goneawayworld | I'm still the talk of this town, I'm still the roll of their dice.

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dan sagittarius

I'm still the talk of this town, I'm still the roll of their dice.

Who: Dan Sagittarius and Beckett
What: Dan and Beckett bond(?) over poker.
Where: The library.
When: Prior to the attack.
Warnings/Notes: None here yet.

Dan feels a little bad underplaying how good he is at poker to Beckett, but on the other hand, he trusts that people who describe themselves as “decent poker players” are generally people who are well into the upper percentages of adept poker players. After all, if you describe yourself as a good poker player, you’ve already indicated that you don’t really know what you’re talking about. Dan’s a very good poker player, so long as they’re only using one deck at a time, because he’s got a fantastic memory for the cards and a practiced, fluid poker face. He’s financed many a trip back and forth across the continent on hustling poker games.

He still hates the library, though, which is why as he waits in one of the little alcove areas with the recliners he’s preemptively shuffling the deck of cards. Being completely illiterate - old school illiterate, the kind that signs that name with an X and needs a witness - is usually just a background handicap in his line of work, but occasionally there are places or things that throw into stark relief that he’s in a world where he’s intellectually got one arm tied behind his back.

But it’s quiet, and he has a bottle of wine, which the lady at the cafeteria gave him after he flirted with her enough to establish a “connection”. It’s not just in her head, either; Dan’s absolutely willing to get unprofessional with things. Anything to break up the tedium of the rig, which so far has been a corporate nightmare full of schedules and fluorescent lights.

He’s looking forward to an evening with Beckett. As far as he’s concerned, they have at least a few things in common, and there’s always something to be said for someone who mentions chess, poker and dancing in their introduction. That’s someone who has at least some kind of taste for intellectual stimulation by the way of both strategy and expression. That’s someone who can tap into both worlds.

“Beckett,” he says with a grin as he sees his new friend enter. “It’ll be a pleasure to get to know you better, and an even greater pleasure to kick your ass at Texas Hold ‘Em.”

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It seems sensible to Beckett, who cares less about how much he'll lie - presumably, as much as necessary - and more that Dan had guessed his game. True, he wasn't going to great lengths to hide it, but he does so hate being on the back foot.

Beckett rubs his chin, thinking. Then he nods, decided.

"By your accent," he begins, "I'd say you hail from somewhere in the American South, or your world's equivalent. I had cause to pass through Georgia about five years ago, doing a - well, call it a favor, but the fellow in question was convinced I was paying a debt. It often goes that way, among Kindred."

Bloody Pieterzoon and his bloody Camarilla.

"My employer's organization was - still is - engaged in a cold war rapidly going hot for territory across the United States. Georgia was particularly disputed; Atlanta had been a stronghold for years, since the city's founding, but had fallen to the other organization some five years back. They were desperate to get it back. I, and two other operatives, had been sent to retrieve what I believed was a mystical artifact from a former planation just outside the city, one that could tip the balance of power."

Pause for effect.

"It was, of course, no such thing. What I had in fact been sent to do was help in the resurrection of an ancient vampiress, a necromancer of great power, so that she could be recruited for that damned war of theirs. She had been betrayed by one of her childer - vampires she had created - and staked in a secret room in the manor. It was all going quite swimmingly until we looked outside and saw half a bloody battalion at the gate."

A coterie of tzimisce, to be precise, riding warghouls crafted of three mortals or more - Beckett hadn't been able to count limbs from the mansion balcony. But he spares Dan those details.

"One of our number was an excellent sharpshooter. He kept them at bay, but it's unfortunately quite difficult to kill a vampire with bullets. I suggested retreat. The newly-awakened Madame Bedelia objected, quite strongly."

He touches his cheek lightly, remembering the slap. It'd been a good one, too.

"She went out on the balcony and raised hell. I mean that quite literally. The ghost of every soul that had ever died on that patch of land and, you can imagine, that was quite a few. They rose at her command, and ripped the enemy apart. It was - quite the sight."

"Remote California. Far from Georgia or the South generally, but I reckon we use the same lingo and have the same pitfalls when we talk." He emphasizes the "tawk" intentionally, coyly, jokingly.

Dan shakes his head and makes the sort of facial expression and wordless noise that indicates he's responding with awe minus the sense of glory; he has no particular fondness for berserkers, be they justifiably-aggrieved supernatural or not. Dan's idea of a good ending to the story would be a truce or a daring escape, not a slaughter.

"So from what you're saying-" Dan deals another hand to each of them- "you've got some sort of reputation amongst the vampires and your faction, enough to be considered an operative."

