Tandy Bowen doesn't have to pick between (cloakndagger) wrote in repose,
Re: The Woods: Pesha/Tandy
Real talk, Tandy's scams didn't involve being nice. That whole thing about negging that had spread about five, ten years back, it had influenced the scene and the scene involved unobtainability. People didn't bother unless you got them a little hot under the collar and unless they thought you would walk away. Scams ran better on predictability and Tandy was nine-tenths fake when it came to an actual, fully-fleshed scam because he had a routine that was worked well enough it was smooth. The tenth was reserved for self-preservation. But to state the obvious, he hadn't come prepped and ready to go. He didn't even have a scam-partner, and he was pretty sure this!Tandy's wouldn't be expecting him to show up.
But he got confidence tricks. That was sort of the way it worked, making people believe something. Some people got there through honesty, other people faked it. Tandy wasn't judging. He was all front, and his eyes clocked the whole set-up with the gas ring and the finger and Tandy kind of thought he was being set up. He leaned forward, his hands still lodged in his jeans pockets to squint at the gas-ring because that was weird, right?
"Coffee would be really great, thanks," he was distracted, but polite, and trying to work out the engineering of this place that had way more twenty-first century capability crammed into it than looked engineeringly possible. The guy, Pesha, was moving around the place in well-practiced order and Tandy couldn't quite get the words out of his mouth about the whole, gas-ring thing.
He sat. It seemed advisable in the circumstances and the likelihood of cracking his head on what constituted ceiling. That, and it had been a long day already and he hadn't actually eaten anything, and the guy had a burn, that looked suspiciously similar to a handprint if the skin weren't slightly shiny which was definitely burn-territory.
"That should be physically impossible," he said finally, when the coffee pot came into being. He couldn't help himself. He said it politely, because he had manners, but it was breaking all laws of physics and Tandy liked physics.