Direct Deposit (Invite Only)

[Madison]

The stench of the sewers always got to her. It was the reason why Madison avoided them as much as possible. The rank smell would stick to her hair for many nights to come if she stayed too long. She didn't even know why she was down here. Perhaps it had something to do with the massive amount of humans she had surrounded herself with the night before at the Canada Day celebration. People irritated her. Be it human or vampire and slaughtering monsters and paladins always made her feel better.

With Blanca, the best weapon she'd created yet in her hands, Madison moved through the sewers from Cherrydale all the way back to Wickbridge. She'd lost count of the number of paladins and hunter footsoldiers that she had killed but it didn't matter to her much anyways. Most humans she didn't mind letting live. But anyone that shot at her first just for passing by was going to pay for it. By the time she hit Wickbridge she'd had her fill. It was time to hit the Depot for a much needed shower.

The Depot was empty when she got there which wasn't at all surprising. Sometimes others were around and most of the time they weren't. No one ever spoke to her. This was the way it had been for the past six months and Madison had gotten quite used to being a part of something that wasn't really anything. In her mind it was all temporary until she could do everything she wanted to do on her own.

A half bottle of strawberry shampoo later the shower had been accomplished. Madison was just settling down to peruse the auction site when her phone went off several times in a row. The sound wasn't from a text message but that of her email. Connecting to her email instead of the Moonlight site, Madison's left eyebrow raised into her forehead as she looked at the direct deposit statements. It seemed Lancaster's computer was on the fritz and had paid her nine times over.

Looking around and not seeing Elliot in sight, Madison pulled herself out of her chair and walked leisurely towards the fade portal that would take her to the pub. If Lan wasn't there, she'd shoot him a text so that they could figure out what happened. Running a hand through her hair, Madison adjusted her shirt before she stepped through the portal that would take her into the manager's office of Lancaster's.

[Pi dArtois]

“Stay out of the kitchen today Pi.” She muttered to herself. It’s not really that she learned her lesson so much as she knew she couldn’t piss off the chef two nights in a row and Elliot was right, the chef did actually know what she was doing, it was wholly the fact Pi knew enough to know something but not enough to know everything. Always a dangerous proposition at the best of times.

Tonight she was relaxing. The crowds were still thick as thieves as people still celebrated the holiday season but she didn’t need to help out, staff were buzzing around the bar collecting glasses, taking orders and a house band sat at the front playing cover songs and a few of their own originals. Just enough to keep the crowds happy. People were laughing and enjoying their night out and Pi enjoyed just being present.

She sat in her chair by the fairy light fireplace (real fire only for winter) with one legged tucked up under her, a drink on the table beside her (because people expected a drink so she used one as a prop) and a small notebook in her lap she wrote in industriously. She stopped once in a while to think, or just watch the band or people then ducked her head again to write more. Lists. Lists for what she needed to craft. Lists of people she needed to speak to. Lists about what in the hell she could or should be doing about now or, in the moments when her mind blanked and she couldn’t come up with anything else to list, she doodled in the margins, lines, and circles that swirled all over the page as if a mad snail had trailed the border of the page in a crazed dance.

Her hair had grown out now, sweeping just past her shoulders. She preferred it shorter but hadn’t taken the time to get it cut. She put that in a list as well. Items she needed to do for herself that she had let slip for so long. Pi had also taken to wearing skirts, knee length ones with ballet flats and a tank top to finish off the casual ensemble. She didn’t dress like a gun for hire when she was in Lancaster’s. Gone were the dark jeans and black tank and utility belt that held her ammo. It seemed so unnecessary these days to dress for the next coming of the zombie apocalypse when she so rarely got herself in positions of strife.

It had been a long time since Pi needed to look over her shoulder for someone trying to find her. She had even stopped thinking about the government body that might still wonder what in the hell had happened to their favourite weapon. It was probably a mistake to do so but she couldn’t help feeling that she had managed to escape that too. It just surprised her that the escape had been managed so easily. When she was first turned she had always figured it was only a matter of time before someone can to investigate her whereabouts. Governments, even hers, didn’t like to misplace weapons they had created. It was bad for business. That too, she seemed to have ducked quite nicely.

Then again, who would look for her here. In the small backwater of Harper Rock, off any sort of known beaten track and stuck out in the wilds of Canada in an Irish Pub with backpackers as co-owner. It might have been a willful act of hubris that made her less cautious but she thought she had a right to it.

Tonight, for the first time in a lot of nights Pi felt like she was moving in the right direction. Moving towards an ephemeral something, and all these lists, no matter how irrelevant, were going to help her get there.

