Perception plus ze awareness
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1
SerafíneNot even God knows why Serafíne is in the Fake Empire - an odd little shop not far from her home in Capitol Hill - on a modest Thursday evening, as dusk is settling in the corners of the sky. But there she is, a singular creature even in hipster central, wearing tiny denim cut-offs over fishnets and heavy black boots, with an old Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt slipping off her left shoulder, long enough and large enough that it mostly covers her shorts and makes it look like she has decided, as she sometimes does, that Fishnets are Pants.
There's a poetry section.
That's why she's here: in the poetry section, crouched down on her haunches, long (dyed)-blonde curls spilling in spirals toward the old wooden floor as she frowns at the used volumes for sale on the lowest shelf.
And even in a place as quiet as this one, even doing no more than browsing, than window shopping, than allow her tattooed fingers to drift through the dusty old volumes of mostly forgotten chapbooks by mostly forgotten poets, she resonates, Serafíne - like someone took a bite out of the base of your spine, all hungry, then healed the wound with warmth of their mouth.
Táltos Horváth[La Percept + Aware?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 5, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )
Táltos HorváthGod actually has a pretty good idea about why Táltos is in the Fake Empire. Táltos was signing a book for the owner, and Táltos was looking over a case of jumbled forgotten treasure: charms and medallions, scraps of broken jewelry, an earthquake's lapidary trove, and his tongue was curling like a wolf's behind his teeth in consideration. Táltos still has the pen in his hand, between his forefinger and his thumb, has just followed the owner out of the back in order to crouch in front of glass opaque with dust and an apparent lack of care. Apparent, because it isn't for lack of washing that the glass is so smokey, refuses to be clear, but age, all storeyed age and cheapness, and that's when he notices Serafíne resonant behind something. He doesn't notice Serafíne, he notices that blaze of her, the burn of a Will that works, and tall loud Táltos looks away from the case. He puts the pen down, and he goes to investigate, rounding a corner, felt before he is seen just as she was felt before she was seen.
He's felt before he is seen, Táltos Horváth, whose spirit candles up beguiling, not like a taking-away or a diminishment, but a tempting-into, a broadening and a joy, who feels like the Devil if the Devil were pure, whose nothing but Lusty for life, for life, for the sheer earthy elation of being godamned alive, who wants to be here. Táltos Horváth, whose accompanied by something that is not candled, is not star-bright and enchanting, who has something like a clot of shadow, dirty, harrowing him from the inside out, working its malice on whatever it is that he is. Will-worker, shaman, magi.
He's heard before he's seen too because he's not quiet. He's wearing too many charms, too much jewelry: Quiet is far, far too beside the point with Táltos.
Here's Táltos, looking curiously around the corner to see what he might find: A tall man. He is a tall man with an aristocratic Slavic nose: hawked, sensitive-nostrilled, large. He is a tall man who seems taller than he is due to a leanness, a certain gangle to the limbs. His hair is a loosed mane, right, and he needs to shave, not just the mustache that he will never, never shave, that is well-kept, but the underside of his jaw, the sides of his cheeks, where stubble's shadowing the space around the neat landscaping.
"Hey there," he says, right away, "Found anything interesting over there?"
Táltos Horváthooc: Hmf. "over here?" not "over there?"
SerafíneHer eyes are on him soon as he rounds the edge of the aisle, soon as he comes into view. She's been watching for him as soon as the twinned sensations of his own resonance and that which is devouring it, that which is attached to him like a shadowself, like a lamprey, like a leech, all consuming mouth snarled her senses, forced itself into the back of her throat. And she is glancing up, still crouched, two books in hand, then she's rising and rising and rising and well, Sera is not natively tall, but she has no qualms about augmenting her height,
and the boots she wears have two inch platforms and three inch heels all wrapped in beaten silver so she's 5'10" or so. Maybe the toussled crown of her hair adds another half-inch.
Listen, she inhales but it is a careful inhalation, and it is not deep, and it is arrested by the jolt of her awareness.
"Susie Timmons and Aimé Foinpré - " is her response to his question, dark eyes looking up and up, her lean frame still, something still withheld about her eyes, " - the Foinpré's in French, I think. I don't know, I don't read it.
"I know someone who does."
