Evans
[nightmares, yo]
Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )
zeal
They all got a letter yesterday.
A
few of them are not easy to find and their properties afford them
enough of a lookout that they could have seen a visitor coming. Others
live in secured buildings. Locks between them and the outside world. It
doesn't matter. The letters bear no postage and no return address and
they do not recognize the handwriting on the outside.
Thin block
letters score their names into the centers of the envelopes' faces. The
paper inside the envelopes is yellow, legal, without scent. The
handwriting on the letter itself is careful with an edge of anger to it.
The author pressed hard but did not smear the ink.
Each letter says the same thing, in the first paragraph:
You
and I have never met. I know you have no reason to read this, let alone
trust me, yet I write to you in the hopes that you are decent and will
meet with me anyway.
The rest of the letter is different for each person.
zeal
I
know what your baby's father is. I cannot prove it. But I know. I also
know the names of several other people you call friends, and I know what
they are too.
I worry my sister is one, too. I do not know what to do. Please meet me at the Wells Fargo center at 7pm tomorrow.
Don't make me come to you.
Evans
Sam
finds the letter in her mailbox, along with ads and junk mail and bills
and such. When she finishes sorting through the stack she picks up the
envelope, frowning a little. The Glass Walker isn't entirely married
to the idea of electronics, but paper correspondence? In this day and
age? When she opens it her frown deepens.
Well. That doesn't
really clear up much. Sam Evans has a lot of friends that are a lot of
things. So, is this letter calling out hackers? Members of the queer
community? Computer engineers? If there is one thing someone might be
worried their sister is, it's a computer engineer.
Garou, maybe?
Whatever
it is, despite the angry cast of the handwriting, someone is asking for
help. If there is one lesson Samantha Evans should have maybe learned
in her time in Denver it's to stop answering calls for help. She's seen
so much, nearly died a time or two. She also got a kid, though, so.
She
fires off a text to Keisha letting her know that something's up, leaves
Jake in the care of the nanny (a Bone Gnawer kinsman by the name of
Anthony, by the way, a kind man with a Garou cousin not far away just in
case of...well, just in case), and heads out to the Wells Fargo Center.
She
pulls her aqua blue CX-5 into the lot, but doesn't get out yet.
Instead, she hangs back in the driver's seat, checking her bag to make
sure she has all of the essentials. Notebook, wallet, taser, mace, 9mm
hand gun, check check check check check.
Lola Hawkes
Lola
had received a letter yesterday, pinned under the foot of the small
wooden table between two rocking chairs on her front porch. She was
immediately suspicious, as such is her nature, but after she'd opened
the letter and started reading that feeling was justified. By the time
she reached the end of the letter, the suspicion was replaced with
defensive anger that boiled in her ribs and flushed her face. It was a
watered down, impotent rage compared to what her Cousins carried, but it
had her crumpling the letter up in her fist and stomping inside of her
house none the less.
The next day she arrived at the Wells Fargo
Center as the letter had instructed, approximately ten minutes within
the seven o' clock hour. She had parked her old and half-rusted metal
deathtrap of a white truck in the parking lot, the vehicle rumbling and
creaking in protest on its suspension as it moved from street to lot.
She found herself a spot that she could fit the dinosaur of a vehicle
into, climbed out, and slammed the door shut behind her.
It's
seven on the nose when Lola makes her way around to the front of the
very tall building. She only looks out of place because she seems to be
searching for something-- wandering, anxious, hunting, but unsure of
what for exactly. She wore her long black hair down her back and over
her shoulders with a white knit cap to keep her head and the tops of her
ears warm. Along with that she wore a thick wool-knit cream colored
sweater with cuffed sleeves that hugged her wrists, and a thick red down
vest overtop of that. Dark jeans and brown riding boots covered her
bottom half, and her hands were jammed into the pockets of her vest.
Along
with clothes she wore a heavy scowl, and when her breath huffed in
white clouds into the air they were almost reminiscent of a bull
snorting steam at a red sheet.
She was hunting for whoever this Matador would be.
Alexis Theron Lambros
Alexis
Theron Lambros is, as those people who have met him can attest to, a
very calm individual. Many people learn martial arts for many reasons;
self-defense, athletic outlet, just so they can beat people up and be a
badass. Alexis' reasons were firmly for the first two, and he studied
the philosophy along with it. He practices elements of that philosophy,
and it gives him a bit of a Zen outlook to complement the teachings of
the Nation. As such, there isn't much (well, Phoebe knows one thing,
but besides that) which can rattle him.
Mention of certain
individuals in conjunction with a potential blackmail threat prompts him
to leave all that Zen calmness at the door of his apartment. The
letter and its envelope are left crumpled on the floor and he's
generally been in a bad mood for the whole of the day afterward. He
keeps to himself and calls off his classes for the day, and stays at
home until the time is right.
The time is now right.
He
shows up at the location, pulling his 1984 Buick LeSabre into the
parking lot of the building. He's dressed simply enough, in a grey
turtleneck and jeans with a windbreaker over the whole thing. He hasn't
come armed, because...well, he doesn't believe in guns. He knows how
to use one, but he hates them as a rule, and the weapons he knows how to
use don't conceal well. So when he slips out of the car, still
frowning, he casts his eyes about the place. Alexis generally has good
situational awareness, and he's putting that to use now as he scans the
lot, starts to move toward the building front.
Eva
By
seven full dark has fallen and the city is wrapped in that strange
balance of shadow and brilliant, artificial light that seems strange and
bright and stirring as the days narrow toward the winter solstice.
Listen,
there is a nondescript Lexus parked some indeterminate distance from
the Wells Fargo Center. It is not close. The woman who drives is is
attractive but not remarkably so. She is careful to check the mirrors
and the terms and conditions of the public meters, and careful of her
periphery, and careful of so-many-things, but also, not entirely
full-of-care.
After all, she is here now, has been here for some
time. At 5:30 p.m. she slips into the bar at Randolph's and orders a
Scotch that she nurses. Something approximating a meal follows, but
anyone closely observing her would note that she does not consume much
of either the beverage or the meal, before paying her bill and leaving a
generous tip. Oh, but anyone observing her closely is so-observed in
turn. This is how things go.
--
Éva arrives before 7. Call it 6:50. She is dressed in business casual attire, carries a leather attaché case.
She is armed in so very many ways.
More than you dare count.
--
When
Lola appears around the edge of a tall building, in the shadows of the
evening, at seven p.m. on the nose, the Shadow Lord notices. Smirks,
mildly and wholly to herself, and turns in an arc for another singular
survey of the space before walking up to the Uktena.
The pair are
of a height, though Éva is wearing moderately-sensible three-inch
heels, which lift her up to 5'10" or so, so perhaps she has to drop her
mouth to murmur into Lola's ear.
"Let me guess. You received a letter."
zeal
Most
of the people who work in the Wells Fargo Center and the shorter
buildings surrounding it have gone home for the evening. The lots are
emptied of everything but empty 20-ounce plastic bottles and cigarette
butts and errant bits of paper fallen out of pockets and purses. Foot
traffic has bled out and the only people still moving between vehicles
and doorways are those with great distances to travel.
For a time
the only two bodies out in front of the building are a hard-faced young
woman and a sharp-dressed sharp-eyed lawyer. Their breath steams up from
their mouths and the wind does not tug at the hems of their garments
but the cold seeks to leech the life from them anyway.
More
vehicles arrive. More faces they recognize from warmoots or the recent
punishment rite. Irony in the meeting but a poetic sort. Alexis is the only one in the parking lot.
If anyone feels as if
someone is watching them it is not paranoia bred of the letter's
nature. It is the same letter. Sent via email it would have been blindly
carbon copied. Maybe the wording would have been more deliberate in its
vagueness.
Whoever wrote the letter had to write it five times.
Travel to the places they spend the most time. Jam them into door frames
or underneath furniture before sneaking off again.
Now she tucks
her hair back behind her ears and glances both ways before she crosses
the street to walk towards them. At a glance she is a young woman of
average height, her build concealed beneath a peacoat, long dark hair
beneath a wool cap. They have about thirty seconds before she's at the
front of the building with them.
She appears to be alone. They
cannot read the nuances of her expression yet. She walks with long
strides and keeps her hands in her pockets.
Alexis Theron Lambros
He's already at the edge of the
parking lot, and then he's turning round to the front, where he sees Lola and Eva.
