Scene #8696: PNL: A Homely Invasion ft. Petra and Guests

Owner	Pose
Petra Soroka	§<<So even if you can't stand ruining anything for §'Lilian Rook'§, at least ruin something for someone else~ Ruin them for yourself. I know you can do it. The difference between a 'rabid animal' and a 'human being' is the selectivity and creativity of violence.§ 'It just feels... a little pathetic, still? I guess this is what Lilian means about it not being worth being angry all the time. I can't even think of ways I want to hurt them.' Petra figured something out. Usually, it's the easiest thing in the world for Petra to think of ways to hurt people for disproportionately minor slights-- she very frequently threatens to murder people for teasing her, and the threats that leave her mouth are the ones that are filtered. Retributive cruelty is Petra Soroka's default state, so it's odd that she'd have any trouble at all with this task, especially with it being whispered in her ear by the §Devil§ herself. It might just be Petra's fault, for not being properly acclimated to the unilateral autonomy granted to her by Lampport's stasis. Murder is one thing, but breaking into someone's house violates boundaries in a way Petra hasn't really adjusted to. She sort of did it at Nova Heliosanctis, but... Maybe it's those Persona kids' fault. Despite them all being around the same age, and all Elites with a similar duration of experience, it feels uncomfortably like punching down. The shift in social dynamic from 'pathetic Watch loser' to 'credible social and physical threat with a kill count who's paired with one of the best Elites in the sector' still takes her off guard sometimes. It was only a year ago that Petra had been threatened by... that... boy, whose name she can't remember, and not that Petra would ever deign to compare herself to him, but she was a homeless girl with a gun fighting a misogynist pig with Concord money. If not punching up, it was at least equal footing. It doesn't feel like that anymore, with the other Persona kids. Maybe Petra's just not that creative. Most of her bullying was done face to face; one-sided fights in locker rooms, hair-pulling and snide words. She could always go beat them up for no reason, but that wouldn't have anything to do with Exigent Serenity's coaxing. It defeats the point if they're here and moving. The point is for them to feel violated.
Petra Soroka	Petra still doesn't have a plan exactly, when she steps through the warpgate into Lampport. She brought an eclectic mix of tools, without any clear idea of which she'd use: sharp implements, a crowbar, a camera, even gasoline and a lighter in case the mood struck. She takes a deep breath in, letting that cold, smoky air flood her lungs and clear her thoughts. She slips on gloves, and heads out into the city. Petra doesn't know where Charlotte's house is, of course. Even during her efforts to befriend the two Lampport kids, she'd never managed to end up in the city itself, only hearing about events and her living situation over the radio. She does know where they attended school, before graduation. Time stop is time stop, and boundaries are boundaries. It's sort of a fun adventure, slipping around the school hallways, ducking between frozen teens, picking up keys off janitors to open doors and then returning them to their hip without a hitch. The weight of the seething disgust that's so oppressive for everyone else invigorates Petra. If They hate me, that makes me not part of them. I hope they fucking gag at the idea of what I'm doing to them. While digging through administrative files, Petra happens to look up at a calendar, lingering on the September 8th still blankly unstruck. She stares at it for a second, with the vice principle stuck on her phone in the corner of her vision, and in this grotesque imbalance of power and transgression of common decency, Petra thinks... ... I wonder how the curriculum will deal with losing a whole semester. Address acquired, from pre-graduation documentation, still dutifully available in a maze of filing cabinets. Petra squints at it, memorizes it, carefully puts it back in the folder and slides the cabinet shut. She tries to pull up a map on her phone, and, of course, it doesn't work in stasis. She sighs and resigns herself to finding a physical map, like in the stone ages. On her way out, for no reason at all, Petra lights a cigarette inside the office and blows a cloud of smoke in the woman's face. Does it count as chewing with your mouth open if she's in stopped time? It's disgusting either way.
