multiversallogs | ( open ) liberate your sons and daughters the bush is high but in the hole there's water

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( open ) liberate your sons and daughters the bush is high but in the hole there's water

Who: Everyone!
What: Events around the city, any time.
Where: Everywhere in Baedal.
When: Whenever you’d like.
Notes:
Behold, your all-purpose open game log. There are a couple pre-written starters to help you generate new and open CR, and you may also use this post to start your own group activities or planned threads. GO WILD!
No one is late to this post. You may use it forever.
The companion thread for this post is right here!
DON'T THINK TOO HARD ABOUT IT JUST RP.
Helpful links: Neighbourhoods, City Map.
Lucky Pastry Advice for the Month of Velldaren: A truly rich life contains love and art in abundance.

Warnings: Zombie horrors in the appropriately titled ZOMBIES! thread, otherwise TBA. Please put warnings in subject lines of your comments if content warrants one.

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"They're a private agency that works with the supernatural community." With a wince, Sebastian sits down on the curb across from the house and rubs his bad knee before offering Alley a scritch behind his ears. He is a good dog and did his job well.

"They do warding, help those who have special dietary needs, things like that."

"That is probably so. But I know better than to speak so quickly, and you are obviously more than just your shape."

Wh--

Whatever that means. Thor says it as effortless as he does words of cosmic power and attempted breakouts that scratched the surface enough to invoke divine intervention, but not to create a rain of monsters. Just water, and strange abilities.

Thor rakes rat-tail wet locks of blonde off his face, breezing by with; "Do you know where I may obtain another speaking tablet?"

Miraculously, Jae doesn't take that as weird. Of all the things happening right now, the notion that a god can tell he uses magic is way, way down on the weird list, right up in the 'completely normal, given context' category.

Because that's totally what Thor means. Magic. Since Jae is a sorcerer.

Yes.

"Did you break your CiD?" ... Yeah, looking at the mess out here, he isn't surprised. "I think you can get help through the job office, they're the sort of unofficial new people social workers."

Edited (where did that word come from) 2012-09-24 20:06 (UTC)

Polite society usually expects a polite offer to right any wrong visited upon a polite stranger, even after a polite refusal, but this man genuinely does not seem to care. And that suits the Rani just fine. She can play at being nice, jump through all the ought to hoops one is expected to obey, but if she doesn't have to...

She watches him for a long moment, watching the way the spectacle above is clearly taken in, deeply, but there is no outward display--yet another thing polite society expects. While she may be reasonably well-versed in their ways, the Rani is far enough removed--by her own choice--from it to not be able to fully grasp its more subtle cues. She cannot read a person, cannot know what they might be thinking, not in the instinctual way most can glance at another and draw conclusions. So she cannot tell if this man is utterly lacking in I care about this sort of interest, or if he is so very interested he is lost in what he sees.

"An interest of yours?" A shoulder raises, head tilting ever so slightly. You know, all this, what's above us.

Lena doesn't know if she's supposed to be lurking around these gardens after dark. She's still not real clear on the rules in the city, and she guesses she should look into that sometime.

But the inn still creeps her out, and she's happy to spend as much time away from it as she can. Echomire isn't terribly far from Mog Hill. Mostly-abandoned areas don't bother her; in fact, the area and these gardens in particular remind her of Ravenwood, the family estate back in South Carolina. There's that sense of old history, of inexplicable connections to the past, and the kind of melancholy a place has when it's seen too much, let too much time soak into its grounds.

Lena feels right at home here.

She's so caught up in wandering the spooky grounds, weaving in and out of statues, that she doesn't realize there's someone else in the gardens until she pops out of a row of shrubs nearly in front of him. "Oh!" she exclaims, throwing up a startled hand. Maybe it's to ward him off, maybe the hand comes up out of some habit, some power she was on the verge of bringing to bear. It's hard to say if it's a defensive or offensive gesture.

She lowers her hand, sheepish, watching for any sign of trouble or any hint that this is something other than running into another night-time wanderer. "Excuse me," she offers, "I'm sorry. I didn't know anyone else was here."

"Yeah!" Oh good, yes, he's interacting socially and isn't receiving any weird looks (sometimes people are hard, okay). Although he tones down the enthusiasm with, "Yeah, I got here a couple of months ago but my friend was here before me and he's been sick, so."

He shrugs, feeling a bit bad about lying. But it's a life-long habit and even if vampires were out in the open here, he's fairly certain telling someone you don't know 'my friend had a problem shaking off his blood addiction' is probably not the best way to go.

"That's why I'm here. They were nice to me when we were struggling so it pays to be nice back."

His initial response would seem to indicate the former, in the British tendency to misdirected understatement: "Passingly."

But aware that one word replies are not considered acceptable by polite society (and he is not yet aware that neither of them have to follow those rules, since neither of them give a flying fuck about them), Rodolphus lowers his eyes again to make eye contact.

"Of course, they are not 'my' stars." As if, his voice implies, the light reaching people's eyes from so far away that the star may be dead by now could belong to anyone, but you know what I mean. "But I do not miss them."

Lena would be surprisingly understanding about vampires and the like, but so my family has quite a few members who aren't fully human, there's my uncle the former incubus and my cousin the succubus and my aunt the shapeshifter and did I mention I can mess up the weather and cast spells because I can is not something you just announce.

She smiles and nods, absently tucking her hair behind her ear. "They seem nice here. I was looking for something to do since I don't have a job yet. I thought I'd try to hlp since I was here."

And then, after a pause, because while she's well-mannered she doesn't always properly remember how to interact with people: "I'm Lena."

One eyebrow raises along with a nearly imperceptible lift of her shoulders, a shrug coming from someone who doesn't care enough to complete the gesture.

"I find myself in agreement on both counts." She doesn't miss her own universe, not in the sentimental way. She wants to be back there because it's where she belongs, but that's a tactical assessment, not some yearning from her pair of hearts.

"I thought I would come anyway. I thought I might at least learn something about this place."

Having run the gamut of his capacity to do the polite society thing, Rodolphus nods in agreement. He feels exactly the same way, so there's no reason to repeat it, right? Of all the burdens of polite conversation, it's the groping he hates the most. It seems you can have a stock of the correct answers, yet never truly be prepared for every interaction. Of course, he could try having a real conversation. She seems somewhat open to that, and if she were not (he thinks, unrepentant as only boring people who know they're boring can be) she shouldn't have said anything.

"It is not a place which yields knowledge," he says after a moment of careful assessment. "It yields mostly theater. Beautiful theater, such as this." He indicates the sky. "Yet what can we possibly learn from it? Our position in the universe, or in relation to other galaxies? It is only a different kind of Fog."

"And yet," she says, surveying the crowd with a disinterested gaze, "so many are taken with it. They allow it in such number that they must want it. I suppose for many it's an easier alternative to thinking for themselves."

She gazes back up at the shooting stars, magnified above their heads. "How wonderful," she muses, drily, "for the city that so much of its kidnapped populace feels that way." It must work wonders for control and for keeping them under whomever's thumb.

"Of course they want it," he says, calm in the irony of his circular reasoning as he looks back up, "it's beautiful."

And maybe he's talking about more than Baedal here; maybe there are one or two stars he misses from this sky. It is easy to ignore, however, as was his intention and as probably suits the Rani's social intuition. What's left of the cocoa is tepid. He tastes it on a whim, and it tastes exactly like tepid free cocoa.

"Let them." Rodolphus concludes with a shrug. Who am I to know better? The Rani must have a different perspective, but he hardly suspects how different.

Hal isn't commonly found on nighttime strolls-- or strolls at all, of late. It's been months since he'd left the Inn, or even his room therein, without Tom to accompany him, relying on the werewolf's presence to remind him what he's doing (~~starving,~~ abstaining) and why he's doing it (guilt, self-respect, basic decency, ~~temporary insanity~~). But while Tom was out at some charity event, they'd run out of dish soap, and it had been such a simple thing, such a basic necessity, that he'd thought, at five-hundred twenty-five years old he had damn well better be capable of going to the corner store.

And he was, actually. It was only on the walk back that he'd passed a group of cruorvore teens on their way to the river by way of Bloody Sunday, and the smell-- he could kill whoever thought blood milkshakes were a good idea, but at that moment he was substantially more concerned about slaughtering half of Mog Hill.