He's wearing jewelry: so is she. Not talismans and trinkets, no: a bicycle chain wrapped five times around her neck and twisted with a string of pearls. A leather-wrapped spiked bracelet on her right wrist, and a skeletal silver hand covering her left hand. The carpal bones spreading in an array to all four fingers and one slender thumb. She holds the books she has claimed in that hand and spreads them a bit for his inspection, still studying him, this ... concern leaching its way into her dark eyes.
"Are you okay?"
Táltos Horváth"I'd like to read French too but I don't know it either. I don't know anyone who does except high school teachers."
And he inspects the books, coming around instead of just looming over a shelf like a stoop-shouldered bird. He isn't very much like a stoop-shouldered bird at all. He's straight-backed and if his skin is a little leached of colour, if his cheekbones are as sharp as an executioner's ax, if there are hollows that intimate at the skeleton beneath the wiry, still-strong musculature of tall-tall him, then so what. There have been others in the past fading like omens in an old story. That which harrows him; she can pinpoint the source. Especially after he has inspected the books she offers, his eyes alight with tactile interest, an interest which extends to her skeletal silver hand, and she has asked him whether or not he's okay. He reaches for his own left hand, tugs at a ring there, and the malice throbs like a wound, and he smiles ruefully under his mustache and perhaps a touch carelessly, shrugging his narrow shoulders while he measures out a pause.
When he answers, it's slowly: "Well no. It's an old curse. Do you feel it?" He looks at her curiously, his eyes a-snap with vitality in spite of the shadows that round them, the red-raw of them telling tales of weariness that he only feels because he has to.
"But I'm meeting you now and that seems just fine. I'm Táltos," and he offers Sera the hand that doesn't bear the ring, his right, and from his right wrist dangles a little miniature painting like something of a saint [Byzantine] impressed in a piece of bark and some copper wiring, and it glints gold like an illuminated manuscript.
Serafíne"'Course I feel it," she returns, as if there were ever any other answer. Something rapt about her attention, quick and alight and living on his expressive features, the droop of the mustache, the red-weariness framing his eyes. Her own are strangely (for her) sober: not glassy, not bloodshot. Even the ever-present, vaguely sweet scent of her burning clove cigarettes is absent from her hair. If he were closer he'd sense that she smells like sweat and sunlight and human skin, which is her own and fine and neither pale nor dark, but which welcomes the sun when she sees it like an old, old friend.
Of course she fells it; and the furrow of her worry for a stranger does not quite leave the niggling little point between her brows as her eyes drop to the ring and measure out that malice with a kind of wariness that does not seem to extend to his person.
"Serafíne," the edge of her smile, not crawling tonight. Not now, as she accepts his hand, right to right hand. Not the left, where malice lurks. The line straight to his heart. "Call-me-Sera. Táltos."
Then she grins, all sudden and sure. " - that's a weird fucking name." Lifts her chin at the sweep of the saint framed in bark and copper. "Are you some kind of a priest or something?"
Táltos Horváth
Táltos has sunlight hands, okay? He has sunlight-on-spring-earth hands, sunlight-striking-through-the-thaw hands, kindling-green-things, flower-calling-hands, hearth-stone hands, so his right hand is warm as any vegetative godling's might have been and feels good like growing is a thing. And 'least-ways, his left hand is probably just as capable of kinging spring.
Serafíne grins and Táltos doesn't exactly grin, but his mobile expression takes the spark of good humour that good humour brushed with the prescience of laughter or amusement or flung-into temptation delineates the broad line of his jaw and the crooked line of his nose and even the neat flash of teeth underneath his mustache and the as-if-stricken tip of his head!
" - it's my fucking name."
He marks the lift of her chin at the saint and releases her hand if he hadn't released it already in order to tilt the framed picture for her study. The man in armor, Byzantine pre-iconoclast, horse-lord in blue robes. "Or something.
"See Sera you might say my father named me as if he'd known and accepted the truth 'cause I'm a táltos, you know; a shaman, not," the smile again, transforming sensitive-expressive features, "a priest. But this is Saint István király, who if you listen to some stories probably would have disapproved. But!" The exclamation can be heard, too. "But I know the others," like he's saying, oh, I know that time at that party when you were drunk, I know the secret color of your heart, but not proprietarily, "and I'm fond of him."
Serafíne
"Huh." There are too many places right now for Sera to look and take in all she wishes to see or sense or know. His face, the drooping drift of his mustache over his moving mouth, the crinkling at the corners of his eyes, the sunlit warmth of his knock-knuckled hand, the glint of the sant in his copper-and-bark frame. The spark of humor in his eyes. She's looking up, her chin sharp and lifted, her hair spilling backward, canted to the left so the long strands fall properly away from the distinctive line of the sidecut that follows the curve of her skull like a moving wave.
