tushanshu_logs | 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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?"

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