<Snipped quote by Ezekiel>
that is... a long post.
Pretend it's two posts and it's not so bad ...
Ezekiel Member
STATUS: What's the worst thing about the Roleplayerguild and why is it the status bar? 4 yrs ago
- Last Seen: 1 day ago
- Joined: 8 yrs ago
- Posts: 488 (0.17 / day)
- VMs: 0
-
Username history
- Ezekiel 8 yrs ago
-
Latest 10 profile visitors:
-
Most recent →
Fuzzybootz,
Simple Unicycle,
Sep,
Half Pint,
Heat,
Nightwing95,
Izurich,
kittyluna45,
Fetzen,
Bloodrose
Status
Recent Statuses
4 yrs ago
Current
What's the worst thing about the Roleplayerguild and why is it the status bar?
3
likes
Bio
User has no bio, yet
Most Recent Posts
Pretend it's two posts and it's not so bad ...
To avoid double posting I added my first solo post to the end of my collab with Ruby as I just about finished it now. I will got back and format it when I'm home, but as I wrote it on my phone, you'll have to make do without pretty colours for now XD .
In
Chronicles of the Grim Crusade - Warhammer 30000 RP Side Thread
→
2 yrs ago
Forum: Advanced Roleplay
The Second Compliance of Praxia
Aulpollriax
“I…. See now…. We die for your perfection.”
The man no longer squirmed in her grip, beyond the natural response to the strain her grasp placed upon his mortal form. The golden mask set upon his features hid the majority of his expression from her, but his eyes shone with a mad delight as his focus sat unwaveringly upon her. The rest of them lay slaughtered around her. They could have been his closest friends, spouses, children even, yet he held only adoration for the one who had brought destruction upon them. The thought sickened her as much as the pleasant yet foul stench that arose from the bodies of the gene-enhanced guardians who had sought to stop her in her retribution. As her spear had cut through them the fluids that had spurted from the monstrously large beings could hardly be described as blood, a mixture of fragrance and effluence pumped from where arteries should have been.
Thankfully their overlords had bled as mortal men, and the creeping taint had been washed clear with a deluge of human ichor. He was the last, or at least, the last that mattered. The warriors of the Pact who had accompanied her yet roamed the halls of the estate, pumping bolter rounds into any remaining Praxians they found. They had responded as swiftly and without question to her commands as if their own Primach had ordered them to do so. That was a praise she would sing to their gene sire once the killing was done.
“You die because you shun the Emperor’s Truth, and cower behind false gods.” Sekhmetara snarled, her armoured grip squeezing around the man’s throat. Something popped within the mortal’s throat, but through a gargle of blood and bone he still spoke.
“You are promised, child of the Serpent’s Nest, The galaxy shall walk in your golden light and know only His perfection.” Even as she brought him pain and suffering beyond which his body could come back from, he did not waver.
“Bask in my Light then. My future is my own.” She witnessed the reflection of her own blazing gaze in the shine of the golden mask the man wore a moment before the heat and fury of her eyes struck him. That was too much even for faith to press beyond and the man screamed and shrieked as the mask began to melt to his features. She could have annihilated him in a moment, but she had enough control of her gifts to allow him to live for the first moments as flesh and metal became one. Even through his shrieks, he gibered about prophecy. That earned him a final death, the solar fury of her eyes increasing to blast flesh from bone, leaving only the gold clad skull which she shook free of the charred corpse. Hot sizzling blood still dripped and hissed from her war plate. Most of the enemy had not been armoured, had practically lined up to be torn apart by her in some form of twisted worship.
As she turned to climb the filigree stairs which made up the far end of the chamber, her footsteps left pools of the substance. The heat exuded from her form refused to allow the tangy liquid to clot and slow, running down her armour in trickling waterfalls as she steadily climbed the decorative stairs. At the summit a marble throne dominated the far wall, the pristine white stone decorated with gold leaf and rising up into a huge frieze. The artistic depiction was beautiful and horrific all the same, human figures depicted writhing with serpents, all surrounding a vast semi-human face which glared from above the back of the throne, the exposed tongue of the collosal visage forming the back of the throne itself. She had not witnessed so perfect a depiction since she had last looked upon her father, her plated fingers reaching up to brush the elevated cheekbones of the sculpture. In truth it wasn’t her father that bore the most resemblance. With careful consideration, she decided it could have been herself, if she had stripped some of her own femininity away. The true brother she had never had.
She knew not what compelled her, but she turned her back to the vast face, looking upon the miasma of slaughter she had left through the room. Her eyes still roared with burning fury, and as she refused to dim the psychic power rushing through her, the deep brown mane of her hair ignited as well turning white then bursting into the fiery locks which denoted the fullest extent of her potential. Then she took the throne, pressing herself into the groove of the tongue with ease. When the High Priest, or whatever ridiculous title he had used, had been sat upon it he had been utterly engulfed, a ridiculous pawn upon a vast throne. She rested within the alcove as if it had been made for her, the width of her hips perfectly held without tightness, the armrests aligned so that the fingers of her hands just draped over the edge. The full length of her height placed her head right at the cusp of the tongue-ridge, so that she appeared framed by the frieze without any of her being obscured. She allowed the image of poised perfection to exist a moment longer before she lent forwards, one elbow resting on her right knee. The image of a conqueror who had seized the throne, rather than the queen it had been crafted for.
”All wings reporting, Encarmine Protocol targets eliminated, Sire.”
The voice crackled in her ear, not as pristine as the audio of her helmet, but she had removed it long before.
“Received, begin retrieval of the Icari.” While she felt a sense of pride for how swiftly her daughters had reacted to the paradigm shift of their deployment, she would wait for true praise. The call of slaughter was upon her, the taste of iron in her mouth and to wax lyrically in his moment would have drip too much of her blood lust into her words.
”Your Eyes Upon Us, Sire.”
She turned the charred skull in her left hand over, regarding the ashen bone held together by the previously molten metal now hardened across its skeletal features, before setting it upon the left armrest of the throne. She shut her eyes, steadying her breathing as the song of conquest still rang in her ears, the pool of blood seeping from her armoured boots growing as it began to run back down the stairs, channels of the slick substance, still refusing to curdle and clot, interrupting the gold and white perfection of the climb to where she sat.
”Your sister approaches”
The voice was Isabis, no doubt monitoring the motion of the Primarchs aside from the military operation. Sekhmetara had no doubt which of her gene-siblings she meant. She did not reply to her adopted mortal sibling, instead simply relaying the message to the Pact securing the compound. There was little chance Daena could be mistaken for any other oncoming aerial blip, but it still seemed reasonable to warn them and alert them to her permission for her sister to join her. She was, afterall, in overall command.
Sekhmetara did not move from the throne, but she did open her eyes, regarding the slaughter one further time before resting on the embossed doorway from which her sister would shortly arrive.
Daena had flown with the haste that only rage could proffer. The plan had been simple - Sekhmetara was to relieve and join forces with the loyalists in the spire, and from there fight upwards, splitting the attention of the hive’s defenders yet another time. With threats from above and below, the decapitation strike would catch them outmaneuvered and out of position. Yet that was not what had happened.
Instead she had found her strike force flanked by reinforcements sent from lower in the spire, the very elements that Sekhmetara and the loyalists were to have tied down. Her only support in that chaotic killing field were the misbegotten and murderous daughters of the Tears, women who seemed to have little understanding of who or what they fought for considering the trail of death they left behind them.
The cost for their victory was far greater than it ought to have been due to this deviation from the plans, and each fallen Doomsayer weighed upon the Angel’s heart as she approached the gutted palace. Her rage, vague and unfocused as it was, already began to cool as she examined the charnel field the Tears had made of the loyalist compound. It had clearly been a slaughter - for the most part, and the sight of the only corpses that had seemed to proffer resistance caused her lips to curl into a sneer of disgust at their warped and inhuman forms.
At last she arrived at her sister’s taken throne, the Angel brushing aside the errant desire to bow before her. Still, she could not but admit that Sekhmetara was sitting where she belonged. Even if that place was surrounded by gore. Calming herself, she remained assured that there must be a reason for such apparent madness. Her sister would not act so otherwise. “What occasioned such foulness, beloved of my heart?”
“The foulness festered here long before our arrival, Sister.” Sekhmetara rested back into the throne as she spoke, straightening back up to perfectly fill the frame of the throne, her hands resting along its edges as she beheld Daena, her eyes focused once more. “This was a cleansing, one that my daughters will complete before we are done here. “ The righteous fury which surged through her had yet to fade, her eyes burning with an intensity which settled on Daena, even if she was not the true focus of the Primach’s ire.
“I have not spoken to you of such things, but you were not the first of our siblings I met. Our father brought Sarghaul and his Lurkers to Mithra. I have spoken of the overlords of my home, the Empire of the Scale, who I drove from Mithra’s surface.” Her attention drifted from Daena as she recounted the tale, a new truth matched with a familiar tale. Her armoured gauntlet lifted the gold-clad skull of the priest up to her own features, the charred icon of her handiwork staring back at her.
“It was not I who threw down the halls of my childhood, who burned the estates of the Empire upon Thotha and vented its environment to the void, only then choking the flames of its destruction..” With a dismissive flick of her fingers, the skull clattered from her grasp, trailing down the stairs to rest beside where Daena stood. “I was present, I knew the necessity, but it was the Lurkers who fought those battles with me, not the people of my home. They wept and raged against the purging, for many we were fighting to free Thotha of the Empire, but our Father had shown me the necessity of it.” Finally, Sekhmetara stood. The fury boiling within her faded, but did not cease, as she descended the steps, the stone, softened by the heat of her, cracking beneath her golden tread.
“Father spoke to me of the beings in the Warp, Xenos creatures more dangerous than any we fight within realspace. They covert humanity, seek the worship of our masses so they might dominate our reality as well. The Imperial Truth is both our cause and our weapon against them. On a thousand worlds you may find cults and hidden enclaves like these.” With a wave of her hand, Sekhmetara motioned to the reliefs along the walls, the works of foul perfection that detailed the entire estate. “That is why Father needs weapons such as the Lurkers. His own monsters, to hunt the tyrants of Old Night.” Finally, her features settled once more on Daena in full, at last with the warmth of expression usually reserved for her, a sad, knowing smile on Sekhmetara’s full lips.
“I am sorry for the loss of your daughters, Stars of my sky, but this cult of Serpents must be put to the pyre, lest they spread among those who claim to be our subjects, not one may escape, and to that task my daughters can be his monsters as well as our brother’s get.”
Were it anyone else who said such things, Daena would have scoffed. The pagan rites of mystery cults and Warp whisperers were dangerous, it was true, she had had lifetimes dealing with them - but this was beyond the pale. If Sekhmetara insisted upon it however, and if she went so far as to claim that the Lurkers were part of Father’s design…
“Very well, Sun of my days, I shall take you upon your word,” the Angel said after a few moments, her wings wilting at the statement. “A full accounting can wait, there are more pressing issues to deal with,” she continued on, attempting to retain the thread of conversation lest she be swept away by her sister’s zeal. It was more difficult than she would like to admit. “But.”
Pulling herself up to her full height, she locked eyes with her enthroned sister. Things might have been simple to Sekhmetara, but these revelations - if she did accept them as truth - only made things far more complicated. “Sekhmetara. If these,” she said with a wave at the carnage around them, “were our loyal functionaries, worthy of death by your hand, then what does that make the rebels?”
“A traitor is a traitor.” As the Mithran primach spoke, her hand came to rest on her sister’s shoulder, the contact felt through the second skin of their ceramite plate. She remembered well, the time before, when she had not known these lessons herself. When she had walked the shattered halls of her home and questioned the justice of her father’s will. Dissent was still dissent, heresy was still heresy. Only the Imperial Truth could strike the centre, the narrow understanding of reality upon which the Imperium could survive.
“What we do here will seed this world for a thousand generations of humanity that might live in peace and prosperity. I am the Unconquered Sun of Mithra, and I will burn away the cancer buried in our father’s realm.” Sekhmetara’s voice was quiet despite her fervor, whispered words of intimate belief to her sister, even as heat and power radiated from her, only dipping as she came upon the one topic she knew would be painful. “My daughters report to me that you encountered my first company, I sense rage and indignity in you sister, speak your piece that I might quell your concerns.”
Daena turned her face away from her sun as it tried to embrace her, wings shrouding her form. Such breezy statements, so certain and filled with conviction, were easy things for Sekhmetara. They had never come easily to her. “Their treason is our failure. If there was any left upon our worlds who followed such foolishness, then it speaks to our inability to root them. To think that such were placed so high says even worse. What use is a conquest without ensuring the Truth is firmly placed in power? What benefit is so hollow a victory?”
Now she overcame her fretfulness, facing her sister full on, eyes gleaming with the light of her genegift. “You are a hunter, o greatest of stars. And you unleashed your hounds. Tell me. Are these wayward souls to be cowed, or prey to be run down?”
“As we do with any failure sister, in our father’s work. We bring Truth to falsehoods, we correct them. Words have failed. It is time for fire and fury.”
Collab with @Ruby
Present Day
Genosha
Hammer Bay
Bobby Drake already missed the brief window of freedom he had enjoyed on Genosha, able to walk freely across the island without attracting stares of any kind. Then M-Day had happened. The stares were not the same as those he had learned to experience elsewhere, not the outright glare of hate, but the insidious wrath of envy. The Mutates had lived for years as slaves and sacrificed much for freedom, then fate had robed them of their identity, human again when it was finally free to be a mutant. He'd be pretty pissed off as well.
