Fucking Ivory Tower

Lux

The fourth - perhaps while Kali is waiting to meet a certain Nosferatu! How delightful. Her cell-phone rings. The number is unlisted.

Kali

She's used to unlisted numbers lately, and expecting some with all the calls she's made out.  She picks up the phone with a click.

"Kali's Bed and Breakfast, taking bookings."

Lux

"What a thing to say. Bookings are for jailbirds, pretty Kali. How are you?"

Kali

"Oh Jesus Christ."  That's a sound of relief.  "Lux, babe, don't you fuckin' scare me like that.  I'm alive.  Tallying up the count.  How're you?"

Lux

- this little sound. Laughter, maybe, something contained - sublimated. The laughter brushes her next words, paints them into something smokier and shadow-on-water. Even over the phone, there's something about Lux. Magnetic creature, dark-heart star.

"I have been much better, but fuck them. I will thrive and they will wonder." A silence. "I have one for your tally. Stone."

Kali

There are several moments of silence.  Kali is not one who is normally at a loss for words.  But she is in fact silent.  Maybe it's for effect, maybe it's because she's upset herself.  She speaks then.

"Sami fut."  Whatever it means, it sounds something vaguely like 'God dammit' or 'Fuck me.'  She sounds...tired, suddenly.  "What the hell happened?  He was fucking out of the building.  I know it, I helped him get out.  Literally."

Lux

"Did you?" Lux sounds fond. "He is an idiot." The fondness carries over; unravels into something more matter-of-fact with, "I don't know exactly; I found him and Wolf when I went back. Fucking fire. But at least I am certain he's nobody's black halo. Head blown off. He was probably going back -- " Trail-away. "...he was too."

Kali

"Fuck.  Fuck, fuck. FUCK."  She actually sounds pissed.  Kali is a Deceiver, and make no mistake: she lives up to her clan's nickname.  Her philosophy is 'I trust people because I know they're going to fuck me over, and I can probably predict when.'  But she is also remarkably humane for a seventy year-old vampire who peddles toxic substances to the masses.  And when people she likes (or kind of likes, or even just respects) are lost to her...

She doesn't like losing.  She sighs then.  "I'm sorry, babe.  I really am."

Lux

Lux is quiet while Kali curses. Quiet when she says she's sorry. Then, "You are a darling," as firmly as she'd said Kali is your name, as if it were a fact of nature like vampires burn. "And I think we will all be a little sorry." Pause. "Anything confirmed? Is Rasmussen...?"

Kali

"Rasumussen's still kicking."  Her snark is gone at the moment; she's speaking in a more serious tone due to the new revelation.  "Lucille too.  Mercy, Jack, Baja, John."  The latter two not necessarily surprising, given their absence.  But still worth mentioning.

"No word on Gotfred.  But Henrietta sleeps with the fishes.  And that fuck who ran the Emergency Room, pretty sure you saw him..  Also pretty sure his name wasn't fucking Ted."  A pause.  "If you ever see my ghoul.  Pretty little thing, named Bo.  She's sorta like me if I was, you know, not dead and not the queen of my own little empire.  Anyway, don't mention the Emergency Room fucker."

Lux

"What did he look like?" Implied: The fuck who ran the Emergency Room. "Don't worry, I won't mention any of this to Bo should I run into her again." Pause.  "Any word on the Lady of the night? Or," a pause, "House Slytherin? Or, hm, would they be Ravenclaw?" 

Kali

"He was the one with the bone whip and the freakshow pet who attacked me."  She spits it out, rather viciously.  "Fuckin' sick fuck.  Anyway, Narcisa's still up.  No clue on the Hogwart's rejects."

Of course, she doesn't sound too much like she'd be upset if they weren't.

Lux

"Okay. I remember." As ornamental as Lux appears... (She'd rather nobody remembered how un-ornamental she could be.) "That was Ted?" surprise, mellow, careless. "Bo has bad taste in men, though somewhat better taste in friends." Look at that compliment, delivered so easily. "That was a thing, huh, their big reveal?"

Lux sounds... well, she doesn't want them all to be dead, and suspects the way her luck is running that they're all very hale and hearty.

Kali

She snorts.  "Bad taste in men...yeah, that's a light way to put it.  I didn't like him before I knew what team he was batting for and I fuckin' hated him in those last few minutes."

She seems to be in a better mood though, after Lux comments on the Tremere and the 'big reveal.'  A little chuckle sounds over the phone.  "Yeah, that was something.  Not gonna lie, I'm of two minds.  One one hand...ew.  On the other...well, that pretty much means they're walking up to the plate with one strike against them already.  I might have another one in my pocket for our little blondie-bear.  That's a count I don't mind pitching to."

Lux

[HMMM. Charisma + Expression? Just for eloquent tone?] 

