Greg and Elodie Compare a Year of Notes on the Situation

Waking up is always a slow process. Waking up after a long evening, that’s frequently even more sluggish. On days like today, where I don’t have to deal with the Basilica, normally I don’t really bother pushing myself, but I’ve got a meeting. And a meeting with someone who would realize such subtle details as me wearing the same clothes as yesterday. So, still half asleep, I force myself up and out of the semi-familiar apartment and back across the courtyard to my own. I do my best to keep to the shadowed corners, not that I suspect that to actually keep anything more secret. It’s a small group of people living in a relatively small apartment building. And, being filled with what are essentially spies in training, most of us are pretty good at figuring out what’s going on right in front of us.

Back in my own apartment, I turn on my coffee maker and head for the bathroom. I strip off the hastily pulled on clothes from yesterday, tossing them into a laundry bin as I pass the threshold into the shower. Nothing too in depth, just a five minute or so rinse and scrub. Get the semi-caked sweat off of me, as well as any other smells from last night. Again, more out of politeness than from a belief people won’t know I went out. After about seven minutes, I feel basically done, and step out of the shower, tracing a symbol of warmth to dry myself off quicker as I head back to the kitchenette to grab my cup of coffee. Drinking it, I decide what to wear between my jeans and my hoodies.

I decide on the forest-green hoodie, as it feels more colorful without being ostentatious. I pull it on over a black shirt and my jeans. Grabbing my bag of nonsensical loose papers from the floor by my couch and throwing it over my shoulder, I knock back the final two fingers of coffee left in my mug and head out.

Even surrounded by spies, my years of training trying to avoid the devil back in my own Apprenticeship has made me incredibly adept at losing trails and escaping notice of my teachers and my fellow trainees. When I’m sober and focused enough to put in the effort. As I pass through a friend’s warehouse, in the loosest definition of friendship, and into an alley, I trace a sigil of awareness. Small enough that, compared to the other shiftings in the city, so long as a Hungered isn’t within a few blocks of me it shouldn’t be a big deal. Checking the sigil, it burns then does not glow. No one is watching. Odd, but not entirely unsurprising. As far as I have been able to tell, She’s moved from motive watches to stationary, due to the lesser impact where magic sensitive beings are concerned. She’s started moving like the long-term parasite on the Magisterium that She was always destined to be. She’s also been upping her physical bug use, so I’m guessing I’m not the only mystical person aware of her influence but not her ally anymore.

Entering the rundown bar, Hasan looks up at me from his busy day of watching some video on the internet. I nod towards the back room. He shakes his head and holds up three fingers. I smile, nod, and walk up to the bar. “Coffee.”

Hasan nods, and turns on the machine. “All good?” he asks.

I smile. “Never. Can I be paranoid, or should I be focused entirely on you?”

Hasan waves it off. “They all know you. If you have friends showing up, they might want to operate less attentively.”

I nod. “Hopefully she’s late, then,” I half joke.

Hasan shakes his head, smiling. Then he turns back to his phone while he waits for something to happen. I lean back and take a moment to think. To organize my thoughts before the meeting. It’s our last year of classwork, so we need to be ready for the knife, and more importantly, where that knife is coming from. The coffee finishes, and Hasan brings it over to me. I take a few sips. A door opens behind me. It’s the room. Vlahou walks out, flanked by a pair of her lieutenants. The door shuts. Elodie enters through a back door as Vlahou walks out the front. She sees me at the bar and heads over. “You’re here early,” she jokes as she sits down.

“Eyes front,” I tell her, then add, “And no one was watching on the walk after my first roundabout, so I came straight in.”

“Interesting,” she replies, diligently reading the label of some bottle on the wall. She knows what I meant when I said eyes front.

“Really?” I ask. After all, what is so interesting about a lack of observation. Unless it wasn’t experienced by her. She doesn’t reply, and I realize that she did have eyes on her. That is interesting.

Behind us, the door opens once more and Savvas walks out, with his second in command, and they look around, give me a nod, and head out the back. I don’t like him that much, that whole organization is a bit more violent then the others who frequent my lovely hidey hole, but socially they’re perfectly alright people. As long as you don’t interfere with their business. I look up at Hasan and raise an eyebrow. He nods. Taking my coffee, I stand up. “Let’s get somewhere more comfortable,” I say, in case any bugs in the building itself are those of our friends, then to Hasan, I add, “Ten, twenty.” He nods, understanding.

“Shut up,” she groans as we head back to the smoking room.

The moment the door closes, she smirks at me. “So,” she says mockingly, “How was your night?”

I do my best to cover my face as I rush over to the couch. “You shut up,” I reply ineffectually.

“I mean, from how loud it was, I’d guess either incredibly good or extremely mediocre, but I’ve never been a great judge of that sort,” she continues to jokingly press.

“If I killed you, would you shut up?” I mutter.

She shrugs, “Probably, but Tshepo heard, too, so you’ll be dealing with this for ages.”

