ArchivedLogs:Hot Coffee

Hot Coffee
Dramatis Personae Dusk, Morgan	2015-02-10 "I want no trouble!" ... and YET.
Location <NYC> East Village
Historically a center of counterculture, the East Village has a character all its own. Home to artists and musicians of many colours, this neighborhood is known for its punk vibe and artistic sensibilities. The birthplace of many protests, literary movements, it is home to a rather diverse community and vibrant nightlife. Reflective, police-style aviators conceal the dark circles under Morgan's eyes and reflect bright white in the afternoon sun. Lips parted just slightly, the former cop still holds a hand up at her brow to block the light even more. Amongst the bustle, a larger man in a grey work jumpsuit shoulders into her and sends her stumbling back a step. Without even missing a beat, she throws out a palm stiffly into his chest and sends him unexpectedly falling back into a group of unsuspecting hipsters. She continues on her way, ignoring all protests as she lines up at the ratty little coffee truck just a few yards away. Tough guy that she is, Morgan shivers and pulls in her fluff-lined brown leather jacket. It's the only one she owns and not made to keep out the frigid cold. Her diner waitress uniform doesn't help with its short, washed out seafoam skirt. The line doesn't move forward for what feels like an unreasonable amount of time. She taps her filthy running sneaker on the pavement, peaking over the shoulder of the business man in front of her. She lights a cigarette and nearly smokes the whole thing. In broken English, the food truck worker repeatedly refuses to serve the young man at the front of the line. In kitchen clothes almost as grease-stained as Morgan's, he repeats a vague refusal in an equally a vague European accent. Both embarrassed and pleading, the boy looks around over his shoulder at everyone he's holding up. Under his hood, his skin is a crayola red. Dusk is somewhat more protected against the cold, in a long ankle-length leather trenchcoat thrown on /over/ his jacket and other layers. Scarf, mittens, hat, boots. There's a messenger bag slung across his chest, and he carries a skateboard in one hand at his side, meandering through the park while glancing at his phone in the other hand. Aside from the kind of unevenly hunched look of his coat there's not much, in all his layers, to mark /him/ out from the crowd -- save that he stops short of the coffee line, brows lifting. The phone gets tucked back in his pocket as he meanders towards the front of the line, eying the boy and then the worker in the truck. "-- You got a problem, man?" "I want no trouble!" The man repeats several times as an explanation to Dusk, pointing directly at the red-skinned boy. He directs them both to a sign to his right, which designates that he may refuse service to anyone at any time at his discretion. As the man in front of her gives up, Morgan replaces him and steps up closer to the scene. Squaring off her shoulders confidently, the blonde flicks her shades down the bridge of her little nose so that her bloodshot eyes are visible. "Three large coffees," she orders in gruff, unabashed apathy as she sizes Dusk up in a very police-type manner. Not even bothering to look at the flustered, foreign line-cook barista whatever. "We were in line before you," the red boy says quietly, but by his tone he's already given up that fight. "Yes. Thank you. Five dollars," Happy to have a distraction, and by a woman who at least appears to exude some authority if not only in demeanor, the food truck worker produces the coffees quickly. Confident that things are leaning in his favor, he beams smugly down at Dusk for his attempt to step in. ...until Morgan takes all three coffees, passes them out, and starts to step away without paying. "Then maybe don't /give/ anyone any trouble." Dusk's brows lift from behind his sunglasses when Morgan steps up; he hands the coffee right back to her with a faintly annoyed grimace. Despite the irritation in his expression his tone is blandly polite: "Uh, thanks, but I wasn't ordering." "HEY! YOU OWE-" "Oh," Morgan replies with the shrug of a shoulder, setting the extra coffee on the lip of the food truck's window. She has the voice of someone who was up all night. She blinks, looking over Dusk a second time with the consideration of why he might have come up. "-ME MONEY! YOU HAVE TO PAY!" The man spits as he shouts, leaning out past the safety of his tiny, cell-like kitchen. "YOU THREE ARE FREAKS! FREAK LOVERS!" Morgan's eyes drift over the odd way Dusk's coat lumps. Her concentration is periodically broken in the short assessment by the man's shouting, so she turns to look at him. She holds out a finger, as if to say, 'One minute.' "I'M GOING TO CALL THE-" The man stops. With his veins bulging out of his neck and his eyes viciously locked on Morgan's. Spittle that had accumulated on his bottom lip remains there. He doesn't breath. He doesn't perceive. "It's