Cleaning House (Ryan)

[Maurelle Lacroix]

Maurelle's business was as good as it ever was and this pleased her greatly. However there was a certain matter that was not pleasant at all and that was a certain Ryan Alcroft. Of all the agents she had under her employ he perhaps had the most potential but also was the least reliable of them. The fact that he was married to that crazy doctor who seemed intent on severing Maurelle's head from her shoulders also was a very unpleasant obstacle in the way of Ryan being an efficient agent. Perhaps the time had come that his usefulness had outgrown his risks.

Rather than attempt to confront the man head on and risk the doctor being present for the meeting, Maurelle went with a more simple option. She cut off the direct deposit of funds into the account that she had set up for the man to receive his pay. Losing that nearly six thousand a month would most certainly get Ryan's attention she believed, especially with the lifestyle that he and his wife choose. Expenses had to be paid in some way or another and the lack of funds made such things very difficult indeed, regardless of your ability.

It would not take Ryan long to track her down she knew, not with those excellent powers that he had. It was one reason that she valued him as an asset, those abilities were so useful in so many scenarios. It was such a shame that they were going to waste the way that they currently were, that he had not utilized them better for her uses. He was a conundrum that she had attempted to solve time and time again but with only mild success and always feeling frustrated after every attempt.

Knowing that he would soon be upon her and likely be demanding to know why his money had been cut off, Maurelle choose not her home to bunker up in. No, she went to a more unlikely of destinations, to the site of The Battle of San Jacinto. It was remote and not exactly in the public eye, a mistake one would think if she wanted to avoid a confrontation. She had also decided not to bring forth any of her strike teams to be able to come in at a moments notice and bring the man down. Her visions say it may have been needed but there were times you had to rely on yourself.

Her yellow and red summer dress whipped in the occasional breeze as she stretched her toes in the sandals. The sun was beating down on her in the Texas heat as summer had begun in earnest, sweat glistening on her forehead. However, she merely smiled like a cheshire cat as she took a seat against one of the trees and waited patiently for her employee to show, as she knew he would. "Come out come out wherever you are."

[Ryan D'Alteau]

By our heart of choice, into the devil's jaws!
Fearless through eternity, for a greater cause!
Time! We need time! To seal the challenge of our call.
Time! We need time! In the land of the lost.
______________________________Gormathon - "Land of the Lost"

Just what had happened over the past few months?

Pretty much the only thing which had piqued his interest to any significant extent had been Dakari's formation of the Jamaican Dominion and the collective media's branding of her as everything from a revolutionary to an international terrorist. Then again, Ryan had quickly come to the realisation that the people who dispensed the fairest account of the news were the ones who satirised and poked fun of it and, beyond the likes of John Oliver's Last Week Tonight, everything else was largely irrelevant and could easily be ignored. Adele did so well enough, so why shouldn't he? If anything, his existence in the southern tip of Texas with his fiancée had grown startlingly close to what some would have considered 'normal' since their last big outing in the spotlight.

Lilith had been the orchestrator of much of what he'd last seen fit to pay attention to in the wider world - a country-wide famine, with a smattering of a cholera epidemic thrown in for good measure - and, mostly at Adele's urging, they had both made their way out to Brownsville in order to dole out some punishment for her misdeeds. Even now, Ryan wasn't entirely sure just how she'd been captured, presumably by Dakari's forces, or how he'd allowed himself to become a party to what had essentially been a torture session. He'd intentionally visited harm on someone and, while he'd definitely done so numerous times in the past, Lilith had been the first situation in which Ryan couldn't fathom a clear reason why.

Regardless of the lack of reasons for him to venture outdoors, Ryan knew that, between their respective jobs, money was far from a problem. Adele was still employed as a doctor and he was still a perpetually on-call component of Maurelle's wide-ranging business enterprise. With just over two hundred dollars finding its way into his bank account every day, he saw no reason to betray her or refuse her sporadic summons. Making seventy-grand a year certainly did a lot to grease certain wheels. With the payments coming in so quickly, Ryan had taken to keeping track of his finances online. On the internet, he didn't have to wait until the end of every month to get a look at all the comings and goings of his money.

