1011/A little late for work

A little late for work
Date of Scene:	13 June 2017
Location:	Unknown
Synopsis:	After a long absence from the fold, Claire Voyant (aka Black Widow) has return to fulfill her duties her satanic overlord.
Cast of Characters:	Lucifer, 1022

---

Lucifer has posed:
The call began as soon as Claire had awoken from her prolonged sleep. It was a quiet call-- a low murmur in her ear, particularly during the darkest hours of the night. A whispered summons, one that grew steadily more insistent as the days rolled on.

The Master, summoning Claire to labor again.

But instead of burning eyes and a voice gravelling with the sound of breaking bones and human screws, it was a /tug/ on her senses. Summoning her. One should could follow unerringly across time and space, even with her eyes shut.

Bringing her to Club Lux.

The Club sits at the basement level of an upscale, unmarked urban hotel building. To the casual eye it's no different than any other of a number of such brick and stone edifaces, the glowing candle on the basement door lacking any other ornamentation or signage.

To Claire, however, the /presence/ of her master overrides all other concerns-- and perhaps it is her sensitivity to the dark mystical arts that she sees clearly past the glamours and illusions to witness the pocket dimension of Lucifer's demesne here on Earth.

Down the stairs, into the club, and no one stops her or interdicts her. Nothing is in her path. The music in the dance floor is a low thundering boom, a heartbeat of basso reverberation.

The bartender looks up and smiles at Claire when she approaches.

"Welcome to Lux," he remarks. "What can I get you?" he inquires.

Claire Voyant (1022) has posed:
In the all-too-brief span of time since Claire's return to the realm of consciousness, she has managed to direct a small fortune in taxpayer funds towards replacing a wardrobe and - rather more surprisingly - has, through some means, located the one and only import shop on the East Coast that still carries a brand of French cigarettes the rest of the world forgot about sometime around 1947.
    And so it is that she enters Club Lux, attired in leather and vinyl and netting, with an unlit cigarette held between the fore and middle fingers of her right hand, navigating around chairs and tables to take a seat at the bar before so much as a word is spoken in her direction.
    "They've made it too bright out there," are her first words to Satan after an absence of nearly a century. "FAR too bright. And they'll not let you smoke anywhere, anymore, not even out of doors" she says, slipping off a pair of large, blackout-dark sunglasses with round lenses and a thick, black plastic frame.
    She places the cigarette between her lips, the tip smoldering to life with a lingering wisp of sulfur, and takes a deep draw.
    "And, with a thin brow arched high, she says, "And the dark lord is tending bar."

Lucifer has posed:
"What, you think you're the only one with hobbies?" In an eyeblink, the illusory visage ripples away. He had been a lean, dusky-skinned fellow with a long jaw and hazel eyes. It melts into nothing, and is replaced by a strapping fellow well over six feet tall wearing a pinstriped black suit and white undershirt, with no tie. Wings ripple from his back as if unbound abruptly, glowing with their own inner light.

The shadows in the bar vanish. A plant nearby perks up a little. The air even /smells/ cleaner-- raw, fresh tobacco mingling with the scent of clean cotton and a gentle coastal breeze.

Gloriously blue eyes focus on Claire's face. "Welcome back to the fold, Claire Voyant," he remarks, his voice carrying a mellifluous echo. "You've been asleep a long time. Gin and tonic?" he offers, reaching under the bar.

Claire's cigarette smoke rises skywards and freezes in midair, suspended in stillness. Lux has stopped. /Time/ has stopped-- except for the fallen archangel and his hellhound.

Claire Voyant (1022) has posed:
    "Certainly."

    She waits; she takes a slight, slow slip of it, then sets her glass atop the bar and lightly traces the tip of her pinky finger along the rim.

    "I do hope you're not looking to ascribe any blame to me for that one. They even managed to subdue the one the angels sent back down, the suicide who never blinks. AND the robots."

    Claire gives a recalcitrant little sniff.

    "I've never tried to back out. I am yours, as I have been since nineteen twenty-eight and shall be until the stars go out."

    She takes another drag; she rolls the cigarette between her fingers, and tilts her chin up to exhale frozen smoke through pursed, darkly painted lips.

Lucifer has posed:
"I liked the guy with the smiles," Lucifer agrees, whipping up a gin and tonic with practiced ease. He's pretty good at it. Small surprise there. It slides across the bar towards Claire, stopping neatly in front of her.

There's a flutter of wings and Lucifer is next to her at the bar, sitting on a barstool with one leg crossed over the other at the knee. "I never once doubted you, Claire," Lucifer says, with all the honest sympathy only an archangel can muster. "You've been loyal to a fault. I watched you slumber for most of a century," he tells her. "Safe and undisturbed in that ancient cell."

A smile crosses his face, and it's warm enough that even the bleak ice around Claire's heart might melt a little. The light of creation itself behind his expression. "I figured you could use the nap."

He picks up an empty shotglass and stares at it until bourbon appears, then takes a sip of the liquor.

