Echoes.

Kiara Woolfe

The drive out to where Annie Pierce had shared a dark moment in the Denver Awakened's history with her was a long one.

Long enough, at the very least that when Kiara Woolfe pulled in to collect Sera, a pair of sunglasses perched low on her nose and the passenger side window lowering with a quiet electronic whirring, it was with the offering of coffee and something sugar-dusted and coconut-covered in a takeaway bag.
A few somethings, to be exact. The Verbena was dressed for the summer; her dark hair pulled away from her face, arms bare to the shoulder and her skin kissed by the sun into a healthy gold.

"Hey - " Serafine's greeting, Kiara leaning across with a red-lipped smile to nudge the door open, her wrists gleaming with silver and stone. " - ready?"

-

The early-afternoon traffic slowed them down only as long as it took to weave out of the city limits; the air pleasant enough that Kiara kept her window half cracked; let it billow and play with their hair as she drove; a hand on the wheel; the other resting an elbow on the window. The roads cutting away into greener, rolling pastures; fenced in property and trickling, but steady outcroppings of trees; nature gradually reclaiming as the mountains loomed in the distance; the turn off into the park kicking up whirls of dust and loose stone as the brunette's hatchback bumped along it, pulling into an empty lot near the Visitor Center.

They weren't the only hikers here, summer bringing steady interest back to the red rock formations and the wonder of 4000 acres. Still, there was a lack of it; the static, steady noise of the city, the instant they stepped outside of the car; slamming doors; Kiara bent to extract a backpack from behind her seat; shrugging it over a shoulder.

"Annie and I hiked a little to get there." Her sunglasses reflected back the cloudless sky; the sun glinting off them as she adjusted the pack. "This way."

Serafíne

Daylight. Really, who sees Sera in daylight. And yet, she's sitting on the porch of 719 Corona Street, one of her long legs (not precisely long by objective measures, but something about the way her body is framed conspires to lend to her the illusion of long, long limbs) swinging from the bannister, spine against the brick pilaster, long blond sidecut pulled back into braided ponytail. Dan's standing there beside her, one hand braced on the brick column, looking down as she's looking up. Then Kiara pulls up and up she pops, grabbing a little pack and giving Dan an impulsive hug as she leaves.

--

No heels today, but the (fairly dusty) hiking boots Sera wears are essentially her only concession to the great outdoors. She's still sporting slightly torn fishnets and denim cut-offs short enough that one of the pockets sticks out a bit beneath the straggly hem. An old Pixies t-shirt (white) over a black bra and the usual bristle of spikes and studs through her elfin ears. A handful of rings, most prominently the old bronze piece she always wears on her right forefinger.

The pack she lets coil beneath her knees on the floor of the car. And she: watches, watches, watches the city as it recedes.

--

She seems sober, Sera, as she swings into step behind Kiara, allowing the other woman to both take the lead and set the pace. Though somehow Sera seems more like a meanderer than an actual hiker, she's pretty sure-footed on uneven ground and actually likes the challenge, the push, the way - as the elevation rises - her heart starts beating, faster.

Not much inclined to conversation for the moment, but it's a sober task they are untaking beneath the bright summer sun.

"How deep are we going in the park?"

Kiara Woolfe

She shouldn't remember the way there as well as she does. Or, no, not should but want to. Remember the way the trail started on a subtle incline and the way the trees seemed to close ranks overhead, becoming a canopy of greens and reds and golds; sunlight speckling through and dappling the track as if to offer its own markers to their progress, Kiara leads them to a trail head, it winds down around the side of a hill; wild grass growing long and bending across the trail; tickling bare legs and striving to reclaim the well used pathway.

There's an abundance of plant-life here and in another time, for another purpose, the Verbena might have wanted to pause and point them out, might have taken a greater pleasure in the sight of a red fox, sighting them and darting over the crest of a distant rocky outcropping. She might have wanted to show Sera things; offer her hand and take her into the expanse of it; the trees; the verdant splendor.

Not today, though.

Not with the way Kiara's focus seems so set, the precision to her movement, the deliberate way she pauses and lifts her chin as if re-aligning herself momentarily with the landscape, the progress of the sun overhead. They head due West. Still - there are points, Sera asks how deep and Kiara stops as they start down into a clearing. There's little in it but scrub land; flowers daring life here and there and in the distance; the beginnings of denser forest; towering pines leaning close.

She stops, the brunette and seems to re-register Sera's presence with a stirring, subtle little smile. Lifts her sunglasses and squints against the sudden infiltration of sunlight into her vision. "The trail ends just past those trees and then we're off the grid. A little. It's - " Kiara looks back, across the field; toward the point where the growth seems older, the trees stretching outward and across the span of the horizon.

"This way. I remember the clearing and then - " She glances back, that smile faltering just a touch. "You can feel it, when we get close. It gets so quiet."

Serafíne

For most of the hike, Sera seems to be content to be quiet and to follow Kiara as Kiara follows the trail. There's no real potential scramble on the well-worn and well-groomed state park trail, but once they head off the grid, as it were, the angle of ascent steepens. Kiara removes her sunglasses. Sera leaves her own on, but she comes to a stop beside the other woman, neat little chin tipped upward, mouth closed.

Takes out a water bottle and takes a swig, offers it to Kiara, after.

Then, takes out a flask and takes another swig. Doesn't really seem appropriate this deep in the wilderness, but hey, we all have our rituals.

And Sera is starting hers.

--

Passing contact, a hand on Kiara's hip, the brush of Sera's spare frame both against and past her as Kiara's expression falters. Briefly, the pressure of her closed mouth on Kiara's shoulder. Yes, that close - then past, though now Sera's gait is even less focused than it was on when they started. She's inhaling now, see, with a deliberation that feels like ritual, but is not.

Another slug from the flask. She is eating so little that the first gives her a moment of discordance that would be lovely were it not for their purpose here. No matter.

She strays ahead now, though so slowly that Kiara can easily take over the lead. The first supple fibers of her magick threading through the air around them.

Serafíne

Time 2 / Correspondence 2. Starting the divination. Difficulty: 5. -2 (merit). Sharing successes between Time (go to back far enough) and correspondence (to open the range) so going for max.

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (4, 6, 10) ( success x 3 )

Kiara Woolfe

Close contact, Serafine's lips on her shoulder; Kiara's fingers find the point of an elbow just for a moment and she holds her; it; the contact; close just for that second. There's a way that she remembers things, Kiara and so much of it she can trace by the memory of touch. The way a body felt close to hers; warm breath against her skin. Lives and thrives inside it, in her own way. The physicality of things - her body, her limits. Those people around her.

Sera moves ahead now, starting to Work and the Verbena stirs to look at her; feels the way the air reacts to it; the way it feels as if it contracts and pulls against it before conceding. Takes a deeper breath in, the brunette and holds it for a moment. They move toward the treeline and into it; the tick of insects in the grass falling behind them; birdsong calling from the treetops and somewhere unseen the sudden kick and scatter of earth as an animal starts away from them.

The gallop of deer, perhaps. A sharp cry as a bird takes flight and shakes the branches overhead.

There's no direct path, here. The terrain becoming uneven and dense; fallen logs and dried leaves; undergrowth crunching beneath their feet as they pick their way through close growth. The trees larger and darker; some with roots that rise and plunge across the ground; gnarled and ancient. The pungent aroma of the earth and pine lingering; breathed in deep as they plot their course. Kiara stops, every so often; points out a snag point underfoot; holds a hand out to help the other woman scramble across a fallen log.

A tiny, trickling silver of fresh water. They pass deeper, deeper and at a point - the silence prevails.

The sounds of the forest begin to ebb as the Verbena predicted and Kiara's progress slows, the density starting to thin; green undergrowth drying; leaves turning into old; hollowed out debris that crumpled and turned to dust beneath their feet. The color seeming to drain from the forest around them as the first dead trunks begin to appear; once, twice.

Then more; distorted and long dead, as if a fire had torn through at some point and left the earth scorched. There's the thick, sickening heaviness to the air Kiara remembers from the last time as they perceive the clearing through the thinning trees eventually. Kiara stops and turns to look at Sera. There's a vaguely stricken quality to her face, the pinch of her mouth down. The lack of color in her cheeks as if the lack of life around them had drained it from the pagan, too.

"It's right here," she offers quietly.

-

Dead, flattened land. Maybe a Grove, once. Certainly a point where nature had once ruled and now - nothing but old, dry earth and tree stumps. The largest in the very center most point; massive; black and twisted as if it had died struggling; roots upheaved from the earth.

The Node Kiara had spoken of, perhaps.

Serafíne

Continuing, difficulty +1 for extending and -1 for focus.

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (3, 5, 9) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne

And continuing. (Want 10 successes.)

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne

And continuing.

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 8, 8) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

Hard to hike and look back. Harder to hike and Look Back and Back and Back, will bent on swimming against the forward-push of conventional thought and will through the eddies and currents, the strange little whorlpools, the once-was and the left-behind. She needs that hand now, Sera. Barks her stupid shins on something else, stumbling now in Kiara's wake, looking: back and back and back and back.

It is almost wholly internal. The strongest, strangest sense of her resonance now is that between-definitions piece, the one that feels like doorways and thresholds, paths and passageways. Like possibility.

And she doesn't really see the glade, much, or sense the wrongness or even - for the moment - see the sigils of stress and sorrow in Kiara's eyes.

In the middle of the deadened clearing, Sera stops. Quiet now, her breathing steady and even, her spare frame still.

She is like this for a long, long time.

--

Coming back is like surfacing from a dive. Sometimes the absence of pressure makes her feel like she's flying, though on some level she always feels like she's flying, these days. At least: her right hand. That ring she does not seem to remove.

But no, listen: she comes to and she shakes her head, clearing away the sensations fogging her perception and stretching back into this time and this place and this body. "Whoever did this didn't want to be observed. They cut whatever happened right out of the timeline. A neat, survial snip.

"Are you sure it was the technocrats?"

They do have other, darker, enemies, after all.

Kiara Woolfe

Sera comes back in waves, shakes herself loose of the dredges of back then and time ago and it's to find Kiara with her hand pressed to that enormous, blackened wreck of a stump. Her shoulders draw back, hunched in with tension as she slides that palm down the length of what remained.

There's blood on it, somewhere (inside it, too, for those who had perished striving to protect it).

