[INTRO; OPEN]

[bokor]

The tall thin man was standing more or less near one gathering of gravestones in the evening dusk. Most people would be avoiding a place like this, and truthfully so should Facilier have been, if defiance hadn't temporarily overridden his common sense. He reasoned that the place wasn't so frightening even to a man who'd so mightily pissed off the spirits and so deeply overdrawn his finances that they'd dragged him off when he'd made the mistake of blurting that he couldn't pay them.

Maybe this was payment, or punishment, or maybe it was a third thing altogether, but Facilier knew second chance when he saw it and he knew landing on his feet when he had to. He could flourish in the sidewalk cracks like a weed, or he could... spend his time outside the castle assessing it nervously from a graveyard in which he paradoxically just felt more comfortable. That was right. Plenty of room around here to see anyone coming, plenty of space to escape if he felt uneasy, and no bokor had anything to fear from the dead that they didn't owe.

When he'd calmed his racing heart enough to actually pretend to be casual, he decided to make his way closer to the castle proper. Maybe there'd be a newspaper. Creepy Gothic Herald, with a date, which was about all he was interested in. He bothered with nothing like brochures, and this was far from New Orleans, but the same rules applied. Talk to people. Get friendly, pick up whatever unbiased, usable information presented itself and pick up the biased stuff too, but it might be harder to sift through that here.

He'd have to hope folks here were friendly enough to avail himself of their hospitality, a fish completely out of water as he reluctantly left even the shadow of familiarity with the graveyard and went people hunting.

And what that meant was lurking in shadowy halls, shuffling his tarot deck and keeping a look out for people who looked like suckers. Or at the very least like they wouldn't just attack him.

Comments

[dustless]

He'll eventually find...someone.

Who probably doesn't fit any of his criteria, because said person seems to be a stereotypical demon. They're pacing through one of the halls, hooves clattering and tail lashing side to side like a scaly sort of cat. Smoking, too--literally, little plumes bubbling up from the corners of their mouth.

They're too busy glaring at nothing to notice him straight away.

[ojisankink]

Barnaby doesn't look like he's going to attack Facilier. He doesn't really look capable of it, in fact. To strangers, he may just look like a very detailed, life-sized toy. He's been painstakingly carved out of wood, his joints screwed together, and dressed in a fairly plain pair of pants and a t-shirt that doesn't cover the sponsor names carved into his arms.

It's probably odd then, for such a carefully put-together puppet to be abandoned in a hallway. But that's where he is, crumpled on the ground, staring sightlessly down at the ground while blue strings fan out from his limbs and attach him to two pieces of wood, glued into a cross.

But hey, if no one's playing with it, that means Facilier is free to grab the strings. Or just trip over them. Either way.

[ifyoumustblink]

Follow the sound of music, would you? Sounds like a very foreign instrument indeed.

He'll be met with the guise of a red paper puppet--an origami kid. It looks like his only posession with the grace of not being paper is the shamisen he plays.

It's not a fast tune by any means--slow, even, a lullaby. Maybe a little chilling.

Doesn't seem to have noticed Facilier yet.

[itstheend]

Chara likes to think they're no sucker, but they can be lead by the nose by their own curiosity more than they'd like to believe. They won't attack him either, unless he makes himself a threat. Their days of unprovoked attack and hunting down to kill are over, they're reformed. Or at least they're trying to be.

None of this detracts from the fact that they are also a skeleton at the moment, watching the shuffling of the deck with bright white dots in somehow narrowed eyesockets. The cards are interesting; they seem slightly different from playing cards even from their angle. The lurking in shadows is suspicious, but they're one to talk.

They don't speak. There's nothing they want to say to him, at the moment. But neither do they make any effort to hide.