2017-05-18: Hawthorne's Guide to Opening Doors

• Log: Hawthorne's Guide to Opening Doors
• Cast: Noah Hawthorne, Cassidy Cain
• Where: Adlehyde
• Date: May 18, 2017
• Summary: A ship mysteriously marooned in the deserts of Filgaia prompts a midnight visit from Noah Hawthorne to Cassidy Cain, and he comes bearing gifts of liquor and information that bear the inevitable consequence of the two of them accidentally treading into uncomfortable personal territories. And drunken shenanigans. The shenanigans are important.

---

<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.

The hotel's antique phonograph that has become on loan, on a seemingly permanent basis, to Cassidy Cain's room spins a vinyl disc round and round on its turnstile, filling the brightly lit space with a vibrant contralto punctuated by a string quartet and a fast guitar. There was a time when Theresa Kilcannon, nee Devivre, filled the dusty spaces of Filgaia with her songs and stage presence, though that came to a bloody end three years ago when she and her troupe had been brutally massacred in a highway robbery. Whatever passes for an entertainment industry in their dying world had mourned her and it is due to her popularity - aided, no doubt, by her vivacity - that some of her recordings still exist. But wherever her ghost lingers now seems to have found a fan in the blonde master thief, in what passes for a temporary sanctuary in a life marked by its perpetual transience.

She has just finished one of her long baths, an indulgence that she allows herself especially with the desert's rampant humidity during the day and its deadly chill in the evenings; it is murder on her skin, and she has plenty of private reasons why she wants to take care of it, though anyone could be forgiven for thinking that this is nothing but a relatively young woman's vanity asserting itself. Dressed in a button-down shirt and cut-offs, her damp hair, darkened to the color of honey by lingering moisture, clings to her shoulders and back in glinting tendrils as she peruses a few pieces of correspondence with the flat stare of someone who is fast friends with exasperation, brows stitched together as emerald eyes roam over letters printed in scrawling script along some of them.

Reaching the salutations in the end, she exhales, tilting her head back to look at the ceiling.

"Ugh," is all she says to that.

Gathering up the pieces of parchment, she moves over to her ashtray, dumping its contents in the trash and sets the telegrams there. With her silver lighter, lamplight caressing its familiar scratches and the detailed engraving of its ouroboros, she sets fire to the end of one of these messages, followed by another corner and another, until red-gold tongues of heat lick over the rest of the letters, reducing them to nothing but a handful of ash in seconds. Fishing for a cigarette and leaving it pinched between teeth, she leans in to light it before the rest of the small conflagration sputters out, a thin wisp of white-gray smoke twisting over the end and reaching upwards to the ceiling.

She really needs to cut down on these.

But this is a pattern that she knows very well; the harder she thinks, the more she smokes, and while a creature driven to act on her impulse ninety-percent of the time, the other ten percent that finds a trigger in actual work necessitates the kind of mental intensity that only a woman who tends to throw herself body and soul in any worthwhile endeavors can generate. And apparently, these mental gymnastics are fueled with nicotine.

She drops on the bench attached to the window sill overlooking the main thoroughfares of Adlehyde, the shutters unlocked and the frame open to let in the breeze. Like some manner of sleek jungle cat, she drapes over it, lashes hung low, cancer stick dangling from her mouth as she watches the lively foot-traffic flocking past somewhere underneath her. And once again, she tries to picture it - all of it, the view of Castle Adlehyde, the shops, bars and other establishments she has frequented in the last few weeks - and even this hotel that has functioned as hers and Jude's home in the last month or so - all gone.

Don't you think Adlehyde is worth saving?

"Alright already," she grouses under her breath. "Shut up."

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

Shut up, she says, to the mental echo of Noah Hawthorne speculating about the rare beauty of Adlehyde. Sure, it's kind of a dump as cities go; there are bigger, better, more advanced, more civilized. There are places with historical wonders littered all about their edges and sunk right into the middle of the town. All across the Badlands there are small jewels hidden amidst the wastes, little collectives that thrive wholly on their proximity to ruins filled with untold wonders of earlier, better ages.

But Adlehyde is green.

Green fields that look out over blue seas. It rains here -- a phenomenon almost unheard of to the west, where even now Kislev and Aveh forces are squaring off in bitter combat, fighting over not the endless dunes of dry sand but the riches beneath. Technology capable of ending an age. It has already, after all. Twice.

The breezes that roll in from the port stink with bilge from time to time, but beyond that are sweet knives of brine air, and the ocean whispers of distant places, every ship a possibility.

This is how Noah sees it, anyway. This is what he believes is worth saving.

Not that he sees it particularly well tonight -- or anything else, for that matter. The liquor he was given on board a Lunarian ship stranded, inexplicably, in the middle of the desert, hit him full force the moment he hauled himself into Shan's saddle, and then he had a long ride back in the last heat of the day. His sweat evaporated off of his skin as soon as he began to perspire, all of that water gone, no food in his stomach. By the time he reaches Adlehyde on an errand of information-sharing, he's--

Well.

There's a knock on her door. It's polite -- at first. It turns into a cadence after that, then pauses, and someone tries the handle. It's locked, or if not locked then the person doing the latch-jiggling is failing to operate the doorhandle properly -- entirely possible at this point. So it's back to knocking in a manner that's more like drumming, really, and if she's not quick enough to answer it it will pause again just long enough for the words to filter through the place her door meets the jam:

"Caaaaaaaaaaaaaaassieeeeeeee, open the god damn door."

<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.

Draped indolently like that, Cassidy doesn't feel like moving. Watching the throngs of people filing past underneath her window, she continues her perusal of the pulse of life through Adlehyde's beating heart, like blood through the dark, twisting veins of a city that's about to go to hell in a handbasket. She puffs at her cigarette, attempts to shut out the rapping at the wooden appendage keeping her solitude secure, smoke curling from parted lips as nicotine does the work that it's supposed to do in her bloodstream.

But it persists. What is a polite knock dovetails into an insistent series. Eyes tick, finally, towards the door. Her head lifts to stare at it.

And finally:

Caaaaaaaaaaaaaaassieeeeeeee, open the god damn door.

Luck operates strangely around her, often manifesting in small bits of twisted, infuriating coincidences, or small miracles in the face of insurmountable odds (and knowing her, in this specific enterprise, that part of her will probably fail miserably because of course it would, in the time she needs it most), but it still manages to catch her by surprise when the very person she's telling to shut up inside of her head manifests in the flesh, demanding entry into her boudoir. Picking herself up unhurriedly from the bench, bare feet take her towards the sound of Noah Hawthorne's voice.

He finally hears a reply through the wood, but the door doesn't open yet:

"What's the password?"

As well-traveled as he is, he'd probably understand the necessity of one. After all, she was a thief, undoubtedly he's come across a variety of questionable dens across Ignas that ask the very thing. But no matter what he answers, though, the door will jerk open, curiosity sated as to what he would say in the eventuality such a question was posed to him when absolutely drunk or high as a pine. A shoulder leans on the frame, arms crossed over her chest. Taking in his present state with lidded eyes, the wry twist to her mouth shortly follows.

Behind her, Theresa's ghost continues to sing.

"Well, if nae else, you're nae half-dead. Just somewhat dead," she tells him, easing back to grant him entrance to her boudoir. "Tae what do I owe the midnight visit, Noah?"

Hotel rooms are what they are, mirror-images of one another - there's a bed and a vanity, windows that overlook Adlehyde's main streets and a desk, things that would be present in the other rooms of the hotel. What may not have come standard is the arrangement that occupies the other side of the room. At some point in their stay, she's had the hotel staff move a roomy brass tub in which she could luxuriate in a bath, empty now save for towels draped on the side, flanked by a small table with yet another bottle of liquor and a single shot glass resting on top. The antique phonograph rests nearby.

