{{PP-PT-F29}} A Drink That Never Ends {On the House}

[Reytac 0]

It was honestly a bit hard for Reytac to keep from reaching out and clasping a hand on Teion's shoulder when she looked back to him again as they stood in front of the bar. She'd been doing it every so often, as if to make sure that he was still there, and if he'd known her a bit better he might have offered that physical support. Instead - 

"No, I see it too Miss Teion. And.. The other glass that I swear was not there when we walked in here and saw that one. Or, any sign of who put these here." Rey swallowed roughly as he processed that. While the drink that was in front of Teion - and he somehow knew it was meant for her, was in a short glass, befitting whiskey on the rocks - the one that was for him was in a fluted wine glass that he most definitely had not seen when they came in here. It had appeared, innocuously, on the bar-top next to the whiskey when Reytac tore his gaze from the other glass to look to Teion, checking on her.

And there was that blasted screen again. The words were fuzzy, not quite right but he couldn't place why they felt wrong. Worse was the fact that the window couldn't be closed - and that unlike normal menu screens, this one didn't turn smoothly with his focus. Instead it staggered, lurched, like it was... off kilter, or getting stuck in the air somehow. The brunette ground his teeth together and stepped forward. 

This was easily the oddest quest, environment, he'd ever been in, and at this point he wanted to get this over with and get them out of here. He grabbed the glass of wine, the scent of plums filling his nose as he lifted it to his moouth and took a drink. Originally, Reytac inteaded to finish the glass off in one go and get them moving - that intent fell to the side as Reytac coughed slightly, his eye going wide as he lowered the glass to stare at it. Something felt - wrong. Off. Different, new. He pulled open his character menu and his eyes shot open. A new debuff was there, one he had never heard of.

 

<<Lightweight>>

 

"Miss Teion wait-" He tried to stop her from taking a drink and getting that debuff. An impossible debuff from the effect description. He didn't know if he was in time as he turned towards her, stumbling slightly - it had been years since he'd been hit by this. And even before then, he only drank sparingly -

 

<<Player feels the effects of consumed alcohol as per physical world.>>

 

Spoiler

Roll ID: 255060  CD: 6 :: Plum Wine

 

Edited 7 hours ago by Reytac

[Teion 0]

Reytac was less cautious with the glass posed for him. Or maybe he was just in more of a hurry to get it over with. Teion plucked her drink from the counter and pulled it close to her face. The scent hit her, sharp and inviting all at once. She didn’t have to take a whiff to feel the prickling in her nose.

The last time she consumed something carelessly, it led to a less than favorable experience. Then again, nothing about their circumstances was anything like that time. Giving in to curiosity, she brought the rim of the glass to her lips moments before Reytac called out in warning. She drained some of its contents with a sip. Warm, then hot, it burned the back of her throat with an oaky weight that made her scrunch her nose. She breathed out through her mouth, eyes still squeezed shut as the familiar but not accustomed sensation washed over her.

”Yep.” She stopped herself from coughing the word out. ”That is just straight whiskey. Whoo.” She breathed out the last of her reaction to the aggressive taste, noticing Reytac nearly trip over himself beside her. ”Hm?” She cocked an eyebrow. Was he upset over something? Maybe—

She opened her mouth to ask a question, but stopped herself. She stood in silence, took her eyes away from Reytac, and narrowed her brows above them. It was like she was waiting for something. Pondering something.

Teion blinked, wondering if her imagination was getting the better of her. She brought the glass back up to her nose and sniffed it one more time, the alcohol burning in her nostrils. She didn’t seem satisfied by whatever she was doing. Finally, she paid attention to her questing companion. ”You okay?”

She’d listen to whatever answer he might have, but multi-tasked while she did. Setting her glass back down on the bar, Teion took a few steps to wade into the mess of the main tavern area and fish out a couple of stools that were intact enough to hold them. She placed one beside the bar in front of Reytac, then planted hers a couple of feet away, taking a seat and swiping open her menus. She navigated to her messages and typed something up, sending it off and returning her full attention to whatever this was.

