[Mind shield, as per usual - diff 4 -1(practiced)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (5, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Justin[Extending because reasons, +1 -1 (focus)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (4, 7) ( success x 2 )
Justin[Oh crap I forgot Nightmares >_>]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 6, 7, 10) ( success x 3 )
ByronIf they find him hard to find it's by design that they cannot track him the way one can track a body fallen down the bottom of a dark pit calling out for help the way they could find Kelsey or they could find Lydia. The way they could find Dick Fairchild. People who don't go into this with intent but wander in and lose their way or never had a way to begin with.
Kelsey's fine now and no one has spoken to Lydia and Dick is... well. Dick is Dick.
The Cultists Work their Work and their bodies are empty but their spirits are full and their hearts are full and they know the way they know in which direction the sun will rise the general direction in which they can find Byron and they know that he occluded himself more than once and blipped across their mental maps more than once and it might have been intentional and it might have been an accident.
Doesn't matter which it was. They can see through Time and the cracks-through-the-glass paths he can take and they make a decision. Go to his house. He lives in the area though he hasn't always lived in the area and in some of the paths he lives past today and in some of the paths he doesn't and some of them cross over into each other and that's just the way Time runs.
In this time they find him and his menagerie in a mixed area residential and commercial. Wide well-kept alleyways with ornate gates. Squares instead of stretched-out lengths of nothing. The sounds of a party trickles through a plaza in the center of a block.
They can hear the music. They can hear the echoes of conversation. They can get to the plaza where their minds and their mind's-eyes tell them Byron reigns through one of the alleyways.
Someone laughs and the laugh turns into a scream but it's hard to tell with drugs if it's the scream of an uninhibited or the scream of an unfortunate.
SerafíneIt has been: such a long day and such a long night and such a long span of weeks to come back into this ritual and now that long day and night are closing into this precise moment in a strange section of a strange neighborhood where the strands of time sift and curl and shake themselves like the layers of an onion until these things intersect:
their presence here. and his.
Serafíne is tired and sober and hungry and there's an odd sort of ecstasy in the Work that is carrying her through to this moment when they're standing outside the edges of a party and the throb of the music and that soundcloud of crowd noise rising in a way that feels both organic and natural and fucking ominous and Sera, she breathes in the air the way you do ozone, tasting it shallow and clear in the back of her throat.
What is she wearing? Oh yes: Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt, shit-kickers, fishnets, and cut-offs. Well, she reaches up and pushes her long fingers through her hair, shakes it out so it falls properly away from her fucking side-cut, so you can see the dark fringe of her hair, the grabs the hem of her t-shirt and takes it off and now she's wearing a black push-up bra with red lace accents and fishnets and cut-offs and fuck if she doesn't look like she's ready for a goddamned party.
Two things, then.
The first: her canine tooth through the soft tissues of her inner cheek, until the blood ruins. The sharp spike of pain that opens and briefly contracts her eyes dilated wide open from the darkness and deprivation and ritual. She breathes out sharply and tastes the wash of blood in her mouth and opens her eyes and opens her eyes even as she sends out her senses, bright and seeking.
The second: a quick gauging glance at Jim, then Justin, largely nonverbal but clear because then she just starts walking, Sera.
She looks like she came to party and she's going in the front door.
SerafínePer + Awareness
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 10) ( success x 2 ) Re-rolls: 1
SerafíneWatch the Weaving Dif 4 -1 (focus)
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (10, 10) ( success x 2 )
JimJim's ears perk up as the raucous din of revelry becomes a laugh that transforms into a howling scream. Maybe it's release. Maybe it's pain and horror. He can't tell, but he looks intent on finding out, crossing the plaza toward the sound, intent on it.
His sandals slap on stone as he gobbles up the distance, and he finally slows. Looking to the other Ecstatic and the Verbena with them, as if to reassure them he wouldn't go racing off into the breach.
Not without them.
His dress is disheveled from a day's exploration. Exploration of a place within himself that had become overgrown, a place he needed to hack and slash at to clear and make habitable again. A place of mindfulness and focus. A place of asceticism and restraint.
