multiversallogs | if travel is searching and home has been found

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if travel is searching and home has been found

Who: Bruce Wayne, Poison Ivy, and some unwelcome guests.
What: Refugees from the Spatters raids are found by the Militia. The Militia is found by someone else.
Where: Barrackham, the forests. Later, the moonpools.
When: A bit after Ivy's arrival.
Notes: /DEVOURS THE LOG COMM
Warnings: Violence and police brutality against minors, xenophobia, mind control/coercion references, will edit more as needed. (DC characters bring the party.)

In the lingering aftermath of the raids in the Spatters, many people refused to return - they were afraid, mostly, and with good reason; but plenty had nowhere to return to now, either, with their property damaged beyond use, or deemed condemned by the city. Homes full of books, clothes, toys, heirlooms, lives - taped over and written off, with no regard for the souls that lived inside. Word amongst the refugees (what other word do they have?) is that the Militia isn't done with them - they're still hunting down those who fled, because vagrancy is a crime. It's not enough, it'll never be enough, until hey are forever silent. Gone.

In the woods south of the city, but not quire the farmlands, some refugees have finally stopped moving. They have children, and lives, and they have to try to move on, even in small degrees. They erect tents, begin to work as they can - one mother, Sharial, does laundry for a farmer while her children practice reading amongst the trees, with her sisters. It's uncomfortable and it's dirty, but the weather's better than in the Spatters, and when she comes home from a day at work and sees her children playing, scales shining, tails fat, she feels almost okay.

The day she comes home and her sister meets her halfway, sobbing, dress torn, it's another story. Her heart sinks, and she hears commotion in the distance already through the trees (the locals, the Elves, always hide in such silence when outsiders come). Through the sound of low voices and cruel laughter, she hears her youngest son scream.

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It's been about a week since Ivy arrived, and she's still on the move, never spending more than half a night in one place. It's in her nature to set down roots; she knows eventually she'll return to Sobek Croix and maybe undertake a slightly more focused investigation of the bipedal life there, but for the time being she hasn't spoken to anyone she hasn't practically tripped over and that suits her perfectly.

She's aware of there being Something Else in the Barrackham woods, a native populace, but they seem benign - at least in that they're leaving her to her own devices if not actively hiding from her. Eventually though, the trees thin out a little and she comes across the tents, and whatever lives in the woods is clearly staying out of their way as much as they are hers.

She watches, unseen in the canopy, for about a day, and establishes a few things. They're on the run; their home is gone; they respect the forest; there are young children here. They're family. And though the older ones try to stay calm for the children, a thread of truth emerges: they believe with the absoluteness of truth that whatever they're hiding from has the power to not simply kill them, all of them, but erase them completely from whatever twisted narrative this city is telling.

Very few things beyond the Green would stir Ivy to action; endangerment of children is a large one. But Ivy is not a hero. Whoever their pursuers are, they aren't in the forest (yet), and these people seem conscious enough of the danger they're in to stay on the move. She sleeps fitfully in the branches overnight, then leaves them to their own devices.

But she still feels troubled. Uneasy.

She heads east during the day, and if she maintains a decent surveillance distance - enough for the trees to let her know if something's happening at the camp - she doesn't let herself acknowledge it. By the time she sees the two women meet on the forest path, she already knows something's wrong. But it's the scream that stirs her into action. The trees know her now, they've talked at length, and when she looks to them for help they reach out with stirring branches and ripples of movement to push her arrow-swift through the canopy, back towards the camp.

Two hooded Militia members are at the small camp - their species or identities impossible to tell, but seemingly one man and one woman - and are currently dismantling it. The refugees have refused to identify themselves by turning over their CiDs (which most of them, everyone in Baedal knows, don't have), so it's their duty to search their belongings until they find identification. Those without identification are subject to arrest, and while minors, of course, don't have CiDs, if their parents are without them then they can can hardly prove the children are theirs, can they? And they must become wards of the state.

The oldest boy is face-down in the dirt, hands cuffed behind his back, unmoving. The two young children are huddled together with the male agent looming over them, too afraid to move any further. One is crying, though attempting desperately to stifle it; they've already been punished once for making too much noise.

The agents aren't concerned about the woman who ran - she'll be back.

They have the children.

Half a mile northeast, the rest of these agents' squadron - three more storm troopers, and a small clockwork vehicle - close in, coming to assist in clearing up the forest and taking these criminals into custody. Further east still, there is a man on horseback, for once out not doing anything particular but getting some air and letting his horse stretch her legs.

