belladonna-wright

[belladonna-wright]

Ah, well, Mitte had rather neatly brought the conversation back around to the main reason Jessie wanted to speak to her in the first place.

"Well that's the worry, isn't it," Jessie fixed Mitte with a piercing gaze from her dark eyes. "Things have been settled in the time that I've been here, at least in regards to our own little bubble." She couldn't care less if there was a witch hunt for whomever else, as long as it didn't come near her and her small circle.

"But it would be easy to awaken suspicion and fear again, if there were people acting ... unwisely." Jessie uncrossed her legs, before switching which of them was across the other, and sitting back, looking at Mitte carefully as she tried to suss her out. "Now, I'm not one to be ruffling any feathers. I'm far too careful for that," she hinted. "But do I need to be worried about you?"

From what had been said so far ... possibly not. It seemed Mitte had a good enough handle on things not to be causing chaos, but one never quire knew.

"Because I've got people in this town I don't want getting caught up in any... drama."

@mighty-mitte

Daughters of the Night - Missie

[belladonna-wright]

Jessie gave a polite chuckle at Karen's joke. "Usually it's more crossword puzzles. She's a killer at them and sometimes I'm just not putting the pieces together, you know? And it's just ... different, right?" Jessie shrugged a shoulder. She was all too aware that Karen and Roz butted heads regularly. It was only natural, really. She had done it enough over the years.

Besides, Karen was a free-spirit, an outlaw. They were going to butt heads with any authority figure, from what Jessie could make out. It was a quality she quietly admired.

"Plus I just find that like, some people my age are so damn cliquey, you know? It's all whatever the most recent trending cocktail is and competing about whose boyfriend got them the biggest bouquet. I do not have time for it. Anyway, enough about me," she flicked her hair back over one shoulder.

"I hear you're a tattoo artist, right? What kind of designs do you like best?"

@into-the-voyd

Courting Trouble || Kessie

[belladonna-wright]

"What I mean is anything liable to actually sell-" Jessie pointed out to him. Art for art's sake was a noble goal, just as learning for learning's sake was. But in her cold dead heart she was a realist about the nature of these things.

She got to lounge around the house all day like a nineteenth-century aristocrat whose family had spent centuries accumulating wealth because ... she had spent over a century accumulating wealth, largely through crime (also like a nineteenth-century aristocrat). Normal people with bills to pay had to make ends meet.

"What have you been writing, then?" Jessie's ears perked up a little at that. It was news to her. And he wanted to get it published? "What's it about?"

@mads-morey

Touching Base, Reaching Out - Messie

[belladonna-wright]

Ah, well, that was always the danger when she brought that up. It did invite questions.

"It's ok," Jessie smiled, sadly, as if the memory was a slightly painful one but one she was still happy to talk about. "It was a long time ago," she explained (in the understatement of the century). "There was an accident."

She liked to leave it vague - people didn't tend to probe much further, and it was easier than explaining why they had passed away of old age when Jessie only looked to be in her early thirties. Still, there were moments that under the facade of everything she knew she was supposed to present that ... she felt that faint pang for her family.

"I'd just turned eighteen," she added. In a way that had been the moment she had lost her parents, when she had stepped out of their home and gleefully, excitedly into a marriage that had given her nothing but heartache and a faint bitter taste in the back of her mouth from that day to this. "So it's nice to have some older friends I can turn to, you know? Get some of that advice."

@into-the-voyd

Courting Trouble || Kessie

[belladonna-wright]

Jessie smiled a little. Oh she knew, alright. In her life she had seen many many partnerships, and the very best ones had complimentary personalities, who were not exactly the same but who could challenge each other.

She felt a faint and unexpected pang, as Karen talked about Bob as a father, and the vision of her own popped into her head.

"They most certainly are," she agreed. "Or maybe I'm simply ... confirming my own biases," she added. "I lost my own parents when I was young," she said, dropping that bombshell to see how Karen would react. They seemed passionate about their father, but Jessie wasn't entirely sure why - well, she knew why, because Bob was by all accounts a very lovely man - but why to Jessie? What was Karen thinking about inside that head of theirs?

"But yes, one of these days I'm going to catch him, and not let him slip away to do something helpful," she joked. "It must be nice for you to be able to see your parents whenever you want, coming home?"

@into-the-voyd

Courting Trouble || Kessie

[belladonna-wright]

Jessie ... really wished he hadn't mentioned knowing her, but she resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of her nose between her fingers. She blamed it on her long years of secrecy, or perhaps it was to do with the counter-intelligence training she had had drilled into her, but the thought of someone out there knowing what she was, without Jessie having been able to vet them first made her skin itch. She had spent a long time preparing for her little meetings with new vampires, making sure there was no risk of her outing herself to a fraud, or a hunter.

She wanted to have the power, in that situation.

She could not guarantee that Bullseye would have done the same, sweet, trusting Bullseye. But there was nothing she could do about it now, except hope that he had been speaking to the same person she had been.

"What was her name?" Jessie asked, instead. It might be the same person, since Mitte had implied she didn't know much about more traditional coven behaviours. She hoped it was the same person. "How did you get on with her?"

