Ask Me When I'm Sober

Ian

[Jae-shin's Dex+Brawl]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 4, 6, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Ian

[Ian's Dex+Brawl]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 10) ( success x 4 )

Ian

Washington Park was full of visitors today - the lush, green landscape dotted with joggers and frisbee players, college kids playing basketball, boisterous children playing hide and seek in the trees and elderly couples walking hand in hand by the lake. The weather was lovely, a welcome change of pace from the cold snap that had hit earlier in the week. The evening sun was a warm golden glow shining through the trees. Ian and Jae-shin were sparring in the grass near one of the flower gardens. Maybe it was the weather (that infectious thrill of spring,) but the today the practice had an air of playfulness about it. Ian grinned as they danced around each other, breathing hard. His pulse beat out a rough rhythm in his ears, and sweat shone on his exposed skin. He had on a pair of tapered silver athletic pants, but was otherwise shirtless and barefoot. His toes dug into the soft earth before he lifted off in a tight, predatory spring.

The attack was swift and elegant, but Jae-shin was just fast enough to block it. After a series of swift blows, Jae-shin finally managed to land a hard kick to Ian's side. Ian exhaled roughly at the impact only to dance away, shaking his head with a laugh.

"Careful, I might start fighting for real."

Jae-shin's expression was quietly challenging.

Serafíne

Awareness.

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

Jo Hamilton

[Jo Hamilton uses SPLASH!]

Serafíne

Among the visitors: someone, you know? Who knows, who has some hint of, every strange tracery of magick in the air tonight. Who is: enthralled by it and entombed by it and entangled by it. Follows that thread from god knows how far away to the place where it makes a new, strange knot.

Ian and his partner have an audience. Probably they are too intent on each other to take note of anything more than the impression of blond hair left loose, streaming into a wild tangled mass when the wind kicks up. The sensation of her resonance: gut-wrenching, enthralling, threshold-hovering right there. Right there. Right there.

Sera is wearing something close to preppy drag: a highwaisted skirt, pleated and short, with silver buttons precise at the waist. A longsleeved, rather high-necked little jacket, also black, with more silver buttons in marching military-themed rows, the cut of which would be conservation were it not, you know, so very short: the undercurve of her breasts, the spare cut of her torso. The dark scrawl of her tattoos against golden skin. Someone's been worshipping the sun: somewhere. Somehow.

Serafíne

(Fair warning guys: I go to bed in an hour and a half, so I am probably going to ignore osting order or I will not get to make another post with these many people in the room. :) )

Jo Hamilton

[I'm fine with that :D]

Grace

"So, yeah. The park!" Grace says, sniffing in the warm air and tree smell. "Places like this are good for distraction-free thinking-time. And you need that."

She walked down a park path with Jo, all decked out in a bright blue shirt with a massive comma on it. Just below the comma, in small text is "or 1=1 --". If we're going to teach, do it right, right? Be the exploit.

"So, first off -- you say you want to learn about electricity and stuff like that? First, I want to know -- what do you think of the physical things? The elements, atoms, that kind of thing? Because it's all related. Well, okay, it is all all related, but forces and matter more so than most."

Lavinia

[Per+aware, oooh?]

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

Jo Hamilton

[Do I sense decepticons?! per+aware]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne

Resonance: Emanating from the slight blonde watching the guys spar, so many layers of resonance.

visceral, enthralling, liminal, sundrenched, soaring

The first three: intrinsic to her being. The latter: extrinsic, less tied to her blood and body and bone and presence, but still close, immediate. In/on/around her, maybe anchored somehow. Maybe lingering like a perfume.

Jo Hamilton

She needs distraction free thinking.

This is what Grace says to Jo, who has her cellphone out in her hand and is plugging away at something. Because Jo... Jo doesn't know the meaning of 'distraction-free' unless what Grace really means is boredom. Jo moves too much to ever be distraction free; always thinking, always searching.

The day has been warm, though the temperature has dropped dramatically from her time on campus, and she's dressed accordingly. Her black tank is lit up with yellow letters spelling out 'IN TRAINING TO BE BATMAN' with the bat symbol displayed at the top. And capri light pants (do men call their long shorts capris or shorts?). Of course, her wrists are touched with all manner of things to decorate them (probably gutted someone's computer somewhere, hopefully they don't know about it).

"Huh? Oh right yeah like.. Ok well I mean like, it's just coding right? Like a background program.. like ya know.. like your desktop wallpaper. Or maybe it's like, like an if-then statement. Like if THIS coding happens, do this! Ya know like.. dude how did the Matrix explain it? Where's trinity when you need her?" Jo hummed. She hummed like the powerlines. Always moving, but never radically. Predictable. Necessary. Pulling humanity along, whether it liked it or not.

Jo Hamilton

[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_-OTZHBIuE for illustration of what I mean by Humming]

Lavinia

It's actually a beautiful day. More than a beautiful day, it's fan-fucking-tastic. She had been spending time with friends, some people she had concluded were decent company, regardless of whether or not they had a roof over their head. There but before the grace of God go she, and all that jazz. She remembers being out here, she remembers being hot and being cold, she remmebers thinking that she had better be brilliant or better be talented because otherwise she wouldn't be able to put a roof over her head.

Anyway, it wasn't important. She'd eaten part of a bucket of chicken with the guys, bid them adios and headed on to enjoy the rest of the park. It was a beautiful place, full of frisbee and basketball and trees and- oooh, were those people sparring?

Something felt interesting, and her dark eyes lit up like torches (like she ever had to really wonder about that) and a grin blossomed across her face. THe blonde, with her golden halo of hair and rather remarkable height and capris (nope, those were regular pants, they were just capris because Lavinia Cervantes was over six feet tall) She followed sensation, marched forward in combat boots and a cut up tee shirt (something to hide naturally occuring holes from God-knew-what)

And she headed forward, looking from the men sparring to a blonde sitting and watching and instead her attention went there. Had no qualms with plopping down next to her. Left ear to the lady's side.

"They just start?"

Ian

[Life 3, Better Body diff 6]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Ian

[+1 Dex for 24 hours, woot]

Lavinia

She sits and there is light. Not the typical light, but something radiant and warm, something that burns, ever so slightly, egging close to the edge, a reminder of some ember burning eternal. Something without boundaries, something without eges, constantly pressing outward, something that went out to the corners of the universe and birthed new and birthed more and there was light, there was warmth, there was something that lingered there.

