2015.08.15.Rousting Duty

Rousting Duty
Rousting!
IC Date	August 15?
IC Time	Night, duh
Players	Siobhan, Rexleigh
Location	The Bad Part of Town
Spheres	Vampire, Fera

"She can easily be spied between a pair of warehouses, the flickering street light strobing over Siobhan as she looms over a huddled form. The bat's held in one dainty hand and she's slapping it slowly into her other hand. She looms poorly without the bat. "Time to go, you. Scram."

Rousting duty.

Although technically homeless, Rexleigh doesn't look like a bum. He's mastered some of their arts, though. For example, his favorite trick by now is making people feel uncomfortable and weird until they buy him food. It works in a surprising amount of circumstances, and tonight was no different. That's why he's sitting outside the pizza shop, with a box of pizza. All to himself. Because who the fuck wants to sit there and listen to an alligator pretending to be a man be awkward and eat pizza?

The alligator pretending to be a man while dreaming about being a dragon is watching Siobhan as she goes about rousting duty. It's an...odd tradition. One he hasn't yet figured out. He's eating a meat-lover's slice, -staring-. Openly.

With much grumbling, the bundle of homeless acquiesces to the demands of the little brujah. No one wants to get smacked with a bat, either. Least of all this poor fellow. Siobhan smiles, then gives that curt, satisfied nod as she watches him stagger off.

That brings her to her next point. Her attention slips sidelong, taking in the pizza joint squatter. For a moment, she's silent, sizing the guy up. She turns, finally, and speaks, "Can I help you?" It's an 'I'm bothered' tone.

"You don't have a ball," the alligator-in-the-man-suit observes. "That's a baseball bat, but you don't have a ball. Why are you getting people together to play without a ball?" The question is posed with an odd sort of tone that is...superior, in its ignorance. As though the silly 'human' did not realize how to human.

"I..." but she pauses, brow furrowing. You see, she hadn't thought of an answer to THAT particular question. "Sometimes a stick is just a stick," Siobhan finally proclaims, satisfied. "It's a different sort of game. There's no ball unless someone wants to be the ball."

"...ah. So sometimes, a stick is a club." He peers at her, then at the back of one of the last retreating figures. He reaches for a slice of pizza, pulls it out, folds it, stuffs a bite into his mouth. Chews, thoughtfully. "Are you going to try to club me?" The question is half-curious, half...skeptical. With maybe a good portion (Rex is not good at math) simple lack of surety.

"Nope," she replies with a grin. The business end of the bat is directed at one of the warehouses. "See, that place there needs to be cleaned up. To get ready for the new owners." The bat then swings to indicate the pizza joint, "But you seem to be there. Might even be a paying customer." Finally, the bat is lowered, the end resting on the pavement.

"Those people were outside the warehouse. I think you may be a little overzealous in your cleaning." He pushes himself up, and plucks the box from the pavement, tossing the crust back in when he gets done with the meat - even leaving a bit of sauce and cheese like a Philistine. "And most people don't use clubs to clean. I'm relatively certain that using the threat of force..." He hesitates, trying to remember a specific phrase. "Violates the social contract and is outside of expected behavior."

Eyes narrowing, Siobhan brings the bat up again, to rest it over her shoulder. Leaning forward, a little, she asks, "You gettin' smart with me?"

She is about as intimidating as a muffin.

That is to say, add blueberries and she's breakfast.

With a stick.

"I'm -always- smart. A bit slow. But I get there eventually. Always." He looks at her as she leans forward, lips pursing. Parsing the body language. "Oh! Oh, you -are- going to hit me with the club, right? You really shouldn't." Not that it wouldn't be awesome. Frenzied Brujah vs. Frenzied Mokole crashing through a pizza place? That's the sort of thing that would be -amazing- to turn into a buddy cop movie afterward. Punky and the Rex. She's a WOMAN ON THE EDGE. He's an alligator who's just in it for the barbecue. TOGETHER THEY FIGHT CRIME.

The slow nod. One can almost read her like a comic book. "The thing is," she says slowly, perhaps to allow him to catch up easier. He DID say he was slow, yeah? "I don't WANT to hit you with this here thumper. That's messy. I only get messy when I have to. That doesn't violate the social contract, right?" She's not slow. Neither is she particularly bright.

