There's a marquee advertising Lawrence of Arabia but the marquee is wrong and has been for weeks, months. Anyone who comes in hoping for parched desert heat, matches against the sunrise finds a very different film cycling through the mostly-ignored projector on the balcony level of the two-story theater sandwiched between a warehouse full of barely-legal Chinese knockoff merchandise (Hello KiTTTy dolls and Sharpee markers and the like) and a desultory strip club where third-rate dancers and second-rate prostitutes and sad-sack johns meet in the dim pink light of a smoke-filled bar.
Excellent sound insulation keeps the low beat of 80s night next door (some pockmarked nineteen year old junkie gyrating to the dulcet tones of Robert Palmer) entirely out of the theater. Tonight they're showing Fritz Lang's Metropolis, with a reconstructed score synced up to the silent action.
Metropolis, however, is preceeded by thirty minutes of black and white footage of dancing girls from the 1910s, prancing around painted backdrops, folding screens, Queen Anne chairs and the like in that rolling stutterstep that belongs to the earliest recorded video. There's no rhyme or reason; that's just what's on offer.
Sera in the top row and she's alone tonight and we won't describe what she's wearing yet because it is fucking dark in here but she feels the way she feels and the universe sort of skews all around her sometimes and she has her legs, which seem long even if they are not, crossed and slung loosely over the threadbare-velvet covered theater-seat in front of her and she has a rather large tub of popcorn and a Mister Pibb soda she has laced with rum and this is what she feels like, see: the central point and the revolving arms of an endless galaxy, spinning out away from her, churning against the unrelenting dark.
She dropped the acid three and a half hours ago. Tracers started, oh, maybe two hours and forty-five minutes ago. Now firmly in the grip of hallucinations, she is sure that she could peel off the ceiling like the lid of a sardine can, if only she had the key, and drink-down-the-sky.
SerafíneTime 3 Weirdness. (-1 for focus, -1 for taking time. -1 for resonance.)
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )
Gaheris[I am aware. + Specialty: Effects.]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 5, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 5 )
GaherisHe knows an awful lot of things. He: the man in the dark coat. His hair is dark, too. And he is nothing, he is not worth notice. Not by the mundanes, and not always by the Awakened. He paid for his ticket - probably. Maybe he just walked in and if somebody noticed that he didn't pay and actually went out of their way to track him down or to get a manager they were unable to describe him satisfactorily.
The man had wanted Lawrence of Arabia not Fritz Lang's Metropolis. All he'd really wanted was a space that was unfamiliar, some cheap movie theatre popcorn, smothered in butter; a place to think. All of his places are places to think, aren't they? He can't get away from thoughts; the flickering of a film-reel, though - or at least the possibility of a flickering, that's all right.
He has been watching the dancing girls from the 1910s with a furrowed brow and something of a frown. He'd become aware of Serafíne -- oh, a while ago, perhaps. Her resonance might be a bruise: liminal, testing thresholds, limitless -- but so enthralling, can't he just taste it? The viscera of it? He certainly can once she begins Working, and Adam's shoulders stiffen. He is sitting in the front row and he rocks his head back to look in her direction. The direction that feeling is coming from. Time: he can taste it.
Better than dancing girls.
SerafíneSera did not come to The Westmark expecting Lawrence of Arabia or Metropolis. She came expecting dancing girls from the 1910s, and there they were, real as life, moving and smiling and bold and shy and strange and faded and fading by turns. Dark eyes wet against the celluloid and their old-fashioned smiles and the many hopes and the many dreams and the many ages that have come and gone: there again. Living, breathing, laughing voicelessly, playing these noiseless castenets, and on and on. What the fuck ever.
The lick of Time magic did not really start until the dancing girls went away.
And now, something is going on on the screen and she hardly knows what. She is Aware of the scratchiness of the velvet like old horsehair against her bare legs and of the depth of the ceiling and of the fact that the ceiling is only a suggestion and of the stuttering song of the film through the projector, an old fashioned noise.
There is popcorn and Sera stirs the popcorn and she thinks about how it feels like grain against her hands, and she wonders if she is perhaps in a forest. A moving forest of black and white where the sky whispers its changes down to the ground; or, no -
galaxies.
They taste like salt and salt tastes like tears and tears taste like regret and Ser aregrets the loss of the dancing girls except hello she has not lost them; if you move forward you can move backwards, easily, see?
It's just a matter of turning around.
Nothing, nothing is ever gone. Not even the past you think you've forgotten.
Everything lives and everything dies and everything is, and now is just another fiction.
Gaheris[Counter!]
Dice: 2 d10 TN8 (4, 8) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Gaheris[Well, I guess Watch the Weaving should've been first, maybe. Let the practically freeforming liiive.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 4) ( success x 1 )
GaherisThey stop and they stutter and they skip-a-beat and they beat-a-skip and and. They flirt so coy they flirt and dance and kick and smile and they're somehow more real sometimes in all their jerky jittery grace quick one-step two-step kick-kick kcik-kcik pets-owt pets-eno kciuq ecarg yrettij ykrej rieht lla ni semitemos laer erom wohemos er'yeht dna elims dna kcik dna ecnad dna trilf yeht yoc os trilf yeht. They flirt so coy they flirt and dance and kick and smile and they're somehow more real sometimes in all their jerky jittery grace quick one-step two-step kick-kick kcik-kcik kcik pets-ow --Enough. He has a devil in him, Adam Gallowglass. And it is dangerous, isn't it? These shenanigans. He shuts his eyes briefly and scrapes a word (a seraphim's word) out from behind his teeth, from the roof of his mouth, a murmured thing - turns to look now more fully, to see Serafíne, her eyes reflecting the film, her face radiantly limned in silverscreen effulgence, and then he
He uncasts, alarmed. He pronounces another quiet word. He wills the Effect to have no Effect un-weaves.
