View source for Log:Suck A Goat

{{ Log
| cast = [[Dielle_Henner|Dielle]], [[Cornelius]], [[Echo_Madrigal|Echo]], and [[Omari Smith|Omari]]
| summary = Changelings congregate at Cat-22, and learn of Suck A Goat.
| gamedate = 2017.10.26
| gamedatename = 
| subtitle = 
| location = [[MT04|Cat-22]]
| categories = Changelings
| log =Dielle is sitting at a table in the backroom of the Crossroads Cafe. She's got a magazine that she's mostly ignoring, in favor of the food in front of her. It looks like a big plate of salad, a container of french fries and a helping of peach cobbler. She's mostly eating the salad and fries, but every so often, there's a bite of cobbler being taken. 

 She's wearing a thin sweater, which is some kind of awful green with BRIGHT purple stripes knitted into it. It looks straight out of the 70s or something. Or at least, a thrift shop. She's wearing that with jeans and cowboy boots. Her hat is hanging off the chair and she seems utterly unaware that she has some FIERCE hat head going on. Her jacket is also draped on the back of the chair. (repose)

A plucked string makes a sensation at times even if the sound is under the radar. That's how it feels when Echo pushes her way into the back room with just a little caution. Some Lost powerful in the Wyrd are flamboyant, but that isn't the case with her. She just carries with her a vibration on a different plane, the suggestion of vocalization without speaking. That's how she announces herself. 

Her appearance is something of a contrast; she's still somewhat recognizable as human, despite the trailing creep of shadows and that funny chill sensation. She doesn't speak, looking around; she waves at Dielle without a word, oddly quiet, then picks up a menu off some other table and stands rather than sitting down, as if she's rusty at the rules of little cafes.

Omari's arrival is with the icy hedge wolf Romulus in tow. The beast looks to be playing the part of the wolfman, and reveals how close he is with the Wyrd. He's in a blue hooded jacket, wrinkled jeans, and dirtied up work boots. He doesn't have any food, and seems to content to drink the water in his bottle as he comes to the back. He pauses upon seeing Dielle, eyes blinking several times over. "You're Dielle, right?" he asks with as much etiquette as his canine visage would betray. "They said I'd know ya when I see ya, and I don't think it's possible for me to miss that," he notes with the bottle pointed in her direction.

The door opens, and in comes Cornelius with a tray of drinks. One is the largest size of coffee available. One is a flask. One is a bag of wine suspiciously lacking the cardboard box that should encase it. The tray is off-balance, so when Cornelius twists to avoid collision when he nearly walks into Echo, it wobbles precariously. He manages to teeter-totter it onto a table and fall backwards into a chair that, itself, nearly goes over backwards. "Start with coffee," he says to himself loud enough for anyone to hear. "Coffee is good." He picks up the flask and starts to open it.

Today Cornelius is wearing ripped jeans, faded boots, fingerless gloves (that do nothing to hide those mean claws), and his Hedgespun robe.

Dielle seems to hear that plucked string that Echo walks with, and thus, notices her walking in before the others. She shoves out a chair with her foot, nodding at it, and then gets distracted by Omari. "Yeah, this is a /particularly/ ugly sweater. Welcome to cold-weather laundry day. I'm Dielle Henner." A chair gets shoved out for him as well, with another nod towards it and then she picks up a french fry. She seems very relaxed until one realizes that one of her hands isn't visible. Once Cornelius walks in, she calls out, "OI. Three Card Monte. You bring enough for the rest of the class?" Her accent is very, very Southern, and probably marks as being from somewhere in Texas, for anyone who follows that kind of thing.

Echo leans sideways and studies the chairs that Dielle is shoving out as if to beckon people over. Still not talking, her lip bitten down as if to button that up, still menu in hand stolen from some other table. As there are others coming in after her, seemingly more familiar to Dielle, she hangs back; takes her time in first studying Omari and then Cornelius, the latter with just a trace more focus. But it's Dielle she speaks to before she sits: "I like your hair." Then, just sitting, she turns back to Cornelius and repeats Dielle, curiously: "Enough for the rest of the class?"

