[Sam Modine] ((Okay, I have a thing and am gonna have to call it. Assume Sam plays a game with Cast, gets whupped upon, says hello to Callie and congratulates Marrick, and waves to everyone on his way out. Thanks for the RP, however short!!))
[Casts] The redhaired girl sets herself down without saying anything to anyone, the light-haired kinswoman lets herself hover about the threshold between the hallway that had failed to keep her secrets and the common room where everyone is pretending not to have heard her, and after a rousing if rather quick and silent game of pool, the two combatants introduce themselves.
Sam Modine; Mjollnir’s Heart.
Irene Ferraro; Casts The First Stone. Nobody calls her ‘Irene.’
[Marrick] And, for her part, she seemed content to watch the game. Something about her motions were feral. She said her words to Sam [“Thanks, hey, I gotta talk to you sometime.”] and then was more than content to look at the game at hand.
And then? Then she realized that this was almost awkward. A bunch of garou standing around, staring intently at the pool table.
The game went on in silence, and the Black Fury seemed perched and content to watch the game for now. Three balls in, the started to head downstairs. A nod to the female- “You want anything while I’m down?”
If the answer was yes, she retrieved food. If it was no? Well, she came up with a sandwich anyway and a glass of milk.
[Gabriella Bellamonte] Sam had somewhere to be, it seemed. Gabbie didn’t stop him, but did mention that she had some words for him when he got a chance. Marrick did the same. Apparently Sam Modine was a wanted man these days.
Marrick, the other familiar face for which she still didn’t have a name, disappeared downstairs, leaving Gabbie alone with a couple of strangers. She pressed her lips together, showing discomfort, and idled her way past the pool tables and to the bookshelf.
Perhaps there was something worth reading here? It never hurt to try new things, and she didn’t think any of the books provided would be in her usual genres of choice.
[Callie] *Once all the marshmallows have gone, the chocolate flakes melted and the cream dispersed into what now appears like an ordinary mug of chocolate, Callie slides off the chair and closes in on the pool table to watch the last few turns of the game. It didn’t take long, and the guy was soon making his retreat from the common room. She nods to his muttered hello, and downs the last few mouthfuls from her mug, not to waste the heat.* so . . is everyone always this chatty here?
[Casts] [Sorry, had to have SRS DISCUSSION with father, I’m typing now.]
[Casts] The entire time that Sam and Casts are playing their game there isn’t much background discussion behind them. It doesn’t last long, and it’s made easier by the fact that there isn’t a smattering of inane chatter to block out, but when it’s over and the nameless redhead and the nameless blonde and the nameless wisp of a thing are milling about the common room, Casts is taking a long slug of her water. It’s not as hot as she’s been used to yet the mugginess isn’t helping; all they’ve really got going for them is the wafting of the climate control through the ventilation system of the Brotherhood. Warm air rises, and it’s not as cool as downstairs, but it’s not staggering, either.
The hot chocolate-drinking Fiann speaks up as Casts is draining her water, asking if everyone’s so chatty, and her face registers a degree of sardonic amusement in the other woman’s words, yet she doesn’t fire back with anything meant to be rude or catty. That’s the danger with getting too many women in too small a space. They turn on each other.
“Y’all heard me introduce myself,” she says, shrugging with her tone and not her shoulders. A lazy reach out to deposit the glass where it was, now empty, and she adds, “Why don’t you try making conversation instead of griping ’bout how there isn’t any?”
[Marrick] Callie asks if everyone is always this chatty. The blonde Fury snorts and lets a half grin cross her face. It would have been cute did she not seem so damnably feral. She sat her sandwich down, taking it in one hand and-
Why don’t you try making conversation instead of griping ’bout how there isn’t any?
She looked down at the sandwich again, then at Casts. She paused, then brushed her hand off on her hip. She transferred the sandwich from her right hand to her left, and then offered it to the nearest person… which, unsurprisingly, happened to be the other Fury.
“Bones to Dust,” she said with a grin. “Marrick Fisher. Feel free t’shorten accordingly.”
She didn’t have to say that she was a Black Fury. Despite the blonde hair, the blue eyes, the freckles dusted across her cheeks, Marrick’s heritage was obvious.
[Callie] ok . . introductions it is then *she says with a shrug and a half grin, seeming partly distracted by scraping something sticky from the bottom of her mug* since you insist ‘n all . . Callie Morgan-McAlistair . . aka Walks-the-line . . from nowhere in particular for longer than I care to recount right here and now . . and since everyone pgs me for Fianna there’s precious little point in denying it
[Callie] ((pegs))
[Gabriella Bellamonte] The Garou all make their introductions, and Gabbie doesn’t involve herself in that. When passage-given names came into the equation, she’d learned by how she was raised to let her lips stay together and her eyes find something else to go.
