[M&M] Plague Kittens [IC]

[rubakhin]

http://img0.oneartworld.com/images/uploaded/large/3932-.jpg

All the white boys in their Sta-Prest slacks,
they're home for the summer from college.
Stayin' out late, gettin' rowdy at the bar,
they're looking for trouble uptown.
They come up my block, 'bout 5 or 6 of them,
smashing they bottles in the gutter.
Yellin' all kinds of obscenities,
about Woman and God and Law.

Old Saint John on death row, he's just waiting for a pardon. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIZmsviQl3s&feature=related)




It's a golden hour, late afternoon, getting towards evening. The dusty yellow heat lays over the city like a blanket, and although there's sound all over, everything seems somehow mute. Comfortingly so. You forget what day it is, but everything feels like a Sunday.

It's peaceful here.

You are all alone.

Maybe in the back of your mind you sense a little spark of something, up somewhere in that piercing summer sky, so blue and cloudless and infinite over the heavy, earthy city, like it's split off from this world below, a whole other dimension. As if there's someone, some spirit, some voice, just out of your reckoning, saying I am with you, I am like you now.

But maybe it's just the way anyone would feel, here in New Grozny, the stream of people - The stream of people, you repeat to yourself, the old turn of phrase taking a new shape and solidity in your mind, a kind of accuracy to it you didn't realize it had, as you watch the steady river of Others, all walking at the same pace, in the same direction, with their heads down. You look at their outfits, at their expressions, each a still life from a different decades-long drama. Girls rising up like Venus from the half-shell, pausing at the top of the hill and shining with the while concrete, girls with electric green hair and bags and books weighed down in pins and notes and costume jewelry each with a meaning you will never know. Imperfect makeup, and frowns, and smiles, and tears. Businessmen and the heavy scent of deep-fried food and junkies with the softly plaintive eyes.

Each one of them is saying, there's a world here you can't touch.

You're just out of it.

- anyway, you're just out of it. You shake your head and go back to trying to figure out what you're doing. You have nowhere to sleep tonight, and you spent the last of your money today. It's been a little while since you came to the city, just dropped everything and ran - on what, a whim? And you don't know just what it is you're doing here. And it's starting to scare you a bit that you can't get ahold of anyone, that your ID is gone and your passwords won't work and somehow, what with one thing or another, you just can't seem to leave.

You're just about to hit reality.

Cassandra doesn't know how she's going to spend the rest of her day. It's kind of weird. You don't really think about boredom being a huge problem among the homeless. Which is, you guess, what you are now.

About all she knows right now, beyond her own name, is that she's near the outskirts of New Grozny where the borough starts to meld with Little Italy.
She sits back on the bright-white concrete and just looks around for a minute. Taking it all in.

The hot mellow crunch of rock music drifting loud from a faded-red convertible parked on the sidewalk with the doors open, like they're playing for the whole street. Or the women leaning out of their kitchen windows. You can just glimpse the room behind them, the color of the walls, all peeling floral paint and smoke-stained, a low-rent version of Norman Rockwell white. The guys below in jeans and wifebeaters and loose, muscular bodies leaning up against the car. You can't hear what they're saying. A burst of laughter from the woman upstairs, the lazy clatter of a shutter falling shut. The same hum of low, easy male conversation. Some angel-faced hustler, a guy they know, comes and flops back on the hood of the car spread-eagle, warming his ass, like he's making a sun angel in the summer heat.

It's beautiful here.

It's not so bad.

Sketch is barely a block down and he has just been resting, huddling in the shade of a nondescript little building that doesn't seem to mind your being here. Your temple against the warm faux-wood exterior, listening with one ear to the conversations around you. People walking by. The human comedy, loud like thunder. The hum and crackle of souls like electricity on a wire.

Little twenty-year-old kid in a white fleece jacket, pale as his skin, stops in his tracks, hovers near you. He's arguing in Ethnic over his cell phone. Maybe with his girlfriend. Somebody important, somebody private. He's got his shoulder turned to the crowd on the street and he's trying, against all logic, to quietly yell.

"Ya skazal - da ya skazal - suka, ya skazal tebye!"

Three guys in tracksuits sitting on the steps of the townhouse across the road, passing back and forth a papirosa (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Belomorkanal.JPG) repurposed with marijuana, solemnly listening to something (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzLr0ksvsBY) that sounds like a Romanian harvest song set to a hip-hop beat, coming out of a static-y ghetto blaster that looks older than they are. They're stoned, they're not speaking at all, their minds are quiet.

The ethnic kid seems to have aged about ten years in five minutes. Did he have those bags under his eyes last time you glanced over that way? Now he's just saying "OK... OK... OK... " over and over again, very quietly, probably to no one but himself. He murmurs "Posmotri vokrug sebya. Menya utomilo ob'yasnyat' Vam obshcheivestniye veshchi." and hangs up. Disappears somewhere, melts into the river of people. You feel for him.

Evens is a world away, in the financial district, with its great glass buildings reflecting sun and sky, where he has just gotten kicked out of a bank. None of your cards are working, nothing, and for some reason when you went in there to explain the teller just looked at you. Before you even opened your mouth, which is what really got you about it, because you have to admit that having all these mysteriously inoperative PINs and no photo ID looks a bit iffy. Like you ooze criminality, all of a sudden. It came as a surprise to you. You're not a really charismatic man, you'd look silly on the cover of Newsweek, but you grew up around money, you know it, it knows you, and you just generally give off the impression of someone who's used the phrase "handling assets" without trying for the double entendre. The people in this city seem immune to it for some reason.

Or maybe it was just that teller. Even though you've done nothing wrong, you feel like it was something of a blessing you got out of there without getting the cops called on you.

Ippolito is down by the masjid, standing by the pay phone that still stubbornly exists in front of a prehistoric Turkish restaurant, listening to the rattle of the last coin disappearing into its metal sepulchre. Somehow, you've missed the woman you were after. She's just slipped away, like something you let go of in the tide. The city seems to change when you're not looking. The vaguely-defined area where you thought her workplace might be keeps turning you out into some back alley no matter what road you take, and all of a sudden you've totally forgotten what her apartment building so much as looks like.

Her number's not working. Again. You're mostly just trying it out of habit now. The permanent marker graffiti on the phone box offers a suggestion as to where unattainable women eventually end up, but you're not quite ready for that adventure yet.

Well, no matter what else happens, right now you all have one simple goal: You're hungry, you're broke, you have no one to go to, and you need to find something to eat.

OOC (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=6904903#post6904903)

[Kazaran]

If Cassandra had studied the I Ching, the Book of Changes, which teaches that everything is relative to everything else, that there are no coincidences, she would probably think that there is some greater reason for her being here, that somewhere in this city, something is waiting for her that will change her life. Maybe she would also hear that otherworldly voice in the back of her head.

But she hasn't, and she doesn't, and by now is thoroughly convinced that running away from home was a rather stupid idea. At this point, she isn't even sure why she went here, of all places - it's certainly not the most glamorous of cities, though she could probably have picked a worse place to try and reboot her life. When she left the train, it was almost as if something was drawing her here, but now she can't feel anything like that - she's simply wondering around aimlessly, having just finished the sandwich she bought with her last dollars to stave off the inevitability of having to beg for food a couple more hours.

Maybe that'd at least be a way to pass the time, though. Almost worse than the knowledge of not having a warm bed to spend the night is not having anything to do to spend the days. As much as she loathed her burger-flipping job, at least it was keeping her busy. Hell must be an eternal afternoon with nothing to do to keep yourself occupied, she thinks. She doesn't even have enough change left to buy a newspaper; all she can do right now is wander the streets aimlessly, watching people go about their daily business. Her stomach is filled for now, but she knows that feeling won't last for long; if she doesn't want to sleep with a growling stomach, she'll have to find a way to get some more food, or money to buy some.

[Matar]

Evens was not amused with his current predicament. Everything was going going south, and he had no idea why. This wasn't a set-up, he knew that much for sure. His source was trust-worthy and wouldn't dare pull anything as elaborate as this on him. Too little to gain, far too much to lose.

He ran his gloved hand against this face for the 37th time today. He counted. His face was oily, and his chin was covered in stubbles. He swore he could feel the filth under his gloves. It was disgusting, it was dirty and it was beneath a man of his stature.