Something that is. That was. That will always be even when the mortal shell of the being who held the universe in her very finite form. She touched against something larger than herself, larger than the heavens. Truly, she must be of the divine. Truly, she must be greater than a being bound only to this plane. All haloed and sonorous voice and eyes like torches, like lighting across the dark. And once that light set aside, her eyes were the space between the stars. Bright but so very, very dark.

Ian

[Ian's Dex+Brawl]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 6 )

Ian

[Jae-shin's Dex+Brawl]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1

Serafíne

"Fuck if I know," the lovely creature shrugs and the movement threatens to upend whatever modesty the cut of the jacket affords her. She is wearing sunglasses. Yesterday they were framed with skulls. Today, they are black, cat-eyed, the frames studded with silver nailheads. Match to the leather wrapped-round her throat.

This sideglance then, her eyes hidden behind the glasses so large they dominate her angular features, without occluding them. "I just started watching them."

The sun slides across the reflective surface of the dark glass. Moving, luminous.

Grace

"Well, yes. Except that there is no real if-then. If you look deep enough into the code, you might say forces are a type of matter, or matter is a type of force. They are composite objects made of the same general parts. Like, take electrons. Electrons are what carry electricity, which is a force, but they're also the things that help make up atoms. They're the same type of object, just with slightly different variables. So if you already have some theory of matter, it's relatively easy to translate that into a theory of forces."

Stroll, stroll, stroll. Lecture, lecture, lecture.

Ian and Jae-shin.

Cloud.

Wait, what?

"Oh hey! They're doing a thing!"

She turns on a heel and heads over. So, now -- a bright-eyed embodiment of shifting, winged focus starts beelining for the assembly, pseudo-apprentice in tow.

Ian

It was the first time any of the people in the park (apart from Ian's current sparring partner) had seen him since he'd gone Seeking up that mountain peak. The first time Sera would notice the addition of a deeper, more primordial note within his resonance. The primal energy of it coiled fittingly with the rest of his feline characteristics. And as Ian moved, the press of his Will blossomed out, his working evident to anyone paying particular attention. He focused with his pulse, his movement, dancing across the grass with an effortless grace that hinted at his ballet training. And then suddenly he lunged, ducking beneath Jae-shin's arms to knock him in the back of his knee. Ian followed it up with a sweeping kick that took the Akashic's feet out from under him.

Then he pounced, pinning Jae-shin to the grass with a sharp, triumphant grin.

Jae-shin looked up at him quietly, catching his breath. After a moment, he laughed - pleased and surprised. "You cheated."

"You're just mad I finally pinned you." Ian reluctantly released his prize, getting to his feet as he cast a glance toward Sera and Lavinia. When he focused on the latter, there was a light tilt of his head. "Hey."

Jo Hamilton

"Buuuuuuuuuuut matter is just code. So like if it's jsut matter and stuff, then it's just code. Cause like, how could it like be anything else? So is it like a program running? Or like.. it has like a schedule? But like if it's not an if-then, then like why is the weather and stuff all chaotic? Like for realsies?"

Now Jo HAD sensed a new individual, she has just been engaged in her phone and Grace, but now was being aimed in their direction. "A thing!" Jo exclaimed, as if this said everything. "We must like see this thing! Because things, things are cool. Not like those thingie-ma-jigs.."

Jo is right on her heels, shoving her phone in her back pocket.

Lavinia

"Good enough for me," she replied with a shrug. She wasn't wearing a skirt today, like Lavinia ever really paid attention to what she was doing in a skirt, dared egg someone closer to getting an eye full of whatever she was wearing underneath, but we digress. It wasn't important what she wasn't wearing right now. "I'm Lavinia."

Sera got another glance, having the worst time not looking and being taken in by the fact that Sera was striking. Maybe she had painting or chalk drawings on her mind after her last escapade with the awakened populace of Denver. She opened her mouth, but then noticed people approaching and turned her attentions again.

When Ian spoke she nonchelantly watches his lips, not longing but decyphering. Then, her eyes went to his face. "Hey, you two are great," she replied.

That was the voice of a herald. Something that spoke with confidence, that bid fear not, something that brought tidings of joy or the message of something wrathful beyond measure. She is a messenger, or at least that's what her voice seems intent on conveying about her.

Ian

[I suppose we should do this awareness thing]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 7, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

Serafíne

Then it's over. Ian - cheating - has pinned his partner and Sera, who seems to be both watchful and somehow removed or contained or maybe merely high, notices. Her sharp little chin rises in a way that makes the sun's reflection glint off the nailheads in her sunglasses: or maybe just the darkdark glass.

And she: claps.

You know: for the show.

Around the paper cup, fingers finding her palm. Mouth crawling, curved at one corner that is essentially inhabited.

"Serafíne. You can call me Sera."

This to Lavinia. Nothing to Ian except the fixed attention of her hidden eyes on him, as he rises: from the hold, from the ground. Glances up at Sera, Lavinia, greets the latter. Something arrested in that awareness. She knows everything: feels everything. Every piece of it, which threatens to peel her apart even as she is cinching herself back together.

Grace

"The weather and stuff is all chaotic because it isn't an if-then. There are very few things in this universe that are a true either-or. Mostly, we exist in the grayish in-betweens. If things were deterministic, like an if-then, we would be able to predict the chaos precisely. But as it's all built on probabilities, even so far as the electrons and protons? The world isn't a firmly defined thing. At all. Which is nice, because hey -- that would be way boring."

That spiel having been said, Grace golf-claps to Ian, and plops down next to Lavinia. "I'm Grace. Hi."

Jo Hamilton

"Well yeah but you're like totally simplifying it. Like, it's an if-then statement but it's not like, if Jo sneezes, Butterflies are born. It's like.. like If this person does this, under this, when this, but only while, then this happens, which does this, but only this while this, and so on and so on. Like it's a lot more complicated and stuff. You can totes predict stuff, if you got the code. Like if I knew the whole code, I could totally tell you when stuff is gunna happen. I mean it's be like super easy. But like we're missing the pieces and stuff so it only seems chaotic.

