Lets Start with Someone Easy: Angelus Karl Price, Homeless Bum.

"It's been a long road, getting from there to here, it's been a long time, but my time is finally here;" Angelus Karl Price sang to himself as he strolled along the back-country road somewhere around the point where Ohio meets West Virginia. Over the past five years he'd lost everything that he cared about, first their newborn child, then his wife, and finally the home they'd once shared. He had almost nothing, now: he hadn't really cared about the dead-end job he had at the local Staples, but, he lost that too, due to side-effects of being homeless. So, packing his meager belongings into a hikers backpack, he tossed the WW2 Combat knife he'd inherited from his great-grandfather when he passed into the air, looked what way the blade pointed when it landed, picked it back up and just started walking. From there, his feet carried him across a good chunk of the state, from Centerville to here, on the winding borderlands of the Ohio River. Rounding a bend in this old and winding road, a vista such as he never expected to see opened before him. There, nestled back into this isolated spot in the hills along the border of the two states, was an old hotel. It was one of those ancient and grand affairs as most Americans reckoned such things, built in the style of a little more than a century ago at the time, 1910s or 1920s, maybe. The façade was all pale cream-color bricks and marble accents, with hundreds of square-paned-windows and window-like-doors that opened onto small wrought-iron balconies. A nice and new-looking sign out-front proclaimed it to be "The Hotel Californication", alongside a lit-up logo of green rolling hills and an indigo sky scattered with stars and a crescent moon. On the other side from the name, a little sign with the words "No Vacancy" in neon sat, and, as twilight initially began to engulf that part of the world, the neon words lit-up too, or, at least, one of them did. "Vacancy" glowed a nice and reassuring green. Weary indeed after weeks of walking and sleeping rough in thickets and sheds and barns and such, he turned his roughened feet in their half-ruined shoes for the entrance. He had 20 dollars to his name, but, maybe, if he bought a water and some chips from a vending machine, they might let him rest in the lobby for an hour or two...

Inside the lobby was as grand, and spacious, as he'd expected it to have been in its hey-day, not the sad-and-worn decrepitude he'd half-expected to find in such an ancient hotel. No, this was tasteful elegance of a kind that had largely gone out of the world in the years since this hotel would have bene built, but here, as though it was a dragon-fly in amber, he could almost believe that he'd gone backwards in time more than a century. Comfortable couches made with real wood accents and cushions upholstered in fine green, white, and indigo velvets, stood scattered around a large entry hall, with a sweeping curved staircase upholstered with custom-made Turkish rugs in those same colors that connected the entrance to the next four floors up in a single vast and sweeping spiral-turn around the central square of the lobby. Wide landings at the point that each quarter-turn met the railing-bounded walkway of the floors above and below that segment of the staircase. The Stairs were supported by vast and towering columns of pink marble, the middle of this central colonnaded area surrounded by low dais of the same pink marble, at the center of which stood a small brazier. In that brazier burned what was marked with a large brass plaque mounted to the Dias edge as "The Eternal Flames of Californication", from which aromatic smoke rose toward an immense glass dome, high above. In total these columns numbered twelve, each roughly the same size as the others, with the stairs attached to them by iron brackets on their inverse side at appropriate points. Outside that central fixture there were many electrified crystalline chandeliers, glittering with their own and the others light, while the crystal tinkled faintly in the small breezes that blew through the area. Each story of the space was half-again as tall as it would be in a modern building, in that vast and airy style popular before the invention of genuine air-conditioning, each view whispering secrets about the elegance of a bygone era so loudly it might as well have shouted.

Near to the base of the grand staircase, but not too close for comfort, stood a long and interconnected front desk, made all of some warm dark hardwood. Whatever lacquer might have once adorned it was stripped away long ago by time and touch, but the wood itself had been polished to nearly a mirror shine by the uncountable hands that had rubbed against it over years untold since it was first installed. It wasn't stained, scratched, dirty, or graphited as he might have expected, but, instead, simply a long piece of dark smooth wood. A little trace of roughness lingered still, in a few places, mostly near to the corners, but over-all every splinter that anyone might ever have gotten from it had already happened decades past, and now it was reduced to the truest essence of itself.

Behind that counter, dressed in what Angelus assumed was the uniform for a hotel employee, based upon the combination of a green ascot with indigo dress and frilly white lace that put him in mind of both a French-Maid's-Uniform and Anime-Girl's Highschool-Uniform, stood a statuesque young woman, African-American by ethnicity, if he was any judge, who's name-tag read "Sheniqua Luzalean Jefferson", and whose reddish-brown hair stood-out from her head in a massive Afro, a style which would have looked less out-of-place on a 70s "Black is Beautiful" fashion model than it did on the front-desk-manager in a modern hotel. However, much like the hotel itself, she had a sort of "stepped out of a different time" eternally-unchanging beauty about her, one that defied the modern sensibility and, in the context of this somewhat odd place, didn't seem to really be out-of-place at all.

"Hello, Sir. Welcome to the Hotel Californication, how long would you like to stay with us?" She said, as though reciting from a prepared script. However, equally, if incongruously, she sounded as though she genuinely meant every word and was quite interested in finding out the answer; no matter the number of times she must already have asked that same question of other guests.

Although he passed-it-off as humor, Angelus felt strangely inclined to radical honesty in that moment. "Heh, if I didn't barely have enough money to buy some water and chips, then eat them before heading out again; I'd LIKE to stay here forever," He replied, jokingly.

"Hum, interesting," Luzalean responded. "While I can't guarantee 'forever', sir, we DO have several openings in the staff-roster at the moment, and on-site living is one of the benefits of employment with the Hotel Californication. Would you like me to show you to the computer-area at the back of the lobby so you could take a look at what's available...?" Luzalean asked in a fully serious response to his 'Joke', as-though she were seeing straight through to its genuine subtext.