CoR Second Shift

Status
Not open for further replies.
illirica

illirica

Well-Known Member
Location
The Railyard
Things weren't normal. Rhetta wasn't sure when they would be, but she'd started to get little glimpses of... something. It wasn't exactly the way things had been, but there were a few similarities, maybe enough to turn into something more. There were a lot of things she was missing, a lot of things that didn't quite sit right, but there were at least some possibilities. Ragenard had given her a fucking to do list, though he hadn't exactly phrased it that way.

It had helped. The arrogant bastard probably knew it, too.

Fucked up she could handle. Fucked up and directionless was harder.

The Railyard wasn't the Den, but the Den was a smoking pile of rubble, and it was easier to move in than to rebuild. They'd gotten a start on it, cleared some spaces out. People were making little changes. Someone had found a coffee pot and a microwave and put them in one of the rooms, so Rhetta supposed that was as good a starting point as anything. She'd always liked the idea of coffee, because they were fucking werewolves and if you started making coffee, someone smelled it. Coffee was good like that. There'd been a time when she could target a specific person by how she made it, using tiny little changes in the water and beans. It was almost a fucking art.

Too bad it tasted like shit. How that worked, she had no idea. At least she didn't mind the smell of it, but she'd never been a fan of the taste. With enough cream and sugar, she could sort of get it down, but she'd never seen why you wouldn't just drink the cream and sugar instead.

She'd heated up some water in the microwave and made a cup of tea instead, or something like one. It was entirely possible that the leaves were from before she'd gone into prison, because there wasn't much to them. It was a cup of vaguely mint-green flavored water, anyway, which the teabag assured her was full of healthy antioxidants and would probably improve her health and well-being and possibly her celestial alignment, whatever the fuck that was.

She carried it with her, fingertips loosely across the rim, the tag of the teabag dangling between one of them, a good easy grip to underhand it into someone's face if she needed to. Theoretically, she didn't need to be that alert, in the Railyard. It'd never stopped her back at the Den, though, and she'd felt more at ease there than here. She'd assessed the situation, though, and gone to find Desmond, because he was around and she was bored and he was probably part of her fucking to-do list, in at least some tangential manner. Ragenard had asked her to do something about the prospects, anyway, and there were only a few people who were going to know anything about them anyway, and he was one of them.

Finding him wasn't hard. She shadowed the doorway without blocking it, from the side so he could get past her if he needed to, leaving him the escape route, just in case. It was always the details.

"Hey." Not that he wouldn't have known she was coming, from the hallway, but it was polite anyway, and Rhetta had her fucking model citizen certificate to keep up or something.

"You did all right today."
 
Desmond was deep in concentration when Rhetta spoke up.

"Hm?" He asked absent mindedly.

It was a reflexive reply, and it took him a moment to realize that Rhetta had spoken to him. He was prone to that when something else had his attention captured.

"Oh, earlier. I guess Ragenard didn't bust me noggin' too badly," he replied with a grin. "You handled the situation well yourself. What was that you called 'im? Cupcake?"

He waved her over.

"I could use your eyes, if you 'ave a minute."

Various papers had been scattered atop the table. The one he was puzzling over was a loose blueprint of the Den and surrounding buildings.

"Broch - if he is who he says he is - came out 'ere. An' those things he was fightin' scattered. He hasn't regained consciousness yet to ask 'im what we might be dealin' with. You where the closest of us, before they fled. Did ye' get a count on them?" Desmond asked. "Draaven is out patrolling for any sign of 'em still in the area now that the rain 'as let up. It would 'elp to know 'ow many there are, and which directions they where last seen."
 
Slow. Was that because his alertness wasn't where it needed to be, or because he'd decided she wasn't a threat to him? If so, was that a wise decision or a poor one?

Apparently they were talking about the Cupcake thing. Rhetta offered a vague smirk of amusement. "Well, you know, 'Fuckpuppy' was taken." She contemplated a moment, her body turned sideways in the door so that she could watch both the room he was in and the hallway outside. "I wasn't going to throw anything that might be really insulting at him, given what he'd come out of and where he was. He wasn't feeling safe enough for that."

The subtext being that apparently she'd thought Desmond was feeling safe enough before to deal with Fuckpuppy, or maybe the subtext was something else entirely. Rhetta rarely had just one reason for the things she did.

