The White Room

Hydra

When Sera wakes up, she won't have any sense of how long she's been out, since there are no windows and no clock in the room. She'll be in roughly the same state she was in the first time she woke up there. Health bad but not any worse than it was, and re-hooked to the IV and the monitor. She's not restrained, so she can get up if she wants to. Callum took away the tray of food but left the bottle of water on the table.

The door is, once more, solidly locked.

If she attempts to communicate, she'll get a single statement from Callum over the intercom. "I'm sorry, Sera, but this really is the only option."

After that, it'll be silence. And no one will come into the room with her. One would imagine that they probably took what they needed while she was unconscious. (And in fact, close inspection will reveal a fresh needle mark on the inside of her elbow, where presumably blood was taken.)

Serafíne

Sera does get up. She's tempted to tear out the IV again and just beat on the fucking door until she passes out. That is a clear possibility inside her. It is a stone she turns over as she shifts in the hospital bed, feeling the plastic mattress sigh beneath her slight weight, the crisp music of the hospital sheets. Closes her eyes tightly and turns over, fetal, holding herself still and trying to simply Be. Or some fucking thing. That meditation shit that Jim does.

She does it differently, Sera. At the node, slides into the warmth of the hot spring and lets the sensation spread out through her and open her up; then a spike of sharp awareness and the brilliant prickling of the magic in everything, everything, the space between spaces and the stars between stars but this,

Christ.

And it is silent. So fucking silent. Maybe - just maybe that silence is better than the stupid drone of daytime television but it is cold and ominous and shivering and she cannot think for it. At some point she's going to pull the IV out again; she can't help it, fuck them. Sera beats on the door and shouts herself hoarse. Shouts until she's coughing up bright red blood again and feels this stark, internal shiver and turns around and slides down the door. She sits there for a long time, arms wrapped around her legs, chin resting on her knee.

Aching.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, that ache becomes meditative; not in the way Jim meditates, so present in her body, but in that physical visceral way she has. She just feels it; allows herself to feel it, everything that's wrong with her. Everything that's wrong. Holds the ache in the back of her throat; the pain and the wrongness, the shaking weakness in her legs, the way the room goes dark and starts to spin when the coughing fit goes on too long.

On and on.

And drifts.

[Going to start with this effect. I don't know if she would try something else but we'll start here!

mnemosyne @ 11:16AM
1. WP - phobia.
Roll: 6 d10 TN7 (3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) VALID

mnemosyne @ 11:16AM
2. Time 2/Mind 2. Who was here and what the fuck were you thinking? Difficulty: 5 +1 (sick) -2 (merit) -1 (taking her damn ass time since she has nothing else to do)
Roll: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 6) ( success x 1 ) VALID

Samael @ 11:17AM
OOOH, I bet I know where Sera is!

mnemosyne @ 11:17AM
Extending, Time 2/Mind 2. Difficulty +1.
Roll: 2 d10 TN4 (8, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP] VALID

mnemosyne @ 11:17AM
aaaand, extending. Time 2/Mind 2.
Roll: 2 d10 TN4 (8, 10) ( success x 2 ) VALID

niko @ 11:18AM
Awwwww Sera =[ niko @ 11:18AM
Also, witnessed!]

Hydra

Sera goes back, and this is what she sees:

The room was once a bare cement space, its walls chipped and dusty from neglect. Then people came and made it what it was. They were all young - all somewhere in their 20's - and they took turns preparing the room. Cleaning, filling in holes and painting. Wiring the place with cameras. Disinfecting the bathroom. They did something to the ventilation system: installed something inside the shafts that involved tubing and a spray unit. The door was a new install as well, and it took them a long time to get the security system wired up.

It was usually only a couple at a time, and none of them were faces that Sera recognized. (Callum was not among them.) Some of them were quiet, while others chatted amiably about mundane topics like sports scores and the last movie they saw. None of them talked about their families or mentioned a significant other.

One of the women - a pretty brunette with vibrant blue eyes who did a lot of the painting - was unreadable to Sera's attempt to glean her thoughts. Another went back and forth between concern for the proper installation of the door (they had to be certain that it would hold up against attack) and daydreaming thoughts about... some guy who looked an awful lot like Eric.

One of the men working on the cameras took his shirt off at one point. Underneath, there was a tattoo of a Hydra on his back.

He was thinking about how excited he was that they were finally going to test out the virus, imagining images of people he'd known (Awakened, one might assume) falling apart and dying at his feet.

Still another man - the one who cleaned up the bathroom - was thinking lonely, nostalgic thoughts about a girl he'd been in love with. The thoughts were steeped in grief and loss, but however she may have died, that wasn't what he was choosing to remember.

Towards the end, Sera finally did see someone she recognized: Eric. He walked in covered in splatters of paint (from another room, perhaps?) and greeted the girl with the bright blue eyes. The two of them had a familial ease around each other. Eric teased her about her hair being messy and reached out to tug her ponytail. The girl swatted him away in annoyance. She had a burn scar on one arm.

Girl: "Don't, Eric." (She seemed tense, anxious.)

Eric: "What's up with you? You've been in a mood since we got here."

Girl: "What am I supposed to be, happy?"

Eric: "I don't know. Hopeful? It's progress, Katie. We're getting that much closer to a cure."

Girl: "A cure..." she spat the words and laughed incredulously. "You sound like a terrorist."

Eric: "We're not terrorists. Don't say shit like that."

Katie was silent.

Eric: "I know it's hard. But we're saving lives. Maybe even the fate of the whole fucking world. That matters more than..."

He sighed.

Eric: "Don't let it get to you. We're doing this for Tom. And for Sadie. And all the other people they've killed. They're a disease, Katie. They don't deserve your sympathy."

Katie stared blankly at the wall. "It isn't sympathy. And don't you dare mention his name again."

Eric tried to put a hand on her shoulder, but Katie shrugged it off violently. He left after that, and she sunk down to the floor and cried.

The next day, after the paint had dried, a couple of people dragged the hospital bed and equipment into the room. They were joined shortly thereafter by Callum, who walked in and surveyed the job they'd done, inspecting the cameras and the door and the ventilation shafts.

All he said was: "Good. Thank you."

Then he left, and they locked up the room.

It stayed that way for a while - empty and dark. Until finally Callum and another of the unknown men brought Sera's unconscious body into the room and laid her out on the bed. They were followed by Katie and another woman, who insisted (in an odd show of courtesy) that they be the ones to clean and dress her. So Callum and the man left, and Sera was cleaned up and re-dressed. Callum returned to take blood samples and to perform some examinations. Then he injected her with something and hooked up the IV and the heart monitor.

Then he left again, leaving Sera alone and unconscious in the bed.

That was when the divination ended.

Hydra

Serafíne

Phobia roll.

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7) ( success x 1 )

Hydra

Given Sera's lifestyle, it was possible (even probable) that she'd woken up in a few unfamiliar locations before. Maybe she'd even woken up in hospitals before. That didn't make it any less terrifying to someone who hated and feared hospitals on such a visceral, subconscious level. Though if this was a proper hospital, it was awfully bare. The walls and the floor were nothing more than painted concrete.

How long had she been out? Hours or days... she didn't know. What she did know was that she was trapped in the one place she never wanted to be. Alone.

Or was this, too, a hallucination? Or a vision? (The difference between the two could get a little thin sometimes.)

There was a faint hum coming from the ventilation system, but otherwise the building was dead silent. There was a dry, sticky bitterness in her mouth and throat that cried out for water. The door to the small bathroom at the end of the room had been removed, leaving an open passage that lead to a metal sink and a shower and toilet. The place was not especially warm or inviting, but it was clean and new. Sterile, even.

Truthfully, it felt more like a prison than a hospital room. Security cameras looked down from the ceiling, and the heavy metal door along one wall looked as though it had been built to keep people inside.

At least she was still alive. Or maybe this was what purgatory looked like?

No, she felt way too shitty to be dead.

Serafíne

Sera wakes up in a bed in a room with bare walls; attached to monitors, security cameras in place. The strange places in which she has awoken do not bear counting. They are beyond count: and yes, she has awoken in the hospital a time or two even within her living memory, which is shorter than most people who know and think they understand her begin to realize. The way she parties; the way she sleeps: it is inevitable. Someone tries to wake her and imagines she's unconcious rather than sleeping, overdosed instead of dreaming. It happens.

--

She wakes.

Oh, she wakes.

She inhales and arches her back and opens her eyes and looks up at the ceiling. Something's pulling in her arm and the sour taste in the back of her throat and her heart beating in her chest. Sera looks up at the ceiling and closes her eyes and opens them again. She does this three times like a spell or a charm and the ceiling is the same.

She's sober. She feels sober. It aches right now; there is a tremor of anticipation in her limbs, she's already bracing herself for whatever she's going to find as she starts to survey the room.

Her hands are shaking, tucked beside the safety rails.

She turns them into fists, blunt nails digging into her palms. This does not stop the shaking. As the pieces turn themselves over, resolve themselves into vignettes (the security door, the stainless sink and shower stall, the lack of privacy, the monitors) her breathing becomes more and more ragged. She's not crying, not yet, she just wants to scream and -

fucking

- Sera closes her eyes. Tells herself,

it'snotrealit'snotrealit'snotreal. Just aloud. Her mouth is moving. If those cameras are being monitored, if they have microphones, if they are sensitive microphones, whoever monitors them could pick it up.

- opens her eyes again.

"Fuck."

--

Sera sits up abruptly. Tears off all the leads for all the fucking monitors and tears out the goddamned IV and she doesn't care if there's pain, she needs the pain, she welcomes the pain, she allows it to lance through her like a spike. Lets it smash her open as she wrenches her body out of that bed and staggers to her feet,

or tries to, god knows how weak she is,

headed for the door. Reaching for the handle, and if it doesn't open, she's pounding, open-handed, as loud as she can. Rattling it in its frame

Hydra

When Sera yanked out the IV, a line of blood welled up from the opening in her vein and slid down her arm, dripping off the tips of her fingers to splatter tiny notes of crimson onto the pristine floor. But by now, she was probably long past caring about the sight of her own blood. Apart from the brief reprieve she'd been given following her healing attempt, the days had been full of it. Dripping and splattering and bubbling in her damaged lungs. It was probably best not to wonder what exactly the virus was doing to her to make that blood appear. (Breaking her pattern down from the inside-out. What part of her would go next? Maybe it would be something she couldn't survive.)

Speaking of which, the exertion caused by her panicked breaths and her attempts (unsuccessful - the door was indeed locked, and sturdy enough that it didn't even so much as creak in response to her attack) to exit the room caused a violent coughing fit, and speckles of red showered the smooth metal in front of her.

"Calm down, Serafine."

It was a man's voice over the intercom, soft and clinically calm. No one she recognized.

"If you panic, you'll pass out again. I'm coming into the room with some water for you. Please step back from the door."

Serafíne

"Let me out."

There's no telling her to calm the fuck down and Sera does not move away from the door when the calm fucking bastard call her by her name (her full name, no call-me-Sera. Jim does that. Jim always calls her by her full name.) and tells her to step back from the door.

Please step back from the door.

They are always calm and they are always assured and they are always fucked and they are always wrong and they are -

Sera doubles over in another coughing fit. Her lungs ache. They're burning. They are disintegrating into pointillist pieces. They are -

"Who the fuck are you?

"Where the fuck am I? I want to get the fuck out."

What else is she going to say?

The room swims. Her lungs feel battered and abraded and she braces herself, she cannot beat at the door anymore but she's holding on to it.

She coughs again, hard enough that it squeezes tears from her eyes. Hard enough that she aches and throbs all fucking over. Hard enough that she sees stars behind her eyes, and the places between the stars, the source of things between the atoms.

"How do you know my name."

[Watch the Weaving: Prime 1]

Dice: 2 d10 TN7 (2, 9) ( success x 1 )

Hydra

It's a sobering thought, to know that a person with her insight and abilities could be made so powerless, not by magic, but by something as ordinary as illness, four walls and a locked door.

