Participants:
| Scene Title | The Implications |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Logan is approached by an unfamiliar face worn by a suspiciously recognizable set of mental problems, for a sale of a drug he no longer carries. It's very interesting, so he names a price that is, as well. |
| Date | August 14, 2010 |
Upper West Side —- The Corinthian Hotel
If nothing else, she looks like she fits in here, at the Corinthian. Either someone destined for a scheduled meeting in the conference hall, or a peculiarly mousey, modest, if high-rent hooker. Harder to say which these days. Her pants suit is tailored to her diminutive frame, a dark enough slate of gray to imply vanity without inculpating herself entirely, corporate chic, and her hair falls rumpled loose over her shoulders, neither big nor fragrant enough to place her squarely into the demarcation of carnal slave.
Big sunglasses, though, especially for the small hours of the day.
Big purse, leather hitched over her shoulder. Her heels take her clicking past the counter with enough an air of authority that she rightly seems to know where she's going, past the concierge with a thin smile, neutrally painted, into the elevator. Floats a short finger up and down buttons marked Guest rooms, Restaurant, Casino, before touching down skeptically on Executive offices. If nothing else, doubtless there's some twiggy secretary to direct her either to waiting room upholstery or take the message.
She's idly composing it in her head already, wondering how to phrase the pragmatic death threats, or save them to rebalance an initial refusal. Work, work, work.
Play, play, play.
Alternatively.
It's what has brought Logan to the hotel and is what is casting him out again, dressed from the previous night in clothes that are far too evening to be suitable attire for the hour. All black, with a shiny mandarin-necked shirt stiffly open at the collar, and his own set of purple-tinted sunglasses already on his face to hide the fact he hasn't slept all that much and is a little hungover, pale irises doing nothing for the bloodshotness in the whites. There is silver thread in his jacket, mimicking Arabic characters, and violet, painstakingly handcrafted Frenchfag shoes on his feet, probably a lot of money, but they fit him well.
They might even suit him. As it happens, rolling out of bed and cruising down the walk of shame suits him too, to a degree, if you're into that kind of thing, and he moves at a lax wander over lush carpeting. Veers around the corner from a stairwell before headed for the elevators, numb-handedly touching at the buttons to make them go.
'Clink' means the doors are going to open. The girl doesn't move, content where she is, over by the control panel, glancing over through the panes of her own shades to study the next incomer as they come in. As he comes in, turns out. With his ridiculous purple glasses, which no doubt, aren't legitimized by a tactical necessity to keep his identity covered, or a suit because that happened to be the kind of thing the hijacked body is garbed in, and his hair probably isn't mussed because he had to punch somebody. (OK Brooklyn???)
Unless she was into that. Or so goes her assessment, peering at the specter standing in front of the lift. "It's going up," she says, after the doors have closed. Her arm pitches up, backward the next moment, a small hand arcing upward. A forefinger and thumb pinch the slender bridge of metal between the lenses, and she has nipped them off his face in less time than it takes to blink.
"You're glowing," she says, a playful edge of marvelling to her voice. "It's been awhile. Have a few minutes to talk? Somewhere there isn't—" and she hitches her head upward, indicating the camera peeking down at them from the corner of the ceiling.
And there go finely silver edged designer whatever glasses off his face, Logan startling back in a second of more alert awakeness that knifes through the fuzzy if satisfied half-asleep state he was in previously. The dogcollar flap of shirt unbuttoned quivers a little like an extended whisker, and consciously, his hands go up to button it closed with his back wedged against elevator wall and eyes squinting at the unfamiliar young woman with deep suspicion.
Gold cufflinks wink and blink in the elevator light. He hasn't changed much. "I think you've mistaken me for someone else," he points out, gentlemanly for all that his demeanor is not, and can't help but glance up at the camera corner himself.
