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Who: Ivy and you!
What: Wandering, irritation, flowers? Come and bother a barefoot green woman wearing a leotard made of plants.
Where: Mostly around Mog Hill, extending into the surrounding districts (Bonetown, Saltbur, Pincod, Echomire, as far as the river to the west and south) - also the forest in Sobek Croix, around the evening.
When: Today (Coardi)
Warnings: Unlikely but will edit as needed.

She had to convince herself to take anything except her seed case. The vouchers and the money were stuffed into an empty compartment she kept for discoveries made on the road; though she had no intention of staying at the Valhalla Inn, or buying clothes for that matter, perhaps they'd have value as currency. Taking the CiD had been the hardest decision to make - she couldn't imagine a more blatantly obvious tracking device - but overall it was better to be informed than not and she'd bound it to her waist with vines for the time being.

Her encounters with the staff at the Inn had been fleeting to say the very least. Now she was outside, feet planted on the earth, and the faintly disturbing pamphlet had been accurate: this wasn't home. The plants spoke to her, mostly, sometimes in tones and languages she didn't yet understand - but they didn't recognize her, didn't love her as they did anywhere on her Earth. It prompted a sense of loneliness she wasn't familiar with; even in Arkham's most secure cells she'd always been aware of the Green just outside its walls, waiting for her to step back into its embrace.

For time time being she was wandering, taking in the lay of the land, sometimes hesitating for passing glances at the shops and business but not straying inside. More often it would be trees or wild flowers that would make her stop, her eyes closing briefly, the act of communication sometimes coaxing a little extra life from the plants she paused to speak with.

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Liaising with the sheriffs is a standard part of Sol's day job; it's a courtesy that they're better off paying than not in most cases, making sure an area's given local-level law enforcement has at least some vague idea of what Hellsing agents are doing in their canton. Saves hassle, toes getting stepped on, people getting hurt over what amount to bureaucratic misunderstandings - he's down-to-earth charismatic and good with people in a way that's essential to making Hellsing's administration a little more palatable to other people's boots on the ground when his superiors still aren't really used to having to accommodate anyone else.

Cutting a long story short, it's not as unusual as it sounds at first blush to see Captain Desk Job out and about in the city, and much of the plant-life in his more familiar routes is already familiar with him and the friendly way he connects and listens to them by instinct and innate gift. He's subtler and more discreet in it than Ivy by necessity and practicality (he's more useful if the full extent of his capabilities aren't well-known or easily traced), but perhaps it'll be hard for her to miss when he tips his hand to her as he goes by and the roses that grow wild seem to know his name.

He's always done well with roses.

Ivy wouldn't know what discretion was if it punched her in the face. Over the last ten years she's made a career of making damned sure everyone in Gotham and beyond knows who she is and what she's capable of. She's restrained here, not by a particular excess of calm but by the lack of a responsible party to direct her anger towards.

She sees the gesture, and the wild white roses murmur his name; they don't just know him, they know him like they'll know her someday, as a man with an affinity. And it's hard for her not to feel - Threatened? Envious? - but she's not so stupid as to lash out for reasons so selfish. Instead she straightens and offers him - Solomon - a small nod of greeting.

Familiarity makes him slow - not to her, personally, but the way like recognizes some kind of like, coming toward similar notions from wildly disparate origins. They don't know her yet, but he can tell when yet is the right word to use; some plants, like some people, will take any audience offered to them, intrigued by unanticipated listeners.

He's going rather than coming, so he's not in so much of a hurry he can't stop and introduce himself, he figures.

“I'm going to guess you're a recent arrival,” he says, friendly and understated about it - the impression he gives is constantly contradictory, sleazy-glamorous like a new money criminal and dangerous in the honest way a wild animal is dangerous, naturally and without present intent, and then he's warm, somehow, green and grounded to the earth under him in a way that reads like a puzzle on someone so evidently city-slick. He wears diamonds and smiles at flowers and he's probably intimidating to a lot of people who aren't Poison Ivy; it is what it is. “Solomon Koenig.”

"Poison Ivy."

The latter is what she sees in him more than the former; if all she had to go by was appearances then she would dislike him instantly, dismiss him in seconds, but she perceives enough of him through their perspective that she can acknowledge there's more to know.

"I'm going to guess that you're not."

“Good guess.” An educated guess, most accurately. Speaking of educated, it's probably the fact that he works regularly with someone named 'Hellboy' that results in not so much as a second look to the name she gives him. “No, not so much. Call it about a year here for me and my daughter.”

(The impression the roses here have of her is an indirect one, through Sol only; a little girl who knows they are beautiful. Priorities straight, as always.)

