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Post by amsterdame on Jul 25, 2015 5:57:07 GMT -8
--1 hour ago--"Ah, Amsteria!" the bespectacled girl called out to her as she passed the cafeteria, ready to continue charting that twisted hall past the gardens. The girl was flushed, flustering, as if anxious to ask but then having to. "I have a morning shift at the mailroom today, but I just can't make it. Could you do me a favour?" -------------------------------------
Setting: Death's HQ, Mailroom
Early morning
--------------------------------------It was not often that people asked her for favours, and Amsteria chalked it up to her looking somewhat intimidating. Anise was a nice girl, though, and for her to ask for help meant that she just could not handle it alone.
So here was Amsteria, standing outside the mailroom. The door was closed, but she could hear the cacophony of birds cawing, squawking, screeching and flapping about behind it. To the left of the door was a series of hatches, probably from where the birds inside would systematically burst out, bearing letters or just sent out to, begrudgingly, lead back some poor Apprentice.
Amsteria pulled out her phone. It was barely past 9 am, and flicking through her messages she could see that she had no reap orders waiting. Pocketing the device, she guessed it was fine to help out for maybe two hours or so. How bad could dealing with birds be? she mused as she knocked on the door, then reaching for the handle to open it. The noise she could hear from behind closed doors was tenfold when the barrier was removed; they did nothing but intensify. Holding up a hand to an ear, Amsteria steps in cautiously past feathers and strewn paper, closing the door behind her. Birds were perched on various surfaces, flapping their wings in a jaded manner, glaring at her, glaring at the papers, glaring at their handlers (well, some not so much). This is what Anise works with? Amsteria could not quite wrap her mind around that prospect as she steps warily across objects on the floor, approaching the main mail box, surrounded by its pidgeon holes. The girl said that her shift consisted of sorting out paperwork with the Apprentice working in the current time slot. Waving her hand dismissively at a bird coming too close for personal comfort, she spots the only other Apprentice near the boxes. Amsteria vaguely recognized the outfit, but she was never certain when it came to one-time meetings. She wondered if she should reach out to tap his shoulder or just knock on the wooden surface of the box. Perhaps the last thing he needed was to be startled, so Amsteria opts to knock, very loudly, on the side of the pidgeon holes box unit. "I've been told you need some sorting out?" |
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Post by quinnquinn on Jul 28, 2015 15:53:01 GMT -8
Owen wasn't too happy today despite being among his feathered friends, his favourite kind. Out of the fairness of sharing around the shifts or whatever business, he'd been put onto sorting out letters in the outbox. On top of that, he had general paperwork for his recent checkups with the birds. He'd at least kept the papers separate this time. He usually was so absent minded trying to keep them neat that somehow a sheet or two would be mixed up despite how differing a paper and a letter could be.
Fixing up some of the letters he had on hand, there were birds everywhere. For someone like Owen he'd learned to drown out, or at least appreciate all the noise. Standing there in his straitjacket, he'd belted the length of the sleeves behind his neck and held a large number of letters in his hands. There were rubber bands on his wrists, presumably leftovers from when he unbound the letters. It was evident he had dropped them all at some point in time. Some stray letters at his feet were tempting birds to come closer and destroy them, while the stack In his hands was disorderly and more of a pile than a stack. He looked very intently at each one of the envelopes, a room number scribbled into it. In front was a large collection of postboxes with the same numbers printed above each pigeonhole.
Being engrossed in his work made a foreign sound like a knock and human voice stand out more. He turned to see a familiar face. He couldn't quite place the name.
"Hello." He spoke a time above the birds. They didn't seem to care or shut up. Owen looked curiously at her. Wasn't this Anise's job? "Where is Anise?" He asked. Perhaps she swapped something today for this shift.
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Post by amsterdame on Jul 28, 2015 23:16:12 GMT -8
"Ah."
