Mermaids

Elijah

[how did I sleep?]

Dice: 4 d10 TN7 (4, 4, 5, 9) ( success x 1 )

Elijah

[Is this going to freak me smooth the fuck out? Willpower]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Elijah

[Entropy 1: find the weak spot]

Dice: 1 d10 TN4 (9) ( success x 1 )

Elijah

OMG Max. There are mermaids at the aquarium.

It was what had spurred all of this. Elijah had a fascination with mermaids. Real, fake, it didn't matter, he knew they weren't real but he had a fascination with mermaids none the less because of the underwater grace and the skill of the performers to keep smiling while they were surrounded by a substance that was more than content to choke the life out of someone. Water was an intense thing, and this was bordering on good ol' fashioned exposure therapy.

It was a hard trade off, because Elijah had a fascination with mermaids but a genuine, seething, gripping something when it came to water. Every fiber of his being tensed up and wanted to be anywhere but inside of a place where he could literally tell each place on the glass that might potentially crack if someone pushed too hard or tried to tap one-two-three-four-forty seven times. Forty seven because that would cause a chain reaction that would piss off the-

"Oh fuck Chili!"

Which was about when Elijah remembered that he couldn't wait for Max inside of the aquarium because she had a dog and they had a problem- they couldn't leave chili inside, and the dog was too big to fit in a backpack… maybe. It was a hasty retreat to the parking lot.

"I'llbeback!"

Maxine

I'm so down. That was the text message that Elijah had received back. From there, a time and date was set-- possibly even later that very same day because whatever it was Maxine did it probably wasn't hold down a real job and make an effort at a typical life because by now Elijah had to have figured out that the girl slept out of her van. He'll have seen the back of it by now, seen the fact that there's a hammock strung up and a few of those plastic mini-dressers stuffed with essentials.

He knew that the little black dog ("A schipperke," Maxine had informed helpfully if Elijah had ever wondered aloud) was never far from her or that van. A faithful little transient animal with its transient mistress. So it occurred to Elijah soon after cash had exchanged hands, that Maxine may still be trying to figure out what to do with Chili, and he fled to go greet them in the parking lot.

The big orange VW van is impossible to miss, parked near the front of the lot but as far off to the side as possible, with nose to a chainlink fence that had weeds and bushes creating green overgrowth through the wire crosshatch. Maxine was standing outside with the passenger door open, cradling a lit cigarette to her face with one hand and holding the other hand on a slim hip. She dressed in a bleach-bright white tank-top that cut off just above the navel and hung loose on her slender frame, and a pair of cargo shorts that were slung low on hips, held in place by a belt that probably sold along with the shorts themselves. She wore pins in her hair to keep it from her forehead and face and had chalk dust dying patches gray-white where she'd touched with chalky fingers. Marks on her shorts suggested she'd tried to dust them off rather than waste water actually washing them.

When Elijah strode up, Maxine puffed her smoke toward the green-grown fence and cast the tall blonde lad a smile. "Well howdy, pard'ner. You came to join us."

Us, being Maxine and Chili both. The dog was standing in the passenger seat with her chin resting on the open window ledge. She perked ears and watched Elijah's approach, but was far too middle-aged and crotchety to get excited over his approach.

Elijah

Thus far, his friends seemed to live out of suitcases. Elijah was an anomaly because he had an apartment he slept at somewhat regularly, if only because he was prone to escapades that required him to have some place to lay down and sleep afterwards. Or, you know, because he had the looming parental threat and couldn't very well sleep inside of Jenn's civic indefinitely.

Not that he hadn't tried before. During the great oh fuck if we are moving into a place with bed bugs debacle, they'd spent a few nights in the civic before determining that they needed to live in a hotel instead. That was an experience he would have rather not relived.

"We should totally get Chili one of those little vests that says hi, I'm a service animal or something," Elijah said. he even reached out to pet the dog when he came over because… well… because Chili was awesome and gave precisely zero fucks about much of anything.

Maxine

Elijah's suggestion caused Maxine to blink big dark eyes at him through the miasma shroud that sprouted from the end of the cigarette she was keeping near her face. It looked like she was trying to smoke it quickly so she could snub it out and get inside with him to see some goddamn mermaids.

"That's actually a really good idea. Do you know where to get one?" Her head tipped to the side, and the question was presented earnestly.

Either way, she'd wave her hand and hold the cigarette in her lips, freeing her hands so she could nudge Chili back away from the window. The dog scrunched her nose but complied because she was left without much choice since her mistress's hand-heel was up against her snout. The dog backed up onto the seat and Maxine swung the door open. She stood then like a chauffeur, holding the door open for her boss, and swept a hand to gesture the little dog to exit. With a huff she trotted on the seat a couple of times in place, then hopped down. With a wheeze-groan, the stout little dog landed and walked away with a calm clackity-clack of claws to nestle into overgrown weeds and grass in the shade of the tree that Maxine had parked under (intentionally, hence the spot against the fence).

A final drag was pulled, and Maxine snubbed the butt out against her shoe and put it into a cup-holder ashtray that was sticky-glued onto the dashboard of the van. She cranked the window back up to about 3/4ths the way up, then closed the door and said with a stage smile: "Well, what are you keeping me waiting for? Let's go see some fucking mermaids."

Elijah

Where could they get one?

"We could probably Google it? I have no idea, but then we could get Chili into all sorts of places, and just tell people she has to come with you in case we need to make sure you don't have, like, a seizure or something. Chili looks like she could smell seizures."

Because, apparently, that was a thing.

Elijah offered Max a grin, big and bright and his constant companion while he went to go and storm the castle with his current companion. Of course, that castle was full of water and the incredible possibility of drowning and the world would end right there but there were mermaids, so why would there not be a little peril when you were dealing with something that could be potentially awesome. He offered Maxine an art, all faux gentleman.

"Let's rock this shit," he replied.

And into the fray with them.

Maxine

An untraditional yet obvious solution to not letting your dog bake inside of a hot car was to let her out of the car. Maxine trusted that Chili wouldn't go far because Chili was a faithful navigator and constant buddy. She was an untraditional thing as a whole, Maxine, and though she hadn't shared this information yet were Elijah to know that she was aligned with a Tradition and to find which it was, she'd strike a whole new resonance of Abnormal.

The offered arm was looked at for a moment before being accepted with a one-sided grin. Her small hand tucked into the crook of his elbow, and she kept pace alongside him, carried on a pair of (chalk)dusty Chuck Taylors.

"Hey, is Alicia meeting us too?"

Because, of course, she would ultimately have to ask.

Elijah

Was Alicia meeting them?

Elijah shook his head, no, and heaved a half-hearted sigh, "nah, she's been hard to get ahold of. We're square now, but we kind of had a falling out about her dad and me doing stupid shit."

Who knew why the sigh was half hearted, but the mention of Alicia kept the grin on his face. He was content to keep pace along with her, and even paid for them to get in (well, paid for Maxine because he already paid and it was rude to invite your friend who lived in her van out somewhere to do things when you weren't entirely certain she had the cash flow to live somewhere). Besides, Groupon is the shit and he did this with Jenn all the time.

We digress, "but, I texted a whole bunch of people so you might get to meet other people. So, it's kind of a plus."

but a minus, because no Alicia.

Maxine

"I didn't even know there was a falling out to begin with. What'd ya do?" She posed her questions in a way that were just so sincere and harmless that sometimes it was easy to forget that she was actually getting very out of line with her prying. She smiled brightly at the girl who took Elijah's money, and onward and into the aquarium they went.

But other people might be coming too, and to hear that the petite example of androgyny perked right back up -- she'd seemed only slightly sombered to have heard that Elijah'd said something about Alicia's dad that had pissed her off (or that's what Maxine took away from the explanation, anyways).

"By a 'whole bunch of people', do you mean ones that Know? I hope so."

It wasn't that Maxine was an elitist or anything, she just understood that nobody else really wanted them around anyways.

Grace

[Perception + Awareness!]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Grace

When Elijah sent Grace a text reading "OMG Grace, there are mermaids at the aquarium," the first thing she did was check the aquarium's website to see if the place was putting on a special mermaid show. He could have meant that actual mermaids had shown up at the aquarium, and that would be cause for a rescue mission of massive proportions.

Luckily for everyone involved, there was, indeed, a mermaid show in progress.

Mermaids eh? Sounds like an advertising stunt that has the puppy-like young Mage all worked up. Put some poorly-paid girls in revealing outfits, give them air hoses and fancy tails, and call it a windfall. It would be more interesting and less depressing if there were actual mermaids...

But she goes anyway, because Elijah is there and he thinks that this sort of thing is neat, and Elijah is a magical creature after all -- merman or no.

She gives the woman at the front her money and walks inside, and she can feel them. There's someone else here. Someone bright. She has to blink a couple times until she convinces herself it isn't actual brightness, but something else...

Maxine

[Perception + Awareness: Good idea]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 4 )

Elijah

[are there people?]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 8) ( success x 1 )

Elijah

The question of what he did made him laugh the kind of laugh that indicated that there was a whole rabbit hole worth of disaster to delve into. It wasn't so much mirth as… something. Everyone's laughed that laugh. We know how it feels in the pit of your stomach.

"Iiii didn't answer my phone for, like, two days. I passed out in a chick's truck and Jenn couldn't find me. Jenn called Alicia. Both of them kind of freaked. When I called Alicia back, we ended up talking and I said I needed to see her and she said she needed to see her dad but she couldn't and she wasn't dying but I called bullshit and, anyway, I was kind of an asshole and now I'm trying to get people to help rescue her dad from a super secret quasi governmental organization."

Ah, that was the laugh that one can place. The one that you have because it keeps you form feeling utterly helpless and lost at sea. Or maybe that was all the water talking. he wasn't having any panic attacks at that juncture. he wasn't trying to flee in utter terror. No, instead, he was more interested in looking at a blue tang that looked remarkably like Dori. he feels something, but he's just a little too busy being distracted by the blue tang and the abundance of anemones.

"I texted a bunch of people who Know. And Jenn, but Jenn is cool… but not cool like that, but I think Jenn has a date."

Maxine

"Did I hear you say that Alicia said she wasn't dying but you call bullshit on that?" Maxine looked up to Elijah with both eyebrows raised on her forehead. She looked skeptical more than concerned, like she wasn't certain that he'd spoken correctly. "Because if so, you just told me that you think she's dying."

She let go of his arm once they were past the counter where you pay for admission and instead folded her arms together at the small of her back. Whatever the first tank was, she'd wander over and peer inside. Maxine was the sort to take advantage of the establishment's air conditioner and take her time visiting each display if allowed. She wasn't sure what time the mermaid show started, and figured Elijah would keep her on track in that regard.

Some freshwater animal was peering back at her through the glass when she sensed (she couldn't say felt, it was sort of like smelling bright lights and colors to try and explain) some other force, something stronger and shifting and bold. Maxine straightened up and lifted her chin, turned her head to look in the direction that Grace would be coming around the corner from.

"A friend?" As though she was going to just shift gears and let her attention be diverted from the topic of Alicia and her life expectancy.

Dan

Mermaids at the aquarium and god knows whether Serafíne was one of the people whom Elijah might have texted but she's not here. Not in the country or perhaps not sufficiently back in the country to respond but:

Dan does.

With a mild smirk and an "Oh really?" via text and later something about We might drop by. later and Elijah doesn't know whom Dan means by we but: he means Dee and a couple of Dee's roller derby friends and Rick who is in the band and This Guy Named Eddie whom everyone somehow knows - people meeting at the Aquarium before drinks or after, one or the other.

Dan has a lanky arm flung comfortably around Dee's shoulder and he might be willing to let that group envelope Elijah and Maxine without much of a second thought but then he sees Grace and sort of detaches himself from Dee with a kiss on her shoulder, pulls away from his larger group of friends and heads on over toward Elijah and Maxine alone, holding out a hand to Elijah to shake, with a "Hey man - " and a "Grace, hey," when the Virtual Adept is within earshot,

and then a glance at Maxine, the brief crest of a smile breaking through his blond beard. "I don't think we've met."

Elijah

"Not, like, literally dying, more like she is figuratively- it's so complicated, basically I was a jackass and said she was realy messed up over her dad even if she said she wasn't, she totally was. Is. Still is, anyway, it's not like she's got cancer or something," that he knows of. Holy shit, what if she had cancer? That would be horrible. But, we digress, "anyway, she's not dying at a rate that is faster than the current rate we're all dying at. Blahblahblah gothkidrant."

was that a friend of his?

