2020-08-21 - Console Complications

It's the day after the chaotic car chase and incident with thugs and Liu that closed roads with quite a noticeable public scene and aftermath. The general reports are that it started with a case of road rage that escalated, most likely, but official statements in local news about the cause are probably being largely avoided for the time being, at least. Lilith and Byron were trying to drive over and catch Abitha for a delivery yesterday, unbeknownst. It didn't go well.

Today, they're trying that again, but this time, there's nothing in their hands as there might have been when they knocked. But things are different now, the console was melted and destroyed and the pair of them want to know why they were almost maimed or killed for it. Lilith texts with a brief heads up to let Abitha know they're coming and to check that she is at home. She doesn't explain why, but she asks for ASAP and Lilith and Abitha don't really know each other, so... yeah. It's one of those kinds of texts that probably means shit continues to hit the fan.

Standing and waiting on the porch with Byron, Lilith is wearing a pair of blue jeans with an airy white button blouse that comes together with ties at the midriff in skin skimming crop style. Summery and stylish woven wedge heels combined with the length of her legs naturally makes her look taller than she is and her hair is loose and curled. Sometimes, when looking at her, it's ridiculous to think there's murder rumors going around about her, she looks like a brunette doll or designer modern Disney princess more often than not, she just has those kind of princess eyes and features to match everything else.

Then again, a good few people know what she's capable of. Maybe it's not that ridiculous to imagine her as a murderess, after all.

"... wonder how much she'll want to talk now..." The comment is murmured aside to Byron before the door opens, features pensive.

While some may think that Byron Thorne would take the day off from work after the whole chaotic incident that left his luxury car totaled, he's dressed as if he were working, in a full dark suit with his shades slipped over his eyes. Perhaps because the whole mess with the console was over and done with, a thing of the past, he's not as over vigilant and as wary as he'd been for the past several days. That doesn't mean that his security detail isn't with him and a pair of them are seated in a car parked several spaces behind his own rented Lincoln.

No, Thorne was more pissed off than he was wary and cautious. With one hand tucked into trouser pockets, his shielded eyes watch the door, his gaze flickering in Lilith's direction when she wonders something aloud. "To be honest? I can't see why she wouldn't talk. I'd like to think that it's over and that our involvement with Liu or this new cartel is finished. That is, unless they believe we still have the console." But after what was done with his car, the PS4 would only still be a thing if it weren't anywhere near the Wraith at all.

The first inkling of a sound seems a trigger for... something? A wave of otherness like a radar ping seems to radiate out of the house, washing over the two on her doorstep. It had been Christmas when Abitha and Byron had met face to face, and they'd never thought at each other, so he was unlikely to recognize her cryptic sort of mental identity, but would most likely know a mind seeking the area for other minds. There's probably a good thirty seconds before motion can be heard in the house, though even then it's faint, Abitha's weight not much to give volume to footsteps. Maybe it's long enough for them to notice the small Nest cam tucked into the top interior corner of the front porch. Either way, the lock on the door is heard clicking open, and it opens enough to display just the width of a face. Green eyes go from Byron to Lilith, then back again. A brow is raised.

"The fuck is up with this town?" The door is then opened fully, as if Byron's presence was enough to dispel any immediate questions and suspicions. Not to mention she'd heard a few things on the scanner, and had used her access at the station to confirm the counter to whatever the fuck was going on about people's memories. She was dressed casually, displaying her reputation of being the World's Okayest Gamer on a loose fitting tank, a tighter, more covering sports bra beneath, and some black and angular-striped active leggings under that. Abitha was barefoot, so she was looking up at both of them, and the look she briefly gives Lilith made it clear she remembered the first time she saw the woman, roughing up a dude at the PoUrHouse. She was a lot more than a doll.

"So do I ask the annoying stuff first about your death," Her eyes go from Byron to Lilith and back again, the subtext there, "...or just ask W T F..." Yeah, she uses the letters, "...happened last night?"

"Well..." Lilith begins, casting a look aside at Byron before she gives two rough summaries to both of Abitha's questions once the door is fully opened beyond peek. She probably doesn't even remember that Abitha was around to see her bullying debts out of people at the POORhouse... so she assumes that brief look is because of the murderer rumors. Which clearly aren't true. Byron's right here. Unless he really is Bryan, but Lilith affirms he's not, so surely it's true, "He's not dead and there is no Bryan. I'm probably not going to kill him before we're married anyway, there's no real point to do it before the gold-digger contract is sealed."

