ArchivedLogs:Get It Done

Get It Done
Dramatis Personae Jim, Masque, Nox
In Absentia	2013-06-09 Occurs during and immediately after Nox's encounter with Kyle.
Location <NYC> Central Park South
Central Park South is home not just to the park itself, but also to the Belvedere Castle, the Alice in Wonderland statues, and the Central Park Zoo. These areas tend to draw tourists like a magnet - it is, perhaps, for that very reason that places like Bethesda Terrace tend to attract more New Yorkers than not, if just to escape the press of tourism that infiltrates the whole city. There are many lovely attractions found in Central Park, none of which would include the open filthy entrance to a drain pipe. Through the trees and down the way, the ditch it feeds into is layered over with plump round stones that allows for an aesthetic, park-appropriate 'gurgle' when even dirty gray city water pours through them. But over here at the water's source, it's just sloppy dribble off the mouth of the wide, four-foot high corrugated drainpipe sticking out of an embankment, not unlike the sound of someone taking a piss onto the stones. And who knows. Maybe that's literally what the sound was at one point. There are two men here; the undergrowth of scrubby brush seeming to have grown up /around/ them in an organic hedgewall that renders them all but invisible. In the early evening gloom, they can't really be seen but for the occasional baleful red glow off the embers of their cigarettes, lazily flaring then fading down to a hidden orange. Or the gleam of light off the wet of their eyes - both fixed in a single direction, where the park opens up into the elegant Bethesda Terrace. In the distance, a teenager has started screaming 'oh god oh god'. A second voice, more commanding, shouting - "/Sutton/ your fucking flashlii --" Jim blows smoke through his teeth, in the direction of the commotion, "-fucking flashlights." His voice is ireful, undertone, textured like rasping dead grass. He leans a hip against the the drainage pipe. Much more nonchalant-sounding is the second, red-coated man beside Jim. "Y'ever wonder what a flash grenade'd do?" That's not to say Masque hasn't still got a voice like a raggedy stray cat's tongue, though. Rough on the ears. He's leaning a little to the left, onto a cane that's plunged wherever he could find somewhere solid enough to do so. His hood's up, as per usual when he's above ground, but his head is very much /up/. Alert, almost reluctant to blink as he peers outward through his deadish grey eyes. The end of his cigarette glows bright for a moment as he lifts it to his face, and the smoke he subsequently breathes out trails decidedly slow enough so as to keep from obscuring his vision. "One second, a little spy," He snaps his fingers - he manages to do so without letting go of his cigarette, and fortunately the fingers he now misses on that hand are not needed for the act, "the next, nothing." He does not, in the least, sound worried. He is, however, occasionally tightening his bony-fingered grip around that cane possibly more than is required of him. "Make a fucking mess," Jim holds his cigarette suspended in front of his mouth with two fingers and a thumb so he can talk around it. It's kind of like a yes AND a no. Or, conversely, "That, or give us something /gray/ to bury." Like a three dimensional shadow left behind from an atomic bomb. There's more screaming now, human voices rising up in terror and alarm. Jim puts the cigarette back in his mouth, "... rilin' 'em up." Inhale. Hold. Exhale - and he adds more conversationally, "'ll put up some thorn walls. Slow 'em down, when they come." Something in Masque's face changes at the screams, though in the dark it may be hard to tell exactly how, past the lines around his eyes deepening ever so slightly. What is clearer is that the next breath he pulls down and into his lungs is much more drawn out than the last few. Like he's found a small pocket of fresh air among the smoke and snark. But then, his expression changes much less gradually. Muscles pulling wryly at the corner of his mouth, in what is /possibly/ a lopsided grin into more twisted skin. He doesn't address the man he's speaking to, gaze hardening. "Playin' a hero, are we, Jimmy." "Takin' after the best. -- Think the heroes're gonna be the ones comin' looking for us." Jim flicks his ash derisively in the direction of the screaming people. You can /see/ the point in which passers by, far off through the trees and looking so /small/ in the distance, like a video watched on a hand-held device, /see/ what the commotion is. Loose evening joggers bounding in the paced easy lope of long-distance travel jerk to a halt - one woman claps a hand over her mouth, silent-screaming in quiet whistling keens. Another almost comically windmills his arms at the sight of something dark and /alive/ pulsing in the fringe of the treeline where a policeman is suspended in the air, eerily silent, /bound/ by shadows. "Pffffff," Jim makes this sound through a stream of smoke exiting his nose and mouth simultaneously, "Huntin' monsters in the dungeon." The rotating officer, far off in the distance, is dropped to the ground. Jim flicks his cigarette at the ditch, "She's done it." Masque simply stays silent for a moment. The responses from onlookers are watched only briefly. The darkness and the act itself holds his attention much more easily. In fact, ash has started to gather on his neglected smoke without it being touched, the flaky grey coming apart under its own weight. A large segment of it drops shortly after the police officer does. "... /Hmh/." A plain sort of noise, though it sounds suspiciously much like mild surprise. Perhaps dismay. His brow lowers, easier on his right than his left, and his head lowers once more, under the hood. The show's over, apparently. He lifts what's left of his cigarette to take a last drag before putting it, too, out of its misery. He drops it, leans back to straighten a little (give or take a hunched back), then /drives/ the business end of his stolen cane at the stub. Gone are the little orange dots of ember. "Let's go." In the time it takes to blink, Nox has traversed the space between /there/ and /here/. She might be fleeing the screams, or the shouting, or the beams of flashlights being produced. Soon there will even be sirens. But mostly she is fleeing whatever it was that compelled her to act in the first place. So the watching men go from standing in the hedge-prickly dusk to being enveloped in shadow. With that change in atmosphere comes a sick buzzing all around them and the copper-sea smell of blood. Before full sensory