actually shitty coffee, anyway," Morgan explains to Dusk through her peripheral, "You're better off." Behind them, the already dwindling line breaks up to avoid being involved. Even the boy who the two had both, in their way, been trying to defend makes himself scarce. "Freak /and/ freak lover, they're definitely not mutually exclusive," Dusk informs the man just before he freezes. His lips twitch up into a quick smile, a sharp flash of fangs glinting behind them. He rests a shoulder against the side of the truck, head turning to watch the boy hurry off. One hand lifts when he turns back around, waving absently in front of the vendor's blank eyes. "Neat trick. And I can drink battery acid so long as it's caffeinated enough, I just --" He shrugs, a motion seen more in a shift at the back of his coat than in his actual shoulders. "Allergies." He pushes himself up against the service window, nudging the motionless man slightly to one side so that he can lean inside and peer around. /Reach/ inside to snag a cellphone out of the man's pocket. The curl of his mitten around it crunches the phone into a broken crumpled-piece of plastic before he -- helpfully! -- tucks it into one frozen hand. "I like your instincts," Morgan purrs, nudging her chin up some in approval as he destroys the phone. She doesn't respond to his compliment of her move, but it seems she's comfortable enough to give them. Training her attention mostly to the man with her finger still held up high, she brings her coffee up to her lips in what would appear to be a casual move. Her lashes flutter as Dusk's hand breaks her eye contact with the man but through some miracle, he remains still. She still doesn't know entirely how this works. "He's frozen in time, I think," she says absently, before her voice rises an octave, like a child asking their parent a question about the world, "What's under your coat?" "What, like forever?" Dusk sounds curious more than alarmed, eying the man again. His mouth hooks up at one side. "I am. -- Though shit, opening this thing always has this kind of skeevy flasher feel to it." Not that he's flashing anything; under the trenchcoat when he reaches to open it are just More Layers. It takes a little tugging to pull it up and off his shoulders -- beneath, his wings have been folded in crumpled-flat against his back. It makes them look rather unobtrusive, initially, just an odd bundle of leathery-dark fuzz pressed up against him, though a small shake stretches them out enough to make it abundantly clearer their /actual/ shape. He drapes the coat over his arm, shoulders stretching in a slow roll. "Get kind of cramped, a little." "Not forever," Morgan assures him, pursing her lips in concentration. Her head slowly tilts as she takes in the frozen man, "I like to walk away before they come back. He still thinks he's yelling at us and suddenly, we're just gone." She tries to watch Dusk as he reveals himself, but it probably becomes a little more clear just how much she has to keep an eye on her target. Gradually drawing back her finger-wielding hand, she starts to walk around the other side of the truck and out of her victim's line of sight. "Wings? I'm jealous." "You get stopped a lot for it?" Dusk moves the extra cup of coffee further in to the truck, uncapping it and dipping a finger in to test its temperature -- not /actually/ scalding! -- before upending the coffee over the broken phone and the man's hand. He leaves the empty cup upended over the phone, following after Morgan around the side of the truck. Another stretch of wings, briefly, extends them to their /full/ span once they're clear of the truck, unfurling to over seventeen feet of claw-tipped bony membrane before he snaps them back in with a grimace. "/All/ the fucking time. Not so much in winter. It's so damn /cold/ I have to keep 'em covered. But the rest of the time, shit. I can be sitting on a bench eating a sandwich some motherfucking cop is going to hand me a ticket." His smile is kind of lopsided. His shoulders are rolling again with a small wince that suggests he's not looking /forward/ to putting his coat back on. "/You/ ever been stopped for that?" One long thumb-claw flicks back towards the truck. "Guess it'd be easy enough to shrug off the police even if you were." "I used to be a cop," Morgan admits, lips twitching up in a smirk as Dusk smiles. She flicks her sunglasses up to hide her eyes, "But yeah. I'm actually in a lot of trouble." She drinks her coffee, savoring what she can only imagine is a hilarious scene inside the truck. The woman starts to chuckle, but is cut off as her phone vibrates. She glances down at the screen before shoving it back into her pocket aggressively and looking up at the sky to collect herself. "Fired," she explains calmly, looking over to vampire and nodding, "Guess I can burn this fucking humiliating outfit." "Shi-i-i-t. For real?" Dusk's head shakes briefly, tipping to track Morgan's phone as she checks it. "You're probably better