[Nightmares]
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )
Kalen Holliday[And how distracted are we by Resonance?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 4, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Grace[Perception + Awareness = Magedar!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )
Kalen HollidayKalen Has come up to the park to be alone.
Look. Sometimes that happens. Infrequently, perhaps, but occasionally he's had enough of planning and projects and breaking the news that magic is real to the baby Magelings he has the luck to find. Considering the way people tend to die around him...that may not be good luck. For him. For them.
So he is out here, staring over the lake from a nice safe distance. He has coffee with him, but it's living in the thermos in his bag yet. With a book that he will probably be glad isn't visible momentarily. For now, he tries to watch the lake and be calm.
Ian Lai[Awareness]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 2, 2) ( fail )
Janisa Jones {Playtesting}She hops out of the car that's brought her here, leaning in through the window to talk to the driver. She looks at her phone, then nods in agreement to the driver. She pulls a small daypack from the back, shuts the door, lowers her sunglasses over her eyes, and begins strapping the bag on over her wicking shirt. She also bends over, lifts the cuff of her jeans, and tightens the laces on the trail running shoes she's wearing.
GraceKalen has come to the park to be alone, and yet here is Grace, come to ruin that notion. She didn't exactly track him down, even though that would be a simple thing. Sometimes the universe just has notions of its own.
Grace likes parks. They're good places to get away from it all, sit down in the grass, and write. Whether that writing is a story or a bit of code really doesn't matter. Well, it doesn't to her at least. So she found herself a nice hill with some nice grass, and has planted herself upon it, variously typing furiously on her laptop and scowling at the screen.
With a sigh, she leans back (though still crosslegged to make a desk for her computer) and stares at the sky with the clouds rolling by. A hint of storm-promise in them today, though. Wait. No.
Kalen?
Curiousness guides her always, and it is that which causes her to abandon her writing and bundle up her laptop to go and find her pseudo-mentor. He never said anything about going to the park today.
She takes a rather strange route on her way, crossing the jogging path, and doing switchbacks every now and then, because despite the fact that she can definitely sense Kalen, she can't exactly see him. Yet.
Ian LaiOn a late-May Sunday, the beach by Echo Lake was busy enough that a person could sit still and become just another nameless, mundane tourist dotting the sandy shore. It made it easy to blend in, particularly if that was what one wanted to do. Except that Ian wasn't really the type to blend, and Kalen more than likely noticed him long before Ian bothered to look in the right direction.
Usually he was the first to sense when he was approaching someone familiar, but today he was too much in his own head, and the presence of the other mages went unnoticed. Like Kalen, Ian had come here alone. Until recently, he'd been walking the trails around the lake, but now he made his way down onto the sand and pulled off his shoes, trailing bare feet through the lapping water at the lake's edge. It was warm enough that he went bare-chested, and he'd rolled the cuffs of his jeans up to mid-calf to keep them dry while he walked.
A few of the people nearby noticed him. One girl smiled when he glanced at her, and Ian returned the smile but kept walking, hands tucked into his pockets while his feet left a trail in the sand that the water soon washed away.
Serafíne(Perception + Awareness)
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1
Janisa Jones {Playtesting}[Resonance- Dynamic: Shifting]
Kalen Holliday[Of course you're touching the stupid water, Ian. (Will)]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )
Kalen HollidayOf course he can't be alone. He can sense Grace, all shifting energy. Colors melting into new colors and sharp and fluctuating angles. She is coming closer. He can sense Ian, can see Ian, and both to his eyes and to every sense that can register it, Ian is all sleek feline grace.
Kalen picks up his bag and heads toward the edge of the water. He's had considerable time to make peace with the lake, and though he does give it occasional wary looks like it might reach up with watery hands to drag him into its depths, he falls into place walking parallel to Ian, just at the outer edges of the water.
"I'm beginning to suspect you may actually live in a tree. A very stylish, posh tree. With many closets." It's a greeting of sorts, one that neatly dodges questions about how people are and little social fluffs of pleasantries.