But when his eyes turn on them that stoicism has taken on a new resilience and strength.
"It sounds like he's trying to wake up the entire neighborhood," not just the sound, and not in the way a loud party might. His tone says he's referring to a more shaken and starling awakening.
His gaze goes back ahead, on the path they're taking toward that place and that location where Byron is (hiding? waiting? scheming?). And when they come upon that location, he takes it in, takes all of it in with a sobered awareness, trying to seek out the runs pulled in the tapestry with his newfound clarity.
[ Perception + Awareness ]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )
JustinJustin's involvement in all of this had so far been limited to the periphery. Serafine had gotten him caught up some the other week at the park when she'd asked if he'd come with them to find Byron. To find the rest of the drugs. Hopefully, to stop him from hurting other people. Maybe she'd expected him to hesitate, but he hadn't. He'd said: Yes. I'll come. (Of course.)
So he'd met them at Sera's place or Jim's place or wherever they'd all agreed to meet up and driven with them to this place where it sounded like someone was having a party to end all parties. And while the others moved ahead with determination, Justin actually stopped.
Still. Listening. Like he was trying to decide something. Then he crouched down on the balls of his feet and ducked his head and closed his eyes and put his hands to his ears and started whispering something low and unintelligible and half-formed.
When it was over, he stood and followed.
He was wearing a jacket. A gun sat holstered against his chest beneath it.
[Life 2 - dialing down the acute hearing cause seriously that shit will make his ears bleed - diff 5 -1 (practiced) -1 (sure we'll say enduring resonance fits)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (4, 5) ( success x 2 )
Justin[Also! Per+Awareness]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )
ByronTo the ones who know no better the aura in the air is the same as any other congregation of celebrants and college kids on a summer when they have nothing else to do. That Saturday afternoon tension-wire drawn back like the game of beer pong could stay easy and free or it could conjure up old memories gone as warm and miserable as the liquid in the bottom of the cup after too long in the sun. Like a fight could break out because the music is so loud and the conversation starts to glint with a razor's edge after too long.
Yet you walk by and you smell the grill and you hear the lilt of the laughter and you see the toned legs beneath the hems of the sundresses and you look anyway. Isn't until the sun goes down and folks have had too much to drink that the lilt of danger sets in and danger draws a certain breed of folk.
Danger and the drugs but the drugs are a promise and as the three Awakened come upon the place they know that it is the place and they have a choice of alleyways but every alleyway is the same. Paved not with filthy asphalt but bricks and some of the bricks have little sprigs of green pushed up through them and no windows up the sides of the alleys for they belong to businesses and some of the walls have chalk graffiti and they pass a smattering of Sharpie graffiti but it lurks in their periphery and it blinks out when they look at it. Blinks back a second later as they pass into the plaza.
Kiddie pool pilled with hose water. Beer pong table made out of discarded doors and sawhorses.
They can feel the drug in the air and Lydia said there was more of it but she didn't tell them what it would do or what it was mean to do other than open the mind and as they draw towards the center of it there's a flash
-- and they see what happened here or what is going to happen here as the hippies and the burnouts all drank out of plastic cups and sprayed each other with squirt guns and lay out on the grass or on the picnic tables and they smoked grass and laughed and then it all turned wrong--
and then they can feel it all start to unravel like even the air itself knows of the wrongness of this the impermanence cigarette smoke drifted in front of an open window only for it to snap back again. Can't escape if you keep taking hits.
And scattered overtop of the ghosts of those who came before are a dozen young people in denim and cotton their eyes glazed but not from magickal causes though they exude an air of expectation like someone's gone off and come back and the music is so loud here and two of the young people are screwing around. Big tanned boy picking up a smaller girl with unruly processed hair and they're both laughing but the girl is shrill and uncertain.
No one notices the interlopers because people ought to come and go. People ought to take the vibe with them.
Byron is inside. He'll be outside in a moment.
