The Chained Watcher

Interview

Had this one written for a couple months, but I couldn't post it without getting to that point in the timeline. Ah, the woes of being unable to instantly beam the story out of my brain...

~~~

(POV is very wishy-washy in this chapter. I wanted to capture everyone's thoughts, and it just... ended up like this.)

The image caught by the camera zooms in, then out, coming into focus. Most of the image is taken up by Jimmy, Martyn partially visible behind him with a clipboard in hand, before he backs up, satisfied. A third person is revealed to be in the room, having previously been concealed by the nearby Listener. Grian.

Grian looks bored. He's sitting in a chair partially sprawled across the table in front of him, rolling a ball back and forth with one finger. There's no mask on his face, no cloak wrapped around his body, and a single pair of pale lilac wings adorning his back.

"Alright, I think it's working now." Grian's eyes shift to look at him when he speaks, revealing that they're also a light lilac. "Okay, so this is being logged as the first recorded instance of a non-hostile Watcher, and will consist of a semi-informal interview with Grian over there. Say 'Hi', Grian."

The avian, or maybe just abnormally small strangely dressed Watcher, parroted back, "Hi Grian."

Martyn snickers while Jimmy facepalms, and Grian has a smug grin. "You know what I meant."

"I think we need to remove the 'semi-' from 'informal'." Martyn's amused suggestion was met with a glare from his partner, along with a snicker from Grian. "You know he's just going to ruin any attempts you make at keeping this formal, right?"

"I know!" He took a breath, lowering his tone from shouting. "I know, but how is anyone supposed to take this seriously if he keeps derailing the conversation every chance he gets?"

Grian's grin shows a gleeful willingness to make that come true, but he just crosses his arms under his chin while Martyn pacifies Jimmy. "No one's going to take anything seriously if we take long enough Grian gets bored and leaves. Just improvise to get it back on track, and don't worry about it too much."

"Fine..." Referencing a clipboard, Jimmy adopted a more professional tone and addressed Grian. "Okay, first things first, we need you to do something that proves you're a Watcher, not just an avian."

After a moment of consideration, Grian's eyes and wings flood with a much darker shade of purple than they had been, and he props his chin up on one hand while twisting a strand of purple magic between the fingers of his other hand. He looked over at the two Listeners for confirmation, letting the color return to pastel and catching the magic once he got a nod.

"Let's see, next we're supposed to ask for verbal confirmation of Tier..."

"Nope, not happening."

Grian's interruption caught Jimmy off guard. "What? Why?"

"Look, I get that neither of you are planning to get me killed, but can you honestly say that none of the other Listeners would try to kill me on sight? No matter how much you promise they wouldn't go after me, I'm not taking the risk that one of them would try to ambush me or hunt me down after finding out my Tier."

"Grian-"

"I'll say I'm above Tier 3," his wings separated into three different pairs for a second before returning to a single pair, "but I'm not saying my exact Tier."

Martyn muttered under his breath, "Still freaky to see that." He raised his voice to address Grian. "Well can you tell us a little about... that? How worried should we be about other Watchers pretending to be avians?"