There is little to reflect her past, but plenty that mirrors her personality - a bottle of scented oil, a brush, a tub of cream and a small dispenser of tinted beeswax sit on her vanity, and there is a pile of books situated on her bedside table, though it's clear that she's no great academic. One gella novellas and tales of adventure lie in the same bunch as a few published plays, the occasional medical journal or two and folded periodicals - the Guild Gazette, of course, but it is not the only one. There are also older issues of the newspaper, one folded across, a handwritten dedication splashed in elegant, but masculine script:

To my admiring Amelia,
May your spirit remain as sweet and steadfast,
as your accent.
~ Jude Moshe

The desk is taken up by her kit - two identical pistols, an array of small tools and a rope done up in various knots, reflective of the expert knotwork that she had subjected him to in that riverboat casino disaster. There is a sword, propped up against the wall, slender, light and well maintained, something he's never seen on her person before, either she's stolen it or she's actually handy with it - something he may have a chance to find out in the future. A familiar revolver of beautiful make, engraved with all sorts of fanciful creatures amidst a swirl of leaves, acorns and other symbols of the Fall, is situated amidst the clutter. The air within is taken up by the fresh trace of cigarette smoke, the source of which is evident in her mouth, though there is another underlay - the subtlest whiff of cinnamon and dark chocolate; the scents that cling to Cassidy underneath the more overpowering notes of leather, cordite and whiskey.

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

What's the password?

The knocking stops. There is a silence. It sounds like 'um' without the actual word ever being used.

"Spigot," he decides, for no immediately apparent reason. He manages to deliver that word with flawless confidence.

She leans against the doorframe as it opens and he is already leaning against it when she does that, half for reasons of personal habit and style and half because, at this point, he needs the additional support.

It would be difficult to tell how absolutely smashed he is if he were sitting down and saying nothing. It doesn't display in his expression at all; no red, glassy eyes incapable of focusing on her and no numb face, either, given to slack expressions. His eyes shine but with the exuberance of a good mood and he's all wide, cutting smiles, but then, isn't he always?

He looks alert, even if that appearance is essentially a very good lie.

Which it is.

He demonstrates that amply by pushing up off of the frame to walk into the room and immediately turning too sharply, bumping into her vanity hard enough to send him reeling back and away from it wearing a theatrical wince, broad palm pressed into the center of his chest where tomorrow he'll certainly have a corner-of-the-vanity shaped bruise to remember their encounter by. "Ah! God. Where I come from, the furniture has the decency to stay in one place."

Fun fact: when Noah's this drunk, which is almost never, his accent is twice is heavy and slightly different than it is most of the rest of the time, as though he's lost control over some essential part of it. He slurs, but mercifully not enough to compromise his enunciation. "Did you know, Cassie, that--"

And then he stops dead where he's standing -- unless one counts the very mild sway of him. A dangerous thing at his height, like the teetering of a tree in a windstorm.

"Theresa," he says eventually, clarifying the reason for the sudden onset of stillness. He spins in place until he sees the phonograph, and with greater care than he exhibited on entering makes his way toward it. "I haven't heard this since...Bledavik. No...Krosse?" He fumbles across the long span of his memory, one place blurring into another, too lubricated by the alcohol in his system for him to keep hold of them for long. "She was something else. In performance, I mean, I--"

He spots the bottle of booze beside the tub and is immediately distracted. It's really only excellent balance that keeps him on his feet, but it does, and he reaches out with one long, lazy arm to snap up the neck of that bottle and spin around to look at her. "Right! Alcohol. This reminds me. I went to Lunar this afternoon. No--" His chest rounds inward with a laugh he keeps in. "No, no. I mean -- I went to see that ship this afternoon, and it's from Lunar. And so is the captain. ...Obviously. And the booze. Which -- Cassie." Through his humor he attempts to flatten his expression, probably to impress upon her the seriousness of what he's about to say. "Cass." Pause. "Eee. Listen. The liquor on Lunar is just. It's." Another pause, and this time he remembers something else, brows knitting as he begins to pat himself down. "I have extra. In a flask. I think."

The flask is looped directly to his bandolier. He is somehow managing to pat down every last part of his upper body save the one place where it's attached.

<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.

Spigot, he says.

Cassidy's cheeks puff out, a sudden gale of laughter, unexpected but real, expanding her chest and choked down before it could escape. Really, anything could have worked, but the term was so random that it's all she could to react. Whatever's in his system, she decides, must be good. And just like that, the rest of her evening has become more entertaining than even she anticipates.

Or so she thinks.

To Noah's infinite credit, she can't tell, just by looking at him, as to how drunk he is; even his smile is the same. But whatever has prompted it must be significant - given his height, the fact that he's built solidly, and the very recent memory of a parade of medicine men go inside a tent with crates of grass just to get him high enough to see to his injuries, whatever's gotten him blitzed must be some serious stuff, and she honestly can't wait to hear just what has possessed him to get absolutely wrecked. Then again, considering the shite that they've been embroiled in together in the last few weeks, she couldn't blame anyone for wanting to go out and obliviating himself from the stress the entire enterprise brings. She would happily bet all the gella in her person that Morgan was probably doing the same thing.

The first thing he does is bull into her vanity, which does nothing for her amusement - it only intensifies when Noah performs his drunken bull in a china shop technique flawlessly - and causes most of the small jars set upon it to topple on their sides. She does nothing to stop him, or guide him, as heavy steps and a matching accent push him back. "Ay, a magic suite this is," she tells him helpfully. "Nae but the best for me, y'ken. I work hard and all. Tub, music, furniture that rearranges itself whenever I want it tae. It's a drifter's dream, at least for someone with verra good taste."

But the fires of her growing amusement sputter out almost immediately when Noah utters a single name, recognizing the voice from the phonograph. The way he stills and sways on his feet is enough to give her cause for concern and that's when she finally reanimates, in the event that he ends up doing to the phonograph what he did to the vanity - not that she cares about what happens to the antique, it isn't hers after all, but the record is and she reaches out a hand, finally, to rest on his shoulder in an effort to maneuver him to a more stable position. The fact that he knows of the singer is not surprising, but the way he reacts to the long-dead voice twists something in her that she is very reluctant to acknowledge.

She was something else.

"Ay," she says, her voice absent, distant - a marked effort to sound as such, but as always, the most telling things about her are the tiniest detractions of her usual bon vivance. "She was."

She doesn't stop him, though, when he reaches for her leftover bottle of whiskey; it is nothing like the McLellan forty-year that she shared with him and Morgan just a day ago, but once he's grabbed ahold of the neck and starts talking about Lunar - what? - and starts patting himself, she reaches out helpfully. Deft fingers relieve him of the flask he's trying to find. "You mean this one? Ay, luv, I got it. Now do me a favor and sit, before you hurt yourself." And wreck my shite.

Hands on broad shoulders turn him around and presses down until he sits on the chair by her desk. Moving directly across from him, she sinks down on the edge of her bed, leg hooking into the other by the knee. There's a glance at the flask; curiosity gets the better of her when she starts to uncap it.

"Heard about the ship in the middle of the desert," she tells him. "Was half expecting you tae tell me you managed tae get in it and actually fly tae there, and leave all of this nastiness behind, but I s'pose that'd be too easy and you've obviously became attached tae me in such a verra short amount of time." She flashes him a quick grin, before taking a sip of it. "Cannae blame you, luv, truly. Would nae be who I am if I dinnae trigger those precious flight-or-fight responses. Do you want more of your ill-gotten brew, or is this all for me?"

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

Too drunk to hear the change in her tone, or not drunk enough to pursue it when he does hear it? Equal odds.

Lunar: yep. The moon. People from the moon. She 'finds' the flask for him and he holds his hand up for what is apparently a high-five-worthy feat on her part. "That's the one. Careful with that and your cigarette. For all I know that stuff could flatten this whole block."

He's content to allow her to steer him to the chair, setting the bottle down not far away on the floor, though almost as soon as he's sitting in the chair he's back out of it again, standing to rock the chair onto one of its legs and give it a little kick to spin the whole thing around, dropping it once the back is facing her. It looks like a maneuver he's performed countless times with more finesse than he does now, sloppy around the edges in the execution, but at least it accomplishes what he was after without breaking the furniture. He straddles the back of the chair and leans into it, and folding his arms atop the back fixes her with glittering eyes. "I did manage to get in it, but it's not going anywhere anytime soon, Cass. But get this: Lunar's where the Malevolence is coming from." Both of his brows arch, though it's difficult to say if this is to emphasize what he's just said, or because she's decided to open the flask. Both, possibly. Probably.

