Chapter #11In Character by: imaj   Joe follows you as you open the hotel room door for the first time and walk in, your suitcase rolling along behind you. The room is spacious and opulent, but you’d expect no less from an upper floor suite at a five star hotel. You set the suitcase besides one of the plush leather couches and use a remote to turn on the wide screen television mounted on the wall. A Chinese news station comes on.
“I’m very lucky to have you paying all the expenses on this trip Mr Durras,” you say to Joe. Since stepping out of Kali’s apartment in L.A. you haven’t once slipped out of character.
Joe ignores you though. He closes the suite door and starts walking round the room, carefully inspecting the furnishings and fittings. “Bugged to hell,” he pronounces after a few minutes. “Cutting edge gadgets too. You’ll have to be careful what you say once I’ve left the room.”
“Shouldn’t I be careful now,” you ask. “Or should you be careful?”
Joe grins wickedly. “Let’s say that what the bugs are picking up right now doesn’t exactly match up what’s happening here.”
You know Joe well enough not to ask, but Wendy Yè doesn’t. She’s only know Joe a few days and since you are Wendy right now, you’re going to act how she would. Besides, what Joe is doing is a useful little trick, although you doubt you’d be able to mirror something so complicated fully without fully taking on Viritrilbia as an ousiarch.
“Just what are they seeing,” you ask, keeping your tone briskly professional.
Joe’s eyes twinkle. You’ve taken the bait. He knows you’ve taken the bait. For a moment you wonder if he laid it out just because you’d be forced to take it to keep in character. “Right now, whoever is watching is getting a good show of us making out on the couch,” he explains, vaulting over the back of on of the leather couches and slouching into it. “This one here.”
“Mr Durras,” you say, folding your arms crossly. “I am a good fifteen years older than you.”
“Wendy,” says Joe with a sweet smile. “Can I call you Wendy?”
You glower at Joe as you think it over. He still has that habit of flirting with any halfway pretty girl or woman. You don’t know what’s happening between him and Rosalie right now – asking would be out of character. In fact, Wendy doesn’t know about Rosalie at all. You have to think about that whilst deciding how to play this. What you really know about Joe shouldn’t be a consideration at all.
How would Wendy react to Joe flirting with her?
Joe’s a handsome guy and it’s hard not to like him. On the other hand Wendy is all buttoned up. Would she play his game? You decide that she would do so cautiously, just to test how serious he was.
You unfold your arms and let your body language defrost a little. “Very well Mr Durras.”
“Joe please,” he says patting the seat next to him. “Come sit next to me.”
You raise an eyebrow but walk over and sit next to him nonetheless. “What are you doing,” you shout, leaning away when he pulls at your blouse and takes the clips out of your hair.
“I’m going to stop spoofing the bugs in a second, so you need to looks dishevelled,” he explains.
“I’ll dishevel myself thank you,” you reply primly, ruffling your hair and undoing a couple of buttons of your blouse.
Joe darts forwards, catching you unaware and briefly kissing you on the lips. You give him a hard stare when he leans back. He meets your eyes and you realise he’s dropped the illusion for the bugs and you have no way of reprimanding him. Or at least it would look odd to the hidden observers watching you. He runs a hand down your cheek. “I’ll see you later,” he mumbles before standing up and leaving.
You sit for a few minutes, pretending to collect your senses, before you fixing your clothes and hair.
*****
A knock at the door wakes you from your dozing. You sit up in the couch, blinking your bleary eyes and look at the television. It’s still on the news channel and the little clock at the bottom of the screen tells you it’s close to midnight.
Whoever is outside raps the door again. You hear the words “Room service”, first in Mandarin and then again in English.
You didn’t order anything, you’ve been quietly napping for a couple of hours, so you warily walk over to the door. There is a little video screen set beside the door that shows the corridor just outside. On the screen you can see a couple of covered dishes sitting on a cart. A uniformed maid beside the card leans and knocks the door again.
“Room…”
“I didn’t order anything,” you interrupt in Mandarin.
The maid looks directly at the camera outside the door, allowing you to see her face in the screen. She’s plain faced and seemingly nervous. “It was ordered for you by the room across the corridor,” she explains after consulting a piece of paper.
Well that explains it: Joe trying to be helpful. You open the door wearily and barely have time to register your surprise when the maid lifts her hand and sprays your face with the contents of a small metal canister concealed in her hand. You have just enough time to feel very woozy before she sprays you again. Your legs fail and everything goes dark as you fall to the floor.
*****
“Hmmm, she’s awake. Should you drug her again?”
“No, we need her conscious.”
“But she’s going to see us.”
“Will anyone believe her anyway? That’s assuming head office doesn’t want her killed anyway. We need her awake and able to answer questions when you go in.”
You only vaguely comprehend the babble of voices that surround you and you struggle to remember where you are or what happened to you. The memories of answering the door finally flit into your head. Your eyes snap open and you try to get up.
You can’t move, you’ve been tied to a chair.
The details of your situation start to make themselves apparent. You are bound at the ankles, wrists and across the torso. The ropes are tight and give you no room to move. Worse you seem to have been stripped completely naked. You turn your attention to the owners of the voices you heard.
One, and judging by his position he is the second voice, is sitting directly in front of you. He seems old, perhaps in his late fifties with greying hair and half moon reading glasses. With one hand he olds your arm in place as he uses the other to paint your body. He dips his thin brush into a glass bowl filled with thick black pigment and you feel the brush as it traces out patterns on your skin.
The first voice sits beside you in another chair, a much younger man with strong looking body. Like you he sits naked, but unlike you he is unbound. His skin is covered with a mass of swirling tattoos. It takes a few minutes of staring to recall where you have seen those patterns before: In the archive, on the wooden golem that Frank and Joe sent to Nash. The golem only had one circular design on it, this man has a dozen or so. Some are filled with names written out in sigils, others are empty.
“Hold still and we won’t hurt you,” says the older man.
It seems like they don’t realise who you really are. You decide that Wendy would be terrified in this situation. Fear shows in your eyes and you go very still. You let your breathing become shallow and rapid. The older man grunts in satisfaction as you let him complete his work.
“You ready for this,” the older man asks the younger. He puts his brush down in a toolbox at his feet and takes out a needle tipped mechanical contraption.
“As much as I ever am,” replies the younger man. “At least she’s good looking.”
“You saw those video feeds though,” says the older man. He repositions his stool so it now sits in front of the younger man’s seat. “She was all over the Stellae.” Oh shit, you think. The only silver lining is they don’t realise you are one too. “Won’t you find that disgusting?”
The younger man shrugs as the older man leans in close and starts moving the needle tipped contraption about one of the empty circular tattooed areas. There is a small hiss from the machinery as it starts its work, leaving a dark mark on his skin when it moves on. It must be a tattoo machine of some kind. “At least that makes it easy to get close to him,” says the younger man.
The older man makes a harrumphing sound. “If you say so,” is all he says in reply. He then works in silence as he continues the tattoo. The only sound is the hissing of the machine and the odd grunt of pain from the younger man. Finally he pulls the stool back. “There.”
You look at the new tattoo on the younger man, recognising it instantly. The newly added sigil represents Wendy’s name. Though you can see that, she would miss the significance. You have to bite on your lip very hard in order to hide that you understand the meaning.
What happens next isn’t surprising. You had begun to realise it was a possibility as soon as you recognised the man’s tattoos, but it still hits like a hammer blow to see it happen.  You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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