The conversation is brief. Less than thirty seconds and it begins, Serafíne thumbs off her phone and tucks it back into an inner pocket of her leather jacket. Glances at the priest in profile as she reaches to grab her pack of cigarettes from the dashboard. The cellophane gleams in the dashboard lights as she fishes for her lighter and one of the cigarettes. Black-papered Djarums with gold foil wrapped at the joint of filter and spiced tobacco, the scent suddenly pungent, particularly in the cool night air streaming in from the open window.
"He's in," she tells Pan, low-voiced as ever, slipping the cigarette into her mouth. The lighter is curved carefully in the palm of her hand and she's leaning forward, head tucked out of the stream of wind when she cuts a glance back at Pan.
"Want one?" Speaking around the cigarette as she sparks the lighter and inhales, sharply enough to spark flame to paper, tobacco, spice. The scent is rich and pungent and the sugars in the mix crackle audibly, spitting before they begin to burn.
"Says he'll meet us there."
She exhales a thick stream of smoke through the open window, watching the city stream by and the neighborhoods change.
"Should I let your apprentice know where we're going?" Shoshannah, she means, though he may not know that. Because why else would the girl subject herself to limitations on alcohol and curfew?
PanThe priest had eaten the grapes and carrots standing in the kitchen before they left and half of the sandwich on the way out the house and the other half once they were on the road. Lack of mindfulness but the body needs fuel. By the time he finishes eating the Cultist is off the phone. At a stop sign Pan brushes crumbs from the thigh of his jeans.
"No, thank you," he says to the matter of the cigarette.
Says he'll meet us there.
"Alright."
The streets are mostly empty for the folks who have mundane places to be in the morning have all gone to bed and those who fill their nights with alcohol are already in place until the bars close. Whenever they pass another car or meet one on the road it is a reminder of the necessity of safe driving.
Even in the darkness she can see his brow furrow at the mention of an apprentice but he does not immediately ask for clarification. After a few seconds pass he exhales and it passes as comprehension.
"I don't think that's a good idea," he says.
JimJim ends up 'there', though they've got a head start on him and take Pan's car, while it's public transportation and the steady slap of desert boots that get Jim to his destination. He wears an assemblage of nondescript staples, a simple pair of crisp Levi's jeans in a dark navy selvedge denim and only a slate gray v-neck t-shirt thanks to the fair weather.
A baseball cap's brim is pulled down low along his forehead and casts a shadow on his face from the illumination of streetlights. The Cultist hoofs it from the bus stop and navigates his way down the sidewalks until he is close to 'there', looking for that same red truck he'd seen the first time he met Pan.
SerafínePan doesn't think that's a good idea. Sera takes this with a surprising degree of equanimity, cutting the priest another glance back with the remark. Her face is bathed in the dashboard lights, her hair pulled back from its usual loose mass into a haphazard ponytail, the ends tucked over her left shoulder. He's quiet. She's nervous enough about whatever comes next that she's quiet too. Perhaps she's infected by the priest's laconic nature, imbiding it somehow from the aura that surrounds him.
Sera puts out her cigarette before its half finished. Pinchs off the cherry and flicks it out the open window so it flares and dances in the wind, peeling back in the airstream of the truck behind them to die in some damp gutter. The filter she keeps and stuffs either into the truck's ashtray or the little AAA trashbag Pan no doubt has looped around some otherwise non-functional nob or button housing. Her fingers still smell sweet, and the scent lingers in her hair and on her skin.
When Pan parks the truck, she slips neatly out of the passenger's seat, slithering down from the high cab to the sidewalk, dark boots solid on the ground. The taillights of a city bus gleaming as it pulls away from the corner ahead, or perhaps the familiar surge of Jim's resonance has her glancing up the street, the sudden flash of a grin illuminating her angular features. Teeth white between her red lips, and briefly sharp.
"There he is," to the priest, unnecessarily - for surely he can feel Jim's resonance as well as she can. Still a flash of her attention toward her fellow Cultist. The lively lift of her chin by way of greeting. The edge of her half-smile lingers on her mouth when she glances back to Pan. "Where to now, Padre?"
As if he was just giving them the city tour.
SerafínePer + Awareness
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 8) ( fail )
Pan[awareness]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1
Serafíne+1 difficulty because I KNOW THAT PAN IS RIGHT NEXT TO ME
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 5, 5, 9, 9) ( success x 1 )
Jim[ A-where-ness. ]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 5, 6, 8) ( fail )
PanIt seems as though he sets off into the park at random but she knows better. Perhaps can't feel anything but by the time they're in Jim's general vicinity Sera is within eyesight. All is right with the world. She marks him with a grin.
