Red surveys the barroom from behind the old mahogany counter. By her reckoning she’s been the innkeeper for about a year or so. It’s hard to tell with everything shifting every day or two, sometimes several within a few hours. No sundial, calendar, or fancy gadget is going to be of much help. Daytimes, nighttime, a world with two suns, a world underground, they just run one into the other without regard to any circadian rhythm.
She feels like she’s seen it all, and yet keeps finding new surprises. As a fire demoness she’s managed to hold her own when the shits really hit the fan, but she shakes her head that she’s still alive. Idly, she wipes down the counter with a steaming rag. Five foot nine, Red has long wavy red hair, dark green eyes, and a skin tone that can vary from California tan to terra-cotta red, depending on her surface temperature. She wears a black Metallica tank top, no bra, frayed blue jeans, and her feet are bare. If you didn’t know you’d assume she was human.
There’s another slide coming up soon; she can feel it. After all this time she knows the subtle signs, the slight change in air pressure, the odd little breezes, and a slow build of static energy. Soon the fog will rise, obscuring the tavern, a thick grey can-hardly-see-your-hand sort of fog. Then, suddenly, with no lurching, no jolts, just soft as kitten paws, the tavern will be in a new place, a new time, along with its immediate grounds. It’s a sphere, really, that slides, a 117 feet radius sphere centered in the middle of the tavern. Ground, air, building, and everyone within, moves onward. And the tavern has always arrived perfectly in its new location, as if scouted ahead by some unseen surveyor.
“Last call before Slide,” she calls out. “If you’re not coming with, it’s time to bail.”
