After the fight, the clean-up crew. Quick and sure and efficient. Snails and Tails shows up at the apartment with them and grimaces this sharp, twisting look when they show her the remains of what is identified as Gerhart. Whatever pieces of him are recovered and cleansed, and a few days later there's a funeral for the old man in the bowls of 1999 Broadway. Word passes on the barking chain and most of the attendees are Gnawers of Bone of one sort or another.
The dead woman with her doubled row of teeth and the poison sacs grown into her cheeks like tumors and her brassy hair and her gold cross on its gold chain: will be cleansed and incinerated.
The living woman though: they bring in a reinforced van, chain her down and wrap her up. That's the last Hector and Jack see of her or hear of her for a few days. Days during which Hector tells a story to Tamsin and another to Jack and Tamsin tells a story to the librarian and -
-
The next day or the day after, later Hector and Jack - Jack, the philodox, particularly - are summoned, not to the city Sept, but to a warehouse in a nondescript commercial neighborhood a solid 5-10 miles from the city center. Tamsin's welcome to tag along too. Hector (and Jack's?) packmate, see. That's how these things work.
"We haven't been able to get much out of her," Snails and Tails tells them, a lean, grim smile gracing the scarred curve of what was once a sensuous mouth. " - it's not like she knows what's happening to her. She's sort of fighting it but humans are so damn soft. Anyway, a theurge is coming later to exorcise her. That'll kill her but at least she'll die clean, right.
"Give her a chance to really get right with god." Not wry, that; an undercurrent of rage in the young woman's voice. After all it was her boyfriend's cousin's uncle they were fucking eating, in there.
"Thought you might wanna get in on the last bit of questioning though. See what you can get outta her; at least see if she's got any truth left. Mostly the bane's rage is consuming her so bad she don't have much awareness. Just babbles that god-shit. Seems to've spent that rage though so maybe she can think straight for five or ten minutes. C'mon.
"Oh, HQ ain't too interested in this, truth to tell. Got bigger fish to fry with the Horror creep-creeping around. So you wanna keep digging seems like you got free rein long's you check in proper when warranted."
--
One of the old nested office serves as a cell. Snails and Tails leads them through the secretarial bay, past the Garou On Watch, into the office proper.
This is their prisoner, this is their prize:
a mousey, thirty-something woman with stringy brown hair and the thin, sunken disposition of a lifelong smoker. She's missing enough teeth from her mouth to make her seem older than she is. She stinks - of rage and bile and shit, quite frankly. Blood crusts her throat where Hector tore it the fuck out, but those near fatal wounds seem to have closed already.
She is strapped to a chair and looks drunk. Looks glassy-eyed. Looks haunted and sick and twisted, like she's always fighting off the urge to puke. Sometimes she looks like she wants to rip their faces off. Sometimes she looks terrified. Actually, pretty much all the time she looks like a terrified madwoman who wants to rip their faces off.
And she misses her mother.
--
The two Galliards, manipulative, persuasive. And then Jack, all bluff bullying, all physical threat.
She mistrusts and despises them; calls them agents of the devil-on-earth, satan's minions, black demons, says that she can see beneath their human skins. She knows, she knows the tricks they play, the windy rubbish they talk. The way they cling to this world. She wants them to kill her; she wants to go home.
The time evolves; they gradually come to understand that the younger of the two women has always been religious. Has always believed in a very immediate and very literal and very unbending biblical reality. Has believed that the apocalypse (and they know she does not mean their Apocalypse, but another one) was imminent and immanent. She cites humans they have never heard of, televangelists selling holy water and prayer clothes and snakeoil on TV. She was always a Free Will Holy Roller and prayed her whole life that her mother would turn her life around, and then her mother come up out of prison this last time, and it seemed like nothing had ever, would ever change, come up out of the halfway house changed and on fire with the holy spirit.
Bearing the mark of his Name, the woman says, agitated, somewhere between the promise of rapture and the ruin of rage her body is changing, to produce and contain.
She shows them her own mark. To ward off their demon menace, as if it could somehow banish them from her presence, preserve her soul against all occupations: the small tattoo in the shape of a cross inside her right wrist.
Dorlene - and that is her name, they learn from a driver's license rather than the woman herself - was so transported by her mother's conversion that she started attending the new church. The House of God. The House of the Covenant. The House of the Covenant of God with His People in Exile on the Earth.
