Fashionably... Late? If Hot Topic is a Fashion

[coffincomfort]

Who: Vincent, Sans, Lambert
When: Uh haha
Where: Sans' Trailer, The Lake
What: Vincent checks in with his two new supervisors.
Warnings: Hmmm.



Sans

Tracking down Sans is really, really easy. It's just a matter of walking across the carnival to reach his trailer, his hot dog in his human--er, reptilian?--hand. It's not a long walk, but it gives him time to enjoy it.

He's also enjoying the sunshine... blue skies, no need for stealth. He clanks a little as he walks; his boots can be silent if he wishes them to be, but he doesn't really care to. Even Vincent can be a little like that sometimes. He just pretends not to be.

But all good things must come to an end. By the time he reaches Sans' trailer, the hot dog is gone, and he's left only with a little mustard on his claws, which he stares at for a second before giving up and just... licking it off.

Shaking hands with Sans isn't a great idea anyway, so he won't worry about it.

Walking up to the trailer's orange door, he lifts his organic hand and knocks.

Lambert

Vincent isn't expecting to find Mari at the Carnival. He already knows where she is, although it took the Ringmaster's explanation to put the pieces together. Introductions are Vincent's least favourite interaction, so he's not looking forward to this. He's working from a list of the supervisor's most likely haunts, and after checking out an empty trailer and the new training ground (when did that happen, he has to wonder), he's left with a lake that definitely hadn't been there when he left.

Bypassing the noisy, difficult underbrush, Vincent moves liquid* through the trees. No. Literally. He'd be mildly concerned about even finding the man, considering how he needs to make his way there through tangled forest, but after getting the new Nightrider's description from the Ringmaster... it turns out he's not a very difficult individual to get a visual on.

Which is how Lambert will find that whatever he's doing by the water's edge... he's being watched.

Comments

[whattaprick]

Whatever Vincent was expecting of his new supervisor, he probably wasn't expecting their first encounter to involve the man standing sans his shirt in the shallows of the lake. Pants rolled up to mid-shin, he's casually tossing a small, round object up and down in his hand while he stares at the water speculatively.

If he senses that he's not alone, Lambert doesn't give any indication of it. After a few moment moments of standing there, he draws his arm back and lobs the thing further out into the lake, sending it sailing through the air in a low, easy arc.

Less than a second after it drops into the water, there's a dull, muffled explosion that sends up a splash of water at least six feet in the air, the ripples spreading over the lake and lapping against Lambert's legs. The Nightrider just keeps standing patiently, tail waving lightly behind him and shade his eyes with a hand, until the first silvery bodies start bobbing out of the water.

[coffincomfort]

No. No, Vincent was not expecting that.

Whatever 'that' was.

He watches silently, his brow furrowing slightly until it becomes clear that this was some kind of... gratuitous....

Fish.... genocide.... activity?

'Fishing' is not a word he could use here, not even by the most generous interpretation of the word.

He let himself get so distracted that for a second, it's actually something he's thinking about before he remembers what he's actually here for.

It doesn't matter.

He drops to the ground--liquid, soundless. If nothing happens, then he simply intones "Nightrider Lambert" in a deadpan after a couple seconds of continued silence.

[whattaprick]

Vincent's timing is pretty good, because a few more moments later and Lambert would have been wading straight into the water, intent on collecting his stunned (and in some cases, very dead) harvest. When he hears his name, he'll turns sharply towards the source of the sound, pupils dilating in the dark.

Not that there's anything to worry about here -- it is the Carnival, and they've taken care of the vampires, right?

"And who the fuck are you?" He asks pleasantly in return, brows raised, tail lashing behind him. Becoming a superior has meant losing certain notions of privacy and anonymity he had before, though he was mostly surprised he had them to lose at all in the first place.

[coffincomfort]

...so it's going to be that kind of conversation.

"Vincent Valentine, reporting back to Nightrider Lambert." Vincent's deep voice is extremely neutral, and he all but makes a point of delivering the line in a manner devoid of any inflection at all.

'All but' because frankly, he's not especially skilled at sounding any other way.

He looks a bit less like what Lambert's anticipating a vampire would than he used to, at the very least. His pale skin has long been covered with a layer of smooth black scales and his facial features are no longer even as human as that; his aesthetic isn't especially unvampiric, though. There are only so many ways to have red eyes and long black hair while wearing a flowing red cloak, after all.

"I was sent to the vampire homeworld by Nightrider Illustrious. I recalled on my own because of... complications."

He pauses, then adds:

"....it seems like anything she needed done, she can do herself."

ughh sorry for the slow on this

[whattaprick]

"You're a veteran, then. One of the nightrunners." That much is obvious enough. Lambert crosses his arms across his bare, scarred chest, looking him up and down.

It's still a little weird to be referred to with a title. Not exactly in a bad way, but more like 'nobody ever uses it to refer to him,' much less the former Nightrider. Which, when Vincent mentions her? Is going to get Lambert's brows rising, and ore of his actual attention. The guy looks and sounds like a morgue, but he does seem to know something, so that makes him worth listening to, at least for now.

"Huh. That's not much of a report," is his caustic assessment when he finishes. Since it seems like a long story, though, he might as well sit down for this. Lambert turns around and heads for a long drawn up on the shore of the lake, waving Vincent closer.

"Start from the beginning. You said the old Nightrider sent you -- to do what?" Lambert looks at him expectantly.

Lmfao I'm the one who took weeks to put it up

[coffincomfort]

'Looks and sounds like a morgue' is probably the most accurate description of Vincent Valentine possible at a first impression. The depressing part is the way it holds up once you know him, too.

His response to Lambert's scorn is to pull back his head just slightly and lower his face into the cowl of his cloak, staring in judgmental expectation.

It pays off somewhat when Lambert redeems himself a bit a second later; Vincent follows on cue, his cloak sweeping over the muddy soil in slightly more dramatic fashion than the actual movement would cause.

"Espionage," he intones with a seriousness that's a little excessive for the situation, but does at least match his aesthetic. "I was to tail the attacking force back to their homeworld and remain undercover as one of their number, with orders to report back at a later date." It's flat: cut, dried, and flavourless. If his words could be mummified, they would be.

[whattaprick]

"Remain undercover? With vampires?" If Lambert sounds wary it's because he has good reason to be, at least in his mind. The rules of how the vampires who attacked the carnival work are only slightly less worrying than back home. Vampirism wasn't a transmissible condition back home -- so it necessarily couldn't be a reversible one either.

Maybe he's not as far off wondering if this guy was a vampire as he thought. But digging deeper into that can wait for a later time, and Lambert waves a hand.

"If you were there the whole time, you saw how that turned out."