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edenfallingThis scene did not go quite the way I was expecting it to. On the other hand, I got a female character in, so I can't say I mind all that much. (2,025 words)
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Weregild, part 10
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Arthur woke at eight -- earlier than he'd have preferred, but later than he'd expected. He had trouble sleeping much past sunrise, which made the semi-nocturnal schedule his jobs and lifestyle demanded rather awkward. He compensated with afternoon naps when possible. Lately Dom had insisted on doing most of the driving so Arthur could at least sleep in their ever-changing array of rental cars.
He showered, shaved, brushed his teeth, and dressed as quietly as he could in khaki slacks and a light cream shirt with a brown sweater vest -- no tie today, since there was no need to look that professional. Dom slept through it all, undisturbed by the familiar routine. Arthur left a note on the night table between the beds, and another taped to the bathroom mirror, just in case. Then he took one of the key cards and headed toward the main office in search of the motel's promised continental breakfast.
It turned out to be slightly better than he'd feared, and he ate a hardboiled egg, a plain bagel, and a cup of mixed fruit while working through a copy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch someone had abandoned on a nearby tiny table. The coffee was too weak, as motel coffee usually was, but it pulled him into focus, which was the main thing.
He returned to the room and picked his phone off his suitcase. Eames had mimicked his brevity in the return message, sending only one word: noon. "And which of us calls whom?" Arthur wondered, slightly irritated at the ambiguity. That was Eames all over, though. He was brilliant, but if you didn't pin him down on details, half the time he wouldn't bother to think about them at all. He liked to wing things.
Arthur could wing things just fine in a pinch, but he preferred not to need to, or at least to have some general notion of where to start improvising so he wouldn't be caught flat-footed.
He decided to give Eames the chance to call first.
That settled, he changed the notes telling Dom his status, grabbed his coat, his gun, his laptop, and the car keys, and pulled out onto I-270. He'd spent enough time on the newspaper that it was already nine o'clock. Businesses would be opening, and he could start getting the lay of the land in preparation for the coming week.
His first stop was Animators, Inc., where Anita Blake worked.
The business was housed in an ordinary looking office building -- a standard block of steel, concrete, and grayish glass ringed by a reef of cement sidewalks and decorative bushes in a lake of asphalt parking lot. The interior was arranged around a central atrium, three stories of empty air nominally filled by two palm trees and a modern art fountain on the ground floor. Arthur checked the office listings in the entryway, just to verify his directions, then took the hallway on the right of the atrium. There were three businesses down this wing: a psychologist to his right, a plastic surgeon at the end of the short hallway, and Animators, Inc. to his left.
Arthur opened the door and stopped, blinking at the sudden impression that he'd wandered into a home decorating show gone wrong. The reception room was wallpapered in pale green with a tiny, overly busy pattern in brown and darker green. The carpet was a slightly less pale shade of green, almost exactly the color of pistachio ice cream, and thick enough it caught the bottom edge of the door and made opening it more than eighty degrees nearly impossible. Plants in off-white ceramic pots, with artificially cracked glaze, festooned every open corner and flat surface, leaving almost no room for chairs or the spread of old magazines every waiting room seemed to collect.
Three doors opened in the back wall of the reception room. Between them, a middle-aged woman with short yellow hair sat behind a institutional-style walled desk, busily typing at a computer. She hadn't noticed Arthur's entrance.
He forced the outer door shut and cleared his throat.
The receptionist looked up and smiled, professionally cheerful. Wrinkles bracketed her mouth, and Arthur revised her age upward five to ten years -- closer to sixty than forty. "Hello. Are you Mr. Ainsley to meet with Mr. Kirkland? He's in the leftmost office."
Arthur smiled and shook his head. "No, I'm not here to see Mr. Kirkland. I was actually hoping I could speak with your manager, Mr. Vaughn. I'm an animator myself -- I worked for the Resurrection Company for a few years, until I left California -- and I'm curious about his business model. Arthur Levine." He offered his hand over the desk.
