Rooms

Who: Clementine and Irene
What: A touch of modern cinema
Where: Hotel → Gatbsy
When: Nowish
Warnings/Rating: Probably safe

Clementine, she reckoned red for Irene's color, and the dress was folded real pretty in tissue and flung over Clementine's arm as she waited in the hallway for the other woman.

Clementine, she wore green, hair held by a silvery band across her forehead, and she'd told Irene clear how to get on out of her door; she figured a big old time gap wouldn't be enough to keep that woman pinned. Could be Clementine should be fussing about this whole damn thing, meeting a woman she'd bedded down with at a hotel party, a woman that just happened to be a man at the time of said bedding down. But the hotel had turned Clementine into a homicidal Alice in Wonderland once, and it had turned her into something like the haint of her sister, and she figured giving a woman a penis was relatively easy by comparison. She wasn't fussed or fretting. She wasn't a thing but happy to get away for a day.

Truth was, there was some things troubling the blonde waiting in the hallway, but they weren't real big or looming. Things with Jake were bad, but she'd already decided that was his daddy's to deal with. Shane and Graham were all paired off, and the smarting of that was fading nice. Matthew was going to live, even if the man was frustrating as briars in socks. James wasn't never going to speak a full sentence, but the man wasn't bad as Shane, not when it came to grunting and expecting folks to understand him. And Declan and her, they seemed to be in some familial truce involving a boat. Most important, she'd gotten to see Joy and hold her close.

All things considered, life wasn't real awful.

Who: Armand
What: Cleaning house
Where: Gatsby
Warnings: NPC death

( He ate on the nights when he could not resist, but he didn't make a habit of hunting within the city limits. )

Who: Alexander
What: Moving
Where: Great Gatsby -> Hotel -> Penny Dreadful(s)
When: Currentish
Warnings/Rating: Nope

( They were both possibilities of the unknowable future. )

[Police arrive at the apartment building of one Aubrey Rois after receiving multiple phone calls of bottles of liquor being tossed off an apartment balcony by an unknown female. They clear the sidewalks of pedestrians but by the time they reach the apartment, no one (and no liquor) is found inside. Unable to reach Aubrey or locate the unknown female, they leave their names with the building manager, along with a request that he call them when he returns home.]

Who: Mingmei and Solas
Where: Gatsby
What: Coping with humanity
When: Nowish.
Warnings: Body dysphoria and probably Solas being a jackass about humanity.

( he didn't need to look in a mirror to know he wasn't right )

[She was excited for her old friend and excited to see her, too. Kitane was a close friend of hers, one that she knew could never be replaced. She was very happy for her that things were looking up and she was out of that horrible city called Gotham. Granted, Gotham had its own characteristics and everything. She at least had Metropolis to fall back to when necessary and for work, too.

Following Kitane's instructions, Mingmei crossed through to the Gatsby Door, following the directions completely. She anxiously knocked on Kitane's door, dressed simply in slacks and a simple blouse. Kitane had told her it was a bit of an older place and Mingmei didn't want to look too out of date or strange in this new world.]

[John's recent conversation with Helena on the mutant issue hadn't spurred him to the Mutant Cause. He was so done with the cause. The cause, right now, could go fuck itself. John had died multiple times because of the cause and different mutants struggling for supremacy. He was, in a word, finished.

So it was time to travel to another door.

He didn't know what door he was entering, and at first, the bright lights and the energy of 1920's New York made him roll his eyes. Couldn't he get away from New York? But as he walked, he noticed the details of a book read long ago. Of glamor and death, and a green light in the distance. The Great Gatsby. He loved that book.

So as the sun set, he made his way through the people to try to find one hell of a party.]

Who: Armand & Alexander Murphy
What: A meeting.
Where: Gatsby
When: Recent

( It wasn’t much like searching for Daniel. )

Who: Brielle, Xavier, Cap
What: Collecting the criminal
Where: Gatsby. The Vega.
When: Now.
Warnings: TBD.

[It was all a blur. The doctors prescribed heroin and the band played soft jazz through the night, gentle notes that crumbled into the muffled sighs of ghosts by the time they reached the upstairs where Brielle slept in an oversized poster bed. Men had replaced the windows, and the blood stains on the floor were removed to the best of housekeeping ability, the memories of dark stains flowed seamlessly into the patterned designs in the carpet. Business carried on as usual downstairs, the bar stayed busy and the parlor stayed polished. The staff brought her food, and the doctors brought medicine, and mostly, Brielle slept.

