Kavax shrugged at the lack of useful information.
"Eh, not that surprised. We'll need at least some more clues to figure out what this is. Doesn't mean we can't start trying to find out."
At Carlos' question, he then points back to Del-Gan. "Oh, this is Del-Gan. He and I actually go way back. Been... ten, twenty? How many doomsdays has it been? Eh, not that important. Anyhow, he summoned me, I ate him, he was actually quite clever and had a persistent contingent resurrection ritual set up keyed to his own death, and now we're stuck with each other until the day someone figures out how to actually kill one of us and make it stick. Old pals, you know. Think that covers the basics, eh Del?"
"Victoria," the woman replied.
She nodded as Jessica said she was leaving. "There are about ten of us left. We'll probably be in the bar later."
"All right," Jessica says. She tries not to run, but she still can't help walking briskly back to the rooms.
"Guys," she announces as soon as she throws the door open, "I met one of the missing people. She says that they keep dying over and over, except that some of them don't come back. And it resets, like that movie."
"I don't remember people staying dead in that movie. Nice work.
"Did she say what killed her? Did she say anything about the other missing people?"
Jessica calls forth some clothes and lays them out on the bed. She frowns at Jerry. "Fire, usually. Or the cold kills them, if people try to run."
She sighs. "And there's something else hunting them. Because of course there is.
"Victoria said there's about ten left. They'll be at the bar later tonight."
She ducks back into the bathroom and quickly rinses the chlorine off. She dries off, leaving her bathing suit hanging in the shower to dry, and pulls on her skinny jeans and t-shirt with the anime cartoon character.
"Ready," she says, expecting the others would want to head to the bar soon.
Kavax, not having much in the way of preparations or anything to do, just hangs around somewhat awkwardly.
"Alright, so some kind of loop going on, though no clue whether it's real or fake. At least that's a start. ANd... well, I don't have too much to fear from fire or cold under normal circumstances, so if we have to go through a loop I'll probably at least get a look at the 'something else'."
"My gut is telling me that the cold is just a contrivance. A reason to kill, but not really the cause of it. If you go out in the cold, you'll still get hit.
"Let's go talk to these people in the bar to find out what we can. But I think we won't get any real answers until we can encounter whatever it is that kills the people that stay in the hotel."
The bar is small, as these things go, with a dozen or so tables and a few booths, plus a handful of stools at the bar. One of the booths is jammed with 7 people, a couple of stools pulled up but unoccupied at the moment, drinking impressively large beverages. A couple of other tables are occupied as well, one with a couple laughing and giggling over there drinks and one with a small family.
Jessica looks around for Victoria. If she doesn't see her, she goes up to the big group at the booth. "So, uh, no. Let me know if any of this makes sense to you. Hashtags. Netflix. Kanye. Bridgerton. Uh, let's see... Obama?" She looks for signs of recognition, or if they look at her like she's crazy.
One of the men - an older gentleman - looked somewhat confused. Most of the others seemed to get what you were talking about, and a middle aged guy waved. "Yeah, yeah. Voted for the other guy, but I get what you mean. Welcome to the sixties!"
"Eighties," Victoria muttered from the other side of the table.
"Then as well," the guy said and took a glug of a viscious brown beverage. "Pull up a chair and decide how you wanna die! I'm voting 'so intoxicated I don't give a f***, but some of the others disagree." The mother of the family threw a dirty look, which the guy ignored.
"Well I would prefer not to." He looks at Victoria, "Has anyone never not come back after a 'loop'?"
Jessica shrugs a shoulder. "I'm legally dead already."
She glances over to Mr. Garcia and nods along with his question. "Yeah, how does that work? Have you figured out how some of you come back, and some don't?"
Victoria nodded. "Some never show up again, yes. We don't know if they leave or if they go somewhere else or...what." She shrugged, uncomfortably. "We haven't worked out why. It doesn't seem to matter how long you've been here, or how you died."
The drunk man snorted. "I'm tellin' ya, we're in Purgatory. The people who don't come back have accepted it, and moved on." He nods with drunken wisdom as the others looked annoyed. "I saw a show like that once."
Jessica frowns at the man's talk about Purgatory. She didn't know if he could be right, but she knew there were other places like Purgatory. She didn't know the name of the realm where the Furies existed when they weren't on Earth, but it wasn't a pleasant place. At all.
She decides to ask a couple direct questions. "Has anyone seen what's after you? Has anyone been attacked and 'come back'?"
"It's hard to say. It's wearing a robe of some kind, and there's a light around it too," Victoria said.
The drinking man drank. "Two arms, two legs. I shot it once. Set it on fire. Tried luring it out, but it didn't want to leave. But I couldn't get in, then froze."
Without getting a better look at it Jessica isn't sure what it is, but it does eliminate all but the most powerful undead and several out of control demons, angels and spirits. Whatever it is, combined with it's apparent manipulation of time, it is uncommonly powerful. It's also possible that the time loop is a prison for this thing, or a hiding place. There just isn't enough information.
