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BOSTON

The Cardinal watched his attendant lead the quivering girl away. She was just sixteen and excessively pretty, with beautiful brown skin and hair that shone starling-black in the dim lighting of his inner chambers. She had cried a lot, but he liked it when they cried. The quiet ones were dull and still like cadavers, and the implication of bedding them was slightly disgusting.

He arose slowly, a pale, trembling mountain of fat. At fifty-four, he still stood tall, and his sharp grey eyes were as clever as they had been twenty years ago. They were dark, the particular shade of graphite, as was his neatly clipped, greasy hair. His enormous, corpulent body glistened with sweat and oil from his deed, and he knew he would need another bath before going out.

It was a sin, but having sacrificed so much that the ordinary man took for granted in order to be God's Hand on Earth, he felt entitled to that small bit of hypocrisy. All men sinned, after all, and when one compared his minor indiscretions with the evils of the common person, he was saintly. His place in Heaven was assured, and it was simply out of the goodness in his humble heart that he worked so tirelessly to combat the demons and witches.

Of course, there were plenty of temporal rewards for his sacrifice—wealth, status, power—but they were nothing compared to his great works. He wouldn't be at all surprised if he was canonized the day after he died; he was already becoming famous within the Church for his subtle reforms. Not, he reminded himself, that fame and power were the reasons that he gave so much of himself to the Church's cause.

Some part of him, the part that was still honest, knew that he liked it when they screamed. The only thing that rivaled that pleasure was the feeling of young bodies and smooth skin and soft hair. The screaming and the begging that he so enjoyed were easy enough to explain: it was only his sense of righteousness. They weren't human, and being such an affront to God, it was only right that they should suffer greatly before they died. What he did was a mercy compared to the eternal torment that Satan would inflict upon them. So with clean conscience, he turned to his bath; he had to look presentable when he met with that fool, Ivan.

~*~*~*~*~

In another part of the grand building, a small, beautiful man with blue eyes like a girl’s knocked timidly at Ivan’s door before entering. Everything about his air betrayed him as a well-whipped dog, right down to the way that his shoulders slumped slightly and his hand shook almost imperceptibly as he offered Ivan the note.

“From his Holiness the Cardinal, sir.”

MANHATTAN

“Isra, your clients are here.”

“Okay!” She called. You can do this, she told the leggy brunette in the mirror sternly, raising a hand to free her wavy hair around her body, her mother’s tips ringing in her ears. "Let your hair do your work for you. Long, well-cared for hair is a dancer’s best friend . . .” She messed with the laces on the side of her top, making sure they were tight and wouldn’t come undone, and grabbed the matching sash she had recently obtained with her the leftovers of her meager earnings.

With a steadying breath, Isra slipped barefoot down the stairs, her dance outfit chiming as the beads swayed with her movement and bumped into one another. Beyond the common room she went, into a side area generally used for overflow from the bar, but group parties were common enough. They’d even had a few wedding receptions. It was amazing how people went on with their lives, lying to themselves about the shattered world around them. Telling themselves it would all be alright.

Shaking off the dark thoughts she focused on the job ahead. Turning on her performing smile, she slipped through the double doors into the dimly lit room and slid them shut with a soft clink. She extended one leg out through a high slit in her loose-fitting skirt and bowed deeply to them, and began to dance. She felt half a dozen eyes on her, and avoided their gaze until the appropriate time.

“Always keep them guessing, keep the mystery alive.”

Isra raised her chocolate brown eyes and focused on the first face she saw, giving him all of her attention. She moved among them, going to each in turn for their own special time, where she had only eyes for them. The dance ended abruptly and she remained in the pose for a few moments, before regaining the initial pose and bowing to their approval.

As she straightened, the man closest to her pulled her into his lap, the stench of the hard liquor thick as he breathed in her face. “Ready for the after show?”

Isra suppressed a grimace and forced it to turn into a smile. “The show’s not over yet. One dance is not all you get,” she teased, untangling herself from him, placing a drink in the hand she recently freed her arm from. “But I think you need a little more of this to enjoy the next one.”

“Hey, don’t be sucha stingy whore! Yer ma was always willin’ to oblige.” A second man piped up. Isra frowned and opened her mouth to deny his claim when she was grabbed from behind.

Thick, sweaty arms wrapped around her bare stomach as the owner laughed in her ear. “Yeah, too bad she’s gone. . . She was a good lay. But we got this one here. Who knows, maybe it runs in the family.”