There wasn't any magic in the room, at least as far as she could tell.

Sera demanded to be let out, and there was no response. The door remained shut. Her questions, too, were met with further silence. At least until she'd finished that horrible bout of coughing and relative silence had settled in once more.

"You're somewhere safe." (As if she would believe that.) "My name is Callum Grey. The thing you've been infected with is called the Hydra virus. Myself and the people I work with have been tracking a group of witch-hunters who stole the virus from the Technocracy. They're the ones who infected you, and they've been watching you since you were injected. And we, in turn, have been watching them.

"When I tried to make contact, you were already pretty far-gone. I found you unconscious and in critical condition, so I brought you here. It's not a proper hospital, but we have the equipment we need, and we're well-protected. I understand you're scared, but if it wasn't for us, you'd be dead right now.

"Can I come in? I need you to promise that you won't attack me."

Serafíne

WP

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (2, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

Serafíne

Strangely enough, something in her snaps and solidifies. Something liquid in her spine fuses. Maybe it is his voice; maybe it is the steadiness of the beating of her heart, insistent against the interior of her mind. Maybe it is the magick in her. The magick of her. God only fucking knows, but Sera's first instinct and second instinct and third instinct and her fucking

seventeenth instinct are to tell Callum Grey to fuck the fuck off but then she will still be in this room and in this place and - and -

- she straightens. Pushes herself upright and steps away from the door. God she feels so miserable as she does that that she cannot help but cry a little bit. Her shoulders jerk with half-voiced, mostly withheld sobs, and she wipes her nose against the back of her palm and it comes away bloody.

"You think my promise matters?" Something wry beneath the need-to-sob, as she walks away from the door. A handful of steps, her eyes on the cameras, suspicious yeah she cannot hide that, but,

there's enough solidity in her that she starts trying to calm herself, the way people sometimes do. Humming an old lullabye beneath her breath. If he has any knowledge of music he will recognize the ode to joy from the chorus of Beethoven's Ninth.

"I won't attack you. I can barely stand up."

Serafíne

Mind 2: Difficulty 5 +1 (distracted) -1 (specialty focus) - aura/surface thoughts.

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (3, 4) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Serafíne

(-1 more for practiced, for the record. Final difficulty: 4, so 2 successes initially.)

Hydra

"Maybe not, but that doesn't mean you aren't dangerous."

Perhaps it hadn't occurred to Serafine to wonder if her captor/supposed rescuer might not be equally afraid and distrustful of her as she was of him.

"Nonetheless, thank you."

Sera stepped back, drawing up what little reserves of strength she had. She could feel her fever prickling hot along her skin, the raw sting of her ruined throat aching in the wake of her voice. Her headache was starting to come back, brought on no doubt by the coughing and the rapid-fire beat of her pulse. It throbbed painfully behind her eyes.

There was a sound of bolt sliding open, and then the door pushed in, and a man carrying a tray with some food and a bottle of water walked inside.

Sera had probably been expecting someone older. Someone who looked... well, like a doctor. This man was closer to the age of a med-student than a physician. Maybe 23-24. He was tall and willowy, with exceptionally pale, freckled skin and red hair down to his shoulders. He was dressed in a pair of jeans and a white lab coat. Something about his appearance and demeanor suggested something otherworldly, but if he was Awake, he didn't resonate.

Callum watched Sera closely as he shut the door, keeping a safe distance (safe for her, or for him?) as he went to set the tray down on the small table next to the bed. The food on it was unappetizing hospital fare: jello, a cup of soup and some saltine crackers.

If he noticed her attempt to scan his surface thoughts, he didn't give any indication. Nonetheless, when Sera's mind reached out to him, she'd find herself confronted by a ominously familiar sensation: that of smacking headlong into an iron wall. It was the same sort of block she'd found on Eric.

"I'm sorry to keep you locked in. We weren't sure what you were going to do when you woke up. How do you feel right now?"

Serafíne

"Like shit."

Sera retreats to the wall, some half-dozen feet from the door, give or take another half-dozen. The fever is bright beneath her skin, all pooling fire and it makes her woozy. Feels like coming down from something or going up on something except she's sixteen and she's managed to actually graduate from one of the fancy rehabs and get her ass lodged in some very quiet, very expensive, very hospital-like reform school where there is enough contact with the outside world that a few of the seniors manage to get their hands on shit-that-is-nothing-close-to-mind-altering but is nevertheless than the droning buzzing drudgery of a literature class that never gets past John Donne and military fucking history.

"Like fucking shit. And in the usual I-must've-had-a-badass-time last night way."

Sera's barefoot, 5'5" and maybe 120 lbs soaking wet. Maybe. And she lost weight on that fucking fast and never gained it all back and she's lost some weight over the past few days. Not as much but still; she looks starched, stretched thin, wretched, and still somehow fucking gorgeous. You can see that in her bones, the sharp cut of them through her skin.

Her arms cross over her midsection. Protective. It still has not occurred to her that he might be afraid of her.

Honestly, it never will.

"If you're sorry to keep me locked in, let me go." Her eyes flick to the hospital tray; she glances sharply away, after, her stomach turns, revolted. Body and mind, revolted too.

"Easy solution." The narrowest curl of her shoulders. "I hate these fucking places," and honest, to a remarkable fault.

"Callum. Can I call you Callum?

"You're not Awake. Why the fuck can't I read your mind?"

Serafíne

Perception + Awareness-as-empathy. -1 die because SIIICK.

Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 6, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 ) [WP]

Hydra

Callum didn't give much reaction to her agitated demeanor. He seemed to expect it, and was neither offended nor overtly sympathetic. Clinical really was the best way to describe him.

He favored Sera with a calm, analytical gaze. As though examining her symptoms from a distance and making some kind of mental notation. (He may have looked young, but he certainly acted like a doctor.) "Well, you're up, anyway. That's an improvement."

Sera wanted them to let her go. Callum crossed his arms in front of his chest. He didn't answer her right away.

"That's what you call it? Awake? Rather condescending to the rest of us, don't you think?" (The assumption there - that since he wasn't awake then he must be asleep.) There was a beat before he continued. A moment of reluctance. "It's a neural implant. Some of us were given them by the people we used to work for." (He didn't actually come out and say the Technocracy, but really, who the hell else could have made something like that?)

"If you left, you wouldn't get far on your own, and you need to be in a hospital. But you can't risk having someone call the CDC, which is what will happen once they find out what you've got. And I promise you, if that happens, you will die, probably while they're busy pumping you full of antivirals, because they won't know that that's exactly the wrong thing to do.

I promise you, Serafine. There is no-one out there who has a better chance of keeping you alive than we do. I know this virus. I'm the best hope you have for a cure, but I can't get what I need without your help. So if you leave... we're both fucked."

Hydra

[Manip+Subterfuge]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 6, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 1 [WP]

Hydra

If there was anything to read off of this guy, Sera wasn't getting it. Maybe he was holding something back, maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was lying... maybe he wasn't. He was difficult to read.

Serafíne

"It's just what we say. That we've opened our eyes. That's what it feels like, too. Waking up. You've been sleeping for so long and you're muddy with it, muzzy with it, and then somehow it's morning and there's sun through the windows with a fire like you've never known before, and you can taste the sun and hear the color three and the sing the letter blue.

"It's not condescending. It's just what if feels like."

God, the sun.

Sera closes her eyes; there's something passionate about her paean to waking up, but there is an edge of nostalgia she cannot suppress. A sort of hollowed-out sorrow that opens itself up in her marrow, in her bones. She is seized by the deep and terrible conviction that they are going to keep her here forever, that -

"Don't you think the choice should be mine? Who the fuck are we?"

Panic starts to bubble up in her like the blood in her lungs.

Shit. Shit shit shit.

Sera closes her eyes. Opens them again. Shoots a glance from him to the door, gauging distance, reaction times. Everything.

Her arms tighten over her midsection.

"I can't stay here. I can't. Jesus Christ you don't understand. And how the fuck do you know my name."

Serafíne

Life/Mind scan Difficulty 4+1 = 5. -1 for practiced. She is using pain/the sensation of illness as a focus.

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Hydra

From what Sera was able to tell, there were a number of other people in the building with her and Callum. About 12, by her count, spaced out at varying distances. Two of them were right outside her door. A couple of the distant life patterns were unreadable to her mind scan, as Callum was. The rest read as normal Sleepers, with nothing especially notable upon first glance.

Inside the room, Callum rather pointedly did not respond when Serafine described her experience with Waking Up. He didn't seem hostile, but... perhaps distrustful was the right word.

He remained calm in the face of her dawning panic, but he let his arms fall back to his sides, and there was a glance at the door, because it didn't take Mind magic to figure out that Sera was probably thinking about bolting.

"It's what your friends call you. I told you, you were being watched." He tried to answer her rationally, though at this point it seemed as though the effort may have been wasted. It was hard to have a rational conversation with someone who was in the throes of fight-or-flight.

"You need to understand. I don't want to lock you up like a prisoner, but you're carrying an infectious disease that could wipe out everyone you know and care about. And the people who did this to you are going to do it to others. Maybe they already have. With all due respect, if I let you make the choice to leave, and more people die because of it, then that's a choice I can't afford to give you."

The implication there was clear, even if it went unstated. Maybe he really didn't want to do this to her. Maybe he was trying to make it feel as though she had a choice because he knew that things would be easier on the both of them that way. But regardless - he was probably not going to let her go willingly.

"I can give you something for the anxiety, if you want it."

Serafíne

"No. No." Her most immediate and visceral reaction is to the suggestion that he could give her something for the fucking anxiety. Sera grits her teeth firmly and shoves back on that suggestion with a vehemence that surprises even her on some level, and leaves her once more: shaking, and also: shaken. "Fucking - fucking no I don't want you making me -

"making me - " and she's struggling for words and her hands are fists now, pressed to her temples and the room has an axis and that axis is spinning around the most central of the light fixtures. " - numb."

Her hands open, she draws them sharply through her hair, dragging her fingers tightly through the tangled curls. That sourness in the back of her throat, the hallucinatory certainty of her approaching death, more -

And she can't help it, the itching need for movement beneath her skin, the way these walls feel like they are smothering her. The conviction that she'll die here, or worse, than she'll fucking live here.

Exist here.

Whereever the fuck here is.

"That's not what they call me. They fucking call me - "

Abruptly, sharply - " - your fucking guards. Do they have fucking guns?"

Hydra

[Init +6]

Dice: 1 d10 TN1 (6) ( success x 1 )

Serafíne

Init +6-1

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (2) ( fail )

Serafíne

[Declare: Run away.]

Hydra

[Callum declare: split grapple/sedate]

Hydra

[Str+Brawl -2]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )

Hydra

[Dex+Brawl -3]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 6, 10) ( success x 2 )

Hydra

Callum didn't answer Sera's question. He was too busy watching her body language - noting the slowly building arc of her anxiety (like a caged animal getting ready to gnaw its own limb off.) He reached into his pocket, and maybe that was the trigger - because Sera probably knew what he was reaching for. And she probably also knew that she had no real hope of escape.

But it didn't matter. She had to try.

So she did. But Callum lunged forward and grabbed her before she could get more than a few feet. He wasn't very strong, and on any other day she might not have been so easily overcome, but her body was barely holding itself together, and it didn't take much to overpower her. She'd feel the sharp sting of the needle sink into the muscle on her neck. A few seconds later, the world around her dimmed.

The last thing she saw before she closed her eyes was the door opening, followed by a rushing torrent of blood sweeping in to flood the room and drown her.

Serafíne

[She runs. She can't help but run. She cannot do anything except try to run; and she knows deep down beneath her skin that this is going to get her nowhere, that there will be orderlies in the hall and restraints or a needle full of something and then a nice thorazine drip and a some new, experimental therapy meant to shock her back into - what -

- no, this is something else, someplace else, somewhen else, though somehow she's here and a there she half-remembers, remembers with her skin and in her throat, remembers with the mad pounding of her panicked heart.