"Just so you know," he says, after visibly debating whether or not to warn her, "I had just..." One hand lifts, his gaze tightening in a squint as he pinches his thumb and forefinger together. "A glass of that stuff. Single glass. Not even a full one. Everybody still looked really impressed when I didn't immediately black out, so consider yourself warned." That hand tilts in at the wrist just enough for him to scrape the back of his thumbnail over the line of his jaw, speculative. "'Course, I'm pretty sure that one girl would've looked impressed no matter what I did, but still -- unless you want the top of your head to blow right off, I'd take it slow." The pause is short, ends with his expression clearing and a sudden dagger of humor unsheathing itself in his eyes. "Or don't, and let's find out what happens. Your call."

<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.

"Oh, ay?" Noah would recognize the look on her face; Cassidy is fully, wholly tempted to chuck her entire cigarette into the flask and throw it out the window, just to see what happens. Forget drinking it, the idea of causing a sudden explosion and see how flame catalyzes the alien brew is an idea that seizes the most destructive impulses in her, and she hasn't even had enough of it to be able to use inebriation as an excuse. But in a way, it's a gift, and there are parts of her that are not immune to sentiment; she tends to keep things that have been given to her and most of them find every day use - Jude's pearls, Noah's revolver.

The lighter.

She is still nursing the flask when he tells her that Malevolence, whatever it was that caused monsters to rise from the deep in the bowels of the Otherworldly Hollow, comes from the moon, and she gapes at him openly from where she sits, her more negligible weight depressed on a bed that has seen better days - it shows the typical signs of wear and tear, and also the more unusual ones - there is a bullet lodged in one of the posts, its dull metal gleaming under the light of the room. "So what, some other star-body's problems decided tae invade ours? How the fook did that shite get here? Dinnae we have enough problems?" She thrives in problems, but usually problems of her own devise, as prodigiously talented in causing trouble as she is in falling into it. But magic shite and doomsday scenarios are things that she most definitely tries to avoid, though these days, she certainly does not have a choice in at least one of those.

But he tries to warn her about the consequences of drinking an entire glass of the stuff straight up, and even as the words leave his mouth, he'd find that she's already tilting the flask to her mouth, taking a healthy gulp.

"Well, I want tae see what happens," she tells him with that familiar smile, bright enough to cleave through scant shadows and put the moon itself to shame. "So bottom's up." And with that, she...

...drains the entire flask into her body.

For someone so slender, she has a hardy constitution; as much developed by her old life as it is honed by the new. She's experienced and tasted worse, and after her earlier contemplations about how anyone in her position would be actively obliviating himself to cope with what will follow, she decides that it is her turn, and with the potent spirit rushing through her veins, for a moment she exhibits very little reaction to it. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she carefully sets the flask on her bedside table.

"Well," she tells him. "That's nae so-- "

Light blossoms from the back of her brain, brilliant and searing, nearly frying her eyeballs from the inside out. The room suddenly disappears in a haze of white fringed with incandescent blue, and Noah's figure perched on the chair appears to be melting. Within her addled stare, hues of bronze, chocolate, green and whiskey start bleeding into the rest of his clothes; his hazel eyes become twice their sizes and for some reason his facial hair is dripping into her floor like dark, scattered rain.

"Noah," she tells him seriously, lifting a hand in an effort to test his cheek; it widely misses the mark and she gropes thin air instead. "Noah. Dinnae know how tae tell you this, but you're aging backwards. Why do you suddenly look twelve and innocent?"

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

"The moon. I'd been wondering about that. Not-- not the moon, but where it came from. Because there's no mention of stuff like this in Filgaia's historical record, Cassie, and you'd think something that could produce a hellkraken armed with a hellbearcat would be--"

He stares, watching her decide that the sip she took wasn't enough, and summarily drain the entire rest of the thing in one go.

His voice is very quiet when he says these next two words, something he murmurs to himself: "Hoh boy."

It happens faster than he expects, too, a veritable ambush of inebriation that intercepts her halfway through a sentence and makes off with her wits, leaving the thought abandoned on the side of the road of sanity. Genuine concern plays across the angles of his face -- hard angles and square lines with stubble on them that some cruel Lunar Goddess sees fit to reduce to amorphous, androgynous prepubescence, all of his carefully cultivated scruff stripped in an instant and replaced with headlamp eyes. It sounds absolutely nightmarish to him, and his widening eyes only widen further still -- probably not helping with whatever kind of hallucination she's having -- as she reaches for his cheek and swipes at nothing, not even close enough to his face for him to feel the air currents of the missed attempt. "I'm...what?" Should he be worried? Should he be offended? Did the Captain play a trick on him and replace the booze with something else, or does it work differently for everyone, or -- is she going to die? She can't die. They need her to sneak them into a castle.

She says he looks innocent. Him. Him. That sounds to Noah like a medical emergency if he's ever heard of one, a deeply alarming state of affairs so foreign to his understanding of reality that he grapples with his own lack of sobriety. He'll have to take her to a local doctor, which means having to get there, which means getting up out of this chair and then taking the stairs and, essentially, all of these developments feel like war crimes. Mistakes have definitely been made.

Unless--

"Does this always happen when you drink? This..." He gestures vaguely at just -- her entire situation. "Whatever? Thing?"

<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.

Hellkraken.

Cassidy tries to picture this, sifting through her memories of that nightmarish moment in the Hollow where they managed to blind a tentacled something with a boulder and a glue trap managed to adhere a...what was it?

Hellbearcat.

She finds these mental photographs but the Lunarian brew twists those as well; the dark violet miasma of the cave is inexplicably awash in rainbow color, the Hellkraken's single eye adorned with long lashes. For some reason, the boulder has a face, with eyes just as big and a smile just as broad, and the monstrous Hellbearcat that a tentacle has been weaponized with is suddenly fluffy and white, if not still a little mean. These three side-characters in what was possibly one of the most ridiculous, bizarre series of circumstances in her life - so much, in fact, that she actually lost her shit during that moment, because her mind desperately needed to defend itself before it was cracked beyond repair - are inexplicably hand in hand, doing some cartoonish version of Theresa's otherwise elegant can-can.

So the first thing Noah gets in response from the addled blonde is laughter, of the sort that dwindles quickly into hysterics. "Oh, it was nae so bad," she tells him through peals of uncontrollable mirth. "The Hellkraken just...wanted a friend. And so did the boulder. It worked out in the end, dinnae it? Dancing through rainbows, looking absolutely disturbing with how cute they all are, but who am I tae judge? They look happy together. So happy together."

It reminds her of a song, and as she moves to stand up from the bed. "So happyyyyy togeeeeeetheeeeerrrr," she says, picking up the strains of the song that suddenly pops in her head.

I'm what?

She spins around to look at him again, head tilting in a forty-five degree angle. She doesn't know what it is, but his eyes look even larger than they were a few moments ago. "Your...your...snnrkkkk..." She tries to swallow down another laugh, and fails miserably. "...eyes are taking up half your face! Ach, lad, what happened? You were so fetching before and now you look like a...a...those! The things with the springy necks and the giant heads with the big eyes that they put in the dashboards of those automobile things in Aquvy! Sommat like that! Sommat!"

A bobblehead.

A moe Noah bobblehead.

Said moe Noah bobblehead starts to shrink. Standing near his chair, she stares directly down past his head, and over the arms folded on the chair's back. Her head tilts the other way.

"...I dinnae think your hands were that tiny," she tells him seriously. "Nae a complete disadvantage, though! I'm sure if you had tae take matters intae them, your d-- "

"-- ong, thong, thong, thong~!" sings a bawdy minstrel as he wanders past underneath her open window, strumming his lute.

"-- must feel gigantic!"

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

'It wasn't that bad,' she says, and his brow quirks. Not reassuring. "What do you mean 'it wasn't--'"

And that's as far as he gets with any of it. Whatever frail shelf of sanity Cassidy Cain has established the empire of her disposition upon, it has been swept over the side and into the abyss by a flood of alcohol from the literal moon like a cautionary tale in some sort of religious text. Appropriate, given the origins of the stuff, and even its name: 'Goddess's Breath,' so called because anybody who drinks it winds up feeling as though they're staring her directly in the face.