Stanley Padgett	Welcome to Easton. It is south of Lampport. Don't ask questions. It was named after a Mr. Easton back when the steel mills and the chemical plants darkened the skies of the Midwest and the money still flowed. Unlike the rest of the city, this side of town needed no Gentrification. It needed no renovations, outside of the usual fiddling with fancy homes when you shift places to live on the rare occasions you do. Even coming up here is going to make Petra... itchy. This is all Old Money. Money that had matured. Property as a legacy, not as a place to raise families. A place where the parks had their own amphitheatres, names on placards that matched the names on streets. Buildings with gates and decorative fences and Too Much Yard. And the Newman house? Has a neat little placard out front that marks it as the "Housmark Estate, built in 1892, the first home of-" The rest is really... unimportant. But this is where a Watch member lived? Really? In this fancy ass place? That can't be right.
Charlotte Newman	The Newman home is a two story affair, easily large enough for multiple bedrooms, offices, separate den and study. A modest pale gray with white trim, a big white garage door that's closed, no car in the driveway, and no sign that anyone is home. Even accounting for stopped time, nobody was here when it happened and whoever could have returned clearly isn't there now. An expansive yard hemmed in by a perfectly manicured hedge and wrought-iron fence, a brickwork path to the front door and a separate driveway with its own gate; though there's no sign that a car has been parked there for some time, nor is the garage door itself open. Each window shows a rather well-to-do home inside, finely decorated and furnished. Lots of books and bookshelves, plush chairs and couches. What must be the den has a huge entertainment center visible from the window. Even behind the front door, through the windows, it's clearly a nice tile-floored atrium with a chandelier and everything, central spiral stairs to the second story. Charlotte wasn't particularly shy about trying to do things for people she was trying to be friendly with. It's clear from this house and the surrounding neighborhood that she must have come from money. There's a security company placard in one of the front windows, as if that matters when time itself is frozen. Would the system ever trigger in the first place if the door is simply closed before time resumes?
Petra Soroka	Petra does very strongly notice the neighborhood, but it's not exactly with discomfort. The corporate-perfect gated suburbs of San Antonio were Petra's home for the first decade of her life-- or, her parents' home, at least. Manicured lawns and McMansions are more familiar than they are imposing, especially when her scale for 'Old Money' is so dramatically altered by weekly-or-more visits to Lilian's ancient manor. So, being a former Watch member, and a former resident of a moderately-wealthy-but-ultimately-constrained-by-American-architectural-and-historical-limitations family home, nothing rings odd to Petra so far. Hell-- Remee's home was a lot more threatening. Petra pauses outside and stares at the facade of the building, replaying the fate of Remee's childhood home in her mind. A nuclear bomb would be too much. She wouldn't even know how to get one like Liza does. And besides, what would Brick say if Petra detonated a second nuclear bomb in an urban center. She discards the idea. The urge to glance around the street and check if anyone's watching her is overwhelming, for a second. The feeling of skulking around in this decent neighborhood, pressingly unwelcome on the sidewalk pressed between flat green lawns, is suffocating. Mom always warned me about looking like a hooligan. She resists the urge to look. It wouldn't matter either way; there's no one to see her shifty hesitation, but even giving credence to the feeling is more than she's willing to allow. Instead, restless and overeager, she walks right up to the house, pulls out her revolver, and whips it into the window. Petra puts her hand on the frame, ready to hop in like a proper criminal, and then stares at the result of her work in bemusement. All the glass shards stopped only inches through the air. She can't get in without lacerating herself on all of them. Instead, Petra sighs, pulls out her lockpicking set with the intent to actually use it for the first time in six months, and opens the front door.
