multiversallogs | float until I learn how to swim

Routines are for things with circadian rhythms. Xas isn't any good at them. But having work to do means - well, mostly it means always having dirt under his fingernails and often on his face, but it also means fitting himself into other people's schedules and usually knowing what day of the week it is. Before long he does inadvertently fall into an irregular orbit. That's why the bartender here knows what he's drinking without being told and why there are two other people Xas knows by name and could go bother, if bothering Wolfgang were to get boring.

But that's not likely. Xas has a long attention span.

He heads back toward him with drink (tequila, neat, but not much of it) in hand, pausing once halfway there to tilt his head and frown when the music's skittering beat shifts into something even less rhythmic. "I don't understand this music," he tells Wolfgang in Arabic while he slips into the space beside him. His tone is more contemplative than complaining, though, and he immediately focuses, smiles, and switches back to English, so as not to deprive any eavesdroppers of this: "I've been ordered to find out if you're available."

Wolfgang opens his mouth to explain, but then closes it when he realises he can't. "I don't think anyone does," he says instead, rueful. "Someone thought it was a good idea to combine polka with Cybertritonian synth metal." A little gesture, then, a jazzhands-y ta-da. Welcome to Baedal, shit gets weird.

It's good to get out of the house; he used to go drinking nearly every night, back when he couldn't — or didn't want to — sleep, but the last couple of weeks he's barely been out. He's fairly convinced that if he just tries hard enough, he can make himself feel better. The bootstraps method of health care is a lot cheaper than actually seeing a doctor.

So every time he manages something normal like this, going out drinking with an acquaintance, he views it as a small triumph. He's not sick. He's functioning, he can do normal things everyone else does. That means he's fine. He takes a drink of what is his third or fourth beer, then pauses. After a moment: "Available for what?"

He can be a bit dim, bless his heart.

Edited (dammit DW i will punch everything you love) 2012-06-05 18:50 (UTC)

Xas wrinkles his nose while he drinks; the drink is fine, but the description of the music isn't very redemptive. "You people," he says, meaning humans, even though it could be something else's idea, an alien or a fairy - but not-angels, whatever, "are almost as stupid as you are clever." He's grinning when he lowers his glass. It's a compliment. He's pretty sure the balance for angels is tipped much further toward stupid; they have time on their side, but they're less inventive and much less interesting.

At Wolfgang's question he tilts his head for a moment, considering it - or, more accurately, considering the fact that he asked it - and then puts his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand and smiles like Wolfgang has given him a present. "Sex," he says.

Wolfgang puts a hand over his heart at that you people, doing his best to look offended, but he's most of the way towards tipsy so it isn't happening, he looks a little amused instead. "I resemble that remark," he says at his huffiest, which as it turns out is not very.

He makes the bad executive decision of taking a drink in between there, so his reaction ends up like something out of a cartoon. He spits it out and chokes on it at the same time as his face goes a shade of red generally not found in nature. He has to pound on his chest to clear his lungs of beer. "What? No!" That he is actually scandalised by that sure is... something.

Sometimes it is hard to believe that Wolfgang is actually a human being and not some kind of space alien.

"No?" Xas echoes, once he's finished laughing - which takes a little while, admittedly, although he does have the decency to offer Wolfgang a napkin. "You don't even know who's asking."

"I haven — I mean, I just. I don't." He wipes his mouth and the bit of the counter in front of him, sheepish and feeling his face heating again. He puts his face in his hands instead. He's embarrassed, but not really upset. "I mean, I don't do that."

Xas leans his head to one side without removing it from his hand, still smiling. Wolfgang is hardly the first person he's ever seen sputter over sex, but he's the first person here. Xas had sort of assumed people had moved on from that, in most futures. "Which part?" he asks. "Sex, sex with strangers, or sex with strangers who have scales?"

Wolfgang peers at Xas from a space between his pinkie and ring finger, and although his expression is hard to read by mostly being covered, it is likely the face he's making is something like are we seriously doing this. "Well, I'm not racist," he says after a moment. "Er, species-ist."

Edited 2012-06-28 07:37 (UTC)

"I appreciate that," Xas says, with all the blitheness of someone who has never been on the wrong end of Baedal's occasional xenophobia. His inhumanity is pretty well obscured by a t-shirt. He takes another sip of his drink - a small one, to hold on his tongue to taste and feel the muted burn - and then says, plying, "Strangers, then? I don't do that either, anymore. It got old."

When Wolfgang's face begins to return to a colour typically found in nature, he slowly lowers his hands, gripping his beer perhaps a little tighter than is strictly necessary. He seems on edge, possibly because he's aware that any slight thing might set him off again, and he is fully prepared to crawl under the bar and hide/die there if he has to. "Mm," he says, entirely noncommittally. It's not a lie if he doesn't actually say yes. Then, a swift subject change: "Speaking of... species-ism, oh good, they've switched to faerie rap."

"Is that what this is." Xas raises his eyebrows at the speakers, then at Wolfgang, who is horribly subtle. "I wasn't born yesterday," he says, and, "I wasn't born at all," allowing himself to be amused for a moment at his own joke. Then he's distracted, though no less amused, and peering beyond Wolfgang's shoulder. "Oh, she's coming over here. She's probably going to flirt with you. There's nothing I can do."

He isn't at all sorry.

When he notices Benji in the street beneath him, Xas seriously considers throwing something at her - just to get her attention. He doesn't really want to get down. But he does want to talk to her, and he doesn't have anything he could throw without injuring someone, so after a moment of fussy hesitation, he shoves the book he was reading into his recently-acquired backpack and pushes himself over the edge of the roof. It's only a two-story drop, but there's a moment when it feels like the air might thicken beneath him and keep him off the ground.

