taxonomites | [OPEN] [Casa Westen] Six of One, Half Dozen of the Other

Michael sat on his kitchen counter, tablet in his lap expanded to its biggest laptop form. He was pretty sure he'd worked out most of the kinks in the gadget -- well, more or less -- except for the crucial matters of breaking it, sabotaging it or trying to get it to stay off for long periods of time. How was it even powered? Taxon (he was resigning himself to accepting it was called that) defied the laws of physics as he knew it, like it had its own laws of sci-fi physics. It probably did. That unnerved him beyond belief -- he was used to being from a world where vinegar and baking soda made foam and gasoline and Coca-Cola bottle made Molotov cocktail. Having to re-learn the basic rules of reality was like getting the muscles in his legs rearranged while he slept so he woke up not actually knowing how to walk.

But: first things first. You broke a task up into tiny steps, and you took the steps. Eventually you got to the end of the task. Or it kept adding steps faster than you could keep up, but Michael Westen was Michael Westen and in his own opinion he could keep up pretty goddamned fast.

He crossed his legs next to the new range Jesse had installed and, after a moment of consideration, tapped a few icons and dialed Paul Smecker, call set to Visual.

[OOC: Call is locked to Paul, but post is open to anyone who wants to call or visit Michael ~~for some reason~~]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

For a place with no law, Taxon sure was overheating with law enforcement. Michael couldn't say he was unhappy to hear it, though; he mustered a smile for the woman on the other side of the screen. "Michael Westen," he said. "Hey. You know Agent -- Dr. Reid? I'm staying here with a buddy," he glanced over his shoulder, "but I don't think he's home right now."

Kate nodded, propping her chin on her hand.

"Yeah, I live with Reid. Who's your buddy? I'm still trying to meet people around here."

Live with could mean a lot of things, but Michael was going to assume roommate till he heard differently. "Sam. Sam Axe. I dunno if you've met him," he allowed for the possibility, considering Detective Beckett was a pretty woman and therefore the kind of porch lantern a moth like Sam dove directly at, "but he's a friend of mine who got grabbed too. I haven't met a lot of people either; you said Detective, though, what force were you on, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Name doesn't ring a bell, and not likely to forget a name like Axe."

She liked the term Westen had used - grabbed. She'd used kidnapped, taken, teleported - grabbed was a much more appropriate term. She smiled slightly at the thought of her job back home.

"NYPD, Homicide."

The man's demeanor screamed cop or military, Kate just couldn't decide which.

"You a cop?"

"Army," Michael answered after a moment, with a brief smile. Astuteness wasn't always a good thing in a stranger, but meeting another intelligent person was always going to be like finding a footprint on a desert island. "Special Ops."

He rested one elbow on the breadbox next to him, studying Kate Beckett through the tablet image. She looked about his age, so probably no less or more than about ten years on the force. Ten years on the NYPD was twenty years on any other police force (well, except maybe the LAPD, where it was five).

"You're not the only one, though. Far as I can tell they get a lot of police and military here," he picked up a nearby spatula, "which I was theorizing on with some people, but God if anyone can know for certain. This place --" He tried to find a way to put it. "This place, it's not. Well, I'm sure you know. I'm the new one."

Special Ops? Kate was impressed, but the only outward sign she showed of this was a slight raising of her eyebrows. She sat back in her chair, allowing Westen his inspection while performing one of her own. His reference to special ops was casual, but it wasn't feigned. He wasn't seeking to impress her, which immediately went against everything she'd ever experienced with military types. Kate suspected there was a story behind that, but now was not the time to ask.

"No, there seems to be an unusually high number of cops in this place, especially given that there's not much in the way of crime. We're generally not the types people want to have idle time on our hands. No telling what we might get up to."

Michael was used to time, idle time: a lot of idle time. A spying career was all about idle time, 90% boredom and 10% terror, like they said about war. It just felt like he hadn't had any in a while. "Well, God only knows how they pick the people they get," he inclined his head ceilingward, as if to indicate their captors in some cosmic sense. "Speaking of idle time, I was thinking of some things we could do with it, if you're interested in rounding up all us gunslingers to make all our lives a little easier."

He gestured with the spatula. "There was a Detective Dodson who was talking about getting together a police force in this city? I dunno if the crime rate warrants that," well, he did think so, but baby steps, "but I was thinking some kind of neighborhood watch? Something anyone can opt in or opt out of participating in, but a system of notification for emergencies and things that just seem off. We might not have crime at the moment, but all it takes is one enterprising person to see an opening. I'd rather people like you and me be enterprising first."

He shrugged. "I admit I'm not that used to working on the LE end of things. But frankly, I always took for granted there'd be someone like you there to enforce that law if I called 911." Michael tapped the counter in thought. "Take it or leave it, I just figure we could do to get a system together so people know what to do if something goes wrong. More wrong."

Kate leaned forward, interested. She'd been considering trying to organize some kind of police force, but she hadn't quite decided how to go about it. She ignored the little voice in the back of her mind that said her restlessness and cabin fever might be influencing the decision a bit too much, and grinned at Westen.

"I'm in. I talked a bit to Dodson, but I haven't heard any more from her. But I think you're right. We've had one murder already. It's just a matter of time before something else happens."

"We should get together a meeting," suggested Michael. "I mean an in-person one, call the law enforcement types together so we can actually start some kind of case file about this: something we can keep track of and refer to, so if anyone finds out anything new everyone can access it. I also think we should cap the number of official investigators on things," he tipped his head back in thought, "to prevent chaos, though -- otherwise we might get the whole city trying to play detective at once. It's one thing to have a neighborhood watch and helpline where people can offer anything they have; it's another to give a civilian population the idea they've all got badges, you know what I mean?"

He imagined she did, given she was NYPD and if anyone was used to dealing with the kind of chaos everyday people could cause if they took the law into their own hands, it would have to be the NYPD. It occurred to him he was one of those 'everyday people,' technically. Life served up irony on a silver platter. "But just for a start, I think some kind of town-hall announcement about the neighborhood watch idea over tablet could do us a lot of favors. You know people around here: is there anyone who's LE or ex-LE here you think people trust? Somebody they'd take seriously as a spokesman for this, you or somebody else?" He smiled at her, relieved at her general cooperation.

She thought for a moment.

"I don't actually know that many people here. I haven't been here long, and a chunk of that time I was glitched into a 1950s housewife...story for another time."

She paused, quickly running through the list of cops she knew in Taxon.

"John Casey was NSA, but I think he's gone...back. I looked for him yesterday on the map and couldn't find him. He'd been here the longest. Maybe Reid? He's been here a while, and he just started the library. I'm sure we could use the library as a base of operations if we need to."

[OPEN] [Casa Westen] Six of One, Half Dozen of the Other

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