milliways_bar | (no subject)

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The door bursts open, and a pile of letters floods the doorway into the bar.

Yes folks, it gets bloomin' earlier every year.

Chris slides down the pile, then attempts to get some of them back into a sack, or shoved back through the door so that he can shut it.

"Why can't they learn to use bloody email for this?"

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"Are you well, sir?" Olivier comes over to join him, helping him to collect up the letters.

"Fit as a fiddle." Chris says, "Cheers though."

He attempts to get more letters in the sack than it looks like it can possibly fit.

"May I be of assistance?" He helps chase the letters that have escaped across the floor.

"Thank you, that would be great." Chris gets a second sack from his pocket and chucks it over to him.

"They get a little out of hand."

Duster only sees an older man, possibly his father's age, fall in and try to carry all of his mail. The Nowhere Islands don't celebrate Christmas or even are aware that such a holiday exists, and have never seen someone receive so many letters at once.

A mailman, perhaps?

"Are you alright? Do you need help?"

If it was his father, he would only get a snappy retort telling Duster that old men don't always need help, but even this task looks to overwhelming for one person to work on.

"Cheers mate." Chris says, trying to shove the letters into a sack that seems to be taking more than it is possibly capable of.

"They tend to overflow."

That's an odd way of greeting someone. Still, he walks over quickly, limp showing more prominently, and begins picking up bunches of the letters.

"Do you-" should he ask the elderly man where he gets these letters? "-get so much mail all of the time?" There. That was a good question.

"From about October to December." Chris says. "But they start drifting in around August. Seems to get earlier every year..."

He gets a second sack out of his pocket which he hands to Duster.

Duster takes the bag and pauses. "Early? Why do they only send things to you now?"

Was he someone important in his world? That would explain all the mail, but most people want to talk to their leaders all of the time.

"For Christmas." Chris says. "Some kids are more organised than others."

"Who's Christmas?"

Is this old man working for him?

"Christmas is a holiday." Chris says. "And I'm known as Father Christmas, one of the people who distributes gifts through the world."

"Oh." He's not surprised by this. After all, lots of families would send letters to faraway relatives during holidays, especially if the old man is from a world much larger than Duster's.

"So you give out letters and presents people send for Christmas? That makes you a holiday mailman!"

He definitely gets it!

Chris chuckles. "Something like that, except it all happens on one night, with a bit of magic."

"In one night?" That would be extremely difficult with all those letters, but by magic does he mean...?

"You have psychic powers too?" People with those powers can eventually teleport, right? And Chris is old enough to have developed them well past that.

"Well, it's one night for everyone else." Chris says. "And not really, it's more about time travel."

Duster nods. Chris' powers might have something to do with slowing down time for everyone but him, but then he hears the truth.

Time traveling is not associated with anything positive. Nope.

He looks at Chris a bit warily before putting an armful of envelopes into his bag. Sure, the last old man he met that traveled through time frequently turned out to be a horrible person, but Chris doesn't seem too terrible. And if he only does it for Christmas, then it would be bad, right?

"Isn't time traveling harmful, though?"

"Yep." Chris says. "But even if you slow time down like I do, you have to make about thirty trips back to cover the whole run. You don't have to sleep, but you're at more risk of going mad."

"Oh," he sighs, relieved. At least this wasn't traveling to different eras.

"So it's basically slowing down time for everyone, then? It must be pretty tiring to do that for the entire world."

This is definitely some sort of psychic power.

"There's more than one of us doing it." Chris says. "But it's still pretty tiring."

"I see," Duster replies. "How many of you are there?"

"I'm not entirely sure." Chris admits. "A good crowd though. And I'm trainin' up an apprentice myself."

"And all of you trained enough to learn to slow down time?" Lucas would love having such a powerful PSI user mentor him!

"So does it mean there's a lot of psychics in your world?"

"Bit more complicated than that." Chris admits.

"And no. To have that power, you must give up a normal life."

"Why do you have to give it up?"

"Because if anyone knew you had that kind of power, they'd want some." Chris says. "You have to have a new identity, a new appearance to work under. My own family don't know. The only one back home outside the Ministry of Elf who knows is Owen, my apprentice, and that's because I rescued him from being mugged and it became too bloomin' obvious."

"That...makes sense," Duster agrees. "But then doesn't everyone else in the world know that you need some sort of power to send everything in one night?"

"You think anyone thinks about that? They just open their pressies, don't they?"

"I mean," he hopes he hasn't offended the old man, "they know that their family sends it to them for the holiday and that someone else has to deliver it."

He thinks about it a little more. Would they rather believe that a couple of people with psychic powers sent their mail or that thousands of mail workers delivered it?

"Why does it have to be so few of you?"

"The ones I deliver don't come from their families, they come from us." Chris says.

"And it's difficult to recruit people. It's a lonely life. Less so since the lad joined me, mind."

Wait. Wait a moment.

"The presents come from you?" He stares at Chris, confused. "But don't families send gifts and letters to each other?"

He looks at the floor, trying to wrap his head around all this. So it's a holiday where people receive gifts from an outside organization? Is the old man part of the government group, hopefully benevolent?

It must be an awfully kind leader to send everyone gifts during one of their holidays.

"Both." Father Christmas says, patiently, scooping more letters into the sack.

"Don't ask about the finances."

He's still silent, trying to wrap his head around how this holiday works. It might be a good idea to ask him to repeat himself; Chris looks like an understanding man.

"Can you," he manages to get out, "start over from the beginning? How does Christmas work?"

"People give each other gifts, I give them gifts too." Chris says. "They eat a lot of food and enjoy themselves, I go home and have a good kip."

He thinks about it for a moment.

"Why do you also have to give them gifts? Are they from your town's leader?"

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