Jack
I mean she has a sword. His packmates will like that, won't they? He is beginning to have a basic understanding of what makes this homid Garou shiver and sniff with glee. Or at least the equivalent. And the Philodox is not above playing matchmaker.
It is plain in his gait as he escorts Ingrid to them:
This one he does not mind. This little wolf with its stinger blade, he does not mind one bit. He remembers a joke about a stinger that he'd heard Tamsin tell recently, one of the many jokes Jack does not yet understand. He will have to tell her the story and ask her to tell it again.
It probably won't help.
It is to Calden's place that he takes her, recalling the last word the Uktena and Fianna had left with him. That of the many places they lay their head, as scattered as the fogs over the mountains and concrete valleys of Denver, that's where they'll be.
And it is with a purpose. They are in need of cleansing. Jack the most. The side of his sweatshirt is caked with dried blood and the fishy smell some might be able to identify as fresh snake venom. A lot of it. Most of its effects have been neutralized, but the necrotized flesh is still struggling to close. Give it a day and he should be whole again.
If he cared about being perfect he might've gotten braces or shaved more often. He might do something about being butt ugly. He cares more for his soul.
Then he'll have a story to tell the Galliards. For them to make epic and sing.
Ingrid
The woman that walks with Jack is shorter by an inch or two, but smaller and slimmer. Somehow, she seems more dangerous. Her presence is unsettling in a way that is wholly different from Rage. Rage is power, anger, ferocity. Ingrid is different. The humans that see her give her a wide berth. Somehow, when they look at this elegant, classy woman in her plainclothes - sky blue short-sleeved shirt with a wide, wide neckline, skinny black jeans tucked into black leather ankle-boots as fashionable as they are sensible - they think of wilder things. She is a jungle cat in human skin, always ready to pounce and tear out someone's jugular with her flat, human teeth.
This feeling she gives off, it's not helped by the way she moves, with a predatory, preternatural grace. It always feels like she's stalking something, although now she seems more sedate. The predator has hunted. The humans are safe for another day.
She should smell terrible. Jack does, in fact he smells worse than usual. He smells like sulfur and feces and old dead things. He smells like the sewer they've both recently vacated, though perhaps also like the wind of his having traveled by motorcycle. Ingrid smells like nothing. Not like the sewer, not like perfume, not like sweat or skin or blood.She is a phantom to the senses.
They need to be cleansed, he'd said, and he knew someone who could do it. That had been the lure to get her to point her little black Nissan in this direction. She stops in a doorway on the way in, stops and looks around. Her hair is short and dark with sun-lightened highlights of lighter brown and falls around her heart-shaped face in choppy segments. Her eyes are hidden by a pair of very large, very round, very dark sunglasses, obscuring her expression as she takes in her surroundings.
Tamsin
The fianna kinsman's place is a large ranch - rugged construct of stone and wood, cresting a low hill and spilling down the back side. Out've Denver, proper. All been here forever part of the land. This blood's here to stay, the place seems to say, was here before and'll be here after. When the biker and his new friend rock up, covered in ichor and dried blood and stench, Jack'll know - Tamsin will have made clear, at the least - that best-thing to do is to go around back and be polite because that's where the entrance to the guest rooms are and because Calden's dad is a venerable elderly guy who deserves respect and to be avoided - uh, not bothered. They don't have to actually try the back (sliding glass, perhaps?) door to see if it's unlocked because Fog's darlings are - conveniently - already outside in the middle of plotting, planning, and otherwise devising.
They are, of course, deep in argument discussion. Tamsin's standing with her right arm folded across her chest, her left elbow resting on her right fist, and her left hand punctuating whatever she's saying. Her gaze is even more distant than usual, all dream-drenched, far-and-away.
"Okay, if we do the back-and-forth thing, which I think'll be good, because it'll build so you don't even need to understand the words, y'know? But if we do that, then we're trading off roles, and I think I should do Jack and you should do Avery." (This is, the covert sharpening of a glance beneath suddenly drooping eyelashes would say, only partly because Tamsin is shy and stage-frighty about trying to emulate the Silver Fang.) "Though," a frown-line appears between her eyebrows. "That leaves the Wretched piece of unsexed vomitous maggot-victim with a gut like lard found itself a poem to fester-nest in - oh! Shit, okay! What about we just trade-off being the bad guy, so when you're Av, I'm him, and when I'm Jack, you're - "
" - Jack?"