It's not the most graceful landing: the backpack almost unbalances him, and he brushes into a mildly startled woman while trying to right himself. "Sorry," he says - not sorry at all, especially since he's hardly the most dangerous thing that could fall out of the sky here, but it's what people say - and weaves ahead through the light crowd to catch up with Benji.

He doesn't have terribly far to go, and he doesn't try to be sneaky about falling into step beside her, windswept and pleased with himself. "Hello," he says. "Are you in a hurry?" He does have some manners.

Largely oblivious to any danger of things being thrown at her, no matter their intention, Benji moves with the pace of someone without anywhere to be with urgency. In truth, she likes this part of Baedal, with the graffiti, the young students and older academics, the general sense of valued education and community. In truth, it gives her a jealous sense of wist; she would like to be smart at something, and know theories, and construct essays. She is also twenty-seven, and not particularly wealthy, but on the plus side, rather used to dreaming.

She is in suede and denim and cotton, wardrobe as muted and ordinary as ever. A brown leather messenger bag bumps against her hip, and she is more or less a million miles away by the time Xas suddenly appears at her side, windswept and interesting. Benji starts, dignity not depicted here, and lets out a huff of a laugh.

"Hello," she replies, slowing without stopping. "Not really. Returning some books. Where did you come from?"

"On a roof," Xas says, with a flippant gesture. "I'd have invited you up, but I don't like to shout." He's starting to like this city - or at least pieces of it, and Benji is one of those pieces. Back home he probably would have moved on to a new city without ever noticing how interesting she was. He pulls the straps on his backpack to tighten it against his back, feathers compressing, and then puts his hands into his pockets and peers at her, with his few extra degrees of inhuman peripheral vision handling the path ahead. "Were they good books?"

"Maybe next time. I love rooftop scenes," Benji says with a brighter smile, arms folding around her as they move. "They were. Baedal authors, local folklore. It's hard to tell if maybe they just made them up so that Baedal would have any or not. Or if it matters." She bites her lip against rambling at what is basically just a conversation filling query, jolting a shrug. "I'm not very good at libraries."

"No?" Xas says. He's not sure how someone might be good or bad at libraries, exactly, but he smiles. "Not much time for them?" That wouldn't be surprising, given what he's seen of Benji's world.

"Libraries remind me of home," he adds, stepping around a sprig of something green and purple that's growing up through the sidewalk. "My brother had a bargain with God, to receive the eleventh copy of everything. We had books everywhere. But I haven't tried - did you have to give them an address?" He'd only just acquired his first library card, before he came to Baedal, and now he's back to not living anywhere. Or to living everywhere, he'd prefer to think.

"The borrowing," she says, mildly, although it's not an answer that negates Xas's guess. Just, you know, also. "They don't remind me of home, and I think I like keeping things." She certainly never lets go of the dreams she collects, stored into some preternatural vault of memory.

She nods, once. "Apparently. I guess so they can send around lone sharks to come collect if you don't return anything." She's joking, but also unsure of what does happen if you're late with them. (A fee, spoiler alert.) "Why the eleventh? Or is that a stupid question?"

"Oh," Xas says. He almost says he doesn't understand that, but then he thinks of his friends, who he didn't want to give up to time or to God, and he shuts his mouth and bites his lip instead. "I've been buying books," he says after a moment, "but I don't know what to do with them when I finish them. You can have them if you want. No promises as to quality."

The next part makes him wrinkle his nose, amused but also disappointed. If they need an address, he won't be borrowing from the library himself anytime soon. Then he shakes his head: it isn't a stupid question. "It wasn't for any specific reason. I suppose he thought anything people bothered to copy ten times must be something worth reading." A quick grin. "This was before you - " Humans, he means. " - came up with printing presses, of course."

"The rules should be adjusted. Eleven thousandth."

The offer of books has its appeal. Wolfgang, anyway, is nerdier than her; they could have a library! But-- "I couldn't take your books! You should keep them. Or sell them, I suppose. But if you need a permanent address," because the assumption that Xas might not have one is easy for her to make, as having one at all is a new novelty, "you could just write down mine." Either Benji really isn't good at libraries, or she trusts Xas to be.

Both, mainly.

It takes Xas a few moments of raised eyebrows to recover - not from surprise at the specific offer, because he's already learned how kind people can be, so much the reminder that this is his life now, walking alongside people and having needs they can fill. It was always the other way around, before.

"Okay. Thank you," he says once he's resettled, without pretending to have to think about it or to be to proud, then smiles. "But if you give me your address, you won't be able to stop me from leaving books at your door."

That gets a quick grin, undercut with a shyer shrug. A brief break in their walking ensues, Benji a bit awkward in navigating the pockets of her jacket and shifting aside her bag to do so to recover her CiD, before continuing. "I think that sounds like a win for me," she points out, eyes on screen as she, a little ponderously, types out the address of the Badside house before she can forget.

Ping. Or whatever sound or indication Xas's CiD makes, should he gave it on him, that a message is received.

Xas slips his backpack strap off one shoulder so he can get to his CiD without stopping, reads the address a few times, and puts it away again. His memory isn't perfect, but it is very good - it has to be, to keep up with his thousands of years. "Thank you," he says again, and then, "Tell me about something," with an entitlement that's only half teasing. After a moment he is generous enough to add a prompt. "How's work?"

float until I learn how to swim

Wolfgang — a bar in Badside

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Benji — the streets in Brock Marsh

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