dualislogs | i wanna hold ‘em like they do in texas, please

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i wanna hold ‘em like they do in texas, please

WHO: Open to all Dualizens
WHAT: Your regularly scheduled NAPs event for the month
WHERE: The brand-new Theronia Casino
WHEN: Dec. 7-10
WARNINGS: Please use these if applicable!

Look at all of these bright, shining new faces! There’s even a few less bright, less shining faces - maybe even a few folks without faces - but hey, this city welcomes all types. Chances are, if you’ve just arrived, you're seeing some pretty crazy things, unless you're used to an eye-blinding amount of neon, robots, weird-ass technology, magic, and an omnipresent police force...and hey, if you are, congrats, you're gonna settle in just fine! But for the rest of you, the Head knows this is gonna be pretty overwhelming, right?

Well, since your quaint individual processing units are probably having a hard time, why not link up with another one? By which the Head means...

Hello, new citizens of Dualis,
and welcome to your monthly Network Adjacency Protocol~!

NAPs are a monthly community networking event similar to the Earth concept of speed dating. Two citizens (new arrivals and old hands alike) are placed at a table together with a handy cue card of queries to help break the proverbial ice. Ask (possibly invasive) personal questions and receive results - or ignore the card and yeet yourself straight into a brand new friendship, whatever works! But don't be too shy - you've only got ten minutes together, and if you just sit in silence for the whole ten, the Network Admins are likely to come supervise and try to repair the uplink through a mild shock to the ol' central nervous system. You might find yourself saying all sorts of unintended facts about yourself if that happens...probably better to just make friends, right? Who doesn’t like friends?!

The weather outside is … not frightful, but this month’s event is still being held in a cozy indoor environment. Welcome to the newly-opened Theronia Casino, a 12-story building that boasts amazing buffets and dozens of different types of gambling on each floor. Enjoy a rousing game of blackjack, poker, or tall card with your friends! Try your luck at roulette, get a group together for dice games, or maybe meet some new faces over a round of mahjong. If there’s another type of gambling game local to your home world, chances are good it’ll have a table on one of the casino floors. Types of cuisine vary from floor to floor, but kosher, vegan, and allergen-free offerings are always available no matter where you choose to dine.

As a special bonus, all NAPs attendees receive free entry into the weekly Go Fish Tournament. Daily finalists win a prize of 1000 duos and advance to the championship game next month. Play your heart out, and remember - anything’s competitive if you try hard enough!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Oh, yeah. Harry's feeling nervous, alright. Nervous enough that when Hank changes the subject, his reply is nothing short of prickly.

"Well, shit! If the food's great!"

It just hangs there for a moment, and he lets it, returning to the vodka and letting that anchor him for the duration of a mouthful. And then his eyebrows pinch together. And he's glancing across at Hank again. He might compare himself to a cockatoo (a fuckupatoo, to be precise), but right now whatever face he's making is a lot closer to guilty dog than parrot.

"It's a lot to take in," he offers in lieu of an apology. "You're, uh..." Hm. He'll try again. "What gets a guy like you going? Y'know, besides food-carts, detecting and this here—" he gestures about himself "—grand ol' church of Ultraliberal sin?"

Hank doesn't seem offended, he just snorts, because what the fuck is good about being a giant AIs labrat?

"Well, fortunately minor gambling here is legal. So that's a high point. Whiskey-" he raises his glass. "It does the trick. ...I read but most of the books are shit." Libraries have been severely editted of anything subversive, and Hank's favorite classic lit is always the slightly problematic kind.

"I like music." But he won't talk about the speakeasies he goes to just to hear a live band here.

"Shoot the shit with people. Spend time with my partner. That kinda thing."

There's a decent list of potential conversation avenues there, yeah, but one stands above the rest like a goddamn titan.

"Music," Harry repeats, the corners of his mouth ticking up again. "I'd just bought me a boom-box before I woke up here. A Harmon Wowshi?" Because Hank definitely knows what that is. "It was a little banged up, but man... sit her up on your shoulder and that baby could blast!" He takes another sip of vodka, shaking his head like another cop might over a fallen colleague. "In all his grand fucking wisdom, the Head settled on not bringing her with me."