Tamsin is not the most perceptive of Gaia's wolves, but now that she's seen him she's seen him. Or maybe it wasn't so much that she saw him and Ingrid first as she smelled them (or, uh, Jack) and started to say Hector a little less stench realism the performance doesn't need that and that caused her to look around and: The transformation in her perception as she takes in the a) embattled appearance and the b) companion means she carries herself a little differently, too, straighter and more alert. The flick of her glance includes Ingrid, and Tamsin studies her a little more closely than Jack, trying to place the story that brought them here before they start telling it, before the study she was making of them ends in a little glance toward Hector. Because he's alpha, see, and body language shows it.
"And friend. Does it look worse than it is?"
Implied: Are you still hurt?
Hector
This is the first time Hector has been to the White homestead since hearing of it. Must have been he wanted to actually meet the man who'd invited them out there before he started crashing on his couch and figured the Cherry Creek Trail slaughter-fest was enough of an icebreaker to warrant the trip out there at a last.
Jack and Ingrid arrive after he's tiptoed through the place oohing and aahing over all of the swank stuff inside. After he's suggested they pilfer the linen closets for sheets for costumes and been shot down. After he's been outside with his hair up all afternoon and now that they're deep into negotiations and it looks like he's going to be the one stood up in front of both septs at the next moot impersonating a lady lawgiver of Falcon he'd better take it down.
So the first time the Shadow Lord is properly introduced to the alpha of Celduin he is barefoot with jeans rolled halfway up his shins, wearing a faded REAGAN / BUSH '84 t-shirt with the sleeves cut off and pulling an elastic band out of his hair. Shaking it out and brushing it with his fingers so he can properly emulate the blonde's shampoo-commercial locks.
And then Tamsin spies Jack and Hector looks over fast, eyes narrowing and nostrils flaring. The latter brings instant regret. He coughs.
"Ugh! Dude!--"
Does it look worse than it is?
"Did you get in a fight with a garbage truck?"
He can see he's hurt and probably mildly tainted but he picks his way across the grass towards them anyway.
Jack
"Jack," he grunts in the affirmative when Tamsin spots him and says his name. Well, maybe Jack'd hoped to be able to get clean before telling the story. But if he's being accused of chasing a garbage truck or getting hit by one (Jack doesn't quite get the joke) he decides to settle that first.
"Ain't that bad," he begins. And it ain't (isn't). It doesn't seem to slow his walk or have effected his mental faculties. He doesn't even wince. That's just his face. The wound is just... there and is having a greater effect on them than it is on him.
"Had to swim to get to the shit," saying it with that veteran's intonation he'd learned from Pops. "Through a river. Of shit," the smell of him making the transition from proverbial to actual fairly easy. It's like he's going to begin the tale, like he's going to tell them it in Smell-O-Vision, but he is not a Galliard, no, so the next part isn't as graphic as the first part smells.
"Got sent by the Sept. Fuckin' snake. Big fuckin' snake. Been huntin' people. Dead fuckin' snake," pulling up the side of his sweatshirt to show where two half-dollar-size puncture wounds have stopped bubbling, liquified flesh erupting out in chunks when he pokes his side.
"Battlesister," not packmate, no, but someone he'd fought alongside and brought here. Here, instead of the Sept where there were any number of other Garou who would be happy to cleanse them.
Looking up at the two, Jack then tosses his head toward Ingrid. There's a certain modesty to his way, now that he's pulled her into the telling. Letting the Galliards take rough dictation for later polishing end embellishment, he does not speak of his own deeds. Saying the snake's dead is enough boasting for him. "She done snuck better than me. Didn't see her. Put a sword in it like a shish kabob from behind. Pinned it. Easy after that," and then, he looks to Hector with a wild and toothy grin that breaks out on his face.
"...Dude," and it isn't a mockery of his usage. He's just stolen it. Added it to his vocabulary. He'll figure out proper usage later.
Ingrid
She'd thought about turning back once it was obvious they weren't going to stop at the city building for a cleansing. She thought about turning back when they passed the Mile High Stadium as they continued north.
