17231/Cupp in Trouble

Cupp in Trouble
Date of Scene:	20 February 2024
Location:	Phillip Cupp's Home - Bristol Township
Synopsis:	TRIGGER WARNING: This scene gets DARK -- Violence, Blood, Broken Bones, Suggested Suicide Osprey (Austin Reese) and Red Robin (Tim Drake) give Phillip Cupp a long overdue visit. They find all the evidence they need -- illegal acts, the strange focus on Phoebe and his involvement with her imprisonment and murder. And so many worse things. Gutless, spineless Phillip Cupp is given choices.
Cast of Characters:	Phoebe Beacon, Austin Reese, Tim Drake

---

Phoebe Beacon has posed:
    Phillip Cupp fancied himself a lot of things. He fancied himself too smart to track, too clever by leaps and bounds beyond Mickey ROgers, the owner of the Gotham Gate who had funded The Silo in Montana. He thought himself terribly smart for hiding his tracks for his support.

    This was a large, ornate house, fieldstone siding, eight car stable, fountain in the front yard -- it's all ostentatious. Where Wayne Manor had style and Old World, Old Money feel this was... not.

    It's a little bit like a Lawyer's Special McMansion had a glow-up and stopped midway through. Almost none of the windows match, it's a mess.

    A Mercedes SUV (definitely doesn't have the blood still on it from that one TikTok 'Hot Mechanic Punches Nepot Baby Outside Gotham U, Remix to 'You Can't Stop the Feelin')was parked at the front of the house.

    Inside, Phillip Cupp was shuffling papers. A lockbox marked MT was open and he was hurriedly trying to move pictures and paper towards the fireplace.

Austin Reese has posed:
He thought he's so clever. So smart. Osprey is in a tree, like an osprey should be, watching the house through his domino mask. He has yet to come back to the cave since Balm died. He has hit a few caches in the city on his way towards Cupp's house, however. It also appears that he may have turned off his GPS tracker.

Tagging security cameras and any potential guards, he jumps off the tree and into the yard, moving quickly across the lawn to get to the side of the home, finding the power box and planting a small charge on it. With that in place, he moves back around to the side of the home where the window into the office looks out over the yard. He quietly opens it and hops inside, closing it behind him, and then he taps a button on the display on his wrist, the charge going off with a loud BANG and plunging the house into darkness, only the fireplace providing any light.

In the dark, Austin moves right behind Phil, grabbing hold of him and slamming his head down into the desk. Not hard enough to hurt him, he just wants to make sure he has his attention, "We need to talk, Phil."

Tim Drake has posed:
    There's not a whole lot to say about where Tim's been. Except that he wasn't there, and that's the only thing that matters.

    Suited up now, Tim is on observation duty. Not of Phillip Cupp, who Tim couldn't give a rat's ass about, in this moment, but the rest of his family. Because he can't process his own guilt, his own grief, not without completely subsuming it into something else, some other obsession that allows him the capability to function without thinking about It.

    It being his sister's, his best friend's, corpse, in his brother's possession.

    This is all a roundabout way to say he's been tracking Austin. Not via his GPS monitor, but other means. Hacking cameras. Trackers he may have placed strategically in the past (call him paranoid; he's lost too many people not to be). Maybe a good dose of just knowing where Austin would go, if Tim were him. So he looms outside of Cupp's McMansion, the winter wind catching his cape and sending it whipping around him.

    He sighs and, as the place descends into darkness, starts his approach.

Phoebe Beacon has posed:
    Processing grief is a complicated action. Right now, Phil is not mourning the woman he supposedly 'fell in love with' when he met her and waited patiently for her to grow up' (gross, btw). He is in fear.

    Saif wasn't supposed to execute her. Something went wrong.

    The tow-headed All American square-jawed lawyer running against Harvey Dent had a hand full of documents and pictures before his head is grabbed, and slammed into his desk. Momentarily stunned, he falls to the floor, papers landing everywehre around him and Osprey.

