Hot dogs are already cooked. Might as well just sear them to add flavor.
7
likes
7 yrs ago
I love it when I catch up on my posting.
2
likes
7 yrs ago
If you take college seriously, it opens doors. Harvard and Hopkins makes it easier, but you can do well anywhere.
3
likes
7 yrs ago
Prefer to brainstorm on Discord for that reason.
1
like
7 yrs ago
Windows 10 is very much like a German prison camp guard, "Ah, I see you are tryink to escape work fifteen minutes early, Herr Colonel Hogan, here ist an update zat vill stall you!"
Gabe Boudreaux, nature lover and resident expert on supernatural animals...or, what a normal person would call monsters. The first thing he did was look at that warehouse, in the darkness, with its rows of barrels and tight confines and said to himself, hell no I won't go.
"Look, no offense, but let's try not to agitate the man-eater, okay? We need it to feel comfortable and potentially hungry, because we want it to come out, not stay in there and hunker down. Because I'm not volunteering to go in there."
The first instincts were usually best. He wasn't in love with the idea of tangling with a giant spider inside its domain, where it had webs, food, eggs, if female. He didn't get a good enough look yet to determine sex. Instead, the hairy man of the group, a flannel-wearing shit-kicker with a Mainer accent, which was a lot like a Canadian accent, was advising caution from a position of expertise on supernatural wildlife. He wasn't Steve Irwin, who got himself speared by a manta ray trying to shove a finger up its quacker and he sure as Hell wasn't Jonah, who got himself into the belly of the beast.
Beyond that, Priest and Hawthorne could be liable for damages to all this expensive-looking whiskey, in addition to human lives lost. So guns blazing didn't make a lot of sense here.
"Look, spiders usually aren't aggressive unless provoked, but they are predators and usually they eat things that eat sugar. They'll go after likely prey. That's us," he pronounced, "so stop provoking it." It probably picked the whiskey distillery for a number of reasons. It was cool, dark and there was a doughnut bakery with a retail space called "Devilish Donuts." There was a coffee roaster there too, Kahuna Coffee Roasters. And they had a shop right across from Devilish Donuts, so people could sugar up even more. While both of these had sweets, it didn't have the ideal conditions for a spider...but it was in proximity to the sort of prey a spider would eat at that size. It needed something that consumed enough sugar to satisfy the carbohydrate requirements, since a spider wasn't just going to raid the donut bakery. But it was going to find a lair close to the Diabeetus Den so it didn't have to go far to pick off some sugar-coated protein.
The smaller cousins of this spider evolved to eat ants and pollinating insects, so it made a certain twisted sense that this spider made a lair near a prime food source. There were spaces between the slab-sided warehouses with their metal doors, which were tall enough, but there were plenty of things where a spider might string up its webbing. Sure enough, he drew a flashlight out of a leather holster on a worn leather belt, clicked it on and shined LED's on the points where there were webs, thicker than the usual kind, but still the iridescent lines that were familiar to everyone. They were strung up all over the place, strategically, but there was plenty of open parking lot/loading yard space where the spider couldn't strike easily.
Unless of course, it decided to charge. But spiders didn't work that way, usually.
"Let's stay clear of those for now," he noted to his colleagues.
He caught a whiff of something sweet and groaned; it had been a long day of sitting in that fucking van with Blackwood, rubbing Vicks under his nose and trying not to turn into a drooling, sex-starved caveman. He'd done as much as he could to open windows, spray Fabreeze and otherwise disrupt the charm. He'd probably pissed off everyone else and offended Morgan multiple times. The Fabreeze made him sneeze, chemicals and a sensitive nose, so he switched to Vicks. In fact, he was moving to keep her down-fucking-wind when the plan clicked and he stopped in mid-stride on those scuffed work boots like lightning hit him.
"Guys, I have a plan," he told the group, "We need to get our beasty to get comfortable, so let's try not to be too loud or bright with lights. And I'm gonna need some help on a couple wish list items. We need to make that warehouse kind of warm and the air out here a little more humid while keeping it cool. We also need a way to create something really sticky on the ground. We're all professionals here, so I'm just listing our needs."
Then he turned to Morgan and, quite conversationally, addressed her, while rubbing his nose a bit to disrupt the more overt tones. In the course of the spider punching through a wall with one hairy, frighteningly spiny leg, the adrenaline must have kicked up her scent production or something. He thought he was used to it and then she blasted him with this whammy. It was their first time really working a case together, so there was a learning curve. He kept the tone very conversational, all things considered, though his voice was a bit muffled by his hand on his face.
"Blackwood, if I may respectfully suggest, you look like you're famished. It's time to go get some donuts."
Name: Gabriel (Gabe) Boudreaux (Boo-Dro if it's down in Louisiana)
Gender: Male
Race/Species: Human, but there might be some ancient-co-mingling with spirits, fae and werewolves down the line. When your family goes back that far, it's hard to tell what the heck really happened. Also endless joke fodder.
