|
   |
Mree waves his fingers delicately toward Carnelian, but he's being comforted with puppy cuddles right now, and he's listening to the conversation more than he's apt to take part in it just yet.
*
"You need a drink, we need to get out of here before the cops come." Duke exhales slowly. The curling smoke from his cigarette doesn't smell like marijuana but it's not tobacco, either. It's sweeter and even second-hand it's a little mellowing. "Let's go. Got lots of beer back at the yard. Just bottled a new batch." He offers Mree a hand up. "And mead. And…well, other things."
Coz hops out of Mree's lap and comes over to inspect Carnelian thoroughly but not too rudely. Apparently, Carnelian passes muster because he barks happily, then romps off to join Tex. He's awfully huge to be romping but he makes it work.
*
When Coz comes to inspect, Carnie extends his hand out to let the big guy get a good wiff. "Great dog." compliments Carnelian with a sudden grin. Being invited off for a drink? There's only a moment's thought before he's nodding his head, "Sounds like something I can't pass up. I love me some beer, but have never had any homebrewed before." Glancing between Duke and the green dude, he wonders, "Did I miss what you guys call yourselves? Carnelian here." He lifts a hand up, and a square of orange-red light appears: carnelian is the color. It vanishes a moment later.
*
Mree lets Coz up and then lifts his hand to wrap fingers around Duke's, before, without even standing, "I'm Mree," he says, then his hand just vaporizes and leaves Duke's briefly shrouded in green mist. *POFF!* Mree is gone. *POFF!* Mree has claimed Tex's backseat and is all sprawled out in it, where Coz will have to wrestle him for space. He'll leave the two front seats free for Duke and Carnie.
*
"Just Duke." Duke ambles toward the car. "Well. Raphael Duke, but no one's called me Raphael since — I'd have to look it up." He's still damp with holy water but the shotgun has long-since been stashed in his bag. They mostly harmless. Coz hops into the back seat to make some space for himself whether Mree cooperates or not. Sloppy dog kisses might be involved.
"I run Dio's Scrap Yard," Duke explains. "We're going there. Well, Coz kind of runs it more than me. I'm bad with money." He gestures for Carnelian to get in the front seat. "Mostly I'm kind of a pharmacist. Guess that's the word for it these days. Apothecary. Gardener. I grow things, make people better." He slides into the driver's seat, then offers his cigarette case up to any takers. "Anyone?" The car starts up without him turning the key, which is still in the ignition.
*
After Carnelian gets into the car, he glances around the inside and considers it for a moment— and is startled when the engine just turns on. ".. Huh." Pause, "Well, really, I'm Carlos. Carlos Serrato. I'm a mechanic at Serrato Autobody, my cousin's shop. But when I'm out and about glowing, I go by Carnelian. You know, secret identity and all that." He glances behind him to Mree and the dog, "I suppose that wouldn't work so well for you, mi amigo." A cigarette is offered though, and Carnie reaches out to accept, "Wait, how does a dog run a junkyard?" This day is getting more and more weird.
*
Mree struggles with Coz for a little while, but he's smiling while doing so, and everyone seems to be getting along fine. Tex's purr draws a sound from Mree which indicates a particular delight in the sensation, and then he's more or less sedate, peeping up at Carnelian when he glances back down to him. It's a sad and sober sort of shake of a head that the guy gets. There's no hiding his strange.
*
Duke's cigarettes are…well, they are mostly tobacco. Just not the usual tobacco. Mostly, they pack the effect of nicotine without any of the unpleasant sensations of sucking on burning leaves. And they're kind of calming, as if they were from the same family as chamomile.
"Well, I'm bad at money and Coz remembers that it's a thing," Duke explains, as they head into the surprisingly packed streets — everyone's trying to get away from Central Park, again, and the cops are trying to get in. The cordon is right up ahead. They're going to be here all night and that's if they don't get identified.
"Hang on," Duke says irritably. He steps on the gas and Tex growls about it. "Will you just…cooperate?" Duke looks annoyed, which is rare for him. "Do you want to end up in impound? Or exorcised? What if they decide they have a problem with Mree?"
Suddenly, they lurch forward. The car is going very fast, which is so weird because they're almost going nowhere at all. There's a popping sensation, or maybe it's a tearing. The buildings blur, time stretches oddly so that thoughts build up a weird Doppler effect. And then everything around them is shades of red, shades of pink, shades of orange. The sky is inverted, pillars come out of the clouds, something is screaming in the distance. The wind is so hot.
