[Sunday] [RP] Wake Up in an Unusual Place
[Corbin needs a tag, Mod-types. As apparently I won't just have Kori here. >.> *Peer-pressure!* Haha.
Entirely for the random factor, not his storyline. Or, maybe, I'll decide after.
Blood/Gore warning for the sensitive sorts.]
It might have been a lie to say that Corbin always woke up somewhere he was familiar with; some nights he woke up with ( Read more... )
Entirely for the random factor, not his storyline. Or, maybe, I'll decide after.
Blood/Gore warning for the sensitive sorts.]
It might have been a lie to say that Corbin always woke up somewhere he was familiar with; some nights he woke up with ( Read more... )
Right about the same moment that he sat up something shaken loose the evening before fell off the wall and smacked Corbin lightly in the top of the head and bounced off into his lap. He first looked down at the skull grinning blankly at him, then upward towards the spot on the wall where it had been situated a moment before; not certain how that had happened. "Oww," he rubbed the sore spot at the back of his head glanced around, taking stock of the entire room.
What a mess.
The answer was simple enough to reach, barely inches away, with that traitorous collection of plastic and glass lens; out of the corner of his eye Corbin regarded the camera but made no effort to reach for it in part because his hands were already full.
He could have chanced a guess, but who needed to guess; it was obvious enough what had transpired.
Some people just got way too into their work.
Standing, stepping over some of the scattered carnage, Corbin wiped a few stray crimson spots off the skull with his jacket sleeve before he looked around for a clean spot to set the object down on. But that would have been like trying to find an unmarked inch of space in a crime scene all movie monster slasher style; since basically the room was reduced to that.
Hector didn't really look all that pleased, though to be honest Hector never looked pleased or much of anything beyond stoic and that was one of the reasons he found him interesting; the problem was it didn't take a genius to guess that the entire travesty that the room had been reduced to probably didn't settle so well.
"Uh," Corbin really loathed having to apologize for anything, he lacked the ability in most cases; so instead he held the skull out towards Hector with a mildly sheepish expression lingering across his pale features.
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A difficult situation indeed.
He walked over to try to re-affix the skull to the wall, just so that he didn’t have to hold it anymore; just being around these remains made him want to contemplate heavy topics. And he couldn’t really do that in Corbin’s presence. “I do hope your film is worth the time I’ll be spending cleaning this room.”
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Sticky stuff; it took him a good few seconds to pry the sludge off his beloved video camera and inspect it for damage.
"So do I," Corbin admitted; a twinge of guilt nagged at him over the entire situation. He should have warned Hector that his methods could get a bit extreme at times but he had been so thrilled at the prospects of being allowed anywhere within that so carefully guarded floor of the building where Hector lived that common sense ended up buried under eagerness.
And he supposed it was only fair that he made some effort to undo some of the damage he didn't really even recall causing in the first place; "I'll help you clean up."
The words were uttered in a shade less steady voice than his normal tone; few things irritated Corbin more than losing any ground gained with the scattered few people he could not only stand but actually enjoyed being around.
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But he didn’t want to talk it over with Corbin here; Hector wasn’t angry, no, but looking at these remains for much longer was going to start making him feel uncomfortable. “Wait here for me. We’ll talk in a moment.” While he did want to talk with the vampire, he wanted some of this mess to start disappearing now, at least from the floor. The skulls and delicate bone decor on the walls were something he wanted to personally clean himself to avoid further damage.
Hector existed his ossuary through a secret bookcase door in his library, and walked several rooms over to his protege Lacroix’s bedroom. A firm knock on the outside wall of the room followed. “Lacroix? I require your assistance immediately.” His tone certainly wasn’t urgent, but it was insistant enough so that his apprentice would know that ‘immediately’ meant ‘right now, and don’t argue.’
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Corbin didn't really expect to get invited back into that room again for a while though, if ever.
Still, all in all it was a fascinating sight and he was more than a little tempted to wander around and prod at all the damp spots, take full stock of the carnage with humored amusement.
Probably not a good idea; accidentally breaking something would have been the worst way to add to the already unpleasant situation.
Left to his own devices when Hector headed out of the room, Corbin turned the camera over and ran his fingers across the buttons at the top of it, mashing the one that sent that device to rewinding the tape with a faint hum of internal motion. Once he heard the soft click that marked the tape reaching the start once more he paused, flipping the side panel out into the small screen used to view images with. Corbin's fingers lingered on the playback button for a few seconds before he decided instead to wait for Hector to return.
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That never worked though, something was always afoot in the Batcave; and Hector still grumbled insistently that he hated that term for their collective lair. Or, more to Hector's style he 'disliked the childish term used to describe the vast impressive hallways of their estate'.
