It's like a never-ending chain of mailmen delivering mail to other mailmen

Emil liked the simple ones. Some of his visions could be solved in a single sentence. It didn't matter if someone believed him when he said they were going to forget about something in the oven and start a fire. The fact that he'd warned them at all would be enough to make them think about it, and then they wouldn't forget. Even if people doubted, the majority of the time it wouldn't even matter. Even if they got nervous or paranoid, they would at least checkwhat he was warning them about, and more often than not, that was enough.

Sometimes, his visions were not so easy to solve. He stood outside the house at a block of mailboxes, sorting the normal letters in as he thought about it. He knew which mailbox needed one of his notes, but he was struggling to figure out how to write it. People had an easier time confronting things like 'your hairdryer is going to malfunction and start a fire' or 'your toilet is about to back up and flood your house with sewage', and had a much harder time dealing with anything that dealt with actual people.

Especially loved ones. People didn't want to believe bad things about loved ones.

But he knew, with absolute certainty, that unless he (or, he supposed, someone else with the ability to see the future) intervened, the woman in the house was going to get into a fight with her boyfriend, and then he was going to hit her across the face and start choking her.

She wouldn't die - not in his vision, anyway - but it would hurt a lot and was exactly the kind of thing most people would want to avoid.

But how was he supposed to warn her about that? He would have to provide some kind of evidence. He would have to tell her about what the argument was about, and then when that argument came up naturally, she would remember and be more careful.

That would have to be it.

He didn't even notice the person who was looking for him. There were always people around, and the overwhelming majority didn't give even the smallest glance to someone who was both silent and simply doing their job.

Emil was heading back up a garden path to the road when he spotted someone approaching him. Well, perhaps more accurately, he assumed that the girl was approaching the house, and ducked out of her way to let her past. She probably lived there, and was on her way home. At most, he might get a wave, and he'd give a little nod, and that would be that.

Only she didn't keep going to head into the house. She stopped right beside him, turned to face him, and started talking.

He didn't even understand what she was talking about right away. It wasn't until she started talking about the future that he understood. She must have been one of the people who got his notes, although he didn't recognize her at all. Often he didn't see people at all - he saw things that happened while they were asleep, or while they weren't home. The majority of the time he only knew whose house it was because of proximity.

He wasn't going to deny it. There was no point. So he simply paused for several long moments, and then nodded. Yes, it was him. Yes, his gift was... useful, if nothing else. It wasn't very useful to him, but he liked to think they were useful to other people.

But he didn't see why she'd follow him all the way there, or how she'd figured out it was him. He didn't sign the notes or anything.

Often when people talked to him he found himself struggling to respond. Open ended questions were by far the worst, but he didn't do badly with yes or no questions. He could still nod. His problem wasn't that he was shy, it was that he'd spent so long not saying a word that he struggled to say any words at all.

He nodded to the first question, following it up with a second nod. Yes, he did it fairly often. Yes, they were accurate enough he could reliably do that. It was obvious that the girl was curious about him, but he wasn't sure how much he could really explain about it. He'd never found any conceivable source for his powers. The just existed. He didn't get any choice in when they came, and while he understood that was fairly usual for people who could see the future, most people had more of a mixed bag of visions. His were consistent - terrible, and always within the next forty eight hours.

The next question was not a yes or no, but it was easy enough to answer without speaking, and Emil popped up a ten without hesitating. It was only after that he realized he wasn't being entirely accurate, and paused for a moment before forcing out a tiny verbal amendment.

"Unless warned." Whether by him or someone else. That was an important distinction, and one he'd learned early on. Whatever warned him, his powers were not tied to a mandatory fate. Warning someone about something about to happen didn't mean it was going to happen no matter what they did - it meant it was going to happen if he (or, he supposed, another person with future sight) didn't warn them.

Emil wasn't the type who would flat out ignore someone, which meant he was going to be stuck talking. He really didn't like talking, but if he was forced to, that was that. Unfortunately, the majority of her questions weren't yes or no - they were questions that required actual answers. Not even brief answers, but detailed ones explaining things that had taken him months to figure out.

He just had to get it all out. He leaned backwards, fingers wrapping around the strap across his chest, as if holding onto his bag for support. He was going a bit red - flustered, not embarrassed - and trying to get it over with as soon as possible.

"48 hours. Yes. No. No. No. No." He was responding like a machine gun, answer by answer, as brief as possible. As many as forty eight hours. Just visions. No, no family history, no seers ever. He was desperately hoping that would be enough, and the girl would leave, but he genuinely doubted he was going to be so lucky.

Ahhh, why couldn't she just keep it to simple questions? Simple yeses or noes he could shake his head to and answer without having to open his mouth. Instead, he was going to have to explain, and while it was going to be brief, a part of him seemed to twist at the very idea of talking that much. It took him a little bit just to work up the nerve, hoping that if he answered, he'd be left alone.

"I see things that will happen in the next two days. I know they'll be true. If I warn people, they can be prevented." That was really it. There was no massive headache that he'd been told other people with future sight had. He just saw things, the way someone might have a day dream, and then they'd happen. Simple enough, and he wasn't really clear on what other details someone could want.