Not that he's bitter or anything.

"...So, what exactly does a guy like you listen to?" Because he sees the shirt, pal.

"Well when I'm at work, I like metal. It fuckin' keeps me awake when I need to be on my toes and I need background music. I like jazz at home. It helps me cool down. I don't know, I like a lot of situationally appropriate shit. I can't even say I hate fuckin' pop. I go to a football game? Watch a halftime show? A live action performance can fuckin' rev you up like anything."

He does hate songs repeated too damn often on the radio.

"God, we don't even have boom boxes anymore. Everything is fuckin' microsized. Which helps when you're on the job and need something in your pocket. But I went out of my way to get an old record player for my house.

"Especially when companies started replacing digital music with new fuckin' 'fixed' versions? Best when I had hard copies."

Excuse Hank, he can infinitely find *something* to bitch about.

Harry tries to keep up, he really does, but by the time Hank's on digital music, Harry's busy taking the world's slowest, thinnest sip, eyebrows drawn up, the rest of his face decidedly neutral.

"I'll be honest," he says after a moment. "I got maybe twenty percent of that."

Even without the thick layer of amnesia coating his mind, Hank's references would likely sail straight over his head. Not that the detective in him's unwilling to try to puzzle them out, of course, but Detroit is sounding less and less like Revachol by the second. "I dunno if metal is... what... anodic rock? Like, uh, rock is proto metal?" Because, you know, etymologically speaking, he can totally see the relation. "But me, I'm more of a disco guy." He gestures to himself as if that should be totally apparent in his look.

It's a half-truth, really. He absolutely loves his sad, reactionary rock music, too.

He forgets, sometimes, the drastic disparity between worlds. But the declaration of his love of disco suddenly makes him look at Harry in a new light, and Hank breaks into another smile. He's like the 'hero' cop in a revenge flick. Like the man should be introduced with him overlaid on a faded yellow and pink background of neat disco lines, and riding around in a Dodge Charger.

"I heard some decent disco." He throws out there, chuckling.

"Man, okay. Your turn. You tell me a good cop story from back home. You got a partner? A task force?"

Oh, fuck. Oh, man, Hank knows disco?!

ELECTROCHEMISTRY — You know what this means, Harrister. This means disco transcends Elysium. Hell, it means it transcends universes, baby! And maybe Hank ain't ever swooned over Guillaume le Million (or his fantastic ass), but think about the reels-upon-reels of Detroit disco tapes he's probably got stashed away! Ask about it immediately.

VOLITION — Or you could calm down for half a second? He put disco and decent in the same sentence. That doesn't scream a fellow holdover.

He takes a moment to attempt to school his expression into something other than beaming idiot. "We're gonna circle back to the disco," he says, sounding resolutely serious. "But sure, first off, tales from the precinct." And with that he tips his head back and finishes the rest of the vodka. Sets the glass down again as he winces through the aftertaste, and turns on his stool to better face Hank.

DRAMA — With feeling, my liege. Your audience awaits.

"Somewhere in Jamrock, Captain Pryce sits with a ledger open on his desk. Rows and rows of names and faces stare up at him, but it's the Major Crimes Unit he's busy staring back at. At the top of that, just a little under yours truly, you got Satellite-Officer Jean Vicquemare—" He sits up, adopting a rigidly straight posture, and gestures up to his face. "Acne-scars, loyalty and a real fucking mean sense of humour." A faint smile. "My old partner. Professional babysitter to all of this," he says, nodding down at himself, slouching again.

"Now, going back a few months, me and Jean worked a number of exciting cases. Together and apart. You wanna hear about: One..." he holds a finger up, "Something sexy and mysterious. Two?" Up goes the second finger. "An unsolvable crime that turned out to be very solvable... or Three?" The third finger joins the party. "Something a little mysterious, but definitely not sexy?"

Hank's preferences of the era (which, strangely enough, he was born a few years after) was Chicago Blues and Soul. But he had caught some decent disco. Just don't expect him to accept ABBA, okay?

"Yeah, uh... Some music can be hard to come by here, but I'm betting there'll be some I know somewhere." He idly agrees to. A lot of disco is about dancing and looking good. Nothing too subservice and illicit about that, the Head couldn't possibly care about censoring Gloria Gaynor, right?