But then the road got its claws in her, and Ingrid was driving and driving with the top of her convertible down and the wind in her hair, making the short choppy locks more than a little windswept. She thought, briefly, about passing the Gnawer on his motorcycle and disappearing northward. She hasn't been there yet, hasn't explored it or anything. So far she's only been south and a little to the west. But she didn't pass him.
And now they're here and she's examining the fences and the size of the homestead. The dogs these places usually have keep far away from her. They growl at her a little, but they don't get too close, because even though they've never seen the movie, wouldn't understand it even if they did, they sort of get the feeling this woman will kick them on the nose if they get too close just like transformed-Ursula in the wedding scene of The Little Mermaid. Maybe that would happen. Probably it wouldn't. But it feels like it would.
Ingrid doesn't concern herself with the things that are afraid of her. Her head turns from the house to the backyard to the young man shaking out his hair like he expects to be sprayed with water and maybe start frolicking about. This is not a hair commercial, though. It's the backyard area of a ranch, and they've interrupted something.
Her head stays fixed on Hector, the Alpha, and she steps a bit closer. If Jack is modest with her, well, that's just to be expected, isn't it. She inclines her head, though, gracious when he gives the abbreviated telling of the story of their meeting. "I started it. He ended it." It is a statement, matter-of-fact. These are not the people to come to for elaborate, embellished tales. When she speaks, her words carry the hint of accent, the sort of thing that suggests English isn't her first language but it's been her main language for a long, long time.
"Ingrid Kim, Dances With the Hurricane, Cliath Shadow Lord Ragabash." The introduction is given with another respectful, if slight, inclination of her head.
Calden
Calden
rides up
on a horse.
Seriously: this is how the Stagsman who owns the house, the ranch, and the animals on the ranch shows up. He rides up on the back of a big chestnut, and it's too bad Eva's little girl Ellie isn't around because she. would be. beside herself to see what a Genuine Cowboy™ Calden really is. He has the reins looped around the saddlehorn, his dusty trailworn boots parked square in the stirrups; guides the animal with his knees, one hand relaxed atop the horn. A rope coiled from the back of the saddle. A battered stetson low on his brow, blue jeans on his ass, and his shirt-sleeves rolled up in deference to the heat.
He sees them a long way off. He doesn't change his pace, though. He comes straight at the small terrace on the lower level, just outside the guest suite, and when the chestnut starts to veer toward the barn he's accustomed to Calden guides him right back.
Some twenty or thirty feet away, the horse doesn't want to come any closer. It shies, it dances, its nostrils flare and its eyes roll. It's the rage. It's the smell. Calden steadies it with a hand on the side of the neck, the brim of the hat and the angle of his head hiding all but his jaw, his mouth. That mouth is set. It's frowning. When he has the animal under control, he sits back in the saddle and his eyes find Tamsin.
"Who the hell are these people?"
-- is what he asks her. Which might give her a sense of his reaction to all the hubbub on what amounts to his back porch. Not to mention: the stink. The mess.
Hector
If Jack thought Hector went stupid-eyed over the motorcycle, his reaction to seeing someone actually riding a horse isn't too far off. Or maybe his eyes go wide and he half jumps back at the idea that the horse is going to spook and charge at them and kick someone in the jaw.
It's short-lived though because he and Tamsin are guests at Calden's place and it's like - oh shit, was he actually not included in the couch-crashing invite, were they supposed to leave Jack tied up someplace else, no stupid use that lump three feet from your ass there are tainted-ass stink-beasts on the property his family's owned for like a bazillion generations and his father's inside watching golf or whatever it is old guys do in the afternoon and doesn't even know they're out here...
And Calden's talking to Tamsin and she's his tribesman but Hector holds up a finger like to ask for permission to interrupt. Realizes before he even opens his mouth how he must look to a grown man out working in the heat of the day with his pants all rolled up and his hair down and no shoes on his stupid feet. He looks like some hippie kid who doesn't understand things like property rights and paying taxes and his mouth hangs thinking-about-speaking open and Calden and whoever else is looking at him can see his thoughts run from excuse-making to empathy to contrition over the course about three seconds before he closes his mouth to regroup.
