05-24-2019, 01:50 AM
OOC: TLDR: Lih ran to the bathroom, came back, had some questions for Dorian about Nox. Purple highlighted the relevant bits 
skip the rest
Lih said nothing as he took it in, as there was nothing left to say. He was training as a junior detective and must learn the protocols of question and proper address. Besides, he knows nothing of Dorian’s plans and his head was swimming with fatigue, as the low voices of the others two ebbed through the cafe. Ivan’s eyes, more alive than anything Lih had ever seen, found his.
He was quietly amazed. Though the two of them were both recently raised to the squad, the other officer spoke of fighting monsters casually. Such was the desperate nature of their war. Missions, especially those aimed to eradicate monsters, were regularly suicide. Most citizens of the CCD go their whole life without seeing one of the monsters in the flesh. They presume oni’s to be myths, yet fear the tunnels all the same… Ivan mentioned not one, but two previous missions in the tunnels. And came away alive. This is a remarkable thing, Lih thought. A remarkable thing.
He looked back at Ivan, a smiling expression on his face but without any light or laughter. He could tell Ivan had been through hell in the last thirty-odd days. Courage and determination seemed to ooze out of him like sweat. He was not a man Lih wanted to be on the wrong side of.
"Sure thing, Officer Sarkozy, I’m honored to work with you," he said, taking Ivan’s gaze, still anxious but calming a little by the other’s smile. Lih softened and nodded back. Ivan’s smile seemed honest, despite his penetrating, serious eyes. He thought it would not be impossible to trust Ivan, who’d worked for his status and position as hard as any other officer.
“I’m sure you guys can handle anything. But I yearned to baptize and test myself in the fire of the tunnels!”
He replied cheerfully, dropping into a soft conspiratorial whisper “my last case there were a lot of questions, Officer Sarkozy, a lot of questions. The paperwork. You know how dull that is? I’m positively itching for the tunnels. It takes me away from my office work. Interviews to do; calls to make; reports to file; training and exercises to observe; all manner of inventory for approval. Our accountants, by the light! They’d drive a person mad with their fussing and their lists. I can’t bear them. I’ve killed two or three of them already.” He half smiled, to show he was joking. “It’s alright. I’ve hidden the bodies well.”
Lih turned and looked across at Dorian. It seems this was no commonplace undertaking. He and the other officer were more than ready to see action. Dorian explained to both of them what he wanted them to do, how they would be used, what objectives they were to achieve. His briefing turned into a warning, a cautious warning of the tunnels and oni’s. At the end of Dorian’s serious replies to Ivan, Lih’s face lost its smile and its color.
Lih put down his coffee and stared at Dorian as if he had just insulted Lih’s own mother. He rose to his feet, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin.
“Sir, please excuse me,” he said hurriedly, failing to disguise the wobble in his voice, “toilet.”
He had heard Dorian’s remarks and he ran inside the bathroom stall, trying to slow his anxious breathing.
He didn’t dare voice his thoughts. He doubted even the experienced detective remembered what it was like to claw and scrape for survival.
He shook his head in disbelief. The first time he’d even come to this cafe with Dorian, he’d just been fighting for his life against two Rougs. Lih was changed, of course. Such an ordeal would change anyone.
This conversation seemed somehow far darker and more dangerous. Like all the leaders Viktor Lih had ever known, Dorian was frustratingly ambiguous. Commanding, authoritative, appealing in his great intelligence and learning, yet treacherous and untrustworthy in that nothing was too precious to be sacrificed if it served his ends. Captain had been like that. So was Nox, a former atharim hunter? And what was the extent of Ivan’s humanity?
He didn’t like where Dorian was going, and he guessed Ivan probably didn’t either. Dorian didn’t just give them orders because he wanted them to know the situation and understand its terrain. How could they clear an area effectively otherwise?
Lih was just a man with a badge. But it’s time he did something more useful than paperwork. That was why he came along. To do real good. And it’s been a long time since he did any real good.
He set his glasses down next to him and sighed deeply. He was too tired. He sat there in the tiny stall, removed his cap and gloves and buried his face in his calloused hands. Sunlight from a window behind him created a halo around his slim form.
Viktor Lih exhaled deeply, shaking his head. He stared at his hands for a moment more. They were… shaking.
The word “Oni” echoed uncomfortably in his mind. He felt his skin crawl, and imagined powerful, inhuman eyes glaring at him, glaring at them all, and seeing inside them. He wondered how the oni’s perceived the world. Were they looking into his mind? Where they seeing through his flesh to his bones? Did they even notice him? He wondered in horrid fascination.
