I have seen the future, brother, it is murder.

[iron_and_latin]

((closed RP for Sam and the Master))

(It's like an old picture in black and white from some noir film, a beautiful woman smoking a cigarette, the man across from her sipping something expensive from a highball glass. They're talking, words he doesn't quite understand, and there's laughter in their tones, an almost lightness. He recognizes her, it'

Comments

[hear_the_drums]

The Master hadn't exactly been expecting any visitors, but then, he rarely did. Still, he usually had a sense of when people were about to show up, and the fact that this sense had failed him in this particular instance was unnerving.

He left the lights low inside City Hall and went to open the door. And he certainly had to hand it to Sam Winchester; he was one of the last people the Master had thought to find on the other side.

"Hello," he said quietly, his expression betraying a -faked- delight at seeing the young man.

[iron_and_latin]

"Hey," Sam answered, himself all pleasantness. He was holding his usual Mickey-Mouse notebook and Disney Princess pen, and he scribbled something down at the sight of the Master. "Sorry to bug you. I'm helping Cayce out with an update on her census; I don't know if you've noticed but there's been a lot of disappearances lately, so we thought it might be a good idea to do a bit of a door-to-door thing this time around."

[hear_the_drums]

That... was exactly the wrong thing to be bringing up.

As the disappearances had been more than noticed by the Master, and he had been trying his very hardest to ignore it. All of it. For reasons that this young man would not be privy to.

"Mm. And what precisely is the point of involving you in this census? As I recall, a piece of paper tacked onto a bulletin board seemed to serve her well in the past."

No. No, strangely enough the child was lying. And it wouldn't have been quite so obvious were it not for a wave of psychokinetic energy that the Master could almost taste, the way it radiated outward from Sam Winchester, and he couldn't believe he never noticed it before, if only due to the sheer magnitude of it.

[iron_and_latin]

Sam half shrugged.

"Not everybody pays attention to stuff on the message board," he pointed out. "I thought, given how freaky the whole situation is, people might feel better if we had something a little more definitive. I know it'd make me."

He allowed a vaguely anxious expression to appear in his eyes and a concerned tone in his voice, playing it a bit naive, a bit timorous, hoping that might make the man a little less on-guard. He knew he was probably in way over his head here, and dealing with something a bit different than his usual, but he could only try and hope that he might get away with it. "Your friend the Doctor can be pretty flighty about answering the censuses, for example." He shrugged again.

[hear_the_drums]

"Well, you can't expect an alien who was raised on a planet that had no need of census taking to actually take the process seriously." He almost sounded genuinely helpful just then. Without taking into account how his eyes were steadily narrowing.

Tsk tsk; bringing up the Doctor would not be an effective way to push his guard off-centre. "So then. What precisely were you planning on asking me?" -if he indeed had an plan at all up to this point-

[iron_and_latin]

Sam hadn't missed the narrowing eyes, and was trying to discern if they meant anything more than that the Master was simply finding this visit annoying. He suspected it did

[hear_the_drums]

The 'whole galaxies at your fingertips' comment elicited a laugh that had been long ago designed to make all sorts of people nervous. "Yes. Yes, used to it. Hm."

He had little patience for thinking about where people went, though. If only because there had been enough time spent on the subject, and all of the theories were less than satisfactory. "Why would you bother thinking that? Because it makes you feel more comfortable? There's not much point to it in the end. You'll never be certain, and so your reasoning is useless." Reasoning was never truly useless, of course, but if Sam Winchester wanted to push his buttons, he could push right back.

[iron_and_latin]

Sam gave him a suspicious glance.

"Well of course I can't be certain," he answered. "At least not until I disappear myself." A short laugh. "Then I guess I'll find out."

[hear_the_drums]

This conversation was going nowhere in a hell of a hurry.

"I guess you will," the Master said brightly. He made the easy push with his own mental energy, his voice seeming to take up physical space. "Go away now."

[iron_and_latin]

'Yeah, sure. No problem," Sam agreed. "Sorry, didn't mean to bore you." He risked a glance over the Master's shoulder; he couldn't see that much of the room beyond, but it didn't look like there was anyone there with him. So Sam figured he'd find a bench maybe and stake the place out. As discreetly as possible. "Again, sorry to bug you. Have a good day." He took a moment to tuck the pen away.

[hear_the_drums]

Wait a minute.

Let's try it the old fashioned way. "You will obey me." It sounded like something of a throwaway line, perhaps because he wasn't quite sure how this was panning out yet.

[iron_and_latin]

Sam glanced back up at him, opened his mouth and considered for a moment before answering simply;

"Excuse me?"

[hear_the_drums]

Maybe he was a little slow. "You. Will. Obey. Your Master."

Any minute now....

[iron_and_latin]

Okay, this just went real fucked up, real fast. Sam took a step backwards, and then another, all of a sudden not quite ready to turn his back on the Master.

"Yeah, okay man. Chill out." Obey your Master? What kind of freaky old-school sci-fi shit was that? Oh right, he was an alien. Well, that answered that question.

Goddamn the stupid park, anyway.

[hear_the_drums]

Psychokinetic energy. That wave from before, it had to be good for something, didn't it? It hadn't quite felt like that kind of energy, but it was entirely possible, given the right kind of focus. "You've got a barrier," the Master surmised, smiling slowly. "It would have helped you if you had known to run. Of course, the longer you stay rooted to the spot

[iron_and_latin]

A barrier?

"I don't know what you're talking about," he answered, ready to deny anything and everything, whatever the Master said. He turned as the man circled him, something in his eyes and the way he moved so much like the yellow-eyed demon in that moment. Sam grit his teeth and stood his ground, though he fell instinctively into a more defensive posture.

Listening more carefully now to what the Master was saying, when the question was asked Sam noticed the change in his voice for the first time. But more than that, he felt it, in a way that he couldn't quite identify but made his blood run cold.

"Is that a jibe about my posture?" he asked stiffly.