Occupy San Francisco

Serge Carlock

Occupy Wallstreet, Toronto, Washington, LA, San Francisco, it was all one big mess, a group of rabble lead by no one, going nowhere, but with a big heart and a head full of dreams and hopes. For some it was a vision of a better future, a vision of caring and awareness, for some it was an idiotic fantasy and for those that it targetted, nothing more then a common nuisance. It is no surprise that the rabble would be drawn here, that the great rebeller's of the Camarilla would find its way into this chaos, peaceful as it was and inflame it, engorge it with their own valour and determination.

Occupy San Fran attracted a great many individuals and its steadily swelling numbers was beginning to pose a greater, and greater concern for a variety of people both public and private, and because of it...and only because of it. Serge was on the scene.

He was not there dressed in leathers and invoking the fury and passion of those protesters, he was not there planning their next great move towards financial re-consolidation, he was not even there to promote simple anarchy in of its own sense...no Serge stood on the other side of the fence swathed in blackened combat gear, a shotgun slung over one shoulder, born openly a radio plug set firmly in one ear....it would seem the man was here on invitation...he moved slowly about the outside of the encampment, stopping to talk with the various officers present, before moving onward in his own, personal patrol.

Work was work....and as the Occupy movement grew...and if other brujah had their way, it would become violent...and Serge, well Serge would be well paid.

Luce

The protesters' encampment does not fill up Justin Herman Plaza. Not after the sun goes down on a cool Sunday night, that sends the more dedicated students from Stanford and Berkeley and SF State and Giant Community College scurrying back to their dorms and flats and rented rooms to throw themselves into their homework in one last moving gasp.

Nevertheless, there are still a good several hundred people out here tonight, in the shadow of the Embarcadero Fountain, which looks like nothing so much as several stories of air ducts crumbled together and left to slowly unkink, sometime after world's end. The huge fountain is bathed in soft, moving light, the palm trees that ring the plaza sway gently in the breeze, backlight by the city's subdued brilliance.

There's a mime in the southern corner trying to coax a few extra coins out of diners hurrying across the plaza. He's having a hard go of it since the protesters moved back in, restrung their tents and solar lanterns, restarted their "Love Kitchen" right in the middle of the encampment. Uniformed police can be seen dotting the far reaches of the plaza, but they have not yet started closer. Not yet shown up in the riot gear they wore when they dismantled it the first time.

Some people are singing; a trio of the ringleaders are giving an interview in the harsh, bright glare of television lights, the fountain prominent in the background. Others are unrolling sleeping bags and egg foam under the orange haze that passes for stars here, though it's far to early to go to bed. Someone with a guitar is has started a This Land is Your Land round, and a couple of hard-core homeless men are getting into a fight in the line for the evening meal

And, on the fringe of the organic mass, a skinny blond sits on the back of a park bench, her feet on the seat, arms crossed, leaning forward. Maybe she's listening to the speaker standing forward, going on about credit default swaps, bonuses and billionaires. There is a look of concentration on her face. But no, it's the crowd that has her attention. The living breathing mass of it.

She reaches up, pulling the long strands of her golden hair into a messy ponytail, glances up at the sky once, then back down at the crowd.

Serge Carlock

The police remained outside of the park, outside of the encampment itself, it was the way these things went, how society reacted in this day and age, they waited for the command to come from on high, for some bureaucrat to make the call that would send them flooding in, sending them in to dismantle this colony and send the rats scurrying for another day. Serge however...was not the police, he was not part of the government, he was not even there on THEIR behalf....he was here because someone else...someone greater wanted him there, and so the man...free of such bureaucracy..moved with impunity, tracing the edges of the encampment baring the cat calls and curses of those within who dared to speak out.

Serge noted the sight of the fight into his communicator, relaying the information to the authorities, just incase it became a good reason to do something, and as he moved around to the mass of gatherer's listening to the speaker talk of freedoms and glorious dreams for the people, His slow tracking gaze fell upon the woman on the parkbench...the woman he knew, and so his trajectory took him slowly around the crowd, bringing him up along side the bench with the slow but obvious crunch of his heavy boots against the pavement and he set his gaze on Luce.

Driscoll

It's common sense that if one would like to avoid becoming the victim of random acts of violence or targeted attacks by the defiler, one would do well to remain indoors after the sun has begun to sink beyond the horizon. Humans have, for the entirety of their existence, taken to their havens with the coming of darkness because it offers cover for those who know how to operate in it, and those who know how to operate in it take advantage of the fear of the unknown that is prevalent in societies where citizens hide instead of stand.

