[I'm doing the thing with the sensing because, y'know. Dice.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )
SerafíneEarly 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 WoolfeThe 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 )
GraceThe 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.
SerafíneThe 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 WoolfeThere'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.
GraceGrace 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 WoolfeSera 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."
SerafíneAck. Not that one!
SerafíneSera 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.
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