And what I give out will make up what I'll receive

[fooloftheking]

WHO: Bobo Del Rey
WHERE: Fountain Park, North Village
WHEN: Sept 4th and beyond
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: language warning, vomiting, will update further as needed

---

Fountain Park - Arrival

Spending one hundred and fifty years waiting on the one love of your life is a long time to pin all your hopes and possibilities on a girl born to your enemy. A longer time to plan and plot all the while losing and gaining the one thing you never thought you’d have. And yet the pain of the grenade that put him down moments was nothing compared to hearing Willa’s words, that betrayal of her stepping through the gates and going beyond without him.

The snow should have been cold, but he didn’t feel it, didn’t feel anything really. For a brief moment there is thought that this is how it is before you’re born, when you’re still weightless and floating in moments before life.

And then water was filling his lungs and Bobo chokes, gagging underwater as conscious thought of where the living hell he is this turns into a desperate need to get air and not water into his body. Not registering that his coat should have weighed him down, flailing as he is somehow pushed upwards. Managing is his panic to break the surface, gasping a thick, wet breath as he hooks an arm over the edge and hauls himself up and out of the water.

Coughing up water as he flops down in the grass, body heaving as his system attempts to clear his lungs. The cough becomes too much and he chokes, vomiting up water and bile and, well, probably whiskey.

Slowly raising his head, eyes red rimmed and his beard bearing marks of charring on one side, his eyes narrow as he becomes aware of one thing in particular.

“Where the hell is my coat?”

North Village - Around

Over the next couple of days a figure may be seen hitting a few places along the north village. Maybe not entirely noticeable, despite the red scrubs that he’s still not sure what to think of, but the weather is not entirely cool enough for the peacoat he’s wearing over them. Bobo will be damned if he takes if off though. They want to pull this Black Badge facility bullshit and release him in some Twilight Zone, Stephen King-esque trap of a town, he’s going to do the best he can to make things right. For himself, at least.

Scrounging about, trying to figure out what it is they want from him because the lack of agents, pain, and hellishly styled torments in the name of science seem to be greatly lacking. Not that he’s complaining, except when he gets the chance to bitch about the lack of alcohol, food, and maybe a radio would be nice.

He hits up the Inn numerous times throughout those days, and it may be scrounging for supplies. Hell, what else good does it do when there’s no alcohol to speak of, and trust him, he’s looked. He does snag a chef’s knife from the kitchen, because being unarmed is the most unnerving sensation he can imagine. Or so he thinks until he realizes there’s more wrong here than just some missing clothes.

North Village - House 111

A few times resurrected in Purgatory and Bobo is actually used to settling in where it suits him. Enough of the houses that way seem empty and he “picks” one mostly because he likes the color and it has fewer houses around it than some of the others. Neighbors may be wanted by someone but really, he’s saving others from himself.

It’s behind that house, by the edge of the trees, that he can be found a few days after he tried to drown painfully in the fountain. Several items from his kitchen, or at least a kitchen, are laid out on a sheet he brought down from the extra bedroom. Standing there in red scrubs and a black coat, Bobo seems to be mostly kind of pointing at the items that include a vegetable peeler, a knife, a spoon, and several other metal objects.

He becomes more frustrated the longer he tries, face flushed and hand shaking as he fights against the rising panic he’s feeling.

Comments

north village - house 111

[quinientos]

Normally, Vasquez comes out this way because it's a guarantee that no one is going to pester him. He can come privately smoke, keep to himself, and have some privacy. When he wanders through this time, there's noise coming from a house.

When he wanders back and finds Bobo staring at objects on a sheet, Vasquez starts to worry that maybe he's madder than he'd considered. Does he like that or not, that's the question. "Is this some kind of weird white man ritual?" he asks, dubiously.

[fooloftheking]

The grass does well in buffering the sound of footsteps and as much as he hates it, Bobo startles when he hears a voice. His hand jerks, not looking back at first, eyes closing as he takes a moment to realize two things. One, he knows that voice. Two, he's kinda glad that he isn't capable of flinging that knife around and behind him without touching it in that moment.

