Sid Chavez
If you’ve been in one independently-owned music store on the west coast, you’ve been in this one: it’s mostly filled with guitars and amps, it smells like wax and sheet music, and the employees are just about all functioning pretty much primarily thanks to the assistance of various stimulants of questionable legality. Most of them are in their 30s, which means that for a change, Sid is not the oldest person in the room.
It’s one of the benefits of being around mortals, truth be told, but given that the only thing separating him from mortals, in the eyes of those who aren’t, is the fact that he doesn’t either run, clam up, or otherwise fear for his life when One Of Them walks into the store.
By some bizarre twist of fate, Sid isn’t hiding in the back room this afternoon. He isn’t out here to chat, necessarily, but he had to come out to pluck another package of strings off the shelf and he hasn’t yet gotten into the habit of yelling at one of the clerks to do it for him. So, he graces the world with his presence.
The weather this afternoon is warm enough that he isn’t wearing a jacket indoors, and since he’s not at home in his basement his Slayer t-shirt actually has sleeves on it. Everything he has on is black, besides his belt, which is brown. He has a ridiculous number of leather straps on both of his wrists, and the dyed-blue patch in his hair is fading to reveal the fact that the strands are shock-white and not chemically bleached.
As Rory enters the shop, he’s moving across the room like Bigfoot, looking bored as hell.
Rory
He’d told her to stop into this shop, that they might need help. She, being the nice obedient type, intends to do just that. What Sid might fight surprising is that she’s got a guitar strapped to her back, as well, since he’s never seen her with it, and she doesn’t really seem the type to play… or maybe she does. She really doesn’t have much of a ‘type’ to normal folks, unless you count ‘scary as fuck’ as a type.
The moon is darkening at night, which means she’s not quite as scary as usual, though the fire of Rage still burns deep inside her, so much so that some might expect to see the heat rising from her freckled skin – of which she’s showing a bit more of than usual as she’s wearing a tank top instead of her tattered t-shirt. Her jeans are nice too, and she’s cleaned up her shoes, and tried to tame her curls which is a completely hopeless task.
She ducks into the shop, trying to do so quietly, unobtrusively. She’s shy, so very shy, and taking this step has a lot to do with the fact Sid didn’t really make fun of her speech patterns, and offered to help.
He looks bored as hell, she looks like a redheaded nervous wreck, but she summons up a little smile for him as she shifts the guitar case strap along her torso nervously… “Hi.”
Sid Chavez
Sid actually does a double take when he realizes that not only is it her, but she’s spoken to him first.
“Oh, shit, you made it.”
If he notices how nervous she is, he doesn’t comment on it. Before he begins talking, he glances around the floor to see who’s milling about. The cashier is flipping through a magazine, and one of the sales associates is off in the corner helping a teenage girl in punk attire pick out an amplifier, so Sid takes one lunging step to the side to swipe the strings he needs off of the rack and tosses them into his other hand.
It has to unnerve her, a little, that he can look her in the face as he’s having this conversation and not quaver or stammer and there isn’t a trace of animal Rage in him. There is absolutely nothing abnormal about him, at all, truth be told, except for this is the first time she’s seeing him without a jacket on. The bands about his wrists don’t do anything to hide the fact that he has dozens of fading track marks on his inner elbows and long lines of scar tissue tracing the lengths of his forearms. Were not for the fact that he has gotten a good deal of sun recently they wouldn’t be noticeable.
“So, were you looking to like, do whatever it is they do out here all day, or did you want to be back in the shop? Because people break shit all the time, it’s insane.”
Rory
It’s unnerving, a little. But she has seen kinfolk that can handle her rage, even those without a speck of breeding, but they are few and far between. She doesn’t know what Sid is, or why he even talks to her, but truth be told? She feels that way about everyone, every single day.
She chews her lower lip, absently, and then her eyes widen as he suggests she work out here and she shakes her head no so quickly and decisively that her curls bounce and one catches on her nose, leading her to lift fragile looking fingers to slide it back into place again. She points to the back and offers him that tiny little smile again. “Shop.”
Definitely.
Sid Chavez
He doesn’t reek of pot smoke, but it’s entirely possible that he’s just so laid back that it takes a good deal of agitation to get him excited about anything. They’re in San Francisco; the chances of Rory running into anyone who finds cannabis to be abhorrent is practically zero, yet there are those who don’t partake for whatever reason or another.
“Alright, rad,” he says, and turns to call across the room to the sales clerk. “Yo, Daniel!”
“Yeah, what!” the other man calls back.
Daniel looks as though he’s about Sid’s age, but he has not lived nearly as hard, it seems; he is even taller, much ganglier, and speaks with a British accent.
