Edesna de Lorme
Tue 09:32PM CST
**Sitting within Elysium she lanquidy sat on one of the comfy couches within the study, flipping through a book of some mild interest. She was more so just passing the night by, as her offices had become quite dreary and uninteresting. With legs crossed and her back leaned against the chair she tapped a slender finger to her plush lips and raised a brow. Her dark blonde curls were loosely held back atop the crown of her head, a few wisps falling haphazardly so around her high french born features. She held an air of elegance about her, a calm and disarming manner that she normally used quite precisely around her 'superiors' in her work place and her elders in her secret life. Giving a subtle and unneeded sigh she shifts in her seat, practically hearing the empty echoe of the room.**
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 09:43PM CST
Edesna was not to be left alone for long. Feet shuffling, heels clattering on the parquet floor: the sound of someone entering the Estate, and presumeably not one of those wretches hoping to find Coors filming another twins commerical who were still to be found mooning around outside the brick walls.
The clatter resolves itself, soon enough, into a tall, whip-thin figure who could well have stepped from the pages of a magazine. She has the same figure as all too many models: long and lean, almost angular, and the same pale, pared sharpness of feature. Flaxen hair - so pale it seems silver in the half-shadows at the edge of the study - shines in a messy, haphazard twist secured by what appear to be a small length of chain and a twist-tie from a plastic garbage bag. The rest of her clothing is almost as disreputable: jeans so worn they are fraying at almost every seam, a faded camoflage tank top that clings starkly to her lean torso, and a pair of riotous heels, Mahnolo Blahniks that have been (apparently) spray-painted blaze-orange.
The creature pauses at the entry, leaning a spare hip against the doorframe and casts a sharp, speculative glance at Edesna.
"I don't believe we've met." How flat, the eyes. How coiled, the smile. "Have we?"
Edesna de Lorme
Tue 09:48PM CST
**Edesna slowly raised her dark green eyes to the woman in the doorway. Without making it obvious, she does a quick once over of the full visage of the woman. Slowly and respectfully she sets her book aside, and stands with a grace that was strictly inforced in her by a well bred family. Her accent is thick and smooth.** no, Mademouselle, I do not believe we have. For a moment there, I thought you were one of those buffons outside, gotten inside somehow. **With a few slow strides she moves towards the woman, offering her a hand shake. Since coming to America, it was something she had to become accustomed to doing.** I am Edesna de Lorme, of clan Ventrue.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 09:57PM CST
"Madame de Lorme." The creature takes Edesna's hand in her own, but not to shake. Instead - ever-so-startlingly-gently - she folds the tips of the Ventrue's fingers over and bends into a brief, sweeping bow, incidentally passes her cold lips over the other woman's knuckles. "The pleasure is entirely mine." And she smiles, the pale creature, over the ridge of Edesna's knuckles - a reveal of teeth, the edge of a glittering, lovely blade.
Straightening, the creature releases the Ventrue's hand and tames the brief, wild expression that twisted across her generous mouth. "Marie-Hélène Alette de Sausanne d'Allais." Her chin rose, a just-perceptible degree, as her free hand went crawling about her pockets in search of smokes and a lighter. "I'm inclined to force you to guess the rest - a bit of a game would add some excitement to the otherwise dreary night, would it not?"
Edesna de Lorme
Tue 10:01PM CST
**A brow quirked, a bit of suprise on her features as the woman made the sweeping bow and the kiss on the knuckles. A gracious smile fills her lips and she bends as well, a gentle and gracefull motion as her own lips brush at the womans knuckles.** I must admit, your apparel threw me off. That serves as a pleasant reminder not to assume. **A flash of that disarming smile as she releases the womans hand and clasps her hands behind her back loosely.** Games do add excitement, in some form or other. **She wasn't very fond of too many games, unless of course they were in some fashion political. Ventrue were like that. She had many of those games at her law firms, which she was slowly but surely winning. Turning around she heads back to her seat, then looks over to Marie, sweeping her arm in a gesture towards the chairs.** Care to sit?
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 10:09PM CST
"You know what they say about assumptions - " pale brows, vibrantly arched, rise and the wreathing smile spreads rich once more. The creature's eyes glitter darkly, reflecting the study's ambient light, but the color - whatever it may be - is lost to the shadow. Negligently, she pushes herself away from the doorframe (a shrug of hip, a shrug of shoulder, a narrow escape) and paces forward - long and lean and loose, like a tiger, like a wolf. " - and asses."
The corners of her mouth crease into a brief smirk. Is she eyeing Edesna's - ? She couldn't be, could she? In either case, she is already past Edesna, folding her long figure into the chair, and then releasing her endless limbs into some langorous sprawl. "The game, Madame de Lorme. Unless you would prefer another one?" The smirk fades; the smile - so bright, so cold, - reasserts itself. "I am ever so inclined to be accommodating."
Edesna de Lorme
Tue 10:14PM CST
**She takes her seat off to the right of Marie, not taking her eyes off the woman as she is slowly studying her to assest what clan she may be in. A slow smile tugs at the corners.** Hmmn. Guessing games are a weakness, I must say. **Tilting her head to the side, she delicately crossed her legs, her top leg pointint its high heeled shoe in a common habit she had of proper posture. A hand rested on her knee and the other rested upon that hand.** ...You seem quite outspoken and quite confident. Tremere? **A brow raised as she waited to guage the womans response.**
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 10:21PM CST
"Interesting." The creature's eyes linger on Edesna's face, without again ever meeting her eyes. It is a weakness, of their kind, to be so forever on guard against the powers one another bear. Never to be direct (does this seem a prevarication, then, or simply prudence?), gaze sliding over cheeks, nose, mouth as Edesna speaks, the movement of lips, the delicate tracery of teeth behind them. "And incorrect."
From the depths of one of her pack pockets, Marie-Hélène produces a package of long, thin cigarellos and a flameless lighter. Carefully, she tweaks one of the former from the package, rustling the plastic shrinkwrap, and tips it between her lips before lighting it with the later. Paper sparks and curls, smoldering, and she is careful of but not wholly disturbed by the close presence of the almost-flame. "Of course - " her voice is thicker now, with the smoke behind it, " - I should not have made you guess. Forgive me the presumption. I'm a Toreador."
Edesna de Lorme
Tue 10:26PM CST
**She smiles mildly. Again, guessing games, not her strong point. My, how the Toreador seemed to be growing. An inner emotion almost akin to sadness seems to quickly well up. Her own was very few as of yet. Something she wished to remedy. But she was not sure how. The Ventrue were VERy particular in who they embraced or even emitted to their circles.** Ahh. And are you another of the 'tortured-soul artists' I have heard so much about? **It was no insult or degration. Merely a chat starter as Edesna more properly marked the book she was reading and set on the end table to her left. Looking back to Marie, she noted how the woman in turn was studying her. Though it seemed in a different manner.** And have you met our Mademouselle Willow St. James yet?
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 10:34PM CST
"Mmm, oh, oh yes - " her words drift casually now, accompanied by a mouthful, a lungful of smoke - more than any human could inhale and exhale in one single breath - and briefly, the creature's sprawl contracted into a coiled thing, like a compressed spring. Her eyes narrowed, pale lashes sweeping down and together, a gilded cage for her intense regard, "tortured artist. That phrase describes me - " and then, just as abruptly, she sank back into the welcoming embrace of the overstuffed leather chair. " - actually, not at all, I'm afraid. If you want either torture or art, you will necessarily have to look elsewhere, entirely."
Some casual gesture curves through her wrist and the long dark cigarello traces a gracious figure eight through the air. "Nor have I met this Willow." Dark-eyed (some intense undercurrent of blued shadow, like the bruise on the back of twilight) intensity, in close study once more. "Tell me of her."
Edesna de Lorme
Tue 10:41PM CST
**Amusement alights her face.** Ahh, I see. Well, she is a rather shy one. Upon her arrive ** a slight slip into her french wording** she gifted the Prince with a painting she had done. I have not seen it myself, but I do believe she made a good impression. She's very meek. I haven't had much of an oppurtunity to speak or get to know her any further, however. **She shifts in her seat, not one of uncomfortabel measure, only to better position her body in a relaxed posture rather than holding her back up perfectly straight. Loosley she slides one arm to rest against the back of her seat, legs still crossed.** Tell me, mademouselle, if I may be so bold to ask, is your profession?
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 10:52PM CST
Nostrils flare; smoke pours from them as if from the snout of a bull. It's a image from the movies, perhaps, or the collective subconscious and unconsciously (or brazenly. There is something of both in the gesture.) she opens her mouth to re-consume the smoke.
"Meek and shy, mmm?" Still infected by the smoke, the creature's voice has fallen to a lower, darker register. And, in truth, one must wonder what she would do when faced with a meek, shy creature, whether she would suffer reticence, whether she would coddle it. " - and a painter." The creature sighs, smoking breath expelled in a long, sweeping rush from the very bottom of her lungs. "Such a shame, I do adore painters."
"As for my profession - " she continues, with a cursory, casual glance around the room to locate an ashtray, " - well, the answer is more complicated than one might guess. Which answer do you want? Public or private consumption? Mortal or Kindred? Do you want to know what I did before I died, or how I fill my nights now?" And, compacting herself once more, shifting in her seat to gather her legs beneath her and kneel on the sinking, sighing cushion and reach for the nearest ashtray, she taps out her sifting ashes into the clear, reflective glass. "What is yours?"
[The witching hour approacheth! Fade.]
mardi, mai 11, 2004
au crépuscule, un réveil
[Forum post]
he darkness is absolute, without relief. There is something (she thinks - awakening, if such an abrupt and unwholesome eruption to consciousness may be called awakening) textural about the unremitting shadow, the absolute absence of light, which appeals to her on a deep and wordless level. Here I am, she thinks, feels her mouth spreading over the sculpture of her skull, opening, just where I was, and she doesn't mean anything by it. Nothing at all.
It is strange, how the darkness swims around her, how she feels it parting and breathing for her, how the rhythms of life still seem embedded somewhere deep down in the intact shell of her body. Sometimes she imagines herself as an alien consciousness, a brain in a box attached to some constructed sham of a substitute corpse, and despises herself for it, despises her condition, with all its fatal lies, for it.
This shell - how easily immolated; how easily everything (I am, she considers, opening her right hand, fingers stretched to the limits of extension, pretending she can see the appendage - ghost-vision - floating like a pallid starfish in front of her, so fucking arrogant. And she is right, of course.) could be lost.
Five minutes or more after awakening (she is not human; they have other concerns. Slave to their bodies, driven by subliminal urges to eat, to piss, to ease whatever tension the night has brought, wakening is a hot-blooded process. She is a cold-blooded creature, deliberate and reptilian.) she takes in her first breath. It is not experimental. It is not for want of air. It is not to speak; she is alone and has no need for words.
No, she breathes to feel herself move and to assert herself against the darkness. She breathes to taste the acrid backwash of the closed and poisoned air, and to reassert the severed connection between that blazing mind and that cold body. And as she breathes, she imagines her lungs expanding and collapsing like withered balloons that have lost their elasticity. How much can she hold? It is a game she has played before; it is a game she will play again and strangely enough, it pleases her. She imagines herself expanding and exploding and then she simply imagines herself.
It isn't so hard.
Later, she will rise - restless, blood on her mind, the aftertaste thick on her tongue. Last night was the girl. The pale one with battered eyes and a headful of hair overdyed so many times that the texture is like shredded straw, who writes long paeans to the moongoddess and broods over her menstrual blood, who eats onions unrepentently and smells of chlorine and turpentine. Last night it was the girl, and tonight it will be another one - a different one - but not the one she really wants. Not him. Not yet. Another day. Wait for it. There is pleasure - starched and stretched - in such denial, in such anticipation.
Her restless, hungry mind pushes through the mental list that reads like the cast of characters in a script, faces and names and wordless, sensory impressions that serve as mere shorthand for the whole. Some are more distinct than others. Some float to the surface of her mind, and she half-follows the impulse, hungry - hungri-er - for whatever nameless spark they seem to possess, such small and lovely flames.
The restlessness finds echo in her limbs, phantom movements (another breath, she swallows it like blood; she is greedy now), base impressions that presage actual movement. From her low crouch to her knees - forward, fabric shhh-shhing against metal, all echoed back to her five-fold - until her knee slams against the lower release valve and she reaches up blindly for the rusting mechanism that is its twin above.
GGGKRKRRECHHHRTESSST - the release valve, the trickle of cool air against her colder skin, some swimming impression of faint smeared light. She stands, presses her hands on the lip of the opening, lifts herself from the old tank or vat or whatever the thing once was, settles - crouched - atop the metal skin, and finds her flip-phone, stocked with all the various phone numbers she fished from the crowd at last week's gathering.
"Jeremy." How reasonable she sounds, how almost ordinary. "This is - " She does not even hear herself. These are words, are tools - rote little lures, the very first steps in a choreographed dance so familiar it has become mere instinct. Ah, evolution. Her voice doesn't change, but her whole stance does, shifting forward as if he were here, as if she were ready to pounce. " - yes, of course, from Mitch's party. I was thinking - about that drink you offered me, and your manuscript."
Here is her beast, waiting and wanting and wanton, blooming beneath her cold flesh like the pain from a blow: first in a round, concentrated starburst and then in a rolling concentric wave outward. She welcomes it with a raw, sharp pleasure that feels something like relief. The conversation ends, and she is rising, she is stalking, she is no longer thinking. She simply is as she is and what she is. It is time to hunger; it is time to hunt.
he darkness is absolute, without relief. There is something (she thinks - awakening, if such an abrupt and unwholesome eruption to consciousness may be called awakening) textural about the unremitting shadow, the absolute absence of light, which appeals to her on a deep and wordless level. Here I am, she thinks, feels her mouth spreading over the sculpture of her skull, opening, just where I was, and she doesn't mean anything by it. Nothing at all.
It is strange, how the darkness swims around her, how she feels it parting and breathing for her, how the rhythms of life still seem embedded somewhere deep down in the intact shell of her body. Sometimes she imagines herself as an alien consciousness, a brain in a box attached to some constructed sham of a substitute corpse, and despises herself for it, despises her condition, with all its fatal lies, for it.
This shell - how easily immolated; how easily everything (I am, she considers, opening her right hand, fingers stretched to the limits of extension, pretending she can see the appendage - ghost-vision - floating like a pallid starfish in front of her, so fucking arrogant. And she is right, of course.) could be lost.
Five minutes or more after awakening (she is not human; they have other concerns. Slave to their bodies, driven by subliminal urges to eat, to piss, to ease whatever tension the night has brought, wakening is a hot-blooded process. She is a cold-blooded creature, deliberate and reptilian.) she takes in her first breath. It is not experimental. It is not for want of air. It is not to speak; she is alone and has no need for words.
No, she breathes to feel herself move and to assert herself against the darkness. She breathes to taste the acrid backwash of the closed and poisoned air, and to reassert the severed connection between that blazing mind and that cold body. And as she breathes, she imagines her lungs expanding and collapsing like withered balloons that have lost their elasticity. How much can she hold? It is a game she has played before; it is a game she will play again and strangely enough, it pleases her. She imagines herself expanding and exploding and then she simply imagines herself.
It isn't so hard.
Later, she will rise - restless, blood on her mind, the aftertaste thick on her tongue. Last night was the girl. The pale one with battered eyes and a headful of hair overdyed so many times that the texture is like shredded straw, who writes long paeans to the moongoddess and broods over her menstrual blood, who eats onions unrepentently and smells of chlorine and turpentine. Last night it was the girl, and tonight it will be another one - a different one - but not the one she really wants. Not him. Not yet. Another day. Wait for it. There is pleasure - starched and stretched - in such denial, in such anticipation.
Her restless, hungry mind pushes through the mental list that reads like the cast of characters in a script, faces and names and wordless, sensory impressions that serve as mere shorthand for the whole. Some are more distinct than others. Some float to the surface of her mind, and she half-follows the impulse, hungry - hungri-er - for whatever nameless spark they seem to possess, such small and lovely flames.
The restlessness finds echo in her limbs, phantom movements (another breath, she swallows it like blood; she is greedy now), base impressions that presage actual movement. From her low crouch to her knees - forward, fabric shhh-shhing against metal, all echoed back to her five-fold - until her knee slams against the lower release valve and she reaches up blindly for the rusting mechanism that is its twin above.
GGGKRKRRECHHHRTESSST - the release valve, the trickle of cool air against her colder skin, some swimming impression of faint smeared light. She stands, presses her hands on the lip of the opening, lifts herself from the old tank or vat or whatever the thing once was, settles - crouched - atop the metal skin, and finds her flip-phone, stocked with all the various phone numbers she fished from the crowd at last week's gathering.
"Jeremy." How reasonable she sounds, how almost ordinary. "This is - " She does not even hear herself. These are words, are tools - rote little lures, the very first steps in a choreographed dance so familiar it has become mere instinct. Ah, evolution. Her voice doesn't change, but her whole stance does, shifting forward as if he were here, as if she were ready to pounce. " - yes, of course, from Mitch's party. I was thinking - about that drink you offered me, and your manuscript."
Here is her beast, waiting and wanting and wanton, blooming beneath her cold flesh like the pain from a blow: first in a round, concentrated starburst and then in a rolling concentric wave outward. She welcomes it with a raw, sharp pleasure that feels something like relief. The conversation ends, and she is rising, she is stalking, she is no longer thinking. She simply is as she is and what she is. It is time to hunger; it is time to hunt.
le main disposée
[Forum post]
The party was going well; Mitchell was pleased. Someone (else, thank god) had taken over the stereo and was keeping up a good, eclectic mix of music. Singer-songwriters, faster things, even dance numbers and kitchy-retro vibes, such that he sometimes found himself just bobbing his head like some sullen teenager in one of those bouncing-cars that figured into MTV videos in the late 90s so much. He'd never understood the point of those, incidentally, and he almost brought it up to the pretty psych student twirling her hair and staring up at him over her appletini, but thought better of it. It might come off as rascist or something, and he wasn't. Rascist, well not overtly.
Mitch felt himself smirking as he put a quick stop to the usual train of qualifications and contagions the filigree of modern thought left him to waddle through whenever he veered too close to any dangerous topic and distracted himself by staring down at the girl's cleavage. That was safe, so long as the glances were brief and he looked back into her eyes pretty quickly, which he did. He wasn't actually a boob. Er, he wasn't actually a bore, most of the time.
"So, it's not that I'm anti-marriage so much as I think the partnership should be, like, quantified elseways until we are - " He was smiling, not really listening. She was just babbling, spouting the things she thought she ought to say. She had a nice face, though, and a nice voice if he could ignore the almost valley-girl sounds of her various interjections and exclamations. " - oh, my god is that Sheila?" She leaned closer, an intimate distance, to share one of those pseudo-intimacies - a nice, gossipy tidbit - that passed for confidences in such a gathering. "Have you heard about - " He smiled and leaned closer, tilting his ear toward her mouth while glancing across the plane of her shoulder, casually studying the crowd and its shifting, amorphous groupings and definitions.