Isra squirmed in his arms, not believing her ears. Her mother? A whore? No—it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be.

“Feisty ain’t’cha?” the thug holding her muttered, his hands sliding down her body. Isra slapped his hands and pushed at them as he grabbed her hips and pulled her back against him. The other men’s eyes were still locked on her, watching as their companion searched for the clasp on her skirt.

“Share the wealth, man.” Another voice, accompanied by a hand groping her.

Growling, Isra pointed her foot and kicked the newcomer in the family jewels before he could come any closer and rammed her elbow into the abdomen of the b*****d holding her. She sunk her nails into his hands and pulled free, dodging around a table and escaping out the door. She pounded through the crowded, smoky room, running straight into the kitchen and shouting for her landlord.

“Gale!” They couldn’t follow her here. And if they were stupid enough to try, there were plenty of sharp pointy objects she could fend them off with. She rounded the broken freezer chests and stopped dead in front of him. “What the hell! Those guys you sent me into thought I was a cheap whore!”

“Those are important clients. You get your a** back in there and do what they ask.”

Isra gaped at him, not believing her ears. “No! I’m not your whore for rent!”

“If you won’t perform, you can’t pay your rent.”

“You’re threatening to kick me out?” Isra scoffed, her anger smoldering. “I don’t want to live here anyway!” She raged, turning away and dashing back through the doors and up the stairs to her single room before he could stop her. The room she had shared with her mother. No more.

Isra gathered her sparse belongings and hurled out onto the street under her scratchy gray woolen cloak, her bare feet protected by thin, cheap shoes. She stopped just outside the door, almost regretting her words. She was now homeless. She straightened her shoulders, lips forming into a grim line. If she’d stayed, she would have been forced into servicing those men. When that kind of thing happened once, the landlord would take full advantage of. He’d force her again, using the excuse that it was nothing new for her.

Sighing, she set off down the street, in search of a new home.

OOC: So... yeah. ^^; I write unnecessarily long opening posts.

Boston: A Laboratory in the Basement of the Main Church Offices, Right Below the Official Office Chapel



Ivan, bent over a device that the young secretary couldn't identify, didn't even look up when he heard the summons. His hand darted out with lightning speed, reaching for a table filled with tools at his side. From the secretary's angle, it didn't seem that Ivan looked at that, either, but instead instinctively knew what he was after as he snatched up a tiny screw driver and shuffled it around on the back of the strange machine. The young man stared for a moment, hesitant to speak again, then coughed lightly and repeated, "F-from his Holiness, the-"

"Do you know what this is, lap-dog?" Ivan asked, still not bothering to turn his attention away from his project.

The young man blanched at the title 'lap-dog,' but responded with automatic ease. "N-no, sir. I was just sent here to-"

"It's called," Ivan began, ignoring him completely and leaning ever further into the machine, "a C-D-Player. A 'stereo system,' to be specific, of the variety known in some places as a 'Boombox'. It's part of the ancient technology, assumed to have been lost to time. We have several that we've found in some of the cities that weren't reduced to rubble, but they were all broken, and none of us knew how to make them work again." He tossed the screwdriver aside and reached for a pair of small silver-colored tubes, holding them up to the light for a second before jerking right back down into his work. "Today, lap-dog, you and I are going to be the first people in almost two hundred years to hear the sounds that a CD Player produces."

"Beg your pardon, sir, but what is this 'CD' that this 'Player' uses?"

Ivan whipped around for a moment, staring over the tops of his tinted glasses to meet the youth with the full power of his crystal-clear stare. The secretary took an involuntary step back; he had heard about the Head Technician's... unusual eyes, but he'd never expected them to be so piercing, so disconcerting and... scary. Like someone was taking a scalpel and digging around in your brain. Ivan seemed to understand the other man's discomfort and tipped the lenses up until they blocked the full force of his gaze. "They really don't teach you lap-dogs a thing, do they?" he asked, maybe a bit sadly. His hand swept out to the table on his other side, this one filled with slim, battered cases. "CDs are, in layman's terms, disc for storing information, primarily music. Take a look at those: remnants of the old culture, collected from a recent dig in D.C."

The secretary's eyes swept across the cases more out of politeness to his superior than actual interest. "They spelled 'Gorillas' wrong," he remarked innocently.

The Technician scowled and turned back to his work. "The point," he went on, "is that I dissembled one of these stereos a week ago, and today I've finished reassembling it, with all the correct parts in working order again. And, as long as my knowledge of chemistry doesn't fail me, a pair of homemade lithium cartridges once called 'batteries' will have us listening to the old world's music in mere seconds. Now hand me one of those cases, I don't care which one."