"If you're trying to threaten people with a club," he says, pitching his voice low (to spare her feelings, obviously, because she's clearly terrible at this), "You shouldn't tell them you don't want to hit them. It makes them realize you're not going to hit them, then they won't do whatever it is you want them to do to avoid getting hit." Clearly, Siobhan needs help in her job. "Are you new at this?"

"Well, I don't WANT to hit you," she states, clearly becoming frustrated. "You're just minding your own business, eating pizza, and staring at me, right?" Pause. "Yes. Yes I am. New at this, that is." Shoulders slump and she looks back down the alleyway. "I could use a hand. If I run into someone with a mind to stay, and the beef to back it up, well, you know how that goes."

"People are more scared of guns than clubs," he offers, helpfully. Then, a few moments later, he frowns. "But then they call the police more. You could bite them! People are very scared of being bitten. But sometimes if people are scared you're going to bite them even if you weren't going to bite them, they kill you and make a purse out of you. It's not really fair, but people don't know how to be fair." There's a certain amount of -frustration-, now, tinging the voice of the albino in the panama hat and the aviator glasses. At midnight. God, maybe he -is- a crazy hobo, despite the suit. "Do you want me to come with you? The patriarchy means that people take females more seriously when there's a male giving her tacit authority via proxy."

Respect. Mah. Uhthoritah.

"Yes. Yes I do." She swings her attention back to regard the man with narrowed gaze. "Wait, bite? Purse? What's wrong with you, specifically? Is it a case of the whackies? You off yer meds?"

"I'm from out of town," he explains. Because that's certainly explanation enough. "Where are we going?"

"Aren't we all," comes the rhetorical reply. She starts walking back into the alleyway, looking for cardboard boxes that snore. "I'm makin' the rounds around the warehouse. Then we're going inside to catch the smarter ones who got out of the weather."

"If they're smarter, they're probably more dangerous. Do you have traps? Traps are better. People are good at traps. You should make some." He peers into the pizza box before he pushes himself to his feet...but finds only crusts. He tosses the box into the trash. "I don't have a club. Do I need a club? I'm under strict instructions not to bite anyone." Beat. "Unless I really have to, and I'm not sure this counts."

"I can tell you on good authority," she stops and looks back, "Bums taste terrible. Really. You don't want to bite them, even if you had orders to. I'm Siobhan, by the way. And if you're good at this, it might just be a paying job." She obviously hasn't done the math, or can't do this particular math, to figure out just what she's dealing with.

"I'll have to take your word for it, I've never bitten a person before. Bum or otherwise. But you're not supposed to call them bums, they're homeless people. Mostly they're in debt because of medical bills or mental illness." He has the tone of a third grader parroting the teachings of an extremely liberal parent. "You're supposed to thank them for their service to our country. -Then- you hit them with the club if they don't go." Something percolates through his mind, until, finally: "Oh! I-am-Rexleigh-St.-George-nice-to-meet-you. It's a British name but I'm not from British, I'm from somewhere else, it's very small and you haven't heard of it. It's probably in Africa."

Rexleigh is, honestly, as terrible at pretending to be human as Siobhan is at intimidating lizardmen.

"A likely story, Rex." Yes, she totally truncates all of that. The bat is offered up. "I don't want you biting anyone. It's unsanitary. Try this out for size. But I want it back. I like it. See the burned letters in the wood? It's my favorite bat." It does have a few dents in it. The burnt etching reads simply: Clue.

"It's a cluebat!" He gets that reference! "I always thought they were metaphorical." He takes the bat and holds it, awkwardly, like someone who somehow managed to live to adulthood without holding a baseball bat before in their life. Even in England they have cricket, and that's basically the same. But no, he holds the damned thing like he never so much as beat up a little brother with a stick. "What do I do with it? Am I supposed to hit people? That can be really dangerous, I don't like to fight unless I've got to." That whole blacking out and waking up in a sea of blood and pink goo so fine you can't tell how many people it was, but you're -really- full thing.

"Well, I only hit people who clearly want me to hit them." There ARE dents after all. She could be lying. Maybe she popped a tree clueless a couple of times to give the impression that she might actually use the thing in a scrap. That's always possible. "So if they refuse to move and get all fighty, it's home run time. But not a messy home run. We shouldn't knock heads off. That gets the cops involved."

"Heads are harder to get off than you think. Clubs don't work well, you pretty much -gotta- use your teeth." He takes a moment to mimic her posture from before, slinging the bat up awkwardly to rest on his shoulder. "What am I getting paid? Money?"