Somehow.

[Madison]

The office was empty as the blonde telepath appeared seemingly out of thin air on the other side of the fade portal. Skirting her way in between the two green chairs in front of the large computer desk, Madison slipped behind it and settled down into the computer chair with a leg tucked underneath her. Her hands went up to her hair and pulled it back behind her head. Holding it with one hand, she dug a hair tie out of her pocket and twisted it around the ponytail so that she wouldn't be minded by constantly brushing it back as she worked.

The Lancaster's logo bounced from one edge of the screen to the other until the moment that her right hand reached out and jarred the mouse a fraction of a centimeter. The darkened background of the screensaver and the Lancaster's logo disappeared from sight as the desktop replaced it. Using the mouse, she clicked on the Alerion program that managed the point-of-sale cash register system and employee information such as hours worked and their pay rate. With a few mouse clicks Madison had pulled up her own employee information and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Her pay rate was the same as it always was, minuses any bonuses she earned during the week and her hours for this week had yet to be put in.

Closing out the program, the woman double clicked on the internet browser icon that opened up to the Google search engine. Using the bookmarks drop-down, she scrolled until she saw the one for the bank that managed their bank accounts. Clicking it, she waited for the page to load and then entered in the log-in information before hitting submit.

The loading indicator spun for longer than normal, causing Madison to furrow her brow at the computer screen. When she was redirected, her left eyebrow raised into her forehead as she read that she had entered in the wrong username or password. Going back to the main page she tried again, this time she slowly entered the password one letter, number and symbol at a time to make sure she had gotten it right and hadn't accidentally hit a wrong or double key. Again she was redirected to the failed log-in page. Had Elliot changed the password and forgotten to tell her?

Getting up from the computer chair, the blonde made her way to the office door and let herself into the main pub, behind the bar. Lucky for the bartender the door to the manager's office opened inwards instead of outwards otherwise he would have gotten whacked right in the face. Apologizing as she waited for him to pass by so she could step out, Madison stopped him for a moment, "Hey, is Elliot here tonight?"

Without stopping or missing a beat, the man served a drink to a waiting patron as he answered Madison's question, "Nope, but Pi is over there."

Looking in the direction that he had nodded, Madison spotted Pi sitting off to the side. An untouched drink sat on the table beside her and the woman looked oblivious to all that was around her as she wrote diligently in the notebook in her lap. With a quick thanks, Madison walked around the bar to the main floor and threaded her way through the crowd until she got to Pi's area.

"Hey Pi, do you know if Elliot changed the bank log-in? There seems to be a problem with payroll but I can't log on to check it out."

[Pi dArtois]

She was crossing out ‘hair cut’ from her list, and then busily putting it back on. It wasn’t so much that she was indecisive about what to do with her hair so much as she didn’t know whether she really wanted to cut it or not. Sure, she used to prefer it long but she also used to prefer to be alone, not touched and was a hired killer than sometimes needed to put on disguises to move around. Short hair was, at the time, a very necessary part of her disguise.

So if Pi was to embrace this new her, shouldn’t that also mean she didn’t need to cut her hair? She pondered this as she gnawed on the end of her pen before deciding that hair cut could actually stay off the list of items she needed to do and lowered low down on the list of priorities.

“Hrmm?” Pi hummed in response, her brain only half on what was being said to her before she raised her head to see who was talking. Madison. Her smile grew and she pulled the pen out of her mouth, and lowered it to her lap, leaving the notebook open with the pen (and her hand around it) laying on top.

“Hello Madison.” Pi greeted easily, motioning to the free chair beside her. “I’m sure he will be soon enough. I think maybe he’s up in Bunk?” Pi offered, wondering if that were true or not because she wasn’t really sure where he was. But this was Lancaster’s and one of them could be counted on being here for some portion of the night. It just happened to be, at this point in time, it was only her.


“Payroll?” Pi asked, her eyebrow arching. “Anything I can help with?” she asked. Pi had long given up hiring and firing staff here, although she still had half ownership of the place. It was Elliot’s baby and she was happy to let him have free rein over it because he had a head for business whereas.. well, she didn’t so much.

If she wanted to try her hand at making money she would do something with the Training Room, charge a fee for use or something. But she hadn’t any problem making money, nor did she feel the need to fiddle around in his businesses. And while she had access just like Elliot, she never used it. Not that she couldn’t. But she just never felt she needed to.

