multiversallogs | It's like paradise, spread out with a butter knife

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It's like paradise, spread out with a butter knife :: [OPEN]

Who: EVERYONE
What: Réjean has decided that more people ought to celebrate and help raise a bit of dosh for one of his favourite bars. See: flyer.
Where: The Apache.
When: Misdi night and into the wee hours of the morning.
Warnings: Discussion of Pickman's manky feet.

The Apache is much the same as it always is: dimly lit, with the jukebox playing in the background, and the bartender serving whatever's on tap. Tonight, the bar is packed with people from all across the city, different cantons and cohorts, all out to celebrate surviving the fungal plague. Patrons are encouraged to buy tickets for a door prize with the proceeds going to repair the damage tunnelling ants made to the cellar.

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"Most, but not all. How many dread secrets are you willing to pry from my cold, dead teeth?" Réjean smiles, small and privately just for the two of them. He's not entirely kidding about being willing to share some of his secrets provided he's properly motivated.

"All of them," as she leans in, so very serious - and that is what she wants to know, all the time. Knowledge; understanding. There's nothing more valuable, she thinks, with the privilege of thought that comes from having never done without before Prometheus.

(Freedom goes hand in hand with it, after all.)

...still, the fact she beeps his nose a moment later is just down to the drink.

The fact that he meeps when she does it is down to his own bizarre sense of humour.

"Three is the traditional number and where we can start for now. Ask and I'll answer." There's something oddly formal to his speech and it's at times like these that he's less a purveyor of exotic goods and more of an inhuman creature bound by unusual rules.

Through the alcohol that always hits her harder than she's expecting - she knows, and even so - Ilde focuses on him, her gaze blue-black and wide, like she feels the need to study him for a moment with her own eyes. When she blinks, the glamour was never gone at all.

Her head tilts to the side. "What drives you?"

"I drive myself. I'm too poor for a chauffeur." Réjean weighs whether or not he should give away a little more and eventually decides that it would be fair. "There is a point on the horizon I aim toward, but it's a long, long drive through bat country to get there, p'tite."

"That's better," she decides, though what she really means is: that's more interesting. A simple answer to that question wouldn't have been terribly satisfying, even if the one he gives her leaves her with more curiosity than anything else. "Everyone I know lately speaks French at me."

That is an exaggeration.

"Do they now?" He grins before launching into an extended ramble in Acadian French about whatever ideas flutter through his mind: what the other patrons are wearing, what she's wearing, and eventually trails off into him singing a truly filthy folk song about what that damned Anglo general can go do with himself, his wife, and their bloodless priest.

"Je ne parle pas français, et vous êtes un pauvre con." ...she speaks just enough French, arguably.

After a moment, she says, "I'm from Calais, originally. But I don't speak it very well as I used to." Spitefully and deliberately neglecting a language in favour of others will do that, she's found; Robin said something about teaching her, a while ago.

(Of course the parts she keeps are the ones she can use to be argumentative.)

"You break my heart." He has to endure speaking English to so many people these days that a little French shouldn't be too much to ask? "And I already told you that I'm poor as the empty desert."

"No one speaks Italian to me, either," she points out, callously unsympathetic to his broken heart.

Hm.

"I've got two more questions, don't I."

«That you do,» he replies in poorly accented Italian. You see, Ilde? He cares for your heart.

Well, it must be said that that scores him points. (It may not be her native tongue, but it is home in a way that English and French both aren't.)

«What do you make of your kind here?» A beat, and then she adds, as though it just occurred to her, «There's a woman here with my face. I told her to talk to you.»

Here in Baedal, not here at the party...though she might come. Who knows! Ilde hasn't seen her yet. Maybe Katherine will come, she'd like that.

"I make them into nothing at all; either they are already reasonable creatures or they are unmade." Simple as that. Réjean likes much of what he's seen in Baedal and won't have his freedom taken away by some barely self-aware leech. It's a sin to kill another of the Kindred, but when they're so stupid that they can't even manage to buy their own food, they're hardly even sentient and their neat, forgotten little deaths don't trouble his conscience.

"Is there? I'll be sure to be welcoming."

Sinners, aren't we all.

His answer suits her, either way; she adds, guilelessly, "You seem to know how things work around here." She has a knack for that twist of perfectly innocent that she probably shouldn't - someone who can lie that well when she puts her mind to it oughtn't be allowed to.

He won't speak to the universal scale, but everyone Réjean has met has been a sinner.

"It's one talent among many and has taken not a little time." There's a high turnover among newcomers, which has gone a long way to helping settle Réjean into the city, but even so, with only a quarter of a century in Baedal he knows that quite a few vampires still consider him too new to associate with.

"What are your other talents?" Is that her third question? Sure.

"I can make lemon squares and I brought them to a church potluck once." Imagine that. "But the rest, well, you've seen more than most."

He's referring to the glamour she saw when he was shot and dumped over the railing of a boat.

"That was clever," she recalls- she'd liked that, generally in favour of the more creative uses of illusion. (Hers are mostly just keeping white dresses pristine and hiding her own true appearance, but it's always nice to branch out.)

"I'm often clever. Sometimes too clever," he says either letting the illusion drop or bringing one up to show a nasty old hangman's scar around his neck.

Ilde has to resist the impulse to reach out and poke him in the throat; that's not very polite. (Less polite than grabbing his ass and judging it subpar? Well, apparently.) It is very tempting, though, and her hand twitches before she picks her glass back up instead. "You're a troublemaker, that's what you are."

"Born and bred. Would you want me any other way?" He runs his hand over the scarring and it vanishes just as easily as he called it up. "And, are you satisfied with your answers?"

"For now," she decides, sipping from her drink. There is no end to her curiosity, not really, but she's the patient kind; she doesn't push. She waits, and she watches, and she loves to listen.

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It's like paradise, spread out with a butter knife :: [OPEN]

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