Then, that sensation again and they're on a road at the far end of Queens. Water glitters in the distance, Riker's Island is a shadow near the horizon. A sign that reads DIO'S SCRAP YARD hangs over a large gate.
"Better," Duke says. "Thank you." He pats the steering wheel.
*
Carnelian officially has very, very little idea what is going on: the dog remembers money? Is this guy talking to his car? WHOA they're going FAST. Carnie's head is spinning, and when they come to a halt, and he's practically jumping out from the car and leaning over and heaving. Not quite throwing up, but man, his stomach is trying. Forgive him, that was his first interdimensional bit of travel.
*
Mree feels strangely heart-hurt when Duke uses him as a rhetorical ploy to get Tex to do something he obviousl doesn't want to do. He's building up the energy to point out that he can easily elude some police officers, but then Tex is taking him on a new sort of joyride. His fingers grip at the upholstery, his head reels, back arcs, tail curls and then curls and then curls some more. By the time he's on the other side he's too postcoital to remember why he was irritated. His chest heaves, and a breath returns from said chest in the form of a lover's sigh. "Tex… that was amazing," he murmurs, nuzzling his face into the backseat.
*
"Sorry. It's out of practice." Duke doesn't sound terribly sorry but he's always a bit off that way. He's hopping out of the car to open the gates and let Tex in. A goat, who has managed to make it all the way to the top of the crushed cars stacked against the wall of the scrap yard, bleats obnoxiously. Several chickens up there look judgmental. Duke ignores them. He does offer poor Carnelian a pat on the back when he returns. He looks at Mree snuggling in the backseat and rolls his eyes. "Go on then," he says to the car, which putters on ahead and through the yard to park itself in the garage. "I have to check my notes but I think that's its first friend in… centuries. And it's a plant. Guess when it was a horse they might have got along less. What with it being a herbivore."
Duke exhales sharply. "Let's go get you a beer," he says to Carnelian. "Don't mind the goats."
*
Carnelian rises up, the heaving finally coming to an end, and regards Mree and the… car? for a — "Wait, it used to be a horse? Man I have no idea what's going on anymore." This complaint is said mildly, but beer is offered, so Carnie nods and moves to follow Duke. "I'm starting to think I took a blow to the head."
*
Duke is unperturbed. He leads Carnelian through the maze of the scrap yard and, weirdly, there's a lot of plants in here. Little gardens and trees. There's a fire pit, smouldering off toward the forest on one side of the property. The garage is huge, and open, full of all kinds of workbenches. In the center, there's a ring of odd writing and Tex has parked himself in the middle of it. There are couches, though, and some chairs, mostly near the open doors of the garage.
"Sit," he says, gesturing toward the sofa nearest the open doors. The sky is pretty clear out here, you can even see the stars. There's a sense of quiet here. "Yeah, they tell me Tex was a horse for a long time. But we put him in a car a while back. This one's new. We move him when we need to. I don't remember much but some of it's written and some of it they tell me." He heads into the back of the garage where there's a fridge. When he comes back, he has four bottles of beer — apparently he's saving himself the first trip. "I don't remember more than a decade or so. Can't tell you why. I know things. I just don't remember them."
*
Sitting upon the indicated the sofa, and leaning back to get comfortable: he pushes his hoodie back down over his head and adjusts the bright red-orange bandana around his neck. "Huh. So it's a person. Him. He's a person. Except he used to be a horse and is now a car, a car you have to talk into … going. And who can go extremely superfast when he wants to. Man, and I thought my life was weird." He gives a long glance over to the car, reaching up to take the offered beer, "Well, I can say, I'm a top notch mechanic if you ever need someone to check under the hood."
*
"Yes. Good." Duke sheds his jacket, then sprawls bonelessly in the chair next to the sofa. "That would be helpful. I'm learning. Mechanical things are not…me. I can't see them the way I can see other things. Tex isn't a person, it's a demon. I think. They say. Him and Coz." He gestures vaguely. "But they're good. They've always been there, as far as I know."
The beer, like the cigarettes, is almost normal but not quite. It's incredibly relaxing without being too intoxicating. They grow better hops in the Other Garden, apparently. Coz climbs up on the sofa to use Carnelian's leg as a pillow, making happy grumbles.
"See," Duke says. "He's good. He's not possessed or anything. He's just Coz, as far as we can tell. Something weird happened and he's just him."
