Storage Wars

[Emrys]

Emrys was still adapting to the new Sanctum, despite having lived there for for some time. He was used to crappy apartments or the Lorehouse, but a fully functional theater was so much more then all that. More space, more money for heating and electric, more cleaning, but also more people to share it with. That last part was what Emrys liked about VT. If a Banisher knocked on their doorstep while everyone was home? Scorched. Earth.

Still, there was plenty of empty space, and while Emrys wasn't going near bedrooms there were dozens of doors to spaces Emrys hadn't thought to look into. No more. The Enchanter decided to take the afternoon to look around the sanctum, starting with the half dozen rooms behind the theaters. Maybe they'd be empty, or maybe they'd have something interesting to tinker with. Place like this though? Emrys was thinking tinker.

  1 suxx Sight, 5 Armor

Date		Action		Roll		Result
2015-10-04 20:21:37		Emrys rolls 6 to Imp Temporal Dodge (Gno+Time+HS-2 Advance Prolong) (10 Again)		10, 7, 8, 2, 6, 10, 8, 8		5 successes
2015-10-04 20:21:26		Emrys rolls 6 to Imp Temporal Eddies (Gno+Time+HS-2 Advance Prolong) (10 Again)		1, 4, 3, 7, 8, 5		1 success

[Avis]

"What are you looking for?" Avis asked suddenly from behind. Apparently, she gained a penchant for sneaking up on people. Some might think an Arrow would know better, but then again, maybe that was why she felt comfortable doing it.

Either way, when Emrys turned towards her, he found Avis leaning against a wall, hands tucked in the cotton nest of her hoodie's pockets.

[Emrys]

Emrys spun at the sudden question being posed to him. Though his eyes widened in surprise he didn't jump or try to throw a punch. After the many issues Emrys had had in Sacramento it was obvious he needed a level head if he didn't want to become a pariah. Apparently, he had acquired one.

"Nothing in particular." He said, a small smile creeping forth as any trace of surprise subsided from his features. "I was just curious what all these rooms back here were for. Thought I'd take a peak and see if any of them had anything cool."

A hand flicked down the hallway at the doors across from the theater bedrooms before Emrys returned his attention to the Warlock. "Wanna show me around? I mean, if you have the time of coarse."

[Avis]

For a moment, Avis just stared blankly off into space. Then nodded.

"Yeah, I think there's a room you'll like. It's got some cool stuff in it, but Star and I kinda forgot about it since Zoey...Zodiac would've thrown a fit if we'd dragged anything out of it." A frown appeared on the Warlocks face. "Honestly, the shit we did to appease that woman..."

Bitter waters stilled from memories of her.

"Anyways, follow me," Avis added, leaning off the wall and heading towards the storage room near the shooting range.

Inside dwelled within massive cabinets of electronics, with cartoons of aliens, spaceships, and anthropomorphic toads scrawled along the sides and strange buttons and joy sticks jutting up before blackened glass screens that offered up hollow reflections of their faces as they gazed at them. Beside the cabinets were other tables, covered in green felt, sporting uniformed dolls impaled on metal rods, and one that had little dots peppering it's plastic surface.

[Emrys]

In cabal conflicts were a thing Emrys was worried he'd brought with him when he saw Ermac and July at the first dinner the newly reformed Veiled Threats had had months ago. His opinions of the two and their opinions of him left him thinking his stay at the sanctum was going to be far shorter then it turned out to be, so when the Enchanter heard that other people, valued people, didn't see their cabalmates as a neatly packaged new family actually brought a bit of peace to the Enchanter's mind.

"That difficult huh?" Emrys couldn't say he had met the former Herald, but that didn't stop her from saying a few choice words about him. The only reason he even remembered her at all was the small act of Fate that did end up bringing Merlin, Morgan LeFaye, and King Arthur into her own cabal.

Fate, as comical as it is understated.

