multiversallogs | Requiem unite!

Entry tags:

Requiem unite!

Who: Brie, Mina, Anna and Jones
What: Meeting up with Brie, as she apparently wants to see everyone from her world
Where: The Valhalla Inn, Brie's room
When: Just after nightfall (though Jones can feel free to come beforehand)
Warnings: None

Brie watched as the sun went down over the horizon. She thought about Luke -- she could still feel the strong grip of his hands as she was being pulling away.

Everything had happened so suddenly. Despite what Anna has told her, Brie is still convinced that the Fae are at work in this world. They clearly proved themselves of teleporting an entire city and its residents to a world that shouldn't exist. What's to say they couldn't teleport all of Chicago's residents to random worlds?

Brie didn't know why she had asked to see Anna and Jones so immediately, but if there were going to be familiar faces in this place, she wants to stick together. There's always strength in numbers, and unless they actively refused, Brie would want Anna and Jones on her side.

Sitting down on her bed, she waited for her guests to arrive.

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Jones arrives about fifteen minutes early; she'd've preferred a little earlier, but work's kept her and after a day at the forge she really needs a quick shower and a change of clothes.

Her face breaks open into a smile as she pokes her head around and sees Brie. They were never particularly close, but it's always lovely to see a familiar face here. "Mrs. Miller! It's... well, I can't really say it's good to see you here, circumstances being what they are, but it's nice, I suppose."

At the sight of Jones, Brie smiles too, and it widens further when Jones calls her "Mrs. Miller." Brie done a lot of thinking last night as she went to bed. If Luke were to arrive, he would definitely make a posting on the device, and she needed to keep it together so that when he finally did come, she would be the first person he'd see.

"Please, just call me Brie," she said, standing up from the bed. "And yes - it is comforting to at least know people here. Wherever, this is."

A gurgling noise came out of Brie's stomach. "Oh, I'm sorry about that. I can't seem to get it to stop."

"God, how long's it been since you've eaten? Years?" She blinks. "That's probably true in your case, isn't it. Oh, hang on—" Jones always carries something light to snack on. "Erm, this won't get you far," she says, pulling an apple from her bag, "but you should try and make it to meals at the Inn, they're not bad."

She tosses the apple to Brie. It's a nice local-grown red variety. "I mean, you're also welcome to dinner at my place anytime, although I don't have to do a whole lot of cooking; my boss provides meals. Nice of him."

Brie caught the apple with both hands, cupping it as if it were a precious gem.

Brie had understood she was hungry, she had even understood that eating food satisfies hunger, but she didn't make the connection that eating would make her stomach stop growling. But now, seeing the apple in her hands, she thought to herself: of course it would.

The last time she had eaten anything, she remembered how distinctly disturbing it was throwing it up. It has been so long she couldn't remember what food tasted like before that. Courage mustered, she took a delicious, crunchy bite of the apple. Before she even had the chance to swallow it, she asked, "There are meals at the Inn? I should probably figure these things out. I still sleep during the day, but I make sure I woke up so I could see this." Brie brushed aside the curtain on her window. The sunset was beautiful.

"I wish Mina could see this."

Jones smiles softly. "I suppose it's one of those things I just take for granted," she says. "I never thought too much about it." It is, though, very pretty tonight.

"They do meals, yes," she adds, after a moment. "At least breakfast and dinner, I wasn't usually in for lunch when I was living here. I've moved out to this part of the city they call Flyside over," she points, "thataway." She considers this for a moment. "God, I'm settling in here. Then again, you do what you must, I guess."

"Haha. I don't know if I'll ever settle in here. But I'm sure you said that when you arrived."

Within five minutes or so, Brie expected the sun to set, and their other guests to be arriving, so she wanted to take advantage of the time she had left.

"Jones. Could you -- read my aura? Or whatever it is you can do? I just need to know what's going on. I've been scared to use any disciplines. I don't know if they'll work, or what repercussions they'd have now that my heart actually pumps the blood in my body."

"I certainly could," she says. And, well, she's been curious. She focuses her senses and raises her eyes to Brie again.

Her aura still bears the fadedness and dullness characteristic of vampirism, but—interesting. There's more mortality to her than she's seen in other vampires' auras, although not enough for her to say mortal for certain. Some of it that now shines clearly again. It's certainly unusual, and nothing she's ever seen before. Then again, she's finding new things every day.

Jones lets herself unfocus. "Well... you still look like a vampire, more than a little. It might be something that wears away, though; there's more mortality about your aura than I usually see on vampires. I don't know if there's any precedent for this, though, honestly. If you are something else, I'm not sure what, or if there's even a name for it. Perhaps time will tell us more."

Brie nods. It wasn't much, but at least it was something.

"Thanks," she said. "Maybe I'll just stick with my disciplines that don't require blood for now. Otherwise, I might need hospitalization."

