first_born_son (ex_first_bor754) wrote in city_limits, @ 2009-04-20 17:13:00 |
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Entry tags: | connor reilly, npc |
Legwork
After having no luck with a careful check of Navy Pier, Connor returned to the studio and looked in the office to find the addresses of the Slayers Kris had been training. If one of them had heard from her, that would at least give him a clue as to where to look, something he could pass on to Hayden to ease the other man's mind. He found the Rolodex and flipped through it, located Teresa's address, decided to run with that first thing.
He pulled the bike up to the curb in front of the younger Slayer's apartment building, looked at the facade of it. This was for himself as much as for Hayden, especially with this new threat around. He didn't want to find Kris beside some jogging trail with leaves in her hair the way he had Rhiannon.
At the door, he rapped lightly, then waited. He'd never really spoken to Teresa one-on-one, but if there was ever a time for that to happen it was now. "Please let her have some good news..."
Teresa was in the middle of an argument with her brother when the knock came at the door and her mother hollered at her to get the door, to which she yelled back. "Why can't Paul get it?" Her mother didn't much like that response and told her to get off her ass and answer the door because she was busy trying to cook lunch.
The young Slayer rolled her eyes and got to her feet, wandering over to unlock and open the door. Her brow furrowed at the sight of Connor, she hadn't been expecting to see him. She had been expecting to see Kris, yes, because she'd skipped out on their last training sesson. Actually she was kind of surprised that the older Slayer had come looking for her.
"Connor, hey."
The Destroyer raised his hand in a brief greeting, craned his next to look past Teresa and into the apartment. No sign of Kris, so he withdrew and said, "Yeah, I was just kind of in the neighborhood and decided to stop by. Got your street address from Kris' Rolodex, hope you don't mind."
He looked over his shoulder at the street as if the mention of the brunette's name would conjure her out of the air, but it didn't. "Can I come in for a minute, or can you step outside? I need to ask you something, and its kind of not for everyone to hear."
Teresa lifted an eyebrow before she shrugged her shoulders. "Yeah, sure." She turned her head and hollered that she was going out for a moment before she slipped out of the door and closed it behind herself. "You wouldn't want to come in, everybody and their mother seems to have decided to come and visit. My grandparents flew in and then my cousins dropped in and never left."
She folded her arms across her chest. "So... what's going on?"
"Nobody can find Kris."
Connor leaned back against the railing of the tiny porch, feeling the metal biting into the small of his back as he did so. "Her boyfriend Hayden texted around the other day looking for her because she didn't check in. I said I'd check her patrol route, but I haven't been able to locate her. When was the last time you talked to her? It seems like someone should have heard from her by now."
He'd tell her about the collector in a minute, because maybe she'd need to watch her back too. "Have you heard from her in the last twelve hours or so?"
Teresa's brow furrowed. "Kris is missing? Shit." She and Kris didn't always see eye to eye, but she cared about the other woman, the same way Kris cared about her. "I mean, I know she was having problems, but missing?" She shook her head. "I haven't heard from her. I was thinking the knock on my door today might be her because I missed our last training session, family stuff." Total lie, but, whatever.
"You might want to check in with the other girls, they might have heard something."
"Yeah, I'm gonna make some calls later, see if any of them have heard anything." Connor rubbed the back of his neck uncertainly. "Tried you first because I knew you guys have been working together pretty closely, so maybe she said something if she wasn't going to be around. Did she say much about the people who have been harrassing her, the vandalism at the studio?"
A station wagon rattled past, and Connor watched it suspiciously until it rounded the corner and disappeared. "Did she say anything at all about it to you?"
"Just that she'd been getting shit from the neighbourhood," Teresa said with a shrug. "Seemed to think people didn't want her around and then there was that whole deal with that kid who came to class one morning only for her parents to show up less than ten minutes later to whisk her away like Kris had some kind of sickness."
Teresa had a think about if Kris had said anything to her, but she definitely couldn't recall anything. "Uh, no. She never said anything to me about having to go away."
"Yeah, I didn't really think so either."
Connor was frowning now, his hands lacing together on the back of his neck when he was thinking something over. His danger sense had already been tweaked by this whole thing, and he lowered his voice a notch. "Look, I don't want to make you paranoid or anything, but there's something else going on and it might have something to do with this."
He stopped talking because he heard someone inside moving towards the door, and when the footsteps subsided he said, "There's a guy around, some creep who's been drugging people and working some kind of mojo to take their powers. He's already claimed two victims, another Slayer and a psychic. I'm not sure if he's the reason Kris is nowhere to be found, but I'm not ruling it out either. Could you tell the other girls to watch themselves until there's more information? They might take it better coming from you."
He had already halfway crossed off the other Slayers as far as having knowlede of Kris' whereabouts, but he'd ask anyway for the sake of covering all his bases. He felt bad enough about possibly going to Hayden with a big handful of nothing as it was. He found a scrap of paper and a pen, wrote down his cellphone number. "If you hear anything, give me a call. I'd appreciate it."
"What happened to those other victims?" Teresa asked. "I mean, by claimed, do you mean dead? Or did he just take away those powers? Because if it just took their powers and this freak returned the victims sans power then why wouldn't he do the same with Kris?"
She leaned back against the door and nodded her had. "Yeah, I'll talk to the other girls. Tell them what's up." She took the scrap of paper, glancing at the number before nodding her head. "I'll call if I hear anything and I'd appreciate you calling me if you hear anything."
"They're alive, they're just...different." He was thinking of Rhiannon now, how wrung-out she'd looked. If that had happened to Kris, then at least she was probably alive. If not? Well, he'd think about that later.
"Good luck with your visitors," he told Teresa with a somewhat strained smile. "And I'll give you a call if anything changes. Watch your back, okay?"
"Thanks," Teresa muttered as she tucked Connor's number away in her pocket.
She was about to go back inside when she remembered something. "Hey, Connor. There was this one guy in particular that hassled Kris a lot. A sleazy old guy in a bad suit, I think his name was George something or other."
The Destroyer paused, tried to remember if the name was familiar. It wasn't, and he wrote it down on another piece of paper. George. Cheap suit, sleazy guy. He'd run it by Hayden later, see if the Watcher was more in the loop. "Thanks, Teresa," he said, inclining his head in the Slayer's direction. "She's got to be somewhere. Now if we can just find out where 'somewhere' is."
NPC Teresa was written by Mands