He checks his hand. Double eights, a spade and a diamond.

"Did Madame Bedelia ever join with the faction that done sent you, or did she decide to go her own way after ripping apart the battalion?"

The first card in the river is the three of clubs.

Edited 2020-10-02 21:19 (UTC)

"Ah, my apologies," he says, with a carefully chastened grin. "I'm afraid I don't spend as much time stateside as should."

He checks his cards. Three of hearts and the jack of clubs. One pair already, not bad.

"Oh, she bore a long-standing grudge against the other side. I extricated myself as quickly as I could manage, but last I heard, Atlanta hadn't changed hands."

He doesn't address Dan's other supposition, interested in letting the man draw his own conclusions.

"No worries. My hometown barely topped eight thousand when I left it." Dan says that as if it's something he finds embarrassing, but the truth is he finds the size of his hometown much less embarrassing than the reality of having left this place he loved so much, for no reason but shame and wanderlust.

He nods. "Alright. So you aren't a loyalist, at least to the parties you've named to me."

Second card in the river is a queen of diamonds.

"And where is your home town? I'm from England, as you may have guessed. A little place by the river that no longer exists. Oxford swallowed it up," he explains, shuffling.

He deals the third. Six of clubs, hellfire and damnation. The night wasn't going his way, so far. Still, there was always a chance. He doesn't twitch at the result.

"Well, I'm sure there's parties in your world determined to involve you in their squabbles. And Kindred breed conspiracy like black mold, unfortunately."

"England's a bigger place than Hallelujah Junction. We ain't even a legitimate city." They're an "unincorporated community", which is a fancy term for a bunch of hillbillies who refuse to engage with invasive government shit like birth certificates or property taxes.

Nothing in the river for him to love, either.

"Kindred, huh? Ain't a term in my world." He takes the deck back. "I'm an independent contractor in my world. I go where my skills are useful to the common good."

"I wouldn't expect it to be," Beckett says, stalling. Bet or call, bet or call... "We're a secretive lot, since the Inquisition. I've not revealed my nature to a mortal I didn't intend to kill in - oh, ever, really."

It had been the hardest thing to learn. Aristotle taught that there was no shame in what they were, only what they might do; so why, then, did he hold with Camarilla secrecy? It had taken a demonstration for Beckett to understand. Fortunately, it had only taken one.

Beckett makes up his mind, taps the table, shows his cards.

"The Spanish Inquisition?" Dan shows his hand; a pair of eights over a pair of threes means he wins, so he gathers up the sweeteners.

"And here you are revealing it to me. I mean, I imagine to plenty of those on this," he waves a hand. "Rig. Anyway. I'm flattered. And awaiting another story."

He starts shuffling for the next hand.

"Well, we all seem a tolerant lot. The circumstances are extraordinary enough to make the lie both impossible and bit tedious, so. And yes, since the Inquisition. Prior to that, our existence was something of an open secret; but the politics are complex, and dull to anyone who wasn't there."

There's a thousand ways to politely tell someone a topic is off limit, and Beckett knows all of them. He doesn't want to spill every secret right off the bat; you never know which one you might need.

"Let's see... ah, yes. I wasn't directly involved, but I bore witness, about twenty five years ago, to an sequence of events in Philadelphia that I found rather amusing, at the time."

He actually rather likes this one, now that it's coming back to him. One of the classic Kindred dramas, rather like a good pull off a healthy adult male; you're never surprised, but you're never disappointed.

"Kindred tends towards hierarchy, as a rule; whether we incline towards discipline or license, we like to bicker and fight until there's a pecking order we can all feel comfortable with. In Philadelphia, the nastiest hen in the coop styles themselves Prince of the city. And the Prince when this story begins was about three hundred years old, vicious as a snapping turtle, and deeply disliked by his subjects."

A ventrue, to be precise, of long and thwarted ambition. Finding himself unable to move up the ranks in his clan, he exorcised his emotions by tormenting his kindred citizens. He was the oldest creature within the city limits, mostly because anyone with any better option got the hell out of Philly as soon as it was feasible. He'd only been there on the hunt, himself.

"Now, he was a kindred of particular tastes, and one night he happened to spy a young man that suited them perfectly. I don't suppose I need to bore you with the details - suffice it to say, the young man enraptured him totally. To the point where he began to neglect his iron control of his subjects. It shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that the young man soon approached a particularly vocal enemy of the standing prince, claiming to represent a party external to the city. This party wanted to see the current Prince overthrown and replaced by someone more amenable to certain business interests that the Prince had rejected in quite insulting terms. Our mark was happy to agree."

