tushanshu_logs | next chance to move on [open]

Entry tags:

next chance to move on [open]

Characters: A newly arrived Yosuke and whoever wants to bump into him!
Date: 17th March (and onwards?)
Location: See prompts! Or wherever - if you want another scenario, feel free to let me know / bring your own.
Situation: There's a new kid in town, and it's painfully obvious just looking at him for half a second.
Warnings/Rating: Nothing but mild swearing for now.

[A: The Hotel]

It turns out Yosuke wasn't hallucinating last night, but he knew that. Since last year, he's stopped expecting anything he sees to be the literal kind of unreal when figurative will do.

And in the meantime, this unreal new world seems to have gone on ticking without him. When he makes it back down to solid, non-magically-activated ground, he wonders just how out of it he must have been to not notice the construction work going on around the ground floor. Workers hurry back and forth - uhh, not workers, kedan...? Dammit, he got a crash course, but what he needed was a cram school. Whoever they are, their hustling and bustling gives him the nagging feeling he should tiptoe past, or at least obligingly flatten himself against a wall.

So he does the latter. It isn't the most efficient way for a person to walk to the lobby, but he's edging along somehow. Preoccupied with it, even.

[B: a street in Metal Sector]

"Uhh... sickness? Cursed land...?"

The one really dream-like part, he thinks, is his perception of time. It took him a million years to drag himself across the fields into the city proper yesterday, a geological era to dismiss the unhelpfully colourful mental images buzzing through his head when he woke up late this morning, and a nanosecond after stepping out of the hotel doors to get lost. ...Although the last one isn't that dream-like, loath as he is to admit it. And the persistent grogginess weighing down his eyelids even after he hauled himself upright might not be helping.

For what it's worth, the gaggle of bulky-looking kedan glowering at him from the sidewalk don't seem interested in anything he could admit; every time he opens his mouth, they seem to take it as an insult. That predicament is pretty familiar to Yosuke outside of dreams too, but it can't be the same here, surely? He's thinking before he talks today. He kind of has to. There's nobody else around to do it for him.

He tries one last time. "Sorry, I honestly don't know what -" he starts to say - cuts himself off, flinches, instinctively shields his face -

- and stares, dumbfounded. The almighty splash catches the front of his already distinctly grimy shirt, but he hardly notices the chill yet. Was there always a banana peel there, in exactly the right place? ... Has he seen anyone in town carrying bananas around so far? Wha...

The two kedan who'd tried to round on him pick themselves up, shoot him a stereo glare at least as icy as the puddle they'd careened into, and finally the group pushes past him before he can hit a wall backing away.

Only once they all seem to be out of earshot does Yosuke relax. "S'one other thing you don't get in the sticks," he mutters, none too quietly. Then he shivers, shakes his head, and starts to wring out the hem of his shirt.

Which draws his attention to the shiny blue card that had insinuated its way into his palm the moment he flung up his hand. Which startles him all over again. Which might not be so sensible, with the offending banana peel from a minute ago still serenely sitting a step away.

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With the quarantine on the Palace grounds ended and the Dust contamination largely under control, Skulduggery had taken to spending his time helping Anton transform part of the Hotel's ground floor into a garage. He was even marginally successful, but in the end Anton practically ordered him to stay away; Skulduggery didn't know much about the dimensional wards and apparently he was scaring the kedan.

Not because of the fact he was a skeleton, mind you. For most of the workers, it was because they'd identified him as the Bentley's owner, and they were terrified of accidentally doing something which might incur his wrath.

Skulduggery, far from being offended, was thoroughly amused by the whole thing. He was on his way out of the lobby himself when he spotted the wallflower inching along towards the door. Too nervous to be a kedan, too unfamiliar to be a Foreigner. For a moment, Skulduggery considered letting someone else handle the explanations - people usually didn't react well to him, after all. But Anton was essentially the prime choice and Anton was too busy. Besides, it was something to do.

So Skulduggery stopped. "The floor's perfectly safe, you know," he pointed out, right as one of the aforementioned kedan workers dodged quickly around him.

Yosuke yelped, and immediately felt bad about it. Trust him to get so wrapped up in getting the hell out of the way that he couldn't notice when he wasn't. Maybe part of him hadn't woken up yet. "S-Sorry," he mumbled, the apology spilling out on reflex before he even glances round. "It's just, if they're all busy renovating in there, I figured it's best not to get under their feet..."