"According to Annie." The Verbena looks back, scopes out the sight of the other woman, turns away and then around; letting her hand fall away from the remains of that wild heart of the Grove; nothing more now than static; a graveyard that even the dead didn't keep on the other side. "They came with machines. And soldiers. They fought over the Node and killed everything in their path to get to it but when it came down to it - " She moves closer to Sera, studies her face and then tilts her eyes to the blighted ground.

Crouches as she had, then. Digs her palm into the earth and raises herself; weighing it; tipping it so it skirts down; carried by the wind as nothing more than specks of rock and dust. "They couldn't take it. It wouldn't bend to them so they killed it, instead. I tried to look across here. To see it from the other side and there's nothing there, either.

There's no trace of anything. The spiritual reflection of this place. Of nature, here." Kiara's expression offers a tiny spasm of grief; knits there; hardens and re-shapes her into something wild and full of unvoiced rage. "It's all gone. If it wasn't them - whatever it was - I hope it died trying."

Serafíne

Sera's expression is spare in this moment. Perhaps there is a quiet, answering shadow, some echo of Kiara's evident grief, but no responsive anger, nothing to match the unvoiced rage that sparks and burns in her dark eyes.

The creature looks away, dark eyes ticking thoughtfully on the dry wood surrounding them, then rising, up and up again, to the sky. Perhaps she is gauging the hour by the passing of the sun. Maybe she just wants some temporary relief from earthly things.

"Sit." Quiet, but with this odd little not of requirement. She's swung her backpack around her body and is digging out the flask again, pulling it out to offer to Kiara. "I'm going to tell you what it was like, before. Because time's a fucking illusion, the same as everything else. Everything that ever was, is now.

"I want you to see it with me."

--

Shares her flask, Sera, and as many stories as she has gathered. Faces known and faces lost, the strangers who gathered here, who - she will say, without qualification - gather here now. The threads of stories of strangers, all, until the day wraps itself around to dusk, and shadows gather in the woods all around them, and they rise then, to hike out, and drive home.

No good reason why not.

Sam

Two weeks ago Samir was following Serafíne down a wooded path to the top of a hill after running into her at a corner store. The trip was precarious and she was stoned and he was not. They sat at the top of the hill and they watched the fireworks and Samir did not think himself brave even though by anyone else's definition of the word he was. He sat close to the Cultist and if she tried to touch him he let her.

Brave but not bold. Their interlude ended with them going their separate ways.

They're on a date right now. Or 'meeting up for coffee.' A coffee date. The place is called Rooster & Moon. Samir is wearing an untucked button-down shirt instead of a leather jacket overtop a t-shirt. His hair is tied back as it usually is. For a Sunday night the place is pretty busy.

Underneath the table Samir is joggling his right foot. He ordered a pot of green tea. He's already had one cup by the time they reach this point in the conversation. He's trying to be like present and shit.

"So..." Brilliant. "I'm just curious: how long've you lived here?"

Serafíne

It's night time, or well - evening, sun still in the sky but falling now, bright in the west, long shadows falling everywhere else. Not quite dusk yet - that's still a couple of hours away. Summer's like that, nearly endless days, but there's no need for sunglasses inside, except Sera's wearing them. Of course.

Shouldn't surprise Samir.

He's a drug dealer, after all.

What might be surprising is that the girl across from him - who looks like an aficionado of the heavily caffeinated, heavily syruped, heavily frothed coffee-as-dessert drinks also ordered tea. Not green but: black.

Darjeeling, in point of fact.

Absent whiskey, she takes it with a spot of milk, not cream, and drinks it from a proper cup-and-saucer when and whereever possible.

Rooster and Moon has proper cup-and-saucers, so. That's nice.

Looks a bit absurd, the girl in the little pink dress (bumble! bees!) and thigh-high suspendered fishnets torn to all fuck and sunglasses and piercings, hands dark and darting with ink, drinking tea from a proper cup-and-saucer, but there you go.

"Fuck if I know," Sera allows her attention to drift: outside, their reflections skimmed over the strangers on the sidewalk gives her a certain kind of sober pleasure. She's looking for something, too - but aren't we all? "Couple years, maybe a bit more than that. Kinda made it home. One of my bandmates has family around here, and had this house she inherited when her aunt passed. So the rest of us kinda - tagged along.

"Feels like I found my place, even when are pieces that are missing, you know?

"What about you? I don't think you ever told me what brought you to Denver?"

Serafíne

It's night time, or well - evening, sun still in the sky but falling now, bright in the west, long shadows falling everywhere else. Not quite dusk yet - that's still a couple of hours away. Summer's like that, nearly endless days, but there's no need for sunglasses inside, except Sera's wearing them. Of course.

Shouldn't surprise Samir.

He's a drug dealer, after all.

What might be surprising is that the girl across from him - who looks like an aficionado of the heavily caffeinated, heavily syruped, heavily frothed coffee-as-dessert drinks also ordered tea. Not green but: black.

Darjeeling, in point of fact.

Absent whiskey, she takes it with a spot of milk, not cream, and drinks it from a proper cup-and-saucer when and whereever possible.

Rooster and Moon has proper cup-and-saucers, so. That's nice.

Looks a bit absurd, the girl in the little pink dress (bumble! bees!) and thigh-high suspendered fishnets torn to all fuck and sunglasses and piercings, hands dark and darting with ink, drinking tea from a proper cup-and-saucer, but there you go.

"Fuck if I know," Sera allows her attention to drift: outside, their reflections skimmed over the strangers on the sidewalk gives her a certain kind of sober pleasure. She's looking for something, too - but aren't we all? "Couple years, maybe a bit more than that. Kinda made it home. One of my bandmates has family around here, and had this house she inherited when her aunt passed. So the rest of us kinda - tagged along.

"Feels like I found my place, even when are pieces that are missing, you know?

"What about you? I don't think you ever told me what brought you to Denver?"

Sam

"A plane."

He isn't trying to be cute or charming or funny. If anything he looks nervous but then he always looks a bit nervous. His hands smell like isopropyl alcohol gel and he keeps his nails trimmed so close to the quick it's a wonder he doesn't nick them more often.

It's worth mentioning that though Sera has caught him selling drugs before she has not yet caught Samir under the influence of anything. Even the night they drank Hendrick's and tonics he didn't get drunk.

"I just... I don't know, I got used to moving around a lot, growing up, and I had a falling out, sort of, with my..." He clears his throat. His eyes dart around the room. Paranoia in a person too young to remember the Ascension War is somehow more potent. It's also worth mentioning that he chose the seat that puts his back to the wall and not a door. "With my people back in Los Angeles, so I just sort of... randomly picked a place. I like it so far, it's just... different. A lot different."

Serafíne

A plane he says, not trying to be cute, but there's this moment where she glances at him, her neat little mouth already carving a smirk across her face, her brows lifted because swear to god, Sera hates those obvious fucking jokes when they are tossed back to her full of self-satiated whimsy. Loves them a little, too: awkward and obvious and human.

So, for a moment her great-big-reflective-but-not-mirrored sunglasses are trained on Samir, hovering so neatly they seem to splice the moment in two. Then like a check, like a tick before a tock, the half-smirk breaks into something altogether else.

Gentler, perhaps even bemused.

"What sort of falling out? Physical or philosophical?"

She takes a sip of tea.

Sam

"Heh..."

He looks down at his cup and twirls it around on the saucer a few times. Though he gave it a cursory inspection earlier his eyes are on the rim of the ceramic like he might have missed something anyway. Like it's easier to look at an inanimate object than her sunglasses.

Not that she hasn't got eyes beneath the sunglasses. Samir may be awkward but he doesn't lack empathy. Easier to look at a cup than her sunglasses because looking at her sunglasses is too confessional for him.

"It, ah... started out philosophical. A bit. Then it turned physical. That's... it's kind of a long story, and it's boring, and..." He chews on his lip one two three times before forcing himself to find Sera's gaze beneath the plastic lenses. A self-depreciating huff of a laugh. "It's probably better for me to be by myself, for a while, anyway. You know? You spend your whole... awakened life around the same people, it's hard to tell if you're actually forming your own beliefs or just... going along with what everyone else is doing... and... I... am talking a lot. What..." He clears his throat again. "What makes you feel like that? That you found your place?"

Serafíne

"Mmmph." This sound she makes, not precisely of agreement so much as consideration. Brightlined beneath it, something else, inward, focused. Tender in the strangest of ways. "Finding your own way. That's something I can fucking get behind."

Her mouth curves again, quick and slicing.

"Not that I have much in common with your people. Bet you I wouldn't begin to understand what the whole falling-out was about anyway."

Then, "Fuck if I know. It just feels like that. You wanna hear this thing Rick told me once?"

Sam

His eyes tick off to the side like he's parsing his memory for a definition of Rick. Either he finds one or he decides it's not worth it to stop and ask. Rick is one of her bandmates. Samir hasn't met him yet.

Then he looks back at her.

"Lay it on me."

Serafíne

"So like there was this study, right? That these folks did at Duke, where they'd bring a bunch of college students in to a room and give them a choice between two posters and the students got to take home the poster that they picked.

"One of the posters was one of those dumb-ass pictures of a kitten hanging from a door or something that said HANG IN THERE right? And the other was some kinda fine art. Monet or Klimt or whatever. The first group of kids they studied had to pick their favorite of the two, but were also told that they were going to have to explain why they liked it. The second group were told that they just had to pick their favorite poster. No one made them explain why they liked it, right?"

Breath.

"And the first group, the ones who had to explain, way more of them picked the stupid kitten poster because that was easier to explain. Hey! Hang in there! I wanna hang in there! And they liked the poster at first, but six months later when they were asked whether they still liked it most of them didn't, not as much, not really.

"The second group, though, the ones who didn't have to explain why they liked the poster they picked, more of them picked the Monet or the Klimt or what have you. And six months later, they were still happy with their choice.

"Which kinda means, that people have more complex tastes than they necessarily or understand and can explain, right? More sophisticated tastes, really. The capacity for - fuck if I know - a higher life than they really know. And that explaining things is fucking hard. And I probably could still tell you why it feels like home, and also why it doesn't, but it'd be easier to show you.

"I'm having a party next week. Why don't you come?"

Sam

And he was following along with her for most of the explanation. Hard to tell if Samir is a smart guy or if he's just sort of stumbling along through life hoping for the best. A lot of their lot tend to be smart because of Darwinian biophysics but a lot of them have the capacity to be just as willful in their ignorance as the typical Sleeper. Samir doesn't talk very much and when he does he sounds uncomfortable. He eases into socialization the more they talk but it has to feel like someone's hit a restart button every time Sera runs into him.