Elijah perked up, tearing his eyes away from the fish and turning just in time to see-

"Grace! Dan! Hey man," he said with a smile, bright and pleased, "Max, this is Dan, he's cool. Dan, this is Maxine, Maxine is also cool."

Because apparently being cool was slang for magical people.

Grace

Grace pops around that corner, and she's not really looking where she's going. She's looking at the walls of fish, not the people here to see the fish. But she knows that Elijah and Maxine are roughly in the direction she's headed, so eventually...

"Grace, hey," says Dan, and suddenly she's paying attention.

"Oh hey, Dan," she says, waves, and then notices he's here with Elijah and someone she hasn't a name for. She gets a wave too. And then Grace makes her way over.

She's wearing a red shirt with a screen-printed fish on it today. The fish is wearing a snorkel. It seemed appropriate.

"I see you have picked up the 'they're cool' thing from Sera, huh?" she remarks to Elijah, talking about the code word they seem to have for those in the Know.

"Also, hey Maxine. I haven't seen you around."

Dan

Grace greets Dan and he returns oh hey/i> with a mildly ironic smile. He has, after all, just rocked up on an extended goth kid-style rant involving Alicia and whether or not she is dying at a rate any faster than the rest of us, which interests him enough that his eyes linger on Elijah's expression a beat or two or perhaps even three longer than necessary, even as Elijah is introducing Dan (who is Tall) to Maxine (who is very much Not Tall), and then Dan holds out a hand and though he's wearing a long-sleeved button-down shirt tonight fastened to the wrists hints of his tattoos creep up over his hands and his knuckles, peek up over the collar (and the bow-tie, he is hipster enough to wear a bow-tie with or without irony. That's how he rolls.)

"Maxine," Dan repeats, because repeating the name of the person you just met helps you to remember it. Because Dan doesn't have magic to help him remember this shit. "Nice to meet you. Also a fan of mermaids or did you just stumble on each other in an ordinary fit of mild coincidence?"

Dan

stop!

Maxine

All at once, two new people round the corner. For a moment it was a hell of a lot more than that, and Maxine had made a 'Hmm' noise to see the posse that came around with Dan. He peeled away from them, though, and joined the display of bland local freshwater pond fish (you know they love to put the local stuff up front). Soon after came a woman with dark hair, not a hell of a lot taller than Maxine. Not like how Elijah and Dan both were.

She smiled first to Grace, the expression genuine but not bubbly-- it was a little bit too sharp, too knowing to carry the sort of innocent mirth that typically brought 'bubbly' into the equation. "Oh, well, I go where the wind goes. There's just been a tunnel caught this side of the mountains the last few months."

Her arms had unfolded from behind her back, gone to her sides when she'd turned away from the fish to face the others that had come to see mermaids as well. Dan had extended a hand that peeked hints of ink and design from under a shirt cuff, and it was accepted with an enthusiastic squeeze from a rather small hand.

"Mermaids are assholes. But Elijah's alright." She'd been summoned by a text, by someone else's idea. Her acquiescence was on account of the company promised.

Elijah

"It totally works, too, I can say they're cool and people who are cool? Totally get what you're talking about. It's just precise and not precise enough that it works fantastically," he replied. And he was content to beam, yes beam, at the mention of people. there was a little bit of pride in that, and somehow he had managed to deliver exactly what it was that he said he would deliver- people. He'd told Maxine he would introduce her to people and now, with the promise of mermaids, he had delivered people.

He kind of wished they were real mermaids. At the same time, he hoped there weren't real mermaids at an aquarium. Quietly, he wondered if there was such a thing. If he could see them and if they did exist. if that would be the last sight he saw before plunging deep, down, downward into all of the water and being moored off and stuck in the water never to be seen again. Perhaps he was confusing mermaids with sirens.

Either way, it seemed dangerous.

"I may or may not have mass texted every cool person I know about mermaids and aquariums."

Grace

"Everyone? Geez, Elijah, you just do not know how to think small, do you?" Grace says, but she's not exactly chiding, just giving him a hard time because it's fun. "If Patience comes by with a net and trident because she misunderstood, I am blaming you, for the record."

Grace is not all that impatient to see mermaids. The local pond fish are pretty enough, as far as she's concerned. No, seems she's more than content to stand here talking to the cool people who are the true lure to this visit.

"Mermaids aren't assholes, it's the guys who don't pay the mermaids enough to swim around and get stared at by assholes who are assholes," Grace says, with a sniff. "Mermaids are just doing their job, yanno."

Dan

There is a sort of cross-conversation here. Maxine goes where the wind blows and Dan - who is not just taller but who is also older than the rest - gives her the briefest of grins. The spark of it slicing through his beard. "Where the wind blows, eh?"

It is a subtle, and supple invitation to Maxine to elaborate, if she wants to elaborate. Or to let it go, if she wants to let it go. Easy as fuck.

--

Then, encompassing Grace and Maxine and Elijah all at once, Dan asks - quietly, "You ever seen a real one?" Mermaids, he means.

Elijah

"I want to," he said with no small amount of awe. No small amount of wonder at the prospect of mermaids being real and genuine and even if there was the potential that it could mean his untimely demise, he wanted ever so desperately to see something magnificent. Unicorns were out. From what Elijah understood, they weren't keen on people who weren't exactly pure and while Elijah Poirot was pure as driven snow, that was more like snow that has been driven on instead of its actual intention. "Water freaks me out, though."

He says in the middle of an aquarium surrounded by water and aquatic things.

Maxine

"I've read about real ones. Watched that shitty discovery channel 'exclusive', too-- which isn't the real ones, mind you, but it's not really that far off base." Maxine looked the youngest by miles, even if she and Elijah were the same age. He had the benefit of height and facial hair to help him out. Maxine was petite, with the big eyes and narrow chin that wasn't uncommon down her heritage line. She probably got carded every time she wanted to buy her cigarettes.

As for the wind: "'Wind' is a figurative. I'm no meteorologist, don't mistake me. A 'current' is the better word for it." She smiled up at the older man with the tattoos and black beard and jammed her hands into the pockets of her cargo shorts, where they remained up only by the grace of the belt having caught on her hip bones. Her shoulders bunched up modestly as she went on.

"Y'know, put the feelers out, catch a vibration and go check it out."

And, following that, she glanced down at her naked wrist to check time on what must be an invisible watch. She wondered aloud to anyone, but mostly to Elijah since he was the one that rallied them together: "When does this thing start?"

Grace

Grace grins at Dan, and lowers her voice. "Nope. Never a real one. But I have ridden a dragon."

Granted, that occasion wasn't the best of times. She shot down a fighter pilot while riding said dragon. But there are still some good memories there.

"Maybe you don't really want to see one, Elijah, if the water scares you."

And, my word, could this guy be any more like Kalen? Probably not.

Dan

"How badly does it freak you out?" Dan asks Elijah, rather thoughtfully. "Does it rise to the level of I can't deal with the world right now freak out? Or is it more cats and baths. It doesn't matter much, really. I doubt you'd see real ones anywhere these days. This world would be harder for them than you - right? Reality would snap its jaws closed on them so hard.

"Where they'd go or come from, I don't know. But think about it - every myth you've ever heard about is real - someway, somewhere, somewhen. Because, once upon a time, people believed in that shit."

--

A down at Maxine, white teeth in his blond beard. This quiet huff of laughter when she explains that she meant figuritively, and that laughter crinkles the corners of his eyes.

"I didn't think you were deploying a windsock. What sort of vibrations? I mean, I get drifting, don't get me wrong. I guess I'm asking whether you know what you're looking for, or if that question is part of the equation, too."

Then to Grace: "A dragon, huh? And you weren't stoned at the time?"

Elijah

When did this thing start, anyway? "I think it starts on the hour," he said as he flipped through his phone. He had things to go through, and despite the cracked screen Elijah was trying to give the expensive phone a try again. he was going to have to figure out some way to replace the glass before his parents came to visit, presuming they ever came to visit, to try and give the impression that he was doing whatever it was. He nodded again.

"And it's somewhere between cat and fuck my life I can't deal with this shit, I mean I'll shower and stuff it's just.. y'know... anyway, mermaids. I'm sure there's somewhere that people still believe n them, somewhere that they would still exist, maybe in the amazon or something. there are places that haven't seen the modern world so there's probably still places where people believe in mermaids."

Did he sound... wistful?

Why yes, ladies and gentlemen, yes he did.

Maxine

Dan gets a raised eyebrow at first, and then a wry, slow and crawling sort of a smirk. He asked what kind of vibrations and what she was looking for, and she answered by shaking her head (though she may as well be wagging her finger, given the tone of voice she answers in).

"Maybe it's not so much that I'm looking for something in particular, as much as it is that I want to just see everything."

But then, Elijah answered with the time and by flipping his phone out of his pocket, and Maxine leaned to the side to peek curiously at the screen to see the time. Sure, she could See Time, better and more purely than most people in the world would ever be able to, but that didn't mean she couldn't suffice for checking a lit phone screen on occasion as well.

"There's a shit ton of people who believe in mermaids that live here in this city, thanks to that documentary. A depressing amount of people believed it."

Though the rubber soles of her shoes stayed in place, spread apart from one another on the tile floor that ran throughout the place, Maxine twisted about at the waist and glanced over her shoulder at the fish through the glass behind her. Eyes flicked quick to Grace's face on the way there, though. That moment of interest was followed by a question:

"Where was the dragon? And where'd it go?"

Grace

Oh, Grace had started something. Something about dragons.

"They're all far away from here. Catch me another not so public time, and I'll tell you all about it. And no drugs, Dan. You know I just say no," she says, sly and full of snark. She does not actually say no.

"I don't know if it's such a bad thing that people are willing to believe in the impossible. Sounds kinda promising, that."

Dan

"Yeah?" to Maxine, quietly. The yeah is simple inquiry. There is not a shred of challenge in it, not a soupçon of doubt. "You looking high? Or low." The question has room in it. Space to breathe.

--

A glance at Elijah, then. "I think it's less Tinkerbell, you know? It all has more to do with the genuine elasticity of experience - whether or not there's room for it all," and back to Grace, encompassing Maxine. "But she's right, you know. The more folks are willing to believe in miracles that have nothing to do with this rigidly defined, experiential world, well. The more space there is within which people who are just a bit outside that rigidly defined, experiential world can work.

Maxine

Conversations to be saved for times when there were fewer ears about, and Maxine nodded her agreement to Grace's recommendation that they avoid the subject of her dragon mount for the time being. She didn't think that people were paying what they had to say to one another too much attention, after all.

But then, Maxine didn't have a whole hell of a lot of experience with ears being all around-- the ones that were specifically listening for them, and would come for them if they knew they were out here to knock things out of balance and screw around with what wasn't meant to be screwed about with. The slender-framed young woman turned back to face the man and woman standing ahead of her (she'd remained beside Elijah without being against his side-- she didn't need his protection or anything, she just knew him while the other two she'd just met).

"High," she answered, and flashed teeth bright for Dan when she did. "Always and forever, High and Above." Then, when it came to the subject of what people were willing to believe and if it was a good thing that they did, she wrinkled her nose just a little bit and shook her head. "It's depressing when they believe schlock. It's fucking elating when they believe The Truth."

Somewhere in the middle of her statement, Maxine's attention had shifted downward. Her left hand pulled a small, simple, outdated cellphone out of her shorts pocket and she glanced down to the screen-- it was buzzing noisily and persistently, she was receiving a call. How her mouth pursed when she registered the name on the screen was a peek into how (not) excited she was to take the call. Apparently she couldn't ignore it-- the pursed lips betrayed that too.

"I'll meet you all at the mermaid tanks-- gotta take this."

And she parted from the trio to do exactly that, phone coming to her ear as she rounded the corner to go back out to the front of the building.

Eleanor

Eleanor has not heard from Elijah in some time. He hasn't dropped by her office to chat about the nature of things both ephemereal and seemingly corporeal. He hasn't run into her in the hallways, or at another bar. Last time he saw her, she was making breakfast in her kitchen, and her enormously tall apprentice was helping her, and Elijah was most likely seeing them blearily as he woke up on her couch. There were no sausages or bacon with breakfast, but there were avocados and eggs and yogurt and bright vegetables and, for good measure, piles of greasy hashbrowns to help with the hangover.