It was also because of the internet that he was quick to discover that, a little over a fortnight ago, the payments had suddenly stopped. There had been no word on the subject from Maurelle - in fact, the two had last dealt face-to-face over a month ago - and nothing had been amiss as far as he could tell. She still desired his - or, rather, Calla's - talents just as he desired the opportunity to get out of the house and stop the boredom from driving him to the very brink of psychosis. She'd effectively cut him off without a semblance of a word as to why.

As far as he was concerned, he deserved an explanation. In the grand scheme of things, two hundred and thirty dollars and sixteen cents wasn't a significant amount of money. But when it was being fed to his wallet on a daily basis, it quickly mounted up. Understandably, his first course of action was to call her. He had her cellphone number, just as she had his. But, this time, the only thing he got across four attempts was a business-like and to-the-point answering machine message. It told him who she was, explained that she was absent and requested that he leave her a message. He wasn't buying it. He wasn't going to leave her a message, either.

With Adele at work, Ryan had nobody to inform as he stormed out of the condo and down into the parking area which sat beneath as a sort of open-air garage-slash-basement. With his unique gifts, Ryan didn't need to get an answer from his boss in order to meet up with her. Somehow, he got the distinct feeling that she knew he'd found out and was preparing to meet up with him at that very moment. Like Adele's father, Maurelle was a precog, gifted with visions of the future just as he was able to unshackle his consciousness from his body and use it to wreak all kinds of havoc. After clambering into his car, Ryan reclined in the driver's seat, closed his eyes, and started to concentrate.

Within moments, his... essence was hurtling out from both the car and his body until he found himself materialising on the roof of his home. Even after nearly six years, the astral plane was a challenging thing to explain. In its purest form, it was a near formless cerulean landscape; an abstract representation of a combination of the world in which he lived and his own mentality. By bringing his mind into focus - something which he'd always done, even in the days when such had been involuntary - he was able to sully it, gaze back through whatever veil he'd kicked his way through and see what was going on. What surrounded him was the real world and, unless they did so directly to his vacant physical shell, nothing corporeal could harm him.

In much the same way as Adele was able to pick him out of a crowd with unerring accuracy - or track him down across the island - Ryan had left shards of his astral essence behind. More often than not, they were embedded harmlessly in locations and people which held significance and, while many had simply decayed and been whisked away over time, there were quite a number of them remaining. Even across vast distances, he could focus on any shard he wished and instinctively know who, what or where they were. The easiest shards to find were those which corresponded to his family. His parents were still living and working in New York while his elder brother was across the Atlantic in London. Despite the ease with which he could track them down, the shard he inexplicably found himself drawn to time and time again was the one inside Adele. Even now, when he wanted to leave her to her own devices, she was distracting him.

In comparison to all of those, the shard which corresponded to Maurelle was far dimmer; a pebble against the sun. But he could see her. Jumping to and from these shards, while taxing, was a much faster way of traversing the astral plane than simply putting one foot in front of the other. Ryan may have been relatively unshackled from the bonds of both gravity and friction while existing as a projection - allowing him to run and jump far in excess of what he or the greatest of olympians were capable of - but even he was limited to how fast he could run. Using the shards as beacons to which he could "teleport" was, like many things, a trick Ryan had crafted out of necessity and curiosity. As far as he knew, he was the only person truly capable of doing what he could do that was still alive. The astral plane was a domain that was solely his and, as such, he felt just as the etymology of his name suggested. Like a king. He could do what he wanted and no-one could stop him.