Jo..gives Ian a thumbs up. That is her congrats to..whatever that was. Because Jo isn't into the physical exercises, save one..or two.

"Yo Sera!" Jo gives her a wave and then finally..oh FINALLY focuses on the new one. She twitches her nose, lifts her brows and seems to look as if someone gave her to the key to the gaming store. Grace sits next to lavinia, who is sitting next to Sera. This... no.. this can't be.

So Jo, sits in Grace's lap and leans in towards Lavinia. "So, will you marry me?"

Lavinia

[You're on my deaf side, did I actually catch any of this?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (1, 3, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )

Lavinia

"Sera," she repeats, grins a little at Serafíne, lights up for a second because there is something vaguely hopeful for the woman at her side. She wasn't entirely human, this one. On first glance, certainly, but there's far too much energy there. More than a mortal body can handle (she's fragile, though she doesn't let on. She's stronger than she looks, but she's not as strong as she thinks) "Glad to meet you."

This is Grace. And there she is, surrounded by strangers who feel like- well, now, this one is certainly different, but happens to have the misfortune of being on Lavinia's right side instead of her left. She scoots back enough so that she can kind of see Grace's face. A little. Just enough so that she doesn't have to turn her head to see the woman next to her. Her brows furrow for a second, like she was thinking, like she was straining.

But, once she puts two and two together, the woman laughs, something that is intent and warm and that stuck to the senses. She wasn't terribly loud, but she certainly cut through the ambient sound.

"Lavinia," she offered to the pile of GraJoCe. "Are you tryin' to make an honest woman outta me." Brow quirked, grin widened, "or are you proposing to Sera? I haven't been married in a little while, so I feel the need to clarify."

Ian

Lavinia said they were great. Grace and Sera clapped, as though Ian and Jae-shin had been nominated the evening's designated entertainment. Jae-shin responded to the approval with a hesitant smile, perhaps unsure if he ought to be encouraging the notion that combat was a spectator sport (or perhaps he was just shy.) He got to his feet with a smooth motion, dusting dirt and grass from his legs. Unlike Ian, he had on a tank top, but was otherwise similarly outfitted in athletic clothes. They'd obviously come here with the express purpose of doing what they'd just been engaged in.

Ian, of course, took the applause in stride. The side of his mouth quirked lightly, and he bent down into a loose, graceful bow. Slightly theatrical.

"You guys are welcome to join us, if you like."

The challenge hung in the air, dry and coyly tempting, though Ian did not expect that any of those seated nearby were likely to take him up on it.

Serafíne

Yo Sera! shouts Jo and our Sera tips her coffee mug in the creature's direction. Her head turns; their collective reflection crawls across the gleaming surface of her glasses. Does not comment on if-thens and why-wheres and data because that all sounds like bullshit to her.

Except of course you can predict stuff. She's a seer. The future and the past crack themselves open between her teeth.

They speak different languages, though. On every level.

She is looking at them though: her golden head turned, her chin low over her narrow shoulder, the dark cut of that little black jacket clearly tailored for her: from the width to the length to the glove-like fit of the arms. Custom-made.

Somehow the lift and curve of that cup is both greeting and farewell. It's clear - body language, the way she holds herself - that this is only a temporary waystation.

"I don't believe in fucking monogamy," this to Lavinia, a sideline, a sidelong. "So marriage is pretty much off the table. I think she was proposing to you, though."

Then she's moving, turns around on her heel because she never sat down, just paused in her passage. Glance back at Ian over a dark shoulder. "Ask me when I'm sober. Watch me say yes."

--

That's really all the farewell they get. She's on her way down the path, into the shadows. Sunglasses still covering her eyes.

Taco Truck

Kiara Woolfe

[I'm doing the thing with the sensing because, y'know. Dice.]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

Early evening, midweek, springtime - warm in a way that feels bonesoaking after the long, dark winter. Now though: my god, the sun, the dogwoods, the tulips and the anemone, the late-blooming daffodils, the iris bristling-green but not yet in-bloom in dark stands around the lake. The redbuds a bruising blush of magenta, here and there a cherry tree that has just come into bloom or has come-and-gone while you were looking at it: tender tender tendersweet.

Spring.

The park is flooded with people from every walk of life and every socioeconomic strata. Skateboarders, joggers, frisbee throwers, dog-walkers, dog-runners, dog-carriers, picnickers of both the makeshift and the wellplanned varieties. Puppet-show creators and street artists and balloon-sellers. Grandparents running after toddlers, teenagers trailing after the world's most clueless adults. Bird-watchers, goose-feeders, toy-sailboat-captains, roast-nut vendors and on, and on, and on. Pick-up softball games and a stray game of intramural quidditch and not one, but two people in Chewbacca suits neither of whom knows the other -

and amidst all this agitation, green-green-growth and exultant tumult a certain creature, laying on her back in the green green grass, dark glasses over her eyes, golden hair threaded through the grass, head back, feet flat on the ground, knees bent, arms spread wide wide wide.

Kiara Woolfe

The warmth had hit her like a freight train. All that deep, deep cold and then suddenly; sunshine. Suddenly the world twisting just so and then - oh. Spring is sprung and there's a poetry to Washington Park again that somehow felt hushed and suspended while the snow fell. As if winter had pressed her finger to her lips and shushed the world and the travelers that once upon a time traversed it. Kiara Woolfe had been one of these - not to say she'd entirely stopped visiting but - her absences had been longer.

Her presence stirring here and there - conversations via Ginger - a flash of dark, wild hair in a Café, a bright red smile across a room - there and then - gone. As if pinched and snuffed out; leaving only the wisps of curling smoke; the suggestion of the Verbena.

That was in essence so very much the brunette's way, however. She was a wilding at heart and as much as the city entertained her there was forever curled around Kiara the notion of something borrowed but for a time from nature. Some sprite that manifested in a flash of sharp white teeth and dark; laughing eyes. Just as it does now - Serafine on the grass and then a shadow sliding across her form. The sensation of rebirth; the tickle at the senses and suddenly -

"Hey, stranger."

- Kiara; sunglasses perched on the edge of her nose; head tilted to the side. Drinking in the sight of the other woman; her fingers idly curled around a bottle of water. Kiara; who smelled like sunshine and coffee; vital and sweet and yet - something else, too. The curl of her lips suggestive. "Mind if I sit?"