Zones of comfort. Every time she meets him out in public he's already outside of his. No time for mental preparation. That's something he's working on.

He nods his head when Sera explains what Rick's story about the Duke study means. Consciousness and self-awareness and so on and so forth. She wants to show him.

When delayed panic hits him like the spray from a violent surf Sera sees it in his eyes. They are the colour of whiskey in this light. Warm and sharp and yet antiseptic. His heart rate just took off. A party. Fuck.

"I..." Internal stammering. He stammers a bit aloud too. Then he pulls his shit together: "... don't... have a good reason why not. What day are you having it?"

Serafíne

Per + Empathy because...

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 6, 6, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 7 ) [Doubling Tens]

Serafíne

She is - aware.

Without thought, without design, and sometimes virtually without flaw, she is aware, and she is aware of him now. The awkward beat followed by a roil of panic, the stammering - internal, external. The beating of his heart. She takes all of that - and more - in with a glance that is little different, perhaps only a beat more measured, than any of her other glances. The dark frame of her sunglasses above the smooth curve of her cheekbone. The line of her profile made lambent by the window beside which she sits. The lilt of her chin, the twist of her mouth, all of this hanging for a moment, or two, or three.

Then lifting, rising as easily as paper-caught-to-flame, away.

Gently, really, "How does Friday sound?"

Sam

Something about her tone tells him she isn't blind to his discomfort. Something about their slowly-growing cache of past experiences too. She's aware of him in a way that makes him uncomfortable but Samir is a private person and he's making himself uncomfortable on purpose. DIY cognitive-behavioural therapy. He knows isolation isn't good for him. It isn't good for any of them. That way lies madness.

"Friday... sounds..." Might as well be honest. He smiles and it does reach his eyes but underneath the light of it there's anxiety. Nervous laughter clotted in his throat. "... fucking terrifying. I'll be there."

The response would beg the question as to well don't you want to know where you're going. He's a Virtual Adept. He doesn't need physical addresses to find people.

Serafíne

"Cool," she returns, lightly, already rising. Hem of her little-pink dress short enough that it barely covers her ass, and certainly shows off the complex little display of garters and stockings. She has a clutch on the table and reaches to pick it up, even as she is shifting around the table to brush by Samir.

Aware of his personal space and his need for it, but she cannot always help herself. Drops her free hand to the crown of his head, and then her mouth.

"We can get high or make out or something. Door's always open. See you then."

And lo, she saunters out the door.

Sam

Folks who get themselves addicted to substances whose absence could kill them can think they need alcohol or heroin the same way Samir can think he needs personal space. It's fear that's knit itself so snug into his pattern that he doesn't know how to think if he doesn't think of the world in terms of his fear.

Sera is aware. Maybe she doesn't have enough evidence to really draw a clear picture of what plagues the young man. Whatever it is it isn't permanent. It could be if he weren't fighting it. She can paint that stroke of him at least: whatever it is he is fighting it.

So his muscles go taut with the touch to the top of his head but he does not jolt away from it. He likes her. Sera is aware of that too.

"Alright," he says. Real smooth, Lakhani. "See ya."

He watches her walk away and then he slumps down in his chair. Sets his teeth into his knuckle like to test and make sure he's still got sensation in his extremities and then picks up his tea cup like it was somehow responsible for this.

Alright. Friday. He can pull his shit together by Friday.

And if that fails: benzos.

It'll ruin my fucking day.

Serafíne

Whiskey River doesn't actually serve much whiskey and there's not a single fucking river in the whole of the sweet little bar tucked away on a sidestreet in East Colfax. The bartender/owner is (naturally) a guy with a pretty impressive beard and round coke-bottle glasses and a thing for hard ciders. Not commercial ciders - too sweet, too girly - but old fashioned ciders where all the sugars have been fermented out so that the alcohol is rather closer to champagne than apple juice, or Red's Apple Ale (heresy: that shit will never be served here.)

It's early. Whiskey River doesn't have a kitchen, doesn't serve food. It's just a bar, not some fucking gastropub. Oh there's always a foodtruck nearby, at least when there's a Thing and often when there's not a Thing but in a city of any size there's almost always some sort of Thing close by. The point though: there's no kitchen, no dinner rush, a few regulars for happy hour maybe but it's not the sort of place that middle managers seek out after their nine to five so at this hour Whiskey River is uncrowded and uncluttered. A little extra business downstairs sure thanks to the pot dispensary upstairs and you can sit out on the back deck beneath the arbor overhung with vines and smoke a discrete bowl and watch some friends unload gear from a white conversion van.

Inside there's this girl seated at the bar. Feels like a rock star and she's wearing sunglasses inside in daylight and has half-her-head shaved so, hey. Maybe. Elfin ears bristle with metal, as do her heavy black combat boots. The bartender has laid out one of those long hand-hewn wooden troughs full of little tasting glasses and one of the guys setting up the stage takes a break to come to her and wrap his arms around her shoulders and drop his mouth to the crown of her dyed blond head. Murmurs something that makes her lift her head up, all sudden and ghosting smiles.

(What he says, which you can't hear, is: I thought you weren't drinking tonight. What he thinks, which you also can't hear, is: If you're going to drink, I wish you'd eat something.

What she says, laughing, back is: I changed my mind.

Girl's got a right.)

Ian

Sometimes people ended up in bars by happenstance - because they were nearby and wanted a drink and hey, look... there's a sign. Ian had never been inside of Whiskey River before and had no real idea of the kind of drinks they served there, but his car was waiting for an oil change and he had time to kill, so he jogged across the street and slipped in through the front door.

The place was relatively empty, apart from the bartender and a scattered handful of regulars. It made Sera's presence at the bar all the more eye-catching, with her bottle-blond hair and her pierced ears and her sunglasses and that unmistakably potent resonance. It didn't take long for Ian to find his way over to her, dropping down onto the seat next to her own. The sleeveless shirt he had on (it was an old black band shirt with a picture of Iggy Pop on the front) showed off the warm tan of his arms when he leaned over and rested his weight on his elbows.

"Any recommendations?" He nodded toward the bottles lined up on the wall and the taps down at the end of the bar.

Serafíne

"Not yet."

Sera, with the flash of a smile - white teeth in a painted mouth, quick and sure - and Ian's own reflection doubled back at him in the surface of her sunglasses. Her posture is a mirror of his - elbows against the bar, her forearms hovering, her hands fine, deliberate, inked - above the tasting glasses. There are stem glasses and brandy-like snifters and beer glasses, all miniaturizednd lined up in front of her. That posture of hers half resembles a master playing chess, half a monk at prayer.

"I'm tasting." So she says, so she smiles, nudging her wooden tray in Ian's direction. "Ciders. You can start on that side and meet me in the middle if you want. I've got a card here somewhere to say what the fuck everything is."

Then her eyes drop from Ian's face to his chest. Back again.

"Tell me that t-shirt belonged to your fucking ex-boyfriend and he left it behind when you kicked his ass out."

Ian

"I don't do boyfriends. If I did, I wouldn't fucking steal their clothes." He glanced down at the shirt for a moment, contemplative. The fabric was thin and faded. A couple of holes showed in the hem at his hip. It fit the over-all look he had going, with his fashionably distressed jeans and black harness boots. Maybe that was intentional, or maybe it was just laundry day. "I got this at a thrift store in New York."

He eyed the drinks on Sera's tray. When the bartender started to approach, Ian gave a little wave of his hand to indicate that he was fine. If she wanted to share, he wasn't going to complain. So he picked up the glass on the end closest to him, swirling the contents slowly. The cider had an opaque golden glow where the light hit. When he took a drink, he let the flavors sit for a moment on his tongue.

"Hmm. Less sweet than I thought it would be." Judging by his tone, that wasn't a complaint.

"You look like a vampire," he teased, reaching over to wiggle the edge of Sera's sunglasses.

Serafíne

PERCEPTION PLUS EMPATHY MAGIC POWERZ? (focused on don't do boyfriends because why the hell not.)

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 2, 2, 5, 8, 9) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]

Ian

It was a matter-of-fact remark. And from what Sera could tell, an honest one (at least from Ian's perspective.) Whatever the status of his particular relationships, he seemed to have a knee-jerk resistance to the word: boyfriend. (Which, knowing him, probably applied equally to girlfriend. Though he had once admitted to having one of those.) Both the title and the implications.

He didn't have any particularly strong emotions about it though. At least, not at that moment. What little was there to read was mostly along the lines of: yeah, no thanks.

Serafíne

"I love thrift stores," Sera tosses back. "Buffalo Exchange is the fucking best. Though I never exactly pictured you inside one. Don't tell me I've judged you all wrong either, Ian. It'll ruin my fucking day."

The last with a slicing grin that is both half-a-challenge and suggests, well, that her day will be anything but ruined no matter what he says.

Sera doesn't really examine the cider. Doesn't lift it to the light to examine the tone, the clarity, the texture. She takes one of the glasses at the far end of the tray, lifts it, drinks. And savors, yeah. Makes a contemplative noise when Ian says that the drink is less sweet than he assumed; more complex. The effervescence and the noise and the base and top notes merging on the palette.

"I'm too fucking tan to be a vampire," she tosses back, lifting her brows as he wiggles her glasses, leaning into it, inviting physical contact in a manner than is heedless, thoughtless, reckless. "And I don't have the teeth.

"You wanna see my new tattoo?"

Ian

Don't tell me I've judged you all wrong.

Ian laughed at that. "I like what I like. But if it makes you feel better, these jeans cost about three hundred dollars."

Likely Sera had a whole closet full of shoes that cost more than that, but it was still a fairly large sum to pay for jeans on a dancer's income. That much, Sera had never been wrong about. Ian's priorities leaned rather heavily toward vanity.

Sera thought she was too fucking tan to be a vampire. It wasn't that long ago that vampires had been in their thoughts in a very real and visceral way, and yet... here the two of them were, joking about it like they were nothing more than myths of folklore and Hollywood horror. How odd their lives were, sometimes. Ian responded to Sera's claim with a broad grin, showing off the white gleam of his own teeth. His canines had always been just a tiny bit too sharp. Perhaps it was him who was secretly harboring vampiric tendencies.

You wanna see my new tattoo?

"Sure."