off. I mean, not being a cop, I don't know about --" He waves a hand towards her current outfit before shrugging his coat back on. "Don't seem too put out, though? I suppose more shitty jobs wait around the corner." Morgan laughs, "For real." She brings up a hand to run it through her hair, "I need this coffee to be liquor." A group of girls walking towards them takes up the whole sidewalk. "That they do," Morgan agrees as she pulls out a cigarette, stopping to light it and forcing the group to break apart. Taking the first drag, she blows smoke on them. Eyeing Dusk, she arches her brow, "I don't know any-" She flicks some ash away, her voice lowering, "-of 'us.'" The statement is her way of asking him about himself but it's not exactly clear. Maybe it says more than she meant. Dusk sidesteps out of the way of the oncoming girls, dipping down briefly into the street before hopping back up onto the curb. "Liquor could probably be arranged. If you've got a serious need. I'd think /any/ time in the police department would pretty much give me a serious need for life." His skateboard is thumping absently against the side of his leg, head tipping back to look up towards the sky as they walk along. "Fff. Maybe you're not hanging out in the right places. I barely know any flatscans anymore. Not," he admits with a small laugh, "that /most/ of them want much to do with --" His hand waves, towards his fanged smile, towards the lumps at the back of his coat. "I mean, so what do you /do/? Outside of shitty jobs." Morgan considers the question, holding the cigarette close to her lips, "What do you mean?" She takes a drag and after a few moments, blows a little stream of smoke away from Dusk. Her little sneakers turn inward slightly as she taps to shake off the cold. A montage of her getting blackout drunk and getting into a fight night after night after night flashes in her mind. She doesn't share that. "What's with the third degree? What do you do?" She smiles. "Mostly sit at home being a huge-ass nerd," Dusk replies easily, teeth flashing in a broader grin. "Oddly not so many people looking to hire vampires so interviews don't work so well. But freelancing online pays the bills. Nearly everyone I live with's a freak, though. Smack in the middle of freak-/town/, too. Mendel Clinic down the road one way and Evolve the other and the whole neighborhood's pretty much swarming with us. Doesn't make the /rest/ of the neighbors too pleased." Morgan nods, considering him and grinning, "You seemed tougher over there." She cocks her head behind them. Sucking in a breath of air through her teeth, she nods, "I mostly go out drinking." She taps her cigarette, gesturing vaguely with it, "Or looking for a shitty job, after I get fired for going out drinking. I'm thinking about saying fuck it." "Freelance what? You smart? Or are you like a fuckin' cam girl?" "Sometimes I fake it." Dusk snorts, lifting his hand to scrub against the scruffy side of his face. "S'an oddly strong niche market for freak porn --" Though his head shakes, here, hand dropping back to his side. "Just more nerding, though. Programmer. Web-dev. -- Did they fire you for getting a damn /coffee/, because that's a bullshit." His mouth quirks up at one side. "Fuck it is a perfectly valid lifestyle choice..." There's a beat of hesitation before adding, "-- I guess if you aren't too attached to eating regularly." "They fired me for being a cop," Morgan explains, "And trying to make-believe I'm a waitress." She flicks away the last ember of her cigarette. "But I mean, before that. When I didn't want to be a freak. I tried to ignore it. But I ended up losing control and beating this shit out of a suspect. Some skuz. He had been, uh, targeting young mutant women." She tries her coffee, cringes, and tosses it in a nearby garbage bin, "But before I did it, I froze him." ... "Programming. That err, difficult?" She's kidding of course. Shed shoot her left hand to not be a a programmer. This pulls another laugh out of Dusk. He's slowing to a halt by a subway entrance, now, leaning against the rails beside the stairway down. "Sounds like you were doing the world a favour. Hey, it's better now. Now you can beat the shit out of assholes like that and not have to worry about a firing." His grin is bright. See? Silver lining! "-- Dunno. Couldn't be that hard, I didn't even go to high school." Morgan chin-nods towards the subway, as if to give him leave to go, "Count my lucky stars." She grins back, "High school sucks. You didn't miss anything." In all seriousness, she pulls out another cigarette. "See ya later, batboy. Try not to give any more baristas trouble, got me?" "Just following your good example. The baristas I'm /usually/ dealing with are rad as hell, though. Down at Evolve. You want a coffee without the flatscan bullshit, should come check it out sometime." Dusk's chin tips upward, his grin bright as he turns to start trotting down the stairs. "The asshole ones, no promises though. See ya."