A Minuet called Avoidance

[Pi dArtois]

(ooc: This is the main thread for the wider RP. While the first 'post' is in the library private board (see link below). Every other location RP will be in this thread. In order to avoid the Necropolis Pi is going to visit everywhere else. PM with ideas for location RP. I'm keen to visit anywhere on the grid and RP Pi there.

Please note the rest, will be linked here.)


Harper Rock Library - (RP with Morghan here)

This bread wasn’t any better than her first attempt.

While she had improved to the point where this loaf couldn’t be used as a blunt trauma type instrument, it certainly hadn’t graduated to something edible. Pi, tossed it in the rubbish. She also tossed out the scones, the biscuits and the things that were meant to be melting moments.

She guessed this new hobby was doing what it was meant to do. She was inordinately distracted from her life through the expedient task of creating something. She had created many somethings at her crafting table in the portal room but it wasn’t the same as the one she had set up at Lancaster’s. It had the same tools sure. They were laid out in exactly the same way too but making those things only made her think of not creating them with Lancaster sitting there playing his piano. Which made her want to stab something.

And thinking about him was counter productive to her main plan of not thinking about him at all.

Plus, creating one object of mass destruction after another had become an irony Pi couldn’t stomach a moment longer. She didn’t want to destroy. She wanted to build. She didn’t want to be a monster or a wild animal with only instinct and no reasoning. She wanted more. She demanded more.

There were a million theoretical debates she could undertake about the nature vs nurture reason for her avoidance of Elliot and the Necropolis. Maybe self preservation was a state of nature. No person in their right mind stood around waiting to be gutted at every opportunity. Maybe it was nurture (or in her case lack of it) that had her ostrich herself in order not to deal with it directly. Either way, her mind was made up.

She needed distance to deal with what was going on. She needed not to see him so much so she could sort herself out. In order to not destroy her family and her friendship with her person with emotions only she felt, Pi needed to take a time out.

So this was her. In time out.

She couldn’t say she liked it very much. In fact. It sucked pretty badly.

[Pi dArtois]

Solace - (RP with Robert Pratt here)

The bed in the trailer had grown lumps. As if the ones it had previously weren’t enough, it had decided to develop more. Pi flopped over and beat the latest one digging into her side with the flat of her hand. It didn’t help. She suspected the old inner spring had decided itself retired and was protesting (through the expedient path of losing its guts) continued use.

She needed a new bed. She needed lots of things but right now, she really needed a new bed. Sitting up in bed she pulled the curtain above her to the side and stared up. Winter stars twinkled, a quarter moon hung low in the winter sky. She was late. Late for what she didn’t really know because she didn’t really have anywhere to get to. She was just late. Late to start the night and late to roll out of bed and generally just… not on time to start her life.

Flopping back onto the mattress she switched her gaze to the ceiling and decided that this view could hardly inspire poets either. The prefabricated ceiling was cracked. The seam that ran down the middle of the room had lost a part of the caulk that kept it joined. Pi closed her eyes. Her hand raised to cover them. Small fingers spread across both and she sighed. This, was not a place to inspire a person. She had bought it for the irony. Now she felt as if irony was strangling her with its karmic laughter. No one wanted to believe they had come full circle.

She thought of her blood thief childe then and lifted her arm to blink bleary back up at the seam above her head. She could learn from her mistakes and she could make up for what she had failed to do before. And she could do something other than lay there on the bed hating the world for not giving her a damned break.

No more moping. No more.

[Pi dArtois]

The Lotus Cafe (RP here with Etienne)

It’s called cause and effect. The analogy about ripples and ponds and the ever increasing circles of effect is a good one because it’s so true. One rock, one moment and the knock on effects of the action create an ever increasing circle of responding reaction.

Pi’s text to Etienne was a part of that.

When you find yourself at ends, you search for a way to tie them up or to cauterize them so you can be healthy again. It seemed like just the beginning for Pi, and it was. It felt like her life had taken a deep breathe and she was waiting to exhale. If only she had three other good friends and a bottle of wine, music and raucous singing like in the movie, to help her deal. But she didn’t.

Women didn’t really warm to her that much. Or maybe Pi didn’t warm to them. It was a telling thing that Pi hadn’t sired any females. Something for some shrink to chew on and spit out psycho-babble about her childhood and issues with her mother. It wouldn’t be the first time someone linked her tragic childhood to her commitment issues. Probably wouldn’t be the last.