“This is Rory, I’m taking her in the back.”
“You’re filthy,” Daniel says, without malice.
“I didn’t hear any complaints when I took your mom back there last weekend.”
“Filthy.”
So, off they go, with the cashier not even bothering to look up from her magazine. She does press closer to the counter, a shiver taking hold of her when Rory passes by, but some sense of self-preservation tells her not to look up until they’ve gone; Sid, though, takes it in without comment, at least not until they’ve gone down a narrow hallway.
“You wash your hair with virgin blood or something?” he asks, without sounding invested in the response. “Why’s everybody do that shit when you’re around?”
Rory
She blinks as Sid says soemthing about taking her back and taking someone’s mom and she tips her head slightly – until it occurs to her what they mean in their teasing and her eyes widen and.. right on cue – she blushes. Bright red flushes her skin, washing across her cheeks as she ducks her head to hide it, seeping under her tank top. It’s not hard to imagine at all that in certain circumstances that blush covers her pale skin in it’s entirety….
She doesn’t notice the cashier’s reaction other than in passing. She’s too used to it – everyone… well, most everyone… does it. She wrinkles her nose at the suggestion she washes with virgin blood, and shrugs her thin shoulders, restlessly. “Knon’t dow…” which isn’t entirely true, of course. “I just make people nervous.”
He’s not invested in the response, or so it sounds, so maybe he won’t ask more… and she won’t have to decide if she should tell him she could eat his face off before he blinks if she were of a mind to do so. He’s not scared of her, and that’s novel enough to appreciate.
Sid Chavez
They end up in the last room on the right, and Sid flicks on a light to reveal the work room. It is not terribly loud, but it has everything in it that one needs in order to fix instruments that the average consumer destroys during the course of several hundred sessions. What she sees when she walks in is a kick drum in the process of having its brakes repaired.
It’s clear that he’s only been in here for a few weeks. There are not very many distractions; he does not have cigarette packets or lighters lying around, there are no posters tacked up, yet there is a worn ghetto blaster parked on a high shelf.
“You’re not going to skin me and wear my flesh out of here, are you?”
It’s a rhetorical question.
“Well, this is where they’d park you. They’re not really advertising for anyone… I don’t know how much experience you’ve got but, you know, it’s like a lot of other shit, you start as an apprentice and work your way up.” He coughs into the crook of his elbow. “Most of the shit we do is just routine repairs, which is pretty easy, but then you get people who want their guitars modded or they need, like, a violin restrung or whatever, and I don’t know what the hell their last guy was doing but they got a fuckin’ backorder and if I don’t want to end up working eighty hours a week, you know, could use the help.”
A beat.
“Do you have any experience?”
Rory
She chews her lower lip as she looks around – and when he asks her if she’s going to skin him – rhethorically – she shoots him a little look and shrugs. “Tot noday.” Aww. How cute. She’s a tease, too…
She moves to the work table and she slides her hands over it. Her’s at home is better, but then again – Adara paid a lot for it and she picked it out specifically for her needs. She nods that she understands the need to work up, and routine repairs…
As for experience.. she wrinkles her nose, slightly. “Sortof?” She hesitates a minute, and then, admits. “I tinker. thix fings. Anything. I…. understand how thinks to gotether, you know?” An innate talent, an idiot savant.. or simply someone who understands how things work on a level she can’t even articulate properly.
As for something musical… she grins a little, proudly. “Working on a gurdy hurdy I found at a yunk jard… is gonna be beautiful…”
Sid Chavez
Her retort has a half-smile coming across Sid’s face, as though he doesn’t have the energy to display that he was actually tickled to hear that she has a sense of humor. As she traipses further into the work room, the tall man crosses his arms over his torso and leans against the door frame. For a moment he just watches her, sees how she runs her hands over surface of the dusty work table, but then they get down to brass tacks.
She sort of has experience. She tinkers. Sid chews on his lower lip, thoughtful, as though he’s attempting to piece together the effect she has on other people and her appearance in his life more than once the last several weeks.
It doesn’t help that he’s letting himself Forget, that he’s being left with the sensibilities and the spine of a Grump but with the memories of a human. There is no fear or wariness in the way he looks at her, yet he clearly knows enough not to welcome her with open arms, damning the torpedos all the way.
“The fuck,” he asks, coming alive now. “You found a wheel fiddle in a junk yard?” It’s an attempt at translating, perhaps, because suddenly he’s come alive. “What is wrong with these people, who throws out wheel fiddles?” Calm down, Sid. “You ever fix one of those before?”