It's about that time when the oldest boy slips his handcuffs (reptilian joints don't work the way humanoid ones do) and attempts to leap up and grab his siblings to flee. Before he makes it near them, he's hit in the chest with a bolt from the female agent's weapon, sending him flying, smouldering, and the children screaming again. Dispassionately, she orders: "Shut them up."

No.

He moves, and she has to react before she can even spare a thought for getting herself elbow-deep in a situation she doesn't fully understand. The weapons are unfamiliar, and the soldiers' species - any esoteric power they might have - is completely unknowable. It'd be a precedent-setter, but maybe they can pose a real threat to her life.

It'll never be relevant. They're hurting children. That, in Ivy's view, is the preserve of monsters.

That her approach, and her presence now, have seemingly gone unnoticed is her best weapon. Hidden amongst the leaves, she reaches out, and her perception shifts; she's still aware of her own body but her reach extends into the earth, the roots, the branches and leaves. It's not quite as easy or instinctive or as comfortable as it would be at home but the forest takes her in, and she reaches through.

The male agent reaches into a pocket at his side, for what she'll never give him the opportunity to find out. A dozen vines burst from the canopy above, winding around his throat, yanking him off the ground with the jerk of a hangman's noose and throwing him bodily into the female agent - away from the children.

All around the camp, imperceptible at first, the forest grows denser and more hostile - jagged branches, leaves bristling with venom, plants growing needle-long thorns that shouldn't have them. The only safe path is the one Sharial's sister used when she fled.

Half a klick away, the man who isn't always Tom is beginning to cotton on to the fact that something is up out here in the forest. The Militia doesn't usually patrol the area, especially not geared up to haul somebody away - when he notices, from afar, that's who he's seeing making their way rapidly southwest, he hops off his horse and creeps closer to investigate. Bruce Wayne doesn't need the help of the forest itself to stay hidden, fortunately, and it only takes him a few minutes of observing their conversation and radio chatter to have full grasp on the situation.

He falls back, digs a few things out of his pockets (of all the days to be out and not geared to the teeth, but it's not like he's ever helpless or carrying two dozen gadgets god-knows-where) and mutters a brief but sincere "Sorry" out loud. Bruce isn't anywhere near cosmically empathetic enough to think that he's apologizing to the trees - more the people that live within them, always circling just outside his field of vision, but not outside his awareness. (Maybe the trees will appreciate the sentiment anyway). He lights a purple-sparking flare, tosses it a meter in front of him, throws his voice to yell 'HELP!, chucks a smoke bomb near him, then another further away, and vanishes back into the trees. The flare will burn out in a half hour regardless of its fuel, the chemicals consuming themselves (and the casing, evidence), though it'll still leave whatever it's touched burnt - the slender arrow that shoots past his head as he hauls himself back up on his horse doesn't surprise him, but he appreciates that whatever light-footed observer fired the shot didn't take his head off. (Good thing he apologized?)

The plan here is: distract the incoming agents long enough to handle whatever's going on further ahead without escalation. But as Bruce is about to discover, it's not him who needs any extra time. (Or anything of his design, really.)

In the clearing, the man being hanged struggles, startled at first, while the children immediately dart to their older brother. The woman turns to stare at the scene before her, head tilted. Curious. Behind her mask, something glows, like red eyes. There's a sense that she's smiling, somehow - and as she steps towards Ivy, the air around her warps, and the dirt under her boots darken, corrosive like rust on metal. At the same time, the man held by the vines manages to slice himself free - with telekinesis.

It's often a bit of an Oh moments for new arrivals when they realize the cops in Baedal aren't redshirts. Behind the wall of thorns, a horse skids to a halt.

Edited (there are probably more typos in there tbh) 2012-08-16 23:17 (UTC)

It does come as a brief surprise, but Ivy has spent too much time between Gotham and Metropolis to be particularly susceptible to Oh moments, and enough to develop a healthy caution regarding anyone who keeps their face hidden. But she's never been a fan of metahumans - a population in which, perhaps curiously, she does not count herself - and the fact that this is the force they're leveraging against crying children only drives her on.

At least the fact that she's been located means that she can do away with stealth. She drops from the canopy to the forest floor, and all around her the air begins to seethe with pheromones. She expects they have some sort of air filtration in their masks - they should, this clearly isn't amateur hour - but if she can bring even one of them under her influence or just throw them an inch off their game then it'll be a help to say the least.

