fangednconfused (fangednconfused) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-11-24 20:50:00 |
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Entry tags: | derek mitchell, maddy rigby |
Good Hang
Who: Maddy/Derek
What: Pinball
Where: Las Vegas, Pinball Hall of Fame
When: Present
Ratings/Warnings: Low-ish
At 1610 E. Tropicana Avenue, a beige building squatted next to a strip mall with a hair supply store and a tattoo parlor of questionable repute. Next to it, a building had been razed and nothing built in its place. Across the street, it was the same story. That end of Tropicana was a hot mess. It was hard to imagine anything of wonder in that stretch of road, but a yellow and black sign hovered over the parking lot among a cluster of palm trees: its lettering made Maddy’s heart go pitter-patter.
Pinball Hall of Fame. It was 10,000 square feet of pinball, claw, and candy machines set up in rows under lazy ceiling fans and fluorescent lights. A few stand-up arcades punctuated the line-up. Maddy could feed the old machines one quarter, or the newer machines two, and play for hours if she wanted, fishing coin after coin out of a plastic cup of loose change.
The blonde sat on a stool in front of Creature from the Black Lagoon, slapping the buttons to keep her ball bouncing. She’d been at it for ten minutes, crouching over the 1993 machine, and she was in the zone, waiting until juuuuust the right moment to roll the sphere off the tip of the lever. As she waited for the ball to ping and slide back down the left side, Maddy reached for her drink with her right hand, oblivious that she’d picked up her change cup instead of her Dr. Pepper until a torrent of quarters hit her in the face.
Derek hadn’t known where to begin. So many pinball titles pulled at his attention. Nightmare on Elm Street, Knight Rider, and Shaq Attack were but a few of the games calling his name. As he wandered up and down the rows of machines, the cup full of change jingling merrily in his hands, his eye was caught by a person deeply engrossed in a game. The vampire watched as she picked up the cup full of coins only for them to fall in a hailstorm of silver around her.
He walked up to where she was perched, kneeling down to help pick up some of the errant change and tossing it back into her cup. “You didn’t swallow any, did you?” he asked, looking up at her. “I don’t know the Heimlich.”
“Pfft.” Maddy spit a quarter into her hand. The expression on her face said it all: filthy. “No. But I’ll take a mouthful of rubbing alcohol if you have it.” She smacked her mouth in distaste and plucked the remaining silver discs from the front of her Joan Jett and the Blackhearts shirt and the crotch of her jean shorts. “Hey… did you know that asshole copyrighted the phrase Heimlich maneuver? That’s why they have to call it abdominal thrusts when you take a class.” She twisted on her stool to face the guy. Nice of him to give her money back instead of cramming it in his pocket or the nearest machine.
“Really?” The fact that a person had even invented it was news to Derek. He thought it was just the scientific term for saving someone from choking. “So, this guy can sue you for copyright infringement?” The vampire looked around carefully, but it appeared as if he had picked up every quarter that had been left on the ground. He returned to a standing position, propping his cup up next to her.
“I came to a museum and I learned something new. Pretty sophisticated,” he added.
“About as sophisticated as the gift shop at the Atomic Testing Museum. So much awaits you just off the strip.” Her fingernails waltzed across the glass top of the machine. Maddy contemplated her lost game of pinball, then picked up her Dr. Pepper and took a sip, watching Tall Guy over the rim. He had puppy dog eyes, she decided, like a Basset Hound with sex appeal, courtesy of his tattoos. “Did you scope out your favorite machine before you came or are you flying by the seat of your pants?”
The vampire grabbed a vacant stool and pulled it up to the game next to hers. “I looked up the list ahead of time and a few titles stuck out,” he told her, before ticking off the three he was most interested in. “I didn’t even know this place existed for the longest time. Why aren’t more people here? Probably because you don’t win anything except a vague feeling of accomplishment.”
He held out a hand. “I’m Derek, by the way.”