Shh, Gabbie, the big kids are talking.
A hardback, thin with no illustrations on the cover, just a worn down forest green that was frayed at the corners with a spine so bent and abused that it was impossible to make out the title that was once scripted in gold there. On the front was only a small gold design of a tree. This caught the Kinfolk’s eye. It couldn’t be more than a hundred and fifty pages, tops, so if she wound up not liking it then she wouldn’t have to suffer long to finish it and get it out of her life.
“Heart of Darkness,” she murmered thoughtfully upon opening the book and finding the title page.
[Casts] “Not unless it ain’t true,” Casts tells Callie Morgan-McAlistair, idly reaching out to accept the sandwich from the other Fury. She’s given a scant smile and a murmured “Thanks” in return for the sandwich, which is treated to a ferocious bite and swift swallowing; her attention is on the kinswoman keeping to herself over in the corner, and after a moment’s consideration she hands the sandwich back to Marrick and calls to her, “What’s your name, gal?”
She doesn’t point out how quiet the well-bred Fang girl is. It likely goes without saying that if she were Kin and staying in a building full of war machines she’d keep her mouth shut, too.
[Gabriella Bellamonte] Pretty, clear blue eyes flicker up from the front page of the book, toward Casts when she was called to. It was no difficult task to discern who the woman with the dark hair and average height was talking to. All the others had given a name, and were speaking in conversational tones. When Casts called to Gabbie, her voice was just a little louder, a little more attention-grabbing.
Her eyebrows lifted just a little, thoughtful and maybe a touch surprised. Like she was expecting to just fade into the bookshelf, or slip back out of the room unnoticed to tackle her book and enjoy the precious silence she recieved when Alex wasn’t in the room banging away on his drumset or breaking poor little Kingirl hearts.
“Gabriella Bellamonte,” she replied dutifully enough.
[Callie] it’s true, I might be lying . . *the spoon is placed back in the mug and her fingers rest on a metal disc that hangs from the chain round her neck. She flips it over, to reveal the Glasswalker symbol engraved on the back.* but that would be pretty much a pointless and somewhat ridiculous extreme to go to for the sake of a cheap laugh, when actually all I really want it to meet a couple of people and make myself known, don’t you think?
[Maija] No double shift today. It’s not surprising really, because though her work has not suffered, the fact that she’s barely dragging her ass around these days is obvious. She’s not sleeping, she’s clearly worried about something, she’s not doing well at all, though she puts in her 8 hours dishwashing and busing tables with as much determination and swiftness as ever. She’s a damn good worker, even for minimum wage. Especially when it’s under the table minimum wage.
Her steps on the stairs are heavy, her boots seeming to weigh 100 pounds a piece as she tries to lift them to gain entrance to the second level. She appears at the top of the stairs, mid-strip, as she’s pulling her uniform t-shirt off, leaving her in just the white tank top underneathe, over jeans that aren’t quite as threadbare as her normal pair – these were bought for work, after all, and you can’t work with your ass hanging out the back of your jeans.
Well. Maija can’t.
Pulling that shirt off, the cling of the ribbed cotton of the tank top accentuates just how thin she really is. at 5’6″, she’s average height, but if she weighs 110, she’s got a brick in both pockets and is probably soaking wet, to boot. Dirty dishwater blond hair hangs in her face, obscuring her features for the most part as she gives the commons area a once over, as if determining if she might actually get in a nap before Alex decides it’s Drumming Hour again…
[Marrick] Gabriella Bellamonte
Wow! What an interesting sandwich! Bite. Bite. Slightly embarassed swallowing.
[Boy] -ThumpThumpThumpThump- Came the footsteps up the stairs and shortly after there’s a very young looking, not-quite-skinny boy at the top. Oddly, he looks like a clean, homeless person. Shaggy, too-long hair, a stitched t-shirt, not-so-lucky jeans, and sneakers, one foot red, one foot brown.
At first he seemed to know where he was going, but he stops upon entering the common room and seeing…strangers. Strangers everywhere.
Why are there always strangers here?
[Callie] ((gtg in about half an hour))
to Boy, Casts, Gabriella Bellamonte, Maija, Marrick
[Casts] Callie fires back before Casts has a chance to well and properly interrogate the kinswoman standing by the row of bookshelves, and the Fury cocks her eyebrow as she considers this. Now she’s leaning with her shoulders against the wall and her hands behind her back, one foot crossed over the other at the ankle as her tailbone connects with the moulding.
“Your phrasing was just a little funny, is all,” is Casts’ explanation, and then her attention goes to the kinswoman.
Gabriella Bellamonte, said so precisely, without question, as though she has conditioned herself to cause as few ripples as is possible. Perhaps Casts should have just let her slip back down the hallway after her argument and her literature acquisition, but hell, if they’re going to be neighbors…
“You like living up here?” is her next question, not quite so loud and not quite so brusque; if she catches the embarrassed air to Marrick’s attack of her sandwich she doesn’t point it out. There are newcomers. Her eyes stay on Gabbie even though the thin blonde and the shaggy kid come up the stairs and vie for her attention. She isn’t the only stranger in the room right now but she’s in the middle of something.
[Gabriella Bellamonte] Gabriella was stepping away from the bookshelf, around the front of the room toward the hallway again when she was stopped by Cast’s returning her attention to her. She paused, book held almost lovingly against her chest with both wrists crossed over it, so her hands gripped opposite corners of the book’s top.
Her eyes flickered toward Boy when he appeared at the stairs, then returned to the woman with the short dark hair that seemed intent on dragging her into a dead fish of a conversation. Gabbie twitched her head up and in one direction, effectively tossing her hair away from her face, giving herself about five to ten minutes before it would find a way to slide down and try and knot into her eyelashes strand-by-strand.
“Sometimes,” she relents after a few moments. “It’s not the easiest place to live, when you’re Kinfolk, but it is far better than others plenty of the time.”
[Marrick] ThumpThumpThumpThump-up! Up the stairs with her brother and rounding the corner and then? Then she looked at him. She grinned ever so slightly and seemed relieved to have something that wasn’t a sandwich to focus on. She headed over, her movements precise and focused.
“Ohmigod, Boy, Wendy and me found stuff.”
Also- hello! How was your day, bro? I’m fine, thank you! Marrick Fisher is the mistress of conversation.
[Maija] Boy comes up behind her and she’s moving away quickly, intent to get her back to a wall and right quick, before someone else can come up behind her. Then here comes Marrick, and…
Dark eyes flick toward Gabriella as she answers the question of the hour, and there’s a flicker of something, deep in her eyes – a reaction there, than gone, before it can be recognized. Then she’s moving along the wall (disappear little wall flower) toward the opening into the hall directly across from her room.
[Callie] *Callie shrugs again, exaggerated for visual effect what more can I say?, leaves the woman to her interrogation and retraces her steps towards the door . . and suddenly the blonde girl with the sandwich comes to life at the sight of the newly arrived boy with the odd shoes, and the skinny blonde girl makes a break for it in the opposite direction. With a sigh, Callie takes her chance* Ok . before everyone gets busy and a party breaks out, can someone tell me where I can find The Fianna?
[Casts] A few moments pass before Gabriella can rouse herself to answer a question that will do little more draw her deeper into a conversation that doesn’t seem to have a point. Casts hadn’t given her Auspice, hadn’t identified which role Gaia had given her, any more than she had given her tribe or her rank. Perhaps she didn’t need to; although there’s a quiet sort of command in her presence much of that could be attributed to her personality and not necessarily her rank.
She could be a Fostern, the way she holds herself and talks to people, but if she was she likely would have gone ahead and said it already.
“Alright,” Casts says, her tone seeming to say You don’t have to stay as she picks up her cup and examines its emptiness, swirling the last few drops of water around as she grants Gabriella her chance for escape.
The skinny one, scentless and skittish, is eyed out of curiosity and not out of predacious tracking but she isn’t called out to. Casts just stands away from the wall and heads toward the stairs, bare feet padding on the carpet as she moves. Her height, matching Maija’s, carries muscle and brawn where the kinswoman’s is slight, yet there is a grace in her movements as she walks. She could be silent if she wanted to. There’s no need now. She’s just getting a drink.
[Boy] He didn’t smile back. He didn’t seem overly relieved to see her either. There was that brief glint, but that was only recognition. At least it wasn’t anger or displeasure. Just a flat stare as he says “I noticed.” and then “We need to talk”.
For a minute it looks like he’s following Maija. Or perhaps he was chasing her. He seems patient enough though, allowing her to skulk to wherever she needs to go and watching her only to say ‘I see you, and I won’t step on you.’ But once he’s in the hallway he turns as many corners as is required to head over to Room +10.
He doesn’t check to see if Marrick is following.
[Marrick] She followed along, looking at Boy with a quiet bit of confusion; there wasn’t overt pleasure, not displeasure, and the Ahroun followed along. She headed off to the room that they shared; the window was still open. She ran a hand through her tangled hair, looking at Boy briefly.
