Kali
The apartment that Kali takes Jack to is situated in Downtown Denver and, conversely to how Kali might present herself, isn't a shithole. It's hardly a high-end place but it's located in that rare range that allow her a certain amount of freedom in coming and going without running into her neighbors yet aren't in any particular state of disrepair. The inside is almost set up more like an office than a home; the front area is arrange for meetings and there's a desk in the corner with a few stacks of papers. Three maps are on the wall; one of Denver, another of the state and a third covering the US as a whole. They're all marked up in red, blue and green Sharpie with roads outlined showing major trucking regions, several X's with indecipherable shorthand and the like.
Kali lets him in, gesturing vaguely. "Welcome to my humble abode. It's the only thing humble about me, I promise." She grins and shuts the door behind them, before moving to a phone on the coffee table and reading some texts. A few frowns, a few replies.
"Make yourself at home. Within reason, anyway. No reading my mail."
Nobody
Jack looks around. He's a Nosferatu. It's what he does: Look around. He looks around for anything interesting and he looks around to take the measure of his surroundings and he looks around because he's a courteous guest just entering somebody else's haven and he even wipes his feet in an echo of good ol' Midwestern gosh-shucks ma'amness that harkens back to who knows how long ago.
"The digs are nice. Nicer than I'm used to, anyway," and that's said without rancor, with a smile that's rather sweet, because Jack's a sweet boy -- or was. Though if there's a stack of mail nearby, he hovers his hand over it in jest.
"Let's just pretend you offered me a drink and I accepted and now we've got that shit out of the way. Thanks for letting me in."
And the couch, the chairs, whatever: He'll drop into that.
[I guess for form's sake, a Percept + Alertness + Hidden Things Specialty, are you hiding stuff, like say rifles under the coffee table or whatever?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 3 )
Kali
A quick scan around would reveal a gun undeneath the desk in the corner, but not the coffee table. Jack would probably also note that there is a lot of flammable material in here, making it an easy thing to send up into flames if she ever has to in order to protect her business. Otherwise, the organizational chaos means that she doesn't have to hide too many sensitive documents or the like.
The Ravnos grins and sits down, putting her feet up and lighting a cigarette. "Okay, so when we last left our heroes in conversation, I had asked about artifacts. And you said 'Not here.' So we're not there anymore. As they say in Spain, 'El spillo es gutso, por favor.'"
She knows most of that isn't real Spanish. Kinda the point.
Nobody
There are stories that you aren't supposed to listen to if you're part of the Ivory Tower. There are stories that you aren't supposed to know and you aren't supposed to tell. Old nightmares you're not supposed to show any interest in 'lest old nightmare you become, perhaps, or perhaps just 'lest you disturb some older-Elder's carefully laid plans -- uncover something that isn't meant to be. The point is: You're not supposed to know them. You're not supposed to be too interested. But everybody usually assumes the Nosferatu are sitting on all manner of deep dark gruesome unmentionable secrets so maybe it's a little more okay.
Then again, nothing's good and forgotten until you can say as forgotten as if even the Nosferatu know nothing.
"I'm damned interested in your sources, Kali. Informational Free Trade Alliance now in session? Okay."
He runs his left hand over his skull, ducking his head, then leaves his hand clasped on the back of his neck in order to look up and over at Kali. "Has anybody ever told you the story of the Cornerstone of Enoch or the Bloodstone of Caine?"
Kali
The Ravnos pauses, just for an instant, as she goes through her texting back and forth. A slight upward quirk of her lips follows that pause, and she raises her eyebrows to look at him. It's a knowing look.
"The Cornerstone of Enoch?" She gives a casual shrug, tossing the phone back on the counter and moving to take a seat. "Let's pretend I have heard that story. The myth around the vampires who hid it anyway, and all that fun. What do you know about it that I might now?"
"You share what you know, I'll share what I know. Yes, the Informational Free Trade Alliance is totally in session.
