Not one to back down from a challenge. [12]

Mara Andrews

A few days had passed since that fateful night, when Mara and the others had knelt in the ash of an old and venerable building and the lives of who knows how many awakened individuals. Since that point they had walled themselves in, sealing themselves against the outside world, a form of isolation one might say. In hopes that they would not draw the attention of those beyond their tiny little motel room.

It was late saturday, and by now each of the members of the team had secured their own little habitat in the crowded room. It was necessary of course, tempers were running ragged and patience was thin, and it had been for the best that each member of the team, had their own space..small as it might be.

Mara had taken the space between the one bed and the exterior wall of room, a small inclosed space that sectioned her off, giving her some space to exist. She had made a makeshift bed there as well, taking one of the spare pillows and propping just so, so that others might use the bed.

In this moment of their isolation, Mara sat there, cross legged and quiet. Her gaze was turned from the others, the woman looking at the exterior wall before her. Her hands rested on her knee's and breathing was slow and deep.

Serafine

Sera seems to prefer sleeping in the bathtub, for the gods only know what reason, but spends some of her waking hours sitting on the other side of the exterior wall, between the a/c unit and the front door. Days have passed, and the food is cheap and processed and the drinks are dwindling, so mostly they drink tap water. Sera alternates her clothes: sometimes she wears a t-shirt and underwear, while her bra and cut-off shorts are being washed or dried. The rest of the time, she wears a black bra with red details and cut-off denim shorts.

Goes about barefoot because god with her clodhoppers she could take off someone's toes if she stepped wrong. And barefoot, it turns out that she's pretty short. She inhabits space because she fills it, and seems tall because of the proportions of her body and the fact that she tends to wear shoes that, between the platforms on the soles and the heels, add at least four to six inches to her height. Which is ridiculous. So, it turns out that Mara is taller than Sera, which she may not have expected.

For all her talkativeness, Sera knows when to be quiet. She's sensitive to the vibe of a room and shuts the hell up when people seem to need her to shut up. And when she shows herself up in Mara's space, sliding across the bed against which the Akashic is resting her spine, she knocks.

In a way. Bare, pale legs slide down the shoulder of the bed preceding her. Sera's toenails are painted black spread with silver glitter, and her pedicure has held up better than her manicure in their exile. So: bare white legs, which haven't been shaved in a few days, glittering black toenails. The sour scent of another body in the close space, and

" - hey." Greeting and query all at once. If Mara looks up, Sera is perched at the edge of the bed, a look of inquiry on her striking features. Brows lifted, eyes steady, mouth still. "Mind if I join you?"

Serafine

(brb!)

Mara Andrews

Mara's choice of clothing in the gathering heat of the room had been utilitarian. She thanked the Record and the Akashakarma that she had the foresight to leave a pack with a spare change of clothing in her car, and so that spare change of clothing had found its way into the room. Where on the eve of their adventure she had worn military stylings with flare. The spare set of clothing was thoroughly utilitarian.

A pair of plain black yoga pants, flared and loose below the knee covered her lower half, while a simple grey tanktop covered her torso. She had thoroughly eschewed the use of footwear, or socks since their arrival, her toes baring a gentle shade of mint green, which at this state was in lamentable condition. Mara herself had chipped most of it off in an attempt to keep her mind occupied, and her legs were now similar to Sera's days of neglect left a fine stubble of the palest blonde.

There was another area of course which now saw neglect, Mara's hair, or lack their off now showed signs of resurgence, pale blonde follicles now sprouted from her scalp, and now and again the others might note her running her fingers over that growth with an irritated look upon her face.

Mara is aware of the intruder in her space when she sat down upon the bed, squishing the springs and those pale green eyes turned to regard the Cultist as her legs slid over the side, the gaze travelling up, up..until it rested upon that beatific, if unorthodox beauty. The question for parley, or simply a desire for company is expressed and Mara's full lips purse into a thin line...but then she nods.

"Sure...come on down." She said patting the space beside her. "Whats up?"

Serafine

Sera could use some clippers too. Her own (partially) shaven skull is not cut so close as Mara's and probably needed to be clipped even before their venture to the warehouse. Now, the neglected is more noticeable. As is the fact that her black roots are dyed black. So looking like a blond with black roots is a sartorial choice she makes.

Look, she slides down the side of the bed with ease. Not the sort of physical ease the Akashic shows so easily, but a certain confidence born of native athleticism - more grace than strength in this. Sera's skinny as a rail. Still, the bed creaks beneath her weight because it is a creaky bed, and sighs upward as she slips down the side, hands braced on the cheap carpet. The creature folds up her knees and wraps her arms around them, lacing her hands in front of them. Clothes off, she has more tattoos, the most prominent of them follows the curve of her ribcage on her left flank, but the shape is mostly obscured by the line of her bra.

"We're not gonna be in here forever, you know," she starts off, quiet, studying Mara's features in profile. Her own gaze attentive in its way, lingering over the curve of Mara's skull before returning to her features. Sera seams her mouth, considering her next words carefully. "And then there's the matter of what to do when we do get out. Aside from watching our asses, of course.

"Before the techs came, the folks in that warehouse were having an argument about what to do with Leah Walker. And I suppose I was wondering what you thought was the right course?"

Mara Andrews

They could both use a spa-day, really the entire team could. Somewhere to relax and refresh, recoup and rebuild. Not that everyone present would take such an opportunity. It was hard to imagine Jake or Jim sitting down and having their nails done and their bodies pampered.

But one never did know these days. Still that thought made Mara smile unconsciously, those full lips widening briefly as she hunched over at let her elbows rest upon her knee's. Her neck craning gently from side to side as she loosened muscles that had become still from a lack of movement. Her eyes narrow as Serafine speaks her mind, her features taking on the caste of someone who had opened themselves to a deeper level of thought, a deep breath taken as she turned her head to regard Serafine directly.

"Good questions, definitely. I've given it some thought myself, and far as I can figure, as that door there hasn't been smashed down..i figure were in the clear. So the best thing we can do is just go back to the way things were. Work, live, sleep..whatever." Her shoulders hitched upward in a gentle shrug before she stretched upwards, her spine coming in line with the side of the bed once more.

"Leah Walker on the other hand...is a whooole different problem." She reached up with both hands, the fingers of each interlaced as she brought them slowly over the stubble of her skull before letting them rest behind her head. She held that position for a moment, before her nose crinkled, and she quickly dropped her arms back down, obviously smelling something less then pleasant.

"I don't know about the rest of them, but to be honest? I don't think we have the pure power to take on something as strong as what Leah did...we'd all end up just like the others. Which leaves us with three options...we either leave her the hell alone and hope someone bigger picks up the ball. We try to convert her to the light side of the force....or we waste her before she sees us coming." Her words hang like a dagger in the air at that last sentiment, the woman obviously not excluding any options from her thoughts.

"To be honest.." Her features becoming apprehensive as she spoke. "I don't know enough about whatever the hell she is to make a call on this. The safest route is avoidance, the surest route is death...but neither of those really sit well with me."

Serafine

Serafíne listens to Mara's answers quite closely and quietly. She is in profile, her own head lowers, long hair pulled back into a ponytail except where it has been shaved. Her posture is loose but there's a tension beneath it, a quickening to her frame and her reflective gaze as Mara shifts from the problems of potential notice by the Techs or the Fallen. When Sera glances up like that, a quiet look on her features, her eyes darkly reflected, her mouth still, a neutral line in her sharp face, she is all still, thoughtful.

Then, Leah Walker. Mara lays out what she considers the three options, and when she describes the third option waste her before she sees us coming, the Ecstatic looks away, all at once. Inhales a deep breath in a quick sharp flare of her nostrils and otherwise swallows her reaction as well as she is able. She is so expressive, concealing feelings on the subject is well-night impossible. If there were a pencil in her hand, she would have snapped it in thoughtless tension.

The reaction is so immediate, so fucking visceral, that Sera very nearly misses or misunderstands the Akashics last comment: that neither the safest route nor the surest route sit well with her. It's only while Sera is sitting there, breathing out slowly, in a faintly controlled rhythm that allows her to at least look back at Mara and count out each one underbreath that she realizes what Mara means. And decides that perhaps this isn't a lost cause yet.

"She's a sixteen year old girl. I saw her. I saw her aura. She didn't do that when she was being left alone. She did that after she was attacked, after the woman who helped her and healed her was murdered in front of her eyes, and when a bullet was coming for her head. She's scared and alone and she's a kid. That's what she is. Whatever's inside her she hasn't - "

Sera arrests the impassioned statement mid-sentence. She does not know what Leah Walker has or has not done by now with whatever's inside her, but her own position is out on the table, without qualm or apology.

"We're going to look for her. We can't leave her out there. If you don't want to get involved, or you aren't sure if you think we should help her, or whatever, I won't blame you for not getting involved. I'd still be there for you if shit goes bad on the other end of things. I wouldn't blame you, either.

"This feels dangerous, and it's not fair to force it on you. But if neither of those options appeals to you and you actively want to help her, we can work together."

Mara Andrews

Mara manages a laugh in that moment. Not because of Serafine's react to her words but simply because of one small statement.

"Feels dangerous?" She chuckles once more. "Sera, you have a mastery of the understatement." A wink followed to show the good humour in the words and just as swiftly as the levity arrived, it disappeared in a uncertain sigh.

"I'm down to help...I really am. But Sera, all the good intentions aside, we all have to be ready to acknowledge that this might be a lost cause. I sure as fucking hell hope it ain't, but...." And she leaves it hanging there, leaves the words unspoken, words that she obviously doesn't have the heart to say in this moment.

"So keep me in the loop alright? lemme know if theres anything I can do. I ain't about to back down from the challenge now after all." She spreads her lips in a confident smile, a sign of surety and purpose.

One can only hope they are up to the task.

Serafine

There's something - withheld about the singing glance that Serafíne shoots Mara in that moment. Her aura, her resonance, somehow banked beneath her skin The look is searching and perhaps troubled, but it ends with a little twist of her mouth in response to the other woman's confident smile.

"Cool," is what she says in the end, pushing herself up off the floor. The edge of a half-smile gracing her mouth as she leaves Mara's little section of the motel room. "I'll let you know."

Motel 6 + 6

Sera

Take the third right and then on 'til morning.

That's next, after. The ash coating their shoes and boots, the legs and cuffs of their jeans, accumulated like falling snow in the diamonds of a certain someone's fishnets is literal. Still there as they pile into the van, that moment of dissonance as they work out the logistics for meeting up again, since Mara drove herself.

They agree on a meeting point in an hour or two, someplace Else. Some anonymous exit in an outer ring of the city's suburbs, a cluster of strip malls and big box stores, fast food restaurants and brilliantly lit gas stations, the running lights of a constant waterfall of taillights and brights against the darkness. Dan drives through the darkened cityscape, taking turns whenever they present themselves, giving himself over to the maze of the city, the air in the truck humid and close and acrid with the scent of vomit. The rough, glottal sound of Jim puking re-awakens the dry heaves Sera fought down earlier. This time, she does not fight them. She bends over in the front seat, her head between her knees, and pukes up that stomachful of vodka into an airsick bag stolen from a long-ago flight. There's a stack of them in the glove compartment, because of course there is, and the paper is thick and waxed and heavy, but not really enough to block the scent, which permeates the air around them now. Her heaving is less deliberate, less ritual purging, more what-the-fuck-I-just-saw, and the first spasm relieves the worst of the pressure. Unlike Jim, when someone (Sid or Dan) thrusts a bottle of water in her direction, she takes it.