Oh, okay. She's so dry and deadpan about that and carries on pretty conversationally without missing a beat. She does, however, reach over to dust fingertips against the back of Byron's knuckles on his near hand where he stands close, "And we were actually on our way to you with a delivery you weren't expecting and some questions. Obviously, we didn't make it. We were ambushed. Then..." The woman pauses here, looking back over her shoulder a moment at the street, then the car parked out near Byron's rental as watch, "I'm not sure if you know what I mean by delivery." Pause, "Can we come in and explain?"

They were shot at yesterday, too, car crash aside, so Lilith unwittingly just doesn't like having her back to the road and street right now. It's probably fine, but PTSD in these parts is what it is.

Perhaps sensing a mental tickling from out of the blue, Thorne's chin lifts to regard the house. In fact, he's tempted to run a scan of the place, himself, but holds back just as the door opens. The suited man may recognize Abitha from somewhere, but by now, he knows her mostly by name due to the things he's been told. Well, that and the fact that he tries to get to know many a business owner in town, when it comes to his various projects.

"Firstly, I don't even know where those rumors came about." Byron adds to what Lilith explains. "Though after a recent phone conversation, I have a guess." He won't go into that right at this moment. "Secondly, I'm not British." Then again, Bryan could be faking a PNW accent, whatever that sounds like. No comment or reaction is made to Lilith's deadpan joke and just as Lilith takes a look behind them, Byron takes a final peek over his shoulder as well, giving the men seated in the dark vehicle a nod that they'll be heading in. Possibly, anyway.

To the other things, though, all that Byron will say about the console mess is, "I definitely have some questions regard that part."

"I was wondering if it was a bit premature?" Abitha is so fucking in on deadpan humor, but the trick was you really couldn't show how entertained, or it broke the joke. She continues on in the same flat sort of speech, as of plotting a grand gold digging black widow scheme was as interesting as a grocery list, but it was really hard not to smirk, "But like, I'm not judging. You do you, girl."

There's a complicated flitting of emotion that plays on Abitha's face. Confusion at the flip and flop on delivery, conflict on what was really expected on her to let them in or not, a little side eye behind her because hosting people that looked like them in a college student house was less than ideal, and a load of suspicion about nearly all of it.

Resigned to it all, Abitha answers nonverbally, simply making sure the door was opened wide enough, then just heading in to the family room after a brief tip of her head toward that direction. "Its almost funny, whatever all this shit is, until it starts fucking with my coffee experience." She remarks to Byron cryptically, because she'd had to put the kibosh on trips to Espresso Yourself after karaoke night.

"So what's up?" She finds a corner of the sectional to tuck herself into, a pillow pulled and clutched to her front as she gets comfortable.

Lilith makes a little noise that resembles a snuffle of amusement, more of an appreciating thing for the manner of return than audible laughter. She then watches Abitha and her conflicted expression for a few beats there, and normally, she might suggest just sitting out on the porch, it's no more prone to eavesdropping or whatever for conversations like this one they're about to have. But... not today. She just waits to be invited in with Byron (not Bryan), even if the other female feels a little cornered into doing it.

While they make the trek inside and settle to talk, Lilith clicks her tongue once and eyes Byron while she makes comment to the coffee gripe, "I think he'd rage if his daily coffee supply was interrupted, so I get it. It's pretty ridiculous and I don't want to accidentally go to jail. I'd rather fight the Vivisectionist's Ghost." That's a little extreme, the Vivisectionist royally fucked Lilith up in a bloody, devastating instant and ghosts are probably +2 to those skills or something. But that's how much she doesn't want to be locked in a cage.

Once seated, Lilith snaps one leg in cross over the other and looks at her painted red toenails for a few passing seconds with intense thought, sussing out where to start. After a look at Byron, she looks back at Abitha and says, "Liu. He burned your shop, didn't he? I'm sure you two have had an exchange over that, he seems to like to play the tough a little too hard. Probably compensating..." The woman wets her lips and pauses before continuing, "I'm wondering what that exchange was because he's been in my shop with a search warrant. He was looking for something that was reported stolen, presumably from your shop."

Lilith watches Abitha after these conversation prompts with natural curiosity and waiting, but when the 'something stolen' is brought up, she seems to gauge the other female a little closer to see if she knows what that 'something' is.

"This is why I have my own espresso machine." Byron brings up, because he's that serious about his coffee. To the idea of Lilith getting arrested though, he's quick to say, "Thank goodness that no one's been stupid enough to try and arrest her. They had us at the station and released us once we were clear. And that was for our not only witnessing, but being the victims of a vehicular assault." Off comes of his glass now that they're inside, and he tucks it into his jacket's breast pocket.

