[Midnight Hotel] November catch-all

[gistful]

Characters: Anyone, everyone.
Date: Month of November, 2015 (2016 in-game).
Location: The Midnight Hotel.
Situation: Catch-all post! Feel free to use this post for anything that happens within the Midnight Hotel during the month, using the subject header to label specific rooms or for specific people. See also the OOC note at the bottom.
Warnings/Rating: Mark your threads if content warnings become applicable, please!

The Hotel’s processes are chugging along in November. Some absences due to Foreigners leaving means that the Hotel employees are fewer, and while nothing changes in terms of services, things are a little bit hectic. For this reason, some of the kedanese part-timers will be more prominent—particularly at the desk and in the lobby, and keeping the peace.

There’s also that incident with Ravel becoming a bunny rabbit, which puts a little extra strain on the staff, having lost one of their own … temporarily.

The kedan who know Anton well are tiptoeing around him a bit this month. Some of them witnessed him with China at the masquerade and there are some rumours going around the Hotel that the proprietor has a squeeze on the side. Those who actually mention it inside his hearing find out quickly not to do it again, and even on good days he’s tense and almost grumpy. The only times his mood lightens at all this month are when he has the care of the tiny white bunny Erskine’s become.

[ooc: The Midnight Hotel’s status page is available here, with the rules at the top and ongoing status at the bottom. PLEASE POST TO THE STATUS PAGE IF YOUR CHARACTER WOULD LIKE A ROOM, JOB OR AREA IN THE GARAGE, OR ARE MOVING OUT. Anton will manufacture means of payment until Foreigners are able to properly offer recompense or choose to move out.]

Comments

[problematical]

A. closed to Anton

Volunteers at the Welcome Center had directed River to the Midnight Hotel and told her to speak to its proprietor. He might be able to help her find a means to pay for the room rental, they said, once the starter package of funds exhausted itself. Their old housings scattered through the various Sectors, it seemed, had long since been taken over-- no default Foreigner housing was provided any longer.

Nor were many of the familiar faces she'd hoped to see still present. She wished very much that Hawke was still around.

The lobby seems as good a place as any to find Anton, so River slips in through the Central Sector entrance and lingers along the wall, looking carefully over everything.

B. open to any

River seems determined to explore every nook and cranny of the Hotel within a week of her arrival. The kitchen, the garage, the hallways, the lobby. If this was to be her new Serenity for the stay, now that a room had been worked out with Anton, she wanted to know all about it.

Other people will quickly find she has a penchant for moving silent on bare feet up and down the hallways, showing up in doorways without announcement and eavesdropping. When she's not doing that, she's having conversations with herself, singsongs and snippets, and then sometimes she's taken a letter opener and is carving a very prim line of mixed Chinese and English characters various pieces of furniture.

A;

[gistful]

The lobby isn't bustling but it's a little bit active, in the way to make a Hotel loked lived-in and used, a community place, rather than a necessary somewhere on the way from A to B. Kedan moving from one room to another; a young man watching some kedanese children at the chairs in one corner; someone using the consoles in another.

Presiding over it at the desk was Anton, very tall and proper, but dressed like a funeral-director, if an old-fashioned one; waistcoat, tie, shoes, braided hair long down his back.

He had an edge of tension, uncharacteristic to him but perceivable to someone observant. It didn't stop him from working calmly and steadily, though River, if she gets close enough, that his numbers come from his pen more easily than words, and that in rare cases words are consistently spelled half-phonetically. (It's also notable that the ledger is a mishmash of alphabets.)

Anton doesn't look up at first, intent on finishing his sentence now that he's halfway through, but he attends to that with a focus his gaze still holds when he glances up to see who's come in.

[ooc: I am a-okay with anything River reads from either of my guys.]

[problematical]

There's something about Anton that is both very intimidating and very reassuring in the same breath, River decides, but not the kind of intimidation that comes from his physical attribute (though he towers a full foot above her). There's been a buzzing in the back of her head since she stepped foot inside, like how Kaylee once described a bad bearing in the compressor coils.

River stops moving in her circuit of the room when his gaze finds her, and the pitch of the buzzing changes.

"You spelled that one wrong. Your house needs maintenance, it's out of tune."

[gistful]

Anton glances down at the ledger, but he can't see any errors. Of course, he came to reading and writing late, and that just means he doesn't recognise some as errors. "Which house?" he asks. He remembers River, and the story she told back when. Then he adds, holding out the pen, "How is it meant to be spelled?"

It's never too late to learn.

[problematical]

"This one," River answered, gesturing to the lobby. "It's too loud. Can you hear it?"

She leans closer to the ledger, frowning. "This one: two l's, no e. That one: two c's. And that one's not a real word."

