Annie and Enoch

Hiram half-turned in his chair, craning his neck to look in Annie's direction. "Hello," he said, somewhat shakily. "Are you a friend of..." trailing off, Hiram straightened. "Enoch. I didn't ask your name, earlier. Or give you mine. I'm sorry. Call me Hiram. Normally... there's not much normal about this, though, is there?"

He paused, patting his pockets and collecting his thoughts. "Please, miss, sit down. If you can tell me anything more about what happened to Thaddius, I'd like to hear it. This place has always been more my style than his. If I hadn't asked him to come along, well. I suppose you wouldn't be here, would you? I'm afraid I'm still not sure why you're here, actually."

Mouse

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"This way, then." The Waiter indicated to Mouse that she should follow, then headed towards the hall that lead to the back of the club. The hall was narrow, with an alcove off to one side containing a pair of restroom doors, and beyond that Mouse could see a swinging gate with an 'employees only' plaque bolted to its face. They turned, heading away from the restrooms, along a hall with a number of closed black doors to the left. Undoubtedly, these led to the club's compliment of private rooms. One of of the doors opened as they passed, a tall gentleman in a dinner jacket much like those worn by the fancier patrons out front emerging to close it behind him. He tipped his hat to Mouse and made his way down the direction they'd come from.

"Must have recognised a fellow creative," the waiter remarked, rounding the corner at the end of the hall and stopping near a final door with a gold star painted on it. He opened the door, holding it for Mouse. "You'll be on after Carlyn. It'll be about a half hour, so you might want to spend it rehearsing." Then he was gone, leaving her with the room and its other occupants.

The room was small, and mostly filled with chairs. There was a low table in the center holding a collection of ashtrays and dog-earred periodicals. A humming refridgeration unit in the corner was stocked with bottled water, and next to that was a full-length mirror, cracked and unframed. A curtain-covered opening to her right looked like the other side of the identical one she'd seen on the stage. The whole place was painted black, and poorly lit by a single old lumen-globe hanging from a chain. It looked shabby, which served as a reminder that this wasn't exactly the classiest of environs.

Then, there were the room's occupants. There were three of them: The first, a man with wild grey hair dressed in a suit that looked either behind or ahead of the current fashion, sat kicked back in his chair with legs resting on the central table. He was holding a notepad and spinning an autoquill around in one hand, reading his words back to himself in an accent thicker than Detective McKaren's. The second was sitting next to him, arms folded across her chest. She wore a plain white shirt and a black vest, and was trying her damndest to look wholly uninterested in what the accented man was saying, smoking a lho stick and sneaking glances at him whenever she thought he wasn't looking. She had a dataslate sitting on the table in front of her, but it looked like it had been turned off. The last was standing, pacing back and forth in front of the mirror, his every other step punctuated by the whirring hydraulics of a poorly maintained augmetic limb. He looked up when she entered, tired eyes regarding her from an otherwise handsome face. "Hello."