Participants:
| Scene Title | This Won't Happen Again |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | What starts as an impromptu band meeting turns into a potential rescue mission after Sable receives an unusual text message. |
| Date | July 11, 2010 |
Gun Hill: Quinn's Flat
"You know, I can't believe I haven't shown this to you yet, Magnes, I was right proud of it…" In fact, Quinn couldn't remember if she'd even had Magnes in her flat yet, period, something which made her feel kind of bad. …or if Sable had really seen yet. How terrible of her. "But it's really cool, I promise you." "Lady Stardust" by Lisa Miskovsky clearly plays from the headphones around her neck, Quinn's arms held out for balance as she practically bounds through her common room, pointing to a door surrounded by tour posters. "Come on! It took a right bit of work t' get this set up, but I think you guys'll appreciate it!" And with that, she vanishes into the room, expectant of the others to follow her inside.
Stepping in reveals that what should be another bedroom has been converted into a makeshift music room and studio in the making. On the east wall rests her piano, synthesizer on one side, keyboard propped up against the wall beside it, and two guitars, one electric one acoustic, and a bass on the other. The far wall sits a computer, a studio quality mic on a stand adjacent, and the west wall has a digital console and several turntables - Quinn's DJ equipment. In the centre of her room sits a comfortable looking chair, three violin cases resting in the seat. Foam lines the walls, acting as soundproofing, among another, unseen measures.
"This is absolutely amazing." Magnes' eyes are wide as he looks around, touching instruments and plucking a few strings. "I converted my extra room into some work space." He's wearing a black shirt that has silvery sequins on it spelling Dazzler, some jeans, and a pair of black shoes. "You know, I've been thinking about the band a lot, and, as we play places, are we just gonna have a new persona for each place?"
Sable's running late, for whatever goddamn reason considering what exactly is she ever doing when she's in Gun Hill besides bothering people by playing music too loud? And now that Quinn's got this new place… her only real function may soon be rendered obsolete, leaving her with no role at all - the tenement creep position has already been filled by one Eric Doyle, and a girl of her stature is more laughable than uncomfortable. Still, this is a chance to get the whole band together in a practice space, so Sable arrives from running down the hallway, her electric guitar in hand. She skids to a halt outside Quinn's apartment door and barges in, looking around. There! She dodges over to the doorway of the new space. …dang. She hasn't seen it fully decked out.
"Jesus Mary 'n' Joseph, Quinngirl…" she says, which will serve as her 'hello', "How th' fuck d' y' manage t' pull this sorta thing off. I have a hard 'nuff time brushin' m' choppers twice a fuckin' day."
“I’ve been workin’ on it ever since I moved in, got the foam right after I moved in, an’ the instruments are all from storage or my old flat,” Quinn says very matter of factly. “It’s not really set up for recordin’ or anything yet, but I’m hoping before too long…” Her own eyes survey across the room, despite the fact that she comes in here every day. “But I figure we’ve got everything we need hear for practice an’ everything.” Turning to Magnes, she tilts her head. “No, I don’t think so. We should probably actually settle on a name and all that soon. I think I got a name of another place we could play once we get some stuff written, though.”
"Serpentera!" Magnes enthusiastically suggests, a suggestion Sable has heard before. He walks back out to the living room and grabs his keyboard bag and guitar, heading back into the studio to start unzipping and getting things set up. "Or maybe we can be, like… the Rock Lantern Corps."
Yeah, yeah, Sable has heard that name before. Robot dragon that eats planets, or maybe robot planet that eats dragons, or maybe planet of robot eating dragons… hard to keep all this crap straight. "That's subject t', like, a proper band meetin' 'n' all, which we gotta organize 'n'," she stops for a beat, "Well, we're all here, ain't we? Informal fuckin' session, perhaps? I've got ideas in th' old brainbox, dig? Thinkin' big, as I tend t'." Though bigger than something that can eat planetoids? Unlikely.
“…Serpentera?” Quinn says with a bit of a laugh, a hand over mouth. “That sounds like a bad hair metal band or something. Or a decent progressive metal band. I can’t say I’m a huge fan, but we’ll see.” She nods, picking up the three violin cases and setting two them over with her DJ equipment. Popping open teh third one, she pulls out her white electric guitar and plops down in the chair in the middle of room, she strums, a grin on her face. “What’ya got, Sable?”
