Before you lecture me, consider that I already know what I did was wrong and didn’t care.

 
Timeline/World: Edge of Forever – Shifting Sands
Characters: Owen Parker
Race: Strife – Elemental
Age: 39, physically about 25
Current residence: Surrey, British Columbia
Final Word Count: 755 words
 

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This is possibly just the story of my life repeating itself again; I don’t know that there’s any other way of thinking about it without feeling as though I’m complaining about my lot in life. It is my decision to run this bar-slash-club. It is my decision to pursue other things, but this place has been mine for so long that I wouldn’t really know where to go, otherwise. I wouldn’t know what to turn to. I run my business just perfectly fine.

It would be a little less problematic if I didn’t have to keep on trying to find new wait staff. Elijah is still a steady presence and now that he seems to have wrapped his mind about otherworldly things—some of them, at least—his moods have improved. The younger wait staff, however, is little more than a frustration and I simply don’t know where to keep on looking for new people.

Especially when my latest hire, who showed so many signs of being just perfect for the job, but I guess that I should have read between the lines, keeps on making mistakes with the orders. She keeps on bringing the wrong drinks to the wrong table and she seems to very much so delight in these things. When I first took her aside to talk to her about it, she cut me off, telling me that before I started to lecture her, I had to take into account that she was very much so aware of what she was doing wrong and that she didn’t care.

Okay.

Straight there at that point, I should have just let her go but I needed her working. I switched her to the bar with Elijah. He grumped at me at first, but it was much harder for her to screw up drinks there. I mean, it wasn’t that she was screwing up the drinks as she was giving them to the wrong person and that seemed to delight her. I know how it feels to be near someone attached to strife and she has none of the essence, so I think she’s just a little off.

Her spot behind the bar didn’t last very long. She purposely went out of her way to prepare the right drinks but to still hand them to the wrong patrons. Her last chance so happened when I took her into the kitchen. She was part of a ‘line’ with one other person and her job was to put a place together with all of the ingredients. It’s not as though we served a lot of food, it was mostly tapas-type foods. Small bite-sized things meant as snacks more than anything else. It’s almost impossible to screw that up.

My cook is also a grumpy old arse and I know the little troublemaker won’t get away with anything.

So far, it has gone well but I know I’m going to have to replace her as soon as possible so I’ve been looking for someone; I have a few people lined up for interviews and I have high hopes for them but until they’re hired, I still have to deal with her being around because, without her, we’re short. I don’t think the rest of my staff is complaining about her being moved around, it gives them a chance to be elsewhere in the place and some of them seem to appreciate that chance.

A week more, I think, is how much I have left to deal with her. From there, I’ll just have to see. I’m hopeful that the folks lined up all will work. Most of them are asking for part-time work and that’s fine by me; their schedule just has to work with mine and that’s the biggest issue, in the long run. Most of them don’t want to be working late into the night but they have to remember that we open last in the afternoon—usually in the early evening—and close in the early morning hours. It’s when most of the clients are around.

I mean, I could be like a few bars and be open almost around the clock. I’d then have drunk idiots on my hands in the early morning and I can’t do that. For one thing, I am absolutely not a morning person but, working from midday to late night and early mornings will do that to someone. I don’t want to be up at eight in the morning and I’m not going to change my hours.

I don’t know how to express that you’re safe here. I won’t let anything happen to anyone under my wing.

 
Timeline/World: Edge of Forever – Shifting Sands
Characters: Owen Parker
Race: Strife – Elemental
Age: 38, physically about 25
Final Word Count: 779 words
 

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I really thought Elijah would quit. For a few months, he would come in late, he would mix up drink orders, he wouldn’t clean up after himself. No amount of trying to get him to talk to me would get him to do so. I thought there was something personal going on but I know he wouldn’t open up to me. Even now, almost six years under my employ, he possibly still just sees me like a boss; though, I’ve had to open up to him about certain things I had never told anyone else.

