Hot date?

Serafíne

So, it's the dinner hour or maybe just past and the sun is still bright and hot and reflects blindlingly off Ferril Lake. In an hour or two the boathouse will be blazing with the fire of the setting sun, but now it is merely alight and its shadow lengthening, deepening. Within view of the lake and the gazebo and the boathouse but closer to the big statue - really, surrounding the big statue - of Martin Luther King, Jr.: though, a buzzing swarm of

hipsters.

Yes, hipsters and hippies and a few other related subspecies of the more avant-garde edge of the subculture drifting around tables and displays and the odd chicken-wire-and-wood frame and the odd tent or three in the midst of a pop-up / guerilla arts-and-crafts show.

A handful of foodtrucks are on hand nearby serving up Korean BBQ Tacos or homemade ice cream or Greek-style vegan or the world's best grilled cheese sandwiches, and buskers tucked here and there ply their trade. The show is entirely unpermitted and illegal and lively and strange. There are a few genuinely talented and sought after artists and sculpters showing a few odd works, and many more unknowns working in nearly every medium. For every artist there are probably two crafters, people selling scrabble-tile necklaces or finely worked silver, blown glass pieces or recycled yard art or handmade soaps.

And: walking through the crowd, one Cultist extraordinaire.

What is she wearing today? We are glad you asked: cut-off jeans, bare legs, a pink... mm, yes, that is basically a pink push-up bra, and does not even conspire to ascend to the level of bustier, beneath a long-sleeved plaid shirt, pink-and-purple plaid, mind, which is wrinkled and crumpled and longer than her shorts and left unbuttoned. The right sleeve is rolled up to her elbow, while the left is just rolled an inch or two up from her wrist. She has, of course, a bag slung across her body, and is examining a display of pastels by a gawky-looking teenage girl with some interest.

All are winter scenes - gray and white and blue and brown, intercut only by the occasional blaze of sun in the sky.

Serafíne

Perception + Awareness

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 5, 5, 5, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 6 )

Justin

[Nightmares]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 4, 4, 4, 6) ( success x 1 )

Justin

[Awareness]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 6, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 5 )

Justin

Justin knew she was there long before he saw her. As she, in turn, probably felt him coming before he even set foot in the park. Like a kind of precognition - or perhaps actual precognition, given Sera's talents. So the two of them went about their business as they drifted inevitably and inexorably toward each other, Sera inspecting the pastels at one of the booths and Justin...

Actually, Justin wasn't there alone. At least, not at first. If Sera happened to look in his direction she'd see him standing in the grass a fair distance away, talking to another man about his own age. The body language between them seemed off. Disparate. One leaning forward with interest while the other (Justin,) held himself at a distance. Whatever their exchange, the stranger departed at the end of it.

Justin didn't approach the booths right away. Instead he walked slowly through the assembling crowd of hipsters and hovered at the edge of a group gathered in front of the musicians. He took a breath and closed his eyes, letting the music fill his head.

Maybe Sera would find her way to him by then, or maybe she'd still be looking at art displays. Either way, Justin opened his eyes and looked at her, giving a little smile of greeting. He left the moment open-ended like that. A casual invitation, but one that didn't require a response, should she be needed elsewhere.

He looked nice tonight. Black fitted jeans and dressy boots (Frye, to be exact: black leather with a harness and a slight heel) and a wine-colored button-down with the cuffs rolled up and the top two buttons left open at the neck.

(Maybe he'd been on a date?)

Serafíne

Perception + Awareness-as-empathy

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 4, 4, 5, 5, 7, 7) ( success x 4 )

Justin

[Manip+sub]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne

Sera is there alone, or so it seems. But she also just knows people here and is returning a greeting or two every few minutes, occasionally with ironic fistbumps, more often with a singing sort of smile, and more rarely still with quick, darting hugs that pull her close to her friends and acquaintances and people-she-knows. Takes some time to chat up the awkward teenager too, before turning finally to follow that spiral of awareness toward the pulsing center of the beat against her senses tonight: Justin.

"You look nice," says Sera, sidling up alongside him. Her awareness of personal space is as challenged and challenging as ever, and they are in something of a moving crowd as people drift down the walkways, pause to listen to the musicians then cut further through. Still: she has not tucked her arm through his as she so often does to Pan.

Not yet, anyway.

"But also like you might be stifling in there. It was so fucking hot today I could barely stand it."

Her voice is low and she's holding her smoothie in her right hand and her left is between them. She has 2 inch, rather deep, rather deliberate laceration on her palm, which has crusted over and healed enough that the scab no longer breaks open with every movement of her hand. It goes right through her sharkscissors tattoo. The beginnings of another, just visible beneath the rolled-up left sleeve of her plaid shirt. And too: she is thinner, somehow - it is so very subtle but, she just seems more hollowed out, somehow.

"Hot date?" And Sera is sober and her eyes are clear and she does not smell like smoke or ashes or whiskey or gin or gatorade or anything except: skin and sweat. Green grass, the setting sun.

And she's not wearing her usual fishnets and her boots are the flat heeled Docs she hauls out sometimes so she's looking up and up at him, and giving him the edge of a wry little grin. There's this way her gaze sweeps up him, all assessing and assured.