Rory
He comes alive, and she ducks her head, shyly before she nods, her curls bouncing vigorously with the movement. What’s wrong with these people – who throws out a wheel fiddle? “I know!” She considered bringing it with her, but she didn’t want to lug it around just yet, not until she gets it in better condition.
Has she fixed one before? She shakes her head no, but follows it with a shrug of her skinny shoulders. She’s really too thin – too pale – too warm to be real. But real she is, and her presence swallows up the air in the room enough so that while he’s not afraid, he’s not trying to cuddle her either.
“No, but it’s hot nard.” Well, to HER it isn’t.
Sid Chavez
I know! Rory says, and Sid holds out both scarred, bracelet-adorned arms as if to welcome her surprise.
Ah, the artisans of the world. They are like any other breed of nerd out there, their interests so esoteric that their acquaintances simply nod their heads and smile when they go off on tangents. His excitement is not so much short-lived as it is quickly reduced from a boil to a simmer, and he pushes his unadorned hands into the hip pockets of his jeans.
This ethereal quality of hers has to be what drew the man to her in the first place, but no one ever looks at him and believes there to be the soul of a fae hijacking his body. It would make sense, though, wouldn’t it; it’s entirely possible he’s known her ancestors, could tell her about encounters he’s had with spirits in her lineage, but no, no no, he’s letting himself Forget. All he has are his human memories, and those are so far back that they’ve been rendered irrelevant.
“Where have you been all my life?” he asks, without expecting an answer, and hikes himself off the door frame. “Alright, uh… how soon are you available?”
Rory
He doesn’t expect an answer – but he gets one.
“Chicago.”
After all, Rory’s been well trained [tortured] into automatically and honestly answering just about anything put to her in question form. especially when she’s distracted, and she is now because she’s seen some little gadget on the table that she’s turning over in her hands. She may not know exactly what it is, but she knows that she can fix it. Sometimes life really is that simple.
Then she looks up at him, and offers that shy little grin again. “Now?”
Sid Chavez
Chicago.
Huh, his face transmits, his lower lip jutting out a bit as he digests this. That’s the extent of it though; he quickly walks it off and poses his next question, met with that tiny grin of hers.
“Well, shit,” he says, flashing a smile that might, perhaps, illustrate why it is he doesn’t smile all that often. Despite the fact that he’s as old as he is and can still be described as ‘babyfaced,’ he has teeth that have not been well-cared for. They haven’t been white likely since before he started smoking or shooting heroin or whatever it is that he did when he was younger, though they’re not rotting out of his head.
It takes a special breed of weirdo to find this man attractive.
“Right on. I mentioned that it’s, like, an apprenticeship, at first, right? So not so much with the paycheck until you, you know… show me you aren’t gonna break anything?”
Rory
Well, as far as weirdo’s go, Rory is certainly a special type. She just also has a really hot girlfriend waiting for her at home, and a curious disconnect with the idea that her body might be found sexually attractive by anyone – even said hot girlfriend. Not to say she’s frigid by any means. She just simply doesn’t think that way until in the moment, and even then, she realizes it’s forbidden. Such is the life of a mule.
A very pretty one, but a mule none the less.
He had mentioned, and she nods, with that same little grin. She’s well used to having to prove herself. At least in THIS task, she’s confident she’ll prove herself worthy of his trust in no time. “Ok.” Said hot girlfriend has cash, after all. She can wow him for a whle before demanding any payment.
especially as she admits… “I worked a ceair rircuit in Chicago for food.” She works well – and, apparently, cheap.
Sid Chavez
“I have no idea what you just said,” he tells her. He’s blunt, but he seems to give enough of a shit about what’s coming out of her mouth that he doesn’t just smile and nod when she speaks. “Listen, let me go tell Daniel what’s up and then I’ll, you know…”
Christ, he hasn’t had to train somebody in ages, if the look of fleeting confusion upon his face is any indication.
“Show you where everything is. Wait here.”
And he ducks out of the work shop, either trusting her enough to not run off with anything or trusting that someone will notice if she makes the attempt.
Rory
She wrinkles her nose, and blushes, dipping her head briefly. She rubs the side of her nose, absently, and then shrugs. “Rid depairs for food in Chicago.” She tries one more time… just so he knows that she isn’t in it for the money alone – she’ll work hard regardless.
Then, he takes off to go tell Daniel, and she allows herself a pleased little smile as she un-slings her guitar, and sits it on the floor and lets it lean against the work table. Her work table. when he comes back, she’s already going through the tools there, getting dusty as she examines the nooks and crannies, waiting patiently for his tour.
He hasn’t trained anyone in a long time – and she’s never been trained. This will either be glorious… or a disaster in the making. Only time will tell…
Sid Chavez
[LE FADE!]