He'd take envy over hatred though, it didn't stop him buying a drink. Hammer Bay was still in the process of rebuilding, a process which had slowed down dramatically following the depowering of most of the population, but the majority of the city now functioned, just with a few lasting scars.
O'Malley's was the typical attempt at an Irish bar by foreign nationals who had never been to the country. It predated the Revolution, but its old owners had either fled or hadn't bothered to return to claim it. New ownership came from among the Mutate population, of which Bobby had heard were some of the few to retain their mutant identity in these trying days. Still, the Guiness wasn't bad. Not that he was purely here for the alcohol.
Sliding up to the bar, quite literally, the blue sheened man took a seat. It was only the early afternoon and service, while not enthusiastic, was immediate.
"I'll take a pint, and I'll pay for five more you can keep if you answer a question of mine."
"Depends on the question." The man was starting the pour even as he spoke, the non-committal reply barely more than a grunt.
"Girl with green hair, think you'll know who I mean if you've seen her."
"I ain't helping you stalk some poor lass now." Bobby didn't know if the somewhat poor attempt at a Gaelic dialect was really part of the act, he hadn't the heart to suggest that was a Scottish term.
"I'm not on personal business." Bobby set the coin down on the bar, a silver piece bearing the Reichsadler, blackened on one side. Much as with the girl he was hunting, if you knew, you knew. "And I'm still paying." The coin was soon joined by several crisp noted, far more than was required for the lonely pint that was already at his lips. Refreshingly cold, but then so was everything he drank once it had touched his lips.
"Came in a couple of times, asking around about folks. We still keep an eye on new folks for Remy, she's staying at Hoffcraft Motel, little down the ways." It was impressive how many syllables the man could fit in a grunt, but it got the point across.
"Cheers, I'll bring the glass back." Bobby stood, still sipping the pint as he left, taking the coin with him but leaving the notes. It was a short walk, but plenty of time to sink the pint before a reunion he wasn't sure he wished to occur took place.
"Jesus, Bobby, would subtly hurt you?"
It was like walking down the street with blue furball Hank McCoy, except the sunlight of early afternoon Hammer Bay reflecting off Bobby Drake and bent as it's rays of light went deeper into the ice blue of one of the original five X-Men. Despite the fact that Magneto was the biggest draw on the island, it was the difference of a royal and a celebrity; there was some cross-over appeal, but the vibe was very different between the two. Magneto was an unofficial royal of Genosha, while the X-Men were celebrities. And the original five X-Men, those the four that were still alive? None seemed to draw more attention than those four.
Lorna's wavy hair was lazily kept up high on her head with a gold jaw-clip, keeping it behind her and down her back. Her denim jacket was time-worn, the back of it covered with flag patches; nearly forty flags from nearly every continent except for Antarctica, including a few unofficial flags, the most unusual of which was a green jungle Xate palm behind the black silhouette of a T-Rex; the Savage Land. With the crimson and gold standard of the Shi'ar Empire a close second. Her jeans were tight things with a thick brown leather belt and silver buckle, coming up a inch or two over her round hips, the teeshirt underneath was black with bold white kanji for Shueisha. Her eyes were covered with black square frame sunglasses, and they never even turned his direction as she walked up from behind him and past, just one pedestrian casually walking past another, shopping bags in hand, the other holding the strap of a brown leather large purse resting off her left shoulder as she marched.
Unlike Bobby Drake, Lorna Dane had no intention of inviting too many eyes and too much attention. She wasn't the 'look-at-me' daughter of Magneto; the other one held that distinction.
He didn't fall into step beside her, nor even more to catch up, watching the figure move past him as any other that moved on the street. That wasn't quite true, she was captivating in a way that no mutant power could replicate, even his own shining skin. The lead had proven true, at least, as he watched her go without directly doing so, had her hips always swayed quite like that?
Suddenly the thought of not arriving empty handed came to mind and he stopped by whatever closest street vendor was hawking something covered in grease, bad for the heart, but oh so good for the soul.
"I'll take two."
By the time he looped back around, several hours had flown by, the Sun burning into low Afternoon. One side effect of his relative fame as a member of the X-men made the iconic look of his frozen exodermis well known, but the very much human look he had been forced to adopt for all the years prior had faded back into obscurity. A change of clothes was all it really required. A second factor, his ability to control temperature and his environment, meant that the wrapped taco shells within the bag he held were good as new.
He waited for her in the lobby, at one of several small cafe tables set up in what had once been a fashionable hall. There was establishment catering, but the place didn't seem to mind him bringing in the package from the outside, still, he did the good favour of at least ordering a rum and coke from their own supply. Long before the Revolution, Genoshan rum had been famous across the world. Perhaps it would be again, particular if this taste was anything to go by, and now it came slavery free.
He had time to kill, and another had been ordered by the time his patience paid off, another set in front of him in the case he wasn't stood up from the engagement he had assumed all on his own.
"Keep cool." He breathed to himself, enjoying the benefits of his own terrible pun.
She stood before the table, arms crossed, shades still concealing her eyes while her tone of voice bordered between intrigue and irritation. “Are you stalking me, Bobby? I didn’t want team pitches, I didn’t want old dramas re-hashed, I didn’t want media attention, I didn’t want anyone to know I’m on the island; in a city where there’s probably a telepath per city block I’m probably hoping against hope there, but even still…what do you want?”
"I'd recommend sitting down then." The look he gave her in turn was all intrigue and no irritation. "No pitches, just carne asada, I hope that sounds a little more appetizing." Long before any of this had all become rather serious, Bobby had always been known as the easy charm of the X-men, and that had carried forth with him into adulthood. It was a little tougher with the weight of history, but he still managed all the same.
Before answering her fully, he began to unwrap his offering, taking up his own portion to manage a bit washed down with the tasting of cola and liquor. "Sometimes we can't avoid all old dramas, and I think you'd prefer me asking you why you're here all of a sudden, instead of Darkholme or Exodus…. Besides, haven't you heard? We're rather down on telepaths these days."
"Sure. You're down telepaths, but all the best ones are still around," she all but snorted, taking a seat and dropping the purse on the floor next to the chair. Then it hit her: his former teammate and friend. Her eyes snapped up to see his face, to see if he was staring, to see if there was some sign the omission had crossed some line, but there was no sign. No outward sign, anyway. One taco wouldn't be enough, but it was a start, especially as she asked the roving waitress for a cerveza, "Right next to Africa and it's Mexican and pizza that I still see everywhere as I walk around Hammer Bay. Well, the more affluent areas, anyway."
There was serious poverty to some of Hammer Bay, much as the mutants, and her father, wanted the issue dealt with there was no magic silver bullet for poverty, but it wasn't a good look...especially when so many of the impoverished were human residents that stayed, or, worse, depowered mutants. Genosha was strange. She'd been there a few days, and it was still just strange. She couldn't help but feel for the depowered; her sister had made her one such victim. It was only Apocalypse that allowed her some restoration of her abilities, and even then...every time she used them it felt more like reading your favourite book, but not your copy, just a copy of it you'd borrowed from someone else. You knew all the words, but everything else about the book was...different, a bit weird.
"I'm sure Raven and Bennet have more pressing matters. Besides, if they knew I was around, he'd know. And if he knew..."
Well. That was obvious, she thought.
"They don't know, I suppose these days I'm meant to tell them about this sort of thing." He spoke with something approaching a defeatist sigh, before carrying on with the easy lack of concern, If you're complaining, I'm sure we can find something more local after, I thought a taste of 'home' made for an alright start, though." It was memories, rather than geography, than tied crunching shell of his second bite to any idea of familiarity. That was the same thought of home that made the sudden memory of Jean burn as brightly as she had in his mind, hot enough to melt even him. Still, he kept the reaction from her, she might have brought it on, but it had never been malicious.
He was tempted to leave it at that, an offer to find somewhere else, to breathe in the tastes of the mutant dom's new home, but he kept talking. "Seemed more likely to work than expecting a text back." There was the usual teasing taunt of his words, but it wasn't entirely untrue. Time apart had made strangers of them, no matter what the past held.
Despite everything, she smiled at her ex-boyfriend, a history that seemed now to be lifetimes ago, “You never answered the question, Iceman,” his codename being used more as a gentle tease, in the moment.
“I’m not stalking you, Lorna.” He replied with a gentle laugh to the use of his codename, another sip of drink as he leant forwards over the table to prevent an errant bite of taco mix ending up on his clothing. “You want to pin down exactly what brings me here, watching you walk away down a street again? Curiosity, concern. Maybe any and all of the above.”
Lifetimes though it may have been, Lorna could still tell when something was up. “Bobby…what are they doing? I’ve been around a few days and all I hear is talk about Charles and my father are up to something. Why are they teaming up? What's changed with Xavier?"
“Your father isn’t the man he was.” There was another munch of taco, swallowed down with a slight laugh, “Normally that’s a negative, but now, it really isn’t. Can’t say it makes up for everything that happened in the past, but I’ll take it.” The pause came afterwards, with a softer sigh, “And, I think Charles is worse, he’s come back, from whoever knows where. It’s like they’ve both been pulled to common ground, an idealistic Magneto and a pragmatic Xavier.” Then the true pain came, the pain which had spurred on his decision to find her without suggesting to the others that there was a mutant unaccounted for on Genosha. “Whatever it is, beyond making this a home for us all, they’ve not told me.”
Lorna Dane took a long drink of the ice cold cerveza, and chuckled at the suddenly grim Bobby Drake. "Guess I'll have to stick around to find out. We need more tacos, and more alcohol, though. Definitely, definitely, more alcohol."
In days gone by the district of Havershaw Heights had been the epicentre of the vast, unequal, wealth of Genosha. The human elites had dined in luxury on the spoils earned by the slave labour of the Mutates.
It had suffered some of the worst devastation during the Revolution, furious Mutates, finally free from both their physical and psionic chains, along with their sympathetic human allies, had vented the greater portion of their wrath on the district. Even the most moderate of the partisans had little sympathy for any of the families who had resided in such wealth, although the leadership of the Revolution had done what they could to ensure servants and children would not be harmed.
The version of Erik Lehnsherr that had waged nearly a century of war against the human dominated globe would likely have simply rebuilt the district to house elite mutant overlords, but now free of the worst of his madness and paranoia, he had forged a different path. Opulent estates were rebuilt as buildings of governance, of institutions that would support the community and nation. Of great personal note had been The Piotr Rasputin Memorial Orphanage, alongside the latest incarnation of Jean Grey Institute of Gifted Youngsters. All the problems of nation building had hardly been solved, poverty had still sunk its claws into the recently ruined nation, but the demolishment of the estates had gone someway to at least removing the visual markers of inequality.
There did, however, remain one private household in the district, the Palatine House, the home of Magneto. Far more humble than the Presidential Home it had replaced, it nevertheless provided a commanding view over the entire city of Hammer Bay. It was not, however, the man himself, enjoying the view of the city sprawling to the sea. The wind caught in her hair, the red and gold of her gown, Wanda Maximoff tried to drown out the weight of memory and her own power with the vast sensation of the view before her. For the moment, it wasn’t working. No power was without cost, and very little compared to the terrifying force of chaos magic she had worked upon reality. With a single desperate cry she had irreversibly altered her own world, and while she did not know, she felt the echoes had passed beyond, spilling forth into alternate realities she had never even witnessed.
To put it mildly, it was a lot.
Had she meant to do it? There seemed little doubt from those who had witnessed it. Her own memory, her own recollection, was flawed. She couldn’t recall the act, but her heart ached with grief and guilt. Those were not the emotions of an innocent woman, so she must have.
Any further time she may have had to ponder events was interrupted by the sound of the wall unmaking behind her. The Palatine House had been crafted by those with great power for beings of their own ilk to live within. It was deliberately impossible for those reliant on simple human locomotion to navigate, few doorways, even fewer staircases. An impossible maze carved into less space than your average McMansion.
Magneto stepped through the already sealing archway he had formed in the wall behind her, leading out onto the balcony. The house appeared to be made from stone, but there was enough metal running through it to make his act less than a moment’s thought for the ruler of Free Genosha. He made a habit of not wearing his helm these days, signifying the lack of discord among mutants. There was nothing hidden between him and the great telepaths of Mutantkind anymore.
An unforeseen side effect of this for Wanda, and she would imagine her twin brother and the rumoured cases of other children, was a constant reminder of how time and worked differently upon her father. His features were closer to her own in age than a man who had been born close to the dawn of the previous century. Yet another reminder that they were far from a normal family, not even a normal estranged one.
“Wanda, how are you feeling?” Still, the age sometimes crept into his voice. The feeling of the concerned, doting, father he could have been, had the fates been less cruel. Had he been less cruel.
“Better than yesterday.” She didn’t expand on the specifics further. Most days she couldn’t maintain consciousness for long. This was likely the longest she had been awake and present since The Decimation. That should have been a good thing, but illness and madness were a shield against what she had done. Lucidity felt too painful.
He paced close to her, but not enough to be truly familiar, his hands behind his back. She would have to make do with the concern in his voice and expression. In truth, she did not know if she would have appreciated anything more.
“You’re wearing the gown.” The doubt was in his words as he drew in the painful vision of her, a comment which made her own eyes draw down to herself, to the loosely flowing red and gold of royal majesty she was clad in. The casual outfit of a Princess. Exactly that.
