next chance to move on [open]

[windbreak]

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.

Comments

A!

[skeletonenigma]

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.

B!

[strokeofgenis]

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."

A.

[wintershepherd]

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?"