The moment he appeared, he could tell that he'd thrown himself pretty far from the condo. Maurelle was driving, heading for a location decidely unfamiliar to him. Knowing that invading her mind and prying the information out of her would have tipped her off more than her own ability already had, Ryan remained passive, watching as she drove along at the law's sedate and boring pace and waiting for signs to come into view; signs which would tell him just where the hell she was. The mostly single-story shrunken-looking houses, functional oblong buildings and slightly dirty, dust-ridden side streets told him that she was somewhere on the Texas mainland. He'd ventured out of Brownsville a few times and recalled bemoaning the state of the roads and how they'd treat the underside of his million-dollar Italian hypercar.

The moment he saw the signs on the front of business after business revealing them to be situated in a Texan town by the name of Deer Park, he was gone. A slightly pained noise rushed out of his mouth as he awoke, once more in the seat of his car and, once he'd shaken off the dizziness, he started to enter the town's name into his GPS in order to allow it to calculate a route. Before zooming in to show his immediate location, he could see that the blue line plotting his future course snaked along the southern coast, tapering up into a small kink somewhere near Houston.

Your destination is three. Hundred. And ninety. One. Miles away.

"Oh, fuck off, Maurelle...", he whined to himself as he turned the key in the ignition, coaxing his car's powerful engine into life. What was wrong with meeting up in Brownsville? Or Harlingen? Why the hell did she have to drive out nearly four hundred miles just to find somewhere nice to encounter the employee she'd suddenly stopped paying? Nevertheless, she'd lured him away by cutting off his salary. Ryan wanted answers. Maurelle knew Ryan wanted answers. All she had to do was wait.

And wait she did. Ryan had set off in the mid-morning and, by the time he'd spotted Maurelle's parked car three hundred and ninety-one miles later, it was almost four in the afternoon. This was not the way in which Ryan wanted to spend six and a half hours on the road and, by the time he'd found somewhere to park and was searching for her on foot, he wasn't in the best of moods. His boss was sitting under a tree in a somewhat secluded park, out of the way from the usual flow of traffic. The only people who came here did so deliberately and, by the time Ryan strolled into view, there were very few - if any - people around.

"Y'do realise I live six hours from here, right?" He wasn't mad at her. Yet. Unlike Adele, Ryan was slow to anger and quick to remain rational. He'd play nice so long as the woman under the tree gave him a reason to. "I get the feelin' we've got business to discuss."

[Maurelle Lacroix]

"Oh do you now? I never would have imagined that you would be so very far from home for this engagement. How inconsiderate of me!" Her voice was oozing sarcasm as she tucked her hair back and watched Ryan approach her. The crowd was as sparse as one could expect a state park in the dead of a summer afternoon to be. They would not have to hold their tongues here, no there would be no beating around the bush unless she deliberately meant to. Seeing as she was who she was, the chances for that were probably high.

She was surprised though that there was not a hint of anger from her employee, at least not yet. Perhaps the long drive had siphoned out the immediate feelings of rage from him or perhaps he was taking the loss of money better than she thought. "You mean you did not come here for a picnic with your boss? Aww what I shame, I will have to inform all the guests that the party is off, it was going to be such a blast." She was in unusually good form despite the nature of the conversation she intended to have with Ryan.

"I suppose you know why I have decided to have this meeting somewhere no one would look to find us. If not, ah well, then I have overestimated you. Either way, it is just the two of us here in a remote part of the state in which history was made because a leader decided to pick their battle and not let the battle pick them." It was all rather fitting, as Sam Houston fled from the Mexican army that was three times his own volunteer army. He came to this spot and picked this battle because the situation suited his designs.

Ryan was right though, they were here to discuss business, the business of whether he would continue to be her employee or not. It was a rather nasty business but alas it was a part of the business and she had to take care of it. Ryan's usefulness made her want to keep him on the payroll but all the baggage that came with his employment was getting tiresome. Would her head or her heart win the decision when she came to it, could she afford to keep such a project at the risk of the rest of her enterprise?

"Convince me Ryan that you are worth my time and the money I am paying to you."