Age (Real and apparent): Early 30's, Apparent. A little more than twice that, realistically. Born in the 1940's.
Appearance: Gabe doesn't bother to hide that he's a bit of a crunchy hippie; things happen in cycles and so does fashion, which means that long hair, beards and flannel are back in. He's got thick auburn hair and a slightly redder beard. The nose is prominent but not overlarge, though slightly upturned, and his eyes are startlingly blue. He has despair-inducing natural eyebrow game.
A life spent in the outdoors, hiking around on the job in various functions has left a large frame, six-one or so, with some muscle, especially on the shoulders and back. It's not some weight lifting bro's build, but he is solid.
What sets him apart from an urbanite imitating the look is that he doesn't have new clothing. It's all been washed and repaired many times, fading down to a comfortable second skin. It's cared for and maintained.
Personality: Gabe knows what he loves in life and devotes himself passionately to that. Other things he cares less for, but he is gregarious and surprisingly good at socialization. What he doesn't do is blend in socially but rather tries to come at people honestly. Sometimes, in the case of the small-minded folk you find in any place, that puts noses out of joint. However, and Gabe believes this, you will always find your kind of people, the intellectually curious and the interesting, by being strange but sociable and get a lot out of that. He's not afraid to try people out at a gathering until he finds what he's looking for.
So he's friendly and down to Earth.
He walks into places and buys people a beer and tries to find common ground. He makes jokes about his redneck ways. He could run for Senate on that, "I am just a country boy" bullshit he peddles but he also loves it when someone takes him at face value.
The thing is, a lifetime of investigating poachers, animal parts smugglers and other types in communities, often rural, means that he's got this act down.
Deep down, he loves the outdoors. Politically, he's a staunch conservation guy, green energy causes and so forth. He is no vegan, but feels that good stewardship in hunting is extremely important and believes in a natural balance that is not being adhered to. That is his life's lodestone.
Powers, Traits, and Abilities: He's average untrained at Ski-ball, let's get that out of the way.
Gabe grew up hunting, fishing, mountain climbing, lobstering and otherwise doing French-Canadian redneck things in a childhood in Maine. As a veteran and veteran federal agent, these skills were refined, and skillsets in investigation, courtroom demeanor, the law, surveillance, interrogation were added. Gabe also is a repository of knowledge on all kinds of creatures and their habits, both supernatural and normal.
He's not really a practitioner, but he's got enough juice to affect plant life and communicate, empathetically, with animals, including the supernatural kind. There are druidic spellcasting types that are deeply versed in the lore, ritual and prophecy, but Gabe is not really one of those. He has other talents.
He's spooky in the wild as he moves through it, light of foot, and he can shimmy up a rock face with near supernatural agility, but it's actually just a lifetime's worth of skill. He doesn't get lost on trails. He's a superb, supernaturally so, tracker in the wild, but in built up areas it gets too confusing to work the way it does out in nature, with clarity. It's suspected, but not confirmed, that he has a nose like a bloodhound, which may well be why he is known to cover it up with a bandana or surgical mask when the scents get too overpowering, particularly as involves petroleum, coal and various other contaminants. In the city, he often has to contend with a bit of a sinus problem, which means having to reduce inflammation with traditional herbal remedies. That blunts the nose.
His immune system is unbelievably hale and hearty. You can shoot Gabe, but plague and poison is not nearly as effective. There are limitations of course. That may well explain why his family weathered all those centuries fairly successfully, particularly during the Plague(s).
Speaking of that, the story is this: a long while ago in Gaul (France) there was a community of what they called druids that Caesar wrote about in less than glowing terms. Ole Julius (self-servingly) described gruesome rituals, human sacrifice, a culture of fear and rulership. When the same Caesar sacked Gaul on the pretext of civilizing it, but actually was intent on looting it and parcelling out parts of it to his army and enriching his political support base. Caesar and his successors, notably Augustus and Tiberius, supposedly eradicated the worst aspects of this culture. Again, they based some of this on the distaste for human sacrifice, but it was probably rooted more in the Julian Emperors' distaste for challenges to the Principate's authority.
Gabe's ancestors survived through many subsequent purges in the name of politics and religion and eventually emigrated to New France, thence to Maine, keeping the old ways alive, managing to preserve themselves. It wasn't ever a conspiracy, like vampires (who never liked druids much, seeing as they could be an impediment to societal control and feeding) or the fae, who maintained ancient and cordial relations with the oak-knowers.
He's also a motorcycle enthusiast, but stopped riding Harley's a while ago and went with Kawasakis. He's a surprisingly good bonsai gardener, and swears he doesn't cheat but the office doesn't believe him one damned bit.