Yeah, whatever; he thought if Hector spent too much time trying his best not to talk like a normal person.
Urgh; that knock at the wall made Lacroix groan and pull the book his hands up over his head in a weak attempt to hide. Not that it would have worked, that was just wishful thinking; Hector had that tone and he knew better than to mess with him when he spoke that way.
"Yeah, I'm coming," he muttered with a climb to his feet from where he had been sitting on his bed and a short trek over to the doorway, leaning his shoulder against it and lifting his eyebrows in a questioning expression.
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The button that opened the door to the laundry room was right beside the elevator in plain sight; that wasn’t exactly a super-secret room that had to be hidden any more carefully than that. Inside was all matter of cleaning products and tools, including the mop. He left that door open so that Lacroix could go back a moment later to take out whatever he needed.
“I will warn you,” Hector said as he led the way back to the library. “The mess is quite gruesome. But do know that no living persons were harmed in its creation.” The young mage was so much more moral than Hector, and that disclaimer really was necessary.
As soon as Hector entered the ossuary again, he offered Corbin, “I apologize for keeping you waiting.” This wasn’t exactly how he’d planned on having Corbin and Lacroix meet, but there wasn’t anything to be done about that now. Hopefully Lacroix would make significant progress cleaning while Hector talked with Corbin elsewhere. “Corbin, this is my protégé, Lacroix.”
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And sometimes the answers should have been left to the imagination; Lacroix's vivid imagination wasn't half as creative as some of the events that carried on inside those walls.
"Gruesome? What's gruesome? Hector...I hate when you tell me things without telling me anyway," Lacroix grumbled as he followed along like the faintly obedient but currently apprehensive lackey he insisted he wasn't. "Why does that not make me feel any better."
And yeah, he didn't know the dead guy Hector liked to hang out with, when Corbin had shown up the evening before he had been ushered off to his room rather than being introduced to the guy.
Some of Hector's affairs he was curious about, but not enough to stick his nose in the middle of it all and find out things still beyond his scope of tolerance.
But right about then that room was really pushing it.
"What the hell?" Startled was an understatement, mildly ill fit just a little better.
Had Freddy Kruger been spending the night playing games in the building and he hadn't been told? Lacroix just stared for a long few minutes; totally ignoring Corbin in favor of watching the ceiling..drip.
And he didn't even want to fathom what that was dripping either; Lacroix had never seen that certain shade of red before in his life, and he had never wanted to either.
Wait.
He shot Hector a look, a very clear 'are you serious?' expression; did Hector expect him to clean up that?
He hadn't even done anything stupid that night to warrant spending the rest of it trying to scrape the remains of whatever Hector had been doing the night before off the walls.
"What were you...no, don't tell me; please just don't tell me." Lacroix lifted a hand to his eyes to block the scene before him, if only for a few moment, but it was still there when he looked again. And it was going to be there until he found a mop, apparently.
"This isn't even remotely fair," he grumbled and then finally realized Corbin was standing there; he figured that had to factor in somehow but he wasn't going to ask. "Yeah, hi."
The temptation to flee back into his bedroom was nearly overwhelming, but then he would have had to deal with some lecture about not being civil mannered or..whatever; he was going to make sure to thank Hector though for the nightmares he was bound to have for a few nights, the jerk.
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He had to bite his lower lip to keep from laughing when Hector's shadow started harking and yelping over all the gore and slime.
"Really?" He wouldn't have expected that, not in a dozen years; not in the form of some wild-eyed, complaining creature that looked ready to bolt. That was Hector's efforts to continue his legacy of death magic and supernatural power?
As humorous as it was, he still a fair amount of respect for Hector and didn't point out any of that amusement, only nodded in greeting to Lacroix and studied him for a lingering moment.
Maybe there was more to the kid than the surface, he wasn't a mage himself so Corbin was no judge of what might lie under the obvious; but the obvious was pretty damn funny.
And he wasn't know for his amazing social skills but at least he had made an effort; Hector knew it took some actual effort to gain anything more than a speculative glance from him at first.
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It might have seemed a little cold, but Hector had cleaned and polished a great number of his mentor Ghede’s rooms and artifacts when he’d been young; it was simply the way a mentor-apprentice relationship was meant to be. Chores like this would increase Lacroix’s tolerance to gore, which was important, if nothing else.
“Let’s talk in the sitting room,” Hector then told Corbin, and stepped back outside to lead him to the very monochromatic living room. As he led the way, he spoke quietly the vampire, just to defend Lacroix’s behavior a little; Lacroix was still new to this, and it was understandable that he’d be a little skittish. “He’s quite young and has yet to grow accustomed to the darker aspects of our craft. Perhaps this will help him do just that.” But he quieted down after that; after all, Lacroix was going to have to come back this way to get the mop, and he didn’t want to talk about the other mage to Corbin right in front of Lacroix.
