Participants:
| Scene Title | Sciontology 101 |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | When Scrivner and Vette bump into Richard and all of his questions, Scrivvie has to explain a few basics… Like when a Daddy god and a mommy mortal love each other very much… |
Battery Park - Lower Manhattan - New York City
Ringed by statues and monuments, this park is named after the cannon that were once stationed here. A swath of green on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, it is an escape from the bustle of the city. Battery Park is as far south as you can go in Manhattan. It offers an expanse of green from which to view the harbor and the Statue of Liberty. The 23-acre park is where the colony of new Amsterdam first began more than three centuries ago. The skyline of southern Manhattan and Wall Street is clearly visible from the park, the huge buildings dominating the view to the north and east. The trees do often hide the view, however, growing thickly around many sections of the park. Looking the other way is the harbor and Liberty Island, where the Statue of Liberty stands out to sea. During the day, flocks of tourists can be seen, putting money into telescopes to see the famous statue. Many choose to venture down to the Port and onto the ferry-boats which shuttle vistors back and forth to Ellis and Liberty Islands. Off to the north, at the edge of the Park, a huge building stands serving no purpose other than pumping air into the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel.
It's a very chilly evening in New York right now, the sort of night one wants to wear a coat for while enjoying the city lights. Not that Rufus Scrivner is paying particularly rapt attention to the lights that leave the black skies with a rather strange, orangey glow. No, right now, he's returning from another venture into Ellis Island. He has a little ongoing project there that he likes to keep an eye on, and occasionally, he goes back to check on it. Now, he could take a ferry, but tourists don't usually go out to the island this late. So. The Scion is carrying Vette in his arms as he lands in the park, glancing quickly around. He /flew/ from the island to the park. Beneath the shelter of a tree, he makes his landing and gently sets down Vette, then he straightens and smoothes down the sleeves of his long, black trenchcoat. "I think it's safe to say," he quietly says, speaking to the lady, "that we can just leave that site in peace and monitor it remotely from here on out. I don't see any changes coming anytime soon, not after all these weeks of quiet."
"Yeah—I really can't figure out what to do with the information we've gathered recently," Vette says, shaking her head. "None of it seems to lead to a new course of action at all, unless you thought of one."
Who's that coming across the park? It's just some punk teenager, a tiny orange gleam coming from the cigarette that he's smoking, his jacket leather with the collar popped up in that pretentious way - or maybe he's just cold, it is a little chilly. He's one of the only ones that notices the people flying down into the park, and he stares for a few moments before heading over in their direction. Richard wouldn't want to seem desperate or fanboyish or anything by /running/ their way.
Rufus has had a lot of bad luck with punks lately. So much. Icy blue eyes flicker to the movement of shadows, catching sight of Richard in peripheral vision, and he turns his head to get a better look at the young man. Drawing in a breath, Scrivner straightens his shoulders and tugs again at his trench coat, till it's draping comfortably, tied at his waist. He doesn't walk away, and he certainly doesn't run. And remember that Vette is usually oblivious to things, especially explosions, he reaches out his hand to touch her elbow and murmur, ever so quietly, "I think we've been spotted, my dear."
Vette starts, and looks around, and misses the sight of Richard three times. She even looks straight up, as if expecting him to come from the sky. "Oh hells bells," she murmurs. "We haven't even done anything new yet. Do you think he decided we wouldn't give up?"
"Hey," Richard calls out as he draws nearer with hands tucked into his pockets, his tone somewhere between aggressive and defensive, as if he expected them to laugh at him for so much as talking to them, "You two were flying. I saw it." Yes, that's an accusation. Fortunately, there's no laws against it, unless one considers an airspace violation.
"I cannot begin to say," Rufus very quietly muses. "It could simply be his minions have stupidly decided another challenge is in order. Who can tell?" When the young man opens his mouth, he coolly arches an eyebrow and takes the slightest step forward, slipping his own hands into the pockets of his coat. His position puts him slightly in front of Vette, clearly protective. "I won't deny that," he calls back to Richard, watching him closely, ready to draw the sword sheathed across his back if the kid reaches for a weapon of his own. "I suggest you forget you saw anything. Go home."
Vette's actions are a bit hard to see from behind Scrivner, but she merely arches an eyebrow expectantly at the kid. She lets Rufus handle the talking to the potential hostile, but looks like someone has coiled her into a spring and left her there, ready to explode.
"Yeah, 'cause that's going to happen." Richard comes to a halt a polite distance away, where 'polite' is 'I don't think he could jump me from there before I could react'. The young man's arms fold across his chest, a brow lifting as he looks at the two suspiciously, "You're, like, some of those… god people. That they have on the news these days. Amiright?"
