Fraternal Order of the Falcon

Grace
Grace only really knows two people from Colorado Springs. Well, two people who are Mages. One of them just Awakened, and isn't exactly local to the place either. Angela. Got to get with her, right? Got to find out what the hell is up with Peregrine.

Falcons are rather near and dear to Grace's heart, but somehow she gets the idea that it's meant in some vaguely horrible fashion. Birds of prey. Preying on Mages?

So she calls one afternoon, irrespective of such things as normal working hours, because when has Grace had normal working hours? Her work takes up most of days and nights and plenty of Doritos to fuel it.

Ring ring, Angela.

Assuming the woman picks up, she'll get Grace on the line, with a: "Hey, Angela. I have some... information about... things. Oh yeah, this is Grace. Evans."

Angela Avella
When she answers the phone, she sounds like she works at a call center. Not at all like a police officer, not at all like someone who was a detective at one point. Not at all like someone who has, in the past, seen the depths of human depravity (and that was before she awakened) and come back with an overwhelming need to bring about justice.

There's a reason to call Angela, and there's a reason she keeps up with the job that she does.

"Oh," is how she replies, "well, I get off in... three hours,t he commute is an hour and some change... I'll be there close to dinner."

Angela, clearly, has no idea when/what it is that Grace eats, but presumes she eats food like a normal person.

Time basses, though, and inevitably she shows up on the front door step of the apartment she's looking for. No need to give real directions. Angela Avella knows her way around places.

Grace
Grace does eat food. Normal person, though? That's stretching it. A lot. Where and when Grace decides to eat is largely determined by whether she is hungry, and whether she is too engrossed in something to remember that she is hungry.

That said, she is a fish swimming in a culture that says approximately what time one should eat dinner. It's not that she doesn't know this fact, just that she doesn't quite understand why it exists.

"Dinner. Okay. Do you like Samosas?"

Because, of course her first thought is to make sure her ally didn't just bring that up out of a desire for food.

Time passes, and Grace has obtained some samosas and paneer masala and some naan, regardless of what Angela says, because hey -- dinner actually sounded like a good idea. Whether she has to share or not, there is food for more than just the two of them. River might like leftovers too. Everybody wins.

Angela doesn't need directions, which isn't entirely unsurprising. Most Mages don't. The front door opens, and Angela will find an apartment -- largely decorated by River's own standards -- Grace having left all the aesthetic decisions to her.

"Hey, thanks for coming by. I uh," she says, steps aside so Angela can enter. "I've been meaning to tell you some things. And also ask some questions."

Angela Avella
What Angela lacks in a phone presence she makes up for in her physical presence. Grace has seen Angela vault over a fence with little fanfare in a pair of pajama pants and an oversized shirt. Seeing Angela in uniform was almost jarring were it not for the fact that it didn't seem out of place on her; the uniform wasn't a power play on her. It just was. She smiles bright and takes her hat off when she comes inside.

Angela deposits several things at the table by the door. Hat. Firearm. Car keys. Cell phone. She inhales and lets a smile cross her face witht he quiet delight that comes from knowing that Indian food was forthcoming. She lingers at the door while unbuttoning her shirt. She treats it like a jacket instead of a shirt-

"Isolde finally stopped being my dry cleaning service," she tells Grace with a grin. Magick is the best stain remover.

"I will try my best with questions- what do you need to know?"

Grace
Grace is usually rather put off by the uniform of a cop, let's be honest. But there is Alex to consider. He didn't turn out to be bad. In fact, most Mages are open-minded enough to understand. After all, they routinely break the rules of the universe. And Angela's a Chakravanti.

Indian food, yes. The warm smell of it is rather intoxicating even from the door, because Grace has already laid out a spread in preparation, and also because she wanted to get a head start on it herself.

Speaking of which, she just starts heading in the general direction of the dining room.

"Do you know anything about 'Peregrine'? Doctor Sepúlveda told me about you guys' problem with a rash of murders... I think this 'Peregrine' might be connected somehow."

Angela Avella
Angela's preferred uniform is a pair of sweatpants and a My little Pony shirt, truth be told. It was the first impression that she got to make on Grace, and it would probably forever color the way that one may perceive her. Police officer or not, Angela Avella believes in being comfy and believes that Friendship is Magic.

