all_inclusive | Gathering: New Guest Reception

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Gathering: New Guest Reception

The black sign positioned in front of the Dining Hall's main entrance reads:

New Guest Reception
TODAY
6 PM - 8 PM

All guests welcome

In the Dining Hall itself, the chairs have been pushed up against the walls and the long dining table turned into a buffet stocked with finger foods. At the far end of the room is a small bar serving beer, standard cocktails and non-alcoholic drinks.

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Will feels like shit. He's been stuck here without his meds for a few days--both the crazy ones and the ulcer ones--and now he's feeling it. A beer probably isn't the best solution to this problem, but it's the only one he's got at the moment so he figures what the fuck, he'll have one or two because they're there. It'll at least make this party somewhat tolerable. He fucking hates parties, no matter where they are.

This place is a helluva lot more comfortable than the prison, but that doesn't mean that Daryl is overjoyed to be stuck here. He's seen people come and go through doors back to their homes or other dimensions or where ever else the hotel lets them go, but for some reason he's still here.

A loner by nature, Daryl isn't exactly fond of parties, but he figures he'll make the most of this one. Besides, there's free beer, and he isn't about to turn his nose up to that.

Spying a guy who looks like he's having less fun than him, if that's even possible, Daryl tips his Bud in the man's direction. "Don't know about you, but I'm plannin' on gettin' shit-faced."

Will nods and raises his beer. "That's the general plan," he says. "Shit-faced is the only way this fucking hotel is going to be remotely tolerable."

Snorting softly, Daryl pulls a long drink from the bottle before answering. "I couldn't agree with you more, man."

Taking a look around the room at all the people, most looking comfortable and chatty and content, he shakes his head, mostly in disgust. "Folks look damned happy to be here, for the most part."

He isn't about to lump himself in with the rest of them, though. There are people back home he can't stop thinking about. Stupid, he knows, but that's how it is.

"I take it you're not happy about being here?" Will sure as fuck isn't. He has a goddamn job to do and while, okay, it's actually kind of pleasant to be away from the fucking tabloids and the critics, he actually does like his job and would like to get back there.

"Not...entirely," Daryl allows. While there are some perks to this hotel business, like hot water, a comfortable bed, and plenty of food, he doesn't want to become complacent. That would be the worst damned thing that could happen to him and, with Daryl's luck, he just knows that would be the moment the hotel would ship him back to zombie central.

"I got things back home to do. People depend on me." Another long pull of Bud.

"Well, I hope you can get back to them soon," Will says. He wouldn't say he has people that depend on him, necessarily, but he would like to think that at least part of his audience misses him when he's not on their television every night. Considering his focus group data lately, he fucking doubts it.

Edited 2013-08-10 16:48 (UTC)

"Yeah." Pulling a little on the moist label on the beer bottle, Daryl nods, almost to himself. Softly, "Yeah."

Tilting his head a little, he figures he ought to go ahead and introduce himself. "M' name's Daryl." Not sure how to brooch the topic of, "Hey, man, you got zombies where you came from?" Daryl shakes his head a little and scuffs the toe of one steel-toed boot. "Might be a strange question, but what were things like where you were?"

Eric had never enjoyed the tedium of parties unless it was a party where humans were there to offer blood and this one was no exception. Still, he wanted to get the measure of every human in the hotel to know what he was working with and this man seemed less pleased than most.

"That terrible? I have to agree."

Will pats his pockets in search of a cigarette, then remembers he left the remnants of his only pack upstairs because he's rationing them. Fuck. "I don't understand the necessity of a social function in the Hotel Psycho," he grumbles.

"I can imagine it arises out of some pathetic need to manufacture normalcy in a not-so-normal place. It's a comforting mechanism among human populations. Luckily, you seem to have risen above the rest of your species."

That, in and of itself, was somewhat of a compliment. Eric had determined this place seemed not to care that he was a vampire and the humans didn't seem to have the long reach and resources of the VRA.