SerafíneSera's got her t-shirt slung over her right shoulder and she's sweaty because it's summer and it's a warm night and there's the kiddie pool and that -
oh, flash of memory gives her such an immediate and heartstopping pause that she is not recalled to this place and time until the shrill and uncertain shout of that girl (being picked up by that big boy) hits some central part of her lizard brain and pulls her back to now and she knows it is now as in where-she-is and swallows against the yawning hungry (which is physical and otherwise) in her and saunters around the courtyard.
Flashes those other kids a quick little peace sign and she looks like them except: cooler and edgier maybe and if a daylong ritual of denial doesn't give a girl like her the glazed-out eyes of a burnout nothing will.
Sera hipchecks the guy and glances up at the girl and grabs his wrist all "Put her the fuck down, man. You're harshing the vibe." Because of course she just fucking said that, and she waits to make sure either the shrieking girl is into being manhandled or has actually been put the fuck down as she keeps going around the courtyard. Picking up three or four of the beer pong cups, tilting them, sniffing them, feeling them for residual.
Plastic cups. In that vision the ghosts drank from plastic cups.
That air of expectation, though, that open door and he'll be down in a moment.
Sera gives Jim a look and Justin a look and the open doorway a fucking look and she cannot help it. In that moment she shivers, all physical, like something strange and dark and changing just crawled up the ladder of her spine.
"Shall we?"
And, if they agree, she does.
JimJim is not behind Serafine when she interrupts to see if it's a matter of King Kong kidnapping Ann or Tarzan rescuing Ann, but he's a step to the side, not meeting the young man's stare and possibly catalyzing an already testy situation, but watching from his periphery should he need to step in.
And on they go when it's resolved, if it gets resolved, if anything in this mess, this tangle of magic and emotion, could ever get resolved. It seems more like a sustained reaction.
And then there is that open doorway. He looks to it too until Serafine questions him and Justin.
They shall. Jim nods his agreement first, ready to meet Byron at that door, or past it, or whenever time and fate will cause their two opposing forces to contact one another. He steps forward with them to do so.
ByronDice: 4 d10 TN3 (4, 6, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )
JustinSera wasn't the only one of them who had to remind herself of the difference between memory and here-and-now. Justin, at least, wasn't so likely to be consumed by his own. But there was this quiet hesitance about the way he approached the party - the way he moved through the guests. And he looked almost sad as he watched them.
But he didn't say anything, and he didn't seem inclined to abandon the two Cultists, so when Sera looked back and asked in that silent expression if they meant to follow, he did.
SerafíneSomehow they're through the door and on the bottom landing of a concrete walk-up. The buzzing of electricity from somewhere upstairs and the echo of the party from outside beyond them and Justin's not there anymore. It's colder in here than it was outside. All that concrete keeps the summer out and chill in and Sera grabs her t-shirt and slips it over her head as they start up the stairs.
Can feel Byron's presence above them and this Work will be harder but they're still in that denial stage, in that head-and-physical space and she says fuck it and grabs the metal railing and tightens her hands and climbs the stairs, rather quickly, pausing on the landing or outside the door as Jim joins her and when he does she reaches for his hand.
JimJim can feel it around him. The party jumps and skips but he leaps and bounds. He'd seen the end of these roads. He'd seen these young faces grow old, these nubile and hale bodies grow withered and broken and used up. And he can only imagine what the awakening of such drugs might do to their fragile minds. Minds unsure and unwilling to believe in their fragility until already broken.
Where he sees revelers he sees not ghosts, but the walking dead they will become in search of their next fix. And then he imagines Bryon. For money or clout or maybe some sickened delight, some social validation, whatever his ends spreading the hits out amongst them and greater Denver.
Like party treats for a Festival of the Damned.
That shiver he'd seen down her spine has made him consider it, but now he doesn't hesitate. It's probably the first real intimate contact they've had all day, their hands meeting, fingers on fingers and the sweat of palm mashed together as they grip to one another in this twisted maelstrom.
