01 / 12 / 11 - Baron (NPC), Belladonna, Harrison, Isabel, Jean-Paul, Lilah, Remy, Terry
It might be late to the central time zone, but to west coast internal time clocks, it's not nearly so. Terry's tucked into a corner with her laptop and a few different search programs going, a bag of chips at one knee and a plastic cup at the other.
If Harrison had any empathic ability, the entire mood of the suite would be disgruntled. Fortunately, his thin-worn temper has no superhuman effect on his teammates; unfortunately, it still has whatever human effect it manages. It is likely there was yelling at some point, either at the hospital or behind closed doors. At any rate, for now he is mostly grouched into silence on the sofa, legs stretched out and heels propped on the coffee table, head set back so he can glower at the ceiling.
Not unlike a chastised cat, Remy lurks at another of the corners of the room, not so much cowed as cautious and curious mingled. His set of lockpicks is unrolled, and with a soft cloth in hand he's polishing them in between assaults upon a quarter of a muffaletta sandwich. Other quarters lurk closer to the centre of the room, peace offering or unpoisoned dinner. Or both.
Nose still slightly red from skin rubbed raw yesterday, Lilah is bundled into her own room rather than in the living room. She sleeps in her jeans, in a worn shirt sans bra, however she's not currently asleep. Instead, she twists in the bed as if trying to find a comfortable spot, pillows pushed to the floor but the blankets pulled up to her chin, held there with her fists propped under. Whatever her mood, it leaks not at all, shields held tightly to exclude her teammates thoughts or gruntled status.
Isabel sits nearish Remy. In theory she's reading something on her laptop screen. In reality, her gaze has drifted, distracted, to the polish of his lockpicks and the evidence of still more New Orleans food.
The nice thing about a shower is that it is a few minutes of promised, quiet isolation in the noisy press of a mission suite. The bad thing about a shower is that they end. Quickly. Jean-Paul lurks in the doorway to the bathroom with steam a fading whisper in the air. He leans up against the frame of the door as he looks over the main room. His head tips to the side as he towels his hair in a ruffle. Against all logic of going to the effort to setting post-shower, he is dressed, although bare-footed.
Ah, the tense silence that follows domestic disputes. Surely even a quiet, polite knock from balcony-way must seem shocking.
If Remy's catlike behavior is chastised, Belladonna's a little closer to scruffed and dunked in an unwelcome bath: she emerges from the room she's been sharing with Terry. She hasn't taken a bath, though, proverbial or otherwise, but she has divested herself of leather skirt and heeled boots, of faux-green contacts and the makeup that previously obscured the profusion of freckles across her face (and elsewhere.) Her hair is still up, though, and her shirt still the same from the club; they are paired with pajama pants and bare feet, however. Whatever corner she was going to go lurk in remains unoccupied, as with the knock at the balcony her head lifts, her eyes narrow.
Remy's head snaps up from where, by the expression so swiftly wiped away, he'd been about to offer Isabel a half-teasing bite of the sandwich. But the muffaletta is secondary now, as Remy observes with thin and tense humour that "I think someone's stealin' my schtick."
Harrison jerks upright at that knock, quiet and polite as it is. His gaze snaps to the glass of the balcony door, trying to see any hint of figure in the darkness. And then he reaches over for his sidearm, left nearby on the end table next to him, and slowly stands. The trouble with vague rooms is that there's no way to know who's closest to the door.
"Did someone lock Lilah out?" Terry asks, her own head not lifting, though a glance is shot toward the patio door from the corner of her eye.
Isabel's gaze shifts away from Remy to follow his upward and toward the balcony. Her eyes narrow, but she does not stir.
Perhaps Harrison can get a glimpse of outline, the hint of a cane, narrow shoulders, the squared-off plateau of the top hat. Again. Knock, knock. A reedy voice comes through the door, but hardly spectrally too-close. "Open up. I can see I'm quite outnumbered."