[Ryan D'Alteau]

You're on your own, lost in the wild.
So come to me, now. I could use someone like you.
Someone who'll kill on my command and ask no questions.
I'm gonna make you... I'm gonna break you... I'm gonna make you...
...a fucking psycho!!
______________________________Muse - "Psycho"

"Oh, do you now?"

The sarcasm leaking from Maurelle's voice as she spoke was almost painful for Ryan to behold. There was clearly some sort of gulf between them, one which had only been exacerbated by the cessation of his wage payments, but not even a six-hour car ride was going to get him mad at his boss. It had been a while since his Zonda had really been allowed to blast along the freeway and to finally unshackle it from the sedate confines of the island - for whaever reason - was a strangely cathartic thing for him to do. "I never would have imagined that you would be so very far from home for this engagement. How inconsiderate of me."

To Maurelle's credit at least, she had chosen a quiet part of town for the purposes of their important meeting. Despite being a public park, the time of day meant that the majority of Deer Park's residents were either at home with their families or embarking on a journey to get there. Ryan wasn't aware of the historical significance of the location but, nevertheless, the two of them were able to speak freely; to fully discuss the illegality of their shared enterprise. With Ryan - or, more accurately, Calla - existing as a permanently on-call component of Maurelle's employ, he wasn't mandated to get up on weekday mornings and cart himself into the centre of town on the mainland for the traditional nine-to-five.

However, when Maurelle called, he was expected to tend to her needs. He was afforded enough time to get changed and make the trip but, as far as he knew, personal circumstances were mostly irrelevant. The only reason he didn't know if serious circumstances preventing his attendance would... fly with his boss was that, up to now, they never had. He'd always been able to ask 'how high' when she needed him to jump. "You mean you didn't come here for a picnic with your boss? Aww. What a shame. I'll have to inform all the guests that the party's off. It was going to be such a blast."

"Unless you wanted a picnic, then no," Ryan responded flatly. The only food which had accompanied him resided in his stomach; the snacks he'd bought whenever he'd stopped for gas. He was left to listen to the explanation regarding why his boss had chosen this particular corner of Texas to meet him. Deer Park was a remote part of the state and, from what he could gather, it had been the site of some kind of battle long before either of them had been born. "Convince me, Ryan, that you are worth my time and the money I'm paying to you."

It felt slightly strange to be standing before Maurelle as his regular self, using his regular voice. In all the chaos of realising her actions, he had seen fit to forego the usual transformative rituals that preceded his meetings with his boss. "You mean beyond the fact I've saved your life at least once?" Admittedly, it had only been the once, where he'd tackled an assault team who would have otherwise gunned his boss down where she'd stood. Sure, she'd took it as disobedience, informing him that she was quite capable of taking care of herself, but the facts were the facts. He'd squared things up after his first job for her had unravelled at the seams and, while none of the tasks for which he'd been called in had gone precisely according to plan, they had all ended with the two of them still among the living. There were no complaints.

"Look." He didn't need to think overly much on any part of the situation. He could guess why she'd kept him around, just as he could surmise why she wanted him as far away from her business as possible. "The reason you took me on in the first place was because I'm an asset to you. You may be able to see the future, but there are simply things that I can do that the rest of your... subordinates can't. I know that Adele's something of an issue, but she's an unavoidable one." Even he could tell that his fiancée and his boss had been at odds ever since they'd met. Adele wanted to protect her future husband while Maurelle wanted to keep her newest asset for as long as she could squeeze a use out of him. "There's little point in asking me to strip her out of my life, because I won't. We've been through far too much to throw it away."