Two more that he hasn't specifically met, though he saw them both at the
judgment the other night. He frowns again and moves to walk toward
them.
And as that other person, the new presence who he knows he
hasn't met, walks across the street, he has another unknown element.
Another blackmail-ee? Or their own person Mister (Ms.) Boddy? And
that's when he stops where he is, between the two kin at the front of
the door and the parking lot where Melantha and (unrevealed yet) Sam
are, watching the woman making her way toward them with hands in
pockets.
He's watching those hands closely, switching his
attention between the pockets and her shoulders. When someone makes a
sudden move, their shoulders are usually where you see it first.
Eva
During
those first ten minutes, Éva studies the hard-faced young woman while
frowning, rather mildly, down at the screen of her tablet. Texting
something; responding to e-mails. Involving herself in the digital
world to provide herself with a reason for loitering here, at this hour,
in this weather, alone in the largely deserted square.
It would be so much easier if she were simply to take up cigarettes, but
instead
she looks like a thoughtless professional captured mid-walk by some
suddenly pressing something at near-seven p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon.
The girl must know who she is, though. To deliver such correspondences.
Must know who they all are.
--
A
sideglance at Lola's expression, long enough to take in what is
doubtless some note of resonance over the letter she received. Some
confirmation, affirmation: something like a yes.
And Éva is
careful, turning her dark head (hair pulled back into a sleek chignon,
her suit jacket dark beneath a short dark peacoat. Her 9 mm always
within reach) noting the others on the periphery, shadoes against the
parking lot.
Notes them, all of them. One by one by one.
And
makes a decision, walking toward the girl rather than away, reaching
into her left pocket with her left hand for a folded piece of paper.
It is blank but otherwise the color and texture of the letter she received, which was examined and then burned to ash.
"Excuse
me," to the hard-faced young woman. " - are you the author of this
letter?" The paper flashes white against the darkness, then disappears
into back into her left pocket.
Evans
Sam sits in
her car, watching as people arrive, a stranger storming toward her
friend, and another stranger headed for the building. It's a few
minutes after seven now, so this has to be it. These people probably
received letters, as well, and chances are decent that this other
newcomer headed toward Lola and Eva is the one who sent it.
Sam opens the driver's side
door and slips down onto the pavement. Quietly, she shuts the door
behind her and heads with a quiet, swift efficiency toward Alexis. If
the other stranger turns out to be a threat she's pretty sure Eva at least will have that area covered.
As
she gets closer she realizes that's no stranger at all, but a young
woman she's seen before, at the last warmoot probably, or somewhere in
the crowd for the punishment. Sam may be
the shortest of the lot by nearly half a foot, but she doesn't need
people to make allowances for her just because of her stature.
So it is that she arrives at the cluster of Kinfolk a little late but just ahead of the stranger.
By
way of greeting, she looks around and simply asks, "Letter?" Her long
brown hair is down beneath a blue knit cap and her hands are tucked into
the pockets of a fitted olive green jacket. Her jeans are snug as
well, her boots comfortable, good for kicking or for running, whichever
comes first.
Lola Hawkes
There's a tell-tale 'clack clack'
of heels on pavement that catches Lola's attention, and she turns
sharply to face the sound, eyes sharp and wide and a dead giveaway to
the woman's intent for half a second. Whoever it was that summoned her
here was in for it, simply put. But recognition dawns upon the Uktena
Kinswoman soon enough, as she's seen this older dark-haired white woman
at several Moots. She's a Shadow Lord Kinfolk, and she could be
trusted, so Lola's body language relaxes (only a little), and she turns
to face Éva more directly.
The question is met with a huff of air through her nostrils, but not blown into the face of the inquirer. "Sure did."
She
didn't ask how the older woman was lured out here, or what her letter
had said. She knew they wouldn't be identical, hers was very specific
to her after all. However, it became clear after a glance past Éva's
shoulder to spy one unfamiliar face, soon joined by one that she knew to be Reese's sister, that
this was a summoning of Kinfolk. They were all called out here,
probably for the same reason.
Lola growled under her breath to the thirty-something (forty-something?): "This reeks of a trap."
Then,
bit by bit, their attention all turns to a woman who is crossing the
street to join them in front of this massively tall skyscraper. Éva
turns and approaches first, asking the question that they all wanted to
know. Lola kept her hands in the pockets of her vest, flicked her eyes
to the other three that were congregating toward the area as well, then
followed after Éva on flat-soled boots. She didn't crowd the older
woman, but she would fall to stand at her side, looking imposing and
brooding but saying nothing-- just glaring at the woman and waiting for
an answer with what is clearly baited breath.
zeal
The
woman wears running shoes with the laces tucked down. They will not
flap or come untied if she decides to bolt. Her jeans are boot-cut and
fit snug to her legs. She walks as if she is used to taking her time to
get from one place to the next.
And as she draws closer her pace
does not slow but the light in her eyes mutes itself and she looks from
one face to the next to read what it is she's walking into. This is a
meeting of her own making but that letter did not tell them anything
other than that if they did not meet her here she would come for them.
It
may well be an idle threat. The woman's posture is impeccable and she
carries herself as if the repercussions for slouching are heavier than
whatever she wears beneath her coat. The coat conceals her weapon but
not the presence of the holster she wears.
Her cheekbones are
covered in freckles. Her hair and her eyes look the same color in the
dark. Yellow street lamps are all they have to push the night back away
from them. When the attorney speaks the woman looks to her. She worries
her lower lip before she answers.
"Yes," she says, and nothing else.
Evans
[percept (insightful) + empathy (emotional states)]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1
Alexis Theron Lambros
[[Per+Emp]]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 4, 8) ( success x 1 )
Lola Hawkes
The
instant the word 'Yes' leaves the woman's mouth, Lola is a flurry of
motion. Her feet move her forward a step and a half, and her hands fly
out of her pockets so that they can shoot forward toward the female.
Anyone with an eye trained for combat can tell that she's not trying to
strike or punch-- she isn't throwing from the hip or shoulder, so that
doesn't apply. Anyone without that trained eye, though, will probably
be convinced that Lola's going to initiate a brawl because her lips peel
back from her teeth and she's already making a gutteral noise in her
chest and throat, the sound mingling with and eclipsing the 's' on the
woman's answer.
She doesn't hit, but she does seize the woman by
her coat-- collar preferably, but lapels or simply loose fabric at the
front will be accepted. Lola's difficult to escape like this-- she's
fast, she's strong, and when she gets a grip on the coat her grasp is
like steel wire.
The poor woman gets two solid shakes by her jacket before Lola snarls in her face.
"Don't you ever fucking lay threats down on me and mine again. 'Don't make me come to you'? Bitch, you wouldn't make it halfway."
Eva
"An
absurd sort of trap," Éva remarks back to Lola, rather agreeably and
remarkably quietly before she approaches the strange woman. All the
work put into those letters and their delivery, merely to draw them
here? If Éva intended to hunt someone, she would not alert them to the
game ahead of time.
Why do anything other than shoot to kill?
"More
than this one, I think." An arched and singular brow and a cool dark
stare that rises from the strange around the space, then falls back to
her. "Which seems to have been quite the task to undertake. Did you do
it of your own volition - "
Then Lola is stepping forward, lips
peeling back from her teeth, all-in-motion, reaching for the girl's
lapel. Éva grits her teeth, a supple spasm of motion in her temple, and
makes a gesture intended to stay or still or forestall Lola before the
Uktena actually grabs the girl, in hopes of giving Lola pause before she
does make that grab. She will not, however, physically put herself
between the two.
Lola Hawkes
Éva will make an effort to stop Lola, gesturing with a hand or expression or otherwise that this is a poor choice.
Lola
likes Éva. Hell, she may even respect her. But Lola's been thinking
about doing this since she decided simply shooting whoever was
unfortunate enough to fess up would be too extreme. She would not cease
her action for the older (wiser) Kinfolk's silent suggestion.
Alexis Theron Lambros
The
woman approaches and the kinfolk start to converge on her. And Alexis
is willing to let them before Lola steps forward and starts snarling
threats. Just like that, the Fury kin is moving foward. He's not
rushing with aggressive intent, but he's still moving quickly as he
tries to get between the two women.