The gathering had grown beyond the quiet invitational cocktail party for a few faculty members and other graduate students he had initially intended. No longer his, no longer static, it was an organic thing, balanced on the cusp of another growth spurt. Most of the invited faculty members were still there, but other people - a younger crowd, a different crowd - were beginning to spill in from the hallway, and the multilayered echoes of music and conversation from the balcony suggested that more than one balcony was involved.
Not bad, he thought to himself, pleased with the tableau, not bad at all. Freakin' smug, actually. Didn't know I had it in me.
The gin was beginning to do its work; he felt the familiar warm flushed tide of good-natured ease creeping up on him, imagined a thermometer on a hot day, the mercury rising, as a perfect visual analog to what he was feeling. He wondered if others could tell, could see his knotted shoulder muscles loosen or the change in his grin, from dutiful to genuine. Weird, how that creeps up on you all of a sudden, how that feeling always surprises you, even when you know its coming, even when you're expecting it.
"Yeah? - " whats-her-name was still talking, and Mitch found himself inserting appropriate noises at the appropriate pauses without thinking about it, leaning too close to her, grinning his grin, - "mmmhmm?" She might have been boring him before, but now the whole fucking world seemed interesting, like someone had popped into actions in the dead moments between seconds and repainted everything in ever-so-slightly-more-intense shades.
He found himself putting his hand on whats-her-name's shoulder, her skin warm beneath his hand, and he was readying himself to ask her to dance (nuts, since he really couldn't dance), when he caught a glimpse of something: flaxen hair, flashing eyes and a supple, crimson mouth that made think of - think of -
"oh god."
Had he said that aloud? He looked down at psych-cleavage-girl and her face was closing in itself in a strange way, a ridged line between narrow, furrowed brows, her mouth opening, eyes narrowing. Time seemed to close and focus and string itself along and the chica was twisting away from him. Pressure on his wrist - "off me. Get your hands off me!" - not yelling yet, but soon, he looked away and back and felt himself distantly, stiffly releasing the psych major's shoulder and looking around, knowing that he should be embarrassed but not quite capable of summoning that feeling (usually so natural to him) to the forefront.
(He had seen her. He had seen her. Where?)
The girl was still there - perhaps a foot away - her arms crossed in beneath her breasts in a narrow-eyed display of feminine outrage. She was waiting for something and he frowned at her, irritated, couldn't she just go away? "Uh - " a moment, epiphany - apology, that's what she was waiting for - and he stammered something like it out, " - sorry. Saw m'ex. Didn't think she'd show."
He forced himself to look straight at the girl, fishing for some evidence that his mumbled apology had down the trick, and she was still standing there, just standing there like a stupid cow (he had to go find her. he was still dreaming about her. she had to know that.) and he realized that his psych major was waiting for something more than apology, that her tight, angry face was easing and there was room for more than mere forgiveness if he pushed the proper buttons in the correct sequence. Mitch was sufficiently outside himself that such arcane knowledge - which usually eluded him - just bubbled up in his mind, ridiculously clear.
"Yeah - " he continued, refocusing (half-focusing) on his psych major, " - thought she knew better than to show up around here. After what happened - " Mitchell tucked his voice into a lower register and reoriented himself, back in the subtle orbit of the girl, perfect shield, perfect weapon. Wasn't she? Wasn't she just made for this? Perfect distraction, perfect substitute.
He shot a hot glance over the girl's shoulder, found the creature, and devoured her with his eyes, if nothing else. His mouth felt sour, his body overheated. He wanted to crush something, to feel something shatter. (Throw a party. Invite me.) Of course she'd come. Of course she hadn't wanted him. Of course she wouldn't speak to him all night long. Maybe he should say something. Maybe she would notice - him, the girl - maybe she would stop it. Maybe she would get jealous, maybe she'd hit him, maybe she'd fuck him. All night long, closer, watching as she flitted from person to person like a bee from bloom to bloom, gathering numbers and names with an obsessive carelessness that reminded him of birds, something large and white and winged. He kissed the girl - his girl, the thought of her, not bothering to learn her name - with an aggression and possessiveness he had never expressed before, but all the time he was watching the other one, the creature, like a wolf, like a starved thing.
She glanced back only once, ten minutes to four in the morning, when the night seemed to have tied itself off and wrapped itself neatly around the edges of morning, the raw and intimate hours that still found a one and a half-dozen people reclining in various states of dress and repose throughout the apartment and balcony ("Great party, man - " and he knew it. Best party he ever gave), and her the center of sprawled group, holding herself elusively and certainly apart, fine fingers circling a smudge-eyed girl's slender wrist. She looked at him - then - as she rose, leading the girl toward the door with a great cat's perverse delicacy. She looked at him then, and smiled.
All night long, he had wanted nothing (so much) more than that.
The party was going well; Mitchell was pleased. Someone (else, thank god) had taken over the stereo and was keeping up a good, eclectic mix of music. Singer-songwriters, faster things, even dance numbers and kitchy-retro vibes, such that he sometimes found himself just bobbing his head like some sullen teenager in one of those bouncing-cars that figured into MTV videos in the late 90s so much. He'd never understood the point of those, incidentally, and he almost brought it up to the pretty psych student twirling her hair and staring up at him over her appletini, but thought better of it. It might come off as rascist or something, and he wasn't. Rascist, well not overtly.
Mitch felt himself smirking as he put a quick stop to the usual train of qualifications and contagions the filigree of modern thought left him to waddle through whenever he veered too close to any dangerous topic and distracted himself by staring down at the girl's cleavage. That was safe, so long as the glances were brief and he looked back into her eyes pretty quickly, which he did. He wasn't actually a boob. Er, he wasn't actually a bore, most of the time.
"So, it's not that I'm anti-marriage so much as I think the partnership should be, like, quantified elseways until we are - " He was smiling, not really listening. She was just babbling, spouting the things she thought she ought to say. She had a nice face, though, and a nice voice if he could ignore the almost valley-girl sounds of her various interjections and exclamations. " - oh, my god is that Sheila?" She leaned closer, an intimate distance, to share one of those pseudo-intimacies - a nice, gossipy tidbit - that passed for confidences in such a gathering. "Have you heard about - " He smiled and leaned closer, tilting his ear toward her mouth while glancing across the plane of her shoulder, casually studying the crowd and its shifting, amorphous groupings and definitions.
The gathering had grown beyond the quiet invitational cocktail party for a few faculty members and other graduate students he had initially intended. No longer his, no longer static, it was an organic thing, balanced on the cusp of another growth spurt. Most of the invited faculty members were still there, but other people - a younger crowd, a different crowd - were beginning to spill in from the hallway, and the multilayered echoes of music and conversation from the balcony suggested that more than one balcony was involved.
Not bad, he thought to himself, pleased with the tableau, not bad at all. Freakin' smug, actually. Didn't know I had it in me.
The gin was beginning to do its work; he felt the familiar warm flushed tide of good-natured ease creeping up on him, imagined a thermometer on a hot day, the mercury rising, as a perfect visual analog to what he was feeling. He wondered if others could tell, could see his knotted shoulder muscles loosen or the change in his grin, from dutiful to genuine. Weird, how that creeps up on you all of a sudden, how that feeling always surprises you, even when you know its coming, even when you're expecting it.
"Yeah? - " whats-her-name was still talking, and Mitch found himself inserting appropriate noises at the appropriate pauses without thinking about it, leaning too close to her, grinning his grin, - "mmmhmm?" She might have been boring him before, but now the whole fucking world seemed interesting, like someone had popped into actions in the dead moments between seconds and repainted everything in ever-so-slightly-more-intense shades.
He found himself putting his hand on whats-her-name's shoulder, her skin warm beneath his hand, and he was readying himself to ask her to dance (nuts, since he really couldn't dance), when he caught a glimpse of something: flaxen hair, flashing eyes and a supple, crimson mouth that made think of - think of -
"oh god."
Had he said that aloud? He looked down at psych-cleavage-girl and her face was closing in itself in a strange way, a ridged line between narrow, furrowed brows, her mouth opening, eyes narrowing. Time seemed to close and focus and string itself along and the chica was twisting away from him. Pressure on his wrist - "off me. Get your hands off me!" - not yelling yet, but soon, he looked away and back and felt himself distantly, stiffly releasing the psych major's shoulder and looking around, knowing that he should be embarrassed but not quite capable of summoning that feeling (usually so natural to him) to the forefront.
(He had seen her. He had seen her. Where?)
The girl was still there - perhaps a foot away - her arms crossed in beneath her breasts in a narrow-eyed display of feminine outrage. She was waiting for something and he frowned at her, irritated, couldn't she just go away? "Uh - " a moment, epiphany - apology, that's what she was waiting for - and he stammered something like it out, " - sorry. Saw m'ex. Didn't think she'd show."
He forced himself to look straight at the girl, fishing for some evidence that his mumbled apology had down the trick, and she was still standing there, just standing there like a stupid cow (he had to go find her. he was still dreaming about her. she had to know that.) and he realized that his psych major was waiting for something more than apology, that her tight, angry face was easing and there was room for more than mere forgiveness if he pushed the proper buttons in the correct sequence. Mitch was sufficiently outside himself that such arcane knowledge - which usually eluded him - just bubbled up in his mind, ridiculously clear.
"Yeah - " he continued, refocusing (half-focusing) on his psych major, " - thought she knew better than to show up around here. After what happened - " Mitchell tucked his voice into a lower register and reoriented himself, back in the subtle orbit of the girl, perfect shield, perfect weapon. Wasn't she? Wasn't she just made for this? Perfect distraction, perfect substitute.
He shot a hot glance over the girl's shoulder, found the creature, and devoured her with his eyes, if nothing else. His mouth felt sour, his body overheated. He wanted to crush something, to feel something shatter. (Throw a party. Invite me.) Of course she'd come. Of course she hadn't wanted him. Of course she wouldn't speak to him all night long. Maybe he should say something. Maybe she would notice - him, the girl - maybe she would stop it. Maybe she would get jealous, maybe she'd hit him, maybe she'd fuck him. All night long, closer, watching as she flitted from person to person like a bee from bloom to bloom, gathering numbers and names with an obsessive carelessness that reminded him of birds, something large and white and winged. He kissed the girl - his girl, the thought of her, not bothering to learn her name - with an aggression and possessiveness he had never expressed before, but all the time he was watching the other one, the creature, like a wolf, like a starved thing.
She glanced back only once, ten minutes to four in the morning, when the night seemed to have tied itself off and wrapped itself neatly around the edges of morning, the raw and intimate hours that still found a one and a half-dozen people reclining in various states of dress and repose throughout the apartment and balcony ("Great party, man - " and he knew it. Best party he ever gave), and her the center of sprawled group, holding herself elusively and certainly apart, fine fingers circling a smudge-eyed girl's slender wrist. She looked at him - then - as she rose, leading the girl toward the door with a great cat's perverse delicacy. She looked at him then, and smiled.
All night long, he had wanted nothing (so much) more than that.
sur les coins
[Forum post, follow-up to scene w/Teagan]
It happened overnight. The corner of Fifth and Sullivan, the corner of Seventh and Trade, the corner of Two-Hundred Twenty-Eighth and Grand, and elsewhere, too. Fliers, small piles of them on brightly colored paper, in brightly colored inks, on a few select corners throughout the greater Chicagoland area, in a few select El stops, near the downtown YMCA, near the Lighthouse Mission, near Cabrini Green, and so on.
The fliers are clear and straightforward. No need to mince words, after all.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS
FREE FREE FREE
BEER BEER BEER
XXX, XXX Street
Chicago, Illinois
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The address printed in bold relief at the bottom is recognizeable only to Kindred as Elysium. To assorted crazy down-n-outs, bums, dealers, pedophiles, night watchmen, frat boys and the like, however, it is merely the address promising a crazy-good time, full of free girls and beer. Sometimes beer commercials really do come to life. Maybe they're even filming one at this big fancy estate. Maybe you'll get some, or at least watch a couple of twins getting it on. Right, wingman?
And the guards at Elysium would recognize, of course, the slow but steady stream of bums, stoners, and horny businessmen as something like trouble.
Strange, really. Quite strange.
---
Teagan is walking home, back toward the Church when a hoard of young teenagers scamper past her- all hormones and acne- and one of them drops a flier.
The Malkavian scoops it up and reads it over once, her lips part and a soft chuckle escapes. There is a slightly triumphant gleam to her eyes as she folds it up and slips in into her pocket, glancing around before continuing on her way.
---
**With hands tucked snugly into her business suit pockets, she liesurely made her way around a corner, only a few blocks from Elysium, in which she was going to pay a little if quiet visit. Nothing else to do for the night, might as well take a walk. But a walk is not the only thing she gets. **
**Upon making her turn of the blind sided corner, a few men, no more than 20 or so nearly collide right into her. Giving a feigned gasp of her pert lips she scowls those dark green eyes at the impertinant little fools. They stop only for a moment to look her up and down, those stupid grins on their faces like true dogs of sexual perversion.**
"Monsieurs, do be so kind as to watch where your going!"
**The guys chuckle, one of them raising a beer to his lips. Edesna had to hold back the sneer from her mouth, the mere scent of the pisswater invading her senses. Wisps of dark blonde hair cross over her high cheek bones as one of the guys speaks, obviously the bold one of the group.**
"Hey lady, ya know where this address is?"
**The man holds up a rather crude flyer only inches from Edesna's face. Nearly growling with impatience at the two she snatches the flyer away, glancing at it and sneering at them while she spoke in her thick french voice.**
"Morons! I would never even think of a place like..."
**Her words trail off, and she blinks, reading the address. That can't be right. How in the world...? Her face seemed to cloud over, thinking this was some sort of childish prank. But by who? One of her own kind? Certainly not anyone from HER clan. It would be unthinkable.**
"There's no party at this location, now move."
**She shuved the dirty flyer back into the man's hands and pushed through them with a suprising bit of strength. Walking away she made sure they did not follow. What was going on???**
It happened overnight. The corner of Fifth and Sullivan, the corner of Seventh and Trade, the corner of Two-Hundred Twenty-Eighth and Grand, and elsewhere, too. Fliers, small piles of them on brightly colored paper, in brightly colored inks, on a few select corners throughout the greater Chicagoland area, in a few select El stops, near the downtown YMCA, near the Lighthouse Mission, near Cabrini Green, and so on.
The fliers are clear and straightforward. No need to mince words, after all.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The address printed in bold relief at the bottom is recognizeable only to Kindred as Elysium. To assorted crazy down-n-outs, bums, dealers, pedophiles, night watchmen, frat boys and the like, however, it is merely the address promising a crazy-good time, full of free girls and beer. Sometimes beer commercials really do come to life. Maybe they're even filming one at this big fancy estate. Maybe you'll get some, or at least watch a couple of twins getting it on. Right, wingman?
And the guards at Elysium would recognize, of course, the slow but steady stream of bums, stoners, and horny businessmen as something like trouble.
Strange, really. Quite strange.
---
Teagan is walking home, back toward the Church when a hoard of young teenagers scamper past her- all hormones and acne- and one of them drops a flier.
The Malkavian scoops it up and reads it over once, her lips part and a soft chuckle escapes. There is a slightly triumphant gleam to her eyes as she folds it up and slips in into her pocket, glancing around before continuing on her way.
---
**With hands tucked snugly into her business suit pockets, she liesurely made her way around a corner, only a few blocks from Elysium, in which she was going to pay a little if quiet visit. Nothing else to do for the night, might as well take a walk. But a walk is not the only thing she gets. **
**Upon making her turn of the blind sided corner, a few men, no more than 20 or so nearly collide right into her. Giving a feigned gasp of her pert lips she scowls those dark green eyes at the impertinant little fools. They stop only for a moment to look her up and down, those stupid grins on their faces like true dogs of sexual perversion.**
"Monsieurs, do be so kind as to watch where your going!"
**The guys chuckle, one of them raising a beer to his lips. Edesna had to hold back the sneer from her mouth, the mere scent of the pisswater invading her senses. Wisps of dark blonde hair cross over her high cheek bones as one of the guys speaks, obviously the bold one of the group.**
"Hey lady, ya know where this address is?"
**The man holds up a rather crude flyer only inches from Edesna's face. Nearly growling with impatience at the two she snatches the flyer away, glancing at it and sneering at them while she spoke in her thick french voice.**
"Morons! I would never even think of a place like..."
**Her words trail off, and she blinks, reading the address. That can't be right. How in the world...? Her face seemed to cloud over, thinking this was some sort of childish prank. But by who? One of her own kind? Certainly not anyone from HER clan. It would be unthinkable.**
"There's no party at this location, now move."
**She shuved the dirty flyer back into the man's hands and pushed through them with a suprising bit of strength. Walking away she made sure they did not follow. What was going on???**
vendredi, mai 07, 2004
elysium is closed for the evening.
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 09:48PM CST
The day had been cloudy and the evening was feeling the bitter sting of the cold. Teagan was dressed only as one should be, given that most mortals are walking about with red noses and flushed cheeks. She's rocking slightly on her heels before the great gates to Dearborn Estate. The pink parka has a fur lined hood (fake of course) and the tiny hairs are rippled by the little wind present. Strands of dark brown hair are partially obscuring her sable eyes from view and a soft lullaby escapes her shining lips in husky tones. She's pressed the buzzar once already and is awaiting some response from Nino, the Ghoul.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 09:57PM CST
Vrooom.
The low rumble of an engine - a sweet freakin' engine, something that some car freak would adore, something some motorhead musclegeek must've sunk into the frame of the '70 'cuda the Toreador drives, because she soes not know much about engines, at all, beyond that she appreciates the low bass rumble and the responsive clutch in the midst of late-night joyrides.
Clink. The driver's side door swings open, and the willowy Toreador does not so much emerge from the car as she erupts from it, rising with a furious confidence just this side of grace, insufficiently ladylike but smooth-motioned and raw. In lieu of her trashy trappings of late, the creature sports something a little more appropriate for the open Elysium of a major American city: a shimmering red dress cut down to there, slit up to here, draped so scandalously low in back that one can see the outline of each and every single vertebra in the lovely S-curse of her spine. To complete the ensemble, a narrow rope of diamonds jealously hugs her throat, but is tossed back and swings down the line of her spine.
"What's going on, petite?" Heels on the sidewalk, and a smoked voice raw from the cold night. "They have not let you in, yet?"
Incredulous. Elysium.
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 10:04PM CST
She blinks at the creature. This vision in red and diamonds. Her own simple attire seems suddenly to cling in all the wrong places. The leather pants crass. Especially in red. The simple velvet green top obtuse and unbefitting. She stares and a hand rises and wipe at her cheek. Drifts of light rain smattering upon a cheek so pale and cold. The lips are vibrant in contrast.
"No. I don't understand it myself. Nino is usually so punctual about it."
The voice is husky, the cold weather corrupting its usual girlish tones and lowering it to the smoulder of a vixen. She smiles slightly. A flash of fang and tooth.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 10:13PM CST
"Ridiculous." Vibrant eyes narrow to dangerous, furious slits - reptilian, almost, so alien are then - and glance off Teagan before rising again to the door. Marie-Hélène stares hard at the door for another moment, as if she could open it by force of will alone. Someone particularly observant might notice the faint twitch of her mouth upward before she forces it into a dark, dangerous frown matched only by the outpouring of passionate outrage in her voice. "Incroyable."