Justin

The shirt was a light material, and the outdoor temperature had mellowed a bit with the onset of evening. Justin didn't appear to be especially uncomfortable. Maybe it was the open collar or the cool breeze that swept in off the lake. Maybe he'd just spent so much time outdoors in the heat that his metabolism had adapted.

She said he looked nice, and Justin smiled a little and looked away. As for the rest, he shrugged. "I'm alright. I took a cold shower when I got home from work." When he looked at her again, his eyes traveled to that wound on her hand, making note of it and the rest of her physical state with an expression that seemed reserved but attentive.

"Not really." For a moment it seemed as though he might not explain, but then he added, "We didn't really click, I guess."

(If one were to add up all of the people that Justin just 'didn't click' with on a scale, they would vastly outweigh his other relationships. Maybe that said something about him. Sera might already have a few theories, given what she knew about his sex and intimacy habits.)

"You okay? Did you find anything out about... you know?"

Serafíne

"Did you even give him a chance?" This is her only comment on his date-not-date. There's a lilt to her brow and she's peering through the crowd as if she might find him close, or pick out someone else checking Justin out to fling him towards. Her smile is a quick flash showing teeth, but rather a sweet one. "He was pretty cute, and he was pretty into you. Sometimes you just need a fling, you know?"

Then, well, she closes the last inch or two of distance between then, slips her left arm through his right and tips her head away from the crowd. "C'mon, let's walk. And I'll tell you all about it."

And walk they do; down the path, away from the pop-up guerilla art show, Sera tucked neatly up against Justin, still carrying and occasionally sipping from her smoothie-thing.

Their path wends closer to the lake and away from the crowds and Sera is humming a bit beneath her breath, strolling slowly enough that Justin may have to adjust his gait to match hers, which is rather shorter than his.

Once they are well away from strangers, well, the conversation starts anew, though rather more hushed.

"That girl, Kelsey. She's at the Four Seasons now. She's like, in a coma or something. Wakes up to drink broth or whatever, but that's pretty much it. Hawksley - have you met? - she came up to him looking for - for whatever she was looking for and he took her to look out for her.

"He scryed out the maker, too. We went and tracked her down last weekend. The PCP's a charm she made; it can - augment your abilities? She never meant it for Sleepers, but her partner went a bit nuts and offloaded a bunch on that Byron guy.

"So Jim and I are going to scry for him. Hopefully soon. You should come.

"I mean, if you wanted to."

Serafíne

Awareness-as-empathy!

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10) ( success x 4 )

Justin

[Stop it with your psychic powers woman! (subterfuge)]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )

Justin

She was too good at reading him. Even with Justin's tendency to obfuscate, there were always these little things to be found. Scraps of information that could be pieced together to form a picture. Serafine knew that he wasn't celibate because of some misguided moral code or asceticism. She knew (first hand) that he had a pretty powerful sex drive when he gave himself the freedom to express it. What she didn't know was why, exactly, he seemed so reluctant to do that.

But she'd know now, just as she always did, that he more than likely hadn't been with anyone since her, and that he hadn't picked out that outfit (which, yes, was garnering him a few interested looks) for no reason. It did seem like he was being honest with her though (if perhaps vaguely so.) However good-looking or interested his date may have been, Justin wasn't attracted to him. And when Sera called Justin out about it, he actually looked away and rolled his eyes. Like maybe he'd heard it before a few too many times. "I don't really work that way."

(So then, what was it he would call what he'd had with her?)

Still, when she pressed close and slipped her arm into his own, he didn't seem to mind the contact. There was a companionable easiness to the way he allowed her into his space, like he didn't really have to think about it any more (though to say that he wasn't still aware of her would be inaccurate.) So they drifted away from the crowd while Sera spoke. Justin let his gait fall into pace with her own as though he was used to moving beside someone who was shorter than he was.

"I haven't met Hawksley," he responded quietly before letting her continue. As the story progressed, a small line of tension appeared between his eyebrows. It made him look a little brooding.

He didn't make any cutting remarks about Cultists and magic drugs, but he might have been thinking it.

"I'll come."

That much, at least, was easily offered.

Serafíne

"Don't you?" - she returns when he says that he doesn't work like that. There's a directness to her eyes; she does not shy from physical contact, nor does she shy from eye contact and she looks at him with this little twist of her head, the drift of her long blond hair behind her. "I don't think that's true."

Quite, yes. But neither smug or knowing; her inquiries are really rather gentle, even - perhaps particularly - up against the wall of his obstinance.

"You gotta open yourself up sometimes you know? Everybody does."

They keep walking, and while she speaks she glances down at her injured hand. This is thoughtless, just a little tic of motion that dovetails into a glance back up at his eyes.

"I took him out to the chantry last weekend? If you see a fucking Porsche in the driveway, that'll be him. You guys should meet. Oh, he's gonna throw a big party for Grace, too. So there's that to look forward to - "

And so on. Justin offers to join them, and Sera warns him, perhaps, that the scrying will take all day, and tells hima small bit about the rite she and Jim plan to do after finding the dealer, and they walk together as the sun sets around the lake, in city park.