"Whoa, easy," he says to Lola
as he puts a hand on Lola's shoulder. He can take a punch if she needs
to unleash one at a target; while Alexis is in fact combat trained and
knows she's not going to hit the woman, she may need somewhere to throw
that anger so they can handle this. Alexis is none too pleased with
this woman either; he doesn't get angry often but he's pissed right
now. Still, threatening a blackmailer is usually not wise. They're
often desperate or have contingency plans. And he noticed that holster,
too.
"Let's step back a moment, and talk." He shoots a glare to
the mystery woman, one that strongly suggests that the key word in there
is talk.
zeal
[oh right i didn't do this yet
manip + subt]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 9, 9) ( success x 2 )
Eva
This
deep and frustrated noise, back-of-the-throat. Whatever else the woman
might have said is forestalled by Alexis' intervention. Éva takes a
distinct step backwards as he puts himself between the two women.
This
lingering irony in the shape of her mouth. Much of what she intended
to say is swallowed, changed, redirected with a glance at the stranger.
Over the heads of the other two kin.
"Is that the reaction you wanted? If so, I think you earned it. What exactly is it that you want out of this."
Eva
For
ST reference: Perception + Subterfuge. Spec: hidden motives. Looking
for: in any answers she gives, whether she is being deceptive.
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1
Evans
Sam
hangs back a bit, a little to the side of Alexis until Alexis is moving
to touch the Uktena kinswoman. For a moment, people are mostly focused
on the potential for violence, for either a punch or a good shaking.
Most of them, that is, except for Sam.
Sam who is looking at the
woman, her own expression calm and just shy of pleasant for all that she
received a similar threatening letter. Whatever was written in hers,
though, it didn't drive her to a fury of protectiveness for the ones she
cares about. Her eyes, too dark to display color in the dim evening
light and lined with heavy black liner, shift to Lola before returning
to the woman.
"That will probably make you feel better, but-" but
then Eva speaks up and Sam cedes the floor to the older, more
experienced kinswoman.
zeal
If the woman does not
anticipate the rural woman leaping forward to grab and shake her then
she does not react to it. But: she knew enough else about her to lance
fear and anger up out of her in less than one written page. She does not
react because she is not surprised.
The eldest of the four allies
attempts to stop her and the only man present attempts to calm her.
With a fist wrapped around her collar the woman stands stock still and
watches Lola's face without staring at her. Watches too Éva. Samantha
doesn't get very far with her sentence but she can read familiarity in
the way the woman carries herself and speaks.
Anything she says
Éva will be able to tell if she is lying. As of right now all she has to
go on is what was in the letter. She thinks her sister is one of them.
"I
don't know which it was," she says and now that she speaks more the
Kinfolk can make out an Eastern European crackle to her accent. "But one
of your friends bit my sister."
Alexis Theron Lambros
He's
got his hand on Lola's shoulder, and he's half-expecting an attack from
her. He wouldn't be surprised. Maybe he's expecting the woman to
shoot them in panic from being semi-assaulted, or a sniper that the
woman has as a backup taking a shot from a hidden location.
He was expecting a lot of things. He wasn't expecting to hear
THAT.
He
really doesn't mean to be rude. It's not laughing at her, really.
But...come on. And so he looks at the woman and a full moment of
laughter gets out before he has a chance to try and swallow it back.
"Oh,
for..." He shakes his head, still trying to hold back a chortle. It's
just so...well, COME ON. "No one bit your sister. I can promise you
that."
Evans
Sam's expression quirks, eyes
narrowing a little as her mouth turns upward in a slight, disbelieving
smile, the sort of smile that graces one's face when they're not sure if
a joke has just been made. At least she doesn't laugh, c'mon, Alexis,
rude much? She didn't get very far with her sentence, which was going
to lead into a question, but the answer to that question comes anyway.
"And you thought, what? You'd tattle to us and ask us to keep our friends in line?"
Of
course she would, she thinks, because if she made it through the
Delirium knowing her sister was bitten by Garou she's probably afraid to
face their shifting cousing head on.
Then again, she doesn't seem terribly afraid at the moment. Maybe she doesn't know what sort of people she's drawn out.
Lola Hawkes
Alexis
was a man that Lola had never met before, but here he was walking up
and clapping a hand on her shoulder and trying to (gently, in his
defense) tell her to step back and step off. Lola at this point seems
to be all but ignoring the other Kinfolk there, but at least she isn't
redirecting her anger where it isn't deserved. Alexis isn't hit for
touching her. Hell, his hand isn't even shrugged off of her shoulder.
But she does keep a firm hold on the woman's coat, and seems even more
bothered by the fact that she didn't get anything close to a reaction
out of her.
When the woman speaks, expressing worry that one of
their lot bit her sister and now she's changing, Lola scoffs noisily and
shoves the woman backward-- hard enough that she would be forced to
stumble at least one step back to maintain her balance. Lola's feet,
though? They don't move from where she's planted them on the concrete.
This is her claiming ground and standing it, and she won't be moved.
But hey, at least she's not shaking anyone anymore.
"Don't
be fucking retarded. If you know enough about us to know where to find
us, how to get us here, and if you know....--" Well, whatever it was
that this stranger knew about Lola was clearly something that she didn't
want to talk about and spit into the public air, so she cut herself off
and sneered instead. "You know full well that's not how that works.
Cut to the goddamn chase, we ain't idiots."
Eva
"I
can see why you're concerned, then." Éva returns without so much as
cracking a smile. There is a degree of concern and a degree of
professional composure and no real warmth in her eyes, but the
competence is can be soothing.
Then Alexis: laughing has Éva
shooting him a brief and quelling look. It is a glancing blow, before
she returns her attention to the stranger, but seriously and quite
precisely.
The flare of her nostrils.
Neither Sam nor Lola
receive the same look, primarily because there are only so many
directions one can glance at once. The first rule of dealing with the
unknowing or insane or the egomaniacal and so many in between is to cede
them the rules of the universe. Grant them their world and let them
describe it for you.
Also: Éva knows that the woman is not lying. She believes what she says.
"Excuse them. I for one take this very seriously. Where is your sister? Is she still injured? Or is she experiencing...
"Other symptoms."
Eva
Manipulation + Subterfuge: biting is absolutely how werewolves are made, yes you are right I totally believe you crazy lady.
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 6, 6, 6, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 2
zeal
[perc + subterfuge: i call bullshit.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 6, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )
zeal
Alexis laughs and she does not react.
Samantha
asks if she is tattling, thinking she is going to ask them to keep
their friends in line, and she looks as if she is going to bust out into
a cousin of the laughter that gripped Alexis. Whereas his laughter was
born of relief thinking the woman before them to carry ignorance with
her hers has a different sire.
Her hands haven't left her pockets.
They are still there even as Lola shoves her back from her. The woman
takes one step back to maintain her balance and another to regain her
stolid footing. She shakes her head to free her shoulders from the curls
fallen down over them and she smirks.
"'Other symptoms.'"
The
woman chews her lower lip again and looks away a moment. The glance
away is not a tell. Wherever she parked is not within her line of sight.
Soon her eyes come back to them.
"Your friends and the things
they fight... they're all the same to me. If I have to, I will put her
down myself. But I thought we could come to an arrangement, seeing as
you know things I do not know."
Alexis Theron Lambros
The
laugh, to his credit, does go away. It was already on its way to gone
before Eva threw him that look. It was more a reaction of relief and
just an emotional release than anything else, not that it would be
interpreted as such. Truth be told, he already feels a little bad for
it, but that's just the way it is.
And it's CERTAINLY gone when she says she might "put her down," her being the sister in question. That draws all the humor off his face, and he looks at her more closely now. Frowns.
"Your
sister. Blood relative, or adopted?" He glances at the other kin and
then back to her. "What sort of arrangement are you talking about?"
Eva
"What
symptoms?" A brief, lifting query. "I ask because it is possible that
the infection has not yet spread. She could be cured, depending how
far this has gone.
"Someone would have to examine her closely,
and determine whether the infection can be contained or eradicated. You
understand the delicacy of the situation. Give us her name and her
address, we will look into it and have someone contact you to let you
know if recovery is possible.
"Or if a more final solution is necessary."
Evans
The
woman wants to make a deal, Alexis (and Sam) want to know what sort of
deal. Preferably one that doesn't have some close or unrelated family
member getting killed. And preferably that doesn't have this woman
asking for access to other supernatural creatures. She is a benign
threat, but a threat none the less.
