Éva Illésházy

Mon 10:20PM CST
Near dusk, a wretched Monday evening on a narrow road with more names than lanes that snakes through the wide bowl of the central Illinois countryside toward Chicago's fat sprawl. On a good day - a clear day, the sky so crystalline blue it seems as discreet and fragile as a piece of porcelain - the skyscrapers of downtown Chicago would be visible from the crest of a low rise - but it is never a good day, and the city's heart is always obscured by heat haze or smog or clouds like the ominous front now boiling out of the north and east.

US 232 crests a small rise not quite worthy of even the term hill, then sinks through a hard, banked curve around a prominent outcropping of native sandstone flecked with green and yellow quartz, the upper third washed red by the dying sun, and crosses a narrow bridge before settling into a nearly straight, flat run toward Chicago. In five miles, or fifteen, the narrow road will begin accumulating houses and traffic, businesses and strip malls, fast food joints and roadsigns and strange cross-wise feeder routes as it goes, will gather them up like glacial waste until it joins up with the outter most ring of beltways, the wide anonymous freeways circling the city like the ring's of a debutante's splayed petticoats.

Here, however, the night is silent, the narrow road mostly deserted. To the north lays some farmer's field, winter wheat ripening, green gone golden, the wind rippling ribbons of darker color through the weavering stalks. The field is bisected by the narrow creek, which is tamed to the agricultural regularity of a concrete furrow where it pours through the fields and released to an untamed rush beneath the flat concrete bridge, which makes this curve dangerous, a local deadman's curve, decorated night and day by a shrine of ugly plastic flowers molded in the shape of a cross or ring or heart.

To the south lays a naturalized area, a dark, new-growth forest that rides hard against the road and swallows the creek, swallows the eye, runs wild as far south as one can see in this hard country, some insignificant ridge-line in the flat country, buckled and seeded with sandstone outcroppings. A narrow dirt track shadows the path of the creek through the close-hanging trees, no more than two rutted furrows furred with native grass. The wood continues indefinitely toward the city - another mile or two or three, as close as it gets to open country these days, but the farmer's field ends abruptly in a sea of mud 100 yards beyond the creek, and a great, ugly sign proclaims the skeletal development taking shape in the otherwise flat and empty landscape.

"Saddle Downs: Upscale Homes for the Country Lifestyle."

The VW crests the rise, running lights splashed against the trees, swings with the curve of the road (thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk) bobbing peculiarly on its (thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk) suddenly flat tire. Brakelights flare crimson against the incipient gloom as the driver navigates the car onto the narrow gravel shoulder, the passenger's door lost in the gloom of overhanging kudzu and trumpet vine and illinois creeper, branches of overgrown scrub pine scratching at the closed windows, sweeping the roof. It's a close thing, to stop on the unanticipated curve, with a hissing tire, as the road sinks and narrows in anticipation of the bridge. Even with the parking brake set, the car lurches uncertainly forward after the driver releases the brakes before settling into place. Nothing for a moment, and then the harsh, blinkered assertion of hazard lights against the threads of mist condensing and unfurling from the creekbed.

Covenant-of-Rain

Mon 10:51PM CST
To complete the miserable experience, it's raining. This city, like certain cities in the pacific northwest, does not seem to know the meaning of summer; or perhaps it does, but its summer is a grey, leaden thing, oppressive in its humid heat, and prone to temper tantrums of thunderstorms rolling in off the lake.

This is the tail end of a storm. The lightning has passed on, the god of thunder returned to whatever vault he came roaring from. This is the trailing skirt of light rain, almost indistinguishable from the creek-mist and the lake-fog, steady and persistent as a terminal illness.

In the shifting greyness, twilight is a color-leached stain in the west. Yellow like disease, blue-purple like a bruise. A streak of red-gold, the signature of the departing sun. Through this weather the few cars on the road swish past, and the unfortunate owner of the VW would be lucky if they even slowed to make certain no one was hurt before driving on. Except, that is, for the black Tahoe that slices past only to flash its taillights in the blurring mist-rain, and pull to a stop at the side of the road.

For a moment, nothing. Then the passenger's door opens and a man climbs out, bareheaded in the rain, the black overcoat too warm for a summer's day, but not at all too warm for this cold, wet rainy night. At this distance conversation is unintelligible; he turns back, one hand on the door, to say something back. Listens. Speaks again, shaking his head. Then he closes the front passenger's door, opens the rear, and retrieves from it a large battleship-grey bag. Slinging this over his shoulder, he closes this door as well and steps back.

The Tahoe pulls out into traffic and is soon gone from sight. Hefting the bag higher upon his shoulder, the man -- the hitchhiker? -- comes back through the weather, alternating between a smear of dark and a shape of dark on her windshield with every sweep fo the wipers.

Closing, his size becomes apparent: imposing shoulders, dark hair, a frown against the rain that seems as though it might well be permanent. He raps on her window, unsmiling.

Éva Illésházy

Mon 11:08PM CST
The doors lock automatically shortly after the engine is engaged, to prevent children or fools from opening the back seat door, from falling out onto the passing pavement. After stopping - eyes narrowed against the indistinct gloom - the driver turned off the engine and unlocked the door, opening it enough to lean around the frame and frown in the general direction of the front tire. Enough to feel the haphazard spittle of slick, cold rain, enough to decide that she could wait until the storm was finished before attempting to change the tire.

Éva was bent over the center console, fumbling through the glove compartment (which is stuffed with maps and receipts, receipts and maps and guidebooks and the like, the usual clutter) for her owner's manual and the small maglite that has, by virtue of greater weight and gravity, sunk to the bottom of the deep plastic cavity, when first headlights flashed in her rearview mirror (an unconscious tension - a breath held against impact, held, held - nothing, and a half-breathed thank god that counts in these dark days as a full-fledged prayer). Taillights, then, lingering red. She sat up, abruptly, a frown creasing her brow, a nervous glance cast toward her rearview mirror, the nothing, the shadows and the wound in the west where the sun was sinking beneath the horizon. As the passenger - hitchhiker - serial killer (her darker mind is one half step, always, beyond her intellect) climbs out of the truck ahead, she clicks the powerlocks deliberately, then cranes a glance around to confirm that the mechanism had worked, that, at the least, she was locked in the car.

The stranger knocks; the driver - dark hair and dark eyes swimming in the shadows, bathed in the dubious relief of the console lights - flashes a quick, tight little smile, polite enough, and cracks the driver's side window just enough to break the hermetic seal of the cabin, just enough to let in the sound of wind and rushing rain, and voices. She glances to the side, the impressionist smear of the stranger's face, then looks through the windshield at the Tahoe's dwindling taillights. Her chin rises in subtle question, and her gaze flickers back to him. However, at the moment, in the dark, there is nothing more.

Covenant-of-Rain

Mon 11:15PM CST
"Thunder has touched you, and so I am obligated to assist you."

Another rambling madman? Surely not. His eyes are so steady, the color not immediately clear for the rain dripping, now, from his eyebrows, and the general gloom of the settling twilight. Some color paler than one would expect, though, hard and cold as diamonds.

The stranger straighten up (and up and up), following her gaze to watch the departing Tahoe's taillights disappear over the next bend. His stance is unconsciously balanced, his weight perfectly distributed between his feet, his shoulders back. "You'll need your tire changed. I'm not adept, but I can manage. In return, I need to find the caern."

