In Need of Rescue (Norah)

[Norah Byron]

[norah]"Nobody in the public better try and consume you," she muttered. "I'm in possession, at least for the moment."

She turned to the bathroom vanity and ran a comb through her hair, dusted on a little more powder and refreshed her lip gloss, then opened up one of several makeup cases in the room, though this one turned out to be full of little packets of wax paper, funny-looking jewelry not so dissimilar from the stuff that Zee had loaded Will up with, and a few bottles of clear or murky liquids. She dropped a couple of the wax paper packets into her purse, along with a glass vial of what looked like it might be olive oil, though why would she need that?, and pulled on a cross necklace that had some sort of lettering incised on the back of the cross pendant where it lay against her skin, though the front was plain and unmarked.

"All right." She closed up the case and smiled at Will, looking exactly like she was the carefree teen pop singer that she actually wasn't. "Food?"[/norah]

[William Doyle]

[will]"You are in complete possession. Your wish is my command, after all," the smile came easily, he was completely unbothered by the innuendo in his words. He watched her, becoming curious. "I'm going to need you to explain what all that was. Maybe not right now, but at some point." He picked at the bracelet Zee had more or less given him. "I still don't understand what this is supposed to do exactly. And I'm not sure I want to know what it's made of."

Brushing that under the rug for the moment, he opened the motel room door for her, catching her hand as she passed and following her. "How many individuals are with your group right now? If you're filling the motel to full capacity, you must have a large train." Will looked momentarily lost. "Where are we going again? I don't know if you said and I missed it. I was a bit distracted."[/will]

[Norah Byron]

[norah]"I'll explain them to you if you like. Once we get to our table." She was leading him to a battered and nondescript pickup truck, "And I saw a Chinese Buffet on our way in to town. Not fancy, but at least it's not fast food. We'll be back in the big city at the end of the week, we can get snob food then if we want."

She grinned at him as they climbed into the truck and got on the road. "The motel was already half-full, but we're at thirty-three people right now. thirty-four with you. That's just about as big as we ever get. Us five in the band, three security under Miguel, four backup singers, three backup musicians, eight roadies, three sound techs, two drivers for the big trucks and five general hangers-on who the label pays for because they think they're our girlfriends/drug dealers/parasites/whatever."[/norah]

[William Doyle]

[will]"Chinese sounds like heaven. If we do go to a snob restaurant, we need to be on our snobbiest behavior. It's more fun that way." Will was happy enough following her lead. He nodded as she listed off the people. "As you get bigger, the group will get bigger. Hangers-on are always fun. Do you have your own personal hanger-on? Or is that me? Because, honey, I don't have much in the way of drugs and I'm not a particularly good parasite. Unless, do I get to be a roadie?"

That actually sounded a lot better than being a hanger-on. "Who's doing your lights or is that a space by space kinda deal? On that note, how have the spaces been since I last saw you? Horror nights or palacial?"[/will]

[Norah Byron]

[norah]"The closest things I've got to hangers-on are an emotionally needy backup singer and a hunter named Sam who's not with us right now but swings through once every month or two to pretend he doesn't need us while I work desperately to repair years worth of damage his psyche has taken under the abuse of an unfair universe." She sounded awfully cheerful admitting it.

"And the lights are handled by the venues, theoretically. In actuality, we end up dealing with them about half the time. And the spaces have been about two-thirds great, one-third horror show. We're moving up in the world, the ratio used to be the other way around."[/norah]

[William Doyle]

[will]Will nodded. "Good, no competition for me, then." The tease was clear in his voice. However, as soon as she told him about the venues, he was all business. "Let me at the venues and the lighting monsters. I'll can whip them into shape as needed. I won't take over sound, because that would just be unfair to the guys you have. But I'll act as a sort-of consultant genie and swoop in occasionally to save them from themselves." Multi-tasking was his forte. Running an entire stage full of 200+ people was the kind of thing he got high off of. The more people, the more chaos, the more calm Will was and the scarier. The cheerful calm with which he dealt with things had given some of his underlings nightmares.

