Thread: A Gorgon and a Djinn walk into a bar... WHO: Mickey and Xanthippe WHEN: TBD WHERE: Starting at the school NPCs: Benny the doorman, various Dockyard patrons
Xanthippe was cold. It was ridiculous, how cold this place got. And the locals told her it would get colder still, with ice on the ocean and snow piled high. They'd had a few flurries to far and Xanthippe did not approve. So she'd asked for some wool to make herself some sweaters. Celebrimbor too, he might get cold.
The staff had been confused when she'd asked for wool and cards. She wanted wool and paper? No, cards to card the wool, then she'd spin it into yarn, then knit it into a sweater. The staff had mentioned that the school was willing to take care of her, and that they could get her sweaters if she was cold. That seemed like cheating to Xanthippe, but the staff insisted that it was easier for them to buy her wool socks than to find raw wool and all the tools for her to make socks. They'd compromised on her accepting some winter clothing including a nice down coat, but also enough balls of wool yarn to knit herself some extras.
Now she was sitting by herself in one of the common rooms of the school. It was usually unoccupied because it was rather small and didn't have a television. It did have a wood fireplace, though, which is why Xanthippe liked it.
The room was toasty warm as she sat on the rug by the fire. Her knitting needles were at work and her earbuds were in her ears, listening to an episode of A Prairie Home Companion and wondering, not for the first time, if Lake Woebegone was a real place.
---
Mickey was sneaking through the school -- well, as much as that was possible, considering his heavy cowboy boots. Together with his jeans, the leather jacket and the flannel shirt, he looked like a caballero. He’d tried sneaking into Hydra, but one of the more nosy people there had informed him that Xanthippe preferred to be on her own, and that there was this room with a fireplace she preferred…
When he found her and stepped into the room, the heat hit him hard. He sighed almost immediately, not liking this stiffling, toasty heat. How could she endure it? He thought she was a creature of the sun and the sea, just like him…
Never mind that. He grinned when he saw she was knitting. It was quaint enough to be charming, especially on someone as young-looking as her. “Hola abuelita, you up for a night out? I promise an exciting activity at least as… engaging as what you’re doing now.”
---
It took Xanthippe a moment to respond, first to notice him, then to pause her iPod, then to take the earbuds out of her ears. But when that was all done, she was smiling. “Mickey Torres,” she greeted him. Their last conversation hadn’t ended well, so she wasn’t sure where they stood. But if he’d come to visit her, it must be alright. Xanthippe was glad. She’d hate to lose a friend for the sake of rules.
“A night out?” she asked, setting her knitting to the side and rising to her feet. “What would we do?”
---
Mickey grinned, noticing that the snakes weren’t hissing at him, weren’t being wary. That was good. “We’re going to have fun, amiguita!” He declared. “We’re going to paint the town pink!”
He gave her a quick once-over. “What you’re wearing is fine.” For the Dockyard, it didn’t matter how the pretty girl dressed. That there was a pretty girl was more important. “You just need to cover up your little gusanos, and then we’ll be on our way. Or can’t Gorgons dance?”
---
Not being one to think about clothing much—though she was starting to a little, as she began to pick up that others cared—it hadn't occurred to her that one might need special clothes for going dancing. But Mickey said what she was wearing was fine. Jeans and a long-sleeve sweater must be appropriate dancing clothes.
Dancing! That did sound fun. Though was that allowed? Xanthippe frowned just a little as she thought. Going out late was fine. Dancing was fine, there was even a dance class.
"There aren't any rules against going dancing," Xanthippe concluded aloud, a little surprised to find something in her life unregulated. Her face lit up in a sudden smile. "We will go dancing! Come, I must find a scarf for my head." And she held her hand out to him to lead him off to her room.
Mickey’s Vespa was bright red and in America, it was something that people liked to mock. It wasn’t even a motorcycle, was it? Mickey didn’t mind. It got him to where he was going, and sometimes, in the summer, as he wound down the cliff roads to Camden, the djinni could pretend he was back in Spain.
Not tonight, though. Outside, the cold was biting, the wind fierce. Still, the Vespa could still be handled: the roads weren’t yet treacherous and icy. Mickey suspected it might be the last ride for the girl this winter, though: he wasn’t entirely comfortable driving it down the cliffs. No alcohol for him tonight.
They stopped on the parking lot of the Dockyard. Despite the cold, there were a few people outside, smoking. Mickey could feel Xanthippe releasing the hold on his waist -- the snakes meant she wouldn’t be wearing a helmet. After she’d dropped off, he got off too, pulling off his helmet and shaking his hair loose. “The Dockyard. We’re here to have fun, yes? Anybody gets too handsy or too annoying, leave them to me.”
