Inn Between The Worlds - Television Tropes & Idioms

It may be an inn on a road in a Heroic Fantasy world, a Wild West saloon, a bar in a high-tech spacestation, or just a local pub — or it could be all of these at the same time. The Inn Between the Worlds exists simultaneously in different worlds, universes and/or times, or perhaps just jumps around in the fashion of The Little Shop That Wasnt There Yesterday. Whether or not you can reliably return to where you came in varies.

Sometimes it's used as a Framing Device for the patrons to tell strange and fantastic stories of their worlds. Sometimes it enables a Time Travel or Trapped In Another World plot, where the character leaves the inn through the wrong entrance (or the right entrance depending on your point of view). Perhaps it enables a Crossover for characters from different worlds or times to meet in a friendly environment. On rare occasions, if no one ever leaves, it may turn out to be a kind of afterlife.

Examples

Anime

The Cafe between Life and Death that Tomoe and Shiki sit across from each other in Chapter 5 of Kara No Kyoukai before they go opposite ways to be with their loved ones.

Comic Books

Book 8 of The Sandman (Worlds' End) is set in such an inn. Book 9 mentions that there are four.
- The latest House Of Mystery comic from Vertigo is set in one of these.
Warhammer has a comic series called "Tales of the Ten-Tailed Cat" set in a tavern like this.
The Oblivion Bar in Shadowpact, formerly a bookstore.
Munden's Bar in Grim Jack; in this case, it's a property of the city the bar is in, though Munden's itself gets more than its share of odd customers even by the standards of Cynosure.
The Transformers comics had Old Maccadam's Oil House, one of the best bars on Cybertron. It's run by the titular Maccadam, who is rumored to be one of the original thirteen Transformers, and in one comic one of the backrooms served as a hangout for dead Optimuses while they were waiting for resurrection. As soon as the Optimuses (Optimi?) got revived, a gaggle of dead Megatrons showed up.

Fanfic

This Time Round, the Doctor Who pub outside continuity, a meeting place for everything in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe - and every canon they've crossed over with. Inspired by the Subreality Cafe, which is this for comics characters.
Arisugawa's Locket also exists simultaneously across many dimensions.

Literature

Callahan's Crosstime Saloon and sequels are all about such a place. (Actually, Callahan's Bar is a perfectly normal location in spacetime, it's the patrons and barkeep that come from everywhere and everywhen.)
- Lady Callahan's is similar, but it is a brothel with a bar downstairs. Oddly, the innocent and regulated downstairs is so awesome some never take advantage of the other services available.
- Ditto with Arthur C. Clarke's Tales from the White Hart, L. Sprague de Camp's Tales from Gavagan's Bar, and Larry Niven's Tales from the Draco Tavern.
The Captain's Table Star Trek novels use it as a Framing Device. This particular version can only be reached by those who hold or have held the Captain rank (or its equivalent) which, coupled with the fact it touches all of time and space, means it sees all sorts of visitors — like a Captain of a Roman Legion. About the only permanent occupant is a dazed man in a tattered uniform who sits in a dark corner staring into nothing and mumbling about icebergs... yes, that's right, it's the captain of the Titanic, who remains in the Captain's Table due to a mixture of having mentally broken and the fact that stepping out the door will place him back on the Titanic's deck as it finishes sinking into the ocean.
Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, after a fashion.
- Also the Massive Multiplayer Crossover LiveJournal . RPG named for it, although whether they're actually meant to be the same bar is unclear.
- And don't forget the Big Bang Burger Bar, at the other "end" of the universe...
Played with in Phyllis Ann Karr's A Night at Two Inns in the second of the Sword and Sorceress anthologies, where there are not one but two such inns opposite each other. Each claims to be Heaven, and denounces the other as Hell. Actually, one was a Valhalla-type afterlife and the other a contemplative one — but the residents of either would find the other hellishly unpleasant.
The 1988 Hugo-Winning short story Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers by Lawrence Watt-Evans features a hamburger joint that exists in the same spot in nearly all universes, making it a popular late-night hangout for inter-dimensional travelers.
Alfred Bester & Roger Zelazny's Psychoshop has a similar nature, but instead of a bar, it's a sort of pawnshop, "where you can dump any unwanted aspect of your spirit as long as you exchange it for something else".
The Old Phoenix Tavern in several works by Poul Anderson, most famously A Midsummer Tempest — where it introduces a character from his Operation Chaos and another from Three Hearts and Three Lions.
The short story The Inn at Mount Either takes place at an inn located on an inter dimensional mountain and is connected to alternated versions of itself. The story deals with the protagonist searching for his wife after she gets lost among the infinite worlds. It is implied that the wife he found wasn't "exactly" who he was looking for, and he may have not returned to the right Earth.
The Draco Tavern in several Larry Niven short stories is a pub in Earth's main spaceport, equpped for a very diverse range of customers.
Cowboy Feng's Space Bar And Grille, from the Stephen Brust novel of the same name, jumps from world to world (and time to time) whenever an atomic bomb goes off nearby. And that's been happening a lot lately...
The House of Red Fireflies is a brothel between the worlds, currently there are three short stories set there. They're safe for work but Your Mileage May Vary
Honest John's in The Riftwar Cycle. It's reached from the Hall of Worlds, by stepping off the path between certain doorways. You have to know the right spots... or else.
- Any of the several right spots. Or else what is never really elaborated upon, but nobody ever comes back from it. Nobody ever says how, exactly, it was found, or for that matter how it exists.

Live Action TV

The "Astral Diner" of the Stargate: SG-1 episode "Threads".
Arguably, Al's diner/bar in Mirror Image, the last episode of Quantum Leap.
The titular diner of Nightmare Café starring Robert Englund was an example of a sentient Inn Between The Worlds.
Hikari Studio in Kamen Rider Decade, which serves as Tsukasa's method of travelling between the parallel worlds.

Tabletop RPGs

The Dungeons And Dragons Mystara campaign world has two: the Comealong Inn and The Inn Between the Worlds. (Originally just one, they were split thanks to a Ret Con.) Other campaign settings have the World Serpent Inn, which is actually theorized to be a sentient demi-plane.
Several roleplaying forums have an Inn Between the Worlds or similar subforum for players to meet up and chat in character despite playing in different campaign worlds.
There is a GURPS worldbook where every adventure starts in a bar where going to the bathroom can land you literally anywhere in the multiverse.
- GURPS also has a semi-sentient Victorian Era-esque Gentleman's Club which has hundreds of doors which all lead to various alternate universes, listed in the original Time Travel supplement.
The eponymous Floating Vagabond from the Tabletop Games Tales From The Floating Vagabond is a variation of this—it only exists in one place and time, but has a device that will randomly cause people who enter other bars in any time, reality, or location in the universe to end up there... and once it's happened once, they can intentionally cause it to happen whenever they enter another bar from then on.
"Chez Régis" in In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas, where angels and demons can drink without fighting each other.
Sigil from the Planescape D&D setting is the city equivalent of this trope — located on the inside of a torus on top of an infinitely tall spire located in the exact center of the planes (who are infinite in size — no, don't think too hard about that one), it is simultaneously, through its virtually infinite amounts of portals, all of whom differ in size, place they lead to and what opens them, connected to virtually everywhere in D&D cosmology. Because of this, Sigil is a place where one can expect to find almost anything. It's still a somewhat normal town with everyday life and time that flows normally, however.
- A city built on the inside of a torus so that you can see it curving above you, where belief can shape reality, frequented by supernatural beings from all over the multiverse, ruled by an enigmatic being who kills those who worship her by pulling her sharp shadow over them... "Normal" may be a bit misleading word.