Spoiler

To: @Ryo
Subject: Hey
I’m at a seedy tavern on F29. Might be the place you mentioned before? Can you check on me if I’m not back in like, an hour or two? Thanks ♡

 

Edited 3 hours ago by Teion

[Reytac 0]

Reytac's shoulders slumped down slightly as he dropped himself into the seat that she'd pulled out for him, mumbling a 'thanks' as he did so before rubbing his face with one hand. He hadn't been in time. He hoped the debuff would clear out quickly for both of them. 

"Check your stat panel for a new debuff." He finally said, leaning back and running one hand through his hair. "Just one more on the list of impossiblilities this floor has thrown at us. I'm sure I'll be feeling it soon, I never was much one for drinking. Always just a social drinker, y'know?" He turned and gave Teion a wan smile before shrugging. He turned back to the table and frowned when he saw that something that bothered him. Bothered him immensely. 

The blue panel for the next stage of the quest was back, and it still seemed unresponsive as he tried clearing it away. It hung there, in the air in front of him as he frowned at it. But worse than that was the fact that the text of the message was garbled - he could make out what it said, but the fuzziness from earlier had given way to distortion, stretching and twisting the letters beyond their normal shapes. Far beyond. And beyond it - on the counter-top, was another glass. Different from the wine glass he'd drank from before, but somehow - as he blinked, it shifted into something else. A different alcohol. He tried it a couple times, testing it, and each time, the glass, and the liquid inside of it changed to his eyes. Once, he even swore it was blood, another time it looked like juice. 

"Uh.. Miss Teion? Did the quest panel pop back up for you - but distorted?" A shiver was running up and down his back as he stared between the distorted panel, and the shifting, warping, drink that was the different each time he looked at it. 

[Teion 0]

She did as he suggested, directing her sights to the upper corner of her vision, pushing past the actual environment to regard her HUD where the two of their names sat next to green health bars. Now she finally noticed there was something new next to either of them. She squinted a little and focused on the icon until it revealed its secrets to her and she read the effects of the «Lightweight» debuff. An expression washed over her like she’d found what she’d been looking for.

”You’re fucking kidding me.” She whispered out the words under her breath, disbelief mixed with pure amusement. Teion cracked a smile, chuckled softly, then took her glass and slammed the rest of her drink. Her head rolled back just long enough to down the whiskey and then she lurched back forward, setting it back down in front of her. Her reaction to the volatile liquid was just as bad as the first, and she coughed lightly through the discomfort.

As if at his summons, another dialogue window appeared in between her and the glass she still held.

 

«Ĥ̵̛̳͍̣͍́̇͂͗͛̐͛̏̆͋͝ave a drink, it`s on thh̵͉̲̠̪̪͚̱̞̫̜̞͙͙͆̒̂͌̃̈́͘͝ě̸̢̧̛͙̝͎͕̯̮̈́̾̉̽́̂ house»

 

”Yep.” Again absent of a prompt to dismiss it, Teion tried to wave it away with her free hand. Her fingers merely passed through it, but beyond the message the lone ice cube sitting in her glass shifted around the new serving of amber that seemed to fill from its bottom. She eyed it suspiciously, trying to peer over the edge of the prompt, until it disappeared with just as little warning. She was met with a fresh glass of whiskey on the rocks. ”I’ll be honest, this is the first and only time I’ve ever seen this place…misbehave.” She planted her arms on the bar and leaned forward on them. ”And I haven’t the slightest idea if that means something really wrong is happening and the servers are about to crash, or if this place was just designed to act buggy.” Maybe waving it all away as a scare tactic would keep her sanity from unraveling.

”Why do you always call me ‘Miss’?” She blurted out the question, turning her head to Reytac with a raised eyebrow. ”How old are you, anyway?” She squinted at him a little.

Edited 2 hours ago by Teion

[Reytac 0]

"Huh? Oh, just upbringing, be polite ta people you meet. At least until they either indicate a desire for something else, or do something that earns a different kind of attitude. The golden rule and all that." 'Treat others as you want to be treated'. For Reytac, that meant he tried to treat others kindly, or politely, until they had told him they didn't care for it - some liked more casual interactions - or if they'd doe something that showed they didn't deserve that politeness. It didn't hurt him any to do that so far. As for his age.. Rey scratched his cheek as he looked up, thinking that one over. 

