by Besyanteo » Sun Sep 07, 2008 12:49 am
Jeridan, after having most everything in the room explained to him with painful slowness and detail (on his own insistence) by Annie, Idran, and even a bit by Spob, locked himself in and drew the curtains. Alone for the first time since arriving on Krynus, he removed his illusion ring, and shook out from head to toe. He'd been resisting the urge all day, and it was a great relief to finally do so now.
The next thing he really, really needed, was to bathe. After a boat ride over on Gaera, and another from the island on Krynus to the mainland (or, he assumed this was the mainland), his coat was starting to collect some very irritating salt crystals. However, he took some time to get into the shower; Jeridan was more than a little worried that his feet would slip on the shiney, smooth looking surface of the floor. Be silly to come so far only to break his neck in a hotel bathroom. When he did set foot on it, though, and his footing didn't abandon him, he hesitantly entered and started working the shower knobs. He learned very, very quickly which knob was hot and which was cold. After the first icy blast, he decided to stick with the other one.
He'd heard about hot water bathing... the nobles and some inns provided it, and he'd heard a very small number of them could even afford to have a system set up like this for their private use, but he never dreamed he'd ever experience that sort of luxury himself. Sparing the details, it was immensely gratifying! Alas, it wasn't quite perfect. The provided bar soap didn't seem to be made for hair, and it irritated his skin almost instantly. He set that aside, early on, and was using the shampoo... The bottle, being about the size of Jeridan's thumb, didn't get much of the job done. He sighed in irritation, little more than his head, neck and shoulders properly cleaned when the bottle ran out. He could hardly complain; It made sense, for humans. They had one small patch of thick hair and sensitive skin to clean. Still, that did nothing to alleviate his irritation. He stayed in long enough to rinse and remaining salt out of his fur, and then began an hour long process of drying himself with two towels and a hair drier. That fiasco led to another hour of combing out fur that had suddenly and bewilderingly burst out to twice it's normal body and thickness. By the time he was finally back to something close to normal (his tail still reminded him of Nekonian after a bad fright), the idea of slipping back into clothes and straightening his fur again afterward to avoid chaffing was not worth considering. He'd just stay in the rest of the evening.
He sat on the bed, and tried to work the 'ree moat', as Annie had referred to it. Point it at the glass box... check. Push this little red button... He started as the TV came to life, dropping the remote on the floor. There was something on the screen talking about the weather in various locations throughout the area. Temperatures and humidities and on and on. He laughed at himself a little and picked up the remote again.
"Ishtar, pull it together, man."
He flipped through channels for a while. Nothing much interesting was on. Or, rather, from one point of view everything that was on was interesting. Very interesting, if not appealing. It was sort of like visiting a zoo full of strange and exotic animals from far provinces... very boring animals that were occasionally foul mouthed, often violent, sometimes shameless tarts... Then, every once in a while, it would swing violently towards the intellectual. Political debates on subjects he knew nothing about, documentaries on animals he'd never seen before... All of it interspersed with what he assumed could only be merchants, hocking foreign objects with foreign purposes for what were apparently "low, low prices!" Somehow it was all a little too much right now. It all moved at it's own pace, and asking questions didn't seem to produce responses. He turned it off.
He glanced at the Commweb machine, sitting over near the window. He could try it... But he couldn't seem to remember much of what Annie and Idran had said to him about operating it. He remembered words like 'click' and 'key' and 'mouse'... None of them made any sense to him in the context they'd been explained in, and he didn't particularly feel inclined to mess with it right now. So what was left? He still didn't want to leave the room just yet, so looking around the city was out. His eyes fell on the phone, sitting on a side table next to the bed. Spob had explained briefly about phones, and those at least sounded pretty simple. Suddenly his stomach growled pretty loudly. Well, now was as good a time as any. The phone had some numbers on the hand piece, each one next to a label. He tried putting one in, and putting the phone to his ear like he'd been shown.
"Hello? Room service?"