---
Xanthippe nodded, not entirely sure what it meant if someone got too handsy, but annoying she understood. It was fine. She wasn't here to talk to humans anyway. She was here to dance!
She'd been to the Dockyard once before on a trip to town, mostly to see what it was. It had been mid-afternoon and fairly empty. Xanthippe hadn’t seen the appeal and left. Now, though, she could see people through the windows, talking, laughing, drinking. Humans. Xanthippe drew a little closer to Mickey and took his hand, smiling up at him, up for doing… whatever it was they were going to do next.
“I’m ready.”
---
Hand in hand, they walked to the door. This was good, Mickey thought. Showing they were together. Showing they were a thing. People wouldn’t be bugging them as much. “Hey,” he said, greeting the doorman, “everything a’ight, Benny?” Mickey wasn’t a local the way Benny was a local, but he’d been here for some years, even spending the summers in the village, and his aunt was the local lawyer. People knew him, Benny included.
They were waved through.
Inside it was warm, the air thick and heady. People didn’t smoke inside, but it was still fuzzy, the lights down low. There was rock-music, a small crowd on the dance-floor. It was busy (holiday) and the crowd was a bit older, a bit more varied than usual. Mickey dumped their coats in a corner already decorated with them, and he shouted: “Want a drink?”
---
“Thank you, Benny,” Xanthippe said in her Greek accented voice as they entered. Not that she’d ever met the man before, but she thought she should be polite. Just in case he wasn’t a human man.
Going inside, it was a little overstimulating, the noise and the people, especially without her snake eyes to help her keep track of things. Xanthippe never understood how people got by without being able to see all around them at all times, it seemed very limiting. Under her scarf, her snakes writhed, creating ripples in the fabric that the observant would be able to see. At least it was warm, though she was a little taken aback to have her brand new coat dumped on the floor. Was that really the local custom? Very strange. Did they not know how build coat racks? That knowledge was perhaps lost to humanity along with the ability to spin wool.
But Mickey was asking her a question, so she gave herself a mental shake. “Yes, please,” she answered, thinking a drink of water did sound nice. She eyed the dancers, but Mickey hadn’t suggested that yet, so perhaps there was a protocol to follow. While he fetched the drinks, she settled herself in a chair against a wall. That way she wouldn’t have to keep wondering who was behind her.
And as she waited, she watched.
--
A few people waved at Mickey or greeted him as he made his way to the bar, and he nodded back at them, grinning. Then there were the two or three girls who took care not to see the dark-haired boy, and Mickey had a pretty good idea what that was all about. He wasn’t the sort of guy to call after a successful date.
He returned to Xanthippe, carrying a water and a beer. They were lucky: it had been the female bartender tonight. When she was working, Mickey didn’t even have to show his hilariously fake ID. “Here,” he said, giving Xanthippe the beer, “local brew. It’s good.”
He looked around the crowd, noting that it was busy, but not too busy. That was good. “Oh, and if you see somebody who looks like he’s a cop or something, just abandon the beer. You’re technically underage here, yeah?” Then again, weren’t they both underage everywhere?
--
Mickey was popular, from what Xanthippe could tell. He liked people, and people liked him back. She wondered what it was about him that people responded to. Perhaps it was part of being a djinn.
She accepted her drink with a thank you and took a sip. It wasn’t bad, for beer. She preferred wine for everyday and something stronger for special occasions. They’d made honey mead once or twice growing up, which she’d very much liked. It was the wrong climate here, though. Perhaps that’s why they drank beer instead of wine.
His next statement, though took her aback. “No, of course I’m not,” Xanthippe said firmly. There was enough discussion on the subject, especially with Celebrimbor and Trent’s recent detention, that she’d looked it up. “The drinking age is twenty-one. I’m fifty-five.” She paused, trying to reason it out. “That’s why you have water and I have beer.” Though now she was no longer sure. “Isn’t it?”
---
“You’re fifty-five?” Mickey asked before remembering to lower his voice. “Damn, but you do age well, abuela.” The nickname was even more appropriate now. “What’s a girl as old as you doing in high school, then?”
He took a sip of his water, the icecubes clinking against the glass. “I’m drinking water because I’m driving, and I don’t want to wreck my Vespa on the way back,” he explained. “You’re drinking beer because I thought I could try to get you to break the rules, but that’s a no-go.” There was a hint of a pout. “So much for my crafty plans.”
