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Who: Xas & You
What: Feels about religion, followed by feels about plants, and also new acquaintances/friends/enemies.
Where: In or around Chimer. Specifically the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in the morning to early afternoon, then the Chimer City Trail Park - but he could have wandered elsewhere by nightfall, although he'll have a plant with him.
When: All day Shundi.
Notes: I have never done this summary-y type thing before. I'm sorry if it's the worst. Also, a rough approximation of clothes, minus the goofy hat and creepy mannequin face.
Warnings: None, I think. If anything comes up in the comments, I'll edit accordingly.

It takes Xas a few weeks to reach out to God, and when he does, it's less desperation than experimentation. He just wants to know. Before they took his wings, he used to hear God all the time, feel Him everywhere, feel himself pulled toward Him like a moth to light. But then he stopped listening, and now Xas isn't sure if the silence is his own doing or if God doesn't reach here, the same way he didn't reach Hell.

He's already in Chimer peering up at the spires of the Cathedral when he gives in and tries. ("All right," he says quietly, a little resentfully, and waits in vain.) He goes inside in time to catch the end of the service - his first time in a church, to add to his string of recent firsts - and sits in the pews for a while afterward, giving a set of stained-glass apostles a rather challenging look.

He always did think humans' idea that God waited in a house for them to deign to visit Him was a little ridiculous, if endearingly earnest. As if He were their patient grandmother.

When he finally leaves the church, it's half boredom and half frustration, and he's glad to stumble almost immediately onto a park and to almost as immediately get lost in it. He's never seen most of the plants before, and by dusk he's on his knees in the dirt, scraping at dirt to get his hands under the roots of a small flowering shrub. It's gotten him into trouble before, this habit of plant-taking, but he doesn't think anyone will miss it.

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"What are you doing?"

Possibly Xas was not expecting a tiny girl to be in the park at this hour. Possibly no one is expecting this, which will surely be their downfall because unexpected Megans are the most alarming types of Megans. Either way, she's here, sucking down some kind of slush thing that isn't a proper Slurpee but is pretty close. Her pupils are roughly the size of nickels, overtaking her irises so that the entirety of her eye appears black -- one of the upsides of being freaky-looking is that it's hard to tell when she's high.

She's standing in shorts that are extremely seasonally inappropriate and a top that is inappropriate at all times of the year, gazing with fascination at the dude digging up plants. That kind of looks like fun, though, she's considering helping.

It takes Xas a moment to look up from the shrub, and when he does it takes him several more moments to answer. He's busy staring - at her hair, a little, and for a second at her wholly unseasonal outfit, but mostly at her wings. They look like insect wings. He doesn't know how she would reasonably be able to fly with them. Probably poorly, if at all. It's a thought more hopeful than analytical.

"I'm going to pot it," he eventually says, tone distant. He looks back down at the plant, then tilts his head at her. Ridiculous wings aside, she looks out place and potentially cold. "What are you doing?"

"Watching you pot a plant, apparently," she says with a bright smile. Yes, in practically her underwear at dusk, that's what she's doing. Megan makes great life choices. She blinks placidly at him for a few moments, glancing at him, to the plant, and then back at him. "Are you allowed to do that?"

She desperately hopes the answer is no because then it instantly becomes cool.

"I don't know," Xas says, glancing back down at the plant as well. He saw several like it along the trail and doesn't think he's destroying anything rare or particularly valuable, but maybe so. Or maybe there are rules about plants here that he's unaware of. "No one has stopped me yet. Can you really fly with those?"

It's not an elegant transition. It's not a transition at all. But it's hard for him to focus on the plant when someone is standing right there being insensitively winged.

"Uh huh!" To demonstrate, she starts flapping them, lifting herself about six inches off the ground, bent slightly forward with her toes dangling underneath her. In motion, they sound about like what one would expect -- a humming-buzzing, loud enough to be unmistakably coming from something human-sized and not an actual insect.

By all rights this ought to be impossible, there's no way those things are sturdy enough or large enough to support her weight, even if she's pretty tiny... and yet, it's happening. After a moment she stops and drops back on the ground, catching herself with a slight wobble.

"Oh," Xas says, and he thinks - vindictively - that she isn't very good at it. But it's still better than he can do. And she's just a kid. "I've never seen wings like that," he says, trying to force himself to warm up to her through sheer force of will. "They're pretty."

They are. Impractical, but pretty.

Steph doesn't look like Steph right now. The disguise is pretty decent, considering this isn't her forte and she hasn't got much to work with, but Babs had helped out which made quite a difference; changing the dsguise from 'passable' to 'good'.

When she comes running through the park near where Xas is wandering, she looks like a seventeen year old boy, with scruffy, short, dark hair and a lot of layers (binding only does so much). There's blood in her mouth, a bruise already forming on her cheek, and her knuckles are scraped. She's working on a persona, and losing fights happens to be a part of that, which is why she'd had to run from a kid about a foot taller than her.

"I'll give you five shekels if you point him in the wrong direction," she says when she's within ear shot of Xas, the offer clearly directed at him, and then she scrambles up a tree to hide.

Half a minute later, a burly eighteen year old boy follows after Steph, obviously searching for someone.

Xas had gone back to poking at a vine almost immediately - more because the vine is threaded with veins of curiously bright orange than because he has much of an instinct for looking natural in these sorts of situations, and what is he going to do with five shekels, anyway? - but he stops when the second boy appears. Whatever disinclination he had to get involved evaporates once he sees how comparatively large he is.

"If you're looking for a boy half your size," he says disapprovingly, waving a hand down the path, "he went that way."

The larger boy gives a cruel grin and runs off with a muttered "thanks".

Steph waits until he's completely out of view to jump down, landing neatly and apparently having cleaned herself up a bit, since there's less blood on her face.

"That was too close," the voice she's putting on is a little rougher than usual, kind of growly, but not that much deeper. Trying to put on a deep voice always sound horribly fake, "Thanks for the save."

The grin she gives is small, but genuine, and she starts fishing in her pocket for those five promised shekels.

"Oh, don't," Xas says. He already doesn't know what to do with the money they gave him when he arrived. They probably based the budget on creatures who need food. He inclines his head and considers the boy, trying to decide whether or not he's actually done a good deed. "Did you rob him?"

"No!" The expression is something between a childsh pout and angry indignation, "He was picking on one a'the girls, so I smacked him."

It's true, part of this persona requires getting people to trust her, and beating up bullies tends to be a good method of gaining trust.

"I see," Xas says, and he'd like to stay guarded, but there's a smile pulling at one corner of his mouth. The conviction is endearing and a little refreshing; maybe Xas should have spent more time with children instead of overly-thoughtful and complicated adults. "Here, I think I have a handkerchief," he adds, patting at his pockets until he finds it and offers it out.

The hankerchief gets eyed warily for a moment before being accepted and used to wipe down bloody knuckles and scrub some of the dirt off Steph's face, "M'guessing you don't want this back." It's kind of a question, but Steph is almost 100% sure of the answer; no one wants a bloody handkerchief.

"Whatcha doing?" Because Xas seemed kind of fascinated by a plant, which is super weird in this persona's opinion.

"Just looking," Xas says, turning his head to look back to the vine for a second. "I don't recognize most of the species here, it's." Disconcerting, but also a little exciting. He thinks he might try to take a plant back to the Inn with him. He doesn't finish the thought, though, and holds out his hand instead - for a shake, not for the handkerchief. That the boy can keep. "I'm Xas."

"If you're into plants y'should check out the Vivarium, it's got all sorts of weird stuff," Steph's never been to the Vivarium, but she once got trapped in a conversation with a biology student who went on and on about it.

The handkerchief gets shoved unceremoniously in a pocket, and then Steph shakes Xas' hand, her grip firm, "Toby."