Video Games

"Pocket D" is a nightclub in a small pocket dimension, in the MMORPGs City Of Heroes and City of Villains. It's accessible from multiple points in either game, and allows characters from both to interact.
- It's also the designated location for special events, including the Winter and Spring Events.
  - Does this really count though? Both the rogue isles and Paragon city, last I checked were in the same universe.'
  - Pocket D is called "Pocket D" as an abbreviation for "Pocket Dimension." It's not anywhere on Earth, or even the same plane of existence as Paragon City and the Rogue Isles.
In the earlier part of Chrono Trigger but (suspiciously) right after the number of characters playable at once exceeds three, time travel happens through portals at the "End of Time", which is a claustrophobic collection of several connecting rooms. It's not nice enough to be an Inn, but it IS an important juncture point between the eras of time.
- There is some kind of explanation given about why you end up there to justify why it happened only as you got four characters in your team.
- The fact that it's the juncture point between points of time is hilarious when you remember that it's the end of time. In other words, the fastest way between two points of time is to go to the end and back.
  - This isn't as surprising when you take into account the fact that the "End" of Time is really just a convenient moniker for a place that simply exists outside of time. It's easy to travel between points in time when you simply exit the continuum and re-enter it at a point of your choosing.
  - Nor is it meant to be the fastest way. It's little more than a temporal divide-by-zero error. (Remember how in Wild Arms, you would get to the Abyss by beating the crap out of the teleporter?)
The aptly-named Tavern of Time, located in the Caverns of Time in World Of Warcraft. It's simply a little house with a bartender NPC in it.
- The mage's tower in Stormwind contains a portal leading to large room with tall Cathedral ceilings, where the mage trainers do their studies. If you listen to some of the mages' conversations around the district, they talk about stabilizing portals and creating small universes.
- Also, the floating dungeon, Naxxramas. The interior of the dungeon is much larger than the exterior would allow.
Traverse Town, in Kingdom Hearts, serves as a refuge for survivors from all the different worlds that've been destroyed by The Heartless, and a launching point into the game's multiverse. The "corridors of darkness" that are ripped open during a world's destruction tend to take people to Traverse Town by default, which is how the hero first arrived after escaping his Doomed Hometown.
- Its mentioned at one point that Traverse Town was created by the aggregation of the pieces of worlds destroyed by the Heartless. Its sorta a frankenstein planet.

Webcomics

The Cross Time Cafe webcomic exists to let webcomic characters meet up outside their own continuity.
The Pub Stub from Goats.
In Achewood, travelling between Earth and Hell is done through the restrooms in Friendly's.
The Adventures Of Doctor Mc Ninja shows Purgatory as being a Restaurant Between the Worlds, in which one eats one's venial sins to purge them from the soul. However, since the restaurant is infinite and there's only one waiter, the process can take millennia.
- Would that make plenary indulgences the spiritual form of bribing the kitchen staff?

Web Original

The Sands of Time in Star Harbor Nights is an extradimensional tavern. Its existence has been used to justify at least one "incredibly pointless cameo" from a minor Tales Of MU character.
Ouroboros a.k.a. The Pub in the Hub of the Multiverse, from AH Dot Com The Series.
Game FA Qs has an invite only board called "Restaurant at the End of the Universe"
"The Inn Between Realms" was a thread in the now defunct Amazon.com Science Fiction & Fantasy discussion board and its user-created continuation at Delphi that grew spontaneously from casual chatting through roleplaying to collaborative storytelling. It was mostly set in the titular Inn which, of course, was an example of this trope. How exactly it existed "between realms" wasn't entirely clear, but one explanation was that it carried with it a small area of geography whose edges linked to random places on various worlds at different times, without visible transition lines. In any case, everyone bringing in their various original characters reflected the world-connecting nature of the location. The story remained mostly an insider thing, but as a handful of the collaborators are published authors (no big names... yet) and many others are prospective, the setting may crop up somewhere yet.