OOC: Third Date Commentary
Log: Third Date
Date: 1/12/2006
Players: Magneto & Rossi
Summary: Here is how this scene came about.
"Oh my God. I haven't RPed tonight."
"Play with me!"
"Okay."
"How can we make this make sense?"
"Screw that. Get your ass over here."
"Okay!"
I am easy.
It is night.
It is cold.
It is my set. Oh, wait. I'm not done yet.
Chris Rossi has, as he is informing the person on the other end of his cell phone conversation, the world's worst fucking job. "--Like a transvestite at a GOP convention," he adds bitterly, measuring the sidewalk before The Sanctuary with his pacing. The heavy overcoat flares, brushed into sullen wings by the draft of his passage; the dull, discreet spill of alley lighting powders the leather with gold. "The hell do I know. I got nothing. Lazzaro call in yet?"
There. That's my set. All three lines. You did a bad thing when you taught me how to paragraph break in SimpleMU, Emma Frost.
If I had realized at the time that this scene would destroy the leathercoat of justice -- well, he would still be wearing it, come to think of it ... and it saved him more injury than he might have had otherwise, so it served its purpose well. The setup is that Rossi is on a case, a homicide that might be related to mutants inasmuch as the victim was a known mutant rights activist, vocal in her community, and the mother of a mutant child. He has come to the Sanctuary to see if the mutant community has anything to say to help. He has spent long hours off-camera trying to ingratiate himself with that community, one way or another. Now that he is in Mutant Affairs, even if only part-time, he makes an attempt to get to know the people he's protecting, or arresting. Can't get information if you can't make friends, by hook or by crook.
He's talking to one of the Lieutenants in Mutant Affairs, Rick North, and his complaint is over the fact that he will stand out like a sore thumb in the Sanctuary. He will go in, because that is his job, but first he checks in with his precinct, because he does not have a partner out here with him. Not SOP, but MA doesn't have that many detectives to spare, and after all, it's just a simple search for witnesses.
I posed a lot of light in this scene, because I had a very clear image of the alleyway's lighting and appearance, one which might not have had a /whole/ lot to do with the way the alley is actually described. Ahem. Electric lighting, spotty, dingy, not very strong and probably on a bad circuit, washed in yellow and with that unformed quality that it gets in cities and alleyways. While I've been trying to be better with my clothing poses, in this particular scene I didn't try as hard. The reason for this is that the overcoat trumps all, and the lighting makes color almost irrelevant. Meanwhile, I must state that I actually liked this first major paragraph of mine.
At the darkened end of the alley, a thin line of light swings open into a blaze of muffled sound and illumination before it's obscured by a lone figure, and then cut off entirely. A scuff - boot rubber over moist asphalt. A cough that plumes irregularly and dissipates, as old lungs adjust to the cold air. Erik pulls his next breath in more carefully through his sinuses, fedora examined in the darkness before it's pushed over the silver of his hair...only to freeze with his right hand still holding it in place against a gust of wind that faded with Rossi's question seconds ago.
"Then the hell do I know," says Det. Rossi, a foot crackling over trash: cardboard; a plastic bag; a discarded can's flattened rib and its Eve, sporting a constipated red bull. "They're not talking to /me/. I can ask Irish, or--" Electric buzz bites nervously across the alley's echoes, carrying the man's Brooklyn-born baritone with it. Chris turns mid-stride, head lifting in canine attention to the door's aborted spurt of sound. Pale eyes squint at shadow. "Maybe the Poodle King."
'Poodle King.' 'Irish.' Hi, Scott and Sean!
Here's a thing. Magneto's player is great with sound effects, those little touches that we sometimes forget and don't pick up during the course of our daily lives. You know, the stuff that make animation like Samurai Jack great. I confess that once in a while I envision a scene in my head as it's happening, but that in reality I'm less a visual person than I am an aural person -- musician background -- so these little touches delight me. The sound of the rubber over the asphalt gives me joy. Also, the way that Magneto's player poses silhouetting, his figure before light and sound, not to mention the plume of breath -- he does such a fantastic job of conveying the cold, the darkness, and his own solitary state that it's always such a joy to read.
Back in my pose, I pick up Magneto's foot sound and bounce it back to him with Rossi's own sounds in the mouthway of the alley. There are touches in this pose that I like. The list of things that he steps on, for instance, and the description of the two cans, though admittedly it is a little bit obscure. I realize that though I may occasionally write pretty, it is often difficult to understand WHAT THE HELL I MEAN. I swear I am working on it. It would go a lot better if I could remember that people cannot read my mind, which is very inconsiderate and tiresome of them. Chris has a dog-like restlessness to him when he's pacing like this, a prowl that marks out his territory, or prefaces (or includes) the hunt.
Meanwhile, I just realized that he has nicknames in his head for mutants. Most people, but mutants in particular. Poodle King, Irish, Pezhead -- it's a symptom of bigotry, albeit a gentler one than most. He unconsciously finds association with them uncomfortable. Reducing them to nicknames is a way for him to deal with the discomfort. Nicknames can have overtones of affection, of mockery, of contempt, or of camaraderie. In any case, by using a nickname in lieu of the name, he can bypass intimacy and keep them at a distance.
Cold eyes unblinking, Erik moves only to lower his hand back to his side - silent, and not entirely sure how much of himself the detective can see, if he can see anything at all. The master of magnetism remains stiff and poised, as if caught in an invisible set of headlights.
Det. Rossi steers himself by that half-guessed silhouette, interest split between receiver and audience. "I guess," he tells the invisible speaker, his pace slowing to match the reluctance of his drawl. "But telepaths? Grey's right. They freak people...." Out. Out. Back turned to light and color, the man pauses with a cocked brow to puzzle out the face behind the shadow. "Hold on, Rick. I think I know this--"
One of the few things about RP that I don't like is the inability to cut someone off. Interruptions require peremptory interjection, and you don't get to do that when the other person is writing in a block of text. Interactive fiction is one thing, but when your character wants to cut someone else off? You lose the opportunity. Assuming that at some point during this scene, Magneto would want to do something of the sort to Rossi (because, dude, phone. And hey, hi there, wanted terrorist! Hold still while I tell my guy--) I spent the next two poses breaking off mid-sentence to give the feeling of interruptus in case Erik wanted to jump in. I could've just asked Mags if he wanted to interrupt. However, that would've been too, you know. Smart.
I am parenthetically amused by both the image of him frozen in the headlights, and of an implied desire to move very little so that Rossi doesn't notice him. If I don't move, he won't see me. Both very prey instincts, from the most dangerous man on the grid. There's irony in that.
Meanwhile, my pose. It's a little cryptic. There was something happening there that seemed obvious to me at the time, but in rereading I realize that most people probably wouldn't get it. One 'Out' is for the telepaths; the other is for the forthcoming Magneto. There. Got it? Yeah, it doesn't really make sense now to me, either. In the space of two short poses, he refers to three of the X-Men, and only one of them by name -- a name that could mean any of a number of people, really, though in context with telepaths I presume the identification is pretty easy. It's more idle curiosity that makes Rossi head towards Magneto. It's a person walking out of Sanctuary, and he has to head into Sanctuary to ask some questions. As long as the person's coming out, it makes sense to front him with his questions without other people sitting around and listening. Maybe he'll get an honest answer! (Maybe pigs will fly.)
And yet. There's something vaguely familiar about the way the man's standing. There's an interesting discovery, that Rossi can /recognize/ Erik, just from the way he stands and walks. Of course, it's not like Erik's gone out of his way to be memorable to Rossi, or anything....
A pair of trash cans. Cars, parked across the street, with time to spare on two of the three occupied meters there. Magneto's eyes slide cooly back onto Christopher.
"--guy," finishes the cop, blankly. A gun at his hip. A badge in his coat's inner pocket. Handcuffs tucked in his back. And, fizzing, glittering, spitting electronic glee in one hand, the cell phone. The green eyes sharpen, slivered between black. "/Fuck/," he begins. "Rick--"
Look at all that metal. All the stuff that Mags could squish Rossi with. Well, shit. Parenthetically, I laugh at the detail of the meters.