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

Lux

Lux laughs. She is one of those people who laughs away from the phone so the sound recedes, and when she comes back it's easy to imagine her, limned in light. "True! But oh please keep it in your pocket for a while yet; I really want to..."

Expression doesn't need to be the words you choose. Expression can be the tone you say the words in, the nuance of the thing, the place the words come from, the slant of light through amber and whiskey silk-darkness of it. 

Lux is pro-tect-ive of certain people on a certain list.

More soberly, "But do you think it is a strike against them or a strike for them?"

Lux sounds genuinely curious about what Kali thinks there.

Kali

She pauses there, and the silence that ensues could be curiosity.  It could be thoughtfulness.  It could be discerning, an attempt to work out what Lux is getting at.

Or it could be, as the flick of flint on metal inside a lighter indicates, the lighting of a cigarette.  The Ravnos just paused before running out of a burning building to put down an enemy; she can light one cigarrette without her precious heat-coil. 

A slow, languorous exhalation of smoke follows.  "I think that it could go either way.  On one hand, it's quite a statement to come here of all places and step out with the graces of your fucking gondola-riding masters of the night to go to battle with the Great Enemy.  And their tactics will be appreciated, at least for now.  But--and you know this as well as I.  There are some people who got out of there who wonder.  They may not think it on the surface, but deep down they wonder.  Is it a coincidence that the big attack came during their official introduction to all of us lowly masses?  And even those that don't...they're thinking perhaps even further down, 'They'll always be the monsters.'"

It's a valid point.  It's a rarity that someone crosses sides, and those that do will always be looked at with some suspicion.  "So I think that it's probably a ball and a strike both.  But every single time they do something that isn't quite right...ignore the rules, even in little ways.  One or two people will remember, and they'll bury it deep down.  And eventually, they'll be unable to bury it anymore.  And they'll bury the trio."

"And don't worry.  I won't pull my card until I have to.  That's some primo blackmail; why use it now when it's of no real use?"

Lux

"Mmm."

This to Kali's assessment of the Tremere and their standing, as Sect-traitors who've come to Denver, who introduced themselves just before the Keep was attacked. There is a quiet little space of quiet. Lux is doing what ever it is Lux is doing; thinking, probably. 

"Well! Once we know we know." About the Tremere, that is. And about what plots and plans and plots and plans and plans and plots and: oh, it's an intimate once we know we know, abandoned for a more careless: "Fucking Ivory Tower. Henrietta!"

Kali

"Fucking all of it, you know?"  She sighs.  Again, even though they are creatures who do not worry about being physically tired, it does sound weary.  Some tiredness goes deeper than just your bones.  "It's like if you made the Montegues and Capulets immortal sociopaths and we're all Leo DiCaprio and Claire Danes getting poisoned while we look for Brody on the Titanic before he blows the whole goddamn thing up and Kate Winslet drowns with our big fuckin' blue rock."

She gives a beat for that mind-whirring hodgepodge of movies and television references sink in.  "One-a these days, I swear to Christ.  I'm gonna decide that the Tower's just isn't stable enough to hold my weight and I'm gonna drop a bombs into the fucking foundation on my way out."

Lux

Lux, amused: "Why do you think I left?"

"There are so few things we need and it is so good to need things. Don't our spirits still require, if they are to be sustained, something that a calcified, rot-riddled, unstable too-old too-mad too-bad too-too structure cannot give us? But I think it might be nothing but foundations. Foundations and cloud castles and airlessness."

Lux

"So use a big bomb. Anyway, beautiful thing, I should go and take care of some business. But let's not keep our heads too low and get together sometime soon, hmm? Fuck them." 

Kali

"Maybe."  She's certainly not disagreeing with Lux.  She plays the good Camarilla subject, and she will continue to do so because...well, because of very good reasons.  She's loyal, as much any Ravnos can be to an institution that marginalizes them, just like so many governments did to her people over the years.  There's a deep bitterness--even hatred--in that one word...maybe.  It's born of remembrance that her fate was determined by those who wouldn't lift a finger to protect her when armies came for them, the outcasts.  The heathens, the unclean.  The Camarilla is not so different than Poland, Romania and so many other countries.

And Kali may be loyal, but she remembers.  "But we have a common enemy.  And the enemy of my enemy...that's someone I'll gladly fucking use to their last drop of blood."

And then, in an instant, the bitterness is gone.  Maybe it never really existed.  Except that it did.  She smiles and it can be heard in her voice.  "You're on.  Take care of yourself and stay safe.  If the light goes out, I might just lose my cool."

Lux

"Oh, but do you promise?" Lux sounds delighted, and her chuckle is soft - more of that shadow-on-silk stuff, less of the nuance around discussion of Tremere and sects. "I will certainly do my best to stay alive; as for safe? Well, safe is boring, isn't it? I'll see you 'round, Kali."

- and a click.