Unsure what else to do, the secretary picked up one entitled "Frank Sinatra: The Very Good Years" and handed it to Ivan, cocking his head to the side as he watched the Head Technician open the case and slip a slim disc into the opening at the top of the machine. He clicked the lid shut with almost affectionate delicacy, then pressed a finger against the button marked with a triangle facing to the side.

"It's the last dance, we've come to the last dance
They're dimming the lights down, they're hoping we'll go
It's obvious they're aware of us, the pair of us, alone on the floor
Still I want to hold you like this forever and more..."

The secretary gaped at the smooth voice and instruments flowing out of the machine, nearly falling over a chair as he scurried to the back of the room. "Th-th-that's amazing, Mr. Mayhugh!" he cried, too excited to remember his composure.

"Of course it is," Ivan said with a matter-of-fact nod. "And what's more..." he produced what looked like a headband with a fuzzy circle on both ends, clicking the end of the long string that connected them into the machine. The music abruptly vanished. "With these, it's possible to listen to your selection privately, as loud as you like, without interfering with another's work." He grinned up at the secretary. "You know what this means, don't you?"

"Yes, sir! We'll be able to reconnect with the culture of our ancestors, and learn more about so much of our lost history!"

Ivan shot him another positively disgusted look. "No," he said, turning back to the machine and slamming his finger into the square button on the top. "It means I won't have to listen to anymore of that damned choir music from upstairs."

"Oh..."

"Why're you here anyway, lap-dog?"

"Ah!" the secretary's hand shot outwards, offering Ivan the note. "C-Cardinal Jenner. From him. Sir."

"Oh?" Ivan opened the message and read it quietly to himself, his face betraying none of his emotions. After a moment he grabbed pen and paper from the nearby desk and scribbled something across the sheet, handing it back to the secretary. "There's my reply."

The young man glanced down at the short, blunt message and his eyes almost fell out of his head.

It read simply: "Piss off."

"Mr. Mayhugh, I can't give this to the Cardinal! He'll kill me!"

Ivan shrugged. The secretary stared at him for another long moment, tears welling up in the corners of his eyes. Ivan groaned and snatched the note out of the man's hands again, crumpling it into a ball and tossing it to the floor. "Never mind, then, if you're going to start slamming terror at me. Go back to your kennel, lap-dog. I'll go see the old b*****d."

The secretary offered Ivan both a hasty salute and nod, unsure how to address a Head Technician, and darted up the stairs as fast as his legs would carry him, praying to the Lord above that he never, never got sent on another job to the Infamous Ivan the Terrible's office again!

-----

Five minutes later Ivan stood at the entrance to Jenner's office. He gritted his teeth, steeling himself for the thoroughly unpleasant meeting that was certain to follow, pushed his glasses all the way up on his nose, adjusted his trench coat, and rapped on the door.

BOSTON

Deep in the New Boston slums, a closing door, followed by a tired sigh, broke the silence of a dark and cramped studio apartment. Through the door, a customer had just departed, and the remaining occupant of the large bed, that took up most of the apartment's floorspace, rolled to her side, and reached for the wad of dirty bills that sat on top of her spindly bedside-table. She sat up, and with a soft click, a dim circle of red light illuminated the corner of the room as she turned on her shadeless lamp. She simply stared at the money for a moment, until Josefina slowly rifled through the bills, counting her fee. Sighing again at having come up short, she reached under the mattress of the bed, and withdrew a gold ring, property of the recently departed man, who had come up short in more ways than one. She let herself relax a bit at the amusing thought, and reaching underneath the bed, she pulled out a beat-up shoe box, in which she tossed the ring among a meager few other treasures. She glanced at the small window high up on the wall, but the thick black curtains she had hung there hid any evidence as to whether it was day or night. Sighing again, she began to shiver a little bit, though the room was not cold. So after quickly sliding the box back into its hiding place, and tossing the money back on the table, she stood up and stretched, yawning through softly chattering teeth, then crossed the 4 feet from her bed to the bathroom. Already naked, the moan of decrepit plumbing greeted her as she turned on the shower, and she stepped inside.