Here again I pop in the interruptus, since it seems like another appropriate place for Erik to break into the conversation. Meanwhile, while Erik is destructive and really really MEAN in this log, it's here and pretty much only here (I think) that he uses 'Magneto,' moving from the prior pose of 'master of magnetism' to evil terrorist SOB. Like Erik's player told us one time, there are two sides to his personality, and the one can be just as destructive as the other. Badass and badasser. (Edit to add: Nope, I was wrong. There's another Magneto in the next pose.)
Rossi doesn't have an emotional reaction yet. Blank surprise -- there always seems to be blank surprise first, for him and Magneto. I mean, who really expects to see a master terrorist wandering around New York? /Clubbing/, no less? -- which is usually (at least in the last three encounters) eventually followed by irritation, exasperation, annoyance, or some desire to just piss Magneto off. I realize, as he does, that this is not necessarily a rational progression of emotion. For the most part, he has been rather well-behaved insofar as Magneto is concerned. For him. Lensherr does not know the full magnitude of assholedom that Rossi has at his disposal. To date, he has been remarkably fortunate in that Chris has managed to control himself, to some extent. Then again, so is Rossi.
No more. The phone dies a quick and merciful death, staticless. Painless. It simply ceases to function, shaken conveniently loose the mortal coil. And so there is silence. Within the alley, at least. In the background, there is traffic to contend with, as well as an airplane rumbling overhead. For a second (possibly two) before the expired meter SUV throws itself against the alley's maw - too large to manuever within its walls, though shrapnel and shattered glass explode into the vacuum. The impact is loud, and forceful enough to be felt through the concrete underfoot. And /finally/, Erik moves, a hand thrown up towards the Sanctuary door, holding it shut.
The phone's death is, in the grand scheme of things, trivial -- and yet the oath Det. Rossi awards it is a more momentous than the one that greets the hurtle of car: massive, grand, /grandiose/ punishment. The cop scrambles, losing the phone (it skitters away on a hopscotch of panic, fleeing with equal prudence) losing dignity in a headlong sprawl into the alley's corridor. "--!" he swears over the shriek and scream of torn SUV. Leather shreds, stabbed by glass and metal; blood stains dark skin, smearing the line of jaw and brow. "/Goddammit/. What the fuck did I do /this/ time?"
This time Erik jumps at the interruption, and boom. B'bye, phone. We do not comment on the fact that it gets to die mercifully and painlessly, whereas Chris gets a fucking SUV thrown at his head. Magneto is a jerk. Rossi does appreciate that it's the car with an expired meter that gets thrown at his head, though. Or he would. If he gave it any thought.
I like the ominous quality of the silence within the alley, and the pause to relay the background -- the noises of the backdrop, the calm before the shitstorm. I love that Erik's player plays into those senses that would commonly be ignored (heck, I tend to ignore them when writing poses) by mentioning the vibration underfoot. Silence followed by explosion, which is the logical progression. Just enough time for Chris to register the lack of phone, the obvious danger that he's in, remember for a split second that the /last/ time he ran into Erik, all went reasonably well, and then forget all that as an SUV explodes in his face.
My pose is not so hot, but I will explain why in a moment. The enormity of the event aborts any truly creative reactions Chris might come up with; the phone, he almost expects. The car? Not so much, though I should note that it certainly isn't the /first/ time that he's had a car thrown at his head. The leather overcoat takes much of the damage, ending up shredded under the barrage of glass and metal. Good-bye, brown leather overcoat of justice. I twink vaguely in not giving Chris a truly serious injury here, which by rights he should get -- but he's in the hospital so often, it seems, and he's had so many stitches, I was starting to feel a little attention-getty in the whole melodramatic, INJURED AGAIN! sort of way. My apologies to Magneto's player for acting like a Gary Stu. Rossi's demand for explanation is rhetorical, and born out of shock rather than indignation or protest; there are very few proper responses to having several tons of metal and glass thrown at you, and he lacks the panache to come up with something clever on the spur of the moment. Anyway, he's busy DIVING FOR HIS LIFE.
And now the reason why this pose is not so good. I do not protest overmuch at the use of 'grand' twice in the pose, because it works fine in that sense. The sentence construction of the part where the phone gets lost and Rossi scrambles is not graceful, and doesn't parse well. If it were more staccato, it would have a lurching feeling, akin to the quality of the character's pose. There are parts of the sentence I like, mind: the image of the hopscotch of panic, the anthropomorphization of the phone, the loss of dignity. Taken as a whole, however, I'm not a fan of that particular part. Oh well.
And here's where I drop into the concept of tone poems. A tone poem, literally speaking, is a piece of music that's based around a theme or a storyline, usually a one-movement symphonic piece of work. Simplistic, but there's a bit more to that. The part that applies specifically to writing is the fact that tone poems are usually programmatic. In other words it's meant to /sound/ like the thing that it's describing. The most obvious way this happens is if the musical representation is literal: a flute echoing a specific bird cry, for instance, or kettle drums used to describe rolls of thunder. Less obvious are the non-literal representations. If you know the famous Blue Danube, for instance, the first page or so is of the slow break of dawn over the river, the sleepy chirp of birds, the clouds slowly gaining color, and so on. Even without /knowing/ that this is what the first movement of Blue Danube is about, you can still hear it in the music. Head over to this link on amazon and click on the music sample next to The Blue Danube to see what I mean, if you don't remember how Blue Danube starts. (Really, it's way too short a sample to get the full picture, but it's close enough.)
So now, how it applies to roleplay. As I've mentioned before, I tend to be an aural writer, and this works best for me because of my background. I hear the words I'm writing aloud in my head, and while there's an element of visualization there as well, there's more vocalization. Namely, mine. I can hear the cadence of the words, and how they string out in my head. This means that there are times when the word choice and sentence formation can contribute to the overall mood of the scene for me. Short, succinct sentences seem to make a scene pick up speed. Longer, windier, more convoluted sentences can have a sense of breathlessness about them, or a slightly dizzy feel. The texture of a word -- it's vowel sounds, its consonants, its length, its accent -- can change the feel of a pose. It's the same premise that goes into beat poetry. These rules aren't absolute, of course. Like music, the tonal influence of a word can be very subjective.
Anyway, that's what's going on in Rossi's player's world.
Er ... so how are you?
Magneto remains untouched by metal, but not by glass - nicks and cuts beginning to bleed here and there, despite the worst of it having hit the ground before reaching him. A protective blizzard of shrapnel gnashes and snarls violently in answer to Rossi's question. In slow motion, before Erik and behind Rossi, gravity overcomes the lodging power of momentum, and the ruined vehicle falls, rolling back down to earth with a pitiful groan. The sanctuary door jars, and his seething glare is drawn off Rossi long enough to dart to it before the shrapnel is dropped, and the man moved for.
A hiccuped step pushes Rossi to his feet again, hands ripping over a bed of concrete and glass. Trapped by dead-end and SUV, the detective scythes a sickle-bladed glance across the alley before baring his teeth, palms out and open: truce. Peace. Goddamn dumpster. "Nice to see you, too," he jags, baritone thinned and tight over adrenaline's breathless rush. The hands, scored across, tremble in their sign before routing elsewhere, swept aside. "You really want to kill a cop in front of /Sanctuary/?"
Oh. Look. There's more log.
Weird.
Again, with the detail! Erik bleeds, injuring himself as much as Rossi (albeit without the furious, heart-stopping /terror/.) How Shylock of him! and a shout out to Sir Ian, old Shakespeare veteran that he is. I love the 'snashes and gnarls' and the 'answer to Rossi's question.' Being a person who anthropomorphizes things myself, I always love it in other people. It's like having a conversation where everybody knows the words. The touch of gravity, the introduction of physics into the scene -- gravity, momentum -- is also cool; though I'm not sure if the player meant it, it's a great lead-in for the resurrection of 'Erik' in the scene, as opposed to 'Magneto.' Dr. Lensherr, the physics professor. Nice guy. When he's not trying to SQUISH YOU.
There's little that Rossi can do in the face of this raw power, and he is unbalanced enough and thrust into fear enough that he's ready to parley, or surrender (conditionally) to avoid death. He is not suicidal, after all, though occasionally reckless enough that it's hard to tell the difference. I like the tremble of the hands; he becomes aware of their shakiness and immediately moves them away, hiding that tremulous quaver to make a show of resolution. 'Sickle-bladed' suggests the Grim Reaper, who is closer today than he has been for a while -- since the last time Chris had a car thrown at him, in fact -- and the 'truce. Peace. Goddamn dumpster' is as much to sketch the jitter of his thoughts as it is to explain the motives behind his gesture. Damn. Show, don't tell! I'm sorry.