"I know a priest, but I've never met a táltos. A Táltos or a táltos."
She holds his right hand at longer than is strictly necessary to shake, and her own are not springing warm; merely human, rather slight against his, and calloused in their own way. When he tilts up the framed portrait of the saint, though, she allows him to release her hand, and catches instead the icon between her thumb and forefinger.
"Are you telling me this fucker was not so saintly as he seems? I mean, he's got a halo. That means something, right?."
Táltos
"Ehh, it's only rare we take up the old traditions. But I'd bet my left ass-cheek you've met a táltos before, one with the lower-case T anyway." He's amused with himself; he's amused with her. He's just generally amused, good-nature like a flame contorting him up making him what he is. Serene: "That's not nothing. The left is the good one. It never falls asleep if I'm waiting for an appointment or I've been hunkered on a bar-stool past the spiriting hour. What kind of priest do you know?"
Sera could be a Technocrat. A visceral, enthralling resonance could easily be tooled by the Men in Black with their Mirror-Shades that'd catch you keep you in a serene and endless reflection of a pax romana and all is cold and in God Man [The Union] we trust. But Táltos doesn't find the young woman at all suspicious, or he just is so deeply rooted in himself -- and conversation, and connection, and present now the moment person -- that even though he's Guarded he's not guarded. All to say: he wonders briefly, when she mentions a priest, is so-drawn to the saint's face, if she's a Singer.
The icon feels almost flimsy between her thumb and forefinger; not poorly made, but as if it is made of what it is made of: bark, paper, gold-leaf, ink. Things that might eventually disappear and decay left out to weather the spring, except for the sturdier copper, the glint of gold-leaf, and the saint's expression is if anything piercing.
He answers her seriously, although there's still a whole lot of animation in his version of 'serious.' He doesn't grow still, as some people might. There's unconscious exaggeration, there's something that fleets at aristocratic: the slope of his brow, the pull of his eyebrows. "Well sure. You see, Istvan was a conquerer. He conquered with churches and he conquered with horses and maybe he conquered with that halo you see there. He probably wasn't as kingly as he seems either but mm-hmm what the hell is kingliness anyway?"
Táltos cants his head at her, like he's curious to hear what she has to say about the subject.
But also adds, "I think it means something, right. A halo's just a thing that some people have. You. Me. And then there're some people who -- " Pause; a short surprised like he can't quite believe it laugh, directed at himself. "Warning, you get me started I won't stop, Sera."
Serafíne
"What fucking good does one ass-cheek do me?" There's a crawling edge to her smile, which suits the curve of her mouth and the length of her face, suits the bravado that seems to be written by the gods or whomever into her frame. Her chin lifted, her eyes glinting in the modest fluorescent lighting of the bookshop as if they were bathed in moonlight, as if they were cavorting under some unknown and nameless star. And, see: skeptical, one brow (the right) climbing as she lifts her head and stares back at him. "If we're betting, your whole ass better be on the table, or there's no fucking deal."
Sera's expression resolves into a smirk. A knowing, prescient, cat-with-whiskers-quivering-in-cream sort of smirk.
"I know the celibate kind of priest. The kind who hears confession, yeah? Not that I've got anything to confess. I'm fucking clean as a whistle."
Then she leans back, taking in his animated and serious expression, the lilt of his aristocratic brows, the sense of movement inherent in the air around him. And listens without interrupting until he has uttered his last warning - you get me started, I won't stop, Sera. - and then she laughs, sudden and open-mouthed and bends her head and walks forward and takes his fucking arm as she is sometimes wont to do, just slides her own neatly into his as if her were her escort to tea on the Regency ball or the contradance next door, tucking her books carefully into her opposite hand and tucking her head a bit in a manner that makes her long curls swing over her left shoulder.
"I know fuck-all about kingliness, Táltos, and fuck-all about conquerors, and fuck-all about halos for that matter. I've never aspired to wearing one.
"But you can talk all you want. I don't mind. I like it when people have something to say.
"Here's the plan," and she's leading - tugging - walking him toward the front counter, where the clerk sits behind that dusty shelf full of trinkets. "I'm gonna buy these books. And something from that case for you to remember me by. Then we're gonna get outta here and I'm gonna buy you a drink."
Fade
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