Terry slides her laptop off her knees, and shifts quickly to her feet, remaining in a squat while she knuckles her eyes and looks to Harrison. She rises, eyes widening at the voice. She can be closest to the door if he wants.
Jean-Paul watches with narrowed eyes at the knock, response, further response. He takes his towel and quietly, casually, unconcernedly heads for his room to exchange terry cloth for metal.
In the interest of getting the door open, Harrison opts to move to open the door himself rather than signal someone else to do so. His gun is gripped loose and familiar, pointing down at the floor where it is clearly entirely harmless.
Quietly, Remy reaches into a pocket and produces a pack of cigarettes. He sets it on the floor, and then sets about quickly rolling his lockpicks back up together as he darts a look to Harrison as well.
Belladonna blinks, not-quite owlish, and turns on her heel to retreat back into the bedroom. When she emerges again, it is with the small, small-of-back holster and belt or -- whatever -- on over her pajama pants, sidearm tucked safely away, but within reach. You know, at the small of her back. This pose is awesome, shut up.
The Baron waits on the balcony, in his top-hat, his skull mask with plugged nostrils, his white-gloved hands clasped over the silver cane. As the door opens, he tchs, a deep-throated shiver of the bone-rattle. "Guns? Against an unarmed man?" Harrison's gun apparently shares the Baron's disdain. It warms in his grasp, softens, then tries to wriggle between his fingers like a caught eel.
"Not so unarmed, it seems," Terry says evenly, close enough that the low-voiced sound carries as she watches the wriggling gun. She closes a step or two.
"And how do we know--" Harrison startles first at the warming, then at the wriggling, and the gun slips from his grip to thump the carpet. GEE I HOPE THAT DOESN'T GO OFF.
"...charming," is Belladonna's contribution, her voice gone a little exasperated-weary. She keeps her own hands away from her own gun; maybe he won't notice it.
Jean-Paul's gun is held firm in his hands, because if he holds it really tight, it isn't going anywhere. He remains toward the back of the gathered group, and takes his stance against the wall.
"Y'had to have expected it," is Remy's suggestion, wry and cautious as he shifts uneasily in his corner, feeling conspicuously under-armed. (His gun is in his jacket still. A longing glance is flicked towards the suite living room's closet.)
Isabel has no gun, but like Remy, she is not precisely weaponless, nor unready. For the moment she sits silent and watches, tugging her laptop closed.
"I have come to you in your seat of power. Going to begrudge me self-protection?" The Baron rises as Harrison drops the gun, as Terry takes her two steps forward, his legs drawn up under him in something like an arrested leap. "You captured a teenage girl to get my attention. You have it. What do you want?" Jean-Paul's gun's going a little rubbery-warm, too. Watch out.
Fingers curling tighter over metal and plastic, Jean-Paul tries to stubborn it still. STOP THAT. His gun remains angled low, and he transfers it to this off-hand, all but harmless.
Trying to retain as much dignity as he can, while also keeping his eyes on the Baron, Harrison crouches slowly in an attempt to retrieve his gun. Bruised ego showing in the snappish edge to his voice, he says, "No one's going to shoot you long as you don't give us a reason." As to what they want, he says, "What exactly you're doing in New Orleans and what you know about the murders."
Terry startles to stillness, eyes narrowing. Just out of reach, she flexes onto the balls of her socked-feet in rising tension.
The bone-shook laughter bounces unnaturally from wall to wall. "What /I'm/ doing in New Orleans? Are you still pretending at FBI? The FBI don't fly, my little darlings." Something offens about the shadows - they grow inky, too-stable, with none of the natural ephemerality of shadows. The Baron's mask seems to sneer. "I am raising up a world for mutants in this mad scrabble for souls. The question is what you are doing. Are you here to help or hinder? To steal or to support?" The reedy voice goes hissed, "For the murders were thefts. Thefts by the envious, the destructive. My people killed out of fear. That's what I know. Are you here to help me protect my flock, or here to - interlope?"
Jean-Paul fails to look guilty. His feet do, however, remain firmly planted to the ground. NO FLYING HERE.