Background: The smell of her was in his nostrils at this range, even in the city, but it wasn't remotely her fault; he could tell that she worked out this morning, caught a whiff of high end yogurt on her breath and could place the perfume, notes of pomegranate, lemon, rose and jasmine. It was good but not pricey and didn't wrinkle his nose, the way college age dudes would with their tendency to spray the shit under their arms.
"So Mr. Boudreaux, thank you for coming in to interview today. Did you want anything to drink before we started?" She got the name right, which was points in his book. The meeting room was easy to peer into, seeing as the walls were glass, the door was glass, all framed by minimal aluminum, rather than metal. Unlike a police station, it was two way glass. The table was spartan, the chairs modern. So Priest probably didn't get much input on the design of this particular space.
"No thank you, Ms. Cloverpetal, the water's fine, though I hear the coffee is great around here," He smiled at her winningly and made eye contact. His body language was kept deliberately open, perhaps from a lifetime of being a meeter and greeter, a guy that knew how to be public facing. Sure, he was an outdoors guy, but that didn't mean he couldn't provide small talk and socialize. In the supernatural community, there was a bit of a misconception about his kind as cranky recluses, which was often the case. Centuries of tradition could make some people tedious. Ada knew him and knew differently, but others might not. So he put on his best winning way. They might have expected a guy wearing a robe with birds nesting in his beard, or something out of a certain popular show where they shot every animal in sight and wore hunting camo underwear to match their bandanna.
Sure, he had that ruddy sort of look from a lifelong outdoorsman, but he came to the interview in jeans and a tan sport coat and an open collared sky blue oxford, which had a good casual, but sharp urban look for a guy with a beard and a manbun. So sue him, he was tuned into this IPA drinking culture of hipsters. He was actually approving of the water's taste. It was in a recyclable paper carton and tasted good, like the place really cared about where they sourced their water from. He didn't wear a tie, but this interview was a bit of a formality that kept in compliance with the process of hiring law, even though the company contacted him and invited him to apply.
Then again, if you were in the magic business, you had to be wary of your water supply. Any number of people with a grudge would look at that as a good way to mess around. He didn't even need to do a quick magical filtering of the water, one of his go to spells. These days, even creekwater needed filtration. He just had a leg up on it over most people.
Once he finished his sip, Ms. Cloverpetal, who had a hippie name straight out of the late 1960's and, despite the perky, dewy fresh blonde look, might have been born back then, essentially revealed intern status when she said, "So, what can you tell me about yourself?" She asked it earnestly enough, referencing a list printed in Courier on white paper.
But Gabe obliged, "I hold a bachelor's in biology from the University of Vermont and am a 26 year veteran of the US Fish and Wildlife Service as a Special Agent, enforcing laws on the books in wildlife preserves and other federal jurisdictions, as relates to hunting and the trafficking or poaching of protected species. We also did disaster relief operations, specifically relating to handling of animals, and I usually got called in when they needed to find someone in remote places. I was stationed in various parts of the country, notably Louisiana, Texas and New England, but I also covered territory in Northern California and South Florida for a few years, mostly working in conjunction with the FBI branches on smuggling ring cases."
Organized crime shit, sometimes dangerous. She was taking notes on a sheet she had printed out and he had a battered notebook and a cheap pen he was using to take down his own notes, as a way to give his hands something to do.
"Of course," Ms. Cloverpetal nodded, as she read from the script, "So can you tell me about a time when you had too much to do and not enough time and what you did in that situation?"
"Does Vietnam count?" He asked, with a trace of irony to the tone.
This is when the lady got a little flustered, perhaps as he made a cardinal mistake of traditional interviews and gave his age. There was a momentary uncomfortable silence and a mumbled, obligatory and amusing, "...thank you for your service..."
To save her a bit he added, "I went to school on the GI bill as soon as I got out in Burlington. I missed Woodstock, but we had some really good concerts out there. Then, after graduation, I got on a bike with some friends and did the Easy Rider thing. I tried to play guitar, but am not that good. That definitely felt like I was trying to get in a lot in a very limited amount of time, if that helps." He didn't tell her about the drugs. It was still a job interview, after all.
"Oh, wow, so what happened after that?" she asked, a little more naturally.
"Well," he said, warming up to storyteller mode, "I grew up in a kind of traditional household in Aroostook County, Maine, right? And my family, we had our traditions, one of them being a deeply-felt connection with and respect for the land. But not everyone thought it through; they were in a hurry to pull themselves out of a time when disease killed much of the population in childhood, and scarred the survivors. Industrialization, science and technology were used to escape these things, but society overdid it, with immense harm to nature to underwrite societal advancement. Hell, my family always felt that good stewardship was important, but in the 1970's, a lot of people were just starting to realize the cost of heedless industrialization. Acid rain, ozone holes, radical climate change, mass extinction. Have you ever see pictures of what this country used to look like, Ms. Cloverpetal?"