He hits her with the tranquilizer.

She staggers, falls to her knees, makes this anguished sound, reaching forward like a supplicant at prayer. Finds herself falling inconscionably and furiously forward.

When she hits the ground, she drowns again.

- in fucking Barcelona

Serafíne

Thursday Sera sent Hawksley a text that says:

you know everything

and maybe:

how did that greek guy kill that hydra thing

Maybe he responds with a link to fucking wikipedia Jesus Christ Sera it is the 21st century. Maybe he's out of reach or out of touch and it slips beneath his radar, and the story of Hercules and his second labor and the wikipedia referral is supplied by someone else: Dee, who breaks off chattering with Em about the next round of roller derby playoffs this weekend to Look Things Up on her own phone, or Dan who directs Sera to the proper place with a certain affection that she shrugs off. Maybe he calls her and just tells her the fucking story because he does know everything or at least knows a hell of a lot and reads and thinks and thinks and thinks about things and Things for hours in ways she cannot quite comprehend.

--

Saturday night, though, or at the outside Sunday morning, Hawksley gets a phone call. The old-fashioned sort. Whether the phone rings through to voice mail or Hawksley answers, the first words out of the consor's mouth are the same:

"Hey man, it's Dan. Is Sera with you?"

Hawksley

Hawksley is in Barcelona.

He is not in Vegas any longer, because he came back from that wretched place of decadent apocalypse some time ago with Sera. He is not in Paris, where he went next, nor Egypt, where he went because -- as he put it -- he missed it. He is in Barcelona, and he has not been checking Ginger and he has not been checking in with anyone because that is how Hawksley exists. This is why Hawksley was Awakened, booted from his Tradition, married, divorced, and let back into his Tradition on a trial basis all before the tender age of 25. He is not, has never been, and may never be the sort to take kindly to fetters of any kind.

It's very odd to him when he gets the texts from Sera. He doesn't get them for a while, and then he calls her back and he's warm and amused and tells her the story in this rambling half-drunk way because he is half-drunk and unless she comes right out and tells him, he has no idea that Anything Might Be Wrong. He just tells her about Iolaus, and he spins off into stories about Heracles and Iolaus being lovers and Heracles giving Megara to Iolaus because he was a fuckhead and at some point he remembers what Sera was asking about. He is actually not drunk. He is somewhat stoned.

It does not stop him from thinking and thinking and thinking.

They say goodnight, or good morning, whatever the time difference is, and she goes back to her life, and Hawksley goes back to his, and yet it warms him and settles him that she reached out, as though now she's just at the periphery of his mind where before she felt unreasonably, absurdly far away.

--

He is in the future by a third of a day. It isn't much, if you compare him to, say, Australians. On Sunday morning which is his Sunday afternoon he gets a phone call and it's a known number because he keeps thinking that maybe at some point Dan would like to fool around -- also because when one hangs out with Sera, one needs to know how to get in touch with Dan. He puts it to his ear, Dan says it's him and Hawksley smirkingly says I know but Dan isn't listening because Dan is asking the stupidest question.

Hawksley actually takes the phone away from his ear, frowns at its screen, then puts it back. "What?"

Dan repeats himself.

"Of course she's not with me, I'm in fucking Barcelona, did --"

He stops to think of whether he sent Sera a ticket or something while high or drunk or if he told Collins to do it or something, but wouldn't Dan know if Sera had needed a ride to the airport? Wouldn't he know something?

Hawksley feels an icy fingertip trace its way down his spine, loving and sensual and revolting. He confirms to Dan that he doesn't know where Sera is but

"I'll find her if I can."

And hangs up.

A moment later: "COLLINS!"

Serafíne

Dan would, in fact, like to fool around sometime. Oh it's complicated because there's Jer and Dan likes Jer and that night Sera broke her fast and fucked Hawksley in his goddamned Porsche without any protection or discussion of the same was the first night the two of them actually had sex. It was great. And Dan likes Jer (that guy) alot but Jer has slightly more conventional expectations and they aren't exclusive except it is heading that way except that it will probably never quite get there.

Because Sera. Because Sera will always be the constant in Dan's life. Jer tells Dan that he gets that; he thinks Sera is this strange mad muse and is mostly-okay with Dan's attachment to her but the fact is, Jer thinks it is all pretty transient or maybe cute or a function of age or - or something. Jer doesn't Know.

Maybe he never will.

--

Hawksley has been traveling the world. Sera wanted to ask him for PRESENTS, and specifically DRUGS. You know, hashish from Morocco or - but Dan told her no, Sera. Christ, do you want to get him beheaded? They take that shit seriously in places like Egypt. Sera is pretty sure that Hawksley would never let anyone behead him but, the practical warning was enough to keep her from asking Hawksley to bring her awesome new direct-from-the-source drugs from whereever he was partying. She sends him sporadic where r u now texts and the odd picture. The band on stage together. A piece of obscenely hilarious graffiti that caught her eye. The occasional weird-butt-dial. It happens to the best of us, at the strangest times and in the oddest places.

Sera does not mention that Something Might Be Wrong. He calls her back and it is Friday and she's feeling better and she's so-pleased to have him call her back. Tucks the phone against her shoulder and twists around in her bed. He's drunk or maybe stoned. He's a little bit stoned, and she's sleepy, just waking up, regardless of the hour and it makes her happy to hear him, to detect that little bit of looseness beneath the texture of his voice that tells her that he's a little bit fucked up. He tells her about Iolaus and Heracles and Megara and fuckhead heroes and gets off and then back on track and Sera laughs and mentions the play Lysistrata tangentially. She doesn't remember the name, so much as the sex-strike and the characters' mention of ancient sex toys but Hawksley can tease apart and identify the play and author from the pieces of it she remembers.

The Greeks, man. Sera says could fucking handle being a Greek but only if she got to be a dude or a goddess.

Or fucking both.

So, it's a warm, lovely little conversation. Sera's feeling better; she doesn't know what is coming yet, just yesterday but even so, she would not mention that anything's wrong. Before they say good night or good morning, Sera tells him things that a man like Hawksley does not need anyone to tell him, because he knows all these things because maybe fucking hubris but whatever. Sera always says what she feels and she tells him that he's a fucking genius. He's so fucking smart. There's this sweet tinge of wonder to her voice; he can feel the admiration which is just flat-out admiration, sleepy and sure. How does he know so fucking many things? Sera can hardly fathom it.

--

Sunday morning. Sunday afternoon.

"Shit." Dan curses quietly beneath his breath when Hawksley says he's in Barcelona. He's not the sort to panic, and he does not do so now, but he does not have to stop and think about whether or not Sera might've flown out to meet Hawksley in Europe. Somewhere in the middle of this conversation, Dan remembers that he has Sera's contacts backed up on his computer.

Hawksley's in Barcelona. Dan does not tell him about the blood in her room; the illness. Any of it. There is a degree of circumspection there, a quietly respectful withholding. Because who the fuck needs that shit? Really? Hawksley'll find her if he can.

"Okay, thanks. I'm giving Sid a call. I'll let you know if she turns up sooner."

Friday Night Girl

Serafíne

I emptied onto shifting sheets, Staring rosary holes in my ceiling, Waiting for my purpose to deliver, And reveal itself to me But all I hear are subway trains Bang against their bedrock lanes So I bang a little too...

I'm a Friday night girl Bracing for Sunday to come Bracing for Sunday to come.

- Neko Case

Serafíne is Not Okay quite nearly as often as she is Okay. Not Okay is Okay too. She stays out all night; all weekend; all week. She brings strangers home, and then new strangers, and then strangers are not strangers anymore. Some nights three a.m. has crawled into four a.m. has rolled itself over into dawn and it is cold, freezing, the grass is cracked and bent with frost and someone is trying, again, to kindle a fire in the old clay chiminea in the middle of the garden and you have a bottle in one hand and a child's plastic rake between your toes and the sky livid as a wound, dawn crawling all around the cracks of it.

Your heart is an egg, this rich yolk of promise at the center-of-it. Some nights it burns with the atom-fusing fire of the sun. Some nights that yolk ends up smeared against the wall of the bathroom of a third-rate walk-up in Soho, which is fucking rich because you live in Denver, Colorado now.

That's where you are.

Though maybe not where you ever thought you'd be.

--

So, Thursday she has a cold and Friday she's feeling better and wanders barefoot into the kitchen in the boxers and old tee she sometimes wears and grabs her leather-bound notebook and some provisions and retreats back to her room. Music, this deep bass throb, from the speakers of the stereo system Dan cobbled together and wired up for her, hidden amongst the wild detritus of her many, many Things. The pile of various versions of spike-heeled platformed black leather boots and stilettos and that spreads like a black lake vomited from the mouth of her closet, the clothes, which are Everywhere. The strange bits of jewelry and found things that function as jewelry and ridiculously high-end pieces meant to mimic found things that function as jewelry except are also encrusted with expensive crystal or studded with black spinel. The books - there are a few, almost all poetry - strewn in front of the bookcase. The wide windows and the garden view and the enormous bed piled with white: sheets, soft as sin, comforter, slick as a cloud, which get washed regularly because Sera does know where the washer is but someone else also has to change them from washer to dryer, and Dan nearly always lugs them upstairs again and makes her fucking bed for her because

please

pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaase

she never gets the corners right.

Somehow whether she's alone or has guests or even Guests the covers always end up in a winding nest somewhere nestled in the half-hollowed heart of the mattress and she sleeps there warm and infinitely cozy, impossible to disturb when she finally falls asleep.

---

No response to Dee who knocks open-handed against the door to Sera's room in that way people have, the resonance of her palm cupped against the wood, the solid point of contact. Dee is tall and it is morning and she does things up. Has on a silky robe printed with tattooed roses and her black-as-ink hair in rollers and somehow even when her make-up is scrubbed clean her mouth still has a crimson stain to it. Like she's just eaten some poisoned apple.

"Feeling any better? There's pain chocolat in the kitchen."

No response. Dee doesn't think anything of it. Or at least, she doesn't think anything particular of it. It's not even noon, yet. Sera doesn't usually stir from her bed until 3-or-so. Not even for roller derby playoffs.

--

Dee's hand hammers against the door in near-perfect time to the insistent throbbing of her head. There's something behind her. It's a wall but it feels like something larger and darker and far more grotesque. She does not remember falling out of bed and crawling into her bathroom but that's what she does, trailing her comforter behind her like a winding cloth. The bathroom tiles are so cool against her fevered temple that she spends a hallucinatory half-hour trying to work out the geometry of pushing the entirety of her face into the entirety of the wall and becoming both things at once, but even when she drops herself into the space where all things merge (and it is not easy for her, like this, these are not the doors she opens, these are not the pieces of herself into which she dissolves) and are and were and will be the wall is still stubbornly blank.

Still, cool. Her breath warm against it, her mouth open, her reflection interrupted by the grout lines but bearing a hallucinatory familiarity.

Sera is grateful to the wall for keeping her upright.

She does not know why she's bleeding.

Sometimes she forgets that the blood is hers.

--

Does not remember getting to her knees or bending over the toilet, her hair spilling all around her. There's no one sitting on the edge of the tub to pick up her hair and hold it out of her way when she starts to puke. Just water at first. The toasted cheese Dan made for her to go with the Campbell's tomato soup late last night, when she was still feeling okay.

The Campbell's tomato soup, which looks like blood.

And then the blood.

It is fresh; bright crimson. Smears against the white porcelain toilet so beautifully like the stain of some mad sun against unbroken snow. In between heaves, Sera wipes her mouth against the back of her right hand, staring down, her shadow a wild construct over the toilet, and she thinks of Where the wild Things Are, just the shaggy shape of a child's nightmares,

which are nothing like the usual sort.

It almost makes her smile.

