RP characters:

[b]BY CLAN/TRIBE/KITH[/b]

[u]Garou: 13[/u]
[i]BSD[/i] 3ish - Natalia Reuissione (Ronin); Maggie Burns(Ronin); Ismene (Sssyssyna), et al.
[i]Fenrir[/i] 2 - Annamaria SomethingOrOther, Lara "Skadi" Andersson
[i]Glass Walker[/i] 1 - Rune
[i]Shadow Lord[/i] 1 - Madeleine "Light-Bringer" Berlusconni
[i]Silver Fang[/i] 1 - Zuzanna "Ana" "Nemesis" "Be Glad I Don't Have All Her Names Here" Kozireski
[i]Bone Gnawer[/i] 1 - Tallulah Revelation "Can't Remember This Stuff" Wade
[i]Child of Gaia[/i] 1 - Summer Anne "Jeez, can't even remember THIS one" Adkins
[i]Black Fury[/i] 3 - Sasha Konstantine, Storm's Heart Dancing, Alessandra Derivan

[u]Kinfolk: 3[/u]
[i]Child of Gaia[/i] 1 - Liza Jane Beaumont
[i]Glass Walker[/i] 1 - Marissa Samuelson
[i]Shadow Lord[/i] 1 - Éva Jozsefa Illésházy

[u]Fera: 1[/u]
[i]Ratkin[/i] 1 - Dustbin Annie

[u]Kindred: 17[/u] (Kicked Damon's wee ass, here)
[i]Malkavian[/i] 3 - Lillian, Emily "Emmy" Thorne, Lila
[i]Tzimisce[/i] 2 - Inocencia, Constanta Iliescu
[i]Brujah[/i] 2 - Juniper Halleck, Annamaria "I Seem Stuck on That Name" Kensington
[i]Lasombra[/i] 2 - Sammy da SNAKE!, Madeleine "Stuck on that Name Too, Want Another Madeleine Character" Brevard
[i]Gangrel[/i] 1 - Dakota
[i]Tremere[/i] 1 - Ysabet Montgomery
[i]Ventrue[/i] 1- Morgan Elizabeth Edwards v 1.0
[i]Daughter of Cacophony[/i] 1 - Merie
[i]Setite[/i] 1 - Najat Aatabou/Margot de Castillhon/Jacinth Elise deBouchard
[i]Toreador[/i] 2 - Sebastian, Marie-Hélène Alette de Sausanne d'Allais
[i]Caitiff[/i] 1- Aisling

[u]Ghouls: 1[/u]
[i]Tremere[/i] 1 - Morgan Elizabeth Edwards v 2.0

[u]Changeling: 2[/u]
[i]Sidhe[/i] 1 - Magdalena de Castro d’Oro d’Ailil
[i]Pooka[/i] 1 - Mariposa

[u]Mage: 1[/u]
[i]Orphan[/i] 1 - Rosa Saks

[u]Sorcerer: 1[/u] - Blanking on name. Another Alessandra?

[u]Mortal: 3[/u] - Bethany Hayes, Some kid whose name I can't remember, Siri

[u]Other: 8[/u]
[i]Immortal[/i] 2 - Zahra, Genevieve
[i]Angel[/i] 1 - S'halilial (The Angel who did not so much rise as saunter vaguely upwards.)
[i]Intergalatic Pizza Delivery Girl[/i] (Time Lords) 1 - Can't remember name. Ask Chuck!
[i]Others[/i] 3 - Lit Professor chick, Lady of the Gray Eyes, Jaione
[i]Amber[/i] 1 - The Right Honorable Her Ladyship Sibelie qua Erroneous qua A'Brèvètŧżo (aka Dudlia Doright)

Total: 50



[b]BY AUSPICE/PRYIO/SECT/COURT[/b]

[u]Garou: 13[/u]
[i]Ragabash[/i] 1 - Madeleine
[i]Theurge[/i] 3 - Alessandra, Maggie, Ana
[i]Philodox[/i] 2 - Ismene, Lulu
[i]Galliard[/i] 3 - Sasha, Storm's Heart Dancing, Natalia
[i]Ahroun[/i] 4 - Skadi, Annamaria, Rune, Summer Anne

[u]Kinfolk: 3[/u] - Liza Jane, Éva, Marissa

[u]Fera: 1[/u]
[i]Ratkin Seer[/i] 1 - Annie

[u]Kindred: 17[/u]
[i]Camarilla[/i] 7 - Lillian, Emmy, Morgan v 1.0, Jacinth [nominally], Sebastian, Annamaria [nominally], Marie-Hélène [Heh!]
[i]Anarch/Independent/Mostly Too Ignorant to Know Better[/i] 2 - Dakota, Aisling
[i]Sabbat[/i] 8 - Ysa, Merie, Inocencia, Constanta, Juniper, Lila, Sammy, Madeleine

[u]Ghouls: 1[/u]
[i]Camarilla[/i] 1 - Morgan v 2.0

[u]Changeling: 2[/u]
[i]Seelie[/i] 1 - Mariposa
[i]Unseelie[/i] 1 - Magdalena

[u]Mage: 1[/u]
[i]Orphan[/i] - Rosa

[u]Sorceror: 1[/u]
[i]Fortuneteller[/i] - whatever her name was. Heh!

[u]Mortal: 3[/u]
[i]Dirt Poor[/i] 1 - whatshername! - the kid who pissed off vampires on StL left and right with her wisecracking ways
[i]Middle Income[/i] 2 - Bethany, Siri

[u]Other: 8[/u]
[i]Inherently Good[/i] 1 - Genevieve
[i]Philosophically Good[/i] 1 - S'halilial
[i]Inherently Depressive[/i] 1 - Zahra
[i]Inherently Stolen from [b]Snow Crash[/b][/i] 1 - Pizza Girl!
[i]Inherently Stolen from [b]Tigana[/b][/i] 1 - Jaione
[i]Inherently Into Hot Blacksmith Guys[/i] 1 - Lit professor (or was she a math prof?) chick
[i]Inherently Ambiguous[/i] 1 - Gray Eyes
[i]Inherently Prim, Utterly Victorian[/i] 1 - Sibelie

[b]Total: 50[/b]

[u]Conclusions:[/u]

- I only play girls because the ONE TIME I played a guy someone-who-shall-remain-nameless nicknamed him "The Deflowerer." Which was way too embarrassing to bear.

- Vampire: I’ve played most Cam clans, but – for whatever reason – am a Tzimisce girl rather than a Sombrero chick. Heh. I’d think I’d like Sombreros, but one of mine was just a knock-off crass crazy thing, and the other was just a private few scenes, so it’s weird. I dunno. After a long middling period were (except for Jacinth) I played only Sabbat, I’m playing Camarilla again. My Cam characters tend to have independent/anarch tendencies, but have them sublimated somehow or other.

- Werewolf: I avoided Ahrouns at first, but in the last few years have been drawn to them. Storm’s Heart Dancing was the only good deed name I ever came up with and I hate you people who can come up with good ones. Hate you. Will make voodoo dolls of you and stick pins in your eyes.

- I still have more vampires than werewolves.

- I am stuck on certain names. I LOVE the name Madeleine. Also, if I can accent it, apparently, I will.

- Finally, despite my many European-ish names, what the addiction to accents and all, and my tendency to play chars with Frenchy backgrounds, I've never played a character who was born and raised in Europe, at least not in a regular WW game. All my characters are from the US, Canada, Mexico, or maybe South America, except for Najat/Margot/Jacinth, who was from - uh, blanking - the Atlas mountains in what is now Morocco. Other characters with funny names are either 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants (with immigrant trads still alive [i]en famillle[/i] at least in naming - a la Éva, Ana, Sasha, et al) or have assumed names for one reason or other (a la Nat, Constanta, Jacinth, Marie-Hélène - and no, unless you find out IC, you don't know that IC!). Add in Genevieve and Zahra, and you'll get two more overseas types - one European (Channel Islands-ish, not sure of origins), one Central Asian (Kyrghistan-ish). So, yeah.

- Oh, man. I know no one else cares about my characters, but this was way fun for me. I want more! More retrospectives. C'mon people, answer the challenge.

Finally, all things being equal, I'm surprised that my character-count approaches Damon's, especially after a long hiatus. Admittedly, I plundered my "other" characters more than he did, but still. Surprised!

For Real

Death took the husband of a neighbor of mine,
on a highway, with a drunk at the wheel.
She told me "Keep your clean hands off the laundry he left,
and don't tell me you know how I feel."
She had a tape that he'd sent her from a Holiday Inn,
and she never played it much in the day,
But when I heard him say he loved her through the window at night,
I just stayed the hell away.

There's a hole in the middle of the prettiest life,
so the lawyers and the prophets say.
Not your father nor your mother nor your lover's
gonna ever make it go away,
And there's too much darkness in an endless night
to be afraid of the way we feel;
Let's be kind to each other, not forever, but for real.

My father never put his parachute on in the Pacific
back in World War Two;
He said he'd rather go down in familiar flames
than get lost in that endless blue,
And some of that blue got into my eyes,
and we never stopped fighting that war,
Until first understood about endlessness,
and I loved him like never before.

chorus

It's lucky that my daughter got her mother's nose,
and just a little of her father's eyes,
And we've got just enough love that when the longing takes me,
well, it takes me by surprise,
And I remember that longing from my highway days,
though I never could give it a name;
It's lucky I discovered in the nick of time
that the woman and the child aren't to blame

For the hole in the middle of a pretty good life,
I only face it 'cause it's here to stay:
Not my father, nor my mother, nor my daughter, nor my lover,
nor the highway made it go away,
And there's too much darkness in an endless night
to be ashamed of the way I feel.
I'll be kind to my loved ones, not forever, but for real.

Some say that God is a lover; some say it's an endless void;
Some say both, and some say She's angry, and some say just annoyed,
But if God felt a hammer in the palm of His hand,
then God knows the way we feel;
And love lasts forever, forever and for real.
Love lasts forever.

There are words on her hands, another's words, the crabbed script reversed and inscrutible. The paper and ink are older than the rusting shell of a structure in which she resides, beached like some fat, dead whale on the banks of the sluggish old river. The lingering scents are chemical, residual, but infected, infested by the river's slow moist rot. The factory - long abandoned - has been stripped of every useful bit of equipment, and most of the useless scraps as well. What remains are only those things too large for the door, too outdated to be worth even the scrap metal, or too cumbersome to lift without a massive industrial crane.

And there is one of those, here, too. A crane: industrial, its stark, rusting structure resembles nothing so much as the broken bones of a brontosaurus slapped together again with rust and glue, looming over the squalid entrance to some third-rate natural history museum. The tracks are invisible, lost in the overhead gloom. Dead thing that she is, she is only there to study the old factory's scraps at night, deep shadows broken here and there by some reflection of the city's lights. Her perspective is that of a blind man, with the whole of an elephant to explore, and she supplies the details that are missing, anthropomorphizes the long dead machine, romanticizes it, when she is in a romantic frame of mind.

Tonight she is in a romantic frame of mind, and she glances up from the crumbling pages, the claustrophobic script, to the still expanse above her. It is dark enough in here that she can fool herself into believing that the roof has been removed, that she stares up into the heart of some altered night sky, some variant future where all the stars have been extinguished, and only the utter blackness remains. She looks to the broken void of the sky; her gaze drops to the open page near dissolving beneath her long, pale fingers. She considers both of them, together, and the harsh quality of light cast by her cheap plastic torch, its directed beam diffused by a makeshift metal shade flaking rust.

[I]The world at this moment, presents very nearly the same evidence that has been given by every country and every age, that wisdom and foresight but rarely have much influence, in producing extensive revolutions. So much depends upon circumstances, beyond all our powers of calculation, that in almost every instance of human history, the events have been productive of consequences, directly contrary to prediction. A few, and a very limited few, have ever possessed talent enough, to form correct estimates of the real bearing of great commotions among mankind. Effects are continually mistaken for causes. [/I]

She is seated, cross-legged, on a bulbous structure that reminds her of a flattened toadstool, seen through a looking glass. An engineer might know what purpose the great fat dead metal thing once served, but she cannot begin to speculate. Such practical considerations are well beyond her, the intricacies of structure and engineering, the mysteries of loads and cogs and wheels, fulcrums and teeth and gears and the like. Her appreciation of the echoing space is wholly aesthetic. Industry dies, lives pass, but the bones remain to rust and bleach in the sun, to be haunted by the cold hard moon.

Somewhere above, on the tar-covered roof a young man - the sort who still breathes and wants and eats and fucks and sleeps the sort of dreaming sleep now foreign to her - sprawls in a lightheaded swoon engendered by alcohol and bloodlust. It is his blood that is still hot in her mouth, staining her pale lips deep red. His blood that makes her head swim until the tight characters of the scrabbling script bleed wordlessly together and reform. She smiles a cool smile at the sensation, [i]against[/i] the sensation, and her head clears abruptly. An hour or two before dawn pales the sky, she will lead the young man stumbling away from this industrial wasteland and put him back on the path to humanity. For now, she is content to leave him where he is, struggling to consciousness beneath the orange ooze of reflected light and the stars beyond.