There were headaches, lapses in time, and notes on the nightstand in handwriting she didn't recognize. The name ERIK circled in ink, pinned beneath the brass edge of a gas lamp at low flame. The bedroom was kept dim like mourning. The colorful glass of a Tiffany lampshade glowed blue and green, seaside floral like the long, sleeveless dress that Brielle wore while she sat at a mirrored vanity, fastening wormsilk curls back with beaded combs. Her reflection was sallow from painkillers and forlorn from happenstance that night. The doctors assured her that her hearing would return completely once she was fully healed, which could take weeks. In the meantime, everything sounded distorted like words spoken through walls. It might have been more bothersome if she had anyone to speak to at all. Instead, she slept.]

[Afternoons held heat. Latent, sticky regret of the dawn broiling tar in the streets. The city at midday smelled like rubber and gasoline, but there was a part of Brielle that did not mind the smell as much as she used to. There was something complex about gasoline, and she could contemplate it from the backseat of stretched towncars. The driver wore a little black hat and never looked her in the eye. The staff skirted around her like so many ghosts in a miserable graveyard. It was widely known that she was a guest of the Vega's criminal echelon. Even with the absence of management, the place ran smoothly with Brielle as the phantom bride of the top floor. They took her into the city on Sundays and they hung her silks out to dry in the mornings.

Evenings held a breeze. The water carried cool memories from the oceans as easily as it carried sailboats. Nights were when the speakeasy brewed with violence and music, gangsters and stolen liquor. But it wasn't night yet. Early evenings like this, when the heat bent to accommodate cooler gusts, the building felt very quiet. The walls decompressed like exhales, and Brielle opened the windows of her bedroom. It hadn't taken her very long to get used to the opulence at all. It was not hers, but she'd had similar things once. She'd had imported carpets and cherrywood that gleamed. She'd had music and silk and nights that whispered promises of violence. Nothing in the world, even in this world, seemed very strange to Brielle.

Not antique pasts or polite gangsters or journal correspondence with perfect strangers. Not vintage outfits or the trunk that gradually accumulated stacks of cash like one might accumulate dust. Sometimes she wondered where it came from, but discovering the truth might just be worse than mild worry.

Downstairs, she could hear the staff beginning to prepare for the evening. People shuffled outside of her door, and the band was beginning to tune their strings from down below. Brielle, meanwhile, sat at her writing desk and opened her journal.]

Who: Alexander
What: Decisions
Where: West Egg, Gatsby
When: Current
Warnings/Rating: Death of a NPC

( The servants above were not ones he knew by the scents they left clinging to the air of the house, nor by the sound of their feet on the floor above. )

WHO: Jude Murphy, Clementine Murphy, Graham Ross & Shane Alexander
WHERE: Murphy Estate on Long Island
WHEN: Now
WHAT: "Visitors"?
RATING: TBD, language for sure!

( To be wealthy and influential in the Great Gatsby, one had to live in West Egg on Long Island )

Who: Ella D and Joey A
What: It's not coffee.
When: Recently
Where: Gatsby
Warnings: These two do not need warnings.

( Inside, light was gas-flare low, the indolent buzz of people drinking, and playing cards, and having a good time, and feeling self-congratulatory that they were having a good time when others weren't )

Who: Clementine & Jude
What: Narrative/Log
Where: Gatsby
When: Ahora
Warnings/Rating: Nada

( She knew that tone of respect. Folks used it all the time when they talked about her daddy. She closed her eyes. Everything would be fine now. )

Who: Preston R & Saint R
What: These two have never managed a successful date.
When: Weekend.
Warnings?: Unlikely.
Status: Incomplete.

( The camera was still sat on the table, he had empty pockets and no reassuring counter-weight of a camera strap around neck or wrist )

WHO: Jude Murphy and Ella Dean
WHERE: At a club, Gatsby
WHEN: Before the event
WHAT: Jude and Ella meet randomly at her place of work.
RATING: Light!
STATUS: log; complete.

