[Drawn in Blood] It would be something of a lie whichever way one were to qualify the evening. The moon is growing dark overhead, and yet that does not mean that all within the Nation is calm. The human world does not pay attention to the moon with any semblance of closeness save for when it suits them to do so. When it’s full, it provides ample proof of the influence of extrinsic forces on human behavior. Every other night of the month, however, it’s simply there, sometimes visible, oftentimes occluded by cloud cover.
Tonight, there is nothing but an impenetrable blanket over the sky, rocketing the light back down to earth in a haze of pink that makes everything brighter than usual. Winter in northern cities is like walking through the Umbra, through a dream, through something otherworldly.
The man walking down the street is staring at the world around him as though it makes little sense. The sky is not dark and dotted with stars, wildlife audible in the distance, the lapping of a creek or the rustling of wind through the desert. It’s a typical tourist’s reaction to being in a metropolitan area for the first time, yet there are no towering buildings this far outside of downtown. They’re multistory, certainly, and historic, but it’s the ambience, the unnaturalness of the world around him that has him looking about in something akin to wonder.
He looks well into his twenties, his jaw covered in stubble and his hair cropped close to his head. Wearing black boots and cheap yet maintained denim jeans, he has only a thick zip-up sweatshirt to protect him from the cold. Blood from an exploded nose stains the front of it; blood from wiping his face stains the back of his left sleeve. His nose is no longer broken. It isn’t even bleeding.
As he walks, he checks a small white piece of paper. It’s a quick flick of his eyes, not a protracted examination: he does not know the neighborhood, does not trust what he’s heard about cities. These places are dangerous.
[Izzy Montoya] This place, these places, are most certainly dangerous. So much so that one might think women are cautioned to stay locked up inside, given tools to protect themselves with like pepper spray, and special whistles on their keys, and pampered and protected to the best of the Big MenFolk’s ability. Certainly such cautions exit, and just as certainly 90% of the women in Chicago are ignoring them.
Case in Point: One Detective Izzy Montoya. Fortunately, she does not have to rely on Mace.
And she doesn’t normally care, anyway. Something of a death wish, perhaps, or simply the effects of her job. She stands near her car, having just left the little restaurant/bar behind her, her head tipped out of the wind, hands cupped around the cigarette she’s lighting. Several things stand out about her – but the most, of course, is the purity of the blood she’d deny if she could. It sings through her, telling stories she’s not even heard herself. It makes strong features look fiercer, it makes her attractive in a way that mere mortals simply can’t understand.
That, however, is neither here nor there. It simply exists. As does the smoke she inhales deep into her lungs as she lifts her head and tips it back to watch the sky as she sighs a slow exhale.
“I’m gettin too old for this shit.” Muttered under her breath, before she lowers her gaze again, and starts to close the distance to her car.
[Drawn in Blood] She’s gettin’ too old for this shit.
Now, just looking at this guy, one can’t automatically assume that he is what he is. Without standing ten feet tall, muscles rippling and fur sprouting from places it would not belong on a human, he simply seems intense to most people. That he’s absolutely silent does not help; when he passes others people on the sidewalk he doesn’t say ‘Hello,’ and when he bumps into them accidentally, he does not mutter an apology. There is hardly anyone out this time of night.
Bars are closing down, kicking people out to go home. Corner stores, fast food restaurants, malls are all locked for the night. Churches are shut up fast. All the world truly has are hospitals and the rare twenty-four-hour convenience store scattered every mile or so. Lights are blaring in the darkness, beating it back even while they don’t manage to ever truly banish it, and occasionally, very very occasionally, a cruiser pulls out of a side street looking for vandals or muggers or rapists.
The man is tall. He eclipses Izzy easily, and though it’s cold as Hell he keeps his hood down. His hands don no gloves, and he has no hat on his head. He doesn’t smoke as he walks, doesn’t have anything in his hands other than that receipt, and until he actually walks past the detective as she’s on her way to her car, he doesn’t seem to pay too much attention to her.
