all_inclusive | in re nelson v the nexus, ltd

Entry tags:

in re nelson v the nexus, ltd

Foggy had presumed that this particular hallucination was simply the result of too little sleep and too much stress so after repeatedly trying to put the whole thing to bed for the past several days, he resigned himself to the fact that either A) he had actually gone insane, which would affect his ability to practice law to some great extent or B) The Nexus was a real place, removed from New York and Hell's Kitchen and anything familiar.

Foggy had never particularly been enamored of insanity as a legal construct but contemplating it as an actual medical condition was a hell of a lot more frightening. He decided the cure for said insanity was going to be to drink, a lot, and had taken himself down to the Smoking Room to do that exact thing. It wasn't his usual place, no, but since that was currently unavailable to him, he needed to take advantage of the next best thing.

It really had to be stress. He was carrying as many secrets as a parish priest the week before Easter and there was a reason he'd never been interested in being a priest. While being an attorney meant carrying a number of secrets, there were ways to divulge those secrets through discovery and arguments and to purge one's self of that burden. Hell, as an attorney, he could confess to his priest and be covered both ethically and legally. But being a priest, or, apparently, Matt Murdock's best friend, meant carrying secrets he couldn't tell to anyone. It meant carrying things he'd never share with another soul.

"Keep 'em coming. Just leave the bottle, actually," Foggy said, plunking some cash down on the bar in front of him. "Might as well just finish it, at this point."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Chiana was always on the lookout for someone to pay her drinks, and this one seemed a particularly likely candidate. He'd just dropped a bundle of cash on the counter in exchange for an entire bottle, and he'd been drinking like he was coming off a particularly good freslin high and wanted to forget how unattractive people really were.

Lucky for Chiana, she actually was that attractive, if she might say so herself.

She checked her cleavage - definitely appropriately attractive, pushed up as her breasts were by her latest corset, made out of a shimmery blue-black fabric she'd found on the other side of a Door - put on a smirk, then went and grabbed the stool next to the human, dark eyes glinting invitingly - but not too invitingly, she was just after a few drinks here. For now.

"You want some company with that bottle?"

Foggy took a moment to take the woman in and tried to decide if he was early for Halloween, late, or just plain nuts. It could be any of the three at this point, sad to say.

"Hi, I'm, sure," he said, deciding the woman was hot, costume or otherwise. "Yeah, I am."

"You are," Chiana stated, baring her teeth in a grin. "I'm Chiana," she added, tilting her head to the side to watch him, in a way that was not quite human (or, if you asked her, not human at all). Her entire body language was different from anything most humans had ever been confronted to, and she figured that he was human. Most people here were, and the suit certainly looked like it was from Earth.

"Bring the lady a glass?" he asked, getting the glass and pouring her a generous measure of scotch. Drinking it straight had never really been Foggy's style but today seemed to have warranted it.

"Foggy. Foggy Nelson," he said, offering a hand to her. "Nice to meet you."

Chiana's gotten used to the human handshake, and she puts her hand in his to give it a small squeeze. "Thanks for the drink, Foggy, but I'm not much of a lady." She grabbed a stool and raised her glass to him before taking an unladylike sort of drink.

"I like to err on the side of caution," he said, giving her a bright smile. "Because every lady is a lady even if proven otherwise by subsequent action. That's just how my mom raised me."

Foggy had always been a little tongue tied around beautiful women and this was no different.

"I'm not sure what that says about your mother," Chiana told him playfully, leaning an elbow on the bar.

"It says that she knew what she was talking about," Foggy said, laughing a little. He was nervous and that was always the default, to laugh and deflect attention away from whatever goofy thing he'd just said. It didn't always work in a legal context but it served just fine for a bar chat.

"You were impressed, weren't you? Because I was aiming for impressed."

Chiana wasn't sure what she was supposed to have been impressed by. And when in doubt, always turn it into a way to flirt. "I'm a hard girl to impress," she told him, eyes sparkling in an invitation for him to try.

"Oh well, I wouldn't be happy otherwise," Foggy said. He didn't know how this was going to work, exactly, but there was a lot unknown about this particular situation. He was currently in an unknown locale drinking whiskey with a woman who didn't look quite human. There was no precedent to look back on and certainly no statute. He was flying solo.

"Could I possibly buy you another drink?"

