Death is in the Triskele.

This isn’t a coy metaphor for murder, implying that Monsieur Hercule Poirot will be along at any moment to solve the case. Death, as in the God Of, is actually in the Triskele.

This is the thing, though. Sure, the Triskele is a club that is pretty exclusively innish—but not every initiate knows everything. Not everyone knows about godmarks and white eyes.

Azrael is being incognito.

If you see an extremely tall, thin, angular man who appears to be drawn on the world in shades of black, white, and gray, you’re going to notice him. That is not, however, what Azrael is currently looking like.

He’s about five eight, at the moment, and… average. More or less. He’s broader through the shoulders than usual, and seems soft in the middle manner of a not-overweight man who isn’t muscled. He’s a usual-ish caucasian skin colour, and his hair’s brown and cropped short. He’s wearing a black suit, completely black, comepletely lint-free—when your suit’s a creation of power, you don’t always remember irregularities. He’s got a black tie on, too, and a black shirt.

His eyes are white: white iris, black pupil, black ring around the iris. This is Azrael—he’s just having fun not sticking out for once. He’s observing.

Bayfield is one of his favourite world cities, and the Triskele is where the innish come. The drink in his hand is camouflage, much like the carefully average form (modeled uncreatively off of some guy he’d seen in Chicago).

Moira is in a slinky pseudovictorian thing made of dove-gray silk satin, a row of improbably tiny buttons holding the thing up in the back and a discrete sort of bustle in the back, bright teal pumps bringing her just shy of six feet- she's been going small, these days, just subtract five inches or whatever- lips painted a darker red than her hair, which is pulled back in a tangled knot. Unlike Azrael, Moira is not doing anything at all to detract attention, and in sidling smoothly up to him is probably making his chosen task that much more difficult.

"You stand out like a sore thumb, sweetheart," she tells him fondly, putting her arm in his, "it's the eyes."

What it is, really, is the voice. He hasn’t bothered to create all the voiceboxes and larynxes and vocal cords (and lungs) that make a body speak; this is, after all, just the seeming of a body. His voice is drawn directly out of the air, created by power; it’s rich and modulated, but fake.

”Moira,” he says (half delight at seeing her and half annoyance at her calling attention to his eyes), and pulls her into a seat beside him.

”I’m blending in excellently, and you know it. No one’s asked me for their aunt back yet or anything.”

He slides his drink onto the counter, content to chat rather than blending in.

”But since you’ve blown my cover…”

The shorter, thicker man blossoms into the taller, paler form that Azrael has been favouring lately. The darkness of his suit falls away into smoke, peeling away to reveal a paper-white god in a paper-white suit jacket and paper-white pants. He’s wearing neither shirt nor tie, and his feet are bare. The buttons on the jacket are ivory, and they match the ivory ankh dangling from one ear. The only real colour on him is around his eyes, where he’s let them be dusted with gold eyeshadow.

”And might I say,” se says, not shifting his casual sitting position throughout this transformation, ”That you look lovely tonight?”

Moira dimples and adjusts for the drastic change in height, having to sit up straight and crane her neck to kiss him on the cheek in belated greeting.

"Yes, and the moment you spoke to anybody the costume would be gone. And, thank you. And, will you go to a dinner party with me? I'm helping a little restaurant venture, apparently." The words 'help' and 'venture' in the same sentence always mean money.

He waves this fact off as well.

”I could speak like a mortal if I wanted,” he says. ”It’s just… rather icky.”

Archly accepting the kiss as his due, he leans back to watch her eyes as she speaks. His expression is, in general, bemused.

Now that he’s no longer incognito, some of his base atmospheric effects are starting to leak in. The stool, carpet around him, and patch of bar on which he’s leaning his elbow all develop a thin skin of frost.

A dinner party, hmm? He lifts his white eyebrows.

”When and where?”

"Fine, fine, voice boxes and all of that nonsense, I understand. I expect the dinner is next week," Moira adds, taking a sip from Az's drink. "It isn't really a party, the man cooks compulsively. And well, or so I hear. He's letting that vampire boy live with him, the one I used to babysit sometimes, the d'Orleans boy."

Matthieu'd needed babysitting periodically throughout his long life, and usually it was Moira's job.

"Sounds fun."

Azrael taps the bar and smoke blossoms up from where his finger'd touched, congealing into a glass.

"What do you want in it?' he asks, and continues, "How should I dress? Up, down? Shake it all around?'

Grin.

Moira chuckles. "Just be yourself. Except, don't, actually. He's a werewolf, but he doesn't know anything at all- and I like him. He's a gentleman, and he takes care of Matthieu as well as anybody can."

So full-on god-of-deathitude is right out. "Odd is quite alright, though."

Azrael smiles.

”What’s this? An opportunity to use the blending-in skills you were disparaging but a moment ago? I never.”

