably get something different," she felt compelled to add. Duty of care.

Olaf smiles winningly -- or as winningly as one can -- gesturing to himself with a palm to his chest. "My apologies," he says. "It's not that I have an allergy, but more that I don't recognize anyone in the crowd and I'm trying to make new friends. Apple martinis, generally, have always been a surefire way of doing it for me. Do you prefer something sweeter? Less sweet." He takes a step back to appraise the woman. "Stronger," he says. "Something out of this world."

Martha was trying to place the bloke's accent (Australia? New Zealand?), managed to give him back a smile as well, if more tentative. "Apple martinis might work," she agreed. "It's a little unorthodox, but better than some of the lines I've heard..."

The last comment, though. Now that--that was slightly creepy, and her eyes widened, just a fraction.

"I beg your pardon?" she said, but it didn't come out quite as frosty as she wanted it to. Maybe she was still convinced, somewhere in the back of her mind, that she'd someday run into other people, besides UNIT or Jack, who knew her not from London but from Out There. Time and space.

"Something that takes you to a whole other plane of existence," Olaf says, because when he looks at her, there's something, but he doesn't know what. If she is a goddess, he doesn't think it'd be the Norse pantheon, but then, he's been privy to meeting all sorts. "I've got some herb from Bali that ought to do it, but I know a mean drink that can take you there too. Aqua vitae," he advises. "There's a brand called Yggdrasil, does wonders to get you out of the real world."

So apparently the guy was only talking about drugs and alcohol, and Martha was slightly relieved by this, though there seemed to be something more to what he was saying than the usual stoner type of talk. Slightly more coherent, anyway. "I...don't smoke up, thanks," she said, trying to be as polite as possible about it. "Doesn't really go over well professionally. But I don't mind a drink," provided it was poured by a professional bartender and she could watch it being made.

"Aqua vitae like aquavit?" Martha continued, after a moment of consideration. "I had that in Iceland once." With some skalds, which was way too long a story to get into with someone she'd just met.

"Very similar, yes," Olaf says, inhaling deeply when she denies the offer -- more for him, after all, has never been a bad thing. Well, okay, sometimes it's a bad thing because sometimes people need a sober oracle, but it's not like he ever gets it right that often and when he does, the family doesn't like to hear from him. "What were you doing in Iceland?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," said Martha, laughing. Admittedly, that did mean she was thinking about the whole volcano thing, and how she and the skalds and the Doctor had to sing the ancient alien intelligence under the volcano back to sleep so the Droussae couldn't steal its power before it spawned.

It had taken a hell of a lot of alcohol, though fortunately the TARDIS was good at hangover cures and the Doctor made a mean fryup. She missed it all, not just him. She was trying not to think about that.

Though maybe she should, considering her situation.

"It was a good time, though," she added, not to seem unfriendly to stoner bloke. "I'd like to go back sometime. Maybe when it's not winter."

"I think I would," Olaf dares her in turn with a knowing glint in his eye that says he'd believe most of the mad shit that people have to say, but don't because they're supposed to be very, very normal. "Ah, winter in the homelands," he says, shaking his head. "One of my cousins can attest to the Norse winters being insanely cold. He probably also had quite a bit of aquavit while he was up there." Olaf would too, trapped in an environment like that and guided by ravens in human form.

The way the man was looking at her led Martha to believe that he might actually believe her if she told him part of the story. Deep down, she realised she was hungry for it, to not keep all these things bottled up, for all-too-rare conversations with Jack or a gaping group of UNIT techs after a mission.

She was beginning to get the impression that around here, it would seem far less like a ridiculous mad story and might be a valid life narrative.

"It was damn cold," she agreed, "and all we had were these skins, I reckon they'd been tanned or something, but they still stank to high heaven. I'd need far more apple martinis to even try to approach the memory." It was a hint, a fairly bold one for Martha.

"You'd need something much warmer," Olaf agrees, thinking of what Anders had packed with him when he left on Agnetha's quest. "But," he says, searching around him for something that vaguely resembles the green drinks Helen had been so fond of serving, "here we are. Apple martini, upon request by the beautiful lady. Tell me a story. I love stories," he encourages.

Drinking apple martinis with a stoner in an alternate universe hotel. Martha wasn't entirely certain about the notion, but on her internal scale of weird shit, it was probably fairly low, all things considered. "We could go find somewhere to sit down?" she asked. "Sorry, I'm not...I've just been on my feet all day at work and this is all--"

She was tempted for a second to say heavy, legacy of 1968, god damn it. "Pretty intense."

He nods, because intense is a pretty damn good way to put it. "I'm always up for sitting down," Olaf promises with an easygoing grin. "I can give you a story or two in turn. It's only fair to barter," he points out.

He was kinda cute. Older, but cute, and hey, when you'd had a thing for someone who was over nine centuries old, it was really all relative. Wasn't it?

"Sounds good," she said with a smile of her own, and gestured over to where a cocktail table'd been vacated. She still wasn't sure what to do with her scrubs, so she set them down at her feet as she sat. "I'll have to keep you in mind if I end up selling something."