Dan slips a hand into her hair while she's throwing up. Just cups the back curve of her head, an acknowledgment of presence and awareness. Some insistence of comfort. Moves his thumb back and forth across the thick sweep of her French braid, and hums a bit to her, quietly while he drives.

Maybe half an hour into the drive, forty-five minutes, Serafíne digs her way through her pockets and the pockets in her little backpack, finds what she's looking for, and slips a little piece of perforated paper beneath her tongue. Jim's going to be working later; she'll help him if she can and it's best that they're on the same wavelength. He's been tripping balls all night, and so soon is she.

--

Their phones are all off, at Sid's insistence. So when they pick Mara up at that BP in I-Have-No-Idea-Where, Sera runs into the convenience store, fills up a reuseable shopping bag with supplies - bottles of water, gatorade and OJ that she knows she'll need later, snacks and snack and snacks: the sort that appeal to someone who's just getting hit by the speed buzz of LSD, with only the faintest hint of visual hallucinations smearing in around the edges of her peripheral vision. She also picks up two of the cheapest prepaid phones available in the place, pays cash and makes a brief call to the church on one of them.

Then hands that phone over to Sid, as Sera is unsure whether to throw it away or smash it or what. Let someone responsible figure that out. Someone for whom the wash of neon outside the windows of the van is not soon to begin merging into a malevolent smear of hothouse flowers that crack and crust and turn gray white and begin to dissolve into flakes that peel away and drift like snow in the air around them, but taste like ash in the back of her throat.

--

Mara collected, the van gassed up, they hit the road again. Sera always has cash - for cabs, for drinks, for drugs - but the van has a huge gas tank and the fill-up guzzles most of her ready cash and leaves her searching for the wallet of emergency funds tucked beneath the driver's seat to pay for their cheap hotel room that night.

Sometimes, the memories of the vision she shared with her fellow Seer shoulder their way through her hallucinating mind, swallow everything else - but Dan usually pulls her back here. Now: van and people and smoke and the curl of bile hanging in the air, the collapsed exhaustion of Jake's grief, where he's curled up in one of the bench seats.

He does it by singing, to/with her. Quiet, gravel-voiced but precise. When he hums it, the rising falling melody is all Beethoven. The Ode to Joy is so universal that the others might recognize it from the Ninth Symphony if they listen (and listen closely, his voice is quiet, his hum more suggestion than thing-itself). Sometimes, though, they take up the words, together in rough harmony. This is an old habit between them, they sing the song very, very quietly, like they are taking up some old conversation they've been having with the universe all this time, precise and sweet and raw. Except for the odd line here and there, where melody and language merge into such a note of raw expression that she feels the fucking vibration of it like a note struck so solidly that it both knots her in place and ties her into the womb of the world all around them, and there's her resonance: visceral and bright, ragged, fear and hope and sorrow and joy all scored together, and her Self laid open, raw to the all the pain and beauty of the fucking world.

I'm wide awake, it's mornin'.

 Sid


They agree upon a meeting place with an approximate time. Sid, quietly clinging to the strap of her bag, the furrow of her brow deeper than usual, manages to keep her head enough to tell them all to turn off their cell phones. Take out the batteries if they must. She doesn't know yet what the Ecstatics discovered in their vision, doesn't yet know just how deeply fucked they all will be if they're tracked and found, but she can tell it's bad.

Mara gets into her car and takes off and the others climb into the van, Dan behind the wheel, Sera beside him. Sid takes the first seat available after Jim, ends up sitting right beside him. Jake is the only one alone, but that's probably for the best right now, with his grief still so fresh and raw and terrible. It's one thing to expect the worst, to prepare for it, to assume that Shelby was never coming back. But without the certainty for knowing there's room for a little seed of hope to grow, a tiny little niggling thing that helps to keep a person afloat. Tonight that seed was crushed for the Consor. He needs a moment to attempt to come to terms with reality.

The van has hardly started when the sounds of retching fill the small enclosed space. Beside her, Jim buries his face in the closest thing he can find. Sid startles at the sound, leans her upper body a little away from him, eyes darting up down up down, from what she can see of his face to the liquid sag of the bag he's found fill with the contents of his stomach. Drawing in a deep breath, closing her eyes and steeling herself against the smell of bile, she lifts her left hand. It hovers above the curve of Jim's spine a moment before slowly, cautiously lowering down. She can feel the bumps of vertebrae against her palm, can feel the spasms of his back with each retch. Jim can feel the warmth of Sid's hand through the fabric of his shirt, the heat of it seeping deep into his skin, relaxing the muscles. Slowly, Sid slides her hand up his back, then down, the movements awkward, then slowly smoothing out to something more natural. Leaning forward herself, she rests her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, her face turned away to watch out the window as they drive and drive and drive.

===

Later, at the meeting place on the fringes, Sid collects the bags of waste, taking them from hands or picking them up from the floor. Without word or explanation, she goes into the convenience store along with Sera, but once inside beelines for the restrooms, backing up against the door and pushing her way inside. When she emerges a few minutes later her hands are empty (and freshly washed), the former contents of Sera's and Jim's stomachs fed to the city's sewage system.

Sera hands her a prepaid phone, and for a moment Sid merely blinks at her, confused, before accepting it. She has two calls of her own to make, the first to her housemate, letting him know she lost her phone but won't be home tonight and no, she doesn't really want to talk about it right now. Later, maybe. The second call is to her work, letting them know that she feels terrible and she doesn't think she'll be feeling any better by morning, so someone will need to take her shift. When she's finished she holds the phone out to the others, offering it in case someone else needs to make similar calls before dismantling the device and throwing a couple pieces into the nearby trash bin. She keeps the battery, because you just never know.

Back in the van Sid is quiet as ever. Her hands stay on the bag she has tucked in her lap, one wrapped over the other, which is clutching a fold of cloth. Her spine is curved forward, the slope of her shoulders is relaxed as she watches the lights streak past the darkened windows.

Jim

  The magi in his vicinity – maybe even the consors – can feel the weaving that is happening in the backseat as the van turns down the highways and byways of Denver. The sound of his stomach grumbling in protest seems to solidify, the urge of his being to be filled and sustained radiating outwards as they drive. Jim? Jim is silent. He focuses on an unforeseen destination. He focuses on his own want. Maybe a part of him focuses on the heat from Sid's hand, stirring deeper passions. And then he transcends outward to the wake of urges this creates, a moving ward that reaches out to play with the minds of those that might follow them.

Drawing law enforcement to stop, take a moment, and grab a cliche donut or some fast food. Maybe pull over and take a nap in one of the speed traps until their radios come alive. The hounds that would be hot on their trail, he hopes, will be drawn to instead indulge their baser instincts. Gluttony. Sloth. Maybe even lust, if there is a nearby girl or boyfriend to spend an unscheduled 'cigarette break.' And not bring their wrath down upon the magi he has surrounded himself with.

That same awareness that allows those who sit about him in the car to feel his weaving into the Tapestry, the echoes of his avatar laden with an addled resonance, might also sense an emotion on his face when it finally rises. That contortion, the shamed turn of his shoulders coupled with it, is that of guilt. He is not so much fearful for himself, but for those that surround him. The ones he shares a ride with, the one that had come to offer her own protection – Mara. The one who pats his back – Sid. The consors that were dragged into this.

Despite his apparent discomfort, again curling up as pangs and cramps grip his inside – his face is reddened with pinpoints of blood beneath its surface from engorged pores and his eyes shot red with the stuff – it's not until the hotel that Jim eats. Drinks. Whatever snacks are there he devours. The effects of the drugs have faded. But not for long.

Another dose spreading across his tongue. Another drop from the iodine-brown vial he pulls from his pocket. This one, this indulgence of vie, not hidden in the bathroom like before they'd headed out to the warehouse. He draws the motel curtains. He turns up the sputtering little air conditioning unit built into the lower wall, and sits across from it on the ground as he pulls his knees to his chest.

He shuts his eyes. Turns on. Tunes in. Drops away from his surroundings.

And begins another weaving as the earlier one fades away. One with a new purpose. One with new and – when he is finished – impressive strength.

When he is finished, every corner of the place is saturated with his resonance. His stoicism lends the cracked walls and fading paint the reassuring heft of a fortress. To the undisciplined? His addled and erratic attentions – well, it's hard to not cycle through the channels on the television, and maybe forget what task you're in the middle of beginning. And the psychedelic nature of his unhinged psyche will no doubt make for interesting daydreams and tinged REM sleep.

When Jim is finished his head is bobbing with fatigue. And beneath the simple lack of rest is a deeper tiredness. He'd given more than a bit of himself over the course of the night. The willwork had been a great feat, the crafting palpable in its strength to all within the ward, but it had also been a great labor.

He is finished in more ways than one. He pulls himself onto one of the beds. He pulls a pillow under his head, sweat-soaked fabric of his shirt clinging to him. He manages to give Jake a final glance, a final appraisal, before looking to Serafine.

"Can you? Can... Can you tell them what we saw." Again his words nearly disjointed. His eyes visibly heavy before they close. Whether or not he has drifted off to sleep is anyone's guess. His breathing is deep and steady.

Sera

  Dan rents the hotel room, pays cash, brings back the keys. Yes, actual keys on plastic diamonds inserted into locks to admit the patrons into the room. An old-fashioned motel that long-since lost its franchise for failing to live up to the lax standards of some low-end chain targeting itself to strapped tourists and unexpected travelers, and is now instead directly marketed toward truckers and prostitutes of every variety.

While they’re exiting the van, Dan hits the glovebox firmly and watches it open. Takes in a breath, glances over his shoulder at the others there, then pulls out two handguns, checking the clips and assuring himself that the safeties are on. They make him nervous, he can't hide that, but he knows the basics. His voice is drawn, quiet.

“Hey,” to Sid as she’s going inside. “ – do you know how to use one of these?” Offering it to her as casually as he can. She does not; he nods. Dan makes asks the same question of Mara – can she use one of these? If she says yes, he offers her one. Sid and Mara are the only ones he queries. Sera is fucked up. Jim is Working. Jake is -

- well, he should not have a weapon close to hand.

--

Inside the hotel room, Sera sinks down against the wall between the a/c and the door, her spine straight and upright, legs bent at the knees, elbows resting on her thighs. She looks thoroughly disconnected from the world and these levels of reality, but the truth is she’s following the weaving Jim performs on some altered level, feeling the cage he builds around them with his resonance, breathing in the shifting patterns as he warps them to form the powerful wards he builds. No: not just breathing them in. She sees them pulled like taffy from the raw stuff of the universe, weaving them into braids, braiding them into weaves, patterning them into the walls and the ceiling, changing and charged and dark and raw. She has not seen work like this in -

- well. Quite literally, she could not say.