Maybe it would be that evil.

"Yeah, my old roommate ended up bypassing me in rank while I was down for the count. Ended up being my captain. Nothing like answering to a guy that you once bitched at over laundry, right? Anyway uh... yeah, hit me with sexy and mysterious. I could use one of the good classics."

Give him some Dashiel Hammet bullshit, Harry. Hit him with a lurid scenario of intrigue and dames or... man-dames or what the fuck ever. What the hell is a man-dame? A chad? Okay he'll worry about that later.

Bypassed? For a moment, Harry considers correcting Hank. He wants to tell him that Satellite-Officer means Jean followed him to the top. That Jean orbited around the star of his double-yefreitor partner, not the other way around. But can he still say that? He's the one who burnt out spectacularly (and publicly) while Jean ran behind him, picking up the pieces. If he ever gets to go home, there's no way he'll be heading up the unit still. They might be willing to keep him, sure, but his best bet is stepping back and crossing his fingers that Kim's transfer goes through. That they'll be partners, and that time will do something to heal the resentment Jean's built up towards him.

Anyway... back to mysterious and sexy. Considering his personal case memory only really goes as far back as January (so, two and a half months prior, when his most recent ledger began), there's not a crazy amount of mysterious and sexy to talk about. But then, if ever there was a story worthy of a Dick Mullen novel, it'd be the case of the Hanged Man, his most recent undertaking. Forgotten identity, shoot outs, communism, a femme fatale, twists and turns, a giant stick insect... the list goes on and on. Perfect, right?

It's not a case he's in any hurry to tell, however. Not yet, and not to a stranger at a bar, anyway. Better he start with someone else's fuckup.

"Murder —tam-tam-taaaam— at the hookah parlour!" His voice switches to a dramatic growl, dropping to that low, low octave normally reserved for his reptilian brain. "Once upon a time, Officer Joseph Mills was given an absolute braintwister of a case. He was on it for a solid month. Then another. He wouldn't shut the fuck up about it. Mystery of the year. Needed more time! Captain said shit or get off the pot, and... he neither shat or got off the pot."

"Eventually they forced him off the pot and handed it over to a detective known for knocking out closer to two cases a week. A regular super cop." He winks, just to underline that, yes, he is that self-same super cop. "So here's the set-up: there's a young guy dead in a hookah parlour — y'know, a place where you sit and smoke soot and vapour all day without actually getting high." A little frown. "Real fucking stupid. So, yeah, anyway, young man — some kinda... big-shot movie producer — found dead, skull busted open. It's the middle of the day and he's right on the floor of the hookah parlour. Only guy in there, and only client that day. Nobody enters, nobody exits. No calls, nothing. He's just sat there, sucking on his watermelon hookah... then bam!" Harry snaps his fingers. "Blood everywhere. Mills gives me the whole line of theories: Girl at the counter did it. Movie deal gone wrong. Invisible fucking assassin."

He spreads his hands, eyebrows hiked up towards his hairline.

"Pretty sexy and mysterious, right? So I go there and take a quick look around the parlour. Over at the counter, the floor, the cushions, and the low, really sharp edged table."

He motions over to Hank, now, like he's handing over a case report.

"What do you reckon happened, detective?"

"Okay, okay... so. First suspect is obviously girl at the counter. Second thing? It's fucking stupid for someone to show up at a hookah place and not expect company. You don't go to those things to chill alone. So I guess you gotta ask some stuff like, is he a regular? Signs of forced entry, see if there's a dress code or uniforms at the hookah place someone might have exploited so it woulda just looked like a worker coming and going to anyone else. If you got psychics? If the fucker somehow did manage to pass out and crack open his own dumbass head."

Hank counts off on his fingers.

"Honestly I'd pass the first guess on the girl, check motives and for security tapes first. Make sure there was no history of affair or anything. And then follow up with the rest of that, even if things were leaning in her direction honestly it's a lot better to catch those dead ends to secure convictions or avoid false arrest charges."

Not that 'false arrest' is a thing to worry about here. That's always a fucked up thing to be reminded of.

