#cor.halloween

Lucas and Codie had chosen hard mode, stalking about enemy territory in corsets and long skirts, but Flick could kiss (would kiss, God Willing) Chamomile for their costume choice, because for all its form fitting tightness, she feels much better skulking about in this spider-girl getup or whatever it was.

She and the newbie swipe the key from César, who seems preoccupied, which, fair, and after exchanging little more than a few reassuring nods and a very hushed good luck, they all part ways.

The Shipping Yard is a maze, and they've only got a number to go off of; tracking it seems like it ought to be easy, like it all goes in order, but it seems to fall apart once they begin to search properly; each number isn't something that goes in order cleanly, it's shipping lots and manifest serials and she doesn't know which number is which because she's never set foot in a shipyard in her life. "Why can't she just hide it in safe like anyone else, Jesus Christ."

She holds a flashlight up to each code on each shipping container; none of them seem to match, and what's more, the locks on these things dont' steem to match the key itself either; they key's some new-fangled plasticene passkey card thing, and these all have hideous, ancient looking padlocks. She lets out a stage-whispered his for Codie. "I'm starting to think this isn't for one of these big metal things," she says. "Look for... weird stuff, I don't know. It has to be close." The letters in front of the number had been clearly plastered on the concrete underfoot - that had to mean something, right?

If Flick was out of her element, then Codie definitely was. Ask her to navigate heavy forests and hills, and she's your girl. Here it's an urban sprawl of towering containers that make her feel a little dizzy if she looks up too much -- the faded and rusty colors are really all she has for comfort as they move through. Numbers aren't easy for her. But she's trying.

They've found the right place but not the right lock, and when Flick points out the difference between the passcode key and the padlock locking the whole container, she frowns. They don't have a lot of time, so Codie whips her head around to try and find something for leverage, nearly yawping in glee when she finds a discarded, broken pipe. "If that card won't get us in, we gotta force it. Bet ya anythin' there's somethin' in there that that'll fit." She swings the pipe down hard, full force as best she can until the old, rusty thing finally breaks -- it's a lot of noise but it'll have to work.

She flings the pipe far away from them, hoping the clatter leads them away. "Help me pull it open." Codie gets a good grip, and when Flick gets situated, too, she heaves the door open just enough for them to slip into. It's a surprisingly small space, not nearly deep enough for the container to hold.

But there is a small, small place to scan a card on the inside corner of the false wall. "Bingo?"

She starts to protest, hushed but urgent; "Code… Codie no! Bad! Put tha-"

The clank and clamor of it as the piece of steal uncouples the lock's shackle from its block, chain rattling against the handle as Codie launches the pipe. It won't by them much time, if any, and she turns back to stare at her. "Fine, I guess!" She hisses out, face half-obscured in the spider-mask.

They pull it open together, and at the back there is a small LED shining through a set of netting. Flick peers around the outside edge of the container, and notices it budges up against another warehouse She looks over at Codie, and there's a quiet moment as she pulls it open. "Don't be smug."

Moving into the container, she takes the key and slides it through the reader, and a tone sounds as the back shifts, revealing a pack panel that swings inside of the adjacent building, revealing a cellar stairway that goes down to a single door. Flick heads in, and sees pipelines along the ceiling, tracing them back to the door, and she recognizes the scent of wolfsbane. "Good thing we didn't bust in, I guess…"

The door at the bottom is old, and looks like it should be stuck, but it gives easy between the two of them. Inside, they find the remnants of what looks like some sort of water ritual and at the center of it is a single square of what looks like ancient pelt. Flick throws a switch that illuminates the room from a single bulb, stares at it; the runes on it seem strange and faded, and besides it is a strange pool in which similar runes seem to float through some form of magic.

"Uh… You seeing all of this?" She asks, picking up a bloody-tipped needle that looks fashioned out of bone, her lips curling into a sickened look of ick.

"Grab anything that looks… grabbable. We've gotta meet up with Lazkano and get the hell out of here."

The smell of magic is strong here, and that concerns her - whatever ritual this is means bad news and the weight of it prickles at her skin. Already she's trying to commit things to memory but grabbing is of the essence - they gotta move and they gotta move fast. She starts shoving things into pockets, into a backpack, whatever she can find. The ancient pelt looks like they need to be more careful with it, and she takes that and rolls it up gingerly before shoving it into her bra. Close and safe.

Once she's got about all she carry, she nods over to Flick. "I hope Cesar's good at the pier. We've been lucky."

Flick swipes a bunch of photographs from where they're pinned brainstorm style to a sheet of plyboard on the side of the old prohibition vault, and when she turns, she watches Codie stuff a rolled up sheet of fur into the front of her dress, which somehow really completes the Mary Sanderson look. "Okay, let's go, something in here has to be worth hiding, or it wouldn't be down here."

"Tiger boy," she nods as her shoulders, caped with ivy and vines that's a little too real to have come from some pop-up costume shop, "You've found your way to me, but our fuzzy little son's not here." a pout.

She doesn't stop dancing, nor does the man behind her, laying his filthy hands clasped across her belly. He sups on her neck with a scruffy chin and pursed lips. In an hour he won't know his own name. By sunup he'll be dirt, withered and sapped dry; she's decided this already.''