"Mary Roth," the receptionist said, shaking his hand briefly and firmly. "Mr. Vaughn is currently in the middle of a phone call, but he should be done within fifteen minutes, if you wouldn't mind waiting."
"Not at all," Arthur said, lounging sideways against the desk, his left arm lying on top of the sheltering wall. "I'd love to get your perspective on Animators, Inc. I'm sure you know all the little details Mr. Vaughn, as the man in charge, might not think to tell me."
"Oh, I couldn't go telling any tales, Mr. Levine," Ms. Roth said, but the smile lurking around the corners of her mouth and eyes said she was willing to play along with Arthur's game. He wasn't that charming, so either he reminded her of someone or Bert Vaughn did not hold the full respect and trust of his employees.
"I wouldn't ask you to break confidence, Ms. Roth," Arthur said. "But the company website is aimed at clients, not at potential employees, so you can see how I'd be curious. On that note, can you tell me how many animators are currently members of the firm?"
"We have six animators on staff," Ms. Roth said. "Manny Rodriguez, Jamison Clark, Charles Montgomery, John Burke, Larry Kirkland, and Anita Blake, whom I'm sure you've heard of. And please, call me Mary." She smiled at him, in a warm and vaguely indulgent manner that reminded him of his mother.
Arthur returned the smile. "I'd be honored. Please, call me Arthur. Do I take it from your phrasing that the animators are employees rather than partners?"
Mary Roth shrugged. "Technically, yes. The company was Mr. Vaughn's idea, so he's the employer of record. But in practice, each animator is more of a semi-independent contractor than a salaried employee. Each raising brings in an individual gross income, of which forty percent goes to the company for overhead, publicity, and the salaries of the non-animators. The rest, less taxes and health insurance fees, remains with the animator in question. Mr. Vaughn also takes a five percent cut of the gross income for any consulting jobs he arranges, but those aren't figured into the income pool for overhead and so on, so the animator's take-home percentage is higher." She looked quizzically at Arthur. "Is the Resurrection Company's business model very different?"
"Yes and no," Arthur said. "For one thing, the Resurrection Company isn't a single, centralized business. It was founded in San Diego, but it runs on a franchise model. Any animator who passes a basic competency test can open a franchise anywhere in California. In return for following the company's fee schedule and restrictions, and sending twenty percent of gross income to the central office, they get to use the company's name and reputation. You lose some freedom, but it reassures potential clients that you're not a fraud."
"Did you operate a franchise?" Mary asked, leaning forward slightly.
Arthur laughed. "No, nothing that reliable. What I did was take some raisings on a freelance contract basis. There's a franchise in San Francisco -- the Flores sisters, maybe you've heard of them? -- but sometimes they had more requests than they could handle. I lived in Oakland at the time, so I tended to handle the raisings on the inland side of the bay. I had to get certified by the company headquarters, of course, but it was a nice side job."
He reciprocated Mary's lean, bending down toward her, and said in a stage whisper, "The certification process was a complete joke. All they did was send a secretary -- not nearly as pretty as you -- to verify that I could safely raise two zombies in one night and wasn't using human sacrifice. Company regulations won't allow more than three raisings in one night. If anyone did four, they'd have to pay overtime."
Mary giggled. "Oh, I'll have to tell that to Anita. She threatens to leave the business every couple months -- I think the Resurrection Company has a standing offer to sponsor her move to California, if she wants -- but she's never said anything about them offering to pay overtime for raisings. She'll take that and trample all over Bert."
And now they were getting somewhere.
"I take it Mr. Vaughn doesn't believe in overtime?" Arthur said.
Mary shook her head. "Not in a month of Sundays. He schedules as many raisings as each animator is physically and mystically capable of per night. It's nice for their budgets, but it puts a strain on their personal lives, especially the ones who have side jobs as well. Jamison Clark, for example, has a side line selling coffins and tombstones for two of the local cemeteries, and he's always complaining he doesn't need to push for three zombie raisings a night when two would support him just fine. As for John, Larry, and Anita... well, they're licensed vampire executioners, you know, and Anita does police consulting as well for RPIT -- the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team -- and I don't think I've ever seen any of them get enough sleep. Particularly Anita, the poor dear. I don't think she'd have half the trouble she does if she simply had more time to slow down and think."