[I]The struggle between good sense and power, has continued with daily increasing violence, since the invention of printing. How this contest is to terminate, it is now difficult to predict; but such is the powerful aid given to reason by the press, that the best result may be hoped. The French revolution was nothing more than an effect of this long opposition of prescriptive usurpation, against a relinquishment of power. Those who view the triumph of despotism as complete, know little of human nature, and less of the ordinary course of thing in the world. Every symptom evinces an approaching storm, of perhaps tenfold more violence, than the one so lately abated. [/I]

These are old words, insignificant. The author is long dead, his name unknown. His whole existance is putative, except for the name attached to the journal in her hand, written in watery ink, in forward slanting script. She has read through the whole of the thing twice now, and but for the passage to which the book is now opened, it is nothing more than an account of the milk production of his cattle and the egg production of his fowl, how many biscuits he ate in the morning, how long the shoes on his ox lasted. Where the sun rose, what the river did, where the storm came from, and how long it took to clean up the debris. But here is this passage, incongruous and out of place among the terse accounts of the day's accounts, and she still cannot wrap her mind around it, she cannot penetrate either veil. Thinking to long on the matter awakens the beast inside her in supple, subtle ways. She considers the man above her, whether it would matter if he died, what might happen to the shell of his body, and then dismisses the thought as not wholly worthy.

Ignoring rather than placating the wanton, violent black thing that lives inside her cool, pale shell, she closes the journal and takes up, instead, a pen. The paper below is thick and rich, almost creamy, appropriate for correspondence, but the pen is cheap, plastic, breakable. He writes with old-fashioned ink. She writes with whatever is handy at the moment, caring for the appearance of the thing only when she wishes to trouble herself to do so. She is momentarily stymied by the blankness before her, not simply by the possibilites, but also by the challenge it presents. Her head tips to the side, and the long, wretched tangle of her pale hair spills over her left shoulder. Irritated, she brushes it away and returns to the blank page before, wonders, idly, whether any other will read her own insignificant words long after she is dead, in the shell of dead building, on the banks of a dead river, beneath the facsimile of a dead night's sky.

Under such circumstances, it is so easy to begin. She smiles, and writes:

[B]Dear Sir,

I think you will appreciate the passage I have found...[/B]

"And then they came and the flagman parked his truck right in front of our loading dock. We told - asked - him to move but he wouldn't do it and he said that he didn't have to do it just because we asked, and in fact he deliberately didn't leave for lunch and sat on the tailgate eating his sandwich and cherries and SPITTING the pits INTO our lawn and said that he should charge us for the cherry trees and they think JUST BECAUSE they're from Highways that they don't have to listen to anyone, but I TOLD him twice to move and I WROTE IT DOWN." The woman's voice is thinned by the distant and staticky. She must be on a cellular phone, and outside, for Eva can hear the dull roar of highway noise as a constant background to the woman's complaints.

The kinfolk has, intermittantly, played with attempting to guess how many cars might pass near her client (the distinctive crescendo-decrescendo of the churning engines remind her of indrawn/exhaled breaths) in the course of another meandering sentence, but now the lawyer's attention is drawn to the slatted pattern of light and shadow on the opposite wall. So distracted by the intricate interplay of light and darkness (is something different, now?) is Eva that she misses the pregnant pause, into which she was supposed to insert yet another soothing assurance that This-Outrage-Will-Be-Avenged, that We-Will-Make-Them-Pay.

"So." Two months later, the woman's voice is still aggressive, bullish with belligerence. Eva has not met her, but can imagine her face, her mouth set, her upper lip trembling with excess rage, her cheeks flushed, her fingers clenched into hard little fists, her hands trembling. "THAT is another one, right? You have that one, right? What is - "

Eva tips the microphone of her headset away from her mouth long enough to murmur another fractured sentence into her dictaphone. It was the only way she could keep notes and bleed off excess energy by pacing about the room, and it all made her feel like an executive in a movie rather. The pacing. The headset. The dictaphone. "Yes - " Eva replied, sliding the microphone back into place. Soothing and competent, reassuring, her tone. "I have that incident on the list. I have put together what I think will be our final demand list, and I want to get your approval before we file the complaint. I could email it, or have the runner bring it over tomorrow. I'm still waiting for some final numbers from your bookkeeper to calculate average daily losses. Could you ask her to - "

There was a faint knock at the door, which tipped further open with the pressure, and someone's fingers were curled around the frame. Eva looked up and held up a staying finger as a coworker ducked just inside. Without a word, the second woman lifted her wrist and tapped her watchface, then offered Eva a sneer that ended in a stuck-out-tongue. So much for professional demeanor. Eva flashed an open hand and mouthed the word [i]minutes[/i], jerking a gesture toward the headset, then resumed her pace, refocusing on the client's words. " - and SHE said that she would have that to you by YESTERDAY so I'm gonna give her a call and you can BET I'm going to give her a piece of my mind because WHAT else am I paying her every month for except for JUST THIS SORT OF THING?"

"Sure, of course - " Eva interjected, before Mrs. Brannon could start reciting yet another injury. " - we have plenty of time, just have her get me those numbers and I'll get the final draft out to you for your approval. I think we're in great shape!" "Butacite® polyvinyl butyral interlayer Someone came and replaced her windows in the middle of the night.

"I have gotten your message now. I am able to be helping you again. Just the one?"

White drum player: Toubabou Djembefola

Sanka is not a djembefola - in Africa, djembefola are very low status. Contrary to what whites may believe, they are not the equivalent of djeli (griot), and to assert such is to insult the djeli.

Sankore "Sanka" Oumou Kouyate Es-Saheli

Garou Name: "Sundjata Saba" (rough translation: oathwish of/to the lion king of the desert; in the Garou tongue, the name is more elaborate still: long wished for oathdaughter of Sundjata (lion king of the Maghreb), last star in his dusking sky)
Tribe: Silent Strider
Rank: Cliath (experienced)
Auspice: Galliard
Concept: modern-day djeli/griot - the traditional class of taleteller and history keepers in malian society, in the old malian empire (elle est une griotte du fin de la monde)

Strength: 2
Dexterity: 4
Stamina: 4

Manipulation: 2
Charisma: 4
Appearance: 2

Perception: 2
Intelligence: 3
Wits: 3

Alertness: 2
Brawl: 2
Dodge: 2
Expression: 3
Streetwise: 2



Languages: English, Bambara,French

Instruments: guitar and kora (A cross between a harp and a lute with 21 to 25 strings. Unusually, because of the harp-like playing method, the strings face the player and not the audience. The Kora is made from a half a gourd calabash with a hardwood post that runs through it to which the strings are attached. The calabash is covered with a cowhide that is stretched over the open side of the half calabash and then left in the sun to dry tight and hold the handposts in place. A tall bridge is mounted upright on the skin face of the instrument and separates the strings into two planes. The Kora player supports the instrument with the 3rd, 4th, and 5th fingers and the notes are played with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands. Koras vary in size dependent on the size of the gourd, whether it is deep or shallow, whether the wood is dry or moist, etc. I have a small page on the kora at: http://www.geocities.com/saba_ril/kora.html)

Spiritual heritage: Sanka is beloved of native African spirits, too often forgotten - or worse - by the Garou, and she finds subtle traces of them throughout the new world as much as the old world. Her father's family lost the tradition of kinship - forgot themselves, in the desert - but always remembered and honored their spiritual heritage. For more, see the story below. She keeps up her devotions, down to the smallest of offerings, no matter how mean her meal is, how sparse her time, and so on. She whispers stories to them, and seeks out the smallest of transplanted spirits, half-forgotten, languishing in the new world's melting pot.

Appearance
It has been a week since she washed her t-shirt, a cotton tie-dye so faded that the sunburst has become ghostly and the loose weave continues to adhere out of nostalgia. The bottom seam is ripped, a paired trail of particolored threads hang down from the frayed, already raveling fabric. If the pattern were not faded to near-obscurity, it would be half-hidden by the tide of roaddust staining the unwashed garment. There are certain particular - perhaps, to most human senses - rank scents about Sanka that testify to her old-fashioned attitude toward washing.

Body odor, sweat and dust, the funk of the road. Her jeans are worn and similarly crusted with dirt, the cuffs stiff with dried mud, bare feet beneath almost hooflike, the skin worn, warm and callused, sunbrown as the rest of her.

Sanka has a strange combination of braids and dreadlocks, a multitude of which spill over her shoulders, down her back in varying widths and lengths. Some are thicker than others, imperfectly knotted and fuzzed, the texture of dreadlocks, while others are so fine and tightly woven that they must have been braided by nanofingers rather than human fingers. Among/of/in/with the braids are a half hundred added decorations, most of which are hidden by the thicket of dark hair. Bone beads, feathers, sticks, broken shells, the tiniest fragmentary skulls of creatures, bits of worn rock worked into the semblance of buttons, woven into the ends of the longer braids, frayed and faded ribbons, the wiretrim poking through the weave, dull and brittle and rusty.

She is of moderate height and moderate build - 5'6", perhaps, or 5'7" when she dons the hiking boots that are usually tied together by the shoelaces and slung over her shoulders or dangling from her makeshift pack. She is pearshaped, somewhat, with curved, childbearing hips, small breasts and a narrow torso. Lean muscle asserts itself beneath the worn clothing: a life on the road leaves little room for fat.

Sanka's eyes are dark brown, with dullish striations of topaz most prominent near the pupils and what appears to be a corona of hazy greenish brown, an outter band around the irises. Her eyebrows sketch a curved line of bone beneathIn the red flesh of either tearduct, she usually wears a (plastic?) gem, faceted but colourless, just domed and oblong, almost perfectly fitted to the miniature pearshape at the place where one digs for sleep of a morning.

Her fingers are short and stubby, with blunt, dirty nails, darker than the rest of her skin - which begins dark and becomes darker, from the endless exposure to the sun. Sanka is a clear Heinz 57, dark of eye and hair - darker than most - but of some indeterminate, perhaps heretofore unrecognized ethnicity. Most people consider her Hispanic, Arab or African, and they are all individually right, to some degree, and specifically wrong. If one truely wishes to categorize, Sanka is the product of an Arab-African father (Malian, with Bambara, Songhai, Arab and even Dogon ancestry, Tombouctou by way Bamako to Cairo and Paris to Montreal to Seattle to, eventually, Portland, a nice, settled, liberal town where a genuine African intellectual Moslem-animist who quaintly offers a small portion of every plate he consumes to the "little gods" that infect and influence the world, despite being a bona-fide scientist is almost as precious as gold) and an African-American mother (who can claim African, American Indian, Cuban, European and Japanese ancestry herself, but who identifies primarily with her slave ancestors).

History
The Garou blood in her came from one of them, somewhere in that riotous mix. It is just as likely that her distant Garou ancestor was a Fianna, Fang or Fenrir master to her American slave ancestors as it is that Strider blood still lurks in the veins of some Malians, dormant for centuries, half-remembered in supple tales but present. Just as likely, but likely not true. (Of course, for Sanka to breed true, it is possible that both parents are unknowing kinfolk, lost kin, the few drops of old blood still bright and present. Like seeks like, does it not?)

Sanka's parents met on campus at the University of Washington, then moved - together - to Portland, accepting tenure track positions there. Saheli Kouyate ibn Al-Rahim (her father) teaches physics, while her mother (Born: Jane Anne Washington; Name taken: Oumou Kouyate) teaches women's studies and African-American studies: cultural issues. Oumou was always frantic about cultural issues, celebrating everything, insisting on authentic this and authentic that, ordering spices from New York merchants and eschewing the Indian market, where everything she might need could be found, while Saheli practiced his faith and maintained his cultural ties with the quiet and understated assurance of someone BORN to something. He was never concerned about his daughter's American ways, her embrace of the corporate conglomerates, the fact that she knew the name "McDonald's" before she knew the name "Tombouctou." It didn't matter. She would be what she would be.

Saheli practiced a combination of Islam and animism peculiar, in many ways, to many muslims of Africa. While Oumou was frantic and erratic in her devotions, drawing from a crazyquilt of ethnicities to cobble together a series of beliefs and ceremonies that were more superficial than felt, Saheli quietly went about his life, putting aside a portion of all the rice he cooked for the spirits, a porton of the flatbread, a taste of peanut sauce, threaded with extra spices as they preferred, flavored with bones. He offered the first taste of any beer to the earth, and kept a spirithouse outside his window, constructing such things cleverly out of rocks and twigs whenever he traveled away from home. He knew the patrons of his home and family, and honored them, subtly, constantly, with understated belief and grace.

Oumou, in contrast, was frantic to maintain what she called "cultural relevance" and insisted that her daughter wear not the cookie monster t-shirt she loved on her first day of kindergarten, but a complicated and colorful dashiki and a half-dozen cowrie shell necklaces. And so it went: papa was easy and abstract, absorbed in his research and in the many political issues that always face exiles. Mama was frantic and pressured, insisting that papa speak not the French that was often lingua franca in Mali before his daughter, but rather his native Bambara, or one of the cultural variants common to the Saharan peoples. Papa wanted to give his daughter an American name - he was an exile, he did not romanticize his home - but his wife wanted to give her daughter a traditional, meaningful name. They settled on Sankore, the name of the first university in Timbukto, established several centuries before the Sorbonne. The compromise pleased both of them, until papa shortened the name to a nickname, Sanka, that made mama see a thousand shades of red. "Decaf" mama called her, when she was angry with papa, in an attempt to get a rise from him. Papa merely repeated it with a smile - he had a strange serenity that drove mama mad - and tosseled Sanka's braids affectionately. Decaf.