Grace

[Awareness!]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 4, 9) ( success x 1 )

Grace

The warmth does not hit Grace like a freight train. This Phoenixite loves the warm, and even embraces the hot. It's amazing she manages to get through the winter without freezing a toe off. Warmth hits her like a fluffy pillow. She just wants to roll around in it.

Maybe that's why she's out here in the 'wild' nursing her internet addiction by strolling around with her face in her phone. Or, she could be peeling away the universe's veils and poking stuff on the inside, it's really hard to tell...

But she isn't. At least, not in any way less mundane than anyone else does with their own quantum-tunneling pocket-sized sums-of-most-human-knowledge.

After some fashion, the skittering wanderer wanders inexplicably towards the others, as Mages are so wont to do. Like attracts like, or something like that. But she still doesn't look up from her phone. Maybe she's just not quite aware of them yet, drifting their way like following a familiar scent.

Serafíne

The creature has to feel it from a long way off: that singular sensation - devouring rebirth, the voracious energy of it, but she does not move, does not stir, does not sit-up-and-wave or otherwise embrace the sensation until Kiara's shadow moves over Sera's skin. Which is already bronzed, as if she had spent those last dredging weeks of winter-to-spring somewhere far, far away. Someplace with white sands and luminous seas and a golden sun. St. Tropez or Rio or Santorini or Phuket or fucking Bali.

Maybe it was fucking Bali.

Maybe it was just Jamaica.

Whereever: she has three bracelets made of braided grass and cheap glass beads around her left wrist, tattoos scrawling dark on her fingers, wrists, forearms, her left bicep, curling up her negligent flank, disappearing into shadow or beneath the straps of her leopard-print bikini top.

Next to her head, sweating in a plastic-domed Big Gulp cup, a bright pink Slurpee. Guarantee you it is dosed with something.

"Hey." This see, as much to Kiara's shadow as to Kiara. Quiet really, for a Sera, the edge of her mouth: curving, faint. This lift of her chin, both subtle and supple, rather hard to see for the angle except for the way it makes her hair slither through the grass. "I'd mind if you fucking didn't sit."

The glasses are too dark for anyone to see her eyes, but the sense of her attention is clear. The direction. The strange, drifting precision.

Kiara Woolfe

There's quiet laughter at that.

At the idea that she'd find offense in it; Kiara's decision whether to sit or not to sit which - frankly - was really no decision at all but an eventuality. She had always had the intention to - it was the tease with formalities she really had no great care for that slowed her descent to the grass. She drops a bag down; it rattles with authority; the contents burdened enough to impact with some weight; to compress the soft earth beneath it before the Verbena folds herself down beside it.

"Guess I'd better fucking sit, then."

Scoops her sunglasses back over her face so her dark eyes are visible. Uncaps the water bottle and tips it against her lips; swallows and watches Serafine out of the corner of her eyes; smiling as she turns her face afterwards. Her mouth is cherry red tonight; the water leaving it gleaming wetly in the gathering dusk.

There's almost something feral about the imagery; the bold, wet, red. She reclines back on a hand and tilts her head - quiet for a beat before: "Grace." A slanted look to Serafine; the edge of humor there around her supple lips. "Have you ever noticed - " Kiara settles down on her side; cupping the side of her neck and pressing an elbow down to support herself; draping across the narrow margin of space between herself and the Cultist as if she had no concern of Serafine minding the invasion.

The way it brought the Verbena's long lashes into greater clarity; the sweep and settle of them against her cheek. The steady weight of her regard through dark eyes. "The way we seem to converge. You'd nearly think it was magic." A slow, satisfied shift of her mouth, then. She lifts her chin.

Watching Sera while she lounges in all her leopard-print bikini-topped glory.

Grace

Grace marches up to the two of them as Kiara is speaking on the oddity of convergences, and Grace -- while still not looking up from her phone -- adds: "It's a consequence, I think. Entanglings, you know? I felt something familiar over here, and my feet must have moved for me."

She puts her phone into a pocket on her jeans, her black t-shirt one with a graphic of a robot in yellow and white, advertising: "Pass your Turing test in 2 weeks! $99"

"What's up. Is this grass taken?"

Serafíne

"Like magic, sure," comes this note of quiet, humming agreement from the Cultist. Except, somewhere within or around the phrase is something else: something not-querelous precisely, so much as it is contrarian. Her golden head turns as Kiara descends, as if on a fulcrum. That same sense of both weight and calibration which somehow both belies and telegraphes her physical state of some-sort of inebriation.

Here's the truth: right now, just now, Sera is really rather stoned.

It's the best way to be stoned, with the sun cracking brilliant above you like the golden yolk of a perfectly cooked egg.

" - but not exactly magic. And it's not really a consequence. And it's not really a convergence: it's a choice. A whole bunch of fucking choices you know? To walk: towards, instead of: away from. To be open right? Somehow and on some level to everything that is. Or at least, the pieces of it that hit you on your fucking wavelength, yeah?"

The sustained sense of eyecontact: the dark lenses and Kiara's dark eyes just - momentarily - hanging.

Then a glance up. The frame of her dark glasses a cluster of tiny crystal-eyed skulls: of course.

"Hey Grace."

Kiara Woolfe

Sera is really rather stoned and Kiara is - mellow, to put it one way. Her smile lingering there as the blonde turns her face toward her and their eyes meet; holding there as the Verbena reaches over with her free hand to catch and surrender a strand of hair away from Serafine's brow; her wrist jangling with its usual assortment of brevity in chains and stones and the silver catch and gleam of something resembling a pentagram.

It's no wonder Arionna possesses the dismay for the brunette she does - she wears her beliefs without compromise, Kiara. There's no attempts to disguise her tendencies when it comes to faith - or the lack of it, in certain things.

The Verbena's touch though, where it ghosts along her skin, is gentle. Barely there to be felt stronger than the breeze before - "That depends, what's the password?" This, Kiara twisting back a little; her sunglasses dropping forward onto her nose as she settles back onto her elbow; pushing space between herself and Serafine; toeing her bag out of the way of Grace's invited situation.

"Been a while." This, Grace's actual greeting beyond the initial drawling tease, a thin eyebrow arching. "How's my favorite technological wizkid been doing? Not behaving yourself, I hope."