She shook her head, and he continued, impassioned.
"Junkyards everywhere, smog, and all kinds of stuff just floating in ponds. We definitely killed off a lot of species in the process and it was obvious that so many others were about to go. It was a total mess. In the 1960's the activism focus was on Vietnam, but I think we," he meant the generation, "all had to make decisions about what to do with our life after the road trip was over. Literally, in my case. Well, the plan was to kind of get involved in that, and a good way to do it was to join the police force that catches people who dump things on public land illegally, who poach animals without a care and who generally screw up national parks with their beer cans and dumb lighter fluid fires so that everyone else has a huge forest fire on their hands. I'm not a politician, but the one thing Nixon did right was come up with the Environmental Protection Agency. There was a lot of cleaning up and enforcement to be done with various federal agencies and a lot of that had to do with a new generation of agents pushing these laws. I mean, the job isn't all chasing around poachers and finding shipments of smuggled ivory, you got to teach kids about respecting the land too. So we were trying to change things at the grass roots and it looked swell at first, we made a lot of progress. Of course, it's never that easy," he ended with a grunt.
He wasn't sure to encapsulate years and decades of disappointment with bureaucracy, congressional oversight, media misrepresentation and supernatural manipulation for its own ends. He didn't lose the romanticism and idealism, but toward the end, he was drawing heat onto the community he was stationed in, in Louisiana, from a particular cartel of vampires. Thralls, schools, bad stuff. They'd sussed out his schedule, which changed last minute, and thought to pin him down. They shot some school resource officer in a uniform that looked vaguely coplike.
Luckily, the tracks got covered there and the school resource officer survived. But he retired soon there after. He'd started in 1976 and it was 2002. He was drawing too much heat, and he didn't like the feeling of walking away, but the truth was that the bureaucrats were demanding some sort of accountability and he was going to be forced out anyway.
"So you retired in 2002," Ms. Cloverpetal stating the obvious, "But what have you been doing since then?" Apparently, Ada had this young lady doing a very ceremonial 'we did it' screening, but he played along.
"Consulting work here and there, a fat pension and I move around a lot. Back home, they expect me to be gray and old, so I stay away because I hate dyeing my hair," he confided, "So I've been biking around the country and camping out rough in all kinds of places when I'm not raking in consulting fees, including with your agency. Heck, these days I can take a laptop and a phone just about anywhere, so my office is on my back." He sounded smugly satisfied with that pronouncement as he patted the backpack beside his chair, a high end Maxpedition model, thoroughly modern, the nylon thick, durable but well-used. You could only take retro so far.
"So Mr. Boudreaux, what did you like most about your job? What did you like least?"
Gabe cocked his head. It was a bog standard question, but he decided to answer honestly rather than play a cagey game, "What I liked least was political oversight, appointees and unknown agendas that tied our hands. What I liked most was our values and mission. Preserving wildlife, encouraging good stewardship and you got to get out in the community and really work with people. You know, teach them well," he shrugged.
"Did you ever have to deal with someone that was having a difficult day and was not in a good mood? How did you address it?"
"Ms. Cloverpetal, I was a Fish and Wildlife cop, which means that I was often dealing with poachers that did not want to be caught and sometimes had guns. So you know that if you're catching them, they might decide to take a shot. So I always tried to catch them in a friendly way in a friendly place to head off that business. But you know how it is with the bigger fish that think there is no law they're accountable to, that's when it gets hairy. But me, I like it nice and easy. No one wants a war out there," he waved a hand around, vaguely, as if to say, in civilization, with humans, "and I prefer to work it out nicely." But his smile was a bit steely, as if to say that he wasn't going to back down off a principle.
"So what would you say is your weakness?"
He almost laughed aloud, it was a stock question. He was a supervisor and he had to ask people this even back then, "I cannot pass up chocolate chip and pecan cookies or cranberry pumpkin bread. And I like action. And my life is getting too boring and patterned. The last case we worked, the Everglades case, made me feel like I could be doing more," which involved a ring of ritual spellcasters with delusions of Egyptology poaching crocodiles for their body parts, vulnerable species, "so here I am. I got a message from Ada about 'barghests' 'staff turnover' and 'we want to bring you on full time.' And I like the sound of that. Guess I never really learn, huh?"
The Mist exploded overhead, causing him to flatten to avoid the shrapnel from that, hissing through the air. He managed not to be perforated with hot metal, but it was a close thing. Along the way, other pockets erupted. Even so, while prone, he got his rifle into position, both eyes open, irons on the two, but he held fire even before the talking started. Others were moving into their positions, even as they tried to reason through the situation.
He knew the calculus; one girl, throwing power around. Setzer, held hostage.
