REI

Nick

The REI in Denver is particularly crowded today, it being the middle of the day on a Saturday at the cusp of real spring. Parking was difficult to find, and the store's landscape is dotted with people browsing through climbing gear and hiking gear and a particularly ambitious couple who are here today examining kayaks.

Nick, for his part, is here mostly because of Thane. When Thane Owens came to Denver, Nick made an effort to show his friend what there was to see outside the city: not the city itself, note. It left him nostalgic in a way that maybe he should have anticipated ahead of time, but regardless, here he is now looking through harnesses and grapples and other climbing gear.

He looks out of place in a place like this, and he perhaps feels out of place too. In a room that is humming with conversation and plans made and casual transaction, he is a hushed calm, standing there with his head slightly tilted as he runs his fingertips over different items.

That's where she'll find him, turning a harness over in his hands, a beam of sunlight filtering through one of the large store windows catching in the matte black of his hair and the bright green of his jacket.

Serafíne

Are there shopping carts in REI Denver?

There must be. There are shopping carts everywhere. There are shopping carts in fucking Macy's, and there would be shopping carts in Nordstrom if the sort of people who like shopping carts would be able to fill them in Nordstrom. But: no. They have to head to Nordstrom Rack to pilot their carts around clearance racks full of mid-level designer brands that richer folks have picked over and discarded.

Ahem.

Here is a shopping cart with one squeaky wheel piloted by a rather striking creature who bends the curve of the universe with her mere existance.

That squeaky wheel heralds her arrival a half-second before she turns the corner. The first impression: the enormous sunglasses, the golden curls. She takes in Nick. She takes in the climbing harness he's fingering. And she says:

"Adventure bound?"

Nick

The squeaky wheel catches Nick's attention before Sera herself does. Miraculously, since Sera herself is quite a presence, the way she feels like the long nights of exhilaration and burning need that were part of Nick's life as a teenager. The Cultist is cutting a path through the crowd, which parts for her if only because maybe they're wondering where and why she got a shopping cart to bring in here.

Still, the important thing is that they part, and Nick has half-turned his head in her direction even before he senses her coming, and once the familiar tang of resonance hits him he does indeed face her in full.

He glances down at the harness in his hands. "Not an adventure in particular. I'm just planning to try to go climbing more often."

His hands lower, and the harness along with it. "I have no idea what I'm looking for, to be honest. When I used to go climbing before, I always went with my friend and borrowed his gear. What adventures are you planning?"

Because Sera is planning some, of this he has no doubt.

Serafíne

There's nothing in the shopping cart and what the hell, once she has made the turn she has also decided to abandon it so abandon it she does. Straightens from her somewhat languid slouch and steps around it and what is Sera wearing at REI? A remarkably (perhaps not-so-remarkably) short red cocktail dress beneath a slashed up leather jacket and fishnets that hug the flesh of her thighs, frame her long legs with diamond-shaped-shadows, and heels that add an extra five-or-so inches to her 5'5" frame. Ambles down the aisle head canted, sunglasses on the gear on display like she's considering it, piece by piece by piece.

"I don't plan my fucking adventures. Takes all the goddamned fun out of it."

Her mouth curves, her chin rises. Equal parts sharp and wry.

"You planning on summitting mountains or just... getting your hands on some rock?"

Nick

"Well, some level of preparation helps keep you from wiping your ass with a handful of leaves or stuck in the hospital with severe dehydration," Nick says, and a look cuts toward her then, his smile also a wry thing.

He returns that particular harness to its hook, and if there is any amusement at Sera's red cocktail dress and slashed leather jacket, he keeps it to himself for now. The Cultist is drawing a look or two, but she's probably used to that.

"I don't think I'm ready to summit mountains or anything like that. I'd mostly just like to get out and do it more. I figure, I'm in Denver and this is the place for it."

Serafíne

Sera gives a neat little shrug, expressive and dismissive all at once: of the perils of poor-planning. I mean hell, she doesn't go that far out, and anyway: magick, right? She can always find her way back home.

And she doesn't look like she belongs here. Those heels and that dress, that jacket. The bristle of hardware in her elfin ears: a half-dozen small hoops and at least two larger spikes. The impression of her tattoos: which are black and white, the lot of them. The suggestion of script when she reaches for the harness he's putting away. Turns over the package, no real hint on what he can see of her sharp features beneath the dark glasses as to what or how much she knows about that shit.. Or why she's here. Or anything.

"We could go bouldering. Don't need any of that gear. Maybe some decent gloves and rock climbing shoes. Best way to learn."

Nick

There is no real hint as to how much Sera knows about that shit, as she turns over the harness in her hands. Maybe that makes Nick a little wary of what she says next, though there's also this: he trusts in Adepts to be Adepts, to be good at a lot of things and to always keep people guessing. These are the sorts of powerful magi he has always encountered, up until now, even the most human of them.

"I'd like that," he says, when she suggests bouldering. And he has straightened, and he is looking down at her, and he is a creature far from his mythic landscape just at this moment with his dark curls and somber features.

"Want to help me find a pair of good shoes and gloves, then?" Because: well, it'll give him a better idea of just how much exactly she knows before he goes climbing boulders with her. Given the exactly zero number of times he's seen her sober, perhaps he's wise to consider this.

Then again, this is indeed the best way to learn, and he uses magick as much as she does, though not with her skill. Can't they always find their way back home?

sysadmin

Serafíne

The bright washing sun competes with scudding clouds for dominance in the April sky and you'd never guess from the raucous game of ultimate frisbee on one of the big grassy swaths of greening lawn that there's a winter storm watch currently looming over Denver and its environs, that spring ski enthusiasts will have another foot or so of fresh snowfall if they go high enough into the mountains.

Right now: shorts and t-shirts and a frisbee that looks like a pink-frosted donut with a bite taken out. Fringe and beads and bare feet and painted toes and gladiator sandals and the musky scent of marijuana in the air and it's too early (she just woke up an hour or so ago and she's still nursing a particularly intense acid hangover) for a certain Cultist to join her friends chasing around the donut-frisbee, but hey, she can watch. Or pretend to watch? Who fucking knows, her glasses are both ridiculously dark and remarkably large and she could very well be napping behind them.

There's a big bottle of orange juice parked in the cool grass beside her. It is early evening. The sun is only just starting to fall.

Grace

Ahh, Denver. It'll be warm today, sure. Then, the weekend brings a high temp in the 30s and more snow. This is Spring, for you. It can never make up its mind.

Grace has dressed herself in jeans, sneakers, a t-shirt, and her bite-proof grey jacket today, although the jacket is unzipped to let the air in -- so one can see the giraffe wearing ten neckties on her tee, with the text "Trust me, I'm super professional".

There is, perhaps, more of a spring to her step than there has been, of late. Winter's melting, for now. Water's flowing in rivers. Things are breaking free, and soon Summer will make that a little more permanent. It's a good day. One that has Grace walking the trails here where monsters tread, with her attentions place firmly into the trees and sky, and not, apparently at her surroundings. Monsters should be afraid of her, not the other way around.

[Awareness?]

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

Nicholas

It's become a habit, walking in the park after work while he tries to process and decompress from the day. Nick finds his home to be a pleasant place, somewhere he looks forward to going to at the end of the day, but settling into his office or having dinner isn't a substitute for taking a few moments of silence where he doesn't have to listen to anybody else or try to project this air of detached competence or quiet empathy.

There aren't any winter storm clouds looming on the horizon, just the soft wash of sunlight that speaks to approaching summer. That, and the smell of marijuana that usually lingers around places like this, in Denver. He still isn't fully accustomed to walking out in public and seeking people smoke; and it doesn't bother him - it just is, and does.

The sailing frisbee catches his eye as he makes his way down the path. No shorts and T-shirts for him, just light gray pants and a pale pink shirt, the color of a first blush or of a drop of blood in a puddle, slight intimations of color. His hair was cut recently, which is to say that it's no longer as wild and overgrown as it had threatened to become last month. As is the style at present, the back and sides are shorn more tightly than the top, which spills out in front of him.

He watches people throw the frisbee back and forth as he walks, and he would have nearly passed them by had a familiar face not caught his attention next. Sera is behind a pair of sunglasses, but he makes note of her nonetheless and his trajectory changes. He lifts a hand as he approaches.

Serafíne

Well: see? Her eyes must be open behind the dark glasses, because the creature lounging on the plaid picnic blanket lifts a hand to return Nicholas' wave. There is a hint of a smirk in the curve of her mouth, or maybe that is simply a grimace. Some little protest against the movement required.

She is as she always is: or at least as she always seems. Long and lean and lovely. Or: the intimation if not the fact of length; the suggestion of hunger, of desire, of want in both the concave curve of her bare stomach; and - well. Not lovely. Arresting perhaps, in that way that Grace, and even some of the sleepers around them, must certainly feel. What else can Grace sense? That sun-drenched, soaring resonance that that eminates from old bronze ring that Sera always wears on her right index finger. Nicholas, of course. And no suggestion of monsters.

Other than that wave, Sera doesn't much move or acknowledge Nicholas' approach until he is within actual hailing distance. Then she turns her head - gingerly, gingerly. This is the day-after. Every part of her aches. Every part of her welcomes the ache. The spread of her neat little mouth beneath her glasses: a wide flat smirk and Nicholas mirrored in the convex surface of her dark glasses.

"You look like you're about to sell someone some goddamned insurance."

So says the creature resplendent in British-flag bikini top beneath a faded black hoodie over denim cut-offs and torn fishnets. She has, at some point, taken off her battered combat boots and her almost-bare feet rest in the grass.

Grace

Mmm. Sera. That gut-wrenching feeling has her attention now, drawing her sight, making her change course. The trees, no longer the source of her fascination, don't honestly care.

Sera might.

"Sera!" she says, strolling up, sitting down next to her on the grass. There is also a wave to Nick somewhere in there.

"Do insurance salesmen wear pink shirts?" she says, honestly curious.

"I've been meaning to talk to you," she adds, quieter.

Nicholas

Nicholas has a talent for mirroring other peoples' expressions, for picking up on their moods and reflecting them back and sometimes twisting them just so. He makes use of it in his job: it's how children learn to identify what they're feeling, having an adult frown when they are saying something sad or smile back when they are happy. It's equally important for adults.

So: he sees Sera, and there is this quick cut of his mouth, this way in which the corner snicks upward as though hooked. "That's because I am. Have you heard about our new life insurance policy?" A thought, a beat. "...I might actually consider that if I were terrible. I'd make a fortune."

He has stopped in front of her, though always always with an eye on the frisbee as it cuts the air. Nick got a black eye from a frisbee once, years ago.

Grace catches his attention next when she comes up on the two of them, and almost without thinking he shifts his stance to allow her space into the conversation and also to face her, or at least pull her into his line of sight. His brow furrows at what she says. "To me?"