Even in extremis, at least he thinks a little. Dead cop in front of Sanctuary, in front of a mutant hideout. True, the thought of reprecussions to his fellow mutants didn't noticeably pause Lensherr before the Purity rally -- but he just came out of the club. He must know some people there. This time, the retaliation might be to people he knows, personally. Rossi points it out, drawing a hasty line between dead cop and potential suspects or witnesses inside.
"You're following me." Erik accuses in answer, manic paranoia clearly evident in the icy pallor of his irises around contracted pupils. The door jars again, and again - only he's ignoring it now, advancing still upon Detective Rossi.
Green eyes glitter back, dilated to black; a step back meets trash and staggers, splaying Rossi's stance wide. "Follow you? Christ. I'd /arrest/ you if I stood half a chance. You think if I /could/ follow you, I wouldn't have the entire NYPD SWAT team here to back me up? Not to mention every poodle in the pack?" The deep baritone jigs across sped breath, catching through the puff and writhe of mist.
Chris is distracted by incredulity. Lensherr thinks he's what? Following him? Following /Magneto/? Are you /shitting/ me? Erik poses about his eyes being contracted; I bounce it back at him with dilated pupils, the natural response to adrenaline and fear. Rossi's logical, professional reply tumbles back: keep him talking. As long as he's talking, he's not killing you. (Edit to add: The more he talks to you, the more you impress him as being an individual, a human being. It's easier to kill a stranger than it is to kill someone you've shared thoughts and conversation with. Theoretically. Make yourself a /person/ in his eyes.) Never mind that Magneto doesn't know what the poodles are -- perhaps it's just as well, really. Calling mutants poodles is not particularly indicative of deep and resounding respect, from the outsider's perspective.
There is one thing that I'm deeply unhappy about in this entire log, and that is that I don't think I did a very good job of showing just how frightened Chris really was. Deeply terrified, in a way he hasn't felt for a very long time. Not even when he and Lazzaro were being attacked by the dumbshit duo, or the last time Magneto made the moves on him and turned him into a pretzel. I don't know why I didn't do a better job, really. There are things I could've done -- his heartbeat, the race of his pulse, the ragged hiccup of breath, or the edge to his voice -- but for some reason ... nada. Damn. It's so rare these opportunities come along, and I fall flat on my face. I do not know why that was. My apologies to Erik's player for my poor showing.
Magneto says nothing in reply to that, breath pushed furling and draconic out into the night air as Rossi's explanation goes in one ear and lingers there, tilting dangerously across a very deadly sword's edge.
Another step back, cautious -- glass crackles underfoot, grating into ice -- and Det. Rossi stills where he stands, arms spread, distanced from the battered home of body: away from pockets, from danger, from the urgent, yearning weight of the gun. The alley light zaps moody applause, flickering jaundiced color over the man's face and shoulder. White plumes eddies, and drags around the knit of jaw. Magneto's move.
In this context, Erik's silence is a bad thing. A very bad thing. (Oh. And there's 'Magneto' again. Well, just prove me wrong AGAIN, why don't you.) Draconic. A good image for what Mr. Smash and Destroy is at the moment -- and there's even a slight suggestion of lair-guarding there, when you add in the 'sword's edge,' with the Sanctuary and its precious mutants being held safe inside, trapped, while the guardian (Lensherr: an old, old dragon) deals with the threat outside.
Threat. Rossi scoffs. Him, a threat? With Old Man Apocalypse flouncing around out here with a fucking SUV?
He retreats still further, because distance between him and the crazy terrorist seems prudent, if ultimately futile. Silence meets silence; Rossi senses the danger of saying something more, of stepping in rashly where things are teetering in the balance. The meta there is a reminder that he has protection, albeit useless to an extreme degree. Given only silence to work with, I try to paint scene more. Sounds, color -- and that's the extent of it, which is interesting. I am not good at the other senses: kinesthetic, scent. I will try to include those more. It's easy to tell that I'm a very sight- and sound-oriented person, isn't it?
"Who are you looking for?"
"A lead. On a case." Careful, that deliberate baritone, rough and low over the thread of cupric-tanged fear. "Nothing to do with you."
The next question is slower in coming. Low, and matter of fact, as Erik turns his head into the light, just enough for his eyes to glint pale and intelligent at Rossi, orange cancelling out blue. "A mutant?"
"Maybe." Rossi's glance flicks past Magneto at the door, that jarring, jangling door into -- ironic -- Sanctuary, beyond. Lids droop, veiling the skip and slap of emotion. "Vic was active in the mutant community. Figure some of her friends or the people who knew her might've seen something, been too afraid to come in."
Well, there's a little bit of a nod to the fear there in my first pose of the group. He answers exactly what Erik asks for, and then answers the earlier question to boot. Nothing to do with you. He recognizes paranoia, and if it were true paranoia, nothing he has to say will be able to appease it. That's a depressing thought. Erik's reply to it is reassuring, however: intelligence, and deliberate. (And I love the orange cancelling out the blue.) Still, the question is also more worrisome. How protective /is/ Lensherr? How hostile is he towards humanity? Rossi knows that he'd follow the lead regardless of whether it was mutant or not, and that he has no particular preference for it to be one or the other. Does Magneto grant the same possibility, that the job supercedes prediliction? Or does he categorically defend mutants purely based on genetics, without regard for the worth or value of the person?
Chris is torn between 'Goddammit, someone, come /out/!' and 'Goddammit, people, /stay inside/!' His instincts for self-preservation and warring with his desire to protect; there is so much about Lensherr that is uncertain in his mind, and he can't see the grand scheme of things the way Magneto can. He doesn't believe in sacrificing a few for the greater good. The good of the many over the good of the one is bullshit, as far as he's concerned. (Except when he's the one, inconsistently enough.) As a result, he can't feel his way with Lensherr. Magneto had to know that his Purity Rally attack would rebound on mutants -- it /did/ rebound on mutants, innocent ones -- and yet, he went ahead anyway. He proclaims mutant superiority and rights and freedoms, and goes on the press to tell them not to fear them, then acts against their interests ... at least insofar as Chris sees it. What will he do for the Sanctuary people? What buttons work on a man like that? Rossi doesn't reject the possibility that Lensherr isn't completely self-serving, that it's all an act for power and fear and fame. Mercenaries can don the mantles of martyrs; it happens all the time.
Given this untenuous, shifting sand beneath his feet, Chris takes the only course he can think of. His entire work life is spent untangling lies. If he's going to get squashed for something, let it be for telling the blunt and straightforward truth.
Just beneath his left cheekbone, Erik feels for a moment - fingers pushing through a line of blood to settle upon a jagged bit of glass, which is then tugged loose and flicked irritably away to skitter over ice. A drop or two of blood pat after it with the force of a second flick. Near enough, police cars are on the move, sirens off. Someone's finally made the call.
Enough sparkles in Rossi's black hair (in his overcoat, in his blood-streaked skin) to make a diadem of the man, a scintillate outline in the absence of chalk. "We never just /talk/ anymore," he drags, baritone black under the lash-flayed gaze. "It's always slam, bang, assault and battery -- Nothing to do with you. Christ. Maybe nothing to do with mutants. Her kid was one. Could've been the ex, or the boyfriend. Still, got to find out."
Magneto poses vulnerability. Physical vulnerability. And yet, no weakness.
Chris is the weaker one, here. (Well, he's younger.) In the face of Erik's silence, he talks. Jaggedly, sardonically, covering his racing heartbeat with smart-aleck machismo and what passes for wit. If you're going to kill him, just get it over with already. Rossi can be silent -- really! I swear! -- but it depends on his mood, and whether he's the one exerting the strain, or having the strain exerted on him. It's this inability to keep his mouth shut when he's being leaned on that makes him the one that IA pulls in first, when they're on one of their periodic hunts after Beston's scalp. For the most part, he can talk smack, enrage another person, and goad them to fury and an explosion without ever betraying anything relevant or important. With normal men, under normal rules, this works just fine.
