2012-09-06 Ink and Insults

For most people, traveling from the US to China is a long, drawn out process involving passports, airplanes, transfers, and lots of luggage. For Zatanna Zatara though, it merely requires a good idea of where she's going, and casting a spell backwards. She rounded up Constantine and dragged him along for the ride, since she needs his ritual magic expertise for this adventure. Adventures in inking, that is.
The tattoo parlor in Shanghai is small, dark, seedy. It's also known among magical communities as using an ink that is particularly receptive to imbuing it with ritual spells. Zee has an appointment. She's wearing her adventuring clothes, leather pants, corset, leather jacket, as she steps inside to the jangle of bells. "I want to be able to tell when demons are around," she notes to John.
John wasn't doing anything, which is probably hard to believe. Actually, knowing John, it probably isn't. Sure, he might have been knee deep in saving the world from some crazy baby eating monster in New York that the population might never even know exists, but... when a friend calls saying they need a tattoo you drop the unimportant shit and jump the next magical byway to Shanghi.
Plus, there's prostitutes. Very, very cheap prostitutes.
Walking down the sidewalk in the cramped Chinese city with a cigarette hanging from his lips, hands shoved down in the deep pockets of his adventure jacket (the same one he wears to the bar... and to bed after leaving the bar), brown slacks and a t-shirt with a stereotypical chinese man smiling with wide slant eyes reading 'Five dollah sucky sucky'.
"We're in China, love... you're surrounded by demons... This place is practically a lay over for hell."
"Well duh," Zee snorts back at John. "But I need to know when they're around me anywhere I go, thus the tattoo idea." They're greeted by an ancient-looking old man, or maybe old woman. It's hard to tell with all the wrinkles. No words are spoken, just a gnarled hand gesturing Zatanna to a chair. She shrugs out of her jacket, handing it to John, and settles into the reclining seat.
The old tattooist points at Constantine, then gestures at a small table nearby, with the ruts, burns, and stains to indicate many a ritual has been done on it.
"You know me, never a missed opertunity to point out the obvious." Constantine stabs out his cigarette on the side of the doorway and flicks it into the street safe in the knowledge that it is virtually impossible to make Shanghi anymore a horrible place. Upon entering there's a cursory glance around, but it's mostly bored. If you've been in one ancient mystical chinese tattoo parlor next to a brothel you're definately going to be spending the night in, you've been to them all.
"Any particular demons?" Pulling out a silken bag on his way over to the ritual table, dumping out various implements. A small parcel of bread, a intricately carved razor blade, a mostly burnt black candle and a small wooden Crucifix that's probably older than the wrinkled old Asian about to ink Zee. Moving things to their various position, intersparcing the pushing back of his hair into the mix.
It remains unrulely.
"The N'Garai. They crashed my last dinner party, and I have sneaking suspicion that Cthon is trying to reenter this plane through them," Zatanna explains. She watches John work, always fascinated how someone can make something so complex and requiring of careful control look so completely slapdash.
The old tattooist doesn't even ask what Zee wants for her ink, she just wipes down her upper arm with alcohol then begins inking.
In truth, John just makes it up as he goes most of the time. Once he's got an idea in his head all it really requires is pomp and ritual, that's been the experience he's seen with most magical situations. Anyone can do it if they follow 'some' set of guidelines, the real power behind it isn't in the tools so much as the will of the practitioner. "Got it."
Quietly, turning the Crucifix slowly between his thumb and index finger. When the alcohol is running down Zee's arm, just before the artists sets the needle to flesh, Constantine is rattling a beat up old box of matches up beside his ear absently and sliding out the last match with a casual sort of flick. It's cupped and held out over the candle, "Oh heavenly father who aren't an absentee landlord. Hallowed be they rent due." It doesn't really matter what the words are. Or maybe it does and he's taunting them into doing what he wants.
The match is waved out slowly and tossed down into one of the grooves beside the razor blade. The flame flickers a bit wider for a brief moment and he's reaching for the cutting impliment. "You've sat mighty on the throne of thy abundent arse and let demon score the earth while you catch up on day time television..."
Seriously, he's a professional.
A brow slooooowly raises as Zee listens to John's ritual. "You really just get them to do things so you'll shut up, don't you?" she asks, even as she sucks a breath in through her teeth as the needling begins. She goes a little pale, but forces herself to watch Constantine instead of the tattoo gun. She doesn't dare cast anything to ease the pain or quell the nausea, in case it would interfere with the ritual.
"I tried that once." John seems to have no problem, or concern, for interrupting his spell craft to chat Zee up while she's getting inked. Pushing up his sleeve with the last three fingers of his left hand, holding the razor blade in the others, "I read the Grapes of Wrath to Saint Peter trying to distract him from reading off my sins." He doesn't even grimace as he draws a long bloody line down the center of the Ankh tattooed on the inside of his forearm.
"That fucker has some impressive concentration."
The blood oozes down towards the open end of the symbol and begins to pool out, filling the white flesh inside the black ink completely defiant of gravity. Razor blade used, he tosses it down unimportantly. "Oh Heavenly father, as much as thy adoreth Jersey Shore, I beseech you to..."
