@Eviledd1984 I was thinking it would make more since for Steele to post next. He has more ability to respond than Enzo, but I can get something up tomorrow if you like.
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The boy just blinked.
That had actually... worked?
"There was some mention of Ludwig," the deceptively young vampire remarked, even as he pulled out his cell phone. Swiping over to the Ancestry app, he continued to talk to Ian even as he started to scroll through the online registry. "The ghost believes that they could be holding him in a house on the Lower East Side, but that's not narrowing it down much."
Well, he supposed it was narrowed down in the sense that they knew Ludwig might still be in New York, but there were hundreds of homes in the Lower East Side.
But, there was definitely a link between Ludwig's abductors and the club if there were people discussing Ludwig. It was not, one would imagine, a very common name in the present night.
That being the case, he hoped that Steele and Elizabeth were doing okay inside.
"Can you text that to one of them?" the boy added, as an aside. "I'd do it, but the ghost is going to be browsing on my phone for a bit."
I'll try to get something up in the morning. The baby hasn't let me put him down for 3 hours now and my brain is mush.
He had a very bad feeling about this.
Of course, Enzo was a vampire. He had bad feelings about pretty much everything. The Camarilla-Sabbat War. The fabled coming of Gehenna. A whole family of undead Italian grandmothers. Not to mention tax filing season.
“...do you have anything useful that might identify any supernatural activity around here? Kindred or otherwise."
The boy turned his head, taking his eyes off the street as he looked up at Ian. “I’m better with corpses than I am with spirits,” the necromancer admitted, before turning his gaze back to the streets and alleys before them.
Closing his eyes, the child was quiet for a moment as he listened. Not to the traffic passing behind them. Not to the people mulling about. “It’s what you’d expect,” the boy offered finally, as he opened his eyes and looked back up at the Brujah. “Lots of lingering regret.”
Glancing off to an alleyway between the club and an adjacent building, he remarked, “An overdose in that alley.” Turning to indicate the street, he added, “Someone killed in the crosswalk.”
But that was it. Which, was neither good nor bad. Lots of Kindred activity never reached the Shadowlands. “The ghosts don’t seem particularly concerned about anything here. It feels like an ordinary street,” Enzo remarked, as a hand came up toward his neck. His fingers played with a locket that he wore, as if by nervous habit.
“Vieni qui, Bruno,” the boy uttered softly. It was possible that Ian would feel the haunting presence as the necromancer called upon the spirit haunting the antique piece.
“I’ll send my ghost around to the other side of the club to see if there’s anything there,” Enzo offered.
Then the boy turned, as if engaged in another conversation with something unseen, and said, “I’ll help you look at ancestry-dot-com later. E lo faro, lo prometto.”
The Italian boy just watched the room as the adults chatted.
"Enzo and I will look too out of place in a club,” Ian remarked. Not an inaccurate assessment to say the least. Internally, the boy felt a bit of relief at the idea of not being dragged along to the club.
“So I propose that Enzo and I investigate the club from outside,”
Large, brown eyes just blinked. They were doing what now? The former ghoul tried to maintain his composure as he gave a slight bow toward the older man. “Bene, grazie,” the boy offered. Purely perfunctory. As one might respond to receiving a task from one of the nonni.
Internally, he was screaming.
Enzo didn’t even go hunting on the streets. These oversized bloodsuckers wanted him to play Watson to Ian’s Holmes? Subconsciously, the boy’s hands grabbed the hem of his t-shirt, fidgeting and fiddling with the fabric in his hands as he tried to process the anxiety.
He was just the book keeper. A Giovanni of the main family, not some La Putanesca from Sicily. Such hitting the streets was not really his strong suit.
What if they came across the Sabbat? What was Enzo supposed to do? Haunt them?
Still, putting on a brave face, the boy looked up at Ian and said, “Andiamo?”
In Venice, they would have had people for this sort of thing.
Unfortunately, right now, they were the people.
Posting coming today. Sorry for the wait, got caught up in all the recent bad weather in the US.
So I assume at this point @rocketrobie2's character will just meet us on the club? If so I'm probably going to have Ian brought it up for my next post
Given that @rocketrobie2's Steele is a rocker/full-time musician, it strikes me that an alternative approach could be to discover that Steele just happens to be playing a gig at that club, which could also explain Steele not receiving the email. We could just jump to the Club and have everyone there.
Just my two cents.
Being drawn into a hug was still a new experience for him.
Kindred might joke that Giovanni were all kissing cousins, but affection wasn’t a quality many within the Clan - mortal or otherwise - associated with La Famiglia. Enzo was fairly certain there were a few who’d never hugged anyone that wasn’t a corpse.
Given that outlook, it went without saying that some of their necromancy rituals were obscene.
As a result, the flinch that the boy displayed as Edwina reached to pull him into a hug betrayed an instinctive fear at having a hand outstretched toward him. Potence was one of the Clan Discplines after all. It left an indelible mark upon La Famiglia. And how they interacted with one another.
The boy was tense at first, only relaxing in Edwina’s embrace after a moment in which he had to remind himself that this Family was not Giovanni.
Considering how most Kindred were distrustful of other Clans, it was probably odd that Enzo felt safer around this Family than those of his Blood.