"High stress lifestyles can lead people into strange places before you quite realize what's happening," Arthur agreed. "I actually work more as a bounty hunter than an animator, and I can tell you with complete sincerity that my life now isn't anything like the life I envisioned when I was eighteen."
Mary made a wordless inquiring noise.
"Mostly I thought I'd be married and settled down by now," Arthur clarified. "I thought for a while I'd found what I was looking for -- that was why I stayed in Oakland for a few years -- but it fell through. I've been at loose ends since then, but I'm thinking it's time to try for something solid again."
"You're one up on Anita, in that case," Mary told him. "I don't think the poor woman has ever had anything solid in her life. First she was dating one man, then he died, then she's engaged to a second man, then she dumps him and starts dating a third, then she dumps him too, then she starts taking him back... And her third man is a vampire, of all things. Not that I'm prejudiced against vampires," she added hastily, "but she spent so long saying that vampires were monsters and she hated them, that it seems funny for her to take up with one, charming though Jean-Claude may be."
It was Arthur's turn to make a wordless noise of inquiry.
Mary obliged him and continued. "He's the Master of the City, you know. And Anita's fallen in with lycanthropes, too. Most of them are lovely people, but their lives seem so violent. I worry about her. She's always had a temper, and her lifestyle is only making it worse. She pushes Bert harder these days, and I've seen her hand move toward her gun when she's annoyed. She never used to do anything like that." She beckoned Arthur to lean down and whispered -- a real whisper, not a stage voice meant to be overheard: "You might know what she's going through, Mr. Levine. Do you think that sounds like she's in trouble?"
Before Arthur could formulate an answer, a man opened the left hand office door and cleared his throat.
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End Part Ten
continue to part 11
back to part 9
read the final version on AO3 (Trust me, you want to read the final version. The journal version is a beta draft, with all the errors that implies.)
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You know something about Laurell Hamilton? I often get the feeling she has no idea what the actual layouts of any of her settings are. They are too vague and shift around too much. I would like to be able to make little faux architectural sketches of various buildings, but there simply is not enough detail to do so.
For example, in this section I have had to invent the office building in which Animators, Inc. is located. All Hamilton has ever said about it, to my knowledge, is a rough description of the reception room, focused more on color and scientific plant names than actual layout; that there are three offices, of which Bert has taken the smallest (painted pale blue, like an ice cube) as his own; that Mary (no last name) is the day secretary and Craig (no last name, no description either) is the night secretary; that there is a parking lot associated with the building; that the animators on staff all use the remaining two offices on a time-share basis; and that Anita sometimes keeps a gun in the drawer of her office desk.
She has also said, and I quote: There was a psychologist's office across from us, nothing less than a hundred an hour; a plastic surgeon down the hall; two lawyers; one marriage counselor, and a real estate company. (The last comma in place of a semi-colon is the book's error, not mine.)
By implication, the animators have keys to the office, since Anita has met people there at odd hours when no secretary seemed to be around -- and really, they would need at least three secretaries to have the office open 24/7. My suspicion is that Mary works 9am-5pm and Craig works 5pm-1am, give or take a little.
Anyway, that is mostly my frustration talking, but there are times I really wish Hamilton paid more attention to her world-building and less to the goddamn sex and romance. (Also, the number of times in the earlier books that I want to smack Anita and say either, "Listen, lady, have you heard of this concept called a threesome? Because people can be in true love with more than one person at a time, swear to god!" and/or, "Seriously, stake Jean-Claude; you're young; you'll get over him," are countless. Oy.)
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Weregild, part 10
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Arthur woke at eight -- earlier than he'd have preferred, but later than he'd expected. He had trouble sleeping much past sunrise, which made the semi-nocturnal schedule his jobs and lifestyle demanded rather awkward. He compensated with afternoon naps when possible. Lately Dom had insisted on doing most of the driving so Arthur could at least sleep in their ever-changing array of rental cars.
