08-13-2013, 11:48 PM
The sewer and underplaces are hospitable to animals such as rats. Even brave little rats like the she-rat that comes to Jack's call. She is a rat with scars, with patches of fur and fingers missing, and even an inch or two of its tail rounded to a stub. What's left of it still whips around behind her as she skitters to Jack.
She is brazen and brave, it shows in these little marks of a rat's life lived, and maybe that's why she comes. Or maybe she's curious and she has to be brave to be curious.
She is gone and when she comes back it is two days later because it is a long journey for a rat to make and once made she has directions left to brave-rat-interpretation. She comes in the day and attends to the corpse like she somehow knows he's resting and not actually dead. Not finally dead, not that a rat would know the difference, but she waits and when his eyes open she doesn't seem surprised.
Doesn't seem surprised and doesn't skitter away because she is brave and has a story to tell to prove it.
Tells her of a patient man, a patient tailor that waits for his master to return, talking to himself in the quiet of an underground warren. Living on canned food and cleaning his gun and then sitting with it ready as he waits. None show up the first night. The Nosferatu are scattered. The next night they trickle in. The survivors. Petit Gourmand who is Gotfred's right hand monster, a fat little blob of a monster, but nothing that would make it into a Pixar movie. The kind of monster that is made in children's dreams after watching movies they shouldn't be.
But they never come to Gotfred's den. It remains empty.
And the next night is the same thing and maybe the rat knows it's day, but the tailor is still patiently waiting. The other Nosferatu do not disturb this tailor, this Lazlo who is keeping the haven of a maybe-dead Primogen, maybe-turncoat, maybe who knows what happened to him after coming down upon Wenceslao and Samit.
And maybe that is for the best. Because just as dawn is threatening the next night a naked monster appears. Tall. Big. Tall even to a rat to which every thing is big in a big world. The monster startles the rat. Jumps for it.
But somehow this brave little rat escaped. Somehow it made its way through those fingers-that-are-claws and somehow it made its way away from the horde of rats that were set after it.
Set after it.
Can Jack hear that? Certainly he can. A great movement that sets in so lightly nothing trembles. Only the sound. The scurrying. The skittering hundred-fold. The coming.
And suddenly many eyes are upon Jack and the brave little rat.
They look at Jack and seem to make a decision. A moment later they are gone.
* * * * *
Hotels and downtowns are inhospitable places for cats who are stray. Luckily cats are often unseen when they don't want to be.
Cats are blurs of fur, the disappearing tips of tails, and movement in shadows when they are outside and inside the back rooms and hallways of places like the Brown Palace Hotel.
Cats are terribly hard to notice when they move deliberately. When they worm between the legs of busy people going to do the things they're busy doing, or when they squirm behind couches in the lobby and jump between the bags of a bell hop's cart. This is an adventure of one. A splinter cell of claws and kitty-sprints.
Boots watches many people come and go from the Brown Palace Hotel. Many people on that floor that he had been sent to watch. They come and go in a hurry. Some don't come back. More don't come back with each passing hour. And by the night they are gone. None are silver-furred lady.
One is a silver-bearded and salt-and-pepper older man that fits a certain Galician Ventrue's description, and it's just that silver fur that catches Boot's attention and is remembered with enough specifics to describe Wenceslao coming and going to never come back with the last of the Ventrue retinue.
She is brazen and brave, it shows in these little marks of a rat's life lived, and maybe that's why she comes. Or maybe she's curious and she has to be brave to be curious.
She is gone and when she comes back it is two days later because it is a long journey for a rat to make and once made she has directions left to brave-rat-interpretation. She comes in the day and attends to the corpse like she somehow knows he's resting and not actually dead. Not finally dead, not that a rat would know the difference, but she waits and when his eyes open she doesn't seem surprised.
Doesn't seem surprised and doesn't skitter away because she is brave and has a story to tell to prove it.
Tells her of a patient man, a patient tailor that waits for his master to return, talking to himself in the quiet of an underground warren. Living on canned food and cleaning his gun and then sitting with it ready as he waits. None show up the first night. The Nosferatu are scattered. The next night they trickle in. The survivors. Petit Gourmand who is Gotfred's right hand monster, a fat little blob of a monster, but nothing that would make it into a Pixar movie. The kind of monster that is made in children's dreams after watching movies they shouldn't be.
But they never come to Gotfred's den. It remains empty.
And the next night is the same thing and maybe the rat knows it's day, but the tailor is still patiently waiting. The other Nosferatu do not disturb this tailor, this Lazlo who is keeping the haven of a maybe-dead Primogen, maybe-turncoat, maybe who knows what happened to him after coming down upon Wenceslao and Samit.
And maybe that is for the best. Because just as dawn is threatening the next night a naked monster appears. Tall. Big. Tall even to a rat to which every thing is big in a big world. The monster startles the rat. Jumps for it.
But somehow this brave little rat escaped. Somehow it made its way through those fingers-that-are-claws and somehow it made its way away from the horde of rats that were set after it.
Set after it.
Can Jack hear that? Certainly he can. A great movement that sets in so lightly nothing trembles. Only the sound. The scurrying. The skittering hundred-fold. The coming.
And suddenly many eyes are upon Jack and the brave little rat.
They look at Jack and seem to make a decision. A moment later they are gone.
* * * * *
Hotels and downtowns are inhospitable places for cats who are stray. Luckily cats are often unseen when they don't want to be.
Cats are blurs of fur, the disappearing tips of tails, and movement in shadows when they are outside and inside the back rooms and hallways of places like the Brown Palace Hotel.
Cats are terribly hard to notice when they move deliberately. When they worm between the legs of busy people going to do the things they're busy doing, or when they squirm behind couches in the lobby and jump between the bags of a bell hop's cart. This is an adventure of one. A splinter cell of claws and kitty-sprints.
Boots watches many people come and go from the Brown Palace Hotel. Many people on that floor that he had been sent to watch. They come and go in a hurry. Some don't come back. More don't come back with each passing hour. And by the night they are gone. None are silver-furred lady.
One is a silver-bearded and salt-and-pepper older man that fits a certain Galician Ventrue's description, and it's just that silver fur that catches Boot's attention and is remembered with enough specifics to describe Wenceslao coming and going to never come back with the last of the Ventrue retinue.