I'm here, too. Just sorta chilling for the moment, I'm imagining that Adam will sort of turn up at a convenient and poignant but unobtrusive and uninvasive moment. Just need things to move forward a *little* more while I figure out how he's been living for the past couple weeks without any money since I forgot to give him any.
Bazmund
Member
Not a Doctor
STATUS: Back at the guild after a long absence. Much changed since I was gone? 6 yrs ago
- Last Seen: 8 mos ago
- Joined: 7 yrs ago
- Posts: 505 (0.20 / day)
- VMs: 0
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Username history
- Bazmund 7 yrs ago
Status
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6 yrs ago
Current
Back at the guild after a long absence. Much changed since I was gone?
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Bio
Medical student living in Scotland, a lover of beer and steak mostly - but also writing, and politics. Because why not make myself even more divisive.
Most Recent Posts
Siobhan
"You've known it was coming? That's... pretty unique. From what I've heard, people usually just wake up knowing rather than know in advance."
Ana turned the wheel and the car responded. It was a smooth ride, with a nicely tuned petrol engine under the hood, and good suspension. It didn't seem to fit her, like it was out of keeping with the rest of her person.
As it made its way down the road she'd turned onto, the noise of the night made a crescendo - there was no doubt about it, you were getting closer to a center in the web of violence spreading across the city.
"Me? I'm fine. As fine as reasonable people should be, when they work for a shadowy underground group of smugglers and criminals with a humanitarian streak, against one of the most advanced, omnipresent, oppressive surveillance states in human history." She replied almost-sharply.
There was a pause.
Ana sighed.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't be be so hard. I haven't been doing this for very long, it is my first time doing this part of the job, and I know what lengths the EMDA will go to if they find us. How can you not be scared?"
Matthew
"Good. I'd heard about your record - not seen it - and I was hoping you were gonna be in a state to make good on it if we had to. Nice to meet you too, kid." Mira gave him a smirk that looked almost like a grimace in the darkness of the cab, as she checked the rear view mirror and frowned.
Getting out of the city was going to take a little while, but not so long that it would be a big trek - though for Matthew they were hardly going fast.
"Luck," she chuffed when he said it, "is not something I've had good experiences with."
After another couple of minutes she checked the mirror again, and frowned harder.
"That's not good." She remarked grimly, looking back at the eerie darkness.
"We were meant to have a follower by now."
Matthew
"Great. Wasn't checking ID kid, get in the car." She pulled open the driver door and started getting into the vehicle. "We don't have long, these jobs are always tight. We're already a couple minutes behind schedule, and I don't like that at all."
The more Matt heard her speak, the more apparent her accent is - though it's still hardly clear. It was Latina, that's for sure, but Matthew doesn't know nearly enough to hazard a guess at anything more specific than 'she probably speaks Spanish'.
As he got into the car, she finished tying her hair back and tweaked key in the ignition. The engine practically groaned in protest as it nevertheless came to life and the car began to move.
"Name's Mira." She said matter of factly, looking over her shoulder to reverse the car out of the alley. "I hear you're quite the wheelman. Might be that you end up having to take the wheel if we get followed. Think you can handle that?"
The car broke from the cover of the alley and into the dark embrace of the night, lit sporadically by fires and blue lights, most of which were easy enough to avoid - at least for the time being.
One step closer to safety, one step further from the life Matthew'd had.
Siobhan
Wordlessly, Ana starts the engine on the car, and the pair of you peel out into the streets. Flight and fleeing are not unfamiliar sensations for Siobhan - albeit, they are usually done under different circumstances - but Ana seems nervous, tense even. Her knuckles are almost white around the steering wheel, she changes gear too sharply, and her breathing is a little fast. She might be new to this.
In a way, you are too. Just not like her.
The streetlights were cut on the 2nd of January, as per EMDA protocols, in order to limit unofficial activity on the streets. The police still have floodlights on their cars of course, so the night isn't entirely black - and there is always the Moon - but what is more worrying is that the EMDA haven't had to use torches at all, and they've remained completely unimpeded. It makes them difficult to see coming, and harder to fight once they're here.
After about fifteen minutes of very cautious driving, Ana finally speaks.
"Are you doing ok?" She sounds genuinely concerned, "I know I wouldn't be. You've got some steel in you if you're not panicking."
January 3rd, 2020
3:12AM
Siobhan
The walk is brief, and cold, and dark. The wind is not gentle to you, plucking at your hair and your coat and your skin, as soft a breeze as it might have seemed to anyone else. You cross two alleys in your journey, you jump as there is the staccato rap of gunfire from the building you've just left, you-
There. In the alley you've just turned into.
A car with the brake lights on, a figure leaning up against the rear passenger door, their face lit by a cigarette.
