applesaucedream | Saving Lives a Mile High [open to all]

Current Music: September 22nd/23rd, 2013

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Saving Lives a Mile High [open to all]

Welcome to another ordinary day in Manhattan. This barely even qualifies as a dream at all, it's so like waking life. The dreamers will find that they're their own perfectly normal selves going about their perfectly normal business and thwarting perfectly normal crimes in their perfectly normal spandex outfits.

What's that? No, of course it's normal to wear spandex (or leather, for the more chic among you) and go around beating up muggers and thwarting your villainous counterparts, don't be silly. What else would you do with your afternoon, not use your superpowers to better the world? That's grossly irresponsible of you; don't you know that with great power comes great responsibility?

So get out there and make the world a better place -- and be sure not to let that disguise slip if you do make it in to work today. Wouldn't want anyone to learn your secret identity, after all.

[OOC: Characters will find themselves thrust into the role of superhero...or at least, super-powered human. Whether they'd use those powers for good or evil (or use them at all), they'll think they've always been this way (or maybe just since that time they fell in toxic waste and developed ~~cancer~~ telekinesis). Usual dream party rules apply: all players and characters welcome regardless of membership status. Characters will remember or forget the events of the dream at players' discretion.]

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She's watched this happen more times than she cares to count, so the abrupt stilling of his recently discarded burner is unmistakable. A tap of her thumb closes the tracking app, now useless, but she doesn't leave her post. He was headed right for her, which means he still might be.

A new app is opened, some mindless game she can pretend to play while she keeps most of her focus on her surroundings. There's a steady stream of pedestrians coming up the street B was on a minute ago, and none of them so much as glance her way.

Come on, B. Quit being so goddamn coy and take the bait.

She notes when the tall guy wanders into the park, because she's noted everyone who's wandered into the park since her arrival. Learn what's normal, pick out the patterns, it's all second nature. It isn't until he starts to wander her way that she gives him her full attention.

Rita is many things, but approachable isn't one of them.

Her phone is lowered into her lap, and she gives the man a level look. Maybe she's seen him before, but that doesn't mean much and it's not easy to judge. Given how much relative time she's spent in this city, it's all but impossible to place people who merely look a bit familiar. They have to make some kind of impression if she's going to remember them.

Well, at least for this loop, he has. 'Tourist' seems likely enough, but it's not the only possibility. She considers what she's learned of B, which still mostly amounts to 'skittish as hell' and 'doesn't take initial brush-offs all that well,' then indicates the correct direction with a tilt of her head. "That way."

Lifting her phone, she returns to her dumb game. To all outward appearances, she's done with him. And if directions are all he's really after, he should be done with her, too.

He glances in the indicated direction, bobbing his head. "Ah, okay. Thanks!" And then, like an obedient tourist, he starts moving off.

Except he only takes a few steps away from her before pausing, returning to his phone and stepping to the side of the path as he apparently starts peering down at something on the screen. He's looking at a map of the area, just as he said he was, and expanding the view as if scanning around, because that's an easy and mindless thing to do while he listens to just what the hell is going on here.

...the repeating parts don't sound quite the way he remembers them. Songs are far from static, but they don't normally alter themselves within a matter of days.

Look who's lingering. Rita continues to poke absently at her phone as she keeps the ostensible tourist in her periphery. He's not bad at pretending to pay attention to his phone, but he's not good enough to fool her. His mind is elsewhere. Takes one to know one.

So begins the next stage of this interminable goddamn day. Time to figure out if this is B or not, and if so, just how to handle him. She exits the game, then twists on the bench to face him. She doesn't get up - doesn't do anything overtly threatening, unless you count taking a good, long look at him. Which, maybe he does. Her looks can be a bit intense.

"So," she drawls, "should I call you B?" Why not cut right to the chase? If she's right, and he bolts, she can use the next reset to handle him a bit more delicately.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

He may be doing a good job at pretending to pay attention to his phone, but his shoulders definitely stiffen a little as he's addressed. Closing the app, he looks up at her. "What?" That look - god, that's more frightening than the bass line of her song. There's no way he can just run from this. She'll remember his face, and after that it's only a matter of time.

But he's good at keeping his composure under threats. If anything, the jolt of fear makes it easier for him to deliberately loosen his posture, raising an eyebrow in amused incredulity. "Wait, is that like bae? I'm flattered, really, but I'm taken." Married to the job, one might say.

Rita's expression doesn't soften, doesn't betray any shred of doubt or uncertainty. She saw the subtle tightening of his shoulders when she first addressed him, and she's going to handle this as if she's finally found her guy. What's the worst case scenario if she's wrong: she confuses some tourist? Who gives a shit. She'll just do it differently next time, and spare this guy the brunt of her irritation.

