[North Shore Nights] Chapter Three: Deepening Night.

Gavin Cosgrave


Eyes roving the shadows, Gavin walks slowly into the room, shoes clapping against the floor with a slow beat until he reaches the table. Pulling out the chair with still more deliberate care, he nods to the gentleman. The chair scraping against the floor seems overly loud in the yellow light.


"Good evening, sir," he says, sitting.
 
To Ourobouros


You do note that the pyramid and triangles are loosely aligned. As for the corpses, well, you might want to look soon, Musgrave's getting touchy and he wants to burn them all soon. They're decaying too slow, even for vampire bodies.


"Do what you have to do, I've got to go look into my teams in the sewers."
 
To Gavin


"What do you think?" He asks, ceasing the shuffling and stacking the cards face down on the table. He waits for an answer. Before you can even ask what he's talking about, images hit assail your mind. It all begins with a book. A book and a blood oath. An unknowing party signing away an apparently moldy and useless grimoire from 'great-granduncle's' library to a third party. He thinks it grants him leverage to make moves inside the city, when all it does is begin a torrid cycle of violence. All over again.


Another set of images. A burning shack somewhere. Someone's...cutting into themselves. Bleeding out, offering dissected genitals to a flame, sobbing in pain but screaming out words of some fell tongue.


Then you pop back into the room, the man regarding you cooly.
 
Gavin


A fine, cold, red sheen breaks out on the historian's brow, hands spasmodically clenching at the armrests. The light seems dimmer, suddenly, and yet somehow is more painful to the eye, like the beginning of a bad migraine. OUCH. "I think," he replies, trying to unclench his teeth, "that I haven't a clue what's going on..."
 
To Gavin


The man shrugs, drawing a card as deftly as any Vegas dealer. "No ever does." Staring at it, the man sits for a long time. "There are men tearing a path across New York to get here, killing everything that walks in the night. The promises of power usually do that to...well, most anyone. Even your kind. They think sucking the teat of some old black dread from beyond the Abyss is the better deal." He snorts, drawing another card and placing it before him. Two distinct rings are on his index fingers. One a plain silver band, the other with a sigil of some sort.


"I've been here too long to put up with this sort of nonsense. And I liked you the last time I saw you. No, you won't remember me even if you had a perfect recollection of your time here. You lived through the performance. Which was...quaint, really." He smiles, showing perfect teeth and a pinched look takes over his plain features.
 
Garrison Blake


Blake sits quietly, listening as the Masters talk and debate. Though impatience beats in his heart, he uses some of the techniques his training has provided to school that impatience, to turn it around. He must wait. The Masters said they had a use for him. They will reveal that purpose in their own good time. Until that moment, he must wait. Patiently. So he does.
 
Gavin


"Bully for me." He pinches the bridge of his nose hard and blinks rapidly, resisting the urge to rub at his face with the back of his sleeve - it would ruin the coat. "Seeing as how I can't corroborate anything you're saying, let me just suspend disbelief and move on, please. Plainly this has something to do with our current dim situation outside, and you clearly dislike it, but what does this have to do with me? Granted I'm no fan of it myself, but I'm just a little out of my depth here...sir."
 
To Gavin


"What this has to do with you? Good God, no. I just like talking to the survivors. They interest me, you see. It's rare that so many are left behind. Well, on your side of the world, I should say. Kindly hard to find such creatures. But this town ropes them in. My dionaea town. So, I understand you're a historian. What have your travels told you about the world?"
 
Gavin


Your town, is it?


"...to avoid men dressed in white." He very slowly manages to let go of the chair - it's like rigor has set into his knuckles and wrists. "To listen rather than speak, to agree with spirits." He touches his head momentarily, remembering. The phantom of pain is dissipating. "That locked doors provide challenges and that memory apparently can't always be trusted. That last one is more common for us than for others...though I've been taking steps to circumvent that, somewhat.


"Mostly I've learned that I generally have much more to learn, and not everything is as it seems. An old cliché, but a truism, unfortunately."
 
Assume he's saying less charitable terms, you'll know where. I refuse to write them.


To Gavin


"Quite, my little Irishman. At least you have learned since your brush with death. The twenties were such good years. Well, for me. Not so much for the negro and other groups who inhabit this cesspool. Heh, racism, such a curious by-product of the haves and have nots in this place. Regardless, one must get into character. Though I can't really understand it.


"But, I do what I can to invest and watch this place grow. Then...I trim the hedges. Quite a bit sometimes. The worst I think was in your 1700s. I took an entire clutch of villages in forfeit of payment due. Then there was the town that lie here originally. But I am now earthly spirit of death. More of a consumer. Much like modern man, I cultivate, help things grow, then I take what I like until I'm...mm, I suppose you would relate it to being full."


Two more cards, face up. Suicide king with his brass knife in his own head. Ace of spades with odd vines designed on the card. "I have always been here. Since the rock of this miserable planet began to cool. Sleeping. The last time I walked is when the worlds were one. We all walked then."
 
Annabelle


She almost trembles, coming up to the musician. Her touch is soft but strong, and she entwines her arms around him, holding him to her as the sharp fangs find their mark. A bare moment of resistance, and then a gentle pop as the flesh gives way. The first release of blood into her mouth nearly makes her groan in relief. Her hand tangles itself into his hair, a sensual but commanding hold on him. A colour mimicking life touches her skin, and she releases him, slowly, licking the bite and placing an almost loving, tender kiss over it.
 
