Thread Roulette: The Stranger

[Event !]

Sean Neville, Zebadiah Hayes, and Eloise Eaton have been invited to discuss psychic powers as an informational segment on Public Access.

[Zebadiah Hayes]

Zeb wasn't exactly sure why he'd ended up here. It wasn't like he was known for his speaking skills. And he wasn't all the comfortable being on camera either. But he'd been asked and Zeb was always happy to bend over backwards to help out someone else. So here he was.

He figured it wouldn't be all that different from explaining his ability to the students who asked. He'd spent a lifetime trying to put people at ease with his ability after all.

He'd gotten dressed up for the occasion, was even wearing a tie and had spent a few minutes getting his hair to look like he hadn't just crawled out of bed. He was standing just off to the side of where they were going to be seated, trying to finish up a coffee without spilling anything on himself.

"Good luck you two," he said to his companions. "Break a leg or...something." Yeah, he was a little nervous.

[Dr. Sean Neville]

After the disastrous event the previous month with Public Access, Sean had been incredulous upon receiving the invitation to film the informational segment about psychic powers. Specifically because, only one month ago, he’d attempted to participate in a low-stakes trivia contest and had been prevented from doing so entirely because of his psychic powers.

However, his desire to spare younger psychics those same moments of humiliation always won out in internal debates with his sense of pride. So he had agreed, and, to make a point, he wore the exact same outfit he had worn in May when they had turned him away.

Unlike Zeb beside him, he felt no nervousness whatsoever. He didn’t mind being on camera, he had spent his entire career talking to people, and he knew this topic like the back of his hand.

He adjusted his tie and then turned towards the younger man. “You’ll do fine,” he assured him with a gentle smile. “Just speak from experience.”

That was his plan. And if he made not-so-subtle reference to the type of discrimination that psychics generally experienced, and telepaths in particular did, about their powers, then that was a consequence that the producers should have anticipated when inviting him here in the first place.