Slowly he turns, giving Vasquez a look. "It's a weird, only this man far as I know can do it ritual," he admits, rolling his eyes. "Except apparently I can't here. Hadn't even hit me until now. No use for it until I nearly took off my toe with a knife."

And found in that moment he couldn't stop the knife.

"Should've figured with Black Badge shit they'd find a way to fuck me over in more ways than one."

He looks Vasquez over a minute and then looks back at the house before turning the look. "Hope you weren't coming out here because this is your place. I kinda commandeered one of the bedrooms. And the house."

[quinientos]

Vasquez is in the process of lighting up his latest cigarette with a new match as he studies the items on the ground, peering at the items and looking for ways to put it all together. When Bobo mentions nearly slicing off a toe, he can't help his amused snort.

"Then you would've had a very interesting story, at least," he coaxes, crouching down to poke at a few items before glancing to the house. "This? No. I stay at the inn," he says, gesturing back to where he'd walked from. "I like coming out here for privacy and the chance to get to walk, not be trapped. I spent too long, trapped in one place," he advises gravely. "What's a Black Badge?"

[fooloftheking]

"Yeah keep laughing," he says, rolling his eyes. "I saw a hospital but this place really got any doctors?"

Not that he's sure he's huge on those either, but he's beginning to think his own mortality is now a concern.

"What's interesting about some asshole that never cooks for himself nearly taking off his toe?" But he knows he can spin it to something better. If he'd had to.

"Yeah, why I like it out here. Away from everything else. Spent a lot of time in a small space with others." And all because he did the right thing. "And they're nothing but shit I got out of the kitchen. Just wanted to experiment with something."

At that question, Bobo falls silent a minute, watching the other man. "Never heard anything like that mentioned? I figured with the scrubs and shit, they had to have a hand in this with their experiments. It's a government organization that's studying all the shit that's considering not normal."

[quinientos]

Vasquez shrugs casually, because he knows there are medical doctors, but he doesn't exactly care so much. He's been healed since long before he came here, and the only reason he knows there's help is because he happens to be casually sleeping with one of them. She takes very good care of him, so he's not upset in any way.

"Most people without limbs have interesting stories," Vasquez offers, which is in his experience of meeting people without arms and fingers and eyes. "Usually gets shot off though, or in a fight." He inhales sharply as he smokes, turning his head to exhale.

"Only badge I know of belonged to a crooked sheriff in the town I just helped free," Vasquez says, even if that had been a year ago. "No badges here, unless you want me to make you one."

[fooloftheking]

"That's the stories they tell," he points out, wagging a finger at the other man. "No one tells the true story. About being stupid enough to wrap reins around your wrist and then your horse gets spooked, or how you were messing around and a stick you were tossing takes out your eye," he points out. "Being a good liar will always make things better."

Which is a theory that he has lived on since he came back the first time.

"Naw, I don't want one. Everyone I've known with a badge ended up being a huge fucking asshole," he says, words darkening as he thinks back to the first one he knew. "Just the only people I can think of that can cause something like this would be them."

He pauses though, glancing at the metal and then at Vasquez. "So what? You a blacksmith?"

[quinientos]

"Maybe I like a storyteller, hmm?" Vasquez retorts, with the poking and prodding of a man who just likes the argument less than a man who wants to win one. He's already gleaming with it, a proud and stupid smirk on his face as he looks at Bobo and reaches down to poke at a few of the items there, smoking as he does.

"Never had a badge, but I worked alongside someone who did," he says. "He wasn't so bad," he admits, of Sam. "Maybe because he had skin that wasn't white as your pale ass," he teases. He glances at the stuff on the ground, then to Bobo. "Not a blacksmith. Thief," he says. "Robber. Bandit. Outlaw. Take your pick of words."

That's what he is now. It's what he's been forced to become, but it's not what he always was.

[fooloftheking]

"A man that enjoys lies. Well, you're keeping good company then," he says, an admission of things he's never tried to hide but not talked about openly either.