Seeing the face of the Apprentice she recalled the young man she had met months ago in some secluded part of the Headquarters. Back then, he was weilding a stick and talking about catching a lost bird. She had sent him back during the Masquerade. Here, he was holding on to papers that look barely sorted.
"Anise has an urgent reap order and had to leave with her team today," she answered his question, noticing some ravens pecking at letters and paper laying around his feet. She stepped closer as an attempt to shoo them, but they just side-eyed her. She stared them down until they squawked at her angrily and flapped off to bother other papers. "Looks like you have a lot at hand, O....wen," she said the name with some uncertainty, but it rolled off her tongue in a very familiar way.
Worried that the birds would come back to bother the letters on the floor, Amsteria lowers herself onto one knee and started picking up the envelopes and papers. Thankfully she was wearing gloves.
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Post by quinnquinn on Aug 5, 2015 15:36:50 GMT -8
"Oh," he said, his eyes widening in understanding. "I hope Anise comes back safe then-- thank you for saving letters..." He saw the woman bending down to pick up what he'd left behind. They weren't too dirty yet but definitely getting scruffier from the... bird-handling.
And she remembered his name. "You remember..! I don't remember yours. I'm sorry I don't remember." It had been fleeting moments they had together, most notably right after the flower festival. He really did try to remember, and he would have if it were not for this mountain of letters.
As Amsteria continued gathering them off the floor, Owen got back to work. As much as he could, with what he had. The mountain in his hands made it perilous to grab any letter without making more of them drop. No wonder he was having trouble. He stared closely at the letter he was holding - 2745 - it read. A room number. He looked up at the wall before him. A placard above them all read '2700-2799'. Well the people before him certainly got the sorting into 100s correct so it would make it faster. So far he hadn't had to take any out of the pile. He had so many of these to deliver that it was going to take a bit of time anyway.
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Post by amsterdame on Aug 6, 2015 18:51:06 GMT -8
Getting up and straightening the envelopes in her hands, she takes a look at what was scrawled on them. Numbers...room numbers? She looked up at Owen, who was fixated on the pidgeon holes in front of him. Turning, Amsteria notices the numbers on the boxes. So this was how the mailroom worked, eh?
"It seems pretty straight forward," she says bluntly. The system indeed was there and organized, it would not be much trouble getting through the letters. Amsteria moved to give the letters to Owen, but the state of the envelopes in his hands were far beyond disheveled. Giving him more would impede the progress of anything at the moment, so she looked around till she found a spare table, shooed the birds off of it and carried it over near him with the letters in her pocket.
"Owen, come," she called, motioning him over to the table, "put the letters here, we'll sort it out in stacks according to number." Sorting the letters on a level surface would be much easier, she believed. It would then just be a matter of slipping them into their boxes systematically. Amsteria squints at some ravens as they stare at her from their perch on the mailboxes.
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Post by quinnquinn on Aug 7, 2015 5:59:34 GMT -8
As Amsteria spoke, he stopped what he was doing and looked over. "I'm not tidy good at straightforward." He said matter-of-fact, though with his stoic expression it could have come off as being slightly offended. "I'm not straightforward. Not anymore..." He looked at her for a moment longer after he'd stopped before turning back to his wall of boxes, as if looking at her distracted him from what he was doing.
He finally located the box that matched the number on his chosen letter, walked over to it and slot it in. He heard Amsteria return from somewhere, this time with a table. She set it down and he too set down his letters on it. Though it was more like dumping the letters instead. He bent and stretched his arms. Owen had been holding them for a long time and though he didn't mind that his muscles were sore, he thought to relieve them for later.
"Match the same numbers? Me and Anise match numbers too." It was the logical and normal way to do it, though when it came to ordering things... That was never really at the front of the boy's mind. There was a reason why Owen was rarely rostered to sort mail after all, and never rostered alone. He would probably take millennia otherwise.