There follows a string of curses so cosmopolitan and inconceiveable that it would take a committee of sociolinguists several weeks to track down every referant, spat with relish onto the cold stone walkway.
"Amateurs." The ultimate insult. The Rose rounds suddenly and wholly on Teagan, thrusting out an imperious hand, commanding attention. "Come. Now."
Quite the flare for the dramatic, no?
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 10:19PM CST
For her part the Malkavian adore any sort of dramatic outpouring as it sparks her own flare for outlandish behaviour. Had she not incured the wrath not two nights previous from an Elder for speaking things she ought not to say? The lips curve in a delighted sort of expression and she lifts one small pale hand from her pocket and slips it easily enough into the furious Toreador's. Shall they march upon Elysium together then? Draw swords with their fists and beat down their foes? She prays for it. Her hood slips down enough for her dark hair to be revealed, tied back in a loose plait, a ribbon adorning the end.
"But what will we do? We cannot impose ourselves unbidden. Can we?"
She breathes out in a fog of cold air, the white mist gone almost as soon as it is expelled from dried lungs. The dark eyes upturned to the taller woman.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 10:31PM CST
"Bien sûr, we may impose ourselves." The creature's frosty brow flattens, perfect counterpoint to her glittering, slitted gaze. Her body seems to hang in time - somewhere between motion and stop-motion - as if someone had slowed the passage of seconds and interposed him-or-herself into the endless yawning gap left thereby. "Impose?" After a moment's thought, Marie-Hélène casts the Malkavian a conspiratorial smile, all flash, fire, and subverted impish fury. "What fool makes his home in Elysium? I would as soon build my home in the midst of Genghis Khan's great army and dare him to pillage my wheatery."
The last word was completely manufactured, but the Toreador pronounces it with the same firm fire as the rest of her utterance, and so somehow, it carries the weight of authority as much as any other.
"However - " after another moment spent staring at the Elysium gates - as if she could push them open with sheer force of will, set them afire with her outrage - she turns and pulls the Malkavian abruptly away with her. "I have a better idea."
And also: no way to open the gate.
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 10:38PM CST
Teagan steps after the Toreador- indeed she has little choice unless she wishes to be tripped- and a tinkling little laugh is pulled from her chest. The words incite her humour and her brow is raised as they march together, women with a mission indeed. Away from the gates though?
Teagan twists her neck around and stares back at the gates longingly, thinking for a moment only of the warmth of the library. Of her books. Yes. She desires nothing more than that room. Damn the fools! She allows the tugging to draw her away. Excitement floods her senses. The dark eyes glow.
"Shall we march upon Elysium Miss Marie? Or better still, find some secret entry?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 10:44PM CST
"Tch - " the small corrective sound is bright at the edge of the creature's tongue, and glides easily into the strange edge of another smile. This one is proprietary, studied, perhaps a bit mysterious. " - m'selle. It is so much more sophisticated and - how you say - less southern. No Scarlett O'Hara's we, eh?
"But no - " here, the Toreador stops and flings open the passenger-side door to her musclecar, and gestures impatiently inside. "We will do so much better, m'selle O'Braonain." The art of improvisation: Marie-Hélène hangs on the edge of the thought, the way the dawn hangs on the verge of a day. She has no fucking idea what she's going to do. "We will, ah," another smile, no less brilliant than the diamonds skimming down her back, " - learn the art and meaning of revenge, and the subtle intricacies of the insult. Come. I will show you."
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 10:51PM CST
Teagan skims her gaze over the figure before her. The eyes linger but for a moment on the sharp features of the face before she slips easily into the vehicle. The eyes immediantly dart about the interior as if plotting out a possible route of escape incase...what exactly? The petite woman did not know but some kind of delighted anxiety gripped her as she burrowed against the lining and slipped her fingers onto the seat, just resting them there and watching.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 11:01PM CST
Some bare few long strides carry the Toreador around the long, arrogant nose of the old 'cuda, and after a few anxious moments, she has taken her place in the driver's seat: high-heeled feet on the clutch and gas pedal, narrow, capable hands on the wheel and gearshift. There's a moment of silence before the stereo roars to wretched life - a raw wall of noise - which the Toreador changes to something driven and Baroque with two quick clicks of her index finger, with its ragged, blunt nail.
"Where do you think we are going, petite?" The impression of her pale face swimming against the darkness beyond, reflected but just in the glass, a strange etching of a second self. The creature's eyes blazed with something (hunger, malice, humor - all so interrelated - ) and flashed with the reflection of someone else's headlights, before she at last turned her attention to the road. "And where would you like to go?"
The 'cuda shot to sudden life, Toreador riding the clutch and guiding the gearshift like an old pro, or at least with all the attendant confidence of one.
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 11:07PM CST
Her fingers play with buckling her seatbelt. An old memory whisps its way through her mind. Another voice asking her the same question. His eyes alight with some desire for her. The youth. ("Where do ye wish to go, my little poet?") She frowns as she pushes the hood down and fingers wind through the hair, pushing it away. She turns big eyes, with the lids dusted gold and red upon the creature beside her. The sweep of artificial lights playing on the face. The voice is soft. A gentle murmur.
"I don't know. Where do you wish to take me?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 11:16PM CST
"Is that all, then, cherie? " a raucous, sidelong glance, the long sweep of pale lashes, the sharp raw edge of something close to a sneer before the shadows change and her face is lost to darkness. Only the ghostly reflections of the instrument panel dusting her with vague green light, the mirrored gloss of reflections from the streetlight, the dance of her hands on the wheel and gearshift. The revolutions of the enginge climb steadily higher and are then undercut by the low roar as she shifts gears. They're steadily gathering speed - tearing through the quiet pedestrian streets. Soon the trees have given way to something more assertive, more industrial - the raw hulks of brownbrick apartment buildings interspersed by the remains of old warehouses and what may have been stockyards. Past them, through.
Marie-Hélène does not speak again until a red light has imposed itself between her and - well - the rest of the street, ending the rich slow poetry of her continual acceleration. Then - idling again - she casts another pointed glance toward the Malkavian beside her, pale brows rising high about her glittering gaze in fine critical repose. "You want only what I want. Only what another wants? You are a vessel waiting to be filled?"
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 11:23PM CST
There is a flash of the eyes. The lips twist in some sort of angry pout. She looks like some cornered creature for a moment. Unsure of its footing and a soft growl creeping along her throat. She snaps her gaze away after a moment. The brow furrowed as the Beast's rumbling resonates around her chest.
"Of course not! I want many things Miss Marie. Sometimes however it is necessicary to bow to the others around you. I have no power to make others listen to me yet. I am but a fawn stumbling around to find its feet. On any occasion some great hunter could finish me off. I want...I seek only to survive."
She quietens now. Looks down at her fingers, steepled together. The outburst seeming to echo in the car's small interior. Her hackles raised just so.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 11:37PM CST
"Bow not to me." The raw curve of a smile, rich and certain, riding high above the fine slippery fabric of the creature's red dress. "...m'selle."
And then, instead of the echo of Teagan's voice, only the raw roar of the engine vibrating through the cabin. Again and again, the engine's scream increases, undercut as the Toreador changes gears. The creature plays the gears to the outter limits, waiting too long to shift, taking some apparent delight in the strain on the massive engine. Factories speed by, now, half of them abandoned, one of them, at least, the elegant creature's excuse for a haven: darkness, the looming rusting carcasses of machinery, the rought burnt-oil scent that permeated everything. Among them, doubtless, too, the homes of their enemies.
The endless march of factories at last gives way to something more familiar, something more comfortingly human than that endless blasted cityscape. Instead, a series of nondescript houses, both attached and detached, businesses and apartments: some lower-middle class residential area. Five minutes on the deserted streets brings them to a large cubist building - obviously constructed in the 1970s - with rectangles of concrete and rectangles of glass intersecting at intervals. The car slows - the creature is more cautious now - and at last Marie-Hélène pulls up behind the library, parking in the alley. Or rather, double-parking in the alley, just behind a trio of dumpsters serving both the building and Nick's Roast Beef beside it.
In spite of her elegant attire - the too-low-cut dress, the sweep of diamonds hanging like a glittering shadow of her spine - the Toreador sweeps out of the car and approaches the foremost dumpster, motion Teagan to come and give her a hand.
"Top-most window's open, but I need to climb to get there. Gimme a boost."
Another flashing smile sparks across her mouth, like heat-lightening splitting the vault of the night. "Hurry. We don't have all night, cherie."
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 11:43PM CST
There is caution in her movements as she steps from the car across from Marie and tilts her head to one side, looking beyond her at the dumpster, then lifting her eyes to the window that is indeed, ajar. A slash of red lips and she slips across around the car. The engine ticking from the drive, heat wafting in invisable waves from the bonnet. The Malkavian's hands come to rest on a hip each as she again looks upward and then leans over, making a step with her hands, hair falling like a silken rope over a shoulder. The eyes burning some mixture of sable and amber.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 11:49PM CST
Marie-Hélène steps out of the strapped arch of her high-heeled shoes and into the curved step of the Malkavian's paired hands. Pushing off the ground, reaching high, scraping the knuckles of her elegant hands against then rough concrete and scrambling for purchase, she at last gains the ledge requested.
It's a narrow thing, no more than a foot across, with an equally narrow smoked glass window barring the further way. The lightest touch sends the window opening, and - with a curving, wretched half-grin - the Toreador slips inside.
Perhaps another minute later, the Toreador swings the back door open and beckons Teagan in. "...and don't forget my shoes."
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 11:53PM CST
Delightful creature. So naughty. Teagan sweeps up the shoes and with almost a prancing quality to her steps, hastens to follow her kindred inside. The scent of the library. Books and ink. The faint cloying scent of some mortal's aftershave or librarians perfume makes her nostrils flare and she feels the enticing sensation of anxious anticipation once more as she murmurs softly.
"Wonderful."
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 11:56PM CST
"When were you embraced?" A casual question, though one that is perhaps a bit outré for the usual Elysium crowd, uttered as the Toreador sweeps her way through the hushed library, bare feet falling quietly on the carpeted floor. She carries her heels dangling from her fingers, now, with a certain disinterest in the whole project - as if she had, now, given up whatever impulse drove her to dress in such high style, as if she had given it up utterly. As if she would never - ever - again be taken by another such desire, though to be certain one would come, fickle, the next night, or the night after that. "Do you know anything about computers?"
There's one already on, glowing and humming as it boots up. The light from the monitor swims in the hushed darkness, smears the edges of the screen as if they were bleeding light into the room.
"I can put - " a pregnant pause, fine mouth pressed together in a vague haze of puzzled irritation, " - the words on the screen and onto the paper, but not pictures. I think we will need pictures for this invitation. Perhaps you know more than I?"
Teagan O'Braonain
Sat 12:02AM CST
The sight of the computer screen fills her with pride. Here is something she excells at. Indeed it is a necessary evil for her writings,though she does prefer the notepad and pencil whenever possible. She makes a soft sound of delight as her fingertips trace over the keys and she immediantly lets them slip into their positions. Index fingers hovering over the 'F' and 'J' keys. She casts a slightly smug smile Marie's way before she begins to locate the proper programs.
"Indeed I do Miss. I pride myself on being rather skilled with them in fact. A writer cannot be without such a device."
The pale light of the screen washes over her face. She lets her gaze flicker back to the creature.
"1952. I was embraced."
Marie-Hélène Alette
Sat 12:09AM CST
"Mademoiselle, I say. I am not some American woman, to be address with this wholly unsatisfying appellation "Miss," which simpers its way through conversations like a rotten banana peel or one of the puff-balls the cheering girls giggle about and toss around," - and this, this is wholly, delightfully affected, another game within a game, as outraged and outrageous as possible.
During the fussy speech, the Toreador arranges herself behind Teagan, peering over the other creature's shoulder at the glowing screen. The chain of diamonds slides across the Toreador's back, colliding quietly with the left arm of the chair, and the silk dress whispers against her thighs as she sits and draws herself closer and begins, "at the top, very very big so even the stupidest can read it, put "Girls Girls Girls." You know, the way they do for burlesque shows."
Teagan O'Braonain
Sat 12:13AM CST
The presence so close behind her, Teagan shifts in her boots, her legs brushing against Marie as she bends closer to the screen, searching for the correct button to click upon. The sound of her little fingers upon the keys a constant as she smiles, an amused expression as she obediently casts the words in bold font over the screen. The color splashing over the white page. She experiments with colors. Red, Gold, Bright pink. Before settling back with Red. She inhales the other creature's scent now.
"What are we creating these for, Mademoiselle?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Sat 12:21AM CST
"Much better - " and that scent, is not merely blood (though blood there is, blood there always is for Kindred, beneath and above it all) but is also acrid, acid - oil and smoke and the faint reek of the dying river, the remnants of the city streaming into the cesspool of a lake. Rough, metallic, industrial - all overlaid with the crimson saltsheen of blood and the distinctive scent of Chanel No. 5. If anything, the combination is distinctive. " - though you may shorten to m'selle, which is also perfectly acceptably cosmopolitan, and will mark you as a frenchified Kindred should you wish to work it into the regular pattern of your speech. And that is also lovely."
Some approving sound in the back of her throat, as Marie-Hélène leans forward and taps the screen lightly with her index finger. "Now put Free Free Free beneath it, in even larger letters, and somewhere put Beer Beer Beer."
Pausing, chin dropping to consider the finer points of the composition, the Toreador smiles again - the flash of her teeth, white, against her pallid face - and snaps that smile closed. "And add pictures - " a sweep of her hand, desultory and suggestive, toward the screen, " - and then the Elysium address. If they do not want us, perhaps they will prefer another crowd, yes?"
Teagan O'Braonain
Sat 12:27AM CST
She works swiftly, her movements with the mouse and the keyboard demonstrating her ability with the device. She opens a seperate window and carefully manipulates images from a website onto the flyer. Pasting wording around the female holding a beer bottle and wearing little but a floral bikini. A soft chuckle cuts through the brief silence that had fallen and with another sound of approval, the Malkavian takes a step back from the screen. Displaying her work and turning a sparkling eye upon the French woman. Experimenting with this new term, enjoying the way it plays on her accented tongue.
"There, M'selle. Is it all you desired?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Sat 12:34AM CST
How fine and cool is the creature's profile, distant in a thoroughly contemporary way, as if she could absent herself from her skin. Glittering eyes focused on the screen, Marie-Hélène leans closer and closer to Teagan's handiwork until she came close to skimming the screen with her nose, then drew back sharply. "Parfait, darling." A raking grin, cast sidelong, as she captures Teagan's chin between her thumb and forefinger and turned the girl's face toward her own.
"Parfait." The brief flutter of the Toreador's mouth against either cheek, a perfect and perfectly executed kiss-kiss, so common abroad, so woefully lost to the American public. Then, abruptly, the creature releases the girls chin and rises with more of that restless, prowling energy - something long-legged and fierce, something low-slinking and vicious. "You are my saviour. Print it, and we can copy and drop it off in a few select places in the city."
Teagan O'Braonain
Sat 12:39AM CST
She would perhaps, blush at that intimate brush of cool lips against either cheek, had she the circulation for such a reaction. As it is she simply allows a brief smile to curl her lips before a finger clicks down upon the mouse button and nearby the printer whirrs into action. As she waits for it to spit out its bounty, she leans her body against the desk upon which the computer rests and crosses her arms over her chest. Dark eyes following the cut of the figure stalking the room.
"Tell me, have you too heard of the actions of Mr Krugan?"
There is an underlying tension in her voice as she speaks that name again.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Sat 12:43AM CST
"The Tremere physician-who-is-decidedly-not-a-physician is here to investigate this man." The Toreador's stalk stops short and she rounds, quickly coming to something like a halt. The potential for motion is still raw in the long lines of the lean figure, but the action absent. " - but I know no more than that. Tell me."
Teagan O'Braonain
Sat 01:03AM CST
"No. I did nothing to him. But something, something must have begun his rage. If not my presence then what?"
She shakes her head, the braid swinging against the curve of her spine violently as she looks to the other female.
"My Primogen holds the same view as you do M'selle but I cannot help but feel like some whore who tempted him. Perhaps it was the lure of the blood. Did he wish to sup on the blood of Malkav? Surely not."
Marie-Hélène Alette
Sat 01:12AM CST
"Is the object to blame for the framing cast of the subject's eye?" Some musing distance has entered the Toreador's voice now, as she retrieves at last the colored paper from the printer. If she knows not how to use a computer, she at least knows how to use that fabled tool of every armchair revolutionary from here to Saigon (or at least Northwestern), the copier. "Or is the subject to blame for the way he frames the picture? Or something else? Circumstance, the alignment of the stars or the sky, some burned memory surfacing wild - " Marie-Hélène shrugs as she feeds a crumpled twenty into the vending machine, which spits out a small copy card. This she inserts into the color copier and - covering the tips of her fingers now - presses a few buttons to begin the printing process.
"Is this part of your - " the Toreador's finger sketches spiraling circles in the air beside her ear. " - curse, or do you genuinely believe that? Guilt is not particularly contemporary, especially if you do not even know what you accuse yourself of doing. If this is part and parcel of your curse - " the machine hums, the Toreador turns, backlit, leaning back against the warm copy machine as it works. " - then I pity you. If not, petite, you should blame yourself only if it turns you on."
The penetrating look, narrow-eyed, arrow-laced, flashing. Meanwhile, the copier whirs and hums.
[Teagan's player poofed. Fade. Assuming distribution of fliers and addressing them in forums post.]
Fri 09:48PM CST
The day had been cloudy and the evening was feeling the bitter sting of the cold. Teagan was dressed only as one should be, given that most mortals are walking about with red noses and flushed cheeks. She's rocking slightly on her heels before the great gates to Dearborn Estate. The pink parka has a fur lined hood (fake of course) and the tiny hairs are rippled by the little wind present. Strands of dark brown hair are partially obscuring her sable eyes from view and a soft lullaby escapes her shining lips in husky tones. She's pressed the buzzar once already and is awaiting some response from Nino, the Ghoul.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 09:57PM CST
Vrooom.
The low rumble of an engine - a sweet freakin' engine, something that some car freak would adore, something some motorhead musclegeek must've sunk into the frame of the '70 'cuda the Toreador drives, because she soes not know much about engines, at all, beyond that she appreciates the low bass rumble and the responsive clutch in the midst of late-night joyrides.
Clink. The driver's side door swings open, and the willowy Toreador does not so much emerge from the car as she erupts from it, rising with a furious confidence just this side of grace, insufficiently ladylike but smooth-motioned and raw. In lieu of her trashy trappings of late, the creature sports something a little more appropriate for the open Elysium of a major American city: a shimmering red dress cut down to there, slit up to here, draped so scandalously low in back that one can see the outline of each and every single vertebra in the lovely S-curse of her spine. To complete the ensemble, a narrow rope of diamonds jealously hugs her throat, but is tossed back and swings down the line of her spine.