There's the rumbling... the second hand on the old style clock slowing to near infinite between each click. "Must be a commericial break."
"Don't taunt almighty God, John. It's rude," Zatanna deadpans. "Also, he might make Snooki stalk you if you make him wrathy enough." She smirks, winces, and chews on her lower lip as the ouchies begin to compile in her skin.
John pauses in his taunting long enough to look around with a distant sort of elevation of his brow. Not really in concern, it's not his first time to the insulting the Lord pony, so much as minor victory. All it takes is a little taunting to get the Host out of their shell.
"Oh come on.. that's cruel and unusual punishment." To Zee, frowning... but he doesn't look convinced that the Lord is above doing it..
When the light starts to dimming, John passes the pool of blood over the parcel of bread and a single long thread drops down onto the white grains and soaks it crimson. The remainder rolls back into the cut, though the wound doesn't heal.
The bloody sacriment is taken between his fingers and held up towards a thickening darkness, "Flames cast." He doesn't have to see what the artists is putting on Zee to know what it will be, "Flame burn. Let the pain of fire warn her of the uninvited."
Crucifix held in his left hand, the bloody bread is used to cross the air, passed over the flame of the flickering candle and pushed into his mouth still smoking.
Zatanna feels herself drifting, into and out of a dream-like state, a place of blood and fire, of ink and steel. She feels the ink of the design seep from her shoulder, into her veins, creeping upwards to her heart, then pulsing out to ears, eyes, and nose, and tongue. When the uninvited are in her presence, she will smell the sulphur, taste the ashes, hear the moans of the tormented, and see their auras.
Constantine chews through the bloody parcel of bread, leaning forward onto his plams partially wrapped around the edge of the table. The candle flame bounces wildly as the shadow grows long near the corner where it appeared and the smoke cast off from the previously fired bloody sacrement rolls out from his nostrils as he fights the urge to vomit it up.
This is the sacrifice.
Dept paid, for favor received. Constantine must torment through the taste of the fire and the feel of its burn rolling down his throat as slowly as a the slow tick of each second, an eternity in the presence of one of the Host, even one still hidden from view.
When it finally reaches his stomach he slumps forward and gags... and the Shadows roll expectantly, waiting to take their 'ultimate' prize if he cannot uphold his end of the bargain.
Zatanna's mystical spirit reaches out in her dream state to steady Constantine, to place spectral hands onto his belly to ease its protest. He can smell her perfume, taste her breathe, sense her heat, even though her body is still in that chair.
John would have found a way to be defiant, solely for the sake of defiance, but the assistance isn't rejected. With a grimace, the muscles and veins in his neck bulging, and a slow turn of his head against resistance of a stiff tendons, Constantine stands back up and rubs both hands back into the uncontrolable blonde locks hanging from his head like a birds nest.
"Put that in your heavenly pipe and smoke it, wankers..." Giving the shadow, one of the angels of God, the finger as it steps back away from the parlor with a hiss... the seconds on the clock return to normal but the candle is gone. Left in it's place is a small pinch of salt as a reminder.
A pinch of salt which Constantine sprinkles onto a cigarette that he's pulled from inside his pocket, sweat pouring from his face. That same book of matches is shaken up beside his ear, coughing something deep up out of his chest as he removes the last match and lights the cigarette for one long drag.. blowing the smoke up towards the ceiling.
One can almost see the glaring stare of some horrible creature trying to destroy him with a look inside that smoke.
The animated pile of wrinkles finishes inking Zatanna in that same moment, and sits back, wiping the blood from the surface of the arm and smearing an ungent over the design, flames, like John incanted. Plastic wrap gets bound around it as well.
Zee opens her eyes and swallows hard. Everywhere is the smell of sulphur. Like John said, this is Shanghai. Demons are everywhere here. She reaches into her leather pants pocket and hands the woman an envelope of cash before sitting up slowly. She looks at John sincerely. "Thank you."
John looks worse for ware, but he'd never say as much. Instead he touches two fingers to his brow and blows out a long exhale of steel gray smoke, "Anytime, Zee." The rolled up sleeve of his coat pulls across his sweat coated face, right over his lips, and comes away with little red in the brown threads... But he's too busy putting his stuff away into the little bag and replacing it in his trench to bother over it much.
"Now I think I need a drink.. Or twelve. Shanghai beer is rubbish."
"we could go back to my place?" Zatanna offers. It's one of /those/ offers. One or the other tends to make them now and again, after going through some trauma together. In that span of time before they want to punch each other in the face.
One of /those/ offers. John's head sort of lulls upwards, brow following, cigarette straightening out just between the fingers that have unclamped to release it to his lips. "You do keep a good stock of alcohol.." Nevermind being relatively pleasant to look upon naked. That is obviously something the old woman is too young to hear about. He'd ear muff her, but he's too busy wiping sweat from his brow. "Oy, yeah. Let's do that."
"Besides. You look like if you tried to walk a ley line right now, you'd trip over it instead and fall into the maw of something vaguely Saarlac like," Zee quips. She stands and reaches for one of his hands, connecting them for their trip home. "Ekat su ot tsercwodahs."
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