realityshifted | Spam for Ray

[Ray is prompt in answering the door; no more than a few seconds pass before it swings open, with his lanky form in the space. He's dressed similarly to how he was last time; grey suit jacket, grey tie, jeans, glasses slipped most of the way down his nose. The only real difference is the stitched up lacerations across his face, reminiscent of having been clawed by something very large.

A professionally polite expression settles on his face as he begins to talk.]

Sorry, I'm not seeing anyone to-

[Ray trails off as he actually bothers to see who he's standing in front of instead of being immediately dismissive. Who- no, he recognized that general look. He knows it older, but in his head he could overlay the two images to conclude who this was. His brows furrow slightly as he becomes a little bit confused, a little bit curious; he doesn't make him sick. Whatever, he can ask about it later when he feels up to knowing whatever went on. Business to attend to.

He steps back from the frame of the door and as he does so, he drops the pretense of pretending to be nice. He settles right back into a more fitting disgruntled scowl.]

Kay. Come in.

[The lacerations are what he notices first, because those weren't there the last time they talked, certainly.

He steps inside, casting one more glance out over his shoulder before he starts pulling off his gloves.] Evenin'. Does this [he gestures over his own face] have anything to do with the phone call?

No.

[Ray locks the door behind Kay.]

I was hunting a local pack. Managed to corner off the weakest link, but he got me pretty fuckin' good.

[He sniffs with disdain. It's worth noting that this place is just as grey as Ray's outfit. Grey walls, grey desk, grey chairs, grey carpet. Ray doesn't seem to be a fan of color, apparently.]

[At least he fits right in. He has a seat, raising an eyebrow.] Weakest links are good for that. [He could name a few.]

What's goin' on with the man in charge?

[He takes his place behind his desk, where he seems to just meld right in with everything. If it weren't for the fact he was currently sporting claw marks on his face, he'd be a vision of boring. A true testament to being not worth noticing.

Ray folds his hands over a folder he had been going through before Kay knocked on the door.]

Your lot has gotten his attention. You killed the host of a misbehaving employee- that isn't a thing that just goes unnoticed...

[He trails off as he gets a thoughtful expression, but he doesn't speak again quite yet; taking the time to consider if the thought brewing in his head is an accurate one. It SOUNDS like it could be... hn.]

[There were words there that didn't quite line up.

The host of a misbehaving employee. Was Grey the host? Which meant of course Kay's suspicion could be correct- a host was just a host, and there was no indication of the employee itself being dead in this conversation.]

Your boss has some interesting hiring practices. It was taking victims from our worlds, we were looking for the perpetrator and were led down a cavern in the middle of podunk. What I assume was his employee showed its real face- but it was there the whole time.

[He squints.] Speaking of which, mind if I take a look at your skeleton? [He likes Ray enough to actually ask.]

Edited 2012-12-12 15:50 (UTC)

[Up go his eyebrows, because that isn't exactly a question you get asked every day. But he does his best to take it in stride, with the reservation he intends on stopping it if it's anything sickmaking.]

Uh, sure?

[He doesn't linger on it and goes right to the important things Kay had said.]

It was Catskill, right? That's where a bulk of his employees are from. Fucked up little town from the looks of 'em all. Anyway, tiny backwoods towns aside, I don't know how or why he hires 'em. I know why he has me- I'm a good little soldier who is, begrudgingly, willing to hunt down the things that go bump in the night. The rest of my... [Ray spits the word with disdain.] colleagues... no clue.

[He now points at Kay; loosely and with his palm up.] Now what I'm thinking is... he knew what was going down. Let it go down on purpose. That's how he works. Set you all up to see what you'd do.

[He pulls out the scanner and holds it up to his eye, giving Ray a look at.]

It doesn't surprise me. The only way it could move between our worlds was through the Plane, and I figured someone had to give it that sort of access. Had to give us that sort of access, too. Until the library, we didn't get to play too much dimensional Frogger.

[If Kay's going to refer to a video game it'll be an old one, of course.]

There were no churches there, either.

