bigapplesauce | Bennett's Arrival~ [OPEN]

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Bennett's Arrival~ [OPEN]

All of the sudden, Bennett's awake and her head is swirling, and she flinches, sitting up against the brick wall she's found herself leaning against. This, she notes immediately, does not make any sense at all. Just a moment ago, according to her memory, she was sitting in a chair in a lab in the LA Dollhouse, working on Caroline's personality wedge, and now she is in a dark alley that smelled of garbage in a city that is most certainly not LA.

Out of nowhere she recalls the gunshot, and her lips press together tightly as she tries to piece it together. I was shot. She checks herself over carefully, but there's no blood or pain to indicate a gunshot wound. Strange, as she can just barely recall --

"I couldn't find -- " Topher was saying, and her head swung back

No. It makes no sense. There is no way she's survived a gunshot wound to the...

"You all right, girl?" a man calls out to her, and approaches her where she's sprawled silently. Her nose wrinkles as he gets closer; he's clearly homeless at best, and she immediately reaches around for something to defend herself with, but finds nothing. She has to lash out with what she has in order to survive, and her head is still spinning.

"Go away," she says directly, coolly.

"Eh, fuck you too," the homeless man answers, and leaves her be. She climbs to her feet at long last, her knees weak, and heads towards the street. A street sign will mean an address, and an address will mean a location, which is the information she needs more than anything else right now.

Where - how?

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One of Gabriel's new and deeply annoying new limitations is the fact that he can't create something out of nothing anymore. Where he used to me able to poof a five star dinner into existence, that now takes a bit more legwork. Now, he has to take things that actually exist. For the past couple weeks, Gabriel has been exploring Manhattan, taking note of where everything is so that he can get what he needs when he needs it.

When Bennett arrives, he's down the street and is close enough to both see and feel her arrival. He waits until she's next to him before he falls into step beside her.

"You're in New York City. Twenty-thirteen, if that makes a difference."

Bennett's just gotten comfortable with where she is, her panic finally ebbing, when someone is suddenly beside her and talking and is apparently trying to... help her? She stiffens, tries to take a short breath, and sneaks a glance at the guy.

"Y-yes. I mean. I thought it must be New York." Her hand begins to worry her sling. "Twenty-thirteen..." She stops dead. "Twenty-thirteen." It's threatening to overwhelm her again, the confusion.

He stops with her and keeps a safe distance from her, casually tucking his hands behind his back. He can tell that she's either uncomfortable or nervous or both and he'd rather not spook her into running off. He smiles.

"The big ol' twenty first century! How far are you from? Can't be far," He breaks a hand away from behind his back, forgetting the 'making her comfortable' thing in favor of gesturing up and down at her clothing. "Judging by the duds."

"2010," she says slowly, and exhales sharply. For some reason he's put her at ease, despite the fact that she's in a crowd, talking to a stranger, and appears to have been raised from the dead, which is all very alarming, she realizes. "Who are you and what do you want and why exactly are you helping me now?" she asks, rapid-fire, nervously.

"Gabriel. A lifetime supply of chocolate. Curiosity." He answers, mimicking her rapid-fire questioning. "Actually," he amends, "I have a lifetime supply of chocolate, so I suppose I have everything I ever wanted." Except friends or family that doesn't try to have you killed. But beggars can't be choosers, right?

He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a Hershey bar (which suddenly disappeared at the moment from the liquor store down the street and appeared within a second in his pocket) and offers it to her. "Don't believe what they say about taking candy from strangers."

Bennett stares blankly at the proferred chocolate bar, and finds herself taking it despite herself. She wants to be annoyed and insecure and frightened, but none of that is really sticking at the moment, so she gives up and opens up the candy bar to take a bite.

After swallowing, she just talks. "I'm Bennett. Halverson. I want to -- " Go home? To DC? Does she, really, now that it's been three years she's been missing? Not even slightly. "Forgive me but you seem to know what you're doing so maybe you can take me to someone who knows what's going on. Why I'm here. Suddenly. I was in Los Angeles."

Gabriel smiles when she takes the chocolate bar and watches her expression as she takes her first bite. She seems less stressed than she had been before. That's a start.