Sam Evans, though? Sam is not
a threat to anyone, not unless she needs to be. Her smile of disbelief
melts into something pleasant and friendly. It's perhaps a strange
counter to Lola's aggression and Eva's sharp tone. But hey, sometimes
you catch more flies with honey.
"I'm interested in names, too,"
she says. "Like yours for one. How do we know we can trust you to
stick to any kind of arrangement you propose?"
[I am totes your friend: charisma (charming) + empathy]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 1
Lola Hawkes
Alexis
asks about this relative, if they are blood related or adopted to be
made sister to the woman who didn't react to Lola's up-front aggression
or Alexis's laughter.
Éva said that the infection could be
spreading and tried to pull information from this woman as to the
whereabouts of this sister.
Lola still didn't even believe that this sister existed.
The
Uktena scoffed again, and swung her arms in front of her, then back to
her sides, then in front again a couple of times. Each time that her
hands met in front of her, it waso to roughly tap the side of a tight
right fist in the curved palm of the other. This made a jarring
clapping sound each time it happened. Thankfully it only went on for
about four turns.
"Whoa, now. Before any goddamn thing else--"
And she cuts a sharp look back to the other three Kinfolk, eyes burning
hard on all three faces for a half a second at a time. Her eyes are
quick to return to the stranger, though. "Who the fuck are you? To
know as much about me and probably these others here, to have looked
that deep into our lives, I don't trust a fucking thing that's come out
of your mouth yet tonight.
"Shit. I doubt this sister even exists."
zeal
They
have more questions than she has given them answers and they do not
have a name for her though she not only has their names but their
addresses and the names of their loved ones. In some instances this
woman has information that not even the rest of the Nation has. Knows
those who have died recently and those who are not even born yet.
If she had reached out to the werewolves themselves they would have cut her down right here or dragged her in for questioning.
Alexis
knows that Phoebe and Thomas would have wanted her checked for taint.
Keisha and Tamsin would have wanted to follow threads back to her
sister, if she has a sister, if she is not out here alone and insane
trying to goad them into giving up more information. Even Lola can't
reliably predict what Hector would have done but they all know what
Erich would have done.
There's too much variability when dealing
with the ones actually perpetuating the War. This woman considers her
options. If she were lying about the sister Éva would have seen it.
That
Sam projects an air of trust and companionability - that it is an air -
is lost on the woman. She's too distracted now by all of the questions
and all of the possible ends to this ride she's started.
"She does
exist," she says. "For now. If the day comes I do not recognize her,
then no. This sister will not exist. She is my twin, Mister Lambros. And
this was all her doing. I will take responsibility for not stopping her
sooner, but... we all have reasons for doing the things we do, yeah?
"If
you can stop this, whatever it is that made your friend bite her, I
will give you everything we have. The computers, the notebooks. Our
guns. All of it. And you'll never hear from us again. That is what I
propose."
She pulls a business card out of her pocket. On the back she has written another address. She hands it to Éva.
"Meet me here at the same time next Friday, if you accept. My name is Nina."
That
isn't her full name but it's enough for mystics to work off of. She
leaves them with that. Turns and walks back the way she came. That's
another difference between them and their cousins. She would have never
given a wolf her back.
Evans
Sam's aura of trust
and kindness isn't so much an air as it is a projection of her self.
She is kind. She draws frightened Black Spiral Dancer cubs into the
circle of her arms not because she'd want her last act on this earth to
be one of kindness, but because that is the kind of selfless person that
she is. She rescued a squalling baby from a burning bar not for praise
or accolades, but because that is what you do when the helpless are trapped in danger.
She
is good, is Sam Evans. That does not mean that she is trusting. The
woman - Nina - turns and walks away and Sam, whatever the others do, she
hangs back a bit. Waiting to see if Lola has another burst of fury to
get out to draw attention. When it's quiet, though, Sam glances at the
others, tips her chin in farewell, and she tails the woman. Not far,
just enough to catch a license plate number or see which bus she
catches.
[dex+stealth, +WP]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (6, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 5 ) [WP]
Lola Hawkes
There
is an instance that the sister does insist, and the woman continues on
in a flat tone and provides some information. It's not nearly what Lola
would have wanted, and not necessarily what she was asking after in the
first place. She wanted very much to know where this woman got her
information and how she was able to find it there in the first place--
why she would have been prompted to dig, where she would have located
their identities to even begin that digging.... This was the biggest,
most important thing for her to understand because, you see, Lola is as
territorial as the literal wolves she calls her cousins.
But.
She
gets a name (probably a fake one), and a flimsy lead (although the
address on the back of the business card would be checked into
immediately), and that's all the woman provides before she turns her
back on them and starts walking away. A more hotheaded Lola would have
persued, would have forced hands away from the holster that she knew was
there, would have knocked her skull into the pavement a few times and
would have fought anyone that tried to stop her, or simply ignore their
blows and pulling arms until she'd gotten what she wanted.
The
Lola that stands her tonight instead takes a deep breath of cold air as
though it can cool the fire in her chest, rolls her shoulders back so
her chest is pushed out a bit and her back is straightened and her
overall posture is larger and more intimidating, and says nothing.
She'll
glare after the woman as she leaves, wait until she is out of earshot,
and then say harshly to Samantha, Éva, and Alexis the three of them
(this prior to Samantha sneaking off, as the Glass Walker was waiting
for the Uktena to make her move anyways): "I'll give you one guess as
to where I'm going." She taps the business card against her palm in
indication, then slips it into her pocket and starts a
distance-consuming long-legged stride back to where she parked.
Eva
Éva
accepts the business card with precise, fine fingers. Glances at the
address, then lifts her dark eyes back to the woman's face. Steady,
quiet, withheld. Shielded, assuredly. There is a quick-curl to her
mouth, which is not quite smoke and is not-quite fire and is more and
less than both.
She is remarkably careful, watching the stranger
walk away. Allowing the name to unfold in her tongue, consider the
diverse knot of other kin to whom the woman issued whatever she issued:
pleas or threats or something in between. When Nina is out of earshot,
she allows the other three to inspect the business card. The name, the
address. To write anything down that they desire.
Then she glances at the rest.
"Someone's
going to have to meet her. I think it would be best to bring a shaman
along, as well, at the very least. Perhaps the sister is a cub.
Perhaps she's Fallen, or falling.
"Stay in touch," the Shadow Lord
counsels the Uktena. With a faintly ironic smile. " - and if you do
go looking prior to the meeting, try not tip your hand."
Alexis Theron Lambros
He listens, and he takes the card, and he frowns. And he does other reactionary stuff and they go their separate ways.
Friday, November 8, 2013
You Don't Control Oceans, You Live With Them - 11.2.2013 [Hector, Thomas]
Lola Hawkes
Two nights. 48 hours. That's how long that's passed since every Garou and Kinfolk was summoned out to Forgotton Questions to see the punishments doled out upon the Elders of the Sept of Cold Crescent. Everyone handled what they saw in their own way. Some were horrified, others were howling and snarling and cheering with the sense of justice served and things made right. Others still were stock still and grim.
Time had passed to allow packs to come together and adjust to the change in the setting around them. No more City Sept, only the one that surrounded Forgotton Questions would remain. The threat of Beloved Horror still existed, but wasn't nearly so heavy as it had been before. Mothers hugged their children and carried them home that night, and many suffered nightmares from the hard things they saw and the terrible noises they heard.
Tonight, though, things seemed better. The sky was clear, even through the ever-present lights of the city you could see stars in the sky (though they were more plentiful out away from the skyscrapers and freeway onramps). It was chill enough to warrant a jacket or heavy sweater, but it was so nice for November that the streets were choked with people here in the Santa Fe Arts District.
Lola and Hector were out of place here. Not necessarily because of how they looked, but because they were both accustomed to the wide open land that they resided on-- Lola because that's where she's lived her life, Hector because he's been avoiding the cities as much as he can these days. They step one after the other out of a simple four-story tall brown brick building, offices at one point converted into apartments. Lola stepped out first and held the door behind her for Hector to follow, talking as she went, continuing a conversation from down the stairs: "...we were young-- I was like thirteen still and he'd just turned eighteen and I caught him laying ink down on his own thigh in his mom's bathroom. It looks like such shit, but he's pretty proud of it anyways."
Lola had her hair wrapped up into a bun at the back of her head tonight, and was dressed in jeans tucked into calf-high brown boots with a dense cream-colored wool sweater on with double-buttons that kept it closed in the front. There was a gray scarf around her neck, and her hands kept falling back into the pockets of her jeans when she wasn't using them.