When he entered the room a smile instantly grew on his face. Machines he hadn't seen since his childhood trips to the Boardwalk sparked a feeling of nostalgia nothing else in Sacramento could claim to mimic thus far. "If she's gone maybe we should break a few of these back out? If they work I mean, which I might be able to help with."

After a moment his attention moved from the electronic to the tables, his attention settling on the dots of the air hockey table. "Looks like everything's in decent shape."

[Avis]

"Cool. I don't even know half of what this stuff is, to be honest. Didn't have this kinda stuff when I was growing up. Well, except for the Pool table, I mean. Hard to not know what a pool table is," Avis said with a half smile.

"How about you? You know what the hell 'Battletoads' is? I mean, this stuff isn't that common, is it?"

[Emrys]

"Pool tables are everywhere." Emrys agreed with a nod. "Arcades stopped being cool when Sony and Nintendo brought video games into people's homes. Battletoads was released in the early nineties when Rare noticed the popularity of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon and Nintendo game and decided they wanted that money too."

The smile never faded as he reminisced about his childhood, but he did stop when he realized it sounded a lot more familiar to one of them then the other. "Um, well, it's not overly common. I lived in Eastern Maryland growing up, and the tourist trap that is Ocean City was just a stone's throw away. My sisters showed me Jaws way to young, and they loved teasing me with it when we went out, so my parents would just give me a few rolls of quarters and let me go to the arcade nearby instead."

He shrugged and glanced over to the machines once more. "The games were more interesting then piles of sand and a polluted ocean anyway."

[Avis]

"So how did Battletoads and arcades get you to China?" Avis asked, leaning up against the aforementioned machine. "I mean, how did you go from hanging out inside your head with the comfort of electronic stimuli to wanting to travel to another place to learn about people that see the world completely differently from you?"

[Emrys]

Fucking stereotypes.

You mention you're a gamer and suddenly you're an antisocial introvert who doesn't like dealing with other people. Granted that was a pretty valid description of Emrys since his arrival to Sacramento, but that didn't make the stereotype anymore okay!

"Um, I wasn't alone." Emrys said as the smile strained ever so slightly. "Games are like every other hobby, in that you probably could do them alone, but you don't have to and that's boring. Arcades are setup with dozens of machines and lots of people to play them. You can stay by yourself, or you can talk to people. It can be just as social as any other pass time, competitive even, and that's why I liked it."

"This will sound pretty out of place, but I do kinda like people." He stopped for a second, waiting for what he assumed would be laughter to subside. "I'm curious about things that are different, whether it's another world in someone's game or a world of belief no one in the west cares to learn because they can be distracted by Fast and Furious twenty seven or The Hobbit Three, Peter Jackson's Next Meal Ticket."

He shrugged and rolled his eyes, less then impressed with how that trilogy developed. "I think the world is full of fascinating things, made by fascinating people, you just gotta look for them behind the piles of shit the Seers tell to keep you distracted from the good parts of the world."

[Avis]

"Everyone's always alone," Avis countered, her voice grim, her gaze becoming lost in the oblivion of shadow shrouding the back of the storage room. "There's no such thing as unity, or even understanding as most people would imagine it. That's the burden of individuality. Of unique perspectives formed by the experiences and biologies that never existed until this particle moment. It's the ultimate tyranny of the lie. The distance it creates between people, between our thoughts and how someone else interprets them, that's a curse we've been inflicted with.

"So, actually, you were alone in that arcade. But I understand now," Avis declared, looking back to Emrys. "You wanted to overcome that distance. To escape the burden and find a connection. Even when you were fiddling around in an arcade, you instinctively tried to use the, quote on quote, 'shared experience' of the games to bridge that gap. Then, years later, you tried to bridge it through learning about other people. Trying to join with them through understanding their perspective, no matter how impossible that task actually was...Your hostility makes sense now, too. Your inability to join with others, to truly share your perspective with them, or learn theirs, makes you frustrated and angry. It chafes at you, and that's why you argue like you do. It's because you hate being alone, you just struggle with actually finding a way to connect with another. Like we all do..."