He pauses here to take his cards, leaving them face-down for the moment.

"So the night came. Everything was ready; the young man had proved an extraordinary liasion, and the way was clear to violently seize power and dispose of the hated Prince. Except someone hadn't done their due diligence. The coup goes off without a hitch, and our mark is about to take the throne - when his backer arrives, unexpectedly, and puts him to death for participating in an illegal action against a sitting Prince. Kindred justice, or what passes for it in some quarters."

Now he checks his cards. Off to decent start, this time. If the river is kind.

"And, of course, the backer then allocated the throne to a favored underling, and things have been going quite smoothly in Philadelphia - for now. I've heard word, however, that the mark had a loyal childe with a brain in their head who escaped Philadelphia that night, so perhaps things may heat up again."

Edited 2020-10-10 05:40 (UTC)

And Dan doesn't pry when Beckett throws up that polite boundary, firstly because Dan really has very little interest in the intricacies of politics and factions - blame his upbringing - and secondly because he's already learning quite a lot about Beckett.

He's learning that Beckett respects subterfuge and manipulation, that he has an affinity for a sense of just desserts (at least when the unfortunate soul includes carelessness as one of their crimes), and can find a spectator's pleasure is bloodshed. The latter two are ones that Dan doesn't find appealing, but that won't matter until they're on missions together; for now, they're just enjoying a friendly cared game, and Beckett's great conversation.

"Well, I'm glad to hear Philly's the city of brotherly love again." He takes another drink; by now, with as much of the bottle is missing, the fact that he's not visibly impaired is not a testament to sobriety but to an extremely high tolerance. "And that the person deposed won't be spoiling the place for everyone else. I don't know how the politicking don't make you crazy. If I had to keep track of ancient feuds and business interests and alliances, I'd blow my brains out."

He checks his hand: a two and a seven, mismatched. The worst pair of cards a gambler can pull; you can't make a straight with them, you can't shoot for a flush, and you have to pray on getting some very mediocre pairs.

He's been playing conservatively so far, but hell, fuck it. A two and a seven is a challenge. He puts in a sugar packet.

Beckett laughs, surprisingly rich and warm.

"Unfortunately, there's no escaping it in my line of work. Every lead I follow and discovery I make turns out to be tied into someone's old grudge or ancient feud. The perils of effective immortality, I suppose."

Which is really putting it mildly, but what does Dan really need to know about the jyhad's invisible strings, and how tightly they cut into the skin?

The sugar packet has him raising an eyebrow, but he doesn't hesitate to meet it.

"Two out of three would have me feeling lucky, too," is all he says.

"You know, I'm finding that more and more in my line, too. I miss the days when I'd just go out, track down a mimic or a ghoul, solve the problem some way or another, then up and move to the next town. Nowadays it seems like everything's infighting with the magicians and instead of helping people it's about salvaging magical artifacts or neutralizing alchemy experiments gone wrong. The shine's really wearing off. Maybe all careers go this way after a few years."

Dan, too, is keeping his secrets. The shine wore off when his partner, his "little sister", the person who got him into monster hunting in the first place, died to save him on a mission gone pear-shaped. Ever since then, hunting has been an increasingly joyless and unsatisfying grind. But he doesn't want to talk about that to Beckett or to anyone else.

"Well, I don't want to count on Lady Luck too much. You know she don't like to be kept." Next card in the river is not a two or a seven. Dan's path to a partway decent hand gets all the narrower.

"No, that one goes where she likes, doesn't she?" Beckett likes the way this is going, so far; he raises cautiously, a pile of sweeteners rather than a sugar pack. The earlier stutters have made him cautious.

Beckett could share a thing or two on the subject of lost loved ones, but why would he? The past is another country, and no one's business besides.

"My experience has been that the complexities are always there," he says instead. "Experience simply makes them more obvious. It's something of a paradox, really - so little happens by accident, and yet somehow, so much ends up subject to chance."

"Sounds like you're talking about our game here." He meets the sweeteners, waiting to raise - he intends to do so next card, to keep the ruse going that he has something tasty in his actually dire hand.

Last card in the river gives him a pair of twos, which is better than nothing but worse than almost everything.

"I just wish there were more...space. More space to do our own things unencumbered. When I started out it was so straightforward, and now I got to worry about non-compete clauses, license dues, other people's rivalries that go back to before I was even born. It makes me want to drop off the grid again."