"Alright, give me the real scenario."

Harry sets his elbow up on the bar, resting that prickly chin of his on the seat of his palm as he listens. He nods slightly as Hank walks him through it. By the conclusion, one side of his mouth is curved up in a small, wry smile.

"Okay, good," he says, voice back to its usual softer tone. "You and me, we'd have been on the same page. Gotta ask questions, sure, but no point traumatizing some poor girl because you're too lazy to take a proper look around, right?"

He straightens up again, sliding his hand up into that thick thatch of mutton-chop as he gives the back of the bar a long, not-so-cursory glance. He's finally starting to feel the pleasant buzz of all that ethanol doing its duty. More vodka would be a poor choice, though, regardless of the so-called healing properties of the Pale-Aged he's been knocking back up until now. Besides, talking shop makes him wanna slow down a little. Some good ol' Potent Pilsner, maybe?

"Right," he repeats, eyes flicking back to Hank. Both hands turn upward: the solution. "So, turns out smoking hookah all day might not get you high, but give it long enough and it starts cutting off the oxygen supply to your brain. You don't notice it 'til you're getting up to take a shit." He grins wolfishly. Yep, you got it, buddy. It was the dumbass option. "Guy stood up, passed out, smacked his head on the table and died."

"The real mystery is how did Mills fail to look into that?" He shakes his head, a picture of pure bemusement. "Guy was a fucking awful detective. The worst. Shit sense of humour, too. Really rape-y." A beat. "He, uh... died a little after that, actually. Him and his partner." His expression has shifted into something a little more somber. "Nothing to do with the hookah thing, mind. Got beaten to death by a Villalobos gang." A frown. "Sad stuff."

"That's generally the only good effect to Hookah I gathered. But Jesus. Yeah, I know guys like that."

But Jesus, rape-y too? Guy sounds like he might have deserved what he got. He won't say that out loud. Hank is the sort of cop where brotherhood ends if someone's enough of a shithead.

Hank holds up a finger. "I had to get my partner's help on this one since he knows androids better than me. Like, a hell of a lot better. He is one. But, anyway, we're brought in on a sex club murder. There's a guy who's been strangled on the bed. There's the android he rented in the room beaten to death." And he calls it 'death' on purpose. That's what happened to her.

"First guys came in and concluded it was barely worth their time. Rough play gone wrong. They pretty much have time to insult me and my partner as they head out like professional cocksucking morons." But Hank's not bitter, right? Onward. "Hooker was dead. Guy was dead. But okay... Girl is in the floor over here," he makes a loose motion behind him on the carpet. "And fucker is dead about where I'm sitting. On his back, on the bed. Hand prints around his throat. Nobody suspicious has been seen coming into or leaving the club. This was practically the only guy there that night besides the manager and his hooker inventory."

That being the important part.

"Now you might be able to figure out what's going on. But how would you have went about working out what happened?"

What would he do? Again, he's... iffy on a few of the references Hank's throwing out, but the gist seems to be strangled John, beaten to death prostitute. Distance between the bodies is kinda weird. Did she crawl away, then die? He frowns, tugging at his tie distractedly as he tries picturing it.

HORRIFIC NECKTIE — You'd have gotten weird, Bratan. Two minutes in and you'd be conversing with some corpses.

INLAND EMPIRE — Nothing weird about that.

RHETORIC — Straight from the dead whore-se's mouth!

"I mean, generally, if things look suspicious, a field autopsy is on the cards. But first up I'd wanna question the pimp. Canvas the rest of the witnesses, so, uh... I'd talk to the other prostitutes. See if they heard or saw anything weird."

"I'd wanna match the guy's ligature marks to her hands before I jumped to conclusions, too. Same with any abrasions on her. See if it looks like she crawled away and died or what. The usual." He scrubs his chin, then proceeds to rest it on his hand. A real thinker's pose. "Otherwise, I'd wanna know if anyone exited the room, or if there were any other ways in or out of it. I figure with them both dead, there's always a chance someone else did it. If that's the case and nobody was seen leaving, you're either shit out of luck, looking at a whole bunch of liars, or the killer—" he pauses to wiggle his fingers spookily "—is still in the house."