"If you want to believe in that sort of thing," Rufus carefully says, "then I can see where you might believe I am one of those." He flicks a glance back at Vette, then he turns to refocus his eyes on Richard, arching an eyebrow.
"Just say no to drugs," Vette chirps up cheerfully. Whether this is the explanation she's offering for flying or whether it's a public service announcement because he's announced that they're god-people and thus might listen is /anyone's/ guess.
Richard exhales a snort of breath at the drugs comment, flicking ash off the tip of his cigarette. "Uh huh. Well, you're not freakin' Criss Angel, so I'm guessing so," he says, firmly convinced of his conclusion in the way that only teenagers can be, "So what's your deal, anyway? There's all sorts of weird shit going down. You got some kind've feud with the Jesus Freaks or something?"
Rufus' eyes narrow, and he sways forward as if he would take a step towards the younger man, but he ends up rocking back on his heels. "You have a most confrontational manner of speech that I find… aggravating, at best," he drily states. "I'll tell you frankly that it's leaving me feeling less than cooperative with you. Who are you and why are you asking? If you're here to try and challenge me to some sort of duel, I really advise against it."
Vette just stares at this kid like she's really not at all sure what to make of him, and is now studying him as if he is some quite interesting life form that might be worth cataloguing, examining in its natural habitat, or quite possibly sticking to a butterfly board with a very thick pin.
"What?" Richard gives Rufus the sort of look someone would give a person uttering complete gibberish, "/Duel/ you? Dude, you can fly, you'd just drop something on my head or something. Why the fuck would I want to /duel/ you?"
There's a moment or two of hesitance, as realisation dawns on Rufus. Some of the aggression in his stance relaxes, enough so that he no longer looks as if he's about to step forward and start dishing out corporal punishment. "You might be amazed at the stupidity that I have encountered," is all that he says in answer. "So who are you? Why /do/ you want to know about us?"
When Rufus relaxes, Vette does, and she pulls her jean jacket a bit closed as she relaxes her stance. She blinks, owlishly, a couple of times. "Oh. My. He actually is a kid," she blurts out rather vaguely. "What a pleasant change."
"Hey!" Richard slants a glare at Vette, "I am not a /kid/. I've been driving for two years now, girlie, so watch it." In teenager years, that's practically forever. A huff, and he looks back at Rufus with a frown, taking another drag off the cigarette before replying, "I just— there's all this weird shit goin' on, and weird people, and people are talking about angels and shit, and I'm just curious, alright?"
A few seconds pass where Rufus silently debates it. Tell the kid? Or walk away now? Well, Hell. The existence of Scions is already all over the news. Quite a few have been publicly outed. Looking back over his shoulder, he shrugs at Vette, and then he looks back around. "Calm down," he levelly states. "I don't tolerate anyone speaking unkindly to my girlfriend. She is not trying to insult you." Sheesh. Teenage insecurity. "When you get to be my age, someone calling you young is surely going to be a compliment. I suppose there's no harm in telling you some things. Have you ever heard of the Titans before?"
"Girlie?" Vette blinks, tasting the word a moment before she simply shakes her head. She sits down on a nearby tree stump and takes out a dagger and a whetstone. The dagger looks bronze, but she begins to slowly and carefully sharpen the thing, all without any apparent hint of real threat. Instead, she just looks rather like she's getting lost in thought.
"Well, don't call me kid, then," Richard decrees, his head tilting a little to one side as Rufus asks that question. His brow furrows a little, then, "What, like— the Tennessee Titans? Or, wait, like that old Harryhausen flick with the robot owl and the big green dude at the end?"
Walking slowly about, Rufus comes to stand slightly off to one side and behind Vette, glancing at what she's doing. "No," he says, able to refrain from rolling his eyes this time. "Think more… what is the phrase you Yanks use? /Oldschool./ Classical mythology sort of Titans. The nasty chaps who are monstrous and god-like in their powers, who strive against the gods to utterly annihilate creation. They have no understanding of compassion, honour or justice. The truly dangerous ones, however, are far from mindless. For now, they remain in their own realms, but there is a war between the gods and the Titans, and it is spilling over into our earth realm. The monsters who find their way here are called Titanspawn."
"And only some of them look like angels," Vette puts in mildly. "Others look like demonic bears or lizard dogs or harpies or all sorts of things. You really ought not walk around by yourself, really. Mortals have little defense. Why there are these women who will eat your eyes just to maintain their monthly beauty treatment."
