[nWoD] Hex, the beta adventure!

"Fair enough." He takes the bill, raises an eyebrow at it, but drops it in the till anyway and gives her a pair of small bills and a few coins (nothing she's seen before) as change. He doesn't ask her name, but writes on the cup before going off to prepare it.

 

"Of course I eat," Nat says. "I'm not a ghost or anything like that."

 

Norm, too eager for coffee to wait any longer, floated over to the shop, stopping once he was beside Katters.

 

The barista blinks, then gives Norm a cheerful smile. At least one person in the world has noticed the oddness of a floating person. "Hey! What can I get for you?"

 

Norm grinned. The barista was attractive, and though Norm figured that flirting with someone while they were doing their job was a bad idea and therefore things were unlikely to go any further, he couldn't help but be glad that the barista smiled at him. He then made his order.

 

"Sure. Coming right up." The man squints over his fashion sunglasses to scribble Norm's name and order onto a cup before getting to work.

Further down the line, the girl from earlier finishes her drink and stands. "Thanks, Mr. H," she says, giving the barista a smile. "Let's hope this shift isn't too horrible, huh?"

"I don't think anything can beat the Great Teenage Display Fiasco," he says with a bit of a grin. The girl groans.

"Don't remind me. Later."

"Later, Cee."

'Cee' turns for the door and leaves, the bell jangling. Practically as soon as it's silent, the barista's expression slips from 'generic cheerful food service' to something more serious. He gives Katters and Norm a much more pointed look over. "So. You kids are new in town, I take it?"

 

Norm nodded. "Yeah, I'm new here."

But I'm not a kid, he continued in his head but didn't voice. He also decided not to ask about the Great Teenage Display Fiasco, even though he was curious about it. It sounded like it must've been funny. Or a complete disaster. Or both.

 

Katters watches Cee leave. "'New in town,'" she repeats, absently. "You could say that. Is it a problem?"

 

"Not for me," he says. "But folks like you are usually looking for information." He slides his sunglasses down with one hand to look directly at the invisible Nat. "Can I get ya anything?"

 

Norm rolled his eyes and said, in a scornful voice, "By looking for information, do you mean 'wanting to know exactly where we are and how we got there'? 'Cause, well, that seems like pretty reasonable information to want, dude."

Even though he was thrilled to be there and free, what the man said couldn't help but grate on him. Sure, he was feeling more joyful than curious about recent events, willing to go with things and less eager to punch the cause of them than Ms. Military was, but so far, all the information they'd looked for was pretty reasonable, not like state secrets or anything - the ways Ms. Military used to go after it weren't always as reasonable, sure, but that didn't reflect on what they all wanted to know.

 

Nat looks around before realizing there's no one else the coffee guy could be looking at. "Huh? Me?...You can see me?"

 

"Well, it kinda depends on what kind of new folk you are. You don't look like you fell out of the Hedge, though." He adjusts his glasses with a sigh. "Which means you're some of the weird ones. Truth is, I don't really know exactly how you got here. The Machine does this sometimes - sucks people right outta their homes and brings them here."

"Yeah. You want anything?" he repeats, as though there's nothing especially interesting. "Trust me, I've seen weirder than invisible folks around here."

 

"The Machine?" Katters asks. "What machine?"

 

Nat sits in shock for some time. "Um," she finally says, and tries again to understand what she's just heard. "There's definitely weirder but - I haven't met anyone that can see me."

 

He rubs at the back of his neck. "It's called the God-Machine, most commonly. No one's sure where it came from, or what it wants, but it's the explanations behind most of the weird happenings in this city, at some level."

"You'll run into quite a few around here. The powers of different kinds of people interact in weird ways, you know?"

 

Norm frowned. "God-Machine?"

He was still thrilled to be free from his lamp, but the barista's explanation of how he got to Hex added a sour note to that. He didn't want some kind of mechanical deity messing around with his life, interfering with him for reasons it was unwilling to disclose. That wouldn't be much better than being trapped in a lamp and forced to grant wishes for people.

 

"Alright, but what is it? Where is it? What's it for?"
'God-Machine' is such a loaded and vague term. Katters needs something more concrete if she plans on doing anything with this information.

 

"Really good questions. No easy answer. On your way here, did you notice any weird gears sticking out of a building or anything like that?" He grabs a rag and starts wiping across the counter as he talks, even though they seem to be pretty clean already. "The Machine isn't in just one place. It's got different installations all over the city. Some of them even look like people and walk around looking for people who ask too many questions." That's a hint, and not a subtle one, to why he didn't start talking while the girl was in the shop.

 

"Not really," Norm replied. Even though there was a tree with a clock in it, he hadn't really noticed it enough to be sure it was there. He was much more interested in how he was suddenly free from his lamp and in making sure that wasn't a dream.

And to the second part, he replied, "So, some of the people here aren't real?"

 

In Katters’ experience, most people aren’t real.
She hadn’t noticed any gears or anything, but she had been pretty preoccupied with that whole ‘I think somebody poisoned me’ thing, to say nothing of the ‘Where am I and how do I not be here anymore’ issue. “I’ll have to take a look when we get back outside,” she says.