“Maddy,” she said, returning with a firm shake. “And it might be because it looks like one of those discount Halloween stores from the outside, only vacant and out of season.” She crossed one leg over the other in an effort to get cozy. The wooden stools were hell on the ass cheeks and required a rotation. “I played Knight Rider earlier. KITT sounded very disappointed in me when I lost,” she confessed, leaning forward with some drama. “My favorite is Nugent,” she pointed in its vague direction, “because what the fuck! It actually plays Cat Scratch Fever.” She tipped her head back. “God. If I could design my own pinball machine, I’d make it so weird.”
“Doesn’t KITT always kinda sound disappointed, though?” Derek answered. He turned his attention to the game in front of him. It was a choice between Meteor and Twilight Zone, which was one machine down from Maddy, and still in good conversation distance. He moved over one and fed a quarter into the slot.
“If I designed my own pinball machine, I’d call it Social Anxiety,” he told her, eyes on the silver ball. “You have to bounce off of Awkward Situations and fall into Panic Spirals.”
Her mouth fell open and she slapped his arm. “Shut your face, that’s brilliant! Way better than mine. I call it Late Stage Capitalism.” Maddy talked while she spectated. “I’m bouncing from paycheck to lottery ticket, and in between, there’s a screaming landlord, utility bills, a baby, and a predatory lender. At the end I just fall into a cardboard shack.” She drank some of her beverage and set it on the floor by her chucks. “Hang on while I feed George Washington’s face into the machine. Like always.” Maddy popped a quarter in the slot and fired her first pinball. “Anyway. It’s either that or a hot dog theme.”
Lights flashed as she scored some points and sent the ball rocketing up again. “Haha! Sucka!”
“Between the two of us, we’d run the most depressing arcade ever,” Derek enthused as the ball pinged against various spooky obstacles. The game reminded him of getting high with his friends and watching the Twilight Zone marathon that always played on cable on New Year’s Eve, and wondering aloud about what it would be like to live through the various scenarios presented in the series.
“What kind of prizes should we have?” he asked, glancing sidelong at her.
“Paxil for everyone!” Maddy tapped a button enthusiastically. “Just dump out the Hot Tamales machine and fill ‘er up. We’ll issue weighted blankets at the door and make up a playlist of Bon Iver and Nick Cave.” It might have been the multitasking, but she dropped her last ball right in the pit and sighed.
She turned and hopped from the stool.
“Are you using tha—?”
“Hands off, buddy.” Maddy shook her head as the dude walked away. “Can you believe that? The seat is still warm. You’ve got to be desperate to want someone else’s hot seat.”
Derek shuddered at the phrase ‘hot seat’. “You know what’s the absolute worst, though? Going to someone’s house and they have one of those cushion-y toilet seats, and you don’t even want to touch it because you know they’re not cleaning that thing on a regular enough basis.”
He made a grossed-out face and shook his head.
“And it like, sighs when you sit down because there’s a tear in it? Ooh ooh!” Maddy pointed at him and jumped. “Or the carpeted lid? Seriously! My old neighbor had one of those. It haunts me.”
This whole conversation was sending her into a strange mental place that was both dark and entertaining, and had her contemplating never peeing again. Maddy tossed her beverage cup in what she hoped was a trash can but one couldn’t be too sure because it also held an old mop head. She retrieved her coins and contemplated her next move.
He was disgusted and laughing at the same time, which caused his ball to sink. “Oops. Oh, well.” Derek turned to look over his shoulder. The would-be seat thief was glaring at them from afar, waiting for them to give up their stools, most likely. “Hey,” he said, nudging Maddy with his elbow. “You want to mess with this guy a little?”
To demonstrate, the vampire acted like he was about to get up from his seat, and the man twitched in anticipation before an expression of disappointment clouded his face as Derek settled back down.
Maddy turned away and snickered behind her cup of quarters. “I got it, I got it…” She sobered up, picked up her stool, and wandered in the man’s general direction, stopping a few pinball machines short of him, where she proceeded to put on a fake top-hat and cane routine around the stool, the penultimate move of which was taking her seat at a multiplayer Pac-Man unit.
Derek watched the bizarre and amazing display with a mixture of awe and approval. He could never have come up with something like that. The vampire clapped enthusiastically, then grabbed his own stool and joined her at the Pac-Man game. “That was truly inspired,” he told Maddy. He watched, amused, as the man stalked off to another part of the arcade.