His cards were not working. He couldn't get a hold of anyone, not even his contact. He was dirty, and penniless. He had spent almost all of his cash in his wallet on the way up here, the trip having cost way more then what it was supposed to. The loose change he has left before checking out the bank was spent on hand sanitizer. Hardly a waste of money, but had he known the trouble he would have at the bank he would have saved it for some food.

This isn't how it was supposed to be.

Food. Yes, that's right. The reason he came up here. It was certainly an incredible to say the least. Once in a life time, even. And it was all for naught. The thought of what could-have-been made his hunger gnaw at his insides.

Even licked his lips. He despised leaving that forbidden desire unfulfilled. However, for now at least, some simple food would have to suffice. A peasants dish, a paupers meal.

He has no money to pay for it of course, but then again... he doesn't have to. Other people have the money to pay for it, and he has a way to get it. A silver tongue, a fear inducing look. Even if the people he's getting the money from know they're being swindled, they're going to be so entertained that they won't mind it.

Of course, no one is going to figure it out what is really going on. None of the simpering low lives that walk the streets of this forsaken city have anywhere near the insight to see past the well formed illusions that flow from his silver tongue.

Though, with things going the way they are, even that might not work out. The people here are... odd.

[Lord Bayushi]

'Etch' sketched a caricature of the ethnic man in the dirt floor of his newest temporary home with a small stick. He saw the dirt from into wicked barbed claws and grasp for his tool while he drew, but focused on what he was drawing rather than the nightmares in his head. He focused on the musical rhythm in the distance, bobbing his head with the time. One such movement was all that prevented a fanged flying creature from tearing off his ear. He pushed it down, away, stared into the image in the dirt and nothing more.

Steve had never been good with languages. He had failed Spanish, which he didn't really care for, in the ninth grade. He did, however, have a background in misery, lately more than ever, and knew distress when he saw it. Something weighed down on the young man in the drawing like a hanging sword. He had dug himself into a pit, and had no way to dig himself back out. He was sinking, and he knew it. It wasn't the face of panic, but resignation, that the ground stared back at him with. Steve knew that face, he saw it in every mirrored surface.

A hideous growl, not that of some unfathomable beast, but that of his own stomach, broke Steve's concentration. He looked down to see small demonic figures, no bigger than cigarette boxes, stabbing hooked blades into his legs and abdomen. He felt the sting of the pain, the warm flow of the blood soaking into his jeans and shirt, saw the twisted grins on toothy faces at the carnage underway. He yawned, straitened his shirt, and watched the little devils vanish as he concentrated on standing up without disturbing his artwork. He would leave it here, someone might find it.

He strolled out to the entrance way of the building, watching the pot-induced philosophers weighing the meaning of the universe hidden in the beats of the music pouring out of their strange plastic box. 'Etch' wondered what wonders they were seeing in their haze, and how they would compare to the wonders he saw in his. He kept to the shade, his pale skin sensitive to the harsh sun rays, but crossed the road and hung near the building, close enough to hear the profound discoveries of the cannabites. Maybe he would ask for a hit before he asked for a dollar. He swatted aside a wasp the size of his hand with three lizard heads before leaning up against a nearby wall.

[rubakhin]

The kid in fleece is wandering back down towards Steve, this time with a tennis ball. He passes the fellas on the steps without really noticing them. "Hey, guys," he says absently.

The boom box switches to a sadder song, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylL-Askiai8) by the same group.

"**** off, Russki," one of them says amiably. "Nu i kak tam khorosho v Dumpsville?"

He shrugs. Bouncing the tennis ball on the sidewalk as he wanders away, down the alley Steve was previously occupying. He catches Steve's eye from across the way but after a moment of awkwardness doesn't really pay him any mind, the way people in the city do. You learn to tune out the others around you, or else you'd go crazy before long. He bounces the tennis ball off the fence and catches it - nearly stepping in Steve's drawing.

"****, sorry, " he says, to himself. He squints down at it. "Oh, hey ... is that me?" he wonders to himself.

Not far from there, Cassandra hangs around taking in the atmosphere. After a little coaxing a couple of the women in the townhouse come out and pile into the convertible with the guys. The hustler rolls off the hood and lands boot-first on the gravel, stomping a tiny, dusty dandelion that wasn't long for this world anyway.