Bobo sank down to sit crosslegged before the items, staring at them with a mixture of disgust and confusion. He doesn't even lift his gaze as he raises his hand, flipping Vasquez off though one corner of his mouth is curved in a smirk. "Weren't complaining about this ass before," he points out, though his gaze slides to the other man.

"Okay then, thief and wordsmith. How and who could literally take the very essence of a man and leave him like he was the day he was born rather than as he's become? Tell me a story then about that."

[quinientos]

Vasquez only laughs when he sees the crude finger, because he's never met a challenge he doesn't like and he knows there's no heat in this one. He settles on the ground, too, getting comfortable as he starts to pick up a spoon or two, wiggling it in the air.

"Definitely not complaining about your ass," he teases, "maybe just the colour of it. I could go blind, looking at it bare." He flicks the spoon at Bobo before he sprawls out, fiddling with his cigarette. "I don't know what this place does to people, but where I come from, you're who you are. A place like this, it can't take it away."

fountain park - arrival

[cannily]

Water, like blood, connects all things. It's why they built the city on an island, why they carved the canals in their spiral. Why they put the Cortuer at the center, bleeding its prisoners back into the source.

In this little village, the fountain is the center. Its mirror on the other side might be dry, but just north of that is the lake, the pod--and it goes into that underground keep, and those glass tunnels, it seems, lead back to here. A circle of sorts, if the blood in their veins moves them over the land between. Blood to water, to blood, and back again.

Without all of that, it wouldn't be much of a fountain. Bare stone, not very many tiers.

These past two mornings, as the others of the Inn wake to stoke fires and pick the rations for the day, Cael pulls on the fur cloak he found across the hall--more for its grounding weight than need of warmth--and walks out to the fountain's edge. He finds the biggest rock in the park, and he drops it into the water.

Wish, protest, experiment? He isn't yet sure. Depends on what happens.

Today, an entire man comes up in the stone's wake, gasping and growling as he paws at the edge. Soaking wet, dressed all in red--that and his shouting disposition should be enough to give Cael pause, but it's the stripe of his hair, the pattern of his beard, that strikes him a little deeper.

Cael backs up, arm pulling his cloak close around as he crouches, the drape hiding that he's gathered another rock. Still crouched, he stares from a man's length away. No one had quite told him a name, for this place he's washed up, and this one looks Vilk. A wolf in man's clothing, and this is more the Mohrrigai's land than his own.

"In what land did you leave it," he asks, his thumb exploring the edges of his weapon, behind the dark fur of his cloak.

[fooloftheking]

The entire world spins, a dizziness that leaves Bobo on the edge of throwing up again. It's like having drunk too much, not enough, and trying to breath it in all at the same time. He hasn't thought much about all of the ways he didn't die before now, but drowning had never been on that list. No one wants to fuck up the only water supply you have when you're trapped in a tiny gap between wasteland and woodland. Not even revenants, apparently.

Hands planted palm down in the grass, one leg bent awkwardly, holding his weight as everything breath sets off a fiery tickle that radiates like branches across his lungs and makes his diaphragm spasm. Being shot had been less painful than this. The grenade though, that is another story and as the moments before he found himself drowning come back to him, his hand goes to his face, checking his cheek and finding a small wound but little else in the way of damage.

He had survived the blast then?

"Never had Hell come with water instead of fire," he grunts, flopping over to lay on his back, realizing that the voice he heard isn't in his head, the ringing in his ears, but another person nearby.

Canting his head back, arms flung out to his sides as water continues to stream off him, Bobo looks at the other person. Upside and not really concerned, even if he is pretty damn angry.

"I was wearing it in Purgatory," he says, not considering that could be confusing. Not considering he's not home either. "And whatever man had the balls to take it off me should have the decency to face me rather than being a cowardly bastard while I'm apparently out of it and then dumping me in the water."

His eyes narrow a moment, taking in the fur the other man is wearing. "Nice fur. You take that off a man that just got blown up too?"

