(no subject)
Characters: Stoneface (stonyfaced) and OPEN to any character that can reasonably be present.
Date/Time: September 13th, midnightish
Location: The Park
Rating: 14-A for gore.
Summary: Stoneface finds Bellflower's body and calls on all watchmen to come to the Park for a debriefing at midnight. I would like to note that all other bodies are up for dibs provided you contact the mun that the corpse belongs to first. Your character is free to show up if they heard the ruckus and wanted to check it out, if s/he's a watchman or a Guard or for any reason, really. Please feel free to log in here or to tag Stoneface with any of your characters, including making your own threads that don't involve him at all. For the sake of ease, I will assume that Stoneface did not check his journal for the hour and a half that this log spans, so feel free to do that too. If I forgot anything or if I'm stepping on anybody else's toes, please let me know and I'll amend things the best I can. And I probably DID forget something, so notice would be much appreciated. XD
------
Even the most paranoid of men put down their guards occasionally, and Stoneface was no exception in this respect. Like most men of a certain age, he had a ritual that he often followed to the tee, provided that the Sphere provided no pesky distractions, which it hadn’t today-aside from the altogether frustrating one of not being able to swear. He settled down in the evenings with his disgustingly brewed tea in the plain brown mug, cracked from being dropped too many times and read over the often dull and wordy reports his men sent to him every week. He looked from the report - Reed’s, and unbearably difficult to trawl through - to Nobby, who was currently occupying himself with his favorite pastimes of drooling and sleeping on his foot, then sighed.
The reports could wait another day. He gently pushed Nobby from off of his foot, and the dog grumbled quietly to himself before collapsing a few feet away from his previous spot and threw the reports onto the slowly increasing pile on his desk. It fell over. He gazed passively at it before shrugging and padding outside for his customary evening smoke. Pensively, he extracted a cigar from his silver case and regarded the sky. It looked like it was going to rain soon. Which was, Stoneface thought, by all means a good thing; rain meant more people stayed inside, and that meant they were busying themselves with nice inside crimes like cheating at cards and being small-minded idiots in their own homes, which generally meant that he didn’t have to take care of it.
He took a deep breath, expecting the surprisingly fresh outside air to greet him, but you didn’t need to have a werewolf’s nose to smell the stench of blood that drifted through the air. The cigar dropped from his fingers, and he poised himself to run, but stopped himself just in time; if there was a potentially dangerous killer out there, he wasn’t about to run out in his nightshirt. He took the time to change into his armour and grabbed his various weapons before running out into the darkness.
With luck, it was just a drunken brawl in some alley that got a bit out of control. He jogged along, peering in candlelit windows and wishing that he had a werewolf’s nose for but a moment. He could smell the stuff, but damned if he could trace it. He ran about aimlessly for what felt like an eternity before he finally managed to track down which house smelled the worst. He crouched behind the door and carefully nudged it open with his loaded crossbow. He squinted into the darkness and stayed crouched until he was properly aware that there was nobody inside.
Nobody living, anyway. Normally, he would tip toe around in hopes of avoiding tarnishing the crime scene, but from the looks of it, even the walls were part of the crime scene. He went through every one of the rooms of the thoroughly rumpled apartment in search of the man who had done it and turned his attention back to the woman. She looked as if she had been handsome before the knife that ended her life had tarnished her features, but other than that, she was unknown to him.
Funny-before coming here, he would have been appalled at the amount of blood spread around when killing was so much easier and so much more common with a simple cut or dart. This time, he was all too aware that there was a great population of people who seemed to like killing simply to see how much they could make the victim bleed. He turned to leave, but something caught his eye. A symbol.
He recognized that symbol.
“Damn!”
After leaning out the window and spitting out the bubbles that filled his mouth at that curse, he waited outside for the two watchmen that were on duty in Square Zero. Right on time, they wandered over. If they were surprised at seeing their boss with armour over his nightshirt, they didn’t show it.
If that symbol was there… well, he’d bet his nonexistent badge on the fact that there were more victims out there. People like Apostle didn’t stop at one. Apostle hated the Watch, and he could heal, and… didn’t Youth say that they were enemies? And if he could stand up against Youth…
“Glen, you’re with me. We’re guarding this door until Blitz there sends somebody else over. Blitz, every watchman is now on unpaid overtime. Get all of them up, send a few over here and send the rest to-“
He hesitated. Now would be a good time to have a Watch House.
“The park. Send ‘em to the park.”
“Everybody, sir? For one murder?”
“Yes.”