“I know, I like it.” It was a harmless enough statement. Never mind the gown was one of the few surviving relics of the world she had built, a world where she had been a princess, and the gown within which she had annihilated her own people. Thankfully, the man across from her was one of few witnesses who could recall such details. Eventually, perhaps, even that would fade. She hoped so. It really was a lovely gown. It wasn’t the fabric’s fault she was a monster.
Eric either conceded the point or gave up the purpose of engaging within it, moving himself, walking, to the edge of the balcony, alongside, but apart from her. “It looks almost peaceful from up here.” He was quite correct, everything substantial enough to be visible from this distance had been rebuilt, many districts were thriving in a way they never had even at the height of Genoshan wealth. The greatest conflicts that remained were those hidden from on heigh, that dwelled in the hearts of the disenfranchised and disempowered, in this case, more literally than most.
“This sounds like the beginning of a warning.” Her voice was a soft sigh, barely heard over the call of the ocean wind, roaring up to the nearly mountainous heights of the city’s premier districts. “Must I fear you too, father?” Since reawakening in this version of reality, she had rarely called him that. She hadn’t meant it to be something of note, but it evidently was.
“Never, Wanda. I know that has not always been true, I cannot claim to have ever been a parent, let alone a good one. But no harm shall come to you, or Pietro, whenever he wishes to return, by my hand, never again.” The words were carefully chosen, expressing the truth of his feelings while accounting for the errors of his past and the difficulties of the present. He had always been good with words, even when there was little else good in him. “But I cannot hold this nation to that standard. They are angry, and I cannot say they are wrong to be. So long as I am here, you will be welcome, but I understanding of them will only bring you further hurt.”
“And you fear what I might do when hurt again?” Once again she did not mean the sense of betrayal that forced itself into her words, but when her large, glistening, eyes turned on her father, she could not help but read the hurt they had caused him. She didn’t regret it, not quite, but she didn’t mean it either.
“Wanda, I…”
”You are with the Decimator” The archaic tone of Exodus burned into his mind. Charles, even Emma, were always easier to have in his consciousness than Exodus. His telepathy ignited with the zeal of his cause.
”I am with my daughter, Exodus”
”It is not my place to question, Sire, but..”
”Then do not, what is it you wish, Exodus?” It had been difficult enough to prevent the zealous mutant from referring to him as such out loud, he had given up the attempt within the privacy of their minds. He was not sure Exodus was capable of that change.
”Scott Summers is with a representative of the US Navy in Hammer Bay.”
”Indeed, both myself and Miss Frost have approved this.” He still avoided using Xavier’s name when communicating with Exodus, his old friend’s role in the governance of Genosha would have to be made official before the ancient mutant would accept Xavier’s prominent role as anything more than a citizen and adviser of the nation.
”Did you approve an escort of seven score souls and world ending fury?” Exodus lacked subtlty just as much as his words often fell into poetry and allegory. It was a genuine question, damn him.
”Show me.”
The conversation took all of a heartbeat, well adjusted minds speaking directly to each other. Already Magento had begun to float into the air as he fixed Wanda with a sad smile. “I will return, Daughter.”
“Fly safe, Father. Rememver they only do what they must.”
“As do I.”
It was not true flight, that enabled Eric to soar, the way the world distorted around him as the magnetic forces of the Earth propelled him could never be mistaken for it. The air hummed with too much power, crackled with potential. Like a continuous sonic boom, Magneto screamed through the air. He moved with purpose and pace. Had Genosha relied on typical human technologies of electromagnetic detection, they would have gone haywire and winked out. Soon the streaking figure of red in the sky was joined by another, a literally blazing trail, a comet of vengeance.
The land of Genosha quickly gave way to the sparkling expanse of the Indian Ocean. A small land mass, it wasn’t long before it was a distant smudge on the horzion, yet still well within the waters claimed by the sovereign nation. Magneto did not feel they guarded their waters too jealously. Any could pass through the waters of Genosha so long as they meant no harm to Mutantkind, and accepted the status of Genosha as a sovereign state. The fact that none of the UN had yet admitted to such a thing changed nothing. The waters were closed, until the world opened to Genosha.
When the pair of flying mutants came to halt above the crashing tide below, there was little of note to mark it from any other part of the wide expanse. A small outcrop several hundreds of meters to their right denoted volanic activity that might one day, in tens of thousands of years, grow the ambition to become an island, was all that interrupted the sparkling sea. To the nake eye, anyway, to one who could sense through the magnetic currents of the Earth and perhaps the third strongest surviving telepath, it was everything but clear.
”What would you have of me, Sire?” Exodus’ thoughts were not concealed and betrayed him. He would scour the sea if it was his will, end nearly two hundred lives in conflagration for the crime of ignoring the will of Genosha, of Magneto. There was a time when Eric would have agreed, but for now, he would settle for Awe, over Shock.
”Give me their minds, the rest, I shall see to.” While Exodus drifted in the currents of air, the true flight of his telekensis apparent, Magneto appeared utterly static in the air, rooted by forces far beyond the raging winds of Earth. His power ran deep. It was this power he called upon with outstretched hand. At first, nothing about the sight before them changed. Steadily, new waves began to ripple out for the water, a vast shape displacing the tide above it. Soon the creaking groan of tortured metal became audible even over the surf, dark shape rising below.
A moment later, and the shape of the USS Florida broke from the surf, the vast submersible, almost 200 meters of human power, was wrenched from the safety of water. It took more of Magneto’s effort to hold the vehicle together than it did to wrench it from the tide, a structure never designed to exist without the pressure of water suddenly finding itself in the sky. The odd system still broke, although its surface hummed with Magneto’s power, preventing any burst or leak that would spell doom once reset, he had little concern for the death dealing weaponry which failed to survive the transit from nautical vessal to unwilling airforce. Sirens blared from within the hull as instruments gave back impossible readings.
Then the voice of Eric Lehnsherr resounded within the mind of every crew member aboard.
”United States Vessel, you act in transgression of the laws of Genosha, Free and Soverign Republic. Be thankful you recieve the clemency your kind have so often denied our own. You have built these weapons to terrify and subdue, but we are no longer afraid, and you will find we have weapons of our own. Do not return.” Even as the words were projected across the vessel, it was in motion, Magneto, Exodus, and the vast submersible traversing the air away from the island nation, the vast bulk of the USS Florida steadily turning as it did, pointing away from the island, as if there was any doubt as to which direction they were being commanded to go.
”Inform Scott Summers of this, and provide my best wishes to him and his guest.” The continuation of Magneto’s thoughts were directed to Exodus, but were still felt by the crew within the Submarine as it was set back into the water. Let them know of the error they had committed.
Exodus’ thought reply was heard only by Magneto, however, before the ‘fire’ wreathed mutant arced away in the sky. ”By Your Will, Sire.”
T H E B R O T H E R H O O D O F M U T A N T S
Present Day
Genosha
Hammer Bay
Bobby Drake already missed the brief window of freedom he had enjoyed on Genosha, able to walk freely across the island without attracting stares of any kind. Then M-Day had happened. The stares were not the same as those he had learned to experience elsewhere, not the outright glare of hate, but the insidious wrath of envy. The Mutates had lived for years as slaves and sacrificed much for freedom, then fate had robed them of their identity, human again when it was finally free to be a mutant. He'd be pretty pissed off as well.
He'd take envy over hatred though, it didn't stop him buying a drink. Hammer Bay was still in the process of rebuilding, a process which had slowed down dramatically following the depowering of most of the population, but the majority of the city now functioned, just with a few lasting scars.
O'Malley's was the typical attempt at an Irish bar by foreign nationals who had never been to the country. It predated the Revolution, but its old owners had either fled or hadn't bothered to return to claim it. New ownership came from among the Mutate population, of which Bobby had heard were some of the few to retain their mutant identity in these trying days. Still, the Guiness wasn't bad. Not that he was purely here for the alcohol.
Sliding up to the bar, quite literally, the blue sheened man took a seat. It was only the early afternoon and service, while not enthusiastic, was immediate.
"I'll take a pint, and I'll pay for five more you can keep if you answer a question of mine."
"Depends on the question." The man was starting the pour even as he spoke, the non-committal reply barely more than a grunt.
"Girl with green hair, think you'll know who I mean if you've seen her."
"I ain't helping you stalk some poor lass now." Bobby didn't know if the somewhat poor attempt at a Gaelic dialect was really part of the act, he hadn't the heart to suggest that was a Scottish term.
"I'm not on personal business." Bobby set the coin down on the bar, a silver piece bearing the Reichsadler, blackened on one side. Much as with the girl he was hunting, if you knew, you knew. "And I'm still paying." The coin was soon joined by several crisp noted, far more than was required for the lonely pint that was already at his lips. Refreshingly cold, but then so was everything he drank once it had touched his lips.
"Came in a couple of times, asking around about folks. We still keep an eye on new folks for Remy, she's staying at Hoffcraft Motel, little down the ways." It was impressive how many syllables the man could fit in a grunt, but it got the point across.
"Cheers, I'll bring the glass back." Bobby stood, still sipping the pint as he left, taking the coin with him but leaving the notes. It was a short walk, but plenty of time to sink the pint before a reunion he wasn't sure he wished to occur took place.
"Jesus, Bobby, would subtly hurt you?"
It was like walking down the street with blue furball Hank McCoy, except the sunlight of early afternoon Hammer Bay reflecting off Bobby Drake and bent as it's rays of light went deeper into the ice blue of one of the original five X-Men. Despite the fact that Magneto was the biggest draw on the island, it was the difference of a royal and a celebrity; there was some cross-over appeal, but the vibe was very different between the two. Magneto was an unofficial royal of Genosha, while the X-Men were celebrities. And the original five X-Men, those the four that were still alive? None seemed to draw more attention than those four.
Lorna's wavy hair was lazily kept up high on her head with a gold jaw-clip, keeping it behind her and down her back. Her denim jacket was time-worn, the back of it covered with flag patches; nearly forty flags from nearly every continent except for Antarctica, including a few unofficial flags, the most unusual of which was a green jungle Xate palm behind the black silhouette of a T-Rex; the Savage Land. With the crimson and gold standard of the Shi'ar Empire a close second. Her jeans were tight things with a thick brown leather belt and silver buckle, coming up a inch or two over her round hips, the teeshirt underneath was black with bold white kanji for Shueisha. Her eyes were covered with black square frame sunglasses, and they never even turned his direction as she walked up from behind him and past, just one pedestrian casually walking past another, shopping bags in hand, the other holding the strap of a brown leather large purse resting off her left shoulder as she marched.
Unlike Bobby Drake, Lorna Dane had no intention of inviting too many eyes and too much attention. She wasn't the 'look-at-me' daughter of Magneto; the other one held that distinction.
He didn't fall into step beside her, nor even more to catch up, watching the figure move past him as any other that moved on the street. That wasn't quite true, she was captivating in a way that no mutant power could replicate, even his own shining skin. The lead had proven true, at least, as he watched her go without directly doing so, had her hips always swayed quite like that?
Suddenly the thought of not arriving empty handed came to mind and he stopped by whatever closest street vendor was hawking something covered in grease, bad for the heart, but oh so good for the soul.
"I'll take two."
By the time he looped back around, several hours had flown by, the Sun burning into low Afternoon. One side effect of his relative fame as a member of the X-men made the iconic look of his frozen exodermis well known, but the very much human look he had been forced to adopt for all the years prior had faded back into obscurity. A change of clothes was all it really required. A second factor, his ability to control temperature and his environment, meant that the wrapped taco shells within the bag he held were good as new.
He waited for her in the lobby, at one of several small cafe tables set up in what had once been a fashionable hall. There was establishment catering, but the place didn't seem to mind him bringing in the package from the outside, still, he did the good favour of at least ordering a rum and coke from their own supply. Long before the Revolution, Genoshan rum had been famous across the world. Perhaps it would be again, particular if this taste was anything to go by, and now it came slavery free.
He had time to kill, and another had been ordered by the time his patience paid off, another set in front of him in the case he wasn't stood up from the engagement he had assumed all on his own.
"Keep cool." He breathed to himself, enjoying the benefits of his own terrible pun.
She stood before the table, arms crossed, shades still concealing her eyes while her tone of voice bordered between intrigue and irritation. “Are you stalking me, Bobby? I didn’t want team pitches, I didn’t want old dramas re-hashed, I didn’t want media attention, I didn’t want anyone to know I’m on the island; in a city where there’s probably a telepath per city block I’m probably hoping against hope there, but even still…what do you want?”
"I'd recommend sitting down then." The look he gave her in turn was all intrigue and no irritation. "No pitches, just carne asada, I hope that sounds a little more appetizing." Long before any of this had all become rather serious, Bobby had always been known as the easy charm of the X-men, and that had carried forth with him into adulthood. It was a little tougher with the weight of history, but he still managed all the same.
Before answering her fully, he began to unwrap his offering, taking up his own portion to manage a bit washed down with the tasting of cola and liquor. "Sometimes we can't avoid all old dramas, and I think you'd prefer me asking you why you're here all of a sudden, instead of Darkholme or Exodus…. Besides, haven't you heard? We're rather down on telepaths these days."