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Post by amsterdame on Aug 14, 2015 0:15:25 GMT -8
Amsteria observes the letters as they fall in a heap, looking out for any envelopes that slid off the table and onto the floor, saving them from the doom that is ravens and their ravenous beaks. She nods to Owen's statement of how he and Anise sorted things before. That meant he was well adept at sorting these things into the boxes, so Amsteria would only perform what Anise had performed: stacking the letters neatly according to number.
Gathering up the pile into a concentric paper mountain, she begins to pull letters out and putting them into individual piles. Clearly it was merely a game of solitaire, and envelopes from the pile began to shrink as their sorted counterparts began to grow. The birds were a continuous flurry of motion, some coming close to the pile to peck at it or peck at Amsteria, but she absent-mindedly waves them off with an envelope in hand as she continues to do her task. She said nary a word, enveloped in work as she had been all her living life. Talking on the job was not something she had wanted to pick up.
Within what seemed to be an hour or more, with some interference from birds flying off with envelopes and subsequent difficult reclamation by the Bird Keeper, the mountain of envelopes was gone, and all that was left were rows of envelopes, single or stacked, arranged according to the numbers scrawled on them. Amsteria stood up, careful not to jostle the table too much and upset everything -living and flying or static paper- and stretches her back.
"Well, Owen," she addresses him, looking at him and then looking at the boxes. "Let's get these envelopes where they should be."
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Post by quinnquinn on Aug 20, 2015 5:14:27 GMT -8
He walked closer to Amsteria to see what she was doing, though he didn't get too close before he recognised the pattern of behaviour. Anise and he did this during these jobs too, didn't they? Owen took each letter he had and started organising them into smaller, more manageable piles. He took his time though. A scattered brain made it hard to do work like this. From time to time the boy too would be chasing birds away, retrieving sneakily stolen papers, calming them down... it was all the general disruptions that came with the job.
It was a fruitful hour, and if not for Amsteria there, it would have taken Owen far longer. And who knew if he would've done it right, either. He'd sorted some letters wrongly during that time, though it was all back in order by the time they were going to deliver everything to their proper holes.
"Yes," he said with an excited smile in his voice. "I'll get some and you get some."
He eagerly scooped up a larger stack and headed towards the wall where they needed to be. It was easier to look through box numbers when the numbers were so close together. It still took him longer than the average person to find each box and slot the letters in, but they were moving at a comfortable pace. He had to stop and shout a word of warning to wandering beaks around the stacks on the table once in a while, though.
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Post by amsterdame on Aug 26, 2015 14:32:59 GMT -8
Letters popped into the boxes, although not entirely systematically, but they were getting to the right places. Amsteria watches over Owen's shoulder once in a while as he continued his task, occasionally handing him letters with numbers on his side of the pigeon hole complex as she slipped in other envelopes and paper pieces. Soon, the pile on the table had dwindled to none, and the birds squawked more frequently now that there was no paper to peck on.
With the boxes filled and no more envelopes to dish out, Amsteria stepped back and leaned on the, now vacant, little table. "Well, that was a smooth operation, wasn't it?" she rhetorically asked, a small smile of satisfaction at the boxes with organized mail in it. Looking around on the floor, there were some loose papers lying about, with a bird or two happily sitting on them. She wondered if they were just loose used -or unused- paper, or just the remnants of someone's letter.
"Are those all your papers for the day, Owen?" she asked after some breather time.
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Post by quinnquinn on Sept 6, 2015 7:12:36 GMT -8
In time, the letters were all gone, into the slots and ready to be sent out to their respective rooms. Owen felt proud of his achievement, though he couldn't have done it without Amsteria's help. "You're tidy good like Anise." He remarked after they were done.
He walked around looking and retrieving letters stolen by the birds, most of them entirely intact save a tiny portion of the envelope. He let out a stern word at each of the little thieves, who all gave him loud caws and maybe even a light scratch or bite upon returning the letters. Owen didn't react at all, emerging back to above table height to dump the last few letters and sort them out again. The room numbers were still very visible so it wasn't much of a challenge. He took them to the remaining slots one by one. He seemed to clap (more like flap) his overly long sleeves together once the final one dropped into its box.
