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Visigny wears a whole lot of armor in a whole lot of real and figurative ways when he is out and about. That coat of his could take several bullets and even more swings from an axe. There's kevlar in his shirts, even. At home, however, he tends to set it all aside in favor of satin robes and sleep pants. His body is strong and lithe and nothing to be ashamed of whatsoever, so long as you're comfortable with hideous scarring and war wounds.
He gets to be himself here, unguarded and uninhibited. And it isn't rude. He's got a violin under his chin, and is slowly drawing out the melody line of the piece Oblivion by Astor Piazzola. He's quite taken with the piece, swaying about their little den of vipers like the king snake himself, the cat of him ensuring his satin robe is always snapping behind him like an agitated tail.
Visigny has used Summon Annikah. It's super effective!
She can be heard coming before she can be seen, the sound of her own violin joining Visigny's as she comes out of the area she's set up as her study. While she plays she stalks closer on bare feet. When she's deep in studies of one sort of another she's often wearing nothing, shedding trappings of material reality as things anchoring her to that more base state. So there ends up being a naked Gangrel with a violin wandering in, losing herself in the song as much as Visigny is.
Her steps come in time to the music, and each one draws her closer to Visigny.
Oh yes, all three of them play the violin, but Artje doesn't bring hers out just now. Instead, she slides out of Obfuscate -- because sometimes it's fun just to be unseen, even if you're as fabulous as Artje is -- standing in the doorway opposite the one she hears Annikah approaching from. Her keen ears pick up the sound of the Gangrel's stalking footsteps, and her fingers rise to shimmer through the air as if conducting, but also drawing out each individual note. Her eyes half-lid, and her deep purple silk peignoir set flows around her like water as she sways.
By the time Visigny's ear has caught wind of the accompaniment, his smile is starting to warm. He leads the mournful piece out of its dark and lonesome refrains and brings it up in modulation and key to pass the melody line along to Ambre, by Nils Frahm. It's a piece designed for duet Violins, and since the first part of the piece is refrained in the second with accompaniment, one can just jump in any time one pleases.
And once he does, properly, have accompaniment? He slithers his catty ass on over to Annikah and leans his back in against her side, letting her feel the vibratto of his fingers through the twitching of his shoulder. She gets to see the fluid swaying of his bow hand out of her peripheral vision, too. Toying at her prey drives.
He sends Artje a heated look as the other two dance and play. Surely someone owns a cello or we'll be dealing with the notes that are left over!
Annikah leans into Visigny when he leans his back against her, and she follows him in the transition from one song to the next. She plays with the confidence of someone who has been doing so for decades, even if that's not nearly as long as some others in the room might have been playing, and she starts to sway her body slightly as the song continues, looking a bit like a snake being charmed.
He gives her a heated look, and Artje tips her head back, laughing in a manner that has her tossing back her head -- a flash of fang, the slide of royal purple silk along her shoulder. "I should buy another piano," she murmurs, somehow in time with the music, threading her words through the notes like stitches passed through the warp and weft of Visigny's satin robe, binding without disrupting. "I should buy an awful lot of things."
A little sigh, and she passes from the place where she stands, closer to both of them, trailing her nose along Annikah's bicep, a fingertip up Visigny's serpentine spine. There is a look of anticipation on her face, and a little delight. "I have news," she murmurs as one piece fades, and that sounds a little regretful, but a little... excited at the same time? Proud, maybe?
"I would absolutely fuck for a cello right now," Visigny assures them both as the song continues on. "Artje, you know how to play the cello? Your knees are absolutely built for it." That comment was scandalous once upon a time, now it's just somewhat silly.
With so many bodies about it's getting a little hard for him to concentrate on the music. But he manages, mostly by closing his eyes and landmarking himself with his back against Annikah's side. Good practice for when they have to fight blinded, one supposes.
"News? From the sound of it, not the bad kind either."
