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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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"Well I'm glad to know I'm off the menu." Arthur's readily hitting the point where he's just going to stop asking questions and roll with whatever game this reality is playing.

"Well, you're off mine," Nick qualified with a grin. "I can't vouch for anyone else around here with fangs, and there are a few from what I've sensed. But I will warn you that it's not a good idea to be around me if I'm pissed off. Doesn't happen often, but it can get ugly pretty fast. Enough about me, though. Where were you before you turned up here?"

"I try not to be on anyone's menu," Arthur promises. "And to stay out of the way of people who disagree."

"Always a good plan," Nick commented, then leveled an eyebrow at the guy. "Am I supposed to take the lack of answer to where you're from as a comment that you're not answering and not push or just ask again?"

He'd been a law student once for a reason.

"Mostly because I don't have a set answer." Arthur shrugs, looking around the hotel. "I travel so much it's hard to say."

Nick had heard enough non-answers in his life past becoming a Dark Hunter to know that further questions were not going to be answered any more than that one had been. If the guy wanted to keep his life quiet, who was Nick to pester him about it?

"Fair enough," he answered instead.

"I was headed to Los Angeles when I started this side trip," Arthur admits. What can this man do if he doesn't know Arthur's an extractor? "I have an apartment in Chicago, but at this point it's an expensive storage unit."

"Sounds like my house in New Orleans. Lovely little place on Bourbon Street that I technically haven't been in for nearly two years, but I'm not sure if the time I was on the island counts, just like I'm not sure how much the time I'm in other realms counts. It's enough to make your head hurt," Nick laughed a little.

Arthur nods politely, thinking about his own perception of time. He can count hours in minutes these days.

"Island?"

"Yeah, I didn't come here from my home in New Orleans. I'd been stuck on an island kind of like this hotel. You know, can't leave, no idea how you got there, all that fun stuff. For most of the people there it was weird, for me? I'm used to going into other realms. So, bottom line, I'm not sure how long it's been since I've been in my house or if anyone even knows I'm missing."

But he was starting to think he'd need to find some way to check.

"I feel like I'm in the rabbit hole and hitting my head over and over again the deeper I go," Arthur observes, shaking his head.

"Tricky thing is, I went back to LA and then here I am again."

He shakes his head, trying to make it shake into sense.

"Not that tricky from what I've heard," Nick shrugged. "I've heard people say they can go do that. I haven't found that door yet, but I'm not really looking. My life's been a descent into the worst kind of rabbit hole for years before I dove into inescapable pocket universes."

Unfortunately, the reason he didn't want to go back was alive and well and poking him in the back of the head, so that need to stay away might be moot at best.

"Like limbo," Arthur suggests, curious to see Nick's reaction to the word.

"Can't say this is my first trip, but it's definitely up there on the list for strangest."

"I grew up calling it Purgatory," Nick grinned, still loving the irony that a demon of his ilk was raised Catholic, "but it amounts to the same. And if that's where I was, I'd still be there. It would've taken a fuckload of prayers to get me out of there."

He regarded the other guy. "Your first trip to limbo?"

"I think so." He hopes so.

It seems that he's the only one here who knows anything about dream sharing, which has him very concerned. It's as if they're all projections of a dreamer, strange and obtuse.

There was a sense to the guy that had Nick wondering enough to try looking further into the guy's head. He was surprised, visibly, at the mental equivalent of shark-filled moats and iron bars on the windows.

He was human, but his mind was well protected and you didn't come by that by accident.

"Lot of strange shit in the world," Nick said blandly.

Even awake, Arthur has several years' worth of training to fall back on for mental defenses and when the alarm bells go off, his brain gets the armor on.

"Indeed," he replies. Arthur keeps his tone bland, but his eyes are piercing.

Nick did nothing but laugh when he felt the iron bars intensify. Whoever this guy was, he had some impressive mental skills for a human. "Ease the throttle back, man. I'm not going to go poking around in there uninvited. No matter what the evil part of me wants, the other part was raised by a God-fearing Catholic woman with a low rudeness tolerance."

"And here I thought vampires needed to be invited in first," Arthur quips.

Nick was still grinning. "Sorry. That only works on houses, and only in the movies."

"I'll have to see what I can do about crosses and garlic without looking too garish." What will the point be if it will get in the way of a good suit?

Nick thought about the other vampires he'd met on the island and considered. "Take my advice? We're not all of us from the same universe here, so I'd check around before you start tossing garlic and holy water on someone with fangs. It might help, but it also might just give you a wet, overly spiced and pissed off vampire."

Arthur gives Nick his usual thin smile, appreciating the humor of the situation.

"I'd hate to offend someone."

"You remind me of one of my trainers," Nick said, utterly unable to stop matching the other guy's smile. "One of the few I've met that can say something that appears to be an answer, but really isn't. It sounds good when you hear it, but the more you think about it, the more you realize it didn't actually answer the question."

"I can't say I do it on purpose," Arthur lies.

"I suppose I resist the straightforward in favor of the elegant."

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malachai - 2013-08-20 18:30 (UTC) - Expand

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