"Year and a half later he opened his first parlor with two assholes he met at a convention or some such shit. The rest is history."
She was telling Hector about how Anthony's (her Kinfolk cousin who they were visiting) tattoo parlors (yes, plural) came to be.
Hector Ghosh
By northern standards the evening is warm but to the dark-skinned Galliard the temperature is so low he has to put on extra layers just to think about leaving the house.
The pair that come out onto the street both look as if they stumbled off of a ranch but they don't gawk up at the high-rise buildings and point around at the crossroads like they don't know how to conduct themselves in this milieu. Hector stands close to a head taller than the kinswoman and clothed he looks skinny and meatless. His jeans hang off his bones and he wears an army jacket over a sweatshirt. His hair is tied back and as they breach the doorway of the apartment building he pulls a black knit cap out of a pocket and down onto his head.
And away they go.
"Maybe I should get a tattoo," he says. "What do you think? A skull with flames coming out of it or something."
He's got to be joking. Hard to tell when he's trying to act like he isn't freezing.
Thomas Delacroix
Thomas comes out of a gallery, because of course he does. He doesn't seem to care about the cold, doesn't pull the hood of his pale silvery-grey sweatshirt up, doesn't curl into himself. He's confident enough on the street, the people ease away from him without any real thought are of no real concern to him.
He drifts half a block and stops, looking in the window of another gallery. His head tilts one way, then the other. Some people would have a knowing expression, a thoughtful one, but Thomas looks at abstract paintings with a confused little frown. He wants to understand them, but the shapes are just shapes to him, tumbled onto paper with no more meaning than little piles of windblown leaves. He'd be as prone to calling a crow's nest with bits of colorful fabric art as the painting in front of him.
After half a minute, he moves to the window on the other side of the doorway. There is another painting. Lines and shifting colors on canvas, as meaningless to him as all the others. He still stares at it like maybe he'll understand it if he just looks at it long enough.
Lola Hawkes
The Hawkes kinswoman was notorious around the Sept of Forgotten Questions. She was known for being a hardass, a badass, and for thinking herself to be bigger and tougher than some people believe she actually is. With that said, some people haven't seen her interrogate possessed humans at gunpoint, or slice through a Fomori with a hunting knife when her gun jammed, or tourniquet her own leg to stop from bleeding out in a battle-frenzied office building.
She isn't known for smiling or laughing a lot. But she grins and chuckles when Hector suggests he get himself a flame-engulfed skull tattoo and pulls a knit cap down over his head. Hector's from California, he isn't accustomed to the kind of cold that you can get up in the mountains, out at this altitude. He's bundled up in his coat and layers against the fifty degree night, but Lola on the other hand seems plenty warm in her thick sweater and jeans and scarf, with nothing covering her ears. She hated the sounds of the city, but she trusted the place so little that she didn't want to not be able to hear what was behind her.
"Yeah, put it right on the side of your neck," she suggested, and paused at a crosswalk. There's a glance in either direction, and she starts to cross the cramped street. A car beeps and has to stop short to keep from hitting her in the knees-- it had been trying to make a turn around the corner that the Uktena stood on and didn't pay mind to the pedestrians trying to cross. The car had beeped, and Lola answered by all-at-once dropping a fist heavily onto the hood of the car and glaring hard at the driver.
She'd wait for the man behind the steering wheel of the car look between her and Hector and decide that the dent in his hood isn't worth getting out of the car and picking a fight with these two. Only once his eyes are averted is Lola content to continue walking, but only after she'd had enough time to cause a minor attention-nabbing ruckus at that intersection.
"Fucker," is what she calls to the man's window when she starts walking again.
Hector Ghosh
[for the lulz]
Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (2, 5, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 2 )
Hector Ghosh
One second they're busting each others' balls about something as insubstantial as permanent body art, of which Hector has none so far, of which Hector has never thought nor given more than passing attention so that he could make a joke about it. They are not wolf-born and the city does not do anything to their senses that it would not do to any other human's.
Hector was born in a city. His parents settled in San Jose long before their oldest child was born and that was where he went to school and where he learned to skateboard and not cough when he took a huge rip off of a joint and run from the cops. How to use his skinny build and dark pigmentation to evade capture.
How to cross a fucking street without almost getting run down by an inattentive motorist.
It isn't either of their faults. The little white man on the opposite side of the street is aglow and Hector spies his packbrother ogling something through a gallery window and that car comes out of nowhere. It doesn't hit them but the driver honks at them and even before Lola reacts she can feel Hector's Rage flare up like a beast dwelling in darkness roused by the sound of an intruder slinking across the hoard of treasure and desiccated bones upon which it slumbers.
She hits the hood of the car and the man stood beside her rankles. Everyone within eyesight stops what they're doing at the screech of the brakes and the collision between fist and metal and the widened eyes and stiffened spine of the young man. He looks like he's about to walk around to the driver's side and haul the guy out of the car but Lola keeps walking.
Lola starts walking. Hector is going to take some coaxing.
"HEY!" he says to the driver. That may be the first that Thomas is aware of him.
Thomas Delacroix
He turns his head at the shout, sees Lola and Hector in a standoff with a car, and shakes his head a little. He heads out toward the corner at first, to meet them. And Lola is coming so that works until Hector stays there, ready to go fight everything and Thomas checks the way is clear and slips into the street.
Not that he has any idea what he is going to do when he gets there. Thomas has, in all the time they've known each other, actually tried to get Hector to do anything only once. You don't control oceans. You live with them. With their terrible beauty and their deadly storms and everything they are. You don't complain when they swallow you whole.
But, he heads that way regardless. Perhaps...perhaps it will come to him.
Lola Hawkes
Well, Lola had been ready to keep walking, but she was caused to stop when she realized that Hector wasn't following along. No, instead the Uktena was left standing squared in front of the car, Rage whipped up around him despite the dampening effect of the moonless sky. He shouted at the driver, a simple vocalization with no real message behind it. It was hard to tell if Hector was going to try and get the man to come out of the car and... fight? Apologize? It was hard to say.
Lola stopped and turned to look back at him, and now was simply standing in the road, still and watching the stand off like the other pedestrians did. One car that was stuck behind the stopped vehicle that Hector prevented from moving forward beeped its horn impatiently and went around, but aside from that not much stirred in that intersection.
When Thomas stepped off the curb and onto the crosswalk Lola glanced toward him, quick and sharp, as though expecting that he was going to be a threat. But she immediately recognizes who he is and her eyebrows fly up, surprised to see him here but not bothered by it. Instead she met his gaze, held it significantly for a second, then turned and joined Hector's side again. Her hand went up to his chest and splayed across the center of it, over his heart and where his Rage tried to storm and swirl when it wasn't resting in his belly.
"Hector." She says his name, and her tone is firm without being severe. It's an odd balance that Kinfolk manage to find when they start sharing their lives with Garou. "What do you think you'll do, huh? C'mon, let's keep on. I found Thomas, look."
And this, likely, is about when Thomas makes it within easy proximity of his Alpha.
Hector Ghosh
That fire in the center of him hasn't flared up to consume his faculties or his sense of reason but it has pulsed up enough that the driver of the car immediately behind the one that almost knee-capped Lola is too scared to hit his horn and everyone else backing up or backed up behind them can see the tall dark-skinned man in clothing that practically screams his status as either disenfranchised or emotionally disturbed and see that he looks fucking pissed.
Nobody is going to honk at them. That would be like poking a dog with a stick while it's deciding whether it wants to bite someone at whom it's been growling for several seconds.
And he does growl when Lola says his name but it's vented-loose frustration and anger and not a warning. With her hand on his chest she can feel he's furious but not impotent with it. His heart races beneath his bones and his head whips around towards her when she appeals to his reason.
She found Thomas.
Thomas has never seen Hector angry like this before. His nostrils flare for breath and his eyes are wide like he was about to tear the door off the hinges. If this were a fatter moon, his moon, he would have had to swallow it down and then they would have really been in trouble.
"Heyyyy!" he says and his voice shakes with how angry he just was. He takes up Lola's hand in his own and he starts walking towards Thomas. Wrangles an arm around Lola's shoulder and holds her in tight against him so if anybody else comes flying around a corner he can whip around and protect her better.