At her request, he twists his mouth to the side with uncertainty and scratches the side of his face. "And I was in Las Vegas circa nineteen sixty up until a few weeks ago." Yeah, that's true. Maybe sometime he'll explain about how he used to be able to time travel. "It's a melting pot of wacky and weird around here. More so than usual for New York, and that's saying something, believe me."

He chuckles and, at the same time, a person bumps into him and keeps going without apologizing. Right. Standing in the middle of the sidewalk isn't the best of ideas, and Bennett is probably getting cold out in the February weather. "Follow me. Let's get out of the cold. Then I'll be Mr. Exposition." He nods back in the direction she came, where the hotel is and starts walking in that direction. A hotel lobby is as good a place as any. And hey, maybe there's a bar.

Edited 2013-02-09 10:29 (UTC)

Bennett follows him, her arms wrapped around her in the increasing cold. "That's a good idea," she agrees, and finds herself looking around at the crowd. It's incredibly unusual that she isn't panicking, but everything is incredibly unusual. It occurs to her that perhaps she may be in a coma, that this is all coming from her own mind, and that jars her enough to press a hand to her face once she's out of the cold in the lobby.

"This can't be real. This can't be -- none of this makes sense. I was working, I was with Topher Brink," she rattles off, "and then their doctor -- she -- "

Gabriel follows Bennett in and walks past her to lounge at the end of a quilted leather couch in the lobby. He's watching her with a bit of concern. Random babbling is never a very good sign for continued mental health. He imagines that more than a couple people dumped through the rift have gone more than a bit wobbly in the transition. Then again, she could have been wobbly to start of with.

Then she mentions Topher, and that definitely gets his attention. How does she know the his personal dream infiltrator? "Topher Brink- I've met him. Dorky blond kid, too smart for his own good?"

Bennett turns, genuinely speechless at the idea that -- how? How could he be here? Is he responsible for this? Her face starts flushing pink. "I - yes. I-I know him. He is a... colleague." She slowly sits down, taking this in. "He's... here?" she voices.

Gabriel raises his eyebrows at the blush. Well, isn't that interesting. He takes a brief glance at her mind to see if he can get some more information about her and Topher and whether or not there was more than a workplace relationship goin' on there, but he doesn't find much. There are some romantic-type emotions there, but he's more interested in her mind. Seems she's a smart cookie too, if a bit odd Something feels a little off there, but he's not sure what, so he withdraws.

He nods. "Not here here. He told me he works for the big tech giant around here. Romac. I'm told they monitor that big hole in the sky you just tumbled out of." He glances towards the door, suddenly wondering why they don't have agents hunting them down. "I might expect someone to come find you, but this place is a bit off the normal landing zone."

He shrugs, a smile lingering at his lips. "Or they just blow at their jobs. Your dear Topher included. Nobody came after me when I landed in the middle of the hot zone, so I wouldn't take any bets that they'll come for you here." He says it like that was an unforgivable oversight, like of course someone should have noticed him, because he's very noticeable.

Something strange has happened, she's quite sure, because she felt something shift in her head and a burst of curiosity, and she can't help but come out with "How did you -- something very, very strange is going on!" Oh, she's speaking loudly and people are looking at her. She lowers her head. "I'm. I want to go to this Romac. I think they would find me very useful." It would be nice to have a job; what else is she supposed to do in a horrible metropolis like New York?

"Romac isn't the only gig in the city. And not the most moral, either, depending on who you talk to." He tips his head to look at her curiously. She's definitely right about something strange going on here. This has all been a little too easy, a little too much like a set-up.

"Everyone dumped through the rift is stuck here, in the city. That might be their doing, might not be." He shrugs. "Again. Who you talk to." He wouldn't mind going to Romac himself, if he thought it might get him some straight answers about what's really going on.

"I am sure I've worked for less moral people in the past," Bennett says matter-of-factly, and slips her glasses on. The confidence is back, and she's talking without thinking it through very much. "I can't tell you anything further. The company I worked for can be very ruthless." She pauses. "Of course, it seems that I am very hard to kill. Which is completely illogical. Humans in general are very easy to kill." She shrugs. "Which is why I gravitate to the closest bastion of power, on average."

