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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"That's one word for it, certainly." Beckett looks up and flashes a brief smile, intending to reassure the mortal that all was well. Which it very much is, of course. He studies his card, hiding his mouth behind his hand.

No love, so far. Lady Luck was in a mood tonight, apparently.

"I fold," he says abruptly, tossing in his hand. He doesn't pay attention to how the fall. "Which means I owe you a story. Let's see..."

"I was in South Africa, investigating rumours of a Ba'ali cult infesting an apartment block in Johannesburg. Infesting is the right word, because Ba'ali are a particularly nasty species of demon-worshipping vampire cultist, and among their many dreadful tricks is turning living bodies into insect hives - usually human, though animal will do in a pinch. This is, unfortunately, relevant information.

I'd made my way up to the thirtieth floor, finding nothing of particular interest aside from clear evidence of cultist activity and a lot of dead bodies." He spares Dan the gorier details, and the nature of the activity. Slaughter mortals, raise demons, nothing terribly novel. "I found there a balcony with a pool, and something stirring inside it. That thing was as staked kindred, terribly mutilated, whom I attempted to revive - only to find that it had been turned into one such incubator, implanted with things that don't bear speaking of, frankly."

Horrible little amoebic leeches that had clung to his legs, squealing and biting. He'd born holes in his flesh for a week.

"And I wish I could tell you I did something clever and heroic, but I actually fell backwards into the pool, lost my pants, and spent a very anxious few hours huddled on the diving board until the thing lost track of me."

He lies fluently and without a moment's hesitation. The point of this is very much to not mention the others who were with him at the time.

Dan doesn't bother showing his cards, instead taking the card back and the sweeteners from the first buy. He shuffles Beckett's hand back into his deck, then starts to deal again. He's got a three and a jack, both hearts.

"Well, I ain't ever been to South Africa, and that sounds a wretched type of vampire." Dan's dealt a few times with creatures that used other living things as breeding grounds, and it's always distinctly upsetting. It's one thing to kill a person possessed and find them full of blood and organs; it's another to do so and find them full of eggs and larvae.

To tell the truth, he's never even been outside North America, unless the faerie realm counts. He's never had enough identification to want to risk getting on an airplane, and teleporters in his world typically can only manage a few miles at a time.

"That sounds horrible. You must have been sitting in terror for hours." Dan sounds, and is, genuinely sympathetic.

Edited 2020-10-22 04:33 (UTC)

"Long enough," Beckett agrees. "It was blind, though, so I knew it would lose track eventually."

That specific statement is true. But "long enough" had only been a few minutes, as Lucita had been in the next room and heard his very-much-not-high-pitched-thank-you cry of distress. She'd come at the thing with a blowtorch, it had escaped down the pool drain, and then their biggest problem had been where he was going to get new pants at three in the morning.

Well, that and burning down the building. There'd been nothing in there but corpses and corpse-hives, and evidence of attempts to raise something that very much should not be raised.

"And yes, the Ba'ali are a truly wretched lot. No sane Kindred gives them succor."

First card in the river is the king of hearts, and Dan considers if it might be wise to bank on a flush.

"I take it the Ba'ali - that's how you say it?" It isn't, the way Dan pronounces it, but he's never had a way with words and that gravelly voice tends to strip most sounds of their beauty. "I take it that making hives of people is their pleasure, as opposed to a necessity. Nasty either way, but inexcusable for the latter."

He decides to hope for the flush and tosses a sugar packet in.

"Both, actually. An act of worship for their particular cult. I'm willing to go into detail, but you'll need a strong stomach."

Not too much - the connections between Saulot, Tremere, and Ba'ali are unlikely to be of interest - but Beckett does have a morbid urge to continue, one he doesn't quite understand. Maybe because Dan had gotten too close, and this is bound to scare him off; maybe because it's been a long time since he could talk freely about the horrors he's seen as horrors, and not intellectual curiosities, or business-as-usual.