[gistful]

"I cannot," Anton admitted, but he drew a notepad closer and made a note to check the Hotel's wards soon. In a manner of speaking, he was relieved that it was the Hotel and not himself; the Hotel was easier to fix.

Then he also fixed the words she had indicated, except the one River claimed wasn't real. He only smiled. "It has meaning to me; therefore it is real. How was your time away, Ms Tam?"

[problematical]

"It's louder upstairs," River sighs, as though it's the most inconvenient thing. She would have commented on his out-of-tuneness too, had he not distracted her with the mention of a word that she didn't know. Things that were new, that were unlearned to her still, captivated her.

"What does it mean?"

[gistful]

Louder upstairs? --Ah. In retrospect, Anton is chagrined it took him so long. "Bacach," he said, answering her question first. "It means someone who has a tendency to drag their heels."

In this case, a patron who rarely got out of their room before check-out. Anton drew a careful line through the note he'd just made. "I'm afraid that particular disharmony is something I can do nothing more about," he said. "I'm sorry it's loud enough for you to hear; most people cannot."

[problematical]

"Bacach," she repeated, matching the pronunciation perfectly, though she showed no sign of recognition to the word, and yet: "Probable origin is Indo-European language family. Displays traits of the broad-slender companioning of consonants and vowels. Broad consonant is velarized."

She tugs a hand through her hair, the gesture seemingly absentminded and in response to an urge to fidget. "You hear it. But that's not why you're feeling bad."

[gistful]

Anton paused. Although he knew River was some fashion of Sensitive, and had met Sensitives before who had a tendency to be both vague and knowing, there was still usually a few moments of adjustment necessary when it occurred.

"I do," he said at last, "and it isn't. It's caused by the beings imprisoned in Room 24. I must ask you not to attempt to enter it, as one of the Hotel rules."

Better she knew what it was than be curious and try to seek it out, against wisdom.

[problematical]

River smiled a little at the reminder, even as Malcolm's voice echoed in her ears about rules bein' all manner of subjective before she nodded. It wasn't a barrier she wanted to breach, not without reason.

River Tam had enough specters in her head without needing some more.

"Then why are you?" she asked instead. "Feeling bad."

[gistful]

Another pause, but this time to consider how to answer. He didn't think River meant anything by asking, but the reminder that he had been having troubled, and why, caused a spike in the gist's movements, and his chest felt warm.

"There is someone here whom I do not like," he said at last, "and it is making life difficult for me."

'It', not them. The dislike, not the person. Although the person certainly was as well.

[problematical]

"Can't you fix it?" The request seems childish, but the look on River's face certainly isn't. Her brother was always trying to help her, to fix what the Academy broke, but here...

"You don't always have to take care of everyone," she said.

[gistful]

"No. She would take advantage of any offers to try." Just being near China these days was a risk to his control. The day she'd enthralled him, she'd made a crack, and he wasn't even sure if she knew that she had.

At the last, Anton paused; but then he said honestly, "I've never done anything else. I wouldn't know how to not."

[problematical]

River nodded; she understood that, because it was the same feeling she got from her brother. It was the same feeling that Mal had for his crew. That feeling surrounded her, and had, for most of her life.

"I could fix it."

[gistful]

Fix. Anton knew that River had certain abilities, and had chalked them up to a kind of Sensitivity from another world. He didn't mind having his moods read. It was probably safer that way.

But that made him pause, again, because he couldn't immediately parse what it meant. "Fix what, exactly, and how?"

[problematical]

She doesn't answer exactly, not in words, but she's staring at his chest in a way that doesn't have anything to do with her being quite a bit shorter than he is. River isn't sure exactly how she plans to do this, and certainly not immediately, but she wants to try. Simon has told her over and over that anything broken can be fixed, and if her brother believes she can be made whole, surely Anton isn't beyond repair either.

[gistful]

The way River stared made Anton tense slowly. "I do not think that's wise," he said quietly. Exposing a Sensitive to the gist wasn't something Anton would do by choice. There was a reason most of them didn't live long. And there was the pact to consider. It wasn't just a matter of an unresolved past event. "The gist isn't in a state which is ... resolvable."

[problematical]

"But Simon says everything can be fixed," she answered, looking pensive for a moment before glancing away from Anton. "I want to believe him."

[gistful]

"You should," Anton agreed. "To have hope is a good thing. But sometimes 'fixing' does not mean removing that which makes things difficult. Sometimes, trying to revert to what was might make things worse."

It's been so long that Anton didn't know what might happen if he and the gist were one thing anymore. And he wasn't willing to take the risk of what would happen if it was tried. Or sure whether he wanted it.