He showered, shaved, brushed his teeth, and dressed as quietly as he could in khaki slacks and a light cream shirt with a brown sweater vest -- no tie today, since there was no need to look that professional. Dom slept through it all, undisturbed by the familiar routine. Arthur left a note on the night table between the beds, and another taped to the bathroom mirror, just in case. Then he took one of the key cards and headed toward the main office in search of the motel's promised continental breakfast.
It turned out to be slightly better than he'd feared, and he ate a hardboiled egg, a plain bagel, and a cup of mixed fruit while working through a copy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch someone had abandoned on a nearby tiny table. The coffee was too weak, as motel coffee usually was, but it pulled him into focus, which was the main thing.
He returned to the room and picked his phone off his suitcase. Eames had mimicked his brevity in the return message, sending only one word: noon. "And which of us calls whom?" Arthur wondered, slightly irritated at the ambiguity. That was Eames all over, though. He was brilliant, but if you didn't pin him down on details, half the time he wouldn't bother to think about them at all. He liked to wing things.
Arthur could wing things just fine in a pinch, but he preferred not to need to, or at least to have some general notion of where to start improvising so he wouldn't be caught flat-footed.
He decided to give Eames the chance to call first.
That settled, he changed the notes telling Dom his status, grabbed his coat, his gun, his laptop, and the car keys, and pulled out onto I-270. He'd spent enough time on the newspaper that it was already nine o'clock. Businesses would be opening, and he could start getting the lay of the land in preparation for the coming week.
His first stop was Animators, Inc., where Anita Blake worked.
The business was housed in an ordinary looking office building -- a standard block of steel, concrete, and grayish glass ringed by a reef of cement sidewalks and decorative bushes in a lake of asphalt parking lot. The interior was arranged around a central atrium, three stories of empty air nominally filled by two palm trees and a modern art fountain on the ground floor. Arthur checked the office listings in the entryway, just to verify his directions, then took the hallway on the right of the atrium. There were three businesses down this wing: a psychologist to his right, a plastic surgeon at the end of the short hallway, and Animators, Inc. to his left.
Arthur opened the door and stopped, blinking at the sudden impression that he'd wandered into a home decorating show gone wrong. The reception room was wallpapered in pale green with a tiny, overly busy pattern in brown and darker green. The carpet was a slightly less pale shade of green, almost exactly the color of pistachio ice cream, and thick enough it caught the bottom edge of the door and made opening it more than eighty degrees nearly impossible. Plants in off-white ceramic pots, with artificially cracked glaze, festooned every open corner and flat surface, leaving almost no room for chairs or the spread of old magazines every waiting room seemed to collect.
Three doors opened in the back wall of the reception room. Between them, a middle-aged woman with short yellow hair sat behind a institutional-style walled desk, busily typing at a computer. She hadn't noticed Arthur's entrance.
He forced the outer door shut and cleared his throat.
The receptionist looked up and smiled, professionally cheerful. Wrinkles bracketed her mouth, and Arthur revised her age upward five to ten years -- closer to sixty than forty. "Hello. Are you Mr. Ainsley to meet with Mr. Kirkland? He's in the leftmost office."
Arthur smiled and shook his head. "No, I'm not here to see Mr. Kirkland. I was actually hoping I could speak with your manager, Mr. Vaughn. I'm an animator myself -- I worked for the Resurrection Company for a few years, until I left California -- and I'm curious about his business model. Arthur Levine." He offered his hand over the desk.
"Mary Roth," the receptionist said, shaking his hand briefly and firmly. "Mr. Vaughn is currently in the middle of a phone call, but he should be done within fifteen minutes, if you wouldn't mind waiting."
"Not at all," Arthur said, lounging sideways against the desk, his left arm lying on top of the sheltering wall. "I'd love to get your perspective on Animators, Inc. I'm sure you know all the little details Mr. Vaughn, as the man in charge, might not think to tell me."
"Oh, I couldn't go telling any tales, Mr. Levine," Ms. Roth said, but the smile lurking around the corners of her mouth and eyes said she was willing to play along with Arthur's game. He wasn't that charming, so either he reminded her of someone or Bert Vaughn did not hold the full respect and trust of his employees.