Janisa Jones {Playtesting}She starts walking along the widest of the available paths, keeping a keen eye out for anyone from the farm. The new dude her dropped her off didn't know if anyone else was coming out today, but mentioned it was possible.
GraceOn her jagged path, Grace is looking, looking for the source of storm-resonance, when it is joined by a flash of feline -- ahh, the (big) cats are off together again, and she smiles. It's good. They should be.
It's then, that the wind changes, shifts, moves ever so slightly differently against her (or is that less the wind and more the world?)
Well, if that isn't new and old at the same time? Is that how...
Grace looks around herself some more, for the new someone. So many new someones lately...
Ian Lai[Per+Alertness - does he notice the book?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN4 (1, 3, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Ian LaiIan glanced to the side with a slant of his eyes to take in Kalen's familiar figure. The silence that followed lasted just long enough to verge on awkward, but then Ian said, in a completely deadpan tone, "Why do you think I never bring anyone home with me?"
Hell, for all Kalen (or anyone else) knew, Ian very well could have lived in a tree. Or a castle. Or a cave. He hadn't exactly made overtures to invite the other mages over for tea.
Ian stopped walking and waded a couple of steps into the water, feeling sand and stones slide beneath his toes. A handful of tiny silver minnows darted up to inspect his feet, and Ian watched them the way a lazy cat might stare at a goldfish. A moment later he glanced back, eyes shifting to take in the visible contents of the Hermetic's messenger bag.
"Good book?" he asked quietly.
Kalen HollidayThere are things he could say in response to the question about Ian bringing people home with him. Playful ones. True ones. But he lets them all lie quiet.
Instead, Kalen follows Ian's gaze, sees the tiny fish, and...doesn't spook exactly. But there is a little huff of surprised breath. If you avoid water hard enough long enough, you greatly delay such things as seeing live fish swimming around. He goes still for a few seconds to watch them.
Grace slides off at an angle, probabilities shifting and intersecting and he glances at where he knows she is but lets her go. She knows how to be cautious. She will call if she needs him.
"All five pages of it I've read are promising. I came out here to read it, but then I was distracted by the lake. There's a good place to watch it back there." He waves back in the direction he'd come from.
Janisa Jones {Playtesting}The new someone has gone slightly off the trail to examine a small patch of mint nearby. She brushes aside some grass, and finds a different plant. "It has a square shaped stem. That means it's...? A member of the mint family!" echoing dialogue of days gone by. "Dueling mint. Huh."
GraceThere appears a stranger behind Janisa. A stranger dressed in jeans and a grey turtleneck jacket, zipped up to the neck. Her hair is messy today, all windblown, and she's slipping a cell phone into the pocket of her jeans and smiling down at the plants.
"Lamiaceae duking it out again? What will we do with them?" she says, by way of greeting.
"Hi. You new around here?"
Ian LaiIan followed Kalen's gesture with his eyes, but didn't offer much reaction. After a few seconds, he took another step forward. Then another. The water rose high enough to soak the edge of his jeans. It felt briskly cold on his skin. Glacial.
"Let me know what you think when you're done."
Kalen Holliday"Yeah." Kalen watches Ian walk a few steps farther into the water. His jaw tightens a little, but he manages not to say something ridiculous about the water being dangerous.
If Ian was someone else, he'd ask questions. But it's Ian and Ian is...mysterious is a tame word. A word lacking in deliberateness and sharp edges. Reading Ian is like looking through shards of obsidian. Half opaque. Likely to end with you bleeding. And sometimes things you think you know just shatter.
But he did indicate he'd talk eventually, even if he wasn't talking now. Or, more precisely he indicated he'd listen. Expecting him to offer much by way of return...problematic.
"Are they-" He frowns. "Do they bite? The little fish."
Janisa Jones {Playtesting}She glances back, up and slightly over her shoulder, and comes to an important realization: this position is way uncomfortable to address the nature ninja from. She stands up and faces the newcomer, instead. "Looks that way. It's like plant Thunderdome over here." She decides it would be -more- suspicious to keep her sunglasses on and so sets them on her forehead. "New to the area? My family is from a drive through town near Boulder, so Yes, but no. Colorado is kinda a country unto itself."