This is all well and good, but for the fact that it's after sundown on a Sunday night, Justin Herman Plaza is less than a mile away from the place where Nora Driscoll lives with her family, and she's run out of the house after having an argument with her father.

Nora is thirteen years old, was born in Bishop's Falls, Newfoundland, and has never seen so many people packed into one place in her entire life.

Hanging near the back of the crowd, glad just to be out of that house where her youngest sister is constantly laughing or shrieking or running around, where the middle one gets all the attention because she's special, where their mother acts as though this is all just something they have to do and don't have a choice and their father isn't ever around and when he is he thinks he can just waltz back in like no one noticed how long he's been gone, it would be a lie to say that Nora is easy to ignore. She's tall, golden-haired, her body getting away from her and her eyes bright and watchful.

This is the first act of disobedience she's taken part in as a teenager. The novelty of it is like perfume. Never mind the fact that her very being is a blessing from some pagan backwards gods, that her bearing is that of someone descended from heroes. None of these people need to know that.

Luce

Even from a distance in the dark, she is a difficult thing to miss. Should one know what one is looking for, as Serge does - the golden blond hair, the whip-thin frame settled bonelessly onto her perch, the evident poise, the easy composure, as if she could be both part of the crowd and apart from it, all at a gone. The creature is dressed the part tonight. Old jeans, loose on her narrow hips, a pale orange t-shirt, some retro style, the logo hidden by the sling of her lean torso forward, a hooded gray cardigan hanging open, and scuffed black boots.

There is a messenger bag on the bench behind her feet, and a discarded, hand-lettered sign that says "THINK: It's Patriotic" not far from the bench, the posterboard beginning to curl up at the edges in the damp. That may or may not be hers. More likely not.

When Serge comes walking up, not bothering to conceal the crunch of his footsteps on the concrete, her awareness is evident. She does not glance up, not at first, but he can read her reaction in the pull of her shoulders blades against the smooth, curving gray line of her cardigan, in the supple bunching of muscles at the base of her spine.

Then she lifts her chin, glances sidelong, her features in profile, half-shadowed, pale eyes bright with reflected light as they touch his face. Then flicker down his attire.

The quick flicker of a grin flashes at him like a shadowstep, and she makes a low nose in the back of her throat. "You look dressed to kill."

But her attention sharpens beyond his profile, just then. Locks onto the hair of a gleaming golden girl just beyond him. With the unerring steadiness of a briefly mesmerized cobra. This wound in the blood.

Serge has her ear. Nora has her eyes - that flashing moment of fascination has passed, and now the look is steadier, more remote, searching. Watching as the girl slips into the fringes of the group. Frowning faintly, with a flicker of her eyes around, looking for the girl's parents.

Driscoll

There is a lot to pay attention to. This is the closest she's going to come to being at a live show, or a revolution, something where the young and the wild congregate to make some purposeful use of all this energy they have inside of them, coiled up like something getting ready to explode, and her eyes are glancing about at everything they can find.

She doesn't look like the country bumpkin she's sure her classmates think her to be. Her clothing is trendy if not exactly expensive or fashionable; she wears red Converse sneakers, skinny jeans, a zip-up hoodie and little studs in the lobes of her ears. At her age, it's difficult to tell if she's topped out at her current height of 5'4" or if she's going to continue to grow as she gets older.

Someone is watching her, and the girl who looks as though she could just as well have wandered out of a barley field, some sunlit terrain in the Old Country, lets her eyes drift that way. It chills her, clearly, to have such focused attention on her, but she does not draw closer to investigate.

Into the crowd she goes, and then, several hundred meters off, barely audible over the din of the crowd, comes a man's voice:

"Nora?"

Serge Carlock

Dressed to kill, it was a statement that brought that slight, upward twitch of Serge's lips that seemed to pass for a smile when he was among vampiric kind, hell when he was around most people it was the most jubilant the man ever seemed to get. It made him something of a conundrum amongst his fellow Brujah, who mostly chose to revel in their passions, to exhalt in their fury and their feelings. Serge was the antithesis to this, cold, rigid, as if the man himself had done his very, very best to remove such things from his persona.