"Sure. You're down telepaths, but all the best ones are still around," she all but snorted, taking a seat and dropping the purse on the floor next to the chair. Then it hit her: his former teammate and friend. Her eyes snapped up to see his face, to see if he was staring, to see if there was some sign the omission had crossed some line, but there was no sign. No outward sign, anyway. One taco wouldn't be enough, but it was a start, especially as she asked the roving waitress for a cerveza, "Right next to Africa and it's Mexican and pizza that I still see everywhere as I walk around Hammer Bay. Well, the more affluent areas, anyway."
There was serious poverty to some of Hammer Bay, much as the mutants, and her father, wanted the issue dealt with there was no magic silver bullet for poverty, but it wasn't a good look...especially when so many of the impoverished were human residents that stayed, or, worse, depowered mutants. Genosha was strange. She'd been there a few days, and it was still just strange. She couldn't help but feel for the depowered; her sister had made her one such victim. It was only Apocalypse that allowed her some restoration of her abilities, and even then...every time she used them it felt more like reading your favourite book, but not your copy, just a copy of it you'd borrowed from someone else. You knew all the words, but everything else about the book was...different, a bit weird.
"I'm sure Raven and Bennet have more pressing matters. Besides, if they knew I was around, he'd know. And if he knew..."
Well. That was obvious, she thought.
"They don't know, I suppose these days I'm meant to tell them about this sort of thing." He spoke with something approaching a defeatist sigh, before carrying on with the easy lack of concern, If you're complaining, I'm sure we can find something more local after, I thought a taste of 'home' made for an alright start, though." It was memories, rather than geography, than tied crunching shell of his second bite to any idea of familiarity. That was the same thought of home that made the sudden memory of Jean burn as brightly as she had in his mind, hot enough to melt even him. Still, he kept the reaction from her, she might have brought it on, but it had never been malicious.
He was tempted to leave it at that, an offer to find somewhere else, to breathe in the tastes of the mutant dom's new home, but he kept talking. "Seemed more likely to work than expecting a text back." There was the usual teasing taunt of his words, but it wasn't entirely untrue. Time apart had made strangers of them, no matter what the past held.
Despite everything, she smiled at her ex-boyfriend, a history that seemed now to be lifetimes ago, “You never answered the question, Iceman,” his codename being used more as a gentle tease, in the moment.
“I’m not stalking you, Lorna.” He replied with a gentle laugh to the use of his codename, another sip of drink as he leant forwards over the table to prevent an errant bite of taco mix ending up on his clothing. “You want to pin down exactly what brings me here, watching you walk away down a street again? Curiosity, concern. Maybe any and all of the above.”
Lifetimes though it may have been, Lorna could still tell when something was up. “Bobby…what are they doing? I’ve been around a few days and all I hear is talk about Charles and my father are up to something. Why are they teaming up? What's changed with Xavier?"
“Your father isn’t the man he was.” There was another munch of taco, swallowed down with a slight laugh, “Normally that’s a negative, but now, it really isn’t. Can’t say it makes up for everything that happened in the past, but I’ll take it.” The pause came afterwards, with a softer sigh, “And, I think Charles is worse, he’s come back, from whoever knows where. It’s like they’ve both been pulled to common ground, an idealistic Magneto and a pragmatic Xavier.” Then the true pain came, the pain which had spurred on his decision to find her without suggesting to the others that there was a mutant unaccounted for on Genosha. “Whatever it is, beyond making this a home for us all, they’ve not told me.”
Lorna Dane took a long drink of the ice cold cerveza, and chuckled at the suddenly grim Bobby Drake. "Guess I'll have to stick around to find out. We need more tacos, and more alcohol, though. Definitely, definitely, more alcohol."
In days gone by the district of Havershaw Heights had been the epicentre of the vast, unequal, wealth of Genosha. The human elites had dined in luxury on the spoils earned by the slave labour of the Mutates.
It had suffered some of the worst devastation during the Revolution, furious Mutates, finally free from both their physical and psionic chains, along with their sympathetic human allies, had vented the greater portion of their wrath on the district. Even the most moderate of the partisans had little sympathy for any of the families who had resided in such wealth, although the leadership of the Revolution had done what they could to ensure servants and children would not be harmed.
The version of Erik Lehnsherr that had waged nearly a century of war against the human dominated globe would likely have simply rebuilt the district to house elite mutant overlords, but now free of the worst of his madness and paranoia, he had forged a different path. Opulent estates were rebuilt as buildings of governance, of institutions that would support the community and nation. Of great personal note had been The Piotr Rasputin Memorial Orphanage, alongside the latest incarnation of Jean Grey Institute of Gifted Youngsters. All the problems of nation building had hardly been solved, poverty had still sunk its claws into the recently ruined nation, but the demolishment of the estates had gone someway to at least removing the visual markers of inequality.
There did, however, remain one private household in the district, the Palatine House, the home of Magneto. Far more humble than the Presidential Home it had replaced, it nevertheless provided a commanding view over the entire city of Hammer Bay. It was not, however, the man himself, enjoying the view of the city sprawling to the sea. The wind caught in her hair, the red and gold of her gown, Wanda Maximoff tried to drown out the weight of memory and her own power with the vast sensation of the view before her. For the moment, it wasn’t working. No power was without cost, and very little compared to the terrifying force of chaos magic she had worked upon reality. With a single desperate cry she had irreversibly altered her own world, and while she did not know, she felt the echoes had passed beyond, spilling forth into alternate realities she had never even witnessed.
To put it mildly, it was a lot.
Had she meant to do it? There seemed little doubt from those who had witnessed it. Her own memory, her own recollection, was flawed. She couldn’t recall the act, but her heart ached with grief and guilt. Those were not the emotions of an innocent woman, so she must have.
Any further time she may have had to ponder events was interrupted by the sound of the wall unmaking behind her. The Palatine House had been crafted by those with great power for beings of their own ilk to live within. It was deliberately impossible for those reliant on simple human locomotion to navigate, few doorways, even fewer staircases. An impossible maze carved into less space than your average McMansion.
Magneto stepped through the already sealing archway he had formed in the wall behind her, leading out onto the balcony. The house appeared to be made from stone, but there was enough metal running through it to make his act less than a moment’s thought for the ruler of Free Genosha. He made a habit of not wearing his helm these days, signifying the lack of discord among mutants. There was nothing hidden between him and the great telepaths of Mutantkind anymore.
An unforeseen side effect of this for Wanda, and she would imagine her twin brother and the rumoured cases of other children, was a constant reminder of how time and worked differently upon her father. His features were closer to her own in age than a man who had been born close to the dawn of the previous century. Yet another reminder that they were far from a normal family, not even a normal estranged one.
“Wanda, how are you feeling?” Still, the age sometimes crept into his voice. The feeling of the concerned, doting, father he could have been, had the fates been less cruel. Had he been less cruel.
“Better than yesterday.” She didn’t expand on the specifics further. Most days she couldn’t maintain consciousness for long. This was likely the longest she had been awake and present since The Decimation. That should have been a good thing, but illness and madness were a shield against what she had done. Lucidity felt too painful.
He paced close to her, but not enough to be truly familiar, his hands behind his back. She would have to make do with the concern in his voice and expression. In truth, she did not know if she would have appreciated anything more.
“You’re wearing the gown.” The doubt was in his words as he drew in the painful vision of her, a comment which made her own eyes draw down to herself, to the loosely flowing red and gold of royal majesty she was clad in. The casual outfit of a Princess. Exactly that.
“I know, I like it.” It was a harmless enough statement. Never mind the gown was one of the few surviving relics of the world she had built, a world where she had been a princess, and the gown within which she had annihilated her own people. Thankfully, the man across from her was one of few witnesses who could recall such details. Eventually, perhaps, even that would fade. She hoped so. It really was a lovely gown. It wasn’t the fabric’s fault she was a monster.
Eric either conceded the point or gave up the purpose of engaging within it, moving himself, walking, to the edge of the balcony, alongside, but apart from her. “It looks almost peaceful from up here.” He was quite correct, everything substantial enough to be visible from this distance had been rebuilt, many districts were thriving in a way they never had even at the height of Genoshan wealth. The greatest conflicts that remained were those hidden from on heigh, that dwelled in the hearts of the disenfranchised and disempowered, in this case, more literally than most.
“This sounds like the beginning of a warning.” Her voice was a soft sigh, barely heard over the call of the ocean wind, roaring up to the nearly mountainous heights of the city’s premier districts. “Must I fear you too, father?” Since reawakening in this version of reality, she had rarely called him that. She hadn’t meant it to be something of note, but it evidently was.
“Never, Wanda. I know that has not always been true, I cannot claim to have ever been a parent, let alone a good one. But no harm shall come to you, or Pietro, whenever he wishes to return, by my hand, never again.” The words were carefully chosen, expressing the truth of his feelings while accounting for the errors of his past and the difficulties of the present. He had always been good with words, even when there was little else good in him. “But I cannot hold this nation to that standard. They are angry, and I cannot say they are wrong to be. So long as I am here, you will be welcome, but I understanding of them will only bring you further hurt.”
“And you fear what I might do when hurt again?” Once again she did not mean the sense of betrayal that forced itself into her words, but when her large, glistening, eyes turned on her father, she could not help but read the hurt they had caused him. She didn’t regret it, not quite, but she didn’t mean it either.
“Wanda, I…”
”You are with the Decimator” The archaic tone of Exodus burned into his mind. Charles, even Emma, were always easier to have in his consciousness than Exodus. His telepathy ignited with the zeal of his cause.
”I am with my daughter, Exodus”
”It is not my place to question, Sire, but..”
”Then do not, what is it you wish, Exodus?” It had been difficult enough to prevent the zealous mutant from referring to him as such out loud, he had given up the attempt within the privacy of their minds. He was not sure Exodus was capable of that change.
”Scott Summers is with a representative of the US Navy in Hammer Bay.”
”Indeed, both myself and Miss Frost have approved this.” He still avoided using Xavier’s name when communicating with Exodus, his old friend’s role in the governance of Genosha would have to be made official before the ancient mutant would accept Xavier’s prominent role as anything more than a citizen and adviser of the nation.
”Did you approve an escort of seven score souls and world ending fury?” Exodus lacked subtlty just as much as his words often fell into poetry and allegory. It was a genuine question, damn him.
”Show me.”
The conversation took all of a heartbeat, well adjusted minds speaking directly to each other. Already Magento had begun to float into the air as he fixed Wanda with a sad smile. “I will return, Daughter.”
“Fly safe, Father. Rememver they only do what they must.”
“As do I.”
It was not true flight, that enabled Eric to soar, the way the world distorted around him as the magnetic forces of the Earth propelled him could never be mistaken for it. The air hummed with too much power, crackled with potential. Like a continuous sonic boom, Magneto screamed through the air. He moved with purpose and pace. Had Genosha relied on typical human technologies of electromagnetic detection, they would have gone haywire and winked out. Soon the streaking figure of red in the sky was joined by another, a literally blazing trail, a comet of vengeance.
The land of Genosha quickly gave way to the sparkling expanse of the Indian Ocean. A small land mass, it wasn’t long before it was a distant smudge on the horzion, yet still well within the waters claimed by the sovereign nation. Magneto did not feel they guarded their waters too jealously. Any could pass through the waters of Genosha so long as they meant no harm to Mutantkind, and accepted the status of Genosha as a sovereign state. The fact that none of the UN had yet admitted to such a thing changed nothing. The waters were closed, until the world opened to Genosha.
When the pair of flying mutants came to halt above the crashing tide below, there was little of note to mark it from any other part of the wide expanse. A small outcrop several hundreds of meters to their right denoted volanic activity that might one day, in tens of thousands of years, grow the ambition to become an island, was all that interrupted the sparkling sea. To the nake eye, anyway, to one who could sense through the magnetic currents of the Earth and perhaps the third strongest surviving telepath, it was everything but clear.
”What would you have of me, Sire?” Exodus’ thoughts were not concealed and betrayed him. He would scour the sea if it was his will, end nearly two hundred lives in conflagration for the crime of ignoring the will of Genosha, of Magneto. There was a time when Eric would have agreed, but for now, he would settle for Awe, over Shock.
”Give me their minds, the rest, I shall see to.” While Exodus drifted in the currents of air, the true flight of his telekensis apparent, Magneto appeared utterly static in the air, rooted by forces far beyond the raging winds of Earth. His power ran deep. It was this power he called upon with outstretched hand. At first, nothing about the sight before them changed. Steadily, new waves began to ripple out for the water, a vast shape displacing the tide above it. Soon the creaking groan of tortured metal became audible even over the surf, dark shape rising below.
A moment later, and the shape of the USS Florida broke from the surf, the vast submersible, almost 200 meters of human power, was wrenched from the safety of water. It took more of Magneto’s effort to hold the vehicle together than it did to wrench it from the tide, a structure never designed to exist without the pressure of water suddenly finding itself in the sky. The odd system still broke, although its surface hummed with Magneto’s power, preventing any burst or leak that would spell doom once reset, he had little concern for the death dealing weaponry which failed to survive the transit from nautical vessal to unwilling airforce. Sirens blared from within the hull as instruments gave back impossible readings.
Then the voice of Eric Lehnsherr resounded within the mind of every crew member aboard.