So he'd walked as fast as he could in a less populated direction, walked until he found space to breathe, and eventually found himself on a bench in a moss-covered courtyard in the monster garden, frazzled but taking deep, measured breaths. There were statues in the enclaves that might have been young women once, but their heads and limbs had been worn away by time -- or may be they'd been carved that way to start. Hard to tell.

In any case, he isn't paying much attention to them or any other part of the garden, at least not until he notices he's not alone. And that the other late-night wanderer is also lacking a heartbeat.

"Oh, for Christ's sake," he mutters none too quietly, dropping his forehead against the heel of his hand. You can't throw a stone in this city without hitting another member of the undead.

Irene's shoes send up tiny explosions of water whenever she takes a step, and the wind is apparently jealous of her umbrella. She's got her CiD held to her ear, but the rain steals her words, leaving only fragments of strained sentences audible; "...can't...dear..."

She doesn't look at Don, but she's seen him; he's quietly unmistakable as the only thing on the street not moving. "...then my answer's still--" Her voice doesn't fade out into the rain this time, but is cut short when her umbrella is dragged inside out, looking like a time lapse flower blooming on a television screen. She determinedly doesn't swear, clenching CiD between damp shoulder and powdered cheek as she tries to shake it back into shape, holding it into the wind and letting it reverse its own damage. She holds it up again, for what good it might still do, and moves faster. Her voice is artfully threaded through with the suggestion of things she is forcing herself not to say. It's a tone she's proud of. "I've got to dash. I've got so much on. Tomorrow night? --don't say that. I'm going." And she's gone, to him.

She slips in beside Don, still without looking, removing her CiD from her ear- there's powder smeared across the screen. She lets down her umbrella and lets it rest against the bench, listening to the rain thunder against the awning. And finally she glances across and reaches across, removing a sticky blue string from Don's shoulder and holding it up to where the light would be if the clouds would move.

"What a terrible party you've been to," she remarks, and a drop of water slips from one swirl of her hair down her neck, under her collar and right down her spine, like drops of water always seem to.

She supposes there's a sense to it--and it's not as if she hasn't held a populace under her thumb, relying on their interests elsewhere, on misdirection. But it chafes now that she's under the thumb, not the one pressing down.

She lets his remark about beauty go; it seems easy enough to do so, he doesn't seem to be anticipating a response. And honestly, it's easier than getting into why she finds beauty useless, especially in a place where so many have come to lose themselves in that idea.

"I'm the Rani," she offers, finally, one concession to the rules of interaction.

He looks back at her again with an expression of mild interest which has to do with his finally sensing they seem to be on the same page in regard to polite interaction. There's nothing he could really point to in her manner that would support that conclusion; it could even be wishful thinking on his part. Yet he feels it's acceptable to return the name and not offer any other normally obligatory gesture.

"Rodolphus Lestrange," he answers. Rani sounds a title, but he has no official title to give her in response. Nothing he'd care to claim here, anyway, apart from 'Hellsing agent', which he deems unnecessary for now.

She nods, giving him a cursory glance in response to his name, then filing it away mentally. She doesn't try to shake his hand, or offer any of those empty pleasantries like how nice to meet you. And it pleases her that he doesn't seem to require them.

"How do you make your living here?" And even that's not polite conversation; she finds it beneficial to know what people do, how they might be of use to her.

"I work for a guild." Not everybody is a fan of Hellsing, but he will answer if she presses. "And you?"

This question is only polite seeming. Rodolphus is genuinely curious. 'What do you do' is almost always a much more interesting answer in Baedal than it is elsewhere.

"I work for myself." It may sound rather more self-important than the standard answer to that question, but it's true. "I'm a scientist--I study many areas but my specialty is in neurochemistry and neurobiology. I contract with interested parties for products. It's serving me well so far in the city.

Well, at least they have that in common.

"Tom." There will presumably be no hand shaking since they're both of the age group where...no, names and possibly a hand in the air as way of 'hello' is fine.

"Yeah, same. I've mostly been doing odd bits and ends. Still can't really believe it's real, to be honest, let alone getting a job and settling." Mostly because he's been too occupied with staying afloat until Hal was better, so the period of being dazed and confused has lasted a little longer than for most.

On the bench Don rolls the string in his fingers before letting it swoon to the ground, knocks some of the rain from his hat. His shirt's pasted to his back. In a minute even the relief at having something over his head'll start to turn soggy. He closes his eyes. Smooths his hair and submits to the rain's patter.