“Are you looking for something in particular?”

If she softens at all at the news that he has a daughter here - or the wave of appreciative, if distant sentiment from the roses - she doesn't show it.

"Since I understand that a way home isn't likely to emerge, I'm trying to better understand my environment." And asking people was generally a good way to get (at worst) lied to or (best) saddled with the idea that someone had done you a favor they expected to be repaid.

He's inclined to approve of her methodology (and disinclined to assume that she'd need or appreciate his approval); in general, he's of the opinion the best way to get to know a place is to get to know it. Cautiously, granted, even if maybe he was a little less cautious in the years before he had a child to account for.

He thinks about warning her about the fog - it leaves an impression on the mind whatever species you belong to - but she isn't asking him for advice and he's not sure she'd welcome it unbidden. It's pretty hard to miss if she gets that far on her own, though, and she doesn't strike him as the kind of woman who'd fail to recognize a clear and present danger; he keeps his peace.

Instead, amiably, “Well, if you get as far as Sobek Croix, say hello to my roses.” He smells faintly of them, as always; like blood and earth and clean, healthy roses. He's never worn cologne, not because he wouldn't like to but because it's not something that occurs to him on his own - he dresses the way he does because an ex-girlfriend taught him what looked good on him and he's stuck with her formula ever since, figuring he might as well not fix what isn't broken.

Left to his own devices, he'd-- probably look not unlike Ivy, but professional and personal obligations mean wearing pants. They're nice pants (tailored, expensive, luxuries he's become accustomed to only in recent years with recent successes), but it's a costume he wears - comfortably, and even so. Beyond not being someone who grew up with money, he's just not civilized. (They call Verbena barbarians; contrarily elegant, he still wears it like a badge of honor.)

“The enclosed nature of the place makes things interesting-- you'd think limited, and yeah, but not in terms of environmental variety. Funny.”

Ivy smells faintly of smoke and chemical pollutants, the remnants of Gotham clinging to her like dust soon to be blown away; beneath that is the scent of the forest in the full bloom of midsummer, sweet and heady. What's human about her is less palpable than ever; she abandoned it long ago. Her re-entrances into 'civilized' society ('civil' being a relative term, of course) are brief, shot through with ulterior motives and tend to end badly, if not violently. None of it interests her enough to guarantee her dedication, any more.

"'Enclosed' how?"

She'll find out eventually, of course. But he comes with good references, and it wouldn't hurt to know how knowledgeable and forthcoming the (more) locals are.

Now, that is a good opening.

“The city stretches the coastline and south into farmland, and that's about it for the world as we know it,” he says - his manner betrays the ease of experience in appraising people of this, that or the other. It's another of those things that isn't technically his job, but tends to fall under his purview more often than not, anyway. “Surrounding that - over land, over the water - is the fog. The further in you get, the more broken reality is; the tendency for people to die or go insane means there's not a lot of straight answers or documented facts about it, besides 'you'll probably die or go insane'. Foghunters guild does what it says on the tin - they go out, not too far, bring back valuables to sell. It's profitable work, but you don't see 'em growing old.”

She tilts her head back, not unconvinced by the information, just absorbing it. 'Broken reality' is an interesting turn of phrase, as if it might completely malfunction or end when the fog grows too dense, which is of course ludicrous (isn't it?).

"The nature of the fog is that it causes madness or worse but that it also brings valuables into the city?" She appreciates the poetic irony, on a certain level. "From where?"

“About everywhere, by the looks of things. Same as things that come through the city less-- psychotically, same as people.” He reflects, briefly, that he'd feel for whatever poor son of a bitch ended up in this city via the fog; if they even came through whole. (He's heard things about what you find out there - a friend of his was on the early cohort fog expedition.) “Baedal's a patchwork, made up out of what comes from outside- people, architecture, plants, animals, cultures. That'd be how we account for the varied population.”

A dozen (more) different kinds of fucking vampire. Who decided that was necessary.

So there were a number of paths into the city. Some were made safe, in some sense regulated, but others weren't. Which could indicate a number of things.

"But I assume there's no means of accounting for the process itself." That no single person or body could be held responsible.

“Officially? No.” Unofficially-- Sol rejects the idea that there isn't an explanation or responsibility, but whatever it is...it's not available right now. There's a hell of a lot about Baedal that they're expected to simply accept or take on faith, and it's not the kind of city in which doing a whole lot of that seems safe. “Everybody's got a theory, but Burnworth's pamphlets are the party line.”

With about 80% accuracy in terms of its basic facts, condescending propaganda all over, and not a whole lot in the way of straight answers where 'why' is concerned.