That had seemed quaint when Noah was handed the bottle by a very amused-looking sea Captain, until he'd had some and they'd begun to tell him just what kind of sadistic Goddess they were talking about. Which thought reminds him, of course, of why he took the time to come here in the first place, merrily blitzed but still somehow juggling his responsibilities and priorities with aplomb -- probably due to years of practice.

And now things are completely upside-down, and he's having to struggle upstream against the current of his pleasant drunk because she's shot off toward the distant horizon and landed herself considerably further out at sea than he is, and he resents this. Very much. She tells him he's some sort of accessory for a vehicle, then she tells him his hands are tiny, and after a minute of silence he just throws his arms out to either side. Exasperation, pure and unfiltered: "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT." Not only can he not tell her the things he came to tell her, he can't even be drunk anymore because one of them needs to be rational.

Wait. Wait. No. Where did that thought even come from?

Noah's brows knit, and then his expression goes blissfully clear. This is not even a little bit his problem. Why is he making this his problem?

He chooses another solution entirely, then, leaning over to pick the bottle up and stare into its depths as though its golden gleam were the last bastion of all sense. "Cassie." For her, he manufactures a wounded look, delicate and sensitive and terribly, horribly accurate. God only knows what he uses that talent for. "I told you, tragic accident in-- " Where did he tell her it happened? He gestures meaninglessly for a moment until his fuzzy memory lands on the right place. "Elluria."

And then to the important bit, once he's sent two solid bubbles rippling up into the remaining contents of the bottle by draining an amount equal to each. "You said I'm fetching, though."

Never gonna let that one go.

"Come on, let's get the hell-- wait." He twists around at the waist to look, but her bath tub is sadly empty, and the disappointment in his expression is real. "Okay, yeah. Let's get the hell out of here. How do you breathe? It's like a pack of cigarettes with a two-pack a day habit lives in here." But when he stands up, and he does -- bottle still in hand -- it's not the door he heads toward. It's the window.

<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

"Your springy head," Cassidy tells him, sweeping a hand in a demonstrative fashion towards him. "And your big eyes and tiny hands! Were you nae paying attention, luv? I'm trying tae tell you shite, here!"

These inquiries are not helping.

The man elects, instead, to absolve himself from all responsibility - and honestly, she would have probably done the same - by draining the leftover whiskey from her table, though the blonde herself doesn't seem to notice. She will most probably notice tomorrow, once she realizes that all of the liquor in her room is gone and she's nursing a headache liable to lay her out for the entire day in a time when she needs her wits about her. But she was never exactly known for her discerning life decisions, especially when alcohol is involved, and even moreso when it's something new that she's never tried before.

And this is certainly new; it doesn't exactly give her a glimpse of a sadistic Goddess' face, but it does give her some hilarious and nightmarish visions of an androgynously prepubescent Noah, a pale, big-eyed imitation of his former glory. That, at least, she will take to the bank; she doubts anything terrible can drive her into the depths of despair, now, when she can look back in this moment and laugh her ass off.

...if she remembers this.

If she remembers.

You said I was fetching.

"Ay!" she confirms with a laugh. "You are! Fetching...a master fetcher! Of slippers! ...whatever the hell Professor whassername wears, I dinnae know, but it was masterful, I'm sure. Because I was there. I was there, was I nae?"

It probably won't be likely, with the way she follows his stare to the bathtub and fixes her own upon it, blank-faced and confused, as if at a loss as to what it's for, or what it's doing in her room, nevermind that she had just gotten out of it half an hour ago after indulging herself in a very long and bubbly soak. She doesn't know why he's looking at it, though were she in her right mind, she would immediately be able to discern it - most probably the urge to dunk her head into it to sober her up and he can get right into the business of...

...what was he doing here again?

But she follows, because he asks. Glassy eyes and stumbling steps take her towards the window, as he laments the state of the air inside. How does she breathe? "Same as any other human. Through the nose, out the nose, or mouth if the nose is preoccupied. Learn your physics." Physics? "....physiology? Ach, fook me anyway, dinnae have much of a brain for science. Where are we going? This way?" She stares at the window. She reaches out to touch a glass pane.

Slowly, she leans her cheek against it, the heat of her skin immediately leaving a halo of mist where the curve is pressed. She closes her eyes and smiles.

"It's so cool..." she murmurs.

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

He probably should look at her bath because her head needs a dunking. Not because that would even work, necessarily -- this stuff is probably dunk-resistant -- but because it would be so cathartic. But no. It's Noah, it's now thirty seconds past the point at which he decided that her insanity doesn't automatically obligate him to become a better human being, and he was looking at her bathtub because a bath actually sounds pretty good.

...It was a long ride back to town.

No water, though. Probably for the best. So his focus becomes escaping the confines of her hotel room, the personal details of which would be more than capable of holding his tactile attention on any other night but this one, with a head full of what he's got a head full of. His body feels to limber, his mind too untethered for being locked away in a tiny box in a larger box full of other small boxes. He has never been sedentary.

Besides: the two of them have a habit of taking up more room and air than they can strictly account for in a physical sense. It would be cramped at the best of times. Now, with everything about either of them artificially inflated, nothing good could possibly come of staying in close quarters -- like holding a spark too close to the side of a powder keg.

"Hetfield," he says, placing his hands on the sill of her already open window to lean out and look down, and then -- predictably, because this is Noah we're talking about -- turn to the side to crane his head and look upward, eyeballing the foot and handholds that would lead them up to the roof. "They're called shoes. And they were all the same. Who wears six identical pairs of shoes? I switched them around to see if she'd even notice and she did. How the hell does anyone pay enough attention to notice the difference between two sets of identical shoes, but not enough attention to avoi--"

He pauses, then slowly turns his head to look back around past the cliff of his shoulder to where she's pressing her cheek to the windowpane. Brows knitting, he opens his mouth to say something flip about it only to decide against it: something to do with the closed-eyed expression of guileless bliss on her face. She'll miss the minute upward twitch to one side of his mouth, but she won't miss the absolutely pitch-perfect mimicry of her accent that follows -- only it's not of her accent, specifically, it's built on the bones of the regional dialect instead, different in subtle ways that say he's heard the genuine article.

"It's nae physics lass," he says, turning until his back is facing outward and he can reach up with both arms to grip the ledge above her window. "Physics is what'll kill us both if you dinnae mind yer bloody step on the way up. Step lively little miss, we've got a moon tae moon, ken it."

There's a rough sound from one of his boots as he plants it on the sill and pushes himself upward, and then his legs disappear behind the rest of him on the ascent.

The night air comes as a shocking relief after the close confines of the hotel room, and this late at night it carries only the perfumes of the countryside mottled with woodsmoke from countless fires, offset by the tang of the sea. The pungent smell of hot, weary bodies and baking dust won't return until the sun does.

<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.

"Because she's a woman, luv," Cassidy replies, in a tone that suggests that this is some sort of plot twist that only she managed to get, nevermind that Noah is blessed with a pair of very sharp and appreciative eyes for well-formed females of any race and creed. "And women are serious about their shoes. Dinnae they teach you that in Rake Academy? And dinnae..." She points a finger at him accusingly. "Tell me nae anything like that exists. Because there has tae be, and you and Morgan and Jude are probably all...distinguished graduates..."

All of this before she's rubbing her cheek against the window pane in that pleased absent way that cools her skin from the accumulated humidity inside of her room; the Lunarian brew certainly doesn't help, when it does nothing but ignite her more languid senses and sending them all in a riotous swirl of drunken euphoria that can only be caused by a potent, high-quality drink. She does miss that smile, given with the way her eyes are closed, but the way he forges her accent has her lifting those lashes again, flashing him a look of consternation so sincere, he wouldn't be blamed if he actually thought he wounded her. "Are you making fun of my brogue?" she wonders, listing halfway out of the window, dangling limply, hair and all, as green eyes stare directly down on the ground below. "Because that's nae verra nice. Just because you have tiny hands dinnae mean you get tae take it out on everyone you know."