But that's for next time. "Not as much fun when it happens to you, is it?" she asks, her tone dry as dust. One corner of her mouth ticks up like the curve of a blade, and she lifts her phone again. Different app this time. "Smile," she intones as she casually snaps a picture.

He doesn't smile.

It takes effort not to snap back, but it's important now that he doesn't. She can't possibly know for sure; she'd have just walked right into the bar if she did, right? Maybe he can play this off - he has to play this off, or he's screwed.

"Okay...?" He shoves his phone back into his pocket and glances up and down the path in a display of confusion. "I'll just be going, then?" Is she going to let him leave? He's gotten as much as he can from her; frankly, he wouldn't have come anyway if he knew this was going to happen. He's going to try it, at least, and he turns to walk off, quicker now as if he might know where he's going after all.

Oh, no you don't. Rita gets to her feet with the menacing grace of a tiger shark and sets off after him, pocketing her phone as she goes. Some distant part of her feels a bit sorry for him if he really is just some hapless tourist, but if he's not, hell if she's letting him just walk away. If he is, well, none of this will have ever really happened. No permanent harm done.

"Hang on," she says with an almost passable impression of amiability as she falls into step beside him. "Big city. You might get lost."

"I think I'll be fine." He turns to flash a smile at her, which turns out quite a bit sharper than he intended. "Thanks anyway." Maybe she really does know, and she's just toying with him. That'd fit in with all the other time-travelers he's ever known.

His attempt at being tricky in his approach means they're heading back towards where he ditched the phone, and towards the bar where all of this started in the first place. At least they don't know him by name there. None of that really matters anyway now that she's got his photo, but it's something. Maybe. He picks up his pace as they reach a crosswalk, taking long quick strides. If he bolts now, he breaks his (possibly already broken) cover for sure. If she keeps tailing him for too long, the same result. How can he shake her?

Are you sure about that? she almost asks. It's tempting. She didn't work so hard to get here just on principle; he's freaked her out, more than she wants to admit, and why the hell shouldn't she return the favor? But if he doesn't know how her power works, she already has the 'intimidation' angle well covered. And if he does... well, same answer. She doesn't have to go out of her way to threaten him.

Keeping up with him is probably enough, and there's nothing difficult about that particular task. Her pace has always been brisk, anyway.

"This doesn't have to be a scene," she says, not sounding menacing so much as tired, because she is, more than he probably knows. Not to be confused with 'weak' or 'defeated,' of course, more of an implied 'I could do this all day.' She could. She has. "I just want to talk."

They're rapidly approaching the bar B came from, and she gives the place a pointed look. If he's not just a tourist, this should put an end to his feigned ignorance. "Back in there, if you don't mind." Look at all this courtesy she's affording you.

The thought does briefly cross his mind that he could just break into a dead sprint and try to make it to the nearest subway entrance. It's pretty easy to lose people down there.

In the end, though, the damage is done. She's seen his face. She knows.

His shoulders slump a little as he follows her glance towards the bar. "Fine." He'll even enter ahead of her, because honestly at this point it doesn't much matter if he turns his back on her or not. It'd be better not to show her that much fear anyway. She sounded honest enough about just wanting to talk; unfortunately, she's shattered what trust he had in her basic decency with the frighteningly prescient stalking. "But I'm not buying."

Rita actually smiles at that, faint triumph and weary relief at the confirmation. She's made it this far. Fucking finally. "Deal." She actually sounds cheerful - or as close to cheerful as she can be expected to get, all things considered.

Still, she keeps a close eye on him as she heads for the bar, making sure he doesn't get any ideas about bolting. It might be unnecessarily unnerving, ordering him what he was drinking before (a tidbit picked up during previous attempts to find him), but hell if she knows what else he might like, and there are more important things to discuss than his beverage preferences. She joins him at a little table - small, but not too intimately so - sets his drink in front of him, and sits down with her whatever-the-hell-was-on-tap, which she utterly ignores.

"How the hell did you find me?" Blunt and to the point.

He certainly does draw into himself a bit as he sets the drink down, staring at her. There is absolutely no way he's going to drink it.

"...people notice when there's new heroes running around, you know," he replies after a moment. It's not a direct answer, nor is it even really to the question she asked. "I bet there's three blogs about you by now." They'll have given her a moniker. He wishes briefly that he'd looked it up; she seems like she'd be very unamused by the entire thing.