Neither of those possibilities give him particular pleasure.

"I hunt monsters for a living. I'm pretty sure whatever you're about to tell me, I've seen similar." Or lived similar. When he was nineteen, his seven year-old sister choked to death on her own teeth. He wasn't that much older when the blood curse on his family dissolved his little brother's bones while his little brother was still alive.

Another hearts card. A sweetener.

"I just hope I don't even get completely numb to it."

"Well, the more coherent of the Ba'ali claim that they're doing us all a favor. According to them, evil powers sleep in the earth, bound by ancient spells. Their orgies of violence and degradation aren't random, but performed purposely at chosen locations in order to glut those entities with death and suffering, thus ensuring they don't rise in hunger and consume the world."

Beckett's got two mismatched jacks, and little hope now of anything decent. But you never know; there's one jack left in the deck, and it could come up anytime. In the spirit of hope, he meets the bet.

"Mind you, there very probably are ancient entities sleeping in the earth of my world. However, Ba'ali tactics are far more likely to wake those creatures than soothe them to sleep - like the smell of frying bacon to a sleeping mortal, I think that's an appropriate metaphor?"

"I reckon that makes sense if you believe in it, but I ain't a fan of the idea of evil ancient gods. In my experience, it's all been an excuse to mistreat folks and conveniently justify your actions."

It's not that Dan's against religion, or even against fire-and-brimstone religion. He was raised quite religious, but the tenants his parents preached were good Samaritanship, integrity, community, mindfulness, even despite the conservative attitudes around bodily autonomy and education. Dan drifted away from the parts of those teachings that didn't sit well with him, but he likes to think he kept the parts that hold him together.

"It is. It makes sense. Am I right on thinking that most of this comes down to faith?"

"Well, yes and no." Beckett has to think for a moment. How to explain it, and how to explain it without naming names? "There is a kernal of truth to their beliefs - to all the different beliefs that unite the kindred. I've spend three hundred years trying to find out what it is, and there are days I feel no closer then when I began. But I've seen and experienced and learned things which lead me to believe that there truly are - things - hidden in the dark corners of the world, and of the world's memories. Things perhaps best left alone and forgotten."

Even by him.

"Win this hand, and I may tell you about one."

Dan listens attentively. There's something deep here, something about how this relates to Beckett's way of interacting with the world.

"I think that's a wise conclusion. Not everything needs to be dug up, and sometimes you gotta respect a thing's wishes to stay in secret." Dan has a tendency to tap the filter end of his cigarette against his bottom lip when he's thinking something over. "It sounds like you might could have learned it the hard way."

Last card in the river is the two of hearts, completing Dan's flush, although he does his best not to let any of that cross his face. He puts two sweeteners in.

Well, Beckett doesn't have nothing, but his odds aren't the best. He's suddenly uninterested in winning, however, as he idly pushes forward a sugar packet.

This is an old game, but one he's played rarely - and he knows, full well, that Dan might not know he's playing it. How badly do you want the truth, my dear ingenue?. De Laurent's eyes had gleamed with what Beckett, in his youth and with another name, had taken for a challenge. Looking back, it had been closer to tears.

De Laurent had put up a fight, as Beckett intends to now. But the last thing his sire had told him as he left his house forever, in the wake of the great betrayal, was that he'd always intended to lose. Seeing how hard Beckett would work - that was the point of the game.

Dan raises an eyebrow and adds the sweeteners to meet Beckett's sugar packet raise, then raps his knuckles on the table to call. He lays out a beautiful red flush.

"If you can't top that, then I get the story."

Beckett shows his hand with a grin perhaps a little more predatory, or pained, then he means to reveal.

"Well. Where to begin?" He drums his fingers on the table, theatrically. "All kindred claim descent from legendary founders, ancient vampires alleged to be the grandchildren of the first vampire, who rose against their creators and slaughtered them, a crime for which the father of kindred cursed them eternally. Or it was at his behest, as he'd grown disgusted by their excess - opinions differ. These founders, according to legend, lie torpid in various hidden tombs throughout the world, subtly influencing their descendants' actions, waiting to wake, rise, and consume the world.

