bigapplesauce | I'm not the way that you found me / I'm neither here nor there [closed]

Jay doesn't bother trying to follow Tim closely - he knows where he's going, and he doesn't want to have to hash out the whole elevator thing again. He focuses on allowing himself to sink down through several floors of hallway, before finally he's hovering outside Tim's door just as Tim's coming up to it. Jay wonders uneasily if Tim had tried to talk to him while he was in the elevator. It's creepy enough that he can spy on people without this additional factor of being able to just vanish while someone presumes him present. This whole situation is unsettling and awkward as hell.

But he is glad to be back, even if it's only sort of.

He drifts into Tim's apartment, where he's spent very little time. Tim had only moved out pretty recently before he re-died, and they'd been sort of avoiding each other. Trying to give space. Something.

Now Jay is pretty desperate for company, and he can't really get it.

What now?

He brushes Tim's shoulder lightly. Just a nudge. Tim has to lead the conversation, here. Won't this be fun for the whole family.

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The touch is unexpected, and he spends his last visible moments sort of staring at her hand. He was just making a vague gesture, but she actually made contact.

It's kinda nice.

"Yeah?" he says, watching unhappily as she winks back into regular existence. He sighs, feeling immediately lonely, looking away. "Maybe he should invest in a fucking ouija board."

"Yeah," sighs Asmodia. "Yeah, I'm done." She runs her fingers through her hair in a gesture that looks awkward without her horns visible to explain their stunted trajectory, then shakes her head. "It's not really that he's, uh, transformed. I was right, he's on the ethereal plane -- it's, uh. Between here and the shadow plane. What we need is someone who can perform a planar shift, or maybe make a gate. All I can do is kind of, you know. Visit." Her shoulders slump and she mutters, "Once a day."

"Do you know anyone could do that?" he asks, and he doesn't even dare to force a sliver of hope into his tone. Her despondency makes it pretty obvious that they've been left with shit luck on that front, as usual.

His arms curl around him in an involuntary defensive gesture, half-folded and half-hugging himself.

"Well. Thanks," he mutters. "For what it's worth."

"If we were in Absalom I could pay someone to do it inside a week, but here..." She shakes her head. "Maybe someone else has come through that has the right skill set. At least you know what he is, and I can tell you he's not turned into some kind of undead or whatever." Because wouldn't that suck.

"...You're welcome."

"Yeah," he mutters. Undead. Her universe sure sounds appealing and safe for all ages.

He'd take over it his, any day of the week.

"I dunno if you - I don't have much." He'd feel like a complete cheapskate if he didn't at least offer, so he reluctantly tugs out his wallet and starts thumbing through it, only to find himself at a loss. What's a reasonable sum for getting someone to act as conduit for a kind-of-dead ghost person?

Yeah, there's probably not a real common market for this.

"Oh! Oh, right!" She was doing this for pay, wasn't she? It's more like being back in Nirmathas, bartering mending and healing magic for supplies, than it is like taking commissions for retrieving relics. She didn't exactly do much, didn't have to slay anyone or even steal anything.

"Twenty dollars?" she suggests dubiously, not sure if she's asking too low or too high. "That's enough for a couple meals, right? Unless you wanted to pay me in eggs or something, done that before."

"Twenty bucks is fine," says Tim, faintly bemused as he obligingly fishes out a twenty and hands it to her. "It'll cover some choice groceries."

He's not sure if she's really as accustomed to living on a budget as he and Jay is, but it helps if she lives in one of the former faction buildings. At least he's got something of an income. Though not, Tim recalls with a pang of anxious guilt, for much longer if he keeps missing work days.

"Thanks," he adds, stuffing hands back into his pockets with a shrug. "For, uh - you know."

No haggling means that she probably underpriced it. Well, you win some and you lose some. Asmodia accepts the bill with a cursory glance (bizarre as this paper money is, at least the numbers on it are nice and clear, not too much danger of mix-ups) and pockets it, making a mental note to actually price check some of the more common goods and get a better idea what things are even worth.

She offers him a reassuring smile. "No problem," she says. She feels competent for the first time in ages, like she's actually been able to do something. That alone would have been worth the trouble. "If you need to talk to him again...I can only do that once each day now, but it's no trouble, really."

"I'll - keep it in mind," he says, earnest despite the crawling need over his skin to get away, think everything over - why are the cats there, and what do they want with Jay - and ducks his head in a short nod. "Well. I got your number."

"Yeeeah." That's a phone thing, isn't it? She's pretty sure he's talking about the phone. "I'll, um, see you around, then," she says, heading for the door. She gives a vague nod in the general direction of the apparently empty room. "You too, Jay."

"Yeah," he says, not sure what else to say, if there is anything else to say. He's probably putting Jay to shame with all this shrugging and noncommittal grunting, but at least he knows, concretely, that Jay is - relatively - all right.

He wait until she's gone before closing the door fully, then breathes out a very loud sigh.

I'm not the way that you found me / I'm neither here nor there [closed]

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