Onward!
"When I saw her--" Almost an hour ago. "--she was on a bench."
When the pair make themselves obvious to Jim the priest lifts a hand to wave. He's wearing a black button-down work shirt and slacks instead of jeans. Dark clothing nearly obviates his form in nighttime without his resonance washing over him.
"Jim," he says in greeting. "You didn't happen to see a girl running real fast away from a bench, did you?"
JimJim ends up relying more on his corporeal senses. The red truck. The beautiful woman he's come to know a little more past the shell of a living body they all wear. The Man (who is sometimes) in Black. The park and its benches. He returns the wave, raising his hand at his elbow in a lackadaisical gesture.
"A lot of girls run away from.me. Real fast. But no, Father," at the sidewalk on the border of the park, which he cuts through the edge of to finally join them. "Namaste," to both of them, the greeting almost an afterthought, and bringing a genuine smile when finally faced with the resonance of the Chorister.
He looks around. "Find the bench? Would you know which way she ran?" They are ideas, but he is already turning back and forth, scanning the horizon for signs of others - people. Sprinting young women. Anything, really.
Serafíne"Hey - " Sera to Jim, when he does finally join them. Her attention now is mostly settled on the dark shadows of the park, at night. The paths of the streetlamps cutting through the shadows, which only seem to exagerrate the dark, deserted sweep of the still, quiet interior.
Hands in her pockets, she glances aslant at the priest then. "We might as well walk, right? Maybe you'll recognize a bush or something. We can peek back and see if there's - anything that might help us find her. And I wouldn't be surprised to find a few homeless camped out in here, either. If the cops aren't harassing them out of the place. Bet they'd've noticed a runaway like Leah.
"At least they could tell us whether she's been hanging around here for long. If she looks okay or - if they've seen her at the local emergency kitchen."
So saying, she starts walking into the interior of the park, elbows held tightly against her torso, her long legs in easy motion. She is better dressed for this sort of expedition tonight than she is most nights. Those boots are solid workboots, and any illusion of height her clothing or proportions lend her disappeared the minute she slid down from the passenger's side of the cab.
While she walks, she digs into that interior pocket of her jacket for her earbuds, fumbling to slip the jack into the iPhone blind. Then, the brief flash of the screen as she wakes it, hits shuffle and tucks the phone back away. She tucks the right earbud in, and leaves the left to dangle around her neck.
PanIt isn't the joke about girls running away from Jim that has Pan's attention drifting away. First his eyes move and then he turns around to face the center of the park. He isn't quite listening when Sera speaks and he doesn't follow when she starts to walk.
Though the night is warm and dry the man who is slow to react for the depth of his belief in acceptance shivers, hard, the reaction to whatever it is he senses beyond his conscious control. Low light hides the goose flesh that erupts on his arms.
Any other man would have taken the Lord's name in vain. Any other man of the cloth would have prayed aloud or crossed himself. The Singer doesn't do any such thing.
When he comes back to himself he realizes Sera's gone on ahead and he takes off walking faster than he usually does.
"It feels all kinds of wrong this way," he says. "Don't go wandering off by yourself."
Jesus Christ, Sera.
JimJim is easier to herd along. Calm as a Hindu cow, he settles into a steady stroll somewhere between Sera and Pan, joining her as the latter speeds up at a brisker pace. Soon, they are walking the path through the park together. When both of them get closer they might be able to smell the faint piney musk of marijuana clinging to his clothing and short buzzed hair. His eyes are faintly bloodshot, though the sunglasses he usually wears (even at night) are hanging from their frame at the neck of his shirt.
"What kind of wrong? Tamas? Or something more corrupt?" He looks to Pan as he asks this, head gently tilted to the side, curious for more of what he's sensed that he has so obviously missed.
SerafíneLife 1 / Prime 1 / Mind 1 Dif 4 -1 for specialty focus
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (6, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
SerafíneExtending dif +1
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (6, 10) ( success x 2 )
SerafíneSerafíne does not react immediately to Pan's admonishment that she not go wandering off by herself. There's time for both Jim and the priest to catch up to her a dozen feet or more down some curving path through the dark lawn while she fiddles with her phone, shakes out those earbuds and sets one firmly into her right ear, the long dark cord tucked behind, disappearing into the interior lining of her leather coat. By the time they reach her, she has mild, far-away look on her face, her eyes unfocused, her fingers unconsciously twitching into familiar chord patterns against her thighs as unhooks her focus from the physical and pushes herself outward, in expanding rings of awareness.