Magneto can throw cars. This is not the best solution in this case. However, like many men, many smarter and more reasonable men, Chris falls back on what he knows. Under duress, you piss the other guy off. Once he's pissed, you can control the situation. Except, well. See above re: the throwing of cars. There is a saving grace, though. He routes back to the explanation: this is why I'm here, this is what I'm doing, this is my job.
"When you open your mouth to expell the vomitous, putrid mass of words and sentences that you attempt to pass off as 'conversation', I desperately want to kill you." Tired. Erik is just tired. A hand sweeps lazily at his side, palm facing the street, and the SUV rolls painfully over, and over again - into the street. A taxi hauling ass past swerves - honks. The SUV collapses back into its parking space. "I fear God may be working more swiftly in his effort to punish me than he is the successful advancement of those crafted in his image."
"Even God needs a hobby." Arms ease warily, lowered to a painful, angular drop by the tight coil of body -- injury there, sketched in the elbow's press against ribs and the cop's mask: skin stretched thin and taut over discomfort. Jaw, lips, throat, temples; shadow steals gold light and paints blue along the skull's hollows. And the brittle voice with its Brooklyn tincture. "What'd you do to the people inside?"
The SUV rolls over, Erik's little puppy dog. Do not think Rossi did not notice that, oh no. Erik's desire to kill him, he takes without comment -- because, bizarrely, he considers it only natural. Chris is intensely irritating when he chooses to be. He accepts the consequences of that without question, because that is the reaction he originally tailored his attitude towards. Perhaps not quite to that /extreme/ case, but still -- close enough. And, oddly, that remark about God actually strikes a chord with Rossi, winning the tiniest bit of perverse sympathy. High-flown as the language is, basically it means what Rossi says all along: God's out to screw you. Poor, exhausted Erik.
There's a sense here that Rossi won't be turned into a toaster after all, and so he finally dares to relax. Just enough to ease the whine of strained muscles, and enough that the pain can start biting through the numbness of shock. He'll have a lot of stitches in his back when this is over; not enough to keep him bedridden, but enough to keep him off truly active duty, and to play a bystander's role in Magneto's arrest later in the week. There are parts here in the pose that I like, again; the stretched skin, the hint of pain, the shadow and the paint of blue, and the hollows of the skull. Since he has a hint of grace here from Erik, he asks the most immediate question on his mind. What happened in the Sanctuary?
"I don't hate humans, you know." Erik replies, once again, offering an answer that has little or nothing to do with the question asked. "I don't /despise/ them. Not all of them. I believe, with a lesson in respect, in understanding, and less political power..." In his eyes, that look is building again. He does know, doesn't he? He understands? Surely, with - the first of the police cars rolls to a quiet stop. Cars have been passing every few seconds, and this is the first time Erik has recognized the slow tug of a car coming to a quiet and complete stop, headlights off. His eyes are back upon Rossi immediately, pulled from the street.
Chris: What the fuck?
There was a pause here in the posing while I turned to Erik's player and admitted, blankly, that we were speechless and absolutely unsure how to respond.
Chris: What the fuck?!
Erik's pose here was unnerving to Chris, in a more rattling and terrible way than the imminent death presented by the SUV. There was a strange feeling that more was at risk here than simple life, even if it was Chris's. Whatever his public views about the Catholic church and his immortal soul, it is far more difficult to really expunge faith from the various nooks and crannies of your mind, even if you've lost your Faith-with-a-capital-F.
Chris: No, seriously. What the hell? What am I supposed to do with that? Jesus, Mary and Joseph. You've got to be shitting me.
Rossi floundered. He was prepared to deal with death. Not willingly, mind, but /that/ he was expecting to confront eventually, so he had some framework, some kind of foundation to fall back on. He's imagined his death a thousand times in the night: close encounters, chance misses, what if this, what if that. To some extent, he feels armored against the eventuality. But here, out of nowhere, comes this other thing, this strange and unprompted reaching out of humanity. Rossi is thrown. The player is thrown.
I salute Erik. Chris struggles gamely on, cursing his useless player.
Chris: Goddammit, stop gobbling like a fish and get back to the damn keyboard, you asshat!
The other man's mouth -- the /human's/ mouth -- opens, cynicism, acerbic wit, intelligence, sweeping to the fray, only to snap shut over prudence. Weight shifts. Rossi's gaze follows Erik's to the street before turning back again, sharp. Shuttered. "Superpowers don't make the man," he says instead, edging another half-step back. "A corpse is still a corpse, whatever he's got for genes. Once his file's on my desk-- What do you want from me? I don't hate mutants."
Two conversations running almost in parallel, not quite meeting until right about here. There's a sense that Erik's looking for something -- validation, forgiveness, understanding -- and Chris is tugged towards it, moved to respond to it without really understanding why. It's the priest in him, warring with the cop; the quiet confessional, which is an almost inevitable aftermath to violence and strong emotion. Catharsis.
Rossi can't respond. He can't supply what Erik needs. Whether he ever will or would be able to is debateable. For the moment, he's too entrenched in the cop to be able to really hear the priest inside. Father Rossi has enough of a hold, still, to stop the cop's first reply: smartass, sharp, tending to push away intimacy (jeer at it) in masculine repulsion. He dimly perceives that Erik is asking for something from him, and he tries to answer it, as much for the other man's sake as for his own, but he answers the wrong question. It would take a miracle, or a lifetime of experience and understanding, to answer the right one.
Edit to add: This is the commentary of edits, really. Rossi's reply gropes rather blindly, trying to answer what he thinks is being asked without ever answering it. 'Do you hate mutants? Is there a future for them?' And his reply, in short: 'No. I don't know. All I can do is treat them equally in death. It's not up to me.' Humility that isn't really humility. Rossi views his work as being, in a strange way, almost divine: dispensing justice, serving as the mills of God. There's nothing like closing a case, and knowing -- /knowing/ -- that you got the right guy, that the dead have justice, and it's because of you. It is the closest thing to joy he knows, and the closest thing to pain he carries, and he hands it over as best as he can. To paraphrase Bujold: how like a man, to guard himself with mask after mask, then carelessly hand you his heart on a platter.
However. That's not enough. He says it wrong, or he says it poorly, and he's the wrong man at the wrong time. The moment's gone. The cavalry is here. And Erik's player, who is smart and knows police, makes them look smart by not having them come rolling in with lights flashing and sirens wailing. Rossi takes a step back, ready to leap for safety again -- although he's injured now, and weak, and shaky -- in case cars start to act like overexcited spaniels again.
For the record, my pose there was not so good. We will move on.
A second car. A third. Helicopter blades churning ever nearer. Doors opening. Erik's eyes upon Rossi turn briefly exasperated, and then he's lifting. Flying, even. Up, one story. Two. Onto the roof, where he can start running, or take his chances with the helicopter cameras.
In a night of shock and surprise, one more barely warrants comment -- and yet. Rossi flinches back at that first, eerie hint of ascent, a step (another, another) stumbling him back to the wall's broad-lipped support. Light washes the alleyway, casting its debris into sterile, austere negatives; christens man and mutant too, bathing the one with a quick touch before turning its focus on the other. Spine pressed against brick, blood and glass stitching his coat, Chris sags down to meet heels with hips, seamed hands covering his face and the shudder of belated reaction.
".../Fuck/."
And we close. Erik's terse and back into the professional terrorist we all know and love, the pragmatic criminal. Rossi collapses at last from shock and gives in to his emotions. At least the shudder was right. As a close, I think it was a little too purple, a little too much detail. It would've been fine without quite so much in there. I would take out the christening, and the debris, moving the light straight from the man to the mutant. However, the last word? I like having it.
The cops start hunting Magneto down, with enthusiasm if without luck. They want him, but bad. Cop-killer? Damn straight. The answering patrolmen who canvas the scene pause to look at the mutilated SUV, neatly deposited back in its original parking spot, and laugh incredulously. You believe that? Magneto parked the fucking car. Beston, responding to the call, eyes the battered vehicle with some interest, then tickets it for running out the meter. An EMT is called to take care of Chris, and he gets sent to the hospital -- /again/ -- to have shrapnel dug out of his back and face, and to have a whole lot of stitches put in his back. He was lucky, he gets informed, and Jesus Christ, can we go one month without having you as a patient?
Bite me, says Chris. Lensherr's got the hots for me. What am I supposed to do?