Ian tipped back his head and finished off his cider. When he set the empty glass down, he leaned closer to Sera, eyeing her with a curious slant to his gaze.

Serafíne

Sera is - in fact - carrying tonight a skull-studded clutch made by Alexander McQueen that costs upwards of two thousand dollars but no matter. Ian likes what he likes. Sera likes what she likes and on some level maintains this absolute bloody pretense that she is not utterly loaded. Twines bicycle chains with her strains of golden south seas pearls, wears tin bubble-gum rings on the hand opposite that deceptively ancient bronze piece she always seems to wear on her right index finger.

And on, and on, and on.

--

But hmmm. Here they are. She says something about her tan (and it is summer, and she is - brilliantly, beautifully golden) and teeth and Ian flashes his, without remark and she, lovely thing, is looking at him. Looking at him, in profile, inhaling over the rim of the next sample she is about to down a certain tick of recognition evident in her countenance that surfaces and turns over and subsides in the time it takes her to swallow the next one down. Golden, dry - winesaps, so says the cheat-sheet on the bar in front of her.

And they're talking about her new tattoo, and it isn't that new really, just new compared to the others and as she sets down her glass she offers Ian her left forearm. Turns it over.

So much ink on her arms, hands, wrists, fingers. On the palm of her left hand her absurd tattoo of a pair of scissors, the blades on either finger, the handle either turning into or being consumed by a shark whose body continues down her palm and onto her wrist. Other bits here and there: compressed letters and words, miniscule images, familiar enough from the flash of her hands. She has a larger piece on her right forearm (a crow's skull) and another large piece on her upper left arm (a grinning, skeletal torso) - but the new tattoo she points out to him (likely with yet another tattoo-framed finger) tumbles down the inside of her left forearm, three small letters following sinuous twists of one of the darker veins branching beneath her skin like objects tumbling down a waterfall.

Three little letters, all akimbo

y

e

s

--

"I think you should try having a boyfriend someday," Sera tells him, then. Why the fuck not? She has opinions about everything, it seems.

Ian

[Life 2, coincidental diff 5 +1 (just had a drink) -1 (practiced)]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 6) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Ian

Sera looked at him, and in the light of the bar his features had a sharp cast. The slope of his eyes, his nose, his lips; the angles of his cheeks and jaw... there was primal elegance in his profile. The kind of beauty that felt at least partly unapproachable - like glossy magazine prints and skyscraper billboards. Sera was that kind of beautiful too. The kind that could hurt, sometimes.

But Ian didn't have any tattoos.

Sera turned her arm over, and her skin said: yes. Ian smiled, just a little, and touched the palm of her hand, guiding a slow, winding path down her wrist to her forearm, where those three letters greeted him. He traced over each one with the tip of his finger, and where he touched the nerves in her skin prickled with warmth and something like the gentlest electric current. As though in acknowledgment of the invocation inked into her flesh.

"I'll take that under advisement."

Serafíne

Awareness. 'Cos!

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 9) ( success x 4 ) [Doubling Tens]

Serafíne

So, Prime 1: Watch the Weaving. Dif 4 -1 (practiced).

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (5, 6, 10) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne

She said the tattoo was new, but it has been long enough that her skin has healed, the ink sealed deep in the layers of her skin. Nothing raw, or raised, or scabbed over about it, really. Months old and yet: new.

--

He touches her. She, lovely thing, goes still in a way the feels expectant, active, animal, coruscant. Head tucked as if she wear listening for a secret. Somewhere between pointing out the new tattoo and Ian reaching for her hand and wrist, she has picked up the next of her drinks with her free hand. Her fingers steepled over the mouth of the glass are still now too.

She has the oddest little smile on her face, no more than a twist of her darting mouth, a certain curve lifting her cheek and she does glance at him, then, when she senses his magic, when she both feels the warmth, the current, and also inhales the texture of as it hangs in the air - around him, between him. Breathes it in and breathes it out,

and looks,

and sees,

mesmeric. Mesmerized, right?

She exhales, a little bit of force from the diaphragm with the shape of a laugh that has gone unvoiced. Her dark eyes bank from his hand to his profile as he assures her that he will take that under advisement. The tone makes her laugh again, and laughter becomes her.

She says, "Will you?" because she wants to needle him, and, a moment later, quieter, "Don't stop," because she doesn't want him to stop. Not right now. Not precisely yet.

The magic, she means. Doesn't she?

And, yeah, the rest of it.

Ian

[One more roll for good measure]

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

Ian

Will you?

"No." His smile broadened when he spoke, the answer a little needle of its own. He was a stubborn creature. But needling words aside, he didn't seem terribly interested in resistance just then.

Don't stop.

Ian's lips parted. His breath exhaled full and slow. Sera's skin was warm and alive beneath his touch, her body language inviting him in as much as her words. That slow, tracing contact from his index finger spread into a series of points as his hand settled onto her arm and slid up the length of it - to her shoulder and then her neck. Wherever his fingers touched, her skin came alive underneath them. When he reached her throat, he slid the pad of his thumb over an artery, feeling the faint beat of her pulse. With his other hand, he reached over and pulled her sunglasses from her face, setting them down on the bar. When he could see her eyes, he looked at her, tilting his head slightly as though in curiosity. His gaze flickered from her irises to her lips.

When he kissed her, it was open-mouthed. Slow and almost infuriatingly gentle, but when his tongue touched hers, it sent a spark of sensation radiating down through her body.

Serafíne

This is what denial does both to her and for her, you see. Wears her, or perhaps she wears it, until her want is as close to the surface as her pleasures ordinarily would be. This is what she seeks, cultivates, hones in these days and nights when she denies herself. No hairshirt purification this vaguely ritualistic fasting of hers, (when she is starving, when she is wanting, when she is hungry, when she is sober The Next Step seems so achingly close that she can hardly begin to understand how or why she doesn't end each fraught, hungry night making out with her goddamned avatar), but something else entirely. Quite as deliberate, and also - somehow - (entirely) wanton.

She is just so - hungry.

-

Another breath, the edge of laughter on its cusp but still withheld as his hand continues up her forearm, and over her spare biceps to her shoulder, to her temple. The glasses she allows, and he finds her on the otherside, the smear of eyeshadow and mascara, her pupils a bit dilated from both the darkness and perhaps some small bit of something she has ingested contricting like a predator's as he pries away the glasses. But she's no predator, not really, she's something else entirely and she is curving her neck in his directly, lifting her chin, inviting his gaze, his touch, his mouth with this lambent stillness that haloes her.

And maybe he starts that kiss slow and infuriatingly gentle - seeking her, provoking her - but fuck it. There is this moment between where she is hanging there, tenterhooked, that sensation sparking warm against her tongue and spreading.

And then she makes this noise.

God that noise.

And she's on her feet and she's kissing him back kissing him back and she wants wants wants and nevermind that it is 5 p.m. or maybe 6 and Ian is maybe getting his oil changed and running and errand and her bandmates are setting up the stage for a quick little runthrough of a gig where they're gonna work (really work) on those songs they're gonna put on the EP and she's (mostly) fasting because It Is Time for Things to Happen and this is Ian and she wants to tell him to go get a boyfriend already, try a relationship, it's not that hard, because she likes to tweak him and she knows he can take it and anyway she has Opinions and none of that matters.

She's reaching for him.

Her hands are in his hair and she's stepping into him and he's kissing her and she's kissing him back harder, breathing the air from his lungs and if there were a wall behind him she'd probably have him pressed against it in two seconds flat, that's the kind of kiss this is.

Serafíne

Time 3 / Mind 2 / Life 2 (Coincidental. Dif: 6. -1 focus. -1 resonance.) I think she'll need at least 4 successes for minimal effect.

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 8, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Serafíne

Extending. :D Dif +1

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

Ian

There were things about Ian that Sera didn't know. Facets of his life and his emotions that only made a complete picture when viewed as a whole. She didn't know that he'd once had something like a boyfriend. But he wasn't thinking about that right now, because Sera was kissing him like she was ravenous and there wasn't room for anything else in his head or his body apart from that overwhelming sensation. It caught him a little off-guard at first, and when she stood up - when she pushed into him - he answered her sound with a quiet one of his own. This low note in his throat - pleased and surprised and slightly tinged with his own hunger.

It was a feeling he knew well. The drive of it. The aggression. The way it coiled up from his stomach into his his teeth and his fingers. The pool of it low in his hips. They were in public. It was barely dinner time and the bar was only sparsely populated, which made their little demonstration all the more obvious to anyone watching. Perhaps the bartender shot them a surprised look and wondered if maybe he ought to say something (suggest they find somewhere else to do whatever it was they were in the midst of doing.) Perhaps one of the customers watched them and secretly hoped that maybe they would stay right where they were. If so, Ian didn't notice, because Sera had his attention captured completely.

They were both standing now, and Ian slid his fingers into Sera's hair, grasping at it on the longer side while his other hand scratched through the soft buzz of the shorn half. Sera kissed him hard enough that their teeth clicked together, and Ian's lips spread in response - almost a baring of fangs (if he had them.) He bit down on her lip hard enough to leave it reddened.

And then time just... stretched. Like an infinite pool of hunger and breath and touch and that kiss, when he melted into her again, seemed to go on forever. And dimly he realized that might be Sera's doing (the same way those warm little sparks of sensation where his) but if so he wasn't about to complain.

Except that, really, pulling off someone's clothes in an open bar was a bit too exhibitionist even for him. Sera wanted to push him somewhere, but there was only empty air behind them. And now the bartender was looking at them. And probably so was everybody else.

"Mm, we should go somewhere," Ian murmured against her lips.

Sera

Mmm, we should go somewhere.

He has to break the kiss in order to murmur that, even if it is murmured against her lips. And, really, she has to breathe sometime, doesn't she? And she: loves to breathe, relishes this too, this coming up for air, the crest of the wave of want and fulfillment when she is breathless enough that her chest is still aching and the first molecules of oxygen are hitting her lungs.

His first answer is laughter. She has pulled away now enough to breathe and her brow rests against apex of his cheek, the bridge of her nose against his jawline, her mouth below, seeking his neck, but gentler now. The first wave of push him against the wall is past and she is dimly aware that she succeeded only in upending a few barstools or something. And that informs the laughter. Shapes it in her body and in her breath.

Her hands have found his body, of course - and her arms are loose around his waist now. Maybe others are watching. Maybe Dan, setting up for the little happy hour set they were going to play to work through some early ideas for the EP Sera has promised she will buckle down to produce: soon, soon, soon.

