metalogs | OPEN | Disasters Mean Rethinking Decisions

Entry tags:

OPEN | Disasters Mean Rethinking Decisions

Who: Mark Bryant

atypical_echo, Tommy Shepherd

slowmotionbuscrash, Open
What: A Bank Robbery Gone Bad, Photography Outside of Guild Headquarters, Awkwardness of confused coffee orders
When: Robbery: 10/14, Photography: 10/15, Coffee: Mid October
Where: First Bank of Central City, Outside Alliance Headquarters, Moondoe Coffee Shop
Content Warnings: Bank robbery might involve violence toward civilians, and will involve explosions.

I. Robberies Make For Bad Days | First Bank of Central City | Closed to Tommy Shepherd

From now on he was going to live his life only through drive through and online banking. With those sorts of things you didn't end up like Mark did, sitting curled up on the floor of the bank with a cluster of other civilians, shaking. The others shook from fear, whimpered whenever the masked robbers looked at them and gestured with either guns or what looked like energy pistols, and didn't talk about their hope that some hero would come and save them.

Mark? Mark sat there quaking not because he cared that he was being menaced with a gun, or that there was a robbery going on, or even that a bad twitch would get him shot. No, he was shaking because these robbers were Metas, and Mark was accutely aware of that in a way no other civilian there was. Sure, they hadn't made use of their powers yet, but Mark could feel them, pressing in on his mind. One was clearly a telepath of some sort, and that Mark knew how to keep control of, how to keep his mind to himself, how to hide from other telepaths. But there was also someone who, best Mark could tell, cause metal to melt, and another one whose power Mark couldn't pin down but made his skin itch.

It was too much. It was a hard enough to keep control of his powers around some Metas, but it was worse when there were more than a few around. With no familiar powers to ground them in it was enough to leave him off balance, and with the fear... Mark was growing terrified that people were going to get hurt if this didn't end soon, and it wouldn't be by the thieves.

"Someone help," he whispered under his breath. That was their only hope, and for reasons no one else knew.

II. Is Heroics Really A Shelter? | Outside of Alliance Headquarters | Open

What do you do with an unsigned Meta? It was a question running through Mark's head, to the tune of some old shanty about drunken sailors. The song had been running circles around his head for days now, and the only way Mark knew to work through shit like this was distraction. So he did his best for distraction. Today his distractions were coming in the form of photography. So Mark stood across the street from the Alliance Headquarters and turned his camera upon the structure, his lens always focused up at large structure, never dipping down toward the doors without Mark first turning it away.

It was important not to piss off people with supernatural powers by making them think that you are taking pictures of them. Which Mark totally wasn't going to do. He doesn't need his ass kicked and himself accidentally stealing someone's powers in the process.

Still, he has to sigh before taking another picture of the building, trying to capture the way shadows fell across it at this late time of day, as if to make a picture to call into mind the idea that the Alliance was come upon dark times.

"This was never what comics prepared me to think superheroes would be like," he sighed as he snapped another shot. "Feel more like sports and movie stars than heroes."

Which was probably a rude thing to say because someone overhearing it could assume weird things. Like that Mark himself is a Meta. Which wasn't wrong at all.

III. Coffee Mix-Up Meeting | Moondoe Coffee Shop | Open

Coffee, the magical brew by which many an artist runs. Or so Mark always thought. He stood near the wall of his local Moondoe Coffee, waiting for his name to be called. Or, well, the poor approximation of his name that places like this seemed to manage.

"Brian!" a voice called, and Mark looked around. No one was making clear motion for the drink, so he walked toward it. Okay, one more way to check. He lifts the cup and, instead of sipping, checks the writing on the side indicating what the drink should be. And there was the familiar shorthand for a dark chocolate machiatto.

Alright, resolved that this was most definitely his drink, Mark lifted it to sip. And immediately cringed when it hit his tongue.

"The fuck?" he sputtered as he winced at the taste. "Is that... apple? Holy shit, what?"

"Maybe it's not your drink," the barista behind the counter said with that look that said 'you picked up someone else's order'.

"It's literally labeled with my name and marked as a dark chocolate machiatto. Soooooo, um, I'm sorry but I think the order might be wrong."

Though he was definitely wincing at the attention this was drawing him. Maybe he should just take this and go? Oh man, would that be more or less embarrassing? He wasn't sure.

[OOC: Mark Bryant's main Meta ability is copying the powers of those near him. This is entirely opt-in, and you can go to opt in over here if you'd like to play with Mark echoing powers.]

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"That's exactly what casing a point of entry involves, dumbfuck. Multiple angles and schedule-watching." She doesn't think for a moment he's got criminal intentions - if he was a criminal mastermind, he probably wouldn't be this blatant about photography - but that's not the point. The point is, she's never in her life been able to let an argument go, even (especially) one she started.

She huffs, for all the world as though he's the one out of line, and taps her ragged fingernail against the crumpled-up cup in her hand. "Anyway, who says I can't? Give your camera here, I'll show you. Might come out a bit blurry, but, listen, that's symbolising the postmodern collapse of structuralism and the overarching forces of chaos even in the face of overbearing autocracy." She smirks, flashing her teeth. They look way too even and healthy for the mess she's in generally. "See, I can pull metaphors out of my ass too."

