Logs:Bad Reputation

Bad Reputation
Dramatis Personae Dusk, Ion, Scramble
In Absentia Lily, Dawson	2022-02-10 "That's a masterpiece of white woman fuckery right there."
Location <BOM> Common Room - Bom Lodge
The common room's rustic-lodge feel has been somewhat mitigated by the modern amenities inside its sturdy wooden walls. It has comfortable couches, several chairs, a refrigerator (stocked with snacks and drinks!), a pool table, a pinball machine (METALLICA!), an assortment of books, a television -- with several game systems! -- and a splendid view out the windows (when their lacy yellow curtains are drawn open) for the rest of the island. The pale wood floors have been covered in places -- by a pair of soft thick blue rugs, by a large squishy pair of beanbags that stand in front of the stone fireplace. There's also a board up on the wall, half corkboard, half whiteboard, with a variety of community notes (and occasional insults) to other Brotherhood members. Large doors on the right-hand side lead off to the kitchen and dining room. In the back of the room, the council room's heavy oak door bears solid locks that are almost never actually barred. A short hall adjacent to the council room's door leads to a trio of multi-stalled bathrooms; these might once have been marked with the typical man-woman-handicapped signs, but someone has given them new plaques on the door; a stick figure with horns and a long tail, one with wings. One -- the large single-user toilet -- has instead been given a helmet and a cape. The windows have been thrown open to let in the unseasonable warmth and let out Scramble's singing as she tidies up the common room. "Shit, your wife in the backseat of my brand new foreign car --" Rihanna she is not, but her alto is powerful and resonant and hits more or less all the right notes. "-- don't act like you forgot!" Her animation this week is a stark departure from the low energy of the last month. "I call the shots, shots, shots!" She sweeps into the kitchen to wash her hands and poke around for food with her newfound appetite. Dusk, on the other hand, is stark contrast to Scramble as he slouches into the common room, wings drooped low at his back and an unhealthy pallor to his skin. His steps are dragging, eyes shaded behind dark glasses that he does not remove once he's indoors. Just drags himself and his laptop case over to the couch to dump himself into a corner, wings shuddering and flexing back out to pool over an arm of the seat. His head lolls back against the arm of the chair as well, tipped upside down to look over toward the kitchen. "Could use some of what you're on." Scramble emerges shortly with a big bowl of leftover stew and a bottle of beer from one of Freaktown's homebrewers (the label reads FIREBREATHER a woodblock print of a distinctively badass dragon). Her scarlet camisole shows beneath a purple off-the-shoulder top that hugs the torso, and low-rise black trousers with wide legs to show off elegant red high-heeled boots. "Boy, you look like you about to keel over." She brings her bounty to the couch and drops down into beside Dusk, offering him her beer. "I ain't barely high no more, but there's flower if you want some." She stretches a foot out to nudge the messenger bag she'd left leaning against the table in front of them. "I got brains enough to share, too." The brush of her powers, quiescent now, its hunger largely sated, is a subtle sensation almost but not quite like déjà vu. Dusk is getting his laptop out -- slow like the rest of his movements as he drags it into his lap. His wing stretches out to drape over Scramble when she sits beside him, though he waves away the offer -- of beer, herb, brains, he doesn't really specify. "Shit's gonna hit me like a freight train right now, I got work to do." Though he isn't actually doing it -- just squeezing his eyes shut hard for a second, only after a delay actually remembering to turn his laptop on. There's a cracklepop by one wall, a faint smell of ozone. a cheerfully booming "-- Yooooo," as Ion crosses the room in a few bounding steps, hopping up to sit backwards over the back of the sofa opposite Dusk and Scramble, one leg resting on the arm and the other dangling down towards the ground. He's in just plain white tee and jeans, heavy boots, hair kind of windswept though he's pushing it back into some semblance of order as he settles himself. Dusk "Boy I heard you got into it over in Freaktown, what that lilywhite chick say to you? {Jerry he say he thought it was gonna come to blows ain't like you to be starting no shit in town fucking square} maybe 'bout time you get a proper meal?" Scramble takes a sip of the beer herself and leans back into Dusk's wing, her soft 'fro compressing lightly against the velvety nap of his skin. "If you don't start eating better