She was stark and straight and she regarded him.
“What’s up?” He didn’t need to look to see where she was going. He knew that she would follow.
[Maija] Boy seems to follow her, the new one’s gaze follows her, and it’s no surprise that the notice makes her drop her room key when she pulls it out of her pocket. She leans forward and lets her forehead thump on her door with an silent explosion of breath. Her eyes close, and she just stands there a minute, before she pushes back, and bends to pick up her key, and try again.
The weight of the world is on this one’s shoulders, it seems, though her spine is straight, her shoulders squared (tension does wonders for one’s posture…), as she goes about unlocking her door.
[Gabriella Bellamonte] Perhaps a little late into the game, something sort of clicks for Gabriella. Marrick had looked at her a little strange, as though she were guilty or embarrassed of something that had had to do with her specifically. Her eyes slid away from Casts and to Marrick’s freckled face, followed as that face turned and rounded the corner.
A bit of post-analyzation occurs, and after perhaps thirty seconds of silence, thought, and staring with fairly unfocused eyes at the doorway that went from common room to dorm hallway, her face dropped in the same way that it does when you’re laughing really hard at a joke and someone drops a bomb on you– your grandmother’s dead, dude. Not funny, not funny at all, and you’ve caught me off-guard.
“Excuse me,” she said faintly before turning and making her way out of the common room, downstairs. It wasn’t polite to scream in front of people.
[Boy] He didn’t say anything. Not until they were in their room. He doesn’t close the door behind him. He does sit on the bed. The bed he’d only sat on one other time and was still as neatly made as the day they arrived. Underneath the bed was a different matter.
“Wendy was here last night. Did you see her?”
[Casts] It’s not polite to scream at people, but Gabriella isn’t the only one who’s headed downstairs. Casts had taken off after essentially excusing Gabriella from the monumental task of tolerating her questions, had gone into the kitchen without shoes on despite the grumbling of Reuben to fill up her water glass.
The dinner rush is coming up, and she shouldn’t be down here and in the way but she’s relatively small and is able to sidestep where necessary. Unaware of Gabriella’s presence, or else uncaring, she whistles to herself as she fills her glass and gets out of the way again.
[Marrick] “Yeah,” she started. The Fury seemed to recall what had happened; she had slept since then. And that night? Well, she hadn’t slept well at all. “She was pretty upset, but when I got here she was already freaking out. And then she started apologizing to me and I couldn’t figure out why she was apologizing to me but it was, like, her default.”
Let it be said that Marrick didn’t get others sometimes.
[Callie] Nice! *Callie finds herself with the whole of the common room to herself* was it something I said?
*and she gives up, heading back down the stairs and out into the street* different city, same crazy people!
[Boy] His head cocked to one side, still watching from the bed. His voice as level and calm as his gaze. Though, Boy always had one of those scary calm gazes, didn’t he?
“Was she with anyone?”
[Callie] ((ok, gtg now, thanks for the scene))
to Boy, Casts, Gabriella Bellamonte, Maija, Marrick
[Gabriella Bellamonte] Downstairs, Gabriella helps herself to a glass of wine that she’s probably not old enough to drink, but the staff know her, don’t care, and are too busy to concern themselves with the safety of their liquor license potentially being threatened by the nineteen year old girl helping herself in the kitchen.
She didn’t speak to anyone, and while normally Jenny was quite perceptive, she was just too busy to take a chance to look at Gabbie long enough to see that something’s wrong. Her jaw is clenched, her brows knitted, and her eyes are a little on the blank side, while normally they’re shining and kind. Her hand shakes just a little when pouring her glass, but the bottle is replaced carefully, nothing falls and breaks.
Normally she would have at least smiled and waved to the staff, but almost as though she couldn’t see them Gabriella instead takes her glass and steps out into the employee parking lot that the kitchen door empties into. A cement buffer to keep cars from running into the building that’s painted yellow is where she decides to sit. Katherine would throw a tissy to see her sister sitting on something so dusty, dirty, and mundane, but Gabbie’s just fine with it.
She sits here, sips her wine, and muses/wallows quietly.
[Maija] The common room clears out, and thus, after slipping into her room, and taking the time to peel out of the rest of her uniform, her boots kicked into a corner, her thin frame dressed in some sweatpants that aren’t hers, rolled over and over at the waist to hang precariously on lean hips, and a clean tank top, she reappears, her laundry – the few things she owns that she’s not wearing – in hand, and makes her way to start a load.
She tucks her key into the pocket of those sweats, and doesn’t bother separating her lights from darks. After all, when one owns all of 6 pieces of clothing, that’s pretty stupid to take up two washers for what barely fills 1/4 of one. She closes the door, and starts the water flowing, before taking advantage of the now empty common room.