"You know my last girlfriend?" A quip at the last comment, before Richard turns a frown in the direction of Rufus, taking one more long drag on the cigarette before dropping it, grinding it out under the toe of his tennis shoe. "So there's a bunch of gods, and a bunch of.. anti.. gods? And they spit out monsters."
"That's one way of looking at it, yes," Rufus says slowly, eyes flickering down to follow the cigarette's fall to the ground. Then he looks up again, evenly searching out Richard's gaze. "Those who call themselves Scions are the half-mortal children of the gods. There are many different pantheons spread across the world. Some are Norse, or Greek… Some are Egyptian, Japanese or Chinese. There are certainly more, but those are the more common ones to be found here in New York."
Vette, for her part, is just listening to Rufus try to set the kid straight now. She puts the dagger away after testing its edge on her thumb, then starts scratching a diagram in the dirt. She doesn't like what she's done, for she soon brushes it away with her shoe and begins again.
"Cylons?" Wasn't there some sci-fi show about that? Richard watches the other man intently, his brow furrowing as he tries to work through all of this — the sort of thing that's definately alien to his upbringing so far. "So, what, these 'gods' like — dropped you all down here to fight the monsters?"
"No, not from Battlestar Galactica," Rufus says with a sigh. Is his accent /that/ thick? Or is it just the kid? "Scions. S-c-i-o-n-s. We were not dropped. We were…." Here his nose wrinkles with a touch of distaste. "… Well, you see, to make a Scion, a god or goddess takes a fancy to a mortal. There's some shagging involved, and nine months later, an infant is born who is half-divine and half-mortal. Powers do not manifest, typically, until around … well, your age. At that point, the divine parent grants unto his Scion a visitation, to tell him of his divine lineage, and to tell him of the threat of the Titans, and also to gift him with a few birthrights. Relics, in other words, that help him to use his divine powers."
Vette can't help it. When Rufus starts in on the birds and the bees of the Scions, she giggles. She presses her hand to her mouth to stop it, but his wrinkled nose and the way he's trying to get it all out with the and-nine-months-later strikes her as /hilarious./
It's probably just the kid. Or not a kid, depending on if you believe his argument on the matter. Richard listens to the man's words with a frown, for some reason, before glancing around the park warily as if looking for something. Not finding it, he only frowns all the more, looking back to Rufus and straightening, "Huh." That's the entirety of his opinion on the matter, apparently. Vette gets a glare as she laughs, but he doesn't say anything, lest he anger Flying British Man.
Rufus glances down at Vette, arching an eyebrow. Eventually, though, he smirks. He's far too fond of her to be aggravated. Very discreetly, or as discreetly as he can manage, he slips his hand from his pocket to lightly flick at her ear. Soon his eyes return to Richard, and that smirk gets wiped off his face. "Any other questions?"
That just makes Vette giggle more, and shake her head, but then she says, "Ah!" and gets down on her knees in the dirt to scrawl what looks a lot like advanced calculus meets ancient crap in a grand conglomeration of WTFBBQ.
"Um." Richard watches her scribbling in the dirt, then looks up to Rufus with a dubious expression, "…does she do that a lot? And, um. Why do some of the monsters look like angels, anyway? And why are they killing teenagers?" A thread of anger winds through his tone at the last, pulling himself up as if it were a personal affront, something dangerous glinting behind his eyes.
Rufus isn't sure how to answer Richard. "Ermm…" he murmurs. "I'm… not entirely certain. Ah, are you all right?" He reaches out a foot to lightly nudge at Vette, unwilling to say her name in front of this strange kid. He shakes his head once, then looks up and answers, "They look like angels because they are… well, technically angels. I have heard many theories, but I don't know the truth. Some say they're from Jehovah, the Judeo-Christian god, who does not like the thought of other pantheons of gods worming in on his territory. Others say that the monotheistic God is nothing more than a Titan who's been masquerading as the one, true God, trying to steal worshippers from the rightful gods and bring about mankind's fall. Either way, they kill teenagers because these teenagers are Scions who are extremely vulnerable. Some have not even yet been visited by their divine parents and may not even realise what they truly are."
"Of course I am. I just had a breakthrough on something I'm trying to build," Vette says absently. To Richard, she adds, "That's another reason why you shouldn't be out alone. For all you know, you're an unvisited Scion or something."
"Y-yeah, right, as if," Richard protests, though there's a rather uncertain underlay to it as he glances around the park once more, "Alright, well, uh. Thanks for telling me all that shit, I'm sure you've got, y'know, god stuff to go do, so I'll let you gt to it."