It felt like it was all changing though. Inexplicably realigning itself, her world. She had commitment issues but here she was building a family, a unit, a group. She did have serious issues with … touch and yet, she had let Doc kiss her and she had participated. She had friends who liked her and met her for coffee and invited her over to watch movies. Life was changing and she was changing with it. Her wings, delicate and tentative, soft and barely formed were being unfurled and tested.

Trust was a slowly built thing, each brick hard won and permanently placed. At least for Pi it was this way. She checked the foundations she had started to lay now, each person a brick in the wall of her new found stability. Some, like Lancaster, had become her load bearing support, irrevocably linked to the structure she had built her new life on. He was the other side of her coin. Then others again, like Robert who had surprised her by being just as important in his way, without her knowing it, without her even placing them they had taken up their place in their family and their group.

The same could be said of the friends she had made, who were still there even after all this time, they were still there. They too were finding their place in her life and taking up their positions in the foundation created over the last year.

Maybe having your heart broken is one of life’s necessary evils. Maybe you needed to have yourself dismantled so you can find a stronger way to move forward. Pi hoped it was true, because it certainly felt she was starting from the very beginning again.

[Pi dArtois]

Oldtown Theatre: (RP here with Velia)

They say the art of learning to be happy is learning to like your own company.

Pi thought that was ******* stupid advice.

They also say, that once you learn to like yourself you are in a better position to love others.

Pi wanted to throw whoever thought up that piece of wisdom right out of a moving car.

Of course, the thing about advice like that is, you think about it. You let your mind percolate on it like one of those fancy coffee pots that wakes itself up at 6:52am, grinds the coffee, starts the drip and permeates the sleeping house with the scent of freshly brewed java. She thought maybe she was at the grinding the beans stage.

The seed once planted grew ‘what if’ fruit. What if that person was right and all she needed to do was ‘find herself’. Pi lay slumped on the pleather couch in her newly purchased single wide trailer and stared at the uninspiring few of the water damaged ceiling of her personal slice of white trash. She moved trying to find a more comfortable position and the couch squeeched underneath her as her jeans created squeaky friction with the cheap material.

Absently she tossed her baking spoon into the air and caught it again.

“I don’t know… if all this alone time is really all its jacked up to be.”

Catching the spoon, she the slung it into the kitchen, not really caring whether it actually made it into the sink, which is the direction she generally threw it in.

“But I can’t sit around here and get to know myself any longer. These four walls are driving me crazy.”

The idea to go to the movies was an impulsive one bourne of trying to figure out what she could possibly do to take up time, without her looking mental and could be done… on her own.

Whoever said that to heal is to love yourself needed to get their heads examined, cause Pi considered (even as she got up to get dressed to head out on her own to the movies) that the dude had no bloody idea what he was talking about. (the thought of course not impacting her decision at all to do exactly that. You know. Just in case.)

[Pi dArtois]

Drunken Revelations -(RP here)

If Pi could do over, she probably wouldn’t have gone about getting all those powers or made three of the wraith guides teach her what she insisted they teach her. All in one night.

She remembered something she read about the act of avoidance being a bit like depression. Or maybe she watched in on You Tube. It apparently sneaks up on a person; small acts of procrastination that eventually built into a wall of self denial, self recrimination and loathing until you sat atop a pile of self indulgent excuses created by your own psyche to explain your own acts of apathy.

Pi wasn’t much good with words to explain how she felt but her brain certainly fired off on all cylinders once she’d given it permission to do much more than eat, breath, sleep and ****. (euphemistically speaking of course).

And there she found herself, leaned up against a light post, in the middle of a busy street, hanging onto the thing like it was the life preserver thrown out to save her *** from drowning. It wasn’t a bad analogy actually, because at the time she was totally and completely out of it.

No, probably she wouldn’t have done it like that again, hindsight being 20/20 and all.

Except.

Yeah, there was always an exception where power was concerned.

The trade off was pretty freaking incredible. She was close, she knew she was. Close to coming to a personal understanding. Close to closing a circle, whose circumference she didn’t realise she wanted to traverse.

Maybe life epiphany’s were like that. Maybe they had to wait until all the stars aligned and the moon was in the influence of Mercury before she’d have seen the opportunity for what it was.

And maybe, it’s okay that for that moment, she was as vulnerable as she had ever been, because she had learned the most about herself and her abilities than she’d ever had in her entire life.

Put together.

Yeah, she didn’t mind epiphany’s so much. She just wished hers had started with something more auspicious than her leaning drunkenly against an inanimate object, out in the middle of street.