If anything, he gives the interior of this place a once over. The homes on Oak weren't mirrors of one another. His own family home, a decent-sized Victorian, still stood further down the street. Settled down where appointed, he'll let Lilith explain what happened, noting the angle which the woman was taking. When it comes to this business of the stolen goods, just as with Lilith, Thorne's dark eyes move to Abitha to gauge her reaction.

Abitha makes a flat-lipped grimace about having an espresso machine, lifting her hand and making a back-and-forth wobble of it, "Meh. It's about the ritual. And not making it yourself. Like, I get it, and good coffee is good coffee..." she trails off, shrugs, not sure where she was going with that line of conversation. She tips her head to Lilith, "And I mean, there'd have to be a body and some evidence for her to be taken in, so..." Again, she leaves the rest of the statement summarized into a shrug. Pause. "Oh, you mean about the PS4?" Because that being the actual system would tie everything into a nice little bow. She shakes her head. Lilith gets a slight lowering of brow, like Abitha was trying to suss out the reference about the ghost, but even as Abitha had been at the factory, that was a detail she hadn't gotten. She'd gotten a concussion. And a Squitten.

Abitha was all in favor all cards on the table, as she'd been briefed by at least a couple people on how the shakedowns had been going down, and had been connecting the dots herself as best she could on others. She shifts her body into a forward curl as an arm snakes back, pulling a phone out of her back pocket before settling back. She seems to have her attention on it for a few moments, but her words were at least keeping up, "Liu wasn't the one that burned my shop, so far that I can tell. He was the one that stopped by and tried to demand some credit card info about some dude he said bought one. I have no idea who that dude was." The phone is flipped around, and the acne-wrecked face of Liu is evident from a high angle, the carpeting and shelves behind him clearly of the Control Pad before it burned. She seemed pretty blase about the fact it was referred to as stolen merchandise, mostly because she figured the arsonists stole it, not Lilith.

"Him and Hallisey wanted to scare me, I could feel it, but I just played dumb, figuring they didn't know who I actually was." Hands are lifted, openly indicating herself, as if there wasn't much to look at, "But then the night after next, people broke in, tried searching my shop, and when they couldn't find whatever, and couldn't shut down my security, they torched it." She said it without getting choked up, so maybe therapy was working. "If they were looking for something that was stolen, it's nothing I reported. Everything burned. If they took something, my cameras were already melting."

The longer Abitha talks, the more her brows start to crease, as if she's trying to figure out the connection between these things. The way Abitha explains them from her side, it makes Lilith start to think about different potential angles to the story behind her own shakedown at the pawn. Again, she looks at Byron, perhaps to see if he has any input yet or is connecting the dots himself in any way. Then she starts to talk, really talk instead of gauging what Abitha knows or suspects. It's bothering her to have things all unmatched like this now, especially since she and Byron could have caught a stray bullet or flipped their own car over the damn console.

"Huh. Okay. Well. We had that console to bring to you yesterday, but it was in the trunk... which was set on fire." Lilith probably didn't set that fire in Byron's car, but who knows. She carries on, raking a hand back to hold through her hair, then drop back to lap like fidget while speaking, blue eyes ticking clockwork pensive. It's a bit as if she's speaking for herself to hear the account aloud and anew for her own sake too.

"Liu and his horrible trash breath came in with four men, guns out to trash my place in a search. While he breathed all over me, they fanned out and did that, left us down there to talk. He wouldn't say what he was looking for initially, beyond some pawned stolen property I was in possession of. Then finally he did, maybe because they weren't finding what they were looking for. But see, they walked right past the damn TVs and game consoles that were out for sale, didn't touch them... and I reminded him that all I had to do was return the property or value as recompensation for anything that isn't a gun reported stolen."

She pauses here to breathe, "He was beating around the bush about something and wouldn't spit it out. Then he said he wanted me to bring him the security footage of the pawn itself and the console before leaving. He didn't take it then. Byron sensed the warrant was coerced, too. We thought it was a plant in my store to try and frame me for something. I took it apart at home looking for bugs or trackers or cocaine or whatever else, but nothing. Then I put it back together and realized it has a whole hard drive. Which is why... if there was something on there..."

Lilith rolls her hand in gesture at Abitha, "You're the obvious choice to pull it, plus I wanted your side. But we... got stalked and ambushed by... I don't know. I thought they were Liu goons, but now..." She looks at Byron here now, to see what he has to piece together or add.

Byron won't argue about how people prefer their coffee. Instead, he's far more interested in the story being told. Some of which contradicts what he'd once believed. "You have no footage of who burned your shop, so how can you tell it wasn't Liu? Because that asshole blew up the trunk of my car setting it on fire." Oh yes, the suited business man knows full well that Abitha has some knowledge, at least, about the shit going on around Gray Harbor due to the Veil. While he may refrain from talking GH weirdness with strangers, especially if he doesn't believe they've encountered the weird or the dangerous yet, he's not afraid to bring up Glimmer, the Veil and things of that nature to those who he probably believes has some inkling about that stuff.