“That said, as a xenian or magical citizen, if you need or want any assistance or information in dealing with Baedal, Hellsing--” he displays his badge, briefly, as he digs inside his jacket for two different cards, “--has a social services department that's mostly about ensuring people get what they need to survive without putting themselves or anybody else in legal or practical danger. Madrasati's newer, hopefully a little more extensive in what they can offer. My card and theirs.”

She doesn't have to take it, but he's inclined to offer; his own card provides his contact details and Hellsing's in general, listing him as the department head for legal ('bureaucratic jack of all trades' in his own opinion, when he isn't-- doing other things), and the Madrasati card is no one's in particular but swiped from Martel, who gets student referrals from the xenian services safe-space.

Her hand just hovers at her side for a moment, and she's tempted to just walk away, but it's been less than twenty-four hours since she tore apart a city block and was torn from her home and maybe she's burnt (demolished) enough bridges for one day.

She takes the cards.

"...thank you."

It comes out like she's not used to saying it.

He doesn't push harder than that on the friendly-helpful thing, once she accepts; he's a pretty good judge, that way, intuitive and more emotion-driven than he tends to seem at a glance. (--and he has a knack for befriending people who'd generally rather not be befriended, but it's a gift that works best when he's not really trying.)

“No problem. Madrasati's south of here a bit in Echomire - you'll find Hellsing in Sobek Croix, nearby the forest's edge.” Dense forest that they are, in fact, surrounded by on all sides; in the village, it's easy to forget for a while that they're also surrounded by 'an actual city', and it's exactly Sol's kind of place. The non-Hellsing community tends toward Moroccan in spite of the 'aulde English village' feel of the architecture; he feels like he lives on eel tagine and taktouka. “Which is where I should be heading back to,” because Ivy seems like someone whose time shouldn't be imposed on too much, and he's inclined to respect that, “but it's good to meet you.”

It's a relief that he's moving on. She wants to be getting back to the plants, the trees, establishing a feel for the place from life that's rooted in the earth and not simply wandering the streets. Things happening this way saves her the possible offense caused by dismissing him or simply walking away.

She doesn't return the sentiment explicitly. Time will tell if it was good to meet him. But she nods, and doesn't scowl, and as a rule that's more than most people get.

Shrieky's moods in Baedal are strangely cyclical. He swings between elation and rage, the desire to be liked and the urge to antagonize. Sometimes he goes between contentment at being somewhere where he's acknowledged - where he's not alone or ignored and it's the best feeling in the world and he'll never let it slip away - to a blistering, panicked state of uncontrollable overstimulation.

Sometimes everything just becomes too much for him. There are too many people in the streets and the city is too large and nothing stops moving and his feet always seem to hurt. Sometimes he accidentally thinks about the vastness of the universe and how small a part of it he is (which was never a problem when the universe seemed constrictingly small). Other times, he'll feel suddenly as if he's not himself anymore. As though losing his loneliness, slowly giving up his rage, takes something else from him as well, something defining and important that he won't get back once it's gone.

When these thoughts come to him, all he wants to do is tear up the streets of the city he loves. He wants to burn down the buildings and fight the militia and the candlelighters and the rioters and the vampires and everything and everyone and fight, and fight, and fight until he tears himself apart just to prove that he can. He wants to hate everyone, and himself, without qualification.

Shrieky doesn't like having to deal with the cognitive dissonance of having those feelings, while being around people he likes, so he can't go home like this. Instead, he flees the city, flees the humans and loses himself in Sobek Croix. It's not the same as it was back home, a different, more bearable kind of isolation, and sometimes he needs that. His target is one of the moon pools, one within walking distance of the main city, if you don't mind a fairly long walk, but as he approaches it, he catches sight of some slight movement in the bush up ahead.

He squints his eyes, trying to pick out a figure beside the pool who could have been responsible for the motion, but all he sees is green, brown and red. Nothing that doesn't belong. He pushes his hesitation aside, and comes closer.

Given that she's been moving without any specific goal in mind, it's taken her a while to get to Sobek Croix; the falling sun has drawn out the shadows. But now she's here she's beset by the sense there's nowhere else she could possibly have been heading, and it's going to take her a long time to leave again. The city was unfamiliar but not oppressive, the air cleaner than in any other she'd visited - but this deep thick wood, this is where she finally feels like she's in good company. The earth is rich beneath her feet, buzzing with chemical communication from root to root; the nervous system of the forest is alive and electric. This place doesn't adore her, doesn't reach for her touch like she's used to, but - if she truly can't return home - that can come in time. She can earn it.