[cannily]

A prone man can still be a threat, but for now Cael keeps the rock as an option, rather than a necessity. A man need not be dangerous: perhaps he'll be boring. "Purghatori," he repeats, sounding out the word. He'd hardly studied a map of Vilksir, though his father had told tales of the war. Clans scattered across the fanged mountains; the Wolves' Grave where the great ambush had been carried out.

And the stories of their pelts, the magic of them. Letting a man change shape; letting another man rule the beast if he could steal it.

As a child he'd been fascinated with the concept; grown, and bowing to enough men for long enough to bite the hand that fed--the idea makes his skin crawl. "No," he answers firmly, lifting his chin. "I took it off a shelf where it was gathering dust. If you're done laying in your sick, there are others for the taking."

[fooloftheking]

Before falling out of a fountain, a sleeping Bobo was a threat. He's yet to realize how much in the past that side of him is. That said, his tongue is still sharp, as is his gaze.

Arching his head back a bit, looking at the other man from that upside down vantage as if all of this is perfectly normal. For a man that drinks a lot, perhaps that is just about as normal as the world can be. Not to mention that he's fairly certain he's going to wake up shortly, and it will pass so that he'll be back laying in the snow. All of this has got to be delirium from being too close to a grenade when it went off. Eventually it will pass and he'll be laying in the snow and she'll be gone.

No reason to play nice or normal in his own mental delusions.

"Yeah, it's a town in the middle of fucking nowhere. Don't go there," he says, as if it would help. The place attracted people, especially the supernatural, like a brothel attracted cowboys back in the day.

That pronouncement though has Bobo shifting, rolling over onto one shoulder and lifting his head to look up at the boy above him. Boy by definition of Bobo being a dick that thought of most of younger than him or beneath him.

"That so. And this shelf got clothes beyond this crap?" He asks, tugging at the scrub top in red that he wore. "Not really my color."

[cannily]

Cael hasn't been a boy since the fire, but it usually pays to sit low in the estimation of strangers. When the man rolls up the disparity of size and power is all the more apparent: surprise is his best ally, in a struggle.

"By some standards," he answers, dry as the central canals in high summer. Dry as the bones brought to light within them. "Your bag should have something, if you find it any better."

Some of it had been sturdier than the rest, and the coat had looked acceptable--but he'll let things get run a little more dry in his wardrobe before he wears certain fabrics. "This way," he says, the rock tucked in the edge of the cloak with his hand, leading his turn that the dark fur might ripple behind, defying the ground to sully it.

[fooloftheking]

Before his death, Bobo never thought of himself as intimidating. He was just a man, living his life. Since he returned from that first death, he's used his height and width to his advantage, if only because he enjoys it.

"My..." He frowns, realizing he has a bag. "What even if this shit." Muttering under his breath, rolling his eyes as he gave it a shake, frowning. "Weirdest kidnapping that I've ever been through."

Shaking his head as he gains his footing, running his empty hand over his hair so that it's slicked back and in place and sluicing the water out of it. Touching then his temple, frowning slightly as the damage from the grenade is little more than a small wound and he begins to wonder how long it's really been.

"So, what? You the welcoming committee to Hell? Not that this is Hell but whatever."

[cannily]

The welcoming--Cael draws his posture up and in, looking over a shoulder at the man. Is that what he's doing? Helping the man back to the inn, offering the information freely. No, he thinks: he's just avoiding the struggle. The one most men engage when the world is new and hard to understand. The one men engage when they're refused.

And he wouldn't mind if he never saw a man in red, ever again.

"I'm simply here," he says, sweeping forward over the late summer grass. "And I need several drinks and a regrettable evening under our belts, before I make you sleep in the dirt."

[fooloftheking]

Bobo at least follows, though he pauses to glance back at the fountain, still trying to make sense of any of this. He feels as if he can still feel the snow on his back, the burn of the grenade against the side of his face. Touching his temple lightly, feeling healing wounds but nothing like should be there after the blast he's taken.

"Okay where even if here? How did I get here?"

And then it hits him. The scrubs and the time difference from the blast and how healed he feels. Even the healing itself. He sighs, the sound exasperated to hide the nervousness he feels.

