undergrounds | Peace and Unity March

Watch on YouTube

It's a glorious hot and sunny evening in London when a ragtag group of supernatural misfits turn up at Leicester Square to wave their placards and begin their march for peace and unity among the city's supernatural communities.

Organised by students at the Redbright Institute, the march begins at 6.30pm and ends at 8.30pm outside the Night Council Headquarters in Whitehall. While the march is open to all, the timing is not vampire-friendly which is not a coincidence; there's a noticeable anti-vampire sentiment amongst the crowd.

The human media pay no attention: they've had the far larger Pride march earlier in the day to report on and this event has been billed as a marine environmental awareness campaign to the outside world. No one cares. But the Night Council do, of course, and accordingly the march is policed by Guardians who are dressed as police community officers. They will intervene if the protest appears to get out of hand and stop anyone who attempts to enter the Night Council HQ.

What's the march about?
The official objective of the Peace and Unity March as posted by the Redbright student organiser is to demonstrate support for a unified supernatural community. Despite the name, it attracts a variety of protesters who all want different things. Those attending or observing the march will see and hear support for the following, in rough order of prominence:

• PEACE AND LOVE. We just want everyone to get along.
• STOP THE FIGHTING. Not just pacifism, there's also a general sense of being sick of losing loved ones and driven out of parts of the city due to fights between factions. Some of the more extreme stances also blame the "monstrous" species for inciting violence i.e. vampires, werewolves, fae.
• WE STAND TOGETHER. A stronger message of solidarity and defiance against the Night Council and its perceived biases.
• REPRESENTATION FOR ALL. Also anti-Night Council. This bleeds into discontent against both vampires and witches.
• VAMPIRES SUCK. The vampires are taking over! This is a disaster for everyone and should be stopped.
• WITCHES SUCK. The witches have been controlling London for years! Down with the witches.

There are likely to be some rather heated debates between the protesters themselves as these varying sentiments contradict each other. Some protesters feel that Sylvia Redbright was unfairly ousted from the Night Council and are vocal in supporting her. Others are just cynical about the Night Council in general.

Route
6.30-6.45pm: Leicester Square
The crowd gathers at Leicester Square where the first fifteen minutes are spent gathering everyone together, waving some placards and generally getting everyone ready to begin the march. At this point the Guardian presence is hardly noticeable, though they are watching as soon as the march begins.

6.45-7.15pm: Victoria Embankment via Trafalgar Square
The crowd walks from Leicester Square to Trafalgar Square, then takes a diversion along the Strand before crossing over to Victoria Embankment. They pause at the Hungerford Bridge and Golden Jubilee Bridges to look out across the Thames to Waterloo, which is in Lambeth, a territory controlled by the Islington Nest. A few protesters spit in the river.

7.15-7.30pm: March from Victoria Embankment to Whitehall
From Victoria Embankment it's only a short walk to Whitehall, where the protesters march along the street before eventually coming to a halt outside the Night Council Headquarters.

7.30-8.30pm: Outside Night Council HQ
The remaining hour is spent as a sit-in protest outside the Night Council HQ. There are chants about standing together as one community, about the perceived lack of representation in the Night Council, and about peace not war. A few use loudspeakers to make speeches which are received with varying levels of enthusiasm. A small group even attempt to enter the Night Council HQ but are quickly rebuffed by Guardians who look increasingly menacing as the evening draws on.

At 8.30pm the protesters are ordered to disperse. Anyone who refuses to leave will be swiftly marched off, or even arrested, though for the most part the Guardians are trying to keep the peace.

Late evening: Off to the pub
There's no official gathering after the protest is over, but various groups do disperse to pubs around the central London area to continue the debate and generally have a good time and/or cause trouble. Some of these – the ones that are identified as potential political troublemakers – are quietly followed by undercover Guardians.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Nancy turns when she hears the voice. Not one of her brothers she knows that immediately. When she sees him though, everything makes sense.

"Joss," she says sweetly, happy to see him. "I've got a lot of unexpected talents." That, and being raised by a Verified Kidsman really made things quite Victorian in her life. had he seen Dodger's top hat?

"What're you doing here?" She's nothing but concerned.

"Taking in the freakshow," he shrugs. It's more interesting than what he had been doing, which was sulking at home after Jean-Claude lost the election. Damn that Cesare Borgia.

"Besides divesting people of their valuables, what are you doing? Doesn't seem quite your, er, scene, given the company you currently keep."

"I wouldn't call it that..." But considering the people here calling for the death of the vampires... She's not going to argue the point.

"I took my brothers out. They always like a good to-do to bring wallets home." She can be candid with Joss, something she appreciates.