Nobody
He doesn't take a seat until Kali does. Because he wiped his feet. Because he is a courteous creature. Manners, thank you, yes please. Because he is using his manners. But when he does sit his hand's still clasped behind his neck. His elbows find his knees and there's a dream-away star in his eye when his lips curl. But he still looks as if he's considering things, and putting them into context, so there's not much rue to the lip curl nor humor.
"I wonder if it was fun. The First City. The Second."
Then -- his attention sharpens and fixes on Kali. And he tells her a fable, a bedtime story for monsters: a story in which The Lord's Wrath coalesced and congealed into a stone so dense that it'd require inhuman strength to move and the spot that this stone was found in the ground where Caine stood and brought Murder into the world. A story in which an Altar of Blood sat in the temple of Caine where Malkav studied to break away from the limits of Creation and the God that damned the First Sire and all vampires after him.
His voice is a burnished thing, tale-telling: give Jack that. He's honey and fire and he tells it well with an appropriate amount of darkness and musing. Musing, he is more and more: musing, and considering, and considerate of his audience.
He tells a story about five of Malkav's childer, nodding at Kali when he does, as if to conjure up what she knows. The story he's telling her that is a story of what she might know. He tells her a tale of the Lernaean Quorum. The Many-Headed Methuselah --
Here, the expression in his [borrowed (somebody else's) eyes sharpens, meaningfully, coming out've musing to be more direct.
-- and he tells her a story about other ancients who sought it. Those stories are half-finished, scrapling things: This one wished to take it and it did not go well. This vampiric battle was met and then some time later what happened to that city the name was lost except for. This one of the line of this wished to take it that he might and then there was thunder and in one sweeping night all his childer vanished and the last that was ever heard of him was that he'd been trapped in the shape of a crow. But that's hearsay, Jack says, wry as anything: that was a poetic footnote.
Kali
Kali listens quietly and for once, she's not snarking it up. This is a truly rare feat; she is focused entirely on Jack and taking in the details of his story. She doesn't interrupt, doesn't ask questions...she just lets him tell the story. It's a lesson she learned long ago: you don't try and lead a Nosferatu when he's telling you things you need to know.
When he's done, she smiles a little, standing, and nods. "Yep. That's what I heard...with a lot more detail on your part, of course. The Quorom and their death in Spain from the Lasombra, the altar itself...I knew that stuff. I had heard that the Quorum possibly had some way of living on past. But you filled in a lot of the details."
She sighs, lighting a cigarette and looking at him. "Let's say, hypothetically of course, that I knew where this book was. It's Camarilla heresey...and frankly, it's probably true for all we know. Which is not a safe dichotomy. What would you do with it?"
Nobody
"'Hypothetically,'" he quotes, inclining his head as if to agree. "One of the most useful words in the English language." A reflective pause, "Beats 'love' and 'no' eight times out of ten."
The gathering of his thoughts is all for the Here-and-Now, now that tales have been told. For the Here-and-Now, and for the Just-the-Other-Week. The reflective pause -- and it had touched the cadence of his last remark -- seems to have given him over to something quiet and contemplative.
Because he's quiet and contemplative, looking at the red-haired Ravnos, all haloed as she is by smoke. Devil-hair, devil's snare. If she weren't Ravnos, an Outsider, a Let's-be-Honest-Ready-Made-Scapegoat, if other Scapegoats are ever in Short Supply, no matter how accepted she is by the Camarilla, and if they hadn't already discussed and made certain agreements about what's going on and madness, then he might have chosen his words differently.
But as it is, he says, with perfect truth, "I have an interest in the Mysteries, Kali. And I would," a sigh, "do with it what I do with all Mysteries and Secrets: Try to know it, and then look at current events with the perspective it has given me."
Jack leans back, his hands which had steepled between his legs during storytime, coming to rest on either knee, bracing him up.
"Fix what's broken.
"But I guess that depends on where you hypothetically know this book is. How many years has it been since the last Tremere set foot in Denver? D'you know?"
Kali
She smirks a little when he expresses his appreciation for 'hypothetically.' She would absolutely agree, though she doesn't at the moment as he has the floor, and she's curious as to his thoughts.