”United States Vessel, you act in transgression of the laws of Genosha, Free and Soverign Republic. Be thankful you recieve the clemency your kind have so often denied our own. You have built these weapons to terrify and subdue, but we are no longer afraid, and you will find we have weapons of our own. Do not return.” Even as the words were projected across the vessel, it was in motion, Magneto, Exodus, and the vast submersible traversing the air away from the island nation, the vast bulk of the USS Florida steadily turning as it did, pointing away from the island, as if there was any doubt as to which direction they were being commanded to go.
”Inform Scott Summers of this, and provide my best wishes to him and his guest.” The continuation of Magneto’s thoughts were directed to Exodus, but were still felt by the crew within the Submarine as it was set back into the water. Let them know of the error they had committed.
Exodus’ thought reply was heard only by Magneto, however, before the ‘fire’ wreathed mutant arced away in the sky. ”By Your Will, Sire.”
"Sic semper tyrannis"
Name: Abraham, Gaius, Praetor, and many more.
Age: Over two thousand
Species: Kindred
Powers: Fortitude, Potence, Celerity, Auspex, Necromancy
Clan: Caitiff
Generation: 5th
Appearance: He carries himself upright and with a quick step, remnants of his days on the march for glory and conquest. His list of names and titles is long, so the short and sweet name of Abraham was taken after an old friend. His clothes clean and freshly pressed, he carries himself well but their a sadness in him and tiredness. He looks remarkably alive for a Kindred, though he carries an aura of man who carries the weight of the world. His body is fit and lean, a surprising amount of scaring dots his chest and his chin is a familiar scar of chin strap from a Legion helmet. With raven black hair and short beard, he looks the part of a young soldier and even has the manners and discipline to prove it.
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, we're discussing this now!
C H A R A C T E R C O N C E P T P R O P O S A L
![]()
B R O T H E R H O O D O F M U T A N T S
T H E R E P U B L I C O F G E N O S H A
C H A R A C T E R C O N C E P T:
“Some would be offended at a wolf presenting as a sheep, but I have learned hard lessons from your kind, so I know the truth … you are all wolves.”
The foundation of the Brotherhood of Mutants formed as a result of great oppression, not initially against mutantkind but under the horrific rule of the Third Reich. Born Max Eisenhardt, the boy who would become Magneto witnessed the death of his family and community first hand, all allegiance his father had shown to the German nation in the First World War forgotten in the racially motivated hatred of the Nazi Regime. A young, broken child, mistakenly buried alongside the dead, would later be recaptured by the SS and subject to the same horror again and again within the walls of Vernichtungslager in Auschwitz. Through lessons learned during his family’s efforts to flee into Poland and beyond, Max survived, narrowly avoiding the worst of the experiments done on populace as the mysteries of mutantkind began to be understood. Equally he was able to aid another young prisoner of the camps, a young girl named Magda. A blight of grave illness delayed the development of Max’s powers, beyond the usual manifestation during adolescence which is common among mutants. Together with Magda he eventually escaped into the Soviet Union, taking on the name Eric Lehnsherr and starting a new life in the Carpathian Mountains.
Eric had not escaped the long arm of oppression, as his powers would eventually manifest while trying to save his young family. For his efforts, Eric was restrained and beaten, prevented from saving his young daughter and terrifying his now-wife Magda in the process. She fled, thankfully not witnessing the destruction Eric brought upon the authorities of their home. Once again a lone survivor, Eric fled into Israel, taking yet another name as Erik Magnus. Here he found perhaps the one peaceful occupation of his life, working as a medical orderly in a psychiatric ward for fellow Holocaust survivors. These years would also result in the defining relationship of Eric’s life, meeting Charles Xavier. The pair had much in common, more than both immediately revealed, and enjoyed each other’s company through the latter’s study of the mind. When Hydra forces later attacked the facility while Xavier was still present as a part of his research, their mutant powers were exposed to each other. While they parted over matters of incompatible philosophy, to think they would end as rivals was yet to cross either mind.
As Eric’s powers grew, he began to work various Western Intelligence agencies, aiding in the hunting down of missing Nazi war criminals and the nascent Hyrda. Eric would often report his targets had died in his pursuit, instead handing over the captured fascists to Mossad, while increasingly viewing the world in a matter of mutants vs humans, he still felt enough connection to his Jewish roots to support their cause of restitution. While the Western agencies were willing to turn a blind eye to this practice when he was primarily focused on ex-Nazis the Soviets were looking to benefit from, eventually the time came when the individual in question had been earmarked for repatriation within the United States in exchange for information on key Soviet projects. As a consequence several Western spy agencies orchestrated a string of attempts to punish, and later kill, Eric. After a particularly brutal string of attacks he resolved to travel to the United States to put an end to those who hunted him at the source, taking on another false name, Magnus Xavier, for this journey.
The choice of name, obviously a reference to the last true friend Eric remembered, proved prophetic as after arriving in New York the use of the surname soon attracted the attention of the true Xavier, recently returned from service in the Korean War. Momentarily distracted from his efforts of vengeance by Charles’ optimism, he assisted in the creation of Cerebro and the first generation of X-men. Ultimately this momentary break from conflict came to an end when the agents who were hunting Eric began to strike at him through personal connections, resulting in yet further tragedy. Driven finally to the conclusion that humanity and mutantkind could not peacefully coexist, and armed with important data from Cerebro, Eric took the name of Magneto and left his work with the nascent X-men to form the Brotherhood.
Using the knowledge gleaned from Cerebro, Magneto was able to recruit powerful and willing mutants to his cause, shortly afterwards creating Asteroid M as their isolated base of operations. Principally among them at first were the Maximoff Twins and Mystique. The membership, even leadership, of the Brotherhood has changed over the years and so has their approach, ranging from supporting partisan mutant factions, championing mutant isolationism and at times, global mutant domination. Their relationship with the X-men has equally shifted over the years, ranging from mistrusted allies to hated foes, several individuals of both teams having even found themselves switching between the two groups of mutants.
Even more pressing to the purpose of the Brotherhood than their ‘cousins’ in the X-men is the changing state of the world and its view of mutants. Regimes have come and gone, the hatred burning on and on. In many ways while the X-men have always shone as the brightness of the world, the Brotherhood have reflected the wrath brought upon mutants and those who support them. They have been the vengeance to Xavier’s justice. In the most extreme of Magneto’s actions he truly threatened the safety of the whole world, although it became apparent that the use of his powers, particularly in the construction and maintenance of Asteroid M, had a powerfully deteriorating effect on his mind and stability. In the greatest of these conflicts, a battle between the X-men and Brotherhood that would eventually destroy much of Asteroid M, the true reality of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver was revealed to Magneto. On the day he lost his first child, he had unknowingly lost twins of his own blood, carried by Magda as she fled from the destruction wrought by her enraged husband. At the time, this shattered the fractured loyalties of the Brotherhood, as much as the physical structure of Asteroid M. With the strain of the battle shattering the last of Magneto’s sanity, even the most cruel hearted of the Brotherhood scattered from his leadership. In a desperate effort to once again achieve domination, Magneto attempted to create the ultimate mutant, Alpha. While successful, his creation rebelled against him, using its distorting power to revert Magneto to an infant. The effect proved temporary, if only from Erik the Red eventually restoring Magneto to adulthood, if not to his same advanced age, the restorative work on him rectified the mental damage his powers had inflicted upon him and stabilised their use. He would never cease to be Magneto, but without the gradual slide into madness resuming again, he abandoned the worst of his aggressive schemes.
In his absence, the other members of the Brotherhood had not been idle. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver spent the interim as heroes of humanity, rather than mutant kind, while the rest fractured, many coming to eventually aid their previous rivals in the X-men while others descended into simple self serving anarchism. By the time Magento’s identity and faculties had been restored, he had no wish to immediately call upon them, recognising that perhaps his children would experience only pain from his sudden return to their lives, and having little need of either the soft hearted or the entirely callous in the new task he had set himself.
The isolated but prosperous nation of Genosha had built its great wealth on the back of vast mutant slavery, a situation that even in Magneto’s calmed state he could not allow to persist. Seeking out the one other member of the brotherhood he could still trust to act in Mystique, the pair set about kindling the fires of a mutant uprising. With her guile and the force of his power it was a matter of months before the revolution swept the island nation. A bloody civil war raged for an extended period, but the mutants were eventually successful, placing Magneto as the new head of state. This began a period of reconciliation for both Magneto and the Brotherhood among mutants, particularly of the younger generation. Painted as a revolutionary and hero, word of his return soon spread from the island of Genosha across the world, and the Brotherhood was reformed, no longer dedicated to violent overthrow of the global order, but instead the preservation of the new mutant homeland of Genosha.
They did not sit idle, however, and were instrumental in rescuing both the X-men, and the wider world, from the ravages of Apocalypse, Magneto stepping in to fill the absence of his old friend Xavier and rebuilding his educational efforts on Genosha. This is not to say the idealistic X-Men and hard line Brotherhood do not still clash, although the conflict is often of a more competitive or theoretical nature these days, the latter are certainly still maintained to do what the heroes of Xavier’s dream could not, especially with the return of Charles to Earth.
Eric had not escaped the long arm of oppression, as his powers would eventually manifest while trying to save his young family. For his efforts, Eric was restrained and beaten, prevented from saving his young daughter and terrifying his now-wife Magda in the process. She fled, thankfully not witnessing the destruction Eric brought upon the authorities of their home. Once again a lone survivor, Eric fled into Israel, taking yet another name as Erik Magnus. Here he found perhaps the one peaceful occupation of his life, working as a medical orderly in a psychiatric ward for fellow Holocaust survivors. These years would also result in the defining relationship of Eric’s life, meeting Charles Xavier. The pair had much in common, more than both immediately revealed, and enjoyed each other’s company through the latter’s study of the mind. When Hydra forces later attacked the facility while Xavier was still present as a part of his research, their mutant powers were exposed to each other. While they parted over matters of incompatible philosophy, to think they would end as rivals was yet to cross either mind.
As Eric’s powers grew, he began to work various Western Intelligence agencies, aiding in the hunting down of missing Nazi war criminals and the nascent Hyrda. Eric would often report his targets had died in his pursuit, instead handing over the captured fascists to Mossad, while increasingly viewing the world in a matter of mutants vs humans, he still felt enough connection to his Jewish roots to support their cause of restitution. While the Western agencies were willing to turn a blind eye to this practice when he was primarily focused on ex-Nazis the Soviets were looking to benefit from, eventually the time came when the individual in question had been earmarked for repatriation within the United States in exchange for information on key Soviet projects. As a consequence several Western spy agencies orchestrated a string of attempts to punish, and later kill, Eric. After a particularly brutal string of attacks he resolved to travel to the United States to put an end to those who hunted him at the source, taking on another false name, Magnus Xavier, for this journey.
The choice of name, obviously a reference to the last true friend Eric remembered, proved prophetic as after arriving in New York the use of the surname soon attracted the attention of the true Xavier, recently returned from service in the Korean War. Momentarily distracted from his efforts of vengeance by Charles’ optimism, he assisted in the creation of Cerebro and the first generation of X-men. Ultimately this momentary break from conflict came to an end when the agents who were hunting Eric began to strike at him through personal connections, resulting in yet further tragedy. Driven finally to the conclusion that humanity and mutantkind could not peacefully coexist, and armed with important data from Cerebro, Eric took the name of Magneto and left his work with the nascent X-men to form the Brotherhood.
Using the knowledge gleaned from Cerebro, Magneto was able to recruit powerful and willing mutants to his cause, shortly afterwards creating Asteroid M as their isolated base of operations. Principally among them at first were the Maximoff Twins and Mystique. The membership, even leadership, of the Brotherhood has changed over the years and so has their approach, ranging from supporting partisan mutant factions, championing mutant isolationism and at times, global mutant domination. Their relationship with the X-men has equally shifted over the years, ranging from mistrusted allies to hated foes, several individuals of both teams having even found themselves switching between the two groups of mutants.
Even more pressing to the purpose of the Brotherhood than their ‘cousins’ in the X-men is the changing state of the world and its view of mutants. Regimes have come and gone, the hatred burning on and on. In many ways while the X-men have always shone as the brightness of the world, the Brotherhood have reflected the wrath brought upon mutants and those who support them. They have been the vengeance to Xavier’s justice. In the most extreme of Magneto’s actions he truly threatened the safety of the whole world, although it became apparent that the use of his powers, particularly in the construction and maintenance of Asteroid M, had a powerfully deteriorating effect on his mind and stability. In the greatest of these conflicts, a battle between the X-men and Brotherhood that would eventually destroy much of Asteroid M, the true reality of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver was revealed to Magneto. On the day he lost his first child, he had unknowingly lost twins of his own blood, carried by Magda as she fled from the destruction wrought by her enraged husband. At the time, this shattered the fractured loyalties of the Brotherhood, as much as the physical structure of Asteroid M. With the strain of the battle shattering the last of Magneto’s sanity, even the most cruel hearted of the Brotherhood scattered from his leadership. In a desperate effort to once again achieve domination, Magneto attempted to create the ultimate mutant, Alpha. While successful, his creation rebelled against him, using its distorting power to revert Magneto to an infant. The effect proved temporary, if only from Erik the Red eventually restoring Magneto to adulthood, if not to his same advanced age, the restorative work on him rectified the mental damage his powers had inflicted upon him and stabilised their use. He would never cease to be Magneto, but without the gradual slide into madness resuming again, he abandoned the worst of his aggressive schemes.