“Unlikely a big deal,” I reply, thinking analytically. Or at least, trying to. “I mean, she’s more going to be upset with Kass than obnoxious to me. Lawan wouldn’t care. Oh god, please say Phoebe was out with the boys.”

Elodie laughs at me. “She was out for long enough she might not know it was you, so you might be safe.”

I shake my head. “Tshepo can’t keep a secret,” I mutter. Which means I will hear no end of this.

“So how was it?” she presses once more.

I ignore the question. “I think it’s more complicated than it looks,” I say, moving on to the whole point of the meeting. “Someone I know has a point of contact in the Game, and they’re definitely getting information straight from us, somewhere along the line.”

“Who?” she asks, her face almost instantly growing serious as she seats herself.

“Why do you think we’ve been doing this investigation?” I ask in return.

She shakes her head. “No, who is this person who you know, and who is the contact?” she presses, "Because they might be the leak.”

“The contact is some man. Will. Doesn’t seem important in the least. And it isn’t the leak,” I reply.

“How do you know?” she asks.

I look at her. I make sure my face is entirely serious, so she understands. “Because whoever is leaking this is doing so for the benefit of the um,” I look through my pages to find the right one, “Some faction called,” I find it, third from the bottom, “The embrace. If it were the person I know, anything shared would only serve her goals.”

“And how do you know it doesn’t?” Elodie presses. Understandable, given her history. Anyone with continued contact with them would be a suspect.

I don’t want to say too much, to get Elodie in more danger than she is from her mysterious entity spying on her, so I just say. “I do. You’re going to have to trust that, okay?”

Elodie sighs, and nods. “So this person you know is the spying lady,” she says, “Got it. So what else have you found out? The embrace, if I recall correctly from my youth, is an organization focused on making everyone vampires slowly and methodically. How does the Mythic coming after us help them?”

I shrug. Pulling out a different page from my notes, I show the memo I copied to her. “The people in charge have not figured out it’s the Mythic, so I don’t think it’s to start a war.”

Elodie frowns. She pulls out her much more organized notes, flipping it open to the Embrace files. “So it’s just a distraction? For what? All they seem to be doing is buying up properties all across the world,” she reads aloud, “And that isn’t anything new.”

“If they’re coming at us, it’s got to be magical. Have you cross-referenced those places with our Villae? Or known nexus?”

“Nowhere near the Villae. Didn’t look into nexuses. What I did note is the company is partially owned, through a couple of shell companies, by Faisal’s family.”

I shift through my bags. Because my notes on Faisal was also interesting. “I was intrigued during that party last year, so I looked into it. It’s weird. He and his family are around a lot of suspicious stuff, but while I found hard evidence of a lot of it over the months I followed, all the evidence of them and the Game is just vicinity.”

“You think he’s being set up.”

I nod. “It would make sense. He’s suspicious, rich, has criminal ties.”

“But who would want to do that?” Elodie wonders.

“Anyone covering tracks. The real question is who could, which basically leaves the boys.”

She nods, then adds, “Don’t discount Ed. Or Phoebe, for that matter.”

I shake my head. “Ed doesn’t care enough to hide that well.” Then, I think about it for a moment, and add, “But you might be right about Phoebe.”

“Of course you forgot about her,” Elodie half jokes.

I shake my head. “No, she just didn’t do anything interesting to me,” I reply defensively, pulling out my sheet on her.

Elodie starts skimming the paper. “Can you pull out Holger and Chris’s, too?” she asks, as she flips through her notes to different sections while skimming details from Phoebe’s life. I do so, laying those between us as well. She looks intently at the documents carefully going through each. Likely crossreferencing the things in my notes on their movements and activities with her own investigation into the vampire society’s movements.

It takes a bit longer than I expected, but she nods and breathes out a sigh of relief. “Can’t say for certain, but it looks like it’s Holger or Phoebe, not Chris. So we have a chance.” Explaining herself, she adds, “Phoebe didn’t do anything interesting, you’re right, but the bank she kept visiting is the same one that has the accounts which are buying up the less expensive of the properties that the Embrace is buying. Might be a coincidence, but worth a look. Holger, for his part, seems to be intentionally avoiding those same vicinities that Faisal is caught in, whenever he’s close to one. And doing so in territory controlled by the Embrace indirectly. Again, might be coincidental, but worth a look.”

I nod. “Sounds like a plan. What do you want to do with the information?”

“Let’s keep it close to the chest, at least until we know for sure who the leak is. Are you going to bring Kass into our circle?” she asks.

I chuckle, look up, and realize she’s being serious, which makes me laugh even more. “Sorry, that was a good one,” I say after a moment to collect myself, “No, I know much better than to actually trust Kass about much of anything.”

Elodie raises an eyebrow. “And yet…” she says, trailing off to leave the implication hanging.

I smile, shaking my head. “You just needed to be a tad more suspicious and obviously secretive,” I say, “Then you might be the one sneaking through the apartment halls early in the morning before our secret meetings.”

Elodie laughs at that, in part at least because she knows I’m not entirely wrong.