The children have the sense to get themselves and their injured brother out of harm's way, pressed close to the edge of the camp, half-hidden behind a tree. Good. She gestures, and the blackened ground beneath the female agent opens, dense roots tearing a deep gouge in the earth. Simultaneously the thorned branches swell inward to tear at the man's clothes - if she can expose enough to touch and get close enough to do it then it'll be all over, and if nothing else it might distract him from coming to his partner's aid.

Some flicker in the back of Bruce's head thinks Sleeping Beauty? as he gets a proper look at the setting - which is not anything near what he expected (he expects everything and nothing, anymore). He prioritizes in an instant, and swings off his horse closest to where the children are before diving downward (he's been mauled by worse than thorns) and getting their attention. "This way," in the city's Ragamoll, and it's actually the youngest that takes the initiative to shove his injured brother through head first, under the opening Bruce is managing to make by pushing up a thorned branch.

He's already punctured in several places when - something - starts to mess with his head a bit, and he realizes there's some kind of mind altering substance... happening. Not quite dizzy yet, he says, "Hold your breath," and twitches with reflexes humans shouldn't have to intercept a telekinetic blast from a few yards away.

The male Militia agent, half-stuck as he is, has decided on a berserker attack now that he's noticed someone sneaking the kids out. His partner is thoroughly distracted, almost as if she's enjoying the increasing brawl with this strange plant-woman; their masks are indeed filtered, and so far her gear is intact. Bruce stays where he is, crouched amongst the thorns, and just waits - the agent barrels at him, disoriented, splitting apart the dirt and trees as he goes, dragging writhing vines, until there's nothing between him and the plain-clothed human man sitting there, and-

-in a heartbeat, Bruce stands up and slams the heel of his hand into the underside of the man's chin, grabs his face and jams an amulet into his mouth. It's the meta-disruptor one he nearly lost an arm figuring out how to forge in alchemy (Seoraj is going to kill him), but it does what it needs to do in this instance: instead of protecting Bruce, it shorts out this man's ability for just long enough to get knocked out cold.

Bruce's head swims immediately, worse than before. He coughs and staggers back, not sure what's happening but prioritizing getting out of immediate blowback range of the two women across the clearing from him.

Edited (now with a line about mask filters) 2012-08-17 00:20 (UTC)

There's something new happening. She's made aware of a new presence in the clearing, interfering with the thorns, and when she realises that the children are voluntarily crawling after it (him?) she distractedly waves a hand to make the way easier for them. With them out of harm's way and the male agent apparently no longer a threat, she can let the pheromones dissipate and concentrate on the woman. The gouge in the earth tears wider, roots tangling around her legs to drag her into the ravine, but there's that blackened corrosion again and she knows they won't last long. The forest aches.

"I'm sorry."

She has to be quick. One last push. The vines come from everywhere, crushingly tight around her throat and wrists, and Ivy clenches her fist and pulls like she wants to tear her in half - though with whatever abilities this woman has she'll be satisfied to simply force her unconscious.

Timely, the sisters arrive - though after a struggle. Sharial would not be held back, no matter how hard her frightened sister fought. She falls to her knees to scoop up the two smaller children and hold them close, the five of them speaking frantically, terrified and relieved. They're wary of Bruce on his immediate approach, but they accept him quickly enough when he gives Sharial all the cash in his wallet and instructs them to go east to Stoneshell and get the blacksmith to call help for them. Help, he clarifies, not the Militia. (Seoraj really is going to kill him.)

Leaving is probably a good idea, but Bruce ends up having to backtrack to grab his horse's reins and lead her away from the partition in the circlet of overgrown and hostile branches. He coughs again, yanks his shirt up over his mouth and nose, backs away some more - but stays.

The Militia woman is fighting, snapping vines and rotting leaves and roots, sending her corrosive toxins towards Ivy herself, but when she's winched it becomes harder and harder and pop- her shoulder's out of place, then her elbow, and a nearly mechanical-sounding hiss of discomfort emanates from her before her armor finally rends, exposing grey skin underneath - and most importantly, a break in her concentration, the rust halting, receding.

Edited (i will make a comment in this post i don't have to edit, i promise) 2012-08-17 01:10 (UTC)

Ivy hisses at the spatter of chemicals across her collarbones and arm - most toxins she simply shrugs off, but the corrosion bites at her just as it does at the vines - but she feels it when the plants are able to surge back into life, and seizes the opportunity instantaneously.

The long roll of a heavy root carries her across the clearing and the vines around one arm reach out, circling the woman's throat anew and going tight; her other hand is seething with toxins and she flattens it firmly against that exposed grey skin. Seconds pass, and finally her body goes slack, and if she's dead or unconscious Ivy isn't interested to know. She spreads her hands, and the vines drop her and the roots retreat.

She takes a deep breath and lets it out, but she doesn't relax. He's quiet, almost preternaturally so, but she doesn't need to be able to see or hear him to be aware of his presence. She turns in his direction and the arch of her eyebrow and the tension in her stance is an extremely clear indicator of Are we going to have a problem?

Christ.

(There's a clinical edge about it when Logan kills or near-enoughs Militia agents, despite his animal nature - strangling just has that personal something special.)

Bruce watches her, not expecting for a moment to go unnoticed. For all he knows, she's the forest itself. Green women aren't unusual in Baedal, but he still doesn't recognize her - he's not sure he wants to, given the percentage of safety anyone who hates the Militia has when interacting with like-minded peers - but even though he knows they need to get the hell out of Dodge with a swiftness before the rest of the garrison show up, he doesn't feel right bailing without at least mentioning that fact to whoever this is.

Face still covered, he raises his hands in a white-flag sort of gesture, and while his body language isn't hostile, it's far from submissive. No, but it would still be nice if you stopped screwing with my head.

It's a start. She lets herself calm a little further, her pheromones no longer clouding the air with every breath, and out in the open their efficacy will fade quickly enough. The vines around her arms are still moving, writhing like snakes in readiness to defend her.

She jerks her chin at the incapacitated female agent.

"The other?"

She doesn't see him and the forest can't sense his movement, but she'd be an idiot to reach any overly optimistic conclusions based on that.

He doesn't respond right away, instead letting his head clear a bit more so that he can assess the finer details of the scene before him. He leaves his face covered for now, and his gaze moves to where the man fell: his shape is still visible though the mostly-obscuring tangle of earth and wood. Bruce lowers one hand enough to point, taking one step after a moment, then another, moving slowly but deliberately in that direction.

Pending Ivy doesn't send a death-vine straight as his head for moving, he's going to go check him out and make sure he's really down. The agent is still laying face-first on the ground in the slim clearing created for the children's escape; Bruce shoves him over with his foot, crouches down, yanks something out of his mouth (good thing he's wearing riding gloves), and at this distance it's more than readily apparently that his jaw is broken. He's breathing but unconscious, and that's fine with Bruce, who doesn't think either agent got a good enough look at him to do any damage. And besides, he's fairly confident whatever brain spores this woman was emanating will mask all other signatures in the area.

Speaking of - he rises, and pulls his shirt collar down off his face, still staring at the KO'd agent for half a heartbeat before looking back up over at Ivy.

"More of them will be here in a minute," he says, and though he's soft-spoken, opening his mouth completes a trifecta of tells that Bruce isn't even aware he's giving. The barely-there coastal New Jersey Palisades accent, the fact that he laid out a super-powered cop without really trying, and his face all come together to turn on a giant proverbial neon sign over his head, even when alternate reality variables like his height and eye color are taken into consideration. With Tim, with that woman who said she was Jim Gordon's daughter, with the girl who had his symbol on - with them, he knows to act, to skew himself, but he has no context for the woman before him now.

Edited (too pretentious even for me) 2012-08-17 02:30 (UTC)

'More' doesn't sound promising. She's reasonably confident she could have taken down the two of them without help, and even wounded and working with unfamiliar plants, she doesn't think she'd be unable to at least get away clean if encountered by the rest of their unit. But 'confident' isn't 'certain', and she's not an idiot; the children and their family are gone and she's not going to engage in a fight for the sake of it. If that was all then this encounter would already be over.

And yet.

It's the accent that strikes her. Here in a foreign wood in a city in God-only-knows-where, a place that she's started to come to terms with having come to alone, he sounds like Gotham - more than she ever will, like he's lived there all his life. She stares at his exposed face, and there are differences, but they're practically cosmetic and she couldn't stop the word coming out of her mouth if she wanted to -

"Wayne."

Hell, Bruce is reasonably confident she could have taken them down without help, and a small part of him feels like a tool for having intervened - but he's headstrong, often ego-fueled, and has a bit of a problem with putting the brakes on momentum once he's started something, so those little shadows of humility are (alas) rarely at the forefront.

Which might be an interesting thing to contemplate, in either an existential realm or merely asking her who she is, what she does, except that he's just been cold busted by a green-skinned woman wearing plants and for a split-second he's got no earthly idea what to do about it.

In that split-second, he bluescreens a little. Not being in control about his identity isn't something that Bruce is used to, and barring aggressively telling too-young would-be vigilantes on no uncertain terms to go to hell or stay out of his way, he doesn't have a very involved contingency plan for being made. It's not like he can pretend to be an airhead playboy at these stakes. But it is only a split second, easy to miss, and when he recovers it's so quick as to be nearly seamless.