"Hmm?" - her question an afterthought, a lilting note as the priest's shadow falls across her path and Jim rolls up, smelling of musky and herbal, from a recently smoked bowl, joint, blunt. She's biting the inside of her lip - in thought or concentration, perhaps - hard enough to draw blood that hits her palate with a faint, coppery flare.
"Sorry - so. I don't really sense any people around here. I mean, prime space, right? No cops around to harass you and no bars on the benches to keep you from cat-napping the night away, but there's no one. Not much animal life, either. Something's chased them away.
"And that decay - " a glance here at Jim, her eyes gleaming in the faint light, " - from the warehouse," quiet here. "Nearer the center of the park. Is that what you're getting, Pan? Or something - " Head canted, still listening to the music. Somehow, she can feel the rhythm of it even in her words, not. A shake of her head, the faintest shiver of fear crawls up her spine, mostly swallowed by the stiffness of her jacket and therefore unseen. Echoing Jim, now - " - else?"
PanIf he knows how to fire a gun he has thus far kept that information to himself. He doesn't project himself as the sort of priest who would happily load a shotgun and go off to hunt demons if they were to punch through a rift between worlds and start destroying things. Sure as Hell hasn't sold himself as some sort of Nephandus expert.
Aside from that initial and involuntary tremor he is not quailing or giving consideration to turning back but neither is he gleeful at the prospects of running into something capable of unmaking the three of them or something bigger than the three of them, frightened newly-awakened teenage girl or not.
"This isn't disharmony," he says. Tamas; Disharmony. Potayto, potahto. "This is something else. New but strong, that sound like her?"
Jim"Strong? Oh, she's ready to headline in Vegas," plodding forward near the edge of the pass, wavering into the grass now and then as his stroll weaves in an unpredictably serpentine pattern, looking behind trees, left and right, and always heading toward that center of the park where they'd thought she would be. Jim seems to remain calm, even as Pan touts the girl's strength.
Though none of them look eager for a fight, Jim seems to have put the idea of any sort of conflict out of his mind. Whether emerging from Leah, or from their group, it does not seem like a possibility or option. He is already trying to gather that positive energy from himself, harvesting it and radiating it outward with each step. Though it isn't an identifiable work of Will - just yet - that does not mean it isn't integral to his own system of belief.
"She's on the run. So, let's not corner her or surprise her, if she is here," continuing on as he speaks.
SerafíneSera listens to their exchange with her head tucked down, her chin skimming the collar of her jacket, hair twisted over her left shoulder in a tangled, curling mass. Her neck is taut enough with the gesture to show the faint beat of her pulse at the base of her neck. Her energy is sharper and brighter than Jim's, an awareness of danger that she cannot subsume and redirect the way he does, her blood spiked with adrenaline running hot through her system. Her gaze brushes over the priest's still countenance, and she favors the padre with a close-mouthed half-smile that shows little of the tension evident in her neck or the set of her shoulders.
"I bet she's hungry," her nostrils flare with an expelled breath she did not know she was holding in. Her tone is distant, speculative, but there is a brief and sudden edge to the curve of her mouth. " - we should've stopped at Subway." On reflection, the thing is, she means it.
"But yeah okay - " not that Sera knows how to not corner or surprise someone. She agrees in principle, " - god knows how many people are looking for her, too." Breathing out a low, quiet breath.
So they walk through the park; the distant sounds of the city night awash in the background, but little to hear other than their footsteps on the graveled or paved paths, the rustle of the leaves in the wind, the quiet, electric hum of the lamps dotted here and there on the jogging trail.
In the park's center, Sera doesn't say anything to them about the bench when they find it. They can see it as well as she can and the site of it gives her another faint shiver, which makes little show overtly given the stiff weight of her jacket. She stands on the path nearby though, and turns around in a wide circuit, studying the dark trees and the deep shadows, listening to the nightsounds all around. Could she be leaking energy? Serafíne does not know and does not want to ask.
This is assuredly where the girl spent most of her time.
"Wanna take a look back?" A darkling glance toward Jim, craning her neck enough to pull the earbud from her right ear.
PanAt mention of stopping at Subway Pan pulls a face and looks for a moment like he's actually thinking about crossing himself. Sera can see his hand twist like he's about to.
But yeah okay.