“Sir? Permission to spea-“
“You don’t need permission to speak, man.” Stoneface snapped back.
“Yessir. But… why everybody, sir?”
Blitz was right. For one murder, it seemed ludicrous. But it didn’t take a genius to put two and two together, and the words that Apsotle threw on the journals like graffiti were burned into the back of his eyes.
“Just a hunch.”
“A hunch, sir?”
“Yes, a hunch. A hunch that we will be needing more than the three of us, and a hunch that there’s more out there, and an even stronger hunch that you will be off doing exactly what I told you to do in the next five seconds instead of standing here questioning me!”
With that, Blitz left reluctantly on his journey to wake up cranky watchmen.
It took longer than he’d like to get everybody together. It always did. People thought that police forces were supposed to act like well oiled machines, but in the end it was made up of very much the same as any other organization: regular people. People who tended not to be very happy about being roused at midnight and would maliciously take their time putting on their clothes or would have to explain to their girlfriend why an armed man was knocking on their door while they were trying to be what people persisted in naming ‘intimate’.
Once they were all gathered at the Park, Stoneface regarded the crowd milling about. It was far from all watchmen, and among them were busybodies, fretting citizens, guards and… well, just about everybody who wanted to show up for a show. It had begun to rain, but somehow Stoneface was unsurprised to see such a vast amount of people there. He could move to watchmen to somewhere more private to give them orders, couldn’t he?
Blow that! They wanted a show? They’d get a show! He jumped onto a picnic table and thankfully kept himself from slipping on the wet surface before cupping his hands around his mouth.
“Watchmen, to me! Listen!”
There was still some mumbling going on and one or two snickers of, The Captain’s wearin’ a dress. He changed tactics.
“Everybody shut up!” He roared. After this appeared to work, he settled down and dropped his hands back to his sides. “You all will be wondering why I called you here! I know, it’s cold and raining and most of you would much rather be inside, but as of now, all of you are on duty. There has been a murder. Some of you know that already.” Looking down, he could see that the rain was washing the crusted blood from off of his boots, and it trickled off the picnic table in a red stream.
“Now! I have reason to believe that there have been more tonight, which is why all of you are called here! I want Square Zero searched! This is good old fashioned policing, ladies and gentlemen. Shake hands with a few doorknobs! Nobody is to be alone tonight, and nobody’s allowed to be alone tomorrow! Travel in groups and leave no stone unturned! We’re after somebody very dangerous, very unpredictable, and above all, somebody who will kill you without a second thought! If somebody tries to get at you, orders are to fight back first.”
And ask questions later was the reasonable way to end that particular sentence, but he intentionally left it out. What did he have to ask Apostle?
“I want everybody armed. If you find a murder scene, you know what to do. Rosalind, you’re on the scene! Elsa, you’ll be with her, and I’m sending you-“ he pointed at a particularly burly watchman staring at him, then at a second, “-and you to accompany him. I want every scrap of evidence you can find! Bring all your science stuff, and be prepared to be up all night!”
He took a deep breath, and continued shouting out commands and separating groups into different patrols. No use in letting them decide on their own where to search; there would be five groups searching the places that just happened to be undercover and out of the rain that way.
“Handmaiden, you take Youth and assemble the strongest group you can, then report to me.”
He glared at the crowd, then one shouted out: “Who are we fighting?”
“Good question!” He shouted back. “It ain’t official yet! But let me just say that I know that this is a man who can put his limbs back on, so people like you are in charge of standing around guarding things, not fighting! I don’t want anybody to actually apprehend the suspect unless I say so!”
He took a deep breath. “I see a few guards are with us tonight. You want to help? You come to me for directions, or you scarper off to somewhere it’s dry. And as for the rest of you, it’s a damn cold night out.”
He paused to viciously spit bubbles off to the side. “You should be indoors.”
He addressed the rest. “Well? What are you waiting for? You have orders, men, now go out there and follow them! Clear off!”
Stoneface jabbed his hand into the crowd. “Elsa, Rosalind, report to me. Sky, lad, you’re with me.”
He stared into the distance, as if confused by something. OUt of the corner of his mouth, he murmured, "Blitz? Did you bring Kagami here?"
"Yessir."
"Why?"
"Watchman, sir. You said all watchmen."
"But he's a bookkeeper."
"A watchman bookkeeper."
Stoneface sighed, and called out one more thing: "And Kagami, go back home. You're not needed here."
Rain beat off of his helmet as he dropped his head to stare bleakly at his legs. He was concerned and worried, but more than that, he really wished he had trousers.