They a shout something vague about seeing each other later and the car pulls out into the streets with a screech. The kid winces - they're going to get killed someday - then goes back to the intersection where he was hanging out before, in front of a quiet-looking little cafe, leaning purposefully against a telephone pole chalked with numbers.

The cafe is probably empty, it's too late for lunch but too early for people to be taking off for the day. Which is why the area near Evens has thinned out all of a sudden and he's found himself in one of those little spots of quiet that seem unsettling in a city of this size.

He looks around. White concrete, steel, a fountain, bushes. There's nobody around - nobody that matters, anyway - but just across the plaza, an old black woman in a grubby hijab is staunchly pushing a grocery cart filled with, one imagines, all her earthly possessions.

[Kazaran]

Cassandra sits back on the sidewalk a bit away from the little group gathered around the convertible, tapping her toes inside her worn-out shoes to the beat of their music. It isn't the kind she'd usually listen to, but right now she's thankful for any sort of distraction. Watching and listening to them takes her mind off her depressing situation for a precious few minutes, and so she sighs quietly to herself when they drive off and leave her alone with her thoughts. She stands up and resumes her aimless walk through the streets, kicking away a dented soda can somebody carelessly tossed on the sidewalk.

[Matar]

Even almost gagged in disgust as he sees the black women. A hobo, how unseemly. Oh course, so was he right now, and it was only getting worse. He watched the women for a moment and a thought occurred to him. At this very moment, that filthy bum had access to more wealth then he did.

The very thought made his blood boil. It didn't show, of course. His face was still and cold and emotionless as it was when he first entered the city. It was there though, and it almost overwhelming. The disgust, the anger, the hunger... he was glad that he didn't have a knife with him. This situation was new to him, and he had no idea if he would be able to control those forbidden desires inside of himself if did have some way of carrying them out.

With a sigh he walked over to the nearby fountain. He needed to cool down. Maybe the sound of running water and the mist from the fountain would be enough to do just that. If he could find a place with no dirt or any other type of filth he would sit down by the fountain, and if he couldn't he would simply stand next to it until he thought of something else to do.

[Lord Bayushi]

As he leans against the wall, Steve catches the comments from stoop wallowing stoners. Again, no lingual background, but he knows racial slurs when he hears them. He snorts and shrugs, noting people are always the same. Over his shoulder, his dead sister tugs at his arm, the blood from her fresh wrist wounds staining his shirt. She says nothing, she always says nothing, but her eyes plead and accuse at the same time. Steve pulls away and crosses back over the street.

He hears the guy's comment as he notices the drawing, walking up behind him silently. "You were around. I was tired of drawing things that weren't really here. It happens."

He looks back across the street at the locals. "They're a-holes. Don't worry about people like them. Bad things eventually happen to people like that."

He turns back around and starts to wonder back down the road, his stomach back on his mind again.

[rubakhin]

"Well, I think it's really good ... "

The young man catches up to him as he starts to walk away. "Hm? Oh, him. He's just been mad at me ever since I dumped his sister Manushek for Katya, and now Katya's mad at me since I, er, poymal na konchik a ne seryozni, and Katya says that Dasha says that you can't get it from a toilet seat, which you can, and which I totally did, but Borta whose boombox that is thinks that Katya got it from Richard who's been after her for like . . . " He runs out of breath all of a sudden. "For like, forever."

He pauses, thoughtfully. "But I don't think that's true, no," he finishes.

He bounces the tennis ball a few times, looking at Steve like he just noticed him, his thin frame. "Um ... are you okay? Are you hungry?"

He's interested in him, in the (slightly) condescending sort of way normal people are. But he doesn't seem so bad.

"My name's Konstantin. You can call me Kostya."



Cassandra notices that on the telephone pole there's a map of the campus nearby. It's a liberal arts school, large-ish, respected. Big enough for colleges, dining halls, dorms.

She's about the right age to be a university student, isn't she? Maybe she could just slip in ...



The fountain's been meticulously maintained. There's no smears over the concrete or grime collecting at the edges. Even the pool looks free of mildew and pennies.

Of course, anyone who belongs in the financial district already has what they want, and anyone who doesn't belong there is probably too intimidated by the gleaming perfection of Marshal Square to go tossing stuff around.