Serafíne

Oh, here's Grace. Asking a very honest question about a very wry quip tossed off by a very hungover Cultist and again that sensation of arrest, of cessation as she shifts the direction of her dark, reflective glasses from Nicholas to Grace. A: very slow lift of one of her flat blond brows, expressive enough that it rises above the curving frame of the glasses. And lingers, because she's not really quite sure how to take Grace's question about insurance salesmen. For example: is it the sort of question that requires an answer?

Something in her decides that it is not the sort of question that requires an answer. Or: that she is too something-something-something after last-night and this-morning and hell, the last few weeks, the last few months, the last few years to have to answer if it does.

Her attention cuts back to Nicholas. Something about the cant of her head suggests that she catches the hint of that smirk carved back to her. And he cannot see her eyes but he can still somehow almost feel that flick of her attention: minute and precise and animal: to his mouth, then back to his eyes. The gleam of the dying sun in her glasses, his shadow long over the blanket, the grass. Might make another quip in that moment, but no. Sera mirrors Nicholas' question, though she does so wordlessly. Inquiry stitched into the lift of her chin.

Grace

"Well, not... I mean, sure I could talk to you, but I don't have anything specific in mind," she says, to Nick, as though that question caught her off guard. It can be rather hard to tell who Grace is talking to, considering she so rarely makes eye contact.

"Sera. I had a run-in with a sysadmin. I got traced, but I'm not sure how bad. I'm no good at looking back in time to figure out what happened, you know? But you..."

Are totally unaware of what a sysadmin is, or why one would trace her... Right. Grace frowns, tries to figure out a better way to say this. "I felt something. Subtle. A hint of resonance."

Nicholas

Nick shifts his weight to his other foot as he glances between the two women. He, too, is rather unaware in any specific sense of what a sysadmin is, other than what conclusions he can draw from the words themselves, and so: he listens.

Serafíne

And here is Sera who can very well unhinge time. Pull it apart. Reel it backwards. Create within it currents as slow as molasses or as rippling-fast as some ever-accelerating black and white montage of a movie-bender and who does not know what a sysadmin is and who, on some deep and really rather important level, does not even believe in them.

When her iPhone works, it works by magick.

Sometimes, some nights, it does not seem to want to work at all.

Her attention hangs on Grace. She has been leaning back on her elbows, but now - a ripple of her flexible frame - sits closer-to-upright. Ow. Her head hurts.

"Like - " here a furrowed V of thought appears between the enormous discs of her glasses. " - yesterday? Someone was spying on you?"

Grace

"No. It was a while ago. Month or so. When I was trying to figure out what happened to Alex," she explains, hopefully that's enough. Not going to go into specifics here in the park, is she.

She seems strangely okay with this -- accepting of the fact. What's done is done, and all. But what was done?

"But yeah. Possibly spying on me. I fought it off, but..." she trails off, waves an arm in the air.

Nicholas

Nick looks between the two of them again, his eyebrows cutting a delicate arch as he listens to the talk of spying and figuring out what happened to Alex. It occurs to him that he has not yet met the man.

"Should I give the two of you some time?"

Grace

"Why?" she asks Nick. "I don't mind you knowing. You're as welcome here as cupcakes, man. Stay. If you want."

Kiara

Washington Park was a sort of nexus for the athletically inclined in Denver, as it happened. There were no small number of them tonight as the sun began to dwindle and sink into the horizon, cutting pathways around the lake and appearing only to weave a steady track over inclines and down again; vanishing into the distance.

Joggers. There was something so mundane and expected to them.

Amidst a world of chaos and uncertainty, lying on the grass surrounded by Frisbees and dogs being walked and the occasional carrying cry of laughter or the smack of a ball hitting the backside of a distant basketball court - there was an easy comfort in the banality.

Breaking away from behind a young couple pushing a stroller down by the glinting lakeside is a familiar figure; tall and lean with long dark hair sailing out behind her. Another runner by any other name but also - a Witch. The pagan known to some here as anything but a nameless addition to the Sleepers. She's slowing to a clipped walk, the Verbena; breathing hard and holding her hands against her side; her pace directing her toward a bench to warm down her muscles.

She's a surge of the Springtime Kiara, as she sets her leg up and stretches it out; a sweatshirt laced around a narrow waist; navy workout gear encasing her form. If she notes the presence of the others up on a shallow rise of grass, she's yet to make it clear.

Though the presence of earbuds and a small MP3 taped to her arm would suggest she's unaware - yet. Here then, was one half of their rescue team that had extricated Alexander from the Union. Nicholas alone perhaps knew the current condition of the other half - for her part, physically at least, the brunette seemed to be coping with the aftermath reasonably well.

Serafíne

There is rhythm behind them. The slap of plastic against strangers' palms. Bare feet against that solid spring grass, the cold soil beneath, warming yeah but still somehow in the grip of winter. The whir of the discs through the air: the twin miracles of propulsion and flight. Aerodynamics or what the fuck ever.

By now Sera is sitting forward, legs crossed beneath her, the picnic blanket rucked up beneathtthem from the movement. Golden curls a messy tangle in the failing light. She takes off her sunglasses here and gives Nicholas a brief, apologetic flash of a glance. Neat little compression of her mouth. Her eyes are a little bit bloodshot and her pupils are still rather-too-large. This hint of bruising beneath them: dark circles, something. That ache more evident without the shield of the glasses, but what the fuck does one expect? She's hung-over.

Breathes out here, Sera. Tried to order her thoughts for Grace and then: a flicker of something else. "You asked to talk to me," Sera reminds Grace, though there is something gentle in her tone. The bravado of her greeting to Nick earlier is long-since drained away. " - remember? Not him. So, you haven't made him feel quite as welcome as cupcakes, Grace. You know? Nick may not want to be a spectator to our conversation. He might even need to get home to start dinner."

Brief curve of her mouth here: the lilt of her chin, this neat, apologetic little gesture toward Nicholas before her attention cuts back to and rests wholly on Grace.

"Have you felt the resonance since then?"

Kiara

[Oh yeah, we should do this for our next post. Mage-dar.]

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

Grace

"Oh," Grace says. It honestly hadn't occurred to her that she might be edging someone out. "I'm sorry. I'll just..."

She takes a breath. Sera asks her something. "No."

But, she's distracted, giving that no to Nick's face, as she radiates confusion with hers. This is one of those times, right? When the rules of social interaction seem to have been missed. It makes her uncomfortable. Makes her want to...

"I should go. You think about it, okay, Sera?" she stands up, gets the attention toward the trees again. Trees are easier to understand.

Nicholas

It doesn't take an especially perceptive person to note the confusion, as boldly as it has been sketched across Grace's features. Nick reaches out toward her as she stands up, motions for her elbow and ends up not grabbing hold just letting his fingertips rest there on the back of her arm. It's meant to catch her attention; little more. "Don't leave, Grace. I just stopped to say hello to Sera. You two should talk."

Kiara

It's a slow progression up the hill when she does notice the others gathered.

The earphones curled around her neck; her face flushed with recent exertion. Kiara Woolfe approaches feeling like the whirl of energy she is, at her core. Thriving, pulsing with life and the promise of vitality and renewal. She smells like sunshine and sweat, the Verbena and somehow; the sheen of it; the essence of that - absolutely feels at home on her.

She makes a slight outward arc to avoid collision with the game at play nearby and approaches from behind a tree; her fingers chasing over the bark.

"Hey."

A breathless greeting that seems to encapsulate them all from the dark eyed female; her mouth bent into a small match for it. The corner curled upward. She settles back against the tree and resumes stretching.

Serafíne

Sera's quiet, as Nick stops Grace. Doesn't pull her dark eyes with the too-large pupils from Grace except briefly, to greet Kiara with a wordless touch of her gaze as the Verbena approaches. A flicker back, and the Cultist slides her dark glasses back over her eyes and rises.

"C'mon Grace, we'll go talk." Except for the fishnets, her feet are bare. Damp grass clings to her skin. Tomorrow, they say, it will snow. Tonight, the Cultist starts to walk, barefoot in the cool spring grass, ambling pass the ultimate frisbee game in the warm spring park. She leaves behind: everything. The orange juice and the plaid blanket and her favorite Doc Martens and her pack of unopened kreteks and her favorite lighter lost somewhere on the blanket, everything.

Maybe she plans to return.

Maybe she assumes: effortlessly, naturally, that someone will always be trailing behind her to clean that shit up.

Serafíne

(I am really sorry but as usual it is my bed time and I have to go to bed. Sera will go off with Grace and talk. Noel: IM me sometime and we can continue the scene. Andrew and Jacqui: I want a real scene sometime soon!)

hipsters @coolbar 2nite only!

Serafíne

Hole in the wall of holes in the wall. The entrance is from the middle of a long alley behind some shallow galleries and the space is strange and there's a red door and a purple light above it that is intuitively menacing but a strange scroll-worked sign above that says simply: cool bar. Then something like a bank big bank vault door and a long stairway down-down-down and: oh hello.

Bar and stage as likely to host impromptu walking productions of MacBeth written back into street slang as it is to have a band, but tonight there's a band. Not much notice. Folks who got the invitation late this afternoon only saw: pop-up show, @coolbar with a link to the location and a minute later come here are new stuff thanks, auto-correct.

Pen

Here is Pen - come through the ominous purple haze, come through the big bank vault door and the long stairway, the echoing stairway, the stairway which echoes (it does echo, echoes and contains, a tunnel) like some kind of nautilus, and: oh hello.

Here is Pen, who came because she wanted to hear the band and see the band members, in an artist's smock doubling as a tunic. The effect is airy and winsome John Williams Waterhouse, some Spring-witch, cobalt blue embroidery at the edges of the collar which is a split that goes down to her sternum the laces left loose like that, and her hips are banded by a belt of braided leather.

Here is Pen - but where is Dan; where is Sera? Pen sweeps the place with a glance, aspiring (the soldier) to alertness, and if she sees either of them: she beelines. Or she joins the small crowd at the bar, ordering a ginger rye from the bartender.

Serafíne

Bright and warm and windy the next morning. The snow mounded up so high yesterday now has a bright, granular crust and everything, everywhere is a paean to gravity, a lesson in watersheds. Easy to get out and back on the road home, even at the immoderately early hour of ten-or-so a.m. And she's curled up in the passenger's seat, knees drawn up, forehead against the glass, sunglasses yes, dark and huge, against the glare. He doesn't imagine she's slept. Doesn't imagine she's slept much, anyway. He knows how much acid she took two days ago. How long it takes to come down.

Well, hey! Dan and Dee and Rick are setting-up on the small stage and there's something easy and companionable about it all, some return-to-rhythm, something necessary and organic that passes between them as they go about the work in an unfamiliar space. Been forever since they 'played-out' after all. Sera is sitting on the stage while the others work. She wanted to wear her Easter dress again but it seemed that the skirt would be an impediment to the on-off she tends to do with her guitar, so she is back to one of her standards: a pair of tiny denim cut-offs and fishnets and filmy, lacy black bra beneath a ripped, worn, studded, shorn leather jacket.