He may not have wanted to obey Maurelle's wishes when it came to Adele, but his work for her was the only job Ryan had. His attempts at trying to find a legal avenue of work had still been mostly fruitless. The closest he'd got to finding an alternative was an open invitation for an interview at one of South Padre Island's tourist traps. If their relationship was going to come to an end, he'd have to take them up on it. But he wasn't going to allow himself to be kicked out of Maurelle's employ without an effort to salvage what he had. "Even though me and Adele live... pretty healthily as it is, I do kinda need this job." It was his only source of income and, as he was unyieldingly adamant that he was going to pay his own way, the money was for more than simple bragging rights. "If you have to... reprimand me again..." His mind recalled the aftermath of the Cantu job. He'd been relegated to a clerical role at one of her offices for a few weeks and, in addition to being boring as hell, it was also somewhat embarrassing. But his self-esteem had taken far worse. "...then so be it. Despite things rarely going to plan with me, you know I can get the job done."

[Maurelle Lacroix]

Maurelle gave Ryan a look over as she listened to him try and convince him of his worthiness to her and her organization. It seemed that the facts seemed to be a little blurred for him, thinking that he had saved her life on any occasion. That was stretching the truth quite a bit, all he had done in that instance was merely hasten the defeat of those who had come to try and end her life. Their lives were forfeit the moment that they had decided it was a wise decision to try and kill Maurelle Laxroix, even if they had tanks and attack helicopters.

"You think too highly of yourself, to say you get the job done is a gross overstatement of the accomplishments that you have performed while under my employ. That and that you had the gall to present yourself to me out of work uniform, not quite the most thoughtful of actions there. Though I suppose the loss of ones rather generous income would make the blood rush to the head and leave a person without the sort of wherewithal to know what decisions ought to be made and which ones are better left not being made."

Maurelle found it strange that he had brought up his relationship with Adele, as she had yet to mention the cumbersome problem that the doctor was to their working relationship. The good doctor often on an internet relay chat threatened Maurelle's life and she had merely tossed it aside as the rudimentary defensive mechanism that she saw that it was. The lioness was worried about her cub, though perhaps mate might have been the better term, and that Maurelle as a rival was putting it in peril. While Maurelle certainly was putting her asset into peril, it was nothing worse than what the doctor herself had done.

"I have not asked for you to forego your relations with the doctor and you are foolish to try and guess as to my motives and ideas. It is as you say, you are a subordinates of mine, just as all my other assets and agents, not an adviser or something of that nature. I have afforded you great luxury in that role, not keeping you tied up with busy work or on a short leash. Yet you presume to know my motivations and to abuse the gifts that I have given you, such a pity."

There were a few ways she could go with her next step, as she had the person before her under her metaphorical heel for the moment. This had not meant to be a roast but that Ryan had assumed to know what Maurelle had desired and had been so bold as to make the claims he did meant that she had to deal a bit of hubris. Perhaps she had missed her calling or perhaps she had been one of the great Greek Gods of Olympus in a past life for the way she decided that the hubris of men should come back to bite them in the ass.

"Right then, I suggest that if Calla desires to keep her employment that she should make herself present by the top of the hour and think of a way to beg my forgiveness. Otherwise she can forget about recovering any of the wealth that she had become accustomed to over her employment with me. Do you understand?"

[Ryan D'Alteau]

I believe I can see the future.
'Cause I repeat the same routine.
I used to think I had a porpoise purpose...
...but, then again, that might have been a dream.
______________________________Nine Inch Nails - "Everyday Is Exactly The Same"

"You think too highly of yourself."

While Ryan had the notion that he'd saved Maurelle's life at least once, the criminal matriarch saw things very differently. Out of necessity, she was far from a simple managerial figure stuck behind a desk. Between her ability of precognition and her ability to fend for herself, she knew that - even without Calla by her side - she would have lived to see another day whenever her numerous adversaries came calling. She simply would have gone about her plans differently. "To say you get the job done is a gross overstatement of the accomplishments you've performed while under my employ."

Ryan wasn't sure how to respond. While neither he nor Maurelle had actually died or come to serious harm during the time they'd worked together, the fact remained that none of the jobs to which he'd been called had progressed flawlessly. Maurelle had had to save him from Cantu and Sun, he had defied her orders on the rooftop and now, as she quickly pointed out, he'd had the gall to present himself out of his working uniform. Having treated his boss' actions with the same immediacy as ever, the act of transforming himself into Calla before he left had somehow slipped his mind.