But for the culture clash (and even this, yes? is ordinary), Sanka had a normal, middle class, American childhood - mostly. Normal comes in infinite variations, of course, and her variation included much of the unrootedness of an exile's life, the dual focus, even though her father had settled in Portland, never to move again, by the time she was born. She went to school and read books, she dreamed about the gods of Africa and the gods of Greece and the gods of the Vikings in their endless war. She read Chinua Achebe and Charlotte Bronte and many things in between. She listened to pop music and rap music and classical music, and sat in with her mother's drum circle every Thursday night (her Malian father refused to join the drum circle. Drummers are low status in Malian society, fit only for marriage to the lowest of the low, or whites - who seem to worship djembefola beyond all reason, apparently unaware of their foul and lowly status.) and was sent to take lessons on traditional instruments of all sorts, but found and settled on a pair of instruments as her own, one traditional, the other western - guitar and the 21-string kora, a cross between a lute and a harp unique to West Africa.

The one made her father happy - western, to be sure, but the guitar is quite useful and common an instrument in Malian music, which is strangely related to the American blues - and the other delighted her mother. Such was her dual life as a child and teenager. Sanka - Decaf - did not mind too much. She was easygoing, sometimes rambunctious, but usually observant, with an ear for songs, which she would sing to herself in a high, thin voice, often in a mixture of Bambara, French and English, while watching herself in the mirror, as if she could see through to the other side.

And she knew there was another side, for all that her father was a scientist, he had taught her this, too. Knowledge - all knowledge - is necessary, and the worlds were closer in Africa than ever in Oregan. Saheli never spoke to his daughter of his nameless crime, his rebellion or his unwise making of foolhardy friends, whatever it was that cast him into exile, but he spoke to her, endlessly, of the sky and the earth, the place where the desert became the savannah, the blistering sun, the mudbricked home in tombouctou, the library and university that were her namesakes, the foolish assumptions the westerners made about the hidden, fabled city that was the cool dark heart of a long-dead empire, and the truths that underlay the assumptions. He spoke to her about the worlds, the fabric and barriers between them, the spirits that live in one and cross to the other, the rituals of propiation and honor, memory and dream. Saheli was an exile, but he was the child of griots, from a family of griots, and even his joking cousins (family associations and alliances are complex, and "joking cousins" are allied families with whom one is required to trade sharp barbs on meeting, but whom one aids, etc. in their time of need) were also griots, the ceremonies of propiation, knowledge of the veil between worlds passed through the line from half-forgotten Garou ancestors.

Oh, that there were loogaroo in the Kouyate family history was long a rumor, whispered by the snake-tongued old women in the Tombouctou marketplace, dry as the dust of that fabled city. The mothers and fathers were silent, whispering only what was necessary to their children. Their place as griots made them respected and feared - and dangerous, depending on the politics of the day, and it was not surprising that every generation or two, a young papa or mama disappeared into the expansive night, never to be seen again.

Sanka was sixteen years old when she experienced her first change, and working as a counselor at a cross-cultural summer camp in the Cascades that her mother adored. Nights found her running through the woods, dreamworld, and mornings found her sheets stained with mud, her body aching from unknown ills. Well into the summer, she was discovered by the guardians of a hidden Uktena Caern, on a tip by a pair of Uktena kinfolk who worked at the camp, as well. The Uktena came for Sanka in the middle of a black, black night and stole her from the woods, back to the sanctity of the Caern. They heard her story, told her their own, and gradually over the coming weeks she came to understand that she could never, ever go home, that the world was different entirely for her now, that some doors had opened and others had closed.

With her mixed ethnicity, her cross-cultural street cred, it seemed natural that Sanka become Uktena. The Uktena sheltered her and educated her and hid her from her parents' frantic searches (impossible to know which parent was like to be kinfolk. Impossible to know how they would react, if they were lost kinfolk, according to the Uktena), and so on. Time passed. Sanka was a typical teenager, half-engaged, irritated by the process, by her isolation, by the moods that raged through her blood. She missed McDonald's and didn't like the goopy mumbu jumbu that reminded her far too much of her mother, but she kept up most of her father's subtler traditions even when no longer in his house, memories of his homeland so embedded in the fabric of her daily life she'd never seen them as something to rebel against.

Months later, the small sept sent Sanka on her rite of passage quest. Most undertake such a quest with a small pack of similarly situated young Garou, but not Sanka. There were no other young Garou, nor were there likely to be any for at least three years. Moreover, the Uktena shaman had had a vision of the young woman's future, one he refused to share with any other, and determined it was best to send her from here, alone, rather than to cart her off to some larger sept to go through the finding of a rite of passage pack.

On a cold October night, Sanka left the shallow circle of firelight near the heart of the small Caern, and stepped into its spirital center. She crossed between worlds, from the tellurian to the penumbra, and began her journey, there. Her task was elegant in its simplicity: she had to find a story, one worth telling, one never before told, and return to the sept with the tale in her mouth. Most expected she would not need to go far - there were stories everywhere, in the wheel of birds across the horizon, in the eruption of darkness against the light, in the endless hunt, in the bones of the earth, fragments of knowledge to be gleaned from those spirits willing to share in exchange for a taste of your heart, a sip of your soul, stories remembered in the hearth stones of the lost, remnant tellings like a bride's shredded veil in the pattern of clouds against a bright blue sky. There are more stories than there are mouths in the world, more truth than memory.

Days became weeks, became months, and she did not return, all tracery of her passage erased, the shortmemoried animalkin lingering about the caern disagreed as to which path she took, where she might have gone, the sept mourned the child's lost - yet another, before she had even been blooded (but they must assume she had been blooded, they assumed she had spilled her blood all over the greedy earth) until one night - one cold November night thirteen months later - a shadow passed across the crescent moon, and in the darkness, a no-moon ragabash dreamed he saw a lion, with a fetched mane and lambent eyes, and there was much speculation about the appearance about the fire that night, about the stillness of the owls known to roost in the trees at the heart of the caern, about the movement of deer through the forest, about the depth of the mast. The lion - a mescaline dream of a young ragabash, or perhaps simply a prank - was forgotten.

The air was hard with frost, and the fire seemed particularly crisp, each bright crackle of fire spat out against the blank night sky. The day's clouds were clearing, and the first of the stars came out, too too bright, sharp and brittle as fractured ice, crystalline in the still air. The Garou - gathered for a meal and stories, gathered because wolves are social, and gather themselves together and because there was a Stider there, had been for a fortnight, with stories of his own to tell - were looking to the first of the stars to appear, an old constellation with no name but its own, unknown to humans but part and parcel of the old Galliard Elder's store of lore. Halfway through the story, the Galliard faltered. But for those out on patrol, the Sept's entire population of werewolves were gathered about the fire, listening to his tale, staring up at the two faint, shining stars to which he referred, but a shadow moved behind them, and as the shadow came into the light, the story stopped and the whole of the small Sept turned and gaped.

Sanka had returned. There was no mistaking her - she was a year older, perhaps an inch or two taller, with another twelve inches of braided and dreadlocked hair to her name and a new collection of fragments knotted into the pass - for they all remembered her, but she was changed, she was distinctively changed. Her hands were gloved in black tattoos that drifted up to her wrists and then disappeared. Each jointed length of each and every finger had its own theme, a traditional djeli spell, prayer and praise to a particular spirit, part of her own story, her path through the world and beyond, imprinted into her flesh. There were similar marks - incomprehensible to all the Uktena - on both feet, again with peculiar attention paid to each joint of each toe - and (they would learn, later, for the marks are always hidden in homid form by her lower lip) on her bottom gum, black ink seared heavily into the delicate pink flesh and a circle of rough, half-burnished topazes embedded into the skin around her ankle.

No longer a girl, she was now a Garou. And she was not Uktena.

The story she brought back - (from where, she would not say. The story was the thing, not her story.) - was the story of the triumph of Sundjata. The story she lodged in her heart - unspoken, because the time was not ripe to speak it - was the story of his fall from grace and death. Both had been forgotten, the Caern he won and lead and died for - a wash of blood, the arrogance, the stand against the Wyrm, the dreams of world's end, the fight against the deep and seething heart - and his fall. First, she would restore him to memory, then - an hour later, or twelve - she would steal back whatever glory the telling of the first story gained the long-dead Garou known to humans as Sundjata, the lion king of Mali, founder of a (dead) empire, who brought the light of learning to "beknighted" lands. The story is one Bastet would recognize, but only from the other side, for it was - in large part - they and their kin whom Sundjata slew to establish himself, their world he at once coopted, seized, cherished, and attempted to destroy. It was not, however, the only story she learned. She learned stories of Africa, of termites and chan-wallas, of slaves and death in the great black water. She learned stories of storms on the horizon and the endless dream of the desert. She, Garou, somehow learned half a dozen stories - some great, some small - unknown to Garou, and another two dozen almost forgotten by her sleeping cousins.

Sanka - or, Sundjata Saba, as the broken, chained spirit of the old man named her, his second coming, his tale-teller, whose words would someday free him from the prison of his taint, the drydust of dead spirit chained and thralled, sleeping in the heart of the old palace in Tombouctou. - was welcomed by the Silent Strider as a cliath Galliard of that tribe. She remained another week at the Sept that was to have been her own, and then departed in the shadow of the Strider who came to await her, in the manner of her tribe. The pair returned to Tombouctou with a small pack at their pack and put the long-lost spirit of the long-lost Strider to rest, his passing a drought on their tongue.

Sanka spent a year in her mentor's shadow, and then departed to follow her own path, which is much less direct than it was before. There are hidden stories here to be uncovered, in the shadows of the United States, and she has wandered throughout the Americas collecting and retelling them. Every new story, she records carefully in a journal, so that the lore will not be lost. She remembers the past and seeks the future: a griot in the truest sense of the word, sorceror, lore-keeper, with a different spell, a different whispered prayer tattooed onto each and every joint of each of her fingers, with songs that whisper to spirits most American Garou never see - the broken remnants of those spirits who followed the slaves across the water, and who now track the dusty footprints of exiles throughout the whole of the Western world. Not only these things, but others - stories of the lost and the dead, the end of days, a bright, tarnished record to be recorded and remembered as example and caution for what or who ever comes after.

Roleplaying Notes
You are not concerned with the past. You are not concerned with the future. You are concerned with the place where the two seemingly oblivious vectors intersect, which is always now. Your story is imprinted on your flesh, in the old sorcerers' language, the runic representations of the old djelis, which bear perhaps some faint resemblance to the hieroglyphs of the ancestral homeland of your tribe. Of all things, you have come to understand how varied the iterations of meaning are, and do not seek to infuse meaning in your stories. It is there or not: you are meant to be a truthteller, not a soothsayer, and you must snap up the last stories of the last days before they are gone.

That does not mean you are frantic. Time moves on its own, and you move in it but not of it. Hitchhiking from place to place, or walking, too, with an eye for the road and another for the sky, you remember the world and project your memory back onto the earth. Traces of the American girl you were - not so long ago - remain. You still crave McDonald's french fries, now and again, and pinball is a thing of beauty, but your life is wholly altered, not merely because of your heritage, but because of the heritage imprinted on each section of each finger.

So: easy. Take what comes as it comes, gather stories, rest where you may, enjoy the fish that asserts itself, or devour acorns like a snuffling wild pig. One is as good as another, steak the equal of wild cress and little green berries.

Possessions
1. Kora - finely made. Sanka's kora is beautifully made, of sufficient quality to be crafted into a fetish, someday, should a shaman agree to do so.
2. Guitar - Sanka had a guitar, but it was broken during a recent encounter with - well, it is not her story she is telling, is it? The guitar is broken and she could use another one.
3. haversack
4. slabs of tinfoil - used for cooking, gathered in a clean ball, recycled regularly
5. lighter
6. flint and steel in case out of lighter fluid
7. bedroll
8. change of clothes
9. hiking boots slung over shoulder
10. journals
11. knife - for gutting fresh trout
12. trinkets - bits of things
13. rice - dry, small tin
14. couscous - same
15. spices - variety, dried, many

Sibelie - the final product

Come then, at least we may enjoy some pleasure for our punishment.

or, the story of Sibelie Tatïana Emmánuelle Finolæn Erroneouš A'Brèvètŧżo

Perhaps we should begin with a brief history of New Haarlem, the largest and oldest city-state (both a city and a state, mind you, or perhaps, a state feeding a single city in the same way a thousand small streams, a hundred running creeks, a dozen wide, rolling rivers feed one monstrous body of water, draining the whole of a continent.) New Haarlam, of course, sits in the squat, fell shadow of Old Haarlem and was born from its smoking ruin more than a five hundred years ago. The ruins of Old Haarlem are considered uninhabitable, the very air tainted and despite the interval of almost half a millennium, there are places where the ruins still smoke, as if there were some endless supply of fuel hidden beneath the collapsed and blackened pile of poisonous debris.

Of course - as with all such places - there are creatures who inhabit the space, although they can scarcely be called human any longer. Subject to the wild riot of lingering thaumaturgical and infernal energies (most people refer the remnant "waste" energy that lingers after large workings or a series of large workings without shielding as radiation, although the few remaining secret thaumaturges, of course, have more technical terms describing the various types of emanations, which differ depending on the energies and humours employed in the working, their origin and effect), these poor, impoverished, brutalized creatures have little of the human remaining. Covered in tumors, or open sores, third eyes or irridescent plumage, they skulk through the ruins, waiting to jump on and devour passersby, their only apparent source of nutriment, or so say the nannies and nurses who are the keepers of all such tales.