It's only a little absurd, that she practically comes up to his elbows and no higher. The girl peers through lenses like violets for a moment, curious, before folding them up between two hands. "No. You're John Logan. We've done business before. Couple times. A lot of boyfriend retrieval, if I'm remembering right: one time, he was whinging in his repression and self-loathing. The second time, he was dead. I have a new outfit, that's all.
"Not as fabulous as yours." She gestures at herself with a tiny flip of the purple glasses in question. Some things, you can say in front of a camera. The elevator hangs in its shaft, quizzically, its iron belly full of maybe-sociopaths sniffing at each other like offended cats. "You have to remember. We go back almost a year now, don't we?"
Oh, he remembers, and he's gone a little like steel in the rigidity of his posture and shapes of his expression, mouth small and angular jaw narrow, his eyes fiercely accusing beneath shaped eyebrows that knit together hard enough to draw lines in his brow. His mouth twists along his jaw going a twitch sideways in thought, before he loosely nudges himself back up to rest weight on his feet than the wall.
A long arm goes passed her, its trajectory obvious and no cause for alarm — long fingers hit the very tippiest top button. The cage they stand in lurches, then glides upwards with expensive smoothness. "Going up," he quasi-echoes, before his hand snares out in an attempt to steal back his glasses in a childish snatching motion.
Here you go. The lady hands them over. That is, Teo hands them over, tipped outward, fingers loose-clasped on the hinge. "Going up," she echoes, turning to set her back against the wall. Surely, not because she doesn't trust Logan behind hers, or that she thinks she needs to keep an eye on him. Surely. She smiles a little, and there's nothing of Teodoro Laudani in it, or if there is, it's probably pretty hard to see in skeletal proportions that much slighter than his. And a vagina attached.
The weight of her gaze might be the same. Even through the big glasses. Not enough blinking going on back there, or not until the ringing tink! of the elevator hiccups cold air into their box. Through her dark hair, and chilling at the open collar of Logan's shirt. She clasps a small hand over the door, pinning it open, politely, deferentially, and if it's a joke at anyone's expense at least it's tremendously understated.
Unpolitely, because today is a series of contrasts, Logan's hand whips out like a striking cobra snake, fingers flared to clamp a bony grip on the woman's elbow. On Teo's elbow. Or whatever the fuck he might be going by. It is unnecessary, and it jars female upperarm bone up into shoulder socket as the former pimp goes to pull her out of the elevator and out onto the clear, empty rooftop, with a morning sun shining cheerily, he still smelling something of musk and whatever body scents Kelly happened to be wearing, as well as his own choking combination of cologne and cigarette smoke.
He walks them together across the space, and there's aim, there, to shove her forward with belly into concrete edge, to induce a little vertigo, though there's no particular movement made to bend her like supple wood over the edge of it. He isn't letting go of her arm, though. It's easy, to bully girls.
"Might do to explain yourself, you little fucker. How are you him? I had you figured out."
And she's a rather small girl, all things said. Abigail Beauchamp stands taller, Isabella Sheridan had more flesh on her, and Logan's most recent lay had both. She whirls in his hand easily as he could send a pinwheel spinning by blowing on it, and then rankles to an uncomfortable halt. There is a gun out by then, on the other side. It should probably be pointing around at Logan's-side, given bullets don't do anything to towering vacuums of air besides make a lot of noise. Possibly cave in the roof of a civilian's head, eventually.
Possibly a sign of weakness, failure to follow-through. Aggressive intent is clear on her face, anyway, upturned, her brow in a furrow, corners of her mouth down, an ugly scowl. "It's fucking superpowers, genius," she snaps, a kitten show of teeth, muscle tightening under the bunched cotton of her sleeve. She doesn't vertigo too easy, fortunately, perhaps partially by virtue of having an awfully low center of gravity. "Yours can do more than one thing. Let go of my fucking arm."
And there's a knife in Logan's hand, but it never gets used, something ferreted out of satin-lined pocket and clenched in his fist, half-opened. Pitiful defense against a gun, but he didn't bring anything of the kind up with him last night — fortunately, Kelly's invite was not an elaborate ploy to off him, which is probably why he was so cheery just five minutes ago.
