Roy Talbot. Supposedly the former CEO of the Corps branch of Handlers. I...used to follow the rulebook. I don't know who I am anymore. I'll...get back to you on that.
The soft sounds of Big Data filtered through the sterile office, perpetuated by the holding cell below. The sound mufflers did little to stop the flow of music, but everything to block out the inevitable sound of screams.
Norman stood adjacent to the big windows, watching the world below. Angela and her team were out patrolling the Bay, looking for some trivial old god no doubt wallowing in the mud by the tepid water. Better for him, all things considered. His own team could effectively torture the small sect of undead below while he dealt with matters marginally more humane above.
His dark eyes circled the floor, following the thin scuff marks where shoes were dragged across tile, trails of lackadaisical blood danced in tandem with ash, and the occasional scratch in marble caught the sun, winking jovially. Norman took a long and considerable drag from his cigarette before grinding it out against the ashtray on the desk nearby, his fingers steady and his face unchanging.
The figure on the chair said and did nothing, as he—it—was in fact, unconscious.
“You know,” said Norman idly, to no one in particular—not the guards who flanked the two doors in and out and a third patrolled the elevators, nor to the frigid secretary standing attentively nearby, “I rather thought we’d lost you for a moment there. Which is what, I expect, Ms. Dourly wanted more than anything else. To keep you safe.” His steps crossed, one in front of the other, unhurried and patient. Slender fingers circled the air, extinguishing smoke with languid flicks of either wrist. “Which puzzles me—because she can’t have cared that much for you. She opposes almost everything you stand for, and yet…”
Norman’s eyes shifted across the prone figure’s face as he crouched before him.
Roy Talbot had never looked worse, but that may’ve been because the glamour was failing.
“Spells weren’t meant to hold up quite this long,” said Norman idly, selecting a pen from his suit breast pocket and lifting the other man’s hand with the end of it, examining the nails. The edges were warped; the weakening enchantment flickering across skin that fluctuated in base hue, threatening something tawnier than the ashen outer layer that looked less like flesh and more like a husk with each passing second. The Station’s disenchantment abilities were nothing short of extraordinary; stripping magic down little by little over time as the technological and counter-magical methods broke everything apart, analyzed it, and began disengaging energy from its source.
To put it in layman’s terms, the perimeter fed off magical outputs and leeched away at them until said perimeter “bled” folks dry.
Norman’s mouth hardened into a lean line of disagreement as he studied the disintegrating marionette strapped to the plain black chair. It’d all gone awry so abruptly, so horribly, that he couldn’t quite understand how it’d happened. Or why. Whether someone had tipped Roy off or sent him on his way; they’d tampered with the initial spells placed upon the figurehead, and as a result, everything was sloughing away—molasses-slow, but inevitable.
Might as well get it over with, then. Rip that bandaid clean off.
“I had been hoping this would be a relatively easy fix. A successful experiment. But no, I had to leave Brussels in the Springtime for your sake. Just because there’d been rumors of your return from the New York offices, and yet…” His tongue clicked; the safety released from a gun, against the back of his teeth. “You’ve nothing to show for it but convenient amnesia and a directionless purpose, and I must say, that does us all here a great disservice.” Norman propped a hand under his chin, staring at Roy.
“So what are we to do with you?”
There was a presto to his gesture, the flourish of removing a tablecloth without upsetting a single piece of silverware. One fell motion, accompanied by a disenchantment, sheared the spell from Roy’s skin. He was unmade; the vision of a white American male replaced by something else. An “other”, more battered and bewildered than even its scattered predecessor. In the wrenching of the glamor, Norman also yanked the restful repose from the captive on the chair somehow as well--he started so suddenly he nearly went nose over tail, chair and all.
"Where--am I." The room came into swirling, delirious view, cascading and clashing images kaleidoscoping in and out of focus. Two Normans slid seamlessly into one, the severe figure standing with his hands behind back, the ruined glamour rippling and disintegrating into cinders followed by nothing behind him. Every part of him hurt; felt raw, like his skin had been shed. He shook; a junkie’s shake, limbs refusing to collaborate with the steadiness he longed for. Everything felt too cold, too sudden, and the smell… the stagnant air was rich with chemicals. Roy swiveled as much as his banded arms allowed, glancing around the familiar-yet-not room with bleary eyes, trying desperately to force it all into focus. Trying to make it all make sense.
But like a word on the tip of one's tongue, the harder he tried to concentrate, the more it all continued slipping away from him.
"Welcome home, Mr. Talbot." Norman's smile was particularly cruel, edged inward by creases of laughter that refused to fully wrinkle his eyes with anything remotely warm. "It's been quite some time since last we spoke." Norman leaned into frame a little better; half-bending to come closer to Roy, who instinctively shifted back in his seat, tensing in his bonds. Norman's smile brightened, ever so slightly, dark eyes darting across Roy's face--his real face. A face that hadn't been seen in approximately...three and a half years.