    "I didn't hurt her! I didn't hurt her! I had nothing to do with this!" he snarls, and stumbling to his feet, he throws a clothesline shot at Osprey -- but he's slower, clumsy. Sweaty and nervous and having taken maybe a little too much scotch.

Austin Reese has posed:
"Bullshit. I know what you did in Montana."

Osprey was waiting for him to throw a punch, shifting around and grabbing his arm, twisting it and pushing him down onto the desk, wrenching his arm again and slamming a big knife directly down through the back of his hand into the desk, "Stay put for a minute. I got a few questions."

Walking around Phil, he pulls one of those extendable batons off his belt, "Do you know how many bones are in the human hand, Phil? I probably just destroyed a few of your's, but there's still so many left." He brings the baton down full force into the back of the wrist of the hand that's pinned to the desk, "WHERE IS SHAW?!"

Tim Drake has posed:
    At some point, someone joins them in the room. There isn't so much as a whisper of cloth or the faintest of footfalls, but yes indeed, there is a figure at the window.

    Red Robin sits at the sill, one hand braced above him, the other resting on his folded leg. He doesn't announce himself, instead tracking the clumsy attempts by Cupp to defend himself. Head cocked to the side, Tim only watches, his eyes narrowed behind his domino mask.

    In his free hand, he holds his in-costume phone, the one tied to his suit's computer.

Phoebe Beacon has posed:
    There was a couple grunts of struggle as Cupp tries to wrestle his way away from Osprey, but he's not really a match for someone who didn't have to hold his punches. He's turned around, and he's slammed back to the desk before Osprey's knife goes clearly through his hand, and CUpp screams in pain.

    "Leksandra! It was all Leksandra's doing in Montana! I just got caught up in it!" he squeals out, struggling, and he breathes out, trying to figure a way to get the knife out and escape.

    SNAP!

    The man screams, falling to his knees.

    "I DON'T KNOW WHERE SHAW IS!"

Austin Reese has posed:
"'Caught up in it?'" Osprey says, walking around the desk a bit more as Cupp drops to his knees, "I know you've been financing it. I have all the documentation I need. But then again, you're just a rich white asshole, aren't you?" He hops up onto the desk, sitting there and looking down at Phil, "You'll just weasel your way out of it, won't you?" He shakes his head, laughing a little bit.

"I suppose I might be able to make it look like you fell off the balcony and broke your neck. Nobody'd even know." He muses, mostly to himself, glancing over to the side to at least catch sight of the other figure behind the curtain. He doesn't acknowledge him for the moment. He doesn't want Phil to know someone else is here.

"Look, if you're just going to waste my time, I'll just finish taking my aggression out of you, dispose of you, and go find the next one of your conspirators on my list. Maybe Cruz Rowland, or Frankie Collier." Name dropping is always a good way to make sure Phil knows he's serious, "Help me help you, Phil. Give me what I want."

Phoebe Beacon has posed:
    "You -- you can't do that. You won't do that! You're a freaking *Bat*. You don't kill! None of you KILL! The Batman doesn't LET YOU!" Phil tries to summon up some testicular fortitude, and tries to force a laugh "All smoke. You're all smoke. The lot of you. She wouldn't even rat you out when she was drugged. Shaw kept trying to press. But I think -- I think I know who you are! One of you stupid furries has got to be -- ha. ha... has got to be..." he trembles a moment. Cruz. Frankie.

    "/No One/ is gonna talk. To a Bat. Not for love or money. 'Cause we *know* what's going to go down. We know what the Lady in Red wanted with the girl. But she's gone. She's gone now. If she would have -- if she would have just *obeyed me* and *listened* none of this would have happened... ha... haa... it's... it's almost funny, isn't it?" he breathes out. "Instead her stupid punk boyfriend takes a cheap shot when I insult his car."

