Record Of An Approaching Fall

Participants:

cardinal_icon.gif colette_icon.gif elisabeth2_icon.gif

Scene Title Record of an Approaching Fall
Synopsis Colette Nichols brings the results of her sweep of the Ferrymen's visions to someone other than the Ferrymen Council…
Date August 25, 2010

Redbird Security


The chair behind the receptionist's desk leans back with a creak, Cardinal's feet kicking up onto the surface of it as his weight shifts. A stir of steam rises off the surface of the cup of coffee that he's holding, his face half-buried in the coiling streamers, and he inhales slowly to savour the aroma, eyes closing.

"I swear to God, Liz," he murmurs as the morning light streams through the front windows, "One of these days people will remember I'm nocturnal."

There's a soft snicker as Elisabeth sips from her own coffee, slouched comfortably in one of the visitors' chairs. "No. They won't. It'll get better, though. The days are getting shorter." Which means Richard will have even longer days than he does now, the blonde privately figures. But she keeps that comment lodged firmly behind her teeth. "Do you know what it is that she's bringing?" she asks mildly.

A ruckus, is one answer to that question.

Barking dogs aren't usually part and parcel to Redbird security's sedate business environment, but the loud and repeated barking that is echoing out in the lobby is most decidedly a very Nichols ruckus. "Jupiter stop! No— no you can't go in there stop!" Familiar is the sound of Colette Nichols' voice squeaking in the lobby the moment the teen comes in through the door. Whatever possessed the dark-haired teen to bring a leased dog into the building also seems to have given rise to this situation, with Jupiter dragging Colette's wiry frame across the lobby without so much as a pause.

Cardinal and Elisabeth can both see Colette struggling as she leans away from a mottled brown and black dog, his ears perked up and nose sniffing at a service access door that leads to the basement. "Jupiter!" Colette embarrasedly grouses, tugging on his bright red leash, claws skittering on tile, but the old dog is still a bit bigger that Colette herself is, and he smells something interesting.

Oh god, a barking dog. Cardinal brings one hand up to rub against his temple and the side of his face, massaging slowly to try and work away the headache that's just begun exploding inside his cranium to the tune and rhythm of Jupiter's staccato voice. A breath's drawn in, and he tips the coffee back to take a swallow of it before setting the cup over to one side.

"No idea, but I suppose we've find out," he murmurs, leaning back and opening his eyes to raise a hand up, "…hey, Colette. New dog?"

Elisabeth watches Colette and Jupiter burst on the scene with a gaze that is part amusement and part…. horror. Really. She raises a brow and says sharply, in a tone laced with as much 'command' as she's capable of (not much, really), "Jupiter, sit." And she also mutes the dog's barking at the same time, taking pity on Richard's poor head. All without getting out of her chair.

"Hey, kiddo," Liz greets Colette mildly. If it becomes necessary, we'll lock the dog in the bathroom.

"Old and senile dog!" Colette grumbles as she stomps over to Jupiter and winds her fingers around his collar and gives it a tug to lead him away from the door. "He's— " she falters when he makes another lunge for the basement door, ears perked up and tail straight, "Jupiter!" This time the inflection of her voice causes the old hound to look up and fold his ears back, whining as he looks to the door before barking directly at Colette again. But the moment that Elisabeth offers a more supernatural solution to the problem, Jupiter promptly heels and perks both ears up, head quirking to the side as he looks at Elisabeth confusedly and interested.

Batting her lashes, Colette stares down at the old dog, then cracks a smile and lists up one hand to scrub at the back of her neck. "Wow that— hey." Grimacing, Colette turns away from the glass facade of the building's front entrance, the light and drizzling rain running in rivulets down the glass.

"Sorry about that, he's usually way more behaved. For an ex-police dog he's a pain in the ass sometimes." and that much is delivered side-long to Jupiter with eyes narrowed. Shaking off a little rainwater from her black windbreaker, Colette slings a damp, olive-drab courier bag around on its shoulder strap, heading over towards Cardinal and Elisabeth.

"We cool to talk out here? Or like— do you have like a Bat Cave or something?" Bruce Wayne jokes, cute. "It's about the Flash," Colette notes with a look over her shoulder to Jiputer, as if expecting him to already be into something, but surprisingly finding him sitting well behaved several feet away, if admittedly a little wet from his walk in the rain outside.

A brief, grateful look is flashed over the edge of Cardinal's shades to Elisabeth, and then he braces both hands down on the table's edge - pushing himself up to his feet slowly, he slides his hands back to the small of his back so he can stretch, vertebrae popping and cracking a bit. "Nnh."

