roadrunnermuses | meme } { open rp post

"Trust me. I'm well aware of what he was." He was his meatsuit once. It was fun. "But according to most records, Ba'al was just another name for him. He had a ton of titles, but I was sure that that was one of them, not a separate demon entirely."

Artemis tapped her finger against the page, disappearing into that place that only she could see for a moment. She might have stayed there for a very long time, had the door to the library not opened suddenly.

A young woman, probably no older than twenty, but dressed like a thirty-something turning tricks in Atlantic City, walked in, carrying a tea tray and a file folder under her arm. She didn't seem fazed by Artemis staring off into space. She just smirked, setting the tray down. "Coffee for the warm-blooded," she said, giving Sam a wink, "and the report on the dead puppy."

The woman snapped her fingers once in Artemis' face. Artemis snapped out of her trance, snatching the file from her. "That will be all for now, Tima," she said.

"Whatever. I'll be in the kitchen. Give a shout if you want something to eat, pretty boy. It's taco night."

Sam just stares, watching in the trance for the moment before the door opens, and his eyebrows go up at the mention of Taco Night. "I'll ... keep that in mind."

But for now, he's just going to go for the file folder to see if he can get a look at what they were looking into.

Artemis gave a faint grunt and a nod to Fatima as she departed. Just as the door closed behind her, Artemis mumbled, "And change out of that dress."

But it was probably too late.

Folding her arms, she leaned against the table, discretely taking the weight off of her bad leg. "In the spring of 2007, the infernalists opened a portal," she said. "To some other place. We never were able to figure it out. For about thirty minutes, there was a demon roaming the streets of Perth. Eventually, the infernalists and the demon were shoved back into the portal by a team of Cainites and werewolves. Immediately after, the werewolves banished absolutely all supernatural creatures from Australia. Precious few got out alive. Since then, we've had no idea what's become of Perth or that portal."

"Spring of ... " Well, fuck. Sam runs a hand over his face, and he exhales slowly. "It was a Devil's Gate." It had to have been. Especially considering that Jake was on this side of the world opening one at the same time. "It was a friggin' door to Hell."

"A Devil's Gate."

Artemis ran her tongue along the tops of her teeth. She knew precious little about Devil's Gates. Of course, she'd heard of them before. And there were doubtlessly volumes and volumes worth of information, somewhere in the stacks of the library.

If only they'd known when her operative was in Perth. Perhaps they could have prevented the bloody thing from ever being opened and the werewolves wouldn't have...

"It's still open," she said abruptly, standing up straight and knocking over the sugar bowl on the coffee tray. "All the recent werewolf attacks in Los Angeles." Her fingers danced through the air, like she was playing the piano. "Something's connected. There are dots all over the chess board. What's the link? Where is it? Where is it?" She turned in a slow circle, conducting her private, little symphony. Then she snapped her fingers and pointed at Sam. "The file. Does it say anything about the werewolf being Australian?"

Sam doesn't like the idea of there being an open Devil's Gate anywhere in the world. But he keeps his mouth shut on that and just flips open the file, paging through the information.

"You can get that from a wolf?"

Artemis looked up, giving him a look that made it very clear she thought he was a bit thick.

"They carry drivers licenses," she told him dryly.

Her mind was racing. Thoughts piling on each other too quickly. She dug her hands into her hair, bending at the waist. Werewolves. Microchips. Perth. Devil's Gate.

"Bloody hell..."

Oh. Of course they do.

Sam watches her, trying to see where the gears in her head were turning, but unfortunately he isn't entirely following. "That doesn't necessarily sound good."

She huffed out an impatient sigh, pulling on her hair a little bit. "Can't think," she mumbled. "Can't think like this. The pieces aren't coming together the right way."

And with her trademark abruptness, Artemis stood up straight. She pointed to Sam. "Follow me, bring the file with you."

Without waiting for a reply, she started out of the room again, heading down the hall as fast as her injured leg would take her. Along the way, she pulled off her father's duster. Artemis was an incredibly slender, frail girl beneath. She seemed to lose more than half of her mass in that one, simple action.

Sam doesn't complain, just follows and decides it's probably better not to ask. He watches as she sheds her coat, and is curious, but doesn't ask. He isn't sure he really wants to know.

Still, he's got the file in his hand and is still looking it over.

Artemis led him to the end of the hall, to a bathroom. It was old, like the rest of the mansion. The floor had uneven, little white tiles and the bathtub had feet and a rickety railing holding up a curtain.

She hung the coat on the corner of the door, then pointed to a rusty folding chair, propped in the corner of the room. "Start reading me anything in the file that seems interesting," she ordered Sam. "There's a missing piece. Something connecting this attack to the Devil's Gate."