"I hear that a lot," he manages, casting both gaze and tone somewhat wary, somewhat weary, just like anyone constantly mistaken for someone else might be, particularly given present circumstances. It's dead-on in pitch and delivery, because he is such a good actor, and now he has to roll with it and hope she doesn't get her nails in under that brief falter (and all the while his mind is racing, Who are you?).

Edited (typos) 2012-08-17 03:34 (UTC)

There's something very wrong, very off about all this. She clearly knows him; there would be no earthly reason for him to pretend he doesn't recognize her, because what good would that do him? Furthermore, he didn't expect her to recognize him. She's genuinely a stranger. That's the only explanation for that brief flicker in his eyes, that fleeting uncertainty.

Ivy is very, very good at reading men.

And she understands the possibility of this not being the Bruce Wayne but merely a Bruce Wayne - that would account for the differences in build, the eyes - and that raises the question: how different is he? She knows that the Wayne of her Gotham isn't quite the benign, bumbling playboy he purports to be, she's seen a different side to him (to her cost, overall), but this Bruce Wayne - a Wayne who was able to take down a telekinetic with minimal effort, a Wayne who just happened to be in the right place at the right time -

[Something catches at her memory. Snags there, uncomfortable:

"You think Bruce Wayne is the answer to all your problems. I'm telling you, he's not."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because Bruce Wayne is -- ")

At least if he isn't the Wayne she knows, he isn't the Wayne who contributed heavily to a series of circumstances which ended in her having to dig her way out of her own grave. So there's that.

"I don't doubt it," she says, flatly, in the clearest 'calling bullshit' tone a semi-human voicebox can muster. She's conscious they're going to have company soon. She's not allowing him the luxury of chaos he can slip away into.

"I could stand to continue this conversation elsewhere."

Don't think for a second you can lose me. Not here.

Well, crap.

Bruce quickly flips through options in his head - if he can get away, he's pretty confident he prevent her from tracking him again; once he knows what he's up against it's difficult to get the drop on him, a feature that's known to infuriate and annoy even the most powerful of beings. However, he's also got a distinct suspicion that if he makes an even slightly obvious break for it he's going to end up in a world of pain.

(It's not the thorns that caution him, it's the sensation of his mind being clouded. This is no-one to be trifled with.)

He decides to play along, and fast - either way, they need to get out of here right now - and take the opportunity to bolt if he sees one. He's curious, yes, but as he figures this is somebody from one of those other worlds where he's lost his damn mind employing children, he's not keen on a heart-to-heart. (Curiosity is a feeling he can mitigate; emotions are easy things to douse.) He keeps his tone reasonably reluctant, only responding after a heartbeat to consider. "Couple miles north, the moonpools." He knows they'll be abandoned - both over reputation for being haunted and the traffic being mostly Hellsing agents, who tend not to be out during the day. "Better go around northwest to get there."

The Militia probably won't expect anybody coming back the other way to hide, and so he swings back onto his horse and starts to head out - he figures she can track him as long as he's on anything green, and doesn't expect to lose her - though as he moves, something about her profile picks at the back of his memory. Familiar, in a distant way. Huh.

She's already visited - spent quite a while there, in fact - and in what she considers to be a completely reasonable indulgence of paranoia she wonders if he knows that.

For the time being it doesn't matter. She takes to the canopy again. With help, she can move fast enough to more or less keep up with him - no interest at all in losing sight of him and having to track him through the forest, no need to make things more complicated than they have to be if she can possibly avoid it.

(If he's here, then how not-alone is she? Ivy tends to distance herself from the rest of her peers - temporary alliances of convenience, for the most part - and they tend to acknowledge that she's not a good enemy to have. And if any of Gotham's other circle are here, how active are they? Will it present a problem? Some are more likely than others to be capable of calling truce.)

There's a rumble of something behind her - mechanical, but absent of the scent of burning fuel. Something to consider later. For now her focus is on following him to the moonpools.

Ivy has no reason to worry, at present - of course he hasn't been keeping tabs on her, he didn't even know she existed until today! (From today onward is an entirely separate affair.)