“I think our hot seats are safe, for now,” Derek added with a laugh.
Maddy craned her neck towards where the manager of the museum sat in a mountain of unidentifiable machine parts and pop culture memorabilia. “He’ll probably come back with some muscle and kick it out from under me.” She imagined herself going down in a pile of broken stool legs, getting an ass cheek impaled in the process. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing she ever explained in an emergency room. Maddy fed the machine and cracked her knuckles. “Prepare to be annihilated!” She grabbed the joy stick and directed the cartoon character to eat some pellets. “Hey. What do you do? For a job, I mean?” The tip of her tongue poked out the corner of her mouth as she concentrated.
“Umm,” he stalled, eyes on the screen, “I’m sort of in between careers right now. You know, checking out my options. Working on some personal development.” Derek looked at Maddy out of the corner of his eye. “I did used to work at the t-shirt kiosk on the Strip, kind of across the street from the Elvis wedding chapel?”
Ms. Pac-Man got trapped between two ghosts and bit the big one. Maddy took a break to release her death-grip on the joystick and flex her fingers. “Wait. You’re not one of those airbrush dudes, are you?” She pictured a tourist proudly rocking a ‘Viva Los Vegas’ shirt, none the wiser. It was better than a misspelled tattoo, in the scheme of things. Of course, who could rule that out? She angled her chin to scan his visible tats. “Not that I can judge a weird job. When I was in LA, I knew all these struggling actors who got paid to show up at things and pretend to be somebody else, so I did it a couple times. Like once, I got paid to be really interested in a property to drum up interest at an open house. Another time, I got paid to sob at somebody’s funeral. Literally nothing in LA is real.”
Derek shook his head quickly. “No, I wasn’t responsible for what was on the t-shirts. If I had been given that duty, they would have been a lot cooler. I was the guy who sold them. I did a really good job, too. My boss said I was very energetic, which I took as a compliment, even though he was scowling when he said it. His default expression is a scowl. Kinda like Batman, but without the money, costume, gadgets, and fighting skills.”
The vampire realized he was probably rambling and switched the conversational gears to Maddy. “Fake crying at a stranger’s funeral? Yeah, that sounds like peak LA. What brought you to Las Vegas?”
Maddy had an idea she would have bought one of Derek’s t-shirts. She respected just about any form of a hustle, which was how she ended up owning so many knock-off purses. “I never really liked LA,” she said, attacking the video game again. “It’s phony, it costs a shit-ton of money, and for some reason you’re always running into an ex. Also, an LA 7 is like a Las Vegas 10 and I’m looking to cash in on that.” Her character ate a bunch of cherries and she veered back to Derek’s job prospects. “Hey, maybe you could be one of those tour guides with the headsets who hypes people up, or somebody’s promotional assistant.”
Maddy slammed the joystick left, driving Ms. Pac-man towards a safe exit, when the red knob came off in her hand.
“Can promotional assistants work at night?” Derek mused aloud without thinking about it. Maddy wasn’t the first person to suggest careers to him lately. He wondered if that was a sign that he really needed to find a job soon, besides the lack of disposable income and a permanent home.
The vampire looked down at the plastic knob in her hand. “You broke something in a museum,” he whispered, cutting a glance toward the manager who was ignoring them entirely.
“No shit!” she hissed.
Maddy grimaced. She stared down at what remained of the joystick and seriously contemplated jabbing her hand on it. Nothing like a good counter-accusation with injury to avoid responsibility. But upon further inspection, it was obvious that the screw was stripped. It was nothing some super glue wouldn’t fix, unless of course this was the original, real deal knob and that messed up the authenticity of the game. She held the red ball up to her face like a clown nose and pitched her voice higher. “Hiya, Derek! Happy clown! Saaad clooown.” She poked out her bottom lip. “Wanna balloon?”
Maddy laughed and tossed the ball at him.
He caught the knob in midair, laughing nervously. Derek may have killed people — sometimes en masse — and aided in stealing evidence from a police locker, but there was something about breaking an item in a museum, albeit a shoddily run one that specialized in pinball machines, that made the vampire feel like a criminal about to be arrested. Even if he wasn’t the one who actually did it.