When he did look towards the stranger's voice, he immediately felt less bad. That... wasn't a costume, was it? Or else it had to be the most convincing one he'd ever stumbled across. Once he'd stared for a fraction of a second too long to remain polite, he could see the vertebrae. Along with a lot more than he cared for. And if it was one thing to watch a skeleton burst into existence from a safe distance away knowing that his best friend had the reins (handlebars? ... shoulders?), it was another to encounter one all but privately snickering at him while he was stranded on his own.

If he was here, said best friend would probably take this in stride, too. With that in mind, Yosuke made a valiant effort. He sagged, still propped up against the wall, but stopped short of screaming and running away. "I... guess I'm still a little on edge," he said, helplessly.

"You're very much on edge," Skulduggery corrected him, gesturing to the wall. "You're so much on edge, in fact, that you're hugging it."

The man wasn't speechless, which was a good sign. Nor was he going dangerously pale and fainting. That was two of the more common reactions efficiently dealt with and tucked out of the way.

"Since you're here," Skulduggery went on, "I imagine someone's given you the basics. But, since you're also more inclined to avoid touching a single thing rather than leaving the Hotel as fast as you can, whoever that someone was didn't do a very good job. Is there anything you'd like to know more about?" The skeleton's head tilted to the side. "The kedan, for example, aren't quite boogeymen."

Far from turning white, Yosuke's face promptly flushed a little pink. Great, now it was making fun of him outside the confines of its own shiny head. Which could do with way more confining itself, but now didn't seem like a good time to get distracted. "Dude, I got stepped on a bunch of times just trying to find this place yesterday!" he protested, not quite looking the skeleton in the eye holes. "I'm not being weird about it or anything..."

Okay, okay. Breathe. There we go. "...Sorry." Twice in less than a minute. It's like he's back home on customer service - man, it's been a day, he can't believe he might be missing that already. "Um, I was going to head out in a minute, I swear... Are they really that busy today, though? Er, sir?"

That, or they were stricter about turfing the moochers out than he'd gotten an impression of when he lurched in. Well, he couldn't really blame them for either of those. Blaming them wouldn't help him decide what to do now that it seemed like he was being kicked out.

"They're busy most of this month," Skulduggery replied, deeming a small step closer to be a safe decision now that the initial ice had been broken. "The Hotel occupies an inter-dimensional space, you see. It opens up onto every single Sector in the city at once. The proprietor is building a garage space onto the side, and that's an endeavour which needs both magical and mechanical knowledge. And it's Skulduggery, by the way. Not 'sir'."

Once, a very long time ago, Skulduggery had been a 'sir'. Those days were far behind him, and he preferred keeping it that way.

"Oh, uh, sorry..." Three times, Yosuke thought to himself. He'd have to start apologising for apologising at this rate.

Or he could seize on the first change of topic that comes to mind and ride it out. That wasn't getting distracted, not really. He could call it intelligence gathering! And, probably more importantly, the skull dude mentioned it first.

(But man, how did you even write a name like that...?)

"So it's an interdimensional space... inside one big interdimensional space?" If he'd managed to catch any of the explanations he'd been peppered with yesterday, that is. He cocked his head. Just the idea gave him the distinct feeling that they were still circling high above it. "Is that - normal for here, or am I still missing something?"

Edited 2015-03-27 10:56 (UTC)

Skulduggery considered that, head tilted to one side, unconsciously echoing Yosuke's mannerism. "That depends on your definition of normal," he eventually said. "Is it outside the realm of possibility? No. No one here was very surprised when the Hotel first appeared. Is it something that happens often? Not particularly. Of course, the Hotel is a very different sort of interdimensional space from this world as a whole, which is probably why it works."

In Skulduggery and Anton's world, the Hotel wasn't even slightly interdimensional. It changed location, but that was it. If Skulduggery had to guess, he'd say Anton was dragged to Keeliai at precisely the same moment as the Hotel was changing location, dragging the Hotel right alongside him - and how do you fit an entire building into a space it wasn't designed to fit in? Shift it just slightly to the side of reality.

It was enough to make even Skulduggery's head hurt if he thought about it too much.

"Oh, so there's different kinds of them! That... makes way more sense than what I was thinking. I kept getting stuck on where the stuff back home would fit in..."

At least he'd calmed down a little, and all it had taken was five seconds of contemplating something other than his own nerves. Presently, he hazarded a lopsided smile. "So what does that make you, the local metaphysics expert or something? Uh, Mister Skullhead?"

"Skulduggery," Skulduggery corrected with all the non-offence of someone who's heard much worse nicknames for much too long. "I wouldn't call myself a metaphysics expert. More of a friendly metaphysics guide."

Whether he wanted to be one or not, unfortunately.

He gestured at the wall behind the other Foreigner. "Starting to get your sea legs?"