He moves swiftly on horseback but not at anything nearing break-neck speed, favoring controlled stealth over barreling around like a crazy person fleeing the authorities on a highway. The way he picks through the land says he's been here a spell, knows his environment. If the trees have any opinion on him it's likely benign at best, save that whole 'lit some stuff on fire an hour ago' thing. He contemplates as he rides (at a few miles distance, he's got more than just a minute to do so), the familiarity of this woman's face nagging at him, along with the far more corporeal matter of a sharp burning in his left arm. He feels blood, knows he's injured; the thorn punctures aren't an issue, but blocking that tk-blast did something. He flexes his hand, his shoulder, his elbow, decides he's fine if he patches it, but that he'll probably drop in on Vanessza later anyway to be on the safe side (and also pass information along). He catalogs every move from above him, every possible route out, considers each stone-paved trail west, the streams, where they connect to the Gross Tar. He thinks about the Militia's ever-changing patrol schedules and the ratio of keeping his head down to doing stupid things after dark and how much that'll need to be adjusted to account for the buzz they've most certainly created today in the woods. He thinks about what kind of woman who's mostly a plant (maybe?) would stay in Gotham, would know Bruce Wayne - and to what extent. There was no tragedy, no desperate keening, no sycophantic desire in her blunt admission of his name, and that, at least, is comforting in its unfamiliar presentation.

(Bruce may have some issues about alternate realities. Just maybe.)

Near the pools, he slows to a stop, remaining atop his horse and canting his head over his shoulder slightly, towards the direction he knows she'll be hovering. It's patient but wary, a halfway concession to ascertain that she still wants to talk, that she's not going to turn immediately hostile - he's not above taking off and antagonizing the local eldritch demon to create a distraction to escape, but they're both adults here, and should be able to play nicely.

In theory.

Her bare feet touch the soft grass, and the vines loosen to let her down. In practice she has no specific grudges against this particular iteration of Bruce Wayne, and he clearly has information she needs, but she doesn't trust him as far as she could throw him (admittedly some distance). So while it would be nice to go down to the nearest pool and wash away the remaining chemical splashes on her skin, she's not prepared to turn her back on him for however long that'll take.

"So. Have I just become acquainted with what passes for local law enforcement, or is this something else?"

Her caution tells him that she isn't stupid, isn't cocky despite the obvious arsenal at her disposal. Something to respect, to be sure, but at present it just puts even more of a damper on the chances of him wiggling out of this. Slightly less irritating is the pragmatic question, versus an attempt to pick further at his identity. (Not everything is about you, Bruce.) After a pause to mull over his decision, Wayne comes down off his horse.

"Federal law enforcement," he clarifies, and starts pulling up his left sleeve - a black long-sleeved thing, pedestrian, revealing a leather bracer around his forearm, and no small amount of fresh and congealed blood matting over his skin. "The city is divided into cantons, and each canton has a sheriff's office and local police of varying degrees of competency, but those were agents of the Militia. The Militia has absolute power over the city." The bracer comes off, his sleeve gets yanked up around his shoulder; his skin looks like somebody took a warped cheese grater to it. How did the shirt survive? Super powers are mysterious. If it hurts, he shows no indication of it. He pulls something out of one of the saddle bags attached to his horse, maintaining a clear line of sight with her, holding up everything he takes out so she can see it's first aid supplies, not weaponry. "The Militia's role in maintaining the city's police state is visible in daily life on a sliding scale. Rich to poor, healthy to impaired, human to xenian."

It's the reader's digest digest version, and his conversational skills when he isn't putting up an act aren't exactly warm and inviting, but she seems quick enough on the uptake. He pulls the glove on his right hand off with his teeth, wipes his arm down with something, doesn't wince. "The people they were terrorizing back there were chased out of the Spatters by the Militia two weeks ago."

Edited (redundancy.. TWICE wtf pay attention, me) 2012-08-17 21:24 (UTC)

She doesn't ask what for. If this is the sort of police force that takes care of the rich and takes care of the poor, she doubts they'll need a reason. A number of questions are raised at this juncture - several pragmatic considerations regarding numbers and armaments and locations, and not least why she or any other nonhuman is 'invited' to Baedal if they're then to be considered second-class citizens (to say nothing of the fact that the Militia seems to be staffed by those somewhat other than human themselves) - but she knows this isn't a good time to conduct an interrogation.

He may not know the answers to her questions, anyway, and conjecture and ignorance are both already to hand. So she asks the question he can answer, although whether or not he will is up in the air:

"And you just happened to be in the area at the same time they were." The actual question being No, you didn't; what exactly is your stake in this?

The Militia is not the first nor will it be the last police force to be fueled in large part by hypocrisy, just like Baedal is not revolutionary in its habit of attempting to instill and exploit a pervasive self-hatred of minority statuses upon society. It's the way of things, human, alien, vampire; there's something about beings capable of higher thought that wants endlessly for dominance. This city hosts a grim case study, with innumerable variables trapped in a bottle.

