infomodder | IC contact [Mask or Menace]

Because it's something to do. I'm good with that sort of thing. It's enjoyable for me. Our house was recently rebuilt, so there's nothing to repair. The shop's in great condition. It'd be fun, nice to have something extra, something challenging. By yourself, but was there a cat or two?

[She can say she had ten cats and this is one person who can't at all start in on hoarding. Safe space.]

[Will being Will is the thing that gets him in the most trouble. This isn't trouble—hanging out with a shield maiden could, in the end, result in trouble, same as living with an undead wolf, but he'll take his chances. It's nice to hear someone speak of their gods (or any deity) in a way that's not bitter, that's not a sign he should be noticing as something malicious. He's doesn't stare at her as she speaks, but his looking off isn't disinterest or a sign she's talking too much. It's Will being Will. Again.]

That's a lot of gods. [And there's more she hasn't mentioned, he assumes. So many more.] Sacrifices like...cows and sheep and cattle sort of sacrifices? [When that muddy dog finally makes his way over to Will, he shifts just enough so that can he flop down right next him, unconcerned about dirtying his clothes or hands or anything else. The question isn't slow to come out of fear, out of horror at the idea of human sacrifice. He's trying to think of how to word it, nothing else. Which doesn't really matter, he realizes, because Kara knows what he's getting at, and sugarcoating it doesn't seem like her brand. So.] Humans? A mix?

[A mix. Like a bag of salad.]

[She knows what he's getting at; it's something a lot of people ask out of morbid curiosity, and she knows what their reaction will be, though she's not sure if Will's reaction will be the same. He's been different so far.]

Mostly animals. We'd hold a blót where we'd cook the sacrificed animals, share the meal with our gods.

[This is important to her, and it comes across in how she speaks. She misses it, those events, and it's been a long time since she thought of her family and her people and the things they shared.]

Human sacrifice was rarer, but it happened. Sometimes slaves, sometimes volunteers, sometimes leaders.

How much do you know about R&D labs? I'll keep it under consideration, though. With my cat. He's been with me a long time.

I think you're adjusting well enough.

[His method of checking in.]

Honestly? Not much. But I can find out. Get a list of code standards, go from there. Basically all that grunt work with hammers and nails and wiring and fiddling with the inside of walls? That's what I'm good at. Sounds pretty ideal. No roommates and a cat.

[Or seven...]

[It's like he doesn't even have to ask for Chilton's opinion, he's so happy to share. Well enough, is that implying he could be doing better and there's an idea for how to do that or...

Oh hell. Did he find the boxed wine Will shoved in that fridge before he took Abigail away for the weekend? Does he know?]

Have you been tracking my progress, Frederick?

[Will doesn't need to reiterate his own tracking habits, and he's never going to be offended or shocked if someone else does anything similar. What's in the public eye is open for consumption, isn't it.]

Not in a clinical way, no. What you exhibit on the Network is fair game, isn't it? What you don't mind showcasing to begin with.

[It would be impossible for him to miss that this is something she takes seriously, that in between the cursing and what might be seen as a flippant attitude, there's nothing about her gods and old world that she doesn't hold in high regard. That while they may have faded into "myth" and "legend" and "never existed" from what he knows, they're real to her. If he had been inclined to sneer or cringe at human sacrifice, that would have been enough to keep it bay.

But he's not inclined to do that so much, and it's not the fact of the matter that humans were sacrificed that hits him the most out of everything she's said. It's the kinds she mentions, that's what has his eyebrows knitting together and him looking torn between confused and surprised.]

Leaders were used as human sacrifice? [That's different, the focal point. Interesting.] That's a nice change of pace.

[Actually none of it is really all that nice, but none of it can be changed. It's history, in his world, in many of them. And yet to hear that much...it's a fun little tidbit. Of course, whether leaders chose to be sacrificed or whether they were sacrificed to make room for someone better, he doesn't know. But that might be too much to ask.]

Usually don't. Get that sort of thing across whenever human sacrifices pop up in— [He waves that glass as he looks for the word. Movies. Books. TV. Really morbid Hallmark cards.] —anything.