"Maybe there's a back room," she mutters back, mouth open, seeking him with her teeth now. Because see, " - we're supposed to play soon. Or you could stay and watch. Take me home, after."

Ian

There was a long delay in his response. Sera's mouth found his neck and with her arms wrapped around his waist she'd be able to feel the way his muscles moved - the shift and flex of them beneath his skin. His stomach tightened when he exhaled. The sound of his breath hitched slightly when he felt teeth on his throat. Had the two of them not been in a public space, this whole affair likely would have unfolded differently.

Ian traced his thumb over the shorn part of Sera's hair, losing himself for a moment in the way it felt under his touch. It would have been easy to stay there with her: to fall into the sensory experience of just exploring the way her body felt against his lips and his hands. It would have been easy to pull her (or let her pull him) into some back room and forget that both of them had other obligations. It would have been so fucking easy. Like falling. But the rush of Sera's impulsive energy was slowing down, pooling around them in this lazy sensuality. And the reminder that she did, in fact, have other obligations, was enough to make Ian pause. Enough to make him blink and look up and think in this strange, idle way, that something about Sera smelled different.

No, she smelled like Sera. Sun-kissed and cider-steeped and punctuated with bits of metal. But Ian noticed it - the presence of her. The newness (even though they'd kissed like this before.) And for a split second it made him feel as though he were out of place (in this bar, in her arms.)

He hesitated, caught somewhere between pleasure and hunger and this creeping sense of doubt.

"To be honest..." he gave a breathy laugh as he began to pull away, reaching back to unhook Sera's arms from around his waist. "I can't really stay. I should probably just let you do your thing."

Sera

Hard to tell when she becomes aware of the change-in-him. Hard to establish, precisely, when it clicks home to her that he has withdrawn from the strange click-home concordance that was - seemed to be - lock-and-key because whereever she is, there is no room for idle thought. She's still there, her brow against his cheek, her mouth beneath his jaw, this sense of wholly-animal-seeking about her now more refined, tempered. Almost delicate: an opening not a consumption.

But then he's laughing - to be honest - and she doesn't know what that actually means but he's pulling away and reaching to unhook her hands and she sure as hell knows what that means. He doesn't really get to do that: unhook her hands from around his waist, because when he starts to do that, like he's untying a strange little knot she figures it out and drops the contact and pulls away, pretty much all-at-once. Breathless on an inhale, this sharp kind of withdrawal that has her dark eyes stitching with this neat, darting, quite shallow precision over his face.

Her brows are drawn together, and her hands - and her body - are shaking, just a little bit. Doesn't say anything, and after that brief, shallow glance - she just turns around and walks away.

Ian

It was a gradual thing, the subtle slide-shift in Ian's expression when Sera pulled away. Because, whatever his conflicts, part of him was still there - still pulling in breath like he couldn't get enough of it, his skin still flushed from the contact - lips still swollen, red, parted, wet. He caught the shake in her hands when she turned. Expected her, maybe, to say something. But she didn't. For a moment it looked like maybe he regretted it (pulling away,) but that would have been an oversimplified reading - and she wasn't watching him anyway.

She didn't ask if he was alright. It was debatable whether he would have really answered if she had.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly. Then he turned around and left the bar.

Sera

She doesn't ask him if he's okay. He doesn't ask her, either. And he's always closed off and right now - right now she's trying very hard to be closed off too and she has not quite the shittiest-walls ever but it's close but if you never think to try to looksee what's on the other side, well. Right now she can't look at him, not really. She has learned to give herself permission to just feel her shit sometimes and not everyone else's, and she's not going to turn around, no sir, except -

It's the apology, the I'm sorry he offers to her back that has her spinning around amidst the disordered jumble of barstools they've upended and shoved about all around them and she spins like whoa.

"Fuck you Ian. I don't accept your generic bullshit apology. What the fuck."

--

Maybe he still leaves. Maybe he doesn't. She's a seer but that doesn't mean she knows which path he's going to take.

Ian

He'd apologized because he had - genuinely - felt bad. For hurting her. For disappointing her. But the moment Sera turned around and lashed out, that empathy snapped off like the flick of a light switch. Maybe she saw it in his eyes. The way they went from soft to obsidian-sharp during the span of a few breaths.

"Don't accept it then."

Maybe Sera had more to say. Maybe she didn't. Either way, he didn't turn back after that.

Ian

Pathfinder

Serafíne

Mermaid night at the Denver Aquarium is normally packed but: today is a Monday, the Monday after a holiday weekend and the place is pretty deserted, for an Aquarium featuring young women swimming in bikini tops and too-large fishtails in the shark tank.

The mermaids can be seen from both a window onto the tropical tank from the snack bar and from the walk-through tunnel, and that is where a certain someone can be found, with Dan, seated on the floor, legs curled out of the walking path, golden head tipped back against the glass, sipping on a smoothie and watching the mermaids as they swim swim swim and then - dart back to their O2 hoses - and swim some more.

Elijah

[WP: because all this water is totes fine]

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

Elijah

Elijah Poirot had a thing for mermaids.

It wasn't a fetish. It wasn't a sexual desire of any kind, it was a deep, abiding love. SOmething that skewed more towards the conceptual instead of the literal. He loved them in ways that his young heart had first learned to love, with quiet awe and wonder. Looking on at pictures with scales and hair and seashells. Then with respect at stories of ships crashing and sirens, and then with aching bleeding, pleading something that he couldn't put into words at the time at the notion of forbidden affections-0 separated by the land and sea. He'd read the LIttle Mermaid, the one that wasn't from Disney. THe one where she died and fell into sea foam.

Something hurt at the notion, something hoped it wasn't real but again knew in that youthful way that it had to have been true. He still held out the belief that mermaids might be real, did not seek them for neverending youth, but rather, because he wanted to know if the stories were true.

These weren't real mermaids. Not really, they were just people with tails but he was fascinated all the same, quiet and delighted in a pair of slacks and a vest- because where else would his pocket watch go? He'd gotten off work late, sent text messages in hopes that someone- anyone- may come and share in the quiet delight.

He'd gotten off work late, but came to the glass anyway like some delighted pilgrim. He settles in, takes a seat with the duo like he belonged there.

"Did I miss anything?"

Serafíne

Dan has an arm around Sera's shoulders, and she is in turn resting against his body. Hair pulled back into a complicated series of plaits and French braids, which make her look just a bit like some cable TV idea of a Viking warrior. Black leather jacket over an American flag bikini top and a pair of denim cut-offs, perhaps in homage to the Independence Day holiday.

--

It is Dan who looks up; tracks Elijah's path down the tunnel. Gives him a mild smirk of greeting and acknowledgment.

"They're swimming," says Dan, quietly and yes, with a certain degree of irony.

"Third one from the left skates roller derby," Sera informs them both, which is true.

Then Dan: "Didn't you invite us to come see mermaids last year? What's your thing with them, anyway?"

Elijah

"I did," he confirmed for Dan, "and it's a thing, the whole grace under water, the ability to explore this whole vast, almost alien landscape- the ocean is intense. Even if mermaids were freshwater lake creatures there's still stories of catfish so big at the bottom that you have fish whose eyes are the size of dinner plates. The lure of an entirely different world that exists just barely out of your reach if you could hold your breath long enough or withstand the pressure."

He leans back, crosses his legs at the ankle, "then there's the whole myth of the mermaid human love affair of things that can't be, broken hearts and sea foam and it's fucking tragic.

"Plus, it's just a beautiful image, if something can ever be just beautioful, ya know?"

Serafíne

"You know that you have all of those things," Sera, quiet, contemplative, humming beneath her breath, beneath her skin, somewhere in the skein of her spare frame, all blood-and-bone and whip-lean muscle. "Here and now, right? Without the fucking ocean.

"Almost sounds like a metaphor for the life you've found your way to live, doesn't it?"

Magick, she means: of course, magick. The poetry and the tragedy and the beauty of it. They're in public, though. Strangers drifting through, glancing down at the probably-drunk (she is not drunk) collection of misfits and reprobates seated on the floor of the tunnel.

Dan offers, then - "Love affairs that can't be aren't really tragic, though - When you're inside them, they just fucking suck."

Elijah

"It's probably pretty close, but thus far I haven't drowned any hapless well-intentioned mortals by attempting to share the majesty of where... actually... I don't think I can actually say that," he says. He has to think, has to wonder for a second about Jenn, if she had actually been-

Fuckit. He stood by the decision to show her the umbra, to share something, to try and make the world make sense and she wasn't drowning yet, was she? She wasn't overwhelmed yet (not entirely), she wasn't floating face down or lungs bursting because the pressure was too much. No, she was here. She was fine.

"I think it's the trying to make them be that can- well, I guess that could- you know, I don't actually have the experience to back that up either," he says, admits without admitting because he's shameless and why should he be? "I'd say tragedy of any kidn just sucks when you're in it. Tragedy's a word for other people to describe someone else's problem."

Serafíne

"Technically," Dan here, wry. "Tragedy is the framing of a story that gives its readers a degree of catharsis by evoking in them the same sort of emotions imputed to the principles, but from a safe distance and presumably with a secondary degree of safety, in that those emotions are shared with the whole of the audience. In the Greek sense, usually some hero brought down by a fatal flaw in his own character instead of the random action of chance."

Sera rolls her eyes are Dan's technical definition of tragedy, Greek or otherwise. Uncurls her legs and shifts her body, both only to settle more comfortably against him.

"I wasn't suggesting you drowning people, Elijah. Just that everything you love about their world - minus the dubiously poetic murder - exists in this one and always has. Even before you opened your eyes."

Quiet, briefly. Then - "Have you thought about that chat we had the other night?"

Elijah

"It didn't used to be something separate. LIke... the whole wonder of it. It just kinda... went... one day, and nothing felt like anything but then it came back and... Yeah," exhales like that is that. A long conversation he didn't know how to have. Shame he'd be so interested in words and find so little capacity to use them.

"I did," he told her, "kind of a kick in the ass to quit coasting and... It was probably the smartest thing, and one of the most helpful things anyone has ever told me."

A little quieter, a little more honest, "if you found someone else I could talk to, I'd love the help. But if you didn't, you've already done a lot."

Serafíne

Dan breathes out a quiet lungful into Sera's hair. Half-a-swallowed laugh. truth is, he doesn't precisely understand what Elijah means when he says that wonder didn't used to be separate. Hard to read someone else's shorthand, perhaps harder when that person is full of their own experiences, strange and dangerous, and has the ability to change reality with the application of will.