Austin Reese has posed:
"What Batman doesn't know won't hurt him." Osprey replies, his voice going cold, "I wasn't always a Bat, you know. I've killed people before." He hops back off the desk, and wrenches the knife out of Phil's hand to let him collapse to the ground fully, moving over him and planting a boot directly on his chest, pressing hard enough to force the air out of him, threatening to break ribs, "I am going to make your position very clear, Mr. Cupp." He says, voice retaining that cold tone from earlier.

"You don't have any choices here. You're going to tell me what I want to know, or being dead will be the least of your problems. When you're dead, you don't have to worry about all the pain." He brings the knife around, turning it in his hand, "See, now we're getting somewhere." He says, after the mention of the Lady in Red, "Who is the Lady in Red? What did she want with Phoebe?"

Tim Drake has posed:
    "Leksandra, the woman he mentioned before," comes Red Robin's clarification. "I helped kill her."

    He looks down at the phone in his hand, frowning slightly, but then his chin lifts so that he can look over at Osprey, entirely ignoring Phillip. "Sorry to interrupt. Please, continue. We're on a time table, anyway, and if we need to move on to another one of them, we should finish this one up quickly," he says, tone flat and uninterested.

    His phone pings. Tim looks down at it again, his face illuminated by the screen, and one half of his mouth quirks upwards in a faint smirk.

Phoebe Beacon has posed:
    "--what... *what* -- No! NO you're BATS. You /don't kill/. EVERYONE KNOWS IT or else Batman would have killed the Joker years ago!" Cupp is sounding a little panicked now as he registers Red Robin there. "YOU'RE BATS!" he squeals out breathlessly, and then squeaks out. "She wanted her kept asleep! Something about a Shard! Something about Hecking?! Hacking?! I don't know I didn't pay attention to anything but her tits!" Phillip wheezes, his hand bleeding and making a puddle on the floor. "And if she's dead then what's the problem?! I was trying to protect Phoebe! BRUCE WAYNE was on that list -- he must have known about it! He only adopted her for her powers!"

Austin Reese has posed:
"Ah good, well we can mark that one off the list then." Osprey responds to Red Robin as he turns to look his way. The mention of the timetable gets him to clap his hands together, "Right, yes. Gotta get to Cruz's big apartment before he gets home." He replies, though when Phil bad mouths Bruce Wayne, he gets one of Osprey's boots smacked into his face with an extremely firm kick, rolling him over onto his stomach with the force of it.

"You know, people like you sicken me. You act like you're helping but all you care about is control. Well how's it feel to have all your control taken from you, Phil?" Osprey asks, grabbing the broken arm and wrenching it around behind Phil's back again as he puts a knee on his back. Then he looks back up at Red Robin, "Oh I know the perfect one. The old 'fell down the stairs'. It'll be able to hide the broken arm way better than faking him hanging himself would."

Tim Drake has posed:
    Red Robin flips his phone over, its screen now face down on his thigh. "He's leaving a photoshoot in the Upper West Side right now. Given he just put in a food order on his phone, we'll have time to make it to New York before he's even picked up his meal." Though he pauses. "If we stay on schedule here," he adds.

    A single glance is given towards the lockbox. "Well, sounds like we can remove Wayne from the list. One less rich corpo fascist for us to deal with tonight, I guess," he says with a sigh that isn't entirely put-upon. This is tedious, but Tim knows the benefits of not playing his hand too early. His phone dings again; this time he doesn't check it.

Phoebe Beacon has posed:
    "N-no... no you're Bats! You don't kill! You don't /kill people/! You can't kill me! I'll do -- I'll do anything! I'll leave her alone. I'll drop out of the DA race. I'll move to Starling City! I'll vote for a moderate! You won't even have to see me again!" he wheezes, holding his stomach, feeling queezy and awful, disorientated, shocky and losing blood. "She's not dead, she's not dead for real is she? Oh God, oh God, this wasn't supposed to happen, this wasn't supposed to happen, you've got to believe me!" he squeaks.

