station72 | [closed] a little less conversation

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ilde vilmaine [original]

[closed] a little less conversation

CHARACTERS: Ilde & Petre; Kusuma Ming & Fahima Hanne
WHERE: Ming's penthouse
WHEN: Day :051
SUMMARY: Turning the screws on Kusuma Ming.
WARNINGS: Violent ideation, torture, cannibalism (GOD DAMMIT PETRE)

Kusuma Ming has a sure stride. It isn't long - no, her mother taught her better than that -, but she moves in a way that's impressively direct. Hesitation is for amateurs or people with time to waste and she is neither. Even here, at the end of what's been a long day with nothing ahead of her but some light last minute work and an evening home, there's no point in lingering. Ming, along with her small fleet of private security personnel, make their way across the building's lobby directly to the private elevator. It opens to her ID chip and three of her security detail slide in after her.

There's no conversation. She instead spends the exceptionally short ride up to the penthouse picking a straw fleck of grit out from under one of her fingernails. When they arrive at the top level foyer, two of the guards hang back wordlessly just at the landing. Only one follows her along to the penthouse proper. Suffice to say, no one works for Ming because she's a pleasant boss. At the very least, she doesn't ask much of them - she knows some people who treat their bodyguards like servants. That's nonsense. She takes off her own coat the moment she's inside. She hangs it up herself, takes her own earrings out and places them in the small bowl inside the door. Better to treat security as if they're not there at all. It makes the whole concept less obtrusive, doesn't it? Who wants to be aware they're being followed or watched? No one, she tells herself (--that's practice for tomorrow; she has a meeting with investors in the afternoon and none of those cheap suits would know what separates good security from the bad).

Kusuma takes her shoes off, then sweeps down the stairs to the penthouse's main level. It's all sleek dark wood, pale grey furniture. There's a broadcast playing quietly on the holoscreen; Fahima must have decided to stay for the evening. It's too late to expect dinner, but--

There are two people on the elegant sofa at the center of the room, the light off the holo feed flickering idly there. Kusuma pauses, one hand still on the steel stair railing. She'd recognize Fahima from the back of her head, but the other one?

Right. She'd been shopping with a friend.

"If I knew you were expecting to entertain, I would've brought a bottle of wine home." It's a little cutting. Fahima might have at least given her the courtesy of leaving a message to warn her she'd be coming home to a guest.

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Ilde nods, while they are peaceful she will remain so. Good behavior gets softness, politeness. Bad behavior will be an experience neither of the women has ever encountered before.

"Thank you," she says, utter patience in the face of Kusuma's vehemence. "Tell me, who has been arranging the bombings? Who gives the word."

There's an urge to spit something, something lurking under her skin that she can't quite put a finger on - a suspicion, but one she can't quite parse the details of. There's a sweet taste on her tongue and Kusuma rolls her eyes at the question.

"No one gives the word. It's a board. We all have different controlling percentages and vote accordingly, isn't that right?" The question is directed to Fahima. Kusuma tips her face to give her a glance and finds her fiance looking completely bewildered.

"What's your percentage?" Fahima asks and the question peels back some layer of-- something. It feels like trying to penetrate through a fog.

I've been drugged. Just the realization is enough to sharpen her, to send a bolt of something very near to fear coursing through her. Maybe some flicker of it shows in the iron wrought lines of her face, but Kusuma doesn't hesitate before she reaches for the heavy bangle on her wrist. Good, her hands are still deft enough. She touches one of the single knots on the side of the bracelet with her thumb. It depresses, a small needle breaching the opposite edge of the metal via the loaded spring inside the bracelet. She pricks her forefinger on it.

"Eelis," this toward the bodyguard at the door. "Call up the team, would you?"

Edited 2016-11-30 02:30 (UTC)

( Nod. Let her think you are going to fetch them. )

It spills from Ilde's thoughts as soon as Kusuma speaks, better to make her think things are still going here way. However, noticing that Kusuma has done something... untoward, Ilde rises to her feet. She comes to stand before the two women. She is not the most imposing, but with the pair of them sitting and her standing she looms. She pushes with her symbiote.

It is different from when she had tried to manipulate an entire room of Bout It Out spectators, there is just the two of them and they are easy to hold on to. She is great and terrible with the weight of fear behind her, pulsating with a power that cannot be denied. She has never tried this in conjunction with the drug before, although she has contemplated what might happen if she prepared a target for vulnerability to her...

"Name your board, Kusuma," a timbre dark and fearful in her tone, promising something terrible, something beyond imagination, if she is not heeded.

For a moment, she enjoys that renewed confidence stitching through her as the cleansing agent courses into her blood stream. It'll take a few minutes to fully decontaminate her system, but even just the knowledge that it's doing its work is enough to seemingly clear her wits. Eelis will bring the guards up. They'll apprehend the girl and have Public Security take it from there. Find a crime to charge her with. Fahima-- well, Fahima would understand. She always did.