As one song fades out and Artje brings up news, Annikah lowers her violin and passes her bow from one hand to the other, so that one is holding both components of her playing and the other can go around Visigny's waist. She leans in and kisses the back of his neck before turning her head to look at Artje. "I would like to hear your news, and I would love to have a piano. Sabine let me learn on her Imperial Bösendorfer, and I've wanted one ever since. Not that there was room to put one in the apartment above the Edge of Reason, y'know? But now..." she gestures around.
"You would fuck with or without a cello," teases the Toreador, her eyes glittering, and then she laughs brightly. If she were Blushed, she'd blush at that. "I do. Not as well as the violin, but I do. Cellos were far less portable during our roaming years, so I had to leave it behind." There's something there, the sort of thing that moves through her sentences every so often without explanation. She doesn't speak about her life before Taire, pretty much at all, ever. That's as close as she comes.
"I had the loveliest piano at the salle," she sighs. "Not an Imperial Bösendorfer, though. Oh, I'd love one of those." A happy little sigh.
She circles back to Visigny's question. "Well. It isn't good news. But it is news in which I am terribly clever."
"The men were always glad of a fiddle," Visigny remarks as he slips away from the pair to put his instrument properly away. It would be rude to leave it out, it would be rude to keep carrying it about. So once that's done, he slides right back in to Annikah's arm and takes a light hold of Artje's hand with both of his own. His head finds Anni's shoulder, even.
"Tell us both how clever you are, my little cabbage. We shall sit here and think about how pretty you are the whole time." His cheek nuzzles in against Annikah's shoulder rather like an affectionate cat.
"I've never learned the cello, but maybe I should. Or the double bass. I could wear it on a strap like a guitar," Annikah says thoughtfully, imagining the possibilities. "That seems like it could be a good time."
She stops imagining and comes back to reality, that prison of the demiurge. "You're always clever, my mistress, but tell us about this particular bit of cleverness. I always like to hear the ways you outmaneuver others. Even me, actually. Maybe especially, since it usually ends up being pretty sexy."
Her eyelids literally flutter as Annikah talks about wearing a double bass on a strap like a guitar. "That wasn't what I heard for a moment," she teases. "I had to think about it twice."
Laughter again. "It's always sexy." They both make her laugh -- really laugh -- so often when she's here, with them, where (like Visigny) she isn't wearing one form or another of armor. "So." she begins, squeezing her hand between Visigny's and turning her thoughts around in her head. "I began thinking about how to dig into the issue of the VII here in the city. And so I consulted the Cacophony, to begin with."
"You see, so very clever," he whispers up to Annikah, not really helping with that whole demiurge thing much. "I can't do any of that cacaphony business. I have too ordered of a mind, you see. Mind palace in there, mmhmm." The shrieking and screeching of his beast begs to differ, but polite little lies are still polite if you wink about them afterwards. Which he does.
"You just hear 'strap' and immediately think 'strap on'," Annikah accuses. With a grin. "I need to start digging back into the Cacophony. I'm used to the one in Vienna, but here in the US things are just different enough that I need to sort it all out again."
But she listens. She nods. Understanding. Waiting for the rest of the explanation.
"Of course I do!" sniffs Artje, as if she's insulted that Annikah might ever think otherwise. "Unlike Americans, who so often think it means gun." She brings Visigny's hands holding on to hers up to her mouth so that she may kiss the base of his thumb, 'accidentally' brushing the tip of one fang against his skin. "I have spent years as its student, here in Philadelphia."
"I found one place which was... silent. Unclaimed. Nothing. And when I started sniffing around about who was coming up and who was on their way out... you know." A pause. "John Malone, the first victim of VII. He had been ... moving and shaking, Making friends and influencing people. And then he died."
Visigny was never terribly good at figuring out the intrigues of others. Quite adept at forming his own, just not quite on top of it where it comes to getting in other people's heads. His is just so much more interesting. So all of these facts register as facts, but they are all milling about behind his eyes not knowing where to set down their drinks.
"So Mister Malone was using this spot as a ... haven? Perhaps?"
"How did he die? Do we know?" Annikah asks, since that's one of the things that most interests her out of the various facts that have been brought up, but also not already queried about by Visigny. She steps away to move over to a nearby coffee table and set down her guitar, then flops down onto the couch and relax. For the moment she's done playing, and on to business mode.