He's not, now, hard eyed and reluctant to let go of her fucking arm. The knife clicks all the way open, blade glistening in a warm morning sun. "There's superpowers and then there's being a liar," he sneers. He didn't put his sunglasses back on, in the elevator — ludicrously, they dangle from where he'd slid them into his open collar, hanging and penduluming a little with the momentum of movement and hard gestures. "Tell me, did you never return to Teo at all, or just did for a weekend and then never bothered to send me a memo when you found your next home, you fucking parasite? Fuck me, I thought you were an elaborate lie, did you know that?"
Ugh. Being wrong. He lets go of her arm, then, a painful pinching movement.
He is pinching her arm, or equivalent: she decides that is atrociously immature. What a dick. She yanks her arm back down, straightening her jacket with violently brusque movements, palm on the lapel, fingers checking the two front buttons are intact below her modest bosom.
"Teo and I had an arrangement. That you aren't supposed to give a damn about. You were never curious before. This seems like kind of a shitty time to start. Of all the things that could be your responsibility, this isn't one you get to cherrypick from." She folds her mouth into a short, severe line. Not much makeup going on there. There's an edge of hauteur to the fact that she actually stoops down, right then and there, plucks up her fallen sunglasses despite that it puts her head-down inches from the man with the naked knife and apparent ill temper.
"This one's from the Institute," he finishes, stonily, privately wondering for one exasperated instant whether John Logan is going to recognize that organization name at all. "You can feel free to be a little flattered I let you near her at all. Look: free intel. Aloe for the ass-chapping. Happy?"
There's a dim flicker of something, lights, somebody's home that recognises that name. "I was curious enough." Maybe not of the right things. Logan's voice has volume, round vowels, flashing teeth. "You mouthed some answers once, I bought them, and then flash forward to the fucking never ending nuclear winter and I'm getting slapped around by Laudani for coming near him." And nearly getting his baby momma killed too, but stands to reason that Ghost didn't seem the type to care before about a random date to his strip show. Christ!
Click, he closes his knife, nonverbal indication that he's not intent on throw Teo around anymore. It doesn't get slid back into coat pocket. Two sets of reflects glimmer back at the little girl from the twin circles of his purple silver framed glasses, dangling against his chest like a centre-pinned badge.
"No intel's free. I know the Institute by name a bit. Got raped just recently, didn't they?"
"Not thoroughly enough." Ghost makes a little face with her little face, shades on again. Scratches at her leg, through the fabric of her trousers, with the side of her gun, or the fingers curled around grip and trigger. When she straightens again, the weapon is still pointed downward. Still unsafetied, still out, but pointed downward. She let herself get thrown around for the entire distance between the elevator and the edge of the roof, so she's going to take her stand-down in smaller increments, if that's all right with Logan.
"Looks like you survived your little weather drama okay. Your digs are pretty cushy, and Teo didn't leave any marks." I don't know what you're complaining about. She frowns slightly, and then jerks her head once, annoyed, flicking wind-warped tendrils of dark hair out of her face. "She has information and resources I need, and I need to get it out of her without making too much of a mess. You can help me get it. I'll expense it."
A hand goes up to scratch a fingertip down the primly straight line of his nose, as if checking for all that he checked obsessively the first time to see if there's any trace of crooked in it. There isn't. Teo didn't leave any marks, but he did kick him in the balls, goddamn. That hand lowers again, settles comfortably into a pocket, folded knife still in hand and rotated around as Logan thinks. His tired eyes dart down to the gun, mouth twisting in open annoyance, but not much.
The city looks like a computer chip, from up here. Logan glances out at it, looks back. Wind toys with his rakishly opened collar, tousled thinned blonde curls. "Right," he says, some doubt in his voice. Some irony. "And what sort of help is that?"
