clockfaced | OPEN POST

( it was not a mission for a Golden Bough, but it had still been a failure.

since the LCCB had been called in to settle the issue that had arisen between Bodhisattva Chicken and Eunbong's Bar and Fryers, which they'd found had resulted in the latter's owner becoming a Distortion, it had settled into an uncommon routine that the team aboard Mephistopheles would occasionally be dispatched to take care of other issues. dante has never been able to see any pattern among these missions, no real rhyme or reason for why they were called to handle it and not any of the dozens (if not hundreds) of other Fixer Offices and Associations in the City. they have to assume there's some sort of overarching plan to it... certainly it can't be that the Company is hurting for cash, given all of the resources that they've seen the other teams to have available to them?

even if vergilius pleads poverty whenever they too often suggest to stop somewhere and get food for the sinners, as a reward for a job well done.

there is certainly no reason for something like that this evening. even though dante had tried their best to direct the sinners (and the ensuing chaos had resulted in several of them dying and needing to be rewound), they hadn't been able to establish control of the situation. they had been called upon to retreat (as threat to the Executive Manager was getting a little too high to be acceptable to continue, or so the team that had come to retrieve them had claimed), and other groups that dante hadn't even recognized had stormed in to try to recover whatever they could from the mess left behind.

of course, dante feels like it's their fault. they sit quiet and defeated in their seat on the bus, shoulders bowed and otherwise unfocused. they can hear the sound of the door opening to the corridors beyond the back of the bus as the sinners quietly file away to their own quarters — they had released them from their duties for the rest of the evening before sitting. they assume that they will all retreat once given time to do so; there's no awkward jockeying for who might take first watch, as there are enough teams from other branches of the Company about outside that it was unnecessary.

they... will go to their own room at some point soon enough. for now, they just want to sit here and gather their thoughts. they go through the paths they had taken, the commands they had given, the choices they had made over and over, trying to figure out if there would have been a successful combination... and if it was even in their power to choose better the next time —

yes, they prefer to think through this here on the bus rather than inside the corridors and the rooms beyond. there's still something about them that unsettle dante ever-so-slightly. )

BKST OVERFLOW CONTINUATIONS:

𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚗𝚟𝚎𝚗𝚐𝚎𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎: