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Vasily is a child of a high ranking Soviet party member, and an officer of the Soviet military. He doesn't really have Christmas traditions, beyond the Orthodox church's rote observations. Certainly no childhood associations. No joy to look forward to. And the new year, well that's just a night for lifting a glass. And to an Acanthus, not at all notworthy for remarking another time around the sun. His subconscious runs a more accurate clock of his local time. Every moment is as the other moments in these collections of moments that is his life. This fuzzy, imprecise series of choices-- each choice leaving his fingerprint on the surface of time itself. Each choice that opens a new choice closes an infinite series of possibilities, propelling him forever forward from the past to the future with all the conscious awareness of a bacterium under glass working its flagellum to move it towards the light, away from entropy.
Seeing life and reality as a fuzzy ball of possibilities interacting forever in a membrane of forever humming and vibrating threads makes things like Christmas and The New Year and, indeed, life and death seem unspecial and unremarkable. Moments in a chain of moments from start to finish, captured under glass. Like the flailing cell under the microscope. And he with an assassin's efficiency and dispassion for violence. It's a recipe for sociopathy. Anyone who really experienced reality the way someone like him does would know to keep an eye on him. A close eye. That the barrier between rational demigodhood and madness is tenuous. Fuzzy. Like time and space and the barrier between being and not being. Porous. The two sides trade heat. And he runs very hot, indeed.
It's why he does unremarkable things with such focus and intention. Like making waffles with Oontz-Oontz while watching The Voice reruns on the kitchen telly. The spirit enjoys the call and answer and sing-along nature of it all.
He's felt this strange pressure before, the way that it suddenly feels like the world is standing on his chest. A supernatural sort of bends that comes with the desire to pop his ears and a feeling like someone standing over his shoulder.
The voice that follows right on the tail end of that sensation, somehow like being plunged into freezing and boiling water at once and rimed around the edges with the very distinct taste of incredibly powerful magic, is not one he recognizes. Much like the sensation comes edged with that feeling of magic, the voice has a slim edge of Ukranian on it. Familiar, but not. Philly, but not. A voice he's heard before and yet never -- he can't place it but somehow he knows it, this young woman's voice.
"You could shoot me; probably only you could do that. But please do not. It would upset people very much."
"It's just a matter of finding the right moment," Vasily answers, miming a toss of cards as though playing dealer to a table of black jack. Over a steaming waffle iron. But, hey. The idea is communicated. "As the IRA said of Mrs. Thatcher. She has to be lucky every time. They only have to be lucky once. And once you realize that's as true of you as it is of everyone you might like to see dead, it makes it less a threat and more of a warning. When we play chess with lives, the pawns are people. So I am going to assume you have a very good reason for putting my whole timeline at risk. Again." Vasha pokes a quad of waffles from the iron with a fork and breaks it in half, tossing two on one plate and two on the other.
"I'm guessing you'll have met Oontz-Oontz before now," he observes, gesturing to the spirit with one plate. He sets one before the spirit and the other at an empty seat opposite him. For the girl, no doubt. "Say your piece and then leave, please."
"You can ask the person who sent me when you get there, if you do. I was told to come, and I come." She stands in the doorway, hands propped loosely on her hips; he recognizes the sort of loose ready posture.
Somewhere around five and a half feet tall, wearing that skin-tight charcoal suit he saw himself wearing all those months ago. Likely, there are weapons hidden in it, but the way she moves when she comes to sit down in the chair across from him -- casual as you like -- marks her just as much a weapon as anything her clothing might conceal. Blonde hair pulled back into a practical ponytail, a soft oval face, bright blue eyes.
"Anyway, I come because sending the same people back gets -- riskier. And she would get distracted." She wrinkles up her nose in mild, affectionate distaste. "It will be necessary to expand the circle of who you talk to frankly. And to find the connections between the events everyone has treated as discrete. And you will say, probably, 'of course, this is what I do,' and I will say 'yes, this is why I am talking to you, because so many things are in so many places.'" Butter, then syrup. Her fork crunches through the waffle as she cuts it into bite-sized pieces.
As if to prove some sort of point, there is now a bottle of whipped cream on the table that very much wasn't there in the reality that had existed prior to him deciding he preferred this one better. But in this reality, the whipped cream was brought to the table. And in this reality, she's still seated across from him, cutting up her waffles.