Sera doesn't quite understand either, but she kinda hums. That's what you do right, when you are stoned and struggling for words to explain whatever the fuck it is that you are feeling, sharing with each other. Gives Dan an upward tilt of her chin and a quick little warning glance.

"I made a call," she tells the young would-be Hermetic. Does not tell him: to whom, or what that person means to her, meant to her. "Someone I know in England. He's not entirely awake, you know? But not asleep precisely, either. Kind of a functionary, but he's gonna get in touch with some folks about you.

"Hopefully that'll help you find the path."

--

Not much more, really. Dan and Sera hang out a bit longer. It feels like sitting around passing around a roach at the tail-end of the night. Soon enough though, Dan looks at his watch and rouses Sera: they have to go. No more mermaids tonight. Night, Elijah.

Independence Day

Kiara Woolfe

Independence Day Eve tradition dictated that there was a celebration in Civic Center Park.

Something about free admission and patriotic concerts followed by light shows and fireworks. Denver citizens invited to bring their own picnics and blankets and sense of pride - Kiara Woolfe was no great follower of tradition. She didn't adhere to the notion of wearing colors for the long weekend or waving sparklers around as dusk settled but there was something almost comforting to the normalcy in sitting with her back against a tree as evening settled and watching families sprawling across the lawn; children running free and wild in the lead up to the light show.

The grass a sea of beach chairs and picnic baskets and red, white and blue.

The Verbena had no picnic to speak of but she did have a blanket thrown down beneath her; shoes removed and tucked up beside her body; a pair of sunglasses still perched atop her head. Hers was not the embodiment of celebration but the quiet contemplation of a witness. Kiara's fingers curled around her knee; one drawn up in lazy respite. She'd been sitting there long enough for activity to build around her, couples arriving and taking up ownership near by but there was still modest space between the brunette and the nearest.

In the sea of bodies out as a warm evening settled in on the city, the brunette was just another figure lost to the banking afternoon light.

Serafíne

Awareness.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 4, 6, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 1

Serafíne

There are kids with sparklers and dad with beers and mothers with visors and beach chair set up on the lawn. Food trucks and strangers on stilts and a whole arena of patriotic bouncy houses. The peppered brightness, the jostling murmurs as people fill in the lawn and compete for space on the fringes. Spreading out, distributing snacks and drinks and responsibilities ("you watch your sister, Amy! I mean it!"). Vendors sell everything: balloons and cheap flashlights topped with fiberoptic cables, red white and blue stuffed dogs and monkeys and sharks, t-shirts and trucker hats and blankets and bikinis. People are playing frisbee and bocce ball but the games get getting more and more crabbed and stunted as more folks fill in the greenspace all around.

Among but not of them: a stranger cutting through the dark. She doesn't have a blanket and doesn't have a crowd and doesn't have a beer-in-hand, though she has acquired an unlit sparkler that she taps against her thigh as she picks her way through the park.

Barefoot because her heels were sinking into the trampled ground.

Beeline for Kiara. Could feel her from a mile away, in her throat and behind her eyes, beneath her ribs and in the most primitive ganglia of her brainstem: everywhere, everything.

This sharp silohuette against the wider darkness, hair a shadowed tangled, the bulk of a leather jacket belying the thin frame beneath. Thumbs hooked through the loops of her denim cut-offs, heels dangling against the meat of her bare thighs, shadow falling across Kiara: just so.

"I'm surprised." A glance up at the still empty sky: darkness still wrapped around with light from the setting sun. "Doesn't really seem like your thing, you know?"

Kiara Woolfe

[Oh, we should do this too. Awareness.]

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

Kiara Woolfe

She feels Serafine coming, it's the barely there but building sense of something with her. This captivating sensation; like pinpricks across her skin; the slightest shift under it. It's a drawcard - she - was a drawcard and it's a wonder at times, like tonight, with the illumination framing her and the buzz and activity that seems to fall away and become muted as it flows around her - it's a wonder to Kiara that they all don't just stop and stare at this creature as she threads a way through them.

Like some barefoot wonder of compelling chaos.

She feels her coming and tilts her head back when she's there, her shadow falling across Kiara's throat; her features; that red-coated mouth. She's dressed in a worn denim jacket over a pale sundress, the pagan. There's a tangle of necklaces around her neck, the flicker and gleam of others around one wrist; rings on her fingers.

"It's really not." This easy, warm greeting. Kiara's cherry painted mouth curling in a smile; her eyes shift over Serafine, bare toes to crown of her head and then return to her face. "I felt a compelling need to be around a whole lot of people and just - " She casts her attention out beyond them to the scope and shape of the celebration; the raucous noise of it all; humanity at its finest (and perhaps, worst) in the height of jubilation.

"- disappear for a few hours. Plus, I don't entirely mind the fireworks." There's a beat, then: "Sometimes it's nice to just watch people."

Serafíne

"That's what I do at a great show, you know? Down in the pit. Not the people-watching, mind. The dissolving, yeah, or something close to it. I mean, I guess people do that at nightclubs, too, with DJs and shit, but I can't really handle the canned music.

"Or, well, I'd rather have bleeding fingers and broken guitar strings than a sound-board and a dude in headphones plotting all that shit out."

Sera does this neat, brimming little survey of the crowd, turning in place balanced on the ball of her right foot, takes in the organic movement of the host all around them, the drift of smoke over the park from one of the food trucks offering barbecue, the quiet sense of - well - wholeness that sometimes comes over strangers gathered in one place, for one purpose.

Finishes the survey with a lashed glance at Kiara, a closer survey, then pads around the blanket and takes a seat beside her.

"You seem different," Sera tells her, quiet now. Dropping her shoes to the ground beside her.

Kiara Woolfe

She does feel different. The brunette's presence has lost that edge of devouring, destructive certainty. There's a subtle pulse to Kiara, now. A drumbeat that keeps in time to that rejuvenating signature of hers. She's changed and it's there in the smile she throws Sera's way as she settles beside her, a tinge of something aware and bittersweet and yet - not wholly without the same sharp humor Kiara has always carried with her like armor.

The Verbena with her dark eyes and red lipstick and brief, sharp-edged smiles.

"It happened on Beltane. I was out near Morrison for a party and - " She lifts a shoulder; settles back then, opening her body to conversation; turning her profile toward the other female. " - I woke up the next morning in a field." She absently plays with the edges of the frayed blanket she'd brought with her; its checkered in navy and red, a fine thread of white running through it; Kiara's thumb plays over the vein of it. The line where the colors bleed together.

"I saw Annie the other day at the Chantry. She took me out to Roxborough State Park. Have you ever been out there?" Kiara's eyes move to Sera's face, there's a subtle play of pleasure that slips into her voice; her dark gaze. "It's beautiful. The trees grow so heavy and close in places it's hard to even push through. She took me on a hike."

Kiara's smile dims, her chin dips low. Nearby, someone has lit a sparkler and it hisses as its waved around; the light reflecting in the Verbena's sunglasses. The distant peal of excited laughter.

"Did you know there was another Node out there once?" She shifts a little; her face turning to look out over the crowd. "There were a lot more of us here."

Serafíne

"Did you go looking?" Dark eyes touch Kiara's profile, then drop to her mouth, her hands, the blanket, then away. "Or did it just find you?"

Then,

"Mmm." That noise is a quiet negative, mostly throat-caught, captured and pinioned in the body. Reflective. Sera is leaning back now, bare feet planted on the blanket, arms back, hands behind her hips, supporting the curve of her spine. "Haven't. Usually when I go hiking I go to this cabin I have. Not far from there, but - "

A supple shrug.

"I didn't know that. Doesn't surprise me, though. Alot of things have been lost. Was it the War?

"Or before?"

Kiara Woolfe

"I think I knew it was coming. I could feel something. I just had no idea what it was until I saw her standing beside a bonfire." There's a shaping of her lips into a smile not entirely without humor but the softening doesn't quite reach her eyes. The little breath she expels. "You just know in the moment. It was like looking at my reflection."

She's quiet a minute or two, then: "The War. It was. Is. They came and slaughtered everyone. Couldn't take the Node, though." There's a noise of mingled defiant pride and disgust. The fire in that look she shoots Serafine is purely primitively glad for it. "Too fucking wild and alive for their machines and God forsaken static reality. So they killed it, too. There's a grove where everything is dead out there. They sucked the life right out of everything. I looked across and it was just - empty."

She frowns down at her hands.

"I think that's why I'm out here tonight. It's easier than remembering that." She looks over at Sera, then. Her eyes roving over her face, the curve of her cheek, the framing of her body there against the blanket. "It's good to see you, though.

How's Dan? Not out feeling the patriotism with you?"

Sera

Kiara says that she knew it was coming and Sera makes a quiet noise, beneath her breath. Not precisely recognition, this, so much as awareness, acknowledgment, something else: wry, hmmm? Glances at Kiara's profile, the reflections of sparklers in her eyes.

"Mine doesn't look like me. Part of me, yeah, but she has never been my reflection. The last time I had no idea it was coming, I stumbled into it, or maybe she pulled me in. Next time - "

This quick, supple shrug, expressive and wholly unguarded.

"I'm ready now."

--

Then, another shrug in response to Kiara's question about Dan. "He's around. Somewhere. We'll meet up later - probably have people over later if you wanna come."

Sera's mouth closes, thoughtful, then she glances back at Kiara, returns to the topic of the broken node. "Why do you think Annie took you out there?"

Kiara

I'm ready now.

The brunette offers a vague smile Sera's way. This encompassing, considering look accompanies that smile for a long minute, it hooks at the edge of Kiara's lip and tugs it into something firmer. "Then she'll find you." Certain, that. Quietly confident, the pagan sounds as her eyes stray back to some point beyond the Cultist. There's more chatter, the sun has slipped down beyond the buildings; just the barest sliver of golden light.

They'll have people over if she wants to come. It's been a while since she's seen Corona Street and she makes a faint, affirmative noise. "I'd love to," confirming softly, easily.

The Node, again. She's looking at Kiara and there's a minute after she asks where the Verbena doesn't speak. She's looking out, away and her brow is drawn, expression unreadable in the settling dark. "They were a coven. The ones that died. Verbena. I think - "

Kiara's eyes narrow for a beat where she stares off into the distance; into the crowds; her mouth twisting and offering up some spasm of remembered grief for a moment past, for women she'd never known who died a long time ago. Her eyes tick back to Serafine's face and she makes no bid to conceal that lingering emotion, the residue of it clinging to her voice, her dark eyes, the downturn of her mouth. " - she wanted someone else to know. To remember their names."