Stanley Padgett	This is the Lockpicking Lawyer and what I have for you today is a standard Yale Lock on a standard security door framework. The lock isn't any different than something we might be used to, so I've decided to ramp up the novelty by placing the lock in a temporal distortion so the pins behave a little... strangely. Let's dive right in. So yeah it's going to open and it's going to take longer than usual, but §You've got all the time in the world to get it right, don't you?§ yeah you do The lock opens, and the door with it. And... Yeah, this is a rich family's house. The foyer has all the usual accoutremonts that you'd want, fancy chairs and artwork and a couple of pillars and a very fancy staircase and it's all done in the standard sort of late 19th Century construction/middle 20th century renovation style you get in the Old Money places in the Midwest. People who had Lots of Money in the Old Days but had that money dry up. That said, it's a little weird. The east side of the foyer into the kitchen and parlor and dining room seems to have a lot more going on, than anything on the west side of the house which now has a smashed window. There's signs of life in the east side. The normal Detritus of Teenagers. Coats on hooks. Recycling that needed to go out in the kitchen. A set of school bags on the table in the parlor. Stanley had graduated, but was still crashing here and still using his school gear. His fuckup of a father had cut him off, after all. Entry to the rest of the house seems to be... there. But there's a lot more going on in the east side. Don't you think it's rude to poke your nose into other people's business? is what the west side of the house yells.
Charlotte Newman	There are pictures on the walls but there's something off about them. There's a few on the walls and some perched on tables or shelves, naturally, but a large number of the frames are just-- empty, or still have the fair use photo that was in the frame at the store. What frames actually are occupied contain just pictures of Charlotte and her friends. Girls she clearly knew at school, the costume party or the school dance, this one is seems to be of the Silver Springs junior girl's lacrosse team. There's a selfie of Charlotte and Stanley together with a... smudge, or something, blotting out the third seat and making the composition lopsided. A photo of Charlotte with a mousey brunette at a Reversal game get-together in a coffee shop. Wide-angle pictures of Lampport-- of the Reverse side of Lampport. Interesting trees and flowering cherries and rosebushes. Nothing in any frame identifies the people who brought this girl into the world. No wedding photos, no family photos, nothing. There are places where those could have gone, but those frames are devoid of anything other than white cardboard.
Petra Soroka	A couple weeks ago, in a fit of productivity and self-care, Petra went out and bought a little plastic tub to store recycling in by the door. She decorated it with washi tape and stickers, making it a little spot of cheer in her apartment, so that her attention would be drawn to it, tricking her into regularly taking it out. Whatever people's opinions about Petra's cleanliness may be, formed from glimpses into the terrible depressive miasma that filled the Kana's cockpit and remaining unchanged in apathy ever since, she at least makes efforts to tidy up. All of this is only to lead to Petra's reaction at the sight of the clutter in Charlotte's home. Briefly forgetting that she has a can of gasoline stored with her mirror so that she can commit arson, Petra huffs at the sight of the recycling. She takes a few steps over, as if planning on cleaning it up, before stopping. Maybe those regular visits to Lilian's manor were having another effect on her psyche, too. "You know, they've had all this time to clean up the place while time's stopped. It's not going to get dirtier. Why not take advantage of it?" To make up for her accidentally-sociallly-positive thoughts, Petra performs a small transgression while considering her larger ones. Pulling another cigarette out of her pocket, she lights it and exhales, the stream of grey stench spreading through the air before halting into a static cloud. Inside the house. The smell will never go away, ha. The empty side of the house doesn't immediately interest her, since her goal lies in messing with their belongings, but the photographs do draw her attention. Petra leans in to squint at one of the stock photo frames, analyzing it for a second before realizing her critical tactical error. Breathing out an opaque substance means she has to hold her breath when closely investigating anything, or it'll be shrouded from her vision after a exhalation or two. "... Stock photos on the wall? Empty frames? No fucking shit. She really is a chatbot." Petra snickers at the photo of Charlotte with the brunette girl. A fucking gacha game meetup in person. It's so profoundly pathetic, as an activity to build a personal friendship off of, that Petra feels bubbling condescension towards the photo meant to commemorate it. She pulls out her lighter from her bomber jacket pocket, spinning it between her fingers while looking across the wall of half-important photos. A good place to start. Or-- not start, not just yet. Petra clicks the lighter shut, and pulls out the camera instead. Each photo is carefully aligned within the sight, and replicated with a snap of the shutter. Even though Petra won't be inclined to ever return these photos to Charlotte, the idea of eliminating them from existence is much more uncomfortable than the idea of committing arson, as if the records of the events are the only proof they ever happened. Then she holds her lighter beneath each of them, letting the flame crawl halfway up each picture before stopping. The rest will catch within minutes of time restarting in the city. Then, the haze of frozen smoke uncomfortably itchy in the air, Petra squints at the rest of the kids' belongings. Should I just... trash stuff? That always makes people in true crime freak out. Even if I don't take anything. After seeing those blank pictures, though, Petra shoots a reconsidering glance at the empty part of the house. The massive blank spots in the domesticity of the home makes Charlotte stand out as being more significant, which is weird enough in Petra's mind that she feels like she has to investigate. What's on that side of the house?
