Paint Splatters, Glass Shards (closed)

[Ivy Takiyok]

Ivy stood outside her shop, frozen. It was morning, she had her keys in her hand, her bag in the other after spending the night at Liam's having a family booze up. It had been fun, they'd had a bit of a debrief about her moving in, how work was going, her intern, how dinner with Mia had gone, all over plenty of beer.

And she'd just got back home, because work and home were the same to her when she lived above her shop.

Broken glass littered the pavement, and paint was streaked in slurs across the outside and inside walls, even the red door and the black and white floor were splattered in paint.

Even her framed drawings.

Even the chairs.

A hand rose to her mouth, bare of her usual lipstick, as Ivy suddenly choked on a sob. Who could do this? Her shop, her art, her shop. She needed to do something. Picking her way across the glass, Ivy paused at the framed painting she had hung over her counter. Her pupils enlarged as she took in the shattered glass, the angry red slashes across it.

Her hands were shaking as she picked up her phone and fumbled with it once, twice, three times before she could dial the police as she turned and walked out again, using the door. The lock was still there. They'd come in through the shattered windows. The signs she'd painted, Ink on the Vine, now were just bits of painted glass.

"My shop's been vandalised," she said, her voice cracking like the glass under her boots. "I need, I need to report it. I don't know if anything's been taken, there's-"

A pause. "Pilot ridge," she muttered, "number 306."

Another pause. "Alright."

Pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes, Ivy gave a waterlogged curse and sat down on the pavement outside as she rocked back and forth, her lips pressed together to keep in the sounds.

Ivy's art was her life. Her shop was her home.

If she had been able to look down the rest of the street, she would have seen that she was not the only one coming to work and finding a nasty surprise. As it was, her long nails raked through her teased hair as her chest heaved.

[Josef Muller]

Josef arrived early to his clinic to get ready for his yoga lessons. He still hosted them religiously, albeit less often than he had. Flexibility was a big deal for a man who could mimic any physical skill. If he couldn't bend properly, then the imitation could end up seriously damaging him. So he always got up early, yawning, to get the clinic ready for a 7 or 8 AM yoga class, depending on the day. It was later this morning. He'd had a chance to sleep in, and truthfully, he wasn't that awake now. He had a coffee cup in hand, gym bag slung over one shoulder, and was just trying to figure out how he was supposed to get the keys to unlock the door when he realized that there was no need. The main window at the front of the clinic had been completely smashed in. Josef's lips parted as he stared inside. The large mirrors on the wall by the pad had been spray-painted with explicit words that, from what he could tell, amounted to Meta Go Home. The shelves of weaponry had been thrown to the ground and smashed, and every single punching bag had been dismantled. Luckily, he reflected, he'd put the weapons and merchandise in a safe, as he did every night. But someone had been very... thorough. Josef set the bag down and the coffee cup and stepped inside with care, looking around.

"All right then,'" he murmured. Josef once would've gone and hunted the person down to teach them a lesson. Now he took it... calmly. The rage was there, but it was a low, steady burn instead. He called the police, politely told them what had happened, then stepped out. He saw a dark haired woman--Ivy, he thought, she owned a tattoo parlor--sitting on the pavement, and went over to her. No point in trying to defend the clinic now. He placed a hand on her shoulder and knelt next to her. "Are you all right?"

His face was calm, but his light eyes burned. How dare they. How dare they.

[Rhea Hartman]

Rhea had seen a lot of crime scenes in her life, and they didn't surprise her much anymore. Painful, stressful, yes, surprising, no. It was just that normally, she wasn't halfway to work with a tub of yogurt in one hand and her uniform half unbuttoned when she laid eyes on them.

The graveyard and morning officer shifts rotated at 7AM, and Rhea was happy to count herself among the latter on this particular morning. A mile out from her apartment, she started getting paged from the station. The dispatcher had called the office not three minutes ago, and something had happened downtown. It was the middle of the shift rotation early in the morning, the dispatcher didn't know who had already gone down, if anyone, and Rhea was trying to untangle the three different lines of communication and not run into a pole at the same time. Finally, she swung her wheel ninety degrees to the right and made a beeline for the town center herself. She'd check in at the station once she made sure everything was all right.

It wasn't. In a small town you got used to knowing the victims of crimes personally, but her stomach dropped when she saw the smashed windows of Josef's clinic. Pawn shops, electronics stores, you expected that, but a self-defense dojo? She and Josef were buddies, and she'd spent hours jabbing at punching bags and teasing him about Damien behind those doors. Ten years of policing couldn't keep the shock out of her voice as she jumped out of her car and asked, "Josef? Shit, what happened?"

A cursory sweep of the two shops said 'vandalism,' a second one said, 'but not just.' She hesitated on the doorstep of Ivy's tattoo parlor for a moment, debating heading inside, but instead turned to the two owners. She repeated her statement again, but in her police voice this time. "What happened?"

[Gunnar Frey]

Even though Gunnar's store had apartment space above it (quite a lot of space, thanks to the expansion a while back), he rarely stayed there overnight. There was a poorly furnished kitchen and bedroom and bathroom, but the vast majority of the space was taken up by his reptile programme. Vivarium's filled the rooms from floor to shoulder-height, stocked with all manner of colubrids, leopard geckos and an assortment of other species in lesser quantities. One bedroom was also a rodentry, with a very meticulously kept fancy rat programme hosted there. As such, the apartment space was often, but not always, lacking any human resident during the night.