Éva Illésházy

Mon 11:28PM CST
The fingers of her left hand are curved loosely around the apex of the steering wheel while her right hand hovers over the rattling keys as if she were considering escape: one thoroughly damaged wheel, broken axles, all the mysterious undergirding of her car bent out of shape versus the innumerable potential futures cast by madmen and prophets, whoever wanders the highway in the rain. But she stretches and flexes her fingers above the leather-wrapped steering wheel, and her hand falls away from the ignition at his statement. She gives him a closed look that is not quite direct and studies his features closely: not the eyes so much, not the color, but the shape of his jaw, his height, his shadow against the glass.

After a moment: "You're one of them, aren't - " her nostrils flare with a pent breath exhaled. The question is not a question; it is a confirmation, and but for the strange, wry tone that infuses a healthy dose not-quite-irony into her words, it is almost flatly spoken. The facts: the always strange facts and them and their mysterious ways. Her jaw sets briefly, protest against fate, and then release, resignation. The window edges downward a full inch. "I can change the tire, I was just waiting for the storm to pass. But I don't know - " She pauses, her mouth stilling and setting into a vague twist of a frown. " - I don't know what you're looking for, where you - I don't know where you can find what you're looking for."

Covenant-of-Rain

Mon 11:34PM CST
She begins, You're one of them, aren't--
"I am," he finishes. It's flat, but oddly not impolite.

The rain does not seem to bother him. Light but steady, it has thoroughly dampened his hair by now, and trickles down the sides of his face and neck to wet his collar, and settle on the shoulders of his coat. Up close, the coat is worn, thin, limp; it's his shoulders, not the resilience of the fabric, that keeps it squared out.

"Surely you know of others? Children of Thunder." His cheekbones are stark. They catch what little light there is.

Éva Illésházy

Mon 11:53PM CST
"I know - " she can feel odd, inappropriate laughter, now merely incipient, a possibility that opens somewhere in her stomach and tickles the back of her throat, twitches at the corners of her mouth. She flattens her mouth to still the twitching expression before it opens on her mouth and leads her from whatever layers of unbelief she still inhabits to - to - what is that, anyway? Consciousness of the absurdity of the shape of the things. Her fingers tighten on the steering wheel, and her eyes flicker up, toward the rearview mirror. She straightens her spine against the lumbar supports, lifting her head and shoulders the half-inch necessary to catch a watery, shadowed glimpse of her eyes and mouth in the mirror. She is surprised, then, at how sober she looks, how normal.

"I know where I've found them in the past. I can give you that much. The rest of it - " her shoulders curl in a dismissive shrug, then she disappears as she bends to pull the latch nestled between the door and her feet, popping the lock on the trunk. "I'll help you with the tire." The locks pop open (if he is what he says he is, locks would not keep his violence at bay) and the driver's door clicks tentatively open. She waits until he steps away, then swings the door wholly open. The drizzle continues, indefinitely, as the sun disappears and the light bleeds from the sky. Pine boughs slap wetly against the roof of the car, rolling in the wind.

The graveled shoulder rolls beneath her hardsoled, professional pumps. Éva swings a hand out to steady herself on the driver's side door and lifts her head to the sky, to the rain, the instinct to do so some childhood remnant, understated and inexplicable. Step out into the rain: look up at the blotted, bloated dark sky.

Covenant-of-Rain

Tue 12:04AM CST
It doesn't happen quite like that. The locks pop open, true. The door clicks tentatively open -- he allows her that much free will. Then he catches the doorhandle in his hand and pulls it open the rest of the way even as he steps back. His free hand comes to rest atop the edge of the door. Each movement blends into the next seamlessly. He waits for her to step out, and then shuts the door behind her.

Throughout, he is watching her, his gaze at once intense and detached. It's as though he looks at her, looks at her, and looks at her all at the same time. No attempt to decipher. No attempt to unravel. No attempt to delve into the convolutions of her psyche; he takes her at face value, as though face value were something to be examined.

"That would be appreciated," he replies, one answer for all. It's an answer that leaves himself out as subject: this might not be coincidence. He nods at the trunk. "The jack?"

Éva Illésházy

Tue 12:13AM CST
Her gaze flashes from the unrelieved and ugly dark of the stormcast sky to his hand on the door frame, and her eyes linger a moment there. Her mouth stills momentarily, then glides into a strained, awkward expression of a smile as she steps away from the door and turns to swing it closed, finding it already swung. Her brows tick upward, the expression lost in the gloom. With the internal lights off, the dashboard lights too low to illuminate so far, her features lose definition, become little more than gradations of shadow. "It's in the trunk as well - " she offers with a sharp gesture, pivoting on the uncertained footing, feeling a particularly sharp stone dig into the ball of her right foot through the hard, slippery sole. "Here - " she takes a rapid step, reaching to balance herself on the car frame, gathering speed to stay just ahead. " - I have some files in there, my laptop and the projector, best not to get them wet."

Covenant-of-Rain

Tue 12:21AM CST
Silently, Covenant-of-Rain stands aside for her to attend to her tire, her files, her jack.

Darkness is beginning to fall now. On an overcast day, this is a subtle thing. Light continues to filter down from the tops of the clouds, and there are no shadows that stretch to cover all. There is only a slowly gathering gloom, in which the details of his face and form are increasingly hard to decipher. Already the bristles of his facial hair, something between a beard and a five o'clock shadow, are beginning to meld into the stark swarthy shadows of his face. His eyes glitter in the light of oncoming headlights, and his head whips around to follow the car's departure as it whisks past them.

Other than that, Covenant stands with his large hands in his pockets, waiting for the kinwoman to attend to her belongings before walking around behind the car to help her with the tire. His feet crunch gravel noisily. Other than that, he's remarkably quiet, his breathing even and very slow.

Éva Illésházy

Tue 12:53AM CST
The trunk is cluttered: the files, the boxes, the promised computer, the awkward weight of a projector, with its own power source, its own complicated tracery of wires stuffed haphazardly into the protective nylon case. Negotiating the vagaries of the trunk to reach the spare requires spacial knowledge, some awareness of physics, an engineering degree. She has none, and, moreover, her suit jacket, tailored and fitted, is not made for such exertions. It pulls tight across her back and shoulders as she bends and struggles to adjust the files without exposing them to the misting rain that dampens her hair now, her cheeks, the fine and subtle weave of her summerweight suit, frizzing the dampened fibers.

Then there is the tire to be changed, a damp and ugly business, crouched inches above the gravel shoulder, the flashlight held awkwardly above, the beam insufficient, the constant threat of more traffic, with only a moment's warning (the flare of headlights skimming above the short rise before the oncoming car is sliding down the grade and banking on the hard, wet curve) to stand and squeeze against the car, to make the smallest possible target. When they are done, the important tools gathered back into their carrying case, and car skewed awkardly on the shoulder, all four wheels touching ground or gravel, she opens the rear driver's side door in lieu of the trunk. "Put the tire in the back seat, if you don't mind." The curve of her mouth, the polite flash of a smile is lost in the gloom. "Easier that way, than rearranging all that in the trunk." Her jaw sets, to ward off chattering teeth, the rain's chill finally seeping through her clothes to her skin. Or perhaps it is not the rain's chill that infects her; instead: the hard work, the silences, the rain, the odd, pillowed light, the wet dark thicket of growth to the south, the near-silent rustle of wheat to the north, the ugly, empty houses, dead eyes for windows beyond. When the tire is stowed, she reaches quite automatically to close the door, then snatches her hand away at the last minute, leaving the field to him.

Her arms cross in front of her body, her elbows wide, her hands buried in either sleeve as if the sleeves of her suit were handmuffs. "Thanks for your help." keys jingle and clink in her hands as she sorts through them. "I can take you to town, if you need a ride. I can show you where - " recalcitrance, some narrow, bitter band of distaste, the pith beneath the orange ring, " - the others are. Drop you there."