Stanley Padgett	The pictures crisp easy enough. Nothing eldritch jumps out to stop Petra from petty arson. All of this will burn. But the... staleness of all those other pictures... yeah. When Petra goes to try and open the door to the west parlor though, it's... there's a hesitation there. Something tactile and yet not. If not for the tangled mess of Petra's mind she barely would have noticed the pronounced Are you sure you want to open this door? mental prompt that defaults to No and then pushes you away from it. So is she sure she wants to open that door?
Charlotte Newman	The pictures burn with no regard to Petra's efforts to tastefully preserve them with her own camera, and with them all those times Charlotte earnestly talked about memories being important. Nothing out of the ordinary happens. They freeze a second or two after being released and will finish up when things start moving again. Whatever guilt there theoretically might have been in that smoke is easily suppressed by the acrid stench of tobacco. Onward and forward.
Petra Soroka	When Petra reaches for the doorknob, her hand spasms with a sudden, unpleasant itch. She squeezes it into a fist, rubs it absentmindedly, and stares at the door. Is that... a defense, that Charlotte put up? In just half of her own house? (Assuming magical traps and location-based deterrents are lurking in every exploratory door is, yet again, another habit built up by Lilian's manor). Whatever is behind this door is something important, Petra reasons, and because she's here specifically in an effort to selfishly intrude and defile the things that they find important, she absolutely has to check it out. She puts her hand on the knob again, other hand tensed and half-poised to grab the spear off her back, and opens the door.
Stanley Padgett	That's all, actually. Just a really strong mental aversion... something. No traps, no nothing, to keep Petra out. And on the other side? It's... Have you ever seen an AirBNB that hasn't been rented in a while? Or been in a house that's been on the market for a while? And the realtor's got it all dressed up real nice for sale? That's this entire half of the house. Room after room. The main living room. The servant's kitchen. The master bath. The master bedroom. The garage. The office that now has a busted window. All of it pristine and Photo Friendly and empty and- It's all clean. And not dusty. Something or someone has been maintaining all of this space and not using it.
Stanley Padgett	The office has a bunch of book that matches someone who is a psychiatrist with a dash of passion for outdoorsy stuff. The main living room has a collection of DVDs and VHS tapes that match someone who has a fondness for police procedurals and late 90s sitcoms and also action movies starring... what's that guy, the one with the face, you know the one? Who yells a lot?