There's a demon in the park. Well, a half-demon, anyway. He's sitting on one of the benches, which is sagging just the tiniest bit with the weight of him. A sword, golden handled and sheathed in a scabbard attached to a baldric, rests next to him, slid through the gap in the slats of the bench seat. On the other side of him there's a bag of bread, but since the season and the lack of a pond to flock to conspire to deprive him of birds to feed the bread to, the bag just sits there untouched. He's got his arms stretched out over the top of the bench's back on either side of him -- the right ending in a hand that looks like it should be on a statue twice his size, with three fingers and a thumb and possibly a little something extra on the inside -- and his head is tipped back, looking up into the sky in apparent contemplation.

The demons Xas is used to aren't quite so large or so brightly colored, and the lack of full horns throws him, but Xas doesn't quite manage to pass the bench without stopping to stare. It's not one of Lucifer's, exactly, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have similarly malicious tendencies.

That probably means he should keep walking and let the people or gods or whatever else is in charge here handle it. He's not always very clever, however, and he moves closer instead, arms wrapped protectively around his middle. "Excuse me," he says, and then stops, trying unsuccessfully to think of a reasonably polite way to ask someone if he's a danger to society. He settles on a clumsy, "Are you allowed to be out here?"

Being addressed pulls Hellboy back from whatever thoughts he'd been having (or, rather, trying to not have, a sort of impromptu unstructured meditation). He heard the question, but it takes him an extra couple of seconds for his brain to fully spin back up enough to process it. As it does so, he straightens up and looks at Xas, the brow under his horn stumps crinkles in gathering annoyance.

"Excuse me, pal?" he asks. "'Allowed' ?! Is that some Xenian bigotry crap?" He doesn't reach for Excalibur yet, but he does lean forward, ready to spring up and draw if Xas turns out to be some human-supremacy nut looking to start a fight. (He apparently does not, in any case, recognize the angel for what he is.)

It takes Xas a few moments, which he fills with a preparatory backward step and an admittedly blank-looking stare, to parse that question. Xenian is a relatively new concept, to him - but no. "No," he says. He straightens his shoulders, perhaps inadvisably. The demon is a lot bigger than he is. "But you're - you look like a demon."

Xas not responding aggressively allows Hellboy's initial flash of temper to cool over, and he relaxes back into his seat a little.

"I suppose I do," he says, his tone more even but with dubious patience. "What's it to you?"

(Depending on how closely he's looking, Xas might notice that Hellboy's belt has a rosary looped around a couple of its pouches, the cross dangling down near the belt's buckle. If he's capable of sensing such things, the rosary is still entirely blessed, and yet doesn't seem to be causing Hellboy any discomfort.)

Xas has been flustered more times than an angel probably should be, but it's still a relatively rare state for him. He crosses an arm over his chest to fiddle with one of the toggles on his suit and tries to pick his words carefully. "The demons I know would cause trouble," he says. That's less blunt than [i]find someone to torture[/i]. He catches sight of the rosary, belatedly - and he isn't much for Catholicism, himself, but it does make his eyebrows go up.

The rosary is actually just one of an assortment of holy items, talismans, relics, charms, and other such detritus that live mostly in his belt's pouches. It is, however, the only one externally visible, with the questionable exception of the iron horseshoe tied to the belt with a length of cord and hooked over one pouch's lip.

"Yeah, well, that's 'cause demons are assholes, and I am not." Not an asshole, not a demon, or both? He chooses to leave it ambiguous, not least of which because he hates being tagged with the d-word, but has learned too much about his heritage to try denying it entirely.

He takes a deep breath in and sighs it out -- possibly contrary to Xas' expectations, the exhale is not filled with sulphur and brimstone -- then gets his badge out of his belt and holds it up so Xas can see it clearly. "Okay, let's just get this out of the way. My name is Hellboy. I'm a senior field agent with Hellsing. If you don't know who we are, our job is to investigate paranormal trouble and make it stop. As far as I'm concerned, I was born in England and raised in America. Now I'm gonna ask again: What's any of this to you?"

Xas's eyebrows take a moment to return to a normal position, having begun raising at demons are assholes and reached their maximum height at Hellboy. It's not a very subtle name, is it?