Could they see into his head and read how scared he was of them?
Shaking the thoughts off, Lih shifted uncomfortably, unwilling to be drawn in. He took his duties and this case seriously—too seriously— probably because, like Ivan said, he’d never been in the tunnels before.
He thought of Boda, Costa and his father, the men who had molded his life and brought him to this, equipping him, each in their own way, with the skills he now used. He missed them all, missed their confidences and strength. Costa had trained him, and Lih had been at the great officer’s side since their academy days. Lih’s father had died far away when Lih was still a trainee at the police academy. And Boda — bad, old Boda; Lih had killed him because he was too weak.
But each, in their own way, had made him. Costa had taught him the selflessness of police service and discipline; Boda: ruthlessness and failure. And his father? What he had gleaned from his father was more difficult to identify. What a father leaves his child is always the most indefinable.
Even now, he could hear his father’s dirty chuckle in his mind, scolding him for becoming attached to anyone or anything.
“Don’t get involved, Viktor, not with anything. If you don’t care, you won’t care, and that makes the hardest parts of police life that much easier. Do what you must, take what you need and move on. Never look back, never regret.”
He realized, perhaps for the first time, that he had broken with his old man’s advice a long time since. When he had met his partner Costa and his family, he had started to care. He decided he didn’t see it as a weakness. In that one thing, his own father had been wrong. Caring for his partner, for the cause, for the fight, or for anyone, made him what he was. Without those reasons, without an emotional investment, he would have walked away or put a gun in his mouth months ago.
Lih looked up with a start, his mind spinning. It took him a moment to remember where he was. How long had he been lost in thought?
There was something in his tired, quiet manner that made other cops stay away. This was not the same blushing young man trying to hit on Sage Parker weeks ago. This was a grown man with slumping shoulders. There was weariness in his manner that no amount of sleep could ease. His lined eyes had seen too much.
He’d spent his days at a desk, with a wallet in one hand and files in the other, and yet he felt more or less dead on his feet with exhaustion. This too was work, real police work, wretched with absolutes and limits.
He’d rather have stepped out to clear his head and have a smoke. The last thing they wanted was to overreach themselves, yet Dorian was determined. Lih was uneasy following the detective, even though Dorian was ranking police officer.
It would take another Lih and a whole different world for there to be any trust and comradeship between him and former atharim like Dorian. But for now, in the thick of this mystery surrounding Alistair Pavlo, Lih couldn’t help respecting the other detective, for that was what he was: a devoted detective of the CCD, just like Lih. But they would find Alistair Pavlov. For the love of the light. Lih nodded. He would. He swore it.
Dorian…. Lih always liked him. Had an air of worldliness about him, the way he carried himself. Ivan… now he had the mark of a leader on him. Might lead a team of his own, one day. But Costa… he missed his nuances and moves. He was one of the most levelheaded and respected men in the department; furthermore Costa liked Lih, he treated him with affection and concern. Dorian was rather more difficult. Although they all faced death here, this wasn’t Dorian’s hometown though his family lived in Moscow. No love lost there.
Still he felt… justified: justified in Dorian’s plans, justified in his faith in the force, justified in his hope to let it be Lih and Costa, shoulder to shoulder, like the old days.
A good man, Lih thought, rising courageously to his moment in CCD history.
Can the same be said about me, he wondered?
He realized that, when all was said and done, there was precious little difference between being a hero of the people of the CCD and being a ruthless, brutal killing machine. To be the former, one had to accept much of the role of the latter. Sometimes duty is painful and ugly, but it must be done.
When Lih came back to the table, Ivan bent down and checked his wallet and Lih did likewise at his side.
He adjusted his glasses and studied the files: greedily accepted the scrap of information thrown to him. He snatched all the maps from the folder before him and read it quickly. What he read arrested his attention, and he went back and re-read slowly, his eyes narrowing.
Dorian told Lih to collate information relating to this case before they came here but there was so much more here. There were new irregularities that demanded investigation and they had taken statements already from anybody who’d been near the area at the time.
Lih took the folder in his other hand and pursed his lips as he read the latest report; his gaze stopped here and there. He began to understand the far reaching political dilemma attached to the report in his gloved hand. Alistair Pavlov disappeared. Despite the fact that the area where he was being kept was secure and under guard. His fate and whereabouts since then are unknown.
Viktor Lih bit back deep unease—the tunnels were big, so big! How in the name of light were three people going to clear a thing that size? The sheer size of the underground was going to take a lot of getting used to. He knew he’d have to beat this awe out of himself as quickly as possible, or he’d be too busy gazing dumbly to do his job.
