aLate November and the city and its stores already have Christmas decorations up, illuminated. Winter wonderland displays framed in windows after the dirty, melting, muddy admixture of slush-and-leaves that are the remnants of this week's 'blizzard' and last night's flurries, and Saturday afternoon in November there is a certain hour when the light goes slanting and anyone walking down the street is forced to remember that the earth is (always) turning her head away from the sun -
and the darkest days are yet to come.
The galleries and boutiques of Sante Fe are open, intermixed with bars and restaurants where you could buy a couple months' subscription to Pandora for the price of an artisinal cocktail. Wedged in between a high-end furniture shop and a highly-curated accessories shop that seems to specialize in Wedgewood china teacups dangling on satin ribbons from birch branches is an empty lot / green space turned into a pop-up public garden this summer. Whoever planted it put up chalkboards framing the space announcing what was in season, what people should search among the leaves for, pick.
The first hard freeze pretty-much ended the growing season. Killed the winding tomato vines and heady sprawls of squash and zucchini, the profligate (and pungent) bunches of herbs, the leggy sprawl of the pickling cucumbers.
--
Gardens are always a bit of an eyesore after the first frost.
--
Today though, that space has come to life again. Handmade signs promise a Holiday Bazaar and Vegan Turkey Fry, whatever that is. There's a firebreather performing out on the sidewalk. Couple of food trucks parked at the curb. Colorful tents in somewhat haphazard rows over the trampled, muddy ground. Maybe ten or fifteen vendors at the pop-up flea market / craft fair, but it's a small space and spills over into and encompasses the outdoor patio of a tea shop. And sure, it's cold, but there are heaters with dancing gas flames and faux-fur blankets tossed over every-other chair or so.
Somewhere around: resonance, resonance, resonance. Insistent, sometimes. Hard to ignore.
Pen[Mm? Resonance?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 4, 9) ( success x 1 )
PenMs. Mercury is out for a stroll through Santa Fe. The city is new and unfamiliar. The buildings are unfamiliar and the streets. The hideyholes and the alleyways and the parking spaces and the dumpsters. The city is unfamiliar and new and a good Magician (Wizard [Mage]) makes a city into a familiar (Golem [Here's the alphabet]), knows just the way: the way is strolling, walking, learning, exploring. There is nothing aimless about Ms. Mercury-Mars but there is also nothing hurried now. She burns alone, and singular; she burns at a languid pace.
Here she is: a woman in her mid-to-late twenties late twenties-to-early thirties with a strong jaw, Morgan le Fay or Medea eyebrows, hair as red as an Ophelia painted by Millais, her coat of crushed black velvet sleek and buttoned twice with vintage buttons wrapped in vintage fabric sunburst dazzle of jagged patterns. Her boots are some dark ruddy brown color, she has a ring on every finger, and as she moves - there; whisk right by the fire breather. Sparks of that craft caught in her hair, limn it in some Hellish radiance - then give the thing back over to shadow and blood.
She wants tea; that's where she goes. And there is something, Some Thing, something that is part and parcel of this unfamiliar new city, some Resonant Thing Nearby, some will and other to consider. Where? Well. This is an exploring night. Lady Explorer's need tea.
SerafíneDan: Per + Awareness
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 5, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )
SerafíneSera: Per + Awareness
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 5, 5, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) [Doubling Tens]
SerafíneMs. Mercury in her crushed-velvet-coat is not out of place in this muddy market and she strides past a pennanted-tent where a pot-bellied old guy with a Grizzly Adams Beard is selling LPs from milk-crates and playing an old Billie Holiday 45 on a turntable that seems to be brass, hand-cranked, magickal and next door a young man and a young woman are hand-knitting fanciful stocking-caps that spill down the spine with baubles and fuzzle-balls in a madcap, Seussian (as in, Dr.) array. There's someone selling crystals and a used-book tent and a hand-made, leather-bound book-tent and a blacksmith, an actual-factual blacksmith, and a guy who makes furniture out of duct tape.
And sometimes bustiers.
Next to the blacksmith, a habardasher. She makes custom top-hats as high as you like.
In short - here, temporarily - a space that is stranger than usual.
--
And past all that, including past the fried vegan-organic, locally-sourced "turkey" truck is the teashop.