Her legs are swinging, swinging, swinging and she sits while her friends work, and she has a beer and a shot and she's talking very companionably with an attractive young rather-earnest looking black guy sporting a pair of hipster glasses, worn jeans, and a distressed t-shirt which features a line drawing of an enormous sheep eating a tiny laser-eyed monster.

Sera waves and beams when she sees Pen making-a-beeline. Her hair is worn differently than it often is, and when she turns to say something to Tre about who-Pen-is it becomes obvious why: she is wearing a crown.

"Hey!" That smile. "You came!"

Silas

Silas' pants are too loose for a true hipster, but other than that? There is the stubble, the hair swept just so, the button down shirt (with sleeves rolled up to approximately the elbow, displaying tattoos on his arms) tucked into denim that moves well with him rather than constricting his movements, the bow tie that coordinates, contrasts, something. It doesn't match, no, where would be the fun in that?

He drinks his whiskey neat, at least tonight, and of course he's here for the band. Why else could he be? But there are things that mark him out as different [as primal, as Other], and there are things that Echo from him, literal representations of the Ars Vitae with which he is so familiar. His skin is warm to the touch on the occasion it's brushed - a sunlit glade full of riotous growth. There is no jewellery but for one thin gold band on his right ring finger, and a paler bit of skin of a similar width on the middle finger next to it.

Sitting with drink in hand, his back is to the bar; his eyes on the assembled are a vivid blue, clear and vibrant, and observant. He sees Pen enter, sees so much.

Serafíne

Awareness!

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 7, 10) ( success x 8 ) [Doubling Tens]

Silas

Same!

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )

Serafíne

Then, well. This moment when she lifts her chin and looks and looks and oh: everything in that moment is sharp, heightened, intimate, surreal. "Check that guy out." So she says to Pen, a lift of her chin toward Silas. "He feels like someone you'd know."

Pen

[?]

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

Pen

Sera beams and it is Sera and it is that smile and Pen smiles back: a flash of a thing, burnished like a piece of silver, see, tarnished until suddenly: a rill of brightness, catching the day, and of course her entire expression is lit up by it and by Sera and by the prospect of music made by somebody fashioned and crafted by someones that she knows here on this particular night with snow a rim outside a créme brulee shell to be cracked get to the sweet within. "Of course!" - that rill of brightness in her voice, too: steadiness. "I feel as if I have been longing to hear you play, that it is exactly what I want to feel in my collar and my rib cage - Sera, I am very excited," and the flash of a smile and its left-over remnant pleasure becomes this curl of a grin. "Hello," to Tre. "I'm Pen."

And she might have said more, but there by the stage is Serafíne, observant, lifting her chin and Pen does check that guy out, turning so her back is to the stage and she can give that guy an assessing look (a weapon must be ready, always; she tries to be always ready).

"I don't, though. He seems as if he should have antlers, doesn't he?"

And if Silas meets Pen's eyes, she lofts her eyebrows and cants her head.

Pen

ooc: Er, make that the fancier and more Pen-like: "He seems as if he should wear a crown of antlers upon his brow, doesn't he?"

Grace

[Awareness!]

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

Grace

There's an invitation. Grace responds to that invitation, not so much because she enjoys going to bars for music, but because of the sender. Sera could make just about anything worth it.

The swirl of different in this place doesn't surprise much. She still blinks as she steps in the door, this be-winged thing, at everyone else's oddness. She wears her coat-of-many-colors -- red, with strips of LED lights sewn in. If it looks a little worn, perhaps it's just because she wears it everywhere in winter.

A bee-line, she travels, straight to Pen, head down, like she is trying to forget the rest of the crowd is here.

Silas

Eyes are met, yes, and a brow raised in return; questioning, perhaps, from the bit of the bar closest the stage. Silas is not terribly far from where Sera and Pen met, and so after acknowledging their presence (and feeling their Presence) he takes up his drink, signals the bartender for two drinks of the women's choice to be added to his tab, and makes his way to where they stand. Why not? There is music, and there is quarry here, even if he chooses not to hunt, and there are people of interest.

Silas is brazen, he is bald, and when he moves towards where Pen assesses and Sera prepares his gait is sure, and nigh predatory. It is not rushed but measured just right to give Sera chance to give answer before he's close enough to hail them.

"Hello," he says and his deep voice is familiar to Grace. There's a slight accent there, as the Other carries itself from impression to reality; it's English, maybe, if you listen to it sideways, but the kind of upper class English that one hears in places that commoners aren't often about. "I feel that you two may be people I should know. I'm called Silas."

Grace

Silas is Arianna's friend. So is Pen. It remains to be seen if Grace will be able to associate with either of them once it comes out that she'd much rather punch Arianna in the face than give her prejudices credit by being nice.

For now, though...

"You don't know Pen? Really?" Grace makes a 'huh' face. Lets them introduce themselves. "Hey, Pen."

Serafíne

"You know we're loud," Sera-to-Pen, "right?" And there is a moment there of introduction: Tre to Pen and Pen to Tre, perhaps. Sera tells Pen that Tre is, you know, cool, which is code enough for Tre to understand that Pen, like Sera, is magickal. And to Pen's comment about crowns and antlers, all Sera has to add is: "Don't look now, he's coming this way."

With a neat wink. They can be all archaic together.

And: a twirl of Sera's fingers at Grace as she is bee-lining and this glance at Tre that includes a neat little smirk and this particular NPC might well shake hands with Pen and even Silas and also: Grace if she gets here soon enough but he also has a feeling that it is time to take his leave. He's gonna go chat up the bartender/manager and work the crowd and he has enough easy, unselfconscious charm that he can really work a crowd.

"Serafíne. Hey. Everyone calls me Sera."

Nick

Here is Nick, who was likely gently persuaded into coming and ultimately came because he wanted to hear the band play. He is come separate from Pen, though he went back to the house to change before coming out because he couldn't stand to be in his work clothes any longer. He is wearing a collarless chambray shirt and a pair of dark brown khakis and boots: the effect is a simple one, contrasting neatly with Pen.

It will also let him blend in here, which is just as well. Nick has the sort of air about him that could be a buzzkill in a place like this.

Nick gathers his bearings for a moment after he has stepped in the door into the haze and red and purple lights. Pen is easy enough for him to see, and so is Sera, and there is Grace. He lifts a hand to all of them, and he stops at the bar first, because damned if he is going to be at a loud concert without a drink in hand.

Pen

They can all be archaic together, and here come to roost two bird-things (winged quake herald of change dark crow reverent portent) in the cool bar as well. The cool bar really is cool; look how many cool people have come to it (because of Sera - core of gravity; center of the circle). Silas has Pen's attention, as a stranger and a stranger who feels as he does, but when Grace cuts through the crowd she is welcomed with a warm look. She offers the man-who-should-wear-an-antlered-crown her hand. Her wrist is clasped in a metal bracelet; there are rings on every finger, including above the knuckle of her thumb, and she says -

"Silas. From Silvanus, I take it?" with easy good humor, and in the middle of the question this perplexed look for Grace, which winds past Grace to rest on Sera: the question continues. Why should Pen know Silas and not Sera, hmm?

Grace

She waves back at Sera, the twinkle of fingers, a quirk of a lip. But she doesn't understand the weird look Pen gives her. Some people are easier to read than others.

"Hey, Nick too. We're freaking flocking."

Silas

"Yes, actually. My mother is ever interested in the esoteric." Grace is there and she waves her fingers, so Silas gives a nod of his head; it could be a bow but that it isn't at all, and while he may sound like it, look like it, he isn't quite that archaic. Any hand offered is shaken, displaying his tattoo-sleeved right forearm - it is cloaked in symbols of Horned Gods and Hunts, lending still more credence to the thought that perhaps there ought to be horns on his person. As stated, he is warm to the touch in a way that might be considered feverish, were it not so vigorous a sign of life.

"It's a pleasure to meet you both. And to see you again, Grace - I hope all is well."

Serafíne

Grace says that we are freaking flocking and Sera favors the Virtual Adept (sorry: Grace, Sera has not adjusted to the name change.) with a neat liiittle smirk. Grace and her propensity for commenting on the coincidences of mages-coming-together. Well: no coincidence tonight. It's the first time Sera's band has played out in...

...months. Nine or more. She has a shot and a beer and when Siles orders another one of whatever the women are drinking to be put on his tab, hell, she gets another round. Of shots, not beer. Stranahan's Colorado whiskey: goes down a treat. She tosses it back like a pro. Eyes Silas' tattooes when he outstretches his hand to be shaken. Notes the warmth and goes, "Oh, your hands are warm!" And she remembers: others with warm hands. The passing wonder of it.

"I hope you brought your earplugs," Sera says this mostly to Grace, in a way that is teasing-serious, and reaches out to ruffle Grace's hair. Whom Dan pauses in his work doling out cords and setting up drums and amps and whatnot to greet with a grin framed by his blond beard.

Nick

When Nick appears behind all of them, it's without emitting a sound; a more forceful presence than his would be likely to startle other people. Lucky he's not like that.

"Hello everyone," he says, and when he finally settles on a place to enter the little circle of Willworkers here it's next to Pen. He has a whiskey and soda in hand. Dan, where he is setting up amps and doling out cards, gets a wave.

Nicholas, curly-headed and solemn, offers a moment's quiet regard for the other man present: he had not arrived in time to catch his name. "Hello. I'm Nick."

Grace

Grace shrugs at Silas. He can hope all is well all he wants. She isn't going to explain why it isn't right now. But she leans into Sera's ruffling fingers, pulls out -- yes -- a pair of earplugs connected to each other by a wire from her coat pocket. Smirks.

"They are loud," she explains. Gives Nick a wave.

There's goodness to this. Coming together, waving at people, the meeting, the parting. Grace, for her part, is simply present. If her eyes go darting to some light fixture or other rather than a person, it's just the way she is.

Silas

"Silas," he says for Nick's benefit, offering a hand as well; there are Manners to this one, and they are deeper and stronger than just a handshake might seem. And Grace's shrug is taken in stride - already he's come to realize that Grace tends towards the terse, at least with him, and that her reactions are not always what he would consider apropos. Or polite. Still, he reserves obvious judgement, and attempts to include her as much as the others, until it seems she'd rather be left alone.

"I've not been in Denver long, though if you are the Nick and Pen of whom I've heard, we have a friend in common." He's not as secretive as his Housemate in some ways - in this way. He doesn't much mind the assembled knowing who he knows.

Pen

Pen's gray as gloaming eyes gleam when Silas blames his name on his mother's love of esoterica, but she does not discuss it (or the fact that she believes likely his mother was inspired by the mien of him, the clear and present godhood in his shadow; what will Margot make of this one?). Only seems friendly enough, inquisitive but questions will keep.

She executes a small double take when Grace actually pulls out earplugs; her eyes gone wide. She measures their proximity to the stage (the scant few inches, since Sera was and perhaps is sitting still on the edge of the stage, her band busy about her), then finds the speakers.

"Should we move if we hope to preserve our eardrums then?"