"That must be why you gravitated towards me." He flashes a grin, completely pleased with himself. And hey, it's true. He's probably the most powerful thing in the vicinity. It had definitely been lucky for her that he was around when she had shown up. He can do a lot more than the average man on the street and he's probably the best person to take her into Romac if she's determined to go.

Bennett raises an eyebrow, but despite herself a chortle escapes and she claps a hand over her mouth. "Thank you," she says, now very serious, and determined to pretend she didn't just do something like laugh at a stupid joke. Caroline would have had a witty comment. That sobers her.

Despite being very aware of her sudden shift in mood, Gabriel smiles back at her. "It's what I do. Now." He claps his hands together. "Lets go see the boy toy, shall we?" He offers her his hand, holding it out to her to take of her own free will.

She stares at his hand, confused at the connection between handholding and transportation, then realizes that she's dealing with a world where there's a hole in the sky that people fall out of, some of whom have been brought back to life. Teleportation would be the least strange thing that would happen today. She seizes his hand.

"This may be a bit...jarring." he warns her, and the next moment, they're standing outside of a tall skyscraper, it's walls glinting bright silver. Gabriel looks up at the height of the building and whistles, long and low. "It definitely pays well, whatever they're doing."

He checks that Bennett is standing upright and isn't in danger of freaking out or falling over before he lets go of her and and walks forward to open the doors. He notes to himself that he's already feeling a little more tired than usual. Usual being not tired at all. Frustratingly, teleporting tends to be more difficult now than it used to be. Adding passengers to that burden must make it all the more difficult.

Bennett ignores that her head is spinning a little, nonetheless that something that should have been impossible just happened, and follows him, now determined to see this insanity through. She gives him a brief nod in gratitude at his holding the door, eyebrows raising when he appears to be winded. "Generally amoral things pay well. It's one of the perks," she says simply.

"Not in my line of work," Gabriel says, before traipsing up to the front counter. He leans against the surface of the counter, only slightly leaning into the personal space of the young woman behind the counter. He smiles warmly and nods to the computer, his entire manner a little looser than it had been a moment before. "Hey, uh." He scratches the side of his face with manufactured uncertainty. "I'm looking for Topher Brink? Could you tell me where his office is?" He nods back to Bennett. "We're friends of his."

The girl nods and picks up her desk phone. "I'll call up. Who should I say it is?"

"Thanks. Just say it's Gabriel."

Edited 2013-02-20 05:49 (UTC)

"Brink's office," Mira answers the phone.

"We have two people here to see Mr. Brink, a Gabriel and companion, claiming to be friends of his," the woman informs her.

"Topher doesn't have friends," Mira answers stiffly. "But if they clear screening, send them up, I'll talk to them."

She hangs up, then speaks into the intercom to Topher's bedroom. "Topher, someone to see you. They're on their way up."

Downstairs in the lobby, the woman smiles at Gabriel. "Take the elevator to the 52nd floor, then head left, you'll find it." She's already made sure that Gabriel's and Bennett's intentions are innocent enough. Half the people at Romac's got powers of their own, and she can sense if anyone's up to anything sinister.

Bennett exhales, nerves suddenly creeping up on her. She puts a hand to Gabriel's arm to steady herself, and somehow, that's enough. She nods firmly and removes her hand from him. "Let's go." She can be panicked, she can be nervous, afraid, but the important thing is not to show it. She hits the button for the elevator and stares into it for a blank moment as it pings open.

Gabriel waves a thank you to the receptionist and follows Bennett into the elevator. He presses the correct button (because who doesn't like pressing buttons?) and waits as they make their ascent. Eventually, the doors ping open again and he leads them out into another fairly nondescript hallway.

"So, let me know," he asks idly as he scans the labels on doorways, "Is this going to be a happy reunion, or should I be prepared for nuclear warfare?" He glances back at her, raising an eyebrow. "Duck and cover, build a bunker, that sort of thing?"

Bennett considers the question, as it's actually a good one. On one hand, things were going rather well before she was apparently murdered. On the other, Topher is the kind of person who might suspect she is a zombie.

"He... he'll be startled," she decides on.

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