"You were our most successful running experiment to date," said Norman idly, still crouched before Roy on the chair. The captive glanced sharply between Roy and the armed guards in the room, stomach plummeting. "And you gave us quite the fright when you up and vanished like that. You recalibrated yourself, no less, in the process...! Blew your own bloody brains out, more or less, trying to escape that troublesome puppy and his meddling kids. Tapping into forbidden powers, oh..." The "tsk" Norman emitted seemed to reverberate throughout the room.
"You know better, don't you?" Roy felt chilly sweat dot his neck, and squirmed a little where he sat. Norman blinked; reptilian slow, and nodded to himself almost imperceptibly, straightening up and adjusting the front of his suit. “Or you used to. You knew exactly what we wanted you to know, which is what I knew.” Norman tapped the side of his nose and strolled away a few steps, ambling amidst his preamble. Roy wet his lips and tasted copper, closing his eyes briefly to catch what little bearings he had.
Memories tried to come back to him from time to time. The past two years had been—difficult to piece together. Like most things before. And…sadly, after. His shattered jigsaw of a circumstance was ill-fitting—the pieces seemed all wrong, almost as if two different puzzles were mixed in with one another. He could remember—a pale woman; a Bridgette, with an icy blue stare and talons of bronze…Angela; vaguely—some soft, dark woman with soft, dark eyes and hands like two iron maces always commanding. Always ready for the next fight.
Another song from Big Data’s breakout hits filtered, muffled, up from below. Roy tensed as the sound interrupted his unsteady strain of thought, head cocked to one side. The room reeled, ugly and vacant, and he shut his eyes again, shivering.
“Where’s—wh…” Roy’s voice cracked. Hoarse and foreign. He was—remembering something else. Something less…pleasant, somehow, than the cold woman with the wrathful stare and the warm woman with the weapons for hands.
He was remembering…himself.
Except he was not himself. He was—commanding, totalitarian. He was—there were Cages, Cages full of people—tags, not people, tags don’t matter, people barely do, either—staring hungrily out at him. Zombies with their gray faces mashed against pristine steel bars, drooling filth onto themselves and to the floor. Vampires crawling out of the darkness on hands and knees; bleached of all color save their red, red mouths and their red, red eyes, shrieking and whimpering from starvation. Desperation. Witches hung from Celtic Knots blessed for the Trinity, their heads bowed forward under the backwash of holy water and oil meant to trap their magic under their skin and keep it dormant. Beaten into submission by all things holy, he was—
“Who are you?” Roy and Norman asked one another simultaneously. Norman smiled a little. He tapped a finger to the side of his nose. Roy, eyes fluttering and exhausted, tried in vain to make him stay in sharper detail. He wanted to—no. He had to remember this. This was important. He’d—
He’d done terrible things. And then—and then there’d been an…explosion, of some kind, he could still feel the ferocity of the fire beating heat into the sides of his face and ripping its flaming claws into his back. The fire had felt alive—it’d all felt so alive, so real.
He dreamed of it often. In fact, he realized [the longer he looked around, and around, and in the circles his vision and head swam in and out of] he dreamt of this office, too—his office. Or—
It was all for show, wasn’t it.
Suddenly everything came to a grinding halt.
And Roy looked into Norman’s eyes, and, deep in their darkness, he saw a man; a face, who was not himself.
And without warning, he started to scream. On the inside mostly, as it came to the surface in sharp, hurried breaths, each more desperate and blazing than the last.
“No--no...no, no, no no, no, no...”
“Oh, he gets it,” said Norman softly, crouching in front of the chair. “He gets it now, doesn’t he? The window dressing. The parlor trick. The grand finale. This was your debut, and you fucked it up royally, didn’t you, Roy? You may’ve been a great attempt at reformation, but you were a mediocre mirror of me and nothing of yourself; you see…” Norman rolled back on his heels, then onto the balls of his feet, oscillating absently as he watched Roy’s true face melt into an expression of abject horror. “I filled your head up with all the ideas they deemed appropriate for presentation. The adequate Handler; the sufficient and sophisticated leader. I made you who you are, after I directed our psychics department to scoop everything else. I’m the candle in your Jack-O-Lantern; Mr. Talbot. I chose everything in your life from your suits to your sentiments to your name.” Roy jerked in his bonds, suddenly much more awake than before.
“No--”
“All this time, you thought you were a real boy.” Norman’s smile creased anew, folding disbelief in with amusement neatly.
“No--!”
“Just because you couldn’t see the strings.” Roy’s heart jumped in his throat. He couldn’t think. What was his favorite color? He didn’t know. Who was the president? He didn’t know. Where was he—who, what was he?—this couldn’t be real. This was a dream. He was back in the New York recovery wards of—that hospital. Wasn’t he? This was a nightmare; a dream—something everyone told themselves when presented with the terrors of possibilities otherwise. His breath caught, sweat breaking out in a new wave across his brow and down his back. It was not unlike witnessing the incoming beeline of a meteor and being helpless to its collision course. He was beyond a deer in the headlights now; he was an elk in the line of fire. Fire.
Fire.
Everything burned. His eyes, his hands, his throat. Norman watched him squirm from his position not even three feet away, features slipping gradually into boredom, then pensive focus.