"Is this some Black Badge holding facility?"

The Inn

[spoileralert]

Steph is bringing in her kills for the day at just the right moment to spot the new guy taking the chef's knife.

"Hey," she calls out from a safe distance, "you know you can't keep that, right? There are other knives, you don't have to take the cooking ones." She keeps a hand poised, ready to grab her own weapons if she needs to. After all, the man is armed. With a big-ass chef knife.

[fooloftheking]

Bobo lifts a brow at the voice, slowly turning to face the owner of that voice. He isn't fast, if only that he's still not sure one gun toting heir isn't here, taking in the way she's standing. He sighs, rolling his eyes.

"Come on. Do I look like someone that's about to use this to g... You know, we're just going to leave that sentence there," he says, moving to lay the knife on the counter. "Is there's others, point me to them. I figured Black Badge wouldn't arm us anyway, so I'm impressed. Unless they expect this to be a fight to the death thing. In which case..." He shrugs, not seeming worried by that.

"Though really, I'm just looking to find something small and furry to make this damn coat feel like home," he says, rocking his shoulders a bit so that the peacoat sways. "It's close but not entirely right."

[spoileralert]

"Yes," she confirms with zero hesitation, "that's exactly what you look like." Still, he puts the knife down, and she only needs one hand to hold a knife of her own. She slides her backpack off and lets it hang on one arm.

"Never heard of 'em. But there are a couple of weapons in the storeroom that you can borrow. And... I have... dead rabbits? And two squirrels. Fast little buggers." Rabbits, strangely, don't seem to be very good at evading hunters from a distance. Maybe they just can't see that far.

[fooloftheking]

"Well, least I have wasted a few decades cultivating a look for nothing," he says, smirking. Not as if he's ever been the type to hide the nature of the beast that he is. After all, he's going to Hell one way or another, so might as well enjoy the trip until he ends up back there.

"Honor system huh? That always works well." At least he doesn't roll his eyes, even if his words sound as if he might. "Rabbit might work. The one they took from me was beaver and wolf, but doubting I will find wolf easily around here. You ever try running a sapling trap? Usually pretty good at catching what's quick and means you don't have to hover over it, or stalk them."

[spoileralert]

"Pretty much." And honor system which Steph has abused, but which she won't let Bobo abuse if she can help it.

She makes a face at the mention of hunting bigger game.

"I'm not so good with, you know, killing things that are looking at me? Or skinning, for that matter." She does start to unpack her bag, though, laying the small kills out and setting the plants aside.

[fooloftheking]

Oh but Bobo is so good at abusing things. It's like his number one hobby. "Never understood how anyone that's maybe seen what people are capable of are willing to do things like that. I mean, you get kicked in the teeth once, you wouldn't just lay your head down again would you?"

And because of his nature, he can't imagine that others don't abuse that system. It's the nature of man, no matter what they've ended up becoming in the long run.

He gives her a funny look at that, taking a risking a striding a bit closer. "One, you use a sapling snare and you don't get to see their eyes until they're dead. Two, skinning is not hard. Just got to be careful of the stomach and the bowels."

[spoileralert]

She lets that first question go, assuming it's rhetorical. Psychology is a complicated subject anyway. Just because she was tortured to death doesn't mean she thinks everybody is that cruel... just any and all strangers.

The second question makes her blanch.

"It's not the skill-level that's a problem." Just thinking about being 'careful of the stomach and bowels' makes her feel a little sick. She doesn't mind making people bleed who deserve it, but cutting up dead animals?

[fooloftheking]

Fighting so hard not to roll his eyes, Bobo turns back and moves to pick up the knife he had. Taking a look at it, he makes a face. "Right. Need something smaller and more flexible. Grab your kills and come on. We don't want to do this in here. Let the blood splatter hit the ground not the floor."

He glances at her, hoping she's not taking this as a threat. He's still not sure how this place is, and while she's not a demon killing, gun toting Earp, he'd hate to find out more than he's noticed is gone and die like that.

"And if you throw up on me, I'm not going to be happy."