There is a Nicholas; Pen reaches for and takes his drink because she has yet to order one of her own and she wants to drink something.

Pen is sharp enough to: "Oh, you are Ari's childhood friend. Sera, have you met Ari yet?"

Grace

[Manip + Subt = Ari? Oh no, I have no probs with her.]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 7) ( success x 1 )

Grace

Never let it be said that Grace has manners. Perish the thought. It's a rare day she remembers to thank people for gifts, and has a tendency to look at people oddly when they thank her -- because property is a bit distasteful when it comes right down to it. What are manners, except for the customs and rituals of tribes who've never claimed her?

"Well, we can," she says, to Pen. "I'm just not a huge fan of loud music, myself."

She tries not to let it show on her face the distaste in her when Ari's name is brought up. She licks her lip, snakelike, tilts her gaze to the side. Not paying attention anymore.

Nick

[Oh? Perception + Empathy.]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )

Silas

[You think so, do you. How droll. Per+Emp]

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

Serafíne

"Tre always has extras," Sera assures Pen: of earplugs. If she is intent on preserving her hearing. "Dee too." Because hearing loss is a problem for musicians. Or at least: musicians who are not disciples of life.

They are indeed very close to the stage. Sera is still sitting there, letting her legs swing and swing and swing. She is excited, wired. Perhaps she is on some-small-thing other than alcohol, in addition to alcohol, but the darkness in cool bar is deep enough that there will be no good view of her pupils.

Gives Nick a quick, chasing grin. Shakes her head no to Pen: she has never heard of Ari and she takes no part in the examination of Grace who is trying-not-to-let-things show. That shake jostles a few of the curls pinned up amidst the glories of her crown but the whole of the mass is well-secured.

Then Dan is there with a hand on her shoulder because everything's set up and they need five minutes to go over the set list, don't they? In the past they've always done covers, or covers of their own shit that Sera-and-Dan have sold to other artists, stitched together by Sera's irrepressible and slowly raveling charm. Tonight though -

"We'll be out in a few! So glad you guys came - "

Nick

His drink is commandeered; Nick allows this with hardly a sideways glance. This is the way of things. It frees up his hand to shake Silas's, and there is this glimmer of recognition there as the man says his name that Nick doesn't bother to hide. "Ari's mentioned you," he says.

His hand falls back to his side, and Nicholas is an insightful man and it's not difficult to notice the way in which Grace's gaze slants sidelong, how there is this slight wrinkling of her nose. Nick marks it; for now, he says nothing. His hazel eyes are for Sera, who is swing swing swinging her legs, and there is this crinkle of amusement at the corners of his eyes. "I didn't realize you were in the band, Sera. Thanks for inviting us."

Pen

Nick didn't realize she was in the band; that brings out Pen's dimples, for whatever reason, a mischievous glint.

Then: "I am glad too! Break the bone and chase the echoes down," Pen says, earnest and whole-hearted and here a quick flash of a smile again that winds up not being quick at all; flash bomb, the way it just dazzles (lake-light, shield-light) for a moment but there's the blinding blot after effect. That lingers; in the place of this metaphor, it becomes diffuse. Dan gets a tilt of her chin, a pleased hello acknowledgment; then courtesy: "I am for the bar."

It is an invitation, sure, because there are people now crowding in, and their area is a coveted one; funny how a crowd will eddy, will whorl like a river against a stone-strewn shore.

She hands back to Nicholas his drink; it has been considerably depelted. "It is good to meet you, Silvanus." Pause; "I meant to say Silas," and she sounds perplexed: because she did. (When one is marked, such things often happen. Especially if one is speaking to someone myth-seeped as Penelope.) "In some other venue, I shall want most dearly to ask you questions!"

And she is for the bar, so.

Silas

Silas marks the same shift in expression that Nick does, and he too lets it lie; he is the new addition, after all, and Arianna is more than capable of fighting her own battles when they're worth fighting. And sometimes when they aren't. More interesting is that Pen has labeled him a childhood friend, and that Nick's eyes sparkle recognition at his name. The way he sips his drink, finishing it, is casual, as are his posture and eyes.

"Yes, she and I know each other of old. If you'll pardon me - I promised my roommates I would remind them to be here for the show. Break legs, Sera."

He says this with sincerity, in the way of far older performance arts than this - and with pleasantries traded, he makes his way for the door - where he'll be able to make his call in more favorable conditions.

Serafíne

This is a ridiculously small venue and those invitations went out to maybe one out of five people on Sera's normal invite-people-to-shit contact list (which is of course, managed by Dan-not-Sera) and the other magi may well have five-ten-fifteen minutes or more of conversation before the quartet come out of - er - the back office and the hallway down to the bathrooms with their instruments and plug in to check a few levels and channels and whatnot but they already tried out the space on Monday when the bar was closed and figured (most) of that shit out. Dan and Sera with guitars, Dee with her bass, Rick on the drums. And this is new work and it is collective work, brawny and rhythm-section forward. Great big and (yes) loud as promised though the wave of noise has been modulated for the space, you see. It is also: loud as in, full, driving. The wall of instrumental sound and Sera's and sometimes Sera-and-Dee's or even Sera-and-Dee-and-Dan's voices a melodic cloud above it, floating through a river of noise.

(Er: thank you all for coming! I gotta sleep!)

Grace

Grace huffs at Nick. Didn't realize Sera was in the band? Wait until the first time she does literal magic with that voice of hers. It is something.

Pen departs for the bar, and Silas departs for his roomates. "Want to follow Pen?" she asks Nick. "It's about to get loud right here. Might be better at the bar, eh?

She hefts her weight back and forth, clearly ready to move if he is. Clearly ready to wait with him if he isn't.

the murder

twilight

Rules:

- I don't have much time tonight, but you are my priority!

- ask me for difficulties before you roll. I may elide / narrate through some bits, I may ask for rolls for others.

- this scene is largely based on what your characters would do, so I'm going to ask you either for OOC direction or IC direction as to where they are starting and what their primary goals are (learn info? set up a distraction? et cetera?)

- if you ever do not understand something I have written but think your character might, feel free to ask for clarification. I may offer to let you roll to learn more.

- you can at any time ask to roll detection / knowledge rolls if you'd like based on the posts. they won't always get tons of info!

twilight

The mercury still dips below freezing at night and each and every frame and edge of the day is ccool or chilly or cold or frigid depending on one's perspective and state of dress but 'round about three p.m. basking in the warm rays of the sun, surrounded by the golden waves of prairie grasses, the low scrub trees, that sense of: space, openness, the mad, endless dome-of-the-sky that inspired some pioneers and drove others mad mad mad. Well, here is Sand Creek Park. The odd sign about construction projects through summer 2016, but otherwise greenspace naturalized enough that the grass is left to go wild, naturalized. Sand Creek proper is low and flat and undulent through the landscape, dark and cold where it runs through its rocky course, and hard to see in the flat sea of waving grasses except when one stumbles upon it, or where a pedestrian bridge arches high over.

Hard to believe a Technocratic lab is little more than a golf course away.

Kiara Woolfe

There's a fine tension here. An undercurrent of it, it rattles through them, rattles bone deep.

Being so close to them. The Verbena can almost taste it; their unyielding trudge toward so-called unification and strength. The idea that Alexander was with them, that they were working to bury their mechanics beneath his skin and twist and distort all that he was to suit their needs had, at first, nearly unwound Kiara Woolfe's carefully built armor.

It kept her safe, you see. That emotional buffer. Kept her from striding across that gently trickling creek into their turf. It was keeping a many great things at bay for the brunette right now - things she carried in those dark eyes of hers when they ticked over the parkland as they arrived; their movements seeming unnaturally loud and echoing.

There were insects singing in the wilder grasses growing by the creek. The Verbena paused only long enough to pass a flashlight to her companion and direct him a slight, brief check of her mouth upward at the corner. Still red, that mouth.

Tonight it feels brazen in a different way - a slash of bold declaration. The pendant around the female's neck glinted as she moved toward the water's edge; adjusting the strap of her backpack.

The insects quieted as they drew nearer, watching.

[Awareness!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 7, 7, 7) ( success x 3 )

Kiara Woolfe

[And, activating Mind Shield! Base Diff 4, -1 Taking her time.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Nicholas Hyde

Nicholas called in sick to work today. It is not the first time he has done this in order to pursue some Awakened agenda, nor will it be the last; and yet it seems to him as though the space between these occurrences grows nearer and nearer. Last year he went on administrative leave from his old job for nearly three months, and when he came back he was so changed and Quiet-riddled the Sleepers in his life all assumed he had cancer. It was the only explanation they had for: holy shit, man.

He is not quite so phased by being this close to a Technocratic stronghold. Nicholas works in a hospital; the risk of running into a Union operative, and the assumption that they perhaps even share some beliefs and aspects of paradigm in common, is a part of his day-to-day life.

Today when he arrives he is also carrying a backpack. Some of his more cumbersome items (the yew staff, in particular) are resting at home in his study; it's fortunate the park is nearby since he will have nearly everything he needs to assist.

Maybe he's a little nervous, today, evidenced generally by fidgeting, by sometimes plucking absently at the curls at the back of his neck. Can she see it? Nick doesn't work around other mages familiar with his preferred Sphere very often.

They arrive at the creek together. His movements are not loud and echoing; he might as well be floating over the landscape here, as though he already stands with one foot in this world and one in the next. They come to the river, and Nick draws in a deep breath that inflates his lungs down to the very bottom and expands his shoulders and chest and lungs.

[Mind shield for Nick too. Base diff 4, -1 taking time. Extending if necessary.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (1, 3) ( success x 1 )

Nicholas Hyde

[Extending.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (3, 5) ( success x 2 )

Nicholas Hyde

[Aaaaaand awareness.]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 5, 5, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

twilight

If there is some monstrous construct, some mad, consumptive, mechanistic, devouring amalgam lost somewhere in the orange glow of Aurora's ambient light pollution (on snow-bound nights, doesn't it all feel a bit nuclear? some assault, some war at the edge of the horizon: Kiara feels not a lick of it. She's open to the sky and oh there's Orion finding a way to shine through the haze and here is the murmur of the creek and the rush of the brace of interstates surrounding them quite as low and susserant as the coursing of any waterway and hum, hum, hum. Come summer the noisy chorus will be loud and lewd, the rush and need, the drive to consummate, god, something, anything, before the sun falls away from the earth again. To be remade, reborn: perpetuated.

Now though.

Now.

Not many in the park afterdark.

They cut through the popular jogging trails heading for something perhaps deeper. Somewhere where the seams between the worlds are thinning, thinning, thinner.

Night all around. Prairie grass rustling in the constant wind.

No evidence anyone knows they are here.

(Gauntlet is generally 7-8 in the park. Kiara's awareness roll is enough that they can probably hike to an area where it is 6-7 at least at night. it would be higher in daylight.)

Kiara Woolfe

In some ways the solitude feels worse. The normalcy to it; being in the open; surrounded by the soft grasses and beneath the sky. It feels like belonging and home to the pagan. She feels as much a part of the earth beneath their feed and the lush, verdant growth all around them as she does within her skin.

