confusion. [narrative]
[Eep, backdated to Valentine's Day? :X]
Haku had found himself a quiet little nook of an apartment. It wasn't anything fancy - he found he could just afford it, though he couldn't quite remember where the money had come from. Some of it was from working at Dinah's flower shop, but somehow he'd come up with more money than she'd paid him. After puzzling over it for awhile, Haku had accepted it as another part of the city's strangeness (while also reassuring himself that if it should somehow turn out to be a trick, he could always escape via the window).
So when he came home with a little bamboo shoot he'd transplanted into a teapot, he also accepted the telephone that he suddenly had. He knew he hadn't had that before. He had no need for it, after all.
But there it was, blinking accusingly at him. He set the plant down on the counter and pushed the biggest button tentatively. Haku had swam deep under water and flown high into the clouds, had nearly lost his identity forever and nearly died of a witch's curse.
He'd never had an answering machine before.
"You have... four unheard messages," the machine informed him.
The first message was from a woman. Or a girl. Or something else female-sounding. "Hi. I'm Raven. I'm, uh -- well, I'm a demon, but a nice one. Promise. If you want -- uh. I work at the Magic Box. If you want to stop by sometime, you can."
Something else, indeed. Haku wasn't quite sure why this demon called Raven was calling him, but he made a mental note of her workplace. If he could find it (and he had a feeling that if he went looking for it, he would), maybe he'd stop by. Dinah was very nice, but it would be good to meet other people too, he supposed.
The second message was short and to the point. "Dragon?!"
It was also quite startling to hear, since Haku generally didn't make a point of going around showing off his true self. He'd shown Dinah because it had been a possible way out, but... well, maybe word had gotten out somehow. He didn't make a note of this message. There didn't seem to be anything to say in reply to it (aside from, "...yes?").
The third message was also short, and not entirely helpful. "Dragons have voicemail? Okay, that's creepy."
"I didn't until today," Haku muttered to himself, feeling that it actually was rather creepy for him to suddenly have voicemail. That didn't seem like quite a good response, though, so he let that message pass without thought.
The fourth message was ominous and despite being just as random as the other messages, was somehow more unsettling than the magically-appearing phone. "Oh, little dragon. You should be very careful. There are Baba Yagas everywhere. You don't want to upset them, do you?"
Haku wasn't familiar with Baba Yagas, not by that term, at least. It did sound a bit like Yubaba, and she certainly wasn't a witch to be messed with, but she wasn't here, was she?
But... he thought he'd seen that term before. Baba Yagas, Babas? Yagas...? his eyes fell upon the newspaper he'd wrapped the teapot in. He'd randomly grabbed it from the pile of extra copies that had been floating around. He'd skimmed it for any news that might be useful, but it'd only been a personal ads section, and dragons definitely had no use for that.
And yet, there it was: Misplaced dragon searching for other mystical types to befriend. Must be clean and like nature, especially water. Yagas not welcome. Can be reached at #441144
Haku dropped the paper and backed away from his phone, which had at least stopped blinking. He hadn't written that. He wouldn't. He was beyond such trivial, frivolous things, even if he'd had the slight good luck to have escaped the Men Seeking Women section. Well. Raven, at least, had seemed sincere, so perhaps something good would come of this. He made another note to find out where this Magic Box was, and made a point of stomping down heavily on the crumpled newspaper as he went to give his new plant some water.