But a demon like the ones Xas knows - knew - would have been trying to inflict some sort of pain by now, on the park's other occupants if not on Xas, so okay. This isn't actually quite the weirdest thing that has happened to him in the last month.

"Nothing, I suppose," he says, and after a moment longer of thought, he plants himself on the edge of the bench at a wary but companionable distance. They might have more in common than Xas does with most of the people he's met here so far, honestly, and he can't help being curious. "I'm just used to having to - well. I'm an angel."

Professor Bruttenholm's mind wasn't much on subtlety at the time of Hellboy's appearance on Earth.

Hellboy himself briefly wonders what he's let himself in for when Xas sits down, but his confusion clears quickly at the angel's confession. "Oh," he says, then has a good hearty chuckle as he more thoroughly settles into his seat on the bench again and puts his badge away.

"Well, I can see how I'd present something of a puzzle to you, then. I've been confounding pretty much everyone's expectations for most of my life." He pauses for a moment, mulling his options, and then decides to elaborate. "I don't talk about this much -- not since I've been here, anyway -- but yeah, the people who'd brought me to Earth had bad intentions for me. Fortunately, they didn't get me, and I was raised instead by good people, taught right from wrong and so on. I have, as the old saying goes, rejected the devil and all his works, and the world isn't ending on my watch, screw whatever destiny supposedly says I have to do it."

With another sigh, this one less exasperated than the last, he pulls out a thin flat silver case. Opening it up, he extracts a wooden match from a little box in the bottom and a cigarette. He considers for a moment, then holds the open case out to Xas, offering him a (holy) smoke if he wants it. "You got a name, angel?"

"Xas," he says, shaking his head at the proffered cigarettes. He's never smoked before, and he doesn't want to cough and sputter in front of a demon, even a very surprising one.

It takes him a second to finish working through everything Hellboy said; the end of the world is a new idea to him, as much as the idea of a demon choosing not to be miserable and sadistic. It's like a human choosing not to be needy and grasping. He doesn't think it would be possible, where he's from, but here - all right. He takes a deep breath.

"I'm sorry. This is strange," he says, then asks, "What was Hell like?" Maybe entirely different - he doesn't know if that would be reassuring or more troublesome.

With a nod of acknowledgement, he puts away the case, then strikes the match on the stone covering his right forearm and lights up. As with the rosary, the holiness transferred into the tobacco from the water used to grow it doesn't seem to cause him any discomfort.

Xas' question gets a big slouchy shrug. "Wouldn't know. First thing I remember of my life was appearing in a fireball on the floor of a burned-out English church." The wallet containing his badge comes out again, and from one of the folds he takes out a photograph. "Look how cute I was.

"I kept getting told, back home, that someday I'd go down there, do my part for their war effort, bring Hell on Earth, but..." He shakes his head. "Nah. Not interested, not happening."

Xas is still peering at the photograph, glancing with silent interest between the enormous arm on the baby and the enormous arm Hellboy just used to light his cigarette. But he doesn't ask. It doesn't seem polite, somehow, and mostly he's charmed: he was cute.

"Well, thank you for that," he says, a little amused - until he remember that it's not his Earth they're talking about, anyway. Lucifer thought Earth was Hell enough on its own without sending demons there. The thought makes him sober up, tugging absently on a strand of his own hair and missing Lucifer (the bastard) more than he'll ever admit to anyone, but after a moment he smiles again and asks, "Are you Catholic?"

He doesn't have a sense for blessedness - before today he'd never even been inside a church - but Sobran was Catholic, and it made him happy, so Xas mostly counts it as a good thing.

Hellboy shakes his head. "I'm not really anything, religion-wise. The man in the bow-tie, Professor Trevor Bruttenholm--" He pronounces it like broom. "--he was Catholic. He adopted me, raised me like his son. I suppose a lot of the morals he taught me probably came from Catholicism, but he never pushed me to embrace any particular faith."

He flips the picture around to have another look at it himself. Everyone in the picture's been dead for years, except for him. He sighs sadly as he puts the picture back into the wallet and the wallet in turn back into his belt, then looks back at Xas. "Are angels all that picky about the religion thing, or were you just curious?"