The wind snatches a shred of conversation, splits the darkness in a flash of blue submerged in green, deep but luminous. Answer. Don blinks as if he has something in his eye, tastes honey beading on his tongue. I've—dash—tomorrow. He's sitting up, sitting forward. The words are chipped. Honey puddles in his mouth, sweet and sluggish. He swallows it down; in the corner of his eye an umbrella collapses to a black streak.

“What a terrible party you've been to,” Irene Adler says. He's running a hand along her voice. It flakes at his touch, peels like an aging coat of paint. Oceanic in color and drier than anything in the next five blocks.

Don's fingertips rub together. He's never looked at her like this; he's never seen her like this.

“There's another kind?” he says haltingly, treading a damp patch of sand. Sawdust, green beans off the vine, and something slight and sour opening like a seam between those flavors. His voice is sickly purple—lavender.

He blinks again, then has the sense to turn his head.

Lena nods, quiet, grave. "I know. I keep thinking it's just all some dream. Or some mistake. And tomorrow morning I'll be back home and everything will be..." Well. Not okay, that's not really possible back home.

"...like it's supposed to be." She shrugs, almost sheepish. "I guess it's silly to keep thinking that. Maybe it'll get easier when I find a job? Something steady to do."

She takes the next basket, dragging it nearer and inspecting its contents. "Is your friend doing better?"

"There's another kind," she promises him in a tone of sincere reassurance, lashes lowering for a moment. She starts to roll the string between her fingers into a faded blue ball before flicking it into the rain with a disdainful sort of flourish, like she's attempting to offend the weather as much as it offends her. Another cold droplet snakes down her neck -- around her neck. She avoids a grimace upon finding a sodden tendril of hair sticking to her skin and tries to one-handedly nurse it back into place. Then there's another, spiralling down from her updo and slithering down her neck, leaving a wet trail; she plucks at her hairstyle with affected absent-mindedness. A pin falls, accidental and entirely inaudible, but Irene feels the slight loss of tension -- the first rumblings of an avalanche. She pulls her hand away swiftly so as to not to bring on total collapse. This, she thinks, is what she needed Kate for. (No, it isn't).

"Did you storm off in disgust?" she asks. He's distracted -- no, he's confused. No, he's damp and miserable. She touches his upper arm with just her fingertips, not to pick off any more of the debris of that assumed terrible party but as a quietly pointed reminder that she's here and that she likes to be looked at. A curl unravels and another pin drops.

Edited 2012-10-11 00:07 (UTC)

Hasibe's house tends to have a lot of foot traffic, but today, there has been none. It's quiet around Amaryllis, except when the up-and-coming actress who lives there comes out to sit in the autumnal sun and shiver against the breeze, two things that tend to go together this time of year. No matter how bright the sky looks, the actual temperature reminds her that things are changing all around her. If she looks closely, she can feel it, the dying and recharging of their bodies by their individual cells; had she not been blessed with a re-binding of her power, that sensation would come to her unbidden.

Anyway, it's not as though she really feels the cold.

But she pretends.

She takes her sunglasses and her dog and goes back inside the house, slipping off her shoes, barefoot in a long white tank dress that is opaque until the hips, and then becomes gradually more sheer. The hem is some sort of magical silk that is downright opalescent, like a glimmer of water and transparency by her lower calves and ankles.

No one would think that she is waiting for something, or someone. But she is, and she's been feeling a little bit strangely toward his circumstances today.

(They all lead dangerous lives, and she would never try to change it.)

Between Hasi being Hasi and the reaction of her dog whenever Bruce is in range, he doesn't need to knock - he does anyway, because it feels like a novelty whenever he does. Because he knocked when he first went to find her, when he showed up in Baedal. He realizes as he knocks that he still thinks of her - when he does think of her - as living in that first apartment all this time.

He doesn't really have a reason for showing up. It's been a while since he's showed up on her doorstep purposeless and casual, and for a moment it feels like it's been years, like the last time was in a bar in another world. He drops his hand back to his side and tries to wonder if it's just the fog contamination that's making him feel strange, lately. But he knows it's not.

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( open ) liberate your sons and daughters the bush is high but in the hole there's water

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( hasi's house/amaryllis. for bruce; closed. )

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