In his absence, the other members of the Brotherhood had not been idle. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver spent the interim as heroes of humanity, rather than mutant kind, while the rest fractured, many coming to eventually aid their previous rivals in the X-men while others descended into simple self serving anarchism. By the time Magento’s identity and faculties had been restored, he had no wish to immediately call upon them, recognising that perhaps his children would experience only pain from his sudden return to their lives, and having little need of either the soft hearted or the entirely callous in the new task he had set himself.
The isolated but prosperous nation of Genosha had built its great wealth on the back of vast mutant slavery, a situation that even in Magneto’s calmed state he could not allow to persist. Seeking out the one other member of the brotherhood he could still trust to act in Mystique, the pair set about kindling the fires of a mutant uprising. With her guile and the force of his power it was a matter of months before the revolution swept the island nation. A bloody civil war raged for an extended period, but the mutants were eventually successful, placing Magneto as the new head of state. This began a period of reconciliation for both Magneto and the Brotherhood among mutants, particularly of the younger generation. Painted as a revolutionary and hero, word of his return soon spread from the island of Genosha across the world, and the Brotherhood was reformed, no longer dedicated to violent overthrow of the global order, but instead the preservation of the new mutant homeland of Genosha.
They did not sit idle, however, and were instrumental in rescuing both the X-men, and the wider world, from the ravages of Apocalypse, Magneto stepping in to fill the absence of his old friend Xavier and rebuilding his educational efforts on Genosha. This is not to say the idealistic X-Men and hard line Brotherhood do not still clash, although the conflict is often of a more competitive or theoretical nature these days, the latter are certainly still maintained to do what the heroes of Xavier’s dream could not, especially with the return of Charles to Earth.
C H A R A C T E R M O T I V A T I O N S & G O A L S:
Unlike the X-Men, the Brotherhood does not simply seek to ensure the survival of mutantkind, but to ruthlessly protect its prosperity and security. They may hold hopes of a similar future, but they do not have the luxury of compassion, instead playing the zero-sum game of realist politik. They have abandoned their mad dreams of global domination (at least openly) but will never be afraid to risk, and take, human lives to safeguard mutant ones.
Currently while the X-Men and Genosha react to the return of Charles Xavier, the Brotherhood continues to work both at home and abroad to safeguard mutant (Genoshan) interests, in much the same manner as any secret service of the human world. Difficult choices have, will and can be made. Recently, with yet another upswing of anti-mutant sentiment festering across the world, their activities have increased greatly, hunting down rumours of yet another planned desolation of their homeland, one they are desperate to prevent.
TLDR: Super fun mutant black ops
Currently while the X-Men and Genosha react to the return of Charles Xavier, the Brotherhood continues to work both at home and abroad to safeguard mutant (Genoshan) interests, in much the same manner as any secret service of the human world. Difficult choices have, will and can be made. Recently, with yet another upswing of anti-mutant sentiment festering across the world, their activities have increased greatly, hunting down rumours of yet another planned desolation of their homeland, one they are desperate to prevent.
TLDR: Super fun mutant black ops
C H A R A C T E R N O T E S:
S A M P L E P O S T:
"You aren't supposed to be in here, trooper."
"No, but you are." As the man turned from the terminal to face the approaching soldier, the features he confronted began to swim and shift, a flash of blue, before they reformed. For the briefest of moment's, it was like gazing into a mirror. A mirror which immediately punched him straight in the throat. The system shock was immediate, doubling over in a splutter of desperate breathing. He was utterly unable to anticipate the elbow, his elbow for all appearances, which slammed down into the back of his head, his cranium immediately rebounding off the desk he had been sitting at, the pain of both strikes only interrupted by the sudden loss of consciousness. The figure now wearing the officer's face easily slid into the chair, drawing themselves up to the station.
"Identification required, please complete iris scan." The security fell away as the body double lent down to provide the reading. Around the capital of Hammer Bay, similar terminals were being accessed as the Resistance launched their great gambit. This, however, was the nexus, the primary access point that could only be interfaced by the highest ranking of the Magistrates.
That, or someone wearing their faces.
Once she had passed the scans, Mystique allowed the false skin of the Magistrate office to fall away, her own deep blue skin swallowing the light cast by the computer screen in a matter wholly different to baseline humans. Her fingers still worked away, inputting the code she had written herself. Some things you couldn't leave up to others, no matter how many hands you could now command. With a flick of her wrist, she placed a finger to her ear, triggering the comm-bead within.
"All cells reporting green, terminating broadcast." As she spoke, the virus placed within each of the government's broadcasting stations began to work, eating away at the code to leave it an inoperable tangle of scrambled data. Far from simply cutting off communication, the psychic signals influencing the minds of the countless slave-mutates began to fizzle and fade across the capital, the greatest main holdout of the Magistrate government. A momentary lapse, before the Brotherhood's transmission replaced it, forcibly played across screens and radios over the entire Genoshan nation.
"You're live, Eric." Mystique lent back in the comfortable padding of the chair as the very same screen she had used to begin the pirate broadcast had the very same message imposed upon it.
From imposed darkness, the figure of Magneto drifted into view, his iconic helm, a symbol that had been rallied to by free mutants across the state of Genosha, framing the details of his face as piercing, charismatic, eye bore into the camera.
"Brothers and Sisters, Mutants of Genosha, bask now in the freedom we have won for you." The magnetism of metal was not the only form that Magneto commanded, the fiery zeal of his words flooding across the nation to both current freedom fighters and those newly freed by the failing mental controls the Magistrates had reinstated since their return to power. "Now is not the time for reconciliation, the humans were offered peace, and they repaid it with throwing you back in bonds, no, it is time they learn what we already know, that there is no place to hide. Rise up, Children of Atom, and claim the future that is our right." As the simple but direct message came to an end, the seat from which Mystique had instigated the broadcast was already empty, the Magistrate slumped across the floor waking up to a Genosha entirely changed in the scant moments of his unconsciousness.
P O S T C A T A L O G:
TBC
Woo!
https://www.roleplayerguild.com/posts/5361387 is complete! Minus me finding some art I like for a few of the primary characters, but don't suppose that matters for judging if I'm good to start writing!
Still got to write some individual summaries for the members and a sample post, but whacking this here for now
Collab with @Ruby
“It’s a little fancier than Joe’s Diner, my turn to look out of place.”
The process of sending the text message over to Rachel chimed even as Henry placed the device back into his pocket, his location shared with the female kindred as he approached the front desk of the Lounge. Despite his words to the Ventrue woman, and indeed, she would no doubt look far more on theme, neither of the receptionist staff offered protest as he moved past them, a card of gold pressed to the electronic sign in as he did so.
He was dressed in the style of what some would consider truly, vastly, wealthy. Smart brown leather shoes tapped across the wooden flooring, but such expenditure was paired with Levi jeans and a white linen shirt against the LA Heat. This was not the attire of the corporate traveler, but the old money that had them on their payroll. It was also a lot more comfortable for him, and so the insinuation suited him fine.
Even at this hour the lounge would usually be open to a relatively high number of red eye travelers, but for now it had been cleared. No doubt a flurry of complaints would have resulted from the minor inconvenience of having to share the One World Alliance lounge instead, but all would soon have impressed on them the importance of not kicking up too much of a fuss. If it had been up to Henry, he’d have closed the place with the excuse of emergency maintenance. The upper echelons of the Germanic Camarilla had a different style altogether. The Masquerade was important, but so too was the principle of hierarchy. All would know the risk of a complaint, even if they didn’t quite understand why.
Henry didn’t pause as he moved through the interior of the lounge. The tables and countertops were even more pristine than normal, the glimmering, minimalistic opulence of the catering areas made all the more needless and beautiful for the lack of the culinary delights that they would usually host. That did give him pause, before the man beckoned over one of the few, oppressively pale and smartly dressed, staff.
“I’ll have the chicken burger, I’ll be outside.” The request took more than a few moments to register on the surprised waiter. Henry wasn’t entirely sure how much these elite servants would know about the nature of their masters, but they knew enough to be surprised at the request for something solid to consume. He savored the reaction for only a heartbeat, before heading out onto the truly outdoor decking, ignoring the secondary internal deck. This area was truly abandoned, although the light of the propane fireplaces already danced in the night air. He drew himself up a chair next to the lit bar top, tapping his fingers on the marble top as he watched a plane scream through the air above. He focused for a few moments, allowing his exceptional eyes to filter through the light pollution to drink in the night. By his calculation, it would still be some time before their favored guest would arrive at the lounge. Might as well enjoy the view.
And his burger.
"The Star Alliance Lounge is closed?"
Rachel blinked at the question. She'd barely had time to get out of the car before the other woman was on her, saying the words in the form of a question. LAX, the airport, wasn't titled such on the management side. It was part of a larger entity; the Los Angeles World Airports. The managing group for more than one of the area's airports. The re-organization had been in place by Rachel's mortal predecessor before she had even met Eva, though it didn't take Eva long to allow Rachel to get her hands on it and work on the efficiency of the operation.
"Yes," was all Rachel said through her blink as she stepped out of the backseat of the Cadillac, though the woman just stared at her with a pained, forced, smile on her painted lips. The woman was Lauren Bradley, red hair, pale skin, mid-thirties, the Chief Airport Operations Officer for LAX, and the Chief of Staff to the LAWA CEO. Where Rachel was dressed in skinny fit style black wool pants, enriched with gold-tone Medusa button closures on either hip, black heels, and a magenta wool blazer with a black silk tank top under it.
For those familiar, it was all part of the latest runway line from Versace, although that line wouldn't be shown to the public for a month in Paris. Lauren Bradley wore something else; some kind of blazer and skirt combo, it looked older, maybe Calvin Klein? Rachel didn't care. Rachel just stared in return, forcing Ms. Bradley to finally get brave, and say something else in the scene that was quickly becoming awkward as they stood just outside one of the VIP entrances to one of the terminals.
"It's just, along with the added security--"
Rachel didn't need the woman to continue, happy to cut her off with a stiff, professional, half-smile. "Ms. Bradley, I assure you we wouldn't be doing either of these measures if they weren't necessary. My goal wasn't to make you apologize to everyone in LAX for us tonight...but at the same time I'm afraid this can't be helped. I'll let you know the moment we can open the lounge back up."
The woman apologized, prattled on about something, but by that point Rachel had to move. What Eva had told her about the Ventrue Inner Council seat holder was that he was something of an act that took himself too seriously, and Rachel didn't figure it would do well to make Henry wait for her long, let alone deal with Hardestadt on his lonesome, making them both wait. Black suited security flanked her, one white, one black, both looking like commandos wearing a suit. She had met both before; they were good gents. Some of Andre's inner circle, highly trained, and impeccably positioned to cover her if it came to it. Yet the short walk to the elevator, and the shorter walk to the front of the longue were both uneventful. She didn't go in through the front door, she went in through the kitchen service, meeting two more armed men that let her and her guards in. The guards peeled off as Rachel found him outside.
"Hey," was all she said as she walked outside to the lounge's Terrace. Something inside her wanted to say more, but her voice wouldn't betray her, and nothing about her appearance suggested anything of the sort. She ditched the magenta blazer and draped it over one of the barstools, before moving closer to him, sneaking a peek at the smart phone the Digital Thaumaturges that they financed and protected had provided her. It felt like years ago her lips and hands were all over his body, not days. Yet so much had happened in between, and they hadn't seen him.
"You talked to her, didn't you?"
Somehow, someway, Rachel just knew.
The sudden charge in the air around him at her arrival wasn’t something he hid, although whether it was purely body language and pheromones or something that spoke of his nature was another matter entirely. The fact she was immediately lost in her phone didn’t dissuade him at all. A slightly more wholesome memory of laughing at the sight of her desperately craning for signal while balanced atop a run down cadillac on a dirt road sprung to mind and he didn’t hide the smile from that either. He didn’t hide the brush of intimacy, his hand tracing her hip for the moment, as he leaned in both in greeting and to reply.
“In a sense. It’s the mages who took her, but they need new tricks if they’re to hide someone from me. She wants to stay with them for now, get them onboard. I think that’s what we need, but I could touch her mind for long enough to get my marching orders.” While he efforts to hide whatever rivaling forces of emotion within her may have been successful, the unspoken question of his presence wasn’t hidden from him, and so he carried on, still not putting space between them. “India. I couldn’t not act.” It wasn’t an apology, but the tone was there. It risked his exposure, but Henry could no more sit back and watch a continent die than he could have submitted to the will of his father when it crashed against his compassion. “And I wasn’t alone, Caine is on the move again, which means I can find him, talk to him. You all have given me hope I might be able to reach him, this time.” His words had nothing to do with the geography and everything to do with his efforts to win the heart of another being cursed to wander.
“But, I still probably need a minder for a meeting with King Ventrue.”
Rachel chuckled, "I almost pity the mages; no one makes an impression like Eva. Grace told us they have her at..." Rachel's brown eyes darted there and here, and back again, a sliver of a shrug rolling her porcelain shoulders and the shoulder length dark hair with the slight wave parted down the middle. Surveillance had her a touch nervous. "Well, you know, I'm sure."
She almost didn't want to speak the next sentence. She remembered what happened the last time Henry saw the creature, and the violence in the man's eyes that day. "We, uh...we saw Nathaniel. He's been stalking us. It sounded like he's been stalking us because he couldn't find Eva anywhere in, or around, the city. You should have seen the stare he gave Yanci. I thought he was going to leap for her throat, then and there. Luckily Andre and Mihail are quite the, uh, dissuasive force."