She has an elegant stature and features - when they're shown by the glow of inhalation, at least - and she turns to look at you as you enter the alley.
"Siobhan?" The woman has an accent. Polish. Faint but extant, like a pretty well naturalised 0th generation immigrant. You'd recognise it anywhere.
She stands from the lean, turning to face you completely. The woman is dressed inconspicuously, in black skinny jeans and a dark green hoodie, but there's a certain air to her that is... well, not quite magnetic. She has presence, gravitas, and grace - but not to the point where you think she has power. Not to the point where you think she could use it.
At least not to speak.
It takes a moment for it to click, but it does eventually. She holds herself like a dancer - specifically, like a ballerina. Which might make sense, given her background. She looks like she's in her mid 30s, but could be older and aging well - or younger and not - pretty easily.
"My name is Ana. It's time to go."
Brooks and Abi
The car drive is slow and uncomfortable, and you are forced more than once to take incredibly inconvenient detours to avoid the periodic roadblocks set up by your pursuers - or at least, by their law enforcement lackeys, the state police. Brooks gets texts every now and again to report on police checkpoints before the car comes into view of those barricades, from his at-least-for-now partner, a young man from Texas called Billy Ray. Billy is keeping watch on your immediate destination, with a rifle; it's a mostly abandoned shack out in the desert, with a significantly less abandoned basement-garage. It was how you got out here, and it is how you'll get back.
You're not sure how Billy knows about the roadblocks. He's not a mage, at least as far as you know - though that doesn't mean he's not in contact with one.
Most likely he's getting reports from local cell members, but that wouldn't necessarily explain how he knew where you were each time either - and you’ve been keeping an eye out for drones or anything of that sort.
In spite of everything in your favour - your secrecy, your headstart on the FOE, your mysterious eye-in-the-sky - the tension in the car never fully disappears. Billy sends you another text.
“aw shit. Cops. how far off are u.”
But things are worse for Abigail.
In the endless sands and shifting dusts of the realms of sleep, lost in the liquid clouds of fatigue and exhaustion, sinking into the floor of your somnolence… you begin to dream. For a moment, you find yourself looking up a short flight of stairs at a ramshackle door, formed of broad planks and slats, outlined by a near-blinding light. The steps up to it are steep and muddy, covered in this thin grey slurry that looks maybe half an inch deep, and there’s an almost sour smell in the air. You look down and find that the mud is everywhere, not limited only to the steps out of this-
Out of this basement.
You don’t know how you know it’s a basement.
You don’t know how you know where you are, but you know you’re not where you were.
Angeline
Your trek is an ambling one, never sure which turn to take or which route is best - though you’re smart enough to stay away from the main roads. You also don’t know what precisely you’re looking for, though you figure that whoever sent the text will make themselves known when it suits them.
You’re turning into a new alleyway when you’re confronted with something you’ve never seen before.
A body. Two cops stand over it, one of them prodding the unfortunate young man’s leg with her foot as something dark pools around him.
“Whaddya think?” Her partner, a big man with a paunch and a sparse beard, muses.
“I think we got lucky, bud.” The other woman is short, but stocky, with blonde hair tied back in a tight ponytail. They’re both wearing local police uniforms and ballistic vests - but they’re not the FOE.
“I’ll say. Hey, d’ya - wait.” He stops, his hand reaching instinctively for his pistol. “You there! Come out into the light, hands up!” The pair of them turn to face Angeline with their guns drawn.
This is where you thought you were going to meet your mysterious saviour. This is where they said they’d be.
Is that them, dead on the ground? Are you joining them?
Zephyr
As you head out of your building, you can hear police cars pull up in front of it. It would seem that you got out in the nick of time - something that may not surprise you.
What might surprise you a bit more is the immediate sounds of screaming and gunfire from inside the lobby of your apartment block. You give it a glance backwards, and you see cops in riot gear by the dozen advancing on the front of the house - until there is another shout, and their ranks are awash with bright white flames. The front four or five are caught in the blast, their gear and their skin catching alight like petroleum as they wail and stumble backwards away from the heat.
One of them does not, charging forwards instead, unaffected by the fire.
Your blood runs cold.
That was an agent of the CA3 - the Canadian Agency for Arcane Affairs, Canada’s answer to the American FOE. There is another brief round of gunfire, the sound of breaking glass, and then the complete stop of the stream of fire.
Good thing you didn’t go out the front.
You will hear your name called before you see the caller.
“Yo! Zephyr! Big man! Over here!”
It’s a skinny teenage looking guy, in ripped jeans and a leather jacket, with a disappointingly dull coloured mohawk. Behind him, there’s a sweaty looking overweight asian man in an ill fitting business suit, who seems alarmed by the kid’s sudden shouting.