Hector took a seat on one of the black coffin couches, and shifted the conversation to the film. It was easier to remain his usual calm out here where he didn’t have to look at the gore covering his years worth of collected bones. “What precisely was your motivation for taking the film to... that level?” It was a curious question; he really wasn’t angry, knew that everything would get cleaned up eventually.
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Clean the nasty gore up; where didn't they have a housekeeper for that stuff?
Oh yeah, because everything was secrets and mirrors in the Styles abode and for a moment Lacroix had forgotten that; all the dirty work fell to the poor loser on the lower end of the chain of command.
It really was no fun being the new guy.
"You don't have to leave me alone in here," he mentioned when Hector started for the doorway, "Hector? Really, I won't listen...I promise."
Yeah, for all the good that did him a few seconds later when he was standing there by himself trying not to think too much about the carnage around him.
"You're a real jerk tonight," he grumbled at Hector's retreating form and stalked off to retrieve a mop; going stock still when a crunch sounded under his sneakers.
Gazing downward and lifting his heel only revealed the shattered bits of what looked like a piece of ribcage still half stuck to the floor.
With a distinct shudder and a bolt down the hallway towards the storage closet Lacroix really had to mark that evening as one of the worst he had the displeasure of experiencing so far.
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But Corbin held that opinion that being undead automatically made him a step up from the human race; superiority and all of that. He didn't consider Hector human, just having a pulse didn't make a person a human; Hector was insightful and powerful in his own right so he was closer to an equal than he was on a lower rung of that evolutionary ladder.
Ultimately it wasn't his business anyway if Hector was teaching some kid to be a useful part of mage society, but it was borderline funny, still.
He actually did believe that Hector knew what he was doing though, he had a strong respect for the man; so sooner or later that kid probably was going to become a mage.
His hands were still wrapped around the camera when he followed Hector into the other room and tucked it into his lap once he had found a spot to sit down, fingers trailing in an idle manner over the buttons.
"It happens," there was nothing obvious in the statement because even Corbin himself wasn't always aware of why things escalated so often when he picked up that unassuming device. "Usually not like that, but I should have mentioned it before anyway."
Violence wasn't the focus of his efforts, no, death was; his fixation with capturing the moment when light faded in a person. But where was that in zombies? Violence was a substitute, perhaps, to his real goals.
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Hector was curious to view that tape, but demanding to see it certainly wouldn’t have been polite; if nothing else, Hector esteemed himself on his etiquette, even in odd circumstances like this. Besides, he wouldn’t have wanted to offend Corbin anyway; the vampire had an interest in death that he found alluring. Even if Lacroix had yet to embrace death with a passion, Hector took comfort in the fact that he still did have acquaintances whom he could talk to that did.
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But determination was; he was resolutely determined to catch that moment, to trap the collapse of life in a person. Only in doing that did he stand any chance of showing to others the uncomplicated beauty there was in those fleeting moments.
Appreciating life was something people no longer had any grasp of because they had lost respect for death; the need to change that burned deeply in his veins.
Turning the camera over in his hands a few times, he finally held it out to Hector; the device was not complicated to operate and Corbin only had slight interest in the tape himself because he knew he wouldn't find satisfaction with the images since there was no moment of death to capture with the already dead.
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If Corbin had wanted the tear the life completely out of those zombies, if that had been his goal for the film, it really would have taken that level of violence. Or perhaps even that would not have been enough. If there were any large enough chunks of person still on the floor in the room, they likely still would be twitchy, trying to carry out whatever command Corbin had given last.
If he heard any unmanly screams coming from the ossuary, Hector would have to assume Lacroix stumbled upon something big enough to still move -- a hand, perhaps, fingers still tearing in vain at the remnants of the dead flesh of another zombie. But Hector hoped that would not happen; the last thing he wanted was to completely traumatize his apprentice.
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The more he considered it the more Corbin sorted out the reasoning, and casting his eyes to the small screen when he heard his recorded voice snap some short command in a tone so much more icy than his usual disinterested accent to words only solidified his assumptions.
"I don't think zombies are really a lot of use for what I try to do," he mused thoughtfully, "Something already dead can't die."
That was no fault of Hector's and he felt bad in that he hadn't been able to show Hector the extent of what his work usually pertained to; so very seldom did anyone understand his motives enough to want to view those efforts.
His lack of interest in the zombies the evening before was apparent on the screen, his voice broke in now and then in the recording to urge some command; all barked orders with a hint of sadistic amusement in those corpses destroying each other and the mockery of real death they were.
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