"I wouldn't ask you to break confidence, Ms. Roth," Arthur said. "But the company website is aimed at clients, not at potential employees, so you can see how I'd be curious. On that note, can you tell me how many animators are currently members of the firm?"
"We have six animators on staff," Ms. Roth said. "Manny Rodriguez, Jamison Clark, Charles Montgomery, John Burke, Larry Kirkland, and Anita Blake, whom I'm sure you've heard of. And please, call me Mary." She smiled at him, in a warm and vaguely indulgent manner that reminded him of his mother.
Arthur returned the smile. "I'd be honored. Please, call me Arthur. Do I take it from your phrasing that the animators are employees rather than partners?"
Mary Roth shrugged. "Technically, yes. The company was Mr. Vaughn's idea, so he's the employer of record. But in practice, each animator is more of a semi-independent contractor than a salaried employee. Each raising brings in an individual gross income, of which forty percent goes to the company for overhead, publicity, and the salaries of the non-animators. The rest, less taxes and health insurance fees, remains with the animator in question. Mr. Vaughn also takes a five percent cut of the gross income for any consulting jobs he arranges, but those aren't figured into the income pool for overhead and so on, so the animator's take-home percentage is higher." She looked quizzically at Arthur. "Is the Resurrection Company's business model very different?"
"Yes and no," Arthur said. "For one thing, the Resurrection Company isn't a single, centralized business. It was founded in San Diego, but it runs on a franchise model. Any animator who passes a basic competency test can open a franchise anywhere in California. In return for following the company's fee schedule and restrictions, and sending twenty percent of gross income to the central office, they get to use the company's name and reputation. You lose some freedom, but it reassures potential clients that you're not a fraud."
"Did you operate a franchise?" Mary asked, leaning forward slightly.
Arthur laughed. "No, nothing that reliable. What I did was take some raisings on a freelance contract basis. There's a franchise in San Francisco -- the Flores sisters, maybe you've heard of them? -- but sometimes they had more requests than they could handle. I lived in Oakland at the time, so I tended to handle the raisings on the inland side of the bay. I had to get certified by the company headquarters, of course, but it was a nice side job."
He reciprocated Mary's lean, bending down toward her, and said in a stage whisper, "The certification process was a complete joke. All they did was send a secretary -- not nearly as pretty as you -- to verify that I could safely raise two zombies in one night and wasn't using human sacrifice. Company regulations won't allow more than three raisings in one night. If anyone did four, they'd have to pay overtime."
Mary giggled. "Oh, I'll have to tell that to Anita. She threatens to leave the business every couple months -- I think the Resurrection Company has a standing offer to sponsor her move to California, if she wants -- but she's never said anything about them offering to pay overtime for raisings. She'll take that and trample all over Bert."
And now they were getting somewhere.
"I take it Mr. Vaughn doesn't believe in overtime?" Arthur said.
Mary shook her head. "Not in a month of Sundays. He schedules as many raisings as each animator is physically and mystically capable of per night. It's nice for their budgets, but it puts a strain on their personal lives, especially the ones who have side jobs as well. Jamison Clark, for example, has a side line selling coffins and tombstones for two of the local cemeteries, and he's always complaining he doesn't need to push for three zombie raisings a night when two would support him just fine. As for John, Larry, and Anita... well, they're licensed vampire executioners, you know, and Anita does police consulting as well for RPIT -- the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team -- and I don't think I've ever seen any of them get enough sleep. Particularly Anita, the poor dear. I don't think she'd have half the trouble she does if she simply had more time to slow down and think."
"High stress lifestyles can lead people into strange places before you quite realize what's happening," Arthur agreed. "I actually work more as a bounty hunter than an animator, and I can tell you with complete sincerity that my life now isn't anything like the life I envisioned when I was eighteen."
Mary made a wordless inquiring noise.
"Mostly I thought I'd be married and settled down by now," Arthur clarified. "I thought for a while I'd found what I was looking for -- that was why I stayed in Oakland for a few years -- but it fell through. I've been at loose ends since then, but I'm thinking it's time to try for something solid again."