Hector lowers that airborne finger and ties his hair back quick and says while rolling down his goddamn pant legs, "I'll take them to the Sept to clean them up. Sorry, Mister White. Won't happen again, sir."
Leaves Tamsin to explain who the hell those people are and makes eye contact with Jack before jerking his head towards the road like to say Come on without opening his mouth again.
Ingrid
A pure bred kin of Stag rides up on a horse and it's a good thing Ingrid's still over by the gate. If the smell and the Rage are enough to make it dance in place, proximity to the predator in their midst would surely cause the beast to throw its rider.
As it is, she watches and anyone could tell from her posture if not her face half-hidden by sunglasses that she's unimpressed with the display. And she becomes less impressed by the second. Her head snaps to Jack.
"We weren't expected." It's not a question, it's flat statement. He brought her way out to bumfuck nowhere, uninvited, for...this.
Her head turns toward the man on the horse. Ingrid slides one foot back through the dirt, bends at the waist, throws one arm back in a flamboyant bow. "Apologies for the tresspass." Smoothly, fluidly, the bow becomes a stand becomes a pivot, and the Ragabash is headed back through the gate.
The stench does not lessen with her leaving. It was all Jack. When Ingrid Kim leaves a place, the only thing she leaves behind is the memory of her presence. Sometimes, not even that.
Tamsin
What Tamsin lacks sometimes in awareness of her surroundings, she makes up for in awareness of people. It's not that she was consciously going to really-for-real ask Jack and Ingrid to recount what happened right-away now (!), but when Jack starts in she sure doesn't stop him, because rocks could come out've nowhere and kill everybody, and then she'd never have known, and that would be the worst thing ever. Ingrid - she's still eyeing, and it's truth of the kind written down in books for people to know down the ages that the mention of a sword brightens her up a little.
"Okay I'm gonna get some sage, Heck you wanna?" It's not unfinished so much as abbreviated so much because she knows she doesn't need to over-use words. She's also not 100% on what'd be the best place to hose Jack off and to cleanse him n' Ingrid. Inside never seems right for that kind of thing, but! But that's what the umbra is for, isn't it? Yessir, it is, and that way there won't be any shit and snake venom and dissintegrating flesh tracked through the guest room.
But then there's an introduction, and then there is Calden on a horse: a horse who is having a bad, bad reaction.
Tamsin used to like books about horses. She went through that phase. She was nine, maybe. She was a pretty good reader, but for a solid month or two all she'd read were books with horses. Then she read Black Beauty and never wanted to read a horse book again, ever, so she widens her eyes at the poor horse's reaction and maybe admires what strikes a book-fed Fianna girl as good riding, and then she starts to feel a hint that tell-tale Dad Just Found You With Dylan Mantchev or Caught By Police Officer While Picking A Car Door's Lock With A Hanger (So It Really Looks Hard To Explain) apprehension.
"You know Jack and Hector," she says, "And this is Ingrid. They need…"
But Hector puts his finger up, and she shoots him a wary look, like she's not 100% she wants him to say something, but when you have a choice between two wolves and you choose to follow one instead of the other you (if you are Tamsin Hall) remember your choice and act like he's your leader, which he is.
Calden
"No," Calden interrupts, furrowing, "you don't have to do that. Your hygiene isn't the problem, and I didn't ask you to leave."
Hard to tell, the way he's sitting up in the saddle and the way that horse is dancing nervously under him, but Calden might just heave a sigh. Then he leans forward, stacking his forearms on the saddlehorn, and frowns down at the youngsters. They all look like youngsters to him. Few Garou survive to old age, but it's not that. Some just seem young.
Then the woman by the gate speaks up. Calden's head turns; he squints at her through the afternoon glare. Then he points a gloved hand in her direction
"She hit it on the head. 'Unexpected'. That's the problem. I'm a son of Stag. I keep the covenant of hospitality. But a host has a right to know who his guests are before they start helping themselves to his home and everything in it. Otherwise, the line between guest and trespasser blurs.
"Tamsin told me she and her packmate would be staying here occasionally over the next month. There are four people here. I know Tamsin. I know Jack. I seem to remember Jack is a packmate. I saw this fellow on Independence Day. I assume he's another packmate. And I don't know you at all, Miss." He cuts a glance to Tamsin as she introduces the fourth. "Ingrid," he amends.
