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The Arms Hotel Lobby, Tuesday

Nana (nee The Dog) was still following Jeff around when he entered the Arms Hotel early that morning. It took him considerable effort - and about half an hour of his shift - to get her to just lie down quietly. Finally, he shook off his jacket and dashed into the kitchen, where he was to return several times that day to attempt to talk Gunther into providing free and sensible food.

It would soon become obvious to Jeff that it was more of an either/or kind of situation.

If you were in luck, you could catch him actually sitting at the front desk, doodling or staring nervously at some flowers. In these intervals, it might actually seem as if the Arms Hotel lobby was really, truly open.

Which it was.

[ OCD indahouse ]

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There's a whole plethora of other hotel space and/or staff here that can be used in a moddedly fashion to help you go about your business.

Better watch out for the dog, though.

He's here, and he's nervous. Nobody is surprised.

For a certain someone.

It was a completely logical process. Get out of work, head over to the arms, say hi to Jeff, maybe go do something. Turtle had even told herself that she didn't really want to, but it would be a nice thing to do and it wasn't like she had anything better to do, right? Right. Then why was she nervous? Ugh. Boys sucked.

So she was up to the say hi part, but found that, "So what exactly do you do around here, anyway?" was what came out instead. Even got that wrong. Great.

She might have also been looking around to see if that infamous dog was around.

It had been two hours since Jeff had given up on talking to Gunther all together and about an hour since he last straightened some invisible flower arrangement, and with every tick of the clock his nerves had jumped exponentially.

This is the only way he could explain not noticing Turtle until she was standing square in front of him.

"...Hippo!" he said. Oh dear God, he was relapsing. "...I mean, er, things. I'm not sure." Mostly because he hadn't actually heard much of what Mary'd been saying when she was explaining it. "There's a computer."

Turtle looked for said computer. "Um....that's good?" Which just left her to asking herself, could she date someone she wouldn't hire? Best to cut the small talk and right get to the meat of the topic. "So, you have a lot you still need to do here?"

"I don't mean physically," Jeff was hasty to explain, "It's just that the information goes into the computers except people still have to sign this." Pretty much the only piece of information he'd retained about the job. He pointed at the Big Book of Signings. "Computers here are smaller than I'm used to," he continued, "I'm terrified I might swallow one."

Oh. Right. They'd moved on from the computers.

"I'm fairly certain I'm done," Jeff said, then blurted, "Do you like flowers? I was going to bring you some, but then I thought, what if she's allergic? There may be petals all over the place, who knows what'll happen..."

By the end of the first part, Turtle was leaning on the front desk with a hand covering her face, wondering exactly what she was doing here. But her hand slid from her eyes to her mouth when Jeff started talking about flowers, and then the hand fell away completely to the desk and her head tilted. "Flowers are nice," she said. "Not entirely necissary, but it is a pretty nice thought..."

No one ever'd gotten her flowers before, except her father. Sometimes, for Valentine's Day, Jake would get all his girls a rose.

"Oh," Jeff said, then got up from behind the desk. "Good, 'cos, er, I got you some in the end, but I put them all the way over there in case of, you know, allergies." There were some advantages to learning everything there was to know about life from classic horror movies.

Also, getting up to go get them allowed him to have a quiet freak-out about all the breast issues without showing Turtle his utter terror. Of course, he knew absolutely next to nothing about flowers, except that they turned up in films a lot and apparently if you didn't bring any, women were allowed to slap you.

Which is how he ended up with some mildly frazzled-looking daisies and a clueless expression.

He...actually got some? Jeff going all the way over there in case of, you know, allergies, also gave her a moment to blink away a sort of stunned expression. No one ever got her flowers before; Jeff wasn't supposed to be competent enough for flowers.

Turtle considered playing the cold game, the whole what a commercial waste of bullcrap and money because they're just going to die anyway routine, until the flowers got there and they were so haggered and he was so clueless that she couldn't help herself as she went, "Awwww. Thank you, Jeff. You really didn't have to do something like that..."

Competent Jeff may not be, but he had considerable experience with fretting over every single detail to hit his life ever, and all these films had ingrained in him a very real fear of getting slapped. Even insectivores didn't take away the horror of watching the Damsel slap the Captain over his late hours and poor time-management skills.

"Well, you know," he said, affably, "I wouldn't want to get slapped."

"Well," Turtle said, a shoulder shrugging slightly, "you wouldn't have to worry about that. I don't slap people."

She took a second to sniff at the daisies. "I kick them."

"Oh, well, that's alright, then," Jeff stammered, then proceeded immediately onwards, terrified of what he'd say in a pause, "There's free food, er, if you don't mind Gunther's ideas. Hopefully nothing that would require excessive bathroom, er, breaks."

...He just had to mention bathrooms, hadn't he? He added that one to his self-sabotage list and made a resolute attempt to continue looking at Turtle's face.

Turtle's nose wrinkled, face scrutching slightly. "Ew. Um, free food is good, but maybe not so much in this case. Uhh...I mean, why do you want to do? There's bowling, maybe, or movie..." Movie, she thought, would be good, because they wouldn't have to talk as much...She would have suggested karaoke at Caritas but, one, she couldn't sing and two, who knows what Jeff would end up singing about...

Yeah, Jeff was with Turtle on the not talking so much. "Movie!" he exclaimed, maybe a little bit too enthusiastically, "Films are good."

...But, then Turtle realized that her date with Tannim had been at the movies. And they all knew how that turned out.

"Maybe not movies," she frowned, looking down into the droopy little daisies thoughtfully. "How are you at chess?" she asked.