Yeah, without admitting to any of his less conventional methods, that... pretty much sums it up. He signifies he's done by shrugging, and signalling for the barman again.

"How'd it turn out?"

Edited 2019-12-26 00:34 (UTC)

"Good. Good route to take. You're on the right track. Now, say that you're with a partner who can do stuff like fix androids to an extent, read their memories too. He can get the girl back for a minute. He can't talk much, but he can figure out that the john wanted two girls.

"So, right. Someone left the room. I question the pimp on it. He didn't see anything. The prostitutes have their memories wiped every half hour for privacy reasons. I got a partner that can read android memories. But a lot of the ones that aren't fuckin' pole-dancing are in rental tubes. You gotta go up, use your handprint, check 'em out with digital currency.

"Partner has no handprint. Guess who gets to rent seven hookers on the police department's dime."

While he steadfastly argued they weren't people at the time, he acted as though they were. He sure as hell bumbled over himself escorting a prostitute back to her tube.

"So we got a direction she headed. Back to the back room. We follow her in there, and she's got bright blue hair. Should be easy to find. We see her. We're about to corner her when another woman of the same model, red-head, fuckin' mauls us. Next thing I know me and my partner are fighting off a pair of really bad-ass women in heels.

"At one point they manage to kick the gun out of my hands. Partner picks it up. Split second decision, and he decides not to shoot 'em. The girls end up standing together by a fence and grab each other's hand. Blue-hair says that the man started trying to break her and the other girl. She strangled the bastard in self-defense. She wanted to get back to the woman she was in love with."

He gestures loosely to the side.

"They would have been just disassembled if we brought 'em in, no chance for trial, and we were pretty convincingly beat up. So we watched 'em go."

Harry has just finished exaggeratedly mouthing the word Pilsner to the barman when one key phrase worms its way back into his ears, causing his heart to skip a beat: memory wipe.

HALF LIGHT — Don't call Abigail.

The initial burst of animal fear fades with the feeling like maybe it's good if the prostitutes don't remember the shit they go through on the daily. All the fucked up characters they don't have to mentally take home with them. Surely it can't just be for the Johns, right?

It calls back to a thought he'd laboured over before coming here: for a time, he'd been able to forget Dora, and had been better for it. What if he didn’t lose his memory? What if something in Martinaise came and stored it all away? Something that allowed him to remember only the flowers on the windowsill. Something that allowed him to lose all the actors and shadows, leaving only good things. Maybe that's what this... erasure is to them?

Or maybe the poor fucks just live in a permanent goldfish hell.

He manages to shake the feeling off before Hank finishes, confident that he's managed to at least somewhat follow along. His expression doesn't really shift from attentive concern, however. He simply listens, head bobbing faintly. That last bit has him silent for a long moment, though.

Finally: "You ever regret not bringing someone in?"

"It's not something I've done a lot." He admits. "Usually I bring people in. If I have a reasonable doubt, I'll recommend bail. Put extra work into finding out what really happened. But these two girls? They were just in love when they shouldn't have been, and one of them got scared."

So he let them go.

"So no, I don't guess I do. I wouldn't give someone that chance unless I was absolutely sure of their intentions. 100%."

And he's at least a good situational judge of character. Sometimes he comes up short on the whole. But in moments of intensity? People are easy to figure out.

"You ever let someone go?"

Harry gives a grunt of approval. Self defense against some brutal John hardly makes someone a sequence killer, and from the sound of things, the woman in question wouldn't exactly be safe behind bars.

Still, Hank's superiors can't have been pleased. It strikes him, then, that Hank's probably a better cop than he was. Or at least, a more consistent one. Hell, he's pretty sure he has a hole seared somewhere in the back of his head from all the times he's been on the receiving end of Kim's disapproving glare.

"Ehhh, yeah. A few," he says, practically sighing it out. Does not bothering to catch a perpetrator count as letting them go? Because if so, he can add the couch assholes and probably a whole host of other small-time douchebags to his list, too. It seems before his whole... amnesiac incident, he was progressively only putting energy into crimes he deemed worth his time. "Sounds like you guys made the right call, though. Too many detectives get mired in protocol and forget they're dealing with people. Shit isn't always black and white."