“Tell me what’s going on,” Roy was ranting, his voice slurred and frantic all at the same time. “Tell me everything, I just—I want to know. I want to know, who am I, who—are you? Why’ve you done this, where is—” Norman snapped his fingers.
And Roy focused.
“Follow my hands,” said Norman calmly. Two fingers rose together, one on each hand. They lifted, and they fell. Roy squinted, disoriented, but having something to pin his thoughts on. The fingers rose. And then they fell. They rose. And they fell. They rose. They fell. They…
“He has not even seen you,” Norman was reciting in a calm, clear metronome to the rhythm of his movements, “he who gave you your mortality; and you, so small, how can you guess…”
“…hhhhis courage or his loveliness?” Roy’s mouth moved almost of its own accord. His initial panic had faded, slipping back under something a bit like a glamour and more like a blanket. This…this was familiar. Familiar was good. Roy needed something familiar that wasn’t a nightmare of…faces were fading, too, now. They were being washed away by the slow, hypnotic pull of words he’d heard before more times than he truly knew. A lullaby in the form of a war-time poem, dragging him down into the darkness.
“Yet in my quiet mind I pray,” Norman murmured; watchful—
“He passed you on the darkling way,” mumbled Roy, inflection and fear evaporating. “His death, your birth, so much the same--”
“And holding you, breathed once your name.” Roy finished, emotions completely wiped from his voice. Norman relaxed marginally, dropping his hands.
The figure in the chair—late twenties; Asian-American, wan and arguably malnourished –had gone slack in his bonds, save for the mechanical tilt of his head, and his glossy stare pinned to the nearby white wall. The music below had droned off into some kind of electro-funk whine, more machinery than music, now. It would’ve been too on the nose for Norman’s preferences normally, but this was a special occasion.
“Don’t glamourize him again until Angela’s seen him,” said Norman calmly, motioning to the guard by the elevators to come forward and collect their now-placid charge. “We’ll discuss the next steps when she gets back from the field.” His jaw set as he watched them unbuckle and carry the puppet out, all limp-limbed and dangling from his lack of orders.
It’d been fun while it’d lasted, he supposed. They could always make another if need be. It was easy enough when you had the model down.
For what position of power in a company such as theirs did not designate a face like the one he’d chosen for Roy-Who-Wasn’t?
Wiping the vague taint of magic from his hands, Norman folded his digits behind his back and slowly turned to look out the office window at the world below.
margueriteboyce-wcw replied to your post:margueriteboyce-wcw replied to your...
That it does. Alas having a low immune system makes me more prone to get it. I see, is there anything I can do that might help even a wee bit? But I’m glad you’re doing okay otherwise. Glad to be here too. Fhfhf I will try. /takes all the lemsip.
margueriteboyce-wcw replied to your post:margueriteboyce-wcw replied to your...
*sweetling. ah typos how I adore thee
.v. you help just by being you wonderful lovely self.
Age: “A gentleman would rather not disclose his age at this current juncture. For now just look at me visually.” –turns in place.- “Not a day over twenty-eight, you might wager? Perhaps even younger. I feel quite young, some of the time.” –drops his arms and chuckles.- “And others, quite old. It depends on the day, you see.”
Height: 5’9” or so.
Hair: Dark brown.
Eyes: It varies! But usually it’s a vivid, light shade of honey hazel. Sometimes a bit greener than that.
Species: According to him, he’s an incubus. There may be more to him than that but at this time we shall say incubus.
margueriteboyce-wcw replied to your quote:margueriteboyce-wcw replied to your...
You dun good swettling, you dun good. /cuddles. It definitely does open more doors, gives a chance to do various things/plots with characters and such. I am full of the cold. :’); But okay otherwise, how are you?
hsjkgh -hides some more- >///<
Sorry to hear you're feeling under the weather. Seems to be that time of year. I'm a ball of anxiety for various reasons but mostly am doing okay. \o/ Glad to be here with all of y'all.
margueriteboyce-wcw replied to your post:margueriteboyce-wcw replied to your post:Basically...
/hugs. Hello sweetling. You alright? .v.
jamesclarke-wcw replied to your post:Basically what you need to know in recap for this...
[loud cheering noises] i mean what
.A . yeah just anxious about being a mod and things. The usual no worries. IhopeIdidtheplotpostokayandjustthatitopensmoredoorsforpeople. Fffs how're you.
Basically what you need to know in recap for this one is that he is safe in New York, but injured and extremely disoriented. Between Mina's magic and Jeremy's tampering, Roy Talbot himself will be out of commission for a while.
margueriteboyce-wcw replied to your quote:margueriteboyce-wcw said: welcome back, did you...
ovo A butterbeer latte? I am incredibly jealous, but I’m glad you had a lovely time. <3. /nuzzles. I’m fine, thank you. Just been munching down on some pate and toast.
Pate! oAo aren't YOU a fancy lady. -v- And glad you're feeling alright. /sends butterbeer latte your way. It's p easy to make. 2 pumps butterscotch, one pump toffee, espresso, and steamed milk. :'D if you know cafes that can do that, of course.
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