@bullseye-stoddard

The Gentle Approach - Jesseye

[belladonna-wright]

"Right, well, I'll keep hands and feet inside the cart at all times," Jessie quipped, giving the little fish a backwards glance and lifting her eyebrows once to Isaac to show that she was joking. She'd like to see any fish try, but she wasn't about to go proving that. Starting a fight with a pet fish would hardly do the best at making a good impression on Nick's beloved boyfriend now, would it?

"Oh, no, thank you," she said politely. "I'll have something when Nick and I are out-" Besides, there were limited options for her here. She could hardly go asking for a hard alcoholic option, or fetching her special travel mug from the car.

"So what are your plans for the evening, once I've kidnapped Nick?" She asked, feeling that faint nudge in the back of her mind to be kind and polite and actually try to continue the conversation a little more. Yes, that little nudge sounded infuriatingly like Ellen, but Jessie wasn't going to acknowledge that in the least.

"Are you and Avery planning anything fun?"

@isaac-morey

Trapped! - ColourWright

[belladonna-wright]

"Well in a way that's the nice thing about it," Jessie said. This was not strictly speaking true. Jessie cherished Roz's company not for the ways they were different, but the ways they were the same - happy to remain acquaintances not familiar with every detail of their lives, happy to embrace silence when it fell and not overstretch things seeking some sort of approval. She rarely found that with younger people. They were so busy trying to prove themselves that it was exhausting.

They were so young. They didn't quite understand yet. Jessie didn't have it in her to pretend to care about dating and things like that.

Roz might be a darn sight younger still, but at least she was more mature.

"Oh yes, Bob comes up quite frequently, although I haven't actually had the pleasure yet," Jessie smiled. Noticing the slightly clunky transition with interest. What was that about then? "He's always busy doing something! Which is a shame, but I can only imagine that's why your mother speaks of him so fondly-"

@into-the-voyd

Courting Trouble || Kessie

[belladonna-wright]

"And what," Jessie said in her very best over-exaggerated drawl, "Is wrong with America?" She shot him a challenging look, one eyebrow raised, before the smirk spread across her face and she laughed.

"I'm just yanking your chain."

There were lots of reasons America was not the right fit for Mads.

"I don't know," she shrugged. "I think you might just need to start leveraging your skills in other ways." He had done well with the podcast, but there must be ways outside that he could start increasing his reputation? Documentaries, perhaps? Or public lectures? Weren't those the sorts of things that modern universities supposedly loved? "It's still absurd, of course," she added. "What a waste of talent to have you jumping through hoops out there instead of just coughing up some damn funding."

@mads-morey

Touching Base, Reaching Out - Messie

[belladonna-wright]

"I could say the same," Jessue confessed, after a beat. She had not stayed anywhere more than six months for, well, for over twenty years! That she had been in Swynlake for this long was practically a miracle in itself. That wasn't to say she didn't find it suffocating at times - the proximity, the neighbourliness, the sweet little events that felt like they surely belonged in a cheesy movie...

And yet she was still here.

But it was perhaps the people, rather than the town's infuriating impredictability that was the biggest reason she was still there. Not that she would admit such a thing to anyone, never mind a stranger who might well seek to use that against her.

"There's always something new, and usually horrifying, to contend with. Most towns barely manage a single magic related disaster in a year," she quipped. Deeper than that, no matter how they hid; no matter how ostracised they still were because of their condition, here was better than elsewhere.

@mighty-mitte

Daughters of the Night - Missie

[belladonna-wright]

"Yes, she's a friend," Jessie smiled - as one would be expected to. She didn't really know if it was fair to call Roz a friend; they hardly knew each other, after all, but it was hard and complicated to explain anything else to someone so very young as Karen.

"We actually met by chance. See, we both go to Tiana's for a drink every now and then, and one week it was so busy we ended up sharing a table." A simple story really, but these things so often were. "And it turns out we're both crossword fanatics, so we started talking about that-"

As well as doing a lot of people watching (and judging) together, but that seemed a little naughty to admit to.

"It's just quite nice, you know?" Jessie shrugged a shoulder, "To have some friends who are a bit older and don't have all the same priorities as the younger crowd." She avoided women her own (seeming) age as much as possible. "Adds a bit of variety, like you said."

@into-the-voyd

Courting Trouble || Kessie

[belladonna-wright]

"Well, I'd say like any seasoning you have to get the levels right," Jessie said, in her infuriatingly vague sort of way. She was still trying to puzzle out what Karen's play might be here? If Jessie tried to see the moves before they played out she could predict what this was all about and steer it how she wanted, but for know... for now, their schemes remained unclear.

"For instance I used to travel a lot, which was brilliant and exciting and wonderful, until it became simply exhausting. It was the same with nightlife for me, clubbing's ... lost its lustre," she smiled. "I hear you've done a fair bit of travelling yourself?" She asked, tilting her head slightly. "Forgive me, I happen to know your mother and she told me about how you went travelling. That must have been a wonderful experience?"