Once the three of them are on the opposite sidewalk he grabs Thomas by the crown of his head with his free hand and carries on. They saw each other last night at the punishment and even then Hector had not rankled so much as he does now. If anything he was one of the calmest ones there. That was nothing he hadn't seen before and this isn't the last time they're going to be in the city and someone is going to drive like they have their head up their ass.
"What're you doing out here, brother-man?"
Thomas Delacroix
Thomas falls into place at Hector's side easily enough, whether or not Hector just looked ready to kill someone for driving like an idiot. And even now, on a street where under only slightly different circumstances there might be blood on the pavement right now, Thomas relaxes when Hector grabs the top of his head. There is a little huff at it, amused.
"Trying to figure out abstract art. It...remains mysterious. I guess mysterious is good. Sometimes. So...at least we're not somewhere entirely terrible." He looks past Hector to smile at Lola.
"How are the two of you?"
Lola Hawkes
The moon is absent, they're in that period of the month where the whole pack of Celduin isn't rippling with Rage and anxious to let it be unleashed someplace. For this reason Hector is easier to deter from his warpath tonight than he would be two and a half weeks from now. He takes her hand and starts to finish crossing the street, then slings his arms over Lola's shoulders instead.
Normally she would shake him off after a moment because she's uncomfortable with other people seeing her affection for him. It's not a matter of shame, far from truth be told. It's more a sense of privacy-- this is mine, not for any of you to see or know or feel or have. For the situation and flash of Rage and moment where things could have turned wrong (if that man didn't know to keep his eyes down and his ass in the car) she does nothing to stop from being dragged into Hector's side and walked across the street.
Thomas is pulled along with, and he expresses that he was looking at art when asked what he was doing. The smile he flashed for Lola is answered with an upward incline of her head. Thomas knows by now not to be bothered when flashing friendly teeth aren't returned.
"We're alright," she answers the question for both of them, the response boring and uninspired as can be. "Just finishing an errand. I'm ready to get the fuck back out of this hellhole."
Hector Ghosh
Hector is shackled with the fire of at least five suns even on a good day and he carries with him an introduction to their world that involves aggravated kidnapping and separation from his birth family and indoctrination into one of the most secretive and insulated tribes int he Nation on the grounds that one of his ancestors was touched by fate and fractiously insane.
None of this is anything he hides from anyone. The young man was born beneath a moon that glutted itself on light and he is open and free with his past with those who deserve to hear it. He doesn't have a lot of beliefs but one of the ones he embodies is that the past is important only so long as it serves as a light and not as an anchor.
Poor Thomas is young and quiet by comparison. The anger of the near-collision on the other corner melts away as Lola leads him off and Thomas greets them. Now that they're out of the crosswalk Hector lets go of his woman's shoulder and turns his attention to his packbrother.
Poor, poor Thomas.
"WHY would anyone ever want to live here?" he asks. Throws an arm over Thomas's shoulders and wheels him around so they're facing the stretch of the street as it yawns towards the mountains. "What, so you can just look--" He holds his free hand out at the Rockies barely visible through the light pollution and the darkness of falling night. Humans cast the two of them wary glances and tuck themselves deeper into their coats and shuffle along faster. "--and be like oh my gawd it's so beauuutiful Marcia I'm so glad we didn't decide to move in Boullllder."
Hector normally speaks with a Cascadian accent. A mutable dialect that has people guessing he's from Canada as often as they peg him as a California transplant. When he imitates other Americans he flattens out his vowels and pushes his voice up higher into his pharynx so it just about comes out his nose. He drops it to hammer home his point.
"I'm telling you, man. Waste of resources."
Thomas Delacroix
And Thomas, by comparison, is just barely back with the world enough to care enough about anything for it to get a rise out of him. But Hector hasn't seen that, yet. Maybe won't see that, because Thomas tends to be so much calmer around him that he might not bristle so easily.
And that calm is why Thomas only laughs as he's swung around to face the mountains, leaning into Hector for only a second here on the street. He's more relaxed than he was sure, but he's not about to melt into actually relaxed anywhere this open. It's hard enough to get him to do that in his own space.
"Well," Thomas says. "They sort of are abominations, but...Thai food?" He smiles. "I don't know. I wouldn't move here for the food. Not for much of anything, really." But, that is not a complete 'I would never move here,' statement. "Maybe they could be less horrible, one day."
Lola Hawkes
"I highly doubt that," is Lola's commentary to the two Garou standing shoulder to shoulder, Alpha with his arm wrapped around his packmate's shoulder, both turned west to look to the Rocky Mountains where they appear through the poor polluted air and the dim night sky.
The Kinswoman stood with her arms folded over her stomach, looking not towards the mountains but up and down the sidewalk. She appeared forever ready here in the city, not on edge necessarily because she was too confident to really be worried. At the same time, though, she seemed ready for some jackass to try and pick a fight with them (although no one would be foolish to approach the trio with Thomas and Hector's very combined presence to drive them away), or to see a flash of too-sharp teeth on a face in the crowd.
Matter of fact, she wanted and itched for it. The chance to lay carnage across some idiot's skull would make her night that much sweeter.
But it didn't come, and so Lola instead was sullen and her hunger for violence went unslaked. Dark eyes cast back around to the pair of Galliards, and she jerked a thumb over her shoulder, up the sidewalk. "I'll go and fetch the truck, I think. You two should grab us some food. We can find somewhere with air that's worth breathing to eat it."
Hector Ghosh
"Food? You want to eat this darkness-laden slop?"
Jokes. All he has to beat back the claustrophobia born of being outside in a place with tall-tall buildings and everybody in a hurry even when they're in vehicles meant to expedite the amount of time traveling from one place to the other are jokes.
That's all it is though, is a joke. It's easier to joke than to lose his shit on the humans around them. With great power comes great responsibility and all that. He doesn't know how that goes. He wasn't much into comics as a kid. Tolkien was his jam.
"You sticking around, or you want a lift back with us?"
Hector asks this even though he knows Thomas drives and has his own place to stay.
Thomas Delacroix
"Mmmmm...I think, as much as I love you both, I have places to get back to tonight. It was good to see you though. Sometime I should come out to see you though. Maybe...." His voice trails off and he blinks. Whatever the hell he almost said, he alters to, "Maybe sometime closer to sooner than later."
Hector Ghosh
Ready for this? Ready? This is why you don't want to let things drop around someone who can remember conversations from four years ago:
Hector tries to contain a big-ass grin and not to waggle his eyebrows but he doesn't try that hard. He does both of those things and then grabs at Lola's ribs and says, "Ohhh, he's gonna go hang out with Reeeeese. We'd better get going, we're holding him up."
Lola Hawkes
Jokes are made about food, and the brief meeting winds down. This was just an encounter, after all. They were on their ways places-- Hector and Lola going home, and Thomas off to do whatever it is he was up to in the first place.
The offer is made for Thomas to join them, but he declines, saying instead that he will come out to visit them sometime sooner than later. Lola nods her head to the Shadow Lord and reaches out to pat his shoulder. She'd reached for him before, after the punishments had been delivered. She knew that the Shadow Lord was fresh to the world that she grew up in, that Hector had become calloused to through his fostering. She'd put her hand to Thomas's face and neck and held his eyes, even though her own looked hollow from what they'd all witnessed. She was a Kinfolk, but she would brace and be strong for the pack that kept her.
Hector teased about going to see Reese, and Lola didn't crack a smile or joke along with. Rather, she bade Thomas farewell, advising: "You're part of the pack. That means you're welcome at The Homestead. We'll see you around."
And with that said, the couple would part from the solo, and they would head their separate ways.
Two nights. 48 hours. That's how long that's passed since every Garou and Kinfolk was summoned out to Forgotton Questions to see the punishments doled out upon the Elders of the Sept of Cold Crescent. Everyone handled what they saw in their own way. Some were horrified, others were howling and snarling and cheering with the sense of justice served and things made right. Others still were stock still and grim.
Time had passed to allow packs to come together and adjust to the change in the setting around them. No more City Sept, only the one that surrounded Forgotton Questions would remain. The threat of Beloved Horror still existed, but wasn't nearly so heavy as it had been before. Mothers hugged their children and carried them home that night, and many suffered nightmares from the hard things they saw and the terrible noises they heard.
Tonight, though, things seemed better. The sky was clear, even through the ever-present lights of the city you could see stars in the sky (though they were more plentiful out away from the skyscrapers and freeway onramps). It was chill enough to warrant a jacket or heavy sweater, but it was so nice for November that the streets were choked with people here in the Santa Fe Arts District.