---
“I can drink beer and not break the rules. Isn’t that better?” Xanthippe asked, not sure what there was to pout about. “It is better,” she said, more assertively this time. And drank some more beer to prove her point.
And perhaps, to stall for time. But really, what was the point of that.
“I am here because my mother was murdered and the other Gorgons do not want me,” she said, trying to say it as dispassionately as she could. “There is no where else for me to go.”
---
Mickey dropped the rule-breaking angle. It paled in comparison to murder. “I… am sorry,” Mickey said, his grin fleeing from his face. Somehow, it didn’t sound like a platitude. It was in his eyes: the djinni had a penchant for looking earnest. ‘I like you’, ‘I love you’, ‘This is my first time’.
Still, given Mickey’s history, he might be truthful in this instance.
“And so you came to the school,” Mickey said. “Fair enough.” He paused, and then looked Xanthippe in the eyes. “I… I never knew my parents. I was raised by a woman in Spain, I called her my mamá. She was murdered as well.”
---
Xanthippe didn’t say she was sorry in return. The look she offered was more resigned. Parents of people like them got murdered. This was how the world worked. But she did stretch her hand across the table to take his, gently so her fingernails wouldn’t scratch him.
“What happened to those who killed her?” She did like getting to the heart of a matter, and in these sorts of situations, that expression wasn’t as much of a metaphor as usual.
---
“I don’t know,” Mickey said, and there was a bit of hardness in his voice now, something dark in his eyes. “They were never found. Ladrones… Burglars, the police said, they came when I was not at home, and they were never found. I didn’t know what I was back then, so I didn’t have many options to find them.”
He sighed. “And now, even if I were good at using magic, I imagine the trail’s gone cold.” He eyed her, remembering something else she’d said. “Why… I mean, the other Gorgons -- why’d they… sent you here?”
---
“Burglars don’t stop with just one house,” Xanthippe said. “If that is what they truly were. That trail may be cold, but there could be warmer ones.” Oh yes, Xanthippe had spent a great deal of time thinking about how to catch murderers.
She left her hand in his and took another drink of beer with the other. “The Gorgons did not send me here,” she clarified. “One of them just… maybe it’s easier to start from the beginning.” One more sip of beer, then she began.
“Most Gorgons live together on an island. That is where my mother lived, until she fell in love with a human man. They were caught. He was killed, she was exiled. When I was born, she had found a new island in Greece, which is where I grew up. It was a good life. A very good life.” Xanthippe fell silent for a moment, lost in memories.
“Hunters found us when we were out raiding,” she went on suddenly, eyes narrowed, hate in her voice. Underneath her scarf, her snakes began to writhe more vigorously, making strange shapes under the fabric of her scarf and one sneaking out the side. “They killed my mother and kept me in a cage. But there are consequences to killing a Gorgon. The others heard of this and found the hunters. Not all of them, some had left by then, but many. The hunters were slaughtered, and I was freed. But while the Gorgons were willing to avenge my mother, they were not willing to forgive her. Or her child. They would not take me with them. But one showed mercy and helped me get to St. Margaret’s. And so I came to live here.
“That is my story.”
---
Mickey frowned as he listened to her story, taking pity on the girl in front of him. And he’d thought his aunt was bad… It was a sad story, a story that explained the anger he sometimes saw in Xanthippe. And then one of her snakes peeped out, and Mickey quickly shifted, blocked Xanthippe from view with his broad shoulders. “Your snake, it’s, ah, getting out.”
He wanted to ask more, to press her for questions, to ask why’d her aunts had killed her father, but the subject seemed to agitate her more. Maybe not the best time. “Should we stop talking about this?”
---
It was? Of course it was, why else could she see better? Still, rules were rules, and a crowded bar was a bad place to frighten humans.
“Oh, thank you,” Xanthippe said, quickly exerting herself over her snakes to calm them down. They still were writhing some, but at least were no longer threatening to escape her headscarf. The errant snake was tucked back in with her fingers the way a human girl might push her hair behind her ears.
“Talking about it or no, it doesn’t change anything,” she said as she worked. “If you have questions, ask. If not, you promised me dancing, not sitting and drinking beer. There, are they all hidden again? I look human?” Xanthippe turned her head from side to side to let him see.
---
It was odd, how docile the snake was, how easily it listened to her as it was tucked back under the scarf. Snakes were a little creepy, but on Xanthippe, they looked natural and almost… Well, not not-creepy, but tolerable. He wondered if Xanthippe ever had a bad hair day? Or was every day a bad hair day?
“Yes,” he said, “you look gorgeous.” He gently took her by the hand. “Let’s go dance.” Even though the current song was Nickelback.