Date: 1/12/2006
Players: Magneto & Rossi
Summary: Here is how this scene came about.
"Oh my God. I haven't RPed tonight."
"Play with me!"
"Okay."
"How can we make this make sense?"
"Screw that. Get your ass over here."
"Okay!"
I am easy.
It is night.
It is cold.
It is my set. Oh, wait. I'm not done yet.
Chris Rossi has, as he is informing the person on the other end of his cell phone conversation, the world's worst fucking job. "--Like a transvestite at a GOP convention," he adds bitterly, measuring the sidewalk before The Sanctuary with his pacing. The heavy overcoat flares, brushed into sullen wings by the draft of his passage; the dull, discreet spill of alley lighting powders the leather with gold. "The hell do I know. I got nothing. Lazzaro call in yet?"
There. That's my set. All three lines. You did a bad thing when you taught me how to paragraph break in SimpleMU, Emma Frost.
If I had realized at the time that this scene would destroy the leathercoat of justice -- well, he would still be wearing it, come to think of it ... and it saved him more injury than he might have had otherwise, so it served its purpose well. The setup is that Rossi is on a case, a homicide that might be related to mutants inasmuch as the victim was a known mutant rights activist, vocal in her community, and the mother of a mutant child. He has come to the Sanctuary to see if the mutant community has anything to say to help. He has spent long hours off-camera trying to ingratiate himself with that community, one way or another. Now that he is in Mutant Affairs, even if only part-time, he makes an attempt to get to know the people he's protecting, or arresting. Can't get information if you can't make friends, by hook or by crook.
He's talking to one of the Lieutenants in Mutant Affairs, Rick North, and his complaint is over the fact that he will stand out like a sore thumb in the Sanctuary. He will go in, because that is his job, but first he checks in with his precinct, because he does not have a partner out here with him. Not SOP, but MA doesn't have that many detectives to spare, and after all, it's just a simple search for witnesses.
I posed a lot of light in this scene, because I had a very clear image of the alleyway's lighting and appearance, one which might not have had a /whole/ lot to do with the way the alley is actually described. Ahem. Electric lighting, spotty, dingy, not very strong and probably on a bad circuit, washed in yellow and with that unformed quality that it gets in cities and alleyways. While I've been trying to be better with my clothing poses, in this particular scene I didn't try as hard. The reason for this is that the overcoat trumps all, and the lighting makes color almost irrelevant. Meanwhile, I must state that I actually liked this first major paragraph of mine.
At the darkened end of the alley, a thin line of light swings open into a blaze of muffled sound and illumination before it's obscured by a lone figure, and then cut off entirely. A scuff - boot rubber over moist asphalt. A cough that plumes irregularly and dissipates, as old lungs adjust to the cold air. Erik pulls his next breath in more carefully through his sinuses, fedora examined in the darkness before it's pushed over the silver of his hair...only to freeze with his right hand still holding it in place against a gust of wind that faded with Rossi's question seconds ago.
"Then the hell do I know," says Det. Rossi, a foot crackling over trash: cardboard; a plastic bag; a discarded can's flattened rib and its Eve, sporting a constipated red bull. "They're not talking to /me/. I can ask Irish, or--" Electric buzz bites nervously across the alley's echoes, carrying the man's Brooklyn-born baritone with it. Chris turns mid-stride, head lifting in canine attention to the door's aborted spurt of sound. Pale eyes squint at shadow. "Maybe the Poodle King."
'Poodle King.' 'Irish.' Hi, Scott and Sean!
Here's a thing. Magneto's player is great with sound effects, those little touches that we sometimes forget and don't pick up during the course of our daily lives. You know, the stuff that make animation like Samurai Jack great. I confess that once in a while I envision a scene in my head as it's happening, but that in reality I'm less a visual person than I am an aural person -- musician background -- so these little touches delight me. The sound of the rubber over the asphalt gives me joy. Also, the way that Magneto's player poses silhouetting, his figure before light and sound, not to mention the plume of breath -- he does such a fantastic job of conveying the cold, the darkness, and his own solitary state that it's always such a joy to read.
Back in my pose, I pick up Magneto's foot sound and bounce it back to him with Rossi's own sounds in the mouthway of the alley. There are touches in this pose that I like. The list of things that he steps on, for instance, and the description of the two cans, though admittedly it is a little bit obscure. I realize that though I may occasionally write pretty, it is often difficult to understand WHAT THE HELL I MEAN. I swear I am working on it. It would go a lot better if I could remember that people cannot read my mind, which is very inconsiderate and tiresome of them. Chris has a dog-like restlessness to him when he's pacing like this, a prowl that marks out his territory, or prefaces (or includes) the hunt.
Meanwhile, I just realized that he has nicknames in his head for mutants. Most people, but mutants in particular. Poodle King, Irish, Pezhead -- it's a symptom of bigotry, albeit a gentler one than most. He unconsciously finds association with them uncomfortable. Reducing them to nicknames is a way for him to deal with the discomfort. Nicknames can have overtones of affection, of mockery, of contempt, or of camaraderie. In any case, by using a nickname in lieu of the name, he can bypass intimacy and keep them at a distance.
Cold eyes unblinking, Erik moves only to lower his hand back to his side - silent, and not entirely sure how much of himself the detective can see, if he can see anything at all. The master of magnetism remains stiff and poised, as if caught in an invisible set of headlights.
Det. Rossi steers himself by that half-guessed silhouette, interest split between receiver and audience. "I guess," he tells the invisible speaker, his pace slowing to match the reluctance of his drawl. "But telepaths? Grey's right. They freak people...." Out. Out. Back turned to light and color, the man pauses with a cocked brow to puzzle out the face behind the shadow. "Hold on, Rick. I think I know this--"
One of the few things about RP that I don't like is the inability to cut someone off. Interruptions require peremptory interjection, and you don't get to do that when the other person is writing in a block of text. Interactive fiction is one thing, but when your character wants to cut someone else off? You lose the opportunity. Assuming that at some point during this scene, Magneto would want to do something of the sort to Rossi (because, dude, phone. And hey, hi there, wanted terrorist! Hold still while I tell my guy--) I spent the next two poses breaking off mid-sentence to give the feeling of interruptus in case Erik wanted to jump in. I could've just asked Mags if he wanted to interrupt. However, that would've been too, you know. Smart.
I am parenthetically amused by both the image of him frozen in the headlights, and of an implied desire to move very little so that Rossi doesn't notice him. If I don't move, he won't see me. Both very prey instincts, from the most dangerous man on the grid. There's irony in that.
Meanwhile, my pose. It's a little cryptic. There was something happening there that seemed obvious to me at the time, but in rereading I realize that most people probably wouldn't get it. One 'Out' is for the telepaths; the other is for the forthcoming Magneto. There. Got it? Yeah, it doesn't really make sense now to me, either. In the space of two short poses, he refers to three of the X-Men, and only one of them by name -- a name that could mean any of a number of people, really, though in context with telepaths I presume the identification is pretty easy. It's more idle curiosity that makes Rossi head towards Magneto. It's a person walking out of Sanctuary, and he has to head into Sanctuary to ask some questions. As long as the person's coming out, it makes sense to front him with his questions without other people sitting around and listening. Maybe he'll get an honest answer! (Maybe pigs will fly.)
And yet. There's something vaguely familiar about the way the man's standing. There's an interesting discovery, that Rossi can /recognize/ Erik, just from the way he stands and walks. Of course, it's not like Erik's gone out of his way to be memorable to Rossi, or anything....
A pair of trash cans. Cars, parked across the street, with time to spare on two of the three occupied meters there. Magneto's eyes slide cooly back onto Christopher.
"--guy," finishes the cop, blankly. A gun at his hip. A badge in his coat's inner pocket. Handcuffs tucked in his back. And, fizzing, glittering, spitting electronic glee in one hand, the cell phone. The green eyes sharpen, slivered between black. "/Fuck/," he begins. "Rick--"
Look at all that metal. All the stuff that Mags could squish Rossi with. Well, shit. Parenthetically, I laugh at the detail of the meters.
