Operation: We'll Always Have Paris - Log 1
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xp_logsChristian Kane visits the Snow Valley offices looking for help with a situation that requires pieces from Kevin's path to solve.
The offices of Snow Valley mostly relied on their anonymity for their security, usually employing someone at the front desk area as the first line of defence so to speak. It tended to create gaps, especially when someone knew where they were going. In this case, the tall old man, with a long silver pony tail falling down the back of his impeccable pearl grey suit strode past the desk and down the hall with a destination in mind.
“Sydney! You miserable janquai bastard! Where are you hiding?” He barked in a Scot brogue. Kevin’s head leaned out of the door of his office with a puzzled look.
“Jesus, who let you back in the country? I thought SHIELD would have you already tussed up like a country hog at the festival in some black site.”
“SHIELD.” He waved away the thought like an idle thought. “I know their tactics. I helped develop them.”
Kevin shook his head and laughed. “Of course. How the hell are you, Chris? Why are you here?” He said as the two swept into a bear hug for a moment, classic in the male slaps on the back to ensure that the affection was strictly platonic and very straight.
“Business. I’m here in an official capacity, helping out a friend. Got some time?”
“Sure, come into my office.” Kevin said, motioning him in and to the couch. “Drink?”
“Constantly.”
Kevin built them a pair of bourbons, aware that his co-workers were starting to wonder what was happening. “So, what do you need from me?”
“Snow Valley, actually.”
“Ah. Let me call the boss before we get into the weeds.” Kevin touched the office intercom. “Colbert, you got a couple of minutes. Christian Kane needs a consult.”
Marie-Ange popped into Kevin's office a bare moment later. "Christian, what sort of unlikely nonsense are you going to drop into our laps?" She gave a quick nod to Kevin, built herself a drink - ice, soda, the vodka she'd put in Kevin's bar herself and sat on the far side of the couch. "Did Garrison tell you his wolf has a name yet?" As though this was just a catch-up conversation and not a master spy visiting to drop something in her lap.
"Considering how he came to have the wolf, I'm unsurprised it ends up having a Scots-Canadian name." Kane waved a hand. "I'm off to the mansion after our talk here to see him. And Ms Grey, which I'm sure will be entertaining to me and me alone."
"Ok, so other than ruining the lives of your kids, what's the play?"
"I assume you've at least had some intelligence about the recent issues the Paris Hellfire Club is facing?"
"Heads of both courts died in a plane crash in the Alps a couple of weeks ago, I think. Triggered some kind of succession process."
"Mildly complicated by the fact that the club majordomo was also killed. In many ways, it was a very convenient crash for anyone ambitious or covetous of the Paris club, wouldn't you say?"
"So, assassination via sabotage? It would be my play. Where do we fit in?"
"Ah, for that, we need to talk to one more member of your organization." He said, standing with his drink. "My sources tell me Emma Frost is in the building. Shall we loop her in now?"
"That is a -very- convienent crash." Marie-Ange agreed. "You would think they would have taken precautions like the British royal family. Stop putting everyone in the same plane." She tapped at her phone, and also made a vague expression as though she were thinking quite loudly. "Emma should be here shortly. My sources tell me my mental voice is attention grabbing and 'spooky'.
“I would have gone with ‘ethereal’ or ‘haunting’, but you do you, Marie-Ange,” said Emma, as she came in the door. “We can go with spooky.” Emma drew out one of Kevin’s chairs, settled herself into it. “If I understood Marie-Ange’s rather cryptic little mental note that she just dropped me, you’re concerned about the Paris Hellfire Club and their lack of succession planning?” She sighed then, quite theatrically. “I do so hate it when Courts get taken out en masse. It feels so medieval.”
"Actually, this request comes from your counterpart in London's Blue Court, Emma Steed. She maintains an elabourate intelligence network still, and has been hearing disquieting rumours that specific artifacts known to only exist in the vaults of the Paris Club are potentially coming up for sale."
"Let me guess. Those rumours pre-date the crash."
"Exactly. She hasn't been able to uncover the identities of the party or parties floating these possibilities, but it is clear there's at least one source within the Club. Now, magic is hardly my area of expertise but I'm told that the books, artifacts and knowledge in the vaults is potentially worth billions to the right buyers, but they also represent extremely dangerous potential actions. Which is why the Club locked them up in the first place as opposed to using them. Steed's magical advisor apparently used words like 'the fraying of reality' when discussing the potential consequences, which even to a layman sounds quite negative."