Eleanor drinks tea, but Eleanor makes good coffee.

--

Then he texts her to tell her there are mermaids in the aquarium. And when Eleanor shows up, it is still raining outside, has been raining all day. She is wearing thin jeans the color of a charcoal-rubbed twilight, and they follow her legs which seem longer when she is not in the company of a seven-foot-tall swimmer. Over whatever shirt she has on she is wearing... well, it's sort of a jacket, and a bit of a cape, and it has a hood. It flows loosely, and it is hard to tell where her arms are. Her hair is in a braid, sweeping down her scalp and curving over her shoulder.

She has found him. And whomever he's with.

Her eyes skip from Dan, who she saw the other night, to Grace, who she knows or has at least met a few times. Then to Elijah.

"Mermaids?"

Grace

Schlock or not, it's the willingness that has Grace happy. Well, happy until the sudden sensation of drowning comes over her, and then...

Okay, so the walls are not crashing down and suffocating her. It's just Eleanor. She shakes her head as if to clear it, and then turns to see the expected woman.

"Mermaids. Because Elijah wanted to," Grace says, and shrugs. "Hi, Eleanor."

Elijah

[Awfuck!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

Eleanor

[that reminds me]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 5, 5, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Elijah

Mermaids?

"They're not real mermaids," he laments, yes laments, but he is old enough that someone must have told him by now that there were not going to be real mermaids at an aquarium, but there was the feeling of cold and ice and drowning and instead of being terrified (because it was so very, very scary to feel), he smiled and it was bright and pleased and, "hey Eleanor! Glad you could make it. You missed Maxine, but you might meet again at some point, because she's pretty freaking awesome."

Dan

Dan has a raw but oddly bemused little grin settled over his mouth as Maxine gives him that answer, that bright flash of her teeth. Always and forever, High and Above - and there is the passion skimming beneath it, as she announces that it is depressing when people believe schlock, elating when they believe The Truth.

"Somehow," he says, and he says this - really - to no one at all. "I don't think her truths are my truths." Then, a glance at Grace. "Tell me someone has introduced that girl to Pan. I don't know why she reminds me of fucking Joan of Arc."

Mermaids? Eleanor asks, and, "Swimmers in fishtails," Dan explains, though she must surely know that. Glances at Elijah, next, "Shows are every hour on the hour. There's a restaurant down in Florida that has had them since the 1950s. We had a gig nearby back when we were living in North Carolina. Sera couldn't get enough of them."

Of course she couldn't.

They were wriggling around in the water half-naked.

But someone somewhere in the crowd is signaling to him and Dan makes his goodbyes, telling them all that he has to go see what Dee wants, exhorting them to enjoy the mermaids. He'll see them around.

Grace

"Joan of Arc? Huh, maybe. She sure is bright like Pan is. Pan does not remind me of Joan of Arc, though," Grace says, and grins at a fish.

She waves to Dan when he leaves, but her eyes don't really leave the fish.

"I could believe that Sera would love watching mermaids, fake or real," she says, to no one in particular. "Shall we go gaze at the fish women then?"

Eleanor

In a place full of water, where there is much glass to break and rooms where there are sharks, there are turtles, there are even tigers, no one wants to feel anything sundering. No one wants to feel like they are drowning, slowly sinking, suffocating not because there is no oxygen, but because that air is rushing into your lungs with a couple of hydrogen hangers-on in every molecule.

Dan departs. Eleanor looks at Elijah as he explains they aren't real.

She sighs. She seems to understand the disappointment.

"You had me worried," is all she says, and slides her hands into the pockets of her cape-jacket, hidden as they are in the folds. She shakes her head, nods in some general direction. "Let's go watch the not-real mermaids. May as well get our money's worth."

The Giving Tree

Elijah

Elijah Poriot didn't climb trees often, or at all really, but when he called he had a proposition for Dan.

You see, he had enjoyed hiking. You see, he had enjoyed the out of doors, and being a child who had been so lovingly, achingly deprived of trees he had one simple request.

Hey, Dan, you wanna climb a tree with me?

"Do you wanna build a snooooowmaaaaaaaan," Elijah crooned.

That's how this problem started, really, because it was too hot and Elijah Poirot, darling Elijah Poirot, was not actually qualified to climb trees. How someone is qualified to climb trees is beyond all reason and comprehension, but Elijah Poirot was not qualified to climb trees for one simple reason: going down. He had no problems going down all sorts of things. Hills, stairs, people- these were all acceptable places to go down on but a tree was something different. There wasn't a gradual Oh yes! when you went down. THere was usually just a crash, thud and then nothing.

But he had decided, since Dan said something about rock climbing, that tree climbing was obviously the appropriate middle ground for this.

Elijah

Five minutes later, Dan gets another text.

Dan, I made a terrible mistake. Trees are dangerous. SOS

---

Elijah peered awkwardly out of the branches, perhaps a tad too high or drunk or whatever to really justify being in a tree right now.

"Weeeeell fuck."

Dan

Dan is just old enough that he does not necessarily live by or with or for his phone. It's a tool, not an appendage, and he doesn't feel lost or strangely at sea when it isn't right in his hand, and he doesn't feel unmoored when he puts it down in the kitchen and forgets about it until tea-time, but to be fair he keeps it reasonably close, especially when Serafíne is outside of view and/or shouting distance, as she has been for some weeks.

Still, he gets Elijah's texts at the same time. Picks up the phone from wherever he laid it in the music room and scrolls through and glances at the first with a hushed sort of smirking laugh, then reads the second one and,

well,

shakes his head and rubs his beard and slides the headphones off his head, ruffling his close-cropped blond hair with one hand as he hits save with the other and then returns to the phone

Where are you?

- is what Elijah gets back, across the ether.

Elijah

Where was he?

Hmmn. That was an interesting question. And an entirely appropriate question if eh was going to invite Dan to come visit him in sprucely solitary confinement. He had to think of what kind of tree he was in, what was where, how he was going to describe this and it was all incredibly complicated. One has to wonder sometimes if Jenn feels like Dan feels some days.

Admittedly, Jenn was about the same age as Elijah, he may have even been little older, but she kept enough of an eye on him that the age difference has negligible at best. In that hazy, not-on-the-groundly state, Elijah had time to stop and reflect and think. Yes, think, because when his mind wasn't trying to revolt against him thinking was a wonderful past time.

Where was he?

Washington Park, Elijah replied. Soon enough Elijah was sending his GPS coordinates, because he had no idea what he was doing in a tree, but he did know how to use his phone.

Dan

K. comes the reply. See you in 15.

--

Dan is tempted - tempted, mind you - to tell Elijah that he should magick himself out of the tree. Dan tells him no such thing. Also, he refrains from telling Elijah not to fall out of the tree, and keeps any other advice he might have to himself. There's no stay put and no don't worry, none of that. Elijah's an adult, even if he is barely an adult by human standards and barely Awake by the standards of the Traditions. He is still both things: Awake and adult and, well, Dan understands and respects both.

-

So. Fifteen minutes or so pass before Elijah gets another text -

Closer to Smith or Grasmere Lake?

Then -

NM. Got it.

A handful of minutes later, the tall, tattooed, bearded blond man is strolling up the nearest jogging path, looking up more than down.

Elijah

There is a tree, a very tall tree. A very tall tree that has yet to have the weight and strength that it should because of its nature. A tree with leaves as big as dinner plates and like some strange arboreal creature, there was the younger man sitting as high as a house in more than one sense of the word. He doesn't seem so much afraid as he seems… inconvenienced. Being in the tree seems to have given him time to think, yes, but it has also given him time to contemplate.

Contemplation was different than thinking, you see, because contemplation was somewhat more spiritual in nature and at that juncture, at the moment when he could have sworn that the leaves were talking to him and there was music in the subtle creak of the branches and there was a second where it was all making sense and it was all beautiful and he looked down at his phone and very, very carefully, he leaned forward and-

Oh, look, there was Dan!

"So I was thinking," he starts, "about distance… and how, if we're all connected, is distance really that much of a factor in stopping people from doing what it is they need to do?"

Dan

"Some of that might depend on your definition of need," Dan responds, peering up at Elijah stuck-in-the-tree, shading his eyes a bit against the sun with the flat of his left hand. The right is tucked quite neatly into the right front pocket of his skinny jeans. Dan is squinting a bit, his mouth closed, one of his rather quiet smirks adorning his long face.

"Why?" He asks, as he starts examining the tree for options beyond the obvious, the suggestive span of THIS ROUTE DOWN. On ski slopes sometimes it is called the easiest way down.

So. Easiest way down?

"Is there something that you need to do, someplace far away?"

Then, a second later.

"And, do you think you can get down? Or do I need to call the fire department."

Elijah

Does he need to call the fire department?

"I'm not a cat," he lamented.

Elijah contemplates this for a moment, really thinks and puts his hands on a branch. Dan had told him down was easier than up, and the young man- clearly just a tad altered in that tree, peered out over a branch and tentatively reached for something that wasn't quite there, only to realize he was grasping at the air. Elijah made a little sound of displeasure.

There was a way down, he wasn't that high up and he could jump with minimal injury, though there were an abundance f branches, just not all of them looked like they could easily support Elijah's weight. The fact that he had gotten into the tree at all and hadn't gone toppling out of it yet was rather impressive.

Did he need to do something far away? "Not yet… I was just thinking about it… every time I try something, I touch it, literally touch it, taste it feel it and it's all right there, but there's a whole world out there, and it's astounding to think that there are parts of it I won't be able to see… and I wondered why I would have to actually be there in order to experience them. I could take a trip halfway across the galaxy if I got good enough and never leave my couch… not that I much care for the idea of having my brain floating off into the cold black void of space, but y'know."

He'd done that before, but it wasn't space he was drifting off through. nothing so grand and magnificent in its coldness.

Dan

If you go up there has to be a way back down. Isn't that some sort of principle of the universe. Doesn't that go right alongside the conservation of matter and the fact that an unlabeled tuna fish sandwich left in the company fridge will stay in place until the day you were planning to eat it and then disappear unaccountably into someone else's stomach.

"Believe it or not," Dan informs Elijah, "cats are more likely to be able to get out a tree when they want to than people." He unearths his hands from the pockets of his jeans and circles beneath Elijah's perch, studying the branches and identifying the sturdiest one with the best connection to the main trunk - as best he can - from down below. Identifies it with a flick of his left hand. "That one - " A huff of a breath. Then, " - no, the other that one." And so on, until Elijah gets it right.

--

"If everything's connected - " this is not precisely idle, just considered, contemplative. The consor allows the thoughts to linger and then bifurcate. "What makes you think that your brain would be floating off in the cold black void of space. Doesn't that just mean that distance, like separation, is just another fucking myth that we share. Couldn't it really mean that everywhere and everywhen is contained in the exact same point of singularity that you occupy at any given moment.

"So there's no fucking void. Just the realization that there never was any distance between you at all."

Elijah

[can I climb trees? Dex+athletics (seriously, how did you get up here?)]

Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (6, 6) ( success x 2 )

Elijah

Eventually, he does seem to figure out how to get himself onto a low enough branch that the prospect of jumping down or getting down seemed like a less than unpleasant factor. The lower branches, unsurprisingly, were better at holding weight. They were better at supporting one hundred forty pounds of teenaged magus. From there, he was content to just sit there.

he smiled, perhaps serene, and perhaps pleased. Dan was a familiar face, and a face that he didn't mind seeing from the new angle.

"If everywhere and every when is connected… Doesn't it reduce everything to here and now. Everywhere is here, every time is now?"

Elijah leaned forward, and ungracefully hopped himself out of the tree. He even landed on his feet, too... perhaps it wasn't so ungraceful afterall.

Dan

"Depends on what you believe, doesn't it?"

Elijah makes his way down. Dan does not put out both arms to brace him or make a gesture like he might consider catching the younger man. He might've done that if Sera were involved: told her, perhaps, simply to let go and trust that she'd be caught. Or perhaps he would've coaxed her down from the treetops until she was within arm's reach, and then held out his arms to pluck her thoughtfully out of the tree.

With Elijah, well. Dan gives him a quiet smirk of approval when Elijah finds that branch - lower than the rest, solid right? - on which he can park himself. Steps back out of the way, stowing his phone in the front pocket of his jeans.