His handwave encouraged her to push off the doorframe, giving one last scan to the hallway beyond before approaching the desk, littered with papers, some of them incomprehensible. The blueprint she knew instantly, at a glance - how could she not? For a moment, her fingertips lingered above it, and then she closed her hand carefully and lowered it to her side.

No.

Desmond was focused on the area around what had been the Den, not what had been the building itself. The place where the sky had scarred over and the earth had split. He asked about the creatures - she remembered the oppressing scent of death, the echoes of blood spilled.

"I can't claim a proper count. There was too much-" Everything. Too much magic, too much death-scent, too much blood, too much badger. "Mm. They smell dead. Long dead, not just dead. Their blood's rotting. At least a half-dozen. I'd know if I got close." They smelled like nothing else. She would know. "Broch might be able to track them. Do you think he's Ragenard's Broch, then? Not some relative?" For all she knew, werebadgers named every third son 'Broch' for reasons only knowable to werebadgers.

"I doubt we'll be able to know too much before we get a chance to talk to him. Don't know how that'll go. Wouldn't surprise me if he's skittish."

Maybe that was strange to say about someone built like a tank, but... no, it wouldn't surprise him. He'd been alone in there, from what she could tell - fighting whatever all of those things had been on his own, without a Pack to back him up.

"I'm going to keep an eye on him. If he panics, I can probably take it."
 
Desmond nodded, trusting Rhetta's assessment of her skills. You didn't survive as long as she had without a good sense of risk assessment. Or luck.

"That's a good idea," he replied. "Maybe we can get ye out with Draaven later, to see if ye can pick up a scent. But fer now..."

He frowned. "Broch died. I seen him die with me own eyes," Desmond explained.

There was a troubled look behind his expression, the same one that had caused his momentary confusion and hesitation out at the Den.

"We'll know better once he wakes," he added. "Just be careful, an' don't underestimate 'im. He's more akin to the Ulfhednar and Berserkir of G'ael than he is to us."

"Where you needin' me fer somthin?""
 
"Sure," Rhetta allowed, "And I saw the sky turn red and the earth split open and a bunch of shambling corpses pop out behind a raging werebadger, and this morning I saw Rage's eyes turn blue like he was hopped up on magical meth and he went between being so slow he was hardly moving to being quick as a long-distance hauler in a whorehouse, so I think it's a given that there's way more going on right now than just the visuals and I'm not ruling anything out, because that's the shit that comes back and bites you in the ass."

Said ass perched on the corner of his desk, though she kept one foot planted and the other ready to kick off of the desk leg if need be, angled open towards the door rather than Desmond. He was Pack, after all.

She'd nodded at the extra information. Maybe she didn't know what Broch was like, but she'd already pegged him as dangerous. That was a big part of why she thought he was interesting enough to be worth putting some vested time into, even despite all the mystical bullshit, which she usually preferred to avoid.

The last question only brought on an impudent half-shrug. "You were barely here before - and you were a fuckin' idiot then - and you got made Second while I was out, so I'm assessing your capabilities to see what gaps I need to fill on or how much I'm gonna have to kick your ass to get it into shape."

He'd probably already figured out that was what she was doing; the question was whether he'd expected her to say it.

"That and Ragenard wants me to prod the prospects into some semblance of competence, and I wanted to get your take on them and how much of my brand of bullshit they can put up with."
 
Last edited:
"ey now, you wound me," Desmond said with a quirk of a grin. "I work really 'ard at bein' a lovable eejit," he added with a wink.

His troubled expression smoothed out in favor of his seemingly insurmountable sense of humor. Recent events had diminished it, but it still found its way out in his jovial demeanor. Habit played a big part in keeping up the sense of normalcy, but his capacity to roll with the flow helped.

"Be 'appy to demonstrate just 'ow 'ard of a 'ead I 'ave for ye," he added. "As fer the prospects, most of them are pretty new. Aside from Liam I'm still gettin' a feel for them meself. I can fill ye in on what I've picked up on from them though."
 
"Nah, from what I hear, Chloe'd get jealous." That wasn't how he'd meant that statement at all, but it was funnier that way. "And you know how James is about the whole not-in-the-Pack thing. Wouldn't wanna be a disappointment."

