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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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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.

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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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