"We can safely assume the location of my whipped cream is not especially relavant to the outcome of your future war," he observes, having done his little trick with time. With dealing out moments. With making it clear that, yes, he could kill her. Could go back and have already killed her. Go back and kill her before she even opens up her mouth. But so could she. To him. Ad nauseum. Still.
There is a semaphore. He is observing it.
"The fact that you have chosen to revisit me gives me a unique opportunity to observe this reality and that reality-- hold up those moments side by side --and eliminate what's changed as relavant. So much noise will fall away. So much noise will remain. But it's noise we can sift. Especially with having encountered the Seer Pylon behind the local attacks prior to now. Cross reference that static reality against their ambitions in the future, and fate will glow brightly enough. To indicate the kernel of what is here and now that is so fucking important to all of you."
"And once we know, I will thank you to let us handle it from there. The more you meddle the more noise you leave in the data. And I have to figure out what's sympathetic to our time and what's symapthetic to your time. And parse them apart. Which gets fucking impossible at quantum levels. And since you're standing here in my kitchen eating my waffles, I'm guessing you know that already."
Oontz-Oontz "speaks up" by playing the line, "Don't cross the streams, Ray," from some unseen speaker in his hoodie.
Vasha points at the spirit, "I think you're damaging the fabric of reality by doing this. It needs to stop."
She stops with her fork partway to her mouth, her gaze sliding sidelong to the whipped cream, and one eyebrow rises just so before she puts the syrup-and-buttered bite into her mouth, crunching slowly as her gaze returns to him. "That is a lot of words for 'fuck off,'" she observes mildly.
"Time is not what I am good at, no. I do not know that. I know that I am given an assignment, which is to come say to you the thing I mostly already said, and the person doing the sending, I trust with my life and yours. And theirs. And the reason I am given is because I am outside this time, on account of I don't exist yet. So I am safer to send." Another slow, crunching bite. "You know already there is someone inside the Guardians who is not on your side, so, you know, trusting people with information, harder. But also, you cannot succeed without the information that the Lost, the Vampires, all of them, have too."
"So I have come, and I have said." She pushes the waffle away from herself, staring at him still with that calm, implacable face. He knows that sort of expression well; he's schooled it in himself. "And you have said."
She gets up from her chair, pushing up the cuff of her left sleeve slightly.
"Not 'fuck off'. I wouldn't be talking about how to use your second visitation to solve your problem for you if I wanted you to 'fuck off'. What I want is to communicate to you that your incursions make it increasingly more difficult for me to do this my way. Is my way so special?" Vasha apes the 'maybe so maybe no' slavic face and elicits an exaggerated shrug, the sort of gesture men like him learn in prison. Not that he's been in prison. Well. Not that he's been sentenced to prison. "But it's the way I have. And I do not trust but a tenth of these people here to remember my coffee order, nevermind keep a secret." Oh, the naked contempt of the Guardian Acanthus. The know it all. The see it all. The do it all. The keep it all for myself.
"So I give you warnings. I tell you what I have observed. The complications you've aroused for me. And the opportunities I see arising from the complications you have aroused. I am going to use this visit to learn a great deal about what is special about the here and now. And I know changelings that I trust to be competent. Vampires... less so. Probably Fox knows Vampires. Fox likes disgusting things." Vasily makes a face. Eugh. Vampires.
"As time has progressed, I've grown less enamored of my old life. And what I was clinging to. I suppose this is now all becoming a part of my exit strategy. One last assassination for the cause, and then I step out. To do my murders in the open from now on." He flashes a wan, tired smile.
"I am curious about one thing, though." He pauses and lifts a finger, tapping at his cheek thoughtfully, "Do I win? Is your name Lyudmila?"
She stands next to her chair for a moment, and she tips her head to the side just a little bit as she watches him. In some moments she looks precisely like a younger version of him, though -- perhaps reassuringly -- in this moment, her mannerisms look exactly like someone else entirely.
"Good." That's all she says to the first bit about his way. It seems to comfort her somehow; the tiny motion of her shoulders and the way she relaxes them just a little bit. "Mmm. True, she does." And the face she makes? An exact mirror of his. Unfuckingcanny.
She nods along with all of this, as if she's hearing an old story. Perhaps that says something. Perhaps it tells him nothing. After all, if he's right, he trained her.
Her hand hovers over the watch, and she pauses for just a moment. Watching him.