He has to stop here. He has to wheel his mount around in a tight circle, sidestep it a few paces one way and then the other. The kinsman leans over the chestnut's neck, murmuring to it, unwrapping the reins from the horn and rewrapping them loosely around his fist as he brings the horse back to a standstill.
"Let's start again," he says, "from the beginning. I'm Calden White, of the Fianna."
Ingrid
Ingrid starts to walk off and Tamsin's kinsman tries to stop her. The young man whose name Calden doesn't have does stop in his tracks, not sure if he's still leading the others away to the Caern, and slowly turns around to face the Fiann. Calden has the Garou's full attention as he speaks but then Hector clears his throat to speak up. He should have done that to start out instead of tearing ass off the property. That's what he's supposed to be doing as the alpha, right? Leading?
Anyone looking at him can tell he has no clue what he's doing.
Tamsin is the only one who can tell by looking at him that he's silently cursing someone who ought to be here right now.
"My name's Hector Echoes-of-the-Lost," he says, standing up straighter. "I'm a Cliath Moondancer of the Uktena. Tamsin Cinder-Song, Furious-Lament and Jack Law-in-War--" He points between Tamsin and Jack. "--are my packmates and I think I was the packmate she said might stay with you before?"
He looks to Tamsin for confirmation but carries on regardless of the answer. May have to point at Ingrid's retreating backside or the empty space where she'd been a moment before but he still introduces her.
"That's Ingrid Dances-With-The-Hurricane. I haven't shook her hand or anything yet but, uh. You know. She was at the Moot. I was totally paying attention. She's one of Thunder's. Jack says they were off on official sept business and came back victorious but tore-up. We weren't gonna take them inside or stay or anything, Jack here is a Bone Gnawer and wolf-born and thinks cell phones are for chewing and had to come find me and I don't want to cleanse them here because it involves a bunch of dancing around and burning-stuff and your horse is already spooked--" Pause for breath. "--so it was more like Jack was just rolling up and tootling the horn and we were jumping in and bailing anyway. You know. If he had a car. Which he doesn't."
Ahem.
"So we'd better get going."
Calden
This time Calden definitely sighs. It's somewhere between exasperated and remorseful. He lifts the hat from his head, hangs it over the saddlehorn, and scrubs a hand through his hair. Scrubs a dusty glove through his hair, actually.
"Nice to meet you all," he says. "And the horse'll survive. This isn't his first time around wolves.
"You don't need to get lost. You really don't. If you need to wash up, there's a shower in the guest room. If you need a place to rest and recup' from coming back victorious and torn up, there's a bed in there. Try not to bleed on the mattress. If you need food and drink, there's food and drink in the fridge. If you need any of these things, ever, just ask. I'm not being the most ... gracious host right now." There's a ghost of a smile; some private little joke. "Or even a polite one. And I know that. But I will help anyone of the Nation that needs it, any time."
A pause.
"There's a stand of trees about a quarter-mile that way." He nods northeast. "Stream runs through it. Might be a good place to dance around and holler. Come back when you guys are done. Take a shower. Have dinner before you go. I'll have one of the ranchhands drive you guys."
Hector
For a second the man perched on horseback gets a look from the Philodox. Like Jack doesn't quite understand what claim he has on this place, on all this open space that is legally White land. To Jack, it looks like it might even be the horse that has more of a claim.
The Philodox recognizes a different law.
But he does glance at Tamsin as she gives introductions. He's still leaking clotted flesh from his side and down to his jeans, but at least he doesn't seem to be bleeding anymore.
He finally looks like he's going to pipe up when Hector does. Thankfully. Because who knows what he would have to say. But Calden has seen this game before, when Jack starts like he's going to say something, but someone else speaks instead. Not as confrontational as the night they'd met Fern the tainted cub. Quiet beginning of words and phrases like growls he never intends on finishing anyway. "I'ma packm-," Rackin'-frackin'-varmint-Yosemite-Sam, if you're a Looney Tunes fan. "We all ain't goin'-," says the bloodied Bone Gnawer, finally letting the fabric fall back over that open wound to his side. "'House nice and I ain't-," this a note of deferment in his scratched washboard of a voice. Of deferment, but not much.
