[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_reetwolf]

"Awwwww." Now the cheerfulness, with a thread of laughter, was completely un-forced. Even though the point he'd made was both serious and true: if nothing else, someone who could help with mind and/or magical matters could prove to be highly useful even if she decided to keep her blank space blank. "Same to you, elf. Nice to know I don't need to worry about peppermint oil in the hallways on your account." Not that she had been, at all, but it could be in the nature of a gift: here's how you mess with scent-based trackers.

[st_abby]

"I wouldn't," he agreed, when Vax took her meaning. He'd known that Trinket had a similar sensitivity to smell, but he'd never given thought to trying to cancel that out. Tracker mammal problems, for sure. "Sorry about the bird smell, anyway. I'm well used to it by now, but I know I'm not exactly springtime fresh from the armor."

[st_reetwolf]

"Don't worry about it. I've smelled worse." Much worse, much more persistent, much less ignorable. "For one, Corporal Nobby Nobbs. To give you a general idea of his cleanliness, he actually had to carry around a signed chitty stating that to the best of his examiner's knowledge and on the balance, he was most likely a human." And that didn't even get into the fact that he genuinely seemed not to know what soap was for or his tendency to buy the cheapest and largest bottles of perfume he could find.

[st_abby]

Vax was making a face before he stopped to consider that Angua couldn't see it to appreciate it. And he'd thought that Scanlan and Grog were bad. They had been, even for him not being an exactly fastidious fellow himself - but that sounded miserable. "I'd rather not try to imagine that smell, if it's all the same to you."

[st_reetwolf]

"And Nobby wasn't even the worst. Ankh-Morpork had a river so polluted you could walk on the crust on top mostly safely." And she knew of at least one dog who'd been loaded in a sack with rocks, tossed 'in' the Ankh, and squirmed out of the sack to trot back to allegedly solid land no worse for wear.

She wondered absently how Gaspode was doing. Likely well, as he was quite clever for a dog. "So never you mind the musty bird smell. At worst, I can smell you coming, but I could do that anyway."

[st_abby]

"Well that sounds pretty disgusting, but I'm glad not to offend your delicate snout," he told her in good humor. "I'd better get back to working this thing out, but let's sniff each other soon."

That did get weird.