[Eve] It's fucking freezing, and Eve doesn't seem to give two shits about that fact. Oh no. She gives half a shit, precisely half a shit about the fact that it's cold bcause she's walking out of some boutique bundled up in about three sweaters that she can't afford, that she pilfered off the shelves because they were warm and the other two she could give to someone else once the weather became managable.
She had to take care of her people, you see. Because, even if they were afraid of her, even if they thought Eve was a serial killer off her meds, Eve was one of them. eve was dirty and rough and strong and fierce and even if she was a monster she was like they were.
Which made Eve their monster. They pay their chiminage in boxes for her protection. She repays their kindness in strength and the occasional bottle of booze. And, today? Sweaters. She walks out of the shop looking like... well.. like she got kicked out. The air is cold, but Eve's got enough clothing on that she doesn't notice. The female trudges down the street. There is no moon in the sky, and Eve is at peace with herself.
[Cracka'Jack] *Why is Lou in Magnificent mile this evening? Well lets face it. Rats go where the best payoff is for their efforts. The vehicles here were all luxury sport editions with that new car smell. The dumpsters full of creamy $15 dollar fettuccine barely picked at by hateful twigs on low carb diets. She might live in the slums, but THIS was the promised land.
The ahroun is at ease tonight, belly full, content as she could be under the truant moon. Cracka'jack in full swagger as skinny legs eat up the sidewalk on her way to a favorite dumpster behind a steak-joint. Or it used to be a favorite dumpster behind a steak-joint, a couple of years ago when she'd first changed. Now it might be something awful. Or worse, Vegan.
A businessman stumbles on ice and falls on his ass in front of the ghetto Diva, and Lou nimbly bounces over him at the last minute, bawling angrily.*
What motherfucker? You ain't got eyes?! Ain't you see I'm fuckin walkin here? Sheeyit boy! Gettup!
*Ah yes. Lou was not a species indigenous to the Magnificent Mile.*
[Eve] "There's ice," she says.
Eve's voice is resonant. Eve's voice is solid and strangely strong. It's not wavering, not mbarrassed, not weak, because she is nothing of the sort. Between Eve and Lou, that poor businessman must think that he's going to get jumped. Eve doesn't really notice him... though she does watch Lou- with her skinny legs and she's chowing down on something good.
"Still hot?" she asks Lou. She walks over quickly. She tries to catch up. the smell is enough to send her over.
[Cracka'Jack] *Lou snorts, looking instead to the 1/4 of a tinfoil wrapped gyro in her hand as the businessman manages to pick up his cellphone and scramble away from the pair of terrifying gutter-mamas. A hip thrown out as the ahroun tears off a bite, spitting tinfoil to the side as an afterthought. Scanning Eve behind knock off raybans. She wears her sunglasses at night. So she can, so she can - not be as readily identified on camera.*
Sho is baby girl. Shit, you gots some major beef on you, aintcha?
*It wasn't often Lou stumbled across someone whose rage lashed as unhinged and present as her own. Its enough that the gnawer jerks her chin and rolls back onto her heels. Ready. Just.. in.. Case.*
[Gwen Sullivan] It took some strength of necessity to be out in weather like this-- people who didn't get snow days at work commuted still because it's what they had to do, because they were diligent or saving their vacation time for an honest-to-god vacation, or because their boss had sworn to them and the ceiling over their heads that if they missed one more fucking day they'd be out on their ass and that was that. No one else in their right minds would be out in this nonsense, in this cold with sidewalks only shoveled in patches and roads piled up with snow-- snowplows only able to do so much.
Here in the Mile, though, the city was doing its best job of keeping going. Ice and sand were on the streets, plows concentrated their effort here first, de-iced the sidewalks to the best of their abilities-- but even that couldn't hold off the blizzard completely.
Up the street from Lou and Eve, Gwen was bundled up in several layers including the black canvas coat on top. She's sitting on a plastic sack on the ground to keep the seat of her jeans dry, with her arms wrapped around her chest and knees drawn up to it as well. Her forehead is tipped forward, touching her kneecaps. She's got the cuffs of her jeans tucked into a pair of heavy work boots, and her hair was back in a short ponytail at the nape of her neck while a red beanie kept her head and ears warm. The hat matched the scarf about her throat and chin and the gloves on her hands.
Yet, even with all the bundling up, she'd shiver occasionally when wind whipped through the streets and dragged snow both from the sky and off the ground with it. Whatever the hell it was she was doing out here, it had to be boarderline suicidal. Because she was high or because she was doing some crazy Fenrir-learned form of meditation through masochism. Who the fuck knew.
[Eve] "No beef," she says, "that's what I'm tyring to fix."