"Lyudmila is my twin sister."
She winks.
She disappears.
Vasily sits in silence, staring at his half eaten waffles and the whipped cream he'd broken temporal cohesion to fetch by way of reminder. So he adds some to the waffles and pulls the plate over, wrapping an arm around it and eating with the knife held overhand. Surly, perhaps a bit discomfited. But in the end he just makes a quiet scoff and shakes his head dismissively, "Nobody has a fucking magical twin sister from the future. Bullshit. This is what she thinks up? Fucking future twins?"
He looks to his familiar, arms spread in a begging gesture. An appeal to heaven. "What in the fucking twee-- if I came to you in an elevator and said, hey mister bigwig hollywood producer, I have story about a super assassin who has magical twins from the future come back and tell him how to shoot one up their mom to ensure a better tomorrow, you think they say to you, 'Mister Oontz-Oontz-- May I call you Oontz? Oontz, I would like to make this story you have just told me in to a movie because it is original and normal and good. Here. A check for two hundred million dollars. Get me a Kardashian. NO."
He takes a bite of his whipped creamed waffles and chews it like a prisoner of the people's state. "She can't even reproduce normal. Fuck." Oontz offers him a sit com shrug before very purposefully unpausing his TV show. "Oh, I'm sorry if my family's temporal war is interrupting Blake fucking Shelton. I am very sorry, servant of my will." Oontz just turns up the volume, shaking his head.
But is that what happened? Surely it had happened. To some one, at some place, at some time. Some collection of occurrences flailing about to increase entropy unto its ending which is not an ending. But that, too, is all just fuzzy happenstance when you examine it up close.
What, in the end, is time? That's what this is all about, isn't it? When is always relative, now is always relative. When compared to what? Now compared to when? We accept that matter and its reactions can be broken down to quanta-- to moments so small that they reflect a single moment of decision --without stopping to consider what this means of time itself. Of what we experience as time.
If matter is just a seriest of steps through reactions, then time-- what we experience as fluid, linear time --is no less granular, no less one step leading to the next. No less particular, individual, and singular. Time truly is sand. But there is no hourglass. Just a beach.
So all of that had happened. To some collection of occurrences that understood itself to be Vasily Tometchko. Son of the Soviet Union. A living martyr to a dead ideal.
But then, also, this happened too. Vasily raised his hand to his daughter and the television began to blur and smear through the same stretch of entropic exchange. Stretching a handfull of sand out, grain by tiny grain, to make forever from a flash.
"I know why they sent you. Here. Now. Please. Pease, do not go." It is only to this potential person that is fully half a part of him, that does not truly exist as his universe understands it, that will disappear and never have been the moment this hand full of sand is counted out; it is only to her that Vasily can speak the truth outside of himself.
"I need to know that I can do this. That I am a good father to you. I need to know that it was hard for me. That it is still hard for me. But I need to know that having you was a better choice than walking into the trap and letting it be. This could all be over so quickly for me. And then it ends. She moves on. The dream dies with me. And that is not so bad. A good Russian ending for a good Russian tale."
"So before I walk away from everything I have ever known. Everything I have fought for and believed in. Killed for and shred my soul for. Before I forsake ever boy I saw bleed out in Donbas, ever poor deluded tool of the lie I sent down the Neva-- before I say that all of that was only to bring me to this? I need to know that you know I made the right decision."
Proving, perhaps, that she is truly his child -- and her mother's child -- her first answer is a faux-whine, and she mimes stomping her foot:
"You never let me make a good exit."
The cross that is her burden to bear, perhaps. But she sobers instantly as he goes on, her nose wrinkling up a little bit -- at him? Probably at herself.
Her hand hovers again over the thing on her wrist meant -- apparently -- to signal that she needs to go back, that her time here is over. And then her arms drop to her sides, and she blinks slowly. Listening. Like, really listening. Listening like someone who grew up around the Children of the Tree. Her whole body listens, which shows when she lets herself show things. Hands in her pockets now, head canted to one side just a little, her body turned entirely toward him. He can see in her some of the small reflections of his mannerisms, of her mother's, of Mei's and Zoya's and --
-- and some things he doesn't recognize. Some things which are entirely hers.
"Okay, Dad."