Rachel ignored the Caine mention. Based on everything she knew, it was better just to keep it to herself.
In the same way he didn’t hide the lingering intimacy, the hand left drifting at her hip or the warmth of his smile for her, he didn’t seek to conceal the sudden tightening of his shoulders, the tautness in his build at the mention of the Nosferatu. The last time he had met Nathaniel he had run him through with the Blade of Eden, and only Eva’s pleas for clemency had prevented him from igniting the divine blade and scattering the kindred’s ash upon the wind.
“Tell me if you encounter him again, please.” The intensity came with his fingers pressing into her slightly, before with an exhalation he relaxed. “I won’t hunt him, but I’ll stop him from taking her.” He didn’t need to add who he meant. His bond was Eva was like nothing else in the cosmos, even he didn’t quite understand what burned, or perhaps had burned, between himself and the woman beside him, but Yanci had been the first of them all for him.
Finally he pulled away from her, just a little breathing room. Perhaps to her relief, certainly a relief for the neatness of her outfit no longer presented with the risk of his grip. The interruption was preemptive, as the glass doors out onto the deck slid open. There was a roar overhead and suddenly the outer deck was engulfed in the dazzling light of a plane’s headlamps, a brightness so intense it momentarily obscured vision. Once the glare faded, he was standing there.
Henry knew that the moment of light had no doubt equally obscured the flash of red sights as unknown marksman dialed in on any perceived threat to the man in the dark suit. Exquisitely tailored from an Italian fashion house no one on the American continent could hope to secure an appointment for, the man was slightly too leonine to be considered truly handsome, no matter the pleasant smile on his face as he approached the pair. He appeared unaccompanied, but that was never the case for a man such as this.
“Miss Fields, it has been some time since your name graced my desk, such a pleasure to see life is treating you well in the interim.” His hand extended to her as he drew closer, palm horizontal to shake, a greeting of respect, rather than expected subservience. The man’s blonde and shortly cropped hair framed a face of powerful edges, atop a form that was equally angular, with just enough substance as to not be lanky despite his near-exceptional height. Hardestadt had made a career of orchestrating the unknowable web of the Ivory Tower, mastering far older elders simply from his ability to master information. It was no surprise someone as promising as Rachel had been an object of interest, even before attaining anything that could be considered greatness by the Camarilla. His cold, grey-blue eyes settled on Henry the moment after, with only a simple nod of greeting. “Mr Locke, a shame to hear about your bar.”
Rachel's physical response to the hand shake was demure, even if the look upon her fine dark features were closer to glacial: he was her blood, she was Ventrue, she would be demure for him. More than anything, Rachel resisted the urge to ask the man about Thaddeous. Mr. Carter hadn't been unkind, and their partnership had provided a huge problem for the Sabbat on the East Coast. She knew they lost every gain they'd had save for D.C.. In a bittersweet moment, she also had an idea that the Camarilla had used some of the analytical information Rachel had composed against Eva and the Anarchs from San Francisco.
Yet she never took it personally, and she had simply never heard another thing from Thaddeous. It wasn't hate Rachel felt for the Camarilla, it was just...indifference. Funny thing when you ran one of the largest money laundering rings the world had ever seen and had a contact spreadsheet that could make even a Ventrue elder blush. Hollywood was the kind of soft power the Camarilla would never achieve, Eva the kind of elder that the Camarilla just simply could not produce for someone like her to serve.
A slight perk of her brow was all the suggestion that she wandered, this close to the man, how Gehenna affected him. The Coterie had Eva's blood to protect them, Hardestadt had nothing of the sort. She hoped it wasn't along the horrible rumors she had heard coming out of Chicago.
"Welcome back to Los Angeles, Mr. Hardestadt. I hope the modern nights have been kind to you."
There was a crackle of amusement in the air at her tone of greeting, Henry's hand passing in a stroke down the indent of her spine, the tone of someone enjoying such a radical change in her nature, even if his gaze towards the opposite kindred remained serious.
"As kind as any have been." The elder Ventrue responded with a smile that lacked any true warmth. "New challenges require new solutions, but that in of itself is a constant." As the male spoke, a waiter arrived with a tray bearing decorated champagne flutes, although the liquid within lacked any sort of sparkle and possessed a deep crimson rather than hints of gold. Hardestadt had collected his own glass before they were offered towards the pair, notably long before Henry's summoned burger had arrived. "I would be most welcome to invite you back to aid in such solutions, those who still speak of you still speak very highly, if with regret." Piercing eyes never left Rachel as the man supped from his drink, the promise of both wrath and opportunity all at once. "But I suppose you will continue to decline the offer, and much as there is always interest I did not come all this way for a hiring prospect." He did not expand on this further for the moment, content to study the pair as he had before.
"No, thank you," Rachel all but beamed at the waiter, dark eyes sparkling with a vibrant warmth that matched the smile she flashed. A brilliance that disappeared within a single beat once the waiter moved on. Instead, confusion riddled her darkly fine features as her head tilted just the barest of angles to the side, her brown eyes fixated on Hardestadt, her voice sprinkled with a cheery amusement atop the sound of confusion, "Why would I downgrade?"
The confusion wiped, her head upright, head and shoulders tall as the real Rachel threw off the facade, her hands with clear polished manicured fingertips coming together in front of her, "Your new challenges pale in comparison to our new challenges. You want to save yourself, we want to save everything and everyone. We are not the same, Mr. Hardestadt. She has never asked for your help, and while we certainly don't believe Matthew Lubbock is your doing, it must be said we do consider this another red mark among a long list of them in our ledgers concerning the debts incurred with our group by your organization. Recompense is of no interest to us, long past is the time for that. I have come simply in the hope your organization wishes to discuss ways in which to collaborate on solutions to the overarching challenges."
Her lips were smiling again by the end of her addressing of the man with such a pleasant and warm tone, the subtle and secure smile of the clear eyed and supremely confident.
Rachel’s words certainly had their sting, and it would be impossible to suggest they were entirely expected, at least in the manner in which they delivered. Nevertheless, as Hardestad paused to sip the offered wine, savoring the unexpected taste of elder blood, if not quite questioning where it had originated, his reaction registered as little more than a twinge across his features.
“A warning then. The past is littered with the unnecessary fallen of those who considered their challenges unique and refused the advice and support of others. I should know, I was there in North Africa when this continent first learned the cost of these Modern Nights, failing to heed the advice of their own allies.”
“That’s entirely why I’ve come from our stronghold, and left the rest of my Coterie, to talk with you, and give you that.” Rachel said, motioning with a nod to the glass in his hand, “it doesn’t long for the effect to kick in. It’s hard to say exactly what it will do to you, you’re the first of your clan and generation to taste it. For certain you’ll notice any lingering Beckoning to be gone, completely. I’ve noticed my mind clears faster and there’s a certain…serenity to it. My Coterie fellow, Andre, has also mentioned he feels a touch more humane after. In that drink is Eva’s blood. We have but a tiny supply of it, yet the effects are good for about a week, give or take, depending on the individual. When she told us her blood could help us remain free of the immediate pull of Gehenna, we didn’t believe her, I’m embarrassed to say. Sounded too good to be true. In either case, a token of our good will and desire to collaborate, should you decide your organization would be best in alignment with our goals.”
Her eyes flicked to Henry, waiting on the man to say…something.
“It’s all true, Hardestadt, not just what Rachel is telling you about Eva, but everything the mad prophecies the Camarilla have worked so long to suppress have warned you. I know you suspect, but I’m telling you, it’s worse than you fear.” Henry finally spoke following the look from Rachel, his focus having not wavered, at least in the line of his eyes, from the man for the length of the conversation. There was a crackle in the air between them, an unspoken something that spoke to an established acquaintance, or at least reputation.
The German Kindred’s attention had, in the meantime, slipped to the drink, tilting his head slightly as he examined both the visual appearance of the glass as well as the sensation Rachel described working through him. It was something of a social and political affront to feed another blood of a potentially dominating elder, but for now the slight would be forgiven. “Some have already been dismissed by the march of time, the millennia came and went, the world still stands.” Hardestadt’s cold gaze fixed Henry Locke for a moment longer, before he spoke. “My father-in-darkness knew you by another name, Mr Locke. Whatever your reasons, you actions in such times were fruitful for the Ivory Tower, for that, we have listened to you both thus far.” Had the elder kindred known the full story of quite how far back the machinations of Henry ran, he would likely act far more decisively, but for now they remained nebulously vast. “There are two agents I trust to be of use to you in this city, I have grown unimpressed with the works of Vannevar, you may dispose of him and I will not act. Genevive Dieudonné and Violetta Kyborowski, I will instruct them to aid your efforts in this city in the interim. What information I have that may be of use to you from the Old World I shall share. Stay out of New York, a great death is building there that I cannot prevent, should it wake no amount of chosen blood will save you from the initial annihilation.” The aid and warning provided, the suited Kindred finished the remainder of his wine in a short gulp. “If that is all?”
Rachel looked unimpressed; or maybe it was just the Ventrue blood in her. “Bye.” She didn’t wait, just flashed a look of rare irritation to Henry and left, only scooping her own blazer on her way out, her last word a word to the security team, “you’re done the moment they leave this airport. Start the hunt for Lubbock. Intel and logistics go through Andre, and we don’t care how much it costs, or who you have to intimidate or hurt to make it happen.”
There was a surge to the loudness of her steps, as she all but buzzed with the fact that she had just unleashed hundreds of their own trained people equipped with an overwhelming surveillance capability, the largest kine and Kindred intelligence and influence network in the state. The only reason she stopped at the door? To turn around, look at the security detail, and add, “Vannevar is dead before midnight tomorrow, and anyone who would try to harbour or protect him, no matter their affiliation or status.”
“It’s a little fancier than Joe’s Diner, my turn to look out of place.”
The process of sending the text message over to Rachel chimed even as Henry placed the device back into his pocket, his location shared with the female kindred as he approached the front desk of the Lounge. Despite his words to the Ventrue woman, and indeed, she would no doubt look far more on theme, neither of the receptionist staff offered protest as he moved past them, a card of gold pressed to the electronic sign in as he did so.
He was dressed in the style of what some would consider truly, vastly, wealthy. Smart brown leather shoes tapped across the wooden flooring, but such expenditure was paired with Levi jeans and a white linen shirt against the LA Heat. This was not the attire of the corporate traveler, but the old money that had them on their payroll. It was also a lot more comfortable for him, and so the insinuation suited him fine.
Even at this hour the lounge would usually be open to a relatively high number of red eye travelers, but for now it had been cleared. No doubt a flurry of complaints would have resulted from the minor inconvenience of having to share the One World Alliance lounge instead, but all would soon have impressed on them the importance of not kicking up too much of a fuss. If it had been up to Henry, he’d have closed the place with the excuse of emergency maintenance. The upper echelons of the Germanic Camarilla had a different style altogether. The Masquerade was important, but so too was the principle of hierarchy. All would know the risk of a complaint, even if they didn’t quite understand why.
Henry didn’t pause as he moved through the interior of the lounge. The tables and countertops were even more pristine than normal, the glimmering, minimalistic opulence of the catering areas made all the more needless and beautiful for the lack of the culinary delights that they would usually host. That did give him pause, before the man beckoned over one of the few, oppressively pale and smartly dressed, staff.
“I’ll have the chicken burger, I’ll be outside.” The request took more than a few moments to register on the surprised waiter. Henry wasn’t entirely sure how much these elite servants would know about the nature of their masters, but they knew enough to be surprised at the request for something solid to consume. He savored the reaction for only a heartbeat, before heading out onto the truly outdoor decking, ignoring the secondary internal deck. This area was truly abandoned, although the light of the propane fireplaces already danced in the night air. He drew himself up a chair next to the lit bar top, tapping his fingers on the marble top as he watched a plane scream through the air above. He focused for a few moments, allowing his exceptional eyes to filter through the light pollution to drink in the night. By his calculation, it would still be some time before their favored guest would arrive at the lounge. Might as well enjoy the view.
And his burger.
"The Star Alliance Lounge is closed?"
Rachel blinked at the question. She'd barely had time to get out of the car before the other woman was on her, saying the words in the form of a question. LAX, the airport, wasn't titled such on the management side. It was part of a larger entity; the Los Angeles World Airports. The managing group for more than one of the area's airports. The re-organization had been in place by Rachel's mortal predecessor before she had even met Eva, though it didn't take Eva long to allow Rachel to get her hands on it and work on the efficiency of the operation.
"Yes," was all Rachel said through her blink as she stepped out of the backseat of the Cadillac, though the woman just stared at her with a pained, forced, smile on her painted lips. The woman was Lauren Bradley, red hair, pale skin, mid-thirties, the Chief Airport Operations Officer for LAX, and the Chief of Staff to the LAWA CEO. Where Rachel was dressed in skinny fit style black wool pants, enriched with gold-tone Medusa button closures on either hip, black heels, and a magenta wool blazer with a black silk tank top under it.
For those familiar, it was all part of the latest runway line from Versace, although that line wouldn't be shown to the public for a month in Paris. Lauren Bradley wore something else; some kind of blazer and skirt combo, it looked older, maybe Calvin Klein? Rachel didn't care. Rachel just stared in return, forcing Ms. Bradley to finally get brave, and say something else in the scene that was quickly becoming awkward as they stood just outside one of the VIP entrances to one of the terminals.