Covenant-of-Rain

Tue 01:01AM CST
He watched, impassive, as she shifted files and struggled with awkward angles and edges. If it took her a long time, he didn't seem to grow any more impatient with the passing moments. Still, there must be some sense of impatience in him, or perhaps at a certain point he just couldn't stand watching her semi-ineffectual struggles anymore. "Here," he spoke up, firmly, "allow me."

With the remarkable efficiency of greater strength, he wedged boxes aside, moved the projector, pulled up the floorboard and exposed the solid-cored spare tire. To be fair, however, her files did get a little more jostled than she would have preferred.

At any rate, then, the tire-changing.

Afterwards, Covenant-of-Rain stands wiping his hands off on a rag he had produced from one pocket or another. "You're welcome," he replies to her thanks; it's not an offhand comment. His courtesies, at least, were imbued with the full weight of his respect. Circling around the front of the car to climb into the passenger's seat of this latest vehicle, he finishes, "I would be grateful, if you would."

Near dusk, a wretched Monday evening on a narrow road with more names than lanes that snakes through the wide bowl of the central Illinois countryside toward Chicago's fat sprawl. On a good day - a clear day, the sky so crystalline blue it seems as discreet and fragile as a piece of porcelain - the skyscrapers of downtown Chicago would be visible from the crest of a low rise, but it is never a good day, and the city's heart is always obscured by heat haze or smog or clouds like the ominous front now boiling out of the north and east.

US 232 crests a small rise not quite worthy of even the term molehill, then sinks through a hard, banked curve around a prominent outcropping of native sandstone flecked with green and yellow quartz, and crosses a narrow flanked bridge before settling into a nearly straight, flat run toward Chicago, accumulating houses and traffic, business and signs as it goes, like glacial waste. To the north lays some farmer's field, winter wheat ripening, green gone golden, the wind rippling ribbons of darker color through the weavering stalks. The field is bisected by the narrow creek, which is tamed to the agricultural regularity of a concrete furrow where it pours through the fields and released to an untamed rush beneath the flat concrete bridge, which makes this curve dangerous, a local deadman's curve.

To the south lays a naturalized area, a dark, new-growth forest that rides hard against the road and swallows the creek, swallows the eye, some insignificant ridge-line in the flat country, buckled and seeded with stone outcroppings. A narrow dirt track shadows the path of the creek through the close-hanging trees, no more than two rutted furrows furred with native grass. The wood continues indefinitely, but the farmer's field ends abruptly in a sea of mud 100 yards beyond the creek, and a great, ugly sign proclaims the skeletal development taking shape in the otherwise flat and empty landscape.

"Saddle Downs: Upscale Homes for the Country Lifestyle."

The VW crests the rise, running lights splashed against the trees, swings with the curve of the road (thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk) bobbing peculiarly on its (thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk) suddenly flat tire. Brakelights flare crimson against the incipient gloom as the driver navigates the car onto the narrow gravel shoulder, the passenger's door lost in the gloom of overhanging kudzo and trumpet vine, branches of overgrown scrub pine scratching at the closed windows. It's a close thing, to stop on the unanticipated curve, with a hissing tire, as the road sinks and narrows in anticipation of the bridge. Even with the parking brake set, the car lurches uncertainly forward once the driver pushes it into park before settling into place. Nothing for a moment, and then the harsh, blinkered assertion of hazard lights against the threads of mist condensing and unfurling from the creekbed.

---

The rear window stained bloody by the dying sun, the city somewhere ahead, lost in the ominous clouds and the thick clotting heathaze, Éva pauses once she climbs out of her car, left hand shading her gaze, eyes narrowing as she studies the storm, the bruising clouds with bruising colors, gray and purple, ochre and smoked mustard, colors that have no expression except in violence: storm clouds, blood broken beneath the skin.

The wind is rising and not just rising but swirling, ominous little dervishes that spiral up from the shoulder of the road, l. It plucks at her skin, at her hair swept severely and professionally up from her neck, from her face; she senses it with a shiver of awareness, a slow crawl of apprehension down her spine. Half the sky is brilliant, lovely, the remnants of the sun's light sharp and bright against the oblivious banks of cumulous clouds. The other half is storm-dark. In the back of her throat, she tastes the storm, cool and metallic, the fractious lightning, wind.

Éva stares at the glutton-black clouds another half-second, gauging them: their weight, their - what? It is futile; she knows nothing about storms, nothing about fronts, nothing about the stillness of the sky, none of the whys or wherefores. She knows only the hoand it all looks quite unreal, digital animation, some manufactured storm.

The road rises over the hump of the worn-down toll and hen sinks through a narrow defile, cut by a creek, Thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk of a suddenly flat tire sounds a l

The windows are stained bright with the setting sun, dead eyes seeded with bright copper pennies, a hedge against otherworldly debt, but the hulks of new/traditional housing are clearly all still empty. The earth around them is thick with mud, fixtures hang half-finished, raw guts of wires spilling from their brass mounting plates, the carefully antiqued pseudo-lanterns still nestled in layers of bubblewrap and sawdust in their new and glossy boxes.

Near dusk, a wretched Monday evening on a narrow road with more names than lanes that snakes through the wide bowl of the central Illinois countryside toward Chicago's fat sprawl. On a good day - a clear day, the sky so crystalline blue it seems as discreet and fragile as a piece of porcelain - the skyscrapers of downtown Chicago would be visible from the crest of a low rise, but it is never a good day, and the city's heart is always obscured by heat haze or smog or clouds like the ominous front now boiling out of the north and east.

Evening, twilight, rush hour, the last of it, anyway, when the westering sun stains car windows bloody blinding red and wearied professionals view the lovely façades of their expensive houses bathed in the light of their headlights, no matter that it is midsummer and the days are stretched to bursting with light. Rush hour: but this road, this road is deserted. To the south of the narrow road, a naturalized area, farmer's fields gone wild, or just old black soil prairie consumed by thick clots of woody growth, a dark and narrow forest To the north lays some farmer's field, winter wheat ripening, green gone golden, the wind rippling ribbons of darker color through the weavering stalks. The field is bisected by a narrow-grooved creek, tamed to the agricultural regularity of a concrete furrow where it pours through the fields, released to an untamed rush beneath a narrow, oft-patched bridge that makes this curve dangerous, a local deadman's curve. The field ends abruptly in a sea of mud 100 yards beyond the creek, and a great, ugly sign proclaims the skeletal development taking shape in the otherwise flat and empty landscape.

"Saddle Downs: Upscale Homes for the Country Lifestyle." The rear window stained bloody by the dying sun, the city somewhere ahead, lost in the ominous clouds and the thick clotting heathaze, Éva pauses once she climbs out of her car, left hand shading her gaze, eyes narrowing as she studies the storm, the bruising clouds with bruising colors, gray and purple, ochre and smoked mustard, colors that have no expression except in violence: storm clouds, blood broken beneath the skin.

The wind is rising and not just rising but swirling, ominous little dervishes that spiral up from the shoulder of the road, l. It plucks at her skin, at her hair swept severely and professionally up from her neck, from her face; she senses it with a shiver of awareness, a slow crawl of apprehension down her spine. Half the sky is brilliant, lovely, the remnants of the sun's light sharp and bright against the oblivious banks of cumulous clouds. The other half is storm-dark. In the back of her throat, she tastes the storm, cool and metallic, the fractious lightning, wind.

Éva stares at the glutton-black clouds another half-second, gauging them: their weight, their - what? It is futile; she knows nothing about storms, nothing about fronts, nothing about the stillness of the sky, none of the whys or wherefores. She knows only the hoand it all looks quite unreal, digital animation, some manufactured storm.