Officially, this is superstition - at least in the sense that two of the three major sects agree that they don't exist, and even if they did, they couldn't possibly be pulling anyone's strings. It's well-known that childer are weaker in the blood than their sires. The idea of the super-powerful common ancestor has a certain sense to it, but if such a being did exist, and did survive to the present day, what of it?

I was in Russia, following the collapse of the Iron Curtain. It wasn't only mortals who'd lost all eyes in Moscow when the revolution came; the kindred, too, had experienced what we came to call the Shadow Curtain. Our limitations are not mortal, but none of our powers or techniques could grant any insight into what was going on in Russia. Periodically someone would emerge with wild claims of ancient vampires enslaving mortal and kindred alike, controlling the land itself, and so on and so forth - things kindred can do, but not at the scale described.

So. The Shadow Curtain fell when the USSR did, and I was on the first flight I could book to Moscow. I met with many local kindred, none of whom could provide me anything useful. They all swore they had been under the control of a single ancient vampire they called Baba Yaga, but were equally certain that none of them had known they were under her control until the curtain fell - and all took that for a sign that she had been destroyed.

Seeing little other choice, I went inward, to the interior. I had a colleague with me, an expert in tracking and scouting, but we made little progress. Eventually he told me to wait at our base camp, and went off alone. He never returned. I did, however, find his remains - along with a message, intended for his clan. A claim that Baba Yaga was real, was one of our legendary ancestors, and furthermore had truly been destroyed.

I believed the claim, and left Russia. You might notice that I don't say why. That's because I don't know. I saw - something - in the tundra, learned something, something that's left me with the absolute certainty that these ancient creatures and their machinations are real and active to this very night. I know it as I know fire burns flesh - but I can't remember where or how or why I came to be so sure. Something has plucked it from my memory, as if it was never there - something that chose to leave a hole, to take the details and leave me the lesson, so that I would know what it had done."

By the time he finishes, his face is haunted.

Dan listens, cigarette burning down in his hand, rapt. His face, when Beckett finishes, a mixture of attentive and sympathetic, and he lets the silence linger for a moment before he responds.

"A respectable thing, that you've kept the lesson even without the context. That's a mark of wisdom, I reckon." He stubs out his cigarette against the napkin on the table, taking care to make sure nothing lights. "Have you tried to find out what memories you had that were lost, or have you wised away from that?"

"I was intended to. It was a warning: 'we exist, we are more powerful than you can imagine, and if you hunt us, we will hunt you.' Wisdom would have been leaving off the search, which I very much did not."

He pauses to carefully watch Dan extinguish the cigarette, as much because his own nerves are starting to jump as genuine fear of carelessness. Alas, nicotine does nothing for a kindred.

"And no, I've never recovered the memories. I have my notes, and some recordings - enough to reassemble the narrative - but what I learned there, what I saw - gone. I can take an educated guess at what they were, but I don't think I'll ever really know."

He hates that more than he can say. To know that he knows, but not know how or why he knows, not be able to explain to others because he has no proof, not even his own eyewitness - whoever was behind it couldn't have conceived of a more perfect irritation.

Dan figures that if Beckett wanted him to ask what Beckett's educated guess was, Beckett would have volunteered that information. He starts to shuffle the cards again, pensive if just a little put out that he's out of wine.

He tries to imagine how that must feel for Beckett, to essentially have a memory planted and chunks of his past sealed away, and can't imagine the willpower and caution necessary to not go try and solve that mystery. Dan knows he'd make the fool decision to go back and look for it, because Dan knows that for someone as chronically anxious and paranoid as he is, there's no threat to his life or constitution that scares him. In cases like this, that wouldn't be a virtue.

"How did your colleague's clan take it?" He deals their hands again.

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

cw body horror, death, devil worship, loss of pants

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