Didn't she? It's not the question to be asking herself in the moment, but there's something about Saffron's presence that has the thought ballooning to fill the room. Kusuma stills where she sits in the shadow of her. She breathes in short, the small hairs at the back of her neck crawling. In the demand what she hears is everything being stripped away from her, being exposed, ruined - someone taking everything she's worked for and dashing it like something delicate and young on a stone. Violence doesn't occur to her. There are bigger things to be concerned about than being made to bleed.

Kusuma croaks out a low noise. She can't refuse, but she can-- "If I give you names, you have to swear to not implicate me." Delay. Not for long. Her people will be here soon. Mother, give her a few hours and none of this matters. Bigger plans are in motion; she just has to keep her head down until they go off and no one in the city will think to look in her direction.

Ilde Vilmaine bares her teeth like a monster when she smiles, vibrating with an energy that stings. When she speaks, there is something there just below the surface... Something deep and rhythmic; the intonations of a cataclysmic destiny. Something powerful and inhuman, her symbiote filtering Ilde's own horrifying memories of a mad king who called himself god into her victim's understanding of the situation. Channels him. Channels terror. Channels power. It is not just the two women she evokes upon, no, Ilde has never been able to use this power without also effecting herself. It is dizzying, but familiar. Toxic, but enthralling.

Her symbiote breathes in her greatest weakness, and breathes power back out. As if they were made for each other.

"You will be spared," she agrees, low and condescending, a suggestion of how little Kusuma Ming impresses her in this moment. Pathetic, sniveling wretch. She is not so certain Kusuma Ming will make it out of this encounter alive if she continues in such a manner. "Now you will tell me: their names, their stations, and where to find them."

Her people are coming, she tells herself and manages to not shrink under the dread that pervades through her now. Her stomach twists, bile in her throat as nausea rises. Universe, her heart is racing. Maybe the decontaminate isn't working. Maybe she's dying. Maybe--

"I don't know any of those things." She can't talk in circles like this forever, she realizes. Her pulse rabbits in her throat. "We operate with code names and disguises. We all only know the identity of one other member. Except for one. I know one name. Erastos Loke." She bares her teeth around the name, grinning manically against the strain of her body twitching with some primordial fear. "He's old money. Fingers in lots of companies. He lives in a townhouse in Beta Block. 2205 Piccola." What else? That doesn't sound like an answer the girl will like, does it? Maybe she should supplement it. Just to be safe. "Doesn't say much. Quiet. But he has the highest percentage on the board."

She manages, just barely, to crane her attention around to Eelis who is-- who should have her gun drawn by now, shouldn't she? Why haven't the elevator doors opened yet? Where is everyone? Her skin crawls and she clamps her mouth shut tight. There's more she could say, but no. Head down, she tells herself. Just keep your mouth shut.

Edited 2016-12-02 01:01 (UTC)

She tilts her head. Watches Kusuma grind her teeth, trying to fight what little of the potion remains, trying to resist the layers of horror that Ilde pushes on her and Fahima. She pushes harder, her face feeling feverish and her eyes dilating, but her sudden paleness and enormously black eyes do nothing but make her more terrifying. She would know. She has seen it, seen the ugly things that come out from behind a pretty face. She has so much fear to use, to twist, to place into the back of their minds.

"Do not resist me," she snaps, thunderously furious. The room pulsates with it, with her. "Do I need to demonstrate to you how dire this situation is for you, and for Fahima? Both your lives depend on your answers."

And oh does Ilde know there are things worse than death.

Edited 2016-12-02 02:12 (UTC)

Sweat prickles at the back of her neck, across her temple and the pad of her thumb - the one she'd pricked just moments ago - stings. There's blood there, she thinks. Just a drop. Not enough to be squeamish about, and yet here she is - nauseous. Anxiety jerking at the edge of focus. Her breath curdles in her chest and the closeness of Fahima beside means nothing.

"There's five others. I don't know their names. I swear." It doesn't matter. The girl doesn't have to know she knows anything more. She doesn't know what to press. She's clearly firing blind here, isn't she? Grasping after straws. The girl Saffron has nothing, and Kusuma will be damned if she gives her more than exactly what she asks for.

"Kusuma," she sighs, the swing back from her anger down to this exasperation is not exactly comforting, it just comes across as wild. The more emotions she can display in the shortest amount of time is part of the act, though if she tried to stop now she might not be able to. Is that an act, at all? "You will instruct me on how to find them, I know what your group has been doing, to avoid notice, meeting in person, moving little papers around."

She reaches into one of the shopping bags discarded at the edge of the seating area. Idly pulling on the pair of taser gloves that had been given to the group when this all began.