He's got a roll of gauze out and is sticking one end to the oozing blood on his arm when he laughs in one exhaled noise, short and wry and nearly entirely devoid of humor. "Today? Yes." Bruce looks up to meet her gaze, smiling in a barely-there way that's a bit private and a lot rusty. "I stable my horse in the southern farmlands. I guess it was just a good day to be outclassed."

Perhaps unexpected quantities of honesty.

As per the conclusions Ivy's reached herself. So much for the Wonderous Citizenship of Baedal.

She inclines her head; there's no good humor in her narrow returning smile. "And I guess you always go out equipped for this sort of encounter on a just-in-case basis."

The first aid kit is one thing, but - she hadn't seen what it was exactly he'd retrieved from the agent's mouth, but it's rather telling that he had something to hand in the first place that perhaps smoothed the way to taking him out.

Edited 2012-08-17 23:01 (UTC)

"Yep."

Well. He does.

Bruce tears off the roll of gauze (with his teeth, again) and tucks it away. He sees no reason to lie about that - it's the wild west out here half the time and he's a mere mortal - there are an infinite amount of reasons why he might be prepared in these ways. Maybe he's a paramilitary medic, maybe he works for Hellsing, maybe he's a Navy SEAL (maybe he's fucking Batman). And besides, you don't have to be the most unique snowflake to find the Militia infuriating.

"You always go out geared up for large scale biological warfare?"

Edited 2012-08-17 23:26 (UTC)

"As you might have noticed," given the fact that she's wearing foliage rather than clothes and is clearly short on storage solutions, "I don't go out geared up for anything. I just don't take kindly to that sort of brutal suppression."

Not unless she's the one carrying it out, but the Militia isn't the only thing around here that functions with the help of a healthy amount of cognitive dissonance.

Flippancy may be a refuge of liars, but at least he can assume with some kind of certainty that she's a being who is meant to be this way, and not manufacturing it. Interesting.

Also interesting is that, after he pulls his shirt sleeve down again and begins putting his gloves back on, the nagging thread in his mind unravels. At the same time that he's reflecting that he's surprised it took him this long (maybe it's the green), he has a pointedly incredulous moment - what was she doing her postgrad work in, wasn't it biochemical engineering? And now a plant person?

The look that comes over his face is contemplative, critical, and somewhat calculating. Unlike her spontaneous declaration earlier, he's not quite sure if he's going to spit out whatever it is that just occurred to him.

She's been watching him carefully throughout - his tells are revealing but faint and very, very fleeting. If she has to guess she'll suspect he's reached some sort of conclusion - about what's just happened, about what's going to happen next, about her? - but clearly he's not going to give up the goods unprompted. And she doesn't imagine that prompting him is guaranteed to make it happen either, but nonetheless:

"...What?"

He knows she knows who Bruce Wayne is - whether personally or not, he can't imagine she didn't expect him to at least recognize her, given what there is to recognize. He also knows she didn't buy his brush-off of being called on it, but - well, maybe she'll be convinced over time, if he keeps it up. It's a crap shoot. The alternative is to just go ahead and confirm it, and see where it leads.

Despite his paranoia, he's got more to gain than lose, probably.

"Pam Isley."

A muted statement (accusation?) but not a question. There's no way she'd recognize him and not be who she reminds him of from home, in some parallel world.

For a split second her eyes narrow and her whole body goes rigid and she does not like to hear her old name. Not from Bruce Wayne, or whatever else Bruce Wayne might happen to be. The only person who still calls her Pam back home is Riddler, not because of any friendly understanding between them but because he's long since been made aware that she doesn't find him worth the energy she'd expend on killing him. Even the Arkham staff understand that Poison Ivy is not a sobriquet but her entire self; she was one thing once, and she's another now.

But whatever echo of herself exists in his Gotham is apparently not so fussy about issues of nomenclature, and she forces herself to relax marginally.

"Not any more."

The confirmation that this woman knows an older Bruce Wayne is not shocking to him; most everyone he's come across does. It's something that grates on him, frankly, the patronizing sense that comes with it, the fascination, like he's a museum exhibit or an unearthed time capsule to people from a technicolor world he can't understand. He wonders if he still looks young, or if the lifestyle's taken too much of a toll on him by now - two years ago in a bar in between worlds, some guy named Richard Grayson followed him into the damn bathroom before he realized they were about the same age and nearly choked on his own tongue skittering away. This is - not that, not by far, and even with the venom in that look she shoots him, it's better. In perhaps a completely contextually inappropriate way, he feels comforted by being disdained a bit. (That there are things wrong with Bruce is not new information.)

