WHO: Mad Sweeney, briefly NPCed Francine Garret and less briefly NPCed Beatrix Russell. WHAT: Unbeknownst to anyone, Laura's been kidnapped by the White Glove Society to become people steak. Sweeney's cycling from anger to concern at her missing status and then Beatrix pisses him off anew with her crappy theory. WHERE: The Atomic Wrangler. WHEN: Monday, September 11th, around 2pm-ish. RATING | STATUS: Description of a ghoul, use of the c-word. | Doneeee.
"I don't pay you to drink, Sweeney," Francine Garret briskly informed him, all the while refilling his glass. She didn't wait for a response before she turned away and that was fine by him. He didn't have shit to say, anyway. Wordlessly, he took a long swig of his drink and set it back down on the bartop. On any other occasion he'd be drinking a jack and coke. This was not that. This was some shitty, badly stored two hundred year old whiskey and a two hundred year old irradiated Coca Cola knock-off. It was close enough. He had ingested far more vile things in his time.
He heard footsteps on the stairs just to the left of the bar - that's how quiet the place was this afternoon - and then another set of heavier, clumsier footsteps. A quick glance would have told him all he needed to know but his mind was elsewhere. His mind was on wherever the fuck Laura might have gone off to. It was easy to be pissed off at her yesterday, it wasn't unlike her to do her own thing to remind him she could without so much as a heads up, but today-
A pair of hands on his shoulders brought his circular thought process to a sudden halt. "Beatrix," he said sourly, rolling his eyes but otherwise making no motion to look her way.
"Aw, how'd you know?" she rasped, digging her chapped, bony fingers into his skin in a way he assumed was meant to be relaxing for him. Sweeney tensed but it was less her poor attempt at a massage that caused it and moreso her voice, akin to a twenty chairs being shoved abruptly backward and scraping on cheap linoleum. Sandpaper on his eardrums.
He knew it was her because she'd been circling him like a shark since he woke up in her bed the morning he arrived here. She found a reason to put her hands on him whenever she could, no one else had that habit. That and he heard her coming down the stairs with her last customer trailing her only moments ago. He shrugged and felt her hands slip from his shoulders as a response and told her by way of explanation, "Lucky guess."
Beatrix stepped from behind him and took a seat on the stool to his right, crossing her legs under the bar. He couldn't help but look. Her skin was just appalling, she looked like a burn victim and that wasn't an exaggeration or even an incorrect way to describe her. She was one of the ghouls who were here when the bombs dropped two hundred years ago, granted near immortality in exchange for her looks by an extreme amount of radiation. He had asked a lot of questions yesterday while she was still thinking he'd taken too many chems the night before to remember their supposed tryst, let alone apparently simple things like what the fuck a ghoul was.
She tapped his glass and laughed hoarsely, "Francine feels baaad for you."
"Why d'ya say that?" he asked, casually moving his glass out of reach of her repulsive hands.
She snorted, "Because that pretty smooth-skinned thing finally did what everyone but you knew she was gonna do."
"Which was?" he inquired testily.
Beatrix spun her stool and leaned back against the bar and to the left enough to put herself squarely in his line of sight. "Robbed you blind and skipped town," she said matter-of-factly, "Word gets around. Saw you borrowing caps off that sketchy guy who came by here yesterday, heard you asking about her. You've been a real stormcloud."
He couldn't tell if the look she was giving him was closer to I-told-you-so or pity. He didn't like either but he liked her words even less. Sweeney bit back the urge to tell her that she had no idea what the fuck she was talking about and took his time draining the remainder of his drink just to give his mouth something to do other than run itself.
"I know it's not what you wanna hear but it's for the best. You'll see that soon. I'm only-"
He brought his glass to the bar with a lot more force than necessary, betraying his annoyance more when he interjected mockingly, "You're only playing the very shittiest Sherlock Holmes." His voice was strained, like his vocal cords were strung too tightly and on the verge of snapping. He locked eyes with her and leaned forward a bit, enunciating for effect, "You're being a nosy cunt and you don't know what the fuck you're talking about."
So much for giving himself time to not say exactly that. That might not have been his first glass of shitty whiskey and knock-off cola.
"I'm being your friend and I will shove your ass right off that barstool if you call me a cunt again."
This time it was Sweeney who snorted, "Not likely." Not unless the excessive radiation made her as strong as it made her grotesque. He stood, head swimming from either whatever he was drinking or the radiation within, and dropped a handful of caps onto the bar for Francine, "I'll be back."
"If you think you're going to find that slimy radscorpion dead in an alley somewhere then don't hold your breath-" she called after him but the door was already swinging shut. Beatrix sighed and spun back to face the bar, completing her thought under breath, "Because I already looked and no such luck."