Then the ferocity of her physical being asserts itself. The power of her blood calls out to him. The young man stops after several steps and turns, nostrils briefly flaring. If she hasn’t turned to keep him in her line of sight, he reaches out to tap her on the shoulder.
He doesn’t say anything; he just taps her.
[Izzy Montoya] Someone taps her.
Now, Izzy isn’t the nicest person on a good day. She’s often quick to anger, and even quicker to draw her gun. She will swing with a fist where other women would back away. She fights with her mouth where others are silent. She is loud, brash, foul-mouthed, guarded and intense.
She is also tired. Bone-weary, and exhausted.
So he taps her – and she spins toward him, her hand at the small of her back, the cigarette on the ground sputtering to an early death, and her eyes directly on his. Fingers curl around the butt of her gun, and she takes a breath.
Then another.
Then. “Don’t fuckin’ DO that, man. Unless you want to get shot!”
[Drawn in Blood] Heavy eyebrows lift in surprise when she… well, seems surprised. She whirls around, going for what he can only assume is a weapon, and while he steps back, receipt held in the fingers of his left hand but both of them lifting in a clear Don’t shoot! movement, he doesn’t articulate at all. Not a reassurance nor an exclamation leaves his throat, and he stares at her with eyes that are clearly blue in the light pouring from the sign nearby.
Now, he doesn’t seem as though he can’t hear, and that is why he chose not to talk. When she speaks, the harshness of her language has the tall Nordic-looking young man furrowing his brow in consternation. A threat of violence has him tilting his head away from her while his eyes remain in place, and he slowly, jerkily, lowers his hands.
Still, he doesn’t speak. A curious, if questioning, expression comes over his face, and he holds out what turns out to be a receipt to a cafe on the North Side occurring earlier this evening. On the back, glyphs have been scratched in pencil. On the front, though, near the bottom where white space has been left under a mocha purchase, is Kora’s name with an address, also in pencil. His finger taps the address a few times before she takes it; if she takes it.
If she looks at him, that questioning expression is still there.
[Izzy Montoya] She watches him, waiting. Watches as his hands go up, still watching as they go down. She watches the consternation drifts across his features, the way he looks curious, afterward. Then, her gaze drops to the paper, and back up again.
She straightens, and slides her hand away from the weapon at the small of her back, and begins to search for her cigarettes again, to replace the one she’d tossed when he’d touched her. As she does so, she looks down at the ticket again, and finally, as fingers of one hand close on her pack, the other takes the paper.
She recognizes the address and name at once, of course. She hands it back to him, and nods. “Yeah, I know it.” Just before she’s repeating the steps of lighting her second smoke in less than five minutes time.
[Drawn in Blood] Compared to some of the other Garou she’s met in her time here, he doesn’t seem as though he’s completely stupid. There is a light of intelligence in his eyes that doesn’t tend to come to those who are more interested in showing off or running off at the mouth than attempting to forge a genuine connection with another person, but it’s muted considerably by the fact that he cannot speak–or, perhaps, just will not; he doesn’t specify.
The kinswoman says yeah, she knows it, and then pauses to light a cigarette. For his Rage being as high as it is, he is not utterly mindless and impatient, or else he just doesn’t know the detective well enough to know how it is she deals not simply with the Nation but anyone who’s asking something of her.
Rather than indicating that he would like some indication of where to go at some point, or plant his hands on his hips to wait, or pointedly look into the distance to suggest that he’s asking because he has no idea where to go, the young man waits. Determining how old he is is no easy task. He is just short of grizzled, between the stubble on his face and the weathered quality of his skin, yet without opening his mouth and proving what sort of English he speaks, it’s difficult to determine what the personality buried beneath forced silence is like.
But: he does wait, silent, for her to light her cigarette. The entire time, his eyes are on her face, curious rather than impatient.
[Izzy Montoya] She lights it, and gets that second first drag, and exhales slowly. It’s almost visible, the way it works through her, not necessarily relaxing her, but at the very lest easing some of the tension, though this close, his rage is a harsh presence against her spine, tangled between her shoulder blades, traipsing under her skin.
