Do something useful. Yeah, all right. "I'm Zan Gethin. And I will. Once I find a damn band-aid."
Following his proclamation, he was promptly directed to a patchily stocked first aid cart, but as it turned out, besides a minor beak-related cut on the back of his left hand, there was nothing to attend to. The token he'd been granted by the Prytaneum had held the worst of his potential injuries at bay, and after a bit of rest and a cup of water, Zan was ready to get helping.
The first place he tried was the top floor, figuring that if any areas might've been neglected during a search for supplies, they would have been the ones not everyone could reach. He was right, in a way. A lot of the stuff left up here seemed useless upon initial inspection, but after a bit of thought, Zan began to turn them sideways and shake, a brainstorming tactic he used to come up with new s**t that tourists might pay him to see.
An hour later, he had amassed a small heap of useless things:
- a saggy mattress he'd found stuffed into the stairwell
two thick, gnarled logs as tall as he was from the fifth floor lounge
a cleaning cart, brimming with at least thirty quarter-full bottles of Windex and a smattering of other cleaning equipment, and
Zan's favorite, two steak knives from a vaguely moldy room service tray.
The mattress's place was clearly flush against the shattered window at the end of the hall, only... someone had already tried that. A second mattress lay flat on the floor in front of the opening instead, forced away by the rampaging birds, if the claw gouges were any indication. Zan cleared all of that away, staring at his meager setup for an almost uncomfortable length of time before moving forward with a plan of his own.
As much as he wanted to hold onto the knives, he was vain enough to realize he would look monumentally idiotic brandishing them as weapons, so into the mattress they went, pointy ends facing out. The cart's wheels were locked in place, the mattress propped against it instead of being braced by nothing and the logs added to the top of the cart to weigh the whole thing down.
The cleaning solution he had removed from the cart was momentarily left without a purpose, at least until Zan used his dagger to cut off the tops of most of the bottles, then lined them up across the highest edge of the uneven mattress. Were the birds to fly at this window with any force, they would likely be stabbed and would definitely be drenched in caustic blue liquid. Of course, they seemed rather smart, all things considered, and the likelihood of them barreling through a window without knowing what was on the other side was rather slim.
Struck with one last burst of genius, Zan retrieved the thin inner curtain from one of the guest rooms and draped it over the hallway window. Any bird with half a brain probably still wouldn't fall for it, but at least he had tried.
Quote:
A mattress with half the stuffing torn out, a cleaning cart, half-stocked with standard supplies, logs from one of the fireplaces, and two sharp steak knives from someone's room service.