"What's going on, petite?" Heels on the sidewalk, and a smoked voice raw from the cold night. "They have not let you in, yet?"
Incredulous. Elysium.
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 10:04PM CST
She blinks at the creature. This vision in red and diamonds. Her own simple attire seems suddenly to cling in all the wrong places. The leather pants crass. Especially in red. The simple velvet green top obtuse and unbefitting. She stares and a hand rises and wipe at her cheek. Drifts of light rain smattering upon a cheek so pale and cold. The lips are vibrant in contrast.
"No. I don't understand it myself. Nino is usually so punctual about it."
The voice is husky, the cold weather corrupting its usual girlish tones and lowering it to the smoulder of a vixen. She smiles slightly. A flash of fang and tooth.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 10:13PM CST
"Ridiculous." Vibrant eyes narrow to dangerous, furious slits - reptilian, almost, so alien are then - and glance off Teagan before rising again to the door. Marie-Hélène stares hard at the door for another moment, as if she could open it by force of will alone. Someone particularly observant might notice the faint twitch of her mouth upward before she forces it into a dark, dangerous frown matched only by the outpouring of passionate outrage in her voice. "Incroyable."
There follows a string of curses so cosmopolitan and inconceiveable that it would take a committee of sociolinguists several weeks to track down every referant, spat with relish onto the cold stone walkway.
"Amateurs." The ultimate insult. The Rose rounds suddenly and wholly on Teagan, thrusting out an imperious hand, commanding attention. "Come. Now."
Quite the flare for the dramatic, no?
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 10:19PM CST
For her part the Malkavian adore any sort of dramatic outpouring as it sparks her own flare for outlandish behaviour. Had she not incured the wrath not two nights previous from an Elder for speaking things she ought not to say? The lips curve in a delighted sort of expression and she lifts one small pale hand from her pocket and slips it easily enough into the furious Toreador's. Shall they march upon Elysium together then? Draw swords with their fists and beat down their foes? She prays for it. Her hood slips down enough for her dark hair to be revealed, tied back in a loose plait, a ribbon adorning the end.
"But what will we do? We cannot impose ourselves unbidden. Can we?"
She breathes out in a fog of cold air, the white mist gone almost as soon as it is expelled from dried lungs. The dark eyes upturned to the taller woman.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 10:31PM CST
"Bien sûr, we may impose ourselves." The creature's frosty brow flattens, perfect counterpoint to her glittering, slitted gaze. Her body seems to hang in time - somewhere between motion and stop-motion - as if someone had slowed the passage of seconds and interposed him-or-herself into the endless yawning gap left thereby. "Impose?" After a moment's thought, Marie-Hélène casts the Malkavian a conspiratorial smile, all flash, fire, and subverted impish fury. "What fool makes his home in Elysium? I would as soon build my home in the midst of Genghis Khan's great army and dare him to pillage my wheatery."
The last word was completely manufactured, but the Toreador pronounces it with the same firm fire as the rest of her utterance, and so somehow, it carries the weight of authority as much as any other.
"However - " after another moment spent staring at the Elysium gates - as if she could push them open with sheer force of will, set them afire with her outrage - she turns and pulls the Malkavian abruptly away with her. "I have a better idea."
And also: no way to open the gate.
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 10:38PM CST
Teagan steps after the Toreador- indeed she has little choice unless she wishes to be tripped- and a tinkling little laugh is pulled from her chest. The words incite her humour and her brow is raised as they march together, women with a mission indeed. Away from the gates though?
Teagan twists her neck around and stares back at the gates longingly, thinking for a moment only of the warmth of the library. Of her books. Yes. She desires nothing more than that room. Damn the fools! She allows the tugging to draw her away. Excitement floods her senses. The dark eyes glow.
"Shall we march upon Elysium Miss Marie? Or better still, find some secret entry?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 10:44PM CST
"Tch - " the small corrective sound is bright at the edge of the creature's tongue, and glides easily into the strange edge of another smile. This one is proprietary, studied, perhaps a bit mysterious. " - m'selle. It is so much more sophisticated and - how you say - less southern. No Scarlett O'Hara's we, eh?
"But no - " here, the Toreador stops and flings open the passenger-side door to her musclecar, and gestures impatiently inside. "We will do so much better, m'selle O'Braonain." The art of improvisation: Marie-Hélène hangs on the edge of the thought, the way the dawn hangs on the verge of a day. She has no fucking idea what she's going to do. "We will, ah," another smile, no less brilliant than the diamonds skimming down her back, " - learn the art and meaning of revenge, and the subtle intricacies of the insult. Come. I will show you."
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 10:51PM CST
Teagan skims her gaze over the figure before her. The eyes linger but for a moment on the sharp features of the face before she slips easily into the vehicle. The eyes immediantly dart about the interior as if plotting out a possible route of escape incase...what exactly? The petite woman did not know but some kind of delighted anxiety gripped her as she burrowed against the lining and slipped her fingers onto the seat, just resting them there and watching.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 11:01PM CST
Some bare few long strides carry the Toreador around the long, arrogant nose of the old 'cuda, and after a few anxious moments, she has taken her place in the driver's seat: high-heeled feet on the clutch and gas pedal, narrow, capable hands on the wheel and gearshift. There's a moment of silence before the stereo roars to wretched life - a raw wall of noise - which the Toreador changes to something driven and Baroque with two quick clicks of her index finger, with its ragged, blunt nail.
"Where do you think we are going, petite?" The impression of her pale face swimming against the darkness beyond, reflected but just in the glass, a strange etching of a second self. The creature's eyes blazed with something (hunger, malice, humor - all so interrelated - ) and flashed with the reflection of someone else's headlights, before she at last turned her attention to the road. "And where would you like to go?"
The 'cuda shot to sudden life, Toreador riding the clutch and guiding the gearshift like an old pro, or at least with all the attendant confidence of one.
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 11:07PM CST
Her fingers play with buckling her seatbelt. An old memory whisps its way through her mind. Another voice asking her the same question. His eyes alight with some desire for her. The youth. ("Where do ye wish to go, my little poet?") She frowns as she pushes the hood down and fingers wind through the hair, pushing it away. She turns big eyes, with the lids dusted gold and red upon the creature beside her. The sweep of artificial lights playing on the face. The voice is soft. A gentle murmur.
"I don't know. Where do you wish to take me?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 11:16PM CST
"Is that all, then, cherie? " a raucous, sidelong glance, the long sweep of pale lashes, the sharp raw edge of something close to a sneer before the shadows change and her face is lost to darkness. Only the ghostly reflections of the instrument panel dusting her with vague green light, the mirrored gloss of reflections from the streetlight, the dance of her hands on the wheel and gearshift. The revolutions of the enginge climb steadily higher and are then undercut by the low roar as she shifts gears. They're steadily gathering speed - tearing through the quiet pedestrian streets. Soon the trees have given way to something more assertive, more industrial - the raw hulks of brownbrick apartment buildings interspersed by the remains of old warehouses and what may have been stockyards. Past them, through.
Marie-Hélène does not speak again until a red light has imposed itself between her and - well - the rest of the street, ending the rich slow poetry of her continual acceleration. Then - idling again - she casts another pointed glance toward the Malkavian beside her, pale brows rising high about her glittering gaze in fine critical repose. "You want only what I want. Only what another wants? You are a vessel waiting to be filled?"
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 11:23PM CST
There is a flash of the eyes. The lips twist in some sort of angry pout. She looks like some cornered creature for a moment. Unsure of its footing and a soft growl creeping along her throat. She snaps her gaze away after a moment. The brow furrowed as the Beast's rumbling resonates around her chest.
"Of course not! I want many things Miss Marie. Sometimes however it is necessicary to bow to the others around you. I have no power to make others listen to me yet. I am but a fawn stumbling around to find its feet. On any occasion some great hunter could finish me off. I want...I seek only to survive."
She quietens now. Looks down at her fingers, steepled together. The outburst seeming to echo in the car's small interior. Her hackles raised just so.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 11:37PM CST
"Bow not to me." The raw curve of a smile, rich and certain, riding high above the fine slippery fabric of the creature's red dress. "...m'selle."
And then, instead of the echo of Teagan's voice, only the raw roar of the engine vibrating through the cabin. Again and again, the engine's scream increases, undercut as the Toreador changes gears. The creature plays the gears to the outter limits, waiting too long to shift, taking some apparent delight in the strain on the massive engine. Factories speed by, now, half of them abandoned, one of them, at least, the elegant creature's excuse for a haven: darkness, the looming rusting carcasses of machinery, the rought burnt-oil scent that permeated everything. Among them, doubtless, too, the homes of their enemies.
The endless march of factories at last gives way to something more familiar, something more comfortingly human than that endless blasted cityscape. Instead, a series of nondescript houses, both attached and detached, businesses and apartments: some lower-middle class residential area. Five minutes on the deserted streets brings them to a large cubist building - obviously constructed in the 1970s - with rectangles of concrete and rectangles of glass intersecting at intervals. The car slows - the creature is more cautious now - and at last Marie-Hélène pulls up behind the library, parking in the alley. Or rather, double-parking in the alley, just behind a trio of dumpsters serving both the building and Nick's Roast Beef beside it.
In spite of her elegant attire - the too-low-cut dress, the sweep of diamonds hanging like a glittering shadow of her spine - the Toreador sweeps out of the car and approaches the foremost dumpster, motion Teagan to come and give her a hand.
"Top-most window's open, but I need to climb to get there. Gimme a boost."
Another flashing smile sparks across her mouth, like heat-lightening splitting the vault of the night. "Hurry. We don't have all night, cherie."
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 11:43PM CST
There is caution in her movements as she steps from the car across from Marie and tilts her head to one side, looking beyond her at the dumpster, then lifting her eyes to the window that is indeed, ajar. A slash of red lips and she slips across around the car. The engine ticking from the drive, heat wafting in invisable waves from the bonnet. The Malkavian's hands come to rest on a hip each as she again looks upward and then leans over, making a step with her hands, hair falling like a silken rope over a shoulder. The eyes burning some mixture of sable and amber.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 11:49PM CST
Marie-Hélène steps out of the strapped arch of her high-heeled shoes and into the curved step of the Malkavian's paired hands. Pushing off the ground, reaching high, scraping the knuckles of her elegant hands against then rough concrete and scrambling for purchase, she at last gains the ledge requested.
It's a narrow thing, no more than a foot across, with an equally narrow smoked glass window barring the further way. The lightest touch sends the window opening, and - with a curving, wretched half-grin - the Toreador slips inside.
Perhaps another minute later, the Toreador swings the back door open and beckons Teagan in. "...and don't forget my shoes."
Teagan O'Braonain
Fri 11:53PM CST
Delightful creature. So naughty. Teagan sweeps up the shoes and with almost a prancing quality to her steps, hastens to follow her kindred inside. The scent of the library. Books and ink. The faint cloying scent of some mortal's aftershave or librarians perfume makes her nostrils flare and she feels the enticing sensation of anxious anticipation once more as she murmurs softly.
"Wonderful."
Marie-Hélène Alette
Fri 11:56PM CST
"When were you embraced?" A casual question, though one that is perhaps a bit outré for the usual Elysium crowd, uttered as the Toreador sweeps her way through the hushed library, bare feet falling quietly on the carpeted floor. She carries her heels dangling from her fingers, now, with a certain disinterest in the whole project - as if she had, now, given up whatever impulse drove her to dress in such high style, as if she had given it up utterly. As if she would never - ever - again be taken by another such desire, though to be certain one would come, fickle, the next night, or the night after that. "Do you know anything about computers?"
There's one already on, glowing and humming as it boots up. The light from the monitor swims in the hushed darkness, smears the edges of the screen as if they were bleeding light into the room.
"I can put - " a pregnant pause, fine mouth pressed together in a vague haze of puzzled irritation, " - the words on the screen and onto the paper, but not pictures. I think we will need pictures for this invitation. Perhaps you know more than I?"
Teagan O'Braonain
Sat 12:02AM CST
The sight of the computer screen fills her with pride. Here is something she excells at. Indeed it is a necessary evil for her writings,though she does prefer the notepad and pencil whenever possible. She makes a soft sound of delight as her fingertips trace over the keys and she immediantly lets them slip into their positions. Index fingers hovering over the 'F' and 'J' keys. She casts a slightly smug smile Marie's way before she begins to locate the proper programs.
"Indeed I do Miss. I pride myself on being rather skilled with them in fact. A writer cannot be without such a device."
The pale light of the screen washes over her face. She lets her gaze flicker back to the creature.
"1952. I was embraced."
Marie-Hélène Alette
Sat 12:09AM CST
"Mademoiselle, I say. I am not some American woman, to be address with this wholly unsatisfying appellation "Miss," which simpers its way through conversations like a rotten banana peel or one of the puff-balls the cheering girls giggle about and toss around," - and this, this is wholly, delightfully affected, another game within a game, as outraged and outrageous as possible.
During the fussy speech, the Toreador arranges herself behind Teagan, peering over the other creature's shoulder at the glowing screen. The chain of diamonds slides across the Toreador's back, colliding quietly with the left arm of the chair, and the silk dress whispers against her thighs as she sits and draws herself closer and begins, "at the top, very very big so even the stupidest can read it, put "Girls Girls Girls." You know, the way they do for burlesque shows."
Teagan O'Braonain
Sat 12:13AM CST
The presence so close behind her, Teagan shifts in her boots, her legs brushing against Marie as she bends closer to the screen, searching for the correct button to click upon. The sound of her little fingers upon the keys a constant as she smiles, an amused expression as she obediently casts the words in bold font over the screen. The color splashing over the white page. She experiments with colors. Red, Gold, Bright pink. Before settling back with Red. She inhales the other creature's scent now.
"What are we creating these for, Mademoiselle?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Sat 12:21AM CST
"Much better - " and that scent, is not merely blood (though blood there is, blood there always is for Kindred, beneath and above it all) but is also acrid, acid - oil and smoke and the faint reek of the dying river, the remnants of the city streaming into the cesspool of a lake. Rough, metallic, industrial - all overlaid with the crimson saltsheen of blood and the distinctive scent of Chanel No. 5. If anything, the combination is distinctive. " - though you may shorten to m'selle, which is also perfectly acceptably cosmopolitan, and will mark you as a frenchified Kindred should you wish to work it into the regular pattern of your speech. And that is also lovely."
Some approving sound in the back of her throat, as Marie-Hélène leans forward and taps the screen lightly with her index finger. "Now put Free Free Free beneath it, in even larger letters, and somewhere put Beer Beer Beer."
Pausing, chin dropping to consider the finer points of the composition, the Toreador smiles again - the flash of her teeth, white, against her pallid face - and snaps that smile closed. "And add pictures - " a sweep of her hand, desultory and suggestive, toward the screen, " - and then the Elysium address. If they do not want us, perhaps they will prefer another crowd, yes?"
Teagan O'Braonain
Sat 12:27AM CST
She works swiftly, her movements with the mouse and the keyboard demonstrating her ability with the device. She opens a seperate window and carefully manipulates images from a website onto the flyer. Pasting wording around the female holding a beer bottle and wearing little but a floral bikini. A soft chuckle cuts through the brief silence that had fallen and with another sound of approval, the Malkavian takes a step back from the screen. Displaying her work and turning a sparkling eye upon the French woman. Experimenting with this new term, enjoying the way it plays on her accented tongue.
"There, M'selle. Is it all you desired?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Sat 12:34AM CST
How fine and cool is the creature's profile, distant in a thoroughly contemporary way, as if she could absent herself from her skin. Glittering eyes focused on the screen, Marie-Hélène leans closer and closer to Teagan's handiwork until she came close to skimming the screen with her nose, then drew back sharply. "Parfait, darling." A raking grin, cast sidelong, as she captures Teagan's chin between her thumb and forefinger and turned the girl's face toward her own.
"Parfait." The brief flutter of the Toreador's mouth against either cheek, a perfect and perfectly executed kiss-kiss, so common abroad, so woefully lost to the American public. Then, abruptly, the creature releases the girls chin and rises with more of that restless, prowling energy - something long-legged and fierce, something low-slinking and vicious. "You are my saviour. Print it, and we can copy and drop it off in a few select places in the city."
Teagan O'Braonain
Sat 12:39AM CST
She would perhaps, blush at that intimate brush of cool lips against either cheek, had she the circulation for such a reaction. As it is she simply allows a brief smile to curl her lips before a finger clicks down upon the mouse button and nearby the printer whirrs into action. As she waits for it to spit out its bounty, she leans her body against the desk upon which the computer rests and crosses her arms over her chest. Dark eyes following the cut of the figure stalking the room.
"Tell me, have you too heard of the actions of Mr Krugan?"
There is an underlying tension in her voice as she speaks that name again.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Sat 12:43AM CST
"The Tremere physician-who-is-decidedly-not-a-physician is here to investigate this man." The Toreador's stalk stops short and she rounds, quickly coming to something like a halt. The potential for motion is still raw in the long lines of the lean figure, but the action absent. " - but I know no more than that. Tell me."
Teagan O'Braonain
Sat 01:03AM CST
"No. I did nothing to him. But something, something must have begun his rage. If not my presence then what?"
She shakes her head, the braid swinging against the curve of her spine violently as she looks to the other female.
"My Primogen holds the same view as you do M'selle but I cannot help but feel like some whore who tempted him. Perhaps it was the lure of the blood. Did he wish to sup on the blood of Malkav? Surely not."
Marie-Hélène Alette
Sat 01:12AM CST
"Is the object to blame for the framing cast of the subject's eye?" Some musing distance has entered the Toreador's voice now, as she retrieves at last the colored paper from the printer. If she knows not how to use a computer, she at least knows how to use that fabled tool of every armchair revolutionary from here to Saigon (or at least Northwestern), the copier. "Or is the subject to blame for the way he frames the picture? Or something else? Circumstance, the alignment of the stars or the sky, some burned memory surfacing wild - " Marie-Hélène shrugs as she feeds a crumpled twenty into the vending machine, which spits out a small copy card. This she inserts into the color copier and - covering the tips of her fingers now - presses a few buttons to begin the printing process.
"Is this part of your - " the Toreador's finger sketches spiraling circles in the air beside her ear. " - curse, or do you genuinely believe that? Guilt is not particularly contemporary, especially if you do not even know what you accuse yourself of doing. If this is part and parcel of your curse - " the machine hums, the Toreador turns, backlit, leaning back against the warm copy machine as it works. " - then I pity you. If not, petite, you should blame yourself only if it turns you on."
The penetrating look, narrow-eyed, arrow-laced, flashing. Meanwhile, the copier whirs and hums.
[Teagan's player poofed. Fade. Assuming distribution of fliers and addressing them in forums post.]
Meeting with Dr. Masterson
Dr. Eric Masterson
Mon 06:02PM CST
Eric pulled up to the Elysium, parking his car where he was told to. He stepped out, straightened his charcol grey suit jacket and tightened his black tie. He inhaled through his nose, catching the flavor of the air this evening. With the sun having set only a few hours prior, the night was still young. He approached the main entrance and after clearing himself through was directed to an acceptable place where he could meet other kindred. Alas, he was the first newcomer this evening... it would be strange, he though, for others to just meet him, sitting in the Elysium.