She bathed quickly, and stepping out again, she dried herself off with a threadbare towel, brushing wet bangs from her face. She yawned again as she padded over to her closet, mindlessly stroking her tail with one hand while grabbing a few articles of clothing with the other. Tossing the clothes unceremoniously onto the bed, she sat down on the edge next to the pile of silky garments, and slowly pulled black lace sleeves onto her arms. A low-cut, deep red blouse that revealed her entire midriff was next, followed by lace stockings to match the sleeves. Finally she stood and pulled on an extremely short red skirt, and threaded secured it around her hips with a black belt, adorned with thin silver chains.

Now dressed, she sat down at a small vanity and quickly applied red lipstick, a generous supply of glittery-red eyeshadow, and finished off with a touch of black eyeliner and blushed her cheeks. It was her usual attire, and she felt it suited her darker skin. Winking once or twice in the mirror, she stood up satisfied, and pulled on a pair of knee-high vinyl platform boots. Snatching up the money from the table, she stuffed it into a medium-sized black bag that also contained her apartment key, a small compact, and a baggy hoodie and pants. Even if it was daytime, she'd still be okay while in the slums, but if she needed to go into the better part of town, an outfit like hers would just be asking to be arrested.

Double-checking to make sure her tail was inconspicuously wrapped around her waist, she quickly scratched one of her ears, threaded her arm through the bag straps, and quickly walked out the door, a seductive smile already playing over her lips as the door locked behind her, and she made her way out onto the afternoon streets.

((OOC: Idunno what time of day it is, so I just guessed at afternoon..I'll edit appropriately if it's otherwise))

MANHATTAN

Medina sat at his desk on the only “reconstructed” block of Manhattan, shuffling papers as the summer heat made the sweat prickle on each hair follicle before it trickled down his back. The building was really the only half of St. Patrick’s Cathedral that had survived the Great War. Fire bombings had cut the cathedral almost exactly in half and taken out the row of buildings behind it, but the front portion with its two great sword-pointed towers had survived in tact over the centuries. His Holiness Cardinal Jenner had thought it a fitting place to begin retaking the ruined slums of Manhattan, and Medina (on pain of death) was forced to agree. It would be a long, thankless task, and it would take years, but sooner or later every witch and demon hiding in the cracks of the crumbling city would have to come out. Not, he thought dryly, that he would be responsible for that; only when Jenner decided to seriously attack the city would it fall.

He lifted another set of papers—an order for supplies, signed by High Priest Daniel Medina of the Order of St. Peter—and watched a cockroach skitter across the desk with his one good eye. He let it scurry down the side of the new wood and into the cracked stonework of the wall; there were so many that killing one wouldn’t really help the pest problem. He set the papers down again, massaging his ruined eye through the black patch over it. It tended to ache when he had headaches, when he was ill, or for seemingly no reason at all. It was one of two visible reminders that he, Father Medina, had once been brave or careless. The other was the three uneven stumps on his left hand. The rest of his rangy body was covered to the neck in silk that didn’t suit him, and at the moment, that silk was dark at the armpits with sweat.

The impatient knock at the new, poorly fitted wooden door made him want to sigh; it was too hot to do anything worthwhile. His sloe-black eye focused on the general area where he expected the person’s head might appear, and he growled a “come in.” He was forty-two, about twenty years too old to expect much from the world but that failing the occasional assassination attempt, it would continue to behave predictably until he sighed for the last time. Still, even he had to admit surprise at the figure that entered his office.

It was a little girl with a knit cap pulled over her ears. It was difficult to guess her age, because she was scarecrow-thin and covered in filth—soot, he thought—with bruises opened wide like purple flowers across the right side of her face. Tangled hair that might have been blonde or brown when clean fell in clumps around her dingy little doll’s face, and blue eyes looked at him dauntlessly. A dress that had probably been light blue at one time was dark with sweat and dirt, hiding everything above her knobby knees. The body trembled slightly, not from fear but from weakness, and he felt deep stabs of pity. It took more willpower than anyone would ever know to rise with slow deliberateness instead of jumping from his chair and running for food and a doctor.

“Harvey,” he called in a coolly level voice, and immediately Albany Harvey’s moon-shaped face appeared in the doorway. “Who is this?”

“Um, well…dunno, sir…but she sort of insisted, you know? I wasn’t going to let her in, but…then I couldn’t help myself.” The chubby man blinked, looking like he was still in some half-amazed state of confusion. Medina’s eye flicked to the girl, whose look was suddenly too innocent to be genuine, and his lip curled.