"I very well could be," he says, with a crooked smile meant to communicate that he isn't. He's noticed Dan's sudden confidence; he also remembers they both opened with bluffs on bad hands. Beckett's eyes gleam, a flash of triumph like the belly of a fish below the river's surface, gone almost before you know you've seen it. He's finally got that straight he was chasing.

But he wants to see where Dan is going with this.

"Ah, that I can understand." He shrugs. "It's always easier before you get a reputation, isn't it? In and out before anyone even knows to look for you - nowadays everyone's got a list somewhere with my name on it, it seems. The price of success, I suppose."

"Oh, it ain't even that I got a reputation. It's just that I've got connections, and it turns out once you have those you have to maintain them. It was easier when I was my own boss."

Where is Dan going with this? At this point he doesn't totally know, and that's a bad sign to him.

"Fold," he says, tucking his cards, unseen, back into the deck. He'll take the loss this time.

Beckett sweeps his winnings over into his pile with a manfully understated smirk. It's not much of a victory, but he's been Kindred too long not to take what he can get.

"Go on, then," he says, shuffling for another hand.

Dan starts to deal the next hand. He has a pair of kings, so Lady Luck is already being much kinder to him this time around. He racks his brain for some sort of story, something innocuous that says more about his world than about him.

"I have a friend back home, you know, a werewolf. Nice guy, name of Lionel. When we first met about ten years ago he was so surprised that I didn't care he was a werewolf that he started crying, that's how much he'd been put through the wringer after getting turned. We ended up on quite a few hunts together, probably more than me and almost anyone else." The exceptions being his friend The Ancient One, and his adoptive sister Eliora - and he has no intentions of bringing her up to Beckett or to anyone else on the rig, ever.

"So, about a few months ago, we were on a hunt together and it turned out it was a conspiracy of blood magic wizards trying to use other supernatural creatures to increase their own power. They had this whole complex full of werewolves they were going to use as fodder. And my friend Lionel, my friend Lionel who was too shy to speak to strangers when we first met - he rallied the whole bunch of them and convinced them to stop hanging in the dungeons with their tails between their legs and to bust free. And they did. We got every single one of the werewolves out safe, and he became their new alpha."

And Dan ended up having rough sex with one of the freed werewolves in the bathroom of a Chevron, so really, winning all around.

"Goes to show you how people can surprise you."

"An conspiracy of blood mages, hmm? Where I'm from, we call that the Tremere." Beckett snickers at his own joke, because it's a very good joke and Dan might not get it.

"And yes, people can. I'm pleased your friend did so for the better." It's a rare thing, in his experience. "Do werewolves suffer much prejudice in your world, then? In mine, the existence of the supernatural is kept strictly secret. I find myself rather fascinated by yours."

Beckett risks complete honesty. He's trying to imagine the results of similar transparency in the world he knows. It comes up bloodshed and death every time, and most of it in pursuit of self-fulfilling prophecy. Camarilla, Sabbat, assorted cults and sects - all aspects of a greater culture, in the end, a parasitical one determined to surrender free will to superstition. Convincing itself that monstrosity is only natural, when you can't possibly help it.

And the worst thing is, despite knowing that what he's in is water, he's still drowning in it like all the rest. It would take courage he doesn't have and resources he won't sacrifice to do anything else.

Maybe some of this shows on his face, in all its bleakness; this is frankly to his advantage, because he's just drawn the queen and ace of spades, which isn't a half-bad start.

Edited 2020-10-15 02:25 (UTC)

Dan does not, in fact, get it, but he laughs politely, that way you do when you don't get a joke and want to make it gentlemanly clear that that's your fault, not the joke-teller's.

"Well, it depends. A good most of the people in our world don't know about anything in the Weird - that's the supernatural, the monsters, the magic, all that - and they think anything that does come out is some animal with rabies or mutant from a lab. Those of us that do know about the Weird, maybe like a single percent of us at most...I wish I could say that we were kinder to those who ain't precisely human. Like I told you, I'm one of only a few hunters that bothered to learn Common Tongue. Most just see anything that goes bump in the night as subhuman, unless it's a magician."

Dan doesn't dislike magicians, but he dislikes the power they hold and how, in his opinion, as a whole they use it irresponsibly for petty feuds instead of for any kind of community betterment. In the Weird, they hold all the power, and they never let "mundanes" like him or the supernatural creatures in their community forget it.

First card in the river is a seven, useless to Dan.