"Dad," he grouses, because he was born in Ukraine. But then he softens a bit. It's hard to complain about how your daughter chooses to love you, even if you're only just now meeting her for the first time. "You know, I am glad you are not a son. I mean. I am sure I would be happy no matter the case. But." His head shakes slowly, "I only know how to make hard men. To make you, I would have felt the need to learn. To study."
And now he's looking her over, as though searching for his hand in her craft. It's been evident from the start, of course. It's how he clocked her in the first place.
"Had you been a boy," he trails off, gestures vaguely with his waffle fork. "I think maybe old habits, you know. They would creep in. Then just another hard bastard. In a line of hard bastards. Hard bastards who are why good women cry at night. Alone." He stabs his fork into his waffle, saws at it slowly. He doesn't end up eating it.
"And if you are good. And happy. And it was worth it. And it is hard for me in that future. Where I struggle because every part of me is telling me I don't belong, don't deserve to belong even if I did? Why is it right that a hard bastard like me should live out his life in peace? How is there not an assassin around every corner? Some old grudge, some old mark I took, some cousin of a man I killed-- some loose thread that comes back not to me but to you?"
"You are a grain of sand on a beach to me. I treasure you. But you are so remote. So particular. And yet so anonymous, too. I do not see the way from this bloody handed killer to a man that deserves to be your father. I don't even know where to begin that doesn't end in a bullet in my brain."
There's a sort of nervousness in her shoulders -- he knows that, too, but not because it's a particular reflection of someone he knows now -- just because he reads people. She glances to the side -- maybe she heard something. This is longer than she's supposed to be here, and he's the only person she's supposed to see.
But then whoever sent her back (total mystery) knew this would happen, probably, and didn't tell her. That must be how it works, right? But she really doesn't seem to understand Time that well. She clears her throat, rubs the side of her neck as she listens. She looks down at the table, then flicks her gaze up to him again. "I am my mother's child. Are you sure I was always a girl?" That wink again, and then she flips her hand absently, brushing away the question as unimportant. Yeah. Her mother's child. Gender? I hardly even know 'er.
"Maybe," she agrees. "But there are a lot of other people I grew up with, too, and that is why we have cadres." Very clearly thinking out the consequences of everything she says, so maybe she doesn't know nothing about Time. "Even if I had been a boy, I think I would have been okay. Surrounding yourself with good people is a skill, too." Her hand rests on the back of the chair she'd just been sitting in, and she squints up her eyes a little bit while talking. "I don't -- actually know how much I'm allowed to tell you without -- breaking it."
"I can say two things for certain. If either you or I's evolving relationship were vital to whatever it is about our timeline that is crucial to your own, they would not be sending you to me directly. So I feel it safe to explore our relationship as father and daughter. And your evaluation of my quality as your father. Keeping in mind that if you give a wrong answer that somehow ruins this for me there is another me just a day ago you could all speak with, and you can attempt another route." Vasily, at least, isn't averse to explaining relative time to his hypothetical future daughter. If you're going to break gold laws, go big.
"That is why you being here gives me so many opportunities, I must remind you. Comparing our two timelines will allow me to eliminate so much noise. And once I begin to meet others you have visited, I will have more data points to more finely tune in to what it is-- what it is, when it is, where it is, who it is, so on --so that we can all be in the right place at the right time doing the right things so that I will know to be very nice to you for a solid month before dropping this on you all of a sudden."
"But it also allows me to do things like let Oontz-Oontz in, if you'd like, so that you can help me keep my promise to him to play MarioKart this evening. It's one of the ways he gains sustenance. Acquring him was one of the first steps I took towards..." Vasha trails off, still not willing to speak it aloud to this universe. Not really. "He's already what he will be, and he is neither hard nor a bastard. He's good in his way. As good as a thing of base hungers can be. A particularly kind and smart dog that happens to look like a teenager on occasion."
Vasha looks at the frozen spirit with an expression that is genuinely affectionate, "And then I could know if it is going to be worth it for me. My father gave me to the state when I was five. I don't know any of this."
It's like she didn't actually understand until now -- realizing that Oontz Oontz is frozen -- that there's no chance of anyone just randomly walking in, because they currently exist out of time. He can kind of see it all play out across her face, now that she's letting emotions exist on said face. Her shoulders unbind, her fingers slowly stretch, tension leaching out of them. At the end of it, she even lets out a long, slow breath. While she thinks, she reaches up to the back of her head, pulling the elastic out of her hair and running her fingers through it, scratching her scalp. The almost unconscious gesture of tension relief ends with her finger-combing her hair back and efficiently braiding it back from her face, an inverted french braid.