"Not a bad plan," says Jones, with a wry smile. "Best to err on the side of caution, after all." The sun's now below the horizon, the sky growing dark. She looks to it, briefly. "Anna and Mina will likely be here soon."

Mina didn't wait to change clothes after she woke up. Her first thought of the evening was of Jacqueline. The second she knew it was safe to rise, she rushed past Anna and hurried through the halls of the inn, rushing up the stairs, breezing right into Jacqueline's room wearing her gold nightgown.

She hadn't expected Jones to be there.

"Oh...oh my..." She blinked, stepping back a pace into the hall. Mina had fed recently, yes, but she still wasn't quite what she had once been. And now she was embarrassing herself further. Well done.

Clearing her throat lightly, she made a pathetic attempt at humor. "Well, I suppose the cat's out of the bag now. I have breasts."

"Could have fooled me."

Anna had spent a bit of blood for the boost of speed she needed to catch up to Mina's head start, but some things, she reasoned, were worth it. And besides, she wasn't about to leave without getting dressed in something.

It is perhaps a questionable choice of priorities, given how exhausted she seems: it's nothing quite tangible, but Anna is somehow faded, drained.

"Mina's anatomy or lack thereof aside -- Brie, I didn't expect to find you here. What happened?"

Edited 2011-08-11 08:57 (UTC)

Brie nearly laughed out loud at Mina's comment. On reflection, she had never seen her aunt in anything so -- so -- womanly.

And Anna. They hadn't been very close in Chicago, but they got along. It was good to see everyone here, in her room.

"I was in Chicago -- in Arcadia, with Luke. One moment I was holding his hands, the next, I was in that little room in the Inn. I don't know what triggered it, or how it happened, but here I am."

"Wait. Brie, you were in Arcadia?" There's a strain to her voice as she says it -- startled and frightened, mostly, but a little eager, too. She can't access Arcadia from Baedal -- and she had never anticipated how trapped that would make her feel.

Mostly, though, there's a mental sinking feeling that would be echoed in her gut were she mortal.

"We...lost, then."

(( p.s. Isis -- if you reply to the individual comments, we'll have an easier time getting the notifications ))

"Well, not exactly," says Jones, with a twist of her mouth. "You could say we won in a rather oblique sort of way. The Baron didn't win, anyway." This is probably messing up the timeline—although maybe not as much as Dr. Brown had. But still. She rests her chin on her hands. "To be fair, the weather is actually quite nice."

The talk of Arcadia made little to no sense to Mina, but it seemed more significant to the others. Who was she to argue, really? And as much as she enjoyed goading Anna at every opportunity, she had to admit that the whole Huntress thing made her a little bit uncomfortable. The fact that she was, technically, the only real Kindred in the room made her even more insecure. More so than the damn, gold nightgown.

She crossed over to the window, glancing out at the early night for a moment. She caught the reflections of the other three in the glass, standing together. And that was when it really hit her. Here, among her friends (and Anna), she felt more alone than she had in...decades. Mina had never made claims to prophecy before, but a vision flashed through her imagination; she was alone.

Biting her lips together for a moment, she turned around, sitting on the window seat and crossing her legs to hide the ugly, P-shaped scar on her leg. She looked at each of them for a moment, before her eyes settled on some point along the far wall. "It doesn't matter where we came from," she said quietly. "As I once told Dr. M, for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure." She paused a moment. "So how do you three intend to move forward in this city?"

"You're right, the Baron didn't win. The Queen did though, and that's when she took back all of her titles, including the one she split between me, Mina and Rosa."

When Mina asked her question, Brie didn't know what to say, but she finally concluded on: "I don't plan on staying here."

It is an immense amount to take in, what Brie and Jones are saying about the fate of the city, and it distracts her from Mina's question for a moment. Instead, she looks at Brie intently.

"You were the Queen?" she begins, confused. "You were...one of us? And Mina too, though she is ...here?"

She is relieved that they defeated that self-important bastard of a fae who saw fit to call himself Baron; confused by the implication that she somehow managed to help despite her presence in Baedal; exultant at her sister-self's victory. What she cannot decide how she feels about is the notion of the Queen taking her title back.

"And me. She took me- The Huntress -- back too?" The idea ought to be a relief, but instead the concept itself feels like a violation. She leans against the wall for support.

Actually, she decides, maybe Mina's question is a welcome distraction after all. There's a subtle waver to her voice when she speaks.

"It has been long enough, by now: I doubt any of us are going anywhere. I, for one, intend to cultivate what connections I can with the Hellsing guild. They seem to be the closest thing to a supernatural power in Baedal, and since it does not appear we will be getting a Prince, either..."