"So you're not adjusting well to this new timeframe," he remarks, sympathetically. "It's a bit of a culture shock. Earth has changed more profoundly in the last century than in the last thousand years."

Claire Voyant (1022) has posed:
    "I suppose."

    For a moment Claire is silent, lifting the glass back to her lips and tilting it; she sets it, emptied, onto the bar and with a flick of her nail against the filter of her cigarette makes it into an impromptu ashtray.

    "The rest, the others, fare worse. They had lives, careers, children - they had attachments which I, thankfully, did not."

    Her lips purse, in clear distaste.
    "It's so damn bright. And all the lighting is white, now, and everyone has a phone that's a computer that's a camera that's a tele-vision. They think they know everything, and understand nothing at all."

    Another drag, deep enough that her breasts push against the top of her corset and that her exhale, when it comes, is a veritable gust.

    "On the plus," she offers, "It must surely be the best of times for you. They don't even think you're real, anymore."

    A moment's pause; she gestures towards herself. "And they finally learned how to dress."

Lucifer has posed:
"Business has been booming," Lucifer agrees, candidly. A smile tugs at his face at Claire's effortless immmodesty. "But to be honest I have almost nothing to do with it." He shrugs at Claire's look. "Oh, I-- I meddle here and there. A little voice in the right place. An untied shoelace at the right time. Pushing people into a corner. But really this is a world with such immense and instant gratification that even with the population boom, fewer people are willing to deal with me for their mortal soul. I'm just pushing dominos over and watching humanity do... well, what I expected them to do," he says, immaculate fingernails dancing over the lacquer of the bar's surface.

"I set my plans in motion when humanity was scratching pictures of their dicks on clay tablets. It's an exciting time," he says, chuckling. "If they can just make it another century or two, the odds of a mass extinction will drop pretty precipitously. Even I can't see the paths to all your possible futures."

"But, I will agree that it's at least refreshing to see humanity letting go some of their more puritan inhibitions. Cheers," he remarks, toasting her with a little tilt of his wrist and throwing back his drink. Another appears before the first hits the bartop.

Claire Voyant (1022) has posed:
    "Still," she says. "I thought it would look different.

    "The future, I mean.

    "I thought the Bauhaus, the Cubists and the Futurists would have built a world where every building were as grand as the Perret's Theatre des Champs-Elysees.

    "The others - they expected their jetpacks and their flying cars, their shining cities on the moon where no one knows the sting of poverty.

    "But they were children of the era. Everything would work out right, they were certain. But I? I merely wanted a world more pleasant to look at."

Claire Voyant (1022) has posed:
    Her lip curls into a sneer.

    "Boxes," she says, with a glance over her shoulder. "Hmph. They turned everything into a box. Just boxes of different sizes. At least Lang made his dystopias stylish."

Lucifer has posed:
"The beauty of unfettered capitalism," Lucifer remarks, his tone a mild counterpoint to Claire's angry disappointment. "The seeds were planted with Rockefeller and Carnegie, you know. Men with enough money to make Croesus green with envy. Not merely a wealth inflated over time, but -wealth-, the kind of money that buys government."

"Capitalism brought perfect efficiency and shareholders and stock markets. The drive to create profit margins instead of creating something good." His wings flutter once. "Something meaningful."

"The fact is, the human creative spirit wasn't killed by the Germans or nationalism or tribalism or religion, my dear hellhound. It was killed by efficiency. There's no more efficient way to organize a city than with cubes."

"So the human spirit dies by a thousand strokes at a three percent annual return on investment."

Claire Voyant (1022) has posed:
    "It's funny," is what Claire adds to this.

    "During the war, they were so afraid of the Russians. Even while we were over there, even while we were linking forces together," she says as she leans against the bar, elbow on its surface, arm crooked, cigarette held towards the heavens, "They were planning the next one, how to best use their doomsday weapons and their mystery men.

    "But it never really came, did it? They fought little wars, but never the big one. They built up their agencies, to throw against one another. But in the end the Russians collapsed inward, and the Americans" - it is clear she feels no particular allegiance to her place of birth, even that she in no meaningful way now views herself as human - "The Americans seem to have collapsed outwards, the body giving way to the tumor that grew within it."

    She flicks her cigarette again.

    "But they stopped lynching people. That's SOMEthing."

Lucifer has posed:
"It is something," Lucifer agrees, nodding along. "Small... stilted progress. In a few countries," he says, fingers flicking through the air. "Most of the rest of the world lurches from disaster to disaster, uncertainty on the horizon every step of the way."

"But, as I said-- business is down, but not out," he assures Claire. "You'll be busy most nights. Lots of people with a bill come due are out there. And you might find Lux a comfortable place to relax," he says, lifting his chin to the frozen dance floor. Time flickers back into proper rhythm, but weirdly he and Claire still seem separated from the rest of reality as the bass drops on the dance floor and a seething mass of humanity roils and twists and curls.

"A safe harbor for the wretches of the world. Hotel upstairs, recreation, a restaurant. Better than resting at the local women's home," he informs her, smiling again a little wryly. "Staring at the ceiling and waiting for daylight to arrive."