GraceAhh, plant Thunderdome. That conjures up images of recent events. For a split second Grace's smile falters, but hey -- this one probably doesn't even know the first thing about that.
But what does she know? And how to ask that question?
"So...." Grace says, and her eyes slide off of Janisa's, to contemplate the clouds. "So..."
Oh, come on, think of something.
"Yeah, Colorado is a magical kinda place, isn't it?"
Hint. Hint. Okay, well, if the woman does know the first thing, that might spark off a little recognition right?
SerafíneSerafíne was sitting on a retaining wall beneath an arbor overlooking the lake, barelegged, wearing her shitkickers rather than her heels. A black and red plaid bustier beneath an unzipped black hoodie with the hood pulled up, which was itself longer than the black leather skirt she's wearing beneath it. Then she reached up and with a boost grabbed the metal bar holding up the frame and lifted herself, swinging with a few pumps of her legs like a child going higher and high until she let go, landing with a solid thump on the packed ground.
Ambled down the path toward the lake and oh, ended up at Kalen's flank.
Sunglasses covering her eyes. Daisies threaded into the laces of her combat boots.
Sera gives Kalen this measuring sort of look. It is all sideglance, and is softened by the curve of her mouth, this rather far-away smile.
There's something tender in her gaze that he cannot see, hidden as her eyes are by those dark glasses. Gleaming.
"Everything bites."
The fish, she means.
And everything. Everything, too.
Ian LaiKalen's willpower in that moment was... admirable, considering. And Ian put forth a rather good show of acting as though he wasn't perfectly aware of how much the water bothered Kalen. To the point perhaps where one might think he had forgotten.
(He hadn't.)
Yet Kalen was still there. And when he asked about the minnows, Ian huffed a light breath of amusement. Not enough to thaw his cool demeanor, but it helped. A little.
"If you stand still they'll try to nibble at you. It doesn't hurt though." Even as he said it, a few of the fish began to tickle the side of his ankle. Ian glanced over his shoulder at the people dotting the beach, noting their placement and activity. Sera was afforded a considering gaze, and though Ian didn't seem unhappy to see her, he didn't offer any formal greeting. When he looked back at the lake, there was a line of energy to his body. A tension that spoke to his desire to keep going. To dive into the lake until the water swallowed him whole.
Ian stood there for a moment, poised and liminal. A few silent, heavy breaths made their way past his lungs. Then he turned around and walked back to the sand.
"Indeed, everything does."
Ian Lai[Edit: To dive in until the water swallowed him whole.]
Kalen Holliday[Minnows seem interesting. (WP)]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 6, 6, 9) ( success x 3 )
Kalen HollidayKalen reaches out, without really thinking, to wrap an arm around Serafine, letting his hand rest against the place where her ribs start to curve inward. "Everything, huh?" He asks softly.
And then he releases Serafine, drops to crouch on the ground and puts one hand into the cold water and waits to see if the minnows will come closer to him. Close enough to bite. His entire body is tense, like he's expecting something horrible to happen. Like...piranhas? The apocalypse?
But he waits there anyway, still and quiet and curious.
Janisa Jones {Playtesting}She looks amusedly, and quizzically, at Grace. "Yeah, it's pretty special out here."
"You a cop?" She asks, shrugging off pretense. "Because if so, I can't help you."
"You're trying to score, right?"
She's not sure when, exactly, she did get the look that says 'this girl knows how to get drugs', but she had noticed that there was a marker, almost supernaturally visible to those who had frequent reason to look for it.
SerafíneKalen wraps that arm around her and Sera tips her golden head aslant, resting her temple briefly against his shoulder. Everything, huh?, he asks her softly and Sera, she inhales and this lovely fading sunset of a smile crests over the quick and supple curve of hear neat little mouth and,
"Every fucking thing," she affirms for Kalen, quietly, before he lets her go.
Then he's stepping forward, toward the water and Sera, she takes a half-step back, hidden gaze dropping to take some measure of the tension in Kalen's frame before rising to watch - oh, steadily, see? - Ian's approach from the water.
Her eyes are hidden.
Without quite thinking about it, she rubs the bronze ring on her right index finger thoughtfully with her left thumb.
GraceJanisa asks if she's a cop, and Grace starts cracking up. Seriously. This is the funniest thing anyone has said to her in quite a long time.
"A cop? Oh fuck, I hope not. If so, I have some serious explaining to do. Listen, if I want to 'score' I know where I can find it," Grace says, and she's trying to recover -- giggling through the conversation like she can't help herself.
"I'm not a cop. But do you know what you are?"
Just then, Grace pulls her cell phone out of her pocket and taps into it, like she's texting. And lo, Kalen, your phone is bleeping.
Ian LaiIan stopped at the edge of the water, half-turned on the axis of his spine to watch the way Kalen knelt down and dipped his hand into the lake. And there was a moment where Ian almost marveled at this, though his interest was veiled beneath a layer of clouded thoughts.
Given the text Grace had just sent Kalen, perhaps the timing of Ian's exit was all the more convenient. In any case, Ian seemed to pull away in that moment. To allow the space his body and resonance had occupied to be replaced by Sera. And he said, quietly, "I'll see you later, Kalen."
Which was as much of a reassurance as he could offer in that moment, as he turned away and walked up the beach toward the parking lot.
[That's it for me guys, thanks for letting me play!]
Kalen HollidayKalen looks up, away from the water and the minnows as Ian draws away. "Yeah. If nothing else, I'll let you know about the book."
He looks, back, but the movement has spooked the poor little minnows and his phone is trying to get his attention. So he takes his hand out of the water, rises, and takes a few steps back from the edge of the water before looking at his phone. He smiles a bit, then looks to Sera.
"Grace found a new friend. You want to go say hi?"
SerafíneAWAREMPATHY what is that look at Kalen et cetera!
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 7, 7, 8, 8, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 8 ) Re-rolls: 2
Ian Lai[Like there's even any hope. Manip+Subterfuge]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )
Janisa Jones {Playtesting}She does not seem at all taken aback by the amount of amusement her question generates, and even smiles lopsidedly at that. Still that leaves the question of what she -was- referring to, and it could only be a set number of things.
"What I am..?" She politely prompts.
Grace
Grace giggles and types some more into her phone before slipping it back into her pocket.
And then, it's back to address Janisa.
"So, some time ago, something happened to you, didn't it?" Grace says, and oh -- quit being so vague. Of course something happened to her.
She steps in a bit closer, to draw her voice a bit lower, to keep others from hearing. "By that, I mean... like... your perspective changed, right? Like you're seeing the world differently now than you did before? A lot of people think they're just going crazy, but you're not. Not crazy."
SerafíneKalen rises, look at the incisive line his shadow cuts across the beach, leaves the minnows behind and fishes out his phone once he is back on solid ground. Gets the text message and glances at it and then looks back to Sera and,
oh,
doesn't she seem so very far away. Kalen is reflected on the surface of her sunglasses and Ian is superimposed see, beyond him, farther away, walking up the beach toward the parking lot, and the whole of the time Sera's head is canted and her gaze is fixed and her breathing is withheld, see, belayed, straight little mouth ever-so-slightly parted as she watches Ian's back receding.
It takes more than her name to command her attention, Kalen has to touch her, forearm or shoulder, some contact to pull her out of wherever it is she has gone, and then she starts and then she relaxes, see, neatly and easily into her shoulders, into her skin, favoring Kalen with a slow-curving and still somehow distracted smile.
"Sure."
The truth is, Sera does not really know what she's agreeing to. She wasn't paying attention. But she agrees.
Ian LaiIan looks at Kalen as though he is surprised that Kalen would touch the water. Because Ian knows that water terrifies Kalen. So there is surprise, and also a grudging respect for Kalen's daring and willingness to push himself. It isn't the first time he's seen Kalen do this (push himself out of his comfort zone,) and it's beginning to make a favorable impression.