"Yeah, I don't really care for the social niceities of--wait. My species?" What the fuck does that even mean? Granted, they are on a floating island in the middle of fucking nothing here, but Will's still operating under the basic assumption that if it looks like a human and talks like a human, it's a fucking human. Anything else is playing around in the realm of Neal's kooky pitches about aliens and Bigfoot and shit.

Eric laughed lightly and flashed his fangs. "Vampire. There are some slight differences in what we consider social niceties."

It seemed some of the people here came from worlds where vampires were decidedly not out of the coffin.

Will pauses for a moment, bottle halfway to his lips, then slowly lowers it again. "Okay," he says. "Okay. Vampire. Right." He'd heard that hallucinations could be a possible side effect of sudden discontinuation of the variety of meds he's been on for the last few months, but this is really just too much.

"You're not from a place that knows about them," Eric assumed, disguising his fangs again. "I have found that to be the case here, strange as it is. We fight all this time for equality and now we're back to square one."

He laughed a little. "Then again, I had no problems conducting business and living my life when my kind was hidden so I wouldn't have a problem going back to that."

Will's still pretty firmly on the side of the argument that's going with this is a fucking hallucination, but since he's not really in the mood to get bitten or killed or whatever vampires do, even in a hallucination, he's just going to go with the plan of pretending to take the guy seriously and not piss him off. "Yeah, no," Will says. "I have a staffer who's into the fringe stories--Bigfoot, aliens, Occupy Wall Street--so if there was even a hint of vampires on the radar, he'd have tried to pitch it to me already."

"Clever staffer. He's probably going to be eaten alive someday," Eric mused. "But clever right now, certainly. Where do you come from, then?"

Eric wanted as clear a picture of the humans in this place as he could get so he knew exactly who could be exploited and who was best left alone.

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onamissiontocivilize - 2013-08-10 18:12 (UTC) - Expand

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vikingvamp - 2013-08-10 18:32 (UTC) - Expand

"Billy, be careful," MacKenzie says, keeping her voice low so the others won't overhear her. She knows she's risking his ire but she doesn't want him to get sick.

"I found out that there's a doctor. Just in case?"

"I'm hoping we'll find that goddamn door soon," Will says. There's a doctor, that's great, but he has no desire to explain all his fucking issues to some new doctor and start over. He can barely stand Habib and what's his name the GI doctor. "And I don't think a beer or two is going to hurt."

"Probably not. Applying alcohol to this problem seems like a brilliant idea," MacKenzie says, lifting her own glass. Her cash is starting to run down a little low and she thinks they need to find that door sooner rather than later.

"Have you met anyone worth mentioning?"

"Not one goddamn person." Will tips back his beer and drains it. "Well, I met people. But no one that met the criteria of 'worth mentioning.' You?"

"Someone who is not quite human," MacKenzie says, thinking of Nick. "He was nice enough, though. I loaned him a little money since he showed up with nothing to his name and doesn't know how to get back home. He says he came from an island, or something, and it seems like he recognized me. I'm not sure how that's possible. You, I would get, since you're on camera but I haven't been on camera since I was embedded."

"Maybe he saw you when you were in Afganistan," Will suggests. He'd seen her on the air a few times, back then, and almost every time immediately changed the channel. It was good to know she was alive, but that was all he wanted to know at the time. "You know, no one has recognized me here." It's weird, and Will's not sure if he cares for it.

"That's shocking," MacKenzie says, fairly certain that News Night and ACN are available in most markets around the world. Someone not knowing who Will McAvoy is doesn't happen very often.

"How does it feel to be anonymous?"

"Fucking weird, but refreshingly normal." Yes, he loves having an audience (at least, when they like him), but he's also discovering that it's a fantastic relief not to have to worry about what some fucking tabloid is going to say about what he ate for breakfast that morning. "I could get used to it. Not this hotel," he clarifies. "The anonymity."