"She means enough for everybody," Omari says to Echo. He grabs a chair to find some measure of comfort before he's standing for too long. He plops down rather unceremoniously while the hedge beast sits at his side. "L-T of the Harvestmen too then, yeah? I've been meaning to catch up with you or this gargoyle cat they told me to talk to." Beat. "I'm interested in joining you guys."

Looking up at the sound of a familiar voice, Cornelius holds up a finger. "You're welcome to try some, toots, but you gotta gimme a sec." He talks to Dielle without looking up from what he is doing. "I'm doing some logic stuff. Coffee is yummy. Whisky is yummy. So coffee plus whisky should be double yummy." He pours a generous amount of the amber liquid in the flask into the coffee. "Wine is triple yummy, so coffee plus whisky plus wine..." He sets the flask down, opens the wine bag and--very carefully!--fills up the rest of the cup with wine. "Would that make five or six yummies? Not sure if it's multiplicative or addi''c''tive." His tail randomly bumps into a chair behind him. "Get it?" He looks up even as he is capping the bag of wine. "Additive. Addictive. 'cause, you know, booze. And math." He looks from face to face before looking back to his polluted cup of coffee.

The reply is torn out of Miss Former Bartender Dielle before she even try to help herself. "JESUS GOD NO, what are you tryin' to do, burn your taste buds off with pure yuck? Three-Card, you are a hazard to good booze!" She shakes her head, which darn near turns into a full body shake, before she says, "I was teasin', if he's gonna do that awful stuff to good coffee, I sure as shit don't want any." She looks at Omari and says, "Fuckin' A. You part of the freehold already?" She lowers her voice when she says it, not wanting to shout it out so that it carries to the rest of the restaurant, even if they are in the back room. "Hey, Miss, you wanna sit? I'm Dielle."

Echo stops leaning on the chair and actually sits in it, and gives her hand to Dielle first. "Echo Madrigal." Not many words, but she has the kind of voice to make even those few fairly memorable. Smooth enough to read a phone book with interest, maybe. She smiles at Omari once she leans against the table and settles in, and adds, "Thank you for clarifying. I'm with Dielle, I'm afraid. I'd rather not try that experiment. Not all liquors mix so friendly. I'll try not to interrupt your business." She leans back once again to watch Cornelius. Just because she's not going to try the wonderbrew doesn't mean it might not be interesting to observe his test run.

Cornelius gets a deadpan stare from Omari, and the beast simply shrugs. "I hated math, and just thinking about algebra makes my head hurt." A shiver runs down his spine, and he has to shake his head to completely focus. "But why mix all that up anyway? Can't be too good." Beat. "Is it?" He then turns his attention back to Dielle, and then nods. "I am, yeah. Not much more than Summer, though."

"What?" Cornelius asks, but it is less a question and more a pout. He wants his experiment to work, yet the doubt of others is infecting him. "How can you know until you try it?" He uses a straw to carefully stir the liquid--somehow not spilling even though the coffee cup is filled to the rim. "Ever coated a steak in honey and Cheerios? Delicious." He taps the straw off on the tray and then sets it down. "Or put cayenne pepper on eggs over easy? So good!" He looks at Dielle very pointedly and adds, "I will admit. My attempts at mixing the perfect of french toast and chicken did only mediocre, but. But! I shall not stop a war due to the loss of one battle." He then picks up his coffee, blows on the surface of it, and takes a sip. His face is puzzled, then thoughtful, then concerned, and finally accepting. "Okay. Someone else needs to try this." He takes one more sip and then holds the cup up. "I don't want to bias your thoughts. Just take a yoga breath, try to push your belly button to your butthole, and then try it. Exist and drink."