He had to add a couple of years to the last birthday he'd had outside - and try not to think about the fact he'd had two birthdays he didn't think about, without his wife. Finally he focused his gaze back on Teion as he picked up the glass - it settled on wine as he did - and took a slow drink before shrugging. "Thirty.. Four? Well, in a week or two, I think, if my calender is right. I wasn't really in a place to keep track for a while, but I'm fairly certain that's about right." Sitting down like this, with the two of them drinking slowly, was the calmest this floor had been - minus the storm howling outside, or the fact that the screen that hung in the air beside him was slowly getting more distorted the longer he sat looking at it. 

"I got this game as a surprise for my wife and I. I was testing it out on launch day so I could help her get adjusted to it the next day, when I popped the surprise on her. Whoops, bigger surprise, I guess, when, well, none of us came back out." He stared down at his drink as he slowly swirled the glass around, watching the purple wine spin in the fluted glass. For a moment he looked up at the ceiling, then back down and paused when he saw that the drink had flickered to something else, but the glass stayed the same in his grasp. That was, somehow, odder than the glass and drink shifting together, but a blink, and the plum wine was back. 

Right. Rey was gonna do what Teion was doing, and try to ignore the oddities, chalking it up to deliberate moves on the game's part. 

[Teion 0]

Teion mulled over his very normal answer. She gently turned the glass around in her hand, walking her fingers against its cool surface up until he took a stab at his own age. Then it was like she’d swallowed her own thoughts.

He was so much older than her. Not that this place didn’t make her feel like she’d put on a few years, both in pure stress and in forcing her to grow up fast in some aspect or another. Thinking about it, he started to remind her of someone. A friend she hadn’t seen in some time. At first she thought Shield might be dragging her out by her collar if he were here, but that wasn’t quite right. He’d probably be stubbornly poking his nose into whatever cursed nooks and crannies this floor might be stashing away treasure on. She never actually knew his tolerance for horror.

Reytac rolled along their mild conversation with his circumstances for arrival. It left her quiet, both of them sitting with the somber thought and memory. Teion’s first thought was a cynical one: how she hadn’t really left anyone behind back home. But that wasn’t true, and she knew it. She just hadn’t lost a wife. ”Sorry to hear.” She finally offered, weak and shallow. Another few moments passed. ”A friend told me about it.” She kept her eyes on her glass and her voice stayed low. ”We were going to start playing together. We did, for a bit.” She shrugged. ”He changed. Things changed for a lot of people in here, I suppose.” Painfully true for her just as well. At least she had someone to go home to.

She nursed her drink now, holding it by the rim with her hand clawed down around it. That little fuzzy feeling started to creep in at the corners of her mind. She didn’t let herself stop to wonder whether or not this was a good idea.

[Reytac 0]

Saying things changed for people here was an understatement for sure. Reytac rocked back on his bar stool, staring up at the flickering bare light bulb hanging above them for a long moment. He wasn't so far gone yet that his balance was bad enough for him to worry about falling over - he just had wine, unlike the whiskey that Teion was knocking back. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and gave a shrug. "Yeah, that's no joke there. I mean, most people don't live with a day to day threat of death anymore - but all of a sudden, in here, we do. I know a lot of people just kind of.. Gave up? I did, too. For long time." He clinked his glass down, doing his best to ignore the fact that it was full again, despite him having finished it twice as they talked. "And now I'm being dumb and headstrong, years late to the party. I don't know if she's even out there waiting for me, but hey, I'm still gonna try. I lost two years to this place. Now.. Well, now I've seen a bunch of forests, and something that would fit in a horror movie." He let out a chuckle as he spun himself around on his bar stool. The creak that came from it was - not right. Instead of metal on metal like he had expected, it was more like.. The creaking you'd feel in your bones, but as a sound. Or glass grinding against itself. Reytac grabbed onto the counter to stop himself abruptly as that sound made his teeth ache. 

"Yeah not doing that again." He shook his head, swaying slightly. This was exactly why he didn't like drinking too much - and why he wasn't gonna touch another drop. Along with the fact that he wasn't sure what exactly he was drinking - not with the way it kept changing.