[Pi dArtois]

Needing to be needed - (Pi's turning RP here)

“Ugh.” She huffed, rolling over in bed and kicking out with her legs, bumping into the long thighs of the man sleeping next to her and kicking them too. Because she was feeling edgy and because she was restless and because, if she was feeling edgy and restless and disquiet, so should he.

Damn him. Damn him for not even moving a freaking muscle leaving her there to huff on her own, blowing out a breath and staring up at the ceiling of their room in the crypt.

Her brain wouldn’t quiet. She blamed it on those wraiths, the bastards. Her brain was rarely quiet these days, it zoomed around on the German super-highway in her head. Heedlessly slinging itself around the cerebral cortexes of her mind and careening around corners at a breakneck pace. That level of mental activity wasn’t good for restful sleep. And she did sleep, in her way.

She knew many vampires konked out like the dead. With that thought she slung a dirty look in the direction of the man who lay there like a lazy lump on a log and huffed again. But she was a day walking vampire, and sometimes, just sometimes, her mind kept her awake. Dreams came and went like flittering butterflies tickling the mind.

Like tonight. Tonight when she couldn’t resist the idea that she was meant to do something. Her skin itched, and she found herself rolling her shoulders, adjusting her position and kicking off the sheet and blanket.

For the first time in a long time she thought about the Rev, and the night she met him. She considered for the first time in ages how different a turning could be when a sire gave a **** about the being they created. The Rev had tried to care. He’d had moments of recognition where he remembered he had childer at all. They had never lasted long. Their brief duration were as inconstant as those butterfly lives tickling her mind.

And for the first time in an age Pi wanted to try again. Maybe this time the childe she pulled into this world would love her like Elliot did. Okay, maybe not that much love, but something similar, warmer, not maternal but… one in friendship and companionship.

Turning onto her side she punched her pillow, massaged it like a cat for a moment and then threw herself out of the bed.

It wasn’t going to happen. Sleep. Her eyelids weren’t cooperating with her repetitive demands to stay closed. Bastards.

She needed to do something. She needed….., with a sigh she slumped on the edge of the mattress, barefeet flat on the cold floor, her elbows rested on her knees so they could hold up her suddenly heavy head.

What Pi needed, at heart. Was to be needed. And wasn’t that just the biggest ******* irony of all. Because the truth was. She wasn’t sure she was needed.

At all.

ooc: I realised when I tried to read old RPs linked to my CS that nearly all of them have been archived. So as I read and relink, I'm going to be doing a series of individual stories based on Pi's memories of old RPs. Just to get Pi's .. 'voice' back. :) Enjoy a bit of memory lane with the Pi Pi

[Pi dArtois]

How many failures?

Failed Turnings:

• Tyler Garner
• Jericho Hakim
• Sam
• Messer Kleiner
• James
• Scott
• Dietrich

She’d told Elliot that she wanted to turn another vampire.

But how many times can a person fail at something before she realizes that that way lies madness?

She’d told Elliot that she wanted to turn another vampire but the truth was, she didn’t think she could stomach it. There had been so many she had tried to lead into this life and for whatever reasons, good or bad, they hadn’t taken.

Like a potted flower you’d transplanted only to watch it fail, fade and die. It was like she’d created a life, a butterfly life that flickered brightly for a mere moment and passed from the earth as if they had never been.

How could that be a part of her legacy when she was turning these people into beings that would live forever. Failure sharpened to a deadly edge when you considered how large the destruction you caused when you tried to give someone forever.

Pi could try and blame it on the spirit of the person who had been turned, but you can only delude yourself into believing such a thing for so long before the numbers in favour of her own inability to keep them alive outweighed the possibility that she had managed to sire so many, who couldn’t sustain this life long term.

No, the fault had to be with her but for the life of her she couldn’t see where she had gone so horribly wrong.

She had told Elliot she wanted to turn another vampire, but the truth of the matter was, she couldn’t accept another failure, like the many who had gone before. Of Heath, Dietrich, Sam, Scott, Jericho, Kleiner, Tyler and others who hadn’t even made it past the turn itself. Bodies she’d had to leave in the alleys where they had died. Twice.

No, Pi didn’t want to turn more. But she did want to help. Somehow. Someway.

That, at least. Hadn’t changed.

[Pi dArtois]

Paying the blood price (RP: The hunt Begins)

Pi had paid dearly for her decision to support the blood hunt. In a way she paid as much a blood price for her decision that the poor bastards they killed in the blood bath that followed. The Blood Thieves were no match for the vampires who single mindedly hunted them like dogs, putting them down, stealing their lives and eradicating as many of them from the city as they could manage without seriously impacting their secrecy.

