Welcome to Gaia! ::

The room was full of assorted junk, a disarray of items that one tried to associate together only because of the human brain's inherent, instinctive need to contextualize every piece of data it was fed. This was difficult; there were pear cores strewn together with the disassembled pieces of a grandfather clock, an opened and empty glass bottle of something-or-other wrapped in some frayed upholstery, and other such things that made about as sense juxtaposed as a great white shark leaping out of the ocean and singing Conjunction Junction.

In one pile in the corner there was a hiking boot, and -- strangely, peculiarly -- not far away at all was another that matched. But that was because they were being worn by a pair of legs, with the rest of the man who owned them present and intact.

With a deep intake of breath, the scuffing of his boots against the floor, some rustling of fabric and the hollow tappity-tapping noise of a pack of ping pong balls hitting the floor with the movement, Dr. Westerman slowly stirred and made his way up to a kneeling-sitting position with a forearm propped up on a knee. Blearily, he furrowed his brow and shrugged his shoulders in a stretch; his hair was free from the tie he kept it up in at work and seemed a bit surprisingly long compared to how it looked in the ponytail.

He was wearing a frown -- also unusual -- but it normally was not a happy circumstance to wake up in an unfamiliar place with no knowledge of how you got there or how far away you were from home. Perry stood up, just a tad shaky, like he'd just awoke from one of those incredibly deep sleeps that messed with your sense of balance. He crossed his arms, still frowning, and silently scanned the room for a few moments. His left ear was sporting one of those earrings shaped like a claw or fang.

The last, wispy thing he could recall was that he was walking through a parking lot near the museum. There wasn't very much traffic around but it hadn't been empty, there had been a colorful handful of cars inching around.

Perry dropped his arms to his sides. He walked across the room, still wordless, and tried one of the doors.

Jammed. Didn't budge.

Finally, he turned his attention over to Wiseman, the odd light color of his eyes surveying him from a sidelong glance for a few moment before turning himself fully to face him.

And he asked, "Am I dead?"

Before Perry could take candy (jam) from a stranger, there was an odd noise coming from one of the doors. The cowboy was stationed at the door in the corner which had the fruit problem, but two doors down there was a -- scratching sound?

The scratching filled the pause. It sounded like somebody's fingers on concrete, scrabbling.

His erstwhile companion clomped his way after him after taking a large bite out of the doorknob, leaving his face somewhat smeared with jam. He wiped it off with the backs of his fingers and then licked that off. "Sorry," he offered. "Munchies. Crying shame when they attack -- bam!, and there go all your Weight Watchers points. A man's waistline is an ocean of secrets, pal."

He leaned on the wall next to the door and watched Perry knock, looked at the door, looked at Perry, then at the door.

"While we're waiting," he mimed two bits in the air with his jam-free hand curled up in a fist, like this might help the person on the other side of the door, "your mama give you a name, and what would she think of a nice boy like you ending up in dives like this with sketchy characters like me?"

Their clomping stopped momentarily, and was replaced by the strange cloaked man's om nom nom noming as he smacked away at his jelly doorknob -- and he was standing close enough that the noise was winging straight into one of Perry's ears. His gaze crept over towards Wiseman, wearing a raised eyebrow and a slight scowl, but zipped back to the door when they heard it swing open.

Brick wall. It looked like one of those prop ones from a sketch comedy show. Perry stared, baffled, raised a hand and knocked at it to see if it would do something to start up the noise again. Nothing.

"Perry," he answered, still tapping at the wall and not turning his attention away from it. "You too sketchy to have a name of your own, pal?"

And he turned his head back around in expectation of an answer, but the man was gone -- except not quite, just wandered off back over to the other side of the room, to the neatly-set table that was over there. His own efforts at the wall fruitless, Perry swung one foot over the other and leaned back against the wall, and peered at whatever it was his momentary roommate was up to.

The chair exploded into the wall with all the force the stranger could launch behind it. As the legs shattered into the bricks, the sound they made was horrible: it was as though he'd hit a piano. Though Perry had touched it before, now that the chair hit it there was a horrible discordant screeching of dozens of notes being hit all at once, a smashed keyboard.

It was as though the wall panicked now, as it belted out three notes:

Shave-and-a???

Equally as frantic, again:

Shave-and-a???

You could see the individual bricks shifting with each note. First one, then a second one twice to sound out the tune.

The stranger was left with one intact chairleg in his hands, the rest having splintered away against the wall. He tested the weight and balance of the chairleg, as if assessing it as a weapon, and rested it on one shoulder and used his other hand to tap experimentally at the wall with his knuckles.

He was whistling -- Shave and a haircut, two bits. And again: shave and a haircut, two bits. Thereupon he knocked on each brick in turn to see if each hit a different note, and tried to spell out the tune on the bricks himself.

Perry bristled a bit at the wall's resurgence of noise, but he continued searching: the piano he discarded after a couple seconds fiddling with the keys, the comb an extremely unpleasant discovery as he'd brushed his fingers against the yellowed row of teeth before seeing what it was. After another moment of digging through junk his hand grasped around the long bridge of a banjo, and a couple of strong yanks pulled the it free from the pile of assorted sundries it was buried under. Not exactly a guitar, but close enough to figure out and seemingly functional enough.

His hiking boots clomped back over to 'John' and the wall; he was plucking away at the strings of the banjo on the way over. He took a few brief seconds to figure out the fingering of the tune, and then inched a little awkwardly closer:

Shave-and-a-haircut,

And waited.