Kavax sat, collected a drink more or less at random, and considered the situation.
"Well, I can at least confirm that this place is not, in fact, Purgatory, nor are we actually dead yet. I'd know if someone'd actually killed me again."
Meanwhile, he leaned back and just tried to get a feel for the situation, while quietly giving the Dragonfang Greatsword a nudge to see if it was being drawn toward any of the people here. Didn't hurt to check.
"Two arms, two legs. I shot it once. Set it on fire. Tried luring it out, but it didn't want to leave. But I couldn't get in, then froze."
"Lure it out of where? The hotel?"
"We won't get much without doing some investigating. If what you say is right, and we're going to die anyway, lets go find some information." He fixes his glasses, "Now if you're all crazy and this is made up, it still wouldn't hurt us to look around."
The expert looks at the drinks and shakes his head, no doubt just a little paranoid about the situation. "It's like Pascal's Wager. You can sit here, but it gives us nothing of value."
"I refu- refa - Disagree with that statement," the man said with drunken indignation. "It gets us drunk."
Victoria sighed. "Yes, he tried to lure it out the hotel, but it refused to leave. It doesn't let you back in either."
Kavax wasn't getting any hint that these people were sinister, but some of them did feel...weak, untethered.
Jessica stays quiet for a while as she puzzles the mystery. She wished she could just turn on her phone and Google time loops, because she couldn't remember how the Bill Murray movie ended.
"Um, what causes the reset? Is it like, midnight? Or does everyone have to die first?" Her eyes get wide. "Oh! Maybe the people who don't come back have actually escaped!"
The people looked at each other. "Has anyone made it to midnight?" There were general headshakes and 'no' from the group. "So yeah, I think it's when we all die." She paused. "I like the idea that the ones who don't come back escape," she added.
The drunk man made a rude noise into his bear.
Jessica looks over to the family with the kids. "Obviously you guys remember the other loops." She points to the couple laughing and the family. "Do they remember the reset? Or is it only the time travelers who know what's happening?"
Victoria shook her head. "They don't remember, just us strangers."
The drunk sloshed his beer. "Nah, they don't remember, but they know something is up. If you watch them they act weird, and if you ask you can see something funky in there eyes for a second."
Kavax shrugged and shifted his shoulders.
"So, whatever the gribbly is, it won't leave the hotel. Maybe can't, if it's what is supporting the loop. But leaving just gets you reset eventually. The locals don't remember things, but can tell that something's wrong. And the hotel burns down at the end of every loop, probably so that the local nasty can feed off of everyone's fear or whatever it's doing this all for. That all correct for a summary of what we know so far?"
Jerry asks if anyone has a count of how many loopers, employees, and just regular guests there are. If not, he'll start a mental tab.
Carlos has no idea what it could be, at least right now. He does now it reminds him of this super niche board game he owned but barely had the time to play. He laughed at the irony, drawing in the attention of some of the patrons.
"Time is ticking. What else stays? Papers? Writing? If we were to damage a wall does it repair itself?"
The expert wondered if there was a way to track information outside of going by memory.
The woman nodded at Kavax's summary. To Jerry she responded, "There three front of desk staff, two concierges, three kitchen staff and four bar staff. I'm not sure how many housekeepers there are, I've never seen them all." She paused. "I think there are twelve guests, plus us."
"Everything physical changes back," she responded to Carlos. "Your clothes are back to what you were wearing when you enter, if you smash something it's repaired when it resets. Anything written down is gone too."
Jessica sighs in disappointment. "I was hoping to put my hoodie in the wash. At least the chlorine smell will be out of my suit."
After a moment, she frowns in thought. "I wonder if stuff will get affected in my..." she looks at Victoria and the others, "... well, where I send stuff."
She calls forth her phone and its charger. She checks its battery life. "It's at sixty-three percent. Which means it was around seventy, seventy-five when we came. I'll go back to the room and plug it in... electrical sockets are still the same in the 80s, right?" Jessica asks, suddenly unsure.
"You can charge it, I think," Victoria replied, sipping on her spirits. "I don't think any of us have bothered. Not exactly much YouTube to drain the battery."
"Okay, I'll go do that. Does anyone want to walk with me back to the room?"
"This is weird, isn't it? Stuck in the past? What if we escape this time loop thingy and we're still in the 1980s? I mean, I'd be older than my parents by the time we get caught up. And then--"
Her eyes go wide. "And then, could I stop it? Could I go to where the other Furies were creating Androleteira and stop them? Or even, make sure I never even went there in the first place?"
"Let's go. No need to stick around here."
He listens to Jessica's concerns, "I can't say its that much weirder than reality ending and then restarting, or fighting living shadow puppets, or any of the myriad other things we deal with on the regular." He gives a reassuring smile. "If we escape and make it to the 80's I think we would have more to worry about than that. You really haven't seen the hair have you?"