--

This is the second time Serafíne has told this story tonight. The first time, she muttered it in five addled and virtually inchoate sentences into a cheap prepaid phone in the brilliantly lit parking lot of a BP filling station. The coronal flare of headlights in her peripheral vision like the birth of galaxies, her awareness all smeary-bright, her heartbeat in time with the steady pulse of the universe. Just so - exquisite - all the cross-sections of awareness and the way they converge, the cage and mobile ward Jim was building around that van with the raw stuff of his own desires, every fucking level of them.

--

Now it is later. Now always becomes later, except when you play with Time. Then now can become both later and yesterday, without discrimination. Sera is still on the floor; the beds are left for others. The reflected resonance of the Disciple's wards is creeping into her spine, beneath her skin. That's why she's sitting up so straight, her head canted aslant, forehead against the doorjam, listening to the work of the walls. Which are living with Jim's energy. The desire for a cigarette, if only for the familiar movement of her hands, the crackle of the tobacco in her lungs, is like a lozenge in her throat. But - oh, stoic (hah), infected by that sensation, lingering in it like a strange dream, wallowing in it the way she might revel in the space she has in a cool, clear, empty porcelain bathtub, she resists. Takes a sort of pleasure in that resistance and does so half-a-dozen times without realizing she has done it before.

So, see. Jim asks her to tell the others what they saw, and she is summoned back to now-or-later, and looks at him, this brief and focused survey that drops away to her guitarist. Dan is seated on the edge of the bed, watching over Jake. Watching over Sera, for that matter. Though from a bit more of a distance. He has put the weapons he retrieved from the car away, tucked them into the bedside table with the Gideon Bible and the 1987 Greater Denver Area Yellow Pages, careful to assure himself that the safeties were thumbed on. As Sera starts to speak, he retrieves Sera's leather-bound folio, opens it to the next blank page, which is the first one after her dream as she's written nothing all week, and takes notes. The names, particularly.

"We saw nothing of whomever worked the illusion," Serafíne's voice is always low, more rough and raw tonight than it often is, but it still has a certain power to it. With Jim's wards, the pulse of his resonance surrounding them, it might seem somehow disconnected from the creature seated beside the door, who is now, while she speaks, slowly pulling the piecework of her French braid down, alive to the feel of her hair between her fingers. Perhaps to some of them the sound of her voice floats in a susurrant stream, like mist drifting through some half-deserted forest, the broad, protective trunks of massive trees the stoic walls caging them in, while strange, unruly night-sounds, that undeniable sense of disorientation and dissociation woven into Jim's working, too play havoc with their senses.

" - though there was a piece of memory sliced out of the timestream. Erased, or warded from our seeing." A thought arises and she turns her head, finds and focuses, vaguely, on Jim's shadow on the far bed. "If the illusion was the Work of the mirrorshades, why would they have bothered to erase themselves from the moment?"

Her question is not rhetorical, and has just occurred to her, but it is a question for later and now is now and also then, and she is telling the story of when. So she returns to it.

"We saw the girl from my dream. The one who asked for my help."

Something of the girl's reflected, remembered confusion and fear insinuates itself into Sera's voice. It is not merely empathy. Closer to a spasm of the sympathetic nervous system. No matter. It passes. Slips back into the stream of consciousness.

"Her name is Leah Walker and she is sixteen years old."

"Shelby and a man named Will rescued Leah from," a flexion of her neck, a movement of her jaw, "the mirrorshades. She was unconscious when they brought her back to the warehouse and they warded themselves in, and let her sleep. They spent a day watching over her by themselves."

"That night, the rest of their cabal found Shelby and Will. Shelby let them in, and they crowded into the warehouse arguing about the rescue and Leah Walker's fate. A man named Jai had instructed Shelby to leave Leah to the technocrats, but Shelby refused. And so, this split between them. This dissension.

"Shelby said, she could not leave Leah. The mirrorshades were going to dissect the girl, splay her open, study her and needle her and break her down into her constituent parts, and use her as bait to catch," a soft, sharp breath. Withheld and raw, " - the others."

"Jai wanted to kill Leah. He said," Something of the Euthanatos' remembered passion, his fury, his righteous power, infects the remembered words. "She is Widderslainte. She is Tamas gone mad."

"No." This is Shelby, in response. An abrupt, calm cessation. Steady certainty. The other half of the echoed argument cool as a hand on a fevered brow. "She is a child. Her name is Leah Walker and she is sixteen and she is terrified and she is a child, and fate can be changed.

"So they argued."

--

"That's when the Technocrats arrived." Sera is far away now, her heart beating faster. The fight vivid in her mind and body; her spine though, against the walls and those stoic wards holds her upright even as her throat constricts around the words, makes them rougher, ragged with violent sensory overload from the memories. "The other six, who make twelve.

"Leah was asleep as the fight exploded around her, but she lurched away when she was wounded. She was crying, mad with pain and fear."

Quiet.

The tale returns to, "Shelby was pinned beneath one of the Technocrats, in desperate straits. But she Worked a healing on Leah from across the room, before the woman attacking her sunk a knife into her heart. And her blood - "

Sera's hands are tucked beneath her legs. She looks so relaxed, so tuned in, so dropped out, but beneath her knees her hands are fists, nails digging into the palms, the punctuate clarity of pain leashing her focus to the immediate and physical, to the spare-bones facts she seeks to relate. When the nails are not enough, her grip shifts. Fingers pushing deeply through maze of flexor tendons in the inner wrist, into the distal radial-ulnar joint.

"A man leveled a gun at Leah. He had and took a clear shot, but in that moment, something in Leah Awakened. Virulent and dark and powerful - quiescent before and quiescent after - but so, so strong in that moment.

"The bullet froze, mid-air, and crumbled to ash.

"And then the gun. And then the man who fired it. And then the rest.

"Flesh and blood and bone. Bricks and mortar and stone."

When they walked through the warehouse, they were walking through a crematorium.

--

"And just as abruptly, whatever awoke in Leah Walker went quiet. Disappeared. Evaporated. Burrowed its fucking," sudden, unleashed vehemence. Venom. " - way back inside her, and left her standing in the ruins.

"And she was a sixteen year old girl, again. And she screamed.

"And she ran, away."

Mara

Mara had expected many things this evening, had been prepared for violence, for pain, perhaps even death [or so she believed] fear, though not something unexpected was also not fully prepared for. Not her own fear, but the fear that spilled from the others, the intense need to leave, to flee, to go to ground. She had fled with them, taking her car and doing as she was told, driving in a nearly endless loop which gave her all the time in the world to think, but no time at all to calm, to reflect.

She had been at the rendezvous when the others arrived, her neck craning to the side to ensure that it was them and not someone else, one might wonder how long she had been waiting there leaning against her little old accent in the darkness of the night, her form illuminated only by the headlights of the van and the distant and stark light of the street lamps which seemed to watch them, an expectant gaze that seemed to imply that there were eyes everywhere, and that there was nowhere to hide.

Her posture as she stepped to the van and listened to the plan was one of calm, an almost aloofness that should not have been possible given the reaction the others were having. But in her face all her fears were visible, the tight lines of muscle and sinew drawn taught with worry and fear, lips tugging this way and that in apprehension, eyes wide and scanning the darkness like a small creature praying and hoping that they have managed to outrun or outsmart a predator who's only desire was to end them.

She followed them of course, there was safety in numbers as the old saying said and Mara was not going to turn away from them in this moment. She followed in her car, refusing to leave it behind, and when they reached the motel she parked it on the other side of the lot well away from the other vehicle, perhaps it would not matter, or perhaps it would be their ace in the hole should they need to flee.

It is here as she stepped quickly towards the room, her arms wrapped around her, her head lower then any had seen previous that Dan approaches her, discreetly offering her the cold heavy weight of iron. She looked at it like it was something venomous and insidious and she simply shook her head. "I don't know the first thing about guns." She said as she turned away and strode into the room, her jacket dumped on a bed as she paced the room, nervous energy rolling off her like a tide.

This behaviour continued as Jim began his weaving and casting forming a safety net about them. It continued as Sid entered, as Serafine slid to the floor and played with her hair, and as the cultist began to tell the tale gleaned from the strands of time itself Mara continued her inexorable circuit, seeking clarity through motion...or perhaps simply a last ditch effort to avoid the full brunt of her thoughts.

It is only upon the completion of the story that Mara's feet still her movements, the woman looking around the room at her fellow magi and consor's. She bit her lip nervously, the muscles in her face twitching as her eyes seemed to water. She turned then and strode towards the washroom.

"I'll be in the shower."  

Sid

The first night in the motel room was one of the hardest for Sid. She'd curled up in the room's only "comfortable" living chair, an ugly thing of sturdy orange and yellow cloth that was anything but comfortable, and tried and failed to sleep. Some time in the night she rose, wanting to get some air, but was stopped at the door. The quiet conversation with one and then both of the awakened Ecstatics lasted into the small hours of the morning, when Sera rose to make a bed of the tub and Jim rolled over for more sleep. Sid curled back up in her chair, and her rest was a little better, but still terrible.

The next day was long. Six people stuck in a room together with nothing but snack foods and whatever entertainment could be found on basic cable. Or whatever Jim or Sera had at their disposal. Sid sat on the floor by the door again; somehow the nearness alleviated the claustrophobia that rose and fell in waves, with each crest rising a little lower than the one before. She spent most of the day writing in a notebook she kept in her bag. Every inch of the pages, in, around, and above the blue college-rule lines, was covered in her neat handwriting. Some pages have drawings, tidy little diagrams or detailed profiles of her room-mates done in miniature. Sometimes exhaustion overwhelms her and she dozes, pen falling one way, notebook dropping in her lap as her arms go slack.

Friday night, desperate for an hour, maybe two (if she's lucky) of uninterrupted sleep, Sid caves to Jim's simple, "There's room," something she might not have done if he hadn't pulled the covers aside a little, making room. She collapses into it, her long red hair fanning out over too-thin pillow, still wearing her jeans and t-shirt from the day before. Curling onto her side, she scoots as close to the edge as possible, so close that if she rolls even a little in that direction she'll tumble right off. It's there that she hopes she'll stay through the next few hours, but she doesn't. At some point she wakes to the warm closeness of another body, her arm draped over their torso, her head nestled in the crook of a shoulder. It's Jim, of course, his chest rising and falling beneath her elbow with each breath. Sid pushes herself up onto her elbow, squints down into a face that may or may not be awake.

Saturday night it's back to the chair.

Which brings us to Sunday, a day when some of them may be on their last nerve with each other. Too many days in close quarters with strong personalities. Not to mention by now their food stores are either empty or close to it. Sid has to make another phone call to her work. They all heard it, hear her tell them again that she can't come in, and they hear her stammered side of the conversation that consists mostly of Ahs, Uhs, and Buts, and ends with her setting the motel phone handset quietly back on its base.

For a moment she just sits there on the edge of one of the beds, chewing on her thumbnail. When her hand drops down, she looks up. At Sera, at Mara, at Jake and Dan, and finally at Jim. "I want to go. I want to leave," she repeats, her brow furrowing, her voice low yet firm. "I can't help you find Leah from here. So...so I'm going," she says, rising. She has to get her socks and shoes on, gather up her belongings, which is exactly what she sets about doing.

Sera

They're there a few days. In that cheap motel room in Nowheresville. Six people in a single motel room with one shower and two beds and one chair and one television (which Serafíne turns off, compulsively, whenever it is left one with no one watching it. She refuses to subject herself to the white noise of it; does not even think about it, makes no mention of the habit, and would not herself understand why. But listen: institutional memory, this) and one microfridge. Fridge and microwave bolted together.

They are not the only group of six in one motel room, especially not in a place as cheap and rundown as this, which advertises weekly rates and offers space not just to truckers and prostitutes and low-end salespeople on the road, but to migrants of all sorts. They do not go outside, but sometimes, at a certain hour of the day, they can hear children outside. A few of the rooms are flanked by cheap children's toys. Second-hand bigwheels and faded Lil Tykes slides, the plastic cracked and weathered by the sun.

Dan and Sera have been on the road before. In that fucking convenience store, they picked up cheap, calorie dense food that can sustain them. Starving artist stuff. Ramen and bread and peanut butter, booze and chips and hot pockets. Microwave popcorn, and some fruit. A sack of apples and a basket of strawberries. For the strawberries, Sera is grateful beyond words. But this stuff won't last long. Not with six mouths to feed, and by the time Sid is finished hiding out, their larder is getting attenuated.

The first night Sera sleeps, when she finally sleeps, in the fucking bathtub. It is still damp from Mara's shower, but she doesn't care. Wake me if someone wants a shower, she said, but if they try she sleeps like a stone. It requires work to wake her up, and if they're tentative, if it is Sid, for god's sake, who's trying, Dan will give her a hand, shake Sera physically awake. Sera swims to consciousness like a deep sea diver returning too fast from pressurized depths.

And she sleeps like the dead.

She's fine, Dan'll say, if asked. She's always been like this.

---

The only instrument in the van was an old acoustic guitar. So, Sera and Dan share that out between them when people are awake and in need of distraction. Sera's fine with the guitar, but Dan - he's really good. He sits propped up against the wall, eyes closed in concentration, feeling the music as it emerges from the vibrating strings. They play songs by Bob Dylan, Will Oldham, Joni Mitchell, PJ Harvey, The Pogues, and they sing them together in rough and easy harmony. They play Cool as Kim Deal by the Dandy Warhols, and that gets Sera on the subject of Kim and Kelley Deal and then she spends like an hour in this recursive loop, fixated on the bass line from the Breeders' Cannonball, trying to figure out why the fuck that thing is so awesome.

There's nothing to do but talk. Or sleep, or get fucked up. So Sera does all three.

She asks Mara where she's from and what she does, and my god if Sera finds out that Mara is a contortionist she wants to see that, right fucking now. She will be astonished and delighted and demand that Mara show her how to do that and then falls on her ass eleventy million times attempting to follow the Akashic's instructions and laughs it off every time.

She asks Jim what was his first trip and when and where and was it before? he opened his eyes. Needles him for more Ghandi quotes and Hunter S. Thompson quotes and any other quotes he wants to quote at her. She takes requests, for music, and claims to know everything everyone asks for but is not always correct, ends up humming mistaken lyrics into being.

She tells them that she and Dan came here by way of Raleigh-Durham and Brooklyn before that. She talks about North Carolina quite a bit, Brooklyn very little, and whatever came before Brooklyn not-at-all. Tells them stories about parties and festivals and bars and happenings she's been to and the people she's met there. About some amazing fucking guy who carves these fucking - animal totem statues out of wood logs with chainsaw. Just tell him what animal you want and he goes town. He sells them on the side of this random road way back in the hills.

Serafíne makes a spectacle of herself whenever distraction is necessary, but not of Sid. Never of Sid. The shy redhead is given space, to be or breathe or participate in the conversation when and where she will. She is not put on display. And someone always has an eye on Jake. Sera or Dan or Jim. The handoffs are natural and thoughtless. When Sera's there, she sits physically close to the kid, and is mostly quiet. Which is astonishing considering how much she can talk when she wants to talk.

About this show one night - or this chick who or - that fucking art professor - or that redneck bar or the time she was tripping and it was sunset and it was June and they were in western North Carolina sitting on this ridgetop and the hills were wreathed with mist and the sky was on fire, but fading, and then, and then - the fireflies started to come out, one by one by one, and it was like watching stars mating and galaxies being born and comets searing through the darkness, searching for home.

--

When Sid announces that she's ready to go, Sera glances toward Jim, her blue eyes flickering over his features. Gauging whether he thinks the coast is clear. Whether they've shielded themselves long enough. Truth is, she's ready to go, too. But Sera, she awaits Jim's word.

 Jim

The press of a body that comes that Friday night stirs only Jim's unconscious. Though the word, only, belies just how much of Jim that entails.

When Sid is looking down at his face his eyes stay shut, his breathing remains subdued by the steady tidal lapping of good (necessary) sleep. And though his body doesn't move much it does seem like... Well, maybe it does the same thing that had gotten her on the bed and left her eventually clinging to him. His muscles and bones and being seems drawn to her. To another living being that is the same in important ways and (just as importantly) different in ways that intrigue him.

Maybe it's how two Cheerios feel in a bowl of milk. Sticking together when a spoon is coming to eat them.

Jim tries and mostly manages to keep this barely-voluntary bonding experience as bearable as possible. The guitar helps. The junk food helps. The smell doesn't. The door and walls don't for some of them. For Jim it's the children outside playing, that sound is what both does and doesn't make it easy. When they do Jim sometimes claws his way to the window, glancing at them through the thin slits of curtains. Watches them with an awe and a curiosity and like it's the best television show he's ever seen – the TV stays off, so his basis for comparison may be limited, but his basis for comparison is also real life outside a digital fishbowl, so there's that.

The questions help the most. And the stories. Sleepaway camp for wayward willworkers and deviants. Jim's first time was on a train to a museum. He never got off the train. He grew up in...

Wait for it...

Cherry Hills Village. He went to school at the University of Denver. Has a degree.

What did he study?

Botany. Biochemistry. Cognitive neuroscience. He rattles them off like he shouldn't stop at one, just like he did the day he skipped from the first to the next.

“What is this a job interview?”

A day passes. A second. He is able to withstand the time with all these social and mental and observational exercises. His spirits build.

Sometimes he's meditating. Sometimes he's writing in his own little book with little words and ideas of varying size and impact. Sometimes he transitions fluidly between one and the other.

But when Sid says she wants to leave, he nods, and almost looks uncomfortable with Sera looking at him for an answer. "Watch your back. I'll be watching it too."

And with that, though the spell remains, the curse of it is lifted by Sid's gumption and Jim's word. He still doesn't seem thrilled with that last part. Heap responsibility on an Ecstatic... Well, he's the one who had done that. But tell him what it is. Make him aware of it. And see how he reacts.

Jim reacts by getting up to take a piss.  

Sid


Perhaps encouraged by the storytelling of the others, Sid opened up a bit about her own past. She'd tell them a little about Chicago, which doesn't sound much different from what they've seen of her Denver experience, except that in Chicago there was a man. When that went south she went west until she couldn't go west anymore, ending up here. Before that? She doesn't remember, she says.

The time spent in the room isn't all bad. Sid even almost laughs a little when Sera tries and fails to contort her body like Mara. Though clearly interested in Jim's schooling, his courses of study, she doesn't pry. Prying leads to reciprocal questions, and Sid is still reluctant to open up about some areas of her life.

When Sunday rolls around and events occur that tell the orphan enough is enough, that's all it is. Sera looks to Jim after Sid's quiet outburst, but Sid doesn't wait. When he speaks, though, she stops in the middle of tying on her scuffed-to-hell sneakers, her eyes seeking him out across the room before dropping with a small nod.

Maybe others are moving now, gathering up their belongings in preparation of their own departure. Maybe they don't. Sid doesn't immediately beeline for the door once she's got her shoes and socks on, her bag slung over her shoulder. Digging through her bag for something, she stops in front of Jake, holding out her hand. Nestled in her upward facing palm is one of her test tubes, small and plastic and filled with grey ash from the warehouse. She doesn't need it, probably doesn't need any of them. It's unlikely she'll find out anything the Ecstatics didn't already discover in their shared vision, but she'll keep the other two just in case. If nothing else, they'll help her with her understanding of non-living matter. But this one...this one she can part with.

"So you can say goodbye. On your terms."

If he looks up at her, meets her dark eyes behind the lenses of her glasses, Sid meets it for a few seconds before her gaze shifts to his nose and then drops entirely. In those seconds, though, the consor would see understanding and empathy. The quiet, timid redhead knows a thing or two about closure. If he accepts it, she hands it over carefully, reverently. If not, she sets it down on top of the microwave/fridge combo, just in case he changes his mind.

And so ends Sid Rhodes' time in the stasis of the motel room.


Howl ST

It was difficult to know what to expect from the grieving consor when they arrived at the motel. A person in his state could be capable of anything. It was probably wise that Serafine thought to keep a close eye on him.

The first night, Jake didn't sleep. He and Sid kept silent company, neither making any attempt to engage the other while the night's long hours drifted by. It was debatable whether Jake even registered the passing time, or the discomfort of his body in its curled position against the wall. He hadn't wanted to take a spot on the bed, or anywhere that may have brought him in proximity of a warm body. Instead he'd taken up residence on the floor near the window, close enough to the A/C unit that when it hummed to life he could close his eyes and tune out all the other sounds. (White noise.)

The next morning he took a shower. When he came out, he crawled into the bed that Jim had occupied the night before and went to sleep.

He didn't get up again until about 7:00pm, at which point he finally seemed to remember that he was alive and needed to eat. Through all this, he barely spoke to the others, but there was a sense that something about the young man had changed. The desperate tension had lifted itself from his frame, leaving him tired and grieving - but calm.

The next day he started talking again. Not much. Mostly he watched and listened while the others found ways to pass the time. But once or twice he allowed himself to be engaged. It started while Dan and Serafine were taking song requests. Near the end, when the pair were winding down, Jake shifted on his chair and said, "Can I play one?"

When Dan handed over the guitar, the consor settled the instrument in his lap. He played a couple of chords to warm up, then after a beat of silence began to play Jeff Buckley's Opened Once.

In the half light, where we both stand
in the half light you saw me as I am
I am the railroad track abandoned
with the sunset forgetting I ever happened

The consor wasn't a professional musician like Dan and Serafine, but he played well and he had a good voice. If anyone asked him why he'd wanted to play that song, he'd say it was because it was one of Shelby's favorites.

After that, Jake spent a lot of time watching the children out the window. At one point, a couple of kids rode past on skateboards, and Jake grinned and said that one of them had a good kickflip. At some point, they'd find out that this was what Jake did for a living - that he was a professional skateboarder, and that he'd met Shelby when she'd come by to take some pictures at the skate park.

Shelby was a photographer. And a singer.

So time passed. And eventually the day came when the group simply couldn't take being in the same room together any longer. As they were getting ready to go, Sid approached Jake and offered him the vial of ashes.

Jake looked at it for a long moment. The truth was, none of them had any way of knowing whose ashes were inside of it - or if any of it was even human. But it was all that remained of Shelby, and real or symbolic, the offer meant something. Jake nodded and took the vial, tucking it gently into the pocket of his jacket. "Thank you."

Eventually they all piled into the van (all but Mara, who took her own car,) and drove away. Drove home.

And when they dropped Jake off at his apartment, there was a sense that, despite everything, he was probably going to pull through.  

