[b]York:[/b]

York, meanwhile, is weaponized chaos. 

The reception area has two barred doors in the back left and right corners, and the reception booth is normally totally unmanned. York starts his shift by grabbing two bars and holding unflinching eye contact with a cop on watch. This moment of silent psychic violence is broken when the cop starts yelling at York to sit the fuck down, but that only makes York’s grin hornier. 

Then, suitably upsetting the guard enough to find someone to complain to about you being here, York starts doing anxious pushups against the floor. He runs into a wall and kicks off it hard enough to bound back across the room like a tennis ball and do it on the other side, when he gets enough air to slap the shitty popcorn’d ceiling and bring dust down all over the countertops.

Then, finally, red-faced, panting, but satisfied he sits next to Brown and starts texting on his phone. Every thirty seconds it’s a different word document, messaging app or email inbox. A different vision of childhood. Over the next two hours, three other lawyers enter the reception, looking like they’re stepping into a country fair haunted house and waiting for the actors to jump out at them. York hands every one of them business cards and manages to look trustworthy long enough to pump their hands. 

Two hours, it’s two hours before someone yells Ho! York jumps up immediately, and gives a two-fingered salute to the the only other lawyer left. Two of the others were made to leave, about half an hour after they arrived. They tried it on Brown, too, but didn’t manage to get her attention through York eyefucking them into giving up. Now that you’re moving on, York stands as close to Brown as it’s physically possible, like she’s projecting a shield bubble and he’ll die if he stands outside it too long. 

The unnamed site isn’t a prison, it wasn’t really made for this from the outset. What looked like a multi-story building on the outside is just a warehouse with a high roof, with chain link pens like dog cages set in macabre cubicles one by one, where prisoners have no bathrooms, food. A lot of them are tied by fibre leashes to the chain links, but the woman you recognize from the tablet is walking around in handcuffs instead, looking quietly pissed off. 

When she recognizes York, though, and then looks at Brown, she bounces to the front of the chain links and throws herself against it so it rattles, like a puppy hearing the car pull into the driveway scratches at the front door. “Hey! Paper boy and coffee girl! You came for me, right?”

Cheadle-Cop stands breathes down your neck. He’s got too much of a circumstantial bonus against York, it’s hard to be unsettled by a guy whose face you already broken once today. So he’s who you got.

[b]Pope:[/b]

This meeting happens in Apollo, in the office of a subsidiary newspaper of OESN - like if CNN also owned Jacobin, Huffington Post and the Daily Wire, this one’s closer to Jacobin, called Stańczyk. It’s a place where you’ve both got plausible reasons to be here, no cameras, and there’s a private meeting room. Pope’s already been published here, and it’s reasonable November might want to be. 

The room you’re in is mostly for job interviews. A plastic fern sits in one corner, the inoffensive blue carpet was luxuriently soft once, and the plastic table and chairs clearly spend more time in storage than in use. This is where Pope wanted to meet, though. 

“Just so you know.” He says amiably. “They’re always watching me. I am genuinely under a constant, and I mean total, surveillance. It just wasn’t safe to mention it the last I talked to your kin, but she handled herself brilliantly. Just be careful about being seen with me, or being seen going to the same places as me, especially with anything as important or as indemnifying as this.” He looks over what he’s been given. “This is good, though. You struck gold and you’re still wishing for diamonds. Sometimes - if you’ll pardon my language a moment? Sometimes you’ve got to burn a motherfucker just because you can. They don’t usually burn.”

“What was it you were looking to really do, here?” He asks. “And why’s that something you want done? First thing I need to understand, helping you write this; authorial intent is everything. First I must know why you [i]need [/i]to tell this story. Why you need it, and why it has to be [i]this [/i]story.”