Blood of The Rose

Chapter 15: On The Hunt

Santa Monica

Main Street

Ruby stood momentarily in the middle of the street, indecisive as to her next actions. She'd already determined she wouldn't be able to attend to the Ocean House tonight. Perhaps, instead, she could tie up a few loose ends…

With a determined nod, and a hurried skip out of the way of an impatient automobile, she headed across from The Asylum and into the brightly-lit, retro-style diner.

So let's see about some clues about Lily's whereabouts… And if I'm lucky, I can finish up in time to go visit Kilpatrick's.

The garishly-colored restaurant was rather dingy and worn but certainly clean enough. Red booths lined the perimeter of the narrow diner, with a small waiting area to the left and a cash register ahead of her, connected to the long counter-top seating area.

Regarding her with a curious gaze from behind the register was an older woman in a waitress' uniform and sporting a steel grey bun and horn-rimmed glasses. Behind the counter was a beefy-looking chef tending the stovetop for the few patrons in attendance.

As her gaze scanned the diner, she noticed bathrooms off to the far right, and on the other side of her an odd-looking man who was standing in the waiting area, seemingly staring off into the distance listlessly. He wore jeans and a grey tank top, with fingerless gloves on his hands and a closely-cropped mane of bright red hair. She wasn't an expert at this yet by any means, but the stranger was definitely giving off the vampire vibe. Ruby decided to approach him first.

As soon as she turned towards him, his focus snapped onto her like some sort of predator, giving her chills. Disinterestedly, he spoke up first in a low monotone. "Something I can help you with?"

Okay, think of something witty, strike up a conversation..."Uh… chilly out there tonight." Oh, yeah, that worked, brilliant as usual, Ruby you social armadillo.

"I... guess," he frowned.

Fine, getting right to the point, then. "You seem preoccupied… is everything okay?"

"I don't see how that's any business of yours." His entire stance was now screaming cautious, defensive even.

Yeah, let's not poke the prickly vampire any longer… "Sorry, um, didn't mean to intrude."

He gave her a scowl before staring back off into the distance once more. "Goodbye, then."

Sighing, Ruby headed over towards the waitress next. Now that she was closer, she noticed the older woman had a tag that read Doris. Over the smacking of her gum, she spoke up with the voice of a pack-a-day smoker.

"What'll it be, honey?"

Ruby cleared her throat, hoping this conversation, at least, would go a little better. "You ever see any pale, kind of strange types in here, late at night?"

Doris frowned at her slightly. "Is that a trick question?"

The fledgling shook her head, red-tipped bangs swaying as she tried another tack. "Um… You see any girls hanging out here… pale girls, maybe?"

"Pale girls? Oh, like the Fitzsimmons albino? Yeah, she hasn't been here in ages."

"No, sorry... " The brunette groaned slightly. Why didn't I think of a better way to go about this? "Okay, how about a couple in here maybe a few months ago, surfer guy, pretty girl?"

Doris plastered a forced smile on her face as she answered with heavy sarcasm. "Hmm… let me think. Oh, yeah, about four dozen a week. Look, honey, you gonna order something or just ask me questions all night?"

"Sure, yeah, it's just… um…" She let out a despondent sigh. "I'm trying to help someone out. Can I ask you just one more thing? Please?" Ruby tried once more for her most winning smile, careful not to let her fangs poke out past her lips. Please work, please work, please work...

"Yeah, okay, sure," Doris sighed. "Why not, it's slow tonight."

"Great, thanks!" Let's try this, then... "Have you ever heard the term... 'thin-blood'?"

"Thin blood? Sounds familiar… is that one of those tropical diseases?"

"Try to remember, please…" Ruby clasped her hands under her chin, almost prepared to break out the puppy-dog eyes. Though after dealing with Knox the whole effect was pretty much ruined for her.

"Hmm… I know I've heard that before." Doris tapped her nails on the counter, brow furrowed in thought.

"Um… Maybe a kind of strange, pretty girl said something about it, recently?"

For whatever reason, that seemed to work, or at least jog the older woman's memory. "Ohhh, that girl. Nice girl. First decent human being I've seen in here for years - not like all the junkies and crazies I normally see. Yeah, I remember her." Doris nodded firmly. "Yeah… weird. She left a tip but she didn't order a thing."

Okay, this is promising so far...

Doris sighed heavily. "Yeah, she looked so hungry, too. Just sat there all night with a full glass of water in front of her, talkin' about this and that. She seemed lonely, a little scared, so I let her stay in the booth until we closed. She left some stuff here."