They come to the bench and his eyes flick across the thing not because he recognizes the thing but because of what he recognizes around it. Of the path she took he saw only the beginning but he has led the two Time Mages this far. His eyes follow the direction the girl had taken off in an hour ago. On foot she could have gone five miles by now, further, could have gone in any direction.
He rests his hands on his hips and looks out into the darkness and lets the Cultists speak.
JimJim halts long enough to contemplate the bench. The way the metal is pitted and nearly disintegrating to its baser elements, season upon countless season having set in - centuries' worth - so much so that the bench looks older than the very city it sits in the middle of.
A ruin in a place of life, and in this state - Pan says he can feel it, though Jim still can't - a lightening rod for more of these energies left by the wayward Leah.
"I don't know, Sera," a beat.
"We can keep looking back and dwelling in the past, or we can try and find her in the now. Try and find her before whatever future other forces are trying to force on her come to be. I'd rather that," his hand reaching out to the remains of the bench, though stopping short of touching it.
"Before this becomes her only future," a sadness in his voice at the end that presents itself, following the girl, like in this one of many artifacts and heaps of ashes left in her wake...
Like he can tell it threatens to consume her.
He looks to Sera. Sometimes she looks to him for answers, for decisions, but he seems to have come to terms with that and instead is warring with that impulse in his own way. By not warring with it. Instead, his words and suggestions are given to try and make her come to the same conclusion. Not force her to it. Not tempt her with rationale. But instead to simply express himself and see where her own heart ends up leading her.
"A step ahead, instead of a step behind?" It was more of an unsure thing. More of a feat. For some Cultists, it was more than all of that: the one taboo. For in the future can lie madness.
The true curse of the Seer.
He may have shown he had the craft of it. With his wards. With his seekings into destiny and space. But as of yet, it's a step he hasn't shown the willingness to take.
Until now.
Because what are Cultists if not the breakers of taboo. The transgressors of what they consider the true taboo. The last taboo. The chains of time itself.
SerafíneThere's a spike of awareness in her brows, a sudden sharpening of her attention on Jim when his first words are I don't know. She reaches up, thoughtlessly collecting the wires of the earbuds in her left hand, untangling the wires from the twist of her hair, which curls thick where she has not shaved it away. And it is freshly shaved since the night before - markedly shorter. The gesture is casual and quiet and thoughtless, the way her palms curves away the familiar weight. The motion to slip them back into the interior pocket from which they curve is arrested for the moment, because her gaze is sharply focused on the Disciple, dropping away - and steeply so - only as he gestures down toward the bench.
Then she takes it in, and that is where her attention lingers on the rusted, flaking metal, the rotting wood slates, all leaning haphazardly, ready to collapse with the force of a fey wind. Now, Serafíne is holding her breath, deliberately, until her lungs burn from the aching urge to breath and her body forces her to let go, to expel that breath and draw in another, just as deep, which she holds just as long, thoughtless as ritual.
She is in profile to them, more thoughtful than she often seems, her gaze skimming slowly over the lines of the bench. Something haunted, or haunting stark in the air around her. Nameless as the sound of the rain, or the memory of a lover's sigh in the darkest hour of the morning.
"Let's look ahead." A sharp glance up at Jim then, the first since she dropped her attention away from him to the broken bench. There is a sudden, wreathing smile that slices across her mouth, the edge of a nervous sort of exhilaration. Her eyes are bright with that knife's edge of fear and a sort of breathless, electric awareness.
"I'm pretty sober, though." A glance at the priest is her only explanation. "I need a bit to get into to the right head space, you know?"
PanStanding beside the priest for too long is almost enough to jolt folks into sobriety if they weren't there to begin with and she has spent the last five hours in his presence. Four of them in his house where even if she were looking to pilfer pharmaceuticals she would have found none. Narcotics Anonymous fliers in the church's corridor and that sense of distant delinquency about him.
For a body intent upon motion his stillness is enough of a tether so when his eyes go unfocused like his sight has gone someplace else it hardly disturbs the aura already around him. He breathes out once, hard, like it takes him by surprise but that's the only sound he makes.
A hand goes to his brow.
JimJim is already pulling out a pack of cigarettes, menthol judging by the chevron of irradiated green, though the palm of his hand obscures the brand. He draws out a rolled joint from within, shoving it back into the front pocket of his jeans.
Ready to light it, but then he hears the exhalation and looks to the priest. The next gesture, the hand to his brow, is a familiar one to him. Something one does when one sees something that reality said one shouldn't be seeing.
He waits for Pan to regather himself before one of his eyebrows rises, a quiet inquisition as to what the man saw when he left the here behind for elsewhere.