Lola and Hector were out of place here. Not necessarily because of how they looked, but because they were both accustomed to the wide open land that they resided on-- Lola because that's where she's lived her life, Hector because he's been avoiding the cities as much as he can these days. They step one after the other out of a simple four-story tall brown brick building, offices at one point converted into apartments. Lola stepped out first and held the door behind her for Hector to follow, talking as she went, continuing a conversation from down the stairs: "...we were young-- I was like thirteen still and he'd just turned eighteen and I caught him laying ink down on his own thigh in his mom's bathroom. It looks like such shit, but he's pretty proud of it anyways."
Lola had her hair wrapped up into a bun at the back of her head tonight, and was dressed in jeans tucked into calf-high brown boots with a dense cream-colored wool sweater on with double-buttons that kept it closed in the front. There was a gray scarf around her neck, and her hands kept falling back into the pockets of her jeans when she wasn't using them.
"Year and a half later he opened his first parlor with two assholes he met at a convention or some such shit. The rest is history."
She was telling Hector about how Anthony's (her Kinfolk cousin who they were visiting) tattoo parlors (yes, plural) came to be.
Hector Ghosh
By northern standards the evening is warm but to the dark-skinned Galliard the temperature is so low he has to put on extra layers just to think about leaving the house.
The pair that come out onto the street both look as if they stumbled off of a ranch but they don't gawk up at the high-rise buildings and point around at the crossroads like they don't know how to conduct themselves in this milieu. Hector stands close to a head taller than the kinswoman and clothed he looks skinny and meatless. His jeans hang off his bones and he wears an army jacket over a sweatshirt. His hair is tied back and as they breach the doorway of the apartment building he pulls a black knit cap out of a pocket and down onto his head.
And away they go.
"Maybe I should get a tattoo," he says. "What do you think? A skull with flames coming out of it or something."
He's got to be joking. Hard to tell when he's trying to act like he isn't freezing.
Thomas Delacroix
Thomas comes out of a gallery, because of course he does. He doesn't seem to care about the cold, doesn't pull the hood of his pale silvery-grey sweatshirt up, doesn't curl into himself. He's confident enough on the street, the people ease away from him without any real thought are of no real concern to him.
He drifts half a block and stops, looking in the window of another gallery. His head tilts one way, then the other. Some people would have a knowing expression, a thoughtful one, but Thomas looks at abstract paintings with a confused little frown. He wants to understand them, but the shapes are just shapes to him, tumbled onto paper with no more meaning than little piles of windblown leaves. He'd be as prone to calling a crow's nest with bits of colorful fabric art as the painting in front of him.
After half a minute, he moves to the window on the other side of the doorway. There is another painting. Lines and shifting colors on canvas, as meaningless to him as all the others. He still stares at it like maybe he'll understand it if he just looks at it long enough.
Lola Hawkes
The Hawkes kinswoman was notorious around the Sept of Forgotten Questions. She was known for being a hardass, a badass, and for thinking herself to be bigger and tougher than some people believe she actually is. With that said, some people haven't seen her interrogate possessed humans at gunpoint, or slice through a Fomori with a hunting knife when her gun jammed, or tourniquet her own leg to stop from bleeding out in a battle-frenzied office building.
She isn't known for smiling or laughing a lot. But she grins and chuckles when Hector suggests he get himself a flame-engulfed skull tattoo and pulls a knit cap down over his head. Hector's from California, he isn't accustomed to the kind of cold that you can get up in the mountains, out at this altitude. He's bundled up in his coat and layers against the fifty degree night, but Lola on the other hand seems plenty warm in her thick sweater and jeans and scarf, with nothing covering her ears. She hated the sounds of the city, but she trusted the place so little that she didn't want to not be able to hear what was behind her.
"Yeah, put it right on the side of your neck," she suggested, and paused at a crosswalk. There's a glance in either direction, and she starts to cross the cramped street. A car beeps and has to stop short to keep from hitting her in the knees-- it had been trying to make a turn around the corner that the Uktena stood on and didn't pay mind to the pedestrians trying to cross. The car had beeped, and Lola answered by all-at-once dropping a fist heavily onto the hood of the car and glaring hard at the driver.
She'd wait for the man behind the steering wheel of the car look between her and Hector and decide that the dent in his hood isn't worth getting out of the car and picking a fight with these two. Only once his eyes are averted is Lola content to continue walking, but only after she'd had enough time to cause a minor attention-nabbing ruckus at that intersection.
"Fucker," is what she calls to the man's window when she starts walking again.
Hector Ghosh
[for the lulz]
Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (2, 5, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 2 )
Hector Ghosh
One second they're busting each others' balls about something as insubstantial as permanent body art, of which Hector has none so far, of which Hector has never thought nor given more than passing attention so that he could make a joke about it. They are not wolf-born and the city does not do anything to their senses that it would not do to any other human's.
Hector was born in a city. His parents settled in San Jose long before their oldest child was born and that was where he went to school and where he learned to skateboard and not cough when he took a huge rip off of a joint and run from the cops. How to use his skinny build and dark pigmentation to evade capture.
How to cross a fucking street without almost getting run down by an inattentive motorist.
It isn't either of their faults. The little white man on the opposite side of the street is aglow and Hector spies his packbrother ogling something through a gallery window and that car comes out of nowhere. It doesn't hit them but the driver honks at them and even before Lola reacts she can feel Hector's Rage flare up like a beast dwelling in darkness roused by the sound of an intruder slinking across the hoard of treasure and desiccated bones upon which it slumbers.
She hits the hood of the car and the man stood beside her rankles. Everyone within eyesight stops what they're doing at the screech of the brakes and the collision between fist and metal and the widened eyes and stiffened spine of the young man. He looks like he's about to walk around to the driver's side and haul the guy out of the car but Lola keeps walking.
Lola starts walking. Hector is going to take some coaxing.
"HEY!" he says to the driver. That may be the first that Thomas is aware of him.
Thomas Delacroix
He turns his head at the shout, sees Lola and Hector in a standoff with a car, and shakes his head a little. He heads out toward the corner at first, to meet them. And Lola is coming so that works until Hector stays there, ready to go fight everything and Thomas checks the way is clear and slips into the street.
Not that he has any idea what he is going to do when he gets there. Thomas has, in all the time they've known each other, actually tried to get Hector to do anything only once. You don't control oceans. You live with them. With their terrible beauty and their deadly storms and everything they are. You don't complain when they swallow you whole.
But, he heads that way regardless. Perhaps...perhaps it will come to him.
Lola Hawkes
Well, Lola had been ready to keep walking, but she was caused to stop when she realized that Hector wasn't following along. No, instead the Uktena was left standing squared in front of the car, Rage whipped up around him despite the dampening effect of the moonless sky. He shouted at the driver, a simple vocalization with no real message behind it. It was hard to tell if Hector was going to try and get the man to come out of the car and... fight? Apologize? It was hard to say.
Lola stopped and turned to look back at him, and now was simply standing in the road, still and watching the stand off like the other pedestrians did. One car that was stuck behind the stopped vehicle that Hector prevented from moving forward beeped its horn impatiently and went around, but aside from that not much stirred in that intersection.
When Thomas stepped off the curb and onto the crosswalk Lola glanced toward him, quick and sharp, as though expecting that he was going to be a threat. But she immediately recognizes who he is and her eyebrows fly up, surprised to see him here but not bothered by it. Instead she met his gaze, held it significantly for a second, then turned and joined Hector's side again. Her hand went up to his chest and splayed across the center of it, over his heart and where his Rage tried to storm and swirl when it wasn't resting in his belly.
"Hector." She says his name, and her tone is firm without being severe. It's an odd balance that Kinfolk manage to find when they start sharing their lives with Garou. "What do you think you'll do, huh? C'mon, let's keep on. I found Thomas, look."
And this, likely, is about when Thomas makes it within easy proximity of his Alpha.
Hector Ghosh
That fire in the center of him hasn't flared up to consume his faculties or his sense of reason but it has pulsed up enough that the driver of the car immediately behind the one that almost knee-capped Lola is too scared to hit his horn and everyone else backing up or backed up behind them can see the tall dark-skinned man in clothing that practically screams his status as either disenfranchised or emotionally disturbed and see that he looks fucking pissed.
Nobody is going to honk at them. That would be like poking a dog with a stick while it's deciding whether it wants to bite someone at whom it's been growling for several seconds.