Ashes to Ashes [12]

Jim Thompson

Jim makes a phone call to the first number he can remember by memory, making small talk before it leads to the next, opening door after door that had been shut since his incarceration. Old friends. Old dealers. The heads and lookouts for street crews. Even a few of his old clientele, especially those in the area of the warehouse. His questions are simple, the topics innocuous. Looking for an old friend who might've disappeared in the area. Maybe people coming and going nearby. Anything funky? Activity from the pigs? And even simpler information, like the lay of the land, friendly faces he might encounter in the surrounding few blocks, etc.

[ Manipulation + Streetwise + Influence: Criminal & Street. Specialty: Criminal Mind. ]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 2

Jim Thompson

Once he's through, he takes a few moments for the simple things in life. Or the simplest. The back of his eyelids drop, his legs pulled into a lotus of bone and sinew, hands resting just at the edge of his thighs and his back straight as an arrow. Muscles relax, breathing steadies, and blood begins to rush and flow in a slower and more efficient manner as he mulls over the visions - in fact, as he tries to recreate what Serafine had so painstakingly recreated in her illuminating retelling. Of the prophesy. Of the phoenix. Of the man and the girl, and of ashes and dust. It ties to that part of him that brushed Shelby's destiny, brushed her connection to Jake, resonating through him as he tries to gain insight and epiphany as to what it all might mean.

[ Intelligence + Meditation. Specialties: Outside the Box & Transcendental. Difficulty 8. ]

Dice: 8 d10 TN8 (1, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 7, 8, 10) ( fail ) Re-rolls: 1

Sid Rhodes

[claustrophobia]

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

Jim Thompson

[ Re-rolling at difficulty of 9 and crossing my fingers and toes. Dropping a WP. ]

Dice: 8 d10 TN9 (1, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1 [WP]

Serfine

We have a van. Promised Sera, and so they do. A Ford conversion van, rather battered. No one has ever gone through with the promise/threat to get it repainted and then airbrushed in grand 1970s style with a giant panther eating a 'gator and vomiting up a phoenix, which is probably for the best. Leaves the thing slightly less conspicuous.

The we of the equation might be vaguely familiar to Sid and Mara when he shows up in the driver's seat. Which is likely a relief for Sid, even if he is a stranger. At least Serafíne, who has never been sober in her presence, does not intend to drive. Sera introduces the driver as Dan-he's-cool, and the two women will recognize him, perhaps, as the tall, skinny, beared blond guitarist from the other night. He's pretty quiet, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt showing the Zombie Food Pyramid, and a knit beanie never mind the temperature.

The van smells of cigarettes and vaguely of pot. There are seats, and bits of their gear. Stray cabling and the odd pick, empty bottles rolling around mysteriously beneath the seats. Travel brochures, the sort one picks up from the cheapest hotels, advertising the world's largest ball of string.

Sera's in the front seat and slips out when they arrive. Earbuds from her iPhone in her ear, she's blissing out to the music, feeling it physically enough that her fingers twitch with the urge toward the chords of whatever it is she's listening to.

[Mind Shield Dif 1 + 3 (coincidental)] 4-1 for taking time, lowest dif possible is 3.

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (1, 6) ( fail )

Serfine

(Extending: +1 difficulty.)

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (4, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Mara

Mara had done her very brief reconnoitre, and described the building as best as she could to the others, it was old, it was run down, and the only security she'd seen were the bars on the windows and the bolt on the door, but then she hadn't cast magic or gone inside....best not to tip ones hand after all. So the following day they arrive at the appointed time, Mara bright eyed and ready for a tussle.

Dressed in a pair of snug fitting combat pants, a simple black T-shirt and her signature red jacket and her normal everyday hiking boots, Mara was as functional over fashion as she could manage, at least for the moment.

Her method of arrival might surprise some, instead of walking or getting a ride the Akashic arrived in an old but serviceable hyundai Accent. The old machine was clean and tidy, and oddly minimalistic for a woman who seemed flashy and bombastic..oh contrasts.

[Mind Trap]

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

Mara

[Extended -1 for time taken]

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (2, 3) ( fail )

Mara

[Extended -1 for time -1 for quint]

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Mara

[One last time!]

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

Jim Thompson

His calls, his meditation, his care taking and near-coddling of Jake had all melted away by the time they made their way to the van. Right around the time he'd disappeared into the bathroom, under the guise of hitting the potty before they hit the road.

Despite the crowded nature of six living breathing twenty-somethings crammed into the back of the van until the time of their arrival, Jim still manages to find room, legs sprawled out and slouched into one of the windows, a seat belt pulled on if possible. Maybe he'd even managed to maneuver himself so that he's sitting near Sid, though his head is rested against the cold and smooth surface of the nearest window.

His attention is settled even further outward. He watches the city streets as they drift pass and the near their destination. He doesn't smell drunk. Doesn't smell high - at least not from the skunk-must of marijuana. But that doesn't mean his toxicity isn't up.

He seems... Strangely attuned. And oddly quiet, in a way that Sid might find inconsistent with their past two encounters. A satellite dish focusing the energies of the universe. Out of his own body. It's in a way that's different from what he experienced Or at least, trying to reach out to do so.

[ Coincidental. Mind 1, Correspondence 1, Prime 1. Taking his time. Specialty focus for dropping a tab... Difficulty is 3 for the first round. Blowing another WP. Down to 5. Need 4 successes overall. ]

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

Jim Thompson

[ Extending at +1 difficulty. ]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 4, 6) ( success x 1 )

Entropy

They did everything they could to prepare for the investigation, unknowing as they were as to what they might find. Between Serafine's dream, Jim's scrying, Jake's information, Mara's recon and Sid's online and telephone investigating, a rough picture was sketched, and the five of them drove to West 12th Ave along with Serafine's Consor bandmate. Along the way, Jake was silent and anxious, rubbing his thumb down the center of his palm as though he'd found a bit of dirt that he couldn't manage to scrape from his skin.

It wasn't long before they arrived on the right road and found a place to park their vehicles a safe distance from the warehouse. Looking down the street, they could see other nondescript warehouses and quasi-industrial buildings, as well as a few low-end retail shops (they'd passed an ammunition store on the way.) As the Harrison property came into view, the others would see that it was as Mara had described: an old brick building with a faded logo for Merial Moving Company on the front. The doors and windows were barred and locked, though these protections were old and marked with rust. Other than that, there did not at first glance appear to be any security in place. From all appearances, it was an old, unused, derelict building.

It was late enough that the nearby shops had closed up for the night. A few cars still lined the street, but none within a few lots of the old warehouse. The sky was dimmed as the sun lowered in the horizon. There were no street-lights. Only large power-lines lining either side of the road.

Sid Rhodes

Sid arrives at the drop zone a little later than agreed upon. She'd debated coming on this expedition, had thought about asking one of the others, Jim probably since she sorta almost kinda feels like she could maybe start to trust him. Maybe. Just a little. But leaving the gathering of samples to someone untrained could lead to contaminations that could through off whatever things she hopes to discover, and she simply can't have that.

So, at the last minute, she crammed things (plastic test tubes, a handful of latex gloves, cotton swabs, and a few other miscellaneous items purchased with the absolute last of her last paycheck) into her bag, twisting her hair at the nape of her neck as she rushed out to her truck, holding the mess in place with a little elastic band. The rest of her appearance doesn't differ much from the norm. Faded old jeans, crummy old black sneakers, a dark blue tee that once had some sort of screened on image that has become completely unrecognizable over time.

By the time she arrives people are already loading into the van and Mara's car. Sid drops from the cab of her truck and hurries over only to stop dead in her tracks a moment. She stares at the van, at someone's back as they get in and claim a seat, and she frowns. Not the small, vaguely worried expression that is her habit, but something full of deeper concern. It has nothing to do with who is or is not behind the wheel. It doesn't matter that the Cultists might be more than a little out of it, or that one or two people are still little more than strangers to her. Well, it has a little to do with that last part. It's so small. And the presence of others makes it seem all the more crammed, like all the air inside is surely being sucked away by other lungs, leaving nothing behind for her to breathe. The other choice, Mara and her little Hyundai, isn't much better. In the end she braces herself, puts on her big girl panties, and she clambors as far back into the van as she can get, wedging herself between gear and equipment if she must. There she sits clutching her bag, eyes closed and her temple pressed against the nearest window or wall, waiting for the ride to be over.

When they get to the warehouse she's the last to climb out into the vaguely fresh air. She closes her eyes and sucks in a deep, steadying breath. When she opens them again she sees in person the warehouse which she only saw in a couple of Flickr images. It seems quiet, but she's alert, turning in a circle to view as much of the area as she can.

[percept+aware: paranoid!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1

Sid Rhodes

[and alert!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 5, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

Mara

It was time to be in the moment, here and now with these awakened that she barely knew. Now was not the time to dwell on what had been, or what may be, because what mattered was the now, what happened here could set the tone for the rest of their day's or at the very least, the forseeable future.

Once parked Mara pulled herself from her car, an old canvas backpack slung up over one shoulder, her other arm easily slipping into the other strap as she looked to what she was certain, would eventually be called the Mystery Machine. When the others piled out Mara offered them all a enthusiastic and certain smile, her eyes sparkling in the half light. She tilted her head towards the building in question and took a few steps in its direction coming to stop and lean against an old telephone pole as she waited for the others to get themselves ready.

Her lean was anything but casual however, the movement of muscles in her neck, through the fabric of her pant's could be seen as she worked to limber up her body. She looked back as the others gathered and looked back at the building.

"So...I think getting overly complicated would be a waste of our time, that and the bars on the windows pretty much exclude those as options...I say we just go straight down the middle and in through the door." She gestured as she spoke, bringing her hands together and driving them forward like a pointed ram before spreading them wide and letting them drop at her side.

"Simplest plan's the hardest to mess up after all, right?"

[Per+Alert]

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

Serafine

(Perception + Awareness; Dif -1. Resonance!)

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1

Serafine

Sera has shotgun unless Sid requires it. There is more space up there in the front seat. She still has her earbuds tucked neatly into her ears, the iPhone a weight in the breast pocket of the old plaid shirt she wears over her costume today: another pair of combat boots, though these are made for function and not fashion. She seems smaller when she slips out of the van, because that height that seems so natural on her - lean limbs and long bare legs - is always an illusion of proportion and her willingness to show so much skin, augmented by an ever-changing wardrobe of shoes with platforms and too-high heels. Tonight, the combat boots add an inch, if that, and well - Serafíne is maybe Mara's height. Certainly she's dwarfed by Dan as he parks the van and circles around to her side while the rest of the group piles out around them.

So: the boots, cut-off jeans, her usual fishnets. Hair pulled back from the shaved fringe into a French braid rather than left hanging loose, an oversized plaid flannel over a Sesame Street LIVE! t-shirt and - fewer necklaces and bracelets than might be usual. One leg jounces up and down quietly as Sera regards the warehouse, breathing in the cool night air.

Dan comes up beside her and she shoots him a glance up, fond and alive. Murmurs, perhaps too quietly for the rest to hear, "Give us a kiss."