There's a little thunk as the barman sets the pilsner on the counter in front of him. It's not a brand he recognizes. Rather than Comrade Potent, he's being stared at by a cherubic child sat in a series of art deco lines and curves. The brine at the top smells the same though.

"A group of kids were camped out on the sea ice near where I was working a case. Long story short, they were trying to set up a speed lab over in an old, abandoned church. They, uh... tried to trick me into helping them do it." He grins, shaking his head at the sheer audacity of it. "You gotta admire the balls of that, right? I mean, I don't know if they thought I was bent, really stupid, or both, but..." He just scoffs. "Teenagers, man. I let them know I knew, obviously. Gave 'em a hard slap on the wrist—" took a bribe "—and helped them straighten their path a little. Y'know, move focus. Fact is, you throw folks like that in jail and you're asking to turn them into something a whole hell of a lot worse."

He leans forward and sips at the foam at the lip of the bottle.

"Past that, I, uh..." A beat. "I dunno. I tried arresting someone I should've probably let go, and I let someone go I probably should've arrested." He sighs, taking the time to turn the bottle so he doesn't have to deal with whatever expression the child adorning it is boring into him. "Turns out being a detective is hard."

"I always figured the point of being of being a detective was either to stop bad things from happening to good people, or to keep assholes from benefitting from intentional harm. That's all you can aim for. In that case, the guy that was killed wasn't a good person, and he was the one that would have benifitted from harming them. Just to get his rocks off. You know that piece of shit had two daughters and a wife? Think of having to make that call. 'Yeah, your husband was killed by androids after he tried to get hard from savagely beating the fuck out of artificial women.' Then they gotta sit there and consider that he might have been wanting to do that to them."

Of course, it would have been in nicer words, but that's the story that would have went down in the account to the wife.

But no, he gets it. He gets why he wouldn't have turned someone in.

"Which of those regrets came first?" Because it'd be very easy to see how one would lead into the other. "You know? ...Here they have these... fuckin' robots. Called 'iterations'. I think I mentioned them, but they do a lot of the work. They make threat based decisions and you don't gotta do much to get tased by one.

"So I'll be honest, I'd rather have a human that made mistakes around than one of those deciding no one was worthy of sympathy."

Yeah, it's hard. Still, it's better than those pieces of shit doing it.

"Iterationsss..." Sometimes an overly drawn out 's' sound is all display of disdain you need. "Sure. I guess for every Mills you got people like you, Jean, Kim..." There's a notable absence from that list. Harry huffs softly. "I'm paraphrasing, but Kim, he told me: 'solving a crime makes very little difference in the world. Not solving one, though? That can change the course of everything.'" He pauses and frowns, realizing that might have been less paraphrasing, more misquoting. "Or... something like that. Fuck, I don't know. Things are shitty, but they can always get a lot worse, so try and stop that by doing your job." His mouth twitches up into a grin. "He's not super idealistic. Mr Moralist vs. bleeding heart Communard over here," he says, gesturing back to himself. "I like your version better."

"As for the regrets, they, uh..." his hand twitches loosely in front of him. He'd clearly rather jump over this topic entirely, but he's never really been one to leave questions unanswered. "They came pretty much one after the other. First woman, I let her convince me she'd stay put. That I didn't have to arrest her, and that if I did certain people would come find her, kill her... the whole nine yards." A derisive snort. "I handed her a little form telling her she needed to check in at the station in two weeks. Fucking A+ by the book cop work, right? Didn't matter that she'd lied to me every time we'd spoken up until then. Oh, no, gut instinct, pal! She's telling the truth this time!"

He's still smiling, but it's entirely humourless now.

"Number two, even though there was plenty of evidence fingering her, I knew it wasn't her." He throws his hands up. "Knew it. Didn't fucking stop me, though. I..." The words die in his throat, and he finds himself staring mutely at the sliver of label still visible on the bottle in front of him. Funny how he leans into his gut one moment, only to ignore it the next. Hilarious. "I shouldn't have tried arresting her."

"Anyway," he finishes, flattening his palms to the counter - a partially written signpost to some other, more pleasant topic.