The road rises over the hump of the worn-down toll and hen sinks through a narrow defile, cut by a creek, Thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk of a suddenly flat tire sounds a l

DODGE Neon SXT: 2003 . Automatic, 13,000 miles, $8,900. 744-4225

Character Name: Robert "Billy" McCann [Yeah - go figure how that happened.
Oh, his middle name's William.]
Character Deedname: Hell and Back

Character Level: Cliath (Veteran)
Player: Liz (Incog - I need to figure out how to post him to the DP. I
might ask Damon to steal his Smilin' Bren account for the DP)
Transfer Character?: No

Breed: Homid
Auspice: Galliard, baby
Tribe: Fianna

Pack Name: The Brothers McCann
Pack Totem: ? still being decided


ATTRIBUTES
Strength: 4 [enduring] (Freebies: 5)
Dexterity: 4 [reaction time]
Stamina: 3

Charisma: 3
Manipulation: 3
Appearance: 2

Perception: 2
Intelligence: 2
Wits: 3 (Freebies: 5)

(Total freebies: 10)

ABILITIES
Alertness:
Athletics: 1
Brawl: 4 [wrestling] (Freebies: 2)
Dodge: who needs to dodge?
Empathy: 1
Expression: 3
Intimidation: 2
Primal Urge: 3
Streetwise:
Subterfuge: he never lies. he says it true. he just changes his mind real
often.

Animal Ken:
Crafts: 1
Drive: 2 real men drive stick
Etiquette:
Firearms: 2 real men own shotguns
Leadership: 1
Melee:
Performance: 4 [tenor is specialty. also plays guitar and bass and does a
bit of pickin' (banjo/madolin) as well] (4 freebies)
Stealth:
Survival: 1

Computer:
Enigmas: 2
Investigation:
Law:
Linguistics:
Medicine: 1
Occult:
Politics:
Rituals: 2
Science:

Total Ability Freebies: 6


ADVANTAGES

[Backgrounds]
1. Pure Breed - 1
2. Resources - 1
3. Rites - 3
4. Totem - 4 (Freebies: 4)


[Gifts]
1. Persuasion
2. Call of the Wyld
3. Resist Toxin
4. Master of Fire


[Rites]
1. Cleansing
2. Binding
3. Breath of Gaia
4. Prayer for Prey
5. Moot Rite (1XP)


[Tempers]
Rage: 5
Gnosis: 4
WP: 6 (Freebies: 10)

[Renown]

Glory: 2
Honor: 1
Wisdom: 1

Rank: Cliath

INSPIRATION

Feel Alright
(Steve Earle)

I was born my papa's son
A wanderin' eye and a smokin' gun
Now some of you would live through me
Lock me up and throw away the key
Or just find a place to hide away
Hope that I'll just go away
I feel alright – I feel alright tonight

I'll bring you precious contraband
And ancient tales from distant lands
Of conquerors and concubines and
Conjurers from darker times
Betrayal and conspiracy
Sacrilege and heresy

I got every thing you wont or need
Your darkest fear, your fondest dream
I ask you questions, tell you lies
Criticize and sympathize
Be careful what you wish for friend
Because I've been to hell and now I'm back again

Hard-Core Troubadour
(Steve Earle)

Girl, don't bother to lock your door
He's out there hollering, "Darlin' don't you love me no more?"
You always let him in before now didn't you
He's just singing the some old song
That he always sang before
He's the last of the hard-core troubadours
Girl, better figure out which is which
Wherefore art thou Romeo you son of a bitch
You'd just as soon fight as switch now wouldn't you
He's come to make love on your satin sheets
Wake up on your living room floor
He's the last of the hard-core troubadours

He's the last of the all-night, do right
Stand beneath your window 'til daylight
He's the last of the hard-core troubadours
Baby, what you waitin' for

Girl, figure out what you're gonna do
When he moves on again and he leaves you alone and blue
But you knew he is just passin' through now didn't you
And now you can't just say this is the last time baby
Like you always did before
He's the last of the hard-core troubadours


CHARACTER DESCRIPTION

Tall, broad-shouldered like he’s gonna fill in real good, but whip-lean.
Don’t mistake him, he ain’t skin and bones. He’s -muscle- and skin and
bones, but some folks cain’t see that. Blonde hair, long face, sort of
buggy eyes. Eyes that’ve done been bleached out so thoroughly they ain’t
hardly no color left to ‘em. Pale eyes, starin’ eyes. Sometimes tanned,
sometimes sunburned, almost always farmer’s tan. Freakin’ white underneath,
that Old Country blood a-comin’ through. Come summertime, with all the
extra light, highlights of sunburn across both cheeks, beneath both eyes.
Mostly dour-faced, close-mouthed, watchful, but sometimes he tosses out a
lazy-assed, near-wild grin that makes it all worthwhile.


CHARACTER HISTORY

The second of seven children ma and pa had. Two of 'em didn't make it. The
rest of were Garou. Ma and Pa was always good solid kin. An' they folk,
an' they folk afore 'em. And so on, but didn't no one hardly remember when
the time was for the last Garou in the family, an' suddenly they was all
these born to Ma. Ma McCann just popped 'em out left and right. Took 'em
to the Garou fer inspection and the Garou did they mumbo jumbo on 'em and
figured out, so made sure the boys got educated right. Little bit of human,
little bit of wolf, little bit of everything.

The boys grew up on the farm and were always working. There's always
something to do, you know, on a farm. Leads to natural muscles rather than
them what you get from a goddamned gym, all pumped here with noplace to go.
Couldn't hardly noone believe that Billy was a Galliard 'cept for his voice,
because he was always a quiet child. Watchful, sometimes watchful enough to
give a person the creeps. Sitting there just a'lookin' at you like he ain't
never seen such a thang as whatever you was doin' before. 'Cept for his
voice, which was gorgeous almost from the first time he opened his mouth to
cry.

Everything was just what you'd expect, really. Grow up. First change.
Trainin' and shit. Still got that in his head, along with Billy Yeats and
Billy Shakespeare, the twin stars in his firmament. Billy was the brother
who found Ryan after the massacre, but he ain't never said nothing to no one
about it. Didn't seem like nothing needed to be said.

Billy's had about a half-dozen loves of his life so far, but it doesn't look
like he's gonna have another one. Thing is, he puts a woman on a pedestal
and keeps her there long as he can, makes her into something she maybe
ain't, sees more than the best and none of the worst, falls in love like
there's not gonna be a tomorrow if'n he don't: hard and fast. Falls out of
love just the same. That's the way it went: the laconic boy has a poet's
heart and soul and he'd about done run through the girls back home and in
the surrounding areas. Even though they knew it was him and the way he was,
well, he just talks so well - pays such attention, and not just
present-attention but attention-attention to who and how she is, promises
the moon and delivers it all, keeps his attention and flattery just for his
girl and no one else in the whole world enters into that private universe -
that they fell agin and agin.

All 'til Daisy, an' Daisy was the love of his life. His brothers say Daisy
wasn't nothing. Was just ordinary, some skank with a baby and another one
on the way from a whole nother man, not even pretty or well-bred, near over
the hill, but it didn't matter none to Billy. He done saw the real her all
coiled up inside her, waiting for him to let it out. He paid his court an'
she accepted it. He didn't treat her first boy like a son cos that boy had
a daddy even if that daddy was dead and a deadbeat scumball to boot, but he
promised his name to her second everwhen it come out her belly. Billy
probably woulda forgotten about Daisy long a'fore she done even had the dang
kid, really. Except, instead of waitin' for him to leave her, Daisy done
left him. Just up and left him. Not a word, not even a note. At first,
Billy figured someone'd done kidnapped her and was in a livid hard-assed
rage until her momma came up and told him she had a postcard. Wouldn't show
it to him, just said Daisy was alright and not kidnapped. That she'd just
left.

