2020-12-28 - Car talk

(TXT to Itzhak) Seth : Yo, Itz...got a sec? '68 is making a rattling noise somewhere, think a bearing popped loose somewhere.

(TXT to Seth) Itzhak : Hey. Yeah? If it's in the engine compartment don't start her. You want I should come have a look?

(TXT to Itzhak) Seth : Yeah, I think the doctor need to make a house call. If I can't start her, I can't bring her to you...lol. No rush, I can use the beater till then.

(TXT to Seth) Itzhak : hell I got a minute, I'll come over. You're right on Elm, yeah?

(TXT to Itzhak) Seth : Sure am. Few doors down from Joey and Vic. 26, I'll have a beer waiting.

(TXT to Seth) Itzhak : be there in 20

In 18 minutes, Itzhak's big shop truck, shimmery orange flake, rumbles up to number 26. The violinist-mechanic himself swings out, the hood of his Reinhardt hoodie up against the drizzle. He hauls out a toolbox and comes up to the door. Rap rap "'ey Seth! Open wide, the doctor's here!"

Seth is out in the detached garage buried deep into the hood of his '68 Cobra when Itz arrives. He's dressed like someone who is working on a car should be. Dirty tee stained with grease and oil and a pair of jeans that have seen much use.

"Come on in doc. Patient is in here. She can certainly use your magic touch." Seth says as he rises from the depths of the engine and wipes off his hands on the jeans. "Want that beer?"

Itzhak saunters around the side of the house, rolling on up to the detached garage and Seth. "Sure I do," he says, but his eyes are all on the car. "Man. What a beauty. You say she's knocking?" He comes over to--oh no, is he going to touch it? He's going to touch it!--to lay a hand on the curve of the fender.

His body language towards Seth himself is guarded, cautious, but towards the car? It's like he just saw a beautiful girl he has every intention of luring to bed.

"Yeah, started knocking on the way home from the Firefly. Don't know what could have caused it, it's not like I went over any bumps or anything that would have jarred something loose." Seth explains as he moves over to the mini-fridge in his detached garage. The enforcer wipes his hands off on his jeans again to try and clean them as best he can from the engine grease and grime that has already accumulated as he was poking around in the engine compartment before he opens the fridge and pulls out another bottle of some imported German Hefeweizen. Seth pops the top off of the bottle with a churchkey and brings it over, setting it on the workbench by the car.

Seth, for his part, seems totally comfortable in his garage. If he has any issues with Itzhak touching the car, they are unvoiced and his body language doesn't change to indicate a problem either. "I'm wondering if a bearing popped out somewhere and is rattling around in there. I hope not, because man, wouldn't that be a bitch. I hope you have a better prognosis after you get a look at her."

"Yeah, actually that's kinda what I think too," Itzhak murmurs, with an upnod of thanks for the beer. Having set down his toolbox, he picks the bottle up and takes a swig. "Mm. So hey, I didn't know you had a whole setup in here. Brought stuff I thought I'd need, though, so it'da been okay if you didn't. Where'd you get this? She got a name?"

Whereas Seth is muscular as hell, Itzhak is lanky and skinny. He stands there drinking the beer with one hand, the other hand on the Cobra, his expression musing.

"It's all good. I didn't tell ya I had a garage all set up out here. Besides, you may have things in there that I don't have. I used to work as a mechanic for a couple of years. but I haven't worked as one in a while." Seth says with a shrug of his shoulder as he takes his own sip of beer. "Her name is Lillith. I picked her up down in Seattle when I was working down there, and have been restoring her ever since. Had her mostly done when I came back and she's been running fine, at least until this little snafu." Seth sets down the beer and walks over to the front of the car to lean into the engine compartment. "I think," he mutters in an unsure tone, "it is somewhere around here, by the carburetor. I was playing with the mix and I'm wondering if I didn't fuck something up and not tighten something down well enough and it just rattled loose."

"Lilith, huh?" This amuses Itzhak for some reason, grinning crookedly as one thumb rubs across a fender. "Yeah, bet a bearings cage was a little loose. They get some wear on 'em, how tight you thought was good ain't so good anymore--well, shit, you don't need me to tell you that." He flicks a glance at Seth, eyebrows quirked in some private amusement.

"Think I can help you out right now." Itzhak's hand stays on the fender, but now his long, inked fingers tap out a rhythm. One-two-three-and-one-two-three and his eyes drift shut. He starts grooving in place, gently, and he opens his mouth and a song comes out.

