milliways_bar | (no subject)

Entry tags:

cameron baum,
raven

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D'Hoffryn enters the bar and leaves a manilla envelope for Bela Talbot, then orders a complex Earth cocktail that involves mare's blood. Haven't been able to get one in centuries, and even then only on the Mongolian steppes.

Just what he needs, when his TV series is stuck in a very literal development hell and he's reduced to running errands for Wolfram & Hart in the vague hope they might let him out of his contract.

Feel free to chat with a pissy vengeance demon, if that's your idea of a good time.

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Raven is easily entertained.

Which is probably why he drops down from the rafters about three feet away from the pissy demon.

At least it wasn't three inches?

Vengeance is a people business, even when the people involved aren't the kind of people most people would call people.

In other words, D'Hoffryn is in no position to be rude to other supernatural beings. He gives Raven a measured nod.

Raven beams in return.

He has a very nice smile. Way too wide, but these things happen.

"You are, perhaps, not so busy?"

"Perks of being the boss," D'Hoffryn growls. Not at Raven, particularly.

"We're swamped, to be honest. There's a hiring freeze." Apparently when your contract says the show will pick the 'next' vengeance demon, and the show drops dead, you don't get to hire any new vengeance demons without breaking your contract.

"I've got a maternity leave, a stabbed by a hero leave, and a retirement. We're down to a skeleton staff." This is more literal than you might like to imagine. All the demons are hopping 24-7, so the clerical tasks are being outsourced to a voodoo priestess. D'Hoffryn is tired of finding fingerbones in his coffee.

Raven makes a face.

"Possibly healers are useful, yes?"

Then he looks shifty.

A little.

"Also you are not so much allowed to cheat?"

"Have you ever seen a Pylean audit?" D'Hoffryn asks. "They make you provide your own cross."

Raven laughs.

"I am, I think, not so good with records. So."

"The great burden of the small business owner," D'Hoffryn sighs. "It was easier when it was all about the vengeance."

"Mostly it is for sounding boring."

Raven is a judgmental bird.

And easily bored.

"Stressful, yes. Exhausting, frustrating. Frequently very, very messy. But never boring, my friend."

"Stress is very boring."

He makes a face.

"It is a thing."

"Well, we do good work."

"Well, sort of the opposite. But it's very satisfying."

Raven snorts.

"Work is also boring, yes?"

Someone here is very picky.

Or aiming for low-level annoyance.

Or both.

"Not if you're doing what you love. The administrative side, I could take or leave, but giving people power--especially people who you just know are going to do some serious fucking damage with it--that never gets old."

"I'm a giver."

Raven snorts.

Loudly.

"There is that, yes. I am also very good at taking power away."

Just ask the men who summoned Coyote several years ago.

Raven still has that magic tucked away somewhere.

"I've done that, too," he admits. "As and when necessary."

Poor Anyaka.

"Whim is also interesting, I think."

He laughs.

Again.

Loudly.

"Hey now," he says. "I always play by the rules."

Rule number one: the customer is always right.

Raven rolls his eyes.

He is lucky they do not pop out of their sockets.

"I cheat."

"We play very different roles in the universe, my friend."

"Sometimes, I think, it is not so much playing."

When is that?

No one knows.

"Oh?" The ability to alter reality and timelines gives you a tendency to see life as a game, yes.

Raven flicks a cookie at D'Hoffryn.

Hard.

Cameron is watching him steadily.

"You're blue," she observes.

Da ba dee da ba die.

"Well observed." Man, fuck robots.

"Thank you," says Cameron, pleased. "I can perceive the standard human spectrum."

"Good for you. Top-notch."

"Yes," Cameron agrees, and moves to the bar to study the specials.

"Look, while I'm out here." He's never 'venged for a robot before. "Is there anything you're particularly pissed off about, in life?"

Cameron looks at him even more blankly than is her wont.

"Pissed off," she echoes.

"Angry," he says. "Desiring of vengeance."

She processes this.

"Are you angry?"

"Not particularly," he says. "I help people who have unresolved grievances."

Strange.

"You get revenge," Cameron guesses.

"I facilitate revenge."

"No," says Cameron.

"...no what?"

She blinks placidly. "No, there's nothing I'm particularly pissed off about, in life."

"Nothing you find unjust or unfair?"

"Life is unjust." Robot earnest.

"What do you want me to do about it?" D'Hoffryn asks, with grinding patience.

"The soul is purified by continued suffering on the wheel of death and rebirth," Cameron tells him helpfully.

Which doesn't fully answer his question. "You could give alms."

Ugh. Not only a robot, but a Buddhist.

"I could alter reality to your specifications," he says, exasperated.

"Everyone can alter reality."

Cameron, for example, can shoot people she does not want to be alive.

"Robots," D'Hoffryn tells the universe at large.

"Yes," Cameron agrees, content with this conclusion, "robots too."

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