Grace

"I wasn't really aware of my making a choice, but hey -- I'll take credit for being open to everything," Grace says, smiles down at Sera.

"The password is: I'm sitting on the grass and you can't stop me?" There's a smirk, and then a plop as she adjusts to the sudden downwardness.

"I am totally not. Behaving myself. Ever."

Because fuck that, okay? Grace doesn't reach out to the others in their touchy-feeliness, but she doesn't seem bothered by it either. Doesn't seem so willing to put distance between herself and others these days.

Serafíne

"Like magic, sure," comes this note of quiet, humming agreement from the Cultist. Except, somewhere within or around the phrase is something else: something not-querelous precisely, so much as it is contrarian. Her golden head turns as Kiara descends, as if on a fulcrum. That same sense of both weight and calibration which somehow both belies and telegraphes her physical state of some-sort of inebriation.

Here's the truth: right now, just now, Sera is really rather stoned.

It's the best way to be stoned, with the sun cracking brilliant above you like the golden yolk of a perfectly cooked egg.

" - but not exactly magic. And it's not really a consequence. And it's not really a convergence: it's a choice. A whole bunch of fucking choices you know? To walk: towards, instead of: away from. To be open right? Somehow and on some level to everything that is. Or at least, the pieces of it that hit you on your fucking wavelength, yeah?"

The sustained sense of eyecontact: the dark lenses and Kiara's dark eyes just - momentarily - hanging.

Then a glance up. The frame of her dark glasses a cluster of tiny crystal-eyed skulls: of course.

"Hey Grace."

Serafíne

Ack. Not that one!

Serafíne

Sera is quite remarkably still as Kiara's arm - with its gleaming cachement of baubles and bangles - shades her face. That stillness is somehow still very inhabited; immediate; cognizent: aware, implicitly, explicitly. Though her eyes are hidden, there is still this sense that she sinks into even the impression of contact. The layers of it, as fine and finely calibrated as the layers of skin, and blood, blood and bone.

Sera tilts the crown of her skull back and back, chin rising to plant a supple, quiet kiss at the base of Kiara's palm.

Lets it go, turns her hidden gaze in Grace's direction as Grace sits in the still-lush grass.

--

Somewhere in the grass: a low buzz-buzzing. Sounds like a bee. Isn't a bee.

The hum of someone's phone, low, insistent, which starts over again as soon as it stops. Sera is patting down the grass, looking for the thing, looking-looking for it as it starts its buzzing chorus all over again, and finally finds it, shades her eyes against the lowering sun to read the screen, makes a noise and then rolls over and lifts herself up from the grass, dusting herself off, this twist of apology in her mouth as she wanders a bit away to take this call thingy.

Anima

Ian

Life was in bloom in Rocky Mountain National Park. Not just the verdant green of the grass and trees, but the bustle of tourists wandering its many trails. When Ian woke up that morning, the air was 70 degrees and clear. Perfect weather for hiking. He passed a number of people on his way to Longs Peak, most of whom were only there for the day. As the elevation went up, the ambient temperature started to chill, and the steady line of hikers thinned out to only a few. Up on the mountain, it was still winter. The ice and the snow made climbing treacherous.

It was the third day of his camping trip, and he was seeking something more than what he'd found so far. The ground. The trees. Rolling forests that seemed to go on forever. Above the mountain, the sky spread out in a vast expanse of blue.

But to get there, he'd have to climb. So he did.

It was easy going at first. Meditative, even - ascending the rocks by instinct and muscle memory. By the time he was halfway up the peak he was alone, and the air had turned cold and biting. The sound of the wind was a low howl. From a distance it seemed a lonely picture: one man climbing away from spring's welcome embrace toward the unforgiving remnant of winter's last breath.

A couple of times he might have slipped, but he was careful, and Ian always did have a knack for keeping his balance. Somewhere around late afternoon he paused to rest on an outcropping jutting out from the rock face. Leaning back against he cold stone, he closed his eyes and breathed deeply of the thin mountain air. His arms and legs ached. His pulse was beating hard against the inside of his eardrums. He could never seem to get enough oxygen out here.

anima

Not many people out today. Tonight: not at this hour, not in this space, not on this particular day. Not up here, the scrubby treeline left behind somewhere near the beginning of the trailhead. Now, the sun is sinking behind the ragged edge of the frontrange mountains among which he climbs and the warmth of the day is rapidly disappearing. From where he sits - atop a rock wall overlooking the scrubby wallow of a treeless valley that has only started waking itself to the thought of spring, above a band of striated granite damp the runoff and snowmelt he can see the ship's prow prominent beneath the greater bulk of the mountain. The outdoor solar privys nestled beneath another prominent little ridge that will take quite the scrabble to get down.

The trail up the peak: maybe tomorrow then, and only if he remembered his ice axe and crampons - that much he recognized from nearly the first glimpse of Long's Peak at the trailhead this morning. Closer now, he can see how much of the climb will be on snow and ice: a wallow up the glacier, the long traverse over a snowfield, hard rock scrabbles and then crosswise up a long, steep couloir. Most people wouldn't tackle a climb like that alone.

Ian isn't most people.

The night's gathering in, though. Out here the stars are spectacularly spangled - but still not bright enough to light the trail outside of a full moon. Time to find a place to camp.

Something about the horizon tonight.

That glow.

Ian

He had his gear with him - packed tightly and efficiently into a backpack that he carried strapped around his torso. For this particular journey, it was only the basic essentials: food, water, rope, axe... but there was a tiny single-person tent, should he have need of it. The round-trip climb was about 15 hours - six or seven to the top of the peak. He hadn't really planned on stopping, but sometimes plans change. The daylight disappeared faster than it seemed it should have. How long had he been out here?

Ian got to his feet carefully and surveyed the landscape above and below him. Wind gusted past, blasting his cheek with a few sharp crystals of snow. The glow on the horizon pulled his gaze back to the sky. He watched it for a few long moments, then turned and began the steep ascent toward the snow. He needed to get out of the wind, and it would provide more shelter than the bare rocks could.

anima

Sometimes the day disappears faster than it should. Sometimes the edges of the world close in upon themselves, then crack open again come morning. He is alone on the trail, night around him. Below the thin glow of sunlight reflected upon the surface of a shallow mountain lake. The skeletal frame of a ranger's cabin, blackened at the eves and around the boarded-up windows tucked into the leeside of the ridge he both eschews and skirts on the shores of the lake. An elegant fringe of ice crusts over the protected southern shore. Everywhere ice, the winter ice has melted. Even as he hikes up toward the snow, he crosses these nameless, snaking little rivulets that find every channel in the rock.