Both cities are situated on the banks of the River Sulka, a wide and ugly, prohibitively brown river that spreads out into an alluvial fan before churning its murky waters forward into the Inland Sea. Old Haarlem - several miles downstream from New Haarlem - is still at least ten miles or more from the Inland Sea. The dead city sits flat and dangerous on both sides of the Sulka for at least a half-mile, the rotting remnants of the old deep port always dangerous. Merchant and pleasure vessels, ferries and so on, know to avoid that stretch of the river at night, and only sail post on full power, steaming in by when the sun is high. Even cloudy days are thought to be - perhaps - too dangerous, too dark, although the demands of commerce, the lure of profit, the thought of profits lost are usually enough to tempt most merchantment past the old capital at high noon on a cloudy day.

Below Old Haarlem, the squat rivers spreads out wide, like a fan or an old whore, with one or two deep channels navigable for seagoing ships and river barges, and thousands of smaller channels sunk in a swampy mire inhabited by all manner of cutthroat. There are several floating cities in the swamp, which serve the merchant fleets, and house the laborers who unload the largest oceangoing steamers onto the heavy riverbarges for further transit up the Sulka to New Haarlem. Most vessels still make the whole journey themselves, but the heaviest of modern ships find the channel from Old to New Haarlem chancy, the trip slow compared to the barges made to float the length of the river.

New Haarlem is perhaps ten miles upstream from Old Haarlem, which was once the navigable limit of the Sulka. After the fall of Old Haarlem (and the attendant fall of the monarchy), the council established the Commerce Directorate as a fully independent arm of the government, with all executive power over the navigable waterways. The Directorate undertook the extraordinary task of taming the alluvial Sulka, and in particular extending the navigable portion from the ruins of the dead city to the first seeds of the new. Some cataracts had to be tamed by a massive series of locks and dams, the largest engineering project ever undertaken in the Known World, while others elevation and channel problems were solved by an ambitious recontouring of the land, the second largest engineering project ever undertaken in the Known World. For almost two hundred years, the struggling young city labored valiently to reopen itself to commerce after the death of the old Empire. In the end, the city was no longer small, no longer young, but and old, wild, sprawling place rife with innovation, a city of science and intrigue rather than magic and mysticism, raising its bright, new challenge to the dead old world. The first merchant vessels to sail into the deepwater port at New Haarlem found a nation improved and enlivened by the massive projects, economically self-sufficient and technically vigorous. The city's economy and population exploded exponentially, and the expansion lasted at least another two hundred years, under the - ah, enlightened self-interest-style "guidance" of the council.

Over time, the council - initially an idealist scheme, the ultimate goal of which was complete self-government after a period of transition following the fall of the old Empire - lost relevance. The Directorate - with its independent power and revenue source, with complete control over trade and communication with the outside world - expanded its area of influence to include all navigable inland waterways, all steampowered vessels, all bridges, vetements and edifaces down to the rudest pair of boards slung across the smallest stream for the most base shepherd's convenience. Any manmade addendum to the transit system fell under the Directorate's purview, and the Agency became the most powerful force shaping the daily lives of New Haarlem and its citizens. Concessions to the aristocracy - in re taxes, benefits, etc. - enacted by the council shortly after its formation (in order, of course, to court the old aristocrats who - with their family seats in the country - had largely escaped destruction at the city's death and who remained physical and economic threats to the council's continued survival) were extended and continued, sometimes strengthened by the Directorate. While ordinary people had to pay to travel the toll roads, aristocrats were given a subsidy in order to assist them in maintaining the traditional equipage necessary to ride the roads in horse-drawn style or, eventually, to assist them in purchasing luxurious private cars to be coupled to the narrow-gauge passenger trains that criss-cross the nation like spiderwebs. Aristocrats were given shares in the "company," which had once been a public agency, and a new advisory body was created within the agency, open only to aristocrats.

Perhaps seventy-five years ago, the council voluntarily disbanded in favor of Carl Ormsdorf, the Director of the Directorate, and - suddenly - the whole of the nation. Ormsdorf - fifty at the time - consolidated power. The Directorate's security forces, which had once guarded against highwaymen and trainrobbers, against the swamp pirates haunting the Sulka's alluvial plain, expanded their purview. New divisions - the Witchfinders to seek out the illegal users of thaumaturgic energies (outlawed since the destruction of Old Haarlem), the HOME force, to investigate crimes that did not occur on the transportation grid, others with darker, more secret names - were created and expanded, until there was an entire Division of the Directorate devoted to watching the other security forces within the Directorate. So many people in New Haarlem were paid informants at the height of Ormsdorf's rule that it was believed that the Directorate's "informer" payroll was actually larger than the nation's population. One person could collect two or three bounties for reporting to three different agencies about what one's neighbors ate for dinner. If the food was too fine, they were accepting foreign bribes, mostlike, and if the food was too poor, they were saving money for the Wretched Arm or the Sixth Black Day, the two most legendary (in every sense of the word) rebel groups, both of which were believed to include crazed old thaums intent to destroying Life as We Know It.

Ormsdorf lived an unnaturally prolonged life until he was assassinated at age 114. He still looked a healthy, vigorous sixty-two when he was assassinated, and although he was rumored to have purchased a double and to have a team of Biotinists and expert Thaumaturges from Francolia on hand to complete the transfer, he never resurfaced. Whether he was assassinated twice (as some have suggested) or whether the complicated transfer - a procedure illegal in New Haarlem, dangerous, incredibly experimental, and prone to 99% failure rates - simply failed was left to conjecture. Perhaps it was merely a rumor, completely untrue.

Following Ormsdorf's death, the country fell into a protracted war of attrition as individuals, families, and companies struggled to gain control of the Directorate. There was a figurehead (Vicker L. Chenowith, scion of one of the lesser families) to be sure, appointed the week after Ormsdorf's death, and he remains nominal head of the Directorate to this day. The principles, of course, have continued the struggle. Every precarious truce, every moment of almost-balanced is countered by a vicious scramble for position. All the state resources are brought to be in this "cold" war, whenever the Families and Lessers and Others and COmpanies can do so.

----

What can one say about Professor Fineous K. Erroneous, Emeritus, Esquire, Doctor of Natural Laws, Maister of Illiberal Thinking and Founder of the League of Prodigious Arts? Or, Fineous K. as he was not-so-affectionately known to his descendents. In truth, I half-suspect that he was not so brilliant as he was made out to be. He didn't need to be brilliant, not after the invention of the kinematiscope. The world has forgotten his every success before and his ever failure after the creation of the famed invention.

There are more rumors and legends about the construction of the first kinematiscope than there are origin stories. After all, Fineous K. - unlike any of the potential gods, unless you are a member of the Thus Smote Aerth sect - walked the streets of New Haarlem and died fewer than 20 years ago. His career parallels the career of Carl Ormsdorf in odd and disheartening ways.

Ormsdorf rose to power less than a year after the kinetiscope was invented, and was able to consolidate power so easily because he was one of the few politicians to realize the power of the kinematiscope. He did not need to give martial speeches from a balcony on the 27th floor of the spire (government's seat in New Haarlem, a spindly high-rise that comes close to scraping the sky and boasts a series of moving staircases to take te administrators to the highests point.) while watching a review of the forces below. Instead, he recorded carefully scripted kinematics of himself picking flowers with dancing children, or standing in a grandfatherly manner before the sun, rescuing an errant young college student from the security service before he could be arrested for a potentially seditious statement, then watching proudly, from afar, as said student went on to renounce his treasonous ways.

Fineous K. helped Ormsdorf, Ormsdorf helped Erroneuous. Indeed, the Directorate continued to flood Erroneous with grants for research despite the fact that very little of said research ever panned out. Erroneous contributed to several other inventions, but often as not the new devices with his name had only a distant connection to the old man himself. In fact, after the kinematiscope took off, he became little more than a ladies' man and dilettante, keeping himself in society base largely that singular invention.

Erroneous never married. Instead, he had a series of affairs, and a series of mistresses, and a series of, well, whores. Basically, the inventor of the kinematiscope - with its obvious erotic possibilities - was bound to get a lot of tail. Whenever some paramour came to him pregnant, he would offer some small portion of the fortune he had earned, but only if the mother would name the child after him. He started with Fineous L. Erroneous, and went from there, alphabetically, through the whole line. Girls were given the name Finola, but Erroneous never thought to give them a distinguishing middle initial, as he had no use for them and could tell but little difference between them.

As he grew older, Erroneous found his prodigious virility failing him, and after spending two years in fruitless search for some biochimical or clockwork mechanism that could aid him in recovering his, ah, fallen manhood, Erroneous returned to more elemental research, attempting to involve some number of his offspring.

Most of the older sons were involved in the development and construction of the nightblanket, an invention that would, it was hoped, revolutionize the kinematiscope industry, which was always subject to great battles for "sign space" on the tall buildings of New Haarlem. The higher the space, the larger the audience for what were now constantly playing sepia-toned ghosts advertising this, that and everything. The nightblanket was to be a weather permeable sheet above the city, on which advertisers and auteurs would rent as much or as little space as they wished, depending on how many people they wished to reach. The vast screen had to allow sun, moon and starlight to pass through when the space was not rented, but still had to reflect the moving pictures back at the hungry city when the space was rented. It was quite a technical achievement when Erroneous finally developed a material with all the necessary properties, despite rumors about thaumaturgical assistance in such construction.

Erroneus and his neglected offspring (at the time, L through S) contracted to perform a clinical trial over a small four-block section of the city, and all was going well until a stray wind caught the heavy, slippery fabric at the wrong angle. The nightblanket rose in the air like a breaching whale, tore the support stakes from their foundations and whipped the engineers wildly into the air before crashing into the streets below. L through S were all killed, although M and Q lingered for days, even weeks afterward, bags of flesh with a thousand broken bones, along with at least 70% of the residents of that portion of the city. Fineous K. - who had been watching the procedure from a tower in order to find the optimal position for the nightblanket - survived, but he was a shell of a man, ever after.

Fineous T. inherited the family mansion, and became the only Erroneous son to make an advantageous match when he met and married the noblewoman, Maurilacious A'Brèvètŧżo. The Brèvètŧżo (the A' is the official title-appendage) family was displeased with the match, for no matter how wealthy the Erroneous family was, the fortune was still going to be splinted off into a dozen dowries for the Finolas and Finneouses, frittered away over the lives of a plethora of illegitimate children. Moreover, the family was not just common but downright COMMON, commoners of the most common of origins.

Maurilacious brazened the situation out for four years, but then left Fineous T. - who was not, was never the man she dreamed him to be, and who she married only because she was half in love with his brother, Fineous Xavier, whom she could not marry because he was not the first of brothers. Maurilacious A'Brèvètŧżo took her firstborn son and left her newborn daughter with her already somehow dottering young husband and returned to her family seat. Although Kaleb - she could not abide the name Fineous - was sent to visit his father and sister on occasion, and Sibelie was shipped off to the family seat once a year, Maurilacious never returned to the Erroneous home.

Sibelie grew up in an empty house. After the disaster, the brothers Erroneous scattered to the four winds and the sisters sank into obscure spinsterhoods, as matrons of country schools, or in similarly retiring circumstances. It was a stain on the communal memory, one that gained a life of its own as the months turned into years, as the years turned into decades. The brothers and sisters came to resent Kaleb and Sibelie, the children who stood in the way of their natural inheritence (should, of course, anything tragic ever befall T.) and while most stewed in the impotent juices in the midde of nowhere, a few found their way to court and back into public life, particularly Xavier and Z.

At 15, Sibelie went away to school - The Young Ladies' Academy and Institute of Engineering and The Finer Arts of Old Upper Cragston, or Old Up(Your)Crag, as it is affectionately and familiarly known to students and alumnae, the finest engineering school for young women in the whole of the land, situated in a particularly bucolic setting, in an elegant old town that still clings to the lush green valleys in the shadows of the BourneFang Mountains. Somewhere in those mountains - at the edge of the borders, overlooking the wide expanse of uninhabitable desert beyond - perches the Brèvètŧżo estate

Sibelie left school a week short of her graduation, when she learned of the sudden death of her father. The professors arranged for her to return and take the rest of her exit exams following the funeral and settlement of the estate, but it was never to be. When Sibelie arrived at the estate - the old twisting mansion with its innumerable half-operable innovations, the talking tea-tray, the clockwork dish washer that always became rusty from the suds and water, the recording engine that would translate spoken word to printed cards, which could then be fed into a hand-cranked press that would translate the punchcards into a lyrical handwritten scrawl meant to mimic your OWN handwriting (set on first purchase), reprogrammable only by an experienced binary engineer - she found the windows covered in black bunting, black crepe rosettes draped from all the casements, and a near army of secret police inside.

Sibelie had expected to see her brother, to be commended to his care by her father's will, to - perhaps - inherit the right to inhabit the dowager house attached to the main house until such time as her wedding, and to be provided with a secure pension that would keep her in raspberry jams and cinnamon should she forgo marriage and instead chose a more ascetic life as a rural engineer or teacher. Instead, she leared that her brother had been deposed and declared persona non grata by the secret police, that she herself was being investigated for treason, and that the whole of her grandfather's fortune was fixed and frozen. And - the police informed her - even were that not so, all monies would likely to be forfeit to taxes, as Fineous T. had claimed the noble exemption based on his marriage to Maurilacious, which was clearly in name only.