To Anna


For all the 'love and tenderness' he falls over like a bag of bricks. Adulio laughs outloud and places the man on the nearest park bench, putting him in a restful enough position, cradling his bass. "At least the lady has had supper now."
 
Annabelle


She looks a little embarrassed, and returns to Adulio's side and continues through the park, walking away from the unfortunate bassist. She looks up at the sky, black as pitch. "Do you think they'll come back?" she says after long minutes of empty silence. "I know it sounds silly, but... the night feels lonelier with the stars..."
 
Gavin


He doesn't know quite how to respond. This gentleman, whoever he is (or, Gavin grudgingly ponders, whatever he is) has some vested interest in the town but his comments are not comforting, far from it - this creature was most certainly not some sort of guardian angel. Questioning his motives feels... wrong - perhaps instinctively he feels he would not like the answers. But he must say something.


"There are...others like you, then."
 
To Gavin


"Oh, goodness gracious me, yes. Not many, but there are more. Came here long ago, long before the Elders came. That was an interesting time. Too many obelisks and omens and 'oh, our servitors are rising against us!' Pfft, tomfoolery, all of it. We incited the damn things to revolt in the first place. They grew smarter you see, slaves to the Elders. We grew tired of the Elders and gave their servitors a little...shove. Terrible war, shifted the whole evolutionary path of this planet. I particularly like the gardenias that came from that shift. Lovely things."


Smiling to himself, the man keeps shuffling cards. "But that's not so relevant to what we're speaking of. Yes, to put it simply. There are others. Some sleeping, some awake. In secret places, some out in the open. I've walked this region back and forth for ages it seems." He holds up a finger and waggles admonishingly, "Now, I suppose you're wondering why I'm telling you this?" It shrugs, running long fingers through well-combed hair.


"As I said, I like survivors, they are an intriguing...piece, I think, of the natural order. Things set into motion billions of years ago, what you call physics, thermodynamics, what have you, and a certain mystical...'oomph' have brought you here, my young bloodsucker. Well, that could all be a lie or a truth, you decide. My question is this: Do you know who I am?"
 
Gavin


"No," Gavin answers blandly, the word falling flatly from his lips - he's just a little too unnerved by the surreal tint of the conversation.
 
To Gavin


Something whispers off to your right.


The Man with Cards leans forward, listening. He nods, 'harrumph'-ing to himself. "That's very well, Mr. Cosgrave, I was simply curious. It would have been delightful if you had. So few do know who I am. Tell me, survivor. Do you enjoy music?"


Did something just...shift in your peripheral vision? Something down the hall to the left.
 
Gavin


What? "...I enjoy music, yes. The 50s was a good decade for music, not much since though..." He clenches the chair again...and inevitably flicks his eyes to the left.
 
To Gavin


Nothing there.


"Excellent!" He claps his hands together, nodding. Then, motioning to an old, old Victrola, he rises, walking over to it and lays the tuning needle down and let's the room fill with music. "I am of the belief that music can take you places if you let. Odd, I know coming from one such as I. But we do so love our music." A haunting choir's voices raise in praise of something called the Hyades and Carcosa.


The man sits down again, smiling like he knows the greatest joke in the whole wide world. Maybe he does. The music is sad, but oddly calming. You can almost HEAR the waters lapping at the shores they sing of.
 
Gavin


The music strikes something in the historian. "It's really quite lovely," he comments, genuinely. It reminds him of... well, he doesn't know what it reminds him of. But it is haunting.
 
To Gavin


QUITE lovely. But you can feel something inside you stirring. Your Beast...is repelled by this music. If that can really make sense in the long run. Not quite like meeting another vampire for the first time, but something incredibly unwholesome is making the Beast, and therefore you, settled and pleased and angry and repulsed at the same time.


And boy, can you hear those waves. You can almost feel the sand of distant shores under your shoes, shifting and giving way.
 
OOC: You... you magnificent bastard, Wakes.


Ourobouros


Moving quickly, Ourobouros takes the closest body for inspection, noting the sigils and performing a swift, Discipline-fuelled dissection...
 
OOC: Why thank you :D


To Ourobouros


The long and short you discover is yes, they did, or it did, whatever it was, removed the genitals of at least this one. Most likely all of them had them removed. The viscera shows no other damage aside rending or puncture wounds. Cloven skull on this woman. No organs taken. Just the genitals.


Where to, though? Would that question even be worth answering? Worth debating at least.
 
Gavin


Gavin shuts his eyes a moment... listening...


He opens them again.


His chair clatters to the ground with the immediate realisation that the room has changed, or rather is changing. "What on Earth?"
 
To Gavin


"Thankfully, your kind doesn't breathe much, do they? Do you not wish to see the shores of Carcosa? Swinging round the Hyades? It's quite lovely this time of the millennium." Barking out a laugh, the man motions to your chair. Something whispers in the air around you, you actually feel something brush by you. "Don't you wish to travel the stars and see what awaits all the slobbering apes that walk upon this hellish little earth, Cosgrave? If not, I would suggest you run. And run fast."
 
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