Physics is what'll kill us both.

"What?" She jerks her head up, the back of it knocking hard against the underside of the window and sending her more cognitive functions in a sudden spiral that nearly has her losing the contents of her stomach where she stands. "...what the bloody hell. Who's this Physics and what did I do tae deserve that? I dinnae do shite!" Her hand sweeps demonstratively to one side, nearly slapping the side of Noah's cheek with her knuckles. "Seriously I've got...too many already wanting tae kill me with the Kid and...fat bastard Carillo and...whoever that cunt was who thinks I stole her gun! Was nae responsible for that this time around, I think it was you. You did that. You-- where the bloody hell are you going...?"

But he's already disappearing up the roof and as she stares upwards, the skies look like they're rolling down the drain, stars whirling around a mysterious epicenter before it drains into the black, distant horizon.

"NOAH!" she hollers, groping for the nearest handhold. "Dinnae think this is the hour tae reach for the stars, y'ken. I think I'm bloody drunk! I see how it is, it's you who wants tae kill me! Not this...bloody Physics sod who....wants tae kill us for nae reason!"

Oh god, why?

Miracle of miracles, perhaps drawn upon by that twisted Luck, he'd hear her heavy body slide into the roof, staggering on her feet and taking a few steps before she takes zig-zag steps to sag next to Noah, wherever he ends up. And the moment she does, she's hunting for her cigarettes, fumbling with her lighter, which pops out of her hand and skitters across the roof.

"Fook, I thought I only had one of those..." She gropes left, and right, and left again until she manages to grasp the precious object with her fingers. "Oh thank God, thought I lost it..."

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

"Making fun of?" That's Noah's voice as he ascends. "I'm making your brogue sound good."

And then he disappears.

He lingers near the edge, though well out of her line of sight. Listening. Because if he hears her fumble once, he's --

But no. The same personal history that made it so trivial for her to leap across moving rafts of stone on sudden geysers of boiling water and skip across rocks in the midst of rushing underground rapids come through for her in spite of the torture she's inflicted upon her body by way of Noah's flask, and before she has time to slip over the lip of the roof and find him hovering, he's already removed himself to the other side, hands thrust into his pockets, standing with his feet planted to look across the city in the opposite direction from her front windows: not the street-facing side, but the angle that leads out to the place where the moon gleams on rippling obsidian waters, swollen and sleepy with the high tide. The spur of land on which Adlehyde sits is a gentle convexity into the bay between Capo Bronco and Port Timney, and far off in the distance to the east and southwest, the dark horizon glows with the lights of those little blots of civilization. They seem terribly remote.

It's not those he's looking at, though, it's the moon hanging heavy in the sky -- a moon that looks as though it cannot possibly harbor life of any kind. Grey, rocky, barren: how is it possible for people to have come from such a place? On a sailing ship, from an ocean, no less?

"I guess if things here get really bad, we can always try to figure out how to get off of this rock and see what that one is like." The darkness makes the horizon line more difficult to discern, and this time when he sways he's forced to pull his hands out of his pockets to catch himself, and concedes that sitting might be a better option.

Scratch that: laying down. He plants a hand on the ground, levers himself down to sit, and then promptly rolls back onto his back, lacing his hands behind his head and letting his eyes close. One knee up -- on the side his most serious wound was on, speaking to some lingering tenderness even now -- and the other leg extended. It's comfortable but the spins start not long after he shuts his eyes, so he's forced to open them again and in so doing turn his head and watch her blindly searching for the lighter she dropped. "One of what? What's the ouroboros for, anyway?"

<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.

Her lighter in her hand, an unconscious gesture has her thumb rolling over the familiar nicks on the silver plate, the rough details engraved upon it; the feel of the tiny scales wrought on the serpent are so familiar now that she would know them if she were blind and she had no other sense available to her by touch. But she doesn't light up another cigarette as expected, content to snap the cover in an absent rhythm. With Noah sprawled somewhere next to her, she remains seated, half-bared legs bent on the knees in a loose splay, feet flat on the roof, turning the pretty token over and over in her fingers. She is not as dexterous as she usually is, fumbling with her grip occasionally, but she always manages to snare it back into her grasp, somehow.

Noah's comment about Lunar has those half-lid eyes turning towards the two moons and the scattered specks of light in the horizon's endlessly stretching abyss. To say that she hasn't wondered what it would be like would be a lie - her own travels have given her a healthy respect and appreciation for exploration, but never before had she actually been part of a conversation that acknowledged the possibility. It certainly does seem like a last resort scenario, in the event that things become as bad as they anticipate they're going to be.

"Ay, because we dinnae have enough tae do here tae shake a stick at," Cassidy tells him, all lazy humor, the cover of her lighter flipped back open, her thumb striking end and letting that sputtering, red-gold flame flare to life, momentarily banishing the heavy cast of shadows on her face and illuminating her profile within its glow. "But seems like a fitting end tae our stories here in Filgaia - some kind of great escape, soaring through the stars tae find a new beginning elsewhere."

It's an open question, however, as to whether she would actually go, and the thought of leaving unfinished business cannot come at the worst time, when the high of the Goddess' brew is starting to fade from her system; the curse of those who dare to soar is to fall, eventually, and Cassidy does this quicker than most. The idea of Jeremiah Black roaming the bloodiest parts of the badlands, horribly alive and above ground from where he was supposed to be buried tightens the deepest niches in her stomach and sets it on fire. It doesn't help that she can still hear Theresa, even from here, her signature vibrato caressing the night air as she sings about worlds colliding while the skies fall.

What's the ouroboros for, anyway?

The lighter cap falls in a snap, snuffing out the flame. The blonde tucks the object back into the pockets of her cut-offs, and the silence lasts for as long as she decides what to tell him about it, if anything. Relic hunters are familiar with symbols; she had seen lines and lines of them scrawled in his journal. She doesn't insult his intelligence by telling him what it symbolizes, though it varies from culture to culture, and there are many in Filgaia.

Besides, that's not really what he's asking.

In the end, the drink grips her system like a vise: "I had two of them, once," she tells him, tilting her head up to look at the spray of stars glinting above their heads. "Never saw anything like them before, was a lot younger. And before you ask, nae, I dinnae steal them, if you can believe it. Was probably two of the verra few things in my life that I dinnae. Anyway, the other one got stolen, and I've been trying tae get it back ever since. Petty, I know. It's tiny and worthless. But it's the principle of the thing, y'ken. Would nae be much of a thief if I let people steal from me. That's my job."

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

His pupils, blown wide by the alcohol and the shadows, shrink when the lighter flares to life and paints her face in burnished tones. When it closes again with a clink and the flame is snuffed, for long moments afterward the outlines of those highlights are still printed on his staggering retinas, turning peacock hues against the darkness he can no longer pierce the fabric of.

So it's blindly that he waits in the silence of her consideration, listening to the sounds of people passing by infrequently on the street facing the front of the building, the distant clang of bells in the harbor and now-and-then sounds of a carriage rumbling past on some nearby larger thoroughfare. It's a long enough time that he's not sure she's going to answer, but he seems prepared to take that as a boundary he shouldn't cross; he doesn't push any further, and eventually turns his eyes skyward as the ghosts of the lighter's naked flame slowly dissolve and allow him to glimpse the stars again.

And then she does. Answer.

She chides him for a question he doesn't ask, earning a twitch at the corner of his mouth, but he's quiet until she finishes explaining, leaving him with inevitably more questions than he had at the outset.

He weighs whether or not to ask any of them. One in particular, more interesting to him than the others for reasons he's not sure he could explain, save a bizarre intuition for the odd angles of a thing.

"Why did you have two in the first place?"

<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.

Why did you have two in the first place?

"Mm..." Cassidy tilts her head back further, letting her eyes track a few stars she recognizes from maps she had studied as a girl. Up, and up, and up, until her spine finds the roof of the hotel. Arms on her side, she lets her lashes fall even further, up until each pinprick of light loses its definition, blurring against the endless field of blue-streaked black, cut through now and then by shafts of moonfire spilling from the double moons.