"Um," Jeff said, "...Not so good." He was starting to feel a little bit lost, here. That was never good. "Maybe... maybe we could just grab a drink, first?" He felt just a little bit more comfortable in bars.

"That'll work," Turtle nodded in approval of this plan. "That'll be better than standing around in a hotel lobby trying to figure out what to do, anyway."

Jeff threw a quick glance back at Nana. "We should probably walk her back to my room, first," he lamented. "I'll feel better knowing my mother isn't watching."

"Uhhh...Did you just say that that dog was your mother?"

He'd walked up to Nana already, poking the dog awake. "Oh, no, no no no," he said, "There's just something about the way she looks at me. I can't help but feel as if she's spying on me."

Turtle set the flowers on the front desk for right now, going over for a better look at the dog. "Spying on you....for your mother?"

"You can't predict these things," Jeff said. Nana rolled onto her back, tongue lolling out of her mouth as she grinned a manic upside-down grin. "There is no such thing as too much paranoia where it concerns my mother. If we leave her here, she's just going to follow me about all evening."

Turtle nodded. "What if she doesn't want to go back?" she asked, blinking at the giant beast of a dog. "I mean, I don't think we have so much of a choice if she thinks otherwise..."

She was keeping a good, safe distance.

Jeff's eyes might have momentarily gone dark. "I'll find a way," he said. There was always a way in the ongoing struggle between man and tank-sized poodle.

"She's nice to people who aren't me, though. That's how I know she's affiliated with my mother." He got up off the floor. The dog got up, too.

"Well, then," Turtle said after a moment, "she should be nice to me, then, right?" Then, she leaned in a little, lightly hitting her hands against her knees. "C'mere, girl. C'mere. Please don't eat me, atta girl..."

"...I don't think that's such a good idea," Jeff said, "She may communicate your identity down to my mother. I wouldn't want you to be bothered."

Nana had other ideas and practically skipped towards Turtle, tail wagging, tongue forwards.

Turtle's eyes might have gotten really wide as the dog..um, skipped, over, bracing herself for impact but, also, at the same time, having her hands ready to go scritching behind the ears that were practically bigger than her hands themselves. And trying to avoid the tongue of doom. "If she is a spy," Turtle pointed out, "I'd rather have it be reported that I was nice to your dog than otherwise."

Nana may have pushed her big, wet nose somewhere in the vicinity of Turtle's not-so-wet one, pawing shamelessly and doing a bizarre little four-legged dance of skipping joy. You could've used her tail for a fan.

"I suppose," Jeff said, "But I would really rather avoid having my mother come down here. It's bad enough she calls me up every week and appears in all of my nightmares, if she's here I'll never have another night's sleep."

Which left Turtle's hands moving in an effort to block paws and noses and holy crap big dog, and any actually petting of the dog that happened was purely accidental. "But why would she come down here just on account of me?" she grunted and then started feeling like she'd listened to Jeff and not called Nana over. "Down girl, come on. No jumping on the Turtle. The Turtle is very little and easily crushed..." And then back to the conversation: "That's one heck of a commute...."

And on to the next stage of the process: Nana began running around her in circles, still waving her tail enthusiastically. Finally, she threw roughly half her weight in the direction of Turtle's legs. There may have been some kind of 'pet me, pet me!' message in there, although that might have gotten buried under all the mass.

"No, no, Nana! Calm! Calm!" Jeff grabbed at his hair, then at the dog, and finally pulled her away by the collar. "Sorry," he said, struggling, "My mother already moved to London for me once. Anything's possible."

"Ooof." And that would be Turtle's butt hitting the floor. She let out a little bit of a grunt, trying to act like it didn't hurt at all and that it hadn't left her a little daze, but her face was betraying her. "S'okay," she muttered, pushing herself up and brushing off her jeans. "Guess we really should just get her back...."

Seeing that Jeff was struggling, though, she went to get a hold of the collar as well to help.

"I'm sorry," Jeff repeated, again, "I think she's a bit confused on-- general size matters--" Turtle's help with the dog was welcome up until a little brush (or gust of air) made Jeff realise about the Proximity Danger. He froze up.

Nana stopped struggling and blinked up at him, still grinning. Or maybe just opening her mouth. With dogs it pretty much amounted to the same thing.

"What?" Blinking, Turtle looked up at Jeff to see what had made him just stop like that. She blinked again; the realization came to her slowly, and more in the glance back down toward Nana's collar, where she would come to discover that their hands were very, very close. "Oh."

"Oh!" Her hand released as though the collar had suddenly turned into smouldering steel and burnt her. "Oh, I...!" Both hands were waving a little in front of her. "Sorry! I...I didn't mean to suggest that...that you couldn't handle her....yourself...." Yeah, that was it. That was why she pulled back like that. Nice save, Wexler.

"I think Nana needs to go, er, relieve herself, somewhere, so we should go now, before she..." Jeff spluttered, "You know. Off we go then." He walked towards the exit, the dog following his every step. Do not think about breasts, Jeffrey! She hasn't ran away yet, just keep your mouth shut forever!

"Unless you, er, prefer lobby-loitering. I tried that myself, but, you know, lobbies..."

"No, no," Turtle said, shaking her head to get a grip on herself, and then jogging a little to catch up with the head start he got until she was on the other side of the dog again on their way. "Loitering looks bad for business..."

Because my reliable Newbie Advisors tell me it's a matter of life and death.

It is! I once took half an hour to put up an OOC and the dead starting coming back to life. It's true!

But the Chevy was okay.

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The Arms Hotel Lobby, Tuesday

Avoid Jeff

Talk to Jeff

After Jeff's Shift

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OOC

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