Joscelin is not impressed by her weak defense of the protesters and he is not shy about showing it. "This is a circus. Wolves and witches and...I don't remember which terms are politically correct for the others these days. Starts with an M." Back in his day they'd just burned them all at the stake; no one was concerned with the subtle differences between metahuman gifts and magic. It was all heretical.

"Good thing they've got you to model socially responsible behavior," he intones sarcastically.

"Meta humans?" Nancy offers hopefully. She thinks she's right, at least. "It's a protest. Aren't they supposed to be somewhat similar?" She looks at Joss and gives him a small smile.

This only lasts until his next comment, then her face falls flat, and she rolls her eyes. "No one ever said I was an upstanding citizen." She's trying to be. But old habits die hard, and if things don't improve between her and Cooper, she's worried she'll have to return to picking pockets regularly to supplement her job at the garage.

"Do they actually think it's going to make a difference? That Cesare Borgia's going to look out his window and say 'golly gee whiz, better resign right now because these people don't seem to like vampires very much?'" Joscelin raises an eyebrow. "Nothing will change."

He still doesn't feel quite comfortable about teasing her, even six months after...the unpleasantness, but it's second nature at this point. And who's to argue against that? "Apparently not."

"Maybe not, but it lets Cesare the Night Council know that they don't like what's going on, and that they need to shape up or get out." She shrugs. "And it comforts people to know they've been heard. That they're not just yelling at a wall."

It's nice, to hear the lightness in his words, the joking nature she often heard her brothers use. It gets her to lower her guard, glancing down. Nancy speaks softly as she admits: "The money goes to my brothers, they don't got much."

"I think it's more of the latter than the former," Joss points out. "I know Borgia very well ar this point and know he doesn't give a fuck what 'the people' want if it doesn't align with what he wants. He knows better than to listen to the rabble. So...yes, they are just yelling at a wall. Anything to make a person feel useful, I suppose."

"How many brothers have you got?"

"He listens to me." Which was a total lie. Sure, she was, at this point, bros with Cesare, but he never listened. He just went on doing whatever the hell Cesare Borgia wanted.

Nancy pauses for a moment, twisting her lips to-and-fro as she tried to do a mental count. "More'n enough. Hardly see the older ones now, dead or in prison, or run out of London all together. I think there's 'round 12 living with the old devil right now." Brother was a very loose term to describe those in Fagin's immediate net.

"Then you would be the first." Joscelin is obviously less than impressed by her statement. He knows she's lying.

"Not related by blood, then, I imagine."

"As far as I know, no." She hoped her mother had had the good sense never to make a deal with Fagin ever again in her life. Idly, she wondered if second-borns were just as valuable as first-borns. Or maybe it was just for the poeticness of it all. She'd never really asked Fagin for the details.

"They're good lads, though, the lot of 'em." Okay, so Jem White kind of sucked. He was a few years younger than Nancy, about ready to strike out on his own.

Joss snorts. "They're petty criminals, same as you," he points out, but he's smiling. A little.

"It's very old-fashioned, this whole 'gang of urchins' thing. Victorian, even."

"Doesn't mean they're not good lads." They had hearts, after all. Usually, she held Dodger up as an example of this, him with all his morals. But Dodger was currently number 1 on her Shit List.

"Fagin's been around for some time," she says, "He was up to his old tricks back then, too- a kidsman, they called him. Kidsman and a fence. Perhaps that's why it seems so Victorian. The same man the whole time..."

Thinking too much about it made her sick. How many children had he ruined over the years?

Joscelin lets out a low whistle. "Very Victorian. Not a vampire, because that was the racket I was running for most of that century--well, less petty theft and more murder but I had my own merry band of urchins around me. I'd have heard of him if he'd been a direct competitor. Fae?" Mortals are too, well, mortal to have been around that long.

Funny, that Joss had had a band of urchins. Maybe that's one of the reasons she inexplicably likes him.

"Yeah- fae. Unseelie." There is no love for the man in her voice. "He don't discriminate though. He's had me, and plenty of wolves beside, sells to vampires." she's suddenly a bit more aware of the bite marks on her neck, and a quick moment of focus brings the glamors on her neck back to full strength.

Someone else might have been scandalized by that.

Unfortunately, Joscelin was far too jaded to let on if he even noticed Nancy's admission, much less cared. His father had consorted regularly with prostitutes, in full view of Joscelin and his other bastard children. Joss hadn't exactly been sheltered from the ways of the world even as a very young child, his monastic education aside. And it's been centuries since then.

"Doesn't sound like someone I'd like very much," he observes instead.

"No," Nancy agrees, glad that Joss hasn't decided to read between the lines. Or if he has, hasn't commented on it, but she's not confident in that, from what little she knows of him.

"Most people don't. Only keep him around out of necessity."

Peace and Unity March

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