[Madison]

A brow quirked as the younger vampire watched her elder rewrite the words 'hair cut' back onto her list after seemingly having crossed it off. Pi had never truly seemed like the overly feminine type to worry about such things as to whether or not to get her hair cut but it had been some time since Pi and Madison had spent any amount of time together, much less spoken to one another in the past six or seven months. She never had to worry about such things. Her long blonde hair hadn't seemed to grow even a millimeter since she had been turned. Had Pi's hair not obviously grown, Madison would have considered it a natural condition of her vampirism. That didn't seem to be the case now.

Averting her eyes from Pi's list as the d'Artois matriarch looked up to greet her, her face fell to an impassive slate. Pi smiled up at her, as though she may have been happy to see the woman before her. Madison didn't feel much of anything. She had long since taken a stance of apathy regarding majority of other vampires and that had started with and included the familial line she'd been adopted into by Pi.

Settling down into the offered seat besides the killer, Madison tucked her legs beneath the chair's seat and crossed her ankles in a comfortable manner. Her head nodded in acknowledgment that Lan maybe upstairs. Madison was aware about the backpacker's retreat that Lan had turned the upstairs into but she had yet to go explore the floor herself. She didn't see much of a need to since she only worked for Lancaster's and while the two businesses were in the same building, they were totally and completely separate in terms of staff.

"You may be able to help if you know what the password is to the bank payroll account," Madison replied to Pi's question, "There seems to have been some sort of glitch regarding the direct deposit employee payments but as far as I can tell, our records look fine on our end but I can't access the bank account to see if something went wrong on our end there or the bank's end."

Madison paused, a smirk pulling at her pale pink lips that held a hint of shine from a swipe of Chapstick. Realizing that it may seem out of place for the look to cross her face, she let Pi in on her thoughts, "If need be I'm sure I could hack the account but I figured I'd take the easier route first."

[Lancaster]

Lancaster’s wasn’t the only business that Elliot ran. It might be the place where he spent the majority of his time but it was also the place he felt most comfortable leaving, because he knew that Pi would be there to take care of any problems, should they arise. Where Elliot was once a trusting man – who trusted everyone he met until they did him wrong – these days his trust had turned sour. People were fickle. People got so caught up in their own lives that they didn’t stop to try to see the world from another’s perspective. Hell, Elliot knew even he was guilty of it, sometimes. Or, no. Elliot did look – he stepped into other people’s shoes and he did his utmost to see the world from their eyes, and sometimes, sometimes he had to walk away anyway. He had his own reasons, and far be it for him to think that everyone could understand them.

Whatever the case, Elliot had come to the conclusion that people were living, breathing cacti. They were full of barbs – and maybe they weren’t conscious of their own barbs, but they were there anyway. Especially these people. Vampire people. They were cacti caught up in their own personal storms. Elliot missed the ordinary people. The wayward, the carefree.

At the end of the day, he only had a handful of people he really and truly trusted. Pi was on the top of the list, regardless of her affiliations – or the affiliations she had wished to gain. The affiliation she lost because of her loyalty to her family. How could he fault that? It was easy enough to forgive her, in the end, if that was the cause.

And so, knowing Pi was at Lancaster’s, he instead was tending to Curlew. The shop at the mall was doing well. Not as well as Lancaster’s, but that was to be expected. The masses do prefer alcohol to instruments. One of the staff members had fallen sick – some bug that was going around. She’d tried to come in to work, but as soon as Elliot saw her he sent her home. She was so pale her freckles stood out like sore thumbs, and he could feel the fatigue as it rolled from her. Besides which, when she coughed it sounded like she was hacking up a frog. Before he sent her home, he took some money from the til and told the poor girl to go to the chemist and get some proper medication to help her out – and that if she didn’t get better, to get her *** to a doctor.

While Elliot waited for the replacement, he meandered around the shop to make sure everything was in order. He took on a repair job for a broken acoustic, and sold a violin to a very proud parent, for a little girl who’d just won first place in some talent contest. The deal was that if she proved she was serious, she’d get her first instrument. Violins aren’t cheap.

After the replacement arrived, Elliot logged onto the computer in the back room to modify the roster accordingly – he liked to keep track, just in case his employees forgot to record their worked hours at the end of every day.

Only when he was sure everything was in order did he leave the shop; he walked from 8th Dimension to Lancaster’s. It wasn’t all that far, and he enjoyed walking. Thus it was that he walked through the front door of the pub, rather than through the office door, or from the backpackers upstairs. He assessed the crowds, first, sharp eyes darting here and there to make sure everyone was happy and that the place was in order – he was assured that the staff were doing their jobs. Until his gaze landed on two of his ‘staff’ sitting by the fire. He assumed they weren’t supposed to be working, but he couldn’t help himself. He approached, with a smirk on his face, and stood, severely tall, in front of them – between them and the fire.