    All around him? Blackmail material for different people around the Tri-City area and beyond. Pictures of the Silo facility in Montana, where Pheobe celebrated her seventeenth birthday by her hand being broken seventeen times. Pictures of Phoebe walking with Robbie, jogging with Idu. Pictures of various Wayne family members. An invoice from a private investigator with mechanic Robbie Reyes, who works at Canelo's Auto Shop in Brooklyn, where he lives in Gotham, pictures of his brother -- all evidence he was trying to burn.

    Cupp knew he fucked up.

Austin Reese has posed:
"Oh you own a gun right Phil? Yeah killing yourself with that does make sense." He says, as he kneels next to the guy while he's panicking and freaking out. He doesn't respond when Phil starts asking if she's dead. He knows the answer to it or he wouldn't have been trying to burn evidence. He grabs hold of Phil and tosses him up off the ground, back into the chair he'd been sitting in. Suddenly he snaps his fingers, and then starts to pull out some steel cable from a belt pouch.

"I've got it. You were trying to dispose of evidence, and you rolled your chair back too fast and fell into the fireplace." He starts to wrap the wire around Cupp, cinching it probably a little too tight, and then patting Phil down for any weapons and especially for his phone, which Osprey extracts and then holds in front of Phil's face so it'll unlock, "I can't believe people actually use that feature." He shakes his head. Swipe code will always be the best.

Pulling a small cable out of the display on his arm, he plugs it into Phil's phone and flash clones it so they can go through it later. He grabbed the pocket square out of Phil's suit coat and stuffed it into his mouth, slapping a piece of tape over it a moment later, "You know it's funny, you're right. We don't kill. We're better than that. Better than you." He pushes Phil back with his foot, not towards the fireplace, tempting that may be. Taking Phil's phone, he lays it on the desk and dials 911, turning it onto speaker.

"911 what's your emergency?"

Osprey puts on a bit of a voice, and then speaks up, "I'm with the Phil Cupp campaign, I need you to send the police out to his home right away. He has something he needs to confess." The dispatcher starts to ask a question, and he turns the call off. Then he dials another number, "GNN? Boy do I have a scoop for you! I just heard the police were on their way to Phillip Cupp's house! If you get someone down there, you can get it on film!" And then he hangs up the phone again.

Moving back over to Phil, he pushes him up against the desk, and pats him on the shoulder, "Have fun, Phil. See you around."

Tim Drake has posed:
    Now that it seems things are wrapping up, Red Robin slides smoothly off of the windowsill. He goes to the lockbox. He looks through its contents, almost sedately, giving time for his domino HUD to get clear pictures of everything.

    "You've never been particularly clever, Cupp," he says, as he keeps some of it, starts feeding other pieces into the fire. "And you've been a very naughty boy. All those immigrant women whose paperwork you helped push through the system, just for them to disappear into the seedy underbelly of Gotham. Funneling money into human trafficking rings doesn't look good on the campaign trail, you know?"

    He clucks his tongue. "I'm sure the GNN and every other news agency in the tri-state area were already on their way, given an anonymous source sent in enough evidence to bury you a thousand times over, just a few minutes ago. Your life is over, Cupp. Your family's name is ruined. You and everyone connected to you will never be anything, ever again." He glances at Osprey, then steps forward to pat Cupp on the shoulder, leaning in to say, under his voice, "Code's still 12345, in case you decide to make the sensible choice tonight." His eyes lift to the painting on the wall that Tim knows hides Cupp's gun safe.

    When he stands, his mouth is in a grim line. "Goodbye, Phillip Cupp. I don't suppose I'll ever have to suffer your presence again."

Phoebe Beacon has posed:
    By the time ambulences and police cruisers pull up, the fire has spread from some of the drifting ashes to other pictures and documents. Phillip CUpp had gone into the gun safe. He had taken out a rife... but was too gutless.

Paramedics pull him from the office as crews arrive from GNN, helicopters overhead as the fire begins to peek through the roof spaces, and the injured Cupp watches his life go up in smoke, and all he could whisper was, in horror:

     'He's coming'.