"We'll loop in Sefton and Maximoff when we're done, but let's assume this is the magical equivalent of a bunch of nuclear warheads on a firesale with all the bad acting countries first in line." Kevin topped his drink back up.
"Why is it always magical nuclear winter, and never 'these books would be the key to gay communist utopia?" Marie-Ange asked, and shrugged before anyone could answer a clearly absurd question. "So we have to crash a Hellfire party, find out which artifacts were made by Magic Oppenheimer, and make sure that whoever engineered all of this does not get their presumably unwashed power-mad hands on them?"
"Ah, there lies the problem." Christian said, leaning back in his seat. "The vault is located behind a magical labyrinth and the secrets used to navigate it are only known to the King and Queen of each court. I'm told it is magically encoded into the rings they wear as part of their coronation. So until the new royalty is properly elected and power is transferred, no one in the Paris Club knows how to get through the labyrinth, much less secure the vault."
Kevin groaned and hid his eyes with his hand. "Fuuuuck. I should have figured it out the second you mentioned the damn club." He drained his glass and refilled it immediately. "There is one person outside of the Paris Hellfire Club that knows the way through the labyrinth. Me."
“Colour me surprised,” said Emma, very dryly. “Honestly, darling, there’s eventually a point where you know enough Club secrets that I will be dishonour-bound to kill you. Which will be annoying for both you and I. So,” she settled back in her seat, “how do you know the ways of the labyrinth in Paris? Does it involve an antipope, by any chance? Because they’ve been dining out on that one for at least five hundred years.”
"Sadly, it's significantly more mundane than that. It was 1968. Recent opening for the position of Silver Queen in the Paris Court. One of their powerbrokers in the court had some aspirations of closer ties with the Black Court and suggested Juliette Somerset as a candidate." He looked at the blank expressions and sighed. "Right, 'you're an old man, Kevin' moment. Juliette was old French upper-crust; aristocratic ancestors, family were extremely wealthy. Unfortunately for them, they went Vichy during the Second World War and the resistance clipped most of them. Juliette married an American officer, Charles Sutton Somerset as war bride and came back to the States. Charles came from an old school patrician family in Connecticut. Ended up in state government after the war. By the early fifties was a US Senator. Having an upper class French wife was useful in Washington. She palled around with Jackie O when she was First Lady, was one of the leaders in the cocktail party circuit. Charles was Black Court; not leadership but a useful member. Especially once he land a seat on the Ways & Means committee."
"And French politics at the time were what they were." Marie-Ange made a very gallic shrug at the very idea of post-war French politics. It was almost a requirement. "Our economy was growing leaps and bounds, and we were trying to be the... safe middle of the cookie between the United States and Russia, or China." A pause. "Both really. Nineteen sixty-eight would have been... oh, right after all the strikes, yes? Or right before. Worker strikes, a blossoming economy, France meddling into everyone's affairs. So of course, we had Americans creeping through all of our basements"
"So, once State heard that the wife of a Senator on one of the most powerful committees in Congress was being courted to serve a leadership position in a foreign political group, the Foggy Bottom boys went straight up and turned sideways. Demanded that US officials had access to the club and its records to determine potential security issues. Black Court was pushing all their DC influence in on it, so eventually they worked out a compromise. 4 US officials, all with Hellfire ties, would be allowed to audit the Paris club prior to the election. So it was... shit, Elias Walpole from State, Tom Kennedy - not one of those Kennedys - from the FBI, Wesley Cormack from Foreign Services and from the CIA, yours truly. I had the thinnest connection, with my in-laws being members of the Hellfire Club, but that was enough. We went top to bottom, ensuring it wasn't supporting Communists or enemy states, and that included a tour. At the end, there was some kind of spell placed on us that obscured some of the details, but enough to allow us to deliver a final report. Turns out the spell had some kind of death expiry, because once I came out of the lake fifteen years ago, I remember it all clearly."