Then she starts to cry, because Jesus fuck when you get right down to it, down to the seams of things and the borders and the crosses, the places where your skin slides open, bleeding light, bleeding dark, just fucking bleeding, everything is so -

so so

so

beautif -

--

The convulsions redouble, violent enough that she does not even hear Dan knocking, knocking, knocking, trying the knob. She is puking hard enough, thoroughly enough that her knuckles go stark-white as she grips the edge of the toilet seat and each wave is so furious, so wracking that she pisses herself as she heaves over the toilet in wretched, choking waves until there is

nothing

left.

The dry heaves are worse.

There is not even the momentary relief of the actual purge, just another blinding, banded wave of nausea and blood, and blood, and blood.

--

In the hallway: Dan, cursing and knocking louder before finally leaving a tray for her on the floor in the upstairs hall beside her bedroom door. These are the things Dan brings Sera when she's sick: a pot of Darjeeling and a bottle of Stranahan's and fresh gingered ale laden with lime.

Some toast, dry, the crusts sliced neatly off.

She hates the crusts when she's sick.

When he comes back to check on her a couple of hours later, the tray is gone, so there's that. He knocks again. It is late afternoon.

What he says is: How'd that go down. Going to the store do you need anything. And, rattling the handle, finding the door locked once again, Jesus Christ Sera I know you think you're infectious but stop locking the door.

What she hears is: the buzz of an insect beneath the root of her tongue, the sighing of the dead skin of trees, the meandering insistence of an intolerable universe beneath her skin.

No, a fly in the room.

There is a fly in the room.

She can feel it inside her. She can feel the walls of her cells and each cell its own solar system, the nucleus a warming star being pierced and consumed and devoured and she has it in her to heal those walls, everything is one and every one thing is inside her and outside her; this is how it works, her skin splits itself open and opens her to the divine, which is the profane, which is the magickal, which is the mundane, which is simply

all.

--

Later she draws a bath. Still in her clothes, skull-covered boxers and her old band's "World Tour" t-shirt with the names of the places they played scrawled down the back in various hands in fabric ink. The water is lukewarm to cool and she draws it deep enough that the constant shudder of the overflow drain is her irregular companion and the water sloshes over the edges and spills onto the subway tile floor, the floofy hot pink bath mat.

She drinks the entire pot of Darjeeling and some of the Stranahans and refills her nalgene bottle at the tap of the tub. The overflow drain gurgles its inconstant little song.

Sera rests her cheek against the edge of the tub.

It does not occur to her to report these things. To open her phone and call up Ginger and leave them all an account of her suffering. She does not remember that she has a phone, not all the time, and sometimes it buzzes with each new incoming text message which dovetails with the sound of that fly in the room.

In the corner above the bookcase, tangled amidst the silk skeins of an mobile / collage she bought from a thirty-seven year old mother of two at an Art in the Park show on a certain rainy day three Septembers ago; at the back of her throat.

--

Sera feels yesterday and today and tomorrow all braided tight inside her. Lashed together unbroken except for the frame around them: which is entirely dark.

She sloshes out of the bath later and she wants to make herself better; it's an ache inside her but lodged underneath is the warning she half-remembers, half-understands in the marrow of her bones. What's left is to endure.

Which she does.

She is curled up in her bed when the walls start to bleed. The mound of white sheets and the white comforter bloodstained now. Hair wet snakes around her throat, still smelling sour from the blood-and-vomit. The windows are closed but the curtains are open and late afternoon sunlight is streaming in,

when the walls start to bleed.

Then the voices come, and that fly is under her skin. Replicating, reproducing itself and she starts squeezing her wrist, digging her nails into the skin of her forearm, trying to dig the fucking things out. Shaking, muffling her cries with one of the pillows, biting down until she can taste the downy goose feathers gamey beneath the ticking.

They tickle her throat as they go down.

Are those feathers? Or something else, entirely.

--

He considers forcing the door; gives himself deadlines of the this is when I act variety. That sort.

When he goes back upstairs, though, the tray that he left midafternoon is gone. He tells himself it's a sign; leans in to listen at the door. Tries knocking again see but figures she's asleep. She has always been impossible to awaken.

The lights are off and the hall floor is old, dark hardwood. He doesn't see the smear of blood.

--

Later, she is dying; her skin is melting, like wax. It is sloughing off her bones. She cannot help but pin herself open; tear out her sternum and breathe in the universe. Her cells pop like soap bubbles and she is the sap and the root and the electrical impulse coursing through the arm of a woman reaching to rest her hand on the crown of her child's head and the sun remembered by the moon and the moon remembered by the sun,

she is everything,

everything,

she is

burning,

and as everyone who has ever kissed her knows,

she was always meant to burn.

--

Midnight or close to it: he comes back to check on her.

The door is open. Sera is gone.

Superflu

Howl ST

Beginning the morning of the 17th (Thursday,) Sera will begin to feel the early effects of the virus. She'll be running a slight (100 degree) fever, her body will be achey and she'll have a mild headache. In the evening, she'll get a slow nosebleed that will last for five minutes.

When she sleeps, she'll have nightmares, but she won't remember them in the morning - only that she had a bad night and feels tired and stressed.

On the 18th (today,) her fever will raise to 102, and she'll be experiencing chills and hot flashes. She'll get another nosebleed in the morning. This one will not last as long but it will produce more blood. In the evening, she'll start coughing and after about half an hour she'll begin to cough up a small amount of blood. The coughing will remain mild, but it will periodically contain blood. The nosebleeds and the coughing will be a persistent symptom from this point on, along with the aches and fever.

Saturday night, she'll have nightmares again. Again she won't remember them, but she'll feel tired and anxious in the morning.

------------------

The attempt to read the surface thoughts of the woman in the bar would reveal her to be (seemingly) innocent to whatever plot Eric may have been involved in. She was thinking about her job at an office and whether or not she ought to ask for a raise, apparently oblivious to anything unusual going on around her.

As for the results of the life scan, this is what Sera will find:

She has indeed been infected with a virus. What she can expect from it... she doesn't know. It isn't something she recognizes. But she can feel the virus spreading and replicating in her body, moving through her bloodstream to infect her respiratory system. And the more her immune system attacks it, the more it reproduces.

There's something more, too. As Sera performs her scan, she'll get a flesh of oracular vision - cryptic omens of things yet to come. In her mind's eye, she'll see a virus blossom into a hydra with a hundred heads, each one dripping blood from its eyes and mouth. When one head opens its mouth to snarl, she dives into the throat and the world goes red. And then she is drowning in a lake of blood. And in the sky above there is a shadow some dark phantom looking down. Watching her die, cold and observant.

Serafíne

mnemosyne @ 3:25PM
Time 2. Difficulty 5, -2 for merit. What was Eric doing before he ran into them at the Tap House?
Roll: 2 d10 TN3 (1, 9) ( success x 1 ) VALID

mnemosyne @ 3:26PM
Extending: difficulty +1 for extension, and -1 for specialty focus.
Roll: 2 d10 TN3 (3, 5) ( success x 2 ) VALID

mnemosyne @ 3:26PM
aaand, extending, ditto.
Roll: 2 d10 TN3 (6, 6) ( success x 2 ) VALID

Samael @ 3:27PM
Witnessed

And, here is a roll for healing some of the virus damage. Mind, if while she's doing this she realizes it redoubles the attack she will probably stop for the moment.

mnemosyne @ 3:27PM
Then: Life 2, healing virus damage on herself. Difficulty 5, -1 for taking her time.
Roll: 2 d10 TN4 (2, 3) ( success x 1 ) [WP] VALID

mnemosyne @ 3:28PM
Hmm. And extending, I suppose. Spending a quint to keep the difficulty at 4.
Roll: 2 d10 TN4 (6, 9) ( success x 2 ) VALID

Hydra

Sera will have no trouble with the Time effect. She'll see that Eric arrived at the bar about an hour before she and Sid did. He ordered a drink (that same beer he was carrying when they saw him) and took occasional small sips, but didn't seem tremendously interested in drinking it. He spent some time looking around the taphouse, and some time on his smartphone playing angry birds. He also chatted a bit with some of the people around him, acting friendly and sociable without really engaging anyone. A couple of girls tried to get him to join them for drinks but he told them he was waiting for someone.

And that does seem like what he's doing. Waiting. Or maybe keeping a lookout.

When Sid and Sera show up, he spots them almost immediately, his gaze lingering on them as they walk to their table. Then he turns back to his beer and takes a few drinks. He folds over a little, putting his hands in his lap, and takes out a tiny spray bottle. He spritzes his palm once, quickly, then puts the bottle away and waits. That's when he gets up and approaches Sid and Sera.

The rest is as it happened.

--------------------------

When Sera performs the healing effect on Friday, it will work as expected. Afterwards, she'll feel a great deal better, and her symptoms will be gone.

The next morning (Saturday) the fever will come back, and it will spike very quickly up to 104 - nearly dangerous levels. The aches will come back, the headache, and she'll get another nosebleed.

Around 10 am she'll cough up a fairly alarming amount of blood, and after that the coughing will persist - worse than before. She'll have some trouble with respiration, particularly if she tries to exert herself, and she'll be able to feel fluid in her lungs.

At noon, she'll get a sharp pain in her stomach and vomit up more blood. The stomach pain will remain, and from then on she'll have trouble keeping food down. She'll also be getting dehydrated, so will need to keep her fluid intake up.

Some time around 4pm is when the hallucinations are going to start. She'll see trails of blood dripping down her walls, but a moment later this will disappear. She'll hear whispering voices speaking in an unintelligible language for about five minutes. At one point she'll look down and see what looks like bugs crawling around literally underneath her skin. She'll feel them too, itching and crawling. Again, this lasts for about five minutes.

Sometime around 10pm she's going to experience an intense hallucination - watching her flesh melt off of her skin. It'll seem real when it happens.

Then she's going to pass out.

Sera's housemates would indeed find her gone, and there would be no clear evidence of how she left - if she walked out on her own or was taken. But yes, if they would let others know, go ahead and do that.

As for her divination...

After Eric left the taphouse, he walked around the corner and got out his smartphone, at which point he did something with the phone which could have been any number of mundane or suspicious things. It was right about the time that Sid and Sera got stung by the bugs though. He stayed for a few seconds, watching the screen on his phone and breathing quickly (like he was pretty amped up - excited maybe?) then he put his phone away and jogged toward a parked black audi. Where he went when he drove away, Sera doesn't know. He was heading North, but that doesn't give much clue.

Iolaus

Serafíne

That first night Sera accompanies Sid to Sid's place; hangs out while Sid updates Ginger, listens to the updates from Grace and Lena that she had missed or ignored. Ginger is genius, really, Sera thinks Grace is brilliant and sometimes calls the phone sex line up just to listen to the sexy, computerized voice though sometimes becomes more rare as the whole thing loses its novelty but also: Ginger is strange and impersonal and somehow imperfect for the details they are discussing.

Sera knocks around Sid's house and spends long enough with Sid for Sid to confirm that the virus is in the blood. She's not breathing it out, not yet, Sera. She's not going to infect the whole of the city if she goes back to the tap house and gets a little bit more stoned and unwinds time to see what she can see about Eric-from-LA, Eric-the-actor from LA with the dirty-girl sister and the slide of cold, implacable anger underneath.

The rest of the night and into the morning, Sera spends in her own home, in her own bed, surrounded by her own things. Rises and checks the messages and wanders downstairs phone in hand for her usual (though early) breakfast. It is only noon and no one expects her to be awake at this hour but -

- fuck if her nose isn't starting to bleed. She cleans it up. Retreats to her room and flushes the tissues down the toilet. Feels the ache in her muscles and the sandpaper assertion behind her eyes and the all-too-familiar sensation of nightmares just beyond her ken.

Shortly after noon on Thursday Sera shows up at Lena's, two reuseable bags full of groceries, though she'll leave them on the landing if the other Cultist insists. Doesn't intend to stay long anyway. If Grace is willing to share her address on Ginger, she'll get a similar visit. And similar groceries: tissues, the good kind with lotion embedded in the weave, toilet paper, cans of soup, OJ, yogurt, bananas: easy foods that are easy to prepare when sick. She doesn't insist on coming in, but if allowed she hangs out for a bit, makes jokes, reassures them both that they'll be okay.

