eldest

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

Rain!

Bai gives you a sideglance. Weighing you up. "Why?" she finally asks. "Has someone been giving you trouble? They shouldn't. You live way too high up for that, and as long as you're thoughtful about where you go into basements, you shouldn't... unless someone's been telling you about the Flower War? Look, that's... a mess. They're fighting over who gets to fill the role of the big boss down there, who gets to have tense tea ceremonies with Empress and occasionally fight her for the honor of everybody involved with all that, and it's going to get messy, and you should try to stay out of it, okay? It'll blow over, or Empress will sort it out once she gets back."

She definitely knows more about this than she's telling you, but she's concerned about you. Like you might break a nail, or get yourself kidnapped, or something like that. She thinks you are the rich girl damsel in distress here.

[Shift: -Savior, +Mundane]

@Tatterdemalion

Hey. Hey now. Excuse you, she has totally interacted with a gang member recently and, well, he thought he was dead and she was also incognito and maybe, just maybe, Bai has... a tiny bit of a point. She's kind of out of her element.

But also! Also. Also. This is how you learn. And get better. And practice. Which is to say. She's not giving up! In spite of that nibbling doubt there. And besides...

"It's for work, actually! We have to go down into the tunnels. And I saw some painted stuff and carved stuff and well. I kinda want to know the basics? There's security and they're cool but also, like, ew. You know?"

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

Flirting? No, no no no, this isn't her Bai's talking about. She's not a vigilante. Clearly Bai is thirsting over Foxpearl. Which, like. Good taste. Solid taste, Rain also has a minor crush, which is not that unusual because everyone's super pretty and wow, girls, and also some boys, but girls.

She pulls Bai onto a bench for the sandwich-eating, facing the direction of the flashing lights. "I'll try to be there around the crack of nine thirty, maybe ten. It's... I was running around trying to figure out what was up with that." She gestures off at the lights. "So I'm kinda. Really tired."

She looks over at Bai. "You gonna be okay tho? Been a lot of excitement tonight." Like fire everywhere and something involving the gangs and...

"Oh do you know anything about the gangs?"

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

Rain lights up as she sees a friendly face. Bai!

"Heeeeeyyyyyy!" A bull's charge of a hug, a titanic squeeze, with her sandwich carefully kept free of flying apart, and she's hanging out with her friend! Which is so much better than hanging out on her own, at least right now. Sometimes alone is good, but not right now, in the wee bits of the night, this is for projects or sleep or lazy talks with friends or... other things with friends that are not appropriate! For this situation! Bai is really cute though. She's wondered. But not asked. Asking is much more than wondering.

She's careful to focus on her improved metaphor game and not on how she was alone, or why she was alone. But she's not alone anymore. And that means we can take all those creeping dark thoughts, and stuff them into a jar! And then you throw the jar out a window! A metaphorical window that would not be littering and wouldn't endanger anybody below.

She frowns halfway through taking a bite out of her sandwich, as the odd hour and Bai's presence combine. "Wait, why are you up this late? I'm all unemployed and wandering, you have respectable people business hours to keep. Everything okay?"

And that's the best fix for your problems, deflect and focus on other people's problems, works great up till it stops working but the plates are spinning still, she's a genius and nothing will go wrong this time, totally.

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

The problem, as the adrenaline drains and the shock wears off, isn't that it'd be hard to sleep. It'd be too easy. Deep in the earth has always felt safe, to Rain, in a way that it probably shouldn't given the sleepless hordes of the dead and, also, people coming down to stick said sleepless hordes into batteries for cool technology. (Laser beams! Powered! With! Ghosts!)

But after the whole... everything. She'd found it way too easy to just drift, when she's sitting down here. Relax and let her mind empty, and just experience the quiet. She's made sure not to, and is stripping out of her coat, and mask, and hat, and everything into her cute leggings and tunic under it, brown and green emerging from grayscale like a corporate screensaver being shaken off and showing the desktop wildlife background. She scowls at that metaphor. Not her best.

But! But the point is. She sleepy. Which is why she's used subpar metaphors, otherwise a banishable offense. And, and, she's going to need to emerge back up into where she's hidden her ornithopter and then meet up with the other two again, probably, sometime soon. So she leaves the muttering of the lost behind, and starts up a ladder to a back room of a bookstore that closes early, opposite a good bahn mi place, and... hm... she could probably bring bahn mis for everyone as an excuse to have one.

Cheered, she scrambles up the ladder faster. So much easier to do this when you're almost weightless. Gym class could never.

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

Blood?

Why would she drink blood?

She is a ghost now. At least, during the night, except when she really wanted to not be, and then sometimes when she really wanted to be during the day. Is that what ghosts... do?

She hadn't paid too much attention to the news. Never had, ever since one of her aunts got super huffy about how the interviewer was super mean. She'd listened to that interview, of course, and hadn't seemed like anything was particularly out of sorts, but if you mentioned it within earshot you'd promptly get an earful, and anyway that anchor got let go a few months later and the aunt seemed super smug and Rain didn't know if it was a coincidence or the Aunt pulled strings.

Rain looks down at her hands. Translucent and see through. It would take her more effort to open a door than to walk through it right now. Her gut twists as she thinks about that.

She doesn't think she craves blood. She could try some, find it in the market from a butcher or something. Or she could try to reach out to somebody. Do research into ghosts, like half the city, or bother Doctor Huan.

Whatever she's doing, though, it's not happening here. Whiny HOUND directors also don't deserve to give her an earful, though she's sure that he'll complain a lot to her uncle that's in town and he'll make all the sympathetic noises and oh, that looks like a big glowing net, time to leave.