*
Casually, Carnie reaches his hand out to settle it upon Coz's head, and begin a thorough effort to scritch behind the big pup's ears. "Wait, Tex is a *demon*? Your car is a demon? Now don't get me wrong I'm not super keen on metaphysics or religion or anything but I swear 'demon' was codeword for 'bad thing that wants to eat you'. At least that's the sorta thing that came out of the whatever that was in Central Park." He eyes the dog a moment, keeping his scritching up, "But he's smart enough to know money and numbers. I wonder if he's a dog-mutant. I mean if there are human-mutants, why not dog-mutants?" He looks at Coz closely, "Are you a dog-mutant, buddy? DOn't take that wrong, I'm a mutant myself."
*
Coz yawns non-committally but wags his tail happily, pounding the sofa cushion. Scritches are the best thing.
"He might be," Duke says thoughtfully. "And demons are…they're diverse. They're mostly monstrous but they have their own rules of order — mostly around power. And they're beholden to some magics. That's why you can bind them and summon them. Just the way not all things that want to eat you are demons, not all demons want to eat you." Duke looks over his shoulder at Tex. "Someone once said that I've just had Tex so long, it doesn't really know how to be anything else anymore. But it gets me to where I need to go. I don't go through Hell much. Demons really want to eat me. No idea why. I just make them angry."
*
Well, Carnelian will keep on scritching. "I had a dog back home." He sighs wistfully, but he otherwise listens quite carefully to what Duke is saying. He shakes his head slowly, "That sounds… complicated. It sounds like there's all sorts of rules. My thing … its instinctive. I make psychic forcefields: for some reason they're carnelian. Sometimes opaque, sometimes transparent, but always carnelian. They're flat planes *placed* at a place and once placed they don't move unless I will them to or they break. And they're sharp enough to cut through anything like butter. Its… easy. I'm force field guy. So… what are you? Demons hate you, so are you some sorta mutant? Or just… collector of weird and useful semi-sentient things?"
*
"Who knows?" Duke finishes one beer, starts another. "I'm just here. I know how things work. Bodies. Chemistry. I can see it, the way the world puts living things together. I can see what's wrong in a body and make a thing to fix it. I know the shape of things in beer, the way the flowers make it happen. I can see what's left of them in it, it's pretty. I know I've been here a long time. But I don't think I'm a mutant. I just am."
Duke stretches out his legs, then sighs heavily, much like the dog. "It's a good color, carnelian. Life color. Don't know where I know that from, but I do. Good for the body and the voice, once upon a time. Things are different now. They work differently. But that's a good thing to have, what you can do. You get choices. Protect or harm. But you hide yourself? I suppose that's wise. I'm not wise."
*
Listening, Carnie sips the beer and blinks a moment, eyeing the beer. "That's… great." he compliments, of the beer itself, before looking back to Duke, "Interesting, but I don't quite know what to make of it. It sounds like you're a mutant: some mutant perception ability? But I don't know." Then he wrinkles his nose, "Look, man, I'm a wetback if you ask half the people in this city— bad enough I'm mexican and .." Though his english is perfect, ".. in white America, life's hard enough being that, and a mutant on top of it? I can get killed, mi amigo. So if I want to put my power to use, I wear my bandana and go by Carnelian, and with the shields up, you can't make out I'm not lily white. So I only deal with one sort of bigotry at once."
*
"Mexico." Duke's expression shifts to something fond. He doesn't appear white himself, though what he is isn't really clear. "I write about a desert there on the border — in my books that I keep, for when I forget. It's important, and beautiful. I don't remember that, I just wrote it down. The plants that grow out there are useful, too. I know it must be important because I have it in more than one book, over and over again. I must go back there sometimes, but it's been a while. I don't remember going and the last book I wrote anything new in is very old. I have no idea how I got up here. New York is like that, though. Like a shore where we all wash up."
*
"My family is from Oaxaca, in the south; we're mostly old Zapotec blood— have you ever been? It's beautiful. I've been through the deserts and they're beautiful in their own way, but whenever I visit, its to Oaxaca that I go. There's nothing quite like it. Its an incredibly diverse region, too, with valleys and high mountains and everything between— with intense diversity of life, sounds like it might be your kind of place.." Carnie frowns a bit, forgetting to scritch the poor dog, "How often do you… forget? Forgetting often doesn't seem… good." He gestures around, "I'm new to New York. Just arrived weeks ago from Los Angeles, myself."