She will never understand their obsession with hierarchy. "I for one intend to see my family again," says Jones, taking a seat on the bed. "In the meantime I've been making some friends and making the most of being able to meet new people and learn new things." Metallurgy: check. Transistors: check. She's going to need better equipment to make the kind of small pieces people have in their little future electronics, but she's working on that. When she gets back, she'll be able to advance science by fifty years or more.

Jones can practically feel the Nobel prize in her hands.

"And—I only have an idea of the events that went on around me, but yes—a certain number of people received titles from the Queen, which were later returned to her upon her victory." More time shenanigans. Of course there would be time shenanigans.

There were two things Mina didn't want to hear, didn't want to talk about. The first was the matter of her being infected by the Fae. The very thought of it made her queasy (metaphorically speaking, of course). It reminded her of things best forgotten, like Jonathan Rogers and powdered wigs. The second was the matter of Hellsing. She was well aware of the fact that eventually, all three of them would fall into Hellsing's ranks, leaving her the odd man out. Sometimes, it was best to put away unpleasant things for awhile.

She looked down at her fingernails, pretending to be bored. Without her rings on, her hands looked bloody naked. "I hope you'll be putting some of that knowledge into the clinic," she told Jones. Without looking up, she continued to the other two, "I'm opening a clinic. Working at the hospital is not...right. For me. And I'm rather anxious to get out of this inn where it's painfully apparent that I rent the only room without windows." Not to mention the fact that she wanted to get far away from Anna with her unnatural new powers.

It would also be nice to have a man over, but that was another matter.

"As for the topic of home, I have time to worry about that. In the meanwhile, it seems one of the gods has granted me the right to send a letter back to Chicago. I have no need of it. It's yours, Brie." Mina picked at the hem of her nightgown absently.

"In fact, Mina, Rosa and I, we all shared in the title of the Queen. And yes, like Jones said, at the end of the battle, she took all of her titles back, including yours." Anna looked particularly shaken by this news. Brie made a mental note to talk to her about it again later.

When Mina offered Brie her letter home, her eyes grew wide. She wanted ever so desperately to talk to Luke. But if Mina had been granted the letter, she must have needed it for something. "I couldn't -- if one of the gods granted it to you" Brie couldn't believe she just said that "you must have needed it for something." It hadn't yet occurred to her that maybe Mina was going to write to her.

Anna's eyes dart up, a bit surprised, when Mina so casually grants Brie the right to such a significant boon. Of course, she had the ability to write a letter, too. Or, rather, she had that boon until she sold it: there was more than ample demand for such a thing in Baedal's markets. (Still, though, she insisted to herself, she didn't believe in these so-called "gods.")

She could have written to Leander, of course.

But their argument was still so sore in her mind. (All this time, to think she had begun to understand him, and then lose him like that, all at once, it felt like, just over some damned bell. She had only been trying to help, for God's sake, but now she could hardly do anything without being his enemy, as he saw it. So all she had gotten out of it was that he wasn't hers any longer -- not in any sense of the phrase. She didn't want to think about him, now, and she most certainly did not want to write him.) And she liked the new wardrobe she'd bought with the money just fine, thank you.

So she talks about something else.

"The time lines are all balled up now, aren't they? We're as bad as Primogen Brown, the lot of us." She quirks her lip.

Edited 2011-08-22 08:49 (UTC)

"Or perhaps this is how it happened all along? Nimue always had more of a sense for these things than I did," Jones admits. "Or perhaps this is a divergent reality, and the original versions of us are still going about their business while we're here?" Thinking about this gives her a bit of a headache, although it's an interesting exercise. Well, less of an exercise now and more practical...

She stops herself, though; that's probably a little over her company's heads. This isn't the Ordo Dracul, after all.

Mina wasn't going to take no for an answer from Jacqueline, but that debate could wait until they were alone. For now, she supposed, they would keep up the appearance of their business relationship. Although it seemed stupid. Every other facade had fallen, at this point. What did it matter if Jones and Anna knew more? It should have been bloody obvious that Mina cared deeply for the Sheriff.

"I submit that if some version of me was foolhardy enough to accept a Fae title, then I am the original version and she is the divergent," Mina said, mostly to prove to Jones that she could follow the conversation than anything else. She supposed that would probably get her struck by lightning or something, but frankly, Mina didn't care right now.

It was a very serious problem; a vampire who had always been so terribly full of life no longer cared.

About anything.

"I suppose that you two," she said, glancing at Jones and Anna, "will want some time to brief Brie about Hellsing. I'll leave you to it." She stood up, smoothing down her nightgown to try to cover up the scar on her thigh. "And I should put on some decent clothing."

"Perhaps," she says, thoughtfully, to Mina's comment about her own words, before taking note of the rest.

"Brief Brie about what?" she asks, tilting her head in a perplexed sort of way. "I mean, I... don't know what's there to brief about?"

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Requiem unite!

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brb loling forever at "(and Anna)"

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