As long as the drinks came easy and free, Chiana had no reason to go anywhere else. She smiled at the offer, and raised her glass to him before knocking back what remained in it. "And here I am, without anything left in my glass." Black eyes glinted playfully, and she tilted her head to the side, watching him.

"See? That's very convenient." Maybe he wasn't so bad at this whole social interaction thing. Foggy had never been what he considered good at it, either, but not being a complete disaster was a step in the right direction.

"Have you been here long? Here as in this...weird hotel and not the bar proper."

"Too frelling long," Chiana agreed, but she didn't sound unhappy about it, despite the expletive. Other than being away from Nerri, the freedom of the Doors made this stay a pretty sweet deal. "Cycle and a half, I think? Time can get weird on the other side of the Doors."

"So, forgive me for being completely naive but how long is a cycle?" It wasn't the way Foggy was accustomed to marking time but he guessed that nothing in this place was what he was accustomed to in the usual sense.

"A year? Would a cycle be about the same as a year? And have you been able to leave in all that time?"

Chiana was glad that he asked, had been hoping he would. Likely from Earth, then, and definitely not a Sebacean. "Yeah, it's about a year. I've been able to leave," she confirmed, with another sharp smile. "Just not go back."

"So you can go other places but not where you came from. Is that normal? I'm trying to get a handle on the parameters," Foggy said, talking it all through the way he usually worked through a problem.

"Normal for here, anyway?"

"Depends with each person, really," Chiana answered with a purse of her lips. "Some people are stuck here completely, some can go back and forth as they like."

"That's not exactly comforting. I don't guess there's any bylaws or anything I could read over? I'm an attorney, it's not like I'm brimming in superpowers." Foggy knew that some attorneys played at being heroes at night but he wasn't Matt or anything like Matt, so he had to use his powers of litigation and nothing else.

"Superpowers," Chiana echoed, eyes glinting in amusement at the word. "What's superpowers?"

"You know, ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound?" Foggy said, squinting a bit as he tried to work that out. A woman who looked the way she does, not exactly base standard human being, and she didn't know what superpowers were?

"Mind reading? Anything like that?"

"All the things humans can't do," Chiana translated with an amused smile. Super-powers. What a human-centric way to think about it, but she liked it.

"Yeah, more or less. I'm just good at litigating the shit out of things," Foggy said. He actually didn't have any trial experience but that was neither here nor there. A good litigator gets a settlement before going to trial so, in that regard, Foggy was the best goddamn litigator he knew.

(Not really)

"What do you do when you're not here? What's your line of work?"

"What do you think it is?" Chiana asked in answer, another not quite human shift of her upper body, eyes glinting inticingly. That would give her time to decide what to tell him; she might even tell him the truth, if she found out she was in the mood for that.

"Dancer? You look like you might be a dancer. In an artistic way," Foggy clarified. "Not an exotic dancer. Or maybe an exotic dancer, if that's something you want to do. There's no shame in that."

He really was awful with women and it seemed like it wasn't going to be any different here in this weird place than it was back home.

"Well, I am exotic," Chiana answered with a sharp grin. By his standards, and by most people's. Nebari were really anything at all like her.

Foggy laughed. "That is so not what I meant and you know it. Seriously, though, what do you do for a living? I feel like it can't be something boring like retail or office work. It has to be something really cool."

"Whatever I have to do, I get by," Chiana answered with a small shrug. Yeah, he was getting the truth, albeit a detail-free truth. "I don't like sticking around in one place for too long."

"Oh, I'm the opposite," Foggy said. "I came right back to my old neighborhood once I finished law school. I wanted to come back home and do some good. It means something to me."

"If you were from my planet, you'd understand," Chiana answered, knowing perfectly well that he might not, still. So many simply conformed.

"So, about that. What's that planet like? It's not Earth, obviously," Foggy said. He wanted to get an idea of what life was like in other places and in other universes and that sounded like a good place to start.

He had a point of reference for 'not from Earth,' considering the nonsense the Avengers cleaned up a couple years ago.

"Horrible," Chiana assured him. "I don't recommend it." The less said about the Establishment, the better.

"Are there any planets you do recommend?" Foggy had always thought as a kid that going into space might be cool. Maybe it wasn't something he'd ever do for real, considering he had always wanted to be an attorney, but it was a nice pipe dream.

"Any that are worth the visit?"

"Oh, plenty," Chiana confirmed with another sharp grin. "In the Uncharted Territories, mostly. The lack of unified government makes for interesting places." She said interesting, but her smile said dangerous. They went hand in hand, if you asked her.