Last night had been one of those nights, with Gunnar having made the four minute walk back to his actual apartment at around eleven pm. All had seemed quiet and peaceful then, and he never could have predicted what he would find when he arrived back on the main street heading to his store the following morning.

The Brit's mouth hung open as he took in the scene before him. In his time in Vermont he hadn't seen anything quite like this – he had moved to Pilot Ridge primarily because it was supposed to be a quiet, quaint, boring town where big-city drama just didn't happen. What the actual fu-

Brown eyes cast over the stores on the way to his own, taking in the full extent of the damage. The words themselves meant little to him; sure Gunnar knew that meta-humans existed and he'd met a few of them in his time, but he didn't really have much of an opinion either way. None had ever caused him any direct harm (that he knew of), but at the same time he'd never heard of one preventing a flood or anything like that. He found it hard to imagine just what had happened to cause such chaos in what he had thought was just a mundane mountain town.

As he headed further down the street Gunnar could see his own store. The main window was cracked and there was a little senseless graffiti but it seemed more like collateral damage than a targeted attack. It was certainly nothing compared to the damage done to the tattoo studio, or to the martial arts place down the street. “Fuck...”

Plucking his earbuds out of his ears, Gunnar approached the little group with a completely bewildered look on his face. He'd never really had a problem with any of the other store owners – especially not Josef. The man had always been nothing but polite and friendly when he'd gone into The Ark to get supplies for the cat and dog. What the hell had they been doing to piss someone off this badly? Shrugging out of his dark grey coat, Gunnar offered it out to drape around Ivy's shoulders. That's what they did for people who were in shock, right? “Is everyone okay? No one got hurt, did they?”

[Carson Flatwood]

"Jesus Christ in a handbasket..." He muttered. Though he normally would have been off-the-clock at this time in the morning, relaxing with a cup of coffee and a decent breakfast meal, hearing of a report of vandalism like this was something that he was personally interested in. He was the chief, this was the town he worked in and tirelessly served, trying to bridge that gap between meta and, well, regular. Things like this, despite his fantasy-dreams of having them in one institution in a private island, made him, well, angry.

They weren't bad people. Hell, there were plenty of them under him on the food chain. And vandalizing their shops was not only unwarranted, but obviously illegal. He stepped out of his car, looking over the entire scene. He noticed that Officer Hartman was the first to arrive on scene. Dispatch obviously clued her in. It'd be up to the detectives to question her about the beginning scene.

"This is a small, peaceful little town... Who could have done something like this..?" His first two guesses were wayward agents inside of PUSE, and he was deep enough with them that they probably weren't going to step on his toes like that. They usually veered more towards the 'Public rallies' side of things. Though, he wouldn't be surprised if others blamed them first.

The second guess on his mind, were probably more local punks, teenagers. That 'fuck authority and respect' sentiment spread everywhere, teenagers, even in small towns like this, were bound to do things. These were ideas he jotted down in his little black notepad, with the PRPD insignia emblazoned on the front in gold.

He watched as Officer Hartman also gave basic questioning. This was good, it gave him more opportunities to take notes, things that would later turn in to paperwork. It gave him a more organizational handle on it. He'd let her handle it. It was proper, instead of constantly changing the hands of officers. And with how shaken up these poor people must have been, confusing them was the last thing he currently wanted to do.

He butted in for just a moment. "I'm sorry for interrupting. Officer, radio for the detectives, and tape this off. We need to thoroughly case this and run interviews before we can clean up."

[Ivy Takiyok]

Ivy looked up as a man crouched beside her. She'd seen him around, enough to recognise him even if she couldn't remember the name. "No," she said honestly, "I'm not alright. I live there," she gestured to the broken glass and sniffed hard, making an effort not to be an hysterical mess now there were people around.

There were people gathering around on the street, and the quiet murmuering reminded her that her breakdown wasn't exactly quiet. At the arrival of a woman in uniform she got to her feet, turning. So it was Josef, that was the name of the man who'd come to check on her. Someone draped a coat over her shoulders and she looked up again at Gunner, smiling in thanks, but the smile quickly faded. "I got back from my friend's this morning," she said as steadily as she could to the officer, rubbing a hand over her tattooed temple, "and it was just... like this."

"It's just a matter of luck I wasn't home last night," she said as her hands balled into fists. "I wish I had been. I keep a baseball bat under my bed and-" she trailed off, pulling the coat closer around her as she shivered. "I didn't think this sort of thing could happen here!" Again, she sniffed hard, actually glad she wasn't in her usual heavy makeup; it would be all down her face by now. "I won't be able to get it fixed for days. How'm I supposed to- Fuck, my apprentice!"

She had to call Lucy before she arrived and saw the mess, she had to call Mia, she had to call her insurance company, she'd need to get security cameras or something and how was she supposed to pay for that shit?

"Can I go in before you tape it off?" she asked Carson, "my apartment's just above, I need to check if they went upstairs-" her voice started to shake again as the shock really started to set in and she tried to stop herself shivering, taking a shuddering breath. "I need to-" she didn't even finish, just rubbed her hands over her face and stamped her feet in frustration.