"Do not fret," now her voice is very sweet. "I will begin very slowly, to give you time to consider your answers."

She thinks about all the women she has seen tortured. About Camille. Her weeping face, her defiance. They could always be broken. It was just a matter of patience.

She can hear breath quickening. It might be hers. Or maybe it's Fahima's. She chooses to ignore it, to ignore the stickiness of her tongue in her own mouth. Instead she bares her teeth at Saffron. It's close enough to a grin that she hopes it counts.

"Of course you will. Without what I know, you can't do anything - can you? Whatever you want will go right down a drain if you ruin me before you can get it, won't it?"

She wishes she had a gun under this sofa cushion. There's one in the seat of the chair across from them, but it's so far out of reach that it might as well not even exist. But Mother, wouldn't it be pleasant to put a slug in the girl's head?

Ilde scoffs at her, reaching out and laying one of her gloved hands onto Fahima's bare knee. While she said she would start slow.... The taser gloves have no particular intensity settings on them. Fahima jerks with a choked off scream that her vocal chords are too tight to fully actuate. Ilde leaves her hand there a long time, letting the woman jerk long after she is no longer entirely conscious. When she lifts her hand Fahima slumps, limbs still twitching from the overload, eyes rolled back in her head. But breathing.

"I was giving you an opportunity," and now her tone is so terribly disappointed. "Now, tell me."

Edited 2016-12-02 03:47 (UTC)

Fahima's scream sizzles between them, hissing like an electrical crackle. Her company's done research on damage caused by exposure to electrical currents. They utilize it in much of their non-lethal personal suppression equipment. Kusuma doesn't flinch, not even when Fahima's weight slumps against her shoulder and side. Instead, she carefully shifts the woman away from her. Breaks their points of contact. If Saffron chooses to shock her-- she doesn't want the current to transfer to Fahima.

"We meet after each bombing. In the city's underground." Her tongue darts across her lips, attention flicking to the glove them back to the girl's face.

Ilde sneers at her, her anger returning and her hand curls into a fist. It threatens that she will continue to use the gloves, but she won't. There are other things to be done now, tasering Fahima Hanne was just a way to start big, to start loud.

"Yes, Kusuma, many of us meet in the underground when we wish our meetings to be more private. Where is the next meeting. When is the next bombing. Do not pretend you are so stupid as to think I would not want to know."

She makes a raw, breathless noise. It might be a laugh.

"What time is it?"

There is only a brief pause, but then Ilde understands.

"Good. Where is the meeting, when are they expecting you?"

She smiles. It's all teeth.

"Six hours from now. It'd probably be easier to draw you a map, my dear."

"Enough stalling," she brushes that off entirely. The sooner she hears the location, the sooner it can be transmitted to the others. "Speak, Kusuma, I grow weary of you."

"There's an old factory on the edge of Subspace that used to manufacture power shields. If you go the basement level, you'll find a tunnel leading into the undercity. It leads directly to the room where we meet." It's the easiest answer in the world to give her. She almost laughs with relief. How funny.

"It's hilarious that you think it'll matter. Give us four hours and there won't be anything left for you to salvage."

"Oh?" The nonchalance of a snake, Ilde reaches out and curls her hand around Fahima's neck. The electric shock of the gloves are turned off, but she squeezes and watches the unconscious woman begin to gag. Ilde is no Iota, but she knows very well that she is stronger than she was before the symbiote, that she could crush this woman's windpipe. That would be too quick... maybe she will dislocate one of her arms instead, but the gesture if it all is effective enough.

"Then perhaps you had best tell me about your bomb, as well."

Kusuma is bare foot, which is good because it might have far greater potential to hurt if she was still wearing her heels when she tries to kick Ilde in the side.

"Don't touch her--!"

She takes it. There's a time and place for simply allowing a strike, and she is not going to react too wildly to what Kusuma does. She has control of this situation, and that is the end of it. She lets go of Fahima's throat, turning instead to take hold of Kusuma's ankle as it recedes from her.

"I will kill her." The drum of her threats is utterly infernal, like a thousand furious hearts all struggling to function. "I will break every one of her bones, one by one, before I slit her open and remove her organs with the same meticulous care."

Her grip on the other woman's foot is very tight, a suggestion of what had begun to press down on Fahima's windpipe. She contemplates the merits of simply snapping that ankle now, just to make herself very clear.

"Or, you may continue to answer my questions."

A moment ago, she hadn't felt anything but certainty that she could make the girl regret. Now, the fear of the threat swallows her. It's choking. She stills, pulse hammering high in her throat.

"The Omega Memory Bank." She hears herself say it more that she knows that she does. That's her voice, shaping those sounds into words. "But if the bomb goes wrong, we'll go underground. You'll never find us again. I'll be the only person you ever see. Loke and everyone like him will disappear."