An offhanded comment, but likely one that said quite a bit more about her than it did about either Desmond or Chloe - or Baron, for that matter.

"Any information is helpful. I know they're all new, but they wouldn't be prospects if we didn't have at least some ideas about 'em. Liam especially, though. Ragenard's got a bit of a special interest in him, it seems, so he must have quite a bit of talent somewhere. Fuck if I know where he put it 'cause he acts like someone pulled half his brain out through his nose and he hasn't regenerated it yet, but presumably he's good for something more than decorating the hallways."
 
"'oi," Desmond replied with a roll of his eyes. "Chloe would bite me 'ead off. As for Liam, he is me cousin, or nephew.. or cousin's nephew... Eh you get the idea. The lad 'as enough enthusiasm to match the rest of the prospects combined, but probably about 'alf the brain. A lot of potential though, if ye can keep 'is 'ead out of his 'arse. It runs in the family ye see," Desmond explained. "'ard 'eads, the lot of us. The lad is green as grass though. Country kid came chasin' after Skye and the rest of 'em. Lookin' for some excitement, and 'as no idea what 'e is capable of. When 'e was just a wee lad, 'e got hit by a car after walkin' into the street. Walked away from it without a scratch on 'im."
 
"Huh. What about the car?" Rhetta inquired, thoughtfully. How much Liam had gotten scratched up was one question, but another important question was what had come of the car in that encounter. Regeneration was only one part of the equation - it sounded like the kid had a hell of one, but it wasn't everything, and a car would have a very different end result if it ran into something like her right now versus something like Ragenard, even if they could both walk it off in their own way, after a while.

"Does he not know what he can do because he hasn't gone up against someone who can give him a run, or does he not fight much?"

That was another good question. Not everyone attempted to get the shit kicked out of them at every available opportunity, for some reason. Untested was one thing, uninterested was something else.
 
"About how ye would expect I suppose," Desmond answered. "He's been in 'is share of scraps, but nothin' too serious. Ye won't find 'im shyin' away from trouble though. Assumin' 'es not the one causin' it."

His phone buzzed while they talked and he gave it a quick look.

"Draaven says he wasn't able to pick up any trails on our mystery creatures."

He paused. "Huh. Says 'e is droppin' off something Baron misplaced. Didn't say what. Has 'e always been so articulate?" Desmond asked.

Draaven was already off in Arteghia when Desmond had first arrived in the city, and he had only just turned up in the wake of the Scion's attack on Baron. He was probably even less familiar with Draaven than Rhetta was with him. He knew the man only by reputation, and his apparent dislike of conversing, or socializing, or being around people in general. A bit of a contrast to Desmond's more amiable and outgoing demeanor.
 
"Shouldn't have been that easy for them to vanish." This wasn't a criticism of Draaven's tracking skills; it was an expression of concern. He was good at what he did, and if those things had managed to elude him, it meant... fuck if Rhetta knew what it meant. More magic bullshit, almost certainly. Equally certain was her feeling that they were going to pop up again somewhere, probably at the most inconvenient moment. That was the way these things usually went, wasn't it?

The last inquiry got a little sound of amusement, though, mostly at the exasperation. "Nah." Not a reassuring answer. "Used to be he'd just walk in without comment and drop whatever he'd found on someone's desk. Saw him do it with a prospect once."

What would it be, though? Somehow, the first thing that came to mind was Rowan's silver, but Rhetta doubted that was the case. She was probably just thinking about it because even if everyone else had already had two weeks to start dealing with that crap, it was still new to her - and unsatisfactory, because she hadn't gotten to hit anyone, so there was still the part of her that very much wanted to go get revenge.
 
"Suppose we should go see what it is then, eh?" Desmond asked. "Unless ye have anythin' else you want to talk about?"

He started collecting up the papers and maps. There didn't seem to be much sense of organization, but as he removed the top map from the pile, Rhetta could see a wide range of stuff Desmond had been working on.

One map of Lupaix had some red markings on it along the eastern edge, near Iron Jackal turf. One building in particular had been circled: The Rusty Nail.

Other papers included blueprints of the network of catacombs that ran beneath Lupaix, a paper with a list of addresses, some questionable magazines, a blueprint of the Railyard building and grounds, takeout receipts, and a note to remember to pick up a package at the post office.
 