"It's alright. We can go downstairs to the 'Bat Cave' as it were, but keep a close rein on Jupiter?" He steps out from behind the desk, admitting, "I don't want him to go barrelling through the string maps and wreck them, I've spent way too much time…" He brings up a hand to suppress a yawn, "…setting them up."

Liz hasn't even seen the string maps yet. She knew he was putting them up, but she hasn't been downstairs today yet. She looks probably about as tired as Cardinal seems, though there's a watchfulness to her blue eyes that perhaps gives away that she's wound up. Not so much so that she's not functional, but enough to put her a little on edge. She pushes up out of her seat and walks toward the ex-police dog. "If he's a cop dog, he'll listen to you just fine if you put some authority to your voice. Don't baby talk him except when you're loving on him. It's not what he's used to." She drops a hand, palm down, to let the dog get her scent well and then scrubs between his ears.

Only then does she take the leash and calmly order, "Heel," as she opens the door. It shouldn't require any kind of suggestion this time. Her other hand keeps her coffee as she descends the stairs with the dog just ahead of Colette and Cardinal. "We could just use your office, you know," she says over her shoulder to Cardinal. "You do have one. And if you start calling yourself the fuckin' Batman, I'm going to beat you upside the head." Her tone is drily amused.

"Wait there— really is a— " Colette's brows screw up and her lips purse as if waiting for Cardinal to start laughing — jokes on Colette! — but when he seems serious about there being some secret basement her expression changes from incredulous to impressed and then pointedly amused when Elisabeth admonishes him out in the open.

Trying to hide her impish smile, Colette watches Elisabeth as she follows the blonde into the stairwell, turning back just long enough to look over her shoulder at Cardinal before heading with squeaking wet bootfalls down the stairs. Elisabeth is noticing a trend of Jupiter's nose on each step as he goes down ahead of her, sniffing furiously on each step, occasionally on one of the handrails, and then back down to the steps on their descent.

"So um," Colette's voice echoes in the stairwell as she follows Elisabeth down, one hand on the guiding rail. "A few months ago you… you told me that like, the people you work with, um…" awkward and nervous, Colette looks back over her shoulder to Cardinal, briefly. "You change the future, right? Like— like that's your job?"

The accusation that Cardinal doesn't use his office just gets a roll of eyes behind his sunglasses, coffee picked up in passing as he heads down after her and down the stairs; stepping around the girls when they hit the bottom, the primitive mechanical combination lock on the door solved with a few quick twists of his wrist.

"I suppose you could say that," he admits, "That's why we collect precognitive visions, paintings, that sort've thing…"

He turns, shoulder against the door, and he shoves it open with a squeak and backs in, a wry smile offered to Colette, "It doesn't pay very well, but Endgame manages to make ends meet."

Ends meet. Elisabeth keeps her snort on that one to herself too. Right now, it's her FRONTLINE paycheck and Peyton's trust fund that are funding the group. Which she's fine with. She keeps one hand on the dog's leash, interested in what he's found. She gives him enough lead to indicate that he should find whatever it is he's looking for, though she'll attempt to guide him around anything like the string maps and such. She's listening right now.

Jupiter jerks against the leash, nose up and sniffing at the air. His jaws part, making a soundless bark thanks to her silence bubble around the canine, and Jupuiter immediately leads Elisabeth on a straight path directly towards the bulletproof glass wall, sniffing around the door and pawing at it, then turning to Elisabeth and perking his ears up, silently barking again.

Colette seems completely oblivious to Jupiter's nosing around, her mismatched eyes trying to make heads or tails of the string map spread like some sort of sybillic spider's web across the basement. Lips parted and brows furrowed, she takes slow steps beneath one line of colored thread, looking up at one picture, then over to another.

Admittedly, Colette's reaction to the sight of the strings is much like anyone else's: confusion. Not knowing how the map words, Colette just slowly shakes her head and turns around to face Cardinal, opening up the front flap of her courier bag to withdraw a Zip-Loc plastic bag filled with memory cards.

"I recorded them," is a little vaguely offered from Colette, glancing back to Jupiter and Elisabeth for only a moment before she turns her attention back to Cardinal. "I um— the Ferry. Everyone I could, I got help too. Recordings… of… of the visions. First-hand accounts from people, and then I asked Tamara how we can stop the riots." Holding out the bag of memory cards, Colette's jaw squares.

"Can you stop it?" is a plea, desperate, but honest.

Of course, whether or not Cardinal knows how the map works either is a question that's up in the air.

"I think the dog smells the gunpowder," Cardinal observes with a hint of amusement as the dog paws at the door, "Well trained animal you've got there - you said he used to be a police dog?"