Now Billy compares ever woman he meets to Daisy. Even if he falls in love
with someone for a little while, in the end they cain't never measure up.
There'll never be another woman like his Daisy. He won't ever (he thinks)
ever really love agin.


RP NOTES

Your real name’s Robert and you used to be Bobby, but your middle name is
William and you made everone start callin' you Billy because you loved the
two twin Billies of the world: Shakespeare and Yeats. You know everything
by heart and plunder ‘em like crazy, but that don’t mean you can’t create
anything yourself. Maybe you’re no Billy Shakespeare or Billy Yeats, but
you tell stores and write songs and the boys seem to like ‘em alright. You
play a guitar sometimes, sing in a rough, whiskey soaked voice, but the
thing your momma’s loved best about you your whole life is your voice. Used
to be it was soprano, high and soaring boyvoice, prettier than a perfect
summer’s day. Now it’s done changed, but still deep, rich and clear, the
sort of tenor voice that it’s near a shame that you’re a Garou and not a
person, cos you could’ve been brilliant with training and technique, the
next Pavarotti, maybe. Maybe not. It don’t do to think on such things.

You don’t have much to say because you’re spending it listening. But when
you do have something to say – at least to anyone not a McCann, don’t hold
with floweriness with your brothers – it’ll mean something. You can find
(and convince yourself) of something gorgeous in almost every women, but
that don’t mean it corresponds to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth. Eventually, their image gets held up against their true self
and then, well, you’re headin’ off, looking for the next heart to break.

Course, that's all 'til you get drunk. You're a different man when it's all
up in you. Takes a helluva lot, but your tongue loosens until you're one
step removed from a burning-sensed madman. You'll fall in love with a woman
you ain't never seen afore and stand outside her window in the snow, singing
her name beneath your breath and writing an epic poem to her beauty in the
snow. Cain't help it. Underneath all that, you're a romantic. You might
love 'em and leave 'em, but by fucking god, you've loved 'em all, every
danged last one.

EQUIPMENT, POSSESSIONS, FETISHES, WEAPONRY
1. pickup truck
2. rented old houseboat
3. shotgun
4. toolchest (Morgan's the one who uses 'em, though)
5. guitar


FREEBIE TALLY

Attributes: 10
Abilities: 6
Backgrounds: 4
Tempers: 10


Total: 30


XP: 0

Éva

Wed 09:10PM CST
The night is painted orange - the clouded sky clotted with reflected light, even the threatening underbellies of stormclouds are brilliantly light, electrified not only by the riot of energy within the storm system, but by the carpet of crawling humanity below. Precinct #34 - which houses Homicide and Serious Crimes Task Force - is a turn of the century brick building with all the usual institutional flourishes. Carved in stone on the heavy casements above the imposing double-doored façade, some quote from Thomas Paine - or Edison - about the nature of justice in the world. Acid rain and exposure have washed the stone carvings down to their most basic elements. The words are little more than impressions now, not one eye in a thousand passing below could prick out the meaning from the quotation. Not one eye in a million even bothers to try.

Light spills from the barred windows - four stories - and from the basement holding cells and record rooms. The parking meters surrounding the precinct are dead soldiers, their squat heads covered with executioners' hoods, black, with sharp red lettering. "NO PARKING" Both the color and the script have faded over time, but orange sawhorses further reinforce the rule. Precinct #34: target 1084 on the terrorists hit list. Activity continues apace. Two policemen stand just outside the front double doors, flicking ash from their smoldering cigarettes. Another pair are doubleparked in front of the sawhorses, dragging some blood-covered suspect up the steep stone stairs. And so on: an ordinary Saturday night has only just begun.

Éva stands with Shame, catty-corner from the precinct. She has pulled the hood from her just-purchased sweatshirt up to cover her hair and shade her face. With her shoulders curved forward and her features concealed by the shadows, she could be anyone. Her car is parked blocks away, some anonymous park and ride garage, barely used at night. It didn't matter how deserted the place was: her hands were shaking. The kinfolk would not make much of a spy. Her energy is too high now, and her heart beats so rapidly it feels like it might burst out of her chest, having gathered speed with every closing block. "So, that's it - " she says, nodding toward the brick building, watching the metis' coarse face with sidelong, wary attention. " - I - well, that's it." She nods again, moving just her head, her hands buried in the pockets of the hoodie.

shame

Wed 09:18PM CST
Shame stands steady. He gazes slowly up and down the street, taking time to let each detail sink into his mind, imprint itself on the backs of his almost luminous retinas. Now that the time to act has come, now that events have reached critical mass, it's almost as if he has no choice, a willing victim in events that will carry him forwards, into the maw of whatever waits, a passive, melancholy spectator.

Taking a deep sniff, he turns to Eva and smiles, pulling the lips back from his fresh ivory canines. Reaching out, he lays a heavy hand on her shoulder, iron rod fingers pushing gently through the material of her hoodie, gripping the muscle of her shoulder. He shakes her, gently, and allows the smile to slip. Still looking her in the eyes, he brings her in close, and, tentatively, encloses her in his arms, holding her slender form against his broad chest, deep in the center of his musk and sweat. Then, releasing her, he steps back, into a doorway, into the dark shadows that occlude the depths of it and the door itself, becoming an outline, a suggestion of a man, and then -

Poof.

Éva

Wed 09:37PM CST
Every muscle in her body seems to have tied itself into a complex series of knots that even an Eagle scout would find messy and daunting. She finds plays out the whole scenario in her mind - again and again and again - but she cannot get beyond this moment - and now that it has come (the garou's blunt hand on her shoulder, a welcome distraction from the lowering ache of straining muscles; the boy - thing - him - hugging her or - or something) and gone (she cannot help but watch, a brief, darting glance as he steps into the shadows of a doorway; she looks away - not to draw attention, not to see that strange, painful, attenuated moment - where do they go?) she finds herself drawing in breath after breath, her diaphragm working painful overtime as her lungs expand to capacity and air bleeds off in short, sharp exhales. There's a string, she doesn't know where it goes - everything doubles back on itself now, and the air feels rich, solid somehow, as if she has been wandering in some vaccuum all night long, and now the seal has been broken.

--
She doesn't know what he sees. She can't - his world, the other side, the reflection of this human world, crawling with webs, sparking with irridescent wires that join each calcified structure on the block. Most of the houses have little presence in the penumbra beyond the agglutinated webbing spun around human lives. The webs give merely the suggestion of the building beyond, without any spiritual substance. On one corner - which in the tellurian is now a brand-spanking new 7-11 - the almost solid impression of a fading church - clapboard rather than brick, with a single spire - which certainly predates the turn of the century rowhouses, or - did, before it was torn down. The police station has an umbral presence as well, a figurehead, a structure. The bricks are stained from the ground to at least the third floor, a rainbow blackness that seems to live, the smallest capillaries slowly claiming the remaining floor and a half. The whole is encased in webbing, though even the webs seem to have grown stained where they touych the blackened bricks. There is not so much a door and windows, here, as there are a series of wounds in the brick, opaque points of darkness rather than the reflective blackrainbow crawl spreading up the façade.

Éva Illésházy

Sat 04:54AM CST
The street is an ordinary street, in an ordinary neighborhood. Five blocks away: Our Lady of Lourdes, the Catholic Church. Three blocks away, The Good Shepherd, the Luthern Church. The rowhouses are uniformly dark except for those lights left burning through the night to fool would-be thieves that someone is home, or that someone is both home and awake (and presumeably, armed to the teeth) and capable of defending the home.