She nods upward, and her chin tilts up and she shows her hand to Lou. She knows what a homid pays attention to, knows that human types pay attention to the hands. There is dirt under her nails and her gloves have holes in them. She is snow flecked and bright eyed.
"Trade you a sweater for steak."
Her words are blunt. Not in their meaning, but rather, in their delivery. She picks words and throws them together. Which is when someone catches her eye. Her attention turns, and Eve looks down the way. There's a girl wrapped up in layers. The cold bites at Eve's nose and chaps her cheeks. She grits her teeth against the wind.
[Cracka'Jack] Shi. Sounds good to me. Getcher grub on.
*Moisture is swiped from above Lou's top lip with the back of her hand, cold making her nose run and her ears burn. A broad toothed grin, before the last meaty chunk of a gyro dinner is slapped in Eve's grubby mittened palm. Gnawer tonguing her teeth and digging around in her oversized (and gaudy) gold purse, before popping a chunk of pre-chewed gum between thick lips. *
Now whats thissabouta sweater, or some shit? You gon' knit me one right here? Cause bitch, It cold.
[Eve] "Nah," she says, and she's stripping clothing off. Her jacket it off. The layers are getting stripped down and she goes from a heavy coat to a hoodie and the hoodie gets tossed down with the coat. the more that gets peeled away, the more obvious it is that Eve is built. Eve is a bit more than built, she's just had whatever protective layers of fat stripped away to where she's nothing but sinew and muscle and, most importantly, hunger.
"I can't knit for shit."
But she gets down to a sweater, something that's way nicer than Eve can afford that's for damned sure. It's red and brown and soft and still has the security tag on it. She hands it over to Lou.
"Eh?"
It takes a second before-
"Takethefuckingsweaterit'smotherfuckingcold."
[Hunter] Cause bitch, It cold.
Hunter stops, his head turns, eyes narrow and he's crossing the street without even looking for traffic. The philodox he knows, he remembers her from a night months ago, her first night in town. He remembers her from the other night at the brotherhood. He was busy, but would have liked to have talked to her then. He will have to make do with a freezing cold alley way instead of the fianna's fine establishment.
"Yo, Eve." Hunter calls out as he approaches, though they can probably sense him coming long before that. His hands are stuffed into the pockets of his overcoat, collars popped to his neck and despite the burning rage in his blood, he still looks pale, he still looks cold.
"Who'dis?" He asks of the ghetto-princess she is offering her sweater to.
[Cracka'Jack] *Pink dragon lady fingernails make the brown hand that reaches for the sweater a full inch longer. The lovely cashmere thing is held up to the unflattering illumination of an iced over streetlight, examined with a grin that is nothing but impressed. Lou flicks down her shades and looks the ripped blonde over. Girl had a body like Lou's minus the color and the requisite booty. A smirk.*
Oh no you di'int. Girl, what else you got in there? You a walkin' Macy's or some shit.
*Hunter approaches, anger radiating off him like a furnace despite the cold, and it certainly gets Lou's attention. Ghetto mama snaking her neck and rolling back on a hip. A bubble POPs.*
Who askin?
[Hunter] "Hunter."
A pause while he looks the girl over, not her body or her clothes or her stance, just the eyes. After a moment, his hand extracts itself from one of his pockets and he offers it to her. There is weight in that offering.
"Names Hunter Matthews. Burnout, Alpha o'tha Vanguard. Bone Gnawer Ahroun."
[Eve] "Aahhuuuh-nuh," she tells Hunter. She even shrugs with the motion to punctuate her point. then, to Lou, "that's Hunter."
Eve can't vouch for the man, though, but he gets an upward not. Her chin tilts up and she starts to pull her hoodie back on and then her jacket. She lacks the booty that Lou has... which is a shame. And what a fine, fine booty that woman has. Alas, Eve wouldn't seem to know what to do with junk in her trunk, except maybe pawn it.
"I got a couple more, they're warm enough."
[Cracka'Jack] Well fuck me if you ain't fo'ward as all hell.
*Lou snorts, tucking her newly acquired sweater into a bulging purse and looking around. Seeing only a teenager crouched a ways up the street, and a passel of busy pedestrians approaching from the crosswalk, the gnawer lowers her voice.*
Cracka'jack. Or Lou if you gotta. Original BeeGee, moony as you is.
[Gwen Sullivan] The girl sitting on the plastic bag several dozen feet away had been still save for the shivering, quiet. You'd think she was dead were it not for the puff of steam that would come from where her head was curled to her knees, protected from the elements by her legs. With that you'd think she was just asleep, then, in danger of cold exposure if nobody bothered to wake her and move her someplace warm.
These presumptions would be incorrect, though, she's coherent enough to be paying attention to the trio up the street, ever since the business man fell down, but ran fearfully from the pair of women that had converged about him. Grown ass men in business suits didn't flee like that, not without something vaguely supernatural prompting him. Without, he'd have dusted his rear end off, properly embarrassed, and grumbled about how he was fine before trudging away briskly. Trudging, not sprinting as he'd done.