Date/Time: September 13th, midnightish
Location: The Park
Rating: 14-A for gore.
Summary: Stoneface finds Bellflower's body and calls on all watchmen to come to the Park for a debriefing at midnight. I would like to note that all other bodies are up for dibs provided you contact the mun that the corpse belongs to first. Your character is free to show up if they heard the ruckus and wanted to check it out, if s/he's a watchman or a Guard or for any reason, really. Please feel free to log in here or to tag Stoneface with any of your characters, including making your own threads that don't involve him at all. For the sake of ease, I will assume that Stoneface did not check his journal for the hour and a half that this log spans, so feel free to do that too. If I forgot anything or if I'm stepping on anybody else's toes, please let me know and I'll amend things the best I can. And I probably DID forget something, so notice would be much appreciated. XD
------
Even the most paranoid of men put down their guards occasionally, and Stoneface was no exception in this respect. Like most men of a certain age, he had a ritual that he often followed to the tee, provided that the Sphere provided no pesky distractions, which it hadn’t today-aside from the altogether frustrating one of not being able to swear. He settled down in the evenings with his disgustingly brewed tea in the plain brown mug, cracked from being dropped too many times and read over the often dull and wordy reports his men sent to him every week. He looked from the report - Reed’s, and unbearably difficult to trawl through - to Nobby, who was currently occupying himself with his favorite pastimes of drooling and sleeping on his foot, then sighed.
The reports could wait another day. He gently pushed Nobby from off of his foot, and the dog grumbled quietly to himself before collapsing a few feet away from his previous spot and threw the reports onto the slowly increasing pile on his desk. It fell over. He gazed passively at it before shrugging and padding outside for his customary evening smoke. Pensively, he extracted a cigar from his silver case and regarded the sky. It looked like it was going to rain soon. Which was, Stoneface thought, by all means a good thing; rain meant more people stayed inside, and that meant they were busying themselves with nice inside crimes like cheating at cards and being small-minded idiots in their own homes, which generally meant that he didn’t have to take care of it.
He took a deep breath, expecting the surprisingly fresh outside air to greet him, but you didn’t need to have a werewolf’s nose to smell the stench of blood that drifted through the air. The cigar dropped from his fingers, and he poised himself to run, but stopped himself just in time; if there was a potentially dangerous killer out there, he wasn’t about to run out in his nightshirt. He took the time to change into his armour and grabbed his various weapons before running out into the darkness.
With luck, it was just a drunken brawl in some alley that got a bit out of control. He jogged along, peering in candlelit windows and wishing that he had a werewolf’s nose for but a moment. He could smell the stuff, but damned if he could trace it. He ran about aimlessly for what felt like an eternity before he finally managed to track down which house smelled the worst. He crouched behind the door and carefully nudged it open with his loaded crossbow. He squinted into the darkness and stayed crouched until he was properly aware that there was nobody inside.
Nobody living, anyway. Normally, he would tip toe around in hopes of avoiding tarnishing the crime scene, but from the looks of it, even the walls were part of the crime scene. He went through every one of the rooms of the thoroughly rumpled apartment in search of the man who had done it and turned his attention back to the woman. She looked as if she had been handsome before the knife that ended her life had tarnished her features, but other than that, she was unknown to him.
Funny-before coming here, he would have been appalled at the amount of blood spread around when killing was so much easier and so much more common with a simple cut or dart. This time, he was all too aware that there was a great population of people who seemed to like killing simply to see how much they could make the victim bleed. He turned to leave, but something caught his eye. A symbol.
He recognized that symbol.
“Damn!”
After leaning out the window and spitting out the bubbles that filled his mouth at that curse, he waited outside for the two watchmen that were on duty in Square Zero. Right on time, they wandered over. If they were surprised at seeing their boss with armour over his nightshirt, they didn’t show it.
If that symbol was there… well, he’d bet his nonexistent badge on the fact that there were more victims out there. People like Apostle didn’t stop at one. Apostle hated the Watch, and he could heal, and… didn’t Youth say that they were enemies? And if he could stand up against Youth…
“Glen, you’re with me. We’re guarding this door until Blitz there sends somebody else over. Blitz, every watchman is now on unpaid overtime. Get all of them up, send a few over here and send the rest to-“
He hesitated. Now would be a good time to have a Watch House.
“The park. Send ‘em to the park.”
“Everybody, sir? For one murder?”
“Yes.”