"I do not think so. These were simply the first two threads I pulled, answers which came in the same piece of information. When one reads the Cacophony, one takes the information as it comes. Who rises, who falls, who feeds where, who claims what." A pause. "Crucified. 'Sins Linger On The Harbor' above the body, or so the rumors go." Artje rolls her eyes at that last bit. "It's only nearly as clever as 'Alucard,'" and she follows after Annikah, draping herself against the Gangrel and pulling Visigny along by his hands. "He was pinned to a wall. Bled out, it looks like."
"The next victim -- Manual Delacruz -- was left with the message 'God Remembers Evil's Every Design.'" She's trying so hard not to roll her eyes right out of her head. "But I am getting ahead of myself. So I found this location, and, alley cat that I am, I went to go and sniff about, to see what I could read there. And what I found is no messages at all, nothing recent."
"When I started dating the messages, the movement, I realized that... " A pause. "There was nothing there past the time when that one Keeper of Elysium got infected by the mermaid disease, near on to three years ago."
"She is being very clever," he whispers back to Annikah again, "I'm not sure how but I'm certain of it." His eyes narrow a bit, trying to put all the pieces together in his head with some obvious difficulty. "Evil's every design sounds a bit... on the nose, yes? It's either a reference to something or pure red herring. And I am a lazy cynic, so you know my vote."
He frees a hand to scratch at his cheek, then shrugs his shoulders. Nope. Got nothing. "That would have made a good time to move about during the jolly ruckus."
"They probably all have moustaches just so that they can twirl them," Annikah groans as she nestles up against Artje and closes her eyes. She breathes in deeply through her nose, something that she absolutely doesn't need to do, but since she's Blushed (pretty much always) she's already breathing anyway, and this brings the scent of the other two vampires in, so it's pleasant.
"Sin Lingers On The Harbor," Artje reiterates, raising a hand and writing out the first letter of each word in the air: S L O T H. "God Remembers Evil's Every Design." G R E E D. "Whoever this is, they think themselves terribly clever." Not, it must be noted, as clever as Artje.
"Property ownership is a matter of public record, and so I went to poke about. The building was purchased in 2020, as expected, when one can move about during the jolly ruckus, as you say, by a company that does not seem to exist, technically speaking. Not even a shell company, simply a false name." She tugs Visigny into the couch-snuggle, tucking him in against her tiny frame. "So I asked around, and the Movement provided me with the names of a few investigative reporters. I sent them a story about a false property ownership scandal. I wanted to turn the lights on in the club and see who flinched."
"And then they killed one of my reporters." Her jaw juts out briefly, annoyed. "Engage Nefarious Vampires Yourself." A little snort. "She didn't just ... run with the story I gave her, she went sniffing around herself. Foolish girl."
Once Artje literally spells it out for him, the hand that was scratching at his cheek curls under his chin and feathers at his chest lightly. It is the most fruity of gestures imaginable when coupled with the look down his nose and the disgusted, "Ew," sound he makes about it all. Oh, that really is fucking gauche isn't it. "No one knows how to commit a series of art murders these nights. It's very sad."
At the news the reported is dead Visigny pouts for a moment. Then, "Shall I murder them all for you-- sorry, sorry, darling." He glances to Annikah with a warm smile and then asides back to Artje, "Shall we murder them all for you, my dear?"
"I suppose I can't really blame an investigative reporter for investigating," Annikah says with a sigh. "Unfortunately. But them deciding to kill someone is on them, we're not responsible for their actions, and all that. But fuck, the whole seven deadly sins thing is so damned boring. Come on."
The toothy grin she flashes at Visigny includes fangs. "You invite me to the best parties, my love."