Éva's house is dark at this hour. Even the streetlights are dark, bulbs busted, no money to pay for new ones until the city makes it to the new fiscal year. Even then, there will be a backlog, a list of priorities. The rowhouse was once-grand - all were - but most are now lower-middle class abodes, crumbling and large and dank, the stonework disfigured by the accumulation of soot, worn down by acid rain. Hers has good bones, but it too is run down. Only two of the houses on the block have been redone, but they are glorious specimans of Victorian architecture, with all the details one would expect. The door, however - heavy and white, not wood, but steel - is brand new, so new that the scent of fresh paint still clings to the fingers after knocking.

4:30 a.m. almost 5:00 a.m. There is a knock at the door. Somewhere upstairs, Eva sleeps through the first and the second repeats, but then the sound begins to imprint itself beneath her skull, a throb in her subconscious. She rolls over, mutters darkly to herself, considers going back to sleep, then sits bolt upright, sucking in a breath of clean air as a balm against the beginnings of a dream. She rubs the sleep from her eyes, checks the time, stares into space, then reluctantly unfolds herself from the coccoon of her bedding. Weaving around the sawhorses and other remodeling tools, she pads down the stairs and heads to the front door, checks the peephole quietly, then sucks in a deep, sudden breath.

"Mary mother Joseph." Muttered beneath her breath, as she checks to see that her make-shift pajamas are presentable, then opens the door.

Santiago

Sat 04:57AM CST
Other men would, at least, smile. Sheepishly, maybe. Or slowly, with pleasure. Or even toothily -- predatorily.

Not this one.

Solemn, unsmiling, Santiago Eyes-Like-Flint nods his hello. "Kinwoman," he says. It's a greeting. It's her title. "May I come in?"

Éva Illésházy

Sat 05:02AM CST
She had time to compose herself, but now finds that that stolen few seconds was not sufficient. And so, she stands and stares at him, blinking (she knows) stupidly. The sky has not yet grown light, but the first of the neighborhood's gang of aggressive birds has started up with a raucous call. She winces as it cracks across her senses. "How did you find me?" She stands in his way another moment, staring at his face but never in his eyes, then rises to her tiptoes to look around him, the empty street, the early morning.

The neighbors. That's what decides her.

"Come in." Stepping back from the door, bare feet on polished hardwood, she pulls the door open and holds it open for him.

Santiago

Sat 05:08AM CST
His chin dips a degree or two, no more. She does not look him in the eye, but he looks her in hers. His gaze is straight and straightforward. "I told you," he says, levelly. The man's patience is a thing of legend, and it shows through in everything. "I know your name. I can find you anywhere."

Feel protected. Feel stalked. It all depends on how she sees him.

"Thank you," he says, carefully: his courtesy is always flawless, and always genuine. Nonetheless, it doesn't quite fit him, the same way the simple cotton shirt he wears is odd on him. He turns sideways to slip in the door, and steps aside for her to close and lock it.

"I have read about the case, but the newspapers are a little sparse on details." Straight to business. "Would you fill me in?"

Éva Illésházy

Sat 05:21AM CST
Her brows draw together as he explains himself. Or, rather, does not explain but again asserts his tracking skills. Her nostrils flare, back molars grind briefly together, before she offers a momentary, damnably tired smile. "The next time you say that - " she locks the doors, multiple locks clanking home, then steps back, pinching her nose at the bridge between thumb and forefinger. Wry, " - I might even believe you, at this rate."

The hall is dark and long, but she gestures toward an arched opening into the front parlor, a tired, overflourished sweep of her arm, and then leads him there, fumbling for the light switch beside the archway. The parlor has been completely restored: plaster, moldings, ceiling, floors, but it is the only room that has been so restored, and thus it serves too many functions to count. There is a small television, a slipcovered couch, an easy chair, a pile of newspapers, an empty wineglass on a packing crate that serves as a makeshift coffee table, and a large group of banker's boxes on the far wall, overflowing with documents, but also serving as a makeshift desk, as is clear from the office supplies atop them, and the task chair in front.

"That's the case." She tips a nod toward the banker's boxes as he enters the room, then takes a careful seat on the couch, leaving the comfortable armchair for Santiago, doubting that he will take it. "The Court of Appeals will held a hearing last week, and while we've not had their verdict, I think they'll give Mr. Delasquez (she has called him Jésus for the last year) a new trial. There's enough for that - " she shrugs, her mouth flattens and narrows, a long-standing frustration, something she can feel but never touch, something that lives just out of her reach. " - but most of what I have, well. Speculation, hearsay, statements from dead eyewitnesses with credibility problems. None of it is admissable at trial. Or, very little is admissable at trial. I - I don't know. I hit brick walls everywhere I go."

Santiago

Sat 05:29AM CST
Santiago does not smile back, tiredly or not. One does not suppose he ever looks tired -- one cannot imagine him as anything other than what he is, composed, guarded, with eyes as dark and alert as a hawk's. But the point is, he does not smile back, but instead merely watches her smile.

"You should. It's the truth."
He does not need to say it: he never lies.

Following her down the hallway, he looks about at her new home, different from the Jersey home, yet similar in that she occupies it, and her presence spreads into it. Her belongings. Her art. Her accoutrements.

There are no compliments for her furnishings, her decor. He stands behind the comfortable armchair, hands resting along the back, and listens attentively. Watches. It's unnerving, to be stared at like that. There's no judgment in his eyes, only endless perceptiveness. That may be worse.

"If he is ever in the open, I can break him out." It's all so simple for him. Sometimes -- oftentime -- his understanding of the world is flawed, terribly simple, that of a sunday school child's.

Éva Illésházy

Sat 05:39AM CST
She stares at him a moment. Then: "I don't - " She inhales, sharply, her hands bunch in the slipcover, wrinkle the already wrinkled fabric. She exhales, and shakes her sleep-toussled head. "What would he do, then?" Lifting her right hand, she pushes her fingers through her hair, over the crown of her head, fingercombing out the worst of the tangles. There is a messy halo of frizzed hair radiating up from the back of her head, as if she had her hand on a lightning ball. Patiently, " - he couldn't hold a job, he couldn't ever see his family again, the most he could hope for would be the worst sort of transient existance. The worst would be to be recaptured, retried for escape as well. Then, whether or not he is guilty of the first crime, he is guilty of the second crime. If you want to save his life, you have to go through the process." She looks down, away, over toward the boxes of documents. "Or, someone does."

The kinfolk shifts uncomfortably beneath his unrelenting stare. She had forgotten this, but now she remembers: the weight of judgment. "Does that make sense?"

Santiago

Sat 05:50AM CST
For a moment -- just a moment -- she is given reprieve from his unrelenting gaze. He looks away, over her living room. The sofa. The patterning on it, if there is one; the coloration, if not. And if it was simply white, the shape of the furniture, then. The craftsmanship. The lamp beside the seating. The coffee table. The boxes, the documents. The evidence of her profession, her career, her living.

"I understand what you are trying to tell me." He is looking at her television now, if she has one. "I understand you speak to me from the world you live in. The mindspace you inhabit."

Then the weight of his eyes comes to bear on her. "But you do not understand me. The process is flawed. The system is flawed. I applaud your efforts, kinwoman, but you may never get him free through the machine of what they call justice." His scorn is subtle, but cutting: a flicker of eyes, a twist of mouth, no more. Composed again: "You may only ever get him near enough, that he can break free. Maybe only this once. And I ask you this: would you rather live alone and always running, or caged and waiting to die?"