Evens sits there a while, growing more and more irritated with the squeak of the bag woman's cart. It echoes across the plaza. She shuffles through the bushes, finds a McDonald's bag - there's a garbage can ten feet to the right, but the owner was apparently too important to go out of his way - and eats the leftover fries. For whatever reason (likely schizophrenia) she presses out and reassembles the boxes and adds them to her collection.

There's a girl - a boy - some creature, too young and underdeveloped for anyone to tell the difference - trailing behind the bag woman at a good pace. Another street kid, judging by its grubby white shirt. They're unrelated. The kid is, well, too pale. But its eyes are loosely fixed on her.

The squeak fades off into the distance. The little one decides that Evens is more interesting and goes and sits by him on the fountain.

It's eating a cube of meat, barely cooked, if at all. It reminds Evens of - well, he decides, forcing the thoughts away, it's probably kebab from the Turkish restaurant down the street.

It licks the juice off its fingers.

It doesn't say anything, but it stretches its leg across the warm concrete, the dirty sole grazing against Evens' leg, and he can't help but see that its calf is smooth, well-formed. A good cut. Good meat.

Hmm.

[Kazaran]

Cassandra pulls the map off the pole, folds it up and puts it into her pocket. Now there's an idea... maybe she can score some food in the dining hall, or maybe there's even a party somewhere on campus tonight where she can get free food, drinks and a place to spend the night... and, maybe more importantly, forget about her worries for a few hours.

She is still a student, too - although far away from her campus - so she should have no problems fitting in. One quick look at herself - yep, clothes still look fine enough. Confident that things are going to be fine, at least for tonight, she sets off, with a bit of a bounce to her step now.

[Matar]

A shiver runs down Even's spine as he looks at the child. Is the world itself taunting him? The final straw was when the child licked its fingers. This filthy street urchin could satisfy its hunger, but he couldn't? With a shaky yet exhilarating sigh he spoke to the child.


Taking ten on Diplomacy, trying to talk the kid into walking with me someplace.


He wasn't thinking. Where could he take the child? Where could eat? How could he eat and yet not be caught after wards?

But... none of that mattered. Only the hunger. That was the only worry he had. How could he sate it? With this child. With this child.

With a smile he talked the child into following him, so carefree and innocent. He wove a story with his silver tongue, vivid and amazing. And at the end he talked the child into following him, some place secluded and alone. By a dumpster, if possible. The smell of filth, the scuttling of insects, the aura and atmosphere mixed with his macabre feast would be simply... orgasmic.

When alone, and hopefully next to a festering pit of trash, Evens would strike. Suddenly and quickly. By snapping the child's neck from behind, or shoving the Kabob stick in its eye. It didn't matter, really, he needed the child dead.

After that... he would bleed it. He'd attempt to use the Kabob stick, jamming it in its throat and draining the excess blood. If that didn't work, he would use his hands. Removing the gloves and scratching away at its throat. It didn't matter if his finger nails came off, and it didn't matter if his hands were covered in blood. He wasn't thinking about anything other then the hunger by now.

Once all this was said and done... he would feast. Carefully, slowly at first, but he would quickly gain in speed and frenzy. Would he notice if someone walked by? If someone saw him? If someone screamed? He didn't know, for he was too far gone in that wonderful haze of euphoria to really think of anything.

[Lord Bayushi]

Steve listened to the young man blather on about mundane issues, trying not to blink as the world around them burst into flames. Screaming in the distance was slightly distracting, despite being completely imaginary. He tried, instead, to remember the days when such issues mattered to him, when his life could be so easily summed up in threads from afternoon television shows. He just sort of nodded to him as he spoke.

He stared forward, the flames before them parted for a moment revealing a great horned beast with many smaller similar servants lined to each side of the street. He stopped, in spite of himself, just as Kostya introduced himself. He blinked hard, then looked back to the other young man.

"Yeah, I mean, hello. I'm Steve, but you can call me Etch if you want to. I, uh, I don't want to go this way anymore. I was just going to find something to eat. Are you.. I mean, uh, yeah, I'm hungry." He took one last look at the flaming path before them, and then turned back the other way.