[fourth wall event]

[slaying]

Okay. What's with the sudden population influx?

[Buffy's wandering through the town, looking concerned. These poor souls, dragged here at Christmas. Too many New Feathers for her to feel good about anything. Something is definitely up.]

Comments

[nadarejin]

I'm afraid most if not all of us don't have an answer to that.

[slaying]

Great. More non-answers. This is just my absolute favourite part of the whole thing.

[Jeez, woman. Chill the sarcasm in front of the newbie. Deep breaths.]

[nadarejin]

Are there many of these unanswerable questions around these parts? I can't imagine that it would be easy to describe a situation like this one.

[slaying]

Unanswerable questions seem to be the reason why this place exists.

[nadarejin]

It's a place of mystery, all right. Do events like this happen often?

[slaying]

Events like...?

[She's still mistaking you for a New Feather.]

[nadarejin]

The influx of "new feathers" and other oddities. What's more is that we, these so-called new feathers, don't have pairs of wings the rest of the residents here do. The way people are behaving, I'd hazard a guess that this isn't a regular occurrence.

[slaying]

[She had gotten so used to the wings; she had hardly noticed.]

Oh, this is wrong. This is so wrong. I mean, the wings? They were wrong in the first place but now not having wings seems more like...uber-wrong.

[nadarejin]

Uber-wrong . . . ? What do the wings represent here, besides the sign of being the abducted?

[slaying]

Camo, I guess. To help us blend with the natives. You, and your not-having of the wings? Kinda suggests you got here in a way us abductees didn't.

[nadarejin]

It would put us in a somewhat bad light. But given the confusion amongst the newcomers too, it should be safe to conclude that we arrived in a similar fashion. I can't fathom why without the wings, though.

[slaying]

Ditto on the unfathomable. [Sigh.] It's either an experiment or an accident. And I can't see what they'd be trying to test. So that leaves me with a big fat accident.

[nadarejin]

I can't say that I know much about this place aside from what I've already said. Is that what the captors do to their captives? Experiment on them?

[slaying]

We're like their very own personal guinea pigs.

[nadarejin]

And no one has yet to find a way out.

[slaying]

Not in the free-will kind of way. People disappear, sometimes. We assume they go back home.