"Literally only one angle. The only angle changing is the light because time is literally a thing," he grumbles to her. And when the woman gestures for the camera he takes a very big step away from her.

"Oh fuck no. I'm not giving my lady to some stranger on the street."

She was his livelihood and he wasn't risking her for anything short of a hero who could easily replace it for him. Not happening. "

"And what you're describing just illustrates you don't know how to keep your hand stable."

She fixes him with a hard, scornful look, her eyes narrowing, as though she's looking for something underneath his expression. After a moment, she scoffs again, taking a step back.

"Yeah, dumbfuck, that's the joke. We can't all spend our lives jacking off about photography, some of us have real jobs." Not that her whole look exactly screams gainfully employed. "Look, I just..."

For a moment, there's something other than scorn on her face, something squirrelly and a little uneasy. Not quite fear, but something like it.

"Forget it. I thought you were serious about the heroes thing."

"I'm not 'jacking off' about it, it is my damn job," he says, definitely looking fully offended by her commentary. He didn't need her pulling an impression of his father.

"I'm serious, but the whole fucking point of art is for the person creating it to convey their own feelings. Not someone else's."

She's (unsurprisingly) used to that look. In many ways, it's what she's angling for, and it doesn't seem to affect her in the slightest - she just leans back on her heels, that furtive look vanishing from her face as quickly as it came.

"But people're gonna pay for your display space, right? People're going to decide to exhibit it, buy it, whatever. People with money and power, the people who set all this shit up. Your feelings don't mean a fucking thing. What're you gonna do about it?"

"They mean something to me," Mark countered. "Capitalism will always be capitalism, yes. But that doesn't mean I have to stop feeling things."

And he's already living as a wedding photographer, so it's not like he's not doing the 'work for the grind not for the love of it' thing. He gets to have the things that still speak to him. No one, especially not some lady on the street, gets to take that from him.

Bethan makes an annoyed sound, somewhere between a snort and a laugh and a cough, and rolls her eyes. "I said do more, not less, dipshit. You've got all these grand feelings about light and shadow and heroes and publicity and whatever the fuck else. You really can't do more with that than take photos about it?"

A connoisseur of the arts, she is not. Evidently. Her general approach is, as always, much more angled towards 'bulldozer'.

"You're really just born to be a critic, aren't you?" Mark asked, without much appreciation for it in his voice. "Sometimes the speech through images is the best you can do."

"Yeah?" Bethan sighed, hunching her shoulders even further. "Well, that sounds pretty fucking depressing to me. Pretty fucking pathetic. But, sure, if that's the best you can do..."

She did sound genuinely disappointed. For a moment, she had actually thought he might be some sort of ally against the Guilds, but now it seemed apparent that it had been wishful thinking. Grasping at straws again, huh, Beth? Seeing things that aren't there. Get your shit together.

Against the guilds? He's too afraid to be noticed by the guilds to even want to face them down. It scared him too much that they might want to hurt him, or study him. He's had too many bad experiences.

Get burned this many times and you just want to hide.

"Survival is not unimportant. And happiness."

She gives him a blank look. This one's not quite as judgemental as the others - it seems, if anything, more like a look of disbelief. Like she can't quite get her head around the idea. It's a moment before she replies, and in that moment, she's managed to hunch herself up even more, her shoulders somewhere up by her ears at this point.

"Whatever helps you sleep at night." It's lacking any real venom, though. The truth is, this is turning into one of those conversations - the ones that set the ground off-balance under her, making her question herself, a brutal reminder of what she already knows. That she's missing something vital. That there's something wrong with her. She can admit she's a mess, but she can't afford to question what she believes. "But justice isn't unimportant, either. Real justice, not the shit they're selling."

"I know," he said, and his voice had a firmness to it, and a touch of fear. He knows all of this, in ways she can't understand. Or perhaps he thinks she can't understand. But she hasn't earned any of that.

"That doesn't mean my photography is any less mine to do with as I wish."

"It just means it's not enough." She sounded a lot less forceful about it, a lot less like she expected or hoped to get a reaction. All of a sudden, she just sounded tired. "But, what the fuck. I guess most of what we do isn't."

She looked down at the crushed coffee cup in her hand, sighing, and turned away. "Fuck it. Good luck with the bread and circuses, I guess."

"This isn't Rome," he said with a roll of his eyes. "For one thing, I've got way more covering clothes. And all roads don't lead to one place."

He sighs and lowers the camera to hang from its strap.

"Why do you care so much?"

She looked back at him, frowning, a look of genuine confusion on her face, as though the question had taken her by surprise. In a sense, it had. It always did, when people asked that.

"Why don't you?"

"Because to me, surviving is important," he answered. Probably not the answer she wanted to hear though. Sometimes things like that are all he has.

She was quiet for a moment, then sighed, raking her free hand back through her tangled blonde hair. There was a lot she could say to that. More important than everyone and everything else? More important than making living worthwhile? What are you even surviving for?

But all she said at last, in a voice that was quiet and oddly flat, was "Must be nice." Then, as she started to walk away, "Good luck not getting arrested, I guess."

If she hadn't found a guy so relatively recently out of all of the traumas of his own world, she might have found a better audience. As it was, he was too recently hurt by organizations like this to want to do anything but cower away as long as he could.

"Good luck not harassing people on the street," he countered."

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OPEN | Disasters Mean Rethinking Decisions

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end here?

yep