st_abby | [phone calls OTA] Technical Difficulties

He'd passed by the alien, gleaming thing in his room a hundred times by now, or nearly must've done, and hardly stopped to examine it. It was strange, but so were most other things in this place. A shiny, awkward looking device attached to the wall by means of a long cable, set on one of the little tables that seemed to litter these rooms. It had neat rows of square buttons with numbers etched on, and a handle, so Vax'ildan had supposed it was meant to work some feature of the room in a way he could scarcely imagine. He didn't want to break it, but eventually the boredom and curiosity got the better of him, much like with the door locks. It would probably fix itself, if it came to that.

After the first few moments spent listening to the monotonous warble that came from the handle, Vax'ildan reached to jab a finger into a button. When it beeped but did no more, he pushed another. And a third...

OOC Note: If you would like a thread with Vax, please leave a top-level comment to this post and he will reply! No need to pre-arrange, but as one does when learning new technology, he may disconnect the call etc. accidentally or your character may tell him to leave them alone in very few words if they so choose - most of these threads are likely to be short.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"We're preceptors, beholders, chroniclers of all that which man does not understand. If the situation warrants it, we share our findings with a few trusted hunters – the very elite. They do the rest. Most of the time, there's no need to involve anyone outside our organization at all but-" Henry cleared his throat and forced himself back on track. "Magic and monsters where I come from aren't... It'd be easy for a pack of werewolves to tear apart a town, for example, because so very few people believe they're real at all. There's a barbaric culture among hunters, a shoot first and ask questions later kind of life style that might...well might drive some of the smaller magics extinct entirely or slaughter innocent people. The order is, as a whole, less concerned with the innocence part and more worried about the balance. Sometimes a smaller evil is necessary to fight a bigger one, even if the only fighting that smaller evil is doing is simply existing so as not to create a power vacuum. Even so, someone has to keep a record and someone has to bother actually having a conversation with the things that go bump in the night." There was a soft thunk as he kicked his feet up on his desk.

"You know I had a very nice conversation with a dragon once. Lovely young lady. Several very nice conversations with a dragon, actually, but the latter ones I was definitely bait for. She still had to die, of course, but I learned a great deal." He would've worried that the elders were trying to murder him when the did things like that, but they wouldn't've dared.

"That's..." Vax was a bit nonplussed to hear how conversationally the man had put all of that.

"You and your buddies in this order, you decide this all in secret? What to keep, what to share, who should live, who should die?"

"In this particular instance, she was kidnapping virgins so she could sacrifice them and open a gate to purgatory and release a far greater-" He cut himself off and pinched the bridge of his nose. "I wasn't high enough in the order to make those kinds of decisions. Beyond that, I'd hardly call them my buddies and it hardly matters now anyway."

Vax might've argued, but there didn't seem to be any point to it.

"Is all of this a treat, or it it terrible? To be locked up in the zoo with all the strange creatures you'd write about from a comfortable distance back at home." And Vax was sure that the voice had noticed by now, given his work, how many different varieties of resident there were. He was willing to bet it would make an unusual living arrangement even for this learned fellow.

There was a heavy pause on the line. "I wouldn't qualify anyone here as a strange creature," Henry finally said. "The people here are people, regardless of what else they may be beyond humanoid. The population of this place doesn't bother me. No one here has given me any reason to fear them. The Inn is a mixed blessing. I'm grateful to be here, to be alive, to get to know my grandsons and meet several other wonderful people I wouldn't've otherwise. That I know I never make it back to the place I originally came from isn't any fault of this place. Please don't confuse my academic non-combative nature with someone who doesn't care about the beings around him."

"I'm a strange creature," Vax'ildan assured him, though it didn't negate his being a person even so. "...Did you say your grandsons are here? I didn't realize think we had any children." It seemed to follow that anyone who sounded fairly young must have very small grandsons.

"They're not children," Henry said, "Sam and Dean are very much grown men. Time travel is...complicated to say the least." And it was something he never should've done even if he hadn't had an alternative at the time. "Made even more complicated by the fact that the versions of them that exist here are several years younger than the ones I met before I arrived."

"Well... Shit," Vax marveled softly. He and Percy had something of a gap between what they remembered, with Percy seeming to have come from only a day or so later, and not having recognized Vax as being gone before he arrived at the inn. It was odd, but nothing in comparison to what this one was describing.

"Is yours a family business, then? Do they do what you do?"

"No," Henry said softly, "They were all supposed to learn like I did, like my father and his father before him and back and back, but there was no one to teach them. There was an attack by a very powerful demon who we all had thought had been dead for centuries. She was after an item that would allow her access to something else very old and very dangerous. She slaughtered everyone." His voice had gone a little distant. He could still picture the night of the attack. All the screams. So much blood. "I managed to escape with what she was after through time where I met the boys, found out she was still hunting me and learned to my great heartbreak that not only do I never see my family again, but my son died thinking I'd just walked out on him."

He cleared his throat. "At any rate, the moment I arrived here I'm fairly certain was slivers of seconds before being eviscerated so there's nothing for it now."

It was too much to be taken in fully at once, and all of it tragedy by one turn or another.

"You've got those grandsons of yours," was all that Vax'ildan could think to say. "Sam and Dean, you called them? It may be a mean comfort, given the rest - but with them, at least, you may have a second chance. That's more than most have here."

There was a dry sort of laugh that blew out of Henry's nose, a soft huff of acceptance. It wasn't enough, of course. It would've been better if Dean had just let him go back and fix things in the first place. If he died, at least he would've died trying. "It's a selfish sort of second chance, though," he said, looking down at his pen. "No matter what happens here, they still won't know me when I come tumbling out of a hotel room closet in their future. I'm grateful to be alive, Vax'ildan," he said, more using the man's name just to prove he remembered it. "And doing my best to use the skills I have to the benefit of all those stuck here with me regardless of what happens with Sam and Dean."

"Good news for your neighbors, from the sound of it." Less so for the grandsons, maybe.

"You know, I've heard it said before that wishing someone to live an interesting life is a kind of curse." Vax let a beat pass, but picked up the next. "I'm starting to think that all of us here lead interesting lives."

"Can't argue with you there," he said and sighed. "Still, I'm sure none of us will run out of stories to tell over drinks. There's got to be some kind of blessing in it."

"If you find it, let us know," Vax suggested, trying to remember how the random conversation had even come to this.

"Not that it hasn't been 'interesting,' but what do I do to turn off this conversation and have another?" There were dozens more people at the inn needing harassment, after all, and he'd barely begun to work the conversation machine.

"Just put the receiver back in the cradle where you found it in the first place," he said, shifting in his chair, preparing to be hung up on.

"Thanks for that," Vax responded brightly, decoding the words well enough to end the call.

[phone calls OTA] Technical Difficulties

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