"Never know where ears will be," warns a raspy kind of voice that had every potential to be smokey and sultry, but hadn't matured to that point quite yet. The figure sitting back against the wall lifted her head, peered blearily with eyes the same cool of the world about them, a gray-green mixing, out toward Hunter, Lou and Eve.
Hunter and Eve she recognized, she'd seen their faces before and she would always remember them, like she did everything. The black girl was entirely new, though. The fact that she didn't go running when the two stood nearby her only confirmed what words muffled out by the wind starting back up would have told her already.
"Just because it's cold enough to kill doesn't mean everyone's hiding from it."
[Eve] [... is that the wyrm?]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1
[Hunter] "Ain't got no time for games." He offers the words to both the cub and the beegee. His eyes lift off them though and traverse the streets. "Shit my neighbourhoods at fuckin' war and this place is tickin' away like fuckin' clockwork. Ain't nobody listenin' to nuthin' but themselves up here."
A pause, brief. He looks over the three girls.
"Who wants ta' get outta' tha cold?"
[Eve] "Be direct," she says to Gwen. There is something about Eve's voice that is too even and too strong and with a bent of... something inhuman. Sure, there's a Texan drawl to it, but it's born of mimicry more than anything else.
Eve is tall. Eve is solidly built. Eve doesn't blink enough. She is looking at Gwen, and for now she hasn't say much else. Instead, she inhales.
"The only threat here is food poisoning... and frostbite. S'cold."
[Cracka'Jack] *Lou's response to Gwen is a loud snort. That said, she rolls her shoulders under a cracked leather jacket, and nods to Hunter with unabashed enthusiasm.*
You fuckin kiddin me? I all about bouncin up out if this freezin ass bullshit. Maybe some folk can jus' sit around freezen them titty off lisn'n to private talk, but I'm an Afri'can't.
[Gwen Sullivan] Gwen eyeballed Eve for an extra moment or two when she was told to be direct. It was hard to read the cub's face, to tell precisely what thoughts were flashing behind those eyes-- it could just as easily be disdain as it could be grudging respect, or simple acceptance of an order from a Metis. Lou, on the other hand, gets a look that's about as bland as could be imaginable. The teen with the light skin, mousy brown hair, cool colored eyes and incredibly average build and features was, apparently, unimpressed with the 'African't' joke.
In the end, though it's Hunter rallying them together, asking who wants out of the cold, that gets Gwen to groan quietly as she stands up, wadding up the plastic bag in her fist and shoving it in a trash can on the curb, intended for pedestrians and bus riders alike. This neighborhood was too nice to give anybody reason to litter, after all.
Her hands jammed into her coat pockets, and she walks toward the three, stops short of arm's reach of any one of them, and shivers hard enough that her whole body shakes. Her face turns into her shoulder and she pushes her scarf up over her mouth and nose with it.
[Hunter] "I gots some wheels, seems we should have ourselves a little fuckin' sit down ye'?" Eyebrow raised in question but he starts to turn regardless. There aren't many cars out on the roads in weather like this, and what ones there are drive slowly and carefully lest they start doing 360's on the ice.
He starts off down the street, turning to walk backwards for a few steps to urge them forward if they are still frozen in place. "C'mon." And it isn't far not far at all until they see something far too beautiful for a Gnawer. The black car has a fine smattering of snow upon it but it obviously hasn't been parked there that long.
His shoulders bunch while he walks and he tucks his chin down into his coat until he reaches the door, unlocks it and climbs inside. Once in there he turns around in his chair to unlock the back and passenger doors of the Impala.
[Eve] Metis don't get to give anyone orders, except for cubs. The time that she's going to get to lord a slightly elevated status. Then again, maybe she's just... odd. She looks at Gwen and wiggles her fingers. She even smiles at her, but it doesn't do much good. Eve doesn't seem too accustomed to the notion of smiling. It seems awkward on her.
"'m Eve," she says. It's the best one can offer.
She then looks at Hunter and heads over, "lead us to the promised land."
She starts to head off to Impala, and Eve (being Eve) piles in the back seat instead of the front. She's either dumb or cocky, because she loaded up in the car too easily.
[Cracka'Jack] *Lou is no sooner in view of the car than she's rattling off questions as to its engine and various parts, looking the black beast over with an eye for detail, circling it at least once before deigning to slide her scrawny self inside. Where she continues to crow about car-related topics until seeing something outside and hollering for them to pull over and go on without her. A misplaced street thug in bright yellow getting one helluva a talking to as the remaining 3 garou drive away*
[Gwen Sullivan] Gwen walks along to the car, her boots crunching on the sidewalk salt, head dipped against the wind so it blew off the top of her head rather than making even more raw the already red-cold skin of her face. She sniffs, watches the black girl go running off after something that even Gwen, perceptive as they come, couldn't determine. Maybe it was something she'd spotted but couldn't imagine important enough to chase? Who knew.