"Really?" Ruby prompted excitedly, trying very hard not to jump up and down. "Like, what kind of stuff?"

"Well, you seem to know her." Doris shrugged as she reached down behind the counter. "Why don't you give it back to her if you run into her?"

"Thanks so much, I'll be sure to do that!" the brunette cheered, eagerly accepting the nondescript, small leather handbag. She took it over towards a booth and sat down, quickly emptying it out. Inside she found a color photo of a girl in a tie-dye shirt, standing on a beach. Ruby immediately recognized it as the same beach where she'd talked to E. On the back of the photo was written, 'August 03, Santa Monica, Lily'. Kinda odd for her to have a photo of just herself in her own purse, but whatever. There wasn't any sort of wallet, but it did contain few loose coins and an empty pack of gum. Among some other more mundane slips of paper was a receipt for a Bail Bond, specifically for one Rolf Toten.

Ruby hummed to herself thoughtfully as she scooped the items back into the purse. Looks like I really oughta pay Kilpatrick a visit after all.

Standing once more, she stopped by the waitress on the way out to ask one more question. "Hey, sorry to bother you again, but can you tell me where Kilpatrick's is?"

"Yeah, sure honey," she smiled. "It's right around the corner from here, take a left out of the diner, can't miss it."

"Okay, thanks again, Doris!"

Exiting the diner, the fledgling headed around the corner and past a crazy-looking man holding a sign proclaiming the coming apocalypse. Sure enough, though, right across the street and next to the overpass was a small shop with the Bail Bonds sign lit up over the door. She passed a fenced off junkyard after crossing the street to avoid the crazy.

"The sewers are all muddied with a thousand lowly suicides!" the Doomsayer proclaimed loudly.

The brunette glanced at him quickly, careful not to make eye contact. He bore a long, matted grey beard, a ratty overcoat and manic eyes that peered out from under a mangy red hat. The disheveled man awarded Ruby with a sneer as she hurried across the street to avoid him.

"Hurry on your way to the apocalypse…" he called after her roughly.

She managed to reach the door as the crazed man raised his voice, pacing her on the other side of the street. "Always room for heathens in the cold and oily pits of the damned!"

Ruby rolled her eyes as she slipped inside. Why do I always manage to attract the crazies?

The fledgling paused at the entrance to the ramshackle large one-room office. Outdated wood paneling, dirty and torn carpeting, and the smell of cheap cigars hit her in the face, all of it like from a scene in an old 70's sitcom. Lining the walls were a number of cheap plastic chairs, along with filing cabinets and boxes of unidentifiable material, and a pair of card tables with stale pizza and donuts. Resting precariously on the edge of the last table was a coffee maker that didn't seem to have been used in ages, maybe even before her teenaged years if the encrusted black dredge at the bottom of the pot was any indication.

Against the far wall was another card table, this one with a computer of dubious lineage set up atop it. Closer to the door, however, was an actual desk with a more recent desktop perched among piles of papers. Squatted on a felt-backed swivel chair was an overweight man in a loud red-patterned shit, wearing sunglasses indoors and sporting a very bad haircut many decades out of style. From the unnatural way his hair sat on his head, Ruby had the sneaking suspicion that it was actually a very bad toupee.

The diminutive brunette struggled mightily to keep a straight face as he swiveled around in his chair and lurched to his feet with a greasy smile.

Holy pink fairy chipmunks!

"Welcome to Kilpatrick 24-Hour Bail Bonds," he stated in a smarmy voice. He was loud enough to drown out the radio playing in the background, from the sounds of it a talk show with a woman speaking in low, sultry tones. "My name's Arthur Kilpatrick. How can I help you?"

As if his overall appearance and the office itself wasn't overwhelming enough in its ludicrousness, Ruby was struck almost speechless by the fuzzy little caterpillar mustache, matched in its ridiculousness only by the pitiful little soul patch clinging stubbornly to life just below his bottom lip. She upped her valiant effort to maintain a straight face.

"Can I just… take a peek at the, y'know…?" She indicated with an extended index finger the computer at the rear with a crude handwritten sign stapled to the paneling overhead.

"Oh, the Krimeputer? Yeah, yeah, sure, go ahead, honey."

Shaking with suppressed laughter, Ruby passed the corpulent Kilpatrick and walked to the back of the room to sit in a squeaky chair in front of the dusty old CRT terminal. Glowing green text greeted her with incongruous cheer.