She doesn't look like she believes it, Sera.

That Thursday afternoon driving herself home - driving herself home, fucking sober - Sera starts feeling worse. The fever's spiking and she has a coughing fit. Develops another nose bleed. Gets impatient with this shit and tries to fix it. For Sera, Lena's warning will come too late.

Does fix it, some of it, temporarily, and heaves a sigh of relief as the symptoms abate.

There are other things niggling at the back of her mind.

She can't go out, can't hang out, can't can't can't expose her housemates to whatever the fuck it is. Well, truthfully she'll figure that out later. Thursday-into-Friday is still restless, though, and there's that vision at the back of her mind.

Sera sends a text, late late or early early, depending on the house you sleep and the hour you rise.

you know everything

some god or whatever killed a hydra

She means Hercules, though she does not know it.

tell me how he did it

And either Hawksley calls her and tells her a bedtime story about Hercules' second labor; how every time he cut off one of the hydra's heads, two more would grow back. Until he sought the assistance of Iolaus, who stood there with a torch and cauterized the wounds each time Hercules lopped off one of those head. Or: someone gives Sera the news about wikipedia, and that it is accessible from her phone.

Friday she gets the messages from Ginger again, and leaves one of her own. A mildly rambling voice mail.

Outbreak

Outbreak

The weather in Denver that evening was about eight degrees warmer than it had been the night before - crisp without being chilly. It was the sort of absolutely perfect fall weather that made people think of bonfires and jack-o-lanterns and everything that was fun and festive about the month of October. Not surprisingly, a number of the bars and restaurants downtown were seeing a rise in business as the weather turned. Falling Rock Taphouse was no exception.

When Sid and Serafine arrived, they'd find the place busy, but not to the point of overcrowding (it was still a weekday, after all.) The main bar, with its line of wooden stools, was pleasantly lively with tipsy conversation, and the various booths and tables were populated with a wide array of patrons.

Sid

A lovely fall night melting into a crisp, cool evening. It's a good time to be out and about, wandering the streets with a friend. Out for shopping, out for a drink, out for the company. Should be a good, pleasant, ordinary time.

Except that Sid is on edge. She's made a habit of checking Ginger regularly and so she knows: two of her friends are sick with something unknown, something that they caught from robotic wasps. So when she enters that bar she does a quick sweep, stretching to her full height, lifting up slightly to the balls of her feet, craning her neck to look around. Looking for a girl with blue eyes, perhaps, or simply anyone out of the ordinary.

Of course, it's a bar that's pleasantly full of people on a weeknight, people who are tipsy and loud or quietly eating or whatever. Sid's dressed for the cooler weather in a soft grey hoody over a pale button down blouse, dark washed skinny jeans tucked into knee-high boots, a thin grey-blue scarf wrapped loosely over her shoulders. Her hair has been twisted up, not in a clip but wound round a pen and pinned into place, wisps falling to brush against her cheeks.

There is a part of her, the paranoid part that keeps that weather eye out at all times, that thinks they shouldn't be out. A larger part refuses to be kept indoors out of fear. So, she listens to the story that Sera tells while they look for a place to settle in.

Sid

[percept (paranoid as hell) + awareness]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 4, 4, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1

Serafíne

Sera's there a bit early or a bit late. This one time Sid doesn't have to pick her up. She does get around the city on her own, somehow, and her means involve tipping a veritable fleet of cab drivers very, very well. So: Sera's already there, standing just inside the front doors, chatting with the hostess like they are old, old friends. Her singular concession to the weather is a hooded leather jacket with cable-knit cuffs and a bristling array of spikes on the shoulders. She has the hood up so she's not immediately identifiable from behind because all her curling blond hair is covered up and there's no immediate awareness of the distinctive sidecut with her head covered, but there's no mistaking the way Sera feels.

Well and fuck. Beneath that hooded leather jacket she is wearing a tiny black circle skirt with hot pink polka dots and torn fishnets and heavy black boots and may not actually be wearing a top, or perhaps she's wearing a bra - no, wait. She's wearing a flannel she's left unbuttoned.

Even though she's not been seated yet, our Sera already has a beer in hand. She smells like the finest Moroccan hashish and Turkish tobacco and looks like sin.

"Hey - " and, already just a bit tipsy, if her drawling greeting is any indication. She woke up two or three hours ago, but launches into this story about Elvis and Graceland and is already planning to order the Elvis Presley Special. Will they really give her the fucking pills? Will they really serve up a defibrillator?

The pair pass up the dining room and head to the bar and Sera's grabbing menus from the bartender and bringing them back to the table-for-more-than-two they settle on, clearly vibing on the pleasant hum of the crowd all around them.

Serafíne

(Perception + Awareness)

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 4, 5, 5, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 5 )

Outbreak

[There seems to be no trace of magical resonance to be found in the bar tonight, aside of course from Sid and Sera's own. The two are able to pick up no trace of willworking, no lingering presence of Awakened souls. By all accounts, the place is utterly mundane.]

Outbreak

Sera drew Sid toward a table near the bar, grabbing menus on the way. As the pair of them took their seats, a couple of college-aged guys leaned out from the bar and grinned at them, all red-cheeked and glassy-eyed. One of them actually winked, but they stopped short of actually cat-calling, and a moment later one of their female friends swatted the winking one on the head and pulled their attention back to their drinks.

It didn't take long for a waitress to show up at the table, bearing tall glasses of ice water which she set down before them. She was young and blond and attractive in an androgynous sort of way, with boy-short hair and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. "Anything I can get you two to drink while you look at the menus?"

Sid

Sid doesn't know about the Elvis Presley memorial special, and she hadn't heard that story before she says as she puts an arm around her shoulders, not caring a whit about those spikes. If Sera hasn't lived in Denver longer than Sid, she's definitely experienced more of it, or heard more about it from this or that friend or acquaintance or other. But what she's seen about Sid once, maybe twice, perhaps enough for it to stick as a 'thing' is that the woman has an interest in trying new things. Even when she's nervous, on edge, wary, she's gone into bars and new restaurants.

She doesn't know about the burger, though, but if Sera's going for Elvis, then Sid will go for Cash. The name stands out when she glances over the menu, spotting the young men - boys, really, to a woman of her age - and lowering her head. Pointedly ignoring them, but always, always aware of their presence in the room. Them and others like them. Sid tried to hide from that sort of attention, and then she finally gave up.

"Do you," starts Sid, quiet voice lost to the din. One shoulder bunching up uncomfortably and one hand reaches up to swipe wisping hair away from her cheek. Dark eyes sweep the beer list as she shakes her head, and she tries again, a little louder. "Just water, please."

Serafíne

One of the rules of the universe: someone winks at Sera and she winks back, though in this case Sera is winking at the female friend of that glassy-eyed boy, watching the girl as she swats him on the ass with a menu or some fucking thing. Her story is suspended in that moment, though she turns her head beneath that hood back to Sid, grinning this neat and slicing-broad little grin that opens up to include the waitress who approaches them with those tall glasses of water.

"Bud light," Sera starts, with a quick and razor edged grin at the waitress ready to pull her hipster credentials, "No, wait - gimme the Redstone Meadery Sunshine Necter and bring us a couple of shots of Patron too."

Sera sits easily, head lolling in the hood, looking lazy as a lounging cat while the waitress scratches down their drink orders, leaving behind the menus and the endless list of beers-on-tap. Waits until the woman leaves before leaning forward over that drink she already has, which she either managed to secure or brought with her in-from-outside, which is decidedly not water.

"C'mon Sid. It's a fucking tap house. You gotta have a beer. Fuck, they even have teeny sample sizes!"

Outbreak

The waitress ginned at Sera's joke, jotting down her order with a nod. Sid said she was happy with water, but Sera insisted upon something more substantial. Whatever their order ended up being (if Sid chose to tack something on for herself,) the girl left them with a smile and a brisk little turn that took her winding back through the tables toward the bar.

If either Sid or Sera happened to follow the waitress's retreating form with their gaze, they might spy a man sitting alone at the end of the bar, watching them with an alert and interested expression. Unlike the other two, he was a few years older (probably around 26 or 27,) and he looked as though he was probably on his first drink of the evening.

But neither of these details were the most immediate. What one noticed about him (what anyone would notice about him,) was that he was beautiful the way that Hollywood actors were beautiful. Almost plastic, in a way, with a strong jaw and huge blue eyes. After a pause of about thirty seconds, he finally picked up his beer (a local brew - some kind of pumpkin stout) and walked toward their table, smiling in a warm and assured manner (like this was something he was used to doing - approaching strangers.)

"Ok, those are some seriously killer boots. Do you mind if I ask where you got them?"

Serafíne

The both of them are wearing killer boots. Sid's are thigh-high and leather. Sera's have fucking platforms and five inch spiked heels and a bristling array buckles and zippers and metal plates every which way and Sera doesn't really notice that guy as the waitress zips away but she does notice him when he walks up to them, lovely and quite nearly plastic, with that self-confidence that so often turns sour late at night when the colors are starting to run.

Still, Sera favors him with a lazy grin and flicks him a look all up-and-down, stretches out her left leg to let him admire the boots, the shiny metal wrapped around the spikey heel, turning her foot this way and that.

"These? Someplace in fucking Brooklyn. I think they cater to drag queens and dominatrixes and fuck me if I can remember the name. Why?"

Her grin sharpens to a fine little edge. " - you shopping for you? Or someone else. Because if you're putting them on here and now," a glance down at his feet. "Well fuck, I might be willing to effect a trade tout-suite. Just to see you trying to walk in them.

"Takes a warrior - what the fuck is your name, anyway?"

Sid

There was a time when Sid was -- scratch that. Sid has been making greater strides in her attempts to not only for once and for all sever her connection to her past, but scrape off and sand down any remaining jagged edges. The woman sitting next to Sera is who she is and who (she is pretty sure) she will always be. Sensitive, considerate, quiet.

Never the less, when Sera presses her about beers in tap houses, Sid frowns. She sticks to her decision, however, sticks with water, will maybe switch to a soda when it's time to order real food. She refuses to let her guard down, because, as she says as soon as the waitress has left, "Did you hear what happened to Grace and Lena?"

She says this as she watches the waitress wander off to put in their order, eyes traveling after her in a way that's not exactly passive or thoughtless. Then she sees that man, so nice on the eyes, watching them at their table and, as with the winker and his buddy, Sid frowns and looks away. But she remains aware of him, watching him from the corner of her eye as he lifts his glass and begins his approach.

And when he's there, asking Sera about her boots, she's still watching him.

[awarepathy because WHO YOU?? WHAT'CHU WANT?? JUST BOOTS OR ARE YOU CASING US TO KILL US LATER??]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 4, 5, 9, 9) ( success x 2 )

Outbreak

[Manip+Subterfuge - who, me?]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8) ( success x 4 )

Sid

[*_* too pretty]

Outbreak

He'd directed the question to Sera, because it was Sera whose dramatic fashion sense always seemed to make that first noticeable impression upon strangers. Yet Sid hardly went unnoticed, as evidenced by the fact that the guy shifted his eyes (and his smile) toward her a moment later, and when he did so the smile widened a bit, flashing a set of perfect teeth to go with his perfect jaw and his perfect eyes and his just-slightly-imperfect dusting of barely-visible freckles across his nose.

Sera asked if he wanted the boots for himself, and he laughed and shook his head. "Nah, I'm more of a kitten heels kind of girl. But my sister would love them." (Alas, it would seem that he was not, in fact, a warrior.)

But Sera asked for his name, so he reached out with the hand not currently occupied with holding his beer and said, "Eric. I'm on vacation from LA. Nice to meet you."

When he was finished addressing Sera, he repeated the gesture with Sid, offering his hand in a warm and gregarious gesture. "Yours are pretty nice too. The boots, that is."

