[log] since you walked right into my life and interrupted the flow
So this is how it always goes: something happens to Gates, and then she happens to someone else. Typically, it doesn't start very interesting, just with the mail. Letter (Da), postcard (Katie!), bill (ugh), bill (ugh), chain letter (what the fuck), promotions (pass), newspaper (pass), magazine subscription (when did she get that?), and...a package ( Read more... )
Hasibe tends to not have people happen to her so much as she absorbs them, wholesale, the way someone who was born with a certain preternatural hunger and fire does. Between them, they will probably not even leave bones in their wake. She's alone in the tattoo parlor, since it's usually empty, comfortably occupying a sofa in a little black dress, seamed stockings, and cherry-red pumps, which are kicking the air lightly owing to how Hasi is actually stretched out nonchalantly on her stomach, a book of some of the local artists' work open in front of her.
She doesn't do flash art, but they're nice examples of the style.
Her hand is balanced in her chin, and she glances up when she hears someone come in, smiling already. (Dear Hasibe: what if it's someone who works there? And who is wondering what the hell you're doing poking through everything? Oh, well, it's not like she'll care.)
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Would you look at that - not only is there someone present, it's someone Gates knows! ...or has met once, which in her opinion qualifies. It ought to, for how many people's lives she's irrevocably changed in a matter of hours - Hasi is not one of those, probably not going to be, but the point remains. (They will end worlds.)
Her eyes are a little red, but she'd thoroughly cleaned herself up before she left and double-checked in the bathroom downstairs before she came up here, so she is footloose and fancy free as she greets: "Hello, again! Do you know, I'm not sure if I got your name last time?"
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Hasibe seems to prefer a direct-to-video medium. Although arguably that's not...really a good kind of change, it's certainly broad-ranging, and apparently her star is rising, somewhat without her permission or inclination. (She's supposed to get an agent, soon, to heighten her million-dollar influence and solidify her name brand, which she finds a little bit funny and very tedious.)
"Hasibe," she provides, sunnily, "I think politesse got lost in the discussion of business and its myriad drawbacks. Were you looking for something?"
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"It does that, doesn't it? But - yes, a tattooist, actually! The usual bloke here is sort of afraid of me, mysteriously enough. I think I'm charming." Really, who could ever think otherwise? (Many people, probably.)
Since they seem to be alone - at least for now - Gates boosts herself up onto the reception desk with her purse in her lap, flipflops hanging loosely off the bottom of her feet. Business does not seem to be the present order of her day, although as conversation topics go it's one that's very difficult to exhaust and they may well end up there anyway. "What about you? Waiting? Browsing?"
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"I've never met him, but I'm a little bit new around these parts." To say the least, but she has a gift for understatement when paired with a wryness that suggests anything but. ...imagine if she'd been around a year or two prior; she could have met some divine great-great-uncles! (No.)
"I am perusing the selection! I don't think they do piercing here, which I'm also entertaining, but there's certainly a divergence in quality compared to what I'm used to on the home front; does the Nexus attract talent, or does it just hoard it, I wonder?"
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"Hoard, I think - once it's touched someone, they stay touched, have you noticed that yet? People who profess to hate this place come back, again and again and again...and again." She lets her shoes ('shoes') slip off and land on the floor, after some precarious toe-work that wasn't trying very hard. "Me, I don't hate it."
No, Gates comes back willingly, because in some sort of magnificent irony it's only through the nexus that she's achieved something that resembles stability if you squint at it through a warped glass window. She dislikes it on occasion the same way that you wish you lived somewhere it didn't rain so much (but you'd hate it more if it stopped raining).
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"I don't feel very touched just yet," Hasibe muses, thoughtfully, "but I was trying to come here in the first place."
Pre-existing awareness of the place has probably done her a few favors. Also, you know, ...weird bloodlines, her approach is always going to be different, even if she never ever realizes quite why (unlikely, but it's not as though Hasi is actively investigating why she's a freak).
"Not to mention I know a handful of people who would freely and continually return to a place they professed to dislike just out of sick fascination, but that's neither here nor there."