Éva Illésházy

Sat 06:01AM CST
Some women wear negligees to bed. Perhaps they receive visitors from Valentino in the middle of the night, ready to sweep them off their feet. Éva wears a pair of cotton drawstring shorts and an old t-shirt. SWARTHMORE is written across the top in large letters. The word arches nicely across the shirt. At the bottom, in tiny script, "Naked Coed Ultimate Frisbee Team." On the back, a faded, peeling number - 23 - visible when she turns half to the side.

She is turned half to the side now, her body strung with tension. She hums with it, quite suddenly, quite wholly, like a fence that has been electrified. She thinks about swallowing, imagines the mechanism of swallowing, the way the throat must work, the way the muscles must push against each other, the way the throat looks, rising-blulging-falling. It's a bit like drowning, isn't it? So brief you don't even realize that you can't breathe. Her hand shakes free of the snags and tangles in her dark hair falls to her throat. The movement is unconscious, unnecessary. Her hand flattens at the base of her throat when she becomes aware of it, over the chain she always wears hidden beneath her clothes or her nightclothes, abashed at the near-drama of the gesture.

She isn't sure she can speak for a moment. Her throat feels thick, as if it has been coated with wallpaper paste, as if her tongue has swollen in her mouth, some beached whale. Beneath her splayed hand, she can feel her accelerated heartbeat. It echoes in her ears, and seems as if it should echo without, but does not. It all could be mistaken for anger, this endless pause, the accelerated respiration rate, pulse, the muscle tic above her left eye.

"I've thought about it." Where did her voice come from? She doesn't know, and that's all she says. "At the second trial they will have to transport him out of the prison to the courtroom. We'll make arrangements then, if you leave the choice up to him."

Éva Illésházy

Sat 06:02AM CST
"Now please - " the ring around her throat tightens. Her mouth draws taut to stave off emotion. " - please leave."

Santiago

Sat 06:07AM CST
Soundlessly, it drinks her in: his depthless gaze, his black eyes devoid of visible emotion. He can't possibly be an automaton. He wouldn't believe as he does, if he were. He wouldn't strive as he does. But sometimes one wonders, as deep as he's buried his pity and his shame and his compassion and his mercy, if he even knew where they had gone.

Likely it doesn't matter to him. A sacrifice. Just like his identity, his last name, his very fingerprints. Scorched away. Cleansed.

In the name of the Father.

When she asks him to leave, he is still for another second, two, three. Then Santiago simply nods, straightening. "Thank you." His fingertips leave the back of the armchair. "Good night, kinwoman."



Éva Illésházy

Sat 06:15AM CST
Eva watches Santiago Eyes-Like-Flint leave her living room. When she hears the locks tumbling in place, she rises and trails him to the hallway. She stands there, listening to her heart beat, watching him undo the locks. Soon they are all undone and he leaves. She steps up behind him, closing the door and turning the locks - slowly - one by one by one, until her home is a veritible fortress. Then she turns and climbs the stairs again, which creak a protest to even her weight with almost every step. Upstairs, she returns to bed. She would like to cry, but she cannot, and she cannot fall back asleep. She will spend the next hour staring at the ceiling, pricking out the intricate patterns in the plaster cracks in her ceiling, the slow seeping stain of waterdamage in the leftmost northerly corner.

She would like to cry, but she cannot, and neither can she sleep. Dry-eyed, she crawls beneath her comforter and stares at the ceiling, waiting for her day to begin.

ohohoh.

Some add'l details: the (innocent) guy on death row's name is Jesus Delasquez, not Martinez. He was convicted of murdering a (white) family of four, the Friedricksens. One of her clients, a hooker, identified Detective First Class Gary Davis as a crooked cop, made the allegations, but she was in withdrawal and raving, not a good witness. Someone else who made similar allegations to her - quietly, though she ignored them, because particularly poor defendants always have conspiracy theories about the police - killed himself in a holding cell before arraignment. There was a witness to the suicide - and after hearing Maria's allegations, she tried to find him, but could not locate him.


As for what she can be charged with - heh. She can be charged with murder. She was the defense attorney for one Robert Brunetti, a former police lieutenant tried three times but never convicted of murder and extortion. He refused to give anyone up. After the third (or fourth) hung-jury mistrial, he was murdered in his home. She was present, but said that she was in the bathroom when she heard a gun.

The bullets were hollow points, with no apparent markings.

shame

Tue 08:30PM CST
He feels it within him, the burgeoning sense of impatience, the sense of being trapped, of the four walls, beige and feckless, pressing in on him like the concrete sides of a nightmare. He's beginning to feel it, the deeper breaths, the heavier pounding of blood blood in his body. It's ok, the walls aren't closing in, aren't bulging erratically, aren't about to tear and sunder under the claws of demons and beasts. Nothing going on, just a room, just a human burrow, just a strange, disgusting cell.

Focusing his mind, bringing his erratic and flustered thoughts to a point, he turns his attention back to Eva, trying to maintian, to continue to follow this long and convoluted train of explanations and gestures. His jaw tightens and relaxes, and he unfists his hands. He lets out a deep breath, and nods, go, keep going. I shall listen, though my thoughts turn to hunt and food, though I yearn for the arctic wastes, though in truth I would settle for the open avenues and parking lots in which I am still beneath Gaia's great sky.


Éva Illésházy

Tue 09:12PM CST
She doesn't feel such things. She cannot begin to imagine them. She is locked within her human shell so thoroughly that it does not occur to her that she might be as alien to them as they are to her. Features bathed in the cool blue glow of her laptop, body curved forward, shoulders tense with everything, everything. Everything. There is a certain well of panic that yawns within her, this dark and featureless space that is normally enough to contain her fears, the strange future, yawing like a ship unmoored, the paths that close before they open, and others, always others, everything she would prefer not to consider on a daily basis, all the strange half-formed, malformed disasters that erupt out of nowhere. Her surface mind is calm as she searches the information she needs - about precincts and cruisers, the departmental structure of the Chicago police department - but there is a tripping, caffeinated voice that spins through a constant, controlled loop of ever-more dire what-ifs, what-nows, and what-thens in the back of her mind. Her hands shake subtly over the keyboard, barely noticeable. Fear or tension, adrenaline, anger, rage: something of each, none of it whole, all of it startlingly containable. There is so much she can live with.

Her eyes twitch rapidly and she chews on the inside of her cheek as she tries to retain and assimilate too much information in too short a time. Research is much easier when the deadline is next week instead of now or yesterday. With a frustrated sigh, she pushes the laptop away, but not before looking up one last number. The kinfolk shifts on the bed, scooching toward the edge and leaning to grab the telephone handset with her right hand. She squints at the directions - such small print - on the heavy plastic phone, then turns and digs through her leather bag until she finds her glasses. After slipping the heavy plastic frames out of their case and sliding them onto her face, she wriggles to the edge of the bed and studies the instructions again. Handset pressed between her chin and shoulder, dark hair spilling in long wet snakes down her arm, leaning into the telephone, toward the wall, she dials, waits, sighs, smiles, flares her nostrils with an irritated exhale of breath, and picks - constantly - at the cheap quilting on the - what is it, anyway, plastic? - bedspread. At last, she sits up straighter and her hand stills against the fabric. Some murmured conversation follows. Yes, I think I saw her. -- No, I want to come in. -- Tell me exactly - et cetera, until she flashes a triumphant little smile and depresses the twin plastic buttons before slamming the handset into its heavy cradle.