“What a delight that must have been for you,” said Emma, raising a perfectly arched eyebrow. “Finding yourself both not dead and in receipt of juicy secrets. Although I assume it wasn’t the first thing on your mind at the time.” She leaned back further in her chair. “So what happened to the plan? And your report? As I know enough of the French Court’s history to say that Juliette Somerset never made Queen.”
"End of the day, it was a waste of time. Somerset got compromised with some specifically unacceptable photos for 1968 and agreed to resign instead of being outed. His marriage collapsed at the same time, which meant Juliette's candidacy had no real worth to the club, so the whole thing ended up being dropped. No one would remember it today except that I told an old associate all about it over drinks in Prague in 1970." He said sourly.
"Intelligence is like a garden. It's about tending the seeds that have been planted." Kane said, trying to stop his laughter with a drink.
"Like you've ever eaten a vegetable."
"The important thing is that Kevin has a map in his head of the least mapped underground system in Europe, and everyone who would want to exploit that now is either dead or in this room." Marie-Ange said. "Kevin knows what only the King and Queen know. What position on a chess board does that put him in?"
"The ace up the sleeve. Best way to beat a chessmaster is hide until the last minute that the game has been poker the whole time." Kane gave her a wolfish grin. "The world believes the only way to that library is through the court elections. That gives us an option no one else will have if they are trying to steal it."
"While I'm not typically in favour of magic or Hellfire, I don't like the idea of anyone upending the magical communities, especially since we seem to have a handle on them for once." Kevin sighed. "So, I'm guessing we're going to mingle in with the party during the election and make sure no one reaches the library, right?"
"Now we go setup all our jacks and jokers, yes." Marie-Ange produced a card from her sleeve, though it was a standard rider-waite tarot, the Seven of Swords. "Well, I intended for an Uno card, but one meaning stealth and trickery shall do."
Emma tapped diamond fingernails on the arm of her chair. “I’m not one to cast aspersions… oh, who am I kidding, I am absolutely one to cast aspersions, but I think with the kind of planning we’re talking about, I’d prefer to do it in my office. If we’re going to talk Court business, I prefer plotting over my own champagne.” She waved a hand airily at Kevin. “Not that your alcohol choices aren’t excellent, it’s just that I have very specific tastes when I’m plotting. Shall we make our way there?”
The offices of Snow Valley mostly relied on their anonymity for their security, usually employing someone at the front desk area as the first line of defence so to speak. It tended to create gaps, especially when someone knew where they were going. In this case, the tall old man, with a long silver pony tail falling down the back of his impeccable pearl grey suit strode past the desk and down the hall with a destination in mind.
“Sydney! You miserable janquai bastard! Where are you hiding?” He barked in a Scot brogue. Kevin’s head leaned out of the door of his office with a puzzled look.
“Jesus, who let you back in the country? I thought SHIELD would have you already tussed up like a country hog at the festival in some black site.”
“SHIELD.” He waved away the thought like an idle thought. “I know their tactics. I helped develop them.”
Kevin shook his head and laughed. “Of course. How the hell are you, Chris? Why are you here?” He said as the two swept into a bear hug for a moment, classic in the male slaps on the back to ensure that the affection was strictly platonic and very straight.
“Business. I’m here in an official capacity, helping out a friend. Got some time?”
“Sure, come into my office.” Kevin said, motioning him in and to the couch. “Drink?”
“Constantly.”
Kevin built them a pair of bourbons, aware that his co-workers were starting to wonder what was happening. “So, what do you need from me?”
“Snow Valley, actually.”
“Ah. Let me call the boss before we get into the weeds.” Kevin touched the office intercom. “Colbert, you got a couple of minutes. Christian Kane needs a consult.”
Marie-Ange popped into Kevin's office a bare moment later. "Christian, what sort of unlikely nonsense are you going to drop into our laps?" She gave a quick nod to Kevin, built herself a drink - ice, soda, the vodka she'd put in Kevin's bar herself and sat on the far side of the couch. "Did Garrison tell you his wolf has a name yet?" As though this was just a catch-up conversation and not a master spy visiting to drop something in her lap.
"Considering how he came to have the wolf, I'm unsurprised it ends up having a Scots-Canadian name." Kane waved a hand. "I'm off to the mansion after our talk here to see him. And Ms Grey, which I'm sure will be entertaining to me and me alone."