As he understood it, Nox’s in charge in the tunnels. Their work here would take some time. And Nox was the key. His knowledge of the monster’s biology was a vital tool. That’s why they needed him to guide them in the tunnels, of course, and that meant the department was using somebody they could trust. In truth, they could use the help from Nox. Lih couldn’t imagine how long it would have taken to investigate in the tunnels otherwise.
Lih shook his head. It all seemed so unlikely. To cooperate with atharim…
Atharim, Lih thought. Praise be. God-killers, monster hunters, legendary cultists, as great and mythical as any elite squad of to use that name.
Lih looked at the map. He saw the tunnels. Saw the size of it. This was all they had, but it wasn’t accurate. This was why they needed Nox’s help.
Anyway, he understood cooperation with a former atharim hunter like Nox, forged as an ultimate weapon in battles beyond the remit of a common man like Lih. But he didn’t like it. Such a dangerous monster hunter was a fearful thing, like those gods one hears about.
Still, he understood it. He looked around at Dorian, began to speak, and then just shook his head. Explaining the real nature of his horror to Dorian might take a lifetime.
And that time was all Lih had left to do something far more important than make complaints to a former atharim like the older detective. He kept his thoughts to himself though. The atharim might be bastards, but he felt Dorian reached an understanding with them. Besides, they’ll need atharim expertise and muscle when it comes to it.
“What we’ll find in the tunnels may assist in the case of Alistair Pavlov.”
Lih paused. “I hope what has happened there is not too late for him.”
“I wouldn’t dream of going in without Nox, sir,” Lih agreed softly to his ranking officer. “I’m glad you’ve invited him, and gladder still for Officer Sarkozy who has found his way in the tunnels twice before.”
He blurted, dropping his wallet and then his folder unto the table. “Why has Nox come here to help us? What is his intent? We are sworn to duty, the duty of the law, given to us by the CCD. We undertake each duty as it comes, and we protect our people. This isn’t what he was made for.”
“Of course sir.” Lih had said hurriedly. He had not intended offense to the former atharim detective. “I do not question your choice. And I have nothing but respect for the atharim’s skills.”
It was a polite and rather awkward appraisal, but he didn’t want to antagonize either Dorian or this outsider Nox. Even as he spat out these words, Lih felt them crossing an almost imperceptible line. The line between a precarious confrontation and total mayhem.
Lih tensed waiting for Dorian’s reply.
skip the restLih said nothing as he took it in, as there was nothing left to say. He was training as a junior detective and must learn the protocols of question and proper address. Besides, he knows nothing of Dorian’s plans and his head was swimming with fatigue, as the low voices of the others two ebbed through the cafe. Ivan’s eyes, more alive than anything Lih had ever seen, found his.
He was quietly amazed. Though the two of them were both recently raised to the squad, the other officer spoke of fighting monsters casually. Such was the desperate nature of their war. Missions, especially those aimed to eradicate monsters, were regularly suicide. Most citizens of the CCD go their whole life without seeing one of the monsters in the flesh. They presume oni’s to be myths, yet fear the tunnels all the same… Ivan mentioned not one, but two previous missions in the tunnels. And came away alive. This is a remarkable thing, Lih thought. A remarkable thing.
He looked back at Ivan, a smiling expression on his face but without any light or laughter. He could tell Ivan had been through hell in the last thirty-odd days. Courage and determination seemed to ooze out of him like sweat. He was not a man Lih wanted to be on the wrong side of.
"Sure thing, Officer Sarkozy, I’m honored to work with you," he said, taking Ivan’s gaze, still anxious but calming a little by the other’s smile. Lih softened and nodded back. Ivan’s smile seemed honest, despite his penetrating, serious eyes. He thought it would not be impossible to trust Ivan, who’d worked for his status and position as hard as any other officer.
“I’m sure you guys can handle anything. But I yearned to baptize and test myself in the fire of the tunnels!”
He replied cheerfully, dropping into a soft conspiratorial whisper “my last case there were a lot of questions, Officer Sarkozy, a lot of questions. The paperwork. You know how dull that is? I’m positively itching for the tunnels. It takes me away from my office work. Interviews to do; calls to make; reports to file; training and exercises to observe; all manner of inventory for approval. Our accountants, by the light! They’d drive a person mad with their fussing and their lists. I can’t bear them. I’ve killed two or three of them already.” He half smiled, to show he was joking. “It’s alright. I’ve hidden the bodies well.”
Lih turned and looked across at Dorian. It seems this was no commonplace undertaking. He and the other officer were more than ready to see action. Dorian explained to both of them what he wanted them to do, how they would be used, what objectives they were to achieve. His briefing turned into a warning, a cautious warning of the tunnels and oni’s. At the end of Dorian’s serious replies to Ivan, Lih’s face lost its smile and its color.
