003 | OPEN. red lipstick on the end of a cigarette.

[norea]

Who: Hasibe Ozcelik, and OPEN.
What: A show premieres at The Vault.
Where: The Vault.
When: Evening til the wee hours of the morning.
Notes: I will set up sections in the comments for people to hang out.
Warnings: WELL IT'S AN ADULT CLUB, SO.

The show starts at nine o'clock, and the bar is full pretty quickly thereafter, but the variety in the club is pretty striking. Xenians in their best suits, non-Xenians in leather and ripped fishnets, everything in between. There doesn't seem to be a lot of cultural divide here between human and not, even given recent issues. Hasibe makes good on her promise to have members of her cohort given seating preference, as she's sweet-talked the cocktail dress-clad hostesses, and the bartenders (in their vague approximations of suits with very open shirts) are aware that she's invited a lot of heavy drinkers. ...she just assumes people in her cohort want to drink--they've been kidnapped to a strange city with many new things to offer, so why wouldn't they?

Comments

[gotbottle]

"No, not at all. It's fortunate that you'll be able to, like, use your background and skills here."

She sips from her glass to buy herself a moment, shrugging one shoulder. "I work at The Shrove's Wing, over in Gallmarch. It's a tea house. I wait tables." She's not exactly ashamed of it, necessarily--it's more that she's restless, these days, knowing she can do more, wanting to do more. "It's all right. The hours are decent and the money's good. I took the job right after I got here, so I could get money under me and get the hell out of that inn."

And yet half a year later, here she is, still making tea. Complacency, maybe. Being comfortable. Not wanting to change things once she was settled in. "Anyway. I volunteer with one of the city's political parties, the People's Independence Front, a few hours a week. Mostly leafletting and stuff. I might try to move into something that's, like, a better fit with my background; I wrote and edited things back home, I was working on maybe moving into reporting."

[caballero]

He nods, recognizing the tea house. He's only swung by once, creeping in for a cup of something that nearly burned his tongue out of his mouth (it was pretty good) in the first few days hew as in the city. That information gets filed away in his head; should he ever come back he'll try to time it so that he can say hello.

"That's the nice one, right?" The Independence Front. (Bruce knows damn well; Tom hasn't caught up just yet.) He sips his soda, and something in the back of his mind wonders what the hell it's flavored with as it doesn't taste like anything he recognizes. "Considering how mass media here is still firmly entrenched in print work despite the whole - network thing - I'd imagine you could do pretty well with that."

[gotbottle]

"The nice one? Oh, the nice political party. Yeah." She grins, faintly. "I like them. They seem like they have some genuine concern for the people who get dragged in here. I'm all for that."

She has another sip of wine, shaking her head slightly. "I have my doubts. I was moving toward getting into investigative reporting. Digging up the stories that don't get told. I'm not sure that'd fly real well in this city." Not that that should stop her--normally it wouldn't, but lately she's tired. Complacent. Unfocused.

"I don't know. Maybe there's another way."