Sibelie was stunned and devastated. Under the watchful eye of the secret police (who would permit her to inhabit the dowager house for the period of time necessary for official mourning), Sibelie made what arrangements she could for the funeral of her father, able to promise only what she might reasonably expect to recoup from the sale of her finest dresses, which were her possessions outright as gifts from her father, and Fineous T had a somewhat suitable funeral. What about the aunts and uncles simmering in the countryside? None returned, save Xavier, who would bring her small treats and advise her from afar on the matches she could still make: the pugnosed, brutish third son of an indigo merchant, the seventeenth bastard of the Abrevio of the Faith of the One God, and so on and study her with perhaps more interest than a youngish half-uncle should show in his half-niece. She refused these offers, categorically, and then the final blow was struck: her brother was captured while she was still in mourning for her father, and hanged as a confessed traitor. Sibelie inherited the title, now completely tarnished and thoroughly meaningless, without the support of the family and its allies, who were now struggling to consolidate their position. The case was made in the courts to deny Sibelie the family estates, as she had never inhabited them for a full calendar year, but they could not deny her the title that came with the estates. The sister of an avowed traitor could never marry - no matter the title still appropriate to her name - and so even the disgusting offers that had trickled in ceased, and Sibelie found herself not simply broke, but also broken - at least as far as society was concerned - and used to the point of no return.

She refused to see her uncle anymore and locked herself in the dowager house, and felt the world unraveling. She had not been permitted to bury her brother, his body was displayed from the ramparts of New Haarlem, the horrible drama of his execution played again and again in sepia all over the city, to the bloodthirsty cheers of the residents, who loved a good execution, no matter what Kaleb was fighting for. In truth, although Sibelie envisioned her brother as a freedom fighter - against the tyranny of the secret police, for the good of the land - she never would know what had happened to destroy him, and her family. For months, she did not care, but rather haunted the dowager house eating the stores until the store were gone, and then foraging in the near woods for acorns and watercress which she ate raw, like an animal, barely pausing to peel the hard skin from the bitter nutmeat.

When Xavier came to check on her, she attacked him. The first time, she threw a bowl of nightsoil on his head. The second time, she flung open the door and ran at him with a sharpened poker, which she used to hunt mice for meat. The madness ran in the family, and could have consumed her utterly, but somehow it did not. One night, the madness broke as a fever will break, never to again return. She woke from it as if from a dream, becoming her old self, but remade, tested by fire, forged.

Still, she had noplace to go, no money and no prospects. It would be impossible to find any sort of respectable employment, and Sibelie refused to consider what unrespectable employment might entail. No, she would never consider such things. And so she remained in the dowager house, and continued to hunt, though now she did so with the aid and skill of a keen and highly scientific mind that was the equal of her grandfather's. She also discovered a heretofore hidden talent for small charms, narrow gatherings of energy that were clearly not elictric, chimical or magnitic, but were rather thaumaturgical, hidden from the sight of all but the gifted. She could - when focused, straining - actually see the lines of force and pluck the hidden strings, altering small, tangential portions of the web of fate. Most resisted her, but she came to know some small rituals, devotions, offerings to the invisible parasites that were creatures only of that energy, and so on. Minor tricks, all of which aided her in her daily life, all of which were completely illegal.

A year after her father's death, ten months after the death of her brother, five months after her return from the land of the mad, Sibelie had another clandestine visitor: her brother's best friend, Jacobin. He assured her - in hurried tones, in the most hushed of voices - that both of them were being watched, but that the police had grown tired of her quiet ways and only the most junior (or senior-senile) of officers were now designed to watch her. He refused to tell her why her brother had been arrested, or what the truth of the matter was, but simply assured her that it was not as they said. More might endanger her. He senses the lines of force about her, and said she must have a guide, or she would bring the police down on her head again, and that her title would not protect her from charges of witchcraft. She couldn't live here anymore. He knew where she could go. He would tell her what he could, when he could. She had to come with him. He would set her up - respectable - in New Haarlem. It would be safer for him there. Here, anyone was suspect. She had to start a new life.

For the last four years, Sibelie has lived alone in an expansive pair of rooms three stories above the Ole Pole Kegger, a watering hole of moderate repute, which caters to a variety of low-lifes and ordinary men in the Caspin district of New Haarlem. Caspin is a melting pot of sorts, where immigrants from far away lands meet and mingle with country bumpkins come to town to find their way. Fortune tellers, willworkers, artists, rebels, prostitutes, and printers, laborers, and so on meet alike on the streets, which are safe as any in the city, and safer than some. Jacobin visits occasionally - always without notice, always on the run - and brings her treats so strange she knows never to ask him. She found a meager tutor in the ways of force, but ignores that aspect of her life for the most part. There are, after all, a number of interesting engineering problems she may study even without a lab, and most of her days are busied providing instruction to those children in the surrounding neighborhoods whose parents can scrounge up a few coins to pay her for instruction. Sibelie is ineligible to join the Educators' Union, so the arrangement is essentially illegal, but matters such as this are routinely overlooked so long as one's bribes are paid, and Sibelie is quite conscientious about paying her bribes as much as anything else. Jacobin says that he is still investigating her brother's death, but she half does not believe him anymore, is half in love with him and half hates him. Xavier periodically appears to tut-tut over her reduced circumstances and to attempt to persuade her to return to public life. She could have, again, much of what she lost, says he, if only she would submit herself to his tutelage and return slowly under his guidance. Once a year, on her name day, he sweetens the deal with a gown so fine she cannot bring herself to sell it, no matter how impractical, no matter how much she needs the money, but she always refuses him. She is safe, here, she is not his, but is rather her own. And she has some friends - artists, intellectuals, publishers of underground papers who live much more bohemian lives and laugh at her own straight laces, the stays always tied, and she laughs with them, sometims, but cannot give up her ideas of propriety and propitiation.

Once a year, Sibelie returns to her grandfather's house, which sits squat and empty. Once it seemed to overlook the city, but now it seems dwarfed by the city, crumbling back in on itself. Sibelie spends the night with her ghosts, and returns to her life, unsure entirely whether she truly wishes to seek answers to her questions, answers she knows she will not wish to hear.

From the journal of Sibelie Tatïana Emmánuelle Finolæn Erroneouš A'Brèvètŧżo, written at the Erroneous estate:

It is a strange, strange day. The sky has a peculiar, painterly quality that is rare here, I think. Perhaps it is more common in the plains, where the sky isn't so immediately bounded by roughgreen hills into a narrow little defile of definition. We just have the valley, here, to look at, and they have the whole wide world, like the sea and the only clockworks for miles are the lurching-urchins, as they're called, picking through the fields on their strange, spindly legs, rocking like a ship with the movement of waves.

Allow me this bit of fancy. I have seen the plains, to be sure, but only from the high mountain seat of my mother's family. We are entitled, you know, and none of these new-fangled, invented-to-be-inventing titles, either. I am most properly addressed as The Right Honorable Her Ladyship Sibelie qua Erroneous qua A'Brèvètŧżo, although in truth only the Tax Man has used my full title since I left the Academy. Urquitsal, the coalseller, and Dunlevy, the landlord both call me Right Hon Sib-darlin', but I do think they're both being rather tongue-in-cheek about it. It is possible that now they mean it respectfully or affectionately, I'm sure, as I believe I have earned something close to their respect and perhaps even admiration over the last few months, but I am certain that was not always the case. Even if they rather like me now, I'm certain that it still gives them great pleasure to see a Right Hon brought so "low."

They were always quite aware of titles at the Academy, and Right Hons were necessarily housed in the finest quarters and served first at every meal. Of course, all the quarters at the Academy are fine quarters, and there is never a lack of food, even for the Charity Cases, so the arresting levels of Protocol were quite unnecessary and - given the state of the world - more than a little outdated. Of course, that is what parents expect when they send their daughters to the Academy, and it is the parents who pay the bills.

There were a few whisps of pale clouds, like a gentleman's white whiskers, licking the edge of the sky, and the haze that is so usual was dissipated by the recent series of storms. In the near-distance, the great, squat metropolis sits, brooding sullenly around the Seven Towers like a rather nasty herd of black toads. Even at this distance it seems to move and breathe like a toad - its sides expanding and contracting and what-all - floppily.

There are words on her hands, another's words, the crabbed script reversed and inscrutible. The paper and ink are older than the rusting shell of a structure in which she resides, beached like some fat, dead whale on the banks of the sluggish old river. The lingering scents are chemical, residual, but infected, infested by the river's slow moist rot. The factory - long abandoned - has been stripped of every useful bit of equipment, and most of the useless scraps as well. What remains are only those things too large for the door, too outdated to be worth even the scrap metal, or too cumbersome to lift without a massive industrial crane.

Sometimes she wears glasses, but this is a pose. Her eyes are sharp. Her death sharpened them. The volume in her hands is fragile, so fragile that a human archivist would never dare touch it. The volatile oils on the skin might damage the brittle paper further, which already flakes like dandruff with every stray gust of wind.

The smear of ink, dusted words, grubby

He had no idea what she was doing in his study.

Or rather, he knew all too

Come then, at least we may enjoy some pleasure for our punishment.

or, the story of Sibelie Tatïana Emmánuelle Finolæn Erroneouš A'Brèvètŧżo

Perhaps we should begin with a brief history of New Haarlem, the largest and oldest city-state (both a city and a state, mind you, or perhaps, a state feeding a single city in the same way a thousand small streams, a hundred running creeks, a dozen wide, rolling rivers feed one monstrous body of water, draining the whole of a continent.) New Haarlam, of course, sits in the squat, fell shadow of Old Haarlem and was born from its smoking ruin more than a five hundred years ago. The ruins of Old Haarlem are considered uninhabitable, the very air tainted and despite the interval of almost half a millennium, there are places where the ruins still smoke, as if there were some endless supply of fuel hidden beneath the collapsed and blackened pile of poisonous debris.

Of course - as with all such places - there are creatures who inhabit the space, although they can scarcely be called human any longer. Subject to the wild riot of lingering thaumaturgical and infernal energies (most people refer the remnant "waste" energy that lingers after large workings or a series of large workings without shielding as radiation, although the few remaining secret thaumaturges, of course, have more technical terms describing the various types of emanations, which differ depending on the energies and humours employed in the working, their origin and effect), these poor, impoverished, brutalized creatures have little of the human remaining. Covered in tumors, or open sores, third eyes or irridescent plumage, they skulk through the ruins, waiting to jump on and devour passersby, their only apparent source of nutriment, or so say the nannies and nurses who are the keepers of all such tales.

Both cities are situated on the banks of the River Sulka, a wide and ugly, prohibitively brown river that spreads out into an alluvial fan before churning its murky waters forward into the Inland Sea. Old Haarlem - several miles downstream from New Haarlem - is still at least ten miles or more from the Inland Sea. The dead city sits flat and dangerous on both sides of the Sulka for at least a half-mile, the rotting remnants of the old deep port always dangerous. Merchant and pleasure vessels, ferries and so on, know to avoid that stretch of the river at night, and only sail post on full power, steaming in by when the sun is high. Even cloudy days are thought to be - perhaps - too dangerous, too dark, although the demands of commerce, the lure of profit, the thought of profits lost are usually enough to tempt most merchantment past the old capital at high noon on a cloudy day.

Below Old Haarlem, the squat rivers spreads out wide, like a fan or an old whore, with one or two deep channels navigable for seagoing ships and river barges, and thousands of smaller channels sunk in a swampy mire inhabited by all manner of cutthroat. There are several floating cities in the swamp, which serve the merchant fleets, and house the laborers who unload the largest oceangoing steamers onto the heavy riverbarges for further transit up the Sulka to New Haarlem. Most vessels still make the whole journey themselves, but the heaviest of modern ships find the channel from Old to New Haarlem chancy, the trip slow compared to the barges made to float the length of the river.

New Haarlem is perhaps ten miles upstream from Old Haarlem, which was once the navigable limit of the Sulka. After the fall of Old Haarlem (and the attendant fall of the monarchy), the council established the Commerce Directorate as a fully independent arm of the government, with all executive power over the navigable waterways. The Directorate undertook the extraordinary task of taming the alluvial Sulka, and in particular extending the navigable portion from the ruins of the dead city to the first seeds of the new. Some cataracts had to be tamed by a massive series of locks and dams, the largest engineering project ever undertaken in the Known World, while others elevation and channel problems were solved by an ambitious recontouring of the land, the second largest engineering project ever undertaken in the Known World. For almost two hundred years, the struggling young city labored valiently to reopen itself to commerce after the death of the old Empire. In the end, the city was no longer small, no longer young, but and old, wild, sprawling place rife with innovation, a city of science and intrigue rather than magic and mysticism, raising its bright, new challenge to the dead old world. The first merchant vessels to sail into the deepwater port at New Haarlem found a nation improved and enlivened by the massive projects, economically self-sufficient and technically vigorous. The city's economy and population exploded exponentially, and the expansion lasted at least another two hundred years, under the - ah, enlightened self-interest-style "guidance" of the council.

