Logs:Of Fingers and Fireworks (Or, Pity Points)

Of Fingers and Fireworks (Or, Pity Points)
Dramatis Personae Gaétan, Kavalam, Roscoe
In Absentia Steve, Lucien, Matt	2024-07-04 "Are we not just doing this for the hell of it?"
Location <NYC> Rooftop Pool - Le Bonne Entente - Astoria - Queens
This luxurious pool deck occupies the center of L'Entente's cross-shaped rooftop, precisely where the bell tower stood before the renovation. The main pool itself is round, its stairs forming concentric rings that give it a pleasing visual sense of depth. Smaller circular pools extend out past the corners of the cross, with submerged bench seating and breathtaking views of the city over curved vanishing edges. On the eastern side of the pool is an elegant long bar in a colonnaded neoclassical pavilion, serving up drinks and gourmet small plates from the restaurant below. Luxurious chaises longues ring the central pool on all sides for sunning, reading, and people watching (in either direction), with tables for both standing and sitting arranged in a larger circle around these. On the western side of the pool, past the chairs and the tables, a sculpture garden with original statuary on classical mythological connects, in warm weather, to the eastern edge of the Carrefour conservatory nestled at the base of the bell tower. There's a number of different festivities going on around this hotel, with varying levels of Celebrity Presence and varying levels of irony that Luci, in all his faux-Captain-America fame, is not in fact American at all. Down in the restaurant, the outside garden, the club and lounge, are the places to Be Seen -- the pool deck, though, proclaims that it among all the hotel amenities is closed for a private party. It's here among the -- still quite a large number of guests who have made the Tessiers' Personal Invite List that Gaétan has been lounging in unassuming black swim trunks and very subtly marbled grey-black Persol sunglasses, enjoying the catering and the unofficial but plentiful early-fireworks popping off around the neighborhood. Just at the moment he is chilling in some Prime Viewing real estate, tucked at the edge of one of the peripheral pools where he can dangle his legs in the water and peer at the last rays of sun setting over the cityscape. He's poking a toothpick festooned with red, white and blue crinkling at its top into a stuffed jalapeño bite and looking at it with an exaggerated sort of woe when the pepper simply falls off the toothpick and back onto his plate. He looks at the pepper -- then his fingers -- then the pepper again, as if this is a more difficult conundrum than he currently has the initiative to work out. "You have fingers," Kavalam is helpfully supplying. He is also helpfully demonstrating how to use them, by reaching down to pilfer one of the jalapeño bites from Gaétan's plate. Did he just get up to refresh his raspberry lemonade, yes. Could he easily have gotten his own food, also yes. Nevertheless. He's munching down Gaé's as he slips back to properly sit in the water (his own trunks are a much brighter orange and yellow.) "What exactly are you anyway celebrating." Maybe emboldened by Kavalam's thievery, and apparently not about to get out of the pool himself, Roscoe twists around on his knees to snag his own stuffed jalapeño, though he graciously tries to shake his hand dry first; as soon as he's popped the pepper in his mouth he is sinking back into the water, slouched cross-legged on the bench. His trunks are striped with probably-unintentional patriotic red, blue, and light grey. With his mouth still full he weighs in, "Are we not just doing this for the hell of it?" "Psh what are you talking about, I love America. Without some jingoistic mad scientist nearly a century ago we wouldn't have Steve rivalling an AK-47 as our national mascot and without him being our national mascot we wouldn't have Capsical and without Capsical, I wouldn't have --" Gaétan gestures around the opulent pool deck. He has been watching these thieveries with a deeper frown but seems no more inclined to do the work of guarding his food than he was inclined to do the work of picking it up in the first place. "Kinda circular now that I think about it since half the damn guest list is here in service of Luci proving to them he's totally alive enough to play Cap again." "I am doing it for the hell of it," Kavalam agrees easily with Roscoe. "This chap does very little for the hell of it. I say party, he thinks networking. -- really it's amazing how much scads of money rich people spend to remind each other they are still rich. A waste when they could be giving that money directly to us