Such was life, well, unlife, that is.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 06:09PM CST
The library: again. Once more, the Toreador eschews the fine leather-bound volumes lining the walls in favor of something else, something much less likely to stand the test of time. Tonight, instead of a pulp paperback, however, it is a glossy women's magazine with ridiculously thin models and ridiculously alarmist headlines and ridiculously impossible sexual promises: 50000 Ways to Please your Man!In Just One Night! tucked under her arm.
Tall, long-limbed, wasp-ish, raptorish, the creature looks of a piece with the models sprawled in silly poses in silly set pieces throughout the magazine, except for the designer clothes. In their place, she wears a loose rugby jersey, jeans so worn that the cuffs are fraying, trailing little white threads, and a pair of astonishingly high heels in a rather astonishing avocado color. Sharp, pale features and flaxen hair swept back and secured by a broken "Quaker State" pencil complete the ensemble, if such it can be called.
The creature winds her way through the building, at last finding the entrance to the library, and as she enters, the expressionless cast to her sharp features changes suddenly and utterly as her intense gaze falls on Dr. Masterson. "Why hello - " her voice is more cultured than one might guess from the get-up. " - I don't believe we've met."
Dr. Eric Masterson
Mon 06:21PM CST
Eric, hearing the footsteps approaching, turned to face the astonishingly gorgeous woman. His pale blue eyes peered through his thin, black wire framed glasses, quickly taking in and assessing the beast before him. Either she was servant or kindred, he quickly thought. You could never tell by the way ghouls had become so lax around their superiors... addressing a kindred on an equal level, rather than a subservient one. It wasn't even a decade prior that this sort of thing would never have happened. How sad, it was. Still, Dr. Masterson decided it would be better to be polite to a ghoul, than rude to a kindred. At least, if he was wrong and it was a ghoul, he had found over the past few decades especially, that it was easier to accomplish tasks when you were nice. Initially, at least.
Nodding, he smiled, "I believe you are correct, miss. My name is Dr. Masterson. Yours?" There was an obvious bit of north eastern twang in his voice... by no means New Yorker, but there were also traces of it.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 06:28PM CST
"Marie-Hélène Alette de Sausanne d'Allais, Dr. Masterson." The Toreador remained standing, her magazine crushed between her right arm and the loose weave of the rugby shirt, her arm cast casually across the front of her torso in a way that only served to emphasize her somewhat affected slouch. She smiled, though, some low crawling thing of a smile that lit a strange spark of awareness in her eyes. "So pleased to make your acquaintance."
Dr. Eric Masterson
Mon 06:32PM CST
Nodding, though never breaking eye contact, "The pleasure is mine, mademoiselle."
Pausing, noting the book beneath her arms, "Do you have a busy evening planned?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 06:38PM CST
The Toreador, however, does break eye contact, dark blue eyes shearing away from Masterson's own all too quickly, as soon as she became aware of the shift. Some edgy undercurrent of awareness, some electricity of movement, sparks as she - looking, for all the world, utterly bored - takes to studying the spines of the books lining the wall.
"Packed," a sly glance back, accompanied by supple curve of a crescent smile. "I have not yet been subjected to my recommended daily allowance of American advertising, and have - indeed - been neglecting advertisements for at least the past week. Now, I am determined to catch up."
Dr. Eric Masterson
Mon 06:45PM CST
"Well, I'm sure you have your work cut out for you," he replies, him too, turning to the wall full of books. "I just arrived a few nights ago, coming from New York. Have you been in Chicago long?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 06:52PM CST
"Mmm - " her reply comes after a moment, and is quietly voiced. The only sound in the interim is the slow ticking of the clock and the faint whoosh of paper quickening to flame as she lights a long, narrow cheroot with a flameless lighter. "No, Dr. Masterson." The creature tips him another glance over the edge of her shoulder, watching him with a quiet awareness. "I arrived in this city perhaps a month ago, perhaps less. I came to Chicago from Paris by way of New York - a few years, there - " the creature's narrow shoulders rise and fall in an easy-motioned shrug. " - a decade, perhaps. Tell me, what has inspired you to leave your country's most famous and cosmopolitan city - such a jewel now, yes? Cleansed of filth, and so on."
Dr. Eric Masterson
Tue 09:02PM CST
Eric paused a moment before answering. "Quite frankly, I was directed here by my sire, in hopes of stabalizing the Tremere in this city. I am a negotiator, a problem solver. So, I was sent here to, well, solve problems. My first order of business is, of course, this Krugan fellow. However, I will find other things to occupy my time, soon enough."
He looked back to the woman, noting her demanor, her posture. "And what inspired you to leave both New York and Paris."
As the word "Paris" left his tongue, the tagline went through his head... he saw it somewhere on a t-shirt... I spent the night in Paris... wanna see the video? It was silly, yes, but it was entertaining no less.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 09:10PM CST
"The Krugan fellow?" Marie-Helene echoed, fair brows drawing up in a fine question that echoed in her gaze. "Tell me about the Krugan fellow?"
Her hand fell from her mouth to her side, wrist coiled, resting against the curve of her hip. The cheroot smoldered there, carefully directed away from her skin, a thin stream of smoke coiling upward. "As for why I left Paris and New York, the reasons are complicated. I'm afraid I cannot contain them in a few words. Is there a format you would prefer? The eager and dutiful youngster, off to find her way in the world? The bored ingenue looking for a new conquest? The artist driven by a reckless vision to cross an ocean and then a continent? If one appeals to you - " another shrug. The razor edge of a smile. " - Dr. Masterson, take it as gospel truth. Tell me - " continuing, with the faintest pause for the faintest of breaths. " - from whence comes the doctor? Medical or philosophical?"
Dr. Eric Masterson
Tue 09:31PM CST
Dr. Masterson did recognize decadence, and this was a fine example before him, and her jeans did hug her closely. He leaned back a little further so that his back was firmly resting against the back of the chaise. Noting the fine leather it was made from, he returned his cold eyes back to his companion for the night.
"I am not much for gossip," he replied. "Though I can tell you that he has answers to the questions I have... and the Prince, like any Prince, simply wants this entire thing dealt with... though I understand he is quite dangerous..." trailing off a bit, "though not as dangerous as the rest of us, I would think."
Asking with a charming smile, "Does that satisfy you?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 09:38PM CST
"Hardly." Her reply is mild and flippant, tossed off without much thought. The cool track of her mind shifts slightly as she draws just back and focuses on him more clearly. After a moment, she thrust her lower lip forward with such deliberation that it could only be done out of a penchant for mockery, and self-mockery at that: a pout, a veritable self-mocking pout. "I don't even know what he's done. You haven't told me, have you?"
Flaxen lashes half-lowered over her deep, gleaming eyes. "I feel wholly cut off from the world in this backwater, and now even Dr. Masterson of the Tremere knows more than me. Tell." The would-be pout slip-slides into another smoldering, razor-tipped smile.
Dr. Eric Masterson
Tue 09:45PM CST
Eric laughs, it isn't a sneer, or a snicker, but a true, entertained laugh. Motioning to the seat next to him on the chaise, "Then sit and cease your self-entrenched depression. It is so not becoming of a lady of the Torreador.. perhaps I can try harder to entertain you... though please understand... I am not much of an entertainer..."
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 09:51PM CST
"You need fear nothing, my good doctor - " casually, desultorily, the creature lifted the cheroot to her mouth again and took a long, slow mouthful of smoke into the dead bellows of her lungs. Her arm dropped again as she sauntered to the chaise and sank into the seat indicated by the Tremere. Then, mouth twitching into a fine O, she breathed out a small series of smoke rings. " - I will not hold you to too high a standard. You need only entertain me in moderate fashion, and I will supply the rest. I would be a rather dismal creature could I not manage that much, hmmm?"
Dr. Eric Masterson
Tue 09:59PM CST
Nodding, playing the game with the Torreador, he replied, "And what would you be supplying to this conversation, pray tell? I will simply be telling you that this Krugan fellow simply sliced off the heads of several kine, as well as truely hurt the feelings of a simply enchanting Malkavian girl..."
Pausing for a moment, shifting his weight away from her, he continued. "So what else would you like? Unfortunately, you have caught me very early on in my investigation... I still have little to share with a fine creature, such as yourself..."
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 10:07PM CST
"To this conversation, I supply whatever is lacking. In general - my keen wit, my razor sharp quips, my fine grasp of the classics and my incisive knowledge of modern thought." The creature sat back, crossing one long, elegant leg over the other, watching him move away with a strange, quiet humor that twisted her mouth into a faint smirk. " - in short, essentially nothing. I will rely entirely on you."
The creature took another draw from her cheroot and allowed her attention to wander across the volumes collected about the room. She expelled this smoke-laden breath through her nose, flaring nostrils that seemed to steam like those of an angry bull. "Please, Dr. Masterson - " she glanced back, so-briefly zeroing her gaze in on his own. Her voice, now, became flat and somewhat affect-less. " - you do not strike me as the type to toss off compliments or pet names without cause. I am not quite the vain creature you think me, and you may dispense with - " shoulders, twitching just, " - any referants you do not actually mean."
Dr. Eric Masterson
Tue 10:15PM CST
Eric smirked, "Ah, social banter and reparte. I have missed this, some what. Although, please do understand, I do not hand out compliments, and I wasn't exactly complimenting you either. I was simply stating a clear fact: you are a creature... technically a beast or even a monster, like the rest of us. However, you are far more physically refinded, hence the adjective I stated to lead the comment."
He was by no means slouching, but he was leaning back some. He seemed visibly disturbed, perhaps more so at the burning embers at the tip of her cheroot than anything else. "Why do you suppose us kindred, creatures that ignite so easily, are so quick to light up a mini torch before our dry lips?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 10:21PM CST
"Tch, impressive - " the faint smile grew and contracted like metal heating and cooling " - although were I you I would not have disavowed the statement as a compliment. I could have merely been fishing for more." Smug, now, fine fair brows rising as she leaned back herself to accommodate his need to get away from the smoldering tip of her chereet.
"This thing?" At his comment, she lifted the long dark cylinder as if it were a foreign thing, holding as far away from her body as her long arms would allow her, while turning the tip so that she could examine it carefully. "Come now, what is life without danger? Certainly we, like all others, must face both fear and mortality?"
Dr. Eric Masterson
Tue 10:35PM CST
As the distance between the embers and Dr. Masterson open, the good doctor seems less bothered. "That statement is not wholey correct. While we must face our fear, every night, we have no requirement of facing our mortality. Firstly, we have already done that. Second, if we truely wish to last forever, then there is no need to put ourselves in any danger. For when that danger does come, it will be in the form of a brutal force, for example, a group of Sabbat, aiming to take your vitae as a prize. Or perhaps a hungry elder, simply wishing to find a play thing... So no, Madam Alette, there is no reason to have to put or mortality at risk."
Then, pausing before he back tracks, "And again, it isn't simply that I was disavowing a compliment... I simply declare it as I see it. But, if it is my most objective, honest opinion, that you desire, then I can with all afirmation say that you are, as previously mentioned, a very, fine, creature." He exhaled what remaining air there was in his lungs, continuing to lean back, observing the vixen before him.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 10:45PM CST
"You neglect the danger that comes from within, Dr. Masterson," Marie-Hélène murmured, her voice quiet and supple, lean as her long limbs. "The shell may not age, but the spirit does, and some may think death preferable to the sort of attenuated existance available to creatures wholly lost to the dynamism of life. I have yet to see, for example, a Toreador whose great gift - " her voice is drenched in a thin layer of contempt now, thin as the as the spill of smoke drifting from her mouth, " - has survived the transition to this existance wholly intact, and yet they - who cannot create - persist in creating. Or, perhaps, recreating their last, great work until the end of days."
Her smile, again, somehow sinful, somehow indulgent as he backtracks and offers the comment again. Her eyes half-lid, as if she were a demure thing, as if such mortal considerations remained to her, and she murmurs some half-voiced sound before correcting him, but briefly. "Please - Dr. Masterson - call me Marie-Hélène or M'selle Alette. Madame, well, I do not think it suits me."
Dr. Eric Masterson
Tue 10:59PM CST
Adjusting his glasses, "I did not neglect commenting upon how age will afect a kindred. I intentionally did not mention it, becuase only the weak would succomb to something as trite as not being able to create a work of art any longer, or not adjusting to the times present. Those who are underassigned have to worry about that... and I find, having entered a new millenia just a few years, there is much to do, and even with eternity before me, I never have enough time."
He remained motionless, simply awaiting a reply.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 11:06PM CST
"Isn't it all - " a faint wave of her hand, dismissive, to hide her mild intrigue. None of that shows on her fine, sharp, cold features. No - the picture of fashionable ennui, as she takes a final drag on the smoldering cheroot and rises. " - just the beetling busy-work you Tremere engage in? Really, what enlightenment do you hope to attain through your little arcanism, anyway?"
And then: across the room, a lean gait that somehow becomes her, faster than one would think but not inelegant. "I suppose anyone could drown themselves in busywork." Her eyes flashed back to him as she stuffed the cheroot into a deep well of sand that served as ashtray, twisting until the circling spiral of smoke ceased to rise from the buried tip.
Dr. Eric Masterson
Tue 11:10PM CST
He watched her leave the chaise, walking across the room. "When I find enlightenment, I'll be sure to let you know," he replies. "But, enough about me, mon cher. You know abou what arts I dabble in, tell me, what form of art do you work with?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 11:20PM CST
"Do." She murmured, tipping the now-snuffed cheroot in the sand, stirring it with vague interest, before shifting her attention back to him. She maintained her pose there, but after a moment crossed her arms, casually bisecting her slender torso, curving her long fingers around the jut of either opposite elbow.
"Tch, mon petit," another smile, this one - like so many - at once distant and indulgent, as if she held a thousand secrets she might just be persuaded to share. "Perhaps I do not dabble in any of the arts. Perhaps my Sire embraced me solely for the loveliness of this hair, these hips - " one arm untangled from the the nest to indicate the flaxen hair, pulled sharply and inelegantly away from her lovely face, the narrow curve of her hips, before coiling back into the crossed position. " - it happens, you know, far too often these dark nights." Another subtle pause, and she draws in a breath like she means it, like she needs it, exhaling wordlessly before stealing another mouthful of air to power her words. "Or perhaps my art is so arcane not even a Tremere could understand? Alas, I'm afraid you must either accept the judgment that I am a poseur, or accept - " another shrug, quixotic, " - these amorphous considerations, my vague assurances to the contrary."
[Fade]
Mon 06:02PM CST
Eric pulled up to the Elysium, parking his car where he was told to. He stepped out, straightened his charcol grey suit jacket and tightened his black tie. He inhaled through his nose, catching the flavor of the air this evening. With the sun having set only a few hours prior, the night was still young. He approached the main entrance and after clearing himself through was directed to an acceptable place where he could meet other kindred. Alas, he was the first newcomer this evening... it would be strange, he though, for others to just meet him, sitting in the Elysium.
Such was life, well, unlife, that is.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 06:09PM CST
The library: again. Once more, the Toreador eschews the fine leather-bound volumes lining the walls in favor of something else, something much less likely to stand the test of time. Tonight, instead of a pulp paperback, however, it is a glossy women's magazine with ridiculously thin models and ridiculously alarmist headlines and ridiculously impossible sexual promises: 50000 Ways to Please your Man!In Just One Night! tucked under her arm.
Tall, long-limbed, wasp-ish, raptorish, the creature looks of a piece with the models sprawled in silly poses in silly set pieces throughout the magazine, except for the designer clothes. In their place, she wears a loose rugby jersey, jeans so worn that the cuffs are fraying, trailing little white threads, and a pair of astonishingly high heels in a rather astonishing avocado color. Sharp, pale features and flaxen hair swept back and secured by a broken "Quaker State" pencil complete the ensemble, if such it can be called.
The creature winds her way through the building, at last finding the entrance to the library, and as she enters, the expressionless cast to her sharp features changes suddenly and utterly as her intense gaze falls on Dr. Masterson. "Why hello - " her voice is more cultured than one might guess from the get-up. " - I don't believe we've met."
Dr. Eric Masterson
Mon 06:21PM CST
Eric, hearing the footsteps approaching, turned to face the astonishingly gorgeous woman. His pale blue eyes peered through his thin, black wire framed glasses, quickly taking in and assessing the beast before him. Either she was servant or kindred, he quickly thought. You could never tell by the way ghouls had become so lax around their superiors... addressing a kindred on an equal level, rather than a subservient one. It wasn't even a decade prior that this sort of thing would never have happened. How sad, it was. Still, Dr. Masterson decided it would be better to be polite to a ghoul, than rude to a kindred. At least, if he was wrong and it was a ghoul, he had found over the past few decades especially, that it was easier to accomplish tasks when you were nice. Initially, at least.
Nodding, he smiled, "I believe you are correct, miss. My name is Dr. Masterson. Yours?" There was an obvious bit of north eastern twang in his voice... by no means New Yorker, but there were also traces of it.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 06:28PM CST
"Marie-Hélène Alette de Sausanne d'Allais, Dr. Masterson." The Toreador remained standing, her magazine crushed between her right arm and the loose weave of the rugby shirt, her arm cast casually across the front of her torso in a way that only served to emphasize her somewhat affected slouch. She smiled, though, some low crawling thing of a smile that lit a strange spark of awareness in her eyes. "So pleased to make your acquaintance."
Dr. Eric Masterson
Mon 06:32PM CST
Nodding, though never breaking eye contact, "The pleasure is mine, mademoiselle."
Pausing, noting the book beneath her arms, "Do you have a busy evening planned?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 06:38PM CST
The Toreador, however, does break eye contact, dark blue eyes shearing away from Masterson's own all too quickly, as soon as she became aware of the shift. Some edgy undercurrent of awareness, some electricity of movement, sparks as she - looking, for all the world, utterly bored - takes to studying the spines of the books lining the wall.
"Packed," a sly glance back, accompanied by supple curve of a crescent smile. "I have not yet been subjected to my recommended daily allowance of American advertising, and have - indeed - been neglecting advertisements for at least the past week. Now, I am determined to catch up."
Dr. Eric Masterson
Mon 06:45PM CST
"Well, I'm sure you have your work cut out for you," he replies, him too, turning to the wall full of books. "I just arrived a few nights ago, coming from New York. Have you been in Chicago long?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 06:52PM CST
"Mmm - " her reply comes after a moment, and is quietly voiced. The only sound in the interim is the slow ticking of the clock and the faint whoosh of paper quickening to flame as she lights a long, narrow cheroot with a flameless lighter. "No, Dr. Masterson." The creature tips him another glance over the edge of her shoulder, watching him with a quiet awareness. "I arrived in this city perhaps a month ago, perhaps less. I came to Chicago from Paris by way of New York - a few years, there - " the creature's narrow shoulders rise and fall in an easy-motioned shrug. " - a decade, perhaps. Tell me, what has inspired you to leave your country's most famous and cosmopolitan city - such a jewel now, yes? Cleansed of filth, and so on."