Has he been here before? Both the trail and the mountain take on a different aspect after dark. The sharp fin of the Ship's Prow gains a ragged prominence as the ridge he follows tucks lower and skirts beneath it. The mountain beyond gains both bulk and prominence - dark and darker against the luminous night sky.

Rock beneath his feet now. Then snow in the slope at the bottom of the couloir.

No one else in sight.

Ian

[Per+awareness]

Dice: 6 d10 TN10 (2, 4, 5, 5, 7, 9) ( fail )

Ian

Somewhere in the world, it was still daytime. Somewhere, but not here. Standing at the base of the Diamond, Ian looked up and surveyed what he could make out of the sheer cliff face. It was dark, but he saw better in the dark than most people did. (Better, but not perfectly.) If he was going to make camp he'd need to follow the keyhole trail past this part of the mountain, into the more gradual slope where the snowdrifts piled against the wall.

If.

But he wasn't tired. And the stars looked beautiful tonight.

"Are you there?"

He said it quietly, almost as much to himself as to the mountain, and the winter winds stole the words away from his lips even as he said them. He didn't expect a response. Another moment, and he hesitated. Looked out across the snow. Then turned and started to climb.

Ian

[Dex+Ath]

Dice: 8 d10 TN7 (3, 3, 6, 6, 7, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Ian

[And again!]

Dice: 8 d10 TN8 (4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 1 )

anima

Are you there?

Ian asks and there's no response. No formal response - though he doesn't seem to expect one. Merely the arcing echo of the wind, funneling over the ridges. There's no response, but that does not stop him, no.

He starts to climb.

--

Here is a familiar rhythm, a familiar path against a familiar obstacle. The loose strength of his wiry frame against the unmoving, implacable rock, breath harsh in his lungs, fingers aching, thighs burning. The stars pinpoint-bright overhead, the seam of the sky -

Difficult angles in the dark, but he pulls himself up and up with ease.

The slope sharpens and the holds grow less certain, more rare, and still he hangs on.

Somewhere above, silhouetted against the impervious sky, this sketch, this shadow of movement. Fleeting - rising, faster than he is, mind, and with an almost impervious ease.

Ian

The climb here was more dangerous than any other part of the peak. A steep drop descended below Ian's feet, stark and cold and unforgiving. A couple of rock chips skittered down the side of the cliff, dislodged by his hand where it gripped a crack in the stone. The sound they made on the way down was deceptively gentle. The climb was slower than Ian would have liked, given the wind and the darkness and the fact that he had to stop periodically to reaffix his rope tether (lest he slip and fall.) But the landscape here was beautiful at night, the slopes and forests below stretching out far into the horizon.

It became a rhythm, almost. Like dancing or running. The sharp crack of the spike going into the rocks. The reach of his arm - seeking, holding, pulling himself up to the next ledge. The rocks were cold and sharp beneath his hands, the surface under his feet slick enough to be worrisome. He'd done this before - not here, but on other mountains. He knew how to be careful. And he was (careful.) But he was also hungry. The sore heat from his arms and legs mixed with a prickling sensation in the subdermal layer of his skin. Some crawling, impatient drive. A need to move. To climb. (To hunt?)

Something was there. High in the shadows. The flicker of motion caught Ian's attention and he stopped still, his body pressed against the rock-face as he looked up, searching.

His heartbeat jumped. After a few beats, he kept climbing. Faster now, trying to catch up.

Ian

[Per+Alertness diff 7 -2 (acute senses)]

Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 5, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 4 )

Ian

[And Dex+Ath again, diff 9 this time]

Dice: 8 d10 TN9 (1, 1, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 1 )

anima

The flick of motion in his peripheral vision, somewhere above. Some plateau, some rockledge, which dissolves into a near-perfect stillness that does not even seem to breathe when he tips his head back: pauses in his climb, and look, stares, seeks.

There, again, rising, and now his efforts redouble and he is on the move. Struggling - straining to go faster but there's a rhythm to this that cannot be rushed. Driving in the anchors, moving the rope that keeps him safe, assessing each new hold, practically blind on an unfamiliar rockface, which only sharpens its prominence.

He can follow the lilting movement of whatever it is above him darting quick and light-footed, before it disappears far above.

He could go faster if he dispensed with the protections, and simply climbed.

Or hell, maybe he's confident enough that he can find and track whatever it is again: in his own time.

Ian

He could go faster, yes. Though it was, by all accounts, an unwise thing to do. Scaling an unfamiliar peak alone in the dark was already pushing the bounds of what any sane climber might hope to get away with. And at this height, if he fell... he might very well not survive.

Ian was not suicidal. He had been... once. A long time ago. That moment seemed both close and very far away. One could add up the things that he had survived, and suddenly falling off a mountain no longer seemed like the worst thing that could happen.

Maybe it was frustration, or maybe it was the sense that somehow these things (these man-made things - ropes and anchors and the synthetic shield of his clothing) did not actually belong here. Ian took a breath to steady his heartbeat and ripped the anchor out of the rocks. It took a few moments for him to free himself of the encumbrance of his gear, but once he did, he reached out over the dark expanse of space beneath him and dropped it all into the void.

Then he pulled off his gloves, and his hat, and his coat. Each of these things went down the mountain, discarded. The wind was cold. Finally his boots and socks. He always did move better barefoot.

He was in danger of exposure now, though a Life mage always had ways to combat that. Regardless, he started climbing again. Faster, easier. More like the lithe creature that moved in the shadows.

Ian

[Stamina]

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

Ian

[Wits+Alertness]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 6, 6, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 )

anima

Ian sheds all these things, divests himself of human accoutrements and human gear and gear and human protections: not simply rock anchors and the light and strong synthetic rope he bought, but other, simpler things. Climbing boots, climbing gloves, hat and coat. The warm woolen socks: drops them down below him into darkness.