"You're one up on Anita, in that case," Mary told him. "I don't think the poor woman has ever had anything solid in her life. First she was dating one man, then he died, then she's engaged to a second man, then she dumps him and starts dating a third, then she dumps him too, then she starts taking him back... And her third man is a vampire, of all things. Not that I'm prejudiced against vampires," she added hastily, "but she spent so long saying that vampires were monsters and she hated them, that it seems funny for her to take up with one, charming though Jean-Claude may be."
It was Arthur's turn to make a wordless noise of inquiry.
Mary obliged him and continued. "He's the Master of the City, you know. And Anita's fallen in with lycanthropes, too. Most of them are lovely people, but their lives seem so violent. I worry about her. She's always had a temper, and her lifestyle is only making it worse. She pushes Bert harder these days, and I've seen her hand move toward her gun when she's annoyed. She never used to do anything like that." She beckoned Arthur to lean down and whispered -- a real whisper, not a stage voice meant to be overheard: "You might know what she's going through, Mr. Levine. Do you think that sounds like she's in trouble?"
Before Arthur could formulate an answer, a man opened the left hand office door and cleared his throat.
---------------------------------------------
End Part Ten
continue to part 11
back to part 9
read the final version on AO3 (Trust me, you want to read the final version. The journal version is a beta draft, with all the errors that implies.)
---------------------------------------------
You know something about Laurell Hamilton? I often get the feeling she has no idea what the actual layouts of any of her settings are. They are too vague and shift around too much. I would like to be able to make little faux architectural sketches of various buildings, but there simply is not enough detail to do so.
For example, in this section I have had to invent the office building in which Animators, Inc. is located. All Hamilton has ever said about it, to my knowledge, is a rough description of the reception room, focused more on color and scientific plant names than actual layout; that there are three offices, of which Bert has taken the smallest (painted pale blue, like an ice cube) as his own; that Mary (no last name) is the day secretary and Craig (no last name, no description either) is the night secretary; that there is a parking lot associated with the building; that the animators on staff all use the remaining two offices on a time-share basis; and that Anita sometimes keeps a gun in the drawer of her office desk.
She has also said, and I quote: There was a psychologist's office across from us, nothing less than a hundred an hour; a plastic surgeon down the hall; two lawyers; one marriage counselor, and a real estate company. (The last comma in place of a semi-colon is the book's error, not mine.)
By implication, the animators have keys to the office, since Anita has met people there at odd hours when no secretary seemed to be around -- and really, they would need at least three secretaries to have the office open 24/7. My suspicion is that Mary works 9am-5pm and Craig works 5pm-1am, give or take a little.
Anyway, that is mostly my frustration talking, but there are times I really wish Hamilton paid more attention to her world-building and less to the goddamn sex and romance. (Also, the number of times in the earlier books that I want to smack Anita and say either, "Listen, lady, have you heard of this concept called a threesome? Because people can be in true love with more than one person at a time, swear to god!" and/or, "Seriously, stake Jean-Claude; you're young; you'll get over him," are countless. Oy.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-10 04:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-10 04:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-10 03:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-09 08:08 am (UTC)Oh that Mary, what a gossip. u.u "I don't think she'd have half the trouble she does if she simply had more time to slow down and think." => bwahahaha.
Um, does Jean-Claude know he's trying to get hired at Anita's place of business. D: Hell, maybe he hopes to be long gone by the time anyone connects the dots, but... aaa where is this going i need to knooooow.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-09 07:07 pm (UTC)Gossip is fun. :-)
Arthur isn't actually trying to get hired. He's trying to learn about Anita, since he's aware of the St. Louis triumvirate, she and Richard are the wild cards in it, and she's a lot easier to find than Richard (who is not publically "out" as a lycanthrope). He's not averse to doing a few freelance raisings while in St. Louis, though, since apparently if strong animators don't raise the dead on purpose now and then, their power will start leaking out and random dead things will follow them home at inconvenient times. Which I doubt Dom appreciates. :-D
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-09 04:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-09 07:09 pm (UTC)