Kilpatrick's Krimeputer

Begin Your Search

"Alright, then," she murmured. "Let's look you up first, mystery guy…" She slid out the driver's license Knox had given her and sat it on the keyboard. Typing in 'crumb, virgil', she was rewarded with an immediate hit. Ruby idly noted that the listed bond was written two months ago.

Two Counts Public Disturbance - Drunk and Nudity. Case#766141.

Bond Amount: $5000. Type of Bond: Cash - paid in full.

Notes: Local. VOID: Subject's corpse identified. Being held at Medical Clinic Morgue. Authorities notifying next of kin.

"Hmm," she hummed to herself. Reading further, she also noted that the last status update was only two days ago. Yay, looks like I get to plan a trip to the morgue… Ugh.

With a resigned sigh, she slipped the license back into her pocket and typed in her next search, 'toten, rolf'. Yet again it produced immediate results, this time the bond written in August, just after the photo of Lily was taken.

Immigration. Case#663321.

Bond Amount: $15000. Type of Bond: Collateral - Car, Red Lightningbird '87 (CA Plate#GUYCONI).

Notes: Go back to Germany, pal. We don't take the Euro in these parts.

"A car, huh?" she grinned. "Likely in one of the garages here…" Finished with the two main queries she'd come there to look up, she paused with her fists clenched in her lap. Silver eyes darted around the room unnecessarily, but she still felt a bit guilty about the next search she was considering. Now that she was there, however, she couldn't pass up the opportunity.

Ruby hesitantly typed in 'xiao long, yang'. Sure enough, a result was quickly pulled up on a bond written two years ago, likely having happened shortly after her sister had gotten into the area.

Two Counts Public Disturbance - Drunk and Disorderly. Case#433219.

Bond Amount: $7500. Type of Bond: Cash - paid in full.

Notes: Bond canceled and charges withdrawn.

The fledgling chewed on her lip as she considered the screen, wincing as she caught her fang again. What did that mean? There was still no address attached, no way to find her… It looked to be a dead end as she hadn't surfaced since.

Ruby breathed out a despondent sigh, knowing that she shouldn't be looking anyway. Perhaps, when all of this was over and she was back up in LA, she could take the time to look more on her own. Secretly, of course.

While pondering her options, the brunette listened to the radio with half an ear as the woman's dulcet tones crept over the airwaves.

"Moving on, line four, what's keeping you up tonight?"

"Deb. I'm about to reveal something that... I'm putting my life on the line. But the people, the people of this city and this country and this planet, they have the right to know this, you understand?"

"What's the word, Gomez."

"This is serious. There are a lot of organizations who would do anything in their power to keep this a secret."

"I don't doubt."

"Deb, Deb, this is really serious now, can I finish? Alright. Everyone knows they've got cameras at every stop lights so the government can keep tabs on our comings and goings. But did you know that they then sold access to the databases to the Illuminati, who is been using that information to compile a list of the most frequently traveled routes and then opening new locations of their well-known chain of coffee houses in the most probable locations? And did you also know that they suppressed fusion and solar power?"

"It all makes sense now."

Ruby sighed to herself softly. Everything she'd learned about in the past few nights, all the things that do, in fact, go bump in the night, and this idiot was spouting conspiracy theories about the Illuminati of all things? Ten-to-one odds they'd be vampires, even if they did exist...

"Well they, the Illuminati, control all the world's energy, and because they monitor all of our energy so much, they can tell who is not watching television, and therefore know who is not receiving the subliminal messages, that they send to keep the sheep, putting their money in banks away from their secret headquarters, a.k.a. Wyoming."

"Amazing. Anything else that you've turned up lately?"

"As a matter of fact, and again I shouldn't be talking about this, but I believe that it's everybody's right to know that recycling is a myth. All that they do with those bottles and cans is get DNA samples from your saliva, so that they can clone you. And train your clone to assassinate you and assume your identity, should you go poking your nose into the whole global warming business."

"Thank you Gomez, I hate to interrupt this mentally stimulating conversation, but the people who keep me chained to the console at this radio station, in my underwear no less, want you to spend money on this stuff."

Ruby finally rolled her eyes as a commercial came on for some sort of local political campaign. She'd heard quite enough of the mind-numbingly farce of a talk show, and got up from her chair to head for the exit.

She paused at the desk on the way out, intending to simply thank the man for the use of his computer, but then she realized that she'd never been exposed to the whole bail bonding scene and was a little bit curious as to how the business worked.

"Um, hey, can I ask you something really quick?" she posed hesitantly, once more donning her most winsome smile. This time, however, it seemed to actually work, as Kilpatrick leaned back in his chair and regarded her pleasantly.