"Ok, so other than ruining the lives of your kids, what's the play?"
"I assume you've at least had some intelligence about the recent issues the Paris Hellfire Club is facing?"
"Heads of both courts died in a plane crash in the Alps a couple of weeks ago, I think. Triggered some kind of succession process."
"Mildly complicated by the fact that the club majordomo was also killed. In many ways, it was a very convenient crash for anyone ambitious or covetous of the Paris club, wouldn't you say?"
"So, assassination via sabotage? It would be my play. Where do we fit in?"
"Ah, for that, we need to talk to one more member of your organization." He said, standing with his drink. "My sources tell me Emma Frost is in the building. Shall we loop her in now?"
"That is a -very- convienent crash." Marie-Ange agreed. "You would think they would have taken precautions like the British royal family. Stop putting everyone in the same plane." She tapped at her phone, and also made a vague expression as though she were thinking quite loudly. "Emma should be here shortly. My sources tell me my mental voice is attention grabbing and 'spooky'.
“I would have gone with ‘ethereal’ or ‘haunting’, but you do you, Marie-Ange,” said Emma, as she came in the door. “We can go with spooky.” Emma drew out one of Kevin’s chairs, settled herself into it. “If I understood Marie-Ange’s rather cryptic little mental note that she just dropped me, you’re concerned about the Paris Hellfire Club and their lack of succession planning?” She sighed then, quite theatrically. “I do so hate it when Courts get taken out en masse. It feels so medieval.”
"Actually, this request comes from your counterpart in London's Blue Court, Emma Steed. She maintains an elabourate intelligence network still, and has been hearing disquieting rumours that specific artifacts known to only exist in the vaults of the Paris Club are potentially coming up for sale."
"Let me guess. Those rumours pre-date the crash."
"Exactly. She hasn't been able to uncover the identities of the party or parties floating these possibilities, but it is clear there's at least one source within the Club. Now, magic is hardly my area of expertise but I'm told that the books, artifacts and knowledge in the vaults is potentially worth billions to the right buyers, but they also represent extremely dangerous potential actions. Which is why the Club locked them up in the first place as opposed to using them. Steed's magical advisor apparently used words like 'the fraying of reality' when discussing the potential consequences, which even to a layman sounds quite negative."
"We'll loop in Sefton and Maximoff when we're done, but let's assume this is the magical equivalent of a bunch of nuclear warheads on a firesale with all the bad acting countries first in line." Kevin topped his drink back up.
"Why is it always magical nuclear winter, and never 'these books would be the key to gay communist utopia?" Marie-Ange asked, and shrugged before anyone could answer a clearly absurd question. "So we have to crash a Hellfire party, find out which artifacts were made by Magic Oppenheimer, and make sure that whoever engineered all of this does not get their presumably unwashed power-mad hands on them?"
"Ah, there lies the problem." Christian said, leaning back in his seat. "The vault is located behind a magical labyrinth and the secrets used to navigate it are only known to the King and Queen of each court. I'm told it is magically encoded into the rings they wear as part of their coronation. So until the new royalty is properly elected and power is transferred, no one in the Paris Club knows how to get through the labyrinth, much less secure the vault."
Kevin groaned and hid his eyes with his hand. "Fuuuuck. I should have figured it out the second you mentioned the damn club." He drained his glass and refilled it immediately. "There is one person outside of the Paris Hellfire Club that knows the way through the labyrinth. Me."
“Colour me surprised,” said Emma, very dryly. “Honestly, darling, there’s eventually a point where you know enough Club secrets that I will be dishonour-bound to kill you. Which will be annoying for both you and I. So,” she settled back in her seat, “how do you know the ways of the labyrinth in Paris? Does it involve an antipope, by any chance? Because they’ve been dining out on that one for at least five hundred years.”