“Fine. Go get a roll with meat, Harvey.” Harvey bobbed his head and disappeared. Eyes still on the child—if indeed it really was a child—Medina stepped from behind his desk, hands at his sides. There was a dagger in the lower left pocket of his robe, centimeters from his fingertips. “What’s your name?” he finally asked.

“Emma,” was the steady reply.

“What can I do for you, Emma?”

“I wanted to ask ya somethin’.” By now Harvey was back with the hot bun, and Medina took it from him and shut the office door. He offered it to the filthy girl and she accepted it with one bone-thin hand. For only a moment, he could have sworn that the corners of her mouth had twitched, but when he looked more closely, her face was stone-serious.

“What did you want to ask, my child?” Instead of behaving like a starving person, she held the bun delicately in one hand while the other closed around a loose thread on her skirt.

“Do ya believe in God?”

“Come…come again?” Daniel Medina rarely asked for people to repeat things, but it was the last question he’d expected, and the first time anyone had really wanted a true answer to it.

“I think ya heard me…sir. Do ya believe in God?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted truthfully, feeling tired and old.

“That’s pretty sad, ain’t it? You bein’ a priest an’ all.” Her voice was soft.

“Yes, it is; but that’s the kind of world we live in.”

Emma nodded in an approving way as though she had just learned something important, then turned and opened the door. Medina frowned when she slipped from the room, but he didn’t call out to her. When he looked into the hall a moment later, she was nowhere in sight.

A block away from St. Patrick’s, the girl snickered and shook her head, looking at the bun in disbelief. As she ate it slowly, pensively, the air around her rippled and shimmered like a sheer silk curtain on a sunny day. The curtain fell away, and with it went the little girl. In her place stood a young man of average height, lean with delicately slanting dark eyes. Two black fox ears sat stop his head amidst silky but choppily cut black hair, and a fat reddish brown tail protruded from the back of his brown breeches, swaying from side to side as he started to walk.

Raven would be relieved to hear that this quiet intrusion of the Church into their territory wouldn’t be anything to worry about. There wasn’t much that an agnostic middle aged priest with ten men could do. What was more, he almost seemed all right. Almost.

“He did give me lunch, after all.” Picking up a tune he'd heard a few days before, the fox-man headed for the Square and his self-proclaimed queen.

MANHATTAN

Weaving her way through the streets, Isra allowed her feet to carry her to her destination of their own accord. Before she could go find a new home, she felt the need to report what had happened to the Queen. She knew now it had happened before, to other girls, and she didn't want it to happen again simply because she failed to speak up about it.

As she picked her way across the rubble that was the remains of the supposedly magnificent city of the past, her thoughts kept returning to what the one client had said, "Yer ma was always willin’ to oblige" Was it true? But then, what reason did the guy have to lie? Isra bit her lip. Had her mother sold herself to keep them off the streets? The very idea of it disgusted her. She would rather be on the streets or live in a pile of rubble than give herself over to a man for a thin pallet made up of moldy straw and a threadbare blanket.

Isra paused and raised an arm to shade her eyes, looking out at the lone tower that was about a few blocks down amidst the ruin and decrepit shells of the other, less fortunate buildings. She scanned her surroundings, but couldn't see any signs of life, though she knew they were there. The Queen's people. The last time she had come here one of them had popped out of nowhere and startled her badly. Worse still, he'd seemed very amused at her reaction, but was polite enough to not say anything about it, and had simply guided her.

Hopefully this time would be different.

Manhattan

Zenith had found it ironic that he had found himself here...of all places, in the remains of what was at one time a church....But he was exhausted and had needed a place to rest, and had no money to get a place....so this would do. He had slept for almost three days straight...having not realized how tired the prior day’s mischief had made him. Now, he roused slowly in what was once a catholic confessional. He pulled himself into a sitting position and reached to his chest where he fingered his necklace…the symbol on it a direct opposition to the church he now resided in.

“Forgive me father, for I have sinned.” He muttered half mockingly.

“And am going to do so again and again and again!” He said with more spring as he brought himself to his feet. He then stepped out of the rotting confessional, its door all but crumbling to dust in his hand. This also amused him. “Am I really that bad?” He smirked jokingly.

He looked around the shattered pews and broken relics from the time when this building was a fill blown church, filled every Sunday, sometimes Saturdays…evening meetings on Wednesdays, youth groups and other programs throughout the week…pageantry on Easter and Christmas…now…dust and broken wood.

He could tell it was still not quite late enough in the evening for him to start mischief again, so he remained in the churches remains, contemplating what kind of trouble he would cause tonight.