Without a drink preference named, he taps the glass and it fills with something vaguely goldenish. Bartenders—who needs ‘em?

”I have a human body I wear sometimes. Have you met it? I could wear that.”

He doesn’t actually want to—he’s had some bad experienced with his JonSuit lately, and is losing interest in playing at being mortal. Still—he has to offer; it’s part of the teasing.

"Oh, leave the poor boy alone, it's tacky. Anyway, Hub will be able to smell it, it'll bother him more than if you just go as you are."

Maybe. She isn't actually sure, but it makes sense for the overtly weird to be less worrisome than the covertly weird, ex., Moira. "Although-" She pauses thoughtfully. "He's lost a wife recently. So nothing too obvious?"

Azrael looks like he’d really like to pout at the ‘tacky’ comment, but instead skips over it as if he didn’t hear.

He instead alights on ‘too obvious’.

”Obvious? Me?” yes, you, Azrael. ”You mean you want me to appear unto him in the form of Azrael Van der Veen, travelling salesman from Pensacola, Florida?”

He seems a little incredulous, but is probably mostly teasing. Possibly.

Moira, laughing, throws her hands up in defeat (Moira doing things with her arms makes the snakes, including the one trailing over her right breast and dipping into her neckline, do very interesting things). "Fine, fine, do whatever you want, who am I to stop you?"

Who was she to stop him indeed?

She, well, you know. She has a very intimidating look of disapproval, sort of thing.

”Don’t worry.” He smiles in what, for Azrael, is probably a very reassuring way and pats her on the arm. With his other hand he pushes the glass of goldenish alcoholic something towards her.

”I’ll be good.”

The problem with such an assurance is that Azrael’s definition of being good is more likely than not very different from everyone else’s.

He might mean only small tentacles.

"I'm so sure," she agrees blandly, flat gray eyes smiling over the rim of the glass.

”Really!” he says, miming/being indignant. He leans back, touches his hand, and lifts his left hand in the class I Swear pose.

”Your little near-human friends have nothing to fear from me. Well, you know.”

He’s still death, after all.

”Outside my official capacity as the great leveller, et cetera.”

Moira laughs again, sets the glass down. "Yes, alright, that's fair. Matthieu is the only one whom you'll really make nervous anyway."

”Mmmn,” Azrael says with a ‘what can you do’ sort of shrug. When he’d met Matthieu, he’d considered him more devoted to Dionis than to any of the other gods who are usually set over vampires.

The devotees of Dionis have always considered Azrael, consciously or subconsciously, a real buzzkill.

”So,” he continues. ”What are you doing here besides inviting your favourite incarnation of the forces of the human and near-human imagination to dinner?”

"Slumming, visiting, keeping an oblique eye on the girl. I spent some time in Ingary, really just long enough to hook an old acquaintance up with a job and debauch a diplomat." She and the snakes shrug. "What about you? Anything new up?"

Azrael rotates a sharp shoulder in return; a half-shrug.

”You remember my little undead minion? I’ve got him working on gathering some worshippers. There’s also a spontaneous cult starting up in some rural southeast asian towns—I’ve been spending time over there.”

He grins, rather pleased at these developments. It belies his next comment: ”Nothing that exciting.”

Leaning forward onto the bartop, he adjusts his posture until he’s slumped over and looking up at Moira.

”How’s the girl, hmm?”

"Oh, she's doing okay," Moira says airily, as though she isn't letting (or helping) her daughter go gradually insane- this beautiful, placid, erudite woman who will sometimes stay with and care for a person their entire long life and other times- well, won't.

"She sees Andrei sometimes. They'd make a formidable team, if they ever learned anything."

Azrael makes one of those throaty ‘mmhmmmn’ noises; like all his other sounds, it’s completely created instead of actually originating in air and lungs and vibrations in the throat. It sounds a bit odd for this. He’s still slumped over with a shoulder resting right on the bar’s counter, his one lanky arm casually folded tent-like over his head.

”They could fight crime in cute little outfits. Deathboy and Kittenbird to the rescue.”

Moira smiles serenely. "In the middle of apprehending a criminal they would remember a fight from earlier in the day and have to sit down and talk it out."

Then they would probably go get drunk.

”Who needs to apprehend criminals? They could just beat people up.”

In spite of the jocular manner of it all, he’s only vaguely smiling. The expression doesn’t reach into his eyes, which seem more serious and are maintaining something akin to eye contact with Moira—when she’s looking.

He draws himself into a sitting position, a bramble of bones and thin skin and maybe a couple tendons.

”Are you concerned about her?”

"No. She'll live. Probably. Less so if she takes on after her papa, but you know how it is." This is actually debatable.

Either way Moira's logic is simple, and she seems for the most part genuinely unconcerned.