"I mean, you can say reduce and if you think that that makes the world smaller, more mean, grimier and all the rest, then it fucking will be. Or, you can say reduce and if you think that means something beautiful and essentialist about the space we occupy - something oblong and perfect and contained, like an egg, everything necessary for life wrapped up in one smoothly fertilized shell, then that's what it means.

"Or you could say that it instead multiplies the here and now into the infinite."

When you make the world conform to your will, words matter, right?

Then: "Look at that. You made it out without assistance from the fire department. No broken bones or anything."

Elijah

"I think of it more… like when you're cooking. When you cook something down to the point where what you have is the core, concentrated, flavor. When you boil off all the unnecessary stuff and you have that essence of what it all is," he replied. feeling the ground beneath him and hearing the tree creak beside him and he wanted, more at that moment, to feel that free falling moment, the milliseconds that could pull out into something longer and more full so it felt like the time that he went skydiving right after he'd turned eighteen. So he could feel that moment of soaring free fall tick by before his feet hit the ground. Even if it was short, because it didn't have to be short.

It could be as long as he damned well pleased so long as he could will it to be so.

"Words always matter."

Like an absolute truth.

"… wanna find another tree?"

Dan

Dan is standing not precisely beneath the spread of the tree's branches, but a few steps away now. They're on the grass made sparse by drought and the heat of the summer, looking out over the guttering glimmer of one of Washington Park's captive, well-groomed lakes, and Dan has both the lake in view and the young mage in view and he is listening and he is captured in an aspect of listening, you understand. There is a way in which he stands and a way in which he cants his head both toward / away from Elijah Poirot, a way he nods slowly while Elijah explains What It All Means to Him, at least Right Now, if not both Yesterday and Tomorrow, and within that aspect of listening a kind of deep and quiet respect for both Elijah's beliefs specifically, and the idea of belief as a Thing Itself.

So many goddamned threads.

"That's where we're different, I suppose." Dan murmured, thoughtfully, blue eyes flickering upward to catch the edge of Elijah's profile in the evening light. He is both quiet and quietly serious. "I don't think any of it is superfluous. Hell, I don't feel like that either."

Then again: look who's awake, and look who is here, still, sleeping with his eyes wide open.

A short bark of laughter follows.

"Depends on what sort of tree you're looking for. And what you intend to do with it."

Elijah

In all truth, if Elijah had never died there is a good chance he would have never awakened. That his life would have never been seen as anything potentially remarkable, and he never would have been standing here in Denver talking with people whose minds and capacities for thought were extraordinary. People who dreamed. People who were still asleep but understood the world so much better than he did.

"What if it's not superfluous? What if I'm wrong? I just… if the world is infinite and here and now can be anywhere and and when and I'm John Wilkes Boothe and Lincoln and… how do you not just sit back in horror of it all? How do you not sit back in wonder? If there are layers and layers and one truth at the center, one universal experience… it feels like it comes to the same place. How can something be everything?" his voice is small at that moment, seeking genuine and open for Dan's opinion because Elijah looks at him like Dan knows.

Look which of them is awake. Look at which of them is aware. The answers are different.

And Elijah grins, "well Dan, fuck if I know what to do with a tree, we've already proven that."

Dan

"Whoa," Dan to Elijah, and Dan's grinning now. This open expression framed by his blond beard, the genuine good humor crinkling the corners of his blue eyes and the whoa comes out of his mouth on another breath that feels like this exhaled cloud of laughter but returns itself to itself in something else: like-minded and like-made, but not precisely aligned.

And Dan slings an arm, companionable, around Elijah's shoulders, claps him on the right shoulder.

"Technically," Dan informs Elijah, "when you're a willworker, I don't think you can be wrong. Or at least, when you decide you were wrong you start looking for the next frame of meaning. Right? You get to frame it all your way, and I get to frame it mine.

"How can something be everything? That's the mystery, isn't it? How the fuck can anything exist? How could the universe have a goddamned beginning, right? What came before all this shit? How can something begin without something preceding it? Mystery. You have to allow space for it, because without it you start looking for answers everywhere and a helluva lot of those answers are absolute bullshit.

"But I don't think you're in danger of that.

"And, there's a helluva lot you can do with a tree. Ever read that children's book - the Giving Tree?"

Elijah

"Actually? No. I've never read the Giving Tree."

Dan

"You should," Dan says with a sideglance. "Read it sometime."

Elijah

"Is this going to help me with my something can be everything problem or my tree problem?"

Dan

"Both, I think."

Then, wry:

"Well, I don't actually think that either one is a problem. Do you?"

Elijah

"Not a problem... more of a jumping off point," he replied. "You rescued me, I owe you a beer, c'mon."

gravity's gone.

Hawksley Rothschild

Hawksley left them behind. And there was something natural about that, at least in the way he did it. He did it without pain, without longing, without protracted anything at all. And it can't be easy, for anyone, to see the way he can turn around and make you feel like he's forgotten about you entirely. It isn't easy, for Collins, who was a trusted member of the Livingston household when Hawksley came red and protesting into the world. But you wouldn't know it, to look at him as Hawksley goes off on his own: he's stoic as ever, still as a monument. He is a stone sculpture of loyalty, and if there's warmth there, it is quite businesslike warmth.

He comes back, though. Some way or other, somewhere or other, he finds Sera and Collins again. And he was tan before, golden, but he's so dark now that it's surreal: he is bronze. His hair is bleached past wheat and past gold into near-white. His eyes are crystalline by the contrast. He is shirtless and shoeless and dirty and scratched and there is even sunburn on his shoulders and back and arms and chest but his eyes are wide and wild and he starts laughing when he sees them,

then collapses. His eyes roll back and everything.

--

Whether they take him to a doctor or not -- and Collins recommends it, and Collins has at least been briefed sparsely enough to mention offhand to Serafine that should she like, he will drop her back at the hotel before taking Mr. Rothschild to the emergency department, or that she can stay in the car, or what-have-you, and even leave it running so she has the A/C and the radio.

One way or another, it turns out that he has a touch of heat exhaustion. He is very, very dehydrated. The story is that he got drunk, ran off from his party, and got lost. Collins tells this story well; Collins is a very good liar. Hawksley is conscious and disoriented, laughing, babbling in Latin here and there. He is telling himself jokes. No one here speaks Latin so they have no idea how witty he's actually being, which he might be disappointed by later if he can remember it.

--

Some time passes. Overnight, maybe. He has an IV for a while, to rehydrate him. They make sure there's nothing more serious going on: some mild bloodwork, and so on. Maybe Sera visits him, and he is sitting up in a hospital bed with a milkshake and he's VERY PROUD OF HIS MILKSHAKE, it's strawberry, and he's in a delightful mood but keeps slipping into other languages, keeps dazing off into space and there's nothing physically wrong with him. And maybe Sera can't visit him, and Collins just tells her these things. If she asks.

Collins does not talk to her about the hospital, unless she asks.

--

Not very long later, certainly not several days, Hawksley ends up back at the hotel. And he is still very bronze of skin and pale of hair but his sunburns have already faded; he has that sort of skin, like it was made for the sun and won't long be bruised by it. He takes a very long shower, though he's not filthy; he got clean at the hospital, after all. He shaves, such as he does, which means his neck and a trim of his face. And when we say 'he shaves' we mean 'Collins gives him a shave and trim'. Of course.

Then he sends Collins off to order food, fruit and champagne and chocolate and steak and all the decadent sorts of things that Hawksley only sometimes eats, and he walks around the room in boxer-briefs that are close-cut and dark blue, humming. His legs are actually the same color as his torso. Maybe he took his pants off while

"-- flying," he sings, badly. "Flyyyying, flyyyyying," alternating high and low, grabbing Sera by the hand and waist and waltzing with her, knocking into a coffee table. It's been a day or two and he's supposedly lucid, but it barely seems so.

Serafíne

(And does Sera visit? WP.)

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 3, 4, 4, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

It was not easy for Sera to watch him leave and it was not easy for her to see him come back like that: sunburned, disoriented, mad somehow, right? Not his usual selfish exuberance either, but the different sort of madness, the one that is all about all those cell walls defining ourselves, our consciousness being lysed into a sort pf primordial every/no/thingness, solvent and somehow insoluble and after that she didn't go out and was grumpy and moody enough herself that Sera - who feels everything, everything - only noticed Collins' stoicism, which made her fucking moodier. So she glomped around the hotel drinking poire william until everyone in the world was asleep, and then she wandered the pre-dawn streets past Chanel and Cartier, past the American embassy, until she stumbled on a temple to the gods in the middle of the city and couldn't get in.

--

Right, see. He collapses. Collins is stoic and practical and assured and a pillar of everything in the face of Sera's drunken tears and she's doing magic she wants to do magic but there are strangers around aren't there, everywhere and that makes it absurdly hard, everything's too real, no one believes in any goddamned thing except doctors, and the only things you can kiss and make better are skinned knees, not sunburnt young men on the edge of heat stroke -

- so Collins suggests the Emergency Room and Sera agrees, of course she does, and perhaps only Collins understands: how far Hawksley has gone and come back and how much will it took to get back in such state but Collins also appears to understand the will it takes Sera to grit her teeth and bend her blonde head and square her narrow shoulders in her rose-covered bustier to join them inside.

She sits with him all night, or at least as much of the night as the French medical personnel will allow, too tense to sleep, not understanding a single one of the jokes Hawksley tells himself because she does not understand any Latin beyond the fragments of the mass that sometimes drift up at the strangest times and in the oddest places and even though these are the strangest times and the oddest places none of those fragments drift up now.

In the hospital, only his glee over his STRAWBERRY MILKSHAKE gets her to crack a smile. It is a tight, lovely little smile. Her arms around her calves and her chin on her left knee and her hair pulled back into a poneytail and her blue eyes strangely sober and she can taste the change in him, can't she, in the air soaring around him, but she can't let herself feel it, not now. Not yet. Not in a place like this.

He's kept overnight and she cannot stay and doesn't want to leave and refuses to leave but she has to and he's just going to sleep with a needle in his arm which scares the fuck out of her and they make her go and Collins drives her back to the hotel and she falls asleep in the SUV and he wakes her when they arrive back at the hotel and learns that Sera is a grumpy little fuck when woken unceremoniously from slumber and almost impossible to awaken, to boot.

--

Sera is settled cross-legged on the bed, with its brocade duvet and fussy plethora of pillows and she was sleeping while Collins fetched Hawksley back from the hospital, curled up to one side of the bed with her arms wrapped around a pillow, having made for herself a very neat little mounded hollow just like she does at home, but she woke as soon as she sensed him, felt his resonance waxing all around her, rising, soaring, right? getting stronger and stronger as Collins brought him round in the SUV and escorted him to the sixth or seventh floor and on and on, and she's wearing a black lace bra and black lace panties (she has spent enough money on lingerie since arriving in Paris to purchase, perhaps, the use of a small army for a solid half-year) beneath one of Hawksley's t-shirts (In the Night Kitchen) that she chose to sleep in and watches Hawksley order his decadent meal and get shaved and trimmed with a gaze that is both somehow bruised and perspicacious and when he grabs her by the hand and waist her legs just unfurl as if they were much, much longer than they are.

He's waltzing her. Her breath catches and she's waltzing with him and all that tension dissolves and who gives a fuck if they knock into a coffee table or three and who gives a fuck that it is an eighteenth century antique (REPRODUCTION. Surely they haul out the reproductions when people who look like Sera are staying in their rooms) and her eyes are on his eyes and she doesn't know what the fuck to say because she has never, never, never ever seen him like this but there's a point mid-dance where she rises to her tiptoes and kisses him, right? This sudden, arresting sort of kiss,

and says, quite simply,

"Show me."

How he flies, of course. How he soars.

Hawksley Rothschild

[arete 3: forces 3. vulgar w/o witnesses. base diff: 7 - 1 (quint), -1 (specialized focus), -1 (research: i would say he has done a fuckton) spending WP. need at least 3 successes.]

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

Hawksley Rothschild

[hawksley you asshole. not spending more quint.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (3, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

Hawksley Rothschild

[oh right, paradox, whatever.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Hawksley Rothschild

[soaking that]

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

Hawksley Rothschild

Hawksley is at least slightly lucid during the milkshake conversation, but he still keeps going into French, because he's hearing so much of it around him, and Latin, because it's filling up his head and he's trying to tell Sera that and only realizing when she looks at him in confusion that he's NOT SPEAKING A LANGUAGE SHE KNOWS, DUMBASS. He tries English again, but forgot what he just said, and ends up failing again, and laughing, and sipping his milkshake and passing out because he's really, really tired.