It hadn’t worked though. Not then, and she imaged it wouldn’t now if they tried it again. Humans hadn’t reached the top of the food chain for no reason. They were a tenacious breed, easily subdued in the short term, but rarely kept that way.

And then there had been Robert. Maybe the relationship between her and her blood thief childe was doomed from the beginning but her decision to offer cash inducement to kill as many of those like Robert as possible had been one of the first nails in the coffin of their association.

Many would come after, another and another and another until their doomed association was neatly entombed in its own sarcophagus, never to see the light of day again.

It was a bad idea for more than just those two reasons and after a while she had come to regret that the rationale for the Office had turned into something that would support the murder of so many.

When Pi realised her error it had been too late to stop and to late to realign the intention of the Office of the Under Secretary to return to the support and education of new vampires. It was already known as a bloodthirsty supporter of silence with the approved use of deadly force.

If she could go back and change things, it would have been the choice to hunt the bounty’s at all. She would have stayed the line and kept The Office as a place of learning only.

Hindsight is 20/20 and none of the powers she had seen exhibited by the ‘others’ of this world had yet to exhibit a way to go back and time and fix it. So she had lost the Office, disbanded the Charter, removed the group from bounty’s altogether and renovated The Office into a gymnasium. No, she couldn’t go back.

But by god, she was determined to learn from her mistakes. Surely. Surely she could learn from them.

[Pi dArtois]

This time will be better - RP with vadablade here

She was having performance anxiety, she knew it but didn't know what to do about it. The awful truth of the matter was that she'd failed so many times with turning vampires she'd almost convinced herself never to do it again.

How many years had it been? Two, maybe? That was a long time especially considering how many she had turned in the beginning, how many she had let into this life only to watch the immortal gift she'd thought she'd given squandered. The eternal flame she thought she'd handed out with glimmer hope for a family made of immortals had guttered and trips to the shadow realm had become one way. And what had remained of their family were silent, their acrimonious voices no longer speaking at all now as if all those words they'd spoken about her absence and her uncaring nature were spouted and then left to fester as they would. The people behind the voices only coming around once in a while, and even then, it was infrequent.

Yet she'd done it again. Twice actually, although the first had yet to reveal himself, a phantom from her past that she secretly hoped stayed gone. And then there was vada, cheeky and a little sly. She knew no more about him now that she did that night, but she was learning slowly, keeping up as she hadn't actively done in a while, hadn't thought she had to.

She'd turned a vampire and in doing so had turned another page in the book of her immortal life. Canidae no longer represented an unattainable ideal no one could (or wanted) to reach, but an open invitation to family to be safe, to find succor. Now she no longer tried to lead but instead was there, present and if needed she would come. She'd found an easier and better way to exist that didn't have as many rules but was at its heart better. Better for her, and better for the family.

It was growing again, d'Artois. Little by little, each brick a little addition to the foundation and she wouldn't rush it. She wouldn't try to control it or weep tears when it didn't go her way but allow it to become what it would be. Because isn't that what family ultimately was? An acceptance of all you were, and a place you were accepted for that... no matter what.

Well, within reason. Cause lets face facts. Pi would do a hell of a lot to avoid another debacle like the one called Robert Pratt.

[Pi dArtois]

Pi tucked the slip of paper into the folds of the appointment book and laid it exactly where she always kept it. Bottom right hand side, neatly tucked into the front left corner, beside it a blue pen.

Closing the drawer, she smoothed her hand across the old wood. Standing, she shouldered the backpack, an ancient world traveler kind, towering over the top of her head, looking as if its mass would tilt her off center and she'd topple at any moment.

Pi was in no danger of toppling. Instead she left the office quietly, shutting the door and escaping out of the alley. The room was empty, too late at night for anyone, being too early in the morning for the first crew to arrive. Yanking a fluffy toboggan over her head, the flaps covered her ears to fend off the frigid temperatures.

Casting one look at the dark windows of the Irish Pub, Pi trudged through the softly falling snow to the airport.

My lawyer's firm is McGreavey Tilton Fawcett. They have my Deeds, including all the passwords to my bank accounts. Just in case. I'll be home as soon as I can. I love you. I miss you. Wait for me.

She wasn't sure how long it would take Elliot to find it. She wasn't entirely sure if she was doing the right thing leaving before he returned and found her gone. But the people she thought she escaped were not people she could long ignore.

The Butterfly was returning to Paris.

And she wondered if she would survive the homecoming. Then again. All things considered, she wasn't really sure, they would survive her homecoming either.

It was time to put The Butterfly into permanent retirement, one way or another.