isn't really the best place to do a lot of thinking

[fuckin_thirsty]

Who: Deacon Frost, Ilde Decima and Ivan.
What: An invitation accepted.
Where: Gutters.
When: Now.

On the surface, time is dictated by the sun, a given constant. Down here, it's a subjective measuring of wound watches and the steady, relentless tick of digital numbers, but it can also be measured by the amount of people flowing through the underground passageways that stem into Gutters.

Otherwise, the lighting doesn't care. The shadows are thick where there isn't that piercing sheen of artificial light staining the concrete walls, iron bars and steel pipes, and that's just the corridor, currently playing host to the nightlife ducking down underground. The space itself is as impervious to the logical progression of time as the people it caters to, permeated with the scent of the underground, water and earth, with cigarette smoke, with copper and salt. Music aches through the floor, a heavy bass, and security isn't particularly overt, but certainly present - that isn't counting the guy at the door handing off the money people give to get in.

This isn't really the best place to do a lot of thinking.

But it is Deacon Frost's natural habitat regardless, for all that he doesn't feed here, doesn't dance much, doesn't strike up meaningful conversation a hell of a lot. He's moving out of the backrooms and into the larger space, doing up the sleeves of his shirt with his CiD gripped in one hand, and going about his evening. Eventually, he's going to need some fresh air.

Comments

[deservesadaisy]

"No one knows much about them," Ivan clarifies. "But I thought it make sense to meet someone else who's properly angry about the whole thing."

Other people, like Ivan, might be hiding it. But he has his doubts. They should not be creatures of fear; they were the creatures that caused it.

[fuckin_thirsty]

That manages to be unexpected, enough that after a second, Deacon smiles wide, a dry, smokey sounding chuckle at the back of his throat. "Glad to have made the right impression," he says, with a glance back over his shoulder at the thinner crowd of vampiric life and their food, cut into silhouettes in the hard intermittent light of the bar.

He refocuses on his current companions, releasing another sigh of smoke. It's to Ilde, he asks; "What's in it for you?"

[rhinemaid]

Ilde studies him before she actually answers that question, measuring and steady. After a moment, she settles on, "That depends. Best case scenario, useful contacts. Worst case scenario, Ivan made a fantastic series of expressions when I said I was coming." Worst case where she still gets something out of this, yes, she's well aware how badly it could go. Ivan.

...it's not actually necessary to mimic his 'are you insane, tiny fairy' face, but she does, disregarding the fact she's still tucked up against him close enough to get pinched for it.

With a blithe smile, "I'm proactive." And she wants to blow Candlelighters to hell.

[deservesadaisy]

"She doesn't trust me not to get in trouble," Ivan speculates, "which I think is rather unfair." But then again, he's gotten over expecting fair from Ilde. And he might be playing off her, just a little.

"Also, she was in Mafaton when this idiocy happened." Which would give anyone good reason to dislike whoever caused it.

[fuckin_thirsty]

The ~couple~ act gets an eyebrow raise from Frost, for all that he allowed a half-smile to split across his face, too much sharp analysis behind his expression to ever truly seem friendly. But they weren't after friendliness in the first place.

He leans back against the iron, considering. "I didn't drink any handouts," he says, seeing as they're sharing war stories, more or less. It's said in a tone; one that communicates, he never drinks handouts. "But fuck if it still didn't hit us where it hurt. I figure--" He gestures with his cigarette, stabbing the air with it. "--if these Candlelighters were after bloodshed, if they want us to be fuckin' ravenous animals, hey, I'm more than happy to give it to them. Personal like.

"What happened in Mafaton wasn't anything."

[rhinemaid]

"It was an insult," she says, deliberately, her gaze following the wrought-iron railing with an absent and alike kind of mistrust; she really wishes they weren't talking so close to it. (It's displacement- the iron irritates her, she isn't thinking about whether or not she might actually get into trouble here, it's easier.)

She shrugs. "They hate all of us, 'xenians'. According to the rhetoric they left in one of the buildings they abandoned before the plague. We took what they left behind, blew the building. I'm interested in finding out more, and..." A shrug. "No one was in that building. Better luck next time."

There will be a next time, that smile says, and they're working with more than just rumours.

[deservesadaisy]

"I think it was likely a stepping stone. A demonstration. Crurovores are an easy target; get the humans properly afraid, and you can extend it out to the non-predators too." Not that there wasn't legitimate reason to be afraid of Ilde, but she didn't routine eat people.

[fuckin_thirsty]

"Fantastic. Politics and PR. Sounds like a sorry excuse for a war, if you ask me."

Not that what happened in Mafaton was anything to dismiss, but that's what it boils down to - how it looks and ensuing propaganda. Deacon isn't disagreeing, however, more open to listening to possibly informed theory than contributing his own. "But that's humans, what else're they gonna do."

[rhinemaid]

"Not an isolated incident," Ilde repeats, patiently, hooking her fingers through Ivan's belt-loops and letting her attention settle properly on Deacon.

"The plague shut down the entire city, forced divine fucking intervention from the Twelve Point-" the first hint of something under that coolly fey exterior, now, but it doesn't present as anything more remarkable than irritation, "-and then before that, the invasion. Genetic experimentation- one of the animal breeds they sent out acted as a receptacle for the smaller ones. Not natural. Diseased, too." They were disgusting; Ilde had spent her time in the river, and when they'd been stupid enough to come near her she'd made them regret it. Briefly. "After the invasion, we found the houses- what they had inside. Candlelighters. The houses became the hives that carried the plague, and the book club propaganda is consistent with the texts they left behind."

