fandomtownies | Mauvaise Chance Office/Lobby, Monday [10/29]

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Mauvaise Chance Office/Lobby, Monday [10/29]

That guy behind the front desk and past the Guy With Tools sign, munching on a bagel as he reads the newspaper, would be Xander, yes. What? He does eat something besides doughnuts once in a while.

Yes, that's totally a box of doughnuts on the counter. Shut up.
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[OOC: Open like an open thing!]

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Mary had gotten tired of looking at her little photograph and decided to do something about it. "Hi there," she said to the guy behind the desk. "Are you the one with the Guys With Tools ad in the classifieds?"

Xander looked up -- appreciatively, because still human and possessing at least one eye, thanks -- and nodded. "That'd be me. Xander Harris, hi."

"Mary Connell. I'm the owner of the Arms Hotel," she said, extending her hand. "I need a white picket fence in front of my hotel."

Xander stood to shake her hand. "Home sweet or at least for the weekend home? I can do that."

"I'm actually living in the hotel, so for me, it's home," said Mary, smiling. "My father-in-law promised me a white picket fence as a wedding present, but his son decided that he'd rather join the Marines than get married."

"Ouch," was Xander's answer. Which would have been more ironic if he'd hailed from one of those ~~canon~~ timelines where he'd done his own bit of picket-fence-avoiding. "But I get the home part - I live on the ground floor here, and it's probably the closest to home I've been in a while."

Apartment complex. Right. She wasn't sure if the bartender gig would count as steady income, and maybe this place would run background checks and dig up that whole, wanted for murder deal. So it was probably a bad idea.

Faith walked up to the counter, still not sure if she was gonna ask about a place ... and couldn't help grinning at the guy standing there.

"Xander."

Technically, Mary has done her share of picket-fence-avoiding as well. She'd been proposed to twice back home, and she turned both down because it didn't feel right.

"Then you know what I mean," she said. "Of course, last year I was living in a hotel in Vegas anyway, but it was one of the perks of the job."

It wasn't that he'd completely missed radio for the past... what, week? It was just that his brain had slid over the name the way it does when you've spent years training it to do just that.

So when he looked up, somewhere in the back of his mind there was a click, but it wasn't quite as loud as the static between his ears, apparently, since the only response he could manage was staring and a few vowel sounds.

"And then you moved to Fandom? What, Vegas was too small-town for you?" he asked, grinning.

"Faith," she supplied with an amused grin. "It's real easy to pronounce. Most people don't got a problem."

Her eyes widened suddenly. "Oh, shit, is this a dimensional thing? 'Cause I'm not evil any more. Went to jail and stopped being psycho and I didn't, like, try to kill you or anything, did I?"

Wait, she'd done that anyway, in her timeline. Fuck.

"I can go?" she offered.

It had become a very small town when her dad was acquitted and she had to take matters into her own hands. "There were some changes in the casino's ownership and things got kind of complicated. Besides, I needed a change of pace," she replied. "From what I hear, my ex is now president of operations at the resort where I used to work."

"Not recently," he answered, because apparently cracking wise was like breathing and he didn't actually need a functioning brain for it. He shook his head, which was both an answer and a re-boot. Hi, Xander, this is Fandom; have you met? Oh, right.

"No. Sorry. Just wasn't expecting to see you. Uh, in Fandom."

"Uh. Yeah. About that. The strangling-thing. I'm ... real sorry. Kinda snapped. No excuse, yeah, I know." She eyed him, curiously. "Is that how it happened your place, too? 'Cause that'd be kinda weird. Same deal, but instead I had a gun on you or whatever."

Faith ran a hand through her hair. "I, uh, you know. Been kicking around Thailand instead of that Council you and B set up. Don't stay in touch a whole lot, but Dawnie ..." She shrugged, a little helplessly. "She's a good kid."

"Double-ouch. I can see why you might want some new scenery."

"It took me a little while to adjust, but I'm enjoying Fandom," said Mary. "Las Vegas is a nice place to visit, but when you live there, you kind of lose your perspective on what crazy really means."

He blinked. "No gun." Xander said slowly, the rest of it registering but hitting about three steps ahead of his ability to come up with an answer. "So you're Dawn's Faith," he finally put together.

Xander laughed. "And Fandom puts crazy back in perspective?"

"It's actually a bit more sane than Las Vegas. At least, most of the time," giggled Mary. "At the very least, at least I'm not getting drunk every night."

"Some places make that easier than others," Xander agreed, though he knew from experience that if you weren't trying to avoid it, pretty much no town was too small.

"Yeah," she said, folding her arms. "I came in for that ... parents' thing? Was gonna take off and she said, maybe I should stick around. Kinda thought she meant it. I, uh, met that other Slayer chick, the future one? Back in Scotland. She said everyone here's kinda from different times and all that. 'Cept me and Dawnie, I guess."

Faith took a nervous breath. "So, uh, the B here - she's real young. Never even met me, right?"

"Most important of all, there is no ex-fiance, ex-fiance's new girlfriend, and ex-fiance's new baby in Fandom," said Mary.

Xander nodded. "'Bout the same age she was when I first met her." Or a year older now, he guessed, but it was a year here, not in Sunnydale. "Willow's..." ...got a storyline that involves more mental math than Xander wanted to do ever. "...younger too."

Faith shook her head. "Gotta be weird. Everybody's here, everybody's wrong. Not sure I'll be able to hack it. Don't things get screwed up, like, 'cause you know stuff about someone's future and then it goes wrong?"

Triple-ouch, Xander thought but didn't say. "Always a plus." He pushed his newspaper aside and pulled his laptop over. "Well, it shouldn't cost much to put in your fence, and I can probably get to it sometime this week, if that's good for you."

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Mauvaise Chance Office/Lobby, Monday [10/29]

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