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 Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2015 1:52 pm
"You could've had an underwater secret base, that would have been better. No one would ever suspect an underwater base." Apart from anyone who had seen movies. But Maia didn't know that. She followed Toby inside, "I'm sure you have all sorts of top secret things Selkies can't see."
It was probably lucky that they couldn't show Maia everything. After they dropped the paperwork off, it was evident that she wasn't paying all that much attention. The selkie had taken to long moments of silence. "You said you had a Dragon here?" she asked, after a while. She couldn't imagine a dragon living in an office space.
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Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2015 1:59 pm
"The ocean's too well-explored. We'd have to live there, and we'd never see any people," Toby reasoned.
Toby and Dari's office was slightly messy compared to what one may expect at a federal building, but it got the job done. Dari translated and entered the information from Maia's file into the database, then they stood again. Both men noticed that the selkie had gone a bit distance, but it didn't seem appropriate to mention. They stood and started out of the office.
"We do. She's even deeper under for now." He didn't much like that the creature couldn't go flying in the actual wilderness, but they were working on relocating her still. It was difficult to find a place where she could eat and also wouldn't be hunted and killed. Dragons were easier to slay in this day and age. "She probably wouldn't like us intruding, though. What else would you like to see?"
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Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2015 2:32 pm
"Probably not. I heard dragons aren't the friendliest creatures." she'd only meant to inquire. She wasn't sure she was ready to meet a firebreathing giant lizard with wings. She hadn't heard whether they enjoyed making selkies their lunch. "And you said you had fae working for you. Could I meet them sometime?"
What else was there for her to see? She glanced at Toby. "Show me what you think I'd like," she suggested. "I don't know anything about the stuff you keep or your secret headquarters."
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Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2015 2:39 pm
Toby put his hands on his hips, clicked his tongue, and peered around them. It was hard to reason what might be exciting for someone entirely new. To him it was just his place of work and at this point it had been as such for more than half of his life. Everything was normal. Very little surprised him any more.
"Come on, I bet Annie's here. If not, we can go looking for Lori." Dari and Toby began to walk, bringing Maia with them. A young woman stopped them in the halls, her face lighting up.
"Hey, boys!"
Dari smiled and nodded. Toby lifted a hand in greeting. "Hey, Lindy. This is Maia. She's going to be learning with us for a little while before relocation."
"Hi, it's nice to meet you," the woman apparently named Lindy answered, offering her hand to shake.
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Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2015 3:11 pm
"Nice to meet you, too," Maia said, taking the woman's hand and shaking it. "These guys don't seem to be able to decide what to show me! Do you know what the most exciting thing to see is?" Apart from possible selkie eating dragons. Was this woman an agent? Did she go traveling about? Had she met fae and all sorts of fascinating creatures?
"Do you work here too?" she asked, instead of the bubble of questions itching to be released. It was possible she was one of their clients.
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Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2015 3:24 pm
Ah, a hand-shake. That was more than some new clients could manage. While Lindy wasn't entirely up-to-date on every assignment in the system, she knew that a third person with Toby and Dari was probably a new entity. They made it back sometimes and were given specific training to help them survive as human, and if not as human than to exist without further danger.
"I do work here. Um... hm." Lindy looked around the building as well, just as Toby had. "How about the logbooks in Files?"
Toby smiled and nodded. "We're actually headed here. Maia wants to meet more fae."
"Ooh! Well, Annie's on today."
"Oh, good."
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Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2015 3:56 pm
Logbooks didn't sound terribly exciting, but meeting more fae did. Maia was intrigued: wasn't Annie the mermaid Toby had mentioned before? "Well, we have to be going now," she decided, taking Toby's hand. "Let's go!" Some of the enthusiasm she had had before boarding the plane seemed to have returned. She wanted to meet fae, to know what was out there in the world.
"How does a mermaid work for you? Don't they have to be underwater? Can they shift? Like in that one movie? But don't they turn to seafoam? Or was that only in that one case? Oh, I know. You've probably got her water somehow."
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Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2015 4:49 pm
"Oh, uh. Alright!" Lindy said, her brows showing confusion but her none of the rest of her body language. "Have fun!" It seemed to be an afterthought.
Toby allowed himself to be taken by the arm, waved to Lindy, laughed slightly, and then took up the lead again. Maia may be having fun leading them but she had no idea where she was going. They were off to file-keeping, a sort of normal desk job that could be achieved fairly easily. It was a fairly small portion of headquarters in activity, but all of the paperwork on actual paper took up more room than imaginable.