[It's always slaves being sold and people who don't want to do it, isn't it.]

Of course it's fair game. I wouldn't put anything on it publicly if I wasn't comfortable with it being found, by you or anyone else. [More Freddie's thing, isn't it.] Have you been doing well, too?

[No haunted dreams disturbed by Abigail, he hopes. No conversations about Abigail's behavior in the house, he hopes. God please no.]

Why?

[Which is not the initial text one wants to send, if one wants to communicate that all is well and nothing is awry. His biggest personal conflicts (Danger, Gideon to and extent) and his recently minted dramatic turns (Karla) are not what he wants to discuss.]

Everything is fine. Even one of my housemates has returned again.

[He was, of course, referring to Troy.]

[sources say that the Porter has brought in multiple cannibals, potential psychopaths and confirmed killers--one of which has attacked an upstanding member of the import community at least twice. gets typed, backspaced, retyped, backspaced, stared at multiple times, finally left alone.]

After he left a famous actor alone on a sailboat in the middle of the Pacific. I saw. Seems like an interesting one to have around the house. Good with kids. [April likes Troy. Will likes April. Troy is on the sniffing list more than before, so it goes.] I asked how you were doing because it seemed politer than asking what you wanted.

[He's not used to people from Baltimore contacting him just to talk. Jack Crawford calls him to cases, not to invite him for dinner with his wife. Left alone until he's needed.]

[ Alright, it's something she will genuinely consider. ]

And how fast can you work?

[The brusqueness takes him by surprise -- it shouldn't, he knows it shouldn't. But Chilton plays a different game, doesn't he, one with arsenic-laced smiles and feisty rejoinders. Chilton seeps into someone's mind to provoke people into murderers, and Will Graham could very well end up hunting those murderers.

Or that was the pattern, in a different world.]

I noticed Hannibal hasn't been floating beside you, at least not on the Network. I watch you, you watch me, and we all have tabs on our own. Are you still seeing him?

[Chilton is free to keep his arsenic-laced smiles and feisty rejoinders; Will Graham is much more adept at openly accusing his psychiatrist of being lazy and then turning the question back on him. Sometimes he wonders if that was the same old song and dance he went through with Chilton, wonders how much information got passed along from Lecter, wonders what sort of patient he might have been. Never ideal, but a pain in the ass from lack of verbal cooperation must have been much more preferable to a pain in the ass because he had a habit of violence if not shackled down, mustn't it?]

The floating, as you call it, is a given. Just because it doesn't show up doesn't mean it's not going on. [By which he means he's totally aware that Lecter doesn't have to say anything to be there, that every single thing he's ever put on the network might have been read, followed, filed away for later. Lecter's pretty good at not being in the same city and still lingering, isn't he.] Dr. Lecter and I have continued our conversations, same as always. I haven't spoken to Gideon in a while. Abigail stops by the shop frequently, and we spent the weekend out. Freddie Lounds and I had our drinks as well, in case she didn't tell you. Thank you for playing wingman to that, by the way. That covers all of Baltimore, I think.

[And gives Chilton a little more to chew on. In all honesty, the only thing Will really sees as forthcoming is the bit about Freddie—Abigail was out of the house for the weekend, his shop's open six days a week, it's not exactly a difficult conclusion to come to. Though the way he words it, that he includes the we in relation to just him and Abigail, he wonders if it's enough to poke at the back of Chilton's head. That the cogs will turn and click into place, Will Graham taking Abigail Hobbs out just the two of them, no Crawford, no Bloom, no Lecter. Not his usual thing, considering the last trip Abigail and he took alone turned out so poorly. He and Freddie agreed it was best for the others not to know that Will knew, and he thinks that's as good an idea as he could have come up with at the time.