"I should warn you. I'm sure I've told you about my theater background. But in my heyday, I was something to be reckoned with. If ever you feel I'm taking over, slap me around. I'll take the message and sulk in a corner with a broken piece of equipment. What you saw...No, sorry. What you didn't see in Chicago? That's who I am." And despite the fact that he was smiling, there was a certain seriousness to his voice. He made things happen, but that was not his job here and he could refrain from doing it if the band preferred. "If it makes everything easier, you guys can simply assign me projects and I'll do them happily. It might be better than way. I won't itch to remodel every place you stop at. Although, that last place? They've got better standards now."

Will took a breath, paused. "The truest truth? I'm running off an adrenaline high. I'm itching to have something - anything - to do to occupy my brain so I don't think about what happened and what it means. And, although it makes me a wuss, I'm running scared."[/will]

[Norah Byron]

[norah]She reached over and laid her hand on his. "Sweetie, if you want to be our lights and venues god, nobody's going to argue. You could also rest for a few weeks, or devote that time to studying about the whole 'monsters are real and they want to eat me' thing, or pretty much anything as long as you don't bring hard drugs or cops into it." The tour had a strict 'no hard drugs' rule, with a somewhat soft definition of where that line was. Pot was everywhere, coke was easy to find though anybody who got too fond of it was politely invited to back off, there was sometimes LSD or shrooms or X around. But the philosophy gently espoused by the band and brutally enforced behind the band's backs by Miguel and his boys was 'moderation in all things'. Have a drink, smoke a bowl, get high at a party now and then. But don't do it every single night or you can't stay.

"We do need to talk about the other part, though. Not today, if you're not ready, but soon. I know how scary it is, believe me. Especially when you don't feel like you're ready to deal with it, like you don't belong in that kind of world. I mean," she laughed and gestured to herself, "do I even begin to seem like I understand the monsters? Like I carry weaponry with me? It's ridiculous. Except that it's still true, and I have to deal with that being my life now."[/norah]

[William Doyle]

[will]Will looked at her and was, at once, immediately grateful for her presence in his upturned life. "I will probably work on all of it at once. Not the drugs. I grew out of that very early when I got sick of pot at twenty-four." He'd smoked for a month straight on a dare from his best friend and then never looked back. He had done everything in that month while high, and while the experience had been interesting, he had never really felt like hitting a bowl because of it. Alcohol, on the other hand, he enjoyed without bothering with the drunkenness. But that was more to do with him preferring a clear head than any odd or bad experiences.

"I'm not sure I'm ready. The monsters are one thing. I've got all my notes and I can probably write more notes while with you guys. I've accepted that as much as I'm currently able. They're out there. It's a fact I can't change and I must deal with it. It's me. Whatever I did back there. That scares me a lot more than the monsters, because...well, what if it means that I'm actually one of them?" And this thought really terrified him.[/will]

[Norah Byron]

[norah]Norah shook her head, her hair feathering across her cheeks as she moved. She invested in very good haircuts. "Not all of the 'monsters' are evil. There's a naga traveling with us right now, an ancient Hindu snake creature. I know a vampire who's raising a trio of orphaned human kids and doing a great job of it. A shapeshifter who's one of my best drinking buddies. A striga who's doing penance for the years he hurt people by hunting the kinds of monsters who really can't be redeemed."

She drove one-handed so that she could reach over and brush a reassuring hand back through his hair. "There's all different kinds of monster, Will. If you are one, we'll figure out what kind and then we'll help you deal with it. Promise."[/norah]

[William Doyle]

[will]She was like a soothing balm, with exactly the right words to ease his worry. It helped, more than he could say, and he only hoped he could repay her kindness by making himself useful to the group. "Thank you. I feel a little bit better about the future now. I'm guessing hunters do not have the most favorable opinions of monsters." Having sat with Zee and listened to her recount what each monster could do and what some of them even looked like, she'd kept her voice clinical but it was also clear she didn't care for a single one of them. It had made him wonder if one day she'd hunt him down with that same clinical intention. That is, if she discovered his origins were not beneficial to the human race.

