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asukaskerian · 7 years

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The Landlord - outside POV - Detective Liese Kassmeyer

"So how the hell did the dollhouse case go in the end?"

Liese's Hanese is almost nonexistent, but the Hanese detectives' Deutsch is worse, so they're all muddling through in Prussian. Which explains her double-take. She's almost positive she's not mixing up that word, but...

"Excuse me, the what?"

She's sitting with Detective Karla Hummel, who's the one who liaised with the Hanese guys back whenever, and she therefore has no idea why that makes Karla choke on laughter and her whisky.

"The -- small house for toy people?" one of the Hanese guys says hesitantly as Karla coughs hard enough to shake the table. "That is the right word, yes?"

"Dollhouse," Karla translates into Deutsch, and switches back immediately. "Oh my god, you don't know that story. Tell her!" she encourages the Hanese detectives, grinning with all her teeth. Liese purses her lips, gives the more awkward of the two a commiserating look.

(She thinks his name is Jianghong, but she may have heard wrong. She didn't catch the senior detective's name at all.)

"Okay," Liese says slowly. "I'm intrigued. How were dolls involved?"

The senior detective and Karla glance at each other; he smothers a grin, waves his hand. "Oh, dolls were not. You have heard of the Song family?"

"Triads?" Liese guesses. Considering it's a conference about international organized crime they're attending it's not exactly a hard one. "Sure."

"Very good. Then I will tell you the story -- wait. More drinks, then the story."

They get more drinks. Why not.

The guy makes a show of downing like half his pint, before smacking his lips and reclining in his seat like a wise grandpa at Christmas. Liese prepares herself for a tall tale with approximately seventy-percent bullshit content.

"This is not about the Song family," he starts, intoning wisely. Karla snickers. "It may or may not have happened to--"

"Huang, come on. It was one of their tributaries, I forget the name."

"You are very annoying," Apparently-Huang says like he's just making a random observation about her hair color instead. "Yes, it was their tributary, who dealt mostly in casinos and secret whores." He shrugs it off, takes another sip. "Lots of very rich customers. They paid their bribes and hid their whores and we could do nothing but be polite."

Liese makes a commiserating grimace. The problem in Berlin is not as bad, but it still exists.

"And then one night -- when was it, Jianghong, you have a better head for these things."

"April fifth, two-thousand twenty-two, at four thirty-five in the morning."

So, a year and a half ago. Liese nods.

"At ... very early in the morning, so, we have a call, from the neighbors, you see. We have several calls, from many neighbors, actually. Which say nothing about bullets and guns, but about maybe an earthquake or a bomb, they didn't know for sure, and so we go, with the firefighters and the medics and a great mass of people...!"

Karla is already snickering. Okay...

"And we go, and the casino house -- it's very big, you understand, almost a whole block's length, and five stories tall, and very elegant, and all its front is in the street in -- like sheets, when you unpin them from the string and you don't catch them and they fall onto themselves in folds. Just, the front of a building, melted in folds in the street."

Liese does blink at that one. She was trying to be blasé but she's failing there. "What kind of magic would -- didn't they have protections?"

Huang chortles. "Oh, they did! Big strong protections, best that dirty money can buy. And the whole of the house behind it -- the whole of it is wide open to see."

"... Hee."

"Everything -- the betting rooms and the offices and the parlors and the boss' office. Barely any dust. And the best is -- the walls, they have been moved. They have been moved just right so the floors don't fall and the ceiling doesn't move, but all the mafia people are trapped in between."

"It was seriously impressive on the pictures," Karla confirms. "Like a dozen toughs pinned between two walls just enough so they couldn't move but could still breathe, their boots buried in the floor -- and like, there wasn't a single still-working weapon in the entire house, secret stockpiles included."

"Jesus. The control. Did that happen all at once?"

"Maybe over three minutes. The muscle were still trying to run out to see when the walls caught them."

Liese shakes her head slowly. "An entire city block in under three minutes. Jeeeesus. That's a really good team." She pauses -- Huang's face is casually amused still but the look that passes on Jianghong's face... "Or a really scary new player."

"We do not know for sure," Huang says casually. "But a lot of the patterning left on the floor, inside the stone, was the same, worked in the same direction, and the energy felt similar to our sensitives before it dissipated, even if... There were strange things. Too many sources. Maybe twins?"

"Anyway," Jianghong adds, "no other attack of that scale has happened since then, and we've been asking. We asked Detective Hummel back then, but..."