"So whether it's Liu or not, Liu has the capability of doing just that." He then comes out and states, "He's a mender. A healer. Breaker of bones and a firestarter." Yeah, he's talking about Spiritualists. Just like Lilith is. "So, you don't remember a guy purchasing a PS4 at all? When Officer Liu came to Lilith's shop with a warrant, we checked to see who dropped the console off. Found out that it was at a time when one of Lilith's employees was managing the store. A woman brought it in. We have all of that caught on surveillance, which has been turned into proper authorities."

He then asks, "Hallisey?" A pause, "You don't have your surveillance footage backed up to another source outside of the store?" Okay, maybe Byron has the money to have a state-of-the-art surveillance system. Dark eyes then stare out at Abitha, he knows that she shares a Talent with him. "Did you try and get a read of the location, maybe there was some emotional residue left over?"

"Wait, no, I have footage of everything until the system died from the heat." Abitha has a head-craned back, face scrunching look at Byron like, 'What do you take me for?' before going on, "But the guys that came in that night weren't Liu and Hallisey. We saw some of their faces. Javier looked at it." She's poking and prodding and slowly swiping on her phone again, brows lowered in concentration as she tries to find it. "There was one guy, on the way out... Javier recognized him and seemed pissed, but I dunno where to find out who he is." She flips the phone around and shows the two of them a shot of the goons exiting, in case they would know who the guy was, because she had still come up blank, and Ruiz had stayed tight-lipped about it.

"Oh, like Maggi and August," Abitha seems to confirm as Byron describes Liu's power usage, "And I sensed trash breath had some ability," Yeah, she liked the moniker, "It just... it seemed super low." She looks between both of them in turn, "Not like you two, more like, um..." Her brows knit, eyes looking down, trying to find an example, but having none, "Just weak." She makes a meaningful eye contact to Byron as she tries to give words to it, "When I read him and Hallisey in my shop, neither of them even seemed to notice. Like, I'm kinda subtle, but, they seemed oblivious. I mean, Hallisey was a normie. Rookie. I hear Wilkinson arrested him? Not sure why or what that's gonna do. They were looking for some hefty guy, but just had a blurry photo and expected me to know because they said it was the week before. Sparrow didn't recognize him. I'm not sure I did either." She was looking back at her phone again, moving through the footage, but wasn't really doing anything effective, "Wish I could have taken a look at it..." The system, likely, she was musing, though has the grace to look up guiltily, "Not that you guys deserved getting killed to bring it over." She's silent for a long moment as she fiddles, before finally admitting in a quiet voice to Byron's question on reading.

"I, um... haven't been back to the shop." Mostly because she was afraid the emotional residue would be hers and she'd get to relive it all over again.

"Interesting." Lilith says after Byron and Abitha both are finished speaking, her head tipping forward into a small, understanding nod about the now-probably-useless hopes of digging into the machine to see if it was even anything at all, or something that was a deliberate frame or downright wild-goose-chase. Why would anyone put anything on a PLAYSTATION? Then again, why not?

"You take secondhand consoles for resale, right? Otherwise, I can't imagine why... they'd even want sales receipts for someone buying a brand new one, especially knowing what we know now. If that's the case, do you keep records of who essentially re-sales it with you first before it's back on the shelves even for purchase? We have a copy of the woman's ID that came in to pawn, along with a name, but I can't remember it and I don't have it on me at the moment. Video didn't show much with baggy clothes, glasses, and a hat/possibly a wig. Didn't hear anything about the woman or her name after turning those copies and a copy of the security footage to de la Vega, so I'm not sure if it's an actual person or a dummy ID alias to try and track."

Lilith looks at Byron here, as if he might know the name to give to Abitha for good measure, but if not, she can always text it later when she has access to the information in front of her again. Suddenly, though, she squints with thought and looks back at the other dark-haired female, "Hallisey. That was what the cap-- chief-- de la Vega said the name was of one of the men captured on my footage with Liu, didn't he?" Pause, "I admit, I didn't have a lot of time to look and see how powerful Liu himself was with the... breaking. Mending. Fire. Whatever the hell people call people like me, but it doesn't really take a lot given the nature of what we can do for it to be... problematic. Especially when both of us are in places that stalemate us from acting out due to roles and public image."

If Lilith recognizes the man Abitha shows out, it's not registering with her right now, most of her focus was on Liu anyway. To the imagery, she shrugs.

"But mm. Shit. I was hoping you'd have some idea of why the hell the console is such a hot commodity. Now we don't know if we're out of the woods or what the hell's going on and which guys are the damned problem."

Since they are showing off details of two possibly connected events, once Thorne gets a good look at the figures on Abitha's phone, he reaches for his own. Byron has private databases where he stores some of his information documents, so of course he still has access to the surveillance feed from his phone. He's actually gaining site access with a password and thumbprint before he starts to scroll through the various data he has on hand. "Her name was Bridget something or other." Turnblom isn't your typical name! Leaning forward to show Abitha the recorded feed, it shows: The woman visible in several minutes of footage and a variety of still frames has short, mousy brown hair and loose clothing that hides much of her shape, as well as sunglasses worn over her eyes when entering and leaving the store.

Only after the recording had played a couple of times that he remembers, "Turnblom. Bridget K. Turnblom."

Byron grew up with some of the GHPD being like family to him. That was years ago though and while he may still keep in contact with many of the older officers who served at the same time as his father did, many of the new breed were foreign to him. Still, as he often helped host fundraisers for the police department or contributed through donations and services since his return back to Gray Harbor, he knows some of these cops by face or name, so when he recites a few of them now, it's something that he'd remembered from before. "Hallisey sounds familiar, but the ones in our footage were Russo, Poppenberg." Look, Poppenberg is a name that stands out! "And some Russian or Pole, starts with a Z ends in a -sky."

Alas, no one in Abitha's footage match the identities of any of the cops in Byron's footage.

"So a guy purchased the console, possibly encrypted data into its save file and then passed it to a woman who has it delivered to the pawn shop for Liu to pick up. See, my one worry was that the data on the console was something incriminating that they needed to get rid of and that with it being destroyed now, we did them a favor." Pause, "Not that we destroyed it, Liu did. However, if it's information being passed along in this way... well, they aren't getting it now."

"So like, storytime?" Abitha shifts in her seat, phone set on the back of the couch, drawing her legs up under her and folding her arms around the pillow again, "Video game systems for a long time were built to be task driven systems. Then you get Microsoft on the scene, king of the personal computer OS, who says, 'We wanna make game systems because of that fat triple A game revenue' Enter XBox with architechture not unlike a small PC, but this time it's the OS that's task driven. Next gen, PS3, Wii, 360, all built the same way, just slightly different per brand. You start seeing modding, people changing memory, upgrading hard drives. Next, current, gen, same. Why is it a hot commodity? Info storage? I dunno, there's a ton of ideas. Anything a PC can do, a game system can do, but by its nature, you need to know how to do it, and it'll be less conspicuous." Another small shrug, though her eyes list off to the left as she tries to think creatively, "Maybe they were using it as a method of communication. Or, PSN just had a hack within the last year or two, big loss of subscriber data. Credit card info and the like. Whole world of shit."

Byron's revelations and names have the phone right back in her hand again though, the screen going to what basically looked like some sort of stream-of-consciousness note taking file, where she starts taking down names as she knows them, details that would match her mental image of what Byron was showing her to be able to remember things later. The typical Russian name does get a bit of a derisive snort, though, considering how vague and full of possibilities it could be to fill in the blank there. A thought does occur to her as she looks back to Lilith, though.

"Maggi broke my table once, then fixed it. How good can you mend things? Is that a possibility?"

Lilith listens and stays seated in silence, watching Byron with his phone while pensively trying to recall certain faces in her own mind, but eventually, she blinks out of it and shakes her head a little. When he's able to come up with the name for the woman in her pawn surveillance, though, she does make a sudden, agreeing 'ah' of noise before nodding a couple of solid times to confirm, yes, yes, that's it.

"There's no telling what it was now. Sounds like the possibilities are pretty numerous, though, I guess. If we're relying on the phrase 'in theory' knowing a good lot of... admittedly confusing context. We're missing something, it's bothersome. There's some main string in all of this, but we can't see it. And the problem with not seeing the string is... we could damn well walk into a garotte wire. We could think hey, we don't even have the damned thing anymore, we're clear now, right? But... that's not how things work for people like us. We can hope, sure, and I'm going to. But steps... mitigating steps."

Lilith looks at Byron here, as if she just knows his mind is probably twelve steps into possibilities and how to try and get in front of them, giving him a little bit of a smile. Abitha's question makes her look at the table a moment, though, then at the other female with consideration. "... I could be humble. But I'm probably one of the best goddamn fixers in town. I don't need all the pieces, I just need..." She squints here, as if she isn't sure how much, but she knows enough to know it might only take the RIGHT piece to let her know what it once was a part of.