But this isn't talking about it directly, is it. This is not a flat-out admission that he has been given certain information from a certain someone. This is something that has to be read into, this is something that can be looked at and easily denied as a confession, as an I got some details, I'm stepping carefully. That "thank you" can be dismissed as sarcastic instead of anything genuine (which if he reads into it enough, he might find it grateful). This can go plenty of ways, can be defended as Will sharing more than he has to in order to get Chilton off his case than what it really is. And as long as he stays where he's from, as long as his last true memory of the world back home is falling asleep in a car with the only person he could ever count on, he finds that last one to be rather believable.

As long as he greets Hannibal Lecter the same as he had before the conversation with Freddie, as long as he indulges him, as long as he all but wags his tail—anything else being read into this should Lecter find it could prove an admission of guilt. Because Will's still the Will he was before the conversation with Freddie, has not changed in the slightest. It's entirely possible that Will and Freddie had drinks, discussed Abigail Hobbs and cleaning up Tattlecrime and nothing else. Judging by Will's behavior around Lecter and Abigail? What he's told them? Seems to be exactly what happened. Especially since Freddie left out the little detail of what the Ripper does with his trophies, which makes it so much easier to have their conversations over breakfast.

Everyone plays the game differently, don't they.]

I own the shop I run, and it's not a really busy season right now. So if it's a few days' worth of work, I could shut down and have it done ASAP.

[Being the boss is great.]

You had drinks with Freddie Lounds.

[Priorities misaligned? You could argue that, certainly -- but Hannibal Lecter will always be the haunting specter ravenous, his plans always in motion and only exposed when it's much too late. Lounds and Graham having a drink is akin to something from the apocalypse.]

I'm hesitant to claim any influence over that event.

[Wingman indeed. Chilton assumed the worst: scheming.]

[He can't really be bothered by this reaction; Freddie Lounds and Will Graham having drinks on his budget is rather surreal. It was on his mind enough while they were out.]

"Are we not meant to take Will Graham's declarations as sincere?" You didn't recognize the lyrics to Puppy Love, either? I sing it all the time in the shower at home, I assumed you'd been privy to a serenade or two.

[That is 100% bullshit. Will's just hesitant to claim what could be taken as any real despair over people not recognizing a song that's about dogs but not actually about dogs.]

Whatever the case may be, it was thanks to your conversation that we did, in fact, end up going out for drinks. Surely there are worse things for you to claim influence over.

If things were bad...

[She pauses again, lifting a shoulder in a half shrug as she tries to find the words to describe it properly. She might have spent centuries with English, but it still isn't her native tongue, and sometimes, especially talking about how things used to be, she struggles.]

We had some choice in who led us. If we didn't like them, they could be killed, replaced, so they had to be strong and well liked. But if things under them were bad, crops and wars and famine, sometimes we'd sacrifice them to Odin, to end the bad luck that came with their rule.

[Most people would call it barbaric, would call it murder, and she knows that. But it was done, and with people she trust, she won't lie about it or cover it up to make it seem nicer than it was.]

Have you considered doing that full-time? I could give you good references provided the work is done well.

I did. My father worked on boats all my life, taught me how to fix them. Doing repairs around the house came along, too. I thought about following in his footsteps before, but I ended up going a different route. Here, I'm content with the shop. I still work on boats part-time. They've got me on call for that. It's a nice balance. I don't have a house that I can work on here, not with roommates. So, really, this would be more pleasure than business for me.

[simpleman.mp3]

Do you mind if I ask how'd you start working law enforcement then?

Opportunity came knocking. I opened the door and walked right on out with it. Nothing too interesting.

[Nothing that doesn't get back into a poor childhood and breaking free from a lifestyle that seemed, at the time, to lead only to misery. Nothing that doesn't go back to a time when the idea might have been he could do some good in the world and all the bitterness that came from it. Nothing that doesn't fall right back into history he rarely divulges and never words properly even when he does.]

It's quite the leap, but whatever floats your boat.

[ See? She can pun, too. ]

This may come as a surprise to you, but Lounds keeps her business obscured. She, of all people, appreciates the value of privacy.

[Something that Chilton couldn't afford now, thanks to Danger.]

But she's not here, is she? So. How did it go?

IC contact [Mask or Menace]

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09.22.14

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