As the others started to talk and otherwise address the girl, he took the time to get on one knee and assume a firing position, the stock of his rifle nestled into his shoulder as he regulated his breathing. This was no sniper rifle and Setzer was so damn big that this girl practically was hidden behind him anyway. He didn't have a particularly good shot, not that he was in a rush to take it. It was not the optimal situation to be taking shots, even if he was damned good with a rifle.
Unlike most Wardens, he didn't need optics for easy firing. He compensated subtly, using minuscule amounts of the Mist to modify the visual effect that replicated the effect of magnification and backlighting and even target designation. It was minor trickery, but it assisted in a well-trained rifleman's sense of aiming the weapon, particularly welcome when under an actual threat with actual adrenaline.
All the same, he'd spent more time in Vangar courses than Zimmy or at least retained it; his training reflected the interests he had. He wanted to do recon and light infantry work, and he'd deliberately adopted the courseload that would put him into that line of work. He was extremely fluent with the language, which the Citadel taught with a junker-class accent, like a proper von type, educated, collegiate. Useful for debriefing Vangar officers if the need were ever to arise.
"We are Wardens on leave, you are on Rassvet soil and this is a search and rescue operation. That is, of course, unless you decide to actually harm our friend, in which case you cease to be the subject of a rescue operation and then become an enemy combatant. Your choice, fraulein. We are not the enemy unless you decide to make it that way."
His Vangar was cold and aristocratic, and he was casual in flicking the safety selector switch on his rifle down to 'fire', which had a very distinctive 'click' sound, as if to say, think carefully about the next move, since you're speaking so glibly of moves.
"I just told the bitch that this is a search and rescue and that if she does anything to Setzer, we're slotting her," he added, to the others in Rass as he covered his sector. She couldn't watch seven at once. So he locked eyes with her. His were hard, especially behind the sights of a rifle.
Name: Gabriel (Gabe) Boudreaux (Boo-Dro if it's down in Louisiana)
Gender: Male
Race/Species: Human, but there might be some ancient-co-mingling with spirits, fae and werewolves down the line. When your family goes back that far, it's hard to tell what the heck really happened.
Age (Real and apparent): Early 30's, Apparent. A little more than twice that, realistically. Born in the 1940's.
Appearance: Gabe doesn't bother to hide that he's a bit of a crunchy hippie; things happen in cycles and so does fashion, which means that long hair, beards and flannel are back in. He's got thick auburn hair and a slightly redder beard. The nose is prominent but not overlarge, though slightly upturned, and his eyes are startlingly blue. He has despair-inducing natural eyebrow game.
A life spent in the outdoors, hiking around on the job in various functions has left a large frame, six-one or so, with some muscle, especially on the shoulders and back. It's not some weight lifting bro's build, but he is solid.
What sets him apart from an urbanite imitating the look is that he doesn't have new clothing. It's all been washed and repaired many times, fading down to a comfortable second skin. It's cared for and maintained.
Personality: Gabe knows what he loves in life and devotes himself passionately to that. Other things he cares less for, but he is gregarious and surprisingly good at socialization. What he doesn't do is blend in socially but rather tries to come at people honestly. Sometimes, in the case of the small-minded folk you find in any place, that puts noses out of joint. However, and Gabe believes this, you will always find your kind of people, the intellectually curious and the interesting, by being strange but sociable and get a lot out of that. He's not afraid to try people out at a gathering until he finds what he's looking for.
So he's friendly and down to Earth.
He walks into places and buys people a beer and tries to find common ground. He makes jokes about his redneck ways. He could run for Senate on that, "I am just a country boy" bullshit he peddles but he also loves it when someone takes him at face value.
The thing is, a lifetime of investigating poachers, animal parts smugglers and other types in communities, often rural, means that he's got this act down.
Deep down, he loves the outdoors. Politically, he's a staunch conservation guy, green energy causes and so forth. He is no vegan, but feels that good stewardship in hunting is extremely important and believes in a natural balance that is not being adhered to. That is his life's lodestone.
Powers, Traits, and Abilities: He's average untrained at Ski-ball, let's get that out of the way.
Gabe grew up hunting, fishing, mountain climbing, lobstering and otherwise doing French-Canadian redneck things in a childhood in Maine. As a veteran and veteran federal agent, these skills were refined, and skillsets in investigation, courtroom demeanor, the law, surveillance, interrogation were added. Gabe also is a repository of knowledge on all kinds of creatures and their habits, both supernatural and normal.
He's not really a practitioner, but he's got enough juice to affect plant life and communicate, empathetically, with animals, including the supernatural kind. There are druidic spellcasting types that are deeply versed in the lore, ritual and prophecy, but Gabe is not really one of those. He has other talents.