Over time, the council - initially an idealist scheme, the ultimate goal of which was complete self-government after a period of transition following the fall of the old Empire - lost relevance. The Directorate - with its independent power and revenue source, with complete control over trade and communication with the outside world - expanded its area of influence to include all navigable inland waterways, all steampowered vessels, all bridges, vetements and edifaces down to the rudest pair of boards slung across the smallest stream for the most base shepherd's convenience. Any manmade addendum to the transit system fell under the Directorate's purview, and the Agency became the most powerful force shaping the daily lives of New Haarlem and its citizens. Concessions to the aristocracy - in re taxes, benefits, etc. - enacted by the council shortly after its formation (in order, of course, to court the old aristocrats who - with their family seats in the country - had largely escaped destruction at the city's death and who remained physical and economic threats to the council's continued survival) were extended and continued, sometimes strengthened by the Directorate. While ordinary people had to pay to travel the toll roads, aristocrats were given a subsidy in order to assist them in maintaining the traditional equipage necessary to ride the roads in horse-drawn style or, eventually, to assist them in purchasing luxurious private cars to be coupled to the narrow-gauge passenger trains that criss-cross the nation like spiderwebs. Aristocrats were given shares in the "company," which had once been a public agency, and a new advisory body was created within the agency, open only to aristocrats.

Perhaps seventy-five years ago, the council voluntarily disbanded in favor of Carl Ormsdorf, the Director of the Directorate, and - suddenly - the whole of the nation. Ormsdorf - fifty at the time - consolidated power. The Directorate's security forces, which had once guarded against highwaymen and trainrobbers, against the swamp pirates haunting the Sulka's alluvial plain, expanded their purview. New divisions - the Witchfinders to seek out the illegal users of thaumaturgic energies (outlawed since the destruction of Old Haarlem), the HOME force, to investigate crimes that did not occur on the transportation grid, others with darker, more secret names - were created and expanded, until there was an entire Division of the Directorate devoted to watching the other security forces within the Directorate. So many people in New Haarlem were paid informants at the height of Ormsdorf's rule that it was believed that the Directorate's "informer" payroll was actually larger than the nation's population. One person could collect two or three bounties for reporting to three different agencies about what one's neighbors ate for dinner. If the food was too fine, they were accepting foreign bribes, mostlike, and if the food was too poor, they were saving money for the Wretched Arm or the Sixth Black Day, the two most legendary (in every sense of the word) rebel groups, both of which were believed to include crazed old thaums intent to destroying Life as We Know It.

Ormsdorf lived an unnaturally prolonged life until he was assassinated at age 114. He still looked a healthy, vigorous sixty-two when he was assassinated, and although he was rumored to have purchased a double and to have a team of Biotinists and expert Thaumaturges from Francolia on hand to complete the transfer, he never resurfaced. Whether he was assassinated twice (as some have suggested) or whether the complicated transfer - a procedure illegal in New Haarlem, dangerous, incredibly experimental, and prone to 99% failure rates - simply failed was left to conjecture. Perhaps it was merely a rumor, completely untrue.

Following Ormsdorf's death, the country fell into a protracted war of attrition as individuals, families, and companies struggled to gain control of the Directorate. There was a figurehead (Vicker L. Chenowith, scion of one of the lesser families) to be sure, appointed the week after Ormsdorf's death, and he remains nominal head of the Directorate to this day. The principles, of course, have continued the struggle. Every precarious truce, every moment of almost-balanced is countered by a vicious scramble for position. All the state resources are brought to be in this "cold" war, whenever the Families and Lessers and Others and COmpanies can do so.

----

What can one say about Professor Fineous K. Erroneous, Emeritus, Esquire, Doctor of Natural Laws, Maister of Illiberal Thinking and Founder of the League of Prodigious Arts? Or, Fineous K. as he was not-so-affectionately known to his descendents. In truth, I half-suspect that he was not so brilliant as he was made out to be. He didn't need to be brilliant, not after the invention of the kinematiscope. The world has forgotten his every success before and his ever failure after the creation of the famed invention.

There are more rumors and legends about the construction of the first kinematiscope than there are origin stories. After all, Fineous K. - unlike any of the potential gods, unless you are a member of the Thus Smote Aerth sect - walked the streets of New Haarlem and died fewer than 20 years ago. His career parallels the career of Carl Ormsdorf in odd and disheartening ways.

Ormsdorf rose to power less than a year after the kinetiscope was invented, and was able to consolidate power so easily because he was one of the few politicians to realize the power of the kinematiscope. He did not need to give martial speeches from a balcony on the 27th floor of the spire (government's seat in New Haarlem, a spindly high-rise that comes close to scraping the sky and boasts a series of moving staircases to take te administrators to the highests point.) while watching a review of the forces below. Instead, he recorded carefully scripted kinematics of himself picking flowers with dancing children, or standing in a grandfatherly manner before the sun, rescuing an errant young college student from the security service before he could be arrested for a potentially seditious statement, then watching proudly, from afar, as said student went on to renounce his treasonous ways.

Fineous K. helped Ormsdorf, Ormsdork helped Erroneuous. Indeed, the Directorate continued to flood Erroneous with grants for research despite the fact that very little of said research ever panned out. Erroneous contributed to several other inventions, but often as not the new devices with his name had only a distant connection to the old man himself. In fact, after the kinematiscope took off, he became little more than a ladies' man and dilettante, keeping himself in society base largely that singular invention.

Erroneous never married. Instead, he had a series of affairs, and a series of mistresses, and a series of, well, whores. Basically, the inventor of the kinematiscope - with its obvious erotic possibilities - was bound to get a lot of tail. Whenever some paramour came to him pregnant, he would offer some small portion of the fortune he had earned, but only if the mother would name the child after him. He started with Fineous L. Erroneous, and went from there, alphabetically, through the whole line. Girls were given the name Finola, but Erroneous never thought to give them a distinguishing middle initial, as he had no use for them and could tell but little difference between them.

As he grew older, Erroneous found his prodigious virility failing him, and after spending two years in fruitless search for some biochimical or clockwork mechanism that could aid him in recovering his, ah, fallen manhood, Erroneous returned to more elemental research, attempting to involve some number of his offspring.

Most of the older sons were involved in the development and construction of the nightblanket, an invention that would, it was hoped, revolutionize the kinematiscope industry, which was always subject to great battles for "sign space" on the tall buildings of New Haarlem. The higher the space, the larger the audience for what were now constantly playing sepia-toned ghosts advertising this, that and everything. The nightblanket was to be a weather permeable sheet above the city, on which advertisers and auteurs would rent as much or as little space as they wished, depending on how many people they wished to reach. The vast screen had to allow sun, moon and starlight to pass through when the space was not rented, but still had to reflect the moving pictures back at the hungry city when the space was rented. It was quite a technical achievement when Erroneous finally developed a material with all the necessary properties, despite rumors about thaumaturgical assistance in such construction.

Erroneus and his neglected offspring (at the time, L through S) contracted to perform a clinical trial over a small four-block section of the city, and all was going well until a stray wind caught the heavy, slippery fabric at the wrong angle. The nightblanket rose in the air like a breaching whale, tore the support stakes from their foundations and whipped the engineers wildly into the air before crashing into the streets below. L through S were all killed, although M and Q lingered for days, even weeks afterward, bags of flesh with a thousand broken bones, along with at least 70% of the residents of that portion of the city. Fineous K. - who had been watching the procedure from a tower in order to find the optimal position for the nightblanket



It is a strange, strange day. The sky has a peculiar, painterly quality that is rare here, I think. Perhaps it is more common in the plains, where the sky isn't so immediately bounded by roughgreen hills into a narrow little defile of definition. We just have the valley, here, to look at, and they have the whole wide world, like the sea and the only clockworks for miles are the lurching-urchins, as they're called, picking through the fields on their strange, spindly legs, rocking like a ship with the movement of waves.

Allow me this bit of fancy. I have seen the plains, to be sure, but only from the high mountain seat of my mother's family. We are entitled, you know, and none of these new-fangled, invented-to-be-inventing titles, either. I am most properly addressed as The Right Honorable Her Ladyship Sibelie qua Erroneous qua A'Brèvètŧżo, although in truth only the Tax Man has used my full title since I left the Academy. Urquitsal, the coalseller, and Dunlevy, the landlord both call me Right Hon Sib-darlin', but I do think they're both being rather tongue-in-cheek about it. It is possible that now they mean it respectfully or affectionately, I'm sure, as I believe I have earned something close to their respect and perhaps even admiration over the last few months, but I am certain that was not always the case. Even if they rather like me now, I'm certain that it still gives them great pleasure to see a Right Hon brought so "low."

They were always quite aware of titles at the Academy, and Right Hons were necessarily housed in the finest quarters and served first at every meal. Of course, all the quarters at the Academy are fine quarters, and there is never a lack of food, even for the Charity Cases, so the arresting levels of Protocol were quite unnecessary and - given the state of the world - more than a little outdated. Of course, that is what parents expect when they send their daughters to the Academy, and it is the parents who pay the bills.

There were a few whisps of pale clouds, like a gentleman's white whiskers, licking the edge of the sky, and the haze that is so usual was dissipated by the recent series of storms. In the near-distance, the great, squat metropolis sits, brooding sullenly around the Seven Towers like a rather nasty herd of black toads. Even at this distance it seems to move and breathe like a toad - its sides expanding and contracting and what-all - floppily.



[Character? Character - I don't know what sort of character, what sort of person I want to play. I think I'm going to make her a young Victorian lady, with a certain prissy precision and a taste for too-exotic things. In a "scientific" society, she's a mystic and somewhat burdened by that, but I think in a mystical society, she would necessarily gear toward the precise, practical and scientific.]

My mother, Maurilacious A'Brèvètŧżo

The Young Ladies' Academy and Institute of Engineering and The Finer Arts of Old Upper Crasigdon, or Old Up(Your)Crag, as it is affectionately and familiarly known to students and alumnae, the finest engineering school for young women in the whole of the land.

kineticinescope

Miriam:

Girlfight.

You may imagine it casual entertainment, you may imagine it the way action movies are -- you'd be wrong. The fun little jello fight soon turned critting, punches and tacles, kicks - and [Dayam.. Miriam punches like a girl.] THe gathered group may lose thier taste for it, for the beatings and the sweat, for the sick thud of fist on flesh and that fact that it seems to go on forever [mere. seconds.] and ends in a KICK that may not have forced miriam into a collapse but does, her long limbs slide against the jello yet again. But its not cute or charming, its visceral and raw and when yuo see her spine relax her limbs sink you know that the victor [was there EVER any doubt?] is the tough ass latina who stands.

Miriam remains in the jello, settled on her ass legs splayed even as that long ink stained hair pasts about her clothing annd skin. If she's hurt, if its terrible she doesn't wimper or wince in fact the whole scenaripo had been eeriely silent from her end. And after the sliding stops miriam flicks a bit of jello from her knee at Danah at lifts her chin. Prideful Brit. She doesn't get up or attempt to fight baxck nor does she run or hide...

Just sits there, staring.
[...you dare?]

Marissa

Wed 09:42PM CST
[Always warm hands. And - here goes! The only really important bit is the last paragraph. Me and my 5000 words. I promise will be quicker from now on. And I can keep manhandling if necessary to push the SL and the subject, so, no worries. :) ]

Silence falls over the crowd as the fight continues, and lingers - stunned - as it ends. That wasn't what people came looking for, and the out and out aggression has drawn the crowd back from the edges of the make-shift jello pit so that there is now an empty ring of sand all around the blue bumpers. The girl from before - still passed out, more obstacle than living being - is the only one close to them.

Even Marissa has taken two steps back from the edge of her little dais, although she still stares, hard, at the pair. The crowd shifts uneasily as the silence continues. That was all a bit more real than they were interested in seeing. Mostly, the girls slip about and tear each others' clothes off, flinging a bit of colorful glop into their opponents bras' or thongs, pulling hair, smearing jello into the mouth. The restless finds expression in little electric ripples, murmurs, but is silenced as one of the lieutenants (not a Brittany, but another blonde, this one Kayla) calls for the next round, the first of the bouts for homecoming queen, the first of next year's seniors to enter the ring.

The pair step tentatively into the center, staring warily at Danah and Miriam as if one or the other might EAT them, and wait until the pair have found their way out of the ring before launching into one of the more slapsilly bouts of the evening. It seems Roxanne's appointment with Danah and the ring will have to wait for some other time, or has perhaps been permanently postponed.

Elsewhere, the party continues. There are drugs to be had, hidden bowls of pills in the bathrooms, candy favors from the girls dressed up as mice and ferrets, cocaine if you hook up with Marissa or one of the hard-partying core of the sorority. There are drinks to be had, here there and everywhere, and bottles of expensive alcohol to be swiped from beneath either bar.

Marissa leaves the jello pits in the middle of the series meant to determine homecoming queen, bored with the whole enterprise. She turns her position over to Kayla and Brittany and wanders off for refreshment before returning to the roof. Once the fights are over, of course, the party on the roof starts to dissipate, most people head off to the clubs or downstairs, where the DJ is still spinning and the bar remains open.

Cut scene:

Three fifty-two a.m. The roof is almost deserted, but for a few people who have commandeered the spa for a late-night soak, or the chaises for a late-night moonbath [Y'all place your characters here? I'm going to rely on serendipty and coincidence. Heh.]. The sorority girls and frat boys are downstairs, long gone. Marissa is skinnydipping, her dress folded on the pool deck, a bottle of booze beside it, a pick-me-up hidden beneath. Squeezing the water out of her hair, drying her hands on a convenient towel, she slides her things out from beneath her dress and starts to prepare said pick-me-up, glancing at the people in the spa or on the chaises, lifting the little flat, mirrored tray in offering. "Anyone?"