"Dinnae know," she tells him absently; not at all far-fetched, considering how she lives her life as a creature of impulse. "I guess I just wanted tae call something what it was."

She falls silent at that, a heartbeat or two, before she turns her head and lifts her brows at him.

"You dinnae explain how the hell this Malevolence shite jumped from the moon tae here, though," she points out, finally. "All this talk about maybe ditching this dead world tae find greener pastures, just because I'm drunk dinnae mean I dinnae remember that the stupid shite we found in the bowels of the Grotto apparently comes from the thing you're considering running tae if shite goes south. Still remember what you were yelling down in the water."

Laughter, in her voice, mimicking his inflection during the referenced event flawlessly: "THIS IS NOT BETTER. THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF BETTER."

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

It isn't that Noah thinks what she says is nonsense, something with no meaning -- he's absolutely sure that it means something, and probably something that cuts close to some kind of truth. It's just a truth about something she's not elaborating on, some facet of her life he doesn't have access to, and he knows a thing to leave alone when he hears it.

He's the last person to open doors uninvited. At least, amongst whatever precious few souls are lucky enough to survive their initial encounter with the hurricane of his life and choose to pass through the worst of the winds to the eye in the center, rather than turn tail and get as far from him as possible. The winnowing is extensive and automatic -- and it sometimes culls people he'd have liked to keep around.

Often them, actually.

Sanity must be reasserting itself, because the words coming out of her mouth in sequence are all on topic and make perfect sense. Enough sense for her to do a spot-on impression of his exasperation as a waterfall-- rise? -- had pulled them in and shot them upward against all decency and sense. Prone, intoxicated and relaxed, his laugh dips down into the lower registers of a voice that traverses octaves with ease, resonant in his chest. "Well, it wasn't."

Enough silent time passes for him to collect his thoughts, and then he pulls a deep breath. "I wouldn't go there, anyway. It's home to some sort of Goddess, Althena, and she's apparently opposed to anything that resembles fun. No drinking, no dancing, no singing, no art. I'd never make it in a place like that. But it's where the Malevolence comes from, yeah. And I don't know how it got here, but then I don't know how people from Lunar are getting here, either. Until today I didn't know there were people on Lunar, and it sounds like nobody else did, either. They're just..." He lifts one of his hands -- the right one, the one with the watch-like ARM on it, and splays that hand against the broad disc of Lunar. Its light spills through his splayed fingers, a faint, wisped glare that he narrows his eyes into. "Appearing. The Captain said she was sailing her ship in the ocean one minute, and the next...pow. Half-buried in a desert dune on Filgaia. Someone else there said she fell into a hole in a cave. They're just...appearing here, and none of them knew why."

He draws his extended leg inward with a slight tightening of expression that may suggest a frame as rangy as his does poorly when in one position for too long. "I'd been wondering about that, too, because there's no mention of anything like Malevolence in Filgaian historical record. Not that I've ever seen. And sure, a lot of that was destroyed over a series of Really Bad Days, but something this bad would definitely have left some kind of lasting impression somewhere. That suggested it was something new, right? And this Shepherd kid turns up, claims he knows all about the stuff. I didn't understand how that was possible. Now I do. Shepherd's from Lunar, too."

Quiet for one or two beats. "I met a medic from Kislev who was looking into the same thing. I guess I'll probably send her a note about it." After a beat, he hisses out a short, impatient breath between his teeth. "And send something back to Hetfield, god only knows what."

Another brief pause. "The worst of it may not even be the Malevolence. This crap Goddess on Lunar has -- soldiers? I don't know. Enforcers. And they are also, apparently, coming to Filgaia. And I don't know about you, Cass, but I can deal with hellkrakens bonded to hellbearcats armed with grenades, but I sure as hell don't plan to sit idle while a bunch of anti-fun zealots colonize the planet I live on."

<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.

No drinking. No dancing. No singing. No art.

As Noah enumerates shared interests that are apparently taboo in the moon across the rooftops from them, every single one has Cassidy's brows stitching lower and lower; amidst the backdrop of Theresa's spectre singing mutedly, still, from her open window, it makes the idea of the loss of such things all the more poignant and unacceptable. Another abject lesson, she thinks, as to how appearances can be deceiving, when the moon looks so cold, and distant and rife with possibilities, and while she's certain that Lunar has untold wonders that would slake the thirst of any dedicated explorer, the trade-offs certainly do seem like it wouldn't be worth it to just hare off to a place where color of any kind is frowned upon.

He claims he would never make it. She agrees with that, too, to a certain and very severe degree: there is no doubt in her mind that being in Lunar, under those conditions, would destroy her. Shrivel up any facsimile of life that she manages to retain in her tattered, murky soul.

How Lunarians are being transported to Filgaia, however, is interesting, and her lips purse at that, tongue darting out to wet lips that have gone chapped under chilly, desert winds and the influence of the drink. She digs into her pocket to find her small dispenser of beeswax, ever so fastidious in taking care of her skin. She dips her pinky into the pale pink substance, to reapply the balm. "So what, like those old sea legends, then?" she wonders. "Ships just mysteriously disappearing off some patch of water in the scattered archipelagos down south? Sommat like that? Sounds disturbingly like the shite I'd read in the more fanciful one gella novellas floating around, about holes in space connecting two different worlds together. These seem like random events, though. Nae any connection whatsoever save they come from there and go tae here."

It's interesting, but she has no brain for science or magic.

When he reveals that Sorey's from Lunar, a small 'ah' escapes her, tucking her beeswax away. "Sure explains why he knows about it. Goddess brew aside, whatever you got up tae in that ship yielded plenty in explaining what in the bloody hell is going on in this continent these days." Mention of the Kislevi medic, though, has her lifting her brows. "Would nae be a Lily Keil, would it? The medic." She knows of only one, though mention of Hetfield has that wicked edge returning to her smile. "I'm telling you," she says, finally retrieving her pack of smokes and dragging one out with a pull of her teeth. "We got what we wanted from her, you really dinnae go above and beyond the call on duty on that unless you really want tae."

The worst of it may not even be the Malevolence...

Her expression flattens around her cigarette. "Dinnae say i-- "

He says it.

"Ach, fook me running," she sighs. "Is it too much too hope that's an exaggeration? How are they going tae do that from that side, anyway? From what you're telling me, the Moon People that are here dinnae even know how they got here. Unless the Goddess' people know how tae control that, somehow?"

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

Ships just disappearing? All Noah can do is shrug, an awkward proposition laid out on the ground with one of his hands cradling his head -- more a bunch of muscle than anything. He lets his upheld hand fall after that, mindlessly draped over his middle. "No idea, Cassie, but I've got a bad feeling we're going to find out more about it than we ever wanted to know." Staring up at that impossibly distant sphere and contemplating the revelation that it isn't the barren, lifeless rock it appears to be is a reminder of other duplicities in the sky. That it represents a threat to the things he's developed a mad, breathless, passionate love for -- Filgaia in all of her battered glory, with her tough, ornery citizens and oblivious determination to go on living life as normal as everything burns to the ground around them -- only enhances that likeness for him, leaves him feeling uneasy about the way it hangs there in the sky with full view of where he is.

He welcomes the change of subject, and does not seem particularly surprised that 'his' medic from Kislev is hers, too. "The very same. Quiet. Pretty eyes. She was friendly enough. I didn't have any especially strong reason to give her my information, but...she's a long way from home, on the wrong side of the front." He found that interesting, obviously, and 'interesting' has always been reason enough for him to do anything.

...make that 'almost anything:' "She's a valuable contact for the forseeable future. When that changes, I'm a ghost, but until then...honestly, Cass, I've put myself through a lot worse than keeping a socially awkward academic periodic, platonic company in order to get at something I wanted."

He can hear it in her voice, the exasperation upon finding herself once again on the event horizon of something that might require her to get Involved. Mild resentment too, possibly. His chuckle rumbles in his chest like thunder packed in cotton. "That's another one I don't have the answer to. But you know who might? That Shepherd kid. Once we're through the worst of whatever this is, we probably oughta ask."