Jesus was meant to rapture his people and bring them home to god. Dorlene has always known this. Has known this her entire life. Has been watching for the signs since she was old enough to know Him. They were meant for better things than this world of sin. This world were old men and mothers -
- well, Dorlene never had an easy life. Not with a mother like Carlita, in and out of prison, in and out of addiction, in and out of consciousness, sometimes vicious sometimes loving never stable rarely sober. At the edge of ruinous poverty, trapped in a privation from which she could never rise. No wonder she grabbed onto the prospect of perfection, of transportation, the promise of the man with the hair and the smile and the teeth and the holy water and the healing hands framed and beaming in her cheap old console television. No wonder she sent them money, all of them, seeds sown against the future, to reap god's rewards.
She was wrong all along though, she knows now. Always thought it was coming, just around the corner, this avalanche of darkness at an end. What she did not understand is that the devil was never trying to bring it all about. He's playing a different, much longer game. Trying to prevent the end from coming. Trying to stop the conflagration. Trying to thwart God's plan by keeping them all here, on this earth.
Which is no more than the topmost layer of his many Hells, in which they are all mired.
You have to work for the end - that's what Dorlene never knew. Never knew before Carlita introduced her to the Pastors Black. Because if it does not come - and soon - they will be trapped here for all eternity. The next world must come. God's cleansing fire must rain down. The next world will be glorious, and will only come about on the ashes of this one.
Even then, Dorlene fought it. The fire they give her in her body. The holy wrath god give her to work in his name. Fought and fought and fought it until the night they came.
Twisted men. Servants of the devil. His demons and his wolves and his attendants, and tore down her mother right in front of her.
She is so grateful that Carlita died with her soul clean and white and holy.
--
There's not much more to be had from the woman. She's both frightened and scared and confessional and on fire with religious fervor, twisted with rage. And in truth: so tertiary that she knows Not Much.
But they question her: and unearth this much, and perhaps more.
When the cliaths are satisfied that they have all they can get from the prisoner, an Adren theurge comes from the Sept to Exorcise the bane. So at least Dorlene will die, but she will die clean. It is a sort of mercy.
The only they have to offer the twisted woman.
[OOC: so, this is based on the rolls y'all sent me. Er... feel free to ask more questions / clarifications and I maaay give more info in later scenes based on what they might've learned from her but, heh. Here you go. Also: I CAN run a quick dice-based one-shot maaaybe next week if you'd like for dealing with the bane that is exorcised from Dorlene, but I'm also good with assuming they Do Stuff and murderate it. So let me know if y'all want a one-shot.]
The dead woman with her doubled row of teeth and the poison sacs grown into her cheeks like tumors and her brassy hair and her gold cross on its gold chain: will be cleansed and incinerated.
The living woman though: they bring in a reinforced van, chain her down and wrap her up. That's the last Hector and Jack see of her or hear of her for a few days. Days during which Hector tells a story to Tamsin and another to Jack and Tamsin tells a story to the librarian and -
-
The next day or the day after, later Hector and Jack - Jack, the philodox, particularly - are summoned, not to the city Sept, but to a warehouse in a nondescript commercial neighborhood a solid 5-10 miles from the city center. Tamsin's welcome to tag along too. Hector (and Jack's?) packmate, see. That's how these things work.
"We haven't been able to get much out of her," Snails and Tails tells them, a lean, grim smile gracing the scarred curve of what was once a sensuous mouth. " - it's not like she knows what's happening to her. She's sort of fighting it but humans are so damn soft. Anyway, a theurge is coming later to exorcise her. That'll kill her but at least she'll die clean, right.
"Give her a chance to really get right with god." Not wry, that; an undercurrent of rage in the young woman's voice. After all it was her boyfriend's cousin's uncle they were fucking eating, in there.
"Thought you might wanna get in on the last bit of questioning though. See what you can get outta her; at least see if she's got any truth left. Mostly the bane's rage is consuming her so bad she don't have much awareness. Just babbles that god-shit. Seems to've spent that rage though so maybe she can think straight for five or ten minutes. C'mon.
"Oh, HQ ain't too interested in this, truth to tell. Got bigger fish to fry with the Horror creep-creeping around. So you wanna keep digging seems like you got free rein long's you check in proper when warranted."
--
One of the old nested office serves as a cell. Snails and Tails leads them through the secretarial bay, past the Garou On Watch, into the office proper.
This is their prisoner, this is their prize:
a mousey, thirty-something woman with stringy brown hair and the thin, sunken disposition of a lifelong smoker. She's missing enough teeth from her mouth to make her seem older than she is. She stinks - of rage and bile and shit, quite frankly. Blood crusts her throat where Hector tore it the fuck out, but those near fatal wounds seem to have closed already.