The essence of the brunette was twofold, here. A thrum; the pulse of nature; her perpetual, never-ending cycle. Nicholas takes the time to breathe when they reach the water's edge and the Verbena stands silently for a moment; staring out into the distance; her shoulders straight, a trace of that lingering agitation drawn into the curve of her spine.

Her fingers fall away from the quartz around her neck. "It feels wrong, doesn't it." She offers simply, quietly. Her eyes shifting to rove Nicholas's face. To search it, before she looks back over the water. "It feels like there should be something more. This close." She takes a few cautious steps off to the side and then gestures up a small crest.

There's a gentle gust of wind that sends the smell of summer-turned earth their way; traces over their skin as if to beckon them on. "I think we'll have a better chance up there, through those trees."

Kiara Woolfe

(feed = feet, I can spell, honest.)

Nicholas Hyde

They've reached the water's edge and as Kiara looks over at his face Nicholas seems to be scanning the water itself, for a moment. There is something in the Chakravanti's demeanor that could lend the impression that he is not particularly paying attention as they walk through the park: there are points at which his eyes seemed to be focused on nothing, or when they are looking at something that neither of them are talking about. They go unfocused, hazy.

Nick needs other people; they are a tether.

As Kiara speaks it draws his eyes over to her, and to her comment he only nods. "They might even have some sort of operation here that's being concealed. It's close enough, and there isn't a lot of other green space on their campus." Perhaps he might not otherwise have been so suspicious but: construction projects.

Kiara leads them on, and Nick follows, shifting the shoulder strap of his bag.

twilight

They have to hike to find it. In the dark, unfamiliar ground. The sea of grass helps. Easy to see where others have tramped then down, particularly when winter keeps them dry and dormant. What trees are here are low and scrub; lonely, scrabbling outposts, strange little copses grown up where the water table is high, where an old half-forgotten oxbow of the stream has become a boggy wetland.

Thirty minutes, forty minutes, and: here.

Kiara Woolfe

While they hike, Kiara's narrow beam of torchlight bounces across the grass. Casts a strange, feeble little yellow orb arcing out. She keeps it low, focusing on swinging it out before their feet so they can navigate around the wild grasses that have thrown themselves into re-growth everywhere their roots can reach. Straining even where they've become trodden and flattened by constant human traffic through the park.

She speaks, after a few minutes of silence. She has a melodic voice, the pagan. Somehow sweet for all the ways she clearly was anything but. There's a sense that perhaps she does it - talks, murmurs into the rustling trees and the gurgle of water - for the sake of distracting them from the task at hand as much as anything.

"There was another Node here, you know. Not here, but - out in the trees. In the wilderness. Annie - one of the Cabal at the Chantry - took me out there once. There's a clearing where the world just sort of - stops." Kiara's movements slow and she waits for Nicholas to catch up, glances at him.

The torchlight sliding along her arm, shoulder. Casting shadows into the lines of the Verbena's face. "On the other side, through time. It's just a void of nothing now. After they came and tried to take the Node. It was too wild for them, though. To powerful. It wouldn't yield." A flare of something like pride at that. A vicious sort of satisfaction that fades soon enough as she begins careful steps forward again.

"So they did what they're good at. They destroyed it. Killed more of us. Left the earth stained with blood." She stops after they've walked onwards a good way; dipping into a silence not fraught with but stained at the edges with a particular sort of grief. One not entirely hers but - felt. But understood.

"I think this is it." She turns a small circuit, the Verbena. Sets her pack down carefully. "I think we might be able to reach across here."

twilight

It is as dark a night as one will find in Sand Creek Park. The moon is absent and the clouds have cleared away. The ambient glow is ever-present on the horizon: impossible to forget the labs, the facilities, the hospital a holes of golf away: but beneath the loose sky and among the dark grasslands below: they work. They have come deep enough that they have to push through the waving grasses like ships through the sea, but so they do. The circle is drawn: physically. The landscape means that it lingers physically even as they feel it taking shape, their resonance twined, the magicks woven together like reeds.

Kiara Woolfe

It feels like a key, turning in a lock, once the circle is cast. The faint hum of energy surrounding them; rising up around them in a small diameter on all sides. Kiara presses her fingertips to the bundle of sage and snuffs out the smoking tip; moves quietly over to her pack and carefully replaces it inside.

There's a sobriety, now, to the witch's movements. As if the casting of the circle had signaled some change in her demeanor. The dark eyes that find Nicholas, twin glimmers in the twilight, are full now of a steady sort of determination. "I think we're ready now," she offers and rises to her feet, gently brushing dirt from her knees.

"Crow won't be able to cross the circle but hopefully he'll be willing to bargain information. You've dealt with him before, you can speak for us, once he's here if you like." Her mouth curls a touch, she holds her hand out to the other Awakened.

"Ready?"

Nicholas Hyde

Nicholas always has a sort of sobriety to his movements; there is no discernible difference in him once that quiet hum of energy seems to spring up around them. If anything, perhaps there is some tension that has crept into him just now: he is unused to Working with an audience, or speaking to spirits with an audience, especially not when that happens to consist of someone who is more experienced than he is.

Still, he levels a look at the Verbena as she rises to her feet and he says, "I'm still learning to summon. If you call him here, I can speak with him."

There is this glance to her hand when she offers it to him, this moment of quizzical hesitation: unsure of its purpose. But he places his hand in hers, nods, and says, "Ready."

Kiara Woolfe

[Right! Let's do this. I think ... we're gonna roll with Spirit 3 to Summon and add in Prime 2 to assist with drawing Crow over. So, we're starting at Base Diff 6, -1 for using Instruments, -1 for taking her sweet time and -1 for using a Quint. GO BIG OR GO HOME. May extend! I think they'll need a few suxx to get Crow's attention. ]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Kiara Woolfe

[Extending! +1 Diff and adding a WP.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 7, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Kiara Woolfe

[Once more for flavor.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (4, 8, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

twilight

Not silence here, but the distance of human-crafted sounds give their circle a strange sense of isolation that should feel rare in an urban setting: anywhere, except - god, it is night, and it is not quite as hard as one imagines to become lost in a cityscape, after full dark has fallen, particularly this close to one of the doorways of the year.

What is that near? That noise that feels like woosh and lift, shadow-against-shadow with this fey hint of gleam, that shadow-without-shadow-without-shadow because tonight there is no moon.

Breathe in: and there. Stippling the bare limbs of the nearest scrub oak, this impression of - oh, a half-dozen dark-winged birds, roosting in the trees. Gleam-of-a-querying eye from the other side of their well-cast circle. And:

?????????

This push of query/question that embodies so many all in one. Who/when/how/why?

And, perhaps also: what do you have for me?

Kiara Woolfe

It takes time, to summon a spirit. Not - endless time, they don't quite have that to spare but - time. There is a drawing in of focus required, you understand. A need for this small, lean woman with her wild hair and eyes to pull at the very fabrics that knit their worlds together and unravel them. To part the seam between and draw out one that resided on the other side.

There was good reason why the Spirit touched Awakened often seemed so displaced - at any given moment prone to staring off into space; to gleaning things that were not quite there. For the Umbra, such as it was, was a profound spectacle to behold - hard to ignore that much wonderment, once your eyes had seen it once.

Kiara grips Nicholas' hand at one point; her eyes fixed ahead; at some point in the inky darkness. There's a thickening; a syrupy gathering of energy and then - the swoop of wings. They are, quite suddenly, not alone and being observed by a gathering of crows nesting in the tree branches.

The Verbena's fingers loosen and she turns dark eyes to her companion. Her expression seeming to read: you're up, batter.

Nicholas Hyde

Nicholas, when he has spoken with spirits, has typically engaged them in this random way: whatever happened to be in the area he was. It so happened that crow spirits and raven spirits and coyote spirits happened to find him, more often than not. He does not know how long he walked in the dead lands when he was there, but he knows they became as friends, or as close to friends as something otherworldly can really ever get.

His gaze is intent as Kiara grips his hand and focuses her eyes (unfocuses them? who can really say) on the black that surrounds them. The swoop of wings: his fingers loosen too at that moment and he looks around toward the winged birds that are roosting in that tree, from the other side of the circle.

"Hello," he says to them, and there's this way that he talks to them without pretense, as though they were people. The two of them are battered by questions, which merit answers, in their turn. And then, "Nicholas Hyde, and this is Kiara Woolfe. I've met others like you before, and I know you're clever and quick, and I know how much you know.

"We called you hoping you'd be willing to trade. Secret for secret?"

twilight

Secret for a secret?

Secret for a secret.

There is something elegant and elegaic about the dark shapes shrouded amongst the bare tree limbs. This sense of communal awareness, of communication, of chorus that ripples from one suggestion to another, dancing through murder, each to each.

At last the foremost among them rears back and opens its body up to the full width of its wingspan, and rears back and takes such soaring flight only to swoop back downward, hopping and backwinging like it intended to land just outside the circle.

And so it does. Somehow the waving grasses sink all around the creature.

Gleam, that eye. Finally:

Assent. Secret for a secret. and

Tell me what you know.

Greedy thing.

Kiara Woolfe

Kiara watches on as Nicholas speaks to the spirit(s). Her stillness could either signify tension or grave, total consideration and a look spared the Verbena's way speaks far more of the latter. The edge of her jaw in the moonlight a finecut thing; she's all hollows and dark, shining eyes.

When Crow assents, when he dives and settle-hops to the ground near the edge of the circle, then Kiara stirs and glances at her companion. Their secrets were a precious commodity and perhaps, given their nature, not to be shared without considerable caution. "We can each offer something," she says quietly, with a tinge of some unidentifiable strain in her voice.

"The more we do, the more he may be inclined to offer back." There's a beat, then Kiara walks to the edge of the circle proper and lowers herself to a crouch; observing the spirit's gleaming, bright eye. "Hello, Crow." The brunette murmurs and then leans in. Her body perched there at the edge of the circle.

She says something, the pagan and then after a beat, pulls back and rises again.

Nicholas Hyde

Greedy thing: he had expected no less. Finding something equitable, that's always the trick; bargaining ethically, without giving away secrets that aren't his to give away - that's the other.

"I will. Do you know anything about the tower back that way?" And here, a significant look over his shoulder toward the Technocratic compound. He can only imagine how it looks to them: he has never been to such a place, not in the Umbra. An infinite network of steel and glass, perhaps. "The web. We want to know everything you know about it."

He watches them with steady eyes, hair dark as one of their wings. Perhaps they, too, think he is a greedy thing. He watches as Kiara moves forward, whispers to the murder. "I'll offer more once we know what you have to tell in kind."

Kiara Woolfe

This is the secret Crow receives from the Verbena: Our friend was taken hostage and when I heard he was the first thing I felt wasn't pity or fear but envy. To be that close to them, to look them in the eye and have the chance to destroy them.

I want to watch them all burn. I want to exact revenge for my friends. And for myself.

twilight

We know it.