In a way, it is good she did not have to hurt either of them too severely. She knows Steve would have been disappointed in her... but she would have. She is glad Kusuma chose to care for her partner over keeping her secrets. That earns her back a little bit of the respect she had utterly lost from Ilde. But only a little.

She fiddles the electricity back on in her gloves without a word, holding on tight as the woman spasms from the shock. The problems as Ming has presented them can be solved.

( I have finished. Please come assist me in moving them... I think we will restrain them in the bedroom, and you will be needing Kusuma Ming's appearance as we leave. )

Petre steps back into the room not long after that. He'd had the sense of what Ilde had been doing, how she was using all her cards, delighted with how the two women succumbed in the end. The one executing the torture might have done it for her own reasons, but Petre latched on to every inch of power greedily. He wants the same. He wants to do it next time.

Maybe if he just grabs Ilde's wrist and turns into her.

Right now, there's someone else in his grip. One of Kusuma's other guards, with the third lying down behind him. To surveillance, it will just look like they attacked the woman called Eelis, who in turn took care of everything. When they see her walk back in, and Kusuma walking back out, they will likely suspect that their boss was actually saved.

Petre drops the body heavily. A curious gaze drifts over to where the women lie, cat-like stillness to his moves.

His thoughts, if unintentionally, are transmitted to Ilde easily enough: he wants to eat them.

She inhales deeply. She is all iron right now, utter control, cold as ice. All emotion has been turned off, it is a comfortable, familiar state of being that she has almost missed since coming to the Hive. She has been inundated with so many new experiences, feelings, forced to process the ebb and flow of all those around her. To have it turned off, to feel in control again... It is empty, callous but glorious. She retains that in the face of Petre's hunger.

( The guards are unimportant. Ming must be preserved to answer for what she's done. )

It is not exactly permission, but if he is going to do it one way or another, her only real care is that Kusuma Ming survives to suffer for her choices.

"... Yeah, whatever."

He says so to shed off the mental link, too bored with silence anymore. Petre simply walks over to take a good look at Kusuma, her features, shape and clothes blossoming from his previous disguise. It isn't a very gruesome process; it's like shedding a layer of liquid to reveal what's underneath.

He looks at Ilde with the same consideration Kusuma would have given a pretty face with no other interesting qualities.

"Can I eat the girlfriend."

She purses her lips. This is not something she wants to be a party to. She has already warped herself into a precarious position as it is, and the only thing holding her together is the utter chill in her heart. That chill wants nothing more than to shrug and tell Petre to do as he pleases. If not Fahima Hanne, then someone else. There is no controlling Petre's demon hunger, Ilde knows that much, there is only... guiding it. Will he think more sweetly on her if she tells him yes? Would he be easier to control later?

She peels off her taser gloves, tucking them back into her shopping bags. It will look best if she leaves with the things she came in with, so she gathers them by the door.

"Don't take long."

Not a yes, not a no.

He watches Ilde with some expectation, though he's almost certain she will say no. For all the coldness she tries to emanate, there will always be a part of the demon who knows that emotions, and the sins that come attached to them, are a part of every human. With or without the symbiote's powers, that's all Ilde is.

Petre's surprise is concealed. He might even be a little impressed; he will be more so if she actually sticks around while he does it.

The boy reverts back to his original form, teeth growing out like a hundred jaws trying to fit inside one. Black eyes, wide mouth and claws, he rips Fahima's body apart. A young demon would never be careful, but he is particularly gruesome and hasty with how he devours his way through the woman's most tender parts. Once he's done, all the blood and gore are hidden underneath that sticky liquid that takes form and allows him to look like someone else.

Two fingers wipe at the corner of his mouth; his other hand runs through the facsimile of Kusuma's impeccable hair, and he places her heels back on. Her jacket, her bag. He's ready.

"Shall we, Miss Vilmaine."

She does not watch with any particular interest, but neither can she simply turn away from what she has allowed. She is complicit. Maybe it is not the first time she has watched someone die so that she may carry on in her goals. She has assuredly seen this ugly display before, the improbable teeth that defy all biology, the black eyes. The pop-crack of bones coming apart, the wet mushing sounds of human flesh being torn apart, consumed. She absorbs all of it, as she has so many times before, but she feels nothing. Stores it away in the polluted well that is her heart, where she carries her horrors, pumps them into her veins.

She meets Petre's eyes calmly as he turns back towards her. Should she be grateful, that this ugly little monster has helped to bring her back to this part of herself which is familiar? She is in control once more, or that is at least how it feels. With her emotions so carefully boxed away, it is hard to decide. Should she be disgusted with the both of them? Or did their ends justify their means. Why had she done it if it hadn't.

"Let's go," she agrees without another thought or glance at Fahima Hanne's remains.

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[closed] a little less conversation

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