"Sure." She doesn't sound so sure. That's partly because she'd not cleared a cohort with the boss. "Money buys the pizza." With that, she's trotting through the alley again. "I don't think I could separate a head with my teeth. And that's very disturbing of you to say."

"Oh." He heads along just behind her and to the right, as though instinctively understanding where, in the body language of hierarchies, a minion stands. "I'm from out of town," he explains again, this time sounding like an apology. "It's not that money that -only- buys pizza, is it? The cards for just one place? I answered survey questions for money once, but it was fake money I could only spend at Best Buy, and they gave me dirty looks when I only bought jerky with it. It wasn't very much jerky."

Eyes right, she replies, "Real money, I think. The boss is pretty well-off AND he's an old friend. I don't think he'd waste our time with gift cards." There's one now, blissfully sleeping away the cooling night. His comforter is the sports section. He has a bottle of high-octane coffee waiting to brew when he wakes up, right there in his hand.

As they approach, Rex is the first to speak to the fellow in the sports section. "Sir? Sir! Thank you for your service to our country!" That done, he gives a nod to Siobhan as he draws up to a stop behind her, then puts on a deliberately mean face. The way a six-year-old would look if he were practicing mean faces in the mirror without ever having made them before.

Look. He grew up completely unable to make facial expressions due to a complete and total lack of moving parts on his face. This is the best you're going to get.

...he is, of course, not six years old, though. That'd be silly.

He's twelve.

Tiger Woods is still in a slump. That's easy to read because whatever's under the paper doesn't move. Not an inch. It's not even breathing.

Siobhan scowls, crouching down to pull that newsprint away with a posture that trumpets, 'Ew!'. Two fingers, holding the paper far away from her body. The man's not a bum at all, unless it was a recent fall from grace. The suit's quite nice. No watch. Maybe he was robbed.

"Is it dead?" There's a quiet sound of...disturbingly...childlike excitment. Like if it's dead, -that's- the unheard of possibility that he didn't even think about. Like the kid who got in the car and suddenly realized they were going to -Disney World- and not the grocery store. "I know what you do with a dead body," he says. "You throw it to the -alligators-." And who pretends to have two thumbs and knows where there are gators? THIS LIZARDMAN.

She let's the paper go and it drifts to the ground. She rests the back of her hand on his face for just a moment, then proclaims, "As a door-nail. He's still warm, though. I'd say he died in the last few hours, but I'm no cop." With that, she regains her full five-foot-six height and sighs. "Know where I can find a gator in these parts?"

"Uh. I mean. Maybe, uhm. Like, I know a guy. He has a truck. I could probably--" Pause. "He'd probably yell at me. Do you have a car? I could call--" Beat. "No, she'd probably--" He frowns. "I think maybe we're supposed to call the police instead. I mean, we didn't kill him so when you're not going to get in trouble you're supposed to call the police and the alligators are for when you kill someone accidentally. Like a hooker. They're sex workers when they're alive, but they're hookers when they're dead, like magma and lava."

"I got a bike," Siobhan shrugs. "Well, I HAD a bike. I need to get a new bike, hey maybe we should clear outta here? I don't wanna talk to the cops right now." Or ever. They might have questions. Like: hey, why the baseball bat? There's no diamond for miles... "If we just move along, pretend like we didn't see it, someone else will happen along and we're off the hook, right? Right." She's moving.

"But, wait. He'll just go bad here if we leave him! Like, rats will eat him, but not very much of him, then they'll find him and they'll put all kinds of embalming fluid in him and then nobody will be able to eat him at all!" There's a sound of near-panic in his voice, like he's watching some kind of crazy dream disappear through his fingers like trying to hold onto smoke. "We could rent a car!"

"So eat him already," the girl calls over her shoulder, still beating her hasty retreat. She does NOT want to be there for that when the spotlight comes streaming down the alleyway and a stern man suddenly asks, with a gun to season, why are you eating that guy?!

There's an answer for it, of course.

And it's totally Funny for about three seconds before the cop is then eaten.

But NOPE!

"Wait! What? I mean, no, I couldn't!" He says, in the same voice someone would use to turn down cheesecake while on a diet. "Wait! What! Not really, right? Are you calling the police?!" He looks down at the body, then up at the retreating Siobhan. "I still have your cluebat!" And that cinches it. He's got to follow her, because humans are weird about their concept of property."