Sleeping is for the Dead [.seren.]

Another day, another 24 hours of fruitless searching and tedious patrolling duty. For a couple of the students, it had been over five months since they were last seen. Nikolai was certain that they were no longer on the island. He was tempted to ask Martina if he could pursue a couple tentative leads mainland.

Or maybe he'd get another staff member to cover his shifts and go without telling her. She was stressed out enough as it was. Her... cousin had challenged her over control of the school. In her place, Nikolai would need space to prepare for whatever trials this claim entailed.

For his part, it felt like somebody had taken a baseball bat to his head. He was sure he didn't look that much better. He caught snatches of sleep while waiting for things, or dozing off on patrol. He knew better, but advanced healing capabilities really could not compensate for sleep deprivation.

He knew his limitations- the giant wombat knew his limitations. When hallucinations spoke sense, it was time to get sleep. OR caffeine.

He opted for the latter, given the time crunch. Nikolai stood in line, three back from the counter. The buzz of voices around him was morphing into paranoid whispers that he desperately tried to ignore. Was it just him or was the woman sitting nearby sending him odd looks?

The were-dragon looked down. He was wearing a plaid red flannel shirt, jeans that had seen their fair share of groundskeeping, work boots, and a black peacoat. He knew that he had trapped his flyaway hair under a wool hat. In the warmth of the coffee house, he was beginning to feel uncomfortable, so he slid off the hat and shrugged out of the coat. Static made his hair stand on end. He shot a sheepish smile at the woman and she returned his look with one of shock and horror.

Right. Sharp teeth. Nikolai sighed as she took her cup of probably-coffee and fled the establishment.

Jenna had been up almost all night at the tavern attending to the drunkards who had been making more of a commotion than usual. Stepping out into the bright light of the day had been harsh at first, but with finding herself some sunglasses to wear the sylph felt just a bit better as she made her way through the village. Finally finding the coffee shop, Jenna stepped into the building drawing less attention than usual since the villagers had been getting used to her.

Clad in warm clothing since it had started to snow today, Jenna ordered some coffee and as she was waiting looked around the shop in a sort of daze. A familiar face caught her attention and Jenna grinned and waved at Nikolai. Taking her coffee quickly as it was given to her, she walked over to the were-dragon make sure that her wings didn't bump into anyone as she did. "Hey," she greeted Nik with a breathless tone. "Fancy meeting you here. I was actually going to go looking for you today, but this works out perfectly."

Nikolai's face broke into a wan smile when he heard a familiar voice. "It certainly does. I trust you are doing fine?" The line moved up a place and he moved to keep his place. "Slow morning?" The next person in line made her selection extremely quickly, so he found himself at the counter sooner than anticipated.

Luckily, his tastes in coffee were simple (and cheap) and they were handing him a large black coffee. He didn't need it sweetened (he enjoyed his coffee sweet, but he did not need the sugar rush at this point- the crash would most certainly take him out). Nik reached into a pocket and fished out some wadded bills, dropping them on the counter as he turned back to Jenna.

"What's on your plate today? Is... ahhh... Soren leaving you alone?"

||guh, short||

Jenna nodded at Nik's question as how she was doing, "I've been up all night, had some issues at the tavern but they are fixed now." The sunglasses she wore backed up her statement about having trouble at the tavern, as if she was trying to protect her eyes from any harsh elements for the time being. As Nik asked about Soren, Jenna thought for a moment and frowned - realizing that she hadn't interacted with the other were-dragon for quite awhile. "It appears so," she said to him - with a tone that almost seemed like she missed him.

Her thoughts then flashed back over to Cade, and the sylph brightened up for a moment - even if they hadn't sorted anything out yet it was definitely a lot easier to think about then Soren. "How are your... school things? When I arrived here, I thought it would be nice to work there - but I like this village way better." Jenna grinned at herself, popping her knuckles in the meantime.

Nikolai listened pensively as Jenna explained about her late night. He'd owned a club once, back when Prohibition was in full-swing and he was swinging wildly between his desire not to make waves and a certain contempt for one of the silliest laws humans had ever come up with. As a result, he also ran a speakeasy alongside his more legal ventures. When it came to sleepless nights as a result of "business as usual", Nikolai had seen his fair share, and then some.

He decided not to read into Jenna's tone when she'd answered his question about Soren, odd as it sounded to his ancient ears. He hadn't seen Jenna for a very, very long time. There was a good chance that she'd picked up mannerisms hitherto unknown to him. His silver eyes went a million miles deep as flashes from his youth came bubbling back to the surface, unbidden. He might be old, but Jenna was older. And he'd been mortal once. How did she handle all of this time flying past them without leaving a mark?

It took him a moment to realize that he'd been asked a question. His eyes focused back on Jenna and gave her a lopsided (albeit grim) smile and a shrug. "Things are getting to be on the dire side, to be honest. You've made a good choice to stay on the outside." He looked around and picked out a table in an intimate corner of the room. He gestured at it with a quick nod of his head and meandered that way, seemingly in no real hurry. "When I came here, I had no plans to get so... ahh... involved with everything. Now I spend my evenings searching for lost students. Speaking of which... have you heard anything in your bar? My leads are growing cold and I am afraid that I may have to venture mainland to get anything fresh."