There's a twitch in the woman's cheek as she watches Logan's hand venture to examine his pretty little face. He's prettier than the girl the ghost is wearing right now, notably. That's mildly offensive. The glasses perched on her nose are tall and dark, and Logan is shown his own reflection, confirming the geometric perfection of his face, while the ghost studies it and absently supposes that, if they'd gotten into a girly slapfight, he would have gone straight for the hair.
Logan's getting increasingly short on that, after all, and it wouldn't do to shoot him, given how far and few between sources are, these days. Ghost has the certain suspicion that Logan is about to object to it, too, when she says:
"Refrain.
"Don't throw a tantrum," she adds, her severe features aligning into a thin smile. The intensifying sunshine puts a fringy gold halo around the maelstrom tangle of her hair.
"Don't tell me what to do," is perhaps petty, bratty, but delivered quickly and with equal severity, and when Logan's eyes go narrow, it's with a mildly facetious kind of expression. He isn't in danger of throwing a tantrum. His body angles enough to lean a hip on the concrete railing where he'd rammed the oval faced girl's gut into its edge. There's the teenage compulsion to spit over the side, but he resists that, too. He could almost pass for mature, sometimes.
Logan doesn't know which one it was, Teo or Ghost, that stole the Refrain from the chinks with him, that one time. "I'm running out of reasons, besides, I suppose, fear of death," a tip of his head, conceding to the gun in her hand, "about why I should ever work with you. You know that?"
His knife is slipped away in favour of the inevitable cigarette, slouched back to the city as he fishes for silver case and matching lighter, going through the ritual.
Ghost takes that petty, bratty delivery without changing her expression even a twitch. Smiling, thin as a blade held horizontal. "I said I'd expense it," she says. She doesn't add, What more do you want? because it's already there, and adding it out loud would undermine her already somewhat… diminutive stance, as far as she's concerned. "Money. Or maybe once I slip into something more comfortable, sexual favors. A little help with a personal project.
"I can take orders. I just can't help if they come from stupid places." Backhanded compliment? Open-palmed insult. A promise, possibly meant to be some kind of reassurance. "You've never run a gig that shat out because of me. It'll be fun." Her thumb moves across the side of the pistol, short fingers shifting around her grasp, and there is the promising click of the gun coming off safety.
It's so too early to be doing business, but when you make your bed, you're supposed to lie in it. Like he told Kelly of his career choices. It's not personal. Logan flicks embering ash on the ground between them, nose wrinkling breathly before the cigarette comes up again, smoke sucked from filter with the pull in of cheeks against angular bone. Smoke comes out as thick and white as a ghost, nostrils and mouth, dispersing into the crisp air. This is John Logan thinking, drugging himself against his own temper, relishing the harsh chemical quality of the poison he takes in.
A puzzle piece is clicking into place, but not so perfectly that he feels the need to announce it, or tell Ghost about its location. "How much and by when?" sounds more like honest query then concession.
"Forty cc's," she says. A shit-ton for private use, too little to make an economically significant profit. Ghost's face is near to unreadable behind the mirrors worn over her eyes, but she'd have to have been suddenly and invisibly brain-damaged between then and now not to be wondering at the wheels spinning in Logan's head. "In two days. If you have any on hand right now, that could be stretched out to a few more." A beat.
"Please," could have sounded better if it had been preceded by only a comma, rather than a great whistling wind and the endearing lag and affect of an afterthought. "Thank you."
Trucks shift gears down below, early-morning grocery deliveries, punctuated with the rattarattaratta of shop fronts uncaging. Buses starting their first circuits, hissing gassily and grumbling the sound of rubber on asphalt. Au contraire, John Logan, New York City says, it's just the time to be starting business.
40 mL is enough for four decent trips. Worth petty change, for deals with high risks factors, and though he doesn't grimace, Logan can't help the lines at his eyes from forming their shadowed disdain. Back on Staten Island, it would be a fantastic little profit and dinner for a fortnight. Times change, of course.