Murmurs sssseeeerrrraaaa in a singsong when she kisses his brow, having to leave the room because of rules and regulations and no wonder she hates hospitals. He is asleep, but he knows her.

Of course that always makes it worse when he walks away, or leaves, or blathers, or surrenders to a book in a way he doesn't surrender to anything at all.

Anyone.

--

The entire hotel feels a bit like it is lifting from its foundations and floating into the sky while he is inside it. That is the mood, as he demands succulent food and drink, as he wants to pop champagne. Gravity will turn off soon. Is turning off. It feels that way, at least. Any second she'll look out the window and see the city falling away.

He sings about flying. He dances with her, he in jeans and t-shirt, she in lingerie and t-shirt. If he has noticed... the bruises, the bruised-ness, the something, he doesn't let on, which means he may not have noticed it or he is simply being a selfish, narcissistic little fuckstick.

It dissolves. He kisses her neck and her shaved part of her head and her ear and flicks his tongue over her earrings. He's not even trying to get anywhere, not trying to arouse her. He's just tasting her, reacquainting himself, like he's been gone far longer than a couple of days or whatever, like time matters, look at who he's with.

Hawksley smiles as she kisses him. He brightens. He straightens up, and he looks around quickly, and then he puts a finger to his lips. He darts to the door and the windows and he's pulling shades and locking things and laughing to himself as he does so, but then he's back to her, smiling at her, and his eyes are so, so

shining.

"Watch me," he says, like she's not going to. And standing before her again, he makes a gesture with his hands. Complicated, the curve of fingers, the way this tip and that meet, the way they move. He twists something. Lifts it above their heads, winding his long arms to create a circle. The circle falls around them as he drops hands to his sides again. Slowly, very slowly, lifts his hands.

Sera feels it internally even before her skin knows. A shift. It's uncomfortable, in a way. And ethereal. And frightening and pleasurable. She can see it on him, the lifting of his longish hair, the difference in the way his clothes hang on him. Do not hang on him. Nothing hangs. Not between the two of them: the effect is localized. The teacups are safe; the bedspread. The building. But the two of them are rising.

And the truth is, he could do a bit of this before. A shield against gravity, against laws that should not apply to people such as them. It was within his power, though perhaps not on a scale where he would risk bringing Sera into that shield. Or letting them do more than just levitate a bit. They aren't levitating a bit. Gravity is off. It is the only way he can show it to her,

and also share it with her.

He cannot make her fly with him.

--

Her hair has lifted. They are touching the ceiling. Hawksley is laughing. Hawksley has a splitting headache but he's laughing anyway.

Serafíne

Of course she's going to watch him because right now there's nothing else to be seen in the room, is there? And they have a view of the Eiffel Tower off the balcony and the green spread of the Tuileries and the grand sweep of the Place de la Concorde with its obelisk there and the Louvre all illuminated in failing sunlight here and he's dancing with her and she's barefoot on the balls of her feet, leaning in as he kisses her, her eyes closed or half-way there, just letting everything whirl away around her,

and he's so bright that when he straightens and drops her hand and darts away to the door she has the absurd thought that she should shield her eyes even as he is closing the doors and pulling the blinds and folding the French doors to the balcony closed, cutting off that view of the city, pulling the shutters tight behind or over them.

His magic is so very different from hers.

--

Sera lets out a breath, a bit giddy, but also somehow unsure. She doesn't really know what is happening and her stomach tightens against the unfamiliar sensation and she opens up her own arms as if she were balancing on a beam , like that might steady her, might make her body feel solid, the way it is meant to feel, rooted or grounded instead of hollow and her own hair is everywhere, like a fright wig and the ceilings here are ridiculously high, and somehow as they are rising to the goddamned ceiling Sera arches her spine and throws her shoulders back just so and does a goddamned flip, just a wholesale spin that wants to keep going and going and going except she gets a bit startled or a bit frightened perhaps and reaches out reflexively to grab Hawksley's hands before the second revolution to stop herself, steady herself and she lets one go but holds on to the other, just settles her hand in his hand and squeezes,

happily,

"That's so fucking amazing - " Sera tells him, biting her lip (yes biting her lip), both enthused and oddly shy. He eyes are shining. If he looks close he might see a few tears on her cheek but he has a splitting headache and he's laughing and all of this is within his goddamned power so looking closely is probably (always) low on Hawksley's list of priorities and anyway, she's also smiling and the light is odd and, "I told you. Remember? Last summer. It was written in your skin, in the air all around you."

Hawksley Rothschild

Oh, he holds her hands. When his have lifted and her hair is flowing upward and outward and everywhere-ward, he slides his hands under hers, palm to palm, to keep her near him. He has some practice at this, but he doesn't look composed, bored, used to it. How can you get used to a feeling like this? Maybe people in space do, because it isn't magic there, it's science. You think you understand it.

Hawksley understands what is happening right now. He has decided that a thing that the whole world agrees upon should not be, at least in this small space. And reality has closed its eyes and surrended to him. So he has a headache. He just overcame a natural law.

Drugs, alcohol, music, dance -- these are not tools of his magic, to bring it to light. The magic itself creates in him an altered state. No wonder he never seems very distracted by... well. Anything else.

Sera slips from him for a moment and flips. Hawksley laughs, and there's no friction in the air to stop her, so he does. He uses the ceiling and he uses his own ability to adjust that shield and propel himself as he wills and takes her hand again. There is no slowing to a stop, but there is no jarring. "You have to ease into it," he says, softly, cautious in a way he rarely is. "You'll throw up everywhere." Practical, sometimes, like he occasionally is.

She squeezes his hand? He squeezes hers back, smiling.

"Yeah," he says, quiet again. "I absolutely remember."

And draws her over, which is so easy. He barely expends effort. The softest tug and there she is, and there his arm is around her waist, and his hand sliding up her forearm, fingers lacing with her fingers. They were waltzing, after all.

Serafíne

Hawksley tells Sera that she'll throw up everywhere and isn't throwing up everywhere one of her almost-normal states and she's starting to laugh at him, that careful note in his voice, in a tone of voice that is very Sera and very wee and very much I am probably about to do this flipping thing again and again and again until I puke except her stomach just lurches and that feels weird and sick when you're sober and her hands tighten in his because she has the strange, brief, absolute conviction that she is going to fall and it is going to be a long, long way,

except that he has turned off gravity and there is, here, in this bubble of space he has created, in this place where he has told the whole fucking world or at least this tiny slice of it not to do that thing it always does, there is no such thing as falling.

Oh.

He tugs her closer, his arm warm and solid against the small of her back and his hand slides up her forearm, over the black lines of her tattoos and her thumb runs over the meat of his palm as he does so and she tips her head forward so that they can be: brow to brow and nose to nose, her hair startled around them, drifting currents of its own making, like a cloud of seaweed.

"Is it the way you dreamed it would be?"

She does not mean that rhetorically. She means that specifically.

He's dreamed of flying, after all, since he was a baby. So he always says.

Hawksley Rothschild

There is no falling. There was never such a thing. And he looks so...

calm, about everything. He looks so content to be up here, one hand lifted to keep his head from bumping against the ceiling, fingertips braced to the molding. He looks settled in a way he hasn't since he walked back into her line of sight and collapsed in a tangled heap of sunburnt limbs and madness. He looks settled in a way she's never seen him. At ease. He's not chasing anything, right now. He doesn't have to, because it's all right here.

Hawksley was never meant to walk the earth, stuck to it the way other people are. His soul is too strong for that, and it fights to be airborne.

--

They are close. And it's been days since they actually felt close. Hawksley is selfish but he's not insensate. He's somewhat narcissistic, but not antisocial. He understands that other people are people. Other people have feelings. He's learned, sometimes with a punch to the face, that his behavior can bruise those feelings. He knows, even if he's forgotten in the past couple of days or even weeks, that there's been a disconnect. Or rather: a straining of the cord, a stretching of the ligament. It aches a little to soothe that strain, ease that tightness, draw back together what has been pulled far, far apart.

Hawksley kisses her beneath her eye.

He smiles faintly at her question.

"Not quite yet," he murmurs, which may tell you something about his dreams. Also true: "And entirely." He says it like a sigh, and kisses the side of her nose. "I'm glad you came with me."

Serafíne

Sera is quiet as he kisses her: beneath her eyes, along the side her nose, and her eyes are half-closed and she absorbs his smile through the frame of her lashes and feels his steadiness, his calm through her skin, that contentment, which is a strange mantle to sense settled over his shoulders when she knows his drive, and how it is measured sometimes in the pounding of his own heart.

Her brow tightens when he speaks, in this strange shadow of a self-aware smile, and she's nodding, really just tipping her head forward against his, brow to brow, sliding her free arm around his torso, allowing him to hold her both: so very high above the ground and also somehow: in place, and when he says not quite yet it makes her mouth curve for him and it makes her throat ache and it makes her eyes sting and she doesn't know why she never knows why she never asks why because why why why does not matter to her and it hardly matters because she can hear the quick in his voice, the sigh half-withheld, then subsumed in the rest: and entirely which eases that strain without allowing it to abate.

"I was worried about you," this is both quiet and in a rush and if feels like confession, after he tells her that he is glad she came, and she's still kinda nodding to that, and even though her eyes are closed she is also looking a bit off to the side and she breathes ininin. "I'm sorry I know it's stupid you can take care of yourself but I was scared I don't know why."

She wasn't even fucked up, she wants to tell him.

Well, maybe just a little bit fucked up.

"You wouldn't let anyone do anything to you. I know that. I still wanted to, I don't know, protect you and shit."

Sera looks back at him, suddenly. They're still floating, for fuck's sake. It is glorious and lovely and beautifully absurd.

"I'm glad you came back."

Sera cries so easily, sometimes. She's crying now. Just a few tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes.

It's not because she's sad.

"I'm really glad."

Hawksley

Hawksley is not ready to transcend the pleasures of the flesh in pursuit of the ecstasy of flight. He turns off gravity, he can propel himself through the air, and whether he chooses to show this to Sera right now, he has just tapped into a well of power that earned an entire House of the Order the name of fire. Domus Ignis, Hawksley calls them, preferring the Latin to the French, always.

We digress; Hawksley lives in the tension between longing and ease of longing, the striving for Something More abated gently but not completely by the here-and-now, the relaxation, the comfort, the lovely woman who is touching the ceiling with him, held aloft by his magic and nothing more.

There is trust in this. He does not note it aloud and does not look at her with ache because of it but that doesn't mean he doesn't feel it.

--

Hawksley thinks, the way she looks aside and the way she breathes, that she is going to cry.

Hawksley usually isn't good at such prophecy.

--

What she says makes his brow stitch. That she was worried. And scared. And she knows, she knows, she knows all these things about him and it makes him want to ask her how she knows any of that, does she really believe it, but he doesn't interrupt her. He looks at her, and at her hair wafting in nothing, in the breeze that is not breeze but merely movement; every breath they take creates some amount of propulsion, and there is nothing to stop them in the air.

Now she is crying, and he realizes he was right, he was totally right, he saw the way she was breathing and the way she was not looking at him for a second and he was totally right. And this usually would but does not now give him any joy, just a wry, sad satisfaction.

Hawksley leans to her, touching the back of her head lightly, and kisses each of her cheeks. They have stayed so close. He likes that.

"You have a lot of faith in me," he says, like an echo, not a question or a confirmation, just an observation. Scientific, but not cold. In Hawksley's sciences there is nothing but revelation, nothing but glory, nothing but frustration upon frustration upon frustration, leading only eventually to mastery, and thus to awe.

He kisses her mouth, at the corner, because he cannot help himself. He likes being this close.

"I want you to have faith that I'll come back to you," he says,

not an echo, and not an observation. A very quiet thing, a wish, which may explain why his voice is a whisper, and why his whisper is beside her ear, beneath that upward-flowing canopy of her hair.

There is a difference there, in what he said, how he said it:

come back

to you.