It was during that particular time that I was actually nearly absolutely certain that I would lose him. I still remember the panicked look in his eyes when I told him I wasn’t human. There had been issues at the bar with particular drunk and belligerent patrons, I had to be the one to handle them and I suppose that, in a way, Elijah fretted and fussed at the idea of little old me getting hurt. It was sweet of him.

Not helpful to that situation was that yes, I got hurt. I got knifed in the gut and from there came the whole thing about needing to tell him what I was because he was panicking and he was getting ready to call 9-1-1. The issue with that, though very kind of him to want to do that, is that they wouldn’t have known what to do with me at the hospital. They’d have probably locked me up.

That being, I don’t know for certain whether or not they would, I just don’t know if they have any experience with non-humans and I’m not in any rush to find out.

So somehow, I had to calm him down, tell him a little bit about my origins as he taped up the wound that, yes, would heal on its own with a lot of rest. I knew he wouldn’t really believe me so I had to show off a little which, by the way, when you’ve been knifed in the gut? Not fun. It takes focus to do the little things and the pain was making me nauseated, I thought for sure that I’d set something on fire.

Anyway, long story short, I managed to not actually set anything on fire, my most long-term bartender was giving me wide-eyed looks as though he was terrified of me and I had to just tell him that if he wanted to leave, he could. I wouldn’t force him to stay. I had no way to express myself in any way that would make it easy to understand that he was safe with me. He’d been safe for the last five and a half years. I had taken him in, he’d stayed with me for this long and I would never actually let anything happen to him.

He helped me back inside, told me he was going to go back downstairs and that was that.

Or, well, I thought that was that. I was certain that I’d have to shut the place down for a week or two while I recuperated but no, there was Elijah the following night, looking a little worse for wear but telling me that he wasn’t going anywhere and that I was stuck with him.

It took another two weeks before I was back on my feet and another week after that before he finally told me that he’d had to deal with the losses of several of his friends a few months back—just before his behaviour started to deteriorate—and that none of the deaths had had any explanations that made sense to him. That being, they all had been stamped as unexplained and he’d been losing sleep trying to figure things out.

I suppose that, in a way, my telling him about what I was might have opened his eyes to the possibilities of the world out there and the last few moments he had of his friends—a video of sorts—had a potentially better explanation for their deaths now than ‘no one knows what happened’.

Not everything that is paranatural is out to kill you, but there is plenty out there that might very well just want to maim you if it can. There’s no denying that. There will always be things out there that will want to hurt you, be they paranatural or not.

All of that just to say that somehow, the guy still hasn’t given up on me and I think I’m going to be able to keep him for a fair few years yet. I’m glad for that.

Lately, it’s started to seem like you couldn’t care any less.

 
Timeline/World: Edge of Forever – Shifting Sands
Characters: Owen Parker
Race: Strife – Elemental
Age: 37, physically about 25
Final Word Count: 648 words
 

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I’ve had employees come and go, it seems inevitable in this business. I don’t know if it’s because of the clientele or just because I seem to attract the ones looking for a temporary job while they are doing their studying but I lost count of how many servers and bartenders I’ve lost over the years. Now, you might as well look at me and try to claim that I’m dramatizing but I’m not, not really.

I’ve had servers who only lasted a handful of months, the one who stayed around longest, was here for about ten months before he quit. The pay is good, the hours are good—for a club-slash-bar—the clients aren’t so bad most of the time but I just don’t know why they don’t stay. Most tend to end up telling me that they’re going back home so I just have to assume that I’m landing myself a lot of kids in their first year of university who are far from home and aren’t meant to be.

My bartenders have lasted a little longer, Elijah, my oldest tender at just shy of four years, has been my employee with the most seniority and it makes me sad, in a way. I’ve been running this place for more than a decade and my oldest employee has only been here for almost four years. How does that make sense?

I’m pretty sure he’s looking for work elsewhere as is. Lately, he’s been coming in a little behind on his schedule, he’s started to mix up a few of the ordered drinks though not many, thankfully and the patrons seem to understand. He doesn’t clean up as thoroughly as before and he’s even come in drunk at one point.