Quiet little teashop, normally, and though it is brimming now, not that many people are drinking tea. Coffee yeah, and cider, the apple/cinnamon scent of it slicing through the air, and hot-wine and that they technically shouldn't be vending but since they don't have a license for it, but who gives a fuck, and hot chocolate in every particular array but: not that many teapots.
--
On the patio, there is a tall blond guy with a full beard and tattoos and no especially negative feelings about throwing a faux-fur blanket over his shoulders to ward off the cold, because he's farther from the heater than anyone else in his shifting circle of friends. He's chatting quietly with a girl who looks kinda like a rockabilly snow white, but check out the neighborhood, she's not the only one.
Chatting with that girl but he looks up - something, some tug, some awareness - when the lady explorer comes striding up the muddy little faux-avenue between the mismatched tents. Watches her, but then glances back inside where a Sera is emerging from the ladies' room and heading to the counter. There's a little line, not a big one, just enough to make one wait. To crowd two strangers together.
One of those strangers has eyes-on-the-other the moment the other opens the door. Keeps them there, curious, interested, aware, intensely so until: you know. Line. To buy things?
Then, quiet right? but musical, somehow.
"I don't think we've met. New in town?"
Pen"We haven't and yes. Hello," the woman says.
The woman's resonance is all hints of subtle resonance woven together: something devoted to the verb of passion -- kiss as a verb; an ardent, devoted acolyte; ardent is intensity. Then there's that dash of daring, of élan, of readiness to gird the beast to foil the fell falcon to walk on the ledge to slide between the spikes the closing doors the falling rocks to do what has not been yet done to say the unpopular thing daring piratical and of course there's also resplendence. Resplendent; shining and glorious and radiant. Because that kind of daring, that kind of ardent devotion to daring; to something. Anything; the woman's resonance is all subtle hints, though, all diffuse - these differing impulses, flavors -
and Sera is striking. Pen feels the suggestive dance of the stranger's resonance (and another resonance which clings, which shivers in the shadow of) and meets it clear-eyed, keen-eyed, interested - her expression might as well be water; what lies seems unreserved.
"Do you come here often?"
SerafíneSera is striking, and she looks quite the way she feels. The sharp arrogance of her nose, the solid delicacy of her jaw-line, something entirely-forward about her, in this moment. The way she meets the eye. The way she: refuses not to stare. The way she holds her narrow shoulders back inside the shell of her leather jacket like her body is, or could be, a weapon. Or maybe like she could be hiding wings beneath the pinned-together shell.
Her ears bristle with spikes-and-studs and her hands with tattoos and there is a stack of bracelets, given, gleaned, found, made, stacked so high up her right wrist she has pushed the sleeves of her leather jacket right up to the elbow. Ink there, too, on the tender skin inside her forearm, the left one this time. A crow's skull, all black-and-shadow.
Does she come here often?
Strange little smirk that slides across her mouth, surfaces and subsides in two or three beats of her heart.
"Me? Naw. Here for the fair. We've got a table outside, my friends and me, if you wanna join, though."
These little denim shorts, despite the weather. Fishnets and combat boots to complete the ensemble. So, yeah: looks the way she feels.
--
It's her turn at the counter then, and she orders a pot of Darjeeling and she makes a face when they offer her green / white / oolong / black. So, clarification: a pot of black Darjeeling, thankyouverymuch.
PenSerafíne looks as if she might be hollow; as if she might be disparate, on her own, a loose thread unraveling - that strange little smirk is an underscore the something avian about the eye to eye. What kind of bird? Hmm. The stranger (flamboyant; flashy; all contained fire, wild hair and dramatic features which are attractive but not pretty) dresses like she feels, too, or like how she wants to feel: right now she says, "Thank you."
Then the Ecstatic is ordering a pot of Darjeeling and a pot of black Darjeeling. Penelope (patience, weaving and unweaving) steps up next and does not order a pot. She wants coffee. She wants coffee and it makes her momentarily curl her tongue against the roof of her mouth; she orders green tea - not a pot but a to-go cup.
When she has it, she looks for the strange fishnet tattoo enthralling resonant creature and her friends.
SerafíneShe finds them outside. The patio furnishings are mismatched not because the tea shop is a mismatch-y shop but because the fair has swelled the crowd and the capacity and the need-for-capacity and people brought their own shit, maybe, or the owner went scrounging so here, at a mismatched table with mismatched chairs Pen finds the mismatched people slung in an open, shifting sort of circle.