[ Crime and Consequence. Mind 2 and Time 2. Coincidental + 2 - 1 for taking their time and - 1 for blowing a Quinessence. Difficulty 3. Casting in concert with Serafine. Blowing a WP. ]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Serafíne(Mind 2 / Time 2. Coincidental 5 -1 (resonance appropriate))
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (6, 6) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
ByronDice: 4 d10 TN8 (2, 2, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )
SerafíneCountermagic
Dice: 2 d10 TN8 (5, 6) ( fail )
JimThe connection to that looming future and all the misery and despondency it will create, makes him squeeze back at Serafine's hand. He feels her Avatar, clung beside his own, reach out to try and diffuse the charm and its hold on Byron. The boons it grants. And his own does the same.
[ Countermagic. ]
Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (6, 7, 7) ( fail )
Jim[ Perception + Larceny. Fucking WP. ]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 6, 8, 8) ( success x 4 ) [WP]
SerafíneSera squeezes back; they're standing on the landing, outside an open fucking door, looking into a drug den with the kingpin of sorts inside. Can feel the magic warping in and around and through him and the magic potential in the remaining charms scattered around and pull the bleakness of potentail futures back into the presence and inflict him with his own ghosts and -
- there's still the magic; he's still stoned. He's still stoned and drifting on the magic and the future-memory and he probably doesn't even really see them when the Rite ends (god knows, really, how long it took, but her knees are stiff and the cold is colder and the party downstairs has shifted and Sera does not let go of Jim's hand until they're inside, searching through the old stiff couch and the discarded vials and the cheap-ass furniture and the stiff, stale scent of old cigarette smoke and someone's open-mouthed, sandpaper-eyed panic and inside the apartment Jim finally lets go of Sera's hand to start searching through the cabinets in the laminate kitchen, where the only food is a jar with one pickle and moldering mayo and a half-dozen old pizza boxes deliquiescing into nothing-ness and she's tucking the first aid kits into a plastic bag and Jim's found the rest of the stash and then, downstairs -
- those fucking kids, man.
They're going to be here for a long fucking time.
JimFloorboards. Check. Mattress. Check. Under the dresser. Fall bottoms? Closet. Inside jackets, pockets, everything soaking up that primal smell from Byron's den of love and lustmaking. In the end Jim has amassed a good pile. He almost misses the first aid kits.
Almost.
But he doesn't drawn to them in the last-place-he'd-look kind of way, adding them to the pillowcases full of haul he's uncovered.
Cleaning him out. He's lost his privileges, and yes, these things are privileges, not rights. Ones the Ecstatics have the power and duty to revoke. When he's finished he finds himself sitting on the edge of that bed, trying not to imagine what has happened on it, though he can smell and guess. It's in the air. He no doubt used users, used their addiction for himself, used himself, and this is what Jim finds himself solemnly contemplating.
A wake up call.
He looks up to find Serafine stuffing the kits into a plastic bag. Nods, as if shaking himself out of the reverie he's stuck in.
Standing again.
Tired, but not too tired to help.
"We've got to keep them here. In one place. Where they can't hurt others. Keep them from hurting themselves," he says to her in a way that she might get the idea of what he's considering. "They're our responsibility. Their shepherd's gone to the corner to think about what he's done. We put him there."
Jim[ Mind 2 and Correspondence 2. Warding the revelers to the party. Coincidental + 2. Base is 5. Dropping a Quintessence. Difficulty 4. Dropping a WP. ]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 3, 3) ( fail )
Jim[ Forgot to click WP on the last. So 1 success. Extending. ANOTHER QUINT to keep it at 4. He only has one left after this. ]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 5, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
SerafíneSera's just standing there, with her arms crossed and her eyes hazy and her body taut and her throat aching and this place feels -
this place feels -
this place feels -
Oh, she breathes out. Looks from the window, shrouded by an ugly old blanket, to Jim and the light in here is ugly and spare and it makes them ghoulish in the whole ghoulish place. He has his pillowcase and she has the first fucking aid kits and they have everything, they have cleaned the bastard out and she breathes out a long slow sigh, tired.
"Show me what to do."
And reaches for his free hand with her own.
Serafíne(Mind 2 / Correspondence 1 - Keeping revelers at the party!) -1 dif for quintessence
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Serafíne[Mind 2 / Correspondence 1 - participating in Jim's ritual] Difficulty +1, still -1 for quint.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (8, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
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