It's a trace amount of optimism, and lost in the deeper pain of having been torn from the Green, but it's there.

She's kneeling at the side of one of the larger moon pools, and experimentally she dips her fingers into the liquid; they're still luminescent when she draws them out, and that faint glow remains when she blows on her fingertips to dry them. There's no chemical cause for it that she can determine, so that's interesting -

She becomes aware of something nearby that doesn't belong, maybe a sound that doesn't seem right, or something chemical that oughtn't be in the forest, and she goes tense but doesn't move. The vines around her arms grow barbs.

As Shrieky comes closer to the water, he forgets about his concern about finding someone else in the forest. There were many things in Baedal which made noises and moved around, but humans tended to cluster together and talk, and they aren't exactly difficult to pick out in the forest, and anyway, he's almost at the pool. He kicks off his shoes in one lazy motion, and without stopping, steps out over the water like he expects it to carry his weight.

It doesn't.

His toes break the surface, and the rest of him is carried down with a whoosh of foam and motion, and he resists the urge to breathe in. After a moment, his feet touch the bottom of the pool, and then he tarts kicking his legs, together, in one smooth motion. It isn't quite how he'd like his body to move, but is as close as he can come, considering how his knees are jointed now.

He breaks the surface again, and takes a breath, putting his hands on the bank quickly, as if he's less confident about all of this than his method of entry into the water may have suggested.

Ivy watches this more in bemusement than anger. Most people who don't know how to get into the water simply don't - but then again, people too stupid to think it through are probably also too stupid to know better.

It's still vaguely annoying when he breaks the surface and seems able to continue breathing unaided; it would have extended her peace and quiet significantly if he'd drowned. Human? She doesn't like to assume. He's not so far away that her voice won't carry but she just observes him, waiting either to be noticed or for him to leave.

It does take him a moment, between treading water and holding the edge of the bank, for that sense of being not alone to return to him. He twists around to look again for somebody there, his expression torn between mild embarrassment for his anxiety, and undeserved anger for anyone who may actually be there.

Then he sees her, and it all sort of... goes.

It's hard to be angry at someone for being in the forest when they look like they're supposed to be a part of it.

"I thought I saw someone moving before, but you're camoflaged!"

He calls across to her, legs still swaying in the water.

She just stares at him for a few moments. Having made herself a household name in Gotham generally means she's managed to avoid these sorts of misconceptions.

"It isn't camoflage," she says archly. "I'm green for the same reason that everything else here is green."

"It still works as camoflage when you come to a place with many trees." He points out, because it does. Plenty of things just have camoflage because they're lucky and it worked out that the way they naturally look blends in with where they live. He assumes.

"You are... botanical, though? Do you have roots?"

He sounds genuinely curious, rather than incredulous about this. He hasn't met a botanical person before, lots of people who love gardening, but no actual plant people.

She's tempted to point out that camoflage is the act of deliberate disguise and not simply resembling one's environment, but she's calm enough to acknowledge that she simply doesn't like being accused of (to all intents and purposes) hiding. She's also not in the mood to deliver a biology lesson and if the conversation continues in that direction she might have to.

"No. I don't have roots."

Not ones that couldn't be torn out and dissolved by the intervention of an inexplicable city, anyway.

"Mommy, look."

That's such a common phrase, and one Sally is beginning to associate it with these moments, the ones where she winds up wincing and apologising to the xenian that Antonia drew attention to, and it's hard because Antonia is better at learning not to do these things when they're objectively mean. But she isn't being mean. She's being fascinated, even if she's been told pointing is also rude (and sometimes dangerous, for little witches). And right now, Poison Ivy is super fascinating, and being pointed at by a wee nearly five-year-old girl.

"Honey," Sally says, reaching out to gently redirect that hand, and giving Ivy a smile -- the tired, knowing smile of a parent, the kind that tries to communicate some kind of adult allegiance. Kids, you know? The park-like area in Ludmead, near the river, is quasi-public -- the trees are dense, thick roots breaking the earth that Antonia had been previously playing amongst, but manmade paths as well.

Sally herself is dressed in warm-weather clothes, whites and floral and practicality, a hemp bag hanging off her arm from shopping. "Sorry," she says, "she's just curious about. Everything."

Edited 2012-08-11 13:12 (UTC)

Ivy doesn't have much of a care for humans as a species, but she has more time for women than men, and her patience for small children (particularly children trapped in less-than-ideal situations) is almost infinite. Girls most of all - and she hasn't seen many children in the city, which gives this one the bonus protection of being...novel, for lack of a better term. A rarity.