Dr. Eric Masterson
Tue 09:02PM CST
Eric paused a moment before answering. "Quite frankly, I was directed here by my sire, in hopes of stabalizing the Tremere in this city. I am a negotiator, a problem solver. So, I was sent here to, well, solve problems. My first order of business is, of course, this Krugan fellow. However, I will find other things to occupy my time, soon enough."
He looked back to the woman, noting her demanor, her posture. "And what inspired you to leave both New York and Paris."
As the word "Paris" left his tongue, the tagline went through his head... he saw it somewhere on a t-shirt... I spent the night in Paris... wanna see the video? It was silly, yes, but it was entertaining no less.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 09:10PM CST
"The Krugan fellow?" Marie-Helene echoed, fair brows drawing up in a fine question that echoed in her gaze. "Tell me about the Krugan fellow?"
Her hand fell from her mouth to her side, wrist coiled, resting against the curve of her hip. The cheroot smoldered there, carefully directed away from her skin, a thin stream of smoke coiling upward. "As for why I left Paris and New York, the reasons are complicated. I'm afraid I cannot contain them in a few words. Is there a format you would prefer? The eager and dutiful youngster, off to find her way in the world? The bored ingenue looking for a new conquest? The artist driven by a reckless vision to cross an ocean and then a continent? If one appeals to you - " another shrug. The razor edge of a smile. " - Dr. Masterson, take it as gospel truth. Tell me - " continuing, with the faintest pause for the faintest of breaths. " - from whence comes the doctor? Medical or philosophical?"
Dr. Eric Masterson
Tue 09:31PM CST
Dr. Masterson did recognize decadence, and this was a fine example before him, and her jeans did hug her closely. He leaned back a little further so that his back was firmly resting against the back of the chaise. Noting the fine leather it was made from, he returned his cold eyes back to his companion for the night.
"I am not much for gossip," he replied. "Though I can tell you that he has answers to the questions I have... and the Prince, like any Prince, simply wants this entire thing dealt with... though I understand he is quite dangerous..." trailing off a bit, "though not as dangerous as the rest of us, I would think."
Asking with a charming smile, "Does that satisfy you?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 09:38PM CST
"Hardly." Her reply is mild and flippant, tossed off without much thought. The cool track of her mind shifts slightly as she draws just back and focuses on him more clearly. After a moment, she thrust her lower lip forward with such deliberation that it could only be done out of a penchant for mockery, and self-mockery at that: a pout, a veritable self-mocking pout. "I don't even know what he's done. You haven't told me, have you?"
Flaxen lashes half-lowered over her deep, gleaming eyes. "I feel wholly cut off from the world in this backwater, and now even Dr. Masterson of the Tremere knows more than me. Tell." The would-be pout slip-slides into another smoldering, razor-tipped smile.
Dr. Eric Masterson
Tue 09:45PM CST
Eric laughs, it isn't a sneer, or a snicker, but a true, entertained laugh. Motioning to the seat next to him on the chaise, "Then sit and cease your self-entrenched depression. It is so not becoming of a lady of the Torreador.. perhaps I can try harder to entertain you... though please understand... I am not much of an entertainer..."
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 09:51PM CST
"You need fear nothing, my good doctor - " casually, desultorily, the creature lifted the cheroot to her mouth again and took a long, slow mouthful of smoke into the dead bellows of her lungs. Her arm dropped again as she sauntered to the chaise and sank into the seat indicated by the Tremere. Then, mouth twitching into a fine O, she breathed out a small series of smoke rings. " - I will not hold you to too high a standard. You need only entertain me in moderate fashion, and I will supply the rest. I would be a rather dismal creature could I not manage that much, hmmm?"
Dr. Eric Masterson
Tue 09:59PM CST
Nodding, playing the game with the Torreador, he replied, "And what would you be supplying to this conversation, pray tell? I will simply be telling you that this Krugan fellow simply sliced off the heads of several kine, as well as truely hurt the feelings of a simply enchanting Malkavian girl..."
Pausing for a moment, shifting his weight away from her, he continued. "So what else would you like? Unfortunately, you have caught me very early on in my investigation... I still have little to share with a fine creature, such as yourself..."
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 10:07PM CST
"To this conversation, I supply whatever is lacking. In general - my keen wit, my razor sharp quips, my fine grasp of the classics and my incisive knowledge of modern thought." The creature sat back, crossing one long, elegant leg over the other, watching him move away with a strange, quiet humor that twisted her mouth into a faint smirk. " - in short, essentially nothing. I will rely entirely on you."
The creature took another draw from her cheroot and allowed her attention to wander across the volumes collected about the room. She expelled this smoke-laden breath through her nose, flaring nostrils that seemed to steam like those of an angry bull. "Please, Dr. Masterson - " she glanced back, so-briefly zeroing her gaze in on his own. Her voice, now, became flat and somewhat affect-less. " - you do not strike me as the type to toss off compliments or pet names without cause. I am not quite the vain creature you think me, and you may dispense with - " shoulders, twitching just, " - any referants you do not actually mean."
Dr. Eric Masterson
Tue 10:15PM CST
Eric smirked, "Ah, social banter and reparte. I have missed this, some what. Although, please do understand, I do not hand out compliments, and I wasn't exactly complimenting you either. I was simply stating a clear fact: you are a creature... technically a beast or even a monster, like the rest of us. However, you are far more physically refinded, hence the adjective I stated to lead the comment."
He was by no means slouching, but he was leaning back some. He seemed visibly disturbed, perhaps more so at the burning embers at the tip of her cheroot than anything else. "Why do you suppose us kindred, creatures that ignite so easily, are so quick to light up a mini torch before our dry lips?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 10:21PM CST
"Tch, impressive - " the faint smile grew and contracted like metal heating and cooling " - although were I you I would not have disavowed the statement as a compliment. I could have merely been fishing for more." Smug, now, fine fair brows rising as she leaned back herself to accommodate his need to get away from the smoldering tip of her chereet.
"This thing?" At his comment, she lifted the long dark cylinder as if it were a foreign thing, holding as far away from her body as her long arms would allow her, while turning the tip so that she could examine it carefully. "Come now, what is life without danger? Certainly we, like all others, must face both fear and mortality?"
Dr. Eric Masterson
Tue 10:35PM CST
As the distance between the embers and Dr. Masterson open, the good doctor seems less bothered. "That statement is not wholey correct. While we must face our fear, every night, we have no requirement of facing our mortality. Firstly, we have already done that. Second, if we truely wish to last forever, then there is no need to put ourselves in any danger. For when that danger does come, it will be in the form of a brutal force, for example, a group of Sabbat, aiming to take your vitae as a prize. Or perhaps a hungry elder, simply wishing to find a play thing... So no, Madam Alette, there is no reason to have to put or mortality at risk."
Then, pausing before he back tracks, "And again, it isn't simply that I was disavowing a compliment... I simply declare it as I see it. But, if it is my most objective, honest opinion, that you desire, then I can with all afirmation say that you are, as previously mentioned, a very, fine, creature." He exhaled what remaining air there was in his lungs, continuing to lean back, observing the vixen before him.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 10:45PM CST
"You neglect the danger that comes from within, Dr. Masterson," Marie-Hélène murmured, her voice quiet and supple, lean as her long limbs. "The shell may not age, but the spirit does, and some may think death preferable to the sort of attenuated existance available to creatures wholly lost to the dynamism of life. I have yet to see, for example, a Toreador whose great gift - " her voice is drenched in a thin layer of contempt now, thin as the as the spill of smoke drifting from her mouth, " - has survived the transition to this existance wholly intact, and yet they - who cannot create - persist in creating. Or, perhaps, recreating their last, great work until the end of days."
Her smile, again, somehow sinful, somehow indulgent as he backtracks and offers the comment again. Her eyes half-lid, as if she were a demure thing, as if such mortal considerations remained to her, and she murmurs some half-voiced sound before correcting him, but briefly. "Please - Dr. Masterson - call me Marie-Hélène or M'selle Alette. Madame, well, I do not think it suits me."
Dr. Eric Masterson
Tue 10:59PM CST
Adjusting his glasses, "I did not neglect commenting upon how age will afect a kindred. I intentionally did not mention it, becuase only the weak would succomb to something as trite as not being able to create a work of art any longer, or not adjusting to the times present. Those who are underassigned have to worry about that... and I find, having entered a new millenia just a few years, there is much to do, and even with eternity before me, I never have enough time."
He remained motionless, simply awaiting a reply.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 11:06PM CST
"Isn't it all - " a faint wave of her hand, dismissive, to hide her mild intrigue. None of that shows on her fine, sharp, cold features. No - the picture of fashionable ennui, as she takes a final drag on the smoldering cheroot and rises. " - just the beetling busy-work you Tremere engage in? Really, what enlightenment do you hope to attain through your little arcanism, anyway?"
And then: across the room, a lean gait that somehow becomes her, faster than one would think but not inelegant. "I suppose anyone could drown themselves in busywork." Her eyes flashed back to him as she stuffed the cheroot into a deep well of sand that served as ashtray, twisting until the circling spiral of smoke ceased to rise from the buried tip.
Dr. Eric Masterson
Tue 11:10PM CST
He watched her leave the chaise, walking across the room. "When I find enlightenment, I'll be sure to let you know," he replies. "But, enough about me, mon cher. You know abou what arts I dabble in, tell me, what form of art do you work with?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Tue 11:20PM CST
"Do." She murmured, tipping the now-snuffed cheroot in the sand, stirring it with vague interest, before shifting her attention back to him. She maintained her pose there, but after a moment crossed her arms, casually bisecting her slender torso, curving her long fingers around the jut of either opposite elbow.
"Tch, mon petit," another smile, this one - like so many - at once distant and indulgent, as if she held a thousand secrets she might just be persuaded to share. "Perhaps I do not dabble in any of the arts. Perhaps my Sire embraced me solely for the loveliness of this hair, these hips - " one arm untangled from the the nest to indicate the flaxen hair, pulled sharply and inelegantly away from her lovely face, the narrow curve of her hips, before coiling back into the crossed position. " - it happens, you know, far too often these dark nights." Another subtle pause, and she draws in a breath like she means it, like she needs it, exhaling wordlessly before stealing another mouthful of air to power her words. "Or perhaps my art is so arcane not even a Tremere could understand? Alas, I'm afraid you must either accept the judgment that I am a poseur, or accept - " another shrug, quixotic, " - these amorphous considerations, my vague assurances to the contrary."
[Fade]
lundi, avril 26, 2004
awe
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 09:43PM CST
The Elysium library is lined with leatherbound volumes in great profusion: all the classics of the last five centuries in very fine if not first editions, and most of the volumes that strive to become classics of the contemporary age, again in fine editions, printed on creamy papers and bound in rich corinthian leather.
Sprawled across an easy chair, all long legs and elegant, sylph-like arms, the Toreador ignores the whole wisdom of remembered history in favor of a cheap paperback that still smells like the greasy spoon and the waitress from whom she stole it. The inexpensive pulp is rough against her fine fingers, the cover is ridiculously lurid, but the creature seems to prefer it to everything else accumulated in the library.
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 09:44PM CST
The gates slowly creaked open to the private estate of Bryce Stavenson. The Elder Brujah was someone Sonatine was very eager to speak with about matters concerning the clan. After-all, it wasn't going to be too long before Bryce would start asking questions about Sonatine's power struggle on the streets. With Erikka's growing reputation among the streets, he was going to need her in more than just servitude.
The black 2004 Lincoln Continental slowly made it's way down the drive. It's headlights died to give way to the amber colored foglights. The light would be sufficient enough to guide his car into the parking space he normally occupied.
While Bryce's home was considered Elysium, it was still the haven of an Elder. As such was the case, certain formalities always were in order. As usual, Sonatine Vidale; Primogen of Clan Brujah, was expected by the head servant. As the car's breaks clamped onto the inner drum of the tire, the car would slow to a stop. It took several minutes before the door opened; these precious minutes being reserved for private instruction for his chouffer.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 09:52PM CST
One long leg curved under her body, the other cast over the arm of the sleek chair, the Toreador shifts quietly and sinks deeper into the comfortable depths. Air sighs out of the cushions as she changes position, faint response to the shifting of her slight weight.
The combination of old army surplus camos and expensive heels is a strange one, made stranger by the narrow sleeveless tee in the blaze orange usually favored by deer hunters that completes the ensemble. Somehow, however, it all seems to fit. The creature's eyes are narrowed in concentration, her mouth half-open, thoughtlessly. Otherwise, she doesn't make much move.
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 10:05PM CST
Stepping out of the car was a black suited individual with a menacing appearence to boost. His suit was expensive, and his looks cold hearted. The pinstripes suggested something of a proffessional career; wether it be legal or not wasn't revealed just yet. Rising from the car, the armani tailored individual gripped the framework of the car, and looked out at the manner from over the top of the door. Moistening his lips, he'd continue to step forward and allow the door to close behind him.
Each step took him closer to the front door, his eyes focusing harder the closer he got. Without his trench coat, he looked a bit more business oriented. With it, the whole criminal element would come out on top. Tonight, he chose to not wear the coat. The fact that he almost looked elegant was coupled with the black tribal tattoo's staining his bald scalp. His skin was a bit pale this evening, but in the company of others, who would honestly care?
His hand moved to the doorhandle, and slowly pulled it open to clear his path. His dress shoes mad ehis presence known to the caretaker of the house, Nino. As the Italian ghoul approached him, they exchanged greetings, and Sonatine was allowed entrance. His path was chosen, and his intentions lead him toward the private study. Soon the wooden doors would slid open, and the menacing figure would make his entrance.
(Flaw: Obvious Predator + Intimidation 4) When at first glance, Sonatine is not the type of person you'd wish to associate with. It was as though on first thought, you would pin him as untrustworthy, and dangerous beyond all comparison. Perhaps it was coupled to the extreme confidence that radiated off him that made him seem in full control of himself; or maybe it was because of the horrible reputation that followed. Whatever the case; few people felt that Sonatine Vidale had anything good for them to deal with.
They would receive no mercy until seeing through his nature.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 10:16PM CST
The sounds of greeting, the usual shuffle of entrance from the front hall pricked the Rose's consciousness and drew her attention away from whatever held it (could it really be the horrible paperback? Shouldn't she be conditioned against that sort of thing?) to the quiet sound of footsteps, the subtle scrape of the door against the floor. Still, she kept her head down, studying the pages with an intensity sometimes thought to be peculiar to the artists in her clan (shh. I am making something sing), and lifted her head, startled, only as Sonatine at last made his entrance.
It was more dramatic that way, the sweep of her dark gaze up from the pages of the novel, just shadowed by a faint shimmer of pale lashes, the sweep of her attention across the strange Kindred, the slow-crawl of a porceline smile. If she were human, her breath might catch in the back of her throat, or her autonomic nervous system would betray her: pulse rate, respiration, the usual signs of anxiety.
She is not mortal, however. She is dead as he, and only the apparition of a smile dances across her mouth as she slipslidesslithers out of her sprawl in the armchair.
"Good evening," it is all a game, and the prick of fear is also the prick of excitement, enlivening a dead heart. The ghost-smile slides full and wide, as the Toreador offers one longer-fingered hand in greeting. "I don't believe we've met, and I hope you don't think me too forward for saying so."
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 10:29PM CST
It was as though tension had halted his steps. Dark eyes casted themselves upon the female form of Marie-Helen Alette. His hands were clasped at his back, his expressions erious and cold. Little did he have time anymore for laughing and carrying on. Pleasantries had been written out of his little black book for a century now. His posture was stern, and his demeanor cold and unforgiving. Dark eyes held her gaze steadily as she felt bold enough to make his aquaintance.
That could be her first mistake. Treating him as a commoner might a fellow peasant.
The Brujah Primogen stepped further into the room as he turned his head to look her over some. As he hand extended, a distant gaze would follow down the smooth and pale skin of the Vampiress before him. A slight murmer was her responce, as though to touch her might give him an illness he'd rather not deal with. "Delighted. I am Sonatine Vidale; Primogen of Clan Brujah." His tone was laced with malevolence, his voice cold with a lack of passion. Sarcasm was the prime weapon of choice for many arrogant bastards alike.
Note, he did not change his posture to accept her hand, but instead decided not to touch her all together. At the small of his back his hands would stay, for now.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 10:39PM CST
"Marie-Hélène Alette de Sausanne d'Allais, M'sieur Vidale," the Toreador murmured, withdrawing her hand as casually as she could muster, as if the slight did not begin to bother her in the least. Perhaps it didn't: perhaps she preferred it that way. Her expression remained, sly and rapt, and her eyes continued to linger upon his face without ever precisely meeting his eyes. "Toreador. If you're planning to take advantage of the library this evening, there's a very fine volume of Aesop's fables you should consider.
"Beyond that, I must apologize for my intrusion and presumption. Good evening, M'sieur Vidale." The creature offers a brief sweep of a bow, and returns to her armchair and her paperback.
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 10:45PM CST
"Yet another Toreador, how lovely." He said, his words rolling with sarcasm. His eyes held their gaze confidently, and why not? Sonatine had the age, experience, and strength to hold his own in several conversations. The problem with this was that there were many other's that could do the same; and perhaps better than he. Simmon Ledeux was one of them, and Sonatine knew that. Fear wasn't the word best associated with what he felt for Simmon; but vigilance was.
The Toreador rarily left s good taste in his mouth. How would this one fair, he wondered.
"Tell me, Marie-Helene; what do you bring to Chicago?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 10:53PM CST
The Toreador's blue eyes swept upward from the cheap pulp, returning to Sonatine's face once more. Her own features were now as still as a frozen lake, and her eyes had darkened with the returned chill. "Aside from my excellent taste, my familiarity with the classics, and my ascerbic wit?"
Her glance grew fixed, and then drained away, as the corner of her mouth twitched upward into the smallest of cultured smiles. "I'm afraid that I give away my secrets less easily than you your hand, M'sieur Vidale. Surely, you wouldn't expect any less, would you?"
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 10:58PM CST
The problem with Vampires these days was that they made things way to obvious. It was as though every one of them had some vast secret life they kept to themselves when in actuallity they were already doing that with the mortals.
How very trite it must be.
A breif smile came over his lips as he decided to take an interest in the youth. His steps guided him carefully toward the leather chair just feet from her placement. Before he lowered into it, he casually unbuttoned his suitcoat and hung it on the thin wooden coat-rack. Afterwards, Sonatine removed a switchblade, a thin metal cylander, and a zippo lighter from the various pockets and sat down. After setting his affectes off to the side, the Primogen would settle into the chair and turn his gaze back upon her.
"Tell me, of these classics.." He said, his voice growing a little more alluring, in a darker quality then most would consider enticing.
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 10:59PM CST
Dice Validated
to Marie-Hélène Alette: 3D10 Dice Roll: 8; 6; 8
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 10:59PM CST
to Marie-Hélène Alette: (Presence 1; Awe, is in affect.)