Still.
The commodity isn't the drug, isn't getting high, but the implications from that itself, the spiraling information coming undone like loose film reels from a broken canister. His tongue runs along the backs of his teeth as he considers, then tips his head. "Two days," he agrees, because no, Logan isn't carrying, not here or back at his bachelor pad apartment, necessarily — or he hasn't been hoarding since Vincent Lazzaro who reeks of cop walked in on him on the loo. Had to get rid of the coke as well. :/
"Don't need the cash, or the handjob. Bring me what you know about Sarisa Kershner. Then we'll talk about that free intel."
"Maybe you should tell me a couple things you want to know about Sarisa Kershner," the woman suggests, "then I'll crap together what I can, and Refrain and further intel come based on my success with that." Not a wildly skewed deal, lacking secrets or wicked advantages in favor of a weird, mathematical symmetry that, to people other than Ghost or Logan, probably approximates fair.
For all the good that ever did people-other-than-Ghost-or-Logan. The girl steps past the Englishman, now, seemingly unbothered by the trickle of smoke from his mouth and moving easily with the easy assumption that they are getting close to done with business. She doesn't walk straight to the elevator, though, slowing to stop there, half-turn, gun carried in a small and indifferent hand, a world of expectation in the arch of her eyebrow.
The implications of that itself.
Everything as a response rarely gets you what you want, and weaknesses too imprecise and telling. Logan rolls his cigarette between fingers, unmoving from his lean against concrete ledge and tilting a look her way, tiny gun-wielding powersuit kitten that she is. "Her likes, her dislikes," is a wry response, possibly just as unhelpful as the answers he had considered. "What she's doing courting criminals, maybe. I think I might be pissing her off soon, and I'd like to go in armed.
"Make of that what you will. I presume you know the name, if you've any arrangements with Teo at all." He takes his weight off the ledge, back on two feet, but not to follow her out. "I'll trust I'll hear back soon."
Dismissal is manifest in the way Logan turns his back, then, maybe bravely, showing the black fabric that stretches shoulder to shoulder, handstitched silver making draconic patterns up his spine as he goes to slouch and consider the morning city stretching into horizon and a river that glistens like oil.
Hussies of New York City rejoice. The ghost does not shoot Logan in the back, or the back of his head, or anywhere else! She puts the gun away, actually, smoothing it back into the broad black back holster webbed around her tiny waist. "Sure," she says. "I'll see what I can do. A few sources come to mind." While she's being reassuring, professional, money— or at least a commodified intelligence equivalent where her mouth is.
She purses it sourly the next moment, a severe line below the sumptuous color of her shades. Seriously considers taking the turn of his back as an insult, but the urge is fleeting, rootless and blooms to nothing, doesn't sting or invoke prideful reflex like it might have once. She doesn't punch him in the kidney in belated vengeance. She does, however, slap him across the right ass-cheek, dismissing him like a pretty, silly secretary despite that his posturing had intended her the same. "La'ahs," she offers, mocking his accent. It's punctuated by the click of her heels as she leaves.
From: moc.xx|xx#moc.xx|xx
To: moc.xx|alipA.k#moc.xx|alipA.k
Hello Hana,
It's me again. Teo from the future. Yes, the Institute has produced two of us, and one of them is who you remember earliest. The third is still out there somewhere, along with a few of my personal effects, unless they've been destroyed. Good shit.
I would like you to know that Sarisa Kershner has been going around 'courting' criminals, possibly Evolved ones, and probably at least in part for the blackmail value. Knowing that the Ferry doesn't exactly discriminate between people with legal or illegal professions, it could be a good idea to put word out about the government's little psychometer General. She has recently been in contact with John Logan. I've given the heads-up to anyone who I remember might have had recent contact with him, but I'll bring the wider notifications to you, or Eileen when I see her tomorrow.
Thanks.
Teo.