He's spooky in the wild as he moves through it, light of foot, and he can shimmy up a rock face with near supernatural agility, but it's actually just a lifetime's worth of skill. He doesn't get lost on trails. He's a superb, supernaturally so, tracker in the wild, but in built up areas it gets too confusing to work the way it does out in nature, with clarity. It's suspected, but not confirmed, that he has a nose like a bloodhound, which may well be why he is known to cover it up with a bandana or surgical mask when the scents get too overpowering, particularly as involves petroleum, coal and various other contaminants. In the city, he often has to contend with a bit of a sinus problem, which means having to reduce inflammation with traditional herbal remedies. That blunts the nose.
His immune system is unbelievably hale and hearty. You can shoot Gabe, but plague and poison is not nearly as effective. There are limitations of course. That may well explain why his family weathered all those centuries fairly successfully, particularly during the Plague(s).
Speaking of that, the story is this: a long while ago in Gaul (France) there was a community of what they called druids that Caesar wrote about in less than glowing terms. Ole Julius (self-servingly) described gruesome rituals, human sacrifice, a culture of fear and rulership. When the same Caesar sacked Gaul on the pretext of civilizing it, but actually was intent on looting it and parcelling out parts of it to his army and enriching his political support base. Caesar and his successors, notably Augustus and Tiberius, supposedly eradicated the worst aspects of this culture. Again, they based some of this on the distaste for human sacrifice, but it was probably rooted more in the Julian Emperors' distaste for challenges to the Principate's authority.
Gabe's ancestors survived through many subsequent purges in the name of politics and religion and eventually emigrated to New France, thence to Maine, keeping the old ways alive, managing to preserve themselves. It wasn't ever a conspiracy, like vampires (who never liked druids much, seeing as they could be an impediment to societal control and feeding) or the fae, who maintained ancient and cordial relations with the oak-knowers.
He's also a motorcycle enthusiast, but stopped riding Harley's a while ago and went with Kawasakis. He's a surprisingly good bonsai gardener, and swears he doesn't cheat but the office doesn't believe him one damned bit.
Background: The smell of her was in his nostrils at this range, even in the city, but it wasn't remotely her fault; he could tell that she worked out this morning, caught a whiff of high end yogurt on her breath and could place the perfume, notes of pomegranate, lemon, rose and jasmine. It was good but not pricey and didn't wrinkle his nose, the way college age dudes would with their tendency to spray the shit under their arms.
"So Mr. Boudreaux, thank you for coming in to interview today. Did you want anything to drink before we started?" She got the name right, which was points in his book. The meeting room was easy to peer into, seeing as the walls were glass, the door was glass, all framed by minimal aluminum, rather than metal. Unlike a police station, it was two way glass. The table was spartan, the chairs modern. So Priest probably didn't get much input on the design of this particular space.
"No thank you, Ms. Cloverpetal, the water's fine, though I hear the coffee is great around here," He smiled at her winningly and made eye contact. His body language was kept deliberately open, perhaps from a lifetime of being a meeter and greeter, a guy that knew how to be public facing. Sure, he was an outdoors guy, but that didn't mean he couldn't provide small talk and socialize. In the supernatural community, there was a bit of a misconception about his kind as cranky recluses, which was often the case. Centuries of tradition could make some people tedious. Ada knew him and knew differently, but others might not. So he put on his best winning way. They might have expected a guy wearing a robe with birds nesting in his beard, or something out of a certain popular show where they shot every animal in sight and wore hunting camo underwear to match their bandanna.
Sure, he had that ruddy sort of look from a lifelong outdoorsman, but he came to the interview in jeans and a tan sport coat and an open collared sky blue oxford, which had a good casual, but sharp urban look for a guy with a beard and a manbun. So sue him, he was tuned into this IPA drinking culture of hipsters. He was actually approving of the water's taste. It was in a recyclable paper carton and tasted good, like the place really cared about where they sourced their water from. He didn't wear a tie, but this interview was a bit of a formality that kept in compliance with the process of hiring law, even though the company contacted him and invited him to apply.
Then again, if you were in the magic business, you had to be wary of your water supply. Any number of people with a grudge would look at that as a good way to mess around. He didn't even need to do a quick magical filtering of the water, one of his go to spells. These days, even creekwater needed filtration. He just had a leg up on it over most people.
Once he finished his sip, Ms. Cloverpetal, who had a hippie name straight out of the late 1960's and, despite the perky, dewy fresh blonde look, might have been born back then, essentially revealed intern status when she said, "So, what can you tell me about yourself?" She asked it earnestly enough, referencing a list printed in Courier on white paper.
But Gabe obliged, "I hold a bachelor's in biology from the University of Vermont and am a 26 year veteran of the US Fish and Wildlife Service as a Special Agent, enforcing laws on the books in wildlife preserves and other federal jurisdictions, as relates to hunting and the trafficking or poaching of protected species. We also did disaster relief operations, specifically relating to handling of animals, and I usually got called in when they needed to find someone in remote places. I was stationed in various parts of the country, notably Louisiana, Texas and New England, but I also covered territory in Northern California and South Florida for a few years, mostly working in conjunction with the FBI branches on smuggling ring cases."