"Not many more papers." He said. "I'm tidy bad with papers. They don't give me a lot of papers." It was a smart move after all. Owen was better serving looking after the birds. "When I finish I stop the birds from eating papers." He explained that after he was done, he would usually call the birds for feeding time and try to find any letters that had been misplaced by other mail room people on the part of the birds. "Those are my last papers. You can help me get the last papers." He offered, though he'd be fine on his own if she declined. Even as he spoke, it was as if the birds knew the boy was done, and they were all waiting for him to do the next part of his job and feed them. They were crowding around their feet.
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Post by amsterdame on Sept 10, 2015 22:37:00 GMT -8
She smiled lightly at his observation. Anise was indeed a tidy girl, but Amsteria didn't know that the girl worked at the mailroom. She had reckoned Anise to be more of a Librarian. Well, it was never wise to assume too soon. "Have you two been paired for a long while?" she asked, and peered at the birds crowding around his feet, looking up at the young man in expectation.
If there was a good indicator of his job being done, it was the birds. "Feeding time, eh?" she absently mentions in a quiet tone, circling the table. She would leave the young Birdkeeper to his duties, and linger a little to catch these...stray last papers that he mentioned. Perhaps Owen meant the papers which would be lying around from being blown away by the birds' flapping activities.
For a while, Amsteria wandered around the mail room, picking up and inspecting papers and envelopes, keeping clear of Owen and the birds. Whatever seemed to be the mail for the day (or maybe for days before), she slipped them into their respective pigeon holes. Once in a while, she looked over to see how the other was doing.
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Post by quinnquinn on Sept 22, 2015 5:42:55 GMT -8
"Anise has helped me sometimes for a few months now..." He looked at Amsteria as he spoke. "Someone else sometimes helps me too." It was as if he couldn't concentrate on two things at once, because only then did he look down and scold the birds a little for being an impatient lot. An arguement he posed to them a lot, though the results hardly changed.
As the birds grew a little more eager, he made his way to a contraption in a nearby wall, grabbed a bucket and dispensed food into it. He slumped as the container gained more weight, pouring the contents into feeders around the room, and the birds left whatever they were playing with, letters or not, to eat. He went around a few before he went to fill the bucket about halfway one more time, and sat down in the middle if the room. He sprawled his legs like a little child and emptied the food on the floor between them. It was one of the less preferred ways the other staff here wanted Owen to feed the birds, mainly because of injury, but the fact that it bothered him little made him want to do it more. The sensation was far too wonderful to pass up.
In an instant, after the sound of sliding seeds onto the floor, the room erupted with cries of birds and the flapping of wings. A tidal wave of feathers descended upon the boy and he held out his arms for them to sit on while they ate. Some landed on his legs as well, taking their own sweet time to eat. Under it all there was a faint laugh coming from the birdkeeper, and one of his rare smiles.
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Post by amsterdame on Oct 11, 2015 5:24:34 GMT -8
Amsteria watched as the birdkeeper proceeded with his duties. A bit unorthodox, especially in terms of safety precautions for the handler. Considering, however, how the boy seemed to be enjoying himself, she shrugged and properly put away any other leftover papers, and shuffled the table back to where it belonged. With the birds now busy gorging on bird food, the rest of the mailroom was pretty free of the feathered beings. She turned back one more time to give the boy a head's up that she was leaving, but decided against it. Best to leave people to the things they like. She can show herself the way out, anyway. Amsteria flipped out her phone as she stepped out of the circle of mailboxes, gingerly stepping over birds that were flapping around on the floor looking for spare seeds or lint. She texted Anise, telling her that her shift had been fulfilled, that Amsteria would be heading out to map the labyrinth now and there are no new messages from the staff for her. When the 'Sent' icon disappeared, she opens the door, gives a peek at the cloud of birds over a Bird-keeper, and stepped out, closing the door behind her. That wasn't so bad. Now to record some paths.
-----END-----
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