He breathes out a silent laugh, nostrils flaring as he exhales, shaking his head quietly. Beneath the beard, a flare of heat. He gives the others a surreptitious glance weighing it a moment until Sera says his name, quietly and urgently. Then he nudges her forward and slips behind her, wrapping his arms around her and holding her close. His bearded cheek slips along the line of her jaw, tugging the earbuds on their little cords out of her right ear and plants a kiss soft and sure in the hollow beneath her ear, right against the line of her jaw. This... continues. She reaches back; that nodal level, feels her heartbeat align to his, opens up that sense of - breathing skin and human touch, like sparks cast off in the darkness. Her eyes half-closed, her senses open.

[Life 1: Life Scan. Dif: 4 -1 for specialty focus. WP]

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

Jim Thompson

"A tomb in a graveyard on salted fields," is what Jim mutters to himself. He's careful to keep his voice low. He'd visibly winced as they'd passed the ammunition shop, and hallucinations of the static hum of machinery in the industrial wasteland almost deafening his senses as they create themselves in a chemical-fueled imagination.

Jim has traded in his swimsuit for a pair of dark navy Levi's, crisp and slim-fitting, desert boots in lieu of flip flops, and a black v-neck all that clings to his upper body. Despite his earlier macabre description of the place, as he steps out of the van he lets his own Avatar - filaments of his Pattern, feeling the vibrations and echoes of the Tapestry - catch the ether and seek out his surroundings.

[ Perception + Awareness. Plus whatever his effect gets him, I guess. ]

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

Sid Rhodes

[Prime scan: Prime 1, no mod because no focus]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (4, 6) ( success x 2 )

Mara

[Awareness]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9) ( fail )

Sid Rhodes

Sid takes that deep breathe, which is hardly fresh and clean. There is of course the usual stench of the city, of concrete and oil and life gone down questionable paths. There's something else, though, something that makes her breath catch and her chest tighten, but only briefly. She's still looking around, her awareness thrown wide open, inviting in all sorts of nasty, terrible things to caress her senses, when the others start speaking, start looking around for themselves.

Sid is very much aware of the others. Their presence, their myriad resonances, are just familiar enough now that she can sort them out, pushing aside the addled psychedelic swirl of Jim, the enthralling visceral presence of Sera, and the intractable nature of Mara. She digs through the colorful quagmire and plucks out something different, something new, something calculated.

She stops in her turn, her eyes wide and bright upon Jim when he mutters those words, words that send a chill down her spine, tightening her brows above her dark rimmed glasses. The look doesn't entirely fade when she turns away from him. What was she expecting on this trip to a place that more than likely houses the unmarked graves of dead Awakened? Swiping her hand over her head, smoothing back the wisps, she looks back at the gated entry.

"Do...do you guys feel that?" She looks around, looking at each one in turn, seemingly oblivious to the make-out session of Dan and Sera, looking for a nod or a word that, no, she's not the only one who notices it. "Someone Worked here," she says. "It's," she coughs suddenly, choking on the other things she picks up, smells that threaten to overwhelm her senses. Putting her the back of her hand beneath her nose as if that could possibly protect it, she finishes, "It's faint, but it's there."

Mara

Mara waited as the others gathered themselves, prepared themselves for the moments to come. She glanced over her shoulder to find Serafine in the middle of a make out session, the woman obviously having no issue with grasping the moment as it was, and that made the Akashic grin, a chuckle escaping her lips as her eyes in turn swivelled and took in Sid.

The timid woman had not changed, but here she was perceptive and collected, and it was obvious that she was feeling something that Mara herself was wholly unaware of. She listened attentively as she turned her gaze back to the location before them and nodded almost imperceptibly.

"That would make sense...if this place is what we think it is, or is at least the scene of all that...ash." She grimaces at that word and folds her arms before her, running her hands down the length of her bicep before abruptly she shook out her hands and stood up from her lean.

"Well....shall we?" She asked looking at the others one more time before starting slowly forward.

Serafine

"Okay," quiet, to the guitarist sliding his mouth down her neck to find her pulse. Both sensual than ritual, this. He knows her well enough to know the sort of touch she requires in that moment and that intimacy is easy between them, nearly as platonic as it is physical. He drops his chin down to her shoulder, which has him hunching over, forward, his eyes glittering pounds in the darkness and is otherwise quiet.

"There's no one in there," Sera informs the others, her voice quiet, rough, her breath quickened. "No one living," and this is enough to banish whatever shadow of want lingered in her tone and manner. To banish it all at a go. " - anyway."

The reassertion of that sense of decay from the interior of the warehouse. She shivers all at once and curls her narrow shoulders forward, with enough force that she breaks free of the shallow circle of Dan's arms. He lets her go, of course. Sighs, slips his callused hands into the front pockets of his jeans. Pulls one out and rubs it nervously over his face, and looks away from them.

Sera glances at Sid then, her eyes catching what light lingers in the west and reflecting it back at the redhead, a dull, twilit glitter. "I feel it," she confirms, quiet. But does not give voice to some precise description of the sensation, because she remembers Jake then, and shoots him a glance in the darkness, circling and weaving through the group to find him. If the boy allows it, Sera will slip an arm through one of his, nudge him physically, every so slightly aslant. "You ready for this? Or are you gonna hang with Dan. Be lookout to his getaway driver?"

Then, a swinging glance up to Mara. The edge of her curving mouth, expressive but drawn. There's no humor in the expression tonight. "I'm ready - " a glance toward Jim, query embedded in the matrix of the look. " - and the front door seems as good as any."

Jim Thompson

Jim's earlier words seem prophesy. He nods to himself. It is an affirmative gesture that is the polar opposite in its tone to the sigh that comes next. A drawn out sound, and then his chest barrels in a deep breath to again steel himself against the bombardment of his mind's eye. It takes all this before he can bare to speak. Even then, at times he falls silent. They are probably lucky this happens mid-sentence, the only hint he might continue. "There aren't any -"

Looking to the left, then the right, up the street and then up to the night sky. Searching out stars. The comfort of a universe that exists, instead of one that has been taken by ash. It tries to superimpose itself over his surroundings. Risen from the stench. From the decay. Like the specter of death not looming, but past.

"-doors to stop us. Those walls are a curtain. An illusion. This place..."

Eyes wide. Not in surprise or fear. In realization. "This place doesn't exist. It was made to hide the truth," speaking faster now, words bleeding out like a gushing artery slit. "Built by a curative mind, painstakingly crafted. A tombstone over the death something -"

He pauses only a moment now - "or someone," he's not sure which, his tone uncertain, "made."

His nostrils flare like he smells something rotten, head turning away from the building for a moment as he's bombarded by an underlying resonance. It rolls on his shoulder with a shiver. "I don't feel anyone else," nodding as he affirms Serafine's report, but shakes his head as soon as the words come out. "But this..." He looks up at the building, almost startled by his own revelation it doesn't exist. "This kind of thing takes power. Whoever made it might might not be seen unless he - she - they - want to be."

And with these revelations, he takes a deep breath again, holding it this time. Three seconds in. Three seconds held. Three seconds out. It wars with the want of his heart to race from the growing clutch of the dose he'd dropped earlier in the night.

And he doesn't look to Mara, but his answer is to mime her earlier gesture. Arms together. Fingers grasping their brothers in either hand. Driven forward toward the place. And his answer is also to begin toward the place.

Entropy

Jake stood with them, the look on his face ashen but firm with determination. It was clear he had no intention of returning to the vehicle. He might be a sitting duck to anything that decided to harm them, but at the moment it was likely that he didn't care. Whatever was there to find, it held an answer for him. An answer he desperately needed, even if it would be as heart-wrenching as he feared.

When Serafine offered her support, he shook his head faintly and pulled away, giving a clear indication that he didn't wish to be touched. Not here. Not now. Not when his thoughts and sense-memories were so full of her. Comfort at this stage might very well undo him.

And so the ragtag group headed forward, and as they stepped onto the property, they would find indeed that it was as Jim described. The illusion, as subtly as it had been crafted, was meant only to fool a wandering passerby. The moment they'd taken more than a few steps onto the barren lawn, the image suddenly fell away to reveal the true shape of the land before them.

And it was all... ash.

No building. No grass. No bodies. Nothing but windswept mounds of particles: grey and black and powdery. This is what remained of the building. Of the bricks and mortar. Of whoever and whatever may have been within.

But there were no clear and neat piles as their had been in Serafine's dream. All patterns become as one in death and decay.

Sid Rhodes

Most of them can feel it, can feel that mixture of resonance undercut with something else, something worse. Jim speaks, and Sid's frown deepens, watching him a moment, watching his face and the shift of his features when he pauses. When he stops to steady the racing of his heart, she looks up at someone's doom. Maybe it's hers this time, maybe it's not. Her gaze drops to the pavement, and she feels a familiar presence. She can't smell it as she sometimes does, like a faint and subtle perfume on the night air, the stench of decay is far too overpowering. But she can almost sense the movement behind her, can almost feel a breath on the back of her neck, warm and comforting. Sid knows that forward is the path toward something's end, and she needs to trace it back to its source. Only then can she understand the Truth.

Sera looks at her, looks and sees that Sid, while obviously full of concern and worry, is determined. She breathes in deep, rib cage expanding and belly expanding, then deflating as she lets it all out. Others lead the way while Sid slips into a pair of simple latex gloves. Once again she takes up the rearguard position, glancing back over the street. When she looks at Dan the corners of her mouth quirk upward in a smile that offers more farewell than comfort.

On the other side of the barrier, the world is grey and full of ash. Sid stops in her tracks and looks around, looking for piles or where piles might once have been. Cautiously, she steps forward, one slow footstep after the other, slipping her hand into her bag and retrieving one of the little test tubes. Crouching by the nearest pile, she dips her finger into it, making little swirls in it before scooping some of it into the first of her little vials.

Mara

Mara waited only a few moments as they moved forward, her ears listening for the responses of those behind her. Some of them responded vocally, others simply by adding their footfalls to the cadence of the street. Only when they had all joined did Mara move forward at a quicker pace, drawing them to the edge of the property as the building loomed before them.

It was there at the very edge of the property line, her toes mere millimeteres from the dirt of the yard that Mara paused, her gaze trailing over the buildings form, over the yard itself and even the air before her. She let her weight shift from one leg to the next, the motion continual and without pause. At last she drew a deep breath and smiled to herself, before uttering a single phrase in cantonese before she stepped forward onto the property.

She did not expect what came next, not in the manner that it appeared. She had still expected...something, something tangible, something solid. Instead it was as if some horrible substance had been set free, and allowed to pour free into this space, destroying everything but itself. She stopped only a few feet inside the illusions barrier and could not hide her surprise. "Wow." She said honestly before taking a few more tentative steps forward before squatting down in the ash.

"This is....this is definitely above me." She said as she tentatively touched the ash with a single finger. That finger drawn up to her eye's she took in the sight of it, the feel of it upon her skin, the smell of it. Before she rose, turned to look at the others for a long moment before starting towards the center of this ashen hell.

"I'm gonna see if I can find anything...well, anything solid."

Serafine

"Fuck." That's the guitarist speaking, swearing softly beneath his breath. He has had a deep and abiding feeling of wrongness about the whole damn thing since a precise moment Sunday morning, which he can remember with a sort of living clarity. He's quiet enough that he doesn't disturb the rest, though. Just sidesteps until he can open the passenger's door of the van, climbs up on the running board and grabs a small leather backpack, which he hands off to the Sera shaking his head. He slides back out, remains standing with arms cross while the rest of the group walks away.