"No carnival on Halloween?" She asks as if she's practiced with the holiday, as if she's lived a few dozen of them in her life.

What she wouldn't give for a night in - but there had been far too many nights in as of late, and not enough spending time with her teacher 'friend'. They'd matched again - on the suggestion that they do something literary together, and while she is having a bit of fun teasing Sadie about the implications of her creating her as a monster, there is something a bit sweet about doing it together.

The rave is loud. The drinks are strong. The people smell heavenly.

And she has Sadie brought from the dance floor to a more quiet area, just outside of the main throughway where other vampires have sought a moment with their own feeds. Werewolf party be damned, she will enjoy herself. No compulsion tonight, and that means even during feeds. She pulls back from Sadie's wrist, blood staining her teeth and lips.

It's easy to blend in here, the way the holes in her neck drape a red spill down the white of a frilled collar; Autumn pulls off a pretty good drag rendition of Rice's French devil, even though her eyes' blue has failed at this point, the potent concoction rushing through her - a combination of who-knows-what drugs and who-knows-how-much liquor going to war inside the chemistry of her ailing brain - has seen wolfish yellow overtake them.

Whatever sludge of misery she's spent the last two months trying not to drown in, it's almost completely absent tonight, boltered by a rare good day, a favorite holiday, and a birthday all rolled into one. The first hour's spent with Aria and a cluster of strangers. Sipping bitter drinks and snuffing lines of powder off variours surfaces or parts of Aria's anatomy. Each one blows her pupils a little wider, buoys her foul mood a little higher out of the mire, and burns away a little more care for anything other than The Moment.

Who the fuck even is she?

Doesn't matter, because she knows who that is.

"AJ!" She says, and her tone's practically bouncing, a far cry from anything in the last two months, hell, a far cry even from her normal degree of subdued. AJ should be fucking proud.

"AJAAAAAAY" She says again, practically colliding with him in a weird, oblong hug, like she's overshot him. "I didn't know you'd be here! Fuck, I should have texted."

His costume, whatever it's made of, feels crazy, and her eyes, blown irises surround in wire-thin rings of inhuman amber, stare at it in the dim lighting of the rave as she feels it between her fingers. "Crazy, crazy."

She looks behind her, lands an eye on her girlfriend, bites at her dry-feeling lip, turns back to AJ. "I have a fucking answer, AJ. I know what I'd do to Westwood."

She says it like she's had the biggest epiphany ever, like she's been thinking about it for the two months since, but it' just now popped in her head now, off the back of seeing his face. "I'd find out something really really important to him, yeah?"

There's some live band she's never heard of (and by rights, should probably never hear of again) singing some weirdly off-key cover of Thriller while she sits at a bar.

Tressa Shaw has never sat at a bar alone drinking, but something about the concept seems correct tonight. Because her normal Halloween activity is unavailable.

So fuck it. She's hunting. Sue her.

There's a bowl of candy in the lap of a lounging skeleton on the front stoop of Embrace. Next to is a note nobody's listened to that reads, simply. "Take some, but not too much." Because vagueness is true horror. Tressa sits at the corner of an ugly bar with an ugly shelf of drinks behind it and a bartender in a lackluster attempt at a Minnie Mouse costume pouring drinks. The energy's lethargic. Like everyone here's just not feeling it this year. Relatable.

One of them, by the end of the night, will probably be dead. Because them's the brakes.

And then, as she scans, she finds something trigger a click in the back of her mind, and, fast like a blink and quiet as smoke she's shifting her seat at the bar, leaning her chin on her palm and looking a gravelly man up and down. "Holy shit, you're Manuel Amador. Can I shake your hand? Buy you a drink?"

Now this is what she's been pining for. A bag of potent powder here, a phial of pulverized pugnacious there, and she was making a fine amount of trade on party-favors alone. Dressed in vines and leaves and glitter, hair stained red for the evening, for the first hour or so she bumps shoulders, grinds hips, and drapes hands over the shoulders of all manner of unique denizens of the night - ghouls, goblins, killers, princesses, vampires and werewolves and witches real and otherwise. Some buy her fixings, others simple pay her a smile.

She hadn't quite understood the concept of Halloween, as explained to her by Lara, nor by Blair, nor by darling Chamomile. No, it had taken Vanessa talking her through it to really get her in the spirit, and now here she was, wearing something that she'll have to remember to re-use for the stage at the Cabaret sometime, only a jacket protecting what little her costume's left to the imagination and only mildly regretting it in the chill of an autumn evening.

And now she sits, watching folks toss balls at a target to dunk their friends into a tank of beer when she catches a covensister passing nearby. "Wahey!" she says, leaping in front of her with a clipclop of her healed boots. "How now sister! I'd not expected to see you running amok here!"

Everyone makes mistakes! Getting caught on a security camera doing some side work for Harford in a big costume, easy to pick out of a crowd, is a mistake. Lucas came as prepared as he could: the bag of clothes he’d thrown into his truck for emergencies would work for a replacement costume, and if nothing else, he had a hat somewhere and some... choice statement pieces.

Lucas Thorne as A Cowboy, whatever. C'mon, let me in, I did this already.