Petra Soroka	One of the unexpected side effects of being in frozen time, at least unexpected for Petra, is how dirty everything usually looks. Like how microexpressions in pictures become ghoulish when committed to eternity on film, dust and dirt appear a thousand times more intolerable when they're not obscured by the lazy motion of linear time. Even besides the clutter of the kids' side of the house, it all radiated an uncurrent of gross, hyperaware of every disgusting flaw. Which makes this real estate magazine of a living area profoundly uncomfortable. Petra unconsciously tones herself down to 'creeping' through the house, uneasy looks around the spotless furniture without touching it. The generic array of 'motherly' and 'fatherly' interests is so stereotyped that Petra can't help but notice it and wonder if this is the set of a television show, until she recognizes some books on the shelves shared with her own dad. "No fucking way she just lives like this... what the fuck is this place? Does she come from a long line of cardboard cutouts?" Eventually, Petra gets fed up with the instinctive urge to shrink up and not make ripples in the seemingly pristine environment. If Charlotte doesn't ever go in here, maybe she won't be affected much-- but maybe whatever the hell is going on here will still end up hurting Charlotte if Petra fucks with it. Petra takes a deep breath of disinhibiting air, comes to a dead stop in the room she happens to be in (the living room), lifts a chair up over her head, and hurls it out the window, breaking it across the lawn. The rest of the room is treated similarly brutally, with torn upholstry, displaced and scattered decor, and a grenade shoved into a hole in the wall for fun. Petra swipes her hand through her hair after battering the furniture around, looking at the immobilized wreckage.
Stanley Padgett	The destruction is wrought and it is going to be so hard to clean up once this place is unstuck. Especially that grenade. Damn, really going for it. "Damn, really going for it." Directly next to Petra, slipping out of nowhere in the midst of the wreckage and the carnage is a blonde woman in a crisp blue suit, and a looooong single braid down her back. "If you go upstairs, you could probably put one of those under the bed too. That will really complete the set." The woman prods the grenade in the wall, and then produces a second grenade just like it, which she holds out to Petra.
Petra Soroka	Petra flips around from admiring her handiwork the moment the voice speaks up. Instincts have gradually been rewired from reaching into her pocket for her gun, instead swinging Pillar of Creation off her back to flash the point of the spear in between herself and the source before she's finished talking. Half-exhaled potential energy wobbles as Petra actually takes in the presence of the other woman moving in stasis, uncertainly following her with the speartip as she walks around the room. Petra squints at her, either in mistrust, or like she's trying to figure something out. "Who the fuck are you? Are you... what are they called? Tyrant? Like that guy Stanley murdered in NovaTech?" Petra doesn't take the grenade just yet, both hands still on her spear. Her expression twists, looking down at the offered explosive, then back up at the woman when she suddenly exclaims, taking a hand off the spear to snap in realization. "That's where I know you from! You're the fucking, video game mascot! Is this what you're like in lore? Encouraging blowing up people's houses? Should I be playing the game?" "... This isn't the first time, I remember once when they had someone from their game at their school. Otherwise-- I'd just guess you're a cosplayer or something. What's your deal?"
Stanley Padgett	"See, I get that comparison, and it might be a fair one, but no, no I am not a Tyrant. Far from it. And far from whatever monster NovaTech cooked up here in the Real World." She primly dusts her uniform, and smiles. "My name is Delilah. I am the Attendant for the Velvet Room. That NovaTech decided to use my likeness for their game is purely coincidental, I am sure." She pauses a moment, and for the first time, Petra will be able to see a Strange Blue Bus idling in the grass, parked over the top of the chair that she vented out through the glass. "I noticed some unusual activity here, and I thought that perhaps one of my Guests was here to gather things. But, no, it is you instead. Stanley's friend Petra yes?" Delilah, seeing that Petra isn't about to take the grenade, spirits it away again, and sits down. Immediately under her bottom is the chair that Petra just hucked out the window, and she sits with grace and poise. There's a moment of consideration, before she waves a hand to Petra, and another chair appears. Actually it forcefully thwocks into existence with a rude popping of displaced air/time/causality. And right along with it? A tray of wrapped Korean moon pies, and several cans of coffee. The coffee is hot, and freshly so.