At long last, Genis is freely heading out and about on the town on his own, and with that he's finally exploring the city. It doesn't seem quite as bad now as when he first came here, though maybe that's because he's just getting his feet wet with everything. But with all the exploration comes a general sort of amazement, and the Metal Sector is one of those places where Genis is utterly amazed by everything. It's got the feel of a culture that he's never seen before with all those architectural angles and everything. Really, it's a city of the future.

Genis happens to see the tail end of the incident up ahead, which is to say that he saw the almighty burst of water, the kedan practically tripping over themselves, and then the kedan practically running away as if they'd just seen some sort of giant or something. Except there's no sort of giant. Even as Genis ran over there to defend whomever it was they were picking on—after all, he didn't look like a kedan, so he had to be a Foreigner, right? And the Foreigners were the good guys... because they were them, of course—it's too late to do anything.

But Genis runs over anyway, his kendama in his right hand to Yosuke before stopping right before him. "Whoa, what happened to you? Looks like you had a fight with the ocean. And lost."

"Huh?" Caught by surprise, Yosuke has enough presence of mind to let his arm drop, although his hand still clutches the tarot card like some sort of good luck charm. A kid? Something about him looks a little different to most of the people who've shoved Yosuke around so far today, but it's hard to put a finger on - his expression, his outfit, maybe the way he's carrying himself? Well, whatever. The important part is that he doesn't sound unfriendly, so Yosuke manages a wry grin without hesitating for too long. "Ahaha, haha... Could've been their generous way of telling me I need a clean shirt."

And now he's reminded himself, against his better judgement. He shivers, almost dropping the card. A warmer shirt, too. He'd thought this one was practical for early spring in the mountains, but for turtles and randomly-materialising banana skins, who the hell knows?

"Not that I forgot," he adds quickly, as much to distract himself as to strike up a better conversation than the one he just failed to have. "Hey, that aside, did you see those guys? They're not lurking around the corner with a knife or anything, are they?"

Yeah, Genis could have said it many, many ways more tactfully. But he's twelve years old, a pint-sized precious child. There's no way he's going to resort to tact.

"Well you need that, too," Genis starts, "due to your accident with the water, but I figured that part was pretty obvious, really." He holds out a hand and gestures vaguely at the shirt before just shaking his head. "Probably could use a warmer one, to boot, though I imagine that's a slightly lower priority than just getting warm. I could probably help on that if there was something that could actually catch fire."

Genis looks over his shoulder as if to look where he's gesturing, but Genis shakes his head. "Nah, those guys totally booked it. Don't exactly know why, though they'd have had to mess with me if they wanted to mess with you. I figure they're just upset with you for the same reason they're upset with all of us."

Mess with... him? A little kid packing a toy and a motor mouth? Yosuke can't help cocking his head for a second - but on reflection, he realises there's not much reason for him to be sceptical. He literally fell out of the sky into a field 24 hours ago, and now he's here. He doesn't have a tarot card to stand on.

...He'll hold onto the one in his hand for the time being, though, until he's finished calming down. It's familiar in a way that nothing else is any more.

"Yeah, they were pretty emphatic about that part," he says, giving up on his damp shirt and wrapping his arms around it to try and stop his teeth from chattering too much. He is talking to a kid, after all, and he's nearly a third-year himself. Can't look so rattled that he'd leave a bad impression. Can he? Nah. "Although the rest of it was kinda vague... Something about a palace?" He contrives to shrug. It ends up looking more like another small shiver. "Anyways, they told me yesterday at that centre it could get rough in some parts of town, but sheesh. Someone oughta keep an eye on guys like that."

If whomever this guy is would talk to Genis for any length of time, there might be the realisation that Genis might be much more the intellectual equivalent than he might think. But of course, that's water under the bridge for the time being as it hasn't even been brought up.

"Well yeah," Genis says before he coughs a bit. "Something about a war, blah blah, something about mistakes made, whatever whatever, and therefore we hate you. I've practically memorised the entire spiel now. It's always the same." He looks a little put out by it really, like he could stand to not have to deal with it. "There are a few," emphasis on those words, "that aren't too bad. But generally I've found them pretty irritable. Some worse than others, though I haven't exactly encountered ones that bad yet. Maybe it's because I'm just a kid, so they don't think to bully me." Which is weird to say since that's the perfect type of person to bully. Thankfully they didn't know he could spellcast circles around them.

"So who are you?"

Yosuke sure is being talked at at length, to the point that he has to stop and re-orient his mildly exasperated train of thought when he realises the kid finally expects an answer. It's for once a good thing that his own mouth is used to speeding on ahead without checking in with his brain. "Oh, my name's Yosuke," he says, brightening up a bit more. "I just went to work yesterday and woke up falling out of the sky instead, nothing special. So we're in the same boat, huh? You know how many of us are around out here? It's a few, isn't it?"