Clearly, she's doing this to calm herself and give herself space and time to think.
At the end of it, she loops the elastic tight around the braid's end, and looks again toward Oontz Oontz. "So I'm allowed to talk in front of him?"
"He is bound to my soul. My familiar. A spirit of the rave. He loves parties, fun. Especially digital fun. Music, dancing, video games, youtube videos, and so on. He's an affectionate troll, but he means well." It's as though he was more concerned she thought he might be mean to her rather than be a potential breach of temporal security. "He knows what I know because in a very real sense we are the same entity now. It's just that I don't let him know all of it at once, unless I need him to know it. And I don't exist as him unless I need to. In precisely the way you weren't aware of the tension you're still carrying in your neck and shoulders until I just mentioned it."
It isn't like that at all, in fact, but it's similar enough to get the point across to -- at best -- a sleepwalker.
The cool thing of course is that once this attempt to defeat them is defeated the future him won't have to be this awful to his daughter. Because they will have already defeated the threat that would have been attacking them.
Just. A beach. Of sand.
All of that to say, with a hesitant but hopeful smile, "Yes. You may speak frankly in front of him. But only of things safe to our relative time. He still exists in our now, not yours."
It's so easy to become a Sleepwalker in 2.0, it would be almost impossible for kids growing up around Mages to not be Sleepwalkers. She keeps her head turned toward Oontz Oontz, watching him instead of her father. Watching a weird spirit who looks kinda like a teenage boy on too much sugar is a little easier, maybe.
"I know who he is," she answers him, a twitch of her mouth's corner at the mention of the tension in her shoulders. She turns her gaze back to him and wobbling her hand on the back of the chair absently. "I just -- mm. The things you want to know are hard to talk about without ... " a little wobble of her opposite hand. "I'll do my best."
"Then don't talk about that," Vasha suggests with a small shrug. She hasn't consented to the experiment in the first place. So the spirit remains frozen with a semi-annoyed expression, staring at the quantum smear of what might be the idea of Blake Shelton on the screen of the television.
"Just play the game with me. Allow me to observe. You will have studied my time. You will have surmised, perhaps, that this is a period of high stress for me. Where I am susceptible to suggestion and coercion. I will have suggested this period as a moment of weakness. Did I tell you why-- you can't answer that." Vasha sets down his cutlery again, tucking them into the corner of his plate. He's done.
He slides from his chair and moves to stand before his daughter, officer straight and shoulders back, chin down. In his youth, he used to smirk a little when doing this. It made him seem rebellious. Like he knew a secret the room did not. Without the smirk, he is just a surly reflection of his father, parsed through his mother's penchant for Kachka. He knows this. And so he tries on a smile, and lifts his hands to bridge the gap between their two times, grasping her upper arms tightly with both of his hands and giving her a little shake once.
"As I stand here, debating the future I will take with respect to creating you? The Russian army are massed on the border of m-- our? Our. Our homeland. A name men know me as fought and bled to stop them once. And they are sending him letters. Telegrams. Captain, we need you to come watch more boys die. No, we don't know you could end it all with a thought. No, we don't know we are asking you to watch men die with both arms and one leg tied behind your back. Just know that if you don't come, it's guaranteed more are going to than if you don't." (edited)
"I have been ignoring them for weeks. Do you know the thought of losing you hurts more than this? Hurts more than not being him again, than doing nothing. If you can't talk to me, if you are too frightened-- just connect with me. I have so many conflicting motivations. Loyalty to my country, to my Order, to my Oaths. Loyalty to my family. To the idea of a family I don't yet have. I can follow any one of them to a worthy end, daughter. For worthy causes. Deaths I can live with in the reaching of them. This special end, this particular end which travels through your life, that's what you've come here to advocate for in this moment of my greatest indecision."
"So please. Play MarioKart with me. At least. Be kind to the one creature I let into myself with me. Let me show my daughter where I started to learn how to nurture. Stop being so fucking afraid of me." (edited)
"I'm not afraid of you." She laughs, then, as if the thought of being afraid of Vasha is so absurd as to utterly beggar belief. It just doesn't exist in her frame of reference. She laughs like she's never in her entire life been afraid of him, never had reason to fear him. Not even her mother can claim that. "... I."