Sid

People usually notice Sera first and foremost. She is quite striking, but more than that she has a vibrancy, a magnetism that draws people toward her. Sid doesn't mind, not even a little, because while people are talking to and checking out Sera, she's a little more free to get a bead on them, check them out, get a sense of who they are and what their intentions are.

or well, usually that's the case. Tonight, Sid isn't given much of a chance to study this rather perfect specimen of the male of the species. That smile gets turned her way and her brows tighten and her head tilts away slightly. There is nothing outwardly wrong, nothing he says rings particularly false and he seems to be everything that he seems to be. Still.

Sid merely looks at the offered hand a moment before looking to Sera and finally looking back up at that too-pretty face. She has been hurt in just about all the ways there are to be hurt, and by or because of people she cares for deeply and who claim that she matters to them. She is not about to trust this stranger.

Her lower lip disappears between her teeth and she looks away. "Thanks."

Sera's Dice

[Per+Awareness]

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (4, 6, 7, 7, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )

Serafíne

"Your sister, eh?" Sera's grin just won't quit. It's a bit shadowed by the hood she's still wearing but fuck if she can quite stop looking at him, though perhaps not the way he's used to people looking at him. These pieces of her face highlighted: the wide brow, the sharp edge of her nose. The crawlingly self-confident smile, all lapped by shadow. "She must be a dirty girl."She did just say that and now she shakes off the hood and extends her hand which bristles with darkly inked tattoos and metal bridges and leather cuffs. Her leather jacket creaks quietly with the movement and falls open a bit more, revealing the lean line of her torso, which is defined not because she lifts weights or anything so particular, so much as because she burns everything she consumes and there's not much left, after."LA - " Sera's saying, shooting Sid a glance as Sid declines to take the guy's hand. "Jesus Christ I fucking hate LA. Let me guess you're an agent, of some fucking sort. Talent or real estate or fucking - FBI or literary with a side of porn. Oh, or maybe a weather person. Everybody loves the goddamned weather."Fucking LA. Only place more artificial is Vegas," Yeah, there's nothing retiring about her and that much is evident even now. Though there is a moment of hesitation. Sera's on the verge of inviting the guy to sit his ass down when she shoots another flicker of a look at Sid. That tightness. That aversion. That inversion. " - and at least Vegas feels like it would just keep going if everything else burned to the ground. Like that's what it was meant to do in the first fucking place."[INSERT PER + AWARENESS ROLL HERE. which is recorded above, thank you Howl!]

Serafíne

"Your sister, eh?" Sera's grin just won't quit. It's a bit shadowed by the hood she's still wearing but fuck if she can quite stop looking at him, though perhaps not the way he's used to people looking at him. These pieces of her face highlighted: the wide brow, the sharp edge of her nose. The crawlingly self-confident smile, all lapped by shadow. "She must be a dirty girl."

She did just say that and now she shakes off the hood and extends her hand which bristles with darkly inked tattoos and metal bridges and leather cuffs. Her leather jacket creaks quietly with the movement and falls open a bit more, revealing the lean line of her torso, which is defined not because she lifts weights or anything so particular, so much as because she burns everything she consumes and there's not much left, after.

"LA - " Sera's saying, shooting Sid a glance as Sid declines to take the guy's hand. "Jesus Christ I fucking hate LA. Let me guess you're an agent, of some fucking sort. Talent or real estate or fucking - FBI or literary with a side of porn. Oh, or maybe a weather person. Everybody loves the goddamned weather.

"Fucking LA. Only place more artificial is Vegas," Yeah, there's nothing retiring about her and that much is evident even now. Though there is a moment of hesitation. Sera's on the verge of inviting the guy to sit his ass down when she shoots another flicker of a look at Sid. That tightness. That aversion. That inversion. " - and at least Vegas feels like it would just keep going if everything else burned to the ground. Like that's what it was meant to do in the first fucking place."

[INSERT PER + AWARENESS ROLL HERE. which is recorded above, thank you Howl!]

Outbreak

[See above for said Awareness roll, which apparently the log decided to keep. This was an Empathy roll directed at both Eric and Sid, btw.]

Outbreak

When Sera grasped Eric’s hand, she’d find his grip warm and assertive. His skin was soft and un-calloused (and let’s face it, he looked like the kind of guy who’d never really had to work a day in his life,) but his palm had a light residue of sweat the seemed to belie his relaxed demeanor. Both she and Sid attempted to get a read on him, but if he was a con artist then he was a very good one. To Sid’s eyes, he was exactly what he seemed: a pretty boy from LA who was probably used to being able to charm his way into conversations with strangers. He seemed interested and friendly, if perhaps a bit too sure of himself.

He ignored Sera’s attempts to bait him, responding to her assumptions with a light smirk. “I’m an actor, actually. Big surprise, I know.”

Sid didn’t take his hand, and it was this that seemed to finally register in Eric’s expression. He gave a slightly awkward pause, dropped his arm and nodded. “Right, well, I’ll leave you two in peace then. It was nice meeting you. Have a good evening.”

As he left, he skirted the edge of their table, heading – not back to his seat at the bar – but toward the exit. As he did so, he barely avoided colliding with a woman at the next table over who’d just gotten out of her chair. (Perhaps he was a bit more flustered than his laid-back demeanor would imply.) The beer in his glass sloshed alarmingly (but did not spill) as he ducked out of the way, setting a hand briefly on the back of Sid’s chair to steady himself. “Sorry,” he apologized to both the woman and Sid simultaneously.

He was gone shortly thereafter, stopping by the bar to deposit his half-empty glass before he disappeared out the door.

All this just in time for the waitress to return with Sera’s drinks, which she deposited on the table with practiced efficiency. “Have you two had time to look at the menus yet?”

Outbreak

Sera, on the other hand, was able to glimpse subtle clues of a more complete and nuanced picture. Much of what he told them didn’t seem to be a lie. As far as she could tell, he really was from LA, and his name really was Eric. As for his interest in Sera’s boots… well, in truth it was closer to curiosity. The suggestion that his sister might like a pair had carried a faint undertone of ironic humor, which one might attribute to some kind of teasing in-joke between brother and sister. More than likely he’d used the boots as an excuse to come over and talk to the two of them, but this in itself was hardly surprising or unusual. Neither was the brief flicker of anger that showed around his eyes when Sera called his sister a ‘dirty girl.’ Some brothers could be protective like that, which was likely why Sera had said it in the first place: to get a rise out of him. There was something cold and powerful about that anger though, for all that it only barely showed. Like the tip of an iceberg. (Yeah, she’d hit a pretty deep nerve with that one.) As for the needling comments about LA, they elicited, as expected, a prickle of irritation – but nothing more telling than that.

It was the manner of the man’s exit that rang the most suspicious. Outwardly the whole thing seemed entirely natural, with an edge of the sort of awkwardness one would expect of the situation. But something was missing from the exchange, and that was disappointment. He didn’t seem embarrassed by the near-collision either, though perhaps he really was just that fucking confident.

Sid

[percept+alert damn it Sid you're supposed be paranoid so BE PARANOID AND NOTICE THINGS AT THE SAME TIME]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Outbreak

[There's very little that Sid misses tonight. Her paranoia keeps her alert and aware of her environment, and she'll feel Eric's hand coming toward her before it actually gets there, giving her time to lean as far out of the way as possible to avoid contact. As she watches him leave, there isn't much to see. He doesn't pay for his drink, likely because he'd already paid earlier (so maybe he'd only ever intended to have the one - and that he didn't even finish.) And he leaves without even so much as a look in their direction. Nothing suspicious, really, aside from the somewhat abrupt manner of his leaving. Though this too could be attributed to embarrassment.]

Sid

Sera glances her way, but Sera should know. Even now, even after all she's been through and how much she's come out of that armor she built up around herself, even with friends near and a phone call away. Sid is wary. She is especially wary of strange men in loud crowded places. If she hadn't read those updates on Ginger, if this was just the two of them going out for a drink like everything's as normal as it can be for people like them, she would have ordered that beer. She would be grinning and talking about who even knows what, or grinning and listening to Sera tell stories.

But this isn't a normal night. There is tension in Sid, and besides that, she is shy with strangers and people she doesn't know. She does not take the hands of strangers because she knows what those hands that seem friendly can do. She is aware of the damage that can be caused by trusting someone.

She does not take this Eric's hand and he seems to finally register that the woman who is engaging him in conversation is not the same as the one sitting next to her. She will not touch him. She will not give him her name. She will watch him warily and speak little. Not quite the timid mouse she seemed to be, but the watchdog she always has been.

He leaves then, and in a hurry, and as he hurries he stumbles into Sid's chair. And Sid sits suddenly upright, spine straight as a rod, her head twisted back to stare at him, at his hand behind her back. Tooclosetooclosetooclosetooclosetooclose! says that look, and she even goes so far as to lean a little further away from him, perching toward the edge like she, herself, is preparing to rise out of that chair.

He goes, and Sid frowns after him. Only when the door swings closed behind him does she turn back to Sera, before looking blankly up at the waitress.

Serafíne

"I'm having the fucking Elvis thing," Sera says with the flash of a mildly distracted smile as the waitress re-appears at their table, drinks in hand. Or rather: Sera's drinks in hand, all three of them, and a dish of lime slices to boot, which will doubtless earn the woman a good tip. "Make sure to bring me a sampling of all the pills, and I probably won't need the fucking whats-it. Defibrillator, but you can bring it so I get a fucking good look at it, or whatever."

Distracted, because Sera's watching Eric as he disappears, checking out that woman at the next table with whom he nearly collided, drawing these vector lines between them and looking, well, a little bit zoned out. Soon as her drinks arrive she picks up the first and tosses back tequila without partaking of either lime or salt. Lets it run, burning, down her throat.

Her fingers are tapping lightly against the tabletop and she's looking a little bit unfocused, paying precisely zero attention to the waitress as Eric from LA whose sister is decidedly not a dirty girl (even in lingering response, the phrase makes Sera's mouth curve in savoring grin) and who is expecting some of this shit. Making a staged fucking exit. Strange how spaces start to dissolve, all the strangers' conversations between a bright and pulsating rhythm, the world turns around on itself. Sera jams a little bit more, see. An old Beatles song under her breath. Their later work. She's an Abbey Road girl, not a candy-colored British invasion mop-top aficionado.

Serafíne

Mind 2: on Eric the Dude. Difficulty: 5 -1 (specialty focus - music) + WP

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (4, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Outbreak

[For Sera, the final clue in small string of maybes - the thing that made this guy really stand out - is what happened when she tried to enter his mind. Because he felt like a Sleeper, but the walls around his thoughts were like a fucking iron box. Instead of forging a connection, her extended perception merely bounced off of the block as though she'd smacked headlong into an actual, physical barrier.]

Outbreak

When Sera ordered the Elvis Presley Memorial Combo, the waitress raised her eyebrows and grinned as though she'd just won a bet. (Maybe she had.) "It doesn't really come with a defibrillator, but we'll be ready to call the paramedics if you need it."

When she glanced at Sid - at her blank and nervous expression - she paused and said, "I can come back, if you need a few more moments."

Then she too was gone (for the moment,) leaving the two alone to discuss - or not discuss - their thoughts.

Serafíne

n"Fine," Sera to the waitress, surfacing from her semi-trance with

a rather troubled expression chasing across her face. "Just

make sure the fucking thing comes with the drugs, though. One of

fucking each. Gotta catch 'em all, right?"

Arch and shining and simmering, yeah, but beneath it her own

discomfort is easy to read to anyone watching. Still, Sera winks

at the waitress as the woman leaves and then glances behind and

beyond her, frowning in Eric's wake.

"That bastard. Can't get anything on him," rather more quietly

to Sid. "Looks and feels like someone whose eyes are all closed, right? But he's mind's locked up tighter than -

"Well, fucking tight. Which takes work and skill. And that collision wasn't accidental. So what's going on? What's this about Grace and Lena?"

Serafíne

"Fine," Sera to the waitress, surfacing from her semi-trance with a rather troubled expression chasing across her face. "Just make sure the fucking thing comes with the drugs, though. One of fucking each. Gotta catch 'em all, right?"