"I think we're good for now." Rhetta could have manufactured something to talk about, but getting a feel for someone wasn't just about what they said. It was about how they acted, and how they reacted. Desmond wasn't who he was five years ago. It wasn't a question of if he was good enough - if the Bloodstones were fine with him, she trusted their judgment. It was just a question of who he actually was - of being able to know him well enough to anticipate what he'd do in a situation. There were always situations, and there wasn't always time to talk about who was going to do what. Being able to have a fairly good idea about someone's actions without having to ask them about it was an edge, and like any edge, it was important to keep it sharp.

Being a nosy bitch, she looked over the maps that he had on hand, noting the places that he seemed to have an interest in. Maybe that was a Bloodstone interest, maybe that was just a Desmond interest, but either one was information about what he might do or how things might go down. Details. Rhetta had always liked the little details.

"Want me to take some of that?"
 
"Sure," Desmond said. "Just toss it in there."

He indicated a nearby cabinet.

Whatever he had been working on, he didn't seem to mind Rhetta going through it. The cabinet, like the table didn't seem to have a system of organization. Things where stacked mostly by size. A habit to keep piles of papers from tipping over.

---

The pair had made their way to the front of the warehouse, but Draaven hadn't arrived yet.

"He said 'e was just a few minutes out," Desmond said. "Should be 'ere soon."

Sure enough as they where headed outside, they picked up the sound of an approaching motorcycle engine. What they encountered was perplexing to say the least. Draaven had dismounted his bike and was headed towards the building as Desmond and Rhetta where heading outside. He was holding a very disgruntled cat that looked like it had seen better days. It was filthy and its fur matted.

Desmond didn't have much time to ask questions before he found the animal being handed over to him. He held it out in front of him awkwardly, and it glared daggers at him through narrowed eyes and gave a low rumbling mrrrrr that was somewhere between a growl and a meow.

"uh... what exactly am I supposed to do with it?" Desmond asked.

"Fuck if I know," Draaven said. "I'll be inside."

He headed in without another word.

Desmond seemed dumbfounded. How had Draaven gotten the thing here, on his bike?
 
Desmond's system of organization was going to give Ziessel nightmares. No categorization, no alphabetization, just a vaguely generalized architectural stability. Well, Sel needed something to keep her busy anyway, so between doing something with those papers and bitching at Desmond about them, she ought to be occupied for at least a little while.

The papers got stashed away again, presumably where they couldn't give Desmond nightmares, and Rhetta followed him outside to wait for Draaven. As usual, he had very little to say, dropping off his package with almost no comment at all, in very typical Draaven fashion.

The item in question wasn't exactly something she'd expected. "Baron has a cat?" When the fuck did that happen? Probably some time in the last five years, just like anything else. The look on Desmond's face was fantastic. He really had no idea what to do at all, did he?

"Well. You give it a bath and try to detangle its fur as best you can, and then you hope your regeneration's up to par when it claws your face off." She held a hand out, fingertips down, giving it a chance to sniff her if it wanted. "It's a cat, Desmond. Just treat it like a slightly more self-sufficient prospect and you'll be fine."
 
The cat let out another low mrrrr of agitation, but didn't seem to be making much effort to free itself. Perhaps still in shock from the ride here.

"...Yeah...." Desmond answered as he stared at the cat staring back at him.

It wasn't that he was afraid of the animal, but he didn't particularly relish the idea of trying to wrangle the thing through a bath. Fortunately Rhetta comparing it to the prospects, and Liam's misfortunate timing of walking across the railyard grounds proved a perfect solution.

"Liam! Get yer ass over here!"

Liam froze, then jogged over uncomfortably and looking a bit sheepish.

"I uh... look it was an accident, I swear," Liam began.

"Is anythin' on fire?" Desmond asked.

"No?" Liam replied, his answer oddly worded more like a question.

"Good, then ye can tell me what ye fucked up later," Desmond told him. "Get this cleaned up for Baron, and then let him know it's 'ere."

The cat let out a rumbling mrrr and a hiss as Desmond passed it to Liam.

"How exactly do I do that?" Liam asked.

He was just as baffled as Desmond had been before him as he stared at the animal he had been handed.

"Use yer head, you'll figure it out," Desmond assured him.

Desmond gave him a friendly clap on the shoulder, and Liam sighed and started to make his way inside the building.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top