"It's just, along with the added security--"
Rachel didn't need the woman to continue, happy to cut her off with a stiff, professional, half-smile. "Ms. Bradley, I assure you we wouldn't be doing either of these measures if they weren't necessary. My goal wasn't to make you apologize to everyone in LAX for us tonight...but at the same time I'm afraid this can't be helped. I'll let you know the moment we can open the lounge back up."
The woman apologized, prattled on about something, but by that point Rachel had to move. What Eva had told her about the Ventrue Inner Council seat holder was that he was something of an act that took himself too seriously, and Rachel didn't figure it would do well to make Henry wait for her long, let alone deal with Hardestadt on his lonesome, making them both wait. Black suited security flanked her, one white, one black, both looking like commandos wearing a suit. She had met both before; they were good gents. Some of Andre's inner circle, highly trained, and impeccably positioned to cover her if it came to it. Yet the short walk to the elevator, and the shorter walk to the front of the longue were both uneventful. She didn't go in through the front door, she went in through the kitchen service, meeting two more armed men that let her and her guards in. The guards peeled off as Rachel found him outside.
"Hey," was all she said as she walked outside to the lounge's Terrace. Something inside her wanted to say more, but her voice wouldn't betray her, and nothing about her appearance suggested anything of the sort. She ditched the magenta blazer and draped it over one of the barstools, before moving closer to him, sneaking a peek at the smart phone the Digital Thaumaturges that they financed and protected had provided her. It felt like years ago her lips and hands were all over his body, not days. Yet so much had happened in between, and they hadn't seen him.
"You talked to her, didn't you?"
Somehow, someway, Rachel just knew.
The sudden charge in the air around him at her arrival wasn’t something he hid, although whether it was purely body language and pheromones or something that spoke of his nature was another matter entirely. The fact she was immediately lost in her phone didn’t dissuade him at all. A slightly more wholesome memory of laughing at the sight of her desperately craning for signal while balanced atop a run down cadillac on a dirt road sprung to mind and he didn’t hide the smile from that either. He didn’t hide the brush of intimacy, his hand tracing her hip for the moment, as he leaned in both in greeting and to reply.
“In a sense. It’s the mages who took her, but they need new tricks if they’re to hide someone from me. She wants to stay with them for now, get them onboard. I think that’s what we need, but I could touch her mind for long enough to get my marching orders.” While he efforts to hide whatever rivaling forces of emotion within her may have been successful, the unspoken question of his presence wasn’t hidden from him, and so he carried on, still not putting space between them. “India. I couldn’t not act.” It wasn’t an apology, but the tone was there. It risked his exposure, but Henry could no more sit back and watch a continent die than he could have submitted to the will of his father when it crashed against his compassion. “And I wasn’t alone, Caine is on the move again, which means I can find him, talk to him. You all have given me hope I might be able to reach him, this time.” His words had nothing to do with the geography and everything to do with his efforts to win the heart of another being cursed to wander.
“But, I still probably need a minder for a meeting with King Ventrue.”
Rachel chuckled, "I almost pity the mages; no one makes an impression like Eva. Grace told us they have her at..." Rachel's brown eyes darted there and here, and back again, a sliver of a shrug rolling her porcelain shoulders and the shoulder length dark hair with the slight wave parted down the middle. Surveillance had her a touch nervous. "Well, you know, I'm sure."
She almost didn't want to speak the next sentence. She remembered what happened the last time Henry saw the creature, and the violence in the man's eyes that day. "We, uh...we saw Nathaniel. He's been stalking us. It sounded like he's been stalking us because he couldn't find Eva anywhere in, or around, the city. You should have seen the stare he gave Yanci. I thought he was going to leap for her throat, then and there. Luckily Andre and Mihail are quite the, uh, dissuasive force."
Rachel ignored the Caine mention. Based on everything she knew, it was better just to keep it to herself.
In the same way he didn’t hide the lingering intimacy, the hand left drifting at her hip or the warmth of his smile for her, he didn’t seek to conceal the sudden tightening of his shoulders, the tautness in his build at the mention of the Nosferatu. The last time he had met Nathaniel he had run him through with the Blade of Eden, and only Eva’s pleas for clemency had prevented him from igniting the divine blade and scattering the kindred’s ash upon the wind.
“Tell me if you encounter him again, please.” The intensity came with his fingers pressing into her slightly, before with an exhalation he relaxed. “I won’t hunt him, but I’ll stop him from taking her.” He didn’t need to add who he meant. His bond was Eva was like nothing else in the cosmos, even he didn’t quite understand what burned, or perhaps had burned, between himself and the woman beside him, but Yanci had been the first of them all for him.
Finally he pulled away from her, just a little breathing room. Perhaps to her relief, certainly a relief for the neatness of her outfit no longer presented with the risk of his grip. The interruption was preemptive, as the glass doors out onto the deck slid open. There was a roar overhead and suddenly the outer deck was engulfed in the dazzling light of a plane’s headlamps, a brightness so intense it momentarily obscured vision. Once the glare faded, he was standing there.
Henry knew that the moment of light had no doubt equally obscured the flash of red sights as unknown marksman dialed in on any perceived threat to the man in the dark suit. Exquisitely tailored from an Italian fashion house no one on the American continent could hope to secure an appointment for, the man was slightly too leonine to be considered truly handsome, no matter the pleasant smile on his face as he approached the pair. He appeared unaccompanied, but that was never the case for a man such as this.
“Miss Fields, it has been some time since your name graced my desk, such a pleasure to see life is treating you well in the interim.” His hand extended to her as he drew closer, palm horizontal to shake, a greeting of respect, rather than expected subservience. The man’s blonde and shortly cropped hair framed a face of powerful edges, atop a form that was equally angular, with just enough substance as to not be lanky despite his near-exceptional height. Hardestadt had made a career of orchestrating the unknowable web of the Ivory Tower, mastering far older elders simply from his ability to master information. It was no surprise someone as promising as Rachel had been an object of interest, even before attaining anything that could be considered greatness by the Camarilla. His cold, grey-blue eyes settled on Henry the moment after, with only a simple nod of greeting. “Mr Locke, a shame to hear about your bar.”
Rachel's physical response to the hand shake was demure, even if the look upon her fine dark features were closer to glacial: he was her blood, she was Ventrue, she would be demure for him. More than anything, Rachel resisted the urge to ask the man about Thaddeous. Mr. Carter hadn't been unkind, and their partnership had provided a huge problem for the Sabbat on the East Coast. She knew they lost every gain they'd had save for D.C.. In a bittersweet moment, she also had an idea that the Camarilla had used some of the analytical information Rachel had composed against Eva and the Anarchs from San Francisco.
Yet she never took it personally, and she had simply never heard another thing from Thaddeous. It wasn't hate Rachel felt for the Camarilla, it was just...indifference. Funny thing when you ran one of the largest money laundering rings the world had ever seen and had a contact spreadsheet that could make even a Ventrue elder blush. Hollywood was the kind of soft power the Camarilla would never achieve, Eva the kind of elder that the Camarilla just simply could not produce for someone like her to serve.
A slight perk of her brow was all the suggestion that she wandered, this close to the man, how Gehenna affected him. The Coterie had Eva's blood to protect them, Hardestadt had nothing of the sort. She hoped it wasn't along the horrible rumors she had heard coming out of Chicago.
"Welcome back to Los Angeles, Mr. Hardestadt. I hope the modern nights have been kind to you."
There was a crackle of amusement in the air at her tone of greeting, Henry's hand passing in a stroke down the indent of her spine, the tone of someone enjoying such a radical change in her nature, even if his gaze towards the opposite kindred remained serious.
"As kind as any have been." The elder Ventrue responded with a smile that lacked any true warmth. "New challenges require new solutions, but that in of itself is a constant." As the male spoke, a waiter arrived with a tray bearing decorated champagne flutes, although the liquid within lacked any sort of sparkle and possessed a deep crimson rather than hints of gold. Hardestadt had collected his own glass before they were offered towards the pair, notably long before Henry's summoned burger had arrived. "I would be most welcome to invite you back to aid in such solutions, those who still speak of you still speak very highly, if with regret." Piercing eyes never left Rachel as the man supped from his drink, the promise of both wrath and opportunity all at once. "But I suppose you will continue to decline the offer, and much as there is always interest I did not come all this way for a hiring prospect." He did not expand on this further for the moment, content to study the pair as he had before.
"No, thank you," Rachel all but beamed at the waiter, dark eyes sparkling with a vibrant warmth that matched the smile she flashed. A brilliance that disappeared within a single beat once the waiter moved on. Instead, confusion riddled her darkly fine features as her head tilted just the barest of angles to the side, her brown eyes fixated on Hardestadt, her voice sprinkled with a cheery amusement atop the sound of confusion, "Why would I downgrade?"
The confusion wiped, her head upright, head and shoulders tall as the real Rachel threw off the facade, her hands with clear polished manicured fingertips coming together in front of her, "Your new challenges pale in comparison to our new challenges. You want to save yourself, we want to save everything and everyone. We are not the same, Mr. Hardestadt. She has never asked for your help, and while we certainly don't believe Matthew Lubbock is your doing, it must be said we do consider this another red mark among a long list of them in our ledgers concerning the debts incurred with our group by your organization. Recompense is of no interest to us, long past is the time for that. I have come simply in the hope your organization wishes to discuss ways in which to collaborate on solutions to the overarching challenges."
Her lips were smiling again by the end of her addressing of the man with such a pleasant and warm tone, the subtle and secure smile of the clear eyed and supremely confident.
Rachel’s words certainly had their sting, and it would be impossible to suggest they were entirely expected, at least in the manner in which they delivered. Nevertheless, as Hardestad paused to sip the offered wine, savoring the unexpected taste of elder blood, if not quite questioning where it had originated, his reaction registered as little more than a twinge across his features.
“A warning then. The past is littered with the unnecessary fallen of those who considered their challenges unique and refused the advice and support of others. I should know, I was there in North Africa when this continent first learned the cost of these Modern Nights, failing to heed the advice of their own allies.”
“That’s entirely why I’ve come from our stronghold, and left the rest of my Coterie, to talk with you, and give you that.” Rachel said, motioning with a nod to the glass in his hand, “it doesn’t long for the effect to kick in. It’s hard to say exactly what it will do to you, you’re the first of your clan and generation to taste it. For certain you’ll notice any lingering Beckoning to be gone, completely. I’ve noticed my mind clears faster and there’s a certain…serenity to it. My Coterie fellow, Andre, has also mentioned he feels a touch more humane after. In that drink is Eva’s blood. We have but a tiny supply of it, yet the effects are good for about a week, give or take, depending on the individual. When she told us her blood could help us remain free of the immediate pull of Gehenna, we didn’t believe her, I’m embarrassed to say. Sounded too good to be true. In either case, a token of our good will and desire to collaborate, should you decide your organization would be best in alignment with our goals.”
Her eyes flicked to Henry, waiting on the man to say…something.
“It’s all true, Hardestadt, not just what Rachel is telling you about Eva, but everything the mad prophecies the Camarilla have worked so long to suppress have warned you. I know you suspect, but I’m telling you, it’s worse than you fear.” Henry finally spoke following the look from Rachel, his focus having not wavered, at least in the line of his eyes, from the man for the length of the conversation. There was a crackle in the air between them, an unspoken something that spoke to an established acquaintance, or at least reputation.
The German Kindred’s attention had, in the meantime, slipped to the drink, tilting his head slightly as he examined both the visual appearance of the glass as well as the sensation Rachel described working through him. It was something of a social and political affront to feed another blood of a potentially dominating elder, but for now the slight would be forgiven. “Some have already been dismissed by the march of time, the millennia came and went, the world still stands.” Hardestadt’s cold gaze fixed Henry Locke for a moment longer, before he spoke. “My father-in-darkness knew you by another name, Mr Locke. Whatever your reasons, you actions in such times were fruitful for the Ivory Tower, for that, we have listened to you both thus far.” Had the elder kindred known the full story of quite how far back the machinations of Henry ran, he would likely act far more decisively, but for now they remained nebulously vast. “There are two agents I trust to be of use to you in this city, I have grown unimpressed with the works of Vannevar, you may dispose of him and I will not act. Genevive Dieudonné and Violetta Kyborowski, I will instruct them to aid your efforts in this city in the interim. What information I have that may be of use to you from the Old World I shall share. Stay out of New York, a great death is building there that I cannot prevent, should it wake no amount of chosen blood will save you from the initial annihilation.” The aid and warning provided, the suited Kindred finished the remainder of his wine in a short gulp. “If that is all?”
Rachel looked unimpressed; or maybe it was just the Ventrue blood in her. “Bye.” She didn’t wait, just flashed a look of rare irritation to Henry and left, only scooping her own blazer on her way out, her last word a word to the security team, “you’re done the moment they leave this airport. Start the hunt for Lubbock. Intel and logistics go through Andre, and we don’t care how much it costs, or who you have to intimidate or hurt to make it happen.”
There was a surge to the loudness of her steps, as she all but buzzed with the fact that she had just unleashed hundreds of their own trained people equipped with an overwhelming surveillance capability, the largest kine and Kindred intelligence and influence network in the state. The only reason she stopped at the door? To turn around, look at the security detail, and add, “Vannevar is dead before midnight tomorrow, and anyone who would try to harbour or protect him, no matter their affiliation or status.”
© 2007-2024