If he doesn't come back and gather them up before the morning, the strange occasion of finding all these things littering the trail will lead the earliest group or two of hikers to call the park rangers. Maybe there'll be a small missing person's hunt, to make sure there's no one lying in a gully with crushed vertebrae and a broken leg.

No matter.

--

There's laughter. Not precisely audible and really quite far from human: the sense of it begins when he flings down the first anchor. Builds as he strips himself down to certain essentials. Physical: spiritual. Laughter: more inside him than without him, felt more than heard, the tattoo of it against the back of his skull, quite as coy as he is. Not precisely mocking, but hardly gentle. Call it: challenging.

--

He climbs: naked.

This is dangerous, and any other climber would call it damn near suicidal: an unfamiliar cliff face, a cold, often snow-bound path lost in absolute shadow, only the sky shining, illuminated, above. Searching, blind, with fingers and toes for each little perch, always maintaining three points of contact with the face of the rock. Muscles aching, trailing the path of a swift shadow barely visible.

Wait.

Not trailing.

Ian hauls himself up over the edge of the cliff face and finds himself on the edge of a ridge that eddies out into a gentle snowfield rimmed with tall, dark pine trees heavy with snow. He knows that he is well above the treeline and yet: here they are, so dark where they are not drenched in snow and limned with reflective moonlight. The bulk of the mountain on whose shoulder this wood sits is massive, prominent. The wind sharper, colder still. Beyond this one peak: even taller giants rise and rise and rise like black teeth against the luminous sky.

All is quiet. His breath is harsh in his throat and both fingers and toes are lightly abraded. He's freezing. Nothing is moving but he is not really searching out movement. He is thinking quite differently in this precise moment: anticipating rather than following.

No need to follow when you can lead.

Ian

[Life 2 - Resist Cold, coincidental diff 5 -1 (focusing with blood) -1 (practiced and/or taking his time)]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (3, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Ian

Somewhere during the climb, the mountain became larger: his intended destination now only a stop on a much more arduous journey. Ian's hands grasped the edge of the cliff as he pulled his weight over the edge, numb fingers clawing at cold stone. The air was freezing, striking sharp against his exposed skin. Every joint and muscle in his body ached from the climb. Where his feet touched down, blood stained the snow. Breathing deeply of the dry winter air, Ian got to his feet and surveyed the landscape - the tall pines and the looming presence of the mountain as it reached up into the black sky.

A voice uncoiled somewhere in the back of his thoughts: coy, feminine. Laughing. A challenge?

This is why he was here, standing in the snow with naked, bleeding feet. Because he needed to try - needed to find that part of himself that was more than a collection of mundane details. The name on his birth certificate: Ian Tao Lai. The things that he owned: a nice car, a collection of art films on blu ray, a closet full of overpriced clothes with designer labels. The jobs on his resume: dancer, model, bartender. Beyond that, what was he? Life. Hunger. Instinct.

Human? Animal? Was there a difference?

He was also something else - something more than both of those. And that part of him was why he was here. Without evolution, life became stagnation.

Kneeling down, he curled his fingers into the snow and scooped up some of the blood from his torn feet. He closed his eyes and drew a line down the center of his forehead; the line of his nose - down to his lips, where he tasted salt and copper. He focused on his heartbeat - on the blood moving through his veins, keeping him alive, keeping him strong. And he bared his teeth as he pushed with his Will, asserting his existence against the creeping chill of the cold. Speeding up his slowing heart. Warming the core temperature of his body.

He felt it like a surge of primal energy. His breath was a sudden gust of heat in the cold air.

And when it was over, he looked down at the snow-blanketed woods and began to run, heading for the trees, and toward the rising peak of stone behind them.

anima

Hmmm.

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 6 )

Ian

[Dex+Ath]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 6, 6, 6, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 6 )

Ian

[and again!]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 4, 7, 9, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

anima

Hmmm.

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Ian

[Stamina 1]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Ian

[Stamina 2]

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

anima

Ian no longer feels the cold. Smears: the blood-stained snow over his face and mouth and chest, remembers that a heart beats beneath the protective shield of his sternum. Reaches inside, feels it beating, and starts to move.

Runs: flat out over the snowfield, steeper than he understood in the darkness. Hurtles himself toward the treeline, kicking up snow behind him as he goes. The world is bright over him: shining stars, brilliant sky,

and then: dark and dark and dark. Every sound cushioned by the heavy branches of the pines and deadened by the deep drifts of snow. Harder to run here than he imagined at the start: on two legs he has to plow through drifts that are knee deep, even thigh-deep and the work itself is exhausting, but he pushes through. Framed by the harsh rasp of cold (he does not feel it) dry (that he feels) air in the back of his throat, which pulls the whole of the drifting world into a peculiar sort of focus.

Gradually he becomes: aware, you see, that he is not alone.

He is shadowed by another, larger and more graceful, unhindered by the drifts through which he has to force himself. This coy presence, at the edge of his vision again - lashing movement and a certain - goading - challenge inherent in the bend and sweep of its frame in his periphery.

When he finally surges past it (and somehow the wood seems much, much deeper than it appeared, somehow the peaks he was seeking seem quite as far away, now, as they ever did) Ian might be forgiven for feeling a certain - primal - surge of triumph.

Ian

He’d chased the winter from his lungs, but winter was not a thing so easily conquered. It was there in the snow and in the dark. In the press of chill that slid over his skin. As he ran, the drifts grew deeper, clinging to his legs as he pushed his way through them. He wasn’t running out of urgency, or to pull away from the shadowed, graceful creature in his periphery. He was running because he could. Because the pain and the struggle and the coursing of his blood made him feel more alive.

When he noticed that he’d pulled ahead, he stopped. His body went still, poised in the deep snow like some kind of predator, his posture and his gaze steady and alert. How much could he see here? The darkness was thick between the tall, blanketing pines. He turned to regard the creature who’d been shadowing him, eyes drifting over the shadows in search of something that yet moved. Did she stop? Or did she dart past him?

Almost, he spoke again. But that kind of language felt wrong here. So he crouched down in the snow and tilted his head and watched; listened. The scent of pine resin was sharp in the air, mingling with the cold clarity of ice and earthy minerals of the stone mountain. Even here, in this inhospitable place, there was life.

Ian

[Sensing Life: Life 1, diff 4 -1 (practiced - using his heartbeat as a focus)]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (4, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

anima

There: a shadow. Another shadow that sweeps and surges - yes, past him now, while he pants in the darkness.