She dips out through a few floors and a wall or two, descending rapidly as her coat flaps through the air, slowing her descent. The tunnels, the tunnels are safe, she'll be able to lose anybody down there and all she has to do is get to them. Which is easy, it's really hard to stop a ghost with fences and walls and doors.

And Rain, she's a ghost.

Accepting shift.

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

He... excuse you? Excuse?

None of those words are good words! There is a gun and it is being shot and this guy is focusing on a ghost and trying to be all tacticool and in control and do mean, anti-ghost things to her! And she was so Very! Very! Careful! To not break the guy's face!

Who is currently dangling off a building and you know what we should fix that.

She very, very carefully reaches through the guy with the rifle, grabs onto the leg of the poor unconscious (Probably? She hopes? This sounds like it'd be really traumatic if he's not out cold...) sucker dangling off a building, and drags him up onto the nice, safe floor.

Safe ish. Somebody's shooting a gun and that's not good. But. Butttttt. But she's only able to do one thing! At! A! Time! Otherwise she's doing two things at once and she's very bad at that and that's not the focus, the focus is this guy in front of her. Who is trying to call for anti-ghost tech. Part of her is very curious what they have, part of her is very not a fan of whatever they end up bringing out, especially since they're the dicks who brought guns to an arrest! Who does that? That's how people get shot, not arrested.

Protect 11 + 2 is 13, clear afraid, marking angry, saving the smuck with the netcaster.

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

She's bolting towards the edge as soon as she sees the net shoot, and leaps into midair, eyes locked on him.

"aaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"

Ohhhhhhh man that is a long way down. Like, a really long way down. Like, wow, she's slowing herself down by hitting the air and she's got a big coat that's helping but oh wow the ground is coming up fast and she's thinking a mile a minute and this was a terrible, terrible plan.

WUNK-zap!

10-2 for afraid -1 for danger is a 7 to directly engage!

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

She gasps, silently, like a ghost. A plot!

It's like that one movie, where the female lead, played by Cybill Shepherd, has to blow up a clock tower and then take the mayor's daughter hostage, while her husband is setting up to assassinate the IMF assistant secretary while he's in town and the clock tower is meant to force them to use the secondary meeting site, that he has access to! But then the lady's repressed interest in a con woman named Sofia flares up, and she bails on the plot, and meanwhile her husband ends up shooting a body double instead of the actual target, and it all ends in tears and tragedy.

You know, Goncharov.

It's not actually a great map onto the situation, on second thought, but look! There's the police! Just like the hostage scenes in the watchmaker's shop. Except... no, actually, HOUND is kind of just as bad as the corrupt Naples cops? Like, sure, they're not actually taking bribes, that she knows about, but they get paid well and they still shoot first, and then second, and then demand answers third. Her mom was sure they were temporary but that's almost worse, because now they don't have a reason to actually fix anything because they get all the fancy power and money while there's a crisis. She'd read a really good post about it, which is somewhere buried between food recipes and parkour videos and very good fanart of cat!Lady and cat!Tramp cuddling each other.

But in them meantime, there's a plot, and she doesn't have her ornithopter nearby, and now she can't get to Sunrise Docks easily, or at least not without calling a taxi.

She takes a minute to look down at the HOUND agent, working her way slowly down the building, one ghost-step at a time. She wants to be ready to intervene if bullets start flying. She's going to be ready, in fact. Positive thinking!

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

She's so caught up in watching the actual heroes play that she misses her next phased-in foot and goes through a wall and floor before catching herself.

Wow.

Look, now there's a hero! She's saved the day and looked totally smooth and kissable while doing it. Empress was a hero, too, and she's the ideal that the city was forged with. But she's busy trying to fix the ghost-disaster thing that's happening, and it's really too much to presume that she could help and not get in the way with that, in spite of being sort of ghost now, so she's up here. And she's not even doing what Princess is doing, saving people, except she did? Kind of? By accident. And then she scared him and then corrected him and ran away and-

Right, there's a fight. She should help.

She's not a real hero, though, so she works her way up and near the edge of the building, and observes the fight going on, peeking her head out through the wall and down, peering at the well armored menace.

Menace. Meeeeanaaaaaaace. It's got a good mouthfeel to it. She rolls it around her mouth a bit more, while she scopes this out. Well. The fight seems done. The cleanup is next, especially since those cracks are deep enough the water is draining from the pool and down into the foundations. Never good to have water where you don't want it.

But that's not everything here, she's certain. This was cover for a kidnapping and there's a very loud, very obvious angry menace (meeeeenaaaaaccceeeeee) in a metal can who's down for the count.

What's missing from this picture, hmm?

Straight. Up. Creepin'. 5 + 7 is a partial success.

What's my best way in, to the fight or an opportunity here? Exit plans are for somebody with brains.

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

Those sure are a bunch of names!

She's heard of some of these guys. Horse might be Iron Horse, the noodle seller, or it could be, well. The other, more famous Horse. Who is more likely to be involved in kidnappings. Stone Monkey, on the other hand, absolutely is somebody she's heard about, by the last dregs of a group she'd chased out of the Eastern Waterways, cursing her and saying they'd go to him. Or her.

But, but but but. There's a probably gang related bodyguard here. Who thinks he's dead! Whoops. Time to fix that.

"Your heart still beats mortal. Take care that that does not change, and that you do not do more harm than good in the world."

There, suitably cryptic and vague. Time to leave before this gets any more awkward. She steps out through a wall and starts to try to work her way back up to the fight, hopping off walls and then up through floors as needed. It's night, ghost things are easy. It's going to be more a problem to stay solid enough to hit somebody.