Petra Soroka	"Oh. The Velvet Room." Petra thinks for a second. "That's where they go to have tantrums after getting mad in the radio." It comes out, and was meant, deeply condescending, but Petra reflects back on the time period where she was getting mad in the radio very frequently, and the unbidden thought that she very much would've liked to have a safe room to have tantrums in comes to mind. "Huh? I'm not Stanley's-- Padgett's friend. The dude oozes disgust at me every time I'm around him. The only reason I don't beat his shit in is because I know he helped Lilian before." Petra flinches at the chair, staying standing. The snacks and invitation for polite conversation are both tentatively ignored for now, though Petra shifts the spear to a one-handed grip to lean on it. "Look, I'm just going to trash Newman's house and then go. If you don't want me to do that, then I'll do it through you. I don't really know what else we have to talk about."
Stanley Padgett	"It is more than that, but sometimes people need a place to rest and rejuvenate and comport themselves. And frankly, Stanley has ended up there more often after being injured than having a tiff." Delilah's smile is gently smug, though for what reason it's hard to say. "Oh, go right ahead, if you are doing that. I dare say the illusion of things is going to falter very soon. My Guests seem to have had the pieces of the puzzle laid out for them and the Game I am bound by is coming unravelled, thanks to you and the others." She unwraps a moon pie herself, and takes a bite, and makes a face. A surprised face. "You have very good taste, Miss Petra." A moment to chew, and swallow primly. "And if you were not Stanley's friend, or if he did not seem to think of you in that manner, I would not even be giving you the time of day. I would have simply evicted you from the premises." Delilah looks up at the room in general and frowns. "Even if Miss Rook is making things difficult through no fault of her own. If you see her, can you convey that I hope she can collect herself in a safe manner? Missing this part of her has to be terribly uncomfortable."
Petra Soroka	"... and the Game I am bound by is coming unravelled, ..." Petra squints, bewildered. "I thought you said it was a coincidence. That the Reversal mascot looks like you." "And if you were not Stanley's friend, or if he did not seem to think of you in that manner, I would not even be giving you the time of day." Upset by this, for some reason, Petra emphasizes her next words with an irritated tap of her spear against the floor. "He literally said I was the one person he wouldn't bother trying to befriend. That I was the absolute least pleasant person he'd ever met, and that I was nothing but hostile to him, and I wasn't worth his time. He's right about all of it but the last part." Petra flicks her still-lit cigarette onto the ground. It stops just below her knee. "Anyways, I'm going to... what's something he thinks is important. All that clothing and hair dye he plays around with? Some complex with his appearance, I guess. I'll go ruin that, then trash whatever else of Newman's I can find, and maybe the next grenade I hide in here will actually have the pin pulled." "He won't think of me as a friend after that." The stale, bodily-poison filled air tinged with Exigent Serenity's presence is like a drug, even after all this time spent in it. Petra leans down to the table to take a moon cake without sitting, dismissively taking a bite before continuing with a hard edge of uninhibited disdain. "Or maybe he's such a pussy that he'll be fine with that. But I know it'll only take him hearing one conversation between Lilian and me before he wants nothing to do with me again, haha." "Missing this part of her has to be terribly uncomfortable." "Is it missing? I don't think so. Even this entire city isn't big enough to hold a piece of Lilian away from her. She can still stop time here, anyways." Petra tosses the wrapper onto the ground, frozen right beside the cigarette. "It's just an inappriopriately pushy and invasive fan Q&A where Exigent Serenity is present. Lilian only loses anything from it when they all come in and fuck it up." Finally done with the conversation and with a goal set in her mind, Petra rocks back on her boot soles, then twists around to start walking away. The hand not holding the spear raises up in a lazy wave goodbye. "Thanks for the snack. I'm going to keep ruining this house, and if you want to evict me for that, I'm not going to let you." "If you're really those kids' handler or whatever, then I can really easily imagine a world where I would've gotten to know you. I'd rather die than live in it. No offense."