"I am as I always am, though tonight...i am a little more me then you might normally see." His response is somewhat cryptic, as his boot shod feet brought him up along side the woman, his body then turning to survey the crowd, briefly catching sight of the woman with the golden hair as she slipped in amongst the teaming masses.

"What brings you to this place?" He enquires, giving her a side long look as he took a quick headcount, before relaying it over the communicator to the men who stood further afield.

His attention was for the woman beside him, and the crowd before him...but somewhere in the mass of matter one called the brain Serge, made note of someone calling someone elses name....a sound of concern...of uncertainty...it could be something, or nothing at all.

Luce

"Ready and willing and eager to stomp your foot on the neck of some out of work longshoreman who has emptied out his savings and can't make next month's rent, are you?" If there is a not of reproof in her voice, it is buried within the words rather than the tone. There's a certain arch lilt to her pale brows that leaches away some of the nascent sting. Not that he would feel it, behind his chosen armor. Not that most of their kind would care. "The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies."

The girl disappears into the crowd, and Luce loses the gleaming flag of her hair somewhere amidst the tarps ahead of them. She straightens, sitting upward and cheating her frame toward Serge. The zip of her hooded cardigan is no more than a quarter closed, the logo of her t-shirt clear to him when she squares her shoulders and lifts her chest in his direction - a guitar on a bed of curl-i-cues, with the words This Machine Kills Fascists following the hourglass line of the guitar.

"I'm here to see who comes. Who stays. What they say. Whether this shit can last." The spark of her gaze is lambent in the dark, gilt with the reflected wash of lights from the jointed fountain. She breathes in deeply, her blond head canting aslant as the man's voice cuts through the relaxed crowd with a certain urgency. Following the sound to its source.

"Why else?" Her shoulders, narrow beneath the charcoal gray cardigan, rise and fall in an elegantly gallic shrug. Briefly, her gleaming eyes touch his face again. There's a supple edge to her smile then, though the look is otherwise distinctly engaging. That still way she holds her body as she cants her head, the steady upward lilt of her fine chin.

"Are you going to write me down in your master's black book, then? Say, she cleans up well." Then she glances away, the name again, her attention lifting as she listens to the layers of sound in the plaza as if she were trying to hear the inner harmonies in a complex Shoshtakovich symphony. "But may have seditious tendencies?

"Or - perhaps you are here on your own. No master at all?"

Driscoll

It's not difficult to surmise that the name being yelled across a distance belongs to the teenage girl; she turns to gauge the direction it's coming from, freezing like a woodland creature that isn't entirely certain of a noise it's just heard. Young, yet, she hasn't reached the age where lying and concealment are second nature to her.

Anyone watching her can see a small-scale battle being waged in her visage; whatever it is anger is fighting, it has decimated. It wins out, her gaze hardening and determination setting itself into her form, and she continues across the plaza, slipping into the thinning crowd.

The police were more interested in making sure this crowd, such as it is, doesn't get out of hand than they were on what the individuals in the mass of bodies were up to. They don't notice the figure as it trots down the sidewalk approaching the plaza, even after it has shouted.

So, the man arrives, and there is not much to say about him. Determining his age is an impossible task, the best guess being "younger than fifty," but he is of average height, blond, has not trimmed his hair in far too long, has allowed facial stubble to begin growing into a beard; he wears work boots and sturdy jeans and a plain olive green t-shirt; it does not take a genius to gather that this is the girl's father.

Standing not too terribly far from Luce and Serge, they cannot glean anything from him that might be remotely useful. He does, however, appear utterly out of place here in the city, and there is something about him that unsettles those who pay too much attention to him. No one in the area fits the bill.

Closer to the mass of bodies, now, he stands stock still and searches the crowd without shouting again.

Serge Carlock

"Officially?" He asked casually as he looked about, watched the people milling here and there with hope in their hearts, but no direction, no guidance. "I am here at the behest of powerful men, but the only master I have ever...or will ever serve has been dead for years, I stand here for my own reasons."

He looks briefly over towards her and one side of his face twitched upward slightly more then it already had. "But perhaps that will fit in my book regardless."

"As to this....this...herd." He said with a gesture of his chin towards the mass of individuals who stood in the cool evening air. "I do not see it lasting, not in the face of real aggression, of a real determination to stomp it out. It is idealistic...but it is without a solid voice, without guidance....it lacks the qualities that have made its enemy so successful...it will kill them."