”You’ve been caught red-handed. You’re just a couple of dole bludgers, aren’t ya?” he rumbled, hands shoved into his pants pockets.

[Attire]

[Pi dArtois]

When Pi saw Elliot enter she smiled. For a moment her brain hiccuped at what Madison had said and she wasn’t sure how to respond. Her recollection of what Madison did at the office had nothing to do with payroll whatsoever so this assumption on the woman’s part had Pi stumped. Sure Pi had passwords. Pi had all of that. What Pi wasn’t sure of in that moment was whether Madison had ever, or should ever have them herself. Her first inclination was… um no, she probably didn’t.

Seeing Elliot was a life saving because a) she wasn’t really the right person to be talking to Madison about what she thought the woman, should or should not be doing and b) Elliot may well have let Madison have access to pay roll. Pi didn’t think that was the case but it was better all the way around if Elliot was the one who talk to Madison about it. Not Pi. Pi might be an owner of this business but Elliot was the one with the head for it. Pi, in her way was the muscle and sometime Senior Management (but only in his absence).

“Ahh Elliot!” Pi greeted, smiling and indicating he join them. “I’m not sure what bludger means but it doesn’t sound… appetizing.”

Getting herself comfortable, this time closing the book and setting it to the side Pi lifted a hand to the blonde woman standing beside her. “Madison here was about to hack into our system to figure out some account information. I’m thinking maybe you should deal with that one..”

Pi said it with a smile because she figured Madison was joking as she did. It wasn’t always clear to Pi when a person was telling a joke in a good way or a bad one but Elliot and Pi both trusted Madison with the clerical side of their business, which meant the woman had serious skills with what she did. Pi though, just wasn’t sure right at that moment, what it was Madison was doing.

She turned her small smile to Madison. “Speak of the devil.”

[Madison]

A dole bludger? Off the top of her head, Madison had no idea what either of those two terms meant. When she heard 'dole', she thought 'Dole' as in the brand of bananas and she wasn't quite sure but she was pretty positive that a bludger was some kind of reference to Harry Potter. Either way, it all went straight over her head and she didn't really care enough to dig into what he had meant by it.

Looking up at Elliot, the blonde gave him what could barely be called a smile. The barest upturning of the corners of her lips that didn't budge the apples of her cheeks or come anywhere close to reaching her eyes. It wasn't like she was unhappy to see him standing there. He was exactly the person she needed to right whatever wrong had happened within the system. But there wasn't any warmth to the way she looked at him either, unlike Pi who always seemed to look at him like he was the only man to ever exist.

Overall Madison was quite indifferent to both of them. She'd barely spoken to either of them in months, hadn't contributed to family discussions or the welcoming of new vampires; most of which she would probably never meet even if they managed to survive longer than a fortnight. Even as employee and employer, the trio of them never spoke. Madison was pretty free to do as she pleased. Come and go as she pleased. Work from home if it suited her. As long as she kept up with her bookkeeping and kept all the spreadsheets and paperwork organized, no one said a damn word to her. The network security she did solely because she was good with technology.

In the end she saw her position at Lancaster's as simply being a level of convenience for both sides. She held no pride in the work she did. Any monkey with half a brain could tally up how many bottles the bar went through in a week. It was simply convenient to know someone who owned an establishment. As dull as it was, it passed the time several nights a week. On the opposite end, it was just as convenient for Pi and Elliot to have someone they knew and with her level of intelligence to keep the system safe from hack happy saboteurs. Her position in d'Artois was a completely different matter and Madison figured the only reason she hadn't left or they hadn't kicked her out was mostly because it made no difference to any of them whether she was there or not.

Half listening to what Pi said, her facial expression remained impassive, fighting the urge to smirk. Had Pi nor Elliot been there or answered her texts, there was very little to nothing that would have stopped her from hacking into the bank account simply to prove to herself that it was none of the systems she had set up that had malfunctioned. Instead she simply held her spot until Pi spoke directly to her and allowed the smirk she'd been holding back to come forth at a seemingly appropriate moment. It lasted for maybe a second or two before relaxing back to its former impassive state.