And that is all. He has unwoven.
SerafíneParadox!
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 6) ( success x 1 )
SerafíneSoak!
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 7) ( success x 1 )
SerafíneWTF!
See - Sera surfaces and it is a kind of surfacing, the way she goes all upright. There were Things and Things were hers and she could feel the way they were spinning out from her, delicious, these tendril arms pulling the moment in which she wants to live back into immediacy once it has past. One it has passed. There is a river and the only reason the river goes one way is that it has forgotten that it can go the other direction.
So she licks the salt from her lips and feels the stricture, the constriction, from the strychnine in the LSD rigid in her muscles, feels her consciousness and the way it is less-than-conscious and
WTF!
Sera does not know the names of any of the Seraphim. She does not know a Name or a Word of power; she has never used a wand. Her body is the magic and her mind and all its progeny, her blood and her heartbeat and her lungs like wings, see, bellows expanding and
that thing is severed and sits up quite nearly straight and now it is Metropolis and the film is farther along than anyone might imagine as the minutes whip back around all in a breathless rush that leaves her panting and bright and raw and she can feel the backlash, the snapback, the blow of it even as her body absorbs it.
She makes this noise.
Those woods seem infinitely more darksome now, don't they? She liked it better when things were bright, so
- let there be light.
[Time 3: DANCING GIRLS HELLO I MISS YOU.]
SerafíneTime 3. (Vulgar w/out witnesses because the other patrons are passed out. -1 (resonance) -1 (liminal). )
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (3, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Gaheris[No, stop!]
Dice: 2 d10 TN8 (2, 10) ( success x 1 )
GaherisHe sets his popcorn down. He wills, wills, again that she should stop, but this time the Effect just loses some of its edge. Perhaps some of its edge. The dark-haired Hermetic sets his popcorn down. (Did he not already do that? Is he now effected, too - he himself? No; but he can taste it in the back of his throat, and) He turns around in his chair, bracing himself against the stained knappy faux-velvet red of the chair, and he says, "Sera!"
There are other patrons, but Adam does not care about them. They are sleepers, after all - and oh, this isn't quite true. Doesn't Adam care about sleepers? He cares very much about them; but he is staring upwards at Serafíne, who is Working, and after a flat moment with the music tinny around around
He stands up, the seat flips up, hits the back of the chair as he (leaving behind butter-stains) walks up the rows to visit her more closely and acquaint her with
Stop!
GaherisDice: 1 d10 TN6 (4) ( fail )
SerafíneThere are Sleepers and they are sleeping. Not just Sleeping but well and truly sleeping, down there in the first few rows, bathed in the colloidal silver light of the images flashing across the screen and Adam shouts her name or maybe just says it or maybe he says it again; no, no, he is not caught in the loop of her work but perhaps their dreams are, the strangers down below. The same sign and the same sigil and the same crossroads; the same branch and the same tree and the same wings of the same bird flashing dark against the sky and -
Sera hears her name; and she hears her name; and maybe she hears her name; or does she hear her name?
She feels the way the blades move, over the meat of her heart.
And Sera laughs, aloud, because it is the most joyful part of the dance where the girl with the tight black curls and the bruised dark eyes pirouettes and plies in nothing but her bloomers and looks precisely at the camera as if it were an eye and smiles winsome and lovely and she's out there too; a speck of dust, a diamond compressed to nothing and then scattered all to sea, somewhere and it makes her feel quick, it quickens inside her and
what is that noise? Has she remembered it from tomorrow?
It's the retort, see, of the seat against its spine. Sera stands up; not steadily, because you should see the drugs she consumed tonight. Because you should see her shoes.
Dice: 1 d10 TN5 (9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
GaherisSera laughs, aloud, because this is the most joyful part. Adam shakes his head as he climbs the stairs, the soles of his shoes sticking, gummy, gunky to the less-than-clean carpeting, and the dim hazard lights which scape up the stairs to help people move in the gleam must be his guide. He shakes his head without raking his fingers through his hair, and she is laughing: of course she is. Standing, too, and he reads unsteadiness in her, the way she wavers where she stands, the way there's a lick of straightness to her spine now. And isn't she beautiful?
The top row. He is at the top row now, and he looks back at the wide screen which is replaying a moment again (it is always replaying that moment [isn't it?]). He stands there for a moment, just stands there at the top of the stairs, looking downward and out. Beneath, the Sleepers are asleep: somebody coughs, somebody else shifts. There is such a quality of silence hushed around the film and the music playing for the dancing girls and Serafíne laughing and Adam going Sera.
There at the top of the theatre room he is a tall, gangling gawk of a man, hunched just a little as if he is often bent over a book or a desk, which he is. But there is a certain absorbant quality to his eyes; isn't there? As he watches, his envious lashes cutting against the theatre's gloom. The gloom makes everybody inside the theatre into nothing but suggestion. The moment passes, and he takes a deep breath, turning again to the Cultist.
Sidling, awkwardly, without grace, down the row towards her. "Serafíne; snap snap, come on, stop it. I don't wish to have dejavu."
No comments:
Post a Comment