Olaf follows along merrily, sitting in the other chair and sprawling out like he's intending to take it over, rather than simply sitting there unassumingly. "So," he says. "Iceland," he encourages, because stories about the homelands are always better, for some reason.

Martha knew someone else who sat in chairs like that. Oh god, she thought to herself, no. I am not getting a type. Wrong, Jones.

She sipped her drink, which she'd seen him take off the server, so if it was spiked, they all were and she was out of luck anyhow. "See, the reason I wanted to sit down is because you have to know the backstory," she said. "Because this was Iceland in the ninth century AD, and that's not usually the Iceland people think of, with Björk and clean energy buses and ice hotels and stuff. I don't really tell this story, much," she admitted, sheepishly.

Olaf raises his brow. "Ninth century Iceland," he echoes, which is a funny thing, because that's actually one of the good times. The god spirit remembers that; all those settlers emigrating to Iceland and bringing their pagan beliefs with them. "Did you meet anyone interesting?" he asks, like it's not a big deal that she's talking about the past. He's ninety-three years old, after all.

"Yeah. Some of the first settlers, a bunch of skalds," said Martha. "See, I...didn't get there randomly, I was travelling with this bloke, time travelling. I'm not from the ninth century, right, and they'd never seen a black person before--and this is where people start to give me looks..."

When she bothered telling the story at all, anymore. Even her family--the ones who'd lived the Year That Was first-hand, remembered it--got a little stunned-looking when she mentioned travels with the Doctor. Funny, the guy here didn't seem to be overly startled. Maybe it was an alternate universe thing, maybe where he was from people just up and went to the past like it was Magaluf.

"Turns out their settling had woken up an alien spirit that had settled in one of the volcanoes, and the energy signature drew some other people, not from around Earth, to try and capture it...oh my god, please don't think I'm one of those people..."

Olaf raises his brow, not bothering to hide his bemusement. "Don't worry," he insists, leaning forward to rest a hand over hers. "I don't think you're one of those people," he promises, easing back when something hits him like the universe is trying to knock him off his seat with everything at once, which makes his head hurt enough to make him drink. "Alien?" he echoes. "Not a god?"

Martha could feel her cheeks heat a little at the touch, but she was good at playing it cool by now, between the Doctor and her job. She took a drink of her own, relieved that he wasn't thinking she belonged on some kind of Channel Five documentary about abductees.

"In the volcano? No, definitely an alien," she said. "Not related to the gods in the area at all, actually. Sort of like a...well, a giant non-corporeal cat? Likes to find warm places to sleep in, gives off some kind of radiation that I don't remember the name of, when it's awake. I say warm places and mean it likes lava for blankets, though, and very much not local."

"You'd definitely need a big kitty litter for that kind of cat," Olaf says knowingly, grinning crookedly as he takes his drink and sips at it, basking in the simple joy of a good apple martini. "So, then, there was an alien in a volcano," he says matter-of-factly. "Where did it go?"

"See, you get it. That was sort of the idea, that the invading forces, the Droussae, would basically capture it and use its, uh, emissions, for a power source. But the Decarian Felis is an endangered species universally, and it's supposed to settle where it likes and not be disturbed. The Icelandic settlers were totally fine with that," Martha noted, making sure he was aware. "So we had to stay up all night waiting for the Droussae to turn up, drinking and telling stories, and it was absolutely freezing."

She paused, grinning, and winked at him. "As far as I know, the Felis is still there."

Edited 2013-07-06 23:50 (UTC)

"I'll have to make sure I go and visit," he says. If his passport is ever returned to him from his frequent trips to Bali. And if he's ever allowed out of the country for more than a week without the family needing the oracle. "So, ninth century Iceland, but you're a modern-seeming lady," he appraises. "How'd you do it? Old soul? Multiple yous?"

"Just don't wake it up. It's hard to get it to go back to sleep again, that's why we needed the skalds. Not that they were boring, but they did know some good lullabies." A soft, faint, but real smile played across Martha's lips at the memory. It was a lot easier to think about it now, she realized.

"And uh, no. Less...metaphysical than that?" she said, looking back at the man across the table. "See, I was in my second foundation year--this is 2008--and some seriously weird stuff happened at the hospital where I was doing my rotation...I met this guy. Another alien. And he was a time traveller, and I couldn't really let that kind of opportunity pass me by. So we travelled for a while, together. Iceland was one stop."

Couldn't let him pass her by, in truth. For fuck's sake.

"I know a song or two," Olaf says, though he hasn't really ever used them in the way that the lullabies were used ages ago and songs aren't as much a part of his every day life as they were back in Asgard. "Aliens," he says, nodding his head, wondering what they smell like. "Weird," he says, in the way one might say 'interesting'. "Little green men?"

"You never know when you might need it," said Martha, with dry humour and more than a little honesty. "And no, actually..." She felt her cheeks heat a little, and took a sip of her drink (more like a gulp). "This one just looks like a skinny tall bloke with messy hair, like a human. Except he has two hearts. I mean, we met aliens that didn't look human at all, but not the Doctor. He'd blend in if he didn't make himself stand out so much," she said, fondly, if with a bit of remaining exasperation.