This is turning into a whole lot of 'we's in a row, and it would be a lie to say that he doesn't give that some thought, probing whether or not he's comfortable with that. He isn't sure, and it's to alleviate that uncertainty that he asks what he does:

"That Jude you mentioned. That your--" He takes a moment to search for words that are slightly less offensive or suggestive than the ones he would typically use: "'Gentleman caller?'"

<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.

His words about finding out more than they would like to earns him a displeased grouse and an irritated puff of cigarette from where she lies, white-gray tendrils twisting up towards the skies in a fruitless bid to reach Lunar itself, as if to pollute it with its insignificant plume in the manner that its Malevolence and anti-fun zealots seek to pollute Filgaia. But she senses his unease, and in deference to the moment, and whatever this is that is developing between them - something that settles uncomfortably like an actual, genuine friendship forged in the manner most soldiers experience after a few runs through the breach - for once, she doesn't say anything dismissive about his love for forgotten things and the thankless task of digging into the sands for secrets that, to her, are best left forgotten. For once, she holds her tongue about the fundamental conflicts that define them - his love for the past, and her unrepentant distaste for it - and lets the silence linger, weighted down by his contemplations and her reluctance to acknowledge that even if they manage to survive this cataclysm, their run-ins with something beyond them is not over by a god damn mile.

"Well, you already know what I'm going tae say tae that, luv," she tells him. "When all of that does come calling, I like our odds."

She turns her head towards him, her grin returning, teeth brilliant in the darkness and gleaming like pearls, smoke dampening the normally edged expression into something gentler than its usual wont.

When he confirms his acquaintance with Lily Keil, amusement grows, glimpsed around those fathomless emerald fields and their golden fragments, though it wouldn't find a cause in anything he has actually said; a private, bitter joke that she shares with no one else but herself and the way her twisted Luck often generates a series of strange coincidences for good or ill. "She's a package deal," she tells him. "Left Kislev in the company of her fiance, Leon Albus. Good enough lad, if not somewhat too quick tae see the good in others. Nearly got swindled by a pair of street urchins if I had nae come across him. Secretive, too - the dangerous kind, from what I managed tae glean from a conversation from her other half. She tell you why she left Kislev?"

But at his emphatic explanation about Emma, she can't help but feel her grin tug wider. "Ay? Well, I know how that goes. You dinnae need tae say anything tae me, luv. Ten years roaming around these sands, I have seen and done some incredibly unrighteous shite. Would be the last person tae judge."

Talk about having a conversation with Sorey, though, has her groaning. "You know, for someone who supposedly came from the bloody god damn moon, he dinnae look all that special. But I s'pose looks can be verra deceiving in that instance. Ay, then. I'll go with you tae accost the wee lad. If nae just tae make sure I keep my head above water on this Malevolence and the anti-fun brigade coming in and ruining everything. Just so you know, I am nae getting used tae this, alright?" She reaches out and pokes his shoulder with a finger. "Absolutely nae."

She rolls her head back and exhales, lashes lidding over her eyes. Though when Noah asks about Jude, and the term he uses...

...the second to the last time anyone mentioned Jude around her was a fifteen year old boy, who she gunned down without so much as a blink. The last time anyone did was the self-same Leon Albus, and she managed to insert enough of her manipulations there to get a specific, desired result. This is the third inquiry within days, and her half-addled mind can't help but wander back in an attempt to determine if there were any points in the past in which she had inferred, in some way, that Jude was someone more significant to her than the other names she tends to mention in the same breath, like Morgan. Had she been and she didn't notice? Discomfort, real and unwanted, settles into the pit of her stomach like a stone.

"He's a traveling correspondent for the Guild Gazette, the rag out from Aquvy." She laughs suddenly, turning those amused eyes back at Noah. "Y'ken I gave him shite about that recently? Being a gentleman reporter? I told him that it must be an interesting balancing act, that, wondered what he does when his mark's a woman. Told him he would nae be able tae get tae the juicy bits if he keeps holding the doors open for them."

Heaving a sigh, she takes another deep inhale of her cigarette. "He's helping me with sommat important. Tae me, personally. God only knows why, I've tried tae chase him off repeatedly, but he will nae go. I thought for a couple of weeks at least that he was after some kind of story, but he has nae written a word. Nae even asked any burning questions a reporter would. Any seasoned operator in Filgaia would know something's up. Dinnae know what yet, though. I'll find out, someday."

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

Cassidy's perpetual determination to like the odds of everything is a quality Noah appreciates sheerly for its optimism alone; contained in that little personality quirk is the seed of a broader and more complex personality trait that he relates to absolutely. Living life a certain way means being able to commit one's self to absurdly risky ventures, and if you're not going to hesitate you may as well decide to do it with a spring in your step.

In this instance, though, he's actually inclined to agree from a practical standpoint. "So much of Filgaia's already been eroded by deserts. In a lot of places, that kind of fun is the only worthwhile thing left. I think there'd be a hell of a scrap if they tried."

Of Lily, just a headshake: "She didn't offer. I didn't ask." For a man with a passion for the past, there are certain careful limits he imposes on that instinct to dig.

He lets all talk of the Hetfield woman go with only a roll of the eyes, but her poke of his shoulder gets a smirk that trends toward smug.

I'm not getting used to this. Absolutely not.

"I definitely wouldn't suggest it."

No accounting of the reasons why, though they are legion.

"Covering the Exhibition," he says, repeating something she'd said earlier, when they'd talked about a possible fourth for their merry little crew of lawbreakers. "Gotcha."

The silence unfolds for a while. She has her boundaries, and she's made them plain: if the others were willing to leave, she would almost certainly not stay, as heroism is not the province of the thief. Noah has his own boundaries. They overlap hers, but the shape is different, and he consults them during that brief lull in the conversation, only to come back with: "I ask because I am at least ninety percent sure you're shacked up with somebody, because we haven't wound up in bed yet-- " His confidence on this point is remarkable, "-- and you and I are getting in a fine habit of landing ourselves in situations where I'm like to find my back to yours. And Cassie, you may not believe this, but I'm not historically very popular amongst men who consider themselves devoted lovers of the young ladies in whose company I often find myself." The grin that follows opens on his face like the dawn, a slow roll of something privately wicked, as good as a confession that he almost certainly earned that distrust amongst his peers. "I'd never get mixed up in all of this with you if you weren't a little dangerous, but dangerous little ladies spend time with dangerous men who aren't always so little, and the last thing I need is a knife in my ribs for the trouble."

<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.

"And between you and me, I'm banking on the very idea of using said scrappers tae get intae the aforementioned scrap, leaving me free and clear tae watch the bloody mess from a distance," Cassidy drawls from around her cigarette. "Would be the best case scenario for my hide, that's for bloody fookin sure."

That short sentence enough is enough to dissuade her from even contemplating whether she should tell him about the kind of nasty business that brought Lily Keil and Leon Albus out of Kislev, though it does remind her to ask Noah and Professor Montagu something else related to that. A thing for another time, now that her earlier malaise about Theresa and the lighter have settled along with the liquor in her blood.

Only for embers to ignite again at what he says, and the sheer temerity he demonstrates in doing so. Eyes flick over at him sidelong from where she's draped, that shot of disbelief suddenly erupting into open laughter. Pulling herself up from her lying position on the roof, she turns to him. Because yes, his confidence in that regard is remarkable, and the brass ones on him can't help but release that sudden outpouring of mirth. "What is this, Noah?" she gasps. "Some kind of reverse con? Dinnae get me wrong, luv, I like the concept, if the ultimate aim is tae get me in bed with you. Riling me up tae prove you wrong by stripping off my clothes right here and jumping your bones just tae prove I dinnae do something so typical as shacking up with someone. And while I'm normally the first tae wax poetic about my verra, verra many appealing qualities, I'm nae an easy woman tae love, if not just because anyone who gets caught up with me tends tae face ridiculous situations more often than nae, and verra sure that gets old verra fast for people who actually want tae live a ripe old age, and I would like tae think that's most. But if it's your ribs that you're worry about, dinnae think you havetae worry about Jude or Morgan trying tae split you from belly tae nose."