Sable rubs her brow. "Magnes, boy, I ain't never gonna fault yer enthusiasm," she says, "But we gotta think market share, dig? We gotta thing broader fuckin' message, reachin' out t' the people 'n' fillin' our venues," she wrinkles her nose, "Yer only half right, dig? We need t' speak t' the times. 'n' I dig that we all got our influences, so this is my idea, like. We-" but it turns out this will have to wait. Sable's phone chirps up, informing her she has a text message. "Uh… one sec, y'all. Hold that thought…" She slips her hand into her cargo pants pocket and extracts her phone, frowning at the display. Her shoulders hunch somewhat, a pointless affectation towards privacy, and starts reading. Her eyes skip up to Magnes, back to the message, then back to Magnes. She lifts a finger, begging a minute, then lets herr thumbs work at the phone, tapping a reply to whatever message was sent her.
At the interruption, Quinn quirks an eyebrow, tilting her head at Sable. “Somethin’ up?” She’s not sure she’s ever actually seen sable get a text message, much less actually answer one. A monumental occasion this must be indeed. Hand runs down her violin, looking up at Magnes. “We need something a little more… I don’t want t’ say fitting, but someone a little less out there. No offense.”
Sable's phone chirps again, and this time her reaction is far beyond a simple frown. Thunder itself gathers on her brow. "Magnes," she says, her tone… strange. Clipped. Icy cold. Razor sharp. "Yer girl's in some trouble." Succinct enough. "That motherfucker," the curse is real curse, dripping with venom. "Here," she tosses him the cellphone, "Yer the hero. Give us a plan." There's something unfamiliar in Sable's voice, in the way she speaks. Not the usual flowing ramble, but short, purposeful, punching statements. And in her face, too. There's a twitch in her jaw.
The two most recent messages on the phone are as follows: 'Magnes was in an accident, Old Madison Street. Going there now. Meet me at the hospital please? Don't know how bad off he is…' and 'trap hes here outsde work w knife cantget away'. Both are from Elaine. Or, rather, from Elaine's phone.
"We're going to my apartment." Magnes says as he tosses the phone back to Sable, and heads out as soon as he says it. He doesn't wait for the others, he heads right up and leaves his door unlocked for them. He stays in his room for about a minute before he comes out loading one of his Company guns, then holstering it to a strap on his ankle, under his pants, then slides a few glass capsules into his pocket and reaches under his couch pillow for a butterfly knife. "Anyone need a weapon?" he asks with his back turned, in case they chose to follow him up.
“I, um-“ Quinn looks rather confused as Magnes takes, off, following after him - and when he asks about weapons, her eyes widen, both in what she believes to be realization, and in horror. “I- Jesus feckin’ Christ, Magnes, you can’t be serious,” she intones disbelievingly. Granted, she doesn’t know there’s a knife involved, but even then! “I, um…” She back a bit back, back towards the door, a distinctly uneasy expression on her face.
"Gimme a blade," Sable says, without what appears to be a second thought. She's staying in Magnes orbit. He's in charge, she'll ceded that to him, but like hell is she going to be left out. Sable looks over her shoulder at Quinn, "Quinngirl, y' don't have t' come 'r nothin', arright? You c'n hold down th' fort, let people know shit went down if we don't come back right quick, dig?" She glances to Magnes, double checking that these are good instructions. That same tension remains in her jaw, and has spread to her shoulders, down her arms, to her hands, which form tight fists.
"Here." Magnes hands off the butterfly knife to her, then heads into his room and comes out with a combat knife and slips it into a strap under his shirt. After that, he grabs two ammo cartridges from under the kitchen sink and slips those on to his ankles as well. "Let's go. The weapons are just a precaution. I don't usually use guns, but code of ethics be damned when someone's screwing with my girlfriend. Let's go. You don't have to bring anything if you don't want to, Quinn, I'll make sure you're safe." He opens the door and starts heading to the stairs, very dutiful with his brows furrowed quite seriously. "Someone lock the door."
Quinn gulps audibly, hands crossing around her midsection, and her uneasiness is more than evident. “Jesus, Magnes, I can understand wanting to protect her, but….” Her eyes close for a moment, and she looks over to Sable. “No. I’m coming.” She says it like there’s no question in her voice. Her uneasiness is not with the situation, but rather with the fact that Magnes is getting strapped like he’s about to walk into a John Woo movie.
Sable takes a moment to get acquainted with the weapon. She even tests the blade against her arm, shaving off a patch of fine arm hair. She blows it free of the blade. Normally, at this moment, she'd grin. It would be her stylistic choice. No smile of any kind is forthcoming. She flicks the blade back into its handles and grips it in her hand, talismanic. She holds the door for Quinn, and then does as Magnes asks, flicking the lock before securing the door.
When they've all headed downstairs and out of the building, he's opened the doors of his black 1967 Impala, slamming the door of the driver's side. "Sable in front." he says for whatever reason, reving the engine with his game face on. "Fucker." he mutters under his breath.
Quinn gulps audibly, following behind the others. There’s no reluctance or regret as she slides into the backseat, though she does stare out the window behind Magnes with a worried expression, silent the entire trip.