"I... know... that a peregrine is a type of falcon?"

She pauses.

"We've had a few murders in the area, but the word on the street is that they may be technocratic in nature. Isolde doesn't believe that, but... maybe there is something I'm not catching. Could you tell me more? I've not spoken with Doctor Sepúlveda"

Grace
"The Technocrats here in Denver seem to be willing to go way out of their way to avoid killing us," Grace says, with a cock of her head. "I realize, though, that we may be just incredibly lucky there."

She leads, not intentionally so, but leads nonetheless over to the table of food, where Angela can note that Grace already has a plate, and has already begun to dig in. But there is another, clean plate available, as well as silverware, even, as if some manners happened to occur to her.

"We had an Apprentice captured by some guy, they took him to their lab. But it seems the head honcho was very displeased by that, and decided to 'kill' said Apprentice -- in their books. And then send him home in an ambulance. I don't think it's connected to what you guys are having."

She sits down at her chair and shoves a samosa in her mouth, before continuing -- with the samosa still in her mouth.

"Doctor Sepúlveda said that the only clues anybody found at the murder sites were half a fingerprint, and a single hair. I traced the hair. Found a really weird guy who nonetheless doesn't seem to be a Mage."

Angela Avella
"They're not fractured, but we did hear about what happend with that Apprentice... he was on the force, yeah?" a bit of empathy there. A bit of sadness but... it makes her knit her brows together, makes her set a little more concerned and sharpens her thoughts.

She starts getting her plate together- has it halfway together before Angela seems to realize something and finishes taking her shirt off. Leaves it to the side and then gets the rest of the delicious deliciousness together.

"The issue with your apprentice friend doesn't sound connected, though... the last few deaths we've had in town were all transplant people- with the exception of one, but that... that was off. Dory died of hypothermia-" she pauses like she was trying to remember- "it wasn't a natural death, and we knew her. She'd lived in Colorado Springs for awhile, didn't fit the MO."

A pause.

"We'd presumed it was either technocratic in nature or big money in play because crime scenes don't come that clean without having a professional tend to them or having someone purposefully botch the clean up so badly that the only things that get logged are a single hair and a dead fingerprint."

Grace
"Big money fits with what I saw," Grace says as she mops up some curry with naan. "The guy looked to be loaded, but carried no identification. He had a credit card, but the name on it was Elizabeth Palor. He did have another, rather opulent card with the word 'Peregrine' on it, too."

She munches, considers, thinks back.

"He seemed rather happy about that card. He showed it to his girlfriend and she asked about one of the guys who was murdered -- La Croix? Asked if he 'got in'. Seems he did not."

Angela Avella
"The only rich bird men I know are the guys in the Fraternal Order of the Falcon- they're like a Elk's lodge- they do charity events. They rub me the wrong way that any organization of rich white guys who like guns rubs me, but they're not backing Trump so I figure they can't be the completespawn of Satan," she takes a mouth full of rice and chases it wiuth some curry. Angela chews like she is being mindful of the taste, but holds her plate like someone who knowes her own weaknesses.

She is going to get food on her shirt. She knows this. She does not accept it easily.

"Did they find the same hair at each crime scene or just the one? Was it the same guy at each scene?"

Grace
Rich white guys who like guns, eh? The murders were mostly accomplished via gun, too. Grace chews. And frowns a kind of thinking frown. "Fraternal Order of the Falcon."

Sounds like the kind of name a Hermetic might think up. They adore the unnecessarily long and extremely verbose. But no, this does not exactly reek of Hermeticism either. Why would they be killing their own allies and potential recruits, for one?

Andrés did bring up the quintessence angle. And Hermetics often don't have nice things to say about Orphans. There's only a small step from thinking a group of people bad to thinking them inhuman. And from there, murder for profit doesn't seem so morally wrong.

She chews more.

"Just one hair, at one crime scene. It's not much to go on, no. But some of the bullet casings matched another murder -- Jacqueline Paix?"

Angela Avella
"Jacqueline Paix was a body dump, or at least that's what homicide thought. Body was scrubbed down clean, they found her by a creek. No clothes, no evidence of sexual assault. Two bullet wounds- one to the chest and one to the head, and the bullet to the chest wasn't a through-and-through. Two different angles, too... I don't work special victims for Colorado Springs. If this were Dallas I'd have a lot more for you.