Hunter got into the driver's seat of a car far too impressive to belong to a Bone Gnawer, and Eve got into the backseat without question, without much to lose. Gwen, however, hesitated. It wasn't quite about having something to lose as it was knowing full well how stupid a move this could very well be.
She sniffed, thinking things through. She could stay out in the blizzard, continue the half-meditative state that she'd been in where she was figuring ways to separate herself from the city while still staying with the Caern, with her Mentor and Linus and Roman Simon and everybody else that was so good to her, for her. She didn't want to flee the city entirely, she knew the fight was here and this was where she would learn, but at the same time she didn't want to see disappointment on the Godi's face or have him remind her that she was still just a City Monster, not yet a Garou.
...She could continue pondering this, and possibly freeze to death. Or she could get in the car with a pair of Garou that she did not know well enough to trust.
Stuck, undecided, it would take goading in either direction to get Gwen to either get into the car or step away from it. She doesn't do one or the other on her own.
[Eve] "Kid, you got shotgun."
[Hunter] "Let er' choose. Ain't gon' learn just doin' what other people tell er."
[Gwen Sullivan] The pair of Gnawers speak-- one offers her shotgun while the driver snaps at her not to give recommendations, that the Cub wouldn't learn if people were making orders for her. This Gwen answers (she was standing with the door cracked open, but not thrown wide out so that the blizzard would permeate the car. Just enough for sound to be exchange) by leaning forward, putting her face near the crack in the door, and looking straight at Hunter.
"I'm young enough to require direction still. If the chosen method of teaching cubs how to be was letting them blunder blindly and try to figure it out on their own all the time, the race would've been extinct long before I got here."
That said:
"What should prompt me to trust getting into a car with a couple of strangers and not continuing my chances out here? Might be on the same side of the war, but that doesn't mean nothing for trust."
[Eve] "You will be a half moon," she replies, "it's your judgment that will instruct you. You aren't young enough to require direction, you are inexperienced enough to require assistance in gaining the information to make your choices. If the chosen method for teaching cubs was to give them all of the answers, we would have died out long before you got here."
It is taking effort for her to do this. Eve doesn't blink, doesn't look away, doesn't straighten up.
"If you want to come, then come. If you don't, then don't. But if you're staying get in because you're letting out all the warm air."
[Burning a willpower: overcoming being shy!]
[Hunter] It really doesn't matter to Hunter Matthews, one way or the other. Or at least it shouldn't. The problem is she is a cub, she is everyone responsibility even if he's fighting a battle in his mind about what to do with his territory, even if the last thing he wants to do is babysit a pup. She is still his responsibility, as much as she is Simon's and Eve's and every other Garou in this sept.
His eyes narrow.
But Eve goes and says it all for him.
"C'mon, I gotsta' talk ta' tha' tribe here, ya' might find that interestin'."
[Gwen Sullivan] Her gaze hops back to Eve in the backseat, and she makes a scoffing sound that has a cloud of white appearing before her mouth and nose and blowing away just as quickly as it had formed. "All the answers and floundering blind are on very opposite ends of the pool, here. Ideally there'd be a middle ground."
And Hunter's saying that they needed to talk tribe, appealed this to her by informing her that she might find it interesting. To this, Gwen shakes her head. The affairs of Bone Gnawers weren't what she needed to be focusing on right now, she had several other things to worry about before that. Rather than sit in the passenger seat of a vehicle too nice for her, Hunter, or Eve and listen to the two Cliaths talk business, twiddling her thumbs and warming her fingers on a heater like a child left out of an adult's conversation, she opted to soldier through the storm on her own.
To embrace an element, the moment of Unstoppable Nature permeating a city even so large and well-manned as Chicago. She steps back, closes the door, and starts up the sidewalk that was already growing invisible under the drifts of white snow piling up more rapidly than the public works crews can keep up with.
[Eve] "Hunter, you mind if I ride shotgun?"
[Hunter] Hunter shrugs, it really does not matter to him. "Sure, go ahead." Keys get put in the ignition and the engine roars to life. He waits for the Metis to either hop through the gap in the seats or open the doors and then he's pulling away from the curb. He passes Gwen and his eyes shift to watch her shrinking in the mirror.
A few minutes later and they're stopping again to let Crack'a'jack out. That leaves just Eve and Hunter, he pulls into a parking space to talk.
"How long ya' know that one for?" He asks, obviously talking about the Gnawer with pink nails who just climbed out of his red leather seats.
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