Organized crime shit, sometimes dangerous. She was taking notes on a sheet she had printed out and he had a battered notebook and a cheap pen he was using to take down his own notes, as a way to give his hands something to do.
"Of course," Ms. Cloverpetal nodded, as she read from the script, "So can you tell me about a time when you had too much to do and not enough time and what you did in that situation?"
"Does Vietnam count?" He asked, with a trace of irony to the tone.
This is when the lady got a little flustered, perhaps as he made a cardinal mistake of traditional interviews and gave his age. There was a momentary uncomfortable silence and a mumbled, obligatory and amusing, "...thank you for your service..."
To save her a bit he added, "I went to school on the GI bill as soon as I got out in Burlington. I missed Woodstock, but we had some really good concerts out there. Then, after graduation, I got on a bike with some friends and did the Easy Rider thing. I tried to play guitar, but am not that good. That definitely felt like I was trying to get in a lot in a very limited amount of time, if that helps." He didn't tell her about the drugs. It was still a job interview, after all.
"Oh, wow, so what happened after that?" she asked, a little more naturally.
"Well," he said, warming up to storyteller mode, "I grew up in a kind of traditional household in Aroostook County, Maine, right? And my family, we had our traditions, one of them being a deeply-felt connection with and respect for the land. But not everyone thought it through; they were in a hurry to pull themselves out of a time when disease killed much of the population in childhood, and scarred the survivors. Industrialization, science and technology were used to escape these things, but society overdid it, with immense harm to nature to underwrite societal advancement. Hell, my family always felt that good stewardship was important, but in the 1970's, a lot of people were just starting to realize the cost of heedless industrialization. Acid rain, ozone holes, radical climate change, mass extinction. Have you ever see pictures of what this country used to look like, Ms. Cloverpetal?"
She shook her head, and he continued, impassioned.
"Junkyards everywhere, smog, and all kinds of stuff just floating in ponds. We definitely killed off a lot of species in the process and it was obvious that so many others were about to go. It was a total mess. In the 1960's the activism focus was on Vietnam, but I think we," he meant the generation, "all had to make decisions about what to do with our life after the road trip was over. Literally, in my case. Well, the plan was to kind of get involved in that, and a good way to do it was to join the police force that catches people who dump things on public land illegally, who poach animals without a care and who generally screw up national parks with their beer cans and dumb lighter fluid fires so that everyone else has a huge forest fire on their hands. I'm not a politician, but the one thing Nixon did right was come up with the Environmental Protection Agency. There was a lot of cleaning up and enforcement to be done with various federal agencies and a lot of that had to do with a new generation of agents pushing these laws. I mean, the job isn't all chasing around poachers and finding shipments of smuggled ivory, you got to teach kids about respecting the land too. So we were trying to change things at the grass roots and it looked swell at first, we made a lot of progress. Of course, it's never that easy," he ended with a grunt.
He wasn't sure to encapsulate years and decades of disappointment with bureaucracy, congressional oversight, media misrepresentation and supernatural manipulation for its own ends. He didn't lose the romanticism and idealism, but toward the end, he was drawing heat onto the community he was stationed in, in Louisiana, from a particular cartel of vampires. Thralls, schools, bad stuff. They'd sussed out his schedule, which changed last minute, and thought to pin him down. They shot some school resource officer in a uniform that looked vaguely coplike.
Luckily, the tracks got covered there and the school resource officer survived. But he retired soon there after. He'd started in 1976 and it was 2002. He was drawing too much heat, and he didn't like the feeling of walking away, but the truth was that the bureaucrats were demanding some sort of accountability and he was going to be forced out anyway.
"So you retired in 2002," Ms. Cloverpetal stating the obvious, "But what have you been doing since then?" Apparently, Ada had this young lady doing a very ceremonial 'we did it' screening, but he played along.
"Consulting work here and there, a fat pension and I move around a lot. Back home, they expect me to be gray and old, so I stay away because I hate dyeing my hair," he confided, "So I've been biking around the country and camping out rough in all kinds of places when I'm not raking in consulting fees, including with your agency. Heck, these days I can take a laptop and a phone just about anywhere, so my office is on my back." He sounded smugly satisfied with that pronouncement as he patted the backpack beside his chair, a high end Maxpedition model, thoroughly modern, the nylon thick, durable but well-used. You could only take retro so far.
"So Mr. Boudreaux, what did you like most about your job? What did you like least?"