Here again I pop in the interruptus, since it seems like another appropriate place for Erik to break into the conversation. Meanwhile, while Erik is destructive and really really MEAN in this log, it's here and pretty much only here (I think) that he uses 'Magneto,' moving from the prior pose of 'master of magnetism' to evil terrorist SOB. Like Erik's player told us one time, there are two sides to his personality, and the one can be just as destructive as the other. Badass and badasser. (Edit to add: Nope, I was wrong. There's another Magneto in the next pose.)
Rossi doesn't have an emotional reaction yet. Blank surprise -- there always seems to be blank surprise first, for him and Magneto. I mean, who really expects to see a master terrorist wandering around New York? /Clubbing/, no less? -- which is usually (at least in the last three encounters) eventually followed by irritation, exasperation, annoyance, or some desire to just piss Magneto off. I realize, as he does, that this is not necessarily a rational progression of emotion. For the most part, he has been rather well-behaved insofar as Magneto is concerned. For him. Lensherr does not know the full magnitude of assholedom that Rossi has at his disposal. To date, he has been remarkably fortunate in that Chris has managed to control himself, to some extent. Then again, so is Rossi.
No more. The phone dies a quick and merciful death, staticless. Painless. It simply ceases to function, shaken conveniently loose the mortal coil. And so there is silence. Within the alley, at least. In the background, there is traffic to contend with, as well as an airplane rumbling overhead. For a second (possibly two) before the expired meter SUV throws itself against the alley's maw - too large to manuever within its walls, though shrapnel and shattered glass explode into the vacuum. The impact is loud, and forceful enough to be felt through the concrete underfoot. And /finally/, Erik moves, a hand thrown up towards the Sanctuary door, holding it shut.
The phone's death is, in the grand scheme of things, trivial -- and yet the oath Det. Rossi awards it is a more momentous than the one that greets the hurtle of car: massive, grand, /grandiose/ punishment. The cop scrambles, losing the phone (it skitters away on a hopscotch of panic, fleeing with equal prudence) losing dignity in a headlong sprawl into the alley's corridor. "--!" he swears over the shriek and scream of torn SUV. Leather shreds, stabbed by glass and metal; blood stains dark skin, smearing the line of jaw and brow. "/Goddammit/. What the fuck did I do /this/ time?"
This time Erik jumps at the interruption, and boom. B'bye, phone. We do not comment on the fact that it gets to die mercifully and painlessly, whereas Chris gets a fucking SUV thrown at his head. Magneto is a jerk. Rossi does appreciate that it's the car with an expired meter that gets thrown at his head, though. Or he would. If he gave it any thought.
I like the ominous quality of the silence within the alley, and the pause to relay the background -- the noises of the backdrop, the calm before the shitstorm. I love that Erik's player plays into those senses that would commonly be ignored (heck, I tend to ignore them when writing poses) by mentioning the vibration underfoot. Silence followed by explosion, which is the logical progression. Just enough time for Chris to register the lack of phone, the obvious danger that he's in, remember for a split second that the /last/ time he ran into Erik, all went reasonably well, and then forget all that as an SUV explodes in his face.
My pose is not so hot, but I will explain why in a moment. The enormity of the event aborts any truly creative reactions Chris might come up with; the phone, he almost expects. The car? Not so much, though I should note that it certainly isn't the /first/ time that he's had a car thrown at his head. The leather overcoat takes much of the damage, ending up shredded under the barrage of glass and metal. Good-bye, brown leather overcoat of justice. I twink vaguely in not giving Chris a truly serious injury here, which by rights he should get -- but he's in the hospital so often, it seems, and he's had so many stitches, I was starting to feel a little attention-getty in the whole melodramatic, INJURED AGAIN! sort of way. My apologies to Magneto's player for acting like a Gary Stu. Rossi's demand for explanation is rhetorical, and born out of shock rather than indignation or protest; there are very few proper responses to having several tons of metal and glass thrown at you, and he lacks the panache to come up with something clever on the spur of the moment. Anyway, he's busy DIVING FOR HIS LIFE.
And now the reason why this pose is not so good. I do not protest overmuch at the use of 'grand' twice in the pose, because it works fine in that sense. The sentence construction of the part where the phone gets lost and Rossi scrambles is not graceful, and doesn't parse well. If it were more staccato, it would have a lurching feeling, akin to the quality of the character's pose. There are parts of the sentence I like, mind: the image of the hopscotch of panic, the anthropomorphization of the phone, the loss of dignity. Taken as a whole, however, I'm not a fan of that particular part. Oh well.
And here's where I drop into the concept of tone poems. A tone poem, literally speaking, is a piece of music that's based around a theme or a storyline, usually a one-movement symphonic piece of work. Simplistic, but there's a bit more to that. The part that applies specifically to writing is the fact that tone poems are usually programmatic. In other words it's meant to /sound/ like the thing that it's describing. The most obvious way this happens is if the musical representation is literal: a flute echoing a specific bird cry, for instance, or kettle drums used to describe rolls of thunder. Less obvious are the non-literal representations. If you know the famous Blue Danube, for instance, the first page or so is of the slow break of dawn over the river, the sleepy chirp of birds, the clouds slowly gaining color, and so on. Even without /knowing/ that this is what the first movement of Blue Danube is about, you can still hear it in the music. Head over to this link on amazon and click on the music sample next to The Blue Danube to see what I mean, if you don't remember how Blue Danube starts. (Really, it's way too short a sample to get the full picture, but it's close enough.)
So now, how it applies to roleplay. As I've mentioned before, I tend to be an aural writer, and this works best for me because of my background. I hear the words I'm writing aloud in my head, and while there's an element of visualization there as well, there's more vocalization. Namely, mine. I can hear the cadence of the words, and how they string out in my head. This means that there are times when the word choice and sentence formation can contribute to the overall mood of the scene for me. Short, succinct sentences seem to make a scene pick up speed. Longer, windier, more convoluted sentences can have a sense of breathlessness about them, or a slightly dizzy feel. The texture of a word -- it's vowel sounds, its consonants, its length, its accent -- can change the feel of a pose. It's the same premise that goes into beat poetry. These rules aren't absolute, of course. Like music, the tonal influence of a word can be very subjective.
Anyway, that's what's going on in Rossi's player's world.
Er ... so how are you?
Magneto remains untouched by metal, but not by glass - nicks and cuts beginning to bleed here and there, despite the worst of it having hit the ground before reaching him. A protective blizzard of shrapnel gnashes and snarls violently in answer to Rossi's question. In slow motion, before Erik and behind Rossi, gravity overcomes the lodging power of momentum, and the ruined vehicle falls, rolling back down to earth with a pitiful groan. The sanctuary door jars, and his seething glare is drawn off Rossi long enough to dart to it before the shrapnel is dropped, and the man moved for.
A hiccuped step pushes Rossi to his feet again, hands ripping over a bed of concrete and glass. Trapped by dead-end and SUV, the detective scythes a sickle-bladed glance across the alley before baring his teeth, palms out and open: truce. Peace. Goddamn dumpster. "Nice to see you, too," he jags, baritone thinned and tight over adrenaline's breathless rush. The hands, scored across, tremble in their sign before routing elsewhere, swept aside. "You really want to kill a cop in front of /Sanctuary/?"
Oh. Look. There's more log.
Weird.
Again, with the detail! Erik bleeds, injuring himself as much as Rossi (albeit without the furious, heart-stopping /terror/.) How Shylock of him! and a shout out to Sir Ian, old Shakespeare veteran that he is. I love the 'snashes and gnarls' and the 'answer to Rossi's question.' Being a person who anthropomorphizes things myself, I always love it in other people. It's like having a conversation where everybody knows the words. The touch of gravity, the introduction of physics into the scene -- gravity, momentum -- is also cool; though I'm not sure if the player meant it, it's a great lead-in for the resurrection of 'Erik' in the scene, as opposed to 'Magneto.' Dr. Lensherr, the physics professor. Nice guy. When he's not trying to SQUISH YOU.
There's little that Rossi can do in the face of this raw power, and he is unbalanced enough and thrust into fear enough that he's ready to parley, or surrender (conditionally) to avoid death. He is not suicidal, after all, though occasionally reckless enough that it's hard to tell the difference. I like the tremble of the hands; he becomes aware of their shakiness and immediately moves them away, hiding that tremulous quaver to make a show of resolution. 'Sickle-bladed' suggests the Grim Reaper, who is closer today than he has been for a while -- since the last time Chris had a car thrown at him, in fact -- and the 'truce. Peace. Goddamn dumpster' is as much to sketch the jitter of his thoughts as it is to explain the motives behind his gesture. Damn. Show, don't tell! I'm sorry.