"I have no idea how long its been. I haven't been here all that long, frankly. But I know they're here now, and I don't particularly like that fact. Pardon me, but there's a reason that of all the many cities I've visited in the Old World, Vienne was never one of them."
Nobody
He tilts to the side in order to dig a pack of cigarettes out of his dockers. He has to get them from the back pocket where they're living with a nondescript and boring wallet that seems to have some metal band's sticker stamped on it along with a glittery skull sticker. Jack goes all-in. His lighter's tucked in the pack and he puts one cigarette to his lips then looks politely aside when he lights it.
"It's been a long time since," he tells her, and then with regret, "And it's too bad. I hear Vienna's beautiful in summer. So, uh, hypothetically, they don't have this book?"
Kali
A light smile lights her face when he lights up a cigarette too. The situation might be considered comical; two people without the need to breath or the capacity to gain any appreciable benefit from smoking other than deception, in a situation where such deception is moot, choosing to do so anyway. It's almost endearing...or would be, if Kali went in for endearing.
Which she absolutely doesn't. So it's more amusing than anything else.
"No." She taps her ash trail into the glass tray on the coffee table. "Hypothetically, they absolutely do not have the book. I hope, in hypothetically desperate way, that they don't have any idea about it whatsoever. It would make such a hypothetical situation much safer for someone who did."
She pauses, and grins. "Hypothetically."
She leans back in her seat and sighs. "Okay, so non-hypothetically. We have two ancient Gangrel fucking around Denver. Either one or both of them came from Vegas or there's ANOTHER ancient who woke up there and is out playing the craps table at the Bellagio or some shit. I think we should operate under the idea that they did, because it involves less coincidence or heretical notions of the End Times. And we can assume that, whether it exists or not, they've come here over the Cornerstone."
Another drag. Another exhale. "The $25,000 question is...what do we do about it?"
Nobody
He lifts the goth's chin in a sort-of cheers-mate sort-of way before taking a drag. They don't need to breathe. And here, they don't need to fake it. But here they are, both smoking. Maybe it's for nerves, eh? Or maybe it's just for something to do. Being a vampire cuts out a lot of the casual crap people do when they're being social. Can't do drinks. Can't do eats. Don't feel the need to fidget all that much, per se, don't really need to get warm or to get cool, can just give yourself up to the stillness of the grave, to an economy of motion which is rare in the living. Smoking's human.
Smoking's habit. At least for Jack who doesn't always smoke. An easy habit to get into and an easy habit to drop.
"Whatever we can," he says, frankly. "Which," a trail-away, which is eloquent of quite a lot. How much can they really do, after all, that Ancients can't? Oh: They can run. That isn't something Jack suggests, however.
After the trail-away, he says, that good ol' boy Texas twang becoming slightly more pronounced again, "I think another question is what exactly do we want to happen here?"
Here's the key-word; we's kind of important, too, or at least tellingly inclusive.
Kali
What do we want to happen here?
We. This is a phrase the Rroma woman isn't used to. Even with the relatively rare circumstance of having another of her clan within the city, she isn't a 'we.' While there is more honor among Ravnos than there is among theives, it's a very strange sort of honor that most people wouldn't recongize as such. But that being said, this is definitely a 'we' situation. Kali can't handle this by herself; hell, Kali and Jack can't handle this between the two of them. But at least it's better than one.
She gives a throaty chuckle and puts her elbows up on the back of the couch behind her, shrugging. "Well, on the 'we' front, I suppose priority #1 is keeping ourselves out of a Dustbuster, metaphorically speaking anyway. Keeping the Camarilla in charge is important, I would think, because I assume there's a reason you're not an honorary citizen of Mexico and I damn sure don't have any wish to get hit over the head with a shovel. And if we can improve our station within the big ol' Tower in the process, all the better?"
That last is said as a question. She's not assuming anything about him.
[TO BE WRAPPED BY JESS WHEN LESS TIRED]
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