Then the photokinetic's turning towards him, and he stops there in front of her to look down into the bag curiously. The zip lock's held up, and he blinks, reaching out slowly to accept the bag. "What… you— seriously? This is exactly what I needed…" He looks at the cards (making a mental note to ask Peyton or Alia how the hell to read them) for a moment, then back to her, silent for a moment.

"We're sure as hell gonna try."

The blonde's head comes back around when Colette says what she's brought, her jaw dropping open for just a moment. Memory cards…. that's a lot of memory cards to fill. "Wow…. that's a damn impressive number of stories, Colette," Elisabeth says quietly. And then she pauses. Colette's pretty freaked out. "Did something in particular catch your eyes as relevant and helpful, since you've already seen all of them?" Because that's hours of cards there. And just in case it's something else he scents, Elisabeth opens the glass door to the shooting range and lets Jupiter investigate.

An askance look is offered to Jupiter and Colette cracks a smile. "Oh— that— heh, yeah he… he's an ex bomb-squad canine unit. Dad says his nose isn't what it used to be but he went berserk when I brought him to the Lighthouse once, he totally wanted in on Brian's armory downstairs." Jupiter, heedless of the story being told of his exploits, moves swiftly inside the glass room once it's opened, sniffing around at the gun racks and on the floor, following a pointedly clear path to where the weapons are kept, barking soundlessly once more before just parking his ass right in front of where the firearms are stored.

Cracking a smile, Colette shakes her head and looks back to Cardinal, crossing her arms over her chest, then shifts her weight to one foot and looks over to Elisabeth. "Um, some more so'n others. I— mine's on there, and I guess it's kinda' selfish of me to say that's the most important to me but— but it is." Sliding her tongue over her lips, Colette looks back to Cardinal.

"There's one from Scott Harkness, he's like… one of the Ferry's main dudes? He was talking about how in his vision the Hangar safehouse gets raided by Homeland Security. Some of the cards only have one or two people's worth of stuff on them, because I was passing around cards and cameras to people."

Having handed off the bag, Colette motions to one card marked with a gold sticker. "That one just has Tamara on it, telling how to stop the riots entirely. I— I couldn't make much sense of it. They um, it's… Please don't tell anyone I gave you all this?" Mismatched eyes avert to the floor and Colette's lashes fall down to partly hide her eyes.

"I haven't told anyone I made copies of the cards yet. I— the Council thinks i was recording it just for them. They… don't know I'm giving you all this, and like— I— I'd get in a lot of trouble if they found out, okay?" Brows creasing together, Colette looks up to Cardinal worriedly. "On some of the cards I'm relaying what people told me, 'cause they didn't want to be on camera, or relaying with Sable or Ygraine had told to them. So— yeah it— there's a lot to go on."

"Tamara doesn't make sense a lot of the time when she predicts things… I've never known her to be wrong though," Cardinal says quietly, regarding the card with the sticker upon it, then setting it down on the table - carefully - and raising one hand to rub against the nape of his neck, gaze swept back to Colette.

A tired smile crooks to his lips, and he assures her quietly, "I won't tell a soul. This… this could be really useful, though, Colette. I can probably fill in a lot of holes on the map, and maybe figure out how to stop this. Thank you."

Behind Colette and Cardinal's conversation, Elisabeth's quiet exit from the armory and shooting range alongside Jupiter stays out of their focus. The ex-police hound finds himself rewarded for a job well done, admittedly one he wasn't solicited for, but in the event that one of these days someone does try to laden down Cardinal's business with explosives, that keen nose may come in handy.

"She's never wrong," Colette agrees on the topic of Tamara, "but…" something's eating at her. "But we have to stop the riots, we— we can't let them happen. So many people die, and… and I just— " Small hands wring together in front of Colette and the teen's posture becomes stiffened and narrowed, shoulders rolled forward. "I really don't want to be one of them."

Looking up to Cardinal, half-blinded eyes square on the shadowmorph, and Colette looks back to the web again, breathing in deeply before exhaling a slow, steady sigh. "What do I do next?"

Apparently, she also came here looking for a job.

"I know," Cardinal says, his voice quiet as he watches Elisabeth walk away when she's not looking, his jaw tensing just a little bit, "I know we do."

He pauses, then turns back to Colette, reaching out to clasp her shoulder, "…we'll change the future, kiddo. Let's just hope we make it better, and not worse." That, after all, is the big problem with messing with the future. It's not that hard to derail one. It's guiding where it goes - ah, there's the rub.

At the last question, a faint smile tugs up at one corner of his lips. "Well. Let's see what's on these cards… and see where we need to go from there. One step at a time."