Ruffling, rustling, the murder responds. The foremost of them bobs its head. That whole and strange and oddly human movement, the too-intelligent gaze.

An echo: rising, whistling, whispering, brightening, query after query after answer after query:

Spiderhome.

Another frission, this dark, lyrical glance from Nicholas to Kiara, Kiara to Nicholas, back again.
--

Everything we know is much and little. Ask what you will and we will answer.

Kiara Woolfe

The brunette's arms fold over her chest and for a beat she frowns into the distance, as the spirits mention the tower; call it the Spiderhome. The spirits of stagnation and the cities; spinning their webs across great divides of gleaming glass and steel.

She exchanges a look with Nicholas, then presses: "We seek someone inside the Spider's domain. He feels like Ice. Frozen things. We want to know what protections there are to reach him. Where are the dangers?"

Nicholas Hyde

Spiderhome, they say, and Nicholas, this is the first time he's heard it described as such: he had some sense of the way these places looked to spirits, from things he has heard others say. He had perhaps been unaware until now of how apt his conceptualization of the place was.

The crows rustle on their branches, and Nicholas shifts his weight from one leg to the other, folding his arms as he thinks. Perhaps he is still thinking of what to offer in return; it is not a decision made lightly. "We also want to know the best way to reach him, the most direct and with the fewest dangers. Are there any places near the web that they haven't touched - any safe places?"

twilight

There is a sense of cessation there. Kiara says that they seek someone inside who feels like ice and there is another flutter from within the murder, ths humming, humming query that comes back to them, in a ricochet:

Many frozen in spiderhome. Frozen-one-who-sought-and-changed is the friend-you-seek?

Another bristling from within the murder, which feels like a shivering sense of refusal or disagreement, some sense of disorder. They do not know the best way to him; where he is being held, except in the heart and here there is something else: an impression from the murder that has flown-over spiderhome, that sees it from above the spinning web of the grid, that sensed this person and this change, some surging change like growth growth growth (flowing and boundless) from deep inside. Later: Kiara and Nicholas will be able to transliterate this impression of space into at least a certain (still large) wing of a certain hospital south of where they stand. Another sense of being: beneath, buried, perhaps - perhaps? Belowground?

One of the murder tells them that noplace is safe but again: that bristling of disagreement, a rustling rising of a secret coming to the surface: The Greenway. Oak still lives.

Scoff. Slumbers.

Lives.

The dangers? Many: myriad. Stasis, says one. Death, says another. Devouring.

Kiara Woolfe

Frozen one who sought and changed is the friend you seek?

Kiara's mouth softens a touch, tilts up at the edge into a slip of a smile; she inclines her face. Nods, briefly. "Yes, that's our friend. He was taken and we want to bring him home." There's this tiny fleeting tremor in Kiara's voice that registers on home. As if she were uncertain of saying it aloud, as if, deep down, she knew there may well not be a home for Alexander to return to.

How did you simply pick up and resume a life after what he's been through, anyway?

Oak still lives. Slumbers. The Greenway.

The Verbena's smile fades a little. "Oak can help?" Aside, to Nicholas. "They might be referring to Greenway Park. It's not that far from here." Then, her dark eyes back on Crow. "I can awaken Oak from his slumber."

Nicholas Hyde

The Greenway.

There is this sharp glance to Kiara then, something that Nicholas tries to shadow more or less as second nature but cannot quite. It is a thing that sounds significant to him, even if he is fully unaware of the area. Fortunately, Kiara expounds, lends color and form to the sketch he is beginning to lay out in his mind.

He heard Kiara's uncertainty too. His jawline is firm: Nicholas had expected to find the man changed. If you wish to be reborn, first you have to die.

"It sounds like we're headed to Greenway next, then." And he takes a few steps closer to the edge of the circle, regards the murder in his somber way. "Thank you, Crow. You've been very helpful to us. Is there something specific you would have of me?"

Kiara Woolfe

[Enigmas + Intel]

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

Nicholas Hyde

[Enigmas + Intelligence]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )

twilight

There was dissension amongst the murder because they were debating whether or not a certain oak (somewhere: perhaps close) was even alive. It sounds a bit like an old wives' tale, as much as a secret. But: if that oak is in a nearby park and if that park is threatened by the technocrats, slumbering is the only way that spirit has of surviving. Waking an oak spirit (which is tied essentially to its rooted-tree) would probably be the death of the tree and its spirit.

If anyone needed a distraction the murder might be the best way to go: they are mobile! and can fly over/away, but I am not sure that they need that right now since they aren't attacking (yet).

twilight

The murder seems to confer amongst itself and they returns to Nicholas. It wants: one shiny secret. And two tears.

Forward.

Serafíne
An old Jeep in the driveway with Colorado plates, parked next to but not inside the garage.  Mud kicked up by the tires is spattered over the flanks.  Hell, it's spring, or near to it.  Mudlucious, right?

That's the first signal that the chantry has a visitor other than its routine residents.

In the kitchen, someone's made tea.  It's cooling beneath a cozy.  The supple of alcohol has been replenished - two big bottles of Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey are set out on the counter.   These days the space is no longer precisely communal - instead, it belongs to someone so.  Harder to figure out where things go.

But Sera isn't in the kitchen or the living room or downstairs in the well-secured library, she is on the back patio, where steam from the hotspring rises in the cool (almost) spring air, densely mineral.  The Cultist has been here, soaking her calves in the warm pool of water, meditative or near to it, long enough that her Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt has gone translucent from the rising steam.  There's a cup of whiskey-spiked tea on the flagstone lip near her right thigh and no one within haling distance.  If Dan drove her (he always does), he is secreted away somewhere else in the Chantry.

Nicholas Hyde
From the driveway, there's a sound of another approaching car: these open spaces, without trees to muffle the sound, forecast approaching vehicles from farther away than the places where Nick has spent most of his recent time.  Sera can hear it come to a stop in the driveway, can hear the engine cut.  She cannot hear the footfalls of whoever emerges from the vehicle. (Ironic, perhaps, that such an Echo should leave no sound.)

Nicholas has not been here, other than the meeting in which they all gathered to talk about Alexander's abduction and likely subsequent torture and reconditioning.  He is unaware of who the chantry is owned by; it only occurs to him how very small the place is considering what he grew used to on the east coast.  The population is sparser here, and so too for their kind.

She can hear the door open and shut; still no footfalls.

It takes a while for Nick to make his way down the spring, if only because he is wandering through the dwelling to see what's there, upstairs and down and into the library and back out to where he can see steam rising past the foggy windows.  When he sees Sera there, it makes him halt, if only for a moment.  "Hello," he says, and he sounds a touch surprised.

A moment later he is sitting next to her near the pool of water, crosslegged.  "It's good to see you up and around."

Serafíne
Sera does not tend to meditate with her eyes closed.  No, she manages it with her eyes: open and she thinks that's as it should be.  Leaning back, palms on the damp stone, her arms straight, back arched,  dark eyes half-lashed, affixed to the sky above.  The scrim of pale, thready clouds in the saturated sky.  The changing light as evening is starting to fall, the trail of jet cutting purposefully through the gloaming.


He says hello and her sharp little chin drops and her dark eyes, too.  Otherwise, her posture does not change.  This spare twinge of an expression (shading wry, as response to his surprise, the source of which she does not know) on her mouth.  "Hello."

Right back at him, but not quite an echo.  He sounds surprised.  She sounds like she knows a secret, and hell - maybe she does.

And she watches him as he exits the house, circles around the patio, comes to sit near her, attention dropping only when he is seated at last.  Her profile to him, then, or an impression of it.  All planes and angles: honed rather than curved.

"I don't actually spend my whole life in a complete state of stupor."    Neat, incisive little shrug here.  "I was up all night, and coming down hard."   From magick, yes, and what she uses to fuel it.  "Quite a welcome wagon we hustled up for you and your wife, hmmm?"


Serafíne
"You never met Alexander, did you?"

Nicholas Hyde
"It was," Nick says, of the welcome wagon.  His fingers have found the knots at the neck of his boots, and he is working them through, trying to untangle them.  He has not answered her other question yet, about Alexander, and something in his expression suggests that he is processing her other words.

He does say: "I only assumed you were exhausted."  Nick's profile, his straight nose and bowed mouth and high cheekbones, are framed in the dimming light of the sun.  His hair has gotten longer since she saw him last; it is beginning to curl around his ears and at the base of his neck, as though he has chosen to eschew shears along with the trappings of the east coast.  (It never fit him anyway - that's not where he's from.)

Finally he has worked the knots loose, and he pulls off his boots.  His socks follow, and are tucked into the boots, which he sets aside.  As he rolls up the cuffs of the grey chinos he is wearing (his legs are sparsely haired), there is something musing there in his expression.  "I never met Alexander," he says, "but Pen told me about him.  It sounded like she respects him."

As he scoots toward the spring on the heels of his feet and hands to drop his feet in, he finally looks over at her.  "It sounds as though everyone around here is taking what happened pretty hard."

Serafíne
Nick says that he only assumed she was exhausted and Sera gives him this queer little glance; over her shoulder.  "Yeah?"  The hint of her nose, the sharp wing of her cheekbone, a shadowed eye.  Curls gone kinkier from the damp and the heat, a little more flyaway.    Her mouth in a smirk that has some edge to it.  Somehow more and less at once than it would, in any other circumstances.  Okay: a sobriety to her that matches her meditative pose, and seems somehow - less precisely sober and more, somehow - sacred.

"I was still hallucinating.  Plus the acid hangover.   Makes you feel like you've been pried apart and put back together."

Kinda what it feels like to scry like that, for someone like her, too.

"I met Alex the day he woke up.  You know?  Shitty thing to happen to him.  Fucking assholes."

Nicholas Hyde
Nick has leaned back on the heels of his hands, his feet fully immersed in the spring, his head tilted slightly back; he is not looking at Sera just this moment.  He is breathing in steam, and letting it swell his chest and settle in his hair and in the hollow of him, drinking in the place almost.  His hair has not yet begun to kink in the heat and the damp, but it will.

"I've never used that for magick," he says, though this is less some sort of judgment and more an idle comment, perhaps an invitation to say more or less as she wishes.

Serafine, when she mentions Alex, draws the Chakravanti's gaze back to her at last.  He sways into a more upright position, his spine perfectly aligned with his base, his shoulders set: he does some sort of yoga or meditation himself.  "What do you think are the chances of us finding him, realistically?" he asks, and perhaps he wouldn't ask this if Sera didn't feel as powerful as she does to him.  He assumes experience, and he assumes wisdom.    "As he was?"

Serafíne
For the moment, she does not pick up the thread of his idle comment about the tools.  A glance sure, a certain attenuated attention: not high-strung but somehow both nuanced and livewire that slides across his features.  She is looking for judgment.  Perhaps expecting it - but -

"Realistically?"  Her eyes, dark and darker, affix on him.  This quick, sorrowful curve to her fine mouth.  An expressively dampness in her eyes.  "I don't believe in their fucking reality.  And we won't find him as he was, yeah?  Because he won't be Then, he'll be Now."  Conviction, bright, sharp, engaging, in every goddamned word.