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 11:10PM CST
"The classics, M'sieur Vidale," the creature repeated, sitting up, perhaps, and leaning closer to him as she murmured the words. "Literature, history, philosophy. Where would you prefer to begin? With Homer, or would you prefer something more recent? Moby Dick, perhaps, and the eternal maddened quest for that which you can never truly find? Or perhaps we could even turn to the contemporary period, when even the precepts of modernism have been torn down into an endless cacophony and the very foundations of language and thought have been destroyed. What makes a cat different from a bat, beyond some convention we affect to know?"
The paperback snapped shut, and the title - though half-obscured by her hand - was mostly visible. Something about love or lust, some contemporary faery-tale of Prince Charming and Mrs. Right, complete with just enough in the way of euphemistic sex to appeal to the average housewife. "Except, now Derrida is old hat, and even the Language poets are old men, drooling into their oatmeal and pissing into their diapers, and they are turning back to a vicious cycle without ever learning the lessons they were so very close to capturing before it all got captured by the academy and calcified by tradition." Expelling the rest of her deep breath, the Rose leans forward again, in a manner that verges on the besotted (to those who know her), but might still seem remote, and lifts a cool, pale brow. "If you tell me where your interest lies, I will be happy - " a faint shrug, as she trails off.
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 11:24PM CST
His eyes settled upon her as she went into her spleal about Moby Dick, Homer, and the true classics of the world. It was good the modern school system still valued their history. By now his interest in her had peaked to a point where he could realize that her intelligence was well off and her rationale qualities were stable. No, she was not the typical young Kindred, abusing the great gifts granted by the blood of Elders.
"Tell me, of your own views about this world you live in. Obviously your death must have had some impact on you, what changes in mentality did you share with those of the classical sence? Did Poe's morbid world excite you to mourn your death, or has such ideals been passified by an unjust God?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 11:38PM CST
"Poe is yet another unfortunate genius, too driven by his brilliance - thank whatever god you know - to see that, essentially, the brittle world he created was simply a creation, not some undiscovered country, some new reality to which he and only he bore the secret key." Her pale eyes half-closed, the fine lashes glancing across her high pale cheek, as she settled back in the chair. Her attention was still rapt upon him. "I - " Her nostrils flare, briefly, some irritation that nuzzles at the core, with the terminology, perhaps, the limits of the same. "I did not mourn my death, M'sieur Vidale, though perhaps I mourn the loss of certain essential portions of the world that I will never again see: the sun at noon, a shadowed summer day. To seperate these things from our experience thins us, until we become a pale core of beaten metal: what is the point of continued existance without something to compel one forward? Power is a dry husk of a thing, and so is immortality, to pretend otherwise is to invent blindness, loss, the cacophony our gibbering enemies would bring to life in the world."
And she continues, speaking with clear force and passion rarely given shrift within the Elysium, which she would never allow to surface under any other circumstances. "Decadent games are simply that: decadent. I do not believe in God, nor do I not believe in God, nor do I believe in the ideal of justice, what is justice, beyond that which we want? As for my death, M'sieur, what would you like to hear? Something was given to me, and something was taken away. This is the way of the world."
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 11:46PM CST
"Ahh.. a true philosopher I see." He mused. His sire was something of a philosopher; until she was murdered.
Sonatine tinted his affects with a light touch. Fingertips edged over the switchblade as he tormented himself with the idea of lighting a cuban cigar. Eyes settled once more upon the inspiring girl as he did indeed find her, inspiring. It was something of an oddity that he find comfort in anyone these nights, besides his blood-doll; Erikka Brennon.
"And what of this city? Your thoughts in particular.."
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 11:56PM CST
"If you will, M'sieur, I would not call myself a philosopher." The curve of her smile; the flash of her gaze - serious now. Her calm, sharp features are oddly expressive under these circumstances, in ways that she could not begin to imagine or control. "Although certainly, you may. It is, however, tempting to the ego, and as important as the ego is in the everlasting Elysium game, I cannot allow it to master me."
"As for this city - " her shoulders rose and fell again, a mild and calculated shrug, " - I have met but few Kindred, and those that I have met are thus far - " she leaned in, confident in her confidante, but some habits are well-ingrained, and perhaps this one, to decline to pass such overt judgment on other Kindred, at least in the hearing of another. " - why, I do not know them well-enough to say." She was surprised for find that to be true. "Although," another skimming almost-smile, more distant and withdrawn. "the Camarilla seems fractured, the ties are loose: it makes me think of wolves, hunting, and how easily they hunt stragglers. This city is vulnerable."
Sonatine Vidale
Tue 12:00AM CST
"Mmm, yes. I think we see eye to eye, you and I." He said, a short taunting smirk approaching his lips afterwards. Sonatine sighed, and rose to his feet. "Regardless, life itself is a mere game, Ms. Alette. .. Good evening." He said with a slight nod. Gathering his things, he would sip the coat on and begin making his way out of the Elysium without another word.
Mon 09:43PM CST
The Elysium library is lined with leatherbound volumes in great profusion: all the classics of the last five centuries in very fine if not first editions, and most of the volumes that strive to become classics of the contemporary age, again in fine editions, printed on creamy papers and bound in rich corinthian leather.
Sprawled across an easy chair, all long legs and elegant, sylph-like arms, the Toreador ignores the whole wisdom of remembered history in favor of a cheap paperback that still smells like the greasy spoon and the waitress from whom she stole it. The inexpensive pulp is rough against her fine fingers, the cover is ridiculously lurid, but the creature seems to prefer it to everything else accumulated in the library.
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 09:44PM CST
The gates slowly creaked open to the private estate of Bryce Stavenson. The Elder Brujah was someone Sonatine was very eager to speak with about matters concerning the clan. After-all, it wasn't going to be too long before Bryce would start asking questions about Sonatine's power struggle on the streets. With Erikka's growing reputation among the streets, he was going to need her in more than just servitude.
The black 2004 Lincoln Continental slowly made it's way down the drive. It's headlights died to give way to the amber colored foglights. The light would be sufficient enough to guide his car into the parking space he normally occupied.
While Bryce's home was considered Elysium, it was still the haven of an Elder. As such was the case, certain formalities always were in order. As usual, Sonatine Vidale; Primogen of Clan Brujah, was expected by the head servant. As the car's breaks clamped onto the inner drum of the tire, the car would slow to a stop. It took several minutes before the door opened; these precious minutes being reserved for private instruction for his chouffer.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 09:52PM CST
One long leg curved under her body, the other cast over the arm of the sleek chair, the Toreador shifts quietly and sinks deeper into the comfortable depths. Air sighs out of the cushions as she changes position, faint response to the shifting of her slight weight.
The combination of old army surplus camos and expensive heels is a strange one, made stranger by the narrow sleeveless tee in the blaze orange usually favored by deer hunters that completes the ensemble. Somehow, however, it all seems to fit. The creature's eyes are narrowed in concentration, her mouth half-open, thoughtlessly. Otherwise, she doesn't make much move.
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 10:05PM CST
Stepping out of the car was a black suited individual with a menacing appearence to boost. His suit was expensive, and his looks cold hearted. The pinstripes suggested something of a proffessional career; wether it be legal or not wasn't revealed just yet. Rising from the car, the armani tailored individual gripped the framework of the car, and looked out at the manner from over the top of the door. Moistening his lips, he'd continue to step forward and allow the door to close behind him.
Each step took him closer to the front door, his eyes focusing harder the closer he got. Without his trench coat, he looked a bit more business oriented. With it, the whole criminal element would come out on top. Tonight, he chose to not wear the coat. The fact that he almost looked elegant was coupled with the black tribal tattoo's staining his bald scalp. His skin was a bit pale this evening, but in the company of others, who would honestly care?
His hand moved to the doorhandle, and slowly pulled it open to clear his path. His dress shoes mad ehis presence known to the caretaker of the house, Nino. As the Italian ghoul approached him, they exchanged greetings, and Sonatine was allowed entrance. His path was chosen, and his intentions lead him toward the private study. Soon the wooden doors would slid open, and the menacing figure would make his entrance.
(Flaw: Obvious Predator + Intimidation 4) When at first glance, Sonatine is not the type of person you'd wish to associate with. It was as though on first thought, you would pin him as untrustworthy, and dangerous beyond all comparison. Perhaps it was coupled to the extreme confidence that radiated off him that made him seem in full control of himself; or maybe it was because of the horrible reputation that followed. Whatever the case; few people felt that Sonatine Vidale had anything good for them to deal with.
They would receive no mercy until seeing through his nature.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 10:16PM CST
The sounds of greeting, the usual shuffle of entrance from the front hall pricked the Rose's consciousness and drew her attention away from whatever held it (could it really be the horrible paperback? Shouldn't she be conditioned against that sort of thing?) to the quiet sound of footsteps, the subtle scrape of the door against the floor. Still, she kept her head down, studying the pages with an intensity sometimes thought to be peculiar to the artists in her clan (shh. I am making something sing), and lifted her head, startled, only as Sonatine at last made his entrance.
It was more dramatic that way, the sweep of her dark gaze up from the pages of the novel, just shadowed by a faint shimmer of pale lashes, the sweep of her attention across the strange Kindred, the slow-crawl of a porceline smile. If she were human, her breath might catch in the back of her throat, or her autonomic nervous system would betray her: pulse rate, respiration, the usual signs of anxiety.
She is not mortal, however. She is dead as he, and only the apparition of a smile dances across her mouth as she slipslidesslithers out of her sprawl in the armchair.
"Good evening," it is all a game, and the prick of fear is also the prick of excitement, enlivening a dead heart. The ghost-smile slides full and wide, as the Toreador offers one longer-fingered hand in greeting. "I don't believe we've met, and I hope you don't think me too forward for saying so."
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 10:29PM CST
It was as though tension had halted his steps. Dark eyes casted themselves upon the female form of Marie-Helen Alette. His hands were clasped at his back, his expressions erious and cold. Little did he have time anymore for laughing and carrying on. Pleasantries had been written out of his little black book for a century now. His posture was stern, and his demeanor cold and unforgiving. Dark eyes held her gaze steadily as she felt bold enough to make his aquaintance.
That could be her first mistake. Treating him as a commoner might a fellow peasant.
The Brujah Primogen stepped further into the room as he turned his head to look her over some. As he hand extended, a distant gaze would follow down the smooth and pale skin of the Vampiress before him. A slight murmer was her responce, as though to touch her might give him an illness he'd rather not deal with. "Delighted. I am Sonatine Vidale; Primogen of Clan Brujah." His tone was laced with malevolence, his voice cold with a lack of passion. Sarcasm was the prime weapon of choice for many arrogant bastards alike.
Note, he did not change his posture to accept her hand, but instead decided not to touch her all together. At the small of his back his hands would stay, for now.
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 10:39PM CST
"Marie-Hélène Alette de Sausanne d'Allais, M'sieur Vidale," the Toreador murmured, withdrawing her hand as casually as she could muster, as if the slight did not begin to bother her in the least. Perhaps it didn't: perhaps she preferred it that way. Her expression remained, sly and rapt, and her eyes continued to linger upon his face without ever precisely meeting his eyes. "Toreador. If you're planning to take advantage of the library this evening, there's a very fine volume of Aesop's fables you should consider.
"Beyond that, I must apologize for my intrusion and presumption. Good evening, M'sieur Vidale." The creature offers a brief sweep of a bow, and returns to her armchair and her paperback.
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 10:45PM CST
"Yet another Toreador, how lovely." He said, his words rolling with sarcasm. His eyes held their gaze confidently, and why not? Sonatine had the age, experience, and strength to hold his own in several conversations. The problem with this was that there were many other's that could do the same; and perhaps better than he. Simmon Ledeux was one of them, and Sonatine knew that. Fear wasn't the word best associated with what he felt for Simmon; but vigilance was.
The Toreador rarily left s good taste in his mouth. How would this one fair, he wondered.
"Tell me, Marie-Helene; what do you bring to Chicago?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 10:53PM CST
The Toreador's blue eyes swept upward from the cheap pulp, returning to Sonatine's face once more. Her own features were now as still as a frozen lake, and her eyes had darkened with the returned chill. "Aside from my excellent taste, my familiarity with the classics, and my ascerbic wit?"
Her glance grew fixed, and then drained away, as the corner of her mouth twitched upward into the smallest of cultured smiles. "I'm afraid that I give away my secrets less easily than you your hand, M'sieur Vidale. Surely, you wouldn't expect any less, would you?"
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 10:58PM CST
The problem with Vampires these days was that they made things way to obvious. It was as though every one of them had some vast secret life they kept to themselves when in actuallity they were already doing that with the mortals.
How very trite it must be.
A breif smile came over his lips as he decided to take an interest in the youth. His steps guided him carefully toward the leather chair just feet from her placement. Before he lowered into it, he casually unbuttoned his suitcoat and hung it on the thin wooden coat-rack. Afterwards, Sonatine removed a switchblade, a thin metal cylander, and a zippo lighter from the various pockets and sat down. After setting his affectes off to the side, the Primogen would settle into the chair and turn his gaze back upon her.
"Tell me, of these classics.." He said, his voice growing a little more alluring, in a darker quality then most would consider enticing.
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 10:59PM CST
Dice Validated
to Marie-Hélène Alette: 3D10 Dice Roll: 8; 6; 8
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 10:59PM CST
to Marie-Hélène Alette: (Presence 1; Awe, is in affect.)
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 11:10PM CST
"The classics, M'sieur Vidale," the creature repeated, sitting up, perhaps, and leaning closer to him as she murmured the words. "Literature, history, philosophy. Where would you prefer to begin? With Homer, or would you prefer something more recent? Moby Dick, perhaps, and the eternal maddened quest for that which you can never truly find? Or perhaps we could even turn to the contemporary period, when even the precepts of modernism have been torn down into an endless cacophony and the very foundations of language and thought have been destroyed. What makes a cat different from a bat, beyond some convention we affect to know?"
The paperback snapped shut, and the title - though half-obscured by her hand - was mostly visible. Something about love or lust, some contemporary faery-tale of Prince Charming and Mrs. Right, complete with just enough in the way of euphemistic sex to appeal to the average housewife. "Except, now Derrida is old hat, and even the Language poets are old men, drooling into their oatmeal and pissing into their diapers, and they are turning back to a vicious cycle without ever learning the lessons they were so very close to capturing before it all got captured by the academy and calcified by tradition." Expelling the rest of her deep breath, the Rose leans forward again, in a manner that verges on the besotted (to those who know her), but might still seem remote, and lifts a cool, pale brow. "If you tell me where your interest lies, I will be happy - " a faint shrug, as she trails off.
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 11:24PM CST
His eyes settled upon her as she went into her spleal about Moby Dick, Homer, and the true classics of the world. It was good the modern school system still valued their history. By now his interest in her had peaked to a point where he could realize that her intelligence was well off and her rationale qualities were stable. No, she was not the typical young Kindred, abusing the great gifts granted by the blood of Elders.
"Tell me, of your own views about this world you live in. Obviously your death must have had some impact on you, what changes in mentality did you share with those of the classical sence? Did Poe's morbid world excite you to mourn your death, or has such ideals been passified by an unjust God?"
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 11:38PM CST
"Poe is yet another unfortunate genius, too driven by his brilliance - thank whatever god you know - to see that, essentially, the brittle world he created was simply a creation, not some undiscovered country, some new reality to which he and only he bore the secret key." Her pale eyes half-closed, the fine lashes glancing across her high pale cheek, as she settled back in the chair. Her attention was still rapt upon him. "I - " Her nostrils flare, briefly, some irritation that nuzzles at the core, with the terminology, perhaps, the limits of the same. "I did not mourn my death, M'sieur Vidale, though perhaps I mourn the loss of certain essential portions of the world that I will never again see: the sun at noon, a shadowed summer day. To seperate these things from our experience thins us, until we become a pale core of beaten metal: what is the point of continued existance without something to compel one forward? Power is a dry husk of a thing, and so is immortality, to pretend otherwise is to invent blindness, loss, the cacophony our gibbering enemies would bring to life in the world."
And she continues, speaking with clear force and passion rarely given shrift within the Elysium, which she would never allow to surface under any other circumstances. "Decadent games are simply that: decadent. I do not believe in God, nor do I not believe in God, nor do I believe in the ideal of justice, what is justice, beyond that which we want? As for my death, M'sieur, what would you like to hear? Something was given to me, and something was taken away. This is the way of the world."
Sonatine Vidale
Mon 11:46PM CST
"Ahh.. a true philosopher I see." He mused. His sire was something of a philosopher; until she was murdered.
Sonatine tinted his affects with a light touch. Fingertips edged over the switchblade as he tormented himself with the idea of lighting a cuban cigar. Eyes settled once more upon the inspiring girl as he did indeed find her, inspiring. It was something of an oddity that he find comfort in anyone these nights, besides his blood-doll; Erikka Brennon.
"And what of this city? Your thoughts in particular.."
Marie-Hélène Alette
Mon 11:56PM CST
"If you will, M'sieur, I would not call myself a philosopher." The curve of her smile; the flash of her gaze - serious now. Her calm, sharp features are oddly expressive under these circumstances, in ways that she could not begin to imagine or control. "Although certainly, you may. It is, however, tempting to the ego, and as important as the ego is in the everlasting Elysium game, I cannot allow it to master me."
"As for this city - " her shoulders rose and fell again, a mild and calculated shrug, " - I have met but few Kindred, and those that I have met are thus far - " she leaned in, confident in her confidante, but some habits are well-ingrained, and perhaps this one, to decline to pass such overt judgment on other Kindred, at least in the hearing of another. " - why, I do not know them well-enough to say." She was surprised for find that to be true. "Although," another skimming almost-smile, more distant and withdrawn. "the Camarilla seems fractured, the ties are loose: it makes me think of wolves, hunting, and how easily they hunt stragglers. This city is vulnerable."
Sonatine Vidale
Tue 12:00AM CST
"Mmm, yes. I think we see eye to eye, you and I." He said, a short taunting smirk approaching his lips afterwards. Sonatine sighed, and rose to his feet. "Regardless, life itself is a mere game, Ms. Alette. .. Good evening." He said with a slight nod. Gathering his things, he would sip the coat on and begin making his way out of the Elysium without another word.
dimanche, avril 25, 2004
mother may i?
Luce
Sun 01:49PM CST
She has been here before; she has been here for two nights running, and the bartender and patrons have grown if not accustomed to her presence, at least less-sensitized to it. Her arms are draped over the edge of the bar like so much cloth; silk, or something like it, the low and liquid sweep, the boneless ease of her perch. The ashtray beside her right elbow holds exactly two butts of her sharp-smelling cigarellos, smashed to nothing with careful precision. Her third smoke of the evening is held negligently between the index and middle fingers of her pale hand. Occasionally, she takes a drag and spills more smoke into the already smokey atmosphere. Her other hand is wrapped around the neck of a bottle of beer, which is turn rests, sweating, on her denim-clad thigh, just below the long angled jointure with her narrow pelvis, wrist settled against the curve of her hip.