Keeping the conversation as light as he can, he stifles a frown when Jessica speaks about going back further, "Maybe. I don't have to tell you that messing with time can be dangerous, very dangerous. Let's get out of here first and see what we can do, si?"
Jessica sighs, deflating after the initial surge of hope. "Yeah. Yeah, you're probably right." She falls silent during the rest of the walk to the room.
Jessica calls forth her phone and its charger, but has to search for an outlet since there isn't the convenient charging stations on the desk like in modern hotels. Eventually she traces the cord of the blinking electric clock down behind one of the beds and has to stretch to plug in her phone.
"Okay, now what do we do?" She looks at the phone as it's charging and suddenly frowns. "Wait. Doesn't this little experiment sort of assume that we're going to die tonight?" She starts envisioning how it might go down -- either in battle with some monster stalking them, freezing to death in the cold outside, or when the boiler explodes. She shakes her head when she quickly recalls she'd died once before. Everything went black, and then she awoke in some horrid hellscape. At least until she was called back to Earth by Jerry's anguished summons.
Truth be told, this would probably be more pleasant.
She calls forth her sword and gives it a twirl as it ignites into flame. "Should we check out the boiler room?"
"And then, could I stop it? Could I go to where the other Furies were creating Androleteira and stop them? Or even, make sure I never even went there in the first place?"
Jerry stops when he hears the conversation about changing this future/their past. He gives a deep sigh and then continues on.
"Even if we can't leave this night, I guess we could mail a letter or make a phone call. I could warn myself about the inmates that... that killed him. Even if I don't mention that they're vamps.
"That would save him, but... I've done a lot of things since I became a Hunter. Would all of that go away? Doesn't seem right that I maybe save one person who's important to me to let dozens of others go."
Jerry agrees to head to the boiler room. He left his shotgun in the truck (again), but he still has his 9mm in his holster, and his nightstick that he wraps up in a beach towel and carries under his arm.
Kavax shrugs somewhat to the questions of time shenanigans.
"Eh, fiddling with timelines isn't worth it. You can pull off a loop or something sometimes, but anything bigger seems like a way to make things end badly. There are things around that don't take kindly to beings that destabilize the world like that."
He also comes along to the boiler room. If nothing else, it will be warm there.
"Okay," she says when everyone agrees to go to the boiler room. Considering they might encounter the monster, she quickly puts on her armor. She pulls her oversized hoodie on over top of her cuirass just in case they bump into a guest before reaching the boiler room.
It isn't too hard to work out that the boiler room is almost certainly tucked away in the basement, but the challenge was getting through the door. Not surprisingly it was locked. There might be a way in from the outside, of course, or possible to find a key. It would also be possible to pick the lock, or to simply destroy it.
Jessica frowns at the lock and eyes her sword. But first, she gives Kavax a look. The apocalypse dragon might have the strength to just batter down the door. "Huh. You know how I can just be somewhere I've been before? I wonder what'll happen if we get reset? Like, let's say we bash the door down now and go into the boiler room. Next loop, I'll try to just move there."
She gives Kavax a nod. "On three?"
Kavax nodded.
"Might as well. If what the others say is true, it's not like the destruction will matter much."
Kavax braces, and readies to slam into the door with draconic might.
The door didn't stand much of a chance between the two of you, despite being a fire door.
The boiler room is sweltering hot, with new-looking machines chugging away cheerfully. Still, several pipes are groaning in a moderately alarming fashion, and several gauges are deep enough into the orange 'warning' zone that they're far close to the red than green.
Jessica steps inside the boiler room and looks around nervously. "Uh, this doesn't look good. Is there any way to fix this?"
Jerry looks around, but he's not even sure what's wrong in here.
Jerry wonders if turning it off for a while, then turning the boilers back on, would work. Kinda like rebooting a computer.
Jessica sidesteps the boiler and goes further into the basement while looking for signs of the monster.
If the monster is down here, Jessica can't see a trace of it. Still, the basement level extends well beyond the boilers. It's not hard to imagine something in the maintenance corridors and storerooms.
Kavax looks around, comfortable in the heat. "So.... isn't it usually a bad thing for the gauges on this to be so high? Maybe fixing it would help? Not that I'd be much of any good for that. Would probably end up exploding it instead."
Jessica frowns as she peers down the corridor into the gloomy basement. Over her shoulder, she calls back to Kavax, "Isn't the boiler supposed to blow up? Wouldn't that change the timeline if we fixed it?"
She thinks back to the people at the bar, including the families unaware that they were going to die soon. "Or, maybe we should anyway?"
"I don't think anybody mentioned dying because of the boiler blowing up. Best not to get distracted."
Jerry moves down the corridor past Jessica. He has a flashlight attached to a headband that he pulls out and turns on to light the way.
Historically speaking, the hotel burned to the ground due to the boilers malfunctioning. It's unlikely, given what you've learned, that it's the sole reason for everyone passing away though.