[phone calls OTA] Technical Difficulties

[st_abby]

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.

Comments

[st_udious]

"Yes," Henry said patiently. "May I help you?" Whoever this voice belonged to, Henry didn't know them.

[st_abby]

What was even going on with this strange voice? Was this... Like his earring, maybe?

"Are you magic? Or is it the device has a magic bit built in?" There was something that sounded very much, to someone who knew what plastic was, like the muted clunk of smooth, hard plastic, which sent a mild rustle of static along the line.

[st_udious]

"I have magic, yes, but the device isn't magic, no," he said, leaning back in his desk chair. "There are wires running throughout the hotel in the walls that connect the phones, what we're talking on now, together. There isn't any magic in this, though. May I know to whom I'm speaking?"

[st_abby]

For a moment, Vax considered refusing him. It might be more fun, to keep some mystery in it. But the even-mannered fellow had been very forthcoming. "Vax'ildan," he offered, considering how they'd begun the call. "Is that how we're supposed to introduce ourselves using this thing? By room number and name?"

[st_udious]

"It's how I was taught to, but as I understand it, more modern people just say hello or something similar." He shifted in his chair, trying to place the man's accent and failing somewhat. It was...almost British, but not quite. Probably that too was just an effect of different worlds. "Normally too you'd be able to call outside of the inn, but that seems to be just as cut off as everything else."

[st_abby]

"Are you not modern?" That didn't seem to add up, as Vax tried to sort it. He was 'modern' enough to know what 'phones' were. But it was interesting if they should be able to makes the phones reach farther, and couldn't.

[st_udious]

"Modern enough that little here is completely foreign to me, but not contemporary. I'm a good forty years behind this place," Henry said, fiddling with his pen. "When I'm from, you spoke to a phone operator who connected you to whoever you were trying to call instead of being able to manually push buttons and do it yourself."

[st_abby]

Vax puzzled this out for some long moments, letting the silence grow before finally answering with a revelation in the gibberish of his own idiom.

"Like being able to teleport yourself rather than needing to use the teleportation circle in the Lyceum," he concluded. "Got it."

[st_udious]

"Is magic like that common in your world?" Henry asked, suddenly very interested in a conversation that had been rather basic up until now.

[st_abby]

"I wouldn't say 'common' - most people are lucky if they can ever learn a trick or two. But there are casters of all kinds, sure," Vax said casually, the claim punctuated by the blaring beep of several of the machine's buttons getting unceremoniously squashed.

[st_udious]

There was a brief silence as Henry pulled away from the receiver to protect his ears. "Fascinating," he said.

[st_abby]

"It's really impressive to watch," Vax agreed. "You've got your druids, your bards, sorcerers, clerics, and all the rest. I don't pretend to understand it, but I've been glad of them in a battle, that's for sure."

Or for anything, honestly. In terms of their skills, at first. Then because they were friends.

"Which flavor are you?"

[st_udious]

There was a bit of silence on the line as Henry blinked a few times, trying to parse all that. "Whichever one has a history of being the most secretive and academic, I suppose," he said, "I'm sorry, those aren't terms we use where I'm from. Most of the general population believes magic to just be a thing of fairy tales and whatnot."

[st_abby]

"There are the fey in Exandria, but they're a whole different headache," Vax suggested lightly at the mention of 'fairy tales.'

[st_udious]

"Fairy tales colloquially here has evolved to mean fictions generally meant for children that can generally refer to any story containing magic or a specific sort of cautionary tale depending on who you talk to," he said, "and the fae themselves are always a headache. For the most part they tend to keep to their own realm."

[st_abby]

The bookish answer reminded Vax of Percy. The more practical part... "Have you had much experience with them?"

[st_udious]

"Enough," was the answer Vax'ildan finally got about that. "Most of my dealings have been with angels and demons, other gods and demigods here and there. The fae don't cross into our world very often, there aren't too many places where they can anymore. Most of those are over in Europe anyway. As for other supernatural entities, werewolves, vampires, shifters and the like, I'm not a hunter and most of my knowledge of them is purely academic. I belonged to a group dedicated to study and the preservation of that knowledge, not slaughter."

[st_abby]

"You're a scholar of such powers?" It was a curious profession, to be sure. "And if you're not a hunter, then... What is it for? Just for learning's sake?"

[st_udious]

"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.

[st_abby]

"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?"

[st_udious]

"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."

[st_abby]

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.

[st_udious]

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."

[st_abby]

"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.

[st_udious]

"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."