Edited 2019-12-31 12:17 (UTC)

Hank catches that absence, and wonders what it means. If it's just that the guy holds himself accountable for all his mistakes, or if he just truly admires these people far above himself. Neither is exactly terrible, and so far Harry doesn't sound like a bad guy.

"Yeah, well. Don't piss the iterations off. If anything, give 'em a wide berth. If it comes down to it, talk to someone normal." That's been his standing point from the beginning. But it had seemed, before, like the police department lacked corruption. Now he realizes that there's a little (far less than any other place he's been in) only because they're all part of this city's fucked up machine.

So 'normal' can be whatever Harry takes it to mean for the moment. A cop. Another newcomer. Normal. Just not the iterations.

"I can see why being a 'zooman' might be a welcome break now."

"I'm being dramatic," he says, having studied Hank for a moment, lips pursed. "But yeah, I figure if they're gonna drag me over to the land of video computers, the least they can do is let me pretend I know what the hell's going on in a chimp's head." A little gesture to the ape pen. Now that's a mysterious little fellow. "I'll get some cards printed. Zoologist/Zooman/Zoo detective."

And speaking of that particular role, he's going to go ahead and retrieve the ID card he'd left sat on the bar, too. He's not about to go through another lost badge debacle. A worn packet of Astra cigarettes soon replaces it, the black triangle logo glaring up at the ceiling. He reaches for the pilsner again.

"Thanks, by the way." Some genuine warmth has leaked back into his expression. He touches the side of his bottle to Hank's glass. "I appreciate the low-down. Sorry if I'm, uh..." He wiggles his fingers in some indistinct gesture. "Y'know." Another huff. "I'm gonna head out for a smoke once I'm done with this, so if you got any last words of wisdom or, you know... basic must-know fundamentals of this new reality?" He moves the bottle around in a broad, all encompassing kind of way. "Now's the time, man."

"Actually, I got a recommendation." He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a light paperback book, some old Vallejo style dramatic illustration on the front, briefly seen before he opens it to a notepad tucked inside.

He pulls off one of the post-its.

"There's this bar. Handsome lady bartender in there on some nights. Great taste in whiskey." There's an address for a place called Rick's bar, along with instructions to 'Check out the downstairs shop'. Because that information, at the moment, is very seriously needed.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY — Told ya this guy is your buddy-buddy. He's got your number, Harry-boy.

"A bar, huh?" Harry plucks up the post-it and holds it in front of him like he maybe needs glasses. He was looking for something a little more conceptual than that, but... whatever. He can't blame Hank: the way he looks, who's to say his personality and priorities don't begin and end at the bottom of a bottle.

INLAND EMPIRE — Tell him about your vast soul.

"Thanks. I'll, uh... take it under consideration. Maybe give it gander some time." He punctuates with another swig of pilsner. "They got karaoke?"

"Nah. They do have live bands, though. Different types of music. There are a couple of karaoke bars in the area, too."

Any place with live music though is great. It's unregulated, uncensored, real and raw. The censorship's gonna be the fuckin' death of him. Literally, maybe, the death of everyone. It's not just the metal or the rock. You get into jazz and cut songs like 'Strange Fruit'? You deserve to be taken out.

"Live bands are a good start." He's eyeing the note with more interest now. The little squint he gives acts as a display of concentration - he's trying to figure out where the hell he should stick it so he won't actually lose it. "Besides, live music means sound system and a mic. Sound system and a mic means they do karaoke." Wink. "They just don't know it, yet."

And he's onto patting his pockets down now. Eventually he lands on a little zipper on the thigh of his FALN joggers - hand hesitating on the rubbery material for all of a second or two. Then a quick unzip and out comes the old RCM badge. It's a blue plastic, simple and altogether unremarkable, save for the photo on it. Despite the lack of wear, (the badge looks recently issued, if anything) the photo's old. Gone are the giant sideburns and — well, gone is the photo. He just stuck the post-it over it, and is busy smoothing it down so it won't peel straight off again.

"You sound like maybe you got some pipes on you," he says, looking up once more. "Base-y." Another drag of Pilsner. "You ever sing?"

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sociallychallenged - 2020-01-08 18:04 (UTC) - Expand

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