She is strapped to a chair and looks drunk. Looks glassy-eyed. Looks haunted and sick and twisted, like she's always fighting off the urge to puke. Sometimes she looks like she wants to rip their faces off. Sometimes she looks terrified. Actually, pretty much all the time she looks like a terrified madwoman who wants to rip their faces off.
And she misses her mother.
--
The two Galliards, manipulative, persuasive. And then Jack, all bluff bullying, all physical threat.
She mistrusts and despises them; calls them agents of the devil-on-earth, satan's minions, black demons, says that she can see beneath their human skins. She knows, she knows the tricks they play, the windy rubbish they talk. The way they cling to this world. She wants them to kill her; she wants to go home.
The time evolves; they gradually come to understand that the younger of the two women has always been religious. Has always believed in a very immediate and very literal and very unbending biblical reality. Has believed that the apocalypse (and they know she does not mean their Apocalypse, but another one) was imminent and immanent. She cites humans they have never heard of, televangelists selling holy water and prayer clothes and snakeoil on TV. She was always a Free Will Holy Roller and prayed her whole life that her mother would turn her life around, and then her mother come up out of prison this last time, and it seemed like nothing had ever, would ever change, come up out of the halfway house changed and on fire with the holy spirit.
Bearing the mark of his Name, the woman says, agitated, somewhere between the promise of rapture and the ruin of rage her body is changing, to produce and contain.
She shows them her own mark. To ward off their demon menace, as if it could somehow banish them from her presence, preserve her soul against all occupations: the small tattoo in the shape of a cross inside her right wrist.
Dorlene - and that is her name, they learn from a driver's license rather than the woman herself - was so transported by her mother's conversion that she started attending the new church. The House of God. The House of the Covenant. The House of the Covenant of God with His People in Exile on the Earth.
Jesus was meant to rapture his people and bring them home to god. Dorlene has always known this. Has known this her entire life. Has been watching for the signs since she was old enough to know Him. They were meant for better things than this world of sin. This world were old men and mothers -
- well, Dorlene never had an easy life. Not with a mother like Carlita, in and out of prison, in and out of addiction, in and out of consciousness, sometimes vicious sometimes loving never stable rarely sober. At the edge of ruinous poverty, trapped in a privation from which she could never rise. No wonder she grabbed onto the prospect of perfection, of transportation, the promise of the man with the hair and the smile and the teeth and the holy water and the healing hands framed and beaming in her cheap old console television. No wonder she sent them money, all of them, seeds sown against the future, to reap god's rewards.
She was wrong all along though, she knows now. Always thought it was coming, just around the corner, this avalanche of darkness at an end. What she did not understand is that the devil was never trying to bring it all about. He's playing a different, much longer game. Trying to prevent the end from coming. Trying to stop the conflagration. Trying to thwart God's plan by keeping them all here, on this earth.
Which is no more than the topmost layer of his many Hells, in which they are all mired.
You have to work for the end - that's what Dorlene never knew. Never knew before Carlita introduced her to the Pastors Black. Because if it does not come - and soon - they will be trapped here for all eternity. The next world must come. God's cleansing fire must rain down. The next world will be glorious, and will only come about on the ashes of this one.
Even then, Dorlene fought it. The fire they give her in her body. The holy wrath god give her to work in his name. Fought and fought and fought it until the night they came.
Twisted men. Servants of the devil. His demons and his wolves and his attendants, and tore down her mother right in front of her.
She is so grateful that Carlita died with her soul clean and white and holy.
--
There's not much more to be had from the woman. She's both frightened and scared and confessional and on fire with religious fervor, twisted with rage. And in truth: so tertiary that she knows Not Much.
But they question her: and unearth this much, and perhaps more.
When the cliaths are satisfied that they have all they can get from the prisoner, an Adren theurge comes from the Sept to Exorcise the bane. So at least Dorlene will die, but she will die clean. It is a sort of mercy.
The only they have to offer the twisted woman.
[OOC: so, this is based on the rolls y'all sent me. Er... feel free to ask more questions / clarifications and I maaay give more info in later scenes based on what they might've learned from her but, heh. Here you go. Also: I CAN run a quick dice-based one-shot maaaybe next week if you'd like for dealing with the bane that is exorcised from Dorlene, but I'm also good with assuming they Do Stuff and murderate it. So let me know if y'all want a one-shot.]
But my heart is wild and my bones are steel
And I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free.
- Phosphorescent, Song for Zula
And I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free.
- Phosphorescent, Song for Zula