Even in extremis, at least he thinks a little. Dead cop in front of Sanctuary, in front of a mutant hideout. True, the thought of reprecussions to his fellow mutants didn't noticeably pause Lensherr before the Purity rally -- but he just came out of the club. He must know some people there. This time, the retaliation might be to people he knows, personally. Rossi points it out, drawing a hasty line between dead cop and potential suspects or witnesses inside.
"You're following me." Erik accuses in answer, manic paranoia clearly evident in the icy pallor of his irises around contracted pupils. The door jars again, and again - only he's ignoring it now, advancing still upon Detective Rossi.
Green eyes glitter back, dilated to black; a step back meets trash and staggers, splaying Rossi's stance wide. "Follow you? Christ. I'd /arrest/ you if I stood half a chance. You think if I /could/ follow you, I wouldn't have the entire NYPD SWAT team here to back me up? Not to mention every poodle in the pack?" The deep baritone jigs across sped breath, catching through the puff and writhe of mist.
Chris is distracted by incredulity. Lensherr thinks he's what? Following him? Following /Magneto/? Are you /shitting/ me? Erik poses about his eyes being contracted; I bounce it back at him with dilated pupils, the natural response to adrenaline and fear. Rossi's logical, professional reply tumbles back: keep him talking. As long as he's talking, he's not killing you. (Edit to add: The more he talks to you, the more you impress him as being an individual, a human being. It's easier to kill a stranger than it is to kill someone you've shared thoughts and conversation with. Theoretically. Make yourself a /person/ in his eyes.) Never mind that Magneto doesn't know what the poodles are -- perhaps it's just as well, really. Calling mutants poodles is not particularly indicative of deep and resounding respect, from the outsider's perspective.
There is one thing that I'm deeply unhappy about in this entire log, and that is that I don't think I did a very good job of showing just how frightened Chris really was. Deeply terrified, in a way he hasn't felt for a very long time. Not even when he and Lazzaro were being attacked by the dumbshit duo, or the last time Magneto made the moves on him and turned him into a pretzel. I don't know why I didn't do a better job, really. There are things I could've done -- his heartbeat, the race of his pulse, the ragged hiccup of breath, or the edge to his voice -- but for some reason ... nada. Damn. It's so rare these opportunities come along, and I fall flat on my face. I do not know why that was. My apologies to Erik's player for my poor showing.
Magneto says nothing in reply to that, breath pushed furling and draconic out into the night air as Rossi's explanation goes in one ear and lingers there, tilting dangerously across a very deadly sword's edge.
Another step back, cautious -- glass crackles underfoot, grating into ice -- and Det. Rossi stills where he stands, arms spread, distanced from the battered home of body: away from pockets, from danger, from the urgent, yearning weight of the gun. The alley light zaps moody applause, flickering jaundiced color over the man's face and shoulder. White plumes eddies, and drags around the knit of jaw. Magneto's move.
In this context, Erik's silence is a bad thing. A very bad thing. (Oh. And there's 'Magneto' again. Well, just prove me wrong AGAIN, why don't you.) Draconic. A good image for what Mr. Smash and Destroy is at the moment -- and there's even a slight suggestion of lair-guarding there, when you add in the 'sword's edge,' with the Sanctuary and its precious mutants being held safe inside, trapped, while the guardian (Lensherr: an old, old dragon) deals with the threat outside.
Threat. Rossi scoffs. Him, a threat? With Old Man Apocalypse flouncing around out here with a fucking SUV?
He retreats still further, because distance between him and the crazy terrorist seems prudent, if ultimately futile. Silence meets silence; Rossi senses the danger of saying something more, of stepping in rashly where things are teetering in the balance. The meta there is a reminder that he has protection, albeit useless to an extreme degree. Given only silence to work with, I try to paint scene more. Sounds, color -- and that's the extent of it, which is interesting. I am not good at the other senses: kinesthetic, scent. I will try to include those more. It's easy to tell that I'm a very sight- and sound-oriented person, isn't it?
"Who are you looking for?"
"A lead. On a case." Careful, that deliberate baritone, rough and low over the thread of cupric-tanged fear. "Nothing to do with you."
The next question is slower in coming. Low, and matter of fact, as Erik turns his head into the light, just enough for his eyes to glint pale and intelligent at Rossi, orange cancelling out blue. "A mutant?"
"Maybe." Rossi's glance flicks past Magneto at the door, that jarring, jangling door into -- ironic -- Sanctuary, beyond. Lids droop, veiling the skip and slap of emotion. "Vic was active in the mutant community. Figure some of her friends or the people who knew her might've seen something, been too afraid to come in."
Well, there's a little bit of a nod to the fear there in my first pose of the group. He answers exactly what Erik asks for, and then answers the earlier question to boot. Nothing to do with you. He recognizes paranoia, and if it were true paranoia, nothing he has to say will be able to appease it. That's a depressing thought. Erik's reply to it is reassuring, however: intelligence, and deliberate. (And I love the orange cancelling out the blue.) Still, the question is also more worrisome. How protective /is/ Lensherr? How hostile is he towards humanity? Rossi knows that he'd follow the lead regardless of whether it was mutant or not, and that he has no particular preference for it to be one or the other. Does Magneto grant the same possibility, that the job supercedes prediliction? Or does he categorically defend mutants purely based on genetics, without regard for the worth or value of the person?
Chris is torn between 'Goddammit, someone, come /out/!' and 'Goddammit, people, /stay inside/!' His instincts for self-preservation and warring with his desire to protect; there is so much about Lensherr that is uncertain in his mind, and he can't see the grand scheme of things the way Magneto can. He doesn't believe in sacrificing a few for the greater good. The good of the many over the good of the one is bullshit, as far as he's concerned. (Except when he's the one, inconsistently enough.) As a result, he can't feel his way with Lensherr. Magneto had to know that his Purity Rally attack would rebound on mutants -- it /did/ rebound on mutants, innocent ones -- and yet, he went ahead anyway. He proclaims mutant superiority and rights and freedoms, and goes on the press to tell them not to fear them, then acts against their interests ... at least insofar as Chris sees it. What will he do for the Sanctuary people? What buttons work on a man like that? Rossi doesn't reject the possibility that Lensherr isn't completely self-serving, that it's all an act for power and fear and fame. Mercenaries can don the mantles of martyrs; it happens all the time.
Given this untenuous, shifting sand beneath his feet, Chris takes the only course he can think of. His entire work life is spent untangling lies. If he's going to get squashed for something, let it be for telling the blunt and straightforward truth.
Just beneath his left cheekbone, Erik feels for a moment - fingers pushing through a line of blood to settle upon a jagged bit of glass, which is then tugged loose and flicked irritably away to skitter over ice. A drop or two of blood pat after it with the force of a second flick. Near enough, police cars are on the move, sirens off. Someone's finally made the call.
Enough sparkles in Rossi's black hair (in his overcoat, in his blood-streaked skin) to make a diadem of the man, a scintillate outline in the absence of chalk. "We never just /talk/ anymore," he drags, baritone black under the lash-flayed gaze. "It's always slam, bang, assault and battery -- Nothing to do with you. Christ. Maybe nothing to do with mutants. Her kid was one. Could've been the ex, or the boyfriend. Still, got to find out."
Magneto poses vulnerability. Physical vulnerability. And yet, no weakness.
Chris is the weaker one, here. (Well, he's younger.) In the face of Erik's silence, he talks. Jaggedly, sardonically, covering his racing heartbeat with smart-aleck machismo and what passes for wit. If you're going to kill him, just get it over with already. Rossi can be silent -- really! I swear! -- but it depends on his mood, and whether he's the one exerting the strain, or having the strain exerted on him. It's this inability to keep his mouth shut when he's being leaned on that makes him the one that IA pulls in first, when they're on one of their periodic hunts after Beston's scalp. For the most part, he can talk smack, enrage another person, and goad them to fury and an explosion without ever betraying anything relevant or important. With normal men, under normal rules, this works just fine.