Arch and shining and simmering, yeah, but beneath it her own discomfort is easy to read to anyone watching. Still, Sera winks at the waitress as the woman leaves and then glances behind and beyond her, frowning in Eric's wake.

"That bastard. Can't get anything on him," rather more quietly to Sid. "Looks and feels like someone whose eyes are all closed, right? But he's mind's locked up tighter than -

"Well, fucking tight. Which takes work and skill. And that collision wasn't accidental. So what's going on? What's this about Grace and Lena?"

Serafíne

WITS PLUS ALERTNESS

Dice: 4 d10 TN8 (2, 2, 5, 6) ( fail )

Sid

[WITS+ALERT]

Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (1, 1, 4, 6, 10) ( success x 1 )

Sid

The waitress looks at her, and it's not until she's saying, "moments," that Sid startles as if to wakefulness and manages to blurt, "Johnny Cash." Hopefully she understands.

"That's weird, right?" she asks, scooting her chair closer to Sera, just two friends gabbing about the failed pick-up that just happened. Maybe. Except that both of them look entirely too uncomfortable after an exchange that looked on the surface to be so friendly and so normal.

"No," she says quietly to Sera's assertion that the collision wasn't accidental. And she looks over to the woman that had been collided into in her stead.

"They're sick, really, really sick. I've asked a friend to look in on Grace."

She, too, is a little distracted. Reaching up, she plucks the pen from out of her hair, allowing the thick, long locks to cascade around her shoulders. Her fear, that little nugget of feeling she carries with her at all times in the form of that rampant paranoia, is grasped, twisted, turned outward to view the threads of fate while. Pushing up the sleeve of her left arm enough to expose the edge of that tattoo's line, she hums a single note quietly, and connects a second carbon molecule to the permanent one.

[Life/Entropy/Prime scan]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 2) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Outbreak

The woman (dark haired, early forties and casually dressed) who Eric had narrowly missed running into seemed fairly oblivious to their attention. She was there with a couple of friends, one of whom had just left to accompany her to the restroom. Perhaps her presence there had merely been a coincidence, or perhaps Eric had seen a moment and taken it. Or perhaps... the whole encounter had been orchestrated. It was rather difficult to tell.

Sid and Sera had more warning of what was to come than Grace and Lena had. But in the end, it did them little good. Sid was so alert that she would have noticed a fucking mosquito flying toward her, but she wasn't looking the one place she needed to. Sera missed the tiny creature entirely, and wouldn't have any warning of what was about to occur until she felt a sudden, sharp sting on the exposed part of her thigh - as though she'd just been struck by a wasp. But whatever it was that had caused the pain, it would be gone before she had a chance to react.

Sid was just a hair quicker, and in her hyper-aware state she'd feel the flutter of the thing's wings just before it landed on her own leg. The sting happened before she could stop it, the needle sticking through the material of her jeans to access the flesh beneath. But in the whip-crack of her reaction, she caught the bug beneath her hand. Its tiny, filigreed metal body crunched and crumbled under the assault, leaving a mangled remnant of what appeared to be - upon close inspection - a tiny gold robotic wasp with an injection needle for a stinger.

But what the hell had they just been injected with?

Outbreak

[Sid attempted to discern the details of her surroundings, but all she was able to pick up was a brief flash of the pulse of human bodies around her. Nothing that gave any clues or indication of what she might be looking for.]

Sid

[extending]

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (1, 8) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Serafíne

Sera's thigh is... yeah, pretty easily accessible. She feels the pinprick, missing the delivery method entirely, turning her thigh and rubbing thoughtlessly at her skin through the ripped and torn diamonds of her fishnets, letting her focus drift and narrow. She is just high enough, just drunk enough, just -

Life scan: Difficulty 4

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (2, 3) ( fail )

Sid

What indeed. Sid is aware of the people that surround her, she's aware of the movement of the man, she's aware of the very air around her. But her legs, they're long and they're mostly under the table. The wings of the metal creature, so much tougher and inflexible than a true insect's, beat against the fabric of her pantleg and she swats almost without thinking. It threatens to break her concentration, but she keeps herself focused.

She keeps her mind open to the patterns around her, to the effects that may or may not be twisting around them, to the shifts of fate.

Her brows constrict, and she comes back to herself, becomes more focused on the here and the now. At least enough to realize she's trapped something beneath her hand. Slowly, she wraps her fingers around the remains and lifts her hands to see--

Her heart sinks.

"We have to go." She unwraps some silverware from its neatly folded napkin and wraps the mechanical thing up in it, slips it into her bag. They have food coming, drinks (although Sid's is only water), but she can't even think about eating now. She knows what's coming. "I need to get something from my place, but. I think we should get Grace and Lena. We should be together."

Outbreak

What Sid was able to pick up upon further concentration would not give much clue as to the nature of the attack. As she'd sensed before, there were no lingering remnants of quintessence or effect-weaving - not on the wasp, and not in the room itself. The threads of fate had not been tampered with, although there was a low, ominous note coming from the wasp - like a dawning sense of dread. A sign of bad omens and things yet to come.

And the more she focused, the louder and deeper the vibrations of that supernatural hum started to feel.

Not surprisingly, she suggested that they leave. Sera would more than likely pay for their uneaten food (though perhaps not.) Either way, they were on their way out.

And in the meantime, something foreign and hungry was swimming its way through their bloodstream.

Outbreak

[Rolling for Sera's Mind scan on the woman]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (9, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Outbreak

[Aaand rolling for her life scan on herself]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (8, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Sid

[science on Sid's blood at home, using that sweet sweet compound whatever microscope, mm yeah: int+science]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Sid

[and Sera's]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 5, 8, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

Sid

[scanning self/blood: Life]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (5, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Outbreak

[Oh, one more quick for Sera because I almost forgot. Per+Aware for oracular ability]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

Alec

Serafíne

The Stumble Inn is a block and a half down East Colfax from the Ogden Theater. Hole in the wall sort of place, down a long, narrow exterior staircase with old wrought-iron railings. Through a heavy, oaken, iron-banded door into a narrow barspace with barrel vaulted ceilings and so many whiskeys lining the shelves back there that each of the battered little tables has a laminated three-ring binder listing them out, organized by country, state, region.

Beyond the bar, the place opens up. There's a small stage and a tight little dance floor but no one's playing tonight. It's a fucking Sunday and the hour's getting later and most folks are just have one or two, to take the edge off. Or three or four, to help them recover from last night.

There's music, though. Of course there is: it's that sort of place.

--

There's a girl at the bar with a headful of blond curls falling down the back of a well-worn leather jacket. Fishnets and heels are also visible from behind with even a spare, cursory glance. She looks, long and lean and tall, 5'9" or 5'10", though she's leaning forward, draped really, over a half-empty bottle of Stranahan's, one hand on the neck, her arm around the base as she chats and laughs with the bartender.

Alec Auden

Alec was the sort of person who didn't especially care what day of the week it was when he went drinking. Or even, for that matter, whether it was night or day. Sometimes he'd spend the whole week working diligently on some project or other. Other days, someone might find him drunk and singing to himself at ten in the morning. (Just depended on the day, really.)

Denver had so far proved amenable to his needs on the latter count, and he had yet to even scratch the surface of the countless bars and clubs and gastro-pubs that dotted the city. This one seemed welcoming enough for his needs, and any bar that kept this much whiskey stocked couldn't be all bad.

If Serafine happened to look in the direction of the stairs, she'd see a tall (6'2" plus an inch and a half from the heels of his boots,) wiry-looking figure with a shock of blond hair and a week's worth of scruff on his chin a few shades darker than the hair on his head. Age-wise he was probably between 25 and 30, with sharp, pretty features. He had on a black leather jacket, which he pulled off to reveal a simple white henley and a bit of braided leather circling his neck.

Whether Serafine noticed him or not, he of course noticed her. Sera wasn't the sort of person who went unnoticed in a bar on a slow night (or any night, for that matter.) So he sat down nearby - not next to her but one seat down - and regarded her with a silent and curious glance for a moment before placing his order with the bartender for some type of obscure rye whiskey. When that was settled, he turned to Sera and said, "You look like you should be somewhere more interesting."

Serafíne

Perception + Awareness, you know how we do.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 5, 7) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

Sera didn't feel him from miles away. Maybe just a tingle when he hit the top of the stairs; something whispering against her drunk senses. Enough that she did half-turn, shooting a glance over her shoulder as Alec walked in.

Her eyes are a bit bloodshot, and have the sort of glossy sheen one gets when one has managed to finish half-a-bottle of Stranahan's on a slow Sunday night on a cool, sharp autumn evening in a mediocre bar in a part of town that's only hip when someone cool is playing at the Ogden. Or the Stumble Inn. Or where the fuck ever Sera happens to be.

So: Alec gets a glance as he walks in and then there's cross-talk with the tender and - and and and -

"Hah!" When Sera laughs, she does so open-mouthed. Thoroughly and fully. Hed tipped back, her shoulders twisting in his direction though neither arm leaves its coil around the bottle. That looseness in her posture, in her motion.

"Where-ever I am is by definition more interesting." Her eyes are dark; and steady on him in that challenging way she often has. "Night's just starting, though. Who knows where I'll end up."

Alec Auden

At her laugh, the edge of a smile peaked at one side of his lips, growing into a broad (sharp, dangerous) thing when Sera spoke. Once his drink was poured and placed before him, he lifted the glass and tipped it lightly toward her. "Good answer."

Then he put the glass to his mouth and drank, slowly but deeply, letting the whiskey warm his throat and permeate his senses. When he finished, he wiped his lip with his thumb and relaxed his posture, leaning to one side against the bar. "Statement like that, though... I think you might have to prove it." His eyes held a soft glow of challenge as he held out his hand. "I'm Alec."

Serafíne

"Does that actually work?" The twist of her glossed mouth is wry and suggestive and scoffing all at once, though perhaps a bit flat. There is a banked sort-of spark in her as her arms melt from the crutch of that body and her body language shifts, towards him rather than away from him. See, she turns, leans her left elbow on the bar, her lean frame an angled sweep up toward bar-and-bottle, left hand still around the neck of the glass though the right hand is reaching to take his.

Though perhaps not the way he thinks.

Sera's right hand bristles with rings and tattoos, dark ink crawls over the knuckles and sides of her hand, though in the light and with her jewelry the details of the tattoos are lost. Some sort of text, all black-and-gray. There is also the dark scrawl of ink on the pale skin of her left hand, the palm itself, magnified and distorted by the lens of that half-empty bottle. A spiked leather cuff is tight around her right wrist, peeking out from beneath the cuff of her right sleeve as she reaches for that hand he offers her.

This is how she takes his hand: index finger beneath the curl of his hand, thumb above, as she bends rather ironically over them, brushing her mouth over his knuckles. Leaving behind a slightly viscous smear of lip gloss, and the scent of her hair - all smoke and whiskey.

"The challenge shit." Her eyes find his as she straightens. Dark shadow and liner rings them, and she's too good with her make-up to let him see the hint of shadows beneath them, or maybe that just adds to her allure. "I mean, if so, fuckin' kudos, but I've got nothing to prove. Doesn't mean you can't tag along, long as you can keep up."

An edge to her, tonight. That feels ever-so-slightly self-destructive.

"Serafíne. Call me Sera."

Alec

The manner in which Serafine took his hand, kissing the knuckles in some ironic imitation of bourgeois etiquette, seemed to both confuse and amuse Alec (if his expression was any indication,) but he let the moment pass. There was a story written on his hands - though his was not so deliberately scrawled or decorated (armored) as Sera's. The bones and muscles were hard-etched by labor, the skin rough and dotted with burns and small scars. When Sera pulled away, he glanced down at the smear of lip gloss she left behind and gave a reflexive roll of his knuckles.

She asked if the challenge shit actually worked for him, and he smirked. "Used to."

(Once upon a time and far, far away.)