I'mma have to keep some weak shit around for your featherweight ass." She salutes Ion with her bottle when he arrives. "Wait you got into what with which lilywhite chick now?" Her head swivels back toward Dusk. "This what I get for taking a day off from the mainland. C'mon, spill." A smile has started to spread across Dusk's face as Scramble nestles in, widening at the familiar crackle of energy -- but it drops away at Ion's questioning, displaced by a grimace and a rumble of growl that thrums low in his chest. "I didn't start shit." Now he's fixed his scowl on his computer as one foot lifts to prop on the coffee table in front of him. "I was minding my own damn business when Lily rolled up to dump all her fucking baggage on me with a side of ugly-ass bigot on top." Ion's leaned forward, chin propped in his hand and his intense gaze riveted on the other two. "How I heard it tell, you menacing the poor girl all riled up and snarl --" Ion cuts himself off with a frown, a snap of fingers. "Shit, maybe I should've got this rundown from --" He's glancing to Dusk's wings before he looks back to his face. "-- someone else first. What happen out there?" "Any shit get started in your general vicinity folks is gon' say you done start it," Scramble says, a faint scowl tugging at her face, though whatever else she might been thinking about that is wiped clean from her mind by Dusk's explanation. "Lily Allred?" She frowns down at her bowl and stirs it listlessly, her shoulders sinking down fractionally along with her voice. "Ain't that many other white Lilys floatin' 'round there. We talkin' Dawson baggage or Prometheus baggage or...?" "Yeah, I'm sure that's what he told you." Dusk sounds exhausted, his wings drooping more heavily behind him. "Just some bullshit. Was sitting with Matt and she came up out of the fucking blue to ask me why I was looming there. Then blew the entire fuck up at me when I pointed out that was a bigoted thing to say. Tried throwing in my face that I got mad at her a goddamn year ago for working at Prometheus before wishing that one of us would kill her. Not for the first time, either, she pulled that shit on me the day I met her, too. It was -- a lot." The growl undergirding his words hasn't vanished, though it has subsided to a lower rumble. "She keeps that shit up, man, someone's gonna take her the fuck up on her bullshit and she's gonna get us in a world of hurt." Ion leans forward to swipe Scramble's beer for a swig as he listens to Dusk talk. His brows are knitting further, one leg bouncing jittery-quick. "She mad you feel a way about torture?" His brows have hiked way up. "She lucky you didn't off her when she roll into town." He's offering Scramble her own bottle back as he sucks at his teeth. "Thought she was on a whole-new-leaf thing now. Help us roll up on the labs and all." Scramble stills as she listens. "Shiiiiit." This comes out flat. "She did that again?" Her eyes linger on Dusk's pale, pale face. "I also thought..." She tips her head aside at Ion, taking the bottle back for a swig. "That. Not just the raids, though that ain't small, neither, especially going back after how the first one went down. But all the work she done taking care of folks -- hell, it was her fixed my brain up this time." She shakes her head slow. "I ain't got a problem with her being a crazy bitch, but damn. Threatening suicide, playing the victim, and baiting violence all at the same time -- that's a masterpiece of white woman fuckery right there." Her next pull of her beer is long. "She ain't stupid, she has to know how easy it is to get folks buzzing about how terrifying you are. But I bet she ain't never thought about how careful you was with her reputation after she did that the first time." "Thinking about how I didn't jam her up in the community would require thinking about the community and me as a part of it." Dusk's shoulder hitches, small. "She sure isn't here for us. She's here for her own guilt and until that changes she's gonna keep being a danger to -- well." He looks over at the others. "Maybe not all of us, but." He shakes his head, thumbclaw flicking down toward his computer screen. "It's whatever. Gonna be busy enough this next little while, I can stay far away from Riverdale anyway." "I ain't turning our homes into some safe haven only if you don't scare no white Mormon girls." Ion sucks his teeth dismissively. "Fuck that noise, she can go screw. You ain't here to be her learning experience." His eyes light when Dusk indicates his computer, chin jerking up toward it. "Shit boy I can't wait and see what y'all got in store there. You can't tell me you doing your best work starving though c'mon I'm not on deck for days I got a vein right here." He's tipping his arm up and out, indicatively. "Need you at your best, we gonna do this right."