*
"My memory only goes back about ten years," Duke says, without any real unhappiness about it. "I've been here…twenty? More? It's on the paperwork for this place. I helped a man who left it to me when he died. I keep the knowing of things without the knowing how I know them. If I see someone all the time, I don't forget, I remind myself of the important things. But if I don't, it fades. The unimportant things dissolve fastest. It's not as complicated as it sounds. Sometimes it's bad because I forget people. Like Liv, I forgot her, but it was long. Very long. You're young, though," he says with a laugh, taking another look at Carnelian. "Not even old enough for me to forget twice. The idea of forgetting is terrible when you're young. You want to hold on to everything."
*
Carnelian wrinkles his nose, "Hey, I'm 22." He's not very heated about it, "So certainly old enough for you to forget twice, plus a couple years. Man, though." He tilts his head to the side, then takes another swig of this most excellent of beers, "I don't know that I want to hold onto everything, but everything I've experienced shapes who I am. Both good and ill. If I can't remember things, then who am I? Am I constantly changing— losing some part of myself or who I was yesterday? I mean we're all constantly changing, but over time the new experiences, I think, don't have as big an impact as the gathered collection of old experiences. Usually." Pause, "So how old ARE you?"
*
"Good question." Duke looks like he's doing the math. "This time? All times? Liv says I died in 1811. But I didn't — don't — stay dead. I knew her for a long time before that. And when I met her, we guessed I'd already been here a while. Maybe centuries. We know that because of some things I wrote, some things I owned, still own — well, Liv knows that. I don't know it, usually. I only know it right now because she told me not long ago. I don't run into people I used to know very often. I suppose it takes me so long to come back around, they're dead or gone."
Duke shrugs as though he's discussing the weather. "Mostly, I'm just here. I envy people like you some times, people who know their past. I just am. I am the same as when I met Liv, I think. I didn't ask."
*
"Wait, this Liv chica knew you in 1811? That makes her like, a hundred and fifty odd years old!" It's one thing for Carnelian to accept this guy is old with his weird memory— maybe being old means you have a weird memory and only so much fits?— but someone *else*, too? He drains his beer as he shakes his head, "Don't envy me. Only thing special about me is my power, not none of my memories, though mi Abuelita is something I wouldn't trade for anything else, especially the moles she'd make." A wistful, longing sigh escapes his lips, "I work hard, get treated like shit; I fight hard, but am always alone; I play hard, and there find sanity. But my life, mi amigo, it is not one to envy. Not for someone who has a magic car and dog. And amazing beer." It might sound like he's complaining, but his tone doesn't really carry that at all: he's fairly content with his lot in life.
*
"Coz likes you, so you can always come here," Duke offers. "He works the gate, lets people in. So you don't have to be alone — you should make some friends, New York isn't so bad for that. If I can make friends, anyone can. Friends who remember me even when I forget. You know yourself. And you know where you come from. That's worth plenty." Duke doesn't sound like he's giving a pep talk. Just saying what he knows. "You come back you'll meet Liv some time, then you'll know her, too. She comes around," he says, with the air of someone who doesn't get it but he accepts it.
*
"He works the gate?" Carnelian gives the dog a long look, still not quite wrapping his head around this intelligent dog. Of all the things Duke has said, that's the hardest to understand, because a dog is a dog! But, scritches happen again. "Oh, I have some friends. They just don't know about Carnelian, and I have to work hard to keep it that way. Then the other things." He shrugs, "But sure, I'll come by, help tune up the — Tex. If this senorita Liz comes by we can share a beer. She's your friend, then?"
*
"Yes." Duke nods, then gestures vaguely. "She comes back." As though that was the defining factor in a friendship — someone knowing who he is and still coming back anyway. That list is small but growing, which is unusual.
*
There's a slow blink, and Carnie nods his head slowly, "Well, that's what friends do, don't they? They stand by you. It's what friends are for, people you can rely on. Well, people and dogs." He scritches Coz some more, "He can rely on you, can't he, boy?" A bit of a goofy grin is offered the dog. Its hard not to get a bit goofy around dogs. Even hypersmart dogs.
*
Coz rolls over on his back, all four paws in the air, to give Carnie a goofy puppy grin, tongue lolling. Of course! Because Coz is the best dog. His wagging tail that makes his whole body shake is proof of that.
"I'm not very reliable, not in the long run," Duke admits. "But I'm here now. And I don't really change. You'd have to ask Liv what kind of friend I make — probably irritating. I do what I can, though, if people need it. There's places to stay, plenty to eat, and I can heal nearly anything from vampires to bullet holes and more. You know where to find me if you need me."
*