What does he have you do when you hunt them down? [Does he keep any of them? goes unspoken.]

[Ray is, thankfully, a normal guy when you look at his skeleton. The only thing really worth note is the fact it's pretty clear he's seen some rough times- he has a fair share of healed breaks in various bones of his body. Some very old, some fairly recent. A sign he's more rough and tumble than his suited, relatively unassuming appearance would lead a person to believe.]

I do what I like with them. Like... this? [He gestures to the lacerations on his face.] He tells Sergei and I to go hunt down a pack. They've been eating a few too many innocent people lately, and something needs to be done about it. So Sergei and I decide we're going to cut down the number of werewolves in town.

[He can't keep himself from laughing here, high and a little stressed.]

Fuck us, right? No easy task.

I've not met Sergei before. Is he another hire or just someone you work with personally? [Probably someone else who gives the appearance of being made out of rubber despite actually not being here, he can respect that. He puts away the device, making no comment on the state of it but glad that it actually has the wear and tear of a well-lived body.

He's aware his currently, well, does not. Sure, still fused joints, but all the breaks and what was there before is gone.]

Makes it hard to go to the supermarket without claiming you work at the zoo or got mugged by Catwoman, anyway. So he put you up to stopping something that had been eating innocent people?

[Stopping them, or finding them so he could bring them back for later use? That seemed possible with Grey. He'd tuck that thought away for speculation later.] So we got his attention... [Musing.]

We're partners, Sergei and I. Both of us work for Jed, but he isn't part of this little shindig. Guess Jed doesn't think there's any use for some muscle in his little focus group. There were three of us, but Holden went missing years back. I exhausted every resource I had looking for that little prick.

[He sounds bitter about that, but continues on, not wanting to linger on a man who once was a partner and had since become Just Another Statistic.]

But yeah. Jed sends us on a lot of 'errands'. Stop this. Exorcise that. Put them to rest. Go get that thing. And if you've got his attention, he may be seeing what use you and the others might provide him.

Holden? [Sadly, while Kay understands not wanting to ruminate on lost partners- he's tried to avoid it himself on more than one occasion -people going missing because others were being tested is enough to raise concerns.]

Did you only get access to the Plane after Jed took over? [Not that there weren't more conventional ways to hide bodies.]

[He answers the second question first, because he honestly wants to put off talking about Holden.]

Yeah. I had no fucking clue this place existed until I was shanghai'd into being involved.

[But then he grabs a pen and starts to tap it, and he rounds back to Holden because now it's on his mind. Should have never mentioned it.]

...Holden was pretty much still a kid. Barely twenty. Grew up on the streets, you know? Thrown outta the house when he was fourteen or fifteen, spent the rest of his time out in alleys and abandoned buildings. Lucky he wasn't killed by something back then. Jed kinda shoved the three of us together for whatever reason, and we did some decent work for a while. Holden was better at people than Sergei or I, so we let him handle dealing with families, with victims, shit like that. He did good work. And then one day he just stopped turning up. Didn't answer his cell phone. Wasn't at any of his regular haunts. Kid just up and disappeared without a trace and nobody gave a damn.

[That means at the very least that he didn't tell Ray about it, or whatever guys were in on it. He squints a little. Contrary to what Ray says, it sounds like someone cared a great deal.]

People talked to him and trusted him, then. Figure he might have found out something that someone decided that he shouldn't have known? [He'll try to keep it short. He's not the best at dealing with emotions, either, and while useful information is useful he'd give someone the out in dealing with theirs.]

No clue. [He shrugs, and pulls back up his defenses, puts his pen down.] I just chalked it up to he got grabbed by something one night. Kid liked to hang around shady places, and shady places are the number one spot for things that view humans as snack food. He wasn't very smart.

Yeah. [He grumbles.] I know how that goes. [And he leaves it safely there.]

Any idea of how we got his attention? I'm gonna be honest, I'm pretty sure there are people that are capable of wiping out whole planets. [He was- in self defense. They fired first. He's been watching some of the other Plane members too, and that sort of destructive power in the wrong hands?...] Then again, the whole Plane itself is concerning. Biggest damn security threat I've ever run into.