So, he did the only thing that seemed to make sense in his head at that moment. Derek took the knob and attempted, with vampiric strength, to jam it back onto the machine. Which seemed like it was going to work, until the console beneath it cracked. “Oh, no. That wasn’t a good sound.” He looked up at Maddy.
Her jaw dropped for all the wrong reasons. “Dude, you are ripped!” She frowned. Unless he wasn’t. If there was one thing Maddy knew from working at Rabbit Hole, it was that plenty of reasons existed for strength. But whatever, there were bigger fish to fry. “Okay,” she whispered. “Think innocent thoughts. Right now we look guilty as fuck.” She picked up her cup of quarters and ever so slowly, casually got off the stool and moved it away from the game so nobody would have a reason to go that direction. “C’mon. We gotta get out of here.”
“Yeah...I totally go to the gym,” Derek confirmed somewhat lamely, before copying Maddy and picking up his stool and change. He glanced around the side of a claw machine, scoping out an escape route to the exit. So far, no one was paying them any mind.
“This way,” he told Maddy. He tried to walk casually, and ended up in a weird kind of saunter.
What the…? Had he never done light crime? Maddy watched the unusual stride and knew they needed a diversion. Quickly, while neither staff nor patrons were watching her, she tossed her change cup high in the air. The cup and its contents seemed to wink out of existence, only to reappear far across the museum on its most crowded aisle, right beside a Star Trek themed pinball machine. Quarters rained down in a loud cacophony upon both person and machine. “Go, go, go!” she said, careening through the front door and onto the sidewalk beyond.
He watched in confusion as the cup went up, then blinked into nothingness, not sure if he imagined or misinterpreted what he had just seen. The only thing he knew for certain at that moment was that Maddy had made a really good diversion.
“I’m going,” Derek muttered as he speed-walked out of the museum. Once they were on the sidewalk proper, he asked, “Are you a magician? Because I think you Criss Angeled that cup of quarters.”
“Sure, we’ll go with that,” the blonde said with a wave of her hand. Maddy breathed easier once they got outside into the parking lot. She didnot need to be paying for a classic arcade game for the next year and a half because of a shoddy piece of equipment she happened to be playing when it bought the farm. “What about you, Hulk Smash?” Her elbows flared as she stood with hands in her hip pockets.
“Do you really want to know?” Derek asked, quirking one eyebrow. “Because if you really want to know…” He trailed off and shrugged. “I’ll tell you.” It occurred to him then that there was a possibility that one day, he’d accidentally tell a hunter he was a vampire, and what then? Would the hunter believe that he didn’t hurt humans? How would Derek be able to prove it? Breath test?
“As long as you promise not to try to kill me,” the vampire added quickly.
Maddy made a big show of patting the pockets of her denim shorts, which were empty except for a phone with a stuck-on wallet and a set of keys. There certainly weren’t any big biceps on display. “What am I gonna kill you with, my charm?” She shrugged her shoulders. “But okay. I promise. In fact, I’ll go you one better. I pinky swear that I will neither kill you nor attempt to kill you.”
She held out her right little finger.
Derek hooked his pinky around hers. “What’s more legally binding than a pinky swear?” He moved a little further down the sidewalk, in case the manager from the Pinball Hall of Fame decided to peek his head out.
“Yeah, so, about me,” he said, looking at Maddy over his shoulder. “I’m a vampire.”
Maddy stared after him dubiously. “Really?” He might as well have told her he was from Mars, the way she was looking at him. “Are you sure? I’ve seen vampires and you don’t seem the type. Let me see your teeth.” She trailed after him in hopes of getting a better look at his fangs, should he decide to bare them.
“You can’t just ask a vampire to see their teeth!” Derek exclaimed, scandalized. “That’s an extreme invasion of privacy. I’m not some sideshow attraction.” It was difficult to maintain a straight face for long, and after a beat, he failed to hold in his laughter.
“I’m just kidding, I don’t care.” The vampire displayed his fangs.