She leans down to kiss Visigny's forehead at that queenish little gesture, charmed by it and the offer of violence which follows. "Soon, my love, soon, you will murder them for me. But I have gone to great lengths to hide my trail, so I would very much prefer that you permit me to finish my work." Artje pauses, trying to remember where she was in all of her cleverness. "So now -- we have established that VII arrived -- or at least, began their work here -- in 2020, during the incidents with the Nereids. We have established -- I believe -- where they are working from. Now... "
"The fool put up fresh graffiti." A small smile, and she turns her face up to Annikah, clearly expecting praise for this. "It's a Gangrel." Clearly she expects them to understand how those two sentences are related. (edited)
"Urine?" Visigny ventures hopelessly, looking aside to Annikah who may just smack him on the back of the head for that one.
He knows fencing, witty rejoinders, and englightenment philosophy. Some things just escape him, and these are very much those things. Which is why Artje exists. So he looks back to her, waiting to finally get it all so he can applaud and say how clever, how clever indeed.
Annikah looks confused for a second about this, because she put up fresh graffiti and she is a Gangrel. Annikah is actually quite smart, but every once in a while she lives up to some Gangrel stereotypes. "Do you mean... no, I think you're talking about a different Gangrel. Sorry. I did some graffiti recently." She waves her hand. "I'm pretty sure you don't mean that, though, since it had nothing to do with VII. I think I'm missing something, because I'm not as clever as you are." She reaches over to pat Visigny's leg. It's okay, bb, that pat says. We can be not clever together.
"When one grows adept with the Cacophony, identifying the clan of anyone who leaves a message intended to be seen by other Kindred is a simple matter." Artje reaches her free hand up and smooths her hair back. Yes, she's preening. She's very very clever.
"So. I have found where I think they are working from. I have found when I believe they arrived. I have found -- yes, again from the Cacophony -- that the Masquerade is thinnest by the harbor, where the Ordo has a presence -- Sins Linger On The Harbor. And I have determined the clan of at least one of them."
A beat, and then she sweetly requests, "My darling 'nika, do you think you could find out which Gangrel came and went from the city during the Nereid incident?" (edited)
"Then we can kill them?" Visigny is clarifying with some hope in his voice, since it's not entirely clear when he'll be able to stab someone and turn the blade really super hard again. "I'm not much of a fan of court proceedings and fair trials. Much more of a fan of 'shall we settle this here' and so on. Much more efficient. And I'm very tired of all the bodies lying about. They're being very rude."
"Is the Masquerade something VII are particularly invested in? You would imagine fewer bodies pinned to the wall would be in order, then."
"I can look into it," Annikah agrees with a nod. "I can't promise results, or that I won't attract attention, since I'm not exactly subtle." She tilts her head. "I can send my Beast out for answers, too." She means that pretty literally, but in a spiritual sense. She has a way of doing some divination by way of letting her Beast return to the holiness of the higher realms where (she believes) they originate, and come back with answers. "The information I get back from that might not be the information we're looking for, but it should be relevant, at least."
She outright pouts then. "After I have shown the Sakima my work, and after I have had an opportunity to make sure that everyone knows that I did this," and everybody in the city can see how pretty and clever and very very smart she is, deserving of all the shiny pretty things in all the world, "then you may murder them. Or maybe before that, if they keep making messes. I do deeply dislike all of the bodies and do not wish to become one. But the point is."
The point is that everybody needs to see how clever she is. Because she is. "I don't think they care. I think they know that we care, and they're trying to use that against us."
Artje flutters her eyelids at Annikah. "Do your best, my darling." She raises Visigny's hand to kiss it again, this time nibbling just a little at the heel of his hand. Can a very clever girl have delicious treats please? "And you. Keep being exactly as you are." The spotlight stays on Jean-Louis The Bombast, and on Artje's pretty, frivolous facade, and the alley cat does her work in the shadows. "It is precisely what I need."
"I can't applaud with you nibbling on my knuckles, darling. But if you could imagine that I am that would go a long way. You are very clever. Very clever, indeed." Just as predicted, minus the applause due to the nibbly eye-fucking Artje's doing to his hand, there.
"By all means, by all means do go out and make these things known. If I can be of any assisstance, please don't hesitate to put me to use. I recognize I am of limited utility in these matters. I would make a conspicuous bird dog, however. When it comes time to do some flushing out with intent."
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