Dark side of the something.

Serafíne

The house is a two-story bugalow a block and a half from the neon corridor of Federal Avenue. Close enough that the glow of streetlights and restaurant signs blots out more of the stars in the sky, far enough away that the streets and sidewalks themselves feel dark and mostly-quiet. The houses are small and rimmed by rusting chainlink fences. Some kept up nicely, with gardens carefully tended and sidewalks carefully edged and the iron security bars over the windows regularly painted rather than rusting to insubstantiality.

This is not one of those places.

Bars in Denver close at two a.m. If you want to keep drinking and dancing until the sunrises you have to find someplace else to go. Three or four or sometimes six roommates cram together in this rental space. One is a mediocre artist with enough of a local following that he sometimes sells a piece for almost the ticket price at one of the two or three local galleries willing to occasionally take his latest piece on consignment. Another is a waitress and an aspiring tattoo artist. The third is a drug dealer. Roommates four-through-six are various shades of hippies, burnouts, alleged poets, hipsters, philosophers, and beauty school dropouts.

It is three-thirty-nine a.m. Which is later than you think it might be when you type the words. Later than you really understand it to be when you see them doubled and tripled and crawling on the screen of the iPhone you cannot quite wake because the coordination necessary to swipe a thumb across the virtual bar while holding the device is well beyond you.

The music's pretty loud though they've turned it down now. The asshole two doors over likes to call the cops and no one here really wants to be frisked. No one here really wants to have their name and social security number run through any number of databases. Smoke from marijuana and cigarettes drifts like mist through the air of the completely trashed living room. There's a television above the mantle that is tuned to an infomercial, but no one's watching it. People have been dropping like flies for the last hour or so. Crashing on couches or stumbling out the door. Sometimes into cabs but mostly out into the night.

Not everyone, though.

Not her, for example.

Whitney

Somebody met the bundled-up Californian out at a bar earlier tonight and decided she was cool as hell despite the black Sharpie X'd across the back of her hand. Didn't take any shit from the people around them and could take tokes like she was born with a joint in her hand and could carry on a conversation that consisted of more than film quotes and regurgitated Internet memes.

It's nearing four o'clock in the morning. In two hours she's supposed to be tying up her running shoes and stumbling out into the frigid pneumonia-loving air to go for a run with her uncle. She's 19 years old and never suffered a hangover before. Her mentor didn't teach her everything she knows how to do but damned if the rotes he did teach her don't come in handy.

She's perched on the railing outside because she prefers to trash her lungs in the open air and she's been perched on the railing for the last half an hour holding out her wrist so a beyond-wasted grad student could forget and reabsorb the fact that Whitney made the bracelet she's wearing but the grad student has been collected by her tattoo artist bestie and they've since disappeared.

Her coat and scarf are going to reek of pot smoke for the rest of the night but there's no one around to care. Everyone who's still up reeks of pot smoke and worse themselves.

Serafíne

oh hai?

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1

Serafíne

It's fucking cold outside. At this hour of the night the air feels like winter, tastes like winter, smells like winter. Open the door though and a blast of humid warmth hits the skin. All the bodies in close proximity. There's a dredlocked white door sprawled on the floor in the foyer, head tipped to brace against a cheap, second-hand bookshelf where people brave enough to strip off their coats and scarves have thrown them. The musky odor of marijuana is heavy in the air and the door to the downstairs powder room is open and there are two girls in there leaning over the pedestal sink, doing a line.

There's a rule about parties like this, which is that at some point in the evening someone's going to put on Dark Side of the Moon and when its over you have to shut the fuck up and go to sleep or go home or some fucking thing, but that's it. Eclipse and the party's over. They're on The Great Gig in the Sky so there's still time yet for a little bit of whatever you fancy.

Sera fancies alot.

She's wearing short pink dress printed with ironic bumble bees over thigh-high fishnets held up by garters. The skirt is short but full and flares out in a wide circle when she spins, which she does sometimes deliberately. The bodice - well, it was hot in here, someone turned on the floor furnace and then all those bodies - she's stripped down to her waist. Beneath, she wears a black-and-pink push-up bra, a tiny pink bow between the cups. Sera has lost one shoe and holds the the other by its ridiculous heel and is perched on the arm of one of the many couches, listing toward the guy sprawled beside her, listening to some story-or-other.

Even in the midst of a state of extreme inebriation, she can feel the beat of resonance from across the room. Looks up and fixes - and tries to fix her attention across the room but the walls have arms that are pushing them slantwise and everything's spinning in this beautiful, beating counterclockwise pulse.

Sera turns to the guy on the couch below her - who has an arm loose but vaguely possessive around her hips - and tells him "Move." He doesn't seem to hear her so she drops her head toward his ear and tells him to move again, this time reaching for her seventeen bottles of tequila (count them!) with her four hands and somehow confiscating the greater part of them.

"Mooooooooooooooooooove."

He can hardly believe her.