She points a finger at him. "Dinnae know how tae take the implication either, that's the conclusion you've reached because I've nae tossed you intae my bed. Dinnae tell me you've never come across one who dinnae because she just was nae interested. Those exist, right? I have it in mind tae ask you about your track record of success, now, and dinnae even tell me that a gentleman never tells, because you opened the door tae this line of questioning. The door, Noah. It's open. My foot is in it."

And she waits, intently, expectantly.

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

He expects the laughter -- it only adds fuel to the banked fires of his sharp smile, visible even in the silver-blue of the starlight in all of that pearly cockiness -- but not the speculation about it being a con. He barks a short laugh and daggers his brows down and inward, the look he shoots her as arid as the sands of Dazil. "Please. Are you filling some kind of quota? Every other day you accuse me of doing something I am nowhere near stupid enough to do. You know who would pull some kind of rookie move like that? Newkirk. And you can tell him I said that."

The embers of that laugh linger in the shape of his eyes and a look of cheshire satisfaction, listening to her go on and on with great emphasis, provoked by his allegation, ever-so-certain.

"Oh? Ridiculous situations more often than not? You don't say. It's almost like that's exactly why I asked. I would bet solid gella that courting you doesn't look much different than the Mamma Mia sinking to the bottom of a river. People are gonna get the wrong idea."

He delivers those remarks with the kind of affable wryness he employs when he's giving Morgan hell: there's nothing much underneath it, words built on companionable ribbing more than anything, but as with everything to do with Noah, there's often a little bit of something serious nestled in amongst all of the confetti and tinsel.

Don't tell me you've never come across one who didn't because she was just not interested. Those exist, right?

It isn't that the levity leaves him, really -- only that he trades it in for something else, or maybe that the glinting edges of it are gradually sheathed within the distance of memory. Hazel eyes turned up to the endless sprawl of remote stars unfocus from those giddy heights and angle themselves backward, inward, across a span of years to a time when he was somebody else. It quiets him down to his marrow, and softens something there, but only for the briefest of moments. It's the stillness common to bodies of water that cut too deeply into the stony heart of the earth for the currents to make themselves known. His expression shifts, complex in the most delicte way. There's affection there, and rue. Self-deprecation, nostalgia or possibly something wistful, or both. Something troubled underneath it all, a sense of things left unresolved.

"There was one," he admits. His delivery is casual, but his tone contains traces of everything on his face -- until a slow blink folds closed the lid on whatever that was, and he shoots her smirk. "I don't tell, since you're asking, but I'll tell you this: good enough that I'm still ninety percent sure you're shacked up with somebody, and one hundred percent sure it's not Newkirk, because he'd never shut up about it if that were the case. But I'm not prying, Cassie. I just don't want to wind up bleeding out in an alley for no reason." He rolls his head back to square, returns his eyes to the sky. "I'd prefer to only get stabbed for things I actually got to enjoy doing."

<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.

It's almost like that's exactly why I asked.

More laughter, tinged with a hint of disbelief that this conversation is actually happening. Emerald eyes come alive with it, and his remark about Newkirk doesn't help. Whatever discomfiture had been there slowly burns away at the wake of a sudden and unexpected torrent of pure affection, which also settles its jagged edges into her stomach and internally making her squirm, see-sawing between the equally potent urges to simmer in it and reject it out of hand. "Ay, well, Morgan was never really good at sticking tae what he's good at. He'll always give it the good ol' try." One of the reasons why she maintains some degree of camaraderie with him, for all of her reluctance to build anything significant or lasting with...well. Anyone.

"Anyway, dinnae think that mattered tae you, if people got the wrong idea. I'm inordinately blessed with the ability tae not give a shite, dinnae see why you oughtae worry. If the people who matter know the truth about you and me and the fact that there's nothing there, dinnae see the need tae stress about it."

She doesn't know, at least initially, what prompts the sudden tempering of those sharp barbs of laughter; it isn't anything that Noah actually says or does, but she senses when memory exerts its ghosts the way they usually do, recognizing it when it happens immediately because she knows what it is like. Her own laughter fades, a slight tilt of her head and a lifted brow angled his way. For all that she picks and chooses what she claims she notices any given day, there is no hiding the attentive perusal she gives him, watches the subtle play of other bits of him that she hasn't seen before enact what's in the theater of his mind, with her as an audience.

There was one.

"Make that two," she tells him, finally rising to stand on the roof, the subtle sway of her body when she gets on her feet suggestive that the Goddess' Brew is not done with her yet. The space between her thumb and index brackets over the hinge of her hip as she looks down at him with that lingering humor. "So I'm nae shacking up with somebody." She was certain one night with a man hardly counts as shacking up, and even more certain that Noah himself would agree with that. "And I'm nae interested, either, if nae else just tae spite your record. I hope that goes a long way in reassuring you on a few things, and thank your lucky stars, because most days I'm nae that. Reassuring."

She moves for the edge of the roof, though she turns around as she does. "As tae the one that got away," she continues. "It's alright, luv. Truly. I have it on good authority that it happens tae the best of u-- "

The short boundary framing the roof catches her behind the knees, and before his eyes, she upends, a garbled sound escaping her as she falls off the roof.

Whenever Noah reaches the edge, he'd catch legs and arms disappearing in the embrace of a passing haywagon, its driver utterly oblivious to the addition of his load as he steers his animals down the street, the lazy clopping of hooves on dirt and the rattling of steel axles taking the conwoman to god knows where. But certainly somewhere. She was certainly fortunate, however, that the thing happened to be moving past; broken bones aren't exactly conducive to sneaking people into highly-secure palaces.

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

"What they think matters to me if what they think is 'that guy is a threat to my domestic bliss and I think he should be pushing up daisies instead' when I'm focused on trying to deal with things like 'cataclysmic devastation of whole cities.' I'm quick and I'm no slouch in a fight, but you can't get out of the way of a fist you don't see coming. This?" He lifts a hand, sweeps it cavalierly, encompassing all of Adlehyde and by extension every intrigue he's suddenly a willing participant in. "Is distracting. Distractions are dangerous. And this distraction is dangerous enough as it is."

It's all linked up with a moment of pure arrogance, or at least manufactured arrogance -- the base assumption that anyone not vulnerable to his charms is necessarily hampered in conceding by some other external influence -- but the steady conviction in his tone says he's maybe been here before, in a situation similar to this, and it's a lesson he learned the hard way. Maybe one it took him several repeat offenses to learn properly.

It's a more comfortable subject for him than whatever radiant phantom haunts his history.

"Ouch," he winces, as she boldly declares her absolute lack of interest. "Don't feel you need to cushion the blow, or anything." But that, too, is vastly preferable to lingering on thoughts of things that eluded him, even if they, in the escaping, gave him everything he's currently grateful to possess -- including the capacity for gratitude.

It seems as though she's going to wax philosophical on the matter, and internally he girds himself. It was long ago enough that he's capable of stomaching whatever comes -- that ghost is nearly transparent now, and he's canny enough to realize that the shape of it is probably more an assembly of his own biases, perspectives, and ideas than anything that might resemble the truth of who she was -- but it's still a tiny hollow he preserves inside himself, an empty space he created for her that she chose not to occupy with anything more significant than her absence. Like most voids, it remains disorienting to visit.

And then she does him the courtesy of falling off of the roof, instead.

He blinks, snaps his head up, and seemingly violates multiple laws of time and space to be instantly at the roof's edge. The shocked concern -- enough sudden adrenaline to run him through with a hard blade of sobriety -- wanes the moment he sees the wagon of hay rumbling down the road, replaced with contemplative indecision. She was pretty well in her cups, and he doesn't know what kind of man is driving that wagon, nor what kind of people might be waiting at that destination. If she hasn't got her wits about her--

His exhale leaves him slowly through the nose, shoulders falling to square. The uncertainty abates.

If they really are going to dig themselves a hole as deep as they one they've been discussing, he supposes he ought to know just how far she can push her own limits to survive. Noah likes Cassidy Cain, but there's no sense in throwing his lot in with someone he has to worry about with any frequency.

A hard stance from a man so willing to come to Adlehyde's defense, on nothing more than the word of a conwoman. Old habits die hard, though.

He has the decency to lock the windows and doors to her rented room when he descends and lets himself back out into the evening.