For the longest moment, Rufus studies the kid. He sighs to himself, then he reaches into his coat and digs around in the inner breast pocket. He pulls out a scrap of paper and a pen, tears off a small piece, then scribbles down a phone number on it. Stepping forward, he offers it to the kid, and he says, "If you should see anything, such as more teenagers being attacked, you can reach me at this number to call for help. I'll come as quickly as I can."
Vette blinks as Ru gives out his number, but doesn't stop him. Nor does she offer her own. She just says, "I'm nearly always with him." And stands up, obliterating the stuff she's been doing on the ground and brushing off her knees.
The offering is considered with the suspicion that all adults get from teenagers, and then Richard almost reluctantly reaches out to accept it. "Alright. I think we can take care of it, though," he says with a sniff, tucking the paper very carefully away inside his jacket despite his words, "Anyway. I was just—curious."
"So you say," Rufus says evenly. "Well, now that our happy little chat is at an end, I shall bid you a good night." With that, the Englishman extends his crooked elbow to the lady in escort. "Shall we be off? I rather fancy a curry right now. There's got to be a decent shop around here somewhere."
"I would like a curry as well," Vette affirms, sliding her arm through his arm and linking it closely. "Especially one of those tofu curries they have at that one place." She's not a pure vegetarian, but she likes it when she can get it without causing a fuss.
A turn away from them, and Richard saunters off along through the park.
At least until he's far enough away that he realizes he's alone in the park, and hears a rustling in the bushes. Then he's jogging through the park in the direction of his motorcycle.
Once he's sure the kid is out of earshot, Rufus walks along the path, happy to make his own way through the city with the lady. "Well, that was … an odd conversation," he murmurs. "I wonder if we can expect to be accosted by any other people wanting explanations, should the public at large find out about us."
"I don't know," Vette says mildly. "It's more likely we'll be beset upon by a jealous mob of angry humans who fear and hate us. This isn't an age for reverence. This is an age of entitlement, where people immediately feel threatened if they perceive someone else as having more. I prefer staying quietwhen we can. In that instancenot much hope of that."
Richard has left.
"I'd rather never be discovered, but it's possible we already may have been outed," Rufus murmurs. "Granted, no one's contacted me at my office, harassing me. So they may not have attached our names to our faces. Still, we should be more careful than we are. If we can be. Sometimes there is no choice but to step up and fight when the unexpected strikes. Sometimes, there is no time to don a disguise."
"I know," Vette replies, shaking her head. "I think it's ok so long as we don't flaunt it. People who see is in a rescue are seeing us rescuing them. It seems like that would be different, somehow." She lays her head on his shoulder. "I worry for the world, though, Rufus. I worry when there's little better than glorified humans to watch out for it."
He slips his arm around her and turns his cheek to her hair, brushing against its softness and briefly closing his eyes. "The world shall have to make do, and we shall resolve to never back down, never surrender." Then Rufus kisses her upon the crown of her head, very lightly, and he smiles. "There's no point in worrying, my dear. You can only do the best you can."
"I merely mean that even our fathers and mothers are falliable," Vette says with a slight smile. "There's no omniscent force or—great moral value watching out for everyone. Only falliable thoughts and emotions, if tempered by great wisdom and age."
"Ahhhhh," he whispers. That he well understands. For a time Rufus is silent as he walks, mulling over that one, and eventually, he murmurs, "I have to wonder where the gods came from. Who was here before them? They cannot be infinite, can they? Not even all of the gods have all of the answers, Yvette. Who knows? Perhaps there is something or a group of somethings still out there that we cannot even begin to comprehend."
"For the world's sake, I hope there is," Vette says softly. "I look at the state of the world and think for heaven's sakewe have no business aspiring to manage any of it. And all of the civilizations our forefathers came from sort ofaren't much around."
"Try not to worry over it, my dear," Rufus murmurs, gently patting the arm linked around his. "Let /me/ deal with that. I want you to be happy, to concern yourself with your studies and tell me what this breakthrough you just had was all about. Please?" He leans in closer, unable to help a small, cheeky grin. "I love it when you speak Geek."
Vette /grins/ at him and purrs in his ear, "Well. When I calibrate the titanium and glass /just so/, it should be perfect to read…" she wets her lips and drops into a husky whisper. "Mononucleotides." She giggles, unable to keep it up. "Which means I might be closer to a device that can read the goo."
He can't help but laugh, keeping his voice low and quiet. "Oh, you send /shivers/ down my spine!" Rufus very quietly exclaims, eyes widening for a heartbeat for emphasis, his grin broad and toothy. He clears his throat, subduing his mirth to a smirk, and more seriously, he says, "Good. That is brilliant. Thank you, my dear."
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