I'm gonna wait 'till the midnight hour
That's when my love come tumbling down
I'm gonna wait 'till the midnight hour
When there' no one else around
I'm gonna take you, girl, and hold you
And do all things I told you, in the midnight hour...

ping! pop! tiktiktiktiktik goes something in the Cobra's engine. It sounds suspiciously like a ball bearing clinking its way up out of the engine. And then there it is, leaping free, and Itzhak moves to snatch it from the air and present it on his palm to Seth. "There's ya troublemaker."

Not much shocks Seth Monaghan, and he has been in this town long enough to know the workings of power, even though he is relatively new to his own. Still when he sees a master of their craft telekineticly lift a ball barring from the innards of an engine just by tapping fingers to a beat, well that impressed him.

"Shit, man, you just saved my bacon. It would have taken me hours to break down that engine and find that little bastard, and here you are fixing it with a damned song. The shit in this town never ceases to amaze me. The stuff that I have seen, or have happen to me, in the last few months still boggles my brain at times."

Seth picks up his beer from the workbench and takes a swig, "Not to long ago I found out I could do some shit too. I had to heal up Ravn Avacantsayhislastname. He got himself stabbed in the arm with a fucking meat cleaver. Not that long after Vic came in with some cracked ribs. She would have been in some bad shape. I'm still not really use to healing people." Just the opposite really, but he leaves that part unsaid.

"Seriously, thanks for the assist. What do I owe you for the house call?"

Itzhak grins a troublesome grin, eyebrows up. Showoff. He tosses the bearing to land on the workbench, which it does, neatly, and sticks there where he wants it to stick. No rolling around. "Yeah, Abildgaard said you healed him up, which, thanks, a guy who can play violin like him? He needs his fingers." He can pronounce 'Abildgaard' almost right, except his New York accent turns the 'aa' into a blat. "Listen, I owed you for takin' care of him. Who else am I gonna play with in this town, other than him? You keep an eye on him, we're more'n square."

He tips back the beer at the end of this speech, wetting his throat. Then, swallowing, he runs his tongue along his teeth. "You got what some people call the Shaping Song. Well, I call it a song. People talk about seeing it, about seeing a shimmer or colors or whatevah, but I hear it." He taps one ear.

"Whatever it is, it is all new to me," explains Seth with a shrug. "I mean, I had an episode back when I was a kid. Started a fire, or at least I think I did. But when I told Felix he just told me I was just so I never thought about it again. Not till a few months ago, when I heard others talking about things. At least I know I am not crazy though."

He lifts his bottle to his lips and takes a big sip. "But yours is all through sound? That is a new one to me."

Seth was Ed a hand dismissively, "I like Ravn, he is a good kid. If I'm around, I'll do my best to keep him safe. "

Itzhak's mouth flattens when Seth mentions Felix. "Yeah." Another swallow for him, another two or three, before he surfaces able to control his tone. "All sound. Not just sound, for me. Music. I can hear it in you. Sounds sorta like a bass line, except there ain't no bass or bassist who could play it. Music that can't really exist, but I can hear it. I can always hear it in people who got it, and it always sounds different. Never met anybody else who could hear it."

To Seth, Felix is just his cousin, not the Keyser Söze that people make him out to be (or that he is). So Seth's brow raises slightly at Itz's reaction for a second before it registers. "Oh, right."

Change the subject, don't dwell on the cousin. "That's awesomely unique, Itz!" exclaims Seth with a grin just before he drains the last of his beer. The redhead takes the bottle over to a bun and tosses it in, moving towards the fridge to grab another. "Most people I have talked to about it see it as a glimmer or shine or glow, something like that. That is distracting enough, I don't know how it would be with music constantly playing. How do you sleep?"

Seth's kindness, not to mention enthusiasm about how Itzhak perceives the shine (or the song, in his case), makes Itzhak blink. He didn't expect either of those things. Hesitantly, he almost smiles, one corner of his mouth hitching up. "Well, uh, I already got music playing in my head all the time. Practically how I think. Music, numbers, gears. Admittedly I don't sleep too good, but it never occurred to me that might be why." And the idea intrigues him, from the way his eyebrows tilt up.

