Repose

Who: Adrian's Nameless friend (narrative)
What: Letting off steam.
Where: The woods.
When: Just following this and sometime after this.
Warnings/Rating: Swear words!

( He bent forward, and the gale seemed to pick his body up, melting his form into a growing black nest that twisted and turned to the object of its attention like a head. )

[Some prankster performed some unscheduled demolition in the woods. One of the old houses has been knocked down. They're all pretty rickety, of course, but this one seems to have somehow both exploded and imploded, which is a challenge to explain. Nothing was apparently scorched, either. The house was never rigged for gas, so the wreck poses no danger. Local authorities remind Repose citizens that, while many of the abandoned houses in the woods may not be habitable, no one is authorized to remove the homes or knock them down without a permit.]

[After this.]

Slow clap, forest-wrecking, house-demolishing, magic dude. Big man, screwing with the woods.

Who: Cat and Jack
What: Cat and mouse
Where: Second City
When: Nowish
Warnings/Rating: They might scream. They do that.

Cat wasn't actually sure if she was going to meet Jack Penhaligon. Oh, she'd said she would, and they'd set up a time and date to meet inside the entrance to Second City. But Cat? Was fickle, and why not? After all, it was a woman's prerogative to change her mind, and Cat liked prerogatives belonging to women. And Jack could be so dull sometimes. He wasn't as bad as Matt, who seemed determined to thwart her enjoyment of life every step of the way, but he was dull. Jack wanted to have all these conversations that meandered endlessly in inquisitive circles, and Cat wondered how old-her hadn't gifted him with attendance to a communication class yet. Not the kind of class where you learned to manage people or convey ideas. No, that was dull too. She imagined he needed one of those old classes, the ones where eligible young ladies sat around learning how to keep conversation going with the dullest of wealthy men.

But all that was digressing. The point was? That Cat wasn't sure she was actually going to interact with Jack Penhaligon. Oh, she was there, but there could be some fun to be had in tormenting the man. After all, he deserved it. He'd been terrible to her, and she hadn't forgotten. Not that she was keeping track, but she hadn't forgotten.

At the entrance to Second City, which required quite a bit of on-foot trekking, climbing down below the docks and picking one's way through rock and garbage and homeless cities alight with trashcan fires and men and women that begged and called out with violence in their voices and desperation in their eyes, Cat waited. She was perched atop a stall, one just a few feet inside the dark bones of the Capital's first city. The stall sold newspapers from all over, especially the black-market kind, with classifieds that promised things you couldn't legally obtain. The papers included badly written stories about life in places just like this, outside the mainstream. There, Cat crouched. She wore black. Leather pants, a black ribbed tank, no jacket, thick boots, gloves to her upper arms. Her eyes were lined in thick black, and her lips were harlot, and Cat watched for the boring little British man to arrive.