Sera does not look back at him as they go, but Sid does. Her face is distant, now, but he sees the glance. Even sees the quirk of her mouth in the dim light, and lifts both his chin and a hand in spare and mildly awkward acknowledgment of her farewell. Then he climbs back into the van, shutting the passenger's door behind him as he slips across to settle into the driver's seat, tapping out an unconcious rhythm against the faux-wood steering wheel.

--

Jake does not want to be touched; and so Sera arrests the movement at the last minute. But look, while they walk through down the sidewalk and through the illusion, she remains just behind and to the young man's left, the bag tucked against her shoulders, contents clinking quietly inside.

She has not dropped acid tonight, and as soon as they step through the painted illusion of bricks and mortar and her vision becomes not a motherfucking metaphor but a real actual place, Serafíne is grateful that she is not tripping at just that moment, perhaps for the first time in the whole of her life.

Or at least in the past few years.

Still and stiff, she breathes out a long, slow breath, without enough force to come through as a whistle, then breathes in again, the way she does when she's stoned and starts to feel the slow pulsing waves of the energy of the universe - from which they are all made, to which they all return.

She tucks the bag against her hip, fishes inside for the flask that was clinking around in there, along with a few other things. Slugs back a stiff drink of the contents, whatever they are. Then another, this one longer, the burn sharp enough to bring tears briefly to her eyes and constrict her throat.

Sera walks around while she's doing this, a slow circle of the ashen landscape, sliding it all neatly into the disturbing slots of a disturbing vision. She turns to find the radial center, where she remembers the girl, and marks and arching, 360 degree turn from just that point.

She offers the flask wordlessly to Jim when he comes within reach; when her hands are free, she taps the front pockets of her flannel and comes up with another pack of cloves. Several tightly-wrapped joints are tucked inside, white against the dark blue clove cigarettes. She pulls one out, plus a cigarette for later, the latter of which she tucks carefully behind her right ear.

"Before we scry," blue eyes on Jim, but a lift of her chin toward the others there. Mara and Sid and Jake. Even Jake - especially Jake, who would know the actors better than any of them could, " - can you share what we see with them?"

Jim Thompson

"Out of here yesterday," Jim says, again speaking to himself. Those who are paying attention to his last few quiet outbursts may be able to identify the differences in his tone.

Jim is similar-but-different from Serafine in that he orbits the consor that does tag along, staying beside and a half-step ahead of Jake as they approach and cross the threshold of the phantasmal building. The lot is as he'd seen it in the now of the previous night. He looks to Serafine. Almost through her. His eyes are still wide, unfocused, blinking too infrequently and too erratically for most to notice that they do so at all, their attentions elsewhere.

"We need to see backward. We need to see what was here, what happened here, what was taken from existence to leave this behind."

Reaching out with his mind and senses of the third eye, yet again, he now focuses the extent of his perceptions on Serafine. Less of an academic debate, less or a listing of foci and theories, he seeks out her aura and resonance and the stains they leave on the Weaving as they pass. Getting to know her energy, how it is manufactured, and how it will dance with his own.

"Turn on," taking the flask and his own (arguably) healthy pull of it, before handing it back to her. "Tune in. Drop out." It is his reflection, his acknowledgement of her paradigm and his meshing for this.

"Namaste. Let us bring light to this."

He looks to Sid. To Mara. To Jake. Into each of their eyes, if they will allow it, when Serafine asks her question. "If you wish to see, you will. If not, you won't. I'll force the Truth of a Seer on no one. It will be waiting for you to claim - after we've unearthed it," a glance, out of the corner of his eye, at Serafine, even as he stomps his heel hard into the ground. As if he needs to feel the real of the fundament beneath him as a reminder.

One thing at a time.

Entropy

Mara would not find anything solid beneath the ash. Only the ground: dry and hard-packed earth.

As for Jake, the expression on his face when he saw the ash laid out before him was one of barely-restrained horror. He moved numb and shell-shocked over the dead ground while the others spoke. Only when Jim mentioned turning his sight back in time did Jake's eyes suddenly sharpen with focus and land on the Disciple.

"Let me see. I need to see what happened. Now."

Jim Thompson

Another shiver. This time when that glare, a dagger directed his way in the demand, comes his way from Jake.

"Welcome to the party," is his answer to Jake's interjection, though he winces a few moments too late. A glance at Serafine's flask, jerking his head back toward the consor. "Might want to give him a joint too. Ease those nerves."

"You want in? We have a dress code," waiting for Jake to take whatever chemical armament he will from Serafine. This time, his Pattern takes a more direct hold of one of those around him, alight, a light house matched with a kaleidoscope to project into his own unawakened but enlightened mind.

And with that, he approaches the boy. Reaches his hand around the back of his head, gripping it gently, fingers digging to gently hold his hair as he presses his forehead into Jake's. "I know you can't let go of Shelby. So instead, hold on. Tight."

[ Mind 3. Coincidental. Difficulty 6 - 1 for appropriate resonance (psychedelic). ]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 3) ( botch x 1 )

Serafine

That's vodka in the flask tonight. Straight vodka, a cold clear burn down the back of the throat. Serafíne accepts the flask back from Jim and already the warmth of the alcohol is sliding loose down her throat, warming her veins with a quickness, opening her senses up past the immediacy of her terror and embracing the raw edge of it. That seize of the heart, the slug of fight-or-flight hormones into her veins. The stillness that veiled her as soon as they walked into this place-of-ashes erodes as she embraces the burn of her fear much the way she opens herself to the burn of alcohol.

A flash of teeth, sudden. The sharp edge of her half-smile. Sera's humor is sudden and bright and has an edge to it like razor wire as he offers the old slogan like a mantra. "Hah! - " is her only response in the moment, but it the sound is immediate, rich, and made-in-her-body. She's doing something with that flask when Jake demands to see what happens.

Sera glances at Jim, reads his intentions in his pattern and his body language, and wordless offers her assistance. Slipping one of those earbuds back into her ear.

[Mind 2 - assisting Jim. Dif 5 -1 for specialty focus focus]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (8, 8) ( success x 2 )

Jim Thompson

[ Extended at +1 difficulty. Blowing a WP. ]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (5, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Serafine

[Extended also at +1 difficulty.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (4, 8) ( success x 1 )

Serafine

Time 2 / Mind 2; Dif 5. -1 for taking time; -1 for specialty focus.

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (4, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Jim Thompson

Jim's hands release, his focus now off of Jake. In fact, he barely sticks around to see his reaction to the new creation taking up space in his psyche, a projection of Jim and Serafine's own quest of divination that has yet to begin. He lets go.

Of everything, instead turning and walking to Serafine. Close. Close enough to smell the liquor they've shared on her breath. Close enough to see the rising of her chest, matching his own to hers. His eyes shut in the physical, while a new set open on the otherside in the then they seek.

[ Time 2 / Mind 2. Difficulty 5. -1 for taking time. -1 for specialty focus. ]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (9, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Serafine

The flask away, Serafíne lights her joint and finally returns Jim's namaste with one of her own, offering a little toast with the joint. The word is not one she ever employs, but she does so now, to let his voice into her lungs and her language into her throat.

By the time Jim finds her in that gray, dead space, the scent of marijuana is another layer above the alcohol they shared. He's close enough, even, that he can smell the rich scent of the clove cigarettes she's been carrying around, a sweet and heavy note beneath the musk of burning pot from the joint.

His eyes are closed; for the first few minutes of their working, her eyes are open but unseeing, her head tipped back, her face toward the sky, like she's inviting all that infinity to come down and through them. Toward the end, her eyes sink closed, and her breathing matches his. Even the sluggish beat of her pulse in the cauldron of her eyes seems to move in time with the beat of his heart, and the tidal rhythm of the universe laid open all around them.

The joint is mostly forgotten now; just burning in her hand. Smoke rises from the tip like incense, curling, curling upward in the ash-gray world.

Entropy

Jim connected his mind with Jake’s, creating a pathway to share whatever vision his Divinations received. As he and Serafine worked their effect, the present moment faded away, cycling back through time as they searched for the origin of the destruction. For a while they saw nothing. Then, a brief hiccup (interesting) – as though a piece of the lot’s memory had been erased. But it wasn’t the piece they were after, and soon enough they’d come upon it, as the warehouse suddenly sprung back into focus.

The building was whole again, at least as whole as it ever had been in recent years. The barred windows were red with coppery rust and the brick walls appeared aged with cracks and mildew. The bare floors were covered with a fine layer of dust, disturbed here and there by a set of mouse tracks or a dead cockroach. The place was still and silent, but for the occasional distant sound of city traffic. It was late evening, and the sun was just beginning to sink below the horizon when one of the side doors creaked open and a man and woman (the latter they would recognize as Shelby) entered the place carrying the prone body of a teenage girl.

They handled the girl with care, Shelby and the unknown man, laying her out on an old but clean-looking mattress that someone had placed near one of the walls. It was dim inside the building, and growing difficult to see, so the man (he was younger than Shelby, and tall with dark hair) took a small battery-powered lamp out of the backpack he carried and turned it on, placing it on the floor.

“Shield the windows,” Shelby hissed quietly, and the man whispered something under his breath and made a series of elegant hand motions. Whatever effect he attempted, it must have worked, because the pair of them calmed after that, and the man moved to pull up a couple of folding chairs.

“So what now?” he asked, after they’d sat down. On the mattress, the girl continued to lie motionless. Her chest rose and fell with shallow, steady breaths. In the light, Serafine would be able to see that she bore the same face as the girl she’d dreamed of: dark hair, pale skin, soft freckles.

“Honestly?” Shelby responded. “I don’t know.” She seemed exhausted. They both did.

“Do you think we made the right choice?”

“Yes.” On this, at least, she sounded certain. “What the mirrorshades would have done to her… no one deserves that. At least this way, whatever happens, she’ll be treated like a human being.”

“Should we call the others?”

Shelby didn’t answer for a long time. “I don’t think they can help, Will. Not with this. We’ll only be putting them at risk.” Then she looked at the man (Will) and glanced toward the door. “You shouldn’t be here either.”

“I’m not leaving you alone with her.”

Shelby looked at her cabal-mate and nodded gently, and the two of them fell into a tired, companionable silence. Will leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, meditating. Shelby leaned forward on her elbows and watched the girl sleep.

Time passed. Outside the sky grew dark and the street silent. That was when a knock came at the door. Will opened his eyes, anxious and alert, but Shelby simply sighed and stood to her feet as though the knock hadn’t surprised her. When she unlocked the door, she stood there a moment staring at the man on the other side. “Hello, Jai.”

“Let us in,” the older man said in a soft Indian accent. After a long moment, Shelby stepped aside and four people entered. She locked the door again behind them.

“Oh my god…” a woman with long blond hair exclaimed at the sight of the unconscious girl. “I can’t believe you did this.” She turned around with a wild, angry look. “Are you insane? You’re going to get us all killed!”

“Or worse,” a man with curly red hair added, ominously.

“You weren’t supposed to follow me,” was Shelby’s response.