( It wasn’t Vegas, there was no neon and rush, rush, rush. There were no bodies, no Ian, nothing that was more complicated than standing up on stage for four hours a week and singing the way that made her heart happy )

Who: Wren and Disguised!Loki
What: Acquiring powers
Where: Gatsby
When: In-progress
Warnings/Rating: Doubtful

It was really, really hard to stop texting Luke and just go. But she'd been talking to the anonymous people on the journals for weeks before the events of the previous evening, and the memory of strength in her arms and shoulders, it just made her more sure that she needed to do this. Luke was always, always the one protecting her. She was going to protect him for a change. She knew he would be mad, she did, but she didn't lie to him about going. She didn't tell the whole truth, but it was better than sneaking off without saying anything. Or at least she thought it was. Okay, maybe she would've had a really, really bad reaction if he'd done this same thing to her. But this was important, and she would make it up to him after.

She hadn't wanted to tell whoever she was meeting where she lived, and she didn't really realize that mentioning the pulse made it kind of a little obvious. She just wanted to keep whoever it was away from Luke and the kids, just in case something did go wrong. And she picked a kind of public place, because she thought that was just smart.

Gatsby's house was crowded, just like it always was during one of his parties, and she waited on the steps in soft florals and a lip that she'd bitten until it swelled.

[Gatsby is glitter and glitz and glamour. It is a constant party, a constant high, a constant flow of liquor in her veins. It is getting lost in everything that everyone expects her to be. It is forgetting about a little girl at home, or about the man that reviles her existence in his life. It is about the buzzing in her mind, and the whispers of thoughts every minute of every day. It is booze and drugs and pretty people doing some not so pretty things.

Gatsby is escape.

MK has used this to her advantage as of late. The frivolity of Gatsby makes it all so much easier. All of it. Her fiance who doesn't love her, a niece who loves a coldhearted doctor more than her broken aunt, the loneliness, the thoughts of strangers prodding into her brain. She's gotten a little better at controlling when she wants to, but most days? She doesn't want to. She just wants the sharp taste of whiskey on her tongue and the opium highs that filled her brain.

She finds herself one day dragged to some show that she's too high out of her mind to even comprehend, dressed in gauzy gray that makes her bright red hair and pale skin stand out, scars scattered up and down her arm covered up by make-up. But she sits there, fake plastic smile and dazed gaze at the stage, and she loses herself in the spinning performers and the music. And then, she sees a familiar flash of blonde and her face falters. She squints, and she tries to focus on the thoughts, but she can't suss anything out. The plastic smile melts into a frown, and when the show is over, no one wants to even deal with that expression. They know, the friends she cultivated here know that the redhead has a darkness lingering, and no one has the patience to deal with that. So MK drifts, searching for a way to find Wren after the show is finished.]

Who: Lyra Vasiliadis
What: Narrative
When: Recently
Where: Gatsby/Marvel/Gotham

( She wondered for the first month or three if she was such a tree. If she would die here, without the neon lights to bathe her and her roots abruptly jerked up from the blood-soaked soil of her family )

[Adam claimed he was working and that wasn't too far fetched. Bootleggers and gangsters needed a doctor who knew what he was doing and could keep his mouth shut. Compared to most of the people in New York? Dr. Waterhouse was practically a mute. But, he loved these parties. He loved watching girls of beads and color spin around in a liberation. They let him touch more because it meant they were different from their mothers. They let him watch because it gave them a false sense of power. Beyond the nameless women, he loved the fizzy drinks, the ancient drugs and the brassy music. Adam sat with a smile on his face, loopy and lubricated with a few drinks too many. Dressed in a black tux like most men there, he slouched forward on a bar that overlooked the pool that people were dancing around and splashing their feet in. He wondered how long it would take the inevitable push of some poor drunk girl into the water and the stampede of drunks to follow her in.

He drank. He smoked. He forgot about that girl who wasn't his and a woman he never really intended on marrying back home.

If anyone asked other party go-ers about Adam, they wouldn't get much information beyond the fact that he was a very good doctor. Some women would make jokes about his bedside manner. Adam had let plenty of these women sloppily kiss him between their drinks. He pretended to listen while they complained about their fellas. Adam had even let a few women lead him upstairs for a good time. Because good times were all the doctor was interested in these days.]