Sable takes shotgun. She'd take an actual shotgun if proffered. Hillbilly hellraiser, on the warpath. Her yellow eyes stay on the road the whole time, each rolling foot gained increasing the thunderstorm charge that's building in her frame.
Magnes was trained by the NYPD to drive, he never actually went through the whole DMV thing, so he knows the speed limit, and how to stay on the very edge of exceeding it as he cuts through lots of small streets to get to where they're going. He knows the city, damned near most of the landscape, so it doesn't take long for them to turn the corner of Elaine's job after around twenty or so minutes. "Quinn, you stay in the car until I say it's safe, Sable, you stay behind me."
The area outside of the building where Elaine works is fairly ordinary at the moment. Elaine, nor her stalker, appear to be in sight. The steps outside of the building lead to the street, a bench a little further down, there's even a hot dog vendor selling his wares across the street. It seems fairly tranquil, to those who aren't looking closely. To the perceptive, however, those looking very carefully, a red spatter of blood is visible on the bench, fresh, but not a terribly large mark. Further down the sidewalk away from the bench, a smaller spatter, more like a tiny drip. Someone fled in that direction. Someone bleeding.
“Magnes, I’m not stayin’ in the car…” she mutters, even as she pulls on the handle. She should, and she was pretty sure certain people wouldn’t bee too happy about her following Magnes into trouble, but if something had happened to Elaine, she certainly wasn’t going to sit in a car and wait, for the exact same reason she couldn’t sit at home and wait – a close friend of hers probably needed her help, and she’d rather walk into danger than do nothing about it.
When she steps out, hand goes over her eyes to shield out the sun, scanning the area. No, she can’t see Elaine anywhere…
Sable says absolutely nothing. She disembarks from the car and prepares to follow after Magnes, ready following his instructions to a T. It's easy to tell that her 'reserve' is less self restraint and more a lack of any meaningful way to express the energy that has possessed her in any useful way, save what Magnes dictates. There is enough reason in her, and enough seriousness, for her to realize that this is way outside of her range of experience. She is, at this moment, open to new experiences. Carving someone up, for example, would be very new indeed.
Magnes looks around for a while, and spots the blood on the bench. He increases gravity around him slightly, just to see if the blood moves, and seeing that it's fresh, he starts following the trail. "That better not be her blood. If he laid one finger on her, I'm breaking every rib in his body."
“Blood?” Quinn’s expression dips dramatically at that, arms again wrapped around her midsection as she follows behind Magnes. Now she is kind of nervous. But she’s also more focused. And a little pissed off, when she comes up to where Magnes is, and sees what he sus. “Holy Mother of the feckin Lord, this guy is going to get it if I see him,” she intones in an incredibly unusually dark tone for her. Not that she knows how he’s going to get it, but goddamn it he is.
Sable, not to be outdone, states in a flat, dead voice. "You don't kill 'im, boy, I will.
"Elaine!" Magnes suddenly calls out loudly, hoping he might get some response, and even raises a hand to shift the couch into the air with his ability. He's trying everything he can, and it's obvious he's starting to get a little stir crazy. "Fuck, fuck!"
"Magnes!"
Behind the dumpster, sitting low in the angle formed between green metal and red brick, is Elaine. Hearing the familiar voice of her boyfriend, her first reaction is to get up, but the movement of the gash in her leg only causes a hiss of pain to escape her lips. "Here!" She calls. She's close. They can hear her behind the dumpster. Upon spotting her, they'd notice more red on Elaine than usual. Her right arm is mostly limp, her left holding onto it and putting pressure on the gash on her right arm, thankfully not terribly close to her wrist. Her leg, too, is bloodied, a gash torn into the jeans and subsequent skin underneath.
Magnes tosses the couch in the air away, then grabs the dumpster and pushes it to the side, crouching down to take in the gashes with wide eyes. "What did he do to you? I swear to god, I'll…" He tries to calm down, taking deep breaths, then rips one of his sleeves off to start tying it around her arm.
Having heard Elaine as well, Quinn is right behind Magnes, and when she finally sees Elaine, she does a double take, a look of shock on her face. “Holy fucking hell,” she says quietly, worriedly. She crouches as well, though a bit away as to stay out of Magnes’ way. Regardless, however, she does reach out put a hand on Elaine’s left shoulder, trying to catch her gaze. “Lord, Elaine, we’re here now, don’t worry…” The calmness she puts in her voice is surpriising, considering her own hand is shaking.
