"I am drunk now Morgan, not foolish. This is something I need to do sober." Maalech made a vague gesture, shaking his head. "It would be... without meaning to do it now. This? Alcohol? It simplifies matters, but also makes them less real. Courage is easy now. It will be less so once morning comes."

He rubbed the scar that crossed his eye a little, gaze distant.

"I am drunk, am I not?"

"Just a little. That floaty feeling is pretty normal." Morgan chuckled some and picked up the bottle, holding it in front of his face, "I could sober you up. I could sober me up, too. Just a little... bloomp." The man laughed again and looked over at the man, "And courage comes in many forms. Liquid is one of my favourites."

He smirked some and nodded, "But you're right. This isn't time for apologies."

"Hmph..." Maalech frowned a little, watching Morgan's distorted face through the bottle. "Please do not. it is disconcerting enough to be drunk, it would be more so to be subjected to magic." He found it deeply unsettling.

"What it is you seek then? In the bottle? I... admit. I am curious."

"Subjected to?" The man laughed a little before speaking again, "Nothing, really. Light playing off glass. Angles and things. I always liked it." The man chuckled a bit, "But that's a boring answer. I should have some anecdote or some shit on-hand for something like that. That was how I'd get those girls to talk to me. Be foreign and weird and do weird things. Look all moody into a glass and sigh."

Morgan put the bottle back on the table. "But it's just a bottle."

"I should have known that it had something to do with women." Maalech sighed and shook his head.

He looked amused. Which was odd.

He felt amused, which was a lot odder.

"But are you certain? That it is just a bottle? It got me drunk. It caused this discussion, because i am not fool enough to believe that I would have embarked on it otherwise. It could be the start of an important chain of events. Or just a bottle." He eyed it closely. "That will most likely give me hangover."

His lips curled in a wry smile. "And how would we know? What this bottle truly is?" He sounded as if he had the answer already.

"The bottle's just a bottle now. Devoid of purpose until it gets more something in it." He paused, looking at it on the table. "And I am in no way ready to even debate what the bottle is or symbolizes now. So you'd better tell me." The man chuckled, taking hold of the neck of the bottle and holding it up to the light again.

"And everything with me comes back to women. You know that."

"We all begin with them, and for most of us they will be our end as well. You are not alone in that." Maalech mused for a moment, picking up a breadstick. "We cannot know now. It is only later, when we look back that we can attribute meaning to this bottle, or to this conversation. And by then, how can we be sure that the past happened as we remembered it? It might just be as we need to remember it, for that future moment to happen. There is no future and we make up our past for each moment. Now is the one thing that truly exists. it is a sobering thought."

Not that it seemed to sober him up much.

"You are so fulla shit."

Morgan frowned some and looked at the bottle again before turning it upside-down and making it stay that way on the table. "I could argue for a month, but you're still full of shit." He nodded at the assertion as if to make it more true and sighed, "It's all happening at once, see. We all just have to parse it together A then B then C because otherwise we'd be like the Powers. Or bigger. Seeing it all at once. And then we'd be so fucking bored existence would just stop."

"At times I am amazed." Maalech nodded sagely, watching the bottle. "You are actually thinking..." He kept playing with hid breadstick as if it had been a pencil. "That is an intriguing concept. That there only is now. Overwhelming except..."

He frowned, watching the reflections in the glass as if he had been a fish contemplating a shiny object. "What if most of our lives were sheer conjecture, created by consensus to fill in the few moments of true existence that are allotted us?"

"Then we can blame Anne and her lot for what shitty people we are and I can go spend the rest of my life in a brothel until I die bedding four buxom redheads."

The man smiled a bit. That was on the list of acceptable deaths. Certainly beat the likely one.

"But, yeah, I thought about stuff. Jack and me used to stay up 'till all hours just talking about what it all might be like underneath the skin. What're the Universe's organs like, what are it's processes, how does it do things?"

Morgan shook his head, "But he's dead now so I mostly just regurgitate the same bullshit."