And then she turned on the tap for the shower.

... Sam stares at her for a moment, glancing back to the chair and then back to her again. "Here? In ... the shower?" This doesn't seem kosher and he doesn't know what he's doing.

"It's not for you," she said, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world. She pointed at the chair in the corner of the room. "Sit. Read. Help me find the connection."

Artemis was used to giving orders. And having them obeyed. So much so that she sometimes forgot about things like hospitality or courtesy.

Or that her Malkavian quirks were just that.

Fully dressed, she stepped into the tub, letting the spray from the showerhead hit in her in the chest. Water ran down her body, tinging a little pink as it washed over the blood on her leg.

Strange though it seemed, the water had a bit of a calming effect on Artemis. She stopped pulling on her hair, she stopped fidgeting about. Serene as an ice sculpture, she closed her eyes, turning her face up, just above the splatter.

Well, it's not as though Sam could say he's been in a stranger situation. He takes a deep breath, tries to not be weirded out at the woman sitting in the shower with her clothes on, and starts reading. He reads the file from the beginning, including every field because all of this is important. All of it could find something that could lead them to the cause of all of this.

Despite all appearances, Artemis listened intently. A part of her began to realize how uncomfortable he probably felt. And she had to applaud his resilience.

Unfortunately, she couldn't find any connection between the werewolf attacks here and the Devil's Gate in Perth. She knew. In the Malkavian part of herself, she was utterly certain that the two were one in the same.

"We're going to have to go to Perth," she muttered softly when he finished.

Wait. Artemis blinked in confusion. We're? That was absurd. She barely knew the boy of letters and he wasn't one of her field agents. What's more, she didn't do field work any more.

Yet she realized, as the word echoed in her mind, that she desperately wanted to go. She wanted to get her hands dirty. She wanted to clean up the mess one of her own people had been a part of. And she wanted to escape. From Diana and Joseph and Liam and their headache-inducing problems.

Sam is equally confused by the sudden declaration that 'we' were going to Perth. Because she couldn't have meant we as in her and him. He pauses, blinking at her for a moment, before shaking his head.

"By 'we' you mean the Order, right?"

Artemis considered the question for a moment. "No," she said. "Yes. But no."

A typical Artemis answer.

Slicking back her wet hair, she turned to look at him. "I need a human," she said. "One who knows what a Devil's Gate is. And one who can take care of himself. You fit the bill on both accounts."

"I have my brother." And the trials. And all the other stupid bullshit that's going on in his life. "Dean really won't go for me hopping a plane to Australia to work with an Order we never heard of before."

He pauses.

"I mean, I'd love to help you out, really, but ... I don't think I'm your guy."

She made a dismissive gesture, droplets of water flinging off of her fingertips. "Bring him along." Really, the Order had more than enough funds, if her young boy of letters was going to be quite so co-dependent. Besides, she imagined that two humans who knew about a Devil's Gate were probably better than one.

And perhaps the other one was a bit quicker on the uptake.

"Hell is empty," she murmured softly to the spray. "And all the devils are here."

Sam tries very hard not to laugh out loud at the idea of trying to convince Dean that they need to take a plane to Australia to check out a case. Because yeah - that'll go real well.

" ... How would we be getting there, exactly?"

In all honesty, it would be Artemis' preference to fly. She didn't particularly fancy the idea of trusting her corpus in a coffin to a stranger, not just yet. But she supposed there might be a trustworthy human or two she could enlist to keep an eye on the boy.

The other alternative was a boat and that would take weeks.

Or were boats faster these days? It had been far too long since Artemis traveled on one.

"A metal bird in the sky," she replied, cupping her hands under the spray and dousing herself with water.

"Yeah, that's not gonna happen. My brother doesn't do planes. Not unless he absolutely has to."

He takes a deep breath, leaning back in the chair and pinching the bridge of his nose. He knows that this is important, that they had to go deal with this, but he isn't sure he can convince Dean to do it, unless ...

"What if I had an alternate suggestion? Still get us there just as fast - in fact, it would probably be faster, and a lot harder to trace."

Colour her intrigued.

Artemis turned to look at her boy of letters. Her hair was wet and glistening against her face. The dark contrast against her pale skin was stark and vivid. Water ran down the bridge of her nose and along her cheeks.

"Faster than a metal bird in the sky?" she asked, arching an eyebrow. "Shall we become the wind?"

"Sort of."

Actually, yeah, that's not an inaccurate description of what Castiel can do. But basically, cutting out the travel time here would not be a bad thing.

"How do you feel about angels?"

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