"That's because fried chicken goes with waffles, not french toast," replies Dielle. "And actually, it don't go /bad/ with french toast. Besides, who doesn't put cayenne on eggs?" She shakes her head at the drink and says, "No booze for me, today, I'm drivin', which means my belly button and butthole can't mix..." She stops herself, this style of talk is catching. "Nice to meet you both, Echo and Omari. Wait. Not much more than Summer? Well, if you're pledged to the 'hold, then you can be a Harvestman. It's actually that easy, you talked to me, you're in as a recruit. Give it a month, you'll be a private. It's mostly a month to learn to work with a squad, make sure you don't wanna kill us and we don't wanna kill you, and that we can all work together as a team without cuttin' each others' heads off. It's a thing."

"Is that like: Here, drink this, it's disgusting?" Echo asks Cornelius, shifting in her chair along with the shadows to face him a little more fully. "Not that I mean to doubt you." Spoken like someone who'll get the hard-sell on trying the concoction for certain. "I'm not sure why chicken wouldn't work with french toast. Turkey does, on...what's it called? It's named after the fellow who gets locked up and goes on a revenge spree...Monte Cristo, that's it." It is almost certainly not named after a Dumas protagonist, but you could be forgiven for nodding along with Echo. A sense of confidence about her helps sell the bullshit really well.

"I ain't got too much of a problem working with a pa- um, group. Makes hunting and the like more efficient. I know R, R, and I could do with that kinda company. Especially with the weird shit I've seen since I got back." Omari seems to be pointedly going out of his way to ignore Cornelius until his curiosity finally gets the best of him. "Eh fuck it," he says to his fellow beast. "Ya only live once, and what's the worst that could happen?"

"Monte Cricket," is the correction given far too casually. It can be hard to trust a man like Cornelius. When Omari takes the cup from him, there is a look of satisfaction on his face. Is it because misery loves company? Is it because he is proud of his concoction? Is it because he poisoned the drink and will now observe writhing agony with great sadism? Whatever it could be, Cornelius is please. He steeples his fingers together--both pads and claws touching--and watches the brave man. Waiting. Observing. Smiling very slightly in a way that would completely unnerve most. Only after several seconds does he ask, "Pray tell, brave soul, what do you think of this drink that I shall title 'Suck A Goat'?"

Dielle grins and says to Omari, "Welcome to the Harvestmen. It really is that easy. But if you're going to insist on drinking that stuff, I'm happy to watch and consider it a feat of strength for joining or some such shit." She nods at Echo. "It's a thing: if it's awful, you try to get people to try it. If you say it's awful and /don't/ try to get people to try it, it means it's delicious and you're hoarding it and lying. That's a general you, meaning people. It's not meaning /you/ do that."

The cup is taken, and momentarily sniffed at by Omari when it's offered. He looks up at Cornelius while doing so, and then shrugs again. "Monte Cricket sounds goofy," the Beast notes before he eventually downs much of the cup's contents. When he pulls it back down he clicks his tongue a few times as if to savor what he's got. "Okay. One, I don't know what the fuck this is, but it ain't right. Two, I ain't dead so there's that. Three, if you work here ya might wanna start selling it, but fuck this shit don't make a damn bit of sense."

Another repetition, this time under her breath as Echo mumbles to herself: "Suck a -goat-." She turns once more to Dielle. "Do you often have problems with your recruits and membership wanting to kill one another?" You wouldn't necessarily think 'here's someone who cares about the fine points of faerie militias' looking at Echo, but she sounds genuinely interested. The question's naive maybe only on the surface. She's still turning over the menu in her hands, bending it as if it's a toy, as if its very solidity attracts her rather than its contents. Omari's sampling of the brew earns a tiny salute with that menu, waved in the air to cheer him on. "Monte Cricket sounds like a drag name. A really terriible one."