Sitting in a shadowy corner as he is, Remy's cat impression redoubles -- if he were actually an alley stray, this is the point at which he'd poof up massively and scuttle away, arch-backed. As it is, he and the lockpicks sliiiiiide a little along the walls, away from the corner and its density of inky dark. The cigarettes and the sandwich stay.
It's the laughter that grasps Lilah's attention where she tries to sleep, unfamiliar as it carries only softly through the door to her bedroom. She pushes out of bed, crossing to open the door slightly to peer out from behind it. Her eyes first catch on the Baron before going to Harrison with a slight widening. Fingers curl around the edge of wood, but she doesn't open it further or close it again.
"We're here to stop the killings. No matter who is doing them," Terry says with a frown, hand reaching out the the edge of the patio door frame while the shadows get... strange.
Belladonna shifts restlessly in her doorway, but doesn't retreat back into the bedroom; instead, her arms fold to hug across her chest, and there is a slight, subtle lift of her chin as she mixes body language signals all over the place.
"Family of criminals isn't much of a flock," Harrison replies. Gun now firmly returned to his hand, he stands and straightens up to his full height, shoulders set back in a rather overt display of attempted male dominance. "Sounds more like a mafia."
Isabel's gaze flicks briefly to Remy, then to Terry and Harrison in turns. She frowns silently.
The Baron - chuckles. The darkness breathes out a crawl of skeletal cats, rats, and serpents to play upon the floor amid our agents. Just a little atmosphere. And Harrison's gun, once retrieved, husks out into nothing but a thinly-held together sheaf of dried cornstalk and dried pea. Little Midwestern to leaven it out. "Be that as it may be," his voice rises as the apartment slips deeper into weird. "Our goals are the same. My power infuriates some - lesser practitioners, and I would lose no more people. Why, if you had a - name, or a series of names, I would be happy to be of . . . service."
Lilah makes a small sound, something that might be akin to fear or startlement at the skeletal creatures that now inhabit the great room. As if spurred by that, with Harrison still speaking with the man, she lowers her shields to reach a tendril of telepathy towards the Baron's mind.
Belladonna sliiiides a foot away from a shadow.
Terry jumps and turns and flattens against the doorframe as the shadows grow shapes. "Stop that!" she says, anger and discomfort putting an edge to her voice.
Muttering a sharp curse as his gun shifts once again in his hand, Harrison does still keep a grip on it. IT'S STILL A REAL GUN, RIGHT? "So you can -- what?" he asks, clearly on edge as his gaze darts to the livening shadows. "Hunt them down in return?"
Remy rises in a rustle as a skeletal rat-creature gambols too close to his feet, leaving him with his back to the wall and a mind warring visibly between logic and all the superstitions a Cajun boyhood on the bayou can leave him with. A hand in his pocket closed over a handful of change and shiny things... but still he keeps the tingle in his fingers of burgeoning power restrained.
Good idea-- except the Baron doesn't have a mind. No, seriously, the floating skull man is as psionically empty as a bag made of tissue paper. This is a problem. For empty as he is, he keeps speaking, amused and irritated in oddly weighted measure. "I am not a murderer." A couple of skeleton rats go leaning shoulder to shoulder and chitter together as if in some private joke. "I believe in firm - deterrents. If you have some legal identity, which I /doubt/," and a cat joins in the cackling, "you are welcome to the perpetrator. As long as you leave me and mine alone."
At Remy's movement, Isabel's gaze moves sharp-frowned toward him. There is a moment of silent question in her eyes and the arch of her brow before she looks back to the Baron, jaw all stubborn-set. Her gaze tracks a skeletal cat and she shivers despite herself.
Just briefly, Jean-Paul closes his eyes, as if by doing so he can shut out the skeleton scrabble and find what truth lies beneath. There aren't /really/ laughing, leaning rats and cats, right? RIGHT?! He does not, however, close his eyes for very long. An uneasy, untrusting twitch reopens them.