"I doubt anyone could accuse Lan of being a devil," Madison replied, somewhat dryly before sitting up properly in her chair. Since she'd already addressed Pi with the issue and it would be awkward to look back and forth from a standing Elliot to a seated Pi, Madison kept her pale blue focus on Lan as she reiterated the issue, "Lancaster's or the bank's system overpaid me several times over this past pay period. I already checked the hours for the week and they look accurate but I can't access the account to see how many times our system ordered wages to be sent out or if it's completely on their end. Last I checked, I had access when making sure that accounts liable checks had gone through before filing them away as paid."

[Lancaster]

Completely comfortable and at his ease, Elliot dropped to the ground while Madison explained her predicament. He sat between the two women, as there weren’t any chairs left and he wasn’t comfortable with standing, looking down at them. One leg was drawn up, and his arm draped over his knee.

It was only after the fact that he realised neither of them would understand the colloquialism that had slipped from his tongue. It happened every now and again – he’d let loose an Australianism that no one else understood; they either let it slide, or he was asked to explain. In this case, he wasn’t asked to explain. The small talk didn’t last very long, and he soon realised that Pi and Madison were not comfortable sitting together to catch up. To just talk, for talking’s sake. It became pretty obvious quite quickly that business was the aim of the game.

He was, of course, privy to the aura spilling from the women. Well, not spilling, per se. A mere drip, a vibration of atmosphere that was diluted by the overall atmosphere of the pub. From Pi he could feel, perhaps, a little bit of relief, perhaps a little bit of lingering frustration, but nothing major. And it was the same from Madison – nothing major. In fact, he couldn’t feel much of anything from Madison. He didn’t stop to think about it.

First, Pi mentioned hacking, and then Madison explained her problem. As she spoke, Elliot’s brows slowly inclined inwards to form a furrowing frown. This was the first he’d heard of this problem, at least recently, anyway. It had happened in the past – a glitch in the system on behalf of the bank, rather than from Elliot’s end, which meant that the staff got paid too much. At the same time, however, the same glitch had his own profits soaring, so he normally allowed the problem to slide. He was a naturally giving person, and perhaps his staff deserved a bonus every now and again. That’s how he’d explained it, if any of them had asked. He’d laugh, and tell them to spend their money wisely.

”Well, no,” Elliot said, glancing from Madison to Pi and back again. ”I’ve had to change the password recently – they force me to, every couple of months or so for security reasons. I’m not sure… if I gave you the password in the past. Did I? You shouldn’t have access to the bank account. Only I or Pi have access to that, and only I or Pi can approve the banking,” he explained. Obviously, Pi didn’t have the need to access the bank too often, but she had the authority to do it if she needed to. ”And I’d really prefer that you don’t go hacking into it, either – if there’s a problem, come to me and talk to me about it,” he said, somewhat sternly. Madison was a trusted employee. If she went hacking into the system that she was supposed to protect to access areas she wasn’t supposed to access, she’d hardly be trusted anymore.

”It’s happened in the past. It’s something on the bank’s end – I get a profit, too. You can look at it as a bonus,” he explained.

[Pi dArtois]

“Overpaid! I wish we all had that problem.” Pi added sotte voce, not really adding to the conversation but letting it roll around her as Elliot took over a large slice of what Madison needed help with. Pi did have access to the accounts but she never made any attempt to do anything about it. In the event Elliot wasn’t around she had the ability to nip in and send out the wages or pay the creditors but that was only in the event he wasn’t and that day hadn’t come… ever.

If there was something she could say about the man she loved was the fact he was consistently who he was and grounded in a way she had never seen before. He cared about other people, made the effort to do what needed to be done and ran his businesses as he ran his life, with care and consideration of others. Pi had never had a reason to access those accounts and wasn’t it just like Elliot to overpay people (a lot by the sounds of things) and not really give it much thought. She smiled even as she watched the conversation between the two.

There wasn’t much she could add here either. She agreed with everything Elliot had just said, confirmed it in her head and even supported that part about her not hacking into their business accounts because…. That just didn’t seem like the best idea.

“That’s just like you…” Pi said, looking at Elliot with a good natured shake of her head “Overpaying people and shrugging it off.”

Turning the smile in Madison’s direction she added a shrug to the smile as if she could express with the lift of her shoulders the affection she felt for this man who had no real thought to his own riches and blew off what was probably a few thousand dollars. “It’s just like him not to worry about something like that… but I’m glad you were on the look out….”

“Is that all you wanted Madison?” Pi asked the woman, wondering then if there was something else she wanted. “It’s been awhile since we talked I know… not much going on in d’Artois these days… so I know you and I haven’t talked in a while… is there anything else?”