Serafíne"Padre?" Sera does not wait for Pan to gather himself. Her voice is a brief and quiet prompt, and then she's reaching out, the touch of her fingertips on his other elbow the other point of inquiry. The sweep of her eyes from Pan's hand against his brow, then outward in a moving sweep of the still shadows of the park's central square.
"You okay?"
Serafíne(BRB)
PanHe takes his hand away from his brow and blinks several times, runs the hand down his face and blows out another breath more controlled than the first exhale.
"Yeah," he says and he doesn't have to ask why concern would flare up in this place. Doesn't know that the wrongness of the girl's aura hasn't burrowed itself inside the Cultists' attention it has his. "She's--" His voice sticks in his throat so he clears it. "She's not that far from here but I don't recognize the building. It's tall. She's on the roof. East, like straight east from here..."
He thinks, quick, then pulls his keyring out of his pocket.
"Come on."
JimThe sudden urgency of the directive enlivens him, as does the preceding revelation about just where Leah is. He does indeed follow behind the Padre, matching his pace as they go.
SerafíneAnd Sera. She's lightfooted when she wants to be. An easy sort of athleticism that usually only shows itself in her physical confidence, or the careless way she wears those motherfucking platforms and heels she wears so often.
They reach the red truck in a handful of minutes and pile in. Were the moment not quite so urgent, Sera might point out once more that she's sober and should totally drive so that Pan can act as their divine dowsing rod. But it isn't that moment and so instead she climbs into the front seat of the cab and squeezes herself between the two Disciples, the priest and the guru, staring out through the windshield as if she, too, might somehow identify the tall building Pan saw in his vision as it sweeps by.
PanHe did not lock the doors when they arrived minutes earlier but he opens the passenger door for the other two anyway before he goes around the front of the truck and lets himself in on his side. As not-stoned as she is this is the second time he hasn't taken her up on her offer to drive.
So they climb in and the Initiate ends up over the gearshift. The priest keys the ignition and realizes he has to reach between her knees to pop the parking brake.
"'Scuse me," he says, "sorry," before he pops the brake and puts it into first. His hand goes back to the steering wheel the moment it's up to speed.
JimJim's eyes are as red as they'd been the handful of minutes before when they'd entered the park's deeper recesses - he'd needed some way to pass the time from the bus stop to the park - but he hands the unlit joint to Serafine anyway, looking from her to Pan and back. Then out the window, not willing to bring himself to ask if they can or can't smoke inside a priest's car.
Smoke. A joint. A doobie. Burn some bud. Get toasted. Whatever.
Instead he remains looking out the window as they drive along the edge of the park and away Eastward. Maybe where Leah had run from herself. As the world passes by the surroundings blur and jump back into focus with every dart of his eyes, fine movements of small muscles that direct rods and cones to soak up new interplays of light and space as they hunt down the end.
And whether she lights up or not (can or not, will or not) he begins to reach out along those same lines of destiny and fate that also are part of the mad entropy welling up in the lost lamb the padre is seeking out. Instead of looking back along the reverberations of time, though, seeking her out, he looks forward to where those ripples will go. What will reflect them back. And how she plays into that future.
[ Correspondence 2 / Time 2 / Entropy 1. Coincidental. Difficulty 4. Need 7 successes. Whoa. Blowing a WP. ]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 5, 5) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
SerafínePan has lucked out. Sera's wearing jeans rather than one of the tiny skirts with fishnets and garter's she sometimes sports. She gives him a lilting, upward glance as he releases the parking breaking, then swings her left leg back over to the passengers side, curling her knees in Jim's direction in deference to the priest's sensibilities. That's how she's seated, precariously but finely balanced between the two as Jim hands over the joint. She toes him in the thigh, tells him to crack the window while she fishes her own lighter out of her own pack of cigarettes and lights up. She inhales deeply; holds in the smoke for as long as her lungs will retain it, then exhales a stream of smoke across the passenger's seat toward the open window. And again, and again. Does not pass back the joint until she's feeling the familiar hum in her veins, that pleasant lassitude in her muscles that has her reaching to find Jim's already unfolding vibe.
[Sooo, Time 2: Difficulty 4 (5-1 for spec focus]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (9, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Jim[ Extended; +1 difficulty. ]
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 10) ( fail )
Jim[ Extended. Spending a Quintessence. Jim is at only 1 remaining Quintessence. ]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )
Jim[ Extended. Need one more success. And he has the resonances! ]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (5, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )
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