Giovanni were right bastards though. Achieve victory through any means necessary and, in the absence of strength, deception. It was the lesson by which the Giovanni had emerged from out of the Cappodocians, the manner in which Augustus Giovanni had led La Famiglia from the start.
When he’d finally relaxed, the boy hugged Edwina back. “Madre,” he uttered softly.
It was formal, but a Giovanni was never familiar.
He listened to the situation, doing a double take at the revelation that Ludwig could have been taken against his will. Ludwig was a Brujah, like Ian was, but far older.
It would take some next level, very bad shit to force a Kindred like that into something against their will, a fact that Ian seemed to pick up on as he spoke.
The boy’s brown eyes glanced up at Ian, then over to Elizabeth before they finally settled on Edwina again. If they were investigating a mortal club, then Enzo’s child-like appearance was going to cause him to stand out.
Unless one were Ventrue or Toreador, standing out in a crowd was generally something Kindred avoided.
“I can plant suggestions in one or two of the mortal’s minds, but I’m likely to draw attention in a club,” Enzo remarked, his voice displaying something close to a British accent as he swapped to English.
It wasn’t a no, he’d do whatever they asked of him. After all, he could see benefits and consequences either way.
As a Giovanni, Enzo could investigate the Shroud in or around the Club to try and get answers. He could also plant suggestions inside the minds of any mortals that might present an obstacle to them.
...and if things got regrettable, he could move the bodies. Or, rather, get the bodies to move themselves so that it didn’t look like... well, a murder.
At the same time, he wasn’t going to pass for any older than thirteen. That made it very hard to go clubbing in the mortal nightlife of New York. Unless it was a Pokemon Go event.
...or, that was probably dating him now. Did mortals still play Pokemon Go? The older he got, the faster it seemed fads such as that passed.
The possible exception seemed to be Skyrim. When Gehenna came, they probably still wouldn’t have Elder Scrolls VI.
You see, tonight, it could go either way. Hearts balanced on a razor blade...
A pair of noise cancelling headphones hugged the side of the boy’s head, as Ed Sheeran’s voice played in his ear while the child sang along with all his heart, as if enshrined in his own world. Head bopping to the rhythm, fingers clattered across the brightly lit keyboard.
Legs drawn up into the chair, the boy sat cross-legged before a widescreen monitor, opening, minimizing, and shuffling various Excel spreadsheets around while keying in different formulas. A gaming PC sat on the desk, it’s transparent panel illuminating the inner workings of the machine.
Finally, the child’s brown eyes looked up as his hands paused over the keys. Two fingers keyed ctrl+s before the boy kicked out with one leg to send his chair wheeling across the room to a small refrigerator that was behind him.
Cracking open the chill box, the boy’s fingers perused three blood donation pouches, before deciding on the one labeled AB Positive and then pushing off to wheel himself back over to the computer.
That was enough work on the Ventrue account.
Popping the blood bag into his mouth, the child’s fangs slid down through the plastic as he held and sipped on it like a kid’s juice box, all the while closing Excel and opening a secure email to send the files over to his client.
The mouse cursor then hovered over Steam. He could get in lots of Baldur’s Gate 3 before sunrise...
There was a ding as an email arrived.
The boy hesitated a moment. He’d already launched Steam, did he want to look?
Curiosity got the better of him, and he brought his email back up.
A summons? The frown was fleeting, but a twinge of regret at not being able to play Baldur’s Gate was felt nonetheless.
It was fortunate that in the modern nights one need only have an Uber or Lyft account. Much more convenient than the bygone era of trying to hail a cab in the streets of New York. Especially in the small hours.
The boy was dressed in a vintage The Lost Boys graphic tee. Black paint was chipped and fading from his fingernails. His bangs were brushed so that they fell over one side of his face, with the most prominently visible eye displaying an application of guyliner. Finishing the look was a choker that looked as if it were a spiked dog collar around his neck.
The Uber driver caught one look of the kid’s fangs in the rear view mirror and just shook his head, muttering something about Marilyn Manson and posers as they made their way toward the mansion.
The smile that spread across the child’s face was genuine.The popularity of the chain store known as Hot Topic had somehow made possible what would otherwise be a flagrant violation of their oldest Tradition.
Certainly, COVID had been nice. Wearing face masks always helped when one had fangs that they could not hide. But in the absence of masks, playing into what had become a cultural norm made him almost invisible.
Just another goth kid.
Fake goth. Mall goth. Whatever label one chose to apply to it.
Getting out in front of the mansion just cemented the preconceived notion that was in the driver’s head. The kid was just a spoiler white brat stuck in some cosplay fantasy.
In contrast to his informal appearance, the boy bowed graciously to the butler at the door – once upon a time, he’d been the butler doing the door answering for his master – and then proceeded repeat the gesture as he entered to find Ian and Elizabeth already present.
“Buona notte,” the boy offered in his native tongue. Then, looking around the room and the assembled faces, asked, “Mi dica?” which was a simple phrase meaning how can I help?
If Edwina shared the information about the club, Enzo wouldn’t be able to join Ian or Elizabeth there, but it was possible he could make inquiries with the spirits and ghosts in the area to see if they’d seen or heard anything.
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