"Leave it to an affluent neighborhood to not really care when a working girl ends up dead," the disdain for her current place of employment is ever-so-obvious. It's what causes her to drip food on her shirt.

Grace
"Yeah. That doesn't surprise me. At all," Grace grumbles. The thing about the 'justice system' is that the phrase has something in common with with the Ministry of Peace and the Ministry of Truth. Very 1984, at its heart. There is no justice to be found in a system that categorizes some people as worthless and others as needing protection.

And yet, people rail on about Black Lives Matter as if they shouldn't. So just we are, as a society, eh?

Grace lifts her eyes from the curry to the uniform, then to the person wearing it. Someone's trying to change the system from within. She wonders if Angela has yet figured out that that's a Sisyphean task.

"I'll look into the bird men. That sounds at least a little promising. The guy did look like a hedge fund sociopath."

He'd be hard to take down, if they went through legal channels. Thankfully, Grace doesn't give two shits about legality.

Angela Avella
"Let me know if you need anything. Or Hell, talk to Isolde- I can give you my partner's number. She's been a lot more involved with these particular murders than I have, plus I think she and some of the Denverites play poker on Mondays. It's a civil-servant-only game, apparently. I came once but it turns out that the witch in HR is out for blood when it comes to her poker games."

Grace
"Ooh, more names and numbers. I like," Grace says, with the kind of aplomb that might make one nervous. Grace can do so very much with a name and number.

She grins at the mention of a witch in HR. A Verbena in human resources? There's a really terrible pun to be found there.

"I'd be... well, shit at poker. But I don't really care. I'm not a civil servant though, so eh."

Angela Avella
"Well, if you want to meet Isolde at any time, you can always say you're trying to either kick a drug habit or you're seeking the guidance of Santisima Muerte. She'll go to Hell and back for you if she thinks you're one of the flock."

She shrugs, is shoveling food into her mouth again and trying to eat away the feeling that comes when she sees the grin on Grace's face and knows good and well that she's thrown the Chroister under the bus and... well... maybe doesn't care too much about it in that regard.

"Choristers, am I right?"

Grace
"I wouldn't even be able to pretend to be one of the flock, and I really don't want to stop smoking weed, so--" Grace shrugs. "That would be really hard to pull off too."

Hell, Grace is good friends with a drug dealer. Not that she's going to say that much in front of a cop, good one or no.

"They can be... not sucky," Grace says. "Sometimes." She grins at that statement too, thinking of Kalen -- a man who dumped his tradition to go join up with the religious nutjobs. Also, not sucky in her book.

Angela Avella
"The Iveys used to be the it couple in Colorado Springs. I didn't get to know them for very long, but James Ivey was my partner's mentor. He was a chorister and his wife Melissa was a Cultist- I'm still trying to figure out how that worked..."

She pauses, "but it's Santa Muerte, she's... she just is. She grants miracles for either purpose because she is truly neutral. I can get behind a Chorus with a healthy respect for death."

Grace
"I don't know. The one Chorister I know really well once went out with a Cultist, but then he's really... rather strange for a Chorister." And he went out with a vampire. But she's really not going to say that either.

Inter-Tradition relationships can be... interesting. Insightful. Useful. Human-Vampire relationships on the other hand? Not so much.

"I don't know much about Santa Muerte, to be honest. When I was growing up, I always thought such things were kind of... Well, I grew up in one of those actually-Agnostic families that sometimes drags their kids to Easter Sunday church and nothing else? I mean... Now, I know that there aregods, just not how I might have envisioned them before."

Gods then. A Mercurial Elite who believes in them. Gods in the machine of the universe.

Angela Avella
Now, I know that there are gods, just not how I might have envisioned them before.<
"They never are," she replies. Seems content to leave it at that and, maybe, have normal conversation sharing stories and generally enjoying Grace's company when it comes to talking about things. Maybe she talks about Texas. Maybe she talks about the yearsthat she spent being the Virgin Mary at her Chrismtas pageants.

Hell, maybe they even talk about Mike. It's hard to tell, but for now Angela seems content to just converse and enjoy the time she has with another person.