Alec grabbed his drink and slid casually to the next barstool, taking up proper residence beside her now. "I can keep up," he answered without affectation or bravado. As much a statement of fact as Sera's assertion that her presence made the world around her more interesting by association. (And oh, were the pair of them ever in the wrong company if they had any desire for safety or sobriety.) In response, he finished off the remainder of his whiskey, smiled at the bartender and silently slid his glass across the bar for a refill.

"If I'm lucky, maybe you'll tell me the stories behind your tattoos."

Serafíne

Sera's hands are fine. She's never worked a day in her fucking life. Even when they go on the road, she gets out of the slog of setting up and breaking down their kit by dint of who she is or whatever she's ingested over the course of the show. So: fine hands, calloused yeah, but not from manual labor of any sort, ever. The nails are painted a reflective, starry-black. The peeling enamel has a deep undertone of crimson if you spend long enough studying it beneath the lights in the place.

Which she does sometimes, though not just now.

He can keep up.

"Well alright," she returns, drawls really, the vowels all drawn out, lifting the bottle by its neck and tipping the base in a pendulum arc out to clink it against his refilled whiskey in a wordless toast. Then she drinks another finger or so of her own whiskey, straight from the bottle. Hardly the proper way to drink whiskey, but she does not give a fuck. Breathes in afterwards, though, sharp and deep and savoring as the whiskey thumps back onto the counter, so maybe she does give a very slight fuck. It is, after all, very good local whiskey she is drinking. Hipster-fucking-approved. "Welcome the fuck aboard."

He mentions her tattoos. Sera gives this lazy shake of her golden head, mouth twisting into a mild smirk as she shoots a glance across the bar. The shelves full of whiskey bottles are backed by a mirror as in an actual old-fashioned saloon, and she can find her reflection there, broken into pieces like a second-hand, third-rate would-be Picasso. Her profile is sharp and is not classically beautiful. Brows too straight, nose too prominent, face too narrow, eyes too close together.

And yet: when she's in the room, who can look anywhere else?

There is a brief, far-away look that ghosts across her face. Then she looks back at him, flashes him the most-absurd of her tattoos in the form of a left-handed peace sign. Sharkscissors. The blades on her index and middle fingers, the handles on her palm, one of the loops turning into the shark that curves down her hand and onto her wrist.

"You might get lucky." The smirk is still immediate on her mouth; the far-away look, though. That is also there, still, this implicit sense of distance in her eyes. " - but I don't think you'll that lucky."

Alec

Alec laughed at her response - an easy, good-humored thing. "Fair enough, then." (He, after all, was no stranger to the intimacy of shared stories.) The soft lights of the bar left a glossy sheen in his eyes, warming their normally icy cast. Perhaps Sera's beauty was not of the classical variety, but there was certainly no lack of interest - not on Alec's part, and not from the other men in the bar that night. She was, indeed, impossible not to notice. (And unconventional beauty was beauty nonetheless.)

You see, Alec was rather fond of sharp and dangerous things. He himself had a hardened edge to his cast, though it was tempered by the soft beauty of his natural features. A youthful face, prematurely weathered by experience.

His other hand - the left one - had a long scar running across the back of it. He'd offered her his right hand earlier, but seemed to have switched to his left to drink. "Whiskey's not bad," he commented off-hand, offering tacit approval of the bar's selection. Then, as if it had just occurred to him, he added, "What if I offered something in trade? A story for a story?"

Alec

He compliments the whiskey and Sera, she laughs. Her eyes are bright and there's a certain sort of light sheening across them, the many-layered lights of the bar in scattered reflection over the surface of her half-focused gaze.

"There's a certain time of night when all the whiskey's good whiskey," the creature declares, watching him with a slightly tented expression, her brows peaked above her gleaming gaze. " - though I guess you aren't there yet if you're still being discriminating."

They are standing close now, or at least: closer than they were. He has taken up the barstool next to her and Sera, she's standing. Leaning really, holding up the bar, as they say, her long arms settling around the base of her whiskey bottle as she drops it back to the polished wood.

"Story for story," she seems to be agreeing.

There's a hook to her smile, and her posture is loose and her eyes have that sheen but oh, they are right on him. Her attention layered, and multipartite.

"Drink for drink." Or maybe it is a challenge. When he drains his second and she leans forward rather drunkenly, wielding that bottle with expertise and care and pours him two generous fingers of her Stranahans. Toasts him again, wordlessly, and tips that bottle back once more.

"Truth for truth."

Or maybe it's a spell.

Except no, she breaks the spell-of-it with a quicksilver little grin. "I'll take the trade, though I still can't promise that you'll get lucky enough to hear the stories you're looking to hear."

Her eyes drop from him to her left wrist, then. The shark's body in black ink nearly following the dark line of her vein beneath her skin. Tracing the lines of that tattoo with her eyes.

Sera cannot - and does not - promise him the story of her tattoos.

She doesn't remembering getting any of them.

Alec

Alec @ 6:35PM [Per+Awareness - I can haz dice now!] Roll: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 6, 10, 10) ( success x 4 ) VALID

------------------------------

Alec grinned broadly when Sera poured him a drink from her own bottle, giving a little nod of thanks as he lifted the glass to return her toast. She warned him that he may yet be disappointed, but he tipped his head to swallow another mouthful of whiskey and said, "Lucky for me, I'm not picky."

(Which was, in fact, patently false, but in this instance at least he could claim it honestly.)

Truth for truth, she'd said. But stories were not the same as the truth. Perhaps, then, he would offer both. Alec paused a moment to contemplate, turning the half-empty glass in his hand. The liquor inside caught the light and glowed burnished gold. Finally he set the drink down and reached to unhook the two remaining buttons on the collar of his henley. The bartender shot a glance their way, as though briefly concerned that one of his customers might be attempting to strip down, but Alec just pulled the shirt to one side, stretching the fabric over his left shoulder until the line of his collar bone was visible. Beneath it, there were no tattoos. What was there was a pink, rounded scar about the size and shape of a bullet wound.

"When I was about... seventeen. My brother thought it'd be fun to rob a convenience store. Only see, he didn't tell me he was gonna do it. So we went in there, and I go to grab a bag of doritos, and suddenly he just takes out his fucking gun and points it at the guy behind the counter. And I know. I just fucking know this shit is gonna go wrong. You could see it in the dude's eyes, you know? The clerk was this old bastard war veteran I'd met a few times. Fucking crazy.

So my brother points a gun at him and yells at him to empty the register. And my brother - he's a big guy. Taller than me by three inches and built like a mac truck. Most people are scared shitless of him. But not this guy. This guy opens the register and puts that money in a bag and just stares us straight down the whole time. Then, just as we're leaving, he pulls his own gun out from under the counter and starts shooting at us. Hits my brother twice in the arm and then gets me in the shoulder. My brother drops the fucking money cause his hand won't work right, and we bolt the fuck out of there cause by this point we can hear the cops coming."

Alec laughed at the memory and pulled his shirt back into place. "Mick always was a fucking idiot."

Serafíne

So they exchange toasts. He drinks and she drinks and she may drink more than he and she may have been drinking for some time already, but the liquid goes down with a sweet and smokey burn that tastes like the crisp autumn air, the dissolving dusk, the half-remembered sound of a name you've long since forgotten, which will never-the-less be always on your tongue. Something melancholy about that smokey burn on a Sunday night in October, when the world is folding back in on itself. When they can be no more fooling oneself that summer is in any way still hanging on.

Sera's eyes cut from Alec's to his shoulder as he unbuttons the henley and pulls it aside. Dart back as he begins to speak, and there's this moment where she seems caught on the spine of her inebriation, between this clarifying awareness and something else, which feels raw and rather more dark. She's listening though. She's listening and even drunk there is something about her that feels quick: not fast but alive, skin-bound assuredly but not base for it.

Her eyes do not leave his while he's telling the story. Not once, but then his brother is dropping the fucking money because his hand won't work right and they are bolting the fuck out of there and her eyes drop to the scar and she uncurls an arm, reaches out without thinking to touch the scar, to run the tips of her callused fingers over the puckered skin. Her fingers are warm and tapered but the pads are a bit rough, and the nails cut rather short.

"Shit." She's breathing out, quiet, though the word is backed by a low whistle. "Shit. Here I was going to tell you about the guy who did me a chainsaw carving of a frog. Now I think I need to come up with something a damn sight better than that.

"Were you guys thrown in jail? Or did you get off for being kids?"

Alec

Alec didn't seem to mind the touch. If anything, there was a quiet energy to the way he responded, as though the contact made him feel more alive and present in his own body. It was a subtle thing: a shift in the expression around his eyes (like a dawning alertness and hunger) and a faint uptick in the rhythm of his pulse. The small knot of scar tissue sat just above Alec's collar bone in the sinewy shoulder muscle, and if Sera happened to inspect the other side, she'd find a second scar where the bullet had made a clean exit.

Here I was going to tell you about the guy who did me a chainsaw carving of a frog.

Alec laughed and downed the rest of his drink. "And here I thought you didn't have anything to prove." This time he didn't wait for Sera to offer him a refill. He just grabbed the bottle and poured himself another glass. When he spoke next, his voice was lowered.

"Nah. Friend took care of the cops." He looked Sera in the eyes and tapped the side of his skull knowingly, as if to imply some sort of telepathic manipulation. Likely as much of an 'I know what you are' as they were likely to achieve in a public space. "We had bigger shit to worry about."

Serafíne

Sera does not go looking for an exit wound. Sera doesn't even think about what happens to bullets after they hit, tear through skin and ricochet off bone. The trajectory, they way they slice right through. But she is more than a bit fascinated by the flaws-in-things, and the borders, and the places where we have been torn open and how those wounds have closed, so yes: the contact is meditative and thoughtless and aware. She senses those minute changes in his physical presence: the subtle shift in his focus, the beat of his pulse. Her nostrils flare with that awareness and her gaze ticks brightly over him as she finally lets him go. Shifting out of his way as he pours himself a drink before reclaiming the bottle and downing another shot-equivalent all at a go.

Oh, she likes it when the room starts to spin and there are lights without sources and sources without lights. Likes the way the booze burns all the way down her throat and laughs at/with/by/for his needling comment about things to prove. The smile she gives him is coruscant,

this lovely, burning thing.

"Not a goddamned thing," she agrees, with flash of her teeth, over/under his laughing retorn, leaning in to hear his assurance that a friend took care of the cops. She has blue eyes that skew to shadow in the demi-darkness of the mostly empty bar. Sunday night, nothing much happening. Ordinary people have to work on the morrow; or go to school or get the kids up or maybe sleep off the weekend, if they are lucky. There is something glassily reflective about her gaze as it darts to follow the movement of his hand against his skull, all I know what you are and she knows, too. Of course she knows. He can read that knowledge in the sly curl of her mouth as her eyes slide away.

"Don't remember his fucking name." She's going to tell him a story, and goddamnit having called her on her shit he is going to get the story about the guy and the chainsaw frog. "In North Carolina right? We were going to this festival, Get Out Way Out up in the mountains. So many two-laned roads I can't even -

"And like on one of those roads that's all - " her golden head bobs and weaves in intimation of a circuitous route, coiled around the ridges and low valleys, " - he was just off on a clearing on the side of the road. This old truck and a bunch of lumber and some bears and shit he'd carved up. And eagles. Fucker said the eagles sold really well.

"Looked like he was about a hundred and fifty two though I figure he wasn't that old. Skinny as shit with a plug of tobacco in his cheek and these blunt, stained hands. Missing parts of these two," here she takes Alec's left hand and grasps his middle and ring fingers, just above the middle knuckle, "fingers. Said he lost them in the war thought I didn't ask which fucking one. Said he could do anything with a chainsaw but I didn't believe him.

"I asked him to make me a frog, when we came back through it was done. Fucking amazing. So we got high together and I sat there while he whittled my name into the frog's arm-thingy. Do frogs have fucking arms? Legs, what the fuck ever. That dude was so fucking cool."