Who knows, they might all be equally chatty. That would suit Yosuke just fine.

If there's one thing that's rubbed off on Genis, it's that he's one to now ask for names first before giving his own. Not that there's any reason to it, but it's his own private joke with Lloyd... and perhaps to annoy him slightly. "I'm Genis, nice to meet ya," he answers.

"Well, I don't know really have an exact count of how many of us there are," Genis answers, thinking back. "I haven't even met everyone yet, much less talked to them on the network, but I'd guess there are somewhere between 25 and 50 of us? Give or take, of course. But yeah, otherwise, we're kind of in the same boat, trying to figure out this world. I just popped up at the University in the centre of town. Thankfully not as embarrassing as your situation, falling out of the sky."

Yosuke sighs, briefly forgetting himself. "It seriously is, isn't it...? If it happens again, I'll have to start ranking them. And that's even more worrying."

Which is something else that this Genis kid doesn't care about, of course. Looking away for a moment, he chances a glance up and down the street. It's wide, with more shops dotted around nearby than shady corners. If those shapeshifter thugs are still lurking just out of sight, they're doing it exceptionally well.

"But man, those guys totally killed the mood," he says eventually, idly tapping a finger on the card he's holding. "I was just trying to look for some stuff... Then again, if there's only that many of us in a whole city, they can get away with it, huh? That's pretty messed up."

"Yeah, there's a handful of them that just absolutely hate us for no good reason," Genis says. "Although I've been told that there actually are a good few reasons here and there, but it's only because of what a few people have done a while ago. It's no excuse to hate everyone."

But it seems that this Yosuke guy certainly seems worried about wherever those guys went. "Well, if you're worried that they're going to come and jump you again, I can be your bodyguard until you get back to the Hotel or wherever it is you want to go. They've got no chance against my magic!"

"B... Bodyguard!?"

Yosuke finds he can't hold back a brief burst of laughter, and belatedly realises he might be giddier from that close encounter than he thought. The mental image isn't even that funny, and honestly, he isn't inclined to be sceptical of anything right now.

"Um... thanks for the offer, I guess, but it's okay. I've got a couple tricks up my sleeve too, you know!" In his hand, in his head, same difference. "Anyways, I really don't think making that kind of scene would help convince them we're not worth worrying about. ...You haven't seriously gone after guys like that before, have you?" he adds, with a faint note of trepidation.

Genis' first reaction: rote annoyance.

"What, you're going to laugh at my magic before you've even seen it? Nobody can take me on with that!" Well, technically speaking, it's not exactly accurate, but Genis' magic is better than almost everyone and everything he's so far come across. "Though for what it's worth, my friends and I have gone stood up to guys like that before. Maybe not here, but back in my Aselia, yes. In fact, I helped save my world."

Oh boy, one of these... is a thought that flits into Yosuke's head and out of it before he can catch it to check where it came from. Huh, that's a little strange. Then again, so is getting all grandiose for a kid in their situation.

He surreptitiously coughs. "Uh, glad to hear it," he says, "but isn't that stuff a little different from handling those kind of thugs...?"

"Uh, not really," Genis says as he gives Yosuke a rather withering expression. "I mean, how is that any different than taking out the bandits who try to con people on religious pilgrimages out of their Gald? Or taking out Desian Cardinals who are running entire human ranches dedicated to making humans suffer? I think I'm pretty qualified in that department."

"Um - well, in that case, sorry," Yosuke says quickly, not because he's convinced, but because on the off chance this kid really is packing enough magic to brag about and finds it this hard to grasp a totally (totally) intelligible hint about scale, it wouldn't be wise to get on the wrong end. Anyway, he's not just killing time out here; even the thought of picking fights shouldn't be entering his mind before said mind has gotten itself more settled. ...Regardless of how cool he knows his Persona to be.

"... I guess I just don't see it helping much. If they're that chafed already, there's bound to be another crowd of guys like them popping up five seconds later."

Well, in fairness, Genis is only 12 years old, and that puts him decidedly in the middle of being entirely too youthful and entirely too mature. If it weren't for him bragging, perhaps he might have caught the hint a little bit better.

"Well I guess you have a point there," Genis says, shrugging his shoulders. "I just figured that if you wanted someone for the day, I could help you out. But I guess that won't help you tomorrow, I don't suppose. You just didn't look exactly ready for them when they came the first time. What exactly happened to send them running anyway though? I couldn't quite tell what happened from where I was."