"I don't want to break anything. That's all." Her face tips up toward him, her gaze assessing him. No. Not assessing. Just... looking at him, maybe. Searching. Not weighing him on some sort of scale, the way the Guardians do, not looking for weaknesses, the way the people who raised him did. She's looking at him the way a person looks at an old picture of their parents, looking for the things she knows, for the person she knows so very, very well.
And then she places a hand flat on his chest, as if she's making some sort of decision and has to seal it in place. "When we were little," she starts. "You learned to braid hair. Mom grew her hair very long so you did not pull our hair while you were learning. And you made us sit still so you could put wealthy braids on us."
Her head tips to one side. "Which, I hated it, when I was little. Kids are shitheads, they made fun of our hair. Pulled it, all that. And you picked Mom up and carried her out of the room when she found out because she got so mad. I mean, can you imagine my mother in the principal's office? Or you?" A pause. "Anyway, I punched the leader in the nose because the school did nothing for weeks, and then I got in trouble, and Ljuma volunteered to get punished too because I only punched the girl because my sister didn't get there first."
She takes another deep breath, her hand still calmly resting on his chest. It's a Fox gesture, sure. But it's hers, too. "My name is Rivka."
This story is one he can believe. An imperfect tale of his foolish, meaningless nationalist pride causing needless suffering for his family and children, and also being a rallying point of family pride and togetherness. Because their hair is beautiful and they had earned it. Things have the meaning we give them. Culture is such a thing as this.
"Rivka," he tries the name on his tongue, to which Hebrew is not unfamiliar. It sounds slavic, too. In its way. He nods once, approving of the name as thought he had any input on the matter in the here and now, not the there and then. (Which he doubtless also had no voice in, either.)
"It is a good name. I am shit with names. So I know that wasn't my idea. No, I am afraid I cursed your sister with that affliction. I assume that is why she will not have come, eh? Too much anger at being Lyudmila?" Worth it, says his smug grin. Clearly, he has a favorite twin. In that it's the only twin here to make jokes with.
"You know, you have helped me make a decision. Just now, actually. A thought came to me, clear as river ice."
"It is both Hebrew and Ukranian, and it is my great-grandmother's name." Since of course Fox would not have let him name the children after anyone living; she may eat bacon sometimes when she's a fox but there are some things you just don't do. "Though she was Litvisher, I guess. Bubbe is the one who told me these things." A wealth of little family factoids in one sentence. A kid connected to her roots. Solid and real and with both feet planted on the ground where her parents (and the rest of her community) put them.
She snorts at his joke, shakes her head, her nose wrinkling up with amusement. "No, we flipped a coin for it."
Of course they did.
Her eyebrows raise, promptingly, and she waits. "Is it Mario Kart?"
"At last, you exhibit some measure of your father's perception." Vasha gives a wry grin at that and claps her arms again. At some point he'll learn she's not a rifle soldier. He steps around to touch his familiar lightly on the shoulder. The thing just looks more cross and gestures at the TV in a 'dude, I was watching that' manner.
Vasha gestures instead to Rivka, "She's staying for a while. Oontz-Oontz, meet Rivka. You two will have already met later." It makes sense when you're tethered to his mind, at least, because the spirit nods his shade-wearing head and turns a gaze her way, lights flashing behind the shades. He lowers them and gives her a purely inhuman wink of one electric eyeball, then raises his shades again. "She probably wasn't impressed by that the first time she saw it-- that's what will have already met later means, Oontz-Oontz. Do I need to start feeding you time spirits? Honestly."
He touches the television and game console. It immediately stops acting like it's receiving signal from the cable, because it isn't in any meaningful way. But it's easily switched over to the N64. Because it's only the classics in this house. And when will she have gotten a chance to play an antique like this? Okay, probably several times, but still.
He drops down onto the couch, which resolves into their notion of time as his ass hits it. Which means it cushions him, rather than feeling like cement. The opening screen pops up, and Oontz sets off to speed navigating the presets to his desired settings. It's just a blur and it's done, and they're at the player select screen. Controllers are doled out. Wireless ones, via a converter. Old school meets new school, fittingly.
He leans forward, flips open a cigar box, clips one, lights in, and leans back into the couch with his controller. "Okay. Prepare to eat smoke and numerous colorful shells, daughter."
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