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“Hey, is Dipper here yet?”
Xi nodded tiredly before Wendy whooped and went running down the hall, which led Xi to call after, “No running!”
“Sorry!” she called back. Before she obeyed his command, there was a loud cry and a thunk as someone hit the floor. Though the cry was high-pitched, Xi knew it was neither Wendy nor any woman in the edifice who had made the sound.
“Kids,” he muttered to himself as the victim came stumbling past the front desk. Straightening his glasses and armful of askew papers, he had to lean on the reception desk to balance himself again. “Wheathead,” Xi uttered a greeting.
“Wheatley,” the man corrected.
Xi watched with boredom as Wheatley straightened out the paperwork that had likely been jumbled by the running Wendy. He shuddered as he recalled that Wheatley was one of the poor souls living with Glados. That was probably why the guy was tense all the time. Glados tended to have that effect on people. Well, people not Chell. Somehow the tiny Brazilian woman managed to escape the many effects interactions with Glados left.
After Wheatley had gathered himself together and gone about his business, Xi sighed and prayed either Lara or Cecil would show up to relieve him of his shift. He was tired, and he was in for a long night at the pub.
Usually when he was tired and working like this, he would place wagers with himself. What did he have to lose? Well, if he lost against himself, he would lose a shot of bourbon. He allotted himself a shot of bourbon a day, meaning he'd have anywhere from twenty-eight to thirty-one shots a month. His wagers only dealt with the shots he had the month he was currently in, so these wagers would determine how many shots he could have this month. He thought it was a genius idea. Well, he had. He hoped to never relive the October where he'd gotten almost triple the normal number of shots a month. He was surprised Lara hadn't killed him let alone the number of shots in one day, that day being Halloween. He'd won a lot of wagers against himself that day.
So far he'd been on a losing streak. He started off by wagering the professors on the third floor would get at least two visitors that day, no more, no less. If more or less than two, he would lose a shot. If just two, he'd gain a shot.
Speak of the devil, the door was ringing now. Pressing the button, he asked, “Who is it?” The only answer he received was a five-letter name spelled out in Morse code. He didn't know Morse code, but he recognized the pattern and buzzed Chell in. She waved at him as she passed by before disappearing down the hall. He liked her. He tended to like people who don't say much. Well, it wasn't like she really could say much. She was mute after all. But she managed her situation beautifully, and he could respect her for the things she often had to tolerate.
An hour passes and he has another wager to set with himself: how long before he has to call a repairman over again? Generally the tenants were good at handling their own messes, but there were some who seemed incapable of doing just that.
The professors upstairs had never asked for help in that department, and Xi sometimes busied himself trying to figure out which of them was so mechanically savvy they managed to take care of their own fixes. Sometimes he wagered the one in the top hat (Layton, he believed). He was a simple man, not unwilling to get his hands dirty given the circumstances. Sometimes he thought it was the one with the weird hair and red glasses, but he was such a snooty man Xi wondered if he'd picked up a tool in his entire career. While Xi did have solid proof that the Sycamore professor could, in fact wield a hammer and wrench, that didn't mean he didn't have doubts. The one he was positive didn't have any mechanical experience was the youngest among them. He was not a professor, but in Xi's head he got lumped with the professors a lot. He wasn't sure if the Triton young man was a student or aide or what exactly his role at the university they worked at was, but had never been curious enough to ask. Xi's only desire was to observe, never interact.
Pitch and Jack usually had to call in a repairman at least once a month. Xi doubted most of the damage was Jack's doing. Pitch was either absentminded eighty percent of the time or purposefully problematic. It seemed only Jack tolerated him most days, the man was such a walking nightmare. There was only one other person who could really handle Pitch Black, but he was Satan himself. Everyone else's behavior tended to pale in comparison to his. That was another individual who never needed a repairman: Bill Cipher. Xi suspected it was less because he could fix his own problems and more because he never seemed to use anything in his apartment. Not even the electricity in the room got used much. It was terrifying, imagining what the almost demonic human did just sitting in a dark room most of the day. All of the day. Bill tended not to emerge from his place until night. Maybe he wasn't Satan in actuality, but he was certainly a vampire.
He didn't yet know Dipper well enough to guess what sort of person he was. He alleged that if something needed fixing, he would likely call Soos and ask him how to do it himself. That was what Wendy did at least. Xi would have thought the resident scientists (four in total if Chell truly counted, but the way Glados and Wheatley talked sometimes made him think the woman was more of a test subject) could fix their own problems. He was right for the most part. Glados was more than capable of handling any faulty equipment or broken faucets. As was Chell, for that matter. Wheatley tended to panic and pretend there was nothing wrong. Xi would probably drop to his knees and thank whatever higher entity he believed in that day if Wheatley ever agreed to some therapy. The man was a walking panic attack waiting to happen and should anyone get on his last nerve . . . Xi had seen the results once. He prayed Wheatley never took up corresponding with Bill, because he didn't think the complex could survive being leveled by the two.
Carlos and Cecil, on the other hand, sometimes needed about as much help fixing things as Pitch and Jack. Neither of them had tempers that Xi had seen or witnessed. Well actually there was some guy named Steve Cecil didn't like and he didn't particularly care for Bill (who did?), but he wasn't outright ill-tempered like Pitch. He was, however, brutally honest about what tended to cause the incidents in which he'd need to phone a repairman: apparently Carlos had a tendency to sleepwalk. In his sleepwalking adventures, he would apparently take entire sinks apart and upon waking up not know how to put them back together. Cecil rarely ever sounded upset about this sort of thing. If anything, he sounded amused. “If you ask him what he's doing while in the act, he just says it's for science,” he shared with Lara once on the subject. Xi had to admit, that was rather amusing.
He wagered that by the end of the week, Pitch and Jack would need to call the repairman at least once. No more, no less.
The door rang then. “Who is it?” he asked.
“Flora Reinhold,” came a soft, sweet, accented voice. “We're here to see the professor.”
On most days, that voice would make him feel guilty for answering so gruffly. Not today. Today he was tired and had already seen Satan once today. He tended to rate his days based on how little sleep he'd gotten and how many times Bill and he had crossed paths. “How many? And which professor?” It was pointless asking the latter, really. Actually no. He tended to forget that Carlos was technically a professor too. He'd done so much independent work for so long and hadn't taught a class that it often slipped his mind that the man had been in academia.
But they were in fact going to see the professors upstairs. “Four for Professor Layton,” a male, American voice took over. Someone was shouting in the background about something he couldn't quite make out because the decibels were simply too high. Brow furrowing, Xi went ahead and buzzed them in. Eyeballing the two men and two women that stepped in, he cataloged their appearances for future reference. They seemed to know where they were going, so he didn't bother pointing anything out to them.
Then he remembered his first wager with himself and rolled his eyes. One shot gone for the month. Wonderful. Lara or Cecil couldn't get here to take his shift fast enough.