Sable's frozen affect reaches cold snap level upon seeing the state Elaine's in, then immediately begins to thaw. The one she needs that chill for is not here. The one she needs to be warm for is. She lets the knife slip from her grasp, into her pocket, and she crouches down next to Elaine, joining the gathering. She looks green, to be honest, and paler than usual where she's not green, but she avoids looking completely stricken. "Oh… darlin'…" she breathes. She takes a sharp intake of breath, then lets it out. "Anythin' I can do?" this is asked of Magnes, though her eyes don't leave Elaine.
Elaine grits her teeth as he reaches to tie the cloth around her arm. "C-Careful, he crushed that hand a bit… haven't tried moving it cause it hurt so bad, but I don't think it's broken…" Her initial reaction to seeing Magnes is utter relief, the expression of fear changing as she sees her salvation. Then there's Quinn's voice, her eyes flickering over to the Irish woman. "Quinn… you came too?" Comfort shows on her face, seeming just a little more at ease. And then there's Sable, and the trio of those Elaine really trusts is once again present. She looks as okay as she can be considering, so she begins to explain a little. "Tried to trick me into thinking you were hurt, Magnes, someone called me said there was an accident and that I needed to be there, they were taking you to the hospital. So I left the building and he was right there and he grabbed my arm. Crushed my hand almost the entire time and then I found out he had a knife… I was lucky that Sable texted when she did." Her eyes flicker back to the yellow-eyed girl, grateful. "He let me text back, thankfully… told him you'd worry if I didn't answer… and I tried to stall him, I was afraid of where we were going to go if he started walking us somewhere. I didn't know where he'd take me. He was mad, though, pissed off at me for everything and he said he'd teach me never to leave again. I thought he was going to just make threats with the knife but then he just fucking cut my arm, right there… so I kicked him, and ran, but he got me in the leg. I hid back here because I didn't know if he was following me and it hurts like hell to try and run further on this thing." She stares at her leg, letting out a breath.
"I'm gonna find him, I'll call every mercenary, secret agent, government person, cop, terrorist and pizza boy that I know, I will find him." Magnes sounds damned serious, ripping his other sleeve off and handing it to Sable, turning his shirt into a tanktop. "Wrap that around the leg wound, tightly, even if it hurts her. You alright, Elaine? Other than the cuts."
For Quinn’s part, she’s mostly quiet, simply giving Elaine a comforting hand on her shoulder, occasionally rubbing gently on her shoulder and arm, before finally just plopping down on the ground next to her. A look up to Magnes, and then over to Elaine. “I swear, if her did anything else to you…” she sounds momentarily fierce, again something unusual for her. “We’re not going t’ let him do this again, Elaine. I know I’m certainly not. Let me know when you work from now on, either Magnes or I’s takin’ you to and from work, an’ anywhere else we need to, until this is behind us.”
Sable does as she's bidden, binding Elaine's wound. Maybe she's bad with blood, though that would seem odd coming from her, but Sable looks in a bad, bad way. Like she might be sick. Her eyes have a hollow, tired look all of a sudden, as if shadows had formed under them in a matter of minutes only. She works in silence, crisis apparently working a miraculous act of taciturnity upon her.
Elaine's eyes flicker to Magnes. "Just be careful. If he knows where I work he might know where we live, too." Ordinarily she might have told him all his contacts would be excessive, but the fact that she doesn't is telling on the fact that she's not comfortable. She nods to Quinn, reaching up with her good arm to pat Quinn's hand. "It's okay. I promise everyone that nothing else happened. Other than him scaring me with what he said, he didn't do anything else." She watches Sable as her leg is bound, and she moves her free hand, coming to let it rest lightly on Sable's head, a sort of affectionate pet. "You okay, Sable? I'm okay."
I'm never letting anything like this happen to you again, I won't lose someone else…" Magnes closes his eyes, then just stands up and points Quinn to the bandage on Elaine's arm. "I need a moment, then I'm gonna start the car. We're going home and I'll make dinner."
Quinn watches Magnes for a moment, and when she’s directed to the bandage, she gives Elaine’s good hand a squeeze and sits up, tending to it. “Do you want us t’ stop at the hospital and get your hand checked out?” she asks, looking up at Elaine with earnest worry. “I really think we should, to be honest, if you’re havin’ trouble with it.” After a moment, she blinks, and gives Elaine a very loose, comforting hug. “Lord, I’m so glad you’re okay.”
Elaine shakes her head. "Not a big fan of hospitals. They remind me of only two things—death and babies, neither of which I want to think about at the moment. I'm pretty sure it's okay, don't think there's anything broken, it just hurts. Once I stop being a wuss I'll move it and see how it feels, I just kinda wanna leave it alone just in case." She watches Magnes with a little concern, but she doesn't protest. "Thank you, Magnes." She offers him, even though she's not sure it'll help him much. She'll give him his moment. Her good hand remains on Sable's head, fingers stroking through hair. "I'm glad you guys came to help. I needed you."