"But we'll find him."  This more nuanced; another hint of that sobriety, that precision.  Less conviction, you know, but still a core of believe.  "And whoever he is now, we'll help him figure it out."

Nicholas Hyde
There is a breath that she can hear; this is not sharp, it's not any kind of gasp for air or fish out of water sucking gills sort of desperation.  Just this quiet drawing in and release, during which his chest swells again.

He looks at her once more and his eyes glint amber in the looming twilight.  "Good.  I expect he'll be different," Nick says, though there is perhaps something in him that was encouraged by what Sera has said.  The expressions his face carries are also nuanced things, full of secrets and whispered promises and always questions.

Of course Nick expects Alex will be different; the core of his Tradition surrounds death and rebirth.

"I appreciated Dan's contribution to the meeting, by the way.  I wish I had stuck around longer afterward to tell him so."

Serafíne
She makes a noise, Sera.  Kicks her bare calves out in the water.  Can't know that the way her power colors his impression of her.  Doesn't understand just how much the way she feels has changed to everyone around her.  Beneath and inside it all, she is now, and always has been: simply herself.  So goddamned strange to grow up.  Right?

And she moves her legs, watches the water sluice over them.  She may be a little bit something even now, but, oh.  Not much.  Mostly she's just a little bit Sera, now.

A little bit sorrowful.  A little bit introspective, and Nick appears encouraged by what she said, and she catches that.  Gives him a flickering, allusive glance.  Half-lashed but strange and steady beneath them, then looks back down at the water again.

"He's around here, somewhere."  Quick, sliding little smile.  "If you really wanna tell him.  Usually doubles as my fucking chaffeur since it hardly seems like a good idea for me to get behind the wheel most of the time.   It's not something he really needs to hear, though, you know?"

Nicholas Hyde
"I should," Nick says, of Dan.  And then, "Maybe I'll try to catch him on the way out."  Whatever glances Sera is throwing him, he has not reacted to them; perhaps he has not noticed them, or merely does not know how to interpret them, and that wouldn't be so unusual.  Most people are self-centered creatures, given to watching others mainly for the purpose of knowing how to react to them.  He adds, "Regardless of need, I think most people like to know when they're valued, even for something small."

This has no barbs; there's nothing in it to argue with Sera.  It is what it is, a simple statement of belief, perhaps a sort of affirmation.

Nick lifts one of his feet too, but only enough to let one of his toes crest through the top of the pool and into the air.  He watches the swirls and eddies in the pool, and he twists his head around to touch his chin to his breastbone, stretching out the muscles in his neck and upper back.

"Can I ask you something somewhat personal?  There's something I've been wondering about."

Serafíne
"Mmmph."   That indulgent, or perhaps simply self-indulgent noise, that sounds like assent.  If there were any doubts, she puts them to rest a moment later.  "Sure.  What is it?"

Nicholas Hyde
After she gives her assent, there is this space in which Nicholas allows silence.  This is less due to any hesitation or regret for initiating the conversation, though if she looks over at him during this time his eyes will be cast off somewhere into the sunset, or wandering somewhere just past what either of them can see.  It's not even a stare, just this sort of dreamy unfocused-ness, without any especial intent.

He gathers his thoughts, orders them to communicate them properly.  Nick is married to a Hermetic; perhaps he is particularly aware that words have weight and is not careless with his.

"I've been struggling to move forward," he says, and while this is a sort of admission it has the air of an admission only given for the purpose of context.  "I think I've noticed...a lot of unhappiness and isolation amongst the Willworkers I've known who seem to have reached a higher level of understanding.  The price of power, so to speak.  Did it ever seem that way to you, when you were where I am now?"

Serafíne
Here is Sera listening, her head tipped toward, her hair curtained around her face.  Blond yes, but the color's artificial and there is almost always a suggestion of dark roots, if only in the fringe once shaved close over her left ear, which she has allowed to grow out at least to pin-curl length.  Still, it catches the light, frames her with it.  Enhances the perhaps mythic sense of wildness she has about her now.

And with her head bent like that, her face is all in shadow.  The subtle flicker of her expression, the damned sense of determination as she concentrates, right, because thinking is hard, but once upon a time someone named Hawksley refused to accept her I don't knows and he is still: in her head, right?  So she thinks even when her native instinct is to elide.  Pushing through the feelings, picks them up and turns them over, trying to find the words.

"I was - " pause, her brow contracted, her hands curled over the lip of the stone.  Neat little fingers, that separate sense of resonance that resolves itself into the ring on her right index finger, and all those tattooes.  "I was where I think you are now, when I came to Denver.  And I didn't think about it then.  There were a couple of Disciples here then, and they were cool, they were there for me.  You know?  And everyone..

"But looking back - "    Her eyes close; she has a flash of Pan.  The old photograph of his son beneath a magnet affixed to his fridge.  Another flash, Jim.  Alone in a cheap, ragged motel room reaking of his resonance.  The sour smell of too many days and too many drugs hanging in the air, the overwhelming sense of his despair.  And she doesn't say any of that, but there's an an indrawn breath, ragged, right?  Something like a spasm in the way her hands grip the stones framing the edge of the hot spring.

Tension in her shoulders as she holds herself: still, still, still.  Breathes in, out, in again.  Nods once, entirely to herself.  The answer to some old, old question.  "Why do you ask?"

Nicholas Hyde
Nicholas is not tipped forward but rather has settled back.  There is something open in his posture (perhaps this is more deceptive than it would seem) and in the set of his shoulders, the way the light falls on him and highlights the smooth plane of his nose and throws a gleam into the dark tangled chaos of his hair, turns the light blue of his shirt into a ripple of light and shadow.

If he understands her struggle to answer this question he does not say so, though in the look he gives her through the dark bar of his eyelashes suggests perhaps a sort of solidarity.  Nick, too, feels far more often than he thinks.

"Looking back?" and this is another question, a prompt, another of his invitations to talk more or less.

Perhaps she'll return to it.  When she asks him why he asks, there is this tilt of his jaw as he contemplates his answer and again, his eyes go questing for something past the limits of their sight.  Then, "I wondered, if you saw that too, if it made you hesitate."

Serafíne
"There was a priest."

Hasn't looked up yet, Sera.  Her expression is private and curtained, banked even, and that's a strange thing for anyone who knows her, but who knows her, really: now, as she was then?  This is an hour when the light is changing constantly.  The sun has slipped below the edge of some horizon and everything down below (we are all down below) is shadow-drenched but for the breathless brilliance of the sky, edged all around.  And the sky: skims the surface of the pool in dark reflection.

"First time I met him I needled him about maybe making out with me in his confessional.  A week and a half later he stood between me and a Fallen Adept.  Refused to let them have the soul of a girl who'd cried out to me in a dream, whose soul I'd sworn I'd try to save.  Or at least: give her a chance to save it her own damned self, you know?  To have a choice.

"And he was always there, whenever I needed him.  And fuck if I know if he ever needed me.  Didn't seem like he needed anybody, really.  Though maybe that wasn't true."

"If I ever hesitated, though.  I don't think that's what held me back."  She looks up here, at last.  Gives Nick a look, right then, entirely, unhesitatingly direct.  "Why?  Is that something that concerns you?"

Nicholas Hyde
Nicholas had caught, earlier, when Sera had said: I was where you are now.  It is hard to say what he thinks of that; it would be hard even for Nick to say what he thinks of that, of the possibility of all that could be given a few years' time.  Sera thinks of a priest, and Nick thinks of Jonas, of Ciara, names that seem long ago and far away now, because they are.

There is this still air that precedes his question, as though he is weighing this again, as though there are words he could have instead inserted before and after.  But instead: "Did she save it herself?  The girl."

The world is shadow-drenched tonight, and it seems to have enlivened him in a way: his eyes are brighter in the half light, and his skin which is light brown at midday seems to drink in the moon now.

He does not flinch beneath the directness of her gaze.  Nick has drawn one of his feet out of the water, brought it up against the rim of the spring, where water sluices down and back into the pool.  To her question, he says, "It concerns me.  I asked you because you seem more settled than many of the ones I've met, though," a glance flicked sidelong to her, an acknowledgement, "granted, I don't know you very well."

Serafíne
"Yeah."  So says Sera, "she did."  Just like that too, a musing curl to her mouth, and she doesn't tell Nick that he may have met the girl, because she doesn't know whether or not he has, and anyway: somehow she has never believed that that part of the story is in any way her own to tell.

--

Still the direct look.  Sera has dark blue eyes that go simply dark in all these shadows.   Straight, expressive brows.  These sharp features that are not plainly pretty, precisely, but are still  - quick, sharp, arresting, and that's her physical presence before anyone tastes the first lick of her magick.  Her mouth is open: the huff of a laugh largely unvoiced.  More the cusp of a breath than anything.

"I never really knew that many powerful mages.  You know?  A handful of Disciples.  Two Adepts, one of them Fallen.  One that priest I mentioned: and when I met him he was a Disciple.  Sounds like you've known alot more.

"And - " she looks down here; half-smiles and this is private, yeah.  Strokes the bronze ring on her right index finger with her the meat of her right thumb - reflexively, thoughtlessly.  This minute tic of a movement.  "I think you're the first person to ever call me settled."

Nicholas Hyde
"Mm."  Nick does not know whether he has met this girl; perhaps it does not even occur to him that he would have.  The landscape of Denver is new and still unfamiliar, larger and smaller at once than the east coast.

Which he says.  "Pen and I met and used to live in coastal Connecticut, near Boston," he says.  His foot has found its way back into the water, and now he is looking into the pool with perhaps some longing, as though it's calling to him in a way that only he can hear: perhaps he'll climb into it, after Sera leaves.  "It's a very Hermetic area, but also just more populated by Awakened people in general,  I think.  At least in the urban areas.  There was a not insignificant number of Adepts there."

Almost an afterthought, then, "And a Master who I always felt would wrap me in a web and suck out my soul, given the chance."

His eyes turn to Sera then, to the ring she turns around on her finger.  "Maybe settled isn't the word.  You seem...more comfortable, maybe.  Less Other."

Serafíne
Poor Nicholas.  If Sera were longing to climb into those waters, she simply: would.  Regardless of her state of dress or undress, regardless of her goddamned audience or anyone else's sense of propriety.  Well, for the most part.

And he glances at her and she is not looking at him.  Listen, she is a spare thing, lovely and raw with this hint of the wild even when she is - as she is now - rather composed, really.  Still enough that one can see the delicacy of her features beneath the especial trappings of her sartorial style.  Ink on the cartilage of her elfin ear, skewered by a half-dozen piercings.  Ink below too, the shape and measure of which is mostly hidden by the fall of her massed (bleached) blond curls.

That ring she turns: thoughtlessly, meditatively, a habitual movement of which she is not wholly aware.  It is old, warm, beaten bronze with a flattened shield etched with symbols she does not know or understand.  And it has resonance of its own, see: the promise of unending flight, the flooding warmth of the sun.