If she could, at least, get Karen talking about themselves a little more, maybe then Jessie would feel more comfortable. Besides, it was always easier to talk about other people than herself. The fundamentals of spycraft still ran deep within her.

@into-the-voyd

Courting Trouble || Kessie

[belladonna-wright]

"I think you'd have to go a long way to find a place like this, in this day and age," Jessie chuckled. Still, she was sure there were such spots in some of the bigger cities, but the line between old fashioned and cos-playing vintage era speakeasies was an easy one for people to tiptoe the wrong side of.

And ye olde worlde attempts at historical tourism never quite landed so well when you'd been there the first time 'round (although thank God she'd largely avoided America during the prohibition era).

"Well I like the live music, obviously, that adds a whole lot of variety, rather than just hearing the same old pop songs everywhere you go," Jessie mused. "I like being able to actually sit down and talk, which is pretty hard at some of the clubs." Mostly, she liked that people left her alone. If she went to Pixies it was crowded and busy and people tried to hit on her and she felt approximately one-thousand years old.

Here she could sit quietly, if she wanted. She could chat to Jessica if she was around, or any of the other customers who looked interesting that night, and she could not feel guilty for it.

"I've never really enjoyed clubbing, as a matter of fact. It's all ... a bit much for me."

@into-the-voyd

Courting Trouble || Kessie

[belladonna-wright]

"Ah well, just lucky then," Jessie agreed. Or, rather, benefitting from Jessica's very fine work in attracting the sort of acts and performers that she managed to do so. It was rare that there was something Jessie couldn't at least find the merit in, even if it wasn't to her exact taste. Some things she did rather avoid though.

It was good that Karen had clarified, since Jessie's perfectly sculpted eyebrows were beginning to hike up her forehead the second the old cliche came out. It wasn't that she never got hit on, it was simply that, well ... she was still not sure how she felt about such things, having sworn off romantic entanglements a long time ago. Besides, it might make cocktail night frightfully awkward to have to tell Roz that she had declined her youngest!

"Well, I'd hope that if you were trying out lines then you could come up with a better one than that," Jessie replied. "I wouldn't describe myself as a particular fan, but it was good. I'm mostly here to enjoy the ambience, you know?"

She liked getting out of the house. It could feel a touch empty at times, and it wasn't always what she wanted.

But if Karen wasn't here to hit on her, why were they here?

@into-the-voyd

Courting Trouble || Kessie

[belladonna-wright]

[Outfit]

Jessie lowered her glass the second she noticed a stranger approaching. Well, not actually a stranger, she had to confess; she knew who Karen Peterson-Boggs was, even if they had never been properly introduced. Jessie had seen them around, it was hard not to! They had the kind of personality that stood out in a crowd, and Swynlake was, after all, a very small town.

Perhaps it was simply a touch of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, you know? That after hearing about some of Roz's concerns for her youngest, Jessie now noticed them more?

Still, Jessie wouldn't have thought the Court was quite Karen's scene, compared to Pixies.

"Very good," Jessie agreed politely. "But then, Jessica has a real knack for selecting only the very best talent for performances, you know?" It was why Jessie so often found herself here, of an evening.

"Are you a particular fan? Or just fancied seeing what all the fuss was about?" She asked politely.

@into-the-voyd

Courting Trouble || Kessie

[belladonna-wright]

It could indeed. It could indeed.

Jessie was thinking three steps removed, as always. What sort of bedfellow would Mitte make? In the metaphorical sense, of course, not a literal one. If things go strange and difficult in Swynlake once more, what would she do in that situation? Flee? Fight? Side with troublemakers?

These were the thoughts that concerned her most. If needed, she herself could turn tail and run - those she left behind would understand if it was for her own safety. She had loved her life in the wilderness and away from the trouble of other vampires or attachments. But what of someone like Dian, eh? Whose family was here and needed to stay?

"Oh yes," she nodded. "Plenty of space for pretty much anything your heart desires down there, it's big country, wide open skies." Well, depending exactly where you went; she was having fond memories of Patagonia again. "So I'm sure you'd find something to your liking. If Swynlake was getting boring for you, anyway."

@mighty-mitte

Daughters of the Night - Missie

[belladonna-wright]

[Outfit]

Jessie leaned idly against the door of the stable as she watched Bullseye at work. She had come up to head out for a ride, but as so often happened, she got waylaid by chatting. At least it was pretty quiet still, so she could speak to Bullseye without feeling the need for too much worry. Apart from the soft sounds of horses in their stables eating hay, or snorting to themselves, they were alone.

"You know, I met another of us, recently," she said, watching Bullseye's back as he tended to one of the horses. For a moment she let it hang there, seeing how he reacted. Had he been meeting other vampires in town? She knew there were more, but for the moment... she was keen to keep her nose out of trouble. Had Bullseye been doing the same? She didn't want him falling in with a bad crowd, especially not if she was going to be able to pull off introducing him and Dian.

"You run into anyone else around here?" She asked, tilting her head.

@bullseye-stoddard

The Gentle Approach - Jesseye