The oldest of the cabal, the Indian man she’d called Jai, stepped forward and gave her a cold glare. “Did you really think we wouldn’t? This was not your decision to make, Shelby. I told you…”

“I know what you told me,” Shelby snapped. “And you’re wrong.”

“You can’t fight this girl’s destiny, Shelby. She is what she is. Rebecca is right. All you are doing is putting the cabal, and the whole city, at risk. And now you’ve set the technocrats after us as well!” His voice rose in volume as a flash of controlled anger crossed his features. “You should have let them eliminate her.”

“Murder her, you mean! But not right away, Jai. I heard them talking. They were going to study her. Dissect her. Use her as bait to catch the others.” Shelby was furious now, backing toward the girl in a protective stance as Will joined her side.

The older man sighed. “Then we will have to kill her ourselves.”

“No we won’t,” Shelby said. “She’s not Nephandi. Her name is Leah Walker and she’s a sixteen year old girl with thoughts and fears and a Will of her own. She has no idea what she is or why any of us are after her, and she’s scared. If we talk to her – if we help her…”

“Enough, Shelby!” Jai shouted. “I know it’s hard. I know it’s heartbreaking. Do you think I want to do this? Do you think any of us want to do this? If she lives, she will destroy everything that you and I care about. You cannot stop it. She cannot stop it. If she’s as human as you say she is, then we’ll be doing her a mercy. She is Widderslainte. She is Tamas gone mad.”

“She is a child,” Shelby said, her voice calm and steady with certainty. “And fate can be changed.”

But the Cultist and the Euthanatos never got a chance to finish their argument, because that was when the Technocrats arrived. The Traditionalists detected the intrusion only seconds before the heavy door blasted off its hinges, sending shards of hot metal flying through the air. The mages managed to avoid the worst of it, but Rebecca took a piece to her upper arm and the girl on the mattress lurched awake with a sharp cry of confused pain when a shard lodged itself in her leg.

Everything was chaos after that. Shelby tried to get to the girl, but one of the technocrats (a lithe and dangerous-looking woman with cybernetic eyes) ensnared her with a net and pinned her to the floor. The others were equally distracted as the two groups closed on each other, attacking and defending with weapons and effects. Powerful wills clashed and intertwined. Gun-shots rang out. Blood spattered the dusty floor.

And through it all, the girl sat terrified, clutching a hand to her wound as she backed herself against the wall and tried to push herself to her feet. Tears of pain and fear traced their way down her cheeks as she sucked in panicked breaths. She gave a cry as she tried to stand, choking back the sound in an attempt to avoid notice.

But it was too late. One of the technocrats – the oldest and tallest of the amalgam, a man in his late 30’s with sandy-brown hair and a body that only really looked human upon passing inspection – ran toward her with his gun raised, his expression grim and determined.

“Kill her!” shouted the woman attacking Shelby, her voice strained with urgency.

“Run Leah!” Shelby called out, struggling beneath the technocrat woman’s weight as she writhed and began to sing, her voice ringing out amidst the chaos of violence in a healing melody. It was the last thing she ever did. Leah’s wounded leg spat out the shard of metal and began to stitch itself back together in the same moment that the technocrat woman’s knife sunk itself into Shelby’s heart.

And a half-second later, the man stopped and fired his gun.

But the bullet didn’t make it to its target. It froze midway through the air and crumbled into dust.

Everyone stilled and looked at the girl with dawning horror as they felt what was about to happen. She opened her mouth and screamed – a raw, visceral sound – and the technocrat’s gun rusted and fell apart in his hand.

Then his hand wrinkled and dried, and the decay that had infected him crept quickly up his arm. Now it was his turn to scream as he felt his skin decompose and slide off his body, revealing the hidden silver and wires beneath. The others turned to run, but within moments they all fell to the ground, Tradition-mage and Technocrat alike, their voices raised in a cacophony of agony. Only Shelby was silent, spared this torture by the blade that had ended her life seconds earlier.

It was a scene from the most gruesome of horror films, watching 12 people (11 living, one dead,) fall apart before one’s very eyes. It was not a thing one forgets – though no one would ever want to remember. And when the life had left those bodies, they rained down upon the floor as dust and ash. Around them, the building vibrated. Spiderweb cracks formed in the bricks. The warehouse began to crumble as powder and stone rained down on the ruined bodies below. And within moments everything had turned to dust.

Except for the girl, who was left standing in the middle of a field of ash, her face dirtied and streaked with tears. She looked out at the tableau of death laid out around her and released a low, guttural sob. Then she ran. Through the dust and the ash and out to the street. Away. Away.

And the vision stopped.

Jim Thompson

[ Perception + Awareness + earlier Meditation successes. ]

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )

Jim Thompson

"She might've come back here," whispered to Serafine as they are lost in the vision. "Or maybe they did. The mirrorshades. But whoever wiped that slate, though... Whoever made that illusion... They wiped it clean. Whatever it was," in reference to the blip. "The feel of it. It's Technocrat. And it's strong."

"We need to get out of here. Now," turning away from Serafine as he ways it. His hands grip, then relax, then grip tight again so that his fingernails press against then into the flesh of his palms. He shakes them loose as he turns back toward the van, and then toward Sid.

"Did you get what you need? We need to get out of here. We need to get out of here yesterday." It's a strange look for Jim, but one that Sid might recognize. She often wore it. A paranoia. Though he is not worried for himself. He is looking to the others around him. The others that he brought here. A grimace of regret contorting his face down to his shoulders.

It is only after he has said this - aired his concerns to Serafine and his concern for Sid - that he realizes Jake saw this all. Saw the same thing he did. And he turns to the consor. "We need to get out of here," repeating it for the third time. And then rethinks, conjuring new words for the boy. "She died doing good. That is how a seer's days are to be accounted for. Doing what she thought was right."

Serafine

Midway through the vision, the joint falls from Serafíne's hand onto the ashen floor. Her fingers are suddenly nerveless, her hand opens and closes in a spasm of movement, reaching to grasp what is not there, or perhaps push it away. That is what Mara and Sid might. It is like watching the audience for some great thriller, with no view of the screen and not even the echo of the soundtrack to contextualize the distant but shifting expressions on their faces.

"I don't - " objecting to the idea of the girl creating this falsehood. Then concurring, quietly with his assessment about the origins, even if her own is less specific than his theories. "This coverup wasn't her."

Will. Shelby. Jai. Rebecca. Leah Walker.

When the vision ends, Serafíne sags back physically, her upright posture sapped by the horror of the final image; by the horrific realization that the ash that they are standing is made of the finely sifted remains of twelve living, breathing human beings. She shakes her head, like a dog trying to clear itself of some persistent pest, and draws her mouth back against her teeth as she fights her suddenly rising gorge. Which pulls in stark spasms down the center of her chest and body.

Her breath comes in sharp, staccato little bursts of movement, and it takes her several long moments struggle before she imagines she has concurred the urge to throw up the contents of her stomach onto the ash beneath them.

Some movements are autonomic, though. Sera pulls the cigarette from behind her ear without thought, between two spasms of near puking, lights it with a flick of her lighter and inhales the sugary, spiced tobacco deeply, all the way into her lungs this time. Her eyes are stark, shining in whatever light there is in this place (those are tears) and with the first lung full of smoke she startles upward, reorients herself in a sweeping glance through the remnants of the destroyed warehouse searching for Jake.

Who shared their vision.

"We have enough," her voice is low and raw and tense, quietly underscoring Jim's admonishment that they need to go.

Now that she's recovered something of her self-possession, Sera is smoking, furiously, and crossing the distance to Jake. He has most of her attention now, except for those touchpoints on the others. Nevermind that she cannot suppress the fear on her face or in her body that radiates out through her spine.

"Come on," from his face to Jim's, and back. This time she doesn't hesitate to wrap her arms around the kid, physically steering him toward her vague memory of AWAY FROM HERE. " - let's go."

Serafine

(also: conquered not concurred. GRUMP @ homonyms.)

Sid Rhodes

It didn't take Sid long to get what she needed. It's all ash, all the same. Everything that was has been burned down to this one same substance. A sample from one pile will be just as good as another. Just in case, Sid collects three, holding each one up before her face to examine the dusty contents before plugging in their little orange stoppers.

She's waiting for them when they come out of it, waiting with that tensely furrowed brow, that firm line of what should be a sweet, soft mouth. When the others return to themselves, they whisper to each other, but Sid, standing near enough to them, hears it. She doesn't understand it, but that's par for the course for the time she's spent in the company of the Ecstatics.

When it seems as though they're as back as they're going to be, Sid moves forward. Toward Sera. When she's closer she drops into a crouch, deftly pushing her bag so that it rests against the small of her back, the better for her to snatch up that fallen joint. For half a beat she stands there, holding it between thumb and forefinger. On the second half of that hesitation she stuffs it into the pocket of her jeans. Their urgency is infectious, there's no time to stand around slackjawed, waiting for instructions. They need to go.

The Ecstatics go to the shaken consor and Sid, she pauses to cast a final look around the area, making sure that they've left no signs of their presence that a little wind won't cover up in their wake. Only when she's certain that they're clear does she follow the others out and back to the van and their waiting driver.

Jim Thompson

By the time he's made it to the car Jim is dry heaving. He leans behind the rear bumper, off the curb, for a moment, but thinks better of it. He paces as the others finally get into the van. He paces back and forth one or two more times before jumping in, casting a final glance at the building, swallowing saliva as he does so. He gets in, finding a trash bag or something else that would work as a catchall for the contents of his stomach.

That organ is emptied in wet splats and angry coughs that are the sound of a throat going raw. Offers of water are waved away. His stomach groans with the effort, bile searching for something and finding only the void of purge and starvation. His head is halfway to his lap, arms draped over the seat in front of his.

"Drive. Drive. Third street to the right. And straight on. 'Til fucking morning. We need to tire out the hounds," shaking his head.

Sid Rhodes

[WP: touching people is gross, do I wanna risk it?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Entropy

The vision stopped, and Jake... collapsed to his knees.

He didn't make a sound. Not at first. And the ashes around him billowed up into the air in a fine plume, coating his clothes and hair in dust. Particles that had once been living, breathing human beings. That may very well have been his friends - his love. Then Jim turned and spoke to him. Jake didn't meet the man's gaze, but the word's seem to break him from his reverie, because he gave a rough, broken sob and balled his fists into his hair.

He didn't seem to understand their urgency, or maybe he simply didn't care. This is what grieving looked like. This is what it felt like - the absence of self-preservation. (She is gone, so why is he still here?)

It was a good thing, then, that Serafine moved to wrap him in her arms. He did not think to turn her away this time. (He did not think to respond at all.) And likely Mara would move to join her, and between the two of them, they managed to hoist the consor back to his feet. He stumbled with them toward the van, barely present enough to offer this small bit of assistance to their efforts, and when they arrived, he'd slump into the seat with little consideration for those near him, crying and lost within himself.

He didn't look pretty anymore.

And then, after they'd all fit themselves into their respective vehicles, they did precisely what Joe suggested: drive.

Away. Away. (And straight on 'til morning.)

And behind them, the field of grief and decay receded into the distance, but it had left its mark upon them in the ash that yet clung to them all, and the stark and terrifying vision that would remain with three of them for a very, very long time.