"You don't have to follow the path that anyone else followed, yeah?  We all make our own.  And anyway, who says that forward is always the best way to go.  That's a fucking lie told by people who don't understand that time moves every which way."

Nicholas Hyde
Every which way, Sera says, and here Nick smiles: "Or back on itself."  We go forward and we end up somewhere where we've already been before.

Nicholas, see, for all his insight into others and elevation of emotion and joy in the human experience: he's still Chakravanti, and the world is cyclic, and his responsibility and duty lend him a sort of propriety that mean that there is little he does without intention.

Nicholas does observe the delicate line of her cheekbones and the dark roots of her hair, the ink just beneath her skin (perhaps he'd ask her about it, except there is little that annoys people with a lot of tattoos quite like intensely personal questions about what their tattoos mean.)  She is not looking at him and so he has looked away again, and his hands find each other and link together in his lap as the fading light of the sun sets fire to the plains.

"I understand that we all reach Ascension differently," he says, and this has a slight air of musing.  "I think the trick is in knowing how you want it to be different."  There is another look to her then, though this is sidelong and doesn't linger.  "Did you create your ring, out of curiosity?"

Serafíne
"I'm probably about to be heretical as fuck but I don't really like that word, you know?  Ascension.  I haven't always lived in Denver?  I flew to London the day I turned 18, and I was already awake when I got on that plane, even if I didn't fucking understand it, and I might've spent as much goddamned time as possible avoiding anyone in a position of authority or power because I kinda hate both: authority and power.  You know?  The mantling of it."

Except when she doesn't.

"All that hierarchy shit?  I think it's just as big a lie as the fucking rest of it.  Helluva lot easier to accept, though, when all these accidents of birth or time or power or devotion or history or what the fuck ever have put you at the top of the pile, right?  Which is some of the problem of your eat-your-soul Master, I'd wager."

Quick-flash of her neat little smile, which begins with a bright, defiant, toothsome edge that shades into something else: complex, aching, nostalgic for his question that follows, after.  "Naw.  I think it's Egyptian or some shit.  Hawksley gave it to me?"  Lilting pause.  Then: her voice banked, "Consecrated it when he left town."

Nicholas Hyde
For Nick's part, he has never heard it described in any other term other than perhaps Enlightenment.  It is not precisely that Sera's vehemence takes him aback: there are no signs that he is offended or set ill at ease by her heretical-as-fuck response.

No.  Nicholas looks over at her while she speaks, and his eyebrows creep up toward one of the dark spirals of hair that winds down in front of his forehead, and when he draws a breath it is this quick bracing thing, as though this is the first time he has ever heard anyone speak of accidents of birth or time or power or devotion or history in this context.  Because it is.

Because something within him settled into place.  Can she hear it?

Her other response names another person he does not know, offers this explanation about consecrating, and to this Nick nods: perhaps he will return to it later.  Conversations are rarely linear, with him; he has a good memory.

"So if the mantling of it is the problem, do you - you personally - go about dismantling?"

Serafíne
"Mostly I personally go about partying."

And yet - you see - her direct look, her dark eyes.  This kind of challenging flash behind him.  The thing inside her that is meant for opposition, for clash, for saying fuck you to every unthinking convention in the world.    And something else, too: quick and keen and expansive, a strange sort of simmering, 'plosive -

"Which isn't - "  God, sometimes she says shit and then she doesn't know what she wants to say again.  All those words inside her, chasing through.  "Fuck, I don't know that I go about doing anything."

Nicholas Hyde
Sera's response makes Nick smile.  Nick, who is part of perhaps one of the most driven Traditions of the Nine, to whom the concept of self-sacrifice is so intrinsic that he had to justify to himself the decision to marry, and who additionally married into the other Tradition known for its drive: maybe he finds her response refreshing, in a way.  Perhaps he can also appreciate its symmetry in how it also flaunts expectation.

"You went and found Alex," he points out.

He'd glanced away, after her direct look, and back into the pool of water; this is less to be avoidant than it is the process of him gathering his thoughts.  His gaze is intent, as though he could read something there beneath the surface.  "I'd imagine it gets kind of jarring, to reject hierarchy and also find yourself closer to the top than you were before."

Serafíne
Sera smirks.  Yet another neat, compact little expression that twists her mobile mouth.  More private than prominent, but - she does glance back at Nick then, at his profile, perhaps she is trying to figure out if he's being sly.  Whatever she says: her views on power and hierarchy and their definition are neither constant nor internally consistent and she doesn't much care about that, but - no.  There is the lingering frame of his smile and the sense of composure, thoughtfulness about him that she finds quietly odd and modestly charming and she remembers with perfect clarity precisely how tolerant he was of her whims as he piloted her around Trader Joe's.

Then she looks away: and Nicholas may not be avoidant, but Sera is often precisely that.  Still, her smirk has eases into one of her smiles, and it is one of her stranger smiles, as she tells him, "Naw.  I mean, you met me for the first time and I'm the way I am," (she has not yet used the word: Adept in reference to herself) " - but in my head I'm me now, sure, but I'm also: every me I ever was.  That's not the strange part."

Nicholas Hyde
Is Nicholas being sly?

That's a question for which she would have difficulty discerning an answer, from his outward expression and tone.  What he had said was voiced not neutrally, but with a sort of quiet and contemplative empathy, this sense that if Nick were Sera this is perhaps something that he'd find difficult to reconcile.  There aren't any knives there, nothing he'd dig in and twist to make a point.

Sera says she is every me she ever was, and from the Chakravanti there is this glance in her direction, some look that implies both understanding and asks for it at once.  "What's the strange part?"

Serafíne
This one of of those strange ellisions in the conversation.  Nicholas asks Sera what's the strange part and Sera is still looking at him; and she is - yes, absolutely - searching perhaps for a razor or a knife or something that has an edge and this is much less about Nicholas, the way Sera searches his face for something of the intent behind that question, than it is about Sera.  What she sees there, though, moves her -

"What held me back, initiate to disciple, was my fear of the responsibility.  Because people fucking matter to me, you know?  And I have no idea what I'm doing.    I pretty much stumbled into that seeking, too.  I was stoned out of my fucking mind and there she was, in the room, and I wasn't looking and I wasn't thinking and I really don't think, much, but I fucking love magick and I can't quite resist her."

Nicholas Hyde
Sera is looking at him, and he is not looking at her anymore, and this seems to be how their conversation will go, in part.  Nicholas too has something delicate about him, in the way that his angles are sharp and his features are thin and his eyes have a perpetual sort of world-weariness about them.  His clothing, his dark sweater and grey pants, seem to constrain him and particularly in the dimming light: he looks as though he could be a Victorian painting of some fey creature, and they're a poor stand in for some sort of silver armor or draping robe.

When she is moved to make her response, that is when Nicholas looks over at her again, absorbing her words.  There is some warmth there in the crinkling of the skin around his eyes as she makes mention of her fear of the responsibility.  "People matter to me too," he says.  "But it sounds like you...it sounds as though you've been able to stay responsible.  Responsibility doesn't always mean forcing the world to fit your vision."

Serafíne
"Hmmm."  There is a musicality to that musing hum.  This inflection of a minor third, perhaps.  Or a minor fifth: something to fit the strange sense of mournful constraint that scrims through world around Nicholas.  And the creature's voice is fine and strangely fond and also, truly: bemused.  "I guarantee you'll be the only person this week, this month, the year to say that I am both settled and responsible."

Some stirring from within the house (some thread, some awareness, some change, some affinity, but she is, beneath all this, a Seer and an Oracle so for fuck's sake shouldn't she know when her best friend, sometimes-lover, songwriting partner and partner-in-crime is climbing up the stairs from the library downstairs, ready usher her back into the world, just fractionally before he appears?

"But I'm pretty sure if I can manage it, you can too.  I mean: you're thinking about it, and it's important to you, and fuck, you have a leg up on me since I'm guessing you're smart and sober more than fifty percent of the time.  I dunno if that's comforting or not, but I also think: that you shouldn't ever have to move at anyone else's pace but your own."

Nicholas Hyde
There is this short note of mirth, something wry-touched, that comes from deep in his throat.  And here, Sera was looking for knives and razors and perhaps this is where it is, though they don't seem to be for her.  "That's the magick of words.  They mean different things to different people."

Some stirring from the house, and Nick turns his ear in that direction before recalling: ah yes, she'd said Dan was in the house.

Again, some warmth as Sera tells him to move at his own pace, and voices confidence.  And all he says is, "Thank you, Sera."

Serafíne
That stirring, which Sera senses before it actually occurs and Nicholas the moment is does resolves itself into the tall, thin figure of the consor seen through the evening sky, reflecting over the glass sliders that separate within from without.  Cold enough out here that the doors are still closed, this haze of condensation further obscuring the interior.

Sera kicks her bare calves through the water and then she is gathering herself up, quick and sure.  A subtle athleticism in her spare frame that is usually spent simply on the world of balancing like a badass in the damned shoes she prefers to wear, which has a much simpler expression when she is - as she is tonight - lithe and barefoot.  Too bad she didn't bring Sid out here tonight.  Sera misses the animal when she's absent; but then forgets she's missing her, quite as quickly.  It's for the best that three other people share the house with her: otherwise as much as Sera adores the animal, she would never remember to feed it day after day after day after day, all the mundane work of life she manages to ignore, refuse, avoid.

Nick says that words mean different things to different people, and Sera says, "I dunno.  Hermetics, man.  Somehow I think most of them would disagree."  Winks as Dan slides open the door and Nicholas thanks her and there is this moment where her instinct is to touch him.  To drop a neat little hand to his head, his hair, or perhaps his shoulder.  More, maybe.

But listen: she arrests the motion.  Glances up at Dan with a lift of her straight brows.  He's standing there, tall and lean lean lean, skinny jeans and a band t-shirt and maybe a wallet chain, probably a wallet chain, holding keys, they're dangling from his left index finger, his eyes on her.  Inquiry there: clear as anything.  The are you ready? sort.

And she is, so it seems.

"Night, Nicholas.  See you 'round."

Nicholas Hyde
The door opens, and Nick's head twists around to regard the consor as Dan stands in the threshold between the chantry house and this space outside.  There is a smile for Dan then, a sort of warm if casual regard as he lifts his hand and waves.

Sera's parting words about Hermetics draw his eyes back to her, and there is something conspiratorial, however humorous, there.  "Can't agree on everything, I suppose," he says.  There is no inkling that he is aware that Sera's instinct is to touch him, and she stops the motion before it starts anyway, and Nick stretches, arching his back and twisting his neck around until they both pop.

"Good night, Sera.  Good night, Dan!"  Slightly raised volume here, so that it reaches Dan's ears where he stands.

And the two of them leave, and Nick turns a pair of contemplative eyes back on the hot spring, and he has enough care for consequences to lift his sweater over his head and cast it aside before he soundlessly slides into the water.