She pauses, then goes weightily simple with re-iteration, "I'm very good. Buy low, shine a little, sell high. It's my thing. Why?"

"If they were using it as a mode of communication, there must be easier ways to do that. Lilith took it apart to see if anything physical was stored in there. Cash. Drugs, things like that. Nothing out of the ordinary." Byron says with a shrug, his eyes looking behind him to idly observe the unfamiliar room once more. "Data breaches, would they need an actual console to do that?" Slowly, he turns to face Abitha again, "I always thought they hacked from a computer."

Byron says nothing for a long moment when Lilith brings up her own paranoia of this event even though they no longer had the console. Hell, Byron was fine to saying fuck-it and move on. It was no longer their problem anymore, right? Not that he'd lessen his own security, of course. But a good lot that they did in this situation... "I mean, why can't we say that this over and done with now that the console was destroyed. It certainly doesn't help /us/ in figuring out what they needed it for. Why they purchased it from one location only to pawn it off at another. Wasn't there an easier way? I don't know, meet up at Firefly Forest or head out of town in some empty parking lot at night. What doesn't go away is that there's still an intrusive cartel using our town as their battleground."

Does Byron have any other plans? Probably. He's always thinking of something.

Now, hwoever, when Abitha asks whether Lilith can fix shit, his gaze drifts off to view something random. "Are we talking fixing the console or do you have something else in mind?" Only then does he look back at Abitha again. "What's left of it is a burned out mess in the burned out mess of my car's trunk."

"I mean, that's kind of my point. I'm familiar with with moving and thinking. Fixing isn't something I do." Pause, lip jut, consideration, correction, "I mean, shine-wise. I'm actually really good at fixing things manually. A good chunk of my business was taking old defunct systems and restoring them to functioning order to resell." A look is paid to Lilith as the description of that makes Abitha recall what work that is, and the idea of simply waving a hand to make it more valuable to sell makes her at least a small bit jealous. "But yeah, could you repair the console if we found the pieces of it? Cause I can probably identify any of the components that belonged to the base. Heck, if you could just restore the harddrive, that would be the part I'm most curious about."

Byron's musing about the console or the motives gives her thought, and a slitted-eyed look makes it seem she gave that idea weight, but she advocates against it eventually, "So like, yes? We could say meh, don't need. But what if it actually fills in the blanks? What if it gives us leverage? Cause like, we can scare individuals off all day, get them arrested or punted from town, but I feel like the overarching problem isn't individuals. If we can unravel the whole thing, it'd be more permanent in ejector-seating them, right?" She does nod to the other point though, "But I totally agree that there are easier ways, I'm presenting oddball side-paths as possibilities, because I think that way, but cops may not. Hell, that's why Javier hired me, I think. Also probably because I found Liu's gambling stuff, but yeah..." She trails off again on an awkward tangent, like the unstable creatives sometimes do.

"I don't know, babe, but... I'm doing that thing where you're supposed to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Maybe it is done and we're out of the crossfire." Lilith quietly sighs to Byron as he speculates, as if she's hoping that's the case, because... at some point this week, enough has just become enough. There's weeks like that here, real life crime and whizzing bullets outside of Dreams and the Veil shenanigans is just some mean icing on top of a shit-cake. Briefly, the woman leans over against Byron's arm and shoulder while still seated relatively still otherwise, legs still crossed with a pensive cast to her features.

She really has to think about Abitha's question of what she can do considering the console is probably just the metal components in a burnt and melted shell in Byron's trunk. And Abitha has some what-ifs of her own to present to Byron to keep them thinking (not that they aren't). But eventually, she says, "... I think I might be able to restore the console to original state if I can have at what's left in any solid state degree." Which would be... very fucking impressive. Some abilities, Lilith can explain. People, for instance, she just looks inside them at the tiniest levels and exploits what others can't see. She can't even begin to explain what happens when she touches a few pieces of something, or the shell of something, and makes it whole again.

It's beautiful, though. It's molecular latticework like art and colors and patterns, fissuring back together from her mind's eye when she sees what should be. Lilith thinks it's almost worth shining like the sun and casting far too much shadow with power and feat. In fact, the more she sits and thinks about it, the more she wants to try, but Byron's sitting there and she doesn't say that. Instead, she brings up the complications.

"Assuming I had enough leavings from the machine, assuming I could restore it, there's the matter of... well. I can't restore data exactly. I have NO clue if it shows up wiped like some factory reset or exactly as it was before in proper state. We could try, but success doesn't mean results-- it might just be a console that's fancily refurbished with a hard wipe reset, much like when you restore to factory state."