With a tilt of her head, she says, "But they get dismissed as rumours and stories and incitement and that doesn't seem like a bad strategy if you don't want anyone looking closely at what you're doing and why."

[deservesadaisy]

"Sounds rather like how we operated at home." 'We' being 'vampires generally.' "If you can get dismissed as a legend, you're halfway there."

[fuckin_thirsty]

"Except they're not. They've got buildings, and influence, and presumably, a jugular."

Deacon is just saying, really.

"Back home," he says, since we're on the topic, "we did it the same way. We also did it through politics, written treaties slide to human politicians under the table. I'm curious about whether the Candlelighters've got some arrangement with the authorities or if this is just their own very special crusade. Seems kind of unwieldy for just a hate-on for vampires. Xenians," he corrects, with a look tipped to Ilde.

Not a word he's completely used to, yet. Or a concept. At the very least, they're still 'delicious'.

[rhinemaid]

Some of them more than others- some of them significantly less so, as will inevitably discover the first vampire who pushes hard enough to find out just why Ilde refuses to take them seriously. (The reason is 'Sonja', and she is the far more frightening predator than any of the three people in this conversation.)

"Anti-xenian prejudice is common, maybe institutional." Which means it could go either way, as she sees it; it seems likely that they have high level allies, but it's equally possible that some people just don't give a fuck. Large parts of the city, in fact, routinely fail to give a fuck when it's a 'xenian problem' and not a human one - heaven help the first sanctimonious hunter pearlclutching at the thought of taking a human life to cross Ilde's path. As though their species is better, somehow-

Not that she's bitter.

"Not surprising. But interesting to pursue."

[deservesadaisy]

"My sympathy for the authorities is small. Either they actively helped, or they turned their heads." Which, in Ivan's opinion, is not much more helpful.

[fuckin_thirsty]

"And not the immediate problem, but it would be a shame if Candlelighters were just a head of a hydra, you know?"

One last puff of smoke has Deacon dropping his cigarette, crushing it out on the concrete beneath the heel of his shoe. A nice pair, shiny, but worn, the soles unseen ground down to a bald shine, but he presents well. He smiles at Ivan, quick and careless. "We were always on our own anyway, man."

[rhinemaid]

Acknowledging both their points - Ilde splays her fingers on Ivan's hip, pressing her thumb like punctuation - she tilts her head to the other side, rolls her shoulders in a lazy shrug. "You can still kill a hydra. You just have to be clever about it."

Which is her purpose, here, it may be becoming clear; a bit of cleverness, and a careful assessment of Deacon Frost.

[deservesadaisy]

"We were, and are, on our own," Ivan says. "But there's a difference between not being helped and being actively targeted. Especially when we still can't voluntarily leave."

[fuckin_thirsty]

This gains a shrug from Frost. He died, in his world. There's a measure of feeling done with it and taking to Baedal that somehow makes more sense to him than others, a belief and trust in ridiculous mysticism coupled with pragmatic mobster entrepreneurship. But Ivan makes a fair point and Deacon honours it with; "It's not like we chose the territory, no."

[rhinemaid]

"That's why the 'safety concerns' were such transparent horseshit," she observes. "It's a closed environment. If you starve predators, they have no choice, they have no where to go." Especially if you then proceed to give them a push.

[deservesadaisy]

"And given that those who could go into torpor did, they specifically targeted people who had no choice but to get desperate." Ivan sighs, and pulls out a cigarette.

"Regardless. Picking that apart isn't getting us anywhere."

[fuckin_thirsty]

Somewhere in the quasi-darkness of the bar, towards the other end of the cave-like space, there's a compulsive shriek, a cluster of bodies. It interrupts whatever Deacon was about to say, causing him to lazily glance back over a shoulder, but it's nothing out of the ordinary. The three are more or less left alone, and there's enough blood to go around that whatever scent Ilde is giving off doesn't have the sharks circling.

It doesn't stop them looking, of course, in small, knife-like glances.

"Doubtless we've all been picking it apart since it happened. So what gets us places?"

[rhinemaid]

Evidently, Ilde came prepared; she turns, leaning her back against Ivan's chest so he's not in her way as she fishes a card out from where she'd tucked it into one of the straps on her bodice, hidden by glamour until she produces it between two fingers and offers it across to Deacon. It's a CiD number and a name.

"Teamwork," she says, slyly, aware of her audience if not deigning to acknowledge it.

[deservesadaisy]

"Comparing notes," Ivan adds, on more or less the same topic. "And trying not to draw too much attention until we want it."

[fuckin_thirsty]

His tongue swipes over his own teeth in contemplation of this concept, but not exactly hesitation; Deacon takes the card with a thin smile, turning it over between two fingers to catch the name and number written there. Cold blue attention switches back to Ivan, that smile becoming a little more crooked, scarred eyebrow raising.

"I'll try hard," he promises, sliding the card into a pocket inside his jacket. "You know where to find me. Obviously."

[rhinemaid]

"If something more proactive than going to ground interests you, then you should call," she shrugs, tucking one foot behind the opposite ankle and letting her gaze move vaguely towards where that shriek occurred moments before; it doesn't stir her.

[deservesadaisy]

Ivan's fingers rested lightly at the small of Ilde's back. "I'm going to be on the move, but I'll answer my CiD."