living skyward

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.