Yosuke, to whom grade school age is a mist-choked period of time surpassed in distance from the present only by whatever the heck he's going to do after senior year, shrugs in turn. "Honestly, me neither. ...And, okay, maybe I panicked a little too." He gestures vaguely downwards. "It looked like one of those guys tripped before I could do anything, and then the other one hit his... uh?"

But the suspicious banana peel he'd thought he was indicating is nowhere to be seen. By city standards, the sidewalk is spotless. You can even see your face in it, although that's largely because of the puddle.

"Slipped, I mean. In the water. That... must've been it." Yosuke looks disconcerted, which already is nothing new, but there's a crease of frustration in his slight frown as well. "Yeesh, I coulda sworn..."

Genis hadn't seen the banana, but he had seen the splash of water, though he hadn't pieced together why that would have made the duo bungle away as if their lives depended upon it.

"Well, I guess that just means you must have met the most inept duo of muggers this city has ever seen," Genis speculates with an amused grin. "Lucky you that they were scared away by a puddle of water."

Jack doesn't live at the Hotel, but he's by here often enough, especially in the public areas like the lobby. Seeing a not-yet-familiar face, he decided to check on the guy, who looked about ready to leap out of his skin. Moving around so he wasn't approaching from the side, he didn't want to further startle Yosuke, he gave an easygoing wave with his free hand, the other easily balancing the long wooden staff over his opposite shoulder.

"Hey there," he said. "You look like you could do with a breather. Everything okay?"

"...Yo!" A simple greeting shouldn't have come as enough of a relief for Yosuke to practically peel off the wall the instant he heard it, but it sure felt like one. Maybe the long day yesterday of getting shoved from door to door had gotten further under his skin than he thought. In any case, he quickly returned the wave with interest. "Hah, to tell you the truth, I kinda overslept... I'm good, though," he said, mustering a smile. It was even true, about as true as it ever could be when he was on his own. At least this random guy looked relatively normal, which was to say somewhere close to Yosuke's age group and capable of holding a conversation.

He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, intending to point at more than just solid wall. "I was just wondering what they were working on back there, that's all. It didn't look like there were this many people around when I came in." Not that he'd been paying attention - to them or to anything by that point in the evening, really.

The winter teen laughed a little at Yosuke's relief, though he was glad to provide it. "Oversleeping is easy here," he grinned. "Helps when there's no real alarm clocks in this place. I'm not much of the rising at dawn type either, when I feel like sleeping." Which was not all the time, as he didn't require it.

"You mean the kedan? I think they're building something for Anton, that's all. As big as the Hotel is, maybe some upgrades were needed if everyone's going to be crashing here. I'm Jack, what's your name?"

He offered a hand, though if Yosuke does shake it, he'll find the white-haired teen's skin rather frigid to the touch.

"Oh, right! I'm Yosuke, Yosuke Hanamura - whoa, yeesh, is it that cold out?" Because he's really not dressed for that, stuck in the clothes he traipsed all the way into town with, not even a decent jacket to his name... and, you know, that's totally beside the point. Yosuke's self-consciousness doesn't kick in soon enough to stop him from letting go of Jack's hand rather quickly, but it promptly tints his face an appropriate shade of pink anyway. "I mean, nice to meet you! Heh."

Unable to think of a better way to mask his embarrassment, he looks back towards the noises of construction for a moment, and rubs at his neck. "And Anton was... uh, who was that again...?"

((I promise it doesn't normally take me a week to respond, sorry!!))

Jack laughed as he pulled his hand back, shaking his head and looking completely nonplussed about how quickly Yosuke let go. "Nah, it's pretty nice outside. The cold's mine, sorry about that. Another Japan drop-in, huh? Per capita, you guys have outnumbered the rest of us over the years. Nice to meet you too."

Jack used the crook end of his staff to indicate the Hotel. "Anton Shudder is the proprietor here," he said. "Innkeeper? Hotel manager? You know, I didn't ever ask what he prefers. Nobody really uses innkeeper anymore, but he's older than I am by like a hundred years."

"Oh, right, yeah! Yeah, that must be where I heard -"

Yosuke stopped abruptly. It was a light, offhand comment, but for a teenager to whom college age felt like a generation away, the comprehension hit like if not a brick then at least a handful of rubble. "Wait, that's who I have to go see? And he's still working?"

"Oh, you've met him? Tall guy, dresses like a funeral director, looks like a smile might snap him in half? That's Anton. Although I can't knock him for still working, when you do something you enjoy. He may come across like a stick in the mud, but he keeps this place really well."

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next chance to move on [open]

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no worries, I'm a snail myself o7

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