"Doesn't it just make you want to wonder what you're doing with your life?" Cornelius asks Omari with a rather pleased look on his face before looking over at Echo and pointing a finger at her. Once. Twice. Then a triple tap. "Okay. That's not tinnitus, and I don't ''think'' I made a magic potion just now. Have you ever tried phone sex, and, if not, would you like to?" He leans forward and cups a hand to his mouth as if he is telling Echo a secret, but anyone in the back room can hear him without straining to. "What I'm saying, just in case it wasn't clear, is that if you whispered some sweet nothings at me, and then I threw my panties at the ceiling? They'd stick. That's all I'm saying." He stands up, scoots his chair in, and knocks the one behind him over in the process of it, then turns and looks at the fallen thing.

Dielle opens her mouth, closes it, opens her mouth, closes it again, then says to Echo, "The year is old, my tenure as a lieutenant is young. My tenure as second is younger. Someone may want to kill me before the night is out, one never knows." She pauses, then grins at Echo, and snickers at both the reaction to the drink and the reaction to the other woman's voice. Plus, y'know, the slapstick stuff with the chair.

Omari shrugs idly, drinking up the rest of it while his eyes start to glaze over just a bit. When he finally sets it down its with a lazy little smile that bares his fangs. "Monte Cricket sounds like something that'll lead to a lot of regret, forgotten shit, and probably losing your clothes." He wobbles his hand, shrugging again. "Maybe. I dunno. Speakin' of bad decisions and losing your head, how much'll it cost for another?"

Echo offers Cornelius an apologetic smile that may be just a wee bit teasing. A pinch of mockery in it. "I'm not trying to make you throw your panties at the ceiling. Wouldn't they ask you to leave the cafe if you did? As for sweet nothings, I could say 'suck a goat' again." Those three words shouldn't appeal, it's true. And yet. And yet. But Dielle gets a bit more seriousness of conversation. "Joining things here is easy enough, then, I take it from this talk?"

When asked for another, Cornelius turns to look at Omari--knocking his chair out of place but not over--with one eyebrow high. "Cost? Money is useless, daddy-o. Nex-" Oh how Echo speaking again derails his thought process. The horned man cuts off an approving wince by biting his lower lip. "Would now be an awkward time to mention that one of my body parts is named 'A. Goat'?" The question must be rhetorical, because he plucks up his flask and his wine and, without another word, heards towards the door in a boneless alien manner that is only underscored by the lashing rat tail that follows in his wake.

Dielle gives up on finishing the french fries, the salad is long gone. She pulls the peach cobbler towards her and picks up her spoon. "Joining the Harvestmen is that easy. Joining the other groups, not so much..." She eyes Cornelius. "You named your asshole A. Goat? What's the A stand for?" She can't really help herself. It just comes out.

Omari had the cup lifted up getting out every last drop until Cornelius' last. "Wait. What?" Before he has a chance to press the faux bartender the other Beast is already gone, and Romulus starts barking in laughter. "Well. Shit." He lets out a sigh, and then shakes his head. "I gotta stop drinking random shit, but it whatever." He looks over to Dielle then, and asks, "Harvestmen's mostly about protecting and fighting for the Freehold, yeah? Any specific kinda shit that I /have/ to do beyond all that?"

"Interesting. I...will ask you about that later," Echo says, standing back up and solemnly setting her chew-toy bent plastic menu near Omari's elbow as if presenting him with a gift. Oddball. "For now, I think I've been out too late as a newcomer. Thanks for sharing your time with me." Solemn little winter; maybe she's off chasing Cornelius and A. Goat, or maybe she's being just straightforward in her taking leave.

Dielle puts on her hat so she can tip it at Echo. She turns back to Omari and says, "Try to be smart. Or at least, cunning. Keep in practice, we haven't been much called upon since I joined and the numbers are growing but we got /real/ small for a while there. If you're good at it, you'll probably end up as a lieutenant sooner rather than later. If you know anyone who wants to join, send 'em our way?" She shakes her head. "For now, that's about it, I think."