instead." He sips at his lemonade, his brows pulling into a slow frown. "Do you think Mr. Captain Rogers ever gets annoyed at that portmanteau. Perhaps they should have picked one a little bit less "remember how you were frozen in ice for decades"." He sinks down just a little lower in the water, idly watching the weird distorted ripples of their limbs beneath the surface. "I was going to ask how alive you need to be but upon a consideration I think death and dramatic return qualifies you extra, no? Only a few positions where that is a plus." "Talk about method acting." Roscoe props one elbow up on the coping to put his head in his hand, tilted slightly now to gawp at some of the celebrity guests -- "I guess if you get kidnapped by aliens for some reason you might as well capitalize on it. Cap-italize?" He wrinkles his nose with amusement, eyes tracking back toward his companions, then away again -- "Pity points are always worth something." Cap-italize draws a quick flash of smile from Gaétan, though his head is shaking at this pun. "Start a betting pool now on who's gonna write the first Promethean memoir." He's pulling himself up out of the water, finally committing to some kind of action -- "need a fork," though, with the gamut of People To Network With between him and flatware it's anyone's guess how long it will take him to return. "Do the whites not understand about fingers." Kavalam is not really waiting for Gaétan to get far before he's poaching a fancy puff of some sort off his abandoned plate, and nudging the plate just a little closer to Roscoe as well. "-- He is just salty he has has not yet found enough good rhymes for Prometheus or it would be on some stage already. Ask him some time how much moneys he's been offered to go talking about the terrible tragedy of being one poor human caught-up in that mess, it's sick." It's hard to tell from Kavalam's tone here if this is an impressive sick or a horrifying sick. Roscoe doesn't wait long before he, too, is twisting toward the plate again, flicking water off his fingers to poach another jalapeño -- "When I first met him I was all 'oh no, poor little human, everyone's stealing all his meals, he's going to die in here' but he really doesn't make it hard, does he," this is with a tone of plain bemusement. He chews on this -- or possibly the prospect of Lassiter! The Musical -- for a moment, the shift in his expression almost too slight to be perceptible, before he says in a slightly sour tone, "Big of him not to do it. I guess he's not hurting for money. -- Toyota Prius rhymes with Prometheus." "He could easily have died in there. He had good help." Kavalam's head bobbles slightly from side to side. "He anyway takes this ally thing too serious to do it. Plus --" He is looking around the pool deck in pointed agreement that is only punctuated with a wry: "He drives one Corvette only." After a pause, though, he is pressing his lips thinner and conceding (even while stealing another bite from Gaétan's plate): "I suppose I cannot rag him too much. His brother has kept me fed as well some time now." "He drives a Corvette?" Roscoe cranes his neck after Gaétan, though by now the crowd has eclipsed him, looking none too sure what he thinks of this new knowledge; finally he says, reaching for a puff, "Man," as though this was either a crushing surprise, or offensive to him somehow. "His dead brother? Did you move back in with them now that he's not dead? Or --" he doesn't voice any alternative to this, just grimaces and eats the puff. "His dead brother. The other one is --" Kavalam scrunches his brow up, uncertain, but can't seem to quite summon up an opinion on The Other One aside from a firm: "I am not living there. But I do poach food at this hotel quite a lot. I had a thought to get one apartment but do you know how much they charge for rent, here. No wonder people end up like Mr. Summers, sixty years old and still in the high --" Here he's gone briefly still, briefly quiet, twitching as a crack of gunpowder sounds abruptly nearer. It passes in an instant, his eyes turning up as the first of the Big Fireworks Display on the river begins. "-- when do you think we'll get some real Gandalf-style fireworks wizardry. Some freak out there has to be able to make one real dragon by now." Roscoe probably doesn't know how much rent is in New York City, though he is shaking his head woefully as though he totally does; this movement stutters just momentarily at the sudden explosion of noise, too, before he slowly settles back into criss-cross applesauce, slouching lower in the water to watch the show. "Heh," he says, "probably he'll do that precisely when he means to."