"Ah, so there is some secrecy. In my world, each supernatural type tends to keep to itself. Aside from my own kind, I know of the existence of werewolves, mortal mages, ghosts, and mummies. Werewolves loathe kindred for reasons they don't deign to explain, mages hold themselves entirely aloof, I've only ever met one mummy, and ghosts are usually being enslaved or tortured by a necromancer, and in no mood to chat. Oh, and every now and then someone claims to have met a fairy, but I'm quite certain that's largely intoxicants speaking."

Beckett is quite pleased to see another ace as the second card. He disguises the pleasure with an uncomfortable cough.

"There are some - ordinary mortals," Beckett catches himself before referring to the kine as such; there's a slim chance Dan might know the word means livestock, "who come to be aware of the existence of the supernatural. Usually they're dealt with, usually not pleasantly; those that survive long enough to try to and turn the tables may pose some threat to the weak or foolish but, in the end..."

He trails off, trusting Dan to guess the conclusion. And perhaps not wanting to go further down the halls of memory then the subject already requires. It wasn't that long ago, by his standards - Berlin in flames, the Beast raging in his heart, an old friend dead for nothing and that woman the only one nearby to blame.

He's paid for it. He'll pay again, he suspects. Some debts have higher interest than others.

"I can hardly blame them for their attitudes. Mortals are - generally not highly regarded or of great concern."

Edited 2020-10-15 03:31 (UTC)

"Oh, we got everything. Werewolves, vampire, mummies, ghosts, mages, wraiths, phantoms, hide-behinds, mimics, wendigos, shapeshifters, ghouls, soul-eaters, dragons, djinns, lamias, crocottas, chupacabras-" he counts off on his hands absently, "-and yeah, faeries. I spent a few weeks in the faerie realm, actually. Got some good intel from the Faerie Queen for running errands for her."

She gave him a heads up that the witch who slaughtered his family was coming for his soul. He wasn't able to figure out enough about the situation to make that warning useful.

"We "mundanes" aren't held in high regard in our world, either. Some people get bitter about it, but I try to think of it as a matter of trade-offs. We may not have magic or strength but we can go pretend the Weird doesn't exist, usually, and assimilate with the larger culture."

Not Dan, though. Something about being cursed for nearly a decade makes it hard to ever truly feel at home in a milieu that doesn't believe in witchcraft. It's not that he ever talks about what happened to him, but the difference is that people who know The Weird know how to turn a blind eye, and ignorant normal people require a fakey explanation like "cancer runs in my family".

"For the record, I don't work with many other mundanes. Like I said, a lot of them takes slights more personal than I do. Bad mindsets."

"It's just that you tend to have such a hard time keeping up," Beckett says, with surprising apology, and perhaps the hint of a joking smile. "Situations do evolve quickly."

That, and the kindred have spent seven thousand years entrenching themselves in the mindset of mortals-as-cattle. They're not going to budge just because it's rude. But he rather likes Dan, so far, so there's no need to get into it.

"What sorts have you worked with before? Do you know much about the vampires in your world?"

"You'd be surprised." Dan says that mildly, but it's true; the skills he brings to the table are often ones his magic-wielding, supernatural comrades overlook until they truly need them. Having a foot in the "mundane" world and being able to use it is an underrated and yet incredibly handy trait. "When a certain type of person runs ninety-nine percent of the world, being able to speak their language gets you real far."

And the language Dan speaks is very encompassing, from seduction and persuasion to more utilitarian skills like firearms and working his way around explosives.

"I've never worked directly with a vampire, but I fought a few. I know the basics, which I imagine are different from the ones on your world." His face is blank, not letting slip that that's where he suffered one of his greatest losses, one that he still has nightmares about almost daily. "I've worked with ghosts, werewolves, wraiths and magicians, mostly. Sometimes a few odds and ends from the other side of the supernatural world. I guess most folk call them 'touched'."

Next card in the river is a seven - a pair for them both.

Edited (hrrdrrtypo) 2020-10-15 05:16 (UTC)

Dan doesn't need to let it slip. The careful stillness of his face and the fact that it was a vampire tells Beckett enough. He'd lived; someone else hadn't. It was ever thus. He could probably guess at details if he tried, but he's done with carrying other kindred's sins.

"Well, the relevant details if we need to work together are thus: Fire will kill me, and sunlight - thought not here, for some reason - and may make me beserk with fear, so do be careful about them. Stake through the heart causes paralysis. As for the rest - running water, invitations, briar thorns, that rot - irrelevant."

He looks at his cards, looks at the river, and pushes five sweetener packs forward.

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im............. alive.................

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