I'm figuring it was killing Grey that did it. Grey doesn't show up, Jed asks me to be a sneaky little spy and try to funnel information to him about the lot of you - which I'm not going to do for him, he can shove his letters and his orders up his ass - and is pointless anyway since he has a fucking omniscient deal going on, but I figure he just wanted to get the pleasure of me attempting to play cloak and dagger.

I put two and two together, figured the lot of you were behind it. Jed confirmed it for me.

[He suddenly stops to peer under the folder on his desk. He grabs what appears to be a folded note, but doesn't bother to open it or read it, and just crumples it up before dropping it into a garbage can.]

People here are powerful, yeah. But he doesn't care about raw power. He wants people with the gumption to get things done.

And we had the gumption to take out the host.

Well, I admit I'm pretty damn upset we didn't get to the actual employee, but I sorta guessed that all along. What I didn't figure is that it mighta been put up to fuckin' with us.

[He watches that note, and is curious about it. He might try to get a look at it before he goes.] You probably already know a lot more about what I am than most people do. [Still human, but a very very brutal one in a universe that desperately needed violent control, whereas some others that could be named needed peaceful chaotic disruption.] What information did he specifically want you to round up?

[Ray just nods. He has a decent understanding, so he thinks, of Kay and what he does. Similar lines of work.]

Whatever I could get. He likes to play it vague, leave a lot of wiggle room for me to do what I want. The only thing I had to do was report back on anything I found out; which I could have been an absolute bastard about and only reported on things like 'favorite food: spaghetti. Favorite color: tangerine'.

[He rubs his hand across his mouth for a moment before speaking again.]

I don't know if it was put up to it, actually. I got what I could outta Jed, and it seems the term of their deal was time. The thing couldn't just roam free as it liked normally. Very mad about that. If it wanted hang about for a while, it had to agree to his deal. And I have never known Jed to let those sorts of things free to kill. He likes them contained, controlled, or cleaned up.

Thanks for favoring our potential well being. [Though it sounded as though that might end up being dangerous for Ray. Kay folds his hands in his lap, fingers twined.

They were played to a bigger extent than Kay first thought- Grey (he'll assume that's the name of the creature) taking advantage of the Plane to get in some killing is one thing, or Charlie even dragging them down to get rid of whatever the fuck was inside of him.

But it seems like a certain amount of authorized killing is fine so long as they were properly felt out. There's also the chance it could just be given a new host.]

Which is what you and Sergei are for [and at one time his little pal Ray suspected bought it through bad decisions]. Your friend ever find his key, by the way? I've been askin' around about it.

No, he didn't. And don't tell him we talked. Kross is annoying enough already, but whenever he remembers my last name, it's a goddamn nightmare.

[Ray rubs the bridge of his nose at the thought. Many hours have been wasted due to Kross going into an obsessive stupor, convinced that because his name is KEYS he must be important to THE KEY.]

He works the shop now, if you want to go bother him yourself. I don't particularly recommend it. He's not that interesting and his girlfriend is constantly hanging around. I haven't figured out what she is yet, but she sets off the radar.

I think I remember you mentioning something about him being a little uh- [He just trails off to be polite.]

His girlfriend? What's her name? [This time he thinks he should probably check. But not check alone because that would be stupid as dipshit, considering what the last one was.

He could grab the Doctor maybe. Or someone else that has a curious eye.]

A lotta people say I'm not too interesting. [He flinches a quick smile that goes away almost as soon as it starts.] Its almost Christmas, I should stop in and do some shopping anyway.

Rita. Rita Blake or Black, I didn't stick around to remotely remember it.

[Ray leans across his desk, elbows on it.]

A lotta people are wrong. You're interesting, Kay, but interesting in a 'don't notice I'm interesting' way. Under the radar, maybe even trying to be easy to forget. [He doesn't go any further from there. He knows trying not to be noticed, and he thinks Kay does too.] If you get anything, bring it here before you run off with it. There's a lot of cursed and magical items in there, and while I can't say what anything does based on a glace, I can tell you if that package of new pens isn't just a package of new pens.