There is a stink, but there isn't much mess, the back of a motorcycle having gone far toward drying on the caked human waste. "I jus'-" and he's only made it a step or two from that gate by the time Hector has started apologizing and explaining and introducing. Ingrid's bow and words finally get an answer. Jack is starting to look frustrated. Calden had seen this before as well. And he finally withdraws, shutting up as Hector says what he can't nicely.
Hector had already started leading them out.
So when Ingrid turns around to leave, and his alpha is already making toward doing so - seeing as he's the one he'd come to for cleansing - Jack gives a sniff as he looks around the land, then back up at Calden, then down at the horse, before finally heading on out as well. "Hos-p-frickin'-hell-these-people-talitly," grumbling again.
Ingrid
Ingrid had started to leave, yes. She had followed Jack out here first because there was mention of cleansing, then because of her love of the open road, and then finally because well she was already all the way out here. But instead of cleansing she found herself inadvertently trapped into dishonorable trespass. On the property of a kinsman of someone else's tribe.
Cue the long, drawn out, internal sigh.
The only sign of her exasperation had been a faint edge to her statement to Jack.
So she turned to go, but then everyone started chiming up in her wake. Calden says it's the unexpectedness that bothers him. That his offer of hospitality had been offered to one, maybe two people who had then extended it and extended it on their own is not lost to Ingrid. And it does not sit well with her, not at all. Hector speaks up, adjusting the fit of his mantle of leadership, trying to get it to set a little more comfortably on his shoulders and finding it uncomfortable, anyway, but he tries. That's what stops Ingrid at the gate. That he tries. Hector introduces and explains. Says they better get going.
And then Calden extends his offer of hospitality. Ingrid's shoulders tighten and her mouth tenses. The rest of her expression is obscured by those overlarge sunglasses of hers. It's one thing to offer and accept genuine hospitality. It's another when the hand that offers it has been sort of mostly forced into it.
Then she smiles. The bow she offers him is slight, an angling of her upper body at the waist. "Thank you, Mr. White, but for my part at least that won't be necessary. Perhaps sometime in the future we may try this again." Her words are polite and courteous, until the this last which is made of ice. "Properly."
This entire affair had been approached all wrong and she found herself an unwitting participant. The most she can do now to salvage her honor is to respect the territory of this kinsman in the only way she can right now. By leaving it.
Hector
Hector looks sufficiently rattled by the time Calden extends the offer. The young man can stand up in front of a Sept full of complete strangers all higher ranked and judging him and he'll gladly embarrass the hell out of himself if it serves the purpose of the story and will make someone else look good. As far as goofing-off in the name of storytelling goes he has had ample practice. His pack was mostly tricksters when he joined them.
A part of him knows he needs to stop goofing off though. The knowledge that he managed to just-barely salvage Ingrid's first impression of him is no reassurance.
"Okay," he says to Calden, and he smiles a flicker-quick almost-grin that takes care not to show teeth because that's a sign of all sorts of things to his people. From where he sits all Calden can see is that the kid is embarrassed. "Thank you, sir."
With that he throws an arm over Jack's shoulders and marches him off. Shoots a look at Tamsin like to say gee thanks a lot even though it wasn't her fault. It's cut short by his inhaling too deep too close to Jack and coughing the cough of someone who's almost lost his lunch.
"Holy," he says and takes his arm off his packbrother as the lupus is grumbling, pushes him away playful and without force. "Hey, next time you see a Highlander riding towards us on a freakin' horse, warn me, would you?"
Calden
Calden's seating the hat back on his head when Jack grumbles something about hospitality and these fuckin people. It arrests Calden's motion for a second. He looks at Jack, a frank, level regard that holds a moment longer than most people would be able to bear.
Then he cuts to Ingrid, who is bowing. Which of course makes Calden tug the brim of his hat in response. "Miss," he says.
Off she goes. And off go Hector and Jack -- at least for the moment -- which leaves just him and Tamsin. Calden clicks his tongue at the big gelding, turning it around toward the stables.
"Can you stick around a minute?" he says to Tamsin. "Let me put Tanner back in his stall and we'll have a word, all right?"
And off he goes, too.
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