Such visible ease, such elemental caution: the hooded eyes, the flaxen hair spilling across her largely-bare shoulders, and her skin pale as the surface of the moon cast against the velvet night. She doesn't speak to anyone, she hasn't responded to anything said to her with more than a slow-blooming smile, wretched and poisonous and perfectly bright.
Ashe Kincade
Sun 01:57PM CST
The wooden stares creaked with each step he took to descending them. His hands hung loosily at his sides as he marched his way down into the main portion of the bar. Soon a single hand would grip the cheap banister and he'd shuffle down to the main area. Eyes scanned over the enterior a bit before deciding to continue on walking. This evening he wore a black bandanna accompanied with black jeans, and a tight fitting grey tee shirt. With this on, his muscles could be seen, as well as his broad chest.
Sniffling a bit, Ashe would make his way toward the bar, having just woken up. Coming closer, his eyes would shift over toward Luce a moment, then come back toward the tender. Yeah, she was the broad that came in not too long ago, but what did that matter? It wasn't like he knew her or anything. He'd bring his attention back to the tender further by leaning closer and listening to what th eman had to say. Nodding, Ashe would reach out, pull the cigarette from the man's lips, and put it in his own. From here, the rogue walked toward his usual table and kicked out a chair.
Luce
Sun 02:14PM CST
From the moment Ashe enters the room, the creature's shadowed, back-lit gaze follows his path. Raptor, hawk, viper: something with half-lidded eyes and a vague, malevolent intellgience, or so she would seem were it not for the skimming curve of her mouth, the wretched certainty of her confident sprawl.
Otherwise, she doesn't move, at least until Ashe has made his rounds. The bar, the 'tender, and then his usual table, the floor scarred from his usual manner of selecting a chair. After he has chosen his chair, the creature rises with a liquid grace; she seems to slither off her perch at the bar, hip bumping the stool back toward the bar as she sidles across the room. Her gait isn't deliberately sidelong, but is perhaps rather a byproduct of her shape: the long limbs, the narrow torso, the unexpected height.
Instead of settling into a chair, she perches on the edge of the table and puts her beer bottle down in emphasis. The cigarello - or is it a cheroot? - falls from one corner of her mouth, expelling smoke like a dull chimney until she takes another draw. "Evenin'."
Ashe Kincade
Sun 02:18PM CST
The chair scutted across the floor some. Ashe's responce to this would be to turn around and lower himself into it promptly. His boots rose to rest upon the edge of the table as he took in a drawing breathe of nicotine. His eyes moved to the sasheying hips of Luce as she drew closer. There was something about the girl that he couldn't quite place. As she came to his table, he'd woonder what the attraction was between them. "Something I can help you with darlin`?" He asked, rather as though he was unimpressed with her.
Luce
Sun 02:26PM CST
"Yeah," her grin: quicksilver. Her voice is rough with smoke, most traces of her French accent scoured from the weight and infelction of the words. "There is, as a matter of fact."
Oh, but she was enjoying herself. It sounded for all the world like the dialogue from some old movie, some movie filmed before the apparent invention of irony, when black and white shadows and long shuttered glances and smoke, spilling from the tip of a cigar, could mean something, and only that. Her mouth thins, just, with that rich background awareness, as she hitches herself further up on the table and hooks her high-laced high-heel'd foot around the bottom rung of Ashe's chair. "Business, not pleasure, though."
Ashe Kincade
Sun 02:31PM CST
His eyes followed down her leg in a manner that suggested he enjoyed what he was looking at. Slowly his smokey blue eyes would come back up to her as his arms crossed. After a second he'd tap his ashes into the nearest tray and cross them again. "And what sort of business are we talking about?" His voice grew a bit gruff toward the end, something that might tell those who know him his demeanor was turning serious.
Luce
Sun 02:41PM CST
The creature braces herself carefully, hands planted beside either hip, long fingers splayed wide. The cigarello remains in her left hand, held like a pencil or a paintbrush, the glowing tip carefully cast away from her body and out over the floor. The wooden table groans as she shifts her weight, balancing against both of her feet. As she leans forward, her spaghetti straps fall in helpless curves against her smooth upper arms.
Mostly, though, it is her face - the half-curve of a sly, delightered smile, the low-lidded light of the eyes - clear as she bends low. Her mouth stops less than an inch from the shell-curve of his ear, an audible snap of her dull white teeth disturbs the air and heralds the widening of her faint grin. "I have a favor to ask you, Mr. Kincade." Her voice is quiet now, it purrs from someplace coiled in her chest. He feels the vibrations, the faint currents of air almost as much as he can hear her voice. "I do hope you can oblige me."
Ashe Kincade
Sun 02:46PM CST
"That all depends on the favor.." He said, turning his eyes back on her.
Luce
Sun 02:53PM CST
"Of course," her smiles rakes rogue, pulling back from her teeth. She doesn't move, now, even when he shifts his stance subtly enough to catch her lashed gaze again. "It's simple enough. I'd like permission to enter your clan's domain and - on occasion - hunt. If you could pass on the request," she continues, offering an elegant shrug of her bare shoulders, "I would be most grateful."
Ashe Kincade
Sun 03:05PM CST
Ashe narrowed his eyes at her some. As she spoke of the blood, it was hard for him not to grimace and perhaps smack her. God how he hated talking about things like this in public. Even if it was his own bar. Talking in a private booth was one thing, but in the middle of the room where people could take the barest chance to listen? Dear god no. "Must you really speak so openly? Besides, I'm not the one you should be talking too.."
Luce
Sun 03:18PM CST
"Calme-toi, mon petit." The Rose flickering a shuttered glance at him, rising at last and lifting the cigarello to her mouth in one long, smooth motion. "There isn't anyone close." Her faint grin reveals even, white teeth, the tip her tongue against the damp twist of paper. "I am not wholly irresponsible," her gaze drops, the smile widens, and lashes shield her eyes, a curtain of pale color. "although, perhaps, sometimes, a little too - free, eh? Perhaps you could - ignore the latter request and pass on the former request."
Leaning back, sprawling again, the creature once more braces herself with either hand and lightly taps her foot against the cross-bar of Ashe's chair, elegantly non-chalant. "I get bored, sometimes - " a wave of her hand, a curl of fine-filtered smoke, " - with the museums."
Ashe Kincade
Sun 03:25PM CST
Ashe looked tired, as though he had been fighting since he was first embraced. His eyes rolled up to her own as he huffed a moment. Relaxing once again, he flicked the ashes away and took another draw of the cigarette. Exhaling, he'd continue. "What's the matter, too afraid to approach him yourself?" He asked, meaning Sonatine Vidale, the Primogen of Clan Brujah.
Luce
Sun 03:30PM CST
"Perhaps," she responds, her quickened mouth flattening, but only at the corners. The expression could be a smirk, but is protected from anything so crass if only by curve of her risen brows.
"I am - " she offers a gesture to the night, a flip curl of her slender wrist. The smoke from her cigarello describes cursive scrawl in the night, looped and intricate. "- what I am, after all, a delicate flower, indeed."
Ashe Kincade
Sun 03:33PM CST
"Huh.. I'm sure." He said eyeing her a bit. Ashe stubbed out the dwindling cigarette and shook his head. Soon his arms would cross again and he'd eye her a bit more. "So what brings you to the wonderful Windy City, baby?" He moved his feet some, repositioning them to cross on the surface. His eyes moved to her hips again for a second before centering on her eyes. He could have been looking past her hips to the bar, by the way.
Luce
Sun 03:42PM CST
Her gaze flickers coolly back, following the trajectory of his shifting glance: her narrow hips, the faint curve cinched into well-worn denim, or the bar lost in drifts of smoke. Briefly, she focuses on the bartender. The smile falls just from her face as she studies the man, all manufactured artiface fading into an intense blank canvas, more sculptural than expressive.
"That's a question and a half," she responded before she even began to turn. In profile, her sharpened features are defined and skimmed by the pale remaining light. Her mouth moves, the corner twitches upward, as she glances back at him, now with a focused intent. "Which answer do you want? I have many. I'll give you this one: it was somewhere on the map between New York City and oblivion." She pauses, then, sandal'd foot tapping lightly at the cross-bar of his chair once more. "Or did you want something better suited for polite society?"
Ashe Kincade
Sun 03:47PM CST
"Honey, I honestly couldn't give a shit. Mind games and enigmatic phrases aren't my fortei.." He said, nearly mocking her flawless french. God, it was amazing how many Germand and French eople resided in Chicago, Il.
Luce
Sun 03:54PM CST
"If you don't give a shit, darlin'," barely shifting to the broad New England tones of her human youth, the Toreador flashes Ashe a whip-razor grin, all white teeth and fine lips, sailor-mouthed. "why the fuck did you ask?"
Ashe Kincade
Sun 03:57PM CST
"To make you think you were special, of course.." He said, standing with the feintest of grins. After tipping an imaginary hat, Ashe turned and started to walk out the door. The city had business with him tonight, and he wasn't about to let an appointment slip.
Luce
Sun 04:00PM CST
The creature returned the imaginary tip of a hat with a raking smile and smoldering little wink. And then she watched him, with a ravaging sort of attention, as wove his way through the smokey confines of the bar and disappeared into the narrow stairwell, up, up and out.
It would not be long before she would follow.
Sun 01:49PM CST
She has been here before; she has been here for two nights running, and the bartender and patrons have grown if not accustomed to her presence, at least less-sensitized to it. Her arms are draped over the edge of the bar like so much cloth; silk, or something like it, the low and liquid sweep, the boneless ease of her perch. The ashtray beside her right elbow holds exactly two butts of her sharp-smelling cigarellos, smashed to nothing with careful precision. Her third smoke of the evening is held negligently between the index and middle fingers of her pale hand. Occasionally, she takes a drag and spills more smoke into the already smokey atmosphere. Her other hand is wrapped around the neck of a bottle of beer, which is turn rests, sweating, on her denim-clad thigh, just below the long angled jointure with her narrow pelvis, wrist settled against the curve of her hip.
Such visible ease, such elemental caution: the hooded eyes, the flaxen hair spilling across her largely-bare shoulders, and her skin pale as the surface of the moon cast against the velvet night. She doesn't speak to anyone, she hasn't responded to anything said to her with more than a slow-blooming smile, wretched and poisonous and perfectly bright.
Ashe Kincade
Sun 01:57PM CST
The wooden stares creaked with each step he took to descending them. His hands hung loosily at his sides as he marched his way down into the main portion of the bar. Soon a single hand would grip the cheap banister and he'd shuffle down to the main area. Eyes scanned over the enterior a bit before deciding to continue on walking. This evening he wore a black bandanna accompanied with black jeans, and a tight fitting grey tee shirt. With this on, his muscles could be seen, as well as his broad chest.
Sniffling a bit, Ashe would make his way toward the bar, having just woken up. Coming closer, his eyes would shift over toward Luce a moment, then come back toward the tender. Yeah, she was the broad that came in not too long ago, but what did that matter? It wasn't like he knew her or anything. He'd bring his attention back to the tender further by leaning closer and listening to what th eman had to say. Nodding, Ashe would reach out, pull the cigarette from the man's lips, and put it in his own. From here, the rogue walked toward his usual table and kicked out a chair.
Luce
Sun 02:14PM CST
From the moment Ashe enters the room, the creature's shadowed, back-lit gaze follows his path. Raptor, hawk, viper: something with half-lidded eyes and a vague, malevolent intellgience, or so she would seem were it not for the skimming curve of her mouth, the wretched certainty of her confident sprawl.
Otherwise, she doesn't move, at least until Ashe has made his rounds. The bar, the 'tender, and then his usual table, the floor scarred from his usual manner of selecting a chair. After he has chosen his chair, the creature rises with a liquid grace; she seems to slither off her perch at the bar, hip bumping the stool back toward the bar as she sidles across the room. Her gait isn't deliberately sidelong, but is perhaps rather a byproduct of her shape: the long limbs, the narrow torso, the unexpected height.
Instead of settling into a chair, she perches on the edge of the table and puts her beer bottle down in emphasis. The cigarello - or is it a cheroot? - falls from one corner of her mouth, expelling smoke like a dull chimney until she takes another draw. "Evenin'."
Ashe Kincade
Sun 02:18PM CST
The chair scutted across the floor some. Ashe's responce to this would be to turn around and lower himself into it promptly. His boots rose to rest upon the edge of the table as he took in a drawing breathe of nicotine. His eyes moved to the sasheying hips of Luce as she drew closer. There was something about the girl that he couldn't quite place. As she came to his table, he'd woonder what the attraction was between them. "Something I can help you with darlin`?" He asked, rather as though he was unimpressed with her.
Luce
Sun 02:26PM CST
"Yeah," her grin: quicksilver. Her voice is rough with smoke, most traces of her French accent scoured from the weight and infelction of the words. "There is, as a matter of fact."
Oh, but she was enjoying herself. It sounded for all the world like the dialogue from some old movie, some movie filmed before the apparent invention of irony, when black and white shadows and long shuttered glances and smoke, spilling from the tip of a cigar, could mean something, and only that. Her mouth thins, just, with that rich background awareness, as she hitches herself further up on the table and hooks her high-laced high-heel'd foot around the bottom rung of Ashe's chair. "Business, not pleasure, though."
Ashe Kincade
Sun 02:31PM CST
His eyes followed down her leg in a manner that suggested he enjoyed what he was looking at. Slowly his smokey blue eyes would come back up to her as his arms crossed. After a second he'd tap his ashes into the nearest tray and cross them again. "And what sort of business are we talking about?" His voice grew a bit gruff toward the end, something that might tell those who know him his demeanor was turning serious.
Luce
Sun 02:41PM CST
The creature braces herself carefully, hands planted beside either hip, long fingers splayed wide. The cigarello remains in her left hand, held like a pencil or a paintbrush, the glowing tip carefully cast away from her body and out over the floor. The wooden table groans as she shifts her weight, balancing against both of her feet. As she leans forward, her spaghetti straps fall in helpless curves against her smooth upper arms.
Mostly, though, it is her face - the half-curve of a sly, delightered smile, the low-lidded light of the eyes - clear as she bends low. Her mouth stops less than an inch from the shell-curve of his ear, an audible snap of her dull white teeth disturbs the air and heralds the widening of her faint grin. "I have a favor to ask you, Mr. Kincade." Her voice is quiet now, it purrs from someplace coiled in her chest. He feels the vibrations, the faint currents of air almost as much as he can hear her voice. "I do hope you can oblige me."
Ashe Kincade
Sun 02:46PM CST
"That all depends on the favor.." He said, turning his eyes back on her.
Luce
Sun 02:53PM CST
"Of course," her smiles rakes rogue, pulling back from her teeth. She doesn't move, now, even when he shifts his stance subtly enough to catch her lashed gaze again. "It's simple enough. I'd like permission to enter your clan's domain and - on occasion - hunt. If you could pass on the request," she continues, offering an elegant shrug of her bare shoulders, "I would be most grateful."
Ashe Kincade
Sun 03:05PM CST
Ashe narrowed his eyes at her some. As she spoke of the blood, it was hard for him not to grimace and perhaps smack her. God how he hated talking about things like this in public. Even if it was his own bar. Talking in a private booth was one thing, but in the middle of the room where people could take the barest chance to listen? Dear god no. "Must you really speak so openly? Besides, I'm not the one you should be talking too.."
Luce
Sun 03:18PM CST
"Calme-toi, mon petit." The Rose flickering a shuttered glance at him, rising at last and lifting the cigarello to her mouth in one long, smooth motion. "There isn't anyone close." Her faint grin reveals even, white teeth, the tip her tongue against the damp twist of paper. "I am not wholly irresponsible," her gaze drops, the smile widens, and lashes shield her eyes, a curtain of pale color. "although, perhaps, sometimes, a little too - free, eh? Perhaps you could - ignore the latter request and pass on the former request."
Leaning back, sprawling again, the creature once more braces herself with either hand and lightly taps her foot against the cross-bar of Ashe's chair, elegantly non-chalant. "I get bored, sometimes - " a wave of her hand, a curl of fine-filtered smoke, " - with the museums."
Ashe Kincade
Sun 03:25PM CST
Ashe looked tired, as though he had been fighting since he was first embraced. His eyes rolled up to her own as he huffed a moment. Relaxing once again, he flicked the ashes away and took another draw of the cigarette. Exhaling, he'd continue. "What's the matter, too afraid to approach him yourself?" He asked, meaning Sonatine Vidale, the Primogen of Clan Brujah.
Luce
Sun 03:30PM CST
"Perhaps," she responds, her quickened mouth flattening, but only at the corners. The expression could be a smirk, but is protected from anything so crass if only by curve of her risen brows.
"I am - " she offers a gesture to the night, a flip curl of her slender wrist. The smoke from her cigarello describes cursive scrawl in the night, looped and intricate. "- what I am, after all, a delicate flower, indeed."
Ashe Kincade
Sun 03:33PM CST
"Huh.. I'm sure." He said eyeing her a bit. Ashe stubbed out the dwindling cigarette and shook his head. Soon his arms would cross again and he'd eye her a bit more. "So what brings you to the wonderful Windy City, baby?" He moved his feet some, repositioning them to cross on the surface. His eyes moved to her hips again for a second before centering on her eyes. He could have been looking past her hips to the bar, by the way.
Luce
Sun 03:42PM CST
Her gaze flickers coolly back, following the trajectory of his shifting glance: her narrow hips, the faint curve cinched into well-worn denim, or the bar lost in drifts of smoke. Briefly, she focuses on the bartender. The smile falls just from her face as she studies the man, all manufactured artiface fading into an intense blank canvas, more sculptural than expressive.
"That's a question and a half," she responded before she even began to turn. In profile, her sharpened features are defined and skimmed by the pale remaining light. Her mouth moves, the corner twitches upward, as she glances back at him, now with a focused intent. "Which answer do you want? I have many. I'll give you this one: it was somewhere on the map between New York City and oblivion." She pauses, then, sandal'd foot tapping lightly at the cross-bar of his chair once more. "Or did you want something better suited for polite society?"
Ashe Kincade
Sun 03:47PM CST
"Honey, I honestly couldn't give a shit. Mind games and enigmatic phrases aren't my fortei.." He said, nearly mocking her flawless french. God, it was amazing how many Germand and French eople resided in Chicago, Il.
Luce
Sun 03:54PM CST
"If you don't give a shit, darlin'," barely shifting to the broad New England tones of her human youth, the Toreador flashes Ashe a whip-razor grin, all white teeth and fine lips, sailor-mouthed. "why the fuck did you ask?"
Ashe Kincade
Sun 03:57PM CST
"To make you think you were special, of course.." He said, standing with the feintest of grins. After tipping an imaginary hat, Ashe turned and started to walk out the door. The city had business with him tonight, and he wasn't about to let an appointment slip.
Luce
Sun 04:00PM CST
The creature returned the imaginary tip of a hat with a raking smile and smoldering little wink. And then she watched him, with a ravaging sort of attention, as wove his way through the smokey confines of the bar and disappeared into the narrow stairwell, up, up and out.
It would not be long before she would follow.