Once more, he raises his hands: a concession, it won't happen again.

"What can I call you?"

Edited (woah what happened to that sentence ) 2012-08-18 23:40 (UTC)

It occurs to her, very briefly, that she could say absolutely anything. Even if this place is lousy with Gothamites, people who know her better than this particular Bruce Wayne does, they have no way of knowing she knows them - if there are two versions of Gotham there could be hundreds. She could clothe herself in the camouflage of something altogether less toxic and lay low, at least for a while.

But she's already burnt out any possibility of her being considered benign by at least one significant facet of Baedal's population, and even if she hadn't, it's not a façade she's particularly interested in cultivating. She hates masks.

"Ivy. Poison Ivy."

But not highly on-the-nose monickers, apparently. (If there is any impulse to raise an eyebrow or balk even in the slightest, it's smothered out of half politeness and half "Batman" isn't subtle either.)

"It's nice to meet you, Ivy." Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. He's something-like-satisfied she was there to wreck those agents, anyway. And then, flatter: "I'm Tom."

It's clear he doesn't expect her to believe he's not Bruce, but if she doesn't have to go by her birth name, then neither does he. Tom is how he's known here, and it's the name he uses - presumably it's not as stealthy to a Gothamite who knows Thomas Wayne exists, but it's mild enough to be getting on with, in any event.

"If you insist," she says, chin tilting up a little, enough there in her tone and posture to let him know she finds this ridiculous but she's accepting it. She's a lot of things but you couldn't accuse her of subtlety, generally speaking. "Are we likely to speak again?"

Nothing to hint at whether or not she's in favor of that happening, not least because she hasn't decided one way or another just yet.

"If you want to," he supposes. Bruce doesn't make a habit out of inflicting his presence on anyone (especially women) who don't welcome it - hell, even the people who do want to ransom his time for socialization have to crowbar it a little. There are other avenues and other people for her to go through to be critical of the Militia that aren't via him.

He digs a slightly beat up business card out of his pocket (it looks like he's been carrying it around for a while; he sticks another one that looks like it's for take-out back in his pocket) and offers it to her, still keeping his distance.

"That's the address for a group who'll help people like who were camping out here. They don't charge anything and they don't require identification. If you come across anyone else, it might be safer for them to start hiding in plain sight."

Versus out here, isolated and alone. (Until now?)

She reaches out halfway with her hand and lets a vine extend from her wrist to close the rest of the distance, snatching the offered card. Her eyes flicker over the type for a second, long enough to absorb the salient information, not long enough to let Bruce - sorry, Tom - leave her peripheral vision.

"And I suppose you have no guarantee, beyond your ample trustworthiness, that this isn't simply a front for the Militia to round up its more evasive clientele." If it was 'her' Bruce she probably wouldn't have said it, but she isn't going to make any assumptions about 'Tom's' opinion on social cleansing.

There was a time when her vine-appendages might have weirded him out. That time was before he got stuck in the thirties with Cthulhu. Somewhere in the back of his head, Bruce laments that kind of naivety. (Sigh.)

"You could always scope it out, I guess." Something like a verbal shrug is buried in his tone. He can't make her trust or believe him, so he's not going to do a song and dance to try. She can scope it out or she can chuck the card - the important thing is he passed along the opportunity. And besides: "There'd be less convoluted ways for me to try and screw you over, if I actually wanted to."

Edited (paying attention while i type would help, probably) 2012-08-24 00:32 (UTC)

She gives the card another passing glance, then it disappears into the leafy thicket she's wearing.

"I don't doubt it." And she wasn't thinking of herself so much as the family he redirected. But she'll leave that there; she has, after all, come from an environment where needless convolution is a way of life and the mere existence of simpler means isn't a reason to use them.

"Thank you for the information." It's not so much actual courtesy as a means of underlining that their meeting is over.

He could have sent that family right into approaching backup, had he wanted to do that. Convolution isn't really his thing (unless it needs to be, of course). But he nods, accepting if not polite.

No ninja tricks here, when he leaves - he just grabs the leather lead below his horse's bridle and heads out, picking a slower path through the trees north to Sobek Croix proper. Zipping back to his apartment or Stoneshell at the moment might look suspiciously convenient, so. Time for another vaguely irritating day out.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

if travel is searching and home has been found

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sorry about the late!

no worries brah!

let's try this once more

8D

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