Lih put down his coffee and stared at Dorian as if he had just insulted Lih’s own mother. He rose to his feet, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin.
“Sir, please excuse me,” he said hurriedly, failing to disguise the wobble in his voice, “toilet.”
He had heard Dorian’s remarks and he ran inside the bathroom stall, trying to slow his anxious breathing.
He didn’t dare voice his thoughts. He doubted even the experienced detective remembered what it was like to claw and scrape for survival.
He shook his head in disbelief. The first time he’d even come to this cafe with Dorian, he’d just been fighting for his life against two Rougs. Lih was changed, of course. Such an ordeal would change anyone.
This conversation seemed somehow far darker and more dangerous. Like all the leaders Viktor Lih had ever known, Dorian was frustratingly ambiguous. Commanding, authoritative, appealing in his great intelligence and learning, yet treacherous and untrustworthy in that nothing was too precious to be sacrificed if it served his ends. Captain had been like that. So was Nox, a former atharim hunter? And what was the extent of Ivan’s humanity?
He didn’t like where Dorian was going, and he guessed Ivan probably didn’t either. Dorian didn’t just give them orders because he wanted them to know the situation and understand its terrain. How could they clear an area effectively otherwise?
Lih was just a man with a badge. But it’s time he did something more useful than paperwork. That was why he came along. To do real good. And it’s been a long time since he did any real good.
He set his glasses down next to him and sighed deeply. He was too tired. He sat there in the tiny stall, removed his cap and gloves and buried his face in his calloused hands. Sunlight from a window behind him created a halo around his slim form.
Viktor Lih exhaled deeply, shaking his head. He stared at his hands for a moment more. They were… shaking.
The word “Oni” echoed uncomfortably in his mind. He felt his skin crawl, and imagined powerful, inhuman eyes glaring at him, glaring at them all, and seeing inside them. He wondered how the oni’s perceived the world. Were they looking into his mind? Where they seeing through his flesh to his bones? Did they even notice him? He wondered in horrid fascination.
Could they see into his head and read how scared he was of them?
Shaking the thoughts off, Lih shifted uncomfortably, unwilling to be drawn in. He took his duties and this case seriously—too seriously— probably because, like Ivan said, he’d never been in the tunnels before.
He thought of Boda, Costa and his father, the men who had molded his life and brought him to this, equipping him, each in their own way, with the skills he now used. He missed them all, missed their confidences and strength. Costa had trained him, and Lih had been at the great officer’s side since their academy days. Lih’s father had died far away when Lih was still a trainee at the police academy. And Boda — bad, old Boda; Lih had killed him because he was too weak.
But each, in their own way, had made him. Costa had taught him the selflessness of police service and discipline; Boda: ruthlessness and failure. And his father? What he had gleaned from his father was more difficult to identify. What a father leaves his child is always the most indefinable.
Even now, he could hear his father’s dirty chuckle in his mind, scolding him for becoming attached to anyone or anything.
“Don’t get involved, Viktor, not with anything. If you don’t care, you won’t care, and that makes the hardest parts of police life that much easier. Do what you must, take what you need and move on. Never look back, never regret.”
He realized, perhaps for the first time, that he had broken with his old man’s advice a long time since. When he had met his partner Costa and his family, he had started to care. He decided he didn’t see it as a weakness. In that one thing, his own father had been wrong. Caring for his partner, for the cause, for the fight, or for anyone, made him what he was. Without those reasons, without an emotional investment, he would have walked away or put a gun in his mouth months ago.
Lih looked up with a start, his mind spinning. It took him a moment to remember where he was. How long had he been lost in thought?
There was something in his tired, quiet manner that made other cops stay away. This was not the same blushing young man trying to hit on Sage Parker weeks ago. This was a grown man with slumping shoulders. There was weariness in his manner that no amount of sleep could ease. His lined eyes had seen too much.
He’d spent his days at a desk, with a wallet in one hand and files in the other, and yet he felt more or less dead on his feet with exhaustion. This too was work, real police work, wretched with absolutes and limits.
He’d rather have stepped out to clear his head and have a smoke. The last thing they wanted was to overreach themselves, yet Dorian was determined. Lih was uneasy following the detective, even though Dorian was ranking police officer.
It would take another Lih and a whole different world for there to be any trust and comradeship between him and former atharim like Dorian. But for now, in the thick of this mystery surrounding Alistair Pavlo, Lih couldn’t help respecting the other detective, for that was what he was: a devoted detective of the CCD, just like Lih. But they would find Alistair Pavlov. For the love of the light. Lih nodded. He would. He swore it.