Sera

Then she'll find you.

(She might say something to that, Sera. It is there in her: in her spine and in her skin, in her bones, in the texture of her being, in the work and in the Work that has brought her here: that something about here, and something about now, and something about where she is and where she is going depends not on Her finding Sera, but on Sera striving: and finding, Her. There is meaning in that thought, that desire, that ideal, that Work to Sera - more meaning than perhaps even the creature herself can fathom, but she feels it, feels it as a physical thing and - also - a change in her.

Could consume the certainty of it and find herself on the other side of it.

But the moment has changed; shifted. She says nothing. Feels that thought like a flame inside her, incandescent.

Burns with it. Knows.)

--

No. A flicker in her dark eyes. Awareness, yes. Empathy - soft and bruising and intense, of course.

"How much witness do you wish to bear?" The briefest of pauses, a twinge of her mouth. "I'm a Seer. I can See." The past, she means: oracle, of course. "And share. And show."

Kiara

She'd known other Verbena that could See. That could scatter runes on a table in her Mentor's home outside New York's city limits and glimpse beyond; into; the eternal moment. Could foster the precise moment to act; when it was ideal to move. They could unsow the seeds and return to witness the grandeur of the towering Oak; could stand at the ashes of all things and know.

And yet - not even this had saved them all. Some had fled, had warped space and stepped between - but others - Kiara's expression flickers, shifts to uncertainty and then, consideration. It's sharpened, sharpens, on the other woman's face where she half sits beside her. Kiara sits up a little straighter, twists to face Sera and her feet tuck beneath her body.

"There aren't any spirits left there, you know. That emptiness when I looked across - I've never seen that. That even nature's been torn away and doesn't hold a reflection anymore. It's - " Kiara's voice is gentle, she seems pained, an earth witch stripped of her power must feel so, one imagines. Must feel acutely the strangulation of her source of comfort and kinship. The wellspring of so much of her magic. "What I looked at hurt but it's not the same as seeing. The way you do."

Her mouth flits slightly; softens into some trace of admiration. "I could find it again. The clearing. If you want to see it too." A pause. "Maybe want is the wrong word, but - " There's a little breath as she looks down between them; rubs her thumb across her palm as if she could still see the cut she'd sliced into it with the other Verbena, could still feel the blood she'd offered to that withered, dying stump. An offering. A mark of respect.

"I could show you."

Sera

An awareness in the air around her; more measured than bright, but see: her profile against the dark, sharp, the strange, thoroughly immoderate, thoroughly appropriate celebrations of others all around them make the moment somehow both more intimate and more universal. The spectacular tableau that casts the private moment into sharp relief.

What she is aware of is not so much the shock of that absence (she knows, after all, little or nothing about the spirit world, Our Sera, does not count that knowledge among her varied skills. Does not care to, precisely, either), but the grief that absence engenders in Kiara.

Dark eyes flick over Kiara's countenance, the curve of her mouth, then drop as if in tandem after Kiara's to her palm.

"Show me."

--

Simple, yes?

"But not now."

--

Quite as simple, too.

Because the twilight around them has softened and has deepened and now the raucous noise of the crowd and settled into more of a lively, organic hum as couples and friends and families gather on their blankets and in their camp chairs in the buzzing darkness. There's a stage somewhere, right? And music of the sort one expects to find on a day light this, full of trucks and warriors and waving flags and mommas and sacrifices. Death because death is life is everything, in the life of a man or a woman, in the life of the mind and of the spirit, and even the life of a country.

The music's stopping though, the last strains of an old drinking song fading as the stage lights are cut with a final blazon of phosphorescence against the sky, and then the fireworks begin.

Fire-work.

Samir

Even Mercurial Elites have to step out sometimes to contribute to capitalism. He could just as soon conjure up whatever he needed himself within the safety of his apartment but for the purposes of getting him out of the apartment today: Samir is still working the bugs out of that particular program and earned himself a nosebleed earlier for his troubles.

So he's managed a trip to the grocery store off of Federal Boulevard. Ignore everything he had to do in order to leave the house and ride his bike half a mile and then lock up the thing and come inside the store. He's here now.

So far he's managed to grab a two-liter bottle of Moon Mist Faygo. Now he's trying to decide if he wants to eat something besides ramen noodles today. Which means he's aimlessly wandering the aisles waiting for something to jump out at him. Thus far nothing has.

Serafíne

The doors here are kinda automatic. Which means they open part-way if you walk at a normal pace, and hang, sighing, open long enough for you to shimmy past before they start to swing or maybe mosey-shut. There is a dusty aura and a low, humming buzz from all the overhead fluorescent bulbs and pretty enormous display of Mexican candies and an entire row of weird canned sea-creatures and another entire row of dented and expired canned goods at a deep discount and now the door is kinda opening and kinda sighing-shut to admit one chick in short denim cut-offs and thigh-high fishnets and a strapless black-lace crop top with 4" heels (which heels are made-of-metal and sculpted to look like skeletal ship's prows) and the security guard (yawning) thinks she's a prostitute and the clerk thinks she's a prostitute and the grandmother buying five cans of dented tinned octopus is sure of it.

The creature stops in the middle of the front aisle, paused, poised between the off-brand, off-date tins and the weird-seafood aisle. Not because she wants anything in any of those aisles, but because: how the fuck did she get here? Why the fuck is she here?

Samir

At some point Samir decides well he ventured this far he might as well grab something in the solid food category. So he settles on a bag of cassava chips. Whatever, Samir.

He comes around the corner of the aisle as conspicuous as any other young adult male in this neighborhood. Average height with long hair and a sort of punk-bohemian fashion sense. Same black leather jacket and blood-red Doc Martens he'd had on the night he met Sera. His hair is pulled back into a knot at the nape of his neck same as his hair is always pulled back.

But Samir has a way of fading into the background of other people's memories. If he puts forth an effort to escape notice then he may as well not exist. Attempts to find traces of him along paper avenues tend to end in dust. He wasn't putting forth an effort to escape her notice the last time their paths crossed and he isn't now.

Still: not expecting to see her tonight. Does a bit of a stutter-stop maneuver before pulling his shit together and continuing on towards the registers and her as if nothing happened.

Serafíne

HMMMM? (-4 for stupid arcane?)

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

Serafíne

crap. lemme do that again.

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

Serafíne

(He's not trying to avoid her notice but he still could, right? Another stranger slipping by, another anonymous pair of eyes, the shift and flicker, the stutterstep. Not like she doesn't see that all the time from actual strangers. It's not like she dresses like that because she wants to go unnoticed. Fuck no: stutterstep all you want. Take another look.

The sharp little shoulders, the articulations of her body, all bones and hollows. This strange, refined delicacy beneath all the fuck you and the horse you rode in on signifiers.

And it's not like her gaze slips around him but somehow lands on him in spite of herself, no. She just sort of wakes, startled and looks right at Samir in a way that people he has not greeted seldom do.

"Hey." Low, this. Conspiratorial, maybe, with a brief flashing glance toward the bored clerk behind the register. Can't mistake whom she addresses, Samir, not even if you Willed it. "Were we supposed to meet here? I don't - I don't fucking remember why I came in."

Samir

And that moment where Sera recognizes him is not a moment to which he has become accustomed even with people who have known him for a considerable amount of time. People with whom he has lived even forgot about him sometimes. Sera recognizes him so fast that the moment may not even register with her.

But then again she forgot why the fuck she even came in here.

Another moment to which Samir has not become accustomed is running into someone with whom he had previously engaged physically. Even if the physical engagement was no more engaging than her tongue in his mouth and her hips pressed against his. She has no idea what that did to the inside of his head. Knocked everything off an already messy desk for lack of a better analogy.

Point being this is not a melding of moments for her as it is for him. But then she is a Time Mage. He has no idea what is going through her head right now either. If he could Will it Samir wouldn't want her to not talk to him right now.

As they come abreast of each other he returns the Hey and chews his lower lip as she asks her question.

"We..." His eyes lock onto hers for a second like to read her pupils. "No? I don't think so. Are you alright?"

Serafíne

The light in here is dingy, yeah, but it's still bright enough that her pupils shouldn't be that large, devouring more than half of her dak-blue irises. So he searches her eyes and she allows him to look, then closes her like I have a secret style and glances again. This is not a sort of shying-away, though, so much as a looking-for something.

"Course I am," she assures him, reassures him. Hums around the thought with a neat little and then kinda turns, not precisely staggering but there is a certain implicit sway to her spare form. It's just she remembers this place, which is bloody weird since she walked in about 97 seconds ago.

And she kinda reaches out and grabs a tin of something (turns out it is eel) because maybe she is supposed to buy something and then makes like she is going to fall into step beside him. Gives his purchases a once-over, this darting engagement of her dark, dark eyes. "What the fuck are you doing here anyway."

Samir

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Samir

Samir holds up the plastic two-liter bottle of neon-green liquid he'd stepped out of his apartment to procure tonight. Like he can't just run a program that would give him the same keyboard-mangling energy that high fructose corn syrup and caffeine would. Something of a self-depreciating half-a-smile comes to his lips and since it looks like she's going to walk with him anyway he wanders over to the register.

The guy ahead of them is buying canned beans and tortilla chips and a slew of other things that the cashier is taking his time bagging up. Whatever they're chatting about is inconsequential. It gives Sam and Sera a moment to sort out what they're both doing here.

"Ran out of junk food," he says. "Besides, I hear going outside occasionally is supposed to be good for you."

Serafíne

"It's very fucking good for you," she assures him, or perhaps reassures him once more. Turns and sets her tin of - eel? yes, eel, second-hand, dented and out-of-date lamprey eel - on the counter with Samir's casava chips and soda and leans back against the register belt. The heels of her palms on the cracked chrome edging, shoulders up and forward though her mouth is closed and her head is lolling pleasantly aslant.

There's a pleasant hum from the fixtures overhead that she is only now hearing. Bright and buzzing and beneath the third-rate Spanish-language radio station that seems to be playing murder ballads extolling the virtues of drug lords in the Mexican cartels.

"If you're out of junk food you should get some Skwinkles. I'm pretty sure they have some somewhere. You live around here?"