Tucker Riley

Wed 09:48PM CST
"I'm good." Comes the voice from across the water. Distinctivly slurred, but not with that distinctive euphoric sound of a drug high. No, straight alcohhol tonight, and it's been a lot of it. The Rage ripples from him as he tries to relax across from the naked girl across from him, under the full moon, and just..... itching to explode.

But at the same time he's drunk, and fairly strong willed. The bottle of jack near his head is swiped at blindly twice before a large hand hits home dragging it around and toward lips slugging at it's contents hard.

Rage and purity swirl about him as those steel blue eyes glance to everyone else in the spa.

Roxanne

Wed 10:10PM CST
Tucker’s drunk.. (probably bare-assed too), pvc queen, wet and slippery in her birthday suit, offering up a sugarcoated ecstasy that wasn’t candy to anyone willing, Miriam and Danah, somewhere on hand, and Roxanne’s found a nice little perch, straddling a lawn chair. Lithe sinewy frame angled slightly to rest her arms upon bent knees, buttery-soft leather pants pulled tightly to ride low down her back, molding the material over her ass and thighs. The black matte steel peeking out of its hiding spot, nestled in its holster against her tailbone, attached to the thing string of her thong.

The edges of a fishnet shirt rode up her spine, damp with sweat and clung to every ounce of lean musculature and supple curve of her chest. Intense cobalt-blue eyes flickered over the faces of everyone, silently gauging them as Roxanne felt like an old-timer.

“No thanks.” The smoky, Southern drawl of her voice rolls out to tell everyone she was still there. Her sobriety remained perfectly intact.

Miriam

Wed 10:11PM CST
Moonlight and Chlorine.
[Intoxication or something like it..]

Miriam's out of the pool her Von Dutch shirt lost somewhere in the pile of Jellow stained rags and with the pool water to cleanse the rest of her form she dries off on the edge of the pool eyes half lidded as she stares at the sky. [..something abou t the sky - like fire..] And maybe ucker didn't like what he's seen, sober miriam LONG-long-gone in favor of a less morose sort. [..don't ask, we won't tell] To that her head turns as she looks up to the tray.

"Whats it do?"

Victoria Santorelli

Wed 10:19PM CST
She sits, cross-legged, back against a potted palm tree, spinning a bottle on the ground in front of her. From time-to-time, she seems to sway a bit - eyes with a slightly unfocused look to them. Hard to tell if she's drunk... or stoned... or completely sober, filing away every little detail for evaluation at a later time.

Blink. Blink. Head vaguely tilted towards the pool - anybody home?

Tucker Riley

Wed 10:21PM CST
"Remember how nice a' guy I was when I was doin' coke alla time?"

Face sets hard at miriam. Tucker shifts a bit in the pool, not bare-assed [Thank-you-very-fucking-much.] but wearing a set of boxers. A swig of the jack is kicked back before he address the others. "We doin' this or not?"

Thank god he'd arrived just after Arabella left. Heads'd be rolling. He'll find out though, and then it's a matter of time.

I'm here to sing this anthem
of ourdying day...

"Here, have a drink M."

Marissa

Wed 10:25PM CST
White powder on the besilvered surface, tipped out only after she has dried her hands and face thoroughly with the fluffy towel. Most of her body is hidden by her crossed arms, by the lip of the pool and the strange, multitudinous shadows cast by the underwater lights. It's all suggestion and innuendo, inference and so on. "It's a pick-me-up, you know. It'll wake you up, keep it intense. You've never - ?" a question, normally sharp hazel eyes lost in a sea of bleeding mascara and eyeliner, the whites of her eyes spiderwebbed with red from the chlorine.

The scent's heavy in the air, chlorine and booze somewhere: whatever you want, whatever you got. "Hey, -" she's not looking at Miriam anymore, diligently laying out the lines, careful to maintain some modicum of modesty by remaining awkwardly in the pool without splashing her arms into the water, or splashing water onto the mirror, etc. " - what's this about the job you were talking about? I think Pops is gonna cut me off for the summer. Have to go home or get a fuckin' internship, or I'll be on fucking iron rations."

Which means, of course: food, rent, clothes, and lattes, but no drugs, no booze, and no effing parties.

The blonde, her hair darkened to something almost brown in the shadows, from the water, shoots a glance across the water at Tucker and can't help but shake her ass. Back to Miriam, a fine flicker of her sharp gaze. "He's in, too?"

Roxanne

Wed 10:33PM CST
Hands drop to her thighs, rubbing calloused palms slowly from knees to hip and back again. Fingers itched to tinker with something, occupy her time while she listens to conversation, aloof to the subject at hand, curious as hell to find out what they were up to.

A ragged sigh expelled from her lips, “Its coke, Miriam, make yar heart explode in yar chest, ya ass skinnier than it already is, and one hell of a deadly kiss. Quite an expensive addiction, ya got there, precious,” she replies, tossing a side-glance to Marissa. “What’s goin’ on?”

Danah

Wed 10:38PM CST
Danah is there, somewhere, sitting in a lawn chair that somehow hadn't gotten trampled during the party. Although, there are some curiously new off-white stains on it. Danah is perched on this chair (not touch said stains, thank you very much!), with a bottle of something on the floor near her boot. And she's staring. Staring at Marissa. She'd be undressing her with her eyes, if Marissa wasn't already naked, so instead she just imagines Marissa during sex.

Marissa

Wed 10:51PM CST
Marissa something metallic against the side of the tray, then bends over it, holding her heavy hair back across her shoulder so that it doesn't swing wetly forward. Two lines. Two left, and more in the bag, as she pushes the tray away from the edge of the pool. "It's Brittany's thing."

The rush hits her, and the sorority girl smiles a sudden, fierce smile at Roxanne. Distracted by the first faltering intensity of the rush, the girl covers her face with a palm as if she could hold her expanding brain inside the structure of her skull and inhales again, deeply, wondering if she'll stop before her lungs get too much air in them and burst from the pleasure of taking a breath.

Everything's so much better now.

"Ever seen - fuck - Ocean's Eleven? Or set if off?" The girl glances toward Miriam belatedly, shoulders curling into a shrug, head tilted in inquiry. It was Brittney's thing, after all.

After a moment, Marissa kicks off from the side of the pool, stretching until she dives deep, reaching fingers splayed wide for the bottom looming large before her face. She erupts a spare breath later in a spray of water and swims toward the side with long, sure strokes. She has a bottle, there, somewhere, and she's thirsty again. Grabbing the bottle, she gives Danah a look, frankly meeting the latina's eyes. When she was tapping out her coke, she made some concessions toward modesty. Now: there's nothing like it.

Miriam

Wed 10:54PM CST
Miriam's head leans back. "Now if you had some ritalin..." Kiddie stuff. Whatever. She's staing at athe sky.

"Oh yeah, Tucker, Danah, Dora, Mari-- Meet your associates." Maybe this was all planned out -- anyone else get the feeling the thing is rigged. "....and Roxy, the girl EVERYONE wants but doesn't know it yet. The job is simple, we scope out a bank in detroit and take what we want in the shortest amount of time possible. No osense in being poverty-striken superheroes and all."

Superheroes.
Poverty...

Wha-huh?

"Equal cuts--and if we pull it off we can move to another job. But I'm thinking we should start simple."


Victoria Santorelli

Wed 10:57PM CST
Ever seen Ocean's Eleven? "The House always wins. Play long enough, you never change the stakes, the House takes you. Unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet big. Then you take the House." The girl says it, semi-monotone, as if quoting something. And then she blinks. "You want to rob Andy Garcia?"


Miriam

Wed 11:00PM CST
Miriam shakes her head and laughs.

"Andy Garcia?"

Roxanne

Wed 11:01PM CST
Ocean’s Eleven…
Set It Off…
Roxanne simply stares at Marissa for a moment, before Miriam lays out the details, drawing her attention. Nostrils flare out, snorting softly as her hands pull away from her thighs. She straightens up, quirking an eyebrow.

“I know what water-soaked rage-monkey over there,” points to Tucker, “and the Latina Heat,” indicating Danah, “do, darlin.” She settles her gaze on Miriam, “What do you three bring to th’table?”

Danah

Wed 11:02PM CST
Danah looks down as her bottle is taken away, following the dripping wet fingers to their owner's naked body. The corner of her dark-red lips pulls into a small mischivious smile as she shakes her head in a chiding manner. "Didn't your parents ever tell you its not nice to take somebody's drink without asking?"

She looks up at Miriam as she starts talking bank robberies. People always have the wildest shit to say when they're drunk and high.

Victoria Santorelli

Wed 11:05PM CST
"You know, actor. Cuban. Played Terry Benedict in the movie." She shrugs.

Marissa

Wed 11:05PM CST
Marissa floats forward and plants her arms on the pool deck, forearms flat, elbows scissored, chin resting on her hands, drifting across the delicate bones leading from knuckle to wrist on the back of her hands, feeling them depress in succession like piano keys. The bottle is forgotten, and instead, the girl flickers her tongue to like the salt-sweat from the corner of her mouth, then drops her chin to taste the pool water on the webbed curve of her right hand.

Everyother breath is a faint, audible snort, a hard breath to clear her sinuses. The habit is so engrained that Marissa no longer notices. "Everyone here?" The girl glances over her shoulder, suddenly, at Tucker, a spasm of movement. "That sort of ruins that all-fucking-girls meme, doesn't it Britt?"

Her attention is dragged back to Danah, and she winks and offers other raw smile, without boundaries. "That's assuming an awful lot about my parents. They produced me, didn't they?" ...and then, the coke fiend's gaze switches toward Roxy. "You don't just want what the teller's got, do you? We want the fucking vault. Gimme a decent hacker, some plans and a fucking week - "

Miriam

Wed 11:09PM CST
Direct Challenge: Miriam sits up regarding the kin, and perhaps she even hears her words but its the stuff beneath she doesn't like. [Me, and the garou-- the rest of you just kin..] and if every muscle oin her body wasn't sore acking, bruised or sprained -- she migt do more than that chuckle, a finger lifts to Dora.

"That girl is Dora, as in PAN-Dora, the bitch is so fucking famous on the internet she'll make your street rep look like a whisper." Her head dips forward "Mari's got connections that you can't buy --" Miriam blink. "Or maybe she did."

And as for Miriam?
[..why do they need her?]

"And of course, even one needs a getaway driver." Sure it wasn't glamourous but that was Miriam's pathetic claim to fame -- she could Drive. Really, Really well.

Roxanne

Wed 11:26PM CST
Lips press back into ghost of a smile, tugging on the left side of her face, ravished with wicked claw like scars. Direct challenge or not, there was usually a pecking order somewhere. Somebody always to run the show, and one to question their reasoning.

“Well, then, connections, muscle, hacker and getaway driver, Brittany, sounds like ya pulled quite a collective crew together,” she tosses a quick glance around, pushing herself up from the chair. “Bank vaults ain’t easy and cheerleadin’ outfits and rubber blond Barbie masks only work in the movies.”

Miriam

Wed 11:28PM CST
"That means your in, Roxx?"

And somehow Roxy's addmitance seemed to solidify the collective. With her [...the mechanical muse..] the little collective would be complete.

Time to be jillionaries--or the closest approximation.

Victoria Santorelli

Wed 11:31PM CST
Collective solidified - and then, fractured again...

"That's assuming everyone here is actually in..." Musing look, lips pursed. "I mean, when your entire plan consists of, 'scope out a bank in Detroit and take what we want in the shortest amount of time possible', you're pretty much fucked."

Legs unfold, feet on ground, knees up. "I'm not signing on for 10-20, here. Some semblance of an ability to prep in advance might be helpful..."


Miriam

Wed 11:37PM CST
Exhale.
"Bloody Christ."

And Miriam leans back down against the poolside tiles her gaze shifting to Marissa, "Oh and I suppose your too good to go in with water guns then.." Goddamn it its hard to be serious when your high, or at least that seamed to be the case. Shit, Miriam needed some Ben Gay. Or Icy Hot--or maybe a Chiropractor...

"I figure the layout and floorplans are where you and area come in-- we can scope out the area and time the patrols in shifts."

Marissa

Wed 11:38PM CST
"This is gonna be the best thing ever." Roxanne is cool and professional, checking the credentials, making assessments, but Marissa - despite her bravado and bullshitting skills - is just squee-fucking-girlfan pleased with the idea, even if that doesn't much show on her face. Even high, Marissa barely smiles now, just a fractional movement past a smirk, she flicks a glance from Miriam to Roxanne and back again. "Gotta start somewhere."

Bored, sly. "So, we pick a place. Then we get the intel, then we make a plan based on what we find out about it. Someplace near a bunch of feeder roads, or with plenty of fucking - " Marissa bounces in the water, her hair floating free on the surface at the level of her shoulders. " - alleys and shit, for the getaway. I can get whatever weapons we need, we just need to start."

"And we need you to do that. It's not like you're in for much. A little snooping, maybe some vital third-party assistance, right? You're not holding the gun. If you're as good as Britt says you are, you don't have a fucking thing to lose, and if you can't cover your tracks, that's not our fault. I suppose it all rests there. It's a moment of choice. A fucking fulcrum, or a choose your own adventure. Open the door to vast wealth, or you know, die of boredom."