"Curious," Xas says. The demon's sigh makes him frown, but all of the wariness is gone from his posture. This has been a surprise, one of the first pleasant surprises since he arrived in Baedal. "I had a Catholic friend once. He tried to use one of those - " Xas gestures toward the rosary. " - to ward me off. I was more intimidating then. Twenty-foot wingspan."

Besides which, Sobran hadn't understood the nuances of Xas's position, so to speak, and thought fallen angels and demons were the same thing. The thought makes Xas brighten, suddenly amused. "I wish he could have seen you."

Hellboy chuckles, taking another puff of his cigarette, and then tilts his head slightly and looks more intently at Xas with one finger tapping against his chin. "Huh. You know, I didn't even think to ask about the wings. Guess I assumed you had some way to hide them. You know, for walking among men and all that."

"Oh," Xas says. "No. Nothing like that." The possibility had never occurred to him, not even as a passing fancy. He didn't try to blend in until he was grounded. He never wanted to.

"We don't usually bother men," he adds, but his tone is distracted and he's looking at Hellboy's sawed-off horns, barely containing the question. He has some manners. He wouldn't want anyone he'd just met asking about his missing pieces, and it doesn't occur to him, either, that Hellboy might have parted with his voluntarily.

Hellboy nods, acknowledging Xas' statement about angels not bothering men without comment. He has heard a thing or two about what angels were like in his world, and how they affected the world long ago, and that's not something he's in the mood to talk about right now. Besides, he notices Xas looking at his stumps, which gets a chuckle out of him as he reaches up and rubs at them.

"I got sick of smacking them into doorways," he says as though that explains everything. Anything more he might say about it is interrupted by a bleeping from his belt. "Really?!" he exclaims plaintively as he reaches into a pouch and retrieves his CiD, shaking his head at what he sees on the screen.

He puts the CiD away, then stands up and slings his sword onto his back. "So much for my afternoon off. Listen, this has been kind of weird, but I should be used to that by now. It's nice to have met you anyway." He extends his left hand to shake. "I got to get going, but maybe I'll see you around."

Today, Jay had decided to look up what parks there were in Baedal and go visit a few. He didn't really know why, it was cold enough that any snakes would be hibernating and he could get all the small rodents he could want at the pet store, but he was curious about what kind of wildlife there would be in a place like Baedal. And that was why he took a particular interest in the man digging in the park, thinking he might be more familiar with the park, plants and, more importantly, local wildlife than Jay himself was, so he decided to approach the man.

"Hey," he said casually.

Even though he's been in Baedal less than a month, Xas is relieved when he twists around to look and sees someone perfectly human and not engaged in any alarming or odd activities. "Hello," he says, smiling, and extracts his hands from the deep, narrow trench he's made around the roots of the shrub. They're brown with dirt, so he doesn't offer one for a shake. A thought occurs to him before he could, anyway, and he adds, "I don't know if I'm allowed to do this." Maybe he's not; if this man is about to tell him so, it's less embarrassing to preempt it.

"Actually, I have no idea if you're allowed to be doing that or not. I just figured since you looked comfortable here, you might spend enough time around places like this to know what kind of animals there are in Baedal. I mean, I know it has rats and pigeons, but like...snakes and stuff I don't know, and was just curious."

Which sounded a bit silly now that he voiced it, but he liked the idea of knowing what cuisines would be available if he were to go out and search for them.

"Oh," Xas says, eyebrows lifting a fraction of an inch. He hasn't seen any snakes - some in the market, dead, but he thinks it's probably too cold for the live ones, if snakes are the same here as where he's from. "No, I've only been here a little while. A few weeks. Maybe there's a guidebook, have you looked?" If there is, Xas wants one.

"Oh. Yeah, if you haven't been here long, I doubt you'd know. I don't suspect there's much of anything this time of year." If he thought there might be something this time of year, he'd look himself. "I'll look for a guidebook, I haven't yet. It just...popped into my head as something to wonder before I started taking walks in the park without knowing what to expect, you know?"