The blonde woman, the out of place man...to the observant eye it was not difficult to match them up, to note how the woman froze at his call, and then slipped away, attempting to escape his gaze. Serge found it amusing perhaps, that the child thought she could escape so easily.

His gaze returns to Luce, but his attention remains on the man as well, listening, and occasionally looking towards him . "Do you support this?"

Luce

"That's an easy question," a supple flash of her gaze streaks back to the stoic Brujah's face. Her sharp features are still, in that moment. The clear blue gaze, the high, pale brow, the smooth pale cheek. With her hair pulled back, the delicate structure of her skill is evident. The soft hollow behind her head, the long line of her neck moving in concert with but apart from the soft drape of the hood of her cardigan.

She is always moving. Breathing - even and regular and tidal, as if she found it not simply expedient, but pleasurable, to remember the way her body was meant to move. All those muscles, their attachment to bones, the concert of it beneath her skin. "There are so many fools here. It's a great, querulous beast, full of noise, a good deal of it sound and fury, signifying - not nothing, but a terribly imperfect understanding of the world, the imperatives of history. The inevitable concentration of power in the hands of a perilous few."

A quiet noise, as she slides the heels of her boots across the bench, arches her long, lean frame to slide from the back of the bench to stand on the concrete pavement. She reaches back for the strap of her messenger bag, lifts it up and over her body in a sweep and settles it over her torso so that the strap bisects her chest diagonally, cutting the visual line of her retro t-shirt right in two. There are three pins on that strap. The top-most repeats the Woody Guthrie quote on her t-shirt.

The second says: Thy Fearful Symmetry, in great sweeping Gothic letters.

The last says: Dumbledore's Army.

"Still," a faint, almost cheeky shrug. "I prefer it to silence."

If they were in Elysium, she might lean in then; step into his space, press a kiss cool cheek to cheek while the impassive Brujah stands there like a stone, like a gargoyle, impenetrable. They are not, however. All she does is click her heels and give him a steady look as she steers around him, headed toward the man searching the crowd.

"Beg pardon. Are you looking for the girl. The blonde? Adolescent?" She pauses just long enough to wait for confirmation on the stranger's face, skin prickling unaccountably. It does not quite show on the woman's features - but she does keep a certain distance.

"She's here. In the crowd somewhere. The protesters' volunteer security tent is right beside the Love Kitchen. If you let them know you're looking for your daughter, they'll have her found in no time. Good luck,"

She doesn't linger for conversation, nor even step close. Just circles 'round and continues out of the plaza, long legs, long swinging steps, ponytail bouncing down her back, the messenger bag heavy on her hip, right hand tucked into her pocket, the left swinging free at her side.

Serge Carlock

Serge listens carefully as she spoke, taking in her agreement with this...mockery of a revolution, this headless beast that ran rampant through the streets of various cities without control, without a real target, the whole of the thing made Serge want to spit....but such luxuries were beyond him and his kind...lest he waste precious blood to do so.

"A headless action such as this does more damage then good, if anything, this revolution will hamper a true revolution from ever forming properly...because the sad example this sets...will do nothing to aid a real one." She moves then, moving away and Serge...well Serge simply nodded to the woman she departed. "Good evening." He said without concern as he too stepped free of the benches gravity, heading around the crowd...heading for the girl.

Might as well do something.

Driscoll

The conversation of the tall blond woman and the shorter scarred man become background noise, something that is simply an annoyance comparing to the size of the crowd, the energy pulsing from it, the presence of armed human lawgivers and the threat of violence looming. This is the worst kind of threat, idle and mundane, impossible to control for how miserable the American people are.

When he's addressed, the man looks over at her, his movements sharp but not paranoid, nostrils flaring once as his gaze narrows on her. A question as to whether she's looking for the girl, and he grinds his teeth once, thoughtful, before he says, "Right."

It's assent, but if Luce hears a question at the end of it, she wouldn't be imagining things. He gives no more information than is necessary to judge where it is her questions will lead, and if she looks close enough, she may be able to see that his eyes have that distant quality that a drunk's tend to, though he does not look or act or smell like a drunk.

Luck is bidden him, then, and he huffs, that being the only response she gets before he starts off in the direction Luce had indicated, long after he has lost track of Serge.

Meanwhile, Nora is just watching, drifting through the bodies looking for a way across the plaza.

Serge Carlock

[Per+Alert Find the girl]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 7, 10) ( success x 1 )