It’s not empty often, and now that it is, she hesitates a moment, two, and then moves to the pool table and racks them up.
[Marrick] “Yeah, Alex was here… When Wendy left she was pretty angry with him,” as though she was impressed that Wendy was overtly displeased with someone. “Bellamonte was trying to calm her down, she seemed pretty concerned. Chick in the hoodie came by and said something that seemed to help.”
[Casts] _>
[Boy] “Mm-hmm…”
Did that mean something? Was there some secret Uktena language that involved revealing facts, saying as little as possible, silence, and staring? Perhaps. Perhaps it was another one of those secret things.
[Marrick] “What did she tell you?”
He was silent. He didn’t say anything except a quiet mm-hmmn. Marrick looked at him, shifting her weight from the left to the center. The Fury was centered, and she cocked her head to the side. He said as little as possible, and Marrick was learning to ask questions.
[Boy] “Well, she wouldn’t say much to tell the truth. Only that he was cruel. That he said she was unwantable. Laughed in her face.”
And there it is, that feeling of water on hot coals. He grimaces slightly, the first show of real emotion so far, and even as he chokes it back his Rage begins to fill the room like steam.
“She wouldn’t say anymore. Too afraid I’d kill him. But what about you Marrick? What did you do to comfort her? To protect her?”
[Maija] She moves around the table, sending the balls flying toward the pockets with the ease of someone who’s done this before a time or two. She’s not competition good, but she is ‘surprise hustler’ good. That gambit only works once, but no one expects a skinny ass girl to be able to shoot anything. Sometimes it’s all one can do to get a hot meal, so ya learn and ya live to hitchhike another day.
Her steps are silent, though the steady CRACK and Clunk of balls hit and falling into the pockets is not. She falls into a steady grove, and enjoys the empty commons – something that never happens.
[Marrick] “I didn’t get anywhere near her. On a good day, I freak her the fuck out. I tried to ask her what was wrong, and she couldn’t tell me anything-“
There it was, a frustration, something close to… she didn’t pace. Marrick was balanced. Marrick was ready.
“I ask her what’s wrong and the first thing she says is that she’s sorry and she doesn’t mean to upset me and that she was sorry for the noise and the only thing I can do is think I can’t help her if she’s terrified of me.“
The most he’s heard her say on a tirade in a long time.
[Boy] “But you should have known something was wrong. She was getting better! You said it yourself, you got stuff. You went shopping together. Then she takes this huge step backwards and you do nothing? She was getting so much better and then…Ugh!”
The hand that swings pounds clearly against the wall. Incidentally it was that wall connecting their bedroom to the common room, and it would do a good job of carrying the thud all along its length, echoing in that entire section. Surprise, folks. You live with Werewolves.
“I’m not…I’m…I’m not angry with you.” He said, catching his breath and his tone, and lowering both to a more civilized rate. “I’m not. But I do want to–” Another grimace. She could almost see him counting in his head. 1…2…3…calm… “I want to talk to him.”
[Maija] Fight or flight?
There’s a crash, and she falls instantly, immediately, 100% still. Tension ratchets up along her spine, tightening into an iron rod of tension, coiling in her lower back, as her face goes carefully blank.
Surprise. You live with Werewolves.
(No surprise. No surprise that she doesn’t sleep, she hardly eats, she has. to. get. out. of. here.)
She takes a careful breath. She sets the cue back on the rack on the wall, silently, and moves toward her room once more.
[Marcus Schwarzkopf] *The echoing sounds of his booted footsteps announced his arrival. He was in his usual work clothes, but he didn’t look that dirty today. Alice pack over his left shoulder he came into the common room. He headed over to Boy and Marrick’s room and knocked on the door.*
[Marrick] “Knowin’ something is wrong and knowin’ what are two diff’rent things! What if me gettin’ close set her off, huh? What if she starts freaking out an’ thinks I’m gonna hurt her? I didn’t-“
She stopped talking. He hit the wall and she was silent for awhile. Marrick wasn’t startled by the act, but rather, but the noise. She tensed, but she seemed more down and ready for the worst. A natural reaction.
He wanted to talk to Alex.
“Go for it, he lives here. But keep your head on straight an’ keep your temper in check. He’s an asshole. He’s acidic. But he’s got a good head on his shoulders.”
[Maija] Marcus walks by, and says nothing, and she digs her key from her pocket, and slides it into place. She turns the key in the lock, opens the door and slips inside, closing it firmly behind her.
A moment later the clock clicks back into place, and silence reigns in Room One.