“Sir? Permission to spea-“
“You don’t need permission to speak, man.” Stoneface snapped back.
“Yessir. But… why everybody, sir?”
Blitz was right. For one murder, it seemed ludicrous. But it didn’t take a genius to put two and two together, and the words that Apsotle threw on the journals like graffiti were burned into the back of his eyes.
“Just a hunch.”
“A hunch, sir?”
“Yes, a hunch. A hunch that we will be needing more than the three of us, and a hunch that there’s more out there, and an even stronger hunch that you will be off doing exactly what I told you to do in the next five seconds instead of standing here questioning me!”
With that, Blitz left reluctantly on his journey to wake up cranky watchmen.
It took longer than he’d like to get everybody together. It always did. People thought that police forces were supposed to act like well oiled machines, but in the end it was made up of very much the same as any other organization: regular people. People who tended not to be very happy about being roused at midnight and would maliciously take their time putting on their clothes or would have to explain to their girlfriend why an armed man was knocking on their door while they were trying to be what people persisted in naming ‘intimate’.
Once they were all gathered at the Park, Stoneface regarded the crowd milling about. It was far from all watchmen, and among them were busybodies, fretting citizens, guards and… well, just about everybody who wanted to show up for a show. It had begun to rain, but somehow Stoneface was unsurprised to see such a vast amount of people there. He could move to watchmen to somewhere more private to give them orders, couldn’t he?
Blow that! They wanted a show? They’d get a show! He jumped onto a picnic table and thankfully kept himself from slipping on the wet surface before cupping his hands around his mouth.
“Watchmen, to me! Listen!”
There was still some mumbling going on and one or two snickers of, The Captain’s wearin’ a dress. He changed tactics.
“Everybody shut up!” He roared. After this appeared to work, he settled down and dropped his hands back to his sides. “You all will be wondering why I called you here! I know, it’s cold and raining and most of you would much rather be inside, but as of now, all of you are on duty. There has been a murder. Some of you know that already.” Looking down, he could see that the rain was washing the crusted blood from off of his boots, and it trickled off the picnic table in a red stream.
“Now! I have reason to believe that there have been more tonight, which is why all of you are called here! I want Square Zero searched! This is good old fashioned policing, ladies and gentlemen. Shake hands with a few doorknobs! Nobody is to be alone tonight, and nobody’s allowed to be alone tomorrow! Travel in groups and leave no stone unturned! We’re after somebody very dangerous, very unpredictable, and above all, somebody who will kill you without a second thought! If somebody tries to get at you, orders are to fight back first.”
And ask questions later was the reasonable way to end that particular sentence, but he intentionally left it out. What did he have to ask Apostle?
“I want everybody armed. If you find a murder scene, you know what to do. Rosalind, you’re on the scene! Elsa, you’ll be with her, and I’m sending you-“ he pointed at a particularly burly watchman staring at him, then at a second, “-and you to accompany him. I want every scrap of evidence you can find! Bring all your science stuff, and be prepared to be up all night!”
He took a deep breath, and continued shouting out commands and separating groups into different patrols. No use in letting them decide on their own where to search; there would be five groups searching the places that just happened to be undercover and out of the rain that way.
“Handmaiden, you take Youth and assemble the strongest group you can, then report to me.”
He glared at the crowd, then one shouted out: “Who are we fighting?”
“Good question!” He shouted back. “It ain’t official yet! But let me just say that I know that this is a man who can put his limbs back on, so people like you are in charge of standing around guarding things, not fighting! I don’t want anybody to actually apprehend the suspect unless I say so!”
He took a deep breath. “I see a few guards are with us tonight. You want to help? You come to me for directions, or you scarper off to somewhere it’s dry. And as for the rest of you, it’s a damn cold night out.”
He paused to viciously spit bubbles off to the side. “You should be indoors.”
He addressed the rest. “Well? What are you waiting for? You have orders, men, now go out there and follow them! Clear off!”
Stoneface jabbed his hand into the crowd. “Elsa, Rosalind, report to me. Sky, lad, you’re with me.”
He stared into the distance, as if confused by something. OUt of the corner of his mouth, he murmured, "Blitz? Did you bring Kagami here?"
"Yessir."
"Why?"
"Watchman, sir. You said all watchmen."
"But he's a bookkeeper."
"A watchman bookkeeper."
Stoneface sighed, and called out one more thing: "And Kagami, go back home. You're not needed here."
Rain beat off of his helmet as he dropped his head to stare bleakly at his legs. He was concerned and worried, but more than that, he really wished he had trousers.