Will caught her hand, surrounding it with his own and marveling at the softness of her skin, how delicate her hand was within his. Not that his hands were all that rough in any way. Not anymore, he hadn't been working on sets or with props in over ten years. "I look forward to learning more, although maybe I'll put self-exploration on the shelf for now." He simply wasn't ready for that. He needed to take things one at a time or he'd lose his mind.[/will]

[Norah Byron]

[norah]"Most don't," she admitted. "But the rules of the caravan is that you play nice with others. Nobody's going to pick on you or try to stake you with silver. I won't let 'em." She slid her thumb along his, driving one-handed because the touch was to be preferred. "Not too long on the self-exploration, though, okay? We still need to figure out why you were targeted. If it was because of me or something else. It's important."[/norah]

[William Doyle]

[will]"Silver stakes? That's a thing?" Apparently silver had been used to make all sorts of things Will never would have thought of. "I won't put it off for too long. I just need a few days to recuperate from information overload. So I can organize everything in my head without it going chaotic on me. Right now everything is a mishmash of facts and things to remember. I haven't fully processed it all." He was, at the moment, afraid to find out why he'd been targeted at all. Given time, he was sure the fear would dissipate and be replaced with natural curiosity, maybe even a need to know what had led to the uprooting of his entire life.

"Other than the sound, are there any other problems you're running into?" A change of subject might help for the moment, getting around to her and her life would also help.[/will]

[Norah Byron]

[norah]They were pulling into the buffet place, and so Norah waited until they'd both walked through the steam tables and were seated at a deep vinyl booth with plates loaded high. She had unashamedly gone straight for the Kung Pao chicken and the beef with broccoli and had to shove a few potstickers and wontons in around the edges. Rice and noodles she hadn't even bothered with.

As she plucked up a peanut between the tips of her chopsticks with the flair of a true California baby, she finally answered Will's question. "Alec and I both have stalkers, Luke may be feeling a bit jealous about that. They're not exactly a problem yet, either of them, but they make Mickey and the guys nervous. Rajeshara, our naga, is going to molt soon and apparently that's kind of problematic because it takes seven days and she has to eat immediately after the shedding or she might go on a rampage. Um, the two new songs we've been working on, one of them we can't decide whether it's better acoustic or plugged-in, the other is stuck because we're not sure it's ever going to be marketable. I'm personally on the side of 'to hell with marketable, it's a good song about true stuff,' but Alec and Doro are both worried that it's too out there even for our listeners." She thought a moment longer and then admitted, "Those are the problems I know about. Talk to Mark and Steve and I'm sure they'll have a whole other list."[/norah]

[William Doyle]

[will]William had unashamedly gone for every single greasy food he could find. From egg rolls and crab rangoon sitting precariously on the edge of his plate to a messy collection of different foods. In the end, it all kind of mixed together until even he couldn't tell what he'd piled his plate with. He sat at the table and calmly tore open his egg rolls to mix them in with the rest of the mess. He picked up a piece of beef with his own chopsticks and popped it into his mouth with a satisfied sound. It was spicy and sweet all at once.

He worked on his plate while she spoke, cataloguing things into different sections in his brain. "While I can't help you in the song department, my specialty is behind the scenes, I can probably help with most everything else. I can get rid of the stalkers. I'll need to talk to Rajeshara, but I can get things set up so that, whether we're on the road or in a motel or even in between, she can molt safely with enough food to avoid any rampaging." Again, taking the whole supernatural part in stride, because he didn't know what else to do with it. "You mentioned sound earlier, I'll talk to your people. And I will definitely be talking to Mark and Steve. Tomorrow, most likely."

Will hesitated only once, studied her. "You sure you don't mind if I go full genie on you again? Like I said, I can keep myself to a minimum." He liked being involved, he really did, but he would also understand if she told him to back off and stick to venues and lighting. He was not a man who did well with the whole rest and relaxation idea, it wasn't really something he understood. And he wanted to learn, to know, about the world he'd found himself in. He would inhale any piece of information he could get a hold and then he would beg for more. Will was already calculating how many days he'd give himself before he'd sink his teeth into figuring out his own secrets.[/will]

[Norah Byron]

[norah]She was honest enough to say, "Find stuff to do, have fun, help out however seems right to you. But you don't have to be my genie. You don't owe it to me, I don't expect it of you. We're...we're just a little pop band, we're playing college towns and sleeping in motels, some venues we're lucky if we have a working sound system, much less the lighting design that's supposed to be in our contracts."

"And you know what? That's okay. We're not a bigger deal than that. We don't need more. We're five teenagers from the suburbs who get to make music and get paid for it. That's enough. That's plenty. We're happy and we're paying our dues and that's okay. You don't owe us being a savior or exploiting all your contacts to make us bigger than we are or any of that. We, I, want you around because you're you. Not because of what you can do for us."[/norah]