"No murder, but nightmares?" Terry suggests, sidestepping closer, lifting her foot up and /over/ one of the shadows. NNnnngh.
At finding nothing, Lilah draws away from the feel of the man's mind as if she can forget that it doesn't exist despite his physical form before her. Instead, she flings out her thoughts to Harrison, saying softly, << I can't feel him. He could have an inhibitor on which means that what he's doing would be--. >> She stops with a shuddering look to a skeleton snake that slips across the floor in front of her door.
Harrison does not shiver, but there is a sort of clamping down of his muscles that suggests suppressed reaction to the chittering animals. "Not exactly prepared to leave you to carve out your own crime syndicate," he tells the Baron. A muscle in his jaw twitches at the sudden touch of Lilah's mind. << Can't you work through those? >> he asks her. His thoughts and emotions are a jumble of forced reassurance to himself that what the Baron is doing isn't /real/, that magic does not exist, that it's some mutation or other.
Belladonna's shiver is not a subtle thing: it crawls up her spine and through her shoulders, and ends on a sharp shake of her head as the cat laughs; one hand frees itself from its clench of the opposite elbow, and she touches her fingers to the medal at her neck, then drops her hand as if burned. (If not really.) She shifts the focus of her gaze from the unsettling aparition of the Baron, skips to Jean-Paul, to Harrison, then over to settle briefly on Remy. She starts to shy away from another skeletal-shadow, but instead squares her feet and tries to stand her ground.
As Lilah withdraws her focus, there is perhaps a glimmer of something. Not the Baron, but /past/ the Baron. Terry's step forward earns her getting stuck ankle-deep in shadow, but only for a half-moment, with an appended "Just a little nightmare," on a withered laugh. It is Harrison that gets his attention, though. The skeletal animals increase in size and general jaggedness, all fangs and spines and claws. "I'm sorry? Are you saying this meeting was a trap? You're here to shut me down? Oh dear, oh dear." There might be the beginnings of a worrying discomfort around Harrison's chest.
<< I don't kn--, >> Lilah starts to respond, her replied thoughts trailing off at the glimpse of something else to the edges of her telepathy. She takes a step forward, away from the door and into the living room as she pushes to explore it, leaving her without wood to hide behind.
A little noise--not a squeak!--escapes Terry at the ankle covering, and she shoots a closer look at the Baron from the corner of her eye. "Is that the kind of world you're building for mutants? One of violence and blood?"
For the moment, Harrison offers no indicative reaction to that discomfort as his hands stay at his sides and his expression remains hard. "Maybe," he replies. "Like you said, you /are/ outnumbered, and I'm sure the police would love to have you."
Oh, there's definitely something to explore, a small nova-star of psionic flare, if one starting to ebb with the first etchings of fatigue. On the balcony. The Baron's creatures keep evolving sharper, more dangerous, the cats lowering like panthers, the rats a-bristle, the snakes coiling closer to feet. Awful lot of snakes. The pressure in Harrison's chest dully intensifies. "You have to own the crime before you can control it. The police are ineffectual. Hand me over to them, nothing will have changed, and you'll leave my people without their means. And I think you'll find I'm a hard man for even as many as you." The psionic flare comments in a low surface mutter, << . . . how the Hellfire Club does it. They buy repellent for crusading, ass-backward yo-yos? >>
Hesitation writes across Lilah's features for a brief moment, tongue touching her lips to wet them sans any makeup to simulate a split one. She presses into the brightness of that mind, slowly as if it would help the intrusion to go unnoticed.
Tension ratchets up Isabel's spine, pulling her visibly straight in her chair as she leans to slide her laptop carefully away. Her gaze remains stubborn on the skull-faced man.
"We're not here for you," Jean-Paul says, sudden and sharp as he re-plants his feet to avoid that nagging temptation to skim upwards in the air. "We're here to stop the murders. If you want to see the killers brought to justice and your people safe, then cut the crap and work with us. For Christ's sake, at this rate there will be more dead by week's end."