Also she notes quietly that Abitha 'found' Liu's gambling issues, but she's too fixated on working through what she's capable of and that's probably more interest to Byron.

Byron listens to this discussion repairing the burnt and partially melted console. He remembers seeing what remained of it and without knowing much about what a Spiritualist can repair, he has no idea if it's repairable or not. Not when some of it probably melted away.

"Gives us leverage?" He then has to ask, a somewhat quizzical look in his eyes. It's almost as if she thought of them as private investigators, detectives. People who deal with this stuff on a professional level. Not just some guy who owned a luxury building and co-owned a casino. He had goons for that usually. Though when she brings up that Javier had hired him, he'll assume that her enthusiasm is tied to that. Whatever his own ideas on how to proceed or whether he has any real interest in it, he doesn't so much as bring it up.

As for Liu's gambling debts, he knows all about that, after going into the man's records. So it's not something that he feels the a need to mention.

"Normally, I'd say, isn't this something that the GHPD should be handling and not regular citizens? But seeing as you're a hire for the GHPD, then I suppose this fall in your ballpark. I've run into many a police detective," Though mostly Ruiz, "Who keep things close to their vest, as per protocol. And they expect us to feed them all the information that we've got." His shoulders then lift, "First things first, I guess. We figure out to what extent that the console and its hard drive can be returned to its former glory, without data loss." It doesn't look as if he will tell Lilith no when it comes to this.

Lilith’s description gives Abitha a thought, and by the look of how her face falls into disappointment, it probably wasn’t a good one. “Oh. Point. Hard Disk drives by their nature actually are moving and scraping. Solid states and flash memory store in a way that just bringing back the hardware, there’s probably no way. You’re right, it’d probably just be factory reset.” At least that was the logical conclusion if the power worked how Lilith was saying. Her eyes go to Byron when he asks about her ideas of leverage.

“Normally, I’d say the cops should handle this too. But we’ve gotten to people using things that call people like us to locations like a siren and trying to kill them. We’ve got the special people of Gray Harbor being shot, stabbed.” Abitha was actually looking a little testy at the notion, her hand making a waving motion to encompass the two of them in example. “You’re the second case I’ve heard of someone getting their cars fucked up or run off the road. Like, when do we say the Man has failed us, we have to defend our home?” Another resigned shake of her head, looking down at her phone, contemplating all her data.

“I had no idea we had organized criminal shit in town before the fire. Now I’m aware, and what’s the best case? Get em all out? Sure. Get the ones out that want to kill Our people.” She enhances the ‘our’ with a finger pointed down and drawing a circle that includes the three of them, “Probably the case closer to what’s possible, and like... that’s the devil we know, right?” She realizes she had been leaning forward, trying to be persuasive, a posture not normal for her, and she sort of curls back into the seat, “Fuck protocol. I want to rebuild my shop and not worry about it burning down again.” Hopefully they didn’t pass that opinion along to Javier, she was thinking, but there it was...

Lilith looks at Byron with a turn of her head that seems to be mild surprise, as quick as she is about it. After a heartbeat of time, she smiles at him, a fond expression there for a moment. She probably thought he was at least half-inclined to tell her 'hell no' about the console repair feat, he hates it when she goes using her glimmer, especially in significant ways like this that might draw more attention for all they know. Then again, maybe it's just another repair, a moment of shine to add to the gradual shadow-tax heap, who knows. After putting her hand to rest on the back of his hand, she looks back at Abitha with a tiny nod of understanding.

Then she decides, "Even if it gives you nothing, I'll try. Who knows how any of this stuff works at the end of the day, in truth. We'll have to look at the results and just know it's not apt to give us anything. No disappointment that way, mm? But it doesn't hurt to try. It's about all I can do, at this point." She looks at Byron again here with another small smile, some backhanded kind of assurance that she's not going to go rogue and pursue who knows what with vengeful ire over what happened.

It's subtle. People sometimes get the idea that Lilith is a scary, domineering force if they only see her in certain circumstances or conditions. But Byron clearly wears some pants in the relationship and has a wrangle on her, the way she's looking to him for small allowances or reassurances. Maybe she's not so scary at all. Imagine that.

(Okay, maybe a little scary.)

Starting to rise up after a check of the time on her phone, she tells the other woman, with sling of purse onto her shoulder, "I'll update you when we finally get access and I can give it a try, the whole wreck is waiting on an insurance estimate and they have to send an adjustor and who knows how long they'll take with that given the car's value they probably don't want to pay. I imagine they'll drag ass." Then she pauses, curious, "Who else got ran off of the road like us?"