[He quirks his brows but doesn't argue with that- after all some people need a little bit of help forgetting.]

I'll do that, even if the temptation to send 'em to someone who pisses me off would be pretty high.

[Not many people piss him off that much. Alpha is probably the only one left. The others are dead.]

Eh, might backfire if you did. Without proper checking, it might end up just on the magical side and be the key to unlimited universal power. Then wouldn't you be regretting your choices.

[A low chuckle to himself. He can't say he hasn't thought about doing the same thing, but the thought of 'whoops, accidentally sent something great to someone I loathe' is the only thing keeping him from being a vindictive asshole.]

Edited (sorry binky i wanted to change a word it was bugging me.) 2012-12-13 15:57 (UTC)

Well hell, why didn't you tell me that was in there?

[He's joking though- not that he doubts that it could be in there.] Don't worry about it- I don't really want anything cursed roaming around even in the hands of people I hate, any more than I want weird monster fetishists with a thing for biting off hands.

Come on, Kay. Shop that seems to have just about anything, of course it'll fuckin' have the key to unlimited universal power. That's how that shit works.

[He goes along with the joke just that little bit further because why not. This'll fill up his yearly quota of not being a complete and utter bastard.]

Yeah, cursed items can be a bitch. Some of them aren't so bad in the curse aspect, but then you got others that go out of their way to ruin you. So you might get something that lets you see in the dark but you're doomed to eternal papercuts, but you also might get something that allows you to win the lottery but it'll kill your family members as 'payment'.

How much would you guess has something attached to it in that store? [He wouldn't be surprised by any number, but now his interest is piqued.]

A lot.

[He licks his teeth as he thinks of the best way to explain it.]

It's easy to say the place sickens me- just about everything does. But this is... imagine being in a room filled with people. All of them loud, clamoring, pushing and shoving and making the place claustrophobic. All at once you've got a headache. And it gets worse. You can smell 'em, you can hear 'em, they're fucking touching you and now you just want to go collapse in the street and vomit.

[Ray nods to himself.]

That get the idea across of how much cursed and/or magical shit is in that joint?

Not the most pleasant trip to the office. [Sounds like walking into a room with a race with no olfactory senses- he's been there, and barely managed to keep collected.

But he scowled the whole time.]

You seem like you're a pretty stand up guy. [Grumpy, but stand up.] What's the deal that means Jed has you by the balls?

[It takes him only a second to open up a drawer in his desk and then toss a bottle of unmarked, unnamed pills in front of him.]

Those. I think you've seen me popping a couple before. They manage to dampen the old radar to manageable levels. But those are new. A little bribe to get me to work with the machine and those involved. [Ray sniffs derisively.] Prior to it, I worked for nothing. Somebody's gotta keep the streets clean, and he helped lead me to where I was needed.

Edited (typo) 2012-12-14 04:29 (UTC)

How bad is it without the drugs? [With the way he described going into the shop? His guess was pretty bad.]

I think if I attempted to enter the machine like you can do, I'd be immediately rendered unconscious.

[He grabs the bottle of pills to put them back in the drawer.]

Possibly other things, but I don't plan on experimenting to find out.

[He's thinking.] This body is an exact duplication of my own from a few decades ago. My mind was imprinted on a nueralyzed brain. But it doesn't seem to be making you sick-

So you can't handle more than base human. This is still human, even the mind is. But if it was something else-

If it was something else, depending on how far you were from 'base human', I'd either be mildly queasy or bleeding from my eyes.

[That answered one of his questions, too. Body duplication. Alright. Not triggering his shitty sixth sense, has to be science. Interesting.]

[He doesn't offer more on it, though. The man that made it is a genius- one that he hates a little bit.] Do you know if he has anything on anyone else?

In the machine: no. But he knows about you. Knows about everybody.

[As if to illustrate this fact, he pulls another note from under the folder. He waves it around, held between his index and middle fingers before he flicks it into the trash.]

Outside of it: yes. Everybody's working for something. I did a little digging on the failures and freaks since the last time we talked in person, if you care to know. Well- aside from Rita.

Oh, I'm interested. I'd hate to get in another situation where a guy suddenly knows that I'm looking under his skin at his fucked up bone structure. You know, right before he leads a buncha people down into his underground lair- I knew I shouldn't have let him take that piss by himself.

[That last self reprimand comes with a bit of a hateful look, disappointed in his own dutifulness.]

[Which Ray doesn't touch, because after all, why the fuck would he? He's spouted the same sort of things to himself before, and god knows it can be frustrating as hell when someone saunters up all buddy buddy and whispers 'there there it isn't your fault'.]

Down the list, then.

[Where to start? Might as well go alphabetical.]

Elias Copperstone. Alcoholic, former cop, as I've mentioned before: failure category. Should be dead - I fount his obit in a paper. Fucker threw himself off a bridge. No details on circumstances, other than I noticed there were a lot of obits going up in a small fucking town like that all at once around the same time. Attached at the hip to his partner. Figuring the deal has to do with the guy, the way he looks at him like he expects the dude to drop dead.

Jacob Kross. The annoying as fuck guy who keeps latching onto my name as if I'm the goddamn solution to his problems. Interesting in that he's the only one not outta Catskill. Says he's from Tinmouth [pronounced Timmith] and moved to a town just outside of Catskill because it's bigger. Also outright said his deal was Jed assured him if he worked for him, he'd get his stupid key.

Jerry McCastor. Cop. Elias' partner. Cursed. It's been- deactivated, I guess you could say, but I can feel it lurking. Found an obit for him, too. Died in the middle of hunting down a depraved sonovabitch killing folk in town. Guessing the deal was the curse being turned off.

[Ray pauses thoughtfully, before adding in one last thing. Even thought he said he had nothing on Rita, he realises that isn't exactly true. He has one thing.]

And Rita... has no deal. She's just here because Kross is.

[Possible theories? Mr. Copperstone feels responsible for whatever happened to Mr. McCastor. Even if it was the curse or the killer.] Did the Catskill killer have a name I could look up? [Damn most newspapers going to the internet now- he'll have to look in two places.]

I'll have to see if the key is to help out his lady friend somehow. If they're joined at the hip like that. In any case I'll have a look around and see what I find out.

[He hesitates as his pocket buzzes, and he squirms to reach into it and pull out his communicator. You can't really ignore calls from work when you work for the MiB.]

Didn't find a name- seems the case went cold when McCastor bought it.

[And then Kay has a call, and Ray gestures to him that yeah, it's cool, you can take it, I don't care.]

[And like the old fashioned guy he is, he's writing on an honest to god notepad and not some handheld thing as he's talking on the phone.

Check out store.

Find out more about Rita.

Look for evidence on the Catskill killer.

Not necessarily in that order.

And he's nodding with the occasional-] Yeah, uh huh. Alright. What?. No. [-before he covers the mic and looks to Ray.]

Do you know what looks like an overturned garbage can with semi-hemispherical protrusions in vertical lines down the surface with a plunger, a paint roller, a dome on top, a campy voice and a pissy attitude?

A bad joke by a props department?

[That's what it sounds like, anyway.]

[He turns back to the phone.] See if some advanced race might have raided a dump for household items. Wouldn't be the first time. If they're the traditional saucers get the right weapons together and I'll be there in [He looks at his watch] twenty minutes is fast enough to get to the moon, right?

[And he hangs up.] The paint rollers shoot. I have no idea what the hell is going on. They're attacking Lunar Max though and that's bad news. [He stands up and offers Ray his hand to shake.] I'll stop back in after having a look around. You look after that scratch...

[Likewise, Ray stands. He does his best not to have a sort of flabbergasted look at 'twenty minutes fast enough to get to the moon'. Obviously, Kay is in a rush... a confusing rush, but-

He shakes the man's hand.]

No need to worry about me. Just go get your business done. Sounds... serious.

['Serious' isn't said with much conviction, but hey.]

Spam for Ray

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