"No, I mean... She's a-- an early old-fashioned kind. Flat-out A-1. She can exist in a bipedal form indefinitely. Dries out a little easier than most, maybe, but we've developed ointments and such. She'll turn to sea foam when she dies, unsure on the whole 'three-hundred years of good deeds' thing and don't mind if we never find out." He opened the filing room for Dari and Maia and then followed them inside. There were several people at different desks and Toby seemed to know all of them by name, but they went to the right and found a young woman with long waves of strawberry-blonde hair. That was it. Her eyes were a bit unusual, perhaps, a little too violet, but for all intents and purposes she was a human woman.
"Annie," Dari greeted her. The woman looked up and smiled, clearly surprised but not displeased.
"Hey, you!" She had a gentle accent, lilting. She rose and approached Maia. Fae? What sort? "What bring you here?" Except she was looking to Maia and talking to the others.
"This is Maia. She's a selkie, and she'd never met other Seelies before."
"Hello, honey!"
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Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2015 5:12 pm
Maia had no idea what Toby was talking about. She raised an eyebrow at him. Early kind? Old fashioned? A-1? What. They must have had classes that each type fell into, based on their traits. Huh. Were there other classes of selkie, she wondered. "You've lost me," she admitted. No idea what he meant by three hundred years of good deeds, either.
They stopped in front of a rather lovely woman with curious colored eyes: she had Maia's attention before she was introduced. "Hi," she greeted. "They told me you're a mermaid but that's all I understood. This guy," She gestured to Toby, "decided to give me numbers."
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Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2015 5:54 pm
"Sorry," Toby apologized with a little laugh. He was used to numbers for classification, not necessarily words. Of course these numbers meant nothing to anyone but his coworkers here. Even some of them had no idea what the numbers meant, only that they were basically classification.
Annie offered out her hand to shake and laughed. It was a delightful tinkling sound, like a wind chime.
"Well, they're correct. I'm Annie. Welcome to the office."
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Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2015 7:13 pm
Maia took Annie's hand and shook it, smiling. "Nice to meet you Annie," she said. Faced with another fae, she was delighted, estastic even, and somehow, struggling to form words. "Are you very busy right now? Ooh, when do you get off? Toby took me to get ice cream, and we could go and talk!" How did she stand being so far away from the ocean? Maia was sure they had plenty in common.
"Do you stay here?" she asked. She would be, until she was relocated. It'd be nice to have someone to talk to.
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Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2015 7:23 pm
"Oh, um. Well. I don't get out until five, but I'm sure we could... figure something out?" She looked to Dari and Toby questioningly. Toby just shrugged. Sure. They could make something work. Of course she didn't actually have to. "Oh, I... no. I don't live on-base but I do live very nearby!"
"We came to see the entity album," Dari said, smiling softly. He wasn't sure it'd distract Maia enough for Annie to get any work done, though. They have to, somehow.
"Oh! Sure, sure thing. How recently?" Annie took this moment to turn and begin sifting through a large cabinet.
"The most recent, if you please," Toby said with a nod.
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Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2015 11:40 am
"Ooh, I'm sure anything after five would be fine," Maia assured her quickly: she didn't want the woman thinking she was pulling her away from her job. "We can talk later." Entity album? That sounded interesting. She watched as Annie went through a cabinet. "I thought all your files were digital?" She asked, glancing at Toby.
What would they find in the album? Maybe another selkie? "Dari, do you live on base?" Maybe she'd be able to convince him to go swimming after dark. Their beach night had been fun!
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Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2015 11:50 am
Annie smiled and nodded as she offered out an odd-looking tablet.
"Not all of them," Toby said, "Remember, 'conflagration?' There's really no completely safe way to store pictures, though." And that was what this was. Pictures from the last ten years or so. Seeing other entities had to be the most exciting thing on base, mustn't it? Especially ones you knew. He signed off on a sheet, gestured for his companions to follow.
"I do sometimes," Dari answered after a bit of a pause. Really he didn't spend much time on-base unless he was working but expressing that he had some special exceptions might not be the best idea. As for the next few days he would be staying on-base just to be near Maia should she need any help.
Toby brought the pair out to a bench and typed something into the datapad and navigated a menu. He came up with a photograph of some dark globule with a glowing white orb atop it.
"Guess who that is," Toby said, offering the tablet to Maia. Should she know how, she would be able to navigate through Dari's file as far as an entity was allowed and view pictures of him at various stages of his development from smear to humanoid.
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Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2015 12:09 pm
Maia took the tablet and studied the picture. She paused, looking towards Dari and then to the picture. She looked towards Dari again. There was no doubt. It was him. "It's your baby picture, Dari," she decided. He'd told her how he'd based his appearance on Toby's, so he must have been fairly formless before. "That must have been around the time you met Toby, huh?"
"Are you in here, Toby?" she asked. She'd figured he was human, but he didn't include himself when speaking about them. And Dari had made hints, enough for her to wonder.
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