Harrison glances to Jean-Paul with a long, heavy gaze and a clenched jaw, but he says nothing to contradict him. Looking back to the Baron, one hand lifts to ghost across his chest as he might brush away the building pressure. "You cut out the theatrics, we might be able to have an actual conversation."
The Baron crosses his legs mid-air and snap-snaps a cigar into being, which he sets between his suddenly not at all mask-like teeth. The cats, rats, and snakes wane away into miniature and slide back into the too-dark shadows, which fade away. The pressure stays, though. Sorry, Harrison. Just fer another minute. "Theatrics cut. Mind your manners, I'll mind mine. Now, what assistance can I give you that you'll accept, my boys and girls?" << Call it a bust and try again at this rate. Poor Selby. Pull out Katrina and Julien and Hermes, try out -- Mexico, maybe. Could go for the Day of the Dead imagery. Just something about skulls. They grow on you. Not so much faux-federal agents. Assist them here, they'll trap me later. >> He seems oblivious to intrusion, at least so far.
Jean-Paul returns Harrison's gaze, sharp in the twitch of his eyebrow. It is like he is totally unsympathetic to his /pain/. He sets his gun to the side. (Close to the side.) "Why those three? Who has reason to want revenge? Start there and we might get somewhere," he says, with only a faint thread of tension in his voice.
Harrison rubs a hand more firmly across his chest now, and when he snaps, "/Stop it/," there is something of the deeply unsettled in the edges of his voice that is far more real than any reaction to chittering animal-shadows.
<< He didn't, really. He's on the balcony. That's why I couldn't feel him, >> Lilah tattles to Harrison, her words kept at a whisper as she continues listening to the Baron. << He's talking about pulling out and going to Mexico, and--. >> She stops, listening more on the Baron.
Jean-Paul shuts up, and gives Harrison an almost wounded look.
Belladonna's attention slashes sideways, twists to focus on Harrison at his snap. /What/.
Terry pushes away from the frame, gingerly scanning the floor for any further skelatal intrusions.
Isabel's gaze snaps from Jean-Paul to Harrison, sharply edged but silent. She watches him for a moment as they wait for the Baron's reply.
Harrison's /snap/ actually intensifies the pressure for a split second with a whispered suggestion of strain. Shouldn't work yourself too hard, codger. And then, by degrees, the pressure relents away. The Baron as Baron ignores Harrison's snap and looks lofty at Jean-Paul. "Who has reason? Every would-be criminal mastermind that my people encroached on. Those three are the unlucky ones they got to first. I have no doubt they'd poison all of us if they could. If I had /names/," he adds in a hiss, "I would have already handled the matter. My particular gifts don't run to scrying." << Do run to respect, though. Watch yourselves, I can do worse than a little chest jiggling. Oh hell, this is busted. Who are these yo-yos? Too old for next-gen X-Men. >>
Fingers clenching briefly in the material of his shirt -- good lord, goes the whisper in his mind, this can't really be real at his age -- Harrison stays silent. Then, as the pressure gradually relents, he finds space to relax. As much as one relaxes in a situation like this.
<< He's dangerous, >> Lilah warns, her own whisper insistent and frightened in Harrison's mind. << His gifts--. He's still on the balcony. >> Nevertheless, she starts a slow exploration of the thoughts, grasping to the one of X-Men as if it could lead to his own identification.
"If you don't have names, is there anything of use you /do/ have?" Terry snaps from her position an arm's-length away from the doors.
<< Can you turn it off? >> Harrison replies to Lilah's silent words. << Or -- is it psionic? Will the inhibitors work? >>
The Baron flicks ash off his cigar. "Power. You're the investigators." He takes a deep drag, and starts to drift back out of the room, as if blown by a scant, slow breeze. "You haven't told me what /you/ know, after all." On the other end, the Baron's mind is drifting out of panic close to boredom. A follow-down leads to some images. Red-haired woman, stern-faced, some guy in a visor-- Old, familiar, almost fond, if distant with time. X-Men.