Tilting her head, Elisabeth says quietly, "We can use the computer down here to load the cards up." She moves forward, releasing the sound bubble from around Jupiter as she moves because so long as he's not barking, he doesn't need to be muted. Reaching out to take the bags, she chooses the one with the star on it first. "Uploading them onto this one won't take long, and it's not Net-connected, so no one will be able to see them except those of us with access to the basement."

She makes herself useful doing that and then says, "There is one other thing you should think about doing, and you should do it before the end of the month if you're thinking to do it because right now the oversight on the matter is damn lax." Looking up at Colette directly, Liz says flatly, "Go see your dad and get him to sign Registration papers for you for being Non-Evo. Unless you want to have to face them down and lie to their faces — I can coach you through what to do to show them your ability and get Tier-0 or Tier-1 rated." Elisabeth shrugs a little. "You know I'm anti- the whole thing, but… they're going to start asking for goddamn cards for every damn thing, so if you can get in under the wire as Non-Evo, it'd be better to do it that way."

Anxiously shifting her footing when she looks back to Elisabeth, Colette occupies her hands with smoothing down the front flap of her courier bag, teeth toying with her bottom lip as she does. "Yeah I… I know I should. The Ferry's getting on about that, so… so'm gonna' try'n get that done. I just dunno how yet. It'll probably be better if I just like… pretend not to have a power or somethin'." Nose wrinkling, Colette offers an askance look to Elisabeth, then down to her feet. "That's not gonna' help stop the riots though…" she mumbles in a bit of awkward defiance.

Therein lies her motivations for being here. Turning to look at Cardinal, Colette's nose wrinkles and her brows furrow. "I'm not just like… stopping at dropping off these videos or nothin'. I— I'm sticking through on this until we figure out how to stop it. Cause— cause I made a promise an' I'm not gonna' break it. So— so I'm gonna' help," Colette insists with a crease of her brows together.

"If you think of somethin' else you need me t'do, or anything I should be lookin' for, tell me. 'Cause m'not gonna' sit on my hands."

At the mention of the computer, Cardinal glances to Elisabeth — thank god, someone knows how these things work — and then back to Colette. "Gillian's going to kill me, you know," he points out, his tone a bit wry, but he's not turning down her help. God knows they need all the help they can get.

A breath's taken, exhaled, and he leans against the table, "Alright. As soon as I go over the videos and see what better picture we have of what happened? I'll find something for you to do to help, I promise you that."

"No, sweetheart, it's not," Elisabeth says softly. She doesn't say that she's not entirely sure anything will stop the riots, but Colette has brought hope in the form of Tamara. "In the meantime, if you can continue to pick up bits and pieces like this, it would be extremely helpful. The more information we have, the more likely we can put the pieces together to sort out the catalyst. And maybe how to head it off."

Elisabeth grins at Colette slightly and adds, "And getting it done is a matter of simply getting the forms and having a law enforcement official and a witness sign them. If the Ferry is pushing you to get it done, I'm pretty sure a number of them have cop contacts, and so long as you only do a few at a time and scatter them through the contact list, you'll get them all through." At least for the ones who need it the most. She glances at Cardinal. "I've been meaning to tell you that I'm meeting with someone about doing it for us too."

One brow lifted as she considers Liz, Colette lets her head dip down into a slow nod as her shoulders shift awkwardly, not entirely due to the weight of her courier bag. "Alright," is a breathily exhaled response to everything Colette's been presented with so far. "I'll… I promise I won't let either of you down. When you get a look at the tapes, and— and as soon as you know what you need me to do, let me know. I always keep my phone on me."

Sliding her tongue across her lips thoughtfully, Colette looks up to Cardinal, then over to Elisabeth and finally to Jupiter, holding her hand out to the old dog, eliciting him rising up from a seated position and trotting over to her, leash dragging along behind him on the floor. When Jupiter comes over, Colette settles down to crouch, wrapping one arm around the dog and taking his leash in her hand.

"I need to get back to my apartment," Colette offers in a hushed tone of voice, almost more for Jupiter than anyone else. When she looks back up to Cardinal, though, her brows are lifted in an earnest expression of worry. Though she doesn't voice it.

"Thank you," isn't something Cardinal is used to hearing. "Thank you for— for doing this." It's as if Colette is treating it like a personal favor.

"Oh? Good, good, I know Aric's been worried…" Cardinal nods a little bit to Elisabeth, a faint smile to her regarding the registration.

Then he looks back to Colette and Jupiter through his shades, and he nods once more to her grateful words, expression one painted with rue. "Don't thank me yet, Colette."

"Don't thank me yet."


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