So she inhales again, and then, after turning her head to the side to exhale, she meets his gaze dead on. She doesn’t shy away from the vibrant blue of his eyes, she doesn’t flinch when her eyes clash with his. She holds the look a moment, and then…
“Got a name?” Before she nods with a tip of her head, and starts walking, presumably in the direction of the church in question.
[Drawn in Blood] There are no bulges in the young man’s pockets to indicate that he is carrying anything other than that piece of paper with the Jarl’s name and the church’s address on it. He doesn’t appear to carry a billfold, or keys, or a flask. No cigarettes or lighter pad his jeans, or his sweatshirt. The cold, such as it is, has chapped at his cheeks thanks to the wind, but he is not shivering or attempting to cover his near-bare head or his naked hands.
He doesn’t ask for a cigarette, but neither does he duck out of the way of approaching streams of smoke, either. If it wanders past him, he lets it, without squinting or chuffing. The kinswoman meets his gaze, and rather than take it as an affront or even a challenge, one would think he’s just stepped into an alien world where the rules are opposite of what he would expect.
The young man cants his head, inquisitive, and then that question.
Does he have a name.
He nods a few times, and once they’ve gone a few feet, he chooses to use an unwashed car rather than the window that appears to belong to the kinswoman he startled as his canvas. With the finger of his left hand, he draws into the slush and salt caking a nearby Jetta:
John. Modi.
[Izzy Montoya] She watches this idly, having already figured he didn’t speak for a reason. She pauses while he writes and then reaches out to slide her hand and muss the Modi off the car with a nod.
“John. I’m Izzy. Kora and her’s are just down this way.” A beat. “Deaf too, or just Mute?”
She is a perceptive one, Izzy, even when she’s burned the candle at both ends so long there is no wax left, only the barest thread to which she’s hanging on…
[Drawn in Blood] The foreign word is pushed off the car’s window before anyone can wander past and wonder what it means. For all anyone would know it’s a surname, yet to someone of the Nation, or an enemy of the Nation, it would be enough of an identifier to track him down using supernatural means, Gifts whose intended purpose was not so insidious as to allow for the opposite sides of the war to come into contact unwillingly.
Pointed in the right direction, he has a street name and a number that will allow him to continue on without assistance. Izzy supplies her name, next, and asks him if he’s unable to hear as well as unable to speak. He has the sense to recognize that this causes profound difficulty in interacting with other people, yet his ability to express himself is limited for reasons having little–or everything–to do with why he can’t speak.
There is no scar on his throat that would offer up an explanation. It’s possible he’s taken a vow of silence. Some he’s met already have assumed this was how he was born, that it is a deformity and not a simple genetic mishap. He doesn’t offer up a concrete explanation. She asks, and he attempts to answer.
First he points to his ear with his left hand, offering a thumb’s up and lifted eyebrows that that is okay. A beat, a furrowed brow, and he points to his throat next. Still pointing, he shakes his head No.
[Izzy Montoya] She is watching him, meeting his gaze evenly, and watching the flicker of his thoughts cross his face in an easily discernible pattern. She lifts the cigarette to her lips, inhales, then exhales to the side, allowing the smoke to float away with the wind, instead of toward John.
she makes no assumptions. She simply asked for clarification. “alright. Just making sure you don’t have to fuckin read my lips or some shit.” She then lifts a hand and points in the direction that will take him to the church. “Two blocks that way, hang a right, and go about halfway down. It’s a church – you can’t miss it.”
She looks along the street, mostly deserted at this hour, and then back to him – just as her phone rings. She slips it from her pocket, checks the number, and groans. She thumbs it on, then lifts it to her ear. “Montoya. Hang on.”
She pulls the phone down, and then with a nod, says again. “Can’t miss it. I’d offer a ride, but I’ve got to take this – and I’ve a feeling it means I’m headed back to work.”
She does give him a chance to ask for clearer directions if he needs it, then, afterward, she turns on a heel, lifts the phone back to her ear, and growls into the phone as long strides carry her back to her car… “This had better be good…”