Gabe cocked his head. It was a bog standard question, but he decided to answer honestly rather than play a cagey game, "What I liked least was political oversight, appointees and unknown agendas that tied our hands. What I liked most was our values and mission. Preserving wildlife, encouraging good stewardship and you got to get out in the community and really work with people. You know, teach them well," he shrugged.
"Did you ever have to deal with someone that was having a difficult day and was not in a good mood? How did you address it?"
"Ms. Cloverpetal, I was a Fish and Wildlife cop, which means that I was often dealing with poachers that did not want to be caught and sometimes had guns. So you know that if you're catching them, they might decide to take a shot. So I always tried to catch them in a friendly way in a friendly place to head off that business. But you know how it is with the bigger fish that think there is no law they're accountable to, that's when it gets hairy. But me, I like it nice and easy. No one wants a war out there," he waved a hand around, vaguely, as if to say, in civilization, with humans, "and I prefer to work it out nicely." But his smile was a bit steely, as if to say that he wasn't going to back down off a principle.
"So what would you say is your weakness?"
He almost laughed aloud, it was a stock question. He was a supervisor and he had to ask people this even back then, "I cannot pass up chocolate chip and pecan cookies or cranberry pumpkin bread. And I like action. And my life is getting too boring and patterned. The last case we worked, the Everglades case, made me feel like I could be doing more," which involved a ring of ritual spellcasters with delusions of Egyptology poaching crocodiles for their body parts, vulnerable species, "so here I am. I got a message from Ada about 'barghests' 'staff turnover' and 'we want to bring you on full time.' And I like the sound of that. Guess I never really learn, huh?"
I'm definitely interested. One question, however...is this based in a specific geographic region? My character ideas might differ on the basis of which part of the US.
Gideon spent his earliest years in training dealing with Mistburn, when he pushed too hard against a limited power trying to compete with guys like Lee, Zimmy and, particularly, Galahad.
He was not the tank that Setzer or Kitty were. And Lori was an entirely different sort of case, but still a beacon of the power.
But he'd learned something from that suffering about limits, about adapting. It made Gideon into a different type of WARDEN, a dangerous mind. He did better in training, once he learned that he had personal limits.
Others never did. The Citadel never put out stats, though they probably existed in secret, on just how many youngsters in training burned out in every stage of WARDEN training; when they first touched the power, midway through as they learned to use it, and toward the end, when people got overly familiar with it. A WARDEN was trained to use it for all sorts of feats, but underlying that was the constant danger of overdoing it and becoming demented, catatonic, comatose or simply a corpse. Some washouts went into other endeavors, but many wound up in carefully guarded, dead metal-impregnated sanitariums, remote and kept under guard, constantly drugged.
They'd all seen it, and knew the seriousness of Mistburn. What happened to Zimmy was like tripping over a root when you couldn't see, but that really didn't encapsulate the risk. She took it in good faith, considering the need to scout quickly urgent.
With the rifle against his chest, the worn canvas sling holding it there, he found himself under Zimmy's shoulder, bringing himself down to a knee again, but with her supported on his. Only against a specimen like Setzer would Gideon look somewhat normal; he had strong shoulders and a wiry strength, but more endurance, a good amount of it mental, that carried him through the training.
"Got you. Breathe. Go loose."
He knew the feeling of balloon-like tension as limbs felt swollen and leaden, as muscles convulsed and skin felt unbearably taut. Your head hummed and your ears could hear something, but faintly, and you strained to listen. When the Mist burned, one's vision swam with seething, malevolent visions of sparkling power that tempted even more, even as the Gods themselves were saying you dare too much, Mortal! But the lesson was drowned out by the visceral, instinctive reaction of a magic user to use more to fix the problem.
Stage 1 made you feel like shit. Stage 2 was hair of the dog, more of what got you there to keep you going. In the altered logic of the mist, it told you to go ahead and take some more to deal with the effects of taking too much already, like drinking salt water to alleviate thirst, only to find yourself even more parched and thirstier.
If the breathing exercises and self-control mantras didn't work, every WARDEN carried a medkit, and he had his on his hip, on his belt. It held a syringe injector that would fix the effect. Certain types of medication, like adrenaline shots, like insulin and others, could massively offset an underlying condition but too much could kill. And in any case, there were side effects to a potent cocktail of tranq drugs designed to stop a WARDEN in their tracks. It was like a hangover the way a tiger was like a housecat. Zimmy would not be functional if they had to inject. Everyone in the squad had everyone's doses memorized, because it happened before.
Gideon didn't want to go there. "Breathe. Don't take in more. Let it go little by little. Release. Breathe. Release." he told her, using the formulaic mantra, the sort of thing they said to someone starting to go through Mistburn to break through the Mist's little siren song.
And if she didn't come back, he'd have to stick her.
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Simple Unicycle,
Izurich,
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Pyrrhic,
Atalanta,
Byrd Man,
Jamesyco,
Sanity43217,
Lord Shaxx