He takes the last swig from his own bottle, tosses it in the air. There it hangs, rotating gently, as if in zero gravity, effortless as a soap bubble. Itzhak flicks it with a nail, and it soars over to drop in the bin with Seth's. "You're a shaper. I'm a mover. I move things."

"Like Ravn and Vic," Seth says with a nod. "And I know Alexander does mind stuff. I'm slowly leaning this shit as I go along." The enforcer says with a shrug of his shoulder as he fishes out two more bottles of beer. "But half of what I hear is all fuckin contradictories. Practice with your power. Don't use your power because it attracts the bad guys...shit like that. So far, since I came back, I have only used it twice," he says as he offers over one of the bottles. "Once to heal up Ravn some when he ended up with a cleaver in his arm, and the other when Vic showed up the other night beat to shit. Someone really did a number on her."

"Oh," Itzhak says, eyebrows going up, mouth tugging into a half-smile, "I get to give you my speech? I love giving my speech." He accepts the bottle. "Thanks. Okay, well, yeah. Some people think we shouldn't use it at all, ever. I got a different view. Obviously." Since he'd just shown it off, and all.

He drinks, meditatively, and quirks those expressive eyebrows at Seth. "The thing is, it's true. It does attract the bad guys. The Takers. The Them, the Bad Men. The ones who're hungry." His harsh, lilting Yiddish accent hushes, when he names the names of Them. Outside, the day goes on, unchanged, nothing happens...and yet. "That's true and I ain't ever gonna tell you that it ain't. But." Itzhak turns over the hand that's not holding the beer, palm-up. As if offering Seth an idea. "The thing is, man, as long as we're here, and as long as we got the Song, that happens anyway. We can't make it not happen. That's not in our power. What's in our power is being able to do something with it."

"Yeah, like fixing up a busted friend for an example," Seth agrees with a nod of his head as he opens his own beer and takes a swig. "Who knows how fucked up Ravn would be now if I hadn't been able to lay hands on him right away? And I know Vic would have been laid up for weeks with those fractured ribs. Even after I healed them we still had to wrap them for a while."

Seth takes another sip and gestures with his bottle as he talks, "And Lilith would be getting disemboweled right now to try and find that little bit of metal if it wasn't for you."

"Thing is, I don't know the extent of what I can do. I know I can heal. I am pretty sure I can start a fire, since that is how this whole thing started years ago. Other than that though, I got no ideas. And I had to be told about the healing." Seth shrugs his shoulder again, "This shit doesn't come with a manual, but it should."

Itzhak blinks when Seth says 'Lilith getting disemboweled', like he completely misheard him. "Wh--OH. Your car. Right. Yeah. I know someone named Lilith, I was confused. Usually she's the one doing the disemboweling." Flushing over misunderstanding, he tips his beer up to cover his fluster.

"Okay, well, listen," he says, after a couple swallows. "You know August Roen? Everybody knows August, right? He's the guy you want to talk to about the shaping. I don't got any of it myself. He runs the garden center, Branch and Bole. Fantastic guy. One of the best you'll ever meet. Track him down. I can talk to you about some stuff, but for the shaping, it's all him. There's other people who can do it too, and real strong, but he's a scientist, you know? He figures this shit out. None of us got a manual and we all just been inventing it as we go along, and he's been amazing." Itzhak practically glows when he mentions the name of August Roen.

"I don't 'know' him, no. I know the name and I have seen him around, but I can't recall if I have ever formally met the man, or had a conversation. I may have to change that," Seth says as he sips at his beer. "Maybe you can make introductions at some point? I think it might be weird if I just showed up and started talking about this shit."

"Shit, buddy, weird is relative." Itzhak grins crookedly. "Sure. Happy to introduce you. Look, uh. I ain't known what to make of you, but Abildgaard and Alexander are real into you. That's a couple of guys it's hard to impress. So, hey. Solid points there." He doesn't drink more than half the beer, which he waggles meaningfully at Seth. "Gotta drive back. I'll talk to Roen and text you, yeah?"

Seth arches a brow at Itz when the mechanic starts talking about not knowing what to make of him, but shrugs is shoulder nonchalantly. "I just am who I am, Itz. Sure, my name has some baggage around this town, but I am not Felix. My job might not be butterflies and rainbows, but that doesn't mean I have to be an asshole off the clock, ya know. But hey, you need to make up your own mind. I get it. No offense taken." The enforcer smiles, lifting his bottle in a departing wave, "I'll look forward to hearing from you. Drive safe."