Gilbert Summers, "The Hat"
Location: Ville au Camp - Main House (Porch) -> Kitchen House
Skills: N/A
As the group took a brief stroll through the remaining two rooms of the main house, Gilbert gave himself the tiny luxury of listening to the conversations of the new Paradoxes. It amused him somewhat how glib of tongue some of them could be, especially considering that he was standing directly in their midst. One of his more smug smiles curled along one side of his mouth, followed by the barest of head shakes. It was an interesting phenomenon. Naturally, Gilbert figured the frank and open discourse with zero guile might be due, at least in part, to the guttural fear yet sudden liberation of being dead. The walking around, taking in the evening air, "what would you like with your tea?" dead, not the shambling about, eater-of-brains kind of dead, nor even the significantly more boring, just laying there kind of dead where your only real concerns (were one cognizant of anything or even spiritually present) were bugs and/or necrophiliacs.
A couple of them were quiet, or very nearly so. The optimistic dark complected one called James looked to have his initial zest run down like a music box coming to premature rest, and the extremely pale one had yet to speak in his presence at all. Everybody had their own way of processing. Hell, when
he found out what he was, there was one hell of an adjustment period. On the other hand, some of these new Paradoxes seemed firmly planted in a specific attitude, be it sarcasm or flirtation or a strange sense of conversational neutrality. None of it particularly concerned him past the need to keep a cursory listen for warning signs of psychosis. That had happened before. Wasn't pretty.
"Are we ready?" he inquired lightly. Everyone seemed to have finished up this stop on the nickel tour, and he was eager to get them back into Evelina's care for another round of Q & A. If he had to field additional questions that didn't involve the layout of the grounds, he might be inclined to answer. That's just not how it worked. Dropper feed information to these people at a rate that their brains could handle it. Problems would invariably arise otherwise.
"Ok, if you'll follow me..." Gilbert stepped off of the porch and cut an immediate left, walking toward the Kitchen House.
"The front grounds are pretty straightforward from here." said Gilbert, crossing the ground in front of the house. As soon as he cleared the outer wall, he pointed beyond the house to a pair of smaller buildings.
"Garages. The less sophisticated types tend to call them 'car holes', but trust me, they're garages. Oh, ah... modern equivalent to a carriage house or a cart shed. Moving on..." Gilbert continued taking them in a straight line toward the Kitchen House, passing a copse of trees with one very familiar, sprawling Oak.
"All of you will remember this. The old Oak is the present site for the gateway here. This is where you arrived. Nice spot. Out of the way. Serene, even. Sometimes I like so sit out here with tea, maybe some sandwiches. Get a little weapon practice in. It's a nice spot, other connotations aside. But hey! Let's keep going." Just past the Oak was one of Gilbert's favorite places
and the end of the line for them, so far as the initial tour went.
"And here we go, the Kitchen House. The weather in this part of the country is, ah... Well, it has humidity and heat that's near impossible this far away from the equator. The Kitchen House produces food for the whole of the grounds and staff, and in the summer. Damn. Just damn. Be glad it's away from the house. That last part shouldn't be a problem for us, but there it is." Gilbert waved a hand toward the ramp and deck attached to the building,
"Let's file inside. Miss Lucas should be waiting."
James Grady
Location: Ville au Camp - Main House (Porch) -> Kitchen House
Skills: N/A
James, meanwhile, walked along behind Gilbert like a man expecting to either wake up any moment then, or fall over stone dead. He had to admit, it was a nice place. Quiet, out of the way, light breeze flitting through the greenery; not bad. Of course, it was extremely likely first constructed and maintained by his ancestors, slave labor sold in exchange for manufactured goods, traded for raw materials of the New World, and left to the mercy of secondary buyers who, for the most part, treated them worse than cattle.
"Fuckin' Dutch..." murmured James, taking in his surroundings. Maybe not his forefathers
exactly, his people were from south Georgia. But he couldn't definitively rule it out, either. Such was life.
James recognized the tree, alright. It was where he first saw Alicia again. His dead bestie right in front of him. It was an amazing dream at first, until his own crushing guilt got the better of him. He needed to have a talk with her as soon as he could. Confess to her what he did. He had accepted punishment for it in his previous life, and hell, maybe this was part of it in a more metaphysical sense. There was a darkness in James that he had accepted a long time ago and that the world in which he had lived made thrive. He really didn't like that it was there, even though it probably saved his life on more than one occasion.
But hey! That was a totally different lifetime, right? Yeah! This little odyssey that he was on was one part second chance, one part self-discovery! Residing on an old Plantation as a dead guy, possibly with superpowers, with a collection of some of the most eclectic and potentially strange people he had ever had the pleasure of making acquaintance that had
also died, and/or had been around since the dawn of frigging time. So, okay: Garages, Oak, Kitchen. He's got this.
As he ambled into the building, he did really wonder if alcohol was forthcoming.