deprivation can set in, they are tugged at. Little pulls, small and frantic tweaks to clothes and limbs to draw them back towards the tunnel. “Come. Come, you must come.” Just short of the enveloping darkness, Jim issues a single rapid glance to Masque. Then closes his eyes and faces forward, his arms moving outward slightly so that the thickest of shadows filters through his opened fingers, streams through his gray hair and scar-broken jaw scruff, like some dark embrace. "Yeah yeah," he ratchets dryly, using one hand to sweep absently at a shoulder sleeve to /brush off/ the tuggings at his clothes - … and leaving one hand that he isn't /looking/ at, offered into it, closing fingers as though to grip the dark air, like trying to catch a cat by its last half-inch of tail. He hangs back from the drainpipe, jerking a head, "I'll come up behind; seal it off." When Jim seals things off, they don't look like anything's been traveling through them for /years/. He looks over his shoulder, jaw tight, at the growing numbers of people arriving. The /church/ of wakefulness filling the night. It would be unlike Masque not to draw his shoulders up and make a grating noise of irritation when that mass of shadows makes its way over. But for once it looks like he's doing his best to simply ignore it, movements as smooth as his voice carrying him exactly where Nox intends him to go- occasionally appearing to twitch and /spasm/ forward moreso than /walking/. The cane is used only after a few steps, and then mainly to drag himself back into obscurity. A thing of practice more so than elegance. "They'll find somewhere else." His tone is one of solid disapproval, but he doesn't look to Jim for his response. Or the gathering crowd, for that matter. "Let 'em come." Assured that they will be following, that they are following, Nox spills deeper into the tunnel and there begins to reassemble herself. More ghost than woman even in the protective near-darkness, she flickers in and out--snapshots of a person touching their throat, looking over their shoulder, cupping their elbows, pressing their hands over their face. Around her, the shadows writhe and twist, displeased by this agitation. They hum. She hums. Gradually words form from that sound. “...home. This is home. Safe. He is dead. He is dead, I felt him die. What did I do. What did I do. Why...” Sound travels more easily through the barrier that Jim has begun to erect. Sirens rising in the night. She looks towards them, eyes glinting. “We need...to do things. There will be...oh, why. I am so sorry. I am. Sorry.” "--Easy," Jim grunts behind her. The barrier of thorny needles that now obscures the entrance breaks down the arriving flash of emergency lights into rhythmic-pulses, spearing between the leaves to backlight the tree man - visible, dark, visible, dark. He looks like he's intending to stride /past/ Nox - save that he has an arm out to hook for her flicker-intangible form. Scooping after her before she -- wanders off. Or something. Hook-hook-hook. He looks to Masque - "What d'you think. Seal off the tunnels we don't need. Buy us some time. Get everyone fallen back." Masque keeps his eyes ahead of him, as he moves forward, with the dull click-click-click of his cane hitting damp surface. His expression could easily be mistaken for one of disinterest, but the fact that he answers Jim shortly after he's asked for his opinion may suggest otherwise. "Little. Spy." His words drag themselves sharply, harshly, /rotten/ out of his throat. "/Nox/. Focus." Concern? It's nowhere to be found in his voice, at least, nor do his eyes stray from what's up ahead. "Find Caliban. Get 'm to find Sunder to help with sealing off entrances. Then, find the others. Annalee, hers, Marrow, Anole, Leech- everyone. You have until one hour after dark to do so. Anyone who hasn't fallen back with us by then- leave 'em. You will be in the main room at that point." With those words said, his pace picks up. Things to /do/. Reflex: when someone moves to touch Nox, she will always try to politely materialize to allow it. Unless that person is Masque. But this is Jim and so the shadow lady’s shoulders are solid enough, as his arm fits to them, that she can be steered back down the tunnel. A ripple effect follows, bringing flickering limbs and features into less chaotic wholeness. “Focus,” she whispers, as if Masque’s voice was a thought from her own head now repeated aloud. “Focus...Anole. He was...the gardens.” Then, softer still, meant only for herself, “Lucien. I have to...” But that thought is left. Suddenly her head turns and she looks up at Jim as if just realizing he were there, beside her. She blinks once. “It was him. The one who took us.” "Got it." Jim says it so blandly he may as well be dismissing Masque's words, giving Nox's shoulders a brief compression, smush, though there is very little amidst stray leaves and flaky dry skin that's going to make it a very comfortable place for the standard person. Jostle. "You hearing this, lady? Lucien ain't goin' anywhere, right? Right now, we got business down here." Then he releases the woman and lengthens his stride to pull ahead, turning to walk backwards just long enough to jerk his head in indication, which tosses his dirty hair across a forehead, "I'mma hit the southern tunnels first." He says it while rummaging out his cigarette back, lipping out a smoke without actually seeming to even notice he's going about it. Then he's branching off from the duo and on his way. "See ya in an hour, kids." "Make me proud." Masque gruffly calls after Jim through an absent, broken-toothed grimace, though it doesn't especially sound like he suspects this to be a thing that might actually /happen/. It's a good few seconds before he speaks again, the eye on the /less/ horrible side of his face narrowing as he shoots Nox a tentative glance. Never quite know how far away she is even if she seems to be standing right there, after all. When he finally does speak, it's still in the same, cold tone befitting /commands/, which does not quite suit the words that come out with it, "You did good." Then, barely a second later, whether he means for it to apply to the search for Morlocks or /other/ matters (or all of the above), "... Get it done." “Right now,” Nox murmurs in the faintest of whispers. It is agreement, even as she’s jostled without appearing to notice. It takes the rasp and snap of Masque’s comments to bring her back from that foggy edge. The look he’s given is bleak--but she stirs herself, wisping away in swirls of shadow after something like a light touch feathers over the smoother half of his face. Then she too is gone.