While he: watches.

While he: listens.

While he reaches out through the strange shadowed density, the close-wrapped stillness of this place to touch the patterns of the world around him, real and unreal, layered bright together.

She does not have precisely that sort of tattoo against his magical senses - and yet he can sense, dimly, faintly, dully, the silvery connection between the two. If she has a beating heart: it is simply another iteration of his own.

Which is larger, stronger in his chest than he has ever before understood before.

--

She is moving again: fast and faster now.

He will need more than his own two legs to keep up with her.

Ian

He remembered a time, once, when he had been something other than human. When his body was not what it was now. The memory of it still felt oddly close to him, though that Awakening had been... years ago. He remembered the way his paws felt ghosting along the ground. The way the brush of wind had seemed like electric current against his face. The way that everything had been sharper, clearer, more alive. He remembered the weight of it, and the ready responsiveness of all that muscle and tendon.

He also remembered the reason why he'd changed - and the reasons why he'd walked away.

This was not that night, and he was not the same person he had been then. When he opened his senses, he sought some deeper connection. A grounding link to the Tapestry around him. Perhaps he was looking inward - for what was this place but a landscape inside his own heart? Was he trying to understand her or himself? Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe there wasn't a difference.

She wanted to run. So did he. He wanted to run and to climb until everything else in his mind disappeared - empty but for the surge of his blood and his breath that screamed I am here. I exist. I am alive.

The rest of his clothes were left discarded in the snow. Whatever he was, whatever he could be, they would only get in the way. And then he ran. The snow was thick and heavy and clung to his legs, but he ran anyway. Pushed through it. Pushed past the aching exhaustion in his limbs. And all the while he could hear his heart in his ears, beating deeper and heavier and louder.

He didn't so much Will the change as accept it - surrender to it. The way he had that night all those years ago.

Ian

[Be a tiger, Ian! diff 8 to start, definitely spending WP - will extend as much as he can]

Dice: 2 d10 TN8 (4, 5) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Ian

[diff 9]

Dice: 2 d10 TN9 (1, 6) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Ian

[down to 3 WP, and again]

Dice: 2 d10 TN9 (5, 9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Ian

[aaand again]

Dice: 2 d10 TN9 (3, 7) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Ian

[last WP!]

Dice: 2 d10 TN9 (3, 7) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

anima

)Ian sheds his clothes and it is not clear how he manages it. This is not the fumbling strangeness of human thumbs and cuffs and collars, the inevitably inelegant dance of getting out of his goddamned underwear. There is far less work, and it takes much less time, than it took him to shed all that gear, back on the physical mountain he was climbing when he came:

here, wherever here is.

Ian sheds his clothes and he does it virtually with a thought.

Steps out of them or perhaps wills them away and then moves again, surges forward, the drumbeat of magic in his body and in his lungs, in his heart and in his blood, a hungry arc bright against the framing darkness.

He runs.

He works.

He Works.

He moves: reaches for something he remembers, now more with his body than his brain, folds himself back into his body and begins to peel what is essential out of himself. No longer on two legs - though somehow not precisely four - he is low and elegant - little more than a shadow surging beneath the overhanging pines. As the elevation rises, the drifts deepen and yet: like her - he glides over them now, rather than floundering through.

Soon enough they leave behind the piney woods. Rising still, snow and ice a skim coat over the shoulder of the mountain that seems both metaphorical and actual: which rises and rises and rises, above them, absolutely wreathed in mist, opaque and dense. There is a kind of triumph radiant in her as they run, as they rise that he can feel but beneath and above that, always the push, the urge, to movement, to rise. She would challenge him all the way to the summit -

- but he has spent himself so thoroughly, exhaustion (of the will, if not the body) begins to assert itself beneath and around the exhilaration of the hunt.

Ian

Triumph, yes. Exilaration - visceral and unguarded. They both felt it. And they ran together now, swift and agile as hunting animals. The wind played patterns in the soft fur that now lined his skin, and when his toes flexed there was the presence of something sharp and hooked. The landscape looked different like this - even the slimmest shards of moonlight were bright and luminous.

He'd given everything he had to find this place - both within and without. And he was tired now, more than he could remember having been in a very long time. The exhaustion went down to his marrow, and deeper still... a spiritual as well as physical exhaustion. But he was happy, too. How could he not be?

I am here to be here. Like these rocks and sky and snow.

Some mountains could not be scaled. Perhaps this one was one of those. Perhaps he'd given everything he had and could go no further. But she would challenge him all the way to the summit, and he was yet standing. Moving. Breathing. And he would climb until he couldn't anymore. Perhaps that would not be much farther. Perhaps it would be farther than he could imagine. (He had already come that far.)

So he grasped the stone wall with his clawed hands and began once more to haul himself upwards, looking upward as he did - toward the mist and the dark, opaque sky.

Ian

[Str+Ath]

Dice: 7 d10 TN8 (1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Ian

[Stamina]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2) ( botch x 1 )

anima

Do di do.

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

anima

Some summits can be had the first time a mountaineer chances a ridge. Others are eternal, somehow: they require long sieges, endless assaults. What he knows - and there is a point where it knows it so clearly and thoroughly that he must understand it in the very marrow of his bones - is that he has come as far as he can now. He has spent himself. And still she is there - peripheral, residual, harrying and leading and rising rising rising. He can go no further.

There is something - (yes) - new in him. Some opening. Some shift, which is paradoxically both smaller and greater than himself. And yet: he digs in his clawed hands, to drag himself still further, leaves behind the windswept ridge on which they had been racing, and follows her into the clouds.

Colder here, sharper, strange. The mist wraps him right 'round until he can see no more than his forepaws in front of him, the face of the rock. And there is more here, stranger things, the murmuring of voices he cannot quite distinguish, which still somehow make his heart - well - seize. By which we mean: stop, only for a moment, but wrenchingly so, before it thunders back to life.

And then: then - something else, disorienting and disconcerting, or perhaps it is the elevation. Everything goes blank: black. Creates itself and comes undone.

Conciousness deserts him.

Ian knows nothing more.

anima

(Ian will awake the next morning still on the trail: he has 4 lethal dmg from a bad fall, WP 0, and Arete 3.)