"Sadly, it's significantly more mundane than that. It was 1968. Recent opening for the position of Silver Queen in the Paris Court. One of their powerbrokers in the court had some aspirations of closer ties with the Black Court and suggested Juliette Somerset as a candidate." He looked at the blank expressions and sighed. "Right, 'you're an old man, Kevin' moment. Juliette was old French upper-crust; aristocratic ancestors, family were extremely wealthy. Unfortunately for them, they went Vichy during the Second World War and the resistance clipped most of them. Juliette married an American officer, Charles Sutton Somerset as war bride and came back to the States. Charles came from an old school patrician family in Connecticut. Ended up in state government after the war. By the early fifties was a US Senator. Having an upper class French wife was useful in Washington. She palled around with Jackie O when she was First Lady, was one of the leaders in the cocktail party circuit. Charles was Black Court; not leadership but a useful member. Especially once he land a seat on the Ways & Means committee."
"And French politics at the time were what they were." Marie-Ange made a very gallic shrug at the very idea of post-war French politics. It was almost a requirement. "Our economy was growing leaps and bounds, and we were trying to be the... safe middle of the cookie between the United States and Russia, or China." A pause. "Both really. Nineteen sixty-eight would have been... oh, right after all the strikes, yes? Or right before. Worker strikes, a blossoming economy, France meddling into everyone's affairs. So of course, we had Americans creeping through all of our basements"
"So, once State heard that the wife of a Senator on one of the most powerful committees in Congress was being courted to serve a leadership position in a foreign political group, the Foggy Bottom boys went straight up and turned sideways. Demanded that US officials had access to the club and its records to determine potential security issues. Black Court was pushing all their DC influence in on it, so eventually they worked out a compromise. 4 US officials, all with Hellfire ties, would be allowed to audit the Paris club prior to the election. So it was... shit, Elias Walpole from State, Tom Kennedy - not one of those Kennedys - from the FBI, Wesley Cormack from Foreign Services and from the CIA, yours truly. I had the thinnest connection, with my in-laws being members of the Hellfire Club, but that was enough. We went top to bottom, ensuring it wasn't supporting Communists or enemy states, and that included a tour. At the end, there was some kind of spell placed on us that obscured some of the details, but enough to allow us to deliver a final report. Turns out the spell had some kind of death expiry, because once I came out of the lake fifteen years ago, I remember it all clearly."
“What a delight that must have been for you,” said Emma, raising a perfectly arched eyebrow. “Finding yourself both not dead and in receipt of juicy secrets. Although I assume it wasn’t the first thing on your mind at the time.” She leaned back further in her chair. “So what happened to the plan? And your report? As I know enough of the French Court’s history to say that Juliette Somerset never made Queen.”
"End of the day, it was a waste of time. Somerset got compromised with some specifically unacceptable photos for 1968 and agreed to resign instead of being outed. His marriage collapsed at the same time, which meant Juliette's candidacy had no real worth to the club, so the whole thing ended up being dropped. No one would remember it today except that I told an old associate all about it over drinks in Prague in 1970." He said sourly.
"Intelligence is like a garden. It's about tending the seeds that have been planted." Kane said, trying to stop his laughter with a drink.
"Like you've ever eaten a vegetable."
"The important thing is that Kevin has a map in his head of the least mapped underground system in Europe, and everyone who would want to exploit that now is either dead or in this room." Marie-Ange said. "Kevin knows what only the King and Queen know. What position on a chess board does that put him in?"
"The ace up the sleeve. Best way to beat a chessmaster is hide until the last minute that the game has been poker the whole time." Kane gave her a wolfish grin. "The world believes the only way to that library is through the court elections. That gives us an option no one else will have if they are trying to steal it."
"While I'm not typically in favour of magic or Hellfire, I don't like the idea of anyone upending the magical communities, especially since we seem to have a handle on them for once." Kevin sighed. "So, I'm guessing we're going to mingle in with the party during the election and make sure no one reaches the library, right?"
"Now we go setup all our jacks and jokers, yes." Marie-Ange produced a card from her sleeve, though it was a standard rider-waite tarot, the Seven of Swords. "Well, I intended for an Uno card, but one meaning stealth and trickery shall do."
Emma tapped diamond fingernails on the arm of her chair. “I’m not one to cast aspersions… oh, who am I kidding, I am absolutely one to cast aspersions, but I think with the kind of planning we’re talking about, I’d prefer to do it in my office. If we’re going to talk Court business, I prefer plotting over my own champagne.” She waved a hand airily at Kevin. “Not that your alcohol choices aren’t excellent, it’s just that I have very specific tastes when I’m plotting. Shall we make our way there?”