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Gates remembers coming here by accident mostly, the first few times; how Stefan destroyed one of the doors downstairs, which did not have the decency to remain destroyed for very long at all. If she were more well-adjusted then she'd probably be doing something healthier now than pretending that nothing is wrong while she plans her next tattoo and chats with a relative stranger, but that woman wouldn't be her, and thus is someone else's problem.
"The occasional kidnap issue is worth mentioning, but I bet if you were trying to come here you already know about that one." ...no, really, it seems like something that would've been covered. "People are fucking odd is my conclusion, though, in a general sense and not specifically relating to things like unexpectedly finding yourself in a bar. -and really there are worse ways to wake up."
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"Like naked and tied to the back of a refrigerator in a church basement," she suggests, after a considering pause, as though this has happened to her.
"Tragically I cannot help us get tattooed without an artist directly on hand, but maybe we can find somewhere else adequate."
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"'Church' really makes it, I think," Gates says, contemplatively, as if considering the assorted ways in which she's woken up in churches. Probably churches in England, and probably at least some of them actually happened.
(Not the most interesting ones. Speculation is great.)
"That aside - that sounds like either a plan or an adventure of some kind, and I am all about both of these things. I've got something in mind for myself."
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Hasi never actually verifies most of what she says (see: "Hasibe" is not even her real name), but she chooses to believe that even if she hasn't done something insane, there's always time. She abandons the book of art and snags her phone from her bag on the floor - which, uh, it's leather and Hermes, Hasibe, pick the damn thing up.
"If Boston suits you, I think I can wake someone up. He'll pout, but he loves me, so he'll get over it." Alternately Hasibe has this guy's balls in a vise, which is also entirely possible. As is the notion that maybe he enjoys it, given her on-screen image. She skims through her phone book.
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It takes her altogether too short a time to decide that additional inconvenience for someone else will only make this better, and she is perfectly all right with jaunting off to Boston with someone she's only met once before. "I'm game. Rayne can be a little hard to pin down at the best of times, around here."
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"Maybe someone ought to invest in a GPS system. Or a cage." She switches to Spanish when someone picks up on the other end of the line. "Diana! Put your big brother on the line, I know he's not asleep. Is he avoiding my calls? Because I hate it when he does that, then I have to show up and make a scene and his neighbors make that face that he loves --"
She smiles, suddenly, with amused satisfaction.
"There you are. Di hasn't gone back to school, huh? Hey, a friend of mine and I are looking to come down to the parlor, are you open?" There's a pause. "Good. Okay. It'll be like five minutes, we're already on our way. No, I didn't plan this! It was spur-of-the-moment, you're just nearest and dearest to my heart. That's a good thing, Javier. Okay. Do you want us to take like five extra minutes so you can clean up and be very professional? Okay, bye.She snaps the phone shut and sits up straight, smoothing down her dress, crossing her legs at the knee ( ... )
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"Fabulous, let's." She slips down from the counter, sliding her feet back into her flip-flops - they'll be less of a nuisance with what she has planned for herself - and doublechecking that her dress is sitting where it should be and nothing's spilled out of her purse that she might require. "Do you know, I don't think I've ever been to Boston?"
...it's true.
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"Really! Well, where are you from? I bet I've never been there." She is also really not from Boston, per se; it's just where Hasi makes her home, these days. The accent is suggestive of some kind of vaguely Southern roots, which always throws people because with the name and everything they expect her to be Exotic.
She veers for her portal, rather than employing a pinpoint, lighting a cigarette as they walk. (...she uses a lighter.)
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"London, originally, but Liverpool last before New York." Her own accent is muddled - somewhere under there her Brixton roots might very well be identifiable to a keen listener, but they're tangled up with her devotion to other languages and tendency to meander all over. 'English' tends to cover it, and let it go at that.
As much as she's got used to pinpoints - useful things - portals are still more comfortable, more familiar. More usual. They feel natural to her, not like the technology she finds herself using regardless.
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