Pot of tea in the middle of course.
They aren't drinking from to-go cups or at least she isn't drinking from a to-go cup. There's a proper cup-and-saucer on the table in front of her. Two, in fact, for she has settled down not in her own space but in the tall blond bearded guy's lap. He leans forward and shifts the faux-fur around her right shoulder as she settles back against and this particular posture with this particular person is unusual for her, but -
Pen has no context for that but. Cannot even be aware of it.
- she needs this closeness. Physical, practical, immediate. Needs it the way aching lungs need air.
By the time Pen makes it to the table, Sera has a flask out. Whiskey and tea, tea and whiskey. "I'm Sera, this is Dan. That's Dee. That's Aimes - " and so on, until the end. When, "Want some?" Dark brows rising from their straight line to these querying arches. She means: want some whiskey for your tea? Wiggles the flask a little, all enticing.
Pen
Pen looks at each person as their name is spoken; they are seen. Her sight is keen; her eyes are lake-swords, still and untroubled but inquisitive. The green tea is held close to her mouth so she can inhale its vapors (Priestess [Highest]), let the scent of it dwell in the impulse of a smile before - social graciousness, plus inquisition! - "No thank you." The demurral is gracious. Whisky on its own or whisky in desserts but never whisky in tea, thank you very much. "Maybe a drop on its own later, once this is no longer green warmth and I want fire. So how is everyone? Sera, Dan, Dee, Aimes, etcetera." Graceful, long-fingered good-natured wave of her (Magician's [Sorceress's: let's turn them to pigs]) hand. New to a group, how to dive into a conversation.
Sera
Okay: later for the whiskey. The flask is returned to some inner pocket of her jacket before she takes up the teacup again.
All of this cross-talk as the stranger repeats the names and goes around the circle and asks how everyone is doing and so on. Some of those introduced are deep enough in their own conversations that they take not-much notice of her but even they glance over, right? Look. Take note, feel something warm and ardent and bright without understanding why or how her resonance affects them.
"I have to work tonight." The chick named Aimes declares, mouth twisting into a grumpy smirk. "Woo. Working Black Friday too, celebrate."
Sera's eyes are on the edge of the stranger's profile after that - greeting. Neat little mouth slightly parted, hovering by then over the edge of her tea-cup quite as primly as any finishing school miss.
"We were talking about Thanksgiving plans," Sera interjects quietly. Neat stitch of her gaze over Pen's profile. "Do you celebrate it?"
Pen
"I'm thankful for celebration," the red-haired woman replies, with enough gravity that she doesn't sound flippant, although she doesn't sound really grave either. Easy, perhaps. Her resonance is passionate, is glorious and daring; the color of her hair matches, though her skin is wintry pale and otherwise she is not warm in color scheme. But nobody's ever accused (the Flambeau) Pen of not being present. Presence. Or honest. Honest, too.
Well - perhaps someone has accused the Flambeau of dishonesty before. Greatly daring; dare even duels, affairs of honor, angels singing. There's a cross at her throat pressing in at the collar, hidden from view by her coat. She forgets it is there sometimes.
"And I really enjoy the food."
Sera
"Mmm." Sera murmurs, leaning back against Dan again, her (slightly cotton-y, hungover) head drifting against his narrow chest. Pen's comment about the food sparks a rolling conversation that moves through the other folks at the table about: well, the mysteries of cranberry sauce and the many-ways of preparing stuffing. Oyster, chestnut, cornbread and Stovetop all come up. A mention of the deep-fried local-organic vegan tofurkey on offer from one of the food trucks at the fair has several folks scoffing while others sing its praises and someone speculates over how far the tofurky people will go to defend their trademark.
Who the fuck came up with that name? Et cetera.
Sera lets it swirl until the group has shifted. This is a constantly moving group. Aimes leaves to get ready for her shift at the bar, Morgan has to meet his girlfriend and their kid on the corner. Frankie see her best friend lingering at the stocking-cap vendor and has to go consult on something.
"You know," and there is no privacy, particularly, when the creature ventures this remark but there is notably more privacy than there was earlier, "I think me and Sid might've crashed your going-away party. Brownstone in Brooklyn a couple of weeks ago.
"How's that for coincidence. What brings you to Denver?"
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