"I'll make sure to do it, yeah. Can't say I know too many folks in town. I left for about..." Romulus barks up, "Half a year." Omari nods, "That. Things have changed a bit with who's where or what's what. If I meet any violently minded or defensive types to you or the bossman if I meet 'em, though. Don't think I need to be some kinda officer. Everything'd be a hunt if I had my way."

Dielle says, truthfully, "Shit got /real/ shaken up in the last six months or more. Been a bit of a clusterfuck, to be honest. Long story. We're lucky in that things only started getting what you might call interesting in the last month or two. And even that's been mostly in the Hedge, or in dreams, and the dream stuff ain't Harvestmen jurisdiction anyway."

"Good to hear. Mostly. That dream shit's way over my head, and always kinda fucky." Omari shivers, the thought of Oneiromancy clearly sobering him some. "Interesting's still my style. Any type of rules or what not for bringing someone along with me if I need that kinda help in the Hedge?"

Dielle opens her mouth and closes it. "Ummm...if it's freehold business, try to keep it to freeholders, only." She smiles a bit and adds, "I'm in the Watchers, too, but that's because of my entitlement. So if you have any problems in dreams, I can help with that, do some dream hunting for you."

"Meant Freehold. Can't say I know anyone outside of it, and not too keen to be the one meeting outsiders. That's to the Way... Way- way-' He shakes his head, and grunts his displeasure. "Way-something. But, what's your Entitlement? One of those dream healers or what's it?"

"Wayhouse, or Waykeepers," supplies Dielle. "Naw, that's my guy, he's the dream healer. I'm the dream hunter. Family of Silent Nights." She indicates her eyes, which are black with stars in. "We're the ones that trap the nasty things that try to feed on dreams."

Omari leans a bit closer to scrutinize her gaze, and when he sits back he nods. His curiosity now sated, he smiles briefly. "Sounds much better. Hunting nightmares and shit. Still dreamy and all that, but it's something impressive. How's that shit usually go for ya anyway? Do ya just put 'em in a box, or...?"

"Bottle, in my case. Funnel the fuckers in there and seal 'em up tight. How about you? What do you do in your spare time?" asks Dielle, curiously. "What kinds of things do you like to hunt?"

"Used to hunt property as job," he justs, but Romulus grumbles, "He was a repoman." The hedge beast gets a brief look and a chuckle. "Yes. That. Spare time's usually practicing at the range, or hunting for things for crafting folks and the like. I need to get some stuff of mine own soon, and my partner's long gone from what I heard. We especially hunt briar wolves that get too close to trods. Occasionally we'll look for bigger shit just for the challenge of it. Predators more than anything else."

Dielle says, "We're planning a hunt soon with the Greenies. They need blood for their gardens. We need materials for hedgespun. Sounds right up your alley." She finishes up her cobbler and stacks up her plates. "Nothing wrong with being a repo man. I spent a few years as a bartender. Mostly a personal trainer now, with a few bartending shifts here and there to pick up money."

"Oh no shame in it. Just no fun either. But, what you're talking about with the greenies sounds like something I'd love to sink my teeth into." Omari nods to that as he leans back in his chair now. "They gotta time on when they plan on going out?"

"I haven't heard, yet, but I know it's gonna be soon," and Dielle sounds a little apologetic for not having a better answer.

"Soon is good enough for me. I've mostly been lazing about time, wishing I could find something out there big, bad, and likely to be something for trouble." He lifts his hands up in innocence, smiling wickedly. "Nothing against or with the humans around the place, though. Got boring picking fights with them ages ago."

Dielle says, thoughtfully, "Might wanna talk to Alonso or Cassian, there's been some problems with mechanical briarwolves, but I've only gotten to hear a little of it. I might just join you, if you do." With that, she stands up and says, "I hate to do this to you, but I've got an early appointment and not a lot of time left to sleep. It was nice meeting you, Omari." She writes a number down on a napkin. "This is my cell, in case you need anything. Give me a text, I'll put you in my phone list, ok?" And with that, she's heading out, putting on her coat as she walks.
}}