002. [visual] in debt to the earth
John Constantine has inherited a bowling alley.
In a burst of bizarre irony - perhaps even the kind worthy of giant hamsters God's sense of humor - the man who owned the place had not a week ago died of bees (and Balthazar), so were he in other circumstances he might have approached this by like ...finding a new apartment. One not above a bowling ( Read more... )
In a burst of bizarre irony - perhaps even the kind worthy of giant hamsters God's sense of humor - the man who owned the place had not a week ago died of bees (and Balthazar), so were he in other circumstances he might have approached this by like ...finding a new apartment. One not above a bowling ( Read more... )
Hi, John. Penelope's back to... well, if not fighting-fit, then back to form, anyway. By which I mean she's Being Snotty Over The Tablets Again. Don't take it personally, that's just her way. In reality, she's completely checking out your tattoos. (She's also rather well dressed, for someone who's basically stuck on a couch. The gorilla is conspicuously absent.)
"I know some dead people, does that help?"
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"It doesn't hurt." Which is a start. "And not really, hobbies are something you do because you want to. Usually. If it's not the case you might want to find a new hobby. Are you talking about ghosts?"
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Penelope's gonna light up a cigarette here, because you know what, she's gone two entire weeks without one, and now that she can take an actual breath, she feels at least part of that breath ought to be nicotine.
"Okay, no--" she says, and plucks the cigarette from her lips, waving it around a little. "If I meant ghosts I'd say ghosts. No I mean like, Dead People. People that are walking around and talking and annoying me and are not fucking alive, that is what I mean."
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He also wonders if every woman he meets in Taxon is going to be a smoker, and how Penny would take it if he casually inquired about sucking the smoke out of her lungs. He refrained from asking this with Cat, but that was on his first day here, and he's been here like an entire week now, which means if he had any sense of restraint at all it's long gone.
....he settles for gum, the empty package of which he slaps down next to the tablet like he wants to hurt it. This presumes such an intent can be read in a gesture; his face mostly gives the usual 'caustically amused' impression. "In my experience ghosts have got all of that covered. But you're talking about something tangible."
Notably: he has known exactly one tangible ghost, and that's not something he's going to bring up here. Or ...ever.
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In Bruce Wayne's house.
"Yeah, I'm not talking like a Sixth Sense I-See-Dead-People thing, where I'm the only one that can see them or whatever. They look normal on the outside, only they like... Look, they don't feel right. They don't eat or drink or sleep, they only breathe when they need to talk, their hearts don't beat. Their bodies are like, hollow. It's like a soul in a shell ( ... )
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Somehow this has turned from theoretical talking shop into a kind of shop ...talk he's never heard before; there are such things as zombies, and he is - or was, as of being Taxonized - pretty well acquainted with a formerly-practicing still-extremely-badass witch doctor, but this doesn't sound exactly the same as much as it might be similar. "You're not the only one who can see them," he confirms, linking one arm over the other in front of him and managing with a reasonable amount of success not to just stare at her cigarette. Look at her face, John, there you go. "But are you the only one who can tell what they are?"
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The sound of her voice says this is a lie. The look on her face says i would not mind tasting you at some point. No one has ever accused Penelope Lane of being subtle. Lay it on a little thicker, why don't you? "Did I mention I fucking hate Dead people? Because I really, really do."
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"I'm getting that impression." He grins slantways at her; her predicament itself is not exactly funny, but look - the way she's explaining it has a certain charm, kind of the way sledgehammers do. That's ...a compliment; there are ways she reminds him of Ellie, and not just physically. Ellie was - well, what she was, but there were reasons he liked her other than his own tendency to self-destructiveness. "Sounds like you might have a Destiny problem." His capital letters are as audible as hers. "Did they follow you here?"
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Honestly, it's been a double-edged sword, coming to Taxon. Sure, she's gotten away from her Otherworldly Stalkers, and yeah she doesn't have to go to a crappy low-paying low-respect job every day, and everything's free, including cat food, sewing supplies, and alcohol, which is mostly what she would spend her money on anyway. But she's isolated entirely from her family, her best friend. Every familiar thing in her life, and now she's got to start over almost from scratch in a place full of vampires and bombs and talking goddamn hamsters for fuck's sake. She gets away from her Destiny, but in return she gets Broken Ribs and A Guy That Looks Like A Creepy Pimp Version Of Her Dead Father.
"So why're you asking about this shit, anyway?" Penelope gestures with her cigarette and leans back in her chair, unsubtly shifting the topic away from herself. Are we sensing a pattern, here? "Can't imagine it could lead to anything good."
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The commentary on where exactly that puts each of them can probably go left unsaid. "It did come with my apartment attached, but someone's sense of humor is pretty fucked up, if you're asking me."
Which she - didn't, but. This has never stopped him before. He hasn't figured out how he feels about being in Taxon yet - for one thing, he's not constantly surrounded by the forces of fucking darkness, but that's a double-edged sword on its own; he's used to it, for a given value of 'used to' where it means 'seeing the parts of the world most people get to bypass' and more pointedly it's all he knows how to do. Being the guy who's managed to piss off both Heaven and Hell to such an extent that they seem to spend a lot of time fighting over which side can screw up his life worse is not a point of ego, exactly (it completely is), but it does comprise a significant part of his identity ( ... )
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Penelope feels the need to smoke some more, so she focuses on that for a second, because she realizes she's venting just a tiny bit more than usual to a perfect stranger. This is probably because she hasn't really done much talking at all for just over two weeks now, and it's been backing up in her brain like paperwork while the boss is on vacation. And on top of that, Morgana has commandeered her cat. Who the hell else is she going to talk to?
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"You got disapproval? I'm jealous, I just got cryptic bullshit."
In fairness, he was asking some pretty existential questions of hamsters. "And denying a person's natural rights to surliness is just cruel."
Who knows how serious that is. Is there a natural right to surliness? There could be in the Hell Bible!
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"Yeah, cryptic bullshit sounds about right. Did you seriously expect answers? They're hamsters, for fuck's sake. Actually I'm sort of disappointed, I was hoping they'd be more impressive."
As for the debate about the natural right to surliness, fought out in thousands of international court cases and parliaments worldwide, the answer is: There damn well better be, or Penelope quits.
"You'd be pretty surly if a crazy person blew you up and crushed your ribs under a broken tram line too. I mean, I assume, unless you're all lined with titanium on the inside or something, who the fuck knows around this place."
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That, his expression says, is a damn dirty lie, the optimism. "And no, I wasn't expecting answers, if I haven't gotten them in thirty-five years, why should that change now?" Someone is bitterrrrrrrrr.
Meanwhile, 'fucking up John's life' is not exactly what Penny's mouth is doing. If nothing else, she has 'not being a hamster' going for her. Also, being cute and vulgar, both of which are things he enjoys, in what passes for day to day normalcy for him. "Besides, a quantifiable reason for your surliness puts you one up on me."
To be fair the overall reason for his surliness is a twenty year old suicide, but why put a damper on the conversation.
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Leisurely, she blows a smoke ring at the tablet camera and shrugs. "It's a matter of patience, honestly, and ninety-nine percent of people don't give enough of a shit to hang around long enough to find out what makes a man, so to speak. If you think you don't have a reason for being an angry antisocial bitch, truth is you've probably got so many reasons you can't keep them straight anymore, and likely you've had them so long you can't remember ever being other than what you are."
A pause.
"And I should know."
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Since they're talking.
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