Liese arches an eyebrow; Karla shrugs. "Guess who'd been to their casino like two weeks ago, and is also a mage."

Yeah, with that disgusted-tired face she's pulling, it's not really a question. Man's been a thorn in her side for a decade and a half by now. "Rolph Manders."

"Rolph fucking Manders," Karla confirms. "But he was very much in Berlin when the dollhouse thing went down, and besides his magical signature is nothing like that and he doesn't have even half the oomph. Also he'd have brought the whole house down, it wasn't his style at all. It's not the style of anyone who works for him actually."

"It's not the style of anyone who wanted the boss dead just then," Huang says. "And yet he is still dead now, and before that he was ruined and his patrons were so very disappointed with him, and a lot of their men are still in prison from all the things we found. Not as many as should be," he adds with a tone that should sound philosophical, but is a bit too hard for him to mean it, "but good enough."

Liese nods again. It's a good story -- some spectacular means, a still-running mystery, and the only victims were criminals.

"Some of the whores were gone," Jianghong adds quietly, playing with his glass. "The others... They had scars and their stories were -- not good -- but they didn't know either, they saw nothing because all the lamps blew. They say men came in and took the other whores away."

Liese's eyebrows go up encouragingly. "Yeah? Did they have anything in common? Identifying signs?"

"One of the men spoke some other language, but all the whores were Hanese and none of them were heard replying. And all of them had mage-work done on them, but maybe not the same, or not as much..."

"How many?"

"Three. Not related. So it can't be a relative paying to have them rescued."

"Maybe several families pooling up their money?" Karla suggests.

"Maybe," Jianghong says, and shrugs.

And Liese...

Liese starts breathing again.

Three Hanese women who've had mage-work done on them, a year and a half ago.

"What kind of mage-work?" she asks as idly as she can.

Karla and Huang are already gone onto a tangent about the local families and the repercussions of the loss of face and money, but Jianghong answers obligingly. "Oh -- silver and pearls, tree leaves, flowers -- pretty things, right?"

"Huh. Yeah. Makes sense. Pretty things."

Pretty things.

She pulls out her phone and leaves herself a note to check the whereabouts of Mikhail Kirillovich Lazarev a year and a half ago, if she finds the time.

But Lazarev isn't a mage.

"Okay, spill," Karla tells her with a close-mouthed smile the second they're in the elevator, and Liese hesitates.

It was a great story, and the Hanese criminals are dead or in prison -- but that doesn't mean there's no one left to avenge the insult, and there's no way to know who's on the take, in another country's police station.

But Karla won't tell, even though she got along with Huang, because she gets that.

"Remember when Rolph Manders had a full-body bionic user as his enforcer?"

"... Yeah?"

"And remember when we turned around and he'd shacked up with some college kid and gone straight?"

Karla scoffs. "Almost enough to make me believe in fairytales. Didn't the kid start, like, collecting them or something?"

The elevator stops. Liese doesn't start talking again until they're safely in their room.

"They have an association now. Official oversight and social workers, a couple pro bono lawyers, the works. Golem rescue."

Karla's eyes widen. "Rescue -- you don't mean..?"

"I mean that in -- two thousand seventeen? Maybe? There was a rash of bionic users beating up Rolph's people, and then there was nothing. No retaliation. Nothing. And in the middle of that you have a mage they call my lord."

"And two weeks after Rolph visits the casino -- oh my god."

Liese sits on her bed, hands planted behind her. "Uh huh."

"How -- what the fuck kind of trade -- think Manders is using the place as a front?"

Strangely enough, Liese doesn't think so. "I met the college guy once," she says slowly, thinking. "One of his bionics guys had been beat up and thrown out of a car on his doorstep. Really bad liar, really nervous, really not used to that shit. But like, pretty infatuated with Lazarev."

"Maybe he offered his services in exchange for the guy?"

"And Manders waited seven years to cash it in? Nah."

"Mn. Yeah." Karla frowns, dropping onto her own bed, and rests her chin onto both fists to brood.

"There is no way he didn't sic them on the triad guy, though," Liese says comfortingly, and woo are the drinks catching up to her finally. "No fucking way. I would bet a hand that the transformation imprint on that street full of fucked-up cars back then would match the casino. And about a fourth of College Guy's golems have done time for battery or worse, and a full half of them were thieves of some kind, too, and about ninety percent of them ping me as ex-military--"

She's on her phone, searching for golem bionics association berlin as fast as her fingers will type.