And he does growl when Lola says his name but it's vented-loose frustration and anger and not a warning. With her hand on his chest she can feel he's furious but not impotent with it. His heart races beneath his bones and his head whips around towards her when she appeals to his reason.
She found Thomas.
Thomas has never seen Hector angry like this before. His nostrils flare for breath and his eyes are wide like he was about to tear the door off the hinges. If this were a fatter moon, his moon, he would have had to swallow it down and then they would have really been in trouble.
"Heyyyy!" he says and his voice shakes with how angry he just was. He takes up Lola's hand in his own and he starts walking towards Thomas. Wrangles an arm around Lola's shoulder and holds her in tight against him so if anybody else comes flying around a corner he can whip around and protect her better.
Once the three of them are on the opposite sidewalk he grabs Thomas by the crown of his head with his free hand and carries on. They saw each other last night at the punishment and even then Hector had not rankled so much as he does now. If anything he was one of the calmest ones there. That was nothing he hadn't seen before and this isn't the last time they're going to be in the city and someone is going to drive like they have their head up their ass.
"What're you doing out here, brother-man?"
Thomas Delacroix
Thomas falls into place at Hector's side easily enough, whether or not Hector just looked ready to kill someone for driving like an idiot. And even now, on a street where under only slightly different circumstances there might be blood on the pavement right now, Thomas relaxes when Hector grabs the top of his head. There is a little huff at it, amused.
"Trying to figure out abstract art. It...remains mysterious. I guess mysterious is good. Sometimes. So...at least we're not somewhere entirely terrible." He looks past Hector to smile at Lola.
"How are the two of you?"
Lola Hawkes
The moon is absent, they're in that period of the month where the whole pack of Celduin isn't rippling with Rage and anxious to let it be unleashed someplace. For this reason Hector is easier to deter from his warpath tonight than he would be two and a half weeks from now. He takes her hand and starts to finish crossing the street, then slings his arms over Lola's shoulders instead.
Normally she would shake him off after a moment because she's uncomfortable with other people seeing her affection for him. It's not a matter of shame, far from truth be told. It's more a sense of privacy-- this is mine, not for any of you to see or know or feel or have. For the situation and flash of Rage and moment where things could have turned wrong (if that man didn't know to keep his eyes down and his ass in the car) she does nothing to stop from being dragged into Hector's side and walked across the street.
Thomas is pulled along with, and he expresses that he was looking at art when asked what he was doing. The smile he flashed for Lola is answered with an upward incline of her head. Thomas knows by now not to be bothered when flashing friendly teeth aren't returned.
"We're alright," she answers the question for both of them, the response boring and uninspired as can be. "Just finishing an errand. I'm ready to get the fuck back out of this hellhole."
Hector Ghosh
Hector is shackled with the fire of at least five suns even on a good day and he carries with him an introduction to their world that involves aggravated kidnapping and separation from his birth family and indoctrination into one of the most secretive and insulated tribes int he Nation on the grounds that one of his ancestors was touched by fate and fractiously insane.
None of this is anything he hides from anyone. The young man was born beneath a moon that glutted itself on light and he is open and free with his past with those who deserve to hear it. He doesn't have a lot of beliefs but one of the ones he embodies is that the past is important only so long as it serves as a light and not as an anchor.
Poor Thomas is young and quiet by comparison. The anger of the near-collision on the other corner melts away as Lola leads him off and Thomas greets them. Now that they're out of the crosswalk Hector lets go of his woman's shoulder and turns his attention to his packbrother.
Poor, poor Thomas.
"WHY would anyone ever want to live here?" he asks. Throws an arm over Thomas's shoulders and wheels him around so they're facing the stretch of the street as it yawns towards the mountains. "What, so you can just look--" He holds his free hand out at the Rockies barely visible through the light pollution and the darkness of falling night. Humans cast the two of them wary glances and tuck themselves deeper into their coats and shuffle along faster. "--and be like oh my gawd it's so beauuutiful Marcia I'm so glad we didn't decide to move in Boullllder."
Hector normally speaks with a Cascadian accent. A mutable dialect that has people guessing he's from Canada as often as they peg him as a California transplant. When he imitates other Americans he flattens out his vowels and pushes his voice up higher into his pharynx so it just about comes out his nose. He drops it to hammer home his point.
"I'm telling you, man. Waste of resources."
Thomas Delacroix
And Thomas, by comparison, is just barely back with the world enough to care enough about anything for it to get a rise out of him. But Hector hasn't seen that, yet. Maybe won't see that, because Thomas tends to be so much calmer around him that he might not bristle so easily.
And that calm is why Thomas only laughs as he's swung around to face the mountains, leaning into Hector for only a second here on the street. He's more relaxed than he was sure, but he's not about to melt into actually relaxed anywhere this open. It's hard enough to get him to do that in his own space.
"Well," Thomas says. "They sort of are abominations, but...Thai food?" He smiles. "I don't know. I wouldn't move here for the food. Not for much of anything, really." But, that is not a complete 'I would never move here,' statement. "Maybe they could be less horrible, one day."
Lola Hawkes
"I highly doubt that," is Lola's commentary to the two Garou standing shoulder to shoulder, Alpha with his arm wrapped around his packmate's shoulder, both turned west to look to the Rocky Mountains where they appear through the poor polluted air and the dim night sky.
The Kinswoman stood with her arms folded over her stomach, looking not towards the mountains but up and down the sidewalk. She appeared forever ready here in the city, not on edge necessarily because she was too confident to really be worried. At the same time, though, she seemed ready for some jackass to try and pick a fight with them (although no one would be foolish to approach the trio with Thomas and Hector's very combined presence to drive them away), or to see a flash of too-sharp teeth on a face in the crowd.
Matter of fact, she wanted and itched for it. The chance to lay carnage across some idiot's skull would make her night that much sweeter.
But it didn't come, and so Lola instead was sullen and her hunger for violence went unslaked. Dark eyes cast back around to the pair of Galliards, and she jerked a thumb over her shoulder, up the sidewalk. "I'll go and fetch the truck, I think. You two should grab us some food. We can find somewhere with air that's worth breathing to eat it."
Hector Ghosh
"Food? You want to eat this darkness-laden slop?"
Jokes. All he has to beat back the claustrophobia born of being outside in a place with tall-tall buildings and everybody in a hurry even when they're in vehicles meant to expedite the amount of time traveling from one place to the other are jokes.
That's all it is though, is a joke. It's easier to joke than to lose his shit on the humans around them. With great power comes great responsibility and all that. He doesn't know how that goes. He wasn't much into comics as a kid. Tolkien was his jam.
"You sticking around, or you want a lift back with us?"
Hector asks this even though he knows Thomas drives and has his own place to stay.
Thomas Delacroix
"Mmmmm...I think, as much as I love you both, I have places to get back to tonight. It was good to see you though. Sometime I should come out to see you though. Maybe...." His voice trails off and he blinks. Whatever the hell he almost said, he alters to, "Maybe sometime closer to sooner than later."
Hector Ghosh
Ready for this? Ready? This is why you don't want to let things drop around someone who can remember conversations from four years ago:
Hector tries to contain a big-ass grin and not to waggle his eyebrows but he doesn't try that hard. He does both of those things and then grabs at Lola's ribs and says, "Ohhh, he's gonna go hang out with Reeeeese. We'd better get going, we're holding him up."
Lola Hawkes
Jokes are made about food, and the brief meeting winds down. This was just an encounter, after all. They were on their ways places-- Hector and Lola going home, and Thomas off to do whatever it is he was up to in the first place.
The offer is made for Thomas to join them, but he declines, saying instead that he will come out to visit them sometime sooner than later. Lola nods her head to the Shadow Lord and reaches out to pat his shoulder. She'd reached for him before, after the punishments had been delivered. She knew that the Shadow Lord was fresh to the world that she grew up in, that Hector had become calloused to through his fostering. She'd put her hand to Thomas's face and neck and held his eyes, even though her own looked hollow from what they'd all witnessed. She was a Kinfolk, but she would brace and be strong for the pack that kept her.
Hector teased about going to see Reese, and Lola didn't crack a smile or joke along with. Rather, she bade Thomas farewell, advising: "You're part of the pack. That means you're welcome at The Homestead. We'll see you around."
And with that said, the couple would part from the solo, and they would head their separate ways.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)