He is…honestly the strangest person I’ve ever seen, I’ve never really talked to him aside from getting his order and when I say thank you for coming when he’s leaving. He dresses a bit like Karl Lagerfeld, but no huge collars, but he always does dress in suits, but in strange colors, materials and all sorts of patterns, prints and styles. Today’s being a suit of dark evergreen crumpled velvet, black satin piping and ornate lapels, matching evergreen trousers and wingtip dress shoes that probably cost more than my tuition used to, a dark gray pressed dress shirt, black on black brocade vest, ornately knotted silver ascot, a silver pocket watch in his vest’s lower pocket fastened to the lapel with a thin gold chain around his neck leading to something tucked in his vest’s breast pocket, matching green blazer, but a black leather duster coat over it, black driving gloves, a black pearl stud on the knot of his ascot and a gold pocket square. He is super, super tall, well over a foot taller than me, extremely pale olive toned skin and usually wearing sunglasses when he walked in, but they do nothing to hide his eyes: sharp, angular and this piercing molten gold color, very sharp and angular facial features with angular black brows and short black facial hair, a low widow’s peak leading to mid-back length wine colored auburn hair. He walked with a black cane with a gold bottom and crow skull top, smudged black eye liner and pointed ears pierced a few times with gold and pearls, gold ring through his left brow and the right side of his nose. He is…broad and muscular: strong shoulders and a wide chest leading to a tapered waist and long heavily muscled limbs, the guy looks like a backhand would throw you through a wall. He had rather sharp and long, pointed nails painted bright silver. He had his overcoat folded over his arm also holding a briefcase as he walked over to his usual booth and set them down along with his cane as he sat down and put his sunglasses in the neckline of his vest, showing that over the vest he had a snug fitted gold leather harness around his torso.

As I walked over to give him a menu, I also brought over his usual coffee. He had his hands resting on his face with his elbows on the table as he was thinking about something deeply.

“Can I get…oh…thank you” he said as he noticed me, his voice is long, slow and rich with a British accent.

“You’ve been here enough that I know what you like, plus you order black coffee, you cannot get more simple than that.”

“Touché” he said lowering his hands down before sighing, “Are you alright?”

“What?” I asked confused as I folded my arms and hands around the black tray I was holding in front of me.

“You seem…very spent today, long its been a long day, but you usually act like that, but today its…far, far more apparent.” He said as he rested his hands down, his gloves on the table beside him showing the tattoos that went down his arms onto his rather large hands: I could see a green, just linework serpent coiling past the cuff of his jacket’s sleeve with the head centered over the back of his left hand, a black linework eye just below the base of the same hand’s thumb, a black crown around the base of his left middle finger too. As he talked, I could see a black ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, was tattooed on his left palm and a black feather curled up along his head behind his left ear.

“I’m…sorry, sir.”

“Please…just call me Kal”

“Kal?”

“My name is Kálmán, but…just Kal.” He said, his name was pronounced as Call-mon. “I know that anyone else won’t be here for the rest of the night…so please, if you wish…you can get yourself a cup of coffee and join me…I always enjoy having someone to speak to over a meal, especially if they’re interesting and…you do seem quite interesting.” He added, his voice was…so persuasive, not in the point of just the words he said, but the air about it: it was nearly like I couldn’t refuse. I just nodded softly before going back with his order and got myself a coffee and walked back over and slid into the booth across from him.

“So, Anthony…what’s your story?” he asked as he took a drink of his coffee.

“You…know my name?”

“I’ve been going here at the same time, every single day for quite some time. Mika always used to talk about a cute boy that usually worked the afternoon shift that would be replacing her for finals, made a special point as to tell me that your name is Anthony and gave me a…vague description about you.”

“She did?”

“She did in fact do that.” He said before reaching up softly to loosen the ascot around his throat showing a dagger was tattooed from the underside of his chin all the way past the collar of his shirt with sea themed adornments like a scallop shell shaped pommel and fish skeleton guards.

“I could very much so ask you the same, Kal…what’s your story?” I asked as I put my usual amounts of cream and sugar into the coffee. “Why is it…that you come here every single morning at four am?”

“I get out of work at around three thirty, I pass here on the way back to my place…and I like the coffee here, you guys actually buy decent coffee unlike other places that buy whatever is extremely cheap and in huge volumes.”

“Are you a stock broker?”

“No, I do some stock market things in my own free time and do so quite well, but it is not my profession.”

“What is your profession then?” I asked, he smiled softly, those golden eyes twinkling softly with the lights of the diner, he was so…out of place, being dressed so finely in comparison to the diner: the rich fabrics, neon red soles of his shoes and the probably all real gold jewelry he wore. All of his fingers had large rings along them, bracelets were stacked on his wrists, a gold necklace around his throat resting over the ascot and the huge studs and rings up his ears and through his face.

“I’m a bit of…a collector for lack of better phrase: I own a business that well…have you ever seen online where some celebrity or rich person has somehow bought something stupidly expensive, rare or weird?”

“Yeah, like Nick Cage and the dinosaur skull?”

“Except the whole thing about the skull being stolen, that is what my company does: rich people and non-rich, contract my employees or myself to find them something weird, expensive or rare…but there’s other things too like people who lost family heirlooms for various reasons hire us to find them.”

“Must be…interesting work.”

“It is: because of it is why I like to call myself a bit of a collector: art, money, interesting stories, knowing interesting people and having connections to those interesting people.” He explained with a soft curt nod.

“Do you have a specialty?”

“All of us do in my company, everyone has their area of expertise, my own…have you ever heard of salvage divers?”

“Yeah, the people that like find ship wrecks and recover whatever they can find, right?”

“Exactly: some people do so to recover the boats, some bodies, some various treasures…my own personal specialty is the various luxury items and treasures that are in wrecks in very…very deep water that other companies refuse to go for.”

“Doesn’t like…the ocean scare you at all?”

“Why do you ask?”