The annoyance he'd felt at having his wages frozen had caused him to miss a few of the usual steps. As far as he was concerned, this wasn't a usual work meeting and, as he'd rushed out to his car, Ryan hadn't thought that Calla's presence was necessary. Once again, he was mistaken. Just as he was seemingly mistaken when he brought up Adele as a possible reason for why this problem had arisen in the first place. "I have not asked for you to forego your relations with the doctor," Maurelle sighed. She'd met Adele. She already knew that there was an issue or two between the three of them. But, up to now, Ryan's fiancée hadn't been a problem. Of course, when she did become a problem, she would have to look at the situation differently.

"It is as you say. You are a subordinate of mine, just as all my other assets and agents. Not an advisor or something of that nature." If she had to keep drilling this into his head until he understood it, then so be it. But there would only be so many times that she'd bother to do so before she lost her patience and cut him loose. "I've afforded you great luxury in that role, not keeping you tied up with busy work or on a short leash. Yet you assume to know my motivations and to abuse the gifts I've given you. Such a pity."

"Okay, fine." Now it was Ryan's turn to sigh. He was a little full of himself at times, that much was obvious. His half-decade with Adele had elevated his view of himself to the point where he now believed - to a point - he was above the rest of humanity. People may have been able to best him in a number of facets, but Ryan's genetics spoke volumes to his perceived superiority. He could do things that no-one else - special or otherwise - could do and, despite his failings, the one thing he wasn't was mundane. "You're right. I don't know your motives. You've got reasons for doing what you do, just as I've got reasons for sending my resumé to you in the first place."

What Ryan had to keep reminding himself was that Maurelle, like many other people, wasn't Adele. She was in a different circle of his life. He had to carry himself differently. "So can we start this meeting again? Set things out a little more... professionally?"

"Right then." Ryan stood quietly as he awaited Maurelle's ultimatum. As soon as she started, however, he realised that his work was cut out for him all of a sudden. "I suggest that, if Calla desires to keep her employment, that she should make herself present by the top of the hour and think of a way to beg my forgiveness." Ryan glanced down at his watch. It was almost ten past the hour, giving him a shade over fifty minutes to obey. "Otherwise, she can forget about recovering any of the wealth that she'd become accustomed to over her employment with me. Do you understand?"

"Yeah. I understand. She'll see you then." Taking his latest instructions as his cue, Ryan turned and left the privacy of the park. With any changes of clothes and his prosthetics at home almost four hundred miles away, he was forced to improvise. Fifty minutes didn't give him all that much to work with given his unfamiliarity with the town but, having spotted an ATM on his way to meet Maurelle, the wall-mounted machine was his first port of call. After draining two hundred dollars from his bank account - just shy of a day's wages with Maurelle - he set off in search of a department store. With no feminine clothes in his car, he would simply have to buy some more.

Somewhat influenced by what Maurelle had said earlier, Ryan set about buying himself the components of an office-styled work uniform. The black knee-length skirt and sky-blue blouse were relatively easy to find, making everything else a trickier prospect. He had had to get the shoes from a fetish store in order to get them in his size and, as a stroke of luck, he was able to pick up a wig and some make-up too. By the time he'd got changed, he looked more androgynous than outright feminine, but it would have to do. Keira Knightley managed well enough with a relatively flat chest, after all.

Calla returned to the park with five minutes to spare but, up to now, she hadn't technically arrived. "Heh. Sorry I'm late, Ms. Lacroix." Once again, Ryan's slight annoyance had vanished, shrouded beneath his alter-ego's friendlier disposition. Having had time and money to spare after her shopping spree, she'd stopped off at a deli along the way and picked up lunch. She didn't know what Maurelle actually liked and hoped that a combination of things she'd overheard and a couple of safe choices would see her through. "I wasn't sure if they had anything you'd like. May we sit down and talk?"