"Hey - " how far has he retreated into himself, oppressed by the weight of all the ugly walls, the endless expanding warren, like some ever-repeating equation, some calculation with no end? She touches his outter thigh - just above the knee - with her bare toe. Her eyes are on his face, her mouth folds into a rueful expression for the lack of name. " - I'm ready." She lifts the pad of yellow paper, which whispers in her grasp, the individual sheets rustling and curling downward as they are pulled by gravity. The top three are covered with blocky maps - representations of buildings - and when she has his attention, she pulls the sheets away from the binding. They come away with a strange sound, oddly wet, almost like the sound human tissue makes when opened, but different, flatter, dryer, without resonance.

She tosses the notepad away - onto the other bed - and places the three sheets directly in front of him, then settles, legs crossed, indian style, in front of the sheets. Maps - clearly - and three of them, the walls outlined in thin black lines, a path marked through the structure in thick red ink. "I don't know how else to do this - I don't really think you'll - well, it doesn't matter. If you - " Her voice catches, throat closing, pulse quickening, and she flashes a stiff, laden little smile before continuing in a different, defiantly clear voice. "Okay. First, poof! Then, start here." She points to the entrance, and walks her fingers along the line through the bottom floor, holding the two higher floors up above with her left hand. The path circles through the first floor, and then her fingers are walking upward through the air until they gain the second floor, the map of which she promptly drops to the comforter. She repeats the process with the map of the third floor. On both the second and the third floor, she has drawn crude traces of the tapes from her dictaphone and surrounded them with a sunburst of many-lengthed lines. She repeats the "path" a second time, but this time - when she puts down the map of each floor - she puts the actual tapes atop the poor drawings, and her walking fingers snatch them away as she reaches them.

"That - " finally, finishing. She shrugs, desultorily, a little defeated, a little deflated by the crudeness of her efforts, but holds out the maps to shame, for him.

shame

Tue 09:33PM CST
Here we go, here we go, leaning forwards he sniffs, his nose actually twitching, his eyes rivetted on her, on the papers, on the slump of her shoulders, trying to catch that elusive scent, that enchanting smell, that strange mixture that is soap and sweat and secretions and phermones and makes her real, makes her Eva. Sniffs, focuses, looks, visualizes. His mind, so used to lupine thought patterns, stretches, distends, forces itself to awaken new neural paths it has rarely been asked to use.

In his mind, he moves, he enters a world conjured by black and red lines. He enters a two dimenosional world, himself a black dot, a black dot of expanding and shrinking power, of burning intensity. Walls of black and paths of red, paths of blood, ruby blood, leading him trackstyle towards his prey, little black plastic beasts that he shall bring home to feast on. He fights his mind, wrestles it, so that instead of thinking in terms of scent and the feel of wind, instead of thinking in terms of splashes of color and the echoing eternities of sound, he sees instead the walls, the geometric patterns, the ins and outs and through and throughs. Think, think, abstract, make it real, put yourself in a place not here, put yourself in a place where there is but one way to go and that way is up up up.

He nods, eyes half closed and brimming over with potential. Liquid eyes, watery eyes of the softest blue, enclosed in the thick folds of raw skin, so that the eyelashes are but bursts of fine, monofilament hairs. Craggy face, feral and pensive, lazy almost in its slack jawed intensity that is all eyes in a mask of crusty flesh. He lolls his tongue out, an obscene crimson worm that laps at his chapped lips, and then snaps his teeth closed and rises. The mattress sinks dangerously beneath his shifting weight, and raising his palms, he presses them against the scored ceiling.

Palms pressed hard, fingers splayed, head thrown back, muscles that slither across his shoulders, that wrap around his sides and house his twisted spine protesting at this stretching, the pain that is always a smoldering white heat growing into a resentful burn, and then he expands his chest, pushes himself, pushes that pain, his eternal companion, his reminder that he is not whole, that he is not pure, that he is nothing but a blight on the face of Gaia, a memory of weakness, a portent of doom, and he growls. It's a complex sound, mangled by his human throat, but still his larynx manages to convey a few of the layers. It's a growl of defiance and acceptance, a growl of anticipation and mourning, a sound of resentful fury and delighted release. In its cadences and rough textures it fortells the death of men, the rending of Weaver webs and the possible fall of his own soul.

He closes his mouth and looks down at Eva, looks down at her human face, at the smooth declevities of her cheeks, at her eyes, the smooth, lustrous fur that glistens around her shoulders, the swell of her flanks and breasts. Ah, if he were a true warrior, a creature of Gaia that could rise to the clouds, that could eat the sun and force the shadows to flee from his own. If he were a monster that could one day be heralded by the scions of the Tribes, whose passage would be marked and admired, who could be seen and emulated. A creature full and proud, a monster of august proportions. No, not he, and a sadness enters his eyes, an old wisdom, a fatal acceptance, a source of true strength and ultimate defeat. Crouching down with almost unnatural grace, he reaches out his thick hand, the foul fingers ghosting across her cheek, so that she feels the rivets of torn callouses, the wide, savage surfaces move down her jaw line and cup her chin, lifting her face so that her eyes look up into his own. She asks him to enter a dangerous place, to find black Weaver tokens and bring them back to her. And he will do it, do it without thought, without hesitation, and all for her. He inhales her, he tastes her across the rough surfaces of his soul, and smiles.

Éva Illésházy

Tue 10:09PM CST
She is caught somewhere in the middle of rising, her right hand behind her on the bed, her left hand on her left thigh, her bare feet splayed in the carpet, toes tucked into the sticky, scratchy pile. Her mouth falls half-open as she rises, and she sinks back to the bed, edging an inch or two toward the headboard, away from him, as he stretches to the ceiling, as she stares at him stretching, the familiar intelligence of his eyes lost amidst the heavy, mottled flesh.
She wets her lips, breathes out a faint, pent-breathed sigh, feels the imprints of tenterhooks crawling beneath her skin, pinpricks of awareness. She is inside and outside herself at once, watching herself watching him. Some inner narrator - an often present voice, the courtroom coach - awakens and falls quickly silent. She can't contain this experience in words. Even the first few, the necessary beginnings, the common pieces (now, and, then) don't seem to fit and leave her frustrated, blacked out.

He makes some noise, and it is not a human noise, but it comes out softened and gutteral in his human throat. German gone wrong - she might quip, under her breath, to a similarly situated colleague when an unfortunate older partner hacks his way through the mission statement at some section meeting - but no, this is not the same, and as he - he - she stills and feels the sound crawling along her skin, the smallest hairs on her arms prick and rise in visceral response, a shiver blooms at the base of her spine and crawls up her vertebrae like a swift-growing weed. "Well - " she offers, into the strange silence that follows, that is haunted by the echoes of that sound. The schoolmarmish utterance is flat and ugly, unsuitable, some left brain attempt at order, some hall-monitor of the spirit, and she wants to snatch it back the moment she says it. Her body tenses as he touches her cheek - the already visible tension in her shoulders ratchets more tightly, her fingers flatten against her thigh and dig into her flesh until she can feel the faint flying spark of pain, five pinpoints, five real pinpoints, and she realizes that she is holding her breath, exhales the breath and opens her eyes to meet his and to - something, what? - nameless and senseless. Some unspoken epiphany she cannot quite understand. She flashes him another smile - a tight one - strange and tremulous, and salt water leaks from the corners of her eyes, not droplets, but a smear of moisture instead, flattened and spread by the fan of her lashes against the delicate flesh beneath her eyes. Then her mouth, too, flattens, the smile swallowed into the structure of her face. She lifts her left hand, cups her hand - her soft fingers, her soft palms - beneath his, beneath her chin, and offers another fleeting smile as she rises sharply, abruptly to her feet and takes in a quick, huge breath, like a diver rising from the depths. "C'mon. Let's go."