"So... You think we're dealing with a minor boss for Manders? Secret backup?"

Liese opens her mouth to say she doesn't know.

The Vindilov Story is one of the tabs on their homepage.

One of Sevan Bauer's ancestors was Varvara Diamondhand, who led three separate rebellions against Tsars and Byzantine emperors and won, who died on a battlefield at age ninety-two, and another one Gaioz Devil's Hand, who died in his bed at seventy-seven after causing a terrifying number of people to die horribly first.

Bauer is rated a triple-ten on the Alexandria scale and has an engineering doctorate.

His speciality is workflow optimisation and mass-production machinery, but there's no way he doesn't have some idea of how to make a house stay up. Even if he has moved the load-bearing walls around.

"I think," she says slowly, staring at the tiny grinning picture imbedded in the article and telling herself she is drunk after all, "I think that I really don't fucking think so, and thank at least three pantheons for that."

Tomorrow they'll be back in Berlin. It's not her beat anymore, but she makes a note to drop by, for old times' sake.

#landlord ofic #asuka writes

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saved-for-me-own-stories · 3 years

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OC-Tober! Day 9: Spice

"Okay, who stole the soul food seasoning?"

Alfred glanced up from his book to look at his red-haired, red-faced sister. "What'd you say, Triss?"

"Look, I am trying to cook here, and if I can't find the seasoning, I'm gonna throw something."

Alfred sat back, looking at the ceiling. "Did you check the drawer?"

"Duh, first place I looked."

"Did you check the spice cabinet?"

Triss sighed exhaustedly and stomped back into the kitchen. "YES, I checked the spice cabinet, silly." Alfred heard the sounds of cabinet doors opening. "And it's STILL not there!" She stormed back just enough to stick out her head and glare at him. "Got any more bright ideas?"

Alfred thought about it for a second or two. "Okay, it might be in the van. I think we brought it last time we went out to use on the fast food fries."

She rolled her eyes. "Sure, the one time we DIDN'T need it out there." And she stomped into the hall. "Ugh, just let me get my shoes."

Alfred heard her door slam shut, then again, and after a flash of red hair in the hall, the outside door slammed.

"Tsk. She is a very angry person."

As soon as he said this, though, he stuck his bookmark in and shut the book. Then, Alfred scampered across the floor. He made sure to reach the door to the girls' room in less than ten seconds.

"Hey, Mee," he whispered as he stuck his head inside.

Mee looked up from her game with Digs on the floor, surrounded by half-empty bowls of leftover pasta. "What?"

"You got the soul food seasoning?"

She grinned and nodded. "Yeah. I used it for lunch."

"Thought so." He held out his hand. "Give it."

"Okay!" shouted Digs, who grabbed it and ran to his big brother. Mee stuck out her tongue at the three-year-old.

"Thanks, buddy." Then, as he took it, he looked over at Mee and added, "You know Triss has been looking for that, right?"

Mee gave a sly look. "Maybe."

"Well, be glad I figured you out before she did."

~~*~~

Good, she's not back in yet. Must've stopped to throw some rocks at a tree or something. He looked at the sizzling porkchops, then set the soul food seasoning on the counter next to the stove. That made him snicker. This oughtta trip her out.

Alfred heard gravel skitter across the patio and recognized it as a sign of approaching wrath. He practically leaped across the floor into the living room and jumped onto the couch (possibly a little too hard, considering the springy sound that came from inside it). He snatched his book just as he heard the door open.

"It wasn't there, Alfred, now what do you suggest?"

"Why don't you use something else? Mommy always does her weird spices and--"

"Well, I don't know which ones she uses, and she and Daddy are still in their meeting. Who else am I supposed to ask? Owen? Una? Someone else who's not here at the moment? I--"

She fell silent. Alfred had to stick his face into the pages to keep his grin from showing.

"What the..." Silence, then a drawer opening. More silence. "I swear, I'm losing my mind."

"Are you sure you checked everywhere? I mean, sometimes, those things end up in really weird pla--"

"Okay, okay, I found it, just go back to your book, okay? Geez."

Alfred had to put a hand over his mouth to stifle his laughter. Once he got control of it, he replied, "Already on it, sis."

@oc-growth-and-development

#oc-tober #day 9: spice #hanesion house #salt and light

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