Magneto can throw cars. This is not the best solution in this case. However, like many men, many smarter and more reasonable men, Chris falls back on what he knows. Under duress, you piss the other guy off. Once he's pissed, you can control the situation. Except, well. See above re: the throwing of cars. There is a saving grace, though. He routes back to the explanation: this is why I'm here, this is what I'm doing, this is my job.
"When you open your mouth to expell the vomitous, putrid mass of words and sentences that you attempt to pass off as 'conversation', I desperately want to kill you." Tired. Erik is just tired. A hand sweeps lazily at his side, palm facing the street, and the SUV rolls painfully over, and over again - into the street. A taxi hauling ass past swerves - honks. The SUV collapses back into its parking space. "I fear God may be working more swiftly in his effort to punish me than he is the successful advancement of those crafted in his image."
"Even God needs a hobby." Arms ease warily, lowered to a painful, angular drop by the tight coil of body -- injury there, sketched in the elbow's press against ribs and the cop's mask: skin stretched thin and taut over discomfort. Jaw, lips, throat, temples; shadow steals gold light and paints blue along the skull's hollows. And the brittle voice with its Brooklyn tincture. "What'd you do to the people inside?"
The SUV rolls over, Erik's little puppy dog. Do not think Rossi did not notice that, oh no. Erik's desire to kill him, he takes without comment -- because, bizarrely, he considers it only natural. Chris is intensely irritating when he chooses to be. He accepts the consequences of that without question, because that is the reaction he originally tailored his attitude towards. Perhaps not quite to that /extreme/ case, but still -- close enough. And, oddly, that remark about God actually strikes a chord with Rossi, winning the tiniest bit of perverse sympathy. High-flown as the language is, basically it means what Rossi says all along: God's out to screw you. Poor, exhausted Erik.
There's a sense here that Rossi won't be turned into a toaster after all, and so he finally dares to relax. Just enough to ease the whine of strained muscles, and enough that the pain can start biting through the numbness of shock. He'll have a lot of stitches in his back when this is over; not enough to keep him bedridden, but enough to keep him off truly active duty, and to play a bystander's role in Magneto's arrest later in the week. There are parts here in the pose that I like, again; the stretched skin, the hint of pain, the shadow and the paint of blue, and the hollows of the skull. Since he has a hint of grace here from Erik, he asks the most immediate question on his mind. What happened in the Sanctuary?
"I don't hate humans, you know." Erik replies, once again, offering an answer that has little or nothing to do with the question asked. "I don't /despise/ them. Not all of them. I believe, with a lesson in respect, in understanding, and less political power..." In his eyes, that look is building again. He does know, doesn't he? He understands? Surely, with - the first of the police cars rolls to a quiet stop. Cars have been passing every few seconds, and this is the first time Erik has recognized the slow tug of a car coming to a quiet and complete stop, headlights off. His eyes are back upon Rossi immediately, pulled from the street.
Chris: What the fuck?
There was a pause here in the posing while I turned to Erik's player and admitted, blankly, that we were speechless and absolutely unsure how to respond.
Chris: What the fuck?!
Erik's pose here was unnerving to Chris, in a more rattling and terrible way than the imminent death presented by the SUV. There was a strange feeling that more was at risk here than simple life, even if it was Chris's. Whatever his public views about the Catholic church and his immortal soul, it is far more difficult to really expunge faith from the various nooks and crannies of your mind, even if you've lost your Faith-with-a-capital-F.
Chris: No, seriously. What the hell? What am I supposed to do with that? Jesus, Mary and Joseph. You've got to be shitting me.
Rossi floundered. He was prepared to deal with death. Not willingly, mind, but /that/ he was expecting to confront eventually, so he had some framework, some kind of foundation to fall back on. He's imagined his death a thousand times in the night: close encounters, chance misses, what if this, what if that. To some extent, he feels armored against the eventuality. But here, out of nowhere, comes this other thing, this strange and unprompted reaching out of humanity. Rossi is thrown. The player is thrown.
I salute Erik. Chris struggles gamely on, cursing his useless player.
Chris: Goddammit, stop gobbling like a fish and get back to the damn keyboard, you asshat!
The other man's mouth -- the /human's/ mouth -- opens, cynicism, acerbic wit, intelligence, sweeping to the fray, only to snap shut over prudence. Weight shifts. Rossi's gaze follows Erik's to the street before turning back again, sharp. Shuttered. "Superpowers don't make the man," he says instead, edging another half-step back. "A corpse is still a corpse, whatever he's got for genes. Once his file's on my desk-- What do you want from me? I don't hate mutants."
Two conversations running almost in parallel, not quite meeting until right about here. There's a sense that Erik's looking for something -- validation, forgiveness, understanding -- and Chris is tugged towards it, moved to respond to it without really understanding why. It's the priest in him, warring with the cop; the quiet confessional, which is an almost inevitable aftermath to violence and strong emotion. Catharsis.
Rossi can't respond. He can't supply what Erik needs. Whether he ever will or would be able to is debateable. For the moment, he's too entrenched in the cop to be able to really hear the priest inside. Father Rossi has enough of a hold, still, to stop the cop's first reply: smartass, sharp, tending to push away intimacy (jeer at it) in masculine repulsion. He dimly perceives that Erik is asking for something from him, and he tries to answer it, as much for the other man's sake as for his own, but he answers the wrong question. It would take a miracle, or a lifetime of experience and understanding, to answer the right one.
Edit to add: This is the commentary of edits, really. Rossi's reply gropes rather blindly, trying to answer what he thinks is being asked without ever answering it. 'Do you hate mutants? Is there a future for them?' And his reply, in short: 'No. I don't know. All I can do is treat them equally in death. It's not up to me.' Humility that isn't really humility. Rossi views his work as being, in a strange way, almost divine: dispensing justice, serving as the mills of God. There's nothing like closing a case, and knowing -- /knowing/ -- that you got the right guy, that the dead have justice, and it's because of you. It is the closest thing to joy he knows, and the closest thing to pain he carries, and he hands it over as best as he can. To paraphrase Bujold: how like a man, to guard himself with mask after mask, then carelessly hand you his heart on a platter.
However. That's not enough. He says it wrong, or he says it poorly, and he's the wrong man at the wrong time. The moment's gone. The cavalry is here. And Erik's player, who is smart and knows police, makes them look smart by not having them come rolling in with lights flashing and sirens wailing. Rossi takes a step back, ready to leap for safety again -- although he's injured now, and weak, and shaky -- in case cars start to act like overexcited spaniels again.
For the record, my pose there was not so good. We will move on.
A second car. A third. Helicopter blades churning ever nearer. Doors opening. Erik's eyes upon Rossi turn briefly exasperated, and then he's lifting. Flying, even. Up, one story. Two. Onto the roof, where he can start running, or take his chances with the helicopter cameras.
In a night of shock and surprise, one more barely warrants comment -- and yet. Rossi flinches back at that first, eerie hint of ascent, a step (another, another) stumbling him back to the wall's broad-lipped support. Light washes the alleyway, casting its debris into sterile, austere negatives; christens man and mutant too, bathing the one with a quick touch before turning its focus on the other. Spine pressed against brick, blood and glass stitching his coat, Chris sags down to meet heels with hips, seamed hands covering his face and the shudder of belated reaction.
".../Fuck/."
And we close. Erik's terse and back into the professional terrorist we all know and love, the pragmatic criminal. Rossi collapses at last from shock and gives in to his emotions. At least the shudder was right. As a close, I think it was a little too purple, a little too much detail. It would've been fine without quite so much in there. I would take out the christening, and the debris, moving the light straight from the man to the mutant. However, the last word? I like having it.
The cops start hunting Magneto down, with enthusiasm if without luck. They want him, but bad. Cop-killer? Damn straight. The answering patrolmen who canvas the scene pause to look at the mutilated SUV, neatly deposited back in its original parking spot, and laugh incredulously. You believe that? Magneto parked the fucking car. Beston, responding to the call, eyes the battered vehicle with some interest, then tickets it for running out the meter. An EMT is called to take care of Chris, and he gets sent to the hospital -- /again/ -- to have shrapnel dug out of his back and face, and to have a whole lot of stitches put in his back. He was lucky, he gets informed, and Jesus Christ, can we go one month without having you as a patient?
Bite me, says Chris. Lensherr's got the hots for me. What am I supposed to do?