Jenna followed Nik over to the corner he found, carefully seating herself in a manner as to avoid hitting anyone or anything with her wings. As her wings folded up close to her and she was was comfortable the sylph turned to Nikolai - listening to him ask if she had heard anything about kidnapping in the tavern. Jenna frowned and thought for a moment, "You'd think my memory would be better with things that happened just a few days or weeks ago," she commented to him idly as she continued to sift through her thoughts in search of anything that might benefit her friend.

"Shady people come into the tavern all the time, Nik. It's difficult sometimes for me to tell the difference between someone who is just old and haunted as opposed to someone who is looking for trouble." Jenna felt a little guilty as she spoke, a few images of suspicious characters popping up in her mind here and there. She was uncertain of her knowledge though, feeling as if any information she gave would lead Nik to a dead end.

Nikolai sighed, leaning back in the chair he had claimed."No, it's all right. I really wasn't expecting you to pull up all of the stuff you might have seen. I was just wondering if anything stood out. It was a question worth asking." He pulled off his hat and ran a hand through his hair, which only made it stand on end. "Very well."

It seemed as though he had made up his mind about matters. He took a long pull from his cup of coffee, as though it were not piping hot. As he put down the mug, his mouth went from an inflamed red to a healthier color. He looked at Jenna for a moment, then shrugged to himself and asked abruptly, "Care to join me for a jaunt to the mainland? It shouldn't take more than a couple of days. It won't be another fiasco like the Venice incident. I promise. It'll be just like old times." He offered Jenna an encouraging smile, then closed his lips over his teeth when another coffeehouse patron shot him a scandalized look.

He was a patient person, but he was ready for all of these politics between humans and semi-humans to be over. He had lived long enough to know that it would have to end at some point. These sorts of thing did tend to get worked out, one way or another, but it was not making things easier for the school.

Jenna sighed along with Nikolai as he leaned back seeming disappointed in her response to him. With the momentary silence between them, Jenna took that as her chance as well to drink a little bit of the coffee that she had been holding onto. At his sudden invitation, Jenna's brows rose quite higher than they normally would. "That's a lot of trouble for me with my wings," the sylph commented quite quickly. Nikolai's encouraging smile though caused her to hesitate though, shaking her head at the dragon - Jenna then laughed. It was unique to hear considering this laugh did not go along with her typical flirty personality, but instead seemed a lot more real than any other pleasant expression she had shown for quite awhile.

After her laugh, Jenna finally nodded. "Fine, I'll come with. Unless you know places that are generally accepting of these," Jenna momentarily pointed at her wings and then continued on. "You are helping me with hiding these." Pausing for another moment, Jenna took a sip of her coffee. "Where exactly are you wanting to go?"

Nikolai's encouraging smile broadened when Jenna finally accepted. He leaned forward, suddenly all business. "If you're with me, nobody will bother you," he promised gravely. "There's a major port where we're going- where most of the boats traveling to Albion embark. They're pretty familiar with Gifteds, even if they are less than cordial. They won't bother us if we don't cause trouble. I'll just ask if any young people matching the descriptions of our missing students have been seen over there. It's my last lead and I fear it is growing cold."

He ticked off a couple of places on his fingers, listing them as casually as anybody familiar with the city could. "Those are just a few of the places that they might have traveled through. If they left on their own." His silver eyes darkened slightly. "However, there are enough missing that I doubt that they all had the same idea. One or two? Might be plausible. They might have decided to run away together. A group this size speaks of something else."

Something he couldn't put a name on just yet. "I can leave this afternoon, but I can wait for you to make adequate preparations. When would you be ready to go?"

Jenna looked momentarily surprised as Nikolai leaned in, "That's good then," she commented as Nikolai told her that no one would be bothering her as long as she was with him. The more Nikolai talked, Jenna found her attention drifting off - not for the lack of finding Nik uninteresting but more so because of so many thoughts going on in her mind at once. With her mind coming back to earth as Nik mentioned the student leaving, Jenna shook her head "How do you know if they've even left the island?" Jenna asked. After all from an aerial view, to her the island did appear large enough to have a few places not explored before.

"I need to go talk to the tavern owner, it won't take that long though so I can leave around the same time." Jenna wasn't necessarily too excited at the idea of leaving the island on a boat once more, but if it was helping out her old friend the old sylph felt more than happy to oblige him.

Nikolai leveled a look at Jenna that couldn't come close to capturing the gravity of the situation. "We don't," he said simply. "All searches, and believe me, we have searched, have yielded nothing on the island. These are students, not survival experts. The likelihood of finding them in the forest somewhere is low, and we are running out of options. I'm trying to narrow down the range of possibilities and this is my way of proving or disproving their movements. If they didn't leave the island, then they are still on the island and we have to change our search patterns or call in different methods of investigation."

He pinched the bridge of his nose. "There are only so many staff members. We're also encountering antagonism or apathy on the part of many of the villagers. Politics are getting in the way of the search."

He nodded. "Very well. I will make the arrangements and meet you at the port at... two thirty? I want to make good headway and there's not much I can get done here until I know for certain what the students did."

Jenna nodded as Nik answered her question about the students. It was a sad thing to her that so many were disappearing and the sylph decided that she would pay more attention to the conversations around her as she worked in the tavern. "Two thirty is good," she then said to Nik as he started to make plans to meet. "Let me go ahead and chat with my boss now and I'll see you here in a few hours." Jenna knocked on the table as she said this, a strange sort of thing to do despite the table being wooden. Moving slowly to get up, Jenna waved good-bye to Nikolai as she made her way out of the coffee shop.

[ooc; Thread is now dead.]