"Sure, honey, what is it?"

"I'm curious about, well, your business here."

"Oh yeah? Bail bondin'? What do you want to know?"

Nonplussed, Ruby glanced around the ramshackle office. "Sooo... do you run this place?"

"Yup. Sure do," he smiled, puffing out his chest proudly. Though in truth all he managed was to stick his prominent belly out further. "I'm a third-generation bondsman. Got a few employees, but I handle most every aspect of the business."

"Uh-huh." Ruby regarded him consideringly. "And… how is business these days?"

"Well, my business ain't bad, I can tell you that much. Santa Monica's gone downhill. Used to be pretty nice, I guess. We do a higher volume now than we did a few years ago, but we gotta deal with a lot more bail jumpers and crap like that."

"Cool. So, you get a lot of people who jump bail?"

"Of course," Kilpatrick grinned. "Goes with the business. Then ya sic the bounty hunter on 'em."

The brunette nodded thoughtfully. "That's got to be an interesting job." Wonder if that's a way for me to make some money? I mean, I got all these new abilities, I'm stronger and a better fighter… Maybe I could put them to use?

"You betcha. I used to do some bounty huntin' back in the day. Takes a good solid set o' brass balls - uh, pardon the expression missy - but it takes balls to be a good bounty hunter."

Ruby snickered to herself, thinking how offended Weiss would have been were she there. "Is the bounty hunter you have now any good?"

"Yep. Damn good." Ruby's spirits sank somewhat as the obese man continued. "I've got a freelance chick that works for me sometimes up in LA, but my regular guy, yeah, his name's Carson. He's great at what he does when he wants to do it. I can't seem to find him now, though. He's pissin' me off to be honest. I need him to go find someone."

The fledgling bounced on her toes in excitement. Finally something interesting! "Sooo… were you gonna send for your freelancer, or…"

Kilpatrick shrugged uncomfortably. "Well, I don't feel right cuttin' Carson loose or givin' up on him just yet - we go way back. I knew his father too. Tell ya what, since I'm stuck here, why don't you go look for him? Just real quick."

"Would there be pay involved?" Ruby asked with a wide grin, careful not to flash her fangs.

"Yeah, yeah, sure," he chuckled genially. "I'll pay ya for your time."

Ruby giggled excitedly. "Then I'm your girl!" she cheered.

"Great, great! I suppose the first place you should look is his apartment in Santa Monica Suites - apartment one, I think it is. Maybe you'll find somethin' there to let you know where he's got himself to. Here's a key card, that'll let ya in."

"I'm on it!" With a happy wave, Ruby tucked the keycard into her pocket and skipped out of the building. Not even the ranting homeless doomsayer could dampen her mood.

Okay, finally something to do that doesn't concern vampires!

It wasn't much, but she had a good feeling about it. And maybe, then, Kilpatrick could give a chance to a scrawny teenaged girl looking for a job, even freelancing like whoever he had up in LA.

Confident thoughts, confident thoughts...

A/N: I think we all have a little bit of social armadillo in us…

So, reviewer SixPerfections brought up the hope that I'm not going to hit up every single sidequest, and I most certainly am not, just the ones I feel are important. And yes, these two (the Thin-Bloods and the Muddy questlines) are important for different reasons, which will become clearer later. But I'm going to be skipping a lot of them; we can't have poor Rubes leveling up too fast now, can we?

I need to address something from the last chapter, namely a translated Mandarin curse I'd used as an homage back to my all-time favorite show, Firefly. At least one reader was offended by the choice of words, and to her and anyone else who felt the same, I apologize profusely. Not that you were offended, but that I had offended any of you. I went back and changed it, in retrospect using the english translation out of context like that was more than a bit tasteless.

One more thing I need to bring up, schedule-wise. I've reached the point where I need to do some more transcribing of my playthrough, but they're a bit out of order, meaning I did a sidequest in the game that I wanted to save for later in the story. So I need to get through a bit before I can actually do the next chapter. Adding to that, I really need to keep Ember Legacy on track, as each chapter there is easily two to three times the length of one of these… So I might need to skip at least a week to get everything in order. We shall see, I don't have another chapter lined up yet but I might get one done over the weekend if I can get into the transcribing.

Props to my very patient Beta and collaborator, Live to anger the World, and all of you awesome readers and reviewers! Sharkdude5, djjohns94, noone297, kaiju62, zerosabers, SkyDD, thanks for the love, and apologies for those I didn't get to reply to. Life just keeps kicking my ass...

Stay shiny!