There is also regret, and guilt, and a little bit of fear. (Fear of Kalen, not for him. Of the tentative threads of connection that have built up between them.) This is the broad picture. Ian doesn't know how he feels about the relationship he has with Kalen. It's there in the hesitance and the conflicting emotions. He knows more about how Kalen feels than he lets on, and it troubles him.
He also thinks that he will be (if he has not been already) a negative influence on Kalen's life. This is the guilt. The regret though... is something else. Something more attached to the here and now. Sera interrupted something between them, some tenuous moment of connection that had nearly resulted in Ian letting go of a thing he is trying to hide.
But now he thinks it is better that he did not. Because there is regret, but there is also relief.
What is he hiding? That much cannot be discerned by intuition - there are too many specifics - but it's the same thing that weighed on him the other night at the chantry. More guilt. More of that instinct towards self-destruction. He did something he wished he had not had to do, and he hates himself for it. Hates more, perhaps, the fact that it bothers him this way at all.
In the end there is this: He leaves because he doesn't want to talk to anyone right now.
Kalen HollidayKalen does not more than glance at Ian walking away. He gets Sera's attention back after a few seconds, possibly more because he wants her to remember to breathe, and starts leading her toward where Grace and the new person are.
"It's good to see you again," he says quietly. He may or may not understand that she has no idea where they're going. He glances at his phone again when it chirps at him, then slides it back into his pocket with a faint smile.
Janisa Jones {Playtesting}Oh. -That-. Of course it's that.
"Ahh..I gotcha now. Yeah. I think I know what you mean, but I'm not sure we can declare that I'm not crazy."
Or, you, She thinks.
"I'm Janisa." She offers her hand to poor, long suffering Grace.
Grace
"Oh, oh, hah! I thought you'd pick up on the whole 'magical' bit, but no, no. Let me go ahead and think you're really new, why don't you," Grace says, and she steps back.
"I'm Grace."
She looks down. Oh. A hand.
"I'm also sorry. I don't shake hands. But ah, hey, I'm sure it's a fantastic hand."
That... sounded better inside her head.
SerafíneKalen rises, look at the incisive line his shadow cuts across the beach, leaves the minnows behind and fishes out his phone once he is back on solid ground. Gets the text message and glances at it and then looks back to Sera and,
oh,
doesn't she seem so very far away. Kalen is reflected on the surface of her sunglasses and Ian is superimposed see, beyond him, farther away, walking up the beach toward the parking lot, and the whole of the time Sera's head is canted and her gaze is fixed and her breathing is withheld, see, belayed, straight little mouth ever-so-slightly parted as she watches Ian's back receding.
It takes more than her name to command her attention, Kalen has to touch her, forearm or shoulder, some contact to pull her out of wherever it is she has gone, and then she starts and then she relaxes, see, neatly and easily into her shoulders, into her skin, favoring Kalen with a slow-curving and still somehow distracted smile.
"Sure."
The truth is, Sera does not really know what she's agreeing to. She wasn't paying attention. But she agrees.
SerafíneMurmured. "I interrupted something, just now. He doesn't think he's good for you. But I think he needs you more than he knows.
"Be careful, darling."
Serafíne(Ack! wrong post. Correct post here:)
There are nights when Sera's sartorial choices have her nearly of-a-height with Kalen. This is not one of those evenings. Tonight her heels are gone in favor of combat boots, with slowly-wilting daisies woven between the laces.
So. She's glancing up at Kalen, all sidelong, when he tells her that it is good to see her and there's something about the cant of her head that makes the glance feel sly, though it is emphatically not sly.
And Sera makes this noise, this quiet noise from behind a close-lipped smile that feels rather withheld, doesn't it. Not sublimated precisely, but - oh - call it liminal -
- and she rises to her tiptops and reaches up to grasp Kalen's head and pull him in - and down - so that she can kiss his temple, smiling against his skin. Murmurs something against his ear before she lets him go.
Then releases him, and steps back. And says - "You go on. I'll catch up."
Pivoting in the sand to climb up the beach toward the parking lot in Ian's wake.
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