<< I don't think I could force him to stop. Not--No. Inhibitors should work. It is psionic, but we'd have to move fast and do--something, >> Lilah answers, half distracted as she tries to follow the line of these X-Men to their relationship with the Baron.
Remy has relaxed a little with the cessation of atmospherics, but there's still a wary attention to him as he studies the Baron. "An' what are you hopin' that we'd know?" he wonders.
Oh, nothing much, just a little -- oh, that's interesting. A door half ajar, our Baron acrouch, illusing dreams on a half-waking red-head stern-face. Is that legal? Little flicker of a memory. "I'd been hoping," says the Baron's simulcra, "that diligent sniffers such as yourselves would've done more than determine the three murders were somehow related to me. I did know that part." Keep a-drifting back, the simulcra. The mind behind is tiring a little more.
Terry turns as if to follow the simulcra, to round the door and spill out onto the balcony after him, though she holds, glancing back at Harrison.
"Oh, we surely do, homme," Remy answers, and the switch away from the fearful 'sir' of earlier is a quitely noteable thing, as Remy shifts so that any watching of him draws the eye away from Terry's movement. "But aside from not interferin', y'ain't really offered much tangible in trade." While nothing so tawdry as money need apply to this exchange, the rubbed-fingers gesture of a man warming a coin has some universal meanings behind it.
"You'd think that. Maybe we're crap sniffers." << Tell Northstar I want him grabbing an inhibitor and following him, >> Harrison tells Lilah. "I guess we'll just have to think of something else. So sorry," he says, sarcasm dripping, "you came all this way."
Lilah relays the message diligently, the whisper of her words stark and quick across Jean-Paul's mind as she says, << Sachs wants you to get an inhibitor and follow the Baron. He's a psionic, and he's already on the balcony. >> She cuts off abruptly to re-focus on her sorting through memories, faster as she attempts to find an identification other than the Baron.
Jean-Paul prickles an irritable crank against the intrusion of telepathy, bristling even as he heeds Lilah's words. Acknowledgment wordless, he keeps his thoughts quite focused on the task at hand. Idly, he reaches to lift his gun and go to put it away. Don't mind him! (He will just also grab an inhibitor while he is at it.)
Isabel's eyes flick briefly to Harrison and then to the stir of Jean-Paul, curious, before they fix again on the Baron with a keen and observant eye.
Terry takes Harrison's sarcasm as an implicit order to hold, and she pivots slowly away from the door.
<< See? You lay off the fear and they start talking trade, start insulting, and you know what? I don't need them. I'll just hit all the old maybes. Marie'd probably just take a trigger full of scare this point, >> the Baron's mind turns to griping, as his shadow laughs with another dark echo. "One of you says you know, but you want to bargain for what you have, the other says you've got nothing. Maybe you'd better decide which you are before calling on me again." And the Baron unfolds his legs and stands flat. "For now, I have no reason to think you have anything I need. Good evening." He turns. << Upstarts. >> Identification is tied tight to that odd memory. Another one, of a blonde woman, perhaps a little sculpted, purring, "Mastermind," like the fine, fine pet he was. But Jason Wyngarde's nobody's pet now, is he?
"I'll be sure to get my lines worked out in advance next time, fantom," Remy assures, with a slight roll of his eyes that suggests this is clearly a cheap shot on the Baron's behalf.
<< I think he knows how to really find Marie. He might be able to lead Northstar there, >> Lilah tells Harrison, her lips pressing together as her own fatigue starts to show in brown eyes, in her limbs.
Harrison offers no words of farewell. He watches the Baron with a hard, edged gaze, body held careful.
Jean-Paul does not come back having returned his gun. He opens a window. Fresh air.
"Hmm," the Baron says, releasing a swift flicker-stretch of skele-cat between Remy's legs, then gone. And then he's gone. No drift, just vanish. Behind the door, Jason clambers away, illusing himself silent and invisible.
Lilah continues to track the mind, keeping her thoughts to herself as he moves away. She doesn't tell him 'nananana, I know you're still there'.
Visits. BARON by EIT.