“Come on man, let’s get the fuck outta here! You get in the front, Sam’ll drive until we’re outta city!” The punk gestures to a slick looking black mercedes, before practically leaping into the back seat.
Behind you, you hear someone shout;
“I saw someone go down the alley!”
Matthew
With the electrical cable for your alarm clock trailing idly behind you through the dirt of the city alleyways, half-illuminated by the light from the nearby streets, you make your way towards what you’d approximate as the rendezvous point. You have trouble remembering the last time you felt snow on your skin, but it’s not an unfamiliar sensation as it starts to fall.
Your breath fogs up the air before you, snowflakes begin to settle on the ground as the snow gets heavier and thicker and muffles more of the world around you. Sometimes it would be easy to suppose that you’ve moved from one world over to the next, when you turn corners and find the floor covered in soft white where it wasn’t but a moment ago.
The start of the riots in the city seems so distant through the snow.
You know that, for all you don’t remember, you will remember this; you will remember it perfectly.
The next corner you turn, you see a young woman with dark, curled hair, a frown on her face, and a big fuck off puffy jacket on. She’s still shivering, so it’s clearly not helping. The woman is standing idly around an incredibly dilapidated brownish sedan, which doesn’t look like it would survive you driving it for very long, but looks like it could still build speed for a little while if it needed to.
She turns to look at you as you enter the alley, and you notice that she’s open carrying a boxy, plastic looking pistol, the kind that cops are usually issued.
“You Matthew? Matthew Mearls?”
Hey everyone! The IC is LIVE! Check the Oth post for our start.
@Parzivol I hope we can actually change him, because my boi Adam is one of the most optimistic, loving people you can meet - but even he would have to struggle to find any compassion for Sir Matthews as-is, and that's not how you want your doctor and surgeon to feel.
@Parzivol Yeah, I didn't wanna use the word but your boy there is basically a nazi. How on earth do the Sunrunners' guild tolerate him?
S a n d o
E v e n i n g
E v e n i n g
Adam Rahim, the man like Birdsong, was entertained.
By the sunset, by the sounds of the children playing in the street, by his tea - by most anything he had to hand, he was entertained; though it occurred to him that entertain might actually be the wrong word, as he did not find these things amusing exactly - it's more that they made him happy. A calm kind of happy. Content.
Yes. That's the word. Content.
Adam Rahim, the man with a songbird's heart, was contented.
Gently, with a slight smile, he raised his tea glass to his lips and drank. The tea was not his - he was staying with a friend he'd made in Sando, another healer who had a practice in the city centre and a house with a spare room - but the honey he'd added was. Amara sat across from him at the table on her terrace, observing her friend and guest as he sat and drank tea in relative silence, only opening his eyes occasionally to check the score in the football game taking place in the street below them.
"They’re still losing, Adam.” The fae spoke with her eyebrow cocked. She was an elegant, but practical and occasionally stern, woman - and she did not normally brook nonsense; a rule to which Adam was an exception.
”I know.” He said, smiling and raising his glass back to his lips, tipping the hot cavemint and honey back into his mouth as he closed his eyes again. ”But I’m not watching to see who wins. I’m watching to enjoy seeing them play.”
She found his sentimentality charming, if occasionally frustrating. Normally the men she spent her time with enjoyed looking at her, not at street kids tackling eachother, and at imaginary sunsets - which was what Adam usually did.
He would sit back, drink her tea, and picture a sunset in his mind. Sometimes she asked him which sunset it was, and somehow he always had a different answer. He made up for this kind of non-presence with his sense of humour, and by helping her in her practice whenever he was in the city.
And by keeping her company.
He was a warm kind of person to be around. It had been thirty years since the last one of his kind had been quite like that, for her - not long enough to be a lifetime for her people, but long enough that the last man had managed to die of old age.
”Are you enjoying yourself, Amara?”
She thought about that for a while. The answer was yes, but she didn’t always know why, with Adam.
One of the things she had learnt from his kind, however, was that the Why does not always matter.
”I am, Adam.”
”I’m very happy to hear that. I have a feeling that more work will be coming soon, my friend. When I come back I will see if I can bring some wine, if you like?” He almost-hummed, opening his eyes to meet hers again, his stubbly face smiling.
She grinned and nodded.
He was a fun drunk.
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Amara Glas (NPC)
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W i t h :
Amara Glas (NPC)
@Parzivol Holy fucking Christ that man is a monster. He eats fae? He literally eats fae? He wears the shaven hair of his victims as clothes and dried their flesh to jerky for use as rations?
@LordOfTheNight Is there anywhere from within Sando that the sunset might be visible, or is everything subterranean?
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