Four, actually. She keeps tabs on all of them to make sure this very thing doesn't happen. It's not like she expected a complete lack of attention - the crime fighters who go out of their way to avoid the limelight are more intriguing than the ones who don't bother with masks or secret identities - but she already knows what happens if her actual identity goes public, and she doesn't want it. Never again.

"They don't text me," she says, unamused anyway because that's her default state. "And I'd like to keep it that way." So if there's a leak, it needs to be stopped.

"Easy enough." He shrugs carelessly, mentally noting the people around them before he continues. No one's listening; it's still early in the day to be in a bar at all. "You aren't too high-profile yet, and none of the super-villains are talking about you." He says it mockingly, as he always does. They're a bunch of idiots, jockeying amongst themselves to be the biggest and baddest. He should know.

But they both know those aren't the people she's concerned with right now. "You said no. We could've just left it at that. I'm not a telemarketer."

Rita doesn't bat an eye at the mention of 'super-villains.' They don't worry her - not yet, anyway, not when the worst any of them could think to do to her would just result in a reset and a smarter sequence of moves on her part. She'd have to live with whatever had preceded it, but that's nothing new. She already has to live with a lot.

The actual worst thing someone could do to her is what B is doing now, and there he sits, heaving his shoulders in a dismissive shrug, like this is nothing.

"No." Rita leans forward, her chair creaking beneath her. "We couldn't." And again, since the question obviously needs repeating: "How did you find me?"

He doesn't lean back. He very deliberately does not lean back.

"I might ask you the same question," he points out instead. "I'm not the one following people - though I guess that's not the right word, is it? Preceding, that's the one." If nothing else, this unwanted proximity has given him plenty of time to listen. The more he thinks about it, the more different she sounds from the way he remembers. That was only a week or so ago; what could possibly have happened in such little time?

He really doesn't know, does he? That's some small relief, though the quiet snort she lets out is more exasperated than anything else. So, he managed to figure out her scrupulously hidden identity and snag her phone number, but is unaware of what she actually does. Christ.

She could tell him.

It's not without risk - he must have something going on, to have found her in the first place - but if he had a way of sussing out the extent of her powers without her telling him, he'd have done it already.

Getting here was difficult. Making sure this conversation didn't actually happen will be easy.

"You want to know how I found you?" She leans against the back of her chair and gives him a maddeningly blasé shrug of her own. See how he likes it. "Trial and error. Weeks of it." She gives that a moment to sink in, then leans forward again. "But you started this. And if you don't want me to finish it, you'll answer my goddamn question."

He doesn't look surprised. The words certainly have an effect, but he doesn't look surprised. He just closes his eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath, in through the nose and out through the mouth.

He knew it.

"Do you think I don't know how this works?" He leans forward to rest his elbows on the table, voice low. "I didn't do anything with you that I don't do with every half-decent vigilante in this town. My only mistake was thinking that this would be different - what can I say, I'm a sucker for do-gooders." Punch a few purse-snatchers and suddenly you must be a good person. Is he still such an easy mark after all this time?

If he didn't know better...but she wasn't sent here by any of them. He could never miss something like that. He knows their songs better than any others. "You can do whatever you want, but I'm not going to be some time looper's personal pet parrot again."

Oh, cry her a goddamn river. Rita huffs out a quiet laugh, incredulous and entirely without pity. "You pull this shit with everyone and expect me to believe I'm the first to object?" It probably says something bad about her that she feels more at ease as he becomes increasingly uncomfortable, but fuck it, she's been at this for a while and it's nice to finally have the roles reversed. "I'm not the only one who likes her privacy." With a glance to either side and a slight lean inward, telegraphing that she's about to impart some great and terrible secret, she adds in a conspiratorial hush, "That's what the mask is for."

A bit much, maybe. But it's obvious that he doesn't know how this works, if his only response to being called out is a load of self-righteous whining. What, does he think none of the others whose identities he casually exposed (even if only to himself) were upset about it? Has he been taking it for granted that his dubious charm and accurate information are all it would take to win someone over?

Or has he just been lucky, up until now, because none of the others could do what she does and hold him personally accountable for his actions?

Yeah, that seems like a safe bet. She sits back and just stares at him for a moment or two, wondering how many people in his contact list are being held hostage by the implicit threat of exposure. Speaking of keeping people as fucking pets. That's his purview, and his apparent experience with other time-loopers barely registers, a fact taken in and quietly filed away while most of her focus is on not throttling him.

"I already told you I don't need an informant," she says without a trace of her former levity. And if he's been paying attention, he knows why. But just in case he hasn't, she speaks slowly and carefully, each word distinct: "What possible fucking use could I have for you?"

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Saving Lives a Mile High [open to all]

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