I’ve talked to him, I asked him a few questions, I’ve tried to get answers but all he does is shrug away my concerns and it makes me mad. At the same time, it makes me worried because I’ve known him for these almost four years and it never was in his usual behaviour to act this way, so I just don’t know. I feel like he couldn’t care any less about his job than he already does.

He used to be seriously passionate about things, he’d want to learn about new mixes, try to create new drinks and he’s done that, we have a few of those specialty drinks on the menu. I really have tried to ask him if it’s something outside of work, if there’s anything I could do but I know that he might not feel ready to open up to me this way, I mean, I am still his boss, he’s about ten years my junior and he may or may not ever feel comfortable enough around me to talk to me about his personal life.

I mean, during the quieter moments, we’d joke together, during the busier ones, we’d have one another’s back but that’s a work thing, there’s no saying he might feel comfortable around me out of the work environment and I don’t blame him. There are things about my life and everything that I’ll never be able to tell anyone else but he might just be able to feel that there’s something different about me.

It’s not hard to remember the open curiosity in his eyes when he first had started working here. It wasn’t about the place in general, it always when he was looking at me, probably thinking I wasn’t catching him looking my way. I just don’t know. It’s not every day that you can tell your mostly human workers and clients alike that you’re not even human in any way, that you’re older than you look. There are so many things.

I’m just going to have to give him time, it really is all I can do at this point and while it frustrates me, what else is there to be done? Nothing. If he quits, he’ll quit and I’ll have to find another bartender but somehow, I don’t think I’ll find one quite as good as him.

It’s not what I ordered, but I guess I’ll take it.

Timeline/World: Main Profile
Characters: Owen Parker
Race: Strife – Elemental
Age: 35, physically about 25
Final Word Count: 584 words

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The soft clink of the glass being set down in front of him pulls him from his thoughts and his gaze focuses as he looks first at the bartender in front of him then down to the fancy glass that was set down in front of him. He studies the strange swirl of blue and green within the glass, noting the little twirl of lemon peel against the rim and looks back up to the bartender. “That’s not what I ordered.”

The woman shrugs at him and walks off, leaving him puzzling this particular turn of events a moment. Owen scans the bar over briefly; it was quiet for this hour, he’d been here just the day before and it had been swarming then but it was quiet now, not even a rush just yet. There’s no reason why his drink should have been misunderstood so drastically. He looks down to the glass again and breathes a soft sigh, shrugging his shoulders as he takes the glass and moves off towards one of the tables along the back.

Never once in his career as a bar owner and tender has he ever gotten a drink order wrong. It’s not even a matter of admitting that he might have gotten one or two wrong, he knows he hasn’t. Now, when he still served snacks to go with those drinks, that was something else entirely and he knows that now and again, the order was wrong but, looking back to those times, it wasn’t so much his fault as the cook’s fault for not paying attention to what he was doing.

Settling in his chosen booth, content that it puts him with his back up against the wall so he can people watch, Owen looks down to the almost dainty glass, bringing it up to his nose to breathe in the scents, trying to see what he might be able to detect. There is the lemon, of course, and he makes a small noise of disgust at it; he’s never liked lemons, not even when his mother made her famous lemon meringue pie that had everyone begging for another slice. He takes the twirl of peel away from the rim and sets it on a napkin. Breathing in the scents from his mistaken drink again, he closes his eyes as he detects a faint hint of cherries though it’s so faint he could imagine it might have been an accident.

The base of the drink seems to be closer to a sort of herbal tea he’s heard about recently. He shakes his head and dares to take a small sip, letting his taste buds get their fill of whatever it is he was given. He swallows, tips his head and shrugs lightly. Not the best taste in the world, the lemon is almost undetectable and he already had paid for the drink. Wasting would have been, well, a waste and he wasn’t in the habit. He just made a mental note that coming back when this particular bartender was working was perhaps not the best of options, not that he would be in the country for much longer, this was just a pit stop before he went back home.

“When in Rome.” He shrugs again and sips from the drink again, letting his gaze and his mind wander to the other patrons of the little bar. It had been better the prior evening but something-something about beggars and choosers, he knew. This was fine for now.