Maddy got on her tiptoes to peer at his mouth. “Oh, no shit… You really are a vampire. Can I touch them? I’m just kidding.” Satisfied, she dropped down to regular height. “I’m human, I just happen to have a bizarre psychic power. Apportation. I can move things from place to place.” She gestured with her hands. “Myself, too, if I try hard enough but it’s kind of a pain in the ass, so I save it for special occasions, like life-threatening scenarios or bad dates.”
“Don’t worry, though, I don’t eat people. Anymore. Gave that up, what was it?” Derek looked up to the left as he mentally counted the months in his head. “Three. Three months.” He nodded.
“That’s pretty cool,” he remarked. “Does that mean you can make pizzas and stuff appear?”
She took the blood thing in stride. At Rabbit Hole, they had a very limited supply of expensive human blood, but animal blood was much more plentiful and cheaper to stock, so it made sense from an economical standpoint for a vampire to go that route if they didn’t have much luck with the hunting part. “Umm… I guess I could?” Maddy hypothesized. “It works better if you know a specific object you’re looking for and not a theoretical one. If I’ve seen the pizza, or I know exactly where it is? Sure.”
She tipped her head. “I bet there’s a support group for vamps who’ve gone cold turkey and they give out their own chips. And occasionally there’s drama, like when Gary the vampire accidentally brings the jelly-filled donuts instead of the custard ones and everybody gets really triggered.”
“You’re full of great ideas.” Derek laughed at the mental imagery Maddy presented, but it also sounded like a creative way to make new friends. “Have you met very many vampires? You didn’t seem freaked out at all. Not that I wanted you to freak out.”
“Oh the first time I met one, I completely freaked,” Maddy said, waving her hand. “This was in LA. I got so scared, I teleported into the nearest building, which happened to be a massage parlor. But I’ve come to terms. I have two part-time jobs. I design costumes for this company that outfits performers, and I work at Rabbit Hole. I’ve run into vampires at both gigs. Vegas is full of ‘em. Full of you. I think it’s the whole nocturnal city thing.” Maddy lifted her shoulders. It was easy to be flippant since she had a decent shot of zooming away from one, as long as she didn’t get caught off guard. “Anyway, you don’t seem too surprised by me, either. But I guess nothing’s that surprising when you’re dead.”
“Oh, I was surprised,” Derek admitted. “But I think I don’t show it as much, anymore.” He shrugged. She was right about Vegas. It seemed to be a hotbed of supernatural types. It was actually quite easy to fit in.
“I’ve been to that Rabbit Hole place, once. Is it fun working there? Or does it become just another job after a while?”
“It’s fun. Like... most of the time everything’s chill? But occasionally an interdimensional demon will drink too much and puke, and they don’t always puke from the same hole they drink with. And it’s not always alcohol they’re drinking. There’s a freaky black market for glandular secretions. Bleh.” Maddy made a sour face and remembered that time she walked in on an extraction procedure.
Derek’s expression changed to one that suggested he had just experienced an epiphany. “The Mos Eisley Cantina!” Understanding that this might mean absolutely nothing to Maddy, the vampire went on to explain, “It kept bothering me, the Rabbit Hole reminded me of something but I couldn’t place it. A toned down, no-violence version of the Mos Eisley Cantina, from Star Wars.” He paused mid-step as something she said earlier sank in.
“Glandular secretions? That’s so much more gross than blood!” He cut a glance to her to make sure. “Right?”
“Right. Well technically mammary glands count but otherwise…” Maddy nodded. “Oh and Han shot first!” It felt important to acknowledge she knew fandom references well enough to respond in kind. As they stood near the end of the parking lot, she pointed out a car that was a smidge dirtier than the rest. “That’s me. Hey, you need a ride anywhere?”
“Oh, yeah, I fully acknowledge this,” Derek agreed. “And to add insult to injury, they edited it and got rid of the copies of the old version. But those of us who saw it, shall never forget.”
He looked toward where she pointed, shaking his head with a smile. “Nah, I’m good. I tend to just wander, and I usually end up where I need to be.”
She smiled and crinkled her nose. “You sound like one of those wall decals people decorate their entrance ways with.” Maddie fished out her keys. “Nevertheless, I take your point and I bid you adieu.” She gave him a deep curtsy and unlocked her door. “Good hang.”