"Normally, I would leave mundane incidents like this to the police." Byron decides to relay, his dark eyes on Abitha, "It's their jobs, for one. And they should be trained to handle such. It's the weirder incidents, anything relating to the Veil or Dreams, that I might sometimes take an active part in." Usually, when he's dragged into a situation. Not that he wasn't dragged into this, so it might be telling. "Most cops are useless in that department and I don't care to step on any of their toes when they are trying to solve a case. I mean, I should know, my father used to bitch about how nosy people," Namely a young Alexander Clayton... " just get in his way when he's working on a case, bringing him this information or that information."

He then adds, "I'm surprised that the FBI hasn't gotten involved already. Unless they have or some of their agents are being paid off by this cartel as well." Who knows! "I mean, of course I want this to end. It's a bad look for the town, but I've given the GHPD any and all relevant information to help them along. With Liu and some of the others going rogue though, I'd like to figure out how much of the precinct is compromised."

Turning to Lilith, he does come out and say, "It doesn't have to be you, you know." There, his objection to this whole console repair business. "But I'll leave that to your decision, because you're terribly good at what you do." Which is what he's worried about. Feeling her reassuring touch to his hand, his gaze lowers to watch this connection for a long, silent moment. He also rises in time with Lilith, believing that everything that needed to be said was, even though she inquires what he'd been thinking of in regards to others being forced off the road in such a volatile high speed chase.

People were getting up and looking ready to go, and Abitha could at least pick up on that social cue. The pillow is set aside and she rises to her feet, ready to accompany them out. Her eyes lift, then roll aside as she tries to remember, taking a moment.

"Yaknow, now that you ask, I don't think Sparrow said who it was. I know she was worried about the gym owner..." Abitha counts on one finger, and each new addition to the list gets a new finger moved, "And Rhys was tangled up in stuff..." She taps a third finger that hadn't accompanied a name, "But there was a third friend that... I guess I've never met?" She gives it only so much more thought before her shoulders rise and fall helplessly.

"You're entitled to do as much or as little as you want," Abitha says flatly to Byron, and there's very little judgement in the tone, regardless of the tone, "Like, I get I may be a little more emotionally ready to face-fuck these asshole than most." A comical expression from someone who can't even look at most forms of physical intimacy. Her eyes sweep to Lilith, "But I appreciate any help you guys are able to give me, or the cops. Which... I guess is still kinda me?" She shakes her head, obviously not liking the implication of that idea, but heaving a stoic sigh, "I dunno. It's tough, and it's a mixed bag of weirdness and normies. I don't know that there's a black and white definition of who handles what. I'm just gonna keep grinding my face on this until it's done or I'm done."

"And honestly, until a month ago, insurance was the most bullshit inane shit. Now?" She tips her head aside, raising an eyebrow, as if her inquisitive look alone was enough to communicate what she thought she'd do without it.

"Thank you. Both. I'm sorry about your car." She can't help but smirk as the last part seems a lot easier to tack on than she thought. Maybe that's why he did it, "Don't die."

Lilith nods solidly at the parting words before her and Byron are on their way out, her mouth turning up with slight slanting of smile for the other brunette in brief at the doorway, "Thanks for being forthcoming and direct. I will be in contact about the console, either way." She leaves Byron's concerns about whether or not she should do anything with it to the car ride. Or dinner. Or maybe he's expressed enough and it's fine.

Either way, if they're going to have it out over WHAT to do next, it won't be here in this poor woman's house! But it's probably fine. Lilith is holding Byron's hand with squeezing pulse of new assurance when they leave.

With the mention of this gym owner, Byron absently nods, but once Rhys is brought up, his brow quirks, "I should ask Evans about that. If someone's bringing trouble to the casino, I want to know about it." Rhys Evans is one of the public faces attached to the Grand Olympic. When Machinae can't recall the name of the third person that had an altercation with the cartel, Thorne doesn't push for it.

"Thank you for your information. It helps to clear up our assumptions of what happened in regards to your store and how it's connected with the threat to Lilith's own shop. If you had any records that weren't destroyed in the fire that might hold a serial number for the console, it would help to link it to the one turned into Harbor Mist. For now, I'll just assume that it's one in the same. Rather than there being a network of, who knows what, using gaming units for the transport of something either illegal, dangerous or both."

He feels the squeeze at his hand, gaze drifting to look on Lilith, "Let's see how much of the console we can get up and running. Hopefully, I'll have similar good news regarding my car." Annoyance heard in his tone. As he leads Lilith out of the house, his dark eyes flicker over towards Abitha when she gives him Alexander's inappropriate and amusing way to say good bye. "Thanks. You too."