Serafíne

The tears do strange things here, where there is no gravity to pull them down so they leak from the corners of her eyes and then - well. He kisses her cheeks, both of them, and they are not damp and her breath catches in her throat because he makes her forget to breathe sometimes. Forget that her body requires oxygen to fucking function until her lungs burn and she gets wrapped up in that fire until she at last, at least, remembers to breathe again, or maybe that is just autonominic. Some poor series of oft-abused neurons firing in the dark.

So, her breath catches and her grip on him shifts. She slides both arms around his neck, worms them into place, and leaves him the task still of keeping them from bumping into the ceiling.

He tells her that she has a lot of faith in him and everything about her says of course and she smiles, a small smile through the half-shed tears and murmurs beneath / after his echo -

" - because you're fucking amazing."

Which he is.

They're drifting in the air, twelve feet, maybe fourteen feet above the ornate parquet floors of the suite and she is still half-murmuring those words as he kisses the corner of her mouth, so her mouth is moving beneath his, you see, and she wants to turn her mouth into his and kiss him fully and feel the full weight of his mouth on hers while he keeps them there, in a bubble of the world changed because he willed it to change.

He moves, though. Finds her ear, not her mouth, and murmurs a very quiet wish.

Sera's breath catches again. He can feel the hitch of it against his body, the supple convulsion of her shoulders, the way her breasts move against his chest. And it does feel caught, like something was leaking out of her and now the leak is sealed and instead she is strangely expanding and her elbows tighten around his shoulders, and her long-fingered hands find their way into his hair and her voice is all throat-caught, she doesn't trust it so she says nothing in return, or says, perhaps, everything she wants to say with her body, opening her mouth, folding herself into him, nodding, her mouth open, teeth dragging against his jaw as she moves to find his mouth again, to kiss him, fully, openly, tenderly, hungrily on the mouth.

Inhaling him, devouring him, loving him, the best, perhaps the only, way she knows.

(She is crying the whole time.)

Hawksley

She's so wrong, though. About him taking care of himself, about him not letting anyone do anything to him. When has that been tested? How does she think these things of him?

All he can think is that she's so wrong, and she's so perfect, and that her arms moving on his sunburnt shoulders causes pain, and that somehow that pain and that faith and that perfection and that wrongness make him very, very hard.

There is also something to be said for the fact that, by his power alone, they are kissing on the ceiling.

--

They are kissing. Because he kept kissing her face and touching her hair, and because she wept, and then she was touching him, eating him, coming at him as though he hasn't been anywhere near her for days and days and not just... well. A few days. His hands are roaming up her back. He is finding fastenings with a deftness and patience that you wouldn't expect from him, or expect her to tolerate.

Clothing drifts, and then finds itself outside of whatever space he has created here and ends up dropping, noisily, to the floor. A few items stay close: a bracelet he eases off of her wrist, the underwear he draws down her thighs. They are standing, weightless, but his feet touch her feet, and he sweeps her off of them, in another sense, or simply 'again'. Of course when her back touches the ceiling it's a soft fall; and when he is over her he is also beneath her, and he is smiling, and his hair is askew, and he smiles even if she is crying,

because he knows what sort of crying this is not.

He does tell her, later, whisperingly, to stop crying. it's okay. it's okay. but by then he is pressing his hand to the ceiling, and clutching at it the way he might pull at sheets if they had any, and his mouth is dissolving into a kiss against her neck instead, and the air around them shudders with momentary friction as he almost, almost loses his concentration.

He doesn't. Or he does, and grabs hold of it again, quickly, snatching it back up again. Holds her there between his body and the ceiling, the ceiling their only guard between their bodies and the sky.

--

Later, he lets himself down first. Descends slowly to the top of the high, cushioned bed they've shared night after night, and holds her hand, and eases her down, placing himself in a spot where he can catch her if his control slips again, if his power shudders.

It doesn't. Gravity's reassertion is gentle, but somehow still feels jarring. Her hair falls, and her feet press into the bed, and Hawksley looks very, very lightheaded, but that has nothing to do with magic. It has everything to do with the way he kisses her again then, harder than before, as though he -- surprising himself more than anyone -- missed the friction, the weight, the heaviness of mortality.

The bed, then. And he wants her above him this time.

Or again.

He really isn't sure which it is.

at my liberty dear [unfinished]

Serafíne

It is hard to know the hour because she has lost hold of time, as she often does. Let go of its raveling strand and ever-so-slightly unmoored herself from its imperatives. Dark because it must be dark, because it is night in a strange city in high summer well to the north and so,

night here does not last long. Still, night comes. The sun does not set until ten and the sky remains illuminated with that strange, sublime light that seems to define Paris for another forty minutes or more before anything like full dark approaches, and come 5:30 a.m. the sky is already getting pale in the east, and the world prepares itself for sunlight again.

So, darkness. Full dark, the seams of the sky all knitted closed, sunset a memory, the city proper on the verge of shut-down, which is a strange thing in a city this size, a city full of such people, but it is also a city full of such spaces as this one. The Tuileries, a garden founded by Catherine de fucking Medici, not that Serafíne has any idea whom she might have been, and refined and expanded and redefined by monarch after monarch until it was opened to the Parisians themselves as a public park, after they decided they were done with monarchs after all, and cut off their goddamned heads in the Place de la Concorde, where the once-royal gates opened onto the public avenue.

Here she is: somewhere in the dark, one of the long avenues shaded by linden trees, which are so strangely, sweetly fragrant this time of year. Seated on the spine of a park bench, her booted feet on the seat, smoking a cigarette, breathing in the steadiness, the strange quiet that is not absolute and feels both permissive and somehow - permeable.

Permeable the way her skin is permeable, the breathing membrane of it.

She's fucked up. Of course she, but the tips of her fingers feel lovely and there's this strange, bittersweet ache in her body that makes her toes curl in on themselves in her boots.

So she takes them off. The boots: pulls back the tongues and loosens the laces and pulls them off and sets them aside and her toes still ache or is that something else?

She hardly knows, Sera.

So she lights another cigarette, and takes another swig from her flask. Which is filled, of all things, with a pear liquer - poire william absurdly sweet but god so delicious.

rêvere

Here she is: somewhere in the dark, somewhere in the twilight has made love to (ravished [enchanted]) Paris and reimagined it in rose and recast it in greens and blues which melt together which pour like syrup into cool shadows and cooler niches and secret places and they're all boundaries and thresholds every planned avenue every pre-plotted arch every city resurrected every time-conquering corner the green and the blue and perhaps the purple leavened by amber-tinged-rose again darkend and darkened but here are the lamps lighting here are the halos kindling candled here she is somewhere in the dark and the dark is breathing, the dark is breathing, the dark is a gloss of oil on water, just reach past the oil, reach past the colors, plunge your fingers through them the world is a picture a painting it floats on the surface of something else go through it go through it and Serafíne she smells watermelon, tangy and sweet, sliding along the bitter taste of her cigarette, a richer tobacco, something strong and untouched by fire, something still leather-shop potent, then that sweet delicacy of pear fermented and the watermelon dissolves; in front of her she can see little fires light in a row of flowers that look almost wild in their little row and in the day they'd be so colorful but tonight in the dark

in the dark they're just guarded, guardianed, by the Nymph and her hound, all cold moonlight and

no she shuts her eyes. That statue; it flicks its eyelids up and looks directly, smoulderingly, at Serafíne who has taken her shoes out; it turns its head. No it doesn't. But there are little candles lit in the flowers; little fires, and nobody, nothing, except a sense of

other.

Serafíne

And Sera, see - she breathes in and she breathes out and she is lingering not-precisely-lost so much as deliberately misplaced and she rests her chin on one hand, that elbow on her bent-knee, the other hand now with the cigarette, now loosed from it as she leaves it hanging from the corner of her mouth and reaches out, undulant, to feel both tethered and free the slick swirl of shadows and light, the boundaries and the tethered places and the places where things become unmoored, and then the cigarette, ash drifting from its tip like snow, well goddamnit she is a smoker.

So she pulls her hand back and plucks the cigarette from the corner of her mouth and watches see, focuses in a manner that is not focus but is still - drawn in, lingering, intent and intense - on the lights, and the Nymph, all glowing-white, all smouldering in the moonlight, the cold solid planes of her body illumined even in this darkness, because the city has its own sort of light, and

moreover,

so does this place.

Sera stands up, on the seat of the elegant metal bench, and ignores the boots she tugged off and feels the cool metal beneath her fishnetted toes and stares at the nymph, mouth open, cigarette forgotten again, this time between her fingers, and tongues the bow in her mouth and jumps - elegant, see? - down from the park bench, body folding into itself to subsume the impact, and steps, so neatly, from the dusty path onto the forbidden glance.

That look.

That otherness.

How can she resist?

Serafíne

1. Dex + Athletics. How elegant the jump-down?

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

Serafíne

2. Not elegant at all. Okay, perception + awareness?

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 3, 6, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 4 )

rêvere

The grass prickles (goat-teeth nibbled it down but it grows verdant in the summer verdant and fortunate and absinthe wishes to be so green or it wishes to be as green as absinthe) against her toes against her heels but does not reach for her ankles and it is dark and there is no one to come suddenly and irrevocably to say to her Serafíne no the grass is forbiden; the Nymph does not move (again?) though Serafíne is drawn near her and those little burning ghost lights among the flowers, static fireflies, still fireflies, what a lovely light they give! but ah, will not last the night (they're a gasp, see, quickening in the throat, they're a visual gasp a visual catch of sound - ) and the little dog with his mouth open that the Nymph watches (usually) so lovingly tenderly with such tender amusement (yes that's it) licks his chops and shivers closer to the nude's calf and looks at Serafíne

and is there a hush? Every city has its tone; every city has its quiet in the dark which is never as quiet as we mean the word to be. But it is hushed now; a moment between, no murmur of people, no river, no gutter, no distant vehicles, nothing that is not grass bending crushing beneath Serafíne's feet catching on her stockings

and the statue; other; threshold;

antique. The night is a veneer; the night has not yet dried; smear it.

Serafíne

Her breath catches in her throat or her throat catches her breath and she smokes the last of the cigarette and does not quite will it out but out it goes, smoke all crackle-hot, burnt-sugar in her lungs and the remnants tossed because, well, she is not always a good citizen, our Serafíne.

And she is freed then, by which we mean both hands free as she picks her way over the grass between the rows of half-illumined flowers in that moment

between

everything, and does she notice it? Oh she notices and that notices becomes part of the ache in the cage of her chest, the way it corkscrews through her half-drunk body, the way she wants to

smear it,

just this scrawl of her tattooed hands through the pigment, pulling the light in shoot-star arcs behind her.

What she does, though, is two-fold. A slewing, a skewing of her senses; a stutterstop of awareness as she bites the inside of her cheek and both: reaches in and lets go. Finds the now in the everywhen and the everywhen in the now. Everything is now. Everything always has been.

That is thing-one, the spell of seeking and sensing and seeing and knowing.

This is thing-two: glancing up at the Nymph, Sera reaches out to pet the dog.

Serafíne

She is trying: Prime 1 / Time 1 - Watch the Weaving / Time Sense - aka What Is Happening Here? Dif 4 -1 for focus

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 6, 10) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

Intelligence (2) + Occult (1) - Can Sera Know Things? Dif: 8

Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (2, 6, 9) ( success x 1 )

rêvere

Serafíne is a mage.

Serafíne is, yes, many things, many things which sound more elusive, which are more textured, many-textured, Serafíne is visceral, is enthralling, is liminal, Serafíne is a mage and as often as she untethers herself unmoors herself looses her mind re-examines corners and unseams them she is still a mage, she is still a thing whose Will does consciously control and force reality into a shape, and she believes things in an under-the-skin sort of way about that, but she is a mage, she knows in that under-the-skin sort of way what goes into the world what the instruments of it are what makes the sounds although perhaps she doesn't think of it in those terms (or did one summer and will again on a winter's day and then one other time in autumn and never somehow in spring), but this is true

that when she performs her spell of seeking and sensing and seeing and knowing she knows and sees that what is happening here is not the work of another Magi it is too slippery too slanted too old too timeless it does not want to be timed it will not be timed it looses those bonds it escapes them and is untouched it is other

other

understand, how other it is? it is wild - something in the statue; she knows a word for living stone; can taste it on her tongue and in her memory before it dissolves, for those fey things trapped in a carving or just seen in a carving by a sculptor and trapped by being given one shape this shape

Nymph

hound

and the hound feels wet to her touch; when Serafíne glances up at the Nymph she can see that tender-affectionate expression is not for the dog; the Nymph is looking, searching, seeking, looking at Serafíne, plinking her gaze downward like a fisher would plink a hook on a fishing line and fish

wait until something tugs. But: mute. They are both mute; Serafíne's fingers can pick up a tremor, a shiver under stone.

Serafíne

Mind 3. Mind-connecting-stuff? Is it vulgar? 3+4. -1 for focus. -1 for taking time. WP spent!

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (3, 8, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Serafíne

She breathes in and she breathes out and she breathes in and she breathes out and there is blood on her tongue, that is how hard she bites it, and the blood swims through her saliva, the metallic aftertaste lingering long after the sharpest edge of the pain that draws her focus and allows her to shape her Will has faded, quiescent.

The hound, the hound, the nymph and the hound and the hound so wet beneath her hand and her tongue against her teeth, the word she cannot remember dissolving there, all lozenge, a hint of chalk, something effervescent and constricting all at once. Something struggling-through,

mutemute mute

and that silence makes her throat close, makes her tongue ache, makes it so difficult for her to hum the nameless three notes that create a chord that bring her into accord that join their minds that bring them close, close, finely closer -

and she weaves those notes into the next and the next, pulls them into the moment, and time, she takes her time, she takes whatever goddamned time she requires.

--

What are you? Are you trapped.

This hint of a something near then end.

Are you trying to get-free.

rêvere

The Nymph's expression (yes, yes) shifts. The lovingly chiseled lashes cast a different shadow, the moon-smoulder pale of her skin her hand held up at her high breasts the fingers curved inward as if in delight and those fingers shift curl further curl deeper curl like toes freed from dancing slippers after a night of dancing dancing but slippers no not slippers there are no dancing slippers now sleep has taken the slipper over now there are dancing boots and shoes and moccasins and heels like toes curling freed from any of those that's how her fingers curl (but no; look again; there was no movement), and Serafíne has tried to connect with a mind, with a Mind caught inside the stone, has tried to speak to what has no working throat and it is good but it is hard it is first and liminal as her Workings are and visceral as her Workings are she feels the Thoughts of the Thing that is capt in stone all around her own plashing like water frothing over an ankle stepped deep rising bubbling burbling silver springing feels the Thoughts slow and cold and timeless there is no slow slow is a time-word and there are no time-words there is only the passage foreer the passage and Serafíne asked a question and the Nymph's voice comes to her in whatever language Serafíne likes but it is the color of the Nymph at dawn when gold light spills across the city like the start of an ache and it says no it does not say perhaps Serafíne thinks perhaps the thought will drown her I am not trapped I was trapped and then I was freed but freed at my liberty dear I am bound I would like to step down I would like to hunt I would like to bathe in the flowers I would like to be what I was before I was freed (after I was freed) at my liberty I want to find my fire that is why (awake [now, but now is a time-word and there are no time-words], that is why (here present presence like this us).

rêvere

ooc: ahem. passage forever the passage, even.

Serafíne

Oh, oh, oh. Her thoughts slow, go still see - arrested, marble, stone, cool as moonlight and far less mercurial - there is a question and that which surrounds the question and she is cool, she is cold, she remembers the night and it is always night, it is always now, it is always here. She would like to hunt, Sera, she would like to bathe in the flowers and kindle the flame and find her liberty and everything, everything else. She would like to step down - naked - from her marble plinth and feel the curl of her little dog's head in the curve of her palm and sink, and sink, and sink through the grass-green sea and shake herself free of the egg all shelled around her and slide off into the dark dark dark wood, which is not a wood but which she remembers as a wood, a strange wood threaded with light, but a wood, a wood nonetheless.

There is, see: a ???? insinuant and there is, also see, a !!! and there is, beneath and around ????!!!! a need, a desire, a want that carves through and focuses the wandering ache in her chest into something sharp and something piercing and oh! you see, she hardly knows that this is her heart.

Yes, she says, Sera, yes yes yes which means exactly what she means it to say. There is a new thread of magic in her, a new desire, a new movement, a new focus of her Will, coalescing around a point of awareness and a point of being and a certain note that gets caught - static - in the back of her throat. The pain of that stasis and the memory of what it means to feel time, see, passing.

She wants to hunt. She wants to free. She wants to unstitch the threads that keep the Nymph and her little dog in this moment forever and give them back to the now. To incise that mind from that marble, and Set It Free.

And so, she starts, to Work.

Climbs up onto the marble plinth and slides her cheek against the Nymph's cheek, her own breath warm on the cool cool stone, her lashes low, her awareness sinking-sharp, brow to brow, nose to nose, lashes to eyelashes, cheek to cheek, she Works.

--

[So: ritual, I am thinking a combination of Mind 3 / Prime 2 / Time 3 for what she intends to do, which is unstitch the Nymph / dog from the statue (Mind 3 / Prime 2 and then the Time 3 to give her back her sense of time - the idea being that the time will help pull her out of marble stasis right? anyway. That is what Sera will try. I will roll later but I figure it will take a while.]

Serafíne

Dan @ 8:20PMPrivate Message to Elijah

Witness a roll!

Sera: freeing the nymph. Mind 3 / Prime 2. Vulgar Without Witnesses: Dif 7. -1 for focus.

Roll: 3 d10 TN6 (8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) [WP]Dan @ 8:24PM

Private Message to Elijah

Extending! +1 difficulty, -1 for spending quint. So: 6 again.

Roll: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 8) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Elijah @ 8:29PMPrivate Message to Dan

Witnessed

Dan @ 8:29PMPrivate Message to Elijah

Now: Time 3. Dif: 7. +1 for time. -1 for focus. + WP.

Roll: 3 d10 TN7 (4, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Dan @ 8:30PMPrivate Message to Elijah

And, extending! +1 to extend, -1 for quint spent. + WP.

Roll: 3 d10 TN7 (1, 1, 4) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Dan @ 8:33PMPrivate Message to Elijah

One more time. One more quint (her last) and one more WP. Because.

Roll: 3 d10 TN7 (4, 8, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

nymphe

and Serafíne begins her ritual

her impromptu unthreading, her unstitching, her unbinding, and the Nymph is not shaped so neat as to be easy for a diminutive woman like Serafíne to place her cheek against, her hand is in the way, her hound, her breast is nearer, all moon-scalded stone that she is now, that she is not, because she is something within the stone, isn't she, isn't that what Serafíne who can enthrall [but enthralling is the opposite of un-thralling] who is an enchantress who is

that Serafíne as she breathes and her breath polishes marble and warms it and when she breathes in she can smell the age smell that glassy smell peculiar to marble which has soaked in night after night wet-grass and ozone and something more mineral

visceral

yes whenever she breathes in she can smell that and a hint of summer and

it is difficult what she is doing: very difficult indeed, undoing a binding that is a pact that is a compact that is older than older than old than archaic (though the statue cannot be older than the Napoleonic Era, than Paris-reimagined and resurrected, the thing within it is)

time sloshes, time splashes, time unspools; Serafíne can feel that time unspools but she can also feel the brush of fur against her leg dappled cool as a river cool as the shiver of wind across grass and if she looks down the little hound is no longer there or is there but is, to her sight, transparent, a husk, and there is something in the grass

the nymph though, the nymph:

it is hard going; it is like, one-handed, trying to drag a water-logged body from a rapid, she is being tugged away, tugged away

and on the path of this garden someone yells (in French):

"Stop! What do you think you're doing!"

Serafíne

Perception 3 + Alertness.1

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 4, 7) ( success x 1 )

Serafíne

The ritual is a half-remembered song, a chord stuck in her throat, a call to now, to movement, to moonlight, to the hunt. The ritual is Artemis-in-moonlight, the swift and silent passage of her hunt through dark streets, strangers sleeping unaware, all around. The ritual is not cheek-to-cheek, perhaps, Serafíne without her heels and accessories is a slight creature and it is all she can do to balance on the plint, near-bare toes (torn fishnets - her boots left behind on the bench) splayed over the carved and weathered stone, but is, assuredly, skin-to-marble-as-skin.

And the ritual is drowning, is spooling, is un-spooling. Is making some new compact and unmaking something ancient, something far, far older than this neo-classical piece, something so neatly and finely stitched into the substance of the place and the stone and the form that Sera has the distinct impression that her fingers themselves are raw and bleeding from the work. Will have that distinct impression when she can think about anything but the stone and the work and the need to hunt and the implacable stasis of the sculpture - living? half-life? what does one name such an existance - conspire altogether to a -

she doesn't know, she doesn't know, she doesn't anything except now and was and want and ache and the song, the song, everything she weaves into the promise of it, sunk as she is in the nymph's strange and static mind when -

what? huh

The startled jerk of her head. Someone's close. Someone's voice. She doesn't know and she looks around for the source of the yell and finds it and entreats - entreats - all in English: "Help me. Help me get her down. She doesn't like this pedestal."

Serafíne

Perception Plus Awareness!

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 6 )

Serafíne

Rerolling 10s.

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (1, 4) ( fail )

nymphe

Someone's close. Someone's voice. Someone's on the path looking hard at Serafíne, someone whose eyes are a deep brown the kind of brown that has orange glints in it like an ember or like that glow of polished wood in certain dusks. Someone's on the path looking hard at Serafíne, alarmed, and that someone's still using French, even after Serafíne speaks to her in English, a stream of French, a torrent of French, the clearest thing about it being that she wants Serafíne to get away, get away, get away from the statue right now, away from the nymph and the hound who Serafíne is aware of as ghosting about the plinth and slinking into the flowers where the candles are. The someone who is a girl looks at the candles -- they aren't real candles; little ghost lights -- burning above the flowers and her eyes widen and she says again something more vehement than before and looking both ways starts across the grass.

And Serafíne can feel that the girl is washed in resonance, much of it centered on something that is of her but also without her, something tucked away (the heart, the core) under her blouse and her open broad-collared jacket, and it feels like an antique candy dissolving on the tongue, like the taste of roses, all bolstered up by something implaccable intractable rigid and unyielding not relentless because this shares something with the idea of

stone and

forever.

Now, the nymph is still being unstitched, isn't she? If Serafíne looks, can she see the nymph's hand lower, just a bit, almost brush her shoulder, reaching for her hound? But no, there was no movement. (But yes, there was.)

Serafíne

Twisting around on the plinth? To watch person-lady? Dex + Ath

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 5) ( fail )

Serafíne

Grabbing the nymph's hand while falling?

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 2, 5, 6, 8) ( success x 1 )

Serafíne

Oh, something bright and old and molten-sweet. Something still and endless and unchanging and briefly, briefly, eternally Serafíne is captured by the sensation of the stranger's resonance, her own eyes dark in the moonlight, dark in the midnight, dark from her fucking pupils, which even in the darkness are far-too-dilated in one of those goddamned universal signs that she is On Something, because she is On Something and probably more than one-thing, and dark with a sort of arrested passion, which started as a sort of sinking-whim folded itself quite neatly into something that is

nothing like stone (gutwrenching)

and forever only because every moment is now, when she stands: in the doorway, on the threshold, at the verge of -

--

She's turning, Sera, edged, perched so precariously on the marble plinth, chary of holding-on to the nymph the way one holds on to solid things made-of-stone because the nymph is not made-of-stone, because beneath the stone she is -

One leg twisting and the other crossing behind it and sliding her hands down the marble curves and reaching for a marbled hand see, as if to say: come, come, come, stay with me, when her left heel slips and then her right foot and then everything is like an avalanche and she falls, and she falls hard all the way to the ground and cannot keep her hand on the nymph and cannot even find purchase on the ground: just falls.

Just impacts.

(Ouch.)

And the stranger is still talking in a torrent of French and Sera probably has tears in her eyes because she's not stopping and she's not helping and how would you like to be suspended, half-sensate, yearning -

"I don't understand," to the stranger, to the girl. Then: Spanish: "No comprendo - see? I don't understand you don't understand, they were supposed to move. They were made to be in motion. I don't understand."

nymphe

[Damage?]

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

Serafíne

satmina!

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

nymphe

The marble fingers moon-drenched moon-blanched tighten on Serafíne's as she falls as she falls down to the grass to sharp corners those fingers they do try to tighten on Serafíne's fingers grasping for her own but they can't. Serafíne is left with an impression of stone, mobile, living, reaching -- and then she is separate; then she is separated. Then the impact is thrilling through her bones and flesh and muscles and shaking her beating on her as if she were a tambourine calling up ghosts calling up the people calling up the dancers calling up calling up and it all goes still but she is hardier than she looks, Sera, and when she stands, the girl has reached her, the girl whose resonance is the taste of rose, the sugar dissolution of rose spun-fine and saliva-unmade and yes eternity stolid staying, and the match-strike of alarm in the girl's eyes fades to anger, has quickened into fury, and she looks as if she is going to strike Serafíne at first.

Spanish. She can speak Spanish with an accent, some words want to stay French.

"You need to get away from here right now or you are in danger, you stupid. Come with me. Come with me right now," and she reaches to take Sera's arm and haul her from the grass, back onto the path, casting one baleful glance at the statue.

And one of the dancing (eerie, ghostly) lights above the flowers; it goes out. A breeze has combed across the gardens and it is cold, cold, cold, as cold as a knife-tip pressed against a living breast, intent, the moment before it is

thrust in. The moment before it has leeched warmth; has let warmth flee forever.

Serafíne

Sera is scrambling upright, scrambling to-her-feet, scrambling to gain: traction, altitude. You know, I mean: she just fell, on her ass from a height, all breath-knocked out and you cannot be a girl like Sera without falling, and falling regularly, and falling from heights like a goddamned pro - drunk or swooning or passing out or puking or just those goddamned shoes she wears so much, they were not made for human feet. You cannot be a girl like Sera without falling, so she takes falling in stride, manages, (almost) the art of both falling-and-reaching-out, which is a strange one but one she knows the way she knows her heartbeat, the way she knows her eyeteeth, the way she knows all of her wanton desires, the way they beat like a drum inside of her, like a heartbeat which is not, like most heartbeats, want/notwant; but which is merely, endlessly: want/want want/want want/want.

"No." says Sera, then - "No." jerking her arm away from the girl, a little bit angry, a little bit longing, and her fingertips still feel somehow abraded though she knows that is a sense-memory that is little more than the lingering resonance and perhaps the push-back of reality, the world's need to stay within the boundaries we have given it, but fuck-you world, fuck-you, fuck-you, isn't that what magic is: I don't like the way things are: so change, so -

Serafíne does jerk her arm away from the stranger as she pulls herself up to her knees and then maybe her feet, backing up protectively against the statue at which the stranger is flashing such baleful looks. Jerks her arm and glances back at the nymph and then at the girl and then the wind comes, and Sera catches her breath,

shivers.

"That's not right." Spanish, this. "That's not fair, you can't leave her in there. She should be bathing in the flowers, she should hunt hunt hunt. Nothing was made to be that still. No thinking-thing."

nymphe

"Who do you think she'll hunt?" the girl says, "Who? Come away from there; come away from there now. What gives you the right to come here and undo what others have done; others who have to live here? Come away from there now!" - anger, mounting, leavened by a note of beseeching at the end.

Where is the hound?

The marble is cold and hard against Serafíne's back; behind the girl who has come the garden is beginning to smear. Already dark, already darkest, now in Serafíne's eyes there is a certain slanting thumbprint waver to the darkness which has become a greenness which smells of linseed oil which is a vision which is not at all real which is in her head which is a vision of

The marble plinth is gone. It is just Serafíne and the girl and there are no lights in the garden and the garden is green. The garden is paint. The girl does not look angry; the girl is reaching for her collar, reaching for a zipper, but the zipper is in her skin and she says in whatever language Serafíne thinks in,

Will you unzip me?

and there is an unthinking and casual sensuality about the question; about the trusting gesture as the girl (it is the same girl, this girl in her vision which has taken her over, which has swarmed up out of the garden) takes a step forward to offer the zipper in her skin.

Serafíne

Perception + Awareness-as-Empathy: are you a horrible imprisoner-of-nymphs or would the nymph really hunt people-who-live-here?!

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 4 )

Serafíne

Consternation. Her breath comes hard and her heart is beating, beating, oh it pains her and Sera there with her back against the cold marble watching as the nightwarps, as her vision changes, as the girl turns around to offer the zupper-in-her-skin, Sera breathes out once and hard as if she had been kicked somewhere in the center of her body and stares openly at the girl, the stranger, the vision, the night turning to darkness-to-green-to-paint, the heavy impressionist imprint of the brushwork in the oils, the mark of the author's hand.

"I don't know - " is there something imploring about Sera's processed ignorance? There is a coiling passion all writ into the words. "I don't know, I don't know if I should trust you, I don't see how you can know about her and leave her there. And I think she'll hunt the moonlight on water and the sound of a rose when the first petals unfurl, I think she'll hunt the flavor of a bruised twilight and the last note of the last song of the last bird of evening and the first bird of dawn and -

" - what are you doing. What are you doing."

Sera bites her lip. The pain brings her in to focus. And she starts: to look.

[Prime 1: Watch the Weaving.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 4, 6) ( success x 2 )

nymphe

In this vision, this moment out of time, this moment all linseed oil and age, all little fly-droppings along the edges which look like holes, dark clusters of tiny pinpricks and impossible to clean off without high-powered lazers, all green swirling away into ghastly ghostly yellows and the blacks are and she knows or she saw the painting the garden has turned into the haze that wraps around them both

and the girl in the vision who is the same girl

she is doing nothing; but something is waiting behind the zipper, under her skin, something is exhaling - something is ready to be unlocked

as soon as that zipper is drawn down

something that is not-of her.

The girl; oh, unquestionably: she knows about the nymph in the statue and the nymph's little hound and unquestionably, unquestionably, she is involved, intimate with the affair as it continues on, if not with its birthing; oh, unquestionably - look at how she approached, listen to the tone of her voice even when it was naught but liquid syllables in a language Serafíne does not know - unquestionably she knows; doesn't care at all for the nymph;

forever, forever; it's such a long time; stay imprisoned.

And, unquestionably, she believes that she is implying: that the nymph will hunt people like herself and Serafíne or others -- innocents; sleepers.

Both are true. Both seem true.

The vision-of-the-girl shrugs and begins to pull the zipper down, but it is hard going, it seems to be stuck.

And Serafíne can hear the girl saying something to her, but not what that something is; the vision-of-the-girl's mouth does not move.

Serafíne

Oh, there is a note of something thoughtful - not considerate precisely, and perhaps a bit querulous, by which we mean: full of confused (AND MILDLY DISGRUNTLED) query, and Sera is caught between her sense of the girl's certainty and her vision of the girl's unzippering, the thing inside that is not of her, the pieces that shift and change, and Sera is not moving, except - you see - to stand protectively between the statue and the stranger, her spine sharp, her skin all crawling-keen, her awareness etched and edged with varying degrees of watchfulness and wariness and awareness and compassion all of which cut through her sharp as swords -

"How do you know that. Is it just something someone put inside you? What if you're wrong and I'm right, and you you're keeping her here forever and ever because you cannot take it on yourself to ask and ask and ask yourself what would it be like to be trapped in forever."

nymphe

[paused for now!]

sorciere

The vision, perhaps outside the warp and weft of time, beyond its loom, a suspicion of pattern - the vision: it encompasses all of Serafíne's awareness as she speaks, confused and disgruntled, caught betwen (of course, liminal darling, you are caught between, held between, like a tongue set against teeth) the girl's certainty and this vision. This, the vision, which becomes total: which becomes the girl finally getting the zipper, shreds of flesh torn and ragged, the zipper-teeth crawling like sinuous bisected scorpion bellies split by lightning, and out of the hole in her chest comes a profusion of dark-winged things - they are shadows, perhaps, they are time, they are coal-smoke wings and gas-lamp poisons, they are time, they are iron and they are heavy, they are unbreathable skin-spoiling silent traps, they are airs made uneasy, they are dragging caught sparks of fire behind them; the winged things are around Serafíne; they sound like bats in a cave; they are humid, they are contagion, they breathe on her and whisper things in a myriad of languages - they sound unhappy; little hands. Through them the surreal impressionist strokes of green and black and gold become ever-gloomier, ever more tinted, as if she is looking at a painted world through the bottom of a bottle -

and then they are gone. The girl is gone. This is a vision; what is her body doing? How does one get back to one's body when one is having a vision?

The ground has begun to peel apart, like a wound not-quite-heeled picked at by childish fingers: they don't know better.

The ground begins to bleed, it moans as it does.

The park is a painting; Serafíne is in a painting-of-a-park; where is the girl and the nymph and the hound? They are not inside this vision any longer.

Serafíne

Serafíne spins in a sparkling arc of motion, reaching reaching reaching for the girl in the vision as she continues to peel back that zipper, when it shreds her flesh there is an answering hiss of responsive awareness, of empathic pain, oh Sera can feel the bite of those teeth into her own skin, all the strange, dark-winged things that live inside us all, that beat their wings against our rib cages, that haunt and haunt and haunt and make four a.m. a wasteland and morning an unwelcome haunt and inhabit the bile in our throat -

and here come the shadows, the assault of them and she doesn't know that the vision is total and the nymph and her little dog are gone, just that they are maybe behind her and she opens her arms like she might shield whatever is behind her from whatever is in front but it all comes anyway, the great dark sweep of them, sparking fire in moving arcs behind them, singeing, perhaps, her own skin, and she's saying "Stop!" or "Don't!" or what, she hardly knows, turning around to look for the nymph in the aftermath, when the night starts to sweep itself into heavy, gloomy brushstrokes of black and gold,

but the nymph is gone,

and the dog,

and the girl, too.

The ground has started to bleed. Sera crouches down by the wound, puts her hand over the center of it, as if she might staunch the bleeding, as if she might hold the ragged edges together with the pressure of her hand.

"Is anybody out there?"

She asks. It is not precisely a plaint but there is a note in there, a rising note that does not fall.

[Corr/Life/Mind Scan: is anyone out there?]

Serafíne

Magick!

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 1, 10) ( success x 1 )

sorciere

The ground pulses under her palm like a fever will pulse with the hurried want|want want|want want|want of the heart and how is it that Serafíne experiences such a scan as she is trying? For there is a person, male, in poor health, bones that are splintering and bones that are not bones so she does not quite read, just under the ground, under the wound, frantic: it is his heartbeat that is want|want want|want want|wanting like a fever ascending toward death he just wants to be free (as the nymph wants to be free although this young man he is under the dirt; he is choking on it and clawing at it; he is no timeless thing, but a thing soon without time)

Serafíne

I want I want I want I do not want except Serafíne always wants, that is how she experiences the world. The pound of the heartbeat beneath her skin, the opening of her body, her pores, the loosening of boundaries, the elasticity of her consciousness, we are everywhere, she is everything, she is nothing, she is neverwhen, she is everywhen, she is right fucking now and she is holding the wound closed with her hands not frantic until she feels that from the stranger undergrown, chocking on the ground, bleeding and she's on her knees, when did that happen? On her knees and making a noise in the back of her throat, no longer struggling to hold the wound in the ground closed but to open it up, to unbury the young man, to heal his shattering bones.

This is how:by kissing the blood pouring from the ground.

[Life 3/Prime 1: heal. Difficulty: 7 -1 focus, -1 visceral resonance?]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 8) ( success x 1 )

sorciere

It is not enough; it is a good start. But it is not enough, and the back of her teeth feel like iron fillings catching electricity but instead of electricity it's a flake of fire and a suggestion of incense and watermelon, and then it is just the grass and the roots and the stones and the man trying to dig to her, as if he is a mole, as if he is a mole and can feel her moving in the dirt is drawn to the echo of her is some mythological creature, a hunter perhaps, who was in love with Echo and followed her once she'd faded to naught but a voice, chasing the echo down, chasing it down, to do what?

The blood is viscous on her lips, is slippery, vaguely metallic, is not at all thin but is not sick-thick either; it is just blood, real, raw, butcher-shop iron

and the ground seems to be full of fine filaments of gold

which Serafíne will notice, pulling apart that ground-wound, kissing it, when a strand of gold clings to her lip that oh it is hair, it is somebody's improbable, impossible hair, a net to keep whatever's beneath down forever

and it is a good start. Bones have not been healed yet; but it is a good start, indeed.

This is a vision; what does it mean? There are no wolves in the vision; only this, gold net of hair, as fine as decorations on a medieval painting, as the faint marks in palimpsest.