Constantine shook his head and waved good-bye. She turned back to her demi-angels as he continued down the stairs, passing people and nonpeople; from the corners of his eyes glimpsing wings, tails, horns; turning a couple of times to look at some of the more distinct ones: a crookedly smiling man whose arms and legs and head were detached from his torso and floating in the air near the places they should be connected to but not touching them, the limbs sometimes spinning in place in a way impossible for people with joints; a man with a winged skull sitting on his shoulder, a sort of pet nuzzling his head like a cockatoo, now and then tearing off bits of a human heart and feeding them to the sniggering skull; a black woman whose gown seemed to be brilliant red rippling satin, till he saw that it was made out of flame, real fire that exuded from her unharmed skin; a prominent senator chatting up a creature with the body of a woman and the head of a large snake, the creature somehow seeming surprisingly pretty, for all of that.
— Constantine: The Novelization
They ended up in The Wandering Company just after Docks midnight. This was not Organization territory, but it was one of Ravna's favorite places, a private dive that attracted traders from the Top to the Bottom. She wondered how the decor would appeal to Pham Nuwen. The place was modeled as a meeting lodge on some world of the Slow Zone. A three-meter model ramscoop hung in the air over the main service floor. Blue-green drive fields glowed from the ship's every corner and flange, and spread faintly among patrons sitting below.
To Ravna the walls and floors were heavy timber, rough cut. People like Egravan saw stone walls and narrow tunnels — the sort of broodery his race had maintained on new conquests of long ago. The trickery was optical — not some mental smudging — and about the best that could be done in the Middle Beyond.
Ravna and Pham walked between widely-spaced tables. The owners weren't as successful with sound as with vision: the music was faint and changed from table to table. Smells changed too, and were a little bit harder to take. Air management was working hard to keep everyone healthy, if not completely comfortable. Tonight the place was crowded. At the far end of the service floor, the special-atmosphere nooks were occupied: low pressure, high pressure, high NOx, aquaria. Some customers were vague blurs within turbid atmospheres.
INT. MEANWHILE AT THE FUCKING SCI-FI BAR THAT FUCKING EXISTS BECAUSE EVERY SCI-FI SETTING HAS TO HAVE A BAR REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THAT MAKES ANY GODDAMN SENSE, I MEAN EVEN THE ORIGINAL TRON HAD ONE SO WHY SHOULDN'T THIS
Our other heroes arrive at THE FUCKING BAR and fuck around with GOOFY BEINGS and BILL MURRAY and get some OOZE and BACKSTORY that could just as easily have come from the MICRO-NOTS but NOOOPE WE GOTTA SEND SOME CHARACTERS TO THIS HALF-ASSED CANTO BIGHT BULLSHIT GODDAMN IT TO FUCK let's just go to a new scene.
