(no subject)

[exterrorist]

Who: Kalenedral, John, and Jacqueline
What: hi welcome to Baedal here's your complimentary fruit basket
Where: the Valhalla Inn
When: some time after Njoki lets Kalenedral out of the arrival room
Notes: n/a
Warnings: does not actually contain a fruit basket

Well, that was definitely a day. Checking out schools and places to live near those schools is sort of tiresome to begin with, and having to drag Jacqueline with him isn't fun for either of them. She misses her mom, and John misses Ana's competence. They both have strong independent streaks, but John is used to being on his own and only taking care of himself, while Ana had to raise her younger sister and is actually a good parent.

Something from lunch today made Jacqueline feel sick. She had to go barf in a women's restroom while John tried not to wring his hands, and now they're back at the Inn early; fortunately, Jacqueline had perked back up on the way and seems fine again. John is trying to tell himself that you can't take a kid to the doctor every time they throw up, then wondering if that still applies in Baedal, where there could be fifty million new diseases. But everybody's a transplant and the city isn't overcome with a new disease every other month, so there must be something at work, here. But what if! But that's ridiculous, calm down —

He has to stop short to not run into Jacqueline, who was walking ahead of him and had just passed the common room.

"Dad dad there is a thing in there," she hisses with exactly that lack of punctuation, and John has had a careful talk with her about xenians and people who look different from the people she's accustomed to seeing, and she knows about mutants anyway, so a 'thing' must be something very unusual indeed.

"Not a thing," he reminds her, taking her hand. "Let's go see. We can say hi."

Still, he's cautious in escorting her into the common room, prepared to see a non-humanoid entity of some sort — a thirty something, scruffy-looking man with a neck tattoo and a solemn-faced seven year old girl with red rain boots.