Xas nods, shifting to look the other man head-on and sitting on his own heels. "That's smart," he says. "Hopefully I'm not disturbing anything." He knows how to handle the plant, but he didn't consider anything that might be burrowing in the dirt - but no harm done, yet. He smiles again. "How long have you been here?" he asks; it's nice to meet someone who is just as new as he is, every now and then.

"About a month, I guess. Maybe a little longer, but not long. And I guess if you were disturbing something that could eat you, it probably would have tried by now, so you're probably good."

Xas startles himself by laughing, even though he knows by now - he's a good listener - that it's probably not entirely a joke. But he doesn't think he would be good for any creature's digestion.

"Let's hope so," he says, sliding one hand back down into the dirt, trying to get under the roots without damaging it or any of its neighbors. "Are you a naturalist?"

Jay shook his head. "Not really, but I like to go for walks in the woods sometimes." And he hadn't done it in a long time, though he tended to prefer walks in the woods when there was decent prey.

"Oh," Xas says. He falls silent for a little bit, struggling with a bit of tangled root, then adds, "It probably would be smart to know about the dangerous things first." Xas doesn't think anything out here can hurt him, personally, but he's not like most people. He's not people at all.

The reasoning is sound, yet the reality resists: Balthazar is still a demon, despite the distinct lack of Hell, or any superiors breathing over his shoulder telling him to reap souls. He may not have the job anymore, but the powers remain. He is what he is, and every step he takes towards the church in Chimer confirms that down to his greasy demon bones. It is a holy place and it repels him like a high keen, a persistent ache, a slow burning. Balthazar retreats to a park bench to rest.

But the trip isn't totally worthless. Someone... unusual enters the church.

Angels have always hurt him to look at, just a little. A holy glint in the eye, as it were. This had a similar sort of reflection, but not exactly what he's used to. Balthazar stretches one arm out along the back of the park bench and waits. And in due time, he is rewarded by this possibly-an-angel stalking right out and past him into the park. Interesting.

He follows at a decent interval, observing the angel gathering some kind of plant, and slows to a stop about fifteen feet away. Just for safety's sake.

"Didn't find what you were looking for?"

"I wasn't looking for one in particular," Xas says, glancing up. He means the plant; this one is pretty and sturdy-looking, that's all, nothing that should whither or be crushed before he can get it back to his room at the Inn. He shifts up from his knees to rest on his heels, moves to wipe his hands on his thighs, and stops when he remembers that will mean he has to wash his clothes. He wipes his hands together instead and gives the man a look equal parts earnest and appraising. It's an odd question, and the man doesn't look like a botanist - but not much looks the way Xas expects it to, here. "Is there another one you'd recommend?"

Jack doesn't typically attend services at the cathedral. Diverse as the House and consequently its services may be, there's a particular slant here that feels alien to him, everything from the name of the venue to the vaulted ceilings and stained glass. The temples he knows are places of calm and clean lines, and no matter how often he reminds himself that they all believe in the same God, this doesn't feel right. (It's why he's funding a house of worship of his own, in fact.) But there are good people in the House, and a particular rabbi in the nearby administrative offices who he drops in on from time to time when he needs to clear his head. Today, after, he takes a walk through the church to light a candle, because that at least is a familiar comfort.

The young man giving the windows a death-glare catches his attention, however. He recognizes that look. Coming around the pews, he pauses at the corner of one and tilts his head at the stranger, the slightest of knowing smiles on his lips.

"Any luck?"

The smile stokes Xas's annoyance, for a moment, but after a few beats and a breath he softens his glare to something more passively troubled. Whatever is wrong, it isn't this man's fault. "None at all," he says, and pushes up the corners of his mouth - too obviously faked to be a smile, but an attempt at being friendly, regardless. "You?"

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poor Hellboy. :(

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we can wrap this if you want! I know it's been going for a while and you've got a lot on your plate

sounds good

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/latest of tags....

no worries, I'm late to everything!