She doesn't return the smile, but she doesn't scowl either; she just nods her understanding.

"It's alright," she says, and crouches to the girl's eye level. "Hello."

Sally relaxes some when assured of the situation's alrightness, planting a hand on her hip and watching, head tipped. Antonia smiles wide and unshy when the mysterious green lady greets her.

"Hi," the girl chirps, a hand clinging to Sally's. "Are you wearing plants?"

There aren't a lot of kids, it's true, especially not when it comes to the recent generation of arrivals. The gods deem it so that they do not arrive here alone. Children in Baedal carry with them a lot of implications, ones they might not understand yet. If they do grow up here, they will. Antonia, currently, seems happy to meet someone new, and that's that.

Sally lets her daughter field the exchange, then, just remaining watchful and ready to interject.

"Yes, I am. I know the plants very well, I speak with them, and because they care for me they give me what I need." Her voice is almost friendly, low and calm, moreso than with most of the adults of her acquaintance. "I hope you're being kind to the trees here?"

That sounds cool, according to Antonia, judging by her knit-brow interest. Sally is a patient and watchful shadow, at this point, free hand pushing back a curtain of brown hair, a part of her mind elsewhere, thinking.

"I'm just jumping between 'em," the little girl asserts. "And climbing, I can go way high. We have a garden, and sometimes we talk to those too to make 'em grow better? But not like that. Are you a witch too?"

Yeah, Sallly could see that one coming, but she doesn't say anything or even wince. It matters less and less every passing day.

Ivy raises an interested eyebrow at the girl's mother, then turns her interest back to the girl.

"Not a witch. The Earth chose me to protect it, and gave me the power to do so." A rather romanticised and heavily compacted version of events, but not strictly untrue.

Lyla does not look like a 'nature person', by any description; the twang of her accent may say rural Tennessee, but the fishnets and heavy eyeliner are straight-up city girl, as is the penchant for recreational drug use. That said, some of the gifts she's learned have drawn her repeatedly out to the forests surrounding Hellsing in Sobek Croix--she remembers how the plants responded to the things Narcisse taught her, how they saved her. The trees moved, snapping up invading monsters and strangling them in the branches.

It had been much more reassuring than when she kills something or someone with her own bare hands. That's always out of instinctive fear and panic, not like something is helping. Anyway, for that and other reasons, Lyla likes it out here, especially when it's quiet, and she's easing off from one of her binges.

Like now.

She's skinny and very young, teen-aged with a baby face to boot, though she attempts to disguise as much with the application of make-up, dressed in ripped fishnets, too-short denim shorts, a gray band t-shirt cropped high on her ribcage, and big clunky combat boots, a leather jacket draped across her knees. Her eyeliner is smudged from the nights of partying, and she overall gives the impression of 'coming down', though with none of the irritability that usually accompanies, thanks to a valium and the fact that she's incredibly used to it by now, a genuinely jaded edge that is much sharper than the adulthood she is otherwise feigning. There are drugs in her system, still, but with a dhampire's constitution, they won't last long.

So while her senses are somewhat dimmed, they're not dampened enough for her to miss someone else's presence. Lyla inhales wearily through her nose and leans forward (she is slouched, currently, underneath a big tree with overhanging branches half-shrouding her, one that she remembers and that, she likes to think, remembers her). It seems like a lot of effort, and she reminds herself not to move so much until she's less of a mess. K-holes will do that to you.

"Somebody there?"

Ivy's still exploring, but it's proving difficult to draw herself out of the deep woods of Sobek Croix and eventually she suspects she'll settle here. The Burnworth Pamphlet doesn't worry her - the forest can clothe, feed and shelter her, and the vaguely threatening instruction to 'be aware that failure to find gainful employment may result in employment being found for you' doesn't much trouble her. It has been an excessively long time since anyone has been able to make her do anything. The only thing that troubles her a little is that living off the land will deprive her of a laboratory, but that's something to think about later.

She's been aware of the other presence in the woods for a while. The forest communes with itself and with her and although she's made no attempt to perform actual surveillance through the trees, she knows a few things: female, familiar to the forest, not human. And Ivy knows she's heading in her direction, climbing from branch to branch now rather than walking the forest floor. It offers a better vantage point and she's generally more comfortable when it's harder to be seen.

When the girl calls out, though, she doesn't see any need to avoid a confrontation. High up in one of the nearby trees, she winds a vine around a branch strong enough to comfortably take her weight and lets it lower her down to the earth nearby.

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I apologise for Ivy's current disinterest in the grownup here /o\

heh heh, it is perfectly fine :D

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