Victoria Santorelli

Wed 11:46PM CST
"Covering tracks doesn't help if you're caught. How long before you cop a plea-bargain and hand me over on a platter?" Eyebrow raised, finger on lips. "Besides, if the payoff is the key motivation, how exactly do you plan to launder the cash? I mean, you DO know that everything you're going to find in a bank vault has marked serial numbers, right? First time you start dropping bills, they know where you are." She pauses for a second, as if lost in thought. "Might even be better to hit a diamond repository or something... at least with those, all you need is a fence."

Either she's DAMNED focused, even when drunk/stoned, or she's quite sober at the moment. One might almost consider it professional...

Roxanne

Wed 11:48PM CST
Roxanne had money. She had a criminal career that swayed to the city streets of back alley deals, stolen high-priced performance machines, and adrenaline junkie episodes while tangoing with a darker force.

Bank vaults weren’t cake walks…

She steps away from the lawn chair, perching her hands on her hips to tap fingertips over leather, giving itchy-trigger fingers something to do. “It means, Britt, what th’ hell ya need me for? I’m just a lowly mechanic remember?”

Her head swings in the direction of Victoria, “Assumin’ everyone’s in…” she shrugs her shoulders, heading over to the first random party-goer unconscious and sprawled on the deck. She drops to a crouch, searching the drunken frat boy over, padding down pockets until she finds something to pilfer. Small Altoids box to carry favored ‘party candy’, lighter and a squished box of cigarettes, Roxanne takes the cigarettes and the cheap bic lighter. She checks out the box, pulls out a one of the few unbroken cigarettes and sets it between full lips. The lighter flicks up, lung expand, filling up with nicotine as smoke rushes from her nostrils like a smoking dragon.

Cool and professional, Marissa couldn’t hit the nail any harder on the head, “Make it sound like fuckin’ trip to Disneyland, precious.” She says to Marissa, “Say Pandora fetches Intel, scope the bank out. How do you propose to go in there? Take out the security systems and cameras, or just crash through the front lobby with a Winnebago full of tactical missiles.” worked once already… Roxanne saw reasoning in Pandora’s words.
Another drag inhaled from the cigarette, as she stands.

Miriam

Wed 11:57PM CST
Miriam is thoughtful. "Aren't there people that do that, launder money..." She turns To Marissa and then to Tucker snapping her fingers.

"Oh i bet i know someone who can launder it for us no sweat." Miriam Shrugs. "Or at least when your bring illegal arms into a country you should have some kind of laundering operation set up.."

Roxanne

Thu 12:03AM CST
"I can toss a few names into the hat as well, but it isn't money that normally gets laundered."

Marissa

Thu 12:04AM CST
"I've been to Disneyworld. Disney's more fucking dangerous, especially if you're tripping." Marissa's chin grinds down against the fine bones of the back of her hand and she winks at Miriam as the girl nods to her. "The laundering's no problem. We'll lose maybe 10% of the gross. If the bank vault seems too fucking over the top, we'll go for something else - a series of small hits, random, spread out over the midwest, no fucking trace or trail. Either way, it works, but it's ass-cooler if we manage it in one big sweep. Still - "

The girl straightens, a glance at Miriam. "Maybe the small hits would be better, if we're careful about the evidence we leave behind, good with cars." Her smile twitches wider and she whips staring glance toward Roxanne. "Cars. We need 'em. Untraceable, getaway, whichever one we do, and that's why we need you, and you'll get yours for 'em. Some cheap fuckers, that run, and some boosted ones. Teach me and I can do it. I can do fucking anything."

She's right about that. She probably can.

"If we do the vault, we'll take out security and overwhelm 'em with firepower. Peopleswarm, baby, camera's blanked. Powerouttage, maybe, and jamming for the secondary power source for the system. I know they've got redundencies, but we're not welfare fuckwads sitting around with our thumbs up our asses. We can do it, but I'm not going further with this shit without a commitment. Right now, you've got nothing on me but a drugged out James Bond fantasy."

Her mouth: fucking crawls, baby.

"You think they can hack it, Britt? Or is it just gonna be you and me and your girlfriend?" The sorority girl smirks at Danah, Britt's shadow. "Not that I'd object to that."

Danah

Thu 12:07AM CST
Frankly, Danah might have lost interest in most of the subject matter if it wasn't for all the drugs and half (sometimes fully) naked bodies laying around the place. Particularly Marissa. [Don't think you're getting away so easy..].

Slowly she stands up, walking over to Roxanne, and stops near her. And with a quick snatch, plucks the cigarette out of her lips, takes a long, healthy drag, and holds it out for Roxanne to take back at her leisure.

"How about we just put a gun to somebody's head and tell them to open the fucking door?" Simplicity at its finest. ".. All worried about cameras.. wear a mask. Christ almight.. whoever that is.." she stumbles away from Roxanne, and finds purchase on the edge of the pool, where she sits and let's her legs (pants and boots and all) dangle over the edge into the water.

She looks at Marissa, smirks [Come 'ere..].

"You guys ever see that movie with the overnight bandits?"

Miriam

Thu 12:08AM CST
Miriam glances from Danah to Marissa, "My girlfriend?" Maybe Miriam is good for something, besides driving. But she wouldn't say so, a talent for knowing the STRANGEST people - thats how do ou word that on an 8 1/2 by 11 sized resume. Miriam shrugs her arms wrapping around her legs. As Roxy fires back the pale waif gestures, "..then you know the score."

"Essentially it comes own to one thing, your in or your out. The details can be worked out later right now we're in the gathering together stage--get it?"

So honestly: There's the door.
[Ironic taht the two richest of the bunch (Miriam has money? Shh.) are the one most in favor of it.]

Victoria Santorelli

Thu 12:09AM CST
"Gunrunner might have the means. Though you'd probably be better off with drug dealer or mob connections - more part of their line of work." She shrugs again. She's doing that a lot. Unconvinced? Where's a used car salesman when you need one?

"Assuming you can get floorplans, blueprints, and diagrams of security systems, which MIGHT be possible, how do you intend to get the rest of the info you need? After all, no bank is going to log every single detail. Guards on duty, maybe, if you get employment records. But that won't tell you where they are, just how many at any given time."

Pause - thinking about any number of movies, common sense, and possibly even a story or three told by a relative... "As for your getaway, the best driver in the world really won't be any help if the cops are on you. There's a LOT of them, and they've got helicopers. Might be better off finding a way to get in and out without the 5-0 ever knowing you're there. She starts ticking things off on her fingers. Which would mean stopping the alarms from ever going off. And cutting the phone lines. And blocking cel phones so they can't call out. And doing everything you need to do before anyone outside can get suspicious. Even if all THAT works, that's still just to start."

Another pause. "Killing people is out. Or should be. Cops'll look WAY harder for mass-murders than they will simple bank robbers. Thieves that go out of their way to not hurt innocent people might even come across like modern-day Robin Hood's, sticking it to the Man. Better press. Wonder if it might be possible to pump something like Nitrous into the air vents or something. Or, some kind of knockout gas, anyway."

Roxanne

Thu 12:18AM CST
Danah saunters over to steal Roxanne’s cigarette, a healthy drag taken. Left hand comes up to take it back from Danah, crinkling her eyes to focus her gaze on the Latina. “Guns…” her right hand flicks behind her, fingers deftly slips into the back of her pants. Unsnap, pull, release, Glock cocked and loaded before Danah finds purchase at the edge of the pool. The arm stretches out to leisurely aim the gun at nothing.

“It’s easy to put a gun to someone’s head, Danah, it’s another matter all together to go through with th’action itself,” a dark expression shadows her eyes, an odd look that had her labeled as a ‘crazy bitch’ in need of major therapy.

She relaxes her gun hand, letting the arm fall limply at her side. The cigarette plucked from her lips, exhaling a long drag.

Miriam

Thu 12:26AM CST
Miriam closes her eyes after Roxy's pulls the gun.

Gun.
Trigger.
Pull.

[...it could be so easy.]

But then again Miriam had worms right, she wasn't right that was the problem. And finally she stretches back down along the edge of the poll staring at the waves her one dangling foot makes against the water & pool lights. "You know what is is?" Its so quiet now. "It think people get confused. I think people think the world is nice, or that somethings gonna happen for them. Its a choice - you either affect the world, or the world affects you. Permutate the variables on that, wrap your conscious around it.."

Kill or be killed.
"Talk is cheap - And I don't have time to wanker around."

Marissa

Thu 12:28AM CST
"Your girlfriend."

Marissa pushes away from the side of the pool, fingers scraping on the flagstone pavers, then winds back for another swig from the bottle. What the fuck was it, again? More importantly, who the fuck cares? The glass resounds dully as it hits the pavement, and Marissa drifts an arms' length away from the edge, her arms swimming in front of her, her legs churning the water below. The ripples, light and shadow obscure the details but highlight the general sweep of her figure, distorted illumination.

Her eyes twitch from Miriam, linger on Danah, then shift back to Pandora as she details the issues. The young woman takes another pair of deep breaths through her nose, nostrils flaring and shoulders curling with each breath, before kicking off and diving seal-like beneath water again.

She rises from the water perhaps six inches away from Danah, water streaming from her hair and face, blinking her eyes against the chlorine sting, and resumes her previous pose: arms spread on the edge of the pool, elbows scissored, each hand on the opposite elbow, chin resting on left hand - the one closest to Danah.

"That would rock. The knockout gas shit. And I know some people - fucking labrats." In response to Pandora, even if the sorority girl is staring at Danah, her mouth curled into one of those almost shit-eating grins. "But seriously - if you want in, you're in. You've got your head into the details, and that kicks ass, but I'm not going to go any further without a committment. You don't want in, walk away.

"That's it." The stoned girl's gaze swings sharply from Danah to Miriam, who just spilled the whole secret of the girl's control over all and sundry. "That's fucking it. She's right. Make up your mind, and we'll get to work. First, I wanna know what I have to work with."

Victoria Santorelli

Thu 12:36AM CST
Talk is cheap. You don't want in, walk away. I wanna know what I have to work with.

Blink.

"Jumping face first into a pool without looking is affecting the world. Question is, is there anything at the bottom? While I'm sure the leap of faith is all cool and adrenaline-rushy, call me crazy - I like to check for water first."

And then she stands, stretches, and shrugs one last time. "Seeing what you're dealing with in advance is a good thing. Always best to see what sort of tools someone has before deciding to fix something. Best to make sure you're not stuck with a box full of hammers when what you really need is a phillip's head."

Is there meaning there? Perhaps, because she chooses that moment to turn around, start walking away. "Great party, Marissa - it's been real. Miriam, catch you online sometime."

Miriam

Thu 12:38AM CST
"Peace Dora."

Two-Fingered wave.

Danah

Thu 12:43AM CST
Danah offers a different kind of wave. This one only has one finger, and she offers it promptly to Victoria's back as she leaves. "Good.. people complicate the hell out of a very simple job." Eyes touch on Miriam then, looking to see if the British girl was still coming or going, since she was Danah's ride. And frankly, Danah had no compulsion to leave just yet.

Her gaze then shifts to Marissa, across her face and the image of her body distorted by the moving water. "I'm always interested in causing some suit trouble," Danah replies, smirking. "I'm in." At which point she puts her hands behind her, leans back, and continues to blatantly admire Marissa.

Victoria Santorelli

Thu 12:44AM CST
Hand raised, like a reverse wave - she doesn't look back.

She walks off, then down the stairs. And just like that - poof - she's gone.


Miriam

Thu 12:38AM CST
"Peace Dora."

Two-Fingered wave.

Danah

Thu 12:43AM CST
Danah offers a different kind of wave. This one only has one finger, and she offers it promptly to Victoria's back as she leaves. "Good.. people complicate the hell out of a very simple job." Eyes touch on Miriam then, looking to see if the British girl was still coming or going, since she was Danah's ride. And frankly, Danah had no compulsion to leave just yet.

Her gaze then shifts to Marissa, across her face and the image of her body distorted by the moving water. "I'm always interested in causing some suit trouble," Danah replies, smirking. "I'm in." At which point she puts her hands behind her, leans back, and continues to blatantly admire Marissa.

Victoria Santorelli

Thu 12:44AM CST
Hand raised, like a reverse wave - she doesn't look back.

She walks off, then down the stairs. And just like that - poof - she's gone.

Roxanne

Thu 12:51AM CST
Cigarette to mouth, Roxanne slips her hands behind her again; putting the gun away into its hiding spot as if it was never there. She rolls her neck back and forth on her shoulders, releasing tension to pop a few discs along her spine.

Contemplation…

And, Roxanne pivots on her boot heels, heading out as well, “Nice party, girls, loved th’jello wrestlin’,” she tosses back over her shoulder with a look. “Have fun stormin’ th’castle, Danah.”

Marissa

Thu 12:56AM CST
"I'm in." Promptly, her eyes dancing from Miriam to Pandora as she leaves. "Forget the fucking vault. Quantity, not quality, fuckit, I have fuckall to do this summer." Her chin shifts as she watches Roxanne leave, too. "Peace." Danah has a one-fingered wave, Miriam has a two-fingered wave, and Marissa has a three-fingered wave, and she offers that to Roxanne as the scarred woman leaves.

"Y'all can crash here tonight if you want." Miriam, Danah, Tucker. "But first - " the girl's posture changes, she plants her hands flat on the side of the pool and starts lifting herself out, water streaming from her limbs, but scrapes her skin and thinks better of it. Instead, she swims to the wide shallow steps and climbs out, dripping as she walks about for a towel, without any sense of modesty. " - I gotta go release David from his servitude. Rules of the bet. Grab me tomorrow or day after and we'll make plans."