"That might not be so good for the legal minded among us," Foggy admitted, laughing a little awkwardly. "So how does it work there? Every man unto himself, may the best win?"

"Some places," Chiana agreed with a shrug. "Every planet out there's got its own law." Or more than one, even. It was the variety she liked, and the variety that made it dangerous. You never knew what to expect.

"I guess it isn't different than earth in that way. Every country has its own laws and there's even regions of my country with different laws than the next," Foggy said.

"Makes for plenty of work for guys like me, trying to interpret that and defend it."

"I'm sure," Chiana agreed, mostly because men liked people who agreed with them. Never mind that she didn't really care. She smiled at him. "What was your biggest case?"

"Right now, it's this tenant case," Foggy explained. "They want to evict a whole bunch of people from their homes, jack the rents and turn the places into condos. I'm not going to let that happen. The neighborhood belongs to them and they deserve to keep being able to live their lives the way they always have. And, on top of that, their supers have the responsibility to make their apartments livable. That's part of the rent agreement."

Chiana watched him in silence for a couple of seconds, clearly trying to figure him out. She ended up settling on, "You're a do-gooder." He seemed sincere enough.

"Try to be," Foggy readily admitted. He had no shame in admitting that his goal in life was to use his talent to better the community he came from and rather than be a corporate lawyer who bills in the millions, he'd rather get paid in tamales and free labor. It was a good enough life for him. He was never going to be anything but a kid from the city anyway.

"I like to make sure the people who looked out for me as a kid are getting looked out for now, you know? I have a lot of pride in where I come from."

That sort of sentiment was completely foreign to Chiana, having grown up under the Establishment's thumb. Still, she nodded as if she got it. "Sounds nice."

"It can be, sometimes," Foggy said. "More often than not, it's about getting knocked on your ass in the dirt and getting back up again. I'm still not used to that."

"I thought that was just life," Chiana remarked with a small, cynical smile.

For Matt, everyone has a certain aura about them, for lack of a better word. When he spends enough time with someone, that combination of scent and mannerisms becomes indelible, unmistakable even when they never speak. Foggy's presence all but leaps out at him the moment he walks in the room, and he's already smiling when he feels his way onto the stool beside him.

"Is it an existential crisis you're drowning, or is there something I should know about?" he asks, all easy amiability.

"It's more like trying to decide whether or not I'm hallucinating," Foggy said, laughing a little. The weird thing about Matt was that as much as he could be quiet, he rarely ever snuck up on him. There was a certain scent and sound to his best friend that Foggy could almost always recognize.

"I guess it's a shared hallucination, isn't it? That's comforting. I don't like to do the crazy thing by myself. It gets all lonely."

"Speaking from experience, I'd have to agree," Matt says, and lifts a hand for the bartender. They're good here, and already getting to know him. His scotch is poured without his even having to ask.

"So I'm guessing you haven't been here that long if you're still in the 'drink away the visions' phase," he continues as he automatically feels for the cool curve of his glass, just for show.

"I just showed up. I was working late and I decided to go out for some tacos when boom, this place," Foggy said. He was talking with his hands because he'd been friends with Matt long enough that he simply forgot he was blind half the time. No wonder, when Matt had some kind of hot woman radar.

"What about you? Same thing, I'm assuming?" Matt wasn't missing back home, though, so Foggy wondered how long he could have possibly been here to have gotten used to the place.

"Pretty much," Matt agrees. "A few months back. Less tacos, although they do have them in the restaurant here every Tuesday."

He takes a sip, licks the scotch from the corner of his mouth, and tries to look as if his next questions are truly as casual as they sound. "Did you get the whole front desk, magic hotel spiel? When are you from, anyway?"

As nice as it would be to have a Foggy who knew nothing about Daredevil, Matt doesn't know if he's up to choosing between guilt over Foggy being hurt, or guilt over opting to be a big, fat liar. Both flavors taste like shit, from his recollection.

"Yeah, I got the welcome tour and everything, so I'm set. Last thing I remember, we were all trying to make sense of those documents Marcy leaked us," Foggy said. It felt a little hazy since he'd been drinking but he was reasonably sure that this whole hallucination was the result of working late nights.

"But I've been drinking, so. Your mileage may vary."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

in re nelson v the nexus, ltd

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject