Pete's Kitchen

Kalen Holliday

[How awake are we?]

Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

Kalen Holliday

[And how distracted by Resonance are we?]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 5, 6, 8, 8, 8) ( success x 4 )

Serafíne

Awareness.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Serafíne

The signage on the old brick building is unassuming - Pete's Kitchen. Inside is a blast from the past. Old pleather booths line the walls, each framed by a tall hook from which customers can hang their coats. The sort of booths into which one can just - burrow. Formica-topped tables, old fashioned salt cellars. Sugar dispensers with a saltine cracker in the center to keep the sugar from getting too moist and caking up.

Coffee like whoa: well brewed and without pretense, served in a mug with a saucer.

Open all day, open all night. The late-night waitresses skew younger, but they still wear

orthopedic shoes to match their tattoos and piercings and they know the drill. Fill the coffee cups as often as possible. Push the pie.

At Pete's they're still boasting about the awards they won ten years ago: best late night eats, best breakfast, best burrito. Maybe there are better ones to be had in Denver but not at the strange hours the Awakened keep. And it is perhaps a strange hour now. Research has kept Kalen up. Life has kept Sera up.

The front door opens and a small group crowds in. Immediately, Kalen can feel Sera's resonance - gut-wrenching, enthralling, and that third strange sensation that feels like a threshold, like the point where old definitions are lost, and new ones not yet attached and everything is flux and possibility. Doesn't see her at first, but that group looks like her. Everyone has tattoos and a certain kind of leather-wrapped, denim-clad androgyny rules. Except for the beards. The guys are all sporting some degree of facial hair.

That group is being led to the big round booth in the corner and she is sort of going-along and when Kalen looks there she is, visible in a slice between two others, temple resting on a taller stranger's shoulder and she looks quite fucked up but also looks like she's looking up, hearing something, starting to awaken. Mutters something to someone or maybe she doesn't. Then:
heads toward Kalen.

She isn't really walking straight.

She's wearing a teeny tiny crimson dress with these thigh-high black lace stockings that alternate stripes: opaque and transparent and are seamed up the back and held up by sweet little garters. Has a shearing lined leather coat because it is fucking cold. Nevermind the snow she's wearing her combat boots so she's really rather small compared to her usual height. The strange catches her by her hip as she detaches from him and she pushes him away. Finds her way to Kalen's table instead of following the group over to the other corner and kind of crawls into the booth across from him. She's smiling but it's one of those smiles that only seems physical: she's drunk and her body feels good right now.

Hi Kalen, says Sera, without saying a word.

Inhales again. Leans her head back against the booth and just decides that she is supposed to be here.

Kalen Holliday

Vampires are not ruining his sleep the way calm does, apparently, because Kalen there are no traces of shadows under his eyes tonight. He looks up from his book as she approaches, sets a napkin in it to mark his page, and slips it to the side. It is not about vampires or magic laying siege to darkness. It is an older book, but there are none of the arcane sigils or Latin one might expect.

Kalen doesn't even speak Latin. Gallowglass has needled him about it since they met.

No, this is a book of poetry by Pablo Neruda and it is not, at least not observably, connected with anything that concerns the fate of the world or the city or the Mages in Denver. And Kalen, curled into the booth with his coffee and in a dark grey sweater and jeans, looks...surprisingly peaceful. There is a toning down of all that intensity, less razor-edged and delicate balance. Tranquility is a little bit odd on Kalen, but if Serafine had just seen him like this for the first time...unhaunted and calm would seem normal enough.

"Hey." He smiles. "How are you?"

Serafíne

(Perception + Empathy: to catch the surprising sense of peace about Kalen.)

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 3, 4, 8, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 2

Serafíne

The world around them fractures into pieces and reassembles itself in her imagination. Everything is both bright and also somehow compartmentalized. The solid planks of the wood paneling behind her head and the groove between two boards that bites and tugs a few strands of her long hair. The smell of the place: which at this hour is deliciously greasy breakfast, strong coffee, old cigarettes and alcohol fumes.

Maybe she's supplying that bit herself.

Kalen asks her how she is and Sera cracks her eyes open. Gives him this half-lashed glance, that meets his eyes and lingers there. Her own are - well, she isn't unreadable, but one does have to look. Mostly glassy but also something else that feels edgy and a bit reckless.

Maybe she always feels edgy and a bit reckless.

Her gaze drops to the spine of his book. Neruda.

The letters are swimming enough that she wonders, briefly, when they have to come up for air but she can read them well-enough. "He's even better in Spanish." Mmms around the thought of it but her fathomless eyes flick back up to him. "You look - " hook-and-line to the edge of her mouth as she searches for a word. Finds one, finds it simple but sometimes simple works. " - good. Solid. Like you were meant to be in your own skin. I like it."

Kalen Holliday

"I do appreciate the Spanish. This particular copy was a gift." He glances at it, smiles faintly. "And an invitation."

He looks back up to her and smiles. "Oh. Do I? I...figured out something. Everything changes. The world is fluid. Nothing will stay exactly the same. But for now I know who I want to be. It never lasts. But I do enjoy it, when it happens." He sounds rather unconcerned about the temporary nature of this calm.

"It isn't who I expected it to be."

Serafíne

Formica is a strange substance - faintly reflective, just enough to catch the shadow of movement over its surface as both a reflection and an absence of light. Sera's chin is down and her eyes are half-hooded and that's how she reads the moment when Kalen looks back up at her and smiles.

She meets his eyes a half-beat later, as if she were moving through molasses rather than air. The strangest of pangs in her chest that has nothing and everything to do with that smile.

It hurts, rather.

And still she returns his smile, her own smeary and tailing. "Who gave it to you? What was the invitation?"

Kalen's waitress interrupts their little conclave to refill his coffee and to give Sera the once-over. Smacks her gum and waits as Sera realizes she is meant to order, which she does: the hunter's breakfast and a root beer float.

And as the waitress is sauntering away, Sera asks him - "And who do you want to be?"

Kalen Holliday

"I don't know who he is yet." Kalen laughs. "But the invitation was to dinner. He says I have nice eyes. I stayed up until a bit past dawn and drank a lot of wine and read poems and eventually said yes. I think it might be complicated, but definitely interesting."

"Someone with something more than just a purpose." He takes a sip of his now warmer coffee.

"You ever study philosophy? Kant...well, Kant said a lot of things. But one of those things was to always never treat people as solely a means. You should remember that people are ends in themselves." He smiles a little. "Or, you know, to people who don't read complicated texts for fun, he said not to be a jerk and see people only as a function of what use they could be. And I wasn't terrible at that with other people, but I was really bad at it with me."

Serafíne

Sera never studied philosophy. Doesn't have the head for it, does she. Knows who Neruda is and not a goddamned thing about Kant and she's pretty drunk and aching more than a little but she also feels: so damned good right now. Her body, the way it floats in the air, because she has forgotten that she is curled up in a tiny little cocktail dress in the bench seat of a pleather diner booth and just imagines herself: floating.

Sera listens, holds so much of what Kalen tells her in her head. Thinks some words and then puts the words in her mouth. Oh, how surprising. They come out:

"I kinda agree with this Kant dude. So is he like - " she thinks that Kalen's guy's name is Kant? Kinda? But doesn't really know why. Breathes in, starts again. "I mean, it's weird that you don't know who he is yet. Where'd you - find this guy?"

Kalen Holliday

"Oh, in the customary manner. There was trouble, it caught my attention, I got someone's number." Kalen smiles a little again. "He owns a bookshop. And he seems nice enough, but this isn't really....

"He's caught up in something bad. I don't know how much a part of him it is. It's going to be complicated and it may end badly and I don't mean hurt feelings badly." He sighs, but it's a calm sound, really.

"I could do it less complicated, play by the scripts I've been given. But that ends badly too, and...it rests pretty heavily on assumptions I don't know are true. So...that's no way to to do this, I don't think. I'll see if I can figure out who he is. I'll see if he can help me save some people. And if the opportunity for mercy presents itself. I will take it."

He smiles again, and there is nothing radiant, he is too calm for radiance. Perhaps luminous. "And if I'm wrong, at least I'll have been wrong being someone I don't hate that I've become."

Serafíne

The waitress comes by again and gives Kalen this look and refills his coffee with one hand as she sets Sera's root beer float down on the table. Sera kinda sits up then, drops her legs from the booth and sets them under the booth, wonders, and finds herself upright, elbows braced against the edge of the table. She has a flask in her jacket pocket and she knows that and she intends to spike the float but she doesn't really remember how drunk she is, just how the night started to knit itself together and -

- a banked flash of her eyes back up, over the foaming rootbeer and ice cream that seems both poetical and absurd in this moment. Such a strange thing to be a thing unto itself.

"Kalen." Solidly and a little more soberly though it is not sober. She is just pushing herself upright and forcing herself to think when it is hard and it hurts and she - "I don't understand. no one gives you Neruda unless they want to fuck you. Now you're talking about bad stuff and scripts and mercy and it sounds fucking dangerous. Will you please tell me what is going on?"

Kalen Holliday

"I don't know yet," Kalen says quietly. "He was, in that moment, trying to protect himself too. But he did try to save Arionna, when he didn't have to." He shrugs. "I'll be careful, Serafine.

"This...I have been held at gunpoint while trying to get coffee. I've been to a lot of fucked up places, I've seen a lot of terrible things, met a lot of terrible people. And there was, in that place, at least one thing that was hunting. The one I'm sure of...he might help me stop. Not because of apple pie and kittens, but because we both want that guy stopped. Him, I think, even more than me."

There is a brief pause, and then he laughs. "Is that true? About Neruda."

Serafíne

"I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, the sovereign nose of your arrogant face, I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes," Sera is looking at Kalen over the deflating surface of her float. She hasn't had a sip from it yet, but gradually the bubbles of the head are popping and sinking back into themselves, turning rich and foam-creamy. She is: in a diner at three a.m. drunk off her ass and a little bit sad and magick and reciting Pablo Neruda in the wrong fucking language but still reciting him: like a poem, like a prayer, like a song,

like an invocation,

"and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart."

Sighs after that, presses her mouth together, the faint smear of her lipstick long, long gone, tattoos flashing on her hands when she talks with them a bit, expressive.

"Of course it's fucking true. Where did you meet him? What's his name?"

Kalen Holliday

"In a bookstore," Kalen says, and his tone is gentle enough, for all that he really isn't answering her question. "I'll be fine, Serafine." And he seems remarkably clear about that. "It's not my first time doing something like this. Trust me. For right this second the less people involved in this one aspect the better. It is delicate. And even more so if he gets spooked. He needs to trust me, at least as much as he can trust me. You going to see him won't help with that.

"He really was terrified. I need him as calm as possible. Whatever is going on, he's already on edge. Precarious. Walking into these things, assessing them, turning them to my advantage when I had to...that's how I lived for years. I really will be fine."

Serafíne

She tries so very hard to watch him and listen to him and match his mouth to the words he utters and something about his gentle tone seems, to her, too gentle - right at the edge of patronizing and she breathes in sharply and shakes her lovely, golden head, as if she were shaking off a fog, eyes closed, feeling the world as it spins, feeling it close, strangely, around her heart.

Then another stutterstep though hitches something else and she opens her eyes - interrupts visceral "I don't even fucking understand what something like this means - " before she pulls it back, breathing harder now, and she doesn't want the rootbeer float, she doesn't want the hunter's breakfast, she doesn't want the boy she came in with, she doesn't want anything and if she hears the rest of it: Kalen's admonishment to her to stay out of it and his reassurance that he knows how to: what - deceive people until he gets what he wants, turn a situation to his advantage, it doesn't really register or at least: not the way he perhaps intends it to register: as calming reassurance, I've done this before, this is completely in my wheelhouse.

And she's snapping open her little clutch and pulling out some cash, hardly matters how much except: enough, more than.

"I never said I was gonna go see him. I asked - " a sharp breath out, her heart's beating so fast, "fuck it. I'm gonna go."

And so she does. Rising to one knee, half-crawling out of the booth to stumble into the aisle. She doesn't wait for her food, doesn't wait for the boy she walked in with: ignores that whole group, too. Heads straight for the door, and god only knows where, thereafter.