Samir

You live around here?

"Yeah." That doesn't exactly make for enthralling conversation and in the pause after that single syllable underneath the humming of the fluorescent lighting Sera can all but hear him debating whether or not he wants to elaborate. "In the neighborhood, anyway. What the hell is a Skwinkle?"

As Sera answers he sets down his containers but does not lean against or otherwise touch the counter. Busies himself fishing his billfold out of his back pocket.

Serafíne

"Candy. Covered in chile. Fucking delicious."

Her dark eyes flick neatly over him: his hands, the unfolding, unfolded billfold. The precision that seems embedded in the pause as he debates whether and how much he wants to elaborate.

"You wanna get the fuck outta here with me?" The supple thread of her smile a strange nearly pointillist counterpoint to the darkness of her eyes.

--

No beating around the bush. When was she ever anything but forward?

Samir

Further commitment to his magick would require him to spend more time inside than he already does. A creature who can conjure up sustenance and convince the universe he's already paid his rent doesn't need to go outside very often. Means he doesn't have to touch paper currency or other people very often either. Madness proliferates quick as bacteria in a petri dish in the absence of outside influence.

Samir pulls out a ten-dollar bill assured of the fact that that will cover the cost of all three things and sets it down on top of the can of eel and then rubs his hand on the side of his thigh. Like he can scrub the germs off his fingertips with the friction between denim and skin. It's a small tic and the cashier doesn't notice.

Does he wanna get the fuck out of here with her. His eyes don't actually widen but the light slants a different way as he begins to suspect there's a correlation between one question and the next.

"... sure," he says.

And then the cashier is greeting him and he's answering back and it's a sparse exchange. There are only three items and they all fit in the bag. He gets four singles and a handful of coins back in change. The singles go into his billfold and he puts the coins into the take-a-penny tray and the plastic bag rustles as he takes hold of the handles. Again with the palm-rubbing.

"Buenas noches," he says to the cashier and then they're off.

Serafíne

Time 2 / Entropy 1: Perfect timing. Coincidental. Difficulty: 5. Target: 3 successes to get a cab ASAP. -1 for specialty focus.

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 4, 5) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

Even in a cheap, third-rate grocery store the air conditioning wheezes out crisp, cold, dry air. The air outside is damp and hot, the blast of it sticky as they slip past the automatic double-doors that only open part-way. Dark outside, right but only just. A rim of light wrapped 'round the western edge of the sky, illuminating the mountains where they are visible between the jagged teeth of storefronts, down intersections aglow with the this cacaphonous array of stoplights receding into forever-away.

They don't exactly match, but they walk out of the grocery store together and something in the air around her sharpens, and this is almost instinctual: her use of magick. The way the threads of time and chance slide neatly into place.

"I can't walk too far in these fucking shoes," which is not precisely true, though it is more-true in circumstances when, as-now, she has indulged herself in certain illicit substances. "I'm gonna get us a cab. You like fireworks?"

Samir

[Corr/Mind 1: Landscape of the Mind because YOLO.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 10) ( success x 1 )

Samir

Last time their paths crossed Sera had not seen anything wrong with walking barefoot out of the park and down the street but Samir isn't going to be the one to suggest if she's that uncomfortable she can go ahead and just take the things off. To the contrary would be more like it. Samir barely likes walking on the sidewalk with thick-soled boots on.

He takes out his cellphone as Sera is looking around as if a cadre of cabs is waiting to pick up a couple of people who don't want to walk five miles to get to where they're going. This isn't New York City.

Does he like fireworks.

Samir glances overhead like he's expecting to see some go off at any second and then he grants Sera a sidelong smile that reveals a flash of teeth. The suggestion of a laugh that doesn't make noise. There's a knowing sort of quality to it though like her question isn't entirely random.

"They're alright," he says. "Why? You want to go shoot off some bottle rockets?"

Serafíne

Extending! +1

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (4, 6, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Serafíne

"Mmmm." So she hums, sauntering on the sidewalk in her too-high heels through the parking lot of the strange little grocery, avoiding pockmarks and potholes, the old Gremlin parked in the single handicapped spot, perhaps indefinitely. The syringes and crack vials that crunch underfoot as they cross the weedy tarmac towards the low, rushing roar of the wide avenue crushed with cars, yeah, but not exactly taxi cabs.

Holds her hand out though - right? - as if it were New York City. Two fingers and this elegant certainty that defines a certain kind of expectation. "Something like that."

Holding a secret like a coin, behind her eyes, in her mouth. The metallic tang of it.

And lo and behold, a taxi shows up. Glides up to the curb like nothing. Like this happens all the time.

Samir

Once he's finished doing whatever he was doing with his phone Samir pockets the thing and transfers the plastic bag to that hand so he can keep one free in case - what. She takes a tumble maybe. He doesn't look like he'd be able to do a whole hell of a lot beanpole-thin as he is.

He looks bulky compared to the wispy Cultist beside him but physical size doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot among their kind. He's heard stories about four-foot-eleven women who could bring an assailant to his knees with a flick of her wrist. Samir doesn't place a lot of stock in physical size.

Still: he treads careful when he's next to her. The terrain is unkind and the land struggling beneath the urban invasion doesn't care for the ones who brought this on themselves.

And then here comes a taxi. Other than a scant lifting of his brows Samir betrays no surprise.

"Alright," he says. This to the matter of what she meant when she asked about fireworks. Trying to sound like he's up for anything even though he's clearly outside of his comfort zone right now. "Lead the way."

Serafíne

Per + Empathy: how uncomfortable are you, bra?

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 3, 6, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 4 ) [Doubling Tens]

Serafíne

"Hmm." Another one of those subvocal sounds, this one accompanied by a supple flicker of her too-dark eyes. There is - there often is, perhaps there always is, if one looks for it - an awareness there that seems separate, shastrucrper, brighter than the tumble-down certainty of both her Self and her High - and also an almost lancing - well - call it compassion. This hook-and-filter catch as she sees something. Takes it in. Drops her eyes for this precise moment from Samir to the edge of the cab, gleaming beneath the streetlights, their own reflections distorted in its surface, and holds that view for two beats, perhaps three of her heart.

Then reaches out and opens the back door and climbs in the car, affording the world a very sweet view of her very sweet ass, thank you very much.

--

Inside, the cabbie asks where to? and she names a place, a park, perhaps one that he has not heard of or been to and he snaps an okay and flicks on the meter to start it running. Despite her spare frame, she fills up space in the back seat, perhaps deliberately, some part of her body always closer than is normal, though not quite touching, this virtual stranger in the back of the cab. Though: stoned and a little bit happy and wiggly, well, maybe her awareness of personal space slips even more.

Ten minutes, maybe fifteen later: the cab pulls up by the main parking area for a small city park. Sera leans forward, chin resting on the cabbie's seat and murmurs a few more directions. Which he follows: letting them out in a small parking lot at the trailhead to an old nature trail.

Samir The way Samir climbs into and sits in the cab one would think he were on his way to his own sentencing. He drops the plastic bag onto the floor between his feet and holds his hands between his knees and when Sera lolls closer to him he glances over and he affords her a tight smile. Maybe she senses the capacity for warmth in him somewhere.

The night he'd kissed her before she kissed him he had started to relax over the course of the hour or so they spent in each others' company but only barely. Enough that he didn't stammer every time he opened his mouth to talk.

Tonight she notices his discomfort and his resolution to carry on in spite of the discomfort. She doesn't say anything about it in the ten-fifteen minutes they spend in relative silence.

When the cab driver pulls into the parking lot Samir retrieves his cellphone again. For all anyone knows he could just be checking his bank account balance. Sera is more attuned to the space in the back of the cab than even the driver is. The driver may just feel uncomfortable carting these two deviant kids around as a default. By the time they arrive at the smaller lot a bit further away Samir has returned his phone to his pocket and shifted to remove his billfold.

Even if anyone were paying attention how would they know how much scratch he had in there before he put his phone away. No one would notice that a couple of bills materialize when he flips his thumb across the surface of what's already inside and produces a pair of five-dollar bills.

He doesn't wait for change. He does remember to grab the plastic bag from the floor before he gets out of the cab. Onward.

--

wallet @ 9:48AM
[matter/prime 2: forgot to stop at the ATM. base diff 5, spending WP bc fuck it. i believe he only needs one success for a "standard" unit.]

Roll: 2 d10 TN5 (3, 7) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Sera

Outside she steps out of those ridiculous heels. Steps out and down and suddenly she's four or five inches shorter and being anchored that much closer to the earth somehow makes her slightness easier to bear. There she is like a little buoy, golden hair with a trick for catching the light floating in the darkness ahead of him, her barefeet on the warm pavement yeah, fore and middle fingers hooked through the straps of her shoes. Too much loose gravel in the parking lot for her to go fast but she's nimble and knows where she's going. Finds the trailhead in the gloaming-darkness. The packed earth is easier on her feet than the rougher asphalt and once on it, despite the dark, she picks up the pace. Glances back, yeah, over her shoulder to make sure that Samir is keeping up.

There's nothing impressive here. Nothing technical. A rising slope flanked by scrub woods, cushioned enough by the absence of streetlights that the brightest stars are more visible from here than they outside the radius of the park. The sky is nothing like the sky would be further out, out beyond the front range of mountains beyond which the last, fading glow of the sun still burns but: oh hey. Venus. And other stuff, who the fuck can be bothered to remember all those fading, burning names?

So, he follows a stranger, an errant-satellite of a girl, equal parts White Rabbit and Betty Boop, high on god knows fucking-what. The trail starts to edge above the scrub, too and there's the city, gleaming-low. The park's lawns full of folks on picnic blankets and in folding chairs, parked on benches or sitting on the tailgates of pickups and SUVs, waiting for the evening's fireworks to start.

The last bit is more of a scramble, no longer packed dirt, a quick scrawl up a rocky outcropping that juts out over the city below. She manages it on two feet with occasional assistance from her hand for balance, but hey: she climbs. Even stoned her muscles has that sort of memory in them, how the body moves and maybe how it falls. If Samir needs help or encouragement she does turn around and offer him a hand, but whether or not he's athletic, he can probably make it. Half-crawling if need be but everything's dark now and who's watching.

Not Sera.

She takes a seat at the summit of the little outcropping, overlooking the mostly dark park. Feet flat on the still-warm stone, knees bent, heels tucked into the space beneath her legs. There's space beside her for him, if he wants to push himself, and join her.