Dorian…. Lih always liked him. Had an air of worldliness about him, the way he carried himself. Ivan… now he had the mark of a leader on him. Might lead a team of his own, one day. But Costa… he missed his nuances and moves. He was one of the most levelheaded and respected men in the department; furthermore Costa liked Lih, he treated him with affection and concern. Dorian was rather more difficult. Although they all faced death here, this wasn’t Dorian’s hometown though his family lived in Moscow. No love lost there.
Still he felt… justified: justified in Dorian’s plans, justified in his faith in the force, justified in his hope to let it be Lih and Costa, shoulder to shoulder, like the old days.
A good man, Lih thought, rising courageously to his moment in CCD history.
Can the same be said about me, he wondered?
He realized that, when all was said and done, there was precious little difference between being a hero of the people of the CCD and being a ruthless, brutal killing machine. To be the former, one had to accept much of the role of the latter. Sometimes duty is painful and ugly, but it must be done.
When Lih came back to the table, Ivan bent down and checked his wallet and Lih did likewise at his side.
He adjusted his glasses and studied the files: greedily accepted the scrap of information thrown to him. He snatched all the maps from the folder before him and read it quickly. What he read arrested his attention, and he went back and re-read slowly, his eyes narrowing.
Dorian told Lih to collate information relating to this case before they came here but there was so much more here. There were new irregularities that demanded investigation and they had taken statements already from anybody who’d been near the area at the time.
Lih took the folder in his other hand and pursed his lips as he read the latest report; his gaze stopped here and there. He began to understand the far reaching political dilemma attached to the report in his gloved hand. Alistair Pavlov disappeared. Despite the fact that the area where he was being kept was secure and under guard. His fate and whereabouts since then are unknown.
Viktor Lih bit back deep unease—the tunnels were big, so big! How in the name of light were three people going to clear a thing that size? The sheer size of the underground was going to take a lot of getting used to. He knew he’d have to beat this awe out of himself as quickly as possible, or he’d be too busy gazing dumbly to do his job.
As he understood it, Nox’s in charge in the tunnels. Their work here would take some time. And Nox was the key. His knowledge of the monster’s biology was a vital tool. That’s why they needed him to guide them in the tunnels, of course, and that meant the department was using somebody they could trust. In truth, they could use the help from Nox. Lih couldn’t imagine how long it would have taken to investigate in the tunnels otherwise.
Lih shook his head. It all seemed so unlikely. To cooperate with atharim…
Atharim, Lih thought. Praise be. God-killers, monster hunters, legendary cultists, as great and mythical as any elite squad of to use that name.
Lih looked at the map. He saw the tunnels. Saw the size of it. This was all they had, but it wasn’t accurate. This was why they needed Nox’s help.
Anyway, he understood cooperation with a former atharim hunter like Nox, forged as an ultimate weapon in battles beyond the remit of a common man like Lih. But he didn’t like it. Such a dangerous monster hunter was a fearful thing, like those gods one hears about.
Still, he understood it. He looked around at Dorian, began to speak, and then just shook his head. Explaining the real nature of his horror to Dorian might take a lifetime.
And that time was all Lih had left to do something far more important than make complaints to a former atharim like the older detective. He kept his thoughts to himself though. The atharim might be bastards, but he felt Dorian reached an understanding with them. Besides, they’ll need atharim expertise and muscle when it comes to it.
“What we’ll find in the tunnels may assist in the case of Alistair Pavlov.”
Lih paused. “I hope what has happened there is not too late for him.”
“I wouldn’t dream of going in without Nox, sir,” Lih agreed softly to his ranking officer. “I’m glad you’ve invited him, and gladder still for Officer Sarkozy who has found his way in the tunnels twice before.”
He blurted, dropping his wallet and then his folder unto the table. “Why has Nox come here to help us? What is his intent? We are sworn to duty, the duty of the law, given to us by the CCD. We undertake each duty as it comes, and we protect our people. This isn’t what he was made for.”
“Of course sir.” Lih had said hurriedly. He had not intended offense to the former atharim detective. “I do not question your choice. And I have nothing but respect for the atharim’s skills.”
It was a polite and rather awkward appraisal